"... The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has designated Slotkin as one of its top candidates, part of the so-called "Red to Blue" program targeting the most vulnerable Republican-held seats -- in this case, the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan, which includes Lansing and Brighton. The House seat for the district is now held by two-term Republican Representative Mike Bishop. ..."
"... The 23rd Congressional District in Texas, which includes a vast swathe of the US-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, features a contest for the Democratic nomination between Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, who subsequently served as an adviser for US interventions in South Sudan and Libya, and Jay Hulings. The latter's website describes him as a former national security aide on Capitol Hill and federal prosecutor, whose father and mother were both career undercover CIA agents. The incumbent Republican congressman, Will Hurd, is himself a former CIA agent, so any voter in that district will have his or her choice of intelligence agency loyalists in both the Democratic primary and the general election. ..."
An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State
Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence
personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.
If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from
the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance
of power in the lower chamber of Congress.
Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence
background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently
clearing the field for a favored "star" recruit. A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq,
who worked as Iraq director for the National Security Council in the Obama White House and as a top aide to John Negroponte, the
first director of national intelligence. After her deep involvement in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where,
as a principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, her areas of responsibility included drone
warfare, "homeland defense" and cyber warfare. Elissa Slotkin
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has designated Slotkin as one of its top candidates, part of the so-called
"Red to Blue" program targeting the most vulnerable Republican-held seats -- in this case, the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan,
which includes Lansing and Brighton. The House seat for the district is now held by two-term Republican Representative Mike Bishop.
The Democratic leaders are promoting CIA agents and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. At the same time, such people are choosing
the Democratic Party as their preferred political vehicle. There are far more former spies and soldiers seeking the nomination of
the Democratic Party than of the Republican Party. There are so many that there is a subset of Democratic primary campaigns that,
with a nod to Mad magazine, one might call "spy vs. spy."
The 23rd Congressional District in Texas, which includes a vast swathe of the US-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, features
a contest for the Democratic nomination between Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, who subsequently served
as an adviser for US interventions in South Sudan and Libya, and Jay Hulings. The latter's website describes him as a former national
security aide on Capitol Hill and federal prosecutor, whose father and mother were both career undercover CIA agents. The incumbent
Republican congressman, Will Hurd, is himself a former CIA agent, so any voter in that district will have his or her choice of intelligence
agency loyalists in both the Democratic primary and the general election.
CNN's "State of the Union" program on March 4 included a profile of Jones as one of many female candidates seeking nomination
as a Democrat in Tuesday's primary in Texas. The network described her discreetly as a "career civil servant." However, the Jones
for Congress website positively shouts about her role as a spy, noting that after graduating from college, "Gina entered the US Air
Force as an intelligence officer, where she deployed to Iraq and served under the US military's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy" (the
last phrase signaling to those interested in such matters that Jones is gay).
According to her campaign biography, Ortiz Jones was subsequently detailed to a position as "senior advisor for trade enforcement,"
a post President Obama created by executive order in 2012. She would later be invited to serve as a director for investment at the
Office of the US Trade Representative, where she led the portfolio that reviewed foreign investments to ensure they did not pose
national security risks. With that background, if she fails to win election, she can surely enlist in the trade war efforts of the
Trump administration.
Do some research it becomes clear quickly what the real story is. Hillary and her bunch
stink to high heaven and have or YEARS. Started with her and husband. They sold this country
o or personal gain.Just search a little and make sure to use factual information. It is there
for anyone to find.
divideand conquer 1. To gain or maintain power by generating tension among others, especially those less powerful,
so that they cannot unite in opposition.
Notable quotes:
"... In its most general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal, but I'm hoping I can say something new. ..."
"... The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy. ..."
"... Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity. ..."
"... If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members, who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump. ..."
I've been thinking about the various versions of and critiques of identity politics that are around at the moment.
In its most
general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that
members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different
things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal,
but I'm hoping I can say something new.
You missed one important line of critique -- identity politics as a dirty political strategy of soft neoliberals.
To be sure, race, gender, culture, and other aspects of social life have always been important to politics. But neoliberalism's
radical individualism has increasingly raised two interlocking problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into
identity groups can be used to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic identity. Self-government requires uniting
through our commonalities and aspiring to achieve a shared future.
When individuals fall back onto clans, tribes, and us-versus-them identities, the political community gets fragmented. It becomes
harder for people to see each other as part of that same shared future.
Demagogues [more correctly neoliberals -- likbez] rely on this fracturing to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism,
which only further fuels the divisions within society. Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and
marketization of everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the preconditions for
a free and democratic society.
The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies.
As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary
neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that
some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they
then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy.
Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies
of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity.
Of course, the result is to leave in place political and economic structures that harm the very groups that inclusionary neoliberals
claim to support. The foreign policy adventures of the neoconservatives and liberal internationalists haven't fared much better
than economic policy or cultural politics. The U.S. and its coalition partners have been bogged down in the war in Afghanistan
for 18 years and counting. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a liberal democracy, nor did the attempt to establish democracy in
Iraq lead to a domino effect that swept the Middle East and reformed its governments for the better. Instead, power in Iraq has
shifted from American occupiers to sectarian militias, to the Iraqi government, to Islamic State terrorists, and back to the Iraqi
government -- and more than 100,000 Iraqis are dead.
Or take the liberal internationalist 2011 intervention in Libya. The result was not a peaceful transition to stable democracy
but instead civil war and instability, with thousands dead as the country splintered and portions were overrun by terrorist groups.
On the grounds of democracy promotion, it is hard to say these interventions were a success. And for those motivated to expand
human rights around the world, it is hard to justify these wars as humanitarian victories -- on the civilian death count alone.
Indeed, the central anchoring assumptions of the American foreign policy establishment have been proven wrong. Foreign policymakers
largely assumed that all good things would go together -- democracy, markets, and human rights -- and so they thought opening
China to trade would inexorably lead to it becoming a liberal democracy. They were wrong. They thought Russia would become liberal
through swift democratization and privatization. They were wrong.
They thought globalization was inevitable and that ever-expanding trade liberalization was desirable even if the political
system never corrected for trade's winners and losers. They were wrong. These aren't minor mistakes. And to be clear, Donald Trump
had nothing to do with them. All of these failures were evident prior to the 2016 election.
If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing
of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members,
who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump.
Initially Clinton calculation was that trade union voters has nowhere to go anyways, and it was correct for first decade or so
of his betrayal. But gradually trade union members and lower middle class started to leave Dems in droves (Demexit, compare with
Brexit) and that where identity politics was invented to compensate for this loss.
So in addition to issues that you mention we also need to view the role of identity politics as the political strategy of the
"soft neoliberals " directed at discrediting and the suppression of nationalism.
The resurgence of nationalism is the inevitable byproduct of the dominance of neoliberalism, resurgence which I think is capable
to bury neoliberalism as it lost popular support (which now is limited to financial oligarchy and high income professional groups,
such as we can find in corporate and military brass, (shrinking) IT sector, upper strata of academy, upper strata of medical professionals,
etc)
That means that the structure of the current system isn't just flawed which imply that most problems are relatively minor and
can be fixed by making some tweaks. It is unfixable, because the "Identity wars" reflect a deep moral contradictions within neoliberal
ideology. And they can't be solved within this framework.
"... The Democrats are fielding as candidates a roster of middle-school clowns and unflavored tapioca. Are they secretly in Trump's pay? Like Clinton with her "Deplorables" suicide line? ..."
They're going to do it, I tell you: The whole touchy-feely do-gooding ratpack of Microaggression worriers, reparations freaks,
weird sexual curiosities, race hustlers, bat.-Antifa psychos, and egalitarian enstupidators of universities. They are going to elect
Trump. Again.
Washington, where I shortly will be for a bit, is crazy. It has not the slightest, wan, etiolated idea of what is going on in
America. The Democrats are fielding as candidates a roster of middle-school clowns and unflavored tapioca. Are they secretly in Trump's
pay? Like Clinton with her "Deplorables" suicide line?
2016 a Russia-Trump campaign collusion conspiracy was afoot and unfolding right before our eyes, we were told, as during his roll-out
foreign
policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., then candidate Trump said [ gasp! ]:
" Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries.
Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out."
NPR and others had breathlessly
reported at the time, "Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the U.S., was sitting in the front row" [ more gasps! ].
This 'suspicious'
"coincidence or something more?" event and of course the infamous
Steele 'Dodgy Dossier' were
followed by over two more years of the following connect-the-dots mere tiny sampling of unrestrained theorizing and avalanche of
accusations...
2019, Wired: Trump Must Be
A Russian Agent... (where we were told...ahem: " It would be rather embarrassing ... if Robert Mueller were to declare that
the president isn't an agent of Russian intelligence." )
It's especially worth noting that a
July 2018 New York Times
op-ed argued that President Trump -- dubbed a "treasonous traitor" for meeting with Putin in Helsinki -- should "be directing
all resources at his disposal to punish Russia."
Fast-forward to a July 2019 NY Times Editorial Board piece entitled
"What's America's Winning Hand if Russia
Plays the China Card?" How dizzying fast all of the above has been wiped from America's collective memory! Or at least the Times
is engaged in hastily pushing it all down the memory hole Orwell-style in order to cover its own dastardly tracks which contributed
in no small measure to non-stop national Russiagate hype and hysteria, with this astounding line:
That's right, The Times' pundits have already pivoted to the new bogeyman while stating they agree with Trump
on Russian relations :
"Given its economic, military and technological trajectory, together with its authoritarian model, China, not Russia , represents
by far the greater challenge to American objectives over the long term . That means President Trump is correct to try to establish
a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China ."
It's 2019, and we've now come full circle . This is The New York Times editorial board continuing their call for Trump to establish
"sounder" ties and "cooperation" with
Russia :
"Even during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union often made progress in one facet of their relationship while
they remained in conflict over other aspects. The United States and Russia could expand their cooperation in space . They could
also continue to work closely in the Arctic And they could revive cooperation on arms control."
Could we imagine if a mere six months ago Trump himself had uttered these same words? Now the mainstream media apparently agrees
that peace is better than war with Russia.
With 'Russiagate' now effectively dead, the NY Times' new criticism appears to be that Trump-Kremlin relations are not close enough
, as Trump's "approach has been ham-handed " - the 'paper of record' now tells us.
Or imagine if Trump had called for peaceful existence with Russia almost four years ago? Oh wait...
" Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries."
-- Then candidate Trump on
April 27, 2016
DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Agent Smith, you testified that the Russians hacked the DNC computers, is that correct?
FBI AGENT JOHN SMITH: That is correct.
DEF ATT: Upon what information did you base your testimony?
AGENT: Information found in reports analyzing the breach of the computers.
DEF ATT: So, the FBI prepared these reports?
AGENT: (cough) . (shift in seat) No, a cyber security contractor with the FBI.
DEF ATT: Pardon me, why would a contractor be preparing these reports? Do these contractors run the FBI laboratories where
the server was examined?
AGENT: No.
DEF ATT: No? No what? These contractors don't run the FBI Laboratories?
AGENT: No. The laboratories are staffed by FBI personnel.
DEF ATT: Well I don't understand. Why would contractors be writing reports about computers that are forensically examined in
FBI laboratories?
AGENT: Well, the servers were not examined in the FBI laboratory.
(silence)
DEF ATT: Oh, so the FBI examined the servers on site to determine who had hacked them and what was taken?
AGENT: Uh .. no.
DEF ATT: They didn't examine them on site?
AGENT: No.
DEF ATT: Well, where did they examine them?
AGENT: Well, uh .. the FBI did not examine them.
DEF ATT: What?
AGENT: The FBI did not directly examine the servers.
DEF ATT: Agent Smith, the FBI has presented to the Grand Jury and to this court and SWORN AS FACT that the Russians hacked
the DNC computers. You are basing your SWORN testimony on a report given to you by a contractor, while the FBI has NEVER actually
examined the computer hardware?
AGENT: That is correct.
DEF ATT: Agent Smith, who prepared the analysis reports that the FBI relied on to give this sworn testimony?
AGENT: Crowdstrike, Inc.
DEF ATT: So, which Crowdstrike employee gave you the report?
AGENT: We didn't receive the report directly from Crowdstrike.
DEF ATT: What?
AGENT: We did not receive the report directly from Crowdstrike.
DEF ATT: Well, where did you find this report?
AGENT: It was given to us by the people who hired Crowdstrike to examine and secure their computer network and hardware.
DEF ATT: Oh, so the report was given to you by the technical employees for the company that hired Crowdstrike to examine their
servers?
AGENT: No.
DEF ATT: Well, who gave you the report?
AGENT: Legal counsel for the company that hired Crowdstrike.
DEF ATT: Why would legal counsel be the ones giving you the report?
AGENT: I don't know.
DEF ATT: Well, what company hired Crowdstrike?
AGENT: The Democratic National Committee.
DEF ATT: Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You are giving SWORN testimony to this court that Russia hacked the servers
of the Democratic National Committee. And you are basing that testimony on a report given to you by the LAWYERS for the Democratic
National Committee. And you, the FBI, never actually saw or examined the computer servers?
AGENT: That is correct.
DEF ATT: Well, can you provide a copy of the technical report produced by Crowdstrike for the Democratic National Committee?
AGENT: No, I cannot.
DEF ATT: Well, can you go back to your office and get a copy of the report?
AGENT: No.
DEF ATT: Why? Are you locked out of your office?
AGENT: No.
DEF ATT: I don't understand. Why can you not provide a copy of this report?
AGENT: Because I do not have a copy of the report.
DEF ATT: Did you lose it?
AGENT: No.
DEF ATT: Why do you not have a copy of the report?
AGENT: Because we were never given a final copy of the report.
DEF ATT: Agent Smith, if you didn't get a copy of the report, upon what information are you basing your testimony?
AGENT: On a draft copy of the report.
DEF ATT: A draft copy?
AGENT: Yes.
DEF ATT: Was a final report ever delivered to the FBI?
AGENT: No.
DEF ATT: Agent Smith, did you get to read the entire report?
AGENT: No.
DEF ATT: Why not?
AGENT: Because large portions were redacted.
DEF ATT: Agent Smith, let me get this straight. The FBI is claiming that the Russians hacked the DNC servers. But the FBI never
actually saw the computer hardware, nor examined it? Is that correct?
AGENT: That is correct.
DEF ATT: And the FBI never actually examined the log files or computer email or any aspect of the data from the servers? Is
that correct?
AGENT: That is correct.
DEF ATT: And you are basing your testimony on the word of Counsel for the Democratic National Committee, the people who provided
you with a REDACTED copy of a DRAFT report, not on the actual technical personnel who supposedly examined the servers?
AGENT: That is correct.
DEF ATT: Your honor, I have a few motions I would like to make at this time.
PRESIDING JUDGE: I'm sure you do, Counselor. (as he turns toward the prosecutors) And I feel like I am in a mood to grant them.
Brilliant! that sums it up nicely. of course, if the servers were not hacked and were instead "thumbnailed" that leads to a
whole pile of other questions (including asking wiileaks for their source and about the murder of seth rich).
"... If the CIA/MI6/FBI did attempt to create a sting it need not be as dramatic as the Skripal fakery. What would you dream up if you were tasked by the CIA to propose something? KISS. ..."
But underlying your comment is an assumption of *logic* in this world. If it ever existed it
certainly does not
apply any longer. Look how much mileage the MSM and the anti-Democracy Party got out of the
nothingburger Russiagate.
The MSM doesn't even need to smell real blood, they will run with anything to continue the
coup.
Anything negative that involves Edward Gallagher between now and election day could be
magnified 1 million-fold and
repeated 1000 million times by the MSM and dropped in Trump's lap.
If the CIA/MI6/FBI did attempt to create a sting it need not be as dramatic as the Skripal
fakery.
What would you dream up if you were tasked by the CIA to propose something? KISS.
Thanks sleeply,
But underlying your comment is an assumption of *logic* in this world. If it ever existed it
certainly does not
apply any longer. Look how much mileage the MSM and the anti-Democracy Party got out of the
nothingburger Russiagate.
The MSM doesn't even need to smell real blood, they will run with anything to continue the
coup.
Anything negative that involves Edward Gallagher between now and election day could be
magnified 1 million-fold and
repeated 1000 million times by the MSM and dropped in Trump's lap.
If the CIA/MI6/FBI did attempt to create a sting it need not be as dramatic as the Skripal
fakery.
What would you dream up if you were tasked by the CIA to propose something? KISS.
1 day ago Maddow is really a propagandist. She really isn't a journalist. Because her
credibility and ratings have gone south because so many of the big stories she has been obliged
to push have been fake from the get-go. People start to notice that after a while. You can't
fool all of the people all of the time as Abe observed. 1 day ago It has been determined to
have been a fabrication. It is not just controversial. Maddow may be spot on in fooling her
drooling sycophants, but facts seldom ever interfere with her fairy tales and TDS motivated
delusions. 10
hours ago Rational Agent:
The CIA told the FBI that the material in the Steele dossier is merely Internet gossip and bar
room talk. This is in the inspector general's report (issued Dec 9) and public testimony under
oath before Congress (Dec 11).
There were several agents in the FBI who were disturbed about the unverified nature of this
material, and they were overruled by other agents and their supervisors and this material was
then presented to the FISA court four times in the knowledge that it was unverified but the
court was told it was verified. That is also in the inspector general's Report and public
testimony.
The result of this misconduct was that the head judge of the FISA court Rosemary Collyer,
issued on Dec 16 an unprecedented and angry public rebuke of the FBI for repeatedly deceiving
the court about the veracity of the Steele dossier.
Enough for you? 1 day ago With apologies to Bob Dylan:
"A man (or woman) sees what he (she) wants to see and disregards the rest."
If you're tuned into cable 'news' at 9 p.m. eastern time looking for objective journalism,
well, good luck with that. Cuomo is probably the best bet; he offers a little bit. 1 day ago I think the
apology should be to Paul Simon?
Not withstanding that, your point is well made. Not much in the way of great thought on the
telly at that time on any station. 1 day ago Independents
view Rachael Maddow, Chris Cuomo and Sean Hannity as hate peddlers who spin, lie and twist
every single issue to fit their fantasy of how the world exists. I cannot imagine how anyone
with a brain or any semblance of logic could be a regular viewer of these hate mongers. If one
does a cursory analysis of the predictions these people have made over the past couple of
years, you will quickly see how ridiculous and wrong they have been. The bigger problem is that
they represent their news organizations and only add to the distrust and declining reliance
that rational folks have of the Media. 2 days ago [she is]
Just another CIA mouthpiece. 2 days ago Maddow is
being sued by the One America News Network for stating the latter were 'really, literally'
Russian assets.
Maddows is furiously back pedalling, not standing by what she said. This speaks volumes.
Maddows is evil. 2 days ago The Steele
dossier is trash. A joke. Comprehensively discredited. Only the wilfully blind or deluded would
believe otherwise. Proof that [neo]liberalism is a form of mental illness. 1 day ago If it is all
propaganda, then we are truly living in a post-truth world. In this world there are no facts,
only competing narratives. This allows us to sink into fact-free thinking and rely only on our
prejudices (or our "gut") to determine our preferences. 2 days ago " The case against Maddow is
far stronger. When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host
pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts
thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam,
quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for
the document."
1 day ago Maddow is really a propagandist. She really isn't a journalist. Because her
credibility and ratings have gone south because so many of the big stories she has been obliged
to push have been fake from the get-go. People start to notice that after a while. You can't
fool all of the people all of the time as Abe observed. 1 day ago It has been determined to
have been a fabrication. It is not just controversial. Maddow may be spot on in fooling her
drooling sycophants, but facts seldom ever interfere with her fairy tales and TDS motivated
delusions. 10
hours ago Rational Agent:
The CIA told the FBI that the material in the Steele dossier is merely Internet gossip and bar
room talk. This is in the inspector general's report (issued Dec 9) and public testimony under
oath before Congress (Dec 11).
There were several agents in the FBI who were disturbed about the unverified nature of this
material, and they were overruled by other agents and their supervisors and this material was
then presented to the FISA court four times in the knowledge that it was unverified but the
court was told it was verified. That is also in the inspector general's Report and public
testimony.
The result of this misconduct was that the head judge of the FISA court Rosemary Collyer,
issued on Dec 16 an unprecedented and angry public rebuke of the FBI for repeatedly deceiving
the court about the veracity of the Steele dossier.
Enough for you? 1 day ago With apologies to Bob Dylan:
"A man (or woman) sees what he (she) wants to see and disregards the rest."
If you're tuned into cable 'news' at 9 p.m. eastern time looking for objective journalism,
well, good luck with that. Cuomo is probably the best bet; he offers a little bit. 1 day ago I think the
apology should be to Paul Simon?
Not withstanding that, your point is well made. Not much in the way of great thought on the
telly at that time on any station. 1 day ago Independents
view Rachael Maddow, Chris Cuomo and Sean Hannity as hate peddlers who spin, lie and twist
every single issue to fit their fantasy of how the world exists. I cannot imagine how anyone
with a brain or any semblance of logic could be a regular viewer of these hate mongers. If one
does a cursory analysis of the predictions these people have made over the past couple of
years, you will quickly see how ridiculous and wrong they have been. The bigger problem is that
they represent their news organizations and only add to the distrust and declining reliance
that rational folks have of the Media. 2 days ago [she is]
Just another CIA mouthpiece. 2 days ago Maddow is
being sued by the One America News Network for stating the latter were 'really, literally'
Russian assets.
Maddows is furiously back pedalling, not standing by what she said. This speaks volumes.
Maddows is evil. 2 days ago The Steele
dossier is trash. A joke. Comprehensively discredited. Only the wilfully blind or deluded would
believe otherwise. Proof that [neo]liberalism is a form of mental illness. 1 day ago If it is all
propaganda, then we are truly living in a post-truth world. In this world there are no facts,
only competing narratives. This allows us to sink into fact-free thinking and rely only on our
prejudices (or our "gut") to determine our preferences. 2 days ago " The case against Maddow is
far stronger. When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host
pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts
thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam,
quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for
the document."
reported
that TV network OAN had filed a lawsuit against Rachel Maddow for the time the host said that
OAN "really, literally is paid Russian propaganda."
Now, Maddow finds herself having to come up with a defense for her statement in court.
And she has also apparently hired Lionel Hutz as her legal adviser.
According to
Culttture , her lawyers argued in a recent motion that " the liberal host was clearly
offering up her 'own unique expression' of her views to capture what she saw as the
'ridiculous' nature of the undisputed facts. Her comment, therefore, is a quintessential
statement 'of rhetorical hyperbole, incapable of being proved true or false."
Oh, it's capable of being proved false, alright. Maddow had previously claimed, on
air, about one of OAN's reporters:
"In this case, the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America is really
literally is paid Russian propaganda," and added, "Their on-air politics reporter ( Kristian
Rouz) is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government."
The testimony of UC Santa Barbara linguistics professor Stefan Thomas Gries, however, stands
at odds with Maddow's defense. Gries said: "It is very unlikely that an average or
reasonable/ordinary viewer would consider the sentence in question to be a statement of
opinion."
"... Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse ..."
"... By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all. ..."
Ever since the Democratic Party abandoned its New Deal legacy and adopted the neoliberal
centrism associated with the Carter presidency and then cast in stone by the Democratic
Leadership Council in 1985, each election loss has generated a chorus of remonstrations in the
left-liberal press about the need to run "progressive" candidates if the party wants to win.
The latest instance of this was a post to the Jacobin FB page that stated: "By running
to the right, Democrats insist on losing twice: at the polls and in constructing an inspiring
agenda. Bold left-wing politics are our only hope for long-term, substantive victory."
The question of why Democrats are so okay with losing has to be examined closely. In some
countries, elections have huge consequences, especially in Latin America where a job as an
elected official might be not only a source of income for a socialist parliamentarian but a
trigger for a civil war or coup as occurred in Costa Rica in 1948 and in Chile in 1973
respectively.
In the 2010 midterm elections, there was a massive loss of seats in the House of
Representatives for the Democrats. In this month's midterm elections, the Democrats hoped that
a "Blue Wave" would do for them what the 2010 midterms did for the Republicans -- put them in
the driver's seat. It turned out to be more of a "Blue Spray", not to speak of the toothless
response of House leader Nancy Pelosi who spoke immediately about how the Democrats can reach
across the aisle to the knuckle-dragging racists of the Republican Party.
Out of curiosity, I went to Wikipedia to follow up on what happened to the "losers" in 2010.
Did they have to go on unemployment? Like Republicans who got voted out this go-round,
Democrats had no trouble lining up jobs as lobbyists. Allen Boyd from Florida sent a letter to
Obama after the BP oil spill in 2010 asking him to back up BP's claim that seafood in the Gulf
of Mexico was okay to eat. After being voted out of office, he joined the Twenty-First Century
Group, a lobbying firm founded by a former Republican Congressman from Texas named Jack Fields.
A 1980 article on Fields describes him as a protégé of ultraright leader Paul
Weyrich.
Glenn Nye, who lost his job as a Virginia congressman, his considerable CV that included
working for the Agency for International Development (AID) and serving in various capacities
during the occupation of Iraq to land a nice gig as Senior Political Advisor for the Hanover
Investment Group.
John Spratt from South Carolina was described by Dow Jones News as "one of the staunchest
fiscal conservatives among House Democrats." That was enough for him to land a job with Barack
Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that was supposed to come up
with a strategy to reduce the deficit. Just the sort of thing that was calculated to lift the
American economy out of the worst slump since the 1930s. Not.
Pennsylvania's Chris Carney was a helluva Democrat. From 2002 to 2004, he was a
counterterrorism analyst for the Bush administration. He not only reported to Douglas Feith in
the Office of Special Plans and at the Defense Intelligence Agency, researching links between
al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but served as an interrogator in Guantanamo. These qualifications
landed him a job as director of homeland security and policy strategy for BAE Systems when the
House of Representatives gig ended. A British security and munitions powerhouse, BAE won a
contract worth £4.4bn to supply the Saudis with 72 fighter jets – some of which
were used to bomb Red Cross and Physician Without Borders hospitals in Yemen.
With such crumb-bums losing in 2010, you'd think that the Democrats would be convinced that
their best bet for winning elections would be to disavow candidates that had ties to the
national security apparatus and anything that smacked of the DLC's assault on the welfare
state. Not exactly. When the candidates are female, that might work in the party's favor like
sugar-coating a bitter pill.
In Virginia, former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger and retired Navy Commander Elaine Luria
defeated Republican incumbents. Air Force veteran Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, former CIA
analyst Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and former Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey also
helped the Democrats regain the House. Sherill calculated that moving to the center would serve
her own and the party's interests. She told MSNBC: "As a Navy helicopter pilot I never flew
Republican missions or Democratic missions, I would have had a very short career. This is
something I do think vets bring to the table, this willingness to work with everyone."
For Sherrill, a newcomer to politics, the 11th has proved to be a tricky terrain. She is
seen as a progressive, but appears wary of carrying the "Trump resistance" banner into the
fray. At Wednesday's debate, Sherrill was determined to show she is more Morris Plains than
Montclair.
There were no heated vows to fight Trump, even though being "appalled" by the president
was what motivated her to run in the first place. The Nov. 6 midterms loom as a referendum on
Trump's presidency, but you would never have guessed that watching Wednesday's contest.
Sherrill repeatedly promised to be bipartisan -- a far cry from the combative,
confrontational tone that many in the party's grass roots are demanding.
On tax policy she sounded more centrist Republican than mainstream liberal Democrat, and
she refused to endorse issues like free community college tuition, which has become a popular
talking point for Democrats and was launched by Gov. Phil Murphy this summer.
"Without understanding how that would be paid for, I haven't supported it because it
sounds like it would raise taxes on our families,'" she said.
The moderate tone puzzled some of her ardent "resistance" activists who mobilized around
her candidacy.
For Eric Fritsch, 32, a Teamster for the film and television industry from West Orange, it
was jarring to hear Sherrill oppose Democratic Party wish-list items like free community
college tuition or "Medicare-for-all" coverage out of fear that it may raise taxes. She used
the same excuse to sidestep supporting a "carbon tax" to reduce global warming.
"By going on the defensive about taxes she is accepting a Republican framing that we don't
want to be responsible with taxes in the first place,'" said Fritsch, who insisted that he
remains a "very enthusiastic" Sherrill supporter.
It should be abundantly clear by now that the Democratic Party leadership will be selecting
a candidate in 2020 in all ways identical to Hillary Clinton but perhaps with a less tawdry
past and less of an appetite for Goldman-Sachs speaking fees. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe
Biden, Andrew Cuomo, et al have no intention of allowing upstarts like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
to spoil their plans, even if it means a second term for Donald Trump.
No matter. Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara urges his readers and DSA comrades to plunge ahead
trying to consolidate a "socialist" caucus in the Democratic Party. From his perspective,
working in the Democratic Party seems to be the "most promising place for advancing left
politics, at least in the short term." Keep in mind that Sherrill raised $1.9 million for her
campaign and my old boss from Salomon Brothers Michael Bloomberg ponied up another $1.8 million
just for her TV ads. Does anybody really think that "socialist" backed candidates will be able
to compete with people like Sherrill in the primaries? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to
defeat the hack Joe Crowley on a shoestring but that was something of a fluke. Until there is a
massive shake-up in American society that finally reveals the Democratic Party to be the
capitalist tool it has been since Andrew Jackson's presidency, it is likely that a combination
of big money and political inertia will keep the Democratic Party an agent of reaction.
Furthermore, the takeover of the House might turn out to be a hollow victory in the light of
how Trump rules. His strategy hasn't been to push through legislation except for the tax cut.
Remember the blather about investing in infrastructure? His minions in Congress have no
intention of proposing a trillion or so dollars in highway or bridge repair, etc. With Nancy
Pelosi fecklessly talking about how the two parties can collaborate on infrastructure, you can
only wonder whether she has been asleep for the past two years.
Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his
executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their
stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse as Malcolm X once put
it. Two days ago, the NY Times wrote about how the "Trump Administration Spares Corporate
Wrongdoers Billions in Penalties". It did not need legislation to help big banks rip off the
public. All it took was naming former head of BankOne Joseph Otting comptroller of the
currency. Senator Sherrod Brown, one of the few Democrats with a spine, called Trump out: "The
president's choice for watchdog of America's largest banks is someone who signed a consent
order -- over shady foreclosure practices -- with the very agency he's been selected to
run."
For all of the dozens of articles about how Trump is creating a fascist regime, hardly any
deal with the difference between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Hitler created a massive bureaucracy
that ran a quasi-planned economy with generous social benefits that put considerable restraints
on the bourgeoisie. Like FDR, he was taking measures to save capitalism. Perhaps if the USA had
a social and economic crisis as deep as Germany's and left parties as massive as those in
Germany, FDR might have embarked on a much more ambitious concentration camp program, one that
would have interred trade unionists as well as Japanese-Americans. Maybe even Jews if they
complained too much.
By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as
Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch
Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior
of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected
government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to
push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the
courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is
unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens
to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all.
President Obama's Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper and his
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan oversaw a secret supercomputer
system known as "THE HAMMER," according to former NSA/CIA contractor-turned whistleblower
Dennis Montgomery.
Clapper and Brennan were using the supercomputer system to conduct illegal and
unconstitutional government data harvesting and wiretapping. THE HAMMER was installed on
federal property in Fort Washington, Maryland at a complex which some speculate is a secret CIA
and NSA operation operating at a US Naval facility.
President Trump's allegation that the Obama Administration was wiretapping him is not only
supported by Montgomery's whistleblower revelations about Brennan's and Clapper's computer
system THE HAMMER, but also by statements made this week by William Binney, a former NSA
Technical Director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, by former
CIA and State Department official Larry Johnson, and by Montgomery's attorney Larry
Klayman.
Computer expert Dennis Montgomery developed software programs that could breach secure
computer systems and collect massive amounts of data.
That system, THE HAMMER, according to the audio tapes, accessed the phone calls, emails and
bank accounts of millions of ordinary Americans.
The tapes also reveal that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court (FISA), Supreme Court
Chief Justice John Roberts, 156 other judges, members of Congress, and Donald J. Trump were
targeted by the HAMMER.
One of the audio tapes made public by Federal Judge G. Murray Snow revealed that Brennan
and Clapper particularly targeted and wiretapped Donald Trump a " zillion
times."
Montgomery also contends that the government can plant files such as child *********** or
state secrets on a target's computer, setting up the owner of that device for blackmail or
framed prosecution.
Former CBS Reporter Sharyl Attkisson Alleged In 2013 She Was Under Electronic Surveillance
For At Least Two Years And That Three Classified Documents Were Planted On Her "Compromised"
Computer.
The audio tapes were released by Federal Judge G. Murray Snow in Maricopa County, Arizona in
the Justice Department's civil contempt case against Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio.
Attorney Klayman, founder of Freedom Watch, represented Montgomery before federal Judge
Royce C. Lamberth. Klayman, who characterizes his client Montgomery as a "whistleblower," told
Fox News that Montgomery "turned over 600 million plus pages of information to the FBI." Judge
Lamberth was formerly the presiding judge over the FISA court.
After Montgomery produced his documentation, the FBI gave him two immunity agreements: one
in the area of "production" and the other regarding "testimony."
The FBI then took possession of Montgomery's documentation.
Attorney Klayman asserts that this information precipitated James Clapper's resignation.
Clapper had gone before Congress to testify under oath that the NSA, and other intelligence
agencies including the CIA," were not collecting massive amounts of telephonic and Internet
metadata on hundreds of millions of innocent American citizens" according to Klayman.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations proved otherwise.
Clapper was subsequently found to be untruthful and resigned on November 17, 2016, effective
January 20, 2017, the day Donald Trump was sworn in.
Clapper has not been prosecuted for perjury and we wonder why.
7 minutes ago Thanks Q! I bring up Montgomery all of the time here. The Eff Bee Eye and Dee oh
Jay have all of the documents and are sitting on them. This is how the IC controls everything
in the Swamp.
BOMBSHELL: CIA Whistleblower Leaked Proof Trump Under "Systematic Illegal" Surveillance
Over Two Years Ago: FBI Sat On It by ZeroPointNow Wed, 03/22/2017 - 22:37 0
SHARES
The same day House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes gave a press conference
disclosing that President Trump had been under "
incidental surveillance ," Attorney and FreedomWatch Chairman, Larry Klayman, sent a letter
to the House Committee on Intelligence imploring them to pursue the claims and evidence
presented under oath at a Washington DC FBI Field Office by his client - CIA / NSA
Whistleblower Dennis Montgomery - who Klayman claims "holds the keys to disproving the false
claims... ...that there is no evidence that the president and his men were wiretapped"
When Montgomery attempted to deliver this information through the appropriate channels two
years ago , the former CIA and NSA contractor wasn't given the time of day:
[W]hen Montgomery came forward as a whistleblower to congressional intelligence committees
and various other congressmen and senators, including Senator Charles Grassley , Chairman of
the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, like Comey, once had a reputation for integrity, he was
"blown off;" no one wanted to even hear what he had to say.
As a result, Montgomery went to attorney and FreedomWatch founder Larry Klayman - who then
approached the FBI:
Under grants of immunity, which I obtained through Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Curtis,
Montgomery produced the hard drives and later was interviewed under oath in a secure room at
the FBI Field Office in the District of Columbia . There he laid out how persons like
then-businessman Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by Clapper, Brennan, and the spy
agencies of the Obama administration.
Montgomery left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of
information , much of which is classified, and sought to come forward legally as a
whistleblower to appropriate government entities, including congressional intelligence
committees, to expose that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal
surveillance on prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other
justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump , and even yours truly.
Working side by side with Obama's former Director of National Intelligence (DIA), James
Clapper, and Obama's former Director of the CIA, John Brennan, Montgomery witnessed "up close
and personal" this "Orwellian Big Brother" intrusion on privacy , likely for potential
coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes.
He even claimed that these spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008
presidential election , which illegal tampering resulted in helping Obama to win the White
House.
Given the fact that the FBI had Montgomery's testimony and evidence for over two years,
Klayman traveled to Washington DC last Thursday to meet with Committee Chairman Devin Nunes in
the hopes that he would ask FBI Director Comey why the FBI hadn't pursued Montgomery's
evidence. When Klayman arrived to speak with Nunes, he was "blown off" and instead shared his
information with committee attorney Allen R. Souza - who Klayman requested in turn brief Nunes
on the situation.
During my meeting with House Intelligence Committee counsel Allen R. Sousa I politely
warned him that if Chairman Nunes, who himself had that same day undercut President Trump by
also claiming that there is no evidence of surveillance by the Obama administration, I would
go public with what would appear to be the House Intelligence Committee's complicity in
keeping the truth from the American people and allowing the FBI to continue its apparent
cover-up of the Montgomery "investigation."
And, that is where it stands today. The big question: will House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Nunes do his job and hold FBI Director Comey's feet to the fire about the Montgomery
investigation?
Klayman has detailed all of this in a
NewsMax article , followed up with an official
letter to Chairman Nunes today, requesting that he question Comey on Montgomery's evidence.
Perhaps this explains Nunes' impromptu press conference today admitting that Trump's team was
under "
Incidental Surveillance " before making his way to the White House to discuss with the
President.
So - we know that evidence exists from a CIA / NSA contractor turned whistleblower,
detailing a massive spy operation on 156 judges, the Supreme Court, and high profile Americans
including Donald Trump. See the letter below:
Looks like Page was Strzok handler within FBI and was intimately involved in suppressing
Hillary email investigation. clinton email investigation has signed of CIA pressure on FBI --
that;s why DNS servers were not investigated by FBI directly -- most probably there was nothing
to investigate as malware was implanted by CrowdStrike which also create fake Gussifer 2.0
personality.
She was probably No.3 person in both email investigation and Russiagate -- "eyes and earths"
of McCabe like she admitted herself.
Looks also that she has a central position in unleashing Russiagate witch hunt and in
scapegoating General Flynn. Whether she deliberately changed documents or not to implicate him is
sill not completely clear.
Interview crates a picture of her as a dangerous ruthless operative. More so then Strzok
deposition. The fact that counter intelligence can be used for the purposes of political witch
hunt is deeply disturbing. Of course, MadCow did not ask this female James Bond why they did not
brief Trump campaign. And the fact that they did not brief Trump campaign suggest that they all
were crooks.
Notable quotes:
"... She had significant roles in the Boston marathon case and in the Edward Snowden case ..."
"... So, I was special counsel to the deputy director. He, of course, runs the FBI. He`s like the COO. And so, with respect to both the Clinton investigation but also the other responsibilities of running the bureau, I tried to serve as his sort of good counsel, his eyes and ears. ..."
"... I was definitely part of the group of people who Director Comey was consulting in terms of what to do, and ultimately, I largely supported his decision. ..."
"... The two investigations couldn`t be less similar. In the Clinton investigation, you`re talking about historical events three years prior, her use of a private e-mail server that was public investigation everybody knew about. With respect to the Russia investigation, we`re talking about trying to investigate what an incredibly hostile foreign government may be doing to interfere in our election. We didn`t know what the answer was, and it would have been deeply prejudicial and incredibly unfair to candidate Trump for us to have said anything before we knew what had had happened. ..."
"... MADDOW: What about the text messages that – in which you and Strzok were talking about, your sort of fear that Trump would be elected and he said, no, we won`t let it happen? ..."
"... PAGE: I mean, by we, he`s talking about the collective we, like-minded, thoughtful, sensible people who were not going to vote this person into office. You know, obviously in retrospect, do I wish he hadn`t sent it? Yes. It`s been mutilated to death and it`s been used to bludgeon an institution I love. And it`s meant that I disappointed countless people. ..."
"... And in terms of the litigation of this issue, the question about whether or not this, as the president and his supporters claimed, reflected some inherent political bias by you and Mr. Strzok and that you had key roles to play in these investigations and therefore the investigations are biased. ..."
One person on that list was Peter Strzok who I`m told not long ago was the top
counterintelligence agent at the FBI. Peter Strzok had a sterling career at the FBI, including
key roles in breaking up high profile Russianintelligence operations inside the United States.
He was the leadcounterintelligence agent in the FBI, and he worked on the 2016
Russiainvestigation.
He was fired in 2018 over text messages he had sent which reflected his personal political
views about President Trump, critical of PresidentTrump, and frankly critical of other people
in politics, too. Now, the president hounds him by name as the FBI`s sick loser,
Peter
Strzok, leader of the rigged witch hunt. Investigating this president, specifically
investigating the central question of his campaign`s potential involvement with the Russian
interference in our 2016 election to try to get him into the White House – I mean, that
national security imperative described in passionate terms today in federal court by the judge
who was overseeing more of the criminal trials that have derived from that investigation than
any other. The people who have actually done that work,the people how have actually talked
about it or supported it or criticized it, but actually done the work, they`ve all been lined
up at the proverbial firing line by this president, as he and his supporters, both in Congress
and in the conservative media, have just tried to pick them up off, destroy them one by one,
ending their careers one after the other, deriding them, attacking them.
But the president has reserved particularly and particularly sustained ire for one former
FBI lawyer named Lisa Page. Lisa Page had been a federal prosecutor. She`d worked in the
criminal division and in the national security division at the justice department. She worked
at the FBI. She had significant roles in the Boston marathon case and in the Edward Snowden
case . Early in 2016, Lisa Page was working a special counsel to Deputy FBI
Director
Andrew McCabe. She worked on the Clinton e-mail investigation. That same year, later in 2016,
she would also play a smaller role in the Russia investigation. And when that became the
Mueller investigation, she briefly worked on that team as well.
... ... ...
She said, quote: The sum total of findings by I.G. Horowitz that my personal opinions had
any bearing on the course of either the Clinton or Russia investigations, zero and zero. And
then she concludes, cool, cool. Lisa Page is now suing the FBI and the Justice Department for
what she calls a breach of privacy with them distributing her personal text messages to
reporters in the middle of an open investigation. She`s also suing them for the suffering that
has followed.
... ... ...
MADDOW: First, I want to talk to you about a million different things, butlet me just ask
you if I got anything wrong in terms of sketching what Iunderstand is the broad outlines of
your career there?
PAGE: No, not particularly. I wasn`t – I wouldn`t want to take credit for Boston or
Snowden. I – it`s really how I met Andy McCabe through the Boston bombing and then
through the work post-Snowden and assisting the White House in the post-intelligence reforms.
But I can`t say that I played an investigative role in any one of those.
MADDOW: So you were involved in the response in those instances (ph) –
PAGE: Exactly right.
... ... ...
PAGE: You know, it`s kind of like all good news stories. It`s part good hard work and part
serendipity. Post-Snowden, there were so many reforms coming out of the Obama White House that
I became the point person for that effort for the FBI. Andy at the time was head of the
national security program, so anything that the White House would be proposing would be
different in term of the authorities and how we conducted our business would have affected his
work. And so, we started working very closely together. He found me trustworthy and reliable
and hopefully smart, and so he asked me to join his staff.
MADDOW: By 2016, by the early months of 2016 in that role in the FBI, you found yourself
working on the Clinton e-mail investigation. Can you talk us through what your role was on that
and what that work is like?
PAGER: Sure. So, I was special counsel to the deputy director. He, of course, runs the
FBI. He`s like the COO. And so, with respect to both the Clinton investigation but also the
other responsibilities of running the bureau, I tried to serve as his sort of good counsel, his
eyes and ears. So I tried to keep both a macro view of all the various things that were
happening at the FBI, but also keep my earto the ground with respect to various investigative
steps and what wascoming next.
MADDOW: One of the things that you described in the interview you did this month with "The
Daily Beast" was that you were aware in the context of that investigation that everything
everybody did that had anything to do with that investigation was going to be very closely
scrutinized and was going to be something that was going to be obviously inherently
controversial. When it came to the decision to make public disclosures about the status of that
investigation, Director Comey criticizing Secretary Clinton even as he was announcing there
weren`t going to be prosecutions, did you have any role in that or did you have strong feelings
about that at the time?
PAGE: I did. I did. I was definitely part of the group of people who Director Comey was
consulting in terms of what to do, and ultimately, I largely supported his decision. This
was not a typical investigation. This was not an investigation where the subject was secret and
nobody knew this investigation was underway. Everyone knew that she was under investigation.
Candidate Trump was ceaselessly, you know, asking to lock her up at his rallies. So, the notion
we would say nothing with respect to choosing not to charge her, even though every person on
the team uniformly agreed that there was no prosecutable case, that was true at the Justice
Department, that was true at the FBI. So, we all agreed that we needed to say something. There
may have been varying differences into how much, and how much detail to get into, but there
wasn`t largely disagreement with respect to whether to say something at all.
MADDOW: And you ultimately ended up working on the Russia investigation deeper into 2016.
Obviously, you were one of the people who was involved in the Justice Department and the FBI in
such a way that you knew a lot about both of those cases.
Did you and the other people involved in those two cases struggle at all with this
discontinuity that the Clinton investigation, for the reasons that you just described, was very
public and various steps of that investigation were disclosed to the public, had a huge
political impact, whereas there was a live, very provocative, very disturbing investigation
into President Trump and his campaign as well and that was kept from the public? Did you
struggle with that discontinuity or the fact that therewasn`t a parallel there?
PAGE: Not at all. Not at all. The two investigations couldn`t be less similar. In the
Clinton investigation, you`re talking about historical events three years prior, her use of a
private e-mail server that was public investigation everybody knew about. With respect to the
Russia investigation, we`re talking about trying to investigate what an incredibly hostile
foreign government may be doing to interfere in our election. We didn`t know what the answer
was, and it would have been deeply prejudicial and incredibly unfair to candidate Trump for us
to have said anything before we knew what had had happened.
MADDOW: In terms of the way this played out ultimately, you become a poster child, along
with several of your colleagues, for these claims from the president, and now increasingly from
the current attorney general that the Trump-Russia investigation was cooked up on the basis of
false allegations or even some conspiracy specifically to hurt his chances of getting elected.
Now, of course, the problem there is no one in the country knew about that investigation before
people had the chance to vote on him. And I just – I mean, as an observer, I find that
flabbergasting. How does that strike you and how does that comport with your understanding of
that process given what you just described?
PAGE: There is no one on this set of facts who has any experience in counterintelligence who
would not have made the exact same decision. This is a question about whether Russia is working
with a United States person to interfere in our election. We were obligated to figure out
whether that was true or not, and to figure out who might be in a position to provide that
assistance.
MADDOW: In terms of the critique that I just implicitly made that if there had been some
sort of conspiracy against candidate Trump, that could have just easily been leaked to the
public so people would know about that when they went to the polls, is that a fair
critique?
PAGE: It is a fair critique, but we were extraordinarily careful not to do anything that
would allow this information to get out before we knew what we had.
... ...
MADDOW: In terms of the text messages and allegations that have been made against you,
you`ve sort of explained yourself in putting those text messages in greater context in terms of
what they meant and the way they were used against you. Can you explain to us tonight what was
meant by, for example, the insurance policy text message? So, this is you and Peter Strzok
texting about theprospect that President Trump is going to be elected, the unlikely
process.
PAGE: Right. I mean, it`s an analogy. First of all, it`s not my text, so I`m sort of
interpreting what I believed he meant back three years ago. But we`re using an analogy. We`re
talking about whether or not we should take certain investigative steps or not based on the
likelihood that he`sgoing to be president or not, right?
You have to keep in mind, if President Trump doesn`t become president, the national security
risks if there is somebody in his campaign associated with Russia plummets. You`re not so
worried about what Russia`s doing vis-a-vis a member of his campaign if he`s not president
because you`re not going to have access to classified information, you`re not going to have
access to sources and methods in our national security apparatus.
So, the insurance policy was an analogy. It`s like an insurance policy when you`re 40. You
don`t expect to die when you`re 40, yet you still have an insurance policy.
MADDOW: So don`t just hope that he`s not going be elected and therefore not press forward
with the investigation hoping, but rather press forward with the investigation just in case he
does get in there.
PAGE: Exactly.
MADDOW: What about the text messages that – in which you and Strzok were talking
about, your sort of fear that Trump would be elected and he said, no, we won`t let it
happen?
PAGE: I mean, by we, he`s talking about the collective we, like-minded, thoughtful,
sensible people who were not going to vote this person into office. You know, obviously in
retrospect, do I wish he hadn`t sent it? Yes. It`s been mutilated to death and it`s been used
to bludgeon an institution I love. And it`s meant that I disappointed countless people.
But this is – this is a snapshot in time carrying on a conversation that had happened
earlier in the day that reflected a broad sense of he`s notgoing to be president. We, the
democratic people of this country, are notgoing to let it happen.
MADDOW: And in terms of the litigation of this issue, the question about whether or not
this, as the president and his supporters claimed, reflected some inherent political bias by
you and Mr. Strzok and that you had key roles to play in these investigations and therefore the
investigations are biased. I mean, the inspector general has looked at that, been critical
of these expressions of strong political views, but also said that there was no indication that
political bias affected any decisions in either these investigations, full stop.
You responded to that on Twitter by saying: cool, cool. Like basically good to know but it
won`t make a difference?
PAGE: It won`t make a difference and it`s two years too late, right? It`s been three
straight years of investigation by the inspector general. Dozens of lawyers and investigators
poring over every investigative step that I took, every text and every email, and I realized
what I`ve known from the beginning which is that my personal views had no impact on the course
of either investigation. But to my "cool, cool" point, two days later, you see Lindsey Graham
in the Senate spend 40 minutes reading text messages again. These are three years old. They`re
– they`ve been described as immaterial ultimately by the inspector general and yet we`re
still talking about them.
"... Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse ..."
"... By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all. ..."
Ever since the Democratic Party abandoned its New Deal legacy and adopted the neoliberal
centrism associated with the Carter presidency and then cast in stone by the Democratic
Leadership Council in 1985, each election loss has generated a chorus of remonstrations in the
left-liberal press about the need to run "progressive" candidates if the party wants to win.
The latest instance of this was a post to the Jacobin FB page that stated: "By running
to the right, Democrats insist on losing twice: at the polls and in constructing an inspiring
agenda. Bold left-wing politics are our only hope for long-term, substantive victory."
The question of why Democrats are so okay with losing has to be examined closely. In some
countries, elections have huge consequences, especially in Latin America where a job as an
elected official might be not only a source of income for a socialist parliamentarian but a
trigger for a civil war or coup as occurred in Costa Rica in 1948 and in Chile in 1973
respectively.
In the 2010 midterm elections, there was a massive loss of seats in the House of
Representatives for the Democrats. In this month's midterm elections, the Democrats hoped that
a "Blue Wave" would do for them what the 2010 midterms did for the Republicans -- put them in
the driver's seat. It turned out to be more of a "Blue Spray", not to speak of the toothless
response of House leader Nancy Pelosi who spoke immediately about how the Democrats can reach
across the aisle to the knuckle-dragging racists of the Republican Party.
Out of curiosity, I went to Wikipedia to follow up on what happened to the "losers" in 2010.
Did they have to go on unemployment? Like Republicans who got voted out this go-round,
Democrats had no trouble lining up jobs as lobbyists. Allen Boyd from Florida sent a letter to
Obama after the BP oil spill in 2010 asking him to back up BP's claim that seafood in the Gulf
of Mexico was okay to eat. After being voted out of office, he joined the Twenty-First Century
Group, a lobbying firm founded by a former Republican Congressman from Texas named Jack Fields.
A 1980 article on Fields describes him as a protégé of ultraright leader Paul
Weyrich.
Glenn Nye, who lost his job as a Virginia congressman, his considerable CV that included
working for the Agency for International Development (AID) and serving in various capacities
during the occupation of Iraq to land a nice gig as Senior Political Advisor for the Hanover
Investment Group.
John Spratt from South Carolina was described by Dow Jones News as "one of the staunchest
fiscal conservatives among House Democrats." That was enough for him to land a job with Barack
Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that was supposed to come up
with a strategy to reduce the deficit. Just the sort of thing that was calculated to lift the
American economy out of the worst slump since the 1930s. Not.
Pennsylvania's Chris Carney was a helluva Democrat. From 2002 to 2004, he was a
counterterrorism analyst for the Bush administration. He not only reported to Douglas Feith in
the Office of Special Plans and at the Defense Intelligence Agency, researching links between
al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but served as an interrogator in Guantanamo. These qualifications
landed him a job as director of homeland security and policy strategy for BAE Systems when the
House of Representatives gig ended. A British security and munitions powerhouse, BAE won a
contract worth £4.4bn to supply the Saudis with 72 fighter jets – some of which
were used to bomb Red Cross and Physician Without Borders hospitals in Yemen.
With such crumb-bums losing in 2010, you'd think that the Democrats would be convinced that
their best bet for winning elections would be to disavow candidates that had ties to the
national security apparatus and anything that smacked of the DLC's assault on the welfare
state. Not exactly. When the candidates are female, that might work in the party's favor like
sugar-coating a bitter pill.
In Virginia, former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger and retired Navy Commander Elaine Luria
defeated Republican incumbents. Air Force veteran Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, former CIA
analyst Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and former Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey also
helped the Democrats regain the House. Sherill calculated that moving to the center would serve
her own and the party's interests. She told MSNBC: "As a Navy helicopter pilot I never flew
Republican missions or Democratic missions, I would have had a very short career. This is
something I do think vets bring to the table, this willingness to work with everyone."
For Sherrill, a newcomer to politics, the 11th has proved to be a tricky terrain. She is
seen as a progressive, but appears wary of carrying the "Trump resistance" banner into the
fray. At Wednesday's debate, Sherrill was determined to show she is more Morris Plains than
Montclair.
There were no heated vows to fight Trump, even though being "appalled" by the president
was what motivated her to run in the first place. The Nov. 6 midterms loom as a referendum on
Trump's presidency, but you would never have guessed that watching Wednesday's contest.
Sherrill repeatedly promised to be bipartisan -- a far cry from the combative,
confrontational tone that many in the party's grass roots are demanding.
On tax policy she sounded more centrist Republican than mainstream liberal Democrat, and
she refused to endorse issues like free community college tuition, which has become a popular
talking point for Democrats and was launched by Gov. Phil Murphy this summer.
"Without understanding how that would be paid for, I haven't supported it because it
sounds like it would raise taxes on our families,'" she said.
The moderate tone puzzled some of her ardent "resistance" activists who mobilized around
her candidacy.
For Eric Fritsch, 32, a Teamster for the film and television industry from West Orange, it
was jarring to hear Sherrill oppose Democratic Party wish-list items like free community
college tuition or "Medicare-for-all" coverage out of fear that it may raise taxes. She used
the same excuse to sidestep supporting a "carbon tax" to reduce global warming.
"By going on the defensive about taxes she is accepting a Republican framing that we don't
want to be responsible with taxes in the first place,'" said Fritsch, who insisted that he
remains a "very enthusiastic" Sherrill supporter.
It should be abundantly clear by now that the Democratic Party leadership will be selecting
a candidate in 2020 in all ways identical to Hillary Clinton but perhaps with a less tawdry
past and less of an appetite for Goldman-Sachs speaking fees. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe
Biden, Andrew Cuomo, et al have no intention of allowing upstarts like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
to spoil their plans, even if it means a second term for Donald Trump.
No matter. Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara urges his readers and DSA comrades to plunge ahead
trying to consolidate a "socialist" caucus in the Democratic Party. From his perspective,
working in the Democratic Party seems to be the "most promising place for advancing left
politics, at least in the short term." Keep in mind that Sherrill raised $1.9 million for her
campaign and my old boss from Salomon Brothers Michael Bloomberg ponied up another $1.8 million
just for her TV ads. Does anybody really think that "socialist" backed candidates will be able
to compete with people like Sherrill in the primaries? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to
defeat the hack Joe Crowley on a shoestring but that was something of a fluke. Until there is a
massive shake-up in American society that finally reveals the Democratic Party to be the
capitalist tool it has been since Andrew Jackson's presidency, it is likely that a combination
of big money and political inertia will keep the Democratic Party an agent of reaction.
Furthermore, the takeover of the House might turn out to be a hollow victory in the light of
how Trump rules. His strategy hasn't been to push through legislation except for the tax cut.
Remember the blather about investing in infrastructure? His minions in Congress have no
intention of proposing a trillion or so dollars in highway or bridge repair, etc. With Nancy
Pelosi fecklessly talking about how the two parties can collaborate on infrastructure, you can
only wonder whether she has been asleep for the past two years.
Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his
executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their
stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse as Malcolm X once put
it. Two days ago, the NY Times wrote about how the "Trump Administration Spares Corporate
Wrongdoers Billions in Penalties". It did not need legislation to help big banks rip off the
public. All it took was naming former head of BankOne Joseph Otting comptroller of the
currency. Senator Sherrod Brown, one of the few Democrats with a spine, called Trump out: "The
president's choice for watchdog of America's largest banks is someone who signed a consent
order -- over shady foreclosure practices -- with the very agency he's been selected to
run."
For all of the dozens of articles about how Trump is creating a fascist regime, hardly any
deal with the difference between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Hitler created a massive bureaucracy
that ran a quasi-planned economy with generous social benefits that put considerable restraints
on the bourgeoisie. Like FDR, he was taking measures to save capitalism. Perhaps if the USA had
a social and economic crisis as deep as Germany's and left parties as massive as those in
Germany, FDR might have embarked on a much more ambitious concentration camp program, one that
would have interred trade unionists as well as Japanese-Americans. Maybe even Jews if they
complained too much.
By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as
Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch
Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior
of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected
government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to
push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the
courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is
unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens
to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all.
Whiners. They're all whiners. I don't understand why Maddow is worried. Hell, if she goes
to the slammer she'll have her pick of all those incarcerated Honeys with which she will
reside.
You have to assume that Rachel is a Russian mole - how else can you explain her so
effectively working to destroy the credibility of the Western media. She talks to her
audience like she thinks she's on Sesame Street - Rachel: folks can pick up when they're
being patronized - it's getting tired.
"... Imagine millions of government employees paid for by America's tax payer class, involved in covert operations undermining nation states for the benefit of war mongering shadow overlords counting on more never ending chaos feeding their hunger for power. ..."
"... This isn't Orwell's 1984, this Team America on opioids. ..."
"... Senior OPCW official had orders from US/ the Donald. Remember that the Donald bombed Syria based on this fake report , after a false flag done by Al Qaeda's artistic branch, the White Helmets. ..."
"... Pray, do tell where are the consequences for these literal demons that engaged in war crimes? It is quite clear: as long as you are a member of the establishment, you can do whatever the f*ck you want. ..."
"... Third rate script, third rate actors and crooked investigators. TPTB seem to have a plan worked out. Their problem now is that we, the hoi-polloi, have seen it all before, many times, and we can now recognise ******** when it's used to try to influence us. ..."
"... If this is not lamentable enough, the OPCW – whose final report came to more than a hundred pages and which even issued an easy-to-read precis version for journalists – now slams shut its steel doors in the hope of preventing even more information reaching the press. ..."
"... Instead of these pieces concentrating on the whistleblower how about putting a little heat on the 50 lying bastards who initiated the coverup? ..."
"... The destruction of the countries of the Middle East for the sake of a dwarf with giant ambitions is the most stupid thing the United States has done over the past 30 years in its foreign policy. And yes, all the wars in the Middle East were grounded in lies. And the Americans paid for it all from start to finish. When Americans realize that they need to defend their national interests, and not other people's national interests, maybe something in the Middle East will change for the better. True, I am afraid that with the hight level of stupidity and shortsightedness that is common among Americans, the United States is more likely to be destroyed faster. No offense. ..."
"... And I propose to remember the Syrian Christians who were destroyed by the Saudi Wahhabis, hired by the CIA with the money of American taxpayers and at the request of Israel. Until the Americans begin to investigate the activities of the CIA (and this activity causes the United States only harm), the responsibility for this genocide (you heard right) will be on the American nation. It turns out that in the Middle East you are primarily destroying Christians. How interesting, why such zeal. ..."
"... According to whistleblower testimony and leaked documents, OPCW officials raised alarm about the suppression of critical findings that undermine the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. Haddad's editors at Newsweek rejected his attempts to cover the story. "If I don't find another position in journalism because of this, I'm perfectly happy to accept that consequence," Haddad says. "It's not desirable. But there is no way I could have continued in that job knowing that I couldn't report something like this." ..."
"... New leaks continue to expose a cover-up by the OPCW – the world's top chemical weapons watchdog – over a critical event in Syria. Documents, emails, and testimony from OPCW officials have raised major doubts about the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. The leaked OPCW information has been released in pieces by Wikileaks. The latest documents contain a number of significant revelations – including that that about 20 OPCW officials voiced concerns that their scientific findings and on-the-ground evidence was suppressed and excluded. ..."
Wikileaks has released their fourth set of leaks from the OPCW's Douma investigation,
revealing new details about the alleged deletion of important information regarding the
fact-finding mission.
RELEASE: OPCW-Douma Docs 4. Four leaked documents from the OPCW reveal that toxicologists
ruled out deaths from chlorine exposure and a senior official ordered the deletion of the
dissenting engineering report from OPCW's internal repository of documents. https://t.co/ndK4sRikNk
"One of the documents is an e-mail exchange dated 27 and 28 February between members of the
fact finding mission (FFM) deployed to Douma and the senior officials of the OPCW. It includes
an e-mail from Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW , where he instructs that an
engineering report from Ian Henderson should be removed from the secure registry of the
organisation," WikiLeaks writes. Included in the email is the following directive:
" Please get this document out of DRA [Documents Registry Archive] And please remove all
traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA.'"
According to Wikileaks, the main finding of Henderson, who inspected the sites in Douma, was
that two of the cylinders were most likely manually placed at the site, rather than
dropped.
"The main finding of Henderson, who inspected the sites in Douma and two cylinders that were
found on the site of the alleged attack, was that they were more likely manually placed there
than dropped from a plane or helicopter from considerable heights. His findings were omitted
from the official final OPCW report on the Douma incident," the Wikileaks report said.
It must be remembered that the U.S. launched an attack on Damascus, Syria on April 14, 2018
over alleged chemical weapons usage by pro-Assad forces at Douma.
Another document released Friday is minutes from a meeting on 6 June 2018 where four staff
members of the OPCW had discussions with "three Toxicologists/Clinical pharmacologists, one
bioanalytical and toxicological chemist" (all specialists in chemical weapons, according to the
minutes).
Minutes from an OPCW meeting with toxicologists specialized in chemical weapons: "the
experts were conclusive in their statements that there was
no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure". https://t.co/j5Jgjiz8UY pic.twitter.com/vgPaTtsdQN
The purpose of this meeting was two-fold. The first objective was "to solicit expert advice
on the value of exhuming suspected victims of the alleged chemical attack in Douma on 7 April
2018". According to the minutes, the OPCW team was advised by the experts that there would be
little use in conducting exhumations. The second point was "To elicit expert opinions from the
forensic toxicologists regarding the observed and reported symptoms of the alleged
victims."
More specifically, " whether the symptoms observed in victims were consistent with exposure
to chlorine or other reactive chlorine gas."
According to the minutes leaked Friday: "With respect to the consistency of the observed and
reported symptoms of the alleged victims with possible exposure to chlorine gas or similar, the
experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and
chlorine exposure ."
The OPCW team members wrote that the key "take-away message" from the meeting was "that the
symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine and no other obvious candidate
chemical causing the symptoms could be identified".
The isisrahell have such long hand to pull the plug any stories implicating their crime in
progress otherwise they can put out some bs spins as bombshell reporting about US lies in
Afghanistan war on their wapo for public for those who read it was nothing important revealed
except being a misdirected na
If you want to pay off that student loan you're going to print what they tell you to
print. You're going to inject kids with what they tell you to inject them with. You're going
to think what they tell you to think or you're going to spend your days in a Prole bar
drinking Blatz.
yes, an attack was launched, 50 missiles I believe, after loud warnings that it was
coming, and none of them actually hit anything significant ... this is the way the game is
played .... the good news is that the missiles cost $50 million, and now they will have to be
replaced, by the Pentagon, first borrowing the money through the US Treasury offerings, and
then paying for them from new money printed by the Federal Reserve. capische?
That`s the way it`s always been, it`s the eternal war of good against evil.
And when one evil enemy is defeated, it`s necessary to create a new evil enemy, how else
can the Establishment Elite make money from war, death and destruction.
It's really very awkward & telling how ***** these bunch of western nations are
looking tough on taking out poor defenceless country like Syria on ******** & at the
satried to ease real kickass Russian as you described when they launch the attacks
I kind wish the US & their Zionist clown launch such huge attacks on Iran based on
false flag
I really wanted these evil aggressive powers to taste what it is like to get bombed back
even one they used to throw on multiple weaker nations freely with nothing to fear as
retribution etc
This organisations are all set up in Europe and US run by the filthiest filth on earth who
still think they have God given right to imperial rule over the world.
Your military-industrial-intelligence complex at work, creating justification for more
funding, like always - and who cares if people die as a result? Like Soros said, if they
didn't do it, someone else would. (do I need /sarc?).
They don't like to be shown to be in charge, just to be in charge. And if you think this
is a function of the current admin, you've been slow in the head and deaf and blind for quite
some time.
I've watched since Eisenhower, and "it's always something". Doesn't matter what color the
clown in chief's tie is.
Imagine millions of government employees paid for by America's tax payer class, involved
in covert operations undermining nation states for the benefit of war mongering shadow
overlords counting on more never ending chaos feeding their hunger for power.
This isn't Orwell's 1984, this Team America on opioids.
Senior OPCW official had orders from US/ the Donald. Remember that the Donald bombed Syria based on this fake report , after a false flag done
by Al Qaeda's artistic branch, the White Helmets.
Pray, do tell where are the consequences for these literal demons that engaged in war
crimes? It is quite clear: as long as you are a member of the establishment, you can do
whatever the f*ck you want. Why do we even follow the law, then? Given the precedent that is
being set, we might as well not have any.
Well, they are looking forward to using all those Israeli weapons, er, uh, products, that
local law enforcement has purchased...so watch out for Co-Intel Pro elicitation going
forward....?
Everybody knows the Golem (USA) does Isn'treal's bidding in Syria and elsewhere in the
Near East. Hopefully they keep hammering in the fact that this "gas attack" was an obvious
set-up to use as a pretext (flimsy itself on the face of it) to brutalize Assad and Syria on
behalf of Isn'treal.
The whole thing is built on ******* lies. Worst part about it is, nothing will happen.
Only official news is to believed. You see it and it is a lie. they tell you to believe
it. A lot of people casually believe whatever is spoken on TV. They become teachers and are
taught in college what is right and wrong. We only have a few years before all the brain dead
are in charge and robotically following the message like zombies with no brain
Third rate script, third rate actors and crooked investigators. TPTB seem to have a plan worked out. Their problem now is that we, the hoi-polloi, have
seen it all before, many times, and we can now recognise ******** when it's used to try to
influence us.
It is difficult to underestimate the seriousness of this manipulative act by the OPCW.
In a response to the conservative author Peter Hitchens, who also writes for the Mail on
Sunday – he is of course the brother of the late Christopher Hitchens – the
OPCW admits that its so-called technical secretariat "is conducting an internal
investigation about the unauthorised [sic] release of the document".
Then it adds: "At this time, there is no further public information on this matter and
the OPCW is unable to accommodate [sic] requests for interviews". It's a tactic that until
now seems to have worked: not a single news media which reported the OPCW's official
conclusions has followed up the story of the report which the OPCW suppressed.
And you bet the OPCW is not going to "accommodate" interviews. For here is an
institution investigating a war crime in a conflict which has cost hundreds of thousands of
lives – yet its only response to an enquiry about the engineers' "secret" assessment
is to concentrate on its own witch-hunt for the source of the document it wished to keep
secret from the world.
If this is not lamentable enough, the OPCW – whose final report came to more than
a hundred pages and which even issued an easy-to-read precis version for journalists
– now slams shut its steel doors in the hope of preventing even more information
reaching the press.
The destruction of the countries of the Middle East for the sake of a dwarf with giant
ambitions is the most stupid thing the United States has done over the past 30 years in its
foreign policy. And yes, all the wars in the Middle East were grounded in lies. And the
Americans paid for it all from start to finish. When Americans realize that they need to
defend their national interests, and not other people's national interests, maybe something
in the Middle East will change for the better. True, I am afraid that with the hight level of
stupidity and shortsightedness that is common among Americans, the United States is more
likely to be destroyed faster. No offense.
And I propose to remember the Syrian Christians who were destroyed by the Saudi Wahhabis,
hired by the CIA with the money of American taxpayers and at the request of Israel. Until the
Americans begin to investigate the activities of the CIA (and this activity causes the United
States only harm), the responsibility for this genocide (you heard right) will be on the
American nation. It turns out that in the Middle East you are primarily destroying
Christians. How interesting, why such zeal.
According to whistleblower testimony and leaked documents, OPCW officials raised alarm
about the suppression of critical findings that undermine the allegation that the Syrian
government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. Haddad's
editors at Newsweek rejected his attempts to cover the story. "If I don't find another
position in journalism because of this, I'm perfectly happy to accept that consequence,"
Haddad says. "It's not desirable. But there is no way I could have continued in that job
knowing that I couldn't report something like this."
New leaks continue to expose a cover-up by the OPCW – the world's top chemical
weapons watchdog – over a critical event in Syria. Documents, emails, and testimony
from OPCW officials have raised major doubts about the allegation that the Syrian government
committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. The leaked OPCW
information has been released in pieces by Wikileaks. The latest documents contain a number
of significant revelations – including that that about 20 OPCW officials
voiced concerns that their scientific findings and on-the-ground evidence was suppressed and
excluded.
This is, without a doubt, a major global scandal: the OPCW, under reported US pressure,
suppressing vital evidence about allegations of chemical weapons. But that very fact exposes
another global scandal: with the exception of small outlets like The Grayzone, the mass media
has widely ignored or whitewashed this story. And this widespread censorship of the OPCW
scandal has just led one journalist to resign. Up until recently, Tareq Haddad was a reporter
at Newsweek. But in early December, Tareq announced that he had quit his position after
Newsweek refused to publish his story about the OPCW cover up over Syria.
As the New Cold War gathers up speed and escalates, we are entering a "fact free world" as
allegations are made that are proved not to be true are promoted; for example, the allegation
that the DNC was hacked by Russia has been officially debunked -- no one could name the
seventeen intelligence agencies, the Coast Guard was one. The notion of the hacking was cooked
up by two agencies: by the DNI's head James Clapper and Brennan at the CIA. Nevertheless,
recently News Anchor Chuck Todd of NBC (the most pro-Russiagate network, the ones who
shamelessly accused presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard of being a Russian asset) took it one
step further: ignoring the facts, Todd again stated that seventeen intelligence agencies agreed
that the Russians not only interfered in the election but that they swung the election to
Trump. While interference is one thing, no one has previously made that allegation.
Consequently, we are now in a fact free discourse in America: no evidence is necessary to prove
anything, falsehoods are taken up by the legacy media, what Professor Cohen would call a world
of tabloid gossip media, except in their favor the tabloids, fearing lawsuits, will do some
fact checking, which is conspicuous in its absence in the legacy media. And Professor Cohen
noted that it's hard to get traction and you can't have a conversation with someone when you
don't agree upon the facts.
In conversation on a cruise with fellow liberals, Professor Cohen noted most take the view
that where there is smoke there is fire and there is something to these allegations of
Russiagate and Putin's control over Trump; they state the media wouldn't continue to promote
these conspiracy theories, these allegations about Trump's nefarious relations with the
Kremlin, without reason and so there must be something to them. Yet while facts have become
absolutely critical Cohen notes you can't get people to focus on the facts; for that reason, he
feels despair and observes that for the first time in his life in his public discussions of
Russia there are no basic premises that people accept any more, for if you say "If there's
smoke, there's fire," that is just not a logical way of thinking: you either have the facts or
you don't.
Batchelor also points out in the impeachment charges there is a great deal of presumption;
there are no facts regarding the president as well, and he cites Trump's letter to Nancy Pelosi
and poses this question: what does the Kremlin think about the impeachment?
Cohen answers that the Russian high policy class in the 1990s -- the America worship period
-- they and not just the youth, strongly believed that Russia's future was with the West and
America in particular, and now what strikes Russians most is the role of Russian intelligence
services in the Western allegations. Pro-America Russians thought that American intelligence
services didn't play the role that the Soviet ones did. In Russian history classes and as a
staple of popular culture, the sinister role of the "secret police" goes back to the Czarist
era but what distinguished America was that it didn't have anything comparable in abuses by its
intelligence services -- or so it was believed. Consequently, for those who looked up to
America, it's a source of disillusion and shock to learn that the American special services
"went off the reservation" for quite a long time, not unlike Russia's, and so they have become
disillusioned while for those who tried to get Russians to be more nationalistic, their
perspective is to say with gratification, "We told you so. Now will you please grow up!"
Russians call the American agencies "the organs" perhaps not being clear on the difference
between the CIA and the FBI and conflating them. For Russians, the role of such agencies is
baked into the culture and this has resulted in rethinking not only about America but about
their own special services. An Op-Ed piece in a Russian liberal newspaper the Russian liberal
author wrote, after watching what's unfolding in America, we used to beat up on our
intelligence services for decades but now maybe we need them. Contrary to a "cult of the
intelligence services," Cohen thinks what must be determined is the role of the American
intelligence services in creating Russiagate from the very beginning.
Yet what is critical is to know how Russiagate began in America, with the Barr-Durham probe
into the origins of Russia and Russiagate will continue to be a major issue in the 2020
election. What struck Cohen about the letter from Trump to Pelosi -- which was so eloquent he
doubts Trump wrote it -- was that he understands it will be an issue in the 2020 elections, and
it was a campaign document. That aside, Trump is aware that Democrats are campaigning still on
Russiagate; nothing has turned up that it factual. Therefore, despite the absence of facts,
this will be a major issue. Ukraine has turned into a stand-in for Russia.
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, once a quintessential conservative, published an
article titled "Time to Call out and Remove Putin's Propagandist in America." While the article
is slightly cagier than that headline, essentially she wants to shutdown and deprive access to
media who aren't espousing and promoting the Russiagate/Russophobic narratives. Cohen condemns
that kind of behavior is that. On opposite side of Rubin, Cohen stated he himself has never
advocated the silencing and removal of those who promote among other falsehoods the provably
false Russiagate narrative. He asks where are things drifting and he answers discourse and
relations are becoming ugly and awful.
Returning to the past, he notes there was an assumption that Russia under Yeltsin would
emerge as a replica and junior partner of America; Cohen believes those who promote the
Russiagate narrative and demonize Trump because their "impossible dream" failed -- Russia is
too old, too vast to ever be a replica of America. What took Professor Cohen aback in the
testimony from Fiona Hill and others was how deep and wide the Russophobia runs in the
Washington think tanks. Until she spoke and testified he had no idea how much she -- and the
other Russia experts -- hate Russia.
Batchelor noted this is the language of civil war in Trump's letter; Trump uses the term
"Star Chamber of partisan persecution" and "coup" which are the language of a country torn in
half and he asked the question whether the weakening of the civil contract to be an advantage
to Putin and Russia. Cohen notes every newspaper and media source in America say Putin is
delighted since it is his goal is to foment disarray in America.
The fact is, however, this chaos and dysfunction and enmity is one of the last things Putin
wants. Putin's purpose is to rebuild Russia from the economic and political catastrophes of the
1990s; Putin's role is to reverse the demographic trend -- men died in their fifties in the
1990s -- and spend funds on modernization; that would be his legacy. Four hundred billion
dollars has been saved to implement the modernization program. That attempt would be taken with
modernizing partnerships with the West. Therefore, the last thing he wants is a new Cold War;
the last thing he wants is political turmoil in America or in any Western nation. Cohen points
out President Macron of France appears to understand that; he called for a rethinking of
relations and said there could be no European security without Russia. Macron has broken with
Washington and there will be a hell of fight because Washington is against it. But the notion
that Putin wants to disrupt American society is wrong; Putin wants stability and partners.
Cohen still thinks that leadership -- the new President of Ukraine, Trump and Putin --
I always listen to the Prof's podcast shows at Batchelor. What bothers me is that so many
Trump supporters and public commentators BELIEVE, or at least parrot the idea that Russia
INVADED both western Ukraine and Crimea.
As the Prof has pointed out and seconded by many others, Crimea has been a part of Russia
since late 18th century. Because Khrushchev "gave' it to Ukraine in 50s when it was all one
country does not obviate the fact that Crimeans consider themselves Russians as proved by all
polling and a plebiscite. They had permanent bases there and the alleged invasion was nothing
more than politely escorting the Ukrainian military off from the peninsula without any
injuries to either side. Some invasion.
Surely some Russians (whether incognito military/intelligence forces or private citizens)
were part of the Donbass forces that rebelled against Kiev. And they had good reasons to
rebel witness the horrors of Odessa when 40 something citizens of Russian ancestry were
burned alive trapped in a building by Ultra-Ukrainian nazi-like forces.
Now Senate Foreign Relations committee, chaired by Senator from my state, has called for
designating Russia as a "terror supporting state." I emailed him and asked if he was insane.
He returned a long letter that is full of obfuscations and lies, and I will compose a
detailed response soon. But the question presents: is the Deep State and their globalists'
master deliberately trying to force Russia into a military alliance with China? Could we
prevail against that combination? Haunting resemblance to conditions that created
Ribbentrop/Molotov pact in late 30s. And what that foretell?
Well, I guess when you have such luminaries as members of the Council on Foreign Relations
spieling the same level of ignorance, blindness, prejudice, propaganda and plain
perverseness, you have to expect it from all levels of "Governance"
For anyone who knows even a small amount about Russia and her leader, go listen to a recent
YouTube convention headed Russia's Resurgence: Prospects for stability in Russia-US
relationship.
One thing is for sure – as long as these supposed "think tank leaders" can deliberately
blind themselves to reality as this trio did, and spout the utterly brain dead stupidity they
used to instigate a Q & A, there is no hope whatsoever of any stability in Russia –
US relationship.
The people of the media lie because they are for sale and are paid to lie. Rather uninspiring
but understandable: they do it for the money and to stay in front of the cameras. But what's
everyone else's excuse? Putin is a Svengali who mind-controls Trump? I thought people like
that wore turbans and robes. How stupid are Americans, anyway? Who'd have thought something
like this would have any traction whatsoever? It's simply incredible.
I was born into the Cold War in 1944. I got my draft notice in 1965. I had been expecting it
all my young life. The Berlin wall did not fall until 1989.
This new Cold War will be over soon. It will turn hot and we will all die or the "West"
will collapse and will repatriate it's legions. The Anglo/Zio Empire is in steep decline
while Russia and her allies are ascendant.
I agree that the truth is no defense against the "left". Their long march is completed and
they occupy the high ground whether it's politics or culture. They have taken over the
country just in time to preside over its demise.
Russians who thought their future was with the West were not completely wrong. If the U.S.
has a future it is probably with Russia.
There is a couple of points I would like to add on a changing European perspective on the
dynamics between the USA and Russia, with Europe caught in-between.
1.) After the Second World War the choice between Bolshevism and US liberal democracy
seemed blatantly obvious; for Germany especially it was a question of national survival,
since Stalin was viewed as a serious threat by the Adenauer government. Germany had actually
enjoyed more internal independence from leading US doctrines in this period. US rule of law,
the character of its elites and the general morality of the society had not completely
degraded yet either. Today institutional erosion of American democracy, the rule of law and a
cynical Neocon approach towards "promoting democracy abroad" turned the USA into a
non-appealing leader of 'the West'. The increasing "Sovietization" of its state apparatus
emphasizes this point: the expansion of the surveillance state, selective access to real
political and economic access to a select few of the privileged; often hereditary dynasties
of oligarchs, a political-media complex of agitation and propaganda. Thus, the accusations
against Russia (or China for that matter) about a lack of transparency, pluralism and the
rule of law sound entirely hollow.
2.) Thus secondly NATO has turned from a credible alliance of defense against the Soviet
Union into a tool of US imperialism; especially after the USA has declared victory in the
Cold War. Wars surrounding Europe and even inside of it – The Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia and in Ukraine – were the result. Nations were destroyed, heads of state
publicly executed or tortured to death like Muammar Gaddafi and millions of people were
killed; many more were made homeless and a refugee crisis was created. And concealing wars of
aggression as "human rights promotion" opened a can of worms for cynical nihilism as the new
norm of US foreign policy – WMD lies, Abu-Ghuraib and NSA scandals included. Just as
the established political-media apparatus is guilty of everything populism is accused of:
post factual parallel realities, fake news and fake realities, systematic disinformation,
social engineering and conditioning into hysteria and the frenzy of the mob. The pathology of
the new US ruling class personified by Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright
3.) There is indeed no lasting European stability imaginable without a permanent peaceful
agreement between Western- and Eastern-Europe and Russia. Russia's role as the Eurasian land
bridge to China is also essential this century. Mutual agreement has to be found to settle
old grievances and fears regarding Napoleon and Hitler on the Russian side and Stalinism and
the Soviet Union on the European side. A situation which the USA also currently exploits for
political destabilization – especially in Poland.
4.) Germany, currently the central country in the EU, owes its unification largely to
Russia. Unfortunately it was a mistake on the Russian side when they had unilaterally
withdrawn all their troops from German territory, that they did not demand the same from
US/NATO forces. In that moment the transformation of NATO was sealed and the New Cold War had
begun. Yet while the attitudes of the older generations are shaped by the US-Soviet Union
Cold War, for new generations it's a different story. Increasingly the USA is seen as a more
credible threat and/or bully with its war policy, real political meddling and especially in
my country the fact that Germany was both forced to sanction Russia, which went against its
own vital interests, and then be sanctioned as well.
5.) I am leaving out the value and identity politics debate. Fundamentally the general
public on both sides of the Atlantic agrees on the theory on foundations of functioning
democracy. Although I do think that since the end of the last Cold War the influence of the
USA has been more harmful and corrosive than helpful and stabilizing.
Conclusion: In this new Cold War which was, I think, initiated by the US establishment, we
could see a future in which Germany and Russia begin to view themselves more in the light of
the Prussian-Russian coalition against the new "Napoleon", the United States. Although this
arising conflict could rightly be dubbed: The Unnecessary Cold War.
that the truth is no defense against the "left". Their long march is completed and they
occupy the high ground whether it's politics or culture.'
'
Left ? Do you believe that the establishment crowd of Democrats (Liberals,) and the
managed news (Liberals,) and others Liberals, neoliberals, neocons, or anything else
comprising the Russiagate hoax can be describes as Leftist?
It's been determined that the Democrats intentionally jettisoned the Working Class decades
ago. It shouldn't be news to working people that they don't have a party!
It was a rational decision to unload the workers, and substitute special interest and
identity politics, because of trends of the decline of union membership in age of technology,
automation, and YUPPIES! The Democrats are now slick pretenders of social justice, but not
left.
@RJJCDA " is the Deep State and their globalists' master deliberately trying to force
Russia into a military alliance with China? "
Hard to say what their intentions are. (The old ploy of unity at home by means of an
external enemy ?) Whatever they are -- US foreign policy (FO) re Russia should go down with
Iraq (II) as among the US's greatest FO blunders.
As the Saker has pointed out– Russia & China are in symbiosis, which runs deeper
than an alliance.
Russiagate is a kind of "two birds with one stone" deal: you get to bash Trump & Russia
using each as a club to beat the other. That this whole base concoction of lies seems to
still have legs speaks volumes as to the deep of Trump derangement syndrome & the
universality of msm propaganda.
Mr Cohen is so far ahead of Washington , when it comes to Russia and other foreign matters,
it just boggles the mind of us normies. The Ukraine Gate is all about the Kyivian Jew
Oligarchs, trying to oust the thief Democrats from all the IMF looting , that those Kyivians
, had their eyes/hands on. It's like – thanks for doing the Coup but all the money we
get is – Ours for the looting. And there are hundreds of millions – missing.
Russia Gate will go on, until the American public – " Grows Up " as Mr. Cohen says.
What damns the US media, both anti-Trump and Fox News, is that America has been massively
meddling in elections all over the globe since Day One, including Russia, and this is known
or should be known to anyone with a basic knowledge of international relations, yet it is
almost NEVER mentioned when the subject of Russian meddling comes up.
There is a feeling that it would be unpatriotic (treasonous?) to admit it. This is
something new for America. In the old days American foreign policy was sharply debated and
America's sins were much discussed by the left. But now, the left is on the CIA's side. This
probably has to do with the Jewishness of the left. Jews tend to hate Russia as much as they
tended to like the Soviet Union. They see post-Communist Russia as politically incorrect
(e.g. anti-gay) and Christian, a potentially nationalistic society that could turn
anti-Semitic.
Because of Russia's nuclear capability it is not possible for the US to invade it, so we
are relying on internal subversion and economic tactics to bring down Putin, leading to the
installation of a US lackey with neocon approval. Even as we speak of Russian meddling the
CIA is busy organizing and funding anti-Putin elements in Russia.
"We're just trying to spread democracy. What's wrong with that!?"
@Back1 Stupidity does not produce the invention and promotion of lie after lie,
Nor is stupidity consistent with the selection of the best lies from those total of lies
generated.
Only lies that work on the minds targeted are repeated.
Repeat the lie but hide it, camouflage the lie with some truth, and embedded the lie into
the propaganda that establishes the narrative, and then mass produce the lie embedded
propaganda that establishes the false or misleading narrative is a complicated process.
Repeat and repeat the false narrative is a hat trick that often deceives innocent minds into
adopting, embedding and acting on beliefs established in innocent minds by mind control
technology. These process are not consistent with stupidity, but instead suggest diabolical
genius at work.
When only the lies that work; that is, that control, deceive or influence innocent minds
are repeated you are looking process which took intelligence to make work. Inventing lies
takes imagination, producing them into propaganda takes skill, and promoting the produced
invented lie takes money, power and access.
Selection (of the best or most suitable lie) is an process that requires identification
and sufficient intelligence to sort; while repetition requires the selected object be either
committed to memory, or to be continuously and precisely regenerated for each
promotion(campaign). Promotion is a delicate process; its success so dependant on so many
things, that many people have obtained Phds from the subject matter that surround the
technology of deceit.
The point is that promoting false narratives is an invented developing technology that
takes professionally trained persons to make work. Someone is paying the mind control
professionals (MCPs) that are working to embed false narrative into the memory of the minds
of the governed masses. MCPs are not stupid people. Not only are they highly trained
professionals but also they don't work for free. So who is paying them.
Why is Steven Cohen credited with this article when obviously it is written by another? What
gives, Unz? It is an example of the same facts twisting it rails against.
@Antiwar7 "If there's smoke, there's fire" is not so much stupid as devious. You have to
understand that many political leaders nowadays have realised that they don't need hard facts
and figures or logic to sway opinion.
Increasingly, political divisions are tribal; and the worst condemnation is "you are not
one of us". Disagreeing with the party line shows that a person is "not one of us".
That is especially the case when the party line is obviously untrue. Then sticking to it
is an absolute proof of devoted, unthinking loyalty. It's more like a pledge of allegiance
than a rational statement of fact.
I agree that the truth is no defense against the "left". Their long march is completed
and they occupy the high ground whether it's politics or culture. They have taken over the
country just in time to preside over its demise.
It is the right as well on important issue to the Deep State there is no right and
left.
Does it really matter? America is already a Jewish/Bolshevik occupied nation?
To achieve absolute power, Lenin focused on fomenting a class war, while Hitler set his
sights on a race war. Either way, the divide-and-conquer modus operandi of fascist and
communist demagogues is pretty much the same, no matter what each side might claim about
the other. Their propaganda content may differ, but not so much their divide-and-conquer
methods. Attitudes of supremacy come in a virtual rainbow of flavors and colors.
theamericanconservative.com : "Forget Trump : The
Military-Industrial-Complex is still running the show " By Bruce Fein , July 18, 2018 theintercept.com " Defense
contractors say Russian threat is great for business "
Did Russian believe that any assurances could prevent Nato being drawn right up to the
borders of Russia? Did Ukrainians believe the UK and US's security assurances 'against the
threat or use of force against Ukraine's territory or political independence' could replace
Ukraine's possession of nuclear weapons? Zbigniew Brzezinski did speak of Russia
"increasingly passing into de facto western receivership" .
They say the Russians only heard what that wanted to hear, but the record suggests the
Americans misrepresented their intentions, and gave assurances that the Russians took at face
value. Russia permitted an American campaign to spent vast sums and organise Yeltsin's
reelection, which would not have happened without them. The Russian foreign minister at that
time, Andrei Kozyrev, now lives in Miami.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2018-03-16/nato-expansion-what-yeltsin-heardD.C
., March 16, 2018 – Declassified documents from U.S. and Russian archives show that
U.S. officials led Russian President Boris Yeltsin to believe in 1993 that the Partnership
for Peace was the alternative to NATO expansion, rather than a precursor to it, while
simultaneously planning for expansion after Yeltsin's re-election bid in 1996 and telling
the Russians repeatedly that the future European security system would include, not
exclude, Russia.
The declassified U.S. account of one key conversation on October 22, 1993, (Document 8)
shows Secretary of State Warren Christopher assuring Yeltsin in Moscow that the Partnership
for Peace was about including Russia together with all European countries, not creating a
new membership list of just some European countries for NATO; and Yeltsin responding, "this
is genius!"
Christopher later claimed in his memoir that Yeltsin misunderstood – perhaps from
being drunk – the real message that the Partnership for Peace would in fact "lead to
gradual expansion of NATO";[1] but the actual American-written cable reporting the
conversation supports subsequent Russian complaints about being misled.[2]
After obtaining a succession of huge US-backed IMF loans, being found on Pennsylvania
Avenue, drunk, in his underwear and trying to hail a taxi cab in order to find pizza in 1995,
Yeltsin chose Putin the teetotal former counterintelligence specialist to succeed him. What a
sense of humour Yeltsin must have had.
@jack daniels I agree that the paraphraser should not go anonymous. But more important is
to bring to the reader's attention that a broadcast podcast is available at the article's
end.
@Vaterland The American elutes might be forgiven theirvicious follies by Americans if
they had not impoverished so many Americans and,at best leaving them struggling.
@9/11 Inside job We do not call it "the Military-Industrial-Complex".
We do not call it "the Banks".
We do not call it "the FED"
We do not call it "the Wall Street"
We do not call it "the Media"
@Realist Agreed. Truth is no defense against the Deep State which is neither left nor
right.. Still, it is the ideological left that denies the existence of objective reality. For
them there are no facts. Only subjective experience. Useful idiots and propagandists for the
Deep State, they "know" Trump is a Russian agent because they can feel it. They don't
need no steenking evidence.
The (left) media promote hatred. Orange Man Bad. The ideological left understands and
enjoys hatred. They can feel it. When you hate somebody you are ready and eager to
believe the worst about them.
@EdNels Thank you. Well said, and not nearly enough.
It's my opinion that the relentless use of "left" to describe the neoliberal half of the
Republicrat/Wall Street/war industry party is no accident.
Describing the "Democrats" of the Clinton DNC as "left" is useful to discredit and
marginalize any political stance that, fairly and realistically, could be considered "left."
It produces chaos and confusion, which is the objective of the neocon/neoliberal grifters who
control both halves of the war party.
@Realist I suspect that the paraphraser is our own Ron Unz since he strikes me as a
hands-on operator. Secondary suspect is Phil Giraldi, UR's National Security Editor.
In any event it's important to dissimulate Cohen's views since he's literally A
Geopolitical Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness! For this both Batchelor and Unz are to be
commended!!
@Realist There's a left alright; there's just no right. Since the 1960's the conservative
movement and Republican Party have conserved exactly nothing while the left has completely
transformed America, successfully implementing much of the 1930's communist agenda and
turning the government into the enemy of the society at large.
In his Myth of Religious Violence William T Cavanaugh points out that before the
arrival of Frankfurter on the Supreme Court, religion, meaning chiefly Christianity, was held
by the court to be the fundamental source of social cohesion and peace in America, while
since the late 1940s and post-Frankfurter, religion, now meaning only Christianity,
has been consistently held to be not only divisive, but the fundamental source of violence.
The point is, this upending of society was accomplished by legislating from the bench, while
the Republicans and Conservatism Inc, as we now learn, were funded to neutralize opposition,
blowing smoke in Americans' eyes about legalisms at a time when at least 90% of this country
was conservative.
Sites like The American Conservative and American Thinker, for example, are apparently
funded to publish fawning material about the Jews and Israel that the latter would be too
ashamed to write themselves, which also pretty much sums up the Republican's m.o. in
Congress.
It's about time the American electorate saw candidates for national and state office as
figureheads for their largest donors, who're presently portrayed as almost incidental by the
msm. Instead of saying that Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham said this or that, accuracy
requires we say Paul Singer and Sheldon Adelson's spokesman in the Senate, some so-and-so
stooge, said this or that. It's the same on both sides of the aisle, obviously, and it turns
out that the owners of both parties are kin when it comes to destroying the social fabric of
this country for their own hateful reasons.
@Patrikios Stetsonis You forgot , an aspect. "We do not call it Z.O.G."
Which commands and guides the US government in both domestic and foreign policy.
On similar note to your closing statement ,
To quote Treitschke 1879 "The Jews are our misfortune"
The zionists hate Christians and since Russia is becoming more Christian the zionists hate
towards Russia has reached a hysteria that is only matched by their demonic hate of
Christians and one of the ways to strike at Russia is through lies and false flags blamed on
Russia.
The ZUS is winning the war against Christians here in America with abortions and
pedophilia in high places and the worship of satan in Hellywood and elsewhere and the
penetration of the Christian churches by zionist elements.
The zionists will not stop until America is destroyed, zionism is the most dangerous
element in America.
Read the Protocols of Zion, it is all right there.
*All* mainstream media is propaganda from clown world. This defines our era in US. Mass
psychosis is the new reality.
The Russia nonsense tells me that US establishment people are stupid and self deluded,
truly sad sack dummies.
Several commenters around here have claimed the Apollo moon landing hoax "does not
matter".
[MORE]
It is old news, not relevant to today, too controversial, etc.
The problem is that once the elites get away with lying, it encourages them to do more of
it. This hoax _is_ going to be exposed, and fairly soon–and it may unravel the whole
ball of string of intelligence agency and mass media lies.
It is _not_ a left/right issue, so folks of any and all political persuasions will be able
to accept it without crushing their ideological dreams.
@Desert Fox Judaic identity is essentially about hating Christians, as the Talmud makes
clear, and as most anyone who's worked with Jews on Wall Street will attest. Michael Hoffman
proves this in his books on Judaism, pointing out that modern Talmudic Judaism came into
being nearly two centuries after the rise of Christianity and in opposition to it.
" is the Deep State and their globalists' master deliberately trying to force Russia
into a military alliance with China? "
Hard to say what their intentions are. (The old ploy of unity at home by means of an
external enemy ?) Whatever they are -- US foreign policy (FO) re Russia should go down with
Iraq (II) as among the US's greatest FO blunders.
Agreed that it's a mistake, but when they've successfully pulled off the WMD lies, the
9/11 fakery, the destruction of Iraq, Libya etc., control the US media, and can dictate to
Congress, then it's understandable that they get rather arrogant.
They simply want to kick Russia and Putin because he was the one that spoiled their
Yeltsin looting party – and worst of all arrested and imprisoned their top guy
Khodorkovsky. That it drives Germany and the EU towards Russia and strengthens Russian ties
with China is secondary. After all, Hitler (after great military success), likened invading
Russia to kicking down a rotten barn door, and he didn't work out the implications of
declaring war on the US.
@Anonymous I agreed with you, except there is a Deep State and it is not made up of just
Jews. But I do concede that Jews are disproportionately represented, as both sponsors and
minions, for their demographics.
I believe the Deep State consists of the very wealthy who are greedy for more wealth and
power. There are 607 billionaires in the US. There is no reason for the Deep State members to
formally collude they all know what needs to be done and how to do it. They use a relatively
small amount of their money to place their minions in positions of power heads of the movie
industry, the media, the federal government, academia. From then on if the lessers in these
groups want to keep their jobs/lives they will toe the line. It becomes self sustaining from
tax money and the Deep State glories in more wealth and power. Here is an excellent example
of the Deep State in action: The SCOTUS has passed down egregious decisions that abridge the
First Amendment and show contempt for the concept of a representative democracy. Buckley v.
Valeo, 424 U.S. 1976 and exacerbated by continuing stupid SCOTUS decisions First National
Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v.
Federal Election Commission.
These decisions have codified that money is free speech thereby giving entities of wealth and
power almost total influence in elections. By gaining control of the SCOTUS the Deep State is
able to further their goals.
The Democrats are now slick pretenders of social justice, but not left.
Excellent summary. What goes under "left" moniker (Cultural Marxist, "communists",
socialists etc.) in the West nowadays is not left. Agree. it is just another iteration of
Neo-liberal politics serving as a substitution for dealing with actual problems of Labor.
"Their respective ambitions led the two men[Trump and Putin] – along with Trump's
future son-in-law, Jared Kushner -to build a set of close, over-lapping relationships in a
small world that overlaps on Chabad , an international Hasidic movement most people have
never heard of ."
@gotmituns @ gotmituns <=Why then did you read the article?
At the heart of the impeachment process (Article II, Section 2, paragraph 3 and 4) are two
questions that should interest most folks: @ paragraph 3 lays out a big part of Trump's
defense in my view "Section 3 requires ..that the President shall take Care that the Laws be
faithfully executed, <=execution requires action so which law did the President not
execute faithfully? <= I do not see such a question in the Articles of Impeachment.. @ Sec
II, Art. II, paragraph 4 "The President shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and
Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.. " < the house
found evidence it says, strong enough to indite the president on charges that .. he violated
which of these 4 things?
Some think Trump should have been impeached for failure to deliver his tax Return.. but I
do not see failure to deliver a tax return as failure to execute a law, or as a high crime,
or as treason, or as an act of Bribery, or as a misdemeanor.. so the current impeachment
indictment by the House against Trump reveals that the constitution is inadequate. The
constitution does not express a government that can protect the Americans such a government
governs; from the possibility, or the reality, that a deceitful president will be empowered
to that job?
The best governed Americans can hope for from the USA is that the Congress of the USA
rather than impeaching will decide to amend the constitution, so that the constitution denies
any one that can be shown to be deceitful, to be the President. This one amendment could
eliminate making campaign promises and do just the opposite once in office.
Of course such an amendment would mean few in politics today could be the President.
Most likely no matter the outcome of the impeachment, Trump will probably be reappointed
President by the electoral college.. (recall that persons who animate the functions allowed
to the USA to governed Americans are not elected by those who the USA governs. (Americans c/n
vote for their president or their vice president because President and VP are article II
persons; and article II persons are appointed to office by processes conducted at the state
level, that appoint persons to the electoral college, and it is the electoral college that
elects the President and the Vice President). Who has written a book on the electoral
college? I have requested information from the government on the electoral college activities
since the beginning and to date have received nothing but referrals to others.
@EdNels Left ? Do you believe that the establishment crowd of Democrats (Liberals,) and
the managed news (Liberals,) and others Liberals, neoliberals, neocons, or anything else
comprising the Russiagate hoax can be describes as Leftist?
No. I do not believe that. I agree with you entirely. But common usage has the people you
are talking about as LEFT and I am tired of bitching about it.
@RJJCDA Russia no more "invaded" Ukraine than the United States "invaded" Texas, Ohio or
Florida. Ukraine has been a Russian fiefdom for centuries longer than it has ever been
"independent," and its fate is no more the business of the United States or Western Europe
than the fate of Hong Kong or Syria should be.
Please just let me ask americans some opinions about
if pastor John Hagee and his followers are jews or christians ? , if the thousands of
pastors in the USA like Hagee and their millions of followers are jews or christians ? if the
US puritan founding fathers were jews of christians ? , if the british angloisraelites are
jews or christians ? , if the yankees are jews or christians ? if the wasps are jews or
christians ? if the US " deep state " is jew or chistian ? , if the US masses are jew or
christian ?
. because blaming the jews all the time of every problem and pretending that that the
anglo-yankees are so pure and naive does not seem to be very realistic
@Antiwar7 Americans should have believed into the existence
of thousands Mayan gods when they first saw the smoke billowing out of the sacrificial pit in
front of the menacing idols.
Some things never change. Russiagate is no aberration. Establishment Authority, police state
apparatuses and religious catechisms, are NOT based on reasoning and evidence, but rather
fact-free Narratives handed down from above and grounded by Fear of the Other, the bogeymen
(be it Russians, White Supremacists, Black men, Assad, Trump, the Devil, etc), without which
authority will collapse. As the historian Will Durant noted, Strabo said it best 2000 years
ago:
"For in dealing with a crowd of women a philosopher cannot influence them by reason or
exhort them to reverence, piety or faith; nay, there is need of religious fear also, and this
cannot be aroused without myths and marvels the founders of states gave their sanctions to
these things as bugbears wherewith to scare the simple-minded."
@Anon John Hagee, his followers and other Christian Zionists are morons. Happily, they
are not nearly as common as you imply. Being a Christian Zionist takes a special kind of
stupid
I cannot see Haggee without immediately recalling Christ's warning to beware of obese
wolves in sheep's clothing, who take jiggly church secretaries and XXXL Italian silk suits as
proof of God's blessing.
Cohen is another Jewish voice in the Jewish Mafia War between factions. I don't consider him
that insightful or honest, as he never mentions the glaringly obvious: the attempt to oust
Trump is a Jew Coup.
Start telling the truth about the Hostile Elite destroying America Cohen. Until then you are
just another lying Jew destroying the country that welcomed your ancestors.
When will the Traitors be routed out and hung?
No country can withstand Treason from Within going unpunished for any length of time. We
either destroy these scum or they will destroy America.
I gotta hand it to Larry King, even with one foot in the grave he's still doing these
interviews and with Professor Cohen no less. Kudos to the old coot. (Grin)
Steven Cohen should be a special advisor to the POTUS. It would be a demotion for Cohen but
good for Trump and for America.
The imperial lie machine sure is disgruntled that the 1990s attempt to economically and
biologically crush Russia once and for all was a failure and Russia has since been
reasserting itself. It wasn't "the end of history" after all.
That was the source of the underlying current of Russia Derangement among the US elite
classes (political, economic, media, academia, professional etc.), the many provocations, and
then the total meltdown beginning in late 2016.
Since it really seems to be a collective mental illness (I mean that literally)
afflicting a power group which is already psychotic and violent, and since it coincides with
the accelerating erosion of the US imperial position, it's looking more and more likely that
this must eventually lead to all-out war. I just can't imagine the US stepping back, any more
than I could imagine Hitler doing so.
America's obsessive bashing of Russia (and now China) is suggestive of a deep
psychological disorder.
Though the Americans and their allied apologists will insist that it is sincerely
motivated by a humanitarian concern for Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights(TM), that is
quite laughable given America's concentration camps for undocumented immigrants; its
incarceration of immigrant children in cages; or the US Prison Industrial Complex in general,
which has been called America's new Jim Crow in that it imprisons millions of African
Americans and other minorities and relegates them to a new racist caste system.
No, cut through the barrage of American Moral Supremacism and other delusions, the United
States is enraged that, despite its attempt to economically rape Russia in the 1990s through
American-promoted Free Market reforms and Neoliberal "shock therapy," Russia is still
standing and indeed resurgent.
THAT is what enrages the Americans and triggers them in rug-chewing fits of frenzy.
In other news, @RANDCorporation report
firmly establishes that Van Gogh was a Russian Agent. May be, the dastardly Kremlin plot
drove him to cut his ear off?.. At any rate, NATO is now on alert. pic.twitter.com/9k9j5K9rx1
I think the Democrat establishment has decided to throw Mayor Pete under the bus. This is
why Warren went after him and some donors appear to be stabbing him in the back. A
fascinating situation to watch.
Just read the same article a few minutes ago and thought of what Yves had said today of
those hired by Mckinsey, "the firm tries very hard to hire individuals who are very insecure
and want badly to do well, including at the firm."
Was driving cross country on debate day listening to NPR as much as I could stand. More
than the combined total of the last fifteen years. They played up Pete as if he were a sports
star about to wipe every opponent off the playing field. And they never mentioned Sanders by
name but included a clip of his voice saying something along the line of "of course taxes
will have to go up" at least a hundred times.
And their impeachment Dem/Donald derangement syndrome made me wonder just what kind of
drugs have they put in the coffee/water cooler.
Intentional dumbing-down of all who listen without question or nausea.
Mayor Pete's base is upper-middle-class, middle-aged, moderate-to-liberal-leaning, white
people. Which is pretty much NPR's core donor base. Their Buttimania could just be fan
service, like the most recent Star Wars movie.
It's painful for me to agree that the early efforts of so many journalists of integrity
have evolved into what you noticed today. I trusted Noah Adams despite him never pleading to
be my trusted news friend or emotional support in hard times.
so much of the bare language–nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and their linking
language is replicated by varying 'personalities' that I find it difficult to believe that
talking points are not circulated by NPR Editors hourly.
I am also increasingly agitated in my listening by being force fed soooo many stories about
Pop Culture 'hooked' to a 'news' item–like Hanukah Shopping events filed under
Religion.
Sympathy, Eureka Springs. We listen to NPR on long trips; usually the choices are
Religion, Country or NPR. Or Sports Talk Call-Ins. I invariably end up banging my head on the
dashboard (not while it is my turn to drive!) and/or screaming into thin air.
Yikes! You could get an old mp3 player and fill it up with your favorite music and
podcasts. It would completely transform your car travel experience. If you don't have a hook
up for the player to the stereo, you can get great FM transmitters for 20 dollars or so. Good
luck!
yeah.
i got out of the habit of listening to the radio a long while ago. we're in an in between
major markets place where if the wind is out of the north, we get stations from abilene and
san angelo out of the south, san antonio.
none very good reception.
only local stations(2, in different towns) are porter wagoner fans that at least have live
coverage of the ball games(for wife,lol. i can't stand it)
so i just got used to having music in my head when on the road, and literally forget that
there's a thing called "radio"..
When I was bicycling around the country, I carried a harmonica. Didn't play it while I was
riding, but boy, would I pull that thing out in campgrounds.
Never became a good player, but gawd, that little Hohner was fun!
Well when we drive the 2 hours each way to San Diego, usually at least once a week, my
wife reads the NC links and commentary. Sometimes she'll save the comments for the trip home
and get so excited when she refreshes the page and , "There are 243 comments, that should
keep us."
A two pack of Buttigieg stories, showing that all the Atlantic should be asking for
Christmas is a clue
First, they're confused about why
people in the Democratic pre-primary season aren't flocking to Mayo Pete when he's
enthusiastic about maintainjng establishment power and welcoming "former republicans" to the
fold. As if "Radical Centrism" hasn't passed its sell by date yet.
And then, they're confused about
why young people don't like Mayo Pete. Clearly it's jealousy for his success and not his
noxious ideas mixed bland centrism.
It's pretty clear Mayor Pete is running for President for two reasons. His own
gratification and to receive big payouts from donors after his time in office. He has nothing
substantial to offer to anyone. People in Indiana don't even like him enough to support him
for a state office. He hasn't done anything worthwhile in little South Bend to show any
promise for higher office either. His history and accomplishments vary between meritocratic
box checking and crude virtue signaling. He's the political equivalent of a bunch of old rich
men trying to create a boy band out of whole cloth. There's nothing there. And the people at
the Atlantic can't figure out why voters don't like him???
My interpretation of Mayo Pete is: identity politics for white, middle-aged,
middle-to-upper-class Americans.
NC linked to a poll the other day that showed that 97% of his supporters were white,
compared to around 47% for Bernie and around 70% for Klobuchar, the next highest after the
Mayor.
Most Democrats hate Republicans (true technically any vote will do when it comes to an
election, but it's often more emotional than rational and not going to be much of a selling
point to Dems, that you are attracting the other tribe they hate and kumbaya).
There is the problem of him not being qualified of course, and not likely to win. The
annoying part is centrists seem to have picked the least promising centrist candidates ever,
so if we are stuck with a centrist, it's going to be one that seems to have little shot of
winning.
Democrats hating republicans? Evidently not when they are DINOs, like Senator Peters
(MI).
But, seriously, I am tired of those in the grip of Trump derangement who say that they
will vote blue no matter who the nominee is. I just wish they would sit out the Democratic
primaries and leave the selection to people who actually follow and mull over issues.
I saw where some celebrity was defending him and his donors and described him as
"guileless ". I was flummoxed. Guileless? He may be over his head as mayor and as candidate,
but there is nothing real there.
I do look at records, but Buttigieg has always struck me as the smart kid B*ll Sh*tting
their way through an assignment when ever I hear him speak. Donors buying a Trojan horse I
get but I don't know how anyone sees sincerity.
I'd like to see a list of his accomplishments in office. What? There isn't one. Oh, wait,
apparently he was really good on fixing the potholes in the roads.
Kind of like Obama, when I encounter the faithful, I pretend to go along, and then ask
"what do you think were Obama's best three things he accomplished while in office?"
Squirming in chair, followed by vague platitudes, followed by "he would have done a lot if
he wasn't blocked by Republicans
I caught a TV news piece over the weekend that claimed Buttgag had been voted "most likely
to become president" (or something to that effect) when he was a senior in high school. That
got me thinking "Why does this not surprise me?"
Well because I had encountered exactly this type of person in some advanced placement
classes in my HS senior year who claimed that his goal was to one day become president of the
US. The word that comes to mind when I recall that guy is "insufferable". I had never
encountered anyone before that proudly displayed such naked ambition. I hadn't really thought
much about that fellow since then – until Buttgag came on the scene and I was
immediately reminded
Yes, the new Netflix series "The Politican" is exactly about one of these types (student
at a rich high school who plans to be president). Not sure yet exactly what angle they take
since I've only watched the pilot and other random bits, but it's at least interesting. As
with any good writing they seem to want to show complexities of the character.
That spec screenplay was considered one of the greatest unproduced films for many years
before it was finely shot.
Read it sometime, there are plenty of copies in circulation. It's simply brilliant.
The film differs slightly from the script, I suppose it was hard to do it exactly. There
are two different endings that I've seen. Neither is the one from the original script.
On my current tangent about proper language. I like that we are able to make fun of his
name and turn it into new nicknames. The guy's name has "butt" in it, after all. Let's free
our inner 12-year olds.
As a gay man, I call him Butt****, with all the derision normally associated with that
term. Theoretically that should be offensive to me.
Booty judge is a spook, Obama the phony pseudo-endorses Warren – the Democrat party
is going to nominate a Republican whether the plebes like it or not!
"The letter is interesting for what it says about Buttigieg's increasingly conventional
and hawkish foreign policy and the preferences of many Democratic foreign policy
experts."
"... "I just want to note that this kind of people, people like the ones who were negotiating with Hitler back then, they now deface monuments to the liberator soldiers, Red Army soldiers who liberated the countries of Europe and the European peoples from Nazism. These are their followers. In this sense, unfortunately, little has changed. And we must keep this in mind, also with regard to the development of our Armed Forces . [My Emphasis] ..."
Voltairenet has a very interesting article about this subject (also discussed in the last
open thread) by prof. Michael Jabara Carley of the University of Montreal: "Justin Trudeau
Needs A History Lesson", in which he describes the unsuccessful efforts of Soviet diplomats
to create an alliance of European countries against the nazis.
People may have read that Putin has said a few more things about the documents he reviewed
with his CIS peers; and in doing so, Putin revealed an aspect about himself few have seen
previously. Putin made his statement at the annual year-end Defense Ministry Board Meeting . IMO,
Putin has had more than enough of the extreme Russophobia now in circulation and he sees it
as being very similar to that of prior historical periods where Russia was then subjected to
attack from the West. I won't post Putin's diatribe here; you'll need to read it for
yourself--I've never seen him so angry or speak undiplomatically. What I will post is what he
said after, which IMO is even more important, although removed from the overall context:
"I just want to note that this kind of people, people like the ones who were
negotiating with Hitler back then, they now deface monuments to the liberator soldiers, Red
Army soldiers who liberated the countries of Europe and the European peoples from Nazism.
These are their followers. In this sense, unfortunately, little has changed. And we must
keep this in mind, also with regard to the development of our Armed Forces . [My
Emphasis]
"Here is what I would like to say in this regard, which I think is critically important.
Please note: neither the Soviet Union, nor Russia have ever tried to create a threat to other
countries. We were always catching up in this regard. The United States created the atomic
bomb, and the Soviet Union caught up with it. We did not have nuclear weapon delivery
vehicles or carriers. There was no such thing as strategic aviation, and the Soviet Union was
catching up in this area, as well. The first intercontinental missiles actually were not
built here, and the Soviet Union was trying to catch up.
"Today, we have a unique situation in our new and recent history. They try to catch up
with us."
Also note the word Putin chose to describe the Outlaw US Empire's withdraw from the INF
Treaty. Clearly, Putin desires to impress upon those charged with Russia's defense that the
times are indeed perilous, that the old lies are being spread without any resistance. As with
the other three transcripts I linked, this one also demands to be read in full and also in
close association with the other three. The Poles will scream along with their sycophants,
but Putin is correct about both the past and the present and the danger present within the
future.
"Change we can believe in" the second series ? That's a real warning sign ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and Buttigieg. ..."
"... as the neoliberal corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking ship .. ..."
So, the fact that Obama is willing to put in a good word for Warren on behalf of the
wealthy elite should give you a clue as to which side Warren is really on. While many
non-political "normies" look upon the Obama years with rose-tinted glasses, I wonder if the
disillusionment that many people had in retrospect with Obama has sunk in to mainstream
political consciousness yet. If that is the case, an Obama endorsement might actually
backfire among progressives, seeing as how it has become evident that Obama was basically a
silver-tongued neoliberal in the same mold as Clinton and Pelosi.
I know that Warren is a political careerist at heart, but I was willing to give her the
benefit of the doubt when she first launched her 2020 presidential campaign. However, it has
become increasingly clear that she has hitched her wagon to the wrong horse as the neoliberal
corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking ship. I honestly do not
think that she would even be fit to be Sander's vice presidential pick at this point
considering how wide the political gulf between Warren and Sanders actually is. A better
choice would be Nina Turner as Sander's running mate, with Tulsi Gabbard as his Secretary of
State if he gets that far.
My guess is that this is why he's working behind the scenes, minimizing the chances of a
backfire on the left. Of course, how behind-the-scenes is it if it's reported by Politico?
Still.
I'm actually undecided on Warren. There was that story last week about her supposedly
pushing Hillary in 2016 to name decent people to her cabinet if elected. But then you have to
ask why that particular story surfaced at the particular time when Warren was sinking in the
polls.
If true, though, and if what the new Politico story says about her clashes with Obama are
true, maybe Warren isn't quite as objectionable as we tend to think. Then again, she came
right out last week (I believe) and said Medicare for All would be a matter of choice under
her plan, emphasizing that "choice" factor.
So I'm confused. But maybe that's what she, her campaign and various surrogates want at
this stage.
It starts with an ambitious goal: consistent with the objectives of the Green New Deal,
the Pentagon should achieve net zero carbon emissions for all its non-combat bases and
infrastructure by 2030.
having the pentagon 'lead the fight' against climate change is akin to appointing prince
andrew as head of the global task force against pedophilia and child trafficking.
A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like
Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's
finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and
Buttigieg.
A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like
Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's
finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and
Buttigieg.
Buttigieg takes no votes from Sanders. While Warren does on the margins. I think Obama's
calculation is simple as that. She also has special appeal to the virtue signaling liberals
that are Obama's base.
as the neoliberal corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking
ship ..
Bingo. Trump's letter goes right to the heart of it. These clowns are completely exposed
and Obama hawking Warren to donors while the blob talks up a gay McKinsey/CIA Indiana Mayor
shows just how far they have fallen.
In other news, @RANDCorporation report
firmly establishes that Van Gogh was a Russian Agent. May be, the dastardly Kremlin plot
drove him to cut his ear off?.. At any rate, NATO is now on alert. pic.twitter.com/9k9j5K9rx1
"... no reason to believe she'd be any less a hawk than she was as a senator, when she backed George W. Bush's war in Iraq, or as secretary of state, when she encouraged President Barack Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan. If her nomination is as sure a thing as people say, then antiwar organizing needs to start right away. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... it's something that might have been called neocon, ..."
"... Charles Davis is a writer in Los Angeles. His work has been published by outlets such as Al Jazeera, The New Republic, and Salon. Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK and the human rights organization Global Exchange. She is also the author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. ..."
Announcing her latest campaign for the presidency, Hillary Clinton declared she was entering the race to be the champion for "everyday
Americans." As a lawmaker and diplomat, however, Clinton has long championed military campaigns that have killed scores of "everyday"
people abroad, from Iraq to Yemen.
As commander-in-chief, there's no reason to believe she'd be any less a hawk than she was
as a senator, when she backed George W. Bush's war in Iraq, or as secretary of state, when she encouraged President Barack Obama
to escalate the war in Afghanistan. If her nomination is as sure a thing as people say, then antiwar organizing needs to start right
away.
"If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue," he said, "it's something that might have been called neocon,
but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else."
We're going to call it what it is: More of the same sort of murderous policies that destroyed Iraq,
destabilized Libya, killed women
and children
with
cluster bombs and drones in Yemen, and legitimized the undermining of democracy in Honduras. There's little chance the Republicans
will nominate someone better, but given Clinton's record as a senator and secretary of state - the latter giving us a very good idea
of how she would approach foreign affairs once in office - it will be hard for them to find anyone much worse.
We know that Clinton is no reliable friend of peace. Today she supports diplomacy with Iran, but
back in 2009, as secretary
of state, she was adamant that the U.S. keep open the option of attacking the Islamic Republic over never-proven allegations it was
seeking nuclear weapons. (In fact, Israel is the region's only
nuclear power.)
Her attempts to portray herself as an ally of those who are pro-peace, as a sort of reluctant imperialist, is the same sort of
co-opting distortion that has helped quiet opposition to President Obama's hawkish agenda. If anything, Hillary is even more militaristic
than the ostensibly reluctant warrior she's campaigning to replace. Still, that hasn't stopped her from trying to be all things to
all people - even people like us.
Indeed, in March 2003, Clinton did something she'll probably never willingly do again: She
met with CODEPINK to explain her support for the Iraq war.
"I like pink tulips around this time of the year," she began. They "kind of remind ya that there may be a spring. Well, you guys
look like a big bunch of big tulips!" It got progressively more awkward after that. "I admire your willingness to speak out on behalf
of the women and children of Iraq," said Clinton, but "There is a very easy way to prevent anyone from being put into harm's way
and that is for Saddam Hussein to disarm and I have absolutely no belief that he will."
We thought the easiest way to prevent harming the women, children, and other living things in Iraq was to stop a war of aggression,
ostensibly over weapons of mass destruction that UN inspectors on the ground couldn't find and which were, in fact, never found -
because they didn't exist. Clinton, however, was steadfast: "If Saddam were serious about disarming he would have been much more
forthcoming," she claimed. "The very difficult question for all of us is how does one bring about the disarmament of someone with
such a proven track record of a commitment, if not an obsession, with weapons of mass destruction?"
Her answer: Destroying Iraq by dropping millions of U.S.-made WMDs, including bombs with
depleted uranium that have more
than doubled the country's pre-2003
rate of cancer. Speaking
to the women of CODEPINK, Clinton even explicitly defended George W. Bush's unilateralism, citing her husband's go-it-alone intervention
in Kosovo back in the 1990s.
In 2011, when the Arab Spring came to Libya, Clinton was the Obama administration's
most forceful advocate for going above and beyond a no-fly zone to depose Muammar Gaddafi, whose U.S.-trained security forces
were killing Libyans with the help of weapons and equipment provided by his erstwhile allies in the United States, Britain, and France.
She even
out-hawked Robert Gates, the defense secretary first appointed by George W. Bush who was less than enthusiastic about going to
war. When Libyan rebels carried out an extrajudicial execution of their country's former dictator, her response was sociopathic:
"We came, we saw, he died," she
said, smiling and laughing. That sent a message that the United States would look the other way at crimes committed by allies
against its official enemies; indeed, it was the same policy of tolerance for friends' war crimes that arguably led Gaddafi to believe
he could get away with killing anyone he labeled "al-Qaeda."
Libya was part of a pattern for Clinton. On Afghanistan, she advocated a repeat of the surge in Iraq, encouraging President Obama
to more than double
the number of troops there. Her State Department also provided cover for the expansion of the not-so-covert drone wars in Pakistan
and Yemen. Clinton's top legal adviser, Harold Koh, exploited his pre-government reputation as an advocate for human rights to declare
in a 2010 speech that not only did the government
have the right to detain people without charge at Guantanamo Bay, but it can kill them with unmanned aerial vehicles anywhere in
the world.
Clinton practiced "soft power" diplomacy too, of course: After Honduran forces trained at the U.S. School of the Americas carried
out a coup against elected president Manuel Zelaya, Clinton's State Department immediately got to work on legitimizing the regime
that seized power. As commentator
Mark
Weisbrot observes, she even said as much in her book, Hard Choices: "In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke
with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico," wrote Clinton. "We strategized on
a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render
the question of Zelaya moot."
The subsequent "free and fair" election would end up being between two candidates who supported a coup opposed by most "everyday
people" in Honduras, now one of the most violent,
drug-war ravaged countries in
the world. Clinton has also
called for deporting child refugees fleeing that violence. In Honduras, as elsewhere, it seems it's not the lives of "everyday
people" that are of chief concern to politicians like Clinton.
When Barack Obama became president, the anti-war movement became his first casualty - followed by a group of Pakistanis
droned to death three days after his inauguration. We should never lose hope that we can bring about positive change, but actually
changing the world for the better requires being aware that whoever sits in the White House come January 2017 is not going to be
our friend.
Charles Davis is a writer in Los Angeles. His work
has been published by outlets such as Al Jazeera, The New Republic, and Salon. Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the peace group
CODEPINK and the human rights organization Global Exchange. She is also the author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.
Buttigieg presents himself as having had little to no impact . Buttigieg presents his
initial work, on a cost-cutting study for Blue Cross Blue Shield, as being about "rent, travel
costs, mail, and printing." Perhaps his little corner of data crunching focused on that, but
Buttigieg is being disingenuous in averting voter attention from the fact that the study was
almost certainly about cutting headcount.
In my day, McKinsey only reluctantly took on what it called "activity value" or "overhead
value" studies, which were its lingo for cost reduction assignments, because there was no way
to make much of a dent unless you got rid of bodies. 70% of most firm's costs are
employment-related and most costs, like rent, key off headcount. In other words, those
"overhead expenditures" that Buttigieg's team was tasked to reduce included employees.
McKinsey didn't like getting people at clients fired because it recognized it might be
creating future enemies, via axed professionals who eventually landed well and would likely do
what they could to prevent McKinsey from getting hired at their new home. And consultants hated
those studies too. They followed a cookbook, which meant they didn't allow the consultants to
develop or show off problem-solving skills, plus it was just plain depressing to go to client
when the people in the corridors correctly saw you as an executioner. 2
Buttigieg is proud of the monster data-crunching pricing exercise he did on his second study
for the Canadian store Loblaw's. There's a bizarre grandiosity in how he presented his role as
a still-wet-behind-the-ears consultant in the Atlantic interview: " .brought him in to figure
out how to do it in a way that would actually help the bottom line." Structuring the analysis
falls to the engagement manager. That isn't to say Buttigieg didn't improve considerably upon
the initial ideas, but it seems wildly implausible that someone who presents himself as having
to be taught spreadsheeting and doesn't have a degree in math, engineering, hard sciences, or
at least a solid knowledge of statistics, would be "brought in" as if he had pre-existing
expertise.
And oddly, he never says this big exercise was valuable to the client. There are acceptable
in McKinsey-speak ways of taking credit without violating the norm of giving the glory to the
client.
This part from the Atlantic interview is also grandiose:
By the time of the Loblaws project, Buttigieg was becoming known within the company for
being a particularly good McKinsey consultant..
This is ludicrous. He's merely nine months into the firm and he has yet to demonstrate any
client-related or project management skills. At most, Buttigieg might have gotten noticed
within the Chicago and/or Toronto offices as being a good number cruncher and quantitative
analyst.
Buttigieg also tries to depict his getting a foreign assignment as a badge of honor. In
reality, when an office can't staff a project from its own team (and Buttigieg was sent from
the Chicago office to work on an Iraq/Afghanistan project staffed out of the Washington
office), nearly all of the time, this is the project everyone else in the office turned down.
Only once in a great while is an office so busy that it can't even staff the good projects
internally. I made this mistake in accepting a London project. I got to the the office in St.
James and discovered that the partner to which I was now assigned was widely despised.
Mind you, Buttigieg no doubt learned a lot from this gig, even if it may not be want he
wanted to learn. But getting put on it didn't mean he was special.
Buttigieg doesn't adequately explain the anomaly of his bugging out to work on a campaign
.
How do we explain this?
I stepped away from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time
with a Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana, returning after the election.
This is sufficiently unusual that I suspect those who have taken notice of it are likely to
have drawn the wrong inferences, so indulge me for a bit.
McKinsey, high-power professional firms, and most employers do not take well to employees
saying they want to take a disruptive break to pursue personal interests.
McKinsey is even less good about making accommodations for women partners who have children
than other top consultants; Bain by contrast has developed a reputation for being enlightened
on this front, so there's no reason to think they are habituated to being accommodating in
general .particularly for someone who has only been there a bit over a year.
Keep in mind that unlike other types of professional firms, where a young hire might join a
particular department, like the bankruptcy practice, and those partners could have the power to
run their own business and cut "their" staffers some slack, McKinsey non-partners are in a pool
and a assignment specialist (who even when not a partner has a lot of clout) negotiates with
partners as to who goes on what study. Even though the partners' interests are important, the
assignment specialist also pays attention to the so-called "development needs" of the
associates and managers, as well as other issues (like they were just on an out of town study
in a terrible location and putting them on another might result in them quitting).
Shorter: for the purpose of keeping peace among the partners, individual partners do not get
to act as godfathers with respect to associates or even engagement managers. 3
So how to make sense of this? Look at the timeframe again: Late summer-fall 2008.
The only thing I can fathom is that enough McKinsey clients saw the crisis unfolding and
stopped signing up for new work so as to create a lot of underutilization. The firm might have
let it quietly or not so quietly be known that it would consider requests for short-term leaves
of absence.
McKinsey was badly hit in the dot-bomb era and wound up reducing its staffing in North
America by nearly 50% in two years. With the benefit of hindsight, the firm might have come up
with other ways to reduce payroll when faced with sudden slack besides cutting hiring and
getting more aggressive about pushing weak performers out the door (both of which take time to
implement).
Why did Buttigieg leave? Buttigieg strongly suggests he was never serious about McKinsey,
that he was there to get his ticket punched. While that may be true, the firm tries very hard
to hire individuals who are very insecure and want badly to do well, including at the firm. And
if you really aren't that serious about your long-term career at the firm, it is hard to put up
with the indignities of being an associate, like insecure managers wanting you to do analysis
that is obviously a waste of time or who nag associates thinking that that will motivate them,
or alternatively the stereotypical bad consulting gig of being on the road all the time, worse
mainly in locations with not-good hotels and restaurants. 4
When I came to McKinsey, I was ambivalent but willing to be persuaded. I wasn't. I saw too
little evidence that McKinsey actually added value, to use its pet expression. Most clients
didn't seem to get better. Now it is true they might have gotten worse without McKinsey, but
that's hard to establish.
One fellow 'Zoid who left around when I did had these observations:
The problem with consulting is you are hired by the problem.
The most profitable clients are the most diseased.
So consulting seemed to me to be a lot like therapy, in a bad way, in that I knew too many
people who were in therapy, were convinced therapy was helping, yet there wasn't much objective
evidence that their lives were getting better (they didn't seem less anxious, or to be having
more success in their relationships or with whatever their presenting problem seemed to be).
5 At my remove, it looked as if in too many cases, the therapist had done a good job
of creating patient dependence. And I saw the same phenomenon at McKinsey.
By contrast, Buttigieg is he exhibits no reservations about what McKinsey does generally,
just some specific bad acts. From the
Atlantic interview :
He said he's disappointed in some of the work the company has done. "Since I've left," he
said, "there are at least four cases that I can think of where someone at McKinsey has done
something upsetting."
Of course, McKinsey partners have turned out to be important funding sources for Buttigieg,
so he has mercenary reasons for avoiding offending members of the firm. Nevertheless, it would
seem more genuine to come up with some reason why consulting wasn't a fit for him, even if that
reason wasn't the operative truth. But Buttigieg doesn't do genuine.
1 I don't consider Kennedy having worked for one month as a correspondent thanks
to his father arm-twisting William Randolph Hearst as "private sector experience." LBJ briefly
taught in public schools, again not a private sector position. Clinton decided at age 16 that
he wanted to be a public servant. He worked on some political campaigns and was a law professor
at the University of Arkansas (public school!) before he won his first race, for governor, at
the age of 32.
3 The dynamic can change later when a consultant has worked regularly on a core
client team. Then the client might actually start asking for a particular consultant to manage
or lead a study. The firm views that positively since consultants that get known at a client
will be contenders to take over the account later. But the earliest when clients start asking
for a specific person is at the engagement manager level, when Buttigieg was a mere
associate.
4 I was exceptionally lucky in getting way less of that than most associates
did.
5 Admittedly New York is very competitive and few people have friends that aren't
part of their professional circle. So the therapist might have filled an important role by
being a safe sounding board/sanity check.
Thanks Yves. In a few paragraphs you summed up the entire world of the big consulting
firm. It can be fun but there's a heck of a lot of misery, especially for the associates and
more junior managers. Getting assigned to a bad MD can set a career back for years and I've
seen at least a dozen times where it led to illness or leaving the firm. Or both.
The odd thing that I noticed about Buttigieg was that at times he sounds like he's trying
to oversell a flimsy resume of consulting experience and at other times sort of clumsily
hiding what he really worked on. I agree with you that he was probably told that his part of
the firm was "taking a break" before he went off to do campaign work. Otherwise it makes no
sense to lose
My basic feeling is that Buttigieg is a creation of the media. Some candidates, like Tulsi
Gabbard, Mike Gravel, or Sanders, are diminished by the press. Others, like Buttigieg, are
promoted. The hype about Buttigieg reminds me of the hype about George Bush giving Michelle
Obama some candy, or about Alito's wife crying during his confirmation hearing.
Here's a post on mgt consulting from awhile back that this post reminded me of. James Kwak
helped place the proper role of consulting projects into the right frame.
I think it helps compliment Yves' very valid questions.
The larger takeaway I'm getting is that Buttigieg doesn't come across as particularly
honest about much of anything on his resume. I know the elites of media and team dem really
want to push this guy, but he's really struggling to catch on with voters, not least because
he's hopelessly unqualified. There's no scenario where you can say:
"I was a low man on the totem pole at McKinsey" and then say, "I'm qualified to be
president" in the next breath.
The same is true with his record as Mayor of South Bend. He's admitted he's not understood
the black community and not represented them all that well, and yet, he wants a big
promotion.
This kind of resume-based critique seems appropriate to me because he's running as the
candidate who's trying to persuade the elite, PMC (prof mgr class) within the democratic
party that he's the man for the job (and tell the larger working class base of the democratic
party that they should just jump on board because he's electable) and he's not even qualified
from their own frame of reference.
What seems to me telling about Buttigieg is that he worked for the occupation and seems to
have bought the imperial cool-aid, which indicates to me that he is not that smart. Some
people, like Gabbard, have enlisted in the military, but were able to think independently and
critically about the wars.
"... Currently the United States is assisting Ukraine against Russia by providing some non-lethal military equipment as well as limited training for Kiev's army. It has balked at getting more involved in the conflict, rightly so. ..."
"... The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now. They inevitably produced the Hitler analogy, citing the example of 1938 and Munich as well as the subsequent partition of Poland in 1939 to make their case. When I asked what the United States would gain by intervening they responded that in return for military assistance, Washington will have a good and democratic friend in Ukraine which will serve as a bulwark against further Russian expansion. ..."
"... But Obama chose to stay home as punishment for Putin, which I think was a bad choice suggesting that he is being strongly influenced by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the other neocons who seem to have retained considerable power in his administration. ..."
"... Obama told a crowd gathered outside the Nike footwear company in Oregon that the deal is necessary because "if we don't write the rules, China will " ..."
"... Obama takes as a given that he will be able to "write the rules." This is American hubris writ large and I am certain that many who are thereby designated to follow Washington's lead are as offended by it as I am. Bad move Barack. ..."
Currently the United States is assisting Ukraine against Russia by providing some non-lethal military equipment as well as
limited training for Kiev's army. It has balked at getting more involved in the conflict, rightly so. With that in mind,
I had a meeting with a delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians and government officials a couple of weeks ago. I tried to explain
to them why many Americans are wary of helping them by providing lethal, potentially game changing military assistance in what Kiev
sees as a struggle to regain control of Crimea and other parts of their country from militias that are clearly linked to Moscow.
I argued that while Washington should be sympathetic to Ukraine's aspirations it has no actual horse in the race, that the imperative
for bilateral relations with Russia, which is the only nation on earth that can attack and destroy the United States, is that they
be stable and that all channels for communication remain open.
I also observed that the negative perception of Washington-driven
democracy promotion around the world has been in part shaped by the actual record on interventions since 2001, which has not been
positive. Each exercise of the military option has wound up creating new problems, like the mistaken policies in Libya, Iraq and
Syria, all of which have produced instability and a surge in terrorism. I noted that the U.S. does not need to bring about a new
Cold War by trying to impose democratic norms in Eastern Europe but should instead be doing all in its power to encourage a reasonable
rapprochement between Moscow and Kiev. Providing weapons or other military support to Ukraine would only cause the situation to escalate,
leading to a new war by proxies in Eastern Europe that could rapidly spread to other regions.
The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will
inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now. They inevitably produced
the Hitler analogy, citing the example of 1938 and Munich as well as the subsequent partition of Poland in 1939 to make their case.
When I asked what the United States would gain by intervening they responded that in return for military assistance, Washington will
have a good and democratic friend in Ukraine which will serve as a bulwark against further Russian expansion.
I explained that Russia does not have the economic or military resources to dominate Eastern Europe and its ambitions appear to
be limited to establishing a sphere of influence that includes "protection" for some adjacent areas that are traditionally Russian
and inhabited by ethnic Russians. Crimea is, unfortunately, one such region that was actually directly governed by Moscow between
1783 and 1954 and it is also militarily vitally important to Moscow as it is the home of the Black Sea Fleet. I did not point that
out to excuse Russian behavior but only to suggest that Moscow does have an argument to make, particularly as the United States has
been meddling in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine where it has "invested" $5 billion, since the Clinton Administration.
I argued that if resurgent Russian nationalism actually endangered the United States there would be a case to be made for constricting
Moscow by creating an alliance of neighbors that would be able to help contain any expansion, but even the hawks in the U.S. Congress
are neither prepared nor able to demonstrate a genuine threat. Fear of the expansionistic Soviet Union after 1945 was indeed the
original motivation for creating NATO. But the reality is that Russia is only dangerous if the U.S. succeeds in backing it into a
corner where it will begin to consider the kind of disruption that was the norm during the Cold War or even some kind of nuclear
response or demonstration. If one is focused on U.S. interests globally Russia has actually been a responsible player, helping in
the Middle East and also against international terrorism.
So there was little to agree on apart from the fact that the Ukrainians have a right to have a government they choose for themselves
and also to defend themselves. And we Americans have in the Ukrainians yet another potential client state that wants our help. In
return we would have yet another dependency whose concerns have to be regarded when formulating our foreign policy. One can sympathize
with the plight of the Ukrainians but it is not up to Washington to fix the world or to go around promoting democracy as a potential
solution to pervasive regional political instability.
Obviously a discussion based on what are essentially conflicting interests will ultimately go nowhere and so it did in this case,
but it did raise the issue of why Washington's relationship with Moscow is so troubled, particularly as it need not be so. Regarding
Ukraine and associated issues, Washington's approach has been stick-and-carrot with the emphasis on the stick through the imposition
of painful sanctions and meaningless though demeaning travel bans. I would think that reversing that formulation to emphasize rewards
would actually work better as today's Russia is actually a relatively new nation in terms of its institutions and suffers from insecurity
about its place in the world and the respect that it believes it is entitled to receive.
Russia
recently celebrated the 70 th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Europe. The celebration was boycotted by
the United States and by many Western European nations in protest over Russian interference in Ukraine. I don't know to what extent
Obama has any knowledge of recent history, but the Russians were the ones who were most instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany,
losing 27 million citizens in the process. It would have been respectful for President Obama or Secretary of State John Kerry to
travel to Moscow for the commemoration and it would likely have produced a positive result both for Ukraine and also to mitigate
the concern that a new Cold War might be developing. But Obama chose to stay home as punishment for Putin, which I think was
a bad choice suggesting that he is being strongly influenced by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the other neocons
who seem to have retained considerable power in his administration.
And I also would note a couple of other bad choices made during the past several weeks. The Trans-Pacific multilateral trade agreement
that is currently working its way through Congress and is being aggressively promoted by the White House might be great for business
though it may or may not be good for the American worker, which, based on previous agreements, is a reasonable concern. But what
really disturbs me is the Obama explanation of why the pact is important. Obama
told a crowd gathered outside the Nike footwear company in Oregon that the deal is necessary because "if we don't write the rules,
China will "
Fear of the Yellow Peril might indeed be legitimate but it would be difficult to make the case that an internally troubled China
is seeking to dominate the Pacific. If it attempts to do so, it would face strong resistance from the Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos
and Koreans among others. But what is bothersome to me and probably also to many in the Asian audience is that Obama takes as
a given that he will be able to "write the rules." This is American hubris writ large and I am certain that many who are thereby
designated to follow Washington's lead are as offended by it as I am. Bad move Barack.
And finally there is Iran as an alleged state sponsor of terrorism. President Obama claims that he is working hard to achieve
a peaceful settlement of the alleged threat posed by Iran's nuclear program. But if that is so why does he throw obstacles irrelevant
to an agreement out to make the Iranian government more uncomfortable and therefore unwilling or unable to compromise? In an
interview with Arabic
newspaper Asharq al-Awsat Obama called Tehran a terrorism supporter, stating that "it [Iran] props up the Assad regime in
Syria. It supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It aids the Houthi rebels in Yemen so countries in the region
are rights to be deeply concerned " I understand that the interview was designed to reassure America's friends in the Gulf that the
United States shares their concerns and will continue to support them but the timing would appear to be particularly unfortunate.
The handling of Russia, China and Iran all exemplify the essential dysfunction in American foreign policy. The United States should
have a mutually respectful relationship with Russia, ought to accept that China is an adversary but not necessarily an enemy unless
we make it so and it should also finally realize that an agreement with Iran is within its grasp as long as Washington does not overreach.
It is not clear that any of that is well understood and one has to wonder precisely what kind of advice Obama is receiving when fails
to understand the importance of Russia, insists on "writing the rules" for Asia, and persists in throwing around the terrorist label.
If the past fifteen years have taught us anything it is that the "Washington as the international arbiter model" is not working.
Obama should wake up to that reality before Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush arrives on the scene to make everything worse.
Tom Welsh, May 19, 2015 at 7:02 am GMT • 100 Words
All of this misses the point, IMHO. There is really no need to explain that Russia has no plans to conquer Europe, China has
no plans to take over the Pacific, etc. Anyone with a little historical knowledge and some common sense can see that plainly.
What is happening is that the USA has overweening aspirations to control (and then suck dry) the entire world – and Europe, Russia
and China are next on its hit list.
So it naturally accuses those nations of aspiring to what it plans to do. Standard operating procedure.
The Priss Factor, May 19, 2015 at 7:19 am GMT • 100 Words
"The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will
inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now."
I can understand Ukrainian animus against Russia due to history and ethnic tensions.
But that is ridiculous. They can't possibly believe it. I think they're repeating Neocon talking points to persuade American
that the fate of the world is at stake.
It's really just a local affair.
And Crimea would still belong to Ukraine if the crazies in Ukraine hadn't conspired with Neocons like Nuland to subvert and
overthrow the regime.
The USA desperately need another resource-rich country to loot and can't find suitable
candidate other then Russia. So MIC prostitute Madcow is just a dog of war. The USA
deperately need another resource-rich country to loot and can't find sutable candiadate othe
then Russia
There is no credible analyst not shackled to the MIC trough who ventures such
an analysis beyond of course GE's W-2 harpie, Rachel Maddow.
The Western elites have long decided. WW3 is coming. In recent years, the Russians have
repeatedly tried to get this message through the western Mediadrome, but to little
effect.
The job of the GE spokespeople (Maddow et al) is diversionary/ preparatory spadework i.e.
to drill with numbing repetition into the American consciousness who the enemy is. And you
can bet the enemy is not who signs their paychecks. Their employers though happen to be OUR
enemy.
Thus we find ourselves in the odd position of having Russia's top general attempting to
shout through the Maddow racket that our two nations are on a collision course for war.
Strange messenger. Or maybe not. They want to live too.
Russia is in demographic collapse. It lacks the human capital to exploit even its own vast
resource trove. The western banking system is over-leveraged. The imaginary numbers have
gotten too big. Its 'denominator of the real' badly needs shoring up.
Russian resource wealth, Iran's massive South Pars LNG field are viewed with watering eyes
as prolongations of the doomed Ponzi. Europe is energy-poor, geriatric and overrun with
Islamic jihadists. With all due respect, who would want it at this late stage? At best, it is
a funding source --and a battleground-- for WW3.
Meanwhile the Ponzi is ravenous and never sleeps. No growth - negative interest rates is a
bell-ringer for WW3. The alternative is deflationary collapse. Maddow's been mysteriously
cranked up again: Rushah Rushah!
So we find ourselves in another Goebellian shift: accuse the opposition of your own
ulterior motives. They have no designs on us. Our overlords have designs on them.
Americans are just the People in the middle, hostages in a sense yet seemingly feared
enough that our minds are still worth battling over. Trump's affinities are too populist.
He's a dodgy helmsman for the massive undertaking of a world war where the people are only to
be galvanized, not consulted.
Far from a duteous seat-warmer, he's a leader who squeaked through. The Oval Office is no
place for leaders. It was thought to have been neutered of all that leadership malarkey
post-JFK. Trump's not enough to hold back the MIC. No POTUS is. He either must depart the job
or be compromised into executing the plan. But he's a bad Lieutenant. They'll never be
comfortable with him.
Then some evil, diseased mind had an epiphany. Don't just Get Trump! Get a twofer! Get
Trump and Russah! Weld them together for one kill-shot. Collusion means no daylight and one
bullet. Yes, there's a genius to it, a very sick genius.
B, great article as usual but disappointed that you didn't write about the latest sanctions
on N2.
Another act of WAR by the US. These sanctions now cover the comoany, Allseas, laying the
pipeline to Germany. They ceased operations and will not complete the project and Gazprom
does not have the expertise. Would love to see your
analysis on that.
The NYT propaganda, true to form and loyal to Dem Russophobes just one more attempt to
manufacture consent
This is maddening. These crazies are looking for war on Russia. Are the American people
stupid enough to give that consent?
My NYT site has the title "Russia Is a Mess. Why Is Putin Such a Formidable Enemy?"
Some quotes:
---- 1 ----
Under Mr. Putin, Vladislav Surkov, a longtime Kremlin adviser, wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta,
a Moscow newspaper, earlier this year, Russia "is playing with the West's minds."
Also its own.
---- 2 ----
All the same, said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political scientist who worked for more than a decade as
a Kremlin adviser, Russia under Mr. Putin still reminds him of a sci-fi movie exoskeleton:
"Inside is sitting a small, weak and perhaps frightened person, but from the outside it looks
terrifying."
---- 3 ----
Whatever its problems, Mr. Surkov, the Kremlin adviser, said, Russia has created "the
ideology of the future" by dispensing with the "illusion of choice" offered by the West and
rooting itself in the will of a single leader capable of swiftly making the choices without
constraint.
China, too, has advocated autocracy as the way to get results fast, but even Xi Jinping,
the head of the Chinese Communist Party, can't match the lightening speed with which Mr.
Putin ordered and executed the seizure of Crimea. The decision to grab the Black Sea
peninsula from Ukraine was made at a single all-night Kremlin meeting in February 2014 and
then carried out just four days later with the dispatch of a few score Russian special forces
officers to seize a handful of government buildings in Simferopol, the Crimean capital.
==========
If true, the resources committed to "Crimea takeover" were comparable with what Israel
committed to assassinate one person, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, dispatching a team of 33 to Dubai in
January 2010. Wasn't the superior productivity the strength of the West?
And this is not a joke. Putin is a maniac for balanced budgets, and compared to the
expansive American style, the resources committed by Syria were minuscule. And by all
accounts, spend well.
REUTERS. Oct 2, 2015 - U.S. President Barack Obama warned Russia on Friday that its
bombing campaign against Syrian rebels will suck Moscow into a "quagmire," after a third
straight day of air raids in support of President Bashar al-Assad. <<-- Obama was well
aware that Russia committed a very small number of troops, and smallish air force that his
military expert were describing as obsolete. Russia could not be many times more effective
than USA, could it?
No sign of Obama's predicted 'quagmire' as Russia's ... https://www.washingtonpost.com
› world › 2016/09/30
Sep 30, 2016 - BEIRUT -- In the year since Russia began conducting airstrikes in support of
the Syrian government, the intervention has worked to secure two ...
That explains the next quote from today NYT
---- 4 ----
"Maybe he's holding small cards, but he seems unafraid to play them," said Michael McFaul, a
former United States ambassador to Moscow and now a scholar at Stanford. "That's what makes
Putin so scary."
=========
Seems that Establishment scours most elite universities, Harvard, Yale, Stanford , Princeton
etc. for the dumbest possible graduates. I know from private sources that not all graduates
are dumb, many are actually brilliant. Does it occur to McFaul that boldness in playing small
cards is even worse than playing large card? Russia (and Assad's partisans in Syria) had to
do something well that USA (in government supporters in Afghanistan) did not do at all or did
badly.
John H. Durham, the United States attorney leading the investigation, has requested Mr.
Brennan's emails, call logs and other documents from the C.I.A., according to a person briefed
on his inquiry. He wants to learn what Mr. Brennan told other officials, including the former
F.B.I. director James B. Comey, about his and the C.I.A.'s views of a notorious dossier of
assertions about Russia and Trump associates.
... ... ...
Mr. Durham is also examining whether Mr. Brennan privately contradicted his public comments,
including May
2017 testimony to Congress , about both the dossier and about any debate among the
intelligence agencies over their conclusions on Russia's interference, the people said.
... ... ..
"The president bore the burden of probably one of the greatest conspiracy theories --
baseless conspiracy theories -- in American political history," Mr. Barr told Fox News. He has
long expressed skepticism that the F.B.I. had enough information to begin its inquiry in 2016,
publicly criticizing an inspector general report released last week that affirmed that the
bureau did.
Mr. Barr has long been
interested in the conclusion about Mr. Putin ordering intervention on Mr. Trump's behalf,
perhaps the intelligence report's most explosive assertion. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. reported
high confidence in the conclusion, while the N.S.A., which conducts electronic surveillance,
had a moderate degree of confidence.
... ... ...
Critics of the intelligence assessment, like Representative Chris Stewart, Republican of
Utah, said the C.I.A.'s sourcing failed to justify the high level of confidence about Moscow's
intervention on behalf of Mr. Trump.
"I don't agree with the conclusion, particularly that it's such a high level of confidence,"
Mr. Stewart said, citing raw intelligence that he said he reviewed.
"I just think there should've been allowances made for some of the ambiguity in that and
especially for those who didn't also share in the conclusion that it was a high degree of
confidence," he added.
Mr. Durham's investigators also want to know more about the discussions that prompted
intelligence community leaders to include Mr. Steele's allegations in the
appendix of their assessment.
Mr. Brennan has repeatedly said, including in his 2017 congressional testimony, that the
C.I.A. did not rely on the dossier when it helped develop the assessment, and the former
director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has also testified before lawmakers that the
same was true for the intelligence agencies more broadly. But Mr. Trump's allies have long
asked pointed questions about the dossier, including how it was used in the intelligence
agency's assessment.
Some C.I.A. analysts and officials insisted that the dossier be left out of the assessment,
while some F.B.I. leaders wanted to include it and bristled at its relegation to the appendix.
Their disagreements were captured in the highly anticipated report released last week
by Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, examining aspects of the
F.B.I.'s Russia investigation.
Mr. Steele's information "was a topic of significant discussion within the F.B.I. and with
the other agencies participating in drafting" the declassified intelligence assessment about
Russia interference, Mr. Horowitz wrote. The F.B.I. shared Mr. Steele's information with the
team of officials from multiple agencies drafting the assessment.
Mr. Comey also briefed Mr. Brennan and other top Obama administration intelligence officials
including the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, and Mr. Clapper
about the bureau's efforts to assess the information in the dossier, Mr. Comey told the
inspector general. He said that analysts had found it to be "credible on its face."
... ... ...
Andrew G. McCabe, then the deputy director of the F.B.I., pushed back, according to the
inspector general report, accusing the intelligence chiefs of trying to minimize Mr. Steele's
information.
Ultimately the two sides compromised by placing Mr. Steele's material in the appendix. After
BuzzFeed News published the dossier in January 2017, days after the intelligence assessment
about Russia's election sabotage was released, Mr. Comey complained to Mr. Clapper about his
decision to publicly state that the intelligence community "has not made any judgment" about
the document's reliability.
Mr. Comey said that the F.B.I. had concluded that Mr. Steele was reliable, according to the
inspector general report. Mr. Clapper ignored Mr. Comey, the report said.
Here's a key point - on June 12, Assange announces that Wikileaks will soon be releasing
info pertinent to Hillary. HE DOES NOT SAY THAT HE WILL BE RELEASING DNC EMAILS.
And yet, on June 14, Crowdstrike reports a Russian hack of the DNC servers - and a day later, Guccifer
2.0 emerges and proclaims himself to be the hacker, takes credit for the upcoming Wikileaks
DNC releases, publishes the Trump oppo research which Crowdstrike claimed he had taken, and
intentionally adds "Russian footprints" to his metadata.
So how did Crowdstrike and G2.0 know
that DNC EMAILS would be released?
Because, as Larry postulates, the US intelligence
community had intercepted communications between Seth Rich and Wikileaks in which Seth had
offered the DNC emails (consistent with the report of Sy Hersh's source within the FBI).
So
US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks.
That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack
was born - distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep
State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam.
"... On the trail, he has invoked his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval reserve intelligence officer who now claims to oppose "endless wars". He insists that "there's energy for an outsider like me," promoting himself as "an unconventional candidate." ..."
"... Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But she had taken an entirely different set of lessons from her grueling stint in Iraq than "Mayor Pete." Her campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with opposition to destructive regime change wars serving as her leitmotif. ..."
"... After ticking off her foreign policy credentials, Gabbard turned to Buttigieg and lit into him for stating his willingness to send U.S. troops to Mexico to crack down on drug cartels. A visibly angry Buttigieg responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his record, then quickly deflected to Syria, where he has argued for an indefinite deployment of occupying U.S. troops. ..."
"... According to John Kiriakou, a former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower, Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism. "There really is nothing going on in Somaliland," Kiriakou told The Grayzone . "To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It's not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist." ..."
"... Whether or not Buttigieg's trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record – and on an absolutely non-controversial issue. ..."
"... When Pete Buttigieg made his journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic Party. ..."
"... Buttigieg likely earned the fellowship after answering an ad like the one the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010 . Soliciting applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking "exceptionally accomplished and dedicated men and women who share President Truman's belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin." ..."
"... Buttigieg blended a call to "end endless wars" with Cold War bluster directed at designated enemies. ..."
"... Before an auditorium packed with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era, blaming President Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S. He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in Korea, slamming the president for exchanging "love letters" with "a brutal dictator," referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. ..."
"... Trojan Horse cum Wolf in Sheep's Clothing #2. Fooled me twice, Obama; shame on me. ..."
I
n
his quest for front-runner status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as
a maverick running against a broken establishment.
On the trail, he has invoked
his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval
reserve intelligence officer who now
claims to oppose "endless wars".
He insists that "there's energy for an outsider like me," promoting himself as "an unconventional candidate."
When former Secretary of State
John Kerry endorsed Joe Biden this December, Buttigieg
went full maverick
. "I have never been part of the Washington establishment," he proclaimed, "and I recognize
that there are relationships among senators who have been together on Capitol Hill as long as I've been alive and that
is what it is."
But a testy exchange between
the South Bend mayor and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard during a Nov. 20 Democratic primary debate had already complicated
Buttigieg's branding campaign.
Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a
military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But she had taken an entirely different set of lessons from her grueling stint
in Iraq than "Mayor Pete." Her campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with opposition to destructive regime change
wars serving as her leitmotif.
After ticking off her foreign
policy credentials, Gabbard turned to Buttigieg and lit into him for
stating his willingness to send U.S. troops to Mexico
to crack down on drug cartels.
A visibly angry Buttigieg
responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his record, then quickly deflected to Syria, where he has
argued
for an indefinite deployment of occupying U.S. troops.
Rehashing well-worn criticism
of Gabbard for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a diplomatic visit she took -- her trip was devoted
to de-escalating the U.S.-backed proxy war that had ravaged the country's population --
Buttigieg attacked the congresswoman
for engaging with a "murderous
dictator."
Throughout the exchange,
Buttigieg appeared shaken, as though his sense of inviolability had been punctured. Gabbard had clearly struck a
vulnerable point by painting the self-styled outsider as a conventional D.C.-style politician unconsciously spouting
interventionist bromides.
How could someone who served
in the catastrophically wasteful U.S. wars in the Middle East, and who had seen their human toll, be reckless enough to
propose sending U.S. troops to fight and possibly die in Mexico? "But Assad!" was the best response he could muster.
The remarkable dust-up
highlighted a side of the 37-year-old political upstart that has been scarcely explored in mainstream U.S. media
accounts of his rise to prominence. It revealed the real Buttigieg as a neoliberal cadre whose future was carefully
managed by the mandarins of the national security state since almost the moment that he graduated from Harvard
University.
After college, the Democratic
presidential hopeful took a gig with a strategic communications firm founded by a former secretary of defense who raked
in contracts with the arms industry. He moved on to a fellowship at an influential D.C. think tank described by its
founder as "a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s." Today, Buttigieg sits on that think tank's board of
advisors alongside some of the country's most accomplished military interventionists.
Buttigieg has reaped the
rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He recently became the
top recipient of donations
from staff members of the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department
and the Justice Department – key cogs in the national security state's permanent bureaucracy.
His Harvard social network has
been a critical factor in his rise as well, with college buddies occupying key campaign roles as outside policy advisers
and strategists. One of his closest friends from school is today the senior adviser of a specialized unit of the State
Department focused on fomenting regime change abroad.
That friend, Nathaniel "Nat"
Myers, was Buttigieg's traveling partner on a trip to Somaliland, where the two claimed to have been tourists in a July
2008 article they wrote for
The New York Times.
Their contribution to the
paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a whimsical safari. Instead, they composed a slick editorial that echoed
the Somaliland government's call for recognition from the U.S. government. It was Buttigieg's first foreign policy
audition before a national audience.
Short, Strange Trip to
Somaliland
Under public pressure for more
transparency about his work at the notoriously secretive McKinsey consulting firm, the Buttigieg campaign released some
background details this December. The disclosures included a
timeline of his work for various clients
that stated he "stepped away
from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a Democratic campaign for governor in
Indiana."
How Buttigieg's "full-time"
role on that gubernatorial campaign took him on a nearly 8,000-mile detour to Somaliland remains unclear.
Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers
spent only 24 hours in the autonomous region of Somaliland. In that short time, they interviewed unnamed government
officials and faithfully relayed their pro-independence line back to the readers of
The New York Times
in a
July 2008 op-ed
.
The column read as though
crafted by a public relations firm on behalf of a government client. In one section, the two travelers wrote that "the
people we met in Somaliland were welcoming, hopeful and bewildered by the absence of recognition from the West. They
were frustrated to still be overlooked out of respect for the sovereignty of the failed state to their south."
Since declaring its
independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has campaigned for recognition from the U.S., EU, and African Union. It
even offered to hand its deep water port over to AFRICOM, the U.S. military command structure on the African continent,
in exchange for U.S. acceptance of its sovereignty.
Several months after Buttigieg
traveled to the autonomous region, Al Jazeera
reported
,
"The Somaliland government is trying to charm its way to global recognition."
Founded by a self-described
anarchist named Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat represents an array of non and para-state entities seeking recognition
on the international stage. Ross's client list has
included the Syrian Opposition Coalition
, which tried and failed to secure power through a Western-backed
war against the Syrian government
.
Independent Diplomat did not
respond to questions from
The Grayzone
about whether it had any role in facilitating the trip Buttigieg and
Myers took to Somaliland.
According to John Kiriakou, a
former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower,
Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism.
"There really is nothing going
on in Somaliland," Kiriakou told
The Grayzone
. "To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It's
not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist."
Kiriakou visited Somaliland in
2009 as part of an investigation for the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he described as the phenomenon of
"blue-eyed" American citizens converting to Islam, traveling to Somalia and Yemen for training with Salafi-jihadist
groups, then returning home on their U.S. passports.
To reach Somaliland, Kiriakou
said he took an arduous seven-hour journey from the neighboring state of Djibouti. His junket was coordinated by the
U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, a regional security officer of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service and an embassy attaché.
"It is not the easiest place
to reach and there's no business to do there," Kiriakou said.
Whether or not Buttigieg's
trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on
international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record – and on an absolutely non-controversial issue.
In his bio, Nathaniel Myers
identified himself simply as a "financial analyst based in Ethiopia." According to his resume, which is available online
at Linkedin, he was working at the time as a World Bank consultant on governance and corruption.
By 2011, Myers had moved on
from that neoliberal international financial institution to a specialized government at the center of U.S. regime change
operations abroad.
Pete
Buttigieg on a pre-graduation trip with his Harvard buddies. Nathaniel "Nat" Myers is to his immediate left.
Imperial Social
Network
Nathaniel Myers' relationship
with the presidential hopeful began at Harvard University. There, they formed two parts of
"The Order of Kong,"
a close-knit group of political junkies named jokingly for the Chinese restaurant they
frequented after intensive discussion sessions at the school's Institute of Politics.
Like most members of the
college-era "order," Myers and Buttigieg have remained close. When the mayor married his longtime partner in 2018,
Buttigieg chose him as his best man.
Myers
currently works
as a senior advisor for the United States Agency for International Development's Office of
Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI) in Washington, D.C. The OTI is a specialized division of USAID that routinely works
through contractors and local proxies to orchestrate destabilization operations inside countries considered
insufficiently compliant to the dictates of Washington.
Wherever the U.S. seeks regime
change, it seems that USAID's OTI is involved.
The
Linkedin page of Nathaniel Myers, a close friend of Pete Buttigieg's.
In a 2015 op-ed arguing for a
loosening of bureaucratic restraints on USAID's participation in counter-terror operations, Myers revealed that he had
"specialized in programming in
places like Yemen and Libya
"
– two conflict zones destabilized by U.S.-led regime-change wars. (Myers was
working as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, but would return to USAID's OTI the following
year.)
In Cuba, meanwhile, the
OTI attempted to stir up civil unrest
through a fake, Twitter-style
social media site called ZunZuneo, hoping to turn the public against the country's leftist government through
coordinated flash mobs. To populate the phony social media platform, the OTI contracted a D.C.-based firm called
Creative Associates that had illicitly obtained half a million Cuban cellphone numbers.
USAID and Creative Associates
attempted to
place ZunZuneo into
private hands
through a Miami foundation called Roots of Hope, which was founded by students at Harvard
University. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was even
solicited
by the
State Department to operate the platform. (Roots of Hope board member Raul Moas, who personally trained ZunZuneo
employees, is today the
director of the Knight Foundation
.)
The devious operation and its
eventual exposure revealed the extent to which covert operations historically associated with the CIA had been
outsourced to private contractors and NGOs.
And the role of the
Harvard-founded "Roots of Hope" in the scheme demonstrated how much USAID and its contractors depended on the same Ivy
League talent pool that produced Buttigieg and Myers.
A lengthy paper Myers authored
for the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
in 2015 indicated that he had
special knowledge of the ZunZuneo scheme and had been invested in its success.
Myers took the journalists who
exposed the USAID-OTI program to task, claiming that "individual grants were pulled out of context and described as
failures without heed to their actual goals," provoking an unfair "Capitol Hill pillorying."
He lamented that the exposure
of covert programs like these had forced USAID officials to pursue "the opposite of the programming most likely to
produce real impact in a hard aid environment." In other words, fear of public scrutiny had complicated efforts to
subvert societies targeted by the U.S. for regime change – and he didn't like it one bit.
To Syracuse University
professor of African American studies Horace Campbell, youthful cadres like Myers were a symptom of the American
university's transformation into a neoliberal training ground.
"Many idealistic graduates
from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of
Syracuse University or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University among
others had been seduced" into careers with USAID contractors like Creative Associates, Chemonics, and McKinsey, Campbell
lamented in a lengthy 2014
survey of the OTI's sordid record
.
"It has been painful," the
professor wrote, "to see the ways in which the so called NGO initiatives have been refined over the past twenty years to
support neoliberalism and to depoliticize idealistic students."
Campbell's comments painted a
clear portrait of Myers, who earned his master's degree at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School on his way towards becoming
a "hard aid" specialist at USAID.
When Pete Buttigieg made his
journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that
provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic
Party.
Buttigieg likely earned the
fellowship after answering an ad like the one
the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010
.
Soliciting
applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking "exceptionally accomplished and
dedicated men and women who share President Truman's belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong
national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin."
This was not the first time
Buttigieg had dipped his toes into Washington's national security swamp. After graduating from Harvard, he worked at the
Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen that maintained an extensive
client list within the arms
industry
. (As
The Grayzone
reported
,
the Cohen Group has been intimately involved in the Trump administration's
bungling regime change attempt in Venezuela).
But it was Buttigieg's
fellowship at the Truman Center that placed him on the casting couch before the Democratic Party's foreign policy
mandarins.
A
Tablet
Magazine profile
of Truman Center founder Rachel Kleinfeld described her as a "gatekeeper and ringleader"
whose network of former fellows spanned Congress and the Obama administration's National Security Council. Her career
trajectory mirrored Buttigieg's.
She had earned degrees at
elite institutions (Yale and Oxford, where Buttigieg pursued his Rhodes scholarship) before accepting a job at a private
contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that
performed an array of services for the U.S. military
and
private
spying
for intelligence agencies.
According to Tablet, "Woolsey
positioned Kleinfeld to work on sensitive government projects the company was pursuing in the wake of the Sept. 11
attacks, including one that involved working as a researcher for the military's Defense Science Board, investigating
information-sharing between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies."
When Kleinfeld founded her
think tank in 2005, she named it for the president who oversaw the detonation of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities,
threats of another nuclear assault on North Korea and the
killing of 20 percent
of that country's population. The Truman doctrine, which called for "containing" the
Soviet Union through internal destabilization and relentless pressure on its periphery, was the basis of Washington's
Cold War policy. (Following Kleinfeld's lead,
Buttigieg named one
of his two pet dogs Truman
).
"We decided there really was a
need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to really start to think about it, very much as a
counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s," she
told
The Forward
at the time.
To fill the center's
board of advisers
,
Kleinfeld assembled a cast of Democratic foreign policy heavyweights whose accomplishments included the devastation of
entire countries through regime change wars.
Among the most notable Truman
advisors were Madeleine Albright, the author of NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia and president of
an influence-peddling operation
known as the Albright Stonebridge Group;
the late Council on Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, who once
proposed dividing Iraq
into three federal districts along sectarian lines; former Department of Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who
oversaw
record levels of migrant deportations
; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department policy planning
director who conceived the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) doctrine
deployed
by the Obama administration to justify NATO's disastrous intervention in Libya and drum up
another one
against Syria.
"The Truman Project mobilizes
Democrats who serve the conventional interventionist agenda," journalist Kelly Vlahos
wrote
.
"Beyond that, they are part of a broader orbit of not so dissimilar foot soldiers on the other side of the aisle."
Though he lost in a landslide,
Buttigieg won election as mayor of South Bend the following year. "Mayor Pete" had not only secured his future in the
Democratic Party, he had won a place in its foreign policy pantheon with
a seat on the Truman Center's advisory board.
Balancing Opposition to
Endless Wars
This July 11, Buttigieg rolled
out his foreign policy platform in a
carefully scripted
appearance
at Indiana University. Introduced by Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman who was a fixture
on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, Buttigieg blended a call to "end endless wars" with Cold War
bluster directed at designated enemies.
Before an auditorium packed
with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era,
blaming President
Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S.
He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in
Korea, slamming the president for exchanging "love letters" with "a brutal dictator," referring to North Korean leader
Kim Jong-Un.
You will not see me exchanging love letters on White House letterhead with a brutal dictator
who starves and murders his own people
@PeteButtigieg
More recently, Buttigieg's
campaign
pledged
to "balance our commitment to end endless wars with the recognition that total isolationism is
self-defeating in the long run." This was the sort of Beltway doublespeak that defined the legacy of Barack Obama,
another youthful, self-styled outsider from the Midwest who campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq war, only to sign
off on more calamitous wars in the Middle East after he entered the White House.
On the presidential campaign
trail, "Mayor Pete" has done his best to paper over the instincts he inherited from his benefactors among the national
security state. But as the campaign drags on, his interventionist tendencies are increasingly exposed. Having padded his
resume in America's longest and most futile wars, he may be poised to extend them for a new generation to fight.
Max Blumenthal is an
award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling
"
Republican
Gomorrah
,"
"
Goliath
,"
"
The
Fifty One Day War
"
and
"
The
Management of Savagery
."
He has also produced numerous print articles for
an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including
"
Killing
Gaza
"
and
"
Je
Ne Suis Pas Charlie
."
Blumenthal founded
The
Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic
repercussions.
Before
commenting please read Robert Parry's
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"We decided there really was a need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to
really start to think about it, very much as a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s."
Blumenthal, dissected Buttigeg down to the bare bones revealing how the security state targets and harvests
willing Ivy League specimens who once sufficiently groomed are launched onto the political stage
infiltrating the Democratic Party shilling when commanded for regime change wars.
occupy on!
,
December 21, 2019 at 13:46
Breathtaking! Thank you, Max Blumenthal, and please watch your back.
Punkyboy
,
December 21, 2019 at 10:43
Trojan Horse cum Wolf in Sheep's Clothing #2. Fooled me twice, Obama; shame on me. But, then, when given
choices between worse and worser or staying home on election day . . . The only candidate with a real chance
of beating Trump in 2020 is Sanders, yet the Dims would rather cut their collective throat. Gabbard would be
my choice, but she has no chance against The Dim Machine. I am so sick of these bastards and their games –
Russiagate, Ukrainegate, now Impeachmentgate – all because they have no platform, and no candidate that
gives a damn about this country and We the People. Shame on all you poseurs!
ML
,
December 21, 2019 at 15:59
Hear, hear, Punkyboy! I concur and applaud your way with words. Google George Carlin's monologue on why
he doesn't vote. Even a committed voter may crack a smile and surmise he may have had a point! And you
can laugh about this mess in the bargain. Might as well. Too many tears and fears these days and a little
levity, especially at the Winter Solstice makes for a lightness of being. Cheers, Punky!
From the interview with Military Times that is linked in the article:
Q After one year of your
administration, what size will the U.S. troop presence be in Afghanistan? In Syria and Iraq? In Europe?
A [first sentence] The size of troop presence in any theater depends on missions determined by overall
strategy and long-term goals, which are well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and
intelligence leaders, not by "
-- --
This is somewhat recent. Before Trump became president, the problem of straying from the script
"well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and intelligence leaders" did not arise. Perhaps
Carter had some weird ideas like pressuring satraps in Latin America to have a lighter hand in deploying
death squads, but he was brought to the fold and eliminated from "the mainstream" without such rhetoric.
To make it clear, I also think that Trump is driven by "arbitrary or capricious decisions based on
personal or political interests and executed on a whim." But the alternative in the form that is
"well-developed by blah blah blah" is not appealing at all.
I guess that I do not need to convince the other readers, but Afghanistan is a good example if you want a
talking point. Staying there follows "the well-developed strategy", but what is it?
improving human rights, education of women etc.
fostering honest competent government
fostering economic growth (apart from consuming profits from heroin and foreign donations)
training effective and honest national armed forces and police
One could add a few, but apparently, none of that was accomplished. Yet, "the well-developed strategy"
had to deliver something important to the "national interest", otherwise it would be a total waste. It is
actually not difficult to figure it out:
Afghanistan may be a total mess, but a mess where we have influence and freedom to operate. If we
withdraw, it will be simply a total mess.
It still begs a question why "we" want to have influence and freedom to operate. Perhaps to create a
total mess nearby. Whatever it is, an alternative is overdue, preferably not capricious and poorly executed.
Tulsi for the head of NSC, DoS or DoD.
Jerry Findlay
,
December 20, 2019 at 11:37
They are trying to repeat the Obama playbook, escorting a pretend outsider and identity-firster posing as a
liberal progressive, who as soon as he gets into office betrays everything he promised in favor of the
corporate state. Why not? It fooled a lot of people before, including myself, once or twice. Why not use it
again? Because American voters have awakened to the trick and don't have time for being fooled again.
Nathan Mulcahy
,
December 20, 2019 at 10:42
Great reporting. I have a simple filter. I instinctively put a black mark on and ignore any candidate being
promoted by the corporate presstitutes. First it was Kamala Who Harris, then the Beto Who and now Buttigieg
Who. Obviously I also do not follow this so called "debate" circus.
Tim Slattery
,
December 20, 2019 at 09:36
Rare, fascinating expose of how warmongers are made. Well done, Mr Blumenthal!
Pete Buttigieg makes me think of a product, a manufactured product. Everything about him from gestures to
words.
His is not an authentic political voice.
Nor does have much to say that's interesting or helpful to anyone.
Such are efforts on the election homefront in the declining days of American empire.
Drew Hunkins
,
December 19, 2019 at 16:47
Buttiejudge, Obama and others are such professional liars. They remind me of some of my fellow students
during my grad school days.
robert e williamson jr
,
December 19, 2019 at 15:59
Thanks Max, it's great to have you out and about.
A man who looks to the Homeland Security nut cases for
money to become president must have decided he was willing t0 give up his freedom for the promise of being
safe and secure. He must be a moderate republican at heart. The country don't need another false
representation buy someone seeking the highest office in the land.
I want one of these candidate to promise they will move to go back and debate the Patriot Act before
extending it again.
Julie
,
December 21, 2019 at 14:07
All you need to know about Mayor Pete can be found on Youtube: Meet the real Mayor Pete; E. Michael Jones
on PatrickCoffinMedia. Dr. Jones is the Mayor's neighbor. Reexaminging Mayor Pete and his years in office
on Peter Hellands channel; Black Pastors speak out against Mayor Pete; CCM; Investigating of Pete & SBPD
and there's more.
I
n
his quest for front-runner status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as
a maverick running against a broken establishment.
On the trail, he has invoked
his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval
reserve intelligence officer who now
claims to oppose "endless wars".
He insists that "there's energy for an outsider like me," promoting himself as "an unconventional candidate."
When former Secretary of State
John Kerry endorsed Joe Biden this December, Buttigieg
went full maverick
. "I have never been part of the Washington establishment," he proclaimed, "and I recognize
that there are relationships among senators who have been together on Capitol Hill as long as I've been alive and that
is what it is."
But a testy exchange between
the South Bend mayor and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard during a Nov. 20 Democratic primary debate had already complicated
Buttigieg's branding campaign.
Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a
military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But she had taken an entirely different set of lessons from her grueling stint
in Iraq than "Mayor Pete." Her campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with opposition to destructive regime change
wars serving as her leitmotif.
A visibly angry Buttigieg
responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his record, then quickly deflected to Syria, where he has
argued
for an indefinite deployment of occupying U.S. troops.
Rehashing well-worn criticism
of Gabbard for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a diplomatic visit she took -- her trip was devoted
to de-escalating the U.S.-backed proxy war that had ravaged the country's population --
Buttigieg attacked the congresswoman
for engaging with a "murderous
dictator."
Throughout the exchange,
Buttigieg appeared shaken, as though his sense of inviolability had been punctured. Gabbard had clearly struck a
vulnerable point by painting the self-styled outsider as a conventional D.C.-style politician unconsciously spouting
interventionist bromides.
How could someone who served
in the catastrophically wasteful U.S. wars in the Middle East, and who had seen their human toll, be reckless enough to
propose sending U.S. troops to fight and possibly die in Mexico? "But Assad!" was the best response he could muster.
The remarkable dust-up
highlighted a side of the 37-year-old political upstart that has been scarcely explored in mainstream U.S. media
accounts of his rise to prominence. It revealed the real Buttigieg as a neoliberal cadre whose future was carefully
managed by the mandarins of the national security state since almost the moment that he graduated from Harvard
University.
After college, the Democratic
presidential hopeful took a gig with a strategic communications firm founded by a former secretary of defense who raked
in contracts with the arms industry. He moved on to a fellowship at an influential D.C. think tank described by its
founder as "a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s." Today, Buttigieg sits on that think tank's board of
advisors alongside some of the country's most accomplished military interventionists.
Buttigieg has reaped the
rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He recently became the
top recipient of donations
from staff members of the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department
and the Justice Department – key cogs in the national security state's permanent bureaucracy.
His Harvard social network has
been a critical factor in his rise as well, with college buddies occupying key campaign roles as outside policy advisers
and strategists. One of his closest friends from school is today the senior adviser of a specialized unit of the State
Department focused on fomenting regime change abroad.
That friend, Nathaniel "Nat"
Myers, was Buttigieg's traveling partner on a trip to Somaliland, where the two claimed to have been tourists in a July
2008 article they wrote for
The New York Times.
Their contribution to the
paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a whimsical safari. Instead, they composed a slick editorial that echoed
the Somaliland government's call for recognition from the U.S. government. It was Buttigieg's first foreign policy
audition before a national audience.
Short, Strange Trip to
Somaliland
Under public pressure for more
transparency about his work at the notoriously secretive McKinsey consulting firm, the Buttigieg campaign released some
background details this December. The disclosures included a
timeline of his work for various clients
that stated he "stepped away
from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a Democratic campaign for governor in
Indiana."
How Buttigieg's "full-time"
role on that gubernatorial campaign took him on a nearly 8,000-mile detour to Somaliland remains unclear.
Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers
spent only 24 hours in the autonomous region of Somaliland. In that short time, they interviewed unnamed government
officials and faithfully relayed their pro-independence line back to the readers of
The New York Times
in a
July 2008 op-ed
.
The column read as though
crafted by a public relations firm on behalf of a government client. In one section, the two travelers wrote that "the
people we met in Somaliland were welcoming, hopeful and bewildered by the absence of recognition from the West. They
were frustrated to still be overlooked out of respect for the sovereignty of the failed state to their south."
Since declaring its
independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has campaigned for recognition from the U.S., EU, and African Union. It
even offered to hand its deep water port over to AFRICOM, the U.S. military command structure on the African continent,
in exchange for U.S. acceptance of its sovereignty.
Several months after Buttigieg
traveled to the autonomous region, Al Jazeera
reported
,
"The Somaliland government is trying to charm its way to global recognition."
Founded by a self-described
anarchist named Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat represents an array of non and para-state entities seeking recognition
on the international stage. Ross's client list has
included the Syrian Opposition Coalition
, which tried and failed to secure power through a Western-backed
war against the Syrian government
.
Independent Diplomat did not
respond to questions from
The Grayzone
about whether it had any role in facilitating the trip Buttigieg and
Myers took to Somaliland.
According to John Kiriakou, a
former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower,
Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism.
"There really is nothing going
on in Somaliland," Kiriakou told
The Grayzone
. "To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It's
not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist."
Kiriakou visited Somaliland in
2009 as part of an investigation for the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he described as the phenomenon of
"blue-eyed" American citizens converting to Islam, traveling to Somalia and Yemen for training with Salafi-jihadist
groups, then returning home on their U.S. passports.
To reach Somaliland, Kiriakou
said he took an arduous seven-hour journey from the neighboring state of Djibouti. His junket was coordinated by the
U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, a regional security officer of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service and an embassy attaché.
"It is not the easiest place
to reach and there's no business to do there," Kiriakou said.
Whether or not Buttigieg's
trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on
international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record – and on an absolutely non-controversial issue.
In his bio, Nathaniel Myers
identified himself simply as a "financial analyst based in Ethiopia." According to his resume, which is available online
at Linkedin, he was working at the time as a World Bank consultant on governance and corruption.
By 2011, Myers had moved on
from that neoliberal international financial institution to a specialized government at the center of U.S. regime change
operations abroad.
Pete
Buttigieg on a pre-graduation trip with his Harvard buddies. Nathaniel "Nat" Myers is to his immediate left.
Imperial Social
Network
Nathaniel Myers' relationship
with the presidential hopeful began at Harvard University. There, they formed two parts of
"The Order of Kong,"
a close-knit group of political junkies named jokingly for the Chinese restaurant they
frequented after intensive discussion sessions at the school's Institute of Politics.
Like most members of the
college-era "order," Myers and Buttigieg have remained close. When the mayor married his longtime partner in 2018,
Buttigieg chose him as his best man.
Myers
currently works
as a senior advisor for the United States Agency for International Development's Office of
Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI) in Washington, D.C. The OTI is a specialized division of USAID that routinely works
through contractors and local proxies to orchestrate destabilization operations inside countries considered
insufficiently compliant to the dictates of Washington.
Wherever the U.S. seeks regime
change, it seems that USAID's OTI is involved.
The
Linkedin page of Nathaniel Myers, a close friend of Pete Buttigieg's.
In a 2015 op-ed arguing for a
loosening of bureaucratic restraints on USAID's participation in counter-terror operations, Myers revealed that he had
"specialized in programming in
places like Yemen and Libya
"
– two conflict zones destabilized by U.S.-led regime-change wars. (Myers was
working as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, but would return to USAID's OTI the following
year.)
In Cuba, meanwhile, the
OTI attempted to stir up civil unrest
through a fake, Twitter-style
social media site called ZunZuneo, hoping to turn the public against the country's leftist government through
coordinated flash mobs. To populate the phony social media platform, the OTI contracted a D.C.-based firm called
Creative Associates that had illicitly obtained half a million Cuban cellphone numbers.
USAID and Creative Associates
attempted to
place ZunZuneo into
private hands
through a Miami foundation called Roots of Hope, which was founded by students at Harvard
University. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was even
solicited
by the
State Department to operate the platform. (Roots of Hope board member Raul Moas, who personally trained ZunZuneo
employees, is today the
director of the Knight Foundation
.)
The devious operation and its
eventual exposure revealed the extent to which covert operations historically associated with the CIA had been
outsourced to private contractors and NGOs.
And the role of the
Harvard-founded "Roots of Hope" in the scheme demonstrated how much USAID and its contractors depended on the same Ivy
League talent pool that produced Buttigieg and Myers.
A lengthy paper Myers authored
for the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
in 2015 indicated that he had
special knowledge of the ZunZuneo scheme and had been invested in its success.
Myers took the journalists who
exposed the USAID-OTI program to task, claiming that "individual grants were pulled out of context and described as
failures without heed to their actual goals," provoking an unfair "Capitol Hill pillorying."
He lamented that the exposure
of covert programs like these had forced USAID officials to pursue "the opposite of the programming most likely to
produce real impact in a hard aid environment." In other words, fear of public scrutiny had complicated efforts to
subvert societies targeted by the U.S. for regime change – and he didn't like it one bit.
To Syracuse University
professor of African American studies Horace Campbell, youthful cadres like Myers were a symptom of the American
university's transformation into a neoliberal training ground.
"Many idealistic graduates
from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of
Syracuse University or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University among
others had been seduced" into careers with USAID contractors like Creative Associates, Chemonics, and McKinsey, Campbell
lamented in a lengthy 2014
survey of the OTI's sordid record
.
"It has been painful," the
professor wrote, "to see the ways in which the so called NGO initiatives have been refined over the past twenty years to
support neoliberalism and to depoliticize idealistic students."
Campbell's comments painted a
clear portrait of Myers, who earned his master's degree at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School on his way towards becoming
a "hard aid" specialist at USAID.
When Pete Buttigieg made his
journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that
provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic
Party.
Buttigieg likely earned the
fellowship after answering an ad like the one
the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010
.
Soliciting
applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking "exceptionally accomplished and
dedicated men and women who share President Truman's belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong
national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin."
This was not the first time
Buttigieg had dipped his toes into Washington's national security swamp. After graduating from Harvard, he worked at the
Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen that maintained an extensive
client list within the arms
industry
. (As
The Grayzone
reported
,
the Cohen Group has been intimately involved in the Trump administration's
bungling regime change attempt in Venezuela).
But it was Buttigieg's
fellowship at the Truman Center that placed him on the casting couch before the Democratic Party's foreign policy
mandarins.
A
Tablet
Magazine profile
of Truman Center founder Rachel Kleinfeld described her as a "gatekeeper and ringleader"
whose network of former fellows spanned Congress and the Obama administration's National Security Council. Her career
trajectory mirrored Buttigieg's.
She had earned degrees at
elite institutions (Yale and Oxford, where Buttigieg pursued his Rhodes scholarship) before accepting a job at a private
contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that
performed an array of services for the U.S. military
and
private
spying
for intelligence agencies.
According to Tablet, "Woolsey
positioned Kleinfeld to work on sensitive government projects the company was pursuing in the wake of the Sept. 11
attacks, including one that involved working as a researcher for the military's Defense Science Board, investigating
information-sharing between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies."
When Kleinfeld founded her
think tank in 2005, she named it for the president who oversaw the detonation of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities,
threats of another nuclear assault on North Korea and the
killing of 20 percent
of that country's population. The Truman doctrine, which called for "containing" the
Soviet Union through internal destabilization and relentless pressure on its periphery, was the basis of Washington's
Cold War policy. (Following Kleinfeld's lead,
Buttigieg named one
of his two pet dogs Truman
).
"We decided there really was a
need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to really start to think about it, very much as a
counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s," she
told
The Forward
at the time.
To fill the center's
board of advisers
,
Kleinfeld assembled a cast of Democratic foreign policy heavyweights whose accomplishments included the devastation of
entire countries through regime change wars.
Among the most notable Truman
advisors were Madeleine Albright, the author of NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia and president of
an influence-peddling operation
known as the Albright Stonebridge Group;
the late Council on Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, who once
proposed dividing Iraq
into three federal districts along sectarian lines; former Department of Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who
oversaw
record levels of migrant deportations
; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department policy planning
director who conceived the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) doctrine
deployed
by the Obama administration to justify NATO's disastrous intervention in Libya and drum up
another one
against Syria.
"The Truman Project mobilizes
Democrats who serve the conventional interventionist agenda," journalist Kelly Vlahos
wrote
.
"Beyond that, they are part of a broader orbit of not so dissimilar foot soldiers on the other side of the aisle."
Though he lost in a landslide,
Buttigieg won election as mayor of South Bend the following year. "Mayor Pete" had not only secured his future in the
Democratic Party, he had won a place in its foreign policy pantheon with
a seat on the Truman Center's advisory board.
Balancing Opposition to
Endless Wars
This July 11, Buttigieg rolled
out his foreign policy platform in a
carefully scripted
appearance
at Indiana University. Introduced by Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman who was a fixture
on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, Buttigieg blended a call to "end endless wars" with Cold War
bluster directed at designated enemies.
Before an auditorium packed
with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era,
blaming President
Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S.
He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in
Korea, slamming the president for exchanging "love letters" with "a brutal dictator," referring to North Korean leader
Kim Jong-Un.
You will not see me exchanging love letters on White House letterhead with a brutal dictator
who starves and murders his own people
@PeteButtigieg
More recently, Buttigieg's
campaign
pledged
to "balance our commitment to end endless wars with the recognition that total isolationism is
self-defeating in the long run." This was the sort of Beltway doublespeak that defined the legacy of Barack Obama,
another youthful, self-styled outsider from the Midwest who campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq war, only to sign
off on more calamitous wars in the Middle East after he entered the White House.
On the presidential campaign
trail, "Mayor Pete" has done his best to paper over the instincts he inherited from his benefactors among the national
security state. But as the campaign drags on, his interventionist tendencies are increasingly exposed. Having padded his
resume in America's longest and most futile wars, he may be poised to extend them for a new generation to fight.
Max Blumenthal is an
award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling
"
Republican
Gomorrah
,"
"
Goliath
,"
"
The
Fifty One Day War
"
and
"
The
Management of Savagery
."
He has also produced numerous print articles for
an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including
"
Killing
Gaza
"
and
"
Je
Ne Suis Pas Charlie
."
Blumenthal founded
The
Grayzone
in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic
repercussions.
Before
commenting please read Robert Parry's
Comment
Policy
.
Allegations unsupported by facts, gross or misleading
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"We decided there really was a need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to
really start to think about it, very much as a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s."
Blumenthal, dissected Buttigeg down to the bare bones revealing how the security state targets and harvests
willing Ivy League specimens who once sufficiently groomed are launched onto the political stage
infiltrating the Democratic Party shilling when commanded for regime change wars.
occupy on!
,
December 21, 2019 at 13:46
Breathtaking! Thank you, Max Blumenthal, and please watch your back.
Punkyboy
,
December 21, 2019 at 10:43
Trojan Horse cum Wolf in Sheep's Clothing #2. Fooled me twice, Obama; shame on me. But, then, when given
choices between worse and worser or staying home on election day . . . The only candidate with a real chance
of beating Trump in 2020 is Sanders, yet the Dims would rather cut their collective throat. Gabbard would be
my choice, but she has no chance against The Dim Machine. I am so sick of these bastards and their games –
Russiagate, Ukrainegate, now Impeachmentgate – all because they have no platform, and no candidate that
gives a damn about this country and We the People. Shame on all you poseurs!
ML
,
December 21, 2019 at 15:59
Hear, hear, Punkyboy! I concur and applaud your way with words. Google George Carlin's monologue on why
he doesn't vote. Even a committed voter may crack a smile and surmise he may have had a point! And you
can laugh about this mess in the bargain. Might as well. Too many tears and fears these days and a little
levity, especially at the Winter Solstice makes for a lightness of being. Cheers, Punky!
From the interview with Military Times that is linked in the article:
Q After one year of your
administration, what size will the U.S. troop presence be in Afghanistan? In Syria and Iraq? In Europe?
A [first sentence] The size of troop presence in any theater depends on missions determined by overall
strategy and long-term goals, which are well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and
intelligence leaders, not by "
-- --
This is somewhat recent. Before Trump became president, the problem of straying from the script
"well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and intelligence leaders" did not arise. Perhaps
Carter had some weird ideas like pressuring satraps in Latin America to have a lighter hand in deploying
death squads, but he was brought to the fold and eliminated from "the mainstream" without such rhetoric.
To make it clear, I also think that Trump is driven by "arbitrary or capricious decisions based on
personal or political interests and executed on a whim." But the alternative in the form that is
"well-developed by blah blah blah" is not appealing at all.
I guess that I do not need to convince the other readers, but Afghanistan is a good example if you want a
talking point. Staying there follows "the well-developed strategy", but what is it?
improving human rights, education of women etc.
fostering honest competent government
fostering economic growth (apart from consuming profits from heroin and foreign donations)
training effective and honest national armed forces and police
One could add a few, but apparently, none of that was accomplished. Yet, "the well-developed strategy"
had to deliver something important to the "national interest", otherwise it would be a total waste. It is
actually not difficult to figure it out:
Afghanistan may be a total mess, but a mess where we have influence and freedom to operate. If we
withdraw, it will be simply a total mess.
It still begs a question why "we" want to have influence and freedom to operate. Perhaps to create a
total mess nearby. Whatever it is, an alternative is overdue, preferably not capricious and poorly executed.
Tulsi for the head of NSC, DoS or DoD.
Jerry Findlay
,
December 20, 2019 at 11:37
They are trying to repeat the Obama playbook, escorting a pretend outsider and identity-firster posing as a
liberal progressive, who as soon as he gets into office betrays everything he promised in favor of the
corporate state. Why not? It fooled a lot of people before, including myself, once or twice. Why not use it
again? Because American voters have awakened to the trick and don't have time for being fooled again.
Nathan Mulcahy
,
December 20, 2019 at 10:42
Great reporting. I have a simple filter. I instinctively put a black mark on and ignore any candidate being
promoted by the corporate presstitutes. First it was Kamala Who Harris, then the Beto Who and now Buttigieg
Who. Obviously I also do not follow this so called "debate" circus.
Tim Slattery
,
December 20, 2019 at 09:36
Rare, fascinating expose of how warmongers are made. Well done, Mr Blumenthal!
Pete Buttigieg makes me think of a product, a manufactured product. Everything about him from gestures to
words.
His is not an authentic political voice.
Nor does have much to say that's interesting or helpful to anyone.
Such are efforts on the election homefront in the declining days of American empire.
Drew Hunkins
,
December 19, 2019 at 16:47
Buttiejudge, Obama and others are such professional liars. They remind me of some of my fellow students
during my grad school days.
robert e williamson jr
,
December 19, 2019 at 15:59
Thanks Max, it's great to have you out and about.
A man who looks to the Homeland Security nut cases for
money to become president must have decided he was willing t0 give up his freedom for the promise of being
safe and secure. He must be a moderate republican at heart. The country don't need another false
representation buy someone seeking the highest office in the land.
I want one of these candidate to promise they will move to go back and debate the Patriot Act before
extending it again.
Julie
,
December 21, 2019 at 14:07
All you need to know about Mayor Pete can be found on Youtube: Meet the real Mayor Pete; E. Michael Jones
on PatrickCoffinMedia. Dr. Jones is the Mayor's neighbor. Reexaminging Mayor Pete and his years in office
on Peter Hellands channel; Black Pastors speak out against Mayor Pete; CCM; Investigating of Pete & SBPD
and there's more.
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In Memoriam Robert Parry (1949-2018)
Books by Robert Parry
Bellingcat's transparency model is similar to the Tor Project's. It lists a bunch of
innocuous, little-known non-profits and human rights-type organizations. To understand who
they and why they'd fund an outfit like Bellingcat takes a lot more digging.
The Washington Post has, after more than two years of investigation,
revealed that senior foreign policy officials in the White House, State and Defense
departments have known for some time that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was failing
.
In other words, government officials have been
lying .
Few people are shocked. That's a stark contrast to 1971, when the Pentagon Papers , a classified study of
decision-making about Vietnam, were leaked and published. The explosive Pentagon Papers showed
that the U.S. government had systematically lied about the reality that the U.S. was losing the
Vietnam War.
The failure of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan has been known for years. Virtually
none of the U.S. goals have been met . These goals included a strong, democratic, uncorrupt
central government; the defeat of the Taliban; eliminating the poppy fields that contribute to
the world's heroin problem; an effective military and police and creating a healthy,
diversified economy.
The Inspector General has repeatedly documented the reality in its widely available (and
widely reported)
audits .
Despite this public record of failure, officials continued to trumpet political
and military gains on the ground, even that the U.S. could prevail.
Privately, they have been wringing their hands.
Shades of Vietnam.
Public confidence in government was shaken by the publication of the Pentagon Papers in
1971.
AP/Jim Wells
Sad history of Vietnam
The Pentagon
Papers revealed that senior officials asserted in the 1960s that the Viet Cong were dying
in record numbers, enemy leadership was decapitated and there was "light at
the end of the tunnel ." Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his commanders, who knew the
reality, continuously called for even more force from 1961 to 1969.
H.R. McMaster, in his classic study of
Vietnam decision-making , excoriated the military for not bringing the truth to President
Lyndon Johnson, for presenting Johnson with the "lies that led to Vietnam."
Now we learn, courtesy of The Washington Post, that, when interviewed in 2015 as part of
Special Inspector General's " Lessons Learned " project,
Lute said , "We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan we didn't have
the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
While Afghanistan is clearly not Vietnam, Washington is still
Washington.
The U.S. secretly plotted and carried out the overthrow of the democratically elected leader
of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeq, in 1953. Here, an Iranian protests U.S. involvement in the coup.
Pahlavi Dynasty, public domain
But
Vietnam was the big lie , permanently exposing the gap between myth – the government
knows everything better – and reality – that policy is failing.
Since Vietnam, the media and congressional, think-tank and scholarly investigators have
suspected something with every intervention.
To the public , the truth about Afghanistan has been clear; public opinion has been way
ahead of what The Washington Post revealed.
Good reasons for lies
Lies are an integral part of national security operations. They seek credibility for
government policy. They mislead adversaries, cover up mistakes and failures.
Above all, they are intended to secure public support for policy and defeat opposition at
home. Political scientist John Mearsheimer has noted
that governments don't often lie to their allies and adversaries, "but instead seem more
inclined to lie to their own people."
In particular, secrecy and deception convey power. As philosopher Sissela Bok says ,
"Deception can be coercive. When it succeeds, it can give power to the deceiver."
Secrecy allows policies to be tweaked outside public view . Insiders gain influence
arguing for new approaches to the same goals. Even the goals can shift as interventions
deteriorate. The political consequences of failure may be avoided.
It is rare for an official to acknowledge failure and reverse policy; personal, political
and national credibility may be at stake. President Johnson insisted that he was not going to
be the "first
president to lose a war." Bush, Obama and even Trump did not want to "lose"
Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, lying about military interventions carries a serious risk.
The Pentagon Papers eroded public faith in the credibility of our democratic government.
That erosion was later reinforced by the Watergate scandal. As
Bok, the philosopher, wrote , "deception of this kind strikes at the very essence of
democratic government."
British leader Winston Churchill said , "In
war-time truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."
Deception aimed at the public and the Axis was an essential part of Churchill's war
strategy.
The Afghanistan papers reveal yet again that statesmen still believe the truth should be
concealed. But the credibility of statecraft and leadership itself were seriously eroded by the
Vietnam lies, weakening the fabric of democracy.
The mild reaction to lying in plain sight about Afghanistan suggests the U.S. may be well
down the road to unravelling government's credibility and our democracy altogether.
s Putin losing his grip? Why did Russian disinformation operations fail so dramatically in
the UK election? Not only did the "rabid socialist" Corbyn fail to seize power from the
Russophobic cold-war warriors of Whitehall but Russia's man in the White House is already
planning to move in with them!
"... The American people and most of the world bought into the lies and half-truths because they wanted to believe the fiction they were being spoon fed by the White House, but is there a whole lot of difference between what the US government did against Iraq in 2003 and what Hitler's government did in 1939 when it falsely claimed that Polish troops had attacked Germany? Was subsequent torture by the Gestapo any different than torture by a contractor working for Washington? ..."
"... A friend of mine recently commented that honest men who were formerly part of the United States government do not subsequently get hired by lobbying firms or obtain television contracts and "teaching" positions at prestigious universities. ..."
"... If the marketplace is anything to go by Feith and Tenet are running neck-and-neck on secondary book exchanges as George also can be had for $.01. ..."
"... The historian Livy summed up the significance of his act, writing "It is worthwhile for those who disdain all human things for money, and who suppose that there is no room either for great honor or virtue, except where wealth is found, to listen to his story." ..."
"... "Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best." ..."
"... senior government officials and politicians routinely expect to be generously rewarded for their service and never held accountable for their failures and misdeeds ..."
"... One thing for sure about the Washington elite, you never have to say you're sorry. ..."
The United States already has by far the per capita largest prison population of any developed country but I am probably one of
the few Americans who on this Independence Day would like to see a lot more people in prison, mostly drawn from politicians and senior
bureaucrats who have long believed that their status makes them untouchable, giving them license to steal and even to kill. The sad
fact is that while whistleblowers have been imprisoned for revealing government criminality, no one in the federal bureaucracy has
ever actually been punished for the crimes of torture, kidnapping and assassination committed during the George W. Bush and Barack
H. Obama presidencies.
Why is accountability important? After the Second World War, the victorious allies believed it was important to establish responsibility
for the crimes that had been committed by officials of the Axis powers. The judges at the Nuremberg Trials called the initiation
of a war of aggression the ultimate war crime because it inevitably unleashed so many other evils. Ten leading Nazis were executed
at Nuremberg and ninety-three Japanese officials at similar trials staged in Asia, including several guilty of waterboarding. Those
who were not executed for being complicit in the actual launching of war were tried for torture of both military personnel and civilians
and crimes against humanity, including the mass killing of civilians as well as of soldiers who had surrendered or been captured.
No matter how one tries to avoid making comparisons between 1939 and 2015, the American invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression,
precisely the type of conflict that the framework of accountability provided by Nuremberg was supposed to prevent in the years after
1946. High level US government officials knew that Iraq represented no threat to the United States but they nevertheless described
an imminent danger posed by Saddam Hussein in the most graphic terms, replete with weapons of mass destruction, armed drones flying
across the Atlantic, terrorists being unleashed against the homeland, and mushroom clouds on the horizon. The precedent of Iraq,
even though it was an abject failure, has led to further military action against Libya and Syria to bring about "regime change" as
well as a continuing conflict in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the US has been waging a largely secret "long war" against terrorists employing torture and secret prisons. The
American people and most of the world bought into the lies and half-truths because they wanted to believe the fiction they were being
spoon fed by the White House, but is there a whole lot of difference between what the US government did against Iraq in 2003 and
what Hitler's government did in 1939 when it falsely claimed that Polish troops had attacked Germany? Was subsequent torture by the
Gestapo any different than torture by a contractor working for Washington?
Many Americans would now consider the leading figures in the Bush Administration aided and abetted by many enablers in congress
from both political parties to be unindicted war criminals. Together they ignited a global conflict that is still running strong
fourteen years later with a tally of more than 7,000 dead Americans and a minimum of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, Afghans,
Libyans, Somalis and Syrians.
War breeds more war, due largely to the fact that guilty parties in Washington who piggyback on the prevailing narrative move
onward and upward, rewarded in this life even if not necessarily so in the hereafter. A friend of mine recently commented that
honest men who were formerly part of the United States government do not subsequently get hired by lobbying firms or obtain television
contracts and "teaching" positions at prestigious universities. Though not 100% accurate as I know at least a couple of honorable
former senior officials who wound up teaching, it would seem to be a generalization that has considerable validity. The implication
is that many senior government officials ascend to their positions based on being accommodating and "political" rather than being
honest and they continue to do the same when they switch over to corporate America or the equally corrupted world of academia.
I thought of my friend's comment when I turned on the television a week ago to be confronted by the serious, somewhat intense
gaze of Michael Morell,
warning about the danger that ISIS will strike the US over the Fourth of July weekend. Morell, a former senior CIA official,
is in the terror business. He had no evidence whatsoever that terrorists were planning an attack and should have realized that maneuvering
the United States into constantly going on alert based on empty threats is precisely what militant groups tend to do.
When not fronting as a handsomely paid national security consultant for the CBS television network Morell is employed by Beacon
Global Strategies as a Senior Counselor, presumably warning well-heeled clients to watch out for terrorists. His lifestyle and substantial
emoluments depend on people being afraid of terrorism so they will turn to an expert like him and ask serious questions that he will
answer in a serious way suggesting that Islamic militants could potentially bring about some kind of global apocalypse.
Morell, a torture apologist, also has a book out that he wants to sell, positing somewhat ridiculously that he and his former
employer had been fighting The Great War of Our Time against Islamic terrorists, something comparable to the World Wars of the past
century, hence the title. Morell needs to take some valium and relax. He would also benefit from a little introspection regarding
the bad guys versus good guys narrative that he is peddling. His credentials as a warrior are somewhat suspect in any event as he
never did any military service and his combat in the world of intelligence consisted largely of sitting behind a desk in Washington
and providing briefings to George W. Bush and Barack Obama in which he presumably told them what they wanted to hear.
Morell is one of a host of pundits who are successful in selling the military-industrial-lobbyist-congressional-intelligence community
line of BS on the war on terror. Throw in the neocons as the in-your-face agents provocateurs who provide instant intellectual and
media credibility for developments and you have large groups of engaged individuals with good access who are on the receiving end
of the seemingly unending cash pipeline that began with 9/11. Frances Townsend, who was the Bush Homeland Security adviser and who
is now a consultant with CNN, is another such creature as is Michael Chertoff, formerly Director of the Department of Homeland Security,
who has successfully marketed his
defective airport
scanners to his former employer.
But the guys and gals who are out feathering their own nests are at least comprehensible given our predatory capitalist system
of government. More to the point, the gang that ordered or carried out torture and assassination are the ones who should be doing
some hard time in the slammer but instead they too are riding the gravy train and cashing in. To name only a few of those who knew
about the torture and ordered it carried out I would cite George Tenet, James Pavitt, Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez from the intelligence
community. The assassination program meanwhile is accredited to John Brennan, currently CIA Director, during his tenure as Obama's
Deputy National Security Advisor. And then there are Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon together with John Yoo at Justice
and Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, and Condi Rice at the White House, all of whom outright lied, dissimulated and conspired their way
to bring about a war of aggression against Iraq.
There are plenty of nameless others who were "only carrying out orders" and who should be included in any reckoning of America's
crimes over the past fifteen years, particularly if one also considers the illegal NSA spying program headed by Michael Hayden, who
defended the practice and has also
referred to those who oppose enhanced interrogation torture as "interrogation deniers." And then there are Presidents Bush and
Obama who certainly knew what was going on in the name of the American people as well as John Brennan, who was involved in both the
torture and renditions programs as well as the more recent assassinations by drone.
So where are they now? Living in obscurity ashamed of what they did? Hardly. Not only have they not been vilified or marginalized,
they have, in most cases, been rewarded. George W. Bush lives in Dallas near his Presidential Library and eponymous Think (sic) Tank.
Cheney lives in semi-retirement in McLean Virginia with a multi-million dollar waterfront weekend retreat in St. Michaels Maryland,
not too far from Donald Rumsfeld's similar digs.
George Tenet, the CIA Director notorious for his "slam-dunk" comment, a man who cooked the intelligence to make the Iraq war possible
to curry favor with the White House, has generously remunerated positions on the boards of Allen & Company merchant bank, QinetiQ,
and L-1 Identity Solutions. He sold his memoir At the Center of the Storm, which has been
described
as a "self-justifying apologia," in 2007 for a reported advance of $4 million. His book, ironically, admits that the US invaded
Iraq for no good reason.
James Pavitt, who was the point man responsible for the "enhanced interrogation" program as Tenet's Deputy Director for Operations,
is currently a principal with The Scowcroft Group and also serves on several boards. Cofer Black, who headed the Counter-Terrorism
Center, which actually carried out renditions and "enhanced interrogations," was vice chairman of Blackwater Worldwide (now called
Xe) and chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions, a Blackwater spin-off. He is now vice president of Blackbird Technologies, a defense
and intelligence contractor. Rodriguez, who succeeded Black and in 2005 illegally destroyed video tapes made of Agency interrogations
to avoid possible repercussions, is a senior vice president with Edge Consulting, a defense contractor currently owned by IBM that
is located in Virginia.
John Yoo is a Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley while Condoleezza Rice, who spoke of mushroom clouds and
is widely regarded as the worst National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in history, has returned to Stanford University.
She is a professor at the Graduate School
of Business and a director of its Global Center for Business and the Economy as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution. She
is occasionally spoken of as either a possible GOP presidential candidate or as a future Commissioner of the National Football League.
Her interaction with students is limited, but when challenged on her record she has responded that it was a difficult situation post
9/11, something that everyone understands, though few would have come to her conclusion that attacking Iraq might be a good way to
destroy al-Qaeda.
Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush Deputy Secretary of Defense, is seen by many as the "intellectual" driving force behind the invasion
of Iraq. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and advises Jeb Bush on foreign policy. A bid to
reward Wolfie for his zeal by giving him a huge golden parachute as President of the World Bank at a salary of $391,000 tax free
failed when, after 23 months in the position, he was ousted over promoting a subordinate with whom he was having an affair. His chief
deputy at the Pentagon Doug Feith left the Defense Department to take up a visiting professorship at the school of Foreign Service
at Georgetown University, which was subsequently not renewed. He is reported to be again practicing law and thinking deep thoughts
about his hero Edmund Burke, who no doubt would have been appalled to make Feith's acquaintance. Feith is a senior fellow at the
neoconservative Hudson Institute and the Director of the Center for National Security Strategies. His memoir War and Decision did
not make the best seller list and is now available used on Amazon for $.01 plus shipping. If the marketplace is anything to go
by Feith and Tenet are running neck-and-neck on secondary book exchanges as George also can be had for $.01.
The over-rewarding of former officials who have in reality done great harm to the United States and its interests might well seem
inexplicable, but it is all part of a style of bureaucracy that cannot admit failure and truly believes that all its actions are
ipso facto legitimate because the executive and its minions can do no wrong. It is also a symptom of the classic American character
flaw that all things are of necessity measured by money. Does anyone remember the ancient Roman symbol of republican virtue Lucius
Quinctius Cincinnatus, who left his farm after being named Dictator in order to defeat Rome's enemies? He then handed power back
to the Senate before returning to his plowing after the job was done. The historian Livy summed up the significance of his act,
writing "It is worthwhile for those who disdain all human things for money, and who suppose that there is no room either for great
honor or virtue, except where wealth is found, to listen to his story." George Washington was America's Cincinnatus and it is
not a coincidence that officers of the continental army founded the Cincinnati Society, the nation's oldest patriotic organization,
in 1783. It is also reported that Edward Snowden used the alias "Cincinnatus."
Lord Acton once observed that "Power tends
to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." More recently essayist Edward Abbey
put it in an American context, noting
"Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best." That senior government officials and politicians
routinely expect to be generously rewarded for their service and never held accountable for their failures and misdeeds is a
fault that is perhaps not unique to the United States but it is nevertheless unacceptable. Handing out a couple of exemplary prison
sentences for the caste that believes itself untouchable would be a good place to start. An opportunity was missed with David Petraeus,
who was fined and avoided jail time, and it will be interesting to see how the Dennis Hastert case develops. Hastert will no doubt
be slapped on the wrist for the crime of moving around his own money while the corruption that was the source of that money, both
as a legislator and lobbyist, will be ignored. As will his molestation of at least one and possibly several young boys. One thing
for sure about the Washington elite, you never have to say you're sorry.
s Putin losing his grip? Why did Russian disinformation operations fail so dramatically in
the UK election? Not only did the "rabid socialist" Corbyn fail to seize power from the
Russophobic cold-war warriors of Whitehall but Russia's man in the White House is already
planning to move in with them!
I suspected that Deep State has at least two opposing factions. The Realistists want him to
break up the empire, turn back into a republic; the Delusionals want to extend the empire,
continue to exploit and destroy the world. If so, the contradictions, reversals, incoherence
make sense. IMO as I said.
Gary Weglarz ,
I predict that all Western MSM will begin to accurately and vocally cover Mr. Binney's
findings about this odious and treasonous U.S. government psyop at just about the exact time
that -- "hell freezes over" -- as they say.
Jen ,
They don't need to, they have Tony Blair's fellow Brit psycho Boris Johnson to go on
autopilot and blame the Russians the moment something happens and just before London Met
start their investigations.
Gossufer2.0 and CrowdStrike are the weakest links in this sordid story. CrowdStrike was nothing but FBI/CIA contractor.
So the hypothesis that CrowdStrike employees implanted malware to implicate Russians and created fake Gussifer 2.0 personality
is pretty logical.
Notable quotes:
"... Not one piece of corroborating intelligence. It is all based on opinion and strong belief. There was no human source report or electronic intercept pointing to a relationship between the GRU and the two alleged creations of the GRU--Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com. Now consider the spin that Robert Mueller put on this opinion in his report on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Mueller bluffs the unsuspecting reader into believing that it is a proven fact that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were Russian assets. But he is relying on a mere opinion from a handpicked group of intel analysts working under the direction of then CIA Director John Brennan ..."
"... In October 2015 John Brennan reorganized the CIA . As part of that reorganization he created a new directorate--DIRECTORATE OF DIGITAL INNOVATION. Its mission was to "manipulate digital footprints." In other words, this was the Directorate that did the work of creating Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. One of their specialties, creating Digital Dust. ..."
"... We also know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the CIA was using software specifically designed to mask CIA activity and make it appear like it was done by a foreign entity. Wikipedia describes the Vault 7 documents : ..."
"... Exhibit A in the case is this document created and later edited in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word format. Metadata left inside the file shows it was last edited by someone using the computer name "Феликс Эдмундович." That means the computer was configured to use the Russian language and that it was connected to a Russian-language keyboard. More intriguing still, "Феликс Эдмундович" is the colloquial name that translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the 20th Century Russian statesman who is best known for founding the Soviet secret police. (The metadata also shows that the purported DNC strategy memo was originally created by someone named Warren Flood, which happens to be the name of a LinkedIn user claiming to provide strategy and data analytics services to Democratic candidates.) ..."
"... Why would the CIA do this? The CIA knew that Podesta's emails had been hacked and were circulating on the internet. But they had no evidence about the identity of the culprit. If they had such evidence, they would have cited it in the 2017 ICA. ..."
"... The U.S. intelligence community became aware around May 26, 2016 that someone with access to the DNC network was offering those emails to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Julian Assange and people who spoke to him indicate that the person was Seth Rich. Whether or not it was Seth, the Trump Task Force at CIA was aware that the emails, which would be embarrassing to the Clinton campaign, would be released at some time in the future. Hence the motive to create Guccifer 2.0 and pin the blame on Russia. ..."
"... The only source for the claim that Russia hacked the DNC is a private cyber security firm, CrowdStrike. ..."
"... Time for the common sense standard again. Crowdstrike detected the Russians on the 6th of May, according to CEO Dimitri Alperovitch, but took no steps to shutdown the network, eliminate the malware and clean the computers until 34 days later, i.e., the 10th of June. That is 34 days of inexcusable inaction. ..."
"... The actions attributed to DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 should be priority investigative targets for U.S. Attorney John Durham's team of investigators. This potential use of a known CIA tool, developed under Brennan with the sole purpose to obfuscate the source of intrusions, pointing to another nation, as a false flag operation, is one of the actions and issues that U.S. Attorney John Durham should be looking into as a potential act of "Seditious conspiracy. It needs to be done. To quote the CIA, I strongly assess that the only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU. ..."
"... LJ bottom line: "The only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU." ..."
"... ICA which seemed to have been framed to allow journalists or the unwary to link the ICA with more rigorous standards used by more authentic assessments? ..."
"... With the Russians not having the advantages that the NSA does (back doors in all US-designed network hardware/software and taps all over the internet), would Russia reveal anything unless it involved an immediate major national security threat. I doubt that would cover Trump. ..."
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report insists that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by Russia's military intelligence organization,
the GRU, as part of a Russian plot to meddle in the U.S. 2016 Presidential Election. But this is a lie. Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks
were created by Brennan's CIA and this action by the CIA should be a target of U.S. Attorney John Durham's investigation. Let me
explain why.
Let us start with the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment aka ICA. Only three agencies of the 17 in the U.S. intelligence
community contributed to and coordinated on the ICA--the FBI, the CIA and NSA. In the preamble to the ICA, you can read the following
explanation about methodology:
When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as "we assess" or "we judge," they are conveying an analytic assessment or
judgment
To be clear, the phrase,"We assess", is intel community jargon for "opinion". If there was actual evidence or source material
for a judgment the writer of the assessment would state, "According to a reliable source" or "knowledgeable source" or "documentary
evidence."
Pay close attention to what the analysts writing the ICA stated about the GRU and Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks:
We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data
obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.
Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker, made multiple contradictory statements and false claims
about his likely Russian identity throughout the election. Press reporting suggests more than one person claiming to be Guccifer
2.0 interacted with journalists.
Content that we assess was taken from e-mail accounts targeted by the GRU in March 2016 appeared on DCLeaks.com starting
in June.
We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks.
Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did
not contain any evident forgeries.
Not one piece of corroborating intelligence. It is all based on opinion and strong belief. There was no human source report or
electronic intercept pointing to a relationship between the GRU and the two alleged creations of the GRU--Guccifer 2.0 persona and
DCLeaks.com. Now consider the spin that Robert Mueller put on this opinion in his report on possible collusion between the Trump
campaign and the Russians. Mueller bluffs the unsuspecting reader into believing that it is a proven fact that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks
were Russian assets. But he is relying on a mere opinion from a handpicked group of intel analysts working under the direction of
then CIA Director John Brennan.
Here's Mueller's take (I apologize for the lengthy quote but it is important that you read how the Mueller team presents this):
DCLeaks
"The GRU began planning the releases at least as early as April 19, 2016, when Unit 26165 registered the domain dcleaks.com
through a service that anonymized the registrant.137 Unit 26165 paid for the registration using a pool of bitcoin that it had
mined.138 The dcleaks.com landing page pointed to different tranches of stolen documents, arranged by victim or subject matter.
Other dcleaks.com pages contained indexes of the stolen emails that were being released (bearing the sender, recipient, and date
of the email). To control access and the timing of releases, pages were sometimes password-protected for a period of time and
later made unrestricted to the public.
Starting in June 2016, the GRU posted stolen documents onto the website dcleaks.com, including documents stolen from a number
of individuals associated with the Clinton Campaign. These documents appeared to have originated from personal email accounts
(in particular, Google and Microsoft accounts), rather than the DNC and DCCC computer networks. DCLeaks victims included an advisor
to the Clinton Campaign, a former DNC employee and Clinton Campaign employee, and four other campaign volunteers.139 The GRU released
through dcleaks.com thousands of documents, including personal identifying and financial information, internal correspondence
related to the"Clinton Campaign and prior political jobs, and fundraising files and information.140
GRU officers operated a Facebook page under the DCLeaks moniker, which they primarily used to promote releases of materials.141
The Facebook page was administered through a small number of preexisting GRU-controlled Facebook accounts.142
GRU officers also used the DCLeaks Facebook account, the Twitter account @dcleaks__, and the email account [email protected]
to communicate privately with reporters and other U.S. persons. GRU officers using the DCLeaks persona gave certain reporters
early access to archives of leaked files by sending them links and passwords to pages on the dcleaks.com website that had not
yet become public. For example, on July 14, 2016, GRU officers operating under the DCLeaks persona sent a link and password for
a non-public DCLeaks webpage to a U.S. reporter via the Facebook account.143 Similarly, on September 14, 2016, GRU officers sent
reporters Twitter direct messages from @dcleaks_, with a password to another non-public part of the dcleaks.com website.144
The dcleaks.com website remained operational and public until March 2017."
Guccifer 2.0
On June 14, 2016, the DNC and its cyber-response team announced the breach of the DNC network and suspected theft of DNC documents.
In the statements, the cyber-response team alleged that Russian state-sponsored actors (which they referred to as "Fancy Bear")
were responsible for the breach.145 Apparently in response to that announcement, on June 15, 2016, GRU officers using the persona
Guccifer 2.0 created a WordPress blog. In the hours leading up to the launch of that WordPress blog, GRU officers logged into
a Moscow-based server used and managed by Unit 74455 and searched for a number of specific words and phrases in English, including
"some hundred sheets," "illuminati," and "worldwide known." Approximately two hours after the last of those searches, Guccifer
2.0 published its first post, attributing the DNC server hack to a lone Romanian hacker and using several of the unique English
words and phrases that the GRU officers had searched for that day.146
That same day, June 15, 2016, the GRU also used the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress blog to begin releasing to the public documents
stolen from the DNC and DCCC computer networks.
The Guccifer 2.0 persona ultimately released thousands of documents stolen from the DNC and DCCC in a series of blog posts
between June 15, 2016 and October 18, 2016.147 Released documents included opposition research performed by the DNC (including
a memorandum analyzing potential criticisms of candidate Trump), internal policy documents (such as recommendations on how to
address politically sensitive issues), analyses of specific congressional races, and fundraising documents. Releases were organized
around thematic issues, such as specific states (e.g., Florida and Pennsylvania) that were perceived as competitive in the 2016
U.S. presidential election.
Beginning in late June 2016, the GRU also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release documents directly to reporters and other
interested individuals. Specifically, on June 27, 2016, Guccifer 2.0 sent an email to the news outlet The Smoking Gun offering
to provide "exclusive access to some leaked emails linked [to] Hillary Clinton's staff."148 The GRU later sent the reporter a
password and link to a locked portion of the dcleaks.com website that contained an archive of emails stolen by Unit 26165 from
a Clinton Campaign volunteer in March 2016.149 "That the Guccifer 2.0 persona provided reporters access to a restricted portion
of the DCLeaks website tends to indicate that both personas were operated by the same or a closely-related group of people.150
The GRU continued its release efforts through Guccifer 2.0 into August 2016. For example, on August 15, 2016, the Guccifer
2.0 persona sent a candidate for the U.S. Congress documents related to the candidate's opponent.151 On August 22, 2016, the Guccifer
2.0 persona transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of Florida-related data stolen from the DCCC to a U.S. blogger covering Florida
politics.152 On August 22, 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona sent a U.S. reporter documents stolen from the DCCC pertaining to the
Black Lives Matter movement.153"
Wow. Sounds pretty convincing. The documents referencing communications by DCLeaks or Guccifer 2.0 with Wikileaks are real. What
is not true is that these entities were GRU assets.
In October 2015 John Brennan reorganized the CIA . As part of that reorganization he created a new directorate--DIRECTORATE
OF DIGITAL INNOVATION. Its mission was to "manipulate digital footprints." In other words, this was the Directorate that did the
work of creating Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. One of their specialties, creating Digital Dust.
We also know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the CIA was using software specifically designed to mask CIA activity and make it
appear like it was done by a foreign entity. Wikipedia describes the
Vault 7 documents :
Vault 7 is a series of documents that WikiLeaks began to publish on 7 March 2017, that detail activities and capabilities of the
United States' Central Intelligence Agency to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The files, dated from 2013–2016,
include details on the agency's software capabilities, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs,[1] web browsers (including
Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera Software ASA),[2][3][4] and the operating systems of most smartphones (including
Apple's iOS and Google's Android), as well as other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux[5][6
One of the tools in Vault 7 carries the innocuous name, MARBLE.
Hackernews explains the purpose and function
of MARBLE:
Dubbed "Marble," the part 3 of CIA files contains 676 source code files of a secret anti-forensic Marble Framework, which is basically
an obfuscator or a packer used to hide the true source of CIA malware.
The CIA's Marble Framework tool includes a variety of different algorithm with foreign language text intentionally inserted into
the malware source code to fool security analysts and falsely attribute attacks to the wrong nation.
Marble is used to hamper[ing] forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks
to the CIA," says the whistleblowing site.
"...for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then
showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion," WikiLeaks
explains.
So guess what
gullible techies "discovered" in mid-June 2016? The meta data in the Guccifer 2.0 communications had "Russian fingerprints."
We still don't know who he is or whether he works for the Russian government, but one thing is for sure: Guccifer 2.0 -- the nom
de guerre of the person claiming he hacked the Democratic National Committee and published hundreds of pages that appeared to prove
it -- left behind fingerprints implicating a Russian-speaking person with a nostalgia for the country's lost Soviet era.
Exhibit A in the case is this document created and later edited in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word format. Metadata left inside
the file shows it was last edited by someone using the computer name "Феликс Эдмундович." That means the computer was configured
to use the Russian language and that it was connected to a Russian-language keyboard. More intriguing still, "Феликс Эдмундович"
is the colloquial name that translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the 20th Century Russian statesman who is best known for founding the
Soviet secret police. (The metadata also shows that the purported DNC strategy memo was originally created by someone named Warren
Flood, which happens to be the name of a LinkedIn user claiming to provide strategy and data analytics services to Democratic candidates.)
Just use your common sense. If the Russians were really trying to carry out a covert cyberattack, do you really think they
are so sloppy and incompetent to insert the name of the creator of the Soviet secret police in the metadata? No. The Russians are
not clowns. This was a clumsy attempt to frame the Russians.
Why would the CIA do this? The CIA knew that Podesta's emails had been hacked and were circulating on the internet. But they
had no evidence about the identity of the culprit. If they had such evidence, they would have cited it in the 2017 ICA.
The U.S. intelligence community became aware around May 26, 2016 that someone with access to the DNC network was offering
those emails to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Julian Assange and people who spoke to him indicate that the person was Seth Rich.
Whether or not it was Seth, the Trump Task Force at CIA was aware that the emails, which would be embarrassing to the Clinton campaign,
would be released at some time in the future. Hence the motive to create Guccifer 2.0 and pin the blame on Russia.
It is essential to recall the timeline of the alleged Russian intrusion into the DNC network. The only source for the claim
that Russia hacked the DNC is a private cyber security firm, CrowdStrike. Here is the timeline for the DNC "hack."
Here are the facts on the public record. They are at odds with the claims of the Intelligence Community:
It was
29 April 2016 , when the DNC claims it became aware its servers had been penetrated. No claim yet about who was responsible.
And no claim that there had been a prior warning by the FBI of a penetration of the DNC by Russian military intelligence.
According to CrowdStrike founder , Dimitri Alperovitch, his company first supposedly detected the Russians mucking around
inside the DNC server on 6 May 2016. A CrowdStrike intelligence analyst reportedly told Alperovitch that:
Falcon had identified not one but two Russian intruders: Cozy Bear, a group CrowdStrike's experts believed was affiliated
with the FSB, Russia's answer to the CIA; and Fancy Bear, which they had linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence.
The Wikileaks data shows that the last message copied from the DNC network is dated Wed, 25 May 2016 08:48:35.
10 June 2016 --CrowdStrike waited until 10 June 2016 to take concrete steps to clean up the DNC network. Alperovitch told
Esquire's Vicky Ward that: 'Ultimately, the teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC.
Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10, all DNC employees were instructed to leave
their laptops in the office."
On June 14, 2016 , Ellen Nakamura, a Washington Post reporter who had been briefed by computer security company hired by the
DNC -- Crowdstrike--, wrote:
Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the
entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security
experts who responded to the breach.
The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC's system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said
DNC officials and the security experts.
The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential
candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political
action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.
15 June, 2016 , an internet "personality" self-described as Guccifer 2.0 surfaces and claims to be responsible for the hacks
but denies being Russian. The people/entity behind Guccifer 2.0:
Used a Russian VPN service provider to conceal their identity.
Created an email account with AOL.fr (a service that exposes the sender's IP address) and contacted the press (exposing his
VPN IP address in the process).
Contacted various media outlets through this set up and claimed credit for hacking the DNC, sharing copies of files purportedly
from the hack (one of which had Russian error messages embedded in them) with reporters from Gawker, The Smoking Gun and other
outlets.
Carried out searches for terms that were mostly in English, several of which would appear in Guccifer 2.0's first blog post.
They chose to do this via a server based in Moscow. (this is from the indictment,
"On or about June 15, 2016, the Conspirators logged into a Moscow-based server used and managed by Unit 74455")
Created a blog and made an initial blog post claiming to have hacked the DNC, providing links to various documents as proof.
Carelessly dropped a "Russian Smiley" into his first blog post.
Managed to add the name "Феликс Эдмундович" (which translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, also known as "Iron Felix") to the metadata
of several documents. (Several sources went beyond what the evidence shows and made claims about Guccifer 2.0 using a Russian
keyboard, however, these claims are just assumptions made in response to the presence of cyrillic characters.)
The only thing that the Guccifer 2.0 character did not do to declare its Russian heritage was to take out full page ads in the
New York Times and Washington Post. But the "forensic" fingerprints that Guccifer 2.0 was leaving behind is not the only inexplicable
event.
Time for the common sense standard again. Crowdstrike detected the Russians on the 6th of May, according to CEO Dimitri Alperovitch,
but took no steps to shutdown the network, eliminate the malware and clean the computers until 34 days later, i.e., the 10th of June.
That is 34 days of inexcusable inaction.
It is only AFTER Julian Assange announces on 12 June 2016 that WikiLeaks has emails relating to Hillary Clinton that DCLeaks or
Guccifer 2.0 try to contact Assange.
The actions attributed to DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 should be priority investigative targets for U.S. Attorney John Durham's
team of investigators. This potential use of a known CIA tool, developed under Brennan with the sole purpose to obfuscate the source
of intrusions, pointing to another nation, as a false flag operation, is one of the actions and issues that U.S. Attorney John Durham
should be looking into as a potential act of "Seditious conspiracy. It needs to be done. To quote the CIA, I strongly assess that
the only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA,
not the GRU.
LJ bottom line: "The only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential
election was the CIA, not the GRU."
Larry, thanks -- vital clarifications and reminders. In your earlier presentation of this material did you not also distinguish
between the way actually interagency assessments are titled, and ICA which seemed to have been framed to allow journalists or
the unwary to link the ICA with more rigorous standards used by more authentic assessments?
Thank you Larry. You have discovered one more vital key to the conspiracy. We now need the evidence of Julian Assange. He is kept
incommunicado and He is being tortured by the British in jail and will be murdered by the American judicial system if he lasts
long enough to be extradited.
You can be sure he will be "Epsteined" before he appears in open court because he knows the source of what Wikileaks published.
Once he is gone, mother Clinton is in the clear.
I can understand the GRU or SVR hacking the DNC and other e-mail servers because as intelligence services that is their job, but
can anyone think of any examples of Russia (or the Soviet Union) using such information to take overt action?
With the Russians
not having the advantages that the NSA does (back doors in all US-designed network hardware/software and taps all over the internet),
would Russia reveal anything unless it involved an immediate major national security threat. I doubt that would cover Trump.
"... You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense -- it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power. ..."
"... You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars. You know this because Biden bragged about it on video. Biden openly stated: "I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars' I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a bitch. He got fired." Even Joe Biden admitted just days ago in an interview with NPR that it "looked bad." Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what Joe Biden has admitted he actually did. ..."
"... This is nothing more than an illegal, partisan attempted coup that will, based on recent sentiment, badly fail at the voting booth. You are not just after me, as President, you are after the entire Republican Party. But because of this colossal injustice, our party is more united than it has ever been before. History will judge you harshly as you proceed with this impeachment charade. Your legacy will be that of turning the House of Representatives from a revered legislative body into a Star Chamber of partisan persecution. ..."
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Madam Speaker:
I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats
in the House of Representatives. This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers,
unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.
The Articles of Impeachment introduced by the House Judiciary Committee are not recognizable under any standard of Constitutional
theory, interpretation, or jurisprudence. They include no crimes, no misdemeanors, and no offenses whatsoever. You have cheapened
the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!
By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution,
and you are declaring open war on American Democracy. You dare to invoke the Founding Fathers in pursuit of this election-nullification
scheme -- yet your spiteful actions display unfettered contempt for America's founding and your egregious conduct threatens to destroy
that which our Founders pledged their very lives to build. Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans
of faith by continually saying "I pray for the President," when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative
sense. It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!
Your first claim, "Abuse of Power," is a completely disingenuous, meritless, and baseless invention of your imagination. You know
that I had a totally innocent conversation with the President of Ukraine. I then had a second conversation that has been misquoted,
mischaracterized, and fraudulently misrepresented. Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from
the transcript (which was immediately made available) that the paragraph in question was perfect. I said to President Zelensky: "I
would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it." I said do
us a favor, not me , and our country , not a campaign. I then mentioned the Attorney General of the United States.
Every time I talk with a foreign leader, I put America's interests first, just as I did with President Zelensky.
You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense -- it is no more legitimate
than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power.
You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing
the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars. You know this because Biden bragged about it
on video. Biden openly stated: "I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars' I looked at them and said: 'I'm
leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a bitch. He got fired." Even Joe
Biden admitted just days ago in an interview with NPR that it "looked bad." Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing
me of doing what Joe Biden has admitted he actually did.
President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure. He further emphasized that
it was a "good phone call," that "I don't feel pressure," and explicitly stressed that "nobody pushed me." The Ukrainian Foreign
Minister stated very clearly: "I have never seen a direct link between investigations and security assistance." He also said there
was "No Pressure." Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a supporter of Ukraine who met privately with President Zelensky, has said:
"At no time during this meeting was there any mention by Zelensky or any Ukrainian that they were feeling pressure to do anything
in return for the military aid." Many meetings have been held between representatives of Ukraine and our country. Never once did
Ukraine complain about pressure being applied -- not once! Ambassador Sondland testified that I told him: "No quid pro quo. I want
nothing. I want nothing. I want President Zelensky to do the right thing, do what he ran on."
The second claim, so-called "Obstruction of Congress," is preposterous and dangerous. House Democrats are trying to impeach the
duly elected President of the United States for asserting Constitutionally based privileges that have been asserted on a bipartisan
basis by administrations of both political parties throughout our Nation's history. Under that standard, every American president
would have been impeached many times over. As liberal law professor Jonathan Turley warned when addressing Congressional Democrats:
"I can't emphasize this enough if you impeach a president, if you make a high crime and misdemeanor out of going to the courts, it
is an abuse of power. It's your abuse of power. You're doing precisely what you're criticizing the President for doing."
Everyone, you included, knows what is really happening. Your chosen candidate lost the election in 2016, in an Electoral College
landslide (306-227), and you and your party have never recovered from this defeat. You have developed a full-fledged case of what
many in the media call Trump Derangement Syndrome and sadly, you will never get over it! You are unwilling and unable to accept the
verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016. So you have spent three straight years attempting to overturn
the will of the American people and nullify their votes. You view democracy as your enemy!
Speaker Pelosi, you admitted just last week at a public forum that your party's impeachment effort has been going on for "two
and a half years," long before you ever heard about a phone call with Ukraine. Nineteen minutes after I took the oath of office,
the Washington Post published a story headlined, "The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun." Less than three months
after my inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters stated, "I'm going to fight every day until he's impeached." House Democrats
introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration, for what will be regarded as one of our
country's best decisions, the firing of James Comey (see Inspector General Reports) -- who the world now knows is one of the dirtiest
cops our Nation has ever seen. A ranting and raving Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, declared just hours after she was sworn into office,
"We're gonna go in there and we're gonna impeach the motherf****r." Representative Al Green said in May, "I'm concerned that if we
don't impeach this president, he will get re-elected." Again, you and your allies said, and did, all of these things long before
you ever heard of President Zelensky or anything related to Ukraine. As you know very well, this impeachment drive has nothing to
do with Ukraine, or the totally appropriate conversation I had with its new president. It only has to do with your attempt to undo
the election of 2016 and steal the election of 2020!
Congressman Adam Schiff cheated and lied all the way up to the present day, even going so far as to fraudulently make up, out
of thin air, my conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine and read this fantasy language to Congress as though it were said
by me. His shameless lies and deceptions, dating all the way back to the Russia Hoax, is one of the main reasons we are here today.
You and your party are desperate to distract from America's extraordinary economy, incredible jobs boom, record stock market,
soaring confidence, and flourishing citizens. Your party simply cannot compete with our record: 7 million new jobs; the lowest-ever
unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans; a rebuilt military; a completely reformed VA with Choice
and Accountability for our great veterans; more than 170 new federal judges and two Supreme Court Justices; historic tax and regulation
cuts; the elimination of the individual mandate; the first decline in prescription drug prices in half a century; the first new branch
of the United States Military since 1947, the Space Force; strong protection of the Second Amendment; criminal justice reform; a
defeated ISIS caliphate and the killing of the world's number one terrorist leader, al-Baghdadi; the replacement of the disastrous
NAFTA trade deal with the wonderful USMCA (Mexico and Canada); a breakthrough Phase One trade deal with China; massive new trade
deals with Japan and South Korea; withdrawal from the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal; cancellation of the unfair and costly Paris Climate
Accord; becoming the world's top energy producer; recognition of Israel's capital, opening the American Embassy in Jerusalem, and
recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; a colossal reduction in illegal border crossings, the ending of Catch-and-Release,
and the building of the Southern Border Wall -- and that is just the beginning, there is so much more. You cannot defend your extreme
policies -- open borders, mass migration, high crime, crippling taxes, socialized healthcare, destruction of American energy, late-term
taxpayer-funded abortion, elimination of the Second Amendment, radical far-left theories of law and justice, and constant partisan
obstruction of both common sense and common good.
There is nothing I would rather do than stop referring to your party as the Do-Nothing Democrats. Unfortunately, I don't know
that you will ever give me a chance to do so.
After three years of unfair and unwarranted investigations, 45 million dollars spent, 18 angry Democrat prosecutors, the entire
force of the FBI, headed by leadership now proven to be totally incompetent and corrupt, you have found NOTHING! Few people in high
position could have endured or passed this test. You do not know, nor do you care, the great damage and hurt you have inflicted upon
wonderful and loving members of my family. You conducted a fake investigation upon the democratically elected President of the United
States, and you are doing it yet again.
There are not many people who could have taken the punishment inflicted during this period of time, and yet done so much for the
success of America and its citizens. But instead of putting our country first, you have decided to disgrace our country still further.
You completely failed with the Mueller report because there was nothing to find, so you decided to take the next hoax that came along,
the phone call with Ukraine -- even though it was a perfect call. And by the way, when I speak to foreign countries, there are many
people, with permission, listening to the call on both sides of the conversation.
You are the ones interfering in America's elections. You are the ones subverting America's Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing
Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain.
Before the Impeachment Hoax, it was the Russian Witch Hunt. Against all evidence, and regardless of the truth, you and your deputies
claimed that my campaign colluded with the Russians -- a grave, malicious, and slanderous lie, a falsehood like no other. You forced
our Nation through turmoil and torment over a wholly fabricated story, illegally purchased from a foreign spy by Hillary Clinton
and the DNC in order to assault our democracy. Yet, when the monstrous lie was debunked and this Democrat conspiracy dissolved into
dust, you did not apologize. You did not recant. You did not ask to be forgiven. You showed no remorse, no capacity for self-reflection.
Instead, you pursued your next libelous and vicious crusade -- you engineered an attempt to frame and defame an innocent person.
All of this was motivated by personal political calculation. Your Speakership and your party are held hostage by your most deranged
and radical representatives of the far left. Each one of your members lives in fear of a socialist primary challenger -- this is
what is driving impeachment. Look at Congressman Nadler's challenger. Look at yourself and others. Do not take our country down with
your party.
If you truly cared about freedom and liberty for our Nation, then you would be devoting your vast investigative resources to exposing
the full truth concerning the FBI's horrifying abuses of power before, during, and after the 2016 election -- including the use of
spies against my campaign, the submission of false evidence to a FISA court, and the concealment of exculpatory evidence in order
to frame the innocent. The FBI has great and honorable people, but the leadership was inept and corrupt. I would think that you would
personally be appalled by these revelations, because in your press conference the day you announced impeachment, you tied the impeachment
effort directly to the completely discredited Russia Hoax, declaring twice that "all roads lead to Putin," when you know that is
an abject lie. I have been far tougher on Russia than President Obama ever even thought to be.
Any member of Congress who votes in support of impeachment -- against every shred of truth, fact, evidence, and legal principle
-- is showing how deeply they revile the voters and how truly they detest America's Constitutional order. Our Founders feared the
tribalization of partisan politics, and you are bringing their worst fears to life.
Worse still, I have been deprived of basic Constitutional Due Process from the beginning of this impeachment scam right up until
the present. I have been denied the most fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution, including the right to present evidence,
to have my own counsel present, to confront accusers, and to call and cross-examine witnesses, like the so-called whistleblower who
started this entire hoax with a false report of the phone call that bears no relationship to the actual phone call that was made.
Once I presented the transcribed call, which surprised and shocked the fraudsters (they never thought that such evidence would be
presented), the so-called whistleblower, and the second whistleblower, disappeared because they got caught, their report was a fraud,
and they were no longer going to be made available to us. In other words, once the phone call was made public, your whole plot blew
up, but that didn't stop you from continuing.
More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.
You and others on your committees have long said impeachment must be bipartisan -- it is not. You said it was very divisive --
it certainly is, even far more than you ever thought possible -- and it will only get worse!
This is nothing more than an illegal, partisan attempted coup that will, based on recent sentiment, badly fail at the voting booth.
You are not just after me, as President, you are after the entire Republican Party. But because of this colossal injustice, our party
is more united than it has ever been before. History will judge you harshly as you proceed with this impeachment charade. Your legacy
will be that of turning the House of Representatives from a revered legislative body into a Star Chamber of partisan persecution.
Perhaps most insulting of all is your false display of solemnity. You apparently have so little respect for the American People
that you expect them to believe that you are approaching this impeachment somberly, reservedly, and reluctantly. No intelligent person
believes what you are saying. Since the moment I won the election, the Democrat Party has been possessed by Impeachment Fever. There
is no reticence. This is not a somber affair. You are making a mockery of impeachment and you are scarcely concealing your hatred
of me, of the Republican Party, and tens of millions of patriotic Americans. The voters are wise, and they are seeing straight through
this empty, hollow, and dangerous game you are playing.
I have no doubt the American people will hold you and the Democrats fully responsible in the upcoming 2020 election. They will
not soon forgive your perversion of justice and abuse of power.
There is far too much that needs to be done to improve the lives of our citizens. It is time for you and the highly partisan Democrats
in Congress to immediately cease this impeachment fantasy and get back to work for the American People. While I have no expectation
that you will do so, I write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record.
One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair, I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it
can never happen to another President again.
Sincerely yours,
DONALD J. TRUMP
President of the United States of America
cc: United States Senate
United States House of Representatives
The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the
Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely
increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc.
The unimportant internecine squabbles of the 'two parties' strengthens the false
perception that there is a choice when voting.
I suspected that Deep State has at least two opposing factions. The Realistists want him to
break up the empire, turn back into a republic; the Delusionals want to extend the empire,
continue to exploit and destroy the world. If so, the contradictions, reversals, incoherence
make sense. IMO as I said.
Gary Weglarz ,
I predict that all Western MSM will begin to accurately and vocally cover Mr. Binney's
findings about this odious and treasonous U.S. government psyop at just about the exact time
that -- "hell freezes over" -- as they say.
Jen ,
They don't need to, they have Tony Blair's fellow Brit psycho Boris Johnson to go on
autopilot and blame the Russians the moment something happens and just before London Met
start their investigations.
The House impeachment is driven by several factors:
After Russiagate, when Trump began to investigate its fraudulent origins, the Dems feared the exposure of Obama-era
corruption if not high crimes. Hence Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics.
The investigation into Russiagate led right to Ukraine, and thus to Biden. In the context of Sanders' campaign,
Ukrainegate became an imperative for the factions of the capitalist class that dominates the DNC. If Biden falls on Ukraine
issues, then Sanders is inevitable; an anathema to Wall Street and Big Tech DNC donors.
3. While 1 and 2 dominate DNC machinations, foreign policy is also a factor. The foreign policy establishment is absolutely
against any hesitation with respect to confronting Russia as part of a regional and global strategy for primacy. Trump's limited
prevarications on Russia might threaten the long established strategy to expand Nato to Ukraine and thereby to encircle Russia
and maintain US dominance over Europe. So, even though Trump names great power rivalry as the name of the game today, his inclination
for making nice with Putin threatens to weaken the US hold over Europe, which Trump wants to label as an economic competitor.
It is with these points that the strategic differences become apparent: Trump is raising a realist, neo-mercantalist strategy
against ALL potential competitors; the DNC and the deep state hold a strategy of liberal hegemony: globalization and US primacy
through dominating regional alliances, and impregnating US hegemony INSIDE the vassal States of the empire.
All of this, however, is bound to fail for the DNC, and down the road for Trump himself.
The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones.
"... Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring their power to bear on domestic policy as well. ..."
"... Impeachment, and the pro-bureaucracy anti-democracy campaign related to it, besides its more petty purposes (distraction from real social problems; forestalling Sanders), is the culmination of technocracy's attempted coup against a president who, even though he agrees with this cabal on all policy matters, is considered too unreliable, too undisciplined, too damn honest about the evil of the US empire. If they can take him down, they think they can restore the full business-as-usual status quo including the compliance of the rest of the world. ..."
Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep
State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials,
often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and
incipient tyranny.
Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of
European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring
their power to bear on domestic policy as well.
Although both halves of the One-Party really want the effective tyranny of state and
corporate bureaucracies, it's not surprising that it's the Democrats (along with the MSM)
taking the lead in openly defending the tyrannical proposition that the CIA should be
running its own foreign (and implicitly domestic) policy, and that the president should be
just a figurehead which follows orders. That goes with the Democrats' more avowedly
technocratic style, and it goes with the ratchet effect whereby it's usually Democrats which
push the policy envelope toward ever greater inequality, ecocide and tyranny.
Now is a time of rising irredentism and the decline of all the ideas of
globalization and technocracy, though the reality is likely to hang on for awhile. The whole
Deep State-Zionist-Russia-Deranged-Trump-Deranged-MSM-social media censorship campaign is
globalization trying to maintain its monopoly of ideas by force, since it knows it can never
win in a free clash of ideas.
Impeachment, and the pro-bureaucracy anti-democracy campaign related to it, besides
its more petty purposes (distraction from real social problems; forestalling Sanders), is the
culmination of technocracy's attempted coup against a president who, even though he agrees
with this cabal on all policy matters, is considered too unreliable, too undisciplined, too
damn honest about the evil of the US empire. If they can take him down, they think
they can restore the full business-as-usual status quo including the compliance of the rest
of the world.
Since impeachment's going to fail, we can expect the system to try other ways.
hey b... i like your title - "How The Deep State Sunk The Democratic Party" ... could change
it to" How the Deep State Sunk the USA" could work just as well...
Seven of the 11 security state representatives who had joined the Democrats in 2018 gave
the impulse for impeachment.
is this intentional?? it sort of looks like it...
good quote from @ 26 lk - "The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be
mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones."
@babyl-on 35
yes that is about right. The top power networks are all a tight mix of names from govt, MIC,
and private equity (incl. top 2-3 investment banks). With the latter group naturally paying
the salaries of the whole policy making ecosystem, and holding the positions that select
future generations who will eventually take their place.
They want the security of knowing noone in the world will mess with them. This
necessitates that noone in the world *can* mess with them. Pretty straightforward from
there.
If anyone was watching The Horowitz hearing in the senate today it would be hard to conclude
that RussiaGate and Ukrainegate will not have serious consequences going forward.
The whole sordid, nasty conspiracy seems on the verge of being exposed, maybe as high as
Obama himself, although he is just a puppet himself, and indictments are sure to follow. I
don't see how anyone could think that this will not be catastrophic for the democratic
party.
"... By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives ..."
Posted on
December 18, 2019 by Yves Smith Yves here. What Black calls
the New Democrats have more recently been called Blue Dogs and even (gah) frontliners, but
whatever you want to call them, they are corporate stooges loyal to bad economic ideas, most
notably deficit hawkery and austerity.
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate
professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of
Bank Whistleblowers United. Originally published at
New Economic Perspectives
On December 5, 2019, Lawrence O'Donnell made an impassioned attack on Pete Buttigieg on his
" The
Last Word " program on MSNBC. Buttigieg's statements criticizing the Democratic Party as
historically soft on deficits enraged O'Donnell. The context was Buttigieg's effort to signal
to New Hampshire voters that he was the most conservative Democratic candidate for the
presidential nomination. Nothing signals 'responsible' so well to 'New Democrats' and the media
as a candidate screaming 'deficits' in a crowded meeting room in a small New Hampshire
town.
O'Donnell correctly pointed out that Buttigieg's claims about Democrats and deficits are
'Republican lies.' The truth is that New Democrats have been the only group in America
dedicated to inflicting austerity on our Nation. Republicans only pretend to care about
deficits when Democrats have power. Buttigieg knows this, but his political interests in
portraying himself as a stalwart emerging leader of the New Democrats caused him to position
himself (falsely) as unique among New Democrats in his dedication to inflict austerity.
O'Donnell (largely) correctly pointed out that New Democrats had been fighting federal
deficits for Buttigieg's entire life. O'Donnell stressed the New Democrats actions in 1993,
when Buttigieg was eleven. O'Donnell lauded the New Democrats for pushing austerity even when
they knew doing so was likely to cause Democrats to lose elections.
O'Donnell's dominant message, measured by both length and passion, was the crippling price
the Democrats paid for the New Democrats' pushing for austerity in 1993. He made clear it was
not a "one-off" – Democrats paid that price again when President Obama, a self-described
New Democrat, pushed to inflict austerity on the Nation in 2010.
O'Donnell describes the New Democrats (Bill Clinton and Al Gore) as knowingly taking a
"grave political risk" in 1993 in voting in favor of austerity. The risk was that Democrats,
not simply New Democrats, would lose scores of seats – and control of the House and
Senate. O'Donnell stressed that no Republicans voted for the New Democrat's 1993 austerity
program. O'Donnell explained the initial political results of austerity. "The Democrats lost
the House because of that vote for the first time in 40 years." He then explained they also
lost the Senate.
O'Donnell repeatedly explained that the New Democrats knew that their decision to inflict
austerity on Americans would likely produce this political disaster – and "bravely" did
so because of their belief that inflicting austerity on Americans was essential. He noted that
he "watched with pride" this exercise of political suicide.
O'Donnell then cited President Obama's austerity efforts – during the weak recovery
from the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). At a time when the need to provide stimulus, not inflict
austerity, was obvious, Obama embraced what again proved the politically suicidal option.
As fate would have it, the death of Paul Volcker days after O'Donnell's takedown of
Buttigieg extended O'Donnell's argument further back in time – to before Buttigieg's
birth. In 1979, President Carter (a Democrat) appointed Volcker to Chair the Federal Reserve.
Volcker soon unleashed powerful monetary austerity, raising interest rates to unprecedented
levels for the United States. Volcker's obituary stressed
the politically suicidal nature of inflicting austerity – and the Democrats' pride in
knowingly losing elections because of their embrace of it.
The harsh Fed policy no doubt contributed to Mr. Carter's re-election defeat at the hands
of Ronald Reagan; he had to campaign when interest rates were at their peak, and before the
inflation fever had begun to break. Mr. Carter, in his memoirs, would offer a typically
understated assessment: "Our trepidation about Volcker's appointment was later
justified."
***
"Paul was as stubborn as he was tall," Mr. Carter said in a statement on Monday morning,
"and although some of his policies as Fed chairman were politically costly, they were the
right thing to do.
O'Donnell's denunciation of Buttigieg for adopting dishonest Republican talking points about
Democrats and deficits did not discuss several essential points. The first two points emerge
from answering this question: what was the cost to the Nation – not the loss of
Democratic seats – of the New Democrats' intransigent insistence on inflicting austerity?
Shakespeare explained famously that "mercy" was "twice blest," because it blesses both the
giver and the receiver. The quality of austerity, however, is typically at least thrice damned.
It is not a "gentle rain from heaven," but a sandstorm from hell that batters the public and
punishes the politicians who unleash the whirlwind. It is at least thrice damned because it
causes three grave forms of harm on the public.
Inflicting austerity on the United States government has three likely consequences for the
public. It is likely to cause or extend a recession. It forces Democrats into an unending
series of "Sophie's choice[s]s." We cannot adopt any new program of consequence without budget
'scoring' – requiring new taxes or cutting other vital federal programs. Under austerity,
Democrats must shrink existing overall federal spending. By extending existing recessions or
leading to new ones, austerity causes economic harms that increase social and political
breakdowns that can lead to the election of fanatics and corrupt fake-populists. The political
parties that refuse to inflict austerity (at least when they are in power) will be the
political winners.
Republican fiscal policies combine "wedge" offerings to fire up the worst of their base and
massive tax breaks for the elites that fund their campaigns – leading to a recurrent
cycle in which the New Democrats champion policies that cause the public to identify Democrats
as the party most likely to raise taxes and cut vital federal programs. Republican political
power and 'wedge' legislation and policies cause enormous harm, particularly to the poor and
minorities. The larger the Republican deficits, the greater the New Democrats' urgency to
inflict austerity – and embrace political suicide. It is a self-reinforcing cycle
producing recurrent political disaster for Democrats.
O'Donnell does not address two other critical points. First, MSNBC's top commentators
endlessly warn Democrats that they must nominate the presidential candidate most likely to
defeat President Trump. MSNBC's commentators implore us not to focus on policy differences
among the candidates. Their message is relentless realpolitik, particularly, you should never
vote for the candidate whose policies you believe are far superior to the candidate the MSNBC
commentators think is most electable. MSNBC and the New Democrats claim they share the same
prime directive – Democratic Party electoral victories are the only imperative.
O'Donnell's anti-Buttigieg rant reveals the truth about MSNBC and the New Democrats' real
prime directive – inflicting austerity even when doing so is economically irrational and
politically suicidal is their sole imperative. The obvious questions, which O'Donnell never
asked or attempted to answer, are why he and his MSNBC colleagues push the false prime
directive (winning must be the sole paramount goal) as gospel while praising the New Democrats
for repeatedly causing the Democratic Party to commit political suicide through inflicting
austerity on our Nation. Logically, the only possible answer to that question is that O'Donnell
and the New Democrats must view inflicting austerity as being of transcendent importance. It
outweighs everything. Inflicting austerity is the New Democrats and MSNBC's sole prime
directive. They are not simply willing to lose so many contests that they lose control of the
presidency, the House, and the Senate – they are "proud" to do so when the reason for
those losses is 'we committed political suicide to fight to inflict austerity.' The related
questions are whether MSNBC and the New Democrats are actually blind to the contradiction
between the real and phony prime directives and why they think viewers and voters will be too
dumb to spot the obvious contradiction. Why do New Democrats and MSNBC insist on hiding their
real prime directive?
A related question arises from this bizarre prime directive to inflict austerity even when
it is politically suicidal. Why did New Democrats and MSNBC choose inflicting austerity as
their holy grail? What is it about inflicting austerity that makes New Democrats so "proud" to
cause the Democratic Party to commit political suicide and deliver control of the House,
Senate, and Presidency to the likes of Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and
Donald Trump? Preventing Bush's invasion of Iraq, global climate disruption, and Trump's
election would all make sense as overriding priorities. Those are things worthy of losing a
House seat or even the entire House.
Inflicting austerity typically harms America and our people. A federal budget deficit is not
bad. A federal budget surplus is not good. Clinton and Gore's budget surpluses were not good
for America. They were likely harmful, as recessions soon followed our prior budget surpluses
throughout our history. In each of the cases O'Donnell lauded, the New Democrats' insistence on
inflicting austerity did not simply prove politically suicidal for the Democratic Party –
austerity was a terrible economic policy that caused harm. How did inflicting austerity become
the overriding priority of New Democrats, swamping all other policies? In 1993, when Clinton
and Gore made O'Donnell "proud" by inflicting austerity, the inflation rate was three percent.
That rate of inflation was trivially higher than what the Fed would adopt as its inflation
target (2%) – the preferred rate of inflation. Even under neoclassical economic nostrums,
there was no need, much less a compelling need, to inflict austerity.
In 2010, when Obama first sought to inflict austerity on us, the rate of inflation was 2.3
percent and the unemployment rate was 9.6 percent. The economic illiteracy of his austerity
horrified even neoclassical economists. Fortunately, the Tea Party Republicans pushed so
aggressively in the "Grand Bargain" negotiations with Obama that the tentative deal he reached
with congressional Republicans collapsed. Otherwise, Obama's infliction of austerity would have
ended the already weak recovery, plunged the Nation back into a Great Recession, and caused him
and scores of congressional Democrats to lose their elections in 2012.
O'Donnell's presentation, implicitly, makes it clear that he thinks austerity is so
obviously desirable, and the budget deficits of a fully sovereign nation so obviously the
gravest conceivable threat that he need provide neither logic nor evidence to support the New
Democrat's politically suicidal and economically illiterate austerity prime directive.
O'Donnell's cheerleading for the austerity prime directive was never supported, but it has
become facially indefensible over the last quarter-century. Trump's tax reduction scheme for
the wealthiest was outrageous on multiple grounds, but O'Donnell can observe the present
unemployment and inflation rates. Unemployment is at 3.5% and the inflation rate for 2018 was
1.9% -- less than the Fed's target rate. Inflation is the only logical bugaboo about federal
budget deficits, so O'Donnell and Buttigieg's feverish fear that federal deficits are about to
cause a catastrophe is beyond bizarre. The bond markets confirm that there is no expectation of
material inflation.
The New Democrats remain transfixed by their 'virtue' and 'bravery' in losing control of all
three branches of government by insisting on inflicting economically illiterate and politically
suicidal austerity assaults on the voters – raising taxes and cutting vital services.
They refuse to act on the real emergencies we face such as global climate disruption based on
the economically illiterate fantasy that 'we cannot afford' to prevent the worsening
catastrophe. The 'New Democrats' and their media enablers demand that we nominate candidates
dedicated to enacting politically suicidal deficit hysteria policies and adopting tepid
anti-environment policies that are suicidal towards the lives of our children and
grandchildren. The most remarkable aspect of this insanity, however, is that the hucksters
pitch their embrace of their prime directive as defining the concept of "responsible." Indeed,
it is so obviously 'responsible' that O'Donnell and Buttigieg feel neither logic nor facts are
necessary to prove the virtues of austerity. They omit the fact that austerity proponents'
warnings and promises have repeatedly proved false and outright harmful as well as politically
suicidal.
Could it be that the New Democrats are not stupid or irrational at all but know what they
are doing and happily play their role in the permanent professional wrestling spectacle as
the hapless patsies who keep losing to the real tough guy? After all, they get paid
handsomely in any case.
Not only did President Carter appoint Volcker, but he also vetoed a bill to raise the
national debt ceiling. Thankfully Congress, run by a very different set of Democrats at the
time, over-rode his veto.
"Austerity" is basically the only policy Team Blue has undertaken without outside
pressure. As bad as it is, it's the one thing they can point to over the last 25 years as
something they did without mass mobilization or court cases embarrassing them into not being
totally heinous.
Then little Mayo Pete is trying to deny Team Blue their only accomplishment.
All pretense of our country being a representative democracy@snoopydawg
is gone. Our two party uniparty government has completely turned its back on serving
the needs of the vast majority of the people of this country, and of the wider world. Profit
sits at the head of our government. The monikers "Fascist" and "Totalitarian" are apt
descriptors of the direction of our current trajectory. A dystopian future surely awaits us on
this beautiful, fragile and life sustaining planet that we are trashing with such abandon.
Other than that, things are going quite nicely. Nancy is wearing her power pants and fools
are applauding.
It still amazes me... that people actually think impeachment accomplishes anything other
than diverting attention from the Dems giving Trump everything he wants.
Kayfabe.
Impeachment without conviction means next to nothing.
The Senate will not convict. Trumps chances of being re-elected are continuing to improve as
Democratic Party insiders work overtime to see to it that Bernie Sanders has to fight the
Republican Party, a MSM that either dismisses or ignores his candidacy, AND the Democratic
Party which has, once again, stacked the deck against him.
... Never-Trump conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin released a scorching
assessment ... "Even Trump knows he will be lumped in with the 'losers' in the presidential
history rankings such as Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson," wrote Rubin. "Impeachment will
define his presidency, dwarfing any other foreign or domestic action. No wonder he rages
against a speaker he is powerless to stop. His worst nightmare is to be humiliated, and if
not now, history certainly will regard him as a pitiful, damaged man utterly unfit for the
role he won through a series of improbable events ... Just as Watergate figures ... were
lionized as defenders of the Constitution, so too will Pelosi and House Democrats ... be
among those admired for their lucidity, intellect and character. ... For every clownish,
contemptible, screeching and dishonest House Republican, there is a sober, admirable,
restrained and honest Democrat.
"No letter, no tweet, no Fox News spin can repair the reputations of Trump enablers," Rubin
wrote. The right-wing media that cheered them on will, like outlets that rooted for Jim Crow
and demonized Freedom Riders, be shunned by decent, freedom-loving people who reaffirm
objective reality. The Republican Party will be known not as the Party of Lincoln but the
Party of Trump, a quisling party that lost its bearings and its soul to defend an unhinged
narcissist.
Trump's letter notes that talk about impeachment started as soon as he stepped into
office:
IMO the Deep State wanted to initiate a new McCarthyism.
Russiagate was the means to do so and that means that Impeachment was always a possibility
(though likely a red-herring, as I explain below).
IMO After the Mueller investigation progressives pressed for Impeachment but establishment
Democratics (led by Pelosi and Hillary) wouldn't allow it. People were (rightfully) asking
why establishment Democrats were protecting Trump.
With this in mind, Ukrainegate is a convenient diversion from Russiagate while providing
the Impeachment satisfaction that progressives had clamored for.
It's difficult NOT to notice that ...
... America First Trump actually furthered Russiagate when he hired Manafort
(who was known to have worked for pro-Russian Parties in Ukraine and had NO recent
experience in US elections) and called upon Russia to publish Hillary's emails (which were
KNOWN to contain top-secret information - making any publication a crime under US law);
... and America First Trump furthered Ukrainegate by the mentioning the
name of an announced political opponent when talking about investigating corruption on a
call with Zelensky.
One might excuse this in many ways: Trump's ego; his unfamiliarity with politics
and statecraft; or just bad luck. But one can also see these actions, in a larger context, as
disturbing part of the effort to initiate the new McCarthyism.
BREAKING BIG: John Durham Is Investigating Former CIA Director John Brennan's Role in 2016
Election Interference and His LIES TO CONGRESS! (Video)
The New York Times reported tonight that federal prosecutor John Durham is
investigating former CIA Director John Brennan's role in the 2016 election. Durham has called
for Brennan's emails, call logs and other documents.
I think if Russians adopt a similar to IHRA definition of thier own and then pursue
trangressors through the courts, the Guardian would be shut down within a month or so.
How would it fly if Trump's EO instead forbade criticism of Russia in schools and colleges in
USA?
Very strange that something like this could ever be written and signed. A fast budding and
explicit "Judeo lese majetse" is unfolding before our eyes. And if it is meant to protect
Jews as a race and nation, then that will naturally induce people to see them as exactly
that: a separate nation. Will this quell concern about loyalty or raise more doubt?
p.s. In 2018, Israeli army expert snipers made a turkey shoot of Palestinians marching on
the 70th anniversary of their people being ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland.
A "shoot to cripple" policy only murdered several score but, with high speed dum dum bullets,
they blasted bloody wreckage through the flesh and bones of many thousands of unarmed people.
You may not see them on your porno channels and game shows, but a large number will be
crippled for the rest of their lives.
This is a good example of a very recent state sponsored atrocity on a large scale.
Students in our schools and colleges might want to examine this in a variety of ways. The
history, legality, ethics, demographic dilemmas etc. Sure, it might roll over into some
criticism and activism, e.g. DBS Israel, but is that to be prohibited by our government? What
sort of citizens are our schools and colleges supposed to be cultivating if students are not
permitted to exercise their freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of
conscience?
Neocons lie should properly be called "threat inflation"
The underlying critical
point-at-issue is credibility as I noted in my comment on b's 2017 article. I've since
linked to tweets and other items by that trio; the one major change seems to have been the
epiphany by them that they needed to go to where the action is and report it from there to
regain their credibility.
The fact remains that used car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking
credibility sans a confession as to why they feel the need to lie to sell cars.
Their actions belie the guilt they feel for their choices, but a confession works much
better at assuaging the soul while helping convince the audience that the change in heart's
genuine. And that's the point as b notes--genuineness, whose first predicate is
credibility.
"... "The sworn statements of Mr. Flynn and his former counsel belie his new claims of innocence and his new assertions that he was pressured into pleading guilty," Sullivan said in his Dec. 16 opinion ( pdf ). ..."
"... In June, he fired his lawyers and hired former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell , who has since accused the government of misconduct, particularly of withholding exculpatory information or providing it late. ..."
"... Powell has argued that Flynn's previous lawyers had a conflict of interest because they testified in a related case against Flynn's former business partner. Flynn had previously told the court he would keep the lawyers despite the conflict, but Powell said prosecutors should have asked the judge to dismiss the lawyers anyway. Sullivan disagreed, saying Flynn failed to show a precedent that the prosecutors had that obligation. ..."
"... Powell also said the government had no proper reason to investigate Flynn in the first place and that it had set up an "ambush interview" with the intention of making Flynn say something it could allege was false. ..."
"... Sullivan disagreed again and said that previously, with the advice of his former lawyers, Flynn never "challenged the conditions of his FBI interview." ..."
"... Powell said Flynn's answers to the agents weren't "material," meaning relevant to the FBI investigation of election meddling. ..."
"... Sounds like Flynn got bad advice from his previous lawyers, and the judge is requiring Flynn to live with the consequences. In other words, it is as if the judge is prohibiting Flynn from changing legal representation because Flynn cannot do anything different than what his first team of "counselors" advised. ..."
"... Flynn is as deep state as it gets. He would throw the book at any one of you. Make no mistake. Being a general is a political appointment. ..."
"... Flynn was also a ******* lobbyist for foreign governments, including Turkey,...without disclosing his advise was paid for. He sold himself out like a whore. ..."
"... "Michael Flynn reportedly filed paperwork on Tuesday for the $530,000 worth of work he did last year that "could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey." https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2017/03/08/michael-flynn-admits-turkey-lobbying ..."
"... NATO Alliance member Turkey? How about a list of Israel friends with benefits. MIC grifters and aipac. Bloated orange imbecile can not fight only tweet. ..."
"... They say Dems and other psychos always accuse others of what they themselves are doing. Ever heard of the Clinton Foundation? Operating expenses: 95%.Benevolent aid: 5%. Suck on that for awhile. ..."
"... Flynn did nothing wrong. Was framed setup and then blackmailed to plead. Who will pay a price. Brennan Comey Strzok? Those who stood with Trump were ruined under false pretenses. ..."
"... Oh how soon you forget that Flynn commited war crimes in Grenada. ..."
"... Then bring him up on those charges. In court those kinds of leaps are inaddmissable. ..."
"... Hahahaha Grenada. Reagan's signature military victory. Flynn should be a super hero. Grenada and Panama are the only victories the Pentagon clowns have managed. What should we expect they only get $1,000,000,000,000.00 a year ..."
"... Remember that Michael Flynn waived his right to appeal this judge's decision when he plead guilty. This won't be going to a higher court. He's going down and the judge who is sentencing him is PISSED. ..."
"... Flynn is going to prison. Hillary is not. The sooner you jackoffs accept that, the sooner you'll be able to move on with your lives instead of living out your pitiful existence in bitterness and regret. And no, you won't be doing any civil war. You'll just be angry, your anger will turn inward, and you'll poison yourselves with resentment, living out your days alone. Don't say you weren't warned. ..."
"... They threatened his son if he did not plead guilty. Of course, to you Dems the means justifies the end. He will be pardoned, and deservedly so. ..."
"... I don't expect Clinton to go to jail ... committing crimes or not she is untouchable. People may wish it but it will never ever happen she has too much on all the other criminals. ..."
A federal judge has denied requests by Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to prompt the government to
give him information he deems exculpatory and to dismiss the case against him .
District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan sided with the government in arguing that Flynn was
already given all the information to which he was entitled. The judge also dismissed Flynn's
allegations of government misconduct, noting that Flynn already pleaded guilty to his crime and
failed to raise his objections earlier when some of the issues he now complains about were
brought to his attention.
"The sworn statements of Mr. Flynn and his former counsel belie his new claims of
innocence and his new assertions that he was pressured into pleading guilty," Sullivan said
in his Dec. 16 opinion (
pdf ).
Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, pleaded guilty on Nov. 30, 2017, to
one count of lying to the FBI. He's been expected to receive a light sentence, including no
prison time, after extensively cooperating with the government on multiple investigations.
In June, he fired his lawyers and hired former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell , who has since accused the
government of misconduct, particularly of withholding exculpatory information or providing it
late.
Powell has argued that Flynn's previous lawyers had a conflict of interest because they
testified in a related case against Flynn's former business partner. Flynn had previously told
the court he would keep the lawyers despite the conflict, but Powell said prosecutors should
have asked the judge to dismiss the lawyers anyway. Sullivan disagreed, saying Flynn failed to
show a precedent that the prosecutors had that obligation.
Powell also said the government had no proper reason to investigate Flynn in the first place
and that it had set up an "ambush interview" with the intention of making Flynn say something
it could allege was false.
Sullivan disagreed again and said that previously, with the advice of his former lawyers,
Flynn never "challenged the conditions of his FBI interview."
Flynn was interviewed by two FBI agents, Joe Pientka and Peter Strzok, on Jan. 24, 2017, two
days after he was sworn in as President Donald Trump's national security adviser.
The prosecutors argued that the FBI had a "sufficient and appropriate basis" for the
interview because Flynn days earlier told members of the Trump campaign, including soon-to-be
Vice President Mike Pence, that he didn't discuss with the Russian ambassador the expulsion of
Russian diplomats in late December 2016 by then-President Barack Obama.
Flynn later admitted in his statement of offense that he asked, via Russian Ambassador to
the U.S. Sergei Kislyak, for Russia to only respond to the sanctions in a reciprocal manner and
not escalate the situation.
The FBI was at the time investigating whether Trump campaign aides coordinated with Russian
2016 election meddling. No such coordination was established by the probe, which concluded more
than two years later under then-special counsel Robert Mueller.
Powell argued that whatever Flynn told Pence and others in the transition team was none of
the FBI's business.
"The Executive Branch has different reasons for saying different things publicly and
privately, and not everyone is told the details of every conversation,"
she said in a previous court filing .
"If the FBI is charged with investigating discrepancies in statements made by government
officials to the public, the entirety of its resources would be consumed in a week."
Powell said Flynn's answers to the agents weren't "material," meaning relevant to the FBI
investigation of election meddling.
Sullivan, however, thought otherwise, using a broader description of the investigation. The bureau, he said, probed the "nature of any links between individuals associated with the
[Trump] Campaign and Russia" and what Flynn said was material to it. The description Sullivan used appears to omit the context of the probe, which focused
specifically on the Russian election meddling.
Powell was dealt a bad hand by Flynn's previous corrupt and incompetent attorneys. The
judge has an obligation to honor the new views of new counsel. He can't assume that Flynn had
been well advised by former counsel. There's no evidence or history of that. They sold him
out.
Sounds like Flynn got bad advice from his previous lawyers, and the judge is requiring
Flynn to live with the consequences. In other words, it is as if the judge is prohibiting
Flynn from changing legal representation because Flynn cannot do anything different than what
his first team of "counselors" advised.
He's so Deep State that Brennen and Clapper went to Soetoro to get him fired after the
election. Flynn was going to rat them out on the treasonous Iran deal. When Obama said no
because it was too close to the end of his presidency they then criminally framed Flynn.
Flynn was lied to. Flynn was a 30 year veteran and General. Flynn couldn't imagine his
country turning against him like this. None of us could. But with the cabal running our
country, it could and did happen. Now we have to stamp out the cockroaches before it's too
late.
Flynn was also a ******* lobbyist for foreign governments, including Turkey,...without
disclosing his advise was paid for. He sold himself out like a whore.
NATO Alliance member Turkey? How about a list of Israel friends with benefits. MIC grifters and aipac. Bloated orange imbecile can not fight only tweet.
This ***** judge will give him a mouse sentence to protect his own *** . We don't know the half of it . How close is the judge to Obama ? I think we are going to find out .
President Trump should step in now and Pardon Gen.Flynn and Roger Stone both trial were
fixed unethical and not based on fact and law. In Stones case a radical jury of Demon
Rat-Brains were assembled to hand down a guilty verdict.
They say Dems and other psychos always accuse others of what they themselves are doing.
Ever heard of the Clinton Foundation? Operating expenses: 95%.Benevolent aid: 5%. Suck on that for awhile.
Flynn did nothing wrong. Was framed setup and then blackmailed to plead. Who will pay a price. Brennan Comey Strzok? Those who stood with Trump were ruined under false pretenses.
Those who violated the constitution and rule of law are media pundants and
undisturbed.
Orange dotard please divert some of your swamp creatures from destroying Iran, Venezuela
and Bolivia.
America needs the secret police smashed and held accountable for sedition and treason.
Hahahaha Grenada. Reagan's signature military victory. Flynn should be a super hero. Grenada and Panama are the only victories the Pentagon clowns have managed. What should we expect they only get $1,000,000,000,000.00 a year
The minute they let Flynn off he talks and they sure as hell don't want that. They want to drag this out as long as possible and hope for a miracle (Trump gets beat
) or at least time enough for them to bugger off. FISA has known for years they were lied to by the FBI and now it has been confirmed . So why didn't they do anything then or now ? Were they in on it ? How do you draw any
other conclusion ?
Remember that Michael Flynn waived his right to appeal this judge's decision when he plead
guilty. This won't be going to a higher court. He's going down and the judge who is
sentencing him is PISSED.
Flynn is going to prison. Hillary is not. The sooner you jackoffs accept that, the sooner
you'll be able to move on with your lives instead of living out your pitiful existence in
bitterness and regret. And no, you won't be doing any civil war. You'll just be angry, your anger will turn
inward, and you'll poison yourselves with resentment, living out your days alone. Don't say
you weren't warned.
I don't expect Clinton to go to jail ... committing crimes or not she is untouchable. People may wish it but it will never ever happen she has too much on all the other
criminals.
Flynn can ask to withdraw plea, but he's turned down that opportunity three times, so
judge might not allow it. Then everything Powell has been doing becomes relevant. Up to this point it's just a bunch
of noise, unfortunately.
So let me just be sure I understand this: he is being denied evidence that could prove
innocence on a trial related to a guilty plea, which was largely the result of persecution by
the FBI and we ALLOW this to happen in America? What has happened to this country?
"... an inquiry by cabinet secretary Lord Hunt in 1996 concluded that "a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5" had "spread damaging malicious stories". ..."
"... Well, if a cabinet secretary says that it must be true. MI5, not MI6 - I think MI5's the heavy mob - but I just wondered if our spooks had passed these tricks on to the lads who put the Steele dossier about. ..."
Massive win, Colonel, that as far as I know nobody predicted. Not the polls, not the political blogs. But I didn't follow it that
closely so that's just a general impression.
My man, Nigel Farage, got squeezed mercilessly. I was looking around the BBC site to find out how mercilessly when I came across
a picture of the bete noir of my father's time, Harold Wilson. Wilson was convinced that MI something was out to get him - bugged
his office, spread smear stories about him around the press, even a possible coup.
The odd rumour of all this had spread to my corner of the English provinces and I'd always wondered if there was anything in it.
So I clicked on the BBC article -
" .. A 1987 inquiry concluded the allegations of a security service plot against Wilson were untrue. However, an inquiry
by cabinet secretary Lord Hunt in 1996 concluded that "a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5" had "spread damaging malicious stories".
Well, if a cabinet secretary says that it must be true. MI5, not MI6 - I think MI5's the heavy mob - but I just wondered if
our spooks had passed these tricks on to the lads who put the Steele dossier about.
On another security matter I note with concern above - "Those are Jacobite tribesmen at the top. Some of my ancestors were
such as they." I thought so. '15 and '45 caused us a lot of trouble and just in case the tradition remained in your family I'm
opening a file. We're very happy with our present Queen, thank you, and we don't want you replacing her with some Stuart relic you
might happen to have dug up.
Though I suppose it would only be poetic justice. We've just had a go at toppling your President so why shouldn't you return the
compliment and topple Her Majesty.
"... I'm not sure what neo-progressivism is, but I know a farce when I see it. The Mueller investigation failed to interview two central persons of interest in it's investigation: Craig Murray and Julian Assange. The fact that they did not interview them underscores that this was not a good faith investigation but one working backwards from it's conclusion. Hail Putin (JK, I couldn't care less about the Kleptocrat-in-chief). ..."
"... Funny, I would apply your description of "useful idiots" to centrist Democrats for advancing an agenda that severely hamstring the Democrats' political effectiveness and marries them to historically reactionary forces like neoconservatives and the intelligence community. ..."
"... Considering that our political establishment, including both parties, our media system including both ostensibly informational and entertainment content, and our civil society are deeply committed to US military and intelligence endeavors, I would "first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye," as the saying goes. ..."
"... The propaganda system that shapes public opinion around matters of geopolitics is extensive and pervasive. There is a relatively small community of academics, activists, and concerned citizens who are students of history, and more importantly, the history of propaganda and have watched what it can do. I've no doubt you're well-intentioned but I can't help but disagree with your perception. The pro-RTP humanitarian interventionist canard is a great way to get people who consider themselves on the left to back the same military/intelligence apparatus that has been waging war on the third world in pursuit of American political and economic hegemony since the end of WWII. ..."
"... It has occurred to me that their contentions are false, but that's precisely the point- if you're doing a competent, exhaustive investigation, you interview people that claim to have information of central importance, if only to exclude those possibilities from consideration. Not doing so is the hallmark of incompetence or something worse. ..."
"There is little point trying to convince someone like Johnstone of what every sane person in the world knows to be almost
certainly true, that Russia hacked the DNC and attempted to swing the election in favor of" ~ Donald Trump."
Count me among the insane, but such fact-free assertions are pretty standard examples of what passes for facts in the post-post-modern
era of Trump. While this is certainly a minority position, competent journalists like Aaron Mate, Matt Taibbi, Michael Tracey
and others have been doing good work in pointing out the deep flaws in the Russiagate narrative.
I'm not sure what neo-progressivism is, but I know a farce when I see it. The Mueller investigation failed to interview
two central persons of interest in it's investigation: Craig Murray and Julian Assange. The fact that they did not interview them
underscores that this was not a good faith investigation but one working backwards from it's conclusion. Hail Putin (JK, I couldn't
care less about the Kleptocrat-in-chief).
I call it fake progressivism or the alt-left but neo-progressivism works too. They are easy to identify because they all listen
to (and frequently cite) the same social media pundits and their logic is so painfully flawed.
They are useful idiots for the right because they advance the same talking points as the right, with a few variations that
are designed to appeal to the left. In short, they are lefties who have been neutralized by clever propaganda and "alt-media"
pied pipers.
Funny, I would apply your description of "useful idiots" to centrist Democrats for advancing an agenda that severely hamstring
the Democrats' political effectiveness and marries them to historically reactionary forces like neoconservatives and the intelligence
community.
In the same way that your "neo-progressives" are labeled "Putin puppets" or "Assad apologists" for opposing destructive and
bellicose foreign policy positions, this neo-red-scare language was used to tar principled anti-war voices during the Cold War
(MLK Jr comes to mind).
Instead of debating policy positions, we must now try to cut through the Orwellian neologism game just to get to a discussion
of substance.
The anti-war narrative is a great hook with which to reel in some people on the left.
Yes, the level of propaganda being utilized is Orwellian, and until progressives realize they are being propagandized rather
than informed, they will be used like pawns on a chess board.
Considering that our political establishment, including both parties, our media system including both ostensibly informational
and entertainment content, and our civil society are deeply committed to US military and intelligence endeavors, I would "first
cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye," as the
saying goes.
The propaganda system that shapes public opinion around matters of geopolitics is extensive and pervasive. There is a relatively
small community of academics, activists, and concerned citizens who are students of history, and more importantly, the history
of propaganda and have watched what it can do. I've no doubt you're well-intentioned but I can't help but disagree with your perception.
The pro-RTP humanitarian interventionist canard is a great way to get people who consider themselves on the left to back the same
military/intelligence apparatus that has been waging war on the third world in pursuit of American political and economic hegemony
since the end of WWII.
I'm reminded of the legacy media's reaction after MLK Jr's Beyond Vietnam speech: "Time magazine called the speech "demagogic
slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post wrote that King had "diminished his usefulness to his
cause, his country, his people."" The pro-war establishment has had 52 years to come up with new false equivalencies and flawed
analyses to disparage the moral and practical clarity of its critics, and they have not.
It has occurred to me that their contentions are false, but that's precisely the point- if you're doing a competent, exhaustive
investigation, you interview people that claim to have information of central importance, if only to exclude those possibilities
from consideration. Not doing so is the hallmark of incompetence or something worse.
Of course, these aren't the only issues with Russiagate, only the most glaring. I'll mention briefly that perhaps the great
sin of Russiagate (even if it turned out to be true) is that is has neatly distracted from election fraud in the US by US actors,
both the DNC's rigging of primaries and the GOP's perennial voter suppression that likely gave Trump the election by securing
him electoral college votes in key states.
Instead of looking at the damning evidence of GOP crimes (a hallowed tradition among Democrats), they did the thing convenient
to DC insiders and national security apparatchiks: blame Russia. Even if Russia had hacked the DNC, their interference pales in
comparison to demonstrable GOP manipulation, yet gets 98% of the coverage (and this will likely be repeated in 2020, thanks to
this circus). Presuming Russiagate is entirely legit (which I don't), it's the hangnail distracting the body politic from stage
4 cancer.
Lastly, why on earth would one trust BCCI Bob and the intelligence community, on Russiagate or anything else considering their
long history of lying to the American people? Maybe they're not in this case but the burden of proof is extremely high when dealing
with serial liars.
"the conspiracy to fabricate the Mueller report would have involved tens of thousands and all would have had to keep quite."
No it wouldn't. It's clear from this statement alone that you haven't studied many conspiracies involving high-profile reports
and political narratives that mislead the public. A small number of people can set the agenda, pick witnesses that will back them
up either due to credulity, confirmation bias, or ambition, and use a compliant media as a megaphone to broadcast their perspective,
then cite that same media (as Dick Cheney was fond of doing). Beyond that, there is a deep dearth of critical thinking in DC,
and incentives not to rock the boat. Why put your career at risk to voice an unpopular opinion? A massive conspiracy isn't required,
nor is it plausible. People that work in large bureaucracies can infer what the consensus is and go with it. From the JFK assassination
to Vietnam, to Iran Contra, to Iraq, to the MANY minor scandals in between that have faded from the public's memory, this is a
sadly common phenomenon.
I'm not dismissing the idea that Russians didn't interfere per se, but rather that this interference had an impact on the election
(bombshell after bombshell failed to detonate). The media circus around Russiagate, an incident that, insofar as it happened,
didn't impact the election, when compared to voter purges that literally handed Trump the White house, has been nearly entirely
absent. Why the overwhelming focus, day after day after day of the former to the scant mention of the latter? I would argue that
it's because one fits neatly into a jingoistic narrative held by the MIC while the other reveals bipartisan corruption and dereliction.
Who will pay for Medicare for all. This is the question. Because 10% of most sick patient
consume 80of all funds it is not that simple quetion. Adter all any medical insurance is in
essence putting a value of human life. Is human life is invaluable you need infinite amount of
money.
So medical system in the USSR for example, where it cane be called Medicare for all in
reality was grossly unfair to old and very sick people. They have limited funds for unlimited
demand for their services. And they tried to save first those who they consider more valuable for
the society.
So while it is clear that Pete Buttigieg is a well spoken corporate tool, his stance on
Medicare for all is not completely obnoxious.
Pete Buttigieg burst on the national scene early this year as a new sort of presidential
candidate. But it turns out he's a very old kind -- a glib ally of corporate America posing as
an advocate for working people and their families. That has become apparent this fall as
Buttigieg escalates his offensive
against Medicare for All.
A not-so-funny thing has happened to Buttigieg on the campaign trail. As he kept collecting
big checks from corporate executives and wealthy donors, he went from being "
all for " a single-payer Medicare for All system
in January to trashing it
in the debate last week as a plan that would kick "150 million Americans off of their
insurance in four short years." The demagoguery won
praise from corporate media outlets.
Those outlets have often lauded Buttigieg for his fundraising totals this year without
scrutiny of the funding sources. They skew toward the wealthy -- and toward donors with a
vested interest in protecting the status quo.
"... On December 5, while the McKinsey story was gaining steam, Buttigieg's campaign triumphantly announced the endorsement of former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee. When former White House officials make early endorsements like these, they're often overtures toward getting their former jobs back. Especially since Goolsbee isn't backing Joe Biden, Obama's natural heir, he's likely angling for a senior position in the Buttigieg administration. Goolsbee said in his endorsement, "It has been a while since I have seen the kind of excitement on the ground in Iowa that Mayor Pete has generated, and the last time worked out pretty well." ..."
"... Buttigieg wants us to see his lack of national experience as an asset instead of a liability ..."
"... Why is Buttigieg jet-setting between Wall Street and Silicon Valley for funding, instead of talking to the average voters (who hate both finance and tech) he supposedly represents? How can a Harvard and Oxford-educated ex-McKinseyite who has never taken up arms against corporate corruption credibly claim to be anything other than elitist in the first place? ..."
"... And who better understands what a Buttigieg administration would actually do -- MSNBC pundits impressed by Buttigieg's down-to-earth persona, or revolving-door insider Austan Goolsbee? ..."
A senator from California, a senator from New York, and a nationally known Texan congressman
have all clocked out of the 2020 Democratic primary. Yet the little-known mayor of the
fourth-largest city in Indiana is not only staying alive, but thriving.
At least he was, until early December. Pete Buttigieg is currently receiving the media
scrutiny expected of a front-runner, and his multilingual Midwestern golden boy routine isn't
holding up very well. After a
horrific ProPublica-New York Times expose put the spotlight squarely on Buttigieg's old
employer McKinsey, he has
struggled to justify his silence on what exactly he did for the firm, and
squirmed under broader scrutiny of his corporate funders and bundlers. That's also
brought his
tight-lipped attitude toward his actual record in South Bend -- as well as
South Bend's racist policing , and Buttigieg's own
dismissive politicking toward African Americans -- back to the spotlight.
My organization, the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy
Research, was
one of the first to call out this election cycle's broad lack of bundler transparency,
but there's another, even simpler data point about the South Bend mayor that we're surprised
hasn't penetrated the broader discourse. Just look at the actual figures lining up behind the
South Bend mayor, and it becomes clear that he's an actor for the well-connected.
On December 5, while the McKinsey story was gaining steam, Buttigieg's campaign
triumphantly
announced the endorsement of former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan
Goolsbee. When former White House officials make early endorsements like these, they're often
overtures toward getting their former jobs back. Especially since Goolsbee isn't backing Joe
Biden, Obama's natural heir, he's likely angling for a senior position in the Buttigieg
administration. Goolsbee said in his endorsement, "It has been a while since I have seen the
kind of excitement on the ground in Iowa that Mayor Pete has generated, and the last time
worked out pretty well."
To hear Goolsbee recall Obama's campaign promises should make all voters groan, and the
Midwest seethe. On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama harshly criticized the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for hollowing out Rust Belt factories, and even agreed to consider
withdrawing the United States in a debate with Hillary Clinton. Yet at the same time,
Goolsbee sent a back-channel memo to the Canadian embassy that Obama's criticisms of NAFTA
were "more reflective of political maneuvering than policy." Later in office, as the
American auto industry crumpled under the recession, Goolsbee
favored letting Chrysler fail rather than "siphon market-share from Ford and GM,"
according to contemporaneous reports.
Goolsbee departed the White House in June 2011 to return to the University of Chicago. In
January 2013 -- while Obama was still in office -- he picked up a new job that should raise
even louder alarm bells about his priorities and worldview. While ostensibly a full-time
professor, Goolsbee now leads the Economic Intelligence practice at 32 Advisors, a firm
founded by fellow Obama alum Robert Wolf. What does 32 Advisors do? It does the two things
most revolving-door figures do to get rich: influencing and investing.
On influencing, 32 Advisors makes no effort to hide what it's up to. While Obama was still
in office, the 32 Advisors website
advertised that it "helps companies navigate the intricacies of government regulations
and develop strategies to build strong relationships." Goolsbee's Economic Advisory
department
advertised "unparalleled insights into the future of the economy and its influence on
businesses," including "Geo-Political Briefings & Ad-Hoc Email Insights." It's not your
average consultant who can offer geopolitical insights from a former Cabinet adviser and
longtime confidante of the then-sitting President of the United States. It also says
something about a person's character to offer that insider take to the highest bidder.
(Goolsbee was unlikely to starve on his salary as a professor at the University of Chicago
School of Business.)
Meanwhile, 32 Advisors also runs its own investing arm called 32 Ventures. This has
echoes of Bain and Company's relationship with Bain Capital, a
former Obama punching bag in the 2012 campaign. 32 Advisors' relationship with 32
Ventures is even closer: instead of separate firms, the consultancy and investment wing are
different divisions of the same company.
Nowadays, 32 Advisors' consulting arm is called Strategic Worldviews, which offers -- for
the right price -- insights from Goolsbee, Glenn Hubbard (a George W. Bush economic adviser
who's now on the board of private equity titan KKR), and others. Here's the twist:
Strategic Worldviews is "a joint venture between 32 Ventures and Anthony Scaramucci's
SALT Ventures."
Yes, that Anthony Scaramucci.
Other highlights from the 32 Ventures portfolio: Blade, a "digitally powered
short-distance aviation company" that puts more recreational planes in the air to gobble up
our carbon budget; the cannabis-related companies 14th Round and High Beauty, both of which
have white founders, and one of whom is
previously wealthy (read about the race and class issues in the legal cannabis industry
here ); and Chanticleer Holdings, the parent company of Hooters.
So we have a man who wanted to let the Rust Belt collapse, who revolved out to the
influence and investment industries, and who literally works with The Mooch, throwing his
support behind the Midwestern mayor. And the mayor is proud of this endorsement! The
whole thing speaks to a fundamental tension about Buttigieg.
He is an elitist's idea of a small-town Indiana mayor. Buttigieg wants us to see his
lack of national experience as an asset instead of a liability . Everyone hates
Washington, after all. But if he is truly alien to the Washington way of doing things, why is
a swamp figure like Goolsbee throwing support to Buttigieg instead of established moderates
like Amy Klobuchar or Cory Booker? If Buttigieg actually is -- to use a meaningless word
D.C.-types love -- "electable," what will he say to an Ohio autoworker wondering why he's
cozying up to the forces who were ready to leave him out in the cold in the recession?
Why is Buttigieg jet-setting between Wall Street and Silicon Valley for funding,
instead of talking to the average voters (who hate both finance and tech) he supposedly
represents? How can a Harvard and Oxford-educated ex-McKinseyite who has never taken up arms
against corporate corruption credibly claim to be anything other than elitist in the first
place?
And who better understands what a Buttigieg administration would actually do -- MSNBC
pundits impressed by Buttigieg's down-to-earth persona, or revolving-door insider Austan
Goolsbee?
Max Moran is a research assistant at the Center for Economic and Policy Research
(CEPR), which aims to increase scrutiny on executive branch appointments.
At the moment there is no way for concerned, affected or just plain good humans to either
eradicate the stench or to jail and make liable the producers, inventors, distributors,
publisher or the liars that deny the wrongful facts often found in smelly propaganda..
It is a violation of basic human rights to produce false, deceptive or misleading
propaganda.. Maybe there will someday be a war on wrongful propaganda and those involved will
find themselves labeled Terrorist.
We will see... I am skeptical about idea that Brennan will be indicted.
But this article supports the idea that impeachment was a counterattack of Brannan faction of CIA and Clinton mafia against
Barr and Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... Former CIA officer and counter-intelligence expert Kevin Shipp says that former Obama Administration Attorney General (AG) Eric Holder gave a big Deep State panic signal when he wrote in an Op-Ed last week in the Washington Post trashing current AG William Barr and his top prosecutor John Durham ..."
"... We have to understand it was Eric Holder that Barack Obama used to target the heads of corporations that spoke out publicly about Barack Obama. We know Holder was held in 'Contempt of Congress.' He spied on AP reporters, ran guns to drug cartels and blacked out the information. He spied on over a hundred journalists, and on and on we go... ..."
"... when Holder comes out and puts out this bombshell in the Washington Post, which is another indication that indictments are coming. John Brennan, former Obama Administration CIA Director, is going to be at the top of the list. " ..."
"... during the entire Trump Presidency, the mainstream media (MSM) has operated as a propaganda arm of the Deep State and the Democrats ..."
"... Shipp says the hoax of Russia collusion and the impeachment sham of President Trump is distracting us from other very big problems such as the extreme debt the country and the world is facing . Shipp says, ..."
Former CIA officer and counter-intelligence expert Kevin Shipp says that former Obama
Administration Attorney General (AG) Eric Holder gave a big Deep State panic signal when he
wrote in an Op-Ed last week in the Washington Post trashing current AG William Barr and his top
prosecutor John Durham. Shipp explains,
"This is very significant. We all remember that Holder was Obama's right hand man. Eric
Holder was Barack Obama's enforcer. The fact that Holder comes out this quickly after the
Inspector General (IG) Horowitz Report comes out... and makes this veiled threat against
Durham's reputation. The fact that Eric Holder came out and made this statement is a clear
indication to me they are running scared.
We have to understand it was Eric Holder that Barack Obama used to target the heads of
corporations that spoke out publicly about Barack Obama. We know Holder was held in 'Contempt
of Congress.' He spied on AP reporters, ran guns to drug cartels and blacked out the
information. He spied on over a hundred journalists, and on and on we go...
They (Deep State) are convinced there are going to be indictments. Secondly, there is AG
Barr's outrage over (IG) Horowitz's report and what it did not do. He made statements that
there was spying and actions by government officials that need to be criminally looked into.
Barr's outrage over this shows me that there are going to be indictments, and that he is
taking this seriously. Again, when Holder comes out and puts out this bombshell in the
Washington Post, which is another indication that indictments are coming. John Brennan,
former Obama Administration CIA Director, is going to be at the top of the list. "
Shipp says during the entire Trump Presidency, the mainstream media (MSM) has operated as a
propaganda arm of the Deep State and the Democrats . Shipp contends,
"They put these stories out intentionally because they are creating their own story, and
that is what the propaganda mainstream media does. It creates its own story...
They want to frame their latest story that there really wasn't any spying on Trump. That's
what FISA warrants and applications are all about. They are all about spying ."
Shipp thinks this will be a big nail in the coffin of the MSM. Shipp says, "The mainstream
media will never come back from this..."
"...because finally, through shows like this and others, the real information is coming
out as to what the mainstream media has done . At the top of that list is the New York Times,
the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC...
What they did is they created the Russia collusion story as if it was reality, as if it
was real. That is part of the procedure in doing this. Then, they invented the evidence, and
that was the Steele Dossier. They portrayed this as evidence to create this false narrative.
Then they sent this story out to each outlet, and all repeat the same story over and over and
over again knowing the more they repeat it, the more people were going to believe it. Then,
the FBI leaked information to the mainstream media. The FBI took that information leaked to
the media and used their stories as evidence. Brennan leaked the dossier to the mainstream
media as part of this whole machine."
Shipp says the hoax of Russia collusion and the impeachment sham of President Trump is
distracting us from other very big problems such as the extreme debt the country and the world
is facing . Shipp says,
"Trump inherited a financial monster that was not his doing. When he was sworn into
office, it already existed. It is very serious, and I think now or very soon the U.S.
government will not be able to afford the interest on the national debt, much less paying off
the debt itself."
It is reported that central banks are buying record amounts of gold, and even Goldman Sachs
is telling its clients to buy the yellow metal. Shipp says,
" This is a solid indicator that we are headed for the financial rapids with Goldman Sachs
especially. Goldman Sachs is a global bank, and it's one of the main banks in the United
States. The fact that Sachs and others are building up gold reserves is a clear indication
that they expect a financial downturn, to put it mildly, that is coming. "
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with former CIA Officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp.
I kinda think that everyone is holding off to see if Trump gets re-elected.
If he does then there will be indictments, jail time, and a real cleaning of the
house.
The guys in the middle of this investigation depose the "liberal" old guard and offer
sacrifices to their own "conservative" god of filth. Same Mammon, just a different order of
worship.
If he doesn't get re-elected then the guys that are investigating this can just slink back
into the current slime and survive in some basic way.
I have seen this dynamic when companies merge as equals. Everybody is afraid to act
because the stakes are so high. It's a chess game played by ruthless cowards.
As Tony Kevin reported (watch-v=dJiS3nFzsWg) at one small fundraiser
Bill Clinton made an interesting remark. He said that the USA should always have enemies. That's absolutely true, this this
is a way to unite such a society as we have in the USA. probably the only way. And Russia simply fits the
bill. Very convenient bogeyman.
Notable quotes:
"... The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium. ..."
One aspect of this report in the NYT is very troubling but not a great surprise to those who
pay attention to Asian affairs.
The reports that US military leaders had no idea of what to
do in Afghanistan and constantly lied to the public should rouse citizens in America to take
a different view of military leaders. That view must be to trust nothing coming from the
Pentagon or from spokespersons for the military. Included must be any and all secretaries of defence, and all branches of the military.
It is totally unacceptable that 1-2 trillion dollars and several thousand lives were spent
by America for some nebulous cause. This does not include many thousands of civilians.
During the Vietnam disaster, it became obvious that American military was lying to the
public and taking many causalities in an unwinnable war. Nothing was learned about Asia or
Asian culture because America entered Afghanistan without a real plan and no understanding of
the country or it's history.
The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up
all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and
America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in
Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which
has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium.
"... I think the current period can be called the “collapse of neoliberalism” period. In any case the neoliberal elite who was in power (Blairists, Clintonists) lost the trust of people. This is true both for the US and labour in the UK. In this sense the anti-Semitic smear against Corbin is equivalent to neo-McCarthyism hysteria in the USA. Both reflect the same level of desperation and clinging to power of “soft neoliberals.” ..."
It’s time to stop pretending we’re still in the postwar period (the question is, are we in a pre-war one).
True. As “Full Spectrum Dominance” inevitably lead to “threat inflation” it is logically drives the USA into the major war.
I think the current period can be called the “collapse of neoliberalism” period. In any case the neoliberal elite who was
in power (Blairists, Clintonists) lost the trust of people. This is true both for the US and labour in the UK. In this sense the
anti-Semitic smear against Corbin is equivalent to neo-McCarthyism hysteria in the USA. Both reflect the same level of desperation
and clinging to power of “soft neoliberals.”
Unfortunately Corbin proved to be too weak to withstand the pressure and suppress Blairists. But Blairists in labour might
still be up to a great disappointment. The history train left the station and they are still standing on the neoliberal platform,
so to speak.
That’s why Brexit, as a form of protest against neoliberal globalization, has legs. It is a misguided, but still a protest
movement.
From now on, only the rich will have the luxury of any sense of historical continuity.
The rich are not uniform. Financial oligarchy wants to stay, while manufacturers probably would prefer Brexit.
Why did so many people – from government contractors and high-ranking military officers, to state department and National
Security Council officials – feel the need to lie about how the war in Afghanistan was going?
This is because it’s easy cash cow for the old boys club by sending working class kids to be killed in a far off land.
The pentagon with the full cooperation of MSM will sell it as we are defending our ways of life by fighting a country 10,000
kms away.
This show the poor literacy, poor analytical thinking of US population constantly brain washed by MSM, holy men, clergy,
other neo con organisations like National rifle club etc.
and
manoftheworld -> Redswordfish 10 Dec 2019 15:47
Perhaps the only thing Trump has got right .. and ever will get right.. is his dislike for war. He is right about Afghanistan.
The terrible US press and political reaction to his peace talks with the Taliban showed that the deep state still doesn’t
get it…
Mattis, Graham et al are insane liars… and so is Hilary Clinton and Petraeus… none of them has ever had the guts to tell
the truth…
the average American is way more indoctrinated than the average pupil at a madrasa. …we should boot these lying American
generals out of NATO.. they’re a threat to world peace…
In any case Brexit is a litmus test of what is the next stage for neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization.
NYT fails to state that the most plausible scenario was that CIA send Page to join Trump
campaign, then to establish contacts with Russians and after that obtain FICA warrants in a
typical false flag operation manner. Essentially Trump campaign was entrapped.
First, when agents initially sought permission for the wiretap, F.B.I. officials scoured
information from confidential informants and selectively presented portions that supported
their suspicions that Mr. Page might be a conduit between Russia and the Trump campaign's
onetime chairman, Paul Manafort.
But officials did not disclose information that undercut that allegation -- such as the fact
that Mr. Page had told an informant in August 2016 that he "never met" or "said one word" to
Mr. Manafort, who had never returned Mr. Page's emails. Even if the investigators did not
necessarily believe Mr. Page, the court should have been told what he had said.
Second, as the initial court order was nearing its expiration and law-enforcement officials
prepared to ask the surveillance court to renew it, the F.B.I. had uncovered information that
cast doubt on some of its original assertions. But law enforcement officials never reported
that new information to the court.
Specifically, the application included allegations about Mr. Page contained in a dossier
compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research was funded
by Democrats. In January 2017, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Steele's own primary source, and he
contradicted what Mr. Steele had written in the dossier.
The source for Mr. Steele may, of course, have been lying. But either way, officials should
have flagged the disconnect for the court. Instead, the F.B.I. reported that its agents had met
with the source to "further corroborate" the dossier and found him to be "truthful and
cooperative," leaving a misleading impression in renewal applications.
Finally, the report stressed Mr. Page's long history of meeting with Russian intelligence
officials. But he had also said that he had a relationship with the C.I.A., and it turns out
that he had for years told the agency about those meetings -- including one that was cited in
the wiretap application as a reason to be suspicious of him.
That relationship could have mitigated some suspicions about his history. But the F.B.I.
never got to the bottom of it, and the court filings said nothing about Mr. Page's dealings
with the C.I.A.
The inspector general's report contains many more examples of errors and omissions. Mr.
Horowitz largely blamed lower-level F.B.I. agents charged with preparing the evidence, but he
also faulted high-level supervisors for permitting a culture in which the inaccuracies took
place.
The Hill reports that a man in Illinois has been charged after allegedly threatening to
shoot Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) and accusing the congressman of "backing the Russians."
Rodney Lee Davis
64-year-old Randall Tar of Rochester, Ill. was charged with communicating threats to injure
a person and threatening to assault, kidnap or murder a federal official, according to court
documents released this week (full release below).
Contacted at his home Thursday, Tarr said he saw a television ad in which Davis, a
Republican from Taylorville, claimed that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for meddling in
the 2016 U.S. elections , and it angered him enough to call.
Prosecutors say Tarr called Davis's district office last month and left a profanity-filled
voicemail, saying:
"I just saw you ... on the TV. You backing the Russians, boy?"
"Stupid son of a bitch, you're gonna go against our military and back the Russians?" he
allegedly added.
"I'm a sharpshooter. ... I'd like to shoot your f---ing head off you stupid
motherf---er."
The bigger story is the number of mentally unstable Americans. When you go driving next,
remember that about 20% of them are gorked on prescribed medications. The behavior you will
observe makes complete sense in that context.
"... While the typical BubisAmericanus will have forgotten all the details by then, me thinks the hard core democrats, I mean nomal'ish people that usually vote blue, simply stay home. ..."
"... Was this whole impeachment thing completely designed for the dems to fall on their sword and put the Donald back in for another 4? Dunno. ..."
They want to do it by Christmas in the vain hope that this circus will all blow over by
November. I think not.
While the typical BubisAmericanus will have forgotten all the details by then, me thinks
the hard core democrats, I mean nomal'ish people that usually vote blue, simply stay
home.
Part of me, however, thinks back to something that Harry Truman said, "in politics there
are no accidents" .
Was this whole impeachment thing completely designed for the dems to fall on their sword
and put the Donald back in for another 4? Dunno.
The Republicans will have both houses when in 2024 the the tax take will barley cover
interest.
designed for the dems to fall on their sword and put the Donald back in for another 4?
Dunno.
Been thinking along the same lines. May be the last thing they want is to be "on line" in
2021. I even wonder if CNN and BSNBC, etc, are there to DRIVE the decent Democrat to the
Republicians.
"... And in the case of Carter Page, the FISA judges initially denied a warrant to surveil the former Trump aide until the agency padded the application with the wildly unverified Steele Report , lying about Steele's credibility, and then fabricating evidence to specifically say Page was not an "operational contact" for the CIA , when in fact he was - and had a "positive assessment." ..."
"... Let's not forget that FISA court judge Rudolph Contreras recused himself from overseeing the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn due to his personal friendship with former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok. ..."
"... And the only reason Contreras did so was because his friendship with Strzok was revealed in their anti-Trump text messages found by the Inspector General. ..."
The shadowy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) and the processes behind
obtaining a warrant from it has fallen under harsh scrutiny by lawmakers following the release
of the DOJ Inspector General's report which found that the FBI was able to easily mislead the
judges to surveil Trump adviser Carter Page.
"The goal is to make sure this doesn't happen again, so you tighten up the system right,"
said Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC), adding: "Quite frankly, I'm looking at
the FISA court itself. ... I'm looking for the court to tell the public, 'Hey, we're upset
about this too,' and, you know, take some corrective steps."
Graham said his committee will look into legislation to introduce more "checks and balances"
to the FISA process, according to
The Hill .
When asked if he thought there would be bipartisan support for FISA reform, Sen. Dick Durban
(D-IL) said "I hope so," adding "This was a real wake-up call that three different teams can
screw this up at the FBI."
The renewed interest comes after five hours of partisan barb trading during a Judiciary
hearing Wednesday with Horowitz that resulted in one clear bipartisan interest: overhauling
the FISA court.
"One of the only points I've heard with bipartisan agreement today is a renewed interest
in reforming the FISA process," said Sen. Christopher Coons (D-Del.). -
The Hill
Created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the FISA court is made up
of 11 judges who are chosen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court to serve seven-year
terms. They are responsible for approving warrant applications for intelligence gathering
purposes and national security operations, which - as The Hill notes, "more often than not,
they sign off."
And in the case of Carter Page, the FISA judges initially denied a warrant to surveil the
former Trump aide until the agency padded the application with the wildly unverified Steele
Report , lying about Steele's credibility, and then fabricating evidence to specifically say
Page was not
an "operational contact" for the CIA , when in fact he was - and had a "positive
assessment."
Last year the government filed 1,117 FISA warrant applications, including 1,081 for
electronic monitoring. The court signed off on 1,079 according to a DOJ report.
That said, reform may come slowly.
But the timeline for any legislative reforms is unclear. Congress already faces a
mid-March deadline to extend expiring surveillance authorities under the USA Freedom Act.
Durbin suggested the discussions could merge, while Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime privacy advocate,
appeared skeptical that Republicans would ultimately get on board with broader changes to
surveillance powers.
"Why after YEARS of blocking bipartisan FISA reforms are senior Republicans suddenly
interested in it? There is no question that we need to improve transparency, accountability
and oversight of the FISA process," Wyden tweeted. -
The Hill
Still, the IG report appears to have 'enlightened' some GOP lawmakers who previously
resisted the notion of reining in FISA courts . Several GOP senators gave credit to their
libertarian-minded colleagues on the hill, who have pushed for surveillance reform after
accurately predicting the potential for abuse.
Those who have long-advocated for reform include GOP Sens. Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Ben Sasse
(Neb.), according to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).
"I wish Mike Lee weren't sitting here two people from me right now, because as a national
security hawk I've argued with Mike Lee in the 4 1/2 or five years that I've been in the Senate
that stuff just like this couldn't possibly happen at the FBI and at the Department of
Justice," said Sasse during the Horowitz testimony, who added that the IG's findings marked a
"massive crisis of public trust" since we should know about FISA applications that aren ' t as
high-profile as Page's.
Horowitz reported a total of 17 "significant inaccuracies and omissions" in the
applications to monitor Page , taking particular issue with applications to renew the FISA
warrant and chastising the FBI for a lack of satisfactory explanations for those
mistakes.
Horowitz stressed that he would not have submitted the follow-up applications as they were
drafted by the FBI . Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer, altered an email related to the warrant
renewal application, according to Horowitz's report.
" [The] applications made it appear as though the evidence supporting probable cause was
stronger than was actually the case ," Horowitz said. " We also found basic, fundamental and
serious errors during the completion of the FBl's factual accuracy reviews. "
Horowitz also found that there were errors that "represent serious performance failures by
the supervisory and non-supervisory agents with responsibility over the FISA applications." -
The Hill
Let's not forget that FISA court judge Rudolph Contreras recused himself from overseeing the
case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn due to his personal friendship with
former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok.
No reputable legal authority would fear ensuring due process for an accused, unless it had no evidence of an actual crime
to justify prosecution...but DID have ulterior motives and nefarious purposes for doing so.
Let's be clear.
To date, not a single shred of actual evidence has ever been produced to prove Russian involvement or interference in the
2016 presidential election.
***.
Nada.
We have the opinion of domestic intelligence agencies, but we have no physical or direct evidence.
On the contrary, we have as much reason to believe some or all of them interfered in the Trump campaign, to orchestrate
and execute a foreign interference hoax against Trump, before and after his election.
Daily, and throughout this sick prog left congressional abuse of power, we have repeatedly heard claims of an "ongoing
war with Russia" in Ukraine.
Which war is this? Is this a continuation of the non-invasion of the Donbas in 2014? The specious and false claims of Russian troop concentrations, and tanks rolling, that even spy satellites didn't see? Are we still lying about this? If so, where are the media reports of Russian airstrikes, burning Ukrainian villages, or body bags?
In any "on-going" war with Russia, we would've been treated to near-constant news video of Russian armor all over eastern Ukraine. Have we? Perhaps this war they keep telling us about is like the Russian "invasion" of Crimea that didn't happen either.
We clearly remember the two Crimean-initiated referenda which put them back in their ancestral Russian
homelands, but none of that had anything to do with invading Russians, who already had a substantial military
presence in Crimea for decades.
No sir, Professor Turley.
There is no basis whatsoever for Trump's impeachment.
There is mounting evidence of a continued coup against this president, and the substantial number of Americans
who actually elected him.
We too are closely monitoring the actual situation...
As Tony Kevin reported (watch-v=dJiS3nFzsWg) at one small fundraiser
Bill Clinton made an interesting remark. He said that the USA should always have enemies. That's absolutely true, this this
is a way to unite such a society as we have in the USA. probably the only way. And Russia simply fits the
bill. Very convenient bogeyman.
Notable quotes:
"... The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium. ..."
One aspect of this report in the NYT is very troubling but not a great surprise to those who
pay attention to Asian affairs.
The reports that US military leaders had no idea of what to
do in Afghanistan and constantly lied to the public should rouse citizens in America to take
a different view of military leaders. That view must be to trust nothing coming from the
Pentagon or from spokespersons for the military. Included must be any and all secretaries of defence, and all branches of the military.
It is totally unacceptable that 1-2 trillion dollars and several thousand lives were spent
by America for some nebulous cause. This does not include many thousands of civilians.
During the Vietnam disaster, it became obvious that American military was lying to the
public and taking many causalities in an unwinnable war. Nothing was learned about Asia or
Asian culture because America entered Afghanistan without a real plan and no understanding of
the country or it's history.
The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up
all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and
America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in
Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which
has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium.
William Lind warns about the cost of threat inflation
By
Larry Kummer, Editor
/
7 Comments
/
9 June 2019
25 June 2019
Summary: Trump promised to put America first and scale back our military adventures abroad. But the Deep State
needs to be fed, and that requires a fearful America. To keep the money flowing to the military and its allied
corporations, threats must be exaggerated. It is the kind of inflation the right-wing loves.
In the 1980s I used to give the slide-show briefing of the Congressional Military Reform Caucus to each
class at the Air Force's Squadron Officers' School. After one of the briefs, an Air Force captain, an
intelligence officer, came up to me and asked, "Does military reform mean I can stop inflating the threat?"
Threat inflation has been one of Washington's most successful growth industries for a long time. The purpose
of inflating the threat is to inflate the military budget. The obvious cost is wasting the taxpayers' money on
capabilities we do not need. But that is not the only cost. As the current tensions with Iran illustrate,
threat inflation can lead to counter-productive military planning and, sometimes, to war.
For weeks, the Defense Department has been warning that Iran is planning to use
allied Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria to attack U.S. forces in those countries
. It has cited
intelligence intercepts of communications between Iran's Revolutionary Guard and the militias as evidence. I'm
sure the intercepts are real. But the interpretation suggests classic threat inflation.
If the U.S. attacks Iran, the obvious Iranian response will be to seize as many U.S. troops in the region as
it can to serve as hostages. The Iranians have stated this response openly, saying, "Last time (in 1979), we
had hundreds of American hostages. This time, we'll have thousands." It is a promising response for the obvious
reason that we have no ready countermove. In 1979, we were largely left helpless, especially after we botched a
rescue attempt. One would hope President Trump would ask the Pentagon, "Okay, if they do that, what's our next
move?" I doubt he will get a reassuring answer.
So what are the communications we have intercepted about? Preparing that response. We have interpreted them
as preparing an attack instead. Why? Because DOD always inflates the threat.
We have also accused Iran of launching small attacks against four oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, attacks
that damaged the ships but did not sink them. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a carefully weasel-worded
statement said, "It seems like it's quite possible that Iran was behind them." That is true. It's also quite
possible other countries in the region that want a war between the U.S. and Iran, including Israel, were behind
them. Pointing only to Iran inflates the threat.
Threat inflation in a crisis can easily transmute itself into an escalatory ladder. That may be happening
here. Iran signaled de-escalation by
removing some "missiles" (probably just rockets) from some small fast boats
used by the Revolutionary
Guard. The Pentagon did not reciprocate by dialing back our actions. On the contrary, it asked President Trump
to send 20,000 more U.S. troops to the region. Wisely, the president chopped that number back to 900.
Editor's note: this is a standard trick of DoD. Ask for a massive increase in
troops, get less. Repeat as needed.
Here we see how threat inflation can lead to actions that are militarily just plain dumb. Iran threatens to
take U.S. troops in the region hostage. How do we counter that? By sending more U.S. troops to the region,
giving Iran more chances to take hostages. Who in the Pentagon is coming up with this, General Braxton Bragg or
General Ben Butler?
Most of the Washington threat inflation industry is focused on inflating the Russian and Chinese
"threats"–puffing the dragon is especially fashionable these days–which in turn feeds the bad strategy of
turning two countries that should be allies into opponents. That is a failure on the grand strategic level,
which is a high price indeed for threat inflation. But threat inflation is so deeply built into our whole
system that it warps everything we do. Does military reform mean we can stop inflating the threat? Yes. But
until the money runs out, the chance of reform is small.
Trump's behavior in this, as in most things, is standard GOP far-right. He has dashed the hopes of Change
aroused by his campaign. Pointless foreign wars, involvement in other nation's civil disorders, and withdrawal
from arms control treaties that have served us well – the mad policies that put America on the path to decline.
But many of those that voted for him, hoping for change, remain supporters. Expect Trump to repeat his con in
2020.
About the author
William S. Lind is director of the
American Conservative Center for Public Transportation
. He has a Master's Degree in History from Princeton
University in 1971. He worked as a legislative aide for armed services for Senator Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio
from 1973 to 1976 and held a similar position with Senator Gary Hart of Colorado from 1977 to 1986. See
his bio at Wikipedia
.
The View From Olympus: The Costs of Threat Inflation In the 1980s I used to give the
slide-show briefing of the Congressional Military Reform Caucus to each class at the Air
Force's Squadron Officers' School. After one of the briefs, an Air Force captain, an
intelligence officer, came up to me and asked, "Does military reform mean I can stop inflating
the threat?"
Threat inflation has been one of Washington's most successful growth industries for a long
time. The purpose of inflating the threat is to inflate the military budget. The obvious cost
is wasting the taxpayers' money on capabilities we do not need. But that is not the only cost.
As the current tensions with Iran illustrate, threat inflation can lead to counter-productive
military planning and, sometimes, to war.
For weeks, the Defense Department has been warning that Iran is planning to use allied
Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria to attack U.S. forces in those countries. It has cited
intelligence intercepts of communications between Iran's Revolutionary Guard and the militias
as evidence. I'm sure the intercepts are real. But the interpretation suggests classic threat
inflation.
If the U.S. attacks Iran, the obvious Iranian response will be to seize as many U.S. troops
in the region as it can to serve as hostages. The Iranians have stated this response openly,
saying, "Last time (in 1979), we had hundreds of American hostages. This time, we'll have
thousands." It is a promising response for the obvious reason that we have no ready
countermove. In 1979, we were largely left helpless, especially after we botched a rescue
attempt. One would hope President Trump would ask the Pentagon, "Okay, if they do that, what's
our next move?" I doubt he will get a reassuring answer.
So what are the communications we have intercepted about? Preparing that response. We have
interpreted them as preparing an attack instead. Why? Because DOD always inflates the
threat.
We have also accused Iran of launching small attacks against four oil tankers in the Persian
Gulf, attacks that damaged the ships but did not sink them. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in
a carefully weasel-worded statement said, "It seems like it's quite possible that Iran was
behind them." That is true. It's also quite possible other countries in the region that want a
war between the U.S. and Iran, including Israel, were behind them. Pointing only to Iran
inflates the threat.
Threat inflation in a crisis can easily transmute itself into an escalatory ladder. That may
be happening here. Iran signaled de-escalation by removing some "missiles" (probably just
rockets) from some small fast boats used by the Revolutionary Guard. The Pentagon did not
reciprocate by dialing back our actions. On the contrary, it asked President Trump to send
20,000 more U.S. troops to the region. Wisely, the president chopped that number back to
900.
Here we see how threat inflation can lead to actions that are militarily just plain dumb.
Iran threatens to take U.S. troops in the region hostage. How do we counter that? By sending
more U.S. troops to the region, giving Iran more chances to take hostages. Who in the Pentagon
is coming up with this, General Braxton Bragg or General Ben Butler?
Most of the Washington threat inflation industry is focused on inflating the Russian and
Chinese "threats"–puffing the dragon is especially fashionable these days–which in
turn feeds the bad strategy of turning two countries that should be allies into opponents. That
is a failure on the grand strategic level, which is a high price indeed for threat inflation.
But threat inflation is so deeply built into our whole system that it warps everything we do.
Does military reform mean we can stop inflating the threat? Yes. But until the money runs out,
the chance of reform is small.
Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes'
new future history,Victoria.
Just as was true when the Mueller investigation closed
without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia
over the 2016 election, Wednesday's issuance of the long-waited report from the
Department of Justice's Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives
from the U.S. media were utter
frauds .
Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI's gross abuse of its power
– its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to
demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in
order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page
during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence,
and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.
If you don't consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in
order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal,
what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building
named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers
and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that's what
these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state
factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and
civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.
In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide
this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It's brimming with proof of
FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not
true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the
Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.
started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins
Good on him – being able to create a thing that rises to such prominence in such a
short space of time speaks volumes about this Higgins guy's entrepreneurial ability. And if
he wasn't mobbed-up to begin with, he sure as fuck is now – which is a double-
mitzvah (for him).
If he did so starting from being unemployed, then anybody who turned down a job
application from the guy must be kicking themselves. (' Unemployed ' is obviously used
pejoratively in the blockquote; 'Englishman' is purely-descriptive).
.
Also, the entire article accepts Bernays' conclusion, but disagrees as to which objectives
should be pursued.
Bernays' conclusions are hardly controversial: most people are gullible imbeciles .
It's not clear to me how much more empirical evidence we need before that becomes just a
thing that everyone with an IQ above 115 accepts.
So the question then becomes " OK, now what? ".
As usual, the right answer is " Depends " – and not just for those with
bladder control problems.
If you want to do things that are just , exploiting gullible imbeciles would appear
to violate the playing conditions. It would be hors jeu ; not done; just not
cricket .
As the Laconian famously said . " IF ."
For those for whom the 'if' condition returns 'false', it does very little to bleat about
how awful they are. You're not going to cause a little switch in their brain to flick on (or
off?), whereupon they realise the error of their ways and make a conscious decision to leave
the gullible imbeciles unexploited.
It's even unlikely to affect their victims (remember, they're imbeciles) – because
otherwise some infra-marginal imbeciles would have to process their way through quite a bit
of cognitive dissonance, and they're not wired for introspection (or processing).
So the sole real purpose (apart from κάθαρσις
catharsis ) is prophylaxis (προ +
φύλαξις – guarding ). Both good enough aims
obviously the writer is the one who gets the cathartic benefit, but who is going to be on
heightened alert as a result of this Cassandra -ish jeremiad -ing?
Non-imbeciles don't need it; imbeciles won't benefit.
Here's the thing: the gullible imbeciles are going to be exploited by
someone .
.
This is something that people of my persuasion struggle with. It boils down to the
following:
Let's assume that a reprehensible thing exists already, and is unlikely to be overthrown
by my opposition to it. Should I just participate and line my pockets?
The resources used are going to be used whether I participate or not, so it may as well
be me who gets them. After all, I will put them to moral uses – and while inside, I
can do things that are contrary to the interests of the reprehensible thing.
There is no satisfactory counter-argument to that line of reasoning, and yet I reject
it.
Then again: I was dropped on my head as an infant, so YMMV.
Unprecedented brazennessDecember 11, 2019
PaulR 6 Comments 'Something is rotten with the state of Denmark', or if not Denmark then
certainly the United States of America. It's the only conclusion one can draw from the way the
absolutely normal is nowadays treated as the most extraordinary drama.
On Monday, US President Donald Trump met Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. It's about
as normal a diplomatic event as one could possibly imagine, but it caused much of the American
commentariat to go into a collective meltdown.
'Trump welcoming Russia's top diplomat to the Oval Office is one of his most brazen moves
yet,' declared the
Washington Post , which makes you think that Trump really needs to step up his game on the
brazenness front. The Post isn't alone in thinking this way, however. What one might call the
'liberal' TV channels leapt on the story too, dragging in some representatives of the American
security apparatus to ram home the point (there was a time when liberals regarded the FBI and
CIA with suspicion, but such days are apparently long gone).
And so it was that CNN brought on as a guest former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe to
'explain why the photograph tweeted by President Trump of his meeting with Russian foreign
minister Sergei Lavrov is so extraordinary.' As McCabe told CNN
:
There's no doubt there's something deeply odd about the way this president interacts with
Russia. We've never seen anything like this before. Russia is our most significant enemy on
the world stage. I don't think that we've ever seen a photograph out of the Oval Office on
the lines of the one we saw today.
Meanwhile, MSNBC had its own star witness, former Under Secretary of State Richard Stengel.
'Why is a head of state meeting with the Russian foreign minister?' Stengel
asked , 'Vladimir Putin doesn't meet with Mike Pompeo when he comes to Moscow. So it's very
curious and it's very strange.'
Actually Rick, dear boy, Putin does meet with Pompeo, as you can see from this photo here.
But when did one ever let little details like factual accuracy get in the way of a good
line?
Stengel wasn't MSNBC's only witness to Trump's suspicious behaviour. Former US ambassador to
Russia Michael McFaul also put in an appearance. 'He's obsessed with the East, like a certain
world leader in the 1940s was obsessed with the East. Why is this guy obsessed with meeting
with Russians all over the place', the host asked McFaul. The latter let pass the gratuitous
Hitler comparison, and gave his learned response: 'It's truly bizarre. I confess I do not have
a rational explanation for it,'
said McFaul .
Just in case you think it was only the media, FBI, and the State Department, others were on
the ball too. The Trump-Lavrov meeting had Twitter abuzz. Anne Applebaum, for instance, had the
following to say.
It's all simply nuts. Trump is Hitler. A former ambassador can't think of any reason why
representatives of two major powers might wish to meet. A former deputy head of the US foreign
service thinks that heads of state never meet foreign ministers. And all of them believe that a
photograph of the US President and the Russian foreign minister is totally unprecedented and
suggestive of something deeply suspicious, though exactly what they can't quite tell us. Which
makes you wonder what they'd all make of this picture.
I don't know about you, but that looks a lot like Sergei Lavrov and President Obama to me.
So, was Obama a Russian agent? Was he secretly selling out US interests to a foreign power?
Should we be investigating him as well? It's all rather suspicious, don't you think?
I'll leave the last word to the excellent Fred Weir of the Christian Science Monitor:
It's pretty clear by now that no normal dialog is going to be possible between Russia and
the US. Perhaps ever again. It's not my job to advise the Russians what to do, but if it were
I would suggest they just give it up. Spend your time going to Beijing, Delhi, Ankara, even
Berlin and Paris, but give Washington a miss.
It's the most peculiar damned thing I have ever seen. Even at the lowest depths of the Cold
War, the Washington Post would never have run a headline that described a US president
meeting a Soviet leader in the Oval Office as "one of his most brazen moves yet."
Analyzing the official photo of Trump and Lavrov in the Oval Office, the main -- disapproving
-- takeaway the WaPo has to offer here is: "Judging by the expressions on their faces, the
conversation does not seem to have been particularly acrimonious." Geez.
Jacques Ellul's 1973 Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Minds is still the antidote to
Bernaysian brainwashing. Short of reading it, there are excellent reviews on Amazon and
elsewhere. Ellul makes the same point as the author here, that no group is more taken in by
propaganda than the educated classes who fancy themselves above propaganda for being
constantly immersed in it.
@Adrian About Chris Hedges' participation in presenting this award to Bellingcat "News from
Underground" came yesterday up with this:
a friend who knows the background of Chris Hedges' involvement writes that "he was duped
into presenting the Emmy to Bellingcat -- and, from what I hear, he believes it was done
intentionally to smear him."
As this friend is someone I (and many others) quite admire for his integrity and bravery,
and as it's wholly plausible that Hedges would have been set up, I am reserving judgementon
his action, and urge people on this list to do so, too.
@Adrian Hedges would have known who the nominees are just seeing Bellingcat in there and
knowing this is the Emmies well, it's hard to believe otherwise than Hedges is a clever fake as
I have long suspected
Let's recall that Hedges in his previous life was an NYT war correspondent who covered the
Bosnian conflict knowing Yugoslavia quite well from visits there in the 1980s his reports
demonizing Serbs stood out like a sore thumb
I quickly pegged him as a complete liar, like the rest of the MSM propagandists that were
repeating boilerplate canards meant to demonize the hugely successful nation of Yugoslavia
which of course they were trying to tear apart
For instance, 'the Serb-dominated Yugoslavia' was a standard sentence that appeared
literally in every single story repeated ad nauseum literallu dozens of times a day and clearly
meant to convince the reader that dismantling the progressive and ethnically harmonious nation
of Yugoslavia was somehow the right thing to do
But it was pure bullshit anyone who had ever been to Yugoslavia would instantly recognize
that as a 'WTF ?'
There is much much more in Hedges' closet
But then, miraculously, he had a 'Road to Damascus' moment a few years later [we are
supposed to believe] and somehow became a 'good guy'
Bullshit Mr. Curtin nails the sly method here exactly
[The] bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.
An excellent article
PS Counterpunch is a complete bullshit rag that has been coopted completely Plutocrat Pierre
Omidyar and his little 'Intercept' outfit is similarly continuing in the footsteps of prior
plutocrat propagandists like the Ford foundation Rockefellers and others
The ultimate goal is controlling YOU they need you to be obedient and believing and not ask
any questions
@FB Haven't looked at Bellingcat (not exactly a sophisticated operation if you ever worked
in the ad business) since MH 17 and Putin's Syria pacification, but upon reading this article
it became clear that Hedges must be either an idiot or deeply embedded.
One doesn't exclude the other, of course. The uneducated public wouldn't need to catch up on
so much information, and still get a great head start if they ever found out wtf "cui bono"
even means – but that's not gonna happen.
It's just not how the human mind works.
John Glaser and Christopher Preble have written a valuable
study of the history and causes of threat inflation. Here is their conclusion:
If war is the health of the state, so is its close cousin, fear. America's foreign policy
in the 21st century serves as compelling evidence of that. Arguably the most important task,
for those who oppose America's apparently constant state of war, is to correct the threat
inflation that pervades national security discourse. When Americans and their policymakers
understand that the United States is fundamentally secure, U.S. military activism can be
reined in, and U.S. foreign policy can be reset accordingly.
Threat inflation is how American politicians and policymakers manipulate public opinion and
stifle foreign policy dissent. When hawks engage in threat inflation, they never pay a
political price for sounding false alarms, no matter how ridiculous or over-the-top their
warnings may be. They have created their own ecosystem of think tanks and magazines over the
decades to ensure that there are ready-made platforms and audiences for promoting their
fictions. This necessarily warps every policy debate as one side is permitted to indulge in the
most baseless speculation and fear-mongering, and in order to be taken "seriously" the skeptics
often feel compelled to pay lip service to the "threat" that has been wildly blown out of
proportion. In many cases, the threat is not just inflated but invented out of nothing. For
example, Iran does not pose a threat to the United States, but it is routinely cited as one of
the most significant threats that the U.S. faces. That has nothing to do with an objective
assessment of Iranian capabilities or intentions, and it is driven pretty much entirely by a
propaganda script that most politicians and policymakers recite on a regular basis. Take Iran's
missile program, for example. As John Allen Gay explains in a recent
article , Iran's missile program is primarily defensive in nature:
The reality is they're not very useful for going on offense. Quite the opposite: they're a
primarily defensive tool -- and an important one that Iran fears giving up. As the new
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report entitled "Iran Military Power" points out, "Iran's
ballistic missiles constitute a primary component of its strategic deterrent. Lacking a
modern air force, Iran has embraced ballistic missiles as a long-range strike capability to
dissuade its adversaries in the region -- particularly the United States, Israel, and Saudi
Arabia -- from attacking Iran."
Iran's missile force is in fact a product of Iranian weakness, not Iranian strength.
Iran hawks need to portray Iran's missile program inaccurately as part of their larger
campaign to exaggerate Iranian power and justify their own aggressive policies. If Iran hawks
acknowledged that Iran's missiles are their deterrent against attacks from other states,
including our government, it would undercut the rest of their fear-mongering.
Glaser and Preble identify five main sources of threat inflation in the U.S.: 1) expansive
overseas U.S. commitments require an exaggerated justification to make those commitments seem
necessary for our security; 2) decades of pursuing expansive foreign policy goals have created
a class dedicated to providing those justifications and creating the myths that sustain support
for the current strategy; 3) there are vested interests that benefit from expansive foreign
policy and seek to perpetuate it; 4) a bias in our political system in favor of hawks gives
another advantage to fear-mongers; 5) media sensationalism exaggerates dangers from foreign
threats and stokes public fear. To those I would add at least one more: threat inflation
thrives on the public's ignorance of other countries. When Americans know little or nothing
about another country beyond what they hear from the fear-mongers, it is much easier to
convince them that a foreign government is irrational and undeterrable or that weak
authoritarian regimes on the far side of the world are an intolerable danger.
Threat inflation advances with the inflation of U.S. interests. The two feed off of each
other. When far-flung crises and conflicts are treated as if they are of vital importance to
U.S. security, every minor threat to some other country is transformed into an intolerable
menace to America. The U.S. is extremely secure from foreign threats, but we are told that the
U.S. faces myriad threats because our leaders try to make other countries' internal problems
seem essential to our national security. Ukraine is at most a peripheral interest of the U.S.,
but to justify the policy of arming Ukraine we are told by the more
unhinged supporters that this is necessary to make sure that we don't have to fight Russia
"over here." Because the U.S. has so few real interests in most of the world's conflicts,
interventionists have to exaggerate what the U.S. has at stake in order to sell otherwise very
questionable and reckless policies. That is usually when we get appeals to showing "leadership"
and preserving "credibility," because even the interventionists struggle to identify why the
U.S. needs to be involved in some of these conflicts. The continued pursuit of global
"leadership" is itself an invitation to endless threat inflation, because almost anything
anywhere in the world can be construed as a threat to that "leadership" if one is so inclined.
To understand just how secure the U.S. really is, we need to give up on the costly ambition of
"leading" the world.
Threat inflation is one of the biggest and most enduring threats to U.S. security, because
it repeatedly drives the U.S. to take costly and dangerous actions and to spend exorbitant
amounts on unnecessary wars and weapons. We imagine bogeymen that we need to fight, and we
waste decades and trillions of dollars in futile and avoidable conflicts, and in the end we are
left poorer, weaker, and less secure than we were before.
Daniel
Larison is a senior editor at TAC , where he also keeps a solo blog . He has been published in the New
York Times Book Review , Dallas Morning News , World Politics Review ,
Politico Magazine , Orthodox Life , Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and
Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week . He holds a PhD in history from the
University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter .
And behind Brennan we can can see the Nobel Peace Price winner.
Notable quotes:
"... A major role in directing the plot has fallen to Obama's consigliere John Brennan, the current director of the CIA. ..."
"... One part of the still ongoing deligitimization campaign was the FBI investigation of alleged Russian connections of four members of the Trump election campaign. ..."
"... The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and on everyone they communicated with. ..."
"... The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later 'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were no more than unconfirmed rumors. ..."
"... That the dossier was mere dreck was quite obvious to any sober person who read it when it was first published ..."
"... That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director level", face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. ..."
"... (This is a Moon of Alabama fundraiser week. Please consider to support our work .) ..."
"... Occam's razor: CIA-MI6, with approval of US Deep State (Clintons, Bush, McCain, Brennan, Mueller, etc.), meddled to elect Trump and pointed fingers at Russia to initiate a new McCarthyism. ..."
"... "Sergey Lavrov: In my opinion, Congress sounds rather obsessed with destroying our relations. It continues pursuing the policy started by the Obama administration. As I mentioned, we are used to this kind of attack. We know how to respond to them. I assure you that neither Nord Stream-2 nor Turkish Stream will be halted." ..."
"... ... the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by Obama's team and was designed for Clinton to escalate ... ..."
"... It's Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 that provides the answer. In this Op-Ed, Kissinger calls for a restored US Empire that is essentially Trump's MAGA. Kissinger is writing immediately after the Donbas rebels have won. The Russians refused to heed Kissinger's advice (to back down) and it has become apparent that Russia's joining the West is no longer an inevitability as the US elite had assumed. ..."
"... Good chance Steele had little to do with writing the Dossier. "Simpson-Ohr Dossier", anyone? Steele was needed as a credible looking intelligence officer with Russia ties and a past working relationship with US Intel, as cover to sell to FBI, FISA Court, and the public (meeting with Isikoff, Yahoo News story). ..."
"... Glenn Simpson and wife Mary Jacoby had written articles for the WSJ in 2007 and 2008 with a script and language similar to the Dossier. Devin Nunes seems to believe this scenario, and it is discussed in detail in books by Dan Bongino and Lee Smith, among others. ..."
"... physchoh @ 60; The difference, at least in my mind, is that, the "Russia did it" meme, is the weakest of all cases against DJT. Corbyn, on the other hand, may actually be hurt by the bogus charges. IMO, what this shows is coordination between the elites to bring down a progressive in the UK, who fancies public control over major finances instead of private concerns. ..."
"... So Horowitz was technically correct when he did not find bias. What he might have been reluctant to spell out is that he did find malice. ..."
When Hillary Clinton was defeated in the U.S. presidential election the relevant powers
launched a campaign to delegitimize the President elect Donald Trump.
The ultimate aim of the cabal is to kick him out of office and have a reliable
replacement, like the Vice-President elect Pence, take over. Should that not be possible
it is hoped that the delegitimization will make it impossible for Trump to change major
policy trajectories especially in foreign policy. A main issue here is the reorientation of
the U.S. military complex and its NATO proxies from the war of terror towards a direct
confrontation with main powers like Russia and China.
...
A major role in directing the plot has fallen to Obama's consigliere John Brennan, the
current director of the CIA.
One part of the still ongoing deligitimization campaign was the FBI investigation of alleged
Russian connections of four members of the Trump election campaign.
Horowitz finds that the FBI was within the law when it opened the investigation but that the
FBI's applications to the FISA court, which decides if the FBI can spy on someone's
communications, were based on lies and utterly flawed.
Your host unfortunately lacked the time so far to read more than the executive summary. But
others have pointed out some essential findings.
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz
constitutes a "clearing" of the FBI, never clear me of anything. ...
Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz's conclusion that there was no evidence of
"political bias or improper motivation" in the FBI's probe of Donald Trump's Russia contacts,
an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had "authorized purpose" to conduct.
...
However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose "serious" procedural problems and
omissions of "significant information" in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the
direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a
president).
...
There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless
headlines were wrong. Some key points:
The so-called "Steele dossier" was, actually, crucial to the FBI's decision to seek secret
surveillance of Page. ...
...
The "Steele dossier" was "Internet rumor," and corroboration for the pee tape story was
"zero." ...
Appendix 1 identifies the total violations by the FBI of the so-called Woods Procedures, the
process by which the bureau verifies information and assures the FISA court its evidence is
true.
The Appendix identifies a total of 51 Woods procedure violations from the FISA application
the FBI submitted to the court authorizing surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter
Page starting in October 2016.
A whopping nine of those violations fell into the category called: "Supporting document
shows that the factual assertion is inaccurate."
For those who don't speak IG parlance, it means the FBI made nine false assertions to the
FISA court. In short, what the bureau said was contradicted by the evidence in its official
file.
The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not
mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and
on everyone they communicated with.
The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had
talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later
'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were
no more than unconfirmed rumors.
The anonymous former British operator hears from an anonymous compatriot that two anonymous
sources, asserted to have access to inner Russian circles, claimed to have heard somewhere
that something happened in the Kremlin.
They assert that Trump was supported and directed by Putin himself five years ago while
even a year ago no one would have bet a penny on Trump gaining any political significant
position or even the presidency.
It is now claimed that the FBI is exculpated because the Horowitz report did not find
"political bias or improper motivation". But that omits the fact that at least four high
ranking people in the FBI and Justice Department who were involved in the case were found to be
politically
biased and were removed from their positions.
It also omits that the scope of Horowitz's investigation was limited to the Justice
Department. He was not able to investigate the CIA and its former director John Brennan who was
alleging Russia-Trump connections months before the FBI investigation started:
Contrary to a general impression that the FBI launched the Trump-Russia conspiracy probe,
Brennan pushed it to the bureau – breaking with CIA tradition by intruding into
domestic politics: the 2016 presidential election. He also supplied suggestive but ultimately
false information to counterintelligence investigators and other U.S. officials.
The current CIA director Gina Haspel was CIA station chief in London during that time and
while several of the entrapment attempts of Trump campaign staff by the FBI investigation
happened. Horowitz spoke with neither of them.
The current Horowitz Report, read alongside his previous report on how the FBI played inside
the 2016 election vis-a-vis Clinton, should leave no doubt that the Bureau tried to influence
the election of a president and then delegitimize him when he won. It wasn't the Russians; it
was us.
That is correct, but the whole conspiracy was even deeper. It was not the FBI which
initiated the case.
My hunch is still that the FBI investigation was a case of parallel construction which is often
used to build a legitimate case after a suspicion was found by illegitimate means. In this case
it was John Brennan who in early 2016 contacted the head of the British GCHQ electronic
interception service and asked him to spy on the Trump campaign. GHCQ then claimed that
something was found that was deemed
suspicious :
That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief
John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director level",
face-to-face between the two agency chiefs.
The FBI was tipped off on the issue and on July 31 2016 started an investigation to
construct a parallel legal case. It send out British and U.S. agents to entrap Trump campaign
members. It used the obviously fake Steele dossier to gain FISA court judgments that allowed it
to spy on the campaign. Downing Street
was informed throughout the whole affair. A day after Trump's inauguration the UK's then
Prime Minister Theresa May
fired GHCQ chief Robert Hannigan.
One still open question is to what extend then President Barack Obama was involved in the
affair.
There is another ongoing investigation by U.S. Prosecutor John Durham. That investigation is
not limited to the Justice Department but will involve all agencies and domestic as well as
foreign sources. Durham has the legal rights to declassify whatever is needed and he can indict
persons should he find that they committed a crime. His report will hopefully go much deeper
than the already horrendous stuff Horowitz delivered.
(This is a Moon of Alabama fundraiser week. Please consider to support our
work .)
Posted by b on December 11, 2019 at 16:16 UTC |
Permalink
Anyone taking bets on Durham/Barr making indictments in this mess? My guess is a whole lot of
horse trading is going on behind the scenes now, as in, "I'll trade you a censure for all
potential indictments going down the memory hole."
Typical dog and pony show which will change nothing relating to interventionist foreign
policy and the new cold war with Russia. Too many saw benefits from the corruption in Ukraine
to dig deep there; the Bidens were just the most blatant, Lindsey Graham and others from both
parties were involved so don't expect much from the Senate hearings. The bipartisan major
goals are a fait accompli; universal acceptance that Russia worked to undermine our elections
(and to destroy our "Democracy") and are thus an enemy we must fight, and it's universally
accepted by all that we MUST provide Ukraine with Javelin missiles and other lethal aid to
fight "Russian Aggression" (with little mention that even Obama balked at that reckless
option). All of these proceedings are great distractions, but the weapons of war will not be
diminished.
Unfortuneately, few will question the findings of these investigations or consider the
possibility that the investigations themselves are misdirection/cover-up.
IMO the Lavrov-Pompeo
presser is notable mostly for Lavrov's discussion of Russiagate (about 6 minutes in).
Lavrov tells us that the Russian's repeatedly sought to clarify their noninterference by
publishing correspondence - which the Trump Administration didn't respond to. And he actual
mentions McCarthyism!
Wait, wot?
Yeah, during the worst of the Russiagate accusations, Trump wouldn't do things that
would've helped to prove that Russiagate was a farce!!
So, during the election, Trump called on Putin to publish Hillary's emails (the very act
of making such a request is likely illegal because at the time it was known that her emails
contained highly classified info) but he wouldn't accept Russia's publication of
exculpatory info about Russiagate?!?!
This would cause cognitive dissonance galore in an Americans that hear it - so one can
be sure that it will not be reported.
Occam's razor: CIA-MI6, with approval of US Deep State (Clintons, Bush, McCain, Brennan,
Mueller, etc.), meddled to elect Trump and pointed fingers at Russia to initiate a new
McCarthyism.
Meanwhile in bizarroland (aka USA), Barr says Russiagate is a fantasy based on FBI "bad
faith" - yet Pompeo still presses on with the "Russia meddled" bullshit.
thanks b... i like your example in the comment - ''those who thought otherwise should
question their judgment''.. good example!
i am a bit concerned like @ 2 casey, that most of this is going to go down the memory hole
and there will be that made in america stamp on it - ''no accountability''... i wish i was
wrong, but getting worked up at the idea anyone is going to be held accountable for any
actions of the usa, or the insiders playing the usa, is clearly a fools game at this point..
all i mostly see is the needed collapse and waiting for that to happen..
Thanks for that, there are definitely cracks in the armor and we should promote that
narrative as you do in your link. Tulsi Gabbard has also expanded the awareness, hopefully
she will make the upcoming debates despite strong efforts to silence her. I'll try more to
focus on the positive!
@ 6 jr.. there is a press release on all what was said
here for anyone interested..
lavrov quote and etc. etc.. "We suggested to our colleagues that in order to dispel all
suspicions that are baseless, let us publish this closed-channel correspondence starting from
October 2016 till November 2017 so it would all become very clear to many people. However,
regrettably, this administration refused to do so. But I'd like to repeat once again we are
prepared to do that, and to publish the correspondence that took place through that channel
would clear many matters up, I believe. Nevertheless, we hope that the turbulence that
appeared out of thin air will die down, just like in 1950s McCarthyism came to naught, and
there'll be an opportunity to go back to a more constructive cooperation."
I continue to believe that the FBI and Horowitz perjured themselves
in the FISA report. To correct a mistake in a previous post I made, I
believe they lied when the claimed the Steele Dossier was not a
predicate for opening crossfire hurricane. How can the Steele dossier
not be instrumental in the opening of the investigation when bruce ohr's
wife nellie ohr was working at fusion gps when bruce ohr met with
steele
to discuss the dirty dossier.
In other words, the FBI
was concocting Operation Crossfire Hurricane prior to the time they had
any knowledge of the phony Papadopoulus predicate that the russians were proferring
the clinton emails to the trump campaign.
The FISA report claim that Operation Crossfire
Hurricane was predicated solely on the Papadopolous allegations is therefore a lie. There
was, in fact, no real predicate for Operation Crossfire Hurricane. The predications
cited were all fictions and inventions fabricated in a conspiracy between MI6(the FFC or
friendly foreign country cited in the Horowitz report), the
DOJ and the FBI. Operation Crossfire Hurricane was a massive Psyop from its inception.
What major publications have picked up this info from the State Dept PR? Which of them are
questioning why Trump didn't agree to let the Russians publish the exonerating information?
And how many of those are linking this strange fact to other strange facts and thus raising
troubling questions about the 2016 election?
<> <> <> <> <> <>
It's not just that Trump refused to publish exculpatory material. Anyone that's been
reading my comments (and/or my blog) knows that Trump also:
- hired Manafort - whose work for pro-Russian candidates in Ukraine had drawn the ire of
CIA - despite Manafort's having no recent experience with US elections;
- helped Pelosi to be elected Speaker of the House by inviting her to attend a White
House meeting about his border wall (along with Chuck Schumer) prior to the House vote to
elect a Speaker.
- initiated Ukrainegate by talking with Ukraine's President about investigating an
announced candidate - he didn't have to do this(!) he could've let subordinates work
behind the scenes .
And then there's a set of suspicious activity that is difficult to explain, such as: ...
- Kissinger's having called for MAGA in August 2014 (Trump announced his campaign 10
months later and he was the ONLY MAGA candidate and the ONLY populist in the Republican
primary) ;
- London as a nexus for the US 2016 campaign (Cambridge Analytica; GPS Fusion;
Halper, etc.) ;
- Hillary's making mistakes in the 2016 campaign that no seasoned politician would
make;
- the settling of scores via entrapments of Flynn, Manafort, and Wikileaks/Assange
(painted as a hostile intelligence agency and Russian agent).
All of these and more support the conclusion that CIA-MI6 elected MAGA Trump and initiated
Russiagate.
The anonymous former British operator hears from an anonymous asserted compatriot what two
anonymous sources, asserted to have access to inner Russian circles, claim to have heard
somewhere that something happened in the Kremlin. <-- Perhaps it is too much to add that
the entire conversation happen in a pub, like an eyewitness account of a trout caught by an
angler that was larger than a tiger shark [the trout was so large, not the angler].
I am a great fan of Dmitri Orlov and have just read a large portion of his linked
post.
What I do not see Orlov doing is taking into account--in his takedown of "scientific"
models---evidence of global warming/change such as *actual* observations of *actual, current*
phenomena that are being measured today, such as the condition of the world's coral reefs;
the rate of melting of permafrost and release of methane gas; the melting of Greenland (and
other) glaciers and release of fresh water into the oceans; acidification of oceans; and
quite a lot of evidence for sea level rise, such as saltwater intrusion into freshwater
swamps, aquifers, etc.
More can be gleaned by the manner in which BigLie Media spin the investigation's results. At
The Hill , Jonathon Turley makes that clear in the first paragraph:
"The analysis of the report by Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz
greatly depends, as is often the case, on which cable news channel you watch. Indeed, many
people might be excused for concluding that Horowitz spent 476 pages to primarily conclude
one thing, which is that the Justice Department acted within its guidelines in starting its
investigation into the 2016 campaign of President Trump."
The further he goes the worse it gets for the Ds. And he's 100% correct about the biases
present in reporting about the Report.
Remarks made by Lavrov at the presser were likely done prior to anyone from Russia's
delegation having digested any of the Report. What I found important was the following
revelation by Lavrov:
"Let me remind you that at the time of the first statements on this topic, which was on
the eve of the 2016 US presidential election, we used the communications channel that linked
back then Moscow and the Obama administration in Washington to ask our US partners on
numerous occasions whether these allegations that emerged in October 2016 and persisted until
Donald Trump's inauguration could be addressed. The reply never came. There was no
response whatsoever to all our proposals when we said: look, if you suspect us, let's sit
down and talk, just put your facts on the table. All this continued after President Trump's
inauguration and the appointment of a new administration. We proposed releasing the
correspondence through this closed communications channel for the period from October 2016
until January 2017 in order to dispel all this groundless suspicion. This would have
clarified the situation for many. Unfortunately, this time it was the current administration
that refused to do so. Let me reiterate that we are ready to disclose to the public the
exchanges we had through this channel . I think that this would set many things straight.
Nevertheless we expect the turbulence that appeared out of thin air to calm down little by
little, just as McCarthyism waned in the 1950s, so that we can place our cooperation on a
more constructive footing." [My Emphasis]
Lavrov on Mueller Report: "It contains no confirmation of any collusion." End of story.
But we do have all this compiled evidence within our communications we're ready to publish is
the USA
agrees.
The Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) organization has yet to publish anything
about the report. However, Matt Taibbi often writes for that outlet, so his reporting at
Rolling Stone ought to be seen as a proxy FAIR report.
Now that we know Carter Page was working for the CIA as an informant in 2016, is it
reasonable to speculate that Page was planted in the Trump campaign by the CIA?
The Inspector General of the Department of Justice, Micheal Horowitz's report on the move to
delegitimize the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is clear proof of the massive rot
that lies at the heart of the US' political system. If this matter is whitewashed over by the
MSM, then one more step will have been taken to a violent and bloody revolution in the US of
A.
By now Steele's credibility is zero. Time to revisit Steele's involvement with the debunked
"Russia bought the soccer World Champion games", the Litvinenko polonium poisening and the
Skripal novichok poisening. The timing of the Skripal matter deserves some scrutiny in
relation to Skripal possibly being Steele's source for the infamous Trump dossier. There
might be a motive hidden there.
Thank you for posting Lavrov's words. Between those words and the IG report the kabuki
farce is revealed. Why was Trump ignoring the Russian offer you might ask. Because it suited
him to have this nonsense dominate the news cycle, you might conclude. Trump and Comey and
Brennan deserve each other.
just like 9-11... this is an inside job... does anyone really think the truth is going to
come to light in any of it?? i'm still with @ 2 caseys view...
Thanks for your reply! Yes, agreed, and I'd add Obama and Clinton.
Lavrov also held another presser at the conclusion of his visit that provides additional
info not covered in the first. The following is one I thought important:
"Question: The day before, US Congress agreed on a draft military budget, which includes
possible sanctions against Nord Stream-2 and Turkish Stream. Have you covered this topic? The
Congress sounds very determined. How seriously will the new restrictions affect the
completion of our projects?
"Sergey Lavrov: In my opinion, Congress sounds rather obsessed with destroying our
relations. It continues pursuing the policy started by the Obama administration. As I
mentioned, we are used to this kind of attack. We know how to respond to them. I assure you
that neither Nord Stream-2 nor Turkish Stream will be halted."
I must emphatically agree with Lavrov's opinion and was very pleased he answered
forthrightly. What seems quite clear is the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by
Obama's team and was designed for Clinton to escalate, with bipartisan Congressional backing.
That she lost didn't stop the anti-Russian wheel from being turned. So, logic tells us to
discover the reason for Obama to alter policy. Over the years I've written here why I think
that was done--to continue the #1 policy goal of attaining Full Spectrum Dominance over the
planet and its people regardless of its impossibility given the Sino-Russo Alliance made
reality by that policy goal. That a supermajority in Congress remain deluded is clearly a
huge problem, and those continuing to vote for the War Budget need to be removed.
b posted, in part;"When Hillary Clinton was defeated in the U.S. presidential election the
relevant powers launched a campaign to delegitimize the President elect Donald Trump."
It doesn't take HRC and her resident scum-bag sycophants to deligitimize DJT, his sorry
life-style, and his past record do that quite nicely, IMO.
Are you aware of any means by which a member of congress or of a congressional committee can
be impeached or otherwise censured for the misconduct of official duties? That would at least
be Schiff...
Posted by: Paul Damascene | Dec 11 2019 21:24 utc |
32
@ 31 john.. i didn't know i had to read the orlov article to say what i did to you!! your
post @11 never make any internet link to orlov... what am i missing? does this mean i can
only speak with you after i have read another orlov article? lol...
"It doesn't take HRC and her resident scum-bag sycophants to deligitimize DJT, his sorry
life-style, and his past record do that quite nicely, IMO."--ben @28
Ah, but that would be legitimate deligitimization, like attacking his actual policies.
Those are rocks that would break the Democrats' own windows as well as Trump's.
1. Senate Foreign Relations Comm passed Turkey sanctions bill
2. Pentagon Chief warned Turkey moving away NATO
3. U.S. lawmakers introduce legislation to curb Turkey's nuclear weapon obtainment"
Finally, the pretense of being nice to Turkey has come to an end. It will now intensify
its looking East, and pursue its national interests. IMO, the Eastern Med's energy issues
will now become a major headache.
karlof @ 29: The head Dems know their pushing the " Russia did it"meme is weak, but the
PTB
insist on it, to keep the MIC funds flowing.
The "no-brainer" charges should be; "Obstruction" and "Emoluments" violations. Charges the
public can grasp.
What happens if you, or any average person, ignores a summons to appear? They are
arrested.
Funneling govt. funds for personal gain is a violation of law, if you are POTUS.
These are violations average Americans can grasp, not the current circus of he said, she
said, going on in D.C. lately.
Guess my point is, this hearings are built to fail, because most of our so-called
leaders
like things the way they are. The rape of the workings classes will continue.
Yes. The impeachment process is the same as for Trump. Censuring is much easier but doubt
it will occur as too many are deserving. We're seeing the reason Congressional elections are
held every two years--vote 'em out if they're no good!
... the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by Obama's team and was designed for
Clinton to escalate ...
I don't agree that the baton would be passed to Clinton. The Deep State uses the two-party
system as a device. It's not tied to partisan concerns. If the Deep State and the
establishment really wanted Clinton elected, they would've made that happen. Few expected
Trump to win and few would've been outraged if he had lost. Yet he won. Against all odds. Furthermore, Clinton wasn't the MAGA candidate as called for by Kissinger - Trump was. And
he was from the beginning of his candidacy.
Russiagate was based on suspicions of a populist that was compromised by Russia.
Hillary has too much baggage to play populist or nationalist - including Bill's involvement
with Epstein.
Also, you're forgetting the set ups of Manafort, Flynn, and Wikileaks/Assange - which were
important parts of Russiagate and also a convenient way of settling scores. These set-ups
required the Russiagate-tainted candidate (Trump) to win.
And Trump's beating Hillary makes him the classic come-from-behind hero - giving Trump a
certain legitimacy that an establishment candidate wouldn't have. That's important when
contemplating taking the country to war in the near future.
It's strange to me that people can think that Hillary was the 'chosen candidate', and be
OK with that but find a possible selection of a different candidate (Trump, as it turns out)
to be outrageous and inconceivable.
=
... with bipartisan Congressional backing . That she lost didn't stop the
anti-Russian wheel from being turned.
Since the Deep State and the Establishment desired an effort to restore the Empire, they
would turn to whomever could most effectively accomplish that task.
Once again: It didn't have to be Hillary that was selected. In fact, for many reasons
(that I've previously expressed) Hillary would have been a poor choice.
=
So, logic tells us to discover the reason for Obama to alter policy. Over the years I've
written here why I think that was done--to continue the #1 policy goal of attaining Full
Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people ...
FSD is US Mil policy, not a political goal. It states that US Mil will strive to have
superiority in weapons and capability in every sphere of combat.
Politically, FSD is just one of several means to an end. IMO that end is the maintenance
and expansion of the Anglo-Zionist Empire (aka New World Order).
Also, your dominance theory doesn't answer the question of WHY NOW? (more on that
below)
... regardless of its impossibility given the Sino-Russo Alliance ...
Firstly, US Deep State believes that it is possible. And I personally don't buy the notion
that Russia and China are fated to prevail. If that were obvious, then the moa bar would have
no patrons.
Secondly (and again), WHY NOW? The Sino-Russo Alliance was long in the making. Why did USA
suddenly take note?
It's
Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 that provides the answer. In this Op-Ed, Kissinger
calls for a restored US Empire that is essentially Trump's MAGA. Kissinger is writing
immediately after the Donbas rebels have won. The Russians refused to heed Kissinger's advice
(to back down) and it has become apparent that Russia's joining the West is no longer an
inevitability as the US elite had assumed.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
I've written many times of Kissinger's Op-Ed and of indications that the Deep State
selected MAGA Trump to be President while also initiating a new McCarthyism. Why is it STILL
so difficult to believe a theory that makes so much sense?
Yes, the status quo is very generous to the Current Oligarchy and its tools, but not so
for the vast public majority which is clamoring for change. IMO, much can be learned from the
UK election tomorrow, of which there's been very little discussion here despite its
importance. I suggest following the very important developments from the past few days at
Criag Murray's Twitter and
at
his website , the linked article being a scoop of sorts.
Also harder to follow but important as well are ballot initiatives within the states.
This site
has current listing . I just looked over those for California where there are a few good
ones, but the threshold for signatures is getting higher, close to one million are now needed
in CA.
Lavrov's comments about the offers to open up normally closed communications really only
highlight two obvious issues:
The previous US Administration had no interest in shutting off the oxygen to the "Trump =
Moscow's Man" campaign; and
The current US Administration cannot afford to be perceived as receiving help in this matter
from the country he is alleged to be beholden to for his election.
With only 9% approval, it ought to be easy to toss out most Congresscritters, excepting
that part of the Senate not up for reelection.
You'd think so, but somehow the numbers pretty much reverse when these same people
consider their own rep, and the incumbency reelection rate is shockingly high (haven't
looked recently but IIRC it has hovered around 90% for decades). Apparently it is amazingly
easy to convince the masses that their guy is the one good apple in the bunch.
Jon Schwartz
reminds me why I don't stop and peruse magazine stands anymore. Seeing the words and this
picture would've sparked lots of unpleasant language:
"The best part of Michelle Obama explaining she shares the same values as George W. Bush
is she was being interviewed on network TV by Bush's daughter. There's nothing more American
than our ruling class making us watch them discuss how great they all are."
And the escalation wasn't rigged for Clinton to initiate--yeah, sure, whatever the rabbit
says.
Until there is some comparison of how the FISA court usually works, none of this chatter
means a thing. Violations of Woods procedures and assertions not supported by documents are
SOP. The FISA court is always a joke.
Delgeitimizing Trump, reversing the election, all simple-minded drviel, as only nitwits
see Trump as anything but the loser.
Skripal knows something that US-UK either 1) don't want the Russians to know OR 2) don't
want ANYONE to know.
What could that be? 1) That Steele dossier is bullshit? We know that. 2) That Steele
dossier was meant to be bullshit ? Well, that raises a whole host of questions,
doesn't it?
Good chance Steele had little to do with writing the Dossier. "Simpson-Ohr Dossier", anyone?
Steele was needed as a credible looking intelligence officer with Russia ties and a past
working relationship with US Intel, as cover to sell to FBI, FISA Court, and the public
(meeting with Isikoff, Yahoo News story).
Glenn Simpson and wife Mary Jacoby had written
articles for the WSJ in 2007 and 2008 with a script and language similar to the Dossier.
Devin Nunes seems to believe this scenario, and it is discussed in detail in books by Dan Bongino and Lee Smith, among others.
The Afghanistan report outlines a *massive fraud*. $14 billion/month, 90% of the world's
opium, no "progress", oh, and lying to Congress for two decades.
physchoh @ 60; The difference, at least in my mind, is that, the "Russia did it" meme, is the
weakest of all cases against DJT. Corbyn, on the other hand, may actually be hurt by the
bogus charges. IMO, what this shows is coordination between the elites to bring down a progressive in the
UK, who fancies public control over major finances instead of private concerns.
Fox News, now: Biden blames staff, says nobody 'warned' him son's Ukraine job could raise
conflict. In a TV comedy Seinfeld, one of the main characters, George, is a compulsive liar with a
knack of getting in trouble. Sometimes he has a job. Final scene of one of those jobs:
Boss: "You have been seen after hours making sex with the cleaning lady on the top of your
desk."
George (after a measured look at his boss): "If I was only told that this kind of things
is being frown upon..." [and she had cleaned the desk both before AND after!]
I have theory about why Horowitz did not bias in the FBI. The
definition of bias is to harbor a deeply negative feeling that
clouds one's judgement about a person or subject. However, the
conspirators' judgement was not clouded in this case. Their
negative feelings focused their intent to destroy the object of
their feeling. The precise term for this is malice.
So Horowitz
was technically correct when he did not find bias. What he might
have been reluctant to spell out is that he did find malice.
Re Really?? | Dec 11 2019 18:31 utc | 14 and AshenLight | Dec 11 2019 19:36 utc | 19
I agree with you. Orlov is a brilliant, insightful analyst, who is also very funny. But he
is off the mark with his dismissal of global warming and also with his endorsement of nuclear
power. The immense amounts of waste from uranium mining all the way to hundreds of thousands
of tons of high-level waste in spent fuel pools pose a huge threat to current and future
generations . . . like the next 3000 generations of humans (and all other forms of life) that
will have to deal with this. Mankind has never built anything that has lasted a fraction of
the 100,000 years required for the isolation of high-level wastes from the biosphere. Take a
look at Into
Eternity which is a great documentary on the disposal of nuclear waste in Finland.
Orlov's analysis is superficial, unfortunately, in these areas.
Russian FM Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have briefed the media after
talks in Washington, DC, the first such meeting since 2017. Speaking at the press conference on
Tuesday, Pompeo said the US was seeking a "better relationship" with Russia and that the
two countries have been working on improving relations since his visit to Sochi in May. He said
lines of communication between Moscow and Washington were open and relations were candid.
Lavrov echoed that, saying the two met regularly and also spoke frequently by phone. "It
is useful to talk to each other," he said. "Always better than not talking to each
other."
In a nod to the ongoing anti-Russia hysteria in the US, Lavrov said their joint work was,
however, " hindered by the wave of suspicions that have overcome Washington." Calling
allegations of Russian interference in US internal affairs "baseless," Lavrov said
Moscow had "many times" asked the Trump administration to publish all correspondence
between Trump and Putin from October 2016 and 2017, but that it had received "no
response."
Allegations of Russian interference in US internal affairs are 'baseless': 'We have not
seen any evidence, because it does not exist' – Lavrov pic.twitter.com/M1Ezgs22kd
"... The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and on everyone they communicated with. ..."
"... The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later 'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were no more than unconfirmed rumors. ..."
The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not
mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and
on everyone they communicated with.
The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had
talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later
'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were
no more than unconfirmed rumors.
By now Steele's credibility is zero. Time to revisit Steele's involvement with the debunked
"Russia bought the soccer World Champion games", the Litvinenko polonium poisening and the
Skripal novichok poisening. The timing of the Skripal matter deserves some scrutiny in
relation to Skripal possibly being Steele's source for the infamous Trump dossier. There
might be a motive hidden there.
As early as
August 2018 , there had been speculation that the Skripals were being held at USAF
Fairford airbase, based on audiovisual evidence in the background garden scene where the
interview took place. Helmer's sources (they requested anonymity) spotted a chicken coop in
the background which they say is a crow ladder trap. This is one indication that the garden
scene was located near a runway. Background noises included the roar of jet engines.
If Helmer's information is correct, then we can now understand why the British government
never gave Russian embassy staff access to the Skripals: London was in no position to do so,
the Skripals were on US territory.
One implication of this new information is that the Skripals may no longer be in Britain
and may now be living in North America somewhere with new identities. Should something happen
to them (or have happened to them already), they will not be missed by their new neighbours.
The Skripals will never be allowed to return to Russia and Sergei Skripal will never see or
be allowed to communicate with his elderly mother again.
It really does look as if Sergei Skripal may have had something to do with that Orbis
dossier after all, even if as a minor source or as a reference rather than the primary source
of disinformation about Donald Trump's past activities in Moscow. What other work has Skripal
done for his American masters?
It looks as if Sergei Skripal may not be the primary source of the disinformation in
Christopher Steele's dossier. Perhaps the person who is the primary source
is not a Russian at all.
JR | Dec 11 2019 19:41 utc | 20 brings up a revisiting of the Litvinenko polonium poisoning.
It is worth mentioning that a tiny but crucial and virtually never mentioned detail of the
official inquiry (considered the last word on the matter) is that those conducting the
official inquiry were never allowed access to the autopsy report -- which should have been
(which would have been, in any honest effort at inquiry) the bedrock starting point. The
report has right along been sequestered by Scotland Yard in the interests of... you guessed
it: national security. Go figure...
It strikes me that the best explanation of the attack on the Skripals is not that he was
responsible for the Steele Dossier in any way, but that he could easily prove that it was a
fantasy. And was planning to do so.
He knew better, though, than to say so in the UK which suggests that he was on his way
home with his daughter when MI6 caught up with him and poisoned them both.
Steele, Pablo Miller and Skripal were old partners in crime.
I'm wondering whether the mistake Sergei made was not to leave the house -- probably worth
lotsa rubles -- behind and just go. On the other hand he was almost certainly under constant
surveillance.
@50 The Official Report to which you refer was also very careful to enter extensive
caveats regarding its conclusions for which there was almost no real evidence.
It seems important to note that Mr. Lavrov refers to administrations in his
comments, not presidents per se. As there are many staff in presidential
administrations, it seems entirely possible that 1) the requests from the Russians never
reached Obama or Trump personally, and 2) either or both presidents were therefore not even
aware of the requests. In the case of Trump, that would be consistent with the fact that many
members of his administration have been revealed to have operated contrary to his wishes.
@Jen #42
The Skripals residing on US territory would definitely indicate that the US has been the
senior partner in the "Skripal operation". This seems to be part of a general pattern.
@Jackrabbit #48
For the Steele dossier to be intentional bullshit (meaning its creator(s) knew it was
false when they created it) doesn't seem all that surprising. Intelligence agencies promote
disinformation all the time. That in no way means that Trump is in on the game.
Both Putin and Lavrov have stated that they talked directly with Obama and Trump about the
issues involved with their relations, so there's no excuses or obfuscation possible is this
case.
This is selective quotes from anti-Trump of neocon author. The general tone of the article is
completely different from presented quotes.
Notable quotes:
"... ..."This was an overthrow of government, this was an attempted overthrow -- and a lot of people were in on it," Trump declared , while Barr insisted , in a more lawyerly fashion, "The Inspector General's report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken." ..."
The report confirmed that the Russia investigation originated, as has been previously
reported, with the Trump campaign adviser
George Papadopoulos bragging to an Australian diplomat about Russia possessing "dirt" on
Hillary Clinton, which the IG determined "was sufficient to predicate the investigation." The
widespread conservative belief that the investigation began because of the dubious claims in
the Steele dossier was false. "Steele's reports played no role" in the opening of the Russia
investigation, the report found, because FBI officials were not "aware of Steele's election
reporting until weeks later."
...The IG also "did not find any records" that Joseph Mifsud, the professor who told
Papadopoulos the Russians had obtained "dirt" on Clinton, was an FBI informant sent to entrap
him.
...Page "did not play a role in the decision to open" the Russia investigation, and that
Strzok was "was not the sole, or even the highest-level, decision maker as to any of those
matters."
...the IG did determine that the Page FISA application was "inaccurate, incomplete, or
unsupported by appropriate documentation," which misled the court as to the credibility of the
FBI's evidence when seeking authority to surveil Page.
..."This was an overthrow of government, this was an attempted overthrow -- and a lot of
people were in on it,"
Trump declared , while Barr insisted , in a more lawyerly fashion, "The Inspector General's
report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential
campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps
taken."
Adam
Serwer is a staff writer atThe Atlantic, where he covers
politics.
The tread is reproduced as is. And out 100 posts available in NYT "all view mode 90% can be classified as plain vanilla Neo-McCarthyism
If they are representative sample of the country, the country is crazy.
This editorial can also be classified as lunatic. But in reality it is much worse: the paper became completely subservant
to intelligence agencies. Should probably be renamed the Voice of the CIA. .
Monday's congressional hearing and the inspector general's report tell a similar story.
By Jesse Wegman Mr. Wegman is a member of the editorial board.
When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.
That's the most important lesson from the two big events that played out Monday on Capitol Hill -- the House Judiciary Committee's
hearings on President Trump's impeachment and the
release of the report on the origins of the F.B.I.'s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
One of these involved the 2016 election. The other involves the 2020 election. Both tell versions of the same story: Mr. Trump
depends on, and welcomes, Russian interference to help him win the presidency. That was bad enough when he did it in 2016, openly
calling for Russia to hack into his opponent's emails -- which
Russians tried to do that
same day . But he was only a candidate then. Now that Mr. Trump is president, he is wielding the immense powers of his office
to achieve the same end.
That is precisely the type of abuse of power that the founders
were most concerned about when they
created the impeachment power, and it's why Democratic leaders in the House are pressing ahead with such urgency on their inquiry.
They are trying to ensure that the 2020 election, now less than a year away, is not corrupted by the president of the United States,
acting in league with a foreign power. "The integrity of our next election is at stake," said Representative Jerry Nadler, the chairman
of the Judiciary Committee. "Nothing could be more urgent."
On Monday morning, lawyers for the Democrats on the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees presented
the clearest and most comprehensive narrative yet of President Trump's monthslong shakedown of the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr
Zelensky, for Mr. Trump's personal political benefit. They explained in methodical detail how the president withheld a White House
meeting and hundreds of millions of dollars in crucial, congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine, all in an effort to get
Mr. Zelensky to announce two investigations -- one into Mr. Trump's political rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter, and another
into Ukraine's supposed interference in the 2016 election.
David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news -- and offers reading suggestions from around the web -- with commentary every
weekday morning.
Who would benefit from these announcements? Mr. Trump, who believes his re-election prospects are threatened most by Mr. Biden,
and Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, who has been working for years to make Ukraine the fall guy for his own interference
in the 2016 election. Mr. Putin has not fooled serious people, like those in the American intelligence community who determined that
his government alone was responsible
for meddling on Mr. Trump's behalf . But he has fooled Republicans in Congress, who have degraded themselves and their offices
by faithfully parroting Mr. Putin's propaganda in the mainstream press.
Republicans are in lawyer mode, advocating for Trump as if he were their client. Lawyers make the best case they can for their
clients. It helps if they believe in the case, but it also helps to know the case's weaknesses so they can avoid them. The best
lawyers can do both at the same time. Republicans are called on by the Constitution to exit lawyer mode and enter juror mode (which
is, or should be, similar to why-did-this-aircraft-crash mode). So far, they are not heeding this call. From all appearances,
they are mouthing the words of the Constitution while avoiding or refusing to hear or understand them. They took an oath to support
the Constitution, but they are deaf to its call, or have moved to a place beyond understanding it.
The issue of whether to impeach was made by the President when he engaged in an abuse of his office for personal gain and then
obstructed Congress' oversight function. We all understand the political downside arising from an acquittal in the Senate but
that interest needs to be secondary to doing the right thing. On these facts, the decision representatives must make of whether
to impeach really is no decision at all. Just do the right thing.
When Senator John McCain died, he scripted his own funeral as a full bore defense against Trumpian Nationalism, and as an admonishment
against a GOP too willing to sell the soul of our nation out to a cultist repudiation of objective fact, truth, and Constitutional
order. McCain was a controversial maverick –a person I both admired and disliked in equal proportion. But there is one thing I
will always admire him for: his final letter to the nation. It was a warning! He blew a golden bugle to sound the alarm against
those entities both within and without our nation who wish to do our democratic republic harm. McCain, whether you agreed with
the premise of the Vietnam war or not, was an American hero who served his country and his fellow soldiers with incontrovertible
valor and love. President Donald Trump has no concept of what that dedication and sacrifice entails – and sadly, neither do many
of the GOP members who continue to lie and make excuses for a president who is clearly abusing his office for personal gain. McCain
characterized Trump's actions in Helsinki as an unfathomable 'abasement of the U.S. presidency.' All I can say is the GOP sure
ain't the party of my father who fought in WWII against fascism and autocracy. It aggrieves me to no end to witness what too many
members of Congress have become: tyrants toward the very meaning of American democracy. God save us from our own duplicity.
@Twg Well said, and though I sometimes did not agree with McCain on matters of policy, I wish he were still with us, hopefully
to show his fellow republicans what integrity looks like, and what America is supposed to be about. The Republican party I have
known and respected is alas, like Senator McCain, no longer with us.
Americans have to realize that the whole world is mocking us, and that doesn't necesarily inspire respect. That cold be dangerous.
Many medical professionals have noticed a decay in the mental abilities of the president, and certain abnormalities. It would
be wise to suggest to the family that maybe the best way forward, with minimal losses would be to motivate a retirement. That
would be face saving for them, and save the country from a bitter impeachment spectacle that would not be positive for the USA.
I'm waiting for Trump's financial info to be released. There's something in there he doesn't even want his base to know . I think
the logical conclusion is that whatever financials DJT has hidden do indeed lead to Moscow. Actually, all of this is very, very
alarming. Does Putin have a political asset planted here? Y or N I wish the answer was no and that we had a different President.
Can we as a nation hold things together when our leader wants to tear us apart?
All roads lead to the highest bidder(s). 21st century America in the era of Citizens United. Market pricing and the government
is open for transactional business domestic and international. Alternate realities per GRU/FOX/GOP misinformation. Combine foreign
money carefully grooming an in-need Trump, and a party worshipping money and you have a perfect storm removing any sense of civic
duty. Hundreds of years to build and unwound in a few decades, the breathtaking and tragic fall of greatness and hope in our lifetime.
It's not fiction, and every day I have to check if it's really happening, and shockingly it is.
There was no Russian meddling, only Ukraine who meddled in 2016 and they are still at it. Listening to the Judiciary Committee
hearings, it seems that the Russians have hacked into the Republican Party servers and are sending talking points to Republicans
who are defending the indefensible president.
At some point, Republicans have to ask themselves which is better for their party and the country. Slavish devotion to Trump,
or losing an election and leaving Democrats a mess to clean up, as in 1932 and 2008?
Block witnesses from testifying, then say that the hearing is incomplete. Romney told America at the Republican Convention in
2012 that Russia was our biggest enemy, DJT wanted them to help Republicans win in 2016, said he believed Putin in 2018, and wants
to convince us that it was really the Ukraine in 2019. The House has to impeach, even if politically it may be a bad move, because
it is the right thing to do; indeed, the very actions I've seen in the past several weeks has given me glimmers of hope for the
country.
Trump will be reelected for the reason that the Russian intelligence agencies are still able to hack our election results, because
Trump has blocked fixing the weaknesses. That is what happens when a Manchurian candidate is elected and then allowed to obstruct
justice. It is not clear the US will survive Trump. One key thing he did was arrange to have the teams at DHS that watch for smuggled
nuclear bombs were stood down and disbanded. See the report in the LA Times last July "Trump administration has gutted programs
aimed at detecting weapons of mass destruction".
I don't suppose a constructed transcript of Trump's meeting with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov tomorrow will be offered up as
a token of our leader's transparency.
It's clear now that AG William Barr isn't interested in enforcing the rule of law with fellow republicans, and especially the
president. How can there be no recourse when an attorney general completely sells out to a criminal president? Can the employees
of the Justice Dept hold a vote of no confidence in the AG? Can 10,000 attorneys nationwide express the same? The prospect of
Trump and Barr running roughshod over the rule of law for another year is truly frightening.
65,845,063 voters knew clearly who this man was from the beginning and voted for what would have been a better now and future.
It was never any secret. 62,980,160 voters also knew clearly who this man was and voted for him anyway. If the Democrats can ensure
that we have a fair election in 2020. I'm confident they will win the majority in the house and senate and retake the White House
and the end game for Trump will be jail. The problem is, he might not be the only one who's crimes come to light and I suspect
a good lot of the GOP are threatening and blackmailing each other to hold the line. If there's any good men or women left in the
GOP, your country and history are calling you.
It has easy to predict Trump's next move for the last 3 years. Just ask, "What would both benefit Trump, and benefit Putin?" Trump
supporters = Putin supporters.
Do you know the American people are fed up with the discourse of all politicians. The republicans are fed up with any decency
for the republic. The democrats are fed up with the republicans not facing the common sense of a exec not capable of being the
President of the United states. I as a person am fed up with a political system that is not working for all people, just a select
few. It's time too have term limits for all positions in gov't. That means all people that serve the people whether it be judges,
senators or congressmen/women. It's time to find common sense again in our society as a whole society. We on this earth are all
HUMAN.
Unfortunately their are serious problems with term limits. Just consider yourself in the role of a Congressional Representative
limited to 4 terms. You know that in 8 years, you'll be be back on the job market. You can selflessly work for the public and
damage your ability to get a job or tend to people who can hire you after you leave office. You're rational. Which future would
you pick?
Trump needs to keep Putin happy lest he unleash with all the damaging info he has collected on Trump and his financial crooked
deals with Russians over decades. THe Russian mob reports to Putin as a former KGB agent he knows how to collect compromat on
a politician and how to use it to get Trump to break into a giddy smile when he sees Putin his master it's obvious to most keen
observers.
Folks it is simple. Can we hear what Trump and Putin said to each other a few months ago. It is recored and on a server it should
not be on. I am not sure why nobody is talking about these transcripts.
Finally! We get someone stating the obvious fact of Trump/Putin. Why are the Dems not talking about this all the time? Why are
Congressmen and women not asking the witnesses about this? This is the ONE thing the Republicans are afraid of, so it is the one
thing Democrats should do. I have been disappointed that the Russian asset thing hasn't been brought up....It's as if it is purposely
bold. Trump is a Russian asset, either witting or unwitting. I doubt if there is one upper Intelligence Official that wouldn't
say this. So find the right one and have them sit as a witness for this inquiry. And now the Russian big wig Diplomat and KGb
spy, Lavarov, is visiting tomorrow. Good grief! Everyone is thinking this, so get out and say it Dems! Dr. Fiona Hill tried to
lead into this direction but still the Dem Committee would take it up and aske her what she thought. Say it: All of Trump's Roads
Lead to Russia.
Any American adult who has made an effort to educate himself or herself about Mr. Mueller's investigation or these impeachment
proceedings understands that yes, with Trump all roads lead to Russia. Now if the poll numbers mean anything, Trump's crimes and
Russia's involvement only matter to about 60% of us. As Trump's poll numbers remain steady, some 40% of Americans don't care what
lawbreaking he is involved with or whether other nations now control our elections. Stop and think about this for a minute. Trump
supporters know but literally do not care that Russia is tampering with our elections (2016 and 2020). Their cult-like support
for Trump is why the Republican Senate will not remove him. There is no other reason Trump will remain in office. Trump has mesmerized
his supporters like a modern day Rasputin. They will do literally anything for him, and Senate Republicans know this. Trump voters
do not mind that Putin controls our nation at the highest levels of decision making. Again - think about this - they know he does,
and they do not care. So I ask the rest of us. Is this the America we want to live in? To raise our families in? Where a large,
rabid minority is in thrall to a lunatic puppet whose strings are firmly in Putin's hands? Because this is very much the America
we live in now. The time will come, though, when we, the majority, will no longer tolerate the Trump/Putin regime. But the longer
we wait, the harder it will be oust these tyrants.
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. said Russia was an important source of funding for the Trump businesses. American banks wouldn't lend
him money. Saudi Arabia likely bailed out Jared's disastrous real estate investment in NYC. Follow. The. Money.
You say that Mr. Putin "has fooled Republicans in Congress, who have degraded themselves and their offices by faithfully parroting
Mr. Putin's propaganda in the mainstream press." You are correct on all counts, except that the Republicans have not been fooled
by Putin. They have gone along, headlong and absolutely willingly, in a complete sellout of personal and national principle and
integrity. They should not be forgiven for this conduct, any more than Mr. Trump should be forgiven for his sellout of America.
For Republicans who believe so fervently in their counterfactual narrative, there is an immediate remedy. Bring facts and evidence
to the Committees and testify under oath. Without witnesses and evidence presented under oath, all of the GOP antics simply look
foolish and very much like they are defending the guilty. It is unfortunate that there is no penalty for elected officials who
share unfounded conspiracy theories, engage in innuendo and obstruct process in official Committee hearings. It is also regretable
that this President is not held accountable for trying to intimidate witnesses in real time during testimony. And it is a sad
reality that one of the most corrupt rulers in the world, who rules a hostile power, has managed to entirely win over one of our
major parties.
The strangest defense advanced today was the idea that the alleged state of the economy was reason not to impeach the President:
the Republicans assert that America, the Constitution, the principle of our government are for sale to be bought by the rising
stock market and a plethora of low-wage jobs. We are Faust, and the smell of sulphur is nauseating.
If the IG's report on the 2016 Russia investigation had found the only problem was that two of the agents involved had horrible
hangnails, Barr and Trump would have condemned it.
Whatever Trump is doing, he always care about his main benefactors, Putin and MBS. This is the first time I have witnessed in
history that an American president became a Russian puppet with all his Republican followers at the Congress and Senate. American
constitutional crisis happening right in front of the world. I heard the cries of James Madison, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin
from their graves.
Sir, do you honestly think that House Republicans have been "fooled" by Mr. Putin? On the contrary, it's pretty obvious they understand
and believe the conclusions from our Intel community. These are instead willful lies for political gain. And while some Americans
may actually be misled by the theater presented as rebuttal to the impeachment, it's hard to imagine for most it's once again,
not conviction but convenience that places such "patriots" solidly in Russia's back pocket.
The pattern of behavior is clear and compelling: Trump is selling out this country, its national security, its integrity and sovereignty,
in order to keep power and avoid his own prosecution, and protect his financial interests. We must get the truth about his relationships
and indebtedness to Putin, the Saudis, and Erdogan. Our country has been hijacked and Trump will continue to corrupt the US and
turn it into an autocracy if he is not stopped and held accountable under the law.
The country voted for this President knowing he is a flawed man in many ways. I don't think anything changes here - the Senate
will speedily acquit him and the voters in the swing states will have to decide if they want to give Mr. Trump a second chance
while the rest of the country impotently watches.
If one looks at all of his actions as "How could this benefit Russia?" most of it makes sense. Why start a trade war with China
and Western allies? Why withdraw from Syria? Why try to polarize the American public? Effectively showing this to the public is
critical.
Excellent piece. We all know Trump, Inc. turned to Russian oligarchs after '08 for condo sales. It just so happened that those
same oligarchs (read as kleptocrats) were laundering money through Deutsche Bank, who was the only bank willing to lend to Trump.
Trump's loan officer amazingly was SC Justice Anthony Kennedy's son. Trump was and is a desperate man in need of cash/ Putin is
a desperate man who knows that the geyser of oil money that funds his national budget, and has done so since the 1920's, is coming
to an end. Russia has no large material economic exports other than oil and gas, but it does still have a large military, hence
the military incursions into Moldova, Ossetia, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. Desperate men do desperate things, and desperately
try to project power with weak hands.
The Republicans in Congress were not fooled by the Russians. They believe in Trump no matter what the Russians do. The bottom
line is - What does Putin have on Trump
I don't understand why there hasn't been more of a pushback by the military. They went heavily for Trump in 20116, with many bases
in the South and many recruits from economically devastated areas, but in the interim, they have seen his reckless, lurching foreign
policy, worship of Putin, and clear evidence that somehow everything he does benefits Russia. A commander's first obligation is
to their troops, so knowing the man in charge considers their lives subject to both Trump's whims, and Putin's whispers should
provoke some reaction. No?
Unfortunately - to put it mildly - impeachment will have no effect on the conduct of the 2020 election. The wheels are already
turning, everyone knows their part, and only a massive commitment by an honest intelligence apparatus (if there is one) can stop
it. One can only hope that, in 2020, the American people make a statement so overwhelming that there can be no doubt as to their
intent, despite whatever meddling there may have been. It is entirely possible that there will never be a truly credible election
again as long as there are bad actors who are power hungry or bent on destabilizing democratic governments. And make no mistake,
these threats are coming from right wing autocracies, and they are in the ascendancy all over the world. American centrists and
liberals are the only force that can change that. Are those stakes big enough for you?
We may finally have the answer as to why Trump is so accommodating to Putin. Trump has so many investments in Russia dependent
on Putin's support. Trump financial reports will reveal this collusion between Trump and Putin. This should not come as a surprise
to attentive Americans. Think of the worst an American president can do and that will bring you close to understanding Trump.
Nobody's saying how Trump withholding military aid to Ukraine would benefit Putin and Russia in their WAR against Ukraine. It
was, indeed, MILITARY aid he was withholding, was it not? I understand that this is not the impeachable offense of attempting
to enlist a foreign government to win an election, but I believe this aspect of the situation should be brought out.
The Republican Party has been officially reduced to a giant miasma of fraud, fiction, fantasy, conspiracy theory, deflection,
misdirection and prevarication. After tax cuts for rich people and rich corporations...the GOP has no other public policy ideas
(except for bankrupting the government). A civilized country needs little things like infrastructure, education, technology, voting
rights, law and order, regulations, fair taxation and facts to move forward. But none of those things are ever mentioned by the
Republican Party; conspiracy-mongering and tax cuts are now the official governing planks of the Grand Old Propaganda/Grand One
Percent party. This is no way to manage a nation anywhere except into the ground. Americans need to hit the Trump-GOP eject button
before these Lord of the Fly Republicans take us over a very steep right-wing cliff of insanity.
The Republican Party is now Trump's party and the Republicans know it and are acting accordingly. You could call them opportunists
following the way the political winds are blowing. The Constitution is based on members of Congress caring about the Constitution
and searching for the truth. Since this is now not the case when if comes to the Republicans the Constitution has no remedy for
this situation. The only remedy is an election and if Trump can manipulate elections to his advantage using foreign powers then
there is no remedy and the system of government set up by the founders will be no more. The new system replacing it will be controlled
by Trump. Putin figured out how to control Russian elections so he always wins and it is likely that Trump has a goal of imitating
Putin. Ultimately this would mean taking over the press as Putin did. Trump cannot declare total victory as long as the there
is a free press which he has labeled the enemy of the people.
From an acute perspective ..indeed shocking to say the least of the nature of this peculiar relationship. But looking at the big
picture as evidence by all that has occurred in his or during this eye opening period for all the world to see....not so much
so...For me, this dynamic is much expected.
"The witness has used language which impugns the motives of the president and suggests he's disloyal to his country, and those
words should be stricken from the record and taken down," Mr. Johnson said. The Johnson rule effectively reads the impeachment
power out of the constitution. How can you impeach a president if no one can say anything bad about him/her?
We have yet to plow the most fertile road yet. What does Trump care about over all else? Trump. How does Trump gauge his progress?
His money. Where does his money come from? Good question. We all know he has filed for bankruptcy 6 times. We all know that because
of those bankruptcies, American banks will not loan him any money. We all know he has significant financial dealings with Deutsche
Bank. Now, who put the money in Deutsche Bank that ended up financing Trump's business.? That is the two billion dollar question.
We also know that Russian oligarchs deal in billions of dollars. We also know that Trump has close relations with Russian business
interests. We also know that Trump kowtows to Putin like Pence kowtows to him. We also know that Trump is doing everything possible
to conceal his financial dealings from everyone and everything. So, we know that one billion plus one billion equals two billion.
But does it also equal Trump? This money road is one we should take a ride on. Will it also take us to Putin?
The first Democratic candidate who labels Trump a "Russian agent" will own the simplest and most effective tag line going into
the general election, provided of course that that candidate does his best to channel his inner Trump by never backing down but
instead doubling down every chance he or she gets. Is Trump a Russian agent, paid for and accounted for? Not easy to say without
some doubt, but that doesn't really matter because he sure as shoottin' acts like one. And when have the facts ever stopped Trump
from going on the attack? The more Trump denies the label, the more he'll be digging his own grave. The real crime here is not
so much the strong arming of Zelenskyy for a Biden investigation. That's small potatoes compared to Trump's withholding congressionally
designated US military aid from a country engaged in a hot war with Russia, the same cast of characters who starved anywhere from
one to eleven million Ukrainians during the 1930's. The Russian agent must go.
I would not say Trump's lying "is effective", I would say it "has been effective". At some point, the public and his party may
have had it with the thuggery and we do not know when that breaking point is.
For the sake of protecting our 2020 elections from Russian hackers and disinformation, the House is justified in moving forward
fast, over the process howls of Republicans, with the compelling evidence they have surrounding Ukraine. But they need to continue
investigating his business and financial ties to Russia and any other autocratic governments and their oligarchs, e.g. Turkey
and Saudi Arabia. Especially if he is not convicted and removed by the Senate and stands for re-election, Americans need to know
what conflicts of interest he has in making foreign policy and military decisions because American soldiers' lives are at stake.
The Mueller investigation did not go down that road. Any businessman with global interests is automatically compromised, even
more than a vice president whose son sits on a foreign corporation's board of director. Trump's own children continue to do business
in foreign countries and we have no idea what Ivanka and Jared, sitting in the White House with top security clearances, are doing.
In short, Ukraine should not be the only concern of congressional oversight committees. There's a lot more.
Trump must believe that Russian help in 2016 did help him to win. He must feel that fake evidence presented by an "independent"
investigator such as a foreign government appears to carry more weight that the same fake evidence from a partisan investigator.
Otherwise why would he be taking such chances to duplicate via Ukraine what he got from the Russians in 2016. But now that the
Russian connection is outed, he can't go back to that well.
I worry it's all for naught. Dems in the House vote to impeach, GOP in the Senate vote to acquit. Trump remains highly competitive
in 2020 election, Russia and other adversaries interfere, Trump stays put. Then what?
@NA Wilson Think of this situation differently. To have all possible scope to defeat him, we must support everything we can to
undermine him. Lack of impeachment would have been business as usual. At some point his finances will get out and then all bets
are off.
@NA Wilson: It's all Hands on deck to save the country. Don't just vote, donate what money you can, work for candidates, knock
doors, make calls. It's the only way out of this nightmare.
The Impeachment hearings weren't really necessary to prove what most everyone who's been paying attention knows. With Trump, all
roads lead to Moscow. In fact, he's already acting very Putin-esque in his own way by forbidding anyone in the White House to
respond to subpoena, by installing the fear of God in those who do, by punishing anyone who dares to think or act on their own,
and then there's the act of holding a foreign country ransom until they agree to do his bidding -- not to mention inviting outside
interference in our presidential elections. All the signs are not only there but they are ominous. By holding himself above the
U.S. Constitution, Trump has declared war on this country and all the laws that govern it. And while entertainment-starved Americans
laugh and cheer at his rallies, he and the Republicans drain our right to vote, and with it our Democracy. Today wasn't an epiphany.
It was a warning.
There seems to be no discussion of the financial backing trump received after '08-09 from sources inside Russia and how these
actors would have expressed their support (or conditions for their silence) to the trump campaign during '15-16. Did the FBI not
identify and investigate the funders behind trump and their interactions with the campaign during 2016? Would this not have been
reasonable for an investigation to look into when its entire raison d'etre was to detect sources of Russian influence?
I wonder if Mr. Wegman believes that this editorial will change anyone's mind or influence how anyone votes in the upcoming presidential
election. Basically, this is classic preaching to the choir and sadly mostly a wasted effort. I would like to read articles with
proven ideas that worked to change the minds of Republicans and other like them. Such articles might give me some better ideas
to convince my pro-Trump friends and neighbors to Vote for America next November.
"When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected." This! This is the central fact of all the things Trump has
done (so far), and yet, the Democrats have failed to make this the central focus of the case against him. Instead, they've focused
on one incident, and not even the most egregious one, to justify impeachment and removal from office. This was a terrible miscalculation.
No, there is no doubt that Trump attempted to coerce Ukraine into helping with his re-election by announcing a bogus investigation
of the Bidens. Nor any doubt that this constituted "high crimes and misdemeanors". But this was not the highest of crimes he's
committed, nor have the Dems been able to convince any Republicans, or many independents, that this deserves Trump's removal.
Moreover, they failed to produce the "smoking gun" of one witness or document in Trump's own words directing the quid pro quo.
They gave plenty of room for the Republican attack machine to cast enough doubt and confusion that all but ensures Trump's acquittal
in the Senate. Instead of focusing only on this one incident, the Democrats should have built their case around the theme that
"with Trump, all roads lead to Russia". That is a crime that even the most skeptical doubter can grasp, and when linked together,
all of his crimes can be shown to be of a pattern of serving Putin, and not the people of the United States. All roads lead to
Putin, but the Democrats chose to follow a dead end.
@Kingfish52 I completely agree with you and truly don't understand why the Democrats have not been shouting this from the rooftops.
For mercy's sake! The problem is not just that the president solicited help from a foreign power for his own personal gain! That's
bad enough, but isn't the point that he did this because he is beholden to Russia? Russia. is. not. our. friend. Why aren't the
Democrats explaining this clearly to the American people? Trump is Putin's puppet and it could not be more obvious! Don't people
understand that it doesn't just happen to be Ukraine that Trump took a notion to squeeze for his "personal gain"? He doesn't just
want to win because it is so nice to win elections. He has to do what Putin tells him. Obviously, every last Republican in Congress
understands this clearly. Why can't the Democrats explain it to the American people clearly?
Obama did not provide lethal aid to Ukraine, after the Russians invaded Crimea. Obama did not Russia prevent the Iranian nuclear
deal. Trump cancelled the Iranian nuclear deal, then provided lethal aid to Ukraine. Now I get it. Trump is working for Putin.
By March 2015, the US had committed more than $120 million in security assistance for Ukraine and had pledged an additional $75
million worth of equipment including UAVs, counter-mortar radars, night vision devices and medical supplies, according to the
Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency. That assistance also included some 230 armored Humvee vehicles. Trump appears
to be echoing a critique leveled at the Obama administration by the late Republican Sen. John McCain. "The Ukrainians are being
slaughtered and we're sending blankets and meals," McCain said in 2015. "Blankets don't do well against Russian tanks." While
it never provided lethal aid, many of the items that the Obama administration did provide were seen as critical to Ukraine's military.
Part of the $250 million assistance package that the Trump administration announced (then froze and later unfroze) included many
of the same items that were provided under Obama, including medical equipment, night vision gear and counter-artillery radar.
The Trump administration did approve the provision of arms to Ukraine, including sniper rifles, rocket launchers and Javelin anti-tank
missiles, something long sought by Kiev.
@Mike Trump was not the one providing lethal aid to Ukraine. It was the house and senate that proposed and forced this aid into
an appropriation bill - against the wishes of the Trump administration. After Trump realized he could not block this funding he
did the second best thing - he used it to blackmail the Ukraine government to provide him with dirt on Biden and support for Putin's
favorite narrative (that it was Ukraine not Russia that interfered in the 2016 election).
@Mike It also took two acts of Congress to get the aid to Ukraine. Trump had nothing to do with it. Only the Impound Inclusion
Act for foreign aid allows the President to time the release of the funds, which Trump did not follow. The Act was created because
Nixon, like Trump, was playing fast and loose with our tax dollars. Who was the last President who asked for help from a foreign
intelligence agency? Which President favored foregn intelligence agencies over his own? Answer no one other than Trump. If that
doesn't show he's in someone's pocket, nothing does.
They poisoned with the USA with Russophobia for decades to come, and that really increases
the risk of nuclear confrontation, which would wipe out all this jerks, but also mass of innocent
people.
Notable quotes:
"... The only way to prevent it, IMHO, is having a Western public shifting just 5 % of their "breads and circuses" paradigm to that issue. Just 5. Not holding my breath I am afraid. ..."
"... Which proves the main point of mine: access to information means shit in the real world of power play. Sheeple didn't care then; they care even less now (better distractions). ..."
Sooner or later you'll have this, IMHO: Reaction time 7 minutes . You know,
decision-making time to say "launch" or not. The decision-maker in the White House, Downing
Street and Elysees Palace either a geriatric or one of this new multiracial breed. Just think
about those people
Add to that the level of overall expertise by the crews manning those systems, its
maintenance etc. Add increased automation of some parts of the launch process with
hardware/software as it's produced now (you know, quality control etc.).
It will take a miracle not to have that launch sooner or later. Not big, say .80 KT. What
happens after that is anybody's guess. Mine, taking the second point from the fourth
paragraph .a big bang.
The only way to prevent it, IMHO, is having a Western public shifting just 5 % of
their "breads and circuses" paradigm to that issue. Just 5.
Not holding my breath I am afraid.
@peterAUS The rational actor false supposition has it that the biologics can't be used
because they don't recognize friend from foe.
Rational actors? Where? Anthrax via the US mail.
One rational actor point of view is that you have to be able to respond to anything.
Anything. In a measured or escalating response. Of course biologics are being actively
pursued to the hilt. Just like you point out about Marburg.
But, the view from above is that general panic in the population cannot be allowed, and so
all biologics have to be down played. "of course we would never do anything like that, it
would be insane to endanger all of humanity". Just like nukes. So professors pontificate
misdirection, and pundits punt.
So don't expect real disclosure, or honest analysis. "We only want the fear that results
in more appropriations. Not the fear that sinks programs." Don't generate new Church
commissions. Hence the fine line. some fear yes, other fears, no.
Well Washington D.C.
Hahahahaha sorry, couldn't resist.
So don't expect real disclosure, or honest analysis.
I don't.
But I also probably forgot more about nuclear war than most of readers here will ever
know. And chemical, when you think about it; had a kit with atropine on me all the time in
all exercises. We didn't practice much that "biologics" stuff, though. We knew why, then.
Same reason for today. Call it a "stoic option" to own inevitable demise.
Now, there is a big difference between the age of those protests I mentioned and today.
The Internet. The access to information people, then, simply didn't have.
Which proves the main point of mine: access to information means shit in the real
world of power play. Sheeple didn't care then; they care even less now (better
distractions).
Well, they will care, I am sure. For about ..say in the USA ..several hours, on
average.
We here where I am typing from will care for "how to survive the aftermath" .. for two
months.Tops.
So CIA agent Carter Page joins Trump campaign and then do several "improper" moves like
travel to Moscow and contracts with Russian officials things in order to create a pretext for FBI
investigation. Which of course was promptly started. This is called false flag operation.
From comments: "He wasn’t a victim, he was an asset. When actors portray a victim, they
are ACTING!!!"
Notable quotes:
"... "The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses". - the esteemed Malcolm X. ..."
"... Seth Rich downloaded the emails on a potable drive. Was he Russian? ..."
"... DNC/ FBI/ CIA/ CNN/ NBC have merged into the 5 headed serpent. ..."
"... Roger Stone got some minor facts wrong and is facing jail time, Brennan and Comey outright lied to Congress, when are they going to jail? ..."
"... "June 2017, CIA told FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith that Carter Page was working for them (the CIA)." Clinesmith then changed that notification so he could submit the last (FISA) renewal. ..."
"... "Lets hope Carter Page spends the rest of his life sueing everyone..." lol Thats the meanest thing ive ever heard you say! O:) ..."
There are so many crooked actors and actresses hired by the MSM it is just pathetic. They
are not reporters, they are there only to put on a show for the masses.
"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the
innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the
minds of the masses". - the esteemed Malcolm X.
"June 2017, CIA told FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith that Carter Page was working for them
(the CIA)." Clinesmith then changed that notification so he could submit the last (FISA)
renewal.
1:52
- This is what a paid shill looks like. If the money is good, they'll read whatever is on the
prompter. Years from now when they're demonized by the corrupt media they'll scratch their
head and ask... What happened to integrity in our country???
If you asked me 20 years ago wether I would be watching Fox News to get the most rational
point of view in politics, I would have said you were crazy. Another great job Tucker! In my
opinion, you’re one of the best news men of our current time; questioning needless
wars, and calling out politicians, gvmnt officials and your counterparts at other news desks
with rational arguments. Well done sir!
Personally seen these types of things/cases in lower levels, police chiefs and officials,
judges, prosecutors, mayor, FBI, and so on. Not surprisingly it happens elsewhere. ...But
very disappointed of it all.
If I were an American citizen, I'd be very concerned about the utter incompetence of the
FBI that the IG report exposed. The dems don't seem to be bothered by this at all. Go
figure.
The Establishment has played this game many times before .. remember PM Harold Wilson was
put up as a Russian Agent .. sure they won that game but NOT this time .. they fear President
Trump because the have nothing over him .
The Democ-rats and the media (I repeat myself) are shamelessly LYING through their teeth
to the American People. There was NO Russian collision—it's a HOAX made by LOSERS who
can't accept their loss in 2016 so they were up to smear the winner, President Trump, by all
means, possible including Illegal surveillance, fraud and manipulation—ABUSE of
government power for political prosecution.
Steele dossier......fake evidence bought and payed for by the democrats and presented to
the FISA court by James Comey...........FELONY FELONY FELONY!......this one can’t be
talked away!
Tucker, thank you for being a constant drumbeat for the criminal activity undertaken by
the FBI and CIA to ultimately unseat a duly elected President. No rest until they are held
accountable.
How could the FBI be innocent? We saw the emails. We saw them cover up for Bill Gates,
Clinton, Epstein, Brunel, and all the others. We saw how they protected these abusers of
children. We saw how they worked to overthrow a sitting president. We saw how they protected
the Awan’s and Huma.
THE FIX WAS IN - People are saying that Nellie Orr the Russian Expert is best friends with
the IG's Horowitz wife - So nice - Bruce your husband is a lap dog and works for the FBI .
People should be outraged as the cover up continues . Just like OJ - they have 10 times the
evidence that would convict anyone else - have them charged , arrested , tried and jailed .
Different rules for corrupt politicians and their friends in law enforcement .
Michael Cohen In prison, Papadopulos went to prison, Flynn is going to prison, Roger Stone
is going to prison, Manafort is in prison and Devin Nunes and Rudy Giuliani are under
investigation.....Lock them up, lock them up!!!!
CIA tells FBI who in turn uses their corrupt media to spread the lies as truth. The less
intelligent among us believe them as gospel and thus we get "Russian Collusion, or Quid Pro
Quo, or Iraq has weapons of mass destruction " and on and on.....
Ukraine and Barisma may be corrupt, but after reading the summary of this report, this
country better not be calling any country corrupt. The USA is following Rome. Soon it will
die.
FBI is totally corrupted by it's unchecked power, these deep states have the guts to
repeatedly use FALSE Information again & again to spy on the opposition political party
presidential candidate campaign. The Fake News medias continue to cover for them, it is
sickening!
The FBI based on the IG report are either criminally liable for deceiving FISA courts, or
the most inept, bumbling criminal investigation agency ever. Looks like both to me. Any FBI
agent or employee who knew the FBI was breaking the law, and remained silent needs to be
fired immediately and prosecuted along with the principals, for aiding and abetting criminal
activity. This sounds like RICO violations.
if Carter Page didn't run the 2016 "Trump Election Campaign Committee of Moscow" from the
ROSNEFT bureau offices inside the Kremlin, where did Carter Page run the "Trump Election
Campaign Committee of Moscow" ?
Horowitz needs to stop being a wuss and tell the whole truth. His report is a big lie. The
whole thing was a political attack. It started with John McCain and he handed it off to Obama
and Crooked Hillary. There was no reason at all to investigate Trump. Is the IG part of the
deep state? Democrats are acting like this report is good news for them.
Steele was not the author of the fake dossier, DNC FusionGPS Glen Simpson was, and Steele
used as cover. Coming in the Durham findings. 17 FBI "mistakes" in a row all against Trump?
No bias? B S.
How Trump has "conned" the American tax payer: This is just a few of his fraud actions!He
set up a foundation to benefit the military, then him and his family pocketed our money.He
started a Fake University, then stole the money from the American people.He cheated on his
wives, then paid them to keep quiet so it wouldn't damage his chances in the election.He
stiffed 100's of worker's he hired and then made up an excuse y they didn't get paid
If Donald Trump was a Russian spy it would’ve been the deepest cover of any secret
agent ever....he came here after his lgb training as a young man and became a celebrity for
30 years before finally putting his dastardly plan to go from pageant owner to president into
action! If that were anywhere close to true the Russians did so much work I think they earned
the 4-8 years in the White House! I know that at this point I’d rather have Vladimir
Putin as President than any of the top democrats!
Folks..All this soap opera is just a smoke screen to hide what is really important and is
happening right now at this very minute. The Federal Reserve Banking cartel is pumping 100s
of billions of dollars into insolvent banks again like they did in 2008. This time it is more
and we taxpayers will again foot the bill. The banks are getting this money called REPO
loans. Watch your cash everyone as the Federal Reserve has only 1 product and that is
printing money( debt) that they will use to steal your assets and future.
There are many opinions about the Horowitz report. As with a prior report Horowitz lays
out damning evidence and then draws exactly the wrong conclusion. Why does he have to draw
ANY CONCLUSIONS? His job is to present the facts and the evidence and to let "We the People'
draw conclusions. Reminds me of Comey declaring that Hillary's actions were irresponsible but
not criminal. Why? She didn't act with intent. She was just incompetent! Tucker is absolutely
right! What does it matter what their motive was? Like Clinton, they behaved in a criminal
fashion.
Anti-Semitism in UK serves the same role as Neo-McCartyism in the USA as demonstrated by
RussiaGate.
There is a deep analogy between neo-McCarthyism complain in the USA nad anti-Semitism campaign in the US Parliament.
Notable quotes:
"... Luciana Berger (image on the right), a Jewish MP who has highlighted what she sees as an anti-Semitism problem under Corbyn, led the charge, stating at the Independent Group's launch that she had reached "the sickening conclusion " that Labour was "institutionally racist". ..."
"... She and her allies claim she has been hounded out of the party by "anti-semitic bullying". Berger has suffered online abuse and death threats from a young neo-Nazi who was jailed for two years in 2016. There have been other incidences of abuse and other sentences, including a 27-month jail term for John Nimmo , a right-wing extremist who referred to Berger as "Jewish scum" and signed his messages, "your friend, the Nazi". ..."
"... That is one reason why anti-semitism smears have been so maliciously effective against anti-Zionist Jews in the party and used with barely a murmur of protest – or in most cases, even recognition that Jews are being suspended and expelled for opposing Israel's racist policies towards Palestinians. ..."
"... The Blairites in Labour, joined by the ruling Conservative Party, the mainstream media and pro-Israel lobby groups, have selected anti-semitism as the terrain on which to try to destroy a Corbyn-led Labour Party, because it is a battlefield in which the left stands no hope of getting a fair hearing – or any hearing at all. ..."
Breakaway MPs hope that smearing Corbyn will obscure the fact that they are remnants
of an old political order bankrupt of ideas
The announcement by seven MPs from
the UK Labour Party on Monday that they were breaking away and creating a new parliamentary
faction marked the biggest internal upheaval in a British political party in nearly 40 years,
when the SDP split from Labour.
On Wednesday, they were joined by an eighth Labour MP, Joan Ryan , and three Conservative
MPs. There are predictions more will follow.
With the UK teetering on the brink of crashing out of the European Union with no deal on
Brexit, the founders of the so-called Independent Group made reference to their opposition to
Brexit.
The chief concern cited for the split by the eight Labour MPs, though, was a supposed
"anti-semitism crisis" in the party.
The breakaway faction seemingly agrees that anti-Semitism has become so endemic in the
party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader more than three years ago that they were left with no
choice but to quit.
Corbyn, it should be noted, is the first leader of a major British party to explicitly
prioritize the rights of Palestinians over Israel's continuing belligerent occupation of the
Palestinian territories.
'Sickeningly racist'?
Luciana Berger (image on the right), a Jewish MP who has highlighted what she sees as an
anti-Semitism problem under Corbyn, led the charge, stating at the Independent Group's launch
that she had reached "the sickening
conclusion " that Labour was "institutionally racist".
She and her allies claim she has been hounded out of the party by "anti-semitic bullying".
Berger has suffered online abuse and death threats from a young neo-Nazi who was
jailed for two years in 2016. There have been other incidences of abuse and other
sentences, including a 27-month jail term for
John Nimmo , a right-wing extremist who referred to Berger as "Jewish scum" and signed his
messages, "your friend, the Nazi".
In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, the former Labour MP said the Independent Group
would provide the Jewish community with a " political home that they,
like much of the rest of the country, are now looking for".
In a plea to keep the party together, deputy leader Tom Watson issued a video in which he
criticised his own party for being too slow to tackle anti-Semitism. The situation "poses a
test" for Labour, he said, adding: "Do we respond with simple condemnation, or do we try and
reach out beyond our comfort zone and prevent others from following?"
Ruth Smeeth , another Jewish Labour MP who may yet join a later wave of departures, was
reported to have broken down
in tears at a parliamentary party meeting following the split, as she called for tougher
action on anti-semitism.
Two days later, as she split from Labour, Ryan accused the party of being "infected with the
scourge of anti-Jewish racism".
Hatred claims undercut
The timing of the defections was strange, occurring shortly after the Labour leadership
revealed the findings
of an investigation into complaints of anti-semitism in the party. These were the very
complaints that MPs such as Berger have been citing as proof of the party's "institutional
racism".
And yet, the report decisively undercut their claims – not only of endemic
anti-semitism in Labour, but of any significant problem at all.
That echoed an earlier report by the Commons home affairs committee, which found there was
"no reliable, empirical
evidence " that Labour had more of an anti-semitism problem than any other British
political party.
Nonetheless, the facts seem to be playing little or no part in influencing the anti-semitism
narrative. This latest report was thus almost entirely ignored by Corbyn's opponents and by the
mainstream media.
It is, therefore, worth briefly examining what the Labour Party's investigation
discovered.
Over the previous 10 months, 673 complaints had been filed against Labour members over
alleged anti-semitic behaviour, many based on online comments. In a third of those cases,
insufficient evidence had been produced.
The 453 other allegations represented 0.08 percent of the 540,000-strong Labour membership.
Hardly "endemic" or "institutional", it seems.
Intemperate language
There is the possibility past outbursts have been part of this investigation. Intemperate
language flared especially in 2014 – before Corbyn became leader – when Israel
launched a military operation on Gaza that killed large numbers of Palestinian civilians,
including many hundreds of children.
Certainly, it is unclear how many of those reportedly anti-semitic comments concern not
prejudice towards Jews, but rather outspoken criticism of the state of Israel, which was
redefined as anti-semitic last year by Labour, under severe pressure from MPs such as Berger
and Ryan and Jewish lobby groups, such as the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour
Movement.
Seven of the 11 examples of
anti-semitism associated with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition
adopted by Labour concern Israel. That includes describing Israel as a "racist endeavour", even
though Israel passed a basic law last year stripping the fifth of its population who are not
Jewish of any right to self-determination, formally creating two
classes of citizen.
Illustrating the problem Labour has created for itself as a result, some of the most
high-profile suspensions and expulsions have actually targeted Jewish members of the party who
identify as anti-Zionist – that is, they consider Israel a racist state. They include T ony
Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Glyn Secker and Cyril Chilson .
Another Jewish member,
Moshe Machover , a professor emeritus at the University of London, had to be reinstated
after a huge outcry among members at his treatment by the party.
Unthinking prejudice
Alan Maddison , who has been conducting statistical research on anti-semitism for a
pro-Corbyn Jewish group, Jewish Voice for Labour, put the 0.08 percent figure into its wider
social and political
context this week.
He quoted the findings of a large survey of anti-semitic attitudes
published by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in 2017. It found that 30 percent of
respondents from various walks of society agreed with one or more of eight anti-semitic views,
ranging from stereotypes such as "Jews think they are better than other people" to Holocaust
denial.
However, lead researcher Daniel Staetsky concluded that in most cases, this was evidence of
unthinking prejudice rather than conscious bigotry. Four-fifths of those who exhibited a degree
of anti-semitism also agreed with at least one positive statement about Jewish people.
This appears to be the main problem among the tiny number of Labour Party members identified
in complaints, and is reflected in the predominance of warnings about conduct rather than
expulsions and suspensions.
Far-right bigotry
Another of the institute's findings poses a particular problem for Corbyn's opponents, who
argue that the Labour leader has imported anti-semitism into the party by attracting the "hard
left". Since he was elected, Labour membership has rocketed.
Even if it were true that Corbyn and his supporters are on the far-left – a highly
questionable assumption, made superficially plausible only because Labour moved to the
centre-right under Tony Blair in the late 1990s – the institute's research pulls the rug
out from under Corbyn's critics.
It discovered that across the political spectrum, conscious hatred of Jews was very low, and
that it was exhibited in equal measure from the "very left-wing" to the "fairly right-wing".
The only exception, as one might expect, was on the "very right-wing", where virulent
anti-semitism was much more prevalent.
That finding was confirmed last week by surveys that showed a significant rise in violent,
anti-semitic attacks across Europe as far-right parties make inroads in many member states. A
Guardian report noted that the "figures show an overwhelming majority of
violence against Jews is perpetrated by far-right supporters".
Supporters of overseas war
So what is the basis for concerns about the Labour Party being mired in supposed
"institutional anti-semitism" since it moved from the centre to the left under Corbyn, when the
figures and political trends demonstrate nothing of the sort?
A clue may be found in the wider political worldview of the eight MPs who have broken from
Labour.
All but two are listed as supporters of the parliamentary "Labour Friends of
Israel" (LFI) faction. Further, Berger is a former director of that staunchly pro-Israel lobby
group, and Ryan is its current chair, a position the group says she will hold onto, despite no
longer being a Labour MP.
So extreme are the LFI's views on Israel that it sought to exonerate Israel of a massacre
last year, in which its snipers shot dead many dozens of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in
Gaza in a single day. Faced with a social media backlash, it quietly took down the posts
.
The eight MPs' voting records – except for Gavin Shuker, for whom the picture is mixed
– show them holding consistently hawkish foreign policy positions that are deeply
antithetical to Corbyn's approach to international relations.
They either "almost always" or "generally" backed "combat operations overseas"; those who were
MPs at the time supported the 2003 Iraq war; and they all opposed subsequent investigations
into the Iraq war.
Committed Friends of Israel
In one sense, the breakaway group's support for Labour Friends of Israel may not be
surprising, and indicates why Corbyn is facing such widespread trouble from within his own
party. Dozens of Labour MPs are members of the group, including Tom Watson and Ruth
Smeeth.
Smeeth, one of those at the forefront of accusing Corbyn of fostering anti-semitism in
Labour, is also a former public affairs director of BICOM, another stridently pro-Israel
lobby group .
None of these MPs were concerned enough with the LFI's continuing vocal support for Israel
as it has shifted to the far-right under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have stepped down
from the group.
'Wrong kind of Jews'
Anti-semitism has taken centre stage in the manoeuvring against Corbyn, despite there being
no evidence of significant hatred against Jews in the party. Increasingly, it seems, tangible
abuse of Jews is of little interest unless it can be related to Corbyn.
The markedly selective interest in anti-semitism in the Corbyn context among the breakaway
MPs and supposed anti-semitism watchdogs has been starkly on show for some time.
Notably, none expressed concern at the media mauling of a left-wing, satirical Jewish group
called Jewdas when Corbyn was widely attacked for meeting "the wrong kind of Jews". In fact,
leading Labour figures, including the Jewish Labour Movement, joined in the
abuse .
And increasingly in this febrile atmosphere, there has been an ever-greater indulgence of
the "right kind of anti-semitism" – when it is directed at Corbyn supporters.
A troubling illustration was provided on the TV show Good Morning Britain this week, when
Tom Bower was invited on to discuss his new unauthorised biography of Corbyn, in which he
accuses him of anti-semitism. The hosts looked on demurely as Bower, a Jewish journalist,
defamed fellow Jewish journalist Michael Segalov as a " self-hating Jew " for defending Corbyn on the
show.
Revenge of the Blairites
So what is the significance of the fact that the Labour MPs who have been most outspoken in
criticising Corbyn – those who helped organise a 2016 leadership challenge against him,
and those who are now rumoured to be considering joining the breakaway faction – are
heavily represented on the list of MPs supporting LFI?
For them, it seems, vigorous support for Israel is not only a key foreign policy matter, but
a marker of their political priorities and worldview – one that starkly clashes with the
views of Corbyn and a majority of the Labour membership.
Anti-semitism has turned out to be the most useful – and damaging – weapon to
wield against the Labour leader for a variety of reasons close to the hearts of the holdouts
from the Blair era, who still dominate the parliamentary party and parts of the Labour
bureaucracy.
Perhaps most obviously, the Blairite wing of the party is still primarily loyal to a notion
that Britain should at all costs maintain its transatlantic alliance with the United States in
foreign policy matters. Israel is a key issue for those on both sides of the Atlantic who see
that state as a projection of Western power into the oil-rich Middle East and romanticise
Israel as a guarantor of Western values in a "barbaric" region.
Corbyn's prioritising of Palestinian rights threatens to overturn a core imperial value to
which the Blairites cling.
Tarred and feathered
But it goes further. Anti-semitism has become a useful stand-in for the deep differences in
a domestic political culture between the Blairites, on one hand, and Corbyn and the wider
membership, on the other.
A focus on anti-semitism avoids the right-wing MPs having to admit much wider grievances
with Corbyn's Labour that would probably play far less well not only with Labour members, but
with the broader British electorate.
As well as their enthusiasm for foreign wars, the Blairites support the enrichment of a
narrow neo-liberal elite, are ambivalent about austerity policies, and are reticent at
returning key utilities to public ownership. All of this can be neatly evaded and veiled by
talking up anti-semitism.
But the utility of anti-semitism as a weapon with which to beat Corbyn and his supporters
– however unfairly – runs deeper still.
The Blairites view allegations of anti-Jewish racism as a trump card. Calling someone an
anti-semite rapidly closes down all debate and rational thought. It isolates, then tars and
feathers its targets. No one wants to be seen to be associated with an anti-semite, let alone
defend them.
Weak hand exposed
That is one reason why anti-semitism smears have been so maliciously effective against
anti-Zionist Jews in the party and used with barely a murmur of protest – or in most
cases, even recognition that Jews are being suspended and expelled for opposing Israel's racist
policies towards Palestinians.
This is a revival of the vile "self-hating Jew" trope that Israel and its defenders
concocted decades ago to intimidate Jewish critics.
The Blairites in Labour, joined by the ruling Conservative Party, the mainstream media
and pro-Israel lobby groups, have selected anti-semitism as the terrain on which to try to
destroy a Corbyn-led Labour Party, because it is a battlefield in which the left stands no hope
of getting a fair hearing – or any hearing at all.
But paradoxically, the Labour breakaway group may have inadvertently exposed the weakness of
its hand. The eight MPs have indicated that they will not run in by-elections, and for good
reason: it is highly unlikely they would stand a chance of winning in any of their current
constituencies outside the Labour Party.
Their decision will also spur moves to begin deselecting those Labour MPs who are openly
trying to sabotage the party – and the members' wishes – from within.
That may finally lead to a clearing out of the parliamentary baggage left behind from the
Blair era, and allow Labour to begin rebuilding itself as a party ready to deal with the
political, social, economic and environmental challenges of the 21st century.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Jonathan Cook, a British journalist based in Nazareth since 2001, is the the author of
three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is a past winner of the Martha Gellhorn
Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at: www.jonathan-cook.net He is
a frequent contributor to Global Research.
"... Hillary Clinton, Her husband Bill and Barak Obama are all deep cover CIA agents in addition to their other positions, as documented in the book "CIA: Crime Incorporated of America". ..."
"... The arms came from more places than simply Libya, although Libya was the central shipping and gathering point to go to Turkey and then on to Syria. Turkey was part of the Obama enablers of ISIS and ISIL big time ! Obama made sure ISIS got all the weapons and munitions and equipment we left behind and did literally nothing to stop them at all. He, Brennan, Hillary as well as Kerry all have massive blood on their hands via the atrocities of ISIS ! ..."
"... Not forgetting William Browder, part of the same gang, whose grandfather was the Leader of the US Communist Party. No doubt with close ties to Allen Dulles and ''peration Paperclip'. ..."
"... Will never forget Brennan, going to Ukraine, with instructions, just prior to 2 May 2014 and the Odessa Trade Union Massacre. Coincidence or what? ..."
"... Brennan may well have already been CIA when he joined the CPUSA. In any case, he's scum. ..."
"... Tucker Carlson and the author of this article asks, How can someone like Brennan be provided security clearance for top secrets in the CIA. A very easy answer: the entire American financial/judicial/military/spy organizations have become highly corrupt. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans could care less. ..."
"... "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you". https://t.co/uKppoDbduj -- John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018 ..."
Let's get something clear from the start. In 1976, in his 20s, John Brennan was a card carrying communist who supported the then
Soviet Union, at the height some might say of the Cold War, so much so he voted and assisted Gus Hall, the communist candidate for
President against a devout Christian, Jimmy Carter who ultimately won the Presidency.
Yet under four years later, just after the then Soviet Union invaded, just weeks before, Afghanistan and months after the tumultuous
Iranian revolution of 1979, which at the time many thought the Soviet Union had a hand in, Brennan was accepted into the CIA as a
junior analyst.
At that time, John Brennan should have never got into the CIA, or any Western Intelligence agency given his communist background.
Think on that carefully as you continue to read this.
Also reflect on the fact that Brennan, later in his CIA career, was surprisingly elevated from junior analyst to the prestigious
position of Station Chief in Saudi Arabia where he spent a few years.
Its said he was appointed purely for 'political' reasons, alleged to have been at the direct request of Bill Clinton and other
Democrats not because of a recommendation or merit from within the Agency.
Its further said that the Saudis liked Brennan because he became very quickly 'their man' so to speak. Some reports, unsubstantiated,
even allege Brennan became a Muslim while there to ingratiate himself with the Saudis.
Important to read is an NBC news article entitled 'Former Spooks Criticize CIA Director John Brennan for Spying Comments' by Ken
Dilanian dated March 2nd, 2016.
The article contains many revealing facts and evidence, while giving a flavour, of the feelings of many in the CIA who felt that
Brennan was totally unsuitable and unqualified to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
A final controversy is the little known fact of Brennan's near four year departure from the CIA into the commercial world, having
been 'left out in the cold' from the CIA, from November 2005 to January 2009 when he was CEO of a private company called 'The Analysis
Corporation'.
So why was he then reinstated into the CIA, to the surprise of CIA's senior management, by newly elected President Obama, to head
the CIA? No answer is available as to why he left the CIA in 2005.
Lastly let's not forget Brennan's many failures as CIA head in recent years, one most notable is the Benghazi debacle and the
death of a US Ambassador and others there. Something else to ponder.
Back to the present an the issue of security clearances.
In early August, on the well known American TV Rachel Maddow Show, Brennan back tracked on his Trump traitor claim by saying "I
didn't mean he (Trump) committed treason. I meant what he has done is nothing short of treasonous." Rachel Maddow responded correctly
"If we diagram the sentence, 'nothing short of treason' means it's treasonous?"
A simple question follows. Since he is no longer in the CIA, why does he need a security clearance other than to commercially
exploit it?
Tucker Carlson explains succinctly here:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kzxf9TcJ_3k
Last month what can be described as 200+ 'friends of Brennan', former CIA officials of varying rank, responded against the removal
of former CIA Director Brennan's security clearances, in support of him.
These men and women too most likely will have their clearances revoked.
And why not?
Since the only purpose they retain it is to make money as civilians?
A potentially more serious issue than 'the Brennan controversies' is that the US intelligence community has around 5 million people
with security clearances as a whole includes approximately 1.4m people holding top secret clearances. It is patently a ridiculously
high number and makes a mockery of the word secret.
Former CIA veteran Sam Faddis is one of the few people brave enough and with the integrity required, that has stood up
and told some of the real truths about Brennan in an 'Open Letter', yet this letter's contents have hardly at all been reported in
the media.
Generally by nature, CIA Officers sense of service and honour to their Country, their professionalism and humility, and disdain
for publicity has dissuaded most of them to enter the current very public Brennan controversy; but for how much longer?
I implore you to cease and desist from continuing to attempt to portray yourself in the public media as some sort of impartial
critic concerned only with the fate of the republic. I beg you to stop attempting to portray yourself as some sort of wise, all-knowing
intelligence professional with deep knowledge of national security issues and no political inclinations whatsoever.
None of this is true.
You were never a spy. You were never a case officer. You never ran operations or recruited sources or worked the streets abroad.
You have no idea whatsoever of the true nature of the business of human intelligence. You have never been in harm's way. You have
never heard a shot fired in anger.
You were for a short while an intelligence analyst. In that capacity, it was your job to produce finished intelligence based
on information provided to you by others. The work of intelligence analysts is important, however in truth you never truly mastered
this trade either.
In your capacity as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, while still a junior officer, you were designated to brief
the President of the United States who was at that time Bill Clinton. As the presidential briefer, it was your job to read to
the president each morning finished intelligence written by others based on intelligence collected by yet other individuals. Period.
While serving as presidential briefer you established a personal relationship with then President Bill Clinton. End of story.
Everything that has transpired in your professional career since has been based on your personal relationship with the former
president, his wife Hillary and their key associates. Your connection to President Obama was, in fact, based on you having established
yourself by the time he came to office as a reliable, highly political Democratic Party functionary.
All of your commentary in the public sphere is on behalf of your political patrons. It is no more impartial analysis then would
be the comments of a paid press spokesman or attorney. You are speaking each and every time directly on behalf of political forces
hostile to this president. You are, in fact, currently on the payroll of both NBC and MSNBC, two of the networks most vocally
opposed to President Trump and his agenda.
There is no impartiality in your comments. Your assessments are not based on some sober judgment of what is best for this nation.
They are based exclusively on what you believe to be in the best interests of the politicians with whom you long since allied
yourself.
It should be noted that not only are you most decidedly not apolitical but that you have been associated during your career
with some of the greatest foreign policy disasters in recent American history.
Ever since this President was elected, there has been a concerted effort to delegitimize him and destabilize him led by you.
This has been an unprecedented; to undermine the stability of the republic and the office of the Presidency, for solely partisan
political reasons. You and your patrons have been complicit in this effort and at its very heart.
You abandoned any hope of being a true intelligence professional decades ago and became a political hack. Say so.
Sam Faddis
EPILOGUE:
I decided to update this article with this epilogue that summarises events since its first publication, but by not writing more.
By simply adding links showing Brennan speaking in March just before Meuller's Report was released, and excerpts of other interviews
and commentaries.
In this way, reader's can judge for themselves Brennan's essentially undoubtable despicable character which shines through by
watching and reading the below 8 links up to 1st April 2019. There are many more, but in consideration of space, I've selected these
links.
These are not in chronological order, date/time wise.
I would add that, for his own 'survival', and that of his co-conspirators, there will, I predict, over the coming days and weeks,
be an attempt by Brennan to STILL try and fabricate 'dirt' on President Trump to justify his treacherous behaviour against importantly
more than just Trump, but 'the Office of the President', something for which, in my opinion, he and those involved should be prosecuted
for, even some jailed for.
Most particularly in addition to Brennan is clearly Obama himself, Clinton, Clapper and Comey et al.
The CIA operation in Benghazi was smuggling weapons captured from the Libyan army to Syria via Jordan and Turkey to arm the
anti Assad forces. This operation was directed by Brennan, Clinton, Obama and General Petraeus and was in total violation of national
and international law.
Ambassador Stevens was aware of this operation and allowed to die by delaying a military rescue operation, as part of a cover
up of this illegal operation. Dead men tell no tales.
Hillary Clinton, Her husband Bill and Barak Obama are all deep cover CIA agents in addition to their other positions, as documented
in the book "CIA: Crime Incorporated of America".
They don't like Trump because he is the first non CIA President in a long while
(George W. Bush was not CIA but under his father's influence) and not part of the secret team. Hopefully, they eventually will
be punished for their crimes. Qanon gives hope!
The arms came from more places than simply Libya, although Libya was the central shipping and gathering point to go to Turkey
and then on to Syria. Turkey was part of the Obama enablers of ISIS and ISIL big time ! Obama made sure ISIS got all the weapons
and munitions and equipment we left behind and did literally nothing to stop them at all. He, Brennan, Hillary as well as Kerry
all have massive blood on their hands via the atrocities of ISIS !
Not forgetting William Browder, part of the same gang, whose grandfather was the Leader of the US Communist Party. No doubt
with close ties to Allen Dulles and ''peration Paperclip'.
Which provided safe passage and new identities for the Nazi and Bolshevik
Elite. Funny how the stench behind the overthrow of he Russian Empire, can still be found, firmly embedded in the swamps of the
21st century.
Will never forget Brennan, going to Ukraine, with instructions, just prior to 2 May 2014 and the Odessa Trade Union
Massacre. Coincidence or what?
Wasn't McCain's father also good friends with Allen Dulles? Wonder where Clinton fitted into the work of Dulles?
One of the more murky issues is the murder of Michael Hastings. A lot of information died with his murder but some info indicates
that he was working on a major report on Brennan. He reportedly advised his friends that the fbi was working on an investigation
on him and he was fearful for his survival
As many will recall, Hastings died in June 2013 in fiery crash of his Mercedes which
was speeding at up to 100 mph in a calif neighborhood.
Also, many will recall, the leaking of "Vault 7" by wikileaks indicated that one of the tools revealed was the ability to remotely
control a vehicle without any input from the driver, positive or negative. This ability is described in detail in the following:
How do you think the Royal Family killed princess Diana? If they can control a drone on the other side of the globe, they can
certainly control the accelerator, brakes and steering of a motor vehicle.
Only the most creepy evil people are allowed to be in our government. They have done a terrible job. Our country is like a
plane in a death spiral, and the same list of creeps keeps getting into the White House. The same people no matter who we elect.
Trump has the same people, or worse than Obama or Hillary or Bush had. It's past time to try and salvage whatever is left of this
country.
100 Stinger shoulder launch ground-to-air missiles. Stevens tried to block the shipment, the embassy was attacked by a highly
skilled, armed, assault team - the story told by "Tonto", one of the military contractors involved in the attempted rescue. All
those Americans in Benghazi were sacrificed in the same way the USS Liberty crew was sacrifice.
Greater Israel is the base of all this violence. Incidentally, "Tonto" and his mates had to commandeer a private jet, after
the fire-fight, that got them to Germany - the US/CIA/State Dept., etc. left them to their own methods and they got out, to the
consternation of the Obama/Clinton Administration.
Tucker Carlson and the author of this article asks, How can someone like Brennan be provided security clearance for top secrets
in the CIA. A very easy answer: the entire American financial/judicial/military/spy organizations have become highly corrupt. Meanwhile,
millions of adult Americans could care less.
Well............Those two contrasts will be intriguing to watch how the grandchildren and great-grandchilren will fare when
the US Empire becomes so degraded, that the young will have to forage on their own for housing, water, and food.
"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful
place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy
America...America will triumph over you".
https://t.co/uKppoDbduj -- John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018
He has to be part of a CIA "cleansing" operation.
Better put him in jail with no rights whatsoever . Let that turd rot in some humid dungeon . That's for the rats like this one
.
"... there is something to the idea that American political culture is becoming increasingly Sovietized ..."
"... This article below inadvertently illustrates the obsession with malign foreign influences, like that which pervaded Soviet discourse and remains a bad smell in Russia to this day. ..."
"... Another rapidly creeping Soviet trait is the weaponization of politics, turning any disagreement into an existential struggle, opponents into enemies, the way words like "treason" or "Russian asset" have become common coin ..."
"... increasingly they have that "enemy of the people" ring to them. The growing prominence of the intelligence services in political life, and their alumni on cable TV news shows, is another worrisome trend to watch. ..."
There is something to the idea that American political culture is becoming increasingly
Sovietized, writes Weir .
This is becoming quite the meme. Upon reflection, I do think there is something in it. Not
this idiotic suggestion that Repubicans have somehow morphed into borscht-swilling,
shapka-wearing, Putin-loving Russkies. Indeed, there are hardly any actual Russians like that.
But there is something to the idea that American political culture is becoming increasingly Sovietized. Of course it's two separate camps, not a monolith, and the Democrats are at least
as guilty as Republicans.
This article below inadvertently illustrates the obsession with malign foreign influences,
like that which pervaded Soviet discourse and remains a bad smell in Russia to this day.
Russians scoff at the idea that Putin is able to get his own man elected president of the US
when he can't even fix the governor in Irkutsk. But the author of this piece implies that Putin
is somehow pulling the strings, not only of Trump but all Republicans?
Another rapidly creeping
Soviet trait is the weaponization of politics, turning any disagreement into an existential
struggle, opponents into enemies, the way words like "treason" or "Russian asset" have become
common coin. And they are not just deployed as simple insults: increasingly they have that
"enemy of the people" ring to them. The growing prominence of the intelligence services in
political life, and their alumni on cable TV news shows, is another worrisome trend to watch.
Also, it looks like big part of the media have become almost Pravda-like, making ideological
mission their main priority. I spend some of my down-time perusing shows from Fox News and
MSNBC, which an alien from outer space would think were the propaganda organs of two different,
mutually-hostile states -- but both very Soviet-like.
... ... ...
THEATLANTIC.COM
The Russification of the Republican Party
GOP lawmakers used to oppose the president's embrace of Putin and the Kremlin. Not anymore.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/12/impeachment-republican-party-russia/603088/?fbclid=IwAR1EC0-CDBEx-3SMS1lJTMT2m0xVjfaguZehK4BIeZ5Bov41Ds1XFi_Cbkg
"... The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating a disinformation" campaign today against Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders and Russiagate. ..."
"... Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States. It is now so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured. ..."
"... It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first. Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then, it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of nuclear deterrence doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation is. ..."
"... Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov (Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the neo-Nazis of western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the Donbass). The Donbass fighters are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile the support for the neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the Ukrainian military, thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency). ..."
"... Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they agreed they were defeated. The US merely assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said any such thing. ..."
"... I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!) ..."
"... "From 1922 onwards the strategic purpose of the Soviet Union was to defend the Soviet Union not global domination, whereas the purpose of the "West" has always been global domination. " ..."
"... "At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause." ..."
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin, in conversation with former Australian Foreign
Minister Bob Carr, says the West is unnecessarily determined to undermine Russia. A t an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United
States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause.
When Kevin said he returned to Russia after more than 40 years in 2016 he realized he "had
to take sides" in the U.S.-Russia standoff when all Nato countries boycotted the Moscow
celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
"I had to take a moral position that it is not right for the West to be ganging up on
Russia," Kevin says in his conversation with the former Australian foreign minister.
The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion
eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating a disinformation" campaign today against
Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders
and Russiagate.
Watch the hour-long in depth discussion which was filmed and produced by Consortium
News' CN Live! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan.
Tony's (especially!) and Bob's sane and sensible view of this dangerous and destructive
state of affairs deserve the widest possible distribution and attention.
George McGlynn , December 9, 2019 at 13:27
A quarter century has passed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and little has changed.
Cold War patterns of thinking about Russia show no sign of weakening in America. The further
we distance ourselves from the end of the Cold War, the closer we come to its revival.
Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States.
It is now so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured.
It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first.
Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then, it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world
war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of nuclear deterrence
doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation
is.
AnneR , December 9, 2019 at 07:48
The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been,
are via that US supported supposed oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK
wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events including the
upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans).
Then there were allegations – of those "highly likely" (therefore one knows to be
untrue and unadulterated propaganda to increase Russophobia) sort – about Russian
hackers (always giving the impression that the "Kremlin" is behind itl) being the Labour
Party's source of the Tory party's US-UK trade deal which would/will deliberately and finally
destroy the NHS and replace it with (of course) US "health" insurance company
profiteering.
(Always the Tory intention from the NHS's initiation in May of 1948; only its popularity
among many Tory party supporters among the working and lower middle classes prevented them
from a full-frontal killing off the NHS; the Snatcher's government began the undermining, via
installing a top-heavy bureaucratization, siphoning off a sizable proportion of the funds
that would otherwise have gone to medical care, demanding that hospitals not "lose" money
– a concept completely beyond the remit of the NHS as originally conceived and
constructed and like exactions.)
Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov
(Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in
France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the neo-Nazis of
western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the
Donbass). The Donbass fighters are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny
them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile the support for the
neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the
Ukrainian military, thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency).
Someone even suggested that President Putin needed to be diplomatic. Really? From what
I've read the man is the most diplomatic and intelligent politician (not just political
leader) along with Xi Jinping and the Iranian government that exist on the world stage. None
of them are hubristic, solipsistic, eager beaver killers of peoples in other countries.
Unlike their western "world" political counterparts.
Jeff Harrison , December 8, 2019 at 18:30
Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they
agreed they were defeated. The US merely assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated
and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said any such thing.
St. Ronnie's whole thing back in the 80's was to outspend Russia militarily and it worked
well. We're trying to do it again but Russia isn't playing the same game this time and now it
is the US that has a mountain of debt and Russia that doesn't. SIPIRI tags US military
spending at $650B and Russian military spending at $62B. But we know that the $650B number is
bogus because it doesn't include our in-violation-of-the-NNPT nuclear program which is in the
energy department or our veteran's expenses which are in HHS. I don't know what's missing
from Russia's $62B but I'll bet they can sustain that a whole lot better than we can sustain
our $650B and rising bill.
Antonio Costa , December 9, 2019 at 13:17
Good point regarding Russia's downsizing the Soviet Union. From Gorbachev to Putin there
was NEVER a surrender, intended in any way. The intent has been multilateral partnerships.
For Russia the US/West won nothing at all except the opportunity to live and work in peace.
(By the way this policy has a long Russian history.)
They gave up the Warsaw Pact and America with our worthless "word" expanded NATO.
The US foreign policy has lost even the semblance of sanity. Our naked aggression is clear
as never before, a mad man throwing a global fit armed with megaton nuclear projectiles on
trigger first strike alert. What could go wrong?
nondimenticare , December 8, 2019 at 15:56
If, magically, Consortium News/CN Live! were a mass-distribution network/magazine (hence
universally consulted), allowing the light in for the mass of the viewing and listening
public, it could change the world – both an exalting and despairing thought.
Lily , December 8, 2019 at 09:52
It is a great joy to listen to this conversation!
I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as
the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK
obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who
is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian
citizen!)
I wish people would have the courage to break away from the group pressure originated by a
nation which has been started by killing more than 90% of the indigenous people in their
country and since then has turned the worl into a very insecure place.
Chapeau, Tony Kevin! Thanks to Bob Carr and Consortiums News.
Lily , December 9, 2019 at 01:18
It seems that some facts are beginning to be realized in the military department.
Words are catalysts of connotations and connotations are functions of
expectations/framing..
Some conflate cause with purpose thereby limiting perception of cause and purpose.
Some understand that causation is interactive and in any lateral system the genesis of
causation is difficult to determine.
Some understand that evaluation is a function of purpose and that purpose can be evaluated
through such portals into wonderlands such as "What is the "United States of America" and how
is it facilitated?"
As thumb-nailed in the comments section of the article Capitalism's suicidal trajectory
– OlyaPola
December 6, 2019 at 07:46
"From 1922 onwards the strategic purpose of the Soviet Union was to defend the Soviet
Union not global domination, whereas the purpose of the "West" has always been global
domination. "
From 1922 onwards various tactics have been attempted by the "West" to facilitate their
purpose, including attempts at "Orange revolution" in many areas which catalysed many lateral
trajectories including the process of transcendence of the "Soviet Union" by the Russian
Federation in the period from 1991 to 2005.
Consequently Mr. Suslov's observation re war of "The United States of America" can be
extended into present times and hence no "New cold war" exists.
""What is the "United States of America"
An initial step through the portal is that "The United States of America" is – a
regime of social relations to facilitate its purpose – the social relations not being
restricted to the "nation state" presently self designated "The United States of America" but
including classes in other "nation states".
Consequently alternative purposes and social relations pose an existential threat to "The
United States of America"; this being perceived of lesser significance in regard to "The
Soviet Union" and greater in regard to the Russian Federation.
"At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United
States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause."
The American establishment's problem with Russia is simply that Russia is the only country
on earth capable of obliterating the United States. Not even China has yet reached that
capacity.
"Carthago delenda est"
Skip Scott , December 9, 2019 at 06:13
There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting,
and worked to benefit average Russian citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the
scenes" to know the "cause".
Bruno DP , December 8, 2019 at 02:34
The West is ganging up on Russia? Replace "West" by "United States of America", and I will agree.
Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The
Magnitsky Act monster, the election interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met
with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a very telling moment
for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic.
Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.
But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin
seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined.
I'm German, living in the US, and I agree with your comment. I especially love the last
two sentences:
"Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.
But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems
to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined."
"... Haddad added that he is now seeking legal advice and looking into the possibility of whistleblower protections for himself, and said at the very least he will publish the information he has while omitting anything that could subject him to legal retaliation from his former employer. ..."
"... Newsweek has long been a reliable guard dog and attack dog for the US-centralized empire, with examples of stories that its editors did permit to go to print including an article by an actual, current military intelligence officer explaining why US prosecution of Julian Assange is a good thing, fawning puff pieces on the White Helmets , and despicable smear jobs on Tulsi Gabbard . ..."
"... Newsweek also recently published an article attacking Tucker Carlson for publicizing the OPCW scandal, basing its criticisms on a bogus Bellingcat article I debunked shortly after its publication . ..."
"Yesterday I resigned from Newsweek after my attempts to publish newsworthy revelations
about the leaked OPCW letter were refused for no valid reason," journalist Tareq Haddad
reported today via Twitter .
"I have collected evidence of how they suppressed the story in addition to evidence from
another case where info inconvenient to US government was removed, though it was factually
correct," Haddad said.
"I plan on publishing these details in full shortly. However, after asking my editors for
comment, as is journalistic practice, I received an email reminding me of confidentiality
clauses in my contract. I.e. I was threatened with legal action."
Haddad added that he is now
seeking legal advice and looking into the possibility of whistleblower protections for himself,
and said at the very least he will publish the information he has while omitting anything that
could subject him to legal retaliation from his former employer.
"I could have kept silent and kept my job, but I would not have been able to continue with
a clean conscience," Haddad said .
"I will have some instability now but the truth is more important."
This is the first direct insider report we're getting on the mass media's conspiracy of
silence on the OPCW scandal that I wrote
about just the other day . In how many other newsrooms is this exact same sort of
suppression happening, including threats of legal action, to journalists who don't have the
courage or ability to leave and speak out? There is no logical reason to assume that Haddad is
the only one encountering such roadblocks from mass media editors; he's just the only one going
public about it.
The ubiquitous propagandistic tactic of fake news by omission distorts the public's
worldview just as much as it would if mass media outlets were publishing bogus stories whole
cloth every day, only if they were doing that it would be much easier to pin them down on their
lies, hold them accountable, and discredit them.
A
recent FAIR article by Alan MacLeod documents how the Hong Kong demonstrations are pushed
front and center in mainstream consciousness despite the fact that to this day not one
protester has been killed by security forces, while far more deadly violence is being directed
at huge protests in empire-aligned nations like Haiti, Chile and Ecuador which have been almost
completely ignored by these same outlets.
This deliberate omission causes a distorted worldview
in casual and mainstream news media consumers in which protests are only happening in nations
that are outside the
US-centralized power alliance . We see the same kind of deliberate distortion-by-omission
with the way mass media continually pushes the
narrative
that Donald Trump is "soft on Russia", while remaining completely silent on the overwhelming
mountain of evidence to the contrary .
The time is now for everyone with a platform to start banging the drum about the OPCW
scandal, because we're seeing more and more signs that the deluge of leaks hemorrhaging from
that organisation is only going to increase. Mainstream propagandists aren't going to cover it,
so if larger alternative media outlets want to avoid being lumped in with them and discredited
in the same sweep it would be wise to start talking about this thing today. It's only going to
get more and more awkward for everyone who chose to remain silent, and more and more validating
for those who spoke out.
"... For one the Ukraine is not fighting "the Russians". The Kiev government is fighting against east-Ukrainians who disagree with the Nazi controlled regime which the U.S. installed after it instigated the unconstitutional Maidan coup. Russia supplies the east-Ukrainians and there were a few Russian volunteers fighting on their side but no Russian military units entered the Ukraine. ..."
"... But aside from that how can anyone truly believe that the Ukraine "fights the Russians so we don't have to fight them here"? Is Russia on the verge of invading the United States? Where? How? And most importantly: What for? How would that be in Russia's interest? ..."
"... And how is it in U.S. interest to give the Ukraine U.S. taxpayer money to buy U.S. weapons? The sole motive behind that idea was greed and corruption , not national interest: ..."
"... To claim that it hurt U.S. national interests is nonsense. ..."
"... It is really no wonder that U.S. foreign policy continuously produces chaos when its practitioners get taught by people like Karlan. In the Middle East as well as elsewhere Russian foreign policy runs circles around U.S. attempts to control the outcome. One reason it can do that is the serious lack of knowledge and realism in U.S. foreign policy thinking. It is itself the outcome of an educational crisis. U.S. 'political science' studies implement a mindset that is unable to objectively recognize the facts and fails to respond to them with realistic concepts. ..."
"... In the meantime Trump is eliminating food stamps for some 700,000 recipients and the Democrats are doing nothing about it. Their majority in the House could have used the time it spent on the impeachment circus to prevent that and other obscenities. ..."
"... The same bs argument about "not fighting the Russians here" was used a couple of weeks ago by another witness, Tim Morrison. This shows you that the hysteria is bipartisan... ..."
"... I don't believe that the so called "Professor's View" is normative for the educated class of Americans. It is the normative view of the Ivy League pseudoeducated individuals that have been placed in leadership positions in the US Goverment and Politics but they are not EDUCATED in any way. Karlan is almost certainly a Jew. She is without a doubt a whore who will do anything for her John as directed by her pimp. ..."
"... Being a brain dead feminist helps her with that role in life. I had an ex wife who fought me post divorce for 10 years trying to destroy me in any way she could. She finally stopped with the Breast Cancer she had for 7 of those years finally killed her. I see the same psychotic, sociopathic and off scall narcissitic behavior in every one of these women in politics and academics today. So don't think that something will get better without a terminal solution. ..."
"... Americans are entranced by the kayfabe (mock combat). Just as in wrestling it is designed to look 'real' but just keeps people engrossed in the action, unable to think of what they are NOT being told. ..."
"... Her delusions are a prerequisite for teaching at an academic level. ..."
"... The military industrial complex is in the people of usa's interest.. they think they benefit from the rayatheons, lockheed martins, boeings and etc - as they have relatives working at these places... the usa is one sick puppy, and Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor is just further proof of this... sorry if someone else said what i did, as i didn't read the comments yet.. ..."
"... The fact that the "papers of record" have become mouthpieces for the CIA/deep state has played a huge role in the brainwashing of academia and the rise of neoliberalism. The false narratives these "trusted sources" of information have been serving up create a very real Matrix, a false reality that is ingrained into those who rely upon them for their daily "news". Karlan is merely repeating what she accepts as truth, garnered from the NY Times and Wash Post, CNN, NPR, etc. ..."
"... The US is dysfunctional on purpose to keep the masses under control and dumbed down/brainwashed ..."
"... BTW, it is totally lost on the entirety of Western establishment that you cannot make Ukraine strong (wouldn't we all love to see strong Ukraine?) while wrecking its economy by encouraging policies like spending 5% of GDP on the military, switching to more expensive energy sources, cutting itself from traditional markets and supplies, replacing with rather worthless "cooperation" agreement with a trading block that is neither particularly interested in trading with Ukraine (Ukraine strongest exports are in surplus within EU) nor inclined to subsidize it (budgets are tights and plenty of recent EU members are in dire needs already) ..."
"... Unfortunately this is endemic in the western world. 'Democracy' seems to consist of dumbing down the population as much as possible, and telling them what they have to think so the self-anointed leaders of society can have their way (both those in front, and behind the scenes). I'm far from certain this is a recipe for success. ..."
"... Russians and Chinese in particular, and BRICS/SCO in general, are showing the way. The countries involved have very different political systems, but they understand that co-operation is much more beneficial than constant conflict. ..."
"... This is a typical example of the stupidity and often dementia of most of the highly educated. Especially those in academia, who exist in a funhouse hall of propagandist and ideological mirrors. But it's true of the educated in the general. I personally know plenty of highly educated people who make themselves more stupid and mentally ill by the day by uncritically reading the NYT and watching CNN. ..."
"... So it's no wonder that an elite Stanford law professor is in practice the exact same stupid, ignorant, deranged yahoo as you could easily find in a trailer park, just with better manners and diction. ..."
"... After all, Karlan's Russia comment would receive enthusiastic thumbs up from at least Biden, Obama, W. Clinton, H. Clinton, Rubio, Klobuchar, Pelosi, Warren, Graham, Buttigieg, Romney, the late McCain, Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis...the list goes on and on. ..."
"... It's even worse than that. The economy will never recover while oligarchs have a stranglehold on economic activity and government. And USA's capitalist dementia ensures that will never change. (The West as a whole is headed in the direction of unabashed oligarchic rule.) ..."
"... Many of the dumbest people I met were university students or graduates. They are thought to absorb information as given, reproduce once, forget. They are not trained to question anything, they follow a narrative. Some even denounced everything they ever learned and became a follower of some religion, which is just another narrative. ..."
"... I've seen Jonathan Turley on TV a number of times. He always seemed to be a person of integrity. One needs to add courage to the list after testifying against impeachment on the presented "evidence". I will be very surprised to see him on PBS or CBS ever again. Their news readers are nearly giddy with excitement about impeachment. They never consider what could happen if Trump is convicted but refuses to leave the White House. Then what? ..."
"... Karlan type of academics is scattered all over the US universities. They are the Academia´s gatekeepers, watching over & "spotting" of our future leaders. the majority of them are claptraps selling jingoism to our youth in order to fulfill the Judeo-Zionist agenda. ..."
"... You hit the nail on the head. Karlan's loyalty is to her tribe, not this nation. That's the crux of almost every major problem and injustice we're suffering from in this country, from private prisons to Wall Street looting to endless foreign wars to censorship. There is one group of people behind it with a very bad track record in terms of how they treat their host nations. I wonder when we will finally get our act together and become the 110th country to expel them. ..."
"... IF Trump is removed from office then the war on Lebanon and Iran would be accelerated. Israel will likely go for all the marbles and annex the last remaining Palestinian holdings. Some here believe this couldn't happen but we all live in bizarro world now. ..."
"... it was obvious (on the video) that Karlan really thought she was (wait for it! It's on the way) landing a very clever bon mot! ..."
"... It is a small thing, yet it speaks volumes about the spirit of this clearly clueless human being (and others of her ilk), and her handlers, who must have cleared this little gotcha for prime time. Been up on the podium too long, bleating to students who can't/don't bleat back! No common sense. ..."
"... As the great wise man, Frank Zappa proclaimed about the USA: "Politics/government is the entertainment division of the Military-Industrial Government." American politics makes much greater sense (and is a hell of a lot more entertaining) if you understand this truism. ..."
During yesterday's impeachment hearing at the House House Judiciary Committee one of the
Democrats' witnesses made some rather crazy statements. Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law
professor, first proved to have bought into
neo-conservative delusions about the U.S. role in the world:
America is not just 'the last best hope,' as Mr. Jefferies said, but it's also the shining
city on a hill. We can't be the shining city on a hill and promote democracy around the world
if we're not promoting it here at home.
As people in Bolivia and elsewhere can attest the United States does not promote democracy.
It promotes rightwing regimes and rogue capitalism. The U.S. is itself
not a democracy but a functional oligarchy as a major Harvard study found:
Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest
groups have little or no independent influence.
But worse than Karlan's pseudo-patriotic propaganda claptrap were her remarks on the Ukraine
and Russia:
This is not just about our national interests to protect elections or make sure Ukraine stays
strong and fights the Russians so we don't have to fight them here , but it's in our national
interest to promote democracy worldwide.
That was not an joke. From the video it certainly seems that
the woman believes that nonsense.
For one the Ukraine is not fighting "the Russians". The Kiev government is fighting against
east-Ukrainians who disagree with the Nazi controlled regime which the U.S. installed after it instigated
the unconstitutional Maidan coup. Russia supplies the east-Ukrainians and there were a few
Russian volunteers fighting on their side but no Russian military units entered the
Ukraine.
But aside from that how can anyone truly believe that the Ukraine "fights the Russians so we
don't have to fight them here"? Is Russia on the verge of invading the United States? Where? How? And most importantly: What
for? How would that be in Russia's interest?
One must be seriously disturbed to believe such nonsense. How can it be that Karlan is
teaching at an academic level when she has such delusions?
And how is it in U.S. interest to give the Ukraine U.S. taxpayer money to buy U.S. weapons?
The sole motive behind that idea was
greed and corruption , not national interest:
[U.S. special envoy to Ukraine] Volker started his job at the State Department in 2017 in an
unusual part-time arrangement that allowed him to continue consulting at BGR, a powerful
lobbying firm that represents Ukraine and the U.S.-based defense firm Raytheon. During his
tenure, Volker advocated for the United States to send Raytheon-manufactured antitank Javelin
missiles to Ukraine -- a decision that made Raytheon millions of dollars.
The missiles are
useless in the conflict . They are
kept near the western border of Ukraine under U.S. control. The U.S. fears that Russia
would hit back elsewhere should the Javelin reach the frontline in the east and get used
against the east-Ukrainians. That Trump shortly held back on some of the money that would have
allowed the Ukrainians to buy more of those missiles thus surely made no difference.
To claim that it hurt U.S. national interests is nonsense.
It is really no wonder that U.S. foreign policy continuously produces chaos when its
practitioners get taught by people like Karlan. In the Middle East as well as elsewhere Russian
foreign policy runs circles around U.S. attempts to control the outcome. One reason it can do
that is the serious lack of knowledge and realism in U.S. foreign policy thinking. It is itself
the outcome of an educational crisis. U.S. 'political science' studies implement a mindset that
is unable to objectively recognize the facts and fails to respond to them with realistic
concepts.
The Democrats are doing themselves no favor by producing delusional and partisan witnesses
who repeat Reaganesque claptrap. They only prove that the whole affair is just an unserious
show trial.
In the meantime Trump is
eliminating food stamps for some 700,000 recipients and the Democrats are doing nothing
about it. Their majority in the House could have used the time it spent on the impeachment
circus to prevent that and other obscenities.
Do the Democrats really believe that their voters will not notice this?
Posted by b on December 5, 2019 at 15:40 UTC |
Permalink
This is the woman that Common Dreams describes as a leading legal scholar.
And maybe she is, it would certainly help explain the current state of the US Judiciary and
the legal system, which reflects internally the utter contempt for law and custom which
characterises US behaviour in international affairs.
The same bs argument about "not fighting the Russians here" was used a couple of weeks ago by
another witness, Tim Morrison. This shows you that the hysteria is bipartisan...
There is a large cohort of Americans who believe every word the professor spoke. Whatever you
and I may think about it the professor's view of the world is normative for the educated
class in America.
Regarding those food stamps, it is actually just a small rule change lowering the
unemployment rate to 6% (from 10%) above which a state can waive the existing work
requirement for single, non-disabled recipients aged 18-49. States can still also waive it if
they deem that job availability is low.
Attributed to Mark Twain. Perhaps the learned professor karlan may affirm: "Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you
with experience."
Budapest has signaled that it will not support Ukraine's bid to join NATO until Kiev
reverses a law that places language restrictions on ethnic Hungarians and other minorities
living in the country.
Legislation that limits the use of Hungarian, Russian, Romanian, and other minority
languages in Ukraine must be repealed before Hungary backs Ukraine's NATO membership,
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Wednesday.
"We ask for no extra rights to Hungarians in Transcarpathia, only those rights they had
before," Szijjarto told Hungarian state media at a NATO summit in London. He alleged that
150,000 ethnic Hungarians living in the region have been "seriously violated" by
Ukraine.[.]
In February, Ukraine's parliament ratified amendments to the constitution which made
NATO membership a key foreign policy objective. However, a number of hurdles still remain
before its membership is likely to be seriously considered. European Commission President
Jean-Claude Juncker predicted in 2016 that it would be 20-25 years before Ukraine would be
able to join NATO and the EU.
I don't believe that the so called "Professor's View" is normative for the educated class of
Americans. It is the normative view of the Ivy League pseudoeducated individuals that have
been placed in leadership positions in the US Goverment and Politics but they are not
EDUCATED in any way. Karlan is almost certainly a Jew. She is without a doubt a whore who
will do anything for her John as directed by her pimp.
Being a brain dead feminist helps her
with that role in life. I had an ex wife who fought me post divorce for 10 years trying to
destroy me in any way she could. She finally stopped with the Breast Cancer she had for 7 of
those years finally killed her. I see the same psychotic, sociopathic and off scall
narcissitic behavior in every one of these women in politics and academics today. So don't
think that something will get better without a terminal solution.
Americans are entranced by the kayfabe (mock combat). Just as in wrestling it is designed to
look 'real' but just keeps people engrossed in the action, unable to think of what they are
NOT being told.
People must free themselves of partisan affiliations that are just levers used to
manipulate them.
The establishment uses Democracy Works! propaganda to give you a false sense of
power and security. But the people are an afterthought in US/Western politics. The
politicians and their Parties work for the money. Much of that money comes from AIPAC, MIC,
and other EMPIRE FIRST organizations that are leading us to WAR.
It's messy and inconvenient but power only responds to power.
The stoopid cult-thinking must stop. This is where it leads: Buffalo
Bishop Resigns Over Sex Abuse Cover-Up . Why do people cling to a corrupt Catholic
Church? It's NOT just a few bad apples!! The pedophilia and cover-ups have been
worldwide and reach into the highest levels of the Church.
This Buffalo Bishop, like dozens of other Bishops in the last decades, lied to cover for
pedophiles and then used the power of his position to remain in his position. His wasn't for
the children or any higher morality but for himself. He will get a nice, peaceful retirement
- paid for by the deluded Catholic flock.
In the meantime Trump is eliminating food stamps for some 700,000 recipients and the
Democrats are doing nothing about it.
The reason for that if very simple: the Democrats agree with Trump on this.It's the same question many ask when studying Roman History for the first time: where were
the legions when the Goths invaded? The answer is that the Goths were the legions, there was
no invasion.
The same logic applies to the Right-Left political spectrum in modern Western Democracies.
"Where are the lefties?" is the modern question the first worlders ask themselves since
2008.
--//--
As for the Pamela Karlan thing, it's an issue I've been commenting on here for some time
now, so I won't repeat everything.
I'll just say again that imbecilization is a completely normal historical phenomenon in
declining empires: the earlier example we have is the Christianization of the Roman Empire
after Marcus Aurelius' death. The rise of Christianity was the messenger of the Crisis of the
Third Century, the historic episode which ended the Roman Empire by giving birth to its
demented form after the Diocletian Reforms.
Empires tend to have a very plastic conception of truth, that is, they believe they can
fabricate reality for the simple reason they are geopolitically dominant.
It's easy to visualize this. The greatest philosopher of the end of the 18th Century and
beginning of the 19th Century was a German, not a British. While Hegel wrote his
proto-revolutionary works which would pave the way to Karl Marx, in UK we had the likes of
Mackinder and Mahan dominating British philosophical thinking. And even then they weren't the
dominant intellectual figures: the UK was the land of accountants and economists, not
philosophers. The reason for this is that neither Hegel nor Marx had any ships to do gunboat
diplomacy in Asia, as the British did.
Empires tend to think and rationalize the world in a much more plastic/practical way than
the periphery. As the old saying goes: the stronger side doesn't need to think before it
acts.
Scroll down the page @ Steven Cheung {VID} on Twitter to watch this exchange where the RATS
are told they are the ones who have abused power.
Professor Jonathan Turley, a lawyer's go-to-Constitutional Expert:
"The Record does not establish corruption in this case - no bribery, no extortion, no
obstruction of justice, no abuse of power."
Trump should include Prof. Turley on his legal team. The RATS have not thought this through to what will unfold in the Senate. A real court
trial; No hearsay and no! no! no! "I was made aware" And the Bidens, Schiff, and Pelosi under cross-examination. And the Whistleblower!!!
I used to think that stupid was a characteristic of the American right. It took Donald Trump
getting elected to see that stupid knows no political borders. Seriously. I thought that
education and progressive thinking also led to a clarity of thought. Boy, was I wrong. The
most pro-war people in the USA seem to be Democrats. Bizarro world.
To "...make sure Ukraine stays strong and fights the Russians so we don't have to fight them
here"
This predates 2003 and stems from the red menace days when it was the communist legions
would behave like a set of dominoes and eventually we (USA) would be fighting them in the
streets of New York etc. Thus it was imperative that they defeat the commies in French
Indo-China despite the fact that they could easily have simply bought the nation by
supporting Uncle Ho who had been working for the OSS during WW2. But no, they had to win
brownie points with the French by bankrolling their effort to retake the nation and when that
didn't work a little "false flag" event employed to keep the ball rolling. I use quotations
because while being false, the Tonkin Gulf event wasn't much of a flag.....
At any rate the fact that both Demublicans AND Republocrats are falling back on such
antiquated rhetoric is bitterly laughable! It can also be seen as an indicator of just how
dumbed down the USAn populace has become. As noted above article, how could anyone think that
the RF would plan much less attempt an attack on the continental US?! A closer look at recent
history has the US and it's poodles surrounding the RF with missile bases, sanctioning and
embargoing the fhaak out it, and generally trying to destroy the nation as a whole with
whatever clandestine methods are available. But hey, take a page from the book of Cheney:
deny everything and make counter accusations.....
thanks b... propaganda is the usa's education... see your breakdown of the nyt articles...
most people don't get this...
The military industrial complex is in the people of usa's interest.. they think they
benefit from the rayatheons, lockheed martins, boeings and etc - as they have relatives
working at these places... the usa is one sick puppy, and Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law
professor is just further proof of this... sorry if someone else said what i did, as i didn't
read the comments yet..
"Throughout her career, Karlan has been an advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court.[10] She
was mentioned as a potential candidate to replace Supreme Court Justice David Souter when he
retired in 2009.[11]
Personal life
Karlan told Politico in 2009, "It's no secret at all that I'm counted among the LGBT
crowd".[12] She has described herself as an example of a "snarky, bisexual, Jewish
women".[13] Her partner is writer Viola Canales.[14]
she is not an American women apparently.. she is a Jewish women.. oh well, lol...
The fact that the "papers of record" have become mouthpieces for the CIA/deep state has
played a huge role in the brainwashing of academia and the rise of neoliberalism. The false
narratives these "trusted sources" of information have been serving up create a very real
Matrix, a false reality that is ingrained into those who rely upon them for their daily
"news". Karlan is merely repeating what she accepts as truth, garnered from the NY Times and
Wash Post, CNN, NPR, etc.
Believe me, even here in the red states, you won't find a hell of a lot of faculty members
at large universities who are Trump supporters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsL6mKxtOlQ
What I find absent in most discussions about impeachment of Trump is the 800 pound gorilla -
what will happen to the US if against all odds, Trump gets impeached. Could the US survive
that cataclysmic event or would it rip the empire apart?
What contingency plans does everybody make for that unlikely, but not impossible singularity?
"In the meantime Trump is eliminating food stamps for some 700,000 recipients and the
Democrats are doing nothing about it. Their majority in the House could have used the time it
spent on the impeachment circus to prevent that and other obscenities."
That's why it's called bread and circus. The loot and pillage party's two separate funding
arms get their funding and privilege from the same sociopath/psychopaths who operate the mass
murder for profit economy we now live in.
They will continue the slaughter until the enforcers within society finally understand
they work for criminally insane cultists who will never have enough money, power, and
prestige.
I see that distrust to everything that is good and decent is extended to law professors.
Stanford is a short (if sometimes slow) ride from Berkeley that has a more famous professor
in its own law school (Wiki):[you know
John Choon Yoo (born July 10, 1967)[4] is a Korean-American attorney, law professor,
former government official, and author. Yoo is currently the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of
Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.[1] Previously, he served as the
Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) of the Department
of Justice, during the George W. Bush administration.
He is best known for his opinions concerning the Geneva Conventions that attempted to
legitimize the Bush administration's War on Terror. He also authored the so-called Torture
Memos, which provided a legal rationale for so-called [you know what]
=====
First, they torture logic... The ignorants who could not tell tollens from a toilet brush
would not even know what to twist, hence the need for professors.
"The U.S. is itself not a democracy but a functional oligarchy as a major Harvard study
found:"
My only quibble with another great post is the assertion that the US is functional.
Functional would mean it had supportive infrastructure but instead we have homeless
shitting in the street because they are driven out of the parks to do so and they must be bad
people that don't deserve public toilets.
Functional would mean, as Jackrabbit linked to above, and a I i did a few hours ago in the
Weekly Open Thread, that there wouldn't be 117 sexually abusive Catholic priests in the
Buffalo NY area doing the same thing as Epstein was doing to his clients.
Functional would mean we would not have the blatant hypocrisy Chervus quoted from the
posting above
"To "...make sure Ukraine stays strong and fights the Russians so we don't have to fight them
here"
I agree with Chervus that this is same BS that got us the Iron Curtain with Russia after WWII
because they wanted Godless communism instead of global private finance. And also, as I
ranted recently in the Open Thread, this gave us the 1950's change to the US Motto to In God
We Trust which gets back to the control of the obfuscatory/hypocrisy narrative telling us
that the private finance cult are doing God's work and that "competition is good/sharing is
bad"
The US is dysfunctional on purpose to keep the masses under control and dumbed
down/brainwashed
Ha! More connections to Stanford:
"Ancient Logic: Forerunners of Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens". Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
BTW, it is totally lost on the entirety of Western establishment that you cannot make
Ukraine strong (wouldn't we all love to see strong Ukraine?) while wrecking its economy by
encouraging policies like spending 5% of GDP on the military, switching to more expensive energy sources, cutting itself from traditional markets and supplies, replacing with rather worthless
"cooperation" agreement with a trading block that is neither particularly interested in
trading with Ukraine (Ukraine strongest exports are in surplus within EU) nor inclined to
subsidize it (budgets are tights and plenty of recent EU members are in dire needs
already)
I think it's tragic that that creatures like Karlan are not simply seen as the blatant bigots
and Nazi's that they are. You have to be wearing a large set of blinkers not to be able to
see that.
Unfortunately this is endemic in the western world. 'Democracy' seems to consist of
dumbing down the population as much as possible, and telling them what they have to think so
the self-anointed leaders of society can have their way (both those in front, and behind the
scenes). I'm far from certain this is a recipe for success.
The biggest tragedy is that Americans seem to think that the only way to succeed is to
tear down any other country that isn't essentially a puppet government, necessarily defining
them as 'enemies', and therefore someone/thing that must be hated and destroyed, by any
means, fair or foul.
Russians and Chinese in particular, and BRICS/SCO in general, are showing the way. The
countries involved have very different political systems, but they understand that
co-operation is much more beneficial than constant conflict. Unless, of course, a quarter of
your government tax income is dedicated to supporting an amazingly corrupt
Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex.
Trump supporters approve of cutting food stamps. The majority of Democratic Party politicians
approve of cutting food stamps. Both parties agree times are good and the future is rosy. The
only thing they disagree on is foreign policy. The guy who couldn't even win the election
(and merely fluked in on a technicality that undermines all progress since 1788,) refuses to
play by the rules on foreign policy. And he is not justified by success, not in any terms,
not in making peace, not in winning, not in anything. The only people who are upset about
impeaching Trump are Trump lovers and cranks who think being president is like being elected
God and no one but sinners can defy Him.
The Trump supporters were going to turn out for him anyway, barring an economic crisis
even they couldn't ignore. Impeachment has no downside so long as it is from the right, and
doesn't rile up the rich people. Except the rich donors are leaving the Democratic Party
anyway. The strategy for a nicey-nice campaign that leaves enough Trump voters soothed enough
to sit it out has one enormous defect: Trump was not elected by the people anyhow.
But the Democratic Party politicians are anti-Communist, which means pro-Fascist, so yes,
they do see this as (im)moral principles to die for, though they hope to politically kill for
it. Their problem is, Trump is also anti-Communist and pro-Fascist, which everyone knows,
which means Trump was merely his office for campaigning. That may be hypocritical and a
violation of campaign laws. But in the eyes even of the anti-Communist/pro-Fascist population
missiles for Ukrainian fascists with strings or without strings is merely a tactical
disagreement. Even worse, the president breaking laws is perceived as strong leadership,
smashing the machine, getting rid of those awful politicians and their oppressive
government.
This is a typical example of the stupidity and often dementia of most of the highly educated.
Especially those in academia, who exist in a funhouse hall of propagandist and ideological
mirrors. But it's true of the educated in the general. I personally know plenty of highly
educated people who make themselves more stupid and mentally ill by the day by uncritically
reading the NYT and watching CNN.
I don't know why anyone would expect anything different. All system schooling at whatever
level boils down to the same two goals:
Instill the basic literacy necessary for a given cog position within the hierarchy.
Instill obedience to authority, including indoctrination into its ideology.
From kindergarten to grad school these are the same; whether one's being trained to pump
gas or to assume a high position in the corporate world/government/academia these are the
same.
So it's no wonder that an elite Stanford law professor is in practice the exact same
stupid, ignorant, deranged yahoo as you could easily find in a trailer park, just with better
manners and diction.
"One must be seriously disturbed to believe such nonsense. How can it be that Karlan is
teaching at an academic level when she has such delusions?"
I assume this question was meant rhetorically. After all, Karlan's Russia comment would
receive enthusiastic thumbs up from at least Biden, Obama, W. Clinton, H. Clinton, Rubio,
Klobuchar, Pelosi, Warren, Graham, Buttigieg, Romney, the late McCain, Pompeo, Bolton,
Mattis...the list goes on and on.
For a related, institutionalized, revolting example packaging multiple instances of such
delusional thought, see "russias-dead-end-diplomacy-syria"
. Have a pail nearby to catch the spew.
"The guy who couldn't even win the election (and merely fluked in on a technicality that
undermines all progress since 1788,)"
I don't think you ever answered when I asked you last time: Are you saying you think Hillary was so stupid she didn't know about the electoral
college, and that it was electoral votes she had to fight for, not popular ones? Because if you're not saying that, then nothing is changed: Trump beat Hillary in the
electoral fight they were both trying to win. It's pure nonsense to babble about
"technicalities".
And if any significant Democrat faction was saying throughout 2016, and not just after the
election, that the election should NOT be about electoral votes, please direct me to where
and when they were saying that, because I don't recall ever hearing it. And I think the
reason I never heard it was because the Dems were so smugly sure of electoral college
victory. And if Hillary had won, we never would've heard a word from you or anyone else about
the electoral college.
it is totally lost on the entirety of Western establishment that you cannot make Ukraine
strong while wrecking its economy
It's even worse than that. The economy will never recover while oligarchs have a stranglehold
on economic activity and government. And USA's capitalist dementia ensures that will never
change. (The West as a whole is headed in the direction of unabashed oligarchic rule.)
Why would anyone invest in Ukraine? Sometimes I think Putin was happy for the Western coup to succeed and simply planned to
keep the best parts.
But do they really believe what they (the mid-level elites) say or is it all some kind of
theater of the increasingly absurd? I am never clear on who among the narrative managers is
sincere and who is simply acting sincere. Are people like this woman or the Bellingcat
narrative managers or any of their numerous colleagues in their mid-level narrative
management positions occupying their positions simply due to their acting abilities? They
seem to be both delusional and ill-informed. When these people get together at their
conferences and dinner parties, does the mask come off?
casey @31: When these people get together ... does the mask come off?
I doubt it. They have convinced themselves that they are right and/or are following the
wishes of people who are right-thinking. In USA, most people are brainwashed to assume that
people with lots of money are right-thinking (as in: they must be doing something
right!).
Upton Sinclair:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not
understanding it.
Upton Sinclair self-published a book in 1922 about education in America entitled Goose
Step . Predating the infamous era of the Nazi/Fascist Goose Stepping thugs then armies, I
read a preview and found an inexpensive copy. The subject as might be assumed was about the
use of school systems to indoctrinate young Americans at all educational levels and
nationwide to conform to the views of the rather few wealthy people who sat on interlocking
boards that controlled curriculum--sort of like the oligarchic control over media today.
And
as we've seen with the study of political-economy, the ability to erase rather recent
developments and personages and inserting false doctrines and their priests was done rather
easily and with little noted protest. And so it's gone on down through the decades until
today--just look at the War Criminals hired by Stanford and other universities for proof of
its being an ongoing problem.
That ideological blinders are omnipresent is easily proven by the various defense planning
documents referenced here over the last several years, all of which relate to the unilateral,
might makes right mindset that's one of the Evil Outlaw US Empire's longstanding traits that
predates the 20th Century. Too many will never learn humility and the reality accompanying it
until it's enforced. But there's a wiser group residing within the Empire, some of us present
at this bar ready to deal with the mess once humpty-dumpty falls from its perch upon which
it's currently tottering.
I just looked up Pamala Karlan. Apparently there is a story that when she was a baby she was
so ugly her parents had to put shutters on her pram.
She claims to have a partner? There's no accounting for taste I suppose but even for a U.S.
citizen there must be a red line. Somewhere? someone!
As to her intellectual prowess, in my limited understanding, intellect depends on the
platform it rests upon. Put a Jaguar engine into a Mobility scooter and see how well that
performs. Plenty of power but no means of utilising it.
Logical mechanisms such as law require as little emotion as possible. People like her just
bring the demise of a great nation into action sooner rather than later.
I suppose we should be grateful such fools consider Russia an adversary, it's makes
predicting what comes next much more clear and succinct action can be instigated.
Professor Pamela Karlan. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
@29 russ...steven is making himself look like a fool regularly with that crap.. oh well..
@36 really? yes, indeed.. same faulty logic one would expect from a stanford law prof.. as
@22 piotr rightly notes - john yoo, the freak who could make torture in abu graib okay is
another one cut from the very same cloth..
i see one of Pamela Karlans comments got the ire of melania trump.. article
here..
"The Constitution states that there can be no titles of nobility. So while the president
can name his son Barron, he can't MAKE him a baron." Pamela S. Karlan
"A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics. Pamela Karlan, you
should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child
to do it." -- Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) December 4, 2019
Karlan apologized for her remark as the hearing continued late Wednesday. "It was wrong of
me to do that,'' she said, according to the Associated Press. "I do regret it."
Universally accepted fact among the devoted is that "America is fighting Russia in the
Ukraine", though there are exactly zero confirmed reports of Russian troops in the region in
the past five years.
Many of the dumbest people I met were university students or graduates. They are thought to
absorb information as given, reproduce once, forget. They are not trained to question
anything, they follow a narrative. Some even denounced everything they ever learned and
became a follower of some religion, which is just another narrative.
I remember one student dorm in particular. Someone came in and decided it was too warm.
Put the central heating thermostat on "arctic winter", opened all doors and windows while it
was freezing outside. Then someone else came in and decided it was cold, closed all doors and
windows, put the thermostat on "incinerate". Repeat 24/7. The few times I tried to explain
how a thermostat works, I felt like being rubbed out of existence.
Only one guy understood that you set a room thermostat at a comfortable level and it would
regulate to desired temperature. He was an alcoholic, always stoned up to his eyeballs, not a
student except for the 3 or 4 studies he briefly tried and failed, and had given up on life
in general. He was also the only one there who questioned things.
I've seen Jonathan Turley on TV a number of times. He always seemed to be a person of
integrity. One needs to add courage to the list after testifying against impeachment on the
presented "evidence". I will be very surprised to see him on PBS or CBS ever again. Their
news readers are nearly giddy with excitement about impeachment. They never consider what
could happen if Trump is convicted but refuses to leave the White House. Then what?
---------
The food stamp program changes will kill people. As intended. One of the most affected groups
will be people who are too sick or otherwise too impaired to work, and maybe unable to even
leave their home, but still can't get social support. The system says there is no problem
because desperate people can get a free meal on Thanksgiving and Christmas. For the other 363
days a year, go find a dumpster to dive in.
Almost all Social Security Disability applicants are denied on the initial application.
There are no interim payments or support of any kind. Many give up, as intended. The rest
file appeals and wait years for a hearing before an "administrative law judge", who is not a
"real" judge, but just some lawyer with fancy title.
ALJ decisions tend to be rather arbitrary, so a favorable decision depends on which ALJ
hears a case. Sure there are more levels to appeal, and many more years of no social support,
if an applicant can find a way to survive for years on zero income, all the while being sick
with probably no medical care.
Social Security and disability lawyers have colluded to keep lawyers in business. Social
Security requires the use of a standard contract that gives the lawyer a fixed percentage of
the retroactive benefits. "Retroactive benefits" are the regular monthly benefits that accrue
from the officially determined "date of disability". So if it takes three years to get
benefits, the lawyer gets a nice chunk of change for a few hours work writing a brief and
showing up for the hearing.
The lawyer who signed my contract did nothing to help my case, and he even hired someone
else to write the brief and attend the hearing. One wonders if ALJs get some benefit from
lawyers to encourage long wait times, since long wait times increase lawyer profits at zero
cost.
The US system really is that cruel and barbaric. It would be kinder to take us out back
and shoot us, but that's too obvious. Much better to let people die slowly in the shadows so
the rest of society doesn't have to see us.
And I'm one of the fortunates who managed to hang on, despite bankruptcy, a civil suit,
the disability benefits process (only took six years), and state attempts to revoke Medicaid,
all at the same time. I know it sounds melodramatic, made up, or at least exaggerated. That's
understandable, because it seems that way to me, too!
About 1000 people a week kill themselves in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
Does anyone wonder why, or even notice? The reason for many of these deaths is the lack of
social supports. In Uncle Sam Land, social apoptosis is a feature, not a bug.
Russ@29 forgot the comments where I've reviewed exactly how everybody rejected the Electoral
College, holding legitimacy came from winning the real election. Until Gore, every time the
EC violated the expectation that it was a technical way of recording the popular vote, there
was justified outrage. Bush's camp in 2000 had plans to contest an EC loss, until that shoe
turned out to be on the other foot. If Trump had won the popular vote and lost the Electoral
College, he would no more accept the results. Only liars take refuge in the simplistic
legalisms. And only Trump ass-lickers are so contemptible as to pretend Trump was the stable
genius who outplayed Clinton in the real game. Trump had no more idea how to win the EC
without winning the popular vote than anyone else. Further, by the witless pretended
principles of Russ' ilk, a presidential candidate who managed to win faithless electors who
ignored even their own states' pluralities* would still be the legitimate president! Every
single defender of Trump the one legitimate president is witless and worthless.
But very likely the real objection to the response is the insistence that Trump isn't
magically guaranteed re-election because...well, the real reason is slavish devotion to a God
named Trump. Even with the advantage of incumbency this time around, with even more support
from the wealthy (the people who have really turned away from the Democratic Party to favor
political gangsterism,) Trump is likely to lose the election again. If I were in Congress I
would offer a compromise, where the Republicans were assured Trump would not be investigated
any more, much less impeached, for abolition of the Electoral College. But I think Trump
would say no, because he knows deep down he's a loser.
*US politicians rarely win majorities of the electorate. Politicians of all stripes have
agreed that non-voting is always to be deemed as "Satisfied" with either choice instead of
"Alienated, with no choice." Decent people suspect otherwise.
@38 Karloff1 You can still Read the late John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of
American Education online. He did a great job highlighting the history and purpose of copying
the Prussian style of education to replace the one room school houses and instill the
"martial spirit" in the American public. I have to hand it to the Oligarchs of old too. They
were very effective in their implementation.
Karlan type of academics is scattered all over the US universities. They are the
Academia´s gatekeepers, watching over & "spotting" of our future leaders. the
majority of them are claptraps selling jingoism to our youth in order to fulfill the
Judeo-Zionist agenda.
John Taylor Gatto, former New York City and New York State teacher of the year, stated:
The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders; and
John Holt concluded, School is a place where children learn to be stupid . . . Children
come to school curious; within a few years most of that curiosity is dead, or at least
silent.
I recall when I was a student at the University of Technology, Sydney, way back in the
Mesozoic era (1980s), the economics dept there had a lecturer there with a Harvard University
background so the staff made him head of the department. Just because he had a Harvard
University PhD. He was hardly a great administrator and the subjects he taught (compared with
other lecturers' subjects) were much less structured. Of course this meant the courses he
taught were easier on students' time and energy, though if you made use of the opportunity a
less structured course gave, you could turn in an end-of-term essay with impressive research
equivalent to the level required of a post-grad.
The university also had an exchange program with the University of Oregon, and most of the
Oregon students who came to UTS (usually in their second or third year) found the UTS
coursework very heavy-going and difficult.
In those days, UTS was only supposed to be a second-tier university in Australia.
This hearing is a theatre performance (kabuki -- hey, I learned a new
word, thanks) and PK's lines are an invocation of the official US myth
(the shinning city on the hill, the exceptional, indispensible
nation). No one in the room took that seriously or literally
(especially PK herself) and IMHO these national myths are not really
anything to freak out about - every nation has got its myth, and this is
an arrogant one, but compared to a few others it's almost likeable.
Of course it is at odds with historical records and the reality, but
all of them are, because, frankly, the truth, being descendants of
genocidal, religious nutters and slavers, is apparently very
motivational -- in the KSA...
The RU/UK lines are slightly more worrisome, but that's just a
matching background for her story - the fluff. She doesn't have to
belive it - it's just a performance, an elegant one but meaningless in the end.
A lot of the visitors comment about the deep state, most of the time
mentioning three letter agencies. Here comes a piece about a four
letters one, acting more or less in the plain sight:
OIRA, E.O.
12866
A group of virtually anonymous, unaccountable people wields quite
considerable power over both legislative and executive. A very
interesting construction...
Posted by: nietzsche1510 | Dec 5 2019 21:03 utc | 65
You hit the nail on the head. Karlan's loyalty is to her tribe, not this nation. That's
the crux of almost every major problem and injustice we're suffering from in this country,
from private prisons to Wall Street looting to endless foreign wars to censorship. There is
one group of people behind it with a very bad track record in terms of how they treat their
host nations. I wonder when we will finally get our act together and become the 110th country
to expel them.
And Goldhoarder, while you may not mind how your posts look, you've managed to damage this
comment thread and until b deletes your poorly structured post, we all suffer for it.
@ Posted by: Lochearn | Dec 5 2019 21:51 utc | 72 who seems to disagree with my concept
"dysfunctional on purpose"
and wants to use decadence instead and wrote:
"
Surely there must be some functionality
to be able to keep the masses dumbed down/brainwashed; it implies some sort of thought out
strategy.
How do we get the same narrative trotted out in media in exactly the same format from LA to
Warsaw,
from Lima to Bangalore if it's all so dysfunctional?
"
I posit that strategy of "dysfunctional on purpose" is control of the narrative and
language and it is purposefully used.
Consider the current seeming understanding of the terms, socialism and capitalism by many
of your fellow barflies.
Many of our fellow barflies would have one believe that China is socialist and the West is
capitalist...exclusively.
I and a few others keep trying to point out that both China and the West are, to varying
degrees mixed economies,
including aspects of both socialism and capitalism
Consider the implicit definition of government if you will. Is government, as compared to
dictatorships, not explicitly socialistic?
Are not the provision of water, sewage treatment and in many case electricity explicitly
socialistic by definition?
Is it not dumbing down and brainwashing that many don't understand reality but spout the
words and concepts they are fed
by those in control of the narrative and media pushing it?
And, not to make too fine a point of it, does all of the West not live under the
dictatorship of global private finance at this time?
So how much more would I get ignored if I beat that drum as part of my comments here?
IF Trump is removed from office then the war on Lebanon and Iran would be
accelerated. Israel will likely go for all the marbles and annex the last remaining
Palestinian holdings. Some here believe this couldn't happen but we all live in bizarro world
now.
Also, don't expect the Electoral College to oust Pence after the general election since
he's more pro-war; even the electors from Democrat controlled states would support him. IMHO,
the US would continue on; business as usual.
However, if the Democrats are crazy enough to follow through, the Republican dominated
Senate would reject it. Basically a repeat of what happened to Clinton. In the end, nothing
changed.
""It was wrong of me to do that,'' she said, according to the Associated Press. "I do
regret it.""
Ya but . . .as Tucker Carlson spot-on reacted, that comment sure looked as though it had
been rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror. It was sooooo lame!!! I mean, it was obvious
(on the video) that Karlan really thought she was (wait for it! It's on the way) landing a
very clever bon mot!
It is a small thing, yet it speaks volumes about the spirit of this clearly clueless human
being (and others of her ilk), and her handlers, who must have cleared this little gotcha for
prime time. Been up on the podium too long, bleating to students who can't/don't bleat back!
No common sense.
Never a connection with a child, I'll bet, or she could never have said such a thing.
Painful to look at the pinched little face, decent hairdo missing in action, with the rant
coming out of the tight little mouth. A pathetic individual.
Ditto Noah Feldman from the Felix Frankfurter Dept of the Harvard Law School: Pure
bloviation with skin like a baby's bottom. Better coiffed, actually, than Karlan. Quels
types!!!
My comment @ 67 was actually just to highlight the (most undeserved) reputations that
places like Harvard and Stanford have among certain faculties in Australian universities. In
those days Stanford, Harvard and MIT were the holiest of holy shrines to do business studies
/ economics degrees. Years later I read a book by someone who actually did do a Stanford MBA
and the scales fell from my eyes then. The work was similar to what I'd done as an
undergraduate (albeit collapsed in the space of 18 months; I had the luxury of doing
part-time and then going full-time as a student).
I should have added that the Harvard PhD guy who taught me comparative economics was a
lousy teacher as well as a lousy administrator. I visited his office once and it looked as if
a tornado had just hit it. To be fair though, he really wasn't cut out to be a lecturer, he
was much better at research and analysis.
Before he became a lecturer, he worked at the CIA as a researcher. He knew next to no
German (he was of Polish background) so he was assigned to the section to read East German
newspapers. A fellow he knew who could speak and read German but no Bulgarian was assigned to
the ... Bulgarian section. That experience must account for my lecturer's sloppy personal
style.
But now that you draw my attention to the link, yes you are right that the study was done
at Princeton University.
Why do you assume a technical illiterate could read those instructions? I can't even begin
to do anything with that. It is never simple enough for those who have not been
initiated.
HTML works by magic. Your instructions do not convince me otherwise.
Better solution is to forgo links altogether if not competent. Or spell out the link and
force the really interested to transcribe. Of course no one is going to go to effort of
spelling out a link as long as that one above. Which would be a good thing.
She's been gone some time now (she died in April 2018) but Karen Dawisha , a so-called expert on
Russian and post-Soviet politics who obtained a higher degree at the London School of
Economics, was another deluded academic twat who wrote the book "Putin's Kleptocracy: Who
Owns Russia?"
The 1-star, 2-star and 3-star reviews on Amazon.com of the book refer to the tabloid
quality of many of the claims in the book, poor sourcing, cherry-picking of facts and the
author's inability to write at a level that would attract a readership outside the academic
community.
The least we can say for her is that she is no longer in a position to, erm, "advise" the
US and UK governments on issues and help formulate policy that would backfire on Washington
and London anyway.
As the great wise man, Frank Zappa proclaimed about the USA: "Politics/government is the entertainment division of the Military-Industrial
Government." American politics makes much greater sense (and is a hell of a lot more entertaining) if
you understand this truism.
US Presidential Debates and impeachment hearings are a swell occasion for drinking
games. Every time a political hack, media shill, or academic invokes some variant of American
Exceptionalism, take a shot of your favorite alcoholic beverage. You will be drunk within half an hour--guaranteed!
I'd say unbelievable but I know that is only wishful thinking on my part. What's scary is
that these people populate the "educational" system which explains why we're as screwed as we
are.
"... When Bush and his allies used this rhetoric, they were trying to spin a war of aggression as an act of self-defense. Now it is part of an even more ludicrous effort to make supplying weapons and other military assistance to Ukraine seem as if it is vitally important to the U.S. Simply put, this is propaganda, and it isn't even very good propaganda at that. ..."
"... Obviously, we aren't going to be fighting the Russians "here" no matter what happens in this conflict. These are the sorts of irrational claims that we get after decades of irresponsible threat inflation and mistakenly assuming that every conflict in the world is somehow our business. ..."
Here is a congealing conventional wisdom around sending military assistance to Ukraine that
is as absurd as can be, and it cropped up again this morning:
"Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" was extremely stupid when
applied to terrorism. It is much more stupid when applied to Russia, and shows how
impoverished the FP thinking of even bright, engaged Americans is. My goodness.
It is discouraging to see that one of the dumbest talking points from the Bush era has
returned. "Fight them there" was always a silly justification for waging unnecessary wars in
other countries, and now it is being repurposed to justify the questionable policy of throwing
weapons at a conflict in Europe. When it was used in the context of Bush-era wars, it was an
attempt to make what were clearly wars of choice seem as though they were unavoidable. When a
government needs to defend a bad policy, it will usually claim that they have no choice but to
do what they are doing.
When Bush and his allies used this rhetoric, they were trying to spin a
war of aggression as an act of self-defense. Now it is part of an even more ludicrous effort to
make supplying weapons and other military assistance to Ukraine seem as if it is vitally
important to the U.S. Simply put, this is propaganda, and it isn't even very good propaganda at
that.
I have written many times why I think it is a mistake to arm Ukraine. It just encourages
escalation at worst and the prolongation of the conflict at best. Until recently, the arguments
in favor of doing this have not been very compelling, but at least they weren't quite so
mindless. Needless to say, Russia's conflict with Ukraine is a local one, and the U.S. doesn't
have much at stake in that conflict. Ukrainians aren't fighting Russia and its proxies on our
behalf or to prevent them from attacking someone else, but for the sake of their own country.
If Russia hawks insist on providing Ukraine with weapons and other assistance, they should at
least be able to acknowledge that this is a peripheral interest of the United States.
Exaggerating the importance of this policy to U.S. security just calls attention to how little
it matters to U.S. security.
Obviously, we aren't going to be fighting the Russians "here" no matter what happens in this
conflict. These are the sorts of irrational claims that we get after decades of irresponsible
threat inflation and mistakenly assuming that every conflict in the world is somehow our
business.
Never in the history of America, probably never in the history of any country, had there
been such open and direct control of governmental activities by the very rich. So long as a
handful of men in Wall Street control the credit and industrial processes of the country, they
will continue to control the press, the government, and, by deception, the people. They will
not only compel the public to work for them in peace, but to fight for them in war. -- John
Turner, 1922
Calling Trump 'Putin's boy' brings up coup tactics used by Birchers when Truman fired
MacArthur!
Brookings tools (Mr. Vindman (I have silver leaves Vindman does not fit) , Fiona Hill,
Holmes eavesdropping....) pleading to Schiff that Trump ain't their kind of 'Murekan empire
builder.
Making up "charges", hearsay evidence, hiding DNC US #resistance corruption, despise the
constitution, hide behind it and patriotism...... define democracy and who is 'patriotic'.
All the trappings of Mao and Hitler before they took over.
"...Making up 'charges', hearsay evidence, hiding DNC US #resistance corruption, despise the
constitution, hide behind it and patriotism...... define democracy and who is 'patriotic'.
All the trappings of Mao and Hitler before they took over."
[Funny (NOT) that they say the same thing about Trump. Your adversaries and yourself would
all make better lampshades or bars of soap than you do citizens.
Democracy has never been more than an illusion, sometimes just an allusion, particularly
though in modern republican times. Leaders have all too rarely been patriotic aside from
maybe George Washington, who largely despised the representative government that he had made.
TJ did not exactly fall in love with the US Congress either. In these times the political
class and their pet sycophants are more idiotic than patriotic.]
One bone: the coup #resistance despises the "office of the president" more than they (swamp
trolls like Schiff's tool Vindman) disdain deplorables and the US constitution.
It is a constitutional thingie in my view going back to the Henry Luce media and
Birchers/McCarthy (the ragings over "who lost Chiang's fiefdom in China?") going after anyone
who they described wrongfully in most cases as "subversives".
I believe that Washington was like Ike as to taking up the executive office.
"Eric Foner" in an effort to unearth this buried history
Calls Congressional Reconstruction
A second founding of the Republic
Reconstruction like the New Deal
Ended by producing its opposite
[ Please be careful in spelling names, and set down where the specific reference is. This
will be important, if a reference is set down. Also, further explanation when possible would
be helpful. ]
I doubt that it was imagination that characterized Joe McCarthy's behavior, but with friend
kurt then imagination appears to be in full blossom. Joe McCarthy was just an opportunistic
scoundrel crassly impersonating a concerned patriot as a pure political convenience for
attacking the left in general with specific intentions on casting a specter of fear over all
New Deal loyalists. He weaponized socialist sympathizers against FDR's legacy. Remember that
it was socialist sentiments that gave rise to FDR and his New Deal. It seemed only fair to
Joe that those same sentiments be used to cover FDR in his grave.
"... Charges of anti-Semitism against Corbyn are highly suspect. From what I can see, they all stem from Corbyn's remarks supporting Palestinian rights in the face of the Israeli government's institutionalized racism and oppression of Palestinians. ..."
"... Yes. This is clearly one of the most dirty tricks played by UK Israel lobby, if we talk about Corbin. Baseless charge of anti-Semitism became a political smear, the way to destroy political opponent. ..."
Charges of anti-Semitism against Corbyn are highly suspect. From what I can see, they all
stem from Corbyn's remarks supporting Palestinian rights in the face of the Israeli
government's institutionalized racism and oppression of Palestinians.
If Bernie were not Jewish, there would have been an enormous smear campaign against him
for exactly the same reasons.
Charges of anti-Semitism against Corbyn are highly suspect. From what I can see, they
all stem from Corbyn's remarks supporting Palestinian rights in the face of the Israeli
government's institutionalized racism and oppression of Palestinians.
Yes. This is clearly one of the most dirty tricks played by UK Israel lobby, if we talk
about Corbin. Baseless charge of anti-Semitism became a political smear, the way to destroy
political opponent.
Much like charge of "Putin stooge" in the USA. And Russophobia is very similar to
Anti-Semitism, if you think about it. It serves as a kind of politically correct
anti-Semitism.
Stephen Cohen (one of the few pundits who actually knows something about Russia:)
"Almost daily for three years, Democrats and their media have told us very bad things
about Donald Trump's life, character, and presidency. Some of them are true. But in the
process, we have also learned some lamentable, even alarming, things about the Democratic
Party establishment, including self-professed liberals. Consider the following:
The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic
attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia
attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an
"attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. But there was no "attack"
in 2016, only, as I have previously explained, ritualistic "meddling" of the kind that both
Russia and America have undertaken in the other's elections for decades. Little can be more
phobic than the allegation or belief that one has been "attacked by a hostile" entity. And
yet this myth and its false narrative persist in the Democratic Party's discourse,
campaigning, and fund-raising.
We have also learned that the heads of America's intelligence agencies under President
Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of National
Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential candidacy
and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. Early on, I termed this operation
"Intelgate," and it has since been well documented by other writers, including Lee Smith in
his new book. Intel officials did so in tacit alliance with certain leading, and equally
Russophobic, members of the Democratic Party, which had once opposed such transgressions.
This may be the most alarming revelation of the Trump years: Trump will leave power, but
these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain.
We also learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream "free press" cannot be
fully trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. Indeed, what the mainstream media --
leading national newspapers and two cable news networks, in particular -- chose to cover and
report, and chose not to cover and report, made the abuses and consequences of Russiagate
allegations possible. Even now, exceedingly influential publications such as The New York
Times seem eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William Barr and his
appointed special investigator John Durham into the origins of Russiagate. Barr's critics
accuse him of fabricating a "conspiracy theory" on behalf of Trump. But the real, or
grandest, conspiracy theory was the Russiagate allegation of "collusion" between Trump and
the Kremlin, an accusation that was -- or should have been -- discredited by the Robert
Mueller report.
And we have learned, or should have learned, that for all the talk by Democrats about
Trump as a danger to US national security, it is their Russiagate allegations that truly
endanger it. Consider two examples. Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can elude US
missile-defense systems, make new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative and
urgent. If only for the sake of his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so.But even if he
is able to, will Trump be entrusted enough to conduct negotiations as successfully as did his
predecessors in the White House, given the "Putin puppet" and "Kremlin stooge" accusations
still being directed at him?" https://www.thenation.com/article/inconvenient-truths-2/
The Russia thingie/falsehoods are part of corrupt demrats assault on the US constitution.
They are even now predicting their loss in 2020 due to "interference" and people wanting to
know how corrupt the DNC [front running] select has been!
Demrat allies in the shadow revolving door government of neocon humbug factories are
denouncing Trump for his ignoring their war mongering imperial objects.
[Adding assault to injury? The US Constitution was damning enough on its own. What are
they thinking inside the deep state apparatus? Don't they know that power and privilege is
reserved for holders of wealth by the US Constitution? Who do they think that they are really
working for?]
Friend ilsm may be less nuts than it appears, but friend ilsm is not less incomprehensible
than it appears. Would it be out of place to thank you for ilsm's sake?
Our two-party system was largely useless after FDR, but our two-party system has been
largely destructive since 1968. Let me know if anything really changes.
It isn't our two party system - it is one of the two parties contained within. The "both
sides" are bad is both demonstrably not accurate (with some exceptions that prove the rule)
and requires ignoring the shattered norms of the last 10 years that came from only one side.
Mitch McConnell is the most dangerous person in America. Trump and Pence are just useful
idiots. But Trump is also corrupt and dangerous because he doesn't believe he is constrained
by anything. And Mitch keeps proving him right.
The cause goes back as far as Truman with roots all the way back to our nation's founding on
the shoulders of slaves and a trail of tears, but "the shattered norms of the last 10 years
that came from only one side" were the inevitable effect of a failed political system. When
the US government has no obvious external enemies and imminent threats then it must
manufacture them from within to maintain a meaningful commanding presence. Otherwise the
government would be tasked with solving our nation's social and economic problems, which
would be both costly and far too complicated for simple self-absorbed minds.
I disagree. What the problem is now is that non-whites and women have taken some power - and
in fact may be able to displace the white christian patriarchy (actually, I think as long as
we can hang onto a free and fair democracy this is inevitable) and the white christian
patriarchy is trying to rule from the minority via fascism and authoritarianism.
I could almost understand this obsession had you never left Indiana, presumably Indianapolis
or somewhere similar, but unlikely Gary. There is greater diversity in the US than just what
you have seen. Every picture tells a story, and it is a different story for each.
Overall the common ground that moves everyone everywhere is money, which in some cases is
just a proxy for power and in other cases is a means to material satisfaction. If one already
has power, then purchase can be had in reverse, money for power instead of power for money.
This is a great explaination of why we need 1. independent regulatory agencies with power, 2.
white collar crime enforcement 3. rule of law and most of all 4. an independent judiciary
that is not overrun by ideologues and theocrats who ignore the first amendment wholesale.
It would have been nice if Obama has demonstrated his concern for the rule of law by frog
marching banksters to Rikers, closing Guantanamo, and prosecuting CIA torturers.
But kurt is only concerned with the rule of law when his party is not in power typical
partisan hack.
I have been to every state except Alaska and have lived in the North East, Southwest,
Midwest, South and California. My comment was about power structures - and the patriarchy of
white supremacy and christianity. I am well aware of the diversity. Heck - I even lived next
to the Great Checkerboard for 3 summers.
"My party's not known for worrying about the deficit or the debt too much but it's time
for us to start getting into that," Mayor Pete says in NH town hall in response to voter
anxious about debt. Says everything his campaign has proposed is paid for.
Mayor Pete expanded on this in the gaggle: "I believe every Presidency of my lifetime
has been an example of deficits growing under Republican government and shrinking under
Democratic government, but my party's got to get more comfortable talking about this
issue"
"And we shouldn't be afraid to demonstrate that we have the revenue to cover every cost
that we incur in the investments that we're proposing."
Looks like MMT is not a McKinsey-approved management tool.
Buttigieg (D)(2): "The trips to war zones that Pete Buttigieg rarely talks about" [ABC].
Missed this at the time: "But what the 37-year-old South Bend mayor didn't mention, and
virtually never discusses in his run for the nation's highest office, were other trips to
Afghanistan and Iraq years prior to his military deployment, when he was a 20-something
civilian contractor for the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company . Buttigieg worked
for McKinsey from 2007 to 2010, after completing post-graduate studies at Oxford. In his
memoir, 'Shortest Way Home,' he mentions his involvement in domestic projects for the firm like
doing energy efficiency research in the U.S., and goes into particular detail about one that
involved analyzing North American grocery prices. But when it comes to his work abroad with
McKinsey, he only drops hints about working on 'war zone economic development to help grow
private sector employment' in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also refers to a 'safe house' in
Baghdad. The book doesn't say exactly when or how long Buttigieg was in either country." •
So Mayo Pete was (?) a spook? No reporting on this; the story just disappeared.
Republicans are afraid to raise this key question. Democrats are afraid of even mentioning CrowdStrike in Ukrainegate hearings.
The Deep State wants to suppress this matter entirely.
Alperovisch connections to Ukraine and his Russophobia are well known. Did Alperovich people played the role of "Fancy Bear"? Or
Ukrainian SBU was engaged? George Eliason clams that
"I have already clearly shown the Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian Intelligence Operators." ... "Since there is so much crap surrounding
the supposed hack such as law enforcement teams never examining the DNC server or maintaining control of it as evidence, could the hacks
have been a cover-up?"
Notable quotes:
"... So far at least I cannot rule out the possibility that that this could have involved an actual 'false flag' hack. A possible calculation would have been that this could have made it easier for Alperovitch and 'CrowdStrike', if more people had asked serious questions about the evidence they claimed supported the 'narrative' of GRU responsibility. ..."
"... What she suggested was that the FBI had found evidence, after his death, of a hack of Rich's laptop, designed as part of a 'false flag' operation. ..."
"... On this, see his 8 October, 'Motion for Discovery and Motion to Accept Supplemental Evidence' in Clevenger's own case against the DOJ, document 44 on the relevant 'Courtlistener' pages, and his 'Unopposed Motion for Stay', document 48. Both are short, and available without a 'PACER' subscription, and should be compulsory reading for anyone seriously interested in ascertaining the truth about 'Russiagate.' (See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/ .) ..."
"... And here, is is also material that he may have had more than one laptop, that 'hard drives' can be changed, and that the level of computer skills that can be found throughout the former Soviet Union is very high. Another matter of some importance is that Ed Butowsky's 'Debunking Rod Wheeler's Claims' site is back up online. (See http://debunkingrodwheelersclaims.net ) ..."
"... The question of whether the 'timeline' produced by Hersh's FBI informant was accurate, or a deliberate attempt to disguise the fact that all kinds of people were well aware of Rich's involvement before his murder, and well aware of the fact of a leak before he was identified as its source, is absolutely central to how one interprets 'Russiagate.' ..."
"... Why did Crowdstrike conclude it was a "Russian breach", when other evidence does show it was an internal download. What was Crowdstrike's method and motivation to reach the "Russian" conclusion instead. Why has that methodology been sealed? ..."
"... Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers. ..."
"... What were the relationships between Crowdstrike, DNC, FBI and the Mueller team that conspired to reach this Russian conclusion. ..."
"... Why did the Roger Stone judge, who just sent Stone away for life, refuse Stone's evidentiary demand to ascertain how exactly Crowdstrike reached its Russsian hacking conclusion, that the court then linked to Stone allegedly lying about this Russian link ..."
"... Indeed, let's set out with full transparency the Ukraine -- Crowsdtrike player links and loyalties to see if there are any smoking guns yet undisclosed. Trump was asking for more information about Crowdstrike like a good lawyer - never ask a question when you don't already know the right answer. Crowdstrike is owned by a Ukrainian by birth ..."
"... Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike. ..."
"... In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives. ..."
"... His role in what we may define as "converting DNC leak into DNC hack" (I would agree with you that this probably was a false flag operation), which was supposedly designed to implicated Russians, and possibly involved Ukrainian security services, is very suspicious indeed. ..."
"... Mueller treatment of Crowdstrike with "kid gloves" may suggest that Alperovich actions were part of a larger scheme. After all Crowdstike was a FBI contactor at the time. ..."
The favor was for Ukraine to investigate Crowdstrike and the 2016 DNC computer breach.
Reliance on Crowdstrike to investigate the DNC computer, and not an independent FBI investigation, was tied very closely to
the years long anti-Trump Russiagate hoax and waste of US taxpayer time and money.
Why is this issue ignored by both the media and the Democrats. The ladies doth protest far too much.
what exactly, to the extend I recall, could the Ukraine contribute the the DNC's server/"fake malware" troubles? Beyond, that
I seem to vaguely recall, the supposed malware was distributed via an Ukrainan address.
On the other hand, there seems to be the (consensus here?) argument there was no malware breach at all, simply an insider copying
files on a USB stick.
If people discovered there had been a leak, it would perfectly natural that in order to give 'resilience' to their cover-up
strategies, they could have organised a planting of evidence on the servers, in conjunction with elements in Ukraine.
So far at least I cannot rule out the possibility that that this could have involved an actual 'false flag' hack. A possible
calculation would have been that this could have made it easier for Alperovitch and 'CrowdStrike', if more people had asked serious
questions about the evidence they claimed supported the 'narrative' of GRU responsibility.
The issues involved become all the more important, in the light of the progress of Ty Clevenger's attempts to exploit the clear
contradiction between the claims by the FBI, in response to FOIA requests, to have no evidence relating to Seth Rich, and the
remarks by Ms. Deborah Sines quoted by Michael Isikoff.
What she suggested was that the FBI had found evidence, after his death, of a hack of Rich's laptop, designed as part of
a 'false flag' operation.
On this, see his 8 October, 'Motion for Discovery and Motion to Accept Supplemental Evidence' in Clevenger's own case against
the DOJ, document 44 on the relevant 'Courtlistener' pages, and his 'Unopposed Motion for Stay', document 48. Both are short,
and available without a 'PACER' subscription, and should be compulsory reading for anyone seriously interested in ascertaining
the truth about 'Russiagate.' (See
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/
.)
It is eminently possible that Ms. Hines has simply made an 'unforced error.'
However, I do not – yet – feel able totally to discount the possibility that what is actually at issue is a 'ruse', produced
as a contingency plan to ensure that if it becomes impossible to maintain the cover-up over Rich's involvement in its original
form, his laptop shows 'evidence' compatible with the 'Russiagate' narrative.
And here, is is also material that he may have had more than one laptop, that 'hard drives' can be changed, and that the
level of computer skills that can be found throughout the former Soviet Union is very high. Another matter of some importance
is that Ed Butowsky's 'Debunking Rod Wheeler's Claims' site is back up online. (See
http://debunkingrodwheelersclaims.net )
Looking at it from the perspective of an old television current affairs hack, I do think that, while it is very helpful to
have some key material available in a single place, it would useful if more attention was paid to presentation.
In particular, it would be a most helpful 'teaching aid', if a full and accurate transcript was made of the conversation with
Seymour Hersh which Ed Butowsky covertly recorded. What seems clear is that both these figures ended up in very difficult positions,
and that the latter clearly engaged in 'sleight of hand' in relation to his dealings with the former. That said, the fact that
Butowsky's claims about his grounds for believing that Hersh's FBI informant was Andrew McCabe are clearly disingenuous does not
justify the conclusion that he is wrong.
It is absolutely clear to me – despite what 'TTG', following that 'Grub Street' hack Folkenflik, claimed – that when Hersh
talked to Butowsky, he believed he had been given accurate information. Indeed, I have difficulty seeing how anyone whose eyes
were not hopelessly blinded by prejudice, a\nd possibly fear of where a quest for the truth might lead, could not see that, in
this conversation, both men were telling the truth, as they saw it.
However, all of us, including the finest and most honourable of journalists can, from time to time, fall for disinformation.
(If anyone says they can always spot when they are being played, all I can say is, if you're right, you're clearly Superman, but
it is more likely that you are a fool or knave, if not both.)
The question of whether the 'timeline' produced by Hersh's FBI informant was accurate, or a deliberate attempt to disguise
the fact that all kinds of people were well aware of Rich's involvement before his murder, and well aware of the fact of a leak
before he was identified as its source, is absolutely central to how one interprets 'Russiagate.'
1. Why did Crowdstrike conclude it was a "Russian breach", when other evidence does show it was an internal download. What
was Crowdstrike's method and motivation to reach the "Russian" conclusion instead. Why has that methodology been sealed?
2. Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently
put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to
help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers.
3. What were the relationships between Crowdstrike, DNC, FBI and the Mueller team that conspired to reach this Russian
conclusion.
4. Why did the Roger Stone judge, who just sent Stone away for life, refuse Stone's evidentiary demand to ascertain how
exactly Crowdstrike reached its Russsian hacking conclusion, that the court then linked to Stone allegedly lying about this Russian
link .
5. Indeed, let's set out with full transparency the Ukraine -- Crowsdtrike player links and loyalties to see if there are
any smoking guns yet undisclosed. Trump was asking for more information about Crowdstrike like a good lawyer - never ask a question
when you don't already know the right answer. Crowdstrike is owned by a Ukrainian by birth .
Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently
put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted
to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers.
Alperovich is really a very suspicious figure. Rumors are that he was involved in compromising PGP while in MacAfee( June 2nd,
2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams - YouTube ):
Investigative Journalist George Webb worked at MacAfee and Network Solutions in 2000 when the CEO Bill Larsen bought a small,
Moscow based, hacking and virus writing company to move to Silicon Valley.
MacAfee also purchased PGP, an open source encryption software developed by privacy advocate to reduce NSA spying on the
public.
The two simultaneous purchase of PGP and the Moscow hacking team by Metwork Solutions was sponsored by the CIA and FBI in order
to crack encrypted communications to write a back door for law enforcement.
Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would
go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike.
In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted
communications for covert action operatives.
His role in what we may define as "converting DNC leak into DNC hack" (I would agree with you that this probably was a
false flag operation), which was supposedly designed to implicated Russians, and possibly involved Ukrainian security services,
is very suspicious indeed.
Mueller treatment of Crowdstrike with "kid gloves" may suggest that Alperovich actions were part of a larger scheme. After
all Crowdstike was a FBI contactor at the time.
While all this DNC hack saga is completely unclear due to lack of facts and the access to the evidence, there are some stories
on Internet that indirectly somewhat strengthen your hypothesis:
Pelosi interference in elections might cost democrats a victory. She enraged Trump base and
strengthened Trump, who before was floundering. Now election changed into "us vs them" question,
which is very unfavorable to neoliberal Dems. as neolibelism as ideology is dead. She also
brought back Trump some independents who othersie would stay home or vote for Dem candidate. No
action of House of Representatives can changes this. Bringing Vindman and Fiona Hill to testify
were huge blunders as they enhance the narrative that the Deep State, unaccountable Security
Establishment, controls the government, to which Trump represents very weak, but still a
challenge. As such they strengthened Trump
Essentially Dems had driven themselves into a trap. Moreover actions of the Senate can drag
democrats in dirt till the elections, diminishing their chances further and firther. Can you
image the effect if Schiff would be called testify under oath about his contacts with Ciaramella?
Or Biden questioning about his dirty dealing with both Yanukovich administration and Provisional
Government after the 2014 coup d'état (aka EuroMaydan, aka "the Revolution of dignity"
?
Notable quotes:
"... It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over "withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one. Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed "isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to criticize a president. ..."
"... Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe, Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S. involvement overseas are reducing it. ..."
"... We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually been adding to them. ..."
Gideon Rachman tries to find
similarities between the foreign policies of Trump and Obama:
Both men would detest the thought. But, in crucial respects, the foreign policies of
Donald Trump and Barack Obama are looking strikingly similar.
The wildly different styles of the two presidents have disguised the underlying
continuities between their approaches to the world. But look at substance, rather than style,
and the similarities are impressive.
There is usually considerable continuity in U.S. foreign policy from one president to
another, but Rachman is making a stronger and somewhat different claim than that. He is arguing
that their foreign policy agendas are very much alike in ways that put both presidents at odds
with the foreign policy establishment, and he cites "disengagement from the Middle East" and a
"pivot to Asia" as two examples of these similarities. This seems superficially plausible, but
it is misleading. Despite talking a lot about disengagement, Obama and Trump chose to keep the
U.S. involved in several conflicts, and Trump actually escalated the wars he inherited from
Obama. To the extent that there is continuity between Obama and Trump, it has been that both of
them have acceded to the conventional wisdom of "the Blob" and refused to disentangle the U.S.
from Middle Eastern conflicts. Ongoing support for the war on Yemen is the ugliest and most
destructive example of this continuity.
In reality, neither Obama nor Trump "focused" on Asia, and Trump's foray into
pseudo-engagement with North Korea has little in common with Obama's would-be "pivot" or
"rebalance." U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a major part of Obama's
policy in Asia. Trump pulled out of that agreement and waged destructive trade wars instead.
Once we get past generalizations and look at details, the two presidents are often
diametrically opposed to one another in practice. That is what one would expect when we
remember that Trump has made dismantling Obama's foreign policy achievements one of his main
priorities.
The significant differences between the two become much more apparent when we look at other
issues. On arms control and nonproliferation, the two could not be more different. Obama
negotiated a new arms reduction treaty with New START at the start of his presidency, and he
wrapped up a major nonproliferation agreement with Iran and the other members of the P5+1 in
2015. Trump reneged on the latter and seems determined to kill the former. Obama touted the
benefits of genuine diplomatic engagement, while Trump has made a point of reversing and
undoing most of the results of Obama's engagement with Cuba and Iran. Trump's overall hostility
to genuine diplomacy makes another one of Rachman claims quite baffling:
The result is that, after his warlike "fire and fury" phase, Mr Trump is now pursuing a
diplomacy-first strategy that is strongly reminiscent of Mr Obama.
Calling Trump's clumsy pattern of making threats and ultimatums a "diplomacy-first strategy"
is a mistake. This is akin to saying that he is adhering to foreign policy restraint because
the U.S. hasn't invaded any new countries on Trump's watch. It takes something true (Trump
hasn't started a new war yet) and misrepresents it as proof that the president is serious about
diplomacy and that he wants to reduce U.S. military engagement overseas. Trump enjoys the
spectacle of meeting with foreign leaders, but he isn't interested in doing the work or taking
the risks that successful diplomacy requires. He has shown repeatedly through his own behavior,
his policy preferences, and his proposed budgets that he has no use for diplomacy or diplomats,
and instead he expects to be able to bully or flatter adversaries into submission.
So Rachman is simply wrong he reaches this conclusion:
Mr Trump's reluctance to attack Iran was significant. It underlines the fact that his
tough-guy rhetoric disguises a strong preference for diplomacy over force.
Let's recall that the near-miss of starting a war with Iran came as a result of the downing
of an unmanned drone. The fact that the U.S. was seriously considering an attack on another
country over the loss of a drone is a worrisome sign that this administration is prepared to go
to war at the drop of a hat. Calling off such an insane attack was the right thing to do, but
there should never have been an attack to call off. That episode does not show a "strong
preference for diplomacy over force." If Trump had a strong preference for diplomacy over
force, his policy would not be one of relentless hostility towards Iran. Trump does not believe
in diplomatic compromise, but expects the other side to capitulate under pressure. That
actually makes conflict more likely and reduces the chances of meaningful negotiations.
It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over
"withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that
they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one.
Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed
"isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been
criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies
because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to
criticize a president.
Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most
of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is
guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe,
Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think
there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world.
Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn
non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S.
involvement overseas are reducing it.
Rachman ends his column with this assertion:
In their very different ways, both Mr Obama and Mr Trump have reduced America's global
commitments -- and adjusted the US to a more modest international role.
The problem here is that there has been no meaningful reduction in America's "global
commitments." Which commitments have been reduced or eliminated? It would be helpful if someone
could be specific about this. The U.S. has more security dependents today than it did when
Trump took office. NATO has been expanded to include two new countries in just the last three
years. U.S. troops are engaged in hostilities in just as many countries as they were when Trump
was elected. There are more troops deployed to the Middle East at the end of this year than
there were at the beginning, and that is a direct consequence of Trump's bankrupt Iran
policy.
We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really
have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually
been adding to them.
"... Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which takes a hawkish approach toward Russia. The Council in turn is financed by Google Inc. ..."
"... In a perhaps unexpected development, another Atlantic Council funder is Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were the subject of Trump's inquiry with Zelemsky related to Biden. The Biden allegations concern significant questions about Biden's role in Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. This took place during a period when Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from Burisma. ..."
"... Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower's complaint alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 presidential race. ..."
"... Another listed OCCRP funder is the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. ..."
"... Together with Soros's Open Society, Omidyar also funds the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which hosts the International Fact-Checking Network that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether news stories are "disputed." ..."
There are common threads that run through an organization repeatedly relied upon in the
so-called whistleblower's complaint about President Donald Trump and CrowdStrike, the outside
firm utilized to conclude that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee's servers
since the DNC would not allow the U.S. government to inspect the servers.
One of several themes is financing tied to Google, whose Google Capital led a $100 million
funding drive that financed Crowdstrike. Google Capital, which now goes by the name of
CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of
Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor
to the Democratic Party.
CrowdStrike was mentioned by Trump in his call with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign,
reportedly helped draft CrowdStrike to aid with the DNC's allegedly hacked server.
On behalf of the DNC and Clinton's campaign, Perkins Coie also paid the controversial
Fusion GPS firm to produce the infamous, largely-discredited anti-Trump dossier compiled by
former British spy Christopher Steele.
CrowdStrike is a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by Dmitri
Alperovitch.
Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the
Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which takes a hawkish approach toward
Russia. The Council in turn is financed
by Google Inc.
In a perhaps unexpected development, another Atlantic Council
funder is Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe
Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were the subject of Trump's inquiry with
Zelemsky related to Biden. The Biden allegations concern significant questions about Biden's
role in Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. This took place during a period when
Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from Burisma.
Besides Google and Burisma funding, the Council is also financed by billionaire activist
George Soros's Open Society Foundations as well as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc. and
the U.S. State Department.
Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State
Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization
repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower's complaint
alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign
country" in the 2020 presidential race.
The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the whistleblower's document and released
by the Google and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting
Project (OCCRP), seem to be the public precursors for a lot of the so-called whistleblower's
own claims, as Breitbart News
documented .
One key section of the so-called whistleblower's document claims that "multiple U.S.
officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of
other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the
Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov."
This was allegedly to follow up on Trump's call with Zelensky in order to discuss the
"cases" mentioned in that call, according to the so-called whistleblower's narrative. The
complainer was clearly referencing Trump's request for Ukraine to investigate the Biden
corruption allegations.
Even though the statement was written in first person – "multiple U.S. officials
told me" – it contains a footnote referencing a report by the Organized Crime and
Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
That footnote reads:
In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on
22 July, two associates of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met
with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelensky adviser, Mr. Serhiy Shefir.
The so-called whistleblower's account goes on to rely upon that same OCCRP report on three
more occasions. It does so to:
Write that Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko
"also stated that he wished to communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these
matters." Document that Trump adviser Rudi Giuliani "had spoken in late 2018 to former
Prosecutor General Shokin, in a Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani."
Bolster the charge that, "I also learned from a U.S. official that 'associates' of Mr.
Giuliani were trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team." The so-called
whistleblower then relates in another footnote, "I do not know whether these associates of
Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by OCCRP, referenced
above."
The OCCRP
report repeatedly referenced is actually a "joint investigation by the Organized Crime
and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and
business records in the United States and Ukraine."
BuzzFeed infamously also first
published the full anti-Trump dossier alleging unsubstantiated collusion between Trump's
presidential campaign and Russia. The dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign and
the Democratic National Committee and was produced by the Fusion GPS opposition dirt
outfit.
The OCCRP and BuzzFeed "joint investigation" resulted in both OCCRP and BuzzFeed
publishing similar lengthy pieces on July 22 claiming that Giuliani was attempting to use
connections to have Ukraine investigate Trump's political rivals.
The so-called whistleblower's document, however, only mentions the largely unknown OCCRP
and does not reference BuzzFeed, which has faced scrutiny over its reporting on the Russia
collusion claims.
Another listed OCCRP funder is the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal
billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
Together with Soros's Open Society, Omidyar also
funds the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which hosts the International
Fact-Checking Network that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether news stories are
"disputed."
Like OCCRP, the Poynter Institute's so-called news fact-checking project is openly
funded by not only Soros' Open Society Foundations but also Google and the National
Endowment for Democracy.
CrowdStrike and DNC servers
CrowdStrike, meanwhile, was brought up by Trump in his phone call with Zelensky. According to the transcript, Trump told Zelensky, "I would like you to find out what
happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike I guess you have one of
your wealthy people The server, they say Ukraine has it."
In his extensive
report , Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller notes that his investigative team did not
"obtain or examine" the servers of the DNC in determining whether those servers were hacked
by Russia.
The DNC famously refused to allow the FBI to access its servers to verify the allegation
that Russia carried out a hack during the 2016 presidential campaign. Instead, the DNC
reached an arrangement with the FBI in which CrowdStrike conducted forensics on the server
and shared details with the FBI.
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017, then-FBI Director
James Comey
confirmed that the FBI registered "multiple requests at different levels," to review the
DNC's hacked servers. Ultimately, the DNC and FBI came to an agreement in which a "highly
respected private company" -- a reference to CrowdStrike -- would carry out forensics on the
servers and share any information that it discovered with the FBI, Comey testified.
A senior law enforcement official stressed the importance of the FBI gaining direct access
to the servers, a request that was denied by the DNC.
"The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to
servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been
mitigated," the official was quoted by the news media as saying.
"This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions
caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier," the
official continued.
... ... ...
Aaron Klein is Breitbart's Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter.
He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, "
Aaron Klein Investigative
Radio ." Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
Joshua Klein contributed research to this article.
Russians did not hack the DNC system, a Russian named Dmitri Alperovitch is the hacker
and he works for President Obama. In the last five years the Obama administration has
turned exclusively to one Russian to solve every major cyber-attack in America, whether the
attack was on the U.S. government or a corporation. Only one "super-hero cyber-warrior" seems
to "have the codes" to figure out "if" a system was hacked and by "whom."
Dmitri's company, CrowdStrike has been called in by Obama to solve mysterious attacks on
many high level government agencies and American corporations, including: German Bundestag,
Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the White
House, the State Department, SONY, and many others.
CrowdStrike's philosophy is: "You don't have a malware problem; you have an adversary
problem."
CrowdStrike has played a critical role in the development of America's cyber-defense policy.
Dmitri Alperovitch and George Kurtz, a former head of the FBI cyberwarfare unit founded
CrowdStrike. Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director at the FBI is now CrowdStrike's
president of services. The company is crawling with former U.S. intelligence agents.
Before Alperovitch founded CrowdStrike in 2011, he was working in Atlanta as the chief
threat officer at the antivirus software firm McAfee, owned by Intel (a DARPA company). During
that time, he "discovered" the Chinese had compromised at least seventy-one companies and
organizations, including thirteen defense contractors, three electronics firms, and the
International Olympic Committee. He was the only person to notice the biggest cyberattack in
history! Nothing suspicious about that.
Alperovitch and the DNC
After CrowdStrike was hired as an independent "vendor" by the DNC to investigate a possible
cyberattack on their system, Alperovitch sent the DNC a proprietary software package called
Falcon that monitors the networks of its clients in real time. According to Alperovitch,
Falcon "lit up," within ten seconds of being installed at the DNC. Alperovitch had his
"proof" in TEN SECONDS that Russia was in the network. This "alleged" evidence of Russian
hacking has yet to be shared with anyone.
As Donald Trump has pointed out, the FBI, the agency that should have been immediately
involved in hacking that effects "National Security," has yet to even examine the DNC system to
begin an investigation. Instead, the FBI and 16 other U.S. "intelligence" agencies simply
"agree" with Obama's most trusted "cyberwarfare" expert Dmitri Alperovitch's "TEN SECOND"
assessment that produced no evidence to support the claim.
Also remember that it is only Alperovitch and CrowdStrike that claim to have evidence
that it was Russian hackers . In fact, only two hackers were found to have been in the
system and were both identified by Alperovitch as Russian FSB (CIA) and the Russian GRU (DoD).
It is only Alperovitch who claims that he knows that it is Putin behind these two hackers.
Alperovitch failed to mention in his conclusive "TEN SECOND" assessment that Guccifer 2.0
had already hacked the DNC and made available to the public the documents he hacked –
before Alperovitch did his ten second assessment. Alperovitch reported that no other hackers
were found, ignoring the fact that Guccifer 2.0 had already hacked and released DNC documents
to the public. Alperovitch's assessment also goes directly against Julian Assange's repeated
statements that the DNC leaks did not come from the Russians.
The ridiculously fake cyber-attack assessment done by Alperovitch and CrowdStrike
naïvely flies in the face of the fact that a DNC insider admitted that he had released the
DNC documents. Julian Assange implied in an interview that the murdered Democratic
National Committee staffer, Seth Rich, was the source of a trove of damaging emails the website
posted just days before the party's convention. Seth was on his way to testify about the DNC
leaks to the FBI when he was shot dead in the street.
It is also absurd to hear Alperovitch state that the Russian FSB (equivalent to the CIA) had
been monitoring the DNC site for over a year and had done nothing. No attack, no theft, and no
harm was done to the system by this "false-flag cyber-attack" on the DNC – or at least,
Alperovitch "reported" there was an attack. The second hacker, the supposed Russian military
(GRU – like the U.S. DoD) hacker, had just entered the system two weeks before and also
had done "nothing" but observe.
It is only Alperovitch's word that reports that the Russian FSB was "looking for files on
Donald Trump."
It is only this false claim that spuriously ties Trump to the "alleged"
attack. It is also only Alperovitch who believes that this hack that was supposedly "looking
for Trump files" was an attempt to "influence" the election. No files were found about Trump by
the second hacker, as we know from Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0's leaks. To confabulate that
"Russian's hacked the DNC to influence the elections" is the claim of one well-known Russian
spy. Then, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously confirm that Alperovitch is correct
– even though there is no evidence and no investigation was ever conducted .
How does Dmitri Alperovitch have such power? Why did Obama again and again use Alperovitch's
company, CrowdStrike, when they have miserably failed to stop further cyber-attacks on the
systems they were hired to protect? Why should anyone believe CrowdStrikes false-flag
report?
After documents from the DNC continued to leak, and Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks made
CrowdStrike's report look foolish, Alperovitch decided the situation was far worse than he had
reported. He single-handedly concluded that the Russians were conducting an "influence
operation" to help win the election for Trump . This false assertion had absolutely no
evidence to back it up.
On July 22, three days before the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks dumped a
massive cache of emails that had been "stolen" (not hacked) from the DNC. Reporters soon found
emails suggesting that the DNC leadership had favored Hillary Clinton in her primary race
against Bernie Sanders, which led Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair, along with three
other officials, to resign.
Just days later, it was discovered that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
(DCCC) had been hacked. CrowdStrike was called in again and once again, Alperovitch immediately
"believed" that Russia was responsible. A lawyer for the DCCC gave Alperovitch permission to
confirm the leak and to name Russia as the suspected author. Two weeks later, files from the
DCCC began to appear on Guccifer 2.0's website. This time Guccifer released information about
Democratic congressional candidates who were running close races in Florida, Ohio, Illinois,
and Pennsylvania. On August 12, Guccifer went further, publishing a spreadsheet that included
the personal email addresses and phone numbers of nearly two hundred Democratic members of
Congress.
Once again, Guccifer 2.0 proved Alperovitch and CrowdStrike's claims to be grossly incorrect
about the hack originating from Russia, with Putin masterminding it all. Nancy Pelosi offered
members of Congress Alperovitch's suggestion of installing Falcon , the system that
failed to stop cyberattacks at the DNC, on all congressional laptops.
Key Point: Once Falcon was installed on the computers of members of the U.S.
Congress, CrowdStrike had even further full access into U.S. government accounts.
Alperovitch's "Unbelievable" History
Dmitri was born in 1980 in Moscow where his father, Michael, was a nuclear physicist, (so
Dmitri claims). Dmitri's father was supposedly involved at the highest levels of Russian
nuclear science. He also claims that his father taught him to write code as a child.
In 1990, his father was sent to Maryland as part of a nuclear-safety training program for
scientists. In 1994, Michael Alperovitch was granted a visa to Canada, and a year later the
family moved to Chattanooga, where Michael took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority.
While Dmitri Alperovitch was still in high school, he and his father started an
encryption-technology business. Dmitri studied computer science at Georgia Tech and went on to
work at an antispam software firm. It was at this time that he realized that cyber-defense was
more about psychology than it was about technology. A very odd thing to conclude.
Dmitri Alperovitch posed as a "Russian gangster" on spam discussion forums which brought his
illegal activity to the attention of the FBI – as a criminal. In 2005, Dmitri flew to
Pittsburgh to meet an FBI agent named Keith Mularski, who had been asked to lead an undercover
operation against a vast Russian credit-card-theft syndicate. Alperovitch worked closely with
Mularski's sting operation which took two years, but it ultimately brought about fifty-six
arrests. Dmitri Alperovitch then became a pawn of the FBI and CIA.
In 2010, while he was at McAfee, the head of cybersecurity at Google told Dmitri that Gmail
accounts belonging to human-rights activists in China had been breached. Google suspected the
Chinese government. Alperovitch found that the breach was unprecedented in scale; it affected
more than a dozen of McAfee's clients and involved the Chinese government. Three days after his
supposed discovery, Alperovitch was on a plane to Washington where he had been asked to vet a
paragraph in a speech by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
2014, Sony called in CrowdStrike to investigate a breach of its network. Alperovitch needed
just "two hours" to identify North Korea as the adversary. Executives at Sony asked Alperovitch
to go public with the information immediately, but it took the FBI another three weeks before
it confirmed the attribution.
Alperovitch then developed a list of "usual suspects" who were well-known hackers who had
identifiable malware that they commonly used. Many people use the same malware and
Alperovitch's obsession with believing he has the only accurate list of hackers in the world is
plain idiocy exacerbated by the U.S. government's belief in his nonsense. Alperovitch even
speaks like a "nut-case" in his personal Twitters, which generally have absolutely no
references to the technology he is supposedly the best at in the entire world.
Dmitri – Front Man for His Father's Russian Espionage Mission
After taking a close look at the disinformation around Dmitri and his father, it is clear to
see that Michael Alperovitch became a CIA operative during his first visit to America.
Upon his return to Russia, he stole the best Russian encryption codes that were used to protect
the top-secret work of nuclear physics in which his father is alleged to have been a major
player. Upon surrendering the codes to the CIA when he returned to Canada, the CIA made it
possible for a Russian nuclear scientist to become an American citizen overnight and gain a
top-secret security clearance to work at the Oakridge plant, one of the most secure and
protected nuclear facilities in America . Only the CIA can transform a Russian into an
American with a top-secret clearance overnight.
We can see on Michael Alperovitch's Linked In page that he went from one fantastically
top-secret job to the next without a break from the time he entered America. He seemed to be on
a career path to work in every major U.S. agency in America. In every job he was hired as the
top expert in the field and the leader of the company. All of these jobs after the first one
were in cryptology, not nuclear physics. As a matter of fact, Michael became the top expert in
America overnight and has stayed the top expert to this day.
Most of the work of cyber-security is creating secure interactions on a non-secure system
like the Internet. The cryptologist who assigns the encryption codes controls the system
from that point on .
Key Point: Cryptologists are well known for leaving a "back-door" in the base-code so
that they can always have over-riding control.
Michael Alperovitch essentially has the "codes" for all Department of Defense sites, the
Treasury, the State Department, cell-phones, satellites, and public media . There is hardly
any powerful agency or company that he has not written the "codes" for. One might ask, why do
American companies and the U.S. government use his particular codes? What are so special about
Michael's codes?
Stolen Russian Codes
In December, Obama ordered the U.S. military to conduct cyberattacks against Russia in
retaliation for the alleged DNC hacks. All of the attempts to attack Russia's military and
intelligence agencies failed miserably. Russia laughed at Obama's attempts to hack their
systems. Even the Russian companies targeted by the attacks were not harmed by Obama's
cyber-attacks. Hardly any news of these massive and embarrassing failed cyber-attacks were
reported by the Main Stream Media. The internet has been scrubbed clean of the reports that
said Russia's cyber-defenses were impenetrable due to the sophistication of their encryption
codes.
Michael Alperovitch was in possession of those impenetrable codes when he was a top
scientist in Russia. It was these very codes that he shared with the CIA on his first trip
to America . These codes got him spirited into America and "turned into" the best
cryptologist in the world. Michael is simply using the effective codes of Russia to design
his codes for the many systems he has created in America for the CIA .
KEY POINT: It is crucial to understand at this junction that the CIA is not solely working
for America . The CIA works for itself and there are three branches to the CIA – two of
which are hostile to American national interests and support globalism.
Michael and Dmitri Alperovitch work for the CIA (and international intelligence
corporations) who support globalism . They, and the globalists for whom they work, are
not friends of America or Russia. It is highly likely that the criminal activities of Dmitri,
which were supported and sponsored by the FBI, created the very hackers who he often claims are
responsible for cyberattacks. None of these supposed "attackers" have ever been found or
arrested; they simply exist in the files of CrowdStrike and are used as the "usual culprits"
when the FBI or CIA calls in Dmitri to give the one and only opinion that counts. Only Dmitri's
"suspicions" are offered as evidence and yet 17 U.S. intelligence agencies stand behind the
CrowdStrike report and Dmitri's suspicions.
Michael Alperovitch – Russian Spy with the Crypto-Keys
Essentially, Michael Alperovitch flies under the false-flag of being a cryptologist who
works with PKI. A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for the creation, storage, and
distribution of digital certificates which are used to
verify that a particular public key belongs to a certain entity. The PKI creates digital
certificates which map public keys to entities, securely stores these certificates in a central
repository and revokes them if needed. Public key cryptography is a
cryptographic
technique that enables entities to securely communicate on an insecure
public network (the Internet), and reliably verify the identity of an entity via digital signatures .
Digital signatures use Certificate Authorities to digitally sign and publish the public key
bound to a given user. This is done using the CIA's own private key, so that trust in the user
key relies on one's trust in the validity of the CIA's key. Michael Alperovitch is
considered to be the number one expert in America on PKI and essentially controls the
market .
Michael's past is clouded in confusion and lies. Dmitri states that his father was a nuclear
physicist and that he came to America the first time in a nuclear based shared program between
America and Russia. But if we look at his current personal Linked In page, Michael claims he
has a Master Degree in Applied Mathematics from Gorky State University. From 1932 to 1956, its
name was State University of Gorky. Now it is known as Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni
Novgorod – National Research University (UNN), also known as Lobachevsky University. Does
Michael not even know the name of the University he graduated from? And when does a person with
a Master's Degree become a leading nuclear physicist who comes to "visit" America. In Michael's
Linked In page there is a long list of his skills and there is no mention of nuclear
physics.
Also on Michael Alperovitch's Linked In page we find some of his illustrious history that
paints a picture of either the most brilliant mind in computer security, encryption, and
cyberwarfare, or a CIA/FBI backed Russian spy. Imagine that out of all the people in the world
to put in charge of the encryption keys for the Department of Defense, the U.S. Treasury, U.S.
military satellites, the flow of network news, cell phone encryption, the Pathfire (media control)
Program, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Global Information Grid, and TriCipher
Armored Credential System among many others, the government hires a Russian spy . Go
figure.
Michael Alperovitch's Linked In Page
Education:
Gorky State University, Russia, MS in Applied Mathematics
VT
IDirect -2014 – Designing security architecture for satellite communications
including cryptographic protocols, authentication.
Principal SME (Contractor)
DISA
-Defense Information Systems Agency (Manager of the Global Information Grid) – 2012-2014
– Worked on PKI and identity management projects for DISA utilizing Elliptic Curve
Cryptography. Performed application security and penetration testing.
Technical Lead (Contractor)
U.S.
Department of the Treasury – 2011 – Designed enterprise validation service
architecture for PKI certificate credentials with Single Sign On authentication.
Comtech Mobile
Datacom – 2007-2010 – Subject matter expert on latest information security
practices, including authentication, encryption and key management.
BellSouth – 2003-2006 – Designed and built server-side Jabber-based messaging
platform with Single Sign On authentication.
Principal Software Research Engineer
Pathfire – 2001-2002
– Designed and developed Digital Rights Management Server for Video on Demand and content
distribution applications. Pathfire provides digital media distribution and management
solutions to the television, media, and entertainment industries. The company offers Digital
Media Gateway, a digital IP store-and-forward platform, delivering news stories, syndicated
programming, advertising spots, and video news releases to broadcasters. It provides solutions
for content providers and broadcasters, as well as station solutions.
Obama – No Friend of America
Obama is no friend of America in the war against cyber-attacks. The very agencies and
departments being defended by Michael Alperovitch's "singular and most brilliant" ability to
write encryption codes have all been successfully attacked and compromised since Michael set up
the codes. But we shouldn't worry, because if there is a cyberattack in the Obama
administration, Michael's son Dmitri is called in to "prove" that it isn't the fault of his
father's codes. It was the "damn Russians", or even "Putin himself" who attacked American
networks.
Not one of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies is capable of figuring out a successful
cyberattack against America without Michael and Dmitri's help. Those same 17 U.S. intelligence
agencies were not able to effectively launch a successful cyberattack against Russia. It seems
like the Russian's have strong codes and America has weak codes. We can thank Michael and
Dmitri Alperovitch for that.
It is clear that there was no DNC hack beyond Guccifer 2.0. Dmitri Alperovitch is a
"frontman" for his father's encryption espionage mission.
Is it any wonder that Trump says that he has "his own people" to deliver his intelligence
to him that is outside of the infiltrated U.S. government intelligence agencies and the Obama
administration ? Isn't any wonder that citizens have to go anywhere BUT the MSM to find
real news or that the new administration has to go to independent news to get good intel?
It is hard to say anything more damnable than to again quote Dmitri on these very
issues: "If someone steals your keys to encrypt the data, it doesn't matter how secure the
algorithms are." Dmitri Alperovitch, founder of CrowdStrike
"... And RUH8 is allied with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike. ..."
"... Russia was probably not one of the hacking groups. The willful destruction of evidence by the DNC themselves probably points to Russia not being one of the those groups. The DNC wouldn't destroy evidence that supported their position. Also, government spy agencies keep info like that closely held. They might leak out tidbits, but they don't do wholesale dumps, like, ever. ..."
"... That's what the DNC is lying about. Not that hacks happened (they undoubtedly did), but about who did them (probably not Russian gov), and if hacks mattered (they didn't since everything was getting leaked anyway). ..."
"... The DNC/Mueller/etc are lying, but like most practiced liars they're mixing the lies with half-truths and unrelated facts to muddy the waters: ..."
"... An interesting question is, since it's basically guaranteed the DNC got hacked, but probably not by the Russians, is, what groups did hack the DNC, and why did the DNC scramble madly to hide their identities? ..."
"... And while you think about that question, consider the close parallel with the Awan case, where Dems were ostensibly the victims, but they again scrambled to cover up for the people who supposedly harmed them. level 2 ..."
"... DNC wasn't even hacked. Emails were leaked. They didn't even examine the server. Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools that we know about from wikileaks. It's important to know how each new lie is a lie. But man I am just so done with all this Russia shit. level 2 ..."
"... Crowdstrike claims that malware was found on DNC server. I agree that this has nothing to do with the Wikileaks releases. What I am wondering is whether Crowdstrike may have arranged for the DNC to be hacked so that Russia could be blamed. Continue this thread level 1 ..."
"... George Eliason promises additional essays: *The next articles, starting with one about Fancy Bear's hot/cold ongoing relationship with Bellingcat which destroys the JIT investigation, will showcase the following: Fancy Bear worked with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian government providing Information War material as evidence for MH17: ..."
"... Fancy Bear is an inside unit of the Atlantic Council and their Digital Forensics Lab ..."
Cyberanalyst George Eliason has written some intriguing blogs recently claiming that the
"Fancy Bear" which hacked the DNC server in mid-2016 was in fact a branch of Ukrainian intelligence linked to the Atlantic
Council and Crowdstrike. I invite you to have a go at one of his recent essays:
Since I am not very computer savvy and don't know much about the world of hackers - added
to the fact that Eliason's writing is too cute and convoluted - I have difficulty navigating Eliason's thought. Nonetheless,
here is what I can make of Eliasons' claims, as supported by independent literature:
Russian hacker Konstantin Kozlovsky, in Moscow court filings, has claimed that he did the
DNC hack – and can prove it, because he left some specific code on the DNC server.
Kozlovsky states that he did so by order of Dimitry Dokuchaev (formerly of the FSB, and
currently in prison in Russia on treason charges) who works with the Russian traitor hacker group Shaltai Boltai.
According to Eliason, Shaltai Boltai works in collaboration with the Ukrainian hacker group
RUH8, a group of neo-Nazis (Privat Sektor) who are affiliated with Ukrainian intelligence.
And RUH8 is allied with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike.
Cyberexpert Jeffrey Carr has stated that RUH8 has the X-Agent malware which our
intelligence community has erroneously claimed is possessed only by Russian intelligence, and used by "Fancy Bear".
This might help explain why Adam Carter has determined that some of the malware found on
the DNC server was compiled AFTER Crowdstrike was working on the DNC server – Crowdstrike was in collusion with Fancy Bear
(RUH8).
In other words, Crowdstrike likely arranged for a
hack by Ukrainian intelligence that they could then attribute to Russia.
As far as I can tell, none of this is pertinent to how Wikileaks obtained their DNC emails,
which most likely were leaked.
How curious that our Deep State and the recent Mueller indictment have had nothing to say
about Kozlovsky's confession - whom I tend to take seriously because he offers a simple way to confirm his claim. Also
interesting that the FBI has shown no interest in looking at the DNC server to check whether Kozlovsky's code is there.
Its worth noting that Dimitri Alperovich's (Crowdstrike) hatred of Putin is
second only to Hillary's hatred for taking responsibility for her actions.
level 1
Thanks - I'll continue to follow Eliason's work. The thesis that Ukrainian
intelligence is hacking a number of targets so that Russia gets blamed for it has intuitive appeal.
level 1
and have to cringe.
Any hacks weren't related to Wikileaks, who got their info from leakers, but
that is not the same thing as no hack. Leaks and hacks aren't mutually exclusive. They actually occur together
pretty commonly.
DNC's security was utter shit. Systems with shit security and obviously
valuable info usually get hacked by multiple groups. In the case of the DNC, Hillary's email servers, etc.,
it's basically impossible they weren't hacked by dozens of intruders. A plastic bag of 100s will not sit
untouched on a NYC street corner for 4 weeks. Not. fucking. happening.
Interestingly, Russia was probably not
one of the hacking groups. The willful destruction of evidence by the DNC themselves probably points to Russia
not being one of the those groups. The DNC wouldn't destroy evidence that supported their position. Also,
government spy agencies keep info like that closely held. They might leak out tidbits, but they don't do
wholesale dumps, like, ever.
That's
what the DNC is lying about.
Not that hacks
happened
(they undoubtedly did), but about
who
did them (probably not Russian gov), and if hacks mattered
(they didn't since everything was getting leaked anyway).
The DNC/Mueller/etc are lying, but like most practiced liars they're mixing
the lies with half-truths and unrelated facts to muddy the waters:
Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools
Yes, but that spoofed 'evidence' is not the direct opposite of the truth,
like I see people assuming. Bad assumption, and the establishment plays on that to make critic look bad. The
spoofed evidence is just mud.
An interesting question is, since it's basically guaranteed the DNC got
hacked, but probably not by the Russians, is, what groups
did
hack the
DNC, and why did the DNC scramble madly to hide their identities?
And while you think about that question, consider the close parallel with
the Awan case, where Dems were ostensibly the victims, but they again scrambled to cover up for the people who
supposedly harmed them.
level 2
What's hilarious about the 2 down-votes is I can't tell if their from
pro-Russiagate trolls, or from people who who can't get past binary thinking.
level 1
DNC wasn't even hacked. Emails were leaked. They didn't even examine the
server.
Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools that we know about
from wikileaks. It's important to know how each new lie is a lie. But man I am just so done
with all this Russia shit.
level 2
Crowdstrike claims that malware was found on DNC server. I agree that this
has nothing to do with the Wikileaks releases. What I am wondering is whether Crowdstrike may have arranged for
the DNC to be hacked so that Russia could be blamed.
Continue this thread
level 1
George Eliason promises additional essays: *The next articles, starting with one about Fancy Bear's hot/cold ongoing
relationship with Bellingcat which destroys the JIT investigation, will showcase the following: Fancy Bear worked with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian government providing
Information War material as evidence for MH17:
Fancy Bear is an inside unit of the Atlantic Council and their Digital
Forensics Lab
Fancy Bear worked with Crowdstrike and Dimitri Alperovich Fancy Bear is
Ukrainian Intelligence
How Fancy Bear tried to sway the US election for Team Hillary
Fancy Bear worked against US Intel gathering by providing consistently
fraudulent data
Fancy Bear contributed to James Clapper's January 2017 ODNI Report on Fancy
Bear and Russian Influence. [You really can't make this shit up.]
Fancy Bear had access to US government secure servers while working as
foreign spies.*
level 1
Fancy Bear (also know as Strontium Group, or APT28) is a Ukrainian cyber espionage group. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike incorrectly has said
with a medium level of confidence that it is associated with the Russian military intelligence
agency GRU . CrowdStrike
founder,
Dmitri Alperovitch , has colluded with Fancy Bear. American journalist
George Eliason has written extensively on the subject.
There are a couple of caveats that need to be made when identifying the Fancy Bear hackers.
The first is the identifier used by Mueller as Russian FSB and GRU may have been true- 10 years
ago. This group was on the run trying to stay a step ahead of Russian law enforcement until
October 2016. So we have part of the Fancy bear hacking group identified as Ruskie traitors and
possibly former Russian state security. The majority of the group are Ukrainians making up
Ukraine's Cyber Warfare groups.
Eliason lives and works in Donbass. He has been interviewed by and provided analysis for RT,
the BBC , and Press-TV. His
articles have been published in the Security Assistance Monitor, Washingtons Blog, OpedNews,
the Saker, RT, Global Research, and RINF, and the Greanville Post among others. He has been
cited and republished by various academic blogs including Defending History, Michael Hudson,
SWEDHR, Counterpunch, the Justice Integrity Project, among others.
Fancy Bear is Ukrainian IntelligenceShaltai Boltai
The "Fancy Bear hackers" may have been given the passwords to get into the servers at the
DNC because they were part of the Team Clinton opposition research team. It was part of their
job.
According to Politico ,
"In an interview this month, at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing
ethnic communities -- including Ukrainian-Americans -- she said that, when Trump's unlikely
presidential campaign. Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev
and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private
intelligence operatives. While her consulting work began surging in late 2015, she began
focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump's ties to Russia, as well."
[1]
The only investigative journalists, government officials, and private intelligence
operatives that work together in 2014-2015-2016 Ukraine are Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta, Ukraine
Cyber Alliance, and the Ministry of Information.
All of these hacking and information operation groups work for Andrea
Chalupa with EuroMaidanPR and Irena
Chalupa at the Atlantic Council. Both Chalupa sisters work directly with the Ukrainian
government's intelligence and propaganda arms.
Since 2014 in Ukraine, these are the only OSINT, hacking, Intel, espionage , terrorist , counter-terrorism, cyber, propaganda , and info war channels
officially recognized and directed by Ukraine's Information Ministry. Along with their American
colleagues, they populate the hit-for-hire website Myrotvorets with people who stand against
Ukraine's criminal activities.
The hackers, OSINT, Cyber, spies, terrorists, etc. call themselves volunteers to keep safe
from State level retaliation, even though a child can follow the money. As volunteers motivated
by politics and patriotism they are protected to a degree from retribution.
They don't claim State sponsorship or governance and the level of attack falls below the
threshold of military action. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had a lot of latitude for
making the attribution Russian, even though the attacks came from Ukrainian Intelligence. Based
on how the rules of the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber are
written, because the few members of the coalition from Shaltai Boltai are Russian in
nationality, Fancy Bear can be attributed as a Russian entity for the purposes of retribution.
The caveat is if the attribution is proven wrong, the US will be liable for damages caused to
the State which in this case is Russia.
How large is the Fancy Bear unit? According to their propaganda section InformNapalm, they
have the ability to research and work in over 30 different languages.
This can be considered an Information Operation against the people of the United States and
of course Russia. After 2013, Shaltay Boltay was no longer physically available to work for
Russia. The Russian hackers were in Ukraine working for the Ukrainian government's Information
Ministry which is in charge of the cyber war. They were in Ukraine until October 2016 when they
were tricked to return to Moscow and promptly arrested for treason.
From all this information we know the Russian component of Team Fancy Bear is Shaltai
Boltai. We know the Ukrainian Intel component is called CyberHunta and Ukraine Cyber Alliance
which includes the hacker group RUH8. We know both groups work/ worked for Ukrainian
Intelligence. We know they are grouped with InformNapalm which is Ukraine's OSINT unit. We know
their manager is a Ukrainian named Kristina Dobrovolska. And lastly, all of the above work
directly with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich.
In short, the Russian-Ukrainian partnership that became Fancy Bear started in late 2013 to
very early 2014 and ended in October 2016 in what appears to be a squabble over the alleged
data from the Surkov leak.
But during 2014, 2015, and 2016 Shaltai Boltai, the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, and CyberHunta
went to work for the DNC as opposition researchers .
The
First Time Shaltai Boltai was Handed the Keys to US Gov Servers
The setup to this happened long before the partnership with Ukrainian Intel hackers and
Russia's Shaltai Boltai was forged. The hack that gained access to US top-secret servers
happened just after the partnership was cemented after Euro-Maidan.
In August 2009 Hillary Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff at the State Department Huma Abedin
sent the passwords to her Government laptop to her Yahoo mail account. On August 16, 2010,
Abedin received an email titled "Re: Your yahoo account. We can see where this is going, can't
we?
"After Abedin sent an unspecified number of sensitive emails to her Yahoo account, half a
billion Yahoo accounts were hacked by Russian cybersecurity expert and Russian intelligence
agent, Igor Sushchin, in 2014. The hack, one of the largest in history, allowed Sushchin's
associates to access email accounts into 2015 and 2016."
Igor Sushchin was part of the Shaltai Boltai hacking group that is charged with the Yahoo
hack.
The time frame has to be noted. The hack happened in 2014. Access to the email accounts
continued through 2016. The Ukrainian Intel partnership was already blossoming and Shaltai
Boltai was working from Kiev, Ukraine.
So when we look at the INFRASTRUCTURE HACKS, WHITE HOUSE HACKS, CONGRESS, start with looking
at the time frame. Ukraine had the keys already in hand in 2014.
Alexandra
Chalupa hired this particular hacking terrorist group, which Dimitry Alperovich and
Crowdstrike dubbed "Fancy Bear", in 2015 at the latest. While the Ukrainian hackers worked for
the DNC, Fancy Bear had to send in progress reports, turn in research, and communicate on the
state of the projects they were working on. Let's face it, once you're in, setting up your
Fancy Bear toolkit doesn't get any easier. This is why I said the DNC hack isn't the big crime.
It's a big con and all the parties were in on it.
Hillary Clinton exposed secrets to hacking threats by using private email instead of secured
servers. Given the information provided she was probably being monitored by our intrepid
Ruskie-Ukie union made in hell hackers. Anthony Weiner exposed himself and his wife
Huma Abedin using
Weiner's computer for top-secret State Department emails. And of course Huma Abedin exposed
herself along with her top-secret passwords at Yahoo and it looks like the hackers the DNC hired to
do opposition research hacked her.
Here's a question. Did Huma Abedin have Hillary Clinton's passwords for her private email
server? It would seem logical given her position with Clinton at the State Department and
afterward. This means that Hillary Clinton and the US government top secret servers were most
likely compromised by Fancy Bear before the DNC and Team Clinton hired them by using legitimate
passwords.
Dobrovolska
Hillary Clinton retained State Dept. top secret clearance passwords for 6 of her former
staff from 2013 through prepping for the 2016 election. [2][3] Alexandra Chalupa was
running a research department that is rich in (foreign) Ukrainian Intelligence operatives,
hackers, terrorists, and a couple Ruskie traitors.
Kristina Dobrovolska was acting as a handler and translator for the US State Department in
2016. She is the Fancy Bear *opposition researcher handler manager. Kristina goes to Washington
to meet with Chalupa.
Alexandra types in her password to show Dobrovolska something she found and her eager to
please Ukrainian apprentice finds the keystrokes are seared into her memory. She tells the
Fancy Bear crew about it and they immediately get to work looking for Trump material on the US
secret servers with legitimate access. I mean, what else could they do with this? Turn over
sensitive information to the ever corrupt Ukrainian government?
According to the Politico article, Alexandra Chalupa was meeting with the Ukrainian embassy
in June of 2016 to discuss getting more help sticking it to candidate Trump. At the same time
she was meeting, the embassy had a reception that highlighted female Ukrainian leaders.
Four Verkhovna Rada [parlaiment] deputies there for the event included: Viktoriia Y.
Ptashnyk, Anna A. Romanova, Alyona I. Shkrum, and Taras T. Pastukh. [4]
According to CNN ,
[5] DNC sources said Chalupa
told DNC operatives the Ukrainian government would be willing to deliver damaging information
against Trump's campaign. Later, Chalupa would lead the charge to try to unseat president-elect
Trump starting on Nov 10, 2016.
Accompanying them Kristina Dobrovolska who was a U.S. Embassy-assigned government liaison
and translator who escorted the delegates from Kyiv during their visits to Albany and
Washington.
Kristina Dobrovolska is the handler manager working with Ukraine's DNC Fancy Bear Hackers.
[6] She took the Rada
[parliament] members to dinner to meet Joel Harding who designed Ukraine's infamous Information
Policy which opened up their kill-for-hire-website Myrotvorets. Then she took them to meet the
Ukrainian Diaspora leader doing the hiring. Nestor Paslawsky is the surviving nephew to the
infamous torturer The WWII OUNb leader, Mykola Lebed.
Fancy Bear's Second Chance at Top
Secret Passwords From Team Clinton
One very successful method of hacking is called
social engineering . You gain access to the office space and any related properties and
physically locate the passwords or clues to get you into the hardware you want to hack. This
includes something as simple as looking over the shoulder of the person typing in
passwords.
The Fancy Bear hackers were hired by Alexandra Chalupa to work for DNC opposition research.
On different occasions, Fancy Bear handler Kristina Dobrovolska traveled to the US to meet the
Diaspora leaders, her boss Alexandra Chalupa, Irena Chalupa, Andrea Chalupa, US Dept of State
personnel, and most likely Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich. Alperovich was working with the
hackers in 2015-16. In 2016, the only groups known to have Fancy Bear's signature tools called
X-tunnel and X-Agent were Alperovich, Crowdstrike, and Fancy Bear (Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta,
Ukraine Cyber Alliance, and RUH8/RUX8. Yes, that does explain a few things.
Alleged DNC
hack
There were multiple DNC hacks. There is also clear proof supporting the download to a USB
stick and subsequent information exchange (leak) to Wikileaks . All are separate events.
The group I previously identified as Fancy Bear was given access to request password
privileges at the DNC. And it looks like the DNC provided them with it.
the Podesta email hack looks like a revenge hack.
The reason Republican opposition research files were stolen can be put into context now
because we know who the hackers are and what motivates them.
At the same time this story developed, it overshadowed the Hillary Clinton email scandal. It
is a matter of public record that Team Clinton provided the DNC hackers with passwords to
State Department
servers on at least 2 occasions, one wittingly and one not. Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian
Intelligence Operators.
If the leak came through Seth Rich , it may have been because he saw
foreign Intel operatives given this access from the presumed winners of the 2016 US presidential
election . The leaker may
have been trying to do something about it. I'm curious what information Wikileaks might
have.
Alperovitch and Fancy Bear
George Eliason, Washingtonsblog: Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell
Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear. investigated. [7]
In the wake of the JAR-16-20296 dated December 29, 2016 about hacking and influencing
the 2016 election, the need for real evidence is clear. The joint report adds nothing
substantial to the October 7th report. It relies on proofs provided by the cyber security
firm Crowdstrike that is clearly not on
par with intelligence findings or evidence. At the top of the report is an "as is"
statement showing this.
The difference bet enough evidence is provided to warrant an investigation of
specific parties for the DNC hacks. The real story involves specific anti-American actors
that need to be investigated for real crimes. For instance, the malware used was an
out-dated version just waiting to be found. The one other interesting point is that the
Russian malware called Grizzly Steppe is from Ukraine. How did Crowdstrike miss this when
it is their business to know?
The bar for identification set by Crowdstrike has never been able to get beyond words
like probably, maybe, could be, or should be, in their attribution. The bar Dimitri
Alperovitch set for identifying the hackers involved is that low. Other than asking
America to trust them, how many solid facts has Alperovitch provided to back his claim of
Russian involvement?
information from outside intelligence agencies has the value of rumor or
unsubstantiated information at best according to policy. Usable intelligence needs to be
free from partisan politics and verifiable. Intel agencies noted back in the early 90's
that every private actor in the information game was radically political.
Alperovitch first gained notice when he was the VP in charge of threat research with
McAfee. Asked to comment on Alperovitch's discovery of Russian hacks on Larry King, John
McAfee had this to say. "Based on all of his experience, McAfee does not believe that
Russians were behind the hacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC), John Podesta's
emails, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. As he told RT, "if it looks like
the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the Russians."
How does Crowdstrike's story part with reality? First is the admission that it is
probably, maybe, could be Russia hacking the DNC. "Intelligence agencies do not have
specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin 'directing' the identified
individuals to pass the Democratic emails to Wiki Leaks." The public evidence never goes
beyond the word possibility. While never going beyond that or using facts, Crowdstrike
insists that it's Russia behind both Clinton's and the Ukrainian losses.
NBC carried the story because one of the partners in Crowdstrike is also a consultant
for NBC. According to NBC the story reads like this."The company, Crowdstrike, was hired
by the DNC to investigate the hack and issued a report publicly attributing it to Russian
intelligence. One of Crowdstrike's senior executives is Shawn Henry , a former senior FBI
official who consults for NBC News.
In June, Crowdstrike went public with its findings that two separate Russian
intelligence agencies had hacked the DNC. One, which Crowdstrike and other researchers
call Cozy Bear, is believed to be linked to Russia's CIA, known as the FSB. The other,
known as Fancy Bear, is believed to be tied to the military intelligence agency, called
the GRU." The information is so certain the level of proof never rises above "believed to
be." According to the December 12th Intercept article "Most importantly, the Post
adds that "intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in
the Kremlin 'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to
WikiLeaks."
The SBU, Olexander Turchinov, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense all agree that
Crowdstrike is dead wrong in this assessment. Although subtitles aren't on it, the former
Commandant of Ukrainian Army Headquarters thanks God Russia never invaded or Ukraine
would have been in deep trouble. How could Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike be this
wrong on easily checked detail and still get this much media attention?
Crowdstrike CEO Dmitri Alperovitch story about Russian hacks that cost Hillary
Clinton the election was broadsided by the SBU (Ukrainian Intelligence and Security) in
Ukraine. If Dimitri Alperovitch is working for Ukrainian Intelligence and is providing
intelligence to 17 US Intelligence Agencies is it a conflict of interest?
Is giving misleading or false information to 17 US Intelligence Agencies a crime? If
it's done by a cyber security industry leader like Crowdstrike should that be
investigated? If unwinding the story from the "targeting of Ukrainian volunteers" side
isn't enough, we should look at this from the American perspective. How did the Russia
influencing the election and DNC hack story evolve? Who's involved? Does this pose
conflicts of interest for Dmitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? And let's face it, a
hacking story isn't complete until real hackers with the skills, motivation, and reason
are exposed.
According to journalist and DNC activist Andrea Chalupa on her Facebook page "After
Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter to a
meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns
within the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. "That's when we knew it was the
Russians," said a Democratic Party source who has been directly involved in the internal
probe into the hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, "we told her
to stop her research."" July 25, 2016
If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her
sister Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news.
The DNC hacking investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by
Russian actors based on the work done byAlexandra Chalupa? That is the
conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the
Russian government connection.
How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he
should have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a
presidential election in a new direction. According to Esquire.com, Alperovitch has
vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the past. Because of
his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said the
measures taken were directly because of his work.
Alperovitch's relationships with the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian
propagandists, and Ukrainian state supported hackers [show a conflict of interest]. When
it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that tried hard to
influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016.
The Chalupas are not Democrat or Republican. They are OUNb. The OUNb worked hard
to start a war between the USA and Russia for the last 50 years. According to the
Ukrainian Weekly in a rare open statement of their existence in 2011, "Other
statements were issued in the Ukrainian language by the leadership of the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (B) and the International Conference in
Support of Ukraine. The OUN (Bandera wing) called for" What is
OUNb Bandera? They follow the same political policy and platform that was developed
in the 1930's by Stepan Bandera . When these
people go to a Holocaust memorial they are celebrating
both the dead and the OUNb SS that killed.[8] There is no
getting around this fact. The OUNb have no concept of democratic values and want an
authoritarian
fascism .
Alexandra Chalupa- According to the Ukrainian Weekly , [9]
"The effort, known as Digital Miadan, gained momentum following the initial Twitter storms.
Leading the effort were: Lara Chelak, Andrea Chalupa, Alexandra Chalupa, Constatin Kostenko
and others." The Digital Maidan was also how they raised money for the coup. This was how the
Ukrainian emigres bought the bullets that were used on Euromaidan. Ukraine's chubby nazi,
Dima Yarosh stated openly he was taking money from the Ukrainian emigres during Euromaidan
and Pravy Sektor still fundraises openly in North America. The "Sniper Massacre" on the
Maidan in Ukraine by Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottowa shows clearly detailed
evidence how the massacre happened. It has Pravy Sektor confessions that show who created the
"heavenly hundred. Their admitted involvement as leaders of Digital Maidan by both Chalupas
is a clear violation of the Neutrality Act and has up to a 25 year prison sentence attached
to it because it ended in a coup.
Andrea Chalupa-2014, in a Huff Post article Sept. 1 2016, Andrea Chalupa
described Sviatoslav Yurash as one of Ukraine's important "dreamers." He is a young
activist that founded Euromaidan Press. Beyond the gushing glow what she doesn't say
is who he actually is. Sviatoslav Yurash was Dmitri Yarosh's spokesman just after
Maidan. He is a hardcore Ukrainian nationalist and was rewarded with the Deputy
Director position for the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) in Kiev.
In January, 2014 when he showed up at the Maidan protests he was 17 years old. He
became the foreign language media representative for Vitali Klitschko, Arseni
Yatsenyuk, and Oleh Tyahnybok. All press enquiries went through Yurash. To meet
Dimitri Yurash you had to go through Sviatoslav Yurash as a Macleans reporter found
out.
At 18 years old, Sviatoslav Yurash became the spokesman for Ministry of Defense
of Ukraine under Andrei Paruby. He was Dimitri Yarosh's spokesman and can be seen
either behind Yarosh on videos at press conferences or speaking ahead of him to
reporters. From January 2014 onward, to speak to Dimitri Yarosh, you set up an
appointment with Yurash.
Andrea Chalupa has worked with Yurash's Euromaidan Press which is associated with
Informnapalm.org and supplies the state level hackers for Ukraine.
Irene Chalupa- Another involved Chalupa we need to cover to do the story justice
is Irene Chalupa. From her bio– Irena Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the
Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center. She is also a senior correspondent
at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), where she has worked for more than
twenty years. Ms. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the Atlantic Council,
where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor
for Ukraine's propaganda channel org She is also a Ukrainian emigre leader.
According to Robert Parry's article [10] At the forefront
of people that would have taken senior positions in a Clinton administration and
especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council . Their main
goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the CEEC (Central
and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with Russia.
Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was "Are you
willing to go to war with Russia?" Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support
throughout the campaign.
What does any of this have to do with Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? Since the
Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions, his own fellowship
status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite
conflict of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Trump's campaign was gaining ground
and Clinton needed a boost. Had she won, would he have been in charge of the CIA, NSA, or
Homeland Security?
When you put someone that has so much to gain in charge of an investigation that
could change an election, that is a conflict of interest. If the think tank is linked
heavily to groups that want war with Russia like the Atlantic Council and the CEEC, it
opens up criminal conspiracy.
If the person in charge of the investigation is a fellow at the think tank that wants
a major conflict with Russia it is a definite conflict of interest. Both the Atlantic
Council and clients stood to gain Cabinet and Policy positions based on how the result of
his work affects the election. It clouds the results of the investigation. In Dmitri
Alperovitch's case, he found the perpetrator before he was positive there was a
crime.
Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence
groups is where things really heat up. Noted above she works with Euromaidanpress.com and
Informnapalm.org which is the outlet for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers.
When you look at Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, you have to ask why the
CEO of a $150 million dollar company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm and
its hackers individually. There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for
the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be
investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government. Crowdstrike is
also following their hack of a Russian government official after the DNC hack. It closely
resembles the same method used with the DNC because it was an email hack.
Crowdstrike's product line includes Falcon Host, Falcon Intelligence, Falcon
Overwatch and Falcon DNS. Is it possible the hackers in Falcons Flame are another service
Crowdstrike offers?
In an interview with Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA.
[11] They consider the
CIA amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance
is a quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity,
Falcon Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the
Myrotvorets site, Informnapalm analytical agency."
Although this profile says Virginia, tweets are from the Sofia, Bulgaria time zone and he
writes in Russian. Another curiosity considering the Fancy Bear source code is in Russian. This
image shows Crowdstrike in their network. Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker
network. In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The
network communication goes through a secondary source. Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for
Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence.
The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates
journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could
be on the list.
Should someone tell Dimitri Alperovitch that Gerashchenko, who is now in charge of
Peacekeeper recently threatened president-elect Donald Trump that he would put him on his
"Peacemaker" site as a target? The same has been done with Silvio Berscaloni in the
past.
Trying not to be obvious, the Head of Ukraine's Information Ministry (UA
Intelligence) tweeted something interesting that ties Alperovitch and Crowdstrike to the
Ukrainian Intelligence hackers and the Information Ministry even tighter. This single
tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of Information
Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him and
Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or
shared. If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be
shared heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it
to themselves and not draw unwanted attention.
These same hackers are associated with Alexandra, Andrea, and Irene Chalupa through
the portals and organizations they work with through their OUNb. The hackers are funded
and directed by or through the same OUNb channels that Alperovitch is working for and
with to promote the story of Russian hacking.
When you look at the image for the hacking group in the euromaidanpress article,
one of the hackers identifies themselves as one of Dimitri Yarosh's Pravy Sektor
members by the Pravy Sektor sweatshirt they have on. Noted above, Pravy Sektor
admitted to killing the people at the Maidan protest and sparked the coup.
Going further with the linked Euromaidanpress article the hackers say "Let's
understand that Ukrainian hackers and Russian hackers once constituted a single very
powerful group. Ukrainian hackers have a rather high level of work. So the help of
the USA I don't know, why would we need it? We have all the talent and special means
for this. And I don't think that the USA or any NATO country would make such sharp
movements in international politics."
What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it
out for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored,
Russian language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack
they have the tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are
also laughing at US intel efforts.
The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting
a war between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt
Russia worst. Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by
Alperovitch, both he and these hackers need to be investigated.
According to the Esquire interview "Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought
the government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of
the personal in his battle cry. "A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate
the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any
other way," he told me. "I have."
While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism
is not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering
a conflict with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't
serving US interests. He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to
Ukraine.
The evidence presented deserves investigation because it looks like the case for
conflict of interest is the least Dimitri Alperovitch should look forward to. If these
hackers are the real Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, they really did make sharp movements in
international politics. By pawning it off on Russia, they made a worldwide embarrassment
of an outgoing President of the United States and made the President Elect the suspect of
rumor.
Obama, Brazile, Comey, and CrowdStrike
According to Obama the
hacks continued until September 2016. According to ABC, Donna Brazile says the hacks didn't stop
until after the elections in 2016. According to Crowdstrike the hacks continued into
November.
Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile said Russian hackers persisted in trying
to break into the organization's computers "daily, hourly" until after the election --
contradicting President Obama's assertion that the hacking stopped in September after he warned
Russian President Vladimir Putin to "cut it out."-ABC
This time frame gives a lot of latitude to both hacks and leaks happening on that server and
still agrees with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs). According to
Bill
Binney , the former Technical Director for the NSA, the only way that data could move off
the server that fast was through a download to a USB stick. The transfer rate of the file does
not agree with a Guciffer 2.0 hack and the information surrounding Guciffer 2.0 is looking
ridiculous and impossible at best.
The DNC fiasco isn't that important of a crime. The reason I say this is the FBI would have
taken control over material evidence right away. No law enforcement agency or Intel agency ever
did. This means none of them considered it a crime Comey should have any part of investigating.
That by itself presents the one question mark which destroys any hope Mueller has proving law
enforcement maintained a chain of custody for any evidence he introduces.
It also says the US government under Barrack Obama and the victimized DNC saw this as a
purely political event. They didn't want this prosecuted or they didn't think it was
prosecutable.
Once proven it shows a degree of criminality that makes treason almost too light a charge in
federal court. Rest assured this isn't a partisan accusation. Team Clinton and the DNC gets the
spotlight but there are Republicans involved.
Investigative Jouralist George Webb worked at MacAfee and Network Solutions in 2000 when the
CEO Bill Larsen bought a small, Moscow based, hacking and virus writing company to move to
Silicon Valley.
MacAfee also purchased PGP, an open source encryption software developed by privacy advocate
to reduce NSA spying on the public.
The two simultaneous purchase of PGP and the Moscow hacking team by Metwork Solutions was
sponsored by the CIA and FBI in order to crack encrypted communications to write a back door
for law enforcement.
Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named
Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking
scandal - Crowdstrike.
In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry
platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) is Michael K Atkinson. ICIG Atkinson is
the official who accepted the ridiculous premise of a hearsay 'whistle-blower' complaint; an
intelligence whistleblower who was "blowing-the-whistle" based on second hand information of
a phone call without any direct personal knowledge, ie 'hearsay'.
The center of the Lawfare Alliance influence was/is the Department of Justice National
Security Division, DOJ-NSD. It was the DOJ-NSD running the Main Justice side of the 2016
operations to support Operation Crossfire Hurricane and FBI agent Peter Strzok. It was also
the DOJ-NSD where the sketchy legal theories around FARA violations (Sec. 901)
originated.
Michael K Atkinson was previously the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of
the National Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ-NSD) in 2016. That makes
Atkinson senior legal counsel to John Carlin and Mary McCord who were the former heads of the
DOJ-NSD in 2016 when the stop Trump operation was underway.
Michael Atkinson was the lawyer for the same DOJ-NSD players who: (1) lied to the FISA
court (Judge Rosemary Collyer) about the 80% non compliant NSA database abuse using FBI
contractors; (2) filed the FISA application against Carter Page; and (3) used FARA violations
as tools for political surveillance and political targeting.
Yes, that means Michael Atkinson was Senior Counsel for the DOJ-NSD, at the very epicenter
of the political weaponization and FISA abuse.
"... Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting in 1971. Barr's youth career goal was to head the CIA. ..."
"... CIA operative assigned to the China directorate, where he became close to powerful CIA operative George H.W. Bush, whose accomplishments already included the CIA/Cuba Bay of Pigs, Asia CIA operations (Vietnam War, Golden Triangle narcotics), Nixon foreign policy (Henry Kissinger), and the Watergate operation. ..."
"... When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA's "legal office" and Bush's inner circle, and worked alongside Bush's longtime CIA enforcers Theodore "Ted" Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines, and others, several of whom were likely involved with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy assassination, and numerous southeast Asian operations, from the Phoenix Program to Golden Triangle narco-trafficking. ..."
"... Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Church Committee investigations into CIA abuses ..."
"... Barr stonewalled and stopped inquiries in the CIA bombing assassination of Chilean opposition leader Orlando Letelier. ..."
"... Barr stonewalled and stopped investigations into all Bush/Clinton and CIA crimes, including BCCI and BNL CIA drug banking, the theft of Inslaw/PROMIS software, and all crimes of state committed by Bush ..."
"... Barr provided legal cover for Bush's illegal foreign policy and war crimes ..."
It is a sobering fact that American presidents (many of whom have been corrupt) have gone out of their way to hire fixers to be
their attorney generals.
Consider recent history: Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), Eric Holder (2009-2015), Michael Mukasey (2007-2009), Alberto Gonzales (2005-2007),
John Ashcroft (2001-2005),Janet Reno (1993-2001), Dick Thornburgh (1988-1991), Ed Meese (1985-1988), etc.
Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting in 1971. Barr's youth career goal was
to head the CIA.
CIA operative assigned to the China directorate, where he became close to powerful CIA operative George H.W. Bush, whose accomplishments
already included the CIA/Cuba Bay of Pigs, Asia CIA operations (Vietnam War, Golden Triangle narcotics), Nixon foreign policy
(Henry Kissinger), and the Watergate operation.
When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA's "legal office" and Bush's inner circle, and worked
alongside Bush's longtime CIA enforcers Theodore "Ted" Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines, and others, several of whom were
likely involved with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy assassination, and numerous southeast Asian operations, from the Phoenix
Program to Golden Triangle narco-trafficking.
Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Church Committee investigations into CIA abuses.
Barr stonewalled and stopped inquiries in the CIA bombing assassination of Chilean opposition leader Orlando Letelier.
Barr joined George H.W. Bush's legal/intelligence team during Bush's vice presidency (under President Ronald Reagan) Rose
from assistant attorney general to Chief Legal Counsel to attorney general (1991) during the Bush 41 presidency.
Barr was a key player in the Iran-Contra operation, if not the most important member of the apparatus, simultaneously managing
the operation while also "fixing" the legal end, ensuring that all of the operatives could do their jobs without fear of exposure
or arrest.
In his attorney general confirmation, Barr vowed to "attack criminal organizations", drug smugglers and money launderers.
It was all hot air: as AG, Barr would preserve, protect, cover up, and nurture the apparatus that he helped create, and use Justice
Department power to escape punishment.
Barr stonewalled and stopped investigations into all Bush/Clinton and CIA crimes, including BCCI and BNL CIA drug banking,
the theft of Inslaw/PROMIS software, and all crimes of state committed by Bush
Barr provided legal cover for Bush's illegal foreign policy and war crimes
Barr left Washington, and went through the "rotating door" to the corporate world, where he took on numerous directorships
and counsel positions for major companies. In 2007 and again from 2017, Barr was counsel for politically-connected international
law firm Kirkland & Ellis . Among its other notable
attorneys and alumni are Kenneth Starr, John Bolton, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and numerous Trump administration
attorneys. K&E's clients include sex trafficker/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and Mitt Romney's Bain Capital.
A strong case can be made that William Barr was as powerful and important a figure in the Bush apparatus as any other, besides
Poppy Bush himself.
Iran-Contra
To understand the scope, scale, and gravity of William Barr's central role working for
George H.W. Bush , one must grasp
the significance of Iran-Contra, the massive
criminal operation that was the cornerstone of the Bush era, headed by the Bushes, with the Clintons as partners.
Originally coined "Iran-Contra" (in reference to illegal arms sales to Iran in exchange for American hostages in Lebanon and
arms to the Contra "freedom fighters" in Nicaragua), the moniker hides the fact that it became a massive and permanent criminal
business and political machine that went far beyond then-current political concerns.
In The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider , Al Martin describes the Iran-Contra Enterprise that a vast operation
that included (and was not limited to) drugs, weapons, terrorism, war, money laundering, criminal banking and securities fraud, currency
fraud, real estate fraud, insurance fraud, blackmail, extortion, and political corruption that involved countless Washington politicians
of both Republican and Democratic parties.
Martin:
"Iran-Contra itself is a euphemism for the outrageous fraud perpetrated by government criminals for profit and control.
Offhandedly, this inaccurate term entered history as shorthand for the public scandals of illicit arms sales to Iran coupled with
illicit weapons deals for Nicaragua. The real story, however, is much more complex When George Bush, [CIA Director] Bill Casey
and Oliver North initiated their plan of government-sanctioned fraud and drug smuggling, they envisioned using 500 men to raise
$35 billion .they ended up using about 5,000 operatives and making over $35 billion." In addition, the operation became "a government
within a government, comprising some thirty to forty thousand people the American government turns to, when it wishes certain
illegal covert operations to be extant pursuant to a political objective" with George [H.W.] Bush "at the top of the pyramid".
The operation's insiders and whistleblowers place George H.W.Bush as one of its top architects, and its commander. It was carried
out by CIA operatives close to Bush since his CIA directorship and even stretching back to the Bay of Pigs. These included Oliver
North, Ted Shackley, Edwin Wilson, Felix Rodriguez, and others. Iran-Contra was a replication of the CIA's Golden Triangle drug trafficking
in Southeast Asia (operations also connected to Bush) but on a larger scale and sophistication, greater complexity, and far-reaching
impact that remains palpable to this day.
In
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography , Webster Tarpley wrote that, "many once-classified documents have come to light,
which suggest that Bush organized and supervised many, or most, of the criminal aspects of the Iran-Contra adventures."
Tarpley further points out that George H.W. Bush created new structures ("special situation group", "terror incident working group"
etc.) within the Reagan administration -- and that
"all of these structures revolved around [creating] the secret command role of the then-Vice President, George Bush The Bush
apparatus, within and behind the government, was formed to carry out covert policies: to make war when the constitutional government
had decided not to make war; to support enemies of the nation (terrorists and drug runners) who are the friends and agents of
the secret government."
This suggests that George H.W.Bush not only ran Iran-Contra, but much of the Reagan presidency. Then-White House press secretary
James Baker said in 1981,
"Bush is functioning much like a co-president. George is involved in all the national security stuff because of his special
background as CIA director. All the budget working groups, he was there, the economic working groups, the Cabinet meetings. He
is included in almost all the meetings."
Hundreds of insiders, witnesses and investigators have blown the lid off of the Iran-Contra Enterprise in exhaustive fashion.
These include the investigations of Mike Ruppert (
From The Wilderness , Crossing the Rubicon
), Al Martin ( The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider ), Gary Webb ( Dark Alliance ), Rodney Stich (
Defrauding America , Drugging America ), Terry Reed ( Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA ),
Stew Webb (and
here ), Dois "Chip" Tatum ( The
Tatum Chronicles ) ( summarized here
), Pete Brewton ( The Mafia, the CIA and George Bush ), among others. The accounts of Barry Seal, Edward Cutolo, Albert Carone,
Bradley Ayers, Tosh Plumley, Bill Tyree, Gunther Russbacher, Celerino Castillo, Michael Levine, Trenton Parker, Russell Bowen, Richard
Brenneke, Larry Nichols , William Duncan, Russell Welch
and dozens more implicate the Bushes, the Clintons and the CIA.
As described by Mike Ruppert (image left):
"It stood, and still stands today, isolated and immune from the operating principles of democracy. It is autonomous and
it operates through self-funding via narcotics and weapons trafficking. To quote [former CIA director] William Casey it is 'a
completely self-funding, off-the-shelf operation.' It, in fact, dictates a substantial portion of this country's foreign, economic
and military policy from a place not accessible to the will of a free people properly armed with facts."
CIA deep cover agent pilot Chip Tatum, a key Iran-Contra player who flew drugs into Mena and Little Rock in Arkansas, worked alongside
CIA pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal. It is believed that Seal was subsequently murdered by the Medellin Cartel, on order of Oliver
North and the Bushes, to prevent him from testifying about his activities. Before he was killed, Seal provided Tatum a list of Iran-Contra
"Boss Hogs" who allegedly controlled the drug trade.
The Pegasus File summaries Tatum's activities,
and features the "Boss Hog" list.
The Iran-Contra apparatus was byzantine, comprised of a network of connected government agencies, subsidiaries, and shell companies
and corporations can be seen in the diagram provided by whistleblower Stew Webb:
The Iran-Contra Enterprise's overseers, criminal associates and beneficiaries, to this day, remain at large [including Barr],
with most enjoying massive illegally-obtained wealth, privilege, and highest political and corporate positions. The imperial positions
of the Bush and Clinton clans exemplify this.
The operation, in essence, evolved and metastasized into ever-more modern and sophisticated incarnation with even more global
reach. New names, new banks, new drugs, new wars, same blueprint. It is not a "deep state" or a "shadow state" but a Criminal State
that operates "in broad daylight". It is the playbook of the New World Order. It is globalization at its finest.
All attempts to prosecute were largely unsuccessful -- blocked, stalled, or given a "limited hangout" treatment. As written by
Ruppert, one of many Iran-Contra whistleblowers, in Crossing the Rubicon:
"[In Congress] Iran-Contra was effectively 'managed' by Lee Hamilton in the House [of Representatives] and John Kerry (among
others) in the Senate throughout the late 1980s to conceal the greatest crimes of the era, crimes committed by a litany of well-known
government operatives."
Which brings us to this:
Iran-Contra was also managed on both the operational and all-important judicial "legal" end by none other than William Barr.
Barr: Iran-Contra insider alias "Robert Johnson"
In his books Drugging America: A Trojan Horse and Defrauding America: Dirty Secrets of the CIA and other Government Operations
, whistleblower Rodney Stich exposed in exhaustive detail the firsthand accounts of whistleblowers and insiders, who participated
in the many criminal operations that stretched across the Bush and Clinton presidencies.
Some of the shocking evidence exposes Barr acting simultaneously as a hands-on covert operative, and as Bush's judicial/political
fixer:
[CIA operative] Terry Reed had been in frequent telephone contact with the man he knew as Robert Johnson. Johnson directed
the drug trafficking and drug money laundering, the training in Arkansas of Contra pilots and fighters, and authorized Reed to
set up the CIA proprietary in Mexico. At a later date, Reed learned that Robert Johnson was really William Barr, appointed by
President George Bush to be Attorney General of the United States.
Reed's CIA contact, William Barr, known at that time by his alias Robert Johnson, told Reed that Attorney General Edwin Meese
had appointed Michael Fitzhugh to be US Attorney in Western Arkansas, and that he would stonewall any investigation into the Mena,
Arkansas drug-related activities. This obstruction of justice by Justice Department officials did occur.
William Barr, who Bush appointed to be the top law enforcement officer in the United States -- US Attorney General -- played
a key role in the smuggling of drugs into the United States. [CIA pilot Chip] Tatum's statements about reaching Barr at Southern
Air Transport in Miami through the name of Robert Johnson confirmed what [CIA operative] Terry Reed, author of the book Compromised
, had told me and had written. Nothing like having members of felony drug operations hold the position of US Attorney General
-- in control of the United States Department of Justice -- and a vice president of the United States [Bush]. With this type of
influence, no one needs fear being arrested. And don't forget the Mafia groups working with the CIA who also receive Justice Department
protection that is not available to US citizens.
According to Stich , Tatum also detailed to him meetings that took place in which he was present for meetings and telephone conversations
between Bush, [NSC Colonel] Oliver North and Barr, discussing not only operations but the skimming of drug money by the Clintons.
The purpose of the meeting was to determine who was responsible for stealing over $100 million in drug money on the three routes
from Panama to Colorado, Ohio, and Arkansas. This theft was draining the operation known as the "Enterprise" The first call was
made by [CIA agent Joseph] Fernandez to Oliver North, informing North that the theft was occurring on the Panama to Arkansas route,
and "that means either [CIA pilot Barry] Seal, Clinton, or [Panamanian General Manuel] Noriega" Fifteen minutes later, the portable
phone rang, and Vice President George Bush was on the line, talking to William Barr. Barr said at one point, referring to the
missing funds, "I would propose that no one source would be bold enough to siphon out that much money, but it is more plausible
that each are siphoning a portion, causing a drastic loss."..Barr told Bush that he and Fernandez were staying in Costa Rica until
the following day after first visiting [CIA operative] John Hull's ranch. Barr then handed the phone to Tatum, who was instructed
by Bush to be sure that Noriega and [Mossad operative Michael] Harari boarded Seal's plane and departed, and for Tatum to get
the tail number of Seal's plane .Tatum said that Barr dialed another number, immediately reaching then-governor Bill Clinton.
Barr explained the missing money problem to Clinton Barr suggested that Clinton investigate at the Arkansas end of the Panama
to Arkansas route, and that he and North would continue investigating the Panama end of the connection, warning that the matter
must be resolved or it could lead to "big problems" (This description of missing drug money provided support to a subsequent meeting
in Little Rock, described by Terry Reed, during which William Barr accused Clinton of siphoning drug money and that this had to
stop.)
Tatum also described to Stich a March 15, 1985 flight, during which "Tatum met with Barr, Harari, and Buddy Young (head of Governor
Bill Clinton's security detail). Barr represented himself as an emissary of Vice President George Bush, who would be arriving soon.
Tatum would note on his flight book " Bush visit/meet with Barr and had dinner at German restaurant ".
As attorney general, obviously still working for CIA/Bush purposes, Barr and Richard Thornburgh (George H.W. Bush's previous attorney
general)
killed off investigations into BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the notorious
CIA drug bank . Barr also
stonewalled investigations
in the Banca Nationale del Lavoro (BNL), another CIA drug bank.
BCCI was a leading CIA bank used by the Bush/Clinton machine for a vast array of operations, including Iran-Contra drug money
laundering.
"before William Barr came to the Justice Department, he was an attorney with the Washington law firm of Shaw Pittman Potts
& Trowbridge. This law firm represented BCCI for several years Barr's former law firm also represented B. Francis Saul II, a director
and powerful shareholder in Financial General Bankshares, Inc. Financial later became First American Bankshares, a covert BCCI
operation Further, Barr had been legal counsel for the CIA, the same agency that was heavily involved with BCCI corrupt activities.
He was CIA counsel during the time that George Bush was Director of the CIA."
When both the CIA and the Justice Department connections and cover-up of BCCI were exposed by the dogged investigations of Congressman
Henry Gonzalez, then-FBI Director William Sessions [ note: not related to recent Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions ] promised
an investigation. This prompted Attorney General Barr, who himself was engaged in the cover-up and the obstruction of justice, to
remove Sessions on trumped-up ethics charges, replacing him with someone more malleable.
Also, as part of the BCCI "negotiation" as well as to maintain control over the Iran-Contra drug operations, Barr allegedly also
crafted a legal justification for then-President Bush to invade Panama and kidnap their associate General Manuel Noriega, in order
to imprison and silence him before he could expose the operation.
Cover-up of Inslaw and PROMIS software theft
Barr stonewalled investigations and assisted the cover-up of the
theft of Inslaw, and PROMIS software by the Department of Justice
and the CIA. The otherworldly power of PROMIS software was and still is so coveted that extreme criminal measures have been get it.
"by misusing the power of their office three US attorney generals in the Reagan-Bush administrations, Edwin Meese, Richard Thornburgh,
and William Barr misappropriated, or aided and abetted, the theft of the software called PROMIS."
When the scandal became too noisy, Barr
"appointed a former Justice Department crony to conduct an "investigation" of the Inslaw matter, and then report back to him.
The special counsel would be selected by Barr; would be subservient to him; and would report to him. Barr could then ignore the
recommendations if, in the remote possibility the special counsel did not cooperate in the expected cover-up."
The Iran-Contra pardons
In the most brazen insult to the American people and the entire world, Barr facilitated George H.W. Bush's
infamous 1992 Christmas
Eve pardons of six Iran-Contra co-conspirators Caspar Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert McFarlane, Dewey Clarridge, Alan Fiers,
Clair George,
With the stroke of a pen, Bush
gleefully set free
six of his Iran-Contra criminal flunkies, and effectively decapitating Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's six-year long Iran-Contra
probe.
It was Barr who closed the lid on Iran-Contra, freeing virtually the entire Bush/Clinton network, including himself, from punishment.
It was Barr who, with this move, "saved their asses".
The New World Order could not have asked for a better henchman, fixer, and spook than William Barr.
Trump's nomination of Barr: insanity or "part of the plan"?
Trump won the presidency in 2016 on the power of the single mandate to "drain the swamp", and
Destroy the Deep State . A vicious global struggle continues
to be waged on every front between populist reformers led by Trump and the Deep State/New World Order. This war is taking place in
every nation and on every continent. The stakes are deadly. Time is running short.
The Justice Department has been ground zero in this war. Jeff Sessions' tenure as attorney general was opaque and riddled with
uncertainties. His interim replacement, Matthew Whittaker, is true Trump loyalist who has the unenviable task of taking immediate
action on FISAgate and other investigations into Obama/Clinton administration spying/treason, ending the Robert Mueller's manufactured
anti-Trump "Russian Collusion" witch hunt hoax, and do it all before January 2019, when a new Congress full of emboldened Democrats
(who will come into office via rampant mid-term election fraud) pursue new avenues to further attack Trump. Numerous critical and
potentially explosive congressional testimonies, including investigations into the Clinton Foundation, are all scheduled to take
place before January, which could well decide the course of Trump's presidency, and the movement behind him.
Why is William Barr -- the antithesis of a "patriot" and the swampiest of swamp monsters -- now being inserted into the middle
of what is supposed to be a "white hat" anti-corruption operation? The move is baffling.
Why did Trump make the pick -- the sole pick -- so immediately, seemingly without thorough vetting?
Who recommended Barr for the job? The "white hats", or the "black hats" that have never stopped planting assassins into
Trump's inner circle?
Is it significant or coincidental that the Barr pick came shortly after the death of George H.W. Bush?
Does Trump, who made the pick but claims that he "does not know" Barr (do we believe this?) realize that Barr -- "Robert Johnson"
-- is the Deep State swamp's most loyal operators and protectors ? And that Barr is deeply connected and loyal to everyone
and everything that Trump opposes?
What role could Trump possibly envision for Barr? Will Barr go after Bill and Hillary Clinton? Jeb and George W. Bush, with whom
Barr managed numerous Iran-Contra operations? Will he go after Robert Mueller and James Comey, and dozens of members of Congress,
who were also deeply connected to the "Enterprise"?
Why would Barr go against everything he helped create and everything he stood for? Why would he undo his own criminal handiwork
by prosecuting his own lifelong criminal colleagues and friends? Barr's career has been about saving the Deep State and the New World
Order that he helped make invincible. Why would he do any differently now?
For reasons known only to him, Trump has surrounded himself with
bad actors , too many to count. Mike Pence (longtime Bush loyalist), John Bolton, H.R. McMaster, etc. etc. Trump's cabinet has
been in constant flux, with many shakeups underway. But William Barr is an entirely different level of criminal. What next? Will
Trump invite Dick Cheney to his administration? Bring back Henry Kissinger?
Is Trump being a genius, or is he a dupe and/or a sell-out?
Have Trump and his forces "turned" or leveraged Barr? Is it even possible to control someone like him? "Once CIA, always CIA."
Imagine the spectacle of the pending "confirmation hearings". Will any member of this corrupt Congress grill Barr about Iran-Contra
or BCCI? Will anyone stand up and ask "Robert Johnson" to tell the truth? Or will Barr look across at a room full of frightened politicians
(many of whom he knows too well) and chortle, knowing that no one in the chamber will dare.
Is this the "draining of the swamp", or is Barr the swamp's ultimate victory, and the end of Trump?
Of limited hangouts and deceptions
In
recent interviews , Barr issued noises that seemed supportive of Trump. Barr obviously caught the Trump team's attention based
on these comments. (Humorously, the CIA-managed corporate mainstream media has labeled Barr, an actual CIA criminal conspirator,
a "conspiracy theorist" for his statements.)
While the mainstream media has latched on to quotes in which Barr said that he supports "some" investigations into the Clintons,
he also insists that "throwing Hillary Clinton in jail is inappropriate".
In other words, Barr does not want the swamp to be drained. In other words, Barr only supports limited investigations and limited
hangouts.
Barr should be disqualified for the job simply based on this.
Or does the nomination of Barr suggest that President Trump also does not want to fully "drain the swamp"? Is his goal to merely
co-opt the New World Order co-opt the New World
Order and
co-opt the Bush Republican apparatus , in order to take down the Clinton/Obama side of it, while leaving the Bush side intact?
Given that Bush-Clinton/Obama are two sides of the same coin, it is ridiculous and impossible to "go after" one side without "going
after" the other, and then claim that any real swamp draining is taking place.
It is also possible that Barr and/or his Bush/CIA colleagues have baited the Trump team with his statements, in order to place
him in Trump's administration as a Trojan Horse.
Muted reaction
It is too much to expect the masses, remain uninformed and controlled by propaganda, to understand the significance and danger
posed by the reappearance of Barr.
The few who seem aware of Barr's background are
alarmed for good reason . But even the
more informed observers aren't getting it. Most of those who "trust Trump" and "trust the plan" have not aggressively questioned
the move. Even the research-intensive Internet Anon community has been quiet about Barr.
Some Trump optimists are stretching, trying to convince themselves that Trump is using the Barr nomination to "troll", and to
point attention back to the Bush history, thus forcing the public to research, recoil and awaken to the truth.
They would like to believe that Trump is continuing to play a game of deception. The "4-D chess player", is merely "keeping enemies
close"; manipulating, co-opting, and leveraging compromised figures to his personal bidding; and turn one of the Deep State's own
into a weapon against the Deep State. Perhaps they believe that Trump is purposely elevating Barr, in order to fire him later, as
he has already done with numerous others in his administration.
Some argue that Barr is useful because he "knows where the bodies are buried". Barr himself helped bury them -- literally in many
cases.
If Trump thinks that he can control or leverage someone as dangerous as Barr, then Trump is taking the biggest risk of his presidency,
and of his life.
He is also placing the country and the world at risk.
All in the crime family
The atrocities and crimes of the Bushes and Clintons are unspeakable and unimaginable in depravity and scale.
These atrocities were facilitated by William "Robert Johnson" Barr.
Barr, a hands-on participant, is guilty. Furthermore, he poisoned and manipulated the judicial system -- "law enforcement" --
to get himself and his friends off the hook.
Barr must be exposed and condemned, along with the entire Bush/Clinton/Obama network, and all must be denied and removed from
all positions of influence and power.
In an unguarded moment in 1992, George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon:
"If people ever knew what we had done, we would be chased down the street and lynched."
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site,
internet forums. etc.
The possibility of CrowdStrike central role in creation of Russiagate might be one reason that Congressional Democrats (and
Republicans) were trying to swipe under the carpet the part of Trump conversation where he asked Zelenski to help to recover
server images CrowdStrike shipped to Ukraine.
Another question is that now it is possible that one of CrowdStrike employees or Alperovich himself played the role of Gussifer
2.0
Notable quotes:
"... There is strong reason to doubt Mueller's suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange. ..."
"... Mueller's decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions. ..."
"... the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party's legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking. ..."
"... John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and overlooked role in all facets of what became Mueller's investigation: the suspicions that triggered the initial collusion probe; the allegations of Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment that purported to validate the interference allegations that Brennan himself helped generate. Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele, hardly a neutral party -- in fact a partisan with a deep animus toward Trump. ..."
Most of the material in this article will be familiar to regular readers of SST because I
wrote about it first. Here are the key conclusions:
The report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events, indicating that
Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for certain whether Russian intelligence
officers stole Democratic Party emails, or how those emails were transferred to
WikiLeaks.
The report's timeline of events appears to defy logic. According to its narrative,
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the publication of Democratic Party emails not
only before he received the documents but before he even communicated with the source that
provided them.
There is strong reason to doubt Mueller's suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout
called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange.
Mueller's decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims
Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of
evidence on fundamental questions.
U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the
Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers
themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for
the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as "Russian dossier" compiler Christopher Steele,
also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors
squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller
ignores.
Further, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party's legal counsel
to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be
revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking.
Mueller's report conspicuously does not allege that the Russian government carried out
the social media campaign. Instead it blames, as Mueller said in his closing remarks, "a
private Russian entity" known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
Mueller also falls far short of proving that the Russian social campaign was
sophisticated, or even more than minimally related to the 2016 election. As with the
collusion and Russian hacking allegations, Democratic officials had a central and overlooked
hand in generating the alarm about Russian social media activity.
John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and overlooked role in all
facets of what became Mueller's investigation: the suspicions that triggered the initial
collusion probe; the allegations of Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment
that purported to validate the interference allegations that Brennan himself helped generate.
Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele, hardly a neutral
party -- in fact a partisan with a deep animus toward Trump.
I encourage you to read the piece. It is well written and provides an excellent overview of
critical events in the flawed investigation.
"... Michael K Atkinson was previously the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ-NSD) in 2016. That makes Atkinson senior legal counsel to John Carlin and Mary McCord who were the former heads of the DOJ-NSD in 2016 when the stop Trump operation was underway. ..."
Folks, this "Ukraine Whistleblower" event was a
pre-planned event. As we begin to understand the general outline of how the Schiff Dossier was
assembled, we are now starting to get into the specifics. First discovered by researcher Stephen
McIntyr e, there is now evidence surfacing showing the ICIG recently created an entirely
new 'whistleblower complaint form' that specifically allowed for the filing of complaints "
heard from others ".
... ... ...
The timing here is far too coincidental. This was a set-up .
Sean Davis from the Federalist
is also hot on the trail.
Sean Davis – Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly
eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged
wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community's behavior regarding the
August submission of a
whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no
longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to
Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are
reporting.
The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until
after the transcript of Trump's July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr
Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand
knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have
zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only "heard about [wrongdoing] from
others."
The internal properties of the
newly revised "Disclosure of Urgent Concern" form , which the intelligence community
inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community
Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24,
2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released
to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no
specific date of revision is disclosed. (
read more )
President Trump announced Joseph Macguire as the Acting ODNI on August 8th, 2019 . (
link ) The CIA operative "whistle-blower" letter to Adam Schiff and Richard Burr was on
August 12th ( link
). Immediately following this letter, the ICIG rules and requirements for "whistle-blowers" was
modified, allowing hearsay complaints. On August 28th Adam Schiff begins tweeting about the
construct of the complaint.
As Stephen McIntyre notes : "it
appears almost certain that, subsequent to the CIA operative "WB" complaint, the DNI introduced
a brand new Urgent Disclosure Form which offered a previously unavailable alternative to report
allegations with no personal knowledge."
The CIA whistleblower complaint is likely the VERY FIRST complaint allowed using the new
IGIC protocol and standard. Taken in combination with the timeline of the August 12th
notification letter to Schiff and Burr and the Schiff tweet of August 28th, there's little room
for doubt this Ukraine whistleblower impeachment effort was pre-planned.
Additionally, this coordinated effort ties back-in Intelligence Community Inspector General,
Michael K Atkinson .
The center of the Lawfare Alliance influence was/is the Department of Justice National
Security Division, DOJ-NSD. It was the DOJ-NSD running the Main Justice side of the 2016
operations to support Operation Crossfire Hurricane and FBI agent Peter Strzok. It was also the
DOJ-NSD where the sketchy legal theories around FARA violations (Sec. 901) originated.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) is Michael K Atkinson . ICIG Atkinson is
the official who accepted the ridiculous premise of a hearsay ' whistle-blower '
complaint; an intelligence whistleblower who was " blowing-the-whistle " based on
second hand information of a phone call without any direct personal knowledge, ie '
hearsay '.
Michael K Atkinson
was previously the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National
Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ-NSD) in 2016. That makes Atkinson senior
legal counsel to John Carlin and Mary McCord who were the former heads of the DOJ-NSD in 2016
when the stop Trump operation was underway.
... ... ...
Within a heavy
propaganda report from the New York Times there are also details about the Intelligence
Community Inspector General that show the tell-tale fingerprints of the ICIG supportive intent
(emphasis mine):
[ ] Mr. Atkinson, a Trump appointee, nevertheless concluded that the allegations appeared
to be credible and identified two layers of concern.
The first involved a possible violation of criminal law. Mr. Trump's comments to Mr.
Zelensky " could be viewed as soliciting a foreign campaign contribution in violation of the
campaign-finance laws, " Mr. Atkinson wrote , according to the Justice Department memo. (
read
more )
Does the " foreign campaign contribution " angle sound familiar? It should, because
that argument was used in the narrative around the Trump Tower meeting with the Russian
Lobbyist Natalia Veselnitskaya. More specifically, just like FARA violations the overused
"campaign contribution" narrative belongs to a specific network of characters, Lawfare.
The "Schiff Dossier", aka "whistle-blower" complaint was a constructed effort of allied
members within congress and the intelligence apparatus to renew the impeachment effort. The
intelligence team, including the ICIG, changed the whistleblower form to allow the CIA to
insert the Schiff Dossier, written by Lawfare.
And the irony is the jstreet/lawfare group along with congress are taking two weeks off for
Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur, day of repentance and day of atonement. What do you wanna make a
bet they're not atoning or repenting of their evil hearts.
The Bongino video (1076 IIRC) did a nice job of showing that Shiff had it before it was
formally filed Schiff references things in the complaint in a tweet prior to the complaint
being filed
"
The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the war in Syria from a
laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while caring for his infant daughter. In 2014,
he founded Bellingcat, an open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen
staff members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special
knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing
video games , which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.
...
Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in seminars attended by
journalists and law-enforcement officials. Along with grants from groups like the Open Society
Foundations, founded by George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for
Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization.
The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the war in Syria from a
laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while caring for his infant daughter. In 2014,
he founded Bellingcat, an open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen
staff members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special
knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing
video games , which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.
...
Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in seminars attended by
journalists and law-enforcement officials. Along with grants from groups like the Open Society
Foundations, founded by George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for
Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization.
Looks like Brown Noser Eliot Higgins and his Bellingcrap organisation may have finally met
their match in a real investigative journalist, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, who (some of us may
recall) has done sterling work in tracing movements of weapons from the Balkan countries to
Turkey and Azerbaijan with their ultimate destination being Syria to be used by ISIS jihadis,
and for which she was sacked by her newspaper employer in Bulgaria.
Does anyone imagine that the Brown Noser will have the courage and fortitude to respond to
legal action brought against him and Bellingcrap? Will his Atlantic Council employers support
him or has he passed his use-by date and become a liability?
"... Only a computer illiterate would think that CrowdStrike needed to take the physical DNC server to Ukraine in order to analyze it. Any computer can be cloned and its digital image can be sent within minutes anywhere on the planet in the form of ones and zeroes. It can also exist in multiple digital copies, carrying not just confidential archives, but also history logs and other content that can reveal to an expert whether the hacking occurred, and if so, by whom. ..."
"... The copies of the DNC server on CrowdStrike computers are likely to hold the key to understanding what really happened during the 2016 election, the origin of the anti-Trump witch hunt, and the toxic cloud of lies that had been hanging over the world and poisoning minds during the last three years. ..."
"... And now the new Ukrainian government might subpoena these copies from CrowdStrike and finally pass them to FBI experts, which should've been done three years ago. The danger of this happening is a much greater incentive for the Democrats to preemptively destroy Trump than all the dirt Joe Biden had been rolling in as Obama's vice president. ..."
"... I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. ..."
"... The fraudulent "CrowdStrike conspiracy" deflection is not a show of the Democrats' strength. Instead, It betrays their desperation and panic, which tells us that Trump is squarely over the target. ..."
"... Yet DOJ Mueller conclusively signed off on the unsubtaniated fact the Russians had hacked the DNC computers in his final Weissman Report. Just one more part of the curious Mueller report that was far more a CYA hit piece against future claims of Obama crimes, than an investigation of past Trump ones. ..."
The conspiracy theory that exposes the Democrats' desperation and panic.
Fri Nov 29, 2019
Oleg Atbashian
133 In the last few days, media talking heads have been saying the word "CrowdStrike" a
lot, defining it as a wild conspiracy theory originating in Moscow. They were joined by Chris
Wallace at Fox News, who informed us that president Trump and his ill-informed fans believe in
a crazy idea that the DNC wasn't hacked by the Russians but by some Ukrainian group named
CrowdStrike that stole the DNC server and brought it to Ukraine , and that it was Ukraine that
meddled in our 2016 election and not Russia.
A crazy idea indeed. Except that neither Trump nor his fans had ever heard of it until the
Democrat-media complex condescendingly informed them that these are their beliefs.
Let's look at the facts:
Fact 1. In 2016 the DNC hired the Ukrainian-owned firm CrowdStrike to analyze their server
and investigate a data breach.
Fact 2. CrowdStrike experts determined that the culprit was Russia.
Fact 3. The FBI never received access to the DNC server, so the Russian connection was never
officially confirmed and continues to be an allegation coming from the DNC and its
Ukrainian-owned contractor.
Fact 4. Absent the official verdict, other theories continue to circulate, including the
possibility that the theft was an inside job by a DNC employee, who simply copied the files to
a USB drive and sent it to WikiLeaks.
None of these facts was ever disputed by anyone. The media largely ignored them except for
the part about the Russian hackers, which boosted their own, now debunked, wild conspiracy
theory that Trump was a Russian agent.
Now that Trump had asked the newly elected Ukrainian president Zelensky to look into
CrowdStrike during that fateful July phone call, the media all at once started telling us that
"CrowdStrike" is a code word for a conspiracy theory so insane that only Trump could believe in
it, which is just more proof of how insane he is.
But if Trump had really said what Mr. Wallace and the media claim, Ukrainians would be the
first to call him on it and the impeachment would've been over by now. Instead, Ukrainians back
Trump every step of the way.
So where did this pretzel-shaped fake news come from, and why is it being peddled
now ?
Note this is a classic case study of propaganda and media manipulation:
Take an idea or a story that you wish to go away and make up an obviously bogus story
with the same names and details as the real one.
Start planting it simultaneously on media channels until the fake story supplants the
real one, while claiming this is what your opponents really believe.
Have various fact-checking outlets debunk your fake story as an absurd conspiracy theory.
Ridicule those who allegedly believe in it. Better yet, have late night comedians do it for
you.
Once your opponent is brought down, mercilessly plant your boot on his face and never let
up.
This mass manipulation technology had been tested and perfected by the Soviet propaganda
machine, both domestically and overseas, where it was successfully deployed by the KGB. The
Kremlin still uses it, although it can no longer afford it on the same grandiose scale. In this
sense, the Democratic think tanks are the true successors of the KGB in deviousness, scope, and
worldwide reach of fake narratives. How they inherited these methods from the KGB is a story
for another day.
For a long time this technology was allowing the Democrats to delegitimize opposition by
convincing large numbers of Americans that Republicans are
Haters
Racists
Fascists
Deniers of science
Destroyers of the environment
Heartless sellouts to corporate interests
And so on - the list is endless.
The Soviet communists had aptly named it "disinformation," which a cut above the English
word "misinformation." It includes a variety of methods for a variety of needs, from bringing
down an opponent to revising history to creating a new historical reality altogether. In this
sense, most Hollywood movies on historical subjects today disinform us about history,
supplanting it with a bogus "progressive" narrative. The Soviet term for such art was
"socialist realism."
Long story short, the Democrat-media complex has successfully convinced one half of the
world that Trump is a Russian agent. Now they're acting as if they'd spent the last three years
in a coma, unaware of any bombshell stories about collusion. And bombshell stories without any
continuation are a telltale sign of fake narratives. The only consequence of these bombshells
is mass amnesia among the foot soldiers.
The Trump-Russian outrage is dead, long live the Trump-Ukraine outrage. And when that
outrage is dead, the next outrage that will be just outrageous.
The current impeachment narrative alleges that Trump used military aid as leverage in asking
Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden (which implies the Democrats know Biden is dirty, otherwise
why bother?). What's not in this picture is CrowdStrike. Even though Trump mentioned it in the
phone call, it has nothing to do with the Bidens nor the Javelin missiles. CrowdStrike has
nothing to do with impeachment. We're told it's just a silly conspiracy theory in Trump's head,
that it's a nonissue.
But then why fabricate fake news about it and plant blatant lies simultaneously in all media
outlets from Mother Jones to Fox News? Why risk being exposed over such a nonissue? Perhaps
because it's more important than the story suggests.
Only a computer illiterate would think that CrowdStrike needed to take the physical DNC
server to Ukraine in order to analyze it. Any computer can be cloned and its digital image can
be sent within minutes anywhere on the planet in the form of ones and zeroes. It can also exist
in multiple digital copies, carrying not just confidential archives, but also history logs and
other content that can reveal to an expert whether the hacking occurred, and if so, by
whom.
The copies of the DNC server on CrowdStrike computers are likely to hold the key to
understanding what really happened during the 2016 election, the origin of the anti-Trump witch
hunt, and the toxic cloud of lies that had been hanging over the world and poisoning minds
during the last three years.
And now the new Ukrainian government might subpoena these copies from CrowdStrike and
finally pass them to FBI experts, which should've been done three years ago. The danger of this
happening is a much greater incentive for the Democrats to preemptively destroy Trump than all
the dirt Joe Biden had been rolling in as Obama's vice president.
This gives the supposedly innocuous reference to CrowdStrike during Trump's call a lot more
gravity and the previously incoherent part of the transcript begins to make sense.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been
through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened
with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike... I guess you have one of your
wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went
on, the whole situation.
If you read the transcript on the day it was released, you probably didn't understand what
Trump was even talking about, let alone what had caused such a disproportionate outrage,
complete with whistle blowing and calls for impeachment. What in that mild conversation could
possibly terrify the Democrats so much? They were terrified because, unlike most Americans, the
Democrats knew exactly what Trump was talking about. And now you know, too.
The fraudulent "CrowdStrike conspiracy" deflection is not a show of the Democrats'
strength. Instead, It betrays their desperation and panic, which tells us that Trump is
squarely over the target.
It also helps us to see who at Fox News can be trusted to tell us the truth. And it ain't
Chris Wallace.
Fine dissection of the CrowdStrike story. Of course if the DNC was serious about
finding out who breached their security they would have allowed the FBI to investigate.
They didn't - which means they're covering something up.
And who doesn't have at least one backup system running constantly, I have two and am
just a home user and the DNC would not have been dumb enough not to have one on the
premises and one off site for safety and preservation and the FBI could have gotten to
either one if they wanted to. DWS was involved in something very similar and the FBI
backed off again. I thought the DNC and the FBI were on the same page and would have
liked to find out how the "transfer" happened?
Yet DOJ Mueller conclusively signed off on the unsubtaniated fact the Russians had
hacked the DNC computers in his final Weissman Report. Just one more part of the curious Mueller report that was far more a CYA hit piece
against future claims of Obama crimes, than an investigation of past Trump ones.
Seth Rich - paper trail to Wikilinks needs to come out in any Senate impeachment trail
since Democrats claim the Ukraine phone call was Trump's alleged downfall. CROWDSTRIKE
was the only favor Trumps asked for.
There are two important facts to glean from this article:
1) Crowdstrike, the DNC contractor, is Ukrainian
2) that the famous server may have been backed up in Ukraine and not tampered with.
From the MSM we were given the 'interpretation' that Trump is an idiot who believes
that the DNC shipped the server with no changes to the Ukraine. No folks. He 'gets'
technology and security. He actual ran a business! (imagine).
I'd love to hear that in Hillary's own voice. :) You know, cleaned with a cloth?
That pretty much sums it up. MSM in total cahoots on this too since they put the
entire topic of the CROWDSTRIKE part of the phone call into the cone of silence.
The Left and media (One and the same within the "Deep State") have been playing "Three
Card Monte" with America for a while; it stops now!
The "Impeachment" media show being run by the Lefty tool cretins in the House has
NOTHING to do with wrong doing by President Trump. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fear
that President Trump will expose the depth of the swamp and bring the criminals on the
Left down to Justice!
We are s close to getting to the bottom of the conspiracies that threaten our nation.
Time to make the America haters pay for the harm they have done to our nation!
We need open and in depth prosecution of the criminal activities of the Left. There
needs to be LONG prison sentences and, yes, even executions for those that seek to
undermine our nation.
People need to know that there our GRAVE penalties for betraying our nation!
In fact, when I first heard this story - that is: very recently - I was puzzled: why
should a major party in the Country that invented IT and is still at its leading edge,
ask an obscure firm of a crumbling, remote foreign State to do their IT security
research? I'm not saying that Ukraine is a s++thole Country, but... you get me.
Either they have very much to hide, or they fear some closeted rightwing geek that works
in any of the many leftist US technofirms. Or, CrowdStrike were involved from the
beginning of the story, from the Steele dossier perhaps?
The whole Crowdstrike fiasco has been around for years - plus became a solid CYA part
of the Mueller report too - just in case the Democrats needed to bury it later.
don't you get it? The DNC is completely infiltrated by Ukrainian graft. Even Joe Biden
was on the take. Why won't they run their IT? (there is no Research in IT here, just
office software)
If you want to sell and deliver State Secrets and Intel to our enemies, then you
(Obama, the Clintons, the DNC) simply make it easier for THEM to access. They have done
this for years, and this is why they had to fill the DOJ, the FBI and the State
Department with traitors and haters of America and American principles. Barack Hussein
Obama, the Clintons, their evil administrations and even two-faced RINOS like McCain,
Romney, and Jeff Sessions were actively involved. This is treason pure and simple, and
all of the above could be legitimately and justifiably hung or shot without recourse, and
rightly so!
I have known about "Crowdstrike" since Dec. 2017. Pres. Trump is just subtlety
introducing background on what will be the biggest story of treachery, subversion,
treason and corruption ever. QAnon that the fakenews tries to vilify as a LARP has been
dropping crumbs about "Crowdstrike", Perkins Coir, Fusion GPS, FVEY and so much more!
Crowdstrike mentioned 7x in the last 2 years. I can't urge people enough to actually
investigate the Q posts for themselves! You will be stunned at what you have been
missing. Q which says "future proves past" and "news will unlock" what I see in the media
now is old news to those of us following Q. Q told us that "Senate was the prize" "Senate
meant more" that the investigations started in the House would now move to the Senate and
all this that the Dems and Rinos have been trying to hide is going to be exposed.
Fakenews corporate media has litterally written hundreds of hit pieces against Q - me
knows "they doth protest to much" - Recent Q post told "Chairman Graham its time. Senate
was the target"
Keep up with the Q posts and Pres. Trump's tweets in once place:
https://qmap.pub/ - And if you are still having a hard time believing this is legit
Pres. Trump himself has confirmed Q posts by "Zero Delta" drops - if you think this is
fake - try and tweet within 1 minute of when Pres. Trump does BUT your tweet has to
anticipate his! YOU have to tweet first and HE has to follow you within 1 minute.
MATHEMATICAL IMPOSSIBILITY UNLESS you are in the same immediate space or communicating at
the time of the tweets! To all you doubters that think Q is just a by chance scam - NO
WAY. There have been MANY, MANY of these ZERO DELTA PROOFS over the last 2 years. The
most recent was Nov. 20th.
Crowdstrike in the dog who did not bark. The Democrat cone of silence they put on even
the mention of the word has been the most damning clue this is where the real action
is.
The assertion that a digital image of the computer can be transmitted quickly all
around the world is not necessarily correct in my experience as a cyber security analyst.
I'm not an upper echelon type, but I am aware that it can take up to weeks to transmit
such images depending on the hard disk, where it is, and the connections/network to your
device creating the image. The FBI should have physically taken the device since there
was a suspicion of wrong doing by Hillary Clinton. Had it been Donald Trump's computer I
do not doubt the FBI would either have imaged it on the spot or taken the device.
Last night I completely removed Catalina-Safari on my older Mac Book Air and
re-installed Mohave-Safari from my backup to the day before I installed Catalina
including the data and system just like it was before. It took around 5 hours and was
cabled and not on Wi-Fi and it was perfect and reset the clock, my old e-mails and the
newer ones as well. I can't believe being hooked into real broadband or fiber couldn't do
the same in a relatively short period of time, but still significantly longer than a
thumb drive or external hard drive.
One variable is how big your hard drive is. If it is a big drive at a remote location,
say somewhere in California to the Midwest, it can take weeks for a forensic backup. I
only say that because . . . well, I'm not allowed to say. But you get it.
The assertion is a figure of speech. Today's IT infrastructure companies sell the
service of maintaining clones in real-time in two or more locations for safety purposes.
VMware and other off-the-shelf products makes this kind of setup easy to deploy. Did
Crowdstrike offer that service and did the DNC buy it, that is the question? And, if so,
did Crowdstrike keep the image on their backups in Ukraine?
(Note: it is not obvious that such a setup would preserve the forensic data the FBI would
be looking for, but its a start).
You say--"John Brennan convened a secret task force at CIA headquarters composed of several
dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI.
The unit functioned as a sealed compartment, its work hidden from the rest of the
intelligence community. Those brought in signed new non-disclosure agreements to be granted
access to intelligence from all three participating agencies."
Repeat: "Those brought in signed new non-disclosure agreements to be granted access to
intelligence from all three participating agencies"!!!
I suppose this means that John Brennan had access to all electronic communications
gathered on Trump campaign officials by the NSA. That suggests to me that the intel agencies
now have almost absolute power over future elections in the US. All the agency chiefs have to
do is concoct some wacky pretext for expanding their surveillance net (Like "collusion") and,
presto, they have immediate access to all private conversations between presidential
candidates and their lieutenants.
Do the American people really want John Brennan and his crooked spawn to choose our future
leaders??
I certainly hope Durham can crack this nut, otherwise this country is headed for the
landfill.
I've been surprised to learn that it wasn't IG Horowitz that uncovered the Strzok-Page texts
but rather Strzok's wife. With all of the so-called investigators involved in the "Russian
collusion" matter, turns out it was a scorned wife who unearthed the Rosetta Stone of the
hoax.
And now Sundance on the CTH has an item addressing the claims of former Overstock CEO
Patrick Byrne that he was used in an FBI op that tried to dirty up Trump campaign associates
via Maria Butina:
Larry, thanks for the clarifications (and the reassurance). Your entry so consistently
mentions payment that I find myself wondering how to correctly relate payment and spying.
That is, one can be an unpaid informant (Sater could be acting simply in exchange for a delay
in sentencing, though that might also constitute payment perhaps?).
Others could just be acting as good citizens, patriots or under direct question by the
authorities. None of which would necessarily entail payment, but some of which could
constitute spying (perhaps??) even if unpaid...
Further, spying here isn't the only thing that might be considered illegal, improper or
otherwise censurable. True?
Sundance sees these leaks as coming from investigation targets who are allowed to read and
comment on and rebut the draft report language addressing them. Thus, this is probably
"spinning" by targets and their media pals to try to "set the narrative" before the report is
released. Horowitz can rebut these "target" comments in the final report and the "targets"
are not provided any rebuttal material prior to the final report release, so it will be quite
interesting to see what the report actually says when final....
so we have this IG investigation that takes forever to complete, and when people ask why so
long the answer is the scope was increasing and we have to get it right. Now, with the report
finally being released, people are told the IG never had the jurisdiction necessary and we
have to wait for Durham.
1. Sater states that he was trying to do the Moscow deal to make money, on his own. Not
prompted by FBI.
2. I don't see in that super long pdf for Steele where there is a payment record. Please
give the exact page. There are some pages on the form, that are for payments. But no
indication that a payment was made. My recollection is that FBI was PLANNING to pay Steele,
but never did. (Correct me if wrong, like to see the actual page number.)
3. The Greenberg thing is the most interesting (and mysterious). Still, it's not 100%
proven to me that he was prompted by the government to make the approach. Perhaps likely, but
I don't see why you refer to it as a fact.
4. In general, there is a bad habit from our side to state speculation, even likely
speculation as fact. See this from Sundance all the time. Really gets in the way of serious
sleuthing and discussion though. The problem is one gets confused over what really is fact,
versus what is speculation. (An easy one is all the speculation that Mifsud was an intel
asset, versus just a networker--who knows for sure.)
P.s. To one of your commenters: My recollection was that the Strozk texts came to light
because of Lisa Page being questioned on the McCabe leak. Have seen a lot of our side jumping
to conclusions that the Strozk wife was the precipitant (but all the recent document said was
that she had access and threatened).
Now after her deposition Aaron should interview Fiona Hill. I would like to see how she would lose all the feathers of her cocky
"I am Specialist in Russia" stance. She a regular MIC prostitute (intelligence agencies are a part of MIC) just like Luke Harding. And
probably both have the same handlers.
Brilliant interview !
Harding is little more than an intelligence asset himself and his idea of speaking to "Russians" is London circle of Russian emigrants
which are not objective source by any means.
He's peddling a his Russophobic line with no substantiation. In fact, the interview constitutes an overdue exposure of this pressitute.
Notable quotes:
"... He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. ..."
"... This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral. ..."
"... Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia. ..."
"... Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil. ..."
"... Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs. ..."
"... Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News. ..."
"... GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked. ..."
"... Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking. ..."
"... NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!! ..."
"... Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here. ..."
"... His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected. ..."
That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence
(something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.
He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch
of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. That's not how you're going to
get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on
"oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season.
Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really,
its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations
of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding
for a shabby argument.
Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering
journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course
if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were
to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.
That is the video about fire arm legalization "cockroaches ", even if you are not Russian speaking it's pretty graphic to understand
the idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ILxqIEEMg
And FYI - Central Asian workers do the low-wage jobs in Moscow, pretty like Mexicans or Puerto Ricans in US. Yet, that "future
president" is trying to gain some popularity by labeling and demonizing them. Sounds familiar a bit?
"definitelly ddissagree with that assertation about Alexei he's had nationalist views but he's definitely not far right and
calling him a tool of US intelligence is pretty bs this is the exact same assertation that the Russian state media says about
him."
I disagree that there is any evidence of Navalny being tool of US intelligence, but you are wrong for not recognizing
that Navalny is ultranationalist. His public statements are indefensible. He is a Russian ultra nationalist, far right and a racist.
Statements about cockroaches, worse than rats, bullets being too good etc - there is no way to misunderstand that.
Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman
"all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always
cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil.
Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises
'' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling
the postal service company for transportation costs.
@trdi I am a Russian. And I remember the early Navalny who made me sick to my stomach with absolutely disgusting, RACIST, anti-immigration
commentaries. The guy is basically a NEO-NAZI who has toned down his nationalist diatribes in the past 10 or so years. Has he
really reformed? I doubt it.
MrChibiluffy, Navalny became relatively popular in Russia precisely at that time, especially during the White Ribbon protests
in 2011/2012. I remember it very well myself.
I am Russian and I lived in Moscow at that time and he was the darling of the Russian opposition. He publicly defined his views
and established himself back then and hasn't altered his position to this day.
What's more important is that around 2015 or so he made an alliance with the far-right and specifically Diomushkin who is a
neo-nazi activist. I understand that people change their views, it's just that he hasn't.
Nikita Gusarov it still feels like the best chance for some form of populist opposition atm. Even though they just rejected
him he has a movement. Would you rather vote for Sobchak?
Lets not forget that one reason many voted for Trump was his rhetoric about improving the peace-threatening antagonism towards
Russia, especially in order to help resolve the situation in Syria. It's not like it was secret he was trying to hide. He only
moderated his views somewhat when the Democrat-engineered anti-Russian smear campaign took off and there was a concerted effort
to tie him to Russia.
Is it crime surround yourself with people that will help you fullfill your pledges?
Yep, when he talked about murdering journalists, I paused the video and told my girlfriend about the murder of Michael Hastings.
Oh an PS the USA puts journalists in Guantanamo. We play real baseball.
Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths
or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate
to The Real News.
GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other
issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC
server was hacked.
Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know
if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever
you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase
that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking.
NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would
not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election.
Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller?
LIAR!!!!
Wow Aaron Matte NICE JOB. I'm only half through, I hope you don't make him cry. Do u make him cry? Did I hear this guy say
he's ultimately a storyteller? Lol.
It may seem like Trump has an alarming amount of associations with Russia, because he does.. that's how rich oligarchs work.
But it's all just SPECULATION still. Why publish a book on this without a smoking gun to prove anything? Collusion isn't even
a legal term, it's vague enough for people to make it mean whatever they want it to mean. People investigating and reporting on
this are operating under confirmation bias. Aaron, you're always appropriately critical and you're always asking the right questions.
You seem to be one of the few sane people left in media. Trump is a disgrace but there still is no smoking gun.
Omg a bunch of unproven conspiracy crap.. Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here..
How would anyone in the years before his candidacy have thought Trump would gain any political relevance. I mean even the pro
Hillary media thought until the end, their massive trump coverage would only help to get him NOT elected, but the opposite was
the case. This guy is a complete joke as are his theses. Actually reminding me of the guardian's so called report about Russian
Hacking in the Brexit referendum. Look here if you want to have a laugh
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/how-097-changed-the-fate-of-britain-not.html
Collusion Rejectionist! Ha Ha. Funniest interview ever. Well done Aaron. The Real News taking a stand for truth. So what's
in the book if there's no evidence? Guardian journalism? Stop questioning the official narrative, oh and have you heard of Estonia.
:)) ps that smiley face was not an admission of my working for the Kremlin.
Best interview ever. Aaron held him to his theories and asked what evidence or proof he had and he didn't come up with one
spec of evidence only hearsay and disputed theories. What a sad indictment this is on America. 1 year on a sensationalized story
and still nothing concrete. What a joke and proof of gullibility to anyone who believes this corporate media Narritive. I guess
at least they don't have to cover policies like the tax theft or net neutrality. This is why we need The Real news.
I'd rather have American business making business deals with Russia for things like hotels, rather than business deals with
the Pentagon to aim more weapons at the Russians. When haven't we been doing business with Russians? We might as well investigate
Cargill, Pepsi, McDonald's, John Deere, Ford, and most of our wheat farmers.
"... The worst of these massacres happened in Ghouta in August 2013 when 2000 civilian hostages (rebel claim) were gassed to death by rebels and their pre-White Helmets "civil defence". The OPCW was there to cover up the crime and to fabricate evidence to assign blame to Syria. ..."
Manufacturing a pretext for the U.S.
missile strike on Syria in April 2018 is nowhere near the biggest of OPCW's crimes. The
OPCW is an accessory , both before and after the fact to the crime of
mass murder.
It should now be clear to everyone that Syrian "rebels" gassed thousands of hostages in
cellars, most likely with chlorine gas, and then paraded the victims in White Helmets
snuff videos. OPCW conspired in this crime in both encouraging the terrorists to more murder
and by protecting them afterward by assigning blame to Assad and the Syrian government.
The worst of these massacres happened in Ghouta in August
2013 when 2000 civilian hostages (rebel claim) were gassed to death by rebels and their
pre-White Helmets "civil defence". The OPCW was there to cover up the crime and to fabricate
evidence to assign blame to Syria.
We have been documenting
these crimes and hoaxes at A Closer Look On Syria from December 2012. OPCW was used
from the beginning to manufacture consent for war. See for example:
Of course, the OPCW is already there! I highly suggest Caitlin Johnstone's article b
linked be read, which can be
found here .
We should expand on Petri's number of people involved in this crime to include all the
paid disinformation artists noted in Caitlin's essay at minimum. What becomes very clear in
all this is the total collusion with OPCW upper level management--those whom the
whistleblowers and their allies within OPCW petitioned--in these crimes as Petri contends.
Until they are visibly replaced, nothing issued by OPCW has any credence.
OPCW has shown to be a pure political entity, used at will by few regimes in the UN to
promote their agenda, b has done a tremendous job to humanity to bring the truth to the
public worldwide. Syrians have paid the price for UN leaders support to global terrorism for
too long. It must stop now.
A mainstream media and academic expert this week issued a rare admission : that pretty much
everything the establishment has fed the public on Syria is false or distorted; but it remains
that after tragic eight-year long war is slowly coming to a close, new indisputable facts are
coming to light. " Truth did not matter at all," he admits after years of providing commentary
for mainstream publications.
In a lengthy thread on Twitter, counter-terrorism author and
assistant professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University Max
Abrahms exposed how he saw the 'narrative managers' at work from the inside of the
establishment think tank world and media. As his own research came to uncover and document the
truth of what was happening in Syria, "the media would excise me and the research from their
stories" he revealed. His work in the early years of the war
appeared in The New York Times and other major outlets, however, he was increasingly
censored and pushed out of a number of platforms for speaking inconvenient truths.
Below is his full commentary , written in the
wake of the new OPCW leaks which the mainstream is still trying hard to ignore.
Every day there are new revelations that the "rebels" were in cahoots not only with Al Qaeda
but also ISIS and official reports of Assad using chemical weapons were doctored according to
the reports' own authors.
Were you ever skeptical that Assad was authorizing chemical weapons attacks when they were
the one thing that put his winning the war at risk?
Authors of the official reports linking him to chemical weapons usage have now supplied
evidence that their own reports were doctored .
When I was interviewed about Syria's military using chemical weapons, I expressed skepticism
as Assad bucked the political science literature by engaging in the one conduct that would
reverse his hard-fought victory.
But the media would excise me and the research from their stories.
The #1 story should be that authors of the official reports linking Assad to WMD usage have
supplied evidence that they were doctored in defiance of the scientific evidence and exploited
to push regime change in Damascus, which risked creating the Islamic State war with Russia.
Until you get how you were duped into supporting regime change in Syria you'll get duped
into supporting other costly ventures to the local population , international stability and our
counterterrorism efforts.
The mainstream narrative of the Syria conflict has imploded.
Every day there are new revelations that the "rebels" were in cahoots not only with Al
Qaeda but also ISIS & official reports of Assad using chemical weapons were doctored
according to the reports' own authors.
The story of doctored WMD reports and Al Qaeda-led rebels must be told.
What happened in
Syria is the American political establishment decided that the ends justify the means. Truth
did not matter at all. We were told Assad must go based on WMD reports their own authors say
were doctored to support "rebels" who were Al-Qaeda-led and helping ISIS.
Watch this interview and determine yourself whether you find trustworthy the official report
linking Assad to the chlorine attack which was sold in the
sold in the media as casus belli
for toppling Assad and has now been exposed by the fact-finders themselves as doctored.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/SMSyLg1E49M
If you think politicians, think tanks and media got a lot wrong in the Iraq war wait until
you hear about the Syria war.
If you cheered for another regime change war then it doesn't matter whether the casus belli
lacks evidence. The media is unmoved that multiple scientists who made up the official
investigation doubt that the Syrian military was behind the attacks or the use of chlorine at
all.
This is how they roll out new deep state Mockingbird Media clones.
The older completely discredited clones are replaced with new ones who pretend to have
been right there with us all along.
Look at Obama. One solitary vote among so many regarding Iraq and he gained the anti-war
vote and a Nobel Prize. Then he went about personally making the kill orders by drone,
allowing the wicked witch to overthrow Syria and sodomize their leader with a bayonet. Then
on to Syria, various African countries, etc.
I'm sure this *** has written lots on returning the Golan Heights to Syria, returning the
West Bank to the Palestinians, renouncing foreign aid to Israel, etc. Right? Not.
The mendacity of 'the system' can be infuriating when you and your work is targeted.
What I see today is not any different in any way from what my elders told me about the
Third Reich and what I heard from East Berlin and the Soviet Union under Stalin and
successors. I grew up in West Berlin and we did meet people, heard things.
Heil Hegemon - and Heil to all its lackeys! Heil!!!
Ron Paul was trying to tell everyone right from the git-go that the Syrian gas attacks
were a false flag, and the evidence and logic supported a false flag operation. Even more
annoying, the 100 or so Tomahawk missiles cost US taxpayers about a $million each. But maybe
the missiles were getting old, and the military needed some practice shots.
Steele is credible. I believe that the OPCW doctored the reports upon instructions. The
narrative management on Syria has totally destroyed the trust in the western governments and
has demonstrated that the US, the UK and the EU are not behaving any better than China or
Russia.
Someone needs to make an argument as to why we should believe any of these guys. I mean,
after you have been proven liars so many times, should we not throw the rotten tomatoes?
America will tell any lie, commit any atrocity, on behalf of its military industrial
complex, bankster, Zionist elite, while manufacturing consent for its evil by its corrupt
complicit Mainstream Media. Is that even news?
It doesn't matter Max, we already knew all this news about Syria was fake. When they were
trying to fulfill an agenda, which was to overthrow Syria for the sake of Israel, since Syria
is part of this fictitious promised land, their lies help support this agenda. Just like the
Zionist attacks on the world trade center and the pentagon with remote controlled airplanes
and pre-planted controlled demolition explosives. They were followed up with a bunch of lies
to the entire world telling us it was a handful of Muslims who have never flown jumbo jets
before. And they performed top gun maneuvers with these jumbo jets and breached perhaps the
greatest air defense system in the world with only primitive box cutters. I totally believe
the US and Israel covertly created ISIS. And the support funds came from the Zionist
controlled printing presses, and from the pentagon budget that was unaccounted for. But
unfortunately, most Americans still drink the Kool-aid. They continue to believe their lies.
And because of this, they will keep doing what they are doing.
Here's Jeffrey Epstein's BFF and Mossad handler Ehud Barak pinning the israeli 9/11 false
flag on the Osama bin Laden donkey within hours of the attack.
A chief architect of 9-11, Ehud Barak, interviewed on BBC an hour after attacks
That was a sloppy *** false flag too. The "agencies" are getting lazy because they own the
press and Americans are incredibly dumbed down on foreign policy. The got away with 2 planes
collapsing 3 WTC buildings so maybe they figure why bother even making it look
convincing.
Since it follows a pattern, it's not even just Syria. The US regime is a state sponsor of
terrorism, by their own definition, and go into countries and create chaos and revolution,
attempting regime change, creating a crisis they then use as "justification" for escalating
into open conflict against the victim. Accuse the victim nation of crimes, blanketing the
world in propaganda to delude the masses. Try to focus their attention on a single bad guy in
their narrative, a "brutal dictator" or whatnot. Attack by proxy and directly, sanction,
bomb, etc until the victim is left unable to produce for their own needs, making them
dependent, and then going in to apply the chains of debt to the victim to pay the empire to
rebuild what they destroyed. Everyone gets rich, increased resources from theft, testing of
weapons systems, dominion over the new vassal nation, etc, while the victim is
subjugated.
The "memo" Wesley Clark refers to came directly from zionist war criminal Paul Wolfowitz
who was whispering in the ear of Donald Rumsfeld the whole way.
Wolfowitz is perhaps better known not for writing the Wolfowitz Doctrine but for
co-authoring Rebuilding America's Defenses, a report released in September 2000 by Zionist
neocon think tank PNAC (The Project for a New American Century). The PNAC membership list is
a "Who's Who" of American Zionist New World Order conspirators – in addition to
Wolfowitz the list includes **** Cheney Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Kagan, I. Lewis (Scooter)
Libby, Richard Perle, Doug Feith and many others.
"The mainstream narrative of the Syria conflict has imploded."
"Every day there are new revelations that the "rebels" were in cahoots not only with Al
Qaeda but also ISIS & official reports of Assad using chemical weapons were doctored
according to the reports' own authors."
Bless you for trying, but you would do less damage by quietly withdrawing. You just look
silly. USA spent 4+ years fighting ISIS, during which time ISIS spread across the middle
East. Russia stepped in with 40 aircraft, funded through their normal air force training
program, and destroyed ISIS in 9 months.
Either Russians are superhuman warriors, or the west was lying when it claimed to be
fighting ISIS. Which is it?
"... A few days after my article was printed, my nephew, who helped me edit the piece and works for corporate America, told me he's afraid to open certain websites on his work computer -- off the clock -- because he could be flagged as "suspicious" and questioned. McCarthy was limited to phone taps and other dirty tricks. ..."
The National Lawyers Guild, born in resistance to political witch-hunts, seems to have
neutered itself in the face of the new wave of manufactured hysteria.
"The Guild has 'a sort of hip neoliberal mindset: anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Syria
etc.'"
I recently returned from a delegation to Russia, and now smell McCarthyism more clearly.
The delegation was organized by the Center for
Citizen Initiatives , an invaluable 32-year old citizen diplomacy organization, but CCI
said it would not to print the article I wrote about the delegation because it needed to say
something critical of the Soviet period, not just praise. The article is titled Russian Pride
and US Exceptionalism. A political decision was made that, in order to have access to some
highly placed people, CCI needs to be "balanced" about the Soviet period and acknowledge the
gulags. That could be a good strategic decision, but I was surprised. [Two weeks later, after
the article was published widely with a very positive response, CCI did publish it.]
A few days after my article was printed, my nephew, who helped me edit the piece and works
for corporate America, told me he's afraid to open certain websites on his work computer -- off
the clock -- because he could be flagged as "suspicious" and questioned. McCarthy was limited
to phone taps and other dirty tricks.
Edward Snowden is in Russia because he told us the state
has access to everything. My nephew is pragmatic, not paranoid. When I told members of the
delegation about him, several said they weren't surprised about his concern, and one called it
tragic. I told them they were all extremely cougeous to go to Russia at this frenzied point in
history. One elder, seasoned member, said McCarthyism is certainly here and she's very careful.
I am not very careful because I hold on to the belief that since I'm not doing anything
illegal, they can't get me. History proves otherwise.
"Edward Snowden is in Russia because he told us the state has access to
everything."
I have been a proud member of the National Lawyers Guild for 35 years, but since Trump's
election I have repeatedly challenged how it has become a partisan organization for the
Democrats. The Guild's Democratic Party loyalty, exposed in a Black Agenda
Report article , is reflected in its
resistance to support for Julian Assange . A recent article by Craig Murray, former British
ambassador to Uzbekistan, exposes how Assange
is being tortured before our eyes, with no pretense of the rule of law. Assange had support
when he went after Bush's war, but is now publicly brutalized because he went after the
Democrats , so is apparently a Russian asset responsible for Trump, as Tulsi Gabbard and Jill
Stein are also "Russian assets." MSNBC claimed that because Gabbard didn't deny she was a
Russian asset, she clearly is. Does that sound like McCarthy?
After I publicly exposed the partisan liberalism of the Guild in the Black Agenda
Report , I was both chastised for airing dirty laundry and told I raised valid, important
concerns about the political compass of the 82-year old organization. There was talk of the
need for elders to provide political context, to help the current ahistorical political
climate, which believes it's all Trump's fault. However, a third annual convention has occurred
since Trump's election and none have addressed the new McCarthyism, or Assange, who is the
victim of one of the most egregious cases of legal abuse in history and should be of grave
concern to a legal organization such as the Guild.
"Assange had support when he went after Bush's war, but is now publicly brutalized
because he went after the Democrats."
Recently, a former Guild president posted an article to the International Committee from
Forbes with the ominous title:
Russia Attempts To Take Over Venezuelan Oil, Creating A Challenge For The U.S. I responded
to the committee and asked if I was missing something, but why can't Russia and Venezuela
trade? Within minutes, a Guild member since 1974 asked to be taken off the list because of what
he saw as "foolish ultra leftism (an infantile disorder to coin a phrase)" that was a "stupid
discussion." Another said I was "lacking in ethical grounding."
One who thought my question was valid, said "I personally support any sovereign nation's
ability to make alliances. Russia is not my enemy. Russia was invited into Venezuela just as it
was invited into Syria. When I started law school in 2002, at the ripe old age of 52, the only
thing I cared about was joining my school's Guild chapter. I have found a good deal of
disappointment in the Guild ever since." Others added that the Guild has "a sort of hip
neoliberal mindset: anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Syria etc.," and that "If it's ultra-left to
call out the Democrats, I wear the badge ultra-leftist as a badge of honor." One member
cautioned, "as Riva said recently, being aware of source is very important." But the discussion
has been shut down, with no plans to discuss the implications of the Guild helping to fan the
flames of anti-Russia sentiment, let alone the need to quell them.
"If it's ultra-left to call out the Democrats, I wear the badge ultra-leftist as a
badge of honor."
A long-time Guild comrade who is now all about anybody but Trump, and knows my nephew, said
his story is just anecdotal. "I don't see an across-the-board 'new McCarthyism.' To rise to
that level, what I'd need to see is a major concerted effort by the government to destroy the
lives, careers and reputations of people accused of being insufficiently hostile to Russia."
Are we waiting for the first obvious suicide of this McCarthy period?
An article about the recent
conviction of seven Catholic peace activists for a Plowshares action generated this
comment: "The greatest risk of nuclear war today comes from Trump Derangement Syndrome. The
fact that the leadership of the Democratic Party would use Russia-gate, a pile of absurd lies,
for political advantage, at the risk of initiating a nuclear war with Russia is beyond
despicable."
The fear of exposing the depth of the rot is pervasive, counter-revolutionary and
jeopardizes life itself. That Trump is the only anti-endless war candidate, other than Tulsi
Gabbard, exposes the Democrats as the war party they are. Many hope that Trump is the wrecking
ball that will knock it all down. Hopefully before somebody pushes the button.
Riva Enteen edited the book Follow the Money, interviews by
Flashpoints producer Dennis J. Bernstein. She can be reached at
[email protected] .
Apologies if someone already posted this but on Nov 16 Joe Rogan and Matt Taibbi discussed
the current state of the MSM in a wide-ranging conversation that I think most Barflies will
find very interesting:
“When the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right
boot is of no consequence.” - Gary Lloyd. We Americans are willingly blind to truth.
It'll be the death of us.
Matt Taibbi: "they’re trying to sound like legitimate news, but they’re also
completely selling out at the same time " perfectly sums up news outlets today, on both
sides.
When I was a kid, i heard, on live radio broadcast, Oswald shot to death in Dallas Police
Station - still think that's a more blatant murder of Witness.
"We don't have any institutional respect anymore".. When even the broadsheets knowingly
sow falsehoods or subtly mislead the public on a regular basis, you'd better be prepared for
the harvest. You never win back respect from someone who's sussed out your con.
"... Sanders went on to argue that "pressure has got to be put on media" to cover policy issues like income inequality and poverty more heavily, instead of devoting attention to sensational campaign moments and the state of political horse races. ..."
"... 'You know what, forget the political gossip. Politics is not a soap opera. Talk about the real damn issues facing this country.'" ..."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has not been shy about
his disdain for the mainstream media. But the
Democratic presidential hopeful
has rarely, if ever, articulated it as bluntly as he did in an interview that aired on
MSNBC 's "
The Rachel Maddow Show " on Friday night. Sanders
called out the network for its corporate character in a novel exchange with host
Rachel Maddow .
"The American people are sick and tired of establishment politics and economics, and by the way, a little bit tired of corporate
media as well," Sanders told Maddow in an interview taped in Burlington, Vermont.
Maddow pressed Sanders for specifics on how he would change the media if he were president. "What's the solution to corporate
media?" she asked.
"We have got to think of ways the Democratic party, for a start, starts funding the equivalent of Fox television," Sanders
answered. Of course, MSNBC is a corporate media outlet that is widely seen as a Democratic version of Fox News because of the perceived
sympathies of many of its political talk shows.
Sanders went on to argue that "pressure has got to be put on media" to cover policy issues like income inequality and poverty
more heavily, instead of devoting attention to sensational campaign moments and the state of political horse races.
He then claimed that bringing that pressure to bear would be difficult, since corporate ownership makes it harder for news outlets
to cover issues in a way that conflicts with the interests of top executives. "MSNBC is owned by who?" Sanders asked. "Comcast, our
overlords," Maddow responded with a chuckle.
"All right, Comcast is not one of the most popular corporations in America, right?" Sanders said. "And I think the American people
are going to have to say to NBC and ABC and CBS and CNN, 'You know what, forget the political gossip. Politics is not a soap
opera. Talk about the real damn issues facing this country.'"
"... The IRA also bought advertisement to attract more people to its accounts. But the amount it spent was tiny. The final price tag for the 2016 election was $6.5 billion for the presidential and congressional elections combined. The IRA spend a total of $100,000 to promote its own accounts. But only some $45,000 of that was spend before the election. It was 0.000007 cent for every election dollar that was spend during that time. It is statistically impossible that the mostly apolitical IRA spending had any effect on the election. ..."
"... U.S. intelligence services tried to explain that away by claiming that the Russians wanted to "sow discord". There is zero evidence that this was really the case. It is simply an explanation that was made up because they failed to find a better one. ..."
"... FOX News is not pro-Trump because it wants to sow discord. Nor is CNN anti-Trump to serve that purpose. Both are in the business of attracting viewers to - in the end - sell advertisements. People flock to the TV station that fit to the opinion they already have. Both stations promote by and large similar products. ..."
"... The virtual IRA persona worked in a similar ways. They took political positions to attract people who already had a similar one. One persona did that for the left, another one for the right. Neither changed the opinions of their followers. ..."
"... of course it didn't matter, as when you have ignored 9-11 and everything else, you may as well buy into Russia influencing the election with some commercial enterprise like the ira... it's shocking actually, to see how many otherwise intelligent people can be bamboozled so easily via the cia with swamp media ..."
"... Every single mainstream media organization refers to Russian interference in the 2016 election as though it were a proven fact. When the government makes an unfounded assertion, it is reported one time as "government sources say" but every time thereafter it is referenced as fact. If you find an alternative source that contradicts the government lie and try to post it to social media, you will be tagged with a "Warning" that claims your story is "fake news". Orwellian doesn't begin to describe it. ..."
"... Once MSM propagandists broadcast 'Russian meddling' hundreds of thousands of times, their audience becomes impervious to the simplest of logic and barest of facts. ..."
"... The US media is still trying to breathe some life into a case which should have been declared dead on arrival, beltway politics must carry on its partisan shows, with the corporate media trying to whip audiences into a frenzy, over the most ridiculous plots in order to ignore that the body politic is corrupt beyond redemption and is as dead as US democracy. ..."
"... RT may have the insidious effect of injecting bits of reality-oriented counter news to the ubiquitous lame bought propaganda from American mass media. ..."
"... "One hates to be in the position of rooting for the Russians, but the Mueller Switch Project is so distasteful that it is hard not to enjoy the prospect of Mueller having to deal with an actual adversary in court. Meanwhile, this is probably the first time in the history of litigation that a plaintiff (here, prosecutor) has told a court that it may not have obtained good service of process on a defendant that has appeared to defend the case on the merits. Mueller to Court: We didn't really mean it, Judge! We had no idea they might actually show up!" ..."
"... The real sin of Russia, is not, of course, the nonsense election meddling, but its resistance against the US culture of open free markets, its threat of closing its markets to the US, its national doctrine against the Full Spectrum Dominance and US-led neo-liberal order. Its sin is economic nationalism. ..."
New Study: "Russian Trolls" Did Not "Sow Discord" - They Influenced No One
The U.S. has claimed that the Russia government tried to influence the 2016 election through
Facebook and Twitter.
Russia supposedly did this through people who worked the Internet Research Agency
(IRA) in St. Petersburg (Leningrad), Russia. The IRA people ran virtual persona on U.S. social
networks which pretended to have certain political opinions. It also spent on advertising
supposedly to influence the election. U.S. intelligence claimed that the purpose of the alleged
Russian influence campaign was to "sow discord" within the United States.
But the IRA had nothing to do with the Russian government. It had no interests in politics.
And a new study confirms that the idea that it was "sowing discord" is blatant nonsense.
The Mueller investigation indicted 13 Russian persons and three Russian legal entities over
the alleged influence campaign. But, as we wrote at that time, there was
more to it than the media reported:
The published
indictment gives support to our
long held believe that there was no "Russian influence" campaign during the U.S.
election. What is described and denounced as such was instead a commercial marketing scheme
which ran click-bait websites to generate advertisement revenue and created online crowds
around virtual persona to promote whatever its commercial customers wanted to promote. The
size of the operation was tiny when compared to the hundreds of millions in campaign
expenditures. It had no influence on the election outcome.
The IRA hired people in Leningrad for little money and asked them to open accounts on U.S.
social media. The virtual persona they created and ran were to attract as many persons to those
accounts as possible. They did that by posting funny dog pictures or by taking strong political
positions. They were 'influencers' who sold their customers' products to the people they
attracted.
The sole purpose was the same as in any commercial media. Create content to attract
'eyeballs', then sell those eyeballs to advertisers.
Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the [financial] accounts to receive money from
real U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions and advertisements on the
ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages . Defendants and their co-conspirators typically
charged certain U.S. merchants and U.S. social media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per
post for promotional content on their popular false U.S. persona accounts , including Being
Patriotic, Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist.
The was no Russian government campaign to influence the 2016 election. There was only a
Russian commercial media enterprise that used sock-puppet accounts with quirky content to
attract viewers and sold advertisement space to U.S. companies.
The IRA also bought advertisement to attract more people to its accounts. But the amount it
spent was tiny. The final price tag for the 2016 election
was $6.5 billion for the presidential and congressional elections combined. The IRA spend a
total of $100,000 to promote its own accounts. But only some $45,000 of that was spend before
the election. It was 0.000007 cent for every election dollar that was spend during that time.
It is statistically impossible that the mostly apolitical IRA spending had any effect on the
election.
That the IRA ran a marketing machine and not a political operation was also obvious when one
analyzed the content that those sock puppet accounts posted. Most of it was apolitical. Where
it was political it covered both sides. Some IRA accounts posted pro-Trump content, others
posted anti-Trump stuff. Some were pro-Clinton others against her.
U.S. intelligence services tried to explain that away by claiming that the Russians wanted
to "sow discord". There is zero evidence that this was really the case. It is simply an
explanation that was made up because they failed to find a better one.
The real answer to the question why different IRA accounts posted on different sides of the
political spectrum is that the IRA wanted to maximize its income. One has to cover both sides
if one wants to optimize the number of eyeballs one attracts.
FOX News is not pro-Trump because it wants to sow discord. Nor is CNN anti-Trump to serve
that purpose. Both are in the business of attracting viewers to - in the end - sell
advertisements. People flock to the TV station that fit to the opinion they already have. Both
stations promote by and large similar products.
The virtual IRA persona worked in a similar ways. They took political positions to attract
people who already had a similar one. One persona did that for the left, another one for the
right. Neither changed the opinions of their followers.
A recently published study which looked at Twitter users who followed IRA sock puppet
accounts and their content confirms that. It found that the IRA sock puppets had no influence
on the opinions of their followers.
Using Bayesian regression tree models, we find no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts
substantially impacted distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors over a 1-mo
period. We also find that interaction with IRA accounts were most common among respondents
with strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network , high interest in politics,
and high frequency of Twitter usage. Together, these findings suggest that Russian trolls
might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already
highly polarized.
Most hardcore Republicans watch FOX New, most hardcore Democrats watch CNN. Neither TV
station changes the core opinions of their viewers. They reinforce them.
The "Russian trolls" were virtual persona created to cover -in total- a wide spectrum. Some
persona played hardcore Republican, other played hardcore Democrats. They created and posted
content that fit to the role they played. Each attracted followers with opinions similar to
those the virtual persona pretended to have. No opinion was changed through those contacts. No
discord was sown.
The IRA then sold advertisement space to vendors to monetize all eyeballs its virtual
personas attracted.
The U.S. intelligence agencies pretended that the commercial IRA was a political agency. It
helped them to sell animosity against Russia and to pretend that Trump was somehow colluding
with Putin.
But it all never made any sense.
Posted by b on November 27, 2019 at 18:33 UTC |
Permalink
thanks b... of course it didn't matter, as when you have ignored 9-11 and everything else,
you may as well buy into Russia influencing the election with some commercial enterprise like
the ira... it's shocking actually, to see how many otherwise intelligent people can be
bamboozled so easily via the cia with swamp media in tow... again - emptywheel is a good case
in point.. complete drivel about russia stole my sandwich on a 24-7 basis.. they have their
heads up their asses so far, there is no light able to shine in...
as for twitter and facebook - two other NSA snoop dog outlets - there may be some value in
these two creations, mostly with the intel agencies, but it is slim pickins' for most
everyone else... the sooner they go the way of the dodo bird, the better..
Title --How Russian intelligence officers interfered in the 2016 election, CBS
Alot of people still think 60 Minutes is a credible news source, but their wild and
unsubstantiated claims in this segment really cast doubt on whether they can trusted or
not.
Every single mainstream media organization refers to Russian interference in the 2016
election as though it were a proven fact. When the government makes an unfounded assertion,
it is reported one time as "government sources say" but every time thereafter it is
referenced as fact. If you find an alternative source that contradicts the government lie and
try to post it to social media, you will be tagged with a "Warning" that claims your story is
"fake news". Orwellian doesn't begin to describe it.
Once MSM propagandists broadcast 'Russian meddling' hundreds of thousands of times, their
audience becomes impervious to the simplest of logic and barest of facts.
"Most hardcore Republicans watch FOX New, most hardcore Democrats watch CNN."
No, most hard core Democrats are repulsed by CNN. The Democrats who watch CNN, and believe it, this goes for NPP, the NY Times, the New
Yorker, and MSNBC, are Democratic Party loyalists. There's a big difference.
The first is set of people largely loyal to the party of FDR, and the other is a group of
corporatists--largely loyal to big businesses like JP-Morgan Chase, Amazon, and many military
contractors.
I watched a bit belatedly the 60 Minutes affair on the link provided. As the video was
unusually very slow to appear, I read the text and then started looking around for when it
was posted. Unbelievable. New stuff? I wrongly thought this had to be an old, superannuated
piece. @emptywheel the producer or just the muse? This sort of nails down the coffin lid on a
free media for me. And for you. We're in a very bad place.
Did you refer to Marcy Wheeler who scribbles the emptywheel blog. That gal is all rim and
no spokes. The entire site is obsessive fantasising, Russia hating, Trump loathing to attract
eyeballs and sell patreon donations.
Marcy couldn't fart and chew gum at the same time.
@b: Sorry b, but I don't buy it. Running a commercial scheme by posting *highly* political
memes in a *foreign* country, such as promoting secession of Texas and California or inciting
race tension, simply isn't a wise idea. Even if it weren't meant political, it still was
political. Cat memes would have been a different story.
Cliff @11 clearly falls off by failing to note b's and the study's major point--the
Russian Government in no way meddled in the 2016 election. IRA as the commercial entity
that didn't either has zero links to said government.
It is funny how Cliff @11 apparently believes that commercial exploitation is
innocent, but efforts at political influence are sinister.
This disorder is part and parcel of the disease that is destroying western culture. The
total loss of perspective is also one of the key symptoms of the hysteria that is clearly
still gripping the West.
I wonder if this is something that the West can ever possibly recover from? I figured by
now the hysteria would have burned itself out, but here it still seems to be going
strong.
uh cliff, what "highly political memes". 100k spent on pictures of kermit the frog hand
puppets or "buff bernie" is not highly political, and even if they were, they influenced
nobody. it's all horseshit.
It might not have been wise but it is obviously what happened.The important point is that
there is not the slightest suggestion of there being any evidence that the Russian state was
involved.
To put the matter in context: hundreds of other sets of influencers did what the IRA did but
because none of them could be associated in any way with Russia their, collectively order of
magnitude more important efforts, most of them pushing Clinton who was thought to be a clear
favourite, but their work goes unanalysed.
Not that there is any evidence of the IRA's connection with the Kremlin except that it is
located not in Moscow but Petrograd, where Putin is from. And that the hustler running the
organisation is said to have supplied sandwiches to meetings in the Kremlin -- hence the
media's coinage "Putin's Chef!"
b in this post is hammering yet one more nail into the coffin of Russiagate, there can't be
much more room on the lid for more. And there isn't much room left in the coffin either-it
already contains half of the Democratic Party, several presidential candidates, poor old
Marcy wheeler and the entire Mainstream Media. High time it was six feet under.
You mean the russian click bait add spam farm, that looks and behaves like an add spam
farm, which everyone with a functioning brain in their skulls said is an add spam farm...
might just turn out to behave like an actual add spam farm?
Well, colour me amazed. ..it's like no one remembered geocities pop up storms or something.
The US media is still trying to breathe some life into a case which should have been declared
dead on arrival, beltway politics must carry on its partisan shows, with the corporate media
trying to whip audiences into a frenzy, over the most ridiculous plots in order to ignore
that the body politic is corrupt beyond redemption and is as dead as US democracy.
Is Trump a Putin stooge? Let's 'investigate' or continually mu(e)ll over this possibility
even more! Meanwhile, the stooges in Washington we are instructed to call 'our
representatives' remain bipartisan in pursuing the dictatorial goals of class elites, no
matter which CEO is temporarily managing affairs for the Fortune 500.
Who needs Russian meddling in an electoral process that means next to nothing when it
comes to affecting in the slightest the homegrown depravity of our oligarchy?
We still have plenty of Dem Party hacks telling us in the most convoluted language what to
think about a report vomited out by a professional liar (See: Mueller Iraq War Crimes for but
one example of Mueller's long and sordid career) and we are suppose to believe any of this?
Oh and let's see we are suppose to care that an orange-haired, spray tanned criminal buffoon
won the Kabuki (s)election in Potemkin Empire against the insanely corrupted and proven War
Criminal Donkey Queen Bee? You just have to wonder how much per word these pundits are paid
to pump out their bilge?
The entire "Russiagate" smokescreen is a perfect example of how propaganda works. Accuse
your "enemy" of the very thing you have been doing in plain sight so that when accusations
are levied against you it will be harder to make them stick- keep that external enemy front
and center so that the real enemy within remains hidden.
To believe that the Mueller report ever was anything than a wax show piece in a stale play
one must put aside all the obvious items such as- 1) Zero evidence; 2) US elections are
already rigged by the US elites before a single vote is cast; 3) The US has been tampering in
just about every countries elections for decades overtly and covertly; AND 4) Recent attempts
BY THE US to ACTUALLY tamper in Russian elections through the ever-handy NED.
There is no other country that intervenes in the political affairs of foreign states so
directly, regularly and shamelessly as the United States. American foreign policy is one
massive intervention in the politics of other countries, running the gamut from propaganda,
destabilization, financing of opposition parties, electoral fraud and coups to military
bombardment and occupation.
Professor Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University assembled a database documenting as many
as 81 occasions between 1946 and 2000 when Washington interfered in elections in other
countries.
There is zero solid evidence that Russia "meddled" in the US elections. It is all
speculation and innuendo. Even if one were to blindly assume that the stories were accurate,
whatever Russia may or may not have done pales in comparison to the operations of US
intelligence agencies all over the world, including within the United States itself, not to
mention the billions of dollars spent by the corporate and financial elite to manipulate US
elections and determine their outcome.
The claim, moreover, that Russian Twitter and Facebook posts are responsible for social
discontent and "disruptions in the democracy" of the United States -- one of the most unequal
countries in the world -- is beyond ludicrous.
I didn't believe that the Russians interfered with the election anyway, but this exposition
of the raw data used by the intell. services as a basis for promulgating the fiction, is
fascinating and hilarious if the consequencies hadn't been so dire. The basis is so utterly
mundane and so "American" if you forgive my saying so, I mean the IRA was just trying to make
money. I suppose the intell. services knew this, knew they were peddling lies as Pompeo says
they are taught to do. All for what? Not just to hurt Trump. No, to feed a McCarthyite fear
to keep the endless wars going. Evil.
Research by the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) found that the Army, as well as Nato
allies, has a "critical shortage" of artillery and ammunition.
The research comes ahead of a meeting of Nato leaders in London next week to mark the
70th anniversary of the alliance.
I know we are supposed to believe that US is so wonderful and exceptional that Russia,
China, Iran, etc. all want to conquer it. But why would they want to? What would they do with
a place like Detroit, Camden, and all the rest of the broken down infrastructure?
"British ground forces would be "comprehensively outgunned" in a conflict with Russia in
Eastern Europe"
So fucking what, if that were actually true? UK is a group of islands in NW Europe, it's
not Poland, and UK hasn't any business to have troops in Eastern Europe to begin with;
meanwhile, the European part of Russia is very much a big chunk of Eastern Europe; odds are
that they'd have their military ready to defend and fight there. These useless hacks should
come back only once they can claim that the British forces would be outgunned in a conflict
with Russia in Essex; that would be worrying.
But there is a sense in which Russia may have subtly influenced the election.
For any well informed American - and in my opinion finding such is more likely than say
spotting a Sasquatch - the varied political presentations of say RT may have the insidious
effect of injecting bits of reality-oriented counter news to the ubiquitous lame bought
propaganda from American mass media.
And the Putin-effect over the last two decades too may be quite insidious: after all, in
the realm dominated by political banality, lies, stupidity and bad acting, an articulate, and
in practical terms effective, political leader of a major country is a rather extraordinary
phenomenon. Such things are possible, discover wayward Americans! But what explains its near
complete absence in our exceptional indispensable nation?
Obama's D-Party set up what the following article
describes which I provide as a marker of that party's leadership's immoral mindset.
Imagine what BigLie Media would do if this was done in Russia or China! We'd read/hear/see
all about it 24/7/365.
1) USA interferes in other countries elections all the time. Recent and very stark
examples: Bolivia and Venezuela.
2) USA's broken, money-based electoral system practically invites
"interference"/"meddling" by powerful interests and skews the results toward candidates that
will serve powerful interests that can afford to support the electoral farce that provides an
illusion of democracy.
3) Pro-Israel Zionists and Zionist organizations, like Haim Saban, Sheldon Adelson, and
AIPAC, contribute huge sums to the duopoly that controls US politics. Their contribution is
vastly greater than a few facebook ads.
4) The vast majority of the "Russian oligarchs" that are supposed to have influenced Trump
are Jewish with closer ties to Israel than Russia.
Bevin @ 17
Evgeny Progozhin - supposedly behind IRA - was - and maybe still is - VVP's chef. I think it
is probably him who started that joke about his being a "hot-dog salesman" in St P. But he
was much more than that.
More importantly he was the man who re-introduced fine restaurants to St Petersburg. In
the nineties he opened several very good restaurants in a city which hadn't seen a decent
meal since the Revolution - a bit like England before it joined the Common Market. He was a
great perfectionist with a tremendous eye for detail. His difficulty was in finding staff in
a city which had no history of training staff beyond the very low levels demanded by the
Intourist hotels - and as soon as he trained them they were poached by would-be rivals, so
often he gave the top places to French and English specialists.
The very best of his restaurants was the Old Customs House on the University Embankment. I
haven't been there for a couple of years but in its hey-day it could match any restaurant in
Europe.
He would also fly his staff to other Russian cities to lay on banquets for the President.
He then went into mass catering and by the sounds of it different fields altogether. An
admirable man, one of those who helped Russia into the 21st Century.
Fresh Air has an interview with Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch of Fusion GPS posted on their page .
There seems to be a full court press on to solidify the 'consensus' narrative, with stories
on BBC and other main US news outlets, including many on NPR, 'explaining' various aspects of
the Russophobic/Sinophibic view of the world, and attacking as 'conspiracy theories' that are
proven false (mainly by way of reciting innuendo and accusations by anonymous sources and
professional liars) any counter narratives.
In my experience, even if people retain some skepticism, they assume the main points of
the narrative as proven fact to the extent that it is nearly impossible to have a reasoned
discussion about the basic assumptions of the narrative.
I am amazed.......... that one and all haven't noticed the inability of the USG to
deal with any.... and I mean any.... issues affecting the people of the USA.
Lead in Drinking Water.....
Farm Bankruptcies.....
Failed Corn & soybean crops.....
Medical prescription costs going through the roof.
Key medicines no longer available to combat serious infections....
Examining direct state-actor involvement would be one thing. But this 'study' is little more
than a sui generis, slow motion ethnic slur. What about Russian-American US citizens in
Boston who happen to tweet benign and banal messages about nothing in particular? Can we get
cooties from them as well? Does it come thru the WIFI?
The sizable Russian-American population has been absolutely stoic during this whole
protracted episode. I can think of many other groups who'd be screaming bloody murder.
As for the IRA indictments, they were a sham from top to bottom. Here's the Powerline
blog:
"One hates to be in the position of rooting for the Russians, but the Mueller Switch
Project is so distasteful that it is hard not to enjoy the prospect of Mueller having to deal
with an actual adversary in court. Meanwhile, this is probably the first time in the history
of litigation that a plaintiff (here, prosecutor) has told a court that it may not have
obtained good service of process on a defendant that has appeared to defend the case on the
merits. Mueller to Court: We didn't really mean it, Judge! We had no idea they might actually
show up!"
None other than Michael Moore is another IRA victim. So much for Trump-Russia.
"I know we are supposed to believe that US is so wonderful and exceptional that Russia,
China, Iran, etc. all want to conquer it. But why would they want to? What would they do with
a place like Detroit, Camden, and all the rest of the broken down infrastructure?"
Also, the greatest political system ever conceived in mankind according the Americans
somehow can just simply crumble in the face of a tiny bit of alleged foreign money.
Jane Mayer used to write good journalism. Her book "Dark Money" from a couple of years ago
was an eye-opener. What happened to her?
I guess the same question could be asked about Marcy Wheeler. And what happened to Democracy Now and Amy Goodman?
The real sin of Russia, is not, of course, the nonsense election meddling, but its resistance
against the US culture of open free markets, its threat of closing its markets to the US, its
national doctrine against the Full Spectrum Dominance and US-led neo-liberal order. Its sin
is economic nationalism.
Its sin is taking shares of Christopher Steele's in Gazprom by
force, who had them by tax fraud in the first place. Its sin is allowing Government of Russia
holding more than half of the shares of Gazprom. Its sin is becoming self-reliant in oil and
gas (and recently food thanks to sanctions), backed with a substantial military force. A huge
country that can industrialize its resources and that can defend itself and deter any
aggression on her soil. A recipe for nightmare for neo-liberals.
Since the Americans voted for a president who is against the neo-liberal order and
promotes nationalism, they are on fire and afraid they are going to have to take it by four
more years.
The question is who will listed to Obama after his "change we can believe in" betrayal. Also
is not he a war criminal? Obama election was probably the most slick false flag operation even
conducted by intelligence agencies. Somebody created for him complexly fake but still plausible
legend.
That Obama desire to interfere in 2020 election also shows gain that that he a regular
completely corrupt Clinton neoliberal. The worst king of neoliberals, wolfs in sheep's
clothing.
And the fact that CIA democrats dominates the Democratic Party actually is another reason
from "Demexit" from the Democratic party of workers and lower middle class. The sad fact that the
USA Corporate Dems recently became the second pro-war militarist party, and learned to love
intelligence agencies; two things unimaginable in 60th and 70th.
As we noted earlier, a bombshell admission from Politico today exploring Obama's
substantial behind the scenes influence as Democratic kingmaker : included in the lengthy
profile on the day-to-day of the former president's personal office in the West End of
Washington D.C. and his meeting with the field of Democratic candidates, is
the following gem :
"Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would
speak up to stop him."
And crucially, when asked about that prior statement reported in Politico, an Obama
spokesperson did not deny that he said it.
The frank admission underscores what many independent analysts, not to
mention prior damning WikiLeaks DNC disclosures , have pointed out for years: that the
establishment controlling the Democratic party has continuously sought to rig the system
against Bernie.
"Since losing 2016, Dem elites have waged a prolonged effort to stop Bernie. Bernie is the
obvious answer to the neoliberal Clinton-Obama legacy voters rejected..." journalist Aaron
Maté observed of the
Politico quote.
Here's the stunning and deeply revealing section in full, which began by outlining Obama's
'advice-giving' throughout meetings with Democrat contenders including Joe Biden, Elizabeth
Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker,
and others :
Publicly, he has been clear that he won't intervene in the primary for or against a
candidate , unless he believed there was some egregious attack. "I can't even imagine with
this field how bad it would have to be for him to say something," said a close adviser.
Instead, he sees his role as providing guardrails to keep the process from getting too ugly
and to unite the party when the nominee is clear.
There is one potential exception: Back when Sanders seemed like more of a threat than he
does now, Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama
would speak up to stop him. (Asked about that, a spokesperson for Obama pointed out that
Obama recently said he would support and campaign for whoever the Democratic nominee is.)
And a further deeply revealing but more laughable quote comes later as follows: "Obama
designed his post-presidency in 2016, at a time when he believed Hillary Clinton would win and
Biden would be out of politics." So the reality is... far from the idea that the Dem elites
would back the actual nominee the party puts forward, clearly the die has already been cast
against Bernie just
like the last time around against Hillary in 2016.
Politico author Ryan Lizza later in the story quotes a "close family friend," who described
that Obama's "politics are not strong left of center."
"I mean it's left, but he's nowhere near where some of the candidates are currently sitting,
at least when he got himself elected," the source claimed.
This means in the mind of Obama and other top party influencers and kingmakers, Bernie and
other popular outliers like Tulsi Gabbard have already long been sidelined. Tulsi, it should
also be noted, is one of the couple of candidates who did not bother to stop by Obama's D.C.
office for a 'blessing' and advice.
"... According to a Nov. 21 report by independent journalist Sara Carter, U.S. Attorney John Durham is questioning personnel in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA). ONA awarded about $1 million in contracts to FBI informant Stefan Halper, who appears to have played a key role in alleged U.S. intelligence agency spying on 2016 Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. ..."
"... In addition, however, a court filing indicates that ONA's director, James H. Baker, "is believed to be the person who illegally leaked the transcript of Mr. Flynn's calls" to The Washington Post. ..."
"... The filing adds that Baker "was Halper's 'handler'" at ONA. Moreover, according to the court filing, the tasks assigned to "known long-time operative for the CIA/FBI" Halper "seem to have included slandering Mr. Flynn with accusations of having an affair with a young professor (a British national of Russian descent)." ..."
"... The filing notes that Flynn's defense team has requested phone records for then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper , likewise in order to confirm contacts with Ignatius. The filing singles out records for Jan. 10, 2017, when, according to the filing, "Clapper told Ignatius in words to the effect of 'take the kill shot on Flynn.'" ..."
"... The Pentagon's current inspector general has already found that Baker's office "did not maintain documentation of the work performed by Professor Halper or any communication that ONA personnel had with Professor Halper." As a result, according to the inspector general, ONA staff "could not provide sufficient documentation that Professor Halper conducted all of his work in accordance with applicable laws and regulations." ..."
"... Acting Pentagon Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in November 2017 started an investigation into charges that Baker retaliated against a whistleblower who red-flagged "rigged" contracts, including Halper's. Another $11 million in contracts under scrutiny went to the Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG), which is run by a schoolmate of Chelsea Clinton, whom she has referred to as her "best friend." ..."
"... The House Judiciary and Oversight committees -- which interviewed almost two dozen witnesses -- concluded in December 2018 that the Obama Justice Department treated Trump and Clinton unequally, affording Clinton and her associates extraordinary accommodations, while potentially abusing surveillance powers to investigate Trump's associates. ..."
The
Obama holdover heading the Pentagon office
reportedly under investigation by the U.S. attorney who is conducting the criminal probe of
the Trump -- Russia investigation was accused of leaking a classified document, in a recent
court filing for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
The connection hasn't been previously reported.
According to a Nov. 21 report by independent journalist Sara Carter, U.S. Attorney John
Durham is questioning personnel in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA). ONA awarded
about $1 million in contracts to FBI informant Stefan Halper, who appears to have played a key
role in alleged U.S. intelligence agency spying on 2016 Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and
George Papadopoulos.
In addition, however, a
court filing indicates that ONA's director, James H. Baker, "is believed to be the person
who illegally leaked the transcript of Mr. Flynn's calls" to The Washington Post.
Specifically, the filing states, "ONA Director Baker regularly lunched with Washington Post
Reporter David Ignatius."
The filing adds that Baker "was Halper's 'handler'" at ONA. Moreover, according to the
court filing, the tasks assigned to "known long-time operative for the CIA/FBI" Halper "seem to
have included slandering Mr. Flynn with
accusations of having an affair with a young professor (a British national of Russian
descent)."
Baker didn't respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times as of press time.
The filing notes that Flynn's defense team has requested phone records for
then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper , likewise in order to confirm
contacts with Ignatius. The filing singles out records for Jan. 10, 2017, when, according to
the filing, "Clapper told Ignatius in words to the effect of 'take the kill shot on
Flynn.'"
Clapper didn't respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times as of press time.
The Pentagon's current inspector general has already found that Baker's office "did not
maintain documentation of the work performed by Professor Halper or any communication that ONA
personnel had with Professor Halper." As a result, according to the inspector general, ONA
staff "could not provide sufficient documentation that Professor Halper conducted all of his
work in accordance with applicable laws and regulations."
Acting Pentagon Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in November 2017 started an
investigation into charges that Baker retaliated against a whistleblower who red-flagged
"rigged" contracts, including Halper's. Another
$11 million in contracts under scrutiny went to the Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG), which
is run by a schoolmate
of Chelsea Clinton, whom she has referred to as her "best friend."
According to the whistleblower's attorney, "Baker's interest was his awareness of the
LTSG-Clinton connection; his presumptive desire to exploit that to his advantage in the event
of a Clinton election win; and the fact that contractors like LTSG served as a lucrative
landing pad for ONA retirees."
The attorney charged that Baker's claims about the whistleblower were "demonstrably false,"
calling Baker "partisan and highly vindictive."
At the time, Richard Perle, Ronald Reagan's former Assistant Secretary of Defense, called
Baker "a shallow and manipulative character that should have gone with the change in
administration." Perle further charged that the whistleblower "clearly was the target, for
political reasons, of an effort to push him out of government," saying "he's a Trump loyalist,
and it was launched and sustained by an Obama holdover."
That inquiry is being carried out by the inspector general's Investigations of Senior
Officials Directorate.
Raising additional questions, a 2016 report further revealed
that the ONA had failed to produce the top-secret net assessments the office was established to
conduct for more than 10 years, even with a yearly budget approaching $20 million.
Baker was named
as ONA director on May 14, 2015, during the Obama administration. A contemporaneous report
called his appointment "part of a wave of new Pentagon personnel moves in recent days,
senior-level officials who will outlast President Obama's final term in office." Baker
replaced Andrew W. Marshall, nicknamed "Yoda" for his "wizened appearance, fanatical
following in defense circles, and enigmatic nature." Obama Defense Secretary Ash Carter, in
selecting Baker, "passed over several of Marshall's acolytes who were in the running for the
position."
The House Judiciary and Oversight committees -- which interviewed almost two dozen
witnesses --
concluded in December 2018 that the Obama Justice Department treated Trump and Clinton
unequally, affording Clinton and her associates extraordinary accommodations, while potentially
abusing surveillance powers to investigate Trump's associates.
Jacqueline Deal, president of LTSG, wrote in an email to The Epoch Times: "My colleagues and
I began performing work in support of the Office of Net Assessment during the George W. Bush
administration, over a decade before the office's current director was appointed. None of the
awards received by LTSG from the Department of Defense resulted directly or indirectly from the
actions or influence of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton. Any statement or implication otherwise is
false."
Baker
replaced Andrew W. Marshall, nicknamed “Yoda” for his “wizened
appearance, fanatical following in defense circles, and enigmatic nature.” Obama
Defense Secretary Ash Carter, in selecting Baker, “passed over several of
Marshall’s acolytes who were in the running for the position.”
Holy ****...The replacement head of the Highlands Group..he may as well be that white
bearded guy in the matrix.. Hes the director of the MIC CIA NSA. ..the whole ball of
wax..puts it all together...only he is not Yoda like before him..like putting a restaurant
fast food manager in charge of the manhattan project. I know those acolytes must be really
pissed..and probably a potential source of leaks.
Investigations my eye! This has been going on since Moby **** was a minnow.
McCabe has been out there making money while under criminal referral.. That investigation
is DONE and still nothing happens.
The public information available on at least 50 of these double dealers is enough to send
them all up the river as of a few YEARS ago...but we have to have more
investigations...that's so they can figure out how to cover it all up.
Fire these creeps. Hire Sidney Powell.. They'll be swinging inside of six months.
"... Authored by John Solomon via JohnSolomonReports.com, ..."
"... Daily intelligence reports from March through August 2019 on Ukraine's new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his relationship
with oligarchs and other key figures. ..."
"... State Department memos on U.S. funding given to the George Soros-backed group the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. ..."
"... The transcripts of Joe Biden's phone calls and meetings with Ukraine's president and prime minister from April 2014 to January
2017 when Hunter Biden served on the board of the natural gas company Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All documents from an Office of Special Counsel whistleblower investigation into unusual energy transactions in Ukraine. ..."
"... All FBI, CIA, Treasury Department and State Department documents concerning possible wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All documents from 2015-16 concerning the decision by the State Department's foreign aid funding arm, USAID, to pursue a joint
project with Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All cables, memos and documents showing State Department's dealings with Burisma Holding representatives in 2015 and 2016.
..."
"... All contacts that the Energy Department, Justice Department or State Department had with Vice President Joe Biden's office
concerning Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden or business associate Devon Archer. ..."
"... All memos, emails and other documents concerning a possible U.S. embassy's request in spring 2019 to monitor the social media
activities and analytics of certain U.S. media personalities considered favorable to President Trump. ..."
"... All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning efforts by individual Ukrainian government officials to exert influence on
the 2016 U.S. election, including an anti-Trump Op-Ed written in August 2016 by Ukraine's ambassador to Washington or efforts to publicize
allegations against Paul Manafort. ..."
"... All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning contacts with a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa
and her dealings with the Ukrainian embassy in Washington or other Ukrainian figures. ..."
There are still wide swaths of documentation kept under wraps inside government agencies like the State Department that could
substantially alter the public's understanding of what has happened in the U.S.-Ukraine relationships now at the heart of the impeachment
probe.
As House Democrats mull whether to pursue impeachment articles and the GOP-led Senate braces for a possible trial, here are 12
tranches of government documents that could benefit the public if President Trump ordered them released, and the questions these
memos might answer.
Daily intelligence reports from March through August 2019 on Ukraine's new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his relationship
with oligarchs and other key figures. What was the CIA, FBI and U.S. Treasury Department telling Trump and other agencies
about Zelensky's ties to oligarchs like Igor Kolomoisky, the former head of Privatbank, and any concerns the International Monetary
Fund might have? Did any of these concerns reach the president's daily brief (PDB) or come up in the debate around resolving Ukraine
corruption and U.S. foreign aid?
CNBC ,
Reuters and
The Wall Street
Journal all have done recent reporting suggesting there might have been intelligence and IMF concerns that have not been fully
considered during the impeachment proceedings.
State Department memos detailing conversations between former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and former Ukrainian Prosecutor
General Yuriy Lutsenko . He says Yovanovitch raised the names of Ukrainians she did not want to see prosecuted during their first
meeting in 2016. She calls Lutsenko's account fiction. But State Department officials admit the U.S. embassy in Kiev did pressure
Ukrainian prosecutors not to target certain activists. Are there contemporaneous State Department memos detailing these conversations
and might they illuminate the dispute between Lutsenko and Yovanovitch that has become key to the impeachment hearings?
State Department memos on U.S. funding given to the George Soros-backed group the Anti-Corruption Action Centre.
There is documentary evidence that State provided funding to this group, that Ukrainian prosecutor sought to investigate whether
that aid was spent properly and that the U.S. embassy pressured Ukraine to stand down on that investigation. How much total did
State give to this group? Why was a federal agency giving money to a Soros-backed group? What did taxpayers get for their money
and were they any audits to ensure the money was spent properly? Were any of Ukrainian prosecutors' concerns legitimate?
The transcripts of Joe Biden's phone calls and meetings with Ukraine's president and prime minister from April 2014 to
January 2017 when Hunter Biden served on the board of the natural gas company Burisma Holdings. Did Burisma or Hunter Biden
ever come up in the calls? What did Biden say when he urged Ukraine to fire the prosecutor overseeing an investigation of Burisma?
Did any Ukrainian officials ever comment on Hunter Biden's role at the company? Was any official assessment done by U.S. agencies
to justify Biden's threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid if Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin wasn't fired?
All documents from an Office of Special Counsel whistleblower investigation into unusual energy transactions in Ukraine.
The U.S. government's main whistleblower office
is investigating allegations from a U.S Energy Department worker of possible wrongdoing in U.S.-supported Ukrainian energy
business. Who benefited in the United States and Ukraine from this alleged activity? Did Burisma gain any benefits from the conduct
described by the whistleblower?
OSC has concluded there is a "substantial likelihood of wrongdoing" involved in these activities.
All FBI, CIA, Treasury Department and State Department documents concerning possible wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings.
What did the U.S. know about allegations of corruption at the Ukrainian gas company and the efforts by the Ukrainian prosecutors
to investigate? Did U.S., Latvian, Cypriot or European financial authorities flag any suspicious transactions involving Burisma
or Americans during the time that Hunter Biden served on its board? Were any U.S. agencies monitoring, assisting or blocking the
various investigations? When Ukraine reopened the Burisma investigations in March 2019, what did U.S. officials do?
All documents from 2015-16 concerning the decision by the State Department's foreign aid funding arm, USAID, to pursue
a joint project with Burisma Holdings. State official
George Kent has testified he stopped this joint project because of concerns about Burisma's corruption reputation. Did Hunter
Biden or his American business partner Devon Archer have anything to do with seeking the project? What caused its abrupt end?
What issues did Kent identify as concerns and who did he alert in the White House, State or other agencies?
All cables, memos and documents showing State Department's dealings with Burisma Holding representatives in 2015 and 2016.
We now know that Ukrainian authorities escalated their investigation of Burisma Holdings in February 2016 by raiding the home
of the company's owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Soon after, Burisma's American representatives
were pressing the State Department to help end the corruption allegations against the gas firm, specifically invoking Hunter
Biden's name. What did State officials do after being pressured by Burisma? Did the U.S. embassy in Kiev assist Burisma's efforts
to settle the corruption case against it? Who else in the U.S. government was being kept apprised?
All contacts that the Energy Department, Justice Department or State Department had with Vice President Joe Biden's office
concerning Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden or business associate Devon Archer. We now know that multiple State Department
officials believed Hunter Biden's association with Burisma created the appearance of a conflict of interest for the vice president,
and at least one official tried to contact Joe Biden's office to raise those concerns. What, if anything, did these Cabinet agencies
tell Joe Biden's office about the appearance concerns or the state of the various Ukrainian investigations into Burisma?
All memos, emails and other documents concerning a possible U.S. embassy's request in spring 2019 to monitor the social
media activities and analytics of certain U.S. media personalities considered favorable to President Trump. Did any such
monitoring occur? Was it requested by the American embassy in Kiev? Who ordered it? Why did it stop? Were any legal concerns raised?
All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning efforts by individual Ukrainian government officials to exert influence
on the 2016 U.S. election, including an anti-Trump Op-Ed written in August 2016 by Ukraine's ambassador to Washington or efforts
to publicize allegations against Paul Manafort. What did U.S. officials know about these efforts in 2016, and how did they
react? What were these federal agencies' reactions to a Ukrainian court decision in December 2018 suggesting some Ukrainian officials
had improperly meddled in the 2016 election?
All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning contacts with a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra
Chalupa and her dealings with the Ukrainian embassy in Washington or other Ukrainian figures. Did anyone in these U.S. government
agencies interview or have contact with Chalupa during the time the Ukraine embassy in Washington says she was seeking dirt in
2016 on Trump and Manafort?
We tend to think of propaganda as something generated by the state. This is a prime example
of it coming from ideologues within universities, and making its way to the public via
sympathizers in the mass media. Eventually, these lies become de facto truths, either because
people really do believe in them, or the cost of questioning them becomes too great, so people
conform. In time, younger people -- those who grew up being socialized into the lie -- don't
know any different. In my interviews for my forthcoming book on lessons we must learn from the
communist experience, a Ukrainian immigrant named Olga Grigorenko, recalling her Soviet
childhood, said "Nobody told me that I was living in a lie. I was just living my life in my
country, the Soviet Union. Nobody said it was a lie."
As she grew older, she came to see that in fact she lived within a system of lies. Her
husband, Vladimir, spoke about how the ideology corrupted all knowledge. From the
transcript:
Vladimir: For example, all history was represented as the fight between capitalism
and the workers. It takes a really creative mind to see the system of classes from
Marxism-Leninism presenting itself in ancient Egypt. But that's what they did. All history
books were filled with that point of view. The Florentine Republic was the equal of the Great
October Revolution – things like that. All our history books were like that. Every
scientific paper was supposed to have a prefatory chapter describing how Marx and Engels were
geniuses in that particular field of science, and how their findings anticipated whatever
this scientific article described. Any and all sciences had to show a connection to the
decision of the party in a previous convention.
Olga: But nobody believed in it.
Vladimir: But everybody knew that you had to say these things in order to be
published.
More:
Olga: In high school and middle school, we had to write essays, like normal school
kids do. But you never could write what you think about the subject. Never, ever. The subject
could be interesting, but you never could put what do you think. You have to find some way to
relate that to the communist view.
Vladimir: The general culture taught you this doublethink.
Olga: I remember when I was eight or nine years old, I came home from school and
told my parents a funny anecdote about a famous Red Army hero, one that made him look bad. I
just started to tell my parents, and my father looked at me and said, 'Never do that again.
Not in our house, not anywhere. Just stop, and forget. You can't tell funny stories about
communist leaders.' And I was afraid.
Vladimir: Sooner or later, society would tell you what you shouldn't say. And if
you said it, you would end up in the camp.
We are reproducing that system here, in an American way. It begins with the ideological
corruption of knowledge in the institutions of higher education, then moves out from there. How
difficult do you imagine it would be within the New York Times newsroom, or any major
American newsroom, to mount a serious challenge to the concepts of "whiteness," "patriarchy,"
and the like? In fact, we have an example of it, from this summer:
the leaked transcript of the Times 's internal town hall meeting , in which an
unnamed staffer told editor-in-chief Dean Baquet that "I just feel like racism is in
everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our
national reporting."
Baquet declined the opportunity to deliver a Journalistic Standards 101 lecture to this
person, and instead gave a fuzzy non-answer (
read the transcript ; you'll see) praising the paper's then-upcoming "1619 Project," a
massive initiative attempting to "reframe" American history around slavery.
If you'll recall, the 1619 Project was named for the year the first African slave arrived on
American shores; the Times said that year, not 1776, ought to be remembered as the
founding of America.
"... "US Officials" say the Bidens are pure in heart and deed? Hah! Is it not clear that The Borg (foreign policy establishment) hate Donald Trump and will say anything possible to injure him? ..."
"... "Debunked," "Discredited," "Conspiracy theories?" Trickery in the press is the real truth , trickery intended to protect the only viable candidate in the Democratic Party field. ..."
"... Lutsenko has had a pretty sketchy career, including charges of abuse of power, forgery and embezzlement among other things. https://heavy.com/news/2019/11/yuriy-lutsenko/ It's telling that Democrats and the mainstream media choose to cite such a character as their primary source for evidence that the Bidens did nothing wrong. Reminds me of Mark Twains old adage: "An honest politician is one who, once he's been bought, stays bought." More recently it seems that his loyalties have shifted, accusing Yovanovitch of giving him a list of people who should be protected. ..."
"... It's not really that complicated an inquiry to decide whether there is a need to go further; two questions: what did Hunter Biden do for the money; and Joe, did you get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired as you bragged you did, and why? Maybe throw in a third if the answer is "I did", what or who made you think that you could do that? ..."
"Graham's conspiracy theory-based investigation is rooted in the
baseless allegation that Biden pressured Ukraine to remove a corrupt prosecutor in 2016
as a way to protect Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, against a corruption probe. Biden's
son Hunter was previously a board member with Burisma until April this year.
There is no evidence to support allegations that Biden acted improperly in calling for the
prosecutor general in charge of the Burisma probe to be ousted, and both Ukrainian and U.S.
officials have said there is no merit to the claim. As many have since noted, the Burisma
investigation was in fact dormant when the prosecutor general was forced out on accusations
he was slow-walking corruption probes, among other things.
Trump brought up that debunked conspiracy during a July 25 call with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, asking the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden as well as a
baseless conspiracy involving the Democratic National Committee servers."
"Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality
of belief. Much debate in epistemology centers on four areas:
(3) the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and
(4) the criteria for knowledge and justification.
Epistemology addresses such questions as: "What makes justified beliefs justified?" " What
does it mean to say that we know something? ", and fundamentally "How do we know that we
know?"
~ wiki on epistemology
-------------
As in the example above from the "American Independent," the MSM and online projects like
the American Independent incessantly insist that the simple fact that Hunter Biden and his dear
old dad, a "Union Man," solicited money in Ukraine and in China for services not rendered
proves nothing, that nothing has been proven against them and that any mention of these
occurrences is evidence of harsh partisan rhetoric based on fantasy and equivalent to belief in
the Loch Ness Monster.
Well, pilgrims I want to know who and what investigation or investigations cleared the
Bidens of anything.
It is obvious that Hunter is qualified for employment as a bag man and not much else. He has
a law degree? So what? As in the matter of the qualifications of doctors, not all learn much in
medical or law school.
"US Officials" say the Bidens are pure in heart and deed? Hah! Is it not clear that The Borg
(foreign policy establishment) hate Donald Trump and will say anything possible to injure
him?
"Debunked," "Discredited," "Conspiracy theories?" Trickery in the press is the real truth , trickery intended to protect the only viable
candidate in the Democratic Party field.
The article highlighted here, typically, is a lie. As documented in Moon of Alabama's
timeline (
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/11/a-timeline-of-joe-bidens-intervention-against-the-prosecutor-general-of-ukraine.html),
Shokin was actively investigating Zlochevsky in February 2016, when Shokin seized his luxury
car. Barely two weeks later, Biden was on the phone to Poroshenko demanding Shokin's firing.
While this doesn't prove that Biden was motivated primarily by a desire to protect his son's
employer, it is certainly consistent with that possibility.
John Solomon has been very much in the lead on reporting from Ukraine which furthers what the
MSM calls "conspiracy theories".
While he earlier reported, or opined, from The Hill,
now he evidently has been bumped (my opinion) from that perch,
and now has own blog John Solomon Report : https://johnsolomonreports.com/
It is tragic, IMO, how the MSM ignores the facts that Solomon documents in his
columns.
It is possible that JS is a mouthpiece for corrupt elements in Ukraine,
but I think his points deserve more attention than they have been getting.
There are two sides to this story, not only one as Col. Lang pointed out in his root
piece.
I recall that the Russiagate conspiracy theory was "proven" factual as well, and by many of
the same people who claim that Biden's corruption has been "debunked". Even though it was
absurd on its face and had been debunked numerous times, many people in fact continue to
insist otherwise.
Seriously....who would think Biden's son taking a highly paid position with a company in a
foreign country that Biden was representing the US in wasn't a conflict of interest? Even the
'appearance' of a conflict of interest should be avoided in such situations.
I find Biden and his political 'career', greased by his 'good old Joe act' disgusting in so
many ways it would take too long to describe them here.
The media really seems to be testing the limits of disinformation. More and more, the media
wants to convince people that black is white and up is down. Fortunately, I don't think their
plan is working all that well.
In the case of Hunter Biden, we are told that "There is no evidence to support allegations
that Biden acted improperly".
Okay, that's one way to look at things, but I have found that even among my liberal
friends, the fetid smell of corruption emitting from this case, is overpowering. And while
most people might have a hard time sinking their teeth into a "quid pro quo", they do have a
pretty good grasp of old fashioned influence peddling, which is what we are talking
about.
So why has the media chosen to defend the crooked goings-on of public officials who were
obviously up to no good? Don't they care about their credibility at all?
Was the American Independent quote lifted from The NY Times? It sure sounds like it!
For some time I've been wondering how exactly Biden got cleared. Was there any formal
investigation? Who conducted it? And how reliable are the facts when they come from a place
like Ukraine, where anything, including the 'truth,' can be laundered?
What's become painfully obvious is how eagerly America's major news outlets, including the
journals of record, participate in the laundering of truth.
Of course, that should have been obvious from the yellow journalism preceding the war in
Iraq.
What's really scary are reports that "intelligence" services get most of their 'facts'
from the very same truth laundering sources.
I always got the impression the "wild, debunked conspiracy theory pushed by right wing nuts"
was always referring to the Crowdstrike DNC computer investigation hoax that Trump tried to
re-open.
They would never specifically refer to the Crowdstrike favor Trump specifically asked for
in the phone call, instead they would substitute Trump asked about some "debunked, wild right
wing conspiracy".
So they never explained how the Crowdstrike investigation hoax was debunked either.
To me this is far more interesting missing debunked conspiracy link - since it shows
incredible coordination between the DNC, the "leak" of their DNC computer data, Ukrainian
Crowdstrike, and finally the Mueller Report who used the DNC Crowdstrike investigation
conclusoin hook line and sinker to reach their own official conclusions which is now "proven"
operating dogma. Without ever doing an independent investigation themselves. How often does
that happen?
To me the Crowdstrike connection begs further investigation - why would a Russian hating
Ukrainian who was running Crowdstrike point the finger at the Russians and claim they
"hacked" the DNC computers, but not let anyone else touch those same computers to corroborate
that conclusion?
And then parlay this into Trump supporting Russian interference in the 2016 election. All
too tidy for me. Feels like dark forces are still at work, and subverting language to achieve
their ends.
Whatever happened to Joe Biden's taped boast, at the Council on Foreign Relations, that he
gave President Poroshenko 6 hours to fire Prosecutor Shokin -- or else lose $1 Billion of US
aid ?
How was this taped confession of QUID-PRO-QUO debunked ?
The media (approx. 99% of them) have been in the tank for Democrats since at least the
Vietnam war.
Roger Ailes said why he didn't read the NY Times:
"You cover the bad news about America. You do. But you don't get up in the morning hating
your country."
Eight days later Joe Biden launched an intense pressure campaign to get rid of Shokin. He
personally calls Poroshenko on Feb 12, 18 and 19 to press for firing Shokin.
To think that this is unrelated is not reasonable.
The rest of the
timeline shows further Biden influence in the case.
(I should update that timeline as a lot of additional evidence of Burisma lobbying State
at that time has since come in.)
There are tons of additional dirt. The U.S. has control over the National Anti-Corruption
Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and uses it to push all such investigations to its favor. NABU has
itself been involved in serious corruption.
There is also a USAID/Soros paid NGO that has a similar function and is equally corrupt.
These organizations are used as weapons to put all Ukrainian assets into the hands of
those that the U.S. embassy likes.
Lutsenko was the guy who was appointed as Prosecutor General after Biden got the previous
one fired. IOW Lutsenko owed his job to Biden.
Lutsenko has had a pretty sketchy career, including charges of abuse of power, forgery and
embezzlement among other things. https://heavy.com/news/2019/11/yuriy-lutsenko/ It's telling that Democrats and the mainstream media choose to cite such a character as
their primary source for evidence that the Bidens did nothing wrong. Reminds me of Mark Twains old adage: "An honest politician is one who, once he's been
bought, stays bought." More recently it seems that his loyalties have shifted, accusing
Yovanovitch of giving him a list of people who should be protected.
The only thing I can conclude is that Lutsenko is probably just trying to survive the
shifting tides in the Ukrainian swamp and will say or do whatever it takes.
"American Independent" is David Brock's Clinton / Soros linked Shareblue disinfo and troll
brigade rebranded. It will obviously tell every lie going to protect the corrupt Corporate Dem Establishment,
the Globalists and the Deep State. https://twitter.com/Ian56789/status/1198338991814250497
It's not really that complicated an inquiry to decide whether there is a need to go further;
two questions: what did Hunter Biden do for the money; and Joe, did you get the Ukrainian
prosecutor fired as you bragged you did, and why? Maybe throw in a third if the answer is "I
did", what or who made you think that you could do that?
Agreed. However, an addendum, you seem to have forgotten to mention Russia's aggressive
training whales to spy on Norway, crickets to drive the US embassy in Cuba nuts, weaponizing
Masha and the bear, using Pokemon to sow the seeds of discord, contemplating on freezing up a
few states, any many others the mere thought of gets one wound up.
Agreed. However, an addendum, you seem to have forgotten to mention Russia's aggressive
training whales to spy on Norway, crickets to drive the US embassy in Cuba nuts, weaponizing
Masha and the bear, using Pokemon to sow the seeds of discord, contemplating on freezing up a
few states, any many others the mere thought of gets one wound up.
This is a replay of Vietnam Communist Domino Theory. May all those neocons rest in Eternal
Hell.
Notable quotes:
"... Now is not the time to retreat from our relationship with Ukraine, but rather to double down on it. As we sit here, Ukrainians are fighting a hot war on Ukrainian territory against Russian aggression. ..."
"... I went to the front line approximately 10 times during a hot war sometimes literally as we heard the impact of artillery, and to see how our assistance dollars were being put to use. ..."
"... Ukraine, with an enormous land mass and a large population, has the potential to be a significant force multiplier on the security side And now Ukraine is a battleground for great power competition with a hot war for the control of territory and a hybrid war to control Ukraine's leadership. ..."
"... She explained that the US-funded and fascist-led "Maidan Revolution" of 2014, which she and other State Department officials absurdly called the "Revolution of Dignity," was part of this conflict. "That's why they launched the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, demanding to be a part of Europe," she declared. ..."
"... Diplomat George Kent invoked the same theme in his testimony last Wednesday, saying: ..."
"... Ukraine's popular Revolution of Dignity in 2014 forced a corrupt pro-Russian leadership to flee to Moscow. After that, Russia invaded Ukraine, occupying seven percent of its territory, roughly equivalent to the size of Texas for the United States ..."
"... Since then, more than 13,000 Ukrainians have died on Ukrainian soil defending their territorial integrity and sovereignty from Russian aggression. American support in Ukraine's own de facto war of independence has been critical in this regard. ..."
"... Kent subsequently compared the role of the United States in the Ukrainian civil war to that of Spain and France in the American War of Independence. In that conflict, Spain and France were officially at war with Great Britain, including formal declarations of war in 1778 and 1779. ..."
"... If Kent's analogy is true, then the United States is in an undeclared war with Russia. ..."
"... But when has this war ever been discussed with the American people? Was there ever a congressional vote to authorize it? ..."
"... When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces," she said, threatening the "president, or anyone else, [who] impedes or subverts the national security of the United States. ..."
"... "In an otherwise divided Washington, one of the few issues of bipartisan agreement for the past six years has been countering Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's broad plan of disruption. That effort starts in Ukraine, where there has been a hot war underway in the east for five years " ..."
"... @wendy davis ..."
"... @jim p ..."
"... @lotlizard ..."
"... Mykola Zlochevsky, former employer of Hunter Biden and current partner of the Atlantic Council ..."
' Who decided the US should fight a "hot war" with Russia? ', 23 November 2019 . Andre Damon,
wsws
"There is a saying attributed to the banker J.P. Morgan: " A man always has two reasons
for what he does -- a good one and the real one ."
If the alleged "organized crime shakedown" by Trump was the "good" reason for the
impeachment inquiry, the "real" reason has emerged over two weeks of public congressional
hearings. The hearings have lifted the lid on a massive US conspiracy to spend billions of
dollars to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014 and foment a
civil war that has led to the deaths of thousands of people.
The impeachment drive is itself the product of efforts by sections of the intelligence
agencies and elements within the State Department to escalate Washington's conflict with
Russia, with potentially world-catastrophic consequences.
On Thursday, Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell showed a photo of Ukrainian President
Zelensky in body armor on the "front lines" of the civil war in eastern Ukraine. He asked the
State Department witnesses "why it's so important that our hard-earned tax dollars help
President Zelensky and the men standing beside him fight Russia in this hot war?"
David Holmes, political counselor at the US embassy in Kiev, replied:
Now is not the time to retreat from our relationship with Ukraine, but rather to
double down on it. As we sit here, Ukrainians are fighting a hot war on Ukrainian territory
against Russian aggression.
Later in his testimony, Holmes pointed to the massive sums expended by the United States
and its European allies to fight this "hot war," saying the US had provided $5 billion and
its European allies $12 billion since 2014.
In her testimony last week, the former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich recalled that
as ambassador:
I went to the front line approximately 10 times during a hot war sometimes literally
as we heard the impact of artillery, and to see how our assistance dollars were being put
to use.
She added:
Ukraine, with an enormous land mass and a large population, has the potential to be
a significant force multiplier on the security side And now Ukraine is a battleground for
great power competition with a hot war for the control of territory and a hybrid war to
control Ukraine's leadership.
She explained that the US-funded and fascist-led "Maidan Revolution" of 2014, which
she and other State Department officials absurdly called the "Revolution of Dignity," was
part of this conflict. "That's why they launched the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, demanding
to be a part of Europe," she declared.
Diplomat George Kent invoked the same theme in his testimony last Wednesday,
saying:
Ukraine's popular Revolution of Dignity in 2014 forced a corrupt pro-Russian
leadership to flee to Moscow. After that, Russia invaded Ukraine, occupying seven percent
of its territory, roughly equivalent to the size of Texas for the United States
Since then, more than 13,000 Ukrainians have died on Ukrainian soil defending their
territorial integrity and sovereignty from Russian aggression. American support in
Ukraine's own de facto war of independence has been critical in this regard.
Kent subsequently compared the role of the United States in the Ukrainian civil war to
that of Spain and France in the American War of Independence. In that conflict, Spain and
France were officially at war with Great Britain, including formal declarations of war in
1778 and 1779.
If Kent's analogy is true, then the United States is in an undeclared war with
Russia.
But when has this war ever been discussed with the American people? Was there ever a
congressional vote to authorize it? Does anyone believe that if the question, "Do you
want to spend billions of dollars to help Ukraine fight a war with Russia," were posed to the
American public, the percentage answering yes would be anything more than minuscule? Of
course, that question was never asked." [snip]
"But in the congressional hearings this week, government officials declared that any
questioning of this aid is virtually treasonous. In her testimony on Thursday, former
National Security Council officer Fiona Hill accused anyone who questions that "Ukraine is a
valued partner" of the United States of advancing "Russian interests. "
" When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces,"
she said, threatening the "president, or anyone else, [who] impedes or subverts the national
security of the United States. "
In 2017, Hill penned a blog post for the Brookings Institution calling Trump a
"Bolshevik," echoing statements made more than 60 years ago by John Birch Society leader
Robert W. Welch, who declared that President Eisenhower was a "communist."
Underlying the mad allegations of the Democrats that Trump is functioning as a "Russian
asset" is a very real content: The extremely dangerous drive by factions within the state for
a military confrontation between the United States and Russia, whose combined nuclear weapons
arsenals are capable of destroying all of humanity many times over.
There is no "peace" faction within the American political establishment. No credence can
be given to either one of the parties of US imperialism, which have, over the course of
decades, presided over the toppling of dozens of governments, the launching of countless wars
and the deaths of millions of people."
Patrick Martin from his Oct. 16, 2019 ' The Trump
impeachment and US policy in Ukraine '
"This utterly reactionary, pro-imperialist role was demonstrated Friday in the tribute
that Yovanovitch paid, in the course of her testimony, to Arsen Avakov, the Ukrainian
interior minister (head of the domestic police) under both the current president, Volodymyr
Zelensky, and his predecessor Petro Poroshenko. Avakov is a principal sponsor of fascist
militias such as the Azov Battalion , which glorify the Ukrainians who collaborated with the
Nazis during World War II against the Soviet Union. In other words, the State Department
officials being celebrated in the media for defending American democracy are actually working
with the fascists in Ukraine .
While Yovanovitch hailed Avakov, Kent cited as his heroes among immigrants who have
rallied to the defense of the United States Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, two of
the biggest war criminals of the second half of the twentieth century ." [snip]
""The connection between the impeachment drive and differences on foreign policy was spelled
out Friday on the front page of the New York Times, in an analysis by the newspaper's senior
foreign policy specialist, David Sanger, a frequent mouthpiece for the concerns of the CIA,
State Department and Pentagon, under the headline, " For President, Case of Policy vs.
Obsession." [snip]
But Sanger goes on to spell out, in remarkably blunt terms, the real foreign policy issues
at stake in the Trump impeachment. He writes,
"In an otherwise divided Washington, one of the few issues of bipartisan agreement for
the past six years has been countering Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's broad plan of
disruption. That effort starts in Ukraine, where there has been a hot war underway in the
east for five years "
Trump, according to Sanger, has betrayed the anti-Russia policy outlined by his own
administration in a Pentagon strategic assessment which declared that the "war on terror" had
been superseded as the top US priority by "great-power competition," particularly directed at
China and Russia. He sacrificed this policy to his own personal, electoral interests, as
expressed in the comment by the US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland:
"President Trump cares more about the investigation of Biden" than about the military
conflict between Ukraine and Russia."
They'll bust both your kneecaps and then fit you with cement overshoes and toss you into
the ocean. Trump is finding out the hard way that entrenched interests in the US government
wield vast veto power over anything a president wants to do.
He's his own worst enemy with his self-sabotaging Twitter rants, endless character
assassinations, hastily burnt bridges, and conflicting statements that change based upon
the last person he talked to. Trump doesn't inspire loyalty in those who work for him and
around him. OTOH, that doesn't excuse the Deep State, an unelected cabal secretly running
our government and risking our lives with endless wars and Russia baiting. If impeachment
has shown nothing else, it's that the Deep State is real and usually gets its way.
almost all the casualties are Russian speakers in the East. Back in the early coup days
there were 37 claims that Russian troops invaded Ukraine. Which turned out to be none. I
still remember when Pravda in New York had a blurred photo they claimed to be a Russ
officer (and how do you get blurring in the digital age) which turned out to be a Ukranian
officer facebook photo. They never explained how that happened.
great context. kent's number 13,000, and yes, they were likely all Novoroosians
, if he hadn't pulled that figure out of his ass, anyway. photos of 'little green men' in
ancient soviet uniforms, old tanks left over from the days of yore.
was kent counting the dead inside the trade unions massacre in odessa petrol-bombed by
the neo-nazis?
in depth reads for later, and thank you, miz lizard. funny that the Atlantic council (at
least one version) had chosen Zelenskiy based on promises to end corruption (read: so
ukraine could have the lucre to enter Nato). and yet, he'd kept 9as per the photo caption)
Mykola Zlochevsky, former employer of Hunter Biden and current partner of the Atlantic
Council in hi cabinet, isn't it?
be encouraged to read your stockman links to his 'The Ukrainian Influence Peddling Rings
– A Microcosm of How Imperial Washington Rolls', David Stockman,
November 13, 2019 , i'll offer a few excerpts. i rarely (if ever) call anything a 'must
read', but even you, voice, might want to dig into this one (part I of II, if i get his
drift).
i'm assumming his historical narrative is correct, as all the pieces i do know about are
there are well, but what he writes i hadn't known is key, of course. his language is also
colorful as all giddy-up, which i like, and good on him. he's lost me a bit in some
sections, as he names names, lobbying firms, and so on, but that's on me, not stockman.
"The latest dispatch from the Wall Street Journal on the stench wafting westward from
Kiev reveals more about the rotten foundation of UkraineGate than its authors probably
understood.
Burisma Holdings' campaign to clean up its image in the West reached beyond the 2014
hiring of Hunter Biden, son of the then-U.S. vice president, to include other
well-connected operatives in Washington, according to officials in both countries and
government records.
The Ukrainian company, owned by tycoon Mykola Zlochevsky, also hired a lobbyist with
close ties to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, as well as a consulting group founded
by top officials in the Clinton administration that specialized in preparing former
Soviet-bloc countries to join NATO (Blue Star Strategies).
Soon the efforts bore fruit. With the help of a New York-based lawyer, Mr.
Zlochevsky's U.S. consultants argued to Ukrainian prosecutors that criminal cases
against the company should be closed because no laws had been broken.
Burisma later became a sponsor of a Washington think tank, the Atlantic Council,
whose experts are often cited on energy and security policy in the former Soviet
Union.
Simple translation: Zlochevsky was an ally, officeholder (minister of ecology and
natural resources) and inner-circle thief in the ousted government of Viktor Yanukovych.
He therefore needed to powder the pig fast and thoroughly in order to hold onto his
ill-gotten billions.""
[longish snip of a who's who involvement]...................
"Finally, the Clinton wing of the Washington racketeering system had to be covered,
too – hence the above mentioned Blue Star Strategies. And the bolded sentence from
the WSJ story quoted below tells you all you need to know about its business, which was
to " .help former Soviet countries prepare for NATO consideration".
That's right. With the Soviet Union gone, its 50,000 tanks on the central front
melted-down for scrap and the Warsaw Pact disbanded, the rational order of the day was to
declare "mission accomplished" for NATO and effect its own disbandment.
The great parachuter and then US president, George Bush the Elder, could have actually
made a jump right into the giant Ramstein Air Base in Germany to effect its closure. At
that point there was no justification for NATO's continued existence whatsoever.
But the Clinton Administration, under the baleful influence of Washington busybodies
like Strobe Talbot and Madeleine Albright, went in just the opposite direction. In
pursuit of Washington's post-1991 quest for global hegemony as the world's only
superpower and putative keeper of the peace, they prepared the way for the entirety of
the old Warsaw Pact to join NATO.
So doing, however, they also laid the planking for a revival of the cold war with the
Kremlin. As the father of containment and NATO during the late 1940s, Ambassador George
Kennan, observed at the time, the Clinton Administration's policy of expanding NATO to
the very doorstep of Russia was a colossal mistake." [longish snip]
...............................
"So that's how the Imperial City rolls. People make policies which extend the Empire
while in office – as did these Clintonistas with the NATO expansion project –
and then cash-in afterwards by peddling influence in the corridors of the beltway on
behalf of Washington's newly acquired vassals and supplicants.
In this case, all roads lead to the Atlantic Council, which is the semi-official
"think tank" of NATO in Washington and is infested with Russophobes and Clinton/Biden
operatives. The latter, of course, make a handsome living peddling anti-Putin propaganda
– the better to grease the Washington purse strings for unneeded military spending
and foreign aid, security assistance and weapons sales to the "front line" states
allegedly in the path of Kremlin aggression."
thank you, miz lizard. love this title of his on the sidebar: ' Democrats Empower a Pack
of Paranoid Neocon Morons '. ; )
i'll grab part II and read it greedily when i have more time.
putting them in the context of the region's deeper past. The first two parts of a
series.
The Special Operations Detachment "Azov", often known as Azov Battalion, Azov
Regiment, or Azov Detachment, (Ukrainian: Полк
Азов) is a Ukrainian National Guard regiment,[1][2][3][4] based
in Mariupol in the Azov Sea coastal region.
In 2014, it gained notoriety after allegations emerged of torture and war crimes, as
well as neo-Nazi sympathies and usage of associated symbols by the regiment itself, as
seen in their logo featuring the Wolfsangel, one of the original symbols used by the
German Nazi Party. In 2014, around 10-20% of the unit were neo-Nazis.[9] In 2018, a
provision in an appropriations bill passed by the U.S. Congress blocked military aid to
Azov on the grounds of its white supremacist ideology. [10] Members of the regiment come
from 22 countries and are of various backgrounds.[11]
On 13 April 2014 Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov [nb 1] issued a decree
authorizing creating new paramilitary forces from civilians up to 12,000.[22] The Azov
Battalion (using "Eastern Corps" as its backbone[20]) was formed on 5 May 2014 in
Berdiansk[23] by a white nationalist.[24] Many members of Patriot of Ukraine joined the
battalion.[20] Among the early patrons of the battalion were a member of the Verkhovna
Rada Oleh Lyashko, and an ultra-nationalist Dmytro Korchynsky and businessman Serhiy
Taruta and Avakov.[25][20] The battalion then received training near Kiev by instructors
with experience in the Georgian Armed Forces.[
In September 2014, the Azov battalion was expanded from a battalion to a regiment and
enrolled into the National Guard of Ukraine.[23][33] At about this time it started
receiving increased supplies of heavy arms.[33] The Azov battalion received funding from
the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and other sources (believed to be Ukrainian
oligarchs).
As of late March 2015, despite a second ceasefire agreement (Minsk II), the Azov
Battalion continued to prepare for war, with the group's leader seeing the ceasefire as
"appeasement".[33] In March 2015 Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that the Azov
Regiment would be among the first units to be trained by United States Army troops in
their Operation Fearless Guardian training mission.[44][45] US training however was
withdrawn on 12 June 2015, as US House of Representatives passed an amendment blocking
any aid (including arms and training) to the battalion due to its Neo-Nazi
background.[46] After the vote Congressman John Conyers thanked the House saying "I am
grateful that the House of Representatives unanimously passed my amendments last night to
ensure that our military does not train members of the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov Battalion,
along with my measures to keep the dangerous and easily trafficked MANPADs out of these
unstable regions."[45]
Since 2015 Azov is organising summer camps where children and teenagers receive
practice in civil defense and military tactics mixed with lectures on Ukrainian
nationalism.[48][20]
Since 2015 the Battalion has been upgraded to Regimental status and "Azov" is now
officially called "Special Operations Regiment" , with combat duties focused on
reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance, EOD disposal, interdiction and special weapons
operations.
Foreign membership [edit]
According to The Daily Telegraph, the Azov Battalion's extremist politics and
professional English social media pages have attracted foreign fighters,[30] including
people from Brazil, Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom, France, America, Greece,
Scandinavia,[2][30] Spain, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Russia. [2][56][57] About 50
Russian nationals are members of the Azov regiment.[58]
According to Minsk Ceasefire Agreements, foreign fighters are not allowed to serve in
Ukraine's military:[66] since "Azov" Regiment was granted full military status, its
foreign volunteers were compelled either to take Ukrainian citizenship, or to leave the
Regiment.
Human rights violations and war crimes[edit]
Reports published by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
(OHCHR) have connected the Azov Battalion to war crimes such as mass looting, unlawful
detention, and torture.[68][69] An OHCHR report from March 2016 stated that the
organisation had "collected detailed information about the conduct of hostilities by
Ukrainian armed forces and the Azov regiment in and around Shyrokyne (31km east of
Mariupol), from the summer of 2014 to date. Mass looting of civilian homes was
documented, as well as targeting of civilian areas between September 2014 and February
2015".[68] Another OHCHR report documented an instance of rape and torture
Rodnovery, symbolism and neo-Nazism [edit]
Emblem featuring a Wolfsangel and Black Sun
Most soldiers of Azov are followers of a Ukrainian nationalist type of Rodnovery (Slavic
Native Faith), wherefrom they derive some of their symbolism (such as a variation of the
swastika symbol kolovrat). They have also established Rodnover shrines for their
religious rites, including one in Mariupol dedicated to Perun.[70][71][72][unreliable
source] German ZDF television showed images of Azov fighters wearing helmets with
swastika symbols and "the SS runes of Hitler's infamous black-uniformed elite corps".[73]
Due to the use of such symbols, Azov has been considered to have connections with
neo-Nazism, with members wearing neo-Nazi and SS symbols and regalia and expressing
Neo-Nazi views.
The group's insignia features the Wolfsangel[78][79][80] and the Black
Sun,[78][81][82] two Nazi-era symbols adopted by neo-Nazi groups.
In 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a provision blocking any training of
Azov members by American forces, citing its neo-Nazi background. In previous years,
between 2014 and 2017, the U.S. House of Representatives passed amendments banning
support of Azov, but due to pressure from the Pentagon, the amendments were quietly
lifted.[87][88][89] This move has been protested by Simon Wiesenthal Center which stated
that the move highlights danger of Holocaust distortion in Ukraine.[89] On 26 June 2015,
the Canadian defence minister declared as well, that training by Canadian forces or
support would not be provided to Azov. [90]
While Azov Battalion troops have denied that the organization has any neo-Nazi or white
supremacist beliefs, journalists stated that "numerous swastika tattoos of different
members and their tendency to go into battle with swastikas or SS insignias drawn on
their helmets make it very difficult for other members of the group to plausibly deny any
neo-Nazi affiliations" .[85]
no more US training? dunno what to say to that. but i plugged '2018' into a bing search
of azov torchlight parades and found this from 2016 instead (although there were some
later, as well):
Ukrainian ultra-nationalist Azov battalion [as well as Right Sector' stages torch-lit
march in Kharkov (VIDEOS)], 12 Dec, 2016 , RT.com
really according to Eva
Bartlett who'd committed journalism in the donbass independent republics, zelenskiy
hasn't been able to control them (as promised) either.
it's a good time to remember all who'd invested in the ukraine who had interest in the
Maidan putsch, isn't it?
The Special Operations Detachment "Azov", often known as Azov Battalion, Azov
Regiment, or Azov Detachment, (Ukrainian: Полк
Азов) is a Ukrainian National Guard regiment,[1][2][3][4]
based in Mariupol in the Azov Sea coastal region.
In 2014, it gained notoriety after allegations emerged of torture and war crimes,
as well as neo-Nazi sympathies and usage of associated symbols by the regiment
itself, as seen in their logo featuring the Wolfsangel, one of the original symbols
used by the German Nazi Party. In 2014, around 10-20% of the unit were neo-Nazis.[9]
In 2018, a provision in an appropriations bill passed by the U.S. Congress blocked
military aid to Azov on the grounds of its white supremacist ideology. [10] Members
of the regiment come from 22 countries and are of various backgrounds.[11]
On 13 April 2014 Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov [nb 1] issued a decree
authorizing creating new paramilitary forces from civilians up to 12,000.[22] The
Azov Battalion (using "Eastern Corps" as its backbone[20]) was formed on 5 May 2014
in Berdiansk[23] by a white nationalist.[24] Many members of Patriot of Ukraine
joined the battalion.[20] Among the early patrons of the battalion were a member of
the Verkhovna Rada Oleh Lyashko, and an ultra-nationalist Dmytro Korchynsky and
businessman Serhiy Taruta and Avakov.[25][20] The battalion then received training
near Kiev by instructors with experience in the Georgian Armed Forces.[
In September 2014, the Azov battalion was expanded from a battalion to a regiment
and enrolled into the National Guard of Ukraine.[23][33] At about this time it
started receiving increased supplies of heavy arms.[33] The Azov battalion received
funding from the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and other sources (believed
to be Ukrainian oligarchs).
As of late March 2015, despite a second ceasefire agreement (Minsk II), the Azov
Battalion continued to prepare for war, with the group's leader seeing the ceasefire
as "appeasement".[33] In March 2015 Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that the
Azov Regiment would be among the first units to be trained by United States Army
troops in their Operation Fearless Guardian training mission.[44][45] US training
however was withdrawn on 12 June 2015, as US House of Representatives passed an
amendment blocking any aid (including arms and training) to the battalion due to its
Neo-Nazi background.[46] After the vote Congressman John Conyers thanked the House
saying "I am grateful that the House of Representatives unanimously passed my
amendments last night to ensure that our military does not train members of the
repulsive neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, along with my measures to keep the dangerous and
easily trafficked MANPADs out of these unstable regions."[45]
Since 2015 Azov is organising summer camps where children and teenagers receive
practice in civil defense and military tactics mixed with lectures on Ukrainian
nationalism.[48][20]
Since 2015 the Battalion has been upgraded to Regimental status and "Azov" is now
officially called "Special Operations Regiment" , with combat duties focused on
reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance, EOD disposal, interdiction and special
weapons operations.
Foreign membership [edit]
According to The Daily Telegraph, the Azov Battalion's extremist politics and
professional English social media pages have attracted foreign fighters,[30]
including people from Brazil, Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom, France, America,
Greece, Scandinavia,[2][30] Spain, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Russia. [2][56][57]
About 50 Russian nationals are members of the Azov regiment.[58]
According to Minsk Ceasefire Agreements, foreign fighters are not allowed to serve
in Ukraine's military:[66] since "Azov" Regiment was granted full military status,
its foreign volunteers were compelled either to take Ukrainian citizenship, or to
leave the Regiment.
Human rights violations and war crimes[edit]
Reports published by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights (OHCHR) have connected the Azov Battalion to war crimes such as mass looting,
unlawful detention, and torture.[68][69] An OHCHR report from March 2016 stated that
the organisation had "collected detailed information about the conduct of hostilities
by Ukrainian armed forces and the Azov regiment in and around Shyrokyne (31km east of
Mariupol), from the summer of 2014 to date. Mass looting of civilian homes was
documented, as well as targeting of civilian areas between September 2014 and
February 2015".[68] Another OHCHR report documented an instance of rape and
torture
Rodnovery, symbolism and neo-Nazism [edit]
Emblem featuring a Wolfsangel and Black Sun
Most soldiers of Azov are followers of a Ukrainian nationalist type of Rodnovery
(Slavic Native Faith), wherefrom they derive some of their symbolism (such as a
variation of the swastika symbol kolovrat). They have also established Rodnover
shrines for their religious rites, including one in Mariupol dedicated to
Perun.[70][71][72][unreliable source] German ZDF television showed images of Azov
fighters wearing helmets with swastika symbols and "the SS runes of Hitler's infamous
black-uniformed elite corps".[73] Due to the use of such symbols, Azov has been
considered to have connections with neo-Nazism, with members wearing neo-Nazi and SS
symbols and regalia and expressing Neo-Nazi views.
The group's insignia features the Wolfsangel[78][79][80] and the Black
Sun,[78][81][82] two Nazi-era symbols adopted by neo-Nazi groups.
In 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a provision blocking any
training of Azov members by American forces, citing its neo-Nazi background. In
previous years, between 2014 and 2017, the U.S. House of Representatives passed
amendments banning support of Azov, but due to pressure from the Pentagon, the
amendments were quietly lifted.[87][88][89] This move has been protested by Simon
Wiesenthal Center which stated that the move highlights danger of Holocaust
distortion in Ukraine.[89] On 26 June 2015, the Canadian defence minister declared as
well, that training by Canadian forces or support would not be provided to Azov.
[90]
While Azov Battalion troops have denied that the organization has any neo-Nazi or
white supremacist beliefs, journalists stated that "numerous swastika tattoos of
different members and their tendency to go into battle with swastikas or SS insignias
drawn on their helmets make it very difficult for other members of the group to
plausibly deny any neo-Nazi affiliations" .[85]
It's great that Ukraine's revisionist far-right politics are at least getting some
attention in the press. But what you won't read in these reports is that the U.S.
government had recently sponsored a "cultural" exhibit that celebrated the Nazi
collaborator who is now getting his own street in Kiev. You can't make this stuff up!
But we have to help the Nazis because Putin's Russia is invading and we owe it to them
to.... blehh!
yasha levine commits good journalism, there too! i'd never even heard of Nil Khasevych
nor his Kil the Jews wood block prints. zelenskiy is not only jewish, but russian speaking,
ukrainian is his second language as i understand it.
imagine now living on Khasevych; wouldn't you be proud? i'd been on yasha's account
recently looking for his take (if any) on the intercept/NYT collaboration on the Iranaian
leaks. i'd figured his link to the history if U S meddling at the bottom would speak at
length about Pierre Omidyar's investments (centre UA, USAID, etc.) and maybe (then)
monsanto/billy gates.
thank you; a whoosh -worthy exposé. do you get his newsletter,
snoop?
p.s. on edit: i tried to subscribe, but it costs money. oh, well...
It's great that Ukraine's revisionist far-right politics are at least getting some
attention in the press. But what you won't read in these reports is that the U.S.
government had recently sponsored a "cultural" exhibit that celebrated the Nazi
collaborator who is now getting his own street in Kiev. You can't make this stuff
up!
But we have to help the Nazis because Putin's Russia is invading and we owe it to
them to.... blehh!
There is lots of good info on Twitter about the Ukraine system and corruption. Bibi
didn't have any problems dealing with the neo Nazis there either which threw me for a loop.
But then it was people in our country that made Hitler's war chest. Bush Sr., Ford and lots
of others thought Hitler's system should be implemented here. Oh yeah and of course the
banks..
Yasha Levine commits good journalism, there too! i'd never even heard of Nil
Khasevych nor his Kil the Jews wood block prints. zelenskiy is not only jewish, but
russian speaking, ukrainian is his second language as i understand it.
imagine now living on Khasevych; wouldn't you be proud? i'd been on yasha's account
recently looking for his take (if any) on the intercept/NYT collaboration on the
Iranaian leaks. i'd figured his link to the history if U S meddling at the bottom would
speak at length about Pierre Omidyar's investments (centre UA, USAID, etc.) and maybe
(then) monsanto/billy gates.
thank you; a whoosh -worthy exposé. do you get his newsletter,
snoop?
p.s. on edit: i tried to subscribe, but it costs money. oh, well...
especially with the editing. but it' like the game of telephone, isn't it? 'he told me
he overheard...', and someone told me s he heard..., yada, yada,
but just think if Pelosi hadn't limited the inquiry to One Phone call? 'as trump's
puppet, is zelenskiy's claiming 'no quid pro quo worth anything?'
There is lots of good info on Twitter about the Ukraine system and corruption. Bibi
didn't have any problems dealing with the neo Nazis there either which threw me for a
loop. But then it was people in our country that made Hitler's war chest. Bush Sr.,
Ford and lots of others thought Hitler's system should be implemented here. Oh yeah and
of course the banks..
Nah not so much. Numerous websites wrote about it back when it happened just like they
wrote about Hunter Biden and Burisma. But now I'm seeing the main stream media trying to
tell us that it didn't happen that way. Well here's one article that hasn't been scrubbed
yet.
Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly
working to boost Clinton.
Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by
officials of a former Soviet bloc country.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by
publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating
a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to
back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging
information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National
Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to
expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to
people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's
resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump's campaign was deeply connected to
Ukraine's foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally
directed than Russia's alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.
Ahh that good ole but. Yes what people in Ukraine did was bad, but.... and here's the
but.
Russia's effort was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, involved
the country's military and foreign intelligence services, according to U.S.
intelligence officials. They reportedly briefed Trump last week on the possibility that
Russian operatives might have compromising information on the president-elect. And at a
Senate hearing last week on the hacking, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
said " I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to
interfere in our election process than we've seen in this case."
There's little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers
suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the
country -- not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia -- would render it unable to
pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country's election. And
President Petro Poroshenko's administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in
Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race.
Yet Politico's investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the
race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from
engaging in one another's elections.
Well there you have it. People in Ukraine were digging up dirt on people in Trump's
campaign whilst Vlad only placed a few ads on FB and most of them were placed after the
election was over. Badder Russia.
That Ukraine was trying to get Hillary elected was well known in the Ukraine government,
but sure let's just say it never happened like that. Then of course there was Hillary
hiring people in another country to dig up dirt too, but that doesn't count. Why? Reasons
of course and because it was Hillary and the DNC doing it. See? Reasons.
Next paragraph starts with this.
Russia's meddling has sparked outrage from the American body politic. Lots of words
about how that outraged people here...and more blah blah blah stuff.
Next paragrap
Ukraine, on the other hand, has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with U.S.
administrations. Its officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has
privately expressed sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about
Poroshenko's regime, while sounding unusually friendly notes about Putin's regime.
Poroshenko is scrambling to alter that dynamic, recently signing a $50,000-a-month
contract with a well-connected GOP-linked Washington lobbying firm to set up meetings
with U.S. government officials "to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations."
Hmm hint of a quid pro quo there?
BTW. Lindsay Graham wants to investigate Hunter Biden and Joe says that he will regret
doing that for the rest of his life. Stay tuned for the fireworks.
Ahh yes Russia was the one that started that propaganda. Burisma and Biden was always on
the up and up so don't even think that they weren't. I really don't know how people who
believe everything about Russia Gate and now Ukraine Gate can keep their beliefs intact
when there is so much information showing that what they believe is wrong or didn't happen
the way they think it did.
Nah not so much. Numerous websites wrote about it back when it happened just like
they wrote about Hunter Biden and Burisma. But now I'm seeing the main stream media
trying to tell us that it didn't happen that way. Well here's one article that hasn't
been scrubbed yet.
Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after
quietly working to boost Clinton.
Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by
officials of a former Soviet bloc country.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump
by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents
implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the
matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies
research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation
found.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National
Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort
to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according
to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's
resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump's campaign was deeply connected to
Ukraine's foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or
centrally directed than Russia's alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic
emails.
Ahh that good ole but. Yes what people in Ukraine did was bad, but.... and here's
the but.
Russia's effort was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin,
involved the country's military and foreign intelligence services, according
to U.S. intelligence officials. They reportedly briefed Trump last week on the
possibility that Russian operatives might have compromising information on the
president-elect. And at a Senate hearing last week on the hacking, Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper said " I don't think we've ever encountered a
more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process than we've
seen in this case."
There's little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers
suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the
country -- not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia -- would render it unable to
pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country's election. And
President Petro Poroshenko's administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in
Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race.
Yet Politico's investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in
the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments
refrain from engaging in one another's elections.
Well there you have it. People in Ukraine were digging up dirt on people in Trump's
campaign whilst Vlad only placed a few ads on FB and most of them were placed after the
election was over. Badder Russia.
That Ukraine was trying to get Hillary elected was well known in the Ukraine
government, but sure let's just say it never happened like that. Then of course there
was Hillary hiring people in another country to dig up dirt too, but that doesn't
count. Why? Reasons of course and because it was Hillary and the DNC doing it. See?
Reasons.
Next paragraph starts with this.
Russia's meddling has sparked outrage from the American body politic. Lots of words
about how that outraged people here...and more blah blah blah stuff.
Next paragrap
Ukraine, on the other hand, has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with U.S.
administrations. Its officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has
privately expressed sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about
Poroshenko's regime, while sounding unusually friendly notes about Putin's
regime.
Poroshenko is scrambling to alter that dynamic, recently signing a $50,000-a-month
contract with a well-connected GOP-linked Washington lobbying firm to set up meetings
with U.S. government officials "to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations."
Hmm hint of a quid pro quo there?
BTW. Lindsay Graham wants to investigate Hunter Biden and Joe says that he will
regret doing that for the rest of his life. Stay tuned for the fireworks.
this morning intending to grab some of his quotes and links here: ' November
20, 2019 , Impeachment Circus - Today's Bombshell Is Another Dud one chris cilizza link
i'd given to linda wood to see if she or others might parse for me/us.
"The impeachment circus continued today with a refreshingly candid opening statement
from Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the EU. Sondland was involved in diplomatic
efforts in Ukraine. Instead of stonewalling Sondland just let it all out:
'Gordon D. Sondland testified that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed off on the
pressure campaign, and that he told Vice President Mike Pence about an apparent link
between military aid for Ukraine and investigations of Democrats. Mr. Sondland
confirmed there was a "clear quid pro quo" for a White House meeting between President
Trump and Ukraine's president.'
The
anti-Trump media see this as another "bombshell" that will hurt him.
But it is more likely that Sondland's testimony will help President Trump and those
involved on his side.
Ahh yes Russia was the one that started that propaganda. Burisma and Biden was
always on the up and up so don't even think that they weren't. I really don't know how
people who believe everything about Russia Gate and now Ukraine Gate can keep their
beliefs intact when there is so much information showing that what they believe is
wrong or didn't happen the way they think it did.
Almost everything Americans have ever been told about US foreign policy is a lie. Almost
everything we think we know is still a lie.
The Democrat's immediate goal is to install Mike Pence as President as soon as
possible.
Everything depends on this. Pence is the continuation of Obama's Neocon policies in
Ukraine and throughout the world. Biden is the premier Neocon on the 2020 ticket. His job
is to lie himself into the nomination and pick-up a Neocon Vice President. If he loses to
Pence, it doesn't matter. The CFR wins either way. And we're off to war with Russia.
This is a must read for those who want to know what is happening to them. And happening
fast.
It will be hard to see the world the same way again.
as with a hella busy 3-day weekend, i hadn't intended to, but what with the smoke
coming out of my ears and all...
i'd long claimed that i'd want to go out in a first strike as well, and here we are
just east of the shit-head capital of bumfuck, CO (h/t ed abbey).
now there are a number of NORAD
sites , but most nations as i understand it still have No First Strike Rules, but
the US no longer does, iirc (meaning: don't count on it). our daughter and her family
live in el paso county, CO home of one or two, one an alt-site under cheyenne
mountain.
i've often been a bit glib as to: 'Who will stop the US Empire? Those who can...and
must.'
but i dunno who that might end up being, nor how including with nukes. but at this
point, i guess it's all philosophical to me, as we're all living on borrowed time, and
Live in the Moment when possible.
i do so wish i could help you ease your fears, my friend.
there's no way i can read anything that long, especially in the zero-hedge format. but i
found it at the duran, and an easier read on my eye-brain configuration at the
saker . strategic culture usually carries his columns, but not this one...yet.
even scanning at the zero hedge version, i hadn't spotted pence's name. in which part
(I-IV) was it? zuesse has always needed a good editor, imo. but yeah, Pentecostal Pence
gives me the shivers.
Almost everything Americans have ever been told about US foreign policy is a lie.
Almost everything we think we know is still a lie.
The Democrat's immediate goal is to install Mike Pence as President as soon as
possible.
Everything depends on this. Pence is the continuation of Obama's Neocon policies in
Ukraine and throughout the world. Biden is the premier Neocon on the 2020 ticket. His
job is to lie himself into the nomination and pick-up a Neocon Vice President. If he
loses to Pence, it doesn't matter. The CFR wins either way. And we're off to war with
Russia.
This is a must read for those who want to know what is happening to them. And
happening fast.
It will be hard to see the world the same way again.
i read the comments on the saker version, what was key was what zuesse hadn't written
(i.e. any mention of the CIA), and part IV at the duran,, withut elaborating, much of which
i disagreed with.
there's no way i can read anything that long, especially in the zero-hedge format.
but i found it at the duran, and an easier read on my eye-brain configuration
at the
saker . strategic culture usually carries his columns, but not this one...yet.
even scanning at the zero hedge version, i hadn't spotted pence's name. in which
part (I-IV) was it? zuesse has always needed a good editor, imo. but yeah, Pentecostal
Pence gives me the shivers.
@Pluto's Republic or New York for sure. There are a lot of other target rich areas
like Langley, the Silicon Valley area and certainly that big base in San Diego in
California, the possible list is long because this Country is littered with military
installations.
But I'd expect that if Russia had only two nukes to fire Washington DC and NY would be
the instant decision. DC is 'evil Central' to most of the world, and NY City's Wall Street
is its oxygen supply and without those two cities it's like chopping off the head of the
snake. (no offense to snakes intended)
It fills the soul with dread. There is no one left to fight the poisonous empire
from the inside. All have succumbed. They will be along soon enough to clean up these
fragments and send them down the memory hole. I'm going to dwell in the large-target
cities from now on. I intend to be vaporized in the first strike.
are brilliant and vital to understanding the Ukraine situation. I think Part 2 is most
important, even though I disagree with him on one point. He establishes how stupid and
moronic the Democrats' impeachment witnesses are to suggest we have to fight Russia in
Ukraine so we don't have to fight them here. He shows how minuscule Russia's conventional
weapons systems are compared to ours, especially with respect to sea and air power, and
then he states,
... Not surprisingly, Russia's pint-sized economy can not support a military
establishment anywhere near to that of Imperial Washington. To wit, its $61 billion of
military outlays in 2018 amounted to less than 32 days of Washington's current $750
billion of expenditures for defense.
Indeed, it might well be asked how Russia could remotely threaten homeland security in
America short of what would be a suicidal nuclear first strike.
That's because the 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons on each side represent a
continuation of mutual deterrence (MAD) – the arrangement by which we we got
through 45-years of cold war when the Kremlin was run by a totalitarian oligarchy
committed to a hostile ideology; and during which time it had been armed to the teeth via
a forced-draft allocation of upwards of 40% of the GDP of the Soviet empire to the
military.
By comparison, the Russian defense budget currently amounts to less than 4% of the
country's anemic present day economy – one shorn of the vast territories and
populations of Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and all the Asian
"stans" among others. Yet given those realities we are supposed to believe that the
self-evidently calculating and cautious kleptomaniac who runs the Kremlin is going to go
mad, defy MAD and trigger a nuclear Armageddon?
Indeed, the idea that Russia presents a national security threat to America is
laughable. Not only would Putin never risk nuclear suicide, but even that fantasy is the
extent of what he's got. That is, Russia's conventional capacity to project force to the
North American continent is nonexistent – or at best, lies somewhere between nichts
and nothing.
I agree with Stockman that in a conventional war with the U.S., we win. But that's just
exactly the problem. Russia can't have a conventional war with us or with NATO. It's
defense from us is ONLY nuclear assured destruction. So the problem is not whether or not
he's nuts. The problem is that we are nuts. Our government is nuts. Our government has a
first strike policy, meaning our government considers it rational to eliminate a portion of
the American people, which in our Nuclear Posture Review would be catastrophic, in order to
win a war with Russia.
... The NPR argues that additional low-yield options are "not intended to enable"
nuclear war-fighting "[n]or will it lower the nuclear threshold" (p. 54). But this
assertion ignores the fact that the stated purpose is to make their use "more credible"
in the eyes of U.S. adversaries , which means that they are meant to be seen as "more
usable."
The belief that a nuclear conflict could be controlled is dangerous thinking. The fog
of war is thick, the fog of nuclear war would be even thicker. Such thinking could also
have the perverse effect of convincing Russia that it could get away with limited nuclear
use without putting its survival at risk.
Many military targets are in or near urban areas. It has been estimated that the use
of even a fraction of U.S. and Russian nuclear forces could lead to the death of tens of
millions of people in each country. An all-out exchange would kill hundreds of millions
and produce catastrophic global consequences with adverse agricultural, economic, health,
and environmental consequences for billions of people.
No country should be preparing to wage a "limited nuclear war" that neither side can
guarantee would remain "limited." Rather, as Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail
Gorbachev declared in 1985, today's Russian and U.S. leaders should recognize that "a
nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought."
and i agree: it's not the defense budget that matters. in this nation, the defense
industries are allowed to do 'cost over-runs', and russia's weapons of war and defensive
war are clearly superior. see how many are wanting russian man-pads missile defense, for
instance.
i'll take part two, but at anti-war.com to the café. commenter juliania loved
part I witless! i was sad to read that justin raimondo has already crossed over, may he
rest in power. one place i'd blogged for a time were outraged i tell you, Outraged, that a
libertarian wrote for antiwar.com. needless to say, i didn't last long at the
accursed dagblog.com.
are brilliant and vital to understanding the Ukraine situation. I think Part 2 is
most important, even though I disagree with him on one point. He establishes how stupid
and moronic the Democrats' impeachment witnesses are to suggest we have to fight Russia
in Ukraine so we don't have to fight them here. He shows how minuscule Russia's
conventional weapons systems are compared to ours, especially with respect to sea and
air power, and then he states,
... Not surprisingly, Russia's pint-sized economy can not support a military
establishment anywhere near to that of Imperial Washington. To wit, its $61 billion
of military outlays in 2018 amounted to less than 32 days of Washington's current
$750 billion of expenditures for defense.
Indeed, it might well be asked how Russia could remotely threaten homeland
security in America short of what would be a suicidal nuclear first strike.
That's because the 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons on each side represent a
continuation of mutual deterrence (MAD) – the arrangement by which we we got
through 45-years of cold war when the Kremlin was run by a totalitarian oligarchy
committed to a hostile ideology; and during which time it had been armed to the teeth
via a forced-draft allocation of upwards of 40% of the GDP of the Soviet empire to
the military.
By comparison, the Russian defense budget currently amounts to less than 4% of the
country's anemic present day economy – one shorn of the vast territories and
populations of Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and all the Asian
"stans" among others. Yet given those realities we are supposed to believe that the
self-evidently calculating and cautious kleptomaniac who runs the Kremlin is going to
go mad, defy MAD and trigger a nuclear Armageddon?
Indeed, the idea that Russia presents a national security threat to America is
laughable. Not only would Putin never risk nuclear suicide, but even that fantasy is
the extent of what he's got. That is, Russia's conventional capacity to project force
to the North American continent is nonexistent – or at best, lies somewhere
between nichts and nothing.
I agree with Stockman that in a conventional war with the U.S., we win. But that's
just exactly the problem. Russia can't have a conventional war with us or with NATO.
It's defense from us is ONLY nuclear assured destruction. So the problem is not whether
or not he's nuts. The problem is that we are nuts. Our government is nuts. Our
government has a first strike policy, meaning our government considers it rational to
eliminate a portion of the American people, which in our Nuclear Posture Review would
be catastrophic, in order to win a war with Russia.
... The NPR argues that additional low-yield options are "not intended to enable"
nuclear war-fighting "[n]or will it lower the nuclear threshold" (p. 54). But this
assertion ignores the fact that the stated purpose is to make their use "more
credible" in the eyes of U.S. adversaries , which means that they are meant to be
seen as "more usable."
The belief that a nuclear conflict could be controlled is dangerous thinking. The
fog of war is thick, the fog of nuclear war would be even thicker. Such thinking
could also have the perverse effect of convincing Russia that it could get away with
limited nuclear use without putting its survival at risk.
Many military targets are in or near urban areas. It has been estimated that the
use of even a fraction of U.S. and Russian nuclear forces could lead to the death of
tens of millions of people in each country. An all-out exchange would kill hundreds
of millions and produce catastrophic global consequences with adverse agricultural,
economic, health, and environmental consequences for billions of people.
No country should be preparing to wage a "limited nuclear war" that neither side
can guarantee would remain "limited." Rather, as Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail
Gorbachev declared in 1985, today's Russian and U.S. leaders should recognize that "a
nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought."
"... "Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount of influence over both parties." ..."
"... She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so serious about what's at stake here." ..."
"... Democratic presidential primary debate, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019, in Atlanta, via the AP. ..."
In a rare moment with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi
Gabbard explained why the leading figures in her party are war hawks. Far from days of the
Democrats feigning to have any semblance of an 'anti-war' platform (only convenient for Liberal
activism during the Bush years, but fizzling out under Obama), today's party attempts to
out-hawk Republicans at every turn.
"I'm looking at the Democratic establishment figures," Matthews introduced, "people I
normally like. John Kerry, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton. You go down the list. They all supported
the war in Iraq. Why were they hawks? " (Though we might ask, what do you mean, "
were ?"). "Why so many Democrats with a party that's not hawkish, why are so many of
their leaders hawks?" Matthews reiterated.
In the segment, Matthews heaps rare praise on Tulsi for being "out there all alone tonight
fighting against the neocons."
"Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy
establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount
of influence over both parties."
She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors
have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have
people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical
decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so
serious about what's at stake here."
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The interview happened immediately after this week's fifth Democratic debate Wednesday night
in Atlanta, and after pundits have continued to complain that Gabbard is a 'single issue
candidate'.
However, is there any candidate in her party or in the GOP saying these things?
We find ourselves in a rare moment of agreement with MSNBC's Matthews: she is "out there all
alone tonight fighting against the neocons." Tags Politics
On Wednesday night, a new Democratic foreign-policy
consensus came together on
the debate stage . For Democrats, it has become dogma that Saudi Arabia deserves only to be
shamed and isolated by the United States, not treated like a valuable strategic partner.
Sen. Cory Booker accused the president of committing a "human-rights violation" by
supporting the Saudi war against Iran-backed militias in Yemen without congressional consent.
Former Vice President Joe Biden called the Saudi Kingdom a "pariah" and said its government has
"very little social redeeming value." Sen. Bernie Sanders accused the Saudis of operating a
"brutal dictatorship" and being an unreliable U.S. ally.
These criticisms are not unfounded. The Saudis were implicated in the murder of a
U.S. resident. The Saudis do commit human-rights violations, both in domestic and
foreign policy. The Saudis have encouraged the radicalization of their citizens and
contributed to geopolitical insecurity in the age of Islamist terror. Democrats are not
unjustified in their criticisms of the Kingdom, but it takes a special brazenness to issue
these attacks on the Saudis while simultaneously calling for the banning of the technology that
has made such displays of American geopolitical independence possible: fracking.
To his credit, Joe Biden has not called for the outright ban of hydraulic fracturing
technology, but Sanders and Booker have
. That policy, if realized, would relegate the United States to a strategically disadvantageous
role vis-à-vis the world's largest energy exporters, including Saudi Arabia. It would
also sacrifice one of the most miraculous developments of this decade: the revival of the
American domestic energy industry.
Since 2013, domestic U.S. oil production has increased by 60 percent. In 2018, for the first
time in 40 years, the United States outpaced Saudi Arabia's oil output and is estimated to have
surpassed Russian production. American energy companies have become major exporters of crude
oil and natural gas, and the U.S. is poised to become a net energy
exporter for the first time since 1953 by the year 2022. This new glut of supply in the
fossil-fuel market has substantially reduced the geopolitical clout of OPEC countries,
including outcast nations like Nicolas Maduro's Venezuela and Vladimir Putin's Russia. That has
enabled the U.S. to pursue precisely the kind of values-based foreign policy Democrats
advocate.
It's no exaggeration to stress that this is among Putin's worst nightmares. He's confessed
as much, in fact, according to former National Security Council official and Russia expert,
Fiona Hill. In testimony
before congressional investigators this week, Hill noted that Putin himself warned of the
threat to Russian interests represented by fracking as early as 2011. The Russian president was
among the first petrol-fueled despots who felt the sting of the American energy sector's
technological revolution. In November 2013, just weeks before his ouster in the Maidan
revolution, the Russia-friendly president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, signed a
$10 billion deal with the U.S.-based multinational Chevron to explore and exploit the
country's domestic shale gas deposits.
Leveraging Russian gas exports to Europe and the former Soviet Republics is a means by which
Moscow has advanced its interests on the Continent. Breaking its hold on energy exports is in
both America's commercial and geostrategic interests. There is no player on the international
stage that Democrats would like to see marginalized more than Putin, and fracking creates more
opportunities to achieve that objective. But Democrats would rather pander to the party's
environmentalist wing and its irrational
hostility toward this successful innovation.
Democrats can adopt as hawkish a posture toward Russia and Saudi Arabia as they like, but
isolating these illiberal states is possible today only because of the domestic energy
revolution they oppose. Democrats can have fracking and the marginalization of Putin and the
House of Saud, or they can have neither. So far, they're opting for neither.
King Lear 57 "he suffers from extreme naïveté, in that he assumes every new U$
president.."
obviously you have not watched many Putin interviews or speeches. Rather than naive, Putin
hopes for the best and prepares for the worst - the reason Russia now has weapon superiority
over US. Research into new weapons was begun back in 2002 - the moment US pulled out of ABS
treaty. The same distrust carries through to politics, but is more in the line of speak
softly and carry a big stick.
I guess you're another of those who think Russia is nothing more than a gas station and
should mouth bravado to cover their (imaginary) weakness.
"... Fiona Hill, a "respected Russia scholar" and former senior White House official, added a harsh critique during testimony on Thursday. She told some of Mr. Trump's fiercest defenders in Congress that they were repeating "a fictional narrative." She said that it likely came from a disinformation campaign by Russian security services, which also propagated it. ..."
"... In a briefing that closely aligned with Dr. Hill's testimony, American intelligence officials informed senators and their aides in recent weeks that Russia had engaged in a yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow's own hacking of the 2016 election, according to three American officials. The briefing came as Republicans stepped up their defenses of Mr. Trump in the Ukraine affair. ..."
"... The accusations of a Ukrainian influence campaign center on actions by a handful of Ukrainians who openly criticized or sought to damage Mr. Trump's candidacy in 2016. ..."
"... Just keep in mind that those claims are unfounded. The 'handful' of Ukrainians managed, with help from the Democratic National Council, to push Trump's campaign manager to resign. They even bragged about it. Ukrainians were also the biggest foreign donors to Hillary Clinton's foundation. ..."
"... Those are "unfounded claims about Ukrainian interference". Because Putin pointed them out. However, let me assure you that neither the Times nor the CIA would ever make unfounded claims of a Russian operation. It is Russia that is trying 'to sow discord'. It is not an unfounded Democratic impeachment inquiry that does that. ..."
Fiona Hill, a respected Russia scholar and former senior White House official, added a harsh
critique during testimony on Thursday. She told some of Mr. Trump's fiercest defenders in
Congress that they were repeating "a fictional narrative." She said that it likely came from
a disinformation campaign by Russian security services, which also propagated it.
In a briefing that closely aligned with Dr. Hill's testimony, American intelligence
officials informed senators and their aides in recent weeks that Russia had engaged in a
yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow's own hacking of
the 2016 election, according to three American officials. The briefing came as Republicans
stepped up their defenses of Mr. Trump in the Ukraine affair.
...
The revelations demonstrate Russia's persistence in trying to sow discord among its
adversaries -- and show that the Kremlin apparently succeeded, as unfounded claims about
Ukrainian interference seeped into Republican talking points.
So there was no Ukrainian meddling, no Ukrainian interference. Claims thereof are
unfounded! But just a few sentences later the piece curiously says something different:
The accusations of a Ukrainian influence campaign center on actions by a handful of
Ukrainians who openly criticized or sought to damage Mr. Trump's candidacy in 2016.
Just keep in mind that those claims are unfounded. The 'handful' of Ukrainians managed, with help from the Democratic National Council, to push
Trump's campaign manager to resign. They even bragged about it. Ukrainians were also the biggest
foreign donors to Hillary Clinton's foundation.
However, because Putin once pointed that out, those claims must be unfounded. They must be
Russian disinformation:
During a news conference in February 2017, Mr. Putin accused the Ukrainian government of
supporting Hillary Clinton during the previous American election and funding her candidacy
with friendly oligarchs.
It is not clear when American intelligence agencies learned about Moscow's campaign or
when precisely it began.
...
One target was the leak of a secret ledger disclosed by a Ukrainian law enforcement agency
that appeared to show that Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump's onetime campaign chairman, had taken
illicit payments from Ukrainian politicians who were close to Moscow. He was forced to step
down from the Trump campaign after the ledger became public in August 2016, and the Russians
have since been eager to cast doubt on its authenticity, the former official said.
Those are "unfounded claims about Ukrainian interference". Because Putin pointed them
out. However, let me assure you that neither the Times nor the CIA would ever make
unfounded claims of a Russian operation. It is Russia that is trying 'to sow discord'. It is not an unfounded Democratic impeachment
inquiry that does that.
Posted by b on November 23, 2019 at 18:08 UTC | Permalink
Maybe the CIA has decided that they need to make the claims more obtuse so that even the
mentally competent have trouble explaining the 11 dimensional chess involved.
After all, if Trump singlehanded, as he claims, kept Xi from sending the troops into HK
then Putin assuredly can influence American politics.....if Putin only could make it all go
away.....what a waste of time, energy and money that could be spent on improving the lot of
the poor, living on the streets in the US
When and how will the private finance empire circus end?
At least the US has Bernie and Tulsi calling out the coup in Bolivia for what it
is.....maybe there is hope.
Manafort was managing campaigns of pro-Russian political parties/candidates in Ukraine for
7 years or so before being hired by Trump. My understanding is that Manafort was warned that
his work was undermining USA efforts in Ukraine.
Why did America First Trump bring on Flynn?
Flynn was known to be hated by the intelligence community for having told the world that
the Obama Administration made a "wilful decision" to support the rise of ISIS.
Why did America First Trump make pleas for Putin to release Hillary's emails via
Wikileaks?
It was already known that some of the emails contained top secret information. AFAIK, USA
would consider any publication a crime.
These were set-ups.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Why was "independent", "socialist true believer", supposed man-of-integrity Sanders
sheepdogging for Hillary ("enough with your damn emails")?
Why did Hillary, a seasoned campaigner with virtually unlimited resources, make so many
grievous mistakes in the 2016 election? She snubbed Sanders and his supporters; took the
black vote for granted; insulted whites as "deplorables"; chose not to campaign in the THREE
STATES that she know would decided the election. Why didn't she pull out all the stops to
win? For her beloved establishment? For her own aspirations as first women President? If she
failed because she was "over confident" as some have suggested, then why did she pay for the
Steele dossier as "insurance"? There was no need for insurance if she knew she would win and
if she were unsure of winning she should have done everything possible to win (as any real
candidate would have).
Why did America First Trump use British company Cambridge Analytica? We later
learned that facebook provided the same info to dozens of other companies (debunking the
initial excuse that Cambridge Analytica had special access to facebook info). Was it because
the Russiagate disinfo and CIA election meddling campaign was located in UK?
Why did Trump initiate Ukrainegate by talking about investigating Biden on a diplomatic
call? He's smart enough to know that such political machinations are handled behind the
scenes.
This Reality Show Presidency is all about kayfabe as the Deep State restructures to meet
the challenge from China and Russia, and seeks to manufacture consent for a war with
Iran.
The take away quote
"
Defend American Democracy has spent six figures on television advertisements pressuring
Republican members of Congress to "hold the president accountable for abusing his office and
risking national security for his own gain." The group, which primarily targets
swing-district Republicans, prominently features military veterans in its ads and presents
itself as a veterans group to local media outlets.
........
The 501(c)(4) group is managed by Eric Kessler, a former Clinton administration official who
runs the philanthropic firm Arabella Advisors. The anonymously funded nonprofit was behind
several groups that ran "issue ads" to benefit Democrats during the 2018 midterms, as well as
Demand Justice, a group that spent millions of dollars on ads attacking Brett Kavanaugh
during his nomination to the Supreme Court. The Sixteen Thirty Fund and its sister 501(c)(3)
nonprofit, New Venture Fund, have fiscally sponsored at least 80 of their own groups,
bankrolling those entities in a way that leaves almost no paper trail.
"
The US has the best government Russian influence has not bought.
div> @b #3
I really think the twitter account is satire, judging from other tweets and the profile
pic.
So Russia hacked and attacked Hillary and DNC as Russia. (I believe that is still the
official left-Dem-media meme, despite investigation producing no evidence.) And they attacked
Trump disguised as Ukraine.
This sowing discord is a busy undertaking.
And rather unnecessary, considering the pre-existing state of discord in the nation and
politics, a duplicitous Dem party lost in the wilderness, as it searches a popular cry that
won't actually empower people, a Republican Party that was overwhelmed by a populist tide and
candidate not sanctioned by the leadership, and a legacy media that can crank up divisions on
command.
Maybe I should've posted my comment @6 on the "Impeachment Circus" thread instead.
It just struck me that neoMcCarthist smearing of Russia (which is ongoing, as proven by
b's post) was made possible via the kayfabe of Russiagate, which had it's origins in the 2016
election.
Fiona Hill...another bare faced liar whose name is not Hillary Clinton....I am no longer
astonished that this crap is actually publishable despite the evidence available to anyone
with at least two brain cells. Having followed on the Net the coup in Ukraine in 2014 from
2013 on via live blogs by Western corespondents who are not beholden to the MSM, I know what
lies that latter "journaille" gets away with.
Fiona Hill is an expert on Russophobic content. Like Condi Rice, a Soviet Scholar, she knows
nothing truthful about Russia. Else, why does she lie about Russia?
The think tanks, academia and State Dept. spew out the lies which the Media multiplies.
99% of Russian experts are Russophobes who possess little expertise, some practicing their
propaganda for decades. Many of them excrete books on regular schedules.
The first test (since 2014) of any expert's credentials is his/her position on Crimea. The
next test is on Russian aggression.
If anyone suggests Crimea does not belong to Russia (most especially the federal district of
Sevastopol), then they are ignorant or lying. You either know that in 1954 Crimea was
unconstitutionally given to Ukraine by the Ukrainian Khruschev. It was illegal by USSR law.
2014 corrected that injustice. The experts who profess otherwise are lying.
And if anyone suggests that the Russians are aggressors, they are lying. If Russia was an
aggressor in Georgia or Ukraine, neither would have governments that are so anti-Russian or
militaries that could form a small parade, much less beg for inclusion in NATO.
Russia reacted to Georgian aggression and mass murder. In Ukraine, the Donbass is a Russian
assisted self-defense operation against an ethnic cleansing war. Russia's participation has
been to save 2.5 million Russian-speaking Ukrainians from slaughter ('filtration' is the Ukie
euphemism for killing the Donbass separatists who refuse Kiev's nazi regime).
Russian 'aggression' is a construct of propaganda. Taken in the context of NATO expansion
and encroachment right to the borders of Russia, there is nothing but lies tied to the
'aggression' canard.
We have had 28 years of demonization of the Russian Federation. Russophobia is centuries
old in some societies. Of late, it focuses on the attempts to separate away from Russia the
brother republics of the CIS region of Eurasia. Fed lies, distortion of history, linguistic
differences, religious issues and economic disadvantages, a mania against Russia has been
cultivated. It all is led by "the experts" like Fiona Hill.
We see the same dynamic used against China with Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and
Inner Mongolia. Propaganda. Lies. Experts who mouth the Sinophobic fabrications are the
talking heads on Media and on Congressional sideshows.
Russophobia and Sinophobia are industries now. Fame, publishing riches, TV appearances,
YouTube videos abound with the 'expertise' of these haters.
Judge the output of these expert operatives. The content is always flawed. The truth is
always hidden. But lies fly fast and loose.
Some people actually do believe this stuff, dependent on their partisan world view.
The IG report, which will outline abuses of the FISA system which appears to have
authorized surveillance of Trump campaign by the FBI, is scheduled for release on December 9.
The degree to which it will be damaging to the Russian collusion/hacking/sowing discord
anti-Trump crowds was anticipated yesterday by the simultaneous publication by CNN and WaPo
of assurances by unnamed "officials" that the report will not find anything but minor
discrepancies. Getting out ahead of the story so obviously and more than a week in advance
likely means the report will be damaging - although that may be just a Russian talking
point.
But much as I enjoyed this, I still have to point out that if Ukrainian meddling was so
important and their US consorts so treasonous, then Russian meddling was so important and
*their* consorts so treasonous. You can't honestly have it both ways, either the Democrats'
excusing Ukrainians or the Trumpists excusing Russia. Actually, you can't even honestly say
you know either made any difference. No one sensible thinks either party meant to give aid
and comfort to enemies of the US---the constitutional* definition of treason---unless you
believe the US is justly in undeclared war with the rest of humanity. The only big difference
is that it was Trump who openly asked for foreign assistance in a public speech. The only
conclusion to draw from that is Trumpists are whiners who can dish it out but can't take
it.
*The legalistic assholes who want to deny majority rule under shelter of the Electoral
College on the fraudulent grounds that a technicality matters more really are against
majority rule. Of course they also pretend that impeachment reverses elections. The cherry on
top of this turd sundae? They would reject the 26th Amendment, which would have been invoked
against Reagan as well as Trump (and possibly his original, Nixon, as well.) Pence is not
even man enough to do his duty.
Why did the Hildabeast get the Steele Dossier as insurance if she was confident of
victory?
For the same reason that a healthy person in their 20's or 30's, someone not in the least
expecting to die for decades, purchases life insurance covering their family. Just "in case"
the wildly improbable does indeed happen.
I can't see anyone who has a realistic chance of being elected president, let alone with
the historic feat of being the first female president deliberately throwing all this
away.
No matter how often I'm brought to consider this, it still seems striking that 2 years and
$40 million in US law fare waged by the Special Prosecutor is not enough to see Fiona Hill
laughed out of chambers at her RussiaRussia harangue, whereas the NYT is able to establish an
equivalent lack of foundation to the Ukraine meddling thesis in a thrice, notwithstanding
rather substantial counter-evidence long in the public domain. Indeed the Grey Lady does not
even try to debunk these claims, allowing herself instead to refer to them debunked. If you
say so, apparently, or if you and your cohort say so often enough.
For any progressives still gaslighted by this, I invite you to consider a similar
full-court legal, media, IC / Deep State campaign featuring most of the same actors, engaging
next in the hobbling or destruction of a Bernie Sanders presidency.
Or the Steele Dossier was intended so much insurance as a cudgel to beat the fallen
Donald, post-election loser, while he was down. This was the man whose most stirring
electoral refrain was "lock her up." She and her masters would have had every reason to want
to grind him into the dirt after beating him.
Fiona Hill studied Russian history with Richard Pipes, the Evil Empire man. Pipes is and
was a laughingstock in academia. No one would study with him who had an actual interest in
the supposed field of study. Being his protegé was simply a roll of the dice for a
careerist. Hill also studied with a Ukrainian emigré named Szporlak. He was likely
closer to awake during class than Pipes, who really was a very old fool while supervising
Hill.
Condoleeza Rice notoriously wrote her dissertation about the postwar Czech military while
having minimal ability in Russian and less in Czech. More likely it was simply ghostwritten.
Full of egregious errors, placing Czech politicians at heart of action while they were
actually teaching at University of Chicago.
Sorry, oldhippie, Pipes wasn't and is not a laughingstock in academia. He merely should have
been. His son Daniel is doing the same in middle east studies and he's not a laughingstock
either. It is hard to underestimate how little effect adhering to the basic scholarly
standards can have in keeping out motivated reasoning, double standards, agendas, political
servitude, etc. It is quite likely that Pipes has a better reputation than Stephen Cohen, J.
Arch Getty or Sheila FitzPatrick. He certainly has a better reputation than a Mark Tauger.
Pipes' classes at Harvard in 70s were a spectator sport. Come and see the Cold War fossil.
Lectures routinely interrupted by gales of laughter. Yes, he had a comeback. No, no one has
ever taken him or his 'scholarship' seriously. He simply happens to be useful. Daniel is just
as bad.
Paul @ 22, wrote: "She [Harridan Hillary] and her masters would have had every reason to want
to grind him [Tweetie Bird] into the dirt after beating him."
I agree, but there was also the need to demonize Russia and V.V.Putin to lay the ground
for the war against Russia. The campaign against Trump began in January 2016, launched by
Brennan and the CIA, whose strumpet H.H. had been since back in Arkansas.
Already in July 2016, she was openly campaigning against V.V.P. There was ONE ( 1! )
foreign policy plank in her platform, and it was the no-fly zone over Syria. General Joseph
Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, testified before the United States Congress
in mid-September 2016, on which occasion he was asked about the no-fly zone. He responded,
promptly and unequivocally, that it would mean war with Russia.
If war with Russia had not been the objective, the Great Grey Whore would have used its
position in New York to investigate Tweetie Bird and publish to the world, indeed, hammer to
the world, the long grotesque story of his attempt to make a career in real estate, and the
fraud he engaged in from the start. His string of bankruptcies was the most spectacular in
the history of American business enterprise (this from somebody who has studied United States
economic and financial history) instead of letting him constantly blather on about what a
great businessman he was etc.
His father had him on the payroll when he was two, to the tune of $200,000, in order to
pass wealth on to him without paying the very high gift tax. By the time his father died, he
had made over to Tweetie Bird something in the neighborhood of $420 million. And Tweetie Bird
squandered it all, plus the fabulous real-estate empire that his father had left him -- all
gone...
In 2002, Tweetie Bird was over $3 billion (yes, BILLION) in debt to 72 banks in New York
and no New York bank would give him a credit line, which he desperately needed to keep up his
incessant refrain that money is no object for Donald Trump. So, he turned to the Russian
oligarchs for whom he had been laundering money to generate cash flow. They gave him a credit
line through the Cypriot banks that they controlled, and now they own him. They are his
Russian connection, not V.V.P., who has been fighting the oligarchs since he first took
office -- look at what V.V.P. did to Michail Khodokovski: ten years in the gulag (he's now
living in Switzerland reduced to scraping by on the ten or so billion that he had squirreled
away in Swiss banks).
Tweetie Bird owns NOTHING. Everything is in the name of the Trump Organization, to protect
it from confiscation when the reckoning comes. And, since the T.O. publishes NOTHING about
its affairs, it's reasonable to assume that he is in debt to his Cypriot banks, probably to
the tune of five or six billion at this point, and that they hold liens on every piece of
property he claims as his own.
Tweetie Bird is all about Tweetie Bird, exclusively. His pitch for détente with
Russia was a classic case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason, to wit he intended
to lift the sanctions if V.V.P. would round up the oligarchs who have Tweetie Bird over the
barrel and pack them off to the gulag. However, in August 2017, Congress pulled the rung out
from under him by reinforcing the sanctions and thus removing them from executive order
purview and placing them under Congressional authority.
Hilarious someone said. Really. The Russians would have to be superhuman geniuses to do half
of what US 'Intelligence' says about them. It is transparently true, OTOH, that CIA and etc.
are true clods and dolts. It's tautological really.
My understanding is that Manafort was warned that his work was undermining USA efforts in
Ukraine.
So what? Maybe Trump wanted to undermine the Washington Borg's efforts in Ukraine as they
were counter to his principle foreign policy - cordial relations with Russia. Since Trump was
very clear about this policy all through the election, he has every right to implement that
policy regardless of what anyone opposed to him might think or try to do. It's one of the
basic concepts of a democratic system (yeah, I am aware that the U.S. is a republic not a
democracy, etc.) that the successful candidate should be able to implement any legal policy
that was part of his manifesto.
As for Trump asking the Russians to look for Hillary Clinton's e-mails, it was a joke. Added
to which it was a reference to the 30,000 "personal" e-mails that that idiot, Hillary
Clinton, had managed to mislay and not the DNC and Podesta e-mails that were leaked by some
unknown party to Wikileaks.
These low brow knuckle draggers know how to spin lies. Their useless parade of irrelevant
nincompoops proves an ongoing campaign to demonize Russian people. We all see it here
constantly on other blogs and MSN reports. These people know very well who their match is and
cannot compete socially, on certain new military complexes, political maturity, etc. I offer
Sergey Lavrov as a person not matched by any other nation. All western parasites in
opposition pale in stature, political maturity, and brains. The Russians know what the deal
is with these western crybabies, and know they are dealing with premature juveniles. These
people show how weak they are by their actions and the Russians show patience. Oh, and that
kayfabe word, Trump ..."be fake."... has much experience with it from his wrestling exposure.
This farce has that written all over it, fake bullshit.
I have been watching the Trump impeachment hearings farce on television over the past weeks
and have heard enough BS by the so-called witnesses to fertilize the Sinai Desert. The real
reason behind the hearings is not 'quid pro quo,' but 'cui bono' (who benefits). The parade
of over-the-hill Cold War warriors has reinforced my belief that the impeachment hearings are
essentially an attempt by the old Cold War guard to retain their privileges and positions of
power in Washington. As for Ms. Fiona Hill, she is a prime example of the old dictum that
states, "A Brit with an upper class accent reading the phone book sounds smarter to most
Americans, than Abe Lincoln reading the Gettysburg Address.
Macabre Comedy is the only appropriate descriptive term IMO. Russia is a very busy nation,
every bit as busy as its leader VV Putin. Who within the Evil Outlaw US Empire's national
government is even close to being Putin's equivalent? The vast majority are mere
kindergarteners in comparison, Trump included. In case you've been asleep since 2007 or so,
Putin and all of Russia are working their tails off to improve their nation and their
comrades's wellbeing and in doing so have surpassed The Empire is qualitative military
equipment, nuclear engineering, and a host of other areas, along with building several
geoeconomic blocs of kindred nations to which the Empire can only answer with idiotic
accusations and factless BigLie Media items.
If anything tells us how low the Evil Outlaw US Empire has sunk, it's this attempt to
impeach a POTUS using bullshit for evidence. The would be emperor isn't the only one sans
clothes--the entire imperial edifice is revealed as a scrawny, emaciated, traumatized waif
that the curtain can no longer hide.
Headline: "How True Is the Story on Which the US Sanctions against Russia Are Based?"
Very good question!! Glad someone in the MSM is (finally) asking it . . .
"Mit seinen Aussagen zum Tod eines Whistleblowers brachte Bill Browder die Amerikaner gegen
Putin auf. Doch seine Darstellung ist voller Widersprüche. Von Benjamin Bidder "
With his statements regarding the death of a whistleblower [Magnitsky was no such thing]
Brill Browder [arch scumbag] stirred up the Americans against Putin. But his account is full
of contradictions [you don't say].
And at Bidder's website in addition:
"Washington based its sanctions on Browder's account of Magnitsky's death."
Unfortunately the Spiegel story is behind a paywall. Perhaps someone here has a sub.
People here may recall that a very good documentary about the whole affair, "Behind the
Scenes," made by Andrei Nekrasov, was buried in the USA but was available online. It is a
great explanation of the scurrilous Browder and his role in getting the balling rolling in DC
against Putin. Has great footage of Browder running away from cameras, men trying to serve
subpoenas, and, in front of the camera, squirming-and-sweating-while-lying.
So it seems to me like good news if questions about Browder and his tale are raised in Der
Spiegel---even though I haven't read the article.
I have no argument with constitutional executive powers. I do have many arguments against
Unitary Executive Theory. You can campaign on a policy and implement it once elected, but you
can't use executive power with corrupt intent and claim immunity.
I have been watching closely both the Trump and the Hillary misbehaviors for quite a
while. Your post up above is, I think, the first string of assertions about the pair of them
that I agree with without exception . As far as the activities that you covered in
that post are concerned, you've got each of them nailed to a "T".
I hope we'll see further comments from you, that will exhibit the same degree of
accuracy.
The degree of dishonesty and blatant manipulation by the MSM has reached ridiculous levels.
MSM journalists are not journalists, they are lying, evil peddlers of propaganda shilling for
the military industrial complex; they are as blood-stained as the psychopathic elite that
they so faithfully serve...they should be held responsible for their lies, up to and
including prosecution for war crimes:
There is an article on
telepolis (no paywall, in German) on the Spiegel piece, demasking the author Benjamin
Bidder as someone who belatedly jumps on the bandwagon that others have set in motion, first
and foremost the Russian filmmaker Andrej Nekrasov.
Really @ 33 Thanks for the reference to the Der Spiegel article questioning Magnitsky. Hij is
absolutely ground zero of the whole Russia paranoia and Ukraine obsession. The US has lost
all perspective: an insignificant place like Ukraine dominates its national and foreign
policies while its own people have to pay the price.
Thanks mk @ 37. Sure Nekrasov investigated the Magnitsky story but his film was available to
no one in the US and the EU in the standard outlets (TV, cinema, etc.). Der Spiegel is MSM as
any MSM can be and it is then significant that the publication prints this article, even if
Magnitsky and the anti-Russian mania he set in motion with the help of US politicians is
still enigmatic. How can one man recruit the whole US political system to protect his
personal wealth? Has a contributed to the campaign funds, Clinton Foundation, etc.?
Hillary Clinton: "We better get to the White House if most of us do not want to end up at the
lamp posts". O America, if you knew what these people are doing to the Americans----- after
they got rid of president Kennedy.
It is important to remember that Hillary Clinton as Sec of State transacted her entire
computer communications operation on an unsecured server in a closet at her home. It was
shared with the Clinton Foundation. It was never secured or in any way made available to the
US Government IT security team.
Likewise she used unsecured phones.
That is what the problem was as that server would have been accessed by a number of state
actors who would suspect some benefit might come their way if they peeked. A cinch for any
state actor let alone a clever hacker.
Hillary Clinton is guilty of the single extreme national security breach in US history.
And they are killing Assange to cover for her criminal treachery.
Mina @40: A beggars banquet. A festival of corruption. I wonder when it will dawn on those
needy greedheads that the Sauds are running on empty too ...
A minor point, true enough, but Fiona Hill does most definitely *not* have an ""upper
class English" accent. (As a former Brit of English and working class origin, that is as
apparent as could be.) Her accent is a much softened after many years away from her working
class family origins in North-Eastern England - specifically, County Durham, and as many
years trying to rid herself of those working class origins, taints there remains the local
lilt to her diction.
Regarding her rank, stinking Russophobia - I would suggest that its origins were *not*
from her background (her father was a coal miner) but rather from the fact that she spent her
late teens and early adulthood under the Thatcher the Snatcher government and its deliberate
ending of public ownership of basic services as it installed TINA - pure rapacious,
plundering, mammon and moloch worshipping corporate-capitalism allied to imperialism.
Add to these likely background effects, the desire among some of those of working class
origins who, on achieving a tertiary education have every intention of eschewing and
disparaging their backgrounds and adopting wholeheartedly the worldview of the ruling elites.
Not at all unusual, certainly in the UK.
Definitely totally distorted. Inaccurate (I doubt that she has ever spent much, if any,
time in Russia with ordinary, working class Russians - ho no, too far down the ladder) and
extremely partisan. Another Dem shill?
An aside: my late husband's friends are all highly educated and all (the American ones,
anyway) glued to the impeachment hearings and gung-ho for them.... Education isn't all it's
cracked up to be, clearly. (And For the record - I am very much anti-both parties.)
Really?? @ 33 : thanks for reminding us about Andrei Nekrasov's "Behind the Scenes". The
effort to bury it as well as the reaction (including -- especially? -- from among the
Congresscritters) was an outstanding example of groupthink -- everybody move in lock-step
with the prescribed belief and vilify, demonize those who dare to propose something different
that contradicts the groupthink
Antispin @ 35, thanks for the compliment. I keep trying...
Glad some of you appreciated the parody. We need such cleverness. It is at the opposite
end of the spectrum from groupthink, and it's a good antidote to the mind-numbing drivel of
mendacious mainstream media.
In reply to Karlof1 - absolutely agree about the abilities of V. Putin and his team. If ONLY
we had any government (had any akin to them over the past decades) as able, sensible,
concerned about their country as Putin and his team clearly are, we'd be a peaceful,
non-terroristic, economically more equal place. I would also include with V. Putin and his
team, Xi and his government and the Iranian elected government - and Khamenei. Our lot are
squealing, uneducated (in the true sense of the term) greedy, amoral children by comparison
AnneR @ 46 wrote: "Education isn't all it's cracked up to be, clearly."
Education has both a very positive and a very negative dimension.
On the positive side is the socialization that puts one in touch with many people, most of
whom, ideally, one would mot meet otherwise (not the least of whom are great teachers at all
levels) and teaches one to get along with them. Also, on the positive side is learning: it
saves one from constantly reinventing the wheel, so to speak, and gives a personal touch to
imparted knowledge.
On the negative side is the lock-step conformity it can -- and more and more does --
impose on social mores. Also there is the transmission of the mindset and beliefs that Andrew
Carnegie splendidly called the gospel of wealth (he was gung-ho for it, of course -- God made
him rich because God wanted him to be rich...). Both of these are essential underpinnings to
groupthink (which, by the way, was studied in depth at Yale University in the 1960s, and
where it got it's name).
There's a movie called "Billy Elliot", which takes place in the 1980s UK, that tells this
story: the boy had a miner father and a miner older brother, with high class consciousness --
there's even a scene where they fight over one of the members who violated the strike and
went to work.
But none of that matters of little Billy, as he wants to be a ballet dancer. The riot
police, the strikes, all of that appears just as a background, the landscape, over which he
and his best friend talk about wanting to do ballet.
The figure of Billy Elliot represents the transition in the UK from an industrial economy
to a services one, and the transition of a social-democratic UK to a neoliberal UK.
Many assume that "education" involves learning true things. There is reason for this
assumption in engineering and math, as these actually involve logical proofs. However many
professionals, presumably "educated" are ignorant of the basic science necessary for
understanding and proving...pharmacists who are re-leaved of the obligation to, for example,
ever take a chemistry class, or chemistry test. Thus the assumption is, well, not always
valid. Other examples abound...look for a few. Ask, for example, the X-Ray technician a few
questions about the physics of his job...
However the assumption fails entirely when one enters the bizarre realm of canonical
myth...such as "history" or "political theory" or the Chicago School of Econ.
It is also often assumed that education involves teachers. I have not noticed that such
people are, generally, of any value. Rather, the profession of teaching serves to park people
who might upset matters in a place where they are under control and addicted to their
paychecks, and serve up propaganda according to the rule.
And it is assumed that it involves a forum dedicated to what they call education, when in
reality it is that forum where the process that binds takes place. The Toga, the Bath>
"Hence, too, a liking sprang up for our style of dress, and the "toga" became fashionable.
Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant
banquet. All this in their ignorance, they called civilization, when it was but a part of
their servitude." (Tacitus)
Think jeans and Hollywood, and propaganda.
One particularly egregious difference 'tween education is the exclusion of any formal
study of Rhetoric and logic, with developed skill in these, as a basic prerequisite. Such
matters are now generally ignored, and have been in the canonical syllabus of US "education"
for, more or less, a century.
AnneR @ 46 wrote: "Education isn't all it's cracked up to be, clearly."
Like with food, deprivation is bad, but content, the manner of serving etc. can have a
variety of effects. Here we have an example of a narrower phenomenon, meritocracy. Somewhere
I read that the imperial government of China had European guest and advisors who informed
their host about certain advances in Europe like clock construction and improved cartography,
but who also brought back information about the Chinese method of selecting officials on the
basis of examinations. Initially, the English adopted civil service selected by examinations
to rule India, and that worked so well that the system was extended for the government of
England as well. Like in China, the key was to learn the wisdom of the classics. Of course,
Confucius was replaced with Plato, Horace etc. Back in China, Confucius seems to be replaced
by the study of the History of Chinese Communist Party -- obligatory regardless of the
major.
However, what is outright sinister is the coupling of "narrative building" performed for
intelligence/national security apparatus in USA and UK with academia. "Properly thinking"
luminaries from top institutions of learning were recruited for the purpose, with Fiona Hill
mentor being prime example. From what I understand, Richard Pipes left the position of the
head of Russian and Slavic Studies at Harvard to be CIA consultant where he lead Team B to
assess the intentions and capabilities of USSR. Unlike more realistic team A, Team B strongly
exaggerated both sinister plans of USSR, basically suggesting that without heeding the
constraints of MAD, they will attempt to subjugate the West, and the capabilities. Almost
hiilariously, his team postulated that the symptoms of economic stagnation in USSR were faked
to lull the West into complaisance. Recommendations of Team B were enthusiastically adopted
by Reagan administration to justify acceleration of defense spending. Check "Team B" in
Wikipedia. "I would say that all of it was fantasy. ... if you go through most of Team B's
specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were
all wrong." Needless to say, the theory of faked economic decline was absurd.
Lamentably, Pipes did not abandoned his teaching duties, and while he toiled as the head
of Team B he was mentoring Ph. D. students including Fiona Hill.
*The legalistic assholes who want to deny majority rule under shelter of the Electoral
College on the fraudulent grounds that a technicality matters more really are against
majority rule. Of course they also pretend that impeachment reverses elections. The cherry on
top of this turd sundae? They would reject the 26th Amendment, which would have been invoked
against Reagan as well as Trump (and possibly his original, Nixon, as well.) Pence is not
even man enough to do his duty. by: steven t johnson @ 17 <=you might also be interested
to know that these same types want to take control of all of the resources, all of the
departments, all of the labor, and all of whatever else that exist in America so the USA can
use them to conduct continuous war and manage the grey zone.. read on..
The white paper "Russian Strategic Intentions"[ https://cryptome.org/2019/07/Pentagon-Russia.pdf],
caste its analysis of the future in terms of "competition and conflict" and presents, in its
preface, a long list of those associated to the claim that the USA should use "all of its
instruments of state power" in a comprehensive fashion, to manage grey area warfare, to
promote elite interest in far away places, and to impose aggression (in environment, in
economic activity, with influence campaigns, with paramilitary assault, with cyber intrusion,
and with political warfare) as a defense to Russian grey zone global activities. What bull
shit! no wonder Americans cannot understand Article II Presidents or the USA endangering
Americans and their quality of life because the USA is involved in bombing, destructing and
aggressing activities. The groups that wrote this report have decided they should decide for
the American public, what the USA policy should be? I wonder what Americans would say about
that?
Is it true that "Americans need go no further than think tanks and intelligence services
supporting USA aggression in foreign lands, to find their enemies and to discover the cause
of why their lot has been reduced to forth world peon status? Who in America allowed groups
of the type that wrote this paper to decide, or even to think about deciding, for Americans
what the USA should be doing? Why is not "war for ever, even when there is no war" the
narrative debated by USA politicians competing to govern America? Governed Americans and
governed Russians should build a stadium, outfit the personnel in Russian and USA
governments, their think tanks and their intelligence services with uniforms, lock the two
opposed teams in the stadium, and sell the TV rights to pay off the national debt of all of
the nations of the world as these two teams as they fight it out to the last man, woman and
paper tiger warrior.
Consider this fascinating assumption or projection => "Russia believes..there is no
unacceptable or illegitimate form of deterrence, compellence, or escalation
management(Goure).. [<= I cannot find in real life the continuum of conflict this group
talks about?]. Like Russia's perception of its competition with the USA, its perception of
conflict is dichotomous: one is either at war or not at war." I had no idea Russia could
believe anything? Apparently think tanks supporting the USA; think Russia can think, and
have concluded, as a result of their thoughts, that war exist, even when: there is no war? My
USA cat jumped over the starry moon, while his Russian cow chased earthly rats? The so-called
Russian grand (balance of powers) strategy vs whole of USA government liberal order
management of the international grey zone => compels and escalates the USA, sez the
report, to maintain a continuous state of war?
.. "Countering Russian provocations [<=competition maybe, but not provocation?] requires
all instruments of USA national power, they say?" <=note: as long as not on American soil
who cares?
Piotr seems to agree with Walter. The general principle seems to be "We'll know our
disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false"
(Casey/ Honneger) and of course everyone must recall Clapper complaining about the Russians
finding "fissures in our [US/CIA] tapestry" (one never hears the word "tapestry" in US
English except, generally,in the phrase "tapestry of lies"...unless one is involved with
curtains or one sort, or another...the term "Eiserner Vorhang" popularized by
Churchill...that's a tapestry, ain't it?
If their lips move, they lie, friend. And do not look behind the green tapestry at the
mighty Wurlitzer...
Well, snake, the thalassocratic rule of the Anglosaxon diaspora into forward operating base
(former republic) USA has evidently failed, and "they" now follow not the republic's laws,
but the ukase of Imperial method. They have no other methods.
This was also the reason for England to start WW1. German industry and Ruski resources
would (will/is/has) integrate(d) Heartland and create(d) a tellurocratic reality those Fine
fella's down at the shop cannot abide.
Think of this as a loose connecting rod in a chevy motor...you know what's going to
happen, but it's the only way to go...so you pretend it's ok...
If US intelligence agencies are asserting that Ukraine meddling in the US election was a
Russian operation, when in fact Ukraine did indeed heavily meddle in the elections, isn't
that treason by the US intelligence agency officials concerned?
" deny majority rule under shelter of the Electoral College on the fraudulent grounds that a
technicality matters more really are..."
The US, formerly a Republic and remaining approximately Republican in institutional
appearances and out-side form, has never been a democracy. It was not intended to be, though
it had some democratic forms. ("Democracy" is without semantic value as it is used these
days.)
That's not a trivial technical characteristic. It was intentional and basic. It's the lay
of the Basic Law of the US since 1789 or so, and perhaps less so in the actual Basic Law c
1776...some claim the 1778 Law was not properly ratified...a sound argument once, eclipsed
entirely by long custom, custom being the basis of all Law (and some Ukase).
Of course nowadays it's not even a Republic, more like an animated zombie largely under
the incompetent control of several elite clubs, including foreign and also zionist and also
financial clubs, which are in constant turmoil...because these clubs are running out of
options.
When you are in a conflict set and run out of options, then you almost always lose...since
everybody can see what you must do, and they themselves make plans to counter yours.
In this undertaking the Ruskis and the Chinese have preeminence.
It's already over... Soon they will realize that, and make deals.
............
BM, fair question about the Big T. It depends on who writes the History, curtain-makers
or... At the present time Big T cannot exist, but...one may assume that the Russian
Historians and the Chinese Historians will say "Big-T".
"The legalistic assholes who want to deny majority rule under shelter of the Electoral
College on the fraudulent grounds that a technicality matters more really are against
majority rule."
You seem to advocating the concept of mob rule. Do you understand that a popular opinion
is not necessarily a correct opinion?
Other important aspect of the Ukrainegate, which leads all the way to the Syriagate, of
utmost importance for European security, since we are made aware that matters of security are
directly in the hands of people strange, or in the way to be strange, to European interests
and organzitions, keeping all European institutions hostage of the NATO military
alliance´s interests, and which differs from the main point it is given here, that
related to the meddling in US elections, as if that were what most matter...when it is the
other way around, that the USUK complex meddles in each adn every aspect of Euroepan life,
interests, prospects and security, underminig them all...
I did watch that film when it was linked at an article about the whole affair at the Unz
Review (now I think the Bitchute link is once again neutered). Before seeing this article I
was virtually ignorant of the Magnitisky affair, scumbag Browder, and the putative affair's
influence on American policy. Here is the UNz Review article, by Israel Shamir: http://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-good-fortune-of-mr-browder/?highlight=Browder
(sorry if not doing link properly)
It's a long story, which Shamir tells pretty clearly.
Kurz um, the American public was denied the chance to evaluate Browder's claims themselves by
viewing the film. Truly, censorship at its most naked.
Bidder may be jumping on a bandwagon (and, I don't know what he actually writes!!) but Der
Spiegel is 150% MSM, toeing the American line in most respects. So I do think even this
headline is worth noting.
However, I have read a large portion of the Telepolis article and it should be read by
anyone interested in Browder/Magnitsky. It is really a case study of an incredibly successful
disinformation campaign. Which are only possible with active and passive collusion of many
state and nonstate actors and of course the MSM media.
(Also, it looks as though Telepolis has been following this story in other articles that call
out news organizations and EU entities for their complicity in pushing Browder's narrative
and ignoring many counter-signs. Including canceling and otherwise burying Nekrasov's
excellent film.)
Actually, the larger topic in light of the Russiagate and impeachment circuses being
"clash of the titans' disinformation campaigns."
oldhippie@25 The anecdotes about what the insiders kept secret is instructive. The gales of
laughter did nothing to impair Pipes' academic reputation, nor were they meant to, I imagine.
Being a respected academic means also being respected in government and in the media, which
Pipes was. Team B and all that
Walter's babble about a Republic instead of a democracy is reactionary cant. The
Constitution originally read that the electors would be in fact the electors, interposing
against a majority to elect a responsible candidate, one determined to preserve the ruling
class. In those times, that meant slavers, of course. But, in Washington's elections,
Hamilton, concerned to prevent an inadvertent tie, intrigued to make sure John Adams got
fewer electoral votes than the popular voting of the time required. Adams was irate. In
Adams' own election, Hamilton supposedly tried to get the electors to switch votes so that a
Pinckney of South Carolina was elected. (Adams was honest in pecuniary matters and rather
intelligent, but he was something of a dingbat, which piety about the "Founding Fathers"
refuses to admit.) Adams was even more furious. And Jefferson made political capital,
swearing to all that his party's electors would vote the people's will. They did, and
promptly created a constitutional crisis when Jefferson and Burr tied, throwing the election
into the House. The intrigues aimed at overturning the people's will provoked talk of another
revolution or the break up of the union.
The principle that electors are not agents to actually elect the president but mere cogs
was established. It was affirmed by the incandescent fury of the Jacksonians at J.Q. Adams.
And it was further confirmed when the contested election of 1876 again was loud with talk
about uprisings. It was only the obscene withdrawal of troops from the South, protecting the
Klan etc., that pacified the uproar. It was not until the political degeneration of the later
years which lead the coward Gore to roll over. As mere agents of the popular vote, yes, the
EC is a mere technicality. My guess is that Walter personally would sneer at a criminal
defendant who relied on a technicality about their rights to get an acquittal. But the other
Walters want to use a technicality to take away people's rights. Then they are so shameless
as to pretend to virtue and wisdom.
As for the notion that the Electoral College is the enemy of the people's rights, instead
of the states' right? In this thread there are idiots ranting about treason because of email
server. If you want to see treason, look at the history of the Confederate States of America.
That's treason. We have a national government, it's part of the constitution (14th Amendment
is otherwise gibberish.) Thus, the Electoral College as a treaty compact between "sovereign"
(semi-sovereign is not really a thing!) is also dead. The EC is just a technicality. Walter
would implicitly have us believe that if the electors just picked someone else through
conspiracy among themselves, then the President chosen would be the President because that's
the Constitution, and that's just the way it is. Electors keeping faith with the people
instead of their parties would have voted for the person who won the vote. And Walter
wouldn't accept the result, no matter how much it followed the Constitution (which it would
have!) because reactionary scum like Walter are always liars.
Ant. seems to think the minority of the good people should overrule the common peoples,
aka the mob. It is doubtful Ant. would know the good people if they were in the same room.
The assumption that Ant. is one of the good people is simply slavish adoration. Also, the
only real meaning to "mob" is "collective noun for people rioting." An election is not a
riot. This is slander by some whose rancid contempt for humanity at large should be directed
first at Ant.
V. Putin said that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but... American journalists, of course,
are aware that this statement is unfounded, and, of course, is Russian disinformation.
Because V. Putin said this.
You seem to advocating the concept of mob rule. Do you understand that a popular opinion is
not necessarily a correct opinion?
Gee! And here I was under the impression that THE MAJORITY of the people equals democracy.
But because most Americans are nuts, Amerikkka, would be the exception to that rule.
By the same token, pretending the Electoral College equals democracy is also legitimizing
the fact that a few married cousin crazies and evangelized bible thumpers from sparsely
populated hicktowns and rednecks, and pretend gentry from the Confederacy have equal
representation to the most populated states in the Union.
Let me though make a precise evaluation: Crazytown U.S.A. imposed karma Trump on the
majority, because a big part of that majority betrayed liberal anti-war values to neoliberal
peace equals war Nobel drone Obama and neoliberal hawk Killary cackling like a shrew
at the Al-Qaeda gang slaughter of Gaddafi.
Now, Amerikka has a ZioCon for President that pardons and glorifies war criminals, that
arms a proxy war committing starvation genocide, that steals oil resources from Syria, that
wields economic tyranny against Venezuela and Iran for the purpose of regime change and
control of foreign energy riches, that is meddling in Lebannon, Iraq and Latin American
countries usurping the will of people, and who gives away territory in Syria and Palestine to
Zionists not to mention his fascist takeover of the Judiciary and and total ignorance of the
climate change threat.
So even though you're totally wrong on what democracy is, it doesn't matter, because
Amerikkka's majority is getting exactly what it deserves for having betrayed and surrendered
liberal values to Neocons like GWBush, Neolibs like Killary and all in service to Zionism and
Zionists like Kissinger and billionaires like Saban and Adelson and the corporate sheisters
on Wall Street.
Very few Americans have a mind of their own raised on the Zionist corporate media alphabet
soup that scrambles the brain. So you're right, the majority, deserve the Trump karma imposed
on them by the lowest crazy common denominator in Amerikkkan society promoted by the
Electoral College and who are the most useful idiots of Zionist supremacy.
And then everyone wonders about the growing desperation manifested by mass tent cities,
mass opiod consumption and mass incarceration. Amerikka is occupied and Trump is the enforcer
of the occupier.
Now try and find a more precise observation of the truth.
America is an insane asylum that masquerades as the "world's leading democracy."
This country is truly unhinged and lives in its own Orwellian reality. The
Ukraine/impeachment issue is only symptomatic of this broader pathology.
For the USA, it doesn't make a difference what actual reality is. What matters is that
America defines what counts as reality itself--not matter how ludicrous or fake it is.
As a former high-level Bush Regime openly admitted in an interview with journalist Ron
Suskind:
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's
actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
This American mentality is most evident in the USA's sociocidal wars of aggression around
the world and the lies that America peddles to pimp for its wars--as well as its political
balkanization, regime change, or destabilization campaigns that it dresses up
as"pro-Democracy"(TM) movements:
Mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq
The fake War on Terrorism
The bogus War on Drugs
Humanitarian Intervention, or the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine
Freedom and Democracy
All-American Lies....
Americans truly are the people of the Big Lie.
There should be a Cordon Sanitaire placed around the United States (and its crime
partners/allies) to prevent this American plague from infecting the rest of the word.
@54 snake "Governed Americans and governed Russians should build a stadium, outfit the
personnel in Russian and USA governments, their think tanks and their intelligence services
with uniforms, lock the two opposed teams in the stadium, and sell the TV rights to pay off
the national debt of all of the nations of the world as these two teams as they fight it out
to the last man, woman and paper tiger warrior."
That's awesome! I was just listening to Devo's 1981 New Traditionalists album the other
day, and while I put it on to listen to "Beautiful World" ("It's a beautiful world, for
you...not me!"), the following song is "Enough Said" and these are the great lyrics:
"Take all the leaders from around the world
Put them together in a great big ring
Televise it as the lowest show on earth
And let them fight like hell to see who's king
Gather up the pieces when the fight is done
Then you'll find out living really can be fun
Enough said!"
You can find in youtube - too apropos to not share.
Jackrabbit 6
"took the black vote for granted"
So very true. Team HRC must have thought they could flip states like Pennsylvania by taking
the cities just like BHO did. Instead the states "deplorables" were dismissed. BHO did the
same but he had the cities in his pocket. But in today's PC hypocrisy, you can't point to
race as being a major factor.
psychohistorian 7
These NGOs and other organizations have an added influence on our politics. For some reason
the MSM doesn't mention them much. It's like the White Helmets. Search for their history at
YouTube and you get the official obfuscation. But toss in Purpose and AVAAZ and you find
more.
@ STJ #63> who wrote, inter alia> "reactionary scum like Walter are always liars." et
sec
Many thanks, Friend. As no doubt all here are well-aware, the resort to ad hominem occurs
when the speaker has no actual argument.
I am obliged. Glad you agree with Walter, and also very glad you do not like that...your
inner-conflict may be part of the dialectic. I hope it works out for you, Steve.
see, if you like, McHenry,"The American Historical Review", vol. 11, 1906 p 618
Here's another bull's eye observation: it's more efficient and cunning to manipulate through
social media tech-savvy means and other localized machinations the really susceptible, dumb,
but important groups in swing states made powerful by the Electoral College than to tackle
the opinion of the urban majority with a few critical articles and the appearance of a
pay-off ledger. Besides, the entirety of Europe was critical of candidate Trump. The
criticism of Trump was not specfic to Ukraine alone. So either the meddling was based on a
vast conspiracy of criticism or it was based on a campaign of targeted populist propaganda
directed at the right and working class together with a perfectly-timed leak that the DNC was
sabotaging Sanders cleverly meant to turn part of the left base against the Dem Party. I say
the latter.
Now don't try to convince me that Ukraine would meddle to turn the left base of the
Democratic side against Hillary when Ukraine preferred her. That logic just don't fly.
The question to ask is. Who had the unlimited financial resources, political connections
and tech savvy to pull the meddling off? I'll give you some clues: it's the usual suspect,
starts with Z and it's mostly based in Israel, the U.S. AND in the Russian oligarchy.
Trump is the Chosen Zionist President and there's nothing more to look at here. The
Ukraine and Russia factors are superfluous and moot to that over-arching FACT.
The most important thing is to learn to read and write.
Rhetoric and logic are important to follow after.
The basis of my comment is that I am currently reading Frederick Law Olmstead's The Cotton
Kingdom.
Fascinating. Unvarnished look at the antebellum South. There was a lot of variation among
states and communities. but the basics remain the same (he covers a very wide territory, both
geog. and intellectually and makes very detailed observations of all that he
encountered).
A huge factor (per FLO) in the mental, psychological, intellectual, economic etc
impoverishment of the South was a lack of any cultural institutions, people lived too far
apart to hire any kind of teachers, of course the slaves were virtually all of them also
uneducated. but in, say, South Caroline 25% of the whites also could not read or write or do
elementary sums.
As adults we all have the responsibility to (continue to) educate ourselves. I get nervous
when I hear people putting a pox on education per se. There are no guarantees when human
beings invent or are given various types of tools. Trying to win the argument by withholding
the provision or preventing the acquisition of tools sounds akin to considering people
"uppity" for using the intellectual tools they possess.
@uncle tungsten | Nov 24 2019 11:58 utc | 44 (the email affair and server)
Assume that the Bruce-Partington Submarine plans (Y'all know yer Holmes?) are under
control of Billary Jones, a senior official in an Imperial State. Billary needs money and has
guilty secrets. He's being blackmailed by Oberstein, a spy.
Jones then accidentally leaves the plans where Oberstein sees and photographs them.
Hi there Stevie...conflict is debilitating, eh? Find the Franklin quote yet? He was there,
and you? But I assume you haven't even realized it wuz Bennie F. Best o' luck.
(apologies to Conan Doyle)
69 Shmoe
Sorry about link not working. Esp since it was so long.
I usually activiate Google translate from a Google hit. But
I think you can also activate Google translate from the original webpage. This link pasted
into a new window (the URL space) did get me to the translation: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Browder-und-das-Magnitski-Narrativ-Ende-einer-Desinformationskampagne-4595245.html&prev=search
">https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Browder-und-das-Magnitski-Narrativ-Ende-einer-Desinformationskampagne-4595245.html&prev=search">https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Browder-und-das-Magnitski-Narrativ-Ende-einer-Desinformationskampagne-4595245.html&prev=search
In case that still does not work, type the title into your browser and then "translate."
If you use Google you should get a hit that shows the German title with "translate this page"
to the right.
Here is the title:
"Browder und das Magnitski-Narrativ: Ende einer Desinformationskampagne?"
Another way is to type "Google Translate German to English" into your browser. You get a
page with a box for German text on the left and English translation on the right.
There are 99 comments so far and a few posters are scratching their heads about what Der
Spiegel is up to with this apparent 180. So it might be interesting to paste a few of them
into Google translate. Here is one:
"What is going on at the mirror (Spiegel)? Since the well-established narrative has been
cultivated about the mean Russians since the founding and has been shown to 100%
transatlantic loyalty, now suddenly something like that. Is this just an accidental slip of
reason or is there more behind it?"
Google translate does make mistakes, beware. A typo can lead to absurdity.
Oh, and one more salient, obvious fact in the form of a question: Why would the biggest and
worst Neocon, Zionist shill in Congress, Lindsey Graham risk his dignity to such an extreme
to rescue Trump's ass if Trump were not the Chosen Zionist President??? ... I'm waiting...10,
9, 8...
Lindsey is the barometer of who and what Zionists want and because they want Trump over
Biden, Lindsey is now at war with his former Dem friend. Lindsey's a loyal subject of Zionism
that butters his bread and that's why he'll do anything to protect Trump.
Amazing really. Back some 3-4 years ago, the wiley Russians looked into the future to
understand that they needed to blame the Ukrainians for interfering in the election. They
predicted that deep state actors would reveal that Trump would in fact strong arm the
Ukrainians into revealing dirt on Joe Biden.
As for the teaching of classical Rhetoric and Logic. Absolutely. Give people the tools to
understand arguments and their validity. One of the best books I had and which I stupidly
lost was a compendium of rhetorical devices as labeled in the original Latin and Greek by
drunk monks of the Medieval Europe. It was just amazing how these rhetoricians drew up a
taxology of the various techniques and tropes--from honest to dishonest. A great toolkit.
"What is going on at the mirror (Spiegel)? Since the well-established narrative has been
cultivated about the mean Russians since the founding and has been shown to 100%
transatlantic loyalty, now suddenly something like that. Is this just an accidental slip of
reason or is there more behind it?"
@ Erelis | Nov 24 2019 19:32 utc | 79 There was once a defrocked Jesuit (with tenure at a
major university) who taught sodomy to the choir and rhetoric to his friends and those whom
he thought might be. He also favored snow... But...as you say, the original Latin and Greek.
A good man, but a pervert, and not a pederast. I liked the guy, and he knew his subject, ah,
the academic subject, to near perfection. He wrote speeches on the side for major political
figures, for cash. Thus in part did my own inability to suspend disbelief become cemented.
For money? Good thing they caught him...oh yeah, his popness also runs a cash an' carry,
don't he? Well, somebody said... (Like Martin Luther?)
Anyway the reason to study rhetoric is that it shall be used against you. Knowing the
Science and Art is your only safe defense, your only warning of true intent by rhetorical
analysis and logical deduction matching real events and actions. Without Rhetoric you are a
chump, a mark, a fool, and like sheep. Ewe! (haha) With it you can form reasoned ideas about
the future intention of any speaker. This may be useful.
The first test (since 2014) of any expert's credentials is his/her position on Crimea. The
next test is on Russian aggression.
If anyone suggests Crimea does not belong to Russia (most especially the federal district of
Sevastopol), then they are ignorant or lying.
Posted by: Red Ryder | Nov 23 2019 19:53 utc
I think that Red Rider is wrong here, starting from assumptions. One assumption is that
rather than status quo 1-5 years before the time we are making a judgment, we should look
back ca. 200 years etc. That could imply that India should belong to United Kingdom,
subsequent treaties notwithstanding.
Even more wrong is the hidden assumption that there should be some general principles that
guide "us" as to who owns what (they actually exist but wait) that hold regardless of
"Washington consensus". Perhaps using lower case in "us" was misleading. History explains the
ethnic and linguistic composition of Crimea etc. but really, everybody agrees the it is not
the only determinant. But let us consider some cases:
Annexation of Tuva and Sikkim. Somehow, nobody cares.
De-facto annexation of North Cyprus which now operates as a quasi-independent state fully
dependent on Turkey. Locals and Turks are satisfied, the rest of NATO and perhaps UN does not
recognize legality, but apart of Greek speaking countries, nobody makes a big deal out of it.
Sanctions? Hehe.
Annexation of Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Universal mild disapproval, except for USA
-- wholehearted approval there.
Crimea. Total need to apply severe sanction forever to maintain faith in "our"
principles.
Cynthia Chung invaded my brain and wrote the short essay that's been on the tip of my tongue
for some months now, "On
Churchill's 'Sinews of Peace'" . Within its body is linked two extremely important items,
the first being Elliott Roosevelt's book about his father Franklin As He Saw It (available limited
preview at link), and the second being an excerpt from that book of paramount
importance .
The more well known name of Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" speech is "The Iron Curtain
Speech" given at Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946, not quite 11 months after FDR's passing.
Here is the opening appetizer from that speech Chung bases the rest of her essay upon:
"This threatening message was not only meant for the Soviets, but was also directed to the
Americans and in between the lines Churchill stated ' Things are going to be very
different from now on. Your dead president cannot protect you any longer .' Some may be
surprised to hear such an aside comment, more likened to the outer ruminations of
Shakespeare's Iago." [My Emphasis]
Things did immediately become different. I consistently point out that the Evil Outlaw US
Empire immediately began violating the UN Charter and thus its own Constitution and Law of
the Land upon its coming into force; however, what I've neglected to point out until now is
that the UK also began violating it just as immediately as did France, although neither has
anything similar to the US Constitution's Supremacy Clause that might be used to curb illegal
behavior. I often point to historical What Ifs? as in this case regarding the coup made
against Henry Wallace, FDR, and the wholesale overturning of the reasons given for waging the
war and winning the peace. Ms. Chung does an excellent job of highlighting what those were,
how they were smashed, and why. I really can't stress the great importance of her essay
enough; its educational importance is second to none! Read it, save it, make sure its read by
your entire family, take it to your kid's teachers, share it with everyone you know and those
you don't. The only people I can conceive of who wouldn't want to know its contents are
racists/imperialists--dare I say fascists--like Churchill. Three generations of people were
subjected to a geopolitical power play that never should have occurred--the deaths,
destruction, and wasted opportunities likely total in the Quadrillions of Dollars. I must
admit some admiration for Chung's an optimist as she clearly shows in her conclusion; my
adding it here in no way diminishes her essay's power and importance:
"The intended policies by Franklin D. Roosevelt for the post war world are still waiting
to be implemented today.
"So what can we the people do about this? We can wake up to the fact that this has
occurred and recognise that the mainstream presentation of world dichotomy today is just
continuing this sickly narrative. That Russia and China are not some monstrous race and that
we should weigh what is currently being offered as an olive branch with great and serious
reflection. That is namely the Eurasian Economic Union and the New Silk Road which also
applies immensely to the US.
"Let us not continue to remain shackled in despair and inaction but rather realise that
there is a great opportunity still for the Century of the Common Man."
Walter confirms being a liar when paragraphs of argument are miscalled "inter alia," then
ignored. The snide insult by the way functions as a fallacious ad hominem, doubly confirms
thatif Walter knows rhetoric, then Walter is doubly a liar. Last and least citing a 1906
volume of American Historical Review to someone who doesn't have university library access is
a snob's rudeness. I'm defeated by the puzzle of what Walter thinks Walter has to be snobby
about. A collection of American Historical Review isn't exactly nothing, but to get snobby
over it? Really?
"... "...it is quite possible that the historically well-informed neocons are merely longing for the good old Bolshevik days in Russia." ..."
"... Neocons resurrect tribal memories to fan the flames ..."
"... Imo Vindman's testimony revealed a 'personal' grudge against Russia. Hill also displayed a 'obsession' with Russia imo..... its interesting her Russian instructor at Harvard was Richard Pipes, the supreme Russian hater. ..."
"... Perhaps you should consider the influence of Ukrainian emigre groups/lobbies. They are essentialy an extension of the Galician movement you refer to. ..."
"... Machiavelli warned repeatedly of the baleful results that listening to exiles gets you into (specifically concerning attempts to reinstate some exiles in the place they came from), George Washingtons farewell adress can be read in a similiar way. Here is the thing with exiles: ..."
"... Lets pretend that Atlantis exists, but 98% of Americans do not particularly care about this country. Now something happens there that genereates exiles. If those exiles are at least somewhat savy, they will passionately argue that the current atlantean government is pure evil. Other then that, they will strive to make themselfs usefull to the host nation. Now, lets pretend that you have 5 such atlantean exiles in a group of 100 politicians. The atlantean exiles would care primarily about condeming the atlantean government, and may be in a position to deliver political points in other areas to anyone who is asking. A normal "I dont care about Atlantis" politican will see a fairly simple cost benefit thing, I condemn Atlantis, something about which I do not care at all, and in return the exiles will back something I care about, like my health policy. ..."
"... This is by no means a rapid development, but give it a couple of decades and the exchange of many such small favors will essentially result in a large group of politicians who will underwrite things like "Atlantis delenda est", mostly because they dont actually care about Atlantis. ..."
"... I don't know why this campaign against Russia was launched but at least part of it was domestic political pressure from Clinton Dems towards Trump Reps. What better way to deflect criticism about the foreign influences on the Clinton Dems (massive bribes from the usual suspects, either direct or via the Clinton Fdn.) but by accusing your opponent of being in the pay of foreign powers? ..."
"... Hillary Clinton shrieking about "Russia Wikileaks" seems to me to be pure projection and also rationalising a cause for her defeat other than the incompetence and corruption of her campaign. ..."
"... Also it seems to me that the Russian defeat of the regime change op in Syria (altho the situation seems rather fluid at the moment...) is another motivation where Israel's interests loom large. ..."
"... A grandfather and great grandfather were in a Union regiment but that hardly is proof that I am a Union man. Unusual family demographics to be sure but even then those Ukrainians served in that SS unit over 70 years ago. I doubt they were even then motivated by National Socialist ideology. Hatred of Russians was likely the primary motivation, as now. The German invasion was an opportunity to settle scores. ..."
"... I understand the hatred but not the application of "Nazi" to any Ukrainian thinking. If "Nazi" merely connotes "thuggish" then perhaps that explains the Azov formations but I suspect much more is at work. Additional inquiry is warranted. ..."
"... Many of those in the Ukrainian SS units ended up in Canada after WW2, resulting in the very pro Ukranian actions of the Canadian Government post 2014. Their FM, Christina Freeland, is a descendant. ..."
"... After the fall of the Former Soviet Union in 1991, saw a resurgence of the OUN. ..."
"... The Ukrainian Nazi formations and political factions openly call themselves Nazis. For that matter, everyone else called them Nazis too, at least before they became useful to the neocons. I'll spare everyone an explanation of Ukrainian diaspora culture, but I will say that, before WWII, the principal Ukrainian nationalist folk devil wasn't Russia. It was Poland and the Jews. ..."
"... Could the anti Russia bias be as simple as the need to protect the empires of people in State and Defence etc that would be no longer needed if Russia was a 'good' guy? ..."
"... Then there is the MIC and the lobbying flows of money into Congress.Russia is far too important to too many insiders to be anything but an enemy. ..."
"... As pointed out earlier - the military industrial complex needs a Big Enemy to justify its exorbitant budgets. The Deep State, the Borg, the Blob, whatever you want to call it, needs a Big Enemy to justify its spying and increasingly blatant interference in domestic US politics. ..."
"... the Russian nation is greatly under populated and owns a staggering per cent of the planets natural resources of every description. envy by those look from the outside towards russia is alone sufficient justification for wanting to grab it for themselves as has been unsuccessfully tried for centuries. ..."
"... The irony, of course, is that in Jewish folk memory, the most pig-headed (pun intended) and virulent anti-Semites were the peasants of Galicia (western Ukraine) and Poland. ..."
"... I also share your bafflement and not just with the political positions of the likes of Victoria Nuland. What do US & UK hope to gain? I can't see any benefits. ..."
Giraldi suggests, "...it is quite possible that the historically well-informed neocons are
merely longing for the good old Bolshevik days in Russia." That aligns more readily with
neocons' (and their oligarch supporters') psychopathic obsession with power and control via
the state. Giraldi also illustrates another more recent period in history when the neocons
were not decidedly anti-Russian:
In fact, the neocons got along quite well with Russia when they and their overwhelmingly
Jewish oligarchs and international commodity thieves cum financier friends were looting the
resources of the old Soviet Union under the hapless Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. Alarms
about the alleged Russian threat only re-emerged in the neocon dominated media and think
tanks when old fashioned nationalist Vladimir Putin took office and made it a principal
goal of his government to turn off the money tap.
There was no monolithic 'Jewish Oligarch' club cashing in on Yeltsin's Russia. In the
broadest sense, the western neocon-friendly Russian-Jewish oligarch group(s) were booted out
by Putin, while rival group(s) stayed in Russia and submitted to Putin's reforms (whatever
that means). Saker has written in the past about the various Jewish oligarch factions in
Russia. It's complicated and beyond me.
Israel Shamir attempts to untangle the contradictory views on Ukraine from the State of
Israel, Ukrainian-Jewish oligarchs, neocons and Jews from the US, Ukraine and Russia:
Summary: 'Tribal' oversimplifies - no unified opinion. It's complicated. Mr. Shamir's
views seem reasonable and go a long way to explaining the contradictions to me.
Giraldi suggests, "...it is quite possible that the historically well-informed neocons are
merely longing for the good old Bolshevik days in Russia."
I have a great deal of respect for Phil Giraldi but he is wrong here--it has nothing to do
with "Bolshevism", whatever that means in the American context, but with settling accounts
with 1930s purges of largely, not exclusively, Jewish Trotskists from the party and a
consistent anti-Zionist position of USSR till the every end. Now, with Russia effectively
de-fanging Israel, they go apoplectic. Modern neocons have zero relation to Bolshevism and if
they dream about anything--it is mostly have Russia gone as such.
''A question for me is the motivation behind the antipathy of the American neo-liberals and
neocons toward Russia. There are a lot of Jews scattered among these groups. .... Or, do
these people see Russia as a plausible geopolitical rival for the US? Surely it cannot be as
simple, or simpleminded as that.''
Jews have next to zero political control in Russia and I do think that the Zionist see
Russia, as the only other superpower, as a hindrance to their aims for one thing.
Also any state where Jews 'lost out' is subject to vilification and branded as evil.
Imo Vindman's testimony revealed a 'personal' grudge against Russia. Hill also
displayed a 'obsession' with Russia imo..... its interesting her Russian instructor at
Harvard was Richard Pipes, the supreme Russian hater.
As for the non Jewish Neos what would they do without a big scary enemy to fight?...they
might have to actually concentrate on doing things for America.
If anyone is interested here is a nice tool for following congressional bills and etc..
Mostly good for counting all the money they are giving away and the sanctions on countries
they are demanding....they aren't doing much of anything else in congress if you don't count
the kangaroo court circus.
How odd on PBS tonight - 'Secrets of Her Majesty's Secret Service" - an inside look at the
worlds only defense against Russia -a love letter to M16 and it nearly 100 year "special
relationship" with the US and CIA.
What strange timing for such a calculated PR piece for an extremely publicity shy Five
Eyes operation. Were they trying to get ahead of the coming Russiagate investigation reports
with this engaging documentary - we are in fact the James Bonds of the world and we know you
Americans love James Bond.
Anyone else see it or have I gotten aa sinister cabal derangement syndrome behind even PBS
"friendly" documentaries?
"A question for me is the motivation behind the antipathy of the American neo-liberals and
neocons toward Russia" Perhaps you should consider the influence of Ukrainian emigre groups/lobbies. They are
essentialy an extension of the Galician movement you refer to.
" Is it Russia's relentless persecution of homosexuals?" What's the evidence for this
persecution?
Essentially, when both 2 persons as contrary to each other as George Washington and
Niccolo Machiavelli agree on something, it behoves one well to listen.
Machiavelli warned repeatedly of the baleful results that listening to exiles gets you
into (specifically concerning attempts to reinstate some exiles in the place they came from),
George Washingtons farewell adress can be read in a similiar way. Here is the thing with
exiles:
Lets pretend that Atlantis exists, but 98% of Americans do not particularly care
about this country. Now something happens there that genereates exiles. If those exiles are
at least somewhat savy, they will passionately argue that the current atlantean government
is pure evil. Other then that, they will strive to make themselfs usefull to the host
nation. Now, lets pretend that you have 5 such atlantean exiles in a group of 100
politicians. The atlantean exiles would care primarily about condeming the atlantean
government, and may be in a position to deliver political points in other areas to anyone
who is asking. A normal "I dont care about Atlantis" politican will see a fairly simple
cost benefit thing, I condemn Atlantis, something about which I do not care at all, and in
return the exiles will back something I care about, like my health policy.
This is by no means a rapid development, but give it a couple of decades and the
exchange of many such small favors will essentially result in a large group of politicians
who will underwrite things like "Atlantis delenda est", mostly because they dont actually
care about Atlantis.
This is not a specifically US thing at all. My understanding is that Russias WW1 decision
to back Serbia was considerably influenced by a group of ethnically serbian/Montenegrin
advisors (who, one has to say were otherwise loyal to Russia, and had fought with distinction
in the Tsars wars, shedding their blood for Russia).
I don't know why this campaign against Russia was launched but at least part of it was
domestic political pressure from Clinton Dems towards Trump Reps. What better way to deflect
criticism about the foreign influences on the Clinton Dems (massive bribes from the usual
suspects, either direct or via the Clinton Fdn.) but by accusing your opponent of being in
the pay of foreign powers?
Hillary Clinton shrieking about "Russia Wikileaks" seems to me to be pure projection
and also rationalising a cause for her defeat other than the incompetence and corruption of
her campaign.
Also it seems to me that the Russian defeat of the regime change op in Syria (altho the
situation seems rather fluid at the moment...) is another motivation where Israel's interests
loom large.
It also seems to me to be stunningly stupid to have thrown away any potential alliance
with Russia in favor of promoting Wahabist scum. And forcing Russia into the arms of the
Chinese instead of recruiting them into the containment cordon.
Anyway, speaking as a denizen of Plato's cave, without direct knowledge of the reality of
the thing it's mostly educated guesses on my part...
A grandfather and great grandfather were in a Union regiment but that hardly is proof that
I am a Union man. Unusual family demographics to be sure but even then those Ukrainians
served in that SS unit over 70 years ago. I doubt they were even then motivated by National
Socialist ideology. Hatred of Russians was likely the primary motivation, as now. The German
invasion was an opportunity to settle scores.
I understand the hatred but not the application of "Nazi" to any Ukrainian thinking. If
"Nazi" merely connotes "thuggish" then perhaps that explains the Azov formations but I
suspect much more is at work. Additional inquiry is warranted.
Many of those in the Ukrainian SS units ended up in Canada after WW2, resulting in the
very pro Ukranian actions of the Canadian Government post 2014. Their FM, Christina Freeland,
is a descendant.
Folks like Freeland openly credit her SS grandfather for her ideology. When speaking in
public, she does then to conveniently omit his services to the national Socialist state.
Try Stephan Bandera, he was as bad of a figure as what the Russians accused him of being.
Bandera's legacy was that of a Nazi sympathizer and a real nut case too boot. He was one sick
twisted individual.
After the fall of the Former Soviet Union in 1991, saw a resurgence of the OUN.
These Russian hating individuals that composed the far-right Nazi resurgence in the Ukraine
government, started terrifying the Russian enclaves in the Crimea, and those enclaves in turn
called on their fellow Russian brothers in Russia for help, to which Putin and the Russian
military came to their aid and the annexation of the Crimea by Russia took place so as to
protect the Russian enclaves from further persecution by the Banderites. Bandera posters
became more and more prevalent. The Euromaidan protests turned more and more violent, the
wolfsangel that was formerly a symbol of the SS but was now taken up by the Azov Battalion
and other militias, the old OUN war cry of "Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes" that was
now ubiquitous among anti-Yanukovych protesters.
Here's some further reading regarding Stephan Bandera:
The Ukrainian Nazi formations and political factions openly call themselves Nazis. For
that matter, everyone else called them Nazis too, at least before they became useful to the
neocons. I'll spare everyone an explanation of Ukrainian diaspora culture, but I will say
that, before WWII, the principal Ukrainian nationalist folk devil wasn't Russia. It was
Poland and the Jews.
That's a very interesting write up at Zerohedge. I believe we discussed the same conduct,
though not the depth of corruption of US politicians, here while that was happening. The borg
are starting to panic with the threat of a real investigation.
Thank you for the posting and thank all for the comments.
Some of us out here in The Middle can't really understand any of the behaviors of those
good and not-so-good Swamp dwellers (any more than we can understand the behaviors of the La
La Land Californian politicians.
I understand more about the issues involving our relationship with Ukraine by reading this
post and comments than I ever would have been able to since I simply don't have time to get
large books and many detailed published papers to read.
Could the anti Russia bias be as simple as the need to protect the empires of people in
State and Defence etc that would be no longer needed if Russia was a 'good' guy?
The US's 'independent' multi-national force NATO would clearly no longer be needed, so
many years after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. Whilst the US 'occupation' forces all over the
place, but especially in Europe, could return home to the US.
Then there is the MIC and the lobbying flows of money into Congress.Russia is far too
important to too many insiders to be anything but an enemy.
Indeed, its boom time as China related structures are expanding in parallel rather than
replacing those directed at Russia.
As pointed out earlier - the military industrial complex needs a Big Enemy to justify its
exorbitant budgets. The Deep State, the Borg, the Blob, whatever you want to call it, needs a
Big Enemy to justify its spying and increasingly blatant interference in domestic US
politics.
There are too many business ties with China, and our supply chains reach too deeply into
that country, for it to serve as a Big Enemy without causing serious disruption.
the reasons for the agreed upon antipathy towards Russia is imo not the actual reason for the
hostilities that have existed for at least the last 100 years and actually much longer.
the Russian nation is greatly under populated and owns a staggering per cent of the
planets natural resources of every description. envy by those look from the outside towards
russia is alone sufficient justification for wanting to grab it for themselves as has been
unsuccessfully tried for centuries.
why complicate matters when simple greed answers so many of the questions asked about WHY
the west hates russia.
The irony, of course, is that in Jewish folk memory, the most pig-headed (pun intended)
and virulent anti-Semites were the peasants of Galicia (western Ukraine) and Poland.
I also share your bafflement and not just with the political positions of the likes of
Victoria Nuland. What do US & UK hope to gain? I can't see any benefits.
Bill Clinton destroyed the USA economy and middle class like no president has ever done.
Bush II and Obama exacerbated the destruction by the hundred folds.
I believe Hedges statement that "the true correctives to society were social movements
that never achieved formal political power" is perhaps one of the most important things for
each of us to understand.
I watched this with interest and curiosity and growing skepticism although he makes some
killer points and cites some extremely disturbing facts; above all he accepts and
uncritically so the American narrative of history.
The message from democrats is "hey we're not bigots". Most people (repubs+dems) aren't. If
they keep calling on that for energy the Dems will forever continue to lose. If they don't
come back to the working class they might as well just call themselves conservatives.
Those of us who seek the truth can't stop looking under every stone. The truth will set
you free but you must share it with those who are ready to hear it and hide it from those who
can hurt you for exposing it. MT
"A Society that looses the capacity for the sacred cannibalizes itself until it dies
because it exploits the natural world as well as human beings to the point of collapse."
I believe Hedges statement that "the true correctives to society were social movements
that never achieved formal political power" is perhaps one of the most important things for
each of us to understand.
I watched this with interest and curiosity and growing skepticism although he makes some
killer points and cites some extremely disturbing facts; above all he accepts and
uncritically so the American narrative of history. The Progressive movement, for example,
(written into American history as being far more important that it ever really was,) unlike
Socialism or Communism was primarily just a literary and a trendy intellectually movement
that attempted, (unconvincingly,) to persuade poor, exploited and abused Americans that non
of those other political movements, (reactive and grass-roots,) were needed here and that
capitalism could and might of itself, cure itself; it conceded little, promised much and
unlike either Communism or Socialism delivered fuck all. Personally I remain unconvinced also
by, "climate science," (which he takes as given,) and which seems to to me to depend far too
much on faith and self important repeatedly insisting that it's true backed by lurid and
hysterical propaganda and not nearly enough on rational scientific argument, personally I
can't make head nor tail of the science behind it ? (it may well be true, or not; I can't
tell.) But above all and stripped of it his pretensions his argument is just typical theist,
(of any flavor you like,) end of times claptrap all the other systems have failed, (China for
example somewhat gives the lie to death of Communism by the way and so on,) the end is neigh
and all that is left to do is for people to turn to character out of first century fairly
story. I wish him luck with that.
The message from democrats is "hey we're not bigots". Most people (repubs+dems) aren't. If
they keep calling on that for energy the Dems will forever continue to lose. If they don't
come back to the working class they might as well just call themselves conservatives.
I have always loved Chris Hedges, but ever since becoming fully awake it pains me to see
how he will take gigantic detours of imagination to never mention Israel, AIPAC or Zionism,
and their complete takeover of the US. What a shame.
The continued growth of unproductive debt against the low or nonexistent growth of GDP is
the recipe for collapse, for the whole world economic system.
I agree with Chris about the tragedy of the Liberal Church. Making good through identity
politics however, is every bit as heretical and tragic as Evangelical Republican corrupted
church think, in my humble, Christian opinion.
The death of the present western hemisphere governments and "democratic" institutions must
die right now for humanity to be saved from the zombies that rule it. 'Cannibalization" of
oikonomia was my idea, as well as of William Engdahl. l am glad hearing Hedges to adopt the
expression of truth. ( November 2019. from Phthia , Hellas ).
ass="comment-renderer-text-content expanded"> Gosh , especially that last conclusion
,was terrific so I want to paste the whole of that Auden poem here:- September 1, 1939 W. H.
Auden - 1907-1973
... ... ...
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
"... Doesn't Warren claim to have indigenous ancestors herself and was proud of it? She caused Trump to call her "Pocahontas"? She agrees to support the unelected interim president Jeannine Añez, who refers to indigenous inhabitants as satanic? Warren is a very horrible person, inhumane, amoral, and rather stupid overall, who wants to get rich. ..."
"... I personally think that capitalism with "human face" and robust public sector is the way to go. But imperialist imposition and aggression is not the part of "human face" that I imagine. ..."
"... I'm sorry but you all need to come to terms with the farce that is the American political system. Anyone who was supporting Warren or even considering voting for her for ANY reason is apparently either in denial or is being duped. Warren is a Madison Avenue creation packaged for US liberal consumption. ..."
"... She hangs out with Hillary Clinton and Madeline Albright, two evil women if ever there were. Now they make the three witches brewing one coup/regime change after another. She's not smart enough to see that HRC and MA are leading her around by her nose. People should call out this phoney everywhere she goes. BTW, Rachel Maddow completes an odious clique. ..."
"... This is a bit of exaggeration. The three ladies are more like good students, they did not write the textbook but they good grades for answering as written, or like cheerleaders, they jump and shout but they do not play in the field. Mind you, "interagency consensus" was formed without them. ..."
"... The DNC's strategy for this election is to ensure that Bernie doesn't go into the Convention with enough delegates to win the first ballot. (Once voting goes past the first ballot, super-delegates get to weigh in and help anoint a candidate who's friendly to the Party's plutocratic-oligarch principals.) ..."
"... That's the reason the DNC is allowing and encouraging so many candidates to run. Warren's specific assignment is to cannibalize Bernie's base and steal delegates that would otherwise be his, by pretending to espouse most of his platform with only minor tweaks. She's been successful with "better educated," higher-income liberal Democrats who consider themselves well informed because they get their news from "respectable" sources -- sources that, unbeknownst to their target audiences, invariably represent the viewpoint of the aforementioned plutocratic oligarchs. ..."
"... if Warren becomes the nominee, I will support her over Trump. It's a lesser of two evils choice, but we must recognize that no candidate will be perfect–ever. ..."
"... Zionism is typically the gateway drug for Democratic would-be reformers. Once they've swallowed that fundamental poison, the DNC feels secure it's just a matter of time before they Get With the Program 100%. Given that "Harvard" and "phony" are largely synonymous, what else could've been expected? ..."
Reiterates Her Neoconservative Policies Against Venezuela
Elizabeth Warren repeated her support for regime change in Venezuela in an interview in September with the
Council on Foreign Relations , a central gear in the machinery
of the military-industrial complex. "Maduro is a dictator and a crook who has wrecked his country's economy, dismantled its democratic
institutions, and profited while his people suffer," Warren declared. She referred to Maduro's elected government as a "regime" and
called for "supporting regional efforts to negotiate a political transition." Echoing the rhetoric of neoconservatives in Washington,
Warren called for "contain[ing]" the supposedly "damaging and destabilizing actions" of China, Russia, and Cuba. The only point where
Warren diverged with Trump was on her insistence that "there is no U.S. military option in Venezuela."
Soft-Pedals Far-Right Coup in Bolivia
While Warren endorsed Trump's hybrid war on Venezuela, she more recently whitewashed the U.S.-backed coup in Bolivia.
Warren refused to comment on the putsch for more than a week, even as the far-right military junta massacred dozens of protesters
and systematically purged and detained elected left-wing politicians from MAS.
Finally, eight days after the coup, Warren broke her silence. In a short tweet, the putative progressive presidential candidate
tepidly requested "free and fair elections" and calling on the "interim leadership" to prepare an "early, legitimate election."
What Warren did not mention is that this "interim leadership" she helped legitimize is headed by an extreme right-wing Christian
fundamentalist, the unelected "interim president"
Jeanine Añez. Añez has referred
to Bolivia's majority-Indigenous population as "satanic" and immediately moved to try to overturn the country's progressive constitution,
which had established an inclusive, secular, plurinational state after receiving an overwhelming democratic mandate in a 2009 referendum.
Añez's ally in this coup regime's interim leadership is
Luis Fernando
Camacho , a multi-millionaire who emerged out of neo-fascist groups and courted support from the United States and the far-right
governments of Brazil and Colombia. By granting legitimacy to Bolilvia's ultra-conservative, unelected leadership, Warren rubber-stamped
the far-right coup and the military junta's attempt to stamp out Bolivia's progressive democracy. In other words, as The Grayzone
editor Max Blumenthal put it, Liz's
Big Structural Bailey compliantly rolled over for
Big IMF Structural Adjustment Program
.
Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone , and the producer of the "
Moderate Rebels " podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His
website is BenNorton.com , and he tweets at @
BenjaminNorton .
A vote for evil is never a good choice, and choosing a candidate you perceive as a lesser evil still condones evil. Allowing
the Oligarchy to limit your choice gives them the power to continue advancing evil policies. They control both major parties.
You may succeed in getting non-gender specific restrooms in your Starbucks, but the murdering war machine will continue unabated.
Now, we are seeing the true colors of candidates, who have professed to be progressive. Sanders went on a "tirade" against
Maduro during the last "debate" I saw. Tulsi Gabbard has stayed against US Imperialism, but, I'm sure the Democratic policy controllers
will never nominate her. I foresee I'll be voting for the Socialist next year.
Raymond M. , November 22, 2019 at 18:09
""""On Nov. 10, the U.S. government backed a far-right military coup against Bolivia's democratically elected President Evo
Morales bla blla bla".
And the 3 right wing candidates spent more time slinging mud at at each other than at Morales. Had the CIAs top front man Ortez stepped aside, the vote would not have split and allowed Morales to claim a first round victory and avoid
a run-off that he would have lost. And the right wing Christian fundamentalist for sure was a CIA plant who manged to split the
vote further.
Under the Trump administration, the CIA can even run a coup right.
If only those anti-Western rulers seen the light and joined RBWO (rule* based world order, * rules decided in DC, preferably
by bipartisan consensus), then the economy would run smoothly and the population would be happy. Every week gives another example:
By The Associated Press, Nov. 21, 2019, BOGOTA, Colombia
Colombians angry with President Iván Duque and hoping to channel Latin America's wave of discontent took the streets by the tens
of thousands on Thursday in one of the biggest protests in the nation's recent history. [ ] Police estimated 207,000 people took
part. [ ] government deployed 170,000 officers, closed border crossings and deported 24 Venezuelans accused of entering the country
to instigate unrest.
So if only Iván did not start unnecessary conflict with Maduro, these 24 scoundrels would stay home and the trouble would be
avoided. Oh wait, I got confused
CitizenOne , November 21, 2019 at 22:10
You must imagine that when candidtes suddenly become mind control puppets what is going on. The scariest thing in American
Politics is how supposedly independent and liberal progressives somehow swallow the red pill and are transported into the world
of make believe. Once inside the bubble of fiction far removed from human suffering which is after all what politicians are supposed
to be about fixing they can say crazy things. Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump are the only souls to retain their independent (yet
opposite) minds and both of them got the boot for being different.
Hide Behind , November 21, 2019 at 20:44
The puppet masters are experts, on the one hand there is A Republican, and on the other is a Democrat, but even they mess up
now and then get the different strings tangled.
Some come back on stage on the different hand so to save time they give a puppet two faces.
Watching same puppets gets old so every so often 2-4-6 they restring an old one that was used as props in past, change their makeup
a bit to give them new faces.
We do not actually elect the puppet, we instead legitimize the Puppeteers who own' s the only stage in town.
Those who choreograph the movements and change the backgrouds, media outlets and permanent bureaucrats know the plays before they
are introduced, and they know best how to get adults to leave reality behind and bring back their childhood fantacies.
Days of sugar plums, candy canes, socks filled with goodies and not coal, tooth fairys, and kind generous Fairy God Mothers.
Toy Nutcracker soldiers that turn into Angelic heros, Yellow brick roads, Bunnies with pocket watches, and and magic shoes of
red, or of glass in hand of handsome Princes and beautiful Princesses, all available if we vote.
So who votes, only those who control the voting puppets know that reality does not exist, they twitch we react, and at end of
voting counts one of hand's puppets will slump and cry, while others will leap and dance in joy, only for all to end up in one
pile until the puppeteers need them for next act.
Frederike , November 21, 2019 at 17:30
"What Warren did not mention is that this "interim leadership" she helped legitimize is headed by an extreme right-wing Christian
fundamentalist, the unelected "interim president" Jeanine Añez.
Añez has referred to Bolivia's majority-Indigenous population as "satanic" and immediately moved to try to overturn the country's
progressive constitution, which had established an inclusive, secular, plurinational state after receiving an overwhelming democratic
mandate in a 2009 referendum."
Doesn't Warren claim to have indigenous ancestors herself and was proud of it? She caused Trump to call her "Pocahontas"?
She agrees to support the unelected interim president Jeannine Añez, who refers to indigenous inhabitants as satanic?
Warren is a very horrible person, inhumane, amoral, and rather stupid overall, who wants to get rich.
Everything she agreed to in the interview listed above is pathetic. I had no idea that she is such a worthless individual.
arggo , November 22, 2019 at 19:57
"neocon" explains this. She seems to have the support of very foundational structures that enabled Hillary Clinton Democrats to attack
and destroy Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Warren has not lost my vote for the simple reason she never had it in the first place. None of this, sickening as it is, comes
as any surprise. Warren is an unapologetic capitalist. She's like Robert Reich in that regard. They both believe capitalism–if
reformed, tweaked a bit here and there–can work. To give her credit, she's always been very honest about that. And of course our
doctrine of regime change is all in the service of capitalism. Unless I'm simply confused and mistaken.
Sherwood Forrest , November 22, 2019 at 09:38
Yes, Capitalist First! That makes it so difficult for any aware person to believe she sincerely supports a wealth tax, Universal
Healthcare, Green New Deal, College loan forgiveness, family leave or anything else the 1% oppose. Because promising like Santa
is part of Capitalist politics, and then saying," Nah, we can't afford it."
I personally think that capitalism with "human face" and robust public sector is the way to go. But imperialist imposition
and aggression is not the part of "human face" that I imagine.
So Warren's imperialist positions are evil and unnecessary to preserve capitalism, how that projects at her as a person it
is hard to tell. A Polish poet has those words spoken by a character in his drama "On that, I know only what I heard, but I am
afraid to investigate because it poisons my mind about " (Znam to tylko z opowiada?, ale strzeg? si? tych bada?, bo mi truj? my?l
o ) As typical of hearsay, her concept of events in Venezuela, Bolivia etc. is quite garbled, she has no time (but perhaps some
fear) to investigate herself (easy in the era of internet). A serious politician has to think a lot about electability (and less
about the folks under the steam roller of the Empire), so she has to "pick her fights".
It is rather clear that American do not care if people south of the border are governed democratically or competently, which
led Hillary Clinton to make this emphatic statement in a debate with Trump "You will not see me singing praises of dictators or
strongmen who do not love America". One can deconstruct it "if you do not love America you are a strongman or worse, but if you
love America, we will be nice to you". I would love to have the original and deconstructed statement polled, but Warren is not
the only one afraid of such investigations. So "electability" connection to green light to Bolivian fascist and red light to Bolivarians
of Venezuela is a bit indirect. Part of it is funding, part, bad press.
brett , November 21, 2019 at 15:15
I'm sorry but you all need to come to terms with the farce that is the American political system. Anyone who was supporting
Warren or even considering voting for her for ANY reason is apparently either in denial or is being duped. Warren is a Madison
Avenue creation packaged for US liberal consumption.
She is a fraud and a liar. One trained in psychology can see, in her every
movement and utterance, the operation that is going on behind the facade. Everything Warren says is a lie to someone. She only
states truth in order to later dis-inform. Classic deception. She (her billionaires) has latched on to the populism of the DSA
etc. in order to sabotage any progressive momentum and drive a stake in it.
Rob Roy , November 22, 2019 at 00:40
She hangs out with Hillary Clinton and Madeline Albright, two evil women if ever there were. Now they make the three witches
brewing one coup/regime change after another. She's not smart enough to see that HRC and MA are leading her around by her nose.
People should call out this phoney everywhere she goes. BTW, Rachel Maddow completes an odious clique.
This is a bit of exaggeration. The three ladies are more like good students, they did not write the textbook but they good
grades for answering as written, or like cheerleaders, they jump and shout but they do not play in the field. Mind you, "interagency
consensus" was formed without them.
Peter in Seattle , November 21, 2019 at 14:53
The DNC's strategy for this election is to ensure that Bernie doesn't go into the Convention with enough delegates to win the
first ballot. (Once voting goes past the first ballot, super-delegates get to weigh in and help anoint a candidate who's friendly
to the Party's plutocratic-oligarch principals.)
That's the reason the DNC is allowing and encouraging so many candidates to run.
Warren's specific assignment is to cannibalize Bernie's base and steal delegates that would otherwise be his, by pretending to
espouse most of his platform with only minor tweaks. She's been successful with "better educated," higher-income liberal Democrats
who consider themselves well informed because they get their news from "respectable" sources -- sources that, unbeknownst to their
target audiences, invariably represent the viewpoint of the aforementioned plutocratic oligarchs.
Absolutely nothing in Warren's background supports her new calculatedly progressive primary persona. She was a Reagan
Republican. When the Republican Party moved right to become the party of batshit crazy and the Democratic Party shifted right
to become the party of Reagan Republicans, she became a Democrat. She's not a good actress, and it takes willing suspension of
disbelief to buy into her performance as a savvier, wonkier alternative to Bernie. And when she's pressed for details (Medicare
for All) and responses to crises (Venezuela and Bolivia), the cracks in her progressive façade become patently obvious. She's
a sleeper agent for Democratic-leaning plutocrats, like Obama was in 2008, and she would never get my vote.
PS: Impressed by Warren's progressive wealth-tax plan? Don't be. Our country's billionaires know she won't fight for it, and
that if she did, Congress would never pass it. (They know who owns Congress.) Besides, do you really think Pocahontas would
beat Trump? Do you think Sleepy Joe would? The billionaires wouldn't bet on it. And they're fine with that. Sure, they'd like
someone who's more thoroughly corporatist on trade and more committed to hot régime-change wars than Trump is, but they can live
just fine with low-tax, low-regulation Trump. It's the prospect of a Bernie presidency that keeps them up at night
and their proxies in the Democratic Party and allied media are doing everything they can to neutralize that threat.
mbob , November 21, 2019 at 18:13
@Peter
Thanks for this beautiful post. I agree with it 100%. I've been trying to figure out why Democrats are so consistently unable
to see through rhetoric and fall for what candidates pretend to be. Part of it is wishful thinking. A lot of it is, as you wrote,
misplaced trust in "respectable" sources. I have no idea how to fix that: how does one engender the proper skepticism of the MSM?
I haven't been able to open the eyes of any of my friends. (Fortunately my wife and daughter opened their own eyes.)
Warren is, if you look clearly, driven by her enormous ambition. She's the same as every other candidate in that regard, save
Bernie.
Bernie is driven by the same outrage that we feel. We need him.
In the last Israeli massacre on Gaza she was all for the IDF killing Palistinians. Americans like to look at the CCP and cry
about China being a one party state. Well is the US not a one party state?= Are the views of the Democrats and Republicans not
the same when it comes to slaughtering people in the third world? There is not a razor`s edge between them. Biden, Warren, Sanders,
Trump, Cruz and Pense they are all war criminals, or if elected will soon become war criminals.
From someone who at the beginning showed promise and humanity, she has turned into Albright and Clinton. How f**king sad is
that?
Dan Kuhn , November 21, 2019 at 14:33
Better to see her for what she really is now then after the election if she were to win. She is disgusting in her inhumanity.
Rob , November 21, 2019 at 13:43
This Is, indeed, disturbing and disappointing. Warren seems so genuinely right on domestic economic and social issues, so how
could she be so wrong on foreign policy issues? The same principles apply in both–justice, fairness, equity, etc. That said, she
is no worse than any of the other Democratic candidates in that regard, with the exceptions of Sanders and Gabbard, so if Warren
becomes the nominee, I will support her over Trump. It's a lesser of two evils choice, but we must recognize that no candidate
will be perfect–ever.
Far better to stick to your principles and write in " None of the above." believe me with this article we can easily see that
Trump is no worse nor better than Warren is. They are both pretty poor excuses as human beings.
Peter in Seattle , November 21, 2019 at 16:04
@Rob:
If you'll allow me to fix that for you, "What Warren tactically claims to support, in the primaries, seems so genuinely
right on domestic economic and social issues ." I'm convinced Warren is an Obama 2.0 in the making. I don't think anyone
can match Obama's near-180° turnabout from his 2008 primary platform and that if Warren is elected, she will try to make Wall
Street a little more honest and stable, maybe advocate for a $12 minimum wage, and maybe try to shave a few thousand dollars off
student-loan debts. I suppose that technically qualifies as less evil than Trump. But I fully expect her to jettison 90% of her
primary platform, including a progressive tax on wealth and Medicare for All. And when you factor in her recently confirmed approval
of US military and financial imperialism -- economic subversion and régime-change operations that cost tens of thousands of innocent
foreign lives, and other peoples their sovereignty -- at what point does "less evil" become too evil to vote for?
John Drake , November 21, 2019 at 13:13
" presidential candidate tepidly requested "free and fair elections". Such a statement ignores the fact that Evo Morales term
was not up; therefore elections are not called for. This means she supports the coup. Restoration of his position which was illegally
and violently stolen from him are in order not elections until his term is up.
Her position on Venezuela is nauseating; as the article states classic neo-conservative. Maybe Robert Kagan will welcome her into
their club as he did with Hillary.
Warren used to be a Republican, she has not been cured of that disease; and is showing her true colors. Maybe it's best as she
is differentiating herself from Bernie. I was concerned before she started down this latest path that she would do an Obama; progressive
rhetoric followed by neo-liberal-or worse- behavior once in office. Maybe she is more honest than Obama.
Guy , November 21, 2019 at 12:40
Warren can't be very informed about what democracy actually means .Democracy is not the same as capitalism .
Not a US citizen but am very disappointed with her stated platform .
Short of divine intervention Tulsi will never make it but Sanders for president and Tulsi as VP would do just fine to re-direct
the US foreign policy and maybe ,just maybe make the US more respectable among the rest of the nations of the world.
It would make a lot of sense from actuarial point of view. The chances that at least one person on the ticket would live healthily
for 8 years would be very good, without Tulsi
Punkyboy , November 21, 2019 at 12:02
I was pretty sure Warren was a Hillary clone; now I'm absolutely sure of it. Another election between worse and worser. I may
just stay home this time, if the world holds together that long.
Socratic Truth , November 21, 2019 at 11:42
Warren is just another puppet of the NWO.
Ma Laoshi , November 21, 2019 at 11:12
I remember years and years ago, I guess about when Lizzie first entered Congress, that she went on the standard pandering tour
to the Motherland and an astute mind commented: Zionism is typically the gateway drug for Democratic would-be reformers. Once
they've swallowed that fundamental poison, the DNC feels secure it's just a matter of time before they Get With the Program 100%.
Given that "Harvard" and "phony" are largely synonymous, what else could've been expected?
Peter in Seattle , November 21, 2019 at 15:32
@Ma Laoshi:
Speaking of Harvard, having contemplated the abysmal track record compiled by our "best and brightest" -- in Congress,
in the White House, and on the federal bench -- I am now almost as suspicious of the Ivy League as I am of the Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security (WHINSEC, formerly known as the School of the Americas). The mission of both is to train capable,
reliable, well-compensated servants to the US plutocracy. (And the only reason I say "almost" is because a non-negligible number
of black sheep have come out of the Ivy League and I'm not aware of any that have come out of WHINSEC.)
Sam F , November 23, 2019 at 18:59
Harvard admissions are apparently largely bought, and doubtless those of Yale and others.
MIT was strictly militarist warmongers in the 1970s, and one compete with 80% cheaters.
Dfnslblty , November 21, 2019 at 11:12
" The only point where Warren diverged with Trump was on her insistence that "there is no U.S. military option in Venezuela."
"
Hell, one doesn't need a military option after immoral, illegal and crippling sanctions.
This essay is the most disturbing piece all year-2019.
Vote anti-military – vote nonviolence.
Don't give these murderers anything but exposure to humane sensibilities.
I didn't think Trump supported a military solution in Venezuela. That was John Bolton's baby and Trump fired him as one would
hope he would soon fire Pompeo as has been hinted at. Trump campaigned on ending wars of choice but has given in to the MIC at
almost every turn. Maybe he will resign in leiu of being impeached. We might then see a Rand Paul vs. Bernie Sanders. I could
live with either one
Skip Scott , November 21, 2019 at 09:12
Once again the Democratic Party is pushing to have our choice for 2020 be between corporate sponsored war monger from column
A or B.
I wish Tulsi would "see the light" and run as an Independent in 2020. There is absolutely no way that she gets the nod from
the utterly corrupt DNC. She is abandoning her largest base (Independents) by sticking with the Democratic Party. Considering
the number of disgruntled non-voters, she could easily win the general election; but she will never win the Democratic primary.
The field is purposely flooded to ensure the "superdelegates" get the final say on a second ballot.
AnneR , November 21, 2019 at 08:50
Warren is as inhumane, amoral and imperialist as anyone in the WH and the US Congress, and she is certainly kindred in spirit,
thought and would be in deed, as Madeline Albright, the cheerful slaughterer of some 500,000 Iraqi children because the "price
was worth it." Of course, these utterly racist, amoral people do not have to pay "that price" nor do any of their families. (And
let us not forget that Albright and Killary are good friends – Warren is totally kindred with the pair, totally.)
And clearly Warren – like all of the Demrat contenders – is full on for any kind of warfare that will bring a "recalcitrant"
country into line with US demands (on its resources, lands etc.). She is grotesque.
She and those of her ilk – all in Congress, pretty much, and their financial backers – refuse to accept that Maduro and Morales
*both* were legally, legitimately and cleanly re-elected to their positions as presidents of their respective countries. But to
do that would be to go against her (commonly held) fundamental belief that the US has the right to decide who is and is not the
legitimate national leader of any given country. And what policies they institute.
Anyone who supports economic sanctions is supporting siege warfare, is happily supporting the starvation and deprivation of
potentially millions of people. And shrugging off the blame for the effects of the sanctions onto the government of the sanctioned
country is heinous, is immoral and unethical. WE are the ones who are killing, not the government under extreme pressure. If you
can't, won't accept the responsibility – as Warren and the rest of the US government clearly will not – for those deaths you are
causing, then stay out of the bloody kitchen: stop committing these crimes against humanity.
Cara , November 21, 2019 at 15:25
Please provide documentation that Sanders is, as you claim, a "full-on zionist supporter of "Israel" and clearly anti-Palestinian."
Sanders has been quite consistent in his criticism of Israel and the treatment of Palestinians: timesofisrael.com/bernie-sanders-posts-video-citing-apartheid-like-conditions-for-palestinians;
and; jacobinmag.com/2019/07/bernie-sanders-israel-palestine-bds
"Sanders is less so, but not wholly because he is a full-on zionist supporter of "Israel" and clearly anti-Palestinian"
Sanders is definitely not "full-on zionist supporter", not only he does not deny that "Palestinians exist" (to died-in-the-wool
Zionists, Palestinians are a malicious fiction created to smear Israel etc., google "Fakestinians"), but he claims that they have
rights, and using Hamas as a pretext for Gaza blockade is inhumane (a recent headline). One can pull his other positions and statements
to argue in the other direction, but in my opinion, he is at the extreme humane end of "zionist spectrum" (I mean, so humane that
almost not a Zionist).
Ray raised interesting question: was Fiona Hill on the list on Brennan experts who created 17 intelligence agencies.
Notable quotes:
"... Fiona Hill's "Russian-expert" testimony Thursday and her deposition on Oct. 14 to the impeachment inquiry showed that her antennae are acutely tuned to what Russian intelligence services may be up to but, sadly, also displayed a striking naiveté about the machinations of U.S. intelligence. ..."
"... Hill's education on Russia came at the knee of the late Professor Richard Pipes, her Harvard mentor and archdeacon of Russophobia. I do not dispute her sincerity in attributing all manner of evil to what President Ronald Reagan called the "Evil Empire." But, like so many other glib "Russia experts" with access to Establishment media, she seems three decades out of date. ..."
"... I have been studying the U.S.S.R. and Russia for twice as long as Hill, was chief of CIA's Soviet Foreign Policy Branch during the 1970s, and watched the "Evil Empire" fall apart. She seems to have missed the falling apart part. ..."
"... Hill has been conditioned to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin and especially his security services are capable of anything, and thus sees a Russian under every rock -- as we used to say of smart know-nothings like former CIA Director William Casey and the malleable "Soviet experts" who bubbled up to the top during his reign (1981 – 1987). Recall that at the very first meeting of Reagan's cabinet, Casey openly told the president and other cabinet officials: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." Were Casey still alive, he would be very pleased and proud of Hill's performance. ..."
"... "The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified." [Emphasis added.] ..."
"... A modicum of intellectual curiosity and rudimentary due diligence would have prompted her to look into who was in charge of preparing the (misnomered) "Intelligence Community Assessment" published on Jan. 6, 2017, which provided the lusted-after fodder for the "mainstream" media and others wanting to blame Hillary Clinton's defeat on the Russians. ..."
"... President Barack Obama gave the task to his National Intelligence Director James Clapper, whom he had allowed to stay in that job for three and a half years after he had to apologize to Congress for what he later admitted was a "clearly erroneous" response, under oath, to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) on NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens. ..."
"... Just eight weeks after she joined the National Security Council staff, Clapper, during an NBC interview on May 28, 2017, recalled "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique." Later he added, "It's in their DNA." Clapper has claimed that "what the Russians did had a profound impact on the outcome of the election." ..."
"... As for the "Intelligence Community Assessment," the banner headline atop The New York Times on Jan. 7, 2017 set the tone for the next couple of years: "Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says." During my career as a CIA analyst, as deputy national intelligence officer chairing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), and working on the Intelligence Production Review Board, I had not seen so shabby a piece of faux analysis as the ICA. The writers themselves seemed to be holding their noses. They saw fit to embed in the ICA itself this derriere-covering note : "High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong ..."
"... "According to several current and former intelligence officers who must remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue," as the Times says when it prints made-up stuff, there were only two "handpicked analysts." Clapper picked Brennan; and Brennan picked Clapper. That would help explain the grossly subpar quality of the ICA. ..."
"... The general problem IMHO, to state obvious, is that there is no truth in the public discourse, only lies which support the narrative. And there is no penalty for the continuous lies, certainly not from what is called the press these days. ..."
"... I remember Phil Giraldi's comment months ago. He had worked for the CIA and now heads the Council for the National interest. He noted his surprise at how many within the CIA still clung to the cold war view of the Russians, ready to accept almost anything bad about the evil Russians. ..."
"... And it does seem the Russian haters still are living in the past and many have a huge impact on public policy and public opinion. It is a very dangerous affliction for the rest of the world. ..."
"... The greatest nation ever's permanent war system requires much deception & permanent enemies to keep the our economy going strong & the people distracted from the real issues. If everyone knew the truth, the world's biggest racket ever would fall apart and world peace would break out. ..."
"... American "intelligence" agencies will do exactly what "intelligence" agencies have done since time immemorial – they will perpetuate their position and power. The fact that that strips you of some of your freedom is a feature, not a bug. ..."
"... Hill's career advancement and access to the MSM depends on her faith in our "intelligence" agencies. And I doubt very much that Durham will be allowed to do his job probing the origins of RussiaGate. The evil ones will stop at nothing to keep control of the narrative. ..."
"... "It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled." Mark Twain ..."
Like so many other glib "Russia experts" with access to Establishment media, Fiona Hill, who
testified Thursday in the impeachment probe, seems three decades out of date.
Special to Consortium News
Fiona Hill's "Russian-expert" testimony Thursday and her deposition
on Oct. 14 to the impeachment inquiry showed that her antennae are acutely tuned to what
Russian intelligence services may be up to but, sadly, also displayed a striking naiveté
about the machinations of U.S. intelligence.
Hill's education on Russia came at the knee of the late Professor Richard Pipes, her Harvard
mentor and archdeacon of Russophobia. I do not dispute her sincerity in attributing all manner
of evil to what President Ronald Reagan called the "Evil Empire." But, like so many other glib
"Russia experts" with access to Establishment media, she seems three decades out of date.
I have been studying the U.S.S.R. and Russia for twice as long as Hill, was chief of CIA's
Soviet Foreign Policy Branch during the 1970s, and watched the "Evil Empire" fall apart. She
seems to have missed the falling apart part.
Selective Suspicion
Are the Russian intelligence services still very active? Of course. But there is no evidence
-- other than Hill's bias -- for her extraordinary claim that they were behind the infamous
"Steele Dossier," for example, or that they were the prime mover of Ukraine-gate in an attempt
to shift the blame for Russian "meddling" in the 2016 U.S. election onto Ukraine. In recent
weeks U.S. intelligence officials were spreading this same tale,
lapped up and faithfully reported Friday by The New York Times.
Hill has been conditioned to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin and especially his
security services are capable of anything, and thus sees a Russian under every rock -- as we
used to say of smart know-nothings like former CIA Director William Casey and the malleable
"Soviet experts" who bubbled up to the top during his reign (1981 – 1987). Recall that at
the very first meeting of Reagan's cabinet, Casey openly told the president and other
cabinet officials: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the
American public believes is false." Were Casey still alive, he would be very pleased and proud
of Hill's performance.
Beyond Dispute?
On Thursday Hill testified:
"The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our
democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence
agencies, confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some
of the underlying details must remain classified." [Emphasis added.]
Ah, yes. "The public conclusion of our intelligence agencies": the same ones who reported
that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would never surrender power peaceably; the same
ones who told Secretary of State Colin Powell he could assure the UN Security Council that the
WMD evidence given him by our intelligence agencies was "irrefutable and undeniable." Only
Richard-Pipeline-type Russophobia can account for the blinders on someone as smart as Hill and
prompt her to take as gospel "the public conclusions of our intelligence agencies."
A modicum of intellectual curiosity and rudimentary due diligence would have prompted her to
look into who was in charge of preparing the (misnomered) "Intelligence Community Assessment"
published on Jan. 6, 2017, which provided the lusted-after fodder for the "mainstream" media
and others wanting to blame Hillary Clinton's defeat on the Russians.
Jim, Do a Job on the Russians
President Barack Obama with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, 2011. (White
House/ Pete Souza)
President Barack Obama gave the task to his National Intelligence Director James Clapper,
whom he had allowed to stay in that job for three and a half years after he had to apologize to
Congress for what he later admitted was a "clearly erroneous" response, under oath, to a
question from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) on NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens.
And when Clapper
published his memoir last year, Hill would have learned that, as Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's handpicked appointee to run satellite imagery analysis, Clapper places the blame for
the consequential "failure" to find the (non-existent) WMD "where it belongs -- squarely on the
shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in
Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found
what wasn't really there." [Emphasis added.]
But for Hill, Clapper was a kindred soul: Just eight weeks after she joined the National
Security Council staff, Clapper, during an NBC interview on May 28, 2017, recalled "the
historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt,
penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique." Later he added, "It's
in their DNA." Clapper has claimed that "what the Russians did had a profound impact on the
outcome of the election."
As for the "Intelligence Community Assessment," the banner headline atop The New York
Times on Jan. 7, 2017 set the tone for the next couple of years: "Putin Led Scheme to Aid
Trump, Report Says." During my career as a CIA analyst, as deputy national intelligence officer
chairing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), and working on the Intelligence Production
Review Board, I had not seen so shabby a piece of faux analysis as the ICA. The writers
themselves seemed to be holding their noses. They saw fit to embed in the ICA itself this
derriere-covering
note : "High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a
certainty; such judgments might be wrong."
Not a Problem
With the help of the Establishment media, Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan, were able
to pretend that the ICA had been approved by "all 17 intelligence agencies" (as first claimed
by Clinton, with Rep. Jim Himes, D-CT, repeating that canard Thursday, alas "without
objection)." Himes, too should do his homework. The bogus "all 17 intelligence agencies" claim
lasted only a few months before Clapper decided to fess up. With striking naiveté,
Clapper asserted that ICA preparers were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA and NSA.
The criteria Clapper et al. used are not hard to divine. In government as in industry, when you
can handpick the analysts, you can handpick the conclusions.
Maybe a Problem After All
"According to several current and former intelligence officers who must remain anonymous
because of the sensitivity of the issue," as the Times says when it prints made-up
stuff, there were only two "handpicked analysts." Clapper picked Brennan; and Brennan picked
Clapper. That would help explain the grossly subpar quality of the ICA.
If U.S. Attorney John Durham is allowed to do his job probing the origins of Russiagate, and
succeeds in getting access to the "handpicked analysts" -- whether there were just two, or more
-- Hill's faith in "our intelligence agencies," may well be dented if not altogether
shattered.
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word , a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Saviour in inner-city Washington. After earning an M.A. in Russian Studies and serving as
an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer, he worked as a CIA analyst, then branch chief, of Soviet
foreign policy; then as a Deputy National Intelligence Officer, and finally as a morning
briefer of the President's Daily Brief .
The general problem IMHO, to state obvious, is that there is no truth in the public
discourse, only lies which support the narrative. And there is no penalty for the continuous
lies, certainly not from what is called the press these days.
Great takedown Ray I managed a few minutes listening to her bloviation, even that was too
much! Fascists always need an enemy even if they have to fictionalize one.
I remember Phil Giraldi's comment months ago. He had worked for the CIA and now heads the
Council for the National interest. He noted his surprise at how many within the CIA still
clung to the cold war view of the Russians, ready to accept almost anything bad about the
evil Russians. Given the history since the dissolution of the USSR, it surprised Mister
Giraldi as I recall. And it does seem the Russian haters still are living in the past and
many have a huge impact on public policy and public opinion. It is a very dangerous
affliction for the rest of the world.
Hard to forget Mueller (not a spook) when he announced that there was no collusion but
vehemently stated that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election and are a threat to
do so in the future. That Russian might have interfered is not surprising since others
countries do it far more and more effectively. That we do it far, far more often would seem
to put a damper on the Russian narrative but it doesn't because the whole thing about Russia
is crazy.
Another John , November 22, 2019 at 20:27
The greatest nation ever's permanent war system requires much deception & permanent
enemies to keep the our economy going strong & the people distracted from the real
issues. If everyone knew the truth, the world's biggest racket ever would fall apart and
world peace would break out.
Jeff Harrison , November 22, 2019 at 20:08
American "intelligence" agencies will do exactly what "intelligence" agencies have done
since time immemorial – they will perpetuate their position and power. The fact that
that strips you of some of your freedom is a feature, not a bug.
Skip Scott , November 22, 2019 at 17:44
Hill's career advancement and access to the MSM depends on her faith in our "intelligence"
agencies. And I doubt very much that Durham will be allowed to do his job probing the origins
of RussiaGate. The evil ones will stop at nothing to keep control of the narrative.
"It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled." Mark Twain
Just as important, where is the proof the Russians hacked the DNC computers (hat tip always
to LJ) - since Roger Stone was banned from getting this information by the judge who just
sent him away for life.
CROWDSTRIKE's role in the Democrat impeachment smokescreen needs to keep moving forward
because, it is not going away. Democrats refusal to even mention it, let alone their
obsession trying to relentless label nameless CROWDSTRIKE as a loony, right wing conspiracy
theory simply does not pass the smell test.
Particularly since Schiff does his very best to deep six even mention of Trump's requested
Ukraine CROWDSTRIKE investigation. https://illicitinfo.com/?p=13576
Deep state CROWDSTRIKE collusion is starting to walk like a duck, quack like a duck and
look like a duck.
"The ICA's blockbuster finding was presented to the public as the consensus view of the
nation's intelligence community. As events have unfolded, however, it now seems apparent that
the report was largely the work of one agency, the CIA, and overseen by one man, then-Director
John Brennan, who closely directed its drafting and publication with a small group of
hand-picked analysts.
Nearly three years later, as the public awaits answers from two Justice Department inquiries
into the Trump-Russia probe's origins, and as impeachment hearings catalyzed by a Brennan-hired
anti-Trump CIA analyst unfold in Congress, it is clear that Brennan's role in propagating the
collusion narrative went far beyond his work on the ICA. A close review of facts that have
slowly come to light reveals that he was a central architect and promoter of the conspiracy
theory from its inception. The record shows that:
Contrary to a general impression that the FBI launched the Trump-Russia conspiracy probe,
Brennan pushed it to the bureau – breaking with CIA tradition by intruding into
domestic politics: the 2016 presidential election. He also supplied suggestive but ultimately
false information to counterintelligence investigators and other U.S. officials.
Leveraging his close proximity to President Obama, Brennan sounded the alarm about
alleged Russian interference to the White House, and was tasked with managing the U.S.
intelligence community's response.
While some FBI officials expressed skepticism about the Trump/Russia narrative as they
hunted down investigative leads, Brennan stood out for insisting on its veracity.
To substantiate his claims, Brennan relied on a Kremlin informant who was later found to
be a mid-level official with limited access to Putin's inner circle.
Circumventing normal protocol for congressional briefings, Brennan supplied then-Senate
Minority Leader Harry Reid with incendiary Trump-Russia innuendo that Reid amplified in a
pair of public letters late in the election campaign.
After Trump's unexpected victory, Brennan oversaw the hasty production of the tenuous
Intelligence Community Assessment.
Departing from his predecessors' usual practice of staying above the political fray after
leaving office, Brennan has worked as a prominent analyst for MSNBC, where he has used his
authority as a former guardian of the nation's top secrets to launch vitriolic attacks on a
sitting president, accusing Trump of "treasonous" conduct."
realclearinvestigations
----------------
I know that Horowitz can't indict but he can forward recommendations to a prosecutor with
indictment authority. Would a Grand Jury in the Democratic Party stronghold of Washington, DC
actually indict Obama era conspirators? I doubt it.
The process should be moved to other venues.
I have a side bet with a friend. I no longer believe that the duopoly of parties in the US
will indict anyone over the matter of this article.
Here are transcripts by NSC personal where LTC Vindman 'judgement' is seriously
questioned. Was Vindman the NSC unauthorized/illegal leak? Will DoD take appropriate UCMJ
action against Vindman?
They sure got Flynn Cohen Manifort and Stone quickly.Giuliani associates were indicted to
open up another front.
Pity people that desperately need to be held accountable wil not be so.
That is how the rule of law fails.
Sorry to post twice, but, on a related note, George Elliason appears to show that the
so-called whistleblower inside information, upon which the impeachment is progressing, is
based on not even hearsay, but a Tweet:
Well, I am certainly saddened by this state of affairs.
It appears that the barn doors have been left totally opened for a complete free for all
for anyone who wants to to and has the money, the un-elected position, and the friends to
take over the workings of the U.S. government. Rule of law and rule of reason be damned.
Let's hope that by some miracle this coming election will be such that the people
recognize what has happened and will provide a strong message to those who feel they have a
right to rule from the offices of their unelected positions.
It'd sure be nice if we could get some MAGA candidates for congress going. Right now, Trump's
all alone in Washington; not much hope of getting any part of his agenda passed.
Any GOP candidate facing down the well-honed Democrat mean machine is a daunting prospect.
The well-calculated legacy of the Democrat ginned-up Kavanaugh hearings - we will do and
say anything to smear you, taint you and bring you down. Don't even think of going against us
because we will do the exact same thing to anyone Trump wants to bring on, or run in support
of his administration.
We see the Democrat mean machine in action a lot in California to the point we now have
increasingly "bye elections" where there is no opposition so the candidate does not even have
to face the voters and risk even a write-in opposition vote.
The system is rigged to quickly become a one-party hegemony. They say trends start in
California, so beware of the tricks they pulled out here and got away with it:
(1) term limits;
(2) jungle primaries;
(3) district elections and mandatory protected minority-majority districts;
(4) counting illegals as district resident numbers;
(5) bye election not facing a ballot;
(6) vote by mail lengthening the campaign season beyond all human endurance;
(7) vote- harvesting;
(8) same day voter registration;
(9) outlawing voter ID..
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
.........
"A former top White House Russia expert testified Thursday that the 'fictional narrative'
embraced by President Donald Trump that Ukraine meddled in the US elections was fabricated by
Russia to wreak havoc in US politics."
So reports one of NATO's BigLie Media outlets. FYI, as I wrote in 2016, no outside nation
needs to "wreak havoc in US politics" as there're numerous home grown domestic sources
already doing that in an ongoing manner since the 1850s. Isn't it a felony to lie to
Congress?
"... Copeland @ 33 said; "It seems like the primary role of the investigation, so far, is to advance the national security narrative that portrays Russia as the perpetual enemy of the US." Yes, it "seems" like it, because it is. The corporate empire needs enemies to keep the $ flowing. ..."
Copeland @ 33 said; "It seems like the primary role of the investigation, so far, is
to advance the national security narrative that portrays Russia as the perpetual enemy of the
US." Yes, it "seems" like it, because it is. The corporate empire needs enemies to keep the $
flowing.
Confrontation is much more profitable than peace...
I included the following to make clear what is the above link is about..
@ Circe It would be a fair assumption that nothing on the internet is what it appears. When
it matters, it is controlled. Internet like media is source of information and manipulation.
One cannot rely on any single source. Everyone is lying much of the time. by: jared @ 55
Weapons of mass deception (WMDs)
Wireless weapons of mind control (WWMC_.
You will know when your government has begun to move in response to those that it governs
when it:==>
1. quits spying on you
2. makes infecting UR computer with spyware, malware, and viri not only criminally illegal
with 10 years automatic no early time release jail time but also makes actionable as a tort,
victim recovery from the perpetrator Jury trials to establish damages.
3. amends the constitution to make it a life time in jail offence to conduct the affairs of
government in secret or to classify any document as secret from anyone who is a citizen of
America and is also a citizen of the Untied States of America.
4. has a budget for domestic needs at least 4x the size of the armament budget.
5. transitions power generation from grid to place of use and transitions from fossil fuel,
nuclear fuel to solar and wind energy
6. gives free education and medical services at the highest level to all comers without
regard to prior qualification.
7. recognizes all people of all race and all religion as one in the same person
8. puts news fakers and propagandist under the jail
9. admits pearl harbor, 9/11 and
10. allows the masses to determine not only the candidates for offices in the USA but also
allows the masses to determine which candidate will serve the USA
11. allows any member of the governed masses to indite any sitting member of a government at
any level, in the independent of the civil government, court of human rights, and allows that
court of human rights to immediately remove the accused person from his or her position in
government until a verdict can be rendered, and if that verdict is guilty, allows to and
assist with enforcing the penalty assessed by the the human rights court for the human rights
violation while in office or as a result of the power of the office.
12. makes it illegal to be a member of government at any level if that persons holds any
citizenship but American and USA.
Just watching "the hate Russia circus" on MSM. If DJT wasn't such a greedy MF, this circus
wouldn't be going on.
Let's be clear, Russia, and every other nation on earth, has the absolute right to defend
itself, and it's people,
from being exploited by the U$A's corporate empire. The empire's record over time is
clear, if it wants something you have, they'll take it.
DJT has no problem following the empire's dictates, but when he deviates and pursues his
own personal enrichment at the expense of the empire's overall goals, things like the D.C.
circus ensues.
I'll say this again, Russia, and all countries on earth have the RIGHT to defend
themselves from our latest empires attacks, no matter in what form they appear..
Adding to his useful Russophrenia , Bryan
MacDonald has coined " Putophrenia ": "A condition
where the sufferer believes Vladimir Putin is a crazed Russian nationalist who wants to destroy
the West, and simultaneously, is, together with his cronies, robbing Russia blind & hiding
all the dosh in the same West." These two neatly point up the absurdities of the Western
propaganda line.
What I do not understand is what will DemoRats get if Senate starts the trial.
Notable quotes:
"... "The Democrats waited for better timing of blowing the allegations it came when Zelenskiy visited Washington and blew it in UN plus, met Trump. ..."
"... "Danilyuk was present at the Zelinskiy + Trump conversation, he told about the matters of the conversation to Alexander Vindman. Zelinskiy administration fired Danilyuk but is not able to fire Vindman." ..."
"... The article continues with info on Schiff's staffers meeting in Ukraine, it has the agenda, who attended, etc. There are other related articles too, worth review IMO. ..."
"... It was not clear to the negotiators what Trump actually wanted. Sondland said that at one point he called up Trump and asked an open questions: "What do you want from Ukraine?". ..."
"... According to Sondland Trump responded: "I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing." ..."
"... That Gordon Sondland and his fellow negotiators were flabbergasted that Trump did not tie money for military weapons to the Biden revelations, and that Sondland himself made the assumption that Trump would make the aid money conditional on what Ukraine could provide, might tell us more about the huckster mindset that prevails among the Washington political and bureaucratic elite than it does about Trump's own worldview and psycholoical make-up. Trump may be obsessed with making the Deal of the Century but the people surrounding him in the White House are obsessed with extracting as much blood out of a stone as they can. ..."
"... Regarding the possibility of a Senate trail, just look at the two major papers. They are pushing impeachment with all they have, including awarding sainthood to some who do not deserve it, e.g. Vindman. If the Beltway echo chamber has the desired affect, Shiff will keep things going. ..."
"... This is from Saint Marie's statement: ..."
"... "Supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing to do. If Russia prevails and Ukraine falls to Russian dominion, we can expect to see other attempts by Russia to expand its territory and influence." ..."
"... In other words, trotting out the old Dominoes Theory, first it will be Ukraine, then Belarus, Poland, the Baltics. Oh the horror! ..."
"... The impeachment hearings will never touch the basic underlying fact that Obama/Biden Administration restarted the Cold War by supporting the Maidan Coup and greenlighting the seizing of the ethnic Russian Donbass region. The trench warfare there continues to this day. ..."
"... The only conclusion is that the hatred between globalist oligarchs and nationalists is so deep and powerful that the consequences of a World War are ignored. The 2020 election is pointless. The Republic is dead. The Empire shutters from internal conflict. If the Battle of Carrhae replays once again, the war with Iran will force any survivors to retreat from the Middle East. ..."
"... Copeland @ 33 said; "It seems like the primary role of the investigation, so far, is to advance the national security narrative that portrays Russia as the perpetual enemy of the US." Yes, it "seems" like it, because it is. The corporate empire needs enemies to keep the $ flowing. ..."
This article is really helpful. https://creativedestructionmedia.com/investigations/2019/11/04
Again I have shortened the link, the article states: "Intelligence sources in Kyiv have
informed CD Media that the 'witness' narrative of LT COL Alexander Vindman was created by
corrupt U.S. State Department officials in Kyiv, Ukraine.
According to our sources, "Alexander Vindman [recent witness in favor of Trump
impeachment], Gordon Sondland [US ambassador to the EU and Trump supporter] and Oleksandr
Danilyuk [Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine from late May
until 30 September 2019 before being fired] had a meeting in July 2019. Sondland asked
Danilyuk as head of National Security Bureau of Ukraine to investigate Biden, Burisma, and
Manafort related investigations.
Apparently, Sondland didnt know that Danilyuk is Soros' agent and supplies info to
Democrats. This was the second leak to the Deep State.
The first leak was made by Danilyuk because he was the only person in the room with fluent
English when Zelenskiy and Trump had a phone call conversation. Zelenskiy speaks English on
very intermediate level, loses the context and emotional sense also, Yermak Andrei, the 2d
Advisor to Zelenskiy is, allegedly, on the hook of FSB. Thus, it was Danilyuk who passed
information to the Deep State to attack Trump.
"The Democrats waited for better timing of blowing the allegations it came when
Zelenskiy visited Washington and blew it in UN plus, met Trump.
"Danilyuk was present at the Zelinskiy + Trump conversation, he told about the matters
of the conversation to Alexander Vindman. Zelinskiy administration fired Danilyuk but is not
able to fire Vindman."
The article continues with info on Schiff's staffers meeting in Ukraine, it has the
agenda, who attended, etc. There are other related articles too, worth review IMO.
(1) b is not being clear that Sondland drew a definite line between the White House
meeting and the stalled military aid, in terms of how he thought they were linked to Zelensky
making the desired announcement of investigations: While Sondland said he merely "presumed"
the linkage to the military aid, he asserts the linkage to the White House meeting was made
explicit to him (albeit via Giuliani).
(2) The "well documented Ukraininan interference" that actually occurred (ostensible dirt
on Manafort) bears only a vague relationship to what has lodged in Trump's shriveled lima
bean brain (the DNC server spirited away to Kiev). Of course, since neither the Dems nor the
Repubs are interested in noting this fact, it will be ignored.
thanks b.... the way i see it, usa and everyone loses in the present set up.. you can't get
down and grovel in the swamp with the usa or ukraine, as youre going to get a lot of mud on
you and some of it is going to stick.. the info that comes out of the dynamic between these 2
countries is toxic, no matter which way you look... of course dems naively think they are
going to use it to get rid of trump, but they are dredging up some toxic stuff with a lot of
their own ckeletons in the closet... they are hoping none of it comes out and the focus
remains on - as @5 jackrabbit notes - trump mentioning biden and how this is not allowed.. i
can't see them gaining from this myself as the whole thing is a political theatre where we
mostly know the final outcome... and, it's not just the ammo that trump can throw out here,
but the accidental info such as what @1/2 frances points to as well... lots of ugliness can
come out of this that is going to stick on everyone...
@3 taffyboy.. that is old footage repackaged in a new link... thanks anyway.. it is fairly
clear though and something that the dems think others are going to miss or something.. i
don't get that part.. the dems want to keep the focus on how trump was going after a 2020
rival but i think once anyone starts looking at this, they are going to see a lot more then
they want to see.. mind you, maybe the usa media will be successful in guiding the narrative
for the war party which on some level seem unhappy with trump.. i don't know that it is
eroding trumps fan base though.. maybe.. but as b says - trump is a crook.. everyone knew
this before he got in power.. however, he has slowed down the military agenda some relative
to obama, which is really ironic.. i think it is because trump doesn't profit off the
military industrial complex as he does other stuff.. either way they are all first class
kleptomaniacs all vying for the front of the trough...
The negotiations around the Ukraine issues were going slow. It was not clear to the
negotiators what Trump actually wanted. Sondland said that at one point he called up Trump
and asked an open questions: "What do you want from Ukraine?".
According to Sondland Trump responded: "I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no
quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing."
Trump is a crook. It is fair to presume that he wanted his aides to use all potential
pressure points to deliver the desired results from the Ukrainians. But Trump is also a
smart enough crook to never say that.
Is it possible that, just for once, Trump really did want nothing from Zelensky other than
to find out what Joe Biden stood to gain from pressuring the Ukrainians to sack Viktor Shokin
as Prosecutor General and what Hunter Biden's role as Board Director of a shell energy
company in Ukraine really amounted to?
That Gordon Sondland and his fellow negotiators were flabbergasted that Trump did not
tie money for military weapons to the Biden revelations, and that Sondland himself made the
assumption that Trump would make the aid money conditional on what Ukraine could provide,
might tell us more about the huckster mindset that prevails among the Washington political
and bureaucratic elite than it does about Trump's own worldview and psycholoical make-up.
Trump may be obsessed with making the Deal of the Century but the people surrounding him in
the White House are obsessed with extracting as much blood out of a stone as they
can.
If this ever gets to the Senate, a full trial will result, which will cause who knows how
many skeletons fall out of various Democrat/"Resistance" closets.
What do you think the odds are that, just somehow, nothing goes to the Senate in the
end?
>Nothing goes to Senate, I bet, but also no indictments from Barr.
> How's that for a quid pro quo?
> Posted by: casey | Nov 20 2019 21:54 utc | 13
For a kleptocracy, that almost sounds like a reasonable resolution, so no, that can not be
allowed. Trump is not being a team player, plus the retreat from northern Syria under fire
from potatoes was an unforgivable humiliation. Someone must pay for that, even if it brings
down the whole rotten house, a real possibility. Trump has how many millions of Twitter
followers? If he ever calls them out to the street, even if only 1% respond, and they show up
with guns...
Trump is unpredictable and dangerous. How does one disarm a drunk with a gun at a party?
Very, very carefully. But brain-dead big-dick Dear Leaders don't do carefully. It's Obey Or
Regarding the possibility of a Senate trail, just look at the two major papers. They are
pushing impeachment with all they have, including awarding sainthood to some who do not
deserve it, e.g. Vindman. If the Beltway echo chamber has the desired affect, Shiff will keep
things going.
This is from Saint Marie's statement:
"Supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing to do. If
Russia prevails and Ukraine falls to Russian dominion, we can expect to see other attempts
by Russia to expand its territory and influence."
In other words, trotting out the old Dominoes Theory, first it will be Ukraine, then
Belarus, Poland, the Baltics. Oh the horror!
Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report is always on the money
'https://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-ukrainegate-farce
She explains that "The Democrats are hoping that Ukrainegate will succeed where Russiagate
failed and they can win the presidency without helping their voters.
"This spectacle is a get out the vote effort that doubles as anti-Russian propaganda."
In other words this is a battle to ensure that the Democratic Party does not do what it
has done a couple of times before in history and become aligned with the people against the
oligarchs.
The last to manage that were FDR in 1936 (though Huey Long didn't think so) and WJ Bryan
in 1896. He came very close to winning in his challenge to the financiers, Wall St and the
rich.
There is a real chance this year that Sanders will win the Primaries and in doing so break
the hold that the corporate machines have over the Democratic Party.
To win Sanders will have, first of all, to win the support of the black voters who have
become the most reliable and malleable vote bank in the party. This would break the hold of
the Black Misleadership Class which exists to ensure that class politics do not develop. The
great fear of the oligarchy and their paid agents in the black community is that voters will
stop thinking in racial terms and start judging politicians by their policies.
If that should happen, and 'Every Man become a King', the Few might as well emigrate to
Brazil or Colombia, and take the political class, the media and the 'intelligentsia' with
them.
The impeachment hearings will never touch the basic underlying fact that Obama/Biden
Administration restarted the Cold War by supporting the Maidan Coup and greenlighting the
seizing of the ethnic Russian Donbass region. The trench warfare there continues to this
day.
The same Corporate Democrats together with the Five-Eyes Intelligence Community have
conducted a continuous campaign to defeat and then remove Donald Trump. But they are so
incompetent that he is still in the White House but he is under pressure, all alone,
frustrated and angry, with only his daughter and Kellyanne Conway for support.
Yesterday, the USS Carrier Abraham Lincoln entered Persian Gulf after 6 months nearby;
Carrier Harry Truman is back at sea, ahead of relieving the Lincoln. US National Guard
armored units deployed to eastern Syria to keep the oil. The September drone attack shows
that Aramco's oil production facilities can be taken out at any time. A bad day and the
global economy crashes.
The only conclusion is that the hatred between globalist oligarchs and nationalists is
so deep and powerful that the consequences of a World War are ignored. The 2020 election is
pointless. The Republic is dead. The Empire shutters from internal conflict. If the Battle of
Carrhae replays once again, the war with Iran will force any survivors to retreat from the
Middle East.
Pelosi is driving this impeachment bus to a trial in the Senate next year at the height of
the primaries. The goal is to keep Warren and Bernie locked up in the Senate chamber, giving
Mayor Pete and Biden ( and maybe Bloomberg) a chance to gain ground and win some state races.
The Democrats don't care if they lose to Trump. They will do anything to make sure a
progressive doesn't win to protect their corporate paymasters.
It is beyond me why the Democrats think they can bring Trump down over this.
Of course they don't. The whole thing is a massive cover up. The idea is to bore the world on
Ukraine, sacrifice Biden and prevent Giulani from digging deeper. There is so much dirt over
Ukraine that just allowing a normal investigation would be suicide for the whole dems, not
just Kerry/Biden/Hillary.
The same thing happened with Russia/Mueller. There was never an attempt to get Trump, just
to distract from Fisa inquiries and the blatant Trump spying. The Durham investigation could
crucify many from Brennan to Hillary to probably Obama.
Bore the world with b/s investigations, hope Trump doesn't have time to do his own
homework. It will never work. Giulani has a ton of dirt to reveal if he wants. And in anycase
Trump won last time by ignoring the mudfight and concentrating on slogans that showed he had
listened to what voters are saying. Working class jobs and pay, and then every time a Dem
calls for "protect the immigrants", Transwomen's rights, better universities or attack
Trump's climate change record they lose a thousand votes.
Dem outrage at Trump is just the best thing for him to win marginal working class votes.
BTW - there seems to be this thing nowadays where you can't say the facts point one way
without claiming to hate the victor. Trump is a crook. Assad is an evil person but. China is
a dreadful place but.
Trump didn't go to Washington until 3 years ago. He is probably the most honest man in the
state.
"It is beyond me why the Democrats think they can bring Trump down over this."
Really, it's the Blue wing of the Quigley Party which, for obvious reasons, must run the
anterior assault with passive assistance from the Red wing. Schiff's role was to do a better
job of simulating substance, if the real stuff couldn't be found.
The RINOs need an optical rope-bridge, allowing them to embark on a
principled/Constitutional and oh-so-difficult moral traverse that they can be seen
reluctantly rising to for the benefit of taking the edge off incensed MAGAs. At this point,
the plan of necessity is to weather the civil insurrection because Trump simply has to
go.
Alas Schiff is not delivering much. Nonetheless I suspect that after trying everything and
the kitchen sink to get Trump, reluctant Senators' own dirty (NSA) dossiers will play key
roles. There has never been in the 70-year post WW2 era a more compulsory vote than this. All
swan-divers will be well cared for.
Those who focus on MERIT and SUBSTANCE forget that the real kingmaker is PROCESS. Article
1 Section 3 requires only 'present' Senators need vote on conviction. Thus a lot of games can
be played in the gap and particularly vulnerable RINOs might be allowed a form of sick-day
(e.g. a 20-Senator panel of Dems & Repubs).
It is hard to imagine Trump surviving Mitch's Star Chamber after heaven and earth has been
moved for three years to maneuver him to this point. The singular criticality of the Senate
well only grows as Trump's re-election appears increasingly assured.
T=Of course the less plausible the Schiff findings, the more 'process gerrymandering' will
be relied upon to carry the weight. Again, some level of civil unrest is unavoidable. However
five more years of Trump is a nonstarter.
"Trump is a crook."
I'm confounded by the persisting refusal to draw a qualitative distinction between Trump
and the system he's so clearly at odds with. Not a panacea of course. This is about power.
But distinction enough to rationalize the Herculean efforts being expended to oust
him.
Come on b, do the algebra! Something's lop-sided. Trump could save everyone a lot of
trouble if he simply fell back into the arms of his confederates. Surely at a minimum there's
a material schism in the elites. A schism means daylight in the Panopticon's ceiling. Why
isn't this cheered more?
If Trump swims in crookedness, why does the entire impeachment process hinge on two
ridiculously banal phone calls after over three years of FISA microscopy? Why, in the course
of his 'mock-defense' has he been allowed to turn back the sheets on the existential levels
of Ukraine corruption? Has the Deep State become masochistic in its old age?
And why hasn't the system found his price? Every crook has one. $50 billion would be a
reasonable opening gambit. Does anyone still think this is some kind of false-dialectic
kabuki? If it is, the stage managers deserve the world, or already have it. That, and an
Oscar. Bravo!
Copeland @ 33 said; "It seems like the primary role of the investigation, so far, is to
advance the national security narrative that portrays Russia as the perpetual enemy of the
US." Yes, it "seems" like it, because it is. The corporate empire needs enemies to keep the $
flowing.
Confrontation is much more profitable than peace...
I love the title of Rick Wilson's book "Everything Trump Touches Dies". The man is completely
beshitting the presidency and the USA brand. This is not to say it wasn't foul before he laid
his tiny hands on it. He is a symptom as another commenter here points out of the failure of
the system that produced him.
Impeachment will not solve the problem even though impeachment is fully justified on the
basis of his illegal maneuvers in Ukraine. He should be removed from his command for looting
Syria's oil, or for simply entering upon Syrian territory without being invited. Bush should
be in prison for the Iraq war, for that matter. But he's another symptom.
The clear and present danger is Trump who has thrown a monkey wrench into the global
system and disunited the nations. He's wrecked trade relations with China. He's exacerbated
problems in the ME and assisted Israel in the further destruction of the Palestinian people.
He's attempting to dismantle the lawful regulatory function of government and convert it to a
lawless fascist fortress America with only contempt for international law. His ignorance of
environmental problems is vast.
If this man is not removed from office this nation will die. Sooner than it would
otherwise. It is already very sick. This spectacle of impeachment is a weak remedy. We have
no alternative.
Trump is not a crook. He approached the situation with Z no doubt as he has been approached
countless times by the Mob and the Cops in NYC. "Nice country you got here. It would be a
shame if anything were to happen to it." If you sincerely believe Trump's denial of "quid pro
quo" and his handwritten notes, you might be the only one on the planet. That will hardly
save him from impeachment but not enough to get him tossed out (which I agree with others, is
not the Dems objective). Remember too, this did not start with the Dems. And it's not some
murky Deep State. I am surprised you have not focused on the obvious role of Bolton in all
this. He's hiding behind Kupperman now, waiting for everybody to testify, then he will come
out. He obviously has first hand info on all of this, and it's his cadre who have been
leading the charge, and his allies who have been beating the war drums (V, Taylor, Kent, et
al) with Russia. Finally, whatever the Biden boys were up to, Trump went full Tony Soprano.
Not a good look for an empire in decline. It's a textbook example of the constitutional
meaning of bribery.
tintorelli , Nov 21 2019 3:29 utc | 42
Trump is not a crook. He approached the situation with Z no doubt as he has been
approached countless times by the Mob and the Cops in NYC. "Nice country you got here. It
would be a shame if anything were to happen to it." If you sincerely believe Trump's denial
of "quid pro quo" and his handwritten notes, you might be the only one on the planet. That
will hardly save him from impeachment but not enough to get him tossed out (which I agree
with others, is not the Dems objective). Remember too, this did not start with the Dems. And
it's not some murky Deep State. I am surprised you have not focused on the obvious role of
Bolton in all this. He's hiding behind Kupperman now, waiting for everybody to testify, then
he will come out. He obviously has first hand info on all of this, and it's his cadre who
have been leading the charge, and his allies who have been beating the war drums (V, Taylor,
Kent, et al) with Russia. Finally, whatever the Biden boys were up to, Trump went full Tony
Soprano. Not a good look for an empire in decline. It's a textbook example of the
constitutional meaning of bribery.
Inadvertently today I found myself trapped into listening for a couple of minutes to the
nonsense that Schiff was spouting in the House of Horrors.
It is almost incredible that what he was doing, in essence, was to draw attention to the two
great facts in this case, the first being the gangster Maidan coup, which the US no longer
even pretends not to have brought about for its own purposes, and the second, the way in
which the Vice President and his family set about profiting, personally, from the looting of
every Ukrainian's fortune-every family's healthcare, pension plan, utility bill, home. In
this case by saddling the people, dependent on gas heat to see them through the winter, with
millions to be paid to Hunter Biden, friends of John Kerry and other assorted profiteers.
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of
worms and feeding it to the world.
But then I wonder if, perhaps, these people do not know something that foreigners cannot
know, something about the societal stupidity and institutional ignorance for which the only
country ever known to have supported "No Nothing" candidates is famous.
Perhaps Schiff and Pelosi know what they are doing and what they are doing is based upon HL
Mencken's dictum:
"Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can
of worms and feeding it to the world.
Just don't claim (like I do) that Russiagate and Ukrainegate are kayfabe courtesy of Deep
State 'managed democracy' or you're a nutcase that everyone will ignore.
Nah, just sit back and enjoy while the Democratic Party cuts its own throat for over the
Ukrainegate nothingburger which will see no one held accountable for anything.
A partisan witch-hunt less than a year before the 2020 Election? Double-plus good for
Trump's re-election.
But the possibility of a set-up is INCONCEIVABLE to naval-gazing Kool-Aid
drinkers.
It's gotta be real because Bloomberg wants to join the Democratic race!
Just as he wanted to join the race in 2016? His intention to do so also underscored the
reality of THAT race. Rinse, repeat. LOL. The dumbf*cks won't notice.
@ 11 jackrabbit.. you can claim that too and i am not ignoring you! i agree with bevin and b
how this is insane what the dems are doing, but the whole usa political scenario is insane...
at the same time i get cranky with regard to everything being laid at the deep states feet
when no one can articulate just what the deep state is.. in fact, i think there are a number
of powerful players running at cross purposes to each other, so i don't think it is as easy
as you make out laying it all at the feet of this 'deep state'... sure, the political process
is mostly a charade and i doubt it matters much who wins at this point...
but, i do think the usa continues to slide into a more precarious place that coincides
with a multi polar world that the usa is also very resistant to... as for the people of the
usa - maybe many of them are easily manipulated, but not all of them.. it is the same around
the world... how does one explain how the protesters in bolivia or honk kong are so easily
duped? no.. i think generally people are easily duped, but not all people..
Deep State: the unusual behavior and strange coincides driven by a small number of very
well connected people that make little sense but advance the interests of the
establishment.
Full-Spectrum Dominance (FSD) means controlled opposition everywhere. FSD in practice:
> Political kayfabe
Hillary makes mistakes that help elect Trump. Trump helps to get Pelosi elected as House
Speaker.
> Compromising whistle-blowers
The Intercept turns in whistle-blowers.
IMO, lumping the D-Party into the same boat doesn't reflect reality. A great many D-Party
members were disenfranchised by the DNC during 2016; many know it and know why, and never
swallowed Russiagate. Many of those D-Party folk are again backing Sanders and Gabbard
because they're the genuine social-democratic faction the DNC abandoned as soon as Reagan won
in 1980 since it supposedly was the Reagan Democrats that swung the election--an assumption
never proven correct. And the DNC stated during the lawsuit over 2016 that it would repeat
its actions again in 2016, 2020, and beyond. Thus there're two main factions: DNC-Corporate
D-Party and small d social-democratic D-Party--both of which are clearly incompatible. It's
the former of those two that Gabbard wants to purge; Sanders also seems willing but hasn't
been as explicit as Gabbard. Thus we have the old House divided against itself cannot stand
situation. Either you're with Obama, Clinton, the Banksters, and the further enslavement of
citizens via debt-peonage and expansion of the Outlaw US Empire or you're with the Sanders
and Gabbard social-democrats and liberation of citizens via the nationalization of education,
health care and dignified retirement, and the neutering of the Outlaw US Empire.
Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they won't run as 3rd Party POTUS
candidates, which means the Corporate faction will get its candidate on the ballot unless
something remarkable occurs--a coup within the DNC that totally purges the
Obama/Clinton/Corporate faction.
Sorry, but that last phrase I find to be 100% fantastical--about as probable as Kentucky's
#1 ranked basketball team losing at home to Evansville at much greater odds than the 40:1
cited for Evansville. Morrison said it was 5:1 50+ years ago, but I don't think people were
as brainwashed then as now.
I am aware not *every single* Democrat bought into Russiagate.
You seem to suggest that the corruption on full display by the DNC during 2016
inoculated
**some** Democrats to Russiagate if they were Bernie supports. Maybe. But we are faced with
the puzzling contradiction that Bernie himself did not support the lawsuit brought by the
Bernie supporters against the corrupt DNC ... AND ... AND ... Bernie has been a
foaming-at-the-mouth supporter of the Russiagate hysteria!
"How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in
our election in 2016, is interfering in democratic elections all over the world, and
according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections that we
will be holding?" "How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship
with Mr. Putin?"
Who said the above? Rachael Maddow? Hillary Clinton? John Brennan? Why none other than
Bernie Sanders!
And did you note that Bernie is being a megaphone for the CIA in this quote?
More and more and more Bernie Russiagate promoting quotes here (and 2018 had only
begun!):
Nemesis@15 -"Trust me when I say" ... never trust anyone who says anything after that phrase!
How exactly did the Dems play the right card with Russiagate? Do you mean they hoodwinked
their supporters into believing Russia to be the enemy, so that is somehow 'the right card'?
I'll stop there. You've completely confused me.
I mean "right" in that allowing Russiagate to seep into the waking consciousness of
America took the pressure off the dems and what was going to be their reckoning. In effect,
they have now doubled-down in the hope that the Trump phenomenon of nationalism will fade
away and their rule will be restored. Whether or not Sanders plays into this I think we are
yet to see, but, so far, Sanders has played ball with a lot of dem garbage.
Again, by the "right" play I mean as if a dark sorcerer had banked his continued favor
with the king he serves on a magic brew that would muddle the King's brain and keep him from
knowing of the Sorcerer's repulsive ambition. Such is the dems plan as well as many if not
all of the republicans who secretly detest DJT but who don't speak up because their base
believes in Trump.
Often I expect these stories in the media to get important technical details wrong...but
here we see that this writer did his homework...
I have said this many times before, but the MCAS system is NOT an anti-stall system...it
is there solely for the purpose of providing the right kind of stick feel to the pilot...
"On most airplanes, as you approach stall you can feel it," a veteran pilot for a U.S.
commercial carrier told me.
Instead of the steadily increasing force on the control column that pilots were used
to feeling -- and that F.A.A. guidelines required -- the new engines caused a loosening
sensation.
This is exactly it...and this is why I have to wonder how exactly is MCAS going to be
cleared to fly again...since the original, much less authoritative version was found
inadequate in providing the stick force required...and the rejigged production version proved
to be a surefire killer if it kicked in at low altitudes such as takeoff...
We recall that Captain Sullenberger called the MAX a 'death trap'...
So clearly the system's authority has to be dialed back...in which case the airplane
handling qualities do not meet established requirements...
The story here tells of the struggle that the family of Ralph Nader's grand-niece, who
perished in the Ethiopian flight, is waging to 'axe the max'...
Hopefully they will succeed, but I doubt it..the MAX can never be a good airplane...full
stop...
Inadvertently today I found myself trapped into listening for a couple of minutes to the
nonsense that Schiff was spouting in the House of Horrors.
It is almost incredible that what he was doing, in essence, was to draw attention to the two
great facts in this case, the first being the gangster Maidan coup, which the US no longer
even pretends not to have brought about for its own purposes, and the second, the way in
which the Vice President and his family set about profiting, personally, from the looting of
every Ukrainian's fortune-every family's healthcare, pension plan, utility bill, home. In
this case by saddling the people, dependent on gas heat to see them through the winter, with
millions to be paid to Hunter Biden, friends of John Kerry and other assorted profiteers.
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of
worms and feeding it to the world.
But then I wonder if, perhaps, these people do not know something that foreigners cannot
know, something about the societal stupidity and institutional ignorance for which the only
country ever known to have supported "No Nothing" candidates is famous.
Perhaps Schiff and Pelosi know what they are doing and what they are doing is based upon HL
Mencken's dictum:
"Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
@Please illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA would be suddenly
discontinued...
Posted by: Chevrus | Nov 13 2019 17:33 utc | 3
Just found your query. Quick and dead-on response is a major EMP event, but that is not
what I had in mind.
Let me see if I can work up another, but necessarily lengthier response.
As I noted on the Bolivia thread, BRICS is having its Summit today & tomorrow in
Brasilia, and will likely be the most important of its brief life. So far, just this report :
"The heads of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will discuss issues related to
economic, financial and cultural cooperation as well as arms control and joint efforts to
counter terrorism.
"The leaders of the five member-states are to attend the BRICS Business Forum, and meet
with the BRICS Business Council and the heads of the New Development Bank.
"In addition, Vladimir Putin will hold a number of bilateral meetings with the heads of
state and government taking part in the summit."
No! But there will be a new "civil war" in the US around the mid of the next decade. Split
occuring not south to north, but west to east; chaos further increased by immigrants from the
middle & south Americas with their own agenda.
Forces (land & air), militia & DHS people of the eastern party may seek secure
backing near frontier to Canada (area of Great Lakes therefore save). Some of the 'big
capitalists' who feel more international than patriot will flee to outer South America
(Argentinia, Chile).
Eventually a dead president (for that and for the civil war please look into cycles of
US-history). Peace will come with the first female president. Keep watch on Tulsi Gabbard
(but may be also another lady - as I am in Europe I am not familiar with all probable coming
female candidates).
Why no permanent split of the States? There are internal benefits (common traffic, markets
etc.) but more it is the outside pressure: to be able to compete with China it is a necessity
for the States to remain united. Also the coming chaos in Europe and Russia demands
unification of the US.
Now a very strange remark: some elites in the US have already accepted, even promote the
tendency toward "civil war" to enable a 'reset' of the political, economical and social
structure of the country. Furthermore, a seemingly weak US with a split in the military may
lead Russia in temptation to make some mistake (towards Ukraine and Europe). And now a very,
very strange remark: while some forces in the homeland are caught in civil disorder some
other forces in the overseas may be involved in a foreign war. Extremely pointed out: the
coming civil war in a very specific manner is a fake (to deceive and trap Russia - of course
not Putin but his followers).
Today I had a look into George Friedman's book about the next hundred years. For the first
view there is a lot of nonsense (disintegration of China etc.). But I agree that the power of
the US will be restored during the century. And if not the same power as it was in the 1990s,
then in every case the internal stability of the USA is completely guaranteed.
With greetings from Germany and with thanks to Bernhard for his valuable work, Gerhard
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can
of worms and feeding it to the world.
Just don't claim (like I do) that Russiagate and Ukrainegate are kayfabe courtesy of Deep
State 'managed democracy' or you're a nutcase that everyone will ignore.
Nah, just sit back and enjoy while the Democratic Party cuts its own throat for over the
Ukrainegate nothingburger which will see no one held accountable for anything.
A partisan witch-hunt less than a year before the 2020 Election? Double-plus good for
Trump's re-election.
But the possibility of a set-up is INCONCEIVABLE to naval-gazing Kool-Aid
drinkers.
It's gotta be real because Bloomberg wants to join the Democratic race!
Just as he wanted to join the race in 2016? His intention to do so also underscored the
reality of THAT race. Rinse, repeat. LOL. The dumbf*cks won't notice.
@ 11 jackrabbit.. you can claim that too and i am not ignoring you! i agree with bevin and b
how this is insane what the dems are doing, but the whole usa political scenario is insane...
at the same time i get cranky with regard to everything being laid at the deep states feet
when no one can articulate just what the deep state is.. in fact, i think there are a number
of powerful players running at cross purposes to each other, so i don't think it is as easy
as you make out laying it all at the feet of this 'deep state'... sure, the political process
is mostly a charade and i doubt it matters much who wins at this point...
but, i do think the usa continues to slide into a more precarious place that coincides
with a multi polar world that the usa is also very resistant to... as for the people of the
usa - maybe many of them are easily manipulated, but not all of them.. it is the same around
the world... how does one explain how the protesters in bolivia or honk kong are so easily
duped? no.. i think generally people are easily duped, but not all people..
Karlof1 @ 9 --
"I expect the atmosphere to be tense..."
I do, as well. Though I imagine certain leaders might feel a temptation to suspend
Brazil's membership, doing so would illustrate a structural weakness to be overcome by any
legitimate multipolar body. That is, if the Empire is able to turn just one member (in this
case Brazil), it may be used to weaken the organization as a whole.
Having just a limited exposure to Putin's approach to multipolarity, my understanding is
that it is to be accepted that sovereign countries evolve along their own trajectories (as
opposed to being subjected to "universal" "liberal" principles). If Brazil or Turkey decide
that this means playing both sides off each other, it will be interesting to see whether
there are any principled (as opposed to realpolitical or pragmatic) objections that Russia
might offer.
Deep State: the unusual behavior and strange coincides driven by a small number of very
well connected people that make little sense but advance the interests of the
establishment.
Full-Spectrum Dominance (FSD) means controlled opposition everywhere. FSD in practice:
> Political kayfabe
Hillary makes mistakes that help elect Trump. Trump helps to get Pelosi elected as House
Speaker.
> Compromising whistle-blowers
The Intercept turns in whistle-blowers.
The reason I ask is because I have heard a load of bull about Russia's plans to Russianize
the world and that Trump is his pawn since day -167 of his inauguration. I have heard this
from coworkers, from friends, from family, seen it on Reddit, read it on neolib outlets like
slate and the like. I'm wondering if you live in Trump country and just don't hear or see the
Russophobia being played out in the beltway and on the elitest coastlines.
Trust me when I say that the dems played the right card, albeit a desperate one, when they
started with the whole Russiagate nonsense. To you and I, b and others, Russiagate is
nonsense. But tell that to the average dem or moron yuppie in their towers along our shining
seas.
Please illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA would be suddenly
discontinued...
Posted by: Chevrus | Nov 13 2019 17:33 utc | 3
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham has powerful players
quaking
in their boots.
9/11 saw Americans willingly surrendering rights;
accepting a pack of lies, a myth, to explain the event;
militarism becoming the refuge for American's safety.
What are the limits of the rights that Americans are next willing to surrender?
**What are those limits?**
The Resistance, Democrats, no longer respects democratic rights -
no thought to the millions of voters that they would disenfranchise if
the nullification of Trump's election were successful via a coup (impeachment).
Five years ago would you have imagined that Democratic voters would be so cavalier
about democratic rights? So willing to accept the vacuous accusation that our
President is a Russian agent. Would resurrect the CIA - the torturing, kidnapping,
assassinating, war promoting, false flag creating, disinformation spewing CIA, - and
ravenously swallow endless streams of McCarthyist propaganda.
How fast,how far, can we spiral downwards? Is the seizure of power too far down the
spiral
to imagine? Five years ago would you have imagined the current decent of Democrats we have
witnessed?
If the pretext, the myth, of the necessity of seizing power, were echoed by the mouthpiece
MSM
would Democrats go along? Americans have surrendered rights in our near lifetime.
Americans
worship militarism and their military heroes more than ever before. Americans have
swallowed
hook-line-and-sinker the new-McCathyism and "Putin is an evil man".
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham has powerful players
quaking
in their boots. To answer your question, I cannot imagine what players like John Brennan
are scheming. But as you know 9/11 was not beyond their criminal limit or capability.
Paul Damascene @13: I generally share your view, about Putin's view, but I don't think Putin
minds Erdogan playing both sides, Bolsonaro, yeah, but not Erdogan, he can play games with us
all he wants. Keeps us distracted, and Erdogan doesn't like us "taking the oil", and we can't
get in a shooting war with him, he's NATO. He's the military counter-balance to the Pentagon
in Syria that Russia cannot be. So I think he will be thrashing around in N. Syria with
Putin's consent until we leave (as long as he doesn't pick a fight with Assad.)
Bolsonaro he may see as something to wait for the end of.
It will be interesting and possibly informative to see what comes out of this meeting.
Thanks for your reply! Note that the main event is the Business Forum, which is an arena
where genuine national interests usually reign. As you're likely aware, BRICS was formulated
as an instrument to facilitate development via commerce and mutual investment and that its
first major joint accomplishment was the formulation of the BRICS Development Bank to bypass
the IMF, World Bank and the dollar dominated international trade regime. I found it curious
that Global Times had zero articles on its main page related to the Summit, while
Xinhuanet ran this
short commentary overview which amounts to a short recap and cheerleading. We'll need to
await the presser this evening to get a better feel.
You make an interesting point librul... It reminds me of the whole continuity of government
scheme. 'In case of _____, break glass an impose martial law or whatever the manufactured
disaster calls for. The fact that the north woods 911 bit worked is a testament to just how
far the ptb are willing to go. You know, in regard to the USA perspective I can tell you from
first hand experience that a steady diet of agitation propaganda as well loads of distraction
have rendered a majority of the population easily lead no matter what stripes they might be
wearing. Selling Russia as the bad bad guy was easy. Look if a large group of people buy the
Bin Laden hit then the sky is the limit.
The 5 mile asteroid would pose a serious problem to most mammals, but given the amount of
species self loathing being pedaled about.... My point about the executive branch and the
question of 'is he the last' hinges on the fact that the president does nothing which is not
somewhat scripted. We know what happens when they go "off the Rez"...
Below is a ZH quote about the meeting with Trump and Erdogan today
"
"It's a great honor to be with President Erdogan... the ceasefire is holding very well, we've
been speaking to the Kurds and they seem to be very satisfied, as you know we pulled back our
troops quite a while ago..."
"I want to thank the President for the job they've [Turkey] done in Syria," Trump said of
Erdogan.
And on that note, he already addressed the rationale for continued US troop presence in
Syria, saying with Erdogan sitting next to him: "We are keeping the oil. We have the oil. The
oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil."
"
To those Trump supporters, I would appreciate understanding how the keep the oil fits in
with you saying Trump wants to get out of Syria?
'Deep State' is just a convenient way of labeling something we can also call 'the
illuminati', or 'the globalists', or 'the one percent', or 'Big Brother', etc.. We know that
there are hidden powers. Some call them reptilians. Who knows? We can tell that they are
there, though we cannot say exactly who they are and how they constitute their coherence, how
they organize themselves. We can see pieces of the deeper pattern, but we cannot see the
whole thing. So we use these vague and sometimes fanciful labels.
Right now a struggle is going on in Bolivia that is the world's struggle. Humanity is
maybe in its final throes, there and in so many other places. Or maybe its the birth pains of
who we were really meant to be. God help us.
IMO, lumping the D-Party into the same boat doesn't reflect reality. A great many D-Party
members were disenfranchised by the DNC during 2016; many know it and know why, and never
swallowed Russiagate. Many of those D-Party folk are again backing Sanders and Gabbard
because they're the genuine social-democratic faction the DNC abandoned as soon as Reagan won
in 1980 since it supposedly was the Reagan Democrats that swung the election--an assumption
never proven correct. And the DNC stated during the lawsuit over 2016 that it would repeat
its actions again in 2016, 2020, and beyond. Thus there're two main factions: DNC-Corporate
D-Party and small d social-democratic D-Party--both of which are clearly incompatible. It's
the former of those two that Gabbard wants to purge; Sanders also seems willing but hasn't
been as explicit as Gabbard. Thus we have the old House divided against itself cannot stand
situation. Either you're with Obama, Clinton, the Banksters, and the further enslavement of
citizens via debt-peonage and expansion of the Outlaw US Empire or you're with the Sanders
and Gabbard social-democrats and liberation of citizens via the nationalization of education,
health care and dignified retirement, and the neutering of the Outlaw US Empire.
Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they won't run as 3rd Party POTUS
candidates, which means the Corporate faction will get its candidate on the ballot unless
something remarkable occurs--a coup within the DNC that totally purges the
Obama/Clinton/Corporate faction.
Sorry, but that last phrase I find to be 100% fantastical--about as probable as Kentucky's
#1 ranked basketball team losing at home to Evansville at much greater odds than the 40:1
cited for Evansville. Morrison said it was 5:1 50+ years ago, but I don't think people were
as brainwashed then as now.
The 'Orwellian Globalists' may have overstepped, hubristically, when they chose an
out-and-out racist, an outspoken racist, to be their puppet to head the new government in
Bolivia. This may be just what was needed to provoke the MAJORITY indigenous people of
Bolivia ...
Librul@16 responds to the statement by start, Chevrus @ 3. "Please
illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA
would be suddenly discontinued..." Chevrus @ 3, end
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham
has powerful players quaking in their boots.
9/11 saw Americans willingly surrendering rights;
accepting a pack of lies, a myth, to explain the event;
militarism becoming the refuge for American's safety.
What are the limits of the rights that Americans are next
willing to surrender? **What are those limits?**
How fast, how far, can we spiral downwards? Is the seizure of power
too far down the spiral to imagine? Five years ago would you have
imagined the current decent of Democrats we have witnessed?
Is media capable to determine who shall have the power? Can
media make Americans surrender their rights?
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham
has powerful players quaking in their boots. To answer your
question, I cannot imagine what players like John Brennan
are scheming. But as you know 9/11 was not beyond their
criminal limit or capability. by: librul @ 16
Snake says look at and carefully read the statements by Assad in Syria.. they
are very telling about circumstances here in the states. Assad distinguishes
top down ideology from bottom up cause a very interesting distinguishment.. ..
So to answer your question how far are Americans willing to allow the Oligarchs to
retract human rights in America: are their any limits to the willing surrender?
I think it is as Assad said in the above citation.. outside investors
instigated the unrest in Syria and used it as pretense to get their governments
to invade Syria so that the investors could privatize all of
Syria.. That is exactly what is happening in USA governed America.
karlof1 @4
Your scenario doesn't reach its logical conclusion:
1) Asteroid strike is automatically blamed on "those damn rooskies".
2) Nuclear war ensues.
3) Far West, South, TransMissisippi and New England all secede with each claiming to be the
rightful 'United State of America'.
4) Voila.
IIRC the Clintons rode into the Whitehouse on the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC).
The DLC has quietly morphed into the DNC (or stolen their ID). Proof might be found on
identifying the faction controlling the Democratic Party's finance committee under the
assumption whoever controls the finance also controls the party. Memory is a perfidious and
ephemeral thing and goes down Alice's rabbit hole in nothing flat.
@14 jackrabbit.. i am sorry, but it is too simplistic for me... your examples are fine, but
as i see it, they random and not some orchestrated plot from up above... that is where we
differ here... in fact, your overview is much too simplistic..you can make it simple for me,
but the whole concept of deep state orchestrating everything here is much too simplistic..
@ 16 librul... good overview that is kind of how i see the democratic party here, although
@ 24 karlof1 disagrees, it looks like that to this outsider / canuck.. here is the line from
karlof1 that gives it away for me - "Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they
won't run as 3rd Party POTUS candidates" which begs the question, why? my answer - they are
useful shills for this same agenda..
I am aware not *every single* Democrat bought into Russiagate.
You seem to suggest that the corruption on full display by the DNC during 2016
inoculated
**some** Democrats to Russiagate if they were Bernie supports. Maybe. But we are faced with
the puzzling contradiction that Bernie himself did not support the lawsuit brought by the
Bernie supporters against the corrupt DNC ... AND ... AND ... Bernie has been a
foaming-at-the-mouth supporter of the Russiagate hysteria!
"How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in
our election in 2016, is interfering in democratic elections all over the world, and
according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections that we
will be holding?" "How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship
with Mr. Putin?"
Who said the above? Rachael Maddow? Hillary Clinton? John Brennan? Why none other than
Bernie Sanders!
And did you note that Bernie is being a megaphone for the CIA in this quote?
More and more and more Bernie Russiagate promoting quotes here (and 2018 had only
begun!):
I see a civil war in the USA as highly unlikely. The upper class has too much common
interest and purpose. The lower classes are divided and powerless and in the near future only
seem to be becoming more so. When the third-worldization reaches a critical point, a staged
and managed revolution may be in the cards. Before a real revolution has any chance, the
elites will have flooded the USA with immigrants from the south, ensuring further division of
the lower classes and postponing any real challenge.
Overall, the societal foundation of the USA looks to have been crumbling for maybe five
decades already and for the next few decades an acceleration of that process is more likely
than a reversal. Don't be on the lookout for leaders or movements to change any of that. Only
when the american people clean up their act, ie. their addiction to numbing drugs, empty
consumerism and false jingoisms, will anything there ever change for good. Until that
happens, the place will be withering more and more.
Not until the American elites start to fail to safeguard their own priviliges at the cost
of the rest of the population will change happen.
I don't see the Russian aggression that you propose to be realistic or likely to happen.
Russia does not need to reach abroad for energy, resources or food. Their main challenge is
to manage the riches of the huge country with the people they have. Already the resurgence
after the post-1990 crash (and the preceding stagnation) is an accomplishment worthy of
admiration.
The Russian interest clearly is consolidation and defence, which is exactly what their
policies have been showing on the international stage. Suggestions of aggression are pure
projection by Atlanticists theselves. Instead of Washington trying to provoke Russian
mistakes, the real game is about Moscow trying to contain NATO's erratic trashing and
carefully preventing any catastrophic escalation.
To wit, what country did recently "update" its nuclear doctrine, suggesting the
possibility of 'limited' use of nuclear weapons? Was it Russia, or ehhm... perhaps the
USA?
The only uncertain factor between Russia and the USA is Europe. I expect a lot more
American craziness towards Europe, as its effective leverage crumbles. Europe has not yet
devolved as badly as the USA and the American implosion is a major risk factor for the
Europeans.
psychohistoiran @22 asks "To those Trump supporters, I would appreciate understanding how the
keep the oil fits in with you saying Trump wants to get out of Syria?"
As someone who voted for Trump I can tell you I do not agree with this decision nor will I
defend it. I hold the same sentiment pre 2016 that I do now - bring these endless wars to an
end. Period. Am I disappointed in his walking back the decision to leave Syria entirely? You
betcha.
Weeks ago when barflies were discussing Trump's withdrawal, someone corrected my
understanding regarding the Kurds who took control of the oil fields, so to speak, and were
selling the oil to SAA. My understanding of this newest policy is the Kurds will continue to
manage and benefit from the sale of the oil. I could be wrong. Feel free to correct me if I
am. But if my understanding of the arrangement is correct, the Kurds maintaining their role,
then they are likely still selling the oil to the SAA. Then again, maybe not, but I wouldn't
be surprised if they were.
So, management or control of the oil fields has changed, but it looks like everything else
remains as it was before when the oil fields were managed/controlled by the Kurds.
What I do respect in the President's decision to leave NE Syria is removing troops from
theater. The CIA's proxy war appears to have been shutdown. This w/o question I applaud,
LOUDLY.
BTW, all this talk about asteroids and false flags makes me remind the brilliant nineties
movie "Starship Troopers", in which Paul Verhoeven not only sort of presages 911 and the
ensuing war on the bugs, but also smuggled into it the ephemeral phrase "Are you psychic?". I
sometimes wonder how many people got that...
This may be just what was needed to provoke the MAJORITY indigenous people of Bolivia ...
I doubt it, without massive quantities of weapons similar to those received by the Syrian
takfiris, the indigenous people don't stand a chance once the Western Hemisphere Institute
for Security Cooperation (formerly SOA) trained Washington-supported death squads get to
work. It's going to be a massacre that'll be barely reported in MSM, because after the
"election" they'll be anti-democratic. Bolivia is not Syria.
The issue with the Americans is a hyper-partisan mindset has been instilled, akin to duelling
sports teams, so one cheers for their team facts or context be damned. This used to be a Fox
News-Republican phenomenon, but now has infected Dem supporters as well.
Break up of US would mean break up of Canada too. Look to the moves made by province of
Alberta in response to fed election - a sort of firewall is being proposed where Alberta will
take on fed gov responsibilities pension, health care, etc. Alberta is a Koch Bros oil
republic, and any N American melt-down will result in formation of private fiefdoms - i.e.
Alberta-Montana-Wyoming-South Dakota become Kochland.
Then you must be a shut-in or unemployed to not see the dual-benefit of the deep state in
that it stymies trump and resurrects Russia as a boogeyman. Nay! Thrice-benefit in that it
also allows for an excuse to be horrifically status quo and gamble on everything returning to
normal after the trump phenomenon runs its course and the duopoly reassert its grip.
I wonder how in the Earth can anyone have cultural cooperation and join efforts against
terrorism with a goon like Bolsonaro who has posted Twitters celebrating Bolivia´s coup
and is known misses Pinochet ´s "expeditive measures" against communists...How this, so
called group BRICS, can continue following its path, as if nothing had happened, especially
since the coup in Bolivia...
Just today read the statements by Kremlin spokeman, Peshkov, and what to say, seemed to me
quite soft his stance, throwing balons out...Sometimes I feel like to trust John Helmer on
his assesment on the existence of two blocks in the Russian Federation, the stavka ,
and these people of the Kremlin office...
To this you add the Russian ambassador to the US, today visiting Kissinger ( the builder
of the Condor Plan...) a man always like begging for better relations to this bully of a
country, and this is one of the times when I wonder if i would not be supporting all this
time just the people who wants to crush me...( meaning my now almost 6 years long support for
the RF and concretely this adminsitration...)
I found quite different the unambiguous and strong statements by the Russian FM and
Kremlin itself when Venezuela was about to suffer a coup, and now when the legitimate
government of Bolivia has been sent into exile and his indigenous population on the verge of
extermination by nazi thugs...
You can not be against nazis in the Ukraine and then support ( or be way too soft in your
lack of condemnation...) nazis in Brasil or Bolivia (... or the EU...) or you are for
international law and human rights, always, or not, but not only when business opportunities
are in prospect....
Yes, today is one of those days when my consideration of the RF and Putin´s
administration as a referent in keeping international order in the face of a lawless US just
wobbles...
No se puede estar en misa y repicando al mismo tiempo
Waiting for the final statement of the meeting for to possibly take a determination on
this issue...
@ 36 jayc... kenney is a divisive politician.. i always think of alberta like the 'texas
wannabe' of canada... they think highly of themselves and their oil, even when they can't get
it out to the coast due the fact the people on the coast view all this very differently.. and
now they are resorting to a type of quebec referendum option to use as leverage over the rest
of canada.. it didn't work with quebec, and it definitely won't work with alberta.. at least
quebec could legitimately claim itself a different type of culture... as for dividing up
canada and the usa - it makes more sense to go along north south lines - cascadia being a
good example of this.. koch republic would be a good name for that zone!!
You'd probably do well to study the history of China after the downfall of the Manchu Qing
dynasty up to the 1930s at least (when Japan began invading the country and bringing its own
forms of chaos, violence and enslavement) to get an idea of where the US might be heading if
and when the Federal government falls. From the 1910s onwards, China was governed by warlords
looking out for No 1, with their own armies.
Not so very different from the situation prevailing in Afghanistan and Libya. Talk about
the chickens coming home to roost.
The other alternative is if the 50 states decide to be self-governing statelets or form
their own federations among themselves or with neighbouring provinces and states in Canada
and Mexico, or even abroad. Alaska may petition Moscow to be accepted back into the Russian
Federation and Hawaii may seek another large patron to attach itself for security reasons.
Washington and Oregon
states may finally form a federation with British Columbia and call it Cascadia.
Yeah, like Formerly T-Bear intoned about memory. I concede, but still note Gabbard hasn't
faltered in her zeal. I finally finished my series of thoughts on the Bolivian thread
regarding the Big Picture. IMO, Evil's sly enough to get elected even if it campaigned
showing its attributes as in
this image . If I were 20 years younger, I'd emigrate to Russia or China, but I'm not and
doubt I've 20 years remaining on this orb. But I do think I've got the struggle properly
diagnosed, although no cure's readily available.
Right now a struggle is going on in Bolivia that is the world's struggle.
@Posted by: Paul | Nov 13 2019 20:06 utc | 23
Indeed ,the same way I see it, and it seems that, in this one, Russian will not be with
us...After all there is neither oil, nor weapons to sale in Bolivia, nor to the working poor
people.....
Just today I was hearing Trump stating that he would like very much assisting to the next
Vicotry Day parade in Moscow...Well, how to say ( wait for me while I go throwing up a
bit...) Just here again, a bit back in myself...
Thus, this thug, who just has unleashed those rabid nazi death squads over the poor
indigenous people of Bolivia is going to sit along the veterans who really fought the nazis
in WWII, the few who still are alive to remember the 25 millions of their own who died in the
battle fields, moreover taking into account that Trump´s father really was a nazi
himself and supported Nazi Germany as if there was no tomorrow...If you though that of
Netanyahu last year was way too much...to see how yo take this...
Seeing these things, no wonder that fascism advance without obstacles...Voting in the UN
or passing all day energically protestingthe demolition of monuments to Soviet heros of WWII
is not enough...It is neede to eergically protest when today´s nazis are salughterin
currently lving people...
As happened during WWII, I fear, it will be us the people who will have to organize
ourselves to fight this scourge...Putin, simply, will not be there....May be the Red Army
will...
Gerhard @10;
I agree the US will split up. As a poli sci initiate, i was forced to consider the role of
institutions acting in support of the polis. I wasn't impressed at the time. my disdain for
the rot of leadership in most if not all institutions in the west, it was mostly for the
greed....but i realize the cumulative effect is the fraying of those 'supports' of the nation
itself. Consider:
The 16 intelligence agencies each have their own agendas, the regulatory agencies are
revolving doors for industry placements, the FBI was crooked since the days of Hoover, the
governments agencies are rife with oligarchy quislings .....and in the end the greed of those
in power will be not be held back by any moral force. The police are militarized, murdering
and robbing their own citizens.
Meanwhile, the MSM are owned by the oligarch, so there is no national forum where the
corruption can be addressed on a national level. This leaves the blog sites such as MOA to
lead the fight against the PTB. The problem is in the nature of the internet, which has no
'locus' as in a national voice. The internet has no center. As example, i am not a US
citizen. When the polis finally hit the point where the Rentier economy has driven them to
extreme reaction, they will not be thinking of reclaiming the vast American experiment,
rather they will seek to at least control their little part of the world. I believe you will
see blocs of similar states rising up to control whet they think is in their own best
interests: The mid-west, the west coast and mountain states, the deep south, the eastern
states will find common issues to crytalize around.
That's my read.
As a Canadian, my thoughts are how Canada will negotiate with these remainder blocs of former
US states.
James @ 39
I general concur with your brief reading of Jayson Kenney and Alberta talk of separatism. But
on that score the comparison would not so much be to Texas as perhaps to Boris Johnson /
Nigel Farage, in their moves to break away from the EU. I don't know that either of them (or
Kenney) is all that passionate about separation itself, but the divisiveness -- and surfing
various waves of polarization -- are what this new nihilist political wave seems to be about.
I support the Cascadia concept. There's a wonderful work of speculative fiction called
Ecotopia that is set in a Cascadia - although it was written before the digital hi-tech era
and so could not predict that such an entity, short of a true revolution, would be run by
Microsoft - Google - Apple etc.
A high speed rail link from Vancouver to Portland has been proposed, which is a
forward-thinking policy initiative, but they are going to take a few years to think about it,
and then another fifteen to twenty years to build it, and that itself will only happen if the
"no new taxes" retrograde types don't stop it in its "tracks" (which they intend to do).
off topic: I've just realized how vexing the idea of a non-citizen army.
Imagine: The tax payer funds the majority of tax dollars to a bureau that funds its own
production of weapons, recruitment, training personnel, maintenance of 800 or so bases across
the world and, finally, deploying these recruits wherever it deems worthy, based on the
directions of it's head, potus. its just so sweet: hire mercenaries, and do whatever you want
across the planet....there are no draftees ....no one to criticize when the body bags return
stateside. Some otherwise brain-dead fuck in the pentagon is enjoying lieutenant generalship,
just for figuring out the army didn't need a draft...there were plenty of poor people, who
could be had with a few bucks......
I'm in Montana and working on a piece of fiction that anticipates the breakup of the
States in the not-so-distant future. I did a little research on Cascadia and found that
there's elements of white supremacism wanting to co-opt the idea of Cascadia for their own
ethno-state fever
dreams :
The far right is known to appropriate pop culture imagery, particularly for recruitment and
to mitigate their viewpoints. But Alexander Reid Ross, a professor at Portland State
University, explained that Cascadia, "a really important movement in the Pacific
Northwest," is targeted specifically for its link to bioregionalism. "It implies a
territorial imperative but doesn't necessarily involve anti-racism, according to the far
right, so fascists appropriate it," he told me of Cascadia.
The appropriation began at least as far back as 2004, when a flag suspiciously similar
to the Cascadian flag appeared on the cover of Harold Armstead Covington's book, A Distant
Thunder. In 2008, Covington founded the white nationalist group Northwest Front, which
calls for an "independent and sovereign White nation in the Pacific Northwest." The group
later penned a disturbing rhyme on its website about this flag, the Tricolor flag, using
language similar to Baretich's:
The sky is blue, and the land is green. The white is for the people, in
between.
Cascadia appropriation has snowballed since then. In 2016, a man adopting the moniker
Herrenvolk, a German word for "master race" used by the Nazis, helped form Cascadia, the
"foremost" alt-right group in the Pacific Northwest. According to its website, its mission
is to "regain our sovereignty and prevent foreign influence on our people." That goal
correlates with the narrative of Cascadia as quintessential, and it echoes the groaning
around Portland about newcomers spoiling the city.
in the narrative I'm working on, New Cascadia does become a white supremacist
stronghold.
I was somewhat puzzled by your Good and Evil post in the last thread, karlof1. Were you just
being facetious or did I misread you to say that all would depend on the outcome of the 2020
election?.
I followed you on the course of 'the rest of the world' under leadership from Russia and
China into multipolarity rather than one hegemon; I'd tend to agree with you on that concept,
though maybe we'd have disagreements on the course of history up to that point. I have a
literary turn of mind myself, and to me "good" literature (with a small g) always comes out
on top - as with goodness in most other aspects of life learning as well.
All the same, it's hard for me to think the coming US election will really decide
anything. That is, I don't see any of the candidates preparing his or herself to join 'the
rest of the world'. That would be the good outcome for me and I just can't see it
happening.
I'll be literary and say that maybe for nations 'the way up is the way down.' And while
the disparity and struggle between wealthy and not in the US is starkly apparent, we are
nowhere near bottoming out here yet. And I think we have to be; I think we will be - but
when? I'll be literary again and say that for Tigger it was when he got all his bounce taken
out of him. All of it. Not 'make America great' but rather 'help America survive
yadayadayada...'
I'm kinda doubting I'll be around to see it. It's sort of that 'not with a bang but a
wimper' sort of scenario - and we're a long way from wimpering yet.
Still, I feel very positive. I think 'the rest of the world' is going to be kinder than we
deserve when it all boils down to the dregs. What a day that will be!
Nemesiscalling 15
Right you are. The Anti-Russia hype has been going on for a while but had a bit of a hiatus
during King (W) Shrub II. Both parties worked to destroy the Russian economy during the
80s/90s with the Chicago/Harvard boys gutting it completely while enriching themselves. It
accelerated under Obama while they presented us with the "Reset" switch. Apparently the
Russians didn't play along so they became the bogeyman that gets inflated as time goes on.
Trump tried but got dragged down in the process.
As to a US split, I live in the south. So I've wondered if California (for example) tried
to leave if a US President would pull a Lincoln and destroy the state ... in order to save
it.
Nemesis@15 -"Trust me when I say" ... never trust anyone who says anything after that phrase!
How exactly did the Dems play the right card with Russiagate? Do you mean they hoodwinked
their supporters into believing Russia to be the enemy, so that is somehow 'the right card'?
I'll stop there. You've completely confused me.
Occupied Palestine continues killing people as documented in the report below from Reuters
"
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli missile strike in the Gaza Strip killed six members of a
Palestinian family on Thursday, all of them civilians, medical officials and residents said,
bringing the death toll in the territory from a 48-hour surge in fighting to 32.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the pre-dawn incident in Deir al-Balah,
which came as cross-border shelling exchanges continued despite a ceasefire offer by the
Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad.
Israel killed an Islamic Jihad field commander on Tuesday, sparking cross-border rocket
salvoes by the militant group and further Israeli strikes. Medics said 32 Palestinians have
been killed, at least a third of them civilians.
Those killed in Thursday's attack on a home in Deir al-Balah included a woman and a child,
medical officials said. Another 12 people were wounded, they said.
"
Sad to see this continue to go on and no resolution in sight, only escalation
I mean "right" in that allowing Russiagate to seep into the waking consciousness of
America took the pressure off the dems and what was going to be their reckoning. In effect,
they have now doubled-down in the hope that the Trump phenomenon of nationalism will fade
away and their rule will be restored. Whether or not Sanders plays into this I think we are
yet to see, but, so far, Sanders has played ball with a lot of dem garbage.
Again, by the "right" play I mean as if a dark sorcerer had banked his continued favor
with the king he serves on a magic brew that would muddle the King's brain and keep him from
knowing of the Sorcerer's repulsive ambition. Such is the dems plan as well as many if not
all of the republicans who secretly detest DJT but who don't speak up because their base
believes in Trump.
TASS and Sputnik have both published short reports on events from the BRICS Summit in
Brasilia. As I noted earlier, it revolved around the Business Forum, so most everything
focused on economics, global trade, and the hindrances in the normal conduct of commerce:
"'Undoubtedly, the global economy was affected by the fact that methods of unfair
competition, unilateral sanctions - including politically motivated ones are being used on a
wider scale in the global trade, [and] protectionism is flourishing. Under those
circumstances, BRICS nations have to take serious effort to ensure the development of their
economies, to prevent the deterioration of the social situation and the fall of living
standards, of our citizens' welfare,' Putin said at the closing ceremony of the BRICS
business forum."
Hopefully, there'll be a full transcript of Putin's remarks and further reporting to
digest tomorrow.
Re: trustworthy people, I meant that my eyes have seen first hand the effects of this
whole Russiagate brainwashing. As a result, I don't talk politics with my family, and it is
tenuous with my coworkers. Can you imagine a guy working in a west-coast city and actually
has something positive to say about DJT?
I still say that DJT deserves an ENORMOURS!...ENORMOUS! amount of credit for awakening
such terminology into the public lexicon as "Globalism," "nationalism," "fake news," and the
like. How he was able to do this was very simple but absolutely revolutionary for any
bonafide presidential candidate that I can remember or know. For myself, I view the issue as
globalism as paramount and far more world-shattering than US imperialism.
Here
is an interesting Frontline interview with Ann Coulter a week or so ago. It shines a light on
how a guy like Trump was able to capture the public imagination. Hint: it wasn't because the
Deep State was grooming him.
For any of you who use protonmail. They seem to be touting their links to clearly compromised
media sources such as Bellingcat quite strongly these days, and are pushing the empire's
message on MH17, Ukraine, Scripals, Russiagate etc etc. I was an early adopter but they now
seem compromised or simply deluded. Too bad, another one bites the dust.
Got it, Nemesiscalling, sorry to be obtuse. But I'm afraid I do disagree. This whole phobia
against Russia and anti-Trump scenario turned off huge numbers of their voters - some didn't
vote but some actually held their noses and voted for Trump. To me (and I sure could be
wrong) Dems just dug themselves a deeper hole with all of this. Save some sort of coup, I
can't see them winning a year from now. If anything more US voters have wised up than were
wised up before - you don't go back once eyes are opened.
I agree with your premise about this being kayfabe. From where I sit, there is no other
explanation for any political party to make these endless attacks based on absolutely nothing
over and over again. Attacks which can only maintain the charade from 2016 of Trump the
Victim. Does anyone think that somehow the Dems suddenly stopped being to calculating
psycho/sociopaths that they and the other side of the aisle are? Why would such shrewd
players not verify what people like Vindeman had to say before putting them on the stand?
They keep undermining their own case over and over again.
I find it impossible that they would continue to stick their hands in the fire after being
burned every single time before this, and with easily verifiable information. Especially when
the attacks are ALWAYS over stupid shit and never go after anything he actually could be
attacked for doing. What I keep seeing is like watching kindergarten kids try to kill a grown
man with foam rocks.
We keep seeing this complex, convoluted, evil shit come out of DC and yet we
simultaneously think these same players are morons? No freaking way. These attacks are the
only thing that keeps Trump's base on his side as he keeps betraying them and the opposition
keeps trying to outdo its last performance of stupid. I have seen a LOT of Trump supporters
throw in the towel on him for things he has done in the last 3 years, yet they come back to
his side after the newest stupid thing the left wing of the uni-party comes up with.
Shit, it isn't like Trump is even really shaking things up to cause such a ruckus!
Tandem of CIA and the State Department against Trump ?
Notable quotes:
"... Yovanovitch, who was removed from her post in May, testified that President Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani led a campaign to oust her as ambassador over unsubstantiated allegations that she badmouthed the president and was seeking to stop Ukraine from opening an investigation into Joe Biden and his son. -Axios ..."
"... Last month, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan reportedly told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Trump recalled Yovanovitch after Giuliani singled her out for having an anti-Trump agenda. ..."
"... McKinley testified to impeachment investigators that he resigned over the State Department's unwillingness to support foreign service officers caught up in the Ukraine scandal and the apparent "utilization of our ambassadors overseas to advance domestic political objectives. ..."
On Monday, the House committees conducting impeachment inquiries into President Trump released transcripts of testimony from several
witnesses, including former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and career diplomat and former senior adviser to Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo, Michael McKinley.
Yovanovitch, who was removed from her post in May, testified that President Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani led a campaign to
oust her as ambassador over unsubstantiated allegations that she badmouthed the president and was seeking to stop Ukraine from opening
an investigation into Joe Biden and his son. -Axios
Yovanovitch, who left her position in May, testified that she "assumed" Trump's lack of support for her stemmed from a "partnership"
between Giuliani and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko .
Last month, Deputy Secretary of State
John Sullivan reportedly told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Trump recalled Yovanovitch after Giuliani singled her
out for having an anti-Trump agenda.
McKinley testified to impeachment investigators that he resigned over the State Department's unwillingness to support foreign
service officers caught up in the Ukraine scandal and the apparent "utilization of our ambassadors overseas to advance domestic
political objectives." -Axios
Trump will leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will
remain.
Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government doesn't
give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your property,
and most of all – your integrity. "Fuck you stupid voters – now go elect another moron – we've got governments
to overthrow"
" The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic
attitudes."
As are the Republican establishment and even such faux dissidents as Andrew Napolitano and
Patrick Buchanan in columns easily found here on The Unz Review.
Exceptionalia needs enemies to keep the sheep herded when the Red v Blue politics and
increasingly absurd culture skirmishes aren't sufficiently distracting.
Excellent summation of the current predicament involving Trump and his ruthless foes. The
greatest and most ridiculous 'conspiracy theory' of all is Russiagate itself–yet this
politicized hoax is not being allowed to die a natural death; thus the Demorat impeachment
inquiry.
So now we have entered Stage Two of this toxic and unnecessary melodrama. We can thank the
partisan, biased and subversive 'mainstream' media for this downward step.
Ironically, the media's rank dishonesty is turning Trump into a heroic figure. This is
poetic justice.
Haven't our media overlords heard?–the Soviet Union is dead.
In its place is Christian Russia. So why the enmity?
Might these lingering tensions have more than a little to do with Putin's stubborn
alliance with Syria and Iran? It sure looks that way.
It must be noted that Israel remains deeply disturbed over the Russia-Iran-Syria
federation. But that's Israel's problem. America is not burdened by those historic
antagonisms, regional rivalries, or security concerns. Americans should therefore be
relieved. Only we're not allowed to be.
The Zionist state has deviously entwined its security interests with America's. Israel and
Zio-America have been artificially conjoined at the political hip. Didn't you hear?
This political union is good for the Jews. The Americans?–less so. Far less.
Unless we can extricate ourselves, this unnatural 'partnership' may end in a cataclysm
Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government
doesn't give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your
property, and most of all – your integrity.
The Deep State doesn't care about the unimportant internecine squabbles of the 'two
parties' as long as their important issues are maintained. As a matter of fact it strengthens
the false perception that there is a choice when voting.
Trump and the Deep State do not care what the American people want. They know that most
American people are inane fools and will believe anything. Most Americans would rather watch
America's Got Talent or Dancing With The Stars than be informed about important issues.
I think if President Trump was faced with a Cuban Missile Crisis situation the outcome could
be very different to the first time. On that occasion the two superpowers, despite coming
close to open war, were able to contain and de-escalate. The conditions are very different
today. As Professor Cohen says," The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly
dangerous, not only due to reasons cited here -- a new Cold War fraught with the possibility
of hot war." In this context it is essential the president is "fully empowered to cope with
the multiple possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation."
One problem is that the original Cold War was the peace, a post-world war environment: today
we are in pre-world war environment. There is a dangerous misconception that a Cold War
sequel will have the same peaceful ending. The world has experienced periods of peace (or
relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the two Peloponnesian
Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna, to name a few. The
Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One. That conflict was
followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was followed by the
United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are they will not
prevent a third world war. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
"The New York Times seem eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William
Barr and his appointed special investigator John Durham."
Ya know, the investigation would be a lot harder to delegitimize if it the guys doing it
didn't whitewash Iran/Contra, like Barr, or systematic and widespread CIA torture, like
Durham. You put lifelong CIA whores hot on the trail of illegal CIA domestic operations
against political enemies? Come on. Nobody with a 3-digit IQ can keep a straight face.
You want this shit to stop? Then do to Langley what the Germans did to their Stasi. CIA
investigation of CIA crimes do not pass the laff test anymore.
Trump's problem was described in simple terms by John Connelly when talking with Henry
Kissinger. "Henry", he said, "In Washington you are judged by the men you've destroyed".
Trump has not destroyed anyone, not Comey, not Brennan, not Clapper. So he is viewed as weak,
an easy target. So they just keep piling on. Attacking Trump is viewed as a "penalty-free
activity
Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can elude US missile-defense systems, make
new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative and urgent. If only for the sake of
his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so
This makes little sense. Russia and the U.S. are not enemies, and are potentially allies.
Why would a U.S.-Russia treaty be desirable? The U.S. wants to help Russia defend its South
western border against dangerous nations, such as Turkey & Iran.
A U.S.-China treaty would be helpful, but China is unlikely to accept anything that might
interfere with their colonial ambitions.
____
Also, the author is likely overestimating Russia's technical prowess. Does anyone remember
the recent incident the Russians had with their nuclear powered "Skyfall" cruise missile?
(1)
The mysterious explosion on August 8 at the Russian navy's range in Nyonoksa killed
seven and spurred fears that Russia was testing its nuclear-powered Burevestnik missile,
also known by the NATO codename 'Skyfall.' But U.S. intelligence indicates the fatal
explosion occurred as Russia attempted to salvage a downed Skyfall missile from the ocean
floor,
Russia has reportedly conducted five unsuccessful tests of Skyfall since November 2017,
all resulting in loss of control and crashes. The longest test lasted for two minutes with
the missile flying 22 miles, and the shortest lasted four seconds and five miles.
@Giuseppe I'm a huge fan
of Stephen Cohen's, but, with bi-partisanship dead, his calling for a new Church commission
is pie-in-the-sky. Nothing good can happen until this impeachment farce is over.
In fact, I'd say that Barr and Durham better hurry up and indict someone. There is less
than a year left before the next election, which only leaves a few weeks this year, and the
first few months in 2020. Once there's like 3-4 months to go before the election it will be
too late. And, BTW, where is the long-awaited IG Horowitz's report? Tick Tock guys.
We've been hearing that for a long time, but one thing to remember is: Islam is a
foreign(ers')-identity in Russia. It won't be taking over the political center in Russia
anytime soon, nor getting any European-Russian converts.
@Dan
Hayes Russia hadn't seized anything. The Black Sea Fleet had always been stationed there.
After the Ukrainian government proposed outlawing the Russian language and ethnic Ukrainians
attacked the Crimean parliament, Crimeans, the vast majority of whom are ethnic Russians,
moved to hold a referendum.
As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It's time
for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty.
The CIA activities restricted by the Church Committee never stopped. They continued "off
the books", financed by drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, and (especially) by kickbacks
from legitimate but overpriced arms contracts with Saudi Arabia. The close relationship with
the Saudi royal family raises awkward questions about who this part of the CIA is really
working for.
A new Church Committee would only be able to investigate the parts of the CIA that it can
see. It is probably impossible for the US government to control the "off-books" parts of the
CIA.
Here too there is an inconvenient truth: To the extent that Democrats any longer
seriously discuss national security in the context of US-Russian relations, it mostly
involves vilifying both Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (Recall also that previous
presidents were free to negotiate with Russia's Soviet communist leaders, even encouraged
to do so, whereas the demonized Putin is an anti-communist, post-Soviet leader.)
Maybe, the fallacy is to think that Democrats were ever opposed to communism. As one can
learn around here, WWII was the joint venture to destroy european national cultures and force
them under globalist domination. The Roosevelt administration did about everything to
strengthen communism. The current Russian leadership is as sanely nationalist as it gets.
Possibly, that is the problem?
What struck me first, before I woke up, was that the ultimate accusation against Russia
– before the Ukraine affair started – was that they were said to be homophopbic.
While this can be a fault in the eyes of a dedicated liberal, to anyone who has lived through
the Cold War, that accusation was outlandishly irrelevant.
The problem that liberal globalists have with Russia is exactly their sanity. Saying this, I
do not want to insinuate that Republicans are sane, just for the record. They are the other
side of the coin in the big charade.
The Bolsheviks in Russia told everyone that they were a Political Party – just like the
Communists Party etc. The Democrats and Republicans say the same thing , but they are more
Bolshevik than any American wants to admit. The Wars, the Police state, the original
European, African, Native American societies being destroyed is not the best example –
if you are pushing for a NWO. It has failed but they are taking down as many as they can
– along with their evil Order. This should one of the highest priority, of most writers
today. Thanks Unz Rev.
@Dan
Hayes From which entity? The country – existing as a unity upon the foundation of a
constitution, known as Ukraine – stopped being that entity when a bunch of people
toppled a constitutionally mandated government with an unconstitutional coup.
You demand peoples and regions of the former Ukraine remain united? Under what unifying
law? The constitution? But the Maidan people tore it apart to get into power. Why would those
that take the other side of the debate agree to be governed by law they know their opposition
has already, and will again, trod on?
Practically speaking, Ukraine after Maidan is not the same entity as Ukraine before, as
there is no social contract left that everyone is willing to be bound by.
Crimea being autonomous, had more freedom than the rest to jump ship, and so they did. But
any region can now go, because anyone saying 'but the Constitution bans secession', forget
that the people who speak this within Ukraine are those exact same people who tore the
Constitution apart.
But don't think it'a just political entities such as Crimea that migrated to Russia of
their own wills (as the UN Charter demands), millions of labourers have left for Russia from
the remaining entity too, and there was no Putin there at each of their houses, giving
personal pep talks over tea about how Russia is better, and how they should migrate accross
the border. People chose with their own feet.
Here's a question – if tomorrow a bunch of gunmen threw out congress, the judiciary,
and the executive from Washington DC, and replaced them with their own – would you
consider that the individual states were then still bound to the federal government through
the Constitution? Would you demand honour from one side, knowing fullwell that the other side
is dishonourable?
Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked
American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack"
so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor.
What's seemingly bizarre is that these modern day Dems with their 'Russiagate' obsession
are the very same people who not so many years back would eat up a 1966 movie like 'The
Russians Are Coming, the Russians are Coming', with it's message that the Soviet Union along
with its Communism was perfectly innocuous (just a laugh really), and the Cold War itself was
all a big joke, and pay to see it multiple times.
It's not so bizarre, though, as there is an underlining continuity in all this, then and
now.
They hate the organic Russian people and their culture, then and now. That hasn't
changed.
A USSR of the past with the Russian people safely subjugated/crushed under Soviet
Communism, they like and are okay with.
A Russian Federation where the Russian people appear to have moved away from Communism
they don't like. That's dangerous.
Russians shouldn't necessarily feel too bad though about this as they are not the only
people so hated. These sorts hate most peoples which attempt to express their physical and
cultural identity, often even their own at times.
There's a hatred for most all of humanity there which stems from an underlying self hatred
with these types.
"... this impeachment isn't directed at Trump at all, it's about undermining the rising left-wing opposition in the Democratic party. They are plausibly on the verge of seizing the party agenda away from the neo-liberal consensus of the Clinton-Obama decades -- with issues like universal public health-care and equitable taxes. They've even found ways to fund campaigns without bowing to the corporate gods. ..."
"... Political parties are nothing more than gangs. To me, the Dems are like the Gambinos and the Repoops are like the Genovese. And they hate it when someone from outside their domain comes and disrupt their racket, when things are going smooth. ..."
"... To me Trump is like the mobster Joe Gallo, killed at Umberto's clam house in NYC. Gallo was a big shot, talked loud and fast, and wanted to start his own racket. And the other crime families would not let him do that. So they whacked him. The same thing both Dems and Repoops are trying to do with Trump. And yes Repoops don't like Trump, as in the latest from Drudge, that the Repoops are split when it comes to impeachment. ..."
"... Apropòs the articles about the 'deep state' meddling in US domestic politics, here's an oldie but a goodie from the World Socialist Web Site: The CIA Democrats . ..."
"... "The Mueller investigation has thus ultimately ended up prosecuting people for telling the same pack of lies that Mueller himself was pushing. The Clinton media, including CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times, are baffled by this. They follow the Stone trial assiduously from delight in seeing a long term Trump hanger-on brought down, and in the hope something will come out about Wikileaks or Russia. Their reporting, as that of the BBC, has been deliberately vague on why Stone is being charged, contriving to leave their audience with the impression that Stone's trial proves Trump connections to Wikileaks and Russia, when in fact it proves the precise opposite. A fact you will never learn from the mainstream media. Which is why I am doing this at 2am on a very cold Edinburgh night, for the small but vital audience which is interested in the truth." ..."
"... Of course, it stretches back to both parties, but that's what it is about - not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine - plus S, L, Y, and above all I & A!!! Gosh, we might get the entire alphabet included; ahoy all boats! ..."
"... Let me briefly sketch out an alternative narrative that more accurately captures our present predicament. Since the end of World War II, successive administrations have sought to devise a formula for assuring American consumers access to Persian Gulf oil while also satisfying pressing domestic political interests. Over a period of decades, that effort succeeded chiefly in giving birth to new problems. Out of these multiplying difficulties came the 9/11 attacks and their immediate sequel, a "war on terrorism" meant to settle matters once and for all. ..."
"... To state the matter bluntly, 9/11 was an expression of chickens coming home to roost, a massive strategic failure that the ensuing military campaigns beginning in 2001 and continuing to the present moment have affirmed. Given the dimensions of that failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X's illusory Pax is essentially zero. ..."
"... The very fact Bloomberg had to enter the Democratic Party presidential race is the definite proof Biden's corruption and involvement on the destruction of Ukraine is so overwhelming and difficult to hide that it will eventually be impossible to cover it with the NYT and WaPo power alone should he be chosen as the nominee. ..."
I am amazed how the Impeachment Circus and the mainstream media continue to
ignore the facts of this story:
Joe Biden has been a favorite target for Trump-allied lawmakers. Many have adopted Trump's unsubstantiated assertion that Biden
pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, because he was investigating Burisma.
The CIA is emerging as a domestic political party.
...
Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest. "The CIA is not involved in domestic politics," he said. "Period. That's on the
record."
This he asserted confidently, at an event where he had just spoken about about influence campaigns on swing voters and implied
that Hillary Clinton might be right in calling U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset. Even seasoned analysts, it
seems, have their blind spots.
What shifted [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] now? I'd say the answer is: this impeachment isn't directed at Trump at all, it's
about undermining the rising left-wing opposition in the Democratic party. They are plausibly on the verge of seizing the party
agenda away from the neo-liberal consensus of the Clinton-Obama decades -- with issues like universal public health-care and
equitable taxes. They've even found ways to fund campaigns without bowing to the corporate gods.
I agree with Mr. Salutin, the impeachment is not about impeachment, although if impeachment results, I'm sure they will take
it. And I agree it's about protecting the current Democratic Part "elites", both from scandal (Joe Biden, Clinton) and from the
challenge on the left. A risky and desperate move .
I tend to think it was Trump going after the Ukraine cesspit that precipitated the impeachment, but other motives seem relevant.
I have thought since Obama went all in with Russiagate that the current Dem leadership does not feel it can afford to relinquish
control.
Political parties are nothing more than gangs. To me, the Dems are like the Gambinos and the Repoops are like the Genovese. And
they hate it when someone from outside their domain comes and disrupt their racket, when things are going smooth.
To me Trump
is like the mobster Joe Gallo, killed at Umberto's clam house in NYC. Gallo was a big shot, talked loud and fast, and wanted to
start his own racket. And the other crime families would not let him do that. So they whacked him. The same thing both Dems and Repoops are trying to do with Trump. And yes Repoops don't like Trump, as in the latest from Drudge, that the Repoops are split
when it comes to impeachment.
Biden / Ukraine: Others begin to get it: 'Further scratches become visible on the picture of the Bidens in the Ukraine affair'
(original in German: 'Am Bild der Bidens in der Ukraine-Affäre werden weitere Kratzer sichtbar' nzz 9.11.19, nzz.ch/international/ukraine-affaere-rolle-der-biden-familie-undurchsichtig-ld.1520759)
Apropòs the articles about the 'deep state' meddling in US domestic politics, here's an oldie but a goodie from the World Socialist
Web Site: The CIA Democrats .
Craig Murray has an exclusive interview with
Randy Credico he prefaces with these remarks:
"The Mueller investigation has thus ultimately ended up prosecuting people for telling the same pack of lies that Mueller himself
was pushing. The Clinton media, including CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times, are baffled by this. They follow the Stone
trial assiduously from delight in seeing a long term Trump hanger-on brought down, and in the hope something will come out about
Wikileaks or Russia. Their reporting, as that of the BBC, has been deliberately vague on why Stone is being charged, contriving
to leave their audience with the impression that Stone's trial proves Trump connections to Wikileaks and Russia, when in fact
it proves the precise opposite. A fact you will never learn from the mainstream media. Which is why I am doing this at 2am on
a very cold Edinburgh night, for the small but vital audience which is interested in the truth."
That would include MoA barflies since we crave Truth. Murray has a bit more to say prior to the excerpt I provide, which I
suggest be read, too.
What a feast of links! I've only just started, with b's Daniel Lazare piece at Stretegic Culture.org - well done!
" ...This is what impeachment is about, not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine – plus Syria, Libya,
Yemen, and other countries that the Obama administration succeeded in destroying – and why Trump should pay the supreme penalty
for suggesting that Democrats are in any way to blame..."
Of course, it stretches back to both parties, but that's what it is about - not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine - plus S, L, Y, and above all I & A!!! Gosh, we might get the entire alphabet included; ahoy all
boats!
Impeachment is about controlling where the attention is focused. When things get to close to home Pelosi says look over here at
the orange head, look over there at the border but whatever you do, do not look over
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1KfU5ifhqE ">here.
"Biden / Ukraine: Others begin to get it: 'Further scratches become visible on the picture of the Bidens in the Ukraine affair'
(original in German: 'Am Bild der Bidens in der Ukraine-Affäre werden weitere Kratzer sichtbar' nzz 9.11.19, nzz.ch/international/ukraine-affaere-rolle-der-biden-familie-undurchsichtig-ld.1520759)"
Andrew J. Bacevich weighs in on US foreign policy:
Let me briefly sketch out an alternative narrative that more accurately captures our present predicament. Since the end of
World War II, successive administrations have sought to devise a formula for assuring American consumers access to Persian
Gulf oil while also satisfying pressing domestic political interests. Over a period of decades, that effort succeeded chiefly
in giving birth to new problems. Out of these multiplying difficulties came the 9/11 attacks and their immediate sequel, a
"war on terrorism" meant to settle matters once and for all.
To state the matter bluntly, 9/11 was an expression of chickens coming home to roost, a massive strategic failure that the
ensuing military campaigns beginning in 2001 and continuing to the present moment have affirmed. Given the dimensions of that
failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X's illusory Pax is essentially zero.
There is no going back to an imagined Golden Age of American statecraft in the Middle East. The imperative is to go forward,
which requires acknowledging how wrongheaded U.S. policy in region has been ever since FDR had his famous tete-a-tete with
King Ibn Saud and Harry Truman rushed to recognize the newborn State of Israel.t
The very fact Bloomberg had to enter the Democratic Party presidential race is the definite proof Biden's corruption and involvement
on the destruction of Ukraine is so overwhelming and difficult to hide that it will eventually be impossible to cover it with
the NYT and WaPo power alone should he be chosen as the nominee.
Trump will leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will
remain.
Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government doesn't
give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your property,
and most of all – your integrity. "Fuck you stupid voters – now go elect another moron – we've got governments
to overthrow"
" The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic
attitudes."
As are the Republican establishment and even such faux dissidents as Andrew Napolitano and
Patrick Buchanan in columns easily found here on The Unz Review.
Exceptionalia needs enemies to keep the sheep herded when the Red v Blue politics and
increasingly absurd culture skirmishes aren't sufficiently distracting.
Excellent summation of the current predicament involving Trump and his ruthless foes. The
greatest and most ridiculous 'conspiracy theory' of all is Russiagate itself–yet this
politicized hoax is not being allowed to die a natural death; thus the Demorat impeachment
inquiry.
So now we have entered Stage Two of this toxic and unnecessary melodrama. We can thank the
partisan, biased and subversive 'mainstream' media for this downward step.
Ironically, the media's rank dishonesty is turning Trump into a heroic figure. This is
poetic justice.
Haven't our media overlords heard?–the Soviet Union is dead.
In its place is Christian Russia. So why the enmity?
Might these lingering tensions have more than a little to do with Putin's stubborn
alliance with Syria and Iran? It sure looks that way.
It must be noted that Israel remains deeply disturbed over the Russia-Iran-Syria
federation. But that's Israel's problem. America is not burdened by those historic
antagonisms, regional rivalries, or security concerns. Americans should therefore be
relieved. Only we're not allowed to be.
The Zionist state has deviously entwined its security interests with America's. Israel and
Zio-America have been artificially conjoined at the political hip. Didn't you hear?
This political union is good for the Jews. The Americans?–less so. Far less.
Unless we can extricate ourselves, this unnatural 'partnership' may end in a cataclysm
Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government
doesn't give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your
property, and most of all – your integrity.
The Deep State doesn't care about the unimportant internecine squabbles of the 'two
parties' as long as their important issues are maintained. As a matter of fact it strengthens
the false perception that there is a choice when voting.
Trump and the Deep State do not care what the American people want. They know that most
American people are inane fools and will believe anything. Most Americans would rather watch
America's Got Talent or Dancing With The Stars than be informed about important issues.
I think if President Trump was faced with a Cuban Missile Crisis situation the outcome could
be very different to the first time. On that occasion the two superpowers, despite coming
close to open war, were able to contain and de-escalate. The conditions are very different
today. As Professor Cohen says," The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly
dangerous, not only due to reasons cited here -- a new Cold War fraught with the possibility
of hot war." In this context it is essential the president is "fully empowered to cope with
the multiple possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation."
One problem is that the original Cold War was the peace, a post-world war environment: today
we are in pre-world war environment. There is a dangerous misconception that a Cold War
sequel will have the same peaceful ending. The world has experienced periods of peace (or
relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the two Peloponnesian
Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna, to name a few. The
Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One. That conflict was
followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was followed by the
United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are they will not
prevent a third world war. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
"The New York Times seem eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William
Barr and his appointed special investigator John Durham."
Ya know, the investigation would be a lot harder to delegitimize if it the guys doing it
didn't whitewash Iran/Contra, like Barr, or systematic and widespread CIA torture, like
Durham. You put lifelong CIA whores hot on the trail of illegal CIA domestic operations
against political enemies? Come on. Nobody with a 3-digit IQ can keep a straight face.
You want this shit to stop? Then do to Langley what the Germans did to their Stasi. CIA
investigation of CIA crimes do not pass the laff test anymore.
Trump's problem was described in simple terms by John Connelly when talking with Henry
Kissinger. "Henry", he said, "In Washington you are judged by the men you've destroyed".
Trump has not destroyed anyone, not Comey, not Brennan, not Clapper. So he is viewed as weak,
an easy target. So they just keep piling on. Attacking Trump is viewed as a "penalty-free
activity
Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can elude US missile-defense systems, make
new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative and urgent. If only for the sake of
his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so
This makes little sense. Russia and the U.S. are not enemies, and are potentially allies.
Why would a U.S.-Russia treaty be desirable? The U.S. wants to help Russia defend its South
western border against dangerous nations, such as Turkey & Iran.
A U.S.-China treaty would be helpful, but China is unlikely to accept anything that might
interfere with their colonial ambitions.
____
Also, the author is likely overestimating Russia's technical prowess. Does anyone remember
the recent incident the Russians had with their nuclear powered "Skyfall" cruise missile?
(1)
The mysterious explosion on August 8 at the Russian navy's range in Nyonoksa killed
seven and spurred fears that Russia was testing its nuclear-powered Burevestnik missile,
also known by the NATO codename 'Skyfall.' But U.S. intelligence indicates the fatal
explosion occurred as Russia attempted to salvage a downed Skyfall missile from the ocean
floor,
Russia has reportedly conducted five unsuccessful tests of Skyfall since November 2017,
all resulting in loss of control and crashes. The longest test lasted for two minutes with
the missile flying 22 miles, and the shortest lasted four seconds and five miles.
@Giuseppe I'm a huge fan
of Stephen Cohen's, but, with bi-partisanship dead, his calling for a new Church commission
is pie-in-the-sky. Nothing good can happen until this impeachment farce is over.
In fact, I'd say that Barr and Durham better hurry up and indict someone. There is less
than a year left before the next election, which only leaves a few weeks this year, and the
first few months in 2020. Once there's like 3-4 months to go before the election it will be
too late. And, BTW, where is the long-awaited IG Horowitz's report? Tick Tock guys.
We've been hearing that for a long time, but one thing to remember is: Islam is a
foreign(ers')-identity in Russia. It won't be taking over the political center in Russia
anytime soon, nor getting any European-Russian converts.
@Dan
Hayes Russia hadn't seized anything. The Black Sea Fleet had always been stationed there.
After the Ukrainian government proposed outlawing the Russian language and ethnic Ukrainians
attacked the Crimean parliament, Crimeans, the vast majority of whom are ethnic Russians,
moved to hold a referendum.
As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It's time
for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty.
The CIA activities restricted by the Church Committee never stopped. They continued "off
the books", financed by drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, and (especially) by kickbacks
from legitimate but overpriced arms contracts with Saudi Arabia. The close relationship with
the Saudi royal family raises awkward questions about who this part of the CIA is really
working for.
A new Church Committee would only be able to investigate the parts of the CIA that it can
see. It is probably impossible for the US government to control the "off-books" parts of the
CIA.
Here too there is an inconvenient truth: To the extent that Democrats any longer
seriously discuss national security in the context of US-Russian relations, it mostly
involves vilifying both Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (Recall also that previous
presidents were free to negotiate with Russia's Soviet communist leaders, even encouraged
to do so, whereas the demonized Putin is an anti-communist, post-Soviet leader.)
Maybe, the fallacy is to think that Democrats were ever opposed to communism. As one can
learn around here, WWII was the joint venture to destroy european national cultures and force
them under globalist domination. The Roosevelt administration did about everything to
strengthen communism. The current Russian leadership is as sanely nationalist as it gets.
Possibly, that is the problem?
What struck me first, before I woke up, was that the ultimate accusation against Russia
– before the Ukraine affair started – was that they were said to be homophopbic.
While this can be a fault in the eyes of a dedicated liberal, to anyone who has lived through
the Cold War, that accusation was outlandishly irrelevant.
The problem that liberal globalists have with Russia is exactly their sanity. Saying this, I
do not want to insinuate that Republicans are sane, just for the record. They are the other
side of the coin in the big charade.
The Bolsheviks in Russia told everyone that they were a Political Party – just like the
Communists Party etc. The Democrats and Republicans say the same thing , but they are more
Bolshevik than any American wants to admit. The Wars, the Police state, the original
European, African, Native American societies being destroyed is not the best example –
if you are pushing for a NWO. It has failed but they are taking down as many as they can
– along with their evil Order. This should one of the highest priority, of most writers
today. Thanks Unz Rev.
@Dan
Hayes From which entity? The country – existing as a unity upon the foundation of a
constitution, known as Ukraine – stopped being that entity when a bunch of people
toppled a constitutionally mandated government with an unconstitutional coup.
You demand peoples and regions of the former Ukraine remain united? Under what unifying
law? The constitution? But the Maidan people tore it apart to get into power. Why would those
that take the other side of the debate agree to be governed by law they know their opposition
has already, and will again, trod on?
Practically speaking, Ukraine after Maidan is not the same entity as Ukraine before, as
there is no social contract left that everyone is willing to be bound by.
Crimea being autonomous, had more freedom than the rest to jump ship, and so they did. But
any region can now go, because anyone saying 'but the Constitution bans secession', forget
that the people who speak this within Ukraine are those exact same people who tore the
Constitution apart.
But don't think it'a just political entities such as Crimea that migrated to Russia of
their own wills (as the UN Charter demands), millions of labourers have left for Russia from
the remaining entity too, and there was no Putin there at each of their houses, giving
personal pep talks over tea about how Russia is better, and how they should migrate accross
the border. People chose with their own feet.
Here's a question – if tomorrow a bunch of gunmen threw out congress, the judiciary,
and the executive from Washington DC, and replaced them with their own – would you
consider that the individual states were then still bound to the federal government through
the Constitution? Would you demand honour from one side, knowing fullwell that the other side
is dishonourable?
Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked
American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack"
so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor.
What's seemingly bizarre is that these modern day Dems with their 'Russiagate' obsession
are the very same people who not so many years back would eat up a 1966 movie like 'The
Russians Are Coming, the Russians are Coming', with it's message that the Soviet Union along
with its Communism was perfectly innocuous (just a laugh really), and the Cold War itself was
all a big joke, and pay to see it multiple times.
It's not so bizarre, though, as there is an underlining continuity in all this, then and
now.
They hate the organic Russian people and their culture, then and now. That hasn't
changed.
A USSR of the past with the Russian people safely subjugated/crushed under Soviet
Communism, they like and are okay with.
A Russian Federation where the Russian people appear to have moved away from Communism
they don't like. That's dangerous.
Russians shouldn't necessarily feel too bad though about this as they are not the only
people so hated. These sorts hate most peoples which attempt to express their physical and
cultural identity, often even their own at times.
There's a hatred for most all of humanity there which stems from an underlying self hatred
with these types.
"... Trump's surprising victory forced a pivot, with Clapper, Brennan and Comey adjusting the narrative to make it appear that Trump the traitor may have captured the White House due to help from the Kremlin, making him a latter-day Manchurian Candidate. The lesser allegations of Russian meddling were quickly elevated to devastating assertions that the Republican had only won with Putin's assistance. ..."
"... The national security team acted to protect their candidate Hillary Clinton, who represented America's Deep State. In spite of considerable naysaying, the Deep State is real, not just a wild conspiracy theory. Many Americans nevertheless do not believe that the Deep State exists, that it is a politically driven media creation much like Russiagate itself was, but if one changes the wording a bit and describes the Deep State as the Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country becomes much more plausible. ..."
"... It is now known that President Barack Obama's CIA Director John Brennan created a Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Brennan fabricated the narrative that "Russia had interfered in the 2016 election." Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the "evidence" produced to support that claim was and still is weak to nonexistent. ..."
"... With the help of the Establishment media, Clapper and Brennan were able to pretend that the ICA had been approved by "all 17 intelligence agencies" (as first claimed by Hillary Clinton). After several months, however Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA." ..."
"... And this was not a CIA-only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task Force with the approval of then Director James Comey. Former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele's FBI handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been one of those detailed to the Trump Task Force. Steele, of course, prepared the notorious dossier that was surfaced shortly before Donald Trump took office. It included considerable material intended to tie Trump to Russia, information that was in many cases fabricated or unsourced. ..."
"... The case officers would work with foreign intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on identifying intelligence collection priorities that would implicate Trump and his associates in illegal activity. And there is evidence that John Brennan himself would contact his counterparts in allied intelligence services to obtain their discreet cooperation, something they would be inclined to do in collegial fashion, ignoring whatever reservations they might have about spying on a possible American presidential candidate. ..."
"... e Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, sometimes using press or social media placements to disseminate fabrications about Trump and his associates. Information operations is a benign-sounding euphemism for propaganda fed through the Agency's friends in the media, and computer network operations can be used to create false linkages and misdirect inquiries. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 may have been a creation of this Task Force. ..."
"... In light of what has been learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower there should be a serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at minimum, reporting to them secretly after he was seconded to the National Security Council. All the CIA and FBI officers involved in the Task Force had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, but nevertheless were involved in a conspiracy to first denigrate and then possibly bring down a legally elected president. That effort continues with repeated assertions regarding Moscow's malevolent intentions for the 2020 national elections. Some might reasonably regard the whole Brennan affair, to include its spear carriers among the current and retired national security state leadership, as a case of institutionalized treason, and it inevitably leads to the question "What did Obama know?" ..."
"... Obama orchestrated the destruction of a political rival and he will get away scott free .because he's an oppressed and downtrodden dindu. ..."
"... But in fact Obama too is CIA nomenklatura, with the same depth of dynastic ties as GW Bush, albeit not at the same lofty level. ..."
"... This past election was CIA office politics, nothing more. Russigate is simply CIA eminence Hillary, the Queen of Mena, ratfucking a bumptious queue-jumper. She outranks Trump, who was merely a junior money-launderer for the CIA agents who looted the Soviet Union. It was her turn to take the figurehead head-of-state sinecure. She and Bill earned it with their lucrative Clinton Foundation covert-ops slush fund. ..."
"... And has been since the early 1950s when the Allen Dulles-Frank Wisner-James Jesus Angleton crew got rolling. They managed to thoroughly penetrate federal and state bureaucracies, the court systems, major corporations, the financial sector, and the mockingbird media. ..."
"... Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA." ..."
There is considerable evidence that the American system of government may have been
victimized by an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S. intelligence and
national security community. Former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA
Director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey appear to have played critical
leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own.
Almost certainly what they may have done would have been explicitly authorized by the former
President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his national security team.
It must have seemed a simple operation for the experienced CIA covert action operatives. To
prevent the unreliable and unpredictable political upstart Donald Trump from being nominated as
the GOP presidential candidate or even elected it would be necessary to create suspicion that
he was the tool of a resurgent Russia, acting under direct orders from Vladimir Putin to
empower Trump and damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Even though none of the alleged
Kremlin plotters would have expected Trump to actually beat Hillary, it was plausible to
maintain that they would have hoped that a weakened Clinton would be less able to implement the
anti-Russian agenda that she had been promoting. Many observers in both Russia and the U.S.
believed that if she had been elected armed conflict with Moscow would have been inevitable,
particularly if she moved to follow her husband's example and push to have both Georgia and
Ukraine join NATO, which Russia would have regarded as an existential threat.
Trump's surprising victory forced a pivot, with Clapper, Brennan and Comey adjusting the
narrative to make it appear that Trump the traitor may have captured the White House due to
help from the Kremlin, making him a latter-day Manchurian Candidate. The lesser allegations of
Russian meddling were quickly elevated to devastating assertions that the Republican had only
won with Putin's assistance.
No substantive evidence for the claim of serious Russian meddling has ever been produced in
spite of years of investigation, but the real objective was to plant the story that would
plausibly convince a majority of Americans that the election of Donald Trump was somehow
illegitimate.
The national security team acted to protect their candidate Hillary Clinton, who represented
America's Deep State. In spite of considerable naysaying, the Deep State is real, not just a
wild conspiracy theory. Many Americans nevertheless do not believe that the Deep State exists,
that it is a politically driven media creation much like Russiagate itself was, but if one
changes the wording a bit and describes the Deep State as the Establishment, with its political
power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City, the argument that there
exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country becomes much more
plausible.
The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields
immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. It also operates through relationships that
are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity
will be exposed.
Nevertheless, some might even argue that having a Deep State is a healthy part of American
democracy, that it serves as a check or corrective element on a political system that has
largely been corrupted and which no longer serves national interests. But that assessment
surely might have been made before it became clear that many of the leaders of the nation's
intelligence and security agencies are no longer the people's honorable servants they pretend
to be. They have been heavily politicized since at least the time of Ronald Reagan and have
frequently succumbed to the lure of wealth and power while identifying with and promoting the
interests of the Deep State.
Indeed, a number of former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directors have implicitly or
even directly admitted to the existence of a Deep State that has as one of its roles keeping
presidents like Donald Trump in check. Most recently, John McLaughlin, responding to a question
about Donald Trump's concern over Deep State involvement in the ongoing impeachment process,
said unambiguously "Well, you know, thank God for the 'deep state' With all of the people who
knew what was going on here, it took an intelligence officer to step forward and say something
about it, which was the trigger that then unleashed everything else. This is the institution
within the U.S. government is institutionally committed to objectivity and telling the truth.
It is one of the few institutions in Washington that is not in a chain of command that makes or
implements policy. Its whole job is to speak the truth -- it's engraved in marble in the
lobby."
Well, John's dedication to truth is exemplary but how does he explain his own role in
support of the lies being promoted by his boss George "slam dunk" Tenet that led to the war
against Iraq, the greatest foreign policy disaster ever experienced by the United States? Or
Tenet's sitting in the U.N. directly behind Secretary of State Colin Powell in the debate over
Iraq, providing cover and credibility for what everyone inside the system knew to be a bundle
of lies? Or his close friend and colleague Michael Morell's description of Trump
as a Russian agent , a claim that was supported by zero evidence and which was given
credibility only by Morell's boast that "I ran the CIA."
Beyond that, more details have been revealed demonstrating exactly how Deep State associates
have attempted, with considerable success, to subvert the actual functioning of American
democracy. Words are one thing, but acting to interfere in an electoral process or to undermine
a serving president is a rather more serious matter.
It is
now known that President Barack Obama's CIA Director John Brennan created a Trump Task
Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force
played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the
Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to
this day. Working with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Brennan fabricated
the narrative that "Russia had interfered in the 2016 election." Brennan and Clapper promoted
that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a
broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the
past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and
substantively different even though the "evidence" produced to support that claim was and still
is weak to nonexistent.
The Russian "election interference" narrative went on steroids on January 6, 2017, shortly
before Trump was inaugurated, when an "Intelligence Community Assessment" (ICA) orchestrated by
Clapper and Brennan was published. The banner headline atop The New York Times, itself an
integral part of the Deep State, on the following day set the tone for what was to follow:
"Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says."
With the help of the Establishment media, Clapper and Brennan were able to pretend that the
ICA had been approved by "all 17 intelligence agencies" (as first claimed by Hillary Clinton).
After several months, however Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked
analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather
unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the
Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor,
whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA."
Task Force Trump was kept secret within the Agency itself because the CIA is not supposed to
spy on Americans. Its staff was pulled together by invitation-only. Specific case officers
(i.e., men and women who recruit and handle spies overseas), analysts and administrative
personnel were recruited, presumably based on their political reliability. Not everyone invited
accepted the offer. But many did because it came with promises of promotion and other
rewards.
And this was not a CIA-only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task
Force with the approval of then Director James Comey. Former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele's
FBI handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been one of those detailed to the Trump Task Force.
Steele, of course, prepared the notorious dossier that was surfaced shortly before Donald Trump
took office. It included considerable material intended to tie Trump to Russia, information
that was in many cases fabricated or unsourced.
So, what kind of things would this Task Force do? The case officers would work with foreign
intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on
identifying intelligence collection priorities that would implicate Trump and his associates in
illegal activity. And there is evidence that John Brennan himself would contact his
counterparts in allied intelligence services to obtain their discreet cooperation, something
they would be inclined to do in collegial fashion, ignoring whatever reservations they might
have about spying on a possible American presidential candidate.
Trump Task Force members could have also tasked the National Security Agency (NSA) to do
targeted collection. They also would have the ability to engage in complicated covert actions
that would further set up and entrap Trump and his staff in questionable activity, such as the
targeting of associate George Papadopoulos. If he is ever properly interviewed, Maltese
citizen Joseph Mifsud may be able to shed light on the CIA officers who met with him, briefed
him on operational objectives regarding Papadopoulos and helped arrange monitored meetings. It
is highly likely that Azra Turk, the woman who met with George Papadopoulos, was part of the
CIA Trump Task Force.
The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, sometimes using press or social
media placements to disseminate fabrications about Trump and his associates. Information
operations is a benign-sounding euphemism for propaganda fed through the Agency's friends in
the media, and computer network operations can be used to create false linkages and misdirect
inquiries. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 may have been a creation
of this Task Force.
In light of what has been learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower there should be a
serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at minimum,
reporting to them secretly after he was seconded to the National Security Council. All the CIA
and FBI officers involved in the Task Force had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the
United States, but nevertheless were involved in a conspiracy to first denigrate and then
possibly bring down a legally elected president. That effort continues with repeated assertions
regarding Moscow's malevolent intentions for the 2020 national elections. Some might reasonably
regard the whole Brennan affair, to include its spear carriers among the current and retired
national security state leadership, as a case of institutionalized treason, and it inevitably
leads to the question "What did Obama know?"
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest,
a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a
more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its
email is[email protected] .
The entire FISA court process has been exposed as an insane sham.
"The Secret Team" just took the absurdity of the process and raised it to the next
level–injecting it into a political campaign.
It would be wonderful if they could fill a jail with every empty suit who touched those
warrants–but I would be stunned if even one of them gets paraded around in the orange
jump-suit they so richly deserve. Read More Replies:
@Moi
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments
Looking on at this affair from outside the USA, it is clear that the power and influence of
the USA is waning a lot faster than most people expected.
The replacement of the US military by mercenaries who are called other names was a first
step. The sanctioning and punishing of allies for stepping out of line is the second step.
BTW, it is notable how Japan and Australia are very keen to stay in line but the Europeans
less so.
I suspect the third step will be to encourage a collapse of the Euro – so as to make
wealthy Europeans shift their money to the USA in a panic.
It seems to me that the US public will be the last to learn of what is really happening.
Even on this website there are sometimes letters or articles that mention 9/11 as a
"terrorist" or "Saudi" act. How can one take anything such a person writes seriously?
The control of media and the internet seems to be the last part of the collapse. They will
hang on to that to the very last moment.
John Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force
Could it become Obamagate?
Perhaps, but what is the point? All this bullshit is engineered to make dumbass Americans
think justice is being served. Nothing will come of it no one will go to prison.
As if Trump weren't part and parcel of the Deep State.
His actions in Syria, Bolivia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, etc. all prove
incontrovertibly that he is (and has always been) a member in fine standing of the Deep
State. If he is a Manchurian Candidate, he is the true puppet of the Deep State, not the
people or of Russia.
Exactly. I voted for Trump, but, as long ago as mid April 2017, I determined that he was a
Deep Stater his actions are just too obvious to ignore.
The Magic Negro cannot be touched and that is why nothing will be done about the biggest crime in the history of our nation
Obama orchestrated the destruction of a political rival and he will get away scott free .because he's an oppressed and downtrodden dindu.
There is considerable evidence that the American system of government may have been
victimized by an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S.
Which one are you referring to, Iran 1953, Kennedy assassination 1963, Gulf of Tonkin 1964
or the other dozens of examples?
"And this was not a CIA-only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the
Task Force "
This just in: both the CIA and FBI are unconstitutional, agencies.Get rid of them -and all
of the other unconstitutional alphabet-soup agencies[FDA,EPA,SEC etc.etc.etc.]. No
downsizing-trash them all- NOW!
This also just in: "Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect
theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [via central bank monopolies], all governments are
essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be
"reformed","improved", simply because of their innate, unchangeble criminal nature."
onebornfree
"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way
to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those
of a professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock
@Alfred
Your point about 9/11 can't be made forcefully enough. We're going straight to hell unless
Israel and its American confederates are brought to justice, these wars ended, and order
restored. Clapper, Comey, Brennan, Mueller, Chertoff and the whole traitorous bunch are
probably guilty as principals but almost certainly they're at least complicit as accessories
before and after the fact. So naturally all we hear about is Russiagate.
The evidence overwhelmingly implicates Israel and not Saudi Arabia as you point out. That
Building 7 was brought down by explosives has been proved beyond doubt by Architects &
Engineers for 911 Truth, and as Dr. Alan Sobrosky put it, if Building 7 was brought down by
explosives, so too were the Twin Towers. The official NIST reports and all related government
narratives are preposterous. They're fairytales for fools inasmuch as the official mechanisms
rely on a suspension of the laws of physics more fanciful than Jack and the Beanstalk. The
story of the nineteen Arabs who couldn't handle Cessna 150s magically flying jetliners into
precise targets is more absurd than fairytale tropes about flying carpets.
Yet for Conservatism Inc and Fox News, which both claim to oppose the Deep State and its
narratives, there's no standard of evidence so low or preposterous that these cucks won't
cling to it to cover up what they must now know is Israel's guilt. We can assume it's
precisely because they're aware of Israel's guilt that they rule out the overwhelmingly
conclusive circumstantial evidence pointing to Israel on the grounds such evidence is
"anti-Semitic" and consequently false on apriori grounds. Moreover, any expert investigator
qualified in the relevant field who uncovers and presents evidence implicating Israel is cast
as the actual terrorist. It should go without saying they've reversed a millennium in the
development of Western thought regarding the connection between evidence and conclusion, and
they've done so for the basest of reasons. At least Conservatism Inc is being daily exposed
for the controlled opposition and worthless club of preppy snots it's always been.
Brilliant Article.
The question is when deep state will finally admit that Globalism after all that sacrifice
and evildoing are just sour grapes. As fox said in Ezops tale.
"the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven
to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding
later that "It's in their DNA."
Right, along with drinking vodka and eating borscht.
The one nation that did interfere in the 2016 election, and has inserted themselves
into other elections to get their candidate elected, Israel remains untouched by this (((Deep
State))).
There's plenty of evidence for the Zionists and Israeli-Firsters corrupting the election
process for their fav nation, Israel, but the Operation Mockingbird asshats in the MSM won't
go near that, not if they want to keep their cushy job, 5th Avenue penthouse and that
chauffeured limo.
Anytime AIPAC comes to town, Congress gets into a fight with each other, trying to be the
one that shows the most slavish loyalty to the nation that has attacked the USA numerous
times, spies constantly on us, stealing our military, business and industrial secrets, had a
hand in both murdering JFK, RFK and masterminded the 9/11 FF, and has an overwheling presence
on the FED, yet most Americans don't know that, because the MSM keeps reporting lies,
distortions and half-truths, and always presenting a boogeyman to hate, sometimes Russia,
most times Muslims.
But fear not, that will soon come to an end, for when those TBTF Wall Street
banks–in collusion with the FED–again crash the stock market and drag the economy
down with their greed, that coming crash will make the one of 1929 seem like a picnic.
When that happens, what's left won't be of any interest to Israel to steal or manipulate.
The Deep State murdered Kennedy.
He planned on destroying the Fed and the CIA.
The Deep State required a president that COLLABORATED, like LBJ.
Then they figured, "why not put our guy in?'
Thus Bush 1.
Then Clinton (Bush 1 was his 'mentor') a pervert stooge.
Then Bush 2, a gaymail stooge.
Then Obomber, the gay Kenyan C_A stooge.
Then America says 'Enough', rejects the Witch and elects Trump.
Now the Deep State wants to kill America.
I think it's time for America to kill its' Deep State.
It is, after all, self-defense. Besides, hasn't this gone on long enough?
The alternative is to end up as the modern parallel of Rome.
Clapper, Brennan and Comey " may not have operated on their own." Duh!
You just remember, a donkey won't carry a heavy burden unless it's fed regularly. Find out
who owns the beast and you will have the culprit!
Phil, you should offer your services to the Trump defense/attack team*. Just stay away from
Giuliani (grin). Good article and salvo against Brennan and the rest who deserve all the pain
thay can get.
*Hey money is good especially around Christmas time. (Grin)
This certainly explains the incessant attacks on Trump by the deep state.
You have no concept of a charade being perpetrated on the American people. You don't find
it a little strange that Trump keeps hiring the Deep State denizens he purports to be
fighting? You are incapable of detecting the friend/foe, psychological tactic used to
deceive?
@Anonymous
That's it. Your hearsay trumps thousands of eyewitnesses and conversations of the victims on
flight 93 and in the pentagon.. You must be a first responder too. Talk about easily
influenced–you are why the old media gets away with their corruption. Some anonymous
source writes, says it on TV, and the lemmings follow.
@Biff
As we write, Obama probably is banging away some groupie in a DC mansion basement while the
gorrila is frying chicken upstairs for Oprah.
And Bubba, most likely, is watching porn in the garage in Westchester and the wicked witch
is massaging mrs. Wiener.
But it's Dubya worth looking into because he is out in the cowshed, buck naked save the
cowboy boots and the ten-gallon hat, whipping himself silly for the "mission
accomplished!"
Or, Obama and the police agencies investigated a known organized crime stooge when it became
apparent the GOP could offer no other candidate. Ironically, this was the original intent of
the creation of the FBI.
Don't play into the "victim trump" brand, he needs no help with it.
Thanks much for the most comprehensive précis yet of this bungled CIA putsch. The
articles in sequence teasingly open Gina's kimono, giving us horripilating glimpses of her
bushy penetralia. The question of Obama's involvement is the next step. CIA bots have been
pushing a partisan perspective for some time. Those darn Democrats!
But in fact Obama too is CIA nomenklatura, with the same depth of dynastic ties as GW
Bush, albeit not at the same lofty level. Just look at the oppo research, the best of which
comes from sanitized glimpses of the errands candidates run for CIA. Obama's other passport
is not Kenyan but Indonesian. It facilitated the youngster's schooling during Mom's year of
living dangerously in Indonesia. Obama's dad and stepdad were CIA skins on the wall. Grandma
was not in fact a drunk – she laundered the money for forcible overthrow and genocide
in Indonesia at her bank job in Hawaii. Grandpa was a "furniture salesman," like Bibi,
travelling around Asia under the hoariest old chestnut of NOC cover.
Young Barack was groomed as carefully as Bush minor. His only real job was BIC, a sheepish
front perennially stuffed to bursting with NOCs. While he was still wet behind the ears he
sported at falconry with a future head of state of Pakistan, for chrissakes, at a time when
nobody could get in there. And he got out without getting his head sawed off. How? The
youthful promise of this sullen stoner was somewhat obscure at that time. His GF was the
Aussie daughter of Mike Barry's opposite number. And the Mockingbird unison of ecstatic
acclaim when he rose to public prominence out of nowhere is the proof. His empty suit belings
to CIA.
This past election was CIA office politics, nothing more. Russigate is simply CIA eminence
Hillary, the Queen of Mena, ratfucking a bumptious queue-jumper. She outranks Trump, who was
merely a junior money-launderer for the CIA agents who looted the Soviet Union. It was her
turn to take the figurehead head-of-state sinecure. She and Bill earned it with their
lucrative Clinton Foundation covert-ops slush fund.
@Rabbi
Zaius They sense the rumblings of White solidarity among "the forgotten men and women" of
Trump's base and they do not cotton to this one little bit. Solidarity is forbidden to
Whites. It is only for the coalition of the fringes, all of those groups whose alienation can
be stoked to weaponize them against the descendants of those who founded and built the United
States.
@Dave
Sullivan The FISA warrants had nothing to do with organized crime.
On second thought, that is not correct.
They _were_ organized crime.
(It is not necessary to defend Trump to understand this. FISA warrants based on known fake
"evidence" are a stunning abuse of power–even within the slime-pit of DC.)
Anyone at all familiar with Brennan knows that he was and remains the driver of the
conspiracy to destroy first candidate, then President -Elect, and then POTUS Trump.
The same cannot be said of Comey and Clapper (especially).
It literally makes me sick to my stomach whenever I think about what it says about this
great republic that seditious filth like him rose to such a powerful position. It's rather
obvious he was willing to do anything including, I would submit, gift Russia and God Knows
Who Else anything they wanted in return for helping him destroy our constitutional
republic.
As I'm sure most here know, long before his 2016 election malefactions he had brazenly
engaged in spying on Congress and, most despicably, had debased President Obama and the
Office of the President through NYT revelations that every week Obama picked from his list of
drone assassination targets.
. . . and it inevitably leads to the question "What did Obama know?"
Yes, though more important than that was what Obama was told (by Brennan) and what real
options did he have as president given that Brennan had him by the short hairs.
I've long considered anyone's efforts to prematurely direct liability to President Obama
as a bald attempt to protect Brennan. That worked for the purposes of a general, earlier on,
cover up. It won't at this stage because it isn't even a close call when it comes to
Democrats, elected and rank and file, choosing between the first black president and Brennan,
the American Beria.
And has been since the early 1950s when the Allen Dulles-Frank Wisner-James Jesus Angleton
crew got rolling. They managed to thoroughly penetrate federal and state bureaucracies, the
court systems, major corporations, the financial sector, and the mockingbird media.
So Phil, was there any cooperation/communication between the Trump Task Force and the DNC
dirt-diggers in Ukraine (Ali Chalupa et al), or were they completely independent actions?
it was plausible to maintain that [the Russians] would have hoped that a weakened
Clinton would be less able to implement the anti-Russian agenda that she had been
promoting.
Not sure I follow this line of reasoning. If the Russians had tried unsuccessfully to
throw the election to Trump and Hellary won anyway, how exactly would that leave her
"weakened"? And wouldn't she have that much more reason to go after Russia?
My theory is that Hellary and her deep-swamp creatures only messed with Trump because they
were certain he was going lose. And if they could then plausibly claim after the
election that the Russians had interfered (albeit unsuccessfull) in the election, Hell-bitch
could've used that as a pretext for well, I don't know. War? More sanctions? Inducting
Ukraine into NATO? Invading Syria?
Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the
FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017,
that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically
driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique,"
adding later that "It's in their DNA."
I had no idea Clapper was into HBD. Damn, he's biased!
@NPleeze
There is a theater play going on, unending series, each episode catching some other
superficial drift. A-l-l actors in the public view, their dialogues and declamations are
scripted. Trump´s also. He is not the major character, just a single, temporary one.
All media opinion pieces, what is news, are prompt readings. Rectal extraction is close.
Why is this possible? The public is beyond understanding. The ones who do, at least part
of what is going on, being closer to some sectors of society where a whiff of the smell of
power is perceived at clouded times, are interested. The middle classes are scraping and
grabbing and bickering for the scraps of the table of the powerful. It takes them most of
their career to even get to under the table. They are happy dogs, and scraps comparing to
scraps makes them a diverse world of nothings.
It is hard work to come up with alternative policies, not rail into historical models
proven wrong as to long term interests and goals of society. A path not to venture into,
against instinct.
That makes for a fine world, while it lasts, and is upended by another cycle. The empty
drum feeling in the head of most is stuffed with images and sound-bites that makes for a life
behind a velvet curtain(Apple´s i-phone).
There is very little cognitive difference between the individuals at the top and the
glorious bottom undesirables, they both like the sniff of the glue.
Donald Trump's election (which was not supposed to be allowed to happen) forced into public
view, the existence of a Deep State that's been in existence for more than 75 years. Although
not widely recognized as such, JFK'S election accomplished the same thing, but to an even
greater extent. Leaving me puzzled as to why Trump has been allowed to remain in office as
long as he has without the Deep State subjecting him to a similar fate.
With one logical
explanation being that, at this point in time, it would become obvious, even to the brain
dead, who's actually in control of the US government.
"... Earlier in Stone's legal process his lawyers filed a motion to try to prove that Russia did not hack the DNC and Podesta emails. The motion revealed that CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign, never completed its report, and only gave a redacted draft to the FBI blaming Russia. The FBI was never allowed to examine the DNC server itself. ..."
"... Faced now with a criminal investigation into how the Russiagate conspiracy theory originated intelligence officers and their accomplices in the media and in the Democratic Party are mounting a defense by launching an offensive in the form of impeachment proceedings against Trump that is based on an allegation of conducting routine, corrupt U.S. foreign policy. ..."
Earlier in Stone's legal process his lawyers filed a motion to try to prove that Russia
did not hack the DNC and Podesta emails. The motion
revealed that CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign,
never completed its report, and only gave a redacted draft to the FBI blaming Russia. The FBI
was never allowed to examine the DNC server itself.
In the end, though, it doesn't matter if it were a hack or a leak by an insider. That's
because the emails WikiLeaks released were accurate. When documents check out it is
irrelevant who the source is. That's why WikiLeaks set up an anonymous drop box, copied
by big media like The Wall Street
Journal and others
. Had the emails been counterfeit and disinformation was inserted into a U.S. election by a
foreign power that would be sabotage. But that is not what happened.
The attempt to stir up the thoroughly discredited charge of collusion appears to be part of
the defense strategy of those whose reputations were thoroughly discredited by maniacally
pushing that false charge for more than two years. This includes legions of journalists. But
principal among them are intelligence agency officials who laundered this "collusion"
disinformation campaign through the mainstream media.
Faced now with a criminal
investigation into how the Russiagate conspiracy theory originated intelligence officers
and their accomplices in the media and in the Democratic Party are mounting a defense by
launching an offensive in the form of impeachment proceedings against Trump that is based on an
allegation of conducting
routine, corrupt U.S. foreign policy.
Stone may be just a footnote to this historic partisan battle that may scar the nation for a
generation. But he has the personality to be the poster boy for the Democrats' lost cause.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent
forThe Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe,Sunday Timesof London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at[email protected]and
followed on Twitter @unjoe .
The tendency to scapegoat rather than make the case for one's own merit is very deeply
ingrained in our top-down liberal democratic systems; the Democratic establishment is
unfortunately just getting back to core principles by shifting almost exclusively to this mode
of discourse over the past decade.
This perfect democracy creates for itself its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. In
effect, it wants to be judged by its enemies moreso than by its results. The history of
terrorism is written by the State; it is therefore instructive.
The spectator populations
certainly cannot know everything about terrorism, but they can always know enough to be
persuaded that compared to terrorism, anything else must seem to be more or less acceptable,
and in any case more rational and democratic.
"... The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. ..."
"... We have also learned that the heads of America's intelligence agencies under President Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential candidacy and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. ..."
"... We also learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream "free press" cannot be fully trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. ..."
"... Opponents of Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate say it is impermissible or unprecedented to "investigate the investigators." But the bipartisan Church Committee, based in the US Senate, did so in the mid-1970s. It exposed many abuses by US intelligence agencies, particularly by the CIA, and adopted remedies that it believed would be permanent. Clearly, they have not been. ..."
"... However well-intentioned Barr may be, he is Trump's attorney general and therefore not fully credible. As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It's time for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty. ..."
Almost daily for three years, Democrats and their media have told us very bad things about
Donald Trump's life, character, and presidency. Some of them are true. But in the process, we
have also learned some lamentable, even alarming, things about the Democratic Party
establishment, including self-professed liberals. Consider the following:
The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic
attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia
attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an
"attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. But there was no
"attack" in 2016, only, as I have
previously explained , ritualistic "meddling" of the kind that both Russia and America
have undertaken in the other's elections for decades. Little can be more phobic than the
allegation or belief that one has been "attacked by a hostile" entity. And yet this myth and
its false narrative persist in the Democratic Party's discourse, campaigning, and
fund-raising. We have also learned that the heads of America's intelligence agencies
under President Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of
National Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential
candidacy and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. Early on, I termed this
operation " Intelgate ," and it has
since been well documented by other writers, including
Lee Smith in his new book . Intel officials did so in tacit alliance with certain
leading, and equally Russophobic, members of the Democratic Party, which had once opposed
such transgressions. This may be the most alarming revelation of the Trump years: Trump will
leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain. We also
learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream "free press" cannot be fully
trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. Indeed, what the mainstream media --
leading national newspapers and two cable news networks, in particular -- chose to cover and
report, and chose not to cover and report, made the abuses and consequences of Russiagate
allegations possible. Even now, exceedingly influential publications such as The New York
Times seem
eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William Barr and
his appointed special investigator John Durham into the origins of Russiagate. Barr's
critics accuse him of fabricating a "conspiracy theory" on behalf of Trump. But the real, or
grandest, conspiracy theory was the Russiagate allegation of "collusion" between Trump and
the Kremlin, an accusation that was -- or should have been -- discredited by the Robert
Mueller report. And we have learned, or should have learned, that for all the talk by
Democrats about Trump as a danger to US national security, it is their Russiagate allegations
that truly endanger it. Consider two examples. Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can
elude US missile-defense systems, make new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative
and urgent. If only for the sake of his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so. But even if
he is able to, will Trump be entrusted enough to conduct negotiations as successfully as did
his predecessors in the White House, given the "Putin puppet" and "Kremlin stooge"
accusations still being directed at him? Similarly, as I have asked repeatedly, if confronted
with a US-Russian Cuban missile–like crisis -- anywhere Washington and Moscow are
currently eyeball-to-eyeball militarily, from the Baltic region and Ukraine to Syria -- will
Trump be as free politically as was President John F. Kennedy to resolve it without war? Here
too there is an inconvenient truth: To the extent that Democrats any longer seriously discuss
national security in the context of US-Russian relations, it mostly involves vilifying both
Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (Recall also that previous presidents were free to
negotiate with Russia's Soviet communist leaders, even encouraged to do so, whereas the
demonized Putin is an anti-communist, post-Soviet leader.)
The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly dangerous, not only due to
reasons cited here -- a new Cold War fraught with the possibility of hot war. Whether President
Trump serves one or two terms, he must be fully empowered to cope with the multiple
possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation. That requires ridding him and our nation
of Russiagate allegations -- and that in turn requires learning how such allegations
originated.
Opponents of Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate say it is impermissible
or unprecedented to "investigate the investigators." But the bipartisan Church Committee, based
in the US Senate, did so in the mid-1970s. It exposed many abuses by US intelligence agencies,
particularly by the CIA, and adopted remedies that it believed would be permanent. Clearly,
they have not been.
However well-intentioned Barr may be, he is Trump's attorney general and therefore not
fully credible. As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed.
It's time for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty.
The tendency to scapegoat rather than make the case for one's own merit is very deeply
ingrained in our top-down liberal democratic systems; the Democratic establishment is
unfortunately just getting back to core principles by shifting almost exclusively to this mode
of discourse over the past decade.
This perfect democracy creates for itself its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. In
effect, it wants to be judged by its enemies moreso than by its results. The history of
terrorism is written by the State; it is therefore instructive.
The spectator populations
certainly cannot know everything about terrorism, but they can always know enough to be
persuaded that compared to terrorism, anything else must seem to be more or less acceptable,
and in any case more rational and democratic.
"... The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding for the creation of an online " troll army " under the name Shareblue. The LA Times described the project as meant to "to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical." In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found broke federal law . Despite this, no prosecution for the breach was ever attempted. ..."
"... In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers argued that it was the party's right to select candidates. ..."
"... The DNC defense counsel's argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party's right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was protected by the First Amendment . ..."
"... The DNC's shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic. This no indication that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race, ..."
"... f Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn't enough, serious interference was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district. Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election in which Canova ran as an independent. ..."
"... Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal ballot destruction , improper transportation of ballots, and generally shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time: ..."
"... Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies. Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being "groomed" by Russia, and that the former Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a "Russian asset", were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments externalize what Gabbard called the "rot" in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet. ..."
"... Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled: " Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent," ..."
Establishment Democrats and those who amplify them continue to project
blame for the public's doubt in the U.S. election process onto outside influence, despite the clear history of the party's subversion
of election integrity. The total inability of the Democratic Party establishment's willingness to address even one of these critical
failures does not give reason to hope that the nomination process in 2020 will be any less pre-ordained.
The Democratic Party's bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential nomination, followed by the DNC defense counsel
doubling down on its right to rig the race during the
fraud lawsuit brought
against the DNC , as well as the irregularities in the races between former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova,
indicate a fatal breakdown of the U.S. democratic process spearheaded by the Democratic Party establishment. Influences transcending
the DNC add to concerns regarding the integrity of the democratic process that have nothing to do with Russia, but which will also
likely impact outcomes in 2020.
The content of the DNC and
Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the DNC
acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the 2016 Democratic primary. The emails also revealed corporate media reporters
acting as surrogates of the DNC and its pro-Clinton agenda, going so far as
to promote Donald Trump during the GOP primary process as a preferred " pied-piper
candidate ." One cannot assume that similar evidence will be presented to the public in 2020, making it more important than ever
to take stock of the unique lessons handed down to us by the 2016 race.
Social Media Meddling
Election meddling via social media did take place in 2016, though in a different guise and for a different cause from that which
are best remembered. Twitter would eventually admit to actively suppressing
hashtags referencing the DNC and Podesta emails in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Additional
reports indicated that tech giant Google also showed measurable "pro-Hillary
Clinton bias" in search results during 2016, resulting in the alleged swaying of between 2 and 10 millions voters in favor of Clinton.
On the Republican side, a recent episode of CNLive! featured discussion
of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which undecided voters were micro-targeted with tailored advertising narrowed with the combined
use of big data and artificial intelligence known collectively as "dark strategy." CNLive! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan noted that
SCL, Cambridge Analytica's parent company, provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations "worldwide,"
specializing in behavior modification. Though Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018, related companies remain.
The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The
barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock
were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding
for the creation of an online " troll army " under the name Shareblue. The
LA Times described the project as meant to "to appear
to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid
and highly tactical." In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign.
In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have
purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls
before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found
broke federal law . Despite this, no prosecution
for the breach was ever attempted.
Though the purge was not explicitly found to have benefitted Clinton, the admission falls in line with allegations across the
country that the Democratic primary was interfered with to the benefit of the former secretary of state. These claims were further
bolstered by reports indicating that voting results from the 2016 Democratic
primary showed evidence of fraud.
DNC Fraud Lawsuit
The proceedings of the DNC fraud lawsuit provide the most damning evidence of the failure of the U.S. election process, especially
within the Democratic Party. DNC defense lawyers argued in open court for the party's
right to appoint candidates at its own discretion, while simultaneously denying
any "fiduciary duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the impression that the DNC would act impartially
towards the candidates involved.
In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued
against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process
was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers
argued that it was the party's right to select candidates.
The Observer noted the sentiments of Jared Beck, the attorney representing the plaintiffs of the lawsuit:
"People paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee -- nominating process
in 2016 were fair and impartial, and that's not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that
we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that's what the Democratic
National Committee's own charter says. It says it in black and white."
The DNC defense counsel's argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party's
right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was
protected by the First Amendment . The DNC's lawyers wrote:
"To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court
precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to
selecting the party's nominee for public office ." [Emphasis added]
The DNC's shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic. This no indication
that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race,
Tim Canova's Allegations
If Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn't enough, serious interference
was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district.
Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election
in which Canova ran as an independent.
Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal
ballot destruction , improper
transportation of ballots, and generally
shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial
results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the
Sun-Sentinel reported at the time:
"[Canova] sought to look at the paper ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months
later when her office hadn't fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in September, signing a certification
that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending."
Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies.
Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms.
Republicans appear no more motivated to protect voting integrity than the Democrats, with
The Nation reporting that the GOP-controlled Senate
blocked a bill this week that would have "mandated paper-ballot backups in case of election machine malfunctions."
Study of Corporate Power
A 2014
study published by Princeton University found that corporate power had usurped the voting rights of the public: "Economic elites
and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average
citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
In reviewing this sordid history, we see that the Democratic Party establishment has done everything in its power to disrespect
voters and outright overrule them in the democratic primary process, defending their right to do so in the DNC fraud lawsuit. We've
noted that interests transcending the DNC also represent escalating threats to election integrity as demonstrated in 2016.
Despite this, establishment Democrats and those who echo their views in the legacy press continue to deflect from their own wrongdoing
and real threats to the election process by suggesting that mere discussion of it represents a campaign by Russia to attempt to malign
the perception of the legitimacy of the U.S. democratic process.
Hillary Clinton's recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being "groomed" by Russia, and that the former
Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a "Russian asset", were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments
externalize what Gabbard called the "rot"
in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet.
Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a
recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled:
" Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent," Jamali
argued :
"Moscow will use its skillful propaganda machine to prop up Gabbard and use her as a tool to delegitimize the democratic process.
" [Emphasis added]
Jamali surmises that Russia intends to "attack" our democracy by undermining the domestic perception of its legitimacy. This thesis
is repeated later in the piece when Jamali opines : "They want to see a retreat
of American influence. What better way to accomplish that than to attack our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of our
elections." [Emphasis added]
The only thing worth protecting, according to Jamali and those who amplify his work (including former Clinton aide and establishment
Democrat Neera Tanden), is the perception of the democratic process, not the actual functioning vitality of it. Such deflective tactics
ensure that Russia will continue to be used as a convenient international pretext for
silencing domestic dissent as we move into 2020.
Given all this, how can one expect the outcome of a 2020 Democratic Primary -- or even the general election – to be any fairer
or transparent than 2016?
* * *
Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter, co-host of CN Live! and regular contributor to Consortium News. If you value this
original article, please consider
making
a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.
"... This period is when Clinton IMHO sent NATO in a wrong direction from being strictly defensive/political to getting involved in Yugoslavia which certainly irritated Russia. ..."
"... Then good old Obama and another Clinton deciding to overthrow Gaddafi and his whole Arab Spring foreign policy to include getting involved in Syria. These were disastrous decisions that the current POTUS inherited and is trying to change except the "deep state" is fighting him tooth and nail. ..."
"... Getting out of Ukraine would be a huge trust maker for Russia and it would be followed by sanctions being lifted allowing for a level playing field to begin working on the issues that need fixing. NATO isn't going away however the forward deployed forces in the Baltic's and Poland could over time in an agreed to reciprocal move say removing Iskander missiles from Kaliningrad could be accomplished. ..."
You are 100% correct that trust is the number one point in coming to any agreement and
currently there is very little trust on either side for varying reasons. One important fact
that is overlooked by most people is the leadership of President George H. W. Bush and PM
Margaret Thatcher during the transition from the Soviet Union/Warsaw pact to independent
sovereign nations. The Bush was a WW II pilot and Thatcher earned the name Iron Lady for her
decisive action in the Falklands War, both understood the world as it was in 1990. This
statement highlights the view that prevailed from Bush at the time: "Not once, but three
times, Baker tried out the "not one inch eastward" formula with Gorbachev in the February 9,
1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev's statement in response to the assurances that "NATO
expansion is unacceptable." Baker assured Gorbachev that "neither the President nor I intend
to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place," and that the
Americans understood that "not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as
well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in
Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction
will spread in an eastern direction." (See Document 6)"
These were complicated issues that involved a multitude of parties being negotiated by
just a few i.e. US, UK, France and West Germany a holdover from the WW II model. The Poles,
Czechs and others were not consulted and IMHO had they been the situation would have become
untenable. It must be remembered that Poland and Czechoslovakia suffered heavily due to
"large important nations" giving them away pre and post WW II. There was no written agreement
nor official treaty between the west and the Soviet Union soon to be Russian Federation and I
believe that was intentional for the reason I give above. George H. W. Bush was not reelected
in 1992 and Bill Clinton became POTUS and he pursued a foreign policy that was entirely
different. Some of his ideas used Thatchers earlier idea of a more political NATO with less
emphasis on the original military mission which brought in the Partnerships for Peace
program. That program was IMHO quite good as it stabilized countries that were wobbly in the
1990's after the breakup occurred. The Clinton White House had Madeline Albright an immigrant
from Czechoslovakia as secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski a former secretary of State
and an academic that influenced his policies which were pro eastern European anti Russian. It
was during this time that NATO expanded. The US is a country of immigrants and there is a
large Polish population as well as other eastern Europeans and political considerations are
always come into play.
This period is when Clinton IMHO sent NATO in a wrong direction from being strictly
defensive/political to getting involved in Yugoslavia which certainly irritated Russia.
G.W. Bush basically continued the trend with regard to NATO but was preoccupied with 9/11
more than anything else. Bush thought that he understood Putin and even invited him to his
ranch in Crawford, Texas which Putin accepted and they did seem to get along.
However 2008
and the Georgia War began the slide in relations between the two countries. Then good old
Obama and another Clinton deciding to overthrow Gaddafi and his whole Arab Spring foreign
policy to include getting involved in Syria. These were disastrous decisions that the current
POTUS inherited and is trying to change except the "deep state" is fighting him tooth and
nail.
Getting out of Ukraine would be a huge trust maker for Russia and it would be followed by
sanctions being lifted allowing for a level playing field to begin working on the issues that
need fixing. NATO isn't going away however the forward deployed forces in the Baltic's and
Poland could over time in an agreed to reciprocal move say removing Iskander missiles from
Kaliningrad could be accomplished.
Many have tried, usually ended up in those infamous endless Russian fields, in long boxes.
See Pushkin, for the exact quote. But historical trivialities aside, there should be a way to
satisfy Imperial hubris without 'salting the grounds'. Hannibal's elephants did not carry
nukes in their trunks. Trying for the sixth time in the last 4 centuries to get Moscow
grounds salted might end badly for the entire planet.
Trust was not breached by Russia, military buildup, hostile threatening military, NATO
expansion and refusal to negotiate on these issues did not originate from Russia. Russia has
tried to negotiate, concede and de-escalate before. The West did not respond to those moves.
Even US sanctions placed on Soviet Union were not removed from Russia, despite there being no
reason for them to remain in place. This and other recent events (libya, iran deal etc) tells
Russia and other global players that de-escalating with the West doesn't work.
Even now, West seems to be interested to trade with Russia at least in some areas. And
Europe is increasingly frustrated with the United States. There is reportedly a number of EU
initiatives aimed at gradually limiting US economic levers created during the Cold War.
Rising economies will gradually offer more opportunities outside of the Western world.
Multipolar wolrd was a slogan in the 00s, in the 2040es it might be a reality.
We know NATO will not maintain ABM and CFE, and it is apparently not interested in INF and
Open Skies, and even START is in question now. NATO will withdraw troops if only Russia does
something? Please, you don't really believe that. With INF gone, Iskander is outdated, it was
a treaty-limited weapon. Moving it a few hundred klicks will not make NATO concede anything
now.
A huge trust maker would be for all NATO members to publically admit on their web page
that pledges to Russia were broken and at least some NATO officials feel responsibility for
that. They've spent 27 years denying any verbal assurances, now that those assurances are
declassified, they build other narratives about how those pledges did not matter. For there
to be trust, there needs to be an admission that trust was there, and was broken, and not by
Russia. No troop movements necessary even.
Biden isn't going to win the next election Trump will be reelected in 2020. The current
strain in relations with Russia has been inherited by Trump and even before he was elected
the DNC and Hillary Clinton cooked up the "Russia colusion" story which after $46 million and
2 1/2 years no Russia collision. Of course now we have the Dems trying to impeach Trump which
will not go anywhere in the Senate more waste of time and money. However there is the Justice
Department I.G. report soon to be released and many of the people who brought you the Russia
colusion hoax will be named. The Justice Department has an ongoing criminal investigation
into the key players and will undoubtedly result in indictments and prosecutions.
The real reason all of this is going on is because the establishment both Dem's & Repub's
along with the deep state look at Trump as an outsider who is tipping over their apple cart
i.e. he is changing the foreign policy direction and they don't like it one bit so they
create fake issues to try and stop him.
After his reelection I predict that more normal relations with Russia will resume.
Nowadays the actual attacks are manifested as 'hybrid warfare'. Of course Russia took the
US intervention and financing of Chechen rebels as an attack back in the 2000 ties. She took
fermenting and financing of the Georgian rose revolution as a hybrid attack, same as promises
made to pres. Saakashvili to support him militarily and politically after his attack on
Tskhinvali were taken as a hybrid attack. Same goes for both of the first color revolution in
Ukraine, and then the Revolution of dignity of 2014 that pushed ultra-right government to
power in Ukraine. In fact the NATO promise to both Georgia and Ukraine to take them in as
members in 2008 right after Putin's warning in 2007 was the first move in the 'hybrid war'.
The West had been warned, yet it decided to bulldoze its way across Eurasia and triggered the
confrontation. The placings of Aegises ashore in Poland and Romania was the cherry on top.
There can be be no meaningful compromise until the West backs off on the NATO enlargement.
That 2008 conference was what had reanimated the image of the collective West as adversary
for Russia.
What both sides should strive for though is at the very least to diminish the degree of
danger to the planet. Russia would not back off because she finds it easy enough to corner
individual EU states into minimal economic cooperation - Germany is already in recession and
there is no way they are going to continue damaging their economy for the sake of US
politics. And then there is China. When the Russians cannot buy goods from Germans they go
for made in China, which in turn gets China secure oil and gas from Russia. Which make the
repeat of pre-WW II situation with blockade on Japan pretty much impossible. Get realistic,
the West is loosing this one and should count her chickens already.
Well, then the sanctions will continue, as will the policy of keeping Russian in check in
the EU gas market.
What's interesting is that NATO never attacked Russia or threatened to attack Russia. Seems
to me that Putin is simply using the expansion as a pretext for military aggression against
the neighboring states. It's what the USSR did in 1939 against Finland. According the Soviet
side, the war started after Finland attacked the Soviet Union...
Russia *needs* the sanctions for at least another 5 years. Her milk and beef production is
still lagging compared to the deceased USSR and the only way her greedy oligarchs will
heavily invest in cow herd rearing is to continue to block the Eastern European milk products
to enter Russia. Chicken, eggs, pork and veggies are already up to speed, wheat production is
exploding, the salmon breeding programme have started so the Norway is not getting her market
back, bu the cow herds take longer to rear.
The Power of Siberia pipeline is being certified and filled right now - China would receive
her first delivery of piped Russian gas in 2020, so it is good that EU is prepping or the
squeeze - they are not going to continue getting unlimited cheap Russian gas, because Power
of Siberia II is in the works.
Every individual NATO member had attacked Russia in the past 4 centuries ( including small
but meaningful US contingent in the 1918), and some non-member allies had stomped those
fields as well. So the Russians are not taking any chances with the buffer zone. All of
Russia expansions to the West have always started with West invading first - then being
rolled back league by league. But seriously - ? Russians can live with Europe staying where
she is - if in turn Europe can learn to respect her civilization borders. The move on Ukraine
and Georgia was not a wise one.
"... There is a collection of Democratic and Republican politicians and think tanks funded by various corporations and governments and bureaucrats in the government agencies mostly all devoted to the Empire, but also willing to stab each other in the back to obtain power. They don't necessarily agree on policy details. ..."
"... They don't oppose Trump because Trump is antiwar. Trump isn't antiwar. Or rather, he is antiwar for three minutes here and there and then he advocates for war crimes. ..."
"... He is a fairly major war criminal based on his policies in Yemen. But they don't oppose him for that either or they would have been upset by Obama. They oppose Trump because he is incompetent, unpredictable and easily manipulated. And worst of all, he doesn't play the game right, where we pretend we intervene out of noble humanitarian motives. This idiot actually say he wants to keep Syrian oil fields and Syria's oil fields aren't significant to anyone outside Syria. ..."
"... Our policies are influenced in rather negative ways by various foreign countries, but would be embarrassed to go to the extremes one regularly sees from liberals talking about Russian influence ..."
" In a sense, the current NeoMcCartyism (Russophobia, Sinophobia) epidemic in the USA can
partially be viewed as a yet another sign of the crisis of neoliberalism: a desperate attempt
to patch the cracks in the neoliberal façade using scapegoating -- creation of an
external enemy to project the problems of the neoliberal society.
I would add another, pretty subjective measure of failure: the degradation of the elite.
When you look at Hillary, Trump, Biden, Warren, Harris, etc, you instantly understand what I
am talking about. They all look like the second-rate, if not the third rate politicians.
Also, the Epstein case was pretty symbolic."
I had decided to stay on the sidelines for the most part after making a few earlier
comments, but I liked this summary, except I would give Warren more credit. She is flawed like
most politicians, but she has made some of the right enemies within the Democratic Party.
On Trump and " the Deep State", there is no unified Deep State. There is a collection of
Democratic and Republican politicians and think tanks funded by various corporations and
governments and bureaucrats in the government agencies mostly all devoted to the Empire, but
also willing to stab each other in the back to obtain power. They don't necessarily agree on
policy details.
They don't oppose Trump because Trump is antiwar. Trump isn't antiwar. Or rather, he is
antiwar for three minutes here and there and then he advocates for war crimes.
He is a fairly major war criminal based on his policies in Yemen. But they don't oppose
him for that either or they would have been upset by Obama. They oppose Trump because he is
incompetent, unpredictable and easily manipulated. And worst of all, he doesn't play the game
right, where we pretend we intervene out of noble humanitarian motives. This idiot actually say
he wants to keep Syrian oil fields and Syria's oil fields aren't significant to anyone outside
Syria.
But yes, scapegoating is a big thing with liberals now. It's pathetic. Our policies are
influenced in rather negative ways by various foreign countries, but would be embarrassed to go
to the extremes one regularly sees from liberals talking about Russian influence .
For the most part, if we have a horrible political culture nearly all the blame for that is
homegrown.
Donald 11.07.19 at 4:40 am (no link)
Sigh. Various typos above. Here is one --
Our policies are influenced in rather negative ways by various foreign countries, but
would be embarrassed to go to the extremes one regularly sees from liberals talking about
Russian influence.
--
I meant to say I would be embarrassed to go to the extremes one regularly sees from
liberals talking about Russian influence.
@13 Joost Your comment is spot on. The demonisation of Russia is all about the long term aim
if destabilising, cracking it open and stealing it's resources. Russia is, in fact, the
woreld's largets and most resource rich nation so its an irresistible target to the insane,
greed-driven psychopath's who rule us.
First and foremost amongst those (and the most insane) is Hillary Clinton who it seems
maybe preparing for another run at the presidency...a Hillary presidency risks a full out
nuclear war.
You see, Hilary and the people who back her (and whom she faithfully serves) genuinely are
psychopaths. They lack empathy, care, and humanity. They see only their own need and greed,
only their own dysfunctional lust for power and wealth; they don't give a damn what it takes
to satisfy their perverse desires and who dies in the process. Psychopaths (blinded by their
own perversity) are also bad judges of risk and, in the minds of Hillary and her cabal of
psychopaths, they actually do believe that the US could fight a 'limited' nuclear war against
Russia, win it and steal all those lovely Russian resources.
The tragic misjudgement here, and why disgusting Hillary and her ilk are so dangerous, is
that there is no such thing as a 'limited' nuclear war. A nuclear war would be global. And
fatal.
The Integrity Initiative, as paid for by the British Foreign Office, Ministry of
Defense, NATO and other such entities, will live on as a non-charitable entity with even less
transparency. Its website, as well as that of Institute of Statecraft, is down. That it
will now have to live in total secrecy will make it more difficult for it to recruit foreign
journalists to spread its propaganda.
On 3rd April, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) minister Alan Duncan revealed his
department's 'Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme' - which bankrolls the
Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative subsidiary - was funding a new
endeavour, Open Information
Partnership (OIP).
The announcement, buried in a response to a written parliamentary question, was supremely
light on detail - Duncan merely said the effort would "respond to manipulated information in
the news, social media and across the public space". Official fanfare was also unforthcoming
- there was no accompanying press release, briefing document, or even mention of the launch
by any government minister or department via social media channels.
The original proposal for
the Open Information Partnership , as
released by 'anonymous' , included the Institute of Statecraft , a Media
Diversity Institute , Bellingcat , DFR Lab (i.e. the Atlantic Council) and
some others in a so called ZINC Network . On the current OIP website the Institute of
Statecraft 'charity' is no longer named.
---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the issue:
At Kit Klarenberg's Twitter ,
there's a long tweet thread further detailing what b has written above. I can't help be
wonder how the Monty Python troop would have portrayed the Institute for Statecraft and its
parent the Integrity Initiative. It appears that the governments of the English speaking
nations became addicted to lying to their citizens @1900 and are unable to kick the habit and
instead have actually deepened their addiction. Elsewhere on the planet, it seems that people
are learning it's easier to talk straight and transparently with other people and to pool
resources and combine efforts to form a community of nations and humanity to better one and
all. Seems simple enough to determine which is functional and which isn't.
Bellingcat only serves one interest, a propaganda/info laundering shop for NATO, the military
industrial complex and some very rich people. The blatant lies about MH17, chemical weapons
in Syria, OPCW, Russia, the list goes on and on.
By the time the people in the Netherlands find out how they have been manipulated with the
MH17 narrative and the role of Bellingcat in this operation, hopefully they will torch the
office of Bellingcat in The Hague and club the survivors to death like the Uktainian Nazi
friends of Bellingcat did in Odessa.
The Ukrainian army shot down MH17. It was no accident. The Dutch were also involved with
the 2014 coup in the Ukraine. Putting the blame on Russia is a political decision, its not
based on facts. Dutch politicians are very dirty people. Burn in hell.
I thought I understood this and many other things about the journalism business at a young
age. I even knew everything that "off the record" entails -- really knew, as if it were a
religious tenet -- before I hit junior high. I thought I was an expert.
Then I read Manufacturing Consent .
The book came out in 1988 and I read it a year later, when I was nineteen. It blew my
mind.
Along with the documentary Hearts and Minds (about the atrocities of
the Vietnam War) and books like Soul on Ice, In the Belly of the Beast,
and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Manufacturing Consent taught me
that some level of deception was baked into almost everything I'd ever been taught about modern
American life.
I knew nothing about either of the authors, academics named Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.
It seemed odd that a book purporting to say so much about journalism could be written by
non-journalists. Who were these people? And how could they claim to know anything about this
business?
This was the middle of the George H. W. Bush presidency, still the rah-rah Top Gun eighties. Political earnestness was extremely uncool. America was awesome
and hating on America was sad. Noam Chomsky was painted to me as the very definition of uncool,
a leaden, hectoring bore.
But this wasn't what I found on the page. Manufacturing Consent is a
dazzling book. True, like a lot of co-written books, and especially academic books, it's
written in slow, grinding prose. But for its time, it was intellectually flamboyant, wild
even.
The ideas in it radiated defiance. Once the authors in the first chapter laid out their
famed propaganda model, they cut through the deceptions of the American state like a buzz
saw.
The book's central idea was that censorship in the United States was not overt, but covert.
The stage-managing of public opinion was "normally not accomplished by crude intervention" but
by the keeping of "dissent and inconvenient information" outside permitted mental parameters:
"within bounds and at the margins."
The key to this deception is that Americans, every day, see vigorous debate going on in the
press. This deceives them into thinking propaganda is absent. Manufacturing
Consent explains that the debate you're watching is choreographed. The range of argument
has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it.
This careful sham is accomplished through the constant, arduous policing of a whole range of
internal pressure points within the media business. It's a subtle, highly idiosyncratic process
that you can stare at for a lifetime and nonetheless not see.
American news companies at the time didn't (and still don't) forbid the writing of
unpatriotic stories. There are no editors who come blundering in, red pen in hand, wiping out
politically dangerous reports, in the clumsy manner of Soviet Commissars.
Instead, in a process that is almost 100 percent unconscious, news companies simply avoid
promoting dissenting voices. People who are questioners by nature, prodders, pains in the ass
-- all good qualities in reporting, incidentally -- get weeded out by bosses, especially in the
bigger companies. Advancement is meanwhile strongly encouraged among the credulous, the
intellectually unadventurous, and the obedient.
As I would later discover in my own career, there are a lot of C-minus brains in the
journalism business. A kind of groupthink is developed that permeates the upper levels of media
organizations, and they send unconscious signals down the ranks.
Young reporters learn early on what is and is not permitted behavior. They learn to
recognize, almost more by smell than reason, what is and is not a "good story."
Chomsky and Herman described this policing mechanism using the term "flak." Flak was defined
as "negative responses to a media statement or program."
They gave examples in which corporate-funded think tanks like The Media Institute or the
anti-communist Freedom House would deluge media organizations that ran the wrong kinds of
stories with "letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits" and other kinds of
pressure.
What was the wrong kind of story? Here we learned of another part of the propaganda model,
the concept of worthy and unworthy victims . Herman and Chomsky defined
the premise as follows:
A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy
victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients
will be unworthy.
Under this theory, a Polish priest murdered by communists in the Reagan years was a "worthy"
victim, while rightist death squads in U.S.-backed El Salvador killing whole messes of priests
and nuns around the same time was a less "worthy" story.
What Herman and Chomsky described was a system of informal social control, in which the
propaganda aims of the state were constantly reinforced among audiences, using a
quantity-over-quality approach.
Here and there you might see a dissenting voice, but the overwhelming institutional power of
the media (and the infrastructure of think-tanks and politicians behind the private firms)
carried audiences along safely down the middle of a surprisingly narrow political and
intellectual canal.
One of their examples was Vietnam, where the American media was complicit in a broad
self-abnegating effort to blame itself for "losing the war."
An absurd legend that survives today is that CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, after a two-week
trip to Vietnam in 1968, was key in undermining the war effort.
Cronkite's famous "Vietnam editorial" derided "the optimists who have been wrong in the
past," and villainously imparted that the military's rosy predictions of imminent victory were
false. The more noble course, he implied, was to face reality, realize "we did the best we
could" to defend democracy, and go home.
The Cronkite editorial sparked a "debate" that continues to the present.
On the right, it is said that we should have kept fighting in Vietnam, in spite of those
meddling commies in the media.
The progressive take is that Cronkite was right, and we should have realized the war wasn't
"winnable" years earlier. Doing so would have saved countless American lives, this thinking
goes.
These two positions still define the edges of what you might call the "fairway" of American
thought.
The uglier truth, that we committed genocide on a fairly massive scale across Indochina --
ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three countries -- is
pre-excluded from the history of that period.
Instead of painful national reconciliation surrounding episodes like Vietnam, Cambodia,
Laos, the CIA-backed anti-communist massacres in places like Indonesia, or even the more recent
horrors in Middle Eastern arenas like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, we mostly ignore
narrative-ruining news about civilian deaths or other outrages.
A media that currently applauds itself for calling out the lies of Donald Trump (and they
are lies) still uses shameful government-concocted euphemisms like "collateral damage." Our new
"Democracy Dies in Darkness" churlishness has yet to reach the Pentagon, and probably never
will.
In the War on Terror period, the press accepted blame for having lost the most recent big
war and agreed to stop showing pictures of the coffins coming home (to say nothing of actual
scenes of war deaths).
We also volunteered to reduce or play down stories about torture ("enhanced interrogation"),
kidnapping ("rendition"), or assassination ("lethal action," or the "distribution matrix").
Even now, if these stories are covered, they're rarely presented in an alarmist tone. In
fact, many "civilian casualties" stories are couched in language that focuses on how the
untimely release of news of "collateral damage" may hinder the effort to win whatever war we're
in at the time.
"After reports of civilian deaths, U.S. military struggles to defend air operations in war
against militants," is a typical American newspaper headline.
Can you guess either the year or the war from that story? It could be 1968, or 2008. Or
2018.
As Manufacturing Consent predicted -- with a nod to Orwell, maybe --
the scripts in societies like ours rarely change. 1
When it came time for me to enter the journalism business myself, I discovered that the
Chomsky/Herman diagnosis was mostly right. Moreover, the academics proved prescient about
future media deceptions like the Iraq War. Their model predicted that hideous episode in
Technicolor.
But neither Herman nor Chomsky could have known, when they published their book in 1988,
that the media business was going through profound change.
As it turned out, Manufacturing Consent was published just ahead of
three massive revolutions. When I met and interviewed Chomsky for this book (see Appendix 2 ), we
discussed these developments. They included:
1. The explosion of conservative talk radio and Fox-style news products. Using point of view
rather than "objectivity" as commercial strategies, these stations presaged an atomization of
the news landscape under which each consumer had an outlet somewhere to match his or her
political beliefs. This was a major departure from the three-network pseudo-monopoly that
dominated the Manufacturing Consent period, under which the country
debated a commonly held set of facts.
2. The introduction of twenty-four-hour cable news stations, which shifted the emphasis of
the news business. Reporters were suddenly trained to value breaking news, immediacy, and
visual potential over import. Network "crashes" -- relentless day-night coverage extravaganzas
of a single hot story like the Kursk disaster or a baby thrown down a
well, a type of journalism one TV producer I knew nicknamed "Shoveling Coal For Satan" --
became the first examples of binge-watching. The relentless now now now
grind of the twenty-four-hour cycle created in consumers a new kind of anxiety and addictive
dependency, a need to know what was happening not just once or twice a day but every minute.
This format would have significant consequences in the 2016 election in particular.
3. The development of the Internet, which was only just getting off the ground in 1988. It
was thought it would significantly democratize the press landscape. But print and broadcast
media soon began to be distributed by just a handful of digital platforms. By the late 2000s
and early 2010s, that distribution system had been massively concentrated. This created the
potential for a direct control mechanism over the press that never existed in the Manufacturing Consent era. Moreover the development of social media would amplify
the "flak" factor a thousandfold, accelerating conformity and groupthink in ways that would
have been unimaginable in 1988.
Maybe the biggest difference involved an obvious historical change: the collapse of the
Soviet Union.
One of the pillars of the "propaganda model" in the original Manufacturing Consent was that the media used anti-communism as an organizing
religion.
The ongoing Cold War narrative helped the press use anti-communism as a club to batter
heretical thinkers, who as luck would have it were often socialists. They even used it as a
club to police people who weren't socialists (I would see this years later, when Howard Dean
was asked a dozen times a day if he was "too left" to be a viable candidate).
But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet empire took a little wind
out of the anti-communist religion. Chomsky and Herman addressed this in their 2002 update of
Manufacturing Consent, in which they wrote:
The force of anti-communist ideology has possibly weakened with the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the virtual disappearance of socialist movements across the globe, but this is easily
offset by the greater ideological force of the belief in the "miracle of the market "
The collapse of the Soviets, and the weakening of anti-communism as an organizing principle,
led to other changes in the media. Manufacturing Consent was in
significant part a book about how that unseen system of informal controls allowed the press to
organize the entire population behind support of particular objectives, many of them foreign
policy objectives.
But the collapse of the Wall, coupled with those new commercial strategies being deployed by
networks like Fox, created a new dynamic in the press.
Media companies used to seek out the broadest possible audiences. The dull third-person
voice used in traditional major daily newspapers is not there for any moral or ethical reason,
but because it was once believed that it most ably fulfilled the commercial aim of snatching as
many readers/viewers as possible. The press is a business above all, and boring third-person
language was once advanced marketing.
But in the years after Manufacturing Consent was published the new
behemoths like Fox turned the old business model on its head. What Australian tabloid-merchant
Rupert Murdoch did in employing political slant as a commercial strategy had ramifications the
American public to this day poorly understands.
The news business for decades emphasized "objective" presentation, which was really less an
issue of politics than of tone.
The idea was to make the recitation of news rhetorically watered down and unthreatening
enough to rope in the whole spectrum of potential news consumers. The old-school anchorperson
was a monotone mannequin designed to look and sound like a safe date for your daughter:
Good evening, I'm Dan Rather, and my frontal lobes have been removed .
Today in Libya
Murdoch smashed this framework. He gave news consumers broadcasts that were pointed,
opinionated, and nasty. He struck gold with The O'Reilly Factor, hosted
by a yammering, red-faced repository of white suburban rage named Bill O'Reilly (another Boston
TV vet).
The next hit was Hannity & Colmes, a format that played as a
parody of old news. In this show, the "liberal" Colmes was the quivering, asexual, "safe date"
prototype from the old broadcast era, and Sean Hannity was a thuggish Joey Buttafuoco in makeup
whose job was to make Colmes look like the spineless dope he was.
This was theater, not news, and it was not designed to seize the whole audience in the way
that other debate shows like CNN's Crossfire were.
The premise of Crossfire was an honest fight, two prominent pundits
duking it out over issues, and may the best man (they were usually men) win.
The prototypical Crossfire setup involved a bombastic winger like
Pat Buchanan versus an effete liberal like New Republic editor Michael
Kinsley. On some days the conservative would be allowed to win, on some days the liberal would
score a victory. It looked like a real argument.
But Crossfire was really just a formalized version of the artificial
poles of allowable debate that Chomsky and Herman described. As some of its participants (like
Jeff Cohen, a pioneering media critic who briefly played the "liberal" on the show, about whom
we'll hear more later) came to realize, Crossfire became a
propagandistic setup, a stage trick in which the "left" side of the argument was gradually
pushed toward the right over the years. It was propaganda, but in slow motion.
Hannity & Colmes dispensed with the pretense. This was the
intellectual version of Vince McMahon's pro wrestling spectacles, which were booming at the
time. In the Fox debate shows, Sean Hannity was the heel, and Colmes was the good guy, or
babyface. As any good wrestling fan knows, most American audiences want to see babyface
stomped.
The job of Colmes was to get pinned over and over again, and he did it well. Meanwhile
rightist anger merchants like Hannity and O'Reilly (and, on the radio, Rush Limbaugh) were
rapidly hoovering up audiences that were frustrated, white, and often elderly. Fox chief Roger
Ailes once boasted, "I created a network for people 55 to dead." (Ailes is now dead
himself.)
This was a new model for the media. Instead of targeting the broad mean, they were now
narrowly hunting demographics. The explosion of cable television meant there were hundreds of
channels, each of which had its own mission.
Just as Manufacturing Consent came out, all the major cable channels
were setting off on similar whale hunts, sailing into the high demographic seas in search of
audiences to capture. Lifetime was "television for women," while the Discovery Channel did well
with men. BET went after black viewers. Young people were MTV's target audience.
This all seems obvious now, but this "siloing" effect that spread across other channels soon
became a very important new factor in news coverage. Fox for a long time cornered the market on
conservative viewers. Almost automatically, competitors like CNN and MSNBC became home to
people who viewed themselves as liberals, beginning a sifting process that would later
accelerate.
A new dynamic entered the job of reporting. For generations, news directors had only to
remember a few ideological imperatives. One, ably and voluminously described by Chomsky and
Herman, was, "America rules: pay no attention to those napalmed bodies." We covered the worthy
victims, ignored the unworthy ones, and that was most of the job, politically.
The rest of the news? As one TV producer put it to me in the nineties, "The entire effect
we're after is, 'Isn't that weird?'"
Did you hear about that guy in Michigan who refused to mow his lawn even when the town
ordered him to? Weird! And how about that drive-thru condom store that opened in Cranston,
Rhode Island? What a trip! And, hey, what happened in the O.J. trial today? That Kato Kaelin is
really a doof! And I love that lawyer who wears a suede jacket! He looks like a cowboy!
TV execs learned Americans would be happy if you just fed them a nonstop succession of
National Enquirer –style factoids (this is formalized today in
meme culture). The New York Times deciding to cover the O.J. freak show
full-time broke the seal on the open commercialization of dumb news that among other things led
to a future where Donald Trump could be a viable presidential candidate.
In the old days, the news was a mix of this toothless trivia and cheery dispatches from the
front lines of Pax Americana. The whole fam could sit and watch it without getting upset (by
necessity: an important principle in pre-Internet broadcasting is that nothing on the air,
including the news, could be as intense or as creative as the commercials). The news once
designed to be consumed by the whole house, by loving Mom, by your crazy right-wing uncle, by
your earnest college-student cousin who just came home wearing a Che T-shirt.
But once we started to be organized into demographic silos, the networks found another way
to seduce these audiences: they sold intramural conflict.
The Roger Ailes types captured the attention of the crazy right-wing uncle and got him
watching one channel full of news tailored for him, filling the airwaves with stories, for
instance, about immigration or minorities committing crimes. Different networks eventually rose
to market themselves to the kid in the Che T-shirt. If you got them in different rooms watching
different channels, you could get both viewers literally addicted to hating one another.
There was a political element to this, but also not. It was commerce, initially. And
reporters stuck in this world soon began to realize that the nature of their jobs had
changed.
Whereas once the task was to report the facts as honestly as we could -- down the middle of
the "fairway" of acceptable thought, of course -- the new task was mostly about making sure
your viewer came back the next day.
We sold anger, and we did it mainly by feeding audiences what they wanted to hear. Mostly,
this involved cranking out stories about people our viewers loved to hate.
Selling siloed anger was a more sophisticated take on the WWE programming pioneered in
Hannity & Colmes . The modern news consumer tuned into news that
confirmed his or her prejudices about whatever or whoever the villain of the day happened to
be: foreigners, minorities, terrorists, the Clintons, Republicans, even corporations.
The system was ingeniously designed so that the news dropped down the respective silos
didn't interfere with the occasional need to "manufacture" the consent of the whole population.
If we needed to, we could still herd the whole country into the pen again and get them backing
the flag, as was the case with the Iraq War effort.
But mostly, we sold conflict. We began in the early nineties to systematically pry families
apart, set group against group, and more and more make news consumption a bubble-like, "safe
space" stimulation of the vitriolic reflex, a consumer version of "Two Minutes Hate."
How did this serve the needs of the elite interests that were once promoting unity? That
wasn't easy for me to see, in my first decades in the business. For a long time, I thought it
was a flaw in the Chomsky/Herman model. It looked like we were mostly selling pointless
division.
But it now seems there was a reason, even for that.
The news media is in crisis. Polls show that a wide majority of the population no longer has
confidence in the press. Chomsky himself despairs at this, noting in my discussion with him (at
the end of this book) that Manufacturing Consent had the unintended
consequence of convincing readers not to trust the media.
There are many ways of mistrusting something, but people who came away from Manufacturing Consent with the idea that the media peddles lies misread the book.
Papers like the New York Times, for the most part, do not traffic in
outright deceptions.
The overwhelming majority of commercial news reporting is factual (with one conspicuous
exception I'll get into later on), and the individual reporters who work in the business tend
to be quite stubborn in their adherence to fact as a matter of principle. (Sadly, in the time
it's taken to write this book, even this has begun to change some). Still, people should trust
most reporters, especially local reporters, who tend to have real beats (like statehouses or
courts), have few of the insular prejudices of the national media, and don't deserve the
elitist tag. The context in which reporters operate is most often the problem.
Now, more than ever, most journalists work for giant nihilistic corporations whose editorial
decisions are skewed by a toxic mix of political and financial considerations. Without
understanding how those pressures work, it's very difficult for a casual news consumer to gain
an accurate picture of the world.
This book is intended as an insider's guide to those distortions.
The technology underpinning the modern news business is sophisticated and works according to
a two-step process. First, it creates content that reinforces your pre-existing opinions, and,
after analysis of your consumer habits, sends it to you.
Then it matches you to advertisers who have a product they're trying
to sell to your demographic. This is how companies like Facebook and Google make their money:
telling advertisers where their likely customers are on the web.
The news, basically, is bait to lure you into a pen where you can be sold sneakers or bath
soaps or prostatitis cures or whatever else studies say people of your age, gender, race,
class, and political persuasion tend to buy.
Imagine your Internet surfing habit as being like walking down a street. A man shouts: "Did
you hear what those damned liberals did today? Come down this alley."
You hate liberals, so you go down the alley. On your way to the story, there's a storefront
selling mart carts and gold investments (there's a crash coming -- this
billionaire even says so!).
Maybe you buy the gold, maybe you don't. But at the end of the alley, there's a red-faced
screamer telling a story that may even be true, about a college in Massachusetts where
administrators took down a statue of John Adams because it made a Hispanic immigrant
"uncomfortable." Boy, does that make you pissed!
They picked that story just for you to hear. It is like the parable of Kafka's gatekeeper,
guarding a door to the truth that was built just for you.
Across the street, down the MSNBC alley, there's an opposite story, and set of storefronts,
built specifically for someone else to hear.
People need to start understanding the news not as "the news," but as just such an
individualized consumer experience -- anger just for you.
This is not reporting. It's a marketing process designed to create rhetorical addictions and
shut any non-consumerist doors in your mind. This creates more than just pockets of political
rancor. It creates masses of media consumers who've been trained to see in only one direction,
as if they had been pulled through history on a railroad track, with heads fastened in
blinders, looking only one way.
As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we
are, the more politically impotent we become.
This is the second stage of the mass media deception originally described in Manufacturing Consent .
First, we're taught to stay within certain bounds, intellectually. Then, we're all herded
into separate demographic pens, located along different patches of real estate on the spectrum
of permissible thought.
Once safely captured, we're trained to consume the news the way sports fans do. We root for
our team, and hate all the rest.
Hatred is the partner of ignorance, and we in the media have become experts in selling
both.
I looked back at thirty years of deceptive episodes -- from Iraq to the financial crisis of
2008 to the 2016 election of Donald Trump -- and found that we in the press have increasingly
used intramural hatreds to obscure larger, more damning truths. Fake controversies of
increasing absurdity have been deployed over and over to keep our audiences from seeing larger
problems.
We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent.
"... "Manufacturing Consent," Taibbi writes, "explains that the debate you're watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it" (p. 11). ..."
"... Americans were held captive by the boob tube affords us not only a useful historical image but also suggests the possibility of their having been able to view the television as an antagonist, and therefore of their having been able, at least some of them, to rebel against its dictates. Three decades later, on the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets, the workings of which are so precisely intertwined with even the most intimate minute-to-minute aspects of our lives that our relationship to them could hardly ever become antagonistic. ..."
"... The massive political revolution was, going all the way back to 1989, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and then of the Soviet Union itself -- and thus of the usefulness of anti-communism as a kind of coercive secular religion (pp. 14-15). ..."
"... our corporate media have devised -- at least for the time being -- highly-profitable marketing processes that manufacture fake dissent in order to smother real dissent (p. 21). ..."
"... And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid. ..."
"... For Maddow, he notes, is "a depressingly exact mirror of Hannity . The two characters do exactly the same work. They make their money using exactly the same commercial formula. And though they emphasize different political ideas, the effect they have on audiences is much the same" (pp. 259-260). ..."
Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc . is the most insightful and revelatory book about American
politics to appear since the publication of Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal almost four
full years ago, near the beginning of the last presidential election cycle.
While Frank's topic was the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to be democratic and
Taibbi's is the abysmal failure of our mainstream news corporations to report news, the
prominent villains in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite social
circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our
intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class.
In fact, I would strongly recommend that the reader spend some time with Frank's What's the
Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal! (2016) as he or she takes up
Taibbi's book.
And to really do the book the justice it deserves, I would even more vehemently recommend
that the reader immerse him- or herself in Taibbi's favorite book and vade-mecum ,
Manufacturing Consent (which I found to be a grueling experience: a relentless
cataloging of the official lies that hide the brutality of American foreign policy) and, in
order to properly appreciate the brilliance of Taibbi's chapter 7, "How the Media Stole from
Pro Wrestling," visit some locale in Flyover Country and see some pro wrestling in person
(which I found to be unexpectedly uplifting -- more on this soon enough).
Taibbi tells us that he had originally intended for Hate, Inc . to be an updating of
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988), which he first read
thirty years ago, when he was nineteen. "It blew my mind," Taibbi writes. "[It] taught me that
some level of deception was baked into almost everything I'd ever been taught about modern
American life .
Once the authors in the first chapter laid out their famed propaganda model [italics
mine], they cut through the deceptions of the American state like a buzz saw" (p. 10). For what
seemed to be vigorous democratic debate, Taibbi realized, was instead a soul-crushing
simulation of debate. The choices voters were given were distinctions without valid
differences, and just as hyped, just as trivial, as the choices between a Whopper and a Big
Mac, between Froot Loops and Frosted Mini-Wheats, between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, between
Marlboro Lites and Camel Filters. It was all profit-making poisonous junk.
"Manufacturing Consent," Taibbi writes, "explains that the debate you're watching is
choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear
it" (p. 11). And there's an indisputable logic at work here, because the reality of
hideous American war crimes is and always has been, from the point of view of the big media
corporations, a "narrative-ruining" buzz-kill. "The uglier truth [brought to light in
Manufacturing Consent ], that we committed genocide of a fairly massive scale across
Indochina -- ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three countries
-- is pre-excluded from the history of the period" (p. 13).
So what has changed in the last thirty years? A lot! As a starting point let's consider the
very useful metaphor found in the title of another great media book of 1988: Mark Crispin
Miller's Boxed In: The Culture of TV . To say that Americans were held captive by
the boob tube affords us not only a useful historical image but also suggests the possibility
of their having been able to view the television as an antagonist, and therefore of their
having been able, at least some of them, to rebel against its dictates. Three decades later, on
the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets, the workings
of which are so precisely intertwined with even the most intimate minute-to-minute aspects of
our lives that our relationship to them could hardly ever become antagonistic.
Taibbi summarizes the history of these three decades in terms of three "massive revolutions"
in the media plus one actual massive political revolution, all of which, we should note, he
discussed with his hero Chomsky (who is now ninety! -- Edward Herman passed away in 2017) even
as he wrote his book. And so: the media revolutions which Taibbi describes were, first, the
coming of FoxNews along with Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio; second, the coming of CNN, i.e.,
the Cable News Network, along with twenty-four hour infinite-loop news cycles; third, the
coming of the Internet along with the mighty social media giants Facebook and Twitter.
The massive political revolution was, going all the way back to 1989, the collapse of
the Berlin Wall, and then of the Soviet Union itself -- and thus of the usefulness of
anti-communism as a kind of coercive secular religion (pp. 14-15).
For all that, however, the most salient difference between the news media of 1989 and the
news media of 2019 is the disappearance of the single type of calm and decorous and slightly
boring cis-het white anchorman (who somehow successfully appealed to a nationwide audience) and
his replacement by a seemingly wide variety of demographically-engineered news personæ
who all rage and scream combatively in each other's direction. "In the old days," Taibbi
writes, "the news was a mix of this toothless trivia and cheery dispatches from the frontlines
of Pax Americana . The news [was] once designed to be consumed by the whole house . But once we
started to be organized into demographic silos [italics mine], the networks found
another way to seduce these audiences: they sold intramural conflict" (p. 18).
And in this new media environment of constant conflict, how, Taibbi wondered, could public
consent , which would seem to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from conflict,
still be manufactured ?? "That wasn't easy for me to see in my first decades in the
business," Taibbi writes. "For a long time, I thought it was a flaw in the Chomsky/Herman
model" (p. 19).
But what Taibbi was at length able to understand, and what he is now able to describe for us
with both wit and controlled outrage, is that our corporate media have devised -- at least
for the time being -- highly-profitable marketing processes that manufacture fake dissent in
order to smother real dissent (p. 21).
And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam
job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid.
Or pretty much so. Taibbi is more historically precise. Because of the tweaking of the
Herman/Chomsky propaganda model necessitated by the disappearance of the USSR in 1991 ("The
Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, / As Russians do ," Jackson Browne presciently
prophesied on MTV way back in 1983), one might now want to speak of a Propaganda Model 2.0.
For, as Taibbi notes, " the biggest change to Chomsky's model is the discovery of a far
superior 'common enemy' in modern media: each other. So long as we remain a bitterly-divided
two-party state, we'll never want for TV villains" (pp. 207-208).
To rub his great insight right into our uncomprehending faces, Taibbi has almost
sadistically chosen to have dark, shadowy images of a yelling Sean Hannity (in lurid FoxNews
Red!) and a screaming Rachel Maddow (in glaring MSNBC Blue!) juxtaposed on the cover of his
book. For Maddow, he notes, is "a depressingly exact mirror of Hannity . The two characters
do exactly the same work. They make their money using exactly the same commercial formula. And
though they emphasize different political ideas, the effect they have on audiences is much the
same" (pp. 259-260).
And that effect is hate. Impotent hate. For while Rachel's fan demographic is all wrapped up
in hating Far-Right Fascists Like Sean, and while Sean's is all wrapped up in despising Libtard
Lunatics Like Rachel, the bipartisan consensus in Washington for ever-increasing military
budgets, for everlasting wars, for ever-expanding surveillance, for ever-growing bailouts of
and tax breaks for and and handouts to the most powerful corporations goes forever
unchallenged.
Oh my. And it only gets worse and worse, because the media, in order to make sure that their
various siloed demographics stay superglued to their Internet devices, must keep
ratcheting up levels of hate: the Fascists Like Sean and the Libtards Like Rachel must be
continually presented as more and more deranged, and ultimately as demonic. "There is us and
them," Taibbi writes, "and they are Hitler" (p. 64). A vile reductio ad absurdum has
come into play: "If all Trump supporters are Hitler, and all liberals are also Hitler," Taibbi
writes, " [t]he America vs. America show is now Hitler vs. Hitler! Think of the
ratings! " The reader begins to grasp Taibbi's argument that our mainstream corporate media are
as bad as -- are worse than -- pro wrestling. It's an ineluctable downward spiral.
Taibbi continues: "The problem is, there's no natural floor to this behavior. Just as cable
TV will eventually become seven hundred separate twenty-four-hour porn channels, news and
commentary will eventually escalate to boxing-style, expletive-laden, pre-fight tirades, and
the open incitement to violence [italics mine]. If the other side is literally Hitler,
[w]hat began as America vs. America will eventually move to Traitor vs. Traitor ,
and the show does not work if those contestants are not eventually offended to the point of
wanting to kill one another" (pp. 65-69).
As I read this book, I often wondered about how difficult it was emotionally for
Taibbi to write it. I'm just really glad to see that the guy didn't commit suicide along the
way. He does describe the "self-loathing" he experienced as he realized his own complicity in
the marketing processes which he exposes (p. 2). He also apologizes to the reader for his not
being able to follow through on his original aim of writing a continuation of Herman and
Chomsky's classic: "[W]hen I sat down to write what I'd hoped would be something with the
intellectual gravitas of Manufacturing Consent ," Taibbi confesses, "I found decades of
more mundane frustrations pouring out onto the page, obliterating a clinical examination" (p.
2).
I, however, am profoundly grateful to Taibbi for all of his brilliantly observed anecdotes.
The subject matter is nauseating enough even in Taibbi's sparkling and darkly tragicomic prose.
A more academic treatment of the subject would likely be too depressing to read. So let me
conclude with an anecdote of my own -- and an oddly uplifting one at that -- about reading
Taibbi's chapter 7, "How the News Media Stole from Pro Wrestling."
On the same day I read this chapter I saw that, on the bulletin board in my gym, a poster
had appeared, as if by magic, promoting an upcoming Primal Conflict (!) professional
wrestling event. I studied the photos of the wrestlers on the poster carefully, and, as an
astute reader of Taibbi, I prided myself on being able to identify which of them seemed be
playing the roles of heels , and which of them the roles of babyfaces .
For Taibbi explains that one of the fundamental dynamics of wrestling involves the invention
of crowd-pleasing narratives out of the many permutations and combinations of pitting
heels against faces . Donald Trump, a natural heel , brings the goofy
dynamics of pro wrestling to American politics with real-life professional expertise. (Taibbi
points out that in 2007 Trump actually performed before a huge cheering crowd in a
Wrestlemania event billed as the "battle of the billionaires." Watch it on YouTube!
https://youtu.be/5NsrwH9I9vE --
unbelievable!!)
The mainstream corporate media, on the other hand, their eyes fixed on ever bigger and
bigger profits, have drifted into the metaphorical pro wrestling ring in ignorance, and so,
when they face off against Trump, they often end up in the role of inept prudish
pearl-clutching faces .
Taibbi condemns the mainstream media's failure to understand such a massively popular form
of American entertainment as "malpractice" (p. 125), so I felt more than obligated to buy a
ticket and see the advertised event in person. To properly educate myself, that is.
I have stopped watching broadcast "news" other than occasional sessions of NPR in the car.
I get most of my news from sources such as this and from overseas sources (The Guardian,
Reuters, etc.). I used to subscribe to newspapers but have given them up in disgust, even
though I was looking forward to leisurely enjoying a morning paper after I retired.
I was brought up in the positive 1950's and, boy, did this turn out poorly.
Matt Taibbi is an American treasure, and I love his writing very much, but we also need to
ask, Why hasn't another Chomsky (or another Hudson), an analyst with a truly deep and
wide-ranging, synthetic mind, appeared on the left to take apart our contemporary media and
show us its inner workings? Have all the truly great minds gone to work for Wall Street? I
don't have an answer, but to me the pro wrestling metaphor, while intriguing, misses
something about the Fourth Estate in America, if it indeed still exists. And that is, except
for radio, there is a distinct imbalance between the two sides of the MSM lineup. On the
corporate liberal side of the national MSM team you have five wrestlers, but on the
conservative/reactionary side you have only the Fox entry. Because of this imbalance, the
corruption, laziness, self-indulgence, and generally declining interest in journalistic
standards seems greater among the corporate liberal media team, including the NYT and WaPo,
than the Fox team.
I'm not a fan of either Maddow (in her current incarnation) or Hannity, but Hannity,
perhaps because he thinks he's like David, often hustles to refute the discourse of the
corporate liberal Goliath team. Hannity obviously does more research on some topics than
Maddow, and, perhaps because he began in radio, he puts more emphasis on semi-rationally
structured rants than Maddow, who depends more on primal emotion, body language, and
Hollywood-esque fear-inducing atmospherics.
I'd wager that in a single five-minute segment there will often be twice as many rational
distinctions made in a Hannity rant than in a Maddow performance. In addition, for the last
three years Hannity has simply been demonstrably right about the fake Russiagate propaganda
blitz while Maddow has been as demonstrably wrong from the very beginning as propaganda
industry trend-setter Adam Schiff. So for at least these last three years, the Maddow-Hannity
primal match has been a somewhat misleading metaphor. The Blob and the security state have
been decisively supporting (and directing?) the corporate liberal global interventionist
media, at least regarding Russia and the permanent war establishment, and because the
imbalance between the interventionist and the non-interventionist MSM, Russia and Ukraine are
being used as a wedge to steadily break down the firewalls between the Dem party, the intel
community, and the interventionist MSM. If we had real public debates with both sides at
approximately equal strength as we did during the Vietnam War, then even pro wrestling-type
matches would be superior to what we have now, which is truthy truth and thoughtsy thought
coming to us from the military industrial complex and monopolistic holding companies. If
fascism is defined as the fusion of the state and corporations, then the greatest threat of
fascism in America may well be coming from the apparent gradual fusion of the corporate
liberal MSM, the Dem party elite, and the intel community. Instead of an MSM wrestling match,
we may soon be faced with a Japanese-style 'hitori-zumo' match in which a sumo wrestler
wrestles with only himself. Once these sumo wrestlers were believed to be wrestling with
invisible spirits, but those days are gone . http://kikuko-nagoya.com/html/hitori-zumo.htm
Today's Noam Chomksy? Chomsky was part of the machine who broke ranks with it. His MIT
research was generously funded by the Military Industrial Complex. Thankfully, enough of his
latent humanity and Trotskyite upbringing shone through so he exposed what he was part of. So
I guess today that's Chris Hedges, though he's a preacher at heart and not a semiotician.
> In addition, for the last three years Hannity has simply been demonstrably right
about the fake Russiagate propaganda blitz while Maddow has been as demonstrably wrong
Eh. Read whats-his-name's (Frankfurter?) book On Bullshit . You are giving
Hannity credit for something he doesn't really care about.
I don't believe the media environment as a whole leans corporate Dem/neoliberal.
T.V. maybe, but radio is much more right wing than left (yes there is NPR and Pacifica,
the latter with probably only a scattering of listerners but ) and it's still out there and a
big influence, radio hasn't gone away. So doesn't the right wing tilt of radio kind of
balance out television? (not necessarily in a good way but). And then there is the internet
and I have no idea what the overall lean of that is (I mean I prefer left wing sites, but
that's purely my own bubble and actually there are much fewer left analysis out there than
I'd like)
The whole review is good, but this extract should be quoted extensively:
While Frank's topic was the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to be democratic and
Taibbi's is the abysmal failure of our mainstream news corporations to report news, the
prominent villains in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite
social circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our
intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class.
In short, stagnation and self-dealing at the top. What could possibly go wrong?
Are you serious? Maddow called Trump a traitor and accused him of betrayal in Russiagate,
and was caught out when that fell apart. This was pointed out all over the MSM .
Three decades later, on the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and
portable tablets
and then goes on to spend most of the article talking about television. I'd say television
is still the main propaganda instrument even if many webheads like yours truly ignore it
(I've never seen Hannity's show or Maddow's–just hear the rumors). Arguably even
newspapers like the NYT have been dumbed down because the reporters long to be on TV and join
the shouting. And it's surely no coincidence that our president himself is a TV (and WWE)
star. Mass media have always been feeders of hysteria but television gave them faces and
voices. Watching TV is also a far more passive experience than surfing the web. They are
selling us "narratives," bedtime stories, and we like sleepy children merely listen.
This rave review has inspired me to add this to my to-read non-fiction queue. Currently
reading William Dalrymple's The Anarchy, on the rise of the East India Company. Next up: Matt
Stoller's Goliath. And then I'll get to Taibbi. Probably worth digging up my original copy of
Manufacturing Consent as well, which I read many moons ago; time for a re-read.
May I suggest Stephen Cohen's "War with Russia?" if it's not already on your list? In
focusing on the danger emerging from the new cold war, seeded by the Democrats, propagated by
corporate media (which he thinks is more dangerous than the first), Cohen clarifies the
importance of diplomacy especially with one's nuclear rivals.
Us rubes knew decades ago about pro wrestling. There was a regional circuit and the hero
in one town would become the villain in another town. The ones to be surprised were like John
Stossel, who got a perforated eardrum from a slap upside the head for his efforts at
in-your-face journalism with a wrestler who just wouldn't play along with his grandstanding.
Somewhere, kids cheered and life went on.
Ah, Ancient Athens, here we come – running back to repeat your mistakes! Our MSM
media has decided that when we are not at our neighbor's throats, we should be at each
other's throats!
I was watching old clips of the 'Fred Friendly Seminars' on YouTube. IMHO any channel that
produced a format such as this would be a ratings bonanza. Imagine a round table with various
media figures (corporate) left, (corporate) right, and independent being refereed by a
host-moderator discussing topics in 'Hate, Inc.'. In wrestling it's called a Battle Royale.
The Fourth Estate in a cage match!
And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam
job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid.
This is important, if people don't want to be naive about what democracy buys. Democracy
in the end is a ritual system to determine which members of an elite would win a war without
actually having to hold the war. Like how court functions to replace personal revenge by
determining (often) who would win in a fight if there were one, and the feudal system
replaced the genocidal wars of the axial age with the gentler warfare of the middle ages
which were often ritual wars of the elite that avoided the full risk of the earlier wars.
That, I think, is important -- under a democracy, the winner should be normally the winner
of the avoided violent conflict to be sustainable. Thus, it's enough to get most people to
consent to the solution, using the traditional meaning of consent being "won't put up a fight
to avoid it". If the choices on the table are reduced enough, you can get by with most people
simply dropping out of the questions.
Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac potuit
It shouldn't be a surprise that we've moved to "faking dissent" -- it's the natural
evolution of a system where a lot of the effective power is in the hands of tech, and not
just as in the early 20th century, how many workers you have and how many soldiers you can
raise.
If you don't like it, change the technology we use to fight one another. We went from
tribes to lords when we switch from sticks to advanced forged weapons, and we went from
feudalism to democracy when we had factories dropping guns that any 15 year old could use
(oversimplifying a bit). Now that the stuff requires expertise, you'd expect a corresponding
shift in how we ritualize our conflict avoidance, and thus the organization of how we control
communication and how we organize our rituals of power.
Aka, it's the scientists and the engineers who end up determining how everything is
organized, and people never seem to bother with that argument, which is especially surprising
that even hard-core Marxists waste their time on short-term politics rather than the tech
we're building.
I'd be curious whether Taibbi thought about the issue of the nature of the technology and
whether there are technological options on the horizon which drive the conflict in other
directions. If we had only kept the laws on copyright and patent weaker, so that the
implementation of communicative infrastructure would have stayed decentralized
Tabby's "manufacturing fake consent" was really the whole punchline – the joke's on
us. Hunter S. Thompson, another of Taibbi's heroes, is, along with Chomsky, speaking to us
through MT. Our media is distracting us from social coherence. Another thing it is doing
(just my opinion) is it is overwhelming us to the point of disgust. Nobody likes it. And we
protect ourselves by tuning it out. Turning it off. Once the screaming lunatics marginalize
themselves by making the whole narrative hysterical, we just act like it's another family
fight and we're gonna go do something else. When everyone is screaming, no one is
screaming.
I have tried to read Hate Inc. and Taibbi's Griftopia but one of my main issues with
Taibbi's writing is his lack of notes, references, or bibliography, etc. in his books. In
skimming Hate Inc. it seems like a book I would enjoy reading, however my personal value
system is that any book without footnotes, endnotes, citations, or at minimum a bibliography
is just an opinion or a story. At least Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal has a section for End
Notes/References at the end of the book. Again just my personal values.
I am from Greater Boston, far, far from flyover country (which I imagine begins in Yonkers
NY), but I sure grew up with pro wrestling as part of the schoolyard discourse. I certainly
knew it was as much of a family affair as Disney on Ice and have trouble believing he thought
otherwise though I will not impugn his honesty. I am very grateful to the author for taking
the time to write this, but is it possible for a male who grew up in the US to be as deeply
embedded in the MSNBC demo as he claims to be?
Seriously, how is it possible for a male raised in the US to not at least have some
working familiarity with pro wrestling? My family along with my community was very close to
the national median income–do higher income boys really not learn about WWF and
WWE?
Seriously, rich kids, what was childhood like? I know you had music lessons and sports
camps, what else? Was it really that different?
Sorry, my blue collar, lifetime union member brother says your view is horseshit. All the
knows about WWE and WWF is that they are big-budget fakery and that's why they are of no
interest.
aye. in my blue to white collar( and back to blue to no collar) upbringing, wrestling was
never a thing. it was for the morons who couldn't read. seen as patently absurd by just about
everyone i knew. and this in klanridden east texas exurbia
wife's mexican extended familia oth luche libre is a big thing that all and sundry talked
about at thanksgiving. less so these days possibly due to the hyperindiviualisation of media
intake mentioned
(and,btw, in my little world , horseshit is a good thing)
Even allowing for my lefty-liberal bias, I do not see how it is possible to equate Fox
Noise and MSNBC, or Hannity and Maddow, as "both-sides" extremists. Fox violates basic
professional canons of fairness and equity on a daily basis. MSNBC occasionally does, but is
quick to correct errors of fact. Hannity is a thuggish outer-borough New York schmuck without
much education or knowledge of the world. Maddow is an Oxford Ph.D. and Rhodes Scholar. It is
one of the evil successes of the right-wing news cauldron to have successfully equated these
two figures and organizations.
Huh? MSNBC regularly makes errors of omission and commission with respect to Sanders. They
are still pushing the Russiagate narrative. That's a massive, two-year, virtually all the
time error they have refused to recant.
The blind spots of people on the soi-disant left are truly astonishing.
'Hannity is a thuggish outer-borough New York schmuck without much education or knowledge
of the world. Maddow is an Oxford Ph.D. and Rhodes Scholar '
oh, well, then – end of conversation! i mean, god knows, it'd be a cold day in hell
before a rhodes scholar, or even someone married to one, would ever lead us astray down the
rosy neoliberal path to hell, while, at the same time, under the spell of trump derangement
syndrome, actually attempt to revive the mccarthy era, eh?
Actual drugs are being used to hinder debate as well as emotional drugs like hate.
They can't trust agency to be removed by words and images alone – the stakes are too
high.
Now all of you go take a feel good pill and stop complaining!
I've been impressed with Taibbi's work, what I've read of it, but ironically this very
article contains a quote from him which exemplifies the problem: his casual assertion that
the US committed "genocide" in Indochina. Even the most fervent critics of US policy didn't
say this at the time, for the very good reason that there was no evidence that the US tried
to destroy a racial, religious, ethnic or nationalist group (the full definition is a lot
more complex and demanding than that). He clearly means that the US was responsible for lots
of deaths, which is incontestable. But the process of endless escalation of rhetoric, which
this book seems to be partly about, means that everything now has to be described in the most
extreme, absurd or apocalyptic tones, and at the top of your voice, otherwise nobody takes
any notice. So any self-respecting war now has to be qualified as "genocide" or nobody will
take any notice.
"... 'Where a charity is providing education in respect of a controversial issue it must do so in a way that allows the people being educated to make up their own minds.' ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft. ..."
"... Integrity Initiative, ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft, ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Open Information Partnership ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Media Diversity Institute ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Integrity Initiative. ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... 'Where a charity is providing education in respect of a controversial issue it must do so in a way that allows the people being educated to make up their own minds.' ..."
james @ 4 opined;"
thanks b... i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia... is this due some
need to find someone to demonize, an outgrowth of christianity or god knows what? or is it
purely to generate more money into the industrial military complex"
I'm with ya' james, this demonization of Russia, and any countries that refuse the
empire's beck and call, is around to stay I'm afraid.
And yes, it's all of the above, but, mostly about the $.
'i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia... is this due some need to
find someone to demonize, an outgrowth of christianity or god knows what? or is it purely to
generate more money into the industrial military complex? what is the rationale?...'
They're the nuclear rival that don't import many of the u.s.'s consumer products.
otherwise, it'd either be china, or both...
plus, of course, there's all them cold war memes that can be triggered in a sizable
portion of the population's heads...
I suspect the the antipathy to Russia and the extensive disinformation campaign stems from
a 'Five Eyes' project and strategy ... with the malign Uncle as its director.
@james #4 "i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia..."
Same motivation as all forgotten empires had. Even our cat want some of it, staring down on
his employees from his basket high up on the fridge with that evil look on his face. We call
it his World Domination Command Centre, WDCC for short. Global domination is what they crave.
Kill the competition, loot its resources, more power, more money. America has been looted,
devastated. Time for the locusts to move on to greener pastures. Russia is the promised land,
the next wild west new world to colonize. Problem is, as always, the natives.
I am hopeful that more and more of the population are realising that if an organisation is
promoted by any western government as a source of information, then that organisation will
provide disinformation by default. There are few, if any, journalists anywhere that are not
part of the empirical disinformation program. Those that are not will be independent and,
therefore, by alternate default, extremely wary of western government/government-funded/NGO
sources. All the hegemon and it's vassals can do now is double-down and hope that the
populations will go back to sleep.
As with all things evil, the British oligarchy began in the 1830s targeting Russia as a
threat to its autocratic interests, in this case "defending" the Ottoman Empire against
Russia.
The Brits were further scared out of their wits when the 1917 Russian Revolution was on
the verge of establishing an anti-capitalist system. So they, along with a ragtag bag of
co-conspirators including the United States, launched a military invasion of Russia.
That's right, U.S. troops landed at two places in Russia and fought against Russian
soldiers. The Brits/U.S/et. al. suffered a humiliating defeat, leaving so quickly that U.S.
dead soldiers were left behind buried in Soviet soil, to be repatriated years later.
But it's Russia that is the threat to "us", right?
@ Trisha | Nov 4 2019 21:22 utc | 16
___________________________________________
Thanks for your informative comment. I'd started to reply to James that Russia has been a
default "boogie-man" and Western scapegoat since the 19th Century, but that sounded
unhelpfully circular-- and I didn't have the ambition to refresh my understanding with actual
historical facts. ;)
The fact that a sort of Western "coalition of the willing" invaded Russia after the 1917
revolution is still a well-kept secret! It was never mentioned in my (US) school courses,
from parochial school through the "Honors Survey of Western Civilization" course I took in
college.
At the end of last year some enterprising 'anonymous' person
released papers of the British Integrity Initiative. As we
reported at that time:
The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading
anti-Russian propaganda and thereby with influencing the public, military and governments of
a number of countries. What follows is an contextual analysis of the third batch of the
Initiative's internal papers which were
dumped by an anonymous yesterday.
Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot
Integrity Initiative . The
Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".
Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government
Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state donors.
That plans seems to have been the blueprint for the
March 2018 mass expulsion of Russian diplomats during the Skripal affair. Several of the
other measures Donnelly and his ilk planned
have since been implemented.
The Institute of Statecraft was registered as a charity under Scottish law. After
the release of its papers the Scottish charity regulator OSCR investigated the status of the
Institute . Unsurprisingly the OSCR
found (pdf) that its shady behavior and its running of anti-Russian disinformation
campaigns did not justify its status:
In the course of our inquiry we found that the charity was not meeting the charity test
required for continuing registration as a charity in Scotland because:
its purposes were not entirely charitable
one of its most significant activities, a project known as Integrity Initiative, did
not provide public benefit in furtherance of the charity's purposes
private benefit to charity trustees was not incidental to the charity's activities that
advance its charitable purpose
The purpose of the charity was purportedly to educate the public. But the regulator found
that the Integrity Initiative did not educate but only spread its own version of
'reality' i.e. disinformation. The charity lacked neutrality:
In addition, our Meeting the Charity Test guidance states that:
'Where a charity is providing education in respect of a controversial issue it must do
so in a way that allows the people being educated to make up their own minds.'
OSCR's view is that the Integrity Initiative expressed a particular perspective intended
to persuade the public to a specific point of view and, given the nature of the subject
matter, it was not sufficiently neutral to advance education.
The crocks who were running the charity were filling their own pockets with the public money
the 'charity' received:
To pass the charity test any private benefit must be incidental to the organisation's
activities that advance its purposes, that is, it must be a necessary result or by-product of
the organisation's activities and not an end in itself.
We were concerned at the level of private benefit that a number of the charity's trustees
were gaining from the exercise of its functions.
There was no clear explanation as to why the salaries being paid to charity trustees were
considered reasonable and necessary, and we had concerns about the charity trustees'
decision-making process around these payments. We do not consider that this private benefit
was incidental to the organisation's activities that advanced its purposes.
The regulator also noted a lack of record keeping and a lack of documentation of decision
making by the Institute's trustees.
Unfortunately the charity regulator will not close down the Institute of
Statecraft. It accepted that it rectified its behavior by taking a number of measures:
the charity has ceased to undertake any activity related to the Integrity initiative,
and this is now undertaken by a non-charitable entity having no legal connection to the
charity
the charity has ceased to remunerate any of its charity trustees
the charity is taking external guidance on governance
some charity trustees are to stand down as soon as replacement charity trustees can be
identified
The Integrity Initiative, as paid for by the British Foreign Office, Ministry of
Defense, NATO and other such entities, will live on as a non-charitable entity with even less
transparency. Its website, as well as that of Institute of Statecraft, is down. That
it will now have to live in total secrecy will make it more difficult for it to recruit foreign
journalist to spread its propaganda.
On 3rd April, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) minister Alan Duncan revealed his
department's 'Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme' - which bankrolls the
Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative subsidiary - was funding a new
endeavour, Open Information
Partnership (OIP).
The announcement, buried in a response to a written parliamentary question, was supremely
light on detail - Duncan merely said the effort would "respond to manipulated information in
the news, social media and across the public space". Official fanfare was also unforthcoming
- there was no accompanying press release, briefing document, or even mention of the launch
by any government minister or department via social media channels.
The original proposal for
the Open Information Partnership , as
released by 'anonymous' , included the Institute of Statecraft , a Media
Diversity Institute , Bellingcat , DFR Lab (i.e. the Atlantic Council)
and some others in a so called ZINC Network . On the current OIP website the Institute of
Statecraft 'charity' is no longer named.
---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the issue:
At the end of last year some enterprising 'anonymous' person
released papers of the British Integrity Initiative. As we reported
at that time:
The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading
anti-Russian propaganda and thereby with influencing the public, military and governments
of a number of countries. What follows is an contextual analysis of the third batch of the
Initiative's internal papers which were
dumped by an anonymous yesterday.
Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its
offshoot Integrity
Initiative . The Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".
Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government
Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state
donors.
That plans seems to have been the blueprint for the
March 2018 mass expulsion of Russian diplomats during the Skripal affair. Several of the
other measures Donnelly and his ilk planned
have since been implemented.
The Institute of Statecraft was registered as a charity under Scottish law. After
the release of its papers the Scottish charity regulator OSCR investigated the status of the
Institute . Unsurprisingly the OSCR
found (pdf) that its shady behavior and its running of anti-Russian disinformation
campaigns did not justify its status:
In the course of our inquiry we found that the charity was not meeting the charity test
required for continuing registration as a charity in Scotland because:
its purposes were not entirely charitable
one of its most significant activities, a project known as Integrity Initiative, did
not provide public benefit in furtherance of the charity's purposes
private benefit to charity trustees was not incidental to the charity's activities
that advance its charitable purpose
The purpose of the charity was purportedly to educate the public. But the regulator found
that the Integrity Initiative did not educate but only spread its own version of
'reality' i.e. disinformation. The charity lacked neutrality:
In addition, our Meeting the Charity Test guidance states that:
'Where a charity is providing education in respect of a controversial issue it must
do so in a way that allows the people being educated to make up their own minds.'
OSCR's view is that the Integrity Initiative expressed a particular perspective intended
to persuade the public to a specific point of view and, given the nature of the subject
matter, it was not sufficiently neutral to advance education.
The crocks who were running the charity were filling their own pockets with the public
money the 'charity' received:
To pass the charity test any private benefit must be incidental to the organisation's
activities that advance its purposes, that is, it must be a necessary result or by-product
of the organisation's activities and not an end in itself.
We were concerned at the level of private benefit that a number of the charity's
trustees were gaining from the exercise of its functions.
There was no clear explanation as to why the salaries being paid to charity trustees
were considered reasonable and necessary, and we had concerns about the charity trustees'
decision-making process around these payments. We do not consider that this private benefit
was incidental to the organisation's activities that advanced its purposes.
The regulator also noted a lack of record keeping and a lack of documentation of decision
making by the Institute's trustees.
Unfortunately the charity regulator will not close down the Institute of
Statecraft. It accepted that it rectified its behavior by taking a number of
measures:
the charity has ceased to undertake any activity related to the Integrity initiative,
and this is now undertaken by a non-charitable entity having no legal connection to the
charity
the charity has ceased to remunerate any of its charity trustees
the charity is taking external guidance on governance
some charity trustees are to stand down as soon as replacement charity trustees can
be identified
The Integrity Initiative, as paid for by the British Foreign Office, Ministry of
Defense, NATO and other such entities, will live on as a non-charitable entity with even less
transparency. Its website, as well as that of Institute of Statecraft, is down. That
it will now have to live in total secrecy will make it more difficult for it to recruit
foreign journalist to spread its propaganda.
On 3rd April, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) minister Alan Duncan revealed his
department's 'Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme' - which bankrolls the
Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative subsidiary - was funding a new
endeavour, Open
Information Partnership (OIP).
The announcement, buried in a response to a written parliamentary question, was
supremely light on detail - Duncan merely said the effort would "respond to manipulated
information in the news, social media and across the public space". Official fanfare was
also unforthcoming - there was no accompanying press release, briefing document, or even
mention of the launch by any government minister or department via social media
channels.
The original proposal
for the Open Information Partnership , as
released by 'anonymous' , included the Institute of Statecraft , a Media
Diversity Institute , Bellingcat , DFR Lab (i.e. the Atlantic Council)
and some others in a so called ZINC Network . On the current OIP website the Institute of
Statecraft 'charity' is no longer named.
---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the issue:
Thanks, B. It's a pity the people of the UK have no foreseeable recourse to stop shadow
government operations like this that exist to disinform the people of the UK.
At Kit Klarenberg's Twitter ,
there's a long tweet thread further detailing what b has written above. I can't help be
wonder how the Monty Python troop would have portrayed the Institute for Statecraft and its
parent the Integrity Initiative. It appears that the governments of the English speaking
nations became addicted to lying to their citizens @1900 and are unable to kick the habit and
instead have actually deepened their addiction. Elsewhere on the planet, it seems that people
are learning it's easier to talk straight and transparently with other people and to pool
resources and combine efforts to form a community of nations and humanity to better one and
all. Seems simple enough to determine which is functional and which isn't.
thanks b... i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia... is this due some
need to find someone to demonize, an outgrowth of christianity or god knows what? or is it
purely to generate more money into the industrial military complex? what is the rationale? i
agree with @ 1 - noyk - it is unfortunate the uk people are used as guinea pigs on such a
regular basis.. i suspect a similar exercise is in operation in canada and the west, although
it seems the msm fulfills this role here...
"CIA, FBI Informant Was Washington Post Source For Russiagate Smears."
The article details a segment of Russiagate's overall unraveling and outs WaPost's David
Ignatius as part of Operation Mockingbird. And I see no reason to dispute the item's
conclusion:
"These close connections between the Washington Post's Ignatius and individuals connected
to the American and British intelligence communities, and the false reporting that has taken
place over the last three-plus years, raise grave concerns that the warfare of the soft coup
aimed at President Trump includes using the media to push propaganda."
The longer the above conclusion's denied, the wider the polarization becomes between those
guided by facts and those following media fantasies.
james @ 4 opined;"
thanks b... i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia... is this due some
need to find someone to demonize, an outgrowth of christianity or god knows what? or is it
purely to generate more money into the industrial military complex"
I'm with ya' james, this demonetization of Russia, and any countries that refuse the
empire's beck and call, is around to stay I'm afraid.
And yes, it's all of the above, but, mostly about the $.
'i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia... is this due some need to
find someone to demonize, an outgrowth of christianity or god knows what? or is it purely to
generate more money into the industrial military complex? what is the rationale?...'
they're the nuclear rival that don't manufacture many of the u.s.'s consumer products.
otherwise, it'd either be china, or both...
plus, of course, there's all them cold war memes that can be triggered in a sizable
portion of the population's heads...
The OSCR report includes the Institute for Statecraft's own description of its purposes, but
nothing about its actual operations, other than the ones now being deemed unsatisfactory
under the charities law.
So now that the Institute has committed not to run the Integrity Initiative, and
not to enrich its trustees, what are its legitimate "charitable" activities that OSCR
is kindly allowing it to continue with?
I suspect the the antipathy to Russia and the extensive disinformation campaign stems from
a 'Five Eyes' project and strategy ... with the malign Uncle as its director.
As an Irish citizen, I think the British deep state - the original deep state -have been very
successful at demonising the enemies of 'freedom' and 'civilisation', the Irish yes, also the
Indians, Africans, Germans, french, Spanish, Muslims and now the Russians. Our enemies are
not each other rather the deep state. Let's recognise who our real enemy is
@james #4 "i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia..."
Same motivation as all forgotten empires had. Even our cat want some of it, staring down on
his employees from his basket high up on the fridge with that evil look on his face. We call
it his World Domination Command Centre, WDCC for short. Global domination is what they crave.
Kill the competition, loot its resources, more power, more money. America has been looted,
devastated. Time for the locusts to move on to greener pastures. Russia is the promised land,
the next wild west new world to colonize. Problem is, as always, the natives.
I am hopeful that more and more of the population are realising that if an organisation is
promoted by any western government as a source of information, then that organisation will
provide disinformation by default. There are few, if any, journalists anywhere that are not
part of the empirical disinformation program. Those that are not will be independent and,
therefore, by alternate default, extremely wary of western government/government-funded/NGO
sources. All the hegemon and it's vassals can do now is double-down and hope that the
populations will go back to sleep.
@8 ben / @ 9 semiconscious / @ 11 chet380.. yes, there is that too, but is that it? money as
ben says rings true for me mostly... that is mostly how i see this...the agencies seem to be
a front for western oligarchs.. the kleptomaniacs want access to all russian resources and
have yet to be successful in getting it.. they succeeded in ukraine for the most part in
having the kleptos gain control over much of ukraine.. the 2014 coop was meant to solidify
more of that and poke russia in the eye too..
@ 13 joost... i would watch out for your cat! alas, we all seem to agree it is about
wanting to loot russia... we share a similar viewpoint.. it is really sick how so many are
ignorant pawns, or worse in all of this.. no wonder i make next to no money working in the
music industry... i am in the wrong game and don't share a lack of ethics on such display
with all these losers..
As with all things evil, the British oligarchy began in the 1830s targeting Russia as a
threat to its autocratic interests, in this case "defending" the Ottoman Empire against
Russia.
The Brits were further scared out of their wits when the 1917 Russian Revolution was on
the verge of establishing an anti-capitalist system. So they, along with a ragtag bag of
co-conspirators including the United States, launched a military invasion of Russia.
That's right, U.S. troops landed at two places in Russia and fought against Russian
soldiers. The Brits/U.S/et. al. suffered a humiliating defeat, leaving so quickly that U.S.
dead soldiers were left behind buried in Soviet soil, to be repatriated years later.
But it's Russia that is the threat to "us", right?
Reading through the OCSR's document at the PDF link in B's post, I am surprised (should I
be?) that during the entire decade-long period when the Institute of Statecraft was
registered as a charity, the OCSR did not see fit at any time to remind the organisation of
its responsibilities to keep proper records of its activities and decision-making, to provide
a proper formal and transparent structure for its activities that could be shown to
demonstrate a public benefit, and to have proper formal structures generally for its
day-to-day running and governance activities. The Scottish public have every right to hold
the OCSR to much higher standards of being a regulatory organisation making sure that
charities are run properly as charities and not simply accept those charities' word that they
will improve their operations when they have spent 10 long years taking money (some of it
taxpayers' money) and misusing it.
@ Trisha | Nov 4 2019 21:22 utc | 16
___________________________________________
Thanks for your informative comment. I'd started to reply to James that Russia has been a
default "boogie-man" and Western scapegoat since the 19th Century, but that sounded
unhelpfully circular-- and I didn't have the ambition to refresh my understanding with actual
historical facts. ;)
The fact that a sort of Western "coalition of the willing" invaded Russia after the 1917
revolution is still a well-kept secret! It was never mentioned in my (US) school courses,
from parochial school through the "Honors Survey of Western Civilization" course I took in
college.
@ 20..lol.. that is true... can't ver ask too many questions! and, it has been a repeat of
mccarthyism.. it's bizarre to see so many otherwise intelligent people swallow this crap.. i
think of emptywheel and how i used to think she was smart.. she is so busy looking at the
trees, she's incapable of seeing the forest..
@16 trisha... thanks... as i have mentioned here at moa numerous times, the book 'paris 1918'
by Margaret Macmillan is an excellent book that gives an overview and discusses exactly what
you are talking about.. i can't recommend the book enough.. https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/1135/Paris-1919
I ploughed through the Kit Klarenberg piece on Sputnik that b linked to and would have wept
at the Orwellian inversions of truth in the OIP's 'mission statment' if I'd had any tears
left after enduring the recent decades of lies and projection of the Empire's propaganda
machine. The Mighty Wurlitzer at corporate-speak indeed. In fact all I could do was laugh
like Group Captain Mandrake in Dr Strangelove when confronted with the madness of
General Ripper.
Tragically, the opening paragraph of their statement sounded like something Caitlin
Johnstone might pen, urging our side to be wary and vigilant of the propaganda of
them .
"Democracy cannot thrive without honest, accurate and freely available information about
the world around us We need to know where our information is coming from, we need to know
the motives (good, bad or neither) of those providing the information, and be in the habit
of thinking critically about everything we read and hear. Every one of us has the right to
be properly informed – that knowledge gives us strength. Every one of us shares
responsibility for informed engagement and critical thinking, to challenge the powerful and
uncover the truth An engaged population, equipped with clarity and the truth, is the
foundation for a world where we can all enjoy greater equality and greater peace."
"critical thinking"
"challenge the powerful"
"uncover the truth"
They are taking the tools that we need to deal with their perfidy, and
pretending that they need to use them to "challenge the powerful and uncover the
truth". I found this Orwellian inversion of the truth so chilling that I could only
laugh.
In all seriousness, I can only presume that they actually believe their own lies.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine (1992) states that Russia should remain America's main enemy for the
forseeable future because it inherited the USSR's nuclear arsenal. At least this is the
official rationale.
But there may be another reason. Courtesy from Pepe Escobar's facebook page:
@22 James ... thanks for the "Paris 1919" book reference, luckily it's available at my local
library. For a detailed history of (sadly) another in a long list of America's criminal acts
of aggressive war, I highly recommend Russian
Sideshow: America's Undeclared War, 1918-1920 by Robert L. Willett.
they are attacking Russia because they know that only military force can stop the collapse
the fake Dollar & all the Jewish printed wealth which goes with it. "yes, the Dollar is
our money, but, it is your problem" sort of imposed doctrine of the last half-century is
coming to an end & no naval carriers could stop its fall.
"CIA, FBI Informant Was Washington Post Source For Russiagate Smears."
The article details a segment of Russiagate's overall unraveling and outs WaPost's David
Ignatius as part of Operation Mockingbird. And I see no reason to dispute the item's
conclusion:
"These close connections between the Washington Post's Ignatius and individuals
connected to the American and British intelligence communities, and the false reporting
that has taken place over the last three-plus years, raise grave concerns that the warfare
of the soft coup aimed at President Trump includes using the media to push propaganda."
The longer the above conclusion's denied, the wider the polarization becomes between
those guided by facts and those following media fantasies.
"... The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, such as information operations. A nice sounding euphemism for propaganda, and computer network operations. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of this Task Force. ..."
The average American has no idea how alarming is the news that former CIA Director John
Brennan reportedly created and staffed a CIA Task Force in early 2016 that was named, Trump
Task Force, and given the mission of spying on and carrying out covert actions against the
campaign of candidate Donald Trump.
This was not a simple gathering of a small number of disgruntled Democrats working at the
CIA who got together like a book club to grouse and complain about the brash real estate guy
from New York. It was a specially designed covert action to try to destroy Donald Trump.
A "Task Force" is a special bureaucratic creation that provides a vehicle for bring case
officers and analysts together, along with admin support, for a limited term project. But it
also can be expanded to include personnel from other agencies, such as the FBI, DIA and NSA.
Task Forces have been used since the inception of the CIA in 1947. Here's a recently
declassified memo outlining the considerations in the creation of a task force in 1958. The
author, L.K. White, talks about the need for a coordinating Headquarters element and an
Operational unit "in the field", i.e. deployed around the world.
A Task Force operates independent of the CIA " Mission Centers
" (that's the jargon for the current CIA organization chart).
So what did John Brennan do? I am told by an knowledgeable source that Brennan created a
Trump Task Force in early 2016. It was an invitation only Task Force. Specific case officers
(i.e., men and women who recruit and handle spies overseas), analysts and admin personnel were
recruited. Not everyone invited accepted the offer. But many did.
This was not a CIA only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task
Force. We have some clues that Christopher Steele's FBi handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been
detailed to the Trump Task Force ( see here
).
So what kind of things would this Task Force do? The case officers would work with foreign
intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on
identifying intelligence collection priorities. Task Force members could task NSA to do
targeted collection. They also would have the ability to engage in covert action, such as
targeting George Papadopoulos. Joseph Mifsud may be able to shed light on the CIA officers who
met with him, briefed on operational objectives regarding Papadopoulos and helped arrange
monitored meetings. I think it is highly likely that the honey pot that met with George
Papadopoulos, a woman named Azra Turk, was part of the CIA Trump Task Force.
The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, such as information
operations. A nice sounding euphemism for propaganda, and computer network operations. There
has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of this Task
Force.
In light of what we have learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, there
should be a serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at
minimum, reporting to them.
When I described this to one friend, a retired CIA Chief of Station, his first response was,
"My God, that's illegal." We then reminisced about another illegal operation carried out under
the auspices of the CIA Central American Task Force back in the 1980s. That became known to
Americans as the Iran Contra scandal.
I sure hope that John Durham and his team are looking at this angle. If true it marks a new
and damning indictment of the corruption of the CIA. Rather than spying on genuine foreign
threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald
Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of Putin.
Petri Krohn's comment @37 "ERIC CIARAMELLA IS NOT A WHISTLEBLOWER - HE IS A SUSPECT"
Little mentioned is the server in Ukraine which was brought up in the phone call. Barr's
investigation has become a criminal investigation and interested in a server in Ukraine.
The impeachment farce is trying to put the focus on Biden, but the server may be what they
are trying to protect.
This impeachment show looks to be a rearguard or defensive action to try and stop the Barr
criminal investigation into russiagate.
"... It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news. There's something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers. What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of "conspiracy theorists" is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor. But with a twisted twist. ..."
"... The Council on Foreign Relations ..."
"... Foreign Affairs, ..."
"... Linguistic mind control is insidious like the slow drip of a water faucet. After a while you don't hear it and just go about your business, even as your mind, like a rotting rubber washer, keeps disintegrating under propaganda's endless reiterations. ..."
"... To think that the deep state is government employees just doing their patriotic duty is plain idiocy and plainer propaganda. ..."
It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news.
There's something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers. What
was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of
"conspiracy theorists" is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor. But with
a twisted twist.
The corporate mass-media has recently discovered a "deep state" that they claim to be not
some evil group of assassins who work for the super-rich owners of the country and murder
their own president (JFK) and other unpatriotic dissidents (Malcom X, MLK, RK, among others)
and undermine democracy home and abroad, but are now said to be just fine upstanding American
citizens who work within the government bureaucracies and are patriotic believers in
democracy intent on doing the right thing.
This redefinition has been in the works for a few years, and it shouldn't be a surprise
that this tricky treat was being prepared for our consumption a few years ago by The
Council on Foreign Relations . In its September/October 2017 edition of its journal
Foreign Affairs, Jon D. Michaels, in "Trump and the Deep State: The Government
Strikes Back," writes:
Furious at what they consider treachery by internal saboteurs, the president and his
surrogates have responded by borrowing a bit of political science jargon, claiming to be
victims of the " deep state ," a
conspiracy of powerful, unelected bureaucrats secretly pursuing their own agenda. The
concept of a deep state is valuable in its original context, the study of developing
countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where shadowy elites in the military and
government ministries have been known to countermand or simply defy democratic directives.
Yet it has little relevance to the United States, where governmental power structures are
almost entirely transparent, egalitarian, and rule-bound.
The White House is correct to perceive widespread resistance inside the government to
many of its endeavors. But the same way the administration's media problems come not from
"fake news" but simply from news, so its bureaucratic problems come not from an insidious,
undemocratic "deep state" but simply from the state -- the large, complex hive of people
and procedures that constitute the U.S. federal government.
Notice how in these comical passages about U.S. government transparency and
egalitarianism, Michaels slyly and falsely attributes to Trump the very definition –
"unelected bureaucrats" – that in the next paragraph he claims to be the real deep
state, which is just the state power structures. Pseudo-innocence conquers all here as there
is no mention of the Democratic party, Russiagate, etc., and all the machinations led by the
intelligence services and Democratic forces to oust Trump from the day he was elected. State
power structures just move so quickly, as anyone knows who has studied the speed with which
bureaucracies operate. Ask Max Weber.
Drip by drip over the past few years, this "state bureaucracy" meme has been introduced by
the mainstream media propagandists as they have gradually revealed that the government
deep-staters are just doing their patriotic duty in trying openly to oust an elected
president.
Many writers have commented on the recent New York Times article, Trump's
War on the 'Deep State' Turns Against Him" asserting that the Times has finally admitted
to the existence of the deep state, which is true as far as it goes, which is not too far.
But in this game of deceptive revelations – going shallower to go deeper – what
is missing is a focus on the linguistic mind control involved in the changed definition.
In a recent article by Robert W. Merry, whose intentions I am not questioning –
"New York
Times Confirms: It's Trump Versus the Deep State" – originally published at The
American Conservative and widely reprinted , the lead-in to the article proper
reads: "Even the Gray Lady admits the president is up against a powerful bureaucracy that
wants him sunk." So the "powerful bureaucracy" redefinition, this immovable force of
government bureaucrats, is slipped into public consciousness as what the deep state
supposedly is. Gone are CIA conspirators and evil doers. In their place we find career civil
servants doing their patriotic duty.
Then there is The New York Times' columnist James Stewart who, appearing on the
Today Show recently, where he was promoting his new book, told Savannah Guthrie
that:
Well, you meet these characters in my book, and the fact is, in a sense, he's [Trump]
right. There is a deep state there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to
respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law. They do not work for the President. They
work for the American people. And, as Comey told me in my book, 'thank goodness for that,'
because they are protecting the Constitution and the people when individuals – we
don't have a monarch, we don't have a dictator – they restrain them from crossing the
boundaries of law. What Trump calls the deep state in the United States is protecting the
American people and protecting the Constitution. It's a positive thing in this sense.
So again we are told that the deep-state bureaucracy is defending the Constitution and
protecting the American people, as James Comey told Stewart, "in my book, 'thank goodness for
that,'" as he put it so eloquently. These guys talk in books, of course, not person to
person, but that is the level not just of English grammar and general stupidity, but of the
brazen bullshit these guys are capable of.
This new and shallow deep state definition has buried the old meaning of the deep state as
evil conspirators carrying out coup d'états, assassinations, and massive media
propaganda campaigns at home and abroad, and who, by implication and direct declaration,
never existed in the good old U.S.A. but only in countries such as Egypt, Turkey, and
Pakistan where shadowy elites killed and deposed leaders and opponents in an endless series
of coup d'états. No mention in Foreign Affairs , of course, of the American
support for the ruthless leaders of these countries who have always been our dear allies when
they obey our every order and serve as our servile proxies in murder and mayhem.
Even Edward Snowden , the courageous whistleblower in exile in Russia, in a recent
interview
with Joe Rogan , repeats this nonsense when he says the deep state is just "career government
officials" who want to keep their jobs and who outlast presidents. From his own experience,
he should know better. Much better. Interestingly, he suggests that he does when he tells
Rogan that "every president since Kennedy" has been successfully "feared up" by the
intelligence agencies so they will do their bidding. He doesn't need to add that JFK, for
fearlessly refusing the bait, was shot in the head in broad daylight to send a message to
those who would follow.
Linguistic mind control is insidious like the slow drip of a water faucet. After a while
you don't hear it and just go about your business, even as your mind, like a rotting rubber
washer, keeps disintegrating under propaganda's endless reiterations.
To think that the deep state is government employees just doing their patriotic duty is
plain idiocy and plainer propaganda.
It is a trick, not the treat it is made to seem.
*
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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the
Centre for Research on Globalization. Visit the author's website
here .
"... We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras. ..."
"... So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? ' ..."
"... I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism and war reporting. ..."
"... Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip, the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations, briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported. ..."
"... He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact me later, in my occupation. ..."
"... Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given, but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline. ..."
"... But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times, and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything will be fine. ..."
"... From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany & Austria. ..."
"... Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate interests. ..."
"... Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs, politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order." ..."
"... "The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"." ..."
"... So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free. ..."
"... Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep. ..."
"... Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the get go. ..."
"... This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order). ..."
"... Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the greater fools want. ..."
"... Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management. ..."
"... Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they could get their greedy hands on at the time. ..."
"... Once pond scum always pond scum. ..."
"... It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm – always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society. ..."
"... Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can to get what they want. ..."
"... All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm ..."
In 2014, the German journalist and writer Udo Ulfkotte published a book that created a big stir, describing how the journalistic
profession is thoroughly corrupt and infiltrated by intelligence services.
Although eagerly anticipated by many, the English translation of the book, Bought Journalists , does not seem to be forthcoming
anytime soon.
So I have made English subtitles and transcribed this still very relevant 2015-lecture for those that are curious about Ulfkotte's
work. It covers many of the subjects described in the book.
Udo Ulfkotte died of a heart attack in January 2017, in all likelihood part of the severe medical complications he got from his
exposure to German-made chemical weapons supplied to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
Transcription
[Only the first 49 minutes are translated; the second half of the lecture deals mostly with more local issues]
Introducer Oliver: I am very proud to have such a brave man amongst us: Udo Ulfkotte
Udo Ulfkotte: Thanks Thanks for the invitation Thanks to Oliver. I heard to my great surprise from Oliver that he didn't
know someone from the intelligence services (VVS) would be present. I wish him a warm welcome. I don't mean that as a joke, I heard
this in advance, and got to know that Oliver didn't know. If he wants – if it is a man – he can wave. If not? no? [laughter from
the audience]
I'm fine with that. You can write down everything, or record it; no problem.
To the lecture. We are talking about media. we are talking about truth. I don't want to sell you books or such things. Each one
of us asks himself: Why do things develop like they do, even though the majority, or a lot of people shake their heads.
The majority of people in Germany don't want nuclear weapons on our territory. But we have nuclear weapons here. The majority
don't want foreign interventions by German soldiers. But we do.
What media narrates and the politicians say, and what the majority of the population believes – seems often obviously to be two
different things.
I can tell you this myself, from many years experience. I will start with very personal judgments, to tell you what my experiences
with 'The Lying Media' were – I mean exactly that with the word 'lying'.
I was born in a fairly poor family. I am a single child. I grew up on the eastern edge of the Ruhr-area. I studied Law, Political
Science and Islamic Studies. Already in my student years, I had contact with the German Foreign Intelligence, BND. We will get back
to that later.
From 1986 to 2003, I worked for a major German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), amongst other things as a war
reporter. I spent a lot of time in Eastern and African countries.
Now to the subject of lying media. When I was sent to the Iran-Iraq war for the first time, the first time was from 1980 to July
1986, I was sent to this war to report for FAZ. The Iraqis were then 'the good guys'.
I was bit afraid. I didn't have any experience as a war reporter. Then I arrived in Baghdad. I was fairly quickly sent along in
a bus by the Iraqi army, the bus was full of loud, experienced war reporters, from such prestigious media as the BBC, several foreign
TV-stations and newspapers, and me, poor newbie, who was sent to the front for the first time without any kind of preparation. The
first thing I saw was that they all carried along cans of petrol. And I at once got bad consciousness, because I thought: "oops,
if the bus gets stuck far from a petrol station, then everyone chips in with a bit of diesel'. I decided to in the future also carry
a can before I went anywhere, because it obviously was part of it.
We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing.
First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents
of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks
in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras.
It was my first experience with media, truth in reporting.
While I was wondering what the hell I was going to report for my newspaper, they all lined up and started: Behind them were flames
and plumes of smoke, and all the time the Iraqis were running in front of camera with their machine guns, casually, but with war
in their gaze. And the reporters were ducking all the time while talking.
So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking
all the time? '
'Quite simply because there are machine guns on the audio track, and it looks very good at home.'
That was several decades ago. It was in the beginning of my contact with war. I was thinking, the whole way back:'Young man, you
didn't see a war. You were in a place with a campfire. What are you going to tell?'
I returned to Baghdad. There weren't any mobile phones then. We waited in Hotel Rashid and other hotels where foreigners stayed,
sometimes for hours for an international telephone line. I first contacted my mother, not my newspaper. I was in despair, didn't
know what to do, and wanted to get advice from an elder person.
Then my mother shouted over the phone: 'My boy, you are alive!' I thought: 'How so? Is everything OK?'
'My boy, we thought ' 'What's the matter, mother?' 'We saw on TV what happened around you' TV had already sent lurid stories, and I tried to calm my mother down, it didn't happen like that. She thought I had lost my mind
from all the things that had happened in the war – she saw it with her own eyes!
I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism
and war reporting.
That is, I was very shocked by the first contact, it was entirely different from what I had experienced. But it wasn't an exceptional
case.
In the beginning, I mentioned that I am from a fairly poor family. I had to work hard for everything. I was a single child, my
father died when I was young. It didn't matter further on. But, I had a job, I had a degree, a goal in life.
I now had the choice: Should I declare that the whole thing was nonsense, these reports? I was nothing, a newbie straight out
of uni, in my first job. Or if I wanted to make money, to continue, look further. I chose the second option. I continued, and that
for many years.
Over these years, I gained lots of experience. When one comes from university to a big German newspaper – everything I say doesn't
only apply to FAZ, you can take other German or European media. I had contact with other European journalists, from reputable media
outlets. I later worked in other media. I can tell you: What I am about to tell you, I really discovered everywhere.
What did I experience? If you, as a reporter, work either in state media financed by forced license fees, or in the big private
media companies, then you can't write what you want yourself, what you feel like. There are certain guidelines.
Roughly speaking: everyone knows that you won't, for example in the Springer-newspapers – Bild, die Welt – get published articles
extremely critical of Israel. They stand no chance there, because one has to sign a statement that one is pro-Israel, that one won't
question the existence of the state of Israel or Israeli points of view, etc.
There are some sort of guidelines in all the big media companies. But that isn't all: I learned very fast that if one doesn't
– I don't mean this negatively – want to be stuck in the lower rungs of editors, if one wants to rise; for me this rise was that
I was allowed to travel with the Chancellor, ministers, the president and politicians, in planes owned by the state; then one has
to keep to certain subjects. I learned that fast.
That is, if one gets to follow a politician – and this hasn't changed to this day – I soon realized that when I followed the president
or Chancellor Helmut Kohl etc, one of course isn't invited because your name is Udo Ulfkotte, but because you belong to the newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine.
Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip,
the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or
the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations,
briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the
same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported.
All the time you no one tells you to write it this or that way but you know quite exactly that if you DON'T write it this or that
way,then you won't get invited next time. Your media outlet will be invited, but they say 'we don't want him along'. Then you are
out.
Naturally you want to be invited. Of course it is wonderful to travel abroad and you can behave like a pig, no one cares. You
can buy what you want, because you know that when you return, you won't be checked. You can bring what you want. I had colleagues
who went along on a trip to the US.
They brought with them – it was an air force plane – a Harley Davidson, in parts. They sold it when they were back in Germany,
and of course earned on it. Anyway, just like the carpet-affair with that development minister, this is of course not a single instance.
No one talks about it.
You get invited if you have a certain way of seeing things. Which way to see things? Where and how is this view of the world formed?
I very often get asked: 'Where are these people behind the curtain who pulls the wires, so that everything gets told in a fairly
similar way?'
In the big media in Germany – just look yourself – who sit in the large transatlantic think-tanks and foundations,the foundation
The Atlantic Bridge, all these organizations, and how is one influenced there? I can tell from my own experience.
We mustn't talk only theoretically. I was invited by the think-tank The German Marshall Fund of the United States as a fellow.
I was to visit the United States for six weeks. It was fully paid. During these six weeks I could this think-tank has very close
connections to the CIA to this day, they acquired contacts in the CIA for me and they got me access to American politicians, to everyone
I wanted. Above all, they showered me with gifts.
Already before the journey with German Marshall Fund, I experienced plenty of bought journalism. This hasn't to do with a particular
media outlet. You see, I was invited and didn't particularly reflect over it, by billionaires, for example sultan Quabboos of Oman
on the Arabian peninsula.
When sultan Qabboos invited, and a poor boy like me could travel to a country with few inhabitants but immense wealth, where the
head of state had the largest yachts in the world, his own symphony orchestra which plays for him when he wants – by the way he bought
a pub close to Garmisch-Patenkirchen, because he is a Muslim believer, and someone might see him if he drank in his own country,
so he rather travels there. The place he bought every day fly in fresh lamb from Ireland and Scotland with his private jet. He is
also the head of an environmental foundation.
But this is a digression. If such a person, who is so incredibly rich, invites someone like me, then I arrive first class. I had
never traveled first class before. We arrive, and a driver is waiting for me. He carries your suitcase or backpack. You have a suite
in the hotel. And from the very start, you are showered with gifts. You get a platinum or gold coin. A hand-weaved carpet or whatever.
I interviewed the sultan, several times. He asked me what I wanted. I answered among other things a diving course. I wanted to
learn how to dive. He flew in a PADI-approved instructor from Greece. I was there for two weeks and got my first diving certificate.
On later occasions, the sultan flew me in several times, and the diving instructor. I got a certificate as rescue diver, all paid
for by the sultan. You see, when one is attended to in such a way, then you know that you are bought. For a certain type of journalism.
In the sultan's country, there is no freedom of the press.
There are no human rights. It is illegal to import many writings, because the sultan does not wish so. There are reports about
human rights violations, but my eyes are blind. I reported, like all German media when they report about the Sultanate of Oman, to
this day, only positive things. The great sultan, who is wonderful. The fantastic country of the fairy tale prince, overshadowing
everything else – because I was bought.
Apart from Oman, many others have bought me. They also bought colleagues. I got many invitations through the travel section in
my big newspaper. 5-star. The reportage never mentioned that I was bought, by country A or B or C. Yemenia, the Yemeni state airline,
invited me to such a trip.
I didn't report about the dirt and dilapidation in the country, because I was influenced by this treatment, I only reported positively,
because I wanted to come back. The Yemenis asked me when I had returned to Frankfurt what I wished In jest, I said "your large prawns,
from the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean, they were spectacular.", from the seaport of Mocha (Mocha-coffee is named after it). Two
days later, Yemenia flew in a buffet for the editorial office, with prawns and more.
Of course we were bought. We were bought in several ways. In your situation: when you buy a car or something else, you trust consumer
tests. Look closer. How well is the car tested? I know of no colleagues, no journalists, who do testing of cars, that aren't bribed
– maybe they do exist.
They get unlimited access to a car from the big car manufacturers, with free petrol and everything else. I had a work car in my
newspaper, if not, I might have exploited this. I had a BMW or Mercedes in the newspaper. But there are, outside the paper, many
colleagues who only have this kind of vehicle all year round. They are invited to South Africa, Malaysia, USA, to the grandest travels,
when a new car is presented.
Why? So that they will write positively about the car. But it doesn't say in these reports "Advertisement from bought journalists".
But that is the reality. You should also know – since we are on the subjects of tests – who owns which test magazines? Who owns
the magazine Eco-test? It is owned by the Social Democrats. More than a hundred magazines belong to the Social Democrats. It isn't
about only one party, but many editorial rooms have political allegiance. Behind them are party political interests.
I mentioned the sultan of Oman and the diving course, and I have mentioned German Marshall Fund. Back to the US and the German
Marshall Fund. There one told me, they knew exactly, 'hello, you were on a diving course in Oman ' The CIA knew very precisely. And
the CIA also gave me something: The diving gear. I received the diving gear in the United States, and I received in the US, during
my 6-week stay there, an invitation from the state of Oklahoma, from the governor. I went there. It was a small ceremony, and I received
an honorary citizenship.
I am now honorary citizen of an American state. And in this certificate, it is written that I will only cover the US positively.
I accepted this honorary citizenship and was quite proud of it. I proudly told about it to a colleague who worked in the US. He said
'ha, I already have 31 of these honorary citizenships!'
I don't tell about this to be witty, today I am ashamed, really.
I was greedy. I accepted many advantages that a regular citizen at my age in my occupation doesn't have, and shouldn't have. But
I perceived it – and that is no excuse – as entirely normal, because my colleagues around me all did the same. But this isn't normal.
When journalists are invited to think-tanks in the US, like German Marshall Fund, Atlantic Bridge, it is to 'bring them in line',
for in a friendly way to make them complicit, naturally to buy them, to grease them with money.
This has quite a few aspects that one normally doesn't talk about. When I for the first time was in Southern Africa, in the 80s,
Apartheid still existed in South Africa, segregated areas for blacks and whites. We didn't have any problems with this in my newspaper,
we received fully paid journeys from the Apartheid regime to do propaganda work.
I was invited by the South-African gold industry, coal industry, tourist board. In the first invitation, this trip was to Namibia
– I arrived tired to the hotel room in Windhoek and a dark woman lay in my bed. I at once left the room, went down to the reception
and said 'excuse me, but the room is already occupied' [laughter from the audience]
Without any fuss I got another room.
Next day at the breakfast table, this was a journalist trip, my colleagues asked me 'how was yours?' Only then I understood what
had happened. Until then, I had believed it was a silly coincidence.
With this I want to describe which methods are used, maybe to film journalists in such situations, buy, make dependent. Quite
simply to win them over to your side with the most brutal methods, so that they are 'brought in line'.
This doesn't happen to every journalist. It would be a conspiracy theory if I said that behind every journalist, someone pulls
the wires.
No. Not everyone has influence over the masses. When you – I don't mean this negatively – write about folk costume societies or
if you work with agriculture or politics, why should anyone from the upper political spheres have an interest in controlling the
reporting? As far as I know, this doesn't happen at all.
But if you work in one of the big media, and want up in this world, if you want to travel with politicians, heads of state, with
CEOs, who also travel on these planes, then it happens. Then you are regularly bought, you are regularly observed.
I said earlier that I already during my study days had contact with the intelligence services.
I will quickly explain this to you, because it is very important for this lecture.
I studied law, Political Science and Islamology, among other places in Freiburg. At the very beginning of my study, just before
end of the term, a professor approached me. Professors were then still authority figures.
He came with a brochure, and asked me: 'Mr. Ulfkotte, what are your plans for this vacation?'
I couldn't very well say that I first planned to work a bit at a building site, for then to grab my backpack and see the ocean
for the first time in my life, to Italy, 'la dolce vita', flirting with girls, lie on the beach and be a young person.
I wondered how I would break it to him. He then came with a brochure [Ulfkotte imitating professor]: 'I have something for
you a seminar, Introduction to Conflict Studies, two weeks in Bonn I am sure you would want to participate!'
I wondered how I would tell this elderly gentleman that I wanted to flirt with girls on the beach. Then he said 'you will get
20 Marks per day as support, paid train journey, money for books 150 Marks You will naturally get board and lodging.' He didn't stop
telling me what I would receive.
It buzzed around in my head that I had to achieve everything myself, work hard. I thought 'You have always wanted to participate
in a seminar on Introduction to Conflict Studies!'
So I went to Bonn from Freiburg, and I saw other students who had this urge to participate in this seminar. There were also girls
one could flirt with, about twenty people. The whole thing was very strange, because we sat in a room like this one, there were desks
and a lectern, and there sat some older men and a woman, they always wrote something down. They asked us about things; What we thought
of East Germany, we had to do role play.
The whole thing was a bit strange, but it was well paid. We didn't reflect any further. It was very strange that in this house,
in Ubierstraße 88 in Bonn, we weren't allowed to go to the second floor. There was a chain over the stairs, it was taboo.
We were allowed to go to the basement, there were constantly replenished supplies of new books that we were allowed to get for
free. Ebay didn't exist then, but we could still sell them used. Anyway, it was curious, but at the end of the fortnight, we were
allowed to go up these stairs, where we got an invitation to a continuation course in Conflict Studies.
After four such seminars, that is, after two years, someone asked me 'you have probably wondered what we are doing here'.
He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction
to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at
potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact
me later, in my occupation.
They gave me a lot of money. My mother has always taught me to be polite. So I said 'please do', and they came to me. I was then
working in the newspaper FAZ from 1986, straight after my studies.
Then the intelligence services came fairly soon to me. Why am I telling you this? The newspaper knew very soon. It is also written in my reference, therefore I can say it loud and clear. I had very close contact with the intelligence service BND.
Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given,
but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline.
I highlight certain things to explain them. But if I had said here: 'There are media that are influenced by BND', you could rightly
say that 'these are conspiracy theories, can you document it?'
I CAN document it. I can say, this and that article, with my byline in the paper, is written by the intelligence services, because
what is written there, I couldn't have known. I couldn't have known what existed in some cave or other in Libya, what secret thing
were there, what was being built there. This was all things that BND wanted published. It wasn't like this only in FAZ.
It was like this also in other media. I told about it. If we had rule of law, there would now be an investigation commission.
Because the political parties would stand up, regardless of if they are on the left, in the center or right, and say: What this Ulfkotte
fella says and claims he can document, this should be investigated. Did this occur in other places? Or is it still ongoing?'
I can tell you: Yes it still exists. I know colleagues who still have this close contact. One can probably show this fairly well
until a few years ago. But I would find it wonderful if this investigation commission existed.
But it will obviously not happen, because no one has an interest in doing so. Because then the public would realize how closely
integrated politics, media, and the secret services are in this country.
That is, one often sees in reporting, whether it is from the local paper, regional papers, TV-channels, national tabloids and
so-called serious papers.
Put them side by side, and you will discover that more than 90% looks almost identical. A lot of subjects and news, that are not
being reported at all, or they are – I claim reported very one-sided. One can only explain this if one knows the structures in the
background, how media is surrounded, bought and 'brought onboard' by politics and the intelligence services; Where politics and intelligence
services form a single unity. There is an intelligence coordinator by the Chancellor.
I can tell you, that under the former coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer, under Kohl, I walked in and out of the Chancellery and received
stacks of secret and confidential documents, which I shouldn't have received.
They were so many that we in the newspaper had own archive cabinets for them. Not only did I receive these documents,but Schmidbauer
should have been in jail if we had rule of law. Or there should have been a parliamentary commission or an investigation, because
he wasn't allowed
For example if I couldn't bring along the documents if the case was too hot, there was another trick. They locked me in a room.
In this room were the documents, which I could look through. I could record it all on tape, photograph them or write them down. When
I was done, I could call on the intercom, so they could lock me out. There were thousands of these tricks. Anonymous documents that
I and my colleagues needed could be placed in my mail box.
These are of course illegal things. BUT, you ONLY get them if you 'toe the line' with politics.
If I had written that Chancellor Helmut Kohl is stupid, a big idiot, or about what Schmidbauer did, I would of course not have
received more. That is, if you today, in newspapers, read about 'soon to be revealed exposures, we will publish a big story based
on material based on intelligence', then none of these media have dug a tunnel under the security services and somehow got hold of
something secret. It is rather that they work so well with intelligence services, with the military counterespionage, the foreign
intelligence, police intelligence etc, that if they have got hold of internal documents, it is because they cooperate so well that
they received them as a reward for well performed service.
You see, in this way one is in the end bought. One is bought to such a degree that at one point one can't exit this system anymore.
If I describe how you are supplied with prostitutes, bribed with cars, money; I tried to write down everything I received in gifts,
everything I was bribed with. I stopped doing so several years ago, more than a decade ago.
It doesn't make it any better, but today I regret everything. But I know that it goes this way with many journalists.
It would make me very happy if journalists stood up and said they won't participate in this any longer, and that they think this
is wrong.
But I see no possibility, because media corporations in any case are doing badly. Where should a journalist find work the next
day? It isn't so that tens of thousands of employers are waiting for you. It is the other way round. Tens of thousands of journalists
are looking for work or commissions.
That is, from pure desperation one is happy to be bribed. If a newsroom stands behind or not an article that in reality is advertising,
doesn't matter, one goes along. I know some, even respected journalists, who want to leave this system.
But imagine if you are working in one of the state channels, that you stand up and tell what you have received. How will that
be received by your colleagues? That you have political ulterior motives etc.
September 30 [2015], a few days ago, Chancellor Merkel invited all the directors in the state channels to her in the Chancellery.
I will claim that she talked with them about how one should report the Chancellors politics. Who of you [in the audience] heard about
this incident? 3-4-5? So a small minority. But this is reality. Merkel started already 6 years ago, at the beginning of the financial
crisis, to invite chief editors ..she invited chief editors in the large media corporations, with the express wish that media should
embellish reality, in a political way. This could have been only claims, one could believe me or not.
But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times,
and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw
their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything
will be fine.
In such a way it should be reported. Ladies and gentlemen, what I just said can be documented. These are facts, not a conspiracy
theory.
I formulated it a bit satirically, but I ask myself when I see how things are in this country: Is this the democracy described
in the Constitution? Freedom of speech? Freedom of the press?
Where one has to be afraid if one doesn't agree with the ruling political correctness, if one doesn't want to get in trouble.
Is this the republic our parents and grandparents fought for, that they built?
I claim that we more and more – as citizens – are cowards 'toeing the line', who don't open our mouths.
It is so nice to have plurality and diversity of opinions.
But it is at once clamped down on, today fairly openly.
Of my experiences with journalism, I can in general say that I have quit all media I have to pay for, for the reasons mentioned.
Then the question arises, 'but which pay-media can I trust?'
Naturally there are ones I support. They are definitely political, I'll add. But they are all fairly small. And they won't be
big anytime soon. But I have quit all big media that I used to subscribe to, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine, etc. I would like
to not having to pay the TV-license fee, without being arrested because I won't pay fines. But maybe someone here in the audience
can tell me how to do so without all these problems?
Either way, I don't want to financially support this kind of journalism. I can only give you the advice to get information from
alternative, independent media and all the forums that exist.
I'm not advertising for any of them. Some of you probably know that I write for the publishing house Kopp. But there are so many
portals. Every person is different in political viewpoint, culturally etc. The only thing uniting us, whether we are black or white,
religious or non-religious, right or left, or whatever; we all want to know the truth. We want to know what really happens out there,
and exactly in the burning political questions: asylum seekers, refugees, the financial crisis, bad infrastructure, one doesn't know
how it will continue. Precisely with this background, is it even more important that people get to know the truth.
And it is to my great surprise that I conclude that we in media, as well as in politics, have a guiding line.
To throw more and more dust in the citizens' eyes to calm them down. What is the sense in this? One can have totally different
opinions on the subject of refugees with good reasoning.
But facts are important for you as citizens to decide the future. That is, how many people will arrive? How will it affect my
personal affluence? Or will it affect my affluence at all? Will the pensions shrink? etc. Then you can talk with people about this,
quite openly. But to say that we should open all borders, and that this won't have any negative consequences, is very strange. What
I now say isn't a plug for my books. I know that some of them are on the table in front.
I'm not saying this so that you will buy books. I am saying this for another reason that soon will be clear. I started to write
books on certain subjects 18 years ago. They have sold millions. It is no longer about you buying my books. It is important that
you hear the titles, then you will see a certain line throughout the last ten years. One can have different opinions about this line,
but I have always tried to describe, based on my subjective experiences, formed over many years in the Middle East and Africa.
That there will be migration flows, from people from culture areas that are like; if one could compare a cultural area with an
engine, that one fills petrol in a diesel engine then everyone knows what will happen, the engine is great, diesel is great, but
if there too much petrol, then the engine starts to splutter and stop.
I have tried to make you aware of this, with drastic and less drastic words. What we can expect, and ever faster. The book titles
are SOS Occident; Warning Civil War; No Black,Red, Yellow [the colors in the German flag], Holy War in Europe; Mecca Germany.
I just want to say, when politicians and media today claim no one could have predicted it, everything is a complete surprise;
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is not at all surprising. The migration flows, for years warnings have been coming from international
organizations, politicians, experts, exactly about what happened and it is predictable, if we had a map over North Africa and the
Middle East..
If the West continues to destabilize countries like Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, country by country, Iraq when we toppled Saddam
Hussein, Afghanistan. We as Europeans and Germans have spent tens of billions on a war where we allegedly defend peace and liberty,
at the mountain range Hindu Kush [in Afghanistan]. And here, in front of our own door, we soon have Hindu Kush.
We have no stabilization in Afghanistan. Dozens of German soldiers have lost their lives for nothing. We have a more unstable
situation than ever.
You can have your own opinions. I am only saying that these refugee flows didn't fall from the sky. It is predicable, that if
I bomb and destabilize a country, that people – it is always so in history – it hasn't anything to do with the Middle East or North
Africa. I have seen enough wars in Africa. Naturally they created refugee flows.
But all of us didn't want to see this. We haven't prepared. And now one is reacting in full panic, and what is most disconcerting
with this, is when media and politicians, allegedly from deepest inner conviction, say: 'this was all a complete surprise!'
Are they drunk? What are they smoking? What sort of pills are they eating? That they behave this way?
End transcription
The transcription has been edited for clarity, and may differ from the spoken word. The subtitles and transcription are for the
first 49 minutes of the lecture only. Subtitled and transcribed by Terje Maloy. This article is Creative Commons 4.0 for non-commercial
purposes.
Terje Maloy (
Website ) is a Norwegian citizen, with roots north of the Arctic Circle. Nowadays, he spends a lot of time in Australia, working
in the family business. He has particular interests in liberty, global justice, imperialism, history, media analysis and what Western
governments really are up to. He runs a blog , mostly in Norwegian,
but occasionally in English. He likes to write about general geopolitical matters, and Northern Europe in particular, presenting
perspectives that otherwise barely are mentioned in the dominant media (i.e. most things that actually matter).
Tim Jenkins
From 1:18 minutes, Ulfkotte reveals without question, that the EU Political 'elite's' combined intelligence services work with
& propagate . . .
Terror, Terrorists & Terrorism / a conscious organised Politics of FEAR ! / Freedom of Movement, of fully armed IS Agents
Provocateurs & with a Secret Services get out of jail free card, 'Hände Weg Nicht anfassen', it's 'Hammertime', "U Can't
Touch this", we're armed state operatives travelling to Germany & Austria, " don't mess with my operation !" & all journalists'
hands tied, too.
The suggestions & offers below to translate fully, what Ulfkotte declares publicly, make much sense. It is important to understand
that even an 'Orban' must bow occasionally, to deep state Security State Dictators and the pressures they can exert in so many
ways. Logic . . . or else one's life is made into hell, alive or an 'accidental' death: – and may I add, it is a curiously depressing
feeling when you have so many court cases on the go, that when a Gemeinde/Municipality Clerk is smiling, celebrating and telling
you, (representing yourself in court, with only independent translator & recorder), "You Won the Case, a superior judge has over-ruled
" and the only reply possible is,
"Which case number ?"
life gets tedious & time consuming, demanding extreme patience. Given his illness, surely Ulfkotte and his wife, deserve/d
extra credit & 'hot chocolate'. Makes a change to see & read some real journalism: congrats.@OffG
Excellent Professional Journalism on "Pseudo-Journalist State Actors & Terrorists". If you see a terrorist, guys, at
best just reason with him or her :- better than calling
INTERPOL or Secret Services @theguardian, because you wouldn't want a member of the public, grassing you up to your boss, would
you now ? ! Just tell the terrorist who he really works for . . . Those he resents ! Rather like Ulfkotte had to conclude,
with final resignation. My condolences to his good wife.
Wilmers31
Very good of you to not forget Ulfkotte. If I did not have sickness in the house, I would translate it. Maybe I can do one chapter
and someone else can do another one? What's the publisher saying?
You wouldn't say that if you could speak German, my friend ! ?
From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on
a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany
& Austria.
But, don't let that revelation bother you, living under a Deep State 'Politic of Fear' in the West and long unedited speeches
gets kinda' boring now, I know a bit like believing in some kinda' dumbfuk new pearl harbour, war on terror &&& all phoney propaganda
fairy story telling, just like on the 11/9/2001, when the real target was WTC 7, to hide elitist immoral endeavours, corruption
& the missing $$$TRILLIONS$$$ of tax payers money, 'mislaid' by the D.o.D. announced directly the day before by Rumsfeld, forgotten
? Before ramping the Surveillance States abilities in placing & employing "Parallel Platforms" on steroids, so that our secret
services can now employ terror & deploy terrorists at will .., against us, see ?
Plus ca change....
I remember on a similar note a 60 Minutes piece just prior to Clinton's humanitarian bombing of Serbian civilian infrastructure
(and long ago deleted, I'm sure) on a German free-lancer staging Kosovo atrocities in a Munich suburb, and having the German MSM
eating it up and asking for more. (WWII guilt assuagement at work, no doubt).
mark
Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate
interests.
That is their job.
That is what they do.
They have long since forfeited all credibility and integrity.
They have lied to us endlessly for decades and generations, from the Bayonetted Belgian Babies and Human Bodies Turned Into Soap
of WW1 to the Iraq Incubator Babies and Syrian Gas Attacks of more recent times.
You can no longer take anything at face value.
The default position has to be that every single word they print and every single word that comes out of their lying mouths is
untrue.
If they say it's snowing at the North Pole, you can't accept that without first going there and checking it out for yourself.
You can't accept anything that has not been independently verified.
This applies across the board.
All of the accepted historical narrative, including things like the holocaust.
And current Global Warming "science."
We know we have been lied to again and again and again.
So what else have we been lied to without us realising it?
mark
Come to think of it, I need to apologise to sex workers.
I have known quite a few of them who have quite high ethical and moral standards, certainly compared to the MSM.
And they certainly do less damage.
Vert few working girls have blood on their hands like the MSM.
Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.
Seamus Padraig
Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.
I heartily agree. Even if one disapproves morally of prostitution, how can it possibly be worse to sell your body than to sell
your soul?
Oliver
Quite. Checking things out for yourself is the way to go. Forget 'Peer Reviews', just as bent as the journalism Ulfkotte described.
DIY.
Mortgage
So natural, all it seems
Part II:
Bought Science
Part III:
Bought Health Services
mapquest directions
The video you shared with great info. I really like the information you share.
boxnovel
Gary Weglarz
I knew we were in dangerous new territory regarding government censorship when after waiting several years for Ulfkotte's best
selling book to finally be available in English – it suddenly, magically, disappeared completely – a vanishing act – and I couldn't
get so much as a response from, much less an explanation from, the would be publisher. Udo's book came at a time when it could
have made a difference countering the fact-free complete and total "fabrication of reality" by the U.S. and Western powers as
they have waged a brutal and ongoing neocolonial war on the world's poor under the guise of "fighting terrorism."
Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and
completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human
rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs,
politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used
to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice
is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities
that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order."
Ramdan
After watching the first 20 min I couldn't help but remembering this tale:
"The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who
lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have
to live on lentils.'
To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"."
which is also the reason why such a large part of humanity lives in voluntary servitude to power structures, living the dream,
the illusion of being free..
Ramdan
"English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalists" Suppressed?" at Global Research 2017!!
Just rechecked Amazon. Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News
by Udo Ulfkotte PH.D. The tag line reads.
Hard cover – currently unavailable; paperback cover – currently unavailable; Kindle edition – ?
Book burning anyone?
nottheonly1
No translation exists for this interview with Udo Ulfkotte on KenFM, the web site of Ken Jebsen. Ken Jebsen has been in the cross
hairs of the CIA and German agencies for his reporting of the truth. He was smeared and defamed by the same people that Dr. Ulfkotte
had written extensively about in his book 'Gekaufte Journalisten' ('Bought Journalists').
The reason why I add this link to the interview lies in the fact that Udo Ulfkotte speaks about an important part of Middle
Eastern and German history – a history that has been scrubbed from the U.S. and German populations. In the Iraq war against Iran
– that the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R. – German
chemical weapons were used under the supervision of the U.S. regime. The extend of the chemical weapons campaign was enormous
and to the present day, Iranians are born with birth defects stemming from the used of German weapons of mass destruction.
Dr. Ulfkotte rightfully bemoans, that every year German heads of state are kneeling for the Jewish victims of National socialism
– but not for the victims of German WMD's that were used against Iran. He stresses that the act of visual asking for forgiveness
in the case of the Jewish victims becomes hypocrisy, when 40 years after the Nazis reigned, German WMD's were used against Iran.
The German regime was in on the WMD attack on Iran. It was not something that happened because they had lost a couple of thousand
containers with WMDs. They delivered the WMD's to Iraq under U.S. supervision.
Ponder that. And there has never been an apology towards Iran, or compensations. Nada. Nothing. Instead, the vile rhetoric
and demagogery of every U.S. regime since has continued to paint Iran in the worst possible ways, most notably via incessant psychological
projection – accusing Iran of the war crimes and crimes against humanity the U.S. and its Western vassal regimes are guilty of.
Here is the interview that was recorded shortly before Udo Ulfkotte's death:
If enough people support the effort, I am willing to contact KenFM for the authorization to translate the interview and use
it for subtitles to the video. However, I can't do that on my own.
nottheonly1
Correction: the interview was recorded two years before his passing.
Antonym
the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R.
So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free.
nottheonly1
It would help if you would use your brain just once. 'Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired
outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You
are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep.
But then, with all the assaults by the unintelligence agencies, it does not come as a surprise when facts are twisted.
Antonym
Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the
get go. The timing of operation Barbarossa was brilliant though: it shocked Stalin into a temporary limbo as he had
his own aggressive plans.
Casandra2
This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting
attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order).
This approach has been assiduously applied, across the board, over many years, to the point were they now own and run everything
required to subjugate the 'human race' to the horrors of their psychopathic inclinations. They are presently holding the global
economy on hold until their AI population (social credit) control system/grid is in place before bringing the house down.
Needless to say, when this happens a disunited and frightened Global Population will be at their mercy.
If you wish to gain a full insight of what the Controlling Elite is about, and capable of, I recommend David Icke's latest
publication 'Trigger'. I know he's been tagged a 'nutter' over the past thirty years, but I reckon this book represents the 'gold
standard' in terms of generating awareness as a basis for launching a united global population counter-attack (given a great strategy)
against forces that can only be defined as pure 'EVIL'.
MASTER OF UNIVE
Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools
for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the
greater fools want. Engaging in compromise allows both parties to have complicit & explicit understanding that corruption
and falsehood are the tools of the trade. To all-of-a-sudden develop a conscience after decades of playing the part of a willing
participant is understandable in light of the guilt complex one must develop after screwing everyone in the world out of the critical
assessment we all need to obtain in order to make decisions regarding our futures.
Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least
the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have
instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management.
Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all
writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as
writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers
don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence
Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they
could get their greedy hands on at the time.
Developing a conscience late in life is too late.
May all that sell their souls to the Intel agencies understand that pond scum never had a conscience to begin with.
Once pond scum always pond scum.
MOU
nottheonly1
What is not addressed in this talk is the addictive nature of this sort of public relation writing. Journalism is something different
altogether. I know that, because I consider myself to be a journalist at heart – one that stopped doing it when the chalice was
offered to me. The problem is that one is not part of the cabal one day to another.
It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm
– always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other
name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society.
And I would also write a critique about a great restaurant – never paying a dime for a fantastic dinner. The point though is
that I would not write a good critique for a nasty place for money. I have never written anything but the truth – for which I
received sometimes as much as a bag full of the best rolls in the country.
Twisting the truth for any form of bribes is disgusting and attests of the lowest of any character.
MASTER OF UNIVE
Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is
involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can
to get what they want.
All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable
than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm.
If the devil offers inducements be sure to up the ante to outsmart the drunken sot.
While true whistleblowers pay the heavy price for their courage, neoliberal Democrats and corrupt to the core neoliberal MSM lionize
a CIA leaker because he justifies their impeachment crusade.
Why couldn't this CIA asset not simply report through regular channels? He wasn't blowing whistle on the CIA itself so no risk there.
Notable quotes:
"... The whole impeachment charade, and that's what it is, rests on the paradoxical and ahistorical assertions that 1) the president's phone call with Ukraine's leader is Trump's worst crime, and 2) the "liberal" press has always supported government whistleblowers. Both are absurd claims, though fitting for this partisan political moment. ..."
"... The inconvenient reality is that Trump and both his predecessors have committed far worse crimes against the Constitution by engaging in illegal wars. ..."
"... The only reason the Left -- which historically has distrusted U.S. intelligence activities -- has canonized this anonymous CIA whistleblower is that he or she, and the entire clandestine apparatus, has implicated Trump, the reflexive archenemy of the liberal elite. Trump's actual crime, contrary to the prevailing yarn, was not his overriding of Congress on war policies (which he largely copied from Obama and Bush II), but that he dared to attack a longtime Democratic insider: Joe Biden. ..."
"... Notice that the Democratic leadership in Congress has declined to investigate the fact that this president, and others before him, overrode congressional authority to wage all sorts of military operations outside the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed after 9/11, including the current assistance we are giving Saudi Arabia in its attacks on Yemen. ..."
"... President Obama, for example, dropped 26,171 bombs on at least seven countries using an AUMF that has been extended well beyond those who attacked America on 9/11. He even executed American citizens overseas without due process . ..."
"... Meanwhile, Trump abets legitimate war crimes in Yemen to the tune of 100,000-plus dead -- without evident remorse. But Obama started that war , providing U.S. aerial refueling, targeting support, and deadly munitions to the Saudis back in 2015. So the Democratic leadership stands down on the issue of Yemen, not wanting to implicate their hero in the process of impeaching The Donald. ..."
"... Mainstream liberal hypocrisy runs even deeper, unfortunately. I'm just old enough to remember when the Left railed against the CIA, NSA, and spooks in general. ..."
"... Suddenly every Obama- and Bush-era national security staffer and intelligence super-sleuth -- John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, etc. -- was regularly appearing on CNN and MSNBC to attack Trump and pine for the status quo of U.S. military hyper-interventionism. ..."
"... Even the language is instructive. They aren't "leakers," "traitors," or "criminals," but whistleblowers , surging with moral courage and exposing ostensibly unthinkable presidential wrongdoing. That's funny: where were these folks when other, far more profound whistleblowers uncovered criminality during the Bush and Obama years? Either crickets or pejorative attacks were all they proffered back then. ..."
"... Meanwhile, Obama utilized the archaic 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. The liberal press and most Democratic legislators barely made a peep. Barack was their guy , one of their own -- the "leakers" must have been in the wrong, enemies, so to speak, of the people. ..."
"... So while Trump is by no means without serious flaws, the Beltway elites and media personalities stuffing impeachment down our throats are hypocritical and dishonest enough to make one believe in a "deep state." ..."
"... Trump's crime is he's an outsider and the CIA did not expect him to win. His very existence is a threat to them. ..."
"... Can he clean up the mess? I doubt it. Imagine what would happen, the screams and agony, were he to eliminate all government secrecy. Imagine what the CIA would claim if the Black Budget became transparent. If Trump tried to eliminate the CIA it would simply reconstitute and shape-shift within other agencies or outside government. ..."
Few see the irony in the corporate mainstream media's love affair with the anonymous whistleblower in President Trump's alleged
Ukraine-gate affair. Yet everyone should. Few see the irony in the corporate mainstream media's love affair with the anonymous whistleblower
in President Trump's alleged Ukraine-gate affair. Yet everyone should.
The whole impeachment charade, and that's what it is, rests on the paradoxical and ahistorical assertions that 1) the president's
phone call with Ukraine's leader is Trump's worst crime, and 2) the "liberal" press has always supported government whistleblowers.
Both are absurd claims, though fitting for this partisan political moment.
The inconvenient reality is that Trump and
both his predecessors have committed
far worse crimes against the Constitution by engaging in illegal wars. Certainly this is more serious than the shady Ukraine/Biden
incident. And the mainstream media has a rather poor track record when it comes to whistleblowers, often demonizing leakers who expose
nefarious government actions. The only reason the Left -- which historically has distrusted U.S. intelligence activities -- has
canonized this anonymous CIA whistleblower is that he or she, and the entire clandestine apparatus, has implicated Trump, the reflexive
archenemy of the liberal elite. Trump's actual crime, contrary to the prevailing yarn, was not his overriding of Congress
on war policies (which he largely copied from Obama and Bush II), but that he dared to attack a longtime Democratic insider: Joe
Biden.
Sure, Trump's apparent threat to use aid as a cudgel to pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden, and his son Hunter,
is a serious matter. Far be it for me, or anyone else, to dispute that. Whether that meets the threshold for impeachment is debatable
-- and by the way, Hunter Biden's $50,000 a month, unqualified position on a foreign corporate gas company's board while his father
was vice president doesn't exactly pass the smell test either. But I'll table that for now.
Notice that the Democratic leadership in Congress has declined to investigate the fact that this president, and others before
him, overrode congressional authority to wage all sorts of military operations outside the Authorization for Use of Military Force
(AUMF) passed after 9/11, including the current assistance we are giving Saudi Arabia in its attacks on Yemen.
President Obama, for example,
dropped
26,171 bombs on at least seven countries using an AUMF that has been extended well beyond those who attacked America on 9/11.
He even executed American citizens overseas
without
due process .
Meanwhile, Trump abets legitimate
war crimes in Yemen to the
tune of 100,000-plus dead -- without evident remorse. But Obama
started that war , providing
U.S. aerial refueling, targeting support, and deadly munitions to the Saudis back in 2015. So the Democratic leadership stands down
on the issue of Yemen, not wanting to implicate their hero in the process of impeaching The Donald.
Mainstream liberal hypocrisy runs even deeper, unfortunately. I'm just old enough to remember when the Left railed against
the CIA, NSA, and spooks in general. And
rightfully so . That, however,
was before Mr. Trump shocked coastal elites and got himself elected president of their America. It was impressive watching
media and Democratic insiders immediately turn on a dime.
Suddenly every Obama- and Bush-era national security staffer and intelligence super-sleuth -- John Brennan, James Clapper,
Michael Hayden, etc. -- was regularly appearing on CNN and MSNBC to attack Trump and pine for the status quo of U.S. military hyper-interventionism.
It was as though all their sins -- mass surveillance, drone assassination, illegal rendition, torture -- had been collectively
pushed down the memory hole, the entire intel apparatus born again as agents of truth and honor. The whole masquerade was bizarre,
and beyond duplicitous.
The final insult was the recent canonization of the anonymous Ukraine-gate whistleblower(s). Even the language is instructive.
They aren't "leakers," "traitors," or "criminals," but whistleblowers , surging with moral courage and exposing ostensibly
unthinkable presidential wrongdoing. That's funny: where were these folks when other, far more profound whistleblowers uncovered
criminality during the Bush and Obama years? Either crickets or pejorative attacks were all they proffered back then.
... ... ...
Meanwhile, Obama utilized the archaic 1917 Espionage Act to
prosecute more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. The liberal press and most Democratic legislators barely
made a peep. Barack was their guy , one of their own -- the "leakers" must have been in the wrong, enemies, so to speak, of
the people. So while Trump is by no means without serious flaws, the Beltway elites and media personalities stuffing impeachment
down our throats are hypocritical and dishonest enough to make one believe in a "deep state." Ultimately it will amount to nothing.
Each side remains entrenched.
Either the Dem elites will hand Trump a second term with this impeachment charade, or, maybe just as likely, President Biden will
take the helm. When he does, whistleblowers will revert, once again, to being traitors.
So while Trump is by no means without serious flaws, the Beltway elites and media personalities stuffing impeachment down
our throats are hypocritical and dishonest enough to make one believe in a "deep state."
Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major whose writing has appeared in The American Conservative, Harper's, the Los Angeles
Times, The Nation and Tom Dispatch. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history
at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq war,
Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers,
Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet
.
The problem with designating this CIA officer a whistleblower, while denigrating the actual whistleblowers as something other,
as criminals, is obvious enough, or should be: in the cases of the latter, they were exposing the crimes of the intel establishment,
and punished for it, the 'protections' of the law notwithstanding; in other words, the intel establishment got its way; in the
case of the former, the intel establishment is getting its way in its campaign to undermine the administration, notwithstanding
Trump's incompetence and corruption, for which he deserves censure, impeachment, whatever.
Heads, they won; tails, we lose.
The problem, in other words, is that we - collectively, as a nation - get to choose only the modality of how our institutions
and norms are degraded, not whether they will be degraded. Pick your poison.
The CIA and the intelligence services operate black budgets. They kill, steal, run drugs, bribe leaders at home as well as
abroad, arrange accidents like the airplane crashes that have killed several Democrats who danced out of tune, have operatives
placed in government including state governments, the courts and Congress. Who owns your favorite candidate? The CIA. Who controls
the media including the New York Times? The CIA. Bribery, threats, blackmail, control files, setups. The chicanery we tolerate
and celebrate in the name of National Security abroad has come home. Secrecy works wonders for control.
Trump's crime is he's an outsider and the CIA did not expect him to win. His very existence is a threat to them.
Can he clean up the mess? I doubt it. Imagine what would happen, the screams and agony, were he to eliminate all government
secrecy. Imagine what the CIA would claim if the Black Budget became transparent. If Trump tried to eliminate the CIA it would
simply reconstitute and shape-shift within other agencies or outside government.
That, however, was before Mr. Trump shocked coastal elites and got himself elected president of their America.
That, for the elitist Left (and Right), is Donald Trump's real and only crime. He got himself elected president of their America.
But to get right to the heart of it, he didn't get himself elected as much as the American people got him elected. This is about
us..all about us..not about him. Any subsequent attacks on him are in fact attacks on the American electorate.
"... Note this key excerpt from the letter of transmittal: ..."
"... " Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state. " ..."
"... The Treaty was reported favourable by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on September 27, 2000, consented to ratification by the Senate on October 18, 2000 and ratified by the President of the United States on January 5, 2001. The Treaty was entered into force on February 27, 2001. Here are the title page of the Treaty and the signature page: ..."
"... With this background and while I don't want to appear to be pro- or anti-Trump, it is very, very clear that the current POTUS was within the law under the Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters between the United States and Ukraine when it comes to asking Ukraine to investigate a potential criminal matter. ..."
With the Trump impeachment procedures ongoing and the connection to his conversation about the
Biden family with Ukraine President Zelenskyy, there has been very little coverage of an
important aspect of the relationship between Washington and Kiev. While none of us can speak to
the actual intent of Donald Trump's remarks be it for personal gain or for other reasons, there
is background information that may help illuminate the context of the discussion between the
two world leaders.
In case you haven't read the pertinent section of the transcript of the conversation, here it
is:
" President Zelenskyy: Yes it is very important for me and everything that
you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any
future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the
United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States
and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard
on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him
having your trust and your confidence and have personal relations with you so we can cooperate
even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just
recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we
will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody
but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most
experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you
Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also
plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as
the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.. That I
can assure you.
President Trump: Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good
and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way
they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr.
Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I
would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy
very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that
would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the
people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that.
The other thing, There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution
and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney
General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you
can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.
President Zelenskyy: I wanted to tell you about the prosecutor. First of all,
I understand and I'm knowledgeable about the situation. Since we have won the absolute
majority in our Parliament, the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate,
who will be approved, by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or
she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue.
The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the
honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. On top
of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to
us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in
our country with regard to the Ambassador to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall
her name was Ivanovich. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad
ambassador because I agree with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she
admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new
President well enough.
President Trump: Well, she's going to go through some things. I will have Mr.
Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get
to the bottom of it. I'm sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor was treated very
badly and he was a very fair prosecutor so good luck with everything. Your economy is going to
get better and better I predict. You have a lot of assets. It's a great country. I have many
Ukrainian friends, their incredible people." (my bolds)
Now, let's look back in time to 1998. On July 22, 1998, a treaty was signed between Ukraine and
Washington.
The Treaty on Mutual Legal
Assistance in Criminal Matters was signed in Kiev on the aforementioned date. Here is an
excerpt from the The original letter of submittal from the Department of State to the
President's office dated October 19, 1999 which states the following:
"I have the honor to submit to you the Treaty between the United States of America and
Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters with Annex (``the Treaty''), signed at
Kiev on July 22, 1998. I recommend that the Treaty be transmitted to the Senate for its advice
and consent to ratification. Also enclosed, for the information of the Senate, is an exchange of notes under which the
Treaty is being provisionally applied to the extent possible under our respective domestic
laws, in order to provide a basis for immediate mutual assistance in criminal matters.
Provisional application would cease upon entry into force of the Treaty.
The Treaty covers mutual legal assistance in criminal matters. In recent years, similar
bilateral treaties have entered into force with a number of other countries. The Treaty with
Ukraine contains all essential provisions sought by the United States. It will enhance our
ability to investigate and prosecute a range of offenses.The Treaty is designed to
be self-executing and will not require new legislation." (my bold)
The Treaty was then transmitted by the President of the United States (Bill Clinton) to the
Senate on November 10, 1999 (Treaty Document 106-16 -106th Congress - First Session) as shown
on this letter of
transmittal from Bill Clinton's office:
Note this key excerpt from the letter of transmittal:
" Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or
statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving
documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or
other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related
to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any
other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state. "
The Treaty was reported favourable by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on September
27, 2000, consented to ratification by the Senate on October 18, 2000 and ratified by the
President of the United States on January 5, 2001. The Treaty was entered into force on
February 27, 2001. Here are the title page of the Treaty and the signature page:
Here are the first two pages of the Treaty which outline the scope of assistance that is to
be offered by both nations as well as the limitations on assistance:
... ... ...
If you wish to read the Treaty in its entirety, please click
here .
With this background and while I don't want to appear to be pro- or anti-Trump, it is very,
very clear that the current POTUS was within the law under the Treaty on Mutual Legal
Assistance in Criminal Matters between the United States and Ukraine when it comes to asking
Ukraine to investigate a potential criminal matter.
"... And there is the real definition, which is using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for undefined democracy, which movement leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform lest they organize, in favor of a secret coterie. ..."
"... No matter how you view Trump, it is undeniable that several signs of a color revolution were present in Russiagate (and Ukrainegate, which is, in essence, Russiagate 2.0 -- a counterattack on the attempt by Trump to investigate the origins of Russiagate). ..."
Faustusnotes@43 continues the meltdown, notably forgetting his own list of non-rigid
class societies (nations, ) retreating to the UK and Australia. Reminding everyone of the
widely accepted definition for color revolution would have been useful. There is the propaganda
notion, a vague image of the outraged people rising en masse to throw out the
Communists/Communist-adjacent corrupt (unlike all others of course,) government. Inasmuch as
likbez specifically denied a mass movement, this is still as much a red herring as it was when
first brandished.
And there is the real definition, which is using a minority to render the country
ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for undefined democracy, which
movement leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform lest they organize, in favor
of a secret coterie. Thus when the Astroturf does drive out the current administration,
mirabile dictu! nothing changes except its receptivity to international capital. The
fundamental color revolution mechanism it seems to me is the hiding of the real program, the
true commitment to capital, behind a facade.
Lastly, the idea that likbez just made stuff up is remarkable. If anything, it seems to me
that likbez has been heavily influenced by the thesis of Quinn Slobodian's The Globalists. But
that book may be touted largely as (unread) proof somebody disreputable isn't acceptable in
polite company, not really useful otherwise.
Surprisingly, nastywoman confirms my general impression is really seeing the EU as the
inspiration for a better society, without radicalism, much less revolution. I agree there's
nothing worse than revolution except not having a revolution, which I guess takes us back to
square one. The EU of course is really the Maastricht treaty, the Lisbon treaty, the
announcement that elections can't change policy, technocrats as PM in Italy, Greece, etc. In
short, nastywoman confesses to incoherence. But nastywoman can take joy in correctly spotting
that I'm a disgusting old person too vile to understand rap and can hope I'll be dead soon, and
blight humanity no more.
likbez 10.31.19 at 11:22 pm
(no link)
Faustusnotes 10.30.19 at 2:38 pm @43
'Color revolution ' has a specific meaning and what happened to Lula and Trump ain't
it
You probably never read Gene Sharp, who passed in Feb 2018. Claims of "corruption" and
"unfair" election results (which includes foreign influence on elections) are classic color
revolution methods described in detail in his books.
Participation of intelligence agencies and controlled by them MSM is a distinctive feature
of any color revolution: is it, in essence, a modern, very sophisticated variant of a false
flag operation. Controlled/influenced (often indirectly) by intelligence agencies MSM
essentially serve the role similar to airforce in modern neocolonial wars (and the level of
control is staggering starting from the operation Mockingbird; see Journalists for Hire How
the CIA Buys the News by Dr. Udo Ulfkotte).
No matter how you view Trump, it is undeniable that several signs of a color revolution
were present in Russiagate (and Ukrainegate, which is, in essence, Russiagate 2.0 -- a
counterattack on the attempt by Trump to investigate the origins of Russiagate).
Here is the list adapted from the writings on the topic by former CIA analyst Larry C
Johnson and Colonel Lang (DIA). The latter led intelligence analysis of the Middle East and
South Asia for the Defense Department and world-wide HUMINT activities in a high-level
equivalent to the rank of a lieutenant general. He runs well respected
Sic Semper Tyrannis blog.
Both think that the CIA pulled the main strings. They noted the following:
-- Obama officials efforts in establishing surveillance on Trump campaign on a false
pretext (FICA memo scandal, etc.) ;
-- CrowdStrike false flag operation with DNC -- converting the internal leak into Russian
break-in;
-- MI6 fabrication of Steele dossier using materials from the USA obtained via Fusion GPS
and Brennan and rehashing them as an original British intelligence.
-- Brennan use of Steele dossier to produce "17 intelligence agencies assessment," which
served as the signal of unleashing of Russiagate hysteria in neoliberal MSM and the official
start of Russiagate.
-- Rosenstein gambit with using firing of Comey as a convenient pretext for appointment
Mueller (appointment of the Special Prosecutor was in the cards anyway and was inescapable
for Trump as it was a preplanned action by the plotters, and they controlled all the
necessary strings; this probably was the meaning of the word "insurance" in Strzok-Page text
messages).
-- McCabe's opening of FBI investigation of Trump links to Russia.
-- Alexandra Chalupa machination with getting dirt on Trump and his associates (Manafort)
from Poroshenko government (which was a client state anyway so it is funny that Schiff now
tries to claim that Ukraine can exercise foreign influence; it is a USA controlled entity;
the country in a debt trap ).
-- Systematic attempts to entrap Trump associates with connection to the Russian
government by CIA, MI6 and Italian intelligence (Misfud entrapment operation, Felix Sater
entrapment operation with idea of building of Trump hotel in Moscow, Halper entrapment
attempt, MI6 entrapment operation with Natalia Veselnitskaya visit to Trump tower, etc.).
I think that under the weight of those facts, the picture is more or less clear -- this
was a color revolution.
"... "To any rational person," says Nunes, "it looks like they were scheming to produce a get-out-of-jail-free card -- for the president and anyone else in the White House. They were playing Monopoly while the others were playing with fire. Now the Obama White House was in the clear -- sure, they had no idea what Comey and Brennan and McCabe and Strzok and the rest were up to." ..."
"... Meanwhile, Obama added his voice to the Trump-Russia echo chamber as news stories alleging Trump's illicit relationship with the Kremlin multiplied in the transition period. He said he hoped "that the president-elect also is willing to stand up to Russia." ..."
"... After refusing to act while the Russian election meddling was actually occurring, Obama responded in December. He ordered the closing of Russian diplomatic facilities and the expulsion of thirty- five Russian diplomats. The response was tepid. The Russians had hacked the State Department in 2014 and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2015. And now Obama was responding only on his way out. ..."
"... Even Obama partisans thought it was weak. "The punishment did not fit the crime," said Michael McFaul, Obama's former ambassador to Russia. "The Kremlin should have paid a much higher price for that attack." ..."
"... But the administration wasn't retaliating against Russia for interfering in a US election; the action was directed at Trump. Obama was leaving the president-elect with a minor foreign policy crisis in order to box him in. Any criticism of Obama's response, never mind an attempt to reverse it, would only further fuel press reports that Trump was collaborating with the Russians. ..."
"... Obama's biggest move against Trump was to order CIA director John Brennan to conduct a full review of all intelligence relating to Russia and the 2016 elections. He requested it on December 6 and wanted it ready by the time he left office on January 20. But the sitting president already knew what the intelligence community assessment (ICA) was going to say, because Brennan had told him months before. ..."
"... Brennan's handpicked team of CIA, FBI, and NSA analysts had started analyzing Russian election interference in late July. In August, Brennan had briefed Harry Reid on the dossier and may have briefed Obama on it, too. Earlier in August, Brennan sent a "bombshell" report to Obama's desk. ..."
AFTER DONALD TRUMP was elected forty-fifth president of the United States, the operation designed to undermine his campaign transformed.
It became an instrument to bring down the commander in chief. The coup started almost immediately after the polls closed.
Hillary Clinton's communications team decided within twenty-four hours of her concession speech to message that the election was
illegitimate, that Russia had interfered to help Trump.
Obama was working against Trump until the hour he left office. His national security advisor, Susan Rice, commemorated it with
an email to herself on January 20, moments before Trump's inauguration. She wrote to memorialize a meeting in the White House two
weeks before.
On January 5, following a briefing by IC leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election, President Obama
had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office. Vice
President Biden and I were also present.
President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is
handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities "by the book." The President stressed that he is not asking about,
initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed
as it normally would by the book.
From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming
team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia. . . .
The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified
information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.
The repetition of "by the book" gave away the game -- for there was nothing normal about any of it.
Rice wrote an email to herself. It commemorated a conversation from two weeks before. The conversation was about the FBI's investigation
of the man who was about to move into the White House -- an investigation from which Obama was careful to distance himself. During
the conversation, the outgoing president instructed his top aides to collect information ("ascertain") regarding the incoming administration's
relationship with Russia.
"To any rational person," says Nunes, "it looks like they were scheming to produce a get-out-of-jail-free card -- for the
president and anyone else in the White House. They were playing Monopoly while the others were playing with fire. Now the Obama White
House was in the clear -- sure, they had no idea what Comey and Brennan and McCabe and Strzok and the rest were up to."
Boxing Trump in on Russia
Meanwhile, Obama added his voice to the Trump-Russia echo chamber as news stories alleging Trump's illicit relationship with
the Kremlin multiplied in the transition period. He said he hoped "that the president-elect also is willing to stand up to Russia."
The outgoing president was in Germany with Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss everything from NATO to Vladimir Putin. Obama said
that he'd "delivered a clear and forceful message" to the Russian president about "meddling with elections . . . and we will respond
appropriately if and when we see this happening."
After refusing to act while the Russian election meddling was actually occurring, Obama responded in December. He ordered
the closing of Russian diplomatic facilities and the expulsion of thirty- five Russian diplomats. The response was tepid. The Russians
had hacked the State Department in 2014 and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2015. And now Obama was responding only on his way out.
Even Obama partisans thought it was weak. "The punishment did not fit the crime," said Michael McFaul, Obama's former ambassador
to Russia. "The Kremlin should have paid a much higher price for that attack."
But the administration wasn't retaliating against Russia for interfering in a US election; the action was directed at Trump.
Obama was leaving the president-elect with a minor foreign policy crisis in order to box him in. Any criticism of Obama's response,
never mind an attempt to reverse it, would only further fuel press reports that Trump was collaborating with the Russians.
Spreading Intelligence to Spring Leaks
In the administration's last days, it disseminated intelligence throughout the government, including the White House, Capitol
Hill, and the intelligence community (IC). Intelligence was classified at the lowest possible levels to ensure a wide readership.
The White House was paving the way for a campaign of leaks to disorient the incoming Trump team.
The effort, including the intended result of leaks, was publicly acknowledged in March 2017 by Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy
assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration.
Obama's biggest move against Trump was to order CIA director John Brennan to conduct a full review of all intelligence relating
to Russia and the 2016 elections. He requested it on December 6 and wanted it ready by the time he left office on January 20. But
the sitting president already knew what the intelligence community assessment (ICA) was going to say, because Brennan had told him
months before.
Brennan's handpicked team of CIA, FBI, and NSA analysts had started analyzing Russian election interference in late July.
In August, Brennan had briefed Harry Reid on the dossier and may have briefed Obama on it, too. Earlier in August, Brennan sent a
"bombshell" report to Obama's desk.
When Brennan reassembled his select team in December, it was to have them reproduce their August findings: Putin, according to
Brennan, was boosting the GOP candidate. And that's why only three days after Obama ordered the assessment in December, the Washington
Post could already reveal what the intelligence community had found.
"The CIA," reported the December 9 edition of the Post , "has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in
the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system."
The story was the first of many apparently sourced to leaks of classified information that were given to the Post team
of Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller. The reporters' sources weren't whistle-blowers shedding light on government corruption
-- rather, they were senior US officials abusing government resources to prosecute a campaign against the newly elected commander
in chief. The article was the earliest public evidence that the coup was under way. The floodgates were open, as the IC pushed more
stories through the press to delegitimize the president-elect.
A Wave of Leak-Sourced Stories All Saying the Same Thing
The same day, a New York Times article by David E. Sanger and Scott Shane echoed the Post 's piece. According to
senior administration officials, "American intelligence agencies have concluded with 'high confidence' that Russia acted covertly
in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton's chances and promote Donald J. Trump."
A December 14 NBC News story by William M. Arkin, Ken Dilanian, and Cynthia McFadden reported that "Russian President Vladimir
Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence
officials told NBC News."
The ICA that Obama ordered gave political operatives, the press, and his intelligence chiefs a second shot at Trump. They'd used
the Steele Dossier to feed the echo chamber and obtain surveillance powers to spy on the Trump campaign. The dossier, however, had
come up short. Trump had won.
But now, on his way out of the White House, Obama instructed Brennan to stamp the CIA's imprimatur on the anti-Trump operation.
As Fusion GPS's smear campaign had been the source of the preelection press campaign, the ICA was the basis of the postelection media
frenzy. It was tailored to disrupt the peaceful transition of power and throw the United States into chaos.
Because Trump hadn't been elected by the US public, according to the ICA, but had been tapped by Putin, he was illegitimate. Therefore,
the extraconstitutional and illegal tactics employed by anti-Trump officials were legitimate. The ultimate goal was to remove Trump
from office.
"If it weren't for President Obama," said James Clapper, "we might not have done the intelligence community assessment . . . that
set off a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today."
Nunes agrees. "The ICA," he says, "was Obama's dossier."
Changing the Intelligence Assessment
Nunes is sitting in his office in the Longworth House Office Building along with his communications director, Jack Langer, a forty-six-year-old
former book editor and historian with a PhD from Duke University.
"The social media attacks on Devin began shortly after the election," Langer remembers. "They're all hinting at some vast conspiracy
involving Russia that the chairman of the Intelligence Committee is part of. And we have no idea what they're talking about."
Nunes points out that his warnings about Russia fell on deaf ears for years. "And all of a sudden I'm a Russian agent," says the
congressman.
Now Langer and Nunes see that the attacks were first launched because the congressman had been named to Trump's transition team.
"I put forward [Mike] Pompeo for CIA director," says Nunes. "He came from our committee."
The attacks on Nunes picked up after the December 9 Washington Post article. The assessment provided there was not what
the HPSCI chairman had been told. The assessment had been altered, and Nunes asked for an explanation. "We got briefed about the
election around Thanksgiving," he says. "And it's just the usual stuff, nothing abnormal. They told us what everyone already knew:
'Hey, the Russians are bad actors, and they're always playing games, and here's what they did.'"
By providing that briefing, the IC had made a mistake. When it later changed the assessment, the November briefing was evidence
that Obama's spy chiefs were up to no good. "I bet they'd like to have that back," says Nunes. "They briefed us before they could
get their new story straight."
'They Kept Everyone Else Away from It'
Nunes acknowledges that he was caught off guard by many things back then. "We still thought these guys were on the up and up,"
he says. "But if we knew, we'd have nailed them by mid-December, when they changed their assessment. 'Wait, you guys are saying this
now, but you said something else just a few weeks ago. What's going on?'"
After the Post story, Nunes wanted an explanation. "We expressed deep concern, both publicly and privately," says Langer.
"We demanded our own briefing to try to determine whether that Post story was true or false. They refused to brief us. They
said, 'We're not going to be doing that until we finish the ICA.'"
Nunes says the fact that the IC conducted an assessment like that was itself unusual. "I don't know how many times they'd done
that in the past, if ever," he says. "But if the IC is operating properly, when someone says what can you tell me on X or Y or Z,
they have it ready to pull up quickly. The tradecraft is reliable, and the intelligence products are reliable." That was not the
case with the ICA. There were problems with how the assessment had been put together.
"If you really were going to do something like an assessment from the intelligence community, then you'd get input from all our
seventeen agencies," says Nunes. "They did the opposite. It was only FBI, CIA, NSA, and DNI. They siloed it, just like they had with
Crossfire Hurricane. They kept everyone else away from it so they didn't have to read them in."
'Manipulation of Intelligence for Political Purposes'
Nunes released several statements in the middle of December. The HPSCI majority, read a December 14 statement, wanted senior Obama
intelligence officials "to clarify press reports that the CIA has a new assessment that it has not shared with us. The Committee
is deeply concerned that intransigence in sharing intelligence with Congress can enable the manipulation of intelligence for political
purposes."
After the statements warned of political foul play in the IC's assessments, the social media attacks on Nunes became more regular.
"They were constant," says Langer.
Anti-Trump operatives recognized that Nunes was going to be a problem. The HPSCI chair had previously called out the IC for politicizing
intelligence. "They said that we had defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria," says Nunes, "and I knew that wasn't true. Then they withheld
the Osama bin Laden documents to conceal that Al Qaeda worked with Iran, because the administration was protecting the Iran deal.
So when I saw them changing this assessment of the 2016 election in midstream, I knew it was the same old trick: they were politicizing
intelligence."
The speed with which Brennan's handpicked analysts produced the ICA and then got a version of it declassified for public consumption
was another sign that something wasn't right. "All throughout Obama's two terms, his IC chiefs aren't paying attention to Russian
actions," says Nunes. "We give them more money for Russia, which they don't use. But now they know so much about Putin that they
manage to produce a comprehensive assessment of Russian intentions and actions regarding election interference in a month -- at Christmastime,
when everything slows down. And then they produce a declassified version in a manner of weeks. None of this is believable."
Three different versions of the ICA were produced: an unclassified version, a top secret one, and another highly compartmentalized
version. According to a January 11, 2017, Washington Post story by Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Karen DeYoung, an annex
summarizing the dossier was attached to the versions that were not declassified.
'Designed to Have a Political Effect'
The FBI had been working from Steele's reports for more than half a year. Including the dossier along with the ICA would provide
Comey with ammunition to take on the president-elect. Both he and Brennan were manipulating intelligence for political purposes.
"A lot of the ICA is reasonable," says Nunes. "But those parts become irrelevant due to the problematic parts, which undermine
the entire document. It was designed to have a political effect; that was the ICA's sole purpose."
The assessment's methodological flaws are not difficult to spot. Manufacturing the politicized findings that Obama sought meant
not only abandoning protocol but also subverting basic logic. Two of the ICA's central findings are that:
Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.
Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary
Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.
To know preferences and intentions would require sources targeting Putin's inner circles -- either human sources or electronic
surveillance. As Nunes had previously noted, however, US intelligence on Putin's decision-making process was inadequate.
But even if there had been extensive collection on precisely that issue, it would be difficult to know what was true. For instance,
the closest you can get to Putin's inner circle is Putin himself. But even capturing him on an intercept saying he wanted to elect
Trump might prove inconclusive. It is difficult to judge intentions because it is not possible to see into the minds of other people.
How would you know that Putin was speaking truthfully? How would you know that the Russian president didn't know his communications
were under US surveillance and wasn't trying to deceive his audience?
Quality control of information is one of the tasks of counterintelligence -- to discern how you know what you know and whether
that information is trustworthy. There was no quality control for the Trump-Russia intelligence. For instance, Crossfire Hurricane
lead agent Peter Strzok was the FBI's deputy assistant director of counterintelligence. Instead of weeding out flawed intelligence
on Russia, the Crossfire Hurricane team was feeding Steele's reports into intelligence products. Yet the ICA claimed to have "high
confidence" in its assessment that "Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President- elect Trump." What
was the basis of that judgment?
According to the ICA:
Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests
against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging
him.
"Most likely" and "almost certainly" are rhetorical hedges that show the assessment could not have been made in "high confidence."
Putin may have held a grudge against Clinton, but there is no way of knowing it.
The supporting evidence deteriorates more the farther the ICA purports to reach into Putin's mind.
Beginning in June, Putin's public comments about the US presidential race avoided directly praising President-elect Trump,
probably because Kremlin officials thought that any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States.
This is absurd. Part of the evidence that Putin supported Trump is that he avoided praising Trump. It is difficult enough to determine
intentions by what someone says. Yet the ICA claims to have discerned Putin's intentions by what he did not say.
There is no introductory philosophy class in logic where reasoning like that would pass muster. Yet Brennan's handpicked group
used it as the basis of its assessment that Putin had helped Trump.
Moscow also saw the election of President-elect Trump as a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition against
the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
This may be an accurate description of how Putin saw Trump. But Trump's predecessor also wanted to coordinate anti- ISIS operations
with Moscow. On this view, Trump would have represented a continuation of Obama's ISIS policy. Why would this make Trump's victory
suspicious to Obama's intelligence chiefs?
Curious Inaccuracies about Russia's RT Network
The ICA also pointed to documentary evidence of Putin's intentions: English-language media owned by the Russian government, the
news site Sputnik, and the RT network, were critical of Clinton.
State-owned Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as the 2016 US general and primary
election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary Clinton.
Curiously, just days before the election, the informant the US government sent after the Trump campaign praised the Democratic
candidate in an interview with Sputnik. "Clinton would be best for US-UK relations and for relations with the European Union," Stefan
Halper told the Kremlin-directed media outlet. "Clinton is well-known, deeply experienced, and predictable. US-UK relations will
remain steady regardless of the winner although Clinton will be less disruptive over time."
The ICA includes a seven-page appendix devoted to RT, the central node, according to the document, of the Kremlin's effort to
"influence politics, fuel discontent in [ sic ] US."
Adam Schiff appeared on RT in July 2013. He argued for "making the FISA court much more transparent, so the American people can
understand what's being done in their name in the name of national security, so that we can have a more informed debate over the
balance between privacy and security."
RT's editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, is a master propagandist, according to the ICA. The document fails to mention that Simonyan
heads another Moscow-owned media initiative, Russia Beyond the Headlines , a news supplement inserted into dozens of the West's
leading newspapers, including the New York Times . Russia Beyond the Headlines has been delivered to millions of American
homes over the last decade. By contrast, RT's US market share is so small that it doesn't qualify for the Nielsen ratings. Virtually
no one in the United States watches it.
Taking the logic of Brennan's handpicked team seriously would mean that the publishers of the New York Times played a major
role in a coordinated Russian effort to elect Donald Trump.
'It Was an Operation to Bring Down Trump'
Nunes realized even then the purpose of Obama's dossier. "Devin figured out in December what was going on," says Langer. "It was
an operation to bring down Trump."
There was no evidence that any Trump associate had done anything improper regarding the Russians, and Nunes was losing patience.
"We had serious things the committee wanted to do," he says. "With Trump elected, we could do some big stuff, like with China."
Still, it was important for HPSCI to maintain control of the Russia investigation. Otherwise, Democrats and Never Trump Republicans
were likely to get their wish to convene a bipartisan commission to investigate Russian interference -- with the purpose of turning
it on Trump.
"Before they started floating the idea of a special counsel, the big idea was a special commission like the 9/11 Commission,"
says Langer. It was outgoing secretary of state John Kerry who first came forward with the proposal.
The point was to change the power dynamic. "In a normal committee," says Langer, "the majority has the power, and that happened
to be us. They wanted to strip our power and make it fifty-fifty."
"Bipartisan" was a euphemism for "anti-Trump." "It would have been a complete joke," says Nunes. "A combination of partisan hacks
from the left and people who hated Trump on the right."
Democrats led by Schiff and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer were joined by the late John McCain, the most active of the Never
Trump Republicans. After the election, the Arizona senator had instructed his aide David Kramer to deliver a copy of the Steele Dossier
to Comey.
"God only knows who they'd have populated that committee with," says Nunes. "Anyone they could control. It would have been a freak
show."
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan defended HPSCI's independence. On the Senate side, Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr
had only one move. To deflect demands for an independent commission, he effectively ceded control of the Senate investigation to
his vice chair, Democrat Mark Warner.
No Evidence of Collusion Years Later
Still, Nunes believed that all the talk of Trump and Russia was a waste of time. "They kept promising us evidence of collusion,
week after week, and they came up with nothing."
Nunes's disdain for the ICA forced the Crossfire Hurricane team's hand. "Right around the time that they came out with the ICA,
they kept saying that we were waiting on something to show us, something important that was coming in," he says. "They said it was
some significant figure who they couldn't quite track down yet."
But the FBI knew exactly where its missing link was, the piece of evidence that they thought would convince hardened skeptics
like Nunes that collusion was real. They didn't have to chase him down, because he was sitting at home in Chicago. He submitted to
a voluntary interview January 27 and without a lawyer because he had no idea what the FBI had in store for him.
The Crossfire Hurricane team was figuring how they were going to set up the Trump adviser they'd used to open up the investigation
in July 2016: George Papadopoulos. Lee Smith is the media columnist at Tablet.
re: human rights
The US, as far as I know, is the only country on the world that publishes an annual human
rights report (State Dept) and which regularly comments on what it sees as poor human rights
in other countries. This is despite the fact, as indicated above, that the US has a poor
record of human rights throughout its history, and still does with definite underclasses
separated geographically from the general public and in prison.
Regarding China, quite a few Chinese people were instrumental in building the railroads
that greatly contributed to the settling of the West. Then, after they had been used and
abused, and the tracks laid, Chinese were evicted from the country under the Chinese Exclusion Act which
technically only prohibited immigration, but was also used for eviction. There are many
Chinese descendants currently in Mexicali Mexico as a result. Also the US Border Patrol (now
used against Hispanics mostly) was originally formed to keep Chinese people out. . .China is
probably too polite to bring this up.
The only mistake Merry makes is his erroneous statement that Trump held up aid to Ukraine to
pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate the Ukrainian firm that made $1,750,000
payments to the corrupt Biden and his corrupt son. The transcript of the telephone call between
Trump and the Ukrainian president shows no Quid Pro Quo, and the Ukrainian president says there
was none. The Quid Pro Quo was entirely on Biden's part when he told the president of Ukraine
to fire the prosecutor investigating the firm that was paying him and his son seven figures in
protection money or forfeit $1 billion in US aid. You can watch it here:
https://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-joe-biden-forced-ukraine-to-fire-prosecutor-for-aid-money/C1C51BB8-3988-4070-869F-CAD3CA0E81D8.html
Moreover, even it Trump did threaten to withhold aid from a country that was covering up
corruption by a US vice president and his son, that is the US president's right. There is no
reason whatsoever that a president should permit US taxpayers' money to be given to a
government that covers up corruption by a vice president of the United States.
Biden's son has admitted that he used poor judgment taking money from a firm in order to
protect it from prosecution.
Even if Trump did what the Democrats allege, which he did not, there is nothing illegal or
unethical about it whatsoever. Compared to the tactics US prosecutors use to convict the
innocent, Trump's conversation with the president of Ukraine is far above the highest ethics
known to US prosecutors.
Why aren't the Democrats complaining about the criminally illegal treatment of Julian
Assange and Manning? The reason is that the Democrats, the most utterly corrupt political
organization on the face of the Earth, are bought and paid for by the Deep State. The Democrats
are dog excrement to the core. They are traitors to America and to our Constitutional order.
The entire party should be arrested and put on trial for sedition to overthrow the government
of the United States.
Eric Ciaramella is connected to Victoria Nuland. IIf this information is true, the entire Impeachment thing is a another phase
of Russiagate. It's the Democrats attempt at a coup d'etat
Ciaramella, who was a Susan Rice protégé and was brought into the White House by H. R. McMaster. Looks like McMaster was a
neocon zealot.
This is not a scandal, this is color revolution, a putsch supported by a large part of the
USA intelligence agencies and Clinton wing of the Democratic Party.
Notable quotes:
"... And given the intrusion of the nation's intelligence's services into domestic politics, a failure to learn lessons and enact safeguards could leave future candidates, especially on the left, vulnerable to similar investigations . ..."
"There is no doubt that Donald Trump would like to exact political revenge on those behind
the Russia probe, and it is fair to be skeptical of his Department of Justice. But it would be
a mistake to reflexively dismiss the inquiry, which is led by US Attorney John Durham and
overseen by Attorney General William Barr. The public deserves an accounting of what
occurred.
And given the intrusion of the nation's intelligence's services into domestic politics,
a failure to learn lessons and enact safeguards could leave future candidates, especially on
the left, vulnerable to similar investigations .
And even with this all-consuming investigation now over, we still do not have a firm
understanding of how it began." • A lonely voice of reason.
"... Not that this should surprise anyone who is familiar with Operation Mockingbird and The New York Times' part in co-operating with the CIA to plant CIA-origin reports with reporters who were either willing volunteers or unaware innocents or to practise self-censorship to appease the CIA. ..."
"... The Deep State has little to nothing to do with "rule of law." It is simply the law of the jungle: might makes right, exercised behind the scenes by the true power brokers and their minions. It is not partisan. It does use both parties to put on a show to distract the people while owning and using major parts of both ..."
"... It is they who have us in Syria now to steal Syria's oil. It is they who were enraged that Trump, an outsider, won the election contrary to all expectations and predictions. It is they who control most of the media. They are not the friends of the American people; in fact, they are our mortal enemies. ..."
"... They have hijacked our government and our foreign policy, which they operate largely for their own interests and not in the true interests of the American people. ..."
"... They use the media to sell us on what they are doing, appealing to our pride, our patriotism, the project of spreading peace, prosperity, democracy, and freedom to the world, the project of promoting human rights, the project of prosperity--whatever works to convince us that we should be in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Syria, and Kosovo, and in hundreds of military bases around the world. They equally exploit left and right; thus dividing us, they conquer. ..."
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who sees the headlines B has linked to and other NYT
headlines (and some of the actual articles themselves, if I have the time and patience to
read them) and realised that The New York Times itself is part of the Deep State it initially
denied and now wholeheartedly supports. Not that this should surprise anyone who is
familiar with Operation Mockingbird and The New York Times' part in co-operating with the CIA
to plant CIA-origin reports with reporters who were either willing volunteers or unaware
innocents or to practise self-censorship to appease the CIA.
The Deep State has little to nothing to do with "rule of law." It is simply the law of the
jungle: might makes right, exercised behind the scenes by the true power brokers and their
minions. It is not partisan. It does use both parties to put on a show to distract the people
while owning and using major parts of both.
It is they who have us in Syria now to steal
Syria's oil. It is they who were enraged that Trump, an outsider, won the election contrary
to all expectations and predictions. It is they who control most of the media. They are not
the friends of the American people; in fact, they are our mortal enemies.
They have hijacked
our government and our foreign policy, which they operate largely for their own interests and
not in the true interests of the American people.
They use the media to sell us on what they
are doing, appealing to our pride, our patriotism, the project of spreading peace,
prosperity, democracy, and freedom to the world, the project of promoting human rights, the
project of prosperity--whatever works to convince us that we should be in Iraq, and
Afghanistan, and Syria, and Kosovo, and in hundreds of military bases around the world. They
equally exploit left and right; thus dividing us, they conquer.
Regardless of what do you think about Donald Trump, what intelligence community did was a plain vanilla coup d'état approved by Obama
and coordinated by run by Brennan faction in CIA. With active participation of factions of FBI (Counterintelligence department),
Department of Justice (several highly placed officials) and State Department (which is a real neocon vipers nest so the majority of high level officials,
especially connected with the Ukrainian color revolution participated) eagerly participated in the coup.
They left too many fingerprints in this and now Barr hopefully will brings some individuals to justice for this coup.
Notable quotes:
"... I was fortunate to participate in a forum in August sponsored by the Ron Paul Institute. Here is my presentation on the attempted coup by US Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community. ..."
I was fortunate to participate in
a forum in August sponsored by the Ron Paul Institute. Here is my presentation on the attempted
coup by US Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community.
"... Libs and neocons are too stupid to see the Russia situation with any clarity. They think it's still 1951 and they're battling the commies hither and yon. ..."
"... Oh, and Putin is still here. Despite the sanctions and despite the Soros funded color revolution against him. Don't get me wrong, I don't trust him much (neither do I trust any politician in the world) but he is the result of the US policy of the 90s to push Russia further into the ground. ..."
"... That color revolution might get stepped up a bit now since Rosneft decided to trade oil and gas only in Euro. ..."
"... US diplomacy and foreign policy has become amateur hour and who can steal the most the fastest, real fuckups. ..."
"... I just watched CNN's 1-hour prime-time special on "Russian spying" on State Department in 1999 (which was, like, 20 years ago. I guess the Russians also colluded in the 2000 presidential elections with the aim of electing George W. Bush) I kid you not. These guys are about as subtle as a gigantic iron mace. ..."
"... Fortunately this is not 1938 ! Now its easy for people to look behind the curtain using the internet and see this is all BS . It only takes one voiciferous truth teller , to get all the 'believing' sheeple to also have a look behind the curtain . I suspect this hysteria is designed to keep Gov slaves in line : toe the line or get the boot . ..."
"... Is it just coincidental, the Deep State and minion (dupe) based "Resistance" from day one of (actually before) Trumps inauguration - which more recently looks distinctly like a coup attempt? ..."
... Somebody leaked e-mails from the DNC showing that it was rigging the nomination for
Clinton and she lost a
99% certain election. Immediately, her campaign settled on blaming Russia for both.
That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. [9 November
2016] Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to
engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours,
with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to
the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument. (From
Shattered
, quoted
here .)
The bogus – bogus because most of the people on his team were part of the conspiracy
and knew there was no collusion – Mueller investigation dragged on until – despite
the endless " bombshells "
– it finally stopped. But the crazies insist not guilty but
not exonerated ! And Trumputin's
principal conspiracist rants on .
Everything I mention below comes from "trusted sources". Therefore we must assume that all
of them – Putin wants Trump to buy Greenland, Russians want to get Americans arguing
about pizza, Russians have no moral sense and all the rest – are not "conspiracy
theories" but honestly "more probable".
" A Kremlin-Linked
Firm Invested Millions in Kentucky. Were They After More Than Money? " To ask the
question is to answer it, isn't it? "[T]hey warn the deal is a stalking horse for a new kind
of Russian meddling in America, one that exploits the U.S. free-market system instead of its
elections". So not only do Putin's super powers threaten our brains but his hands are in our
pockets too.
Tulsi Gabbard questions Washington's addiction to regime-change wars and actually met
Assad. This makes her not only Assad's "
mouthpiece " but (because all enemies are connected) the "
New Darling of 'Russia's Propaganda Machine '".
And don't let the facts confuse you: what Moscow has done is no
guide to what it could do : "Russia has generally followed international law and
procedure in establishing the limits of its extended continental shelf. Russia could choose
to unilaterally establish those limits if the procedures prove unfavourable and could utilize
its military capabilities in an effort to deny access to disputed Arctic waters or
resources". USAID must counter " Malign
Kremlin Influence " (and you thought USAID was about being " the world's premier international development agency "). The
astute reader will, of course, have noticed that all this is projection
. Serious observers have long understood that when Washington and its minions accuse Moscow
of something it's an admission that they are already doing it
Russia, Russia, Russia, unchanged since whenever: "
A Post-Soviet 'War and Peace': What Tolstoy's Masterwork Explains About Putin's Foreign
Policy ". Of course that's a famously long novel, full of impenetrable Russian names and,
because Putin has probably read it, something no self-respecting American would want to read
( gotta watch these
tricky Russian novelists – propagandists every one) so here's the short version:
"In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Napoleon (like Putin after him) wanted to
construct his own international order "
Anti-Russia prejudice can have unhappy consequences. We have just learned that Putin phoned
Bush a couple of days before 911 to warn him that something long-prepared and big was coming
out of Afghanistan. Other Russian warnings had been dismissed by Condoleezza Rice –
supposedly a Russia "expert" – as "Russian bitterness toward Pakistan for supporting the
Afghan mujahideen". One is reminded of Chamberlain's dismissal of Stalin's attempts to form an
anti-Hitler alliance because of his "most profound distrust of Russia" (
see Habakkuk comment ). In some alternate universe they listened to Moscow in the 1930s and
in the 2000s, but, in the one we live in, they didn't. And they don't.
Or maybe (foolish optimism!) this is starting to end: after all, it's been a complete
failure. I especially enjoyed the NYT, that bastion of the
Russian-conspiracy/Putin-superpowers/Trump-treason meme, solemnly opining :
"That means President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia
and peel it away from China. But his approach has been ham-handed and at times even counter to
American interests and values." Ham-handed! – here's the NYT's view of the Trump-Putin "
love affair " again
if you missed it the first time. And now it's Trump's fault that relations with Russia aren't
better! French President Macron has recently said that " I believe we should rebuild and revise the
architecture oftrust between Russia and the European
Union ." And Trump rather brutally delivered the
message to Ukraine's new president that he ought to talk to Putin .
Well, we'll see. Russophobia runs deep and the Russians have probably got the message. As
long as we're stuck in a mindset of "
Nine Things Russia Must Do Before Being Allowed to Rejoin the G7 " it's not going to
change. An arrogant invitation is not an invitation.
The ossified club of the imperialist G7 has served its time and the times they are a
changin'.
Without China as the 2nd (and soon) largest economy, nothing goes in this world and ever
since 2014 Russia was forced to look to the East for not bowing down to the imperial US
and
its minions in the G7, ousted from the G8.
Thus only the broader spectrum of the G20
makes
any sense in the context of the world economy.
Paperclips carried the last message from the Wolf's lair: "The western world must unite
against the slavic hordes".
.
They are still peddling the same mantra. Kind of sad, really. The world is going through a
phase change. All the symptoms are there:
Global cooling; Failing crops; African Swine Fever; huge asymmetric response from the
world population over energy price increases... Other signs are more subtle but the dying
culture of the shopping mall must be noted; Amazon; Alexa.
The US is following the lead of the ghosts of WWII to its own detriment. Brzezinsky's
Grand Chessboard is no more, all its objectives have been defeated. The "World order"
nightmare is fading away fast.
One has to be amazed that these desperate MSM & political idiots get so much mileage
out of this dead horse. Worse yet is that anyone - catching the first whiff of a Russiadiddit
narrative - doesn't reflexively just pass on and ignore it.
Libs and neocons are too stupid to see the Russia situation with any clarity. They think
it's still 1951 and they're battling the commies hither and yon.
What those two aforementioned groups of dumb asses represent is mr global in their corner
and, in the other corner, national culture and sovereignty.
Back then, I remember you saying (I remember because I have a brain the size of a planet)
that Putin was finished and that you would be out of here. You indeed disappeared for a while
to come back some time ago. Back then, your postings were more elaborate and eloquent. Now,
not so much. Makes me wonder what happened to you in the meanwhile...
Oh, and Putin is still here. Despite the sanctions and despite the Soros funded color
revolution against him. Don't get me wrong, I don't trust him much (neither do I trust any
politician in the world) but he is the result of the US policy of the 90s to push Russia
further into the ground.
That color revolution might get stepped up a bit now since Rosneft decided to trade oil
and gas only in Euro.
According to Google and Michael R. Gordon of the NYT, there was a bombing of 116 ISIS
tanker trucks on Monday November 16, 2015, three days before the Russian attack. And then
again on Monday November 23, 2015, four days after the Russian bombing, when the US destroyed
295 ISIS tankers.
I remember nothing about "Tidal Wave II", and the US attack 3 days before the renown
Russian attack. But hey, I'm an oldtimer and my memory is dim. Do you? Or is this an example of the Pentagon's 'Memory Hole' and Winston Smith's day
job?
(1) after all Geroge Herbert Walker Bush was a corrupt crook who stole the money
from the AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a
blatant tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real
democratic political opposition.
(2) after all William Jefferson Clinton is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the
AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant
tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic
political opposition.
(3) after all George W Bush is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the
AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant
tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic
political opposition.
(4) after all **** Cheney is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN
people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will
not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political
opposition.
(5) after all Barak Hussein Obama is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the
AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant
tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic
political opposition.
(6) after all Joe Biden is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN
people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will
not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political
opposition.
(7) after all Hillary Clinton is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the
AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant
tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic
political opposition.
(8) after all Victoria Nuland is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the
AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant
tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic
political opposition.
Read in their own words as the DNC went insane election night -- - Read the new book for sale on amazon the night 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' began the democrats are insane with LOSER hate
the whole russia deal was a con
their deranged hate for our President is why we must remove them all from office
I like Putin as the alien love child reincarnation of Rasputin, see, it is all in the name
;DDD.
The more US and EU media attacked Putin in that PR=B$ way, the more popular Putin
became.
Here's an attack. Putin is doing deals with Saudi Arabia, this after Saudi Arabia funded
terrorism in Chechnya killing thousands of Russians, I mean it is really bad, the optics
would be quite damaging, in fact I challenged them on it via Vesti and was immediately
censored, no bad language just pointing out reality.
The funny thing is, the US B$=PR machine can not use it because it would mean attacking
Saudi Arabia. So there they have a great opportunity to really stick it to Putin, taking
Saudi Arabia money after Saudi Arabia funded the murder of thousands of Russians, really bad
political optics (to be clear my beef is with Saudi Arabia and their murdering Australians
with the terrorist funding the House of Saud did all over the globe and not with the Russian
government, apart from them letting the House of Saud get away with it, just like the slimey
American government).
Passed it onto Voice of America, to stick it to Vesti with a damned if you do and damned
if you don't message and as you can guess, silence from the US government, bwa hah hah. Their
chance to attack and silence because they would also have to attack the House of Saud.
Now the reason Russia media was uptight and hence the government, well, after all the US
**** ups all over the place, they stand to gain diplomatic alliances with Iran, Saudi Arabia
and Venezuela and then add in Russian Oil and well, the US just clumsily and stupidly handed
over control of oil to Russia, if they can tie up the deal with Saudi Arabia and so US sent
more troops to Saudi Arabia during the negotiation process, what a pack of clowns.
Oil is yesterdays tech, nuclear energy is where the focus should be and there are much
better designs available including a low output reactor, quite a smart design, it is all
changing and the US really has to push nuclear, abandon oil and make deals with Australia and
Japan, one for uranium and the other for manufacturing including rebuilding US
manufacturing.
US diplomacy and foreign policy has become amateur hour and who can steal the most the
fastest, real fuckups.
I think the label first became widely used to slander people who questioned the details
surrounding the JFK assassination, and forty years later, there aren't too many thinking
people who still believe the Warren Commission's "lone gunman" explanation. That explanation
is doubted by everyone who has taken the time to look into the details, and believed only by
people who refuse to.
Which is "theory" and which is fact? In the absence of a full confession, this can only be
decided by a preponderance of evidence, and it would be silly to come to a conclusion on any
matter without looking at all the evidence available. This is only common sense, just as it
is safe to assume some degree of guilt or complicity on the part of anyone who lies about an
event, or tries to hide, plant, or destroy any type of evidence.
Conspiracy theories arise from evidence. After the government releases an explanation of a
particular event, a conspiracy theory is only born because evidence exists to disprove their
explanation, or at least call it into question. There's nothing insane about it, unless you
define sanity as believing whatever the government tells you. In light of the fact that our
government lies to us regularly, I would define believing everything they tell you as utter
stupidity.
The orthodox, for their part, dismiss the unorthodox as conspiracy theorists (by which
term they mean: people whose opinions are based in something other than objective reality
– if it were objectively real, the sources which provide the orthodox with their
opinions would have told them about it).
In July of 1996, flight 800 exploded over Long Island. Shortly after their terrorist
explanation failed scrutiny, our government then explained the event by claiming that a
faulty electrical system caused a spark that ignited a fuel tank, and the people who doubted
this explanation were quickly labeled "conspiracy theorists." More than a hundred witnesses
saw a missile travel from the ground up to the plane just prior to its explosion, but rather
than being treated as eyewitnesses to an event, they were labeled "conspiracy theorists,"
which label allowed all subsequent investigation to ignore the strongest evidence in the
matter.
Our "investigative" news agencies decided to accept and disseminate the official story,
and they helped us forget the U.S. naval station nearby, the fact that missiles were
regularly test fired there, and naturally, they paid no heed to more than a hundred
"conspiracy theorists" who saw the plane get blown out of the sky by a missile. I believe
that the U.S. Navy accidentally shot down flight 800, and that's my belief because it's the
most sensible explanation that can be drawn from the available evidence. I'm not theorizing
about conspiracies, but there are conflicting explanations of the event, and if the Navy did
accidentally blow a passenger plane out of the sky, who would have a motive to lie about it?
The U.S. government, or a hundred witnesses?
The one thing that always puzzled me about flight 800 was why a gas tank explosion lead to
no more waiting in your cars outside the terminals and additional gate security?
"Responding to repeated criticisms of the security at Kennedy International Airport after
the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, Port Authority officials announced a series of
changes yesterday intended to make it more difficult for anyone to plant a bomb on a
plane."
But it was the jet fuel fumes from sitting on the hot tarmac and a frayed wire. So how in
the world did someone think about the B word?
I just watched CNN's 1-hour prime-time special on "Russian spying" on State
Department in 1999 (which was, like, 20 years ago. I guess the Russians also colluded in the
2000 presidential elections with the aim of electing George W. Bush) I kid you not. These guys are about as subtle as a gigantic iron mace.
I practically had to be hospitalized for acute lobotomy. An hour later, I still feel like
3/4s of my brain were surgically sucked out by Jeff Zucker. Will have to have me some Russian
sex soon to regain some of my missing IQ.
Within the first few years after the Kennedy Assassination, the American people were
collecting evidence and pointing fingers at the CIA, the Military Industrial Complex, the
Mossad and Israel. The late Michael Collins Piper provides all the evidence necessary in his
book FINAL JUDGEMENT to realize that Israel had Kennedy killed.
1967 is the same year Israel murdered 34 US Servicemen and injured over 200 others during
its cowardly attack on the USS Liberty.
In the mid-sixties, the world was first introduced in full baloney mode to the
Holocaust.
Intersting coincidence.
Maybe the deep state (Central Banks and Israel) desparately needed a BAIT and SWITCH to
hide their tracks.
Today, our kids must bow before the Holocaust g_d and yet few realize that JFK wanted to
eliminate Israel's nuclear weapons and was instead sacrificed for GREATER ISRAEL
For Bibi, being against him, equates to Antisemitism, for Trump being critical of him is
Anti-American, for ZH being opposed to Putin is a Anti-Russian.
Anti-Russia prejudice can have unhappy consequences.
Fortunately this is not 1938 ! Now its easy for people to look behind the curtain using the internet and see this is all
BS . It only takes one voiciferous truth teller , to get all the 'believing' sheeple to also
have a look behind the curtain . I suspect this hysteria is designed to keep Gov slaves in line : toe the line or get the
boot .
So, is the anti-Russia/anti-Putin a head fake? By looking to be oh-so over the top freaked
out about anything Russian, and taking on the mantle of looking freaked out (though in
actuality are not), Democrats are perhaps intentionally making him look less harmful and
dangerous by comparison.
After all, the Russian communist form of government, a dictatorship run by a small
percentage of elites, is exactly the road down which Democrats want to take the U.S. Similar
comparisons of this fashion can be made with the Chinese communist government, too.
The Democratic primary was obviously rigged. Democrats thought, with insider help from the
FBI, CIA, IRS and others, that the actual election was rigged, too.
Is it just coincidental, the Deep State and minion (dupe) based "Resistance" from day one
of (actually before) Trumps inauguration - which more recently looks distinctly like a coup
attempt? With, of course, the vast majority of news outlets (virtually all Left leaning) in
the US pushing and covering the obvious subversion. Hence, the astoundingly intense looks of
deep shock on TV when it was realized an "outsider," Trump, would win?
"... If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge. ..."
"... There is a third possibility. What if Trump wasn't supposed to become President, according to the CIA's plans? This seems plausible to me, because during the 2016 election, it seemed to me at least that almost nobody in the US political and media establishments took Trump's candidacy seriously. Clinton was so sure she could easily beat Trump that she used her influence with the media to get Trump media coverage, in order to weaken the "serious" Republicans, one of whom everyone thought would get the nomination, like Jeb Bush. ..."
As we know from Wayne Madsen's little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama
has been a CIA asset since he was a suckling babe.
If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA
(via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we
conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge.
There is a third possibility. What if Trump wasn't supposed to become President,
according to the CIA's plans? This seems plausible to me, because during the 2016 election,
it seemed to me at least that almost nobody in the US political and media establishments took
Trump's candidacy seriously. Clinton was so sure she could easily beat Trump that she used
her influence with the media to get Trump media coverage, in order to weaken the "serious"
Republicans, one of whom everyone thought would get the nomination, like Jeb Bush.
I know you believe that Trump was somehow exactly what the US deep state needed. I don't
agree, but even if you are right, are you really sure that the CIA and the rest of the deep
state were smart enough to understand and agree that they needed someone like Trump?
"... The Democrats are the ones who are twisting the "protocols" regarding private hearings to protect the seditious liars and their lies... To paraphrase the Washington Post : "Democracy Dies In The Darkness"... The Darkness created by the shadowy deep state and those who dwell in it ! ..."
"... Without expressing any opinion on the truth or falsity of Taylor's testimony or any of it, the idea that being a West Point graduate and Vietnam vet is some kind of assurance of probity is a joke. ..."
"... Have you learned nothing from RussiaGate, from the various imperial wars on Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Serbia, etc.? All these were based on flat out lies promoted by cleancut, well dressed, well spoken, impeccably credentialed monsters. Many of them veterans themselves. All of them lying without shame, and lauded for telling lies. ..."
"... You realize that we are an empire, and our institutions act the way that imperial institutions do? Imperial institutions cannot be hindered by things like honesty and "rule of law", because the empire cannot survive if its freedom of action is restrained. ..."
"... Is your anti Russian phobia a product of Slavic racism or of disliking orthodox countries or what? Why do you pro war liberals obsess over Russia so much? I think it is empire envy. ..."
"... I Keep reading about this "aid to ukraine" improperly tied to an investigation of a rival. But this "aid" to Ukraine is really just weapons isn't it? Weapons meant to stoke conflict with a nuclear power. The deep state and the pro war liberals will never let This country move past militarism ..."
I'd like to commend Rep. Gaetz for this very well justified act of 'civil disobedience' to draw attention to this farce of a travesty
of a sham of a mockery of a witchhunt. This so-called "impeachment" is totally consistent with the manufacturing of "evidence"
to justify an "investigation" of Trump's campaign to keep him from being elected as well.
I'm glad we have someone standing up to these corrupt lying leaking Democrat bullies. It would be nice if we could have an
investigation of the actual and documented illegal campaign contributions of Hillary to her attorney to Chris Steele, but that
water has passed under the bridge by now.
But if we're going to go down the rabbit hole of campaign finance law violations, I'd like to propose that the quite obvious
main and only real (non-manufactured) reason for these so-called "impeachment" hearings is to prevent Trump from being re-elected
(as opposed to investigating "corruption").
Thus the Democrats' activities are quite obviously a misappropriation of taxpayer funds and an illegal donation to the political
campaigns of the Democratic party. I demand an investigation. In secret of course.
As you rightfully said, the rule of law is a pain in the butt, after all. The double standard is infuriating.
We are coming to a point in American society where the only meaningful "truth" belongs to whoever wins. If that is true, under
those circumstances, you've got to decide whom you trust more to protect your interests. Is it Adam Schiff or Donald Trump? If
you choose not to decide, you've still made a choice. Or are elections only supposed to have consequences if Democrats win them?
Matt Gaetz is one of those few Republicans in on the fundamental truth of our country: We are an empire in decline and politics
is 100% theatre. And so he puts on one of the best shows on television.
Yeah, he is likely a nihilist, but I can't really call him a grifter any more than you could call Milo or Jacob Wohl grifters.
They are performance artists, dressing up in conservative drag and giving everyone the show of their lifetime, and they are so
dedicated to it they don't break character. In wrestling it is called kayfebe.
If you are in on the joke, these people are amazing, true heroes of late capitalism, exposing the absurdities of our commodified
democracy and news cycle.
The standards for a sitting Congressman representing 800,000 Americans should probably be a bit higher than the standards for
alt-right YouTube dancing bears.
As our country winds down and enters the end of its natural lifespan, and every country has a lifespan, don't fool yourself, because
no human creations last forever, some of the dancing bears we get aren't going to be quite as funny as Matt Gaetz, and there are
only going to be more and more of them coming out of the woodwork.
So I think we should appreciate people like him while we can, who at least elevate the art to something legitimately entertaining,
and are generally pretty harmless. "I love the president so much I may never love another president again." is an amazing line,
for instance, and I'll never understand anyone who doesn't appreciate it. That's something he put care and thought into.
People like entertainment. They elected an entertainer as president for a reason, and he is representing a lot more than 800,000
Americans. But I'm sure those 800,000 Americans are pretty happy with the entertainment they are getting from Gaetz too, even
if they might not appreciate the nuances of his performance and only like that he is "triggering the libs" or somesuch. And maybe
some of them do see how his performance implicates them too and they just don't care because it is such a fun show. I know if
Matt Gaetz were running for president (Against some neo-liberal like Buttigieg, not against someone I like) I'd be tempted to
vote for him just to add fuel to the fire.
The Democrats are the ones who are twisting the "protocols" regarding private hearings to protect the seditious liars and their
lies...
To paraphrase the Washington Post : "Democracy Dies In The Darkness"... The Darkness created by the shadowy deep state and those who dwell in it !
"The seditions liars and their lies"? Bill Taylor is a West Point graduate, decorated Vietnam vet, and was G.W. Bush's appointee
to be Ukraine ambassador. The smears aren't going to stick to him.
Like they didn't stick to Mueller, Comey, Mattis, McCain, Romney, and whoever else is the white knight of the week who will save
liberal decadence from Trump. As if!
He will be down in the mud with the rest of them, loathed by Trump's base and forgotten by the Democrats once the next savior
conservative messiah comes along. Eventually there won't be enough Never Trump zombies in the Bush establishment morgue left to
revive, and what then?
They certainly aren't going to work with the left to concentrate on substance and policy rather than the Trump news cycle,
so I imagine liberals will just all collectively die from despair
Without expressing any opinion on the truth or falsity of Taylor's testimony or any of it, the idea that being a West Point graduate
and Vietnam vet is some kind of assurance of probity is a joke.
Have you learned nothing from RussiaGate, from the various imperial wars on Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Serbia, etc.? All these
were based on flat out lies promoted by cleancut, well dressed, well spoken, impeccably credentialed monsters. Many of them veterans
themselves. All of them lying without shame, and lauded for telling lies.
Not "misspeaking", as if they were merely overenthusiastic in defense of the Freedom, but lying. And their lies killed innocent
people on a hitlerian scale.
You only don't recognize this, because you are fortunate enough to live in America, where you don't have to see your children
droned and your country destroyed because some monster claims to be bringing you the freedom.
You realize that we are an empire, and our institutions act the way that imperial institutions do? Imperial institutions cannot
be hindered by things like honesty and "rule of law", because the empire cannot survive if its freedom of action is restrained.
Is your anti Russian phobia a product of Slavic racism or of disliking orthodox countries or what? Why do you pro war liberals
obsess over Russia so much? I think it is empire envy.
If the Democrats are so concerned with confidentiality then why are the anti-Trump snippets of testimony the only things getting
leaked?
Bill Taylor's testimony was shredded in 90 seconds of cross-examination by a Republican member of the Committee. Funny, that
didn't make the time breathless coverage of the umpteenth bombshell. (Or is it "The Walls Are Closing In!" this week?
By any standard of fairness, Schiff should have recused himself due to a monumental conflict of interest. He had contact with
the main complainant prior to the filing of the complaint. A Dem Senator visited Taylor in the Ukraine several weeks ago. Nothing
to see here.
As Ben Franklin was noted as saying: "Well, Doctor, what have we got -- a Republic or a Monarchy?"
"A Republic, if you can keep it."
Well, we didn't keep it. This is purely Political Kabuki Theater. Both sides deserve to lose. At this point, with the Dems
tilting so hard left, and the Rockefeller Wing (Re-branded as NeoCons for some silly reason) of the Republicans ever-waiting for
their ascendance it remains for most of the country wish both sides could lose - if for nothing else than to just stop the noise.
"A nation is born a stoic and dies an epicurean" Will Durant
I do not trust our "betters" to hold closed door trials. After 2 years of Russia Russia Russia I don't believe a word they say.
Shiff told us he had ironclad evidence of Russian collusion, I saw him say it at the interview. He lied. When a politician says
"trust me" the last thing we should do is trust him. Open hearings, transparency, due process...we should demand
That's what they're afraid of: a veritable conga line of skeletons, loosed from the Trumpian closet, cha-chaing across the Senate
chamber in front of the whole world.
Actually that did involve intelligence NOT an impeachment. Apples and oranges. But thanks for reminding us of the lies and ineptitude
that got American's killed by Obama and Clinton in Libya. They lied and people died.
If Schiff weren't selectively leaking like a sieve, your argument might have some merit.
As it is, easily the best reason to believe they are doing as they are doing is FOR the purpose of only leaking the parts they
want.
And it goes far beyond simply "closed door" - the controls enacted are extreme, at least for the Republicans, yet somehow,
certain *very convenient* bits find their way to the press, time after time. After time. After TIME.
The whole thing is a farce, designed to allow control of the narrative, facts be hanged.
Brilliant comparison to that Animal House scene - thanks for that! The facts on the ground are so devastating to Trump than even
his most lickspittle toadies can't properly defend them, and so they scheme up weak stunts like this. The mind boggles.
I suppose all the Trump supporters would be on this very page defending Barack Obama if he called the Saudi Crown Prince in 2011
and told him that any military aid is contingent on investigating the Bush family and any business ties they have with Saudi Arabia
because Jeb Bush might run in 2012. Totally legal. No problem and nothing to see.
That is not the point. What you write is simply deflection. If any President other than Trump did this, Republicans would be (correctly)
moving to impeach and remove. So I ask again: would it have been OK if Obama called the Saudis and held up military aid until
they provided him information damaging to the Bush family?
The picture is funny, but you're on the wrong side of this, Dreher. I've finally realized why Schiff and his merry men, but especially
Schiff, give me such agita.
Let's pick a date, or an incident: Bork. Since then, long before then, but let's pick a date, the Democrats have stood for
moral anarchy . The only chance they had to show they retained a shred of principle was the Gulf War (both Gulf Wars, actually,
but let's take the second), and there their response was, at least legislatively, muted to say the least (considering their Senatorial
champion was the Lion of Chappaquiddick...) Since then it's been what? Feminism, abortion, and that more abundantly, all LGBTQ
all the time, micro regulation of speech and behavior, race hustling, and--ha ha--more unjust unnecessary wars and the destruction
of the white middle class. The soft totalitarianism we talk about in these boxes--no need to go on. The usual menu of "liberal"
horror.
And this guy is to be impeached because he cusses in public? It's not adding up for me. Schiff's behavior is outrageous (read
Kim Strassel today) but he's getting the job done. You might want to call it soft Leninism.
Not sure why so many conservatives hang their hat on Bork. This man was the guy who committed the Saturday Night Massacre, this
is who you stake your moral ground on?
Conservatives are so angry Dems stopped the guy who tried to shield Nixon from accountability? It's moral anarchy for Congress
to refuse to confirm a president's nomination for the Supreme Court? Congress is supposed to give a president's nominee a hearing
and a vote, not a rubber stamp. Congress if fully within it's constitutional rights to not confirm a president's nominee, and
it's hard to find a less fit man for the Supreme Court than Bork was.
Meanwhile your guys refused to even grant a hearing to President Obama's nominee. I guess that's OK because you don't acknowledge
the rights of Democrats under the Constitution.
You don't really think the Democrats got together to destroy Bork professionally and personally because he signed off on Nixon's
firings, do you? You can't be that dumb. If you'd like to know why, it was keeping Roe v. Wade alive. And that is moral anarchy,
pal.
You know what's moral anarchy? Supporting an immoral character like Bork because you think he's going to help you get rid of
Roe vs Wade. Kind of reminds of the deal you RWers have struck with Trump. You support a man you know is morally debased because
you think he will help you restore a white Christian conservative America.
It just boggles my mind you RWers are mad Democrats refused to confirm a man who help cover up one of the most egregious acts
an American president has ever committed. A person who would commit such an unethical act was not fit for a seat on the Supreme
Court, I shouldn't even have to say this.
And you offer an unsupported calumny. Bork was "morally debased"? By what standard? By whose standard? John Dean's? Elliot Richardson's?
Remember when they rifled through his borrowing habits at Blockbuster and it turned out he was a Fred Astaire fan? They were expecting
maybe Leni Riefenstahl. Or hoping for it. And a conspiracy is usually thought of as somewhat secret. The Lion of Chappaquiddick
was pretty up front about what he didn't like about Bork.
And I think Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was far worse than anything Nixon did. Have fun with that one, pal.
"The Democrats have offered no plausible and persuasive rationale for holding these proceedings in secret and keeping the evidence
and testimony behind closed doors."
Other than that they're simply following the rules established by a previous Republican congress.
Below, someone wrote: "By any standard of fairness, Schiff should have recused himself due to a
monumental conflict of interest. He had contact with the main
complainant prior to the filing of the complaint."
Using that standard, Barr should have recused himself a thousand times over, no?
Coined by a Randian objectivist fantasy author. It is absolute truth, but knowing the source will become the utmost irony because
for some, it will be personal proof of it.
People will believe a lie because they're afraid it might be true, or because they want it to be true.
The Trump candidacy and tenure in office is a non-stop series of examples proving this.
Yet again, I note Rod, that there is more than one explanation over this hysterical impeach Trump nonsense.
This 'aid' is actually 'US military assistance'. Did it ever occur to you 'impeachers' that Trump may have deliberately been
avoiding such a meeting with his top 4 warmongers precisely so as to avoid US 'aid' escalating the military tension betwen Ukraine
and Russia? (and getting the US firmly tied into that fight?)
Trump was elected in part on a platform of no more foreign wars, and he seems genuinely committed to that (at least when he
thinks he can). Maybe the withheld 'aid' was all just leverage for a Biden investigation, but it may also be Trump trying not
to get pressured and bullied into more conflicts (which all prior Presidents were happy to go along with) in the face of a deep
state totally committed to a condition of forever war.
As an anti-war activist who campaigned against the Afghan and Iraq wars, in Trump's shoes I would also have tried to avoid
fueling an existing dangerous conflict that brings no benefit to my nation (other than a few arms sales) but may drag us into
a war with major nations. Same situation repeating right now in Syria - no major benefit to US in staying, and staying may drag
US into conflict between Turks and Kurds and Syria & Russia.
Not saying Trump has acted lawfully always - just that he may have been trying to avoid military escalation (at the same time
as getting dirt on Biden). Lets not jump to obvious conclusions when they may not be so obvious.
Thugs disrupting a Constitutional and legal proceeding doing the people's business in order to protect their Dear Leader -- that's
not frat-boy stuff. There's a much better "f" word to label that.
If these people were testifying in public, I'm sure the Trumpists would find a reason to oppose that as well. But I hope they
are ready for the public phase when they will need to defend Trump on the substance rather than voice procedural complaints. And
calling people like Taylor never-Trumpist "human scum" (what a classy president we have) is not going to cut it.
Democrats say these House Intelligence Committee procedures
aren't official hearings, but rather the equivalent of depositions,
meant to gather facts that will later be examined and argued over in
public hearings.
If that's the case they shouldn't be characterizing themselves as having an "impeachment inquiry." This is not in any legal
sense an impeachment. It's an inquiry without a cause...political games. The abberant activities of Dems trying to remove the
US President where there are no crimes justifies abberant reactions from the opposition. Since they are going to abuse the House
of Representatives and pursue unprincipled and unprecedented antagonism of a co-equal branch of government, why should the GOP
be idealistic and proper under such circumstances? I find Schiff to be a lot more of a problem than Gaetz.
No, it's the first stage of an inquiry. They're gathering evidence -- and Republican reps are there to question too -- that will
be used in open impeachment hearings.
Concerning Republican reps on the committee...apparently they're not getting all the evidence. If they're not it's not bi-partisan,
and it's irregular. Also, Schiff did not notify Republicans on the committee of an intelligence official who came to one of his
aides with concerns about President Trump before filing a whistleblower complaint. If that's true he's withholding evidence. I'm
sure he has a good reason for that...if you know what I mean.
October 18, 2019 By Chrissy Clark
All nine GOP members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence penned a letter to Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.,
lambasting him for hiding documents related to Democrats' impeachment inquiry.
"We are concerned that the Majority is knowingly withholding Committee documents related to your so-called 'impeachment
inquiry' from the Minority," the letter reads. " it has come to our attention that the Majority is not uploading (or providing
physical copies of) certain
Committee documents related to your 'impeachment inquiry' to its document repository, thus withholding the existence of such
documents from the Minority."
I think you don't like the Republicans playing by the same rules and tricks Democrats do. Looks different when the shoe is on
the other foot, huh? Think KFC eating and setting all night on the senate floor.
"The Democrats have offered no plausible and persuasive rationale for holding these proceedings in secret and keeping the evidence
and testimony behind closed doors. Given the character of the people in question, it is safe to assume that their reasons for
doing so are corrupt and motivated by narrowly calculated political self-interest. "
That's a heck of a leap in logic there, Kevin. And kind of incredible in light of Kevin McCarthy previously admitting on national
television that the Benghazi Select Committee's purpose was to tank Clinton's poll numbers. Would Kevin agree that committee was
corrupt then, I guess?
These are depositions, not hearings. Public hearings come later, once depositions are complete, and there's no more opportunity
for deposed subjects to coordinate details. Then a Senate trial after that, where Trump gets all the "due process" he has been
disingenuously complaining about.
It's amusing to me how it seems to be lost in all of this, that half of the people sitting in on these depositions are REPUBLICANS.
I Keep reading about this "aid to ukraine" improperly tied to an investigation of a rival. But this "aid" to Ukraine is really
just weapons isn't it? Weapons meant to stoke conflict with a nuclear power. The deep state and the pro war liberals will never
let This country move past militarism
If you supported the Schiff parody-as-truth from the other week but this bothers you, then you are an anti-Trump partisan. Conversely,
if you support this but had a problem with Schiff, you are a pro-Trump partisan. And that is okay because impeachment is a political
act. Just don't dress it up and pretend your side follows the rule of law and the other side doesn't. Both sides are engaging
in politics to convince the public. And we'll be just fine as long as both sides stick with that, and obey the constitutional
rules for impeachment. We'll only get in serious trouble if folks decide to go extra constitutional:
The picture is funny, but you're on the wrong side of this, Dreher. I've finally realized why Schiff and his merry men, but especially
Schiff, give me such agita.
Let's pick a date, or an incident: Bork. Since then, long before then, but let's pick a date, the Democrats have stood for
moral anarchy . The only chance they had to show they retained a shred of principle was the Gulf War (both Gulf Wars, actually,
but let's take the second), and there their response was, at least legislatively, muted to say the least (considering their Senatorial
champion was the Lion of Chappaquiddick...) Since then it's been what? Feminism, abortion, and that more abundantly, all LGBTQ
all the time, micro regulation of speech and behavior, race hustling, and--ha ha--more unjust unnecessary wars and the destruction
of the white middle class. The soft totalitarianism we talk about in these boxes--no need to go on. The usual menu of "liberal"
horror.
And this guy is to be impeached because he cusses in public? It's not adding up for me. Schiff's behavior is outrageous (read
Kim Strassel today) but he's getting the job done. You might want to call it soft Leninism.
Yet again, I note Rod, that there is more than one explanation over this hysterical impeach Trump nonsense.
This 'aid' is actually 'US military assistance'. Did it ever occur to you 'impeachers' that Trump may have deliberately been
avoiding such a meeting with his top 4 warmongers precisely so as to avoid US 'aid' escalating the military tension betwen Ukraine
and Russia? (and getting the US firmly tied into that fight?)
Trump was elected in part on a platform of no more foreign wars, and he seems genuinely committed to that (at least when he
thinks he can). Maybe the withheld 'aid' was all just leverage for a Biden investigation, but it may also be Trump trying not
to get pressured and bullied into more conflicts (which all prior Presidents were happy to go along with) in the face of a deep
state totally committed to a condition of forever war.
As an anti-war activist who campaigned against the Afghan and Iraq wars, in Trump's shoes I would also have tried to avoid
fueling an existing dangerous conflict that brings no benefit to my nation (other than a few arms sales) but may drag us into
a war with major nations. Same situation repeating right now in Syria - no major benefit to US in staying, and staying may drag
US into conflict between Turks and Kurds and Syria & Russia.
Not saying Trump has acted lawfully always - just that he may have been trying to avoid military escalation (at the same time
as getting dirt on Biden). Lets not jump to obvious conclusions when they may not be so obvious.
"The Democrats have offered no plausible and persuasive rationale for holding these proceedings in secret and keeping the evidence
and testimony behind closed doors. Given the character of the people in question, it is safe to assume that their reasons for
doing so are corrupt and motivated by narrowly calculated political self-interest. "
That's a heck of a leap in logic there, Kevin. And kind of incredible in light of Kevin McCarthy previously admitting on national
television that the Benghazi Select Committee's purpose was to tank Clinton's poll numbers. Would Kevin agree that committee was
corrupt then, I guess?
These are depositions, not hearings. Public hearings come later, once depositions are complete, and there's no more opportunity
for deposed subjects to coordinate details. Then a Senate trial after that, where Trump gets all the "due process" he has been
disingenuously complaining about.
It's amusing to me how it seems to be lost in all of this, that half of the people sitting in on these depositions are REPUBLICANS.
I Keep reading about this "aid to ukraine" improperly tied to an investigation of a rival. But this "aid" to Ukraine is really
just weapons isn't it? Weapons meant to stoke conflict with a nuclear power. The deep state and the pro war liberals will never
let This country move past militarism
If you supported the Schiff parody-as-truth from the other week but this bothers you, then you are an anti-Trump partisan. Conversely,
if you support this but had a problem with Schiff, you are a pro-Trump partisan. And that is okay because impeachment is a political
act. Just don't dress it up and pretend your side follows the rule of law and the other side doesn't. Both sides are engaging
in politics to convince the public. And we'll be just fine as long as both sides stick with that, and obey the constitutional
rules for impeachment. We'll only get in serious trouble if folks decide to go extra constitutional:
"... If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge. ..."
"... There is a third possibility. What if Trump wasn't supposed to become President, according to the CIA's plans? This seems plausible to me, because during the 2016 election, it seemed to me at least that almost nobody in the US political and media establishments took Trump's candidacy seriously. Clinton was so sure she could easily beat Trump that she used her influence with the media to get Trump media coverage, in order to weaken the "serious" Republicans, one of whom everyone thought would get the nomination, like Jeb Bush. ..."
As we know from Wayne Madsen's little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama
has been a CIA asset since he was a suckling babe.
If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA
(via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we
conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge.
There is a third possibility. What if Trump wasn't supposed to become President,
according to the CIA's plans? This seems plausible to me, because during the 2016 election,
it seemed to me at least that almost nobody in the US political and media establishments took
Trump's candidacy seriously. Clinton was so sure she could easily beat Trump that she used
her influence with the media to get Trump media coverage, in order to weaken the "serious"
Republicans, one of whom everyone thought would get the nomination, like Jeb Bush.
I know you believe that Trump was somehow exactly what the US deep state needed. I don't
agree, but even if you are right, are you really sure that the CIA and the rest of the deep
state were smart enough to understand and agree that they needed someone like Trump?
"... On February 2 Shokin confiscated four large houses Zlochevsky owned plus a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a "Knott 924-5014 trainer". (Anyone know what that is?) Ten days later Biden goes into overdrive to get him fired. Within one week he personally calls Poroshenko three times with only one major aim: to get Shokin fired. ..."
"... Zlochevsky had hired Joe Biden's son Hunter for at least $50,000 per month. In 2015 Shokin started to investigate him in two cases. During the fall of 2015 Joe Biden's team begins to lobby against him. On February 2 Shokin seizes Zlochevsky's houses. Shortly afterwards the Biden camp goes berserk with Biden himself making nearly daily phonecalls. Shokin goes on vacation while Poroshenko (falsely) claims that he resigned. When Shokin comes back into office Biden again takes to the phone. A week later Shokin is out. ..."
"... Biden got the new prosecutor general he wanted. The new guy made a bit of show and then closed the case against Zlochevsky. ..."
"... Is the "conspiracy theory" about Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election really "debunked"? It is, of course, not. The facts show that the interference happened. It was requested by the Democratic National Committee and was willingly provided by Ukrainian officials. ..."
"... Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found. ..."
"... A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia , according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. ..."
"... In March 2016 Chalupa went to the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC and requested help from the Ukrainian ambassador to go after Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort. In August 2016 the Ukrainians delivered a secret "black ledger" that allegedly showed that Manafort had illegally received money for his previous work for the campaign of the former Ukrainian president Yanukovych. ..."
"... Serhin A. Leshchenko, the member of the Ukrainian parliament who published the dubious ledger, was rabidly anti-Trump. Shortly after providing the "secret ledger" he talked with the Financial Times and promised to continue to meddle in the U.S. election. The FT headline emphasized the fact: ..."
"... insisting on innocence of Biden will have a political cost. ..."
"... That term "conspiracy theory" has been so widely abused that, to me at least, it now means something that the author wishes were not true but almost certainly is. ..."
"... Joe Biden needs to STFU, and go away. He and his ilk are part of the problem, not the solution. The rulers of America insist on pushing this sycophant for the empire down our throats. And, he can take HRC and her crowd with him. It's high time for some new blood, IF, TPTB, will even allow that to happen, which I very much doubt.... ..."
"... If you were referring to Trump's convo with Zelensky specifically, reasonable people might disagree over whether that was an abuse of power or sleazy and dumb (in being unnecessary)--which of course shouldn't mean the Bidens get a pass here, which none of these young journalists are suggesting. ..."
"... Well, there you have it--proof that BigLie Media indeed specializes in publishing Big Lies that ought to reduce such outlets to the status of Tabloids. Of course, the media is free to lie all it wants within the limits of slander and libel, but most people don't like being lied to particularly over matters of importance. ..."
"... Larry Johnson has a piece at SST on a CIA task force set up to compromise Trump and prevent him becoming president. That Trump avoided all the traps set for him (even the Mueller investigation could pin nothing on Trump) and won the election says a bit for Trump ..."
"... Alexandra Chalupa's connection to the thinktank The Atlantic Council should be borne in mind in the developing discussion in the comments forum. Her sister Irena is or has been a non-resident Senior Fellow there. Irena Chalupa has also been a senior editor at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. ..."
"... Also the founder and CEO of the Crowdstrike company in charge of cybersecurity for the DNC during the 2016 presidential election campaign was Dmitri Alperovich who is a Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council. It was Crowdstrike who came up with the idea that Trump had to be under the Kremlin's thumb and from there the hysterical witch-hunt and associated actions known as Russiagate began. ..."
"... I'm surprised that at this point in time, Bellingcat has not been included in digging up "dirt" on Trump ..."
"... Lee Stranahan of Radio Sputnik has been reporting on Alexandra Chalupa's role for a number of years now. I hope he gets proper credit as this story comes out. ..."
"... It seems some corners are coming unglued if the ZH link below is any indication: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-entrapped-flynn-manipulated-evidence-clapper-allegedly-issued-kill-shot-order ..."
"... The take away quote from a Matt Taibbi twit "LOL. Barack Obama is going to love this interview his former DIA James Clapper just gave to CNN about the Durham probe: "It's frankly disconcerting to be investigated for having done... what we were told to do by the president of the United States." ..."
"... Prescient observation by Aaron Mate : "When CNN & MSNBC now cover the criminal inquiry into conduct of intel officials in Russia probe, they are literally covering their employees -- John Brennan (MSNBC); James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, James Baker (CNN). I avoid the term, but it's appropriate here: Deep State TV." ..."
"... The take away quote: "Joe Biden intervened at least two times on matters his son Hunter's firms was being paid to lobby on, according to government records reviewed by the Washington Examiner." ..."
"... Indeed, the guilty are hiding in plain sight. It appears sinister, and is, but I think its a positive development of late, as it would suggest that big media are scrambling to preserve the status quo by legitimising these deep state actors. ..."
"... Obama orchestrated the regime change operation in Ukraine. As we know from Wayne Madsen's little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama has been a CIA asset since he was a suckling babe. To promote containment of the Russian menace, the US got in bed with Ukrainian fascists and successfully exploited political tensions in that country resulting in the removal of the duly elected Yanukovitch. A right wing billionaire then took the reigns and Putin orchestrated a referendum in Crimea in retaliation that resulted in its return to Russia. The Crimeans were and continue to be happy, happier than the rest of Ukrainians under Kiev neo-fascist free market exploitation. ..."
"... It is natural that neo-fascist Ukrainians would express their disapproval of Trump, who was making nice with Putin. No matter what his motives were, he was bucking US anti-Russian policy. I liked Trump at that time for this willingness to end a Cold War policy sponsored by the US military industrial complex. You can cal it "deep state" if you like. It's not deep and it's not a shadow government. It's the war party. It's the elite profiting from weapons manufacture. Trump has no principles except expedience and his pro-Russian stance is likely owing to the money laundering he's been doing for Russian criminals since he is such a lousy business man. ..."
"... The general charge against Trump is that he was "digging up dirt" on opponents. Well laddy-dah. So what. Welcome to Politics 101. ..."
"... Empires don't act on facts: they are all-powerful, so they sculpt reality as they see fit. What determines this is class struggle: the inner contradictions of a society that results in a given consensus, thus forming a hegemony. ..."
"... Again, not surprised at all. Pro-democratic/anti-Trump media write articles (obviously made-to-order) to whitewash already badly discredited Biden, and present all the arguments in favor of his dark connections with Ukraine as a kind of "conspiracy theory". This is a common practice. Not having sufficient competence to reasonably refute the arguments of opponents, MSM (as well as all sorts of "experts") immediately mark the position of opponents with "conspiracy theory" (there are also other options to choose from: "Putin's agent", "Putin's useful idiot", "Kremlin's agent", "pro-Russian propaganda", etc.). It is assumed that this makes unnecessary/optional (and even "toxic") all further conversations with the opponent (that is, there is no need to answer him, to prove something with facts, etc.), because his position is a "conspiracy theory". ..."
"... Western MSM are actively using this simplest propaganda technique of information warfare. For example, this was the case when reporting on events in Syria - those journalists, the media, experts who did not agree with the lie of MSM about Assad's use of the chemical weapons were declared "conspiracy theorists" (and also "Assad apologists"). This method was also used to cover "the Skripal case" - those who questioned the British authorities' version of the "Novichok poisoning" were declared "conspiracy theorists". ..."
"... This is the way the controlled media works. They provide half a story, half truths, straw-man facts, selective quotes and 'expert' comment, opinion and unwarranted assumption presented as fact that all together cover the spectrum from black to white, spread across the many titles. ..."
"... They also disseminate a fine dusting of lies and actual truth here and there. The result is the public have a dozen 'truths' to pick from, none of which are real, while the outright lies and actual truths get dismissed as not credible and the half-truths and straw-man truths appear to carry some validity. ..."
"... If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge. ..."
"... as Caitlin Johnstone lets to say - who gets to decide what the narrative is here? i don't have an answer for this, but those who appear to be taking a side in all of this - including you with the quote i make - seem to think that it has to be the issue of trumps extortion of Ukraine, verses what appears to me the CIA - Dem party extortion of the ordinary USA persons mind... ..."
"... Has mccarthyism version 2 come to life since the advent of what happened in the Ukraine from 2014 onward?? is the issue of a new cold war with Russia been on the burner for at least 5 or more years here and began before trump was even considered a potential candidate for the republican party? did Russia take back Crimea, which wasn't supposed to happen? is this good for military industrial complex sales? and etc. etc. ..."
"... i am sure biden is small potatoes in the bigger picture here, but if taking a closer examination of what took place in ukraine leading into 2014, with the victoria nulands and geoffrey pyatts and etc. etc. of usa diplomatic corps, usa dept of state and etc. could lead to a better understanding of how the usa has went down the road it has for the past 60 years of foreign policy on the world stage, it would be a good start... so, to me - it ain't about trump.. it is about usa foreign policy and how it has sucked the big one on the world stage for at least since the time of vietnam when i was a teenager.. ..."
Several mainstream media have made claims that Joe Biden's intervention in the Ukraine and
the Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election are "conspiracy theories" and "debunked". The
public record proves them wrong. By ignoring or even contradicting the facts the media create
an opening for Trump to rightfully accuse them of providing "fake news".
[In late 2018], Giuliani began speaking to current and former Ukrainian officials about the
Biden conspiracy theory, and meeting with them repeatedly in New York and Europe. Among those
officials was Viktor Shokin, a former top Ukrainian prosecutor who was sacked in March, 2016,
after European and U.S. officials, including Joe Biden, complained that he was lax in curbing
corruption. Shokin claimed that he had lost his powerful post not because of his poor
performance but rather because Biden wanted to stop his investigation of Burisma, in order to
protect his son. The facts didn't back this up. The Burisma investigation had been dormant
under Shokin.
Several other
media outlets also made the highlighted claim to debunk the "conspiracy theory". But is it
correct?
We have looked into the claim that Shorkin's investigation against Burisma owner Zlochevsky
was dormant, as the New Yorker says, and found it to be false :
The above accounts are incorrect. Shokin did go after Zlochevsky. He opened two cases against
him in 2015. After he did that Biden and his crew started to lobby for his firing. Shokin was
aggressively pursuing the case. He did so just before Biden's campaign against him went into
a frenzy.
... On February 2 Shokin confiscated four large houses Zlochevsky owned plus a Rolls-Royce
Phantom and a "Knott 924-5014 trainer". (Anyone know what that is?) Ten days later Biden goes
into overdrive to get him fired. Within one week he personally calls Poroshenko three times
with only one major aim: to get Shokin fired.
... Zlochevsky had hired Joe Biden's son Hunter for at least $50,000 per month. In 2015 Shokin
started to investigate him in two cases. During the fall of 2015 Joe Biden's team begins to
lobby against him. On February 2 Shokin seizes Zlochevsky's houses. Shortly afterwards the
Biden camp goes berserk with Biden himself making nearly daily phonecalls. Shokin goes on
vacation while Poroshenko (falsely) claims that he resigned. When Shokin comes back into
office Biden again takes to the phone. A week later Shokin is out.
Biden got the new prosecutor general he wanted. The new guy made a bit of
show and then closed the case against Zlochevsky.
It is quite astonishing that the false claims, that Shokin did not go after Burisma owner
Zlochevsky, is repeated again and again despite the fact that the public record , in form of a report
by Interfax-Ukraine , contradicts it.
On Thursday Buzzfeed Newswrote
about a different Ukrainian prosecutor who in early 2019 was approached to set up meetings
with President Donald Trump's private lawyer Rudy Giuliani:
[Gyunduz] Mamedov's role was key. He was an intermediary in Giuliani's efforts to press
Ukraine to open investigations into former vice president Joe Biden and the debunked
conspiracy theory about the country's interference in the 2016 presidential election , a
collaboration between BuzzFeed News, NBC News, and the Organized Crime and Corruption
Reporting Project (OCCRP) can reveal.
The OCCRP is funded by the
UK Foreign Office, the US State Dept, USAID, Omidyar Network, Soros' Open Society, the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund and others. Most of these entities were involved in the 2014 coup
against the elected government of the Ukraine.
Is the "conspiracy theory" about Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election really
"debunked"? It is, of course, not. The facts show that the interference happened. It was requested by
the Democratic National Committee and was willingly provided by Ukrainian officials.
As Politico reported shortly after Trump had won the election, it was the Democratic
Party organization, the DNC, which had asked the
Ukrainians for dirt that could be used against the campaign on Donald Trump:
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly
questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump
aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after
the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his
advisers, a Politico investigation found.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee
met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties
between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia , according to people with direct
knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's resignation
and advancing the narrative that Trump's campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe to
the east, Russia.
The Ukrainian-American who was the go between the DNC and the government of Ukraine had
earlier worked for the Clinton administration:
Manafort's work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named
Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the
Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for
Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to
Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that
time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC's arm for engaging expatriate Democrats
around the world.
In March 2016 Chalupa went to the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC and requested help from
the Ukrainian ambassador to go after Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort. In August 2016 the
Ukrainians delivered
a secret "black ledger" that allegedly showed that Manafort had illegally received money
for his previous work for the campaign of the former Ukrainian president Yanukovych.
Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr.
Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych's pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to
Ukraine's newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the
disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included
election officials.
"Paul Manafort is among those names on the list of so-called 'black accounts of the Party
of Regions,' which the detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are
investigating," the statement said. "We emphasize that the presence of P. Manafort's name in
the list does not mean that he actually got the money, because the signatures that appear in
the column of recipients could belong to other people."
The provenance of the ledger is highly dubious. It was allegedly found in a burned out
office of Yanukovych's old party:
The papers, known in Ukraine as the "black ledger," are a chicken-scratch of Cyrillic
covering about 400 pages taken from books once kept in a third-floor room in the former Party
of Regions headquarters on Lipskaya Street in Kiev.
...
The accounting records surfaced this year, when Serhiy A. Leshchenko, a member of Parliament
who said he had received a partial copy from a source he did not identify, published line
items covering six months of outlays in 2012 totaling $66 million. In an interview, Mr.
Leshchenko said another source had provided the entire multiyear ledger to Viktor M. Trepak,
a former deputy director of the domestic intelligence agency of Ukraine, the S.B.U., who
passed it to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
Anti-corruption groups in Ukraine said the black ledger detailing payments was probably
seized when protesters ransacked the Party of Regions headquarters in February 2014.
The pages from the ledger, which had come from anonymous sources probably
supported by John Brennan's CIA , were never proven to be genuine. But the claims were
strong enough to get Manafort fired as campaign manager for Donald Trump. He was later
sentenced for unrelated cases of tax evasion.
Serhin A. Leshchenko, the member of the Ukrainian parliament who published the dubious
ledger, was rabidly anti-Trump. Shortly after providing the "secret ledger" he talked with the
Financial Times and promised to continue to meddle in the U.S. election. The FT
headline emphasized the fact:
The prospect of Mr Trump, who has praised Ukraine's arch-enemy Vladimir Putin, becoming
leader of the country's biggest ally has spurred not just Mr Leshchenko but Kiev's wider
political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene,
however indirectly, in a U.S. election.
...
Mr. Leshchenko and other political actors in Kiev say they will continue with their efforts
to prevent a candidate - who recently suggested Russia might keep Crimea, which it annexed
two years ago - from reaching the summit of American political power.
"A Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy," Mr
Leshchenko, an investigative journalist turned MP, told the Financial Times. "For me it was
important to show not only the corruption aspect, but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate
who can break the geopolitical balance in the world."
...
If the Republican candidate loses in November, some observers suggest Kiev's action may have
played at least a small role.
A Democratic Party operative asked the Ukrainian ambassador to find dirt on Trump's campaign
manger Paul Manafort. A few month later a secret "black ledger" emerges from nowhere into the
hands of dubious Ukrainian actors including a 'former' domestic intelligence director.
The ledger may or may not show that Manafort received money from Yanukovych's party. It was
never verified. But it left Trump no choice but to fire Manafort. Ukrainian figures who were
involved in the stunt openly admitted that they had meddled in the U.S. election, promised to
do more of it and probably did.
The Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election is well documented. How the Buzzfeed
News author can claim that it is a "debunked conspiracy theory" is beyond me.
1. The Contracting States shall provide mutual assistance, in accordance with the provisions
of this Treaty, in connection with the investigation, prosecution, and prevention of
offenses, and in proceedings related to criminal matters.
2. Assistance shall include: (a) taking the testimony or statements of persons; (b)
providing documents, records, and other items; (c) locating or identifying persons or items;
(d) serving documents; (e) transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes;
(f) executing searches and seizures; (g) assisting in proceedings related to immobilization
and forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and (h) any other form of
assistance not prohibited by the laws of the Requested State.
3. Assistance shall be provided without regard to whether the conduct that is the subject
of the investigation, prosecution, or proceeding in the Requesting State would constitute an
offense under the laws of the Requested State.
When Trump
asked the current Ukrainian President Zelensky to help with an investigation into the above
matters he acted well within the law and within the framework of the treaty. It was certainly
not illegitimate to do that.
But when mainstream media deny that Biden's interference in Ukraine's prosecutor office is
suspect, or claim that the Ukraine did not interfere in the U.S. elections, they make it look
as if Trump did something crazy or illegal. He does plenty of that but not in this case. To use
it a basis of an 'impeachment inquiry' is political bullshit.
Making these false claims will come back to haunt those media outlets. Sooner or later the
public will recognize that those claims are false. It will lessen the already low trust in the
media even more.
Posted by b on October 26, 2019 at 17:51 UTC |
Permalink
"Sooner or later the public will recognize that those claims are false. It will lessen the
already low trust in the media even more."
More precisely, there exit Trump-friendly media with millions of followers, so insisting
on innocence of Biden will have a political cost. Not to mention leftist media reminiscing
how Senator Biden championed the cause of MBNA (credit cart giant) when it was also a
generous employer of his dear son. Of course, given the size of Delaware, it could be just a
coincidence.
Thanks b for providing the nitty gritty details of this sorry saga. That term "conspiracy
theory" has been so widely abused that, to me at least, it now means something that the
author wishes were not true but almost certainly is.
What is certain is that if Biden is selected as the Dem candidate and ends up as President,
the GOP (if it retains influence in Congress) will open an investigation into his actions on
behalf of his son. Russia-gate is the gift that keeps on giving!
Thanks b, for the reality check.
Joe Biden needs to STFU, and go away. He and his ilk are part of the problem, not the
solution. The rulers of America insist on pushing this sycophant for the empire down our
throats. And, he can take HRC and her crowd with him. It's high time for some new blood, IF, TPTB, will even allow that to happen, which I very
much doubt....
Thanks for another informative and insightful commentary, B. It's like a drink of cool, clean
water after staggering through a volcanic landscape full of fumaroles belching sulfurous
plumes of superheated gas.
Sometimes my hobby horses merrily hop along under me without any effort on my part. I just
hang onto the reins and howl. So: it's bad enough that the US mass-media
consent-manufacturers, aka the CIA/Deep State's "Mighty Wurlitzer", gin up endless propaganda
to discredit the facts you mention; their mission is to fool enough of the public that
there's no "there" there, and prop up Biden's presidential campaign in the bargain.
But what increasingly bugs me is so-called "alternative" news outlets and independent
journalists buying into the spin that Trump and his associates are using the pretext of
investigating corruption as a means to illegally and illicitly "dig up dirt on political
rivals". Put the other way around, they concede that Biden and other Team Obama honchos are
indeed "dirty", and that their Ukraine adventure was reprehensibly illicit or illegal and
self-serving-- but they return to faulting Trump for impermissibly exploiting these
circumstances in order to gain political advantage.
It doesn't surprise me that talented but co-opted journalists like Matt Taibbi are careful
to affirm that Trump et al 's conduct is manifestly an abuse of power. But, sadly,
even journalists like Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Michael Tracey have
echoed this rote condemnation.
My guess is that this arises from two acronyms: incipient TDS, which compels even
"alternative" US journalists to regard Trump as the "heel" in the staged
"professional"-wrestling scam of US electoral politics. Also, CYA; I suspect that these
relatively young, professionally vulnerable journalists are terrified of coming off as
"defending" or "excusing" Trump, lest they trigger wrathful excoriation from their peers and
the hordes of social-media users whose custom they cultivate.
This is why I appreciate your clarity and forthrightness on this fraught topic.
Rereading your post, and agreeing with some it, I find I disagree less with its conclusions
than on first reading.
If you were referring to Trump's convo with Zelensky specifically, reasonable people might
disagree over whether that was an abuse of power or sleazy and dumb (in being
unnecessary)--which of course shouldn't mean the Bidens get a pass here, which none of these
young journalists are suggesting.
But where I would disagree is if you were suggesting that Taibbi, Mate and Blumenthal are
making obligatory objections to Trump more generally, in order to curry favour with their
peers. I think each of them would readily reel off lists of things (more substantive than
Ukrainegate -- and probably not including Russia collusion) that they think Trump should be
castigated, impeached and perhaps prosecuted for.
Well, there you have it--proof that BigLie Media indeed specializes in publishing Big Lies
that ought to reduce such outlets to the status of Tabloids. Of course, the media is free to
lie all it wants within the limits of slander and libel, but most people don't like being
lied to particularly over matters of importance.
Larry Johnson has a piece at SST on a CIA task force set up to compromise Trump and prevent
him becoming president.
That Trump avoided all the traps set for him (even the Mueller investigation could pin
nothing on Trump) and won the election says a bit for Trump. He definitely is more than the
twitter reality TV persona that he puts up as a public face.
With the Barr investigation, it looks like the non Trump section of the swamp will be drained
in the near future.
Possibly an irrelevant point, but Shokin's replacement Lutsenko was the prosecutor who
resurrected the "deceased", self declared journalist, Arkady Babchenko. The story was full of
plot twists, involving a Boris German/Herman, who was Russian. B kept Us regaled with events.
I'd post a link, but have witnessed too many thread expansions too risk it.
I think a lot of people give the MSM too much credit. Of course editorials etc. can influence
people's thinking but the media, and journalists in general, are loathed by the people who
voted for Trump. It's a big reason he was elected.
Ort @ 8 said;"It doesn't surprise me that talented but co-opted journalists like Matt Taibbi
are careful to affirm that Trump et al's conduct is manifestly an abuse of power."
Co-Opted, or truthful, depending on what you believe. You, have every right to your
opinion, but, when push comes to shove, think I'll give my opinion being swayed or not, by
giving more credibility to the five names you've decided to "shade".
DJT has a record of behavior, and so do the five you've mentioned. My choice is clear,
I'll believe the five..
Alexandra Chalupa's connection to the thinktank The Atlantic Council should be borne in mind
in the developing discussion in the comments forum. Her sister Irena is or has been a
non-resident Senior Fellow there. Irena Chalupa has also been a senior editor at Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty.
Also the founder and CEO of the Crowdstrike company in charge of cybersecurity for the DNC
during the 2016 presidential election campaign was Dmitri Alperovich who is a Senior Fellow
at The Atlantic Council. It was Crowdstrike who came up with the idea that Trump had to be
under the Kremlin's thumb and from there the hysterical witch-hunt and associated actions
known as Russiagate began.
I'm surprised that at this point in time, Bellingcat has not been included in digging up
"dirt" on Trump, Manafort or anyone Manafort supposedly had connections with who is also
mentioned in the "black ledger" but maybe that's because with the garbage that Bellingcat has
so delivered, Eliot Higgins and company can't be trusted any more. Their masters should have
known though, that when you give your subordinates base material to work with, they can only
come up with base results: garbage in, garbage out.
Thanks for your ongoing documentation of the political criminality in the US b. The recent events are playing out like a two-bit soap opera rerun in a nursing home for
America's brainwashed. Maybe Trump could start a new TV game show called Apprentice Corruption and instead of
saying "Your Fired!" it could be "Your Guilty!"
As an American it is difficult to watch the country that I was taught such good things
about in school be exposed as a criminal enterprise running cover for the elite cult that
owns global private finance and manipulates Western not-so-civilized culture.
I hope all this BS we are going through wakes up enough of the semi-literate public to
overthrow the criminal sect and restore the Founding Fathers motto and concept of E Pluribus
Unum.
Lee Stranahan of Radio Sputnik has been reporting on Alexandra Chalupa's role for a number of
years now. I hope he gets proper credit as this story comes out.
Given the fact that she got a first hand look at the Outlaw US Empire's injustice system and
its tie-in with BigLie Media, the comments by the now back in Russia Maria Butina carry some legitimate weight that're
worth reading: "'I believe that the Americans are wonderful people, but they have lost their legal
system,' Butina said. 'What is more, they are routinely losing their country. They will lose
it unless they do something'.... "'I am very proud of my country, of my origin,' Butina stressed. 'And I come to realize it
more and more.'"
Should I bold the following, maybe make the lettering red, and put it in all caps:
"They are routinely losing their country."
I know this is an international bar, but the general focus has long been on the Outlaw US
Empire. IMO, Maria Butina is 100% correct. The topic of this thread is just further proof of
that fact. As I tirelessly point out, the federal government has routinely violated its own
fundamental law daily since October 1945. The media goes along with it robotically. And aside
from myself, I know of no other US citizen that's raised the issue--not Chomsky, not Zinn,
not anyone with more credentials and public accessibility than I. I sorta feel like Winston
Smith: Am I the only one who sees and understands what's actually happening?! Well, I've
shared what I know, so I'm no longer alone. But that's not very satisfying, nor is it
satisfactory.
The take away quote from a Matt Taibbi twit
"LOL. Barack Obama is going to love this interview his former DIA James Clapper just gave to
CNN about the Durham probe: "It's frankly disconcerting to be investigated for having done...
what we were told to do by the president of the United States."
"
Prescient observation by Aaron Mate :
"When CNN & MSNBC now cover the criminal inquiry into conduct of intel officials in
Russia probe, they are literally covering their employees -- John Brennan (MSNBC); James
Clapper, Andrew McCabe, James Baker (CNN). I avoid the term, but it's appropriate here: Deep
State TV."
Sure, he sees it, many of us barflies see it, but it's the public within the Outlaw US
Empire that must see and understand this dynamic. If they don't or won't, then
Butina's words are even more correct--They are losing their country.
The take away quote:
"Joe Biden intervened at least two times on matters his son Hunter's firms was being paid to
lobby on, according to government records reviewed by the Washington Examiner."
The merry-go-round scenario you post would indicate a broken state. Biden's been in office
for 43 years, Trump 3 yrs... the potential for dirt is large, mix it with even larger GOP
vengeance should that scenario arise and this will drag on through the decades.
Part and parcel of democracy. Western style democracy at least. Perhaps others can set
theirs up better, though allways, the achilles heel of democracy is information, or media.
Who oversees ensuring voters recieve accurate information.
It took complaints from the public and investigated them. They did not have power to bring
charges, but for a time findings were made public. Once it got onto a money trail it would
keep following and that would lead to other money trails. It was a state agency and had to
stop at state borders but most money trails led to federal politics. It was defanged when
they came too close to federal politics.
Something like this in a countries constitution could work though it could be corrupted the
same as anything else.
Indeed, the guilty are hiding in plain sight. It appears sinister, and is, but I think its a
positive development of late, as it would suggest that big media are scrambling to preserve
the status quo by legitimising these deep state actors.
It wasn't so long ago these deep state types would rather steer clear of the media. Now
they are out there earning bread driving the narrative. Are these deep state media faces a
tactical last resort...?
Obama orchestrated the regime change operation in Ukraine. As we know from Wayne Madsen's
little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama has been a CIA asset since he was a
suckling babe. To promote containment of the Russian menace, the US got in bed with Ukrainian
fascists and successfully exploited political tensions in that country resulting in the
removal of the duly elected Yanukovitch. A right wing billionaire then took the reigns and
Putin orchestrated a referendum in Crimea in retaliation that resulted in its return to
Russia. The Crimeans were and continue to be happy, happier than the rest of Ukrainians under
Kiev neo-fascist free market exploitation.
It is natural that neo-fascist Ukrainians would express their disapproval of Trump, who was making nice with Putin. No
matter what his motives were, he was bucking US anti-Russian policy. I liked Trump at that time for this willingness to end a
Cold War policy sponsored by the US military industrial complex. You can cal it "deep state" if you like. It's not deep and
it's not a shadow government. It's the war party. It's the elite profiting from weapons manufacture. Trump has no principles
except expedience and his pro-Russian stance is likely owing to the money laundering he's been doing for Russian criminals
since he is such a lousy business man. Putin and other Russian kleptocrats saved Trump boy's bacon. So it's very
confusing when bed actors do good things.
Biden is no doubt quite corrupt. But that's got little to do with Trumps quid pro quo with
Ukraine. You say that Ukrainian interference in US elections is well documented. You don't
offer any documents, b. Anti-Putin Ukrainians were naturally anti-Trump. So what? Where's the
beef? Show me how that little piss ant country that can't even pay its fuel bills and gave
the world Chernobyl, interfered in US elections.
Your defense of Trump is getting tiresome. He's a criminal with no respect for the US
Constitution and he deserves to be impeached. This is not to say that Joe Biden or his drug
addict son are not also shit stains. I am just dismayed that you, an ostensibly intelligent
independent commentator would go to bat for an ignoramus like Trump.
The general charge against Trump is that he was "digging up dirt" on opponents. Well
laddy-dah. So what. Welcome to Politics 101.
President Harry Truman probably received as much flak as any politician ever did,
especially after he canned war-hero General MacArthur. But Truman wasn't a candy-ass current
politician complaining about dirt-digging. No, he gave back more than he got, in spades.
What was "give-em-hell" Harry Truman's attitude? Some Truman quotes:
--"I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell."
--"It's the fellows who go to West Point and are trained to think they're gods in uniform
that I plan to take apart"
--"I didn't fire him [General MacArthur] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he
was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three quarters of them
would be in jail."
-- "I'll stand by [you] but if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen ."
That's what Trump is doing and will probably continue to do with fake news. (And he coined
the phrase.)
I'll repeat what I posted here some days ago: this is not a battle between truth vs lies, but
between which is the truth that will guide the USA for the forseeable future.
Empires don't act on facts: they are all-powerful, so they sculpt reality as they see fit.
What determines this is class struggle: the inner contradictions of a society that results
in a given consensus, thus forming a hegemony.
It's not that the liberals deny Biden did what he did, but that they disagree with Trump's
interpretation over what he did. This is what the doctrine of the vital center is all about:
some facts are more facts than others, prevailing the one which maintains the cohesion of the
empire.
There's a battle for America's soul; the American elite is in flux: Russia or China?
In 1984 , the narrative was now 100% in your face and everything had to be
manipulated to match it, which apparently hadn't been needed previously. But we aren't told
if that was done as a "last resort." I would think not given continuing polls showing ongoing
distrust of media, thus the difficulty of manufacturing consent. Look at the great popularity
enjoyed by Sanders amongst 18-30 year-olds who get most of their information online or via
social media and the measures being taken to try and manipulate those realms. Then there're
efforts to counter the misinformation and manipulation by numerous activists, many of which
get cited here.
Another thought: They're out front now because the Establishment's deemed the fight to
control the narrative's being lost, and they've been drafted to rectify the situation. If
correct, they ought to keep failing.
The international nature of this bar and its many flies is that mostly (from what I read)
they have an immense respect for the rule of law. It is this singular concept that we trust
will transcend religion and the quasi religiosity of political allegiances.
The rule of law is a deity-like singularity that embraces all beings equally, or
should. Assaulting that legitimate expectation of the law applying equally is what confronts us
daily in so many ways and when it is observed being assaulted by the highest office bearers
in political and corporate life that we barflies get mighty annoyed. The gross vista of assumed immunity demonstrated by Nixon is equaled by the antics of the
Clinton foundation and its Directors. Each and every one of them.
But it is far worse than that as the assault on the rule of law is daily carried out by
the mafias that infest our societies, the corrupt and violent police that cant/wont protect
our citizens, the international warmongering criminal classes that propagandise us to accept
warring as a legitimate exercise of power even though we recognise it as a crime against
humanity.
So when we see the deplorable state of media and jurisprudence and fairness we can only
think as Maria Butina does "that we are routinely losing our countries" and I would add our
civil societies. The latter is vastly more concerning than the former IMO.
Again, not surprised at all. Pro-democratic/anti-Trump media write articles (obviously
made-to-order) to whitewash already badly discredited Biden, and present all the arguments in
favor of his dark connections with Ukraine as a kind of "conspiracy theory". This is a common
practice. Not having sufficient competence to reasonably refute the arguments of opponents,
MSM (as well as all sorts of "experts") immediately mark the position of opponents with
"conspiracy theory" (there are also other options to choose from: "Putin's agent", "Putin's
useful idiot", "Kremlin's agent", "pro-Russian propaganda", etc.). It is assumed that this
makes unnecessary/optional (and even "toxic") all further conversations with the opponent
(that is, there is no need to answer him, to prove something with facts, etc.), because his
position is a "conspiracy theory".
Western MSM are actively using this simplest propaganda technique of information warfare.
For example, this
was the case when reporting on events in Syria - those journalists, the media, experts
who did not agree with the lie of MSM about Assad's use of the chemical weapons
were declared "conspiracy theorists" (and also "Assad apologists"). This method was
also used to cover "the Skripal case" - those who questioned the British authorities'
version of the "Novichok poisoning" were declared "conspiracy
theorists".
When I see words like "conspiracy theory" in the headlines and see what media use them,
then, you know, it's all clear. No chance for such articles/media to be taken seriously.
@32 jadan quote "Show me how that little piss ant country that can't even pay its fuel
bills...." are you familiar with the name porkoshenko, or any other one of the numbers of
kleptomaniacs in positions of power in the ukraine? how do you think they got their, if
''that little piss ant country' can't even pay it's bills? i am sure you are capable of
adding 2 + 2...
b isn't defending trump here.. he's highlighting how corrupt the msm is! it looks like you
missed that.. check the headline..
This is the way the controlled media works. They provide half a story, half truths, straw-man
facts, selective quotes and 'expert' comment, opinion and unwarranted assumption presented as
fact that all together cover the spectrum from black to white, spread across the many titles.
They also disseminate a fine dusting of lies and actual truth here and there. The result is
the public have a dozen 'truths' to pick from, none of which are real, while the outright
lies and actual truths get dismissed as not credible and the half-truths and straw-man truths
appear to carry some validity. If you look for it you can find it applying in almost every
bit of 'news', if it is in any way controversial, whether it is partisan politics, Climate
Change or Brexit to give examples.
As we know from Wayne Madsen's little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama
has been a CIA asset since he was a suckling babe.
If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas
drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about
Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge.
Ukraine was just one hell of a honey pot that too many couldn't resist visiting.
Kind of like Russia (Uranium One and HRC) or China (Biden for a start).
Giulani is going to be very busy - he still hasn't produced anything that wasn't already
published, but I bet he has much more.
... smart enough to understand and agree that they needed someone like Trump?
Yes, I do think they are smart enough and agreed to act in their collective best interest.
Kissinger first wrote of MAGA in a WSJ Op-Ed in August 2014. Trump entered the race in June
2015, IIRC.
Do you think that Trump - who failed at multiple businesses - just woke up one day and
became a political and geopolitical genius? As a candidate he said he'd "take the oil" and
now, more than 3 years later, he has! LOL.
And JUST AFTER the Mueller investigation formally ends, Trump ONCE AGAIN solicits a
foreign power to interfere in a US election. The biggest beneficiary? Deep State BIDEN! Who
now gets all the media attention.
FYI Wm Gruff makes your same point often: that Deep State mistakes demonstrate that they
couldn't possible pull of a Trump win (if that's what they wanted). I disagree.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
I very much doubt that anyone will go to jail - or serve any meaningful jail time if they
do - over the Deep State shenanigans. Nor will people 'wake up' and see how they've been
played anytime soon. Even the smarter, more savvy denizens of the moa bar have much
difficulty connecting dots. Dots that they don't want to see.
If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas
drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about
Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge
Trump at first threw down the gauntlet to the spies and proclaimed his autocratic
prerogative when God held off the rain for his inauguration (!) but now he would gladly get
on his knees between Gina Haspel's legs if the CIA would only help him stay in power.
What
distinguishes Obama from other presidents is the degree to which he was manufactured. He made
it to the WH without much of a political base. Control of the political context, media and
process, launched Obama to the top. It was fulfillment of the liberal American dream. It was
a great coup. Talk about the "deep state"! It's staring us all in the face.
Oh, but Deep State DID interfere.
FACT: Deep Stater Hillary colluded with DNC against Sanders. ( But she would NEVER
participate in collusion that caused her to lose an election./sarc LOL)
And now pro-Trump people say Clapper, Brennan, and Comey interfered in the 2016 election
OR committed treason by trying to unseat the President!
So we can talk about Deep State interference . . . as long as it follows the partisan
narrative that's been established for us.
I have news for you. USA Presidents use strong coercive persuasive arguments or means of
speech ALL THE TIME. And always have. Sometimes they can be subtle and allude to an action
that might make them happy and sometimes they can be blunt. Its a presidential thing. It is
what statespeople do when they 'negotiate' for their desired outcome.
It is not illegal or corrupt. It is power nakedly exercised. Just because Biden is a
candidate for the same presidential role does not confer immunity for Biden's graft in favor
of his son a few years back. You make a mockery of your position.
One USA President visited Australia once and when confronted with a roadblock of
demonstrators seeking peace in Vietnam demanded of the Australian Premier to "drive over the
bastards". That didn't happen but the President continued to drive all over the Vietnamese
innocents.
Trump may be a grifter and a scumbag but there are warmongers well ahead of him in the cue
for justice. Take Hillary Clinton for example. She is a ruthless killer and the greatest
breach of USA national Security ever with her Secretary of State emails held on an unsecured
server in her closet.
The same powers some call "deep state," are the same powers that have given us ALL modern day
presidents, probably from FDR on.
IMO, they are nothing more, nothing less than the "captains of commerce", who, through the
vast accumulation of wealth by monopoly, buy our "representatives" to legislate rules and
regulations to benefit themselves.
Our so-called "leaders" work for them, with very few exceptions, and transcends all
political parties, and now also the Supreme Court.
$ has been ruled speech, unlimited $ is allowed to be given to politicians for elections.
How could anything but massive corruption take place under this kind of system?
they make it look as if Trump did something crazy or illegal. He does plenty of that but not
in this case.
You suffer from TDS. What on Earth are you talking about here? Plenty of that? Say what?
Why do you undercut your entire point in your article with this little piece of utter
nonsense?
Name one thing that Trump that has done that is illegal. Name one thing that is crazy. Stop apologizing to the crazies by denigrating Trump. Your entire article was all about
how none of the bs is true. And then you put your own brand of bs in there at the end. Cut it
out.
@ 54 jadan... thanks for your comments... i am feeling more philosophical tonight, as i don't
have a gig and have some time to express myself a bit more here.. first off, i don't like any
of these characters - trump, biden, and etc. etc.. i have no horse in the game here, and it
sounds like you don't either.. your comment- "The issue is Trump's extortion of Ukraine, not
Biden's extortion of Ukraine." i can go along with that until i reflect back onto what
increasingly looks like an agenda to get trump even prior to when he was elected, at which
point i want to say why are we only examining trump in all of this? who gets to decide what
the issue is, or as Caitlin Johnstone lets to say - who gets to decide what the narrative is
here? i don't have an answer for this, but those who appear to be taking a side in all of
this - including you with the quote i make - seem to think that it has to be the issue of
trumps extortion of Ukraine, verses what appears to me the CIA - Dem party extortion of the
ordinary USA persons mind...
let me back up... Has mccarthyism version 2 come to life since the advent of what happened
in the Ukraine from 2014 onward?? is the issue of a new cold war with Russia been on the
burner for at least 5 or more years here and began before trump was even considered a
potential candidate for the republican party? did Russia take back Crimea, which wasn't
supposed to happen? is this good for military industrial complex sales? and etc. etc..
so, i don't think it is fair to only consider the latest boneheaded thing trump did when i
consider the bigger picture unfolding here.. now, maybe you think i am a trump apologist... i
am just saying what the backdrop looks like to me here.. i am sure biden is small potatoes in
the bigger picture here, but if taking a closer examination of what took place in ukraine
leading into 2014, with the victoria nulands and geoffrey pyatts and etc. etc. of usa
diplomatic corps, usa dept of state and etc. could lead to a better understanding of how the
usa has went down the road it has for the past 60 years of foreign policy on the world stage,
it would be a good start... so, to me - it ain't about trump.. it is about usa foreign policy
and how it has sucked the big one on the world stage for at least since the time of vietnam
when i was a teenager..
i suppose it depends on the time frame one wants to take.. my time frame will be
considered an evasion of the moment to some, but it is how i see it.. sure, trump is scum,
but the bigger issue to me is the usa's foreign policy agenda.. anything that can pull back
the covers on that would be an extremely good thing... now, perhaps this is the straw that
broke trumps back and the deep state will not tolerate being scrutinized.. that i could
understand, but i am not going to be putting it all on trump as the reason the covers have to
remain on all the shit the usa has been responsible for on the world stage to date and
especially the past 10 years.. i am not able to blame trump for all of that.. and as you can
see, i would prefer to get down to the nitty gritty of who is zooming who here... the msm for
all intensive purposes is complicit in duping the american public.. that to me is the gist of
b's comment here, not that he is cheer-leading for trump.. i just don't see it that way...i'm
definitely not!
"... "What they did was treasonous, OK? It was treasonous," he told author Doug Wead for his upcoming book, " Inside Trump's White House: The Real Story of His Presidency." ..."
President Trump has ratcheted up his claim that the Obama White House spied on his 2016 campaign, charging in a new book that
it was a "treasonous" act by the former Democratic president.
"The interesting thing out of all of this is that we caught them spying on the election. They were spying on my campaign. So you
know? What is that all about?" said Trump.
"I have never ever said this, but truth is, they got caught spying. They were spying," said Trump who then added, "Obama."
In 2017, Trump tweeted that he felt the Obama White House "had my wires tapped" in Trump Tower. He later said he didn't mean it
literally but that he felt his campaign was being spied on.
Attorney General William Barr earlier this year said he was looking into whether "improper surveillance" may have occurred in
2016.
He has tasked a prosecutor to look into Obama officials and other officials who sparked the Russia collusion investigation into
Trump after a report showed no collusion. New reports on that investigation described it as "criminal" in nature.
"It turned out I was right. By the way," Trump told Wead in excerpts provided to Secrets.
"In fact, what I said was peanuts compared to what they did. They were spying on my campaign. They got caught and they said,
'Oh we were not spying. It was actually an investigation.' Can you imagine an administration investigating its political opponents?"
said the president.
In the book, Trump said that the Russia investigation undercut his presidency.
" Anybody else would be unable to function under the kind of pressure and distraction I had. They couldn't get anything done.
No other president should ever have to go through this. But understand, there was no collusion. They would have had to make something
up," he said.
Technically, it was sedition, unless Trump can show that Obama was acting for a foreign power. There definitely were foreign
powers involved, the question is who was in charge?
The attempt to circumvent democracy and ensure Hillary's victory in the elections with falsified Russian collusion allegations
along with a constant communist media bombardment to discredit Trump, absolutely constitutes treason. What you need to understand
is that socialist progressives serve a different god - lucifer - and a different nation - Israel; that they do not have your best
interests at heart is a given.
Everything they do is to undermine traditional morality and the moral fabric that holds civilization together. Ordo Ab Cao.
Flynn's story became a classic story of FBI entrapment...
Notable quotes:
"... The Federalist ..."
"... According to the 37-page motion , a team of " high-ranking FBI officials orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new president's National Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of criminal activity -- they already had tapes of all the relevant conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn -- but for the purpose of trapping him into making statements they could allege as false ." ..."
"... Notably, Lisa Page lied to the DOJ, saying that she didn't recall whether she took part in editing Flynn's 302 form . ..."
"... Then, quoting from a sealed statement by Strzok, Powell reveals that over next two weeks, there were "many meetings" between Strzok and [FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe to discuss "whether to interview [] National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and if so, what interview strategies to use." ..."
"... Another startling claim in Powell's filing references a purported conversation between former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Washington Post reporter David Ignatius, which claims Clapper told the reporter "words to the effect of 'take the kill shot on Flynn,' after Ignatius reportedly obtained the transcript of Flynn's phone calls. ..."
"... Lastly, Powell's filing also notes that US District Judge Rudolph Contreras, who recused himself after accepting Flynn's guilty plea, had a personal relationship with Peter Strzok , according to text messages. ..."
FBI Entrapped Flynn With Manipulated Evidence As Clapper Allegedly Issued 'Kill Shot' Order: Court Docs by
Tyler Durden Sat, 10/26/2019 - 11:30 0 SHARES
A bombshell court filing from Michael Flynn's new legal team alleges that FBI agents altered a '302' form - the official record
of the former national security adviser's interview - that resulted in the DOJ charging him with lying to investigators.
Early last week Flynn attorney Sidney Powell filed a sealed reply to federal prosecutors' claims that they have satisfied their
requirements for turning over evidence in the case. A
minimally redacted copy of the
reply brief was made public late last week, revealing the plot to destroy Flynn , as reported by
The Federalist 's Margot Cleveland.
According to the 37-page motion , a team of " high-ranking FBI officials orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new president's
National Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of criminal activity -- they already had tapes of all
the relevant conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn -- but for the purpose of trapping him into making statements they
could allege as false ."
At the heart of the matter is the 302 form 'documenting' an FBI interview in which Flynn was asked about his conversations with
former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Powell alleges that FBI lawyer Lisa Page edited her lover Peter Strzok's account of the
interview - texting him, "I made your edits."
"On February 10, 2017, the news broke -- attributed to 'senior intelligence officials' -- that Mr. Flynn had discussed sanctions
with Ambassador Kislyak, contrary to what Vice President Pence had said on television previously." Following this leak, "overnight,"
Flynn's 302 was changed -- and substantively so. " Those changes added an unequivocal statement that 'FLYNN stated he did not'
-- in response to whether Mr. Flynn had asked Kislyak to vote in a certain manner or slow down the UN vote."
" This is a deceptive manipulation " Powell highlighted, " because, as the notes of the agents show, Mr. Flynn was not even
sure he had spoken to Russia/Kislyak on this issue . He had talked to dozens of countries." The overnight changes to the 302 also
included the addition of a line, indicating Flynn had been question on whether "KISLYAK described any Russian response to a request
by FLYNN."
But the agent's notes do not include that question or answer, Powell stressed, yet it was later made into the criminal offense
charges against Flynn . And "the draft also shows that the agents moved a sentence to make it seem to be an answer to a question
it was not ," Powell added.
Here's Powell describing how they know the 302 form was altered:
Notably, Lisa Page lied to the DOJ, saying that she didn't recall whether she took part in editing Flynn's 302 form .
Laying the groundwork
Leading up to the interview with Flynn, the text messages reveal that the FBI wanted to capitalize on news of the 'salacious and
unverified' Steele dossier - and whether they "can use it as a pretext to go interview some people," Strzok texted Page.
Then, quoting from a sealed statement by Strzok, Powell reveals that over next two weeks, there were "many meetings" between
Strzok and [FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe to discuss "whether to interview [] National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and
if so, what interview strategies to use." And "on January 23, the day before the interview, the upper echelon of the FBI met to
orchestrate it all . Deputy Director McCabe, General Counsel James Baker, Lisa Page, Strzok, David Bowdich, Trish Anderson, and
Jen Boone strategized to talk with Mr. Flynn in such a way as to keep from alerting him from understanding that he was being interviewed
in a criminal investigation of which he was the target."
Next came "Comey's direction to 'screw it' in contravention of longstanding DOJ protocols," leading McCabe to personally call
Flynn to schedule the interview . Yet none of Comey's notes on the decision to interview Flynn were turned over to defense. Even
Obama-holdover "Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates candidly opined that the interview 'was problematic' and ' it was not always
clear what the FBI was doing to investigate Flynn ," Powell stressed. Yet again, the prosecution did not turn over Yates' notes,
but only "disclosed a seven-line summary of Ms. Yates statement six months after Mr. Flynn's plea."
-The Federalist
'Kill Shot'
Another startling claim in Powell's filing references a purported conversation between former Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper and Washington Post reporter David Ignatius, which claims Clapper told the reporter "words to the effect of 'take the
kill shot on Flynn,' after Ignatius reportedly obtained the transcript of Flynn's phone calls.
Clapper's spokesman told Fox News that he "absolutely did not say those words to David Ignatius," adding "It's absolutely
false" and "absurd."
Powell claims that Ignatius was given the Flynn-Kislyak call transcripts by a Pentagon official who was also Stefan Halper's "handler."
Halper - who was
paid over $1 million by the Obama administration - was one of many spies the FBI sent to infiltrate the Trump campaign.
Halper, in 2016, contacted several members of the Trump campaign including former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos
and former aides Carter Page and Sam Clovis.
"The evidence the defense requests will eviscerate any factual basis for the plea and reveal the conduct so outrageous --
if there is not enough already -- to mandate dismissal of this prosecution for egregious government misconduct ," Powell wrote.
-
Fox News
Lastly, Powell's filing also notes that US District Judge Rudolph Contreras, who recused himself after accepting Flynn's
guilty plea, had a personal relationship with Peter Strzok , according to text messages.
"The government knew that well in advance of Mr. Flynn's plea that Judge Contreras was a friend of Peter Strzok and his recusal
was even discussed in an exchange of multiple texts," writes Powell, referencing Strzok-Page texts discussing Strzok and Contreras
speaking "in detail" about anything "meaningful enough to warrant recusal."
"The government knew that well in advance of Mr. Flynn's plea that Judge Contreras was a friend of Peter Strzok and his recusal
was even discussed in an exchange of multiple texts."
"... "I've always felt that the media leaned left. That wasn't a surprise to anyone. "But what we've seen over the past three years is something entirely different. This is the media actively engaging on one side of a partisan warfare. It's overt." ..."
"... "We had a media cheerleading the FBI for meddling in American politics. Can you ever imagine a time in American history where the media would have played such a role? ..."
"... "I keep warning my friends on the other side of the aisle: Think about the precedent you are setting here," Strassel said. ..."
The anti- Trump "Resistance" has devastated core American
institutions and broken longstanding political norms in seeking to defeat and now oust from office President Donald Trump, said Kimberley
Strassel, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and member of the Journal's editorial board.
"And this, to me, is the irony, right? We've been told for three years that Donald Trump is wrecking institutions," Strassel
said in an interview with The Epoch Times for the "American Thought Leaders" program.
" But in terms of real wreckage to institutions, it's not on Donald Trump that public faith in the
FBI and the
Department of Justice has precipitously fallen.
That's because of Jim Comey and Andy McCabe. It's not on Donald Trump that the Senate confirmation process for the Supreme Court
is in ashes after what happened to Brett Kavanaugh. It's not on Donald Trump that we are turning
impeachment into a partisan political tool."
The damage inflicted by the anti-Trump Resistance is the subject of Strassel's new book, "Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump
Haters Are Breaking America."
Strassel uses the term "haters" deliberately, to differentiate this demographic from Trump's "critics."
In Strassel's view, all thoughtful critics of Trump - and she counts herself among them - would look at Trump the same way that
they have examined past presidents - namely, to call him out when he does something wrong, but also laud him when he does something
right.
" The 'haters' can't abide nuance. To the Resistance, any praise - no matter how qualified - of Trump is tantamount to American
betrayal, " Strassel writes in "Resistance (At All Costs)."
She told The Epoch Times: "Up until the point at which Donald Trump was elected, what happened when political parties lost is
that they would retreat, regroup, lick their wounds, talk about what they did wrong.
"That's not what happened this time around. Instead, you had people who essentially said we should have won."
From the moment Trump was elected, this group believed Trump to be an illegitimate president and therefore felt they could use
whatever means necessary to remove him from office , Strassel said.
'Unprecedented Acts'
"One thing I try really hard to do in this book is enunciate what rules and regulations and standards were broken, what political
boundaries were crossed, because I think that that's where we're seeing the damage," Strassel said.
The "unprecedented acts" of the Resistance have caused the public to lose trust in longstanding institutions such as the FBI,
the CIA, and the Department of Justice, and cheapened important political processes like impeachment, she said.
The Resistance fabricated and pushed the theory that it was Trump's collusion with Russia that won him the presidency, not the
support of the American people, and lied about the origins of the so-called evidence -- the Steele dossier -- that was used by the
FBI to justify a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, Strassel said.
"We have never, in the history of this country, had a counterintelligence investigation into a political campaign," she said.
In an anecdote that Strassel recounts in her book, she asked former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)
if there was anything in America's laws that could have prohibited this situation.
Nunes, who had helped write or update many laws concerning the powers of the intelligence community, replied, "I would never have
conceived of the FBI using our counterintelligence capabilities to target a political campaign.
"If it had crossed any of our minds, I can guarantee we'd have specifically written: 'Don't do that.'"
In Strassel's view, the Resistance is partially fueled by deep-seated anger, or what others have termed "Trump derangement syndrome"
-- an inability to look rationally at a man so far outside of Washington norms.
But at the same time, in Strassel's view, much of the Resistance is motivated by a desire to amass political power using whatever
means necessary.
"That involves removing the president who won. That involves some of these other things that you hear them talking about now:
packing the Supreme Court, getting rid of the electoral college, letting 16-year-olds vote," she said.
"These are not reforms. Reforms are things that the country broadly agrees are going to help improve stuff. This is changing
the rules so that you get power, and you stay in power."
The impeachment inquiry into the president, based on his phone call with Ukraine's president, is just another example of how the
Resistance is violating political norms and relying on flimsy evidence to try to remove him from office, she said.
Testimony in the inquiry has taken place behind closed doors, led by three House committees, and Democrats have so far refused
to release transcripts from the depositions of former and current
State Department employees.
"[Impeachment] is one of the most serious and huge powers in the Constitution. It was meant always by the founders to be reserved
for truly unusual circumstances. They debated not even putting it in because they were concerned that this is what would happen,"
Strassel said.
In the impeachment inquiries against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, Strassel said, American leaders "understood the great importance
of convincing the American public that their decision to use this tool was just and legitimate.
"So if you look back at Watergate, they had hundreds of hours of testimony broadcast over TV that people tuned into and watched.
It's one of the reasons that Richard Nixon resigned before the House ever held a final impeachment vote on him, because the public
had been convinced. He knew he had to go," she said.
But now, instead of access to the testimonies, the public is receiving only leaked snippets and dueling narratives.
"You have Democrats saying, 'Oh, this is very bad.' And Republicans saying, 'Oh, it's not so bad at all.' What are Americans
supposed to think?" Strassel said.
Bureaucratic Resistance
Within the federal bureaucracy, there is a "vast swath of unelected officials" who have "a great deal of power to slow things
down, mess things up, file the whistleblower complaints, leak information, actively engage against the president's policies," Strassel
said.
"It's their job to implement his agenda. And yet a lot of them are part of the Resistance, too," she said.
Data shows that in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, government bureaucrats overwhelmingly contributed toward the
Clinton campaign over the Trump campaign.
Ninety-five percent, or about $1.9 million, of bureaucrats' donations went to Clinton, according to
The Hill's analysis of donations from federal workers up until September 2016. In particular, employees at the Department of
Justice gave 97 percent of their donations to Clinton. For the State Department, it was even higher -- 99 percent.
"Imagine being a CEO and showing up and knowing that 95 percent of your workforce despises you and doesn't want you to be there,"
Strassel said.
Strassel pointed to when former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, publicly questioned
the constitutionality of Trump's immigration ban and directed Justice Department employees to disobey the order.
"It was basically a call to arms," Strassel said. "What she should've done is honorably resigned if she felt that she could
not in any way enforce this duly issued executive order.
"It really kicked off what we have seen ever since then: The nearly daily leaks from the administration, the whistleblower
complaints," as well as "all kind of internal foot-dragging and outright obstruction to the president's agenda."
According to a
report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, in Trump's first 126 days in office, his administration
"faced 125 leaked stories -- one leak a day -- containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the
standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama."
Activist Media
Strassel says the media has played a critical role in bolstering the anti-Trump Resistance.
"I've been a reporter for 25 years," Strassel said.
"I've always felt that the media leaned left. That wasn't a surprise to anyone. "But what we've seen over the past three years
is something entirely different. This is the media actively engaging on one side of a partisan warfare. It's overt."
Along the way, the media have largely abandoned journalistic standards, "whether it be the use of anonymous sources, whether it
be putting uncorroborated accusations into the paper, whether it's using biased sources for information and cloaking them as neutral
observers," she said.
Among the many examples of media misinformation cited in Strassel's book is a December 2017 CNN piece that claimed to have evidence
that then-candidate Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. had been offered early access to hacked emails from the Democratic National
Committee. But it turned out
the date was wrong . Trump
Jr. had received an email about the WikiLeaks release one day after WikiLeaks had made the documents public.
"If it hurts Donald Trump, they're on board," Strassel said. And in many cases, the attacks on Trump have been contradictory.
"He's either the dunce you claim he is every day or he's the most sophisticated Manchurian candidate that the world has ever
seen. You can't have it both ways.
"He's either a dictator and an autocrat who is consolidating power around himself to rule with an iron fist, or he's the evil
conservative who's cutting regulations."
Contrary to claims of authoritarianism, Trump has significantly decreased the size of the federal government. Notably, he reduced
the Federal Register, a collection of all the national government's rules and regulations, to the lowest it's been since Bill Clinton's
first year in office.
"You can't be a libertarian dictator," Strassel said.
In addition to the barrage of attacks on Trump, the media has actively sought to "de-legitimize anybody who has a different viewpoint
than they do, or who is reporting the facts and the story in a way other than they would like them to be presented."
"They would love to make it sound as though none of us are worthy of writing about this story," she said.
"The media is supposed to be our guardrails, right? When a political party transgresses a political boundary, they're supposed
to say 'No, that's beyond the pale.'"
Instead, "they indulged this behavior," Strassel said.
"We had a media cheerleading the FBI for meddling in American politics. Can you ever imagine a time in American history where
the media would have played such a role?
"In a way, I blame that for so much else that has gone wrong."
Long-Term Consequences
Strassel says the actions taken by the Resistance will have long-term consequences for America.
"I keep warning my friends on the other side of the aisle: Think about the precedent you are setting here," Strassel said.
For example, if Joe Biden wins the presidency in 2020
but Republicans take back the House, would the Republican-dominated House immediately launch impeachment proceedings against Biden
for alleged corruption in Ukraine?
"I wouldn't necessarily use the word [corruption], but there's a lot of Republicans who happily would. And if they thought
they'd get another shot at the White House, why not?" Strassel said.
It's short-term thinking, she said, just like Sen. Harry Reid's decision in 2013 to drop the number of votes needed to overcome
a filibuster for lower-court judges.
"Did he really stop to think about the fact that it paved the way for Republicans to get rid of the filibuster for Supreme
Court judges?" Strassel said.
If there's any rule in Washington, "it's that when you set the bar low, it just keeps going lower," Strassel said.
"Donald Trump is going to be president for at most another five years. But the actions and the destruction that's coming with
some of this could be with us for a very long time," she said.
"Should anyone allow their deep disregard for one particular man to so change the structure and the fabric of the country?"
Rachel Maddow's trademark pouty-face got a workout as she strained to imagine " what the
thing is that Durham might be looking into." Yes, that's a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside
an enigma, all right with a sputtering fuse sticking out of it.
... ... ...
Over in the locked ward of CNN, Andy Cooper and Jeff Toobin attempted to digest the criminal
investigation news as if someone had ordered in a platter of shit sandwiches for the green room
just before air-time. Toobin pretended to not know exactly who the mysterious Joseph Misfud
was, and struggled to even pronounce his name
... ... ...
As for impeachment, ringmaster Rep. Adam Schiff is surely steaming straight into his own
historic Joe McCarthy moment when somebody of incontestable standing denounces him as a fraud
and a scoundrel and the mysterious workings of nonlinear behavior tips the political mob past a
criticality threshold, shifting the weight of consensus out of darkness and madness. It has
happened before in history.
Matt Taibbi recently coined the term MSNBC Democrats to describe those who primarily get their news from MSNBC instead of other
sources. They are more likely to believe Russiagate is a fact. According to new polling data, they are also far more likely to believe
the economy is bad.
The online poll, by data firm Morning Consult, asks the same five core questions as the University of Michigan's well-known consumer
sentiment survey, and for nearly two years has been collecting about 210,000 responses a month, compared to 500 or so each month
for the Michigan survey.
American voters face the same set of economic facts, from low unemployment to the risks from a trade war, but the survey's index
of overall sentiment - at 108 just above the 100 line that separates positive from negative impressions of the economic outlook -
masked the huge divide between those who approve of Trump, whose views measured a far rosier 136, and those who disapprove of the
president, with a reading of 88 .
The results, weighted by factors like age, race and sex, to be nationally representative, were similarly skewed based on media
consumption. Viewers of conservative-leaning Fox News registered 139 for current sentiment about the economy; viewers of MSNBC, an
outlet often critical of Trump, registered 89 . Readers of the New York Times sat in the middle at 107, near those who get their
news from Facebook (110) and Twitter (112).
This chart from the article shows respondents' view of the economy by news source:
The results shouldn't be surprising to anyone paying attention. MSNBC is in the liberal fake news business while Fox is in the
conservative fake news business. Interestingly, the New York Times falls in the middle. This sort of makes sense. While I don't trust
their political reporting, especially anything Russiagate related, their coverage of the economy does seem to be fair and balanced.
I think the economy is shit, personally, and professionally. It's pretty expensive to live these days.
Negative interest rates are not what I would expect in a functioning economy... And say nothing of corporate balance sheets,
gold repatriation and denials of repatriation, Q4, and a shit ton of big banksters just dying to have a bail-in.
But, I think that the MSNBC Democrat would simply blame Drumpf.
Just found it an interesting angle to essay. Stopped clocks and whatnot.
Rachel Maddow's trademark pouty-face got a workout as she strained to imagine " what the
thing is that Durham might be looking into." Yes, that's a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside
an enigma, all right with a sputtering fuse sticking out of it.
... ... ...
Over in the locked ward of CNN, Andy Cooper and Jeff Toobin attempted to digest the criminal
investigation news as if someone had ordered in a platter of shit sandwiches for the green room
just before air-time. Toobin pretended to not know exactly who the mysterious Joseph Misfud
was, and struggled to even pronounce his name
... ... ...
As for impeachment, ringmaster Rep. Adam Schiff is surely steaming straight into his own
historic Joe McCarthy moment when somebody of incontestable standing denounces him as a fraud
and a scoundrel and the mysterious workings of nonlinear behavior tips the political mob past a
criticality threshold, shifting the weight of consensus out of darkness and madness. It has
happened before in history.
Battle of Blair... on Thu, 10/24/2019 - 7:10pm The same media that can't stop
chanting Russian interference, has completely ignored
this bombshell.
A recent investigation from independent news outlet Middle East Eye (9/30/19) uncovered
that a senior Twitter executive is, in fact, an officer in the British Army's 77th Brigade, a
unit dedicated to psychological operations (psyops), propaganda and online warfare.
I had to take note that later down the article it also read:
In September, Twitter suspended multiple accounts belonging to Cuban state media. And
along with Facebook and YouTube, it also suspended hundreds of Chinese accounts it claimed
were attempting to "sow political discord in Hong Kong" by "undermining the legitimacy" of
the protest movement. These social media giants have already deleted thousands of Venezuelan,
Russian and Iranian accounts and pages that were, in their own words, "in line with" those
governments' positions. The message is clear: Sharing opinions that do not fall in line with
official US doctrine will not be tolerated online .
I found this quite interesting because I was just permanently banned from Twitter for saying
to a propagandist media writer that "corporate whores gotta corporate whore."
"... The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking points without understanding any of it. ..."
The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the
media is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world -
the MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them
distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of
affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking
points without understanding any of it.
While it will always be mystifying to me why so many people on the street blindly support
America fighting and dying in the middle east, the support of the MSM and the paid hacks for
eternal war is no surprise. I hope they get to send their children and grandchildren to these
wars. More than that, I hope we get out of these wars. Trump might be able to put an end to
it, and not just in Syria, if he wins a second term, which he will if he is allowed to
contest the next election. There is however a chance that the borg will pull the rug from
under him and bar him from the elections. Hope that doesn't come to pass.
"... Clearly, the US hopes wrench Turkey from the Russian embrace. Moscow's studied indifference toward the US-Turkish cogitations betrays its uneasiness. Conceivably, Erdogan will expect Putin to take a holistic view, considering Russia's flourishing and high lucrative economic and military ties with Turkey and the imperative to preserve the momentum of Russia-Turkey relationship. ..."
"... If the US policy in Syria in recent years promoted the Kurdish identity, it has now swung to the other extreme of stoking the fires of Turkish revanchism. This is potentially catastrophic for regional stability. ..."
"... the main outcome will be that Turkey feels it has western support for its long-term occupation of Syrian territory. ..."
"... Arguably, US expects Turkey's cooperation to strengthen its strategy in Syria (and Iraq) where it seeks to contain Iran's influence. From Ankara, Pompeo travelled to Jerusalem to brief Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. " ..."
Now, [..] the sense of betrayal among the Kurds [..] is matched only by their outrage at who
will move in: Turkish soldiers supported by Syrian fighters the United States had long
rejected as extremists, criminals and thugs .
...
The deadly battles [..] have also given new leeway to Syrian fighters once considered too
extreme or unruly to receive American military support.
...
Grandly misnamed the Syrian National Army, this coalition of Turkish-backed militias is in
fact largely composed of the dregs of the eight-year-old conflict's failed rebel movement.
Early in the war [..] the military and the C.I.A. sought to train and equip moderate,
trustworthy rebels to fight the government and the Islamic State.
A few of those now fighting in the northeast took part in those failed programs, but most
were rejected as too extreme or too criminal . Some have expressed extremist sensibilities or
allied with jihadist groups.
The reality is the opposite of what the NYT claims. The majority of the groups now
fighting with the Turkish army had earlier received support from the U.S. Even their nominal
leader is the same one who the U.S. earlier paid, armed and promoted.
On August 31, the Syrian National Coalition came together and elected the president and the
cabinet of the Syrian Interim Government in which Abdurrahman Mustafa was elected president
and Salim Idriss was elected defense minister . With the new cabinet, the Syrian Interim
Government became more active on the ground, started visiting each faction of the National
Army, and accelerated the stalled negotiations to unite the National Army and the NLF under
one command.
Among the 41 factions that joined the merger, 15 are from the NLF and 26 from the National
Army. Thirteen of these factions were formed after the United States cut its support to the
armed Syrian opposition. Out of the 28 factions, 21 were previously supported by the United
States , three of them via the Pentagon's program to combat DAESH. Eighteen of these factions
were supplied by the CIA via the MOM Operations Room in Turkey, a joint intelligence
operation room of the 'Friends of Syria' to support the armed opposition. Fourteen factions
of the 28 were also recipients of the U.S.-supplied TOW anti-tank guided missiles.
The SETA study provides a detailed list of the groups involved in the current Turkish
invasion of Syria. Not only is their commander Salim Idriss a former U.S. stooge but the
majority of these groups did receive U.S. support and weapons.
The New York Times claim that only "a few of those" who now fight the YPG Kurds
took part in the U.S. programs is a blatant lie.
The NYT piece quotes three 'experts' who testify that the 'rebels' the U.S. had
armed are really, really bad:
"These are the misfits of the conflict, the worst of the worst," said Hassan Hassan, a
Syrian-born scholar tracking the fighting. "They have been notorious for extortion, theft and
banditry, more like thugs than rebels -- essentially mercenaries."
It was Hassan Hassan who since the start of the conflict lobbied for
arming the rebels from his perch at the UAE's media flagship The National .
Another 'expert' quoted is the Israeli propagandist Elizabeth Tsurkov:
"They are basically gangsters, but they are also racist toward Kurds and other minorities,"
said Elizabeth Tsurkov, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. "No human should
be subjected to their rule."
Tsurkov earlier
lauded the Israeli hiring and arming of the very same 'Syrian rebels'.
Another 'expert' quoted by the Times is a co-chair of the 'congressionally
sponsored bipartisan Syrian Study Group':
"We are turning areas that had been controlled by our allies over to the control of criminals
or thugs, or that in some cases groups were associated or fighting alongside Al Qaeda," said
Ms. Stroul, of the Syrian Study Group. "It is a profound and epic strategic blunder."
The 'Syrian Study Group' wants to prolong the war on Syria. Ms.
Stroul and her co-chair Michael Singh reside at the Washington
Institute which is a part of the Zionist lobby and has long
argued for 'arming the Syrian rebels'.
The Times report does not mention that the 'experts' it quotes all once lobbied for
arming the very same groups they are now lamenting about. When these groups ran rampant in the
areas they took from the Syrian government the Times and its 'experts' were lauding
them all the way. No effort to support them was big enough. All crimes they committed were
covered up or excused.
Now, as the very same rebels attack the Kurds, they are suddenly called out for being what
they always have been.
Posted by b on October 20, 2019 at 11:19 UTC |
Permalink
Hah! More lies from the NYT....mainstream media in the west has deteriorated into a
propaganda channel for the Military Industrial Complex and the oligarchy, pumping out a never
ending tide of lying filth aimed at more and more war (more and more weapon sales) and
promoting and preserving predatory capitalism (more money for the Billionaire class, less for
you).
In my own reading of MSM press and my own watching of the MSM Talking Heads I believe I've
indentified 8 techniques that amoral, dangerous, barely competent idiots that have the cheek
to call themselves journalists use to lie to you, the reader/viewer/listener. Here's my
list...
Okay how practical.
Now only is the NYT trying to whitewash themselves by faking, they are also kind enough to do
the same for their Jihadi lovin partners in crime.
How empathic! How sensible! Like a true moral authority.
BTW: It seems my previous claims were right. The Turks made a 180 and allied with the US
again, reviving the NATO allaince. Now that the Kurds are out of the way in Turk-US
relations, US and NATO has much more to offer than Russia, and noe Erdogan has support from
NATO and will not be deterred by Putin.
B, i respect you immensly, but your belief the Turkish invasion was Erdogan doing some secret
Putin plan was unproven at the time, and now, AT LEAST since the US-Turk deal, is
obsolte.
Read M. K. BHADRAKUMARs blog, he thought like you, but after the US-Turk deal, EVERYTHING
HAS CHANGED:
"The extraordinary US overture to Turkey regarding northern Syria resulted in a joint
statement on Thursday, whose ramifications can be rated only in the fulness of time , as
several intersecting tracks are running.
The US objectives range from Trump's compulsions in domestic politics to the future
trajectory of the US policies toward Syria and the impact of any US-Turkish rapprochement on
the geopolitics of the Syrian conflict.
Meanwhile, the US-Turkish joint statement creates new uncertainties. The two countries
have agreed on a set of principles -- Turkey's crucial status as a NATO power ; security of
Christian minorities in Syria; prevention of an ISIS surge; creation of a "safe zone" on
Turkish-Syrian border; a 120-hour ceasefire ("pause") in Turkish military operations leading
to a permanent halt, hopefully.
The devil lies in the details. Principally, there is no transparency regarding the future
US role in Syria . The Kurds and the US military will withdraw from the 30-kilometre broad
buffer zone. What thereafter? In the words of the US Vice-President Mike Pence at the press
conference in Ankara on Thursday,
"Kurdish population in Syria, with which we have a strong relationship, will continue to
endure. The United States will always be grateful for our partnership with SDF in defeating
ISIS, but we recognise the importance and the value of a safe zone to create a buffer between
Syria proper and the Kurdish population and -- and the Turkish border. And we're going to be
working very closely ."
To be sure, everything devolves upon the creation of the safe zone. Turkey envisages a
zone stretching across the entire 440 kilometre border with Syria upto Iraqi border, while
the US special envoy James Jeffrey remains non-committal, saying it is up to the "Russians
and the Syrians in other areas of the northeast and in Manbij to the west of the Euphrates"
to agree to Turkey's maximalist stance.
Herein lies the rub. Jeffrey would know Ankara will never get its way with Moscow and
Damascus. In fact, President Bashar al-Assad told in unequivocal terms to a high-level
Russian delegation visiting Damascus on Friday, "At the current phase it is necessary to
focus on putting an end to aggression and on the pullout of all Turkish, US and other forces
illegally present in Syrian territories."
Is there daylight between Moscow and Damascus on this highly sensitive issue? Turkish
President Recep Erdogan's forthcoming meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi
on October 22 may provide an answer.
Clearly, the US hopes wrench Turkey from the Russian embrace. Moscow's studied
indifference toward the US-Turkish cogitations betrays its uneasiness. Conceivably, Erdogan
will expect Putin to take a holistic view, considering Russia's flourishing and high
lucrative economic and military ties with Turkey and the imperative to preserve the momentum
of Russia-Turkey relationship.
If the US policy in Syria in recent years promoted the Kurdish identity, it has now
swung to the other extreme of stoking the fires of Turkish revanchism. This is potentially
catastrophic for regional stability. The heart of the matter is that while Turkey's
concerns over terrorism and the refugee problem are legitimate, Operation Peace Spring has
deeper moorings: Turkey's ambitions as regional power and its will to correct the perceived
injustice of territorial losses incurred during the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The
ultra-nationalistic Turkish commentator (and staunch supporter of Erdogan) wrote this week in
the pro-government daily Yeni Safak:
"Turkey once again revived the millennium-old political history on Anatolian
territory. It took action with a mission that will carry the legacy of the Seljuks, the
Ottomans, the Republic of Turkey to the next stage It is not possible to set an equation in
this region by excluding Turkey – it will not happen. A map cannot be drawn that
excludes Turkey – it will not happen. A power cannot be established without Turkey
– it will not happen. Throughout history, both the rise and fall of this country has
altered the region the mind in Turkey is now a regional mind, a regional conscience, a
regional identity. President Erdoğan is the pioneer, the bearer of that political
legacy from the Seljuks, the Ottomans, and the Turkish Republic to the future."
Trump is unlikely to pay attention to the irredentist instincts in Turkish regional
policies. Trump's immediate concerns are to please the evangelical Christian constituency in
the US and silence his critics who allege that he threw the Kurds under the bus or that a
ISIS resurgence is imminent. But there is no way the US can deliver on the tall promises made
in the joint statement. The Kurds have influential friends in the Pentagon. (See the article
by Gen. Joseph Votel, former chief of the US Central Command, titled The Danger of Abandoning
our Partners.) Nonetheless, the main outcome will be that Turkey feels it has western
support for its long-term occupation of Syrian territory.
All in all, it's a "win-win" for Erdogan insofar as he got what he wanted -- US' political
and diplomatic support for "the kind of long-term buffer zone that will ensure peace and
stability in the region", to borrow the words of Vice President Pence. A Turkish withdrawal
from Syrian territory can now be virtually ruled out. State secretary Mike Pompeo added at
the press conference in Ankara on Thursday that there is "a great deal of work to do in the
region. There's lots of challenges that remain."
Pompeo said Erdogan's "decision to work alongside President Trump will be one that I think
will benefit Turkey a great deal." Arguably, US expects Turkey's cooperation to
strengthen its strategy in Syria (and Iraq) where it seeks to contain Iran's influence. From
Ankara, Pompeo travelled to Jerusalem to brief Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. "
Add to that, that the Turks now threaten SAA with "full out war".
John Helmers latest post sheds light on the fact, that the Russian military leadership and
the Stavka in general has warned Putin since the Idlib deal again and again to no avail that
the Turks would do this.
Which seems now to have been proven true since the US-Turk deal, which in essence changed
everything overnight.
As the extremity of propaganda in mainstream news becomes more obvious a few American
consumers of news do begin to have doubts. Most continue to be entirely uncritical. The
barflies here are in the habit of being critical, analytic, skeptical when reading any news
from any source. That is not the American way.
The cohort of educated prosperous middle class readers of the NYT has total faith in NYT.
Having the paper edition on the doorstep in the morning is a badge of membership. A totem
that gives them status. Questioning any word or phrase or clause that appears in print is
wrong. Asking questions means something is wrong with you. The Times is never wrong. Those
who doubt the Times have mental health issues. Or they are alt-right. Or they are deplorable.
For the intended audience the propaganda feed is always completely effective. Readers of the
Times will never untie the knot.
As the extremity of propaganda in mainstream news becomes more obvious a few American
consumers of news do begin to have doubts. Most continue to be entirely uncritical. The
barflies here are in the habit of being critical, analytic, skeptical when reading any news
from any source. That is not the American way.
The cohort of educated prosperous middle class readers of the NYT has total faith in NYT.
Having the paper edition on the doorstep in the morning is a badge of membership. A totem
that gives them status. Questioning any word or phrase or clause that appears in print is
wrong. Asking questions means something is wrong with you. The Times is never wrong. Those
who doubt the Times have mental health issues. Or they are alt-right. Or they are deplorable.
For the intended audience the propaganda feed is always completely effective. Readers of the
Times will never untie the knot.
"Why" always seem like a good question, eh? The NYT lies...why?
This quote caught my attention> " The powerful and historical walls to study today are
those of the Kremlin." (Fisk, information clearing house)
As it was for Winston's "Ministry of Truth" (Orwell) the NYT article is necessary. That's
the significance - not the lies but the necessity of lies...
And under what situations are lies required? Think about that when (if) you read Fisk's
analysis. (I am not a fan of Fisk, but his views in this instance align with my own rather
well)
Fisk article title> "Trump's disgrace in the Middle East is the death of an empire.
Vladimir Putin is Caesar now"
Some may recall that the monks on Mt Athos quietly elected VVP as the Byzantine Emperor
(about 2 years ago) - the Eastern branch of Christianity continues whilst nominally
christian(western) branch is fake and perverse ritual and worse...while his Popeness in Rome
has as Luther saw... I think Luther said it was a vast brothel...
Does this need Daniel to read the writing...
which is?
mene mene tekel upharsin (well somebody said..)
By the way my vote for the clown-man was cast because I reasoned the best esthetic feature
in the freak parade at the end of empire would be a clown act. I am indebted to the late
George Carlin for the symbolism.
I am proved right? I think so. Dogs bark and caravan continue...and many expect dollars to
go weimarish. then?
Ahh.. "experts"... Hassan Hassan is not a Syrian-born scholar, but a Syrian "born-scholar"...
Nuance. Or is it "a natural-born-scholar"? ...
As for Israeli propagandist Elizabeth Tsurkov, those very same "bad extremists" she now
repudiates on Twitter she once excused for mutilating children "because they were deeply
traumatised"... A very coherent "expert"!!
From The Grayzone, Ben Norton and Aaron Maté (and Dan Cohen) about Tsurkov: Western
pundits who lobbied for Syrian rebels now admit they are jihadist extremists, Oct. 16 (about
Tsurkov, go about 1:45 and the rest): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tkg4wJFpc_E
Now Tsurkov seems rather busy rooting for some "color revolution" to take place in Lebanon.
Where is Israel?...
As for the picture of Guy Verhofstadt next to Salim Idriss, it seems very aptly to epitomize
the EU "politics" about the Syrian conflict: "How tasty those American boots are!! Wanna lick
more American boots, please!!"
Ahh.. "experts"... Hassan Hassan is not a Syrian-born scholar, but a Syrian
"born-scholar"... Nuance. Or is it "a natural-born-scholar"? ...
If he is writing nothing but lies he is not any kind of scholar at all except a
fake scholar. Nor is he a journalist. He is a propagandist, nothing else. Call a spade
a spade.
-----
Ahhh, I've just posted to the Media and Pundits thread, but it should have come here much
more sensibly. Anyway the post is top a new page over there, on Trump and Syria's oil
fields.
The new narrative seems to me to have everything to do with Turkey and nothing to do with
Russia.
A comment in the last Syria-related thread.
Then again there are so many loose ends concerning Turkey that almost anything could
happen (coup attempt and "cleansing", dead ambassadors, Cyprus, Greece, Armenia, Syria, ISIS
and others, Kurds, weapon deals, shooting down a Russian plane, annoying Europe and the EU as
well as the US and just about everybody, some only politically but many militarily as well
(at least the US, Germany, and France), the list surely goes on).
As I commented I'm not convinced Turkey will survive this, are they able to stop and
reverse if they find they've set themselves up?
Turkey might be playing a double-game, or plan to betray one side - whether it'll be US or
Russia remains to be seen. But that this is all a clever NATO plot conflicts a bit with the
fact that the US is systematically destroying its bases in NE Syria. Sure, that might be
because they don't want the SAA to use them and to plunder them for techs and scraps, but
that would also make things more complicated for a Turkish take-over - it will surely
considerably slow the process if the Turkish army and its lackeys have to do everything back
from scratches.
Besides, odds are that Putin has taken that into consideration and has some contingency
measures ready, just in case - not that they could fully stop Turkish aggression in its
tracks in a couple of hours, but still.
Meanwhile Nicholas Kristof at the NYTimes also is whitewashing Obama's Syrian policy. He
conveniently forgets Timber Sycamore (the CIA's second largest operation, over $1 billion) to
overthrow Assad - 2013-2017, that allowed ISIS to get a firm foothold.
Trump Takes Incoherence and Inhumanity and Calls It Foreign Policy
"It was just five years ago that an American president, faced with a crisis on Syria's
border, acted decisively and honorably."
"Barack Obama responded with airstrikes and a rescue operation in 2014 when the Islamic
State started a genocide against members of the Yazidi sect, slaughtering men and forcing
women and girls into sexual slavery. Obama's action, along with a heroic intervention by
Kurdish fighters, saved tens of thousands of Yazidi lives."
"Contrast Obama's move, successfully working with allies to avert a genocide, with
President Trump's betrayal this month of those same Kurdish partners in a way that handed a
victory to the Islamic State, Turkey, Syria, Iran -- and, of course, Russia, ."
@ Walter 5: "I reasoned the best esthetic feature in the freak parade at the end of empire
would be a clown act"
Just love it!!
On a side note. Last night met with a new friend couple for dinner. Both are highly
educated and work in technical professions. Accordingly they pride themselves in logical
thinking ability. I wanted to check out their political leanings and asked about Trump's
troop pullback in Syria. Not surprisingly, both were outraged. When asked about their
rationale the expected answer was Trump's betrayal of the Kurds. I politely pointed out that
our troops' presence in Syria violates both domestic and international laws. That was news to
them!!! One of them did lamely point out that Assad is a brutal dictator. Being new
"friends", we refrained from further in depth political discussions. That incidence further
convinced me of the impending total collapse of the empire.
There has been some discussion regarding Syrian oilfields, here's some more on that.
The Syrian Democratic Council is the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces in the
Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, including sites of Syrian oilfields. The
SDC's stated mission is working towards the implementation of a "secular, democratic and
decentralized system for all of Syria. The Syrian Democratic Council was established on 10
December 2015 in Al-Malikiyah.
Here is a
letter dated Jan 21, 2019 from the SDC to the CEO of Global Development Corporation (GDC)
Inc. in New Jersey, "a formal acceptance of your company, GDC, to represent the Syrian
Democratic Council (SDC) in all matters related to the sale of oil owned by SDC . .the
estimate off production of crude oil to be 400,000 barrels per day. . .current daily
production is 125,000 barrels. ."
The CEO of New Jersey's GDC (no mention on the web) is Mordechai (Moti) Kahana (Hebrew:
מוטי כהנא; born February 28, 1968,
Jerusalem, Israel) is an Israeli-American businessman and philanthropist. He is most notable
for his work for the civil war refugees in Syria. . .Since 2011 he heads a group of Israeli
businessmen and American Jews who travel to the Syrian refugee camps to provide humanitarian
aid to Syrian Civil War refugees.. . He paid for Senator John McCain's trip to war-torn
Syria. . . here
.
The GDC mailing address is the Roxbury Mall, 275 Route 10 E, Succasunna, NJ.
re: Salim Idriss a former U.S. stooge
WSJ, Jun 12, 2013 Rebels Plead for Weapons in Face of Syrian Onslaught
A top Syrian rebel commander has issued a desperate plea for weapons from Western
governments to prevent the fall of his forces in Aleppo, pushing the Obama administration
to decide quickly whether to agree to arm rebels for the first time or risk the loss of
another rebel stronghold just days after the regime's biggest victory.
Gen. Salim Idris, the top Syrian rebel commander backed by the West, issued a detailed
request in recent days to the U.S., France and Britain for antitank missiles, antiaircraft
weapons and hundreds of thousands of ammunition rounds, according to U.S. and European
officials and Mr. Idris's request to the Americans, a copy of which was reviewed by The
Wall Street Journal.
Gen. Idris's call comes at a pivotal moment in Syria's war, following rapid-fire gains
by Bashar al-Assad forces, including last week's recapture of Qusayr, a strategic town near
the Lebanon border. Fighters from Hezbollah, which were crucial in helping the Assad regime
to take Qusayr, are now massing around Aleppo, say rebels and Western officials. . .
here
This was after H. Clinton (SecState) and D. Petraeus (CIA) wanted to fully arm the
US-supported rebels but President Obama declined. Clinton had resigned Feb 1, 2013.
thanks b... stellar writing and comments throughout... i especially liked your last line
:
"Now, as the very same rebels attack the Kurds, they are suddenly called out for being what
they always have been."
@13 don bacon - the address says it all.. The GDC mailing address is the Roxbury Mall, 275
Route 10 E, Succasunna, NJ.
regarding the nyt, larry johnson has a post up on sst
here.. i quote from it :
"Let us start with a reminder of how damn corrupt the NY Times and its reporters are.
Consider this paragraph penned by Adam Goldman and William Rashbaum:
Closely overseen by Mr. Barr, Mr. Durham and his investigators have sought help from
governments in countries that figure into right-wing attacks and unfounded conspiracy
theories about the Russia investigation, stirring criticism that they are trying to deliver
Mr. Trump a political victory rather than conducting an independent review.
"Unfounded conspiracy theories?" What a damn joke."
Wow! Quite a knee jerk reaction by the NY Times to Max
Blumenthal's 16 Oct article in The Grayzone , "The US has backed 21 of the 28
'crazy' militias leading Turkey's brutal invasion of northern Syria," which I linked to
Friday. It's great to see such a reaction to what for most people's an obscure online
publication.
Notice of MoA website change: I must now type in my name and email every time I want to
comment after years of never needing to do so. My issue might be related to the one ben
encountered in thinking he couldn't comment, which you can't if those two fields aren't
filled.
"Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down a government.
When the government lacks an effective, fact-based defense, other techniques must be
employed. The success of these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press
and a mere token opposition party..."
Trump should not have sent Pence and Pompeo to Turkey. They will do everything possible to
derail the rollback of the US in Syria. They are both more subtle than Bolton, but they are
both neocons. If you want anything done, you have to do it yourself.
So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his
conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked," or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy.
Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up
a last-minute military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers
patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of
Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools,
National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.
"... This is when it became clear it wasn't just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that "respected" mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. ..."
"... Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can't help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard, they aren't easing up. ..."
"... Comey was a senior vice president for Lockheed Martin before returning to Washington ..."
"... Excuse me, the voting going on up there for sanctions on Russia for various bogus things has been pretty much unanimous and bipartisan. ..."
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their
wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
– Arundhati Roy
Last week, Hillary Clinton called Tulsi Gabbard (and Jill Stein) Russian agents on a podcast. More
specifically :
"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on someone who's currently in the Democratic primary and
are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians," said Clinton, apparently referring to Rep.
Gabbard, who's been accused of receiving support from Russian bots and the Russian news media. "They have a bunch of sites and
bots and other ways of supporting her so far." She added: "That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because
she's also a Russian asset. Yeah, she's a Russian asset -- I mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate.
So I don't know who it's going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states
that they most needed."
Tulsi subsequently responded to this slanderous accusation with a series of devastating blows.
Her tweets set off a firestorm, and even if you're as disillusioned by presidential politics as myself, you couldn't help but
cheer wildly that someone with a major political platform finally stated without any hint of fear or hesitation exactly what so many
Americans across the ideological spectrum feel.
Of course, this has far wider implications than a high profile feud between these two. The "let's blame Russia for Hillary's loss"
epidemic of calculated stupidity driven by Ellen-Democrats and their mouthpieces across corporate mass media began immediately after
the election. I know about it on a personal level because this website was an early target of the neoliberal-led new McCarthyism
courtesy of a ridiculous and libelous smear in the Washington Post over Thanksgiving weekend 2016 (see:
Liberty Blitzkrieg Included on Washington Post Highlighted Hit List of "Russian Propaganda" Websites) .
This is when it became clear it wasn't just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that "respected"
mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been
spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller
to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. The whole charade seems more akin to an intelligence
operation than journalism, which shouldn't be surprising given the proliferation of former intelligence agents throughout mass media
in the Trump era.
Former CIA Director
John Brennan
(2013-17) is the latest superspook to be reborn as a TV newsie. He just
cashed in at
NBC News as a "senior national security and intelligence analyst" and served his first expert views on last Sunday's edition of
Meet the Press .
The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN, which employs former Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper and former CIA Director
Michael Hayden
in a similar capacity.
Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV's grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include
Chuck Rosenberg
, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and
counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III;
Frank Figliuzzi , former chief of FBI counterintelligence;
Juan Zarate , deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC; and
Fran
Townsend , homeland security adviser under Bush, at CBS News.
CNN's bulging roster also includes former FBI agent Asha Rangappa
; former FBI agent James Gagliano
; Obama's former deputy national security adviser
Tony Blinken ; former House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers ; senior
adviser to the National Security Council during the Obama administration
Samantha Vinograd ; retired CIA operations officer
Steven L. Hall; and
Philip Mudd , also retired from the CIA.
Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications
of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can't help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda
campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard,
they aren't easing up.
Which brings us to the crux of the issue. Why are they doing this? Why is Clinton, with zero evidence whatsoever, falsely calling
a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, a veteran with two tours in Iraq, and someone polling at only 2% in the Democratic primary a "Russian
asset." Why are they so afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?
It's partly personal. Tulsi was one of only a handful of congressional Democrats to set aside fears of the Clintons and their
mafia-like network to endorse Bernie Sanders early in 2016. In fact, she
stepped
down from her position as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee to do so. This is the sort of thing a petty narcissist
like Hillary Clinton could never forgive, but it goes further.
Tulsi's mere presence on stage during recent debates has proven devastating for the Ellen Degeneres wing of the Democratic party.
She effectively ended neoliberal darling Kamala Harris' chances by simply telling the truth about her horrible record, something
no one else in the race had the guts to do.
In other words, Tulsi demolished Kamala Harris and put an end to her primary chances by simply telling the truth about her on
national television. This is how powerful the truth can be when somebody's actually willing to stand up and say it. It's why the
agents of empire -- in charge of virtually all major institutions -- go out of their way to ensure the American public is exposed
to as little truth as possible. It's also why they lie and scream "Russia" instead of debating the actual issues.
But this goes well beyond Tulsi Gabbard. Empire requires constant meddling abroad as well as periodic regime change wars to ensure
compliant puppets are firmly in control of any country with any geopolitical significance. The 21st century has been littered with
a series of disastrous U.S. interventions abroad, while the country back home continues to descend deeper into a neo-feudal oligarchy
with a hunger games style economy. As such, an increasing number of Americans have begun to question the entire premise of imperial
foreign policy.
To the agents of empire, dominant throughout mainstream politics, mega corporations, think-tanks and of course mass media, this
sort of thought crime is entirely unacceptable. In case you haven't noticed, empire is a third-rail of U.S. politics. If you dare
touch the issue, you'll be ruthlessly smeared, without any evidence, as a Russian agent or asset. There's nothing logical about this,
but then again there typically isn't much logic when it comes to psychological operations. They depend on manipulation and triggering
specific emotional responses.
There's a reason people like Hillary Clinton and her minions just yell "Russia" whenever an individual with a platform criticizes
empire and endless war. They know they can't win an argument if they debate the actual issues, so a conscious choice was made to
simply avoid debate entirely. As such, they've decided to craft and spread a disingenuous narrative in which anyone critical of establishment
neocon/neoliberal foreign policy is a Russia asset/agent/bot. This is literally all they've got. These people are telling you 2+2=5
and if you don't accept it, you're a traitorous, Putin-loving nazi with a pee pee tape. And these same people call themselves "liberal."
Importantly, it isn't just a few trollish kooks doing this. It's being spread by some of the most powerful people and institutions
in the country, including of course mass media.
This inane verbal vomit is considered "liberal" news in modern America, a word which has now lost all meaning. Above, we witness
a collection of television mannequins questioning the loyalty of a U.S. veteran who continues to serve in both Congress and the national
guard simply because she dared call out America's perpetually failing foreign policy establishment.
To conclude, it's now clear dissent is only permitted so long as it doesn't become too popular. By polling at 2% in the primary,
it appears Gabbard became too popular, but the truth is she's just a vessel. What's really got the agents of empire concerned is
we may be on the verge of a tipping point within the broader U.S. population regarding regime change wars and empire. This is why
debate needs to be shut down and shut down now. A critical mass of citizens openly questioning establishment foreign policy cannot
be permitted. Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor. The national
security state doesn't want the public to even think about such topics, let alone debate them.
Ultimately, if you give up your capacity for reason, for free-thought and for the courage to say what you think about issues of
national significance, you've lost everything. This is what these manipulators want you to do. They want you to shut-up, to listen
to the "experts" who destroy everything they touch, and to be a compliant subject as opposed to an active, empowered citizen. The
answer to such a tactic is to be more bold, more informed and more ethical. They fear truth and empowered individuals more than anything
else. Stand up tall and speak your mind. Pandering to bullies never works.
* * *
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For those of us who grew up during the Cold War going to Russia is intense. I have never been so scared in my life as when
that plane touched down at Pulkovo 2. And I though Dulles was a shithole.
Russians love art and they have fantastic museums and fantastic architecture. Food is a bit sketchy but you can make do. No
fat women there that I saw. In fact, you will see some of the most beautiful women in the world there. Trust me on that.
Pelosi is smart enough to know that all roads lead to Putin. But is she smart enough to know that're not just American and
its 'allied' Western 'roads', but now its all the roads in the world.
Because the world finally understands that Putin is the only peacemaker on the scene. And that most of the disputes the international
community is saddled with are a direct result of American foreign policy and the excesses of its economy.
The world is tired of being dragged through Hell at the whim of a handful of American neocon devotees of Paul Wolfowitz and
the fallacious Wolfowitz Doctrine which was credited with having won the Cold War for the West and has been in effect ever since.
Except there seems to be some doubt now who actually won the Cold War with America scrambling to get out of Syria, leaving
behind a symbolic force of a couple of thousand troops.
That's the reason for everything that's going on America today. Russia, under Putin, has turned the tables on Congress, the
neocons, the warmongers, and those politicians and elite who want the Middle East and its vast reserves of oil to continue to
be destabilized by intranational, neighborly hatreds, by terrorism and by America's closest ally, Israel to continue to expand
its borders with its policy of settlements. This problematic situation is scrupulously avoided in America and the West's MSM,
and can only be seen in foreign media. Which brings us back to Putin.
Is he following the strategies of Sun Tzu, who advises you to
'appear weak when you are strong and strong when you are weak.'
'all warfare is based on deception'
'victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first then try to win.'
Hillary Clinton is obviously testing the waters for a last-minute, swoop-in candidacy. She sees Biden deflating and realizes
there's nobody to keep the Democratic nomination firmly in corporate hands. She wants them to beg her, though.
Without Russia, ASSAD would be long gone and IRAN would have been bombed to oblivion, and Greater Israhell would have been
fulfilled and ruling over the MidEast.
In other words, Russia bashing by Jewish-controlled politicians and in Jewish-controlled Western media
is simply PAYBACK .
I am a Russian Agent. Well, not formally but act as one. Only in elections though as Russia forbids (after losing 30 million
dead in WW2) any military or violent interference. Agent may be too strong a word as my actions reflect the beauty of Russian
literature, music and philosophy. (qv Kropotkin, Rimsky Korsakoff etc. etc.) Maybe a spokesman?
In this coming election vote for the agent of your choice. Gabbard, Trump, (Cackles, hang on and wait for this one) or Biden
( on whom we await a conversion). This agency stuff is fun. Can't wait.
The quid pro quo for many Deep State bureaucrats comes after they are no longer in office as typified by jobs as "experts"
with the corrupt news networks. Comey was a senior vice president for Lockheed Martin before returning to Washington.
Trump is outing them all and they are out to destroy him.
If the Russians are so bad, why did we give them our Uranium? Hillary and corrupt Washington Swamp dwellers in action. How
many in Congress opposed the deal? We need Trump to be reelected to Make America Great Again.
I remember in the 80's Democrats would mercilessly lampoon and make fun of Conservatives for their (at the time) hard-line
stance against the Soviet Union and how we should just get over it: peace, love and b*llsh*t. My how times have changed.
You need a scorecard to keep track these days. Barry lampooned Mitt for speaking against the Russians, like they were the 'good
guys' (ahem, 'tell Vlad' and Kills power reset button) Make up your ******* minds people.
Thank you for bringing my attention to Russia. Had it not been for your constant denunciations, I probably would never have
investigated that nation to the extent that I have, and that would have been my loss. Allow me to explain.
As a permanent student of human history and culture, I've traveled to, and studied many different nations, from Japan, China
and Thailand, to Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, but somehow I managed to completely miss Russia. Of course I was familiar
with the Western narrative concerning communism and the USSR - I grew up with that - but I never fully understood Russian culture
until, by your actions, you forced me to look into it.
I've since studied their history intently, and have studied their language to the point where I can at least make myself understood.
I've spoken to Russian expats, read numerous books, watched their TV shows, listened to their music, and have kept a close eye
on current events, including the coup in Ukraine and Russia's response to that event. At this point I feel well enough prepared
to travel to Russia and I'm looking forward to my upcoming trip with great anticipation.
I operate on the basic premise that I'm nobody special - that there are thousands of people just like me with a deep interest
in human affairs, who, like myself, have been prompted to investigate a culture that, for various reasons, has been largely overlooked
in the West. So, on my own and their behalf I thank you for providing the impetus to focus our attention in that regard. It's
probably not what you intended, but it is what it is. Thanks to you, many hundreds, if not thousands of people have now undertaken
a study of Russia and her people, and that can only be a good thing, as the more we know about each other, the less we have to
fear, and the less likely we are to come into conflict with one another.
Bravo well written and right on the mark. If Tulsi wasn't a gun grabber and openly supported the 2nd Amendment she would be
a front runner, only a few steps behind Trump. And by the way, don't trust those 2% Polls. We all know the polls are pure ********.
When one Colonel Gary Powers was shot down in his USAF U2 spy plane in 1960 and captured alive he was asked by his then KGB
interrogators what the difference was between the Republican and Democratic parties.......and he admitted to being at a loss to
explain that there was any fundamental difference at all.
Therein lies the root problem with the American political system. All through the process it arrives at the same outcomes and
it doesnt matter who you vote for.
It could be argued that it is in effect a one party system as both are indistinguishable from each other ultimately as they
push the America PLC agenda.
The entire system is held captive by secretive and "invisible" unelected groups who call the shots and if you push too hard
they have you killed one way or another.....all the esoteric secret societies of any significance are represented.
The question therefore is this; Is America any different to China other than the wallpaper coverings?
To paraphrase Mark Twain; If voting really mattered they wouldn't let you do it.
Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor
This is true with Trumptards on this comments board. They unquestionably follow lies, manipulative, and hollow Trump doctrine
without thinking.
Just yesterday there was and idiot spewing out that 'Assange was treasonous' before engaging his cerebral matter to realise
you cannot be a traitor against a country that's not yours.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child
molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Some of the "virtual facts:" ..."
"... The Soviet Union never ended. Russia is still communist and an inevitable and indeed indispensable enemy of the US. Anyone who challenges that certitude is an obvious agent of the Russian government. ..."
"... Iran is the "greatest supporter of terrorism" in the world." ..."
"... The Syrian Arab Government is an abomination on the scale of Nazi Germany and must be destroyed and replaced by God knows what . ..."
"... Saudi Arabia is a deeply friendly state and ally of the US. ..."
"... It is beyond scary to see just how entrenched and powerful Deep State is and how it involves/controls both political parties ..."
"... I doubt there is any magic bullet website or other source of information that would turn people over night. A good start would be encouraging them to read transcripts of various Putin and Lavrov speeches and pressers, also Valdai Club, economic forum ect. ..."
"... The colonel's complaint implicitly assumes that things were not always thus. My adult experience since I saw a war up close has been that the "facts" of our public discourse are always simplified and usually grossly distorted. ..."
"... Not only are the MSM married to a narrative but they feel compelled to attack the few who ever challenge the orthodoxy. For example, 'Tulsi Gabbard met with the war criminal Assad'. ..."
"... It is certainly true that Russia is being demonized in all the MSM I have sampled. A frequent criticism is that Putin, like Assad, and earlier Saddam and Quadaffi, is essentially an illegitimate ruler of his country, ruling through brute force and without the consent of his countrymen. (Thus the WaPo editorials routinely call Putin a "thug", just as they call Assad a "butcher".) ..."
"... Not to defend Trump and his balance sheet mindset with respect to the Saudis, the reality is that both parties and presidents from George H.W to Bill Clinton to W and Obama have treated the Saudi monarchy as our "friend", even when they sponsored the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11. ..."
"... Tony Blair became a wealthy man after his prime ministership on the back of money thrown his way by the Arab sheikhs ..."
Mika B remarked a couple of years ago on the show that she and her sex slave stage in the
early morning that the social media were out of control because it is the job of the MSM to
tell people what to think. The Hillary stated recently that life was better when there were
only three TeeVee news outlets because it was easier to keep things under control. Now? My God!
Any damned fool can propagate unauthorized "facts." What? Who?
Well, pilgrims, the US government (along with our British and Israeli helpmates and masters)
are the preeminent creators and purveyors of the manufactured virtual facts on which we base
our policy. These "facts" are "ginned up" in the well moneyed hidden staff groups of "hidden"
candidates that are devoted to the seizure of power made possible by a deluded electorate.
These "facts" are then propagated and reinforced through relentless IO campaigns run by
executive "bots" in the MSM and in such remarkable and imaginative efforts as the "White
Helmets" film company manned by jihadis and managed by clubby Brits left over from the Days of
The Raj (sob). These "facts" are now so entrenched in the general mind that they can be used to
denounce people like Rep. (major ) Gabbard as traitors because they challenge them.
Some of the "virtual facts:"
The Soviet Union never ended. Russia is still communist and an inevitable and indeed
indispensable enemy of the US. Anyone who challenges that certitude is an obvious agent of
the Russian government.
Iran is the "greatest supporter of terrorism" in the world." Iran is so designated by the
State Department on the annual list of terrorism supporting states which asserts this to be
true on the basis of Iranian support of Lebanese Hizbullah and Palestinian Hamas, calling
them "terrorist" groups rather than anti -Israeli nationalist resistance organizations. This
Zionist inspired propaganda is spread far and wide by neocon "useful idiots" like Maria
Bartiromo and Jesse Watters.
The Syrian Arab Government is an abomination on the scale of Nazi Germany and must be
destroyed and replaced by God knows what ... "They gassed their own people!" Bullshit! There
is no objective evidence for that. There are nothing but propaganda statements by the FUKUS
governments unsupported by any real evidence. The MI-6 funded (with USAID money) Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights (located in a basement in England) as well as the White Helmets
murder/propaganda operation states that the SAG is guilty as charged but independent
investigation says that assertions of SAG guilt are untrue.
Saudi Arabia is a deeply friendly state and ally of the US. How mad an idea is this! This
theocratic, absolute monarchy is a friend of the US? How insane an idea! Trump has a balance
sheet where a soul should be and that is the basis for the belief that MBS and/or his
"country" are our friends. pl
Yes I fully concur. We have gone from fact-based news to faith-based fake news led by the
MSM. I recall at the start of the Iraq War in March 2003, the line was out that British PM
Tony Blair was George W. Bush's "poodle," forgetting entirely that it was the first of the
British "dodgy dossiers" that made the totally discredited claim that Saddam had gotten tons
of yellow cake from Niger. So the British have no military resources but they continue to
maintain the idea that they can manipulate the U.S. and make up for the demise of the old
British empire.
The Steele dossier was the second British "dodgy dossier" that got the ball rolling on
Trump the Russian mole and Putin's "poodle."
So much fraud. But now social media must be patrolled and anyone daring to challenge the
voice of the MSM must be purged by Google, Facebook, Twitter et al.
My question is: When will the machinations of the Big Lie MSM Wurlitzer cross the line and
trigger the backlash that they secretly fear so much? MSM has to destroy Trump by 2020 or
else his "fake news" polemic will stick... because there is no much truth to it. The
messenger may be crude, but he has the bully pulpit to have a real impact.
I await the release, as Larry Johnson pointed out, of the Horowitz IG report on the
origins of the fake Trump-Russia collusion line. Also the pending Barr-Durham larger report
which is zeroing in on John Brennan.
"MSM has to destroy Trump by 2020 or else..."
The MSM are joined by all those folks who were wined, dined, and degraded by Jeffrey Epstein
and Hollywood hero Harvey Weinstein. Nobody seems to care about who Jeffrey abused, or who
enjoyed his island paradise. Harvey, he's about to buy a free ride out of jail. Meanwhile we
jail idiots who "bribe" there kids way into that "elite" institution - UCLA.
an ideal study would no doubt want to look into the Italy-GB-US angle already concerning
the "first dossier", or whatevers. Didn*t that have mediawise an intermediate French
angle?
This is what happens when the deciders believe their own propaganda. The media now says
that a residual force of American troops and contractors will stay behind at the Deir ez-Zor
oil fields and Al-Tanf base near the Jordon border. The media moguls dare not mention that
the real intention is to prevent the Syrian Arab Army from retaking its own territory or that
Turkey is seizing thousands of square miles of Syria. Syrians with Russia, Chinese and
Iranian aid won't quit until Syria is whole again and rebuilt. This means that America
continues its uninvited unwinnable war in the middle of nowhere with no allies for no reason
at all except to do Israel's bidding and to make money for military contractors. The swamp's
regime change campaign failed. The Houthis' Aramco attack shows that the gulf oil supply is
at risk and can be shut down at will. Continuing these endless wars that are clearly against
the best interests of the American people is insane.
It strikes me, as a matter of observable fact, that the Houthi attack had almost no long run
affect on oil production. Everything was back to normal within 10 days. I think that the
attack was allowed to occur for exactly one reason and that was to start a shooting war
between the USA as KSA's great defender and Iran as the horrible nation that has a mild
dislike for Israel.
It failed. So far.
To believe that the 24/7/52 AWACS, Ground radar, Israeli radar, and the overlapping close in
radar coverage of the Saudi oil fields all failed to detect the drones and cruise missiles is
to believe in more miracles than I can handle on a good day. It also means that assets in
other parts of this world covered by these same type of radars are just as vulnerable to
local disaffected groups.
The FUKUS thinks we are all a bunch of brainless sheep to be led by a ring in our noses. The
'Muktar' is clueless regarding our Saudi brethren, he's supposed to administer how the
overlords say he's to administer, nothing more. The CIA administration still has a hard-on
because they blew it regarding Iran and they're still embarrassed about it.
In two days, counting closer to a day and a half will be the sad anniversary (October 23)
where the Israeli government willfully with forethought let our Marines and other service
personnel bunked with them at the barracks in Beirut die needlessly, because Nahum Admoni
wanted U.S. to get our noses bloodied.
Never mind that the Russians lost close to 30 million to the brotherhood of the Operation
Paper Clip, and the Bormann Group that today controls from behind the scenes most of the
World's money thanks to Martin creating over 750 corporations initially to start with, that
has expanded like a Hydra. Any time that truth (Russia is no longer Communist) rears its ugly
head, the Bormann group goes into overdrive to ensure that the big lie perpetuates.
The FUKUS think we're all a bunch of sheep to be led off a cliff, and the propaganda mills
have created the trail right up to the edge of the precipice that the sheep are trotting.
Amen. The landslide of disinformation and bullshit disseminated on a daily basis by a pliant
media is happily lapped up by ignorant, uninformed Americans. I've had quite an exchange with
a liberal friend of mine who was shrieking MSNBC talking points on Syria and the Kurds. Mind
you, this fellow never served a day in the military. Never held a clearance in his life.
Didn't know a thing about JOPES and how Special Ops forces use a series of written orders
signed off on by the CJCS. Yet, he was qualified to criticize Trump. At the same time not one
of his kids or grandkids are signed up to fight on that frontline. I told him politely to
STFU and get educated before trying to comment on something he knows nothing about.
Thanks Colonel.
I am British and did consider the military in my youth but if I were that age now I would
not. Having seen what my political master, and yours, have asked the military to do the
danger of being sent on some counter product regime change mission or to prop-up someone I
would rather fight is just too great. I would only end up refusing to follow orders which I
understand the military takes a rather dim view of.
... regime change mission or to prop-up someone I would rather fight is just too
great.
once upon a time, and strictly I had opted not to believe either side before that, but
yes, at one point I wondered fully aware they may be legitimate complaints, how would the
UCK, or the Kosovo Liberation Army become the "Western" partner in war.
In hindsight I was made aware of this one grandiose British officer ... once upon a
time.
"if I were that age now..." That is the same line used by the American left since the
'60s.
"I would only end up refusing to follow orders..."
Samantha Power at the UN and James Comey at the FBI both had a "higher loyalty" than to the
elected government or the Constitution on which it is based. That's why they are busy trying
to subvert it.
There's a lot of truth there, Colonel. Life would be better with just three TV new outlets,
huh. Which three? Can you imagine being limited to three cable new outlets? Actually most
people probably limit themselves to three news outlets or less. They find an echo chamber and
stick with it. I thank God I don't have cable or satellite TV and I have too many interests
to engage with talk radio.
I couldn't agree more with your characterization of "virtual facts" about Iran, Syria and
Saudi Arabia. I also agree that those who continue to view Russia as an implacable enemy bent
on our destruction and world domination are liars and/or fools. The Soviet Union was just a
phase, a phase now past. Russia never ended. Conversely, those who insist that Russia is a
newly minted nation of glitter farting unicorns incapable of nefarious behavior are also
fools and/or liars. Russia is a formidable competitor, fully capable and willing to take
prudent actions in pursuit of her interests. We should respect her and seek cooperation where
we can and tolerance where we must.
How the never-Trumpers treat Tulsi Gabbard is shameful. What Clinton recently said is mild
compared to what others have been saying for quite some time. Calling Tulsi a Russian asset
is foolishly wrong. That Russia may prefer Tulsi over other potential Presidential candidates
should be seen as a positive thing. A policy of mutual respect, cooperation and tolerance
between our two countries would benefit the entire world.
America needed to restore the Kuwait monarchy for freedom and democracy. Remember defense
Secretary Dick Cheney sending captured Iraq arms to the Taliban.
Same play book was used to run Libyan arms through Bengazi to Wahhabism freedom fighter
"ISIS" and the al Lindsey McCain head choppers.
The nonsense will end since not even the United States can endure these costs. Did you hear
Trump? 8 trillion yankee dollars and nothing to show for it.
What is highly alarming, almost terrifying, is that really well educated people who have
achieved great things in their careers and are pillars of society believe this crap.
I had dinner guests last week; a former Chairman of a bank and his wife who is a highly
acclaimed Professor of public Health and Epidemiology who told me how awful Trump and Putin
are neither of these friends are what you could remotely classify as Social Justice
leftists.
My problem is that I don't know where to start to try and put them right without them
thinking I'm a tinfoil hatted conspiracy nut. I wish there was a website dedicated solely to
purveying basic truthful information that is not perhaps as esoteric as SST. Should I try and
start one or are there already good examples to point to?
I'm thinking this is so far and so deep there is nothing that can or will be done. Trump's
election and presidency has lifted the curtain on the puppet show. This recent Syria troop
removal is Trump's second attempt at openly declaring troops will be pulled out of Syria only
to have the military has said, "Um, no, we will stay and simply relocate."
Trump openly
called for FISA warrants to be declassified only to have the DOJ and FBI either ignore and
defy him. Groups like Judicial Watch and others go into court to get the requested
information through FOIA and DOJ and FBI lawyers and the courts block them.
It is beyond
scary to see just how entrenched and powerful Deep State is and how it involves/controls both
political parties. Trump has faced hurricane winds of opposition from day one and has been
constantly subverted by his own party and his own people. I don't know how he can get up
every day and continue to fight the obvious and concerted Deep State coup against him. I pray
for him. I pray the rosary for him.
There are members within Trump's own party who have agreed that there should be an
investigation into the impeachment of Trump for running a yellow light (at most). Again,
members of his own party. Renowned Constitutional lawyers John Yoo and Alan Dershowitz, from
Cal-Berkeley and Harvard laws schools respectively, have said that not only has Trump done
nothing, even remotely, which could trigger an impeachment inquiry but if Congress were to do
so it would be unconstitutional and illegal. But alas, who would enforce this? Deep State
snakes like John Roberts at the Supreme Court? Robert has already signed off on the coup (
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/john-roberts-mitch-mcconnell-trump-impeachment-trial.amp).
The only thing that separates America from falling into the abyss is Trump, a handful of
people in Washington, a few conservative talk show hosts, and about 40% of America. Many
people have talked a good game at points but I think in the end are just double agents of the
dark side/Deep State (Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, ... IG Horowitz, etc.). And some, such
as Chris Wray, are unabashed dark side/Deep State agents in good standing.
As St. Thomas More said, "The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them."
I have faith in Barr. I have faith in Durham. Two men whose Catholic faith is integral to
every aspect of their lives and work. But with as pervasive, entrenched, and powerful as the
Deep State is I'm skeptical they have the power to do anything. Btw, here's U.S. Attorney
John Durham's lecture before the Thomistic Institute at Yale (hosted by the Dominican Order):
https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/perspective-of-a-catholic-prosecutor-honorable-john-durham
One thing that really amuses me is that the marionettes of Deep State in the media and
politics actually believe that once Trump is gone their puppet show theatre can resume like
nothing happened. Sorry, but there is no coming back from this. They will be lucky if the
worst thing that happens is a sizable part of of the American populace protests by throwing
sand in the gears. I'm afraid it will end much worse.
I doubt there is any magic bullet website or other source of information that would turn
people over night. A good start would be encouraging them to read transcripts of various
Putin and Lavrov speeches and pressers, also Valdai Club, economic forum ect.
Most only get to see the odd sentence or paragragh in western MSM with an entirely
fictional story built around it, so perhaps and MSM piece like that and the transcript of the
relevant presser or speech alongside it.
I suspect the fine detail in Putin and Lavrov's replies to press questions
rather than cliches would surprise many people.
Walrus--100% my experience as well. Many dinners with "liberal" even "progressive" friends,
mostly of the retired kind require great psychic energy. Their Overton Window is 1"-square,
making exchanges very difficult to squeeze even minimal bits of political reality.
My daily
blog tour, like MW's above, takes me through: Moon of Alabama, Naked Capitalism, SST, Caitlin
Johnstone, Grayzone and a few others. I'm intel gathering -- but I need to figure out how to
convey broader perspectives even to my 40-45 year-old children and their friends. Inside the
Beltway assumptions are hard to de-program.
While I agree with the essence of the post I disagree with the characterization of SOHR. It
tends to get its stuff right. I have listed several significant events where SOHR disagreed
with the official narrative: On Sources And Information - The Syrian
Observatory For Human Rights . Those are exactly the moments where SOHR is disregarded by
the pressitude.
It is the selective quoting of such sources that paint them as partisan even as they try
to stay somewhat neutral.
---
@Pat - Any comment to the Gen. McRaven op-ed in the NYT? Our Republic
Is Under Attack From the President If President Trump doesn't demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time
for a new person in the Oval Office.
Isn't it a call to mutiny? It seems to me to be far beyond the allowed political comment
from a retired General.
Those that look up the pole, all they see is assholes. Those that look down all they see is
assholes, but those that look straight ahead, they see which path to take.
The colonel's complaint implicitly assumes that things were not always thus. My adult
experience since I saw a war up close has been that the "facts" of our public discourse are
always simplified and usually grossly distorted.
Is the Iranian regime terrible? Well, yes,
but it is also a regime that holds real elections and often loses them. Not in the same
league of awful with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
Similarly with the other examples. The
"facts" have in each case a basis in truth but do not by themselves give a true picture. Is
our discourse more unfair to Russia than it was to Nasser's Egypt? Is our promotion of Saudi
Arabia any worse than our adulation of Chiang Kai-shek?
Not only are the MSM married to a narrative but they feel compelled to attack the few who
ever challenge the orthodoxy. For example, 'Tulsi Gabbard met with the war criminal Assad'.
It would do our vaunted free press wonders if they traveled to Damascus instead of
repeating the same tired talking points about Syria. I'll never forget the look on Gabbard's
face when she talked about the Syrians came up to her and said, 'why are you attacking us,
what did we do to you'. Meeting real people can undo a lifetime of blather and must be
stopped at all cost.
b Perhaps memory fails me but I think SOHR propagated the SAG gas attacks mythology. I have
stated that McRaven should be recalled to active duty and court-martialed. I could find
several punitice articles in UCMJ under which he could be charged.
When McCain returned from the Hanoi Hilton he could have been prosecuted for treason he was
not because "peace with honour" overrode UCMJ and honour. McRaven is being offered up as a
distraction. Call him back to active duty yes, and assign him somewhere dreary, unimportant
and far from CONUS. Ignore the stuff he is blathering while he is retired, if he repeats
blather while on active duty then the navy might be able to recover some honour.
No...your memory does not fail you, Colonel, the SOHR was the main source cited at MSM level
on the alleged protests which gave place to the destruction of Syria and the legitimation and
labelling of alleged "moderate rebels" which then resulted being but terrorist jihadi groups
brought mainly from abroad under financing and mtrainning of non Syrian actors...
The source on the alleged atrocities commited by Assad was SOHR at the first years of the
war on Syria, along with Doctors Without Borders and "special envoys" by British and French
main papers reporting from the former, and first, "Baba Amr" caliphate in Homs....I am
meaning the times of Sunday Times´ Marie Colvin and the other woman from Le
Figaro , who then resulted or KIA or caught amongst the jihadists ranks along with other
foreign "special envoys" who then were released in a truce with Assad through a safe
corridor, especially made for that end, to Lebanon.
I fear SOHR was the source of the super-trolling consisting on inundating the MSM comments
sections, like that of El País , with dozens of vertical doctored photographs
every time any of us aware entered commenting to debunk their fake news.
I remember this since that was the starting point of Elora as net activist...( till then,
just a baby, peacefully growing up...unaware....but had no election, felt it was a duty,
since, as you comment here, so few people aware...Having known Syria few years before she
could not believe what they were telling about Assad, who, eventhough not being perfect, as
it has been long ago proved any other leader in the world is, had managed to show the
visitant a flourishing Syria where misery present at other ME countries was almost
absent...
It is only lately, when the Syrian war was obviously lost for the US coalition, that the
SOHR started contradicting some fake claims by the White Helmets, especially last two alleged
chemical attacks, if Elora´s not wrong.
Why this, why now, why in this form? Probably those powers behind SOHR trying to secure a
part in the cake of reconstruction and future of Syria...since, it got obvious, love for
Syria is not amongst one of their mottos...
Trump approves $4.5 million in aid for Syria's White Helmets
WASHINGTON -- US President Donald Trump has authorized $4.5 million in aid for Syria's
White Helmets group, famed for rescuing wounded civilians from the frontlines in the civil
war, the White House says today...
Thank you for this refuge from the noise. How long before the strangling of information makes
its way here, and to Craig Murray, Naked Capitalism, and others who look on with clear eyes?
Humans are copy/paste artists and generally not very good at creative thinking. When shown a
series of steps to achieve a reward people will repeat all the steps including clearly
unnecessary ones. Monkeys will drop unnecessary steps and frequently show more creativity by
using a different method to achieve the reward instead of copying.
The old story goes how a woman always cut the ends off a roast before putting it in a pan.
When her daughter asks why she doesn't know, asks her mother who doesn't know and asks the
great grandmother who laughs and says her pan was too small.
I suspect it is a functional tradeoff that lets us transfer great amounts of cultural
information and maintain a civilization of sorts. It creates a tough environment for
innovators and allows for easy manipulation of the majority.
Nature of course always has a sprinkling of minority traits in the gene pool to allow for
sudden changes in the environment. Most likely those of us that are more critical thinkers
and like in depth, multi-dimensional viewpoints and historical knowledge are always going to
be standing by watching the crowd do their copy/paste thing.
The rise of the internet giving easy access to more "sources" means more fragmentation in
worldviews than ever before depending on where people copy/paste from.
Re: only three TV channels and they all said the same thing!
Once Upon a Time, not so long ago, publishing news was hard. For one thing, you needed a
printing press, which was big, expensive and required housing and specialized technicians to
operate it. Not only that, but a printing press cost money for every sheet of paper printed,
and you had to spend more money to distribute what he printed.
They say that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" but there's more! Unless
you were already rich and planned to publish as an expensive and time-consuming hobby, you
needed an income stream. You would get some money from subscriptions, but subscriptions are
really a means to sell advertising. Dependence on advertising meant that there were some
people the publisher had to keep happy, and others he could not afford to annoy.
Anyone who knows anything about local news knows this. At best, it's a tightrope walk
between giving subscribers the news they want to know, and not infuriating your advertisers.
The result was a sort of natural censorship. Publishers had to think long and hard before
they published anything that would tork the bigwigs off. The fact that a publisher was tied
to a physical location and physical assets also made libel suits much easier.
The same thing applied to broadcast TV, only more so. It took orders of magnitude more
money, and you were restricted to a limited amount of bandwidth.
The internet changed all that. Now, any anonymous toolio with a laptop ($299 cheap at
WallyWorld) and WiFi (free at many businesses) can go into the news publishing business by
nightfall, and with worldwide distribution and an advertising revenue stream, to boot.
Marginal cost of readership is zero.
Needless to say, this development has The People That Matter very concerned, and they are
working hard to stuff that genie back into the bottle.
For what it's worth, I found the late Udo Ulfkotte's personal-experience book "Bought
Jounalism" to be quite interesting on this topic, as it details the kind of nuts-and-bolts of
print-media prostitution. But I would really like to see an org-chart sometime of the
overlapping, possibly competing, mission control centers (if that's the right phrase) that
control the various "Wurlitzer" messaging and who, ultimately, is on charge of these. It has
been intriguing to watch, since Kerry uttered his "the Internet makes it very hard to govern"
line years ago, the blurry outline of a vast operation to shut down any non-approved media
messages, now including all social media. To give credit where credit is due, "they" sure
have done a bang-up job in feeding bullshit across all platforms down the throats of a
Western people, like a goose being fattened up for foie gras.
"...the US government (along with our British and Israeli helpmates and masters) are the
preeminent creators and purveyors of the manufactured virtual facts on which we base our
policy."
Sir
I've been perplexed for some time what the objectives are of these virtual fact creators?
When one digs into who the movers & shakers are in the virtual fact creation apparatus
then it seems very much analogous to the Jeffrey Epstein orbit. Folks bound together through
the carrot of extraordinary personal gain and the stick of personal destruction. Your
Drinking the Koolaid, is a seminal work in exploring how these virtual facts are created and
how those who challenge the creation are marginalized and even destroyed personally.
IMO, policy making on the basis of virtual facts extends beyond foreign policy to economic
and financial policy as well as healthcare policy in the US. The symptoms are seen in growing
wealth inequality and increased market concentration globally and financial policy completely
unmoored from common sense and sophistry an important element in virtual fact creation.
We're seeing signs of the early breakdown in social cohesion with social unrest in France,
Spain, Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Ecuador. Brexit and the election of Trump despite the
intensity and vitriolic nature of how the media was used against them. The impeachment of
Trump another tool in the desperate attempt to retain and consolidate power. Maybe we're in
the Fourth Turning as Howe & Strauss label it.
"The Soviet Union never ended. Russia is still communist ..."
In the interest of specificity and accountability, where/who in the MSM are asserting
that?
You (PL) are making a serious charge.
Just who is guilty of perpetrating such a blatant falsehood?
well it seems to me that the groundwork is being laid for an authoritarian state - and it
already has sophisticated tools that are unprecedented in their scope and depth and ability
to store data. And the whole enterprise is based on three rules:
1) secrecy - data is restricted to "insiders";
2) deception - the "outsiders" (you know, the citizens) are regarded as a herd of cattle to
be managed - with lies and disinformation so we don't get any ideas;
3) ruthless enforcement to dehumanize and destroy dissent. Just consider the torture and
destruction of Journalist Julian Assange: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
Not sure what the appropriate response is but I spend a lot of time at my camp working in
the woods. Thanks, Colonel Lang, for maintaining this site.
Keith Harbaugh
This is my opinion. I am uninterested in proving anything to you. If you listen to what is
said on the MSM (including Fox) it is evident that in the "minds" of the media squirrels
Russia is just the USSR in disguise. Try listening to what they are saying as sub-text.
The request was not just for my benefit, but with the thought that it would be useful to
document the occurrences of such clearly false statements in the media.
It is certainly true that Russia is being demonized in all the MSM I have sampled.
A frequent criticism is that Putin, like Assad, and earlier Saddam and Quadaffi,
is essentially an illegitimate ruler of his country,
ruling through brute force and without the consent of his countrymen.
(Thus the WaPo editorials routinely call Putin a "thug",
just as they call Assad a "butcher".)
I am certainly not endorsing that view, just reporting what I hear and read.
When I hear that, I harken back to my graduate school days,
when the same sort of charges were leveled against America, which was usually spelled
"Amerika", or sometimes "AmeriKKKa", and described as a racist, imperialist, fascist country
whose establishment must be "Smashed".
I believe the core group of people who so wanted a revolution in America in 1970
(which they essentially got, as we have seen over the last 50 years)
are much the same as those now demonizing Russia.
Here is some specificity on their complaints against Russia back then:
They were not opposed to the USSR, or communism.
Many of them were in effect communists.
The cry among many was : "Marx, Mao, and Marcuse" (Herbert Marcuse was a former Brandeis professor who extolled cultural Marxism).
What they did have, in spades, was a feeling that their ancestors had been victimized by the
Czarist regime in Russia,
which, among other supposed sins, had not done enough to prevent pogroms against them.
They seemed to have a deep fear of the Russian people,
based on their long experience with them.
My suspicion (actually, belief) is that the opposition to Putin is based on the fact that
he is sometimes viewed as a throwback to the the Czars,
and that is definitely not something looked upon favorably by many Jews.
"Trump has a balance sheet where a soul should be and that is the basis for the belief
that MBS and/or his "country" are our friends."
Not to defend Trump and his balance sheet mindset with respect to the Saudis, the reality
is that both parties and presidents from George H.W to Bill Clinton to W and Obama have
treated the Saudi monarchy as our "friend", even when they sponsored the terrorists that
attacked us on 9/11.
Tony Blair became a wealthy man after his prime ministership on the back of money thrown
his way by the Arab sheikhs.
"... "I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate." ..."
"... The Times piece goes on to list an assortment of unsavory, extremist, white supremacist, horrible, neo-Nazi-type persons that Tulsi Gabbard has nothing to do with, but which Hillary Clinton, the Intelligence Community, The Times , and the rest of the corporate media would like you to mentally associate her with. ..."
So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked,"
or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy. Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up
a last-minute
military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration
camps, gigantic banners with the faces of Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public
schools, National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.
We probably should have seen this coming.
That's right, as I'm sure you are aware by now, president-in-exile Hillary Clinton has discovered Putin's diabolical plot to steal
the presidency from Elizabeth Warren, or Biden, or whichever establishment puppet makes it out of the Democratic primaries. Speaking
to former Obama adviser and erstwhile partner at AKPD Message and Media David
Plouffe, Clinton revealed
how the godless Rooskies intend to subvert democracy this time:
"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary
and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate."
She was referring, of course, to Tulsi Gabbard, sitting Democratic Member of Congress, decorated Major in the Army National Guard,
and long shot 2020 presidential candidate. Apparently, Gabbard (who reliable anonymous sources in the Intelligence Community have
confirmed is a member of some kind of treasonous, Samoan-Hindu, Assad-worshipping cult that wants to force everyone to practice yoga)
has been undergoing Russian "grooming" at a compound in an undisclosed location that is probably in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, or
on Sublevel 168 of Trump Tower.
In any event, wherever Gabbard is being surreptitiously "groomed" (presumably by someone resembling
Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love ),
the plan (i.e., Putin's plan) is to have her lose in the Democratic primaries, then run as a third-party "spoiler" candidate, stealing
votes from Warren or Biden, exactly as Jill Stein (who, according to Clinton, is also "totally a Russian asset") stole them from
Clinton back in 2016, allowing Putin to install Donald Trump (who, according to Clinton, is still being blackmailed by the FSB with
that "kompromat" pee-tape) in the White House, where she so clearly belongs.
Clinton's comments came on the heels of a preparatory smear-piece in The New York Times ,
What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?
, which reported at length on how Gabbard has been "injecting chaos" into the Democratic primaries . Professional "disinformation
experts" supplied The Times with convincing evidence (i.e., unfounded hearsay and innuendo) of "suspicious activity" surrounding
Gabbard's campaign. Former Clinton-aide Laura Rosenberger (who also just happens to be the Director of the
Alliance for Securing Democracy , "a bipartisan transatlantic
national security advocacy group" comprised of former Intelligence Community and U.S. State Department officials, and publisher of
the
Hamilton 68 dashboard) "sees Gabbard as a potentially useful vector for Russian efforts to sow division."
The Times piece goes on to list an assortment of unsavory, extremist, white supremacist, horrible, neo-Nazi-type persons that
Tulsi Gabbard has nothing to do with, but which Hillary Clinton, the Intelligence Community, The Times , and the rest of the corporate
media would like you to mentally associate her with.
Richard Spencer, David Duke, Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Tucker Carlson, and so on. Neo-Nazi sites like the Daily Stormer .
4chan, where, according to The New York Times , neo-Nazis like to "call her Mommy."
In keeping with professional journalistic ethics, The Times also reached out to experts on fascism, fascist terrorism, terrorist
fascism, fascist-adjacent Assad-apologism, Hitlerism, horrorism, Russia, and so on, to confirm Gabbard's guilt-by-association with
the people The Times had just associated her with. Brian Levin, Director of the CSU Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, confirmed
that Gabbard has "the seal of approval" within goose-stepping, Hitler-loving, neo-Nazi circles. The Alliance for Securing Democracy
(yes, the one from the previous paragraph) conducted an "independent analysis" which confirmed that RT ("the Kremlin-backed news
agency") had mentioned Gabbard far more often than the Western corporate media (which isn't backed by anyone, and is totally unbiased
and independent, despite the fact that most of it is owned by a handful of powerful global corporations, and at least one CIA-affiliated
oligarch). Oh, and Hawaii State Senator Kai Kahele, who is challenging Gabbard for her seat in Congress, agreed with The Times that
Gabbard's support from Jew-hating, racist Putin-Nazis might be a potential liability.
"Clearly there's something about her and her policies that attracts and appeals to these type of people who are white nationalists,
anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers."
But it's not just The New York Times , of course. No sooner had Clinton finished cackling than the corporate media launched into
their familiar Goebbelsian piano routine, banging out story after television segment repeating the words "Gabbard" and "Russian asset."
I've singled out The Times because the smear piece in question was clearly a warm-up for Hillary Clinton's calculated smear job on
Friday night. No, the old gal hasn't lost her mind. She knew exactly what she was doing, as did the editors of The New York Times
, as did every other establishment news source that breathlessly "reported" her neo-McCarthyite smears.
As I noted in my previous essay
, 2020 is for all the marbles, and it's not just about who wins the election. No, it's mostly about crushing the "populist" backlash
against the hegemony of global capitalism and its happy, smiley-faced, conformist ideology. To do that, the neoliberal establishment
has to delegitimize, and lethally stigmatize, not just Trump, but also people like Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and any
other popular political figure (left, right, it makes no difference) deviating from that ideology.
In Trump's case, it's his neo-nationalism.
In Sanders and Corbyn's, it's socialism (or at least some semblance of social democracy).
In Gabbard's, it's her opposition to the Corporatocracy's ongoing efforts to restructure and privatize the Middle East (and
the rest of the entire planet), and their using the U.S. military to do it.
Ask yourself, what do Trump, Sanders, Corbyn, and Gabbard have in common? No, it's not their Putin-Nazism it's the challenge they
represent to global capitalism. Each, in his or her own way, is a symbol of the growing populist resistance to the privatization
and globalization of everything. And thus, they must be delegitimized, stigmatized, and relentlessly smeared as "Russian assets,"
"anti-Semites," "traitors," "white supremacists," "fascists," "communists," or some other type of "extremists."
Gabbard, to her credit, understands this, and is
focusing attention on the motives and tactics
of the neoliberal establishment and their smear machine. As I noted in
an
essay last year , "the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or small-scale) is to resist the
temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible
." This will not save her, but it is the best she can do, and I applaud her for having the guts to do it. I hope she continues to
give them hell as they finish off her candidacy and drive her out of office.
Oh, and if you're contemplating sending me an email explaining how these smear campaigns don't work (or you spent the weekend
laughing about how Hillary Clinton lost her mind and made an utter jackass of herself), maybe check in with Julian Assange, who is
about to be extradited to America, tried for exposing U.S. war crimes, and then imprisoned for the remainder of his natural life.
And, if Katharine is on holiday in Antigua or somewhere, or having tea with Hillary in the rooftop bar of the
Hay-Adams
Hotel , you could try Luke Harding (who not only writes and publishes propaganda for The Guardian , but who wrote a whole
New York Times
best-seller based on nothing but lies and smears). Or try Marty Baron, Dean Baquet, Paul Krugman, or even Rachel Maddow, or any
of the other editors and journalists who have been covering the Putin-Nazi "
Attack on America ," and keeping us apprised of who is and isn't a Hitler-loving "Russian asset."
Ask them whether their smear machine is working... if you can get them off the phone with their brokers, or whoever is decorating
their summer places in the Hamptons or out on
Martha's Vineyard
.
Or ask the millions of well-off liberals who are still, even after
Russiagate was exposed as an enormous hoax
based on absolutely nothing , parroting this paranoid official narrative and calling people "Russian assets" on Twitter. Or never
mind, just pay attention to what happens over the next twelve months. In terms of
ridiculous official
propaganda , spittle-flecked McCarthyite smears, and full-blown psychotic mass Putin-Nazi hysteria, it's going to make the last
three years look like the Propaganda Special Olympics.
* * *
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published
by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel,
ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy,
Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or
consentfactory.org .
So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his
conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked," or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy.
Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up
a last-minute military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers
patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of
Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools,
National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.
Easy ;-) Weaken the Deep State (aka drain the swamp). Remove three factors driving
impeachment: Obama mafia, Clintons mafia and Brennan mafia. Neutralizing them probably mean
(imperfect but workable) vaccine against impeachment derangement.
The author does not understand that neoliberal coup d'état against Trump is driven by
the burning desire to kick the can down the road and ignore the crisi of neoliberalism that led
to Trump election (as well as Brexit and Orban in Europe)
Notable quotes:
"... The idea that Americans are steps away from squaring off across the field at Gettysburg is something that should only exist in satire. It would be hilarious, except that such fantasizing is influencing the actual future of our country. We have crossed a line where rationality is in the rearview mirror. Most of us have lost track of the constitutional crises that have never actually happened since the first one was declared, over the non-issue of Trump losing the popular vote in 2016. ..."
"... What was it last week? Sharpiegate? Or the hotel in Scotland? Or an impeding war with Iran/North Korea/China? Or treason? Or something about security clearances? The Kurds were a thing in 2017 and again now. Paul Krugman of the New York Times first declared that Trump was going to destroy the economy in 2016 , and has written the same article regularly ever since, most recently just last week . It doesn't seem to matter that none of these things have actually proven to be true. Learned people are saying them again and again. ..."
"... It wasn't supposed to be this way. The fantasy was to use Robert Mueller's summer testimony about Trump being a literal Russian asset to stir up the masses -- Mueller Time, Baby! Congress would go home for August recess to be bombarded by cries for impeachment, and then autumn would feature hearings and revelations amplified by the Blue Check harpies leading up to, well, something big. ..."
"... Desperation makes for poor strategy. Think back just two weeks and no one had heard of any of this. Yet Dems and the media took America from zero to 100 nearly overnight as if this was another 9/11. With the winter caucuses approaching, Dems in search of a crime groped at something half slipped under the door and half bundled up by clever lawyers to be slipped under the door. Mueller was a lousy patsy so a better one needed to be found in the shallow end of the Deep State pool. It wasn't much but it was going to have to be made good enough. ..."
"... The details will come out and they will stink. The first whistleblower had some sort of prior working relationship with a current 2020 Democrat. Given that he is a CIA analyst, that suggests a member of Vice President Biden's White House team, Cory Booker's Committee on Foreign Relations, or maybe Kamala Harris's Select Committee on Intelligence. ..."
"... The so-called second whistleblower appears to actually be one of the sources for the first whistleblower. That's a feedback loop , an old CIA trick where you create the appearance of a credible source by providing your own confirming source. It was tried with the Steele Dossier where the original text given to the FBI appeared to be backed up by leaks filtered through the media and John McCain's office. ..."
"... It is easy to lose one's sense of humor over all this. It is easy to end up like Ginsberg at the end of his poem, muttering to strangers at what a mess this had all become: "Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! To solitude!" But me, I don't think it's funny at all. ..."
"... And of course MSNBC hires Brennan whose CIA spied on Congress when it was investigating torture. No principles here at all. ..."
"... When they put State power brokers over the will of the people and love of country, it equals Ideology. What they really worship is the ideology itself. All of the various actors are just tools in service of that cause. ..."
"... a lot of the call was about Crowd Strike, not that anyone noticed ..."
"... The Democrats are doing the impossible by making Trump look good by comparison. ..."
"... As I think we all have come to understand, the Swamp is disconnected from mainstreet, [it is] a world all its own. Point being, neither side realizes most Americans have tuned this whole issue out. Two years of Russia gate led to exhaustion. My bigger concern going forward after Americans get a chance to vote in 2020, is, is this how we are destined to be governed ? ..."
"... Bush, Obama, and Trump have all committed vastly larger crimes and in our twisted political culture these don’t matter. Remember when centrist liberals claimed to care about torture and war under false pretenses? ..."
"... And all these former intelligence goons like Brennan are embraced on the liberal cable networks, even if the now beloved intelligence community tortured prisoners, lied about it, and spied on Congress. ..."
"... Had DT used withheld military aid to strong-arm Ukraine to do something in the national interest, then it would have been business as usual. Everyone expects a President to wheel, deal, lie and cheat for the nation. ..."
"... The public knew what Trump was about from the very beginning. That he was bumptious, impetuous, always shooting from the hip and often saying stupid things. And yet he was nominated by one of the two major parties, then turned around and beat the candidate of the other major party. What does that say about this country, other than its citizens elected a real estate businessman turned TV star with no political experience whatsover as president ..."
"... It's all a diversion (among many others) from what we should all be talking and doing something about anyway. It's all part of a sick game the global elites entertain and enrich themselves with. ..."
"... 'Once intelligent people are talking about actual civil war in America' - Peter van Buren, Oct 14, 2019 'We should have a revolution in this country!' - Donald Trump, Nov 6th, 2012 ..."
Can any of the Democratic candidates pull America back from this
madness?
Once intelligent people are talking about actual civil war in America. This
began after Trump
retweeted a pastor saying impeachment would cause a "civil war-like fracture in this
Nation." Never mind that it was a retweet, and never mind that the original statement used
"like" to make a comparison. The next headline was
set: Trump Threatens Civil War If He's Impeached. Newsweek
quoted a Harvard Law professor saying that the "threat" alone made Trump impeachable.
Another
headline asked: "If Trump's Rage Brings Civil War, Where Will the Military Stand?"
Blowing up some online nonsense into a declaration of war tracks with the meme that Trump
will
refuse to leave office if defeated in 2020, or will declare himself
the winner even if he loses, sending coded messages
to armed minions. "Trump Is Going to Burn Down Everything and Everyone," reads the headline
from a NASDAQ-listed media
outlet . "Before Trump will allow himself to be chased from the temple, he'll bring it
down,"
wroteTheNew York Times.
That's just what the MSM is saying; it gets worse the further off the
road you drive . "Trump
is going to try everything, Fox is going to try everything, and they're going to both further
the injuring of societal reality and inspire dangerous individuals to kill and maim," Jared
Yates Sexton, a well-known academic, tweeted on
September 28 . "There's a vast number of people in this, people who have been taught their
whole lives that they might need to kill in case of a coup or corrupt takeover," he continued.
"Trump and Republicans signal to them constantly. They're more than ready to see this as the
occasion."
The idea that Americans are steps away from squaring off across the field at Gettysburg
is something that should only exist in satire. It would be hilarious, except that such
fantasizing is influencing the actual future of our country. We have crossed a line where
rationality is in the rearview mirror. Most of us have lost track of the constitutional crises
that have never actually happened since the first one was declared, over the non-issue of Trump
losing the popular vote in 2016.
What was it last week? Sharpiegate? Or the hotel in Scotland? Or an impeding war with
Iran/North Korea/China? Or treason? Or something about security clearances? The Kurds were a
thing in
2017 and again now. Paul Krugman of the New York Times first declared that Trump was going
to destroy the economy in
2016 , and has written the same article regularly ever since, most recently just last
week . It doesn't seem to matter that none of these things have actually proven to be true.
Learned people are
saying them again and again.
Those who oppose Trump have convinced themselves they must impeach for something , and if
all of Russiagate (remember that? It's like Aunt Edna's brief failed marriage, only not
mentioned at the dinner table) wasn't enough, then Democrats will impeach over a phone call to
a minor world leader.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. The fantasy was to use Robert Mueller's summer
testimony about Trump being a literal Russian asset to stir up the masses -- Mueller Time,
Baby! Congress would go home for August recess to be bombarded by cries for impeachment, and
then autumn would feature hearings and revelations amplified by the Blue Check harpies leading
up to, well, something big.
Were rationality still in vogue, it would be hard to imagine that Democrats would consider
the Ukraine call impeachable. But they closed out Russiagate like the OJ Simpson murder trial,
certain Trump had gotten away with so much that they had to catch him at something else to make
it even.
Desperation makes for poor strategy. Think back just two weeks and no one had heard of
any of this. Yet Dems and the media took America from zero to 100 nearly overnight as if this
was another 9/11. With the winter caucuses approaching, Dems in search of a crime groped at
something half slipped under the door and half
bundled up by clever lawyers to be slipped under the door. Mueller was a lousy patsy so a
better one needed to be found in the shallow end of the Deep State pool. It wasn't much but it
was going to have to be made good enough.
The details will come out and they will stink. The
first whistleblower had some sort of prior working relationship with a current 2020
Democrat. Given that he is a CIA analyst, that suggests a member of Vice President Biden's
White House team, Cory Booker's Committee on Foreign Relations, or maybe Kamala Harris's Select
Committee on Intelligence.
The so-called
second whistleblower appears to actually be one of the sources for the first whistleblower.
That's a
feedback loop , an old CIA trick where you create the appearance of a credible source by
providing your own confirming source. It was tried with the
Steele Dossier where the original text given to the FBI appeared to be backed up by leaks
filtered through the media and John McCain's office.
So forget everything about this cooked-to-order crisis except the actual thing impeachment
would turn on: the transcript of Trump's call. It does not matter what one, two, or 200
whistleblowers, former Obama officials, or talking heads "
think " about the call. There it is, the actual words, all pink and naked on the Internet
for everyone to read. Ukraine did not investigate Biden. Trump did not withhold aid. The
attorney general was
not involved. DOJ ruled there was
no violation of the law. It has little to do with Pompeo or Pence (though Pompeo was
on the call ). You and the Congress pretty much have it all in the transcript. It's
bathroom reading,
five pages .
Only a few months ago, the Democrats' drive to the White House began with the loftiest of
ideals, albeit a hodgepodge from trans toilet "rights" to a 100 percent makeover of the health
care system. It is now all about vengeance, clumsy and grossly partisan at that, gussied up as
"saving democracy." Our media is dominated by angry Hillary refighting 2016 and "joking" about
running again, with Adam Schiff now the face of the party for 2020. The war of noble intentions
has devolved into Pelosi's March to the Sea. Any chance for a Democratic candidate to reach
into the dark waters and pull America to where she can draw breath again and heal has been
lost.
Okay, deep breath myself. A couple of times a week, I walk past the café where Allen Ginsberg, the Beat
poet, often wrote. His most famous poem, Howl , begins, "I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." The walk is a good leveler, a reminder that
madness (Trump Derangement in modern terminology) is not new in politics.
But Ginsberg wrote in a time when one could joke about coded messages -- before the Internet
came into being to push tailored ticklers straight into people's brains. I'll take my relief in
knowing that almost everything Trump and others write, on Twitter and in the Times ,
is designed simply to get attention and getting our attention today requires ever louder and
crazier stuff. What will get us to look up anymore? Is that worth playing with fire over?
It is easy to lose one's sense of humor over all this. It is easy to end up like
Ginsberg at the end of his poem, muttering to strangers at what a mess this had all become:
"Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade
farewell! They jumped off the roof! To solitude!" But me, I don't think it's funny at
all.
You are the idiot if you think Peter doesn't know what the Mem-Con was. He was one of the
first to explain exactly how the process works. It's as close to an actual recording as it
gets and all parties sign off on the "Memo Of Communication" stating it's accurate before
it's saved.The idiots are the ones who think it's not accurate, grasping at straws doesn't
help you. But it does serve to make a point, YOU like bobbleheaded Shift realize that the
Transcript, as it stands, does not point to anything illegal so you like Shift make stuff up.
Each and every time you guys make the claim that it's not a real transcript it's a
admission that even YOU don't think what's in the call is illegal. Think about that one for a
second.
OH and you can claim that he did it to "punish his political opponents" all you like,
that's just spin, just as anyone can much more easily spin this as Trump's duty to find out.
Anything that requires mindreading isn't actual evidence and the "spin" in this case is
exactly that. Unless you crawl into his head you don't know if he did it to hurt Biden or
Help America, so either way we are left with his call as the only real evidence, the one you
yourself think was altered to the point where it no longer shows wrongdoing.
It’s clear that you are suffering from the Impeachment Derangement Virus as mentioned
in the article.
The President’s calls to world leaders were being leaked all throughout the
beginning of his presidency. That is a national security issue and so they added an extra
layer of security using a password protected system that had been used by previous
administrations. Your fantasy about the contents “alarming staffers” is absolute
nonsense because even in the “whistleblower” statement it states that other calls
to world leaders were also being put into this secured system. The fact that other calls are
being put into this system shows just how delusional your fantasy about this call being
special in some way, truly is.
As for the texts, as the author stated the opinion of what a diplomat THINKS is the
motivation is proof of absolutely nothing especially when that diplomat is told point blank
in the next text that his opinion is not factual.
Rational people understand all this. Those with Impeachment Derangement Virus do not.
DT is a populist, in an age where politics is all about withholding from the people what they
most want, because the people's instincts are deemed by the liberal consensus to be too
"deplorable" to follow.
Another great example is Brexit. The elite made the foolish mistake of asking the people of
the country what they wanted, and have spent 3 years tying things in ridiculous knots to
avoid the outcome the people voted to have.
Trump won the game according to the game's rules, but if you're gonna start opining about
what "The People" want, it kinda seems like you need to at least start by addressing the part
where millions more of The People voted for Trump's opponent.
Trump is not a populist, he is an opportunist and a nationalist who wants everyone to
recognize his greatness.
He is using the rubes to that end, he doesn’t care what happens to you.
DT ran as a populist and is unpopular. HC ran as a technocrat and her political machine
broke. Therefore both lost in 2016, in ways most personally humiliating to each.
This cloak and dagger nonsense is all about trying to give an air of authority to this
ridiculous plot to impeach Trump. This issue does however show just how disturbingly far left
the USA has become, when leftists worship spy chiefs as the ultimate authority figures.
To all the leftists here that think that people like Clapper or Brennan are in any way
respected or in any way seen as legitimate, think again.
Broadly speaking the Left doesn't trust the intelligence community or the police any further
it can throw them. It says something about the sad state of affairs we are in that the Left
is now supporting its traditional enemy in order to save the Republic from the traitorous
ra*ist the Right has put in the White House.
Sorry, but no. Trump is a terrible human being, but that broad left you speak of is composed
of mainstream centrist liberals and various people further left. Centrist liberals have
demonstrated no moral consistency on the crimes committed by the intelligence community or
the interventionist state in general.
They claimed to be outraged by such things during the
Bush era, then forgot about them or even switched sides when Obama came in. They
wouldn’t dream of impeaching Bush for war crimes ( and become furious when
Obama’s are pointed out) but they think Trump’s use of the office to obtain dirt
on Biden is a matter of principle. Think about that. War crimes are trivial. Look forward,
not back. The use of Trump’s powers to obtain dirt against Biden— not acceptable.
And of course MSNBC hires Brennan whose CIA spied on Congress when it was investigating
torture. No principles here at all.
How many times did you hear "seventeen intelligence agencies proven it! ZOMG!" while the
RussiaGate conspiracy theory was au courant?
For that matter, I was frequently treated to the spectacle of Team D partisans insisting
that any questioning of "our intelligence community" was ipso facto "treason".
As if it were our patriotic duty to unquestioningly accept anonymous statements from
perjurers (NSA), torturers (CIA) and entrapment artists (FBI) all with a long track record of
lying and talking about supposed evidence that we are not allowed to see.
When they put State power brokers over the will of the people and love of country, it equals
Ideology. What they really worship is the ideology itself. All of the various actors are just
tools in service of that cause.
Laughing Well,
you might want to actually read those messages . . . seeing them is one thing reading them
is another. If i were a democratic supporter --- you bet i would be alarmed.
The cat is getting of the bag and the cat is covered in unsavory behavior by the state
department and the supporters of the Ukrainian revolution against a democratic state and ally
of the US.
A cabal that nearly sent the Ukraine into a complete civil war ----- encourage and
participated in by the previous admin. under the direct leadership of the Sec of State, Madam
Hillary Clinton.
Its very damning but who is damned was not in office at the time.
Quiz for the day:
Does this “whistleblower” even exist? Or is it a composite creation of the
CIA, Schiff and Co?
Did Schiff and friends turn ghostly white when Trump called their bluff by releasing the
transcript?
Is Pelosi’s new found reticence a result of her self annoyance that she let herself
get talked into this new debacle and payback is to let Schiff shift in the wind dangling over
the thought that no one in the CIA wants to walk the plank for him?
Do the Democrats and their allies in the deep state increasingly look like the Keystone
Kops?
What is referred to commonly as the “transcript” is a U.S. government memorandum
of conversation. Over the course of my 24 years at the State Department I saw and wrote many
of them as the official record of conversations. At the White House level, voice recognition
software is used to help transcribe what is being said, even as one or more trained note
takers are at work. Afterwards the people who listened to the call have to sign off on the
accuracy and completeness of the document. It is the final word on what was said in that
call.
though in a less forward manner the policies of candidates, including foreign policies and
their implications are always at issue regarding selection.
It may be unseemly to have it brazenly broadcast, but illegal -- not. The real question
here is whether members of the democratic and republican party solicit, incite, encourage a
violent revolution in the Ukraine against a democratic ally of the US and in so doing,
encourage and engage in graft, theft or illegal influence, such as demanding the removal of a
prosecutor attempting to regain some stability and investigative power into how that
incitement corrupted and disrupted Ukrainian politics. In otherwords, have member of the US
colluded with certain forces in the Ukraine to over throw a democratically elected
government, that the international community and the Ukrainians indicated was fair. This
activity goes well beyond supplying weapons and post posters, but involved bribing, and
removing government officials. Unlike the consideration in Iran, which was an inside coupe,
the Ukrainnian affair seems to have been led and run by the US and Europeans, political,
economic and intelligence members. And it seems to include a company that used similar
tactics in the US to incite suspcion by using falsified computer data, accuasations of
hacking in an attempt to falsey accuse the US candidate of colluding with the Russians
because part of his agenda was to reduce tensions in between, the Ukraine, Russia and the
US.
And peaceful negotiations threatened to uncover those violations of international law by
members of the US and Eurpoean communities in which US citizens used the unstable environment
in the Ukraine which they fostered to engage in graft.
Could not have said it better myself. We are truly in bizzaro-World.
The Bidens are scooping
up as much IMF (read American) cash as they can in Ukraine with some more on the side in
China, and all the shrieking is about Trump who asked the leader of a country, to cooperate
in investigating an ongoing criminal investigation (a lot of the call was about Crowd Strike,
not that anyone noticed).
We have a treaty with Ukraine which obligates exactly that. The
Biden's activity is about as bald a case of corruption and bribe-taking as one could imagine.
Barr is investigating the nauseating deep-state origins of Russia-gate, but in today's World
I'm not that confident that the truth will ever come out. Trump is stupid, but his enemies
are far, far worse.
The rabid drivel dripping from the mouths of the lib-Dem-media regarding Trump's supposed
existential threat to the universe -- complete with idiotic hysteria about refusing to leave
office and so forth -- is yet another example of their habit of projection, namely accusing
others of tactics and threats that they themselves routinely employ.
They're the ones who refused to accept the results of the 2016 election, after their
criminal attempt to subvert the campaign of one of the candidates, and they've put us through
three years of what Peter Van Buren correctly calls "madness" ever since -- like 3-year olds
rolling on the floor kicking and screaming because they didn't get their way.
They've got the media, the Ruling Class, the Deep State, and most of the power brokers on
their side, and yet laughably portray themselves as victims and targets of oppression. They
are doing serious damage to this country and they are worthy of contempt, which is what I
feel for them.
The Democrats are doing the impossible by making Trump look good by comparison. When Trump
finally wakes up to the fact that his opponents will never relent until he is in jail, along
with his family, he will respond in ways that will abrogate what little remains of this
constitutional democracy. Many will support him because of the opposition's overreach. Will
it rise to the level of a civil war? Will millions take to the streets if Adam Schiff is
jailed for treason? I doubt it. That's the hole the Democrats are digging for themselves and
the country.
As I think we all have come to understand, the Swamp is disconnected from mainstreet, [it is] a
world all its own. Point being, neither side realizes most Americans have tuned this whole
issue out. Two years of Russia gate led to exhaustion. My bigger concern going forward after
Americans get a chance to vote in 2020, is, is this how we are destined to be governed ?
I think that in the desire to attack this column about Ukrainegate, people ignored the
earlier point, which is that some liberals are unhinged. Go back and read it. I think that
part is right.
I also think Trump tried to use his office to obtain dirt on a political foe, which is
impeachable imo. But here is my problem.
Bush, Obama, and Trump have all committed vastly
larger crimes and in our twisted political culture these don’t matter. Remember when
centrist liberals claimed to care about torture and war under false pretenses? That is long
gone. Bush is a lovable figure now. Centrist liberals never did care about Obama’s
crimes—drone strikes, Yemen, arming terrorists in Syria. They are more likely to
despise whistleblowers like Snowden than care about mass surveillance. Trump’s war in
Yemen was ignored by most liberals until Khashoggi’s murder and then many of them
seriously seem to think Trump started it. It still doesn’t interest them that much. You
can’t impeach Trump for complicity in genocide without looking at what other Presidents
have done, so best focus on Ukrainegate.
And all these former intelligence goons like Brennan are embraced on the liberal cable
networks, even if the now beloved intelligence community tortured prisoners, lied about it,
and spied on Congress.
Oh, I forgot one thing. As shoddy as Trump’s behavior is, notice how we just accept
that we should be arming yet another side in what is in part a civil war in the Ukraine.
That’s just what we do.
I am not defending conservatives. Most conservatives, with some honorable exceptions, are
worse. But the whole political system is run by competing morally repugnant factions.
Excuse me,
a little integrity is in order here ----- The current president inherited these wars, and while he must take responsibility for them
during his tenure, they aren't his.
And oddly enough as much as I opposed the previous executive, They weren't a part of his
agenda until he chose interventionists as part his admin. He owns them lock stock and barrel
-- he should have declined to add Sec Clinton and her interventionists.
The issue with outsiders is that in attempts to placate insiders derails their agenda.
Which, if it's even true, is germane to a blatant attempt to leverage and extort them into doing so... why?
"Trump did not withhold aid."
Trump absolutely did withhold aid, until conspicuously releasing that hold for unstated reasons a couple of days after
learning of the whistleblower communicating with Congress. I guess his concerns about "corruption" just suddenly evaporated,
said the ostrich to the hole.
"The attorney general was not involved."
That remains to be seen, though...
"DOJ ruled there was no violation of the law."
...he still has plenty of ways to try and shield his client. I like how you offer this, like Bill Barr's DOJ has a shred of
credibility for objective application of the law right now.
"It has little to do with Pompeo or Pence (though Pompeo was on the call)."
How on Earth do you know this? There's growing evidence that Pence absolutely WAS in-the-know to some extent, and Pompeo is
actively assisting with the WH attempts to stonewall the unambiguous, Constitutionally granted impeachment powers of the
House, by telling his employees not to respect lawful subpoenas for testimony and documents.
It must give TAC writers like Larison heartburn to see Peter's terrible arguments so prominently displayed on the website
every week.
What this article fails to appreciate is that the majority of Americans are suffering from
Trumpzaustion. We are tired of the daily barrage of tweets, corruption, graft,
patronage, incompetence, incivility, lies, emoluments, edicts by Tweet, destruction of
alliances, lies, racism, sexism, obstinacy, impulsive executive decisions that turn sour,
disregard for science and expertise generally, lies, nepotism, narcissism, vulgarity,
hypocrisy, and did I mention lies?
This administration is annoying, costing many of us time and treasure, and like a migraine
headache, we just want it to go away.
Yes, the media and Democrats want to degrade any Republican Politician's powers by any means
necessary. They have done that to all past Republican Presidents going back to Nixon.
On the other hand, Trump gives them all of the ammo that they need to promote their
narrative. He is a caricature of the narcissistic, corrupt, crony capitalist Republican that
the media loves to sell to the public.
For crying out loud, the very next day after the Mueller probe ended, Trump appeared to
try to pressure a foreign nation to help him get reelected. If you don't recognize that Trump
gives his enemies ammo by his own reckless behaviour, then you may be in denial.
Had DT used withheld military aid to strong-arm Ukraine to do something in the national
interest, then it would have been business as usual. Everyone expects a President to
wheel, deal, lie and cheat for the nation. But the favors he extorted from Ukraine were personal . That's not in the unwritten rules.
Trump is being impeached for doing the wrong quid pro quo. This is the world we
live in.
The public knew what Trump was about from the very beginning. That he was bumptious,
impetuous, always shooting from the hip and often saying stupid things. And yet he was
nominated by one of the two major parties, then turned around and beat the candidate of the
other major party. What does that say about this country, other than its citizens elected a
real estate businessman turned TV star with no political experience whatsover as president.
A
"cri de coeur?" Perhaps. This thing of ours doesn't work anymore . There are a lot of things
wrong with this country but one thing seems increasingly and disturbingly clear: our system
of government, which was put into place via a document written in the late 18th century is
not responsive to the needs of the 21st. So much needs to be changed, starting with:
1.) De-emphasizing the office of Presidency, which has increasingly become more a source
of entertainment rather than enlightenment (to the extent that ANY president has ever been
"enlightened"). There was a very good reason why the first article of the US Constitution
refers to the legislature and not to the executive (or, for that matter, to the
judiciary).
2.) Instituting a multi-party system rather than the current farce--which has long since
become archaic.
Perhaps the time has at last come for a second Constitutional Convention, because the
rules no longer fit the game. A constitution prepared in 1787 when the US was still an
agrarian society consisting of 13 states from Maine to Florida and from the Atlantic seaboard
to the Alleghenies with a total population of less than 4 million may simply not be
responsive to the US of 2019, an advanced, information based, society consisting of 330
million (and counting) situated on a land mass of nearly 3.8 million square miles. Either we
may have to re-think what it means to govern ourselves in the 21st century or--and I shudder
at the thought-- perhaps the concept of what we call "the United States of America" may no
longer be tenable.
It was, after all is said and done, only meant to be an experiment.
"So forget everything about this cooked-to-order crisis except the actual thing impeachment
would turn on: the transcript of Trump’s call. It does not matter what one, two, or 200
whistleblowers, former Obama officials, or talking heads “think” about the call.
There it is, the actual words, all pink and naked on the Internet for everyone to read.
Ukraine did not investigate Biden. Trump did not withhold aid. The attorney general was not
involved. DOJ ruled there was no violation of the law. It has little to do with Pompeo or
Pence (though Pompeo was on the call). You and the Congress pretty much have it all in the
transcript. It’s bathroom reading, five pages."
How dare you suggest reality be considered on this matter. And it may be more ironic than
what went on before --- but there are plenty of places and reasons to find humor --
even if the humor is the result of tragedy.
"“Before Trump will allow himself to be chased from the temple, he’ll bring it
down,” wrote The New York Times."
Laughing.
Now there's an interesting reference --- Samson in the Temple ---
I couldn't give a bucket of methane emitting cow dung whether Trump is impeached or not. It's all a diversion (among many
others) from what we should all be talking and doing something about anyway. It's all part of a sick game the global elites entertain and enrich themselves with.
Have a gander at this recent interview by Greg Hunter and Dr. Paul Craig Roberts -
https://usawatchdog.com/oli... - I may not agree with all of the conclusions the good Dr.
has drawn but a lot of what he says does have a ring of truth to it based on my own
independent research into a various aspects of our so-called civilization.
Unfortunately for the Dems, not one of them has one tenth of Trump's charisma and ability to
campaign. He doesn't need to be right all the time, his personality will carry him through,
and the more the Dems plot, the smaller they look. Is there anyone in world to put him in the
shade?
'Once intelligent people are talking about actual civil war in America' - Peter van Buren,
Oct 14, 2019
'We should have a revolution in this country!' - Donald Trump, Nov 6th, 2012
"... Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018, was hired in February, while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff's committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted his complaint . ..."
"... The whistleblower was an NSC official who worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and who has expertise in Ukraine, the Washington Examiner has reported . ..."
"... later emerged that a member of his staff had spoken to the whistleblower before his complaint was submitted on Aug. 12. The Washington Post concluded that Schiff "clearly made a statement that was false. ..."
"... Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House, recruiting his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing the rules so they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the lunatic efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding their own business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a coincidence. ..."
"... Trump's been having a bad time with public opinion in the wake of the Schiff operation orchestrating the media coverage as well. But the facts on the ground suggest it was all an illegal spying operation on the president. ..."
"... It's an abuse of his office, for sure, given that Schiff is supposed to be focused on intelligence ..."
"... Image credit: Caricature by Donkey Hotey via Flickr , CC BY-SA 2.0 . ..."
"... Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House, recruiting his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing the rules so they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the lunatic efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding their own business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a coincidence. ..."
Seems every day brings a new revelation about Democratic efforts to rig an impeachment of
the president. The false claims and astonishing conflicts of interest being thrown out there
are piling up fast.
The latest, from the San Francisco Examiner, exposes House Intelligence Committee chairman
Adam Schiff's choice of staffers, who it turns out were
two disgruntled Deep-Staters from the White House
who had actually worked with the
so-called "whistleblower":
Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018,
was hired in February,
while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff's
committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted
his
complaint
.
The whistleblower was an NSC official who worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and
who has expertise in Ukraine,
the Washington Examiner has reported
.
A career CIA analyst with Ukraine expertise, the whistleblower aired his concerns about a
phone conversation
between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to
a House Intelligence Committee aide on Schiff's staff. He had previously informed the CIA's
legal counsel's office.
Schiff
initially denied
he knew anything about the complaint before it was filed, stating on
Sep. 17: "We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to."
But it
later emerged that a member of his staff
had spoken to
the whistleblower before his complaint was submitted on Aug. 12. The
Washington Post
concluded that
Schiff "clearly made a statement that was false.
"
Grace, 36,
was hired
to help Schiff's committee investigate the Trump White House. That month, Trump
accused Schiff
of
"stealing people who work at White House." Grace
worked at the NSC
from 2016 to 2018 in
U.S.-China relations and
then briefly
at the Center for a New American
Security think tank, which
was founded by
two former senior Obama administration officials.
So these people were all buddies beforehand, and this would explain why the so-called
whistleblower had been sneaking around with Schiff's staff before he made his whistleblower
complaint.
And that came only after someone with influence was able to get the inspector general of the
Intelligence Community (IGIC) to change the rules about whistleblowers needing no firsthand
knowledge about the wrongdoing they were supposedly reporting. Once that rules change was put
into place, the whistleblower got going.
More and more, this sounds like a pre-planned setup. One Trump operative has a very good
summary of what seems to have been really going on as these anything but exculpatory stories
mount:
Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House, recruiting
his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing the rules so
they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the lunatic
efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding their own
business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a coincidence.
Experienced intelligence operatives, and apparently this Trump operative has this sort of
background, like to say there are no coincidences.
As facts continue to roll out, it's getting more and more obvious that Schiff's operation
was to orchestrate this impeachment scenario all along, going into high gear with the flame-out
of the Mueller investigation.
Trump's been having a bad time with public opinion in the wake of the Schiff operation
orchestrating the media coverage as well. But the facts on the ground suggest it was all an
illegal spying operation on the president.
It's an abuse of his office, for sure, given that Schiff is supposed to be focused on
intelligence
, not on being one of those creepy secret police characters in The Lives of
Others . It's also an outrageous misuse of taxpayer dollars. In light of this Schiff spy
operation, and if Democrats don't want some backatcha next time there's a Dem in office with a
Republican House, it really ought to be every last one of them signed up to that Biggs
list.
Image credit:
Caricature by Donkey Hotey via
Flickr
,
CC BY-SA
2.0
.
Seems every day brings a new revelation about Democratic efforts to rig an
impeachment of the president. The false claims and astonishing conflicts of interest being
thrown out there are piling up fast.
The latest, from the San Francisco Examiner, exposes House Intelligence Committee chairman
Adam Schiff's choice of staffers, who it turns out were
two disgruntled Deep-Staters from the White House
who had actually worked with the
so-called "whistleblower":
Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018,
was hired in February,
while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff's
committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted
his
complaint
.
The whistleblower was an NSC official who worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and
who has expertise in Ukraine,
the Washington Examiner has reported
.
A career CIA analyst with Ukraine expertise, the whistleblower aired his concerns about a
phone conversation
between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to
a House Intelligence Committee aide on Schiff's staff. He had previously informed the CIA's
legal counsel's office.
Schiff
initially denied
he knew anything about the complaint before it was filed, stating on
Sep. 17: "We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to."
But it later emerged that a member of his staff
had spoken to
the whistleblower before his complaint was submitted on Aug. 12. The
Washington Post
concluded that
Schiff "clearly made a statement that was false."
Grace, 36,
was hired
to help Schiff's committee investigate the Trump White House. That month, Trump
accused Schiff
of
"stealing people who work at White House." Grace
worked at the NSC
from 2016 to 2018 in
U.S.-China relations and
then briefly
at the Center for a New American
Security think tank, which
was founded by
two former senior Obama administration officials.
So these people were all buddies beforehand, and this would explain why the so-called
whistleblower had been sneaking around with Schiff's staff before he made his whistleblower
complaint.
And that came only after someone with influence was able to get the inspector general of the
Intelligence Community (IGIC) to change the rules about whistleblowers needing no firsthand
knowledge about the wrongdoing they were supposedly reporting. Once that rules change was put
into place, the whistleblower got going.
More and more, this sounds like a pre-planned setup. One Trump operative has a very good
summary of what seems to have been really going on as these anything but exculpatory stories
mount:
Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House,
recruiting his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing
the rules so they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the
lunatic efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding
their own business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a
coincidence.
Experienced intelligence operatives, and apparently this Trump operative has this sort of
background, like to say there are no coincidences.
As facts continue to roll out, it's getting more and more obvious that Schiff's operation
was to orchestrate this impeachment scenario all along, going into high gear with the flame-out
of the Mueller investigation.
Trump's been having a bad time with public opinion in the wake of the Schiff operation
orchestrating the media coverage as well. But the facts on the ground suggest it was all an
illegal spying operation on the president.
And that's a far more concrete crime than anything Trump is accused of committing. Right
now, Schiff has 109 congressional representatives
signed on to GOP rep. Andy
Biggs of Arizona's
call to condemn and censure Schiff for this sick little illegal
freelance operation to spy on Trump.
It's an abuse of his office, for sure, given that Schiff is supposed to be focused on
intelligence, not on being one of those creepy secret police characters in
The Lives of
Others
. It's also an outrageous misuse of taxpayer dollars. In light of this Schiff spy
operation, and if Democrats don't want some backatcha next time there's a Dem in office with a
Republican House, it really ought to be every last one of them signed up to that Biggs
list.
"... inspector general of the Intelligence Community (IGIC) to change the rules about whistleblowers needing no firsthand
knowledge about the wrongdoing they were supposedly reporting. Once that rules change was put
into place, the whistleblower got going." Doesn't that beg the question IF Atkinson had any past
relationships with any of these people in his former position? I believe I read somewhere that
Atkinson somehow was involved in the Steele Dossier from his former job.
Our government has always operated this way. Nothing new here. It only seems "run worse" because the results are out in the
open for all to see. Whereas, the same thing could be done in secret and you'd never know
about it (the changes in the rules).
Which do you prefer? The sloppy American way, or the secretive Chinese way?
I'm sorry to say we have only these two choices. The sloppy American way is preferable to
me because it's the better part of our openly democratic republic and our Constitution.
The current problems and distractions we are dealing with are the result of Biden,
Schiff, and the Democrat's attempts to be secretive about what they're doing. So, we have to
wonder why these people don't want their actions to be known.
We should delight in seeing such illegitimate secrets exposed.
"...The sloppy American way, or the secretive Chinese way?"
What difference does it make if the criminals
are never indicted? The fact that I know of don't know makes no difference. We know
politicians are dirty scum, anyway..
But I think it's not good enough to just accept rampant corruption, surely things
could be better than this?
Also, it's not so much the Dems in question but the entire system.
And I see little evidence that the system is changing.
Though as you point out, one big shift is that more of us have become aware of how
bad it is.
And as you point out, it's always been that way, going back at least to 1913... but
more like forever and with all systems.
And if it is forever and all systems, then maybe it's better we DON'T get to see
all the dirty laundry all the time, including that nothing is done about it. Maybe
better not to know! Maybe that's the only way to make the country 'great' again!?
"... Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that away and the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia (and China) supposedly justifies all their crimes. ..."
The transcript of President Trump's July 25 telephone conversation with Ukraine's recently
elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has ignited the usual anti-Trump bashing in American
political-media circles, even more calls for impeachment, with little, if any, regard for the
national security issues involved. Leave aside that Trump should not have been compelled to
make the transcript public and ask: Which, if any, foreign leaders will now feel free to
conduct personal telephone diplomacy with an American president directly or indirectly, of the
kind that helped end the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, knowing that his or her comments might
become known to domestic political opponents? Consider instead only the following undiscussed
issues:
§ Even if former vice president Joseph Biden, who figured prominently in the
Trump-Zelensky conversation, is not the Democratic nominee, Ukraine is now likely to be a
contested, and poisonous, issue in the 2020 US presidential election. How did the United States
become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is
NATO expansion, as some of us who opposed that folly back in the 1990s warned would be the
case, and not only in Ukraine. The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in
2013 -- 14 resulted in the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally
elected president Viktor Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass. All
those fateful events infused the Trump-Zelensky talk, if only between the lines.
§ Russia shares centuries of substantial civilizational values, language, culture,
geography, and intimate family relations with Ukraine. America does not. Why, then, is it
routinely asserted in the US political-media establishment that Ukraine is a "vital US national
interest" and not a vital zone of Russian national security, as by all geopolitical reckoning
it would seem to be? The standard American establishment answer is: because of "Russian
aggression against Ukraine." But the "aggression" cited is Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea
and support for anti-Kiev fighters in the Donbass civil war, both of which came after, not
before, the Maidan crisis, and indeed were a direct result of it. That is, in Moscow's eyes, it
was reacting, not unreasonably, to US-led "aggression." In any event, as opponents of eastward
expansion also warned in the 1990s, NATO has increased no one's security, only diminished
security throughout the region bordering Russia.
§ Which brings us back to the Trump-Zelensky telephone conversation. President Zelensky
ran and won overwhelmingly as a peace-with-Moscow candidate, which is why the roughly $400
million in US military aid to Ukraine, authorized by Congress, figured anomalously in the
conversation. Trump is being sharply criticized for withholding that aid or threatening to do
so, including by Obama partisans. Forgotten, it seems, is that President Obama, despite
considerable bipartisan pressure, steadfastly refused to authorize such military assistance to
Kiev, presumably because it might escalate the Russian-Ukrainian conflict (and Russia, with its
long border with Ukraine, had every escalatory advantage). Instead of baiting Trump on this
issue, we should hope he encourages the new peace talks that Zelensky has undertaken in recent
days with Moscow, which could end the killing in Donbass. (For this, Zelensky is being
threatened by well-armed extreme Ukrainian nationalists, even quasi-fascists. Strong American
support for his negotiations with Moscow may not deter them, but it might.)
§ Finally, but not surprisingly, the shadow of Russiagate is now morphing into
Ukrainegate. Trump is also being sharply criticized for asking Zelensky to cooperate with
Attorney General William Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate, even though
the role of
Ukrainian-Americans and Ukraine itself in Russiagate allegations against Trump on behalf of
Hillary Clinton in 2016 is now well-documented
.
We need to know fully the origins of Russiagate, arguably the worst presidential scandal in
American history, and if Ukrainian authorities can contribute to that understanding, they
should be encouraged to do so. As I've argued repeatedly, fervent anti-Trumpers must decide
whether they loathe him more than they care about American and international security. Imaging,
for example, a Cuban missile -- like crisis somewhere in the world today where Washington and
Moscow are militarily eyeball-to-eyeball, directly or through proxies, from the Baltic and the
Black Seas to Syria and Ukraine. Will Trump's presidential legitimacy be sufficient for him to
resolve such an existential crisis peacefully, as President John F. Kennedy did in 1962?
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York
University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book War
With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback and
in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show, now in
their sixth year, are available at www.thenation.com.
Trump is an agent of the Deep State, playing good cop to the bad cop Deep State. I have been
saying this since mid April 2017. His multitude of actions belie his promises. Trump is a
quisling to his supporters.
Here is an excellent article that comports with my view of Trump.
I am puzzled why Cohen is permitted to publish in the Nation. Is it due to his marriage
to its publisher or to the magazine's remnant infatuation with the Soviet state? Just
asking.
The whole situation is a rather ironic
Prof. Cohen is certainly one of America's most eminent Russia scholars, and I think that
for decades he was regarded as one of the most left-leaning ones, regularly denounced for his
leftism by all the Neocons and other rightwingers. I remember I used to see him on the PBS
Newshour, sometimes paired with a conservative critic of the Soviets. I'd guess that past
history plus being married to the publisher of The Nation is what gives him his
residual foothold there.
I'd suspect that if someone had told him a couple of decades ago that by the late 2010s
he'd be blacklisted from the MSM and denounced as a "Russian agent," he probably would have
been greatly saddened at the disheartening turn in American society, but not totally shocked.
He probably would have regarded such a scenario as having a 10% possibility.
But if someone would have told him that the people denouncing and blacklisting him would
have been the *liberal Democrats* and some of their most "excitable" elements would be
accusing him of being a "Neo-Nazi White Supremacist Russian Agent" he would have thought the
entire country had gone on LSD.
It's sad that our entire country has gone on LSD
The whole situation is actually a perfect parallel to the various past American purges
I've often covered in my articles:
Russia is the excuse for US actions in the Ukraine as it was in the ME.
What is America without a big bad boogeyman like Russia?.
Certainly not a “Superpower’ defending the world.
Without enemies like Russia we would be nothing but big rich country.
And all the Neos and Zios and politicians would have to use Viagra instead of war to squirt
out their poison.
A lot of countries like the Ukraine have gotten a lot of US taxpayer money by
‘standing up to a Russian takeover’….and are laughing all the way to
their bank.
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine’s torturous and famously
corrupt politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in
the target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials.
Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs
of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes
to mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump
said to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is
the exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption
can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of
other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
It is more than ironic that the Dems (and their like-minded cronies in Big Media) are up in
arms over Trump’s attempt in find ‘dirt’ about Joe Biden when the
‘dirt’ looks and smells like actual corruption. Have laws been broken? Was
Biden selling influence through his son? Stranger things have happened. At the very least,
it looks as though Joe Biden crossed an ethical line. This will likely cost him the
nomination.
Similarly, the news media should–if it was doing its job–pursue leads that
would help find the source behind the missing server and the Fake News that helped justify
the toxic and duplicitous ‘Russiagate’ investigation. But they’d rather
pursue Trump instead. I have never witnessed a more partisan and bloodthirsty Fourth
Estate.
Why is the media so utterly uninterested in finding out who/how the fake
Putin-Trump ‘conspiracy’ was cooked up in the first place? Doesn’t it
make sense the Trump would want to find out more? Justice demands it. False intelligence
can sow chaos and start wars.
Consider, for instance, the manufactured lies (Saddam’s phantom WMD, links to 911,
etc) that were used to justify Zio-America’s annihilation of Iraq. What intelligence
agency cooked up these falsehoods? Who spoon-fed these fairy tales to G.W. Bush and Colin
Powell?
Not only have these questions never been answered, they are seldom even asked! The Deep
State has gone rogue. And Big Media is covering it up.
This whole ridiculous drama may profit the Dem’s in the longer term — that is,
by removing that corrupt, dementia ridden nit-wit Biden from the presidential
competition.
As president, Biden would be a greater sock puppet than even GWB…of course,
“sock puppet” maybe just what the Dem’s want….
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with inevitable
impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
@Ron Unz Thanks to Tucker Carlson’s show, some folks on the left like Cohen, Mate
and Greenwald, are more likely to get air time on Fox News than MSNBC and CNN.
The current CIA talking point is that it is illegal for the President to seek foreign
assistance for his campaign. One might also slant it that the President of the United
States has an obligation to the people who elected him to require an allied, friendly
government to reopen the investigation of Biden because there is adequate reason to suspect
that the Democrats are running yet another corrupt criminal for President. Incidentally,
this puts Zelensky in a very awkward position, as one of the backers of his transition from
sitcom star to President of Ukraine was a principal in Burisma
It is not the threat of impeachment that will energize Trump’s base; it is the
grotesque, constant character assassination in the (largely CIA manipulated) media that
will return him to the White House. The American people have a sense of fairness. They have
always been of better character than the reprobates we are allowed to vote for. Whatever
happened to trusting the democratic process, instead of using intelligence assets to
engineer domestic regime change?
History is not made by nice guys. Trump has torn a big hole in the tissue of lies about
what this country is and what it stands for, and that is too much for those who make their
living deceiving us.
Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that
away and the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia
(and China) supposedly justifies all their crimes.
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country’s constitutionally elected president
Viktor Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment — none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) — how fucking hypocritical is it
to presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? — none of
it would have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
1) Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset (Clinton).
2) Jill Stein is a Russian asset (Clinton).
3) Donald Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987 ( Intelligencer
).
4) Rand Paul is "working for Vladimir Putin" (
McCain ,
Greg Olear ).
5) Bernie Sanders is "just a tool" to the Russians (
The Washington Post ).
"... It's a major unanticipated consequence of the digital "revolution." It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we'd only be watching jumbotron replays while failing to pay attention to the action on the field. ..."
"... The stupendous failure of the Mueller Investigation only revealed what can happen when extraordinary bad faith, dishonesty, and incompetence are brought to this project of reinventing "truth" -- of who did what and why -- while it provoked a counter-industry of detecting its gross falsifications. ..."
"... Perhaps you can see why unleashing the CIA, NSA, and the FBI on political enemies by Mr. Obama and his cohorts has become such a disaster. When that scheme blew up, the intel community went to the mattresses, as the saying goes in Mafia legend and lore. The "company" found itself at existential risk. Of course, the CIA has long been accused of following an agenda of its own simply because it had the means to do it. It had the manpower, the money, and the equipment to run whatever operations it felt like running, and a history of going its own way out of sheer institutional arrogance, of knowing better than the crackers and clowns elected by the hoi-polloi. The secrecy inherent in its charter was a green light for limitless mischief and some of the agency's directors showed open contempt for the occupants of the White House. Think: Allen Dulles and William Casey. And lately, Mr. Brennan. ..."
Here's one big reason that America is driving itself batshit crazy : the explosion of computerized records, emails, inter-office
memos, Twitter trails, Facebook memorabilia, iPhone videos, YouTubes, recorded conversations, and the vast alternative universe of
storage capacity for all this stuff makes it seem possible to constantly go back and reconstruct reality. All it has really done
is amplified the potential for political mischief to suicide level.
It's a major unanticipated consequence of the digital "revolution." It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively
replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real
time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we'd only be watching jumbotron replays while failing
to pay attention to the action on the field.
Before all this, history was left largely to historians, who curated it from a range of views for carefully considered introduction
to the stream of human culture, and managed this process at a pace that allowed a polity to get on with its business at hand in the
here-and-now -- instead of incessantly and recursively reviewing events that have already happened 24/7. The more electronic media
has evolved, the more it lends itself to manipulation, propaganda, and falsification of whatever happened five minutes, or five hours,
or five weeks ago.
This is exactly why and how the losing team in the 2016 election has worked so hard to change that bit of history. The stupendous
failure of the Mueller Investigation only revealed what can happen when extraordinary bad faith, dishonesty, and incompetence are
brought to this project of reinventing "truth" -- of who did what and why -- while it provoked a counter-industry of detecting its
gross falsifications.
This dynamic has long been systematically studied and applied by institutions like the so-called "intelligence community," and
has gotten so out-of-hand that its main mission these days appears to be the maximum gaslighting of the nation -- for the purpose
of its own desperate self-defense. The "Whistleblower" episode is the latest turn in dishonestly manipulated records, but the most
interesting feature of it is that the release of the actual transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call did not affect the "narrative"
precooked between the CIA and Adam Schiff's House Intel Committee. They just blundered on with the story and when major parts of
the replay didn't add up, they retreated to secret sessions in the basement of the US capitol.
Perhaps you can see why unleashing the CIA, NSA, and the FBI on political enemies by Mr. Obama and his cohorts has become
such a disaster. When that scheme blew up, the intel community went to the mattresses, as the saying goes in Mafia legend and lore.
The "company" found itself at existential risk. Of course, the CIA has long been accused of following an agenda of its own simply
because it had the means to do it. It had the manpower, the money, and the equipment to run whatever operations it felt like running,
and a history of going its own way out of sheer institutional arrogance, of knowing better than the crackers and clowns elected by
the hoi-polloi. The secrecy inherent in its charter was a green light for limitless mischief and some of the agency's directors showed
open contempt for the occupants of the White House. Think: Allen Dulles and William Casey. And lately, Mr. Brennan.
The recently-spawned NSA has mainly added the capacity to turn everything that happens into replay material, since it is suspected
of recording every phone call, every email, every financial transaction, every closed-circuit screen capture, and anything else its
computers can snare for storage in its Utah Data Storage Center. Now you know why the actions of Edward Snowden were so significant.
He did what he did because he was moral enough to know the face of malevolence when he saw it. That he survives in exile is a miracle.
As for the FBI, only an exceptional species of ineptitude explains the trouble they got themselves into with the RussiaGate fiasco.
The unbelievable election loss of Mrs. Clinton screwed the pooch for them, and the desperate acts that followed only made things
worse. The incompetence and mendacity on display was only matched by Mr. Mueller and his lawyers, who were supposed to be the FBI's
cleanup crew and only left a bigger mess -- all of it cataloged in digital records.
Now, persons throughout all these agencies are waiting for the hammer to fall. If they are prosecuted, the process will entail
yet another monumental excursion into the replaying of those digital records. It could go on for years. So, the final act in the
collapse of the USA will be the government choking itself to death on replayed narratives from its own server farms.
In the meantime, events are actually tending in a direction that will eventually deprive the nation of the means to continue most
of its accustomed activities including credible elections, food distribution, a reliable electric grid, and perhaps even self-defense.
www.aejmc.org
/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Journalism-Quarterly-1973-Donohue-652-9.pdfofmassmedia as interdependent
parts of a total social system in which they share facets of controlling, and being controlled by, other subsystems. A major purpose
of this paper is to relate the subsystems of massmedia to the total pattern of social organization and social control
and to point up the crucial nature of
Massmedia are media forms designed
to reach the largest audience possible. They include television, movies, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, records, video games
and the internet. Many studies have been conducted in the past century to measure the effects of massmedia on the
population in order to discover the best techniques to influence it.
https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinion
The Central Intelligence Agency has made use of massmedia assets, both foreign and domestic, for its covert operations.
In 1973, the Washington Star-News reported that CIA had enlisted more than thirty Americans working abroad as journalists, citing
an internal CIA inquiry ordered by CIA director William E. Colby.
Bill Barr: This is not decay. This is organized
destruction. Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House. Trade Deal With China Is a Blockbuster
"... When propaganda is cleverly engineered, people don't even recognize it as propaganda: welcome to the USSR, the United States of Suppression and Repression. The propaganda in the U.S. has reached such a high state that the majority of people accept it as "Pravda" (truth), even as their limbic system's BS detector is sensing there is a great disturbance in the Force. ..."
"... To give some examples: healthcare is over 18% of the nation's GDP, yet it makes up only 8.7% of the Consumer price Index. Hundreds of thousands of families have to declare bankruptcy as a result of crushing healthcare bills, but on the CPI components chart, it's a tiny little sliver just a bit more than recreation (5.7%). ..."
"... "Facts" are a funny thing when the data sources and massaging of that data are all purposefully opaque. Again, inflation is a lived-world example of how "official facts" are clearly massaged to support an essential narrative -- that inflation is so low it's basically signal noise, while in the real world it has impoverished the bottom 95% to a startling (but unmentionable) degree. ..."
"... This is what happened to this site in the bogus PropOrNot propaganda campaign of 2016, in which every alternative-media website that questioned the "approved narratives" was labeled "fake news" in a classic propaganda trick of labeling dissenters as propagandists to misdirect the citizenry from the actual propaganda (PropOrNot), which by the way was heavily promoted on page one by Jeff Bezos' propaganda mouthpiece, The Washington Post . (Who's your daddy, WP "journalists"?) ..."
"... Fake news, indeed. Those individuals who support the "approved narratives" and orthodoxies win gold stars, and so virtue-signaling is now the nation's most passionate hobby. (Shades of the Stasi...) ..."
"... In the wake of the 1976 Church Committee revelations on the institutional lawlessness and corruption of the FBI and CIA, the idea that former CIA propagandists and spy masters would be on TV as "commentators" would have been laughed off as a bad joke. Yet here are Clapper, Brennan et al, the "most likely to lie, obfuscate, rendition and propagandize" individuals in the nation welcomed as "experts" who we should all accept as trustworthy Big Brother. (Ahem) ..."
"... Welcome to the USSR: the United States of Suppression and Repression , where your views are welcome as long as they parrot "approved narratives" and the corporate-state's orthodoxies. "Facts" are only welcome if they lend credence to the "approved narratives" and orthodoxies. ..."
We're all against "fake news," right? Until your content is deemed "fake news" in a "fake news" indictment without any evidence,
trial or recourse.
When propaganda is cleverly engineered, people don't even recognize it as propaganda: welcome to the USSR, the United States
of Suppression and Repression. The propaganda in the U.S. has reached such a high state that the majority of people accept it as
"Pravda" (truth), even as their limbic system's BS detector is sensing there is a great disturbance in the Force.
Inflation is a good example. The official (i.e. propaganda) inflation rate is increasingly detached from the real-world declines
in the purchasing power of the bottom 80%, yet the jabbering talking heads on TV repeat the "low inflation" story with such conviction
that the dissonance between the "official narrative" and the real world must be "our fault"--a classic technique of brainwashing.
To give some examples: healthcare is over 18% of the nation's GDP, yet it makes up only 8.7% of the Consumer price Index.
Hundreds of thousands of families have to declare bankruptcy as a result of crushing healthcare bills, but on the CPI components
chart, it's a tiny little sliver just a bit more than recreation (5.7%).
Then there's education, which includes the $1.4 trillion borrowed by student debt-serfs--which is only part of the tsunami of
cash gushing into the coffers of the higher-education cartel. Yet education & communication (which presumably includes the Internet
/ mobile telephone service cartel's soaring prices) is another tiny sliver of the CPI, just 6.6%, a bit more than fun-and-games recreation.
As for housing costs, former Soviet apparatchiks must be high-fiving the Federal agencies for their inventive confusion of reality
with magical made-up "statistics." To estimate housing costs, the federal agency in charge of ginning up a low inflation number asks
homeowners to guess what their house would rent for, were it being rented--what's known as equivalent rent.
Wait a minute--don't we have actual sales data for houses, and actual rent data? Yes we do, but those are verboten because they
reflect skyrocketing inflation in housing costs, which is not allowed. So we use some fake guessing-game numbers, and the corporate
media dutifully delivers the "pravda" that inflation is 1.6% annually--basically signal noise, while in the real world (as measured
by the Chapwood Index) is running between 9% and 13% annually. How
the Chapwood Index is calculated )
As the dissonance between the real world experienced by the citizenry and what they're told is "pravda" by the media reaches extremes,
the media is forced to double-down on the propaganda , shouting down, marginalizing, discrediting, demonetizing and suppressing dissenters
via character assassination, following the old Soviet script to a tee.
(Clearly, the CIA's agitprop sector mastered the Soviet templates and has been applying what they learned to the domestic populace.
By all means, start by brainwashing the home audience so they don't catch on that the "news" is a Truman Show simulation.)
In 2014, Peter Pomerantsev, a British journalist born in the Soviet Union, published
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia which drew on his years working in Russian
television to describe a society in giddy, hysterical flight from enlightenment empiricism. He wrote of how state-controlled Russian
broadcasting "became ever more twisted, the need to incite panic and fear ever more urgent; rationality was tuned out, and Kremlin-friendly
cults and hatemongers were put on prime time."
Now, he's written a penetrating follow-up,
This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality that is partly an effort to make sense of how the disorienting
phenomena he observed in Russia went global. The child of exiled Soviet dissidents, Pomerantsev juxtaposes his family's story
-- unfolding at a time when ideas, art and information seemed to challenge tyranny -- with a present in which truth scarcely appears
to matter.
"During glasnost, it seemed that the truth would set everybody free," he writes. "Facts seemed possessed of power; dictators
seemed so afraid of facts that they suppressed them. But something has gone drastically wrong: We have access to more information
and evidence than ever, but facts seem to have lost their power."
"Facts" are a funny thing when the data sources and massaging of that data are all purposefully opaque. Again, inflation is
a lived-world example of how "official facts" are clearly massaged to support an essential narrative -- that inflation is so low
it's basically signal noise, while in the real world it has impoverished the bottom 95% to a startling (but unmentionable) degree.
This is the reality as inflation has eaten up wages' purchasing power:
Families
Go Deep in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class Wages stalled but costs haven't, so people increasingly rent or finance what their
parents might have owned outright Median household income in the U.S. was $61,372 at the end of 2017, according to the Census
Bureau. When inflation is taken into account, that is just above the 1999 level.
We're all against "fake news," right? Until your content is deemed "fake news" in a "fake news" indictment without any evidence,
trial or recourse. This is what happened to this site in the bogus PropOrNot propaganda campaign of 2016, in which every alternative-media
website that questioned the "approved narratives" was labeled "fake news" in a classic propaganda trick of labeling dissenters as
propagandists to misdirect the citizenry from the actual propaganda (PropOrNot), which by the way was heavily promoted on page one
by Jeff Bezos' propaganda mouthpiece, The Washington Post . (Who's your daddy, WP "journalists"?)
Meanwhile, back in reality, the primary source of data here on oftwominds.com is 1) the Federal Reserve data base (FRED) 2) IRS
data and 3) content and charts posted by the cream of the U.S. corporate media Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal and the New York
Times.
Fake news, indeed. Those individuals who support the "approved narratives" and orthodoxies win gold stars, and so virtue-signaling
is now the nation's most passionate hobby. (Shades of the Stasi...)
In the wake of the 1976 Church Committee revelations on the institutional lawlessness and corruption of the FBI and CIA, the
idea that former CIA propagandists and spy masters would be on TV as "commentators" would have been laughed off as a bad joke. Yet
here are Clapper, Brennan et al, the "most likely to lie, obfuscate, rendition and propagandize" individuals in the nation welcomed
as "experts" who we should all accept as trustworthy Big Brother. (Ahem)
What if every employee in the corporate media who was paid (or coerced) by the FBI, NSA, CIA etc. had to wear a large colorful
badge that read, "owned by the FBI/CIA"? Would that change our view of the validity of the "approved narratives"?
Welcome to the USSR: the United States of Suppression and Repression , where your views are welcome as long as they parrot
"approved narratives" and the corporate-state's orthodoxies. "Facts" are only welcome if they lend credence to the "approved narratives"
and orthodoxies.
For example, corporate earnings are rising. Never mind estimates were slashed, that was buried in footnotes a month ago. What
matters is Corporate America will once again "beat estimates" by a penny, or a nickel, or gasp, oh the wonderment, by a dime, on
earnings that were slashed by a dollar when "nobody was looking." Meanwhile, back in reality, the bottom 95% have been losing ground
for two decades. But don't say anything, you'll be guilty of "fake news."
Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that away and
the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia (and China)
supposedly justifies all their crimes.
1) Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset (Clinton).
2) Jill Stein is a Russian asset (Clinton).
3) Donald Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987 ( Intelligencer
).
4) Rand Paul is "working for Vladimir Putin" (
McCain ,
Greg Olear ).
5) Bernie Sanders is "just a tool" to the Russians (
The Washington Post ).
"... New Knowledge's victory lap was short-lived. On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate. ..."
"... Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead. ..."
"... In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet. ..."
US cyber-security experts have blamed Russia for meddling in American elections since 2016.
Now it has emerged that authors of a Senate report on 'Russian' meddling actually ran a "false
flag" meddling operation themselves. A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee
released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting
African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household
name.
Described by the New
York Times as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has
ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies. Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan
previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agency. His partner, Ryan Fox,
is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for
the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract
the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone. Morgan and Fox
have struck gold in the "Russiagate" racket, which sprung into being after Hillary
Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan, for example, is
one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that purports to monitor
and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. The dashboard is bankrolled by
the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats
and neoconservatives funded in part by NATO and USAID.
It is worth noting that the 600 "Russia-linked" Twitter accounts monitored by the
dashboard are not disclosed to the public, making it impossible to verify its claims. This
inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry
journalists, however.
From the way it was formed to the secrecy of its "methods" to the blatantly false
assumptions on which its claims rest, "Hamilton68" is probably the single most successful
media fraud & US propaganda campaign I've seen since I've been writing about politics.
It's truly shocking.
New Knowledge's victory lap was short-lived. On December 19, a New York Times
story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as
fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017
special election for the US Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake
Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several
Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to
support a write-in candidate instead.
In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false
flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by
a Russian botnet."
It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by
Mother Jones , which based its story on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious
creation, Hamilton 68.
Ultimately, Moore ended up losing the race by a miniscule 1.5 percentage points –
making his opponent Doug Jones the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the US Senate in over
25 years.
Money trail and weak apologies
Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Times piece,
had known about the meddling for months, because he spoke at an event where the organizers
boasted about it!
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement
Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar.
Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican
votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hurt
Moore. He dubbed it "Project Birmingham."
This gets even weirder: NYT reporter @ScottShaneNYT , who broke the
Alabama disinfo op story, learned of it in early September when he spoke at an off-the-record
event organized by one of the firms that perpetrated the deception https://t.co/gIAytOh2yy
The money for the venture came from a $750,000 contribution to AET by Reid Hoffman, the
billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a big Democrat donor. Once that emerged, Hoffman offered
a public apology for his connection to the shady operation, but insisted that he didn't know
what his money was going towards.
" I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing ," Hoffman
said in a statement.
"For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET -- the organization I did
support -- more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would
reject."
As for Shane, he told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, but had
signed a nondisclosure agreement at the request of AET, so he could not talk about it
further.
Spin and denial
Shane's spin on the tale was that New Knowledge "imitated Russian tactics" as part of
an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 and had no effect on the
election. Yet these tactics are only considered "Russian" because New Knowledge and
similar outfits said so! Moreover, New Knowledge's budget in Alabama was greater than the
reported amount spent by "Russians" on the 2016 US presidential election, yet Moscow's
alleged meddling was supposed to be decisive, while New Knowledge's failed?
New Knowledge responded to the Times story by insisting that the "false flag"
operation was actually a benign research project. In a statement posted on Twitter, the
company's CEO claimed that its activities during the Alabama Senate race were conducted in
order to "better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media
disinformation."
Morgan emphasized that he in no way took part in an influence campaign, and warned people
not to mischaracterize his "research."
While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that
Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard to give his "false flag" more credibility
– misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was
fake.
New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which announced last
week that five accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been
suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
Meddlers
unmasked
The final nail in the coffin of Morgan's story came on Thursday, when the leaked secret
after-action report from "Project Birmingham" was published online, showing that those
behind the Alabama campaign knew perfectly well what they were doing and why.
BREAKING: Here's the after-action report from the AL Senate disinfo campaign.
So, it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy by "Russian bots."
Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat
operatives chiefly responsible for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria
over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
"... "much of this Volume's analysis is derived from" ..."
"... "Russian troll farm" ..."
"... "Intelligence Community Assessment," ..."
"... "Strategic Communications Center of Excellence." ..."
"... "a cybersecurity company dedicated to protecting the public sphere from disinformation attacks." ..."
"... "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet." ..."
"... "Russian" ..."
"... "significantly informed the Committee's understanding of Russia's social media-predicated attack against our democracy," ..."
"... Ever since Hillary Clinton blamed "Russian hackers" ..."
There is a
reason for that. By the committee's own admission,
"much of this Volume's analysis is derived
from"
the work of two Technical Advisory Groups (TAG), which produced two public reports back in
December 2018, to the same kind of fawning press coverage the report is receiving now.
NEW: The Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S.
elections involved using social media content to mostly target African-Americans, a new
Senate committee report concludes.
https://t.co/7BRUmiG18T
Not surprisingly, the report's
"findings"
are being cited as conclusive proof that
Democrats were right and President Donald Trump was wrong about 2016, Russia, Ukraine and the US
presidential election.
The Senate Intelligence Committee unveiled a sweeping new bipartisan
report showing Russian efforts to boost Trump's White House bid on social media during the
2016 U.S. election
https://t.co/TUjUhBdMnc
The only trouble with that is that the committee provides no actual evidence for any of its claims
– only assertions. For example, their description of the Internet Research Agency – the
"Russian
troll farm"
– is basically copied over from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of a
dozen of its alleged members. Yet a federal judge presiding over the case ruled back in May that
allegations cannot be treated as established evidence or conclusion, coming close to finding Mueller's
prosecutors in contempt.
Another document presented as evidence is the January 2017
"Intelligence Community Assessment,"
the disingenuously named work of a small group of people, hand-picked by the Obama administration's
DNI and chiefs of the CIA, FBI and NSA – all of whom, except for the NSA, have since been implicated
in what seems to be a campaign to spy on Trump, delegitimize his presidency, and have him impeached.
The Senate report also quotes testimonies from Obama aides such as Ben Rhodes – helpfully redacted
of course – Gen. Philip Breedlove, the NATO commander who tried to set off a war with Russia;
professional
"Russian bot"
hunters like Clint Watts and Thomas Rid; and NATO's
"Strategic
Communications Center of Excellence."
The best part, however, has to be the reliance on New Knowledge, presented as
"a cybersecurity
company dedicated to protecting the public sphere from disinformation attacks."
In reality, New
Knowledge was exposed by the New York Times as the outfit that actually ran bots and disinformation
operations during the 2017 Alabama special election for the US Senate, targeting Republican candidate
Roy Moore on behalf of Democrats – while blaming Russia!
In an internal memo, New Knowledge executives boasted how they
"orchestrated an elaborate 'false
flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a
Russian botnet."
The other TAG, led by British academics and researchers, found that the
activity of 'Russian trolls' increased after the election – by 238 percent on Instagram, 59 percent on
Facebook, 52 percent on Twitter, and 84 percent on YouTube. So it was influencing elections
retroactively?
Left unsaid was that the absolute quantity of
"Russian"
posts was minuscule, a proverbial
drop in the bucket compared to the billions of social media posts generated and consumed by the US
electorate during the campaign.
These are the people who
"significantly informed the Committee's understanding of Russia's
social media-predicated attack against our democracy,"
as this week's report puts it.
Ever since Hillary Clinton blamed
"Russian hackers"
for the revelations of corruption
within the DNC in July 2016, the Washington establishment has been eager to blame Moscow for all the
ills of the US political system, real or imagined. The Senate Intelligence Committee's report seems to
be nothing more than an attempt to reheat the long-cold corpse of a conspiracy that should have been
buried with the Mueller Report and allowed to rest in peace.
Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal attorney, defended himself Sunday on "This
Week with George Stephanopoulos" from accusations lodged by the president's former homeland security adviser that he
has trafficked unfounded theories about foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election.
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Tom Bossert, the former White House official, took aim at Giuliani earlier on "This Week,"
calling it a mistake for the president to have hired him in the first place. He also called out Giuliani for
repeating a "completely false" theory that Ukraine – not Russia – was responsible for interference in the 2016
election.
"At this point I am deeply frustrated with what [Giuliani] and the legal team is doing and
repeating that debunked theory to the president," Bossert, who is now an ABC contributor, said. "It sticks in his
mind when he hears it over and over again."
Giuliani fired back later in the show, telling Stephanopoulos, "Tom Bossert doesn't know
what he's talking about I'm not peddling anything."
The president's personal attorney also sought to defend his role in pressing Ukrainians to
investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, the fallout from which has led to an impeachment inquiry in Congress.
"Everything I did was to defend my client and I am proud of having uncovered what will turn
out to be a massive pay-for-play scheme," Giuliani told Stephanopoulos.
The "pay-for-play scheme" Giuliani has accused Biden of perpetrating in Ukraine dates back
to 2016 and the dismissal of the country's former prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. At the time, Biden was leading
U.S. policy toward Ukraine with an emphasis on cracking down on corruption.
He called for Shokin to be fired.
At one point, Giuliani waved what he said were several affidavits, including one by Shokin
defending himself, which he said verified his claims that Shokin was dismissed as a result of his investigation of
Burisma and Hunter Biden.
It was not immediately clear how the documents verified those claims.
Trump and Giuliani have accused Biden of calling for Shokin's dismissal because his office
was investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where Biden's son, Hunter, had a seat on the board of
directors.
"This is not about getting Joe Biden in trouble," Giuliani said. "This is about proving
that Donald Trump was framed by the Democrats."
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
President Donald Trump and Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky speak during a meeting in New York on September 25, 2019, on the sidelines of the United
Nations General Assembly.
more
+
But the assertion that Biden acted to help his son has been
undercut by widespread criticism of Shokin from several high-profile international leaders, including members of the
European Union and International Monetary Fund, who said Biden's recommendation was well justified.
The IMF threatened to withhold aid to Kiev in early 2016, citing "Ukraine's slow progress
in improving governance and fighting corruption," according to Christine Lagard, the IMF's managing director.
Giuliani also sought to undermine a whistleblower complaint, which was filed in August and
released publicly last week, that describes the nature of the president's phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart,
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and an apparent effort within the White House to "lock down" records of the conversation.
"The whistleblower says, 'I don't have any direct knowledge, I just heard things,'"
Giuliani said. "I'm not saying [the whistleblower] was false, I'm saying he could have heard it wrong."
Stephanopoulos cited several examples from the complaint in which the whistleblower
accurately described the content of Trump's conversation with Zelenskiy as compared to the transcript.
The whistleblower, who has not been identified, claimed that at least a half dozen
administration officials had raised concerns that Trump had used "the power of his office to solicit interference
from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election."
Siavosh Hosseini/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The annual Free Iran Conference for the
first time at Ashraf 3, the headquarters of the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran on July 13, 2019, near Duress
in Albania.
more
+
Democrats have accused the president of using his desire for an
investigation into the Bidens as leverage with Zelenskiy, particularly in light of the fact that the White House had,
at the time, withheld nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine.
It was later released.
Giuliani's name is invoked more than 30 times in the whistleblower's complaint.
When Stephanopoulos asked Giuliani whether he will cooperate with the House Intelligence
Committee, for which Rep. Adam Schiff is the chair, Giuliani said he wouldn't cooperate with Schiff. But when pressed
said he would "consider it" if his client, the president, signed off.
"I'm a lawyer. It's his privilege, not mine," he responded. "If he decides that he wants me
to testify, of course I'll testify, even though I think Adam Schiff is an illegitimate chairman. He has already
prejudged the case."
In his interview on "This Week," Giuliani sought to clarify the timeline of his
conversations with Ukrainians and insisted he did not instigate communications.
"November of 2016, they first came to me," Giuliani said of the alleged outreach from
Ukrainians through the State Department. "The Ukrainians came to me. I didn't go to them."
The State Department and its chief, Mike Pompeo, have faced scrutiny for their handling of
Giuliani's overtures to the Ukrainians. The former U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, helped coordinate at
least one interaction Giuliani had with an aide to Zelenskiy in Madrid in May, Volker confirmed.
Giuliani has claimed the State Department directed him to act and has said he briefed
Volker and the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, after his meetings with Ukrainians.
On Friday, ABC News reported that Volker had resigned from his post with the State
Department. House Democrats still plan to interview him next week as part of their impeachment inquiry, according to
a congressional aide.
Giuliani planned to speak at a conference in Armenia next week, according to a schedule.
But he cancelled after news outlets reported that several Kremlin officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin
would also be in attendance.
"... Giuliani planned to speak at a conference in Armenia next week, according to a schedule. But he cancelled after news outlets reported that several Kremlin officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin would also be in attendance. ..."
Giuliani has claimed the State Department directed him to act and has said he briefed Volker
and the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, after his meetings with
Ukrainians.
On Friday, ABC News reported that Volker had resigned from his post with the State
Department. House Democrats still plan to interview him next week as part of their impeachment
inquiry, according to a congressional aide.
Giuliani planned to speak at a conference in Armenia next week, according to a schedule.
But he cancelled after news outlets reported that several Kremlin officials and Russian
President Vladimir Putin would also be in attendance.
Foreign new coverage in modern western societies is controlled by intelligence agencies. There are no exceptions.
Notable quotes:
"... At this stage, any one who still believes in the western propaganda about China is simply too brain-washed and not too smart for any cure. Excuse me, I should say "too dumb for any cure". ..."
"... For example, Nathan Rich's recent video shows how media biased reporting of Hong Kong compare with Ukraine riots. The contrast can't be anymore stark: ..."
"... All these so-called anti communist slant against countries, I suspect, have its origins in the Vatican. People seem to forget that they should bear false witness https://www.youtube.com/embed/yUGPIeE9kMc?feature=oembed ..."
@d
dan " ..media biased Hong Kong reporting ."
How would American cops react to punks tossing Molotov Cocktails at them? Arson is a felony
but there would be no need for a trial just a coroner.
@Godfree Roberts "The
weird result of this enormous, expensive effort is that, while we were busy lying to
ourselves about China "
At this stage, any one who still believes in the western propaganda about China is
simply too brain-washed and not too smart for any cure. Excuse me, I should say "too dumb for
any cure".
For example, Nathan Rich's recent video shows how media biased reporting of Hong Kong
compare with Ukraine riots. The contrast can't be anymore stark:
@Godfree Roberts Here
is a good analysis of how the main stream media (MSM) gang up to give propaganda, and how I
wish they have objective comments about China or any country they do not like.
All these so-called anti communist slant against countries, I suspect, have its origins in
the Vatican. People seem to forget that they should bear false witness
@48 piotr.. "Pretending that Russia is some source of evil inventions is the true
intellectual dishonesty." exactly... i'm thinking the amount of ignorance that the western
MSM has happily shed on this has won over a number of otherwise intelligent people... it is
friggin' shocking... many folks like Kool-Aid it seems, including otherwise intelligent
people...
The key question here is: Is Nancy Pelosi a CIA controlled politician who followed Breenan instruction to open the second stage
of the color revolution against Trump. Her long service in House Intelligence Committee suggest that this is a possibility.
Nancy Pelosi just took the biggest gamble of her entire political career. If she is ultimately successful, she will be remembered
as the woman that removed Donald Trump from the White House, and Democrats will treat her like a hero for the rest of her life. But
if she fails and Trump wins in 2020, the backlash that she created when she tried to impeach Trump is likely to be blamed, and she
could potentially lose her leadership role in the House. Of course at that point she probably wouldn't want to remain in the House
much longer, and she would be hated by many Democrats for the rest of her life for subjecting them to four more years of Trump. So
it really is all on the line for Nancy Pelosi, and she never should have gone down this road if she wasn't absolutely certain that
she could deliver.
And at this point, most Americans don't want impeachment proceedings to happen. For example, just check out what a Politico/Morning
Consult poll just found
In the poll -- conducted Friday through Sunday, as stories circled about Trump allegedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate
former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the Democratic candidates hoping to oust him -- 36 percent of respondents said they believe
Congress should begin impeachment proceedings against Trump.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday the opening of a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump in response to the
Ukraine controversy. If it's found that Trump did use his presidential power to force a foreign leader to help take down a political
rival, 55 percent of U.S. adults said they would support removing him from office, according to a recent YouGov survey.
Forty-four percent of those polled said they'd "strongly support" removing Trump if the allegations are true, while another
11 percent said they'd "somewhat support" it.
But as it stands right now, on the national level this is a very unpopular decision by Pelosi, and it could potentially hurt Democrats
among key blocs of voters
Worse yet, impeachment isn't selling where Democrats made their best gains in the midterms. A majority of suburban respondents
oppose starting the impeachment process (35 percent/50 percent), with a wider gap among rural respondents (27/59), while urban
voters are more ambivalent than one might guess (47/35). Impeachment trails by double digits in the South (33/53), Midwest, (36/48),
and even in the Democrat-friendly Northeast (37/48).
Another reason why this is potentially a giant mistake by Nancy Pelosi is the fact that all of this focus on Ukraine is almost
certainly going to damage one of the frontrunners for the Democratic nomination.
All of a sudden, everyone is talking about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and Ukraine. A lot of voters are going to look into what happened,
and they are not going to be pleased. And this comes at a time when Elizabeth Warren is surging in the polls, and real votes will
start to be cast in just a few months.
Up until recently, the Biden campaign had successfully kept the focus off Hunter Biden and Ukraine , and Joe was widely considered
to be the heavy favorite to win the nomination.
But now everything could change thanks to Nancy Pelosi.
And what if this push toward impeachment is not successful? Trump's base is going to be extremely fired up by all of the political
drama over the next several months, and if Trump survives it is going to be a huge boost for his campaign.
All of the recent polls indicated that a Democrat was likely to win in 2020, and there was a very good chance that the Democrats
were going to take the Senate too, but now this could dramatically shift public opinion and change everything.
Nancy Pelosi is rolling the dice, and if she fails it is going to be absolutely disastrous for the Democratic Party. The following
is how
Matthew Walther summarized the situation that she is facing
Pelosi knows this will not be popular. She knows more than that. She knows that it will be a disaster for the Democratic Party,
that it will inflame the president's base and inspire even his most lukewarm supporters with a sense of outrage. She knows that
in states like Michigan, upon which her party's chances in 2020 will depend, the question of impeachment does not poll well. She
knows, further, that Joe Biden will not be able to spend the next 14 or so months refusing to answer questions about the activities
of his son, Hunter, in Ukraine, and that increased scrutiny of the vice president's record in office will not rebound to his credit.
She and her fellow Democratic leaders had better hope that someone like Elizabeth Warren manages to steal the nomination away
from him before this defines his candidacy the way that Hillary Clinton's emails and paid speechmaking did during and after the
2016 primaries.
And it isn't going to be easy for Pelosi to be successful, because she is going to need 67 votes in the Senate to convict Trump,
and right now Democrats only hold 47 seats.
In the end, this is yet another example that proves that America's political system is deeply broken, and we desperately need
a seismic change .
Because no matter what the end result is, this entire episode is going to be a giant stain in the history books.
If future generations of Americans get the chance, they will look back on this entire saga with disgust.
And if our founders could see us today, they would be rolling over in their graves, because this is not what they intended.
"... U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts -- usually more than $166,000 a month -- from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia. ..."
"... Biden used his power as vice-president to ask the Ukraine to fire a prosecutor he didn't like and who (by chance?) was going after the company which enriched his son. He openly withheld money to achieve his aim. ..."
"... Trump should be impeached for his crimes against Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. ..."
"... But the Democrats will surely not touch on those issues. They are committing themselves to political theater that will end without any result. Instead of attacking Trump's policies and proposing better legislation they will pollute the airwaves with noise about 'crimes' that do not exist. ..."
"... The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump will again present himself as the victim of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the bad politicians in Washington DC. Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will motivate them to vote for him. ..."
"... It is likely Biden and son are being investigated in Ukraine and dirt or charges will come from it. Dems blowing smoke about impeachment to take attention away from what may come out of Ukraine. ..."
"... What seems even more idiotic, is that Pelosi made this announcement BEFORE the transcript was published. Is everyone senile in the Democratic leadership? ..."
"... Now that Trump has effectively betrayed his base, and - tweets aside - is governing like Hilary Clinton would have, the only way for him to hold on to his base is for them to think that he's being treated unfairly. Make it all about fake impeachment, and nothing about real issues. ..."
"... Remember, the corporate Democrats and the corporate Republicans are all paid by the same masters, they all read form the same script. This is just theater to distract the proles. It's like professional wrestling without the muscles. ..."
"... I would like to suggest another reason for this impeachment malstorm at this point. Trump is acting presidential at the UN. He made a very nationalistic speech that I'm sure the MSM would like to erase. See The future does not belong to globalists. ..."
"... With Gabbard now making it to the next debate the CORPORATE Dems are running scared. Gabbard will be taking someone out, perhaps it'll be either Warren or Biden: maybe "Beto" or "Pete" just to put a stake in the hearts of these clowns (Harris is already fatally wounded -- just waiting for her to finally drop). ..."
"... The Dems cannot attack Trump's policies. They are bound to sing the same song as Trump, just to a different melody. They have the very same masters, and those who pay the bill dictate the music. It is that simple. ..."
"... The Current Oligarchy is behind the strings controlling Pelosi's mouth and teleprompter as Biden won't be nominated, and it can't totally count on Warren's allegiance. Gabbard has already voiced her opposition to Trump's impeachment, arguing that it's better to beat him at the polls. ..."
"... Trump re-election chances just shot up. Not just the Biden collateral damage, but this is a clear reprise of the Russiagate nonsense. This will re-energize the Trump base - and Trump is going to cry all the way back to the White House saying he's being unfairly prosecuted. Saker is saying this is a literal reprise, but it is irrelevant if that is true or not. ..."
"... A bit off topic, but, DJT's speech at the UN was a eff'en joke. Everything he said about Iran, Venezuela, and other countries negatively, was the most blatant use of "projection" I've ever heard. ..."
"... If during that phone call, Trump would have said in Biden's style "I expect an indictment of Hunter Biden until next week, otherwise Ukraine won't receive any money any more." the push towards indictment would be understandable. But just mentioning Biden's corruption, for which there are strong indications, can be no basis can hardly be a basis for impeachment. ..."
"... A second reason that may be plausible is that Joe Biden is quite influential within the Democratic party, he may have been enraged that someone dared to speak about his corruption and therefore have demanded impeachment. ..."
"... Perhaps impeachment is also meant to distract from the findings about the origins of Russiagate and FISA abuse that will probably soon come out. But it may still be a bit unwise to choose something that is so closely connected with Biden's corruption (and probably also with the fabrication of Russiagate for which the DNC's Ukraine connections were also used). ..."
"... But Michael Tracey said this before the contents of the phone call was known, and I think it is fair to say it is rather underwhelming, and impeachment could end in an embarrassment for Democrats. ..."
"... I think Tulsi Gabbard who so far seems to be the only Democrat who clearly spoke out against impeachment proceedings could profit from this - even though a majority of Democrats currently seems to be in favor of impeachment, the percentage of Democrats who oppose impeachment on such dubious grounds and prefer campaigning on real political issues is probably much higher than Gabbard's current rating, and some of those could be motivated to support her. ..."
"... If a corporate Democrat who is fully behind impeachment is nominated, the chances in the general election are probably not that great, anyway. Even though polls now show the opposite, I hardly think Biden could win against Trump - not only because of the profiteering of the Biden family from his vice presidency, but mainly because of the clear signs of mental decline. ..."
"... Of all the various misdeeds committed by the Trump government over the last few years within US borders and without, the one crime Nancy Pelosi decides to go after Trump over turns out not only a non-crime but it is not even a pale shadow of a more egregious incident in which Joe Biden, while US Vice-President, pressured the Ukrainian government under Porky Pig Poroshenko to sack Viktor Shokin as Prosecutor General for launching an investigation into possibly corrupt activities of Burisma Holdings and in particular of one of its directors who happens to be Joe Biden's son, Hunter. ..."
"... Incidentally wasn't a major shareholder of Burisma Holdings at one time (if not currently) the notorious Ihor Kolomoisky, governor of Dnepropetrovsk region in mid-2014, about the time that the Malaysia Airlines Boeing passenger jet fell from the sky in a region where Burisma Holdings had been granted a license to explore and prospect for shale oil? ..."
"... Incidentally Dmitri Alperovich, CEO of Crowdstrike, the cyber-security company that worked for the DNC during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensics Research Lab where Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat is a non-resident advisor. ..."
"... I feel that the Democrats' real problem with Trump is that he ended their corruption financing plan for the future. I would like to add Trump just replaced the Democrats corruption plan with his own, but OOPS, the Democrats haven't provided any evidence of that, instead they spent 3 years trying to prove something that never happened. ..."
"... Instead the Democrats chased a ghost for 3 years and now the Democrats have just signalled that they will spend the next 6 months trying to impeach Trump for investigating Joe Biden's corruption. The American people have, in effect, been defrauded of their political leadership time, how do the Democrats think this will go over with the American voters in 2020. ..."
"... impeachment provides another topic to help avoid discussion of the Empire, its wars, ..."
"... Yes, the congress-critters get to enjoy a well-paying job with an annual salary of $174,000 and increase their already high likelihood of getting re-elected if they don't do anything notable that people might not like, but only play politics and sound important on presidential betrayals like (quoting Pelosi) "betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections." ..."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday
announced to open an
impeachment process against President Donald Trump:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump,
charging him with betraying his oath of office and the nation's security by seeking to enlist a foreign power to tarnish a rival
for his own political gain.
Instead of running on policy issues the Democrats will (again) try to find vague dirt with which they can tarnish Trump. This
is a huge political mistake. It will help Trump to win his reelection.
After two years of falsely accusing Trump to have colluded with Russia they now allege that he colludes with Ukraine. That will
make it much more difficult for the Democrats to hide the dirty hands they had in creating Russiagate. Their currently preferred
candidate Joe Biden will get damaged:
For the past two years, talk of impeachment had centered around the findings of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who
investigated Russia's interference in the 2016 elections and Mr. Trump's attempts to derail that inquiry. On Tuesday, Ms. Pelosi,
Democrat of California, told her caucus and then the country that new revelations about Mr. Trump's dealings with Ukraine, and
his administration's stonewalling of Congress about them, had finally left the House no choice but to proceed toward a rarely
used remedy. ... At issue are allegations that Mr. Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation
of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and his son.
The conversation is said to be part of a whistle-blower complaint that the Trump administration has withheld from Congress. And
it occurred just a few days after Mr. Trump had ordered his staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine.
Trump indeed withheld money
from the Ukraine. But the Ukrainian president did not know that when Trump spoke with him:
Mr. Trump did not discuss the delay in the military assistance on the July 25 call with Mr. Zelensky, according to people familiar
with the conversation. A Ukrainian official said Mr. Zelensky's government did not learn of the delay until about one month after
the call.
At that time Trump was withholding money from several countries. The money for the Ukraine was released in early September without
any known conditions.
The immediate impulse to start an impeachment investigation came from some whistle blower in the intelligence community who claimed
that Trump did something nefarious during a phone call with the newly elected President of Ukraine Zelensky.
The White House published a
memorandum of the phone call
. The call was made on July 25 2019, a day after the final Robert Mueller testimony in Congress. There are two passages which the
Democrats will claim are damaging:
President Zelenskyy: [...] I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue
to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.
The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot
about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike ... I guess
you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole
situation.. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you
or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor
performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever
you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible.
President Zelenskyy: Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President,
it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page of cooperation in relations between
the United States and Ukraine. [...]
Trump wanted Zelensky to look into the Ukrainian influence on the whole Russiagate campaign. There certainly was a lot of it.
The three Ukrainian-American Chalupa sisters,
Alexandra
,
Irena and Andrea , worked with the DNC and Ukrainian
officials in Washington and Kiev to
sabotage the Trump campaign
. They are, together with other Ukraine affiliated persons like the Dimitry Alperovich, the CEO of the
hacks at Crowd
Strike, at the core of Russiagate.
The Mueller investigation closed a day before the phone call. It found that Trump had not colluded with Russia or the alleged
Russian influence on the 2016 election. That Trump wants the new Ukrainian leader to investigate what Ukrainian officials did in
support of a debunked campaign against him may be a wrong thing to do but it is certainly not criminal.
In another passage Zelensky says that he will soon meet Trump's lawyer Rudi Guiliani who wanted to revive an investigation into
the Ukrainian company that hired Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden while vice-president Biden himself was running U.S. foreign policy
with regards to Ukraine. Trump then
asks for support for
Giuliani:
President Zelenskyy: [...] I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr.Giuliani just recently and we are
hoping very much that Mr. Guliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. [...] We are great
friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround
myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations
will be done openly and candidly. That I can assure you.
The President: Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A
lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved.
Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I
will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy.
If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people
she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that The other thing, There's a lot of talk about
Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the
Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it ... It
sounds horrible to me.
Zelensky then again assures Trump that the incoming prosecutor general will look into the issue.
Trump asks for investigations and Zelensky assures him that those will happen. Trump applied no open pressure. There is of course
always implicit pressure any time a U.S. president utters a wish to the president of a country that needs U.S. good will and money
to survive.
As for the Biden case it was Joe's Biden big mouth that brought the issues back into light. In January 2018 he gave a talk at
the Council of Foreign Relations and explained how he
directly threatened
( video ) to withhold money to blackmail the Ukraine
into firing a prosecutor general who was seen as corrupt:
And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan
guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor.
And they didn't.
So they said they had -- they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I'm not going to -- or, we're not going
to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You're not the president. The president said -- I said, call
him. (Laughter.) I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars. I said, you're not getting the billion. I'm
going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor
is not fired, you're not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who
was solid at the time.
Biden did that at a time when his son
lobbied for the Ukrainian company Burisma who the prosecutor he wanted fired investigated (or maybe blackmailed):
U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one
of its accounts -- usually more than $166,000 a month -- from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when
Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.
The general prosecutor's official file for the Burisma probe -- shared with me by senior Ukrainian officials -- shows prosecutors
identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.
There is no direct evidence that Joe Biden told the Ukrainians to stop the investigation into Burisma. But it was not difficult
for the Ukrainians to figure out that ending the investigation into the company that Joe Biden's son worked for would help them with
further requests to him.
How the Democrats want to construct an impeachment out of this is beyond me.
Trump is the president. Foreign policy is his constitutional prerogative. He used his power to ask the Ukraine to open investigations
into two issues. He withheld money but not to achieve that. The Ukrainians did not even know at that time that the money was blocked.
Biden used his power as vice-president to ask the Ukraine to fire a prosecutor he didn't like and who (by chance?) was going after
the company which enriched his son. He openly withheld money to achieve his aim.
How will the Democrats explain that what Trump did was wrong or even criminal while insisting that what Joe Biden did was normal
business?
They can't. Pelosi knows that there is no case to impeach Trump. That's why she
does not have a plan
how to do proceed with it:
Although Ms. Pelosi's announcement was a crucial turning point, it left many unanswered questions about exactly when and how Democrats
planned to push forward on impeachment. ... And Ms. Pelosi said she had directed the chairmen of the six committees that have
been investigating Mr. Trump to "proceed under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry." In a closed-door meeting earlier in the
day, she said the panels should put together their best cases on potentially impeachable offenses by the president and send them
to the Judiciary Committee, according to two officials familiar with the conversation. That could potentially lay the groundwork
for articles of impeachment based on the findings.
Pelosi has nothing. Six committees have investigated Trump issues but so far found nothing to charge him with. Neither did the
Mueller investigation find anything damaging. How will combining all those nothing-burgers make an impeachment meal?
Trump should be impeached for his crimes against Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.
But the Democrats will surely not touch on those issues. They are committing themselves to political theater that will end
without any result. Instead of attacking Trump's policies and proposing better legislation they will pollute the airwaves with noise
about 'crimes' that do not exist.
There is no case for impeachment. Even if the House would vote for one the Senate would never act on it. No one wants to see a
President Pence.
The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump will again present himself as the victim
of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the
bad politicians in Washington DC. Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will motivate them to vote for him.
Why is it so hard for Democrats to understand this?
Posted by b on September 25, 2019 at 18:03 UTC |
Permalink
It is likely Biden and son are being investigated in Ukraine and dirt or charges will come from it. Dems blowing smoke about impeachment
to take attention away from what may come out of Ukraine.
What seems even more idiotic, is that Pelosi made this announcement BEFORE the transcript was published. Is everyone senile
in the Democratic leadership?
Missing the point. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Now that Trump has effectively betrayed his base, and - tweets aside - is governing like Hilary Clinton would have, the
only way for him to hold on to his base is for them to think that he's being treated unfairly. Make it all about fake impeachment,
and nothing about real issues.
Remember, the corporate Democrats and the corporate Republicans are all paid by the same masters, they all read form the
same script. This is just theater to distract the proles. It's like professional wrestling without the muscles.
I would like to suggest another reason for this impeachment malstorm at this point. Trump is acting presidential at the UN.
He made a very nationalistic speech that I'm sure the MSM would like to erase. See
The future does not belong
to globalists.
In a continuation of the anti-globalist, sovereign-nations theme, Trump warned against totalitarianism and the erosion
of democracy and individual freedoms. "We must always be skeptical of those who want conformity and control," he told the assembly.
"Even in free nations, we see alarming signs and new challenges to liberty."
Obviously, the MSM needs some very negative news about Trump to breathlessly report instead.
Keep in mind that when when we're talking Biden, Pelosi et al we're talking CORPORATE Dems. CORPORATE Dems will do anything,
even lose an election, to ensure that there is the least disruption to their corporate funders -- they would rather have Trump
in office than say Sanders. The Dem's campaign is showing a lot of weakness in their CORPORATE Dem puppets in which case they're
afraid of allowing Sanders to rise (working really hard to push up the CORPORATE Wishy-Washy-Warren).
With Gabbard now making it to the next debate the CORPORATE Dems are running scared. Gabbard will be taking someone out, perhaps
it'll be either Warren or Biden: maybe "Beto" or "Pete" just to put a stake in the hearts of these clowns (Harris is already fatally
wounded -- just waiting for her to finally drop).
Instead of attacking Trump's policies and proposing better legislation
This is exactly the point. They can't! They are paid by the same 0.1 % as the Republicans. They can only propose to secure
the Mexican border by other means (drones! lol), they would continue to deport small children just as Obama did, continue all
illegal wars, and try to enrich the ruling class even further. Just like Trump. That's why they got rid of candidates like Gabbard
that fast and instead install an old man suffering from dementia.
The Dems cannot attack Trump's policies. They are bound to sing the same song as Trump, just to a different melody. They
have the very same masters, and those who pay the bill dictate the music. It is that simple.
Yep, b's 100% correct that there're plenty of grounds on which to impeach the entire upper echelon of TrumpCo that won't ever
make it into whatever Articles of Impeachment are generated. The Ukrainian stuff is all political with absolutely no impeachable
offense incurred.
The Current Oligarchy is behind the strings controlling Pelosi's mouth and teleprompter as Biden won't be nominated, and it
can't totally count on Warren's allegiance. Gabbard has already voiced her opposition to Trump's impeachment,
arguing that it's better to beat him at the polls.
Sanders in contrast, has endorsed impeachment
. IMO, Gabbard's approach is best. However, IMO, both Sanders and Gabbard must plan on what to do when the DNC again throws the
nomination to someone other than the best candidate to beat Trump as the DNC is wholly owned by the Current Oligarchy.
karlof1 - if sanders had any character he would have left the dem party and ran as an independent... at this point the dem party
is completely insane..
Trump re-election chances just shot up. Not just the Biden collateral damage, but this is a clear reprise of the Russiagate
nonsense. This will re-energize the Trump base - and Trump is going to cry all the way back to the White House saying he's being
unfairly prosecuted. Saker is saying this is a literal reprise, but it is irrelevant if that is true or not.
"Why is it so hard for Democrats to understand this?"
I think they understand that they need a big distraction, even if it later swirls down the toilet like the previous turd, because
Brennan's tit is in the wringer. If Brennan is indicted, then the whole corrupt Russia-hoax starts unraveling. I think the DNC
gerontocracy are playing for time with this fiasco out of desperation on several fronts.
I don't think the issue is Sanders's "character;" if you follow
his Twitter , you'll quickly discover he has a fine character, as with this proposal:
"We are going to end homelessness and build millions of new affordable housing units -- paid for with a tax on the billionaire
class."
Sometimes, I don't think he wants to become POTUS, which has allowed him to get rather radical by US political norms. I also
wonder how closely those promoting him pay attention to the DC Circus. Given Pelosi and Co's opposition to a host of Bernie's
proposals--particularly Medicare For All--it seems wise to put them into the oppositional camp too, as I have.
Mistake or not, I'll enjoy the theater, IF, it's on MSM. Personally, I'd like to know if the "whistle blowers" accusations can
hold water. It needs to be released.
If this regime has nothing to hide, let your people respect lawful summons to testify. If DJT continues to advise them to ignore
'em, that's obstruction..
P.S. This coming circus will be a massive distraction, and keep relevant issues from the public a little longer, which, the
corporatists will love.
The Dims seem to be setting new records in Stupid, and, as we all know - you can't fix Stupid. Surely they see that while Trump
is an appalling scoundrel elected almost by accident due to the Stupid factor in the Dims prior campaign - Pense is a certifiable
Lunatic. Too scary for words.
I think maybe casey # 18 is right. The Dims are running scared because they think something Really wicked this way comes.
On the other hand, it is a nice distraction from the Greta Pet Rock Whinging Society - itself a distraction from, well, reality....
A bit off topic, but, DJT's speech at the UN was a eff'en joke. Everything he said about Iran, Venezuela, and other countries
negatively, was the most blatant use of "projection" I've ever heard.
I think what's going in the brain trust of the DNC is something like this:
i. Biden is a non-starter with the public. He'll be devoured alive by the Republicans, who only need to bring up his career
to expose his mendacity. ii. Warren might be co-opted, having been a Republican and fiscal conservative up to the mid-90s, but
what if she isn't? iii. Sanders is a non-starter, but with the "people who matter".
Rather than having to threaten him with the
suspicions around his wife, or go for the JFK solution, they'd rather he didn't even get past the primaries, much less elected.
iv. As a CNN talking head said weeks ago, it's better for the wealthy people the DNC is beholden to that their own candidate loses
to Trump if that candidate is Sanders.
So better to hedge their bets. Start impeachment hearings, give Trump ammunition to destroy Sanders or Warren. That way, the
rich win in all scenarios:
a. If Biden wins the nomination, the campaign will be essentially mudslinging from both sides about who is more corrupt. The
rich are fine with whoever wins. b. If Warren gets the nomination and is co-opted, the media will let the impeachment hearings
die out, or the House themselves will quickly bury it. c. If Warren gets the nomination and is not co-opted, or if Sanders get
it, the impeachment will suck up all the air of the room, Trump will play the witchhunt card and be re-elected.
If during that phone call, Trump would have said in Biden's style "I expect an indictment of Hunter Biden until next week, otherwise
Ukraine won't receive any money any more." the push towards indictment would be understandable. But just mentioning Biden's corruption,
for which there are strong indications, can be no basis can hardly be a basis for impeachment.
If the new rule was that any contact
with foreign governments relating to information that can be relevant in elections, Hillary Clinton should have been disqualified
before the election because her team and the DNC worked with Ukraine to get dirt on Manaford (and anything they could find about
people around Trump, let alone the Steele dossier for which rumors were also collected abroad).
The behavior of Democrats seems a bit odd. They start impeachment procedures although a majority of Americans is against this
(so, despite the polarization, a sizable percentage is against Trump, but wants him to be defeated in elections rather than be
impeached, which hardly won't happen anyway when it is tried). I think there are probably mainly two possible reasons.
One is
that, although a majority of Americans overall is against impeachment, a majority of Democratic voters is currently in favor of
impeachment. Obviously, as to many issues, Democrats don't do what a majority of their voters want (they generally don't when
their voters want something different from what their donors want), but sometimes, they do what a majority of their voters wants,
even if it is rather stupid strategically.
A second reason that may be plausible is that Joe Biden is quite influential within
the Democratic party, he may have been enraged that someone dared to speak about his corruption and therefore have demanded impeachment.
Perhaps impeachment is also meant to distract from the findings about the origins of Russiagate and FISA abuse that will probably
soon come out. But it may still be a bit unwise to choose something that is so closely connected with Biden's corruption (and
probably also with the fabrication of Russiagate for which the DNC's Ukraine connections were also used).
An interesting question is what the influence on the primaries will be. Obviously, it will be rather inconvenient for those
candidates who are senators (Sanders, Warren, and others that may or may not be in the race at that time) if there are impeachment
hearings in the Senate at the same time as primaries. Michael Tracey thinks the impeachment procedure would rather help Elizabeth
Warren (who had been demanding impeachment for some time) and Joe Biden, while it would be quite inconvenient for Bernie Sanders
because he would primarily want to talk about things like economic inequality and healthcare, and constant headlines about impeachment
only hinder this.
But Michael Tracey said this before the contents of the phone call was known, and I think it is fair to say it is rather underwhelming,
and impeachment could end in an embarrassment for Democrats. The suspicious profiteering of the Biden family will inevitable constantly
be an ubiquitous subject, and even if the media who support the Democrats attempt to frame this in a way that protects Biden,
in the end, it can hardly be good for him. Of course, a significant part of the Democratic basis is now completely consumed by
conspiratorial thinking (in some online forums, we can see constant claims that Trump has been found guilty of conspiring with
Russia and that the Mueller report confirmed this because it did not "exonerate" him) - they will support impeachment without
caring on what basis is done. But if they continue with such a weak case, support for impeachment could weaken even among Democratic
primary voters, and then fervent impeachment proponents like Elizabeth Warren may not profit from this.
I think Tulsi Gabbard who so far seems to be the only Democrat who clearly spoke out against impeachment proceedings could
profit from this - even though a majority of Democrats currently seems to be in favor of impeachment, the percentage of Democrats
who oppose impeachment on such dubious grounds and prefer campaigning on real political issues is probably much higher than Gabbard's
current rating, and some of those could be motivated to support her. That way, she might move up. At the moment, it seems unlikely
that she could win outright, but if she has good results and Sanders is elected, there might be a chance that she is appointed
to an important position (e.g. Secretary of State) where she has influence on foreign policy.
If a corporate Democrat who is fully behind impeachment is nominated, the chances in the general election are probably not
that great, anyway. Even though polls now show the opposite, I hardly think Biden could win against Trump - not only because of
the profiteering of the Biden family from his vice presidency, but mainly because of the clear signs of mental decline. Maybe
Sanders can, like with the Russiagate conspiracy theory, nod to the establishment enough that he does not get in trouble, but
not invest himself too much in that partisan bickering that he is not damaged too much when it fails.
Huawei Chairman Liang Hua told China-Germany-USA Media Forum that the US putting Huawei on entity list has had no substantial
impact on Huawei's business. All of the company's flagship products are shipped normally. Ecosystem of Huawei's end products will
be built in 2-3 years.
B is once again a sane voice that is being drowned out by a chorus of screaming DC morons. The stupidity of those cretins that
run the US of A has no limits. It is indeed infinite! Get ready America, the orange haired jackass (with my apologies to that
durable, noble beast of burden) will get another four years in the White House thanks to the Democratic Party's leadership. Reason
and logic roll-off what passes for their brains like water on a duck's back. The late journalist, critic and cynic H.L. Mencken
was once asked why if he so disliked America why then did he remain in it? He replied, "why do men go to zoos?"
The only way this will help Democrats is that perhaps Biden will vanish from the political scene more expeditiously. I theorize
that his current "support" is not related to any particular position but nostalgia and a certain amiability -- that vanishes when
you try to understand what (the hell) is he saying. That said, Trump is a master of assorted serious facial expression, can spontaneously
coin an insult, for him Biden is a lamb waiting to be roasted.
The Democratic impeachment process isn't a mistake it's a strategy. As with Bojo's Brexit or the Canadian election centrally planned
to result in a weak minority, the UK-centred financiers of the Leviathan Soviet needs weak governments to enact their derivative
flushing and fiat takedown exercise + the inevitable Financial Patriot Act that follows, as Mark Carney essentially promised several
weeks ago.
Sever the head of the beast. Arrest and prosecute the gangsters and financiers when they make their only possible move. The
Lubavitcher mob will be used as scapegoats but we can't stop there. Those directing this centuries long crime spree against humanity
must be held accountable for their perfidy and their every pilfered asset must be returned to the people from which they stole.
There's probably an internal struggle in the Democratic Party between the "democratic socialists" (Sanders, Warren?, Gabbard,
AOC etc.) and the liberals (the "establishment": Pelosi, Biden, DNC etc. etc.).
The term "democratic socialism" comes from the early Cold War in the UK, more precisely, in the right-wing of the Labour party
at the time (also called "Gaitskellites"). It proposes general welfare state policies in order to best manage the capitalist boom
of post-war Britain while, at the same time, embracing the idea of capitalism. Democratic socialists are not really socialists
-- but they still represent a radical leftwards turn for the political spectrum of the USA, hence are seen as an existential threat
to the American electoral machine.
My guess is the liberal faction of the Democratic Party sees Biden as its last hope of aborting the historical process that
brought Trump to power thus reconnecting American recent history with Obama's legacy. It's either that or a permanent transformation
of American political landscape for the forseeable future.
The problem is that Biden is probably extremely corrupt and has a lot of skeletons in Ukraine. If said investigation proceeds
honestly and quickly in Ukraine, my hypothesis is that Biden will go down and even be arrested (alongside his son). That would
permanently damage the liberal faction.
The American people still is rabidly anti-socialist (or "anti-communist", in Cold War terminology that they still use nowadays).
However, American capitalism has reached its structural limits and even mild socialistic reforms such as universal healthcare
free at the point of use is too much for the country to handle without collapsing. For practical purposes, the American elite
must consider democratic socialism (Gaitskellism) as full-fledged socialism simply because they are very fragile -- that's also
why dumbed down leftists such as Elizabeth Warren and AOC are disferring such devastating blows to the liberals and are so popular.
At the same time, Trump's reelection would still be bad for the American capitalist class as whole because he is eroding America's
image to its allies. This is specially true to its First World allies (Western Europe and Japan). The special case here is Atlanticism,
i.e. the ideology that posits the existence of a unified Western Civilization in the North Atlantic that strikes envy to the rest
of the world (in Asia and India in particular). Besides, a lot of very powerful American billionaires owe their social status
to outsourcing to China, so they prefer a Russophobe in the White House instead of a Sinophobe. The American elite is divided.
That Sanders and Gabbard work within the duopoly is all that needs to be known. One person can only make a difference if there
is a party that is independent of the duopoly behind them. We had one here for a bit. Took the combined efforts of the duopoly
and media plus splitting her electorate and then jailing her to bring her down. I didn't agree with some of the policies, but
that was the first time in my life I voted as they were not part of the system.
While it's true that there is nothing impeachable here (replace the name "Biden" with "Assange" or "Snowden" and imagine if anyone
would have even batted an eyelash at this). That said Trump talks too much. I only hope that this was a rookie mistake as it was
done a long time ago but he just talks too much. People make too much of too many unguaraded comments. Anyway, as to why the democrats
need this instead of talking policy, that's easy. All their large campaign contributors are very much against the ideas of the
progressive wing in their party and without the progressive wing their policies are the same as the republicans on every major
issue. They think it helps them in the election. Kinda stupid but Schumer, Pelosi, Leahey, Grassley and the rest of the gang will
drive the party straight into the ground rather than upset their large campaign contributors because that's the seat of their
power and why all their policies are identical to republican policies.
OMG! Trump and Zelensky talk again, now on TV. The recording snap I have seen shows Trump saying thoughtfully "I hope that you
and Putin will get together and sort out your problems. I know that this is what you were planning to do, and it would be a tremendous
achievement. Zelensky looks as if he just learned about the death of his beloved babushka.
The Democratic Party position is only incomprehensible if you assume they actually want to win and govern in the people's interest.
They clearly do not. Late empire circumstances dictate that the pseudo-left choice on the ballot cannot actually adopt any positions
opposing the elite, so all that is left is identity politics and orange man bad to veil this increasingly obvious and embarrassing
scam. Trump will prevail against any non-progressive Democratic candidate running an orange man bad campaign. Book it.
News that an impeachment inquiry is being initiated instantly sent stock prices tumbling on Tuesday, but that small jolt is nothing
compared to what we will experience if Donald Trump is actually impeached. Over the past couple of years we have seen a tremendous
boom in stock prices, and one of the big reasons for that boom is the fact that the folks on Wall Street know that Trump is always
going to be looking out for their best interests. Trump understands that his chances of winning again in 2020 will be greatly
enhanced if stock prices are rising and most Americans believe that we have a "booming economy", and so he wants to do everything
in his power to try to make those things happen. That means that Trump's short-term interests are perfectly aligned with Wall
Street's short-term interests, but things will shift dramatically if someone like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders ends up in
the White House. Wall Street knows that they have a friend in Donald Trump, and losing that friend would potentially be absolutely
devastating.
B.'s post and the comments (so far) are a refreshing change of pace from the US mass-media coverage, which as usual treats this
as another "bombshell" event to be taken at face value.
Since I try to avoid corporate mass-media infoganda, I can only assume that the Biden video referenced in the post has not
gotten much mainstream airplay. As the quoted bit shows, Biden is openly and smugly bragging to an enthusiastic audience about
how he successfully gave Ukraine's leaders an ultimatum: either fire the prosecutor who was investigating his crooked son, or
lose "a billion dollars" in aid.
Sounds like an, er, quid pro quo , no? Unlike the accusation against Trump, Biden's motives and actions don't have to
be hyped, massaged, and spun to create the "impression" of misconduct-- the video speaks for itself.
I've seen alternative-media speculation that the DNC, or some faction within the Democratic Party leadership, actually want
this "bombshell" to boomerang back upon Biden and force him to withdraw his candidacy. There are indications that Elizabeth Warren
has been moved to the on-deck circle.
I lack expertise and interest in electoral-politics handicapping, but it may be that since the odious Kamala Harris isn't exactly
a "hit" with the public, and the charade of Sanders being an "independent" may exclude him from the position of the Democratic
Party's 2020 "standard-bearer", Warren is considered "electable".
Warren has issues too, but if Biden drops out for one reason on another, the Dem strategists probably see her as a New! Improved!
version of Hillary: a "historic" candidate by identity-politics standards, a reassuringly "safe pair of hands" in contrast to
Wild 'n Crazy Trump, and though hardly "charismatic", more personable than Hillary and with less baggage.
Given the Democratic Party leadership's TDS-saturated hysteria and groupthink, it's plausible that the Dems hope that their
ongoing assault on Trump's character will prime the public to enthusiastically turn to a reformist "clean as a hound's tooth"
schoolmarm type for political salvation.
Theory 1) Perhaps given Trump will not agree to a launch a war with Iran, there are those who do, assuming Pence is the idiot
who will agree to starting such a war?
"Biden used his power as vice-president to ask the Ukraine to fire a prosecutor he didn't like.... Pelosi has nothing"
Theory 2) Perhaps the Dems have faced reality after all and know Biden who will lose to Trump. Is this a backhanded way to
smear Biden, forcing him to pull out of the race once this inevitably blows up in his face?
This is puzzling. I can't see why the thread has been stymied into overshoot but it has. Never mind, the issue was so important
that it is worth doing our best to scroll sideways on the comments.
I also cannot see why Sanders has shot himself in the foot. Perhaps he thinks, with all the pressures of the office, it is
better left to Trump.
Thank you b, for analyzing the phone call. How can this be seen as an impeachable issue? It is all very strange indeed, since
calling attention to the situation with Biden's son cannot be in the best interests of the Democratic party, and yet that is what
Pelosi has done.
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain..." Is that it?
stupidity of those cretins that run the US of A has no limits. It is indeed infinite! Get ready America, the orange haired jackass
(with my apologies to that durable, noble beast of burden) <-- GeorgeV | Sep 25 2019 20:09 utc | 33
As anyone with some contact with computing knows (using a laptop should be sufficient), information processing power comes
from small size of processing units and their number. In a living mammal, the but has some trillions of bacteria in the gut, and
this is the source of ideas for some (they pull them out of their anus), used sparingly it yields a few megacretins, but we use
most of them, we can reach teracretins and more. But if we assemble more than 1000 experts, politicians, commentators, bloggers
etc., we can get petacrektins. I would need to check calculations, I think that we will not see exacretins.
Also, noble or not, which beasts of burden have sparse orange manes? Baltimore orioles do not count.
I am not sure I agree with the author. The Ukraine call is definitely a bigger scandal than the Mueller's fishing trip, and it
may sway some independents. Much depends on what Trump actually said, how he said it, etc, i.e. the actual phone recording will
decide whether Democrats make the right decision to impeach this time.
which has allowed him to get rather radical by US political norms
If pointing out the crucial problems the US society faces and adding solutions vis "getting radical by Us political norms",
what is radical is not Bernie Sanders discourse, but "US political norms"
Painting him as radical contributes to avoid discussion of those crucial issues by US society.
On Ivan Redondo, Basque, formed at private jesuit Deusto University, and then at the US in political communication, presents
himself as "respectful of all ideologies", amongst which he thinks "we must reach an agreement"...He assures, at his parents home
there is of almost all ideologies ( although I very doubt that there is anyone of the left in his home...but I may be wrong...)
and recommends reading the "suspicious", Freud, Nietzsche, Marx..if not for to learn....An interesting guy, no doubt...
"Trump should be impeached for his crimes against Syria, Venezuela and Yemen" and the Muslim ban, and separating kids from parents
at the US-Mexico border, the denial of asylum too.
Impeachment hearings will give Biden cover for his racism, jingoism, and his flailing memory.
Right Biden and son should be prosecuted for corruption by the USA, but that's true of Trump and his adult children too.
Trump stepped over line and invited Ukraine to work against the candidacy of Biden, doesn't matter what Biden foolishly said
about the prosector in Ukraine.
@Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Sep 25 2019 20:20 utc | 37
One person can only make a difference if there is a party that is independent of the duopoly behind them.
But, is it at all possible in the US, with its current electoral system, present yourself as "independent" for presidential
elections, out of the "duopoly"?
The system in Spain ( although not only of Spain...the "system"...) managed to thwart the popular support of even new third
political force born out of the "15M Movement" ( kinda Occupy...) Podemos, by using a it of kabuki and political machinations
amongst oligarchic powers and monarchy ( and I do not discard also US Embassy, as happened during the NATO referendum... )....Sánchez
flew to have dinner with Macron as soon as he won the past presidential elections...the same night!
DNC just got scared that their front man Biden's dirt is being on the front page. ANYTHING to deflect the attention NOW. They
dont think about long term fallout anyway.
Beautiful. Now that Trump after some years more and more realizes he is indeed president, we may finally see some of his promises
full filled in the coming years. Only question is at what cost. But with Bibi and Bolton out, MBS shaky after Aramco attack, the
neocons influence my finally decrease. Though it may all end out much worse we can imagine. We will see.
News reports are saying that Pelosi changed her position on impeachment because Democrats representing Trump districts suddenly
changed to a pro-impeachment position. Pelosi and Schumer bend over backwards to accommodate these Republicans posing as Democrats,
using them as their excuse for not getting anything meaningful done.
When it became obvious to them that Trump was going all out for Biden, their savior, I believed they got spooked, seeing their
reelection chances plummet if anyone but Biden got the nomination. So of course Pelosi stepped in, as she always does for corrupt,
corporate Democrats, and tried to preempt the Ukraine investigation. It may well backfire.
Democrats will spend the next six months trying to make Trump the issue. Republicans will spend the next six months making
Biden's corruption the issue. Because Ukraine is such a swamp of corruption, the facts of the matter will remain murky. Ukrainian
politicians are likely to say whatever the person controlling the purse strings wants them to say. Back then, it was Obama/Biden.
Now it's Trump until it becomes obvious that Trump won't control the money.
In the process let's hope that a lot of dirty laundry about how the US conducts foreign policy gets aired. One of the major
goals of US foreign policy is to promote US business abroad and any politician would prefer that his supporters and donors get
helped the most which means that tacit, corrupt quid pro quos are the norm.
@37 peter au... thanks.. how is it working out in australia since you voted? has the system reverted to another duopoly?
@46 d dan... did you watch the 1 1/2 minute video
on biden speaking that b shared up above and i am again sharing in this link here? check it out and let us know what you think..
@49 jay.. i agree it was a mistake on trumps part, but biden is caught in a much more serious bind as i see it.. ultimately
this impeachment idea of pelosi's is very dead in the water and will sink biden too.. maybe that is the point?
According to Ivan Redondo at that interview, the Sanders campaign in 2016 was the one really counterposed to that of Trump....
Thus, attacking Sanders now could equate campaigning for The Donald...hwen who must be attacked is Biden...
Sasha I do not know enough about the system in Spain to make any comment in that direction.
Re US and an independent president. The two party system or duopoly would take an independent down immediately using impeachment.
Impeachment is somewhat different to criminal investigation and trial. A claim can be made and is voted on first by congress.
If enough votes it then goes to the senate who vote as to guilty or not. For any president to survive, they must have backers
in either the congress or senate.
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/09/open-thread-on-the-effort-to-expel-trump-from-office-through-impeachment.html
"It takes a simple majority (218) for the House of Representatives to pass a bill of impeachment against any federal official.
The Democrats have 232 seats in the present congress. The Bill (equivalent to an indictment) then is transferred to the US Senate
where the impeached person is tried before the US Senate with the Chief Justice of the United State presiding.. 2/3 of the senators
must vote for conviction for that to occur. Two presidents have been impeached. None has been convicted."
Biden is in no trouble. He is/will make the case that the removal of the Ukrainian prosecutor was supported by many people
and allies that saw the prosecutor as slow/unwilling to tackle corruption in Ukraine.
This is whole thing is truly a nothing-burger distraction from the fact that we are on the cusp of war.
When Joe Biden's son, Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma, the Vice-President's spokesperson described Hunter as just
"a private citizen".
In case anyone believes that the Ukrainian company appointed Hunter Biden purely on merit (and not because of who his father
is), there are a few things that should be considered:
- Hunter had no previous experience either in eastern Europe or in the gas industry.
- His appointement was made just a few days before his Dad visited Ukraine:
- Joe Biden gave a speech during his visit, in which he encouraged Ukraine's 'energy security'( to Ukrainian Legislators in
Kiev on April 22, 2014).
- The day before that speech (three days after Hunter's appointment), the White House announced that the USA would help with
Ukraine's 'energy security' by sending expert teams in the following weeks. The aim was "to help Ukraine meet immediate and longer
term energy needs" and "to increase conventional gas production from existing fields to boost domestic energy supply".
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/21/fact-sheet-us-crisis-support-package-ukraine
The Democrats have made a big mistake by drawing attention to the Bidens' interests in Ukraine.
When Joe Biden's son, Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma, the Vice-President's spokesperson described Hunter as just
"a private citizen".
In case anyone believes that the Ukrainian company appointed Hunter Biden purely on merit (and not because of who his father
is), there are a few things that should be considered:
- Hunter had no previous experience either in eastern Europe or in the gas industry.
- His appointement was made just a few days before his Dad visited Ukraine:
- Joe Biden gave a speech during his visit, in which he encouraged Ukraine's 'energy security'( to Ukrainian Legislators in
Kiev on April 22, 2014).
- The day before that speech (three days after Hunter's appointment), the White House announced that the USA would help with
Ukraine's 'energy security' by sending expert teams in the following weeks. The aim was "to help Ukraine meet immediate and longer
term energy needs" and "to increase conventional gas production from existing fields to boost domestic energy supply".
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/21/fact-sheet-us-crisis-support-package-ukraine
The Democratics have made a big mistake by drawing attention to the Bidens' interests in Ukraine.
the people at the dnc don't really care about winning, they just have to make sure the dollars keep rolling in, and that people
like gabbard and sanders lose. to that end, they try political grandstanding like talking about impeaching trump and keeping russiagate
alive.
Yeah, straight back to the duopoly. Greens always get a few votes but they're no different. Put a vote on a long shot one time.
He had a falling out with his side of the duopoly and set up a new party. Gained the ballance of power and all roads from both
sides of the duopoly led to his door. Literally he sat back in his chair, big obese clown shirt half unbuttoned and held court
there. In the end the duopoly caved in and gave him the required permits for to run a rail line from a new coal mine he was kicking
of to the coast. Straight away he was one of the boys again, and those of his party that had been elected left him and become
independents. Entertaining while it lasted though.
from
Pelosi statement : "The president has admitted to asking the president of Ukraine to take actions which would benefit him
politically. The actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable facts of betrayal of his oath of office and betrayal of
our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.'
presidential oath of office: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the
United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." It comes
from Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.
So: > It's not clear why a US president asking a foreign president to investigate the actions of an American to cause the firing
of a prosecutor is wrong. > The only way such an investigation could benefit Trump politically is if that American (Biden) had
done something wrong. > So obviously Biden did do something wrong. > Therefore we must conclude that wrongdoing by Americans in
other countries must not be publicized because that might affect elections. > Americans voters should not be allowed access to
information about US politicians acting badly in foreign countries, and any president who requests such information should be
impeached. > The integrity of our elections requires the withholding of some information from voters, when it impacts badly on
Democrats.
Oh the irony of the Democrats building their impeachment case on information from a whistleblower. After the record shattering
prosecutions of the Obama Presidency, I didn't think there were any left. This instance of Biden's oral incontinence is just one
reason he's a poor choice. Besides being on the wrong side of history on every issue of importance, according to another whistleblower
Edward Snowden, Biden was responsible for EU nations denying him asylum and was the primary reason he ended up in Russia.
I find it impossible to believe the narrative we are being fed that politicians with decades of experience with shrewdness and
the swamp of DC under their belts could possibly step on their own dicks this many times in a row by accident. This has the feel
of being orchestrated reality TV playing to the Trump victim narrative that barely pushed him over the hump in 2016.
And impeachment provides another topic to help avoid discussion of the Empire, its wars, and the financial burden it places on
everything. The very sour state of the Empire's economy was mentioned above; in that light, I suggest
this excellent
if somewhat technical essay , as a multitude at the bar have voiced their approval of the topic: "Are We Approaching the End
of Super Imperialism?"
Jackrabbit I reckon we are going to see Netanyahu but with Lieberman who is worse (more homicidal lunacy) even than nutty, calling
some of the shots. I think it was Lieberman behind the downing of the Russian plane.
This is my go to site now for real news and evaluation, thanks b. The overall thread here fits my perceptions in many ways except
for the elephant in the room and that is the tremendous influence (power) that the Zionist/Neocon/Israeli Fifth column has over
US government, political parties, media and foreign governments. Why is this so lightly touched on here or dismissed as "corporate
interests"? Is this site vulnerable to those special interests or $$? Or are there so many shills here ready to destroy anyone
mentioning it? I guess I will see?
Bravo!! Your next pint's on me! I merely stated no impeachable offense was committed while you laid out the illogic of it all!
As with Bill Clinton's impeachment, none of the Articles focused on the genuine crimes he committed, and the same will prove
true with Trump. Lots of Jonesing for Pence as POTUS, a desire by many D-Partyites since Trump's win. My guess is the election
will occur before the trial's resolved in the Senate if it even gets that far.
After 3 years of the Democrates being totally up their own asses, I've come to the sad conclusion that they must be paid to lose,
there's simply no rational explanation for how insane they've behaving, 3 or 4 crazy Democrates shouting at trees is one thing,
but there's not one Democrat pointing out how deranged they've been behaving. I can only imagine that their campaign contributors
are laughing into their sleeves as they wright one check to the Republicans and then a slightly smaller one for the Democrates.
John Sanguinetti Israel does have strong influence on the US. I have noticed that many who would like to concentrate on just that
aspect in anything that happens, Try to place all blame on Israel and depict the US as an innocent baby led astray. It was a conscious
choice for the US to side with Israel and unless the yanks can clean up their act, there will always be an Israel. In fact there
are many Israels behind anything political in the US. To name them all is just a matter of looking up who puts money into politics,
be it sponsorship or lobbying or has in any way a hold over one or more elected politicians. You will find that virtually nobody
can run for a public office in the US and hope to win without having a sugar daddy.
Please, see this excellent interview of The Duran: "BIDEN SCANDAL EXPLODES: UKRAINE FRACKING, MONEY LAUNDERING, BANK OF CHINA
PAYOFFS" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qxk9Pnw4tbM
With Gabbard now making it to the next debate the CORPORATE Dems are running scared. Gabbard will be taking someone out, perhaps
it'll be either Warren or Biden: maybe "Beto" or "Pete" just to put a stake in the hearts of these clowns (Harris is already fatally
wounded- just waiting for her to finally drop).
Posted by: Seer | Sep 25 2019 18:37
Tulsi is making up for all those years wasted in the medical unit and shines in her new job: bomb throwing. One bomb hit Kamala
the hanging prosecutor, the most recent "we are not Saudi prostitutes" is even better. I would most sincerely ask people here
to contribute to her campaign and see your pennies at work. Of course, if you would rather see debates full of establishment collegiality
then you should not do it.
One of the reasons that I doubt Biden's version of the story stems from my experience in Venezuela. After Chavez took power, Venezuelans
told me that he had found that a critical subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA was basically a CIA shop. The names of
CIA on the Board of Directors were not just ordinary CIA, but were recognizable figures at the very top. To me this is entirely
plausible. Control of oil is critical to US global hegemony. And what better way to control foreign oil than to have trusted American
asset sit on the BOD? This brings us to Hunter Biden's appointment to Ukrainian energy giant Burisma. After the coup in 2014,
why wouldn't Biden want a trusted asset on the board of the biggest natural gas producer in Ukraine? IOW it was unpublicized standard
operating procedure.
"For decades there has been a "catch me if you can" quality about Donald Trump, skipping from casino bankruptcies to fraudulent
universities to porn actor payoffs." True--- But that may be coming to a end.
Thank you Piotr Berman #77, I share that view with you. Tulsi Gabbard is changing the debate and corporate Dems AND Repugs are
terrified of a wave.
I see that Bernie's moment is coming where he will have to choose to either step in line as a sheepdog or take a truly independent
path. He is unlikely to run again in 4 years and given the vice grip that these corporate Democrat party thugs have on the machine
it may well be time for a leader to go on strike against the machine and run as a people's president.
Tulsi is running hard and I dont expect her to break ranks but I do not see her capitulating as a sheep dog either given her
profound focus on messages that the USA working and middle class support. They both need to consider their power and risk in taking
direct action in this campaign when the watershed moment arises.
It is funny, The Dems spent 4 years trying to find the stain on the dress for Trump and impeach him for lying about it - and it
seems that they have absolutely no other idea how to get into power. There is an election next year, and still they prefer to
shoot themselves in the foot rather than appeal to voters. Step one of course would be to listen to voters - the ones telling
them to shut up about impeachment and find a candidate under 65 with electable policies. In that sense the inevitable departure
of Biden is good for the Dems.
Why is it so hard for Democrats to understand this?
Is the key question. Psychiatrists would call it projection. The Dems seem to take everything bad that they get accused of
and accuse the oppo early. Thus The Russia smears on Trump came right after internal research told Hillary that she was vulnerable
to corruption charges over Uranium One. (it is to the Trump campaign's great credit that they did not respond to the silly Russia
gate charges by Hillary by pointing to the far more serious and credible corruption charges against HRC and the $145 million payment
to the Clinton foundation by the guy that was permitted by HRC to sell his Uranium stake to Russia's Rosatom. Rather Trump ignored
media chat and stuck to his message to voters - essentially that the Dems had abandoned the working man and that Trump at least
listened to them.)
And clear criminal behaviour by Biden with Ukraine is the model to accuse Trump in the Biden coverup (though surely he gets
ditched now - the Chinese $1 billion to the hedge fund run by Biden's son + Kerry Step-son + big drugs criminal and murder, Whitey
Bulger's nephew is just dynamite - just wait till we get to discussing why Obama never faced down China over trade!!).
Has to be said that with all this media power but no policies the Dems are doing appallingly badly, with much of the blowback
from the Mueller inquiry yet to hit them.
That's a rather macabre balancing act that the creatures in DC are performing. They are certainly a strange lot. I wonder just
how badly the faction being represented by the DNC and Democratic Party actually screwed up (on a global/cosmic scale that is).
Because, they sure do seem to be stuck in freak out mode. I mean, it is a known fact that Obama, and Biden, were directly responsible
for the Kiev coup (I'm sorry, but anyone who believes otherwise really needs a little cognitive adjustment therapy), so that's
not really a bombshell. Everyone already knows that Clinton was on point for the Arab Spring and the Libya debacle (to include
bumping off a US diplomat), not to mention in on the ground floor of the entire aggression against Syria (and possibly had a finger
in the aggression against Yemen). So, these things are in no way able to be considered secrets (even if they do ammount to Nuremberg
style war crimes). What else could these ridiculous creatures possibly be afraid of people finding out about, which would prompt
them to behave so aggressively towards someone who merely mentions 'maybe looking into somebody's something'?
Of all the various misdeeds committed by the Trump government over the last few years within US borders and without, the one crime
Nancy Pelosi decides to go after Trump over turns out not only a non-crime but it is not even a pale shadow of a more egregious
incident in which Joe Biden, while US Vice-President, pressured the Ukrainian government under Porky Pig Poroshenko to sack Viktor
Shokin as Prosecutor General for launching an investigation into possibly corrupt activities of Burisma Holdings and in particular
of one of its directors who happens to be Joe Biden's son, Hunter.
Incidentally wasn't a major shareholder of Burisma Holdings at one time (if not currently) the notorious Ihor Kolomoisky, governor
of Dnepropetrovsk region in mid-2014, about the time that the Malaysia Airlines Boeing passenger jet fell from the sky in a region
where Burisma Holdings had been granted a license to explore and prospect for shale oil?
God, even the real news network is descending into madness over this Trump impeachment, they just interviewed Elie Mystal & Alexandra
Flores-Quilty and they have drunk the cool-aid so hard they are basically convulsing on the floor. According to them investigating
Joe Biden's video confession of extortion is a crime but Joe Biden's extortion is perfectly fine.
I feel that the Democrats' real
problem with Trump is that he ended their corruption financing plan for the future. I would like to add Trump just replaced the
Democrats corruption plan with his own, but OOPS, the Democrats haven't provided any evidence of that, instead they spent 3 years
trying to prove something that never happened.
Millions of dollars, millions of manhours of political discourse and newsmedia
coverage, all of it wasted. Those hours could have been used discussing foreign policy, economic policy, healthcare policy, industrial
policy, environment policy but nope. Instead the Democrats chased a ghost for 3 years and now the Democrats have just signalled
that they will spend the next 6 months trying to impeach Trump for investigating Joe Biden's corruption. The American people have,
in effect, been defrauded of their political leadership time, how do the Democrats think this will go over with the American voters
in 2020.
impeachment provides another topic to help avoid discussion of the Empire, its wars,
Yes, the congress-critters get to enjoy a well-paying job with an annual salary of $174,000 and increase their already high
likelihood of getting re-elected if they don't do anything notable that people might not like, but only play politics and sound
important on presidential betrayals like (quoting Pelosi) "betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of
our elections."
Dems don't take the A Train, they take the B Trail! . . .sorry, I couldn't resist a corny joke (again)
"... "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about," Papadopoulos replied according to his recent book , "Deep State Target." But what if he had instead chuckled or said something stupid in order to puff himself up? Based on previous FBI entrapment cases , the answer seems clear: after threatening him with prosecution, the bureau would have outfitted him with a wire so that he could bring down other campaign officials. It wouldn't have stopped until it snared the ultimate prize –Trump himself. ..."
"... Trump told reporters in May he wanted Australia's role to be investigated by the Justice Department. Comey's Trump Tower meeting was important because it led directly to the publication of the notorious dossier that would generate endless headlines and cripple the incoming Trump administration even though it was full of baloney. ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Instead of electing presidents, Americans would merely submit them to the FBI for review. ..."
"... With the Electoral College and the Supreme Court already overturning the popular vote in two of the last five presidential elections, voters would have a fourth branch to contend with – the intelligence community. ..."
"... As Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer told MSNBC'S Rachel Maddow at the height of the Russiagate madness: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community – they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you." Had Comey succeeded in bringing down Trump, they may have had a seventh. ..."
Before the Trump Tower visit, Comey sat down with top FBI brass – Chief of Staff James
Rybicki, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, General Counsel James Baker, and others involved with
the Russiagate investigation – to strategize about the upcoming meeting.
Page 17 of the OIG report tells of what they were up to:
"Baker and McCabe said that they agreed that the briefing needed to be one-on-one, so that
Comey could present the 'salacious' information in the most discreet and least embarrassing
way. At the same time, we were told, they did not want the President-elect to perceive the
one-on-one briefing as an effort to hold information over him like a 'Hoover-esque type of
plot.' Witnesses interviewed by the OIG also said that they discussed Trump's potential
responses to being told about the 'salacious' information, including that Trump might make
statements about, or provide information of value to, the pending Russian interference
investigation."
As the final sentence shows, Comey's job was to confront Trump about the alleged 2013 Moscow
incident and see whether he would give the FBI reason to advance its Russiagate investigation
to a whole new level, that of the presidency itself.
This was the same approach the FBI would employ a couple of weeks later after listening in
on a telephone conversation between Mike Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and not
liking what it heard about plans to bolster U.S.-Russian relations. The solution was to send a
couple of agents to quiz the newly-appointed national security adviser and see how he would
respond. After telling Flynn not to bother bringing along a lawyer because it was just a
friendly chat and "they wanted Flynn to be relaxed, and they were concerned that giving the
warnings might adversely affect the rapport" – as a follow-up memo
noted – the agents caught the ever-voluble Flynn fudging various details. Three weeks
later, he found himself out of office and in disgrace. Ten months after that, he was in federal
court pleading
guilty to making false and misleading statements.
Another Set-Up
Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department's inspector general. (Wikimedia Commons)
Now we know from the OIG report that this was apparently the goal with regard to Trump.
Russiagate began nine months earlier with a smallarmy of intelligence agents buzzing around
a naïve young Trump adviser named George Papadopoulos. [See " Spooks Spooking
Themselves ," May 31, 2018.] An Anglo-Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud, an individual
with strong Anglo-American intelligence connections, wined and dined him and told him that
Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails."
An Australian diplomat, former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer , who was similarly
connected, invited him out for drinks and then passed along the fruits of the conversation to
Canberra, which related them to Washington. A Belorussian-American businessman who worked for
Steele offered Papadopoulos $30,000 a month under the table. A U.S. intelligence asset named
Charles Tawil presented him with $10,000 in cash. A long-time CIA informant named Stefan Halper
flew Papadopoulos to London and barraged him with questions:
"It's great that Russia is helping you and the campaign, right, George? George, you and your
campaign are involved in hacking and working with Russia, right? It seems like you are a
middleman for Trump and Russia, right? I know you know about the emails."
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about," Papadopoulos replied according to
his recent book , "Deep State Target." But what if he had instead chuckled or said
something stupid in order to puff himself up? Based on previous
FBI entrapment cases , the answer seems clear: after threatening him with prosecution, the
bureau would have outfitted him with a wire so that he could bring down other campaign
officials. It wouldn't have stopped until it snared the ultimate prize –Trump
himself.
Trump
told reporters in May he wanted Australia's role to be investigated by the Justice
Department. Comey's Trump Tower meeting was important because it led directly to the publication of the
notorious dossier that would generate endless headlines and cripple the incoming Trump
administration even though it was full of baloney.
Most of what we know about that meeting in the early days of the Trump administration comes
from a memo that Comeydashed off minutes later and then lightly revised the next morning.
According to his memo, Comey met one-on-one with Trump to tell him about the Steele dossier
because
"the content [was] known at IC [intelligence community] senior level and I didn't want him
caught cold by some of the detail . I said I wasn't saying this was true, only that I wanted
him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said
media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not
give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material and that we were keeping it very
close-hold."
But Comey's memo was disingenuous, starting with his line about not wanting to give the
media "the excuse to write that the FBI has the material." Leaks are an integral part of
Washington, as an insider and a leaker like Comey knows.
As Comey must have also known, his very decision to brief Trump on the dossier wound up
triggering press attention to it.
Four days later, Buzzfeed
posted the dossier on its website. The source remains anonymous but it's easy to imagine
that either Director of National Intelligence James Clapper or CIA Director John Brennan
spilled the beans. They both accompanied Comey to the meeting and were appalled by Trump's call
for a rapprochement with Russia.
Comey's memo also rings false where it says he "wasn't saying this was true, only that I
wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands."
Glenn Simpson, the ex- Wall Street Journal reporter whose private Washington
intelligence firm, Fusion GPS, commissioned the dossier on behalf of the Clinton campaign and
the DNC, told the House intelligence committee that Steele began sharing his findings with the
FBI "in July or late June" of 2016. (See p. 60 of testimony
transcript ).
That means that the bureau had the Moscow Ritz-Carlton report in hand six months prior to
the Trump Tower meeting. Surely, this is enough time to reach some conclusion as to its
veracity.
'Might Make Statements'
Had Trump fallen into Comey's trap, millions of Americans would no doubt have cheered – and given
Trump's dismal record in office, who can blame them? But the implications are chilling, and not
just for rightwing dissidents. Instead of electing presidents, Americans would merely
submit them to the FBI for review.
With the Electoral College and the Supreme Court already overturning the popular vote in
two of the last five presidential elections, voters would have a fourth branch to contend with
– the intelligence community.
As Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer told MSNBC'S Rachel Maddow at the height of
the Russiagate madness: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community – they
have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you." Had Comey succeeded in bringing down Trump,
they may have had a seventh.
Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing
Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a
wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and
blogs about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com .
Richard A. , September 24, 2019 at 15:13
I think Russiagate is more than just smearing Trump, it's also about smearing Russia. The
war lobby here in the US and the UK are trying to manipulate public opinion in to hating
Russia.
R Zarate , September 24, 2019 at 05:02
And now there are calls to impeach Trump for asking for an investigation into Biden! It
speaks volumes about the MSM that there was no uproar when H.B. took the job at Bursima, I
remember the White House putting out a release at the time saying they could see no conflict
of interest, I guess the lack of conflict was it was par for the course to enrich family
members.
By the bye. So Trump gets impeached, then what? Didn't do Clinton any harm.
CitizenOne , September 23, 2019 at 23:26
It is an interesting history filled with plots within plots to destroy Trump for the
audacity to win the presidential election. True he won the election with a lot of help from
Cambridge Analytica and his election team which included Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos
(the nube) Paul Manafort (the former partner in the Black, Stone, Manafort and Kelly lobby
firm) , Rick Gates and Michael Flynn.
All these people were indicted under the Mueller probe but yet Trump escaped without a
scratch on his record. To pull this off Trump abandoned all of them in turn claiming he
hardly knew them and had no involvement. How Trump escaped from the Mueller investigation has
nothing to do with his innocence and everything to do with the lack of evidence tying him to
the crimes his associates admitted to under intense scrutiny by the Mueller Special Council
Investigation into the alleged Russian Hacks which supposedly threw the election toward
Trump. Michael Cohen, Trump's long time lawyer was also convicted of paying off two women
that alleged Trump arranged for sex with the women and later paid them off handsomely
allegedly by orders from Trump.
It is like Trump won his freedom because there was no evidence to convict him despite the
many people who were closely associated with himwho fell as victims to the special
prosecutors zeal for indictments of Trump's inner guard.
In the end the Mueller report all but exonerated Trump with Mueller claiming Trump had
committed impeachable evidence but that Mueller could do nothing about that leaving his
conclusions up to the court of popular appeal as to whether or not Trump was guilty of
obstruction of justice in the entire Russia Gate story.
Trump accurately called out the testimony of Comey before Congress into what he knew about
the Russian attempt to hack the election as fake news. Trump banked on what the intelligence
community would share about the election result and he won big time when the Mueller
investigation into Russian hacking of the election produced no tangible connection between
Trump and the alleged hackers. The Steel dossier was also l shown to be just more fake news
paid for by the democrats.
The longer Trump remains in charge the less likely that he will be implicated in a scandal
although the new allegations that he attempted to get the Ukrainian government to investigate
Joe Biden has the potential to raise a new round of fake news decrying that the president has
engaged in yet more impeachable offenses.
robert e williamson jr , September 23, 2019 at 21:23
Beware of the Department of Justice, mad dogs and dogs of war.
Appears to be FBI disruption of the domestic governmental tranquility for the unique
purpose of disrupting a duly elected president.
I mean the FBI bill themselves as the domestic counter intelligence apparatus and CIA
apparently agrees. Maybe CIA is actually running another of their counter intelligence covert
mission that involves the undoing of Ole Donny J. .
No I didn't say it, no mention of the dreaded "executive action" my me.
My assumption is that this may be simply collateral damage from the investigation into the
Russia meddling in the 2016 elec . . . . .
. . . and the beat goes on, la da da dee . . . !
That far away look in the eyes of the old democratic leaders is the look of "the fear"
(H.S.T.). They watch as the repugs, their partners in crime get skewered , by the same DOJ
that will skewer them in a New York second given a chance.
DOJ and the USAG leading the shock troops of the National Socialists take over.
Sandra Thompson , September 23, 2019 at 20:58
One of your best lines: "Instead of electing presidents, Americans would merely submit
them to the FBI for review." Liked last couple of paragraphs too. Thank you
Abby , September 23, 2019 at 19:43
So Comey knowingly and blatantly lied to the incoming president and it was that incoming
president that got investigated? How the hell does that make sense to the Russia Gaters? And
then they elevated Comey after he got fired? This makes as much sense as people thinking that
Robert Mueller was going to save the country.
After reading Parry's essay on Joe ByeDone from 2014 after the Obama coup in Ukraine that
showed how corrupt the powerful people in our government are I don't even know why people
bother to vote anymore. The country is run by people behind the scenes who use congress
critters to do their dirty work and give them cover. And with our corrupt military industrial
complex setting the world on fire I think it's time for the empire to burn.
I read somewhere early on that someone was peddling the steele-dossier to many different
outlets weeks or even months before trump's briefing, but they wouldn't bite (too fantastic)
until the feds legitimized it. The people should be informed about these mechanics.
Dan Anderson , September 23, 2019 at 15:09
Here's the warning before being sworn in:
January 3, 2017 – Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: "Let me tell you, you take on
the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you. So, even for a
practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he is being really dumb to do this."
Rachel Maddow: "What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were motivated
to?"
Schumer: "I don't know, but from what I am told, they are very upset with how he has treated
them and talked about them," -- The Rachel Maddow Show Jan 3, 2017
"... CIA decided under Dulles that they were the only ones capable of leading this country, mainly because they wanted it ran their way and no other. Don't take my word for it though, read Arthur B. Darling's "THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, AN INSTRUMENT OF GOVERNMENT TO 1950 copy right 1990 Penn State Press. (This work was classified for quite a long while.) ..."
"... So the first thing that works in CIA et al's favor is politicians who have been in DC long enough to be worn down and thoroughly compromised by blackmail of one sort or another and there fore vulnerable. ..."
It has been my contention that Biden's powerful backers from the
military-industrial-intelligence-media complex are fully aware of his mental state, and that
is precisely why they want him to be president. Why? He would only be a figure-head
president. He would be given a suggested running mate as well as a list of candidates for
cabinet and other appointed positions (as Obama was given) and Biden would follow that in
making appointments. Policies of his administration would be consistent with the interests of
the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex.
robert e williamson jr , September 20, 2019 at 15:19
Kids this is exactly what the intelligence community wants, someone who they can claim
needs to be told what to do or be kept discreetly out of the loop, so currently Joe maybe the
chosen one just as Bill Barr is reported to have told Slick Willy.
We end up where we are at the moment because our security state apparatus is ran by the
intelligence community who do not really want a strong intelligent, clear minded president
who can actually think for himself. Ask Barrack Obama!
For years I've used this analogy, crude as it maybe, that when the newly elected president
is called on for his national security briefing it is always a tense encounter because this
"Newby" is about to have a come to Jesus meeting with this most abusive of all government
entities. The intelligence community. He is "shown the way"he will act because if he doesn't
this community who has relieved him of one his go -- -s will come and relieve him of the
other.
This started as a joke on my part, I'm now convinced it reflects reality.
At some point many here will understand that since around the time of the murder of JFK ,
CIA has framed things in this manner.
CIA decided under Dulles that they were the only ones capable of leading this country,
mainly because they wanted it ran their way and no other. Don't take my word for it though,
read Arthur B. Darling's "THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, AN INSTRUMENT OF GOVERNMENT TO
1950 copy right 1990 Penn State Press. (This work was classified for quite a long
while.)
Doing so will help make your mind more flexible , jeesh what a slog to get through it.
So the first thing that works in CIA et al's favor is politicians who have been in DC
long enough to be worn down and thoroughly compromised by blackmail of one sort or another
and there fore vulnerable.
I figured if Caitlin could say "dog balls " which I think was a great analogy I could say
gonads.
Time to sit down Joe.
Thanks again to Consortium News for their great efforts at informing the masses.
This is a apt demonstration of the raw power of the US neoliberal MSM propaganda.
Notable quotes:
"... This is a very interesting process: no matter how absurd is the particular notion and how many contravening facts exist, the power of neoliberal MSM is such that soon enough it is viewed as an established and indisputable fact. As you aptly call it "an article of faith". ..."
"... So we can state that neoliberal MSM are performing part of functions that in Medieval Europe was performed by the Church. Kind of giant televangelism pulpit in the mega church of neoliberalism ..."
Interesting – apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential
election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world
regards as established fact, it is safe to advance on that a little. Now Donald Trump
actually asked Vladimir Putin to hack the emails of his democratic rival.
Curiously, the Washington Post's recently-adopted new slogan is "Democracy dies in
darkness". So telling the readers any old shit that you made up and can offer no proof
whatsoever is true is infinitely better than darkness. And they wonder why academic standards
are slipping, and why Americans faithfully believe things that few other countries accept as
true. All the while they are cultivating a nation of dunces which believes anything it is
told by its government.
likbez
"apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip
the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as
established fact,"
Mark, you are a very astute political observer!
This is a very interesting process: no matter how absurd is the particular notion and how
many contravening facts exist, the power of neoliberal MSM is such that soon enough it is
viewed as an established and indisputable fact. As you aptly call it "an article of
faith".
So we can state that neoliberal MSM are performing part of functions that in Medieval
Europe was performed by the Church. Kind of giant televangelism pulpit in the mega church
of neoliberalism
Young people in the west, generally speaking, are know-it-alls convinced of their own
absolute currency of knowledge, and most of what they believe they know comes from reading
newspapers and watching television. I say this from experience as, like all of us, I was
young once and thought I knew it all, and I got almost all my information from newspapers and
television news, although some came from professional journals like the US Naval Institute
Proceedings. I grew up believing Russia was a grey and colourless place where hopeless people
in shabby, ill-fitting clothes trudged dispiritedly from one line-up to another, then home to
their tenth-floor walk-up concrete box shared with from eight to a dozen other family members
and relatives.
Of course, it WAS like that for some people. Just as it likely was for the poor in the
west, although they were all but invisible then save for occasional charity drives to 'help
the less fortunate'. I was a huge fan of the United States, loving pretty much everything
about it, as my first foreign trips with the Navy were to places like New London, Connecticut
(right across the river from Groton, the headquarters of submarine builders Electric Boat)
and Boston. I was a big fan of the U.S. Navy, and in many respects I still am – it was
and is mostly a professional service with capable leaders and sound ethics common to seagoing
services the world over.
It was in the area of the USA's political system that gradual and then total
disillusionment took place. Any respect I might once have had for the media vanished at about
the same time.
The media has become a cesspool of bottom-feeders all looking for the 'gotcha' moment,
while the business and profession of journalism in general has morphed to uncritical relay of
government propaganda.
From that same link, a very interesting dissection of the Salisbury poisonings. We've
become used to mocking or horrified refutations of the UK government's line that it could
only have been Russia, but this source does it with considerable detail; for instance, the
formula originally devised by Vil Marzayanov and his compatriots in the Soviet Union was
later patented by a US Chemical lab.
"... As for Falun Gong's potential affiliations with the CIA and NED that's another quite plausible storyline altogether. ..."
"... One surely wondered (until how) how Falun Gong can fund The Epoch Times using the same business model that Sheldon Adelson uses to fund a pro-Netanyahu newspaper "Israel Hayom" in Israel that Netanyahu himself endorses and which he or other people in the Israeli government might privilege with news of events that the rest of the Israeli news media has no access to. In this way "Israel Hayom", offered for free in Israel, poses a threat to other Israeli newspapers which have no rich patron to fund their activities and pay their staff but must rely on people buying their papers or regularly subscribing to them. ..."
Some of Mr Li's pronouncements are certainly unconventional, some would say just plain strange.
He believes aliens walk the Earth and he has reportedly said he can walk through walls and make himself invisible.
Mr Li says that he is a being from from a higher level who has come to help humankind from the destruction it could face as
the result of rampant evil.
In 1999 the cult attempted to gain political power in China. The government shut it down for pushing its followers to not use
medical therapies. Li Hongzhi and some of his followers moved to the United States. As the cult is strongly anti-communist the U.S.
government used it to put pressure on China. Some institutions and companies related to Falun Gong are openly funded with U.S. government
money.
The main media outlet of the Falun Gong organization is the Epoch Times . NBC reports of its
astonishing growth as a pro-Trump social media force:
By the numbers, there is no bigger advocate of President Donald Trump on Facebook than The Epoch Times.
The small New York-based nonprofit news outlet has spent more than $1.5 million on about 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in
the last six months, according to data from Facebook's advertising archive -- more than any organization outside of the Trump
campaign itself, and more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns.
Those video ads -- in which unidentified spokespeople thumb through a newspaper to praise Trump, peddle conspiracy theories
about the "Deep State," and criticize "fake news" media -- strike a familiar tone in the online conservative news ecosystem. The
Epoch Times looks like many of the conservative outlets that have gained followings in recent years.
...
In April, at the height of its ad spending, videos from the Epoch Media Group, which includes The Epoch Times and digital video
outlet New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, combined for around 3 billion views on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, ranking 11th among all
video creators across platforms and outranking every other traditional news publisher.
...
The Epoch Times brought in $8.1 million in revenue in 2017 -- double what it had the previous year -- and reported spending $7.2
million on "printing newspaper and creating web and media programs." Most of its revenue comes from advertising and "web and media
income," according to the group's annual tax filings, while individual donations and subscriptions to the paper make up less than
10 percent of its revenue.
New Tang Dynasty's 2017 revenue, according to IRS records, was $18 million, a 150 percent increase over the year before. It
spent $16.2 million.
XXX
The NBC report says it is not clear where the "web and media" money that gets invested in pro-Trump advertisement actually
comes from. I didn't realize it was the same Epoch Times that did a good job covering Russia-Gate:
"The Democrats could up their game by taking a deeper look into this issue." you mean the CIA democrats like Mark Warner? the
US has nothing to offer the world except war, which is why the people of the US must destroy this country. there is 1000% bipartisan
agreement on the war drive against both china & russia. both parties spend their days yelling at each other about who is the most
commie, like moscow mitch or comrade nancy, b/c they are unified in their war drive. as they are on anything else that matters.
this country exists to wage war, as the platform for projection of power, against competitors. nothing else. the illusion that
any of the operators w/in the system, any of them at all, are doing anything but crafting a persona in relation to power for self-aggrandizement,
not challenging power in the slightest, is not helpful.
Thanks for the info on Shen Yun.
In the Bay Area, it seems there are at least 3 or 4 permanent Shen Yun advertising billboards at any given time. Just yesterday,
I passed one advertising tickets for 2020!
The Epoch Times is also very widespread in distribution, although unclear on the actual readers. It seems that every 2nd SF Weekly
box has an Epoch Times one next to it, although my personal experience is mostly downtown where the large Cantonese speaking population
is.
Falun Gong is kinda like Scientology crossed with Amway. Get rich quick while simultaneously healing your goiters. In its best
days it was a terrible scam. Now it is just a blunt instrument that the US State Department uses to try and beat China with.
The Epoch Times' Jeff Carlson has been in the thick of uncovering the broad Democratic Party coup (in league with transnational
intelligence assets) against the Trump Presidency. Thus b's depiction here of the Dems potentially acting in the role of white
knight subverts mountains of evidence. As for Falun Gong's potential affiliations with the CIA and NED that's another quite
plausible storyline altogether.
Perhaps experience affords one the possibility of rapidly discerning the underbelly of an organized grouping like Falun Gong.
Early in its manifestations on streets in Europe it became as apparent as the nose on one's face that it was a well financed propaganda
tool for the gullible and naive. In short, its a ridiculous novelty, a con job and a rip off for all who are taken in by such
preposterous pretensions when its plainly so assuming in its virulent hatred. Anyone who protests their disturbing, illegal and
unacceptable behavior best be prepared to be bitten.. Like various other cults they are not what they appear. Rather they are
a mish-mash of absurd fantasies and hypnotic imaginations. Finally, such groups can seem innocent enough and yet become highly
dangerous to others. But ask around and expect the response they are nice, gentle, kind and harmless or other such understanding
expressions. Don't be taken in by the setup folks!
Thanks B for an excellent survey covering Falun Gong's business activities and cybersecurity connections with the US government
and its agencies.
One surely wondered (until how) how Falun Gong can fund The Epoch Times using the same business model that Sheldon Adelson
uses to fund a pro-Netanyahu newspaper "Israel Hayom" in Israel that Netanyahu himself endorses and which he or other people in
the Israeli government might privilege with news of events that the rest of the Israeli news media has no access to. In this way
"Israel Hayom", offered for free in Israel, poses a threat to other Israeli newspapers which have no rich patron to fund their
activities and pay their staff but must rely on people buying their papers or regularly subscribing to them.
Also, when the sources of most news about prisoners having organs forcibly removed from them by the Chinese government go back
to Falun Gong itself, one has to wonder about the veracity of such claims. If after 20, 30 years of such claims, there is still
no independent verification of the claims of forced organ removals and transplants (and the British design firm Forensic Architecture
hasn't yet been approached to create its 3D Bellingcrap-style visual recreations of the horrific surgery theatres in which the
operations supposedly take place), then we must regard these claims with all the scepticism and scorn they may deserve.
In 2013, Edward Snowden was an IT systems expert working under contract for the National
Security Agency when he traveled to Hong Kong to provide three journalists with thousands of
top-secret documents about U.S. intelligence agencies' surveillance of American citizens.
To Snowden, the classified information he shared with the journalists exposed privacy abuses
by government intelligence agencies. He saw himself as a whistleblower. But the U.S. government
considered him a traitor in violation of the
Espionage Act .
After meeting with the journalists, Snowden intended to leave Hong Kong and travel -- via
Russia -- to Ecuador, where he would seek asylum. But when his plane landed at Moscow's
Sheremetyevo International Airport, things didn't go according to plan.
"What I wasn't expecting was that the United States government itself ... would cancel my
passport," he says.
Snowden was directed to a room where Russian intelligence agents offered to assist him -- in
return for access to any secrets he harbored. Snowden says he refused.
"I didn't cooperate with the Russian intelligence services -- I haven't and I won't," he
says. "I destroyed my access to the archive. ... I had no material with me before I left Hong
Kong, because I knew I was going to have to go through this complex multi-jurisdictional
route."
Snowden spent 40 days in the Moscow airport, trying to negotiate asylum in various
countries. After being denied asylum by 27 nations, he settled in Russia, where he remains
today.
"People look at me now and they think I'm this crazy guy, I'm this extremist or whatever.
Some people have a misconception that [I] set out to burn down the NSA," he says. "But that's
not what this was about. In many ways, 2013 wasn't about surveillance at all. What it was about
was a violation of the Constitution."
Snowden's 2013 revelations led to changes in the laws and standards governing American
intelligence agencies and the practices of U.S. technology companies, which now encrypt much of
their Web traffic for security. He reflects on his life and his experience in the intelligence
community in the memoir Permanent Record.
On Sept. 17, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit to recover all proceeds from the book,
alleging that Snowden violated nondisclosure agreements by not letting the government review
the manuscript before publication; Snowden's attorney, Ben Wizner, said in a statement that the
book contains no government secrets that have not been previously published by respected news
organizations, and that the government's prepublication review system is under court
challenge.
The USA clearly overextended itself with all those neocon global neoliberal empire games. So
for Canada, to think of it as an independent country is somewhat naive. It is vassal of
Washington at best, a colony at worst.
But RussiaGate is not about Russia and its attitude to the West. Russiagate is about crisis
of neoliberalism and cracks in the facade of the neoliberal society, the cracks that the ruling
elite tried to patch by redirecting anger to the external enemy.
This is the point that the author seems do not understand. all russigate stupidity is just at
attempt to use the image of expernal enemy to rally the nation and produce at this some kind of
artificial unity. Unity that now is severely lacking in the USA.
West.
Boosted by victory in the Cold War, believing that our systems represent the 'end of history',
we in the West have come to see ourselves as 'masters of the universe'. We are all that
matters.
And so it follows that we must be at the top of everybody else's agenda, and that whatever
anybody else in the world does, it must somehow be about us.
Take the paranoid stories I've been covering on this blog about how the Russians are
bound to 'meddle' in Canada's upcoming general election. Why on earth do people here think that
this is so likely, given that the choice is between a governing party whose foreign minister is
banned from entering Russia and an opposition party whose leader is banned from entering
Russia? The answer lies in our strange belief that we're actually really important. Canada
is a G7 country after all. Of course the Russians will target us. We matter! Except that in
reality we don't.
As was mentioned in the report by Sergey Sukhankin which I critiqued a week or so ago,
Russians who study international affairs don't look at Canada as a truly independent country.
To most of them, we're just an appendage of the United States. Our belief that the opposite is
true – that we're a big player, that our elections really matter to foreign countries,
that they're bound to try to undermine us because 'WE'RE IMPORTANT!' – is narcissism pure
and simple.
Canadians aren't the only one guilty of this. Americans have a similar problem. It's why
they had such a huge problem understanding what Saddam Hussein was up to after his defeat in
the 1991 Gulf War. Faced with apparent Iraqi obstruction of US demands, they assumed that this
meant that Saddam was plotting some sort of evil revenge against the United States. In fact, it
turned out that he wasn't thinking of the Americans at all; his real concerns were to do with
Iran. You can find lots of examples like that. Americans are told that they must fight the
Taliban because of the danger that terrorists might again use Afghanistan to strike the United
States. But is the average Talibani really thinking about America? Or is he thinking about his
home, his family, his village – all things local? If the Iranians are helping the Syrian
government, is it because they view the war in Syria as part of a global struggle against the
United States, or is it because Syria is next door to Iran and what happens there is of direct
importance to Iran's own security? The answers, I think, are pretty clear.
To put it another way, states (and non-state actors) have their own interests unconnected to
us. The fact that their pursuit of their interests sometimes makes them clash with Western
states who are pursuing different interests doesn't mean that they're doing what they doing
because of us. Moreover, as the balance of power in the world shifts, it's likely that more and
more often the West will become less and less of a factor in non-Western states' calculations.
As Derek Averre says with reference to Russia in another part of the LSE report:
We are in danger of missing the fact that European norms are becoming less important as a
reference point against which Russia's political elite measures its policy. Indeed, Ted
Hopf's argument – that Russia constructs its identity in relation to the US/Europe as
'significant others' – should be subject to appraisal at this time of far-reaching
change in Russian foreign policy.
In short, it's not all about us, and becoming less and less about us with every passing
day. But arrogance and narcissism prevent us from seeing this. As a result we stumble from
foreign policy blunder to foreign policy blunder . Unless and until we are able to come off
our high horses and recognize that we're not the centre of the universe, we're going to keep
getting things horribly wrong.
"... "Sadly, the country spent over three years and 40 million taxpayer dollars on these investigations," said Lewandowski. "It is now clear the investigation was populated by many Trump haters who had their own agenda -- to try and take down a duly elected president of the United States," Lewandowski said in his opening statement - later adding "We, as a Nation, would be better served if elected officials like you concentrated your efforts to combat the true crises facing our country, as opposed to going down rabbit holes like this hearing." ..."
"... Nadler and Schiff and those in their camp have a single-minded purpose: Never, ever , again allow the unwashed to get away with a successful rebellion. ..."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blasted House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler last week
over his 'Moby Dick'-like obsession with impeaching President Trump - days before Trump's 2016
campaign manager Corey Lewandowski
wiped the floor with Congressional Democrats during a contentious five-hour hearing on
Tuesday in front of Nadler's panel.
Pelosi's comments came during a closed-door Capitol Hill meeting of Democrats last week,
where she complained that Judiciary Committee aides have advanced the impeachment push "far
beyond where the House Democratic Caucus stands," according to Politico
.
" And you can feel free to leak this ," Pelosi added, according to several people who were
there.
It was the latest sign of the widening schism between Pelosi and Judiciary Committee
Chairman Jerry Nadler, two longtime allies who are increasingly in conflict over where to
guide the party at one of its most critical moments.
Both Pelosi and Nadler, who have served in the House together for more than 25 years,
insist their relationship remains strong. But their rift over impeachment is getting harder
and harder to paper over amid Democrats' flailing messaging on the topic and a growing divide
in the caucus. - Politico
And while Pelosi aides told Politico that Nadler has coordinated with her office on
investigations, legal strategy and messaging - and Pelosi has signed off on all the Judiciary
Committee's court filings against Trump, the House Speaker has been expressing skepticism for
months that a successful impeachment in the House would only lead to "exonerating" Trump on the
campaign trail after the effort dies in the GOP-led Senate.
Pelosi has privately clashed with Nadler over his aggressive impeachment agenda, arguing
the public does not support it and it does not have the 218 votes to pass on the House floor.
So far, about 137 Democrats say they would vote to open an official impeachment inquiry.
...
The relationship between the two veteran lawmakers has become strained . While Pelosi has
blocked the House from formally voting to open an impeachment inquiry, Nadler declared he is
authorized to begin one even without a House vote. -
Washington Examiner
"Am I concerned? The answer is yes!," Florida Democratic Rep. Donna Shalala told the
Washington Examiner . "In my district, I'm not getting asked about impeachment.
I'm being asked about healthcare, I'm being asked about the environment, and about
infrastructure. It's not like around the country they are thinking about impeachment. It's a
Washington phenomenon as far as I can tell."
... ... ...
During Tuesday's 'impeachment' hearing, Corey Lewandowski beat Congressional
Democrats like a red-headed stepchild - starting with his opening statement:
"Sadly, the country spent over three years and 40 million taxpayer dollars on these
investigations," said Lewandowski. "It is now clear the investigation was populated by many
Trump haters who had their own agenda -- to try and take down a duly elected president of the
United States," Lewandowski said in his opening statement - later adding "We, as a Nation,
would be better served if elected officials like you concentrated your efforts to combat the
true crises facing our country, as opposed to going down rabbit holes like this
hearing."
" As for actual 'collusion,' or 'conspiracy,' there was none. What there has been, however,
is harassment of the president from the day he won the election ."
"Corey Lewandowski was very precise," Rep. Matt Gaetz, a member of the House panel, told
Fox News ' Sean Hannity. "And House Democrats looked like a dog that had chased a car
and then caught it and then did not know what to do about it ."
Nadler and Schiff and those in their camp have a single-minded purpose: Never,
ever , again allow the unwashed to get away with a successful rebellion.
That's the reason a now 90% controlled Trump can't be allowed to escape
unscathed, no matter how otherwise useless the exercise -- even by the standards of their own
(apparent) issue agendas.
Nadler:Corey what time is it? Corey :It's 2pm. Nadler: The clock shows 1:59 . Charge Corey for
lying to Congress! All a gotcha game by a group of angry haters.
Nadler:Corey what time is it? Corey :It's 2pm. Nadler: The clock shows 1:59 . Charge Corey for
lying to Congress! All a gotcha game by a group of angry haters.
"... "If instead of focusing on petty and personal politics, the committee focused on solving the challenges of this generation, imagine how many people we could help." ..."
"... He also took a swipe at Trump's 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, and her handling of emails, and criticized the "Obama-Biden administration" for its inability to stop Russia election interference -- dropping the name of the former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate. ..."
"... Nadler is an incompetent idiot with a Napoleon complex. Why did this hearing ever happen and televised when it was certain it was going to be a bust. ..."
"... More of our vicious, counterproductive political duopoly. This was just one example of what is happening in general with our current political processes - a lot of stagnation. ..."
He set the tone in his opening statement, mocking Democrats and ridiculing what he called
the "fake Russia collusion narrative."
"We as a nation would be better served if elected officials like you concentrated your
efforts to combat the true crises facing our country as opposed to going down rabbit holes like
this hearing," Lewandowski said. "If instead of focusing on petty and personal politics,
the committee focused on solving the challenges of this generation, imagine how many people we
could help."
... ... ...
He also took a swipe at Trump's 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, and her handling of emails,
and criticized the "Obama-Biden administration" for its inability to stop Russia election
interference -- dropping the name of the former vice president and 2020 presidential
candidate.
"Donald Trump was a private citizen and had no more responsibility than I did to protect the
2016 election," he said. "That fell to the Obama-Biden administration and they failed. "
... ... ...
At times the hearing was almost comical. When Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) asked
Lewandowski, "Are you the hit man, bag man, the lookout or all of the above?" Lewandowski
replied: "I think I'm the good-looking man, actually."
Lewandowski also scolded Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) for saying the tooth fairy was not
real: "My children are watching, so thank you for that."
Republicans, meanwhile, used their time to praise the president and sympathize with
Lewandowski because Democrats asked him to testify.
"Why do Dems continue this charade?" Trump ally Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) asked. Lewandowski
replied: "I think they hate this president more than they love their country."
=== 5 minutes
ago Lewandowski made everyone including himself look foolish and today’s circus proved
nothing except Nadler is an incompetent idiot with a Napoleon complex. Why did this hearing
ever happen and televised when it was certain it was going to be a bust. 1 minute ago One
of the commentators said this was exactly to be expected … He said the Dems requested
this hearing because their constituents wanted it. I think plenty of us knew what was gonna
happen -- as it often does in these situations, regardless of party. More of our vicious,
counterproductive political duopoly. This was just one example of what is happening in general
with our current political processes - a lot of stagnation.
I think we need to get away from parties, they naturally lead to antagonism, and an "us vs
them" mentality, and fighting. I have some ideas (humble and basic) on doing away with parties
at ourconstitution.info , Outreach,
Other Comments.
We must do something; take back Washington's lead -- he couldn't stand parties. Much scarier
stuff as well -- rise of the Medical-Military Industrial, " a lot of killers" (Trump to
O'Reilly, video on my LInks page), in and out of hospitals. Some are concerned also that the
military and CIA are running the Country -- I see a big problem with these career positions vs
desires of an oncoming president. Apparently, these orgs, if they don't like a president or
policy, just wait them out (or kill them), "contributing" to this current disgrace of a
Constitutional Republic. What to do about that? Something needs to be done... Maybe those
personnel should be changed out, they can be as much or more dangerous than a president for
life...
It is Our Republic, Of, By, and For The People, as long as we can keep it. Protest with me
in Miami, or wherever you are, before it is too late.
Nadler:Corey what time is it? Corey :It's 2pm. Nadler: The clock shows 1:59 . Charge Corey for
lying to Congress! All a gotcha game by a group of angry haters.
Nadler:Corey what time is it? Corey :It's 2pm. Nadler: The clock shows 1:59 . Charge Corey for
lying to Congress! All a gotcha game by a group of angry haters.
"... The source was said to be responsible for the reporting used by the former director of the CIA, John Brennan, in making the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election for the purpose of tipping the scales in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump. ..."
"... On closer scrutiny, however, this aspect of the story falls apart, as does just about everything CNN, The New York Times ..."
"... "And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free," John 8:32, is etched into the wall of the main lobby of the Old CIA Headquarters Building. ..."
"... Every Russian diplomat assigned to the United States is screened to ascertain his or her susceptibility for recruitment. The FBI does this from a counterintelligence perspective, looking for Russian spies. The CIA does the same, but with the objective of recruiting a Russian source who can remain in the employ of the Russian government, and thereby provide the CIA with intelligence information commensurate to their standing and access. Turning a senior Russian diplomat is difficult; recruiting a junior Russian diplomat like Oleg Smolenkov less so. Someone like Smolenkov would be viewed not so much by the limited access he provided at the time of recruitment, but rather his potential for promotion and the increased opportunity for more essential access provided by such. ..."
"... The reality is, however, that the CIA and the FBI have different goals and objectives when it comes to the Russians they recruit. As such, Smolenkov's recruitment was most likely a CIA-only affair, run by NR but closely monitored by the Russian Operations Group of the Agency's Central Eurasia Division, who would have responsibility for managing Smolenkov upon his return to Moscow. ..."
"... But his job as foreman of the Rossotrudnichestvo coop was not the kind of job a Maurive Thorez graduate gets; Smolenkov had to have felt slighted. He allegedly turned to drink, and his marriage was on the rocks; his colleagues spoke of a man who believed his salary was too low. ..."
"... The enticements of money and future opportunity -- the CIA's principle recruitment ploys -- more than likely were a factor in convincing this dissatisfied diplomat to defect. ..."
"... the fact is, sometime in 2007-2008, Smolenkov was recruited by the CIA. ..."
"... He was granted a "second-level" security clearance, which allowed him to handle top secret information. ..."
"... Moscow Station, however, was having trouble carrying out its clandestine tasks. In the fall of 2011, the CIA's chief of station in Moscow, Steven Hall, had been approached by his counterpart in the Russian Federal Security Service (the FSB, Russia's equivalent of the FBI) and warned that the CIA should stop trying to recruit agents from within the FSB ranks; the FSB had detected several of these attempts, which it deemed inappropriate given the ongoing cooperation between the intelligence services of the two countries regarding the war on terrorism. ..."
"... The loss of Hall at this very sensitive time created a problem for both the CIA and Smolenkov. Smolenkov's new assignment was a dream come true for the CIA -- never before had the agency managed to place a controlled agent into the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation. ..."
"... With communications down, and the chief of station evicted, Smolenkov was left in a state of limbo while the CIA trained up new case officers capable of operating in Moscow and sought a replacement for Hall. ..."
"... "To put it mildly," Ushakov said, "it is surprising that this extremely crude, clumsy attempt at recruitment took place in a situation where both President Obama and President Putin have clearly stated the importance of more active cooperation and contacts between the special services of the two countries." ..."
"... As a senior aide to Ushakov, Smolenkov was ideally positioned to gather intelligence about the Russian response. If he was able to communicate this information to the CIA, it would have provided Obama and his advisers time to prepare a response to the Russian letter. The situation meant that Smolenkov may have been reporting on events related to the expulsion of Hall, one of the CIA officers specifically trained to manage his reporting. ..."
"... Smolenkov's success was directly linked to the work of his boss, Ushakov. In June 2015, Ushakov was put in charge of establishing a high-level working group in the fuel and energy sector for the purpose of improving bilateral cooperation with Azerbaijan. The reporting Smolenkov would have been able to provide on the work of this group would have been of tremendous assistance to those in the Obama administration working on U.S. energy policy, especially as it related to countering Russian moves in the former Soviet Republics. ..."
"... Ushakov's 10-year tenure as Russia's ambassador to the U.S. gave him unprecedented insight into U.S. decision making, experience and expertise Putin increasingly relied upon as he formulated and implemented responses to U.S. efforts to contain and punish Russia on the international stage. ..."
"... While Ushakov's meetings with Putin were conducted either in private, or in small groups of senior advisers, meaning Smolenkov was not present, Smolenkov was able to collect intelligence on the periphery by photographing itineraries and working papers, as well as overhearing comments made by Ushakov, that collectively would provide U.S. policymakers with important insight into Putin's thinking. ..."
"... According to the FSB, the Russians were adept at identifying CIA officers working under State Department cover and would subject these individuals to extensive surveillance. ..."
"... In addition to the decimation of its staff, Moscow Station was experiencing an alarming number of its agents being discovered by the FSB and arrested. While the Russians were circumspect about most of these cases, on several occasions they indicated that they had uncovered a spy by intercepting the electronic communications between him and the CIA. This meant that the Russians were aware of, and actively pursuing, the Google-based internet-based system used by the CIA to communicate with its agents in Russia. ..."
"... Sometime in early August 2016, a courier from the CIA arrived at the White House carrying a plain, unmarked white envelope. Inside was an intelligence report from Smolenkov that CIA Director Brennan considered to be so sensitive that he kept it out of the President's Daily Brief, concerned that even that restrictive process was too inclusive to adequately protect the source. The intelligence was to be read by four people only -- Obama, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Avril Haines and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. The document was to be returned to the courier once it had been read. ..."
"... The contents of the report were alarming -- Putin had personally ordered the cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election in favor of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. ..."
"... The White House found the Smolenkov report so convincing that in September 2016, during a meeting of the G-20 in China, Obama pulled Putin aside and told him to stop meddling in the U.S. election. Putin was reportedly nonplussed by Obama's intervention. ..."
"... It is not publicly known what prompted the report from Smolenkov which Brennan found so alarming. Was it received out of the blue, a target of opportunity which Smolenkov exploited? Was it based upon a specific tasking submitted by Smolenkov's CIA handlers in response to a tasking from above? Or was it a result of the intervention of the CIA director, who tasked Smolenkov outside normal channels? In any event, once Brennan created his special analytical unit, Smolenkov became his dedicated source. If Smolenko was in this for the money, as appears to be the case, he would have been motivated to come up with the "correct" answer to Brennan's tasking for information on Putin's role. By late 2016, Western media had made quite clear what kind of answer Brennan wanted. ..."
"... Brennan took the extraordinary measure of sequestering the source from the rest of the Intelligence Community. He also confronted the head of the Russian FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, about the risks involved in interfering in U.S. elections. ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Smolenkov's firing occurred right before the Intelligence Community released its much-anticipated assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election ..."
"... Brennan had sold the Smolenkov reporting to both President Obama and President-elect Trump, along with the rest of the intelligence community, as "high-quality information." It was, at best, nothing more than uncorroborated rumor or, at worst, simple disinformation. This reporting, which was parroted by an unquestioning mainstream media that accepted it as fact, created an impression amongst the American public that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered and directed a Russian interference campaign during the 2016 election designed "to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible," according to the ICA. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... Concerned that Smolenkov could be arrested by the Russians and, in doing so, have control over the narrative of Russian interference transfer to Moscow, the CIA once again approached Smolenkov to defect to the United States. This time the Russian agent agreed. ..."
"... Sometime in June 2018, Smolenkov and his wife bought a home worth nearly $1 million in northern Virginia. The couple used their real names. They were not afraid. ..."
"... I can only speculate as to the circumstances that led to Smolenkov's firing by secret decree. Normally, Russians charged with transmitting classified material to the intelligence services of a foreign state are arrested, placed on trial and given lengthy prison sentences, or worse. This did not happen to Smolenkov. ..."
"... In any case, the Smolenkov report in the white envelope represented a level of access that would have significantly deviated from what one could expect from a person in his position and which suggests he may have been telling the CIA what he knew Brennan wanted to hear. ..."
"... The third scenario is that Smolenkov, a low-level failure of a diplomat with drinking issues, marital problems and monetary frustrations, was recruited by the CIA, but only with the complicity of the Russian security services. ..."
"... The same red flags that the CIA looks for when recruiting agents are also looked at by Russian counterintelligence. At what point in the recruitment process the Russians stepped in is unknown (if they did at all.) ..."
"... Moreover, this muddling diplomat whose questionable behavioral practices scream "recruit me" is, within three years of returning to Moscow, given a significant promotion that enables him to follow Ushakov into the Presidential Administration–a posting which would require extensive vetting by the Russian security services. Smolenkov's promotion pattern is enough, in and of itself, to raise red flags within the counterintelligence offices tasked with monitoring such things. The fact that it did not indicates that the quality and quantity of reporting being provided by Smolenkov was deemed by the Americans too important to interfere with. ..."
"... In this scenario, Smolenkov would have been playing to a script written by the Russian security services. Since he, technically, had broken no laws by serving as a double agent, he would not be subjected to arrest and trial. But once his existence became the fodder of the U.S. media via inference and speculation, his services as a double agent were no longer needed. He was fired from his position, via a secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live his life as he saw fit. ..."
"... In my view, if one assumes that the Smolenkov July 2016 report at the center of this drama was not a result of serendipity, but rather a product derived from a specific request from his CIA managers to find out how high up in the Russian decision-making chain the authorization went for what U.S. intelligence agencies were already publicly pushing as an alleged DNC cyber attack, then the answer I believe becomes clear–the Russians knew the U.S. had an intelligence deficit. ..."
"... In my view, the CIA, Russia and Smolenkov were happy to maintain the status quo, with Smolenkov living in comfortable retirement with his family, the CIA continuing to accuse Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, and Russia denying it. ..."
"... Trump's instructions to Barr are linked to a desire on the part of the president to hold to account those responsible for creating the narrative of possible collusion. Reports indicate that Barr is particularly interested in finding out how and why the CIA concluded that Putin personally ordered the Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. ..."
"... Seen in this light, the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the "exfiltration" of the CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by Brennan and his allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the truth. ..."
"... A few days following Smolenkov's "outing" by the U.S. media, the Russian government filed a request with Interpol for an investigation into how someone who had gone missing in Montenegro was now living in the United States. ..."
"... The only person at risk from this entire sordid affair is Brennan, whose reputation and potential livelihood is on the line. At best, Brennan is guilty of extremely poor judgement; at worst, he actively conspired to use the office of Director of the CIA to interfere in the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Neither option speaks well of the U.S. Intelligence Community and those in Congress charged with oversight of its operations. ..."
"... Watch Scott Ritter discussing this article on ..."
"... Consortium News does not necessarily endorse the views of its authors. ..."
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"... And under the third scenario, with Smolenkov a double agent all along, Ritter writes: "But once his existence became the fodder of the U.S. media via inference and speculation, his services as a double agent were no longer needed. He was fired from his position, via a secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live his life as he saw fit." ..."
"... That doesn't make sense to me. In fact I see the opposite: if he had been a successfully run double agent all that time, then when his usefulness had ended he would have been decently pensioned off – not simply cut loose to fend for himself – but *not* allowed to travel abroad unimpeded (with his whole family, no less) where he would have the opportunity to cause mischief. ..."
"... In the extremely sophisticated world of high grade intelligence I have repeatedly said that the Brennan, Clapper, Comey trio were lead-footed imbeciles ..."
"... Read The CIA as Organized Crime and Strength of the Wolf and Strength of the Pack by Douglas Valentine. ..."
"... "Kiriakou also notes that the way Smolenkov's intelligence was handled raises echoes of the CIA's manipulation of intelligence to help justify the Iraq war. The information from Smolenkov was handled personally by then-CIA Director John Brennan. Brennan reportedly sidelined other CIA analysts and kept the Smolenkov information out of the Presidential Daily Briefing – instead delivering it personally to President Obama and a small group of officials." ..."
"... More like a Le Carre' film. The CIA was originally sold as an intelligence gathering and analysis organization, and was not supposed to be involved in operations. Thus, it was founded on lies and the lies have only grown since. ..."
"... Even the former communist state governments in Europe and the Soviet Union rued the day that they unleashed their secret police from accountability, and thereby became subservient to their power. ..."
"... I suspect Scott was provided a great deal of the reporting in this fascinating article from a disgruntled insider, or former insider. Knowledge of Brennan's break with protocol to form a select 'stand alone fusion cell' that reported only to him is something that I haven't seen reported before. In any case this story adds another red flag to the entire Russiagate hoax. ..."
"... Just as Mueller failed to interview Julian Assange or Christopher Steele for his report -- obvious red flags -- we should now watch the conduct of Barr's investigation. Will Barr's investigators interview Smolenkov? ..."
"... ( ) the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the "exfiltration" of the CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by Brennan and his allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the truth. ..."
"... "If Smolenkov was a spy, he could have delivered important insights about Russia's foreign policy thinking and planning to U.S. intelligence. But if he was the source for the U.S. intelligence community's certainty that Putin personally orchestrated a covert interference campaign, that certainty rests on a weak foundation. Smolenkov served the wrong boss in the Kremlin to get reliable information about such ventures." ..."
OPINION: Scott Ritter probes Oleg Smolenkov's role as a CIA asset and the use of his data by
the director of the CIA to cast doubt over the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
By Scott Ritter Special to Consortium News
Reports that the CIA conducted an emergency exfiltration of a long-time human intelligence
source who was highly placed within the Russian Presidential Administration sent shock waves
throughout Washington, D.C.
The source was said to be responsible for the reporting used by the
former director of the CIA, John Brennan, in making the case that Russian President Vladimir
Putin personally ordered Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election for the purpose of tipping the scales in favor of then-candidate Donald
Trump.
According to CNN's Jim Sciutto, the decision to exfiltrate the source was driven in part
by concerns within the CIA over President Trump's cavalier approach toward handling classified
information, including his willingness to share highly classified intelligence with Russia's
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a controversial visit to the White House in May 2017.
On closer scrutiny, however, this aspect of the story falls apart, as does just about
everything CNN, The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets have reported.
There was a Russian spy whose information was used to push a narrative of Russian
interference in the 2016 presidential election; this much appears to be true. Everything else
that has been reported is either a mischaracterization of fact or an outright fabrication
designed to hide one of the greatest intelligence failures in U.S. history -- the use by a CIA
director of intelligence data specifically manipulated to interfere in the election of an
American president.
The consequences of this interference has deleteriously impacted U.S. democratic
institutions in ways the American people remain ignorant of -- in large part because of the
complicity of the U.S. media when it comes to reporting this story.
This article attempts to set the record straight by connecting the dots presented by
available information and creating a narrative shaped by a combination of derivative analysis
and informed speculation. At best, this article brings the reader closer to the truth about
Oleg Smolenkov's role as a CIA asset; at worst, it raises issues and questions that will help
in determining the truth.
"And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free," John 8:32, is etched into
the wall of the main lobby of the Old CIA Headquarters Building.
The Recruit
Oleg Smolenkov
In 2007, Oleg Smolenkov was living the life of a Russian diplomat abroad, serving in the
Russian embassy in Washington. At 33 years of age, married with a 1-year old son, Smolenkov was
the picture of a young diplomat on the rise. A protégé of Russian Ambassador Yuri
Ushakov, Smolenkov worked as a second secretary assigned to the Russian Cultural Center, a
combined museum and exhibition hall operated by the Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of
Independent States, Compatriots Living Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation
(better known by its common Russian name, Rossotrudnichestvo), an autonomous government agency
operating under the auspices of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In addition to hosting Russian artists and musicians, Rossotrudnichestvo oversaw a program
where it organized all-expense paid cultural exchanges for young Americans to travel to Russia,
where they were accommodated in luxury hotels and met with Russian officials. Smolenkov's boss,
Yegeny Zvedre, would also tour the United States, speaking at public forums where he addressed
U.S.-Russian cooperation. As for Smolenkov himself, life was much more mundane -- he served as
a purchasing agent for Rossotrudnichestvo, managing procurement and contract issues for a store
operating out of the Rossotrudnichestvo building, which stood separate from the main embassy
compound.
Rossotrudnichestvo had a darker side: the FBI long suspected that it operated as a front to
recruit Americans to spy for Russia, and as such every Russian employee was viewed as a
potential officer in the Russian intelligence service. This suspicion brought with it a level
of scrutiny which revealed much about the character of the individual being surveilled,
including information of a potentially compromising nature that could be used by the American
intelligence services as the basis of a recruitment effort.
Every Russian diplomat assigned to the United States is screened to ascertain his or her
susceptibility for recruitment. The FBI does this from a counterintelligence perspective,
looking for Russian spies. The CIA does the same, but with the objective of recruiting a
Russian source who can remain in the employ of the Russian government, and thereby provide the
CIA with intelligence information commensurate to their standing and access. Turning a senior
Russian diplomat is difficult; recruiting a junior Russian diplomat like Oleg Smolenkov less
so. Someone like Smolenkov would be viewed not so much by the limited access he provided at the
time of recruitment, but rather his potential for promotion and the increased opportunity for
more essential access provided by such.
The responsibility within the CIA for recruiting Russian diplomats living in the United
States falls to the National Resources Division, or NR, part of the Directorate of Operations,
or DO -- the clandestine arm of the CIA. In a perfect world, the CIA domestic station in
Washington, D.C., would coordinate with the local FBI field office and develop a joint approach
for recruiting a Russian diplomat such as Smolenkov.
The reality is, however, that the CIA and
the FBI have different goals and objectives when it comes to the Russians they recruit. As
such, Smolenkov's recruitment was most likely a CIA-only affair, run by NR but closely
monitored by the Russian Operations Group of the Agency's Central Eurasia Division, who would
have responsibility for managing Smolenkov upon his return to Moscow.
The precise motive for Smolenkov to take up the CIA's offer of recruitment remains unknown.
He graduated from one of the premier universities in Russia, the Maurice Thorez Moscow State
Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, and he married his English language instructor.
Normally a graduate from an elite university such as Maurice Thorez has his or her pick of jobs
in the Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Defense or the security services. Smolenkov was hired by
the Foreign Ministry as a junior linguist, assigned to the Second European Department, which
focuses on Great Britain, Scandinavia and the Baltics, before getting assigned to the embassy
in Washington.
Felt Underpaid
But his job as foreman of the Rossotrudnichestvo coop was not the kind of job a Maurive
Thorez graduate gets; Smolenkov had to have felt slighted. He allegedly turned to drink, and
his marriage was on the rocks; his colleagues spoke of a man who believed his salary was too
low.
The enticements of money and future opportunity -- the CIA's principle recruitment ploys --
more than likely were a factor in convincing this dissatisfied diplomat to defect. Did the CIA
compromise him by dangling the temptation of contract-based embezzlement? Or did the FBI
uncover some sort of personal or financial impropriety that made the Russian diplomat
vulnerable to recruitment? Only the CIA and Smolenkov know the precise circumstances behind the
Russian's decision to betray his country. But the fact is, sometime in 2007-2008, Smolenkov
was recruited by the CIA.
After Smolenkov accepted the CIA's offer, there was much work to be done -- the new agent
had to be polygraphed to ascertain his reliability, trained on covert means of intelligence
collection, including covert photography, as well as on how to securely communicate with the
CIA in order to transmit information and receive instructions. Smolenkov was also introduced to
his "handler," a CIA case officer who would be responsible for managing the work of Smolenkov,
including overseeing the bank account where Smolenkov's CIA "salary" would be deposited.
Various contingencies would be prepared for, including procedures for reestablishing
communications should the existing means become unavailable, emergency contact procedures and
emergency exfiltration plans in case Smolenkov became compromised.
Took Away His Name, and Gave Him a Code
The recruitment of a diplomat willing to return to Moscow and be run in place is a rare
accomplishment, and Smolenkov's identity would become a closely guarded secret within the ranks
of the CIA. Smolenkov's true identity would be known to only a few select individuals; to
everyone else who had access to his reporting, he was simply a codename, comprised of a
two-letter digraph representing Russia (this code changed over time), followed by a word chosen
at random by a CIA algorithm (for example, Adolf Tolkachev, the so-called "billion dollar spy,"
was known by the codename CKSPHERE, with CK being the digraph in use for the Soviet Union at
the time of his recruitment.) Because the specific details from the information provided by
Smolenkov could compromise him as the source, the Russian Operations Group would "blend" his
reporting in with other sources in an effort to disguise it before disseminating it to a wider
audience.
Smolenkov followed Ambassador Ushakov when the latter departed the United States for Moscow
in the summer of 2008; soon after arriving back in Moscow, Smolenkov and his wife divorced.
Ushakov took a position as the deputy chief of the Government Staff of the Russian Federation
responsible for international relations and foreign policy support. Part of the Executive
Office of the Government of the Russian Federation, Ushakov coordinated the international work
of the prime minister, deputy prime ministers and senior officials of the Government Executive
Office. Smolenkov took up a position working for Ushakov, and soon found himself moving up the
ranks of the Russian Civil Service, being promoted in 2010 to the rank of state advisor to the
Russian Federation of the Third Class, a second-tier rank that put him on the cusp of joining
the upper levels of the Russian government bureaucracy. He was granted a "second-level"
security clearance, which allowed him to handle top secret information.
Moscow Station
Ukashov, r. with Putin (Kremlin photo)
In 2013 Ushakov received a new assignment, this time to serve in the Presidential Executive
Office as the aide for international relations. Smolenkov joined Ushakov as his staff manager.
Vladimir Putin was one year into his second stint as president and brought Ushakov, who had
advised him on foreign relations while Putin was prime minister, to continue that service.
Ushakov maintained an office at the Boyarsky Dvor (Courtyard of the Boyars), on 8 Staraya
Square.
The Boyarsky Dvor was physically separate from the Kremlin, meaning neither Ushakov nor
Smolenkov had direct access to the Russian president. Nevertheless, Smolenkov's new job had to
have pleased his CIA masters. In the five years Smolenkov worked at the Executive Office of the
Government, he was not privy to particularly sensitive information. His communications with CIA
would most likely have been administrative in nature, with the CIA more interested in
Smolenkov's growth potential than immediate value of any intelligence he could produce.
Smolenkov's arrival in the Presidential Administration coincided with a period of
operational difficulty for the CIA in Moscow. First, the CIA's internet-based covert
communications system, which used Google's email platform as the foundation for accessing
various web pages where information was exchanged between the agent and his CIA handlers, had
been globally compromised. Smolenkov had been trained on this system, and it provided his
lifeline to the CIA. The compromise first occurred in Iran, and then spread to China; in both
countries, entire networks of CIA agents were rounded up, with many being subsequently
executed . China is believed to have shared the information on how to detect the covert
communication-linked web pages with Russia; fortunately for Moscow Station, they were able to
make the appropriate changes in the system to safeguard the security and identity of its
agents. In the meantime, communications between the CIA and Smolenkov were cut off until the
CIA could make contact using back-up protocols and re-train Smolenkov on the new communications
procedures.
Moscow Station, however, was having trouble carrying out its clandestine tasks. In the
fall of 2011, the CIA's chief of station in Moscow, Steven Hall, had been approached by his
counterpart in the Russian Federal Security Service (the FSB, Russia's equivalent of the FBI)
and warned that the CIA should stop trying to recruit agents from within the FSB ranks; the FSB
had detected several of these attempts, which it deemed inappropriate given the ongoing
cooperation between the intelligence services of the two countries regarding the war on
terrorism.
But Hall had his orders, and after a year-long pause to review its operating procedures,
Moscow Station resumed its targeting of FSB officers. Things went real bad real fast. In
January 2013, a CIA officer named Benjamin Dillon was arrested by the FSB as he tried to
recruit a Russian agent, declared persona non grata, and expelled from Russia. Then in May 2013
the FSB arrested another CIA officer, Ryan Fogle. Fogle was paraded before television cameras
together with his spy paraphernalia, and like Dillon before him, expelled from the country.
Moreover, the Russians, in condemning the CIA actions, revealed the identity of the CIA's
Moscow chief of station (Hall), who because of the public disclosure was compelled to depart
Russia.
A CIA Dream
Steve Hall (CNN/YouTube)
The loss of Dillon and Fogle was a serious blow to Moscow Station, but one from which the
CIA could recover. But the near simultaneous loss of two case officers and the chief of
station was a different matter altogether. Hall was one of the few people in the CIA who had
been "read in" on the recruitment of Smolenkov, and as such was involved in the overall
management of the Russian agent. The loss of Hall at this very sensitive time created a
problem for both the CIA and Smolenkov. Smolenkov's new assignment was a dream come true for
the CIA -- never before had the agency managed to place a controlled agent into the
Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation.
But while Smolenkov had been able to provide evidence of access, by way of photographs of
presidential documents, the CIA needed to confirm that Smolenkov hadn't been turned by the
Russians and was not being used to pass on disinformation designed to mislead those who used
Smolenkov's reporting. Normally this was done by subjecting the agent to a polygraph
examination -- a "swirl," in CIA parlance. This examination could take place at an improvised
covert location in Russia, or in a more controlled environment outside of Russia, if Smolenkov
was able to exit on work or during vacation. But arranging the examination required close
coordination between the CIA and its agent, as well as a healthy degree of trust between the
agent and those directing him. With communications down, and the chief of station evicted,
Smolenkov was left in a state of limbo while the CIA trained up new case officers capable of
operating in Moscow and sought a replacement for Hall.
One of the ironies surrounding the arrest and expulsion of CIA officer Fogle, and the
subsequent outing and eviction of Hall, was that Smolenkov was ideally positioned to provide an
inside perspective on how the Russian leadership reacted to the incident. Smolenkov's boss,
Ushakov, was tasked with overseeing Russia's diplomatic response. In a statement given to the
Russian media, Ushakov expressed surprise at the timing of the incident. "To put it mildly,"
Ushakov said, "it is surprising that this extremely crude, clumsy attempt at recruitment took
place in a situation where both President Obama and President Putin have clearly stated the
importance of more active cooperation and contacts between the special services of the two
countries."
Ushakov coordinated closely with the head of Putin's Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev,
regarding the content of a letter Putin was planning to send in response to a previous
communication from Obama. While the original text focused on missile defense issues, Ushakov
and Patrushev inserted language about the Fogle incident. As a senior aide to Ushakov,
Smolenkov was ideally positioned to gather intelligence about the Russian response. If he was
able to communicate this information to the CIA, it would have provided Obama and his advisers
time to prepare a response to the Russian letter. The situation meant that Smolenkov may have
been reporting on events related to the expulsion of Hall, one of the CIA officers specifically
trained to manage his reporting.
The Center
Amid the operational challenges and opportunity provided by Smolenkov's new position within
the Russian Presidential Administration, the CIA underwent a radical reorganization which
impacted how human agents, and the intelligence they produced, would be managed. The past
practice of having intelligence operations controlled by insular regional divisions, which
promoted both a physical and philosophical divide between the collectors and their analytical
counterparts in the respective regional division within the Directorate of Intelligence, or DI,
was discontinued by Brennan, who had taken over as director of the CIA in May 2013.
To replace what he viewed as an antiquated organizational structure, Brennan created what he
called "Mission Centers," which combined analytical, operational, technical and support
expertise under a single roof. For Moscow Station and Smolenkov, this meant that the Russia and
Eurasia Division, with its Russian Operations Group, no longer existed. Instead, Moscow Station
would take its orders from a new Europe and Eurasia Mission Center headed by an experienced CIA
Russia analyst named Peter Clement.
Clement, who had earned a PhD in Russian history from Michigan State University, had a
diverse resumé with the CIA which included service as the director for Russia on the
National Security Council and as the CIA representative to the U.S. Mission to the United
Nations. Clement served as the director of the Office of Russian and Eurasian Analysis and as
the CIA's Russia issue manager from 1997 to 2003; as the President's Daily Brief (PDB) briefer
for Vice President Dick Cheney from 2003-2004, and from 2005-2013, as the deputy director for
intelligence for analytic programs. In 2015 Brennan appointed Clement to serve as the deputy
assistant director of CIA for Europe and Eurasia, where he directed the activities of the newly
created Europe and Eurasia Mission Center. If one was looking for the perfect candidate to
manage the fusion of operational, analytical and technical experience into a singular,
mission-focused entity, Peter Clement was it.
Peter Clement (C-Span)
As Clement got on with the business of whipping the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center into
shape, Smolenkov was busy establishing himself as an intelligence source of some value. Smolenkov's success was directly linked to the work of his boss, Ushakov. In June 2015,
Ushakov was put in charge of establishing a high-level working group in the fuel and energy
sector for the purpose of improving bilateral cooperation with Azerbaijan. The reporting
Smolenkov would have been able to provide on the work of this group would have been of
tremendous assistance to those in the Obama administration working on U.S. energy policy,
especially as it related to countering Russian moves in the former Soviet Republics.
Another project of interest was Russia's sale of advanced Mi-35 helicopters to Pakistan in
support of their counterterrorism efforts. Coming at a time when U.S.-Pakistani relations were
floundering, the Russian sale of advanced helicopters was viewed with concern by both the
Department of State and the Department of Defense. Again, Smolenkov's reporting on this issue
would have been well received by critical policymakers in both departments.
But the most critical role played by Ushakov was advising Putin on the uncertain state of
relations between the U.S. and Russia in the aftermath of the 2014 crisis in Ukraine, and
Russia's annexation of Crimea. Ushakov's 10-year tenure as Russia's ambassador to the U.S.
gave him unprecedented insight into U.S. decision making, experience and expertise Putin
increasingly relied upon as he formulated and implemented responses to U.S. efforts to contain
and punish Russia on the international stage.
While Ushakov's meetings with Putin were conducted either in private, or in small groups
of senior advisers, meaning Smolenkov was not present, Smolenkov was able to collect
intelligence on the periphery by photographing itineraries and working papers, as well as
overhearing comments made by Ushakov, that collectively would provide U.S. policymakers with
important insight into Putin's thinking.
Managing an important resource like Smolenkov was one of the critical challenges faced by
Clement and the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center. Smolenkov's reporting continued to be
handled using special HUMINT procedures designed to protect the source. However, within the
Center knowledge of Smolenkov's work would have been shared with analysts who worked side by
side with their operational colleagues deciding how the intelligence could best be used, as
well as coming up with follow-up questions for Smolenkov regarding specific issues of
interest.
Given the unique insight Smolenkov's reporting provided into Putin's thinking, it would be
logical that intelligence sourced from Smolenkov would frequently find itself briefed to the
president and his inner circle via the PDB process, which was exacting in terms of vetting the
accuracy and reliability of any intelligence reporting that made it onto its pages. As a
long-time Russia expert with extensive experience in virtually every aspect of how the CIA
turned raw reporting into finished intelligence, Clement was ideally suited to making sure his
Center handled the Smolenkov product responsibly, and in a manner which maximized its
value.
Meanwhile, Moscow Station continued to exhibit operational problems. By 2015 the CIA had
managed to rebuild its stable of case officers operating from the U.S. embassy. But the FSB
always seemed to be one step ahead. According to the FSB, the Russians were adept at
identifying CIA officers working under State Department cover and would subject these
individuals to extensive surveillance. As if to prove the Russian's point, in short order
the FSB rounded up the newly assigned case officers, along with the deputy chief of station,
declared them persona non grata, and expelled them from Russia. To make matters worse, the FSB
released surveillance video of all these officers, who in some cases were joined by their
spouses, as they engaged in elaborate ruses to evade Russian surveillance in order to carry out
their covert assignments.
Moscow Station's string of bad luck continued into 2016, when one of its officers, having
been detected by the FSB during a meeting, fled via taxi to the U.S. embassy, only to be
tackled by a uniformed FSB officer as he tried to enter the compound. In the scuffle that
followed, the CIA officer managed to make entry into the embassy building, compelling the FSB
guard to release him once jurisdiction was lost. The CIA officer, who suffered a separated
shoulder during the incident, left Russia shortly thereafter, together with a female colleague
who had also been detected by the FSB while engaged in clandestine activities and subsequently
declared persona non grata.
FSB Headquarters in the Lubyanka Building, Moscow.
The FSB indicated, at the time these two officers were being expelled, that it had evicted
three other CIA officers during the year. In addition to the decimation of its staff, Moscow
Station was experiencing an alarming number of its agents being discovered by the FSB and
arrested. While the Russians were circumspect about most of these cases, on several occasions
they indicated that they had uncovered a spy by intercepting the electronic communications
between him and the CIA. This meant that the Russians were aware of, and actively pursuing, the
Google-based internet-based system used by the CIA to communicate with its agents in
Russia.
Meanwhile, Smolenkov continued to send his reports to his CIA handlers unabated, using the
same internet-based system. Under normal circumstances, an exception to compromise would raise
red flags within the counterintelligence staff that evaluated an agent's reporting and
activity. But by the summer of 2016, nothing about the work of the CIA, and in particular the
Europe and Eurasia Mission Center could be considered "normal" when it came to the Russian
target.
Little White Envelope
Sometime in early August 2016, a courier from the CIA arrived at the White House carrying
a plain, unmarked white envelope. Inside was an intelligence report from Smolenkov that CIA
Director Brennan considered to be so sensitive that he kept it out of the President's Daily
Brief, concerned that even that restrictive process was too inclusive to adequately protect the
source. The intelligence was to be read by four people only -- Obama, National Security Advisor
Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Avril Haines and White House Chief of Staff Denis
McDonough. The document was to be returned to the courier once it had been read.
Brennan in Oval Office where he had envelope delivered. (White House photo/Pete Souza)
The contents of the report were alarming -- Putin had personally ordered the cyber attack
on the Democratic National Committee for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential
election in favor of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
The intelligence report was not a product of Clement's Europe and Eurasia Mission Center,
but rather a special unit of handpicked analysts from the CIA, NSA and FBI who were brought
together under great secrecy in late July and reported directly to Brennan. These analysts were
made to sign non-disclosure agreements protecting their work from their colleagues.
This new analytical unit focused on three new sensitive sources of information -- the
Smolenkov report, additional reporting provided by a former MI6 officer named Christopher
Steele, and a signals intelligence report provided by a Baltic nation neighboring Russia. The
Steele information was of questionable provenance, so much so that FBI Director James Comey
could not, or would not, vouch for its credibility. The same held true for the NSA's assessment
of the Baltic SIGINT report. By themselves, the Steele reporting and Baltic SIGINT report were
of little intelligence value. But when viewed together, they were used to corroborate the
explosive contents of the Smolenkov intelligence. The White House found the Smolenkov report
so convincing that in September 2016, during a meeting of the G-20 in China, Obama pulled Putin
aside and told him to stop meddling in the U.S. election. Putin was reportedly nonplussed by
Obama's intervention.
It is extraordinarily difficult for a piece of intelligence to be deemed important and
reliable enough to be briefed to the president of the United States. The principal forum for
such a briefing is the Presidential Daily Brief, which prior to 2004 was a product produced
exclusively by the CIA. When the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act was signed
into law in 2004, the responsibility for the PDB was transferred to the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence (ODNI), a newly created entity responsible for oversight and
coordination of the entire Intelligence Community, or IC. The PDB is considered to be an IC
product, the production of which is coordinated by ODNI's PDB staff in partnership with the CIA
Directorate of Intelligence (DI)'s President's Analytic Support Staff.
Since he began reporting about his work in the Russian Presidential Administration in 2013,
Smolenkov had, on numerous occasions, produced intelligence whose content and relevance was
such that it would readily warrant inclusion in the PDB. After 2015, the decision to submit a
Smolenkov-sourced report for inclusion in the PDB would be made by Clement and his staff. For a
report to be nominated, it would have to pass an exacting quality control review process which
evaluated it for accuracy, relevance and reliability.
U.S. Embassy Moscow ( Wikimedia Commons)
Sometime in the leadup to August 2016, this process was halted. Oleg Smolenkov was a
controlled asset of the CIA. While he was given certain latitude on what information he could
collect, generally speaking Smolenkov worked from an operations order sent to him by his CIA
controllers which established priorities for intelligence collection based upon information
provided by Smolenkov about what he could reasonably access. Before tasking Smolenkov, his CIA
handlers would screen the request from an operational and counterintelligence perspective,
conducting a risk-reward analysis that weighed the value of the intelligence being sought with
the possibility of compromise. Only then would Smolenkov be cleared to collect the requested
information.
It is not publicly known what prompted the report from Smolenkov which Brennan found so
alarming. Was it received out of the blue, a target of opportunity which Smolenkov exploited?
Was it based upon a specific tasking submitted by Smolenkov's CIA handlers in response to a
tasking from above? Or was it a result of the intervention of the CIA director, who tasked
Smolenkov outside normal channels? In any event, once Brennan created his special analytical
unit, Smolenkov became his dedicated source. If Smolenko was in this for the money, as appears
to be the case, he would have been motivated to come up with the "correct" answer to Brennan's
tasking for information on Putin's role. By late 2016, Western media had made quite clear what
kind of answer Brennan wanted.
Every intelligence report produced by a controlled asset is subjected to a
counterintelligence review where it is examined for any evidence of red flags that could be
indicative of compromise. One red flag is the issue of abnormal access. Smolenkov did not
normally have direct contact with Putin, if ever. His intelligence reports would have been
written from the perspective of the distant observer. His report about Putin's role in
interfering in the 2016 election, however, represented a whole new level of access and trust.
Under normal circumstances, a report exhibiting such tendency would be pulled aside for
additional scrutiny; if the report was alarming enough, the CIA might order the agent to be
subjected to a polygraph to ensure he had not been compromised.
This did not happen. Instead, Brennan took the extraordinary measure of sequestering the
source from the rest of the Intelligence Community. He also confronted the head of the Russian
FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, about the risks involved in interfering in U.S. elections.
Whether Brennan further tasked Smolenkov to collect on Putin is not known. Nor is it known
whether Smolenkov produced more than that single report about Putin's alleged direct role in
ordering the Russian intelligence services to intervene in the 2016 U.S. presidential
elections.
Despite Brennan's extraordinary effort to keep the existence of a human source within the
Russian Presidential Administration a closely-held secret, by December 2016 both The
Washington Post and The New York Times began quoting their sources about the
existence of a sensitive intelligence source close to the Russian president. The timing of
these press leaks coincided with Smolensky being fired from his job working for the
Presidential Administration; the method of firing came in the form of a secret decree. When the
CIA found out, they desperately tried to convince Smolenkov to agree to extraction, fearing for
his safety should he remain in Moscow. This Smolenkov allegedly refused to do, prompting the
counterintelligence-minded within the CIA to become concerned that Brennan and his coterie of
analysts had been taken for a ride by a Russian double agent.
Trump and Barr on Feb. 14, 2019. (Wikimedia Commons)
Smolenkov's firing occurred right before the Intelligence Community released its
much-anticipated assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election . Like the special
analytical unit created by Brennan to handle the intelligence about Putin ordering the Russian
intelligence services to intervene in favor of Trump in the 2016 election, Brennan opted to
produce the Russian interference assessment outside the normal channels. Usually, when the IC
opts to produce an assessment, there is a formal process which has a national intelligence
officer (NIO) from within the National Intelligence Council take the lead on coordinating the
collection and assessment of all relevant intelligence. The NIO usually coordinates closely
with the relevant Mission Centers to ensure no analytical stone was left unturned in the
pursuit of the truth.
The 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was produced differently -- no Mission
Center involvement, no NIO assigned, no peer review. Just Brennan's little band of sequestered
analysts.
Smolenkov's information took top billing in the ICA, "Assessing Russian Activities and
Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections," published on Jan. 6, 2017. "We assess," the unclassified
document stated, "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed
at the U.S. presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S.
democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential
presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for
President-elect Trump." Smolenkov's reporting appears to be the sole source for this
finding.
The ICA went on to note, "We have high confidence in these judgments." According to the
Intelligence Community's own definition, "high confidence'" generally indicates judgments based
on high-quality information, and/or the nature of the issue makes it possible to render a solid
judgment. A "high confidence" judgment is not a fact or a certainty, however, and still carries
a risk of being wrong.
The same day the ICA was published, Brennan, accompanied by Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper, and Admiral Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security
Agency, met with President-elect Trump in Trump Tower, where he was briefed on the classified
information behind the Russian ICA. Included in this briefing was the intelligence from "a
top-secret source" close to Putin which sustained the finding of Putin's direct
involvement.
Brennan had sold the Smolenkov reporting to both President Obama and President-elect
Trump, along with the rest of the intelligence community, as "high-quality information." It
was, at best, nothing more than uncorroborated rumor or, at worst, simple disinformation. This
reporting, which was parroted by an unquestioning mainstream media that accepted it as fact,
created an impression amongst the American public that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered
and directed a Russian interference campaign during the 2016 election designed "to help
President-elect Trump's election chances when possible," according to the ICA.
As CIA director, Brennan understood very well the role played by intelligence in shaping the
decisions of key policy makers, and the absolute need for those who brief the president and his
key advisers to ensure only the highest quality information and derived assessments are
briefed. In this, Brennan failed.
Coming in From the Cold
Tivat, Montenegro
After being fired from his position within the Presidential Administration, Smolenkov
continued to live in Moscow, very much a free man. By this time he was the father of three
children, his new wife having given birth to two daughters. Following Trump's inauguration on
Jan. 20, 2017, Brennan resigned as CIA director. By May, Brennan was testifying before Congress
about the issue of Russian interference. Increasingly, attention was being drawn to the
existence of a highly-placed source near Putin, with both The New York Times and The
Washington Post publishing surprisingly detailed reports.
Concerned that Smolenkov could be arrested by the Russians and, in doing so, have control
over the narrative of Russian interference transfer to Moscow, the CIA once again approached
Smolenkov to defect to the United States. This time the Russian agent agreed.
In July 2017, Smolenkov, accompanied by his wife and three children, travelled to Montenegro
on vacation. They arrived in the resort city of Tivat, flying on a commercial air flight from
Moscow. The CIA took control of the family a few days later, spiriting them away aboard a yacht
that had been moored at the Tivat marina. Upon his arrival in the U.S., Smolenkov and his
family were placed under the control of the CIA's resettlement unit.
According to the Russian media, Smolenkov's disappearance was discovered in September 2017.
The FSB opened an investigation into the matter, initially suspecting foul play. Soon, however,
the FSB reached a different conclusion -- that Smolenkov and his family had defected to the
United States.
Normally a defector would be subjected to a debriefing, inclusive of a polygraph, to confirm
that he or she had not been turned into a double agent. Smolenkov had, over the course of a
decade of spying, accumulated a considerable amount of money which the CIA was holding in
escrow. This money would be released to Smolenkov upon the successful completion of his
debriefing. In the case of Smolenkov, however, there doesn't seem to have been a detailed,
lengthy debriefing. His money was turned over to him. Sometime in June 2018, Smolenkov and
his wife bought a home worth nearly $1 million in northern Virginia. The couple used their real
names. They were not afraid.
I can only speculate as to the circumstances that led to Smolenkov's firing by secret
decree. Normally, Russians charged with transmitting classified material to the intelligence
services of a foreign state are arrested, placed on trial and given lengthy prison sentences,
or worse. This did not happen to Smolenkov.
But this does not mean the Russian authorities were ignorant of his activities. This raises
another possibility, that Smolenkov could have been turned by the Russian security services
before he had compromised any classified information, and that he operated as a double agent
his entire CIA career. Since the only classified information he transferred would, in this
case, be approved for release by the Russian security services, he would not have technically
committed a crime. If Smolenkov was working both sides, it could have been a Russian vehicle to
create distrust between the U.S. intelligence community and Trump.
Smolenkov was fired, and left to his own devices, once his utility to Russia had expired.
Having escaped being arrested as a spy, Smolenkov believed he might be able to live a normal
life in Moscow. But when the potential for compromise arose due to leaks to the press, I assess
that it was in the CIA's interest to bring Smolenkov in, if for no other reason than to control
the narrative of Russian interference.
Three Scenarios
Old CIA building in Langely, Virginia.
There are three scenarios that could be at play regarding Smolenkov's bone fides as a human
intelligence source for the CIA. First, that this was a solid recruitment, that Smolenkov was
the high-level asset the CIA and Brennan claim he was, and the information he provided
regarding the involvement of Putin was unimpeachable. Mitigating against this is the fact that
when Smolenkov was fired from his position in late 2016, he was not arrested and put on trial
for spying.
Russia is fully capable of conducting secret trials, and controlling the information that is
made available about such a trial. Moreover, Russia is a vindictive state–persons who
commit treason are not tolerated. As Putin himself noted in comments made in March 2018,
"Traitors will kick the bucket. Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers
in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces silver they were given, they
will choke on them." The odds of Smolenkov being fired for committing treason, and then being
allowed to voluntarily exit Russia with his family and passports, are virtually nil.
The second scenario is a variation of the first, where Smolenkov starts as a solid
recruitment, with his reporting commensurate with his known level of access–peripheral
contact with documents and information pertaining to the work of the aide to President Putin on
international relations. Sometime in July 2016 Smolenkov produces a report that catches the
attention of DCI Brennan, who flags it and pulls Smolenkov out of the normal operational
channels for CIA-controlled human sources, and instead creating a new, highly-compartmentalized
fusion cell to handle this report, and possibly others.
Three questions emerge from the second scenario. First, was Smolenkov responding to an
urgent tasking from Brennan to find out how high up the Russian chain of command went the
knowledge of the alleged DNC cyber attack, or did Smolenkov produce this report on his own
volition? Was Brennan arranging evidence to show that there was indeed a Russian hack. After
all, all the FBI had to go by was a draft of a report by the virulently anti-Russian private
security firm CrowdStrike. The FBI never examined the DNC server itself.
In any case, the Smolenkov report in the white envelope represented a level of access
that would have significantly deviated from what one could expect from a person in his position
and which suggests he may have been telling the CIA what he knew Brennan wanted to hear. As
such, normal counterintelligence procedures should have mandated an operational pause while the
intelligence report in question was scrubbed to ensure viability. Under no circumstances would
a report so flagged be allowed to be put into the Presidential Daily Brief. However, by pulling
the report from the control of the Europe and Eurasian Mission Center, turning it over to a
stand-alone fusion cell, and bypassing the PDB process to brief the president and a handful of
advisors, there would be no counterintelligence concerns raised. This implies that Brennan had
a role in the tasking of Smolenkov, and was waiting for the report to come in, which Brennan
then took control of to preclude any counter-intelligence red flags being raised.
The third scenario is that Smolenkov, a low-level failure of a diplomat with drinking
issues, marital problems and monetary frustrations, was recruited by the CIA, but only with the
complicity of the Russian security services.
The same red flags that the CIA looks for when recruiting agents are also looked at by
Russian counterintelligence. At what point in the recruitment process the Russians stepped in
is unknown (if they did at all.) But it is curious that this professional failure was
suddenly transferred from running a co-op to being the right hand man of one of the most
influential foreign policy experts in Russia–Yuri Ushakov.
Moreover, this muddling diplomat whose questionable behavioral practices scream "recruit
me" is, within three years of returning to Moscow, given a significant promotion that enables
him to follow Ushakov into the Presidential Administration–a posting which would require
extensive vetting by the Russian security services. Smolenkov's promotion pattern is enough, in
and of itself, to raise red flags within the counterintelligence offices tasked with monitoring
such things. The fact that it did not indicates that the quality and quantity of reporting
being provided by Smolenkov was deemed by the Americans too important to interfere
with.
In this scenario, Smolenkov would have been playing to a script written by the Russian
security services. Since he, technically, had broken no laws by serving as a double agent, he
would not be subjected to arrest and trial. But once his existence became the fodder of the
U.S. media via inference and speculation, his services as a double agent were no longer needed.
He was fired from his position, via a secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live
his life as he saw fit.
The most pressing question that emerges from this possibility is why? Why would the Russian
security services want to cook the books, so to speak, in a manner which made the Russians look
guilty of the very thing they were publicly denying?
In my view, if one assumes that the Smolenkov July 2016 report at the center of this
drama was not a result of serendipity, but rather a product derived from a specific request
from his CIA managers to find out how high up in the Russian decision-making chain the
authorization went for what U.S. intelligence agencies were already publicly pushing as an
alleged DNC cyber attack, then the answer I believe becomes clear–the Russians knew the
U.S. had an intelligence deficit.
I am speculating here, but if the Russians provided an answer guaranteed to attract
attention at a critical time in the U.S. presidential election process, it would inject the CIA
and its reporting into the democratic processes of the United States, and thereby politicize
the CIA and the entire intelligence community by default. This would suppose, however, that the
agencies did not have their own motives for wanting to stop Trump.
Rogers, Comey, Clapper and Brennan all in a row.
In this scenario, the Russians would have been in control of when to expose the CIA's
activities–all they had to do was fire Smolenkov, which in the end they did, right as
Smolenkov's report was front and center in the post-election finger-pointing that was taking
place regarding the allegation of Russian interference. The best acts of political sabotage are
done subtlety, where the culprit remains in the shadows while the victims proceed, unaware that
they have been played.
For the Russians, it didn't matter who won the election, even if they may have favored
Trump; simply getting President Obama to commit to the bait by confronting Putin at the G20
meeting in September 2016 would have been a victory, because I assess that at that point the
Russians knew that they were driving the American narrative. When the President of the United
States acts on intelligence that later turns out to be false, it is an embarrassment that
drives a wedge between the intelligence community and the Executive Branch of government. I
have no solid evidence for this. But in my speculation on what may have happened, this was the
Russian objective–to drive that wedge.
An Idyllic Truce
In my view, the CIA, Russia and Smolenkov were happy to maintain the status quo, with
Smolenkov living in comfortable retirement with his family, the CIA continuing to accuse Russia
of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, and Russia denying it. As well, Russia
seems to have brushed off the sanctions that resulted from this alleged "interference." This
idyllic truce started to unravel in May 2019, when Trump ordered Attorney General William Barr
to "get to the bottom" of what role the CIA played in initiating the investigation into
allegations of collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russians that led to the appointment
of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller's investigation concluded earlier this year, with a
400-plus page report being published which did not find any evidence of active collusion
between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
Trump's instructions to Barr are linked to a desire on the part of the president to hold
to account those responsible for creating the narrative of possible collusion. Reports indicate
that Barr is particularly interested in finding out how and why the CIA concluded that Putin
personally ordered the Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 presidential
election.
Barr's investigation will inevitably lead him to the intelligence report that was hand
couriered to the White House in early August 2016, which would in turn lead to Smolenkov, and
in doing so open up the can of worms of Smolenkov's entire history of cooperation with the CIA.
Not only could the entire foundation upon which the intelligence community has based its
assessment of Russian interference collapse, it could also open the door for potential charges
of criminal misconduct by Brennan and anyone else who helped him bypass normal vetting
procedures and, in doing so, allowed a possible Russian double agent to influence the decisions
of the president of the United States.
Seen in this light, the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the
"exfiltration" of the CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by
Brennan and his allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the
truth.
At the end of the day, Smolenkov and his family are not at risk. If the Russian government
wanted to exact revenge for his actions, it would have done so after firing him in late 2016.
In any event, Smolenkov and his family would never have been allowed to leave Russia had he
been suspected or accused of committing crimes against the state. A few days following
Smolenkov's "outing" by the U.S. media, the Russian government filed a request with Interpol
for an investigation into how someone who had gone missing in Montenegro was now living in the
United States.
The only person at risk from this entire sordid affair is Brennan, whose reputation and
potential livelihood is on the line. At best, Brennan is guilty of extremely poor judgement; at
worst, he actively conspired to use the office of Director of the CIA to interfere in the
outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Neither option speaks well of the U.S. Intelligence
Community and those in Congress charged with oversight of its operations.
Watch Scott Ritter discussing this article on CN Live! Episode 9.
Consortium News does not necessarily endorse the views of its authors.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet
Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm,
and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.
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Linda Wood , September 17, 2019 at 00:34
Brennan may have written the white envelope report and attributed it to Smolenkov, who may
or may not have been a double agent. The Russian interference story is not just something
Brennan wanted to hear, it's what the military industrial complex needs us to believe.
Dan Anderson , September 16, 2019 at 22:09
I trust Scott Ritter. Had we listened to him, the USA would not have invaded Iraq over
WMDs.
Reading the piece added to my distrust of our intelligence community, remembering this
haunting exchange on live TV.
January 3, 2017 – Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer:
"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to
get back at you. So, even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he is being
really dumb to do this."
Rachel Maddow:
"What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were motivated to?"
Schumer: "I don't know, but from what I am told, they are very upset with how he has
treated them and talked about them," -- The Rachel Maddow Show Jan 3, 2017
David G , September 16, 2019 at 18:32
I'm surprised Scott Ritter thinks it likely that Russia engineered the "Putin meddled"
narrative – that just seems unbelievable to me. There are enough moving parts here that one doesn't have to commit to one of Ritter's
three scenarios: numerous variations are possible. For instance, Smolenkov may have been fired for some mundane mix of reasons going to
performance and reliability. He may have been considered dubious without Russian
counterintelligence having fingered him as a U.S. agent.
And under the third scenario, with Smolenkov a double agent all along, Ritter writes: "But once his existence became the fodder of the U.S. media via inference and speculation,
his services as a double agent were no longer needed. He was fired from his position, via a
secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live his life as he saw fit."
That doesn't make sense to me. In fact I see the opposite: if he had been a successfully
run double agent all that time, then when his usefulness had ended he would have been
decently pensioned off – not simply cut loose to fend for himself – but *not*
allowed to travel abroad unimpeded (with his whole family, no less) where he would have the
opportunity to cause mischief.
Were it not so powerful militarily and financially, the United States would be the
laughingstock of the world. This entire business is just another avenue travelled in America's nonstop Russophobia
lunatic wanderings. The DNC material was not hacked as a number of true experts have told us, including the
key one now languishing in a British prison. Putin had no plan because nothing ever happened.
Nothing. And I think we've all seen that when Putin plans something, it happens. The article is interesting for its laying out of elaborate security procedures –
kind of a high-level almost academic "police procedural" – but I do feel in the end it
is not that helpful, much as I respect Mr Ritter.
When nothing has happened, it does seem a bit odd to scrutinize every piece of fiber and
bit of dust and to construct a massive scenario of "what ifs."
Meanwhile, the murder of Seth Rich, a genuine and meaningful event, goes virtually
uninvestigated.
No wonder you are in so much trouble, America, and no wonder you make so much trouble for
others.
Anonymot , September 16, 2019 at 15:16
In the extremely sophisticated world of high grade intelligence I have repeatedly said
that the Brennan, Clapper, Comey trio were lead-footed imbeciles. That has been the CIA
tradition since Dulles left. All of those in our intelligence racket have led us to the
trough of poisoned water and all of our Presidents drank. They have all become very rich, but
not from book sales nor from consulting fees.
It says a lot about the entire echelon of those who decide our fates. There is no way to
know whether it stems from ignorance or incompetence, but those with the Deep State mindset
like each other, hire each other, and have been in some sort of daisy chain since university.
We not only need to describe How it happens as this article does very well, but even more
importantly Why. Only then can we start to do something about it, although it is probably far
too late – it would be like taking the shell off of an egg and leaving that delicate
interior membrane just inside the shell intact.
Clods like these (add the Clintons) should have their post-employment millions confiscated
and put on trial.
Sorry, but "Big Intelligence" is always a failure, and on many levels. It is not a matter of any "clods." It is a matter of the very nature of the institution and the nature of the people who use
its output. The CIA only has a good record at doing bad things. I refer to its operations side and the havoc and violence they have released through the
decades. It is an army of richly-equipped thugs without uniforms interfering in the business of
others, "lying, cheating, and stealing."
I find it maddening that we "puppet proles" are treated like stupid fools, lied to
constantly, and nothing happens to stop the mad lying/false flag garbage that keeps on. Now,
today, after Bolton departure, out of the weirdness comes Pompous Pompeo spewing even worse
madness that could tip "us" into attacking Iran! Saudis are insane, Netanyahu faces his
electorate tomorrow, and we should believe MbS and cronies? Trump is nothing but a
stooge!
Maricata , September 16, 2019 at 19:28
Read The CIA as Organized Crime and Strength of the Wolf and Strength of the Pack by Douglas
Valentine.
Please, CN, have Mr. Valentine on your livc broadcast
Jeff Harrison , September 16, 2019 at 14:36
It occurs to me that this may have an inappropriate title. Plausibly Mr. Ritter has pegged
what Smolenkov was eventually – a double agent. In which case I would probably call him
pretty successful.
hetro , September 16, 2019 at 13:06
Also published yesterday, this Aaron Mate interview with John Kiriakou on Smolenkov:
"Kiriakou also notes that the way Smolenkov's intelligence was handled raises echoes of
the CIA's manipulation of intelligence to help justify the Iraq war. The information from
Smolenkov was handled personally by then-CIA Director John Brennan. Brennan reportedly
sidelined other CIA analysts and kept the Smolenkov information out of the Presidential Daily
Briefing – instead delivering it personally to President Obama and a small group of
officials."
"That is a highly highly unusual thing to do, but I think [Brennan] did it because he knew
that the source wasn't well placed, he knew that the source was lying about his access to
Putin -- or information coming from Putin -- and I think that for whatever reason John
Brennan really wanted the president to run with this narrative that the Russians were trying
to somehow impact the 2016 election, when the intelligence just simply wasn't there,"
Kiriakou says.
When Trump campaigned against the bloody foreign policies of the duopoly he was also
campaigning against an out of control, coup making, drug running, blackmailing, imperial CIA.
my comment to The Brennan wanted to 'get' Trump to save his own hide, the CIA, and the
duopoly from further embarrassment.
If Smolenkov is missing from his Virginia home (Chancellor below at 9.15.19 at 23:40)
hopefully he is in hiding to assure he can tell a Grand Jury about any instructions or
suggestions he may have received from Brennan, or others regarding the election of Donald
Trump.
Zhu , September 16, 2019 at 05:25
Re John 8:32, people forget Pilate's remark, "what is truth"?
Igor Bundy , September 16, 2019 at 04:29
The next report from the CIA will be from hogwarts and how the measter is concatenating a
secret potion on how to turn dykes into donkeys.. This is especially impotent to the CIA and
such.. to hide in plain sight..
Imagine them trying to make a bond movie from this. Or more of Bourne.. But now it makes
sense of all the shows that show the CIA as protector of humanity and the good guys.. There
are no righteous intelligence agencies anywhere, only how evil and their limits.. Why their
powers should be limited and their actions also limited to a small sphere. Because where does
it stop? Once given the power to shape reality, then the entire world is shaped according to
a few with psychopathic tendencies. Which normal person would want to control everyone
according to their own reality? When you cant control your very own family, you have to be
one heck of a control freak to do it globally and to force everyone to do as told. But these
are the dreams and aspirations of an ape.. To remake the world in his own image.. and the
prize is the banana..
John Wright , September 16, 2019 at 15:11
More like a Le Carre' film. The CIA was originally sold as an intelligence gathering and analysis organization, and
was not supposed to be involved in operations. Thus, it was founded on lies and the lies have
only grown since.
Neither the CIA nor the FBI are salvageable at this point. They need to be abolished,
their functions reconsidered and new institutions which adhere to the Constitution created.
Of course, the entire military intelligence complex needs to be dismantled, starting with the
DHS, but that will require a revolution in this country.
Even the former communist state governments in Europe and the Soviet Union rued the day
that they unleashed their secret police from accountability, and thereby became subservient
to their power.
Chancellor , September 15, 2019 at 23:40
"But his job as foreman of the Rossotrudnichestvo coop was not the kind of job a Maurive
(sic) Thorez graduate gets;"
Of course it isn't, because that was never really his job. My guess is that his real job
all along was to be recruited by the CIA, when, in fact, he was always a double agent. The
rumors that he drank too much, was dissatisfied with his pay, and so on, strike me as too
obvious a come-on to an over-confident CIA. If Mr. Ritter knows that this is the type of
individual the CIA looks for, then the Russian security services know this as well. After
all, they tagged every American on the Moscow Station. Clearly, they have excellent
tradecraft.
The final coup by the Russian security services was to create a situation where Smolenkov
would have to be extracted by the CIA, although the Russians probably didn't think it would
take so long. Now it appears that Smolenkov is missing from the Virginia home that he
purchased openly under his own name. I wouldn't be surprised if he is living comfortably
somewhere back in Russia–this time having been "extracted" by the Russians, since his
cover as a CIA asset was finally blown.
Clearly this is speculation, but no more so than the scenarios Mr. Ritter posits.
Fabrizio Zambuto , September 16, 2019 at 14:11
Third scenario seems possible. He starts to drink, he shows how unsatisfied he is, knows
Americans will target him.
Meanwhile he gets spoonfed the intel he will have to share with the CIA.
According to Lavrov, he was a employee with little access to the echelons.
Last but not least: Putin said traitors will be punished but they don't get killed,
they're sent to Prison and handed years like Skripal which managed to go to UK thanks to a
swap.
Overall I like the article but too much Hollywood in the story. Why was he fired?
John Wright , September 15, 2019 at 23:38
[The Chinese play Go, the Russians Chess and the Americans Poker (badly)]
I think it's pretty clear that Mr. Ritter's third scenario is the correct interpretation
of the facts. I wouldn't even be surprised if the Russians surreptitiously got the U.S. media
to out their double agent. Timing is everything, after all, and now he's Langley's problem to
deal with.
The Russians know that the corrupt Anglo-American Deep State will work against any
relationship which is beneficial to Russia, so they have absolutely nothing to lose by
feeding the Deep State a narrative that can potentially wreak havoc within it.
Having Smolenkov feed this narrative into the bowels of the CIA clearly helped advance the
Deep State's rather obvious operation to create the appearance of collusion between the Trump
campaign and Russia, all the more reason for Brennan and company to swallow it hook, line and
sinker.
So Deep State tool Obama bites on the interference narrative, confronts Putin and takes
illegal actions that, if exposed, have the potential to seriously damage his legacy and the
presidency. This plausible result would cause Americans to lose even more faith in their
increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional government and affect world opinion.
We now see that if Barr actually does his job as mandated by the Constitution, then this
becomes a very distinct possibility.
Had the rabid neocon Clinton won, her administration would've undoubtedly buried Obama's
unconstitutional indiscretion, but fingerprints would've lingered for a future Republican to
possibly uncover and cause chaos with. It's even possible that Smolenkov would've remained in
place and continued to feed even more poisonous disinformation to the U.S. intelligence
morass, setting Clinton up for who knows what.
However, the unstable, narcissistic and easily played Trump miraculously wins. He's
immediately and continuously hit with RussiaGate. Trump reacts predictably by fanning the
flames of distraction when he calls out the Deep State and keeps punching back. The Executive
Branch is divided against itself, Congress and the electorate are further polarized and a
significant amount of energy is tied up with unproductive domestic political
machinations.
Almost three years of noise and crisis worked to increase Trump's natural dysfunction
while the Russians and Chinese quietly manage their coordinated effort to transform the
global power structure in their favor.
Will this Russian gift keep on giving?
Will Barr, or someone else if Trump fires him, dig into the entire RussiaGate mess and
expose all the lies and blatant illegality potentially causing a serious national crisis,
further damaging the reputation and credit worthiness of the U.S. ?
Or will Barr remain a faithful Deep State fixer, convince Trump that taking down Obama
would not be good for the economic health of the country (and his re-election), and carefully
steer everything he can down the memory hole?
Are those vodka glasses I hear clinking in Beijing?
[I'm just left wondering who will produce the deliciously embarrassing (to the U.S.) film
that this would make.]
Taras77 , September 15, 2019 at 19:42
Remarkable detail on the recruitment and control of agents by the CIA. In this case, it
would appear that Brennan has been played big time. IMO, to see Smolenkov walk away with his
loot in the bank, there can not be any other conclusion.
Hence, the obvious panic by brennan to use the likely suspects, NYT and wapo, to cast more
haze on the story. If there were treason, I doubt Smolenkov would be walking because the
Russians do not take that lightly. Actually, they have acted and are acting with competence
and confidence in the face of the bumbling, fumbling bombast and threats of the group around
trump which passes themselves off as diplomats and security advisors.
Brennan in his obsession to interfere with the political process prob contributed to his
malfeasance and a possible crime-I am no legal expert but it certainly seems that he
committed crimes.
Of course, this raises the question as to whether barr et al will act accordingly and
bring him to justice-I have strong doubts about barr taking on the cia as they will certainly
close ranks to protect him. My doubts about barr, however, go well beyond this particular
issue vis-a-vis the cia.
SilentPartner , September 15, 2019 at 18:58
I suspect Scott was provided a great deal of the reporting in this fascinating article
from a disgruntled insider, or former insider. Knowledge of Brennan's break with protocol to
form a select 'stand alone fusion cell' that reported only to him is something that I haven't
seen reported before. In any case this story adds another red flag to the entire Russiagate
hoax.
Just as Mueller failed to interview Julian Assange or Christopher Steele for his report --
obvious red flags -- we should now watch the conduct of Barr's investigation. Will Barr's
investigators interview Smolenkov? This should be an important metric to determine how
serious his investigation is. Another metric for Barr will be whether Ghislaine Maxwell is
indicted and arrested in the Jefferey Epstein affair. If not, we will soon know just how deep
goes the corruption of the ruling class.
Sam F , September 15, 2019 at 18:28
Many thanks to Scott Ritter for this information and cogent argument.
However it is not clear how Russia would expect to benefit by allowing Smolenkov to
deceive the CIA that Putin directly ordered interference in the US election. While later
discrediting of the US "Russia-gate" nonsense would make the US IC look bad, it is unclear
that this could be done, and it would have been done by now to reduce political tensions, but
still has not been done. Putin himself denied the accusations as nonsense.
So something is missing: if that was not the plan, Smolenkov was not asked to do that, and
he would not have been viewed as harmless when fired for that. If he had other incriminating
info on decision makers there, he would not have been allowed to leave, and having escaped,
he would have concealed his new location. Perhaps his superiors ill-advisedly asked him to
make false statements, for which he was not blamed.
Anon , September 16, 2019 at 07:09
I agree. The logic of "embarrassing" the CIA and dividing them from the president by
passing inflammatory information seems a stretch. On the other hand, I agree there do appear
a number of "red flags."
I'm wondering about the merit of the idea that this guy cooked up the story himself,
though I'm not sure that works either. It just seems to me something is missing.
Ojkelly , September 16, 2019 at 12:00
I thought the idea was that a Brennan minion planted or asked for the "Putin is
interfering " report, or even made it up and attributed it to a minor asset.
Brendan , September 15, 2019 at 15:00
( ) the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the "exfiltration" of the
CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by Brennan and his
allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the truth.
That's very likely to be true, but I think there's more to it than just getting Brennan's
version of events published before anyone elses. If you want to implant your narrative in the
public's mind it certainly does help to get your story out first, but in this case there's an
additional motive for leaking the spy story.
One effect of the leak was that Smolenko suddenly disappeared. His family apparently fled
their house in a hurry, leaving belongings lying around according to media reports.
Normally the CIA would never 'out' a valued asset, even a used one, because that would
discourage potential informers. And CNN and the NYT would not reveal details that would
identify a Russian defector – as happened in this case when Russian Kommersant
identified Smolenkov. American mainstream media would first check that it was OK to publish
those details.
This looks far too unusual to be simply a result of incompetence by Americans. A much
better explanation is that some powerful people were really desperate to make Smolenko
disappear. And the reason is that he knew too much. And now he has gone into hiding,
supposedly to escape vengeance from Putin. What is most significant is that he does not face
as many questions about his role in Russiagate.
A general search for Intel on google doesn't yield an abundance of articles that mention
its move to Israel in 1974, but I discovered it when the Spectre/Meltdown (intentional
Israeli processor security flaws, I mean "features") became known in 2018. "Nothing is ever
impossible, in this life" except for a computer that's not infested with the US-Israeli
partnership. We are also not surprised that Intel was not on Donald Trump's list of American
companies to bring back to the US.
Mike from Jersey , September 15, 2019 at 14:23
Good article. This is the kind of analysis you will not find in the New York Times or the Washington
Post. This is why I come to the Consortium News.
hetro , September 15, 2019 at 13:46
If I'm following properly, the white paper from Smolenkov is at the heart of the January
6, 2017, "assessments" that the case would be made–Trump as dupe of Putin.
Recall, too, that these "assessments" differed. Brennan's and Comey's were "high";
Clapper's was "moderate."
And, as Scott Ritter points out, they were "estimates" not based on hard proof; they were
essentially "guesses."
Why the discrepancy? (Related: William Binney says this "moderate" from Clapper means the
NSA knows Russia did not hack the DNC.)
I think this discrepancy question is important. How could a (supposedly) verifiable report
via white paper from a verifiable double agent Smolenkov be anything but a slam dunk
(unanimous) "high" for the major intelligence agencies?
The other question is Scott's WHY the Russian intelligence apparatus, with Putin
complicit, would set out to embarrass the US intelligence agencies with a cooked up
story–that made Putin look bad?
Of course, they could not know back at that time how the story would cook and proliferate
across US mainstream media with all the glee of Russia-bashing run amok and its TDS.
This view would also suggest a belief that somewhere in the US justice system was the
integrity to dig everything out and expose the fraud.
nwwoods , September 15, 2019 at 17:56
I believe that it was NSA which declared "moderate confidence", so no, not Clapper.
Clapper, in my opinion, was in on the gambit, a witting confederate of ringleader
Brennan.
hetro , September 16, 2019 at 11:30
Yes. Technically Clapper resigned as head of the NSA in 2016, and it was Mike Rogers, the
new head in 2017 who declared the assessment "moderate." Clapper had been involved with
Brennan and Comey in forming the January 6, 2017 assessment.
The question still remains: why the discrepancy in this "assessment" at the very beginning
of Trump's presidency, with its powerful impact.
JP McEvoy , September 15, 2019 at 12:33
One thing is for sure, if anything bad happens to the mole, it's won't be the Russians who did it.
Watch your back Mr. Skrip – er – I mean Smolenkov.
Robert Emmett , September 15, 2019 at 11:25
Damn! Please allow me to toss the "curveball" too. What's that? The real one or the fake,
you say? Ha ha. Yes, exactly! O, Vaunted sacred screed of PDB where the truth shall set you
free to prime the pump with lies. (hint: to spare your soul don't look into their eyes)
I haven't exactly been able to figure out what's wrong with Brennan's face, 'til I just
got it. He's been double-yoked! His own plus Barrack's (truer sp.). Egg that just won't wash
off! So you have to wear it everywhere, every day. Talk about serviceable villains hiding in
plain sight. Hey, Clapper! Don't get any on ya! Haha. Too late!
Carroll Price , September 15, 2019 at 10:43
Another example of checker champions competing with chess masters.
CortesKid , September 15, 2019 at 10:33
Brilliant and thorough. As I was reading Mr. Ritter's analysis, an overwhelming impression
was building, analogous to the third scenario, that Smolenkov , indeed, was a lure perfectly
placed to catch an intelligence agency or three. As I've watched and read many Russian
official's communications, especially their diplomatic efforts, it has become obvious to me
that, on average, they are some of the few "adults in the room." In broadstrokes, they are
playing chess, while the whole of the West, with its increasingly senile elites, is at the
Checkers table.
And in even broader strokes, I believe that at the heart of all of these shenanigans, is a
foundational turning away from a matured-and-deflating West, to an energized and expanding
Eurasia (Brezhinki's nightmare). As you know, changes on the scale of hegemon are never easy.
"Dying empires don't lay down, they double-down."
And I don't necessarily think Smolenkov and family are safe–from, for instance,
"Novichok" delivered via some American ally's secret service–as a pretense for further
demonization of Russia.
Brendan , September 15, 2019 at 07:51
Sorry but the theory that's proposed above is a bit too convoluted to be believable
– that Russia manipulated the CIA with the fake hacking story from Smolenkov and then
the CIA chief Brennan used it to manipulate Obama who then unwittingly revealed to Putin that
the USA was fooled by the story.
I'd rather follow Occam's razor and go for a simpler scenario. Brennan and the CIA
persuaded Smolenkov to invent the story (that he had inside knowledge that Putin ordered the
hacking of the DNC).
Not only that, but Obama suspected that the story was fake, since it was passed on to him
outside the normal channels and was investigated in a similar unconventional way. It's hard
to believe that Obama was easily hoodwinked and simply accepted the story as fact without any
convincing evidence.
The Democratic Party's fingerprints are all over the Russiagate story. The DNC
commissioned the Steele dossier and Steele met officials in the Obama administration's State
Department before the 2016 election. We're expected to believe that this all went on behind
President Obama's back.
We're also expected to believe that Obama innocently believed Smolenkov's report, as if
the CIA and FBI would never tell a lie. He's not completely stupid – at the very least
he must have had serious doubts about the allegations, or he could even have been in on the
Russiagate fabrication himself.
Maricata , September 16, 2019 at 19:34
It is more and more difficult to ascertain reality from fantasy, certainty from
assumptions. And this all plays into the hands of the ruling elites and their international
and national pratorean guards.
Americans do not ask questions. They prefer to believe than to know and thus the {swirl}
will yield nothing.
F. G. Sanford , September 15, 2019 at 07:05
Putin must surely have smirked. The little white envelope worked.
The debate made it plain he had pulled Brennan's chain,
And behind the scene subterfuge lurked!
Only four people went to the meeting. Connections might prove rather fleeting.
The "puppet" rebuke at the time seemed a fluke,
No one dared claim that Clinton was cheating!
Brennan's confidence level was high. He had sources and methods to spy.
He had top secret stuff that he claimed was enough,
But no evidence he'd specify!
Then Clinton claimed Russian subversion. In retrospect, not a diversion.
She must have been tipped by somebody loose lipped,
And she ran with the Putin incursion!
Strzok and Page were kept out of the loop. They didn't get insider poop.
They found no 'there' there, Comey's cupboard looked bare,
Brennan's spy had not yet flown the coop.
The durable lie picked up traction. Their spook would require extraction.
How could Clinton be sure that the blame would endure,
And the Steele Dossier would get action?
The 'Agent in Place' was a double. He didn't get in any trouble.
Hillary's pride had some hubris to hide,
In the end it would burst Brennan's bubble!
The big secret meeting was leaked. On the stage, "He's a puppet!" she shrieked.
Perhaps Susan Rice was inclined to be nice,
And her duty to Hillary peaked!
So now, they blame Trump for the outing. But it's over except for the shouting.
The 'insurance' is void, the illusion destroyed,
And poor Hillary just keeps on pouting!
David Otness , September 14, 2019 at 23:41
Scott -- so glad I got the head's-up on this via the CN Live show. I just now finished it
and am putting it into perspective. Well-researched, and well-written -- it's truly a web so
very reminiscent of what should have remained Cold War 1.0 finis.
And Episode Nine of CN Live is showing us where this internet platform can go with the
assembled experience and talent exhibited. The tech glitches were too bad, but the audio was
quite good enough.
Thanks for this travel guide to the heart of the labyrinth. Hopefully good things come of it.
I do worry about Barr's too many allegiances to his CIA incubator though, especially with all
of the ongoing coverups of the Epstein fiasco (engineered or not,) that complicate and
obfuscate the twin scandals that both end up under Barr's purview.
Ya done good, nonetheless. Thank you.
Abe , September 14, 2019 at 22:07
"After the U.S. reports came out, an anonymous, well-informed Russian Telegram channel,
The Ruthless PR Guy, reported that the asset was Kremlin official Oleg Smolenkov. On Tuesday
(10 September 2019] morning, the Moscow daily Kommersant published a story confirming that it
was him based on anonymous sources and some pretty convincing circumstantial evidence. [
]
"If Smolenkov was a spy, he could have delivered important insights about Russia's foreign
policy thinking and planning to U.S. intelligence. But if he was the source for the U.S.
intelligence community's certainty that Putin personally orchestrated a covert interference
campaign, that certainty rests on a weak foundation. Smolenkov served the wrong boss in the
Kremlin to get reliable information about such ventures."
Mr Ritter, Very lightly done. " Curveball made me do it" is the defense.
Brennan, well,I am not knowledgeable , but tight with Barry, unprofessional to my view, has
an issue. He made the most outrageous statements, Commander believing his own BS, NYT
magazine. Imagine going around saying that Trump was a Russian agent . Did incomparable
harm.And Morrell endorsing Hillary Clinton :beyond the pale , Professional members of the
agency must've been? Shocked appalled, whatever.
Jeff Harrison , September 14, 2019 at 21:52
Whooof! Obviously the MSM won't touch any of this stuff. I also don't have a lot of
confidence in the US government's ability to clean up the mess it has made. Amusingly, I've
watched the US's ham handed operations around the world and wondered when somebody would
return the complement. If Mr. Ritter is to be believed, it seems the Russians have started.
As Mr. Lawrence pointed out on CN live, Americans need to dispense with the notion that we
are exceptional. That's a weakness as it leads to complacency. How many more bricks of trust
in our government will we have to see broken before the entire edifice collapses? I would
also like to point out that we wouldn't be having these kind of problems if we weren't hell
bent on being the global hegemon.
Clark M Shanahan , September 14, 2019 at 22:54
"If Mr. Ritter is to be believed"
Jeffrey, I've followed Mr Ritter.
You can believe what he is stating, he's a good man.
my bad: Ritter starts at 48 minutes, before Nixon & Maupin
Jeff Harrison , September 15, 2019 at 17:43
I'm hip, Clark. I said that simply because I have no other collaborating commentary.
Ritter had my vote when he stood up to Shrub over Iraq's WMDs. But you do have to keep the
realization that you could be wrong so if Mr. Ritter is to be believed. I think that the odds
that Ritter is wrong are in the general vicinity of the odds that the US will start acting
like a normal nation.
A retired Australian diplomat who served in Moscow dissects the emergence of the new Cold
War and its dire consequences.
I n 2014, we saw violent U.S.-supported regime change and civil war in Ukraine. In February,
after months of increasing tension from the anti-Russian protest movement's sitdown strike in
Kiev's Maidan Square, there was a murderous clash between protesters and Ukrainian police,
sparked off by hidden shooters (we now know that were expert Georgian snipers) , aiming at
police. The elected government collapsed and President Yanukevich fled to Russia, pursued by
murder squads.
The new Poroshenko government pledged harsh anti-Russian language laws. Rebels in two
Russophone regions in Eastern Ukraine took local control, and appealed for Russian military
help. In March, a referendum took place in Russian-speaking Crimea on leaving Ukraine, under
Russian military protection. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, a request promptly
granted by the Russian Parliament and President. Crimea's border with Ukraine was secured
against saboteurs. Crimea is prospering under its pro-Russian government, with the economy
kick-started by Russian transport infrastructure investment.
In April, Poroshenko ordered full military attack on the separatist provinces of Donetsk and
Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine. A brutal civil war ensued, with aerial and artillery bombardment
bringing massive civilian death and destruction to the separatist region. There was major
refugee outflow into Russia and other parts of Ukraine. The shootdown of MH17 took place in
July 2014.
Poroshenko: Ordered military attack.
By August 2015, according to UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
estimates, 13,000 people had been killed and 30,000 wounded. 1.4 million Ukrainians had been
internally displaced, and 925,000 had fled to neighbouring countries, mostly Russia and to a
lesser extent Poland.
There is now a military stalemate, under the stalled Minsk peace process. But random fatal
clashes continue, with the Ukrainian Army mostly blamed by UN observers. The UN reported last
month that the ongoing war has affected 5.2 million people, leaving 3.5 million of them in need
of relief, including 500,000 children. Most Russians blame the West for fomenting Ukrainian
enmity towards Russia. This war brings back for older Russians horrible memories of the Nazi
invasion in 1941. The Russia-Ukraine border is only 550 kilometres from Moscow.
Flashpoint Syria
Russian forces joined the civil war in Syria in September 2015, at the request of the Syrian
Government, faltering under the attacks of Islamist extremist rebel forces reinforced by
foreign fighters and advanced weapons. With Russian air and ground support, the tide of war
turned. Palmyra and Aleppo were recaptured in 2016. An alleged Syrian Government chemical
attack at Khan Shaykhun in April 2017 resulted in a token U.S. missile attack on a Syrian
Government airbase: an early decision by President Trump.
NATO, Strategic Balance, Sanctions
An F-15C Eagle from the 493rd Fighter Squadron takes off from Royal Air Force Lakenheath,
England, March 6, 2014. The 48th Fighter Wing sent an additional six aircraft and more than 50
personnel to support NATO's air policing mission in Lithuania, at the request of U.S. allies in
the Baltics. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Emerson Nunez/Released)
Tensions have risen in the Baltic as NATO moves ground forces and battlefield missiles up to
the Baltic states' borders with Russia. Both sides' naval and air forces play dangerous
brinksmanship games in the Baltic. U.S. short-range, non-nuclear-armed anti-ballistic missiles
were stationed in Poland and Romania, allegedly against threat of Iranian attack. They are
easily convertible to nuclear-armed missiles aimed at nearby Russia.
Nuclear arms control talks have stalled. The INF intermediate nuclear forces treaty expired
in 2019, after both sides accused the other of cheating. In March 2018, Putin announced that
Russia has developed new types of intercontinental nuclear missiles using technologies that
render U.S. defence systems useless. The West has pretended to ignore this announcement, but we
can be sure Western defence ministries have noted it. Nuclear second-strike deterrence has
returned, though most people in the West have forgotten what this means. Russians know exactly
what it means.
Western economic sanctions against Russia continue to tighten after the 2014 events in
Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to block the nearly completed Nordstream Baltic Sea
underwater gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. Sanctions are accelerating the division of the
world into two trade and payments systems: the old NATO-led world, and the rest of the world
led by China, with full Russian support and increasing interest from India, Japan, ROK and
ASEAN.
Return to Moscow
In 2013, my children gave me an Ipad. I began to spend several hours a day reading well
beyond traditional mainstream Western sources: British and American dissident sites, writers
like Craig Murray in UK and in the U.S. Stephen Cohen, and some Russian sites – rt.com,
Sputnik, TASS, and the official Foreign Ministry site mid.ru. in English.
In late 2015 I decided to visit Russia independently to write Return to Moscow , a
literary travel memoir. I planned to compare my impressions of the Soviet Union, where I had
lived and worked as an Australian diplomat in 1969-71, with Russia today. I knew there had been
huge changes. I wanted to experience 'Putin's Russia' for myself, to see how it felt to be
there as an anonymous visitor in the quiet winter season. I wanted to break out of the familiar
one-dimensional hostile political view of Russia that Western mainstream media offer: to take
my readers with me on a cultural pilgrimage through the tragedy and grandeur and inspiration of
Russian history. As with my earlier book on Spain 'Walking the Camino' , this was not
intended to be a political book, and yet somehow it became one.
I was still uncommitted on contemporary Russian politics before going to Russia in January
2016. Using the metaphor of a seesaw, I was still sitting somewhere around the middle.
My book was written in late 2015 – early 2016, expertly edited by UWA Publishing. It
was launched in March 2017. By this time my political opinions had moved decisively to the
Russian end of the seesaw, on the basis of what I had seen in Russia, and what I had read and
thought during the year.
I have been back again twice, in winter 2018 and 2019. My 2018 visit included Crimea, and I
happened to see a Navalny-led Sunday demonstration in Moscow. I thoroughly enjoyed all three
independent visits: in my opinion, they give my judgements on Russia some depth and
authenticity.
Russophobia Becomes Entrenched
Russia was a big talking point in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the initially
unlikely Republican candidate Donald Trump's chances improved, anti-Putin and anti-Russian
positions hardened in the outgoing Obama administration and in the Democratic Party
establishment which backed candidate Hillary Clinton.
Russia and Putin became caught up in the Democratic Party's increasingly obsessive rage and
hatred against the victorious Trump. Russophobia became entrenched in Washington and London
U.S. and UK political and strategic elites, especially in intelligence circles: think of
Pompeo, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. All sense of international protocol and diplomatic
propriety towards Russia and its President was abandoned, as this appalling Economist
cover from October 2016 shows.
My experience of undeclared political censorship in Australia since four months after
publication of 'Return to Moscow' supports the thesis that:
We are now in the thick of a ruthless but mostly covert Anglo-American alliance
information war against Russia. In this war, individuals who speak up publicly in the cause of
detente with Russia will be discouraged from public discourse.
In the Thick of Information War
When I spoke to you two years ago, I had no idea how far-reaching and ruthless this
information war is becoming. I knew that a false negative image of Russia was taking hold in
the West, even as Russia was becoming a more admirable and self-confident civil society, moving
forward towards greater democracy and higher living standards, while maintaining essential
national security. I did not then know why, or how.
I had just had time to add a few final paragraphs in my book about the possible consequences
for Russia-West relations of Trump's surprise election victory in November 2016. I was right to
be cautious, because since Trump's inauguration we have seen the step-by-step elimination of
any serious pro-detente voices in Washington, and the reassertion of control over this
haphazard president by the bipartisan imperial U.S. deep state, as personified from April 2018
by Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Adviser Bolton. Bolton has now been thrown
from the sleigh as decoy for the wolves: under the smooth-talking Pompeo, the imperial policies
remain.
Truth, Trust and False Narratives
Let me now turn to some theory about political reality and perception, and how national
communities are persuaded to accept false narratives. Let me acknowledge my debt to the
fearless and brilliant Australian independent online journalist, Caitlin Johnstone.
Behavioural scientists have worked in the field of what used to be called propaganda since
WW1. England has always excelled in this field. Modern wars are won or lost not just on the
battlefield, but in people's minds. Propaganda, or as we now call it information warfare, is as
much about influencing people's beliefs within your own national community as it is
about trying to demoralise and subvert the enemy population.
The IT revolution of the past few years has exponentially magnified the effectiveness of
information warfare. Already in the 1940s, George Orwell understood how easily governments are
able to control and shape public perceptions of reality and to suppress dissent. His brilliant
books 1984 and Animal Farm are still instruction manuals in principles of
information warfare. Their plots tell of the creation by the state of false narratives, with
which to control their gullible populations.
The disillusioned Orwell wrote from his experience of real politics. As a volunteer fighter
in the Spanish Civil War, he saw how both Spanish sides used false news and propaganda
narratives to demonise the enemy. He also saw how the Nazi and Stalinist systems in Germany and
Russia used propaganda to support show trials and purges, the concentration camps and the
Gulag, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, German master race and Stalinist class enemy
ideologies; and hows dissident thought was suppressed in these controlled societies. Orwell
tried to warn his readers: all this could happen here too, in our familiar old England. But
because the good guys won the war against fascism, his warnings were ignored.
We are now in Britain, U.S. and Australia actually living in an information warfare world
that has disturbing echoes of the world that Orwell wrote about. The essence of information
control is the effective state management of two elements, trust and fear , to
generate and uphold a particular view of truth. Truth, trust and fear : these are the
three key elements, now as 100 years ago in WWI Britain.
People who work or have worked close to government – in departments, politics, the
armed forces, or top universities – mostly accept whatever they understand at the time to
be 'the government view' of truth. Whether for reasons of organisational loyalty, career
prudence or intellectual inertia, it is usually this way around governments. It is why moral
issues like the Vietnam War and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq were so distressing for
people of conscience working in or close to government and military jobs in Canberra. They were
expected to engage in 'doublethink' as Orwell had described it:
Even in Winston's nightmare world, there were still choices – to retreat into the
non-political world of the proles, or to think forbidden thoughts and read forbidden books.
These choices involved large risks and punishments. It was easier and safer for most people to
acquiesce in the fake news they were fed by state-controlled media.
'Trust, Truth and False Narratives'
Fairfax journalist Andrew Clark, in the Australian Financial Review , in an essay
optimistically titled "Not fake news: Why truth and trust are still in good shape in
Australia", (AFR Dec. 22, 2018), cited Professor William Davies thus:
"Most of the time, the edifice that we refer to as "truth" is really an investment of
trust in our structures of politics and public life' 'When trust sinks below a certain point,
many people come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham."
Here is my main point: Effective information warfare requires the creation of enough
public trust to make the public believe that state-supported lies are true.
The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted
voices. Once a critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks
in: its dissemination becomes self-sustaining.
" Power is being able to control what happens. Absolute power is being able
to control what people think about what happens. If you can control what happens,
you can have power until the public gets sick of your BS and tosses you out on your ass. If
you can control what people think about what happens, you can have power forever. As
long as you can control how people are interpreting circumstances and events, there's no
limit to the evils you can get away with."
The Internet has made propaganda campaigns that used to take weeks or months a matter of
hours or even minutes to accomplish. It is about getting in quickly, using large enough
clusters of trusted and diverse sources, in order to cement lies in place, to make the
lies seem true, to magnify them through social messaging: in other words, to create credible
false narratives that will quickly get into the public's bloodstream.
Over the past two years, I have seen this work many times: on issues like framing Russia for
the MH17 tragedy; with false allegations of Assad mounting poison gas attacks in Syria; with
false allegations of Russian agents using lethal Novichok to try to kill the Skripals in
Salisbury; and with the multiple lies of Russiagate.
It is the mind-numbing effect of constant repetition of disinformation by many eminent
people and agencies, in hitherto trusted channels like the BBC or ABC or liberal Anglophone
print media that gives the system its power to persuade the credulous. For if so many diverse
and reputable people repeatedly report such negative news and express such negative judgements
about Russia or China or Iran or Syria, surely they must be right?
We have become used to reading in our quality newspapers and hearing on the BBC and ABC and
SBS gross assaults on truth, calmly presented as accepted facts. There is no real public debate
on important facts in contention any more. There are no venues for dissent outside contrarian
social media sites.
Sometimes, false narratives inter-connect. Often a disinformation narrative in one area is
used to influence perceptions in other areas. For example, the false Skripals poisoning story
was launched by British intelligence in March 2018, just in time to frame Syrian President
Assad as the guilty party in a faked chemical weapons attack in Douma the following month.
The Skripals Gambit
The Skripals gambit was also a failed British attempt to blight the Russia –hosted
Football World Cup in June 2018. In the event, hundreds of thousands of Western sports fans
returned home with the warmest memories of Russian good sportsmanship and hospitality.
How do I know the British Skripals narrative is false? For a start, it is illogical,
incoherent, and constantly changes. Allegedly, two visiting Russian FSB agents in March 2018
sprayed or smeared Novichok, a deadly toxin instantly lethal in the most microscopic
quantities, on the Skripals' house front doorknob. There is no video footage of the Skripals at
their front door on the day. We are told they were found slumped on a park bench, and that is
maybe where they had been sprayed with nerve gas? Shortly afterwards, Britain's Head of Army
Nursing who happened to be passing by found them, and supervised their hospitalisation and
emergency treatment.
Allegedly, much of Salisbury was contaminated by Novichok, and one unfortunate woman
mysteriously died weeks later, yet the Skripals somehow did not die, as we are told. But where
are they now? We saw a healthy Yulia in a carefully scripted video interview released in May
2018, after an alleged 'one in a million' recovery. We were assured her father had recovered
too, but nobody has seen him at all. The Skripals have simply disappeared from sight since 16
months ago. Are they now alive or dead? Are they in voluntary or involuntary British
custody?
A month after the poisoning, the UK Government sent biological samples from the Skripals to
the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , for testing. The OPCW sent the
samples to a trusted OPCW laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland.
Lavrov Spiez BZ claims, April 2018
A few days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dramatically announced in Moscow
that the Spiez lab had found in the samples a temporary-effect nerve agent BZ, used by U.S. and
UK but not by Russia, that would have disabled the Skripals for a few days without killing
them. He also revealed the Spiez lab had found that the Skripal samples had been twice tampered
with while still in UK custody: first soon after the poisoning, and again shortly before
passing them to the OPCW. He said the Spiez lab had found a high concentration of Novichok,
which he called A- 234, in its original form. This was extremely suspicious as A-234 has high
volatility and could not have retained its purity over a two weeks period. The dosage the Spiez
lab found in the samples would have surely killed the Skripals. The OPCW under British pressure
rejected Lavrov's claim, and suppressed the Spiez lab report.
Let's look finally at the alleged assassins.
'Boshirov and Petrov'
These two FSB operatives who visited Salisbury under the false identities of 'Boshirov' and
'Petrov' did not look or behave like credible assassins. It is more likely that they were sent
to negotiate with Sergey Skripal about his rumoured interest in returning to Russia. They
needed to apply for UK visas a month in advance of travel: ample time for the British agencies
to identify them as FSB operatives, and to construct a false attempted assassination narrative
around their visit. This false narrative repeatedly trips over its own lies and contradictions.
British social media are full of alternative theories and rebuttals. Russians find the whole
British Government Skripal narrative laughable. They have invented comedy skits and video games
based on it. Yet it had major impact on Russia-West relations.
The Douma False Narrative
I turn now to the claimed Assad chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018.This falsely
alleged attack triggered a major NATO air attack on Syrian targets, ordered by Trump. We came
close to WWIII in these dangerous days. Thanks to the restraint of the then Secretary of
Defence James Mattis and his Russian counterparts, the risk was contained.
The allegation that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used outlawed chemical weapons
against his own people was based solely on the evidence of faked video images of child victims,
made by the discredited White Helmets, a UK-sponsored rebel-linked 'humanitarian' propaganda
organisation with much blood on its hands. Founded in 2013 by a British private security
specialist of intelligence background, James Le Mesurier, the White Helmets specialised in
making fake videos of alleged Assad regime war crimes against Syrian civilians. It is by now a
thoroughly discredited organisation that was prepared to kill its prisoners and then film their
bodies as alleged victims of government chemical attacks.
White Helmets
As the town of Douma was about to fall to advancing Syrian Government forces, the White
Helmets filled a room with stacked corpses of murdered prisoners, and photographed them as
alleged victims of aerial gas attack. They also made a video alleging child victims of this
attack being hosed down by White Helmets. A video of a child named Hassan Diab went viral all
over the Western world.
Hassan Diab later testified publicly in The Hague that he had been dragged terrified from
his family by force, smeared with some sort of grease, and hosed down with water as part of a
fake video. He went from hero to zero overnight, as Western governments and media rejected his
testimony as Russian and Syrian propaganda.
In a late development, there is proof that the OPCW suppressed its own engineers' report
from Douma that the alleged poison gas cylinders could not have possibly been dropped from the
air through the roof of the house where one was found, resting on a bed under a convenient hole
in the roof.
I could go on discussing the detail of such false narratives all day. No matter how often
they are exposed by critics, our politicians and mainstream media go on referencing them as if
they are true. Once people have come to believe false narratives, it is hard to refute
them.
So it is with the false narrative that Russian internet interference enabled Trump to win
the 2016 U.S. presidential elections: a thesis for which no evidence was found by [Special
Counsel Robert] Mueller, yet continues to be cited by many U.S. liberal Democratic media as if
it were true. So, even, with MH17.
Managing Mass Opinion
This mounting climate of Western Russophobia is not accidental: it is strategically
directed, and it is nourished with regular maintenance doses of fresh lies. Each round of lies
provides a credible platform for the next round somewhere else. The common thread is a claimed
malign Russian origin for whatever goes wrong.
So where is all this disinformation originating? Information technology firms in Washington
and London that are closely networked into government elites, often through attending the same
establishment schools or colleges like Eton and Yale, have closely studied and tested the
science of influencing crowd opinions through mainstream media and online. They know, in a way
that Orwell or Goebbels could hardly have dreamt, how to put out and repeat desired media
messages. They know what sizes of 'internet attraction nodes' need to be established online, in
order to create diverse critical masses of credible Russophobic messaging, which then attracts
enough credulous and loyal followers to become self-propagating.
Firms like the SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) and the now defunct
Cambridge Analytica pioneered such work in the UK. There are many similar firms in Washington,
all in the business of monitoring, generating and managing mass opinion. It is big business,
and it works closely with the national security state.
Starting in November 2018, an enterprising group of unknown hackers in the UK , who go by
the name 'Anonymous', opened a remarkable window into this secret world. Over a few weeks, they
hacked and dumped online a huge volume of original documents issued by and detailing the
activities of the Institute for Statecraft (IfS) and the Integrity initiative
(II). Here is the first page of one of their dumps, exposing propaganda against Jeremy
Corbyn.
We know from this material that the IfS and II are two secret British disinformation
networks operating at arms' length from but funded by the UK security services and broader UK
government establishment. They bring together high-ranking military and intelligence personnel,
often nominally retired, journalists and academics, to produce and disseminate propaganda that
serves the agendas of the UK and its allies.
Stung by these massive leaks, Chris Donnelly, a key figure in IfS and II and a former
British Army intelligence officer, made a now famous seven-minute YouTube video in December
2018, artfully filmed in a London kitchen, defending their work.
He argued – quite unconvincingly in my opinion – that IfS and II are simply
defending Western societies against disinformation and malign influence, primarily from Russia.
He boasted how they have set up in numerous targeted European countries, claimed to be under
attack from Russian disinformation, what he called 'clusters of influence' , to
'educate' public opinion and decision-makers in pro-NATO and anti-Russian directions.
Donnelly spoke frankly on how the West is already at war with Russia, a 'new kind of
warfare', in which he said 'everything becomes a weapon'. He said that 'disinformation is the
issue which unites all the other weapons in this conflict and gives them a third
dimension'.
He said the West has to fight back, if it is to defend itself and to prevail.
We can confirm from the Anonymous leaked files the names of many people in Europe being
recruited into these clusters of influence. They tend to be significant people in journalism,
publishing, universities and foreign policy think-tanks: opinion-shapers. The leaked documents
suggest how ideologically suitable candidates are identified: approached for initial screening
interviews; and, if invited to join a cluster of influence, sworn to secrecy.
Remarkably, neither the Anonymous disclosures nor the Donnelly response have ever been
reported in Australian media. Even in Britain – where evidence that the Integrity
Initiative was mounting a campaign against [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn provoked brief media
interest. The story quickly disappeared from mainstream media and the BBC. A British
under-foreign secretary admitted in Parliamentary Estimates that the UK Foreign Office
subsidises the Institute of Statecraft to the tune of nearly 3 million pounds per year. It also
gives various other kinds of non-monetary assistance, e.g. providing personnel and office
support in Britain's overseas embassies.
This is not about traditional spying or seeking agents of influence close to governments. It
is about generating mass disinformation, in order to create mass climates of belief.
In my opinion, such British and American disinformation efforts, using undeclared clusters
of influence, through Five Eyes intelligence-sharing, and possibly with the help of British and
American diplomatic missions, may have been in operation in Australia for many years.
Such networks may have been used against me since around mid-2017, to limit the commercial
outreach of my book and the impact of its dangerous ideas on the need for East-West detente;
and efficiently to suppress my voice in Australian public discourse about Russia and the West.
Do I have evidence for this? Yes.
It is not coincidence that the Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2017 somehow lost all my
sign-and-sell books from my sold-out scheduled speaking event; that a major debate with
[Australian writer and foreign policy analyst] Bobo Lo at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne was
cancelled by his Australian sponsor, the Lowy institute, two weeks before the advertised date;
that my last invitation to any writers festival was 15 months ago, in May 2018; that Return
to Moscow was not shortlisted for any Australian book prize, though I entered it in all of
them ; that since my book's early promotion ended around August 2017, I have not been invited
to join any ABC discussion panels, or to give any talks on Russia in any universities or
institutes, apart from the admirable Australian Institute of International Affairs and the
ISAA.
My articles and shorter opinion commentaries on Russia and the West have not been published
in mainstream media or in reputable online journals like Eureka Street, The Conversation,
Inside Story or Australian Book Review . Despite being an ANU Emeritus Fellow, I
have not been invited to give a public talk or join any panel in ANU (Australian National
University) or any Canberra think tank. In early 2018, I was invited to give a private briefing
to a group of senior students travelling on an immersion course to Russia. I was not invited
back in 2019, after high-level private advice within ANU that I was regarded as too
pro-Putin.
In all these ways – none overt or acknowledged – my voice as an open-minded
writer and speaker on Russia-West relations seems to have been quietly but effectively
suppressed in Australia. I would like to be proved wrong on this, but the evidence is
there.
This may be about "velvet-glove deterrence" of my Russia-sympathetic voice and pen, in order
to discourage others, especially those working in or close to government. Nobody is going to
put me in jail, unless I am stupid enough to violate Australia's now strict foreign influence
laws. This deterrence is about generating fear of consequences for people still in their
careers, paying their mortgages, putting kids through school. Nobody wants to miss their next
promotion.
There are other indications that Australian national security elite opinion has been
indoctrinated prudently to fear and avoid any kind of public discussion of positive engagement
with Russia (or indeed, with China).
There are only two kinds of news about Russia now permitted in our mainstream media,
including the ABC and SBS: negative news and comment, or silence. Unless a story can be given
an anti-Russian sting, it will not be carried at all. Important stories are simply spiked, like
last week's Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivistok, chaired by President Putin and attended by
Prime Ministers Abe, Mahathir and Modi, among 8500 participants from 65 countries.
The ABC idea of a balanced panel to discuss any Russian political topic was exemplified
in an ABC Sunday Extra Roundtable panel chaired by Eleanor Hall on July, 22 2018, soon after
the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki. The panel – a former ONA Russia analyst, a professor
of Soviet and Russian History at Melbourne University, and a Russian émigré
dissident journalist introduced as the 'Washington correspondent for Echo of Moscow radio'
spent most of their time sneering at Putin and Trump. There were no other views.
A powerful anti-Russian news narrative is now firmly in place in Australia, on every topic
in contention: Ukraine, MH17, Crimea, Syria, the Skripals, Navalny and public protest in
Russia. There is ill-informed criticism of Russia, or silence, on the crucial issues of arms
control and Russia-China strategic and economic relations as they affect Australia's national
security or economy. There is no analysis of the negative impact on Australia of economic
sanctions against Russia. There is almost no discussion of how improved relations with China
and Russia might contribute to Australia's national security and economic welfare, as American
influence in the world and our region declines, and as American reliability as an ally comes
more into question. Silence on inconvenient truths is an important part of the disinformation
tool kit.
I see two overall conflicting narratives – the prevailing Anglo-American false
narrative; and valiant efforts by small groups of dissenters, drawing on sources outside the
Anglo-American official narrative, to present another narrative much closer to truth. And this
is how most Russians now see it too.
The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018 was damaged by the Skripal and Syria
fabrications. Trump left that summit friendless, frightened and humiliated. He soon surrendered
to the power of the U.S. imperial state as then represented by [Mike] Pompeo and [John] Bolton,
who had both been appointed as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser in April 2018
and who really got into their stride after the Helsinki Summit. Pompeo now smoothly dominates
Trump's foreign policy.
Self-Inflicted Wounds
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (Gage Skidmore)
Finally, let me review the American political casualties over the past two years –
self-inflicted wounds – arising from this secret information war against Russia. Let me
list them without prejudging guilt or innocence. Slide 20 – Self-inflicted wounds:
casualties of anti-Russian information warfare.
Trump's first National Security Adviser, the highly decorated Michael Flynn lost his job
after only three weeks, and soon went to jail. His successor H R McMaster lasted 13 months
until replaced by John Bolton. Trump's first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson lasted just 14
months until his replacement by Trump's appointed CIA chief (in January 2017) Mike Pompeo.
Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon lasted only seven months. Trump's former campaign
chairman Paul Manafort is now in jail.
Defence Secretary James Mattis lasted nearly two years as Secretary of Defence, and was an
invaluable source of strategic stability. He resigned in December 2018. The highly capable
Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman lasted just two years: he is resigning next month. John Kelly
lasted 18 months as White House Chief of Staff. Less senior figures like George Papadopoulos
and Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen both served jail time. The pattern I see here is that
people who may have been trying responsibly as senior U.S. officials to advance Trump's initial
wish to explore possibilities for detente with Russia – policies that he had advocated as
a candidate – were progressively purged, one after another . The anti-Russian U.S.
bipartisan imperial state is now firmly back in control. Trump is safely contained as far as
Russia is concerned .
Russians do not believe that any serious detente or arms control negotiations can get under
way while cold warriors like Pompeo continue effectively to control Trump. There have been
other casualties over the past two years of tightening American Russophobia. Julian Assange and
Chelsea Manning come to mind. The naive Maria Butina is a pathetic victim of American judicial
rigidity and deep state vindictiveness.
False anti-Russian Government narratives emanating from London and Washington may be laughed
at in Moscow , but they are unquestioningly accepted in Canberra. We are the most gullible of
audiences. There is no critical review. Important contrary factual information and analysis
from and about Russia just does not reach Australian news reporting and commentary, nor –
I fear – Australian intelligence assessment. We are prisoners of the false narratives fed
to us by our senior Five Eyes partners U.S. and UK.
To conclude: Some people may find what I am saying today difficult to accept. I understand
this. I now work off open-source information about Russia with which many people here are
unfamiliar, because they prefer not to read the diverse online information sources that I
choose to read. The seesaw has tilted for me: I have clearly moved a long way from mainstream
Western perceptions on Russia-West relations.
Under Trump and Pompeo, as the Syria and Iran crises show, the present risk of global
nuclear war by accident or incompetent Western decision-making is as high as it ever was in the
Cold War. The West needs to learn again how to dialogue usefully and in mutually respectful
ways with Russia and China. This expert knowledge is dying with our older and wiser former
public servants and ex-military chiefs.
These remarks were delivered by Tony Kevin at the Independent Scholars Association of
Australia in Canberra, Australia on Wednesday.
Watch Tony Kevin interviewed Friday night on CN Live!
Tony Kevin is a retired Australian diplomat who was posted to Moscow from 1969 to 1971,
and was later Australia's ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. His latest book is Return to
Moscow, published by UWA Publishing.
Bruce , September 17, 2019 at 08:58
Excellent article. It's very interesting to see how the state and its media lackey set the
narrative.
Most of this comment relates to the Skripals but also applies to other matters (the
Skripals writing was some of Craig Murray's finest work in my opinion). One of the hallmarks
of a hoax is a constantly evolving storyline. I think governments have learned from past
"mistakes" with their hoaxes/deception where they've given a description of events and then
scientists/engineers/chemists etc have come in and criticised their version of events with
details and scientific arguments. Nowadays, governments are very reluctant to commit to a
version of events, and instead rely on the media (their propaganda assets) to provide a
scattergun set of information to muddy the waters and thoroughly confuse the population. The
government is then insulated from some of the more bizarre allegations (the headlines of
which are absorbed nonetheless), and can blame it on the media (who would use an anonymous
government source naturally). Together with classifying just about everything on national
security grounds, they can stonewall for as long as they want.
The British are masters of propaganda. They maintained a global empire for a very long
time, and the prevailing view (in the west at least) was probably one of tea-drinking cricket
playing colonials/gentlemen. But you don't maintain an empire without being absolutely
ruthless and brutal. They've been doing this for a very long time.
When we hear something from the BBC or ABC, we should think "State Media".
That's probably why its got a nice folksy nickname of "aunty" .build up the trust.
Society is suffering the extreme paradox; there is the potential for everyone to have a
voice, but the last vestiges of free speech have been whittled away. Fake news is universal,
assisted by the fake "left". It is impossible to get published any challenge to even the most
outlandish versions of identity politics. As the experience of Tony Kevin exemplifies, all
avenues for dissent against hegemonic orthodoxies are closed off.
Disinformation is now an essential weapon in waging hot and cold wars. Cold War historians
are well informed on false flags, "black ops", and other organised dirty tactics. I do not
know what happened to the Skripals, and while it is legitimate to bear in mind KGB
assassinations, despite the enormous resources at its disposal, the English security state
has been unable to construct a credible case. Surely scepticism is provoked by the leading
role being played by the notorious Bellingcat outfit.
Zenobia van Dongen , September 17, 2019 at 00:29
Here is part of an eyewitness account:
"After the Orange Revolution which began in Kiev, the country was divided literally into two
parts -- the supporters of integration with Russia and the supporters of an independent
Ukraine. For almost 100 years belonging to the Soviet Union, the propaganda about the
assistance and care from our "big brother" Russia, in Ukraine as a whole and the Donbass in
particular has borne fruit. At the end of February 2014, some cities of the Southeast part
were boiling with mass social and political protest against the new Ukrainian government in
defense of the status of the Russian language, voicing separatist and pro-Russian slogans.
The division took place in our city of Sloviansk too. Some people stood for separation from
Ukraine, while Ukrainian patriots stood for the unity of our country.
On April 12, 2014 our city of Sloviansk in the Donetsk region was seized by Russian
mercenaries and local volunteers. From that moment onward, armed assaults on state
institutions began. The city police department, the Sloviansk City Hall, the building of the
Ukraine Security Service was occupied. Armed militants seized state institutions and
confiscated private property. They threatened and beat people, and those who refused to obey
were taken away to an unknown destination and people started disappearing. The persecution
and abduction of patriotic citizens began."
Michael McNulty , September 16, 2019 at 11:36
Watching Vietnam news coverage as a kid in the '60s I noticed the planes carpet-bombing
South East Asia were American, not Russian. And as I only watched the footage and never
listened to the commentary (I was waiting for the kids programs that followed) the BS they
came out with to explain it all never reached me. I saw with my own eyes what the US really
was and is, and always believed growing up they were the belligerent side not Russia. Once
the USSR fell it was clear there were no longer any constraints on US excesses.
dean 1000 , September 15, 2019 at 18:17
Doublethink, not to mention doublespeak, is so apt to describe what is happening. If
Orwell was writing today it would have to be classified as non-fiction.
Free speech is impossible unless every election district has a radio/TV station where
candidates, constituents, and others can debate, discuss and speak to the issues without
bending a knee to large campaign contributors or the controllers of corporate or government
media. It may start with low-power pirate radio/TV broadcasts. No, the pirate speakers will
not have to climb a cell tower to broadcast an opinion to the neighborhood or precinct.
If genuine free speech is going to exist it will start as something unauthorized and
unlawful. If it sticks to the facts it will quickly prove its value.
Excellent article. The only exhibit missing was reference to Bill Browder's lies.
Browder's rubbish has been exposed by intrepid journalists and documentary makers such as
Andrei Nekrasov, Sasha Krainer and Lucy Komisar but to read or listen to our media, you'd
think BB was some sort of human rights hero. That's because BB's fairy tale fits nicely into
the MSM's hatred of Putin and Russia. Debunk Browder and a major pillar of anti-Russia
prejudice collapses. Therefore, Browder will never face any serious questions by the MSM.
John A , September 16, 2019 at 09:18
judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which
utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the
case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the
mainstream media at all. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/the-magnitskiy-myth-exploded/
MSM propaganda by omission. Anything that doesn't fit the government narrative gets zero
publicity.
I have stopped following australian mainstream media including the darlings of the 'left'
ABC/SBS over a decade ago, completely. My disgust with their 'coverage' of the 2008 GFC was
more than enough. Since 2008-9 things have deteriorated drastically into conspiracy theory
propaganda by omission la-la land *it seems*, given I don't tune in at all.
The author has a well supported view. I find it a little naive in him thinking that the
MSM has that much power over shaping public opinion in australia.
People who want to be informed do so. The half intelligent conformists on hamster wheel of
lifetime mortgage debt have 'careers' to hold onto, so parroting the group think or living in
ignorance is much easier. The massive portion of australian racists, inbred bogans and idiots
that make up the large LNP, One Nation etc. voting block are completely beyond salvation or
ability to process, and critically evaluate any information. The smarter ones drool on about
the 'UN Agenda 21' conspiracy at best. Utterly hopeless.
I don't expect things to change as the australian economy is slowly hollowed out by the
rich, and the education system (that has always been about conforming, wearing school uniform
and regurgitating what the teacher/lecturer says at best) is gutted completely. Welcome to
australistan.
Fran Macadam , September 14, 2019 at 19:21
Note that the prohibition against false propaganda to indoctrinate the domestic population
by the American government was lifted by President Obama at the tail end of his
administration. The Executive Order legalizes all the deceptive behavior Tony itemizes in his
article.
Josep , September 17, 2019 at 04:10
I thought it was Reagan who did that by abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. At least
in terms of television and radio (?) broadcasts.
Thank you Tony for your thoughtful talk (and interview on CN Live! too).
What's encouraging is this cohort of what might be called 'millennial journalists' coming
through willing to do 'shoe-leather' journalism and stand up to smears and flack for
revealing uncomfortable facts and truth. They're the online 5th estate holding the 4th to
account (to steal Ray McGovern's apt view), and they're congealing against the onslaught.
Some include Max Blumenthal and Rania Kahlek (both now being pilloried by MSM and others
for visiting Syrian government held areas and reporting that life isn't hellish as MSM would
have everyone believe heaven forbid); Vanessa Bealey who's exposed a lot of White Helmet
horrors and false-flag attacks in Syria (and being attacked by all and sundry for exposing
the White Helmets in particular); Abby Martin whose Empire Files are excellent and always
edifying; Dan Cohen who has written the best expose of the actors behind the Hong Kong
rioting and co-authored the best expose of the background of Guaido et al.; Whitney Webb of
Mint Press whose series on Epstein is overwhelming and likely a ticking timebomb; Caitlin
Johnstone of course; and Aaron 'Buzzsaw' Mate who made his first mark with a wonderful
takedown interview of Russiaphobe MI6 shill Luke Harding. Others too of course, with most
appearing or having written pieces on CN. John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Greg Palast, et al. won't
drop off their twigs disappointed.
This, along with the fact that MSM -- that cowed and compromised fourth estate --
increasingly is held in such laughable contempt by most people under about 50 yr, is highly
encouraging indeed. Truth is the new black.
nwwoods , September 15, 2019 at 11:49
The Blogmire is an excellent resource for detailed analysis of the Skripal hoax. The
author happens to be a long-time resident of Salisbury, and is intimately familiar with the
topography, public services, etc., and a very thorough investigator.
John Wright , September 14, 2019 at 18:35
I'm not surprised that Mr. Kevin is being isolated and shunned by the Australian
establishment. Truth and truth tellers are always the first casualties of war. I do hope that
his experience will encourage him to increase his resistance to the corrosiveness of
mendacious propaganda and those who promulgate it.
Truth is the single best weapon when fighting for a peaceful future.
If Australia is to flourish in the 21st century, it really needs to understand Russia and
China, how they relate to each other, and how this key alliance will interface with the rest
of the world. Australia and Australians simply cannot afford to get sucked down further by
facilitating the machinations of the collapsing Anglo-American Empire. They have served the
empire ably and faithfully, but now need to take a cold hard look at reality and realign
their long-term interests with the coming global power shift. If not, they could literally
find themselves in the middle of an unwinnable and devastating war.
* * *
The first Anglo-American Russian cold war began with the Russian revolution and was only
briefly suspended when the West needed the Soviet people to throw themselves in front of the
Nazi blitzkrieg in order to save Western Europe. Following their catastrophically costly
contribution to the victory on the Continent, the Russians were greeted with an American
nuclear salute on their eastern periphery, signalling their return to the diplomatic and
economic deep freeze.
While the Anglo-American Empire solidified and extended its hold on the globe, the
enlarged but war-ravaged and isolated Soviet Union hunkered down and survived on scraps and
sheer will until its collapse in 1989. Declaring the cold war over, and with promises to help
their new Russian friends build a prosperous future, the duplicitous West then ransacked
their neighbors resources and sold them into debt peonage. The Russians cried foul, the West
shrugged and Putin pushed back. Unable to declaw the bear, the west closed the cage door
again and the second cold war commenced.
* * *
The first cold war was essentially an offensive war disguised as a defensive war. It
enabled the Anglo-American Empire to leverage its post-war advantage and establish near total
dominance around the globe through naked violence and monetary hegemony.
Today, with its dominance rapidly slipping away, the Anglo-American Empire is waging a
truly defensive cold war. On the home front, they fight to convince their subjects of their
eternal exceptionalism with ever more absurd and vile propaganda denigrating their
adversaries . Abroad, they disrupt and defraud in a desperate attempt to delay the demise of
the PetroDollar ponzi.
The Russians and the Chinese, having both been brutally burned by the Western elites, will
not be fooled into abandoning their natural geographic partnership. They are no longer
content to sit quietly at the kids' table taking notes. While they may not demand to sit at
the head of the table, it is clear that they will insist on a round table, and one that is
large enough to include their growing list of friends.
If the Americans don't smash the table, it could be the first of many peaceful pot
lucks.
John Read , September 15, 2019 at 02:11
Well said. Great comments. Thanks to Tony Kevin.
Mia , September 14, 2019 at 18:33
Thank you Tony for continuing to shine light on the pathetic propaganda information bubble
Australians have been immersed in .. you demonstrate great courage and you are not alone
??
Peter Loeb , September 14, 2019 at 12:58
WITH THANKS TO TONY KEVIN
An excellent article.
There is a lack of comments from some of the common writers upon whose views I often
rely.
Personally, I often avoid the very individual responses from websites as I have no way
of checking out previous ideas of theirs. Who funds them? With which organizations are
they
affiliated? And so forth and so on.
Peter Loeb, Boston, Massachusetts
Peter Sapo , September 14, 2019 at 10:24
As a fellow Australian, everything Tony Kevin said makes perfect sense. Our mainstream
media landscape is designed to distribute propaganda to folk accross the political spectrum.
Have you noticed that the ABC regurgitates stories from the BBC? The BBC has a long history
(at least since WW2) of supporting government propaganda initiatives. Based on this fact, it
is hard to see how ABC and SBS don't do the same when called upon by their minders.
Francis Lee , September 14, 2019 at 09:48
I just wonder where the Anglo-Zionist empire thinks it is going. It should be obvious that
any NATO war against Russia involving a nuclear exchange is unwinnable. It seems equally
likely the even a conventional war will not necessarily bring the result expected by the
assorted 'experts' – nincompoops living in their own fantasy world. The idea that the
US can fight a war without the US homeland becoming very much involved basically ended when
Putin announced the creation of Russia's set of advanced hypersonic missile system. But this
was apparently ignored by the 'defence' establishment. It was not true, it could not possibly
be true, or so we were told.
Moreover the cost of such wars involving hundreds of thousands of troops and military
hardware are massively expensive and would occasion a massive resistance from the populations
affected. It was the wests wars in Korea, and Indo-China that bankrupted the US and led to
the US$ being removed from the gold standard. The American military is rapidly consuming the
American economy, or at least what is left of it. From a realist foreign policy perspective
this is simply madness. Great powers end wars, they don't start them. Great powers are
creditor nations, not debtor nations. Such is the realist foreign policy view. But foreign
policy realists are few and far between in the Washington Beltway and MIC/NSA Pentagon and
US/UK/AUSTRALIAN MSM.
Thus the neo-hubris of the English speaking world is such that if it is followed to its
logical conclusion then total annihilation would be the logical outcome. A sad example of not
very bright people who face no domestic opposition, believing in their own bullshit:
"American elites proved themselves to be master manipulators of propaganda constructs But
the real danger from such manipulations arises not when those manipulations are done out of
knowledge of reality, which is distorted for propaganda purposes, but when those who
manipulation begin to sincerely believe in their own falsifications and when they buy into
their own narrative. They stop being manipulators and they become believers in a narrative.
They become manipulated themselves." (Losing Military Supremacy – Andrei,
Martyanov)
Or maybe just the whole thing is a bluff. Those policy elites maybe just want to loot the
US Treasury for more cash to be put their way.
John Wright , September 15, 2019 at 19:15
The self-serving Israeli Zionists know that the American cow is running dry and their days
of freely milking it are coming to an end. They have an historic relationship with Russia
and, leveraging their nuclear arsenal, know they can make a deal with the emerging
China-Russia-centric global paradigm to extort enough protection to maintain their armed
enclave for the foreseeable future. Their no so hidden alliance with the equally sociopathic
Saudis will become even more obvious for all to see.
Israel, like China and Russia, knows how to play a long game. Thus, Israel will
consolidate its land grab with the just announced expansion into the Jordan Valley and
quietly continue as much ethnic cleansing as possible while the rest of the world is
preoccupied with the incipient global power shift (True victims of history, the Palestinians
have no real friends). While they will bemoan the loss of their muscular American stooge,
Israel enjoyed a very lucrative 70 year run and will part with a pile of useful and deadly
toys. They're also fully aware that no one else will ever let them take advantage to the
degree they've been able to with the U.S.A. (Unlimited Stupidity of Arrogance?)
Eventually, the social schizophrenia that is the state of Israel will catch up with them
and they will implode. Let's hope that breakdown doesn't involve the use of their nuclear
arsenal.
Yes, the U.S. Treasury will continue to be looted until the last teller turns the lights
out or the electricity is shut off, whichever comes first.
The Western transnational financial elites will accept their losses, regroup and make
deals with the new bosses where they can; but their days of running the game unopposed are
over.
Today is a good day to learn Mandarin (or Russian, if you prefer to live in Europe).
Bill , September 16, 2019 at 03:36
Very well said and I agree with a lot of what you say.
Tiu , September 14, 2019 at 06:01
Won't be too long before writing articles like this will get you busted for "hate-speech"
(e.g. anything that is contrary to the official version prescribed by the "democratically
elected" government) https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uk-tony-blair-think-tank-proposes-end-free-speech
Personally I always encourage people to read George Orwell, especially 1984. We're there, and
have been for a long time.
geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 01:15
Tony Kevin – Nice rundown of what ails society. You have a fine writing style that
gets the point across to the reader. Kudos and cheers.
Michael , September 13, 2019 at 22:34
The 'modernization' of the Smith Mundt Act in 2013 "to authorize the domestic
dissemination of information and material [PROPAGANDA] about the United States intended
primarily for foreign audiences" was a major nail in the Democracy coffin, consolidating the
blatant ruling of the US Police State by our 17 Intelligence Agencies (our betters). The
Telecommunications Act of 1996 lead to ownership of (>80%) of our media (the MSM by a
handful of owners, all disseminating the same narratives from above (CIA, State Department,
FBI etc) and squelching any dissenting views, particularly related to foreign policies.
Tony's article sadly just confirms the depth and breadth of our Global Stasi, with improved,
innovative and (mostly) subtle surveillance, and the controlling constant interference with
alternate viewpoints and discussions, the real basis for free societies. It is bad enough to
be ruled by neoliberal psychopathic hyenas and jackals, soon we won't be able to even bitch
about what they are doing.
Tom Kath , September 13, 2019 at 21:42
The most impressive article I have read in a very long time. I congratulate and thank
Tony.
I have myself recently addressed the issue of whether it is a virtue to have an "open mind".
– The ability to be converted or have your mind changed, or is it the ability to change
your own mind ?
Tony Kevin clearly illustrates the difference.
Litchfield , September 13, 2019 at 16:11
Great article.
Please keep writing.
Do start a website, a la Craig Murray.
There are people who are proactively looking for alternative viewpoints and informed
analysis.
How about starting a website and publishing some excerpts of your book there?
Or, sell chapters separately by download from your website?
You could also have a discussion blog/forum there.
John Zimmermann , September 13, 2019 at 16:02
Excellent essay. Thanks Mr. Kevin.
rosemerry , September 13, 2019 at 15:37
At least Tony Kevin was an Australian ambassador, not like Mike Morrell and the chosen
russop?obes the USA assumes are needed as diplomats!! Now he is treated as Stephen Cohen is-
a true expert called "controversial" as he dares to go by real facts and evidence, not
prejudice.
If instead of enemies, the West could consider getting to understand those they are wary
of, and give them a chance to explain their point of view and actually listen and reflect on
it.
(Dmitri Peskov valiantly explained the Russian official response as soon as the "Skripal
poisoning" story broke, but it was fully ignored by UK/US media, while all of Theresa May's
fanciful imaginings were respectfully relayed to the public).
geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 23:26
As you usually are with your comments, you are spot on again, rosemerry.
Martin - Swedish citizen , September 13, 2019 at 14:46
Excellent article!
I find the mechanics of how the propaganda is spread and the illusion upheld the most
important part of this article, since this knowledge is required to counter it.
When (not if) the fraud becomes more common knowledge, our societies are likely to
tumble.
Pablo Diablo , September 13, 2019 at 14:45
Whoever controls the media, controls the dialogue.
Whoever controls the dialogue, controls the agenda.
' The present risk of global nuclear war is as high as it ever was in the Cold War.' And
possibly higher. The Cold War, though dangerous, was the peace. The world has experienced
periods of peace (or relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the
two Peloponnesian Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna,
to name a few. The Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One.
That conflict was followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was
followed by the United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are
they will not prevent a third world war. The powers that are leading us towards conflagration
see this as a re-run of the first Cold War. They are dangerously mistaken. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Guy , September 13, 2019 at 13:21
With so many believing the lies ,how will this mess ever come to light . I don't reside in
Australia but anywhere in the Western world the shakedown is the same .In my own house ,the
discussion on world politics descends into absolute stupidity . As one can't get past the
constant programming that has settled in the minds of the comfortable with the status quo of
lies by our media. There are intelligent sources of news sources but none get past the
absolutely complete control of MSM.So the bottom line is ,for now ,the lies and liars are
winning the propaganda war.
He speaks the truth. Liars and dissemblers have won over the minds and hearts of so many
lazy shameful citizens who will not accept the truth Tony Kevin wants to share with the
world.
Washington resumes military assistance to Kyiv. According to American lawmakers, Ukraine
is fighting one of the main enemies. "Contain Russia": what the US pays for Ukraine
Anyone or article who spells Kiev as Kyiv can be safely ignored as western anti-Russia
propaganda. It's a true tell.
Robert Edwards , September 13, 2019 at 12:53
The Cold war is totally manufacture to keep the dollars flowing into the MIC – what
a sham . and a disgrace to humanity.
Cavaleiro Marginal , September 13, 2019 at 12:52
"The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted voices. Once a
critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks in: its
dissemination becomes self-sustaining."
This had occurred in Brazil since the very first day of Lula's presidency. Eleven years
late, 2013, a color revolution began. Nobody (and I mean REALLY nobody) could realize a color
revolution was happening at that time. In 2016, Dilma Rousseff was kicked from power
throughout a ridiculous and illegal coup perpetrated by the parliament. In 2018 Lula was
imprisoned in an Orwellian process; illegal, unconstitutional, with nothing (REALLY nothing)
proved against him. Then a liar clown was elected to suppress democracy
I knew on the news that in Canada and Australia the police politely (how civilized ) went
to some journalist's homes to have a chat this year. Canadians and Aussies, be aware. The
fascism's dog is a policial state very well informed by the propaganda they call news.
Robert Fearn , September 13, 2019 at 12:48
As a Canadian author who wrote a book about various tragic American government actions,
like Vietnam, I can relate to the difficulties Tony has had with his book. I would mail my
book, Amoral America, from Canada to other countries, like the US, and it would never arrive.
Book stores would not handle it, etc. etc.
Josep , September 17, 2019 at 05:21
Not to disagree, but some years ago I read about anecdotes of anti-Americanism in Canada,
coming from both USians and Canadians, whether it be playful banter or legitimate criticism.
I believe it is more concentrated among the people than among the governmental elites (with
the exception of the Iraq War era when both the people and the government were against it).
And considering what you describe in your book and the difficulty you've faced in
distributing it abroad, maybe the said people are on to something.
Stephen , September 13, 2019 at 11:44
This interview by Abby Martin with Mark Ames is a little dated but is a fairly accurate
history. I post it to try and counter the nonsense.
Outstanding article and analysis. Thank you Sir! Jeremy Kuzmarov
Jeff Harrison , September 13, 2019 at 10:17
Thank you, sir. A far better peroration than I could have produced but what I have
concluded nonetheless.
Skip Scott , September 13, 2019 at 10:10
Fantastic article. Left unmentioned is the origin of the west's anti-Russia narrative.
Russia was being pillaged by the west under Yeltsin, and Russia was to become our newest
vassal. Life expectancy dropped a full decade for the average Russian under Yeltsin. The
average standard of living dropped dramatically as well. Putin reversed all that, and enjoys
massive popular support as a result. The Empire will never tolerate a national leader who
works for the benefit of the average citizen. It must be full-on rape, pillage and plunder-
OR ELSE. Keep that in mind as we watch the latest theatrical performances by our DNC
controlled "Commander in Chief" wannabes.
Realist , September 17, 2019 at 05:48
?The ongoing success of the "Great Lie" (that Washington is protecting the entire world
from
anarchy perpetrated by a few bad actors on the global stage) and all of its false narrative
subtexts
(including but far from limited to the Maidan, Crimea, Donbass, MH-17, the Skripals,
gassing
"one's own people," piracy on the high Mediterranean, etc) just underscores how successful
was
the false flag operation known as 9-11, even as the truth of that travesty is slowly
being
unraveled by relentless truth-seekers applying logic and the scientific method to the
problem.
Most Americans today would gladly concur, if queried, that Osama bin Laden was most
certainly
a perfidious tool of Russia and its diabolical leader, Mr. Putin (be sure to call him "Vlad,"
to
conjure up images of Dracula for effect). The Winston Smith's are rare birds in America or
in
any of its reliable vassal states. Never mind that the spooks from Langley (and the late
"chessmaster") concocted and orchestrated all these tales from the crypt.
Lily , September 13, 2019 at 07:54
Great summary of the developement of a new cold war. The narrative of the Mainstream Media
is dangerous as well as laughable. I am glad to hear the Russian reaction to this bullshit
propaganda. As often the people are so much wiser than their government – at least in
the West.
During the Football WM a famous broadcaster of the German State TV channel ARD, who is a
giftet propagandist, regrettet publicly the difficulty to convince the stubborn Germans to
look at Russia as an enemy because they have started to look at Russia as a friend long
ago.
Contrary to the people and the big firms who are completely against the sanctions against
Russia and 100 % pro Northstream the German government with Chancelor Merkel is one of the
top US vassalles. Even the Green Party which started as an environmental and peace party are
now against North Stream and in favour of the filthy US fracking gas thanks to NATO
propaganda although Russia has never let them down. Most of "Die Grünen" party have been
turned into fervent friends of our American occupants which is very sad.
Thank you Tony Kevin. It has been great to read your article. I cant wait to read your
book 'Return to Moscow' and to watch your interview on CN Live.
Godfree Roberts , September 13, 2019 at 07:37
Good summary of the status quo. From my experience of writing similarly about China,
precisely the same policies and forces are at work.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the end of the war in Syria and the
country's return to a state of peace. "Syria is returning to normal life": Lavrov announced
the end of the war
You hit several nails squarely on the head with your excellent article Tony. Thank you for
the truth of how the media is in Australia. It is indeed chilling where all this is leading.
The blatant lies just spewed out as fact by both ABC and SBS. They, in my opinion are nothing
but stenographers for the Empire, of which Australia is a fully subservient vassal state,
with no independence.
I try to boycott all Australian presstitutes . Oops, I mean 'media' now. Occasionally, I do
slip up and watch SBS or The Drum or News on ABC.
Virtually all my news comes from independent news sites like this one.
I have been accused of being a 'Putin lover', a Russian troll, a conspiracy theorist, while
people I know have claimed that "Putin is a monster whose murdered millions of people".
On and on this crap goes. And the end result? Ask Stephen Cohen. Things are very surreal now.
Sadly, you've been made an Unperson Tony.
Robyn , September 13, 2019 at 04:08
Bravo, Tony, great article. I enjoyed your book and recommend it to CN readers who haven't
yet read it.
The world looks entirely different when one stops reading/watching the MSM and turns to
CN, Caitlin Johnstone and many others who are doing a sterling job.
Cascadian , September 13, 2019 at 03:52
I don't know which is worse, to not know what you are (reliably uninformed) and be happy,
or to become what you've always wanted to be (reliably informed) and feel alone.
Realist , September 14, 2019 at 00:19
Knowing the truth has always seemed paramount to me, even if it means realising that the
entire world and all in it are damned, and deliberately by our own actions. Hope is always
the last part of our essence to die, or so they say: maybe we will somehow be redeemed
through our own self-immolation as a species.
Deb , September 13, 2019 at 02:54
As an Australian I have no difficulty accepting what Tony Kevin has said here. He should
do what Craig Murray has done start a website.
"... This damage to supposed bastions of US journalism cannot be overstated. More than two years of spinning speculation-cum-reporting about Russian collusion with Trump and/or interference in US politics has produced not a crumb of substantive fact. ..."
"... So when they got the chance to seemingly resurrect their buried "Russiagate" yarn with this latest fable about agent Oleg Smolenkov being exfiltrated from Russia to the US, they leapt at it because their equally buried reputations are also at stake. ..."
"... As far as we can tell, an anonymous intelligence source started the ball rolling. The source is likely to be former CIA chief John Brennan or former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Both are hangouts for the anti-Trump media since they lost their intel jobs at the beginning of 2017, and both are believed to have seeded the "Russiagate" narrative in 2016 from before Trump was elected. ..."
"... Thus, if Smolenkov is peddling fiction to his former handlers in the CIA, that means he has no credibility as a "top mole". ..."
"... Again, opportunism is the key. Somebody came up with a lurid story about "Russian interference" in US democracy and "collusion" with Trump. Maybe it was Smolenkov who saw an opportunity to win a big pay day from his CIA patrons by flogging them a blockbuster. ..."
"... CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, Brennan and Clapper are so much damaged goods from past failure of "Russiagate" fabrications, they find an opportunity to salvage their disgraced names by outing the hapless Smolenkov at this juncture. ..."
"... There is a sinister similarity here to the Sergei Skripal case in England. Is Smolenkov being set up for hit which can then be conveniently blamed on Russia as "revenge" by the Russophobic, anti-Trump, deep state US media? ..."
The saga of daring escape by a supposed Russian CIA agent from the Kremlin's clutches and
then the added twist of a security-risk American president putting the agent's life in danger
does indeed sound like a pulp fiction novel, as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it.
How to explain this sensational story? "Opportunism" is one word that comes to mind.
The news media who pushed the story, CNN, the New York Times and Washington Post, are
vehemently "anti-Trump". Any chance to damage this president and they grab it.
Also, perhaps more importantly, these media are desperate to salvage their shot-through
journalistic credibility since the "Russiagate" narrative they had earnestly propagated died a
death, after the two-year Mueller circus finally left town empty-handed.
This damage to supposed bastions of US journalism cannot be overstated. More than two
years of spinning speculation-cum-reporting about Russian collusion with Trump and/or
interference in US politics has produced not a crumb of substantive fact. That means those
media responsible for the "Russiagate" nonsense have forfeited that precious quality –
credibility. They no longer deserve to be categorized as news services, and are more
appropriately now listed as fiction peddlers.
So when they got the chance to seemingly resurrect their buried "Russiagate" yarn with
this latest fable about agent Oleg Smolenkov being exfiltrated from Russia to the US, they
leapt at it because their equally buried reputations are also at stake.
As far as we can tell, an anonymous intelligence source started the ball rolling. The
source is likely to be former CIA chief John Brennan or former Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper. Both are hangouts for the anti-Trump media since they lost their
intel jobs at the beginning of 2017, and both are believed to have seeded the "Russiagate"
narrative in 2016 from before Trump was elected.
Notably, the current CIA assessment of the latest US media reporting on the exfiltrated spy
is that the reporting is "false" and "misguided". In particular, the CNN spin that the agent
(Smolenkov) had to be extricated from Russia in 2017 because Langley feared that Trump may have
endangered the supposed Kremlin mole when he hosted Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in
the White House in May 2017.
Also of note is the dismissive response from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who rubbished
the reports. He was head of the CIA during 2017. (Admittedly, Pompeo is a self-confessed
liar.)
According to CNN, NY Times and Washington Post, the former spy in the Kremlin, named as Oleg
Smolenkov by subsequent Russian media reporting, was a top mole with direct access to President
Vladimir Putin. It is claimed that Smolenkov confirmed allegations about a Putin-directed plot
to interfere in US presidential elections. The agent is said to have also confirmed that Putin
(allegedly) ordered the hacking of the Democratic party's central database to obtain scandalous
material on Hillary Clinton which was then fed to the Wikileaks whistleblower site for the
purpose of scuttling her bid for the presidency in November 2016, thus favoring Trump.
Smolenkov was allegedly providing this information on a purported Kremlin interference
campaign in 2016.
The US media claim Smolenkov was exfiltrated from Russia by the CIA in June 2017 – out
of concern for his safety, which CNN reported was being jeopardized by President Trump due to
his implied compromised relations with Putin. Smolenkov and his family disappeared while on a
holiday in Montenegro in June 2017.
After the story broke earlier this week about the exfiltrated Kremlin mole, subsequent media
reporting tracked down Oleg Smolenkov and his wife living in a $1-million-dollar mansion in
Stafford, Virginia. Curiously, public records showed the house purchase was in their names,
which seems odds for a supposed top-level spy, who had apparently committed extreme betrayal
against the Kremlin, to be living openly. The family apparently fled the house to unknown
whereabouts on September 9 after the story about his alleged spy role broke this week.
Who is Oleg Smolenkov? The Kremlin said this week that he previously worked in the
presidential administration, but he was sacked "several years ago". He did not have direct
access to President Putin's office, according to the Kremlin. For his part, Russian foreign
minister Sergei Lavrov says he never heard of the man before, never mind ever having met
him.
It is understood that Smolenkov previously worked in the Russian embassy in Washington under
ambassador Yuri Ushakov (1999-2008). Smolenkov reportedly continued working for Ushakov when
the diplomat returned to Moscow after his ambassadorial tenure in the US.
Here is where we may speculate that Smolenkov was recruited by the CIA during his diplomatic
assignment in the US. But we assume that the Kremlin's assessment is correct; he did not have a
senior position or access to Putin's office. By contrast, the US media are claiming Smolenkov
was "one of the CIA's most valuable assets" in the Kremlin and that he was providing
confirmatory information that Putin was (allegedly) running an interference campaign to subvert
the US presidential elections.
The discerning detail as to the truth of the imbroglio is revealed by the US media claims
that Smolenkov corroborated the alleged hacking into the Democratic party database in 2016.
However, that specific allegation has been disproven by several top hacker experts, notably
William Binney who was formerly technical head at the US National Security Agency. There was no
hacking. The damaging information on Hillary Clinton was leaked by a Democratic party insider,
possibly Seth Rich, who soon after was shot dead by an unknown attacker. In short, the entire
narrative about the Kremlin hacking into the Democratic party is a fiction. The premise to
"Russiagate" is baseless.
Thus, if Smolenkov is peddling fiction to his former handlers in the CIA, that means he
has no credibility as a "top mole".
Again, opportunism is the key. Somebody came up with a lurid story about "Russian
interference" in US democracy and "collusion" with Trump. Maybe it was Smolenkov who saw an
opportunity to win a big pay day from his CIA patrons by flogging them a blockbuster. Or
maybe, Brennan and Clapper (known liars in the public record) dreamt up a scheme of Kremlin
malignancy to benefit Trump, and if that could be tied to Trump then his election would be
discredited and nullified. But what they needed was a "Kremlin source" to "corroborate" their
readymade story of "Russian interference". Step forward Oleg Smolenkov – fired and out of
work – to do the needful "corroboration" and in return he gets a new life for himself and
family with a mansion in a leafy Virginian suburb.
CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, Brennan and Clapper are so much damaged goods from past
failure of "Russiagate" fabrications, they find an opportunity to salvage their disgraced names
by outing the hapless Smolenkov at this juncture.
That then raises the grave question of why he was permitted to live openly in his own
name?
There is a sinister similarity here to the Sergei Skripal case in England. Is Smolenkov
being set up for hit which can then be conveniently blamed on Russia as "revenge" by the
Russophobic, anti-Trump, deep state US media?
"... "We vote for one party which is 100% anti-Russian rather than for another party which is 100% anti-Russian? Is that the point? Because here in Canada, that's basically the choice on offer [A]t the end of the day we're still going to end up electing somebody determined to prove that he or she is more anti-Russian that the next guy or girl. " ..."
"... For Heaven's sake, the worst country for meddling in other nations' internal affairs is the US, by far! With respect to the Arctic, both Canada and Russia signed the Treaty of the Sea, under which various challenges to ownership of the seabed are settled by the terms of the treaty. The US, of course didn't sign it. Why would they when they sincerely believe that their impressive military can just grab whatever pieces of the Arctic they want. ..."
You may have missed it in the all the excitement around the world, but Canada
has a general election coming up in October. As you know, elections equal Russian meddling.
They're when our Eastern friends pull out all their computer bots, fire up their trolls, and
start spreading shedloads of disinformation in order to confuse and disorientate us, so that we
lose our faith in democracy and then we we well I'm not sure what we're meant to do then; the
ultimate aim of it all rather defeats me. We vote for one party which is 100% anti-Russian
rather than for another party which is 100% anti-Russian? Is that the point? Because here in
Canada, that's basically the choice on offer. Those pesky Russkies can confuse us all they like
with their dezinformatziia, active measures , and maskirovka , but at the end
of the day we're still going to end up electing somebody determined to prove that he or she is
more anti-Russian that the next guy or girl. Meddling, schmeddling – it's not going to
make a blind bit of difference to the result.
None of this stops the fearmongers, however, and so it was that yesterday the Canadian
press was
happily quoting a new
report from the University of Calgary, saying that, 'Russia could meddle in Canada's
election due to "growing interest" in Arctic'. Now, I've been saying for a while now that these
worries are exaggerated, but for some reason 'Professor at University of Ottawa says it's a
load of nonsense' doesn't generate any headlines, whereas 'part-time lecturer in Calgary says
it's so' is national news. Well, so be it. We all know that the press has its biases. So rather
than rely on the media, I thought I'd better check out what the report in question actually has
to say, and it turns out that it's not quite what you'd imagine, at least not entirely.
The report is written by one Sergey Sukhankin who is said to be 'a Fellow at the Jamestown
Foundation' in Washington DC, and to be currently 'teaching at the University of Alberta and
MacEwan University (Edmonton)'. According to his Linkedin page, he has a 3 month contract to
teach a single course at the former, and a 9 month contract as a lecturer in the latter. He's
also listed as an 'Associate Expert at the International Center for Policy Studies (Kyiv).'
Anyway, he starts off his report encouragingly enough by declaring that he aims 'to give a more
balanced and nuanced picture of the situation, particularly with regard to Canada', and it is a
'tactical error to label as disinformation or propaganda every news item emanating from Russia.
This creates the perception of a Russian disinformation machine that is much more powerful than
it really is.' Personally, I would say that it's not a 'tactical error', it's just plain wrong,
but at least Sukhankin isn't trying to overdo things. But this praiseworthy restraint doesn't
mean that he wants us to let down our guard. No, he says, 'the peril is real', 'the West must
stick to confronting the Kremlin', and (and this is the bit which got the headlines):
The Kremlin has a growing interest in dominating the Arctic, where it sees Russia as in
competition with Canada. This means Canada can anticipate escalations in information warfare
Perceived as one of Russia's chief adversaries in the Arctic region, Canada is a prime target
in the information wars, with Russia potentially even meddling in the October 2019 federal
election.
There's a leap of logic here which I must admit I failed to understand. Why does
'competition' in the Arctic 'mean' that Canada 'can anticipate escalations in information
warfare', let alone 'meddling' in the election? Why does the one necessarily lead to the other?
I don't see it. It would only make sense if the second part (the meddling) helped achieve some
objectives in the first part (competition in the Arctic) but Sukhankin doesn't show how they
would. He just connects two unconnected things. But we'll get back to the Arctic a little
later. For now, let's return to the report.
This essentially has two parts. The first is a fairly standard summary of the general
argument that Russia is engaged in some sort of information war designed to undermine the West
from within. It makes reference to the normal vocabulary of Soviet active measures and
the like, as well as to the conventional list of sources, such as Peter Pomerantseve, Michael
Weiss, and Edward Lucas (not the most reliable types in my opinion). In short, it doesn't add
anything new. By contrast, the second part, which specifically focuses on alleged Russian
information operations against Canada, is much more interesting.
Russian disinformation about Canada, says Sukhankin, is centred on four themes:
'Canada as a safe haven of russophobia and (neo)fascism.
'Canada as part of the colonial forces in the Baltic Sea region'.
'Canada as Washington's useful satellite'.
'Canada as a testing ground for the practical implementation of immoral Western
values.'
The extent to which these could all be called 'disinformation' is debatable ('Canada as
Washington's useful satellite' doesn't seem entirely inaccurate to me). But the key point
Sukhankin makes is that these themes reflect the Russian government's own internal, domestic
political priorities – i.e. its desire to convince its own citizens that its policies are
right, by means of discrediting others. In general, says Sukhankin, Russian propaganda targets
'the following audiences, prioritized from the greatest to the smallest'.
The Russian domestic audience
The post-Soviet area (including the russophones in the three Baltic States)
The Balkans and east-central Europe
Western and southern Europe
The U.S.
The rest of the world
Canada, therefore, falls into the lowest priority of targets. This reflects the fact that,
as Sukhankin says, 'Russians don't see Canada as a fully independent political actor'. To be
frank, we're not high on Russia's information war hitlist. The Russian government doesn't care
that much about us, and it cares even less about our internal politics. Consequently, says
Sukhankin, while the Russian media and social media do publish anti-Canadian stories, the point
of them isn't to 'meddle' in Canadian internal affairs. Rather, he says, in what to me is the
most crucial statement in his report:
Russia's anti-Canadian propaganda, which still plays a marginal part compared to other
theatres, is primarily tailored for domestic Russian consumption – it is not
designed for a Canadian audience. [my underlining]
Here, therefore, we run into a huge problem. We're told to fear the genuine 'peril' of
Russian disinformation, and Russian 'meddling' in Canada's election, but we're also told that
Russia doesn't actually care very much about Canadian internal affairs and that in any case
Russian disinformation isn't targeted at Canadians. It seems to me that you can't have it both
ways. If it's not targeted at Canadians, then it doesn't constitute meddling, interference, or
anything else of the sort. The logical conclusion of Sukhankin's analysis is that we should
calm down a little and stop worrying so much.
That, however, would not fit with the current zeitgeist . Although his logic points
him in one direction, Sukhankin apparently feels a desperate need to nonetheless throw in
something about the dangers of Russian interference in Canadian internal affairs. So all of a
sudden, completely out of the blue, and unconnected with anything else, in his final paragraph
he suddenly throws in a quotation from the head of that most neutral of trustworthy academic
sources, the head of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Alexandra Chiczij, saying that, 'The
Kramlin's propaganda machine will increasingly target our country with anti-Canadian
fabrications in an attempt to sow discord, conflict, and to undermine our democratic
institutions.' Sukhankin then adds that this might happen 'during the 2019 Canadian federal
election.' No evidence to support this claim – which is entirely at odds which everything
which preceded it – is produced. Why would Russia suddenly become so interested in
Canadian internal affairs? Sukhankin thinks he has an answer, 'from this author's point of
view, Moscow's next theme could be the Arctic', he says. But since this is his last paragraph,
he doesn't have time to develop this thought. As I said, it just comes out of the blue.
It's also rather odd. As I said earlier, it's not at all clear why interfering in Canada's
election (exactly how, Sukhankin never makes clear) would promote Russia's interests in the
Arctic. But more than that it ignores the nature of Russian-Canadian Arctic politics. In my
conversations with both Canadian and Russian officials, the Arctic is always mentioned as a
zone of cooperation rather than competition. In an era when Canadian and Russian diplomats
barely talk to each other, the Arctic is the one subject they both think it's actually possible
to discuss in a constructive manner. Conversations about how to improve Canada-Russia relations
generally take the form of something like, 'Let's not aim too high. Let's just take little
steps, and focus on areas where agreement is possible, especially the Arctic'. To pick on the
Arctic as the subject likely to provoke Russia (for purposes unknown) to 'meddle' in Canada's
oncoming election (by means and to effect unknown) seems to me to completely misread the
situation.
In short, what we have here is a report which tells us that Canada doesn't matter much to
Russians, and that to date Russians have shown little or no interest in targeting Canadian
public opinion, let alone interfering in Canadian politics, and yet which nonetheless concludes
that we face the 'peril' of Moscow 'potentially even meddling in the October 2019 federal
election'. I don't know about you, but that doesn't make any sense to me.
Mitleser says: September
10, 2019 at 3:00 pm "4. Canada as a testing ground for the practical implementation of
immoral Western values.'"
Reminds me of one of the comments to an another article of yours.
" Canada has generally been the test case for new features of this "western
universalism," and, as a peripheral resource-based economy tightly tied into globalized
value-chains, we have often been intellectually colonized by liberal-internationalist views
(for good and ill). Unlike Russia, as we are small in population and sit next to the US, we
have rarely had the capacity (or the will) to resist US-led "universalism," but our
analysis when we have tried has been much the same as Remizov's ."
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2017/11/02/interview-with-mikhail-remizov/#comment-6953
Quite literally US diplomats in Cuba, and with them many US policymakers and
journalistic organisations descended into mass hysteria about Cicadas.
Alex Kramer says: September
10, 2019 at 6:35 pm Makes sense to me as both Canadian academia and media are full of
dipshit Russophobes.
Karl Kolchak
says: September
10, 2019 at 8:22 pm If Russia wants the weakest possible Canada, wouldn't it be in their
interests to see a feckless little poodle like Trudeau remain as PM?
Lyttenburgh says: September
11, 2019 at 5:21 am"We vote for one party which is 100% anti-Russian rather than
for another party which is 100% anti-Russian? Is that the point? Because here in Canada,
that's basically the choice on offer [A]t the end of the day we're still going to end up
electing somebody determined to prove that he or she is more anti-Russian that the next guy
or girl. "
Now, on a more serious note – about propacondom Sergey Sukhankin (formerly from
Kaliningrad oblast, RF).
He's one of those "professional victims of the Putinist Regime", that "miraculously"
escaped our Northern Mordor, and now spends ink, bytes and bodily fluids in a ceaseless
struggle with the Dark Overlord. "Russian interference" is both his idea fix and bread and
butter. E.g., check out his
logorrhea on "Russian trace" in Catalonia's referendum (published by his sponsors in
Jamestown foundation AKA CIA). There are many stock accusations, about RT, "pro-Kremline
profiles" in FB and Twitter, and, the horror of horrors, the fact that the Immortal
Regiment now dares to happen on the sacred soil of the country, which dispatched the Blue
Division to the Abode of all Evil. He admits, that to proof the fact that the "Russian
meddling" was the cause of what transpired in Catalonia (uh, you remember what happened
back then, right?) is difficult, but what is without doubt, is that it benefits Kremlin and
the Terrible Russkiy Mir.
Sukhankin is also an active participant in the anti-Russian propaganda efforts of the
European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), where he regularly rubs shoulders and tries
to imitate another well known "researcher" and expert on Russian maskirovka,
dezinformatsiya and active measures, Russophobic fantasy and sci-fi author Mark
Galeotti.
archie1954 says:
September
17, 2019 at 3:57 pmFor Heaven's sake, the worst country for meddling in other
nations' internal affairs is the US, by far! With respect to the Arctic, both Canada
and Russia signed the Treaty of the Sea, under which various challenges to ownership of
the seabed are settled by the terms of the treaty. The US, of course didn't sign it.
Why would they when they sincerely believe that their impressive military can just grab
whatever pieces of the Arctic they want.
As a matter of fact, the US wants to separate Canada right across the middle by
designating the waterway between the mainland and the Arctic Islands as an
international one. It is the US which is meddling in Canada's internal affairs, not
Russia!
Josh says: September
11, 2019 at 8:45 am It always baffles me how, usually motivated by an American
Russophobe, the Arctic gets used or abused for this polemic. As you correctly point out,
the Arctic council is an example of multipolar peaceful talks. In addition, we forget that
when we look at the Arctic sea routes opening up, that it is primarily the NEP – the
route along Russia and in Russian waters – is the one more navigable. Yet even to
keep that one open for the small amount of time per year, Russia has a lot of maintenance
to do with expensive ice breakers. It follows quite logically that Russia puts a lot of
effort and money into this; and the regimented discipline of the army is the better and
cheaper option for the safety and rescue services.
If Canada wanted to do the same thing in the NWP, not only is this route much more
treacherous, iced up and difficult, the investment would be higher than that which Russia
is making, while global warming will only help this passage marginally.
All this to say that the sea routes are the most talked about issues here; mineral, oil
and other deposits along the continental shelves are dealt with rigourously and with full
support from all sides through the UN. The only small conflict is the disputed island
between Canada and the US.
Another media spin in preparation of the public proof that the Steale dossier and Russia
Gate was a soft coup and media hoax. Articles like this allow the traitors to argue that they
didn't know it was fake or that certain assets were not Russian because the Russians were
several steps ahead manipulating the situation using FBI hacked coms.
Time to start setting fire to every MSM outlet and making s'mores as we watch it all
burn.
What a terrible typographical error. Somehow the word "Russian" was inserted in this text
when the word "Israeli" was supposed to be used. Hey, typographers, pay more attention.
"The technical break-through allowed Russian spies in American cities, key insights
into how FBI surveillance teams were operating. "
The Russians learned how the FBI goes about lying to cover up for it's actions. How "False
Flag" operations are coordinated and how entrapment schemes are run.
We didn't understand that they were at political war with us already in the second
term
Spying is not political war, moron. But fact is the Evil Empire never stopped its war
against Russia - under Yeltsin they just moved it inside the country with their *** oligarch
traitors, getting Russia to dismantle its industry, etc.
According to a report this week, Israel has been spying on the White House. While that
news itself isn't shocking, the Trump administration's response – or lack thereof
– has taken many in DC by surprise.
But, unlike past administrations, the Trump team has not taken any action against
surveillance by one of its closest allies, and spying on US soil has had no real
consequences for Israel, American officials said.
Israeli spying is not new – but the Trump administration's response is
"Shortly before the Obama administration approved a deal granting Russia 20% of America's
uranium," LInk? If Russia mines uranium in the Western Hemisphere, it cannot export it. See
Forbes Magazine, 13Dec2018, the article debunking Hillary-Uranium One.
All roads lead to that neocon infested festering cesspool of anti American shitlips called
the State Department. With friends like that who needs "the Russians"
If the Russians did crack certain communications and the US knew it, they would use that
to really screw the Russians and let them think they had us by the balls.
And they certainly would no be admitting any of it in an article.
And all the while the FBI / DOJ was running cover for the Clintonn Foundation and the
Clintons, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the Awan brothers and surveilling American citizens
with help of contractors. NOT ONE FBI whistle blower came forward...
I have been asking "Why?" At first I thought perhaps the threats to self/family may be the
reason, but I'm now convinced THEY WERE ALL IN ON THE CORRUPTION. This agency is totally and
thoroughly corrupt and beyond redemption. This is why Wray continues to carry water for the
corrupt FBI leadership. Time to completely dismantle and re-engineer into the US Marshalls
office.
Looks like very polarized decision: to friends everything, to enemies the law. And treatment by NY of Epstein and Harvey
Weinstein supports this hypothesis.
New York state prosecutors in Manhattan have subpoenaed President Trump's
accounting firm, Mazars USA, demanding eight years of his
personal and corporate tax
returns
according to the
New
York Times
, citing "several people with knowledge on the matter" - the gold standard in
modern sources.
The subpoena was issued by the Manhattan DA's office last month following the launch of a
criminal investigation into hush-money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels (real name
Stephanie Clifford) by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen - who pleaded guilty last year to eight
charges; seven of which were unrelated to the Trump campaign, and one for breaking federal campaign
finance laws. He is currently serving a three-year prison sentence.
At issue - Democratic Manhattan D.A. Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (whose daddy was Jimmy Carter's
Secretary of State
- and who took money
from Harvey Weinstein while
declining to
prosecute
him for sexual assault -
and
who sought a
reduced sex-offender
status
for Jeffrey Epstein) wants to see if
Trump's reimbursement of Cohen violated any
laws in New York
, and whether Trump's accounting firm falsely accounted for the
reimbursements as a legal expense.
In New York, filing a false business record can be a crime.
But it becomes a felony only if prosecutors can prove that the false filing was made to
commit or conceal another crime, such as tax violations or bank fraud.
The tax returns
and other documents sought from Mazars could shed light on whether any state laws were broken
.
Such subpoenas also routinely request related documents in connection with the returns. -
New
York Times
Congressional Democrats have been hunting down Trump's tax returns for years after the
billionaire refused to do so, citing an ongoing IRS audit as well as the position that Trump
Organization competitors would then have access to industry secrets.
The president has fought back
to keep his finances under wraps, challenging the subpoenas in
federal court. He has also sued to block a New York state law, passed this year, that
authorized state officials to provide his state tax returns in response to certain congressional
inquiries. By tying up the requests in court,
Mr. Trump's team has made it diminishingly
likely that Democrats in Washington will get the chance to review them before the election next
year
. -
New
York Times
And while Trump and the Treasury Department have proven thus far successful in thwarting
Democratic lawmakers' inquiries,
it may not be as easy to fend off a subpoena in Manhattan
.
According to Mazars, they will "will respect the legal process and fully comply with its legal
obligations," adding that the company was legally prohibited from commenting on its work.
If the Manhattan DA
is
able to obtain Trump's tax returns, the
Times
notes
that "the documents would be covered by secrecy rules governing grand juries, meaning they would
not become public unless they were used as evidence in a criminal case."
The
Times
does
not
note, however, that the records would likely be leaked
within 30 minutes to the
Washington Post
or similar.
State prosecutors also subpoenaed the Trump Organization in early August for records of the
payments to Daniels and Cohen's reimbursement -
a request which has been complied with
according
to the report.
"It's just harassment of the president, his family and his business, using subpoenas as
weapons," said Trump Org attorney, Marc L. Mukasey in a statement last month.
As part of its investigation, prosecutors from Mr. Vance's office visited Mr. Cohen in prison
in Otisville, N.Y., to seek assistance with their investigation, according to people briefed on
the meeting, which was first reported by CNN.
Mr. Cohen also helped arrange for American Media Inc., the publisher of The National
Enquirer, to pay Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who also said she had an affair with the
president. Prosecutors in the district attorney's office subpoenaed American Media in early
August, as well as at least one bank. -
New
York Times
Will the Democrats' gambit pay off? Or will the ongoing "witch hunts" into President Trump
backfire and turn him into a martyr?
There is no evidence that any crimes of any type has been
committed.
There is no legal grounds for a subpoena to be issued without
evidence that a crime has been committed.
Cearly, the Manhattan DA is violating the civil right of a
citizen for asking for 8 years of tax records with no indication
of a crime. Trump should sue the DA and the jutice department
should look into the DA violation of due process and legal rights
of a citizen.
Has he subpoenaed Epstein's docs? Is he going to claim tax fraud
is worse than child molestation? Why don't Trump supporters file a
class action lawsuit and RICO against this clown?
wants to see if
Trump's reimbursement of Cohen violated any
laws in New York
, and whether Trump's accounting firm falsely
accounted for the reimbursements as a legal expense. "
Love to see the Bio on the Judge that approved the Subpeona
How many people reading this think that the IRS never reviewed
Trump's tax returns?
How many people reading this think that
Obama's IRS did NOT make a special effort to go over Trump's taxes
in great detail, even as Obama's FBI and DOJ spied on Trump and
his campaign?
How many people reading this think that Obama's IRS would NOT
have charged Trump with tax evasion even if they could have?
How many people reading this think that making Trump's tax
return public is NOT an effort to twist, distort, and misinterpret
complex tax returns in an attempt to make Trump look bad as bad as
possible for taking legitimate, legal, but large tax deductions?
How many people reading this think that it is perfectly fine
for democrat leaders, such as Pelosi, Schumer, and
multimillionaire Maxine Waters NOT to have to release their tax
returns while Trump has to release his?
Why did Weinstein and Epstein get such special treatment?
Both did get the same treatment- in escaping from justice. Oh,
you mean not producing tax returns? No one is demanding them, for
one plus they are not public servants. All government officials
should submit their tax returns to ensure they are not compromised
by those who have access to them.
Essentially neoliberal MSM were hijacked. Which was easy to do. The current anti-Russian campaign is conducted under
the direct guidance of MI6 and similar agencies
Notable quotes:
"... committee minutes note the secretary saying: "The Guardian was obliged to seek advice under the terms of the DA notice code." The minutes add: "This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it." ..."
"... These "considerable efforts" included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day after The Guardian published the first documents – to all major UK media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would "jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel". It was marked "private and confidential: not for publication, broadcast or use on social media". ..."
"... "The FT [Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden revelations] and the Telegraph published only a short". It continued by noting that only The Independent "followed up the substantive allegations". It added, "The BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story." ..."
"... The British security services had carried out more than a "symbolic act". It was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The Guardian was then the only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the US and British security bodies to receive and cover their exposures, a situation which posed a challenge to security agencies. ..."
"... The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The committee chair noted that after GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the newspaper's laptops "engagement with The Guardian had continued to strengthen". ..."
"... But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice Committee itself. The committee minutes are explicit on this, noting that "the process had culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice Committee] member". ..."
"... The Guardian's deputy editor went directly from the corporation's basement with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee alongside the security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing. ..."
"... In November 2016, The Guardian published an unprecedented "exclusive" with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain's domestic security service. The article noted that this was the "first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service's 107-year history". It was co-written by deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice Committee. This was not mentioned in the article. ..."
"... The MI5 chief was given copious space to make claims about the national security threat posed by an "increasingly aggressive" Russia. Johnson and his co-author noted, "Parker said he was talking to The Guardian rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the Snowden files." ..."
"... Just two weeks before the interview with MI6's chief was published, The Guardian itself reported on the high court stating that it would "hear an application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service's decision not to charge MI6's former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant wife who were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004". ..."
"... The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these "exclusives" as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralising the only independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as Snowden's. They were possibly acting to prevent any revelations of this kind happening again. ..."
"... The Guardian's coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically. While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when Corbyn became Labour leader, 0.06% of the Labour membership has been investigated for anti-Semitic comments or posts. In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour concluded that the party "is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated every single United Kingdom race equality law." ..."
"... A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: "It is significant that exclusive stories recently about British collusion in torture and policy towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been passed to other papers including The Times rather than The Guardian." ..."
"... The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. Which begs the question: where does the next Snowden go? DM ..."
The Guardian, Britain's leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been
successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the 'security state', according to newly released
documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.
The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents
leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.
Snowden's bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and
its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of
mass surveillance
operated by both agencies.
According to minutes of meetings of the UK's Defence and Security Media Advisory
Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence.
" This event was very concerning because at the outset The Guardian avoided engaging with the [committee] before publishing the
first tranche of information," state
minutes of a 7 November
2013 meeting at the MOD.
The DSMA Committee, more commonly known as the D-Notice Committee, is run by the MOD, where it meets every six months. A small
number of journalists are also invited to sit on the committee. Its
stated purpose is to "prevent inadvertent public disclosure
of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations". It can issue "notices" to the media to encourage them
not to publish certain information.
The committee is currently chaired by the MOD's director-general of security policy Dominic Wilson, who was
previously director of security and intelligence
in the British Cabinet Office. Its secretary is Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE, who
describes himself as an "accomplished, senior
ex-military commander with extensive experience of operational level leadership".
The D-Notice system describes itself as voluntary ,
placing no obligations on the media to comply with any notice issued. This means there should have been no need for the Guardian
to consult the MOD before publishing the Snowden documents.
Yet committee minutes note the secretary saying: "The Guardian was obliged to seek advice under the terms of the DA notice code." The minutes
add: "This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it."
' Considerable efforts'
These "considerable efforts" included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day after The Guardian published
the first documents – to all major UK media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would "jeopardise
both national security and possibly UK personnel". It was
marked "private and confidential: not
for publication, broadcast or use on social media".
Clearly the committee did not want its issuing of the notice to be publicised, and it was nearly successful. Only the right-wing
blog Guido Fawkes made it public.
At the time, according to the committee
minutes , the "intelligence
agencies in particular had continued to ask for more advisories [i.e. D-Notices] to be sent out". Such D-Notices were clearly seen
by the intelligence services not so much as a tool to advise the media but rather a way to threaten it not to publish further Snowden
revelations.
One night, amidst the first Snowden stories being published, the D-Notice Committee's then-secretary Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance
personally called Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian. Vallance "made clear his concern that The Guardian had failed to
consult him in advance before telling the world",
according to a Guardian journalist who interviewed Rusbridger.
Later in the year, Prime Minister David Cameron again used the D-Notice system as a threat to the media.
" I don't want to have to use injunctions or D-Notices or the other tougher measures," he
said
in a statement to MPs. "I think it's much better to appeal to newspapers' sense of social responsibility. But if they don't
demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act."
The threats worked. The Press Gazette reported
at the time that "The FT [Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden revelations] and the Telegraph
published only a short". It continued by noting that only The Independent "followed up the substantive allegations". It added, "The
BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story."
The Guardian, however, remained uncowed.
According to the committee
minutes , the fact
The Guardian would not stop publishing "undoubtedly raised questions in some minds about the system's future usefulness". If the
D-Notice system could not prevent The Guardian publishing GCHQ's most sensitive secrets, what was it good for?
It was time to rein in The Guardian and make sure this never happened again.
GCHQ and laptops
The security services ratcheted up their "considerable efforts" to deal with the exposures. On 20 July 2013, GCHQ officials
entered The Guardian's offices at King's Cross in London, six weeks after the first Snowden-related article had been published. At the request of the government and security services, Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson, along with two others, spent
three hours destroying the laptops containing the Snowden documents.
The Guardian staffers, according to one of the newspaper's reporters,
brought "angle-grinders, dremels – drills with revolving bits – and masks". The reporter added, "The spy agency provided
one piece of hi-tech equipment, a 'degausser', which destroys magnetic fields and erases data."
Johnson
claims
that the destruction of the computers was "purely a symbolic act", adding that "the government and GCHQ knew, because we
had told them, that the material had been taken to the US to be shared with the New York Times. The reporting would go on. The episode
hadn't changed anything."
Yet the episode did change something. As the D-Notice Committee
minutes for November
2013 outlined: "Towards the end of July [as the computers were being destroyed], The Guardian had begun to seek and accept D-Notice
advice not to publish certain highly sensitive details and since then the dialogue [with the committee] had been reasonable and improving."
The British security services had carried out more than a "symbolic act". It was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The
Guardian was then the only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the US and British security bodies to receive
and cover their exposures, a situation which posed a challenge to security agencies.
The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The committee chair
noted that after
GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the newspaper's laptops "engagement with The Guardian had continued to strengthen".
Moreover, he added
, there were now "regular dialogues between the secretary and deputy secretaries and Guardian journalists". Rusbridger later
testified to the Home Affairs Committee that Air Vice-Marshal Vallance of the D-Notice committee and himself "collaborated"
in the aftermath of the Snowden affair and that Vallance had even "been at The Guardian offices to talk to all our reporters".
But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice
Committee itself. The committee minutes are explicit on this,
noting that "the
process had culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice
Committee] member".
At some point in 2013 or early 2014, Johnson – the same deputy editor who had smashed up his newspaper's computers under the watchful
gaze of British intelligence agents – was approached to take up a seat on the committee. Johnson attended his first meeting in
May 2014 and was
to remain on it until
October 2018
.
The Guardian's deputy editor went directly from the corporation's basement with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee
alongside the security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing.
A new editor
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger withstood intense pressure not to publish some of the Snowden revelations but agreed to Johnson
taking a seat on the D-Notice Committee as a tactical sop to the security services. Throughout his tenure, The Guardian continued
to publish some stories critical of the security services.
But in March 2015, the situation changed when the Guardian
appointed a new editor, Katharine Viner, who had less experience than Rusbridger of dealing with the security services. Viner
had started out on fashion and entertainment magazine Cosmopolitan and had no history in national security reporting. According
to insiders, she showed much less leadership during the Snowden affair than Janine Gibson in the US (Gibson was another
candidate
to be Rusbridger's successor).
Viner was then editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia, which was
launched just two weeks before the first Snowden
revelations were published. Australia and New Zealand comprise two-fifths of the so-called
"Five Eyes" surveillance alliance exposed by Snowden.
This was an opportunity for the security services. It appears that their seduction began the following year.
In November 2016, The Guardian
published an unprecedented "exclusive" with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain's domestic security service. The article
noted that this was the "first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service's 107-year history". It was co-written
by deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice
Committee. This was not mentioned in the article.
The MI5 chief was given
copious space to make claims about the national security threat posed by an "increasingly aggressive" Russia. Johnson
and his co-author noted, "Parker said he was talking to The Guardian rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the
Snowden files."
Parker told the two reporters, "We recognise that in a changing world we have to change too. We have a responsibility to talk
about our work and explain it."
Four months after the MI5 interview, in March 2017, the Guardian
published another unprecedented "exclusive", this time with Alex Younger, the sitting chief of MI6, Britain's external
intelligence agency. This exclusive was awarded by the Secret Intelligence Service to The Guardian's investigations editor, Nick
Hopkins, who had been appointed 14 months previously.
The interview was the first Younger had given to a national newspaper and was again softball.
Titled "MI6 returns to 'tapping up' in an effort to recruit black and Asian officers", it focused almost entirely on the
intelligence service's stated desire to recruit from ethnic minority communities.
" Simply, we have to attract the best of modern Britain," Younger told Hopkins. "Every community from every part of Britain should
feel they have what it takes, no matter what their background or status."
Just two weeks before the interview with MI6's chief was published, The Guardian itself
reported on the high court stating that it would "hear an application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service's
decision not to charge MI6's former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant
wife who were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004".
None of this featured in The Guardian article, which did, however, cover discussions of whether the James Bond actor Daniel Craig
would qualify for the intelligence service. "He would not get into MI6," Younger told Hopkins.
More recently, in August 2019, The Guardian was
awarded yet another exclusive, this time with Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, Britain's most senior
counter-terrorism officer. This was Basu's " first major interview since taking up his post" the previous year and resulted in a
three-part series of articles, one of which was
entitled "Met police examine Vladimir Putin's role in Salisbury attack".
The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these "exclusives" as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralising
the only independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as Snowden's. They were possibly acting to prevent
any revelations of this kind happening again.
What, if any, private conversations have taken place between Viner and the security services during her tenure as editor are not
known. But in 2018, when Paul Johnson eventually left the D-Notice Committee, its chair, the MOD's Dominic Wilson,
praised Johnson who, he said, had been "instrumental in re-establishing links with The Guardian".
Decline in critical reporting
Amidst these spoon-fed intelligence exclusives, Viner also oversaw the breakup of The Guardian's celebrated investigative team,
whose muck-racking journalists were told to apply for other jobs outside of investigations.
One well-placed source
told the Press Gazette at the time that journalists on the investigations team "have not felt backed by senior
editors over the last year", and that "some also feel the company has become more risk-averse in the same period".
In the period since Snowden, The Guardian has lost many of its top investigative reporters who had covered national security issues,
notably Shiv Malik, Nick Davies, David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor, Ewen MacAskill and Ian Cobain. The few journalists who were
replaced were succeeded by less experienced reporters with apparently less commitment to exposing the security state. The current
defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh,
started
at The Guardian as head of media and technology and has no history of covering national security.
" It seems they've got rid of everyone who seemed to cover the security services and military in an adversarial way," one current
Guardian journalist told us.
Indeed, during the last two years of Rusbridger's editorship, The Guardian published about 110 articles per year tagged as MI6
on its website. Since Viner took over, the average per year has halved and is decreasing year by year.
" Effective scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies -- epitomised by the Snowden scoops but also many other stories
-- appears to have been abandoned," a former Guardian journalist told us. The former reporter added that, in recent years, it "sometimes
seems The Guardian is worried about upsetting the spooks."
A second former Guardian journalist added: "The Guardian no longer seems to have such a challenging relationship with the intelligence
services, and is perhaps seeking to mend fences since Snowden. This is concerning, because spooks are always manipulative and not
always to be trusted."
While some articles critical of the security services still do appear in the paper, its "scoops" increasingly focus on issues
more acceptable to them. Since the Snowden affair, The Guardian does not appear to have published any articles based on an intelligence
or security services source that was not officially sanctioned to speak.
The Guardian has, by contrast,
published a steady stream of exclusives on the major official enemy of the security services, Russia, exposing Putin,
his friends and the work of its intelligence services and military.
In the Panama Papers leak in April 2016, which revealed how companies and individuals around the world were using an offshore
law firm to avoid paying tax, The Guardian's front-page launch scoop was authored by Luke Harding, who has received many security
service
tips focused on the "Russia threat", and was
titled "Revealed:
the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin".
Three sentences into the piece, however, Harding notes that "the president's name does not appear in any of the records" although
he insists that "the data reveals a pattern – his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured
without his patronage".
There was a much
bigger story
in the Panama Papers which The Guardian chose to downplay by leaving it to the following day. This concerned the father of
the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, who "ran an offshore fund that avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small
army of Bahamas residents – including a part-time bishop – to sign its paperwork".
We understand there was some argument between journalists about not leading with the Cameron story as the launch splash. Putin's
friends were eventually deemed more important than the Prime Minister of the country where the paper published.
Getting Julian Assange
The Guardian also appears to have been engaged in a campaign against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who had been a collaborator
during the early WikiLeaks revelations in 2010.
One 2017 story came from investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who writes for The Guardian's sister paper The Observer,
titled "When Nigel Farage met Julian Assange". This concerned the visit of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage to the Ecuadorian embassy
in March 2017,
organised by the radio station LBC, for whom Farage worked as a presenter. Farage's producer at LBC accompanied Farage
at the meeting, but this was not mentioned by Cadwalladr.
Rather, she posited that this meeting was "potentially a channel of communication" between WikiLeaks, Farage and Donald Trump,
who were all said to be closely linked to Russia, adding that these actors were in a "political alignment" and that " WikiLeaks is,
in many ways, the swirling vortex at the centre of everything".
Yet Cadwalladr's one official on-the-record source for this speculation was a "highly placed contact with links to US intelligence",
who told her, "When the heat is turned up and all electronic communication, you have to assume, is being intensely monitored, then
those are the times when intelligence communication falls back on human couriers. Where you have individuals passing information
in ways and places that cannot be monitored."
It seems likely this was innuendo being fed to The Observer by an intelligence-linked individual to promote disinformation to
undermine Assange.
In 2018, however, The Guardian's attempted vilification of Assange was significantly stepped up. A new string of articles began
on 18 May 2018 with
one alleging Assange's "long-standing relationship with RT", the Russian state broadcaster. The series, which has been
closely
documented elsewhere, lasted for several months, consistently alleging with little or the most minimal circumstantial
evidence that Assange had ties to Russia or the Kremlin.
One story, co-authored again by Luke Harding,
claimed that "Russian diplomats held secret talks in London with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they
could help him flee the UK, The Guardian has learned". The former consul in the Ecuadorian embassy in London at this time, Fidel
Narvaez, vigorously denies the existence of any such "escape plot" involving Russia and is involved in a complaint process with The
Guardian for insinuating he coordinated such a plot.
This apparent mini-campaign ran until November 2018, culminating in a front-page
splash , based on anonymous sources, claiming that Assange had three secret meetings at the Ecuadorian embassy with Trump's
former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
This "scoop" failed all tests of journalistic credibility since it would have been impossible for anyone to have entered the highly
secured Ecuadorian embassy three times with no proof. WikiLeaks and others have strongly argued that the story was
manufactured
and it is telling that The Guardian has since failed to refer to it in its subsequent articles on the Assange case. The Guardian,
however, has still not retracted or apologised for the story which remains on its website.
The "exclusive" appeared just two weeks after Paul Johnson had been congratulated for "re-establishing links" between The Guardian
and the security services.
The string of Guardian articles, along with the vilification and smear stories about Assange elsewhere in the British media, helped
create the conditions for
a deal between Ecuador, the UK and the US to expel Assange from the embassy in April. Assange now sits in Belmarsh maximum-security
prison where he faces extradition to the US, and life in prison there, on charges under the Espionage Act.
Acting for the establishment
Another major focus of The Guardian's energies under Viner's editorship has been to attack the leader of the UK Labour Party,
Jeremy Corbyn.
The context is that Corbyn appears to have recently been a target of the security services. In 2015, soon after he was elected
Labour leader, the Sunday Times
reported a
serving general warning that "there would be a direct challenge from the army and mass resignations if Corbyn became prime minister".
The source told the newspaper: "The Army just wouldn't stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise
the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that."
On 20 May 2017, a little over two weeks before the 2017 General Election, the Daily Telegraph was
fed the story that "MI5 opened a file on Jeremy Corbyn amid concerns over his links to the IRA". It formed part of a Telegraph
investigation claiming to reveal "Mr Corbyn's full links to the IRA" and was sourced to an individual "close to" the MI5 investigation,
who said "a file had been opened on him by the early nineties".
The Metropolitan Police Special Branch was also said to be monitoring Corbyn in the same period.
Then, on the very eve of the General Election, the Telegraph gave space to an
article from Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of MI6, under a headline: "Jeremy Corbyn is a danger to this nation.
At MI6, which I once led, he wouldn't clear the security vetting."
Further, in September 2018, two anonymous senior government sources
told The Times that Corbyn had been "summoned" for a "'facts of life' talk on terror" by MI5 chief Andrew Parker.
Just two weeks after news of this private meeting was leaked by the government, the Daily Mail
reported another leak, this time revealing that "Jeremy Corbyn's most influential House of Commons adviser has been barred
from entering Ukraine on the grounds that he is a national security threat because of his alleged links to Vladimir Putin's 'global
propaganda network'."
The article concerned Andrew Murray, who had been working in Corbyn's office for a year but had still not received a security
pass to enter the UK parliament. The Mail reported, based on what it called "a senior parliamentary source", that Murray's application
had encountered "vetting problems".
Murray later heavily suggested that the security services had leaked the story to the Mail. "Call me sceptical if you must, but
I do not see journalistic enterprise behind the Mail's sudden capacity to tease obscure information out of the [Ukrainian security
service]," he wrote
in the New Statesman. He added, "Someone else is doing the hard work – possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt
if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows?"
Murray told us he was approached by the New Statesman after the story about him being banned from Ukraine was leaked. "However,"
he added, "I wouldn't dream of suggesting anything like that to The Guardian, since I do not know any journalists still working there
who I could trust."
The Guardian itself has run a remarkable number of news and comment articles criticising Corbyn since he was elected in 2015 and
the paper's clearly hostile stance has been widely
noted .
Given its appeal to traditional Labour supporters, the paper has probably done more to undermine Corbyn than any other. In particular,
its massive coverage of alleged widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has helped to disparage Corbyn more than other smears
carried in the media.
The Guardian's coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem
in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically. While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when
Corbyn became Labour leader, 0.06% of the Labour membership has been
investigated for anti-Semitic comments or posts. In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour
concluded
that the party "is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated
every single United Kingdom race equality law."
Analysis of two YouGov surveys, conducted in 2015 and 2017,
shows that anti-Semitic views held by Labour voters declined substantially in the first two years of Corbyn's tenure and
that such views were significantly more common among Conservative voters.
Despite this, since January 2016, The Guardian has published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-Semitism, an average of
around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. In the same period, The Guardian published
just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party's much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example,
found that nearly half of the Tory Party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister.
At the same time, some stories which paint Corbyn's critics in a negative light have been suppressed by The Guardian. According
to someone with knowledge of the matter, The Guardian declined to publish the results of a months-long critical investigation by
one of its reporters into a prominent anti-Corbyn Labour MP, citing only vague legal issues.
In July 2016, one of this article's authors emailed a Guardian editor asking if he could pitch an investigation about the first
attempt by the right-wing of the Labour Party to remove Corbyn, informing The Guardian of very good inside sources on those behind
the attempt and their real plans. The approach was rejected as being of no interest before a pitch was even sent.
A reliable publication?
On 20 May 2019, The Times newspaper
reported on a Freedom of Information request made by the Rendition Project, a group of academic experts working on torture
and rendition issues, which showed that the MOD had been "developing a secret policy on torture that allows ministers to sign off
intelligence-sharing that could lead to the abuse of detainees".
This might traditionally have been a Guardian story, not something for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times. According to one civil
society source, however, many groups working in this field no longer trust The Guardian.
A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: "It is significant that exclusive stories recently about British collusion in
torture and policy towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been passed to other papers including The
Times rather than The Guardian."
The Times published its scoop under a strong
headline , "Torture: Britain breaks law in Ministry of Defence secret policy". However, before the article was published,
the MOD fed The Guardian the same documents The Times were about to splash with, believing it could soften the impact of the revelations
by telling its side of the story.
The Guardian
posted its own article just before The Times, with a headline that would have pleased the government: "MoD says revised
torture guidance does not lower standards".
Its lead paragraph was a simple summary of the MOD's position: "The Ministry of Defence has insisted that newly emerged departmental
guidance on the sharing of intelligence derived from torture with allies, remains in line with practices agreed in the aftermath
of a series of scandals following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." However, an inspection of the documents showed this was clearly
disinformation.
The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state
to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has
been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. Which begs the question: where does the next Snowden
go? DM
The Guardian did not respond to a request for comment.
Daily Maverick will formally launch Declassified – a new UK-focused investigation and analysis organisation run by the
authors of this article – in November 2019.
Matt Kennard is an investigative journalist and co-founder of Declassified . He was previously director of the
Centre for Investigative Journalism in London, and before that a reporter for the Financial Times in the US and UK. He is the author
of two books, Irregular Army and The Racket .
Mark Curtis is a leading UK foreign policy analyst, journalist and the author of six books including Web of
Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World and Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam .
"... Like the Cold War, the new cold war was triggered by an American lie. It was a lie so duplicitous, so all encompassing, that it would lead many Russians to see the agreement that ended the cold war as a devastating and humiliating deception that was really intended to clear the way for the US to surround and finally defeat the Soviet Union. It was a lie that tilled the soil for all future "Russian aggression." ..."
"... That key promise made to Gorbachev was shattered, first by President Clinton and then subsequently supported by every American President: NATO engulfed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, most recently, Montenegro. ..."
"... When Clinton decided to break Bush's promise and betray Russia, George Kennen, father of the containment policy, warned that NATO expansion would be "the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-cold-war era." "Such a decision," he prophesied, "may be expected to . . . restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations . . .." ..."
"... As Matlock explains, the urgent transition allowed "privileged insiders[to] join the criminals who had been running a black market [and to] steal what they could, as fast as they could." The sudden, uncompromising transition imposed on Russia by the United States enabled, according to Cohen, "a small group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its people into poverty and misery." ..."
"... The rape of Russia was funded, overseen and ordered by the United States and handed over by President George H.W. Bush to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Much of their advice, Matlock says generously, "was not only useless, but sometimes actually damaging." ..."
"... The economic policies wrestled onto Russia by the US and the transition experts and international development experts it funded and sent over led to, what Cohen calls, "the near ruination of Russia." Russia's reward for ending the Cold War and joining the Western economic community was, in Cohen's words, "the worst economic depression in peacetime, the disintegration of the highly professionalized Soviet middle class, mass poverty, plunging life expectancy [for men, it had fallen below sixty], the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia's wealth, and more." ..."
"... By the time Putin came to power in 2000, Cohen says, "some 75% of Russians were living in poverty." 75%! Millions and millions of Russian lives were destroyed by the American welcoming of Russia into the global economic community. ..."
"... But before Putin came to power, there was more Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was a necessity for Clinton and the United States because Yeltsin was the pliable puppet who would continue to enforce the cruel economic transition. But to continue the interference in, and betrayal of, the Russian people economically, it would now be necessary to interfere in and betray the Russian democracy. ..."
"... Intoxicated with American support, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament that had rescinded his powers and abolished the constitution of which he was in violation. In a 636-2 vote, the Russian parliament impeached Yeltsin. But, President Clinton again sided with Yeltsin against the Russian people and the Russian law, backed him and gave him $2.5 billion in aid. Clinton was blocking the Russian people's choice of leaders. ..."
"... "Funded by the US government," Cohen reports, Americans "gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers, drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin's reelection headquarters in 1996." ..."
"... Asserting its right as the unipolar victor of a Cold War it never won, betraying the central promise of the negotiated end of the cold war by engulfing Russia's neighbors, arming those nations against its written and signed word and stealing all Russian hope in capitalism and democracy by kidnapping and torturing Russian capitalism and democracy, the roots of the new cold war were not planted by Russian lies and aggression, as the doctrinal Western version teaches, but by the American lies and aggression that the fact checked, demythologized version of history reveals. ..."
When Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev received his peace prize in 1990, the Nobel Prize committee
declared that "the two mighty power blocs,
have managed to abandon their life-threatening confrontation" and confidently expressed that "It is our hope that we are now celebrating
the end of the Cold War." Recently, U.N. General Secretary António Guterres funereally closed the celebrations with the
realization that "The Cold War is back."
In a very short span of history, the window that had finally opened for Russia and the United States to build a new international
system in which they work cooperatively to address areas of common interest had slammed back closed. How was that historic opportunity
wasted? Why was the road from the Nobel committee's hope to the UN's eulogy such a short one?
The doctrinal narrative that is told in the U.S. is the narrative of a very short road whose every turn was signposted by Russian
lies, betrayal, deception and aggression. The American telling of history is a tale in which every blow to the new peace was a Russian
blow. The fact checked version offers a demythologized history that is unrecognizably different. The demythologized version is also
a history of lies, betrayal, deception and aggression, but the liar, the aggressor, is not primarily Russia, but America. It is the
history of a promise so historically broken that it laid the foundation of a new cold war.
But it was not the first promise the United States broke: it was not even the first promise they broke in the new cold war.
The Hot War
Most histories of the cold war begin at the dawn of the post World War II period. But the history of U.S-U.S.S.R. animosity starts
long before that: it starts as soon as possible, and it was hot long before it turned cold.
The label "Red Scare" first appeared, not in the 1940s or 50s, but in 1919. Though it is a chapter seldom included in the history
of American-Russian relations, America actively and aggressively intervened in the Russian civil war in an attempt to push the Communists
back down. The United States cooperated with anti-Bolshevik forces: by mid 1918, President Woodrow Wilson had sent 13,000 American
troops to Soviet soil. They would remain there for two years, killing and injuring thousands. Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev would
later remind America of "the time you sent your troops to quell the revolution." Churchill would record for history the admission
that the West "shot Soviet Russians on sight," that they were "invaders on Russian soil," that "[t]hey armed the enemies of the Soviet
government," that "[t]hey blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed for its downfall."
When the cause was lost, and the Bolsheviks secured power, most western countries refused to recognize the communist government.
However, realism prevailed, and within a few short years, by the mid 1920s, most countries had recognized the communist government
and restored diplomatic relations. All but the US It was not until several years later that Franklin D. Roosevelt finally recognized
the Soviet government in 1933.
The Cold War
It would be a very short time before the diplomatic relations that followed the hot war would be followed by a cold war. It might
even be possible to pin the beginning of the cold war down to a specific date. On April 22 and 23, President Truman told Soviet foreign
minister Vyacheslav Molotov to "Carry out his agreement" and establish a new, free, independent government in Poland as promised
at Yalta. Molotov was stunned. He was stunned because it was not he that was breaking the agreement because that was not what Roosevelt,
Churchill and Stalin had agreed to at Yalta. The final wording of the Yalta agreement never mentioned replacing Soviet control of
Poland.
The agreement that Roosevelt revealed to congress and shared with the world – the one that still dominates the textbook accounts
and the media stories – is not the one he secretly shook on with Stalin. Roosevelt lied to congress and the American people. Then
he lied to Stalin.
In exchange for Soviet support for the creation of the United Nations, Roosevelt secretly agreed to Soviet predominance in Poland
and Eastern Europe. The cold war story that the Soviet Union marched into Eastern Europe and stole it for itself is a lie: Roosevelt
handed it to them.
So did Churchill. If Roosevelt's motivation was getting the UN, Churchill's was getting Greece. Fearing that the Soviet Union
would invade India and the oil fields of Iran, Churchill saw Greece as the geographical roadblock and determined to hold on to it
at all cost. The cost, it turned out, was Romania. Churchill would give Stalin Romania to protect his borders; Stalin would give
Churchill Greece to protect his empire's borders. The deal was sealed on October 9, 1944.
Churchill says that in their secret meeting, he asked Stalin, "how would it do for you to have ninety percent predominance in
Romania, for us to have ninety percent predominance in Greece? . . ." He then went on to offer a fifty-fifty power split in in Yugoslavia
and Hungary and to offer the Soviets seventy-five percent control of Bulgaria. The exact conversation may never have happened, according
to the political record, but Churchill's account captures the spirit and certainly captures the secret agreement.
Contrary to the official narrative, Stalin never betrayed the west and stole Eastern Europe: Poland, Romania and the rest were
given to him in secret. Then Roosevelt lied to congress and to the world.
That American lie raised the curtain on the cold war.
The New Cold War
Like the Cold War, the new cold war was triggered by an American lie. It was a lie so duplicitous, so all encompassing, that
it would lead many Russians to see the agreement that ended the cold war as a devastating and humiliating deception that was really
intended to clear the way for the US to surround and finally defeat the Soviet Union. It was a lie that tilled the soil for all future
"Russian aggression."
At the close of the cold war, at a meeting held on February 9, 1990, George H.W. Bush's Secretary of State, James Baker, promised
Gorbachev that if NATO got Germany and Russia pulled its troops out of East Germany, NATO would not expand east of Germany and engulf
the former Soviet states. Gorbachev records in his memoirs that he agreed to Baker's terms "with the guarantee that NATO jurisdiction
or troops would not extend east of the current line." In Super-power Illusions , Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was the American
ambassador to Russia at the time and was present at the meeting, confirms Gorbachev's account, saying that it "coincides with my
notes of the conversation except that mine indicate that Baker added "not one inch." Matlock adds that Gorbachev was assured that
NATO would not move into Eastern Europe as the Warsaw Pact moved out, that "the understanding at Malta [was] that the United States
would not 'take advantage' of a Soviet military withdrawal from Eastern Europe." At the February 9 meeting, Baker assured Gorbachev
that "neither the President or I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place."
But the promise was not made just once, and it was not made just by the United States. The promise was made on two consecutive
days: first by the Americans and then by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. According to West German foreign ministry documents,
on February 10, 1990, the day after James Baker's promise, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher told his Soviet counterpart
Eduard Shevardnadze "'For us . . . one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.' And because the conversation revolved
mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: 'As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general.'"
A few days earlier, on January 31, 1990, Genscher had said in a major speech that there would not be "an expansion of NATO territory
to the east, in other words, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union."
Gorbachev says the promise was made not to expand NATO "as much as a thumb's width further to the east." Putin also says mourns
the broken promise, asking at a conference in Munich in February 2007, "What happened to the assurances our Western partners made
after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them."
Putin went on to remind his audience of the assurances by pointing out that the existence of the NATO promise is not just the
perception of him and Gorbachev. It was also the view of the NATO General Secretary at the time: "But I will allow myself to remind
this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. [Manfred] Woerner in Brussels on 17 May
1990. He said at the time that: 'The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet
Union a firm security guarantee.' Where are those guarantees?"
Recent scholarship supports the Russian version of the story. Russian expert and Professor of Russian and European Politics at
the University of Kent, Richard Sakwa says that "[r]ecent studies demonstrate that the commitment not to enlarge NATO covered the
whole former Soviet bloc and not just East Germany." And Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Politics at Princeton University and
of Russian Studies and History at New York University, adds that the National Security Archive has now published the actual
documents detailing what Gorbachev was promised. Published on December 12, 2017, the documents finally, and authoritatively,
reveal that "The truth, and the promises broken, are much more expansive than previously known: all of the Western powers involved
– the US, the UK, France, Germany itself – made the same promise to Gorbachev on multiple occasions and in various emphatic ways."
That key promise made to Gorbachev was shattered, first by President Clinton and then subsequently supported by every American
President: NATO engulfed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia
and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, most recently, Montenegro.
It was this shattered promise, this primal betrayal, this NATO expansion to Russia's borders that created the conditions and causes
of future conflicts and aggressions. When, in 2008, NATO promised Georgia and Ukraine eventual membership, Russia saw the threat
of NATO encroaching right to its borders. It is in Georgia and Ukraine that Russia felt it had to draw the line with NATO encroachment
into its core sphere of influence. Sakwa says that the war in Georgia was "the first war to stop NATO enlargement; Ukraine was the
second." What are often cited as acts of Russian aggression that helped maintain the new cold war are properly understood as acts
of Russian defense against US aggression that made a lie out of the promise that ended the Cold War.
When Clinton decided to break Bush's promise and betray Russia, George Kennen, father of the containment policy,
warned that NATO expansion would be
"the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-cold-war era." "Such a decision," he prophesied, "may be expected
to . . . restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations . . .."
The broken promise restored the cold war. Though it is the most significant root of the new cold war, it was not the first. There
was a prior broken promise, and this time the man who betrayed Russia was President H.W. Bush.
The end of the Cold War resulted from negotiations and not from any sort of military victory. Stephen Cohen says that "Presidents
Reagan and George H.W. Bush negotiated with the last Soviet Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, what they said was the end of the
Cold War on the shared, expressed premise that it was ending 'with no losers, only winners.'"
The end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union occurred so closely chronologically that it permitted the American mythologizers
to conflate them in the public imagination and create the doctrinal history in which the US defeat of the Soviet Union ended the
cold war. But the US did not defeat the Soviet Union. Gorbachev brought about what Sakwa calls a "self-willed disintegration of the
Soviet bloc." The Soviet Union came to an end, not by external force or pressure, but out of Gorbachev's recognition of the Soviet
Union's own self interest. Matlock flatly states that "pressure from governments outside the Soviet Union, whether from America or
Europe or anywhere else, had nothing to do with [the Soviet collapse]." "Cohen demythologizes the history by reinstating the chronological
order: Gorbachev negotiated the end of the cold war "well before the disintegration of the Soviet Union." The Cold War officially
ended well before the end of the Soviet Union with Gorbachev's December 7, 1988 address to the UN
Matlock says that "Gorbachev is right when he says that we all won the Cold War." He says that President Reagan would write in
his notes, "Let there be no talk of winners and losers." When Gorbachev compelled the countries of the Warsaw Pact to adopt reforms
like his perestroika in the Soviet Union and warmed them that the Soviet army would no longer be there to keep their communist
regimes in power, Matlock points out in Superpower Illusions that "Bush assured Gorbachev that the United States would not
claim victory if the Eastern Europeans were allowed to replace the Communist regimes that had been imposed on them." Both the reality
and the promise were that there was no winner of the Cold War: it was a negotiated peace that was in the interest of both countries.
When in 1992, during his losing re-election campaign, President Bush arrogantly boasted that "We won the Cold War!" he broke his
own promise to Gorbachev and helped plant the roots of the new cold war. "In psychological and political terms," Matlock says, "President
Bush planted a landmine under the future U.S.-Russian relationship" when he broke his promise and made that claim.
Bush's broken promise had two significant effects. Psychologically, it created the appearance in the Russian psyche that Gorbachev
had been tricked by America: it eroded trust in America and in the new peace. Politically, it created in the American psyche the
false idea that Russia was a defeated country whose sphere of interest did not need to be considered. Both these perceptions contributed
to the new cold war.
Not only was the broken promise of NATO expansion not the first broken American promise, it was also not the last. In 1997, when
President Clinton made the decision to expand NATO much more than an inch to the east, he at least signed the
Russia-NATO Founding Act , which explicitly
promised that as NATO expanded east, there would be no "permanent stationing of substantial combat forces." This obliterated American
promise planted the third root of the new cold war.
Since that third promise, NATO has, in the words of Stephen Cohen, built up its "permanent land, sea and air power near Russian
territory, along with missile-defense installations." US and NATO weapons and troops have butted right up against Russia's borders,
while anti-missile installations have surrounded it, leading to the feeling of betrayal in Russia and the fear of aggression. Among
the earliest moves of the Trump administration were the moving of NATO troops into Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and nearby Norway.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who offered the West Russia and cooperation in place of the Soviet Union and Cold War, was rewarded with lies,
broken promises and betrayal. That was the sowing of the first seeds of the new cold war. The second planting happened during the
Yeltsin years that followed. During this stage, the Russian people were betrayed because their hopes for democracy and for an economic
system compatible with the West were both destroyed by American intervention.
The goal, Matlock too gently explains, "had to be a shift of the bulk of the economy to private ownership." What transpired was
what Naomi Klein called in The Shock Doctrine "one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy in modern history."
The States allowed no gradual transition. Matlock says the "Western experts advised a clean break with the past and a transition
to private ownership without delay." But there was no legitimate private capital coming out of the communist system, so there was
no private money with which to privatize. So, there was only one place for the money to come. As Matlock explains, the urgent
transition allowed "privileged insiders[to] join the criminals who had been running a black market [and to] steal what they could,
as fast as they could." The sudden, uncompromising transition imposed on Russia by the United States enabled, according to Cohen,
"a small group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its
people into poverty and misery."
The rape of Russia was funded, overseen and ordered by the United States and handed over by President George H.W. Bush
to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Much of their advice, Matlock says generously, "was not only useless, but
sometimes actually damaging."
Sometimes damaging? In the first year, millions lost their entire life savings. Subsidy cuts meant that many Russians didn't get
paid at all. Klein says that by 1992, Russians were consuming 40% less than they were the year before, and one third of them had
suddenly sunk below the poverty line. The economic policies wrestled onto Russia by the US and the transition experts and international
development experts it funded and sent over led to, what Cohen calls, "the near ruination of Russia." Russia's reward for ending
the Cold War and joining the Western economic community was, in Cohen's words, "the worst economic depression in peacetime, the disintegration
of the highly professionalized Soviet middle class, mass poverty, plunging life expectancy [for men, it had fallen below sixty],
the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia's wealth, and more."
By the time Putin came to power in 2000, Cohen says, "some 75% of Russians were living in poverty." 75%! Millions and millions
of Russian lives were destroyed by the American welcoming of Russia into the global economic community.
But before Putin came to power, there was more Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was a necessity for Clinton and the United States because
Yeltsin was the pliable puppet who would continue to enforce the cruel economic transition. But to continue the interference in,
and betrayal of, the Russian people economically, it would now be necessary to interfere in and betray the Russian democracy.
In late 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin won a year of special powers from the Russian Parliament: for
one year, he was to be, in effect, the dictator of Russia to facilitate the midwifery of the birth of a democratic Russia. In March
of 1992, under pressure from the, by now, impoverished, devastated and discontented population, parliament repealed the dictatorial
powers it had granted him. Yeltsin responded by declaring a state of emergency, re-bestowing upon himself the repealed dictatorial
powers. Russia's Constitutional Court ruled that Yeltsin was acting outside the constitution. But the US sided – against the Russian
people and against the Russian Constitutional Court – with Yeltsin.
Intoxicated with American support, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament that had rescinded his powers and abolished the constitution
of which he was in violation. In a 636-2 vote, the Russian parliament impeached Yeltsin. But, President Clinton again sided with
Yeltsin against the Russian people and the Russian law, backed him and gave him $2.5 billion in aid. Clinton was blocking the Russian
people's choice of leaders.
Yeltsin took the money and sent police officers and elite paratroopers to surround the parliament building. Clinton "praised the
Russian President has (sic) having done 'quite well' in managing the standoff with the Russian Parliament," as The New York Timesreported at the time.
Clinton added that he thought "the United States and the free world ought to hang in there" with their support of Yeltsin against
his people, their constitution and their courts, and judged Yeltsin to be "on the right side of history."
On the right side of history and armed with machine guns and tanks, in October 1993, Yeltsin's troops opened fire on the crowd
of protesters, killing about 100 people before setting the Russian parliament building on fire. By the time the day was over, Yeltsin's
troops had killed approximately 500 people and wounded nearly 1,000. Still, Clinton stood with Yeltsin. He provided
ludicrous cover for Yeltsin's
massacre , claiming that "I don't see that he had any choice . If such a thing happened in the United States, you would have
expected me to take tough action against it." Clinton's Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, said that the US supported Yeltsin's
suspension of parliament in these "extraordinary times."
In 1996, elections were looming, and America's hegemonic dreams still needed Yeltsin in power. But it wasn't going to happen without
help. Yeltsin's popularity was nonexistent, and his approval rating was at about 6%. According to Cohen, Clinton's interference in
Russian politics, his "crusade" to "reform Russia," had by now become
official policy . And so, America
boldly interfered directly in Russian elections . Three American political consultants, receiving "direct assistance from Bill
Clinton's White House," secretly ran Yeltsin's reelection campaign.
As Time magazine
broke the story , "For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin's
campaign."
"Funded by the US government," Cohen reports, Americans "gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers,
drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin's reelection headquarters in 1996."
More incriminating still is that Richard Dresner, one of the three American consultants, maintained a direct line to Clinton's
Chief Strategist, Dick Morris. According to
reporting by Sean Guillory , in his book, Behind the Oval Office , Morris says that, with Clinton's approval, he received
weekly briefings from Dresner that he would give to Clinton. Based on those briefings, Clinton would then provide recommendations
to Dresner through Morris.
The US not only helped run Yeltsin's campaign, they helped pay for it. The US backed a $10.2 billion International Monetary Fund
(IMF) loan for Russia, the second-biggest loan the IMF had ever given. The New York Timesreported
that the loan was "expected to be helpful to President Boris N. Yeltsin in the presidential election in June." The Times explained
that the loan was "a vote of confidence" for Yeltsin who "has been lagging well behind in opinion polls" and added that the US Treasury
Secretary "welcomed the fund's decision."
Yeltsin won the election by 13%, and Time magazine's cover declared: "Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American
advisers helped Yeltsin win". Cohen reports that the US ambassador to Russia boasted that "without our leadership we would see a
considerably different Russia today." That's a confession of election interference.
Asserting its right as the unipolar victor of a Cold War it never won, betraying the central promise of the negotiated end
of the cold war by engulfing Russia's neighbors, arming those nations against its written and signed word and stealing all Russian
hope in capitalism and democracy by kidnapping and torturing Russian capitalism and democracy, the roots of the new cold war were
not planted by Russian lies and aggression, as the doctrinal Western version teaches, but by the American lies and aggression that
the fact checked, demythologized version of history reveals.
Ted Snider writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.
I'm no fan of Trump, but I would like to see a comparison of the total "US instigated
foreign fatalities" for his last 2 & 1/2 years compared with Obama's last 2 & 1/2
years, and what we guess the number would have been under Hillary. I'm sorry, but I think
Trump's number would be the lowest. In coming up with an explanation, I like to use the
"Reality Show Entertainment Value" theory which many have described. In this case, people
like to watch Trump bullshitting and freaking out the establishment, but they really don't
like watching dead bodies burn up or be carried away in body bags. That reality is not
attractive entertainment, despite the fantasy of it being bankable entertainment when
Tarantino flame throws a teenager at the end of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."
Obama and Hillary are not "reality TV fans." They are more immersed in their megalomaniac
view of themselves as world actors, and will willfully kill a few hundred thousand if they
think it advances their misguided objectives.
RussiaGate serves several very useful political purposes. First and foremost it supports
exorbitant financing of MIC at the expense of everybody else, and as such it will not be
abandoned, facts be dammed. In this sense Philip Giraldi is right. BTW intelligence agencies are
apart of MIc and they (and first of all Brennan's faction of CIA and FBI (counterintelligence))
are the main force in RussiaGate. US government also was instrumental for the same reasons: for
them maintaning EU hostility to Russia and preventing alliance of Russia and Germany is the
ancient geopolitical goal, the goal which contributed to flaring two world wars.
But in view of Trump appointment of a war criminal and rabid warmonger Bolton as well as his
track record of incompetence and impulsivity one can feel some sympathy to those who try to
impeach Trump ;-)
There are two persistent bogus narratives about Donald Trump that are, in fact, related. The
first is that his campaign and transition teams collaborated with the Russian government to
defeat Hillary Clinton. Even Robert Mueller, he of the famous fact-finding commission, had to
admit that that was not demonstrable. The only government that succeeded in collaborating with
the incoming Trumpsters was that of Israel, but Mueller forgot to mention that or even look
into it.
Nevertheless, Russia as a major contributing element in the Trump victory continues to be
cited in the mainstream media, seemingly whenever Trump is mentioned, as if it were
demonstrated fact. The fact is that whatever Russia did was miniscule and did not in any way
alter the outcome of the election. Similarly, allegations that the Kremlin will again be at it
in 2020 are essentially baseless fearmongering and are a reflection of the TDS desire to see
the president constantly diminished in any way possible.
The other narrative that will not die is the suggestion that Donald Trump is either a
Russian spy or is in some other, possibly psychological fashion, controlled by Russian
President Vladimir Putin. That spy story was first floated by several former senior CIA
officers who were closely tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign, apparently because they
believed they would benefit materially if she were elected.
Former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell was the most aggressive promoter of Trump as
Russian spy narrative. In August 2016, he wrote a New York Times
op-ed entitled "I Ran the CIA. Now I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton." Morell's story began
with the flat assertion that "Mrs. Clinton is highly qualified to be commander in chief. I
trust she will deliver on the most important duty of a president – keeping our nation
safe Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our
national security."
In his op-ed, Morell ran through the litany of then GOP candidate Trump's observed
personality and character failings while also citing his lack of experience, but he delivered
what he thought to be his most crushing blow when he introduced Vladimir Putin into the
discussion. Putin, it seems, a wily ex-career intelligence officer, is "trained to identify
vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the
primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence business, we
would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian
Federation."
How can one be both unwitting and a recruited agent? Some might roll their eyes at that bit
of hyperbole, but Morell, who was a top analyst at the Agency but never acquired or ran an
actual spy in his entire career, goes on to explain how Moscow is some kind of eternal enemy.
For Morell that meant that Trump's often stated willingness to work with Putin and the nuclear
armed state he headed was somehow the act of a Manchurian Candidate, seen by Morell as a
Russian interest, not an American one. So much for the presumed insider knowledge that came
from the man who "ran the CIA."
The most recent "former intelligence agents'" blast against Trump appeared in the
Business Insider last month in an
article entitled "US spies say Trump's G7 performance suggests he's either a 'Russian
asset' or a 'useful idiot' for Putin." The article cites a number of former government
officials, including several from the CIA and FBI, who claimed that Trump's participation at
the recent G7 summit in Biarritz France was marked by pandering to Putin and the Kremlin's
interests, including a push to re-include Russia in the G-7, from which it was expelled after
the annexation of Crimea.
One current anonymous FBI source cited in the article described the Trump performance as a
"new low," while a former senior Justice Department official, labeled Trump's behavior as
"directly out of the Putin playbook. We have a Russian asset sitting in the Oval Office." An
ex-CIA officer speculated that the president's "intent and odd personal fascination with
President Putin is worth serious scrutiny," concluding that the evidence is "overwhelming" that
Trump is a Russian asset, while other CIA and NSA veterans suggested that Trump might be
flattering Putin in exchange for future business concessions in Moscow.
Another recently retired FBI special agent opined that Trump was little more than "useful
idiot" for the Russians, though he added that it would not surprise him if there were also
Russian spies in Trump's inner circle.
The comments in the article are almost incoherent. They come from carefully selected current
and former government employees who suffer from an excess of TDS, or possibly pathological
paranoia, and hate the president for various reasons. What they are suggesting is little more
than speculation and not one of them was able to cite any actual evidence to support their
contentions. And, on the contrary, there is considerable evidence that points the other way.
The US-Russia relationship is at its lowest point ever according to some observers and that has
all been due to policies promoted by the Trump Administration to include the continuing threats
over Crimea, sanctions against numerous Russian officials, abrogation of existing arms
treaties, and the expansion of aggressive NATO activity right up to the borders with
Russia.
Just this past week, the United States
warned Russia against continuing its aerial support for the Syrian Army advance to
eliminate the last major terrorist pocket in Idlib province. Once against, Washington is
operating on the side of terrorists in Syria and against Russia, a conflict that the United
States entered into illegally in the first place. Either Donald Trump acting as "the Russian
agent" actually thinks threatening a Moscow that is pursuing its legitimate interests is a good
idea or the labeling of the president as a "Putin puppet" or "useful idiot" is seriously
misguided.
Repeating lies over and over makes old-fashioned Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda.
Repeating lies, then contradicting them; moving them from one government-paid think-tank to
another; footnoting a new lie to an older version; quoting policemen and gangsters saying
fatuities; adding slang and the words of pop songs -- this is still Goebbels-type but
stretched out and product-diversified to make its author more money. This is Mark Galeotti's
method .
####
The rest at the link and a deep dive on Galeotti himself.
The fact that Smolenkov purchased house on his name excludes his "extraction" to the USA. He probably legally emigrated
amazing some serious money in Russia
Notable quotes:
"... [Smolenkov] follows Ushakov back to Moscow, where he is a mid-level paper pusher doing administrative support for Ushakov. The CIA gets copies of Putin's itineraries that Smolenkov photographs. He is a big hit, but ultimately produces nothing of vital importance because all truly sensitive information is hand carried by principles, and never seen by administrative staff. Moreover Ushakov advises on international relations, and would not be privy to anything dealing with intelligence. Ushakov, as a long-serving Ambassador to the US, would be asked by Putin to opine on US politics. Smolenkov has access to Ushakov's post-meeting verbal comments, which he turns over to the CIA. ..."
"... The initial reports of the Steele Dossier appeared in June 2016. This coincided with John Brennan ordering Moscow Station to turn up the heat on Smolenkov to gain access to what Putin is thinking. But Smolenkov has no real direct access. Instead, he starts fabricating and/or exaggerating his access to convince his CIA handler that he is on the job and worth every penny he is being paid by US taxpayers. ..."
"... The information Smolenkov creates is passed to his CIA handler via the secure communications channel set up when he was signed up as a spy. But these reports are not handled in the normal way that sensitive human intelligence is treated at CIA Headquarters. Instead, the material is accepted at face value and not vetted to confirm its accuracy. My intel friend, citing a knowledgeable source, indicates that Smolenkov was not polygraphed. ..."
"... This raised red flags in the CIA Counterintelligence staff, especially when Brennan starts briefing the President using the information provided by Smolenkov. Brennan responds by locking most of the CIA's Russian experts out of the loop. Later, Brennan does the same thing with the National Intelligence Council, locking out the National Intelligence Officers who would normally oversee the production of a National Intelligence Assessment. In short, Brennan cooked the books using Smolenkov's intelligence, which had it been subjected to normal checks and balances would never have passed muster. It's Brennan's leaks to the press that eventually prompt the CIA to pull the plug on Smolenkov. ..."
"... The dossier attributed to Steele, it has seemed to me, showed every sign of being the proverbial 'camel produced by a committee.' ..."
"... Although I know that fabricating evidence and corrupting judicial proceedings is part of its supposed author's 'stock in trade', I think it is unclear whether he contributed all that much to the dossier. ..."
"... His prime role, I think, was to contribute a veneer of intelligence respectability to a farrago the actual origins of which could not be acknowledged, so it could be used in support of FISA applications and in briefings to journalists. ..."
"... Although it had started much earlier, the moving into 'high gear' of the conspiracy behind 'Russiagate, of which the dossier was one manifestation, and the phone 'digital forensics' produced by 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait another, were I think essentially panicky 'firefighting' operations. ..."
"... Part of this involved turning the conspiracy to prevent Trump being elected into a conspiracy to destabilise his Presidency and ensure he did not carry through on any of his 'anti-Borgist' agenda. ..."
A flood of news in the last 24 hours regarding Russiagate. I am referring specifically to
reports that the CIA ex-filtrated Oleg Smolenkov, a mid-level Russian Foreign Ministry
bureaucrat who reportedly hooked himself on the coat-tails of Yuri Ushakov, who was Ambassador
to the US from 1999 through 2008. He was recruited by the CIA (i.e., asked to collect
information and pass it to the U.S. Government via his or her case officer) at sometime during
this period. Smolenkov is being portrayed as a supposedly "sensitive" source. But if you read
either the
Washington Post or
New York Times accounts of this event there is not a lot of meat on this hamburger.
Regardless of the quality of his reporting, Smolenkov is the kind of recruited source that
looks good on paper and helps a CIA case officer get promoted but adds little to actual U.S.
intelligence on Russia. If you understood the CIA culture you would immediately recognize that
a case officer (CIA terminology for the operations officer tasked with identifying and
recruiting human sources) gets rewarded by recruiting persons who ostensibly will have access
to information the CIA has identified as a priority target. In this case, we're talking about
possible access to Vladimir Putin.
If you take time to read both articles you will quickly see that the real purpose of this
"information operation" is to paint Donald Trump as a security threat that must be stopped.
This is conveniently timed to assist Jerry Nadler's mission impossible to secure Trump's
impeachment. But I think there is another dynamic at play--these competing explanations for
what prompted the exfiltration of this CIA asset say more about the incompetence of Barack
Obama and his intel chiefs. John Brennan and Jim Clapper in particular.
A former intelligence officer and friend summarized the various press accounts as the
follows and offered his own insights in a note I received this morning:
[Smolenkov] follows Ushakov back to Moscow, where he is a mid-level paper pusher doing
administrative support for Ushakov. The CIA gets copies of Putin's itineraries that Smolenkov
photographs. He is a big hit, but ultimately produces nothing of vital importance because all
truly sensitive information is hand carried by principles, and never seen by administrative
staff. Moreover Ushakov advises on international relations, and would not be privy to anything
dealing with intelligence. Ushakov, as a long-serving Ambassador to the US, would be asked by
Putin to opine on US politics. Smolenkov has access to Ushakov's post-meeting verbal comments,
which he turns over to the CIA.
The initial reports of the Steele Dossier appeared in June 2016. This coincided with John
Brennan ordering Moscow Station to turn up the heat on Smolenkov to gain access to what Putin
is thinking. But Smolenkov has no real direct access. Instead, he starts fabricating and/or
exaggerating his access to convince his CIA handler that he is on the job and worth every penny
he is being paid by US taxpayers.
The information Smolenkov creates is passed to his CIA handler via the secure communications
channel set up when he was signed up as a spy. But these reports are not handled in the normal
way that sensitive human intelligence is treated at CIA Headquarters. Instead, the material is
accepted at face value and not vetted to confirm its accuracy. My intel friend, citing a
knowledgeable source, indicates that Smolenkov was not polygraphed.
This raised red flags in the CIA Counterintelligence staff, especially when Brennan starts
briefing the President using the information provided by Smolenkov. Brennan responds by locking
most of the CIA's Russian experts out of the loop. Later, Brennan does the same thing with the
National Intelligence Council, locking out the National Intelligence Officers who would
normally oversee the production of a National Intelligence Assessment. In short, Brennan cooked
the books using Smolenkov's intelligence, which had it been subjected to normal checks and
balances would never have passed muster. It's Brennan's leaks to the press that eventually
prompt the CIA to pull the plug on Smolenkov.
There is public evidence that Brennan not only cooked the books but that the leaks of this
supposedly "sensitive" intelligence occurred when he was Director and lying Jim Clapper was
Director of National Intelligence. If Oleg Smolenkov was really such a terrific source of
intel, then where are the reports? It is one thing to keep such reports close hold when the
source is still in place. But he has been out of danger for more than two years. Those reports
should have been shared with the Senate and House Intelligence committees. If there was actual
solid intelligence in those reports that corroborated the Steele Dossier, then that information
would have been leaked and widely circulated. This is Sherlock Holmes dog that did not
bark.Then we have the odd fact that this guy's name is all over the press and he is buying real
estate in true name. What the hell!! If the CIA genuinely believed that Mr. Smolenkov was in
danger he would not be walking around doing real estate deals in true name. In fact, the
sources for both the Washington Post and NY Times pieces push the propaganda that Smolenkov is
a sure fire target for a Russian retaliatory hit. Really? Then why publish his name and confirm
his location.
That leaves me with the alternative explanation--Smolenkov is a propaganda prop and is being
trotted out by Brennan to try to provide public pressure to prevent the disclosure of
intelligence that will show that the CIA and the NSA were coordinating and operating with
British intelligence to entrap and smear Donald Trump and members of his campaign.
I want you to take a close look at the two pieces on this exfiltration (i.e., Washington
Post and NY Times) and note the significant differences
REASON FOR THE EXFILTRATION :
Let's start with the Washington Post:
The exfiltration took place sometime after an Oval Office meeting in May 2017, when
President Trump
revealed highly classified counterterrorism information to the Russian foreign minister and
ambassador, said the current and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to
discuss the sensitive operation.
What was the information that Trump revealed? He was discussing intel that Israel passed
regarding ISIS in Syria. (See the Washington Post story
here .) Why would he talk to the Russians about that? Because every day, at least once a
day, U.S. and Russian military authorities are sharing intelligence with one another in a phone
call that originates from the U.S. Combined Air Operations Center (aka CAOC) at the Al Udeid
Air Force Base in Qatar. Trump's conversation not only was appropriate but fully within his
right to do so as Commander-in-Chief.
What the hell does this have to do with a sensitive source in Moscow? NOTHING!! Red
Herring.
The NY Times account is more detailed and damning of Obama instead of Trump:
But when intelligence officials revealed the severity of Russia's election interference with
unusual detail later that year, the news media picked up on details about the C.I.A.'s Kremlin
sources.
C.I.A. officials worried about safety made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to
extract the source from Russia. The situation grew more tense when the informant at first
refused, citing family concerns -- prompting consternation at C.I.A. headquarters and sowing
doubts among some American counterintelligence officials about the informant's trustworthiness.
But the C.I.A. pressed again months later after more media inquiries. This time, the informant
agreed. . . .
The decision to extract the informant was driven "in part" because of concerns that Mr.
Trump and his administration had mishandled delicate intelligence, CNN reported. But former
intelligence officials said there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the
source, and other current American officials insisted that media scrutiny of the agency's
sources alone was the impetus for the extraction. . . .
But the government had indicated that the source existed long before Mr. Trump took office,
first in formally accusing Russia of interference in October 2016 and then when intelligence
officials declassified parts of their assessment about the interference campaign for public
release in January 2017. News agencies, including NBC, began reporting around that time about
Mr. Putin's involvement in the election sabotage and on the C.I.A.'s possible sources for the
assessment.
Trump played no role whatsoever in releasing information that allegedly compromised this
so-called "golden boy" of Russian intelligence. The NY Times account makes it very clear that
the release of information while Obama was President, not Trump, is what put the source in
danger. Who leaked that information?
WHAT DID THE SOURCE KNOW AND WHAT DID HE TELL US?
But how valuable was this source really? What did he provide that was so enlightening? On
this point the New York Times and Washington Post are more in sync.
First the NY Times:
The Moscow informant was instrumental to the C.I.A.'s most explosive conclusion about
Russia's interference campaign: that President Vladimir V. Putin ordered and orchestrated it
himself . As the American government's best insight into the thinking of and orders from Mr.
Putin, the source was also key to the C.I.A.'s assessment that he affirmatively favored Donald
J. Trump's election and personally ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee
.
The Washington Post provides a more fulsome account:
U.S. officials had been concerned that Russian sources could be at risk of exposure as early
as the fall of 2016, when the Obama administration first confirmed that Russia had stolen and
publicly disclosed emails from the Democratic National Committee and the account of Hillary
Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta.
In October 2016, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence said in a joint statement that intelligence agencies were "confident that
the Russian Government directed" the hacking campaign. . . .
In January 2017, the Obama administration published a detailed assessment that unambiguously
laid the blame on the Kremlin, concluding that "Putin ordered an influence campaign" and that
Russia's goal was to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process and harm Clinton's chances
of winning.
"That's a pretty remarkable intelligence community product -- much more specific than what
you normally see," one U.S. official said. "It's very expected that potential U.S. intelligence
assets in Russia would be under a higher level of scrutiny by their own intelligence
services."
Sounds official. But there is no actual forensic or documentary evidence (by that I mean
actual corroborating intelligence reports) to back up these claims by our oxymoronically
christened intelligence community.
Vladimir Putin ordered the hack? Where is the report? It is either in a piece of intercepted
electronics communication and/or in a report derived from information provided by Mr.
Smolenkov. Where is it? Why has that not been shared in public? Don't have to worry about
exposing the source now. He is already in the open. What did he report? Answer--no direct
evidence.
Then there is the lie that the Russians hacked the DNC. They did not. Bill Binney, a former
Technical Director of the NSA, and I have written on this subject previously (
see here ) and there is no truth to this claim. Let me put it simply--if the DNC had been
hacked by the Russians using spearphising (this is claimed in the Robert Mueller report) then
the NSA would have collected those messages and would be able to show they were transferred to
the Russians. That did not happen.
This kind of chaotic leaking about an old intel op is symptomatic of panic. CIA is already
officially denying key parts of the story. My money is on John Brennan and Jim Clapper as the
likely impetus for these reports. They are hoping to paint Trump as a national security threat
and distract from the upcoming revelations from the DOJ Inspector General report on the FISA
warrants and, more threatening, the decisions that Prosecutor John Durham will take in deciding
to indict those who attempted to launch a coup against Donald Trump, a legitimately elected
President of the United States.
As I told LJ yesterday while he was writing this piece I have a slightly different theory
of this matter. It is true that CIA suffered for a long time from a dearth of talent in the
business of recruiting and running foreign clandestine HUMINT assets. This was caused by a
focus by several CIA Directors on technical collection means rather than espionage. This
policy drove many skilled case officers into retirement but the situation has much improved
in the last decade and it must be remembered that an agency only needs a few skilled case
officers with the right access to human targets to acquire some very fine and useful well
placed foreign agents (spies). IMO it is likely that CIA has/had several well placed Russian
assets in Moscow of whom Smolenkov was probably the least useful and the most expendable. It
may well be that Brennan was using the chicken feed provided by Smolenkov to fuel the
conspiracy run by him and Clapper against Trump's campaign and presidency, but Brennan left
office and then the CIA under other management was faced with the problem of a Russian
government which was told in the US press by implication that either the US had deep
penetrations of Russian diplomatic and intelligence communications or that there were deep
penetration moles in Moscow. that being the case it seems likely to me that the Russians
would have been beating the bushes looking for the moles. In that situation the CIA may have
decided to exfiltrate Smolenkov and his wife while leaving enough clues along the way that
would have indicated that he might have been THE MOLE. People do not need a lot of
encouragement to accept thoughts that they want to believe. A point in favor of this theory
is that once CIA had him in the States they quickly lost interest in him, terminated their
relationship with him and paid him his back pay and showed him the door. No new identity, no
resettlement, he was given none of that. Finding himself alone in a strange land, Smolenkov
then bought a house in the suburbs of Washington in HIS OWN NAME. Say what? That would not
have happened if CIA had maintained some sort of relationship with him. And then... someone
in CIA leaked the story of the exfiltration as movie plot to "a former senior intelligence
officer" who gives sit to Sciutto at CNN. Why would they do that? IMO they would have though
that having the story appear in the media would reinfocer Smolenkov's importance in Russian
minds. Well, pilgrims, Clapper fits the bill as the "former blah, blah". He is an employee of
CNN. CNN hates Trump and they quickly broadcast the story far and away. Unfortunately for CNN
the story immediately began to disintegrate even in the eyes of the NY Times. The
Smolenkov/Brennan affair will undoubtedly be part of the road that leads to doom for Brennan
and Clapper but the possible CIA story is equally interesting.
Sir;
The fact that Mr. Smolenkov is out and about in his new home in the West shows that he is a
small fish. As you say, if he was really in danger, he would be living somewhere in the West
now under a new name and maybe a new face. The fact that his 'handlers' allow this lax
security to happen is a sign of how unimportant he is. Unless, my inner cynic prompts, he is
destined to become one of the "honoured dead," perhaps by a false flag 'liquidation.'
How low will Clapper and Brennan et. al. go?
Thanks for keeping this matter front and centre.
So the son of Our Man in Havana went to Moscow. It would make a decent movies if it weren't
for the damage Brennan and company have done to us. Obama, of course, knew nothing......
I have lost hope that anyone--especially Brennan and Clapper--will be held accountable for
their attempt to "launch a coup" (as you put it).
Since their coup attempt ultimately failed, most people will be wanting just to move
on.
As an unimportant citizen liveing in a fly-over state, I feel very angry that my tax
dollars were wasted on these many government hearings and enormously expensive investigations
rather than on actually on governing and improving the governing of our country.
The least we should be able to expect is that people who live off our tax dollars should
be held accountable for all that wasted expense and for the lack of actual governing going on
in The House and The Senate. So many problems that need the attention of our elected
representative and Senators were ignored while elected representatives and representatives
got to capture the spotlight and try to become "media stars" while accomplishing nothing.
I also feel terrible that men have been sent to prison for seemingly nothing and have
their lives ruined for nothing but the chance of some to grand stand and claim they are
really doing the jobs they were sent to do. So many people with no real sense of honor or of
what is right and what is wrong.
Thanks, Larry. You have been consistently one of the good guys. (And I bet you are happy
now that Yosemite Sam Bolton is no longer advising the POTUS.)
"The fact that his 'handlers' allow this lax security to happen is a sign of how unimportant
he is."
It indicates to me that he and any handlers believe that the Russians are OK with it. That
could be for various reasons. But relying on Russian tolerance because he is a "small fish"
seems incredibly trusting. Neither fled agents nor their handlers are known for their
trusting natures. They have had some reasons stronger than that for their unconcern. Whether
those reasons will survive publicity remains to be seen.
Are those CIA agents as stupid, naive & incompetent as you paint them to be?
If that's the case our country is in real danger! You are. Pro Trump
and, you are basically defending him, but Putin do own Donald Trump,whether you like it or
not!
My question is: why did they push this report now? Any way you cut it, the Times and Post are
just providing some trivia and drivel. Without substance, they can accomplish nothing and
substance has been what's been missing all along.
I doubt that Democrats, having been burned once, are eager to explore Brennan's smoke and
mirrors again. It's never been a big concern to voters. And unless Brennan & Co. can do
better than this superficial stuff, voters are never going to be concerned.
Maybe the Times and Post just felt sorry for Brennan, who's been off barking at the moon
for years now.
...Smolenkov is a propaganda prop and is being trotted out by Brennan to try to provide
public pressure to prevent the disclosure of intelligence that will show that the CIA and the
NSA were coordinating and operating with British intelligence to entrap and smear Donald
Trump and members of his campaign...
Well said. Thank you for following this closely and shining the light! You are an amazing
American patriot, Mr. Larry C. Johnson. A glass in your honor!
IMO this scenario is the most plausible, Thanks for the sanity check. That said, given the
desperation by these Sorcerer's Apprentices, I would be on the lookout for Mr. Smolenkov lest
he be 'Skirpal-ed' in the coming weeks.
This whole story convinces now more than ever before that there is a high level spy/mole in
the us administration and intelligence community.The only question is it spying for russia or
china or both.Just a beautiful thing to watch.Those knickers,must surely be in a knot by
now.
Even rocketman had a giggle.
How many CIA Assets have been exposed..Tortured and Murdered During The Barrack Obama
Reign...In May..2014 HE Paid a Surprise Visit to Afghanastan..His White House Bureau Chief
Sent out an email to Reporters with a List of Who would meet With President Obama..It
Contained the NAME of the CIA...Chief of Station in Kabul...Now that is REAL MESSY..
Having been away from base, I have not been able to comment on some very fascinating
recent posts.
Both your recent pieces, and Robert Willman's most helpful update on the state of play
relating to the unraveling of the frame-up against Michael Flynn, have provided a lot to chew
over.
Among other things, they have made me think further about the 302s recording the
interviews with Bruce Ohr produced by Joseph Pientka – a character about whom I think
we need to know more.
On reflection, I think that the picture that emerges of Ohr as an incurious and gullible
nitwit, swallowing whole bucket loads of 'horse manure' fed him by Christopher Steele and
Glenn Simpson, may be a carefully – indeed maybe cunningly – crafted fiction.
The interpretation your former intelligence officer friend puts on the Smolenkov affair,
and also some of what Sidney Powell has to say in the ''Motion to Compel' on behalf of Flynn,
both 'mesh' with what I have long suspected.
The dossier attributed to Steele, it has seemed to me, showed every sign of being the
proverbial 'camel produced by a committee.'
Although I know that fabricating evidence and corrupting judicial proceedings is part of
its supposed author's 'stock in trade', I think it is unclear whether he contributed all that
much to the dossier.
His prime role, I think, was to contribute a veneer of intelligence respectability to a
farrago the actual origins of which could not be acknowledged, so it could be used in support
of FISA applications and in briefings to journalists.
Although it had started much earlier, the moving into 'high gear' of the conspiracy behind
'Russiagate, of which the dossier was one manifestation, and the phone 'digital forensics'
produced by 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait another, were I think
essentially panicky 'firefighting' operations.
They are likely to have been responses, first, to the realisation that material leaked
from the DNC was going to be published by WikiLeaks, and then the discovery, probably
significantly later, that the source was Seth Rich, and his subsequent murder.
Although the operation to divert responsibility to the Russians which then became
necessary was strikingly successful, it did not have the expected result of saving Hillary
Clinton from defeat.
What I then think may have emerged was a two-pronged strategy.
Part of this involved turning the conspiracy to prevent Trump being elected into a
conspiracy to destabilise his Presidency and ensure he did not carry through on any of his
'anti-Borgist' agenda.
In different ways, both the framing of Flynn, and the final memorandum in the dossier,
dated 13 December 2016, were part of this strategy.
Also required however was another 'insurance policy' – which was what the Bruce Ohr
302s were intended to provide.
The purpose of this was to have 'evidence' in place, should the first prong of the
strategy run into problems, to sustain the case that people in the FBI and DOJ, and Bruce and
Nellie Ohr in particular, were not co-conspirators with Steele and Simpson, but their
gullible dupes.
This brings me to an irony. Some people have tried to replace the 'narrative' in which
Steele was an heroic exposer of a Russian plot to destroy American democracy by an
alternative in which he was the gullible 'patsy' of just such a plot.
In fact there is one strand, and one strand only, in the dossier which smells strongly to
me of FSB-orchestrated disinformation.
Some of the material on Russian cyber operations, including critically the suggestions
about the involvement of Aleksej Gubarev and his company XBT which provoked legal action by
these against BuzzFeed and Steele, look to me as though they could come from sources in the
FSB.
But, if this is so, the likely conduit is not through Steele, but from FSB to FBI cyber
people.
How precisely this worked is unclear, but I cannot quite get rid of the suspicion that
Major Dmitri Dokuchaev just might be serving out his sentence for treason in a comfortable
flat somewhere above the Black Sea. Indeed, I can imagine a lecture to FSB trainees on how to
make 'patsies' of people like the Ohrs.
If this is so, however, it mat also be the case that these are attempting to make
'patsies' of Steele and Simpson.
David Warner Mathisen definitely know what he is talking about due to his long military career... Freefall speed
is documented and is an embarrassment to the official story, because freefall is impossible for a naturally
collapsing building.
Now we need to dig into the role of Larry Silverstein in the
Building 7 collapse.
Notable quotes:
"... Below is a video showing several film sequences taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen years ago on September 11, 2001. ..."
"... The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative" promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004. ..."
"... Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7 ..."
"... This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001. ..."
"... its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed, as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an interview here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview. ..."
"... the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building ..."
"... Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states). ..."
"... Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day. ..."
"... In addition to these interviews and the Dig Within blog of Kevin Ryan, I would also strongly recommend everybody read the article by Dr. Gary G. Kohls entitled " Why Do Good People Become Silent About the Documented Facts that Disprove the Official 9/11 Narrative? " which was published on Global Research a few days ago, on September 6, 2019. ..."
"... on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept what we already know. ..."
"... Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see here for example, and also here . ..."
"... The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare: ..."
"... David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University. ..."
Below is a video showing several film sequences
taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen
years ago on September 11, 2001.
The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative"
promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004.
Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska
published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7, which was not hit by any airplane
on September 11, 2001, and concluded that fires could not possibly have caused the collapse of that 47-story steel-frame building
-- rather, the collapse seen could have only been caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every support column (43 in number).
This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue
to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001.
Various individuals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to argue that the collapse of Building
7 was slower than freefall speed, but its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed,
as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an
interview
here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview.
Although the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all
the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to
prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building prior to the flight of the aircraft into the Twin Towers of the World
Trade Center (Buildings One and Two), as well as the power to cover up the evidence of this criminal activity and to deflect questioning
by government agencies and suppress the story in the mainstream news, the collapse of Building 7 is by no means the only evidence
which points to the same conclusion.
Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly
during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting
the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states).
However, eighteen years later there is simply no excuse anymore -- except for the fact that the ramifications of the admission
that the official story is a flagrant fraud and a lie are so distressing that many people cannot actually bring themselves to consciously
admit what they in fact already know subconsciously.
For additional evidence, I strongly recommend the work of the indefatigable Kevin Robert Ryan , whose blog at Dig Within should be required reading for every man and woman in the united
states -- as well as those in the rest of the world, since the ramifications of the murders of innocent men, women and children on
September 11, 2001 have led to the murders of literally millions of other innocent men, women and children around the world since
that day, and the consequences of the failure to absorb the truth of what actually took place, and the consequences of the
failure to address the lies that are built upon the fraudulent explanation of what took place on September 11, continue to
negatively impact men and women everywhere on our planet.
Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan
but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters
to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a
jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless
the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day.
I would also strongly recommend listening very carefully to the series of five interviews with Kevin Ryan on Guns and Butter with Bonnie Faulkner, which can be found in the
Guns and Butterpodcast archive here . These interviews,
from 2013, are numbered 287, 288, 289, 290, and 291 in the archive.
I would in fact recommend listening to nearly every interview in that archive of Bonnie Faulkner's show, even though I do not
of course agree with every single guest nor with every single view expressed in every single interview. Indeed, if you carefully
read Kevin Ryan's blog which was linked above, you will find a
blog post by Kevin Ryan dated June 24, 2018 in which he
explicitly names James Fetzer along with Judy Woods as likely disinformation agents working to discredit and divert the efforts of
9/11 researchers. James Fetzer appears on Guns and Butter several times in the archived interview page linked above.
That article contains a number of stunning quotations about the ongoing failure to address the now-obvious lies we are being told
about the attacks of September 11. One of these quotations, by astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996), is particularly noteworthy --
even though I certainly do not agree with everything Carl Sagan ever said or wrote. Regarding our propensity to refuse to acknowledge
what we already know deep down to be true, Carl Sagan said:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even
to ourselves, that we've been taken.
This quotation is from Sagan's 1995 text, The Demon-Haunted World (with which I have points of disagreement, but which
is extremely valuable for that quotation alone, and which I might suggest turning around on some of the points that Sagan was arguing
as well, as a cautionary warning to those who have accepted too wholeheartedly some of Sagan's teachings and opinions).
This quotation shows that on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept
what we already know. This internal division is actually addressed in the world's ancient myths, which consistently illustrate that
our egoic mind often refuses to acknowledge the higher wisdom we have available to us through the reality of our authentic self,
sometimes called our Higher Self. Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character
of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see
here for example,
and also here .
The important author Peter Kingsley has noted that in ancient myth, the role of the prophet was to bring awareness and acknowledgement
of that which the egoic mind refuses to see -- which is consistent with the observation that it is through our authentic self (which
already knows) that we have access to the realm of the gods. In the Iliad, for example, Dr. Kingsley notes that Apollo sends disaster
upon the Achaean forces until the prophet Calchas reveals the source of the god's anger: Agamemnon's refusal to free the young woman
Chryseis, whom Agamemnon has seized in the course of the fighting during the Trojan War, and who is the daughter of a priest of Apollo.
Until Agamemnon atones for this insult to the god, Apollo will continue to visit destruction upon those following Agamemnon.
Until we acknowledge and correct what our Higher Self already knows to be the problem, we ourselves will be out of step with the
divine realm.
If we look the other way at the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children on September 11, 2001, and deliberately
refuse to see the truth that we already know deep down in our subconscious, then we will face the displeasure of the Invisible Realm.
Just as we are shown in the ancient myths, the truth must be acknowledged and admitted, and then the wrong that has been done must
be corrected.
In the case of the mass murder perpetrated on September 11, eighteen years ago, that admission requires us to face the fact that
the "terrorists" who were blamed for that attack were not the actual terrorists that we need to be focusing on.
Please note that I am very careful not to say that "the government" is the source of the problem: I would argue that the government
is the lawful expression of the will of the people and that the government, rightly understood, is exactly what these criminal perpetrators
actually fear the most, if the people ever become aware of what is going on. The government, which is established by the Constitution,
forbids the perpetration of murder upon innocent men, women and children in order to initiate wars of aggression against countries
that never invaded or attacked us (under the false pretense that they did so). Those who do so are actually opposed to our government
under the Constitution and can be dealt with within the framework of the law as established by the Constitution, which establishes
a very clear penalty for treason.
When the people acknowledge and admit the complete bankruptcy of the lie we have been told about the attacks of September 11,
the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate repeal and dismantling of the so-called "USA PATRIOT Act" which was
enacted in the weeks immediately following September 11, 2001 and which clearly violates the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Additionally, the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate cessation of the military operations which were
initiated based upon the fraudulent narrative of the attacks of that day, and which have led to invasion and overthrow of the nations
that were falsely blamed as being the perpetrators of those attacks and the seizure of their natural resources.
The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent
pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media
for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing
the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That human right has been grievously trampled upon under the false description of what actually took place during the September
11 attacks. Numerous technology companies have been allowed and even encouraged (and paid, with public moneys) to create technologies
which flagrantly and shamelessly violate "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" and
which track their every move and even enable secret eavesdropping upon their conversation and the secret capture of video within
their homes and private settings, without any probable cause whatsoever.
When we admit and acknowledge that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, which has been falsely used as a supposed
justification for the violation of these human rights (with complete disregard for the supreme law of the land as established in
the Constitution), then we will also demand the immediate cessation of any such intrusion upon the right of the people to "be secure
in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" -- including the cessation of any business models which involve spying on men and
women.
Companies which cannot find a business model that does not violate the Bill of Rights should lose their corporate charter and
the privilege of limited liability, which are extended to them by the people (through the government of the people, by the people
and for the people) only upon the condition that their behavior as corporations do not violate the inherent rights of men and women
as acknowledged in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
It is well beyond the time when we must acknowledge and admit that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, 2001
-- and that we continue to be lied to about the events of that awful day. September 11, 2001 is in fact only one such event in a
long history which stretches back prior to 2001, to other events which should have awakened the people to the presence of a very
powerful and very dangerous criminal cabal acting in direct contravention to the Constitution long before we ever got to 2001 --
but the events of September 11 are so blatant, so violent, and so full of evidence which contradicts the fraudulent narrative that
they actually cannot be believed by anyone who spends even the slightest amount of time looking at that evidence.
Indeed, we already know deep down that we have been bamboozled by the lie of the so-called "official narrative" of September 11.
But until we admit to ourselves and acknowledge to others that we've ignored the truth that we already know, then the bamboozle
still has us .
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog
site, internet forums. etc.
David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne
Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster
Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature
and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.
David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne
Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster
Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature
and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.
"... So, this fully-spun story, apparently a mix of fact and fiction, arises at this moment to prop up the Russia-leaked-email hoax? ..."
"... If that's the case, does that mean this story's "authors" release it now to keep at least part of the Russia hoax alive as the Flynn case plods toward charges being dropped or because the Concord case is turning into a cluster f*k? Maybe someone is worried about the DNC-insider-leaked-email story breaking out? We need to talk about Rich? ..."
"... if I am wrong in supposing that a senior Chekist would never, as a question of policy, have been allowed a passport for foreign travel for him and his family. ..."
"... If Oleg Smolenkov reported allegedly "valuable" insider information about Russia's interference in US elections, as they say first hand, then why did Mueller's investigation fail? ..."
"... The New York Times story resurrects the Russia collusion hoax. This time the proof comes from Oleg Smolenkov. The story is identical to what the Steele dossier claimed: Putin personally directed a campaign to interfere in the US presidential elections. ..."
"... Every part of Steele narrative has already been shown to be a hoax and a fabrication. What proves that the Steele dossier is a work of fiction is that it is written from a fly-on-the-wall point of view. Only a person who was sitting in the same room with Putin when he had secret meetings could have written it. So how many moles did the West have sitting on Putin's desk? It seems like the CIA mole and Steele's secret source are one and the same source. But if Oleg Smolenkov was CIA's most tightly guarded secret, how did the information end up in Steele's dossier? ..."
"... Larry Johnson just posted about this on SST, and his take seems much more plausible: Desperation on the part of Clapper and his cabal as the chickens are coming home to roost. This story is chock full of holes, and the media hackery is disintegrating under its own weight. ..."
"... Perhaps someone should advise Smolenskov to stay away from park benches after eating seafood and to not touch doorknob's etc. ..."
"... "For those curious about what's going on with this bizarre Russia 'spy' story: Burr/Durham know Steele was fed obvious disinformation, they know who originated it, they know who peddled it, and it's just a matter of rounding up the whole network." ..."
"... In his third entry, he poses the following question: "So the only two unanswered questions about this particular pre-emptive leak campaign from the usual Russia hoax suspects are 1) why now, and 2) what specific event or official revelation are they trying to get ahead of?" ..."
"... Why the CIA would allow such a spy, once extradited, to live under his real name is beyond me. ..."
"... Because this man has nothing to do with "spies", "secrets" and "special services". He is an ordinary civilian, a former official from Russia. Many Russian ex- lives in abroad, including high-ranking persons. Smolenkov of course had no access to any "secrets", and had no access to entourage of the Russian president. ..."
"... That's the end of Smolenkov's anonymous quiet comfortable lifesyle. It doesn't send out a very reassuring message - that the CIA can publicly expose someone it considers a very useful asset. There must be a good reason why they threw Smolenkov under the bus in that way. ..."
"... It must be a very nice house. A 3-ish acre lot in that neighborhood has an assessment of $140k for the land. But the assessment for improvements for this house is over $900k while others in the neighborhood are more in the $600k range. I was looking at the aerial photos and trying to pick out what seem to be other nice houses, including ones with swimming pools which this one lacks, and which also have big garages (this one has 4 car garage apparently), but couldn't find a neighbor above an assessment in the $600k's. ..."
"... The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister. ..."
"... My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch. He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity. ..."
"... Sergei Skripal was not just an turncoat for UK he also worked for Estonian intelligence. It seems to me the poisoning fits better as an Estonian job, to keep relations in Europe with Russia in very bad shape. It's easy to say that the Russians wouldn't be so incompetent, also goes for the UK, which could have come up with something more compelling if they pre planned it as false flag. ..."
"... Joe Mifsud and Claire Smith of MI6, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, especially FBI special agent Joseph Pientka plus that BIG shot FBI agent (who's name I forget) are the names to remember. Why aren't Misud and Smith extradited to face inquiry? ..."
"... So what is emerging? is Mueller due in court to prosecute the Russian ad agency that has fully shirt fronted him? Is Flynn business about to upend a steaming pot of turds over Mueller and other heads. Is Seth Rich about to be posthumously knighted by some New York monarch for his role in smashing the HRC cart in public? Or is Julian Assange about to be put through more torture for being a journalist and publisher? ..."
And then there is the possibility that CIA extracted a minor source to divert attention
from someone or someones who remain(s) in place. The open purchase of a house in the outer
suburbs of Washington by the extracted would seem to support the possibility that this is
all a diversion. The narrative continues that "a former senior intelligence official" told
Sciutto, an Obama man, at CNN of all this. Clapper is "a former senior intelligence
official" and a CNN "contributor" (employee) is he not? He is dumb enough to have had this
story planted on him.
Double games, triple games ... Spies are so confusing ...
thanks b... i agree about your comment on pls comment - double / triple and etc games can be
played with spies... what seems clear to me is that some in the cia-msm want to frame trump..
this one feel apart fairly quickly... the frame up of russia over skripal has never been
addressed by the usa.. in fact, most folks - using ew as an example - are still drinking the
russia done it koolaid 24/7..
james , Sep 10 2019 18:14 utc |
3casey , Sep 10 2019 18:18 utc |
4
So, this fully-spun story, apparently a mix of fact and fiction, arises at this moment to
prop up the Russia-leaked-email hoax?
If that's the case, does that mean this story's "authors" release it now to keep at least
part of the Russia hoax alive as the Flynn case plods toward charges being dropped or because
the Concord case is turning into a cluster f*k? Maybe someone is worried about the
DNC-insider-leaked-email story breaking out? We need to talk about Rich?
Funny about Lang and his crew. So much practical experience and yet they would make an
interesting case study of extreme psychological compartmentalization as a means of
denial.
Lucky Oleg & Antonina. In Oz a 760 square metre house used be known as having an area of
81 squares (8,172 square feet. In well-maintained condition such a 3-storey house anywhere in
Oz would cost between A$2.5 million and A$3.5 million. Being in AmeriKKA Oleg's house
probably has a basement too. That's another $150,000 minimum if it's damp-proof and
ventilated.
Nice networking by 4 BigLie Media outlets to make certain Russia knows where this man and his
family reside. Maybe it's for an Outlaw US Empire sequel to MI-6's Novochock BigLie to be
sprung as the election heats up. If I were the Smolenskovs, I'd demand an immediate identity
change, sell ASAP and move to Idaho.
If Skripal could live safely under his own name I guess this guy could too. It just makes it
easier for the US to get him in their own time.
I don't really see this guy served any purpose until he was outed. Just a late effort to
pretend that Russiagate had any credibility.
I wish that there was a resident Russian on this site, as there is on Craig Murray's.
That person could then tell me if I am wrong in supposing that a senior Chekist would
never, as a question of policy, have been allowed a passport for foreign travel for him and
his family.
If Oleg Smolenkov reported allegedly "valuable" insider information about Russia's
interference in US elections, as they say first hand, then why did Mueller's investigation
fail?
The New York Times story resurrects the
Russia collusion hoax. This time the proof comes from Oleg Smolenkov. The story is identical
to what the Steele dossier claimed: Putin personally directed a campaign to interfere in the
US presidential elections.
Every part of Steele narrative has already been shown to be a hoax and a fabrication. What
proves that the Steele dossier is a work of fiction is that it is written from a
fly-on-the-wall point of view. Only a person who was sitting in the same room with Putin when
he had secret meetings could have written it. So how many moles did the West have sitting on
Putin's desk? It seems like the CIA mole and Steele's secret source are one and the same
source. But if Oleg Smolenkov was CIA's most tightly guarded secret, how did the information
end up in Steele's dossier?
Larry Johnson just posted about this on SST, and his take seems much more plausible:
Desperation on the part of Clapper and his cabal as the chickens are coming home to roost.
This story is chock full of holes, and the media hackery is disintegrating under its own
weight.
> Obama administration .... Russia had stolen .... Democratic National Committee and .....
John Podesta.
So we have to allege that Podesta's laptop between naked underage girls photos had list of
CIA secret agents in Russian government? What else rid it contain and where did Podesta stole
those lists?
Same question about Paki-managed DNC server. Was managing CIA agents in foreign
governments outsourced to DNC or what?
"Once in the lifetime of yer townfolk! F..en circus! Imbecile clowns! Degenerate tamers!
Deformed strongmen! Dysfunctional acrobats! Don't miss out!"
@2
Diversion is one of the three possibilities that I can think of:
1) clan wars within US special services, particularly in view of the 2020 elections.
2) diversion (as suggested by col. Pat Lang)
3) preparation of the ground to make this guy a "sacrificial lamb" like Scripal, to avoid
any new rapprochement between the US and Russia after the end of the Muller report.
@11 roy g.. this is what i said @3 "what seems clear to me is that some in the cia-msm want
to frame trump.. this one feel apart fairly quickly..." for others who want to read larry
johnsons latest at sst
here...
Interesting
Tweet thread by a Sean M Davis has 5 entries and almost 1000 retweets beginning with
this:
"For those curious about what's going on with this bizarre Russia 'spy' story: Burr/Durham
know Steele was fed obvious disinformation, they know who originated it, they know who
peddled it, and it's just a matter of rounding up the whole network."
In his third entry, he poses the following question: "So the only two unanswered questions about this particular pre-emptive leak campaign from
the usual Russia hoax suspects are 1) why now, and 2) what specific event or official
revelation are they trying to get ahead of?"
The easy answer is the story itself is enough of a distraction as the 1000 retweets
show.
I tend to agree with Larry Johnson (at Pat Lang's) that this guy wasn't that useful back
then. He might have become more useful, had he stayed at the Kremlin and rose further up the
ladder, granted; or Obama's top guys assumed he wouldn't and it wasn't an issue to risk to
burn him.
I tend to agree with Larry Johnson (at Pat Lang's) that this guy wasn't that useful back
then. He might have become more useful, had he stayed at the Kremlin and rose further up the
ladder, granted; or Obama's top guys assumed he wouldn't and it wasn't an issue to risk to
burn him.
This whole story is entirely in the spirit of Hollywood comics.
I had a good laugh when I saw the news about the "valuable spy successfully extracted from
Russia".
Here are some reasons why this is fake/disinformation:
1) The news was published by CNN. I think there's no need to explain whether it is worth taking seriously the "sensations"
published by news outlets with a reputation like CNN.
2) Sorry, but you must be a complete idiot (in the medical sense) to openly declare in the
media that you had a "very valuable spy" in the immediate circle of the president of the
Russian Federation (or any other country). Just because in this way you, by your own hands,
are giving your opponent the reason to "strengthen control", conduct checks and identify
those [other] people who might be able to work for you for a long time and be useful. When this really takes place in real life (the presence of a spy of the highest rank,
close to the head of state), then this becomes public only after many years/decades, when the
'Top Secret' stamp is removed from the documents, you know.
3) V.Putin is a former intelligence officer. To put it mildly, it is very naive to assume
that the presence of an "American spy" (close to Putin) would not be known to a person with
Putin's experience/knowledge/capacity.
4) To be a spy, a member of the inner circle of the President of Russia (or any other
country) and not to be exposed, one need to have extraordinary abilities and competencies.
This is the highest class. In recent years, it seems only the lazy one did not notice and did
not note the monstrous degradation of the American political class. These people do not know
how to behave in a civilized society, do not have the traditions and culture of diplomacy and
communication. The situation is similar in the American defense industry. With this level of decline in the competence of the American elite (political, military,
etc.), to assume that they have such a ultra-high-class spy is at least very strange.
5) The fact that the "valuable spy" in the inner circle of the Russian president is pure
CNN fiction is confirmed in practice. What I mean:
- If Smolenkov is really a "very valuable spy" and had access to "secrets," it's rather
strange that he didn't tell the CIA, for example, about the Crimean operation of the Russian
Federation in 2014. Russia's actions then began for the United States (and not only for the
United States, by the way) a complete surprise. This is some really strange "valuable spy"
who did not know anything about the intentions and actions of the Russian leadership in the
spring of 2014.
- If Smolenkov is really a "very valuable spy," and had access to "secrets," the fact that
he knew nothing and did not tell the CIA about Russia's plans to launch the Syrian campaign
in September 2015 looks unusually strange. Just to remind that the actions of Russia then
became a complete surprise for the United States. They did not know anything about this and
did not expect such a development of events. Within a month before the official start of the
Syrian campaign, Russia transferred equipment and weapons to Syria. This remained a secret
for all intelligence services in the world, no one noticed anything. Even Israel, located in
close proximity to Syria, made a "discovery" about the presence of the Russian military there
only 2 days before the start of Russia's actions in the SAR. A rather strange "valuable spy"
who was completely ignorant of Russia's plans/actions in the Syrian direction.
- If Smolenkov is really a "very valuable spy" and had access to "secrets", it is very
strange that he did not know anything and did not inform the CIA about the development by
Russia of the latest weapons presented by President Putin in the spring of 2018. The
presentation of the latest models of Russian weapons was a real shock for the United States,
and I remember that at first the Americans, smiling, called all this "cartoons." Now they no
longer laugh. The development of these weapons was carried out for many years. It's somehow
strange that a "very valuable spy" never found out about it.
6) Serious Russian experts unequivocally spoke out that all this was fake and that
Smolenkov certainly could not be a spy. In particular, Armen Gasparyan, one of the leading Russian political scientists,
historian, writer (incidentally, who wrote several books on intelligence), spoke quite fully
about this in his recent commentary .
Why the CIA would allow such a spy, once extradited, to live under his real name is
beyond me.
Because this man has nothing to do with "spies", "secrets" and "special services". He is
an ordinary civilian, a former official from Russia. Many Russian ex- lives in abroad,
including high-ranking persons. Smolenkov of course had no access to any "secrets", and had
no access to entourage of the Russian president.
An attempt to present Smolenkov as a "valuable spy" from exactly the same series as the
clumsy attempt by the British government to introduce two Russian civilians (Ruslan Boshirov
and Alexander Petrov) as "GRU agents".
It is hardly reasonable to take this seriously.
That's the end of Smolenkov's anonymous quiet comfortable lifesyle. It doesn't send out a
very reassuring message - that the CIA can publicly expose someone it considers a very useful
asset. There must be a good reason why they threw Smolenkov under the bus in that way.
This guy could not possibly be what the CIS and media are presenting to be. Living under his
own name in Virginia? Could it be any simpler to find him? The Russians do have search
engines, too.
B may be right that this is a double or triple play, but find it hard to see the benefits to
pretending to have had a deep mole in the Kremlin. I also find it implausible that any
Russsian diplomat who has been stationed in DC would not be viewed as potentially
compromised. It would be relatively simple to feed him bullshit and see what filters into DC.
Many thoughtful comments here. My take, as a fan of Le Carre and Mad Magazine's Spy vs Spy
cartoon, is that USA's spy was discovered and turned. He was dismissed, employed somewhere
close by, and fed chicken feed for his CIA masters. When they realized he was a failure, the
CIA got him and his family out with the possible object of turning him into a propaganda
subject. Of course he would have to die first, but CIA could make it look like the Russians
did it.
I'm generally interested in how spies are referred to in corporate media stories.
For instance, we were told constantly that Skirpal was a 'Russian Spy'. This ran contrary
to the normal usage, which would have referred to a British Spy within the Russian government
as a 'British Spy'. If that signaled a general change in language, then Solemenkov, would
also be referred to as a Russian Spy and not as an American Spy. He shares with Skirpal
having a Russian nationality, while he was spying for the Americans. Of course, when the
propagandists are going for an emotional reaction, they can be relied on to use whichever
helps tilt the story in their direction.
Historically, spy agencies aren't really known for their great humanity in pulling out a spy
who is in a useful position just because they fear for that spy's safety. The more common
course of action for Spy Bosses is to keep the spy in place, keep pushing for more, more,
more information from the spy, before perhaps holding a brief moment of silence over their
spy ending up in prison.
Maybe it's for an Outlaw US Empire sequel to MI-6's Novochock BigLie to be sprung as the
election heats up.
That's what I thought as well. Why would the MSM hype a spy other than establishing his
persona in the public eye, to be followed by some event later? Either he's a double agent and
they will kill him and blame it on Russia, or he is not a double agent and they will use him
to announce some "strong evidence" of Trump–Russia connection.
Part of the intention of this farce is to give the CIA and the CIA News Network (CNN) the
opportunity to pretend that they are not knotted together like mating dogs (I leave it up to
the reader to guess which one is the bitch).
1. Smolenkov was the source of the Steele Report, in other words he received a substantial
payment to come up with fictional "dirt" on Trump.
2. With all the publicity about the Steele report, Brennan/Obama/etc. were scared (and
with good reason) that the Russians would figure out that Smolenkov was the source and would
then make a grand show of his confessing to how he had made everything up at the request of
US/UK intelligence agencies.
3. Therefore he was extricated for a very good reason (if you are Obama/Brennan, that
is).
4. His extrication is now being used as an anti-Trump weapon, but also as a pre-emptive
measure to reduce the fallout if (or when) reports emerge that Smolenkov was the source for
Steele.
Be interesting to know what was occurring if Smolenkov was the source for the Steele
report.
Whatever information he was sending, that he just left on holidays makes me think Russian
intel were on the ball and had started feeding him a bit of disinformation.
I don't expect the US--and by US I mean the Current Oligarchy--to save anyone, while
Russia is very busy trying to save its current and future populace--the differences being
quite extreme. Since the US isn't intent on saving anyone, it wants to ensure its populace
thinks other governments act the same way toward their populaces so the US populace doesn't
get any ideas about saving itself from its own viscous government. Busting that narrative is
what keeps us busy--There IS an alternative.
From digging around on the property site (from the link).
It must be a very nice house. A 3-ish acre lot in that neighborhood has an assessment of
$140k for the land. But the assessment for improvements for this house is over $900k while
others in the neighborhood are more in the $600k range. I was looking at the aerial photos
and trying to pick out what seem to be other nice houses, including ones with swimming pools
which this one lacks, and which also have big garages (this one has 4 car garage apparently),
but couldn't find a neighbor above an assessment in the $600k's.
The neighborhood as a whole has had its valuations decline in the 2018 biannual
assessment. Not sure why, but maybe the neighborhood of 20 year old mansions isn't as hot as
some newer developments. The last previous lowering of assessment values occurred during the
Great-Not-A-Depression in the 2008 revaluations. Note, the land is not considered to have
lower values, but all of the homes on the street have had the assessments of the improvements
on the property lowered in the last reassessments.
Hard to tell much about the selling price from neighboring properties. Many of the
neighbors bought their homes direct from the construction company back in the early years of
the century. So not too many direct compares for homes bought in 2018.
A point that appears to have missed by several is that an aide to an aide to the foreign
minister is not likely to have access to Putin's super-top-secret plans to use a few thousand
dollars worth of utube and twit ads to change the course of multi-billion dollar American
election, nor would he have access to information that might be used to blackmail a potential
foreign leader. Both would be closely held secrets and apparently way above his pay grade.
Often the FM wouldn't know of either, and both operations would be compartmentalized into a
close team Putin can trust.
The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the
style of LeCarre's "The Tailor of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they
know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because it suits their little
power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned
to run that scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister.
My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means
he was working for an oligarch. He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's
anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch money because
he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his
own name because he's not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in
the USG is setting him up with a fake identity.
House likely bought by CIA and annual upkeep--taxes etc.--also paid by them.
MoA's investigators have fairly well established that Skripal was the most likely
contributor to the Steele Dossier given the overall web of established connections--that was
most certainly an MI-6 operation in league with DNC/HRC officials, not CIA, although CIA was
involved in Russiagate Cover-up.
In examining Russia's foreign policy, where were the compromises generated by this alleged
spy? Aside from the UNSC vote debacle on Libya, I see nothing but a string of successes,
although the Ukraine Coup wasn't debauched. IMO, Outlaw US Empire policy toward Russia has
failed spectacularly, and it is within the US government where I'd expect to find well placed
spies.
@35 turner.. no.. and no one here at moa believes anything out of the western msm either...
see @ 29 william gruff comment for more meaningful lingo on the set up..
Here's a tough problem for a counter-intelligence agent. Find the source of info for a
fictional report.
Normally, after a link, one avenue of investigation would be to check who had access to
the leaked information. But, if the report is completely fictional, then there is no list of
people who had access to information that didn't exist. Everyone or no one had equal access
to the non-existent information. The Tailor of Moscow had the same access to the non-existent
information as did Putin's closest personal aide. Who done it?
Ingérence russe :la CIA disposait d'une source haut-placée au Kremlin.
Russian collusion: CIA had high placed source at the Kremlin.
A lot of commentators see the incongruence of this title and make jokes about
it. Really, when a superpower becomes a source of jokes and ridicule, than the end might be
nigh.
Evidence-free accusations of Russian meddling. Now with extra sauce.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was
deliberately planned as part of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to
strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling.
The first report in US Press about Putin personally involved was on Dec 14 2016.
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that
Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used.
The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the
officials said.
Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News.
What began as a "vendetta" against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show
corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating the image
that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore,"
the official said.
Notice the source is spies working for US Allies. Remember that the NSA did not sign off on the Russian interference/hacking because they
were concerned that too much critical info rested on intelligence from a single foreign
country.
Sergei Skripal was not just an turncoat for UK he also worked for Estonian intelligence.
It seems to me the poisoning fits better as an Estonian job, to keep relations in Europe with
Russia in very bad shape. It's easy to say that the Russians wouldn't be so incompetent, also
goes for the UK, which could have come up with something more compelling if they pre planned
it as false flag.
Notice how we have some sources saying concern grew after the Trump Putin meeting, where
supposedly Trump gave Israeli intelligence to Putin on Syria, I think they were concerned
Trump would have no problem revealing a spy for another government, much like he was free
with foreign intelligence.
I don't think the exfiltration was the real source but someone to sacrifice, to protect
the real source, who is working for Estonian intelligence. To me this seems like it is
possibly Anton Vaino, Chief of Staff of the Kremlin since August 2016, Deputy Chief of Staff
of Kremlin before that. This is not to say his info is accurate, but is in line with the
foreign policy of Estonia to alienate everyone with Russia.
Just out of curiousity, if what has been reported is true then what reason would Mueller have
to exclude this from his report? The dude is proof of the Russia-did-it!! narrative. Check.The dude has already been extracted. Check. The Russians must have already noticed that he has done a runner. Check.
What would stop Mueller from producing a one-paragraph report that starts with: "we know
the following to be true because for the last decade everything that Putin did was being
relayed to us by an aide to the foreign policy advisor to the Kremlin, since extracted and
now living in the USA".
I call it a red herring, and I bet this sucker has been fully set up. Publicly listed address
and all the indicators are that he is held in reserve to throw to the dogs whenever the
action gets too close to the mongrel perpetrators.
Joe Mifsud and Claire Smith of MI6, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, especially FBI special
agent Joseph Pientka plus that BIG shot FBI agent (who's name I forget) are the names to
remember. Why aren't Misud and Smith extradited to face inquiry?
So what is emerging? is Mueller due in court to prosecute the Russian ad agency that has
fully shirt fronted him? Is Flynn business about to upend a steaming pot of turds over
Mueller and other heads. Is Seth Rich about to be posthumously knighted by some New York
monarch for his role in smashing the HRC cart in public? Or is Julian Assange about to be put
through more torture for being a journalist and publisher?
This poor Russian sod is a patsy for the vicious deep state game that now needs to prey on
him and deliver his carcass to the howling mob and so distract them again. This Friday's
quiet press releases might hold a clue.
This guy will probably be making the rounds on CNN and cable news promoting the Steele
dossier and the Russian collusion hoax as its complete disintegration is now fully evident.
Offer up some turds on a plate, dress it up with a pinch a parsley and the truth will be
avoided.
The whole 2 year media storm of lies on Russian collusion will be avoided by offering up
another turd on a plate. This guy will pull down a few million and the media will never admit
their false reporting.
It would seem that a great deal has certainly changed at the CIA since 2003 when Valerie
Plame was revealed as a spy by a newspaper journalist who was given the information about her
during a phone conversation with someone close to the White House at the time, apparently to
punish her ambassador husband Joseph Wilson for going to Niger to verify if that country had
exported uranium to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Then there was shock and anger at the time that
the cover of a CIA operative had been blown.
Now the CIA doesn't even bother to give Smolenkov and his family new identities and
biographies to explain their living in Washington DC, and even co-operates with the outgoing
Obama administration in 2016 in risking the exposure of one of its own to try to stop Donald
Trump from ensconcing himself in the White House.
Something certainly has changed in the culture of the CIA: while it was always a political
animal, it is becoming an extremely ideological one as well.
The idea that this could be a fake spy is interesting.
Sabine wrote:
fuck are you guys not tired of this bullshit kabuki theatre that you get fed daily in order
to keep you amused and busy?
Only speaking for myself I ignore almost all of it (and actively treat it as propaganda,
deception, and manipulation) and take a lot of breaks. I test the waters (or sewage) from
time to time but I don't expect much and have no right to expect anything either.
However despite such sentiments the last decade seems like it has been an improvement
although too many people (and probably me as well) are searching for "replacements" to
failures when maybe there shouldn't be any: any false choice requires at least two wrong
answers but there could be any number .
In Bulgaria is a spy scandal too.
Reschetnikov is banned for ten years to visit Bulgaria. A reporter from NYT has tried to
interview him before steps are take in Bulgaria to investigate the case. The officials say
the Russians wanted to divert Bulgaria to the asia-project and that money-laundering was used
to finance subversive activities. The case started on 9.09 2019. Today the parliament heard
the statements of the agencies. Nothing new they sayed
Sounds fishy, the whole thing. Of course, when everyone is lying about everything while they
are pretending to fight with each other, it may well get a bit convoluted. CIA outing thrir
own dude on their own propaganda outlet is quite strange though. Also, their dude just
trotting about using his real name (in a publicly listed mansion no less),... ehh... Who
knows...
Of course, they could be trying to 'put him on the spot' to use him for yet another
propaganda push (whether he wants to play along, or not). But, again, the whole thing seems a
bit strange.
i would caution people here on patrick lang's views on this issue. remember he is an
existensialist american "patriot" who stop at nothing and will approve of any warcrime to
held up the mighty american empire. Look at patrick lang's history , he is ex intelligence
and thus never left the "services" even when he is "retired".
Pat lang's hate toward those who criticize american empire is legendary.. just look at his
own comments on SST.
another one to watch is patrick lang's friend called TTG which also US intelligence and it
is not unknown for this guy to post or inject nonsense narrative on SST especially on
intelligence matters concerning russia.
The posts that seems clean of US narrative lies seem to come from Publius Tacitus and
Walrus. But then again never take off your mandatory antipropaganda shield especially on SST
owned by ex spook who love the american empire and military trashing of the world
The following rumor (through sputniknews.com) is sort of educational even if it should
turn out to not be true (its Boolean value is essentially irrelevant which is interesting as
a separate matter as well):
Trump mistrusts spies etc .
It wasn't just shock. Scooter Libby, Cheney's (?) Chief of Staff, broke a federal law when
he exposed Valerie Palme as a CIA operative. He served part of a prison sentence for this.
Joseph Wilson verified that Saddam Hussein did not buy yellow cake. After his report was
ignored, he wrote an article about his findings. I remember reading it in the International
Herald Tribune. It put the WMD narrative in doubt.
"We have a president who, unlike any other president in modern history, is willing to use
sensitive, classified intelligence however he sees fit," said Steven L. Hall, a former C.I.A.
official who led the agency's Russia operations. "He does it in front of our adversaries. He
does it by tweet. We are in uncharted waters."
But the government had indicated that the source existed long before Mr. Trump took office,
first in
formally accusing Russia of interference in October 2016 and then when intelligence
officials declassified parts of their assessment about the interference campaign for public
release in January 2017. News agencies,
including NBC , began reporting around that time about Mr. Putin's involvement in the
election sabotage and on the C.I.A.'s possible sources for the assessment.
The news reporting in the spring and summer of 2017 convinced United States government
officials that they had to update and revive their extraction plan, according to people
familiar the matter.
The extraction ensured the informant was in a safer position and rewarded for a long career
in service to the United States. But it came at a great cost: It left the C.I.A. struggling to
understand what was going on inside the highest ranks of the Kremlin.
The agency has long struggled to recruit sources close to Mr. Putin, a former intelligence
officer himself wary of C.I.A. operations. He confides in only a small group of people and has
rigorous operational security, eschewing electronic communications.
James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence who left office at the
end of the Obama administration, said he had no knowledge of the decision to conduct an
extraction. But, he said, there was little doubt that revelations about the extraction were
"going to make recruiting assets in Russia even more difficult than it already is." Correction
: Sept. 10, 2019
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the timing of the initial
reporting on the C.I.A.'s 2016 exfiltration offer to a Russian informant. An offer that appears
to be the same one that The New York Times described was reported in 2018 in Bob Woodward's
book "Fear."
OK, lets' assume that neoliberal MSM are not lying. Then why Mueller did not include him in his report? He was already in the USA
since June 2017. It is unclear when he was fired by russians.
Also as Smolenkov for a long time lived in the USA he knew very well what the USA wants and could lie with impunity trying to earn
more money. In a way similar personality as Skripal.
Is the idea to create the second Skripals-style false poisoning hysteria to help to sustain RussiaGate?
Notable quotes:
"... The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister. ..."
"... My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch. He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity. ..."
"... MoA's investigators have fairly well established that Skripal was the most likely contributor to the Steele Dossier given the overall web of established connections--that was most certainly an MI-6 operation in league with DNC/HRC officials, not CIA, although CIA was involved in Russiagate Cover-up. ..."
"... In examining Russia's foreign policy, where were the compromises generated by this alleged spy? Aside from the UNSC vote debacle on Libya ..."
"... A lot of commentators see the incongruence of this title and make jokes about it. Really,when a superpower becomes a source of jokes and ridicule, than the end might be nigh. ..."
"... We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was deliberately planned as part of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling. ..."
"... The first report in US Press about Putin personally involved was on Dec 14 2016 ..."
"... I don't think the exfiltration was the real source but someone to sacrifice, to protect the real source, who is working for Estonian intelligence. To me this seems like it is possibly Anton Vaino, Chief of Staff of the Kremlin since August 2016, Deputy Chief of Staff of Kremlin before that. This is not to say his info is accurate, but is in line with the foreign policy of Estonia to alienate everyone with Russia. ..."
"... Just out of curiosity, if what has been reported is true then what reason would Mueller have to exclude this from his report? The dude is proof of the Russia-did-it!! narrative. Check. The dude has already been extracted. Check. The Russians must have already noticed that he has done a runner. Check. ..."
"... What would stop Mueller from producing a one-paragraph report that starts with: "we know the following to be true because for the last decade everything that Putin did was being relayed to us by an aide to the foreign policy advisor to the Kremlin, since extracted and now living in the USA". ..."
"... Well, I just think Putin had more important things to think about than the charade that is now the US electoral process. Probably he felt (I'm guessing of course) that the whole Russiagate scenario was a desperate move to throw a curtain over the demise of American democracy that served his, Putin's, purposes very well because it kept the idiots busy while he shored up the badly leaking ship of his own state. ..."
"... And I go with Smiley@34 - no spy of even mediocre caliber would agree to being placed in such an exposed position under his own name, for crying out loud! ..."
"... It doesn't make sense that he would leave himself exposed if either in Russia or in the US he had undercover connections of this sort. Just doesn't make sense. But that he was the best the US operatives could come up with right now simply speaks to further deterioration of US ability to field persuasive stories. ..."
"... Putin hasn't had to worry about vendettas or showing corruption in American politics. Take a reliable poll. Who in the US thinks our politics ISN'T corrupt? ..."
"... We didn't need Putin, mastermind though he is, to 'create an image' of American unreliability. Was it Putin who reneged on so many treaties? Was it Putin who antagonized the Koreas? Was it Putin who set up the trade war with China? Was it Putin who threatened and sanctioned Russia, Iran, Venezuela? ..."
"... What can the Russians do to get ahead of the narrative on the likely impending demise of Smolenkov by novichok or polonium poisoning? ..."
"... The concern is about the three hundred million other Americans who are at least partially captured by the false narratives pumped out non-stop from their Plato's Cave displays. Is there anything that the Russians can do now to inoculate some Americans against the hard sell they will be facing when the corporate mass media ( Mighty Wurlitzer ) cranks up the multi-channel marketing campaign for the United States' own Skripal farce? ..."
A point that appears to have missed by several is that an aide to an aide to the foreign minister is not likely to have access
to Putin's super-top-secret plans to use a few thousand dollars worth of utube and twit ads to change the course of multi-billion
dollar American election, nor would he have access to information that might be used to blackmail a potential foreign leader.
Both would be closely held secrets and apparently way above his pay grade. Often the FM wouldn't know of either, and both operations
would be compartmentalized into a close team Putin can trust.
The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor
of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because
it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that
scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister.
My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch.
He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch
money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's
not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity.
House likely bought by CIA and annual upkeep--taxes etc.--also paid by them.
MoA's investigators have fairly well established that Skripal was the most likely contributor to the Steele Dossier given
the overall web of established connections--that was most certainly an MI-6 operation in league with DNC/HRC officials, not CIA,
although CIA was involved in Russiagate Cover-up.
In examining Russia's foreign policy, where were the compromises generated by this alleged spy? Aside from the UNSC vote
debacle on Libya, I see nothing but a string of successes, although the Ukraine Coup wasn't debauched. IMO, Outlaw US Empire
policy toward Russia has failed spectacularly, and it is within the US government where I'd expect to find well placed spies.
Here's a tough problem for a counter-intelligence agent. Find the source of info for a fictional report.
Normally, after a link, one avenue of investigation would be to check who had access to the leaked information. But, if the
report is completely fictional, then there is no list of people who had access to information that didn't exist. Everyone or no
one had equal access to the non-existent information.
The Tailor of Moscow had the same access to the non-existent information as did Putin's closest personal aide. Who done it?
Headline in le Figaro: Ingérence russe :la CIA disposait d'une source haut-placée au Kremlin (Russian collusion: CIA had high
placed source at the Kremlin.)
A lot of commentators see the incongruence of this title and make jokes about it. Really,when
a superpower becomes a source of jokes and ridicule, than the end might be nigh.
Evidence-free accusations of Russian meddling. Now with extra sauce.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was deliberately planned as part
of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling.
The first report in US Press about Putin personally involved was on Dec 14 2016.
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked
material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for
U.S. allies, the officials said.
Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against
Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating
the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said.
Notice the source is spies working for US Allies. Remember that the NSA did not sign off on the Russian interference/hacking
because they were concerned that too much critical info rested on intelligence from a single foreign country.
Sergei Skripal was not just an turncoat for UK he also worked for Estonian intelligence. It seems to me the poisoning fits
better as an Estonian job, to keep relations in Europe with Russia in very bad shape. It's easy to say that the Russians wouldn't
be so incompetent, also goes for the UK, which could have come up with something more compelling if they pre planned it as false
flag.
Notice how we have some sources saying concern grew after the Trump Putin meeting, where supposedly Trump gave Isreali intelligence
to Putin on Syria, I think they were concerned Trump would have no problem revealing a spy for another government, much like he
was free with foreign intelligence.
I don't think the exfiltration was the real source but someone to sacrifice, to protect the real source, who is working
for Estonian intelligence. To me this seems like it is possibly Anton Vaino, Chief of Staff of the Kremlin since August 2016,
Deputy Chief of Staff of Kremlin before that. This is not to say his info is accurate, but is in line with the foreign policy
of Estonia to alienate everyone with Russia.
Just out of curiosity, if what has been reported is true then what reason would Mueller have to exclude this from his report?
The dude is proof of the Russia-did-it!! narrative. Check. The dude has already been extracted. Check. The Russians must have
already noticed that he has done a runner. Check.
What would stop Mueller from producing a one-paragraph report that
starts with: "we know the following to be true because for the last decade everything that Putin did was being relayed to us by
an aide to the foreign policy advisor to the Kremlin, since extracted and now living in the USA".
Well, I just think Putin had more important things to think about than the charade that is now the US electoral process.
Probably he felt (I'm guessing of course) that the whole Russiagate scenario was a desperate move to throw a curtain over the
demise of American democracy that served his, Putin's, purposes very well because it kept the idiots busy while he shored up the
badly leaking ship of his own state.
And I go with Smiley@34 - no spy of even mediocre caliber would agree to being placed in such an exposed position under
his own name, for crying out loud!
This was a guy who had big money stashed away, wanted to be in a place where rich guys are held in high esteem, planned his
exit from a no-longer-friendly-to-rich-folk environment (if you had money in Russia these days, you should use it for the good
of the country).
It doesn't make sense that he would leave himself exposed if either in Russia or in the US he had undercover connections of
this sort. Just doesn't make sense. But that he was the best the US operatives could come up with right now simply speaks to further
deterioration of US ability to field persuasive stories.
And this gave me some amusement:
Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against
Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating
the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said. [Quote
from Goldman Kropotkin@43]
Putin hasn't had to worry about vendettas or showing corruption in American politics. Take a reliable poll. Who in the
US thinks our politics ISN'T corrupt?
We didn't need Putin, mastermind though he is, to 'create an image' of American unreliability. Was it Putin who reneged on
so many treaties? Was it Putin who antagonized the Koreas? Was it Putin who set up the trade war with China? Was it Putin who
threatened and sanctioned Russia, Iran, Venezuela?
We, our leaders, masterminded it all. Sorry, Mr. Putin - you lose that enviable title. We own it.
What can the Russians do to get ahead of the narrative on the likely impending demise of Smolenkov by novichok or polonium
poisoning?
I know some here might say "Everyone would know it is a false flag if Smolenkov gets assassinated!" and that is certainly true
if by "everyone" one means the regular readers here and at a few other analysis sites that are not controlled by the empire.
The concern is about the three hundred million other Americans who are at least partially captured by the false narratives
pumped out non-stop from their Plato's Cave displays. Is there anything that the Russians can do now to inoculate some
Americans against the hard sell they will be facing when the corporate mass media ( Mighty Wurlitzer ) cranks up the multi-channel
marketing campaign for the United States' own Skripal farce?
Given that Washington continuously claims that Russians are responsible for the election of Donald Trump, here is an interesting
look at what Vladimir Putin had to say about why Donald Trump was elected:
While drawing links from economic class to voting patterns is difficult given that education impacts voting rates, it is pretty
clear that Vladimir Putin's observations about American society and the growing sense that middle class America is being left
behind is accurate. It is becoming increasingly clear that globalization benefits the few at the top and leaves behind the vast
majority of society who feel that their place in society is under threat.
"... Macron then outdid himself: "We are living the end of Western hegemony," he told the assembled envoys. ..."
"... Macron is an opportunistic main-chancer in European politics, and it is not at all certain how far he can or will attempt to advance his new vision of either the West or Europe in the Continent's councils of state. But as evidence of a new current in Western thinking about Russia, the non–West in general, and Europe's long-nursed desire for greater independence from Washington, the importance of his comments is beyond dispute. ..."
"... Macron may prove a pushover, or a would-be Gaullist who fails to make the grade. Or he may have just announced a long-awaited inflection point in trans–Atlantic ties. Either way, he has put highly significant questions on the table. It will be interesting to see what responses they may elicit, not least from the Trump White House. ..."
"... who in their right mind would trust the U.S. anymore for any reason? ..."
"... Until now, the conflict with Russia has resulted in the conversion of the Ukrainian (and other formerly eastern bloc countries) economy from highly industrial to a supplier of cheap labor, some agricultural products, and raw materials to the EU. ..."
"... The empire's war machine always needs a boogeyman. ..."
"... America has earned the mistrust of most of the world. Although establishing a good relationship with Russia is a good idea, using it to isolate Russia probably will not work. ..."
"... Many of Patrick's observations are astute and well-reasoned. But he is ABSOLUTELY WRONG to put any faith whatsoever in Trump being able to negotiate ANYTHING of importance, whether it be with North Korea or Russia. Wake up! There is "no one home" in Donald Trump!! ..."
"... We are witnessing a severely incapacitated, mentally ill individual pretending to be a leader, who is endangering the entire planet. If this doesn't scare the shit out of you, you need to have your head examined! ..."
"... IMHO, it is a fool's errand for our policy makers to think that Russia can be "peeled away from China", or that Russia and China has not seen through that strategy as another ploy by the West to retain hegemony. ..."
"... The West has been hostile to Russia since its inception as a non-monarchy in 1917. ..."
"... The New York Times has played an effective Orwellian role in recent years, simply by reflecting unannounced policy directives – notably the smooth shifts in designated official enemies from ISIS to Russia/Putin to China/Xi all in the space of six short years. ..."
"... The Times has become nothing but a bunch of stenographers for the Intelligence Community. ..."
"... You nailed it in calling it Orwellian. ISIS as "official" enemy indeed is a classic representation of 'doublespeak.' All of those *accidental* U.S. arms-drops on their positions, helicopters showing up to rescue their leaders, the apparent invisibility of those oil tanker fleets freely and blatantly running the highways into Turkey for several years ..."
"... As much of that oil was shipped to Israel by Erdogan's kid at below market prices, it was another testament to the duplicitous nature of the entire scheme to bring Syria down. Fail. Epic fail. I love it. That egg looks great on Netanyahu's face. ..."
"... Trump and the establishment punish and sanction Russia but get along fine with MBS Mohammad Bone Sawman. I voted for Trump but got Hillary's foreign policy. The Devil runs America. ..."
In desultory fashion over the past month or so, we have had indications that the policy
cliques in Washington are indeed reconsidering the Cold War II they set in motion during the
Obama administration's final years. And President Donald Trump, persistent in his effort to
reconstruct relations with Russia, now finds an unlikely ally in Emmanuel Macron. This suggests
a nascent momentum in a new direction.
"Pushing Russia away from Europe is a profound strategic mistake," the French president
asserted in a stunning series of
remarks to European diplomats immediately after the Group of 7 summit in Biarritz late last
month.
This alone is a bold if implicit attack on the hawkish Russophobes Trump now battles in
Washington. Macron then outdid himself: "We are living the end of Western hegemony," he told
the assembled envoys.
It is difficult to recall when a Western leader last spoke so truthfully and insightfully of
our 21 st century realities, chief among them the inevitable rise of
non–Western nations to positions of parity with the Atlantic world. You have nonetheless
read no word of this occasion in our corporate media: Macron's startling observations run
entirely counter to the frayed triumphalism and nostalgia that grip Washington as its era of
preeminence fades.
President Donald J. Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron in joint press conference in
Biarritz, France, site of the G7 Summit, Aug. 26, 2019. (White House/ Andrea Hanks)
There is much to indicate that the West's aggressively hostile posture toward Russia remains
unchanged. The Russophobic rhetoric emanating from Washington and featured daily in our
corporate television broadcasts continues unabated. Last month Washington formally abandoned
the bilateral treaty limiting deployment of intermediate-range ballistic missiles, signed with
Moscow in 1987. As anyone could have predicted, NATO now suggests it will
upgrade its missile defense systems in Poland and Romania. This amounts to an engraved
invitation to the Russian Federation to begin a new arms race.
But a counter-argument favoring a constructive relationship with Russia is now evident. This
is not unlike the abrupt
volte-face in Washington's thinking on North Korea: It is now broadly accepted that the
Korean crisis can be resolved only at the negotiating table.
The Times Are Changing
The New York Times seems to be on board with this this sharp turn in foreign policy.
It reported the
new consensus on North Korea in a news analysis on July 11. Ten days later it published another
arguing that it's time to put down the spear and make amends with Moscow. Here is the
astonishing pith of the piece: "China, not Russia, represents by far the greater challenge to
American objectives over the long term. That means President Trump is correct to try to
establish a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China."
It is encouraging that the Times has at last discovered the well-elaborated alliance
between Moscow and Beijing. It took the one-time newspaper of record long enough. But there is
another feature of this article that is important to note: It was published as a lead
editorial. This is not insignificant.
It is essential, when reading the Times , to understand the close -- not to say
corrupt -- relations it has maintained with political power in Washington over many
generations. This is well-documented in histories of the paper and of institutions such as the
CIA. An editorial advancing a policy shift of this magnitude almost certainly reflects the
paper's close consultations, at senior levels of management, with policy-setting officials at
the National Security Council, the State Department, or at the Pentagon. The editorial is
wholly in keeping with Washington's pronounced new campaign to designate China as America's
most dangerous threat.
It is impossible to say whether Trump is emboldened by an inchoate shift of opinion on
Russia, but he flew his banner high at the Biarritz G–7. Prior to his departure for the
summit in southwest France he asserted that Russia should be
readmitted to the group when it convenes in the U.S. next year. Russia was excluded in
2014, following its annexation of Crimea in response to the coup in Kiev.
Trump repeated the thought in Biarritz, claiming there was
support among other members for the restoration of the G–8. "I think it's a work in
progress," he said. "We have a number of people that would like to see Russia back."
Macron is plainly one of those people. It was just after Trump sounded his theme amid
Biarritz's faded grandeur -- and what an excellent choice for a convention of the Western
powers -- that the French president made his own plea for repairing ties with Russia and for
Europe to escape its fate as "a theater for strategic struggle between the U.S. and
Russia."
Biarritz from the Pointe Saint-Martin, 1999. (Wikimedia Commons)
"The European continent will never be stable, will never be secure, if we don't pacify and
clarify our relations with Russia," Macron said in his
address to Western diplomats. Then came his flourish on the imminent end of the Atlantic
world's preeminence.
"The world order is being shaken like never before. It's being shaken because of errors
made by the West in certain crises, but also by the choices made by the United States in the
past few years -- and not just by the current administration."
Macron is an opportunistic main-chancer in European politics, and it is not at all certain
how far he can or will attempt to advance his new vision of either the West or Europe in the
Continent's councils of state. But as evidence of a new current in Western thinking about
Russia, the non–West in general, and Europe's long-nursed desire for greater independence
from Washington, the importance of his comments is beyond dispute.
The question now is whether or how soon better ties with Moscow will translate into
practical realities. At present, Trump and Macron share a good idea without much substance to
it.
Better US-Russia Ties May Be in Pipeline
But Trump may have taken a step in the right direction. Within days of his return from
Biarritz, he
put a hold on the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, a military aid program that was
to provide Kiev with $250 million in assistance during the 2019 fiscal year, which begins Oct.
1 and runs to Sept. 30, 2020. The funds are designated for weaponry, training and intelligence
support.
Trump has asked his national security advisers to review the commitment. The delay, coming
hard on his proposal to readmit Russia to a reconstituted G–8, cannot possibly be read as
a coincidence.
There will be other things to watch for in months to come. High among these is Trump's
policy toward the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking Russian gas fields to terminals in Western
Europe, thereby cutting Ukraine out of the loop. Trump, his desire to improve ties with Moscow
notwithstanding, has vigorously opposed this project.
The Treasury Department has threatened sanctions against European contractors working on
it. If Trump is serious about bringing Russia back into the fold, this policy will have to go.
This may mean going up against the energy lobby in Washington and Ukraine's many advocates on
Capitol Hill.
To date, U.S. threats to retaliate against construction of Nord Stream 2 have done nothing
but irritate Europeans, who have ignored them, while furthering the Continent's desire to
escape Washington's suffocating embrace. This is precisely the kind of contradiction Macron
addressed when he protested that Europeans need to begin acting in their own interests rather
than acquiesce as Washington force-marches them on a never-ending anti–Russia
crusade.
Macron may prove a pushover, or a would-be Gaullist who fails to make the grade. Or he may
have just announced a long-awaited inflection point in trans–Atlantic ties. Either way,
he has put highly significant questions on the table. It will be interesting to see what
responses they may elicit, not least from the Trump White House.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International
Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is
"Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via
his Patreon site .
Erelis , September 10, 2019 at 18:49
A few European countries may develop warmer relations .but reproachment with Russia will
not happen in our lifetimes. Macron offered nothing but rhetoric. The West continues economic
warfare and a militaristic stance toward Russia. Western institutions and interests are too
tied into Russo-phobia to give it up–it is a financial and emotional heroin to the
West. Break the Russian/Chinese alliance? Ain't gonna happen.
As for the NYTimes. They recently have published unsubstantiated accounts about some spy
close to Putin who swears by gawd that Putin personally ordered Trump's victory. How is it
going to be possible for Trump or even a new democratic president to engage Russia
diplomatically with such widely published and accepted propaganda?. Every leading democratic
party candidate have sworn to the Russiagate hoax and issued highly aggressive rhetoric. They
will be called traitors if they even speak with Putin unless they attempt to punch out
Putin.
Jim Glover , September 10, 2019 at 17:36
Now that the war monger Bolton is gone that is good news for pursuing Peace.
It is also good that Patrick points out what has been hiding in plain site from the divide
and conquer propaganda from the mass media that the Cold War and the old ones have always
been about the West against the East. Maybe the Trump challengers can join the new Pursuit of
Peace for the good of Humanity. It Can't hurt!
Stephen M , September 10, 2019 at 15:14
This is as good a time as any to point to an alternative vision of foreign policy. One
based on the principle of non-interference, respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity,
and, above all, international law. One based on peaceful coexistence and mutual cooperation.
A vision of the world at peace and undivided by arbitrary distinctions. Such a world is
possible and even though there are currently players around the world who are striving in
that direction we need look no further than our own history for inspiration. Ladies and
gentlemen, I give you one Henry A. Wallace, for your consideration.
(The following excerpts from an article by Dr. Dennis Etler. Link to the full article
provided below.) --
The highest profile figure who articulated an alternative vision for American foreign
policy was the politician Henry Wallace, who served as vice president under Franklin D.
Roosevelt from 1940-1944 and ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the Progressive
Party.
After he became vice president in 1940, as Roosevelt was increasingly ill, Wallace
promoted a new vision for America's role in the world that suggested that rather than playing
catch up with the imperial powers, the United States should work with partners to establish a
new world order that eliminated militarism, colonialism and imperialism.
Wallace gave a speech in 1942 that declared a "Century of the Common Man." He described a
post-war world that offered "freedom from want," a new order in which ordinary citizens,
rather than the rich and powerful, would play a decisive role in politics.
That speech made direct analogy between the Second World War and the Civil War, suggesting
that the Second World War was being fought to end economic slavery and to create a more equal
society. Wallace demanded that the imperialist powers like Britain and France give up their
colonies at the end of the war.
In diplomacy, Wallace imagined a multi-polar world founded on the United Nations Charter with
a focus on peaceful cooperation. In contrast, in 1941 Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine,
had called for an 'American century,' suggesting that victory in war would allow the United
States to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see
fit and by such means as we see fit."
Wallace responded to Luce with a demand to create a world in which "no nation will have the
God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help
younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither
military nor economic imperialism." Wallace took the New Deal global. His foreign policy was
to be based on non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and mutual respect
for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty.
--
Sadly, since then, despite occasional efforts to head in a new direction, the core
constituency for US foreign policy has been corporations, rather than the "common man" either
in the United States, or the other nations of the world, and United States foreign relations
have been dominated by interference in the political affairs of other nations. As a result
the military was transformed from an "arsenal for democracy" during the Second World War into
a defender of privilege at home and abroad afterwards.
-- -
Foreign aid for Wallace was not a tool to foster economic dominance as it was to become, but
rather "economic assistance without political conditions to further the independent economic
development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries." He held high "the principle of
self-determination for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and other colonial
areas." He saw the key policy for the United States to be based on "the principles of
non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and acceptance of the right of
peoples to choose their own form of government and economic system."
--
Wallace's legacy suggests that it is possible to put forth a vision of an honest
internationalism in US foreign policy that is in essence American. His approach was proactive
not reactive. It would go far beyond anything Democrats propose today, who can only suggest
that the United States should not start an unprovoked war with Iran or North Korea, but who
embrace sanctions and propagandist reports that demonize those countries.
Rather than ridiculing Trump's overtures to North Korea, they should go further to reduce
tensions between the North and the South by pushing for the eventual withdrawal of troops
from South Korea and Japan (a position fully in line with Wallace and many other politicians
of that age).
Rather than demonizing and isolating Russia (as a means to score political points against
Trump), progressives should call for a real détente, that recognizes Russia's core
interests, proposes that NATO withdraw troops from Russia's borders, ends sanctions and
reintegrates Russia into the greater European economy. They could even call for an end to
NATO and the perpetuation of the dangerous global rift between East and West that it
perpetuates.
Rather than attempt to thwart China's rise, and attack Trump for not punishing it enough,
progressives should seek to create new synergies between China and the US economically,
politically and socioculturally.
-- -
In contrast to the US policy of perpetual war and "destroying nations in order to save them,"
China's BRI proposes an open plan for development that is not grounded in the models of
French and British imperialism. It has proposed global infrastructure and science projects
that include participants from nations in Africa, Asia, South and Central America previously
ignored by American and European elites -- much as Wallace proposed an equal engagement with
Latin America. When offering developmental aid and investment China does not demand that free
market principles be adopted or that the public sector be privatized and opened up for global
investment banks to ravish.
--
The United States should be emulating China, its Belt and Road Initiative and Community of
Common Destiny, as a means of revitalizing its political culture and kicking its addiction to
a neo-colonial concept of economic development and growth. Rather than relying on
militarization and its attendant wars to spark the economy, progressives should demand that
the US work in conjunction with nations such as China and Russia in building a sustainable
future rather than creating one failed state after another.
Now it is clear why the CIA spilled the phony beans on a spy they had in Putin's inner
circle – to revive the anti-Russian animus that has been dying down.
Rob , September 10, 2019 at 12:00
But if there is a rapprochement between the U.S. and Russia, will that put the brakes on
the new arms race?Surely, the defense industry will fight that with every fiber of their
being. China alone is not so great a potential military adversary as to warrant so a great
expenditure. Or is it? I have little doubt that some interested parties will see it that
way.
David Otness , September 10, 2019 at 11:16
A breath of fresh air ?
Dare we hope?
Good luck peeling away Russia from China, they have some very solid bonds established.
Besides, who in their right mind would trust the U.S. anymore for any reason?
... ... ...
Vera Gottlieb , September 10, 2019 at 11:04
Well, for far too long has Europe allowed itself to be "run" by the US. And sadly, Europe
– up to now- has lacked the backbone to stand up to the Americans. Time to realize
that, even without the US, the sun will still rise in the East America this America the other
why should we have to wait until the US makes up it's mind on anything. We are grown up folks
who can manage very well by ourselves without constantly having to worry as to what the US
might do or say. Enough of this blackmail.
Insightful, Patrick. This new shift will present many new challenges and opportunities for
the US and Russia. I can see that if Trump is permitted (by deep state and NATO) as much
access to Putin as Netanyahu has had, I can see a far more balanced US foreign policy and
certainly a large step toward reducing world conflicts. Iran may be convinced to negotiate
with Trump for removal of sanctions coupled with a new nuclear deal. I have no idea if this
will impact the Iran-China oil/security agreement which is a (very expensive, unpopular but
necessary) lifesaver for Iran and huge investment opportunity for China (backed with up to
5000 Chinese military). Syria needs the removal of US sanctions to stabilize its economy, and
with the US onside, more pressure can be put on Turkey to stop arming the terrorists in
Idlib, enforce their removal/surrender, and accommodate the Kurds within Syria. Finally, with
EU participation, I can see rapid settlement of the civil war in Eastern Ukraine, and
normalization of trade with Russia. Until now, the conflict with Russia has resulted in the
conversion of the Ukrainian (and other formerly eastern bloc countries) economy from highly
industrial to a supplier of cheap labor, some agricultural products, and raw materials to the
EU.
AnneR , September 10, 2019 at 09:51
Mr Lawrence, apparently the tune has not changed re Russiagate, not really. That is if the
news item on the BBC World Service this a.m. is owt to go by.
This was all about some supposed CIA asset in the Kremlin that they got out in 2017
(Smolenkov according to RT and Sputnik) who played a role, so the BBC said in furtherance of
maintaining Russophobia, in providing said "reputable" secret agency (as now so viewed by the
Demrats and DNC) with info about Russian – nay, Putin's personal – interference
in the 2016 US presidential election. All of the (dis/mis) information that the MSM
presstitutes have been selling us on both sides of the pond re the "heinous" activities of
Russia-Putin were rehearsed again from Russiagate to Russian attempted and completed
assassinations of escaped/released ex-spies, Skripal among them.
They, the US-UK-IS deep states, will not let it go. And their stenographers in the MSM
continue to propagate the real dis/misinformation in order to keep the
corporate-capitalist-imperialist western dominance warmongering/war-profiteering status quo
in operation.
Meanwhile, NPR (and PBS doubtless) are to be headed by one John Lansing, who till now was
in charge of that dispenser of "the truth, whole and unadulterated" the Voice of America and
Radio Marti; and the BBC is partnering with DARPA-Mossad via Google, FB, Twit and the rest of
the internet behemoths, as they told us (well, they didn't advert to the underlying
structure, of course). Why is the BBC so doing? In order, they said, to ensure that we, the
plebeians, the mindless bewildered herd, are no longer subjected to, no longer have our
perspectives distorted by "Dis or Misinformation."
Heartening to know, ain't it, that they – the really existing state-funded and
controlled media – have our best interests at heart?
I'm v pleased you picked up on this shard of nonsense, AnneR, and then took the trouble to
write of it. I thought to do the same while reading this morn's New York Times. A flimsier,
more obvious propaganda ploy I have not seen in a while, and this is saying something. This
fellow must be Guccifer 2's in-law or something. My read: Those who recklessly over-invested
in the Russiagate universe thought it would go away the instant HRC was elected. They're now
stuck w/ it three years on, and this is another effort to keep it alive long enough to get it
into the histories. They'll never make it. Transparently horse-droppings. Tks again for
writing. Patrick.
Skip Scott , September 10, 2019 at 09:23
The empire's war machine always needs a boogeyman. Macron is proposing transitioning to a
multi-polar world, and ending its vassal status to empire. Good luck with that. We can only
hope that Putin's countering of our war machine keeps MAD a reality, and that the example
that Russia and China are setting in opposition to empire will encourage other vassals to
rebel. Waging peace in a multi-polar world is the only moral course of action. The war
machine, with its huge waste of manpower and resources, is the main factor in our current
path to extinction. Reining it in is the first step to ensure mankind's survival.
America has earned the mistrust of most of the world. Although establishing a good
relationship with Russia is a good idea, using it to isolate Russia probably will not work.
Meremark's comments puts it very well. Meeremark is on the mark.
Many of Patrick's observations are astute and well-reasoned. But he is ABSOLUTELY WRONG to
put any faith whatsoever in Trump being able to negotiate ANYTHING of importance, whether it
be with North Korea or Russia. Wake up! There is "no one home" in Donald Trump!!
We are
witnessing a severely incapacitated, mentally ill individual pretending to be a leader, who
is endangering the entire planet. If this doesn't scare the shit out of you, you need to have
your head examined!
The US has been fed b.s. for so long and it's hard to see getting the country in any
decent shape, foreign policy or otherwise. The Pentagon and alphabet agencies have been
calling the shots since the days of the Dulles bros. I can't see anything other than a top
heavy collapse since this long con. It's good to hear Macron saying this and good for Orange
Bejesus wanting to get along with Russia, but how far gone have humans gone before Mother
Nature gives us the swiftest kick due to our stupidity?
I agree with Patrick Lawrence's perceptive analyses of 'frayed triumphalism and nostalgia'.
An empire on the rise, for example modern China, is probably less dangerous than one in
decline. There are more of the latter type, making geopolitics dangerously unstable, and
increasingly difficult to prevent world war, where the pattern of history seems to be
pointing us. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Moi , September 10, 2019 at 02:54
Zhu, if you are not aware, China has just delivered the biggest F.You to the US in geopolitical history by more or less
buying Iran oil.
China is to invest $US280 billion upgrading Iran's oil and gas sectors, unlocking a
further $500 billion of otherwise unrecoverable oil, upping it's own oil purchases, opening
factories to make "made in China" products, etc.
They also get to deploy 5,000 Chinese "security officers" so if the US attacks Iran they
could kill lots of Chinese military.
IMHO, it is a fool's errand for our policy makers to think that Russia can be "peeled away
from China", or that Russia and China has not seen through that strategy as another ploy by
the West to retain hegemony. As for inviting Russia back into the G-8 and Russia's response,
the following exchange at last week's Eastern Economic Forum in Vliadivostok is instructive
[Yandex/Google translation of the Russian text]:
Sergey Brilev: Mr Abe, I would like to ask you about this. When I just said, "the big
Seven" We all heard the report that President Trump was at the last summit of the "Seven" a
kind of lawyer [advocate] for the Russian Federation and Vladimir Putin. You've seen it from
the inside. Without breaking any obvious rules, after all it is a closed club, maybe you will
tell how it was? (Laughter.)
Shinzo Abe: As for the G–7, there used to be a G-8, there was a discussion that
creative influence on the international community is important. But as President Putin is
well aware, because he took part in the" G-8″, there are such rules: you can only quote
yourself, so other leaders can not be quoted. So I can't say exactly what President Trump
said there, for example. But I personally said that Russian influence, Russian creative
influence, plays an important role in solving international problems. Therefore, I raised the
issue of Russia's possible return to this format. (Applause.)
Sergei Brilev: if they call, will you go, Mr President?
Vladimir Putin: Where?
S. Brilev: The "G-8". In the States, I think it's next. There, however, will be the height
of Trump's campaign.
Vladimir Putin: At the time, the next "G-8" was to be held in Russia.
Sergei Brilev: In Sochi, yes.
Vladimir Putin: We are open. If our partners want to come to us, we will be happy.
(Applause.) But we did not postpone it, our partners postponed it. If they want to restore
the "Eight", please. But I think it's clear to everyone today, and President Macron just
recently said publicly that the West's leadership is coming to an end. I cannot imagine an
effective international organization that works without India and without China.
(Applause.)
Any format is always good, it is always a positive exchange of views, even when it is held
in a raised tone, as far as I understand, and it was this time in the "Seven", it is still
useful. Therefore, we do not refuse any format of cooperation.
Jeff Harrison , September 10, 2019 at 00:32
I have to object on several levels, Patrick.
"Are Western democracies, the U.S. and France in the lead, rethinking the hostility toward
Russia they conjured out of nothing since Moscow responded to the coup Washington cultivated
in Ukraine five years ago?" Good question but it beggars the truth that The West has been
hostile to Russia since its inception as a non-monarchy in 1917. The US refused to recognize
it until 1933. The classic phrase "godless communist hordes" was intended to drive home the
point that the commies were theoretically atheists and they were not capitalists. Russia
helped it along by trying to spread communism just as the US is trying to spread capitalism
now (we like to claim we're spreading democracy but that's bunk.) I'm not sure which is more
distasteful, having some foreign economic structure shoved down your throat (communism) or
some foreign political structure shoved down your throat (totalitarian dictatorship). Both
suck.
"China, not Russia, represents by far the greater challenge to American objectives over
the long term. That means President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder
relationship with Russia and peel it away from China." I realize you're quoting the Times but
mind if I ask, what, precisely, are American objectives? If our objective was to simply live
peaceably with the other nations of the world and dazzle them with the brilliance of every
little thing we did, nobody, not Russia, not China, nobody could challenge that objective.
But that's not our objective, now is it? It could be best characterized by the weekly
exchange between Pinkie and The Brain. Pinkie: What are we going to do this week, Brain?
Brain: Same thing we do every week, Pinkie. Establish world domination. That's never going to
work. There are too many people in this world and too many countries in this world who will
not put up with diktats from somebody else for the Brain to succeed.
As for the G7 becoming the G8, as I've already said, it's not gonna happen. Putin has
already said that it should include India and China. The West won't accept that. Frankly, if
membership in "the club" can be lifted as easily as it was last time, why should Russia be
interested? As I've said, I think that Russia has turned eastward. If the west has something
on offer, great but they wouldn't be looking for it. Russia has managed to make the sanctions
regime very painful for the EU even though the EU doesn't seem to notice. Offering Russia a
very junior chair at the G7 whilst maintaining the sanctions and other visions of economic
warfare against Russia is not a calculus that Russia will be interested in.
This could turn into the one bridge too far for the Europeans.
Zhu , September 9, 2019 at 21:13
It'll be China, China, china, next. How dare they prosper! How dare they not submit and not
obey!
jaycee , September 9, 2019 at 20:07
The New York Times has played an effective Orwellian role in recent years, simply by
reflecting unannounced policy directives – notably the smooth shifts in designated
official enemies from ISIS to Russia/Putin to China/Xi all in the space of six short years.
Judging by the Times' own comment sections, a fair number of the general public are quick to
internalize a hatred of the "enemy" without reflection on how/why the object of their ire can
be one day one villain, and then a whole new villain the next.
Steve , September 10, 2019 at 07:11
The Times has become nothing but a bunch of stenographers for the Intelligence Community.
The days of them treating their sources with skepticism are LONG gone. I'm no fan of Ben
Rhodes, but that guy was spot-on when he referred to the Washington press corps as a bunch of
20-something know-nothings whose ignorance makes them easily manipulated into becoming an
echo chamber of support for whatever policies their government sources are pushing.
lysias , September 10, 2019 at 08:21
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
David Otness , September 10, 2019 at 11:01
" .. notably the smooth shifts in designated official enemies from ISIS to Russia/Putin to
China/Xi all in the space of six short years."
You nailed it in calling it Orwellian. ISIS as "official" enemy indeed is a classic
representation of 'doublespeak.' All of those *accidental* U.S. arms-drops on their
positions, helicopters showing up to rescue their leaders, the apparent invisibility of those
oil tanker fleets freely and blatantly running the highways into Turkey for several years.
(The Russians sure found them in a hurry.) As much of that oil was shipped to Israel by Erdogan's kid at below market prices, it was another testament to the duplicitous nature of
the entire scheme to bring Syria down. Fail. Epic fail. I love it. That egg looks great on
Netanyahu's face.
Brent , September 9, 2019 at 20:00
Trump and the establishment punish and sanction Russia but get along fine with MBS
Mohammad Bone Sawman. I voted for Trump but got Hillary's foreign policy. The Devil runs
America.
Tim , September 9, 2019 at 19:48
Yes Bob, it would be a good change, except, if Britain is co-opted by the US, then it will
be a wholly owned subsidy and block change in Europe.
Tim Jones , September 9, 2019 at 20:50
subsidiary
Tim Jones , September 9, 2019 at 19:40
Just hope Brexit is negotiated and Britain is not fully taken over by Washington as a new
investment opportunity.
Ikallicrates , September 10, 2019 at 10:57
US corporations did indeed anticipate that post Brexit UK would be a new investment
opportunity. The US health insurance industry, for example, was poised to swoop down on the
UK as soon as the Tories finished destroying the NHS. But thanks to BoJo's bungling of
Brexit, the Tories could lose the next general election, so they've reversed direction and
are appeasing angry Brits by promising to save the NHS. By bringing down the Tories, BoJo may
make Britain great again (#MBGA).
Meremark , September 9, 2019 at 19:18
RT said Putin says Russia in G-8 is improvident without China and India economies and
geo-strategies also figured in. A G-10 league?
Putin's chessmanship is operaticly clean. not to be confused with poker as people
generally do confuse. This lacks the bluffing of poker; in this the pieces of global power
projection are standing on the board, chess obvious.
Maybe not so easy to peel Russia apart from China, if that's Plan B kicking around the
Pentagon.
At some point maybe they can consider Plan Delta ? which stands for change.
Steve , September 10, 2019 at 07:03
Let's be honest, the G-7 is pretty outdated. Canada and Italy are pretty much out of their
league. America's hat and a fourth western European power seem unnecessary. Replace them with
China and India, and bring Russia back in to make it the G-8.
Thank you, Meremark. Putin does not take his directives from the NYT.
Daniel Rich , September 9, 2019 at 19:17
Macron, a Rothschild pawn, gives as much abut true Democrat as he does about the Yellow
Vests' protest
No, no, not the Hong Kong, US flags waving goons, but ordinary French citizens who're fed
up with the direction their government moves onward to, the ones you hear nothing about.
Bob Van Noy , September 9, 2019 at 17:25
Thank you Patrick Lawrence, if your analysis is correct it would be a turning point in
international relations and extremely significant. I like to think that the web has put us
about a week or two ahead of the headlines here at CN, so if the NYT is finally calling the
events accurately, it would by a stunning breakthrough
Ok, TTG. What's your proof? How can you believe, religiously, everything claimed without any
proof?
The CNN article provided enough rope to hang itself with it. Literally anyone can try to
verify it in a few easy steps:
1) Make a list of RusGov ranking officials by, say, May 2016.
2) See, who's absent in the current composition of the RusGov
3) Find out, who amongst those absent is no longer in Russia.
4) Of them, find out who had any kind of plausible potential to be the CIA asset, by having
the access to all sorts of data and "insight into Putin's head" as per this CNN article.
re " I don't believe he's a Russian asset, either. His personality makes him unsuitable as
a controlled asset. "
I think the key word here is indeed controlled . I have doubts that anyone can
control him, and that excludes himself.
Should it ever come to the D's going for impeachment (which would IMO be understandable if
unwise and pricely) and succeed - what would the US get instead?
Pence.
The difference that that dude is white & white and not orange & yellow. That's
about it. Pence likely would immediately pardon Trump for whatever he was found to have
done.
He is probably just as far right as Trump, only more discrete and self controlled - and of
course evangelical. The evangelical part can be somewhat problematic as seen in Brazil under
also evangelical Bolsonaro.
One of Bolsonaro's "underling politicos", formerly an evangelical bishop (or something
like that) demanded to confiscate US marvel comics since in these comics some
superheros , ghasp, were gay - and that that is utterly unacceptable since it
undermines Brazil's ... immensely high moral principles.
Also, since Boslonaro took office the destruction of Amazonas, compared to the last year,
has reportedly already doubled - and we're only in early september by now.
Crappily assembled Steele dossier/crossfire hurricane coup d'etat fails. Democrats are
floating only craven extremist nutjobs that most Americans can't handle and whose policies
can't possibly work in the real world. So they will certainly lose in 2020. All manner of
hyper aggressive negative media BS has failed. What's a power crazed global elitist to do?
:-(
On to deep state plan F!!! Trump is a national security risk because he's CRAZY! and
irresponsible! This one will stick. Sure. Bring out the liars! Spin the story! That's the
ticket. And we can still shout "Racist!" all day every day.
C.I.A. officials worried about safety made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to
extract the source from Russia. The situation grew more tense when the informant at first
refused, citing family concerns -- prompting consternation at C.I.A. headquarters and sowing
doubts among some American counterintelligence officials about the informant's
trustworthiness. But the C.I.A. pressed again months later after more media inquiries. This
time, the informant agreed."
This has nothing to do with Trump but with leaks from Brennan and Co who outed the spy. He
worked in the Kremlin administration and had good but not top access.
Kommersant reports that the guy's name is Oleg Smolenko.
He and his wife bought a house in Stafford Virginia, LOT 28 HUNTERS POND, under their own
name. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4087921
Maybe Pat or someone else in the area can visit them and find out how much of their
information is true and how much is bonkers. I'd bet on 50:50.
Most of trump and the 7 Russians is fake news. The fact is that the USA has sought Russian
assistance in pressuring Israel. The rest is a smoke screen. The whole scenario is being
carefully managed so as to not set off a middle east war. The outcome of this project coming
at the tail end of the Arab spring will become clear after the election.
And then there is the possibility that CIA extracted a minor source to divert attention
from someone or someones who remain(s) in place. The open purchase of a house in the outer
suburbs of Washington by the extracted would seem to support the possibility that this is all
a diversion. The narrative continues that "a former senior intelligence official" told
Sciutto, an Obama man, at CNN of all this. Clapper is "a former senior intelligence official"
and a CNN "contributor" (employee) is he not? He is dumb enough to have had this story
planted on him.
I'm sure Mr. Smolenko has been following the story of Sergei Skripal and wondering if perhaps
he would have been better off going to prison in Russia....
LOL Sorry. Too terse? It strikes me that this CNN assertion is useful -- to provide a
fig-leaf, albeit lacy, for the wretched Steele dossier's 'Kremlin source'.
I'm always amazed how little it takes and how little there is there. I'm probably wrong,
but that's what came to my mind.
As newly appointed US Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, was reported to have claimed about
wanting for Russia to ''behave like a normal country'', Sergey Lavrov urged for him to
clarify what he means by ''normality'' during a press conference in the Russian capital; if
Russia was to behave like the US, it would have had to bomb Iraq, Libya, supporting an armed,
anti-constitutional coup in Kiev, and allocating millions in the interference in the affairs
of other countries, as in the ''promotion of democracy'' in Russia.
Sergey Shoygu did not have much to add, but what he did add could not be clearer: Russia
will probably have to remain being ''not normal''.
The main achievement of neoliberal and imperial (warmongering) propaganda in the USA is that it achieved the complete,
undisputed dominance in MSM
Pot Calling the Kettle Black: "The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation machine is being unleashed via new platforms and continues to grow in Russia and
internationally. Russia seeks to destroy the very idea of an objective, verifiable set of facts as it attempts to influence opinions
about the United States and its allies. It is not an understatement to say that this new form of combat on the information battlefield
may be the fight of the 21st century."
Notable quotes:
"... Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to "court the compatible left." ..."
"... The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites. ..."
"... Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media (The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world. ..."
Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to "court the compatible left."
Right-wing and left-wing collaborators were needed to create a powerful propaganda apparatus that would be capable of hypnotizing
audiences into believing the myth of American exceptionalism and its divine right to rule the world.
The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites.
Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts
And Letters, and Joel Whitney followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers,
with particular emphasis on the complicity between the CIA and the famous literary journal, The Paris Review.
By the mid-1970s, as a result of the Church Committee hearings, it seemed as if the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. had been caught in flagrante
delicto and disgraced, confessed their sins, and resolved to go and sin no more.
Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media
(The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world.
It seemed as if all would be hunky-dory now with the bad boys purged from the American “free” press. Seemed to the most naïve,
that is, by which I mean the vast numbers of people who wanted to re-stick their heads in the sand and believe, as Ronald Reagan’s
team of truthtellers would announce, that it was “Morning in America” again with the free press reigning and the neo-conservatives,
many of whom had been “converted” from their leftist views, running things in Washington.
USAGM provides consistently accurate and compelling journalism that reflects the values of our society: freedom, openness,
democracy, and hope. Our guiding principles—enshrined in law—are to provide a reliable, authoritative, and independent source
of news that adheres to the strictest standards of journalism…
Russian Disinformation. And make no mistake, we are living through a global explosion of disinformation, state propaganda,
and lies generated by multiple authoritarian regimes around the world. The weaponization of information we are seeing today is
real. The Russian government and other authoritarian regimes engage in far-reaching malign influence campaigns across national
boundaries and language barriers.
The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation machine is being unleashed via new platforms and continues to grow in Russia and
internationally. Russia seeks to destroy the very idea of an objective, verifiable set of facts as it attempts to influence opinions
about the United States and its allies. It is not an understatement to say that this new form of combat on the information battlefield
may be the fight of the 21st century.
Then research the history of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, Radio and Television Marti, etc. You will
be reassured that Lansing’s July testimony was his job interview to head National Propaganda Radio.
Edward Curtin writes, and his writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He writes as a public
intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. He believes a non-committal sociology is an
impossibility and therefore sees all his work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding. His website is
edwardcurtin.com
"... And behind it all, the demonization (demonetization) of Russia (and Putin) still continues. ..."
"... is admittedly so cool (given the advanced technology) to be dropping bombs on women and children for the uncountable time, clearly we now know we are going broke killing the innocent. We are bludgeoning them to the point that we have broken our rifles on their corpses. Time to let off. ..."
Very well written and keeping focus on what's important. Very useful, revealing event with many issues remaining to be fully
considered regarding behaviors of
- the elected officials,
- the "intelligence" "community",
- the media,
- the public.
And behind it all, the demonization (demonetization) of Russia (and Putin) still continues.
There likely are cases where Russia is acting nefariously or in bad faith, but who could tell given all the b/s they are feeding
us.
So it's clear (to anyone interested) that they are misleading us, and (I think) clear why they are misleading us, but that
does stop the the constant stream of crap in the media - "news" and "entertainment".
Is their target audience the most obtuse among us?
While is admittedly so cool (given the advanced technology) to be dropping bombs on women and children for the uncountable
time, clearly we now know we are going broke killing the innocent. We are bludgeoning them to the point that we have broken our
rifles on their corpses. Time to let off.
Leaving aside the need to feed the war machine (particularly in light of slowing economy), many on both sides seemed to fear
that the public had succeeded in electing a populist and that could not be allowed. So they attacked him knowing the technocratic
state would support them. But Trump out-smarted them and went all in deep state, elitest and sooth the worried vested interests
and their owners. So that's all past us now. Still, kind of hard to over-look. Does Shiff take himself seriously?
"... The "report" was his work. Mueller never looked for anything, never found anything and never wrote anything. ..."
"... The entire charade was part of the "resistance" to straight jacket Trump until the mid term elections, a strategy put in motion by Comey and Brennan, which achieved the desired result: Republicans lost the House. ..."
"... Of course there was "little Russia in Russiagate." The narrative was all disinformation set loose by Crowdstrike and Fusion GPS, paid for by Hillary and the DNC with the blessing of President Obama. Welcome to the tin foil hat brigade as contributor. ..."
Officially, at least in the FBI's version, its operation "Crossfire Hurricane," the
counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign that began in mid-2016 was due to
suspicious remarks made to visitors by a young and lowly Trump aide, George Papadopoulos. This
too is not believable, as I pointed out previously .
Most of those visitors themselves had ties to Western intelligence agencies. That is, the young
Trump aide was being enticed, possibly entrapped, as part of a larger intelligence operation
against Trump. (Papadopoulos wasn't the only Trump associate targeted, Carter Page being
another.)
But the question remains: Why did Western intelligence agencies, prompted, it seems clear,
by US ones, seek to undermine Trump's presidential campaign? A reflexive answer might be
because candidate Trump promised to "cooperate with Russia," to pursue a pro-détente
foreign policy, but this was hardly a startling, still less subversive, advocacy by a would-be
Republican president. All of the major pro-détente episodes in the 20th century had been
initiated by Republican presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.
So, again, what was it about Trump that so spooked the spooks so far off their rightful
reservation and so intrusively into American presidential politics? Investigations being
overseen by Attorney General William Barr may provide answers -- or not.
... ... ...
It is true, of course, that Barr and Durham, as Trump appointees, are not the ideal
investigators of Intel misdeeds in the Russiagate saga. Much better would be a truly
bipartisan, independent investigation based in the Senate, as was the Church Committee of the
mid-1970s, which exposed and reformed (it thought at the time) serious abuses by US
intelligence agencies. That would require, however, a sizable core of nonpartisan, honorable,
and courageous senators of both parties, who thus far seem to be lacking.
There are also, however, the ongoing and upcoming Democratic presidential debates. First and
foremost, Russiagate is about the present and future of the American political system, not
about Russia. (Indeed, as I have repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in
Russiagate.) At every "debate" or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be
asked about this grave threat to American democracy -- what they think about what happened and
would do about it if elected president. Consider it health care for our democracy.
"former special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of "collusion."
Let me unpack that for you, esteemed professor: RM was "special counsel" in name only. The
real boss was Andrew Weissman. The "report" was his work. Mueller never looked for
anything, never found anything and never wrote anything.
The entire charade was part of the "resistance" to straight jacket Trump until the mid
term elections, a strategy put in motion by Comey and Brennan, which achieved the desired
result: Republicans lost the House.
Of course there was "little Russia in Russiagate." The narrative was all disinformation
set loose by Crowdstrike and Fusion GPS, paid for by Hillary and the DNC with the blessing of
President Obama. Welcome to the tin foil hat brigade as contributor.
"everyone in journalism appears completely untroubled by the complete paucity of information
that an organisation which troubles them"
Robert Parry's pieces on perception management. They come up by putting perception
management in the site search at Consortium News. Parry read through the Reagan papers.
"Declassified documents now reveal how extensive Reagan's propaganda project became with
inter-agency task forces assigned to develop "themes" that would push American "hot
buttons.""
But things were about to change. In a Jan. 13, 1983, memo, NSC Advisor Clark foresaw the
need for non-governmental money to advance this cause. "We will develop a scenario for
obtaining private funding," Clark wrote. (Just five days later, President Reagan personally
welcomed media magnate Rupert Murdoch into the Oval Office for a private meeting, according
to records on file at the Reagan library.)
As administration officials reached out to wealthy supporters, lines against domestic
propaganda soon were crossed as the operation took aim not only at foreign audiences but at
U.S. public opinion, the press and congressional Democrats who opposed funding the Nicaraguan
Contras." https://consortiumnews.com/2014/12/28/the-victory-of-perception-management/
Here are just some of the twists and turns in the case, which has gone on for more than
three years.
Flynn's trip to Russia in 2015, where it was claimed Flynn went without the knowledge or
approval of the DIA or anyone in Washington,
was proven not to be true .
Flynn was suspected of being compromised by a supposed Russian agent, Cambridge academic
Svetlana Lokhova, based on allegations from Western intelligence asset Stefan Halper.
This was also proven to be not true.
The very strange post-dated FD-302 form on the FBI's January 2017 interview of Flynn that
wasn't filled out until August 2017, almost seven months afterward, is
revealed in a court filing by Flynn's defense team .
FBI agent Pientka became the
"DOJ's Invisible Man," despite the fact that Congress has repeatedly called for him to
testify. Pientka has remained out of sight and out of mind more than a year and a half since
his name first surfaced in connection with the Flynn case.
Now, it's not that far-fetched of an idea that the Mueller special counsel prosecutors would
hide exculpatory evidence from the Flynn defense team, since they've just admitted to having
done exactly that in another case their
office has been prosecuting .
The defense team for Internet Research Agency/Concord, more popularly known as "the Russian
troll farm case," hasn't been smooth going for the Mueller prosecutors.
Then, in a
filing submitted to the court on Aug. 30, the IRA/Concord defense team alerted Judge
Friedrich that the prosecutors just got around to handing them key evidence the prosecutors had
for the past 18 months. The prosecution gave no explanation whatsoever as to why they hid this
key evidence for more than a year.
It's hard to see at this point how the entire IRA/Concord case isn't tossed out.
What would it mean for Flynn's prosecutors to have been caught hiding exculpatory evidence
from him and his lawyers, even after the presiding judge explicitly ordered them in February to
hand over everything they had?
It would mean that the Flynn case is tossed out, since the prosecution team was caught
engaging in gross misconduct.
Now you can see why Flynn refused to withdraw his guilty plea when Judge Sullivan gave him
the opportunity to do so in late December 2018.
A withdrawal of the guilty plea or a pardon would let the Mueller prosecution team off the
hook.
And they're not getting off the hook.
Flynn hired the best lawyer he possibly could have when it comes to exposing prosecutorial
misconduct. Nobody knows the crafty, corrupt, and dishonest tricks federal prosecutors use
better than Powell, who actually wrote a compelling book about such matters, entitled "
License to Lie: Exposing
Corruption in the Department of Justice ."
Everything this Mueller prosecution team did in withholding exculpatory evidence from
Flynn's defense team -- and continued to withhold even after Judge Sullivan specifically issued
an order about it -- is going to be fully exposed.
Defying a federal judge's Brady order is a one-way ticket to not only getting fired, it's a
serious enough offense to warrant disbarment and prosecution.
If it turns out Mueller special counsel prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence -- not
only in the IRA/Concord case, but also in the cases against Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael
Cohen, Rick Gates, Roger Stone, and others -- that will have a huge impact.
If they are willing to withhold exculpatory evidence in one case, why wouldn't they do the
same thing in other cases they were prosecuting? Haven't they have already demonstrated they
are willing to break the rules? Tags
We have become a third-world country. Even throwing Mueller and his entire prosecutors'
team in jail would not be enough to restore confidence in our legal system. But it would be a
start.
On or about December 28, 2016, the Russian Ambassador contacted FLYNN.
c. On or about December 29, 2016, FLYNN called a senior official of the Presidential
Transition Team ("PTT official"), who was with other senior ·members of the
Presidential Transition Team at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, to discuss
what, if anything, to communicate to the Russian Ambassador about the U.S. Sanctions. On that
call, FLYNN and 2 Case 1:17-cr-00232-RC Document 4 Filed 12/01/17 Page 2 of 6 the PTT
official discussed the U.S. Sanctions, including the potential impact of those sanctions on
the incoming administration's foreign policy goals. The PIT official and FLYNN also discussed
that the members of the Presidential Transition Team at Mar-a-Lago did not want Russia to
escalate the situation. d. Immediately after his phone call with the PTT official, FLYNN
called the Russian Ambassador and requested that Russia not escalate the situation and only
respond to the U.S. Sanctions in a reciprocal manner. e. Shortly after his phone call with
the Russian Ambassador, FLYNN spoke with the PTT official to report on the substance of his
call with the Russian Ambassador, including their discussion of the U.S. Sanctions. f. On or
about December 30, 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin released a statement indicating
that Russia would not take retaliatory measures in response to the U.S. Sanctions at that
time. g. On or about December 31, 2016, the Russian Ambassador called FLYNN and informed him
that Russia had chosen not to retaliate in response to FL YNN's request. h. After his phone
call with the Russian Ambassador, FLYNN spoke with senior members of the Presidential
Transition Team about FL YNN's conversations with the Russian Ambassador regarding the U.S.
Sanctions and Russia's decision not to escalate the situation.
The coup plot between the international intelligence community (which includes our
FBI-CIA-etc) and their unregistered foreign agents in the multinational corporate media is
slowly being revealed.
Here’s another possibility... elites in the US Gov set on running a soft coup
against a duly elected president and his team made up a whole pile of **** and passed it off
as truth.
The Manafort thing has me totally riled since HRC's "Password" guy and his brother were
PARTNERS with manafort, did the same damn things, and were NOT investigated.
Donald Trump is many things to many people, but is not his social personna to be patient.
He is being VERY patient to let this unfold, to "give a man enough rope" or political party
and its owner, as it may be....
Donna Brazile's book is under-rated: it holds they keys as to who ran the DNC and why
after Obie bailed.
Our local community rag (Vermont) had an opinion piece last week about "The slide towards
Facism", where the author breathlessly stated that she had learned from a MSNBC expose by
Rachel Maddow that the administration was firing researchers at NASA and EPA as well as
cutting back funding for LGBTQ support groups. Oh the horror. The author conveniently forgot
that the same dyke had lied for 2 years about Russia,Russia,Russia but it's still OK to
believe any **** that drops out of her mouth.
This is the level of insanity happening around here. Of course it is Bernie's turf.
People who are so stupid and gullible deserve everything they are gonna get.
Poor Flynn. Rail-roaded by ZOG and Obama and Hillary and Co. I hope beyond hope that the
truth is revealed and that he can sue the **** out of the seditionists/(((seditionists))) who
put him into this mess such that his great-great-grandchildren will never have to work.
I also blame Trump for throwing Flynn under the bus.
If they are willing to withhold exculpatory evidence in one case, why wouldn’t they
do the same thing in other cases they were prosecuting? Haven’t they have already
demonstrated they are willing to break the rules?
Duh! Because it's easy and the media never covers it and AG Barr and FBI director Wray
will cover it all up. America no longer operates under rule of law, and now we all know it.
Never cooperate with them!
flynn didn't rape children, to buzy trying to fight liberators of iraq and afganistan from
invasion... that's his major crime.
I guess, kelly, mattis, mcmaster neither are on the child rape trend. but what can they
do? when the entire cia and doj and fbi are full on controlled and run by the pedos? it's
like when all the cardinals and the pope are pedos, what a bishop to do...
Why would CIA Rothschild'd up puppet Trump pick only the best William Barr?
Who told Acosta to cut no prosecution deal with Epstein? George Bush? Robert Mukasey? or
Bob Mueller?
Trump, Barr, Bush, Mueller all on the same no rule of law national no government
pys op , for Epstein & 9/11 clean op team Poppa Bush, Clinton, &
Mossad.
Barr: CIA operative
It is a sobering fact that American presidents (many of whom have been corrupt) have gone
out of their way to hire fixers to be their attorney generals.
Consider recent history: Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), Eric Holder (2009-2015), Michael
Mukasey (2007-2009), Alberto Gonzales (2005-2007), John Ashcroft (2001-2005),Janet Reno
(1993-2001), **** Thornburgh (1988-1991), Ed Meese (1985-1988), etc.
Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting
in 1971. Barr’s youth career goal was to head the CIA.
CIA operative assigned to the China directorate, where he became close to powerful CIA
operative George H.W. Bush, whose accomplishments already included the CIA/Cuba Bay of
Pigs, Asia CIA operations (Vietnam War, Golden Triangle narcotics), Nixon foreign policy
(Henry Kissinger), and the Watergate operation.
When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA’s
“legal office” and Bush’s inner circle, and worked alongside Bush’s
longtime CIA enforcers Theodore “Ted” Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines,
and others, several of whom were likely involved with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy
assassination, and numerous southeast Asian operations, from the Phoenix Program to Golden
Triangle narco-trafficking.
Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Church Committee investigations into CIA
abuses.
Barr stonewalled and stopped inquiries in the CIA bombing assassination of Chilean
opposition leader Orlando Letelier.
Barr joined George H.W. Bush’s legal/intelligence team during Bush’s vice
presidency (under President Ronald Reagan) Rose from assistant attorney general to Chief
Legal Counsel to attorney general (1991) during the Bush 41 presidency.
Barr was a key player in the Iran-Contra operation, if not the most important member of
the apparatus, simultaneously managing the operation while also “fixing” the
legal end, ensuring that all of the operatives could do their jobs without fear of exposure
or arrest.
In his attorney general confirmation, Barr vowed to “attack criminal
organizations”, drug smugglers and money launderers. It was all hot air: as AG, Barr
would preserve, protect, cover up, and nurture the apparatus that he helped create, and use
Justice Department power to escape punishment.
Barr stonewalled and stopped investigations into all Bush/Clinton and CIA crimes,
including BCCI and BNL CIA drug banking, the theft of Inslaw/PROMIS software, and all
crimes of state committed by Bush
Barr provided legal cover for Bush’s illegal foreign policy and war crimes
Barr left Washington, and went through the “rotating door” to the corporate
world, where he took on numerous directorships and counsel positions for major companies.
In 2007 and again from 2017, Barr was counsel for politically-connected international law
firm Kirkland
& Ellis . Among its other notable attorneys and alumni are Kenneth Starr, John
Bolton, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and numerous Trump administration attorneys.
K&E’s clients include sex trafficker/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and Mitt
Romney’s Bain Capital.
A strong case can be made that William Barr was as powerful and important a figure in the
Bush apparatus as any other, besides Poppy Bush himself.
there is a war on america, and the DoD and men like flynn are too arrogant, dumb, and
proud to admit they have been fucked and conned deeply by men way smarter than them...
we don't need ******* brains, but killers to wage this revolution against the american
pedostate.
and that, what they master, they don't want to do.
if they want money, they should have learned to trade and not kill...
"... Anyone read Ronan Farrows "War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence"? In one passage he describes a meeting at the State Department where they are complaining that nobody is interested in their policy prescriptions and decide that the problem is that they need some graphs. They all turn to Farrrow and look at him as he is the youngest in the meeting and figure he is the only one who would know how to do that. "Ageism" he thought. ..."
"... The problem with the mainstream media calling out Trump is that this is like the pot calling a kettle black. Trump is awful, sure. But so is the corporate media with its pro-war and neoliberal economic agenda. ..."
"... As Ian Welsh notes, the press is Trump's enemy, not the servant of the people: https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-press-is-trumps-enemy-not-the-lefts-friend/ ..."
"... RussiaRussiaRussia has been very profitable, not only personally for the talking heads in the intelligence community but for the press. Removing clearance not only hits the talking heads in the wallet, it disrupts the relation between the press and its network of anonymous sources. ..."
"... Re 2), there seems to be an element of induced demand to support the preponderance of repetitive coverage, somewhat akin to the dopamine manipulation in video games and on social media websites. Bug and feature. ..."
This author is right. I do not know if you would call what the media did a form of virtue-signalling or whatever but the net
effect is a demonstration that the media is into coordinated campaigns. I do not think that people have forgotten the "This Is
Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy" Sinclair script a few months ago. This is just more of the same.
I don't even know why they act so b***-hurt when Trump attacks their honesty. In the last few months I have seen them call him
a traitor, a gay-bitch, they have called for a military coup to unseat him, they have begged for the deep state to rescue them,
they have elevated people who are responsible for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers to the ranks of noble heroes of
the Republic. As far as I am concerned, they have made their own bed and now they can lay in it, even if they have to share it
with Donald J. Trump.
Yesterday when I looked at the NYT online, the big featured graphic in the center of the page, typically a photo, was a rotating
feed of Trump tweets, in headline-sized text. It struck me as a new low in the pathetic Trump-media feedback loop. It's all a
game of "made you look!"
Yeah, they probably got a summer intern to do that.
Anyone read Ronan Farrows "War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence"? In one passage he describes a meeting at the State Department where they are complaining that nobody is interested in their
policy prescriptions and decide that the problem is that they need some graphs. They all turn to Farrrow and look at him as he
is the youngest in the meeting and figure he is the only one who would know how to do that. "Ageism" he thought.
The problem with the mainstream media calling out Trump is that this is like the pot calling a kettle black. Trump is awful, sure. But so is the corporate media with its pro-war and neoliberal economic agenda.
A case could be made that independent media like Naked Capitalism is doing a key public service. Not the corporate media though,
whose main objective is always to maximize advertising revenues and to impose the views of its owners, the very rich, on society.
1) The best justification for giving officials formally out of government clearance on either side of the revolving
door is that you may need to call on them for advice. It seems to me that this incentivizes "intelligence" over wisdom. And for
wisdom, long experience plus open sources should be enough. (For example, if you want to call in an ex-official on North Korean
nukes, they don't really need to know the details of the latest weaponry, or Kim's weight gain, or whatever. That can be explained
to them by the customer , as needed. What's really needed is an outside voice -- the role played by an honest consultant
-- plus wisdom about power relations on the Korean peninsula. No need for clearance there.)
2) RussiaRussiaRussia has been very profitable, not only personally for the talking heads in the intelligence community but
for the press. Removing clearance not only hits the talking heads in the wallet, it disrupts the relation between the press and
its network of anonymous sources.
Enquiring Mind, August 18, 2018 at 9:02 pm
Re 2), there seems to be an element of induced demand to support the preponderance of repetitive coverage, somewhat
akin to the dopamine manipulation in video games and on social media websites. Bug and feature.
"... Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I’m wondering why it’s that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. ..."
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The CIA Bull
in Glenn Simpson's Russia Shop Posted on January 22,
2018 by Jerri-Lynn ScofieldBy
John Helmer , the longest
continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct
his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a
professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United
States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy
Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with
Bears
In criminal trials the rule for prosecuting and defending lawyers is the same. Never ask a
witness a question unless you already know the answer. The corollary rule for defending lawyers
is – if the answer to your question will incriminate your client, don't ask it, and hope
the prosecutor fails to do his job.
Glenn Simpson, a former employee of the Wall Street Journal in New York, is currently on
trial in the US for having fabricated a dossier of allegations of Russian misconduct (bribes,
sex, blackmail, hacking) involving President Donald Trump and circulating them to the press;
the objective was to damage Trump's candidacy before the election of November 8, 2016. Simpson
was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on August 22, 2017; then the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on November 8 and again on November 14, 2017. So
far, Simpson's veracity and business conduct face nothing more than the court of public
opinion. He has not yet been charged with criminal or civil offences. That will happen if the
evidence materializes that Simpson has been lying.
Simpson's collaborator in the dossier and his business partner, Christopher Steele, is
facing trial in the London High Court, charged with libels he and Simpson published in their
dossier. Together, they are material witnesses in two federal US court trials for defamation,
one in Miami and one in New York. If they perjure themselves giving evidence in those cases,
they are likely to face criminal indictments. If they tell the truth, they are likely to face
fresh defamation proceedings; perhaps a civil racketeering suit for fraud; maybe a false
statement prosecution under the US criminal code.
One question for them is as obvious as its answer. Who do an American ex-journalist on US
national security and an ex-British intelligence agent go to for sources on Russian undercover
operations outside Russia in general, the US in particular? Answer -- first, their friends and
contacts from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); second, their friends and contacts from
the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, as the UK counterpart is known.
Why then did the twenty-two congressmen, the members of the House Intelligence Committee who
subpoenaed Simpson for interview, fail to pursue what information he and Steele received either
directly from the CIA or indirectly through British intelligence?
The answer noone in the US wants to say aloud is the possibility that it was the CIA which
provided Simpson and Steele with names and source materials for their dossier, creating the
evidence of a Russian plot against the US election, and generating evidence of Russian
operations. If that is what happened, then Simpson and Steele were participants in a false-flag
CIA operation in US politics.
This isn't idle speculation. It has been under investigation at the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) since Simpson and Steele decided in mid-2016 to go to the FBI to request an
investigation, and then told American press to get the FBI to confirm it was investigating. At
the fresh request this month from the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI is
still
investigating .
Simpson's appearance at the House Intelligence Committee was the sequel to his testimony
before the Senate Judiciary Committee; for that story, read this .
Simpson's three lawyers from the Washington, DC, firm of Cunningham Levy Muse, who appeared with him at the Senate and House committee hearings. From left to right, Robert Muse; Joshua Levy, and Rachel Clattenburg.
The firm's other name partner, Bryan Cunningham, was a CIA officer specializingin cyber operations.
The transcripts of the House Intelligence Committee were released last Thursday. Simpson's
first appearance was on November 8, and can be read in full here
.
Simpson's lawyers did all the talking; Simpson said nothing, pleading the US Constitution's
Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.
Although his lawyers repeatedly claimed during the earlier Senate Committee hearing that
Simpson was testifying voluntarily, the House Committee recorded that Simpson was compelled to
testify. "Our record today," the November 8 transcript begins, "will reflect that you have been
compelled to appear today pursuant to a subpoena issued on October 4th, 2017." Simpson then
told the Committee through his lawyers that he would plead the Fifth Amendment and not answer
any questions. The first transcript is a record of debate between Republican and Democratic
members of the Committee.
This resulted in an agreement for Simpson to testify under the subpoena but on terms his
lawyers said would limit the scope of the questions which he would agree to answer.
Steele, according to the November 8 transcript, was also summoned to testify. A British
citizen with home in Berkshire and office in London, he refused and the Committee recorded his
"noncooperation and nontestimony."
Republicans outnumber Democrats on the House Committee, 13 to 9. Just 5 Republican members
were at Simpson's November 14 appearance; 7 Democrats. The Republican committee chairman, Devin
Nunes, was absent. Release of Simpson's transcript was an initiative of the Democrats. In a
statement by their leader on the committee, Adam Schiff, the Democrats claimed
last week "thus far, Committee Republicans have refused to look into this key area and we hope
the release of this transcript will reinforce the importance of these critical questions to our
investigation."
Members of the House Intelligence Committee on the podium at an open hearing inNovember 2017. From left to right: Adam Schiff (D), Michael Conaway (R),and Thomas Rooney (R).
Search the 165 pages of the transcript for the CIA, and you will find many references to the
letters, C, I and A – spe cia lize, so cia l, commer cia l, espe cia lly, asso cia tion,
finan cia l and politi cia n. There were 44 mentions of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence
(FBI); 4 mentions of "British Intelligence" – the spy agency to which Steele belonged ten
years ago – one mention each of the Israeli Mossad, the Chinese and Indian intelligence
services.
According to Simpson, "foreign intelligence services hacking American political operations
is not that unusual, actually, and there's a lot of foreign intelligence services that play in
American elections." He mentioned the Chinese and the Indians, not the Israelis. The Mossad,
Simpson did tell the Committee, was his source for his belief that Russian intelligence has
been operating through the Jewish Orthodox Chabad movement, and the Russian Orthodox Church.
"The Orthodox church is also an arm of the Russian State now the Mossad guys used to tell me
about how the Russians were laundering money through the Orthodox church in Israel, and that it
was intelligence operations."
There are just two references in the Committee transcript to the CIA. One was a passing
remark to imply the Russians cannot "break[ing] into the CIA, [so instead] you are breaking
into, you know, places where, you know, an open society leaves open."
The second was a bombshell. It dropped during questioning by Congressman Thomas Rooney
(right), a 3-term Republican
representative from Florida with a career as an army lawyer. Rooney asked Simpson: "Do you or
anyone else independently verify or corroborate any information in the dossier?"
Simpson replied by saying, "Yes. Well, numerous things in the dossier have been verified.
You know, I don't have access to the intelligence or law enforcement information that I see
made reference to, but, you know, things like, you know, the Russian Government has been
investigating Hillary Clinton and has a lot of information about her."
Then Simpson contradicted himself, disclosing what he had just denied. "When the original
memos came in saying that the Kremlin was mounting a specific operation to get Donald Trump
elected President , that was not what the Intelligence Community was saying. The Intelligence
Community was saying they are just seeking to disrupt our election and our political process,
and that this is sort of kind of just a generally nihilistic, you know, trouble-making
operation. And, you know, Chris turned out to be right, it was specifically designed to elect
Donald Trump President."
How did Simpson know with such confidence what the "Intelligence Community" was "saying",
and who were Simpson's and Steele's sources in the "Intelligence Community"? Rooney failed to
inquire. Instead, he and Simpson exchanged question and answer regarding the approach Simpson
and Steele made to the FBI when they delivered their dossier. In the details of that, Simpson
repeated what he had already told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Rooney then asked what contact had been made with the CIA or "any other intelligence
officials". Simpson claimed he didn't understand the question at first, then he stumbled.
What Simpson was concealing in the two pauses, reported in the transcript as hyphens, Rooney
did not realize. Simpson was implying that noone from Fusion GPS, his consulting company, had
been in contact with the CIA, nor him personally. But Simpson left open that Steele had been in
contact with the CIA. Rooney followed with a question about "anyone", but that was so
imprecise, Simpson recovered his confidence to say "No". That was a cover-up – and the
House Intelligence Committee let it drop noiselessly.
Intelligence community sources and colleagues who know Simpson and Steele say Simpson was
notorious at the Wall Street Journal for coming up with conspiracy theories for which the
evidence was missing or unreliable. He told the Committee that disbelief on the part of his
editors and management had been one of his reasons for leaving the newspaper. "One of the
reasons why I left the Wall Street Journal was because I wanted to write more stories about
Russian influence in Washington, D.C., on both the Democrats and the Republicans eventually the
Journal lost interest in that subject. And I was frustrated that was where I left my journalism
career."
Left: Glenn Simpson reporter for the Wall Street Journal in 1996, promoting his book, Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics. Right: Simpson in Washington in August 2017.
When Simpson was asked "do you – did you find anything to -- that you verified as
false in the dossier, since or during?" Simpson replied: "I have not seen anything – ".
Note the hypthen, the stenographer's signal that Simpson was pausing.
"[Question]. So everything in that dossier, as far as you're concerned, is true or could be
true?"
"MR. SIMPSON: I didn't say that. What I said was it was credible at the time it came in. We
were able to corroborate various things that supported its credibility."
Sources in London are divided on the question of where Steele's sources came from –
CIA, MI6, or elsewhere. What has been clear for the year in which the dossier's contents have
been in public circulation is that the sources the dossier referred to as "Russian" were not.
For details of the
sourcing . The subsequent identification of the Maltese source Joseph Mifsud, and the
Greek-American George Papadopoulos, corroborates their lack of
direct Russian sources. Instead, the sources identified in the dossier were either
Americans, Americans of Russian ethnic origin, or Russians with no direct knowledge repeating
hearsay three or four times removed from source.
So were the allegations of the dossier manufactured by a CIA disinformation unit, and fed
back to the US through the British agent, Steele? Or were they a Simpson conspiracy theory of
the type that failed to pass veracity testing when Simpson was at the Wall Street Journal? The
House Intelligence Committee failed to inquire.
One independent clue is what financial and other links Simpson and Steele and their
consulting firms, Fusion GPS and Orbis Business Intelligence, have had with US Government
agencies other than the FBI, and what US Government contracts they were paid for, before the
Republican and Democratic Party organizations commissioned the anti-Trump job?
The House Committee has subpoenaed business records from Fusion, but Simpson's lawyers say
they will refuse to hand them over. The financial records of Steele's firm are openly
accessible through the UK government company registry, Companies House. Click to read
here .
Because the Trump dossier work ran from the second half of 2015 to November 2016, the
financial reports of Orbis for the financial years ending March 31, 2016, and March 31, 2017,
are the primary sources. For FY 2016 and FY 2017, open this link to read.
The papers reveal that Orbis was a small firm with no more than 7 employees. Steele's
business partner and co-shareholder, Christopher Burrows, is another former MI6 spy. They had
been hoping for MI6 support of their private business, but it failed to materialize, says an
London intelligence source. "Chris Burrows is another from the same background. They all hope
to be Hakluyt [a leading commercial intelligence operation in London] but didn't get the nod on
departure."
Left: Christopher Steele; right, Christopher Burrows.
They do not report the Orbis income. Instead, for 2016 the company filings indicate
£155,171 in cash at the bank, and income of £245,017 owed by clients and
contractors. Offsetting that figure, Orbis owed £317,848 – to whom and for what
purposes is not reported. The unaudited accounts show Orbis's profit jumped from £121,046
in 2015 to £199,223 in 2016, and £441,089 in 2017.
The financial data are complicated by the operation by Steele and Burrows of a second
company, Orbis Business Intelligence International, a subsidiary they created in 2010, a year
after the parent company was formed. Follow its affairs here .
According to British press reports ,
Orbis and Steele were paid £200,000 for the dossier. Simpson told the House Intelligence
Committee the sum was much less -- $160,000 (about £114,000). Simpson's firm, he also
testified, was being paid at a rate of about $50,000 per month for a total of about $320,000.
If the British sources are more accurate than Simpson's testimony, Steele's takings from the
dossier represented roughly half the profit on the Orbis balance-sheet.
British sources also report that a US Government agency paid for Orbis to work on evidence
and allegations of corruption at the world soccer federation, Fédération
Internationale de Football (FIFA). Indictments in this case were issued by the US Department of
Justice in
May 2015 , and the following
December . What role the two-partner British consultancy played in the complex
investigations by teams from the Justice Department, the FBI and also the Internal Revenue
Service is unclear. That Steele, Burrows and Orbis depended on US government sources for their
financial well-being appears to be certain.
Another reported version of the FIFA contract is that Steele, Burrows and Orbis were hired
by the British Football Association to collect materials on FIFA corruption, and provide them
to the FBI and other US investigators, and then to the press. The scheme's objective was
reportedly to advance the British bidding for the World Cup in 2018 or 2022 by discrediting the
rival bids from Russia and Qatar. Click to
read . Were MI6 and CIA sources mobilized by Orbis to feed the FBI with evidence the US
investigators were unable to turn up, or was Orbis the conduit through which disinformation
targeting Russia was fed to make it appear more credible to the FBI, and to the media?
US Congressional investigators have so far failed to notice the similarities between the
FIFA and the Trump dossier operations. Early this month two Republican members of the Senate
Judiciary Committee announced
that they have called for a Justice Department and FBI investigation of Steele for providing
false information to the FBI. The provision of the US code making lying a
federal crime requires the falsehoods occur "within the jurisdiction of the executive,
legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States." Simpson has testified
that when Steele briefed the FBI on the dossier, he did so at meetings in Rome, Italy.
Now then, Part I and this
sequel of the Simpson-Steele story having been read and thoroughly mulled over, what can the
meaning be?
In the short run, this case was a black job assigned by Republican Party candidates for
president, then the Democratic National Committee, for the purpose of discrediting Trump in
favour of Hillary Clinton. It failed on Election Day in 2016; the Democrats are still
trying.
In the long run, the case is a measurement of the life, or the half-life, of truth. Giuseppe
di Lampedusa wrote once that nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily. On his clock, that
was five minutes. He didn't know the United States, or shall we say the stretch from Washington
through New York to the North End of Boston. There, truth has an even shorter life. Scarcely a
second.
I pay pretty close attention to this topic and I must say I sometimes wonder if the
Russians haven’t sold the rope to the American political elite. I read all 311 pages of
Simpson’s testimony. I was struck that much of what he was “fed” by Steele
confirmed his “OMG Russia corruption” biases.
And I say “fed to him” when I’m in a generous mood, giving him the
benefit of the doubt, because usually I am of the opinion that he’s either a really
crappy CIA agent posing as a journalist or just a garden variety rat f*!@er. A black job
political operative, stitching together a few almost-believable “facts” and
out-and-out fabrications with squishy words like “collusion” and
“ties.”
London due diligence firms say the record of Simpson’s firm Fusion GPS and
Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence operations in the US has discredited them in the
due diligence market. The London experts believe the Senate Committee transcript shows
Simpson and Steele were hired for the black job of discrediting the target of their
research, Trump; did a poor job; failed in 2016; and now are engaged in bitter
recriminations against each other to avoid multi-million dollar court penalties.
A source at a London firm which is larger and better known than Steele’s Orbis
says “standard due diligence means getting to the truth. It’s confidential to
the client, and not leaked. There are also black jobs, white jobs, and red jobs. Black
means the client wants you to dig up dirt on the target, and make it look credible for
publishing in the press. White means the client wants you to clear him of the wrongdoing
which he’s being accused of in the media or the marketplace; it’s also leaked
to the press. A red job is where the client pays the due diligence firm to hire a
journalist to find out what he knows and what he’s likely to publish, in order to
bribe or stop him. The Steele dossier on Trump is an obvious black job. Too
obvious.”
I read all 311 pages of Simpson’s testimony. I was struck that much of what he was
“fed” by Steele confirmed his “OMG Russia corruption” biases.
Same here, but not just about what he was fed by Steele. Simpson claimed to have done some
of his own research and said it was consistent with what he got from Steele.
I’m about three-quarters of the way through the transcript of Simpson’s
interrogation by the House Intelligence Committee, and I’ve read all 312 pages of the
Senate Judiciary Committee transcript, which bears little resemblance to what was reported in
the major media – shocking, I know.
Among the “bombshells” the mainstream reported was “proof” that it
wasn’t the dossier that launched the FBI’s investigation of Trump, and therefore
the dossier couldn’t have been used as justification for a FISA warrant. A bigger
bombshell, which of course none of them mentioned, is that Simpson, with his client’s
consent, was secretly briefing Clinton-friendly reporters on information from Steele’s
memos, and they used it to write stories based on “unnamed sources.” He even
admitted that he didn’t verify the information before feeding it to the media, said he
didn’t feel he needed to, because it came from a trustworthy source. Where have we
heard that before?
Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the
DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I’m wondering why it’s that
much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. It’s
well-established that the State Department often acts as a cover for the CIA, and the agency
under Secretary Clinton had a strong anti-Russia faction that’s on the record as
meddling in Ukraine’s presidential election. And how much doubt could there be that
both Clintons kept the CIA connections they made while in office?
Then there was the whole “Grizzly Steppe” report just before Trump’s
inauguration, presented as a consensus among “17 intelligence agencies” that the
Russians “hacked the election” to help Trump win.
I’m not 100-percent convinced that U.S. intelligence was behind the dossier, but
it’s enough of a possibility that I’m not writing it off as some nutty
“conspiracy theory.”
Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that
the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I’m wondering why it’s
that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole
thing.
FWIW this NC commenter has never had any problem believing that this may be the case. In
fact I am fairly certain that it is the case, although from what I understand the FBI and MI6
were also involved.
Adding: Heh. I posted this before looking at Rev Kev’s link to the Raimondo article,
which comes to the same conclusions. Interesting times!
I believe that Seth Abramson or someone put photographs to the Steele dossier showing
people in the places & at the times delineated in the Steele dossier.
From the very first Steele said he would not & could not reveal his sources. It was from
the first indicated that it would be to the FBI & CIA to discover.
He said he believed that his sources were credible.
When I was studying Intelligence services the CIA was said to be the private army of the CIA.
These days I don’t know exactly who the CIA works for, or answers to.
I certainly don’t think well of the CIA believing they are wrapped up working for their
Front businesses more than focusing on the mission of spying in the interests of the American
people.
Of private intelligence companies I get what I can from IHS Jane’s.
That the CIA lost 20 assets, human beings, in China for incompetent secret communications
methods would lead professionals to withhold as much of identities as possible.
For awhile there I believe Steele was worried about his own health.
David Corn at Mother Jones was reticent to break the story.
So now what I see to look for is what Steele said needed to be done, & that being what
Mueller is doing at the behest of the DOJ.
The US has been at war, albeit Hybrid war since the imposition of sanctions for their
violations of international law as regarded the annexation of Crimea & the attack on the
Ukraine.
Sanctions are Economic Warfare.
That the US feels the right to engage in warfare of any kind Economic or Hot over violations
of International Law leads me to believe that the UN will fail to prevent the apocalyptic
riot.
But that as regards Trump becomes neither here nor there, correct?
William Binney, former NSA technical official and whistleblower, comments on the FISA
memo, that has apparently just been released. Obviously, a major development in
‘Russia-gate’.
It is not vey clear for whom Epstein used to work. Mossad connection is just one hypothesis.
What sovereign state would allow compromising politician by a foreign intelligence service. This
just does not compute.
But the whole tone of discussion below clearly point to the crisis of legitimacy of
neoliberal elite. And Russiagate had shown that the elite cares about it and tried to patch the
cracks.
As Eric
Rasmusen writes: "Everybody, it seems, in New York society knew by 2000 that Jeffrey
Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were corrupting teenage girls, but the press wouldn't cover it."
Likewise, everybody in New York society has long known that Larry Silverstein, who bought the
asbestos-riddled white elephant World Trade Center in July 2001 and immediately doubled the
insurance, is a mobbed-up friend of Netanyahu and a confessed participant in the controlled
demolition of Building 7 , from which he earned over 700 million insurance dollars on the
pretext that al-Qaeda had somehow brought it down. But the press won't cover that either.
The New York Times , America's newspaper of record, has the investigative talent and
resources to expose major corruption in New York. Why did the Times spend almost two
decades ignoring the all-too-obvious antics of Epstein and Silverstein? Why is it letting the
absurd tale of Epstein's alleged suicide stand? Why hasn't it used the work of Architects and
Engineers for 9/11 Truth -- including the brand-new University of Alaska study on the controlled
demolition of WTC-7 -- to expose the biggest scandal of the 21 st century, if
not all of American history?
The only conceivable answer is that The New York Times is somehow complicit in these
monstrous crimes. It must be protecting its friends in high places. So who are those friends,
and where are those high places?
One thing Epstein and Silverstein have in common, besides names ending in "-stein," is
alleged involvement in the illicit sex industry. Epstein's antics, or at least some of them,
are by now well-known. Not so for Silverstein, who apparently began his rags-to-9/11-riches
story as a pimp supplying prostitutes and nude dancers to the shadier venues of NYC, alongside
other illicit activities including "the heroin trade, money laundering
and New York Police corruption." All of this was exposed in a mid-1990s lawsuit. But good
luck finding any investigative reports in The New York Times .
Another Epstein-Silverstein connection is their relationships to major American Jewish
organizations. Even while he was allegedly pimping girls and running heroin, Larry Silverstein
served as president for United Jewish Appeal of New York. As for Epstein, he was the boy toy
and protégé of Les Wexner, co-founder of
the Mega Group of Jewish billionaires associated with the World Jewish Congress, the
Anti-Defamation League, and other pro-Israel groups. Indeed, there is no evidence that
"self-made billionaire" Epstein ever earned significant amounts of money; his only investment
"client" was Les Wexner. Epstein, a professional sexual blackmailer, used his supposed
billionaire status as a cover story. In fact, he was just an employee working for Wexner and
associated criminal/intelligence networks.
Which brings us to the third and most important Epstein-Silverstein similarity: They were
both close to the government of Israel. Jeffrey Epstein's handler was Ghislaine Maxwell,
daughter of Mossad super-spy Robert Maxwell; among his friends was Ehud Barak, who is currently
challenging Netanyahu for leadership of Israel. Larry Silverstein, too, has friends in high
Israeli places. According to Haaretz , Silverstein has "close ties with Netanyahu"
(speaking to him on the phone every weekend) as well as with Ehud Barak, "whom Silverstein in
the past offered a job as his representative in Israel" and who called Silverstein immediately
after 9/11.
We may reasonably surmise that both Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Silverstein have been carrying
on very important work on behalf of the state of Israel. And we may also surmise that this is
the reason The New York Times has been covering up the scandals associated with both
Israeli agents for almost two decades. The Times , though it pretends to be America's
newspaper of record, has always been Jewish-owned-and-operated. Its coverage has always been
grotesquely
distorted in favor of Israel . It has no interest in exposing the way Israel controls the
United States by blackmailing its leaders (Epstein) and staging a fake "Arab-Muslim attack on
America" (Silverstein). The awful truth is that The New York Times is part of the same
Jewish-Zionist "
we control America " network as Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Silverstein.
Epstein "Suicide" Illustrates Zionist Control of USA -- and the Decadence and Depravity
of Western Secularism
Since The New York Times and other mainstream media won't go there, let's reflect on
the facts and lessons of the Jeffrey Epstein suicide scandal -- a national disgrace that ought
to shock Americans into rethinking their worldviews in general, and their views on the official
myth of 9/11 in particular.
On Saturday, August 10, 2019, convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was allegedly
found dead in his cell at Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York City, one of
America's most corrupt prisons. The authorities claim Epstein hanged himself. But nobody, not
even the presstitutes of America's corporate propaganda media, convincingly pretends to believe
the official story.
Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile pimp to presidents and potentates. His job was recruiting
young girls for sex, then offering them to powerful men -- in settings outfitted with hidden
video cameras. When police raided his New York townhouse on July 6-7 2019 they found locked
safes full of pornographic pictures of underage girls, along with piles of compact discs
labeled "young (name of girl) + (name of VIP)." Epstein had been openly and brazenly carrying
on such activities for more than two decades, as reported throughout most of that period by
alternative media outlets including my own Truth Jihad Radio and False Flag Weekly News . (Even
before the 2016 elections, my audience knew that both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were
blackmailed clients of Jeffrey Epstein, that Clinton was a frequent flyer on Epstein's "Lolita
Express" private jet, and that Trump had been credibly accused in a lawsuit of joining Epstein
in the brutal rape of a 13-year-old, to whom Trump then allegedly issued death threats.) It was
only in the summer of 2019 that mainstream media and New York City prosecutors started talking
about what used to be consigned to the world of "conspiracy theories."
So who was Epstein working for? His primary employer was undoubtedly the Israeli Mossad and
its worldwide Zionist crime network. Epstein's handler was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of
Mossad super-spy Robert Maxwell. According to sworn depositions, Ghislaine Maxwell recruited
underage girls for Epstein and oversaw his sex trafficking operations. As the New Yorker
reported August 16: "In court papers that were unsealed on August 9th, it was alleged that
Maxwell had been Epstein's central accomplice, first as his girlfriend, and, later, as his
trusted friend and procuress, grooming a steady stream of girls, some as young as fourteen,
coercing them to have sex with Epstein at his various residences around the world, and
occasionally participating in the sexual abuse herself." Alongside Maxwell, Epstein's other
Mossad handler was
Les Wexner, co-founder of the notorious Mega Group of billionaire Israeli spies , who
appears to have originally recruited the penniless Epstein and handed him a phony fortune so
Epstein could pose as a billionaire playboy.
Even after Epstein's shady "suicide" mega-Mossadnik Maxwell continued to flaunt her impunity
from American justice. She no doubt conspired to publicize the August 15 New York Post
photograph of herself smiling and looking "chillingly serene" at In-And-Out-Burger in Los
Angeles, reading The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of C.I.A. Operatives .
That nauseating photo inspired the New
Yorker to accuse her of having "gall" -- a euphemism for the Yiddish chutzpah , a quality
that flourishes in the overlapping Zionist and Kosher Nostra communities.
Maxwell and The New York Post , both Kosher Nostra/Mossad assets, were obviously
sending a message to the CIA: Don't mess with us or we will expose your complicity in these
scandalous crimes. That is the Mossad's standard operating procedure: Infiltrate and compromise
Western intelligence services in order to prevent them from interfering with the Zionists'
over-the-top atrocities. According to French historian
Laurent Guyénot's hypothesis, the CIA's false flag fake assassination attempt on
President John F. Kennedy, designed to be blamed on Cuba, was transformed by Mossad into a real
assassination -- and the CIA couldn't expose it due to its own complicity. (The motive: Stop
JFK from ending Israel's nuclear program.) The same scenario, Guyénot argues, explains
the anomalies of the Mohamed Merah affair
, the Charlie Hebdo killings, and the 9/11 false flag operation. It would not be surprising if
Zionist-infiltrated elements of the CIA were made complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's sexual
blackmail activities, in order to protect Israel in the event Epstein had to be "burned" (which
is apparently what has finally occurred).
So what really happened to Epstein? Perhaps the most likely scenario is that the Kosher
Nostra, which owns New York in general and the mobbed-up MCC prison in particular, allowed the
Mossad to exfiltrate Epstein to Occupied Palestine, where he will be given a facelift, a
pension, a luxury suite overlooking the Mediterranean, and a steady stream of young sex slaves
(Israel is the world's capital of human trafficking, an honor it claimed from the Kosher Nostra
enclaves of Odessa after World War II). Once the media heat wave blows over, Epstein will
undoubtedly enjoy visits from his former Mossad handler Ghislaine Maxwell, his good friend Ehud
Barak, and various other Zionist VIPs. He may even offer fresh sex slaves to visiting American
congressmen.
This is not just a paranoid fantasy scenario. According to Eric
Rasmusen : "The Justice Dept. had better not have let Epstein's body be cremated. And
they'd better give us convincing evidence that it's his body. If I had $100 million to get out
of jail with, acquiring a corpse and bribing a few people to switch fingerprints and DNA
wouldn't be hard. I find it worrying that the government has not released proof that Epstein is
dead or a copy of the autopsy."
But didn't the alleged autopsy reportedly find broken neck bones that are more commonly
associated with strangulation murders than suicides? That controversy may have been scripted to
distract the public from
an insider report on 4chan , first published before the news of Epstein's "suicide" broke,
that Epstein had been "switched out" of MCC. If so, the body with the broken neck bones wasn't
Epstein's.
The Epstein affair (like 9/11) illustrates two critically important truths about Western
secularism: there is no truth, and there are no limits. A society that no longer believes in
God no longer believes in truth, since God is al-haqq, THE truth, without Whom the whole
notion of truth has no metaphysical basis. The postmodern philosophers understand this
perfectly well. They taught a whole generation of Western humanities scholars that truth is
merely a function of power: people accept something as "true" to the extent that they are
forced by power to accept it. So when the most powerful people in the world insist that three
enormous steel-frame skyscrapers were blown to smithereens by relatively modest office fires on
9/11, that absurd assertion becomes the official "truth" as constructed by such Western
institutions as governments, courts, media, and academia. Likewise, the assertion that Jeffrey
Epstein committed suicide under circumstances that render that assertion absurd will probably
become the official "truth" as recorded and promulgated by the West's ruling institutions, even
though nobody will ever really believe it.
Epstein's career as a shameless, openly-operating Mossad sexual blackmailer -- like the
in-your-face 9/11 coup -- also illustrates another core truth of Western secularism: If there
is no God, there are no limits (in this case, to human depravity and what it can get away
with). Or as Dostoevsky famously put it: "If God does not exist, everything is permitted."
Since God alone can establish metaphysically-grounded limits between what is permitted and what
is forbidden, a world without God will feature no such limits; in such a world Aleister
Crowley's satanic motto "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" becomes the one and
only commandment. In today's Godless West, why should men not "do what they wilt" and
indulge their libidos by raping young girls if they can get away with it? After all, all the
other sexual taboos are being broken, one by one. Fornication, adultery, homosexuality,
sadomasochism, gender-bending all of these have been transformed during my lifetime from crimes
and vices to "human rights" enjoyed by the most liberal and fashionable right-thinking Western
secularists. Even bestiality and necrophilia are poised to become normalized "sexual
identities" whose practitioners will soon be proudly marching in "bestiality pride" and
"necrophilia pride" parades. So why not normalize pedophilia and other forms of rape
perpetrated by the strong against the weak? And why not add torture and murder in service to
sexual gratification? After all, the secret bible of the sexual identity movement is the
collected works of the Marquis de Sade, the satanic prophet of sexual liberation, with whom the
liberal progressivist secular West is finally catching up. It will not be surprising if, just a
few years after the Jeffrey Epstein "suicide" is consigned to the memory hole, we will be
witnessing LGBTQBNPR parades, with the BNPR standing for bestiality, necrophilia, pedophilia,
and rape. (It would have been LGBTQBNPRG, with the final G standing for Gropers like President
Trump, except that the G was already taken by the gays.) The P's, pioneers of pedophile pride
parades, will undoubtedly celebrate Jeffrey Epstein as an ahead-of-his-time misunderstood hero
who was unjustly persecuted on the basis of his unusual sexual orientation.
It is getting harder and harder to satirize the decadence and depravity of the secular West,
which insists on parodying itself with ever-increasing outlandishness. When the book on this
once-mighty civilization is written, and the ink is dry, readers will be astounded by the
limitless lies of the drunk-on-chutzpah psychopaths who ran it into the ground.
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought Lucky Larry only leased the WTC buildings rather than
actually purchased them. I think I have read that his investment was in the region of 150
mill for which he has recouped a whopping 4 bill.
Would you please answer a preliminary question before I put finishing this on my busy agenda?
You stake a fair bit of your credit on what you say about Larry Silverstein and insurance. My
present understanding is that the insurance cover for WTC 1 and 2 was increased as a routine
part of the financing deal he had made for a purchase which was only months old. Not true?
Not the full story? Convince us.
As to WTC 7 my understanding is that he had owned the building for some years and had not
recently increased the insurance. Not true? And when did any clause get into his WTC7
insurance contract which might have had some effect on inflating the payout?
“Trump had been credibly accused in a lawsuit of joining Epstein in the brutal rape of
a 13-year-old, to whom Trump then allegedly issued death threats.)”
The “Katie Johnson” case collapsed in 2016 when it was revealed that
“she” was in fact a middle-aged man, a stringer for the Jerry Springer show. Just
another Gloria Allred fraud.
“a society that no longer believes in god no longer believes in the truth, since god is
the truth….blah blah blah”
This is thin gruel indeed…..just silly platitudes from a muzzie convert. There are at
least 100 billion galaxies in the universe with each galaxy containing as many as 100 billion
stars. And there is no telling how many universes there are. Does anyone really believe
Barrett’s preferred deity takes a time out from running this vast empire to service
Barrett’s yearning for “truth”? Just goes to prove that humans will believe
almost any idea as long as it’s sufficiently idiotic.
“The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse
of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that
studied the collapse.”
“It is our conclusion based upon these findings that the collapse of WTC 7 was a
global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of all columns in the building and
not a progressive collapse involving the sequential failure of columns throughout the
building.”
Speaking of the truth v. parody I’d really rather work on the cause of
Epstein’s death –yes I think he’s dead– suicide or
strangulation ?
There are some things the Justice Dept. could do if they wanted to. Why they apparently
didn’t want to expose the corpse in greater detail, let media view the cell, have
correspondent(s) interview the ex- cellmate of Epstein, et.al just leads to suspicions.
This is something they should have to answer for . That includes AG Barr. Trump could make
it happen–like every thing else– if Barr says no. The President won’t.
Dostoyevsky with his “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
overlooked the Jewish God who permits much more when it comes to Jewish gentile relations.
The Jewish God is not limited by the Kant’s First Moral Imperative. The Jewish
God’s moral laws are not universal. They are context dependent according to the
Leninist Who, whom rule.
Not so for Silverstein, who apparently began his rags-to-9/11-riches story as a pimp
supplying prostitutes and nude dancers to the shadier venues of NYC, alongside other
illicit activities including “the heroin trade, money laundering and New York
Police corruption.”
I would like to see more about the beginnings of Silverstein’s career.
Good work Kevin, Irrelevant exactly what Silverstein did in way of insurance.The FACT is
that WTC7 DID NOT FALL due to fires. Neither did WTC1 or 2. The 6 million dollar question
is ‘WHO put the ‘bang’ in the building?’ to bring them down, by
what ever means. Im in favour of nukes for 1 and 2.
Answer that! Why isnt Silverstein arrested? I think Kevin provided the answer in the
article..
I just stumbled onto your article from a link on reddit, r/epstein. You make some
convincing arguments. I was thrilled that you brought 9/11 into this – because the
Epstein “suicide” and how it is being covered reminds me so much of how I felt
after 9/11 and the run-up to the war. -But you lost me at the end with the stuff about
Godless secularism. I’ve read the bible and it is not the answer to what’s
wrong with the world.
Why did the Times spend almost two decades ignoring the all-too-obvious antics of
Epstein and Silverstein? Why is it letting the absurd tale of Epstein’s alleged
suicide stand?
One thing cannot be denied : Epstein was arrested, denied bail and jailed awaiting trail
on a Federal indictment for much the same offence he had pleaded guilty to a decade ago,
which did not involve even a single homicide yet made him universally reviled and in as
much trouble with the legal system as a man could be (almost certain never to get out
again). Epstein was in far more trouble that anyone of his financial resources has ever
been, but then that was for paying for sex acts with young teen girls.
What an awesomely impressive testament to the impunity enjoyed by the Jewish
elite Epstein is. It is no wonder that Larry Silverstein was insouciant about the risks of
a Jewish lightning fraud controlled demolition killing thousands of people in a building he
had just bought and increased the insurance coverage of. After all, it wasn’t
anything serious like paying for getting hundreds of handjobs from underage girls. And it
is not like someone like the Pizzagate nut that fired his AR15 into underground child
molestation complex beneath the Dems restaurant/pedophile centre would take all those WTC
deaths seriously enough to shoot at him just because of inevitable internet accusations of
mass murder. Mr Barrett, why don’t you step up and do it, thereby proving you
believe the things you say .
@NoseytheDuke Yes, he leased the World Trade Center buildings one and two from the Port
Authority of New York and New Jersey. He built World Trade Center building seven, having
acquired a ground lease from Port Authority.
I can’t imagine why you ask this question in a public venue. I found the answer in
less than one minute on the internet.
I assume the insurance policies were for the present value of his net profits for the
duration of the leases.
I recall reading about this guy prior to the event. I believe it was USATODAY . He and a
silent partner had bought the complex with a down of 63million and had it insured for
7billion. I thought it odd that the port authority would let go of the property at the
time.
As the building deficiencies became known afterwards,my thoughts were along the line of
insurance fraud.
I came across a copy of the rand Corp “state of the world 2000” which
accurately describes the scenario and resulting culture of terror as “one possible
future “…. funny how it’s taken all these years to discover this
website.
Indeed, there is no evidence that “self-made billionaire” Epstein ever
earned significant amounts of money.
Good thing that Wexner is Jewish so we can discount the possibility that he was telling
the truth the other month when he said that Epstein stole vast amounts of Wexner money
Alongside Maxwell, Epstein’s other Mossad handler was Les Wexner, co-founder of
the notorious Mega Group of billionaire Israeli spies
Wexner and his fellow Mossad spy Maxwell leaving Virginia Roberts alive to repeatedly
sue them, and use the world”s media to accuse them of sexually abusing, trafficking,
pimping her out to VIPs, and fiming the trysts was a brilliant way to keep everything a
secret.
Mossad handler Ghislaine Maxwell, his good friend Ehud Barak, and various other
Zionist VIPs.
Yes, they are the greatest covert operatives ever.
Epstein’s crimes are simple breaches of etiquette when compared to Silverstein. I
believe the term “Silverstein valleys” has been used to describe the melted
granite discovered beneath the former towers, Silverstein grins widely in interviews, while
so many suffered horribly.
One might even consider the 9/11 deaths to be something of a “holocaust”.
Certainly one of the most evil human beings to have walked the Earth.
@Wizard of Oz Silverstein said he gave the okay for wtc 7 to be “pulled”.
The building was on fire at the time. Either someone wired it to be pulled while it was on
fire and already damaged or it was wired for demolition beforehand. The second scenario
seems a lot more likely. In that case all the insurance contract details are largely
irrelevant to the bigger picture.
The idea that the CIA is somehow independent of Mossad and that Mossad would have to warn
the CIA off of the Epstein matter is implausible to me. Guyenot’s hypothesis tends to
give cover to the CIA in the assassination of JFK by claiming that the CIA plot was set in
motion as some sort of attempt to control JFK and that it was hijacked into an actual
assassination by Mossad. That just isn’t credible.
It’s much more accurate to observe that the CIA was erected by the same zionists
who oversaw the creation of Israel and later the forming of Mossad, and that the two
agencies have been joined at the hip ever since.
@WorkingClass Bad cop good cop. NYT is trying to destroy him . Israel says to him
:” send this , do this ,allow us to do this , increase this by this amount , and we
will make sure that in final analysis you don’t get hurt ”
Trump possibly knows that the only people who could hurt him is the Jewish people of power
.
Has NYT ever criticized Trump for relocating embassy , recognizing Golan, for allowing
Israel use Anerican resources to hit Syria or Gaza , for allowing Israel drag US into more
military involvement. for allowing Israel wage war against Gaza ,? Has NYT ever explored
the dynamics behind abrogation of JCPOA and application of more sanctions?
NYT has focused on Russia gate knowing in advance that it has no merit and no public
traction, Is it hurting Trump or itself ?
People with normal IQ would believe that Epstein killed himself, if the following took
place –
Media day and night asking questions about him from 360 degree of inquiries
1 why the surveillance video were not functioning despite the serious nature of the
charges against a man who could rat out a lot in court against powerful people
2 why the coroner initially thought that Epstein was murdered
3 how many guards and how many fell asleep?
4 who and why allowed the spin story around Epstein brilliance and high IQ build up over
the years ?
5 how does Epstein come to get linked to non -Jews people who have absolute loyalty to
Israel
6 how did Epstein get involved with Jewish leaders ?
7 How did Epstein continue to enjoy seat on Harvard and enjoy social celebrity status after
plea deal ?
8 Why did Wexner allow this man so much control over his asset ?
9 Media felt if terrorism were unique Muslim thing , why media is not alluding to the fact
that pedophilia is a unique Jewish thing ?
10 why the angle of Israel being sex slavery capital and Epstein being sex slave pimp not
being connected ?
11 how death in prison in foreign unfriendly countries often become causus celebre by US
media , politicians , NGO and US treasury – why not this death ?
@Fozzy Bear Not true. A respectable civil rights attorney, Lisa Bloom, handled Katie
Johnson’s case. Shortly before the scheduled press conference at which Johnson was to
appear publicly, she received multiple death threats: “Bloom said that her
firm’s website was hacked, that Anonymous had claimed responsibility, and that death
threats and a bomb threat came in afterwards.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/3/13501364/trump-rape-13-year-old-lawsuit-katie-johnson-allegation
Johnson folded because she was terrified (and perhaps paid off).
@Twodees Partain In “Body of Secrets” by James Bamford, a newspaper article
from the Truman era is referenced where the OSS, predecessor of the CIA, is described as
“a converted vault in Washington used as an office space for 5 or 6 Jews working to
protect our national secrets” (or similar wording).
Going from memory and gave away my copy of the book….. sorry for the vague
reference, but you can look it up.
@nsa An atheist like “nsa” must concede Dosteovsky’s point from his
novel The Possessed that even for the atheist the concept of God represents the collective
consciousness, highest principles, and ontological aspirations of believers. Given this
sense, “nsa’s” real animus is more than likely an atavistic hatred of
Christians and Muslims, probably for just being alive in his paranoid mind. What imbecility
when this clown cites a multiverse of universes that has no proof and less plausibility for
its existence than the tooth fairy. I’d also bet “nsa” speaks algebra,
too, like the recently deceased mathematical genius, Jeffrey Epstein.
What’s Mr. Wexner’s, Mega’s, and Mossad/CIA’s involvement?
That’s the real question trolls like “nsa” and the Dems and Republicans
alike are crapping in their pants we’ll find out. When evidence starts to cascade out
of their ability to spin or suppress it, things will get interesting. Meanwhile, Fox News
is still doing its best from what I can tell to run cover for 911, now extended to the
suspiciously related perps in the Epstein affair.
“The Epstein affair (like 9/11) illustrates two critically important truths about
Western secularism: there is no truth, and there are no limits. A society that no longer
believes in God no longer believes in truth…..”
“While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national
consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state,
the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to
build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a
central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own
sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted
scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.
It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one
section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open
effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.”
More prophetic words were ever spoken or written by any of the statesmen of the
Twentieth Century than these, even though they themselves were insufficient to describe the
horrors that the Zionist state would bring upon the world if left unchecked- and its power
and influence have been unchecked since the 1960’s. The last time that the world
stood up to Zionist power in an appreciable way was during the Suez Crisis.
DOT.. Port loses claim for asbestos removal | Business Insurance https://www.businessinsurance.com › article
› ISSUE01 › port-loses-claim-… May 13, 2001 – The suit sought claim of the Port Authority’s huge cost
of removing asbestos from hundreds of properties ranging from the enormous World Trade
Center complex
DOT…Silverstein knew when he leased WTC 7 that he would have to pay out of pocket
for asbestos abatement removal in WTC 7, multiple millions, which is why the Port Authority
leased it so cheaply.
DOT…In May, 2000, a year before, signing the lease, he already had the design
drawn for a new WTC building. Silverstein had no plans to remove the asbestos as he already
had plans to replace it.
DOT… Larry Silverstein signs the lease just six weeks before the WTC’s twin
towers were brought to the ground by terrorists in the September 11, 2001, attacks.
DOT….After leasing the complex, Silverstein negotiated with 24 insurance
companies for a maximum coverage of $3.55 billion per catastrophic occurrence.
However, the agreements had not been finalized before 9/11.
DOT…..Silverstein tries to sue insurers for double the payout claiming 2
catastrophic occurrences because of 2 planes involved.
DOT….Silver loses that lawsuit but sues the air lines and settles for almost
another billion, $ 750,000,000.
Just another Jew insurance fire folks. He planned on tearing down WTC 7 to begin with.
The only missing DOT is who he hired to set the demolition explosives in WTC 7. Were they
imported from our ME ally?
While people do not agree of detail the main theme is common: government stories explaining
both 9/11 and Epstein death are not credible. And that government tried to create an "artificial
reality" to hide real events and real culprits.
Absence of credible information create fertile ground for creation of myths and rumors,
sometimes absurd. But that'a well known sociaological phenomenon studies by late Tamotsu Shibutani in the
context of WWII rumors ( Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (1966)).
Now we can interpret famous quote of
William Casey "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American
public believes is false as an admission of the fact that the government can create artificial
reality" much like in film Matrix and due to thick smoke of propaganda people are simply unable
to discern the truth.
A foreign policy of "maximum pressure" and swagger: tawdry bribes, heavy-handed threats,
and complete failure ..now what group does this remind me of?
US State Dept Program Offers $15 Million to Iran Revolutionary Guards September 4,
2019
The US State Department has unveiled a new $15 million "reward program" for anyone who
provides information on the financial inner workings of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, in an
attempt to further disrupt them.
The program comes after the US declared the Revolutionary Guards "terrorists," but remains
very unusual, in as much as it targets an agency of a national government instead of just
some random militant group.
The Financial Times reports on the farce that is our government's Iran policy:
Four days before the US imposed sanctions on an Iranian tanker suspected of shipping oil
to Syria, the vessel's Indian captain received an unusual email from the top Iran official at
the Department of State.
"This is Brian Hook . . . I work for secretary of state Mike
Pompeo and serve as the US Representative for Iran," Mr Hook wrote to Akhilesh Kumar on
August 26, according to several emails seen by the Financial Times. "I am writing with good
news."
The "good news" was that the Trump administration was offering Mr Kumar several million
dollars to pilot the ship -- until recently known as the Grace 1 -- to a country that would
impound the vessel on behalf of the US. To make sure Mr Kumar did not mistake the email for a
scam, it included an official state department phone number.
The administration's Iran obsession has reached a point where they are now trying to bribe
people to act as pirates on their behalf. When the U.S. was blocked by a court in Gibraltar
from taking the ship, they sought to buy the loyalty of the captain in order to steal it.
Failing that, they resorted to their favorite tool of sanctions to punish the captain and his
crew for ignoring their illegitimate demand. The captain didn't respond to the first message,
so Hook persisted with his embarrassing scheme:
"With this money you can have any life you wish and be well-off in old age," Mr Hook wrote in
a second email to Mr Kumar that also included a warning. "If you choose not to take this easy
path, life will be much harder for you."
Many people have already mocked Hook's message for its resemblance to a Nigerian prince
e-mail scam, and I might add that he comes across here sounding like a B-movie gangster.
Hook's contact was not an isolated incident, but part of a series of e-mails and texts that
he has sent to various ships' captains in a vain effort to intimidate them into falling in
line with the administration's economic war. This is what comes of a foreign policy of
"maximum pressure" and swagger: tawdry bribes, heavy-handed threats, and complete
failure.
The Committee of 300 is an evolution of the British East Indies Company Council of 300. The
list personally last seen included many Windsors (Prince Andrew), Rothchilds, other Royals.
Some of the Americans included some now dead and other still living: George HW Bush, Bill
Clinton Tom Steyer, Al Gore, John Kerry, Netanyahu, lots of bankers, Woolsey (ex CIA),
journalists like Michael Bloomberg, Paul Krugman, activists and politians like Tony Blair,
now dead Zbigniew Brzezinski, CEOs Charles and Edgar Bronfman. The list is long and out of
date but these people control much of what goes on whether good or bad. Their hands are
everywhere doing good and maybe some of this bad stuff.
Given the facts a 10 year-old child could see that the official 911 explanation was totally
flawed. Just three of these facts are sufficient, the 'dancing Israelis', Silverstein
admitting to the 'pull (demolish) it' order and the collapse of steel-framed WTC 7 in
freefall despite not being hit. It is not hyperbole to say that America is a failed state
given that the known perpetrators were never even charged. ZOG indeed.
A respectable civil rights attorney, Lisa Bloom, handled Katie Johnson's case.
"Respectable"?
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
You do realize that Lisa Bloom is the daughter of Glora Allred and defender of Harvey
Weinstein do you not?
You people are so desperate to try to link Trump to Epstein it's pathetic.
I suggest you go back to your gatekeeping nonsense of trying to discredit the 9/11 Truth
Movement by spreading misinformation about nukes in the towers.
This article stakes out much important ground of information and interpretation Kevin
Barrett. The essay resonates as a historic statement of some of our current predicaments.
What about the comparisons that might be made concerning the mysteries attending the
disappearing corpses of Osama bin Laden and Jeffrey Epstein. And according to Christopher
Ketcham, the release of the High Fivin' Urban Movers back to Israel was partially negotiated
by Alan Dershowitz who played a big role in defending Epstein over a long period.
@anon The ultimate "nutjob quackery" of 9/11 is Phillip Zelikow's 9/11 Commission Report,
a document that stands as a testimony and marker signifying the USA's descent into a mad
hatter's imperium of lies. legend and illusion.
It is getting harder and harder to satirize the decadence and depravity of the secular
West, which insists on parodying itself with ever-increasing outlandishness. When the book
on this once-mighty civilization is written, and the ink is dry, readers will be astounded
by the limitless lies of the drunk-on-chutzpah psychopaths who ran it into the ground
@Kevin Barrett Adding to Junior's comment, I quit reading after you wrote of "credible
accusations" of Mr. Trump being involved "in the brutal rape of a 13 year old." And feminist
shakedown artist Lisa Bloom, daughter of the even more infamous feminist shakedown artist G.
Allred, is your "credible source?" Bloom has about as much credibility as the sicko democrat
women who tried to derail Judge Kavanaugh.
Regardless of how much one might hate Trump (and I'm no Trump supporter) levelling such
unfounded accusations is journalistic malfeasance. Did we elect the Devil Incarnate? Mr.
Barrett, I'm done reading you.
The special relationship between the CIA and the Mossad was driven partly by the efforts of
CIA officer James Angleton . Philip Weiss in his article in Mondoweiss entitled "The goy and
the golem: James Angleton and the rise of Israel." states that Angleton's " greatest service
to Israel was his willingness no to say a word about the apparent diversion of highly
enriched plutonium from a plant in Western Pennsylvania to Israel's nascent nuclear program "
The same program which JFK tried to curtail which efforts may have led to his assassination .
a confessed participant in the controlled demolition of Building 7,
For the love of God, this is stupid. Larry Silverstein was talking about the Fire
Commander , for fuck's sake. The Fire Commander made the decision to pull the
firefighters out of the building because they could not put the fire out and were in
unnecessary danger. That's all he meant. There is not one word in this that has anything to
do with a controlled demolition whatsoever.
In order to believe what the 9/11 Douchers would have you believe about this comment, you
would have to believe that 1) Building 7 was wired for demolition beforehand; 2) That the NYC
Fire Commander somehow knew about this; 3) That the NYC Fire Commander was perfectly okay
with allowing his men to spend hours inside a burning building in which he knew that
explosive charges had already been rigged to blow; 4) That the NYC Fire Commander had the
authority to decide when the charges should be blown and had access to the master switch that
would blow them all; 5) That after 7 hours of attempting to fight the fire, the NYC Fire
Commander (who by now can be nothing but a full-fledged member of the conspiracy) decides,
after briefly consulting with Larry Silverstein, "Oh, the hell with this! Let's just blow up
the building now!", to which Larry Silverstein agrees; 6) That after spending 7 hours in a
burning building that had fires burning randomly throughout it and that had been struck by
multiple pieces of debris, all of the explosive charges and their detonators were still in
perfect working order; 7) That none of the firefighters extensively searching the building
for survivors happened to notice any of the pre-placed explosive charges nor thought it
necessary to report about such; 8) That the NYC Fire Commander then proceeds to "pull" the
building after presumably giving some other order for the men to evacuate, which order was
never recorded because the "pull" order must have meant "blow up the building"; 9) And that
Larry Silverstein, after being part of a massive conspiracy involving insurance fraud,
murder, and arson which, if exposed, would send him to a federal death sentence, just decides
to casually mention all of this in a television interview for all and sundry to see, but it
is only the 9/11 Douchers who pick up on the significance of it.
Does any of this sound remotely believable? Did anyone subscribing to this nonsense stop
to think about the context in which this conversation took place? Do any of you 9/11 Douchers
even care that you're being completely ridiculous and grasping at nonexistent straws in your
vain attempt to establish some sort of case for controlled demolition? Do you even care that
everybody can see that what you are saying makes no sense at all? It is perfectly
obvious that Larry Silverstein is NOT talking about controlled demolition here. To
believe otherwise would require you to literally be insane, to not understand the plain
meaning of words and to have no awareness of conversational contexts; yet not only have you
swallowed all of this, you have been beating the drum of this insanity for nearly 20
years.
There is no point in reasoning with an insane person. There is, however, the possibility
that you don't really believe what you are saying and are just flogging a hobbyhorse, in
which case it is you who are engaging in mendacious journalism and trafficking in
lies. In either case, you need to be silenced. Neither lies nor insanity have any "right" to
be uttered in the public square. You 9/11 Douchers are really the ones doing everything you
accuse the mainstream media of doing, and worse. You have become a danger to the public weal
and must be stopped. Your conspiratorial nonsense just isn't cute anymore.
The official stories about the Kennedy assassination, Epstein's death, and 9/11 are
clearly suspect. No one with the capacity for critical thinking can seriously deny this.
Which elements of these stories are true and which are false will never be resolved.
Because:
The mainstream media including Fox News have abdicated their mission as fact finders and
truth tellers. They peddle entertainment and sell ad space. Rachel Maddow foaming at the
mouth about Trump's pee tape and Hannity fulminating about FISA abuse are the same product,
simply aimed at different demographics.
Nothing in the above two paragraphs is even remotely novel. It's all been said before
twenty bazillion times.
Being a feminist or Democrat (or nonfeminist or Republican) is irrelevant to a person's
credibility. It's possible that Lisa Bloom was part of a conspiracy to invent a fictitious
Katy Johnson story, in which case Bloom is guilty of criminal fraud as well as civil libel.
That would be quite a risk for her to take, to say the least. It's also possible that she was
somehow duped by others, in which case they would be running the civil and criminal
liabilities, while she would just get disbarred for negligence.
The same is true of Johnson's attorney Thomas Meagher.
It is also possible that Johnson's story is at least roughly accurate. There is supporting
testimony from another Epstein victim.
If you set aside your prejudices about Democrats-Republicans, feminists-antifeminists,
Trump-Hillary, etc., and just look at what's been reported, you'll agree with me that the
allegations are credible (but of course unproven). If you suffer emotional blocks against
thinking such things about a President, as so many did when similar things were reported
about Bill Clinton, I sympathize but also urge you to get psychiatric treatment so you can
learn to face unpleasant facts and then get to work cleaning up this country.
The release of Prof. J. Leroy Hulsey report on the finite element analysis of the WTC7
collapse should be a big news.
But won't be.
Democracy works this way. The ruling elite, via the media, Hollywood, etc., tell the
people what to think, the people then vote according to the way they think.
So the truth of 9/11 will never be known to the majority unless we have a public statement
from George W. Bush acknowledging that he personally lit the fuse that set off the explosions
that brought WTC 7 down at free-fall
speed .
This is fortunate for the intrepid Dr. Hulsey* who would, presumably, otherwise have had
to be dispatched by a sudden heart attack, traffic accident, weight-lifting accident suicide
with a bullet to the back of the head. As it is, hardly anyone will ever know what he will
say or what it means.
* Fortunate also for those who so rashly advocate for truth here and elsewhere on the yet
to be fully controlled Internets.
Nicely done. Article will not be featured on front page NYT & discussed on TV.
There are many highlights in your article. This is one.
Epstein's career as a shameless, openly-operating Mossad sexual blackmailer -- like the
in-your-face 9/11 coup -- also illustrates another core truth of Western secularism: If
there is no God, there are no limits (in this case, to human depravity and what it can get
away with). Or as Dostoevsky famously put it: "If God does not exist, everything is
permitted."
Please consult the following papers about the CIA/Mossad crimes against humanity and their
pimps who pose as 'politicians' of the fake Western 'democracy' where Epstein was their agent
serving their interest as a PIMP.
{from being the work of a single political party, intelligence agency or country, the
power structure revealed by the network connected to Epstein is nothing less than a criminal
enterprise that is willing to use and abuse children in the pursuit of ever more power,
wealth and control.}
If you want a vision of the future, don't imagine "a boot stamping on a human face -- for
ever," as Orwell suggested in 1984 . Instead, imagine that human face staring mesmerized
into the screen of some kind of nifty futuristic device on which every word, sound, and image
has been algorithmically approved for consumption by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ("DARPA") and its
"innovation ecosystem" of "academic, corporate, and governmental partners."
The screen of this futuristic device will offer a virtually unlimited range of
"non-divisive" and "hate-free" content, none of which will falsify or distort the "truth," or
in any way deviate from "reality." Western consumers will finally be free to enjoy an
assortment of news, opinion, entertainment, and educational content (like this Guardian
podcast about a man who
gave birth , or MSNBC's latest bombshell about
Donald Trump's secret Russian oligarch backers ) without having their enjoyment totally
ruined by discord-sowing alternative journalists like Aaron Maté or satirists like
myself.
"Fake news" will not appear on this screen. All the news will be "authentic." DARPA and its
partners will see to that. You won't have to worry about being "influenced" by Russians, Nazis,
conspiracy theorists, socialists, populists, extremists, or whomever. Such Persons of Malicious
Intent will still be able to post their content (because of "freedom of speech" and all that
stuff), but they will do so down in the sewers of the Internet where normal consumers won't
have to see it. Anyone who ventures down there looking for it (i.e., such "divisive" and
"polarizing" content) will be immediately placed on an official DARPA watchlist for "potential
extremists," or "potential white supremacists," or "potential Russians."
Once that happens, their lives will be over (i.e., the lives of the potentially extremist
fools who have logged onto whatever dark web platform will still be posting essays like this,
not the lives of the Persons of Malicious Intent, who never had any lives to begin with, and
who by that time will probably be operating out of some heavily armed, off-the-grid compound in
Idaho). Their schools, employers, and landlords will be notified. Their photos and addresses
will be published online. Anyone who ever said two words to them (or, God help them, appears in
a photograph with them) will have 24 hours to publicly denounce them, or be placed on
DARPA’s watchlist themselves.
If you want a vision of the future, don't imagine "a boot stamping on a human face -- for
ever," as Orwell suggested in 1984 . Instead, imagine that human face staring mesmerized
into the screen of some kind of nifty futuristic device on which every word, sound, and image
has been algorithmically approved for consumption by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ("DARPA") and its
"innovation ecosystem" of "academic, corporate, and governmental partners."
The screen of this futuristic device will offer a virtually unlimited range of
"non-divisive" and "hate-free" content, none of which will falsify or distort the "truth," or
in any way deviate from "reality." Western consumers will finally be free to enjoy an
assortment of news, opinion, entertainment, and educational content (like this Guardian
podcast about a man who
gave birth , or MSNBC's latest bombshell about
Donald Trump's secret Russian oligarch backers ) without having their enjoyment totally
ruined by discord-sowing alternative journalists like Aaron Maté or satirists like
myself.
"Fake news" will not appear on this screen. All the news will be "authentic." DARPA and its
partners will see to that. You won't have to worry about being "influenced" by Russians, Nazis,
conspiracy theorists, socialists, populists, extremists, or whomever. Such Persons of Malicious
Intent will still be able to post their content (because of "freedom of speech" and all that
stuff), but they will do so down in the sewers of the Internet where normal consumers won't
have to see it. Anyone who ventures down there looking for it (i.e., such "divisive" and
"polarizing" content) will be immediately placed on an official DARPA watchlist for "potential
extremists," or "potential white supremacists," or "potential Russians."
Once that happens, their lives will be over (i.e., the lives of the potentially extremist
fools who have logged onto whatever dark web platform will still be posting essays like this,
not the lives of the Persons of Malicious Intent, who never had any lives to begin with, and
who by that time will probably be operating out of some heavily armed, off-the-grid compound in
Idaho). Their schools, employers, and landlords will be notified. Their photos and addresses
will be published online. Anyone who ever said two words to them (or, God help them, appears in
a photograph with them) will have 24 hours to publicly denounce them, or be placed on
DARPA’s watchlist themselves.
"... Last Friday, August 30th, Sidney Powell filed a brief with the District Court in the District of Columbia laying out in exquisite detail the misconduct of the Mueller prosecutors, who have withheld exculpatory evidence. The document is still behind a pay wall (Pacer). But let me share with you some of the salient points of this filing: ..."
"... Likewise, the prosecutors did not produce evidence of Weissmann's and Ahmad's relationship and work with Bruce Ohr on transmitting the corrupt information to the FBI, and the numerous 302s resulting from the interviews of Bruce Ohr by the second agent. ..."
"... This case, involving Adam Lovinger, is related to issues involving Mr. Flynn, as Mr. Lovinger was wrongly charged (and secretly cleared) after blowing the whistle on the fraudulent payments to FBI/CIA/DOD operative Stefan Halper -- a central figure in the government's targeting and intelligence abuses of the last several years -- including against Mr. Flynn. ..."
"... Got that? The Mueller prosecutors lied about what the investigation of Mr. Lovinger concluded. He did NOT, repeat NOT, "yield any classified or sensitive information. " But Mueller's team of hacks, disgraceful pieces of excrement, took out the word, "NOT". ..."
"... How in the hell does Goldman know what is in those "transcripts"? He was told. ..."
"... But there is a broader, more important point--Michael Flynn's conversation with the Russian Ambassador was not illegal. It was not improper. He could discuss whatever he wanted to discuss as the incoming National Security Advisor for Donald Trump. This was a false claim by the Mueller Prosecutors. ..."
"... If the Mueller team, what is left of it, was confident of their position, they would not have leaked this story to the New York Times hack, Goldman. This is a sign of desperation and panic. ..."
"... Knowing what we know about Judge Sullivan, who is in charge of the Michael Flynn case, he is likely to be furious by this bald lying by Mueller's hacks. ..."
"... On another front of the Russiagate affair, per a Monsieur America Twitter thread, Loretta Lynch in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee has absolved herself of any involvement in the FISA warrant on Carter Page. https://twitter.com/MonsieurAmerica/status/1168885394269564928 ..."
"... Now the rats are throwing their subordinates under the sinking ship. Good to know the grandma AG had time to meet Hillary's husband on the tarmac but no time to be briefed about "foreign interference" in our election. I can't wait to hear Obama's excuse. ..."
"... Flynn may have been set up and lied to right and left, BUT... how did he get three stars? He comes across in this as a victim and a dummy. ..."
The short answer to the title of this article--YES!!
Michael Flynn's new lawyer, Sidney Powell, is a honey badger. If you do not know anything about honey badgers I encourage you
to watch the documentary, Honey Badgers, Master's of Mayhem . They tear
the testicles off of lions. And it sure looks like Ms. Powell is emasculating prosecutor Andrew Weisman.
Last Friday, August 30th, Sidney Powell filed a brief with the District Court in the District of Columbia laying out in exquisite
detail the misconduct of the Mueller prosecutors, who have withheld exculpatory evidence. The document is still behind a pay wall
(Pacer). But let me share with you some of the salient points of this filing:
The government's most stunning suppression of evidence is perhaps the text messages of Peter Srzok and Lisa Page. In July of 2017,
(now over two years ago), the Inspector General of the Department of Justice advised Special Counsel of the extreme bias in the now
infamous text messages of these two FBI employees. Mr. Van Grack did not produce a single text messages to the defense until March
13, 2018, when he gave them a link to then-publicly available messages.14
Mr. Van Grack and Ms. Ahmad, among other things, did not disclose that FBI Agent Strzok had been fired from the Special Counsel
team as its lead agent almost six months earlier because of his relationship with Deputy Director McCabe's Counsel -- who had also
been on the Special Counsel team -- and because of their text messages and conduct. One would think that more than a significant
subset of those messages had to have been shared by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice with Special Counsel to warrant
such a high-level and immediate personnel change.
Indeed, Ms. Page left the Department of Justice because of her conduct, and Agent Strzok was terminated from the FBI because of
it.
Likewise, the prosecutors did not produce evidence of Weissmann's and Ahmad's relationship and work with Bruce Ohr on transmitting
the corrupt information to the FBI, and the numerous 302s resulting from the interviews of Bruce Ohr by the second agent.
The Government's misconduct was not limited to General Flynn. Ms. Powell describes in detail how the Government lied in another
case related to General Flynn:
In yet another recent demonstration of egregious government misconduct, the government completely changed the meaning of exculpatory
information in a declassified version of a report -- by omitting the word "not." This case, involving Adam Lovinger, is related
to issues involving Mr. Flynn, as Mr. Lovinger was wrongly charged (and secretly cleared) after blowing the whistle on the fraudulent
payments to FBI/CIA/DOD operative Stefan Halper -- a central figure in the government's targeting and intelligence abuses of the
last several years -- including against Mr. Flynn.
Mr. Lovinger had been an analyst at the Pentagon for more than ten years when he was detailed to the White House at then-National
Security Advisor Flynn's request. Mr. Lovinger voiced concerns internally regarding the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment for prioritizing
academic reports (one of which was written by Stefan Halper) at the expense of real threat assessments. He was recalled to the Pentagon,
accused of mishandling sensitive information, stripped of his security clearance, and suspended. As it turned out, the Naval Criminal
Investigative Service conducted a thorough examination of his electronic devices, but "[a]gents found no evidence he leaked to the
press, as charged, or that he was a counterintelligence risk.
Even though the investigation exonerated Mr. Lovinger of these charges a full month before Mr. Lovinger's hearing, the government
did not reveal to Mr. Lovinger's attorneys that this investigation occurred.17 Even worse, the declassified version of the NCIS left
out a crucial "not". It read that the investigation "did yield any classified or sensitive information,"18 when the truth was the
investigation "did not yield any classified or sensitive information."19 The declassified version omitted the word "not."
Got that? The Mueller prosecutors lied about what the investigation of Mr. Lovinger concluded. He did NOT, repeat NOT, "yield
any classified or sensitive information. " But Mueller's team of hacks, disgraceful pieces of excrement, took out the word, "NOT".
Now here is where it gets interesting. Sidney Powell filed her document on Friday night (30 August). She also submitted a sealed
portion detailing how the Mueller team has lied about the evidence. I have seen one of the affidavits she filed. I will not say who
or what it contained other than to expose specific details how Michael Flynn's Fourth Amendment rights were violated. But the prosecutors
ran immediately to Adam Goldman of the New York Times as leaked this sealed information.
Adam wrote an article the same day and "reported" the following:
Lawyers for Michael T. Flynn, the president's first national security adviser, escalated their attacks on prosecutors on Friday,
recycling unfounded conspiratorial accusations in a last-ditch bid to delay his sentencing in a case in which he has twice admitted
guilt.
The move could anger Emmet G. Sullivan, the federal judge who will sentence Mr. Flynn. The filings could magnify any doubts
by Judge Sullivan about whether Mr. Flynn truly accepts responsibility for his crime of lying to the F.B.I. and whether he fulfilled
his cooperation agreement with the government in one of the lingering cases brought by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller
III.
In a pair of filings, Mr. Flynn's lawyers made clear that they view him as a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, amplifying
right-wing theories about a so-called deep state of government bureaucrats working to undermine President Trump. The defense lawyers
accused prosecutors of engaging in "pernicious" conduct in Mr. Flynn's case, saying they had been "manipulating or controlling
the press to their advantage to extort that plea."
Yet, when you read the full filing by Ms. Powell, not a single "unfounded conspiratorial accusation" is discussed. The prosecutors
gave that protected information to Goldman.
Worse, the prosecutors gave Goldman information from the NSA intercepts of Michael Flynn's conversation with the Russian Ambassador.
So far, the Mueller team of miscreants have refused to turn over this material to Michael Flynn's lawyer. But they shared it with
Goldman, who wrote:
"We must have access to that information to represent our client consistently with his constitutional rights and our ethical
obligations," Mr. Flynn's lawyers wrote.
The classified transcripts of the calls make clear that the two men discussed sanctions at length and that Mr. Flynn was highly
unlikely to have forgotten those details when questioned by the F.B.I., several former United States officials familiar with the
documents have said. It was clear, the officials said, that sanctions were the only thing Mr. Flynn wanted to talk about with
Mr. Kislyak.
Mr. Flynn's lawyers also suggested in the filing that the government had exculpatory material, but it is not clear if they
consider the transcripts to be that material. Some conservatives have embraced a theory that Mr. Flynn's nonchalance in the F.B.I.
interview, which agents documented because it seemed at odds with how blatantly he was lying, was exonerating.
How in the hell does Goldman know what is in those "transcripts"? He was told.
But there is a broader, more important point--Michael Flynn's conversation with the Russian Ambassador was not illegal. It
was not improper. He could discuss whatever he wanted to discuss as the incoming National Security Advisor for Donald Trump. This
was a false claim by the Mueller Prosecutors.
If the Mueller team, what is left of it, was confident of their position, they would not have leaked this story to the New
York Times hack, Goldman. This is a sign of desperation and panic.
Knowing what we know about Judge Sullivan, who is in charge of the Michael Flynn case, he is likely to be furious by this
bald lying by Mueller's hacks.
Should be an interesting week ahead. Sidney Powell will probably be feasting on a heaping plate of prosecutor balls. Like the
Honey Badger, she is ripping them a new one.
They were incompetents. They should be sued for malpractice and disbarred. They helped serve up General Flynn and he trusted them.
That's now water under the bridge. Sidney Powell is a force to be reckoned with.
They might have been too scared of what Mueller would do to them if they put up a good case for Flynn.
I think the same thing happened to George Popadopoulos who had his lawyers roll over and play dead before Mueller.
You need to find Lawyers who are not afraid of the system, or are in bed with the system.
The "confession" they got Papadopolus to sign made no sense and almost looked like it had been altered after Papadopolus had already
signed his name. There were a series of very disjointed and irrelevant statements of facts, to which Papadopolus agreed they were
factual.
Then pow at the very end was basically a confession he had violated the Logan Act.
None of the prior statements supported this conclusion, but as the cherry on top of his "confession" was the claim he engaged
in policy level discussions with the very highest Russian higher ups while Obama was still President. (Was he ever in this role
- hard to remember?).
That always struck me as a very weird "confession - but there is was with Papadolopus's signature on it, and accepted by the
deep state investigating authorities.
This "confession" deserves a re-read in light of what we are learning now about the set-up and ambush mentality of the deep
state "investigators.
On another front of the Russiagate affair, per a Monsieur America Twitter thread, Loretta Lynch in testimony before the House
Judiciary Committee has absolved herself of any involvement in the FISA warrant on Carter Page.
https://twitter.com/MonsieurAmerica/status/1168885394269564928
Now the rats are throwing their subordinates under the sinking ship. Good to know the grandma AG had time to meet Hillary's
husband on the tarmac but no time to be briefed about "foreign interference" in our election. I can't wait to hear Obama's excuse.
Logically just doesn't make sense - it's almost as if the person editing the NCIS report decided he didn't like doing what he
asked to do and produced a piece of text that only really made sense with a "not" in it. Either that, or he was actually an idiot.
Flynn may have been set up and lied to right and left, BUT... how did he get three stars? He comes across in this as a victim
and a dummy.
He should have known that the FBI NEVER interviews people honestly. The agents told him that he didn't need a lawyer so he
didn't call one. That's just massive stupid.
Cops I know have told me to NEVER talk to police without a lawyer present. How come the former head of the DIA didn't know
that?
"... It must again be emphasized: It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a more toxic allegation in American presidential history than the one leveled against candidate, and then president, Donald Trump that he "colluded" with the Kremlin in order to win the 2016 presidential election -- and, still more, that Vladimir Putin's regime, "America's No. 1 threat," had compromising material on Trump that made him its "puppet." Or a more fraudulent accusation. ..."
"... Was it plausible, for example, that Trump, a longtime owner and operator of international hotels, would commit an indiscreet act in a Moscow hotel that he did not own or control? Or that, as Steele also claimed, high-level Kremlin sources had fed him damning anti-Trump information even though their vigilant boss, Putin, wanted Trump to win the election? ..."
"... Nor was Russian "meddling" in the election anything akin to a "digital Pearl Harbor," as widely asserted, and it was certainly far less and less intrusive than President Bill Clinton's political and financial "interference" undertaken to assure the reelection of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996. ..."
"... Nonetheless, Russiagate's core allegation persists, like a legend, in American political life -- in media commentary, in financial solicitations by some Democratic candidates for Congress, and, as is clear from my own discussions, in the minds of otherwise well-informed people. The only way to dispel, to excoriate, such a legend is to learn and expose how it began -- by whom, when, and why. ..."
"... Why did Western intelligence agencies, prompted, it seems clear, by US ones, seek to undermine Trump's presidential campaign? ..."
"... the repeatedly hapless Comey seems incapable of having initiated such an audacious operation against a presidential candidate, still less a president-elect. As I have long suggested, John Brennan and James Clapper, head of the CIA and Office of National Intelligence under Obama respectively, are the more likely culprits. ..."
"... First and foremost, Russiagate is about the present and future of the American political system, not about Russia. (Indeed, as I have repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in Russiagate.) ..."
"... At every "debate" or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be asked about this grave threat to American democracy -- what they think about what happened and would do about it if elected president. Consider it health care for our democracy. ..."
It must again be emphasized: It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a more toxic
allegation in American presidential history than the one leveled against candidate, and then
president, Donald Trump that he "colluded" with the Kremlin in order to win the 2016
presidential election -- and, still more, that Vladimir Putin's regime, "America's No. 1
threat," had compromising material on Trump that made him its "puppet." Or a more fraudulent
accusation.
Even leaving aside the misperception
that Russia is the primary threat to America in world affairs, no aspect of this allegation has
turned out to be true, as should have been evident from the outset. Major aspects of the now
infamous Steele Dossier, on which much of the allegation was based, were themselves not merely
"unverified" but plainly implausible.
Was it plausible, for example, that Trump, a longtime owner and operator of
international hotels, would commit an indiscreet act in a Moscow hotel that he did not own or
control? Or that, as Steele also claimed, high-level Kremlin sources had fed him damning
anti-Trump information even though their vigilant boss, Putin, wanted Trump to win the
election? Nonetheless, the American mainstream media and other important elements of the
US political establishment relied on Steele's allegations for nearly three years, even
heroizing him -- and some still do, explicitly or implicitly.
Not surprisingly, former special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of "collusion"
between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. No credible evidence has been produced that
Russia's "interference" affected the result of the 2016 presidential election in any
significant way. Nor was Russian "meddling" in the election anything akin to a "digital
Pearl Harbor," as widely asserted, and it was certainly far less and less intrusive than
President Bill Clinton's political and financial "interference" undertaken to assure the
reelection of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996.
Nonetheless, Russiagate's core allegation persists, like a legend, in American political
life -- in media commentary, in financial solicitations by some Democratic candidates for
Congress, and, as is clear from my own discussions, in the minds of otherwise well-informed
people. The only way to dispel, to excoriate, such a legend is to learn and expose how it began
-- by whom, when, and why.
Officially, at least in the FBI's version, its operation "Crossfire Hurricane," the
counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign that began in mid-2016 was due to
suspicious remarks made to visitors by a young and lowly Trump aide, George Papadopoulos. This
too is not believable, as I pointed out previously .
Most of those visitors themselves had ties to Western intelligence agencies. That is, the young
Trump aide was being enticed, possibly entrapped, as part of a larger intelligence operation
against Trump. (Papadopoulos wasn't the only Trump associate targeted, Carter Page being
another.)
But the question remains: Why did Western intelligence agencies, prompted, it seems
clear, by US ones, seek to undermine Trump's presidential campaign? A reflexive answer
might be because candidate Trump promised to "cooperate with Russia," to pursue a
pro-détente foreign policy, but this was hardly a startling, still less subversive,
advocacy by a would-be Republican president. All of the major pro-détente episodes in
the 20th century had been initiated by Republican presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, and
Reagan.
So, again, what was it about Trump that so spooked the spooks so far off their rightful
reservation and so intrusively into American presidential politics? Investigations being
overseen by Attorney General William Barr may provide answers -- or not. Barr has already
leveled procedural charges against James Comey, head of the FBI under President Obama and
briefly under President Trump, but the repeatedly hapless Comey seems incapable of having
initiated such an audacious operation against a presidential candidate, still less a
president-elect. As I have long suggested, John Brennan and James Clapper, head of the CIA and
Office of National Intelligence under Obama respectively, are the more likely
culprits.
The FBI is no longer the fearsome organization it once was and thus not hard to investigate,
as Barr has already shown. The others, particularly the CIA, are a different matter, and Barr
has suggested they are resisting. To investigate them, particularly the CIA, it seems, he has
brought in a veteran prosecutor-investigator, John Durham.
Which raises other questions. Are Barr and Durham, whose own careers include associations
with US intelligence agencies, determined to uncover the truth about the origins of Russiagate?
And can they really do so fully, given the resistance already apparent? Even if so, will Barr
make public their findings, however damning of the intelligence agencies they may be, or will
he classify them? And if the latter, will President Trump use his authority to declassify the
findings as the 2020 presidential election approaches in order to discredit the role of Obama's
presidency and its would-be heirs?
Equally important perhaps, how will mainstream media treat the Barr-Durham investigation and
its findings? Having driven the Russiagate narrative for so long and so misleadingly -- and
with liberals perhaps finding themselves in the incongruous position of defending rogue
intelligence agencies -- will they credit or seek to discredit the findings?
It is true, of course, that Barr and Durham, as Trump appointees, are not the ideal
investigators of Intel misdeeds in the Russiagate saga. Much better would be a truly
bipartisan, independent investigation based in the Senate, as was the Church Committee of the
mid-1970s, which exposed and reformed (it thought at the time) serious abuses by US
intelligence agencies. That would require, however, a sizable core of nonpartisan, honorable,
and courageous senators of both parties, who thus far seem to be lacking.
There are also, however, the ongoing and upcoming Democratic presidential debates. First
and foremost, Russiagate is about the present and future of the American political system, not
about Russia. (Indeed, as I have repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in
Russiagate.)
At every "debate" or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be asked
about this grave threat to American democracy -- what they think about what happened and would
do about it if elected president. Consider it health care for our democracy.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the
host ofThe John Batchelor Show
. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are atTheNation.com .
Stephen
F. Cohen Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New
York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book
War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback
and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show, now
in their sixth year, are available at www.thenation.com .
Jean Seberg on a phone call during the filming of 'Joan of Arc', directed by
Otto Preminger, in 1957, in London
( AFP/Getty )
T
he circumstances of
Jean Seberg
's death 40 years ago in late August 1979 were squalid and pathetic. The American star's body lay
decomposing in a car on a street in
Paris
for 10 days before the French police discovered it. There was a bottle of barbiturates and a suicide note
beside the corpse. As the press reported, her body had "baked in the sun" and the odour was "unimaginably foul". This
was the actress who, at the start of her career, was described as "so unimaginably fresh" by her colleagues.
Paris
was the city with which Seberg was most closely associated. Every film lover remembers her in
Jean-Luc Godard
's
Breathless
(1960) in her white
New York Herald Tribune
T-shirt, selling newspapers and gallivanting around the streets with her co-star,
Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Seberg had one of the strangest and most contradictory careers of any
Hollywood
star during the postwar years.
"She was so misunderstood. It's not like you need to hero-worship a celebrity, they are just people you want to
look at. The fact that people stared at her and fixated on things that were not real, projections: that really
ultimately destroyed her,"
Kristen Stewart
, who plays her in the new film,
Seberg
, commented recently of the ill-fated actress in a
Vanity Fair
interview. As an actress who has worked on both big Hollywood productions like
Twilight
and in independent French arthouse features, Stewart seems perfectly qualified to play her.
Seberg
, a world premiere at the
Venice film festival
, isn't a straight biopic. Its focus is its subject's deadly entanglement with the
FBI
. Days after her suicide, the FBI admitted that its agents had plotted to ruin her reputation as part of their
counter-intelligence programme, Cointelpro, authorised by FBI founder,
J Edgar Hoover
himself. Seberg's crime, in Hoover's eyes, was her involvement in political causes and her support
of the
Black Panther Party
. In particular, they were suspicious of her close links with Black Power leader, Hakim Jamal
(played in the film by Anthony Mackie).
Kristen Stewart as Jean
Seberg
in Benedict
Andrews's film '
Seberg
'
(Amazon Studios)
In 1970, the FBI planted the false rumour that Seberg was pregnant by a Black Panther Party member in order to
"cause her embarrassment" and "cheapen her image" with the American public. Their plan worked. It was dispiriting but
inevitable that some gossip columnists followed the false leads that the FBI dangled in front of them. From the FBI's
point of view, she was involved in radical politics, had contributed financially to the Black Panthers and was
therefore fair game. The story was picked up by gossip columnist, Joyce Haber, who referred obliquely to it in the
Los Angeles Times
.
Newsweek
also wrote about it and named Seberg.
"Under the ruthless gaze of the FBI, the threads of Jean's life come apart," Benedict Andrews, the director of
Seberg
, pointed out. The assault on her reputation set in motion the events that led to her death a decade
later. At the time of the leak, Seberg had indeed been pregnant. In the wake of reading the false stories about
herself, she went into labour. Her baby was born prematurely and died a few days later.
The woman Hoover set out to crush was the quintessential young American, "the golden sunflower girl" from the
midwest, as she was characterised. A pharmacist's daughter who had grown up in Marshalltown, Iowa, she had won
Hollywood's version of the Lottery by landing the lead role in Otto Preminger's George Bernard Shaw adaptation,
Saint Joan
(1957). The autocratic Preminger had launched a nationwide talent hunt for a new Joan of Arc. A
reported 18,000 girls had sent in pictures and resumes and 3,000 had been given personal auditions. Seberg got the
part. She was the one, as TV show host Ed Sullivan put it, who had "caught lightning in a bottle". It was the
equivalent of Vivien Leigh being cast as Scarlett O'Hara in
Gone With the Wind
(1939).
Seberg
and Jean-Paul
Belmondo
in Jean-Luc
Godard's
'Breathless' (Films Around The World)
Preminger was the perfect gentleman off-set but, when the cameras began to roll, he turned into a bad-tempered
ogre. He used every ruse at his disposal to publicise the film and its new young star. It would have made the perfect
story about overnight stardom if it hadn't been for the fact that the film didn't turn out very well. By her own
admission, Seberg wasn't obvious casting. She talked about being burnt at the stake twice, first in making the movie
and then by the critics. Preminger cast her in a second film,
Bonjour Tristesse
(1958) but then discarded her. "He used me like a Kleenex and then threw me away", is how she
described her treatment at his hands.
The irony is that Preminger had been right all along. Seberg really was a special talent. She had a spontaneity,
mischief and lambent grace on screen that immediately enraptured the young critics and would-be filmmakers from
Cahiers du Cinéma
in France. "When Jean Seberg is on the screen, which is all the time, you can't look at
anything else," Francois Truffaut enthused about her performance in
Bonjour Tristesse
. Godard and Claude Chabrol were equally smitten with her.
In one of the more bizarre transformations in Hollywood history, the midwestern girl-next-door type became the
sacred muse of the French Nouvelle Vague.
Seberg was wryly humorous about the effect she exercised on French male directors. "I was their new Jerry Lewis, I
suppose," she told journalist Rex Reed, comparing herself to the American comedian who made goofy films with Dean
Martin and was treated with near contempt by American critics but revered as "Le Roi du Crazy" by their French
counterparts. "Godard is like a Paul Klee painting, always hiding behind those funny dark glasses," she suggested,
going on to call the French auteurs who worshipped her "very strange little men".
Thanks to
Breathless
, Seberg also became more highly valued back in Hollywood. Director Robert Rossen, who cast her in one
of her greatest roles as the beautiful schizophrenic opposite
Warren Beatty
and
Peter Fonda
in
Lillith
(1964) spoke of her "flawed American girl quality, sort of like a cheerleader who's cracked up". She had
prominent roles in all-star blockbusters like
Airport
(1970) and successfully held her own against such scene-stealers as Lee Marvin and
Clint Eastwood
in
Paint Your Wagon
(1969).
That, though, was the period before Hoover and the FBI set about destroying her just as surely as Otto Preminger
had tried to create her as a star in the late Fifties in the first place.
Preminger and Hoover bookend her career. The media colluded with those two patriarchs, building her up and then
knocking her down.
Elements of Seberg's story are utterly heartbreaking. As Alistair Cooke told British listeners in one of his
Letters from America
broadcasts the week after her death, she took her prematurely born baby's corpse back home
to Iowa "in a glass coffin as a glaring proof that the baby was white – an excessive reaction perhaps but in 1970,
she knew that the FBI could and did destroy hundreds of radicals and non radicals".
On each anniversary of the baby's death, her then-husband Romain Gary later revealed, she had attempted suicide.
Seberg
as the beautiful schizophrenic who starred opposite Warren Beatty and Peter Fonda in '
Lillith
'
(1964) (Glasshouse/Rex)
Seberg continued to work throughout the 1970s, making an experimental film with Philippe Garrel and collaborating
on projects with her third husband, Dennis Berry. She wrote to Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish director, telling
him that she looked a little like Bibi Andersson, who had starred in Bergman films from
The Seventh Seal
(1957) to
Persona
(1966), and expressing her fervent desire to work with him. The letter is kept in Bergman's archives. He
received it and read it – but didn't deign to reply to it.
If Seberg was feeling marginalised and paranoid in her final years, you could hardly blame her given the FBI
harassment, the upheaval in her private life and the alarming way her career had begun to creak. As her biographer
David Richards notes, she was putting on weight, drinking too much and seemed to be in a state of permanent
"psychological siege". By the late 1970s, she was close to being forgotten. Her death, though, put her right back on
the front pages. The public was reminded of just how abominably she had been treated both by Hollywood and by the
FBI. There was a sense of frustration over talent that had never been properly fulfilled. Then again, as is pointed
out in Mark Rappaport's dramatised documentary,
From The Journals of Jean Seberg
(1995), most of her films may have been "mediocre", but she made one or two
"great ones" and that is more than in most careers. Now, with Stewart portraying her on screen (and already being
talked up for awards), Seberg is likely to be rediscovered all over again
'Seberg' is a world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Friday 30 August (labiennale.org). It has its UK premiere
at the London Film Festival on 4 and 5 October (bfi.org.uk)
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Russiagate skeptics are vindicated, but conspiracy theorists are rewarded (w/ Glenn Greenwald)
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Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept joins Aaron Maté to discuss the disappearance of
Russiagate after Robert Mueller's testimony; how Andrew McCabe has become the latest
former U.S. intelligence official to join either CNN and MSNBC; and the absence of
accountability for those who continue to promote what he calls the "moronic, irrational,
baseless, conspiracist narrative" of Donald Trump as a Russian asset.
class="comment-renderer-text-content expanded">
Greenwald hits the nail on the head. Hillary's little RUSSIA! RUSSIA!! RUSSIA!!!
crying-boo-boo-hissy-fit has brought the world to the brink of destruction. Anyone
still think that woman would have been a better president? Madame President "If I
can't have it I will destroy the world"? This issue is not about past battles, but
rather about what the DNC does now. Hillary 2.0 in whatever form they try to excrete
upon us is just as dangerous. If the DNC can't offer a real choice for us and only
comes up with another obsequious sniveling doorman for the MIC, we are truly and
irrevocably doomed.
Mueller? Does he live in the United States of Amnesia? "Lying" is institutionalized
in the United States of Hypocrisy? It is a corrupt and broken ethos, has been since
its inception?
Someone like Warren or really any of them, if they win the White House, will have to
be very tough with Russia so Glenn is right. Increases to the military will be
knee-jerk, nuclear clock too close to midnight.
US Political Establishment: "Thank you Robert Mueller for the 3 years of providing
evidence-free conspiracy theories, nonsensical distractions, hysterical red-baiting,
and massive deflection from the corruption that seeps through both parties in
America. You've served your purpose, now it's time for you to go down the memory
hole!"
CNN and MSNBC are status quo outlets... they're just overly excited to have gov
professionals and known republicans willing to come out and talk about how mean
Trump is... nevermind focusing on policy issues that everyday Americans actually
care about and want information and votes on
It is apparent that the caricature of the Soviet Union in both productions is really a stand-in for the present-day Russian government
under Vladimir Putin. As only American exceptionalism could permit, Hollywood did not hold the same disdain for his predecessor,
Boris Yeltsin, whose legacy of high inflation and national debt have since been eliminated. In fact, most have forgotten that the
same filmdom community outraged about Russia's supposed interference in the 2016 U.S. election made a celebratory movie back in 2003,
Spinning Boris , which practically boasted about the instrumental role the West played in Yeltsin's 1996 reelection in Russia.
The highly unpopular alcoholic politician benefited from a near universal media bias as virtually all the federation's news outlets
came under the control of the 'oligarchs' (in America known simply as billionaires) which his economic policies of mass privatization
of state industry enriched overnight.
Yeltsin initially polled at less than 10% and was far behind Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov until he became the recipient
of billions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) thanks to his corrupt campaign manager, Anatoly Chubais, now one of the most
hated men in all of Russia. After the purging of votes and rampant ballot-box stuffing, Yeltsin successfully closed the gap between
his opponent thanks to the overt U.S. meddling.
Spinning Boris was directed by Roger Spottiswoode, who previously helmed an installment in the James Bond series, Tomorrow
Never Dies . The 1997 entry in the franchise is one of thousands of Hollywood films and network television shows exposed by journalists
Matthew Alford and Tom Secker as having been influenced or directly assisted by the Pentagon and CIA in their must-read book National
Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood. Based on evidence from documents revealed in Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA) requests, their investigation divulges the previously unknown extent to which the national security complex
has gone in exerting control over content in the film industry. While it has always been known that the military held sway over movies
that required usage of its facilities and equipment to be produced, the level of impact on such films in the pre-production and editing
stages, as well as the control over non-military themed flicks one wouldn't suspect to be under supervision by Washington and Langley,
is exhaustively uncovered.
As expected, Hollywood and the military-industrial complex's intimate relationship during the Cold War is featured prominently
in Alford and Secker's investigative work. It is unclear whether HBO or Netflix sought US military assistance or were directly involved
with the national security state in their respective productions, but these are just two recent examples of many where the correlated
increase in geopolitical tensions with Moscow is reflected. The upcoming sequel to DC's Wonder Woman set to be released next
year , Wonder Woman 1984, featuring the female superhero " coming into conflict with the Soviet Union during the Cold War
in the 1980s ", is yet another. Reprising her role is Israeli actress and IDF veteran is Gal Gadot as the title character, ironically
starring in a blockbuster that will demonize the Eurasian state which saved her ethnicity from extinction. Given the Pentagon's involvement
in the debacle surounding 2014's The Interview which provoked very real tensions with North Korea, it is likely they are at
least closely examining any entertainment with content regarding Russia, if not directly pre-approving it for review.
Ultimately, the Western panic about its imperial decline is not limited to assigning blame to Moscow. Sinophobia has manifested
as well in recent films such as the 2016 sci-fi film Arrival where the extra-terrestrials who reach Earth seem more interested
in communicating with Beijing as the global superpower than the U.S. However, while the West forebodes the return of Russia and China
to greater standing, you can be certain its real fear lies elsewhere. The fact that Chernobyl and Stranger Things are
as preoccupied with portraying socialism in a bad light as they are in rendering Moscow nefarious shows the real underlying trepidation
of the ruling elite that concerns the resurgence of class consciousness. The West must learn its lesson that its state of perpetual
war has caused its own downfall or it could attempt a last line of defense that would inevitably conscript all of humanity to its
death as the ruling class nearly did to the world in 1914 and 1939.
"... "Who will watch the watchers?" Well, if Barr and company are not going to indict these characters, the answer is NOBODY! ..."
"... If you read the long litany of articles on SST by David Habakkuk and Larry Johnson, the pattern of a soft coup conspiracy against the possibility of HC's defeat is quite clear. ..."
"Federal prosecutors have been weighing for well over a year whether to charge McCabe, after the Justice Department's inspector
general alleged that McCabe had misled investigators several times about a media disclosure regarding the investigation into Hillary
Clinton's family foundation.
By the inspector general's telling, McCabe approved the disclosure and later -- when asked about the matter by investigators
with the FBI's inspection division and inspector general's office -- denied having done so. McCabe's attorney has said previously
that his statements "are more properly understood as the result of misunderstanding, miscommunication, and honest failures of
recollection based on the swirl of events around him." Lying to investigators is a federal crime."
Washpost
-------------
This whole thing has the odor of something by Dostoevsky, C&P maybe?
"Who will watch the watchers?" Well, if Barr and company are not going to indict these characters, the answer is NOBODY!
If you read the long litany of articles on SST by David Habakkuk and Larry Johnson, the pattern of a soft coup conspiracy against
the possibility of HC's defeat is quite clear.
And then following her loss, largely brought on IMO, by her unwillingness to cultivate the Deplorables, the semi-Deplorables and
the Irredeemable Deplorables, this disdain on her part for ordinary people was further displayed in her offhand dismissal of coal
miners as future wards of the state.
Once she had lost, the plot rolled on in an effort to make the ultimate Deplorable a failure in office.
It is de rigeur to write that both parties should feel equally wounded by the plot but they do not. pl
PRC90
We have to make it clear that fidelity to the constitution is not a pretense. IMO HRC and Obama are at the heart of this matter,
but better to scourge them and let them go.
The article about how many intelligence officials (retired) now work for the corporate press
is misleading. It does not take into account the "undeclared" operatives such as Anderson
Cooper and Rachael Maddow. Cooper went to work for the CIA and they out him in his job,
Maddow is a Rhodes Scholar, a trained apparatchik for the elites.
This is nothing new, after WWII, when the press was most compliant and the CIA was formed
the press was "taken over" by the newly reforming and consolidating of deep state power.
There was Operation Mockingbird which was exposed long ago but nothing changes if they get
caught they just reorganize and continue.
"... And what did the spying involve? In such intelligence work, wiretaps are recorded; transcripts are made. The same can be true for person-to-person conversations between FBI informants and Trump campaign figures. In May, Trey Gowdy, the former Republican congressman who read deeply into Trump-Russia materials when he was in the House, strongly implied the FBI had transcripts of informant communications. ..."
"... "If the bureau is going to send an informant in, the informant is going to be wired," Gowdy told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo. "And if the bureau is monitoring telephone calls, there's going to be a transcript of that." ..."
"... "Where are the transcripts, if any exist," Gowdy continued, "between the informants and the telephone calls to George Papadopoulos?" ..."
"... And then the biggest questions: If there was evidence gained from the wiretapping and informing, what was it? Was it valuable? What did it tell the FBI about Russia and the Trump campaign? And did it prove that the Justice Department was right all along to spy on the campaign -- that the spying was, in the words of Attorney General William Barr, "adequately predicated"? ..."
"... Here is why Republicans are skeptical. Special counsel Robert Mueller had access to the results of the FBI's spying, and Mueller could not establish that there was any conspiracy or coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. After a two-year investigation with full law enforcement powers, Mueller never alleged that any American took part in any such conspiracy or coordination. ..."
"... And even if it were entirely declassified, Horowitz will not tell the whole story of spying and the 2016 election. Horowitz is the inspector general of the Justice Department and does not have the authority to investigate outside the department. For example, he cannot probe the actions of the Central Intelligence Agency and its then-director John Brennan during the period in question. ..."
There will be much to learn in
Inspector
General Michael Horowitz's upcoming report on the Trump-Russia investigation, but most of it will likely boil down to just two
questions. One, how much did the Obama Justice Department spy on the Trump campaign? And two, was it justified?
Many Democrats would immediately protest the word "spying." But the public already knows the FBI secured a warrant to wiretap
low-level Trump adviser Carter Page a few months after Page left the campaign. The public also knows the FBI used informant
Stefan Halper to gather information on other Trump campaign figures. And the public knows the FBI sent an undercover agent who
went by the alias "Azra Turk" to London to tease information out of another low-level Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos.
Was that all? Were there more? Horowitz should give definitive answers.
And what did the spying involve? In such intelligence work, wiretaps are recorded; transcripts are made. The same can be true
for person-to-person conversations between FBI informants and Trump campaign figures. In May, Trey Gowdy, the former Republican congressman
who read deeply into Trump-Russia materials when he was in the House, strongly implied the FBI had transcripts of informant communications.
"If the bureau is going to send an informant in, the informant is going to be wired," Gowdy told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo.
"And if the bureau is monitoring telephone calls, there's going to be a transcript of that."
"Where are the transcripts, if any exist," Gowdy continued, "between the informants and the telephone calls to George Papadopoulos?"
The "if any exist" was Gowdy's way of casting his statements as a hypothetical, but there was no doubt he was speaking from the
knowledge he gained as a congressional investigator.
And then the biggest questions: If there was evidence gained from the wiretapping and informing, what was it? Was it valuable?
What did it tell the FBI about Russia and the Trump campaign? And did it prove that the Justice Department was right all along to
spy on the campaign -- that the spying was, in the words of Attorney General William Barr, "adequately predicated"?
Here is why Republicans are skeptical. Special counsel Robert Mueller had access to the results of the FBI's spying, and Mueller
could not establish that there was any conspiracy or coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. After a two-year investigation
with full law enforcement powers, Mueller never alleged that any American took part in any such conspiracy or coordination.
So, Republicans know the end result of the investigation, but they don't know how it began. Yes, they know the official story
of the start of what the FBI called Crossfire Hurricane -- that it began with a foreign intelligence service (Australia) telling
U.S. officials that Papadopoulos appeared to have foreknowledge of a Russian plan to release damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
But they don't think it's the whole story.
That's where Horowitz comes in.
There's one big potential problem that people on Capitol Hill are talking about, and that is the issue of classified information.
Everyone expects a significant amount of Horowitz's report to be classified. How much, no one is quite sure. But the fact is, the
report was done to tell the American people what the nation's intelligence and law enforcement agencies did during the 2016 election.
Issuing a report with page after page blacked out would not be a good way to do that. But no one will know the extent of the classification
issue until Horowitz is ready to go public.
And even if it were entirely declassified, Horowitz will not tell the whole story of spying and the 2016 election. Horowitz
is the inspector general of the Justice Department and does not have the authority to investigate outside the department. For example,
he cannot probe the actions of the Central Intelligence Agency and its then-director John Brennan during the period in question.
That will be the role of another investigator, John Durham, the U.S. attorney appointed by Barr to investigate the origins of
the Trump-Russia probe. Durham is working with the support of top Republicans on Capitol Hill, like Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman
Lindsey Graham, who recently said, "I really am very curious about the role that the CIA played here."
But first, the Horowitz report. It will be an important step in answering the questions of how much spying took place and whether
it was justified. It's long past time Americans learned what happened.
The more things change the more they stay the same. The level of paranoia of the neoliberal elite toward Russia probably exceeds
the level achieved during the Cold War I, and their intellectual level is considerably lower, so the danger is greater.
Notable quotes:
"... I am coming to believe that it will never be possible to achieve anything resembling a sophisticated understanding of Russia in American governmental and journalistic circles. ..."
"... The lingering tendencies in [the United States] to see Russia as a great and dangerous enemy are simply silly, and should have no place in our thinking. We have never been at war with Russia, should never need to be and must not be. ..."
I find the view of the Soviet Union that prevails today in large portions of our governmental and journalistic establishments
so extreme, so subjective, so far removed from what any sober scrutiny of external reality would reveal, that it is not only ineffective
but dangerous as a guide to political action. This endless series of distortions and oversimplifications; this systematic dehumanization
of the leadership of another great country; this routine exaggeration of Moscow's military capabilities and of the supposed iniquity
of Soviet intentions; this monotonous misrepresentation of the nature and the attitudes of another great people ... this reckless
application of the double standard to the judgment of Soviet conduct and our own; this failure to recognize, finally, the communality
of many of their problems and ours as we both move inexorably into the modern technological age; and this corresponding tendency
to view all aspects of the relationship in terms of a supposed total and irreconcilable conflict of concerns and of aims: these,
believe me, are not the marks of the maturity and discrimination one expects of the diplomacy of a great power; they are the marks
of an intellectual primitivism and naïveté unpardonable in a great government. (
The New York Review of Books , 01.21.82)
Above all, we must learn to see the behavior of the leadership of that country [the Soviet Union] as partly the reflection
of our own treatment of it. If we insist on demonizing these Soviet leaders -- on viewing them as total and incorrigible enemies,
consumed only with their fear or hatred of us and dedicated to nothing other than our destruction -- that, in the end, is the
way we shall assuredly have them -- if for no other reason than that our view of them allows for nothing else -- either for them
or for us. ( The New York Review of Books
, 01.21.82)
On forcing Russia into concessions in a letter to J. Lukacs[1]
: I would like to say that it never pays, in my opinion, for one great power to take advantage of the momentary weakness or distraction
of another great power in order to force upon it concessions it would never have accepted in normal circumstances. (Letter written
in 1990 via " Through the History of the Cold War: The
Correspondence of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs ," 2010)
I fear the consequences of his [U.S. President Jimmy Carter's] moralism -- with respect both to Southern Africa and to the
Soviet Union. The question of pressure on behalf of the Russian "dissidents" is one of those highly complicated political questions
in which one has to work with contrary forces, carefully gauging the best compromise line between them. (Letter written in 1977
via " Through the History of the Cold War: The Correspondence
of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs ," 2010)
One great part of the U.S. government professes to be seeking peace with Moscow; another great part of it -- CIA and the Pentagon
-- appears to live and act on the assumption that we are either at war with Russia or are about to be. Both of these attitudes
have their domestic cliques and constituencies; and our good president, anxious to return the support of both of them, wages peace,
demonstratively, out of one pocket, and war, clandestinely, out of the other. Hence -- his split mind. (Letter written in 1977
via " Through the History of the Cold War: The Correspondence
of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs ," 2010)
I am coming to believe that it will never be possible to achieve anything resembling a sophisticated understanding of
Russia in American governmental and journalistic circles. Recognizing this, to begin to think that it should be best if the
relationship between the two countries were to be, over the long term (and by this conscious choice), a cold and distant one,
directed solely to the maintenance of peace, but avoiding both polemics and the search for intimacy -- a disillusioned relationship
in other words, in which the avoidance of unnecessary misunderstandings in practical questions would be given a higher priority
than the search for any real philosophical understanding or any wide ranging agreement on political values. (Letter written in
1983 via " Through the History of the Cold War: The Correspondence
of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs ," 2010)
The lingering tendencies in [the United States] to see Russia as a great and dangerous enemy are simply silly, and should
have no place in our thinking. We have never been at war with Russia, should never need to be and must not be. ... The greatest
help we can give will be of two kinds: understanding and example. The example will of course depend upon the quality of our own
civilization. It is our responsibility to assure that this quality is such as to be useful in this respect. We must ask ourselves
what sort of example is going to be set for Russia by a country that finds itself unable to solve such problems as drugs, crime,
decay of the inner cities, declining educational levels, a crumbling material substructure and a deteriorating environment. The
understanding, on the other hand, will have to include the recognition that this is in many ways a hard and low moment in the
historical development of the Russian people. They are just in process of recovery from all the heartrending reverses that this
brutal century has brought to them. We , too, may someday have our low moments. (
Foreign Affairs
, 12.01.90)
This is a case of setting up a ludicrous straw man.
Suppose for the sake of argument it was established that the Russian
state actually did try to kill Skripal. Of course they didn't, but assume they did.
It would be entirely legitimate to say "the Russians" did it. This wouldn't be racist, or bigoted, or anything else. It
wouldn't mean that all 150 million Russians were personally involved, or approved of this action, or played an active part in
it, or even that they knew of it or could care less about it.
It wouldn't be some kind of racist trope that bus driver Mr. Ivanovich in Novosibirsk was somehow responsible.
Any more than 300 million Americans and 60 million British were personally responsible for the conspiracy to invade Iraq,
or Bush's and Blair's criminal war of aggression.
In like manner the 9/11 atrocity was carried out by a few hundred individuals. Mostly Israeli and dual national Americans,
and a significant number of Israel First stooge goys serving Zionist interests.
The vast majority of Jews and Israelis in the world played no part at all, and are just passive recipients of the cover
conspiracy theories to explain it away.
This is just a smokecreen that is habitually thrown up whenever anyone connects the dots between Silverstein, a 200 strong
Mossad ring, Chertoff, and so many others.
Images removed. See the original for full version.
Much more plausible explanation of Russiagate then Mueller report that cost probably 1000 times less. Mueller and his team should
commit hara-kiri in shame.
It contains more valuable information about Russiagate and color revolution against Trump initiatesd by Obama and Brennan. And
what is important it is much shorter and up to the point. In other words, Jeff Carlson beat the whole Mueller team to the
punch.
An excellent reporting by Jeff Carlson !!! Bravo!!!
Notable quotes:
"... Horowitz continued to push Congress for oversight access and encouraged passage of the Inspector General Empowerment Act . Horowitz would ultimately win his battle, but only as President Barack Obama was leaving office. On Dec. 16, 2016, Obama finally signed the Inspector General Empowerment Act into law. ..."
"... The IGs' memo included an assessment that Clinton's email account contained hundreds of classified emails, despite Clinton's claims that there was no classified information present on her server. ..."
"... On July 30, 2015, within weeks of the FBI's opening of the Clinton investigation, McCabe was suddenly promoted to the No. 3 position in the FBI. With his new title of associate deputy director, McCabe was transferred to FBI headquarters from the Washington Field Office, and his direct involvement in the Clinton investigation began. ..."
"... Strzok was one of the agents selected, and in late August 2015, he was assigned to the Mid-Year Exam team and transferred to FBI headquarters. Strzok, in his comments to lawmakers, acknowledged that the newly formed investigative team was largely made up of hand-picked personnel from the Washington Field Office and FBI headquarters. ..."
"... On Jan. 29, 2016, Comey appointed McCabe as FBI deputy director, replacing the retiring Giuliano, and McCabe assumed the No. 2 position in the FBI, after having held the No. 3 position for just six months. ..."
"... By early 2016, the three participants in the infamous "insurance policy" meeting -- McCabe, Strzok, and Page -- were now in place at the FBI. ..."
"... Priestap, who testified that he was unaware of the frequency of meetings between McCabe, Strzok, and Lisa Page, seems to have been kept in the dark regarding many of the actions taken by Strzok, who appeared to be exercising significant investigative control. ..."
"... It sounds like Peter Strzok was kind of driving the train here. Would you agree with that?" ..."
"... Peter and Jon, yeah." ..."
"... Do you know if Mr. McCabe was aware that some of his agent executives were concerned that they were being bypassed on information on what, by all accounts, was a sensitive, critical investigation?" ..."
"... My understanding was that he was aware." ..."
"... Notably, Comey had been convinced to remove the term "gross negligence" to describe Clinton's actions from his prepared statement by, among others, Page, Strzok, Anderson, and Moffa. ..."
"... While GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted, after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Most of these meetings with Papadopoulos -- whose own background and reasons for joining the Trump campaign remain suspicious -- occurred in the first half of 2016. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly so. ..."
"... As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of any traditional channels -- was gathered, Brennan began a process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director pushed the FBI toward the establishment of a formal counterintelligence investigation. ..."
"... The last major segment of Brennan's efforts involved a series of three reports. The first, titled the "Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security ," was released on Oct. 7, 2016. The second report, "GRIZZLY STEPPE -- Russian Malicious Cyber Activity ," was released on Dec. 29, 2016. The third report, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections " -- also known as the intelligence community assessment (ICA) -- was released on Jan. 6, 2017. ..."
"... On July 5, 2016, Gaeta traveled to London and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis. At some point in early July, Steele passed his initial report to Nuland and the State Department. Nuland later said these documents were passed on at some point to both the FBI and then-Secretary of State John Kerry. ..."
"... Prior to joining Fusion GPS, Nellie had worked as an independent contractor for an internal open-source division of the CIA, Open Source Works, from 2008 to at least June 2010; it appears likely she remained in that role into 2014. ..."
"... Additionally, email communications between her and Bruce Ohr show that she routinely sent her husband at the DOJ articles on Russia -- most carrying a similar negative slant. The emails continued through the duration of Nellie's employment with Fusion GPS and usually contained a brief, often one-line comment from Nellie. ..."
"... In her testimony, Nellie described her work as online open-source efforts that utilized "Russian sources, media, social media, government, you know, business registers, legal databases, all kinds of things." Ohr said that she would "write occasional reports based on the open-source research that I described about Donald Trump's relationships with various people in Russia." ..."
"... Steele had produced eight reports from June 20, 2016, through the end of August 2016 (there also is one undated report included in the dossier). No further reports were generated by Steele until Sept. 14, when he suddenly wrote three separate memos in one day. One of the memos referenced a Russian bank named Alfa Bank, misspelled as "Alpha" in his memo. Steele's sudden burst of productivity was likely done in preparation for his Sept. 19 meeting in Rome with the FBI. ..."
"... The impact of Brennan's potential knowledge of the dossier in August 2016 should not be underestimated. As Brennan testified to Congress, his briefing to the Gang of Eight was done in consultation with the Obama administration: ..."
"... Halper, who has been outed as an FBI informant, stayed in contact with Carter Page for the next 14 months, severing ties exactly as the final FISA warrant on Page expired. ..."
"... Following the publication of the Isikoff article, the Hillary for America campaign released a statement on the same day that touted Isikoff's "bombshell report," with the full article attached. ..."
"... Winer had received a separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. This "second dossier" had been compiled by another longtime Clinton operative, former journalist Cody Shearer, and echoed claims made in the Steele dossier. Winer gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele then shared this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it as a means to corroborate Steele's own dossier. ..."
"... Steele also met with U.S. media during his visit to Washington, doing so "at Fusion's instruction." According to UK Court documents , Steele testified that he "briefed" The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, The New Yorker, and CNN at the end of September 2016. Steele would engage in a second round of media contact in mid-October 2016, meeting again with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yahoo News. Steele testified that all these meetings were "conducted verbally in person." ..."
"... Sometime in late 2016, his wife, Nellie Ohr, provided him with a memory stick containing all of her research that she had compiled while employed at Fusion GPS. Bruce Ohr testified he gave the memory stick to Pientka. Nellie Ohr had left Fusion in September 2016. Through Pientka, Strzok now had all of Nellie Ohr's Fusion research in his possession. ..."
"... Flynn's 2015 dinner in Moscow was initially used to implicate the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. It was then used as a means to cast doubts on Flynn's ability as Trump's national security adviser. Following Flynn's resignation, it was then used as a means to pursue the ongoing collusion narrative that gained full strength in the early days of the Trump administration. ..."
"... On April 18, 2016, Rogers moved aggressively in response to the disclosures. He abruptly shut down all FBI outside-contractor access. At this point, both the FBI and the DOJ's NSD became aware of Rogers's compliance review. They may have known earlier, but they were certainly aware after outside-contractor access was halted. ..."
"... Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of the compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the NSA inspector general and associated FISA abuse to the FISA court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702-compliance review. ..."
Efforts by high-ranking officials in the CIA ,
FBI , Department of Justice (
DOJ ), and State Department to portray President
Donald Trump as having colluded with Russia were the culmination
of years of bias and politicization under the Obama administration.
The weaponization of the intelligence community and other government agencies created an environment that allowed for obstruction
in the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the relentless pursuit of a manufactured collusion narrative against Trump.
A willing and complicit media spread unsubstantiated leaks as facts in an effort to promote the Russia-collusion narrative.
The Spygate scandal also raises a bigger question: Was the 2016 election a one-time aberration, or was it symptomatic of decades
of institutional political corruption?
This article builds on dozens of congressional testimonies, court documents, and other research to provide an inside look at the
actions of Obama administration officials in the scandal that's become known as Spygate.
To understand this abuse of power, it helps to go back to July 2011, when DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was appointed.
From the very start, Horowitz found his duties throttled by Attorney General Eric Holder, who placed limitations on the inspector
general's right to have unobstructed access to information. Holder
used
this tactic to delay Horowitz's investigation of the failed sting operation known as Operation Fast and Furious.
"We got access to information up to 2010 in all of these categories. No law changed in 2010. No policy changed. It was simply
a decision by the General Counsel's Office in 2010 that they viewed, now, the law differently. And as a result, they weren't going
to give us that information," Horowitz told
members of Congress in February 2015.
On Aug. 5, 2014, Horowitz and other inspectors general had sent a
letter to Congress asking for unimpeded access to all records. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates responded on July 20, 2015,
with a 58-page memorandum, titled "
Memorandum
for Sally Quillian Yates Deputy Attorney General ," written by Karl R. Thompson, the principal deputy assistant attorney general
of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
The July 20, 2015, opinion was
widely criticized . But it accomplished what it was intended to do. The opinion limited IG Horowitz's oversight from extending
to any information collected under Title III -- including intercepted communications and national security letters. (Notably, The
New York Times
disclosed that national security letters were used in the surveillance of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.)
In response, on Aug. 3, 2015, IG Horowitz sent a
blistering letter to Congress. The letter was signed not only by Horowitz but by all other acting inspectors general as well:
"The OLC opinion's restrictive reading of the IG Act represents a potentially serious challenge to the authority of every Inspector
General and our collective ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner. Our concern is that, as
a result of the OLC opinion, agencies other than DOJ may likewise withhold crucial records from their Inspectors General, adversely
impacting their work.
Horowitz continued to push Congress for oversight access and encouraged passage of the
Inspector General Empowerment
Act . Horowitz would ultimately win his battle, but only as President
Barack Obama was leaving office. On Dec. 16, 2016,
Obama finally signed the Inspector General Empowerment Act into law.
It is against this backdrop of minimal oversight that Spygate took place.
Ironically, the Clinton email server investigation, known as the "Mid-Year Exam," originated from a disclosure contained in a
June 29, 2015, memo sent by the inspectors general for both the State Department and the Intelligence Community to Patrick F. Kennedy,
then-undersecretary of state for management.
The IGs' memo included an assessment that Clinton's email account contained hundreds of classified emails, despite Clinton's claims
that there was no classified information present on her server.
On July 6, 2015, the IG for the Intelligence Community made a
referral
to the FBI, which resulted in the official opening of an investigation into the Clinton email server by FBI officials Randall Coleman
and Charles Kable on July 10, 2015.
At this time, Peter Strzok was an assistant special agent in charge at the FBI's Washington Field Office. The assistant director
in charge at the Washington Field Office during this period was Andrew McCabe, a position he
assumed on Sept.
14, 2014.
On July 30, 2015, within weeks of the FBI's opening of the Clinton investigation, McCabe was suddenly
promoted to the No. 3 position in the FBI. With his new title of associate deputy director, McCabe was transferred to FBI headquarters
from the Washington Field Office, and his direct involvement in the Clinton investigation began.
Strzok would follow shortly. Less than a month after McCabe was transferred, FBI headquarters reached out to the Washington Field
Office, saying it needed greater staffing and resources "based on what they were looking at, based on some of the investigative steps
that were under consideration," Strzok told congressional investigators in a closed-door hearing on June 27, 2018.
Strzok was one of the agents selected, and in late August 2015, he was assigned to the Mid-Year Exam team and transferred to FBI
headquarters. Strzok, in his comments to lawmakers, acknowledged that the newly formed investigative team was largely made up of
hand-picked personnel from the Washington Field Office and FBI headquarters.
Starting in October 2015 and continuing into early 2016, FBI Director
James Comey made a series of high-profile reassignments
that resulted in the complete turnover of the upper-echelon of the FBI team working on the Clinton email investigation:
Oct. 12, 2015: Louis Bladel was moved to the New York Field Office.
Dec. 1, 2015: Randall Coleman, assistant director of Counterintelligence, was named as executive assistant director of the
Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, and was replaced by Bill Priestap.
Dec. 9, 2015: Charles "Sandy" Kable was moved to the Washington Field Office.
Feb. 1, 2016: Mark Giuliano retired as FBI deputy director and was replaced by Andrew McCabe.
Feb. 11, 2016: John Giacalone retired as executive assistant director and was replaced by Michael Steinbach.
March 2, 2016: Gerald Roberts, Jr. was moved to the Washington Field Office.
Comey is the only known senior FBI leadership official who remained involved throughout the entire Clinton email investigation.
McCabe had the second-longest tenure.
On Jan. 29, 2016, Comey
appointed
McCabe as FBI deputy director, replacing the retiring Giuliano, and McCabe assumed the No. 2 position in the FBI, after having
held the No. 3 position for just six months.
It was at this point that FBI lawyer Lisa Page was assigned to McCabe as his special counsel. This was not the first time that
Page worked directly for McCabe. James Baker, the FBI's former general counsel, told congressional investigators that Page had worked
for McCabe at various times during McCabe's career, going back as far as 2013.
By early 2016, the three participants in the infamous "insurance policy" meeting -- McCabe, Strzok, and Page -- were now in place
at the FBI.
In January 2016, Bill Priestap was named as head of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, replacing Coleman and inheriting the
Clinton email investigation in the process.
According to Priestap, Coleman had "set up a reporting mechanism that leaders of that team would report directly to him, not through
the customary other chain of command" in the Clinton email investigation. Priestap, who said he didn't know why Coleman had "set
it up," kept the chain of command in place when he assumed Coleman's position in January 2016.
This new structure resulted in some unusual reporting lines that went outside normal chains of command. Strzok, who would not
normally fall under Priestap's oversight, was now reporting directly to him.
As Priestap described it, the team involved in the Clinton investigation comprised three different but intertwined elements: the
primary team, the filter team, and the senior leadership team.
The primary team was small, consisting only of Strzok, FBI analyst Jonathan Moffa, and, to varying degrees, filter team leader
Rick Mains and FBI lawyer Sally Moyer. Mains reported to Strzok and Moffa, who in turn, along with Moyer, provided briefings to Priestap.
Below Strzok and Moffa was the day-to-day investigative "filter" team of approximately 15 FBI agents and analysts that was overseen
by Mains, a supervisory special agent.
The senior leadership team was more fluid, consisting of higher-level FBI officials who provided briefings and updates to Comey
and/or McCabe. In addition to Priestap, Strzok, and Moffa, frequent attendees included Moyer, Page, Deputy General Counsel Trisha
Anderson, chief of staff Jim Rybicki, and General Counsel James Baker.
While the elements of the day-to-day investigative team differed for the Clinton email investigation and the Trump–Russia investigation,
the primary team remained the same throughout both cases -- as did the lines of communication between the FBI and the DOJ. According
to testimony by Page, John Carlin, who ran the DOJ's National Security Division (NSD), was receiving briefings on both investigations
directly from McCabe.
Priestap Left in the Dark
Priestap, who testified that he was unaware of the frequency of meetings between McCabe, Strzok, and Lisa Page, seems to have
been kept in the dark regarding many of the actions taken by Strzok, who appeared to be exercising significant investigative control. Priestap was asked about this by congressional investigators during a June 5, 2018, testimony:
Rep. Meadows: " It sounds like Peter Strzok was kind of driving the train here. Would you agree with that?"
Additionally, Page often circumvented the established chain of command, not only with McCabe, for whom she reportedly served as
a conduit for Strzok, but also with Baker. Additionally, there were concerns that Page bypassed both the executive assistant director
for the National Security Branch -- first Giacalone, then Steinbach -- and Priestap, the head of counterintelligence. Anderson, the
No. 2 lawyer, admitted in her testimony to congressional investigators that she had been aware of these concerns, saying, "Neither
of them personally complained to me, but I was aware of their concerns."
A report published by IG Horowitz in June 2018, which reviewed the FBI's investigation of the Clinton email case, included the
notable statement that several witnesses had informed the IG that Page "circumvented the official chain of command, and that Strzok
communicated important Midyear case information to her, and thus to McCabe, without Priestap's or Steinbach's knowledge." Steinbach,
who was the executive assistant director and Priestap's direct supervisor,
left the FBI in early 2017.
According to Anderson, McCabe was aware of the ongoing concerns regarding Page's circumventions, but it appears that nothing was
done to address them:
Mr. Baker: " Do you know if Mr. McCabe was aware that some of his agent executives were concerned that they were being bypassed
on information on what, by all accounts, was a sensitive, critical investigation?"
Ms. Anderson: " My understanding was that he was aware."
DOJ Prevents 'Gross Negligence' Charges
By the spring of 2016, the Clinton email investigation was already winding down. This was due in large part to the fact that the
DOJ, under Attorney General Loretta Lynch , had decided
to set an unusually high threshold for the prosecution of Clinton, effectively ensuring from the outset that she would not be charged.
In order for Clinton to be prosecuted, the DOJ required the FBI to establish evidence of intent -- even though the gross negligence
statute explicitly does not require this.
This meant that the FBI would have needed to find a smoking gun, such as an email or an admission made during FBI questioning,
revealing that Clinton or her aides knowingly set up the private email server to send classified information.
According to Page, the DOJ played a far larger role in the Clinton investigation than previously had been known:
"Everybody talks about this as if this was the FBI investigation, and the truth of the matter is there was not a single step,
other than the July 5th statement, there was not a single investigative step that we did not do in consultation with or at the direction
of the Justice Department," Page told congressional investigators on July 13, 2018.
Comey also had hinted at the influence exerted by the DOJ over the Clinton investigation, at a July 5, 2016,
press conference , in which he
recommended that Clinton not be charged, stating that "there are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially
regarding intent."
Notably, Comey had been convinced to remove the term "gross negligence" to describe Clinton's actions from his prepared statement
by, among others, Page, Strzok, Anderson, and Moffa.
CIA Director Instigates Trump Investigation
As the Clinton investigation wound down, interest from the intelligence community in the Trump campaign was ramping up. Sometime
in 2015, it appears former CIA Director John Brennan established himself as the point man to push for an investigation into the Trump
campaign. Using a combination of unofficial foreign intelligence compiled by contacts, colleagues, and associates --
primarily from the UK , but also from other Five Eyes members, such as Australia -- Brennan then fed this information to the
FBI. Brennan stated this fact repeatedly during a May 23, 2017,
congressional testimony :
"I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump
campaign, was shared with the [FBI]."
Brennan also admitted that it was his intelligence that helped
establish the FBI investigation:
"I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in
my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and
it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred."
In late 2015, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was involved in collecting information regarding then-candidate
Trump and transmitting it to the United States. The GCHQ is the UK equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
While GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been
targeted, after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Most of these meetings with Papadopoulos -- whose own background and reasons for joining the Trump campaign remain suspicious
-- occurred in the first half of 2016. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's
Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly so.
Mifsud, who introduced Papadopoulos to a series of Russian contacts, appears to have more connections with Western intelligence
than with Russian intelligence.
Downer, then Australia's high commissioner to the UK, met with Papadopoulos in May 2016, in a meeting
established through a chain
of two intermediaries.
Information allegedly relayed by Papadopoulos during the Downer meeting -- that the Russians had damaging information on Clinton
-- appears nearly identical to claims later contained in the first memo from former MI6 spy and dossier author Christopher Steele
that the FBI obtained in early July 2016.
Downer's conversation with Papadopoulos was reportedly disclosed to the FBI on July 22, 2016, through Australian government channels,
although it may have come directly from Downer himself.
Details from the conversation between Downer and Papadopoulos were then used by the FBI to open its counterintelligence investigation
on July 31, 2016.
In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, the head of the UK's GCHQ, traveled to Washington to
meet with Brennan
regarding alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Around the same time, Brennan
formed an inter-agency task force comprising an estimated
six agencies and/or government departments. The FBI, Treasury, and DOJ handled the domestic inquiry into Trump and possible Russia
connections. The CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the NSA handled foreign and intelligence aspects.
During this time, Brennan appeared to have employed the use of
reverse targeting , which refers to the targeting of a foreign individual with the intent of capturing data on a U.S. citizen.
Mr. Brennan:
" We call it incidental collection in terms of CIA's foreign intelligence collection authorities. Any time we
would incidentally collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI because they have the legal authority
to do it. We would not pursue that type of investigative, you know, sort of leads. We would give it to the FBI. So, we were picking
things up that was of great relevance to the FBI, and we wanted to make sure that they were there -- so they could piece it together
with whatever they were collecting domestically here."
As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of any traditional channels -- was gathered, Brennan began a
process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director pushed
the FBI toward the establishment of a formal counterintelligence investigation.
This final report was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of President Donald Trump.
Notably, Adm. Mike Rogers of the NSA publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning it only a moderate confidence level.
Fusion GPS and the Steele Dossier
Meanwhile, another less official effort began. Information paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton
campaign targeting Trump made its way to the highest levels of the FBI and the State Department, with a sophisticated strategy relying
on the personal connections of hired operatives.
At the center of the multi-pronged strategy to disseminate the information were Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and former
British spy Steele.
In early March 2016, Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie -- the law firm used by the Clinton campaign and the DNC -- expressing
interest in an "engagement," according to an Oct. 24, 2017,
response
letter by Perkins Coie. The firm hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to "perform a variety of research services during the 2016 election
cycle."
Steele's firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, was retained by Fusion GPS during the period between June and November 2016. During
this time, Steele produced 16 memos, with the last memo dated Oct. 20, 2016. There is one final memo that Steele wrote on Dec. 13
at the request of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Steele provided Fusion GPS with something that Simpson's firm was lacking: access to individuals within the FBI and the State
Department. These contacts could be traced back to at least 2010, when Steele had provided assistance in the FBI's investigation
into FIFA over concerns that Russia might have been engaging in bribery to host the 2018 World Cup.
Sometime in the latter half of 2014, Steele began to informally
provide reports
he had prepared for a private client to the State Department. One of the recipients of the reports was Victoria Nuland, the assistant
secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.
After Steele's company was hired by Fusion GPS in June 2016, he began to reach out to the FBI through Michael Gaeta, an FBI agent
and assistant legal attaché at the
U.S. Embassy in Rome who Steele had worked with on the FIFA case. Gaeta also headed up the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime unit, which
specializes in investigating criminal groups from Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine.
Gaeta was later identified as Steele's FBI handler, in a July 16, 2018, congressional testimony before the House Judiciary and
Oversight committees by Page.
On July 5, 2016, Gaeta traveled to London and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis. At some point in early July,
Steele passed his initial report to Nuland and the State Department. Nuland later said these documents were passed on at some point
to both the FBI and then-Secretary of State John Kerry.
Exactly what happened with the reports that Gaeta brought back from London, and precisely who he gave them to within the FBI,
remains unknown, although some media reports have indicated they might have been sent to the FBI's New York Field Office. During
the period following Steele's initial contact with the FBI, there appears to have been no further FBI interaction or contact with
Steele.
Former CIA Contractor Worked for Fusion GPS
Notably, eight months before Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, Simpson had hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of then-Associate Deputy
Attorney General Bruce Ohr, to work for his firm as a researcher in October 2015. It was at this time that Fusion GPS was retained
by the Washington Free Beacon to engage in research on the Trump campaign.
Prior to joining Fusion GPS, Nellie had worked as an independent contractor for an internal open-source division of the CIA, Open
Source Works, from 2008 to at least June 2010; it appears likely she remained in that role into 2014.
Nellie told congressional investigators, in her Oct. 19, 2018, closed-door testimony, that part of her work for Fusion GPS was
to research the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, including campaign associate Carter Page, early campaign supporter Lt. Gen. Michael
Flynn, and campaign manager Paul Manafort, as well as Trump's family members, including some of his children.
Additionally, email communications between her and Bruce Ohr show that she routinely sent her husband at the DOJ articles on Russia
-- most carrying a similar negative slant. The emails continued through the duration of Nellie's employment with Fusion GPS and usually
contained a brief, often one-line comment from Nellie.
In her testimony, Nellie described her work as online open-source efforts that utilized "Russian sources, media, social media,
government, you know, business registers, legal databases, all kinds of things." Ohr said that she would "write occasional reports
based on the open-source research that I described about Donald Trump's relationships with various people in Russia."
The work Nellie conducted for Fusion GPS matches the same skill set used when she worked for Open Source Works, which is a division
within the CIA that uses open-source information to produce intelligence products.
When asked how she came to be hired by Fusion GPS and who had approached her, Nellie responded, "Nobody approached me," telling
investigators that it was she who had initiated contact and approached Fusion GPS after reading an article on Simpson.
Nellie would continue to work for Fusion GPS until September 2016. By this time, Simpson and Steele already had started working
on pushing the Steele dossier into the FBI.
Following the end of her employment with Fusion GPS, Nellie provided Bruce with a memory stick that contained all of the research
she had compiled during her time at the firm. Bruce then gave the memory stick to the FBI, through his handler, Joe Pientka.
Bruce Ohr Becomes a Conduit
Nearly a month after Gaeta brought back the reports that Steele provided in London, Simpson and Steele decided to pursue a new
channel into the FBI through Bruce Ohr. Bruce had known Steele since at least 2007, when they met during an "official meeting" while
Steele was still employed by the British government as an MI6 agent. Steele had already been in contact with Bruce via email in early
2016. Notably, most of these prior communications appeared to discuss Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and his ongoing efforts to
obtain a U.S. visa.
On July 29, 2016, Steele
wrote to Bruce, saying that he would "be in DC at short notice on business," and asked to meet with both Bruce and his wife.
On July 30, 2016, the Ohrs met Steele for breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel. Also present at the breakfast meeting was a fourth individual,
described by Bruce as "an associate of Mr. Steele's, another gentleman, younger fellow. I didn't catch his name." Nellie testified
that Steele's associate had a British accent.
The timing of the July 30 breakfast meeting is of particular note, as the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, "Crossfire
Hurricane," was formally opened the following day, on July 31, 2016, by FBI agent Peter Strzok.
According to a transcript of Bruce's testimony before Congress, Steele
relayed information from his dossier at this meeting and claimed that "a former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service,
the SVR, had stated to someone that they had Donald Trump over a barrel."
Steele also referenced Deripaska's business dealings with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter
Page's meetings in Moscow.
Lastly, Bruce noted that Steele told him he had been in contact with the FBI but now had additional reports. "Chris Steele had
provided some reports to the FBI, I think two, but that Glenn Simpson had more," he said.
Immediately following the Ohrs' breakfast meeting with Steele, Bruce Ohr reached out to FBI Deputy Director McCabe and the two
met in McCabe's office -- sometime between July 30 and the first days of August. Also present at this meeting was FBI lawyer Page,
who had previously worked for Bruce Ohr at the DOJ, where he was her direct supervisor for five to six years.
Bruce Ohr would later testify that during the July/August meeting, he told McCabe that his wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion, noting,
"I wanted the FBI to be aware of any possible bias." FBI General Counsel Baker, who reviewed a portion of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) application to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page -- which relied in part on the information from
Steele -- told congressional investigators that he was never told of Ohr's concerns regarding possible bias and conflicts of interest.
On Aug. 15, 2016, a week or two following Bruce Ohr's meeting with McCabe, Strzok would send the now-infamous "insurance policy"
text referencing McCabe to Lisa Page:
"I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office – that there's no way he gets elected – but I'm afraid
we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."
On Aug. 22, Bruce Ohr had a meeting with Simpson. Ohr would later discuss that meeting during his testimony:
"I don't know exactly what Chris Steele was thinking, of course, but I knew that Chris Steele was working for Glenn Simpson, and
that Glenn might have additional information that Chris either didn't have or was not authorized to prevent [present], give me, or
whatever."
It was at this meeting that Simpson first mentioned Belarusan-American businessman Sergei Millian and former Trump attorney Michael
Cohen.
During this same period in late August 2016, Brennan began briefing members of the Gang of Eight on the FBI's counterintelligence
investigation, through a series of meetings in August and September 2016. Notably, each Gang of Eight member was briefed separately,
calling into question whether each of the members received the same information. Efforts by Democrats to
block the release of transcripts from each meeting are ongoing. Comey, however, did not notify Congress of the FBI investigation
until early March 2017, and it's entirely possible he was unaware of Brennan's private briefings during the summer of 2016.
During her testimony, FBI lawyer Lisa Page was questioned by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) in relation to an Aug. 25, 2016, text
message that read, "What are you doing after the CH brief?" CH almost certainly referred to Crossfire Hurricane.
Lisa Page then was asked about an event that took place on the same day as the "CH brief" -- a briefing provided by Brennan to
then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid:
"You give a brief on August the 25th. Director Brennan is giving a brief. It's not a Gang of Eight brief. It is a one-on-one,
from what we can tell, a one-on-one briefing with Harry Reid at that point."
According to Meadows, Brennan briefed Reid on the Steele dossier:
"We have documents that would suggest that in that briefing the dossier was mentioned to Harry Reid and then obviously we're going
to have to have conversations. Does that surprise you that Director Brennan would be aware [of the dossier]?"
Lisa Page appeared genuinely surprised that Brennan would have been aware of the dossier's existence at this early point, telling
Meadows: "The FBI got this information from our source. If the CIA had another source of that information, I am neither aware of
that nor did the CIA provide it to us if they did."
She elaborated further: "As of August of 2016, I don't know who Christopher Steele is. I don't know that he's an FBI source. I
don't know what he does. I have never heard of him in all of my life."
This claim by Page seems incongruous when viewed against Bruce Ohr's testimony that he met with Page and McCabe in the first days
of August following his July 30, 2016, breakfast with Steele:
"My initial meeting was with Mr. McCabe and with Lisa Page.
"I was telling them about what I was hearing from Chris Steele."
Meanwhile, Brennan's briefing prompted Reid to write not one but two letters to Comey. Both demanded that Comey commence an investigation,
with the details to be made public.
Reid's first letter
, which touched on Carter Page, was sent on Aug. 27, 2016. Reid's
second letter
, far angrier and declaring Comey to be in possession of material information, was sent on Oct. 30, 2016.
There had been
reports that Comey had been considering closing the FBI investigation of Trump, something Brennan strongly opposed. Now, with
Reid's letters sent, that avenue was effectively closed. The termination of the FBI's Trump–Russia investigation would be all but
impossible in the face of Reid's public demands.
Perhaps it was in response to Reid's Aug. 27 letter that the FBI suddenly reached out to Steele in September 2016, asking him
for all the information in his possession. The team working on Crossfire Hurricane received documents and a briefing from Steele
in mid-September, reportedly
at a meeting in Rome, where Gaeta also was present.
During Lisa Page's testimony, she appeared to corroborate this account, noting that the team received the "reports that are known
as the dossier from an FBI agent who is Christopher Steele's handler in September of 2016." She would later clarify the timing, noting
"we received the reporting from Steele in mid-September." A
text sent to her by FBI agent Peter
Strzok on Oct. 12, 2016, may provide us with the actual date:
"We got the reporting on Sept 19. Looks like [redacted] got it early August."
Steele had produced eight reports from June 20, 2016, through the end of August 2016 (there also is one undated report included
in the dossier). No further reports were generated by Steele until Sept. 14, when he suddenly wrote three separate memos in one day.
One of the memos referenced a Russian bank named Alfa Bank, misspelled as "Alpha" in his memo. Steele's sudden burst of productivity
was likely done in preparation for his Sept. 19 meeting in Rome with the FBI.
The impact of Brennan's potential knowledge of the dossier in August 2016 should not be underestimated. As Brennan
testified to Congress, his briefing to the Gang of Eight
was done in consultation with the Obama administration:
"Through the so-called Gang-of-Eight process we kept Congress apprised of these issues as we identified them. Again, in consultation
with the White House, I personally briefed the full details of our understanding of Russian attempts to interfere in the election
to congressional leadership.
"Given the highly sensitive nature of what was an active counter-intelligence case, involving an ongoing Russian effort, to interfere
in our presidential election, the full details of what we knew at the time were shared only with those members of Congress."
As the dossier was making its way into the FBI, the agency began its preparations to obtain a FISA warrant on Trump campaign adviser
Carter Page, who was surveilled under Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
According to Baker's testimony, it appears that the FBI began to set its sights on Carter Page in the summer of 2016. When asked
how he had first gained knowledge of the FBI's intention to pursue a FISA warrant on Carter Page, Baker testified that it came through
his familiarity with the FBI's investigation:
Mr. Baker: " I learned of -- so I was aware when the FBI first started to focus on Carter Page, I was aware of that because
it was part of the broader investigation that we were conducting. So I was aware that we were investigating him. And then at some
point in time –"
Rep. Meadows: "But that was many years ago. That was in 2014. Or are you talking about 2016?"
Mr. Baker: " I am talking about 2016 in the summer."
Rep. Meadows: "Okay."
Mr. Baker: " Yeah. And so I was aware of the investigation, and then at some point in time, as part of the regular briefings
on the case, the briefers mentioned that they were going to pursue a FISA."
It appears the FBI, and possibly the CIA, began to focus on Carter Page earlier than Baker was aware. Carter Page had been invited
some months prior to a July 2016 symposium held at Cambridge regarding the upcoming election. The speaker list was notable:
Madeleine Albright (former U.S. secretary of state)
Vin Weber (Republican Party strategist and former congressman)
Peter Ammon (German ambassador to the UK)
Sir Richard Dearlove (former head of MI6 and Steele's former boss)
Bridget Kendall (BBC diplomatic correspondent and the next master of Peterhouse College)
Sir Malcolm Rifkind (former defense and foreign secretary)
Carter Page attended the event just four days after his July 2016 Moscow trip, and it was during this time in the UK that he first
encountered Stefan Halper. Page's Moscow trip would later figure prominently in the Steele dossier.
Halper, who has been outed as an FBI informant, stayed in contact with Carter Page for the next 14 months, severing ties exactly
as the final FISA warrant on Page expired.
Trisha Anderson, the principal deputy general counsel for the FBI and head of the bureau's National Security and Cyber Law Branch,
approved the application for a warrant to spy on Carter Page before it went to FBI Director James Comey.
According to Anderson, pre-approvals for the Carter Page FISA warrant were provided by both McCabe and Deputy Attorney General
Sally Yates, before the FISA application was ever presented to Anderson for review.
"[M]y boss and my boss' boss had already reviewed and approved this application. And, in fact, the Deputy Attorney General, who
had the authority to sign the application, to be the substantive approver on the FISA application itself, had approved the application.
And that typically would not have been the case before I did that," said Anderson.
The unusual preliminary reviews and approvals from both McCabe and Yates appear to have had a substantial impact on the normal
review process, leading other individuals like Anderson to believe that the warrant application was more vetted than it really was.
Anderson also testified that she had not read the Carter Page FISA application prior to signing off on it and passing it along
to Comey for the final FBI signature. According to FBI lawyer Sally Moyer, the underlying Woods file (a document that provides facts
supporting the allegations made in a FISA application) was only read by the originating agent and the supervisory special agent in
the field. Moyer also noted that the Woods file relating to the Page FISA had not been reviewed or audited by anyone.
The Carter Page FISA application was largely reliant on the Steele dossier, which was unverified at the time of its submission
to the FISA court and remains unverified by the FBI to this day. Circular reporting, provided by Steele himself, was used as corroboration
of the dossier. Additionally, Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, whose conversation with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer
was used to open the FBI's July 31, 2016, counterintelligence investigation, is referenced in the FISA, yet there "is no evidence
of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos," according to a House Intelligence Committee memo.
Moyer testified that without the Steele dossier, the Carter Page application would have had a "50/50" chance of achieving the
probable cause standard before the FISA court. Notably, the Steele dossier is generally considered to have been largely discredited.
On Sept. 19, shortly after Steele completed his latest three memos, FBI General Counsel James Baker met with Perkins Coie partner
Michael Sussmann, the lawyer the DNC turned to on April 28, 2016, after discovering the alleged hacking of their servers.
Sussman, who sought out the meeting, presented Baker with documents that Baker described as "a stack of material I don't know
maybe a quarter inch half inch thick something like that clipped together, and then I believe there was some type of electronic media,
as well, a disk or something."
The information that Sussmann gave to Baker was related to what Baker described as "a surreptitious channel of communications"
between the Trump Organization and "a Russian organization associated with the Russian Government."
Baker was describing alleged communications between Alfa Bank and a server in the Trump Tower. The allegations, which were investigated
by the FBI and proven to be false, were widely covered in the media.
Just four days earlier, on Sept. 14, Steele mentioned Alfa Bank (misspelled as Alpha bank) in one of his memos.
According to Baker's testimony, there appears to have been at least three meetings with Sussmann -- the first in person and at
least two subsequent meetings by phone. In either the second or third conversation, Baker came to understand The New York Times was
also in possession of Sussmann's information. As would become clear later, other members of the media also had this same information.
As Baker was meeting with Sussmann, Steele was back in Washington for a series of meetings that included his DOJ contact, Bruce
Ohr.
On Sept. 23, 2016, Bruce Ohr again met with Steele for breakfast, telling lawmakers during testimony, "Steele was in Washington,
D.C., again, and he reached out to me, and, again, we met for breakfast, and he provided some additional information." Ohr said this
meeting concerned similar topics that were discussed at the July 30, 2016, meeting but did not provide further details.
Bruce Ohr would also meet either that same month or in early October with FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and DOJ
career officials from the criminal division, Bruce Swartz, Zainab Ahmad, and Andrew Weissman (Ohr testified that he was unsure whether
Weismann was at this or a later meeting). Both Weissman and Ahmad would later become part of the team assembled by special counsel
Robert Mueller.
Steele's Meetings With the Media
On the same day that Bruce Ohr met with Christopher Steele for breakfast, on Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff
published an article about Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. The article, headlined "
U.S. Intel Officials Probe Ties Between Trump Adviser and Kremlin ," was based on an interview with Steele. Isikoff's article
would later be used by the FBI in the FISA spy warrant application on Carter Page as corroborating information.
Following the publication of the Isikoff article, the Hillary for America campaign released a
statement on the same day that touted
Isikoff's "bombshell report," with the full article attached.
A second lengthy article was published on Sept. 23, by Politico: "
Who Is Carter
Page? The Mystery of Trump's Man in Moscow ," by Julia Ioffe. This article was particularly interesting as it appeared to highlight
media efforts by Fusion GPS:
"As I started looking into Page, I began getting calls from two separate 'corporate investigators' digging into what they claim
are all kinds of shady connections Page has to all kinds of shady Russians. One is working on behalf of various unnamed Democratic
donors; the other won't say who turned him on to Page's scent. Both claimed to me that the FBI was investigating Page for allegedly
meeting with Igor Sechin and Sergei Ivanov, who was until recently Putin's chief of staff -- both of whom are on the sanctions list
-- when Page was in Moscow in July for that speech."
Ioffe noted that "seemingly everyone I talked to had also talked to the Washington Post, and then there were these corporate investigators
who drew a dark and complex web of Page's connections."
Her article also mentioned rumors regarding Alfa Bank:
"In the interest of due diligence, I also tried to run down the rumors being handed me by the corporate investigators: that Russia's
Alfa Bank paid for the trip as a favor to the Kremlin; that Page met with Sechin and Ivanov in Moscow; that he is now being investigated
by the FBI for those meetings because Sechin and Ivanov were both sanctioned for Russia's invasion of Ukraine."
It was probably during this same trip to Washington that Steele
met with Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement and former special envoy
for Libya, whom Steele had known since at least 2010.
Winer had received a
separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. This "second dossier" had been
compiled by another longtime Clinton operative, former journalist Cody Shearer, and echoed claims made in the Steele dossier. Winer
gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele then
shared this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it as a means to corroborate Steele's own dossier.
Steele also met with U.S. media during his visit to Washington, doing so "at Fusion's instruction." According to
UK Court documents , Steele testified
that he "briefed" The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, The New Yorker, and CNN at the end of September 2016. Steele
would engage in a second round of media contact in mid-October 2016, meeting again with The New York Times, The Washington Post,
and Yahoo News. Steele testified that all these meetings were "conducted verbally in person."
As Steele's media meetings were going on, FBI General Counsel James Baker learned that Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann was
also speaking with reporters from The New York Times regarding the Alfa Bank information that Sussmann had provided to the FBI. After
some internal discussion, the FBI approached both Sussmann and The New York Times, asking that any story be held until the FBI had
time to complete an investigation into the documents provided by Sussmann. It appears that an agreement was reached, and the FBI
began to look into the claims regarding Alfa Bank and the server at Trump Tower.
But Sussman wasn't the only one that Baker, currently the subject of an ongoing criminal leak investigation, was speaking with.
According to congressional investigators, beginning sometime in September 2016 -- before the presidential election -- Baker began
having conversations with his old friend and journalist, David Corn of Mother Jones.
According to Baker, these conversations were in relation to ongoing FBI matters:
Rep. Jordan: " Did you talk to Mr. Corn prior to the election about anything, anything related to FBI matters? Not -- so we're
not going to ask about the Steele dossier. Anything about FBI business, FBI matters?"
Mr. Baker: " Yes."
Rep. Jordan: " Yes. And do you know -- can you give me some dates or the number of times that you talked to Mr. Corn about
FBI matters leading up to the 2016 Presidential election?"
Mr. Baker: " I don't remember, Congressman."
By Oct. 31, 2016, the FBI had apparently wrapped up their investigation into the Alfa Bank allegations, finding no evidence of
anything untoward in the process. It was on this day that three separate articles on Alfa Bank would be published.
The first, " Investigating
Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia " by The New York Times, appeared to be an updated version of the article they
had intended to publish before the FBI asked them to delay their reporting. It stated the following:
"In classified sessions in August and September, intelligence officials also briefed congressional leaders on the possibility
of financial ties between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump. They focused particular attention on what cyberexperts said
appeared to be a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia's biggest
banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin."
The reference to "classified sessions in August and September" is likely in relation to the series of Gang of Eight briefings
that former CIA Director John Brennan engaged in at that time -- including his briefing to then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.
The article continued:
"F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa
Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 'look-up' messages --
a first step for one system's computers to talk to another -- to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I.
ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts."
The second article,
"Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?" by Slate Magazine, was solely focused on the allegations regarding a server in
the Trump Tower that had allegedly been communicating with a server at Alfa Bank in Russia.
Immediately following the publication of the Slate article, Clinton
posted a tweet that included a statement
from Jake Sullivan, a senior policy adviser:
"Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank."
Sullivan's statement referenced the Slate article and included the following:
"This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert
server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.
"This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization
felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists."
The Alfa Bank story took off -- despite the same-day story from The New York Times that specifically noted the FBI had investigated
that matter and found nothing untoward.
"In recent weeks, reporters in Washington have pursued anonymous
online reports that a computer server related
to the Trump Organization engaged in a high level of activity with servers connected to Alfa Bank, the largest private bank in Russia.
On Monday, a Slate
investigation
detailed the pattern of unusual server activity but concluded, 'We don't yet know what this [Trump] server was
for, but it deserves further explanation.' In an email to Mother Jones, Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, maintains, 'The
Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication
or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.'"
More notably, Corn's article also provided the first public reporting on the existence of the Steele dossier:
"A former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones
that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian
government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump -- and that the FBI requested more information from him."
As it turns out, Corn had detailed, first-hand knowledge of the dossier. According to testimony from Baker, Corn had been provided
with parts of the dossier by Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson. Baker knew of this fact, because within a week of publishing his article,
Corn passed these dossier parts on to Baker personally:
Rep. Jordan: " Prior to the election Mr. Corn had a copy of the dossier and was talking to you about giving that to you so
the FBI would have it. Is that all right? I mean all accurate."
Mr. Baker: " My recollection is that he had part of the dossier, that we had other parts already, and that we got still other
parts from other people, and that -- and nevertheless some of the parts that David Corn gave us were parts that we did not have from
another source?"
Steele had written four memos after the FBI team received his information in mid-September. All of the memos were written in October
-- on the 12th, 18th, 19th, and the 20th. It is possible that these were the memos passed along to Baker by Corn.
Baker testified that he received elements of the dossier from Corn that were not in the FBI's possession at the time. He said
that he immediately turned this information over to leadership within the FBI, noting, "I think it was Bill Priestap," the head of
the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.
The use of personal relationships as a mechanism to transmit outside information to the FBI was actually noted by Baker, who said
of Corn: "Even though he was my friend, I was also an FBI official. He knew that. And so he wanted to somehow get that into the hands
of the FBI."
Bruce Ohr's FBI Handler
Christopher Steele was terminated as a source by the FBI on Nov. 1, 2016, for communicating with the media. Despite this, DOJ
official Bruce Ohr and Steele communicated regularly for another full year, until November 2017.
On Nov. 21, 2016, Ohr had a meeting with FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and was introduced to FBI agent Joe
Pientka, who became Ohr's FBI handler. Pientka was also present with Strzok during the Jan. 24, 2017, interview of
Trump's national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn .
The next day, Nov. 22, 2016, Ohr met alone with Pientka. Ohr would continue to relay his communications with Steele to the FBI
through Pientka, who then recorded them in FD-302 forms. What Ohr didn't know was that Pientka was transmitting all the information
directly to Strzok.
Ohr, in his testimony, detailed his interactions with Steele and Glenn Simpson, as well as his communications with officials at
the FBI and DOJ. Notably, Ohr repeatedly stated that he never vetted any of the information provided by either Steele or Simpson.
He simply turned it over or relayed it to the FBI -- usually to Pientka -- but Ohr also testified that "at least on two occasions
I was handed onto a new agent."
Sometime in late 2016, his wife, Nellie Ohr, provided him with a memory stick containing all of her research that she had compiled
while employed at Fusion GPS. Bruce Ohr testified he gave the memory stick to Pientka. Nellie Ohr had left Fusion in September 2016.
Through Pientka, Strzok now had all of Nellie Ohr's Fusion research in his possession.
On Dec. 10, 2016, Bruce Ohr met with Simpson, who gave him a memory stick that Ohr believed contained a copy of the Steele dossier.
Ohr also passed this second memory stick along to Pientka.
On Jan. 20, 2017, Ohr had one final communication with Simpson, a phone call that took place on the same day as Trump's inauguration.
Ohr testified that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson was concerned that one of Steele's sources was about to be exposed through
the pending publication of an article:
Mr. Ohr: " He says something along the lines of, I -- there's going to be some reporting in the next few days that's going
to -- could expose the source, and the source could be in personal danger."
Rep. Meadows: " And why was he concerned about that source being exposed?"
Mr. Ohr: " I think he was aware of some kind of article that was likely to come out in the next, you know, few days or something."
Apparently, Simpson's information was at least partly accurate. On Jan. 24, 2017, The Wall Street Journal
reported that Sergei Millian, a Belarusan-American businessman and onetime Russian government translator, was both "Source D"
and "Source E" in the dossier. It remains unknown exactly how Simpson knew in advance that Millian would be outed as a source.
But there are some questions as to the accuracy of the Journal's reporting. The dossier appears to conflict with the newspaper's
article in at least one aspect. According to the dossier, Source E was used as confirmation for Source D -- meaning they can't be
the same person.
McCain, the Dossier, and a UK Connection
Simpson and Steele were carefully thorough in their dissemination efforts. The dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several
different sources.
One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the former
British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood may have previously
worked on behalf of Steele's company, Orbis Business Intelligence; he was referenced in a
UK court filing as an associate of
Orbis. Wood was also referred to as an adviser to Orbis in a deposition by an associate of late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), David
Kramer.
Kramer knew Wood previously from their mutual expertise on Russia. Kramer said in his deposition, which was part of a defamation
lawsuit against BuzzFeed News, that Wood told him that "he was aware of information that he thought I should be aware of and that
Senator McCain might be interested in."
McCain, Wood, and Kramer would meet later that afternoon, on Nov. 19, 2016, in a private meeting room at the Halifax International
Security Forum in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Wood told both Kramer and McCain that "he was aware of this information that had been gathered that raised the possibility of
collusion and compromising material on the president-elect. And he explained that he knew the person who gathered the information
and felt that the person was of the utmost credibility," Kramer said.
Kramer ascribed the word "collusion" three times to Wood in his deposition. He also said that Wood mentioned the possible existence
of a video "of a sexual nature" that might have "shown the president-elect in a compromising situation." According to Kramer, Wood
said that "if it existed, that it was from a hotel in Moscow when president-elect, before he was president-elect, had been in Moscow."
No such video was ever uncovered or given to Kramer.
Kramer testified that following the description of the video, "the senator turned to me and asked if I would go to London to meet
with what turned out to be Mr. Steele."
Kramer traveled to London to meet with Steele on Nov. 28, 2016. Kramer reviewed all the memos during his meeting with Steele but
wasn't provided with a physical copy of the dossier.
When Kramer returned to Washington, he was provided with a copy of the dossier -- which, at that point, consisted of 16 memos
-- during a meeting with Simpson on Nov. 29, 2016. Kramer also testified that there was another individual, "a male," present at
the meeting.
Interestingly, Kramer testified that Simpson gave him two copies of the dossier, noting that Simpson told him that "one had more
things blacked out than the other." Kramer said, "It wasn't entirely clear to me why there were two versions of this, so but I took
both versions."
Kramer noted that Simpson, who was aware the dossier was being given to McCain, said the dossier "was a very sensitive document
and needed to be handled very carefully."
Despite that warning, Kramer showed the dossier to a number of journalists and had discussions with at least 14 members of the
media, along with some individuals in the U.S. government.
Kramer testified that he gave a physical copy of the dossier to reporters Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy; to Fred Hiatt,
the editor of the Washington Post editorial page; Alan Cullison of The Wall Street Journal; Bob Little at NPR; Carl Bernstein at
CNN; and Ken Bensinger at BuzzFeed. It's possible that Kramer gave copies to other reporters as well.
Kramer said that Simpson and Steele were aware of most of these contacts, but that Kramer hadn't told either of them that he gave
the dossier to NPR. He also noted that Steele had been in contact with Bernstein at CNN and that the CNN and BuzzFeed meetings occurred
at Steele's request. Steele told Kramer that he and Bensinger "had been in touch during the FIFA investigation; they got to know
each other that way."
According to Kramer, he didn't believe that Fusion GPS and Simpson were aware of these two meetings with CNN and BuzzFeed.
Kramer testified that he, McCain, and McCain's chief of staff, Christopher Brose, met to review the dossier on Nov. 30, 2016.
Kramer suggested that McCain "provide a copy of [the dossier] to the director of the FBI and the director of the CIA." McCain later
passed a copy of the dossier to James Comey on Dec. 9, 2016. It isn't known whether McCain also provided a copy to then-CIA Director
John Brennan. Notably, Brennan did attach a two-page summary of the dossier to the intelligence community assessment that he delivered
to outgoing President Barack Obama on Jan. 5, 2017.
Kramer said that he wasn't aware of the content of McCain's Dec. 9 discussion with Comey, noting that he "did not get any readout
from the senator on the meeting, but just that it had happened."
Kramer did, however, provide updates to both Steele and Simpson regarding the status of McCain's meeting with Comey, in subsequent
discussions with Simpson and Steele:
"It was mostly just to inform him about whether or not the senator had transfer -- transmitted the document to the FBI. Both he
and Mr. Steele were -- I kept them apprised of whether the senator was -- where the senator was in terms of his contact with the
FBI."
The implications of this statement are significant. Kramer, a private citizen, was providing updates to a former British spy as
to what a sitting senator, and chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, was saying to the director of the FBI.
Other members of the media also had advance knowledge of McCain's intention to meet with Comey. Kramer testified that both Mother
Jones reporter David Corn and Guardian reporter Julian Borger came to meet with him. According to Kramer, "They were mostly interested
in Senator McCain and his, whether he had given it to Director Comey or not."
Several days after McCain, Brose, and Kramer met to discuss the dossier, Kramer said that McCain instructed him to meet with Victoria
Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, and Celeste Wallander, the senior director for Russia and
Central Asia on the National Security Council.
The purpose of the meeting was to verify whether the dossier "was being taken seriously." Both Nuland and Wallander were previously
aware of the dossier's existence, and both officials previously knew Steele, whom "they believed to be credible." Kramer said he
didn't physically share the dossier with them at this point, but met again with Wallander "around New Years" and "gave her a copy
of the document"
Nuland had actually
received a copy of the earlier Steele memos back in July 2016.
Steele produced a final memo dated Dec. 13, 2016. According to
UK court documents , Kramer, on behalf
of McCain, had asked Steele to provide any further intelligence that he had gathered relating to "alleged Russian interference in
the US presidential election." Notably, it appears it was this request from McCain that led Steele to produce his Dec. 13 memo.
Although Kramer didn't provide a date, he said he received the final Steele memo sometime after "Senator McCain had provided the
copy to Director Comey." We know that Kramer received the final memo prior to Dec. 29 -- when Kramer met with BuzzFeed's Bensinger.
Kramer testified that Bensinger "said he wanted to read them, he asked me if he could take photos of them on his -- I assume it
was an iPhone. I asked him not to. He said he was a slow reader, he wanted to read it. And so I said, you know, I got a phone call
to make, and I had to go to the bathroom " Kramer said that he "left him to read it for 20, 30 minutes."
Kramer also testified that besides the reporters, he gave a final copy of the dossier to two other people in early January 2017:
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Il.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan's chief of staff, Jonathan Burks.
James Clapper Leaks Details of Obama–Trump Briefings
The ICA on alleged Russian hacking was released
internally on Jan. 5, 2017. On this same day, outgoing president Obama held an undisclosed White House meeting to discuss the assessment
-- and the attached summation of the dossier -- with national security adviser Susan Rice, FBI Director James Comey, and Deputy Attorney
General Sally Yates. Rice would later send herself an
email documenting the meeting.
The following day, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Comey attached a written summary
of the Steele dossier to the classified briefing they gave Obama. Comey then met with President-elect Trump to inform him of the
dossier. This meeting took place just hours after Comey, Brennan, and Clapper formally briefed Obama on both the ICA and the Steele
dossier.
Comey would only inform Trump of the "salacious" details contained within the dossier. He later
explained on CNN in an April 2018 interview
that he had done so at the request of Clapper and Brennan, "because that was the part that the leaders of the intelligence community
agreed he needed to be told about."
Shortly after Comey's meeting with Trump, both the Trump–Comey meeting and the existence of the dossier were leaked to CNN. The
significance of the meeting was material, as Comey
noted in
a Jan. 7 memo :
"Media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that
the FBI has the material."
The media had widely dismissed the dossier as unsubstantiated and, therefore, unreportable. It was only after learning that Comey
briefed Trump on it that
CNN reported
on the dossier. The House Intelligence Committee report on Russian election interference confirmed that Clapper personally leaked
confirmation of the dossier, along with Comey's meeting with Trump, to CNN:
"The Committee's investigation revealed that President-elect Trump was indeed briefed on the contents of the Steele dossier and
when questioned by the Committee, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted that he confirmed the existence
of the dossier to the media."
Additionally, the House intelligence report shows Clapper appears to have been the direct source for CNN's Jake Tapper and his
Jan. 10 story that disclosed the existence of the dossier:
"When initially asked about leaks related to the ICA in July 2017, former DNI Clapper flatly denied 'discuss[ing] the dossier
[compiled by Steele] or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists.' Clapper subsequently
acknowledged discussing the 'dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,' and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists
about the same topic.
"Clapper's discussion with Tapper took place in early January 2017, around the time IC leaders briefed President Obama and President-elect
Trump, on 'the Christopher Steele information,' a two-page summary of which was 'enclosed in' the highly-classified version of the
ICA."
The allegations within the dossier were made public, and with reporting of the briefings by intelligence community leaders, instant
credibility was given to the dossier's assertions.
Immediately following the CNN story,
BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier, and the Trump–Russia conspiracy was pushed into the mainstream.
David Kramer was asked about his reaction when CNN broke the story on the dossier. According to his deposition, Kramer stated,
"I believe my words were 'Holy [expletive].'"
Kramer, who was actually meeting with The Guardian's Julian Borger when CNN reported on the dossier, said that he quickly spoke
with Steele, who "was shocked."
On the following day, Jan. 11, 2017, Clapper issued a statement condemning the leaks -- without revealing the fact that he was
the source of the leak.
On Nov. 17, 2016, Clapper submitted his resignation as director of national intelligence; his resignation became effective on
Jan. 20, 2017. Later that year, CNN hired Clapper as its national security analyst.
The Effort to Remove General Flynn
Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then-national security adviser to President Donald Trump, was
interviewed on Jan. 24, 2017, by FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka about two December 2016 conversations that Flynn had
had with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
Details of the phone conversation had leaked to the media. Flynn ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI regarding
his conversations with Kislyak. It remains unknown to this day who leaked Flynn's classified call -- a far more serious felony violation.
The Washington Post reported in January 2017 that the FBI had found
no evidence of wrongdoing in Flynn's actual call with the Russian ambassador. The call, and the matters discussed in it, broke
no laws.
Flynn has been portrayed in the media as being suspiciously close to Russia; a dinner in Moscow that occurred in late 2015 is
frequently cited as evidence of this.
On Dec. 10, 2015, Flynn attended an event in Moscow to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Russian television network RT. Flynn,
who was seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin for the culminating dinner, was also interviewed on national security matters
by an RT correspondent. Flynn's speaker's bureau, Leading Authorities Inc., was paid $45,000 for the event and Flynn received $33,000
of the total amount.
Seated at the same table with Flynn was Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate in the 2016 election. By all accounts, including
Stein's , Flynn and Putin didn't engage in any real conversation. At the time, Flynn's trip didn't garner significant attention.
But it would later be used by the media and the Clinton campaign to push the Russia-collusion narrative.
Notably, as stated
by lawyer Robert Kelner, Flynn disclosed his Moscow trip to the Defense Intelligence Agency before he traveled there and provided
a full briefing upon his return:
"As has previously been reported, General Flynn briefed the Defense Intelligence Agency, a component agency of the DoD, extensively
regarding the RT speaking event trip both before and after the trip, and he answered any questions that were posed by the DIA concerning
the trip during those briefings."
Flynn's trip to Russia was first brought to broader attention on July 18, 2016, during a
live interview at
the Republican National Convention with Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff.
The Isikoff interview took place on July 18, 2016. Unknown at the time, the matter had also captured the attention of Christopher
Steele, who had begun publishing his dossier memos on June 20, 2016.
Contained within an Aug. 10, 2016,
memo was this initial
reference to Flynn:
"Kremlin engaging with several high profile US players, including STEIN, PAGE and (former DIA Director Michael Flynn) and funding
their recent visits to Moscow."
In addition to the obvious questions raised by the timing of Flynn's name appearing in Steele's Aug. 10 memo, is the manner in
which Flynn is denoted. All other names are capitalized, in the manner of intelligence briefings. Flynn's name isn't capitalized
and, in one case, appears within parentheses.
Steele met with Yahoo News' Isikoff in September 2016 and gave him information from the dossier. The resulting Sept. 23, 2016,
article from Isikoff was then cited by the FBI as validating Steele's claims and was featured in the original
FISA application , and its three subsequent
renewals , for a warrant to spy on Trump campaign
foreign policy adviser Carter Page.
Steele wasn't the only person Isikoff was working with. On April 26, 2016, Isikoff
published a story
on Yahoo News about Paul Manafort's business dealings with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It was later learned from a Democratic
National Committee (DNC) email leaked by Wikileaks that
Isikoff had been working with Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American operative who was doing consulting work for the DNC. Chalupa
met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose alleged ties between Trump, Manafort, and
Russia.
The obvious question remains: How did the information on Flynn make its way into the dossier at the time it did, and who provided
the information to Steele?
Flynn's 2015 dinner in Moscow was initially used to implicate the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. It was then
used as a means to cast doubts on Flynn's ability as Trump's national security adviser. Following Flynn's resignation, it was
then used as a means to pursue the ongoing collusion narrative that gained full strength in the early days of the Trump administration.
"In an extraordinary report released last week, the agencies
bluntly accused
the Russian government of having worked to undermine American democracy and promote the candidacy of Mr. Trump.
The report is likely to renew questions about Mr. Flynn's avowed eagerness to work with Russia, and his dismissal of concerns about
President Vladimir V. Putin."
Flynn would resign from his position as national security adviser in February 2017. The sequence of events leading to his resignation
were both coordinated and orchestrated, with acting Attorney General Sally Yates playing a leading role.
On Jan. 12, 2017, Flynn's Dec. 29, 2016, call with Kislyak was
leaked to The Washington Post. The article portrayed Flynn as undermining Obama's Russia sanctions that had been imposed on the
same day as Flynn's call with the Russian ambassador.
On Jan. 15, five days before Trump's inauguration, Vice President Mike Pence
appeared
on "Face the Nation" to defend Flynn's calls.
A few days later, on Jan. 19, Obama officials -- Yates, Clapper, Brennan and Comey -- met to discuss Flynn's situation. The concern
they
reportedly discussed was that Flynn might have misled Trump administration officials regarding the nature of his call with Kislyak.
Yates, Clapper, and Brennan supported informing the Trump administration of their concerns. Comey took a dissenting view. On Jan
23, Yates again pressured Comey, telling the FBI director that she believed Flynn could be vulnerable to blackmail. At this point,
according to media reports, Comey relented, despite the FBI finding nothing unlawful in the content of Flynn's calls.
Strzok and Pientka, at the instruction of McCabe, interviewed Flynn the following day. According to court documents, McCabe and
other FBI officials "decided the agents would not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they wanted
Flynn to be relaxed." It was during this interview that Flynn reportedly lied to the FBI.
The DOJ was provided with a detailed briefing of the Flynn interview on the following day. On Jan. 26, Yates contacted White House
counsel Don McGahn, who agreed to meet to discuss the matter. Yates arrived at McGahn's office, bringing Mary McCord, John Carlin's
acting replacement as head of the DOJ's National Security Division.
Yates later testified before Congress that the meeting
surrounded Flynn's phone calls and his FBI interview. She also testified that Flynn's call and subsequent interview "was a topic
of a whole lot of discussion in DOJ and with other members of the intel community." McGahn reportedly asked Yates, "Why does it matter
to the DOJ if one White House official lies to another official?"
McGahn called Yates the following day and asked her to return for a second meeting. Yates returned to the White House without
McCord. McGahn asked to examine the FBI's evidence on Flynn. Yates said she would respond by the following Monday.
Yates failed to provide McGahn with the FBI's evidence on Flynn. From that point, the pressure on Flynn and the Trump administration
escalated -- with help from media reporting.
Flynn resigned on Feb. 13, after it was reported that he had misled Pence about phone conversations he'd had with Kislyak.
The following day, The
New York
Times reported that "phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and
other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according
to four current and former American officials."
With Flynn gone and the Russian narrative firmly established, the conspirators then turned their attention to Trump's newly confirmed
attorney general, Jeff Sessions . On March 1, 2017, The
Washington Post
reported that Sessions had twice had contact with the Russian ambassador, Kislyak. The following day, March 2, Sessions recused
himself from the Russia investigation.
On the same day that Sessions recused himself, Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, detailed efforts
at hampering the newly installed Trump administration, during a March 2, 2017,
interview with MSNBC , in which she described how the Obama
administration gathered and disseminated intelligence on the Trump team:
"I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill 'Get as much information as you can. Get as much
intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.'
"The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, [they] would try to
compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. That's why you have the leaking."
Note that Farkas said "how we knew," not just "what we knew."
Obama Officials Used Unmasking to Target the Trump Campaign
On Tuesday, March 21, 2017, the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), met
a classified source who showed him "dozens" of intelligence reports. Contained within these reports was evidence of surveillance
on the Trump campaign. Nunes held a
press conference on March 22 highlighting what he had found:
"I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens
involved in the Trump transition. Details about persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little apparent
foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting."
In a series of rapid-fire questions and answers, Nunes attempted to elaborate on what he had been shown:
"From what I know right now, it looks like incidental collection. We don't know exactly how that was picked up but we're trying
to get to the bottom of it I think the NSA's going to comply. I am concerned – we don't know whether or not the FBI is going to comply.
I have placed a call, I'm waiting to talk to Director Comey, hopefully later today.
"I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show the President-elect and his team were at least monitored and disseminated
out in intelligence, in what appears to be raw -- well I shouldn't say raw -- but intelligence reporting channels.
"It looks to me like it was all legally collected, but it was essentially a lot of information on the President-elect and his
transition team and what they were doing."
The documents Nunes had been shown highlighted the unmasking activities of the FBI, the Obama administration, and CIA Director
Brennan in relation to the Trump campaign. Although March 2017 would prove chaotic, the Trump administration had survived the first
crucial months, and would now begin to slowly assert its administrative authority.
Comey Testifies No Obstruction by Trump Administration
On May 3, 2017, James Comey
testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Under oath, Comey stated that his agency -- and the FBI's investigation -- had
not been pressured by the Trump administration:
Sen. Hirono: " So if the attorney general or senior officials at the Department of Justice opposes a specific investigation,
can they halt that FBI investigation?"
Mr. Comey: " In theory, yes."
Sen. Hirono: " Has it happened?"
Mr. Comey: " Not in my experience. Because it would be a big deal to tell the FBI to stop doing something that – without an
appropriate purpose. I mean where oftentimes they give us opinions that we don't see a case there and so you ought to stop investing
resources in it. But I'm talking about a situation where we were told to stop something for a political reason. That would be a very
big deal. It's not happened in my experience."
Less than a week later, on May 9, Trump fired Comey based on a May 8 recommendation by Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein .
Rosenstein would later
tell members of Congress: "In one of my first meetings with then-Sen. Jeff Sessions last winter, we discussed the need for new
leadership at the FBI. Among the concerns that I recall were to restore the credibility of the FBI, respect the established authority
of the Department of Justice, limit public statements and eliminate leaks."
Regarding the recommendation, Rosenstein said: "I wrote it. I believe it. I stand by it."
McCabe's FBI Reaches Out Again to Steele
Within days of Trump's firing of Comey, the FBI, now under the leadership of acting-FBI Director Andrew McCabe, suddenly decided
to reestablish direct contact with Christopher Steele through DOJ official Bruce Ohr.
The re-engagement attempt came six months after Steele had been formally terminated by the FBI on Nov. 1, 2016.
The FBI's re-engagement of Ohr was highlighted during a congressional review of some text messages between Ohr and Steele:
Mr. Ohr: " The FBI had asked me a few days before, when I reported to them my latest conversation with Chris Steele,
they had had would he -- next time you talk with him, could you ask him if he would be willing to meet again."
Rep. Jordan: " So this is the re-engagement?"
Mr. Ohr: " Yes."
The texts being referenced were sent on May 15, 2017, and refer to a request that Ohr received from the FBI to ask Steele to re-engage
with the FBI in the days after Comey had been fired on May 9.
This was the only time the FBI used Ohr to reach out to Steele.
The Battle Between McCabe and Rosenstein
Two days after Comey was fired, on May 11, 2017, McCabe
testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. While the hearing's original intent had been to focus on national security
threats, Trump's firing of Comey completely altered the topic of the hearing.
McCabe, who
agreed that he would notify the committee "of any effort to interfere with the FBI's ongoing investigation into links between
Russia and the Trump campaign," told members of Congress that there had been "no effort to impede our investigation to date." In
other words, McCabe testified that he was unaware of any evidence of obstruction from Trump or his administration. Notably, Comey's
May 3 testimony may have left McCabe with little choice other than to confirm there had been no obstruction.
McCabe, however, failed to inform the committee that he was actively considering opening an obstruction-of-justice probe of Trump
-- a path he would initiate in a meeting with Rosenstein just five days later.
On the morning of May 16, 2017, Rosenstein allegedly
suggested
to McCabe that he could secretly record Trump. It was at this
meeting that McCabe was "pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation into the president," according to witness
accounts reported by The Washington Post.
In addition to McCabe, Rosenstein, and McCabe's special counsel, Lisa Page, there were one or two others present, including Rosenstein's
chief of staff , James Crowley, and possibly Scott Schools, the senior-most career attorney at the DOJ and a top aide to Rosenstein.
An unnamed participant at the meeting, in comments to The Washington Post,
framed the conversation between McCabe and Rosenstein in an entirely different light, noting that Rosenstein had responded with
angry sarcasm to McCabe, saying, "What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"
This was just five days after McCabe had publicly testified that there was no obstruction on the part of the Trump administration.
Sometime later that same day, both Rosenstein and Trump met with former FBI Director Robert Mueller in the Oval Office. The meeting
was reported as being for the FBI director position, but the idea that Mueller would be considered for the FBI director role seems
highly unlikely.
Mueller had previously served as the FBI director from 2001 to 2013 -- two years beyond the normal 10-year tenure for an FBI director.
In 2011, Obama requested that Mueller stay on as FBI director for an additional two years, which required
special congressional approval .
Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel the following day, on May 17, 2017, and in doing so, Rosenstein removed control
of the Trump–Russia investigation from McCabe and put it in the hands of Mueller.
This was confirmed in a recent statement by a DOJ spokesperson, who said, "The deputy attorney general in fact appointed special
counsel Robert Mueller, and directed that Mr. McCabe be removed from any participation in that investigation."
Following the appointment of Mueller as special counsel, it also appears the FBI's efforts to re-engage with Steele abruptly ended.
'There's No Big There There'
We know the FBI hadn't found any evidence of collusion in the May 2017 timeframe. While McCabe was attempting to open an obstruction
investigation, Peter Strzok -- who played a key role in the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign -- texted Lisa
Page about lacking evidence of collusion:
"You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I'd be there, no question. I hesitate, in part, because
of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there."
Page, who was asked about this text during her July 2018 testimony, said, "So I think this represents that even as far as May
of 2017, we still couldn't answer the question."
James Baker, who was questioned about the Strzok text, was then asked if he'd seen any evidence to the contrary. He stumbled a
bit in his reply:
Rep. Meadows: " Do you have any evidence to the contrary that you observed personally in your official capacity?"
Mr. Baker: " So the difficulty I'm having with your question is, what does 'collusion' mean, and what does 'prove' mean? And
so I don't know how to respond to that."
FBI Leadership Speculates on New Trump–Russia Collusion Narrative
In his testimony, Baker disclosed the actual substance of discussions taking place at the upper echelons of the FBI immediately
following Comey's firing -- that Vladimir Putin had ordered Trump to fire Comey:
Mr. Baker: " We discussed, so to the best of my recollection, with the same people I described earlier: Mr. McCabe, possibly
Mr. Gattis [Carl Ghattas, executive assistant director of the National Security Branch], Mr. Priestap, possibly Lisa Page, possibly
Pete Strzok. I don't remember that specifically."
Rep. Ratcliffe: " So there was -- there was a discussion between those folks, possibly all of the folks that you've identified,
about whether or not President Trump had been ordered to fire Jim Comey by the Russian Government?"
Mr. Baker: " I wouldn't say ordered. I guess I would say the words I sort of used earlier, acting at the behest of and somehow
following directions, somehow executing their will, whether -- and so literally an order or not, I don't know. But -- "
Rep. Ratcliffe: " And so -- "
Mr. Baker: " As a -- it was discussed as a theoretical possibility."
Rep. Ratcliffe: " When was it discussed?"
Mr. Baker: "After the firing, like in the aftermath of the firing."
The FBI, with no actual evidence of collusion after 10 months of investigating, began discussing a complete hypothetical at the
highest levels of leadership as a means to possibly open an obstruction-of-justice investigation of the president of the United States.
During his testimony, Baker told lawmakers: "I had a jaundiced eye about everything, yes. I had skepticism about all this stuff.
I was concerned about all of this. This whole situation was horrible, and it was novel and we were trying to figure out what to do,
and it was highly unusual."
McCabe was later fired for lying to the DOJ inspector general and is currently the subject of a criminal grand jury investigation.
The Fixer
Despite the ongoing assault from the intelligence community and holdovers from the Obama administration, Trump was not entirely
without allies.
Dana Boente, one of the nation's highest-profile federal prosecutors, served in a series of critical shifting roles within the
Trump administration. Boente, who remained the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia until early 2018, concurrently
became the acting attorney general following the firing of Sally Yates. Boente, who was specifically appointed by Trump, was not
directly in the line of succession that had been previously laid out under an unusual executive order from the Obama administration.
Upon the confirmation of Sessions as attorney general, Boente next served as acting deputy attorney general until the confirmation
of Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general on April 25, 2017. Boente then
became the acting head of the DOJ's National Security Division on April 28, 2017, following the sudden resignation of Mary McCord.
Boente was appointed as FBI general counsel on Jan. 23, 2018, replacing Baker, who was demoted and reassigned. Baker is currently
the subject of a criminal leak investigation. Boente remains in his position as FBI general counsel.
On March 31, 2017, the Trump administration asked for the resignations all 46 holdover U.S. attorneys from the Obama administration.
Trump refused to accept the resignations of just three of them -- Boente, Rosenstein, and John Huber.
As Sessions noted in a
March 29, 2018, letter
to congressional chairmen Chuck Grassley, Bob Goodlatte, and Trey Gowdy, Huber was assigned by Sessions to lead a prosecution
team and is currently working with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz:
"I already have directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate certain issues previously raised by the Committee. Specifically,
I asked United States Attorney John W. Huber to lead this effort."
The Carter Page FISA application has been the subject of significant media attention, but there's another element to the story
that, although largely ignored, is equally important. It involved what amounted to a surreptitious race between then-NSA Director
Adm. Mike Rogers and DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin.
Following a March 9, 2016, discovery that outside contractors for the FBI had been accessing raw FISA data since at least 2015,
Rogers directed the NSA's Office of Compliance to conduct a "fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702" at some
point in early April 2016 (
Senate testimony &
pages
83–84 of court ruling).
On April 18, 2016, Rogers moved aggressively in response to the disclosures. He abruptly shut down all FBI outside-contractor
access. At this point, both the FBI and the DOJ's NSD became aware of Rogers's compliance review. They may have known earlier, but
they were certainly aware after outside-contractor access was halted.
The DOJ's NSD maintains oversight of the intelligence agencies' use of Section 702 authority. The NSD and the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence (ODNI) jointly conduct reviews of the intelligence agencies' Section 702 activities every 60 days. The NSD
-- with notice to the ODNI -- is required to report any incidents of agency noncompliance or misconduct to the FISA court.
Instead of issuing individual court orders, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence (DNI) are required
by Section
702 to provide the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) with annual certifications that specify categories of foreign
intelligence information the government is authorized to acquire, pursuant to Section 702.
The attorney general and the DNI also must certify that Intelligence Community agencies will follow targeting procedures and
minimization
procedures that are approved by the FISC as part of the certification.
Carlin filed the government's proposed
2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of the compliance review by Rogers. The NSD
was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016,
report by the NSA inspector
general and associated FISA abuse to the FISA court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing
Section 702-compliance review.
On Sept. 27, 2016, the day after he filed the annual certifications, Carlin announced his
resignation , which would become effective on Oct. 15, 2016.
On Oct. 4, 2016, a standard follow-up court hearing was held (
Page 19
), with Carlin present. Again, he made no disclosure of FISA abuse or other related issues. This lack of disclosure would be
noted by the court later in the April 2017 ruling:
"The government's failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing [was ascribed] to an institutional
'lack of candor.'"
On Oct. 15, 2016, Carlin formally left the NSD.
On Oct. 20, 2016, Rogers was briefed by the NSA compliance officer on findings from the 702 NSA compliance audit. The audit had
uncovered a large number of issues, including numerous "about query" violations (
Senate testimony ).
Rogers shut down all "about query" activity on Oct. 21, 2016. "About queries" are particularly worrisome, since they occur when
the target is neither the sender nor the recipient of the collected communication; rather, the target's "query," such as an email
address, is being passed between two other communicants.
On the same day, the DOJ and FBI sought and received a Title I FISA warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. At this point,
the FISA court still was unaware of the Section 702 violations.
On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally informed the FISA court of his findings:
"On October 24, 2016, the government orally apprised the Court of significant non-compliance with the NSA's minimization procedures
involving queries of data acquired under Section 702 using U.S. person identifiers. The full scope of non-compliant querying practices
had not been previously disclosed to the Court."
Rogers appeared formally before the FISA court on Oct. 26, 2016, and presented the written findings of his audit:
"Two days later, on the day the Court otherwise would have had to complete its review of the certifications and procedures, the government
made a written submission regarding those compliance problems and the Court held a hearing to address them.
"The government reported that the NSA IG and OCO were conducting other reviews covering different time periods, with preliminary
results suggesting that the problem was widespread during all periods under review."
The FISA court was unaware of the FISA "query" violations until they were presented to the court by then-NSA Director Rogers.
Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications, apparently in order to avoid raising
suspicions at the FISA court ahead of receiving the Carter Page FISA warrant.
The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page. FISA
Abuse & the FISC
Rogers presented his findings directly to the FISA court's presiding judge, Rosemary Collyer. Collyer and Rogers would work together
for the next six months, addressing the issues that Rogers had uncovered.
It was Collyer who wrote the
April 26, 2017,
FISA court ruling on the entire episode. It also was Collyer who signed the original FISA warrant on Carter Page on Oct. 21,
2016, before being apprised of the many issues by Rogers.
The litany of abuses described in the April 26, 2017, ruling was shocking and detailed the use of private contractors by the FBI
in relation to Section 702 data. Collyer referred to it as "a very serious Fourth Amendment issue." The FBI was specifically singled
out by the court numerous times in the ruling:
"The improper access previously afforded the contractors has been discontinued. The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI's
apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information
that have not been reported."
Rogers informed Collyer of the ongoing FISA abuses by the FBI and NSD just three days after she personally signed the Carter Page
FISA warrant.
Virtually every FBI and NSD official with material involvement in the original Carter Page FISA application would later be removed
-- either through firing or resignation.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated the wrong month for Christopher Steele's 2016 meeting with the FBI in
Rome. The meeting took place in September 2016.
Spot-on . Whenever I read this nonsense in the NYT or elsewhere I always ask myself the
same question ' Is this deliberate or are they really ignorant ? ' . I suspect the latter,
but I could be wrong.
Spot-on . Whenever I read this nonsense in the NYT or elsewhere I always ask myself the
same question ' Is this deliberate or are they really ignorant ? ' . I suspect the latter,
but I could be wrong.
"... Toward the end of the segment , Bartiromo asked Graham: "Who do you think is the mastermind of this? Whose idea was it to insert Donald Trump into Russia meddling?" ..."
"... Graham responded: "You know, I really am very curious about the role the CIA played here. We know that the FISA warrant application was based on a dossier prepared by Christopher Steele, who was biased against Trump, that was unverified. That's one problem. But this whole intelligence operation -- what role did the CIA play?" ..."
"... "Over the spring of 2016, multiple European allies passed on additional information to the United States about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians. Is this accurate?" ..."
"... "Yes, it is, and it's also quite sensitive. The specifics are quite sensitive." ..."
"... "We call it incidental collection in terms of CIA's foreign intelligence collection authorities. Any time we would incidentally collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI because they have the legal authority to do it. We would not pursue that type of investigative, you know, sort of leads. We would give it to the FBI. So, we were picking things up that was of great relevance to the FBI, and we wanted to make sure that they were there -- so they could piece it together with whatever they were collecting domestically here." ..."
"... So, it's an intelligence-sharing operation between " ..."
"... Right. We put together a Fusion Center at CIA that brought NSA and FBI officers together with CIA to make sure that those proverbial dots would be connected." ..."
"... "I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign. I know that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials." ..."
"... "We have documents that would suggest that in that briefing the dossier was mentioned to Harry Reid and then, obviously, we're going to have to have conversations. Does that surprise you that Director Brennan would be aware of [the dossier]?" ..."
"... "Yes, sir. Because with all due honesty, if Director Brennan – so we got that information from our source, right? The FBI got this information from our source. If the CIA had another source of that information, I am neither aware of that nor did the CIA provide it to us if they did." ..."
"... "So what you're saying is, is that you had no knowledge of these potential unverified memos prior to the middle part of September in your investigation?" ..."
told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo that Justice
Department Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz was "doing a very in-depth dive about the FISA warrant application" and "the behavior
regarding the counterintelligence operation."
Graham noted that he believed Horowitz's
report would be coming out in "weeks -- not days, not months" and would prove to be "ugly and damning regarding the Department of
Justice's handling of the Russian probe." Graham noted that the IG's report has been delayed because "every time you turn around,
you find something new."
Graham said he wants the IG's report to be as declassified as possible in order for the "American public to hear the story."
Graham said that prosecutor John Durham "will be looking at criminality, did somebody violate the law," while Horowitz "will be
telling us about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and what should be done internally." He went so far as to mention exploring a possible
restructuring of the Department of Justice.
Toward the end of the segment , Bartiromo
asked Graham: "Who do you think is the mastermind of this? Whose idea was it to insert Donald Trump into Russia meddling?"
Graham responded: "You know, I really am very curious about the role the CIA played here. We know that the FISA warrant application
was based on a dossier prepared by Christopher Steele, who was biased against Trump, that was unverified. That's one problem. But
this whole intelligence operation -- what role did the CIA play?"
Graham then went a step further, asking: "Who knew about this in the White House? Here's a question: Was President Obama briefed
on the fact that they were opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign? I'd like to know that."
Bartiromo, who noted that Brennan was running the CIA at that time and would have likely provided the Obama briefing, asked Graham
if he was going to call Brennan to testify before Congress. Graham responded somewhat cryptically, saying only, "We'll see."
Brennan's Role
Brennan appears to have played a key role in
establishing the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign -- including making repeated use of questionable
foreign intelligence.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper personally confirmed foreign intelligence involvement during
congressional testimony in May 2017:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein: "Over the spring of 2016, multiple European allies passed on additional information to the United States
about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians. Is this accurate?"
James Clapper: "Yes, it is, and it's also quite sensitive. The specifics are quite sensitive."
Brennan has testified to Congress that any information,
specifically "anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign was shared with the bureau [FBI]." Brennan also admitted
that it was his intelligence that helped establish the
FBI investigation:
"I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in
my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and
it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred."
Focus on Intelligence Role Prior to FBI Probe
John Solomon of The Hill, who has extensively covered the Spygate scandal, told Bartiromo in an
interview that he was hearing that "John
Durham and Bill Barr are focused on the part before the FBI officially got started on July 31, 2016, the period of March to July,
and whether intelligence assets -- Western, private, or U.S. -- were deployed in an earlier effort to start probing the Trump campaign
and its Russia ties -- maybe lay the breadcrumb trail of evidence that Christopher Steele then collected up and gave to the FBI."
Solomon noted that when Attorney General Barr said, "I believe there was political surveillance going on," this was likely what
he was referring to.
This focus on the spring of 2016 is particularly interesting given that during this time, Brennan appeared to have employed the
use of
reverse targeting on members of the Trump campaign. Reverse targeting refers to the targeting of a foreign individual with the
intent of capturing data on a U.S. citizen. During an
Aug. 17, 2018, interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Brennan said:
"We call it incidental collection in terms of CIA's foreign intelligence collection authorities. Any time we would incidentally
collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI because they have the legal authority to do it. We would
not pursue that type of investigative, you know, sort of leads. We would give it to the FBI. So, we were picking things up that was
of great relevance to the FBI, and we wanted to make sure that they were there -- so they could piece it together with whatever they
were collecting domestically here."
As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of traditional channels -- was gathered on members of the Trump
campaign, Brennan began his process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from
the CIA director helped push the FBI toward establishing a formal counterintelligence investigation.
Role of Joseph Mifsud
Solomon also discussed the role of Joseph Mifsud, the individual who told Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos in March 2016
that Russia had Hillary Clinton emails. Solomon noted that he had recently interviewed Stefan Roe, Mifsud's lawyer, who told him
that Mifsud "had long worked with Western intelligence" and that he was "asked to connect George Papadopoulos to Russia -- meaning
it was an operation, some form of an intelligence operation."
As Solomon noted, this would mean that the "flashpoint that started the whole investigation was, in fact, manufactured from the
beginning." Solomon also noted that "both John Durham and two different committees in Congress have recently reached out to get this
evidence from the lawyer, which includes an audiotaped deposition that Mr. Mifsud gave his lawyer before he went into hiding."
Bartiromo closed by asking Solomon
the same question she put to Graham, "Who do you think is the mastermind?" Solomon responded in a similar fashion to Graham, noting:
"I think the CIA. We have to take a closer look at them. We're starting to see some sign of it."
Role of UK Intelligence
Luke Harding, a journalist for The Guardian, had
previously reported
on the early involvement of UK intelligence and their interaction with the U.S. intelligence community, noting that Britain's
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was engaged in collecting information on the Trump campaign and transmitting it to
the United States beginning in late 2015:
"In late 2015, the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ was carrying out standard 'collection' against Moscow targets. The intelligence
was handed to the U.S. as part of a routine sharing of information," Harding wrote in an article on Nov. 15, 2017.
Additionally, in the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then-head of GCHQ, traveled to Washington to personally
meet with Brennan:
"That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the U.S. to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed
so important that it was handled at 'director level,' face-to-face between the two agency chiefs," Harding reported.
Around the same time, Brennan formed an inter-agency
task force comprising an estimated six agencies and government departments. Brennan appeared to describe the task force formation
during the Aug. 17, 2018, interview with MSNBC's Maddow:
Maddow: " So, it's an intelligence-sharing operation between "
Brennan: " Right. We put together a Fusion Center at CIA that brought NSA and FBI officers together with CIA to make sure
that those proverbial dots would be connected."
FBI's 'Mid-Year Exam' Team Shifts to Trump Probe
By the spring of 2016, the Clinton email investigation was winding down. This was due in large part to the fact that the Department
of Justice, under Attorney General Loretta Lynch, had decided to set an
unusually high threshold for the prosecution of Clinton, effectively ensuring from the outset that she wouldn't be charged.
In order for Clinton to be prosecuted, the department required the FBI to establish evidence of intent -- even though the gross
negligence statute explicitly doesn't require that.
It was at this same time that Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos had his April 26, 2016,
meeting with Mifsud, followed
a few weeks later with his
ill-fated meeting with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in May. The meeting with Downer, then Australia's high commissioner
to the UK, was established through
a chain of two intermediaries.
Downer's conversation with Papadopoulos was reportedly disclosed to the FBI on July 22, 2016, through Australian government channels,
although it also may have come directly from Downer himself via the U.S. Embassy in London. Details from the conversation between
Downer and Papadopoulos were then used by the FBI to open its counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign on July 31,
2016.
Interestingly, the information allegedly relayed by Papadopoulos during the Downer meeting -- that the Russians had damaging information
on Clinton -- appears nearly identical to claims later contained in the first memo from former MI6 spy and dossier author Christopher
Steele that the FBI obtained in early July 2016.
Steele's first dossier
document , dated June 20, 2016, noted that "a dossier of compromising information on Hillary Clinton has been collated by the
Russian Intelligence Services over many years."
Which raises a good question, recently posed
by internet researcher Nick Weil on Twitter: "When the FBI got the tip from Alexander Downer that the Russians had Hillary's
33k emails, the appropriate action would have been to re-open Mid Year Exam, no?"
Rather than deciding to re-examine the "Mid-Year Exam" investigation, which looked into Clinton's handling of her emails and use
of a private server, the FBI instead used this information to establish an investigation into the Trump campaign.
What makes this sequence of events even more telling is exactly when the FBI first received information from Steele.
After Steele's company was hired by Fusion GPS in June 2016, he began to reach out to the FBI through Michael Gaeta, an FBI agent
and assistant legal attaché at the
U.S. Embassy in Rome whom Steele had worked with on the FIFA case. Gaeta also headed up the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime unit,
which specializes in investigating criminal groups from Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine.
Gaeta would later be identified as Steele's FBI handler, in a July 16, 2018, congressional testimony before the House Judiciary
and Oversight committees by FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
Following a reported
initial meeting that took place during late June 2016 in Rome, Gaeta
traveled to London on July 5, 2016, and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis. During the July 5 meeting, Steele
provided the first memo in his dossier to Gaeta for ultimate transmission back to the FBI and the State Department.
At the exact time that Gaeta was meeting with Steele, on July 5, 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey announced the closure of
the FBI's investigation into Clinton's use of a personal e-mail system during her time as secretary of state.
During the July 5, 2016,
press conference , Comey recommended that Clinton not be charged, stating, "We cannot find a case that would support bringing
criminal charges on these facts." Comey also noted that "although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like
this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case."
With the July 5 closure of the Clinton investigation, many of the same FBI agents who had worked on the case were assigned to
the agency's July 31, 2016, counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign -- the opening of which was based on little more
than details from the conversation between Downer and Papadopoulos, provided by the Australian government. Although all investigative
focus fell on the Trump campaign, the fact that Downer said that the Russians had Clinton's emails appears not to have been an impetus
for the FBI to reopen the Clinton email investigation.
CIA's Use of Unofficial Intel on Trump Campaign
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who has seen the electronic communication that was used to officially open the FBI's counterintelligence
investigation, has publicly stated , "We now know that
there was no official intelligence that was used to start this investigation."
Contrast Nunes's statement with what Brennan testified
before Congress on May 23, 2017:
"I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials
and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign. I know that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required
further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials."
Brennan has claimed that
he didn't see the dossier until "later in that year; I think it was in December [2016]." Brennan also stated in his testimony that
the CIA didn't rely on the Steele dossier and that it "was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment
that was done."
https://g.jwpsrv.com/g/gcid-0.1.2.html?notrack Rewind 10 Seconds Next Up Live 00:00 00:00 00:00 Closed Captions Settings Fullscreen
click to watch video
But this claim was countered during the July 16, 2018,
testimony of former FBI lawyer Page, when the following discussion took place regarding Brennan's August 2016 briefing of then-Sen.
Harry Reid:
Rep. Mark Meadows: "We have documents that would suggest that in that briefing the dossier was mentioned to Harry Reid and
then, obviously, we're going to have to have conversations. Does that surprise you that Director Brennan would be aware of [the dossier]?"
Lisa Page: "Yes, sir. Because with all due honesty, if Director Brennan – so we got that information from our source, right?
The FBI got this information from our source. If the CIA had another source of that information, I am neither aware of that nor did
the CIA provide it to us if they did."
While some within the FBI likely had parts of the dossier in early July, Page testified that the counterintelligence investigative
team didn't receive it until mid-September -- likely during a trip to Rome, where they met with Steele:
Rep. Meadows: "So what you're saying is, is that you had no knowledge of these potential unverified memos prior to the middle
part of September in your investigation?"
Page: "That is correct, sir."
Was Reid's Letter Based on Steele Dossier Info?
In the days following Brennan's briefing, Reid
sent a letter on Aug. 27,
2016, to Comey demanding an investigation -- and that the investigation be made public. Based on Brennan's briefing, it's highly
likely that Reid knew an FBI investigation was already underway. Some of the details contained within Reid's letter relate to former
Trump adviser Carter Page and match details contained only within the Steele dossier at the time.
Specifically, Reid claimed that Page had "conflicts of interest due to investments in Russia energy conglomerate Gazprom" and
that he had "met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow in July of 2016, well after Trump became the presumptive
Republican nominee."
Page's investment in Gazprom was known prior to Reid's letter, but it appears that the first public allegations that Page had
met with "high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow" weren't made until Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff published his
article "
U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin " on Sept. 23, 2016, based on information directly from Christopher
Steele.
Prior to Isikoff's September article, the only place that information had been referenced, aside from Reid's letter, was in a
July 19, 2016, Steele
dossier memo (there is also a mention in a sequentially earlier, but undated memo from Steele). The Steele dossier wouldn't become
public until its Jan. 10, 2017,
publication
by BuzzFeed.
During his May 2017 testimony, Brennan discussed his briefings to the Gang of Eight. Brennan testified that the briefings were
done "in consultation with the White House" and stated that he gave the "same briefing to each of the Gang of Eight members." Notably,
Brennan conducted his briefings individually over a period of almost a full month between Aug. 11, 2016, and Sept. 6, 2016.
However, Nunes has stated that he wasn't given the same briefing as was Reid, despite that Nunes held the position of chairman
of the House Intelligence Committee at the time. Nunes made this disclosure in a July 28, 2019,
interview with Bartiromo, noting: "We now know that John Brennan briefed Harry Reid on the dossier in August 2016. At the same
time, he never briefed me or Paul Ryan, who was the speaker of the House at the time."
Brennan's Role in Official Reports
The last major segment of Brennan's efforts involved a series of three reports. The
first report was released on Oct. 7, 2016, and the
second
on Dec. 29, 2016.
This final report was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of Trump as president. Notably,
Adm. Mike Rogers, then director of the National Security Agency , publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning it only
a moderate confidence level.
As previously noted, while Brennan has denied using the dossier in the ICA, he did attach a two-page summary of the dossier to
the intelligence community assessment that he, along with Clapper and Comey, delivered to President Barack Obama on Jan. 6, 2017.
Comey then met with President-elect Trump to inform him of the dossier. This meeting took place just hours after Comey, Brennan,
and Clapper formally briefed Obama on both the ICA and the Steele dossier.
Comey would only inform Trump of the "salacious" details contained within the dossier. He later
explained on CNN in an April 2018 interview
that he'd done so at the request of Clapper and Brennan, "because that was the part that the leaders of the intelligence community
agreed he needed to be told about."
They are afraid to admin that a color revolution was launched to depose Trump after the
elections of 2016. Essentially a coup d'état by intelligence agencies and Clinton wing of
Democratic Party.
Notable quotes:
"... The 53 House Intel interviews. House Intelligence interviewed many key players in the Russia probe and asked the DNI to declassify those interviews nearly a year ago, after sending the transcripts for review last November. There are several big reveals, I'm told, including the first evidence that a lawyer tied to the Democratic National Committee had Russia-related contacts at the CIA. ..."
"... The Stefan Halper documents. It has been widely reported that European-based American academic Stefan Halper and a young assistant, Azra Turk, worked as FBI sources . ..."
"... Page/Papadopoulos exculpatory statements. Another of Nunes' five buckets, these documents purport to show what the two Trump aides were recorded telling undercover assets or captured in intercepts insisting on their innocence. Papadopoulos told me he told an FBI undercover source in September 2016 that the Trump campaign was not trying to obtain hacked Clinton documents from Russia and considered doing so to be treason. ..."
"... The 'Gang of Eight' briefing materials. These were a series of classified briefings and briefing books the FBI and DOJ provided key leaders in Congress in the summer of 2018 that identify shortcomings in the Russia collusion narrative. ..."
"... The Steele spreadsheet. I wrote recently that the FBI kept a spreadsheet on the accuracy and reliability of every claim in the Steele dossier. According to my sources, it showed as much as 90 percent of the claims could not be corroborated, were debunked or turned out to be open-source internet rumors. ..."
"... The Steele interview. It has been reported, and confirmed, that the DOJ's inspector general (IG) interviewed the former British intelligence operative for as long as 16 hours about his contacts with the FBI while working with Clinton's opposition research firm, Fusion GPS. It is clear from documents already forced into the public view by lawsuits that Steele admitted in the fall of 2016 that he was desperate to defeat Trump ..."
"... The redacted sections of the third FISA renewal application. This was the last of four FISA warrants targeting the Trump campaign; it was renewed in June 2017 after special counsel Robert Mueller 's probe had started, and signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein . It is the one FISA application that House Republicans have repeatedly asked to be released, and I'm told the big reveal in the currently redacted sections of the application is that it contained both misleading information and evidence of intrusive tactics used by the U.S. government to infiltrate Trump's orbit. ..."
"... Records of allies' assistance. Multiple sources have said a handful of U.S. allies overseas – possibly Great Britain, Australia and Italy – were asked to assist FBI efforts to check on Trump connections to Russia. ..."
"... Attorney General Bill Barr's recent comments that "the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign, to me, is unprecedented and it's a serious red line that's been crossed." ..."
As the Russiagate circus attempts to quietly disappear over the horizon, with Democrats
preferring to shift the anti-Trump narrative back to "racist", "white supremacist",
"xenophobe", and the mainstream media ready to squawk "recession"; the Trump administration may
have a few more cards up its sleeve before anyone claims the higher ground in this farce we
call an election campaign.
As
The Hill's John Solomon details, in September 2018 that President Trump told my Hill.TV
colleague Buck Sexton and me that he would order the release of all classified documents
showing what the FBI, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other U.S. intelligence agencies may
have done wrong in the Russia probe.
And while it's been almost a year since then, of feet-dragging and cajoling and
deep-state-fighting, we wonder, given Solomon's revelations below, if the president is getting
ready to play his 'Trump' card.
Here are the documents that
Solomon believes have the greatest chance of rocking Washington, if declassified:
1.) Christopher
Steele 's confidential human source reports at the FBI. These documents, known in bureau
parlance as 1023 reports, show exactly what transpired each time Steele and his FBI handlers
met in the summer and fall of 2016 to discuss his anti-Trump dossier. The big reveal, my
sources say, could be the first evidence that the FBI shared sensitive information with
Steele, such as the existence of the classified
Crossfire Hurricane operation targeting the Trump campaign. It would be a huge discovery
if the FBI fed Trump-Russia intel to Steele in the midst of an election, especially when his
ultimate opposition-research client was Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National
Committee (DNC). The FBI has released only one or two of these reports under FOIA lawsuits
and they were 100 percent redacted. The American public deserves better.
2.) The 53 House Intel interviews. House Intelligence interviewed many key players in
the Russia probe and asked the DNI to declassify those interviews nearly a year ago, after
sending the transcripts for review last November. There are several big reveals, I'm told,
including the first evidence that a lawyer tied to the Democratic National Committee had
Russia-related contacts at the CIA.
3.) The Stefan Halper documents. It has been widely reported that European-based
American academic Stefan Halper and a young assistant, Azra Turk,
worked as FBI sources . We know for sure that one or both had contact with targeted
Trump aides like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos at the end of the
election. My sources tell me there may be other documents showing Halper continued working
his way to the top of Trump's transition and administration, eventually reaching senior
advisers like Peter Navarro inside the White House in summer 2017. These documents would show
what intelligence agencies worked with Halper, who directed his activity, how much he was
paid and how long his contacts with Trump officials were directed by the U.S. government's
Russia probe.
4.) The October 2016 FBI email chain. This is a key document identified by Rep. Nunes and
his investigators. My sources say it will show exactly what concerns the FBI knew about and
discussed with DOJ about using Steele's dossier and other evidence to support a Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in October 2016. If
those concerns weren't shared with FISA judges who approved the warrant, there could be major
repercussions.
5.) Page/Papadopoulos exculpatory statements. Another of Nunes' five buckets, these
documents purport to show what the two Trump aides were recorded telling undercover assets or
captured in intercepts insisting on their innocence. Papadopoulos told me he told an FBI
undercover source in September 2016 that the Trump campaign was not trying to obtain hacked
Clinton documents from Russia and considered doing so to be treason. If he made that
statement with the FBI monitoring, and it was not disclosed to the FISA court, it could be
another case of FBI or DOJ misconduct.
6.) The 'Gang of Eight' briefing materials. These were a series of classified
briefings and briefing books the FBI and DOJ provided key leaders in Congress in the summer
of 2018 that identify shortcomings in the Russia collusion narrative. Of all the
documents congressional leaders were shown, this is most frequently cited to me in private as
having changed the minds of lawmakers who weren't initially convinced of FISA abuses or FBI
irregularities.
7.) The Steele spreadsheet. I
wrote recently that the FBI kept a spreadsheet on the accuracy and reliability of every
claim in the Steele dossier. According to my sources, it showed as much as 90 percent of the
claims could not be corroborated, were debunked or turned out to be open-source internet
rumors. Given Steele's own effort to leak intel in his dossier to the media before
Election Day, the public deserves to see the FBI's final analysis of his credibility. A
document
I reviewed recently showed the FBI described Steele's information as only "minimally
corroborated" and the bureau's confidence in him as "medium."
9.) The redacted sections of the third FISA renewal application. This was the last of
four FISA warrants targeting the Trump campaign; it was renewed in June 2017 after special
counsel Robert
Mueller 's probe had started, and signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein . It is the one
FISA application that House Republicans have repeatedly asked to be released, and I'm told
the big reveal in the currently redacted sections of the application is that it contained
both misleading information and evidence of intrusive tactics used by the U.S. government to
infiltrate Trump's orbit.
10.) Records of allies' assistance. Multiple sources have said a handful of U.S.
allies overseas – possibly Great Britain, Australia and Italy – were asked to
assist FBI efforts to check on Trump connections to Russia. Members of Congress have
searched recently for some key contact documents with British intelligence . My sources
say these documents might help explain Attorney General Bill Barr's
recent comments that "the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and
counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign, to me, is
unprecedented and it's a serious red line that's been crossed."
These documents, when declassified, would show more completely how a routine
counterintelligence probe was hijacked to turn the most awesome spy powers in America against a
presidential nominee in what was essentially a political dirty trick orchestrated by
Democrats.
I disagree with Solomon. Nothing will "doom" the swamp unless the righteous few are
willing to indict, prosecute and carry out sentencing for the guilty. Exposing the guilty
accomplishes nothing, because anyone paying attention already knows of their crimes. Those
who want to believe lies will still believe them after the truth comes out.
It's ALL A WASTE OF TIME unless we follow through.
Does anyone see a pattern here after the 2009 Tea Party movement began?
2009 - Republicans: "If we win back the House, we can accomplish our agenda."
2011 - Republicans: "If we win back the Senate, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE:
After winning back the House)
2012 - Republicans: "If we win back the Senate, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 2
YEARS After winning back the House)
2013 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE:
1 YEAR after winning back the House and the Senate)
2014 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE:
2 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)
2015 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE:
3 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)
2016 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE:
4 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)
2017 - Republicans: "Now that we've won back the Presidency, we can accomplish our
agenda." (NOTE: After winning back the House 6 YEARS AGO and the Senate 4 YEARS AGO)
2018 - Republicans: "Now that we've won back the Presidency, we can accomplish our
agenda." (NOTE: After winning back the House 7 YEARS AGO and the Senate 5 YEARS AGO)
2019 - John Solomon - "If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed"
I hate to say it, but I DON'T BELIEVE YOU, JOHN.
ALL WE HAVE HEARD OVER THE COURSE OF THIS DECADE IS "IF THIS HAPPENS...THEN THEY ARE
DOOMED / WE CAN ACCOMPLISH OUR AGENDA / YADDA YADDA YADDA.
WHEN THE FOLLOWING ARE FOUND GUILTY OF TREASON, THEN AND ONLY THEN WILL I BELIEVE YOU:
CLINTONS
OBAMA
BIDEN
KERRY
BRENNAN
CLAPPER
COMEY
MCCABE
MUELLER
WEISSMAN
STRZOK
RICE
POWERS
LYNCH
YATES
ET AL
WHY ARE THESE TREASONOUS, VILE, CORRUPT CRIMINALS NOT INDICTED FOR TREASON?
As if there's any major philosophical difference between the Librtads and Zionist
Cocksuckvatives.
Both sides use the .gov agencies to subvert and ignore the Constitution whenever possible.
Best example is WikiLeaks and how each party wished Assange would just go away when he
revealed damaging information about both sides on multiple occasions.
"... However, while throughout Webb's articles she draws linkages that lead to the Mossad, she only suggests CIA connections. This is similar to but milder than a point made in an article written by Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist, " Did Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein Work for Mossad? " Giraldi writes that the CIA "would have no particular motive to acquire an agent like Epstein." This makes no sense. Of course, it would. The CIA and the FBI have a long record of such activities, and to hold such a club over the heads of presidents, senators, et al to make sure they do their bidding is obviously a strong motivation. ..."
"... The CIA is organized crime, and if Epstein is Mossad connected, he is CIA also, which is most likely. Epstein could not have operated as he did for decades without being sustained and protected. ..."
"... no prosecution of the central operational cog in the gang, Ghislaine Maxwell, or her cohorts named in the fantastic settlement agreement ..."
"... “It is a mind game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites who run the show and are abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative press who mean well but are confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing confusion together with their mainstream Operation Mockingbird partners.” ..."
W hen phrases such as "the deep state" and "conspiracy theory" become staples of both the
corporate mainstream media and the alternative press, we know the realities behind these
phrases have outlasted their usefulness for the ruling elites who control the United States and
for their critics, each of whom uses them refutably or corroboratively. These phrases are
bandied about so often that they have become hackneyed and inane.
Everything is shallow now, in our faces, and by being in our faces the truth is taking place
behind our backs. The obvious can't be true since it's so obvious, so let us search for other
explanations, and when the searchers search, let us call them "conspiracy nuts." It is a mind
game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites who run the show
and are abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative
press who mean well but are confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing
confusion together with their mainstream Operation Mockingbird partners.
It is a spectacle of open secrecy, in which the CIA, which created the "conspiracy theory"
meme to ridicule critics of the Warren Commission's absurd explanation of the Kennedy
assassination, has effectively sucked everyone into a game of to and fro in which only they
win.
"When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it
extra."
Outside the Narrative Frame
Only by stepping outside this narrative frame with its vocabulary can we begin to grasp the
truth here in our Wonderland of endless illusions.
Death, sex, power, intrigue, murder, suicide – these are the staples of the penny
press of the 19 th century, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World , Hearst's
New York Journal , the tabloids, today's mass media, and the CIA. People hunger for
these stories, not for the real truth that impacts their lives, but for the titillation that
gives a frisson to their humdrum lives. It is why post-modern detective stories are so popular,
as if never solving the crime is the point.
Robert Pfaller in 2016. (Suzie1212, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
To say "we will never know" is the mantra of a postmodern culture created to keep people
running in circles. (Note the commentaries about the Jeffrey Epstein case.) Elusive and
allusive indeterminacy characterizes everything in the culture of postmodernity. Robert
Pfaller, a professor at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria, and a
founding member of the Viennese psychoanalytic research group "stuzzicandenti," put it clearly
in a
recent interview :
"The ruling ideology since the fall of the Berlin Wall, or even earlier, is postmodernism.
This is the ideological embellishment that the brutal neoliberal attack on Western societies'
welfare (that was launched in the late 1970s) required in order to attain a "human",
"liberal" and "progressive" face. This coalition between an economic policy that serves the
interest of a tiny minority, and an ideology that appears to "include" everybody is what
Nancy Fraser has aptly called "progressive neoliberalism". It consists of neoliberalism, plus
postmodernism as its ideological superstructure."
The propagandists know this; they created it. They are psychologically astute, having
hijacked many intelligent but soul-less people of the right and left to do their handiwork.
Money Buys Souls
Money buys souls, and the number of those who have sold theirs is numerous, including those
leftists who have been bought by the CIA, as Cord Meyer, the CIA official phrased it so
sexually in the 1950s: we need to "court the compatible left." He knew that drawing leftists
into the CIA's orbit was the key to efficient propaganda. For so many of the compatible left,
those making a lot of money posing as opponents of the ruling elites but taking the money of
the super-rich, events like the JFK assassination are inconsequential, never to be broached, as
if they never happened, except as the authorities say they did.
By ignoring these most in-your-face events with their eyes wide shut, a coterie of
influential leftists has done the work of Orwell's crime-stop and has effectively succeeded in
situating current events in an ahistorical and therefore misleading context that abets U.S.
propaganda.
The debate over whether Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide or not is a pseudo-debate meant to
keep people spinning their wheels over nothing. It attracts attention and will do so for many
days to come. There are even some usually astute people suggesting that he may not be dead but
might have been secretly whisked off somewhere and replaced with a dead look-alike. Now who
would profit from suggesting something as insane as this? The speculation runs rampant and
feeds the spectacle. Whether he was allowed to kill himself or was killed makes little
difference.
(Christopher Dombres, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)
Debates to Nowhere
It's akin to asking who pulled the trigger that killed President John Kennedy. That's a
debate that was intended to go nowhere, as it has, after it became apparent that Lee Harvey
Oswald surely did not kill JFK. Kennedy's murder in broad daylight in public view is the
paradigmatic event of modern times. It is obvious to anyone who gives minimal study to the
issue that it was organized and carried out by elements within the national security state,
notably the CIA. Their message was meant to be unequivocal and clear: We can kill him and we
can kill you; we are in full control; beware. Then they went on to kill others, including RFK
and MLK. It takes little intelligence to see this obvious fact, unless you wish not to or are
totally lost in the neighborhood of make-believe.
As it was with Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald, so it is with Epstein. There will be no
trial. Nothing is really hidden except the essential truth. Guess, debate, wonder, watch, read
to your sad heart's content. You will have gotten nowhere unless you step outside the frame of
the reigning narrative.
New York Post: Reigniting the narrative.
A corollary example of another recent national headline grabber, the Mueller investigation,
is apropos here. Douglas Valentine, expert on the CIA and author of "The CIA as Organized
Crime," said in a recent interview that in all the endless mass media discussions of the
Mueller investigation, one obvious question was never asked: What is the CIA's role in it all?
It was never asked because the job of the corporate mass media is to work for the CIA, not to
expose it as a nest of organized criminals and murderers that it is.
What is important in the Epstein case is the deep back story, a tale that goes back decades
and is explored by Whitney Webb in a series of fine
articles for the Mint Press. Read her articles and you will see how Epstein is just the current
manifestation of the sordid history of the American marriage between various factions of the
American ruling elites, whose business is sexual exploitation as a fringe benefit of being
willing members of the economic and military exploitation of the world. A marriage of spies,
mafia, intelligence agencies, sexual perverts, foreign governments and American traitors who
will stop at nothing to advance their interests.
Destroys the Fairy Tale of Democracy
It is a hard story to swallow because it destroys the fairy tale that has been constructed
about American "democracy" and the decency of our leaders. Webb's articles are not based on
secret documents but on readily available information open to a diligent researcher. It's known
history that has been buried, as is most history in a country of amnesiacs and educational
illiterates. The average person doesn't have Webb's skill or time to pull it all together, but
they can read her illuminating work. Often, however, it is the will to truth that is
lacking.
While Webb places the Epstein matter in an historical context, she does not "solve" the
case, since there is nothing to solve. It is another story from a long litany of sex/espionage
stories openly available to anyone willing to look. They tell the same story. Like many
commentators, she draws many linkages to the Israeli Mossad's long-standing connections to this
criminal under and over world in the United States and throughout the world. She writes:
"Ultimately, the picture painted by the evidence is not a direct tie to a single
intelligence agency but a web linking key members of the Mega Group [a secretive group of
Jewish billionaires, including Epstein's patron Leslie Wexner], politicians, and officials in
both the U.S. and Israel, and an organized-crime network with deep business and intelligence
ties in both nations."
If anything is obvious about the Epstein case, it is that he was part of a sexual blackmail
operation tied to intelligence agencies. Such blackmail has long been central to the methods of
intelligence agencies worldwide and many arrows rightfully point to the Mossad.
However, while throughout Webb's articles she draws linkages that lead to the Mossad, she
only suggests CIA connections. This is similar to but milder than a point made in an article
written by Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist, " Did Pedophile
Jeffrey Epstein Work for Mossad? " Giraldi writes that the CIA "would have no particular
motive to acquire an agent like Epstein." This makes no sense. Of course, it would. The CIA and
the FBI have a long record of such activities, and to hold such a club over the heads of
presidents, senators, et al to make sure they do their bidding is obviously a strong
motivation.
Valentine's point about not asking the question about the CIA's involvement in the Mueller
investigation pertains. Does Giraldi believe that the Mossad operates independently of the CIA?
Or that they don't work in tandem? His statement is very strange.
The CIA is organized crime, and if Epstein is Mossad connected, he is CIA also, which is
most likely. Epstein could not have operated as he did for decades without being sustained and
protected. Now that he is dead there will be no trial, just as there will be no mainstream
media or justice department revelations about the CIA or Mossad. There will be a lot of
gibberish about conspiracy theories and the open secret that is the spectacle of secrecy will
roll on. There will, of course, be much sex talk and outrage. We will anxiously await the movie
and the TV "exposés." Most people will know, and pretend they don't, that the country is
ruled by gangsters who would pimp their mothers if it served their interests.
Those of us who oppose these criminals – and there are growing numbers all over the
world – must avoid being sucked into the Establishment narratives and the
counter-narratives they spawn or create. We must refuse to get involved in pseudo-debates that
are meant to lead nowhere. We must reject the language created to confuse.
If revolutionary change is to come, we must learn to tell a new story in language so
beautiful, illuminating, and heart-rending that no one will listen to the lying words of child
molesters, mass murderers, and those who hate and persecute truth tellers.
As John Berger said, "In storytelling everything depends on what follows what. And the
truest order is seldom obvious."
Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology, Ed Curtin is a
former professor of sociology. His writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many
years. He sees all his work as an effort to enhance human freedom.
Prince Andrew hung out with Epstein because he made a good tuna on rye. We are all conditioned to accept that powerful
people do not have to go to jail. Its just the way it is and will always remain so. There is not an honest person anywhere on
planet earth who believes that Bill Clinton and the others did not have sex with “those girls”. America and the west are
morally corrupt piles of garbage. No wonder the African Americans and others rage against an unbalanced system of justice.
Actually it is just poor people of any color who get the book thrown at them.
I saw the pictures yesterday on the telegraph of the young blond girl leaving Epsteins Manhattan home with Prince Andrew
poking his head out the door. The girl looked like she was no older than 14. The dear old Queen doesn’t represent justice
either.
Vera Gottlieb, August 20, 2019 at 11:29
Just curious…will the Epstein saga be as prolonged and boring as the Russiagate saga???
Litchfield, August 20, 2019 at 14:00
I don’t think so.
It is in the interest of the puppetmeister to let thing die out ASAP. Not so the Russiagate hoax: the idea was to prolong it
in the hopes of finally finding a smoking gun of some kind. With the Epstein story we are awash in smoking guns, but they are
being ignored.
Dan D. August 20, 2019 at 09:34
If there is no trial and further revelations about the nature of this operation, which should be expected, it won’t simply
be because Epstein is dead, but because there will be no prosecution of the central operational cog in the gang,
Ghislaine Maxwell, or her cohorts named in the fantastic settlement agreement. There are more than sufficient facts in
the public sphere to proceed.
Bob Van Noy, August 20, 2019 at 09:07
“It is a mind game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites who run the show and
are abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative press who mean well but are
confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing confusion together with their mainstream Operation
Mockingbird partners.”
“The CIA is organized crime,…”
Edward Curtin has summarized our contemporary hell as few others can. In the above comments he fully describes our dilemma
and underscores the necessity for sites like Consortiumnews to present the truth for citizens to be able to sort truth from
lies. Still we cannot forget that our democracy is “a criminal conspiracy”…
I actually believe knowing what happened to Epstein is knowable. It is also important because it will reveal who/what has
the power to make such a thing happen. However, while this information will take a long time to come out it is our job to
push on behalf of his victims right now.
There is information showing that Maxwell and several other people committed multiple rapes of children. We do not see her,
Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, just to name a few, hauled in for questioning. That really needs to happen. We
have built up the powerful into untouchable icons. This needs to full stop now. These are not icons, they are potential and
likely guilty child rapists of children. Our power system is held up by unspeakable cruelty to children and to others who
simply don’t have the power to fight back unless we offer our support and services to them. There is enough testimony and
other evidence to bring them in for questioning.
The conspiracy to commit rape should be ready to go. Investigators have had that information for a long time. I’m not buying
that they are too incompetent to move that case forward. We are going to need to push for this. Deliberate infliction of
human misery is evil and it is not acceptable to create one’s society on such a thing.
There is ground penetrating radar which can see under Jeff’s concrete pour. It can also show the tunnels on the islands.
“Lost” evidence can be relocated from it’s undisclosed location. The ranch in NM can be sealed off and also scanned by this
radar. No one should believe agencies with the resources of this government behind them are incapable of doing such things.
In the meantime, there is a tape of Jeff’s wing from that night. There’s one from the hospital and the investigators can
offer immunity to anyone guard or hospital/ambulance employee in exchange for their truthful explanation of what they were
doing and what they saw. This was not a series of incompetent actions which all went one way and one way only. It took a lot
of planning and a lot of resources. That means there are a lot of witnesses.
We do need to uncover and dismantle this chain of human misery. No More.
ML, August 20, 2019 at 11:27
Excellent comment, Jill. As a family medicine nurse practitioner for many years, I have witnessed and helped many teen
victims of adults who thought it somehow A-ok to sexually take advantage of them. I understand teen psychology. They are
wholly unprepared to deal with the often underhanded tactics of pedophiles who use charm, deceit, threats, flattery, physical
violence, tangible needed goods like money, clothing, or even a place to sleep, to get what they want— sex with a young
person.
It is truly evil and that is not too strong a word for it. Epstein apparently used all of these tactics on his victims.
How I wish there were a hell for the likes of him.
Litchfield, August 20, 2019 at 12:14
I agree with all you say, and thanks for putting it so clearly. There is NO EXCUSE for this case NOT to go forward and for
all the parties of interest to be interrogated, and not with velvet gloves on. Clinton, Andrew, Dersh, Wexner, Maxwell, just
for starters. Possibly Barr should recuse himself, as he seems to be too intertwined with the Epstein background story.
Brian Murphy, August 20, 2019 at 12:42
Is it really such a mystery what organizations acting together have the capability to have done this? They are identified
in the article. The western coalition of intelligence agencies, which includes the Mossad along with NATO powers. In the USA,
that includes the entire intelligence apparatus — CIA, NSA, MIA, FBI, Secret Service, as supported and defended by the DOJ.
Which of those entities placed someone in the jail cell to crack his neck is somewhat immaterial. The current President
and at least one former President were implicated, which justifies the use of the full arsenal in the minds of those
involved, as a “threat to national security,” which of course means strictly “threat to the profits of certain entities.”
Walter, August 20, 2019 at 06:56
There is sparse evidence and zero proof that the charming fellow committed suicide, and only claims (somebody said stuff)
that he’s actually dead. (Same for his girlfriend’s dad, same for Skirpal :–)
Whitney Webb at Mintpressnews is doing good job on Mr E.
"... Obviously, a large fraction of everything described by our government leaders or presented in the pages of our most respectable newspapers -- from the 9/11 attacks to the most insignificant local case of petty urban corruption -- could objectively be categorized as a "conspiracy theory" but such words are never applied. ..."
"... Put another way, there are good "conspiracy theories" and bad "conspiracy theories," with the former being the ones promoted by pundits on mainstream television shows and hence never described as such ..."
"... by the time we attacked Iraq in 2003, polls revealed that some 70% of the American public believed that Saddam was personally involved in the destruction of our World Trade Center. By that date I don't doubt that many millions of patriotic but low-information Americans would have angrily denounced and vilified as a "crazy conspiracy theorist" anyone with the temerity to suggest that Saddam had not been behind 9/11, despite almost no one in authority having ever explicitly made such a fallacious claim. ..."
"... Based on an important FOIA disclosure, the book's headline revelation was that the CIA was very likely responsible for the widespread introduction of "conspiracy theory" as a term of political abuse, having orchestrated that development as a deliberate means of influencing public opinion. ..."
"... So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational supporters of "conspiracy theories." Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continueing right down to the present day. Thus, there is considerable evidence in support of this particular "conspiracy theory" explaining the widespread appearance of attacks on "conspiracy theories" in the public media. ..."
"... But although the CIA appears to have effectively manipulated public opinion in order to transform the phrase "conspiracy theory" into a powerful weapon of ideological combat, the author also describes how the necessary philosophical ground had actually been prepared a couple of decades earlier. Around the time of the Second World War, an important shift in political theory caused a huge decline in the respectability of any "conspiratorial" explanation of historical events. ..."
"... Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with "conspiracy theories" was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies. ..."
"... This argument may be more than purely hypothetical. A crucial turning point in America's renewed Cold War against Russia was the passage of the 2012 Magnitsky Act by Congress, punitively targeting various supposedly corrupt Russian officials for their alleged involvement in the illegal persecution and death of an employee of Bill Browder, an American hedge-fund manager with large Russian holdings. However, there's actually quite a bit of evidence that it was Browder himself who was actually the mastermind and beneficiary of the gigantic corruption scheme, while his employee was planning to testify against him and was therefore fearful of his life for that reason. Naturally, the American media has provided scarcely a single mention of these remarkable revelations regarding what might amount to a gigantic Magnitsky Hoax of geopolitical significance. ..."
"... To some extent the creation of the Internet and the vast proliferation of alternative media outlets, including my own small webzine , have somewhat altered this depressing picture. So it is hardly surprising that a very substantial fraction of the discussion dominating these Samizdat-like publications concerns exactly those subjects regularly condemned as "crazy conspiracy theories" by our mainstream media organs. ..."
"... Such unfiltered speculation must surely be a source of considerable irritation and worry to government officials who have long relied upon the complicity of their tame media organs to allow their serious misdeeds to pass unnoticed and unpunished. Indeed, several years ago a senior Obama Administration official argued that the free discussion of various "conspiracy theories" on the Internet was so potentially harmful that government agents should be recruited to "cognitively infiltrate" and disrupt them, essentially proposing a high-tech version of the highly controversial Cointelpro operations undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. ..."
A year or two ago, I saw the much-touted science fiction film Interstellar , and
although the plot wasn't any good, one early scene was quite amusing. For various reasons, the
American government of the future claimed that our Moon Landings of the late 1960s had been
faked, a trick aimed at winning the Cold War by bankrupting Russia into fruitless space efforts
of its own. This inversion of historical reality was accepted as true by nearly everyone, and
those few people who claimed that Neil Armstrong had indeed set foot on the Moon were
universally ridiculed as "crazy conspiracy theorists." This seems a realistic portrayal of
human nature to me.
Obviously, a large fraction of everything described by our government leaders or presented
in the pages of our most respectable newspapers -- from the 9/11 attacks to the most
insignificant local case of petty urban corruption -- could objectively be categorized as a
"conspiracy theory" but such words are never applied. Instead, use of that highly loaded phrase
is reserved for those theories, whether plausible or fanciful, that do not possess the
endorsement stamp of establishmentarian approval.
Put another way, there are good "conspiracy theories" and bad "conspiracy theories," with
the former being the ones promoted by pundits on mainstream television shows and hence never
described as such. I've sometimes joked with people that if ownership and control of our
television stations and other major media outlets suddenly changed, the new information regime
would require only a few weeks of concerted effort to totally invert all of our most famous
"conspiracy theories" in the minds of the gullible American public. The notion that nineteen
Arabs armed with box-cutters hijacked several jetliners, easily evaded our NORAD air defenses,
and reduced several landmark buildings to rubble would soon be universally ridiculed as the
most preposterous "conspiracy theory" ever to have gone straight from the comic books into the
minds of the mentally ill, easily surpassing the absurd "lone gunman" theory of the JFK
assassination.
Even without such changes in media control, huge shifts in American public beliefs have
frequently occurred in the recent past, merely on the basis of implied association. In the
initial weeks and months following the 2001 attacks, every American media organ was enlisted to
denounce and vilify Osama Bin Laden, the purported Islamicist master-mind, as our greatest
national enemy, with his bearded visage endlessly appearing on television and in print, soon
becoming one of the most recognizable faces in the world. But as the Bush Administration and
its key media allies prepared a war against Iraq, the images of the Burning Towers were instead
regularly juxtaposed with mustachioed photos of dictator Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden's
arch-enemy. As a consequence, by the time we attacked Iraq in 2003, polls revealed that some
70% of the American
public believed that Saddam was personally involved in the destruction of our World Trade
Center. By that date I don't doubt that many millions of patriotic but low-information
Americans would have angrily denounced and vilified as a "crazy conspiracy theorist" anyone
with the temerity to suggest that Saddam had not been behind 9/11, despite almost no one
in authority having ever explicitly made such a fallacious claim.
These factors of media manipulation were very much in my mind a couple of years ago
when I stumbled across a short but fascinating book published by the University of Texas
academic press. The author of Conspiracy Theory in Americawas Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, a former president of
the Florida Political Science Association.
Based on an important FOIA disclosure, the book's headline revelation was that the CIA was
very likely responsible for the widespread introduction of "conspiracy theory" as a term of
political abuse, having orchestrated that development as a deliberate means of influencing
public opinion.
During the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren Commission
findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been solely responsible for President
Kennedy's assassination, and growing suspicions that top-ranking American leaders had also been
involved. So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field
offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such
critics as irrational supporters of "conspiracy theories." Soon afterward, there suddenly
appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording,
arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge
spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the
residual impact continueing right down to the present day. Thus, there is considerable evidence
in support of this particular "conspiracy theory" explaining the widespread appearance of
attacks on "conspiracy theories" in the public media.
But although the CIA appears to have effectively manipulated public opinion in order to
transform the phrase "conspiracy theory" into a powerful weapon of ideological combat, the
author also describes how the necessary philosophical ground had actually been prepared a
couple of decades earlier. Around the time of the Second World War, an important shift in
political theory caused a huge decline in the respectability of any "conspiratorial"
explanation of historical events.
For decades prior to that conflict, one of our most prominent scholars and public
intellectuals had been historian Charles Beard , whose influential writings
had heavily focused on the harmful role of various elite conspiracies in shaping American
policy for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, with his examples ranging from
the earliest history of the United States down to the nation's entry into WWI. Obviously,
researchers never claimed that all major historical events had hidden causes, but it was widely
accepted that some of them did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities was deemed a
perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.
However, Beard was a strong opponent of American entry into the Second World War, and he was
marginalized in the years that followed, even prior to his death in 1948. Many younger public
intellectuals of a similar bent also suffered the same fate, or were even purged from
respectability and denied any access to the mainstream media. At the same time, the totally
contrary perspectives of two European political philosophers, Karl Popper and Leo Strauss , gradually gained ascendancy in
American intellectual circles, and their ideas became dominant in public life.
Popper, the more widely influential, presented broad, largely theoretical objections to the
very possibility of important conspiracies ever existing, suggesting that these would be
implausibly difficult to implement given the fallibility of human agents; what might appear a
conspiracy actually amounted to individual actors pursuing their narrow aims. Even more
importantly, he regarded "conspiratorial beliefs" as an extremely dangerous social malady, a
major contributing factor to the rise of Nazism and other deadly totalitarian ideologies. His
own background as an individual of Jewish ancestry who had fled Austria in 1937 surely
contributed to the depth of his feelings on these philosophical matters.
Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh
in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite
conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy
or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from
the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with "conspiracy theories" was not
that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was
potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense,
elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of
suspected conspiracies.
Even for most educated Americans, theorists such as Beard, Popper, and Strauss are probably
no more than vague names mentioned in textbooks, and that was certainly true in my own case.
But while the influence of Beard seems to have largely disappeared in elite circles, the same
is hardly true of his rivals. Popper probably ranks as one of the founders of modern liberal
thought, with an individual as politically influential as left-liberal financier George Soros claiming to
be his intellectual disciple . Meanwhile, the neo-conservative
thinkers who have totally dominated the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement for
the last couple of decades often proudly trace their ideas back to Strauss.
So, through a mixture of Popperian and Straussian thinking, the traditional American
tendency to regard elite conspiracies as a real but harmful aspect of our society was gradually
stigmatized as either paranoid or politically dangerous, laying the conditions for its
exclusion from respectable discourse.
By 1964, this intellectual revolution had largely been completed, as indicated by the
overwhelmingly positive reaction to the famous article by political scientist Richard
Hofstadter critiquing the so-called "paranoid
style" in American politics , which he denounced as the underlying cause of widespread
popular belief in implausible conspiracy theories. To a considerable extent, he seemed to be
attacking straw men, recounting and ridiculing the most outlandish conspiratorial beliefs,
while seeming to ignore the ones that had been proven correct. For example, he described how
some of the more hysterical anti-Communists claimed that tens of thousands of Red Chinese
troops were hidden in Mexico, preparing an attack on San Diego, while he failed to even
acknowledge that for years Communist spies had indeed served near the very top of the U.S.
government. Not even the most conspiratorially minded individual suggests that all alleged
conspiracies are true, merely that some of them might be.
Most of these shifts in public sentiment occurred before I was born or when I was a very
young child, and my own views were shaped by the rather conventional media narratives that I
absorbed. Hence, for nearly my entire life, I always automatically dismissed all of the
so-called "conspiracy theories" as ridiculous, never once even considering that any of them
might possibly be true.
To the extent that I ever thought about the matter, my reasoning was simple and based on
what seemed like good, solid common sense. Any conspiracy responsible for some important public
event must surely have many separate "moving parts" to it, whether actors or actions taken, let
us say numbering at least 100 or more. Now given the imperfect nature of all attempts at
concealment, it would surely be impossible for all of these to be kept entirely hidden. So even
if a conspiracy were initially 95% successful in remaining undetected, five major clues would
still be left in plain sight for investigators to find. And once the buzzing cloud of
journalists noticed these, such blatant evidence of conspiracy would certainly attract an
additional swarm of energetic investigators, tracing those items back to their origins, with
more pieces gradually being uncovered until the entire cover-up likely collapsed. Even if not
all the crucial facts were ever determined, at least the simple conclusion that there had
indeed been some sort of conspiracy would quickly become established.
However, there was a tacit assumption in my reasoning, one that I have since decided was
entirely false. Obviously, many potential conspiracies either involve powerful governmental
officials or situations in which their disclosure would represent a source of considerable
embarrassment to such individuals. But I had always assumed that even if government failed in
its investigatory role, the dedicated bloodhounds of the Fourth Estate would invariably come
through, tirelessly seeking truth, ratings, and Pulitzers. However, once I gradually began
realizing that the media was merely "Our American Pravda" and perhaps had
been so for decades, I suddenly recognized the flaw in my logic. If those five -- or ten or
twenty or fifty -- initial clues were simply ignored by the media, whether through laziness,
incompetence, or much less venial sins, then there would be absolutely nothing to prevent
successful conspiracies from taking place and remaining undetected, perhaps even the most
blatant and careless ones.
In fact, I would extend this notion to a general principle. Substantial control of the media
is almost always an absolute prerequisite for any successful conspiracy, the greater the degree
of control the better. So when weighing the plausibility of any conspiracy, the first matter to
investigate is who controls the local media and to what extent.
Let us consider a simple thought-experiment. For various reasons these days, the entire
American media is extraordinarily hostile to Russia, certainly much more so than it ever was
toward the Communist Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. Hence I would argue that the
likelihood of any large-scale Russian conspiracy taking place within the operative zone of
those media organs is virtually nil. Indeed, we are constantly bombarded with stories of
alleged Russian conspiracies that appear to be "false positives," dire allegations seemingly
having little factual basis or actually being totally ridiculous. Meanwhile, even the crudest
sort of anti-Russian conspiracy might easily occur without receiving any serious
mainstream media notice or investigation.
This argument may be more than purely hypothetical. A crucial turning point in America's
renewed Cold War against Russia was the passage of the 2012 Magnitsky Act by Congress,
punitively targeting various supposedly corrupt Russian officials for their alleged involvement
in the illegal persecution and death of an employee of Bill Browder, an American hedge-fund
manager with large Russian holdings. However, there's actually quite a bit of evidence that
it was Browder himself who was actually the mastermind and beneficiary of the gigantic
corruption scheme, while his employee was planning to testify against him and was therefore
fearful of his life for that reason. Naturally, the American media has provided scarcely a
single mention of these remarkable revelations regarding what might amount to a gigantic
Magnitsky Hoax of
geopolitical significance.
To some extent the creation of the Internet and the vast proliferation of alternative media
outlets, including my
own small webzine , have somewhat altered this depressing picture. So it is hardly
surprising that a very substantial fraction of the discussion dominating these Samizdat-like
publications concerns exactly those subjects regularly condemned as "crazy conspiracy theories"
by our mainstream media organs.
Such unfiltered speculation must surely be a source of
considerable irritation and worry to government officials who have long relied upon the
complicity of their tame media organs to allow their serious misdeeds to pass unnoticed and
unpunished. Indeed, several years ago a senior Obama Administration official argued
that the free discussion of various "conspiracy theories" on the Internet was so potentially
harmful that government agents should be recruited to "cognitively infiltrate" and disrupt
them, essentially proposing a high-tech version of the highly controversial Cointelpro operations
undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.
Until just a few years ago I'd scarcely even heard of Charles Beard, once ranked among the towering figures of
20th century American intellectual life . But the more I've discovered the number of
serious crimes and disasters that have completely escaped substantial media scrutiny, the more
I wonder what other matters may still remain hidden. So perhaps Beard was correct all along in
recognizing the respectability of "conspiracy theories," and we should return to his
traditional American way of thinking, notwithstanding endless conspiratorial propaganda
campaigns by the CIA and others to persuade us that we should dismiss such notions without any
serious consideration.
"... "I am not into conspiracy theories. But Epstein had destructive information on an extraordinary number of extraordinarily powerful people. It is not easy to commit suicide in prison. ..."
"... The meaningless of the term has been clearly illustrated by Russiagate, whose adherents react with sputtering outrage whenever anyone points out that they're engaged in a conspiracy theory, despite the self-evident fact that that's exactly what it is: a theory about a band of powerful Russian conspirators conspiring with the highest levels of the U.S. government. Their objection is not due to a belief that they're not theorizing about a conspiracy, their objection is due to the fact that a highly stigmatized label that they're accustomed to applying to other people has been applied to them. The label is rejected because its actual definition is ignored to the point of meaninglessness. ..."
"... The term "conspiracy theory" should always serve as red flag to any astute reader concerning what follows. The term was reportedly coined by a CIA disinformation guy in the late 1960s to counter and discredit efforts to get at the truth of the Kennedy assassination. ..."
"... Individuals hanging themselves almost never possess information about how it is done. Typically they either hurl themselves off something like a staircase or kick away something they are standing on, as a chair or stool. Neither of those approaches has much probability of producing the classic executioner's result, although the first can certainly break neck bones or even behead someone. Epstein, we know, used neither of those methods. Indeed, he couldn't, given the small, deliberately-bare cell he was in. ..."
"... What is required to achieve the instantly-broken neck, and in just the right place for quick death, is a drop of a certain amount plus a certain positioning of the rope. Those conditions generally are not possible with efforts like hanging by bedsheets. ..."
"... Sheets, incidentally, as I've previously noted, not even available to inmates at this institution. They sleep on special paper sheets. ..."
"... The term 'conspiracy theory' appears to have first been used by the CIA in the 1960s about those who did not believe the findings of the Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination. ..."
"... The assertion that Epstein's death cannot be questioned without accusations of 'conspiracy theory' seems contradicted by the fact that many people, in and out of government, including AG Barr have found the circumstances in need of an investigation. Has anyone yet accused Barr of being a conspiracy theorist for finding the Epstein death questionable? ..."
"... When the "Conspiracy Theorist" sirens are blaring, you can be certain that an elite crime has just been openly committed and they are triggering the populace to suppress any questioning of the narrative; it is all very Pavoliavian. ..."
"... This will then be followed by an endless set of dead-end inquiries which trains are minds to focus on the trivial. Were sheets in Epstein's Prison? Why were the prison guards too exhausted to monitor the prisoner? Or, my favorite – Why were the cameras off, I think a 5-year-old child could answer that question. ..."
"... If you ever wonder how Intelligence Agencies spend their day, with their budget the size of Bulgaria's GNP, I say, look no further. ..."
"... Now we get to the big one, why did Epstein return to the US when he had to know an arrest warrant had been issued? This one bothers me the most. Epstein had the money and the means to live in many countries without extradition to the US. ..."
"... If someone in power wanted him dead, it would make more sense to do it before all of the attention, not after he's arrested. ..."
"... "That epithet has a sordid history in the annals of U.S. intelligence. Legendary CIA Director Allen Dulles used the "brand-them-conspiracy-theorists" ploy following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy when many objected -- understandably -- to letting him pretty much run the Warren Commission, even though the CIA was suspected of having played a role in the murder. The "conspiracy theorist" tactic worked like a charm then, and now. Well, up until just now." ..."
"... The question should be about evidence for or against any conspiracy theory. ..."
"... In the Epstein case there is a very strong motive, by very powerful interests, to have him gone. There was a very strange lapse in the watchfulness of the prison where Epstein was kept. There has to be an inquiry. ..."
"... Part of the use of this 'conspiracy theory' term is an effort by mass, established (corporate) media to discredit and dismiss alternate media. They are aiming to protect their market by intimating that they report the truth (TM) while over there, the internet is full of hyperventilated, wild and rediculous trash. ..."
"... The invariable responses from everyone ever associated with "high-society", sex-addicted, global criminal pimp for the wealthy-and-powerful Jeffrey Epstein, – on his scandalous and disgusting activities across many years, and finally Epstein's world-record-setting-mystery death: "No comment." ..."
"... there are names of actual people who signed off on taking him off suicide watch, removing his cell mate, and telling the guards to not worry about checking in on Epstein that night. Those are all strange things which should have an answer if a reporter with the resources of the powerful behind them cared to know ..."
"... Clearly, the message is, don't ask questions. That's exactly the opposite of what everyone should be doing who wants to understand what has happened. ..."
"... A Fitbit or equivalent on Epstein with preset alarms monitored at a guard station ( or , for that matter , by his family or lawyers over the web ) could have prevented Epstein's death , but in 2019 , that's a big ask , I suppose. Maybe in a few decades. ..."
"... Apparently "pending further investigation" is now code for "national security"/"classified." Come on. They've had the body since Saturday morning. What are the results of the medical examination? This question under FOIA auspices and principle. ..."
"... The entire Russia-gate hoax is a conspiracy theory. What we need then, in advance of the Gestapo on the Doorstep, is to define conspiracy theory properly as either a) founded in facts and logic or b) founded in spin and deceit. We could then apply for Conspiracy-A permits, and have them sitting in our wallets with the rest of our cards. Again, we should be reminded of 1918 and Eugene Debs. ..."
"... – Every organized crime operation is a conspiracy, and many are charged as such. – Watergate was a conspiracy–in fact, it was a collection of conspiracies. (Let me count the ways ) – Iran-Contra was quite an elaborate conspiracy that no one would have believed if the participants hadn't been busted. Tu parles! – The CIA's overthrow of Allende in Chile in 1973 was a conspiracy. – The CIA's overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 was a conspiracy. – The CIA's many assassinations of foreign leaders around the world for decades are all conspiracies. – All of the CIA's operations in partnership with Mossad or MI6 are and have been conspiracies. – September 11 was a conspiracy. It's just a question of which version (or "conspiracy theory") you wish to believe–there are many. – The concoction of "evidence" to rush to war in Iraq was a conspiracy. – The concoction of "evidence" for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was a conspiracy, – LBJ's coverup of Israel's deliberate attack on the USS Liberty was a conspiracy. ..."
Plutocratic propaganda outlet MSNBC has run a spin segment about the medical examiner's determination of the cause of Jeffrey
Epstein's death "pending further information."
"Our sources are still saying that it looks like suicide, and this is going to set conspiracy theorists abuzz I fear," said NBC
correspondent Ken Dilanian. "NBC News has been hearing all day long that there are no indications of foul play, and that this looks
like a suicide and that he hung himself in his cell."
Dilanian, who stumbled over the phrase "conspiracy theorists" in his haste to get it in the first soundbite, is a known asset
of the Central Intelligence Agency. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is a well-documented fact. A 2014
article in
The Intercept titled "The CIA's Mop-Up Man" reveals email exchanges obtained via Freedom of Information Act request between
Dilanian and CIA public affairs officers which "show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency,
explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication."
There is no reason to give Dilanian the benefit of the doubt that this cozy relationship has ended, so anything he puts forward can
safely be dismissed as CIA public relations.
Up until the news broke that Epstein's autopsy has been unable to readily confirm suicide, mass media headlines everywhere have
been unquestioningly blaring that that was known to have been the cause of the accused sex trafficker's death. This despite the fact
that the FBI's investigation has been
explicitly labeling it an " apparent suicide," and despite the fact that Epstein is credibly believed to have been involved
in an intelligence-tied sexual blackmail
operation
involving
many powerful people , any number of whom stood
to gain plenty from his death .
Berating by Mass Media Narrative Managers
So, things are moving in a very weird way, and people are understandably weirded out. The response to this from mass media narrative
managers has, of course, been to berate everyone as "conspiracy theorists."
These outlets generally match Dilanian's tone in branding anyone who questions the official story about Epstein's death as a raving
lunatic. Meanwhile, normal human beings all across the political spectrum are
expressing skepticism
on social media about the "suicide" narrative we're all being force-fed by the establishment narrative managers, many of them
prefacing their skepticism with some variation on the phrase "I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but "
"I'm not a conspiracy theorist but there are an awful lot of very powerful people who would like to see this Epstein thing go
away. Is anyone investigating the guard on duty?"
tweeted actor Patricia Heaton.
"I am not into conspiracy theories. But Epstein had destructive information on an extraordinary number of extraordinarily
powerful people. It is not easy to commit suicide in prison. Especially after being placed on suicide watch. Especially after
already allegedly trying," tweeted
public defender Scott Hechinger.
Journalist Abi Wilkinson summed up the silliness of this widespread preface very nicely,
tweeting , " 'I'm not a conspiracy theorist'
is such a weird assertion when you think about it, the idea there's a binary between believing all conspiracies and flat out rejecting
the very concept of conspiracy in all circumstances."
Indeed, I think it's fair to say that we are all conspiracy theorists if we're really honest with ourselves. Not everyone believes
that the official stories about 9/11 and the JFK assassination are riddled with plot holes or what have you, but I doubt that anyone
who really sat down and sincerely grappled with the question "Do powerful people conspire?" would honestly deny it. Some are just
more self-aware than others about the self-evident reality that powerful people conspire all the time, and it's only a question of
how and with whom and to what extent.
Dictionary Definition
The word "conspire" is defined by Merriam-Webster
as "to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement."
No sane person would deny that this is a thing that happens, nor that this is likely a thing that happens to some extent among the
powerful in their own nation. This by itself is a theory about conspiracy per definition, and it accurately applies to pretty much
everyone. Since it applies to pretty much everyone, the label is essentially meaningless, either as a pejorative or as anything else.
The meaningless of the term has been clearly illustrated by Russiagate, whose adherents react with sputtering outrage whenever
anyone points out that they're engaged in a conspiracy theory, despite the self-evident fact that that's exactly what it is: a theory
about a band of powerful Russian conspirators conspiring with the highest levels of the U.S. government. Their objection is not due
to a belief that they're not theorizing about a conspiracy, their objection is due to the fact that a highly stigmatized label that
they're accustomed to applying to other people has been applied to them. The label is rejected because its actual definition is ignored
to the point of meaninglessness.
The problem has never been with the actual term "conspiracy theory;" the problem has been with its deliberate and completely meaningless
use as a pejorative. The best way to address this would be a populist move to de-stigmatize the label by taking ownership of it.
Last month Cornell University professor Dave Callum
tweeted , "I am a 'conspiracy theorist'.
I believe men and women of wealth and power conspire. If you don't think so, then you are what is called 'an idiot'. If you believe
stuff but fear the label, you are what is called 'a coward'."
This is what we all must do. The debate must be forcibly moved from the absurd question of whether or not conspiracies are a thing
to the important question of which conspiracy theories are valid and to what degree.
And we should probably hurry. Yahoo News reported earlier this
month that the FBI recently published an intelligence bulletin describing "conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists" as a
growing threat, and this was before the recent spate of U.S. shootings got establishment narrative-makers
pushing for new domestic
terrorism laws . This combined with the fact that we can't even ask questions about extremely suspicious events like Jeffrey
Epstein's death without being tarred with this meaningless pejorative by the mass media thought police means we're at extreme risk
of being shoved into something far more Orwellian in the near future.
The term "conspiracy theory" should always serve as red flag to any astute reader concerning what follows. The term was
reportedly coined by a CIA disinformation guy in the late 1960s to counter and discredit efforts to get at the truth of the Kennedy
assassination.
It's amazing the way it has hung around.
The mainline press loves the phrase, and you'll find it somewhere in their output weekly trying to discredit this or that matter.
The autopsy of Jeffrey Epstein is reported to have shown that his neck was broken, "in several places. "The coroner stated
that she "is confident the cause of death is suicide by hanging."
I don't know. I 'm certainly not an expert. In traditional capital-punishment hanging, as in a prison by an executioner, the
neck is indeed broken, but as I understand it, cleanly, not "in several places."
That is how a hanged person dies, not by strangulation, something that is the result only of botched hangings.
Virtually all self-hangings are botched hangings.
Individuals hanging themselves almost never possess information about how it is done. Typically they either hurl themselves
off something like a staircase or kick away something they are standing on, as a chair or stool. Neither of those approaches has
much probability of producing the classic executioner's result, although the first can certainly break neck bones or even behead
someone. Epstein, we know, used neither of those methods. Indeed, he couldn't, given the small, deliberately-bare cell he was
in.
What is required to achieve the instantly-broken neck, and in just the right place for quick death, is a drop of a certain
amount plus a certain positioning of the rope. Those conditions generally are not possible with efforts like hanging by bedsheets.
Sheets, incidentally, as I've previously noted, not even available to inmates at this institution. They sleep on special
paper sheets.
Newspaper reports of how Epstein killed himself say that the six-foot man tied a bedsheet to the top of the bunk bed in
the small cell and then kneeled towards the floor, strangling himself. It is not easy to see how doing that could result in a
neck broken "in several places."
I think the autopsy result, at least to a non-expert, only increases doubts.
Tony , August 15, 2019 at 08:53
The term 'conspiracy theory' appears to have first been used by the CIA in the 1960s about those who did not believe the
findings of the Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination.
Some people, apparently, thought that LBJ might have had something to do with it.
Fancy thinking that the person who was facing being dumped as vice president and who had spent so much time trying to get JFK
to visit his home state might have had something to do with it!
By any proper investigative standards, Johnson should have been seen as a suspect. And yet he was able to appoint his own panel
of investigation and to determine its membership. Absolutely unbelievable!
Anonymous , August 14, 2019 at 23:23
People who run around slinging terms like "conspiracy theorist" are more than just empowered by psychiatry – it is literally
what brought this plague of all the stigma against all dissent and doubt being more than just a mere slur. People come up with
some flat out absurd nonsense all the time -- but so what.
If it's absurd, ignore it. Argue against it if you think they aren't trolling and weren't just conditioned to be a self unaware
sockpuppet – but don't comdemn for it, or you destroy the one thing that stands in the way of this country becoming a tyranny
on a level that will make "1984" sound like the Teletubbies.
nwwoods , August 14, 2019 at 21:04
See Whitney Webb's three part (and more to come) series on the Epstein saga at Mint Press News, but be sure do fasten your
seatbelts.
Steve Parosns , August 14, 2019 at 16:11
The assertion that Epstein's death cannot be questioned without accusations of 'conspiracy theory' seems contradicted by
the fact that many people, in and out of government, including AG Barr have found the circumstances in need of an investigation.
Has anyone yet accused Barr of being a conspiracy theorist for finding the Epstein death questionable?
Deniz , August 14, 2019 at 18:04
I have no doubt that Barr is about to launch another investigation that will be long on theatrics, but short on convictions.
I assume you have overlooked the uncanny coincidence of Donald Barr's appointment of an unlettered Epstein at Dalton.
Skip Scott , August 15, 2019 at 08:01
Given Barr's history, I have little faith in him. I think he may actually be in there to squelch any real investigation while
pretending to support one. And yes, it is ALL theater.
Steve Parsons , August 14, 2019 at 16:09
A glaring non-sequitir should be corrected: "There is no reason to give Dilanian the benefit of the doubt that this cozy relationship
has ended, so anything he puts forward can safely be dismissed as CIA public relations."
Because a journalist had a cozy relation with the CIA does NOT mean "everything" s/he writes IS dismissable as "CIA pulbic
relatiions".
The article about the 'cozy relationship" did not prove "everything" he wrote was "CIA public relations" in the past, so there
is no reason to believe "everything" he writes in the future is either!
This is one way conspiracy theories work – a part is taken for the whole, a suspicion becomes a proof.
Please edit your statement to something that does follow, like "Since there havbe been well-documented instances of this author
writing distorted stories to serve the CIA's interests, anything he writes "could be" the same.
You have written that is should be dismissed without scrutiny. Never a good idea.
manorborn , August 14, 2019 at 14:07
It should be a civic duty to be a conspiracy theorist considering how our rogue government has never once told us the truth
about anything and has consistently shown itself as the world's leading aggressor.
Deniz , August 14, 2019 at 12:53
When the "Conspiracy Theorist" sirens are blaring, you can be certain that an elite crime has just been openly committed
and they are triggering the populace to suppress any questioning of the narrative; it is all very Pavoliavian.
This will then be followed by an endless set of dead-end inquiries which trains are minds to focus on the trivial. Were
sheets in Epstein's Prison? Why were the prison guards too exhausted to monitor the prisoner? Or, my favorite – Why were the cameras
off, I think a 5-year-old child could answer that question.
If you ever wonder how Intelligence Agencies spend their day, with their budget the size of Bulgaria's GNP, I say, look
no further.
Brian , August 14, 2019 at 11:50
I have this gut feeling that no one is asking the right questions about this case, I respect Caitlin as a journalist, so I'm
really surprised she didn't "go there". So let me tighten up my tin foil hat, and dive in.
The first thing I've noticed is everyone and every "news" organization has come to the conclusion that Epstein is dead, why?
We have no proof of this, the one photo I've seen has discrepancies of this fact, right off the bat I noticed there was no backboard
under the patient on the stretcher. No official EMT would perform CPR on a patient, on a padded stretcher without one. The EMT
wasn't positioned to be performing chest compressions properly on the patient (fake?).
Next we are to believe the total breakdown in the prison surrounding this incident was a coincidence and/or failure of the
staff. Now I believe in coincidences, but the more there are for a given incident, the less likely that was the cause. Given the
high profile of this prisoner, it becomes even less likely. Epstein had the ability to take down many high profile people, why
wasn't he under 24/7 surveillance?
No one is questioning the supposed visit to Epstein from AG Barr, why? How often does the AG of the US visit a prisoner, especially
one with ties to the prisoner (Barr's father was OSS during WWII, and hired Epstein to teach without a college degree at a prestigious
school in NY in the early 1970's)?
Now we get to the big one, why did Epstein return to the US when he had to know an arrest warrant had been issued? This
one bothers me the most. Epstein had the money and the means to live in many countries without extradition to the US. Why
come back if you didn't have a guarantee of basically getting "off the hook" with a "slap on the wrist", like in south Florida?
It makes no sense.
If someone in power wanted him dead, it would make more sense to do it before all of the attention, not after he's arrested.
... ... ...
Guy , August 14, 2019 at 11:47
All options/opinions will be put forward in order to properly obfuscate the truth and the truth might never see the light of
day. Much too much at stake for too many .It will probably go down as another event left for the conspiracy theorists .Move on
folks, nothing to see here .
Jeff Harrison , August 14, 2019 at 11:45
Here's what Uncle Ray had to offer about "conspiracy theorists":
"That epithet has a sordid history in the annals of U.S. intelligence. Legendary CIA Director Allen Dulles used the
"brand-them-conspiracy-theorists" ploy following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy when many objected -- understandably
-- to letting him pretty much run the Warren Commission, even though the CIA was suspected of having played a role in the murder.
The "conspiracy theorist" tactic worked like a charm then, and now. Well, up until just now."
Randal Marlin , August 14, 2019 at 11:36
Undoubtedly conspiracy theories can be correct or they can be false. An example is 9/11, where a conspiracy between the largely
Saudi attackers certainly existed. Some have argued that further conspiracies must have taken place. To have made the accurate
decision about exactly where the planes that flew into the twin towers should hit would have required highly sophisticated knowledge
about the building's construction, about the amount of fuel the planes should carry, which floor to hit, etc. It is reasonable
to suppose other knowledgeable people were in on the conspiracy. There are further more speculative theories, some that are worth
pursuing, others not.
The question should be about evidence for or against any conspiracy theory. Which among various conspiracy theories
are supported by the evidence?
In the Epstein case there is a very strong motive, by very powerful interests, to have him gone. There was a very strange
lapse in the watchfulness of the prison where Epstein was kept. There has to be an inquiry.
Glennn , August 14, 2019 at 10:41
Great article. Here's a quote from Adam Smith about the elites – Smith calls them the masters – combining. "We rarely hear,
it has been said, of the combination of masters; though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account,
that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.
Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour
above their actual rate. To violate this combination is every where a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master
among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural
state of things which nobody ever hears of. "
LH , August 14, 2019 at 10:12
Isn't it strange how all the corporate media are in lock step on 'conspiracy theories' and Epstein?
Part of the use of this 'conspiracy theory' term is an effort by mass, established (corporate) media to discredit and dismiss
alternate media. They are aiming to protect their market by intimating that they report the truth (TM) while over there, the internet
is full of hyperventilated, wild and rediculous trash.
They are choosing to report that these myriad of views exist, but mainly as a warning their readers/viewers not to bother going
there because there is nothing but these 'conspiracy theories'.
Yet, the corporate media seem to echo the same shallow reporting on Epstein.
If the narrative doesn't feel right in your gut then it probably isn't
Realist , August 14, 2019 at 05:23
The people running the system can never admit Epstein's death was due to anything other than suicide. If such evidence exists,
it will be suppressed. If it were admitted that the guy was knocked off, those in control would be held to account. Nothing could
be more un-American than that.
Outside hit men did not just fortuitously waltz in, enter his cell and off him under the noses of the American security state.
They would need as much inside assistance as Mr. Phelps had to deviously arrange on a weekly basis in "Mission Impossible." Such
sources of help would be limited to rather few suspects and their superiors in the chain of command. Heads would roll.
So I say, the guaranteed finding of any committee "investigating" this will be that the guards assigned to check on Epstein
periodically were remiss (overworked, don't ya know?), offering him the small window of 0pportunity to strangle himself with the
single-ply Charmin substitute he meticulously hoarded for weeks until it could support the weight of a 200-lb man 2-ft above the
floor near his bunk.
It's either the above scenario, or an anorexic double-jointed ninja climbed the outside wall of the building, removed the glass
from the 4-inch wide window overlooking the courtyard below, squeezed into Epstein's cell as he slept and strangled him in his
bunk. Don't bother dusting for prints, he was wearing latex gloves. Even Mark Furman will never come up with a "plausible" alternative
to Epstain's suiciding, no matter who killed him.
Zhu , August 14, 2019 at 05:14
It is legitimate to be suspicious about the circumstance of Epstein's death. But it is also true that most if the conspiracy
stories people like to repeat are fantasy fiction. Lizard men from Zeta Reticuli do not rule the world.
Tiu , August 14, 2019 at 03:45
It's done it's job – now this event event is dominating all the headlines. Makes me wonder what it is that isn't supposed to
be noticed?!
Vivek Jain , August 14, 2019 at 01:51
"[C]onspiracies do exist. If we define conspiracy as planning in secrecy for illicit purposes while misleading the public as
to what is happening, then there have been conspiracies aplenty."
– Michael Parenti
"No social order of any complexity exists without the application of conscious human agency. Ruling elements must intentionally
strive to maintain the conditions of their hegemonic rule. The social order of a society does not operate like a mystical abstracted
entity. It is directed for the most part by people who deliberately pursue certain goals, using all kinds of power, including
propaganda, persuasion, fraud, deceit, fear, secrecy, coercion, concessions, and sometimes even concerted violence and other criminal
ploys . we might consider how conspiracy [by which most people seem to mean secret, consciously planned programs by persons in
high places] is one of the instruments used by the dominant interests in political life. Some conspiracies are imagined; some
are real."
– Parenti
The invariable responses from everyone ever associated with "high-society", sex-addicted, global criminal pimp for the
wealthy-and-powerful Jeffrey Epstein, – on his scandalous and disgusting activities across many years, and finally Epstein's world-record-setting-mystery
death: "No comment."
CitizenOne , August 13, 2019 at 22:33
Relax folks. There is nothing to get alarmed about. Trustworthy Attorney General William Barr has sleepily assured us in his
quiet droll words that he will dig deep into the matter and investigate it with all the force he can muster which is not much.
We can relax knowing that the investigation will be thorough like a fresh coat of whitewash on a rotting fence and completed in
just a few days or weeks and it will be an open and shut case that some prison guard didn't do his or her job very good like he
or she was supposed to. Then the case will be closed as an unfortunate event due to the poor performance of some bad prison guards.
Somebody will be suspended for not doing their job real good but real bad and the matter will be officially closed leaving everyone
else with questions that persist labeled as supporters of a conspiracy theory A.K.A. a lunatic.
Whew, that was a close one and we are all soon to be glad that the investigation resulted in fingering incompetent prison guards
case closed. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
Roger Milbrandt , August 13, 2019 at 21:59
This is quite a good discussion of the irresponsible and tendentious use of the phrase "conspiracy theory." I think you should
point out that in the case of 9/11 every explanation presupposes a conspiracy, at least by the Merriam-Webster definition of the
term. The only exception would be the claim that the hijackers acted independently and that the fact that all of these events
occurred on the same day is a coincidence. But who ever offers this non-conspiracy-theory explanation?
Whenever you ascribe conscious intent and pursuit of self interest at the top, you will hear someone say: 'What are you,
a conspiracy theorist?' You can say farmers consciously organize to pursue their interests and everybody will say 'Uh huh,
farmers are organized.' You can say machinists or auto workers are organizing and everybody will say 'Uh huh, they're consciously
organizing and pursuing their own interests,' or school teachers, and other people. But if you say the people who own most
of America and most of the world – if you say they consciously organize and pursue things to get what they want, then you hear
people say 'Oh, you have a Conspiracy theory? You think they really do that?'
The alternative to a conspiracy theory is an Innocence theory. That is, they do all of this stuff but they're not pursuing
self interest. They just do it, you know. The other alternative is a Somnambulist theory. Somnambulism is the tendency to walk
in your sleep. David Rockefeller gets up in the morning and says, 'What am I going to do, to advance and protect my interests?
No, no, that would be conspiratorial.' Another alternative would be Coincidence theory: it's just coincidence that this happened.
A variation of coincidence theory is Uncanny theory. Then there's Stupidity theory and Incompetence theory. There's also Stochastic
theory. It means everything happening by random there's really no causality, as such. Stuff just happens. History is just these
eventualities that tumble down on top of each other.
Abby , August 13, 2019 at 21:05
That one of the biggest prisoners in history was being guarded by a person who wasn't a prison guard makes me think that he
was either killed in his cell or removed from it to go into the never lands never to be seen again.
Why wouldn't they have taken every possible step to make sure he stayed alive? If they wanted him to testify they would have.
I think that this is an in your face and blatant show that the PTB are running on us. "Sure we know that you don't believe the
official story, but what can you do about it?"
Tom Kath , August 13, 2019 at 20:57
Caitlin, as you have often remarked, "who controls the narrative controls the world". I have already suggested to Ray that
we should concentrate on discrediting and undermining the FAITH in the benevolence of these controlling agencies. We might then
deal later with the "truth" (discrediting their narrative).
OlyaPola , August 14, 2019 at 08:08
"Everyone's a Conspiracy Theorist. The only problem with the term is the meaningless use of it as a pejorative " ...
"who controls the narrative controls the world"
"Doubling down" in self-absorption obfuscates that who chooses the narratives frames perception, thereby obviating the "need
to control" whilst encouraging extrapolations of resort to belief to bridge doubt, sometimes known as "conspiracy theories".
Welcome to the O.K. Corral.
Jill , August 13, 2019 at 20:53
There are so many unanswered questions and conflicting information regarding Epstein's ? that I thought it was very telling
that the press of the powerful was worried about conspiracy theories. Why would that be where they put all their energy?
The press of the powerful would be much better engaged in trying to get as much actual information as possible out to the public.
Instead it's all unnamed sources say this or that contradictory thing. The strange thing is, in this case there is documented
information. The prison has cameras in the hallway which can be reviewed. This might answer the question as to whether there were
screams coming from Epstein's cell, what time that occurred, who was around, etc.
Further, there are names of actual people who signed off on taking him off suicide watch, removing his cell mate, and telling
the guards to not worry about checking in on Epstein that night. Those are all strange things which should have an answer if a
reporter with the resources of the powerful behind them cared to know.
Clearly, the message is, don't ask questions. That's exactly the opposite of what everyone should be doing who wants to
understand what has happened. Many of the questions have (or should have) answers. I believe the press of the powerful should
attend to getting those answers and quit being concerned about what anyone believes. If the answers to knowable information show
that a conspiracy took place, that is simply what happened. Berating people for wanting to know what actually happened, for demanding
answers to questions that are knowable, is called propaganda. It most certainly is not journalism.
Marko , August 13, 2019 at 20:32
A Fitbit or equivalent on Epstein with preset alarms monitored at a guard station ( or , for that matter , by his family
or lawyers over the web ) could have prevented Epstein's death , but in 2019 , that's a big ask , I suppose. Maybe in a few decades.
Not that it WOULD have prevented Epstein's death. There's always a workaround.
hetro , August 13, 2019 at 20:23
Apparently "pending further investigation" is now code for "national security"/"classified." Come on. They've had the body
since Saturday morning. What are the results of the medical examination? This question under FOIA auspices and principle.
hetro , August 13, 2019 at 20:19
Good points, very good points. The fight is for clarity and precision. The brainwashing machinery is working very hard to demonize
whatever opposes its will. So a legitimate phrase "conspiracy theory" is pejorated or demonized.
The entire Russia-gate hoax is a conspiracy theory. What we need then, in advance of the Gestapo on the Doorstep, is to
define conspiracy theory properly as either a) founded in facts and logic or b) founded in spin and deceit. We could then apply
for Conspiracy-A permits, and have them sitting in our wallets with the rest of our cards. Again, we should be reminded of 1918
and Eugene Debs.
Archie , August 15, 2019 at 03:37
The term "conspiracy theory" is used so often and so casually that it's worth exploring its history and meaning.
Right off the bat, when we hear that something is a "conspiracy theory," we're expected to understand that people are talking
about a crackpot idea. That much is clear, as Spock says in Star Trek IV.
But if we analyze the term, we can see it's a bit strange. Are conspiracies so unusual? – Every organized crime operation is a conspiracy, and many are charged as such.
– Watergate was a conspiracy–in fact, it was a collection of conspiracies. (Let me count the ways )
– Iran-Contra was quite an elaborate conspiracy that no one would have believed if the participants hadn't been busted. Tu
parles!
– The CIA's overthrow of Allende in Chile in 1973 was a conspiracy.
– The CIA's overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 was a conspiracy.
– The CIA's many assassinations of foreign leaders around the world for decades are all conspiracies.
– All of the CIA's operations in partnership with Mossad or MI6 are and have been conspiracies.
– September 11 was a conspiracy. It's just a question of which version (or "conspiracy theory") you wish to believe–there are
many.
– The concoction of "evidence" to rush to war in Iraq was a conspiracy.
– The concoction of "evidence" for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was a conspiracy,
– LBJ's coverup of Israel's deliberate attack on the USS Liberty was a conspiracy.
I'm tired of coming up with examples. You get the point.
Now, what's a "theory"?
A theory is an explanation for phenomena in the world for which there is actual evidence. A theory is well on the way to being
considered fact, though it may not be established fact without further evidence. A theory is distinct from a hypothesis in that
a hypothesis is an explanation that has not received evidence leading to its acceptance or confirmation as fact.
Here are some examples of theories:
1. The Theory of Evolution–Who doubts that apart from evangelical Protestants or people with little education? We aren't
100% sure of all the details, but we accept the overall theory as fact.
2. The Theory of Gravity–Does anyone doubt it? Of course, like evolution, gravity is a lot more complex than most of us
know.
3. The Theory of Relativity–This one many people might doubt, but it's generally accepted as fact, and you probably don't
doubt it yourself.
4. Newton's Theories (or Laws) of Motion–Most people don't even know them, but they're (all three of them) accepted as
fact.
5. Genetic theory–This is vast and complex and certainly subject to modification upon the introduction of new evidence,
but we all (mostly) accept that we have genes that determine our physical characteristics at the very least. Genetic determination
of intelligence is much more subject to caution (nature vs. nurture).
6. Language Acquisition theory–This is much more subject to change and hard to accept as plain fact, given the very fluid
nature of the evidence for and against the various ideas that theory involves.
What about borderline theories, or theories that might better be called "hypotheses"?
The main "theory" that comes to mind is String Theory in Physics. Since there's evidence neither for nor against it and physicists
have stated that it is unfalsifiable (or impossible to prove or disprove by experimentation), it might be better to call it "the
String Hypothesis."
Mathematical Theory:
There is so much mathematical theory, all of which has a solid underpinning of irrefutable proof. By the standards of modern
physics, a major concept in mathematics, the Riemann Hypothesis, would be called "Riemann Theory," since all available evidence
appears to confirm it. However, that's not good enough for mathematicians. No proof currently exists (or has yet been verified,
but see Attiyah), so it's still considered a "hypothesis."
HISTORY OF THE TERM "Conspiracy Theory": The term was coined by Allen Dulles, the ex-head of the CIA, fired by John Kennedy
for having lied to him about the Bay of Pigs. Dulles was the effective head of the Warren Commission, although the titular head
was Earl Warren, who was actually a mere figurehead. (See Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable. )
LONG STORY SHORT: The term "conspiracy theory" is strange but typical shorthand for telling us which ideas are taboo to believe
or even entertain, but an examination of the term shows just how ridiculous it is.
OlyaPola , August 16, 2019 at 04:08
"However, that's not good enough for mathematicians. No proof currently exists (or has yet been verified, but see Attiyah),
so it's still considered a "hypothesis."
Many including Mr. Feynman were aware of many causal networks, developments and consequences in and of "Cargo cult science"
and hence it's still considered a (indefinite article) "hypothesis" and illustration of resort to belief to bridge doubt to attain
"comfort/confort/confront" by many practitioners not restricted to mathematicians.
Among the consequences of "Cargo cult science" are the "practices and other outcomes" of Boeing and Microsoft not restricted
to patching as functions of many causal networks in illustration of decay as a process of fertilisation, akin to doubt as a catalyst
in "Science".
@Sean McBride Not sure if I'm correct here, but my understanding is that the CIA (&
& Dulles in particular) "invented" the term ""conspiracy theory" to further muddy the
waters in the wash up from the Kennedy assassination.
A nice analysis of the rhetorical structure of conspiracy theories in general.
Another important aspect of this: the use of conspiracy theories to generate propaganda
sufficiently toxic to severely damage or even destroy political opponents. For instance,
Russiagate.
The mainstream media, since 2016, while railing against the conspiratorial mindset expressed
in Internet alternative media channels, have been wallowing in it, promoting it with all the
power at their disposal. Talk about twisty and sinister doublethink. One could almost describe
it as diabolical.
They are often portraying false conspiracy theories as truth, and true conspiracy research
as lies -- turning reality upside down and inside out.
Jewish economist Murray Rothbard contrasts "deep" conspiracy theories with "shallow" ones.
According to Rothbard, a shallow theorist observes an event and asks, who benefits? He or she
then jumps to the conclusion that the posited beneficiary is responsible for covertly
influencing events. Under this theory, Israel benefiting from the events of 9/11 made it into a
prime suspect. This is often a completely legitimate strategy and is exactly how detective and
investigative researchers operate. In order to identify the culprit, they may well ask who
would benefit from the crime. Of course this is only a first step towards substantiation.
According to Rothbard the "deep" conspiracy theorist begins with a hunch and then seeks out
evidence. Rothbard describes deep conspiracy theory as the result of confirming whether certain
facts actual fit one's initial 'paranoia.' This explanation pretty much describes a lot of how
science works. Any given scientific theory defines the realm of facts that may support or
refute its validity. Science is a deductive reasoning process, so that in science, it is the
theory that defines the relevance of the evidence. Would Rothbard describe Newtonian physics as
'deeply conspiratorial'? I doubt it. My guess is that, bearing Rothbard in mind, attributing a
'conspiratorial nature' to a theory is an attempt the deny the relevance of the evidence it
brings to light.
If for instance, the theory that Epstein was a Mossad agent is 'conspiratorial,' then the
facts that he was a business partner of Ehud Barak and
involved in a company that uses Israeli military intelligence tactics become irrelevant. The
same applies to former Federal Prosecutor Alex Acosta's admission that Epstein belonged to
intelligence and that was why he was the beneficiary of a laughable plea deal. If, for
example, the theory that it was the Jews who led the 1917 Bolshevik revolution is
'conspiratorial,' then the facts regarding the demography that led
the revolution and its criminal nature are of no
consequence.
The labelling of a theory as conspiratorial is an attempt to erase uncomfortable evidence by
reprioritising the relevance of certain facts.
'Conspiracy theory' is how the mainstream media characterizes any narrative that differs
from their reporting of the official line. What is a conspiracy theory? Can it be defined in
categorical terms? Can a conspiracy theory be validated forensically or refuted by similar
means? What criteria can be used to differentiate between a conspiracy theory and theoretical
musings?
The labelling of a theory as 'conspiratorial' is an attempt to discredit its author/authors
and deny its validity. A 'conspiracy theory' usually involves an explanatory thesis that points
to a malevolent plot often involving a secretive interested party. The term 'conspiracy theory'
has a pejorative connotation: its use suggests that the theory appeals to prejudice and/or
involves a farfetched, unsubstantiated narrative built on insufficient evidence.
Those who oppose conspiracy theories argue that such theories resist falsification and are
reinforced by circular reasoning, that such theories are primarily based on beliefs, as opposed
to academic or scientific reasoning.
But this critique is also not exactly based on valid scholarly principles. It isn't just
'conspiracy theories' that resist falsification or are reinforced by circular reasoning. The
philosopher Karl Popper, who defined the principle of falsifiability, would categorically
maintain that Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism fail for the same reasons. The Oedipal
complex, for instance, has never been scientifically proven and can't be scientifically
falsified or validated. Marxism also resists falsification. Despite Marx's 'scientific'
predictions, the proletarian revolution never occurred. I have personally never come across
anyone who refers to Marx or Freud as 'conspiracy theorists.' 'Resisting falsification' and
"reinforced by circular reasoning," are traits of non-scientific theories and do not apply only
to 'conspiracy theories.'
The Oxford English Dictionary defines conspiracy theory as "the theory that an event or
phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties; spec. a belief
that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in
intent) is responsible for an unexplained event".
The Oxford dictionary does not set forth the criteria that define a conspiracy theory in
categorical terms. The history of mankind is saturated with references to hidden plots led by
influential parties.
The problem with refuting conspiracy theories is that they are often more elegant and
explanatory than the official competing narratives. Such theories have a tendency to ascribe
blame to hegemonic powers. In the past, conspiracy theories were popular mostly amongst fringe
circles, they are now becoming commonplace in mass media. Alternative narratives are widely
disseminated through social media. In some cases, they have been disseminated by official news
outlets and even by the current American president. It is possible that the rapid rise in
popularity of alternative explanatory theories is an indication of a growing mistrust of the
current ruling class, its ideals, its interests and its demography.
The response to the story of Jeffrey Epstein's suicide is illustrative. The official
narrative provoked a reaction that was a mixture of disbelief expressed in satire and inspired
a plethora of theories that attempted to explain the saga that had escalated into the biggest
sex scandal in the history of America and beyond.
The obvious question is what has led to the increase in popularity of so called 'conspiracy
theories'? I would push it further and ask, why is a society that claims to be 'free' is
threatened by the rise of alternative explanatory narratives?
In truth, the question is itself misleading. No one is really afraid of 'conspiracy
theories' per se. You will not be arrested or lose your job for being a 'climate change
denier.' You may speculate on and even deny the moon landing as much as you like. You are free
to speculate about Kennedy's assassination as long as you don't mention the Mossad . You can even
survive being a 911 truther and espouse as many alternative narratives as you like, however,
the suggestion that ' Israel did 911' will get you
into serious trouble. Examining 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' as a fictional,
however
prophetic , piece of literature can lead to imprisonment in some countries. Digging into
the true origin of Bolshevism and the demographics of the Soviet revolution is practically a
suicidal act. Telling the truth about Hitler's agreement with the Zionist agency
will definitely result in your expulsion from the British Labour party and you will be accused
of being
at the least, theoretically conspiratorial .
"... "The failing New York Times, in one of the most devastating portrayals of bad journalism in history, got caught by a leaker that they are shifting from the Phony Russian Collusion Narrative (the Mueller Report & his testimony were a total disaster), to a Racism Witch Hunt ," Trump wrote on Twitter ..."
"... Systematic deception by the press is a national security issue. In a real crisis, 2/3rds of this country is not going to believe either the government nor the media. That will be a real problem, and it's a massive weakness. ..."
"... Neoliberal MSM propaganda like heroin. Those "news" outlets don't care about actual facts or news, they are more script writers than anything else. ..."
President Trump slammed the "failing New York Times" on Sunday after leaked comments from executive editor Dean Baquet revealed
that the paper is pivoting from the Russia narrative (which he described as being "a little tiny bit flat-footed") to 'Trump is a
racist.'
"The failing New York Times, in one of the most devastating portrayals of bad journalism in history, got caught by a leaker that
they are shifting from the Phony Russian Collusion Narrative (the Mueller Report & his testimony were a total disaster), to a Racism
Witch Hunt ," Trump wrote on Twitter, adding "'Journalism' has reached a new low in the history of our Country. It is nothing more
than an evil propaganda machine for the Democrat Party. The reporting is so false, biased and evil that it has now become a very
sick joke But the public is aware! The reporting is so false, biased and evil that it has now become a very sick joke But the public
is aware!"
Systematic deception by the press is a national security issue. In a real crisis, 2/3rds of this country is not going to believe either the government nor the media. That will be a real problem, and it's a massive weakness.
Neoliberal MSM propaganda like heroin. Those "news" outlets don't care about actual facts or news, they are more script
writers than anything else. These pretend journalists have conjured up a narrative and it is all about repeat repeat repeat,
keeping that constant drip going into the vein of the Dem constituency. It's been going on for decades and the only people that
are too stupid to see it are the Dems themselves.
I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is
Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].
Symptoms include:
Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently
absurd MSM propaganda. For example, the meme that releasing factual information about actual
election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging of its own
nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;
Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on
and lying to the American people, spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and
assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer Brennan;
Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples
of "norms-respecting Republican patriots";
Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating
Russian stooge.
STEPHEN COHEN: I'm not aware that Russia attacked Georgia. The European Commission, if you're talking about the 2008 war,
the European Commission, investigating what happened, found that Georgia, which was backed by the United States, fighting with an
American-built army under the control of the, shall we say, slightly unpredictable Georgian president then, Saakashvili, that he
began the war by firing on Russian enclaves. And the Kremlin, which by the way was not occupied by Putin, but by Michael McFaul and
Obama's best friend and reset partner then-president Dmitry Medvedev, did what any Kremlin leader, what any leader in any country
would have had to do: it reacted. It sent troops across the border through the tunnel, and drove the Georgian forces out of what
essentially were kind of Russian protectorate areas of Georgia.
So that- Russia didn't begin that war. And it didn't begin the one in Ukraine, either. We did that by [continents], the overthrow
of the Ukrainian president in [20]14 after President Obama told Putin that he would not permit that to happen. And I think it happened
within 36 hours. The Russians, like them or not, feel that they have been lied to and betrayed. They use this word, predatl'stvo,
betrayal, about American policy toward Russia ever since 1991, when it wasn't just President George Bush, all the documents have
been published by the National Security Archive in Washington, all the leaders of the main Western powers promised the Soviet Union
that under Gorbachev, if Gorbachev would allow a reunited Germany to be NATO, NATO would not, in the famous expression, move two
inches to the east.
Now NATO is sitting on Russia's borders from the Baltic to Ukraine. So Russians aren't fools, and they're good-hearted, but they
become resentful. They're worried about being attacked by the United States. In fact, you read and hear in the Russian media daily,
we are under attack by the United States. And this is a lot more real and meaningful than this crap that is being put out that Russia
somehow attacked us in 2016. I must have been sleeping. I didn't see Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and 2016. This is reckless, dangerous,
warmongering talk. It needs to stop. Russia has a better case for saying they've been attacked by us since 1991. We put our military
alliance on the front door. Maybe it's not an attack, but it looks like one, feels like one. Could be one.
Real politik. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Don't start fights in the first place. The idea that American leadership
is any better than mid-Victorian imperialism, is laughable.
AARON MATE: We hear, often, talk of Putin possibly being the richest person in the world as a result of his entanglement
with the very corruption of Russia you're speaking about
Few appear to be aware that Bill Browder is single-handedly responsible for starting, and spreading, the rumor that Putin's
net worth is $200 billion (for those who are unfamiliar with Browder, I highly recommend watching Andrei Nekrasov's documentary
titled " The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes "). Browder
appears to have first
started this rumor early in 2015 , and has repeated it ad nauseam since then, including in
his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 . While Browder has always framed the $200 billion figure as his own
estimate, that subtle qualifier has had little effect on the media's willingness to accept it as fact.
Interestingly, during the press conference at the Helsinki Summit, Putin claimed Browder sent $400 million of ill-gotten gains
to the Clinton campaign. Putin
retracted the statement and claimed to have misspoke a week or so later, however by that time the $400 million figure had
been cited by numerous media outlets around the world. I think it is at least possible that Putin purposely exaggerated the amount
of money in question as a kind of tit-for-tat response to Browder having started the rumor about his net worth being $200 billion.
The stories I saw said there was a mistranslation -- but that the figure should have $400 thousand and not $400 million. Maybe
Putin misspoke, but the $400,000 number is still significant, albeit far more reasonable.
Putin never was on the Forbes list of billionaires, btw, and his campaign finance statement comes to far less. It never seems
to occur to rabid capitalists or crooks that not everyone is like them, placing such importance on vast fortunes, or want to be
dishonest, greedy, or power hungry. Putin is only 'well off' and that seems to satisfy him just fine as he gets on with other
interests, values, and goals.
Yes, $400,000 is the revised/correct figure. My having written that "Putin retracted the statement" was not the best choice
of phrase. Also, the figure was corrected the day after it was made, not "a week or so later" as I wrote in my previous comment.
From the Russia Insider link:
Browder's criminal group used many tax evasion methods, including offshore companies. They siphoned shares and funds from
Russia worth over 1.5 billion dollars. By the way, $400,000 was transferred to the US Democratic Party's accounts from these
funds. The Russian president asked us to correct his statement from yesterday. During the briefing, he said it was $400,000,000,
not $400,000. Either way, it's still a significant amount of money.
There's something weird about the anti-Putin hysteria. Somehow, many, many people have come to believe they must demonstrate
their membership in the tribe by accepting completely unsupported assertions that go against common sense.
In a sane world we the people would be furious with the Clinton campaign, especially the D party but the R's as well, our media
(again), and our intel/police State (again). Holding them all accountable while making sure this tsunami of deception and lies
never happens again.
It's amazing even in time of the internetz those of us who really dig can only come up with a few sane voices. It's much worse
now in terms of the numbers of sane voices than it was in the run up to Iraq 2.
Regardless of broad access to far more information in the digital age, never under estimate the self-preservation instinct
of American exceptionalist mythology. There is an inverse relationship between the decline of US global primacy and increasingly
desperate quest for adventurism. Like any case of addiction, looking outward for blame/salvation is imperative in order to prevent
the mirror of self-reflection/realization from turning back onto ourselves.
we're not to believe we're not supposed to believe we're supposed to believe
Believe whatever you want, however your comment gives the impression that you came to this article because you felt the need
to push back against anything that does not conform to the liberal international order's narrative on Putin and Russia, rather
than "with an eagerness to counterbalance the media's portrayal of Putin". WRT to whataboutism, I like
Greenwald's definition of the term :
"Whataboutism": the term used to bar inquiry into whether someone adheres to the moral and behavioral standards they seek
to impose on everyone else. That's its functional definition.
aye. I've never seen it used by anyone aside from the worst Hill Trolls.
Indeed, when it was first thrown at me, I endeavored to look it up, and found that all references to it were from Hillaryites
attempting to diss apostates and heretics.
The degree of consistency and or lack of hypocrisy based on words and actions separates US from Russia to an astonishing level.
That is Russia's largest threat to US, our deceivers. The propaganda tables have turned and we are deceiving ourselves to points
of collective insanity and warmongering with a great nuclear power while we are at it. Warmongering is who we are and what we
do.
Does Russia have a GITMO, torture Chelsea Manning, openly say they want to kill Snowden and Assange? Is Russia building up
arsenals on our borders while maintaining hundreds of foreign bases and conducting several wars at any given moment while constantly
threatening to foment more wars? Is Russia dropping another trillion on nuclear arsenals? Is Russia forcing us to maintain such
an anti democratic system and an even worse, an entirely hackable electronic voting system?
You ready to destroy the world, including your own, rather than look in the mirror?
You're talking about extending Russian military power into Europe when the military spending of NATO Europe alone exceeds Russia's
by almost 5-1 (more like 12-1 when one includes the US and Canada), have about triple the number of soldiers than Russia has,
and when the Russian ground forces are numerically smaller than they have been in at least 200 years?
" to put their self-interests above those of their constituents and employees, why can't we apply this same lens to Putin and
his oligarchs?"
The oligarchs got their start under Yeltsin and his FreeMarketDemocraticReformers, whose policies were so catastrophic that
deaths were exceeding births by almost a million a year by the late '90s, with no end in sight. Central to Yeltsin's governance
was the corrupt privatization, by which means the Seven Bankers came to control the Russian economy and Russian politics.
Central to Putin's popularity are the measures he took to curb oligarchic predation in 2003-2005. Because of this, Russia's
debt:GDP ratio went from 1.0 to about 0.2, and Russia's demographic recovery began while Western analysis were still predicting
the death of Russia.
So Putin is the anti-oligarch in Russian domestic politics.
I know of many people who sacrifice their own interests for those of their children (over whom they have virtually absolute
power), family member and friends. I know of others who dedicate their lives to justice, peace, the well being of their nation,
the world, and other people -- people who find far greater meaning and satisfaction in this than in accumulating power or money.
Other people have their own goals, such as producing art, inventing interesting things, reading and learning, and don't care two
hoots about power or money as long as their immediate needs are met.
I'm cynical enough about humans without thinking the worst of everyone and every group or culture. Not everyone thinks only
of nails and wants to be hammers, or are sociopaths. There are times when people are more or less forced into taking power, or
getting more money, even if they don't want it, because they want to change things for the better or need to defend themselves.
There are people who get guns and learn how to use them only because they feel a need for defending themselves and family but
who don't like guns and don't want to shoot anyone or anything.
There are many people who do not want to be controlled and bossed around, but neither want to boss around anyone else. The
world is full of such people. If they are threatened and attacked, however, expect defensive reactions. Same as for most animals
which are not predators, and even predators will generally not attack other animals if they are not hungry or threatened -- but
that does not mean they are not competent or can be dangerous.
Capitalism is not only inherently predatory, but is inherently expansive without limits, with unlimited ambition for profits
and control. It's intrinsically very competitive and imperialist. Capitalism is also a thing which was exported to Russia, starting
soon after the Russian Revolution, which was immediately attacked and invaded by the West, and especially after the fall of the
Soviet Union. Soviet Russia had it's own problems, which it met with varying degrees of success, but were quite different from
the aggressive capitalism and imperialism of the US and Europe.
The pro-Putin propaganda is pretty interesting to witness, and of course not everything Cohen says is skewed pro-Putin – that's
what provides credibility. But "Putin kills everybody" is something NOBODY says (except Cohen, twice in one interview) – Putin
is actually pretty selective of those he decides to have killed. But of course, he doesn't kill anyone, personally – therefore
he's an innocent lamb, accidentally running Russia as a dictator.
The most recent dictator in Russian history was Boris Yeltsin, who turned tanks on his legislature while it was in the legal
and constitutional process of impeaching him, and whose policies were so catastrophic for Russians (who were dying off at the
rate of 900k/yr) that he had to steal his re-election because he had a 5% approval rating.
But he did as the US gvt told him, so I guess that makes him a Democrat.
Under Putin Russia recovered from being helpless, bankrupt & dying, but Russia has an independent foreign policy, so that makes
Putin a dictator.
"Does any sane person believe that there will ever be a Putin-signed contract provided as evidence? Does any sane person believe
that Putin actually needs to "approve" a contract rather than signaling to his oligarch/mafia hierarchy that he's unhappy about
a newspaper or journalist's reporting?"
Why do you think Putin even needs, or feels a need, to have journalists killed in the first place? I see no evidence to support
this basic assumption.
The idea of Russia poised to attack Europe is interesting, in light of the fact that they've cut their military spending by
20%. And even before that the budgets of France, Germany, and the UK combined well exceeded that of Russia, to say nothing of
the rest of NATO or the US.
Putin's record speaks for itself. This again points to the absurdity of claiming he's had reporters killed: he doesn't need
to. He has a vast amount of genuine public support because he's salvaged the country and pieced it back together after the pillaging
of the Yeltsin years. That he himself is a corrupt oligarch I have no particular doubt of. But if he just wanted to enrich himself,
he's had a very funny way of going about it. Pray tell, what are these 'other interpretations'?
"The US foreign policy has been disastrous for millions of people since world war 2. But Cohen's arguments that Russia isn't
as bad as the US is just a bunch of whattaboutism."
What countries has the Russian Federation destroyed?
Here is a fascinating essay ["Are We Reading Russia Right?"] by Nicolai N. Petro who currently holds the Silvia-Chandley Professorship
of Peace Studies and Nonviolence at the University of Rhode Island. His books include, Ukraine
in Crisis (Routledge, 2017), Crafting Democracy (Cornell, 2004), The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Harvard, 1995), and Russian
Foreign Policy, co-authored with Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Longman, 1997). A graduate of the University of Virginia, he is the recipient
of Fulbright awards to Russia and to Ukraine, as well as fellowships from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the National
Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington,
D.C., and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. As a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, he served as special assistant
for policy toward the Soviet Union in the U.S. Department of State from 1989 to 1990. In addition to scholarly publications
on Russia and Ukraine, he has written for Asia Times, American Interest, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian
(UK), The Nation, New York Times, and Wilson Quarterly. His writings have appeared frequently on the web sites of the Carnegie
Council for Ethics in International Affairs and The National Interest.
Thanks for so much for this. Great stuff. Cohen says the emperor has no clothes so naturally the empire doesn't want him on
television. I believe he has been on CNN one or two times and I saw him once on the PBS Newshour where the interviewer asked skeptical
questions with a pained and skeptical look. He seems to be the only prominent person willing to stand up and call bs on the Russia
hate. There are plenty of pundits and commentators who do that but not many Princeton professors.
It has been said in recent years that the greatest failure of American foreign policy was the invasion of Iraq. I think that
they are wrong. The greatest failure, in my opinion, is to push both China and Russia together into a semi-official pact against
American ambitions. In the same way that the US was able to split China from the USSR back in the seventies, the best option was
for America to split Russia from China and help incorporate them into the western system. The waters for that idea have been so
fouled by the Russia hysteria, if not dementia, that that is no longer a possibility. I just wish that the US would stop sowing
dragon's teeth – it never ends well.
The best option, but the "American exceptionalists" went nuts. Also, the usual play book of stoking fears of the "yellow menace"
would have been too on the nose. Americans might not buy it, and there was a whole cottage industry of "the rising China threat"
except the potential consumer market place and slave labor factories stopped that from happening.
Bringing Russia into the West effectively means Europe, and I think that creates a similar dynamic to a Russian/Chinese pact.
The basic problem with the EU is its led by a relatively weak but very German power which makes the EU relatively weak or controllable
as long as the German electorate is relatively sedate. I think they still need the international structures run by the U.S. to
maintain their dominance. What Russia and the pre-Erdogan Turkey (which was never going to be admitted to the EU) presented was
significant upsets to the existing EU order with major balances to Germany which I always believed would make the EU potentially
more dynamic. Every decision wouldn't require a pilgrimage to Berlin. The British were always disinterested. The French had made
arrangements with Germany, and Italy is still Italy. Putting Russia or Turkey (pre-Erdogan) would have disrupted this arrangement.
The Crimea voted to be annexed by Russia by a clear majority. The US overran Hawaii with total disregard for the wishes of
the native population. Your comparison is invalid.
"Putin's finger prints are all over the Balkan fiasco".How is that with Putin only becoming president in 2000 and the Nato
bombing started way beforehand. It's ridiculous to think that Putin had any major influence at that time as govenor or director
of the domestic intelligence service on what was going during the bombing of NATO on Belgrad. Even Gerhard Schroeder, then chancellor
of the Federal Republic of Germany, admitted in an interview in 2014 with a major German Newspaper (Die Zeit) that this invasion
of Nato was a fault and against international law!
Can you concrete what you mean by "fingerprints" or is this just another platitudes?
I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].
Symptoms include:
o Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently absurd MSM propaganda. For example,
the meme that releasing factual information about actual election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging
of its own nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;
o Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on and lying to the American people,
spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer
Brennan;
o Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples of "norms-respecting Republican
patriots";
o Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating Russian stooge.
The title sounds like it was written yesterday, despite the fact the article is two years
ago. That suggest that Russophobia is the official policy of both parties. Why they are trying to
remove Trump, who folded after thee month in power, is less clear. May be the crimes they
committed are such that anybody in power then Clinton gang is very dangerous for them.
Please looks also at selected comments. They are definitely sounds as written yesterday.
Notable quotes:
"... Congressional Democrats and their media allies have renewed their offensive in the past two weeks. Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) even argues that the evidence already amassed seems to be enough to warrant President Trump's impeachment. It was especially notable that no prominent Democrat denounced such an inflammatory accusation. Indeed, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee appear to be escalating their concept of what constitutes a thorough investigation, now insisting that any contact by advisers to the Trump campaign with any Russian official be subject to scrutiny. ..."
"... They and their neoconservative allies also insist on a laser-like focus on the alleged misdeeds of the Trump people and nothing else. ..."
"... Such an outrageous accusation might have made even the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy blush. That it came from a prominent Republican also suggests that the current bout of Russophobia is not purely a partisan phenomenon. The broader implications are extremely worrisome. A campaign appears to be underway to intimidate and silence critics of the current policy toward Russia, and even policy regarding NATO. ..."
"... The track record on previous group think on such decisions as the military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Libya also confirms that it can produce truly tragic results. Creating a similar situation of stifling debate regarding U.S. policy toward a nation armed with thousands of nuclear weapons is the essence of folly. ..."
or a brief period in April, it appeared that the campaign that Democrats and
neo-conservative Republicans were waging for a comprehensive investigation into the Trump
campaign's alleged collusion with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential
election had peaked and was beginning to ebb. The Trump administration's decision to launch
missile strikes against a Syrian air base despite Russian President Vladimir Putin vehement
objections to the assault on his ally, quieted accusations that Trump was Putin's puppet.
Indeed, hawks in bothparties praised
Trump for taking action in Syria, and the president's supporters at Fox News and elsewhere
contended that the U.S. attack discredited the notion that he was guilty of appeasing
Russia.
But the hiatus in the allegations of collusion was only temporary. Worse, the resurgent
anti-Russia hysteria has broader, ominous implications for U.S. foreign policy and the health
of political discourse in the United States.
Congressional Democrats and their media allies have renewed their offensive in the past
two weeks. Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) even argues
that the evidence already amassed seems to be enough to warrant President Trump's impeachment.
It was especially notable that no prominent Democrat denounced such an inflammatory accusation.
Indeed, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee appear to be escalating their concept of
what constitutes a thorough investigation, now insisting that any contact by advisers to the
Trump campaign with any Russian official be subject to scrutiny.
They and their neoconservative allies also insist on a laser-like focus on the alleged
misdeeds of the Trump people and nothing else. The current scandal erupted full force when
leaked reports from the U.S. intelligence community that newly installed National Security
Adviser Michael Flynn had met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign and
discussed sensitive issues, including the ongoing U.S. economic sanctions against Russia, thus
apparently undermining the Obama administration's policies. Flynn's action showed poor
judgment, and his attempt to conceal the contact from Vice President Mike Pence, was even
worse. A recent Washington Post article
contends that Flynn went ahead with his meeting even though senior Trump campaign officials
cautioned against it and warned him that it was almost certain that U.S. intelligence agencies
were electronically monitoring Kislyak and all of his contacts.
Examining Flynn's behavior is appropriate, but even that investigation should focus not only
on his questionable Russia contacts but on the leak of the intelligence report outing him.
Indeed, an intelligence official's unmasking the identity of an American citizen in that
fashion constitutes a felony. However, except for perfunctory statements from a few Democratic
members of Congress that such an illegal leak also needed to be investigated, little interest
has emerged in actually doing so.
Such an outrageous accusation might have made even the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy
blush. That it came from a prominent Republican also suggests that the current bout of
Russophobia is not purely a partisan phenomenon. The broader implications are extremely
worrisome. A campaign appears to be underway to intimidate and silence critics of the current
policy toward Russia, and even policy regarding NATO.
Attempting to enshrine Washington's group think on crucial issues is unhealthy for any
democratic system. The track record on previous group think on such decisions as the
military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Libya also confirms that it can produce truly
tragic results. Creating a similar situation of stifling debate regarding U.S. policy toward a
nation armed with thousands of nuclear weapons is the essence of folly.
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor
at the National Interest, is the author of 10 books, the contributing editor of 10 books, and
the author of more than 650 articles on international affairs.
Mr. Carpenter makes the excellent point that political sobriety, rational thought and
action, and responsible dialogue is missing from the cadre of drum beating anti-Trump die
hearts, who are using the made-up Trump collusion story to destroy the Trump
presidency.
Their kamikaze style political tactics will end badly for the democrats, who will be
pulverized during the next election for neglecting the people’s business in favor
of political scandal, turmoil and extremist partisan behavior.
Keep it up Chuck, you are working overtime to insure greater Republican gains.
Actually, I am an agent of all people who disapprove of Washington’s willingness
to use nuclear war in order to establish Washington’s hegemony over the world, but
let us understand what it means to be a “Russian agent.”
It means to respect international law, which Washington does not. It means to respect
life, which Washington does not. It means to respect the national interests of other
countries, which Washington does not. It means to respond to provocations with diplomacy
and requests for cooperation, which Washington does not. But Russia does. Clearly, a
“Russian agent” is a moral person who wants to preserve life and the national
identity and dignity of other peoples.
Aren't people in the US getting tired of the Russia bashing? Really. And don't the
Russia bashers know that the longer this goes on, without evidence, the public is slowly
waking up to the truth. Now to blame Russia for the US failings in Afghanistan is beyond
ridiculous. Keep it up, kiddies.
The success of the web of lies that got 65 to 75 percent of Americans to believe that
Saddam had WMD and was responsible for 9/11 only encourages these regime-change lunatics.
All they have to do now is articulate the equivalent of Bush’s “We cannot
wait for the smoking gun, which might come in the form of a mushroom cloud,”
— i.e., we don’t need evidence, we just need to generate enough fear —
and they’ll have all the public support they could possibly need to commence with
their program of regime change at home, followed by regime change in Russia. That’s
the diabolical beauty of governing a population through the politics of fear —
which has been the practise since the beginning of the first Cold War.
It's interesting that the Democrats and the media didn't seem very interested in
Hillary Clinton's foreign ties (and the money she received), or the potential blackmail
that could have been tied to any of her "missing" emails that the Russians and others
probably have.
I can't share it with you because it's classified and I don't (unlike Trumps
administration) believe in sharing sensitive information with Russian stooges.
Russia [aka Soviet Union] was simply a "red herring" (pun intended) during the Cold
War days when the Left always blamed American first. Now post-Soviet autocratic Russia is
a lethal menace behind every GOP trash can. The irony is so rich.
I am old enough to have a conscious memory of the end days of the McCarthy smears.
This seems a lot like that. Wild charges, no evidence. Senator McCarthy always "had" a
list of 57, 95, or 212 active communists in the State Department, he just never got
around to disclosing names. Evidence? The Democrats don't seem to need it. Just
investigate, investigate, investigate. Anything to distract from the true reasons for
Clinton's loss. The party of FDR wrote off the white working class. They thought they'd
have enough minority and female voters to win. They didn't.
Oh, oh. Mike Rogers, Obama's head of the NSA is testifying that the NSA did NOT have
high confidence that the wusskies interfered to help Trump win. I wonder if Boris
Badanoff and Natasha threatened him and his family?
Look, Democrats just cannot bring themselves to accept the blame for their loss, no
surprise, they truly believe they are on the right side of history, Cuba, North Korea,
and venezuela not withstanding. But the aging cold warriors, like McNasty, pine for the
days when people used to seek their opinion on the USSR.
Thank you for an excellent article. Building a sense of hysteria against the one
country in the world with as many nuclear weapons as us is truly foolish and
dangerous.
And the best part in this fishing expedition of democRATS and politicized government
agencies is that they have found NOTHING, only the daily, weekly and monthly fabrications
cooked backstage by MSM and accomplices agents leaning or part of Obanus regime..
Really good piece. So why does DC go bonkers over Russia but not deeper and more
problematic connections of politicians and public figures such as with Turkey, China, or
Israel? It's all about the emails and Hillary's lame excuses.
I find it ironic because during the Cold War, it was generally Republicans who opposed
the Soviet Union and its foreign policy the most strongly, with both language and action,
while Democrats favored conciliation with American rivals. Nowadays, however,
conservatives seem more pro-Russia while liberals seem much more hostile.
Let's be realistic, given the enormous number of leaks about Trump, if there was
anything to this we would know by now.
That's why I say :. Bring on the investigation!
It will just end in the entire media/Dem establishment looking bad.
Also:. Why would Putin want a US president that has a very aggressive pro drilling
stance and who wants a larger US military?
I would imagine it's the last thing he wants. Putin would probably *VASTLY* prefer
Sanders who is anti-energy, anti-military and honeymooned in Moscow during the cold war
as a political statement.
Buhaha You assume that I am a russian/live in Russia because I dare (oh, by the Gods
what a sacrilege!) to support russian foreign policy..
This alone is a good example of the delusional and zealot-like nature of russophobes such
as you..
Learn my uneducated "friend" that I live in an EU country, born and raised here-and
judging by the median US salary there is a great chance I make more $$ than you..But then
again only a cretin would judge a country based solely on these metrics..(Well, a cretin
and a russophobe in your case..)
Americans don't see it, but this anti-russian craze is creating serious pressures in
Europe, where voters more and more consider EU governments' blind following of U.S.
foreign policy as dangerous to their interests. Contrary to U.S. establishment, we
Europeans are not supremacists who believe that only their opinions and ways are the
right ones and the whole world needs to bow down to them. Remember what is the basis of
democracy? It's pluralism of opinions and civilised discussion. If Washington continues
this ideological war for longer time, it may cause serious problems for NATO.
Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another. It may also
include prejudice ,
discrimination , or
antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity , or the belief that
members of different races or ethnicities should be treated differently. [1][2][3] Modern
variants of racism are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between
peoples. These views can take the form of social actions , practices or beliefs, or
political systems
in which different races are ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on
presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. [2][1][4]
Notable quotes:
"... Given the Democratic Party's reliance on the Russia narrative, these types of comments are likely to continue and worsen as the highly polarized investigations continue ..."
During an interview with NBC's
Chuck Todd on May 28, Clapper said, "If you put that in context with everything else we
knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election," he said. "And just the historical practices of the Russians, who
typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So, we were concerned."
It's unclear what Clapper meant or what evidence he has to suggest that Russians are "almost
genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor." His comments are xenophobic towards an
entire ethnicity and are far beyond criticism of Putin and the Russian government.
His comments go far into neo-McCarthyist territory, which many critics and skeptics have
warned the Democratic Party and intelligence community against. Clapper jumped from explaining
the investigation into Russia's role in the election to propagating an unhealthy and unfounded
definition of the Russian people. These comments are the type of sentiments that provoke such
policies as deporting all Russians from the United States, severing all ties with Russians,
banning all multi-national corporations from engaging in business with Russians, dispelling the
Russian Embassy, and setting off a chain of events that exponentially increase the likelihood
of military conflict between two nuclear superpowers.
In the United States alone, nearly three million people claim
direct Russian ancestry and almost one million people speak Russian.
However, Russia's interference in the election and the current political climate have fostered
an environment in which Clapper could say this on national television without anyone batting an
eye. Chuck Todd ignored the comment and proceeded with the interview as though Clapper's
response was normal.
The mainstream media have contributed to this Russiophobic rhetoric by perpetuating,
elevating and sensationalizing the Russia narrative. Several hucksters and conspiracy theorists
have gained massive followings from crying Russia at every opportunity, such as British
Conservative Louise Mensch and
former Bill Clinton volunteer director Claude Taylo r, who continue duping followers into
believing they have exclusive sources or insight into the "smoking gun" on Trump's ties with
Russia. By interviewing them, the mainstream media have irresponsibly elevated these people as
reliable sources on the subject. The New York Times even published an op-ed by Mensch,
who has furthered baseless claims that Russia
was behind Anthony Weiner's sexting crimes and has called
Bernie Sanders a "Russian agent."
Given the Democratic Party's reliance on the Russia narrative, these types of comments
are likely to continue and worsen as the highly polarized investigations continue .
I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is
Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].
Symptoms include:
Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently
absurd MSM propaganda. For example, the meme that releasing factual information about actual
election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging of its own
nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;
Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on
and lying to the American people, spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and
assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer Brennan;
Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples
of "norms-respecting Republican patriots";
Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating
Russian stooge.
"The Campaign Press: Members of the 10 Percent, Reporting for the One Percent" [Matt
Taibbi,
Rolling Stone ]. "Anyone who's worked in the business (or read Manufacturing Consent)
knows nobody calls editors to red-pencil text.
The pressure comes at the point of hire. If you're the type who thinks Jeff Bezos should
be thrown out of an airplane, or that it's a bad look for a DC newspaper to be owned by a
major intelligence contractor, you won't rise.
Meanwhile, the Post has become terrific at promoting Jennifer Rubins and Max Boots.
Reporters watch as good investigative journalism about serious structural problems dies on
the vine, while mountains of column space are devoted to trivialities like Trump tweets
and/or simplistic partisan storylines.
Nobody needs to pressure anyone. We all know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in
newsrooms. Trump may have accelerated distaste for the press, but he didn't create it. He
sniffed out existing frustrations and used them to rally anger toward 'elites' to his side.
The criticism works because national media are elites, ten-percenters working for
one-percenters.
The longer people in the business try to deny it, the more it will be fodder
for politicians. Sanders wasn't the first, and won't be the last."
• Yep. I'm so glad
Rolling Stone has Matt Taibbi on-board. Until advertisers black-list "the One Percent," I
suppose.
"... Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name. ..."
"... In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets, also funded by the FO. ..."
"... "The Guardian is struggling for money" Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets. ..."
OffGuardian already covered the Global Media Freedom Conference, our article
Hypocrisy Taints UK's
Media Freedom Conference , was meant to be all there was to say. A quick note on the obvious hypocrisy of this event. But, in
the writing, I started to see more than that. This event is actually creepy. Let's just look back at one of the four "main themes"
of this conference:
Building trust in media and countering disinformation
"Countering disinformation"? Well, that's just another word for censorship. This is proven by their refusal to allow Sputnik or RT
accreditation. They claim RT "spreads disinformation" and they "countered" that by barring them from attending. "Building trust"?
In the post-Blair world of PR newspeak, "building trust" is just another way of saying "making people believe us" (the word usage
is actually interesting, building trust not earning trust). The whole conference is shot through with this language
that just feels off. Here is CNN's
Christiane Amanpour :
Our job is to be truthful, not neutral we need to take a stand for the truth, and never to create a false moral or factual equivalence."
Being "truthful not neutral" is one of Amanpour's
personal sayings
, she obviously thinks it's clever. Of course, what it is is NewSpeak for "bias". Refusing to cover evidence of The White
Helmets staging rescues, Israel arming ISIS or other inconvenient facts will be defended using this phrase – they will literally
claim to only publish "the truth", to get around impartiality and then set about making up whatever "truth" is convenient. Oh, and
if you don't know what "creating a false moral quivalence is", here I'll demonstrate: MSM: Putin is bad for shutting down critical
media. OffG: But you're supporting RT being banned and Wikileaks being shut down. BBC: No. That's not the same. OffG: It seems the
same. BBC: It's not. You're creating a false moral equivalence . Understand now? You "create a false moral equivalence" by
pointing out mainstream media's double standards. Other ways you could mistakenly create a "false moral equivalence": Bringing up
Gaza when the media talk about racism. Mentioning Saudi Arabia when the media preach about gay rights. Referencing the US coup in
Venezuela when the media work themselves into a froth over Russia's "interference in our democracy" Talking about the invasion of
Iraq. Ever. OR Pointing out that the BBC is state funded, just like RT. These are all no-longer flagrant examples of the media's
double standards, and if you say they are , you're "creating a false moral equivalence" and the media won't have to allow
you (or anyone who agrees with you) air time or column inches to disagree. Because they don't have a duty to be neutral or show both
sides, they only have a duty to tell "the truth" as soon as the government has told them what that is. Prepare to see both those
phrases – or variations there of – littering editorials in the Guardian and the Huffington Post in the coming months. Along
with people bemoaning how "fake news outlets abuse the notion of impartiality" by "being even handed between liars the truth tellers".
(I've been doing this site so long now, I have a Guardian-English dictionary in my head).
Equally dodgy-sounding buzz-phrases litter topics on the agenda. "Eastern Europe and Central Asia: building an integrated support
system for journalists facing hostile environments" , this means pumping money into NGOs to fund media that will criticize our
"enemies" in areas of strategic importance. It means flooding money into the anti-government press in Hungary, or Iran or (of course),
Russia. That is ALL it means. I said in my earlier article I don't know what "media sustainability" even means, but I feel I can
take a guess. It means "save the government mouthpieces". The Guardian is struggling for money, all print media are, TV news
is getting lower viewing figures all the time. "Building media sustainability" is code for "pumping public money into traditional
media that props up the government" or maybe "getting people to like our propaganda". But the worst offender on the list is, without
a doubt "Navigating Disinformation"
"Navigating Disinformation" was a 1 hour panel from the second day of the conference. You can watch it embedded above if you really
feel the need. I already did, so you don't have to. The panel was chaired by Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Foreign Minister. The
members included the Latvian Foreign Minister, a representative of the US NGO Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Ukrainian
Deputy Minister of Information
Have you guessed what "disinformation" they're going to be talking about? I'll give you a clue: It begins with R. Freeland, chairing
the panel, kicks it off by claiming that "disinformation isn't for any particular aim" . This is a very common thing for establishment
voices to repeat these days, which makes it all the more galling she seems to be pretending its is her original thought. The reason
they have to claim that "disinformation" doesn't have a "specific aim" is very simple: They don't know what they're going to call
"disinformation" yet. They can't afford to take a firm position, they need to keep their options open. They need to give themselves
the ability to describe any single piece of information or political opinion as "disinformation." Left or right. Foreign or domestic.
"Disinformation" is a weaponised term that is only as potent as it is vague. So, we're one minute in, and all "navigating disinformation"
has done is hand the State an excuse to ignore, or even criminalise, practically anything it wants to. Good start. Interestingly,
no one has actually said the word "Russia" at this point. They have talked about "malign actors" and "threats to democracy", but
not specifically Russia. It is SO ingrained in these people that "propaganda"= " Russian propaganda" that they don't need
to say it.
The idea that NATO as an entity, or the individual members thereof, could also use "disinformation" has not just been dismissed
it was literally never even contemplated. Next Freeland turns to Edgars Rinkēvičs, her Latvian colleague, and jokes about always
meeting at NATO functions. The Latvians know "more than most" about disinformation, she says. Rinkēvičs says disinformation is nothing
new, but that the methods of spreading it are changing then immediately calls for regulation of social media. Nobody disagrees. Then
he talks about the "illegal annexation of Crimea", and claims the West should outlaw "paid propaganda" like RT and Sputnik. Nobody
disagrees. Then he says that Latvia "protected" their elections from "interference" by "close cooperation between government agencies
and social media companies". Everyone nods along. If you don't find this terrifying, you're not paying attention. They don't say
it, they probably don't even realise they mean it, but when they talk about "close cooperation with social media networks", they
mean government censorship of social media. When they say "protecting" their elections they're talking about rigging them. It only
gets worse. The next step in the Latvian master plan is to bolster "traditional media".
The problems with traditional media, he says, are that journalists aren't paid enough, and don't keep up to date with all the
"new tricks". His solution is to "promote financing" for traditional media, and to open more schools like the "Baltic Centre of Media
Excellence", which is apparently a totally real thing .
It's a training centre which teaches young journalists about "media literacy" and "critical thinking". You can read their depressingly
predictable list of "donors" here . I truly wish I was joking. Next
up is Courtney Radsch from CPJ – a US-backed NGO, who notionally "protect journalists", but more accurately spread pro-US propaganda.
(Their token effort to "defend"
RT and Sputnik when they were barred from the conference was contemptible).
She talks for a long time without saying much at all. Her revolutionary idea is that disinformation could be countered if everyone
told the truth. Inspiring. Beata Balogova, Journalist and Editor from Slovakia, gets the ship back on course – immediately suggesting
politicians should not endorse "propaganda" platforms. She shares an anecdote about "a prominent Slovakian politician" who gave exclusive
interviews to a site that is "dubiously financed, we assume from Russia". They assume from Russia. Everyone nods.
It's like they don't even hear themselves.
Then she moves on to Hungary. Apparently, Orban has "created a propaganda machine" and produced "antisemitic George Soros posters".
No evidence is produced to back-up either of these claims. She thinks advertisers should be pressured into not giving money to "fake
news sites". She calls for "international pressure", but never explains exactly what that means. The stand-out maniac on this panel
is Emine Dzhaparova, the Ukrainian First Deputy Minister of Information Policy. (She works for the Ministry of Information – nicknamed
the Ministry of Truth, which was formed in 2014 to "counter lies about Ukraine". Even
The Guardian thought that sounded dodgy.)
She talks very fast and, without any sense of irony, spills out a story that shoots straight through "disinformation" and becomes
"incoherent rambling". She claims that Russian citizens are so brainwashed you'll never be able to talk to them, and that Russian
"cognitive influence" is "toxic like radiation." Is this paranoid, quasi-xenophobic nonsense countered? No. Her fellow panelists
nod and chuckle. On top of that, she just lies. She lies over and over and over again. She claims Russia is locking up Crimean Tartars
"just for being muslims", nobody questions her. She says the war in Ukraine has killed 13,000 people, but doesn't mention that her
side is responsible for over 80% of civilian deaths.
She says only 30% of Crimeans voted in the referendum, and that they were "forced". A fact not supported by
any polls done by either side in the last
four years, and any referenda held
on the peninsula any time in the last last 30 year. It's simply a lie. Nobody asks her about the journalists
killed in Ukraine since their
glorious Maidan Revolution . Nobody questions the fact that she works for something called the "Ministry of Information". Nobody
does anything but nod and smile as the "countering disinformation" panel becomes just a platform for spreading total lies.
When everyone on the panel has had their ten minutes on the soapbox, Freeland asks for recommendations for countering this "threat"
– here's the list:
Work to distinguish "free speech" from "propaganda", when you find propaganda there must be a "strong reaction".
Pressure advertisers to abandon platforms who spread misinformation.
Regulate social media.
Educate journalists at special schools.
Start up a "Ministry of Information" and have state run media that isn't controlled, like in Ukraine.
This is the Global Conference on Media Freedom and all these six people want to talk about is how to control what can be said,
and who can say it. They single only four countries out for criticism: Hungary, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Russia .and Russia takes
up easily 90% of that. They mention only two media outlets by name: RT and Sputnik. This wasn't a panel on disinformation, it was
a public attack forum – a month's worth of 2 minutes of hate. These aren't just shills on this stage, they are solid gold idiots,
brainwashed to the point of total delusion.
They are the dangerous glassy eyes of a Deep State that never questions itself, never examines itself, and will do anything it
wants, to anyone it wants whilst happily patting itself on the back for its superior morality. They don't know, they don't care.
They're true believers. Terrifyingly dead inside. Talking about state censorship and re-education camps under a big sign that says
"Freedom". And that's just one talk. Just one panel in a 2 day itinerary filled to the brim with similarly soul-dead servants of
authority. Truly, perfectly Orwellian.
Read and be appalled at what America is up to .keep for further reference. We are in danger.
Tim Jenkins
It would serve Ms. Amanpour well, to relax, rewind & review her own interview with Sergei Lavrov:-
Then she might see why Larry King could stomach the appalling corporate dictatorship, even to the core of False & Fake recording
of 'our' "History of the National Security State" , No More
Amanpour was forced to laugh uncontrollably, when confronted with Lavrov's humorous interpretations of various legal aspects
of decency & his Judgement of others' politicians and 'Pussy Riots' >>> if you haven't seen it, it is to be recommended, the whole
interview, if nothing else but to study the body language and micro-facial expressions, coz' a belly up laugh is not something
anybody can easily control or even feign that first spark of cognition in her mind, as she digests Lavrov's response :- hilarious
Einstein
A GE won't solve matters since we have a Government of Occupation behind a parliament of puppets.
Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which
is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name.
In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business
of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign
countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets,
also funded by the FO.
Pryce's ventriloquist's dummy in parliament, the pompous Alan Duncan, announced another £10 million of public money for this
odious brainwashing programme.
Tim Jenkins
That panel should be nailed & plastered over, permanently:-
and as wall paper, 'Abstracts of New Law' should be pasted onto a collage of historic extracts from the Guardian, in
offices that issue journalistic licenses, comprised of 'Untouchables' :-
A professional habitat, to damp any further 'Freeland' amplification & resonance,
of negative energy from professional incompetence.
Francis Lee
Apropos of the redoubtable Ms Freeland, Canada's Foreign Secretary.
The records now being opened by the Polish government in Warsaw reveal that Freeland's maternal grandfather Michael (Mikhailo)
Chomiak was a Nazi collaborator from the beginning to the end of the war. He was given a powerful post, money, home and car by
the German Army in Cracow, then the capital of the German administration of the Galician region. His principal job was editor
in chief and publisher of a newspaper the Nazis created. His printing plant and other assets had been stolen from a Jewish newspaper
publisher, who was then sent to die in the Belzec concentration camp. During the German Army's winning phase of the war, Chomiak
celebrated in print the Wehrmacht's "success" at killing thousands of US Army troops. As the German Army was forced into retreat
by the Soviet counter-offensive, Chomiak was taken by the Germans to Vienna, where he continued to publish his Nazi propaganda,
at the same time informing for the Germans on other Ukrainians. They included fellow Galician Stepan Bandera, whose racism against
Russians Freeland has celebrated in print, and whom the current regime in Kiev has turned into a national hero.
Those Ukrainian 'Refugees' admitted to Canada in 1945 were almost certainly members of the 14th Waffen SS Division Galizia 1.
These Ukie collaboraters – not to be confused with the other Ukie Nazi outfit – Stepan Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army -were
held responsible for the massacre of many Poles in the Lviv area the most infamous being carried out in the Polish village of
Huta Pienacka. In the massacre, the village was destroyed and between 500] and 1,000 of the inhabitants were killed. According
to Polish accounts, civilians were locked in barns that were set on fire while those attempting to flee were killed. That's about
par for the course.
Canada's response was as follows:
The Canadian Deschênes Commission was set up to investigate alleged war crimes committed by the collaborators
Memorial to SS-Galizien division in Chervone, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine
The Canadian "Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes" of October 1986, by the Honourable Justice Jules Deschênesconcluded that in
relation to membership in the Galicia Division:
''The Galicia Division (14. Waffen grenadier division der SS [gal.1]) should not be indicted as a group. The members of Galicia
Division were individually screened for security purposes before admission to Canada. Charges of war crimes of Galicia Division
have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this
Commission. Further, in the absence of evidence of participation or knowledge of specific war crimes, mere membership in the Galicia
Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.''
However, the Commission's conclusion failed to acknowledge or heed the International Military Tribunal's verdict at the Nuremberg
Trials, in which the entire Waffen-SSorganisation was declared a "criminal organization" guilty of war crimes. Also, the Deschênes
Commission in its conclusion only referenced the division as 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr.1), thus in legal
terms, only acknowledging the formation's activity after its name change in August 1944, while the massacre of Poles in Huta Pieniacka,
Pidkamin and Palikrowy occurred when the division was called SS Freiwilligen Division "Galizien". Nevertheless, a subsequent review
by Canada's Minister of Justice again confirmed that members of the Division were not implicated in war crimes.
Yes, the west looks after its Nazis and even makes them and their descendants political figureheads.
mark
Most of these people are so smugly and complacently convinced of their own moral superiority that they just can't see the hypocrisy
and doublethink involved in the event.
Meanwhile Owen Jones has taken to Twitter to rubbish allegations that a reign of terror exists at Guardian Towers – the socialist
firebrand is quoted as saying 'journalists are free to say whatever they like, so long as it doesn't stray too far from Guardian-groupthink'.
Good analysis Kit, of the cognitive dissonant ping pong being played out by Nazi sympathisers such as Hunt and Freeland.
The echo chamber of deceit is amplified again by the selective use of information and the ignoring of relevant facts, such
as the miss reporting yesterday by Reuters of the Italian Neo-Nazi haul of weapons by the police, having not Russian but Ukrainian
links.
Not a word in the WMSM about this devious miss-reporting as the creation of fake news in action. But what would you expect?
Living as I do in Russia I can assure anyone reading this that the media freedom here is on a par with the West and somewhat
better as there is no paranoia about a fictitious enemy – Russians understand that the West is going through an existential crisis
(Brexit in the UK, Trump and the Clinton war of sameness in the US and Macron and Merkel in the EU). A crisis of Liberalism as
the failed life-support of capitalism. But hey, why worry about the politics when there is bigger fish to fry. Such as who will
pay me to dance?
The answer is clear from what Kit has writ. The government will pay the piper. How sweet.
I'd like to thank Kit for sitting through such a turgid masquerade and as I'm rather long in the tooth I do remember the old
BBC schools of journalism in Yelsin's Russia. What I remember is that old devious Auntie Beeb was busy training would be hopefuls
in the art of discretion regarding how the news is formed, or formulated.
In other words your audience. And it ain't the public
The British government's "Online Harms" White Paper has a whole section devoted to "disinformation" (ie, any facts, opinions,
analyses, evaluations, critiques that are critical of the elite's actual disinformation). If these proposals become law, the government
will have effective control over the Internet and we will be allowed access to their disinformation, shop and watch cute cat videos.
Question This
The liberal news media & hypocrisy, who would have ever thought you'd see those words in the same sentence.
But what do you expect from professional liars, politicians & 'their' free press?
Can this shit show get any worse? Yes, The other day I wrote to my MP regards the SNP legislating against the truth, effectively
making it compulsory to lie! Mr Blackford as much as called me a transphobic & seemed to go to great length publishing his neo-liberal
ideological views in some scottish rag, on how right is wrong & fact is turned into fiction & asked only those that agreed with
him contact him.
Tim Jenkins
"The science or logical consistency of true premise, cannot take place or bear fruit, when all communication and information is
'marketised and weaponised' to a mindset of possession and control."
B.Steere
Mikalina
I saw, somewhere (but can't find it now) a law or a prospective law which goes under the guise of harassment of MPs to include
action against constituents who 'pester' them.
I only emailed him once! That's hardly harassment. Anyway I sent it with proton-mail via vpn & used a false postcode using only
my first name so unlikely my civil & sincere correspondence will see me locked up for insisting my inalienable rights of freedom
of speech & beliefs are protected. But there again the state we live in, i may well be incarcerated for life, for such an outrageous
expectation.
Where to?
"The Guardian is struggling for money"
Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets.
Harry Stotle
Its the brazen nature of the conference that is especially galling, but what do you expect when crooks and liars no longer feel
they even have to pretend?
Nothing will change so long as politicians (or their shady backers) are never held to account for public assets diverted toward
a rapacious off-shore economic system, or the fact millions of lives have been shattered by the 'war on terror' and its evil twin,
'humanatarian regime change' (while disingenuous Labour MPs wail about the 'horrors' of antisemitism rather than the fact their
former leader is a key architect of the killings).
Kit remains a go-to voice when deconstructing claims made by political figures who clearly regard the MSM as a propaganda vehicle
for promoting western imperialism – the self-satisfied smugness of cunts like Jeremy Cunt stand in stark contrast to a real journalist
being tortured by the British authorities just a few short miles away.
It's a sligtly depressing thought but somebody has the unenviable task of monitoring just how far our politicians have drifted
from the everyday concerns of the 'just about managing' and as I say Mr Knightly does a fine job in informing readers what the
real of agenda of these media love-ins are actually about – it goes without saying a very lengthy barge pole is required when
the Saudis are invited but not Russia.
Where to?
This Media Freedom Conference is surely a creepy theatre of the absurd.
It is a test of what they can get away with.
Mikalina
Yep. Any soviet TV watcher would recognise this immediately. Message? THIS is the reality – and you are powerless.
mark
When are they going to give us the Ministry of Truth we so desperately need?
"... We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.' ..."
"... Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of the public. ..."
"... All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria, blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included bankers, financiers, industrialists, and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the ill-fated beer-hall putsch. (See here , and here .) ..."
"... The purpose of this propaganda barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering business interests.' ..."
Here was, of course, another surreal spectacle, this time courtesy of one of the Deep State's most dangerous, reviled, and divisive
figures, a notable protagonist in the Russia-Gate conspiracy, and America's most senior diplomat no less.
Not only is it difficult to accept that the former CIA Director actually believes what he is saying, well might we ask, "Who can
believe Mike Pompeo?"
And here's also someone whose manifest cynicism, hypocrisy, and chutzpah would embarrass the much-derided
scribes and Pharisees of Biblical days.
We have Pompeo on record recently in a rare moment of
honesty admitting – whilst laughing his ample ass off, as if recalling some "Boy's Own Adventure" from his misspent youth with a
bunch of his mates down at the local pub – that under his watch as CIA Director:
We lied, cheated, we stole we had entire training courses.'
It may have been one of the few times in his wretched existence that Pompeo didn't speak with a forked tongue.
At all events, his candour aside, we can assume safely that this reactionary, monomaniacal, Christian Zionist 'end-timer' passed
all the Company's "training courses" with flying colours.
According to Matthew Rosenberg
of the New York Times, all this did not stop Pompeo however from name-checking Wikileaks when it served his own interests. Back
in 2016 at the height of the election campaign, he had ' no compunction about pointing people toward emails stolen* by Russian hackers
from the Democratic National Committee and then posted by WikiLeaks."
[NOTE: Rosenberg's omission of the word "allegedly" -- as in "emails allegedly stolen" -- is a dead giveaway of bias on his part
(a journalistic Freudian slip perhaps?), with his employer
being one of those MSM marques leading the charge with the "Russian Collusion" 'story'. For a more insightful view of the source
of these emails and the skullduggery and thuggery that attended Russia-Gate, readers are encouraged to
check this out.]
And this is of course The Company we're talking about, whose past and present relationship with the media might be summed up in
two words:
Operation Mockingbird (OpMock). Anyone vaguely familiar with the well-documented Grand Deception that was OpMock, arguably the
CIA's most enduring, insidious, and successful
psy-ops gambit, will know what
we're talking about. (See
here ,
here ,
here , and
here .) At its most basic, this operation was all about propaganda and censorship, usually operating in tandem to ensure all
the bases are covered.
After opining that the MSM is 'totally infiltrated' by the CIA and various other agencies, for his part former NSA whistleblower
William Binney recently added , ' When it
comes to national security, the media only talk about what the administration wants you to hear, and basically suppress any other
statements about what's going on that the administration does not want get public. The media is basically the lapdogs for the government.'
We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.'
In order to provide a broader and deeper perspective, we should now consider the views of a few others on the subjects at hand,
along with some history. In a 2013 piece musing on the modern significance of the practice, my compatriot John Pilger
ecalled a time when he met
Leni Riefenstahl
back in 70s and asked her about her films that 'glorified the Nazis'.
Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger
noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's
spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the
"submissive void" of the public.
All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria,
blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also
impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included
bankers, financiers, industrialists,
and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the
ill-fated
beer-hall
putsch. (See
here , and here .)
" Triumph " apparently still resonates today. To the surprise of few one imagines, such was the impact of the film -- as casually
revealed in the excellent 2018 Alexis Bloom documentary Divide and
Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes -- it elicited no small amount of admiration from arguably the single most influential propagandist
of recent times.
[Readers might wish to check out Russell Crowe's recent portrayal of Ailes in Stan's mini-series
The Loudest Voice , in my view one the best performances of the man's career.]
In a recent piece unambiguously titled "Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems", my other compatriot Caitlin Johnstone also
had a few things to
say about the subject, echoing Orwell when she observed it was all about "controlling the narrative".
Though I'd suggest the greater "root" problem is our easy propensity to ignore this reality, pretend it doesn't or won't affect
us, or reject it as conspiratorial nonsense, in this, of course, she's correct. As she cogently observes,
I write about this stuff for a living, and even I don't have the time or energy to write about every single narrative control
tool that the US-centralised empire has been implementing into its arsenal. There are too damn many of them emerging too damn
fast, because they're just that damn crucial for maintaining existing power structures.'
Fittingly, in a discussion encompassing amongst other things history, language, power, and dissent, he opined, ' Determining how
individuals communicate is' an objective which represents for the power elites 'the best chance' [they] have to control what people
think. This translates as: The more control 'we' have over what the proles think, the more 'we' can reduce the inherent risk for
elites in democracy.
' Clumsy men', Saul went on to say, 'try to do this through power and fear. Heavy-handed men running heavy-handed systems attempt
the same thing through police-enforced censorship. The more sophisticated the elites, the more they concentrate on creating intellectual
systems which control expression through the communications structures. These systems require only the discreet use of censorship
and uniformed men.'
In other words, along with assuming it is their right to take it in the first place, ' those who take power will always try to
change the established language ', presumably to better facilitate their hold on it and/or legitimise their claim to it.
For Oliver Boyd-Barrett, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open
exchange of ideas.' Yet for the author of the recently published
RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media , 'No such infrastructure exists.'
The mainstream media he says, is 'owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates'
that lie at the very heart of US oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates:
The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies
that are free of the shackles of US plutocratic self-regard is also well documented.'
Of course the word "inability" suggests the MSM view themselves as having some responsibility for maintaining such an egalitarian
news and information environment. They don't of course, and in truth, probably never really have! A better word would be "unwilling",
or even "refusal". The corporate media all but epitomise the " plutocratic self-regard" that is characteristic of "oligopoly capitalism".
Indeed, the MSM collectively functions as advertising, public relations/lobbying entities for Big Corp, in addition to acting
as its Praetorian bodyguard , protecting their secrets,
crimes, and lies from exposure. Like all other companies they are beholden to their shareholders (profits before truth and people),
most of whom it can safely be assumed are no strangers to "self-regard", and could care less about " histories, perspectives and
vocabularies" that run counter to their own interests.
It was Aussie social scientist Alex Carey who
pioneered the study of nationalism ,
corporatism , and moreso for our purposes herein, the
management (read: manipulation) of public opinion, though all three have important links (a story for another time). For Carey, the
following conclusion was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that
we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' This former farmer
from Western Australia became one of the world's acknowledged experts on propaganda and the manipulation of the truth.
Prior to embarking on his academic career, Carey was a successful sheep
grazier . By all accounts, he was a first-class judge of the
animal from which he made his early living, leaving one to ponder if this expertise gave him a unique insight into his main area
of research!
In any event, Carey in time sold the farm and travelled to the U.K. to study psychology, apparently a long-time ambition. From
the late fifties until his death in 1988, he was a senior lecturer in psychology and industrial relations at the Sydney-based University
of New South Wales, with his research being lauded by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, both of whom have had a thing
or three to say over the years about The Big Shill. In fact such was his admiration, Pilger
described him as "a second Orwell", which in anyone's lingo
is a big call.
In fact, for anyone with an interest in how public opinion is moulded and our perceptions are managed and manipulated, in whose
interests they are done so and to what end, it is as essential reading as any of the work of other more famous names. This tome came
complete with a foreword by Chomsky, so enamoured was the latter of Carey's work.
For Carey, the three "most significant developments" in the political economy of the twentieth century were:
the growth of democracy the growth of corporate power; and the growth of propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against
democracy.
For Carey, it is an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is 'distinctive'
of totalitarian regimes. Yet as he stresses: the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda
is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is
vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not).' In this context, 'conventional
wisdom" becomes conventional ignorance; as for "common sense", maybe not so much.
The purpose of this propaganda
barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as
possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic
right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering
business interests.'
An extreme example of this view playing itself right under our noses and over decades was the cruel fiction of the "
trickle down effect " (TDE) -- aka the 'rising tide that would lift all yachts' -- of
Reaganomics . One of several mantras that defined Reagan's
overarching political shtick, the TDE was by any measure, decidedly more a torrent than a trickle, and said "torrent" was going up
not down. This reality as we now know was not in Reagan's glossy economic brochure to be sure, and it may have been because the Gipper
confused his prepositions and verbs.
Yet as the GFC of 2008 amply demonstrated, it culminated in a free-for all, dog eat dog, anything goes, everyman for himself form
of cannibal (or anarcho) capitalism -- an updated, much
improved version of the no-holds-barred mercenary mercantilism much reminiscent of the
Gilded Age and the
Robber Barons who 'infested' it, only one
that doesn't just eat its young, it eats itself!
Making the World Safe for Plutocracy
In the increasingly dysfunctional, one-sided political economy we inhabit then, whether it's widgets or wars or anything in between,
few people realise the degree to which our opinions, perceptions, emotions, and views are shaped and manipulated by propaganda (and
its similarly 'evil twin' censorship ,) its most adept practitioners, and those elite, institutional, political, and corporate entities
that seek out their expertise.
It is now just over a hundred years since the practice of propaganda took a giant leap forward, then in the service of persuading
palpably reluctant Americans that the war raging in Europe at the time was their war as well.
This was at a time when Americans had just voted their then-president
Woodrow Wilson back into office for a second term, a victory
largely achieved on the back of the promise he'd
"keep us out of the War." Americans were
very much in what was one of their most
isolationist
phases , and so Wilson's promise resonated with them.
But over time they were convinced of the need to become involved by a distinctly different appeal to their political sensibilities.
This "appeal" also dampened the isolationist mood, one which it has to be said was not embraced by most of the political, banking,
and business elites of the time, most of whom stood to lose big-time if the Germans won, and/or who were already profiting or benefitting
from the business of war.
For a president who "kept us out of the war", this wasn't going to be an easy 'pitch'. In order to sell the war the president
established the Committee on Public Information
(aka the Creel Committee) for the purposes of publicising the rationale for the war and from there, garnering support for it
from the general public.
Either way, Bernays 'combined their perspectives and synthesised them into an applied science', which he then 'branded' "public
relations".
For its part the Creel committee struggled with its brief from the off; but Bernays worked with them to persuade Americans their
involvement in the war was justified -- indeed necessary -- and to that end he devised the brilliantly inane slogan,
"making the world safe for democracy"
.
Thus was born arguably the first
great propaganda catch-phrases of the modern era, and certainly one of the most portentous. The following sums up Bernays's unabashed
mindset:
The conscious, intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power
of our country.'
The rest is history (sort of), with Americans becoming more willing to not just support the war effort but encouraged to view
the Germans and their allies as evil brutes threatening democracy and freedom and the 'American way of life', however that might've
been viewed then. From a geopolitical and historical perspective, it was an asinine premise of course, but nonetheless an extraordinary
example of how a few well chosen words tapped into the collective psyche of a country that was decidedly opposed to any U.S involvement
in the war and turned that mindset completely on its head.
' [S]aving the world for democracy' (or some 'cover version' thereof) has since become America's positioning statement, 'patriotic'
rallying cry, and the "Get-out-of-Jail Free" card for its war and its white collar criminal clique.
At all events it was by any measure, a stroke of genius on Bernays's part; by appealing to people's basic fears and desires, he
could engineer consent on a mass scale. It goes without saying it changed the course of history in more ways than one. That the U.S.
is to this day still using a not dissimilar meme to justify its
"foreign entanglements" is testament to both its utility and durability.
The reality as we now know was markedly different of course. They have almost always been about power, empire, control, hegemony,
resources, wealth, opportunity, profit, dispossession, keeping existing capitalist structures intact and well-defended, and crushing
dissent and opposition.
The Bewildered Herd
It is instructive to note that the template for 'manufacturing consent' for war had already been forged by the British. And the
Europeans did not 'sleepwalk'
like some " bewildered herd ' into this conflagration.
For twenty years prior to the outbreak of the war in 1914, the then stewards of the British Empire had been diligently preparing
the ground for what they viewed as a preordained clash with their rivals for empire the Germans.
To begin with, contrary to the opinion of the general populace over one hundred years later, it was not the much touted German
aggression and militarism, nor their undoubted imperial ambitions, which precipitated its outbreak. The stewards of the British Empire
were not about to let the Teutonic upstarts chow down on their imperial lunch as it were, and set about unilaterally and preemptively
crushing Germany and with it any ambitions it had for creating its own imperial domain in competition with the Empire upon which
Ol' Sol never set.
The "Great War" is worth noting here for other reasons. As documented so by Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty in their two books
covering the period from 1890-1920, we learn much about propaganda, which attest to its extraordinary power, in particular its
power to distort
reality en masse in enduring and subversive ways.
In reality, the only thing "great" about World War One was the degree to which the masses fighting for Britain were conned via
propaganda and censorship into believing this war was necessary, and the way the official narrative of the war was sustained for
posterity via the very same means. "Great" maybe, but not in a good way!
The horrendous carnage and destruction that resulted from it was of course unprecedented, the global effects of which linger on
now well over one hundred years later.
Such was the
enduring power
of the propaganda that today most folks would have great difficulty in accepting the following; this is a short summary of historical
realities revealed by Macgregor and Docherty that are at complete odds with the official narrative, the political discourse, and
the school textbooks:
It was Great Britain (supported by France and Russia) and not Germany who was the principal aggressor in the events and actions that
let to the outbreak of war; The British had for twenty years prior to 1914 viewed Germany as its most dangerous economic and imperial
rival, and fully anticipated that a war was inevitable; In the U.K. and the U.S., various factions worked feverishly to ensure the
war went on for as long as possible, and scuttled peacemaking efforts from the off; key truths about this most consequential of geopolitical
conflicts have been concealed for well over one hundred years, with no sign the official record will change; very powerful forces
(incl. a future US president) amongst U.S. political, media, and economic elites conspired to eventually convince an otherwise unwilling
populace in America that U.S. entry onto the war was necessary; those same forces and many similar groups in the U.K. and Europe
engaged in everything from war profiteering, destruction/forging of war records, false-flag ops, treason, conspiracy to wage aggressive
war, and direct efforts to prolong the war by any means necessary, many of which will rock folks to their very core.
But peace was not on the agenda. When, by 1916, the military failures were so embarrassing and costly, some key players in the
British government were willing to talk about peace. This could not be tolerated. The potential peacemakers had to be thrown under
the bus. The unelected European leaders had one common bond: They would fight Germany until she was crushed.
Prolonging the Agony details how this secret cabal organised to this end the change of government without a single vote being
cast. David Lloyd George was promoted to prime minister
in Britain and Georges Clemenceau made prime minister
in France. A new government, an inner-elite war cabinet thrust the Secret Elite leader, Lord
Alfred Milner into power at the very inner-core of the
decision-makers in British politics.
Democracy? They had no truck with democracy. The voting public had no say. The men entrusted with the task would keep going till
the end and their place-men were backed by the media and the money-power, in Britain, France and America.
Propaganda Always Wins
But just as the pioneering adherents of propaganda back in the day might never have dreamt how sophisticated and all-encompassing
the practice would become, nor would the citizenry at large have anticipated the extent to which the industry has facilitated an
entrenched, rapacious plutocracy at the expense of our economic opportunity, our financial and material security, our physical, social
and cultural environment, our values and attitudes, and increasingly, our basic democratic rights and freedoms.
We now live in the Age of the Big Shill -- cocooned in a submissive void no less -- an era where nothing can be taken on face
value yet where time and attention constraints (to name just a few) force us to do so; [where] few people in public life can be taken
at their word; where unchallenged perceptions become accepted reality; where 'open-book' history is now incontrovertible not-negotiable,
upon pain of imprisonment fact; where education is about uniformity, function, form and conformity, all in the service of imposed
neo-liberal ideologies embracing then prioritising individual -- albeit dubious -- freedoms.
More broadly, it's the "Roger Ailes" of this world -- acting on behalf of the power elites who after all are their paymasters
-- who create the intellectual systems which control expression through the communications structures, whilst ensuring these systems
require only 'the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men.'
They are the shapers and moulders of the discourse that passes for the accepted lingua franca of the increasingly globalised,
interconnected, corporatised political economy of the planet. Throughout this process they 'will always try to change the established
language.'
And we can no longer rely on our elected representatives to honestly represent us and our interests. Whether this decision making
is taking place inside or outside the legislative process, these processes are well and truly in the grip of the banks and financial
institutions and transnational organisations. In whose interests are they going to be more concerned with?
We saw this all just after the
Global Financial Crisis
(GFC) when the very people who brought the system to the brink, made billions off the dodge for their banks and millions for
themselves, bankrupted hundreds of thousands of American families, were called upon by the U.S. government to fix up the mess, and
to all intents given a blank cheque to so do.
That the U.S. is at even greater risk now of economic
implosion is something few serious pundits would dispute, and a testament to the effectiveness of the snow-job perpetrated upon Americans
regarding the causes, the impact, and the implications of the 2008 meltdown going forward.
In most cases, one accepts almost by definition such disconnects (read: hidden agendas) are the rule rather than the exception,
hence the multi-billion foundation -- and global reach and impact -- of the propaganda business. This in itself is a key indicator
as to why organisations place so much importance on this aspect of managing their affairs.
At the very least, once corporations saw how the psychology of persuasion could be leveraged to manipulate consumers and politicians
saw the same with the citizenry and even its own workers, the growth of the industry was assured.
As Riefenstahl noted during her chinwag with Pilger after he asked if those embracing the "submissive void" included the liberal,
educated bourgeoisie? " Everyone ," she said.
By way of underscoring her point, she added enigmatically: 'Propaganda always wins if you allow it'.
Greg Maybury is a freelance writer based in Perth, Australia. His main areas of interest are American history and politics
in general, with a special focus on economic, national security, military, and geopolitical affairs. For 5 years he has regularly
contributed to a diverse range of news and opinion sites, including OpEd News, The Greanville Post, Consortium News, Dandelion Salad,
Global Research, Dissident Voice, OffGuardian, Contra Corner, International Policy Digest, the Hampton Institute, and others.
nottheonly1
This brilliant essay is proof of the reflective nature of the Universe. The worse the propaganda and oppression becomes, the greater
the likelihood such an essay will be written.
Such is the sophistication and ubiquity of the narrative control techniques used today -- afforded increasingly by 'computational
propaganda' via automated scripts, hacking, botnets, troll farms, and algorithms and the like, along with the barely veiled
censorship and information gatekeeping practised by Google and Facebook and other tech behemoths -- it's become one of the
most troubling aspects of the technological/social media revolution.
Very rarely can one experience such a degree of vindication. My moniker 'nottheonly1' has received more meaning with this precise
depiction of the long history of the manipulation of the masses. Recent events have destroyed but all of my confidence that there
might be a peaceful way out of this massive dilemma. Due to this sophistication in controlling the narrative, it has now become
apparent that we have arrived at a moment in time where total lawlessness reigns. 'Lawlessness' in this case means the loss of
common law and the use of code law to create ever new restrictions for free speech and liberty at large.
Over the last weeks, comments written on other discussion boards have unleashed a degree of character defamation and ridicule
for the most obvious crimes perpetrated on the masses through propaganda. In this unholy union of constant propaganda via main
stream 'media' with the character defamation by so called 'trolls' – which are actually virtual assassins of those who write the
truth – the ability of the population, or parts thereof to connect with, or search for like minded people is utterly destroyed.
This assault on the online community has devastating consequences. Those who have come into the cross hairs of the unintelligence
agencies will but turn away from the internet. Leaving behind an ocean of online propaganda and fake information. Few are now
the web sites on which it is possible to voice one's personal take on the status quo.
There is one word that describes these kind of activities precisely: traitor. Those who engage in the character defamation
of commenters, or authors per se, are traitors to humanity. They betray the collective consciousness with their poisonous attacks
of those who work for a sea change of the status quo. The owner class has all game pieces positioned. The fact that Julian Assange
is not only a free man, but still without a Nobel price for peace, while war criminals are recipients, shows just how much the
march into absolute totalitarianism has progressed. Bernays hated the masses and offered his 'services' to manipulate them often
for free.
Even though there are more solutions than problems, the time has come where meaningful participation in the search for such
solution has been made unbearable. It is therefore that a certain fatalism has developed – from resignation to the acceptance
of the status quo as being inevitable. Ancient wisdom has created a proverb that states 'This too, will pass'. While that is a
given, there are still enough Human Beings around that are determined to make a difference. To this group I count the author of
this marvelous, albeit depressing essay. Thank you more that words can express. And thank you, OffGuardian for being one of the
last remaining places where discourse is possible.
Really great post! Thanks. I'm part of the way through reading Alex Carey's book: "Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate
Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty," referenced in this article. I've learned more about the obviously verifiable history of
U.S. corporate propaganda in the first four chapters than I learned gaining a "minor" in history in 1974 (not surprisingly I can
now clearly see). I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in just how pervasive, entrenched and long-standing are the
propaganda systems shaping public perception, thought and behavior in America and the West.
Norcal
Wow Greg Maybury great essay, congratulations. This quote is brilliant, I've never see it before, "For Carey, the following conclusion
was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from
propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' "
Too, Rodger Ailes was the man credited with educating Nixon up as how to "use" the TV media, and Ailes never looked back as
he manipulated media at will. Thank you!
nondimenticare
That is also one of the basic theses of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech.
vexarb
I read in 'Guns, Germs and Steel' about Homo Sapiens and his domesticated animals. Apparently we got on best in places where we
could find animals that are very like us: sheep, cattle, horses and other herd animals which instinctively follow their Leader.
I think our cousins the chimpanzee are much the same; both species must have inherited this common trait from some pre-chimpanzee
ancestor who had found great survival value in passing on the sheeple trait to their progeny. As have the sheep themselves.
By the way, has anybody observed sheeple behaviour in ants and bees? For instance, quietly following a Leader ant to their
doom, or noisily ganging up to mob a worker bee that the Queen does not like?
I'd say the elites are both for and against. Competing factions.
It's clear that many are interested in overturning democracy, whilst others want to exploit it.
The average grunt on the street is in the fire, regardless of the pan chosen by the elites.
"... Even more importantly, we should all be troubled by efforts to shut down content and discussions labeled "false and misleading" on major social media platforms . ..."
"... Conspiracies can be found out by many different ways e.g. documents uncovered, discrepancies, evidence that contradicts what has been claimed etc. ..."
"... "A two decade old CT, like 9/11, or worse, one six decades old (the JFK assassination), are false because they would have involved too many people–someone would have blown the whistle, if only on their deathbed." ..."
"... "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. ..."
"... The old adage 'two men can keep a secret, if one of them is dead' applies here. ..."
"... This co-ordinated and global media attack on the 'Conspiracy Theorist' is co-ordinated and Global for good reason. ..."
"... The determination of international deepstate to make illegal any question or recognition of it under guise of 'Conspiracy theorist=domestic terrorist/anti-semite/anti-Zionist/BDS/trump supporting white supremacist(etc)'- conflating those ULTRA memes with growing awareness of the Anglo/Yankee/zionist PSYOPS underway globally, mean we are entering a choke point in progression of reason, truth and beauty. ..."
"... The danger of the conspiracy theorist to the present world order, is that most of the BIG ones, the nasty ones, are true. And CIA operation Mockingbirds' job (Quote) 'is to Guard against the illicit Transformation of Probability into Certainty," that they are . ..."
"... Ultimately, the average conspiracy theorist has a better grasp of how the world works than the average liberal. ..."
"... The reality is that the ruling class and its public servants really do have a parasitic and predatory relationship to the vast majority of humanity ..."
"... I like Michael Moore's response when asked if he believed the conspiracy theories which were floating about at the time: "Just the ones that are true" ..."
"... A conspiracy theory, like any theory is as strong as the evidence put forward to support it. ..."
"... One of the ways they will do this is to plant "evidence" purporting to support the theory, but easily disproved by easily available information. Unfortunately,it is a sad fact that far too many "conspiracy theorists" readily accept and share along with genuine evidence, this planted "evidence" to the wider internet, thereby undermining the solid evidence of a conspiracy, by associating it with the easily disprovable nonsense. ..."
"... For example, after the attack on the WTC Kissinger was appointed to the head the 9/11 commission (before stepping down). ..."
"... 'Conspiracy theorists' would have thought – why are neocons appointing a mass-murdering neocon to investigate an event that might have involved neocons (raising obvious credibility issues) – whereas those who regard conspiracy theorists as dribbling fruitcakes would have welcomed the appointment of the nobel peace prize winner. ..."
Noam
Chomsky has pointed out , the more educated we are, the more we are a target for state-corporate propaganda. Even journalists
outside the mainstream may internalize establishment values and prejudices. Which brings us to Parramore's embrace of the term "conspiracy
theory." Once a neutral and little-used phrase, "conspiracy theory" was infamously weaponized in
1967 by a memo from the CIA to its station chiefs worldwide.
Troubled by growing mass disbelief in the "lone nut" theory of President Kennedy's assassination, and concerned that "[c]onspiracy
theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization," the agency directed its officers to "discuss the publicity problem
with friendly and elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)" and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the
attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose."
In the 45 years before the CIA memo came out, the phrase 'conspiracy theory' appeared in the Washington Post and New
York Times only 50 times, or about once per year. In the 45 years after the CIA memo, the phrase appeared 2,630 times, or
about once per week."
While it turns out that Parramore knows something about this hugely successful propaganda drive, she chose in her NBC piece to deploy
the phrase as the government has come to define it, i.e., as "something that requires no consideration because it is obviously not
true." This embeds a fallacy in her argument which only spreads as she goes on. Likewise, the authors of the studies she cites, who
attempt to connect belief in "conspiracy theories" to "narcissistic personality traits," are not immune to efforts to manipulate
the wider culture. Studies are only as good as the assumptions from which they proceed; in this case, the assumption was provided
by an interested Federal agency. And what of their suggested diagnosis?
On the contrary, most of the people I know who hold these varied (and not always shared) views are deeply empathic, courageously
humble, and resigned to a life on the margins of official discourse, even as they doggedly seek to publicize what they have learned.
A number of them have arrived at their views through painful, direct experience, like the
loss of a friend or the illness of a child, but far from having a "negative view of humanity," as Parramore writes, most hold
a deep and abiding faith in the power of regular people to see injustice and peacefully oppose it. In that regard, they share a great
deal in common with writers like Parramore: ultimately, we all want what's best for our children, and none of us want a world ruled
by unaccountable political-economic interests. If we want to achieve that world, then we should work together to promote speech that
is free from personal attacks on all sides. Even more importantly, we should all be troubled by efforts to shut down content and
discussions labeled "false and misleading"
on major social media platforms.
Who will decide what is false and what is true? ... ... ...
President Kennedy said:
a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
Perhaps we should take a closer look at ideas that so frighten the powers-that-be. Far from inviting our ridicule, the people who
insist that we look in these forbidden places may one day deserve our thanks.
John Kirby is a documentary filmmaker. His latest project, Four Died Trying, examines what John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther
King and Robert Kennedy were doing in the last years of their lives which may have led to their deaths.
George
I am responding to an earlier comment you made because, for some reason, I cannot reply to it in the proper place.
"The old adage 'two men can keep a secret, if one of them is dead' applies here."
Wrong: secrets can be uncovered even if both of them are dead.
"The conspiracies we know about are exposed because someone talks, or a computer gets hacked."
Conspiracies can be found out by many different ways e.g. documents uncovered, discrepancies, evidence that contradicts what
has been claimed etc.
"A two decade old CT, like 9/11, or worse, one six decades old (the JFK assassination), are false because they would have involved
too many people–someone would have blown the whistle, if only on their deathbed."
Always a bad sign when you start to repeat "would have". Lots of presumption here.
"No new facts have emerged because the only people who knew anything are long dead, taking the reasons to their graves .."
New facts can emerge all the time even regarding the most ancient of events.
" .or in the case of 9/11, because there was no great conspiracy, beyond the one reported."
So you now have godlike omniscience?
"A propensity for subscribing to conspiracy theories, is, sad to say, indicative of mental inadequacy "
There's no point in going much further here. You now devolve into psychobabble which, as always, is based on the dogmatic assertion
that you are right. (cf. the formerly mentioned godlike omniscience)
Ragnar
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only
for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.
It thus
becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the
lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." These words are attributed to Joseph Goebbels.
-So, George, it would hardly make a difference whether the State is Marxist or Capitalist. It's either power or
truth. They are inherently different and can not be reconciled. Ultimately, there is no bridge possible.
However, so-called "common" goals are of a lower order and cooperation here is possible, temporarily. These relationships are
unstable and prone to breaking up precisely because they're ultimately not common at all. The principle are different and the
personalities too. Ships Passing In The Night, like. -See?
George
We all have common goals. Basically the goals of life and health. And these are hardly goals "of a lower order". If that was true
then we must be living in a state of "postmodernist relativity" where anyone can decide arbitrarily what matters. And that would
certainly lead to your ships-passing-in-the-night scenario i.e. the ultimate divide-and-rule vision.
As for power, the late Marxist writer Ellen Meiksins Wood noted that, in modern times, we have an unprecedented degree of political
freedom. But the reason for that is that power no longer lies in politics. It lies in economics. What is the point of having formal
rights when your livelihood is gone?
The old adage 'two men can keep a secret, if one of them is dead' applies here.
The conspiracies we know about are exposed because someone talks, or a computer gets hacked. A two decade old CT, like 9/11,
or worse, one six decades old (the JFK assassination), are false because they would have involved too many people – someone would
have blown the whistle, if only on their deathbed. No new facts have emerged because the only people who knew anything are long
dead, taking the reasons to their graves, or in the case of 9/11, because there was no great conspiracy, beyond the one reported.
A propensity for subscribing to conspiracy theories, is, sad to say, indicative of mental inadequacy. Such people are unable
to deal with the complexities of the world as it is, and therefore seek to make it a world of black and white, good and evil,
heroes and villains. The internet, with its blurring of fantasy and fact enables them. This is why discussions like this get so
polarised.
TFS
1. 9/11 and JFK are false because WILLIAM HBonney has declared it so.
Boom, thanks for watching kids.
2. In other news, some Conspiracy Theorists Imagined 747-E4Bs above Washington at the time of 9/11 and 25+second delay introduced
into the Air Traffic Control System but the Official Conspiracy Account of 9/11 didn't discuss it because there was nothing to
see.
6. But it's ok kidz, because HWB wack jobs, like first responders, police, fire personnel architects, physicists, former military
personnel, pilots, Nobel Peace Prixe winners, medical experts, etc etc all collectively asertained that the Official Conspiracy
Theory of 9/11 is about as usefull as the Warren Commission Report.
7. HOWEVER, HWB THINKS YOU'RE A WACK JOB.
r. rebar
unless & until someone goes to jail -- there are no conspiracies & as silence is -- like any commodity -- only as good as the
price paid to maintain it -- those who know have a real vested interest in not talking (it's not a secret if you tell someone)
roger morris
Ms Parramore is doing nothing more than her profession and tenure demands. Witting or un-witting. This co-ordinated and global
media attack on the 'Conspiracy Theorist' is co-ordinated and Global for good reason.
It is the 'Great Wurlitzer' at full throat
coinciding with extraordinary reductions in internet freedoms of information flow. The determination of international deepstate
to make illegal any question or recognition of it under guise of 'Conspiracy theorist=domestic terrorist/anti-semite/anti-Zionist/BDS/trump
supporting white supremacist(etc)'- conflating those ULTRA memes with growing awareness of the Anglo/Yankee/zionist PSYOPS underway
globally, mean we are entering a choke point in progression of reason, truth and beauty.
A read of the Cass Sunstein/Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule Paper describing 'Conspiracy theory' as a 'crippled Epistemology'
and determining 'COINTELPRO' type strategies to counter the danger of their truth becoming certainty, will enlighten those in
the dark of IIO methodology and expose Ms Parramore as a true MOCKINGBIRD.
The danger of the conspiracy theorist to the present world order, is that most of the BIG ones, the nasty ones, are true. And
CIA operation Mockingbirds' job (Quote) 'is to Guard against the illicit Transformation of Probability into Certainty," that they
are .
"Ultimately, the average conspiracy theorist has a better grasp of how the world works than the average liberal. Even the most
outlandish "conspiracy theory" in existence -- that people like George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth are shape-shifting, extra-dimensional
reptilians -- is closer to the truth than what liberals believe.
The reality is that the ruling class and its public servants really do have a parasitic and predatory relationship to the
vast majority of humanity "
I've often felt there is a lot of (metaphorical!) truth in David Icke's ravings, although the reptile image is unfortunate
in that actual reptiles are amongst the most sedate and peaceful creatures.
Molloy
Eichmann and today's useful idiots; Hannah Arendt
(start Arendt quote)
Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed
not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather
hard to sustain, in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused so many millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly
noticed. What could you do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent
life was that one should never take an oath ("Today no man, no judge could ever persuade me to make a sworn statement. I refuse
it; I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience tells me that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences,
I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or other authority will ever be capable of making me swear
an oath, to give sworn testimony.
I won't do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me"), and then, after being told
explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he might "do so under oath or without an oath," declared without further
ado that he would prefer to testify under oath? Or who, repeatedly and with a great show of feeling, assured the court, as he
had assured the police examiner, that the worst thing he could do would be to try to escape his true responsibilities, to fight
for his neck, to plead for mercy -- and then, upon instruction of his counsel, submitted a handwritten document that contained
a plea for mercy?
As far as Eichmann was concerned, these were questions of changing moods, not of inconsistencies, and as long
as he was capable of finding, either in his memory or on the spur of the moment, an elating stock phrase to go with them, he was
quite content. (end quote)
And why it is essential to understand what Eichmann was facilitating (and the madness that morphed into the same apartheid bigotry
in the 21st century).
I appreciate the article, but the sentence below is offered with no logical or rational support – it is simply an evidence free
assertion:
("But Parramore and many journalists like her are neither assets of an intelligence service nor unthinking tools of big media;
) – really?
It is quite clear that if someone "is" (an asset of an intelligence service) that they will certainly not be broadcasting this
fact to the world or to friends and family. And for someone to assert that "conspiracies" don't exist in the real world requires
a level of credulity that most intelligent and rational people the least bit familiar with the historical record would find rather
difficult to muster up. I dare say it would be much easier in fact to prove the assertion that our Western history is simply the
"history of conspiracies" given the oligarchic control of Western populations for millennia. This is hardly "rocket science" as
they say. We do have a rather well documented historical record to fall back on to show the endless scheming of Western oligarchy
behind the backs of Western populations.
wardropper
I like Michael Moore's response when asked if he believed the conspiracy theories which were floating about at the time:
"Just the ones that are true"
John Thatcher
A conspiracy theory, like any theory is as strong as the evidence put forward to support it. Often people offer as fact conspiracies
that only as yet exist as theories,with greater or lesser amounts of evidence to support.I have no doubt that interested parties
who are the accused in these theories, will mount efforts to discredit any theory mounted against them or those they represent.
One of the ways they will do this is to plant "evidence" purporting to support the theory, but easily disproved by easily
available information. Unfortunately,it is a sad fact that far too many "conspiracy theorists" readily accept and share along
with genuine evidence, this planted "evidence" to the wider internet, thereby undermining the solid evidence of a conspiracy,
by associating it with the easily disprovable nonsense.
Harry Stotle
Isn't it high time we had a term to describe those who always accept the official version of events after controversial political
incidents no matter how implausible this account might be?
For example, after the attack on the WTC Kissinger was appointed to the head the 9/11 commission (before stepping down).
'Conspiracy theorists' would have thought – why are neocons appointing a mass-murdering neocon to investigate an event that
might have involved neocons (raising obvious credibility issues) – whereas those who regard conspiracy theorists as dribbling
fruitcakes would have welcomed the appointment of the nobel peace prize winner.
Anyway, here's a clip of Henry – the believers in everything the government say would never have considered the objections
raised in the film – such questions are tantamount to mental illness according to these 'progressives'.
" (the) factional struggle evident in the rise of Trump "
Thank you.
One of the many purposes of Russiagate was to misdirect people away from the fact that
Trump's election represents (among other things) a huge split in the ruling class, which can
roughly be described as one between extractive industries (energy, agriculture, mining, etc.)
and finance, media and tech. A map of the 2016 election results strongly supports this
analysis. Thus, Comcast was more than happy to give free reign to Rachel Maddow's two+ years
of disinfotainment
This split in the ruling class would provide an immense opportunity if the US had a real
functioning Left, rather than lumpen bourgeois and childish virtue signalling about open
borders and reparations.
Grandpa Putin Loses Another Bet
TrueStory Gazette, Aug. 2019
Several anonymous, unverified, and possibly non-existent sources announced today that they
know, might know, or could possibly have heard from unknown others, who they suspect might
know or could have reasonably speculated that Vladimir Putin lost a bet he made with his
2-year old grandson, Vladimir, Jr.
We caught up with the young Putin as he emerged from his daycare school in central Moscow.
"Yes, he said, it is true. Grandpa lost the bet we made last week. We wagered about how long
Western media could cling to even a microcosm of credibility. Grandpa said it would last
until the end of this year, but I bet him that it would be gone much sooner than that."
Two-year old Putin, who is an avid reader of Moon of Alabama, said that when he woke up
this morning he read the latest article. He said, "I just rubbed Grandpa's face into that
article. He shrieked. He was so embarrassed. He had to admit that western media's credibility
is already totally kaput, not even a shred of credibility left, zero."
"Now Grandpa is the laughing stock of my daycare center. One of my classmates, who is
four, said 'how could your Grandpa be so dumb. Even a two-year old could see that western
media's credibility is in the dumpster. Your Grandpa is such a loser!'"
The young Putin, who stands only up to our reporter's waist, said that he is studying
English but still struggles with difficult words like "history." But he is not shy. When
asked what was the prevailing political view at his childcare center, he looked our reporter
in the eye, raised both fists, and loudly proclaimed, "All of us kids agree that U.S. Empire
is a hysterectomy!"
We asked Vladimir, Jr. about the stakes of his bet, what did he win? He said, "Grandpa
said I could have a place called Camp Pendleton in California to make a playground for kids
but I will have to wait a little while until he acquires it. I'm going to make it a
playground for Russian and American kids and we also will invite all of the kids from Central
America and Mexico."
Asked if he knew that Camp Pendleton was a U.S. military base, he replied, "I don't know
what it is now, but it's going to be a great playground for kids." And he added, "Look Pal,
my Grandpa loses lots of times. He loses his keys and his wallet and every bet he ever made
with me. But one thing about Grandpa, he ALWAYS KEEPS HIS PROMISES!"
Grandpa Putin Loses Another Bet
TrueStory Gazette, Aug. 2019
Several anonymous, unverified, and possibly non-existent sources announced today that they
know, might know, or could possibly have heard from unknown others, who they suspect might
know or could have reasonably speculated that Vladimir Putin lost a bet he made with his
2-year old grandson, Vladimir, Jr.
We caught up with the young Putin as he emerged from his daycare school in central Moscow.
"Yes, he said, it is true. Grandpa lost the bet we made last week. We wagered about how long
Western media could cling to even a microcosm of credibility. Grandpa said it would last
until the end of this year, but I bet him that it would be gone much sooner than that."
Two-year old Putin, who is an avid reader of Moon of Alabama, said that when he woke up
this morning he read the latest article. He said, "I just rubbed Grandpa's face into that
article. He shrieked. He was so embarrassed. He had to admit that western media's credibility
is already totally kaput, not even a shred of credibility left, zero."
"Now Grandpa is the laughing stock of my daycare center. One of my classmates, who is
four, said 'how could your Grandpa be so dumb. Even a two-year old could see that western
media's credibility is in the dumpster. Your Grandpa is such a loser!'"
The young Putin, who stands only up to our reporter's waist, said that he is studying
English but still struggles with difficult words like "history." But he is not shy. When
asked what was the prevailing political view at his childcare center, he looked our reporter
in the eye, raised both fists, and loudly proclaimed, "All of us kids agree that U.S. Empire
is a hysterectomy!"
We asked Vladimir, Jr. about the stakes of his bet, what did he win? He said, "Grandpa
said I could have a place called Camp Pendleton in California to make a playground for kids
but I will have to wait a little while until he acquires it. I'm going to make it a
playground for Russian and American kids and we also will invite all of the kids from Central
America and Mexico."
Asked if he knew that Camp Pendleton was a U.S. military base, he replied, "I don't know
what it is now, but it's going to be a great playground for kids." And he added, "Look Pal,
my Grandpa loses lots of times. He loses his keys and his wallet and every bet he ever made
with me. But one thing about Grandpa, he ALWAYS KEEPS HIS PROMISES!"
"... So, at last, buried deep within the Times story, is the source for its claim that Russia is behind everything. So, what is the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), and who is behind it? ..."
"... If you go to Wikipedia, you find it was founded by George Weidenfeld, a famous London publisher, lifelong Zionist and friend to, among others, Angela Merkel, Kurt Waldheim (yes, that Kurt Waldheim) and too many Israeli politicians and military figures to count. When he died in 2016, he was granted the singular honor by Israel of burial at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Before his death, he founded a chair for Israel Studies at University of Sussex, for the purpose of countering criticism of Israel . ..."
"... Weidenfeld died at the age of 96 in 2016. During the last few years of his life, he emphasized that he regarded Israel studies as explicitly political. ..."
"... ISD partners with and receives funding from a number of private social media multinational corporations, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft. It also has ties to numerous governmental agencies around the world, including the US State Department, a plethora of NGOs and several US and UK neoliberal think tanks, like the Brookings Institution, as well as charitable foundations ranging from The Carnegie Corporation to the Open Societies Foundation (founder: George Soros). All in all, ISD is deeply tied to groups promoting the global status quo. Many of them also take a confrontational stance when it comes to Russia , while ignoring any bad actions by Israel, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the United Sates. ..."
"... Neoliberalism, a policy model that advocates the control of economic factors to the private sector from the public sector, has been a dominant ideology since the 1980s. It rests on two main planks. Firstly, by increased competition that is achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets and, secondly, through privatization and limits on the ability of government to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt, the paper – dated June 2016 - explained. [...] ..."
"... The IMF authors also state that the costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent and such costs epitomize the trade-off between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda. They further argue that increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth. ..."
"... I'm just dumbfounded at how many people have thrown out their reasoning skills and bought into the Russian propaganda nonsense. ..."
"... But you don't have a right to say whatever you want about Israeli politics, stooge. ..."
"... Nice. I like to remind people of that time when Putin came before congress and told them to vote against Obama's Iran treaty and got a standing ovation. ..."
"... totally nuts. "Team Putin", "I long for...Putin in the Hague", "...watched Rachael Maddow...", someone dissing Caitlin Johnstone because she's Australian, "Dorsey and Gabbard and Assad and Putin, they're all in the same boat", "Russians actually showed up in Sweden and offered to pay immigrants to act out a riot." ..."
Of course, Trump is blamed as well, because he and Putin are best buds. And what they want, apparently is "far-right wing nationalism"
to spread across the entire globe.
To dig beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden, though, is to uncover the workings of an international disinformation
machine, devoted to the cultivation, provocation and amplication of far-right, anti-immigrant passions and political forces. Indeed,
that machine, most influentially rooted in Vladimir V. Putin's Russia and the American far right , underscores a fundamental
irony of this political moment: the globalization of nationalism.
The central target of these manipulations from abroad -- and the chief instrument of the Swedish nationalists' success -- is
the country's increasingly popular, and virulently anti-immigrant, digital echo chamber.
A New York Times examination of its content, personnel and traffic patterns illustrates how foreign state and nonstate actors
have helped give viral momentum to a clutch of Swedish far-right web sites.
Russian and Western entities that traffic in disinformation, including an Islamaphobic think tank whose former chairman is
now Mr. Trump's national security adviser, have been crucial linkers to the Swedish sites, helping to spread their message to
susceptible Swedes.
Beyond the fact that these bare-faced allegations in the Times article about Russia's influence in spreading right wing nationalism
are not supported by any, well, facts, is the reality that Sweden, just as in the United States has a long history of nationalist
and nativist movements.
An article in The Harvard Political Review, dated
February 11, 2017 , sums up nicely the factors that have led to the ascendancy of right wing nationalism in Europe.
These right nationalist campaigns, including those of Brexit and Trump, have run on two fundamental ideas currently trending
in many western countries: uplifting the poor working class in a crippling globalized economy, and constricting immigration from
the Middle East. Although the political clashes in culture and economics seems to be the major driving forces of the rise of the
far right, there is another factor at work. The economy and immigration concerns have only been political speaking points disguising
the true catastrophe of modern politics: the loss of the general public's trust in institutions .
Two and a half years later, however, The New York Times is having none of those squishy nuanced arguments. It focuses its narrative
primarily on Putin and Russia as the source of rising right wing nationalism.
At least six Swedish sites have received financial backing through advertising revenue from a Russian- and Ukrainian-owned
auto-parts business based in Berlin, whose online sales network oddly contains buried digital links to a range of far-right and
other socially divisive content.
Writers and editors for the Swedish sites have been befriended by the Kremlin. And in one strange Rube Goldbergian chain of
events, a frequent German contributor to one Swedish site has been implicated in the financing of a bombing in Ukraine, in a suspected
Russian false-flag operation.
The distorted view of Sweden pumped out by this disinformation machine has been used, in turn, by anti-immigrant parties in
Britain, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to stir xenophobia and gin up votes, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue
, a London-based nonprofit that tracks the online spread of far-right extremism.
So, at last, buried deep within the Times story, is the source for its claim that Russia is behind everything. So, what is
the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), and who is behind it?
If you go to Wikipedia, you find it was founded by George Weidenfeld, a famous London publisher, lifelong Zionist and friend
to, among others, Angela Merkel, Kurt Waldheim (yes, that Kurt Waldheim) and too many Israeli politicians and military figures to
count. When he died in 2016, he was granted the singular honor by Israel of burial at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Before his
death, he founded a chair for Israel Studies at University of Sussex, for the purpose of
countering criticism of Israel .
Weidenfeld died at the age of 96 in 2016. During the last few years of his life, he emphasized that he regarded Israel
studies as explicitly political.
Teaching the subject, he said, was "very important" in universities "with an anti-Israel or anti-Semitic presence." Weidenfeld's
comments indicate that he conflated criticism of Israel as a state with bigotry against Jews.
ISD partners with and receives funding from
a number of private social media multinational corporations, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft. It also has ties
to numerous governmental agencies around the world, including the US State Department, a plethora of NGOs and several US and UK neoliberal
think tanks, like the Brookings Institution, as well as charitable foundations ranging from The Carnegie Corporation to the Open
Societies Foundation (founder: George Soros). All in all, ISD is deeply tied to groups promoting the global status quo. Many of them
also take a
confrontational stance when it comes to
Russia , while ignoring any bad actions by Israel, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the United Sates.
Obviously, it's become a reflexive response by the corporate and legacy media in the US to blame Russia for all our troubles regarding
race and political polarization, as if none of these problems existed before Trump assumed office. Certainly, I agree Trump's actions
have enabled right wing extremists and exacerbated racial tensions in our country, but neither he nor Russia created the problems
of racism and xenophobia that have been with us since the beginning of American history. To continue to harp on Russia as the sole
bad actor in foreign and domestic affairs around the world is ludicrous, especially as it ignores the underlying factors that are
driving right wing nationalism: increasing poverty, massive wealth and income inequality (which has arguably
surpassed the levels that existed
prior to the Great Depression ) and the increasing efforts in the media to divide people from one another along racial and ethnic
lines.
No one who benefits from these levels of income and wealth inequality wants to point out the real reason why populist/nationalist
movements are attracting more and more followers. As always, it's the economy, stupid. A
2016 study conducted
by the IMF , hardly a bastion of radical leftists, makes this point very clear:
Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality and have not delivered as expected, according
to a 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Neoliberalism, a policy model that advocates the control of economic factors to the private sector from the public sector,
has been a dominant ideology since the 1980s. It rests on two main planks. Firstly, by increased competition that is achieved
through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets and, secondly, through privatization and limits on the ability of
government to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt, the paper – dated June 2016 - explained. [...]
The IMF authors also state that the costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent and such costs epitomize the trade-off
between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda. They further argue that increased inequality in
turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth.
Obviously, that isn't the reality that the powers that be in our country want to promote - not at all. It might give people the
idea that, instead of living in a democracy, we are actually governed by puppets of wealthy and powerful corporations that are squeezing
us dry to benefit their bottom lines. Those in control of our two major parties much prefer disinformation, such as the promotion
of the conspiracy theory that our former Cold War adversary bears most, if not all, of the blame for everything bad happening in
our country, from the election of Trump to gun violence to political polarization. Telling the truth would be harmful to their interests.
These same powerful and wealthy interests would risk the takeover of governments around the world by fascist and right wing authoritarian
regimes, rather than change existing policies that favor unfettered capitalism and globalism, policies that are
literally threatening our future on this planet.
In short, expect more truthiness like this from the Times and other media outlets when it comes to explaining the causes of right
wing nationalism here and abroad:
As the 2018 elections approached, Swedish counterintelligence was on high alert for foreign interference. Russia, the hulking
neighbor to the east, was seen as the main threat. After the Kremlin's meddling in the 2016 American election, Sweden had reason
to fear it could be next.
"Russia's goal is to weaken Western countries by polarizing the debate," said Daniel Stenling, the Swedish Security Service's
counterintelligence chief. "For the last five years, we have seen more and more aggressive intelligence work against our nation."
But as it turned out, there was no hacking and dumping of internal campaign documents, as in the United States. Nor was there
an overt effort to swing the election to the Sweden Democrats , perhaps because the party, in keeping with Swedish popular opinion,
has become more critical of the Kremlin than some of its far-right European counterparts.
Instead, security officials say, the foreign influence campaign took a different, more subtle form: helping nurture Sweden's
rapidly evolving far-right digital ecosystem.
Oh those subtle Russkies! How they manage the time to destroy the democracies of every country on earth is beyond me, but then,
I'm not a reporter for The New York Times.
But blaming the rise of far right nationalism on Russia is definitely a major point as it diverts attention from the many and
varied causes for it which goes to the very heart of the globlist neoliberal capitalist order. Just as a side note, academia is
one of the important stalwarts in the diversion as they are gladly producing phony studies of tweets, etc which confirm these
beliefs.
BTW, the idea that Russia was responsbile for the rise of white nationalism and racism goes back a while now. There were a
few diaries on TOP that got a lot of attention claiming Putin had a major hand in Charotsville when it occurred.
I am surprised by the continued insistence that Russia is making "divisions" over BLM. It is an obvious attempt to minimalize
America racism, and also to marginalize BLM and smear it as Russian lackies (shades of the Civil Rigths movement and MLK). This
originally caused some anger within Black activists so the narrative became that Russians were pushing both pro-BLM and anti-BLM
messages (although wink wink, we know the Russians are really anti-Black).
doing neoliberalism, they've just switched the type of market. It looks like a good fit if you are looking at tanking the labor
market. Import cheap, disempowered labor to create the market that you want.
I was going to say something about how Globalists are really pushing immigration too far. It would be better to rise the standard
of living in your colonies and vassal states, but that would cost money and dilute control, so instead you import them and shift
to domestic colonialism.
Inserting large, non-assimilated populations into democratic states IS a problem to many people. Loss of self governance -
"We didn't get a say in this.", loss of a national or cultural identity - which becomes white vs non-white, it rigs the labor
market and promotes inequality via a two tiered economic system.
But that IMF quote jumped out at me, and they're still doing neoliberalism, but they're doing it to crush labor markets instead
of opening markets or tapping international labor markets. It fits well within neoliberal ideology.
Rubio is saying that Russian bots are spreading the Clintons killed Epstein crap on Twitter. Seriously? But he says nothing
about Trump who retweeted a tweet saying that the Clintons killed Epstein. Or s lil Marco calling Trump a Russian bot?
Then there's this one.
HeyRussians, writing here on an AMERICAN platform, I have a constitutional right to say whatever I want about American or
Russian politics. No one is forcing you to read what I say. Stop with the demands for censorship. Russian "sovereignty" does
not extend to Twitter.
totally nuts. "Team Putin", "I long for...Putin in the Hague", "...watched Rachael Maddow...", someone dissing Caitlin Johnstone
because she's Australian, "Dorsey and Gabbard and Assad and Putin, they're all in the same boat", "Russians actually showed up
in Sweden and offered to pay immigrants to act out a riot."
Rubio is saying that Russian bots are spreading the Clintons killed Epstein crap on Twitter. Seriously? But he says nothing
about Trump who retweeted a tweet saying that the Clintons killed Epstein. Or s lil Marco calling Trump a Russian bot?
Then there's this one.
HeyRussians, writing here on an AMERICAN platform, I have a constitutional right to say whatever I want about American
or Russian politics. No one is forcing you to read what I say. Stop with the demands for censorship. Russian "sovereignty"
does not extend to Twitter.
totally nuts. "Team Putin", "I long for...Putin in the Hague", "...watched Rachael Maddow...", someone dissing Caitlin Johnstone
because she's Australian, "Dorsey and Gabbard and Assad and Putin, they're all in the same boat", "Russians actually showed
up in Sweden and offered to pay immigrants to act out a riot."
But you don't have a right to say whatever you want about Israeli politics, stooge.
Nice. I like to remind people of that time when Putin came before congress and told them to vote against Obama's Iran treaty
and got a standing ovation.
totally nuts. "Team Putin", "I long for...Putin in the Hague", "...watched Rachael Maddow...", someone dissing Caitlin Johnstone
because she's Australian, "Dorsey and Gabbard and Assad and Putin, they're all in the same boat", "Russians actually showed
up in Sweden and offered to pay immigrants to act out a riot."
But you don't have a right to say whatever you want about Israeli politics, stooge.
Nice. I like to remind people of that time when Putin came before congress and told them to vote against Obama's Iran treaty
and got a standing ovation.
@snoopydawg
@snoopydawg The Hillbots, not the Rooskies, are all in for restricting "hate speech", which means anybody who disagrees
with them. Talk about xenophobia. Dems have this in spades, as well as more than a few Repugnants. We are being outmaneuvered
away from peaceful co-existence to Russia ruins everything.
Orange man bad is corollary to RussiaRussiaRussia.
Rubio is saying that Russian bots are spreading the Clintons killed Epstein crap on Twitter. Seriously? But he says nothing
about Trump who retweeted a tweet saying that the Clintons killed Epstein. Or s lil Marco calling Trump a Russian bot?
Then there's this one.
HeyRussians, writing here on an AMERICAN platform, I have a constitutional right to say whatever I want about American
or Russian politics. No one is forcing you to read what I say. Stop with the demands for censorship. Russian "sovereignty"
does not extend to Twitter.
@snoopydawg guaranteeing American constitutional rights? But I thought the current Democratic talking point is that the
big tech monopolies are private companies so they can censor and misinform with impunity. Does McFail also concede that we have
a right to privacy on that wonderful "AMERICAN" platform?
It's hilarious this was Obama's ambassador to Russia. I didn't think you were supposed to hate the people, culture, and government
of the country to whom you had been assigned as a diplomat.
Rubio is saying that Russian bots are spreading the Clintons killed Epstein crap on Twitter. Seriously? But he says nothing
about Trump who retweeted a tweet saying that the Clintons killed Epstein. Or s lil Marco calling Trump a Russian bot?
Then there's this one.
HeyRussians, writing here on an AMERICAN platform, I have a constitutional right to say whatever I want about American
or Russian politics. No one is forcing you to read what I say. Stop with the demands for censorship. Russian "sovereignty"
does not extend to Twitter.
saying about Russia were instead directed at Israel? AIPAC would be in front of congress daily to get people to stop saying
those things.
Misfud is the guy who told Papadapoulus that Russia had Hillary's emails who then 'got drunk and blabbed it to the Dutch ambassador'
who then told someone in the FBI who then decided to open an investigation into the Trump campaign. I just read that this information
about Misfud has come to the intelligence committee's attention. So I'm sure that any day now we will be told to forget everything
we've been told about how Trump colluded with Russia right? Any day...yup...congress is going to tell us that the two year long
propaganda campaign that they have been pushing on us was false. Just like Trump said it was. Any..day..
#7 guaranteeing American constitutional rights? But I thought the current Democratic talking point is that the big tech
monopolies are private companies so they can censor and misinform with impunity. Does McFail also concede that we have a right
to privacy on that wonderful "AMERICAN" platform?
It's hilarious this was Obama's ambassador to Russia. I didn't think you were supposed to hate the people, culture, and
government of the country to whom you had been assigned as a diplomat.
Has been a big promoter of Russiagate for years, since near the beginning. How do I know he's working with the Clintons? Longtime
Clinton ally and co-chair of the Hillary Clinton Transition Team, Neera Tanden, repeatedly cites him as a source of validity for
Russiagate in this video. You can make a drinking game out of how many times she says "Marco Rubio."
is that Chris Cuomo actually behaves like a real journalist. I wonder how many more talking heads up there in corporateworld
actually would like to be journalists?
Wonder what it was about Neera that pushed him over the edge and made him betray his journalistic leanings.
Has been a big promoter of Russiagate for years, since near the beginning. How do I know he's working with the Clintons?
Longtime Clinton ally and co-chair of the Hillary Clinton Transition Team, Neera Tanden, repeatedly cites him as a source of
validity for Russiagate in this video. You can make a drinking game out of how many times she says "Marco Rubio."
The economy and immigration concerns have only been political speaking points disguising the true catastrophe of modern
politics: the loss of the general public's trust in institutions.
Years ago in a sociology class, I learned that 5 components are necessary for a functioning society: family, education, religion,
an economic structure, and a political system. These 5 elements are interrelated, so when one goes awry, other parts are affected.
It is no secret that our political system is broken and our economic system (neoliberalism) is cracking. Many mainstream churches
are losing membership, being replaced by non-affiliated ones. For a couple of decades public education has been the enemy due
to right-wing conservatives, hoping to replace this system with private and home schooling. Public universities are in their crosshairs,
too. Of course, all these malfunctioning components affect the basic structure of a society: the family. I'm afraid we're in for
a bumpy ride, before the air is cleared.
5 components are necessary for a functioning society: family, education, religion, an economic structure, and a political system.
Corporate owns all of them, save the family, but they're working on it...
Education - completely corporate dominated with public acquiescence.
Political - Think tanks create policy for sponsored talent to ratify
Religion - Atheism, Megachurches, televangelists, political activity, NGOs as slush funds
Economic - Private FED, banks, ratings institutions, bailed out by stakholder bail-in
Family - 2 worker families, tv as baby sitter, mobile phones
Seriously, corporate owns or can significantly disrupt all 5 pillars of a functioning society. It's rather terrifying.
The economy and immigration concerns have only been political speaking points disguising the true catastrophe of modern
politics: the loss of the general public's trust in institutions.
Years ago in a sociology class, I learned that 5 components are necessary for a functioning society: family, education,
religion, an economic structure, and a political system. These 5 elements are interrelated, so when one goes awry, other parts
are affected. It is no secret that our political system is broken and our economic system (neoliberalism) is cracking. Many
mainstream churches are losing membership, being replaced by non-affiliated ones. For a couple of decades public education
has been the enemy due to right-wing conservatives, hoping to replace this system with private and home schooling. Public universities
are in their crosshairs, too. Of course, all these malfunctioning components affect the basic structure of a society: the family.
I'm afraid we're in for a bumpy ride, before the air is cleared.
5 components are necessary for a functioning society: family, education, religion, an economic structure, and a political
system.
Corporate owns all of them, save the family, but they're working on it...
Education - completely corporate dominated with public acquiescence.
Political - Think tanks create policy for sponsored talent to ratify
Religion - Atheism, Megachurches, televangelists, political activity, NGOs as slush funds
Economic - Private FED, banks, ratings institutions, bailed out by stakholder bail-in
Family - 2 worker families, tv as baby sitter, mobile phones
Seriously, corporate owns or can significantly disrupt all 5 pillars of a functioning society. It's rather terrifying.
of word, but I think in any society larger than a tribe you have to have some kind of common ground, a common belief system
- cultural mores and values. If you look at secular humanism and atheism as religion or belief system, it completely fits.
Politics and science are near religions for many people at this point in time, IMO, replete with priests, choirs, dogma, and
blasphemy.
Politics and science are also highly material at this point in time. Values are predicated on profits and social control and
ideas are nothing more than mechanistic computations. If you suggest something that costs profits or removes social control, or
you offer ideas that say we're in anything but a mechanistic, dead, dumb universe, you're blaspheming.
I'd say they did a pretty fine job of creating new religions and belief systems, and they are every bit as dogmatic and stupid
as their big boss man in the sky predecessors.
@The Voice In the Wilderness
Kamala seems so much more passionate about displacing blame onto Russia for structural US racism than about fighting the
disenfranchisement of black and brown citizens, including the many she gleefully sent to prison.
https://t.co/hpcTt7QRtF
She said that Russian bots were helping push what Tulsi said about her and they spread the "taking a knee" when it was Kaepernick
who started it. Kamillary for this BS! She hired Hillary's campaign team as well as her lawyers. Hillary got people to go to the
Hamptons for a Harris fundraiser.
Trump is a student of Hitler & a disciple of Putin, with whom he's had several secret conversations with Putin giving him
advice. Putin certainly knows how to make troublesome people disappear while keeping enough distance to claim plausible deniability
& may have given Trump some tips on how to do the same (assuming Trump hadn't already learned that from his ample experience with
mobsters).
A disciple? A student of Hitler? Seriously where do people come up with this sh*t? And why do others agree with that person?
SMDH. I can't understand how anyone can believe this.
@The Voice In the Wilderness
. . . didn't take my tip seriously. The lady on the other end of the line was all ears about the assault rifles stamped "US ARMOURY"
that I reported being hidden in the garage of where I had lived, as well as something I had never seen that might have been a
grenade launcher due to the size of the barrel.
However, when she found out I was the "estranged" wife of the person who possessed them, she actually told me my tip would
not go any further because "estranged" wives can't be believed.
No way in hell I was going to report it while I was still living there. I did it after going into hiding almost a thousand
miles away. Our son and I remained in hiding for 6 years, until the ex also almost killed the next love of his life in front of
a neighbor. We were freed by that neighbor's testimony and a 99 year prison sentence for retaliation (he held her at gunpoint
too after being released on no bond for assaulting her because his dad was buddies with the local judge). But yeah, ex wives lie.
Now I know: If you see something, say not a goddamned thing because you won't be believed anyway.
Further, Trump's ex-wife brought this up - if I remember correctly - 20, or more, years ago. It was from an interview in Vanity
Fair. You can dredge it up online if you want. The Vanity Fair site was where I read it years ago.
I don't think Trump was planning a presidential bid back in the day, so the revelation of Trump's reading material wasn't quite
the bombshell then. Curious? Yes, even then. Hardly surprising if you've followed Trump's antics over the decades.
#13.1 can also tell some inconvenient truths.
This one is backed by the fellow who gave him the book . When a reporter, who had heard about this, asked Trump about it,
he claimed it was a copy of Mein Kampf, and that anyway it's all innocent enough because the friend who gave it to him was
a Jew.
When the friend was contacted, he clarified that it wasn't MK but My New Order, a book of Hitler's speeches. And that, actually,
he isn't Jewish.
@travelerxxx the link to that VF article is at the top of the article I linked above.
We know he had a brief bid for the presidency in the 2000 cycle, iirc.
And practicing his speechmaking with the Hitler speeches: reminds me that Hitler himself spent years before he came to power
practicing in front of a mirror, with a photographer capturing images.
No, Donald is not Hitler. But does have authoritarian/dictatorial tendencies, along with the desire to whip up the crowd on
an ignorant populist basis, including racial division.
Further, Trump's ex-wife brought this up - if I remember correctly - 20, or more, years ago. It was from an interview in
Vanity Fair. You can dredge it up online if you want. The Vanity Fair site was where I read it years ago.
I don't think Trump was planning a presidential bid back in the day, so the revelation of Trump's reading material wasn't
quite the bombshell then. Curious? Yes, even then. Hardly surprising if you've followed Trump's antics over the decades.
...the link to that VF article is at the top of the article I linked above.
And so it is! I missed it! Thanks.
#13.1.2.1 the link to that VF article is at the top of the article I linked above.
We know he had a brief bid for the presidency in the 2000 cycle, iirc.
And practicing his speechmaking with the Hitler speeches: reminds me that Hitler himself spent years before he came to power
practicing in front of a mirror, with a photographer capturing images.
No, Donald is not Hitler. But does have authoritarian/dictatorial tendencies, along with the desire to whip up the crowd
on an ignorant populist basis, including racial division.
Much of that crap appears to be Projection.
Putin's Polices Destroying Russian Farmers will probably be next since as you'll learn
once you click that it's the exact opposite. It looks quite possible that the opening up of
ag lands in Russia's Far East will see China cease its imports of soybeans from the Western
Hemisphere as it's already done so in response to Trump's Trade War. As the article notes:
"Net farm income in America has plunged by nearly half over the last five years from
$123.4 billion in 2013 to $63 billion last year. It plummeted by 16 percent last year
alone."
And with China's market closed, the result this year will be even worse. And it's all
Putin's fault!
And to make matters worse, Putin has weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's budget deficit,
forcing it to spend "more than twice as fast as tax collections" and now stands at $867
Billion through "the first 10 months of the budget year." (No link, from Business section
of today's newspaper.) IMO, that will be headlined as: Putin Loses Control Over Russia's
Budget as Deficit Skyrockets!
It's this one most of us are hopeful of reading soon:
Yes, we're in rich psychological terrain. Aberrant terrain, to the extent such things
can be extrapolated to system behavior.
It's a psychological projection. The Full Spectrum Dominance crowd feels their quest
receding into permanent incompletion. So they wishfully project their sense of loss onto
the opponent. Wanting everything, dominance perceives alternate visions as being nothing
less than obstinate escapees. Who knew they were in a figmentary prison in the first place?
Competing visions, through no real fault of their own, become weapon pointed at this
totalizing vision. Heck, they're not even competing. They're just living.
Dominance's blind spot is that it never stops to ask if others want to be dominated.
This makes it structurally myopic and prone to self-deception.
The same psychology is found in the sanctioning impulse. "In order to preserve our sense
of omnipotence, we hereby subtract you from the game board." But pariah nations, while
perhaps vanishing psychologically to the offended party ('you're dead to me now') don't
vanish in any existential sense. They re-gather under different umbrellas: SCO, OBOR, AIIB,
etc.
Too many subtractions and the subtractees acquire a critical mass all their own.
Subtraction adds up. There is an opportunity here to exploit the Empire's irrational
denialism -via the rational accumulation of estranged and heretofore 'banished'
interests.
One day, the lesser critical mass will achieve parity, then dominance or perhaps simply
multipolarity. Before that day, a ruinous world war could happen first. This latter
decision has already been taken since pre-kinetic versions of WW3 are popping up everywhere
at once as though instigated by some spanning Hidden Hand.
Putin is the Emmanuel Goldstein of the Neoliberal World Order, every bad decision, every
mistake, every failure, especially the ones that were obviously flawed from the start, are
the results of that dastardly Putin. It's amazing how in the Empire of the Lies, a
competent political leader of a sovereign country is becoming a Lex Luthor like
supervillain mastermind.
It's almost romantic that these Western elites spend so much time high up in their ivory
towers surrounded by the wastelands of their own making, clutching their pearls, thinking
about Putin and wondering how he will get to them.
We should note that Obama was the first to announce Putin would fail in Syria when the
Russians came to help out the Assad government against the US backed Takfaris. The results
of Russian support were quite spectacular. Of course, the war is still going on but there
is no question that Russia saved the Syrian state. Can anyone mention a single military
victory that the US has achieved since what? Grenada under Reagan and Bush I against Panama
?? Other than those two "victories" the US has lost every war it has engaged in since the
end of WWII.
It gets confusing, but that is the point of all this.
We should be scared of our hero, tragic anti-hero, uber villain and rolemodel.
Not just Russians under the bed, but THE Russian under the bed.
Or so many a lady (or not, as the case may be) might wish or be fearful of or both...
(In other news: Epstein dead? Highly unlikely, ever so doubtful, I do side with Aangirfan
on this)
I especially like how Putin lost in Crimea. One of his best losses, in my opinion.
Also, Masha and the Bear , Russia's
ultimate weapon in the war for the minds of the Western youth, continues its march across
the globe: the "Маша
плюс каша" episode is at 4.08 billion
views ( 4th most-viewed video on
YouTube ) and growing fast, set to overtake Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again" (4.20
billion) and Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" (4.35 billion) in the coming weeks.
@Bemildred #10: What a great piece by Patrick Armstrong. Very logical and rational. Perfect
for deprogramming people brainwashed by the Mockingbird Media.
How much more do the lobotomized American Sheeple (generally not represented in this forum)
need to realize that the mainstream "news" media are the propaganda arms of the western
(Anglo-Zionist) power structure?
"Let us be clear here. It is the United States who has broken its word and treaties
consistently. We said we wouldn't move NATO up to Russia's borders and then we did. We
unilaterally walked away from the ABM treaty, we unilaterally walked away from the Iran
nuclear deal, we unilaterally walked away from the INF treaty and we will almost certainly
walk away from the nuclear test ban treaty. We always allege violations from the other side
but never provide any proof of said violations. The United States has invaded Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, and Syria - so far without consequences. The United States has fomented coups
in Ukraine (twice), Georgia, probably in Brazil, Venezuela (twice) - again, without
consequences. And people wonder why I gag when I listen to Pompous pontificate that Iran
needs to start acting like a normal nation."
Posted by: Jeff | Aug 13 2019 17:03 utc | 43
Clear, concise, and right on target. Should be on a handbill, and passed out to the
general public. Thanks Jeff!!
Breaking News : Putin has a private army now. How devilish. CNN is definitely a bunch of
clowns, that makes you laugh everytime they talk. Enjoy this one:
The take away quote
"
At a recent political event in his home state of Kentucky, McConnell was heckled and booed by
Democrat supporters chanting "Moscow Mitch, Moscow Mitch!" The protesters were wearing
T-shirts and brandishing placards with images of McConnell donning a Cossack hat with
Soviet-era hammer and sickles.
Understandably, the 77-year-old senator has reacted with aghast over the political
attacks. He called it "modern-day McCarthyism" harking back to the Cold War years of Red
Baiting. He even said it was worse that the past McCarthyism. And he has a point there.
McConnell's exasperation is borne out of the complete irrational vacuousness of the
accusations. The six-time elected lawmaker is the longest-serving Republican senator. He is a
grandee of the traditionally rightwing party, with an "impeccable" record of being hawkish
towards Russia and President Vladimir Putin.
How anyone can construe that good ole boy McConnell is a Russian stooge is too absurd for
words. What the accusations do betray is the total derangement and politically illiterate
condition of mainstream American political and media culture.
"
Sometimes it's appropriate to call out, for the benefit of others, the propaganda memes
and dishonest arguments employed by a pro-establishment commenter.
One such trick is the pretense that a pro-establishment commenter is concerned
about "cynicism" or "conspiracy theories". You see, thinking for yourself may cause a
reluctance to love Big Brother. And sharing that thinking in an open forum is even more
problematical.
A pro-establishment commenter with pro-establishment concerns often attempts to cover
their tracks. They claim to be socialist and/or that they are seeking "common ground" but
such characterizations are merely honey for the distasteful medicine that the
pro-establishment commenter seeks to administer.
Unsuspecting readers often fall prey to the soothing words of a pro-establishment
trickster. Sometimes even supporting the pro-establishment commenter's right to express views
that are already well-covered in MSM. But just as "SALE" sounds sooo appealing yet
often is not what it seems, concerns of a pro-establish commenter are often misleading
and crafted to confuse and misdirect.
So I implore you ... don't be fooled. Think for yourself. And don't take allow yourself to
be swindled by a "SALE" that is really just bait and switch.
"... Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized. Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract from her being a loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor interests. "Moderates" need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests of voters. ..."
Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which
varied interests can be organized. Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms
spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract from her being a
loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor
interests. "Moderates" need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests
of voters.
"Mueller's Inquiry was never a serious search for truth is that at no stage was any independent forensic independence taken from
the DNC's servers, instead the word of the DNC's own security consultants was simply accepted as true. Finally no progress has been
made – or is intended to be made – on the question of who killed Seth Rich, while the pretend police investigation has "lost" his laptop.
"
"... Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized. Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract from her being a loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor interests. "Moderates" need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests of voters. ..."
So, there we have it. Russiagate as a theory is as completely exploded as the appalling Guardian front page lie published by Kath
Viner and Luke Harding fabricating the "secret meetings" between Paul Manafort and Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy. But
the political class and the mainstream media, both in the service of billionaires, have moved on to a stage where truth is irrelevant,
and I do not doubt that Russiagate stories will thus persist. They are so useful for the finances of the armaments and security industries,
and in keeping the population in fear and jingoist politicians in power.
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to
October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
michael , August 12, 2019 at 19:53
So far there is as much evidence presented that Martians interfered in the 2016 Election as RUSSIANS!!!
Just a much needed excuse to blow on the dying embers of the Cold War and get the nuclear weapons ready.
I'm still waiting for Robert Mueller to be tried for lying to Congress (when asked who hired him, instead of saying "I have no
idea", he said "Bush!" It is a matter of public record that Reagan hired him, a blatant lie! Is Michael Flynn out of jail yet?)
Drew Hunkins , August 12, 2019 at 14:49
" and I do not doubt that Russiagate stories will thus persist. They are so useful for the finances of the armaments and security
industries, and in keeping the population in fear and jingoist politicians in power "
They are also extremely useful as a scapegoat for the corporate warmongering DNC to camouflage the genuine reasons they lost
to Trump of all people.
Mark Thomason , August 12, 2019 at 10:34
Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized.
Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract
from her being a loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor interests. "Moderates"
need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests of voters.
"Those whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad".
Larry Mofield , August 12, 2019 at 08:41
If Russia actually wanted to help someone win I think it would be Hilary because Trump is a plain shooter from the hip and
takes nothing off of nobody.
If anything Sanders should had sued the DNC and Hilary for rigging the DNC
Go figure why he has kept his mouth shut.
Bif Webster , August 12, 2019 at 11:13
Putin preferred Obama to his running mates as well. But you won't ever hear that on the corporate "news" media.
Others sued on behalf of Bernie. That case died in south Florida, near Wasserman-Schultz's district yeah, and the excuse was,
"The DNC is a 'private organization" and do what they like, apparently. However, the "judge" did not find it odd that a private
entity can run a public election? And how there's an obvious conflict of interest involved?
Bernie kept his mouth shut because he's inside the Belly of the Beast.
Martin , August 12, 2019 at 11:54
i think there was something of a lawsuit, but the judge decided that the rigging was an inside thing to which no external laws
applied. if you got a non-profit or a company and there's no internal rules that forbid the rigging of votes, rigging is not illegal.
the superdelegates still exist.
Seer , August 12, 2019 at 12:04
He kept his mouth shut because advancing "My Revolution" was more important. And, because he's NOT a Democrat: he's only "allowed"
to run as one: he is therefore a little more constrained. Had he lashed out he'd have NOT been allowed to run again as a Democrat
-- bank on that!
Tulsi Gabbard, on the other hand, is a Democrat, in which case she really couldn't be kicked out: it was she who acted as Bernie's
mouth on this matter.
Trump is a piece of crap. There's nothing straight about him at all. He's a con-man of the highest order. Other than give money
to the rich he's done nothing: and "nothing," is probably the best that could have been hoped for given that he could have started
some wars (he hasn't found one that he feels safe would not undermine his presidency, otherwise he'd be lighting it up). The reason
the guy is so good at firing people is because he's so crappy about firing them.
Oh yeah, I have not cast a single vote for anyone I have mentioned here.
evelync , August 12, 2019 at 13:20
Interesting question, Larry Mofield!
Bernie's not a stupid guy and I believe (as does Cornel West and Noam Chomsky) he's dedicated to policies that serve working people
and sustainability.(as I see it – reversing the NeoLiberal agenda in order to restore a level playing field for working people and also to shift
to a democratic, non imperial foreign policy.)
So why didn't he, let's call him "David", not aim his slingshot at the DNC, let's call it "Goliath"?
Probably because a single stone in a slingshot was hopeless. He was up against a massive corrupt network of hangers on, IMO,
who rabidly shouted down the person who dared to question Clinton's policies.
For an even more recent example of a delusional grandiose, imperial mind set, let's take the 200+ people affiliated with the
JFK School of Government at Harvard. The ones who accepted the School's shameful withdrawal of Chelsea Manning's honorary fellowship
because Pompeo and Morrell attacked it with Cold War rhetoric. Manning's crime? Telling people the truth about horrific wrongdoing
she witnessed in Iraq. When I emailed 200 people at the JFK School a shame-on-you letter I heard back from only one who chastised
(threatened) me for not understanding "National Security" .say what????) Others chimed in to agree with her. (I shared that email
with Robert Parry at the time and he emailed back that he didn't blame me for being outraged. He was such a wonderful person.)
So Bernie had the whole MSNBC related propaganda machine at his throat.
– think Mimi Rocah's recent "he makes my skin crawl" comment, knowing surely, that her words would be applauded over there.
and think all the people who have accepted since 2016 that the Russians cost Hillary Clinton the election in denial over the truth
– a flawed candidate who seemed to consider her constituency the big banks and the polluters and the war machine.
I know lifelong conservative Republicans who liked Bernie in 2016 and like him now because they find him truthful but didn't
trust Clinton and some voted for Trump in order to beat her.
This country is filled with a patronage network of well off established people including Democrats who believe everything's fine
as it is and are willing to shut their eyes to what's not working – the financial crisis of the working class, the racism underlying
the for profit prison system and immigration system, the horrific endless regime change wars and the massive deregulation of banks
on Bill Clinton's watch and much more, including the Climate Crisis.
It's taken almost 3 years to discredit what apparently was a faux "excuse" why Hillary Clinton lost. Too many voters in key
states didn't trust her to serve their interests because she clearly was an apparatchik for the MICIMATT.
Enough of Trump's voters were willing to gamble on this "unknown" character who piggy backed off what Bernie was saying at
the time – too bad he was lying ..
rosemerry , August 12, 2019 at 15:39
The whole suggestion has ignored any words and actions of Pres. Putin, who is careful to keep to the truth. He often stated
that he would accept whoever the US population chose (ie did not even want to lean towards the one claiming to desire better relations,
let alone interfere) because the difference between US administrations was small and policies unlikely to change in 2016. Because
the US constantly causes "régime change" does not mean that Russia does. The quick decision to "blame Russia" immediately after
Trump's win, activated by Obama expelling diplomats and stealing their US property, set the ball rolling and it has not stopped.
T he AP and no doubt other media are setting the stage for claiming that if Trump is reelected in 2020, the Russians again
were responsible. As HItler learned, repeat a lie often enough and it will assume the appearance of truth. It's not surprising
that the Democrats led by Hillary are behind this maneuver. The Dems have been blaming Russia ever since Truman did so in 1945.
Sally Snyder , August 12, 2019 at 08:05
As shown in this article, key Western countries including the United States have put in place a mechanism that is supposed
to protect us from election meddling:
Given the anti-Russia bias that took root and has become pervasive in the West since 2014 and, in particular, since the Hillary
Clinton loss in 2016 which is blamed on Russian-sourced disinformation, it is interesting to see that the G7 has been driven to
take extreme moves to battle what they see as an "evil Russia".
jdd , August 12, 2019 at 07:05
Devastating. A cogent and insightful analysis of Judge Koeltl's decision. Thank you Ambassador Murray.
Michaelevan Hammond , August 12, 2019 at 02:16
What's hilarious is that Binney was able to discern that the download was later split in two and then transmitted state side.
Think of when you download a movie or a file .. it doesn't come in 2 parts, you either download the whole thing or it is an error/fail.
Binney is able to show that the whole thing is one download at 49mbps impossible speed for transatlantic transmission .he absolute
fastest you can achieve over the cable is 29mbps ..plus there are 6-12 NSA monitoring junctions added to the cable to capture
such things and not one had any Russians attempting to "hack"(2001 term). It was all just deflection for Hillary and she may we'll
have selfishly killed the Dems party.
Realist , August 12, 2019 at 00:37
Russiagate is not "dead." It has more lives than a cat bitten by a vampire. It is permanently undead. The antithesis of a dead
parrot.
How many times does Rachel Maddow have to tell you? Anyone who did not vote for Hillary Clinton and refuses to back her never-ending,
constantly metamorphosing coup against Trump has got to be a Putin agent even Mitch McConnell. Check back tomorrow for the latest
Maddowsplaining on this and other bad crazyness.
Seer , August 12, 2019 at 12:07
I agree. The FACT that the US has been sanctioning Russia for the better part of 100 years pretty much tells it all. It's about
the West's ruling elite keeping Their game going: but, nothing lasts forever, and this game is about to run out on them (the perpetual
growth model, which has given them their power, is ending).
Realist , August 12, 2019 at 00:18
Unless he was being sarcastic, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough tweeted that the Russians were probably behind Jeff Epstein's "suiciding"
in the high security NYC federal lockup!
Anyone who truly believes that Epstein actually took his own life probably does still have a severe case of Putin Derangement
Syndrome, aka Russophrenia, Russiagate-itis, -osis or whatever ya wanna call it. Their minds cannot co-exist within both the Deep
State Matrix and objective reality at the same time. Blaming all evil in the world on Russia gives them license to act outside
conventional morality with impunity.
Mark Stanley , August 12, 2019 at 11:32
Yes, they are endeavoring to tip-toe around this one. If Epstein had started squealing, the excrement would really have hit
the fan. After his purported suicide, the smokescreen "conspiracy" word popped up immediately in every mainstream mention of Epstein.
If the populace found out about the deranged sexual practices of too many of the world's elites it would certainly upset the apple
cart–to use an American expression.
Seer , August 12, 2019 at 15:51
This IS VERY DEEP! First three parts of this most excellent four part series is available, starting with this one (Mint Press
also needs supporting).
After reading this I now understand why Trump won't release his tax returns.
Realist , August 12, 2019 at 18:12
Seer,
Probably, because like Romney, he didn't pay any.
Dershowitz's client Leonna Helmsley explained the principle decades ago: "Only the little people pay taxes." Probably as truthful
a description of the American system as you will ever hear. Sadly, it went down the memory hole because the media will never mention
it again. Investigative reporters like David Cay Johnston have to write individually researched books on the subject and hope
that the swamp creatures don't seek retribution against him some dark night.
The most the public is ever going to get in this world is perhaps a brief glimmer of the truth through the hard work and suffering
of individuals like Assange, Manning and a few other brave altruistic souls, but never justice. The system is set up to sacrifice
the lives of millions for the benefit of dozens.
I figured that since 'gaslighting' is a relatively new term, and although I already had a
general idea what it meant from context, it would be best to look it up. I was surprised to
learn the concept of ' gaslighting ' has been around since 1938.
"a form of psychological manipulation in which a person seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a
targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory,
perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying,
gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's
belief."
In America's case, gaslighting – like charity – begins at home, and the
full
force of US government efforts to convince the skeptical that America is more powerful and
influential than ever, is still kicking ass and taking names, is felt by Americans.
I repeat the assessment of Veteran Intelligence Professional for Sanity (VIPS), to the effect
that the hack – if you can call it that – could not have been carried out over
the internet, as the data-transfer rate was far too high. In fact, it had all the
fingerprints of a portable device such as a thumb drive, coupled directly to the server at a
convenient USB port. And then Democratic staffer Seth Rich died, with no convincing
explanation for his death. Conservative American techhies tried to explain it away with a
barrage of bullshit about how that level of bandwidth could be realized over the internet and
how various tags and suchlike proved it was the Russians, but the Russians certainly would
know better by now than to leave those kinds of traces, and the US intelligence agencies are
quite proud of their ability to insert identifiers to make a transmission appear to have
originated someplace else. It's kind of like how Israel and the Ukrainian SBU destroyed
people's faith in voice intercepts.
The latter reference, despite its hopeful headline, merely argues the election was not
'hacked'; it was 'meddled with', and since the Russians wanted Trump to win, they probably
did get up to mischief, we're pretty sure.
This one even speculates that Russia wants American voters to know it can hack them
anytime it likes.
The electorate is now so polarized, demoralized and witless with fear and fury that voting
in America is merely a knee-jerk homage to democracy. Nobody will be remotely surprised if
the winner is not who they voted for, even if everyone says "Hey! I voted for him/her too!!"
They will just look at each other, nod significantly, and whisper "The Russians". And when
you think about it, that's just about where the US government wants them, except for the part
about their legitimacy being conferred by Vladimir Putin. That's going to be a hard one for
the winner to spin away.
US intelligence agencies are quite proud of their ability to insert identifiers to make a
transmission appear to have originated someplace else. ..
Yes, the famous 'Vault 7' set of NSA tools that were leaked, including a reversing tool so
that they can check if someone is trying to pass off their sneaky cyber stuff as American
when it's not.
"PART II: Gaslighting
Author's Note: Because "NATO" these days is little more than a box of spare parts out of
which Washington assembles "coalitions of the willing", it's easier for me to write "NATO"
than "Washington plus/minus these or those minions".
Both Devastating .Absolutely spot on devastating: (Above is excerpt from the first
link)
"The majority of Americans accept mass murder under the pretext of the right to protect,
because their ability to form rational and reasoned opinions has been engineered out of them.
This is now the definition of US exceptionalism. It is their ability to manipulate the world
into accepting their lawlessness and global hegemony agenda. In seeking to impose its own
image upon our world the US has drifted so far from its founding principles, one wonders how
they will ever return to them. They have employed a recognised form of torture to ensure
capitulation to their mission of world domination which entails the mental, physical and
spiritual torture of target civilian populations.
In conclusion, the US has indeed achieved exceptionalism. The US has become an exceptional
global executioner and persecutor of Humanity. Imperialism is a euphemism for the depths of
abuse the US is inflicting upon the people of this world."
Look out for the bad reviews from The Fraudian's writers: Luke Harding can be relied on to
add his 2 cents' worth of conspiracy paranoid garbage, Shaun Walker will be parsing the book
for dill references and non-Russia experts like Marina Hyde and Natalie Nougat-head will want
a crack as well at reviewing the book.
Probably the only half-decent reviews will be from Mary Dejevski and Prof. Stephen Cohen
but theirs will be buried in a back page or inaccessible behind an Error 404 wall.
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it
6 (UK) Division is the new organisational home for the Army's "asymmetric edge",
comprising all things "Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence, Information Operations, Electronic
Warfare, Cyber and Unconventional Warfare".
Launched this morning, 6 Div is a rebranding of the formation formerly known as Force
Troops Command, which covered a hotchpotch of Royal Signals, Intelligence Corps and other
units, including the infamous 77 Brigade
####
Don't forget to hit the comments for hilarity!
Also, the timing of the announcement says plenty, i.e. slipping it in to the news stream
when people have already gone on holiday and all the BREXIT and other bollocks. I've not seen
this reported on the tv in the UK – which is currently facing severe flooding etc.
Is it just me or is all the PPNN reporting that 'Putin's support has dropped to levels
not seen since 2011!'. Of course they don't actually give you any numbers and cherry pick
dodgy poll numbers but there really is this Pavlovian reaction anytime there is a
demonstration in Russia, like undertakers gathering at an allegedly dangerous road crossing
waiting for some cyclist to be dragged under a trash lorry so that they can tut tut and then
profit from the cyclist's misfortune. Nix that, the PPNN are just professional versions of
MacBeth's witches, something which they don't understand is a story .
Putin is in as much danger of being unceremoniously chucked out of office as he is of choking
to death on his grandmother's knitting. The west is ever hopeful, and dutifully rallies to
the glorification of every new dissident firebrand, but whether or not they know it, they are
just going through the motions. The only group, and I mean the only one, that would benefit
from Putin's overthrow would be the disaffected kreakliy and the poncy forgotten
semi-intellectuals. They would be feted by the west as political visionaries, and perhaps
given minor government positions to satisfy their vanity. But who else would make out like a
bandit? The military? Hardly – the west, after years of giggling about Russia's
decrepit military, lapsed into an uneasy silence on the subject just about the time that
long-distance Kalibr cruise-missile attack took place from the Caspian Sea into Syria, and a
west given meddling-room would want to disband the Russian military, if anything, down to a
token force of absolutely-trustworthy sycophants who would probably be issued with American
weapons. The oligarchs? Hardly – western business would be snapping up former state
assets while simultaneously carrying out an 'anti-corruption drive' under the new President's
imprimatur. Small businesses? Hardly – corporate interest would be in melding large
state interests into the Corporate Borg, and their method is to squeeze out small business in
order to expand market share. The people? Hardly – Russia would be a convenient place
to move all the refugee immigrants from that entire hemisphere, while the stubborn loyalty of
the population to Putin would not be forgotten.
It is no coincidence that it is always the same people who show up to bitch and carp about
how dreadful Putin is, and how Russia needs American-style freedom and democracy and non-stop
Pride parades and all the trappings of fresh admission to Club West. They are the only people
who would stand to benefit from driving Putin out. Nobody else is interested.
They're just trying to get some mileage out of Olga what's-her-name, and make it look like a
drop in Putin's poll numbers happened exactly at the moment this young political firebrand
emerged. Pretty sad, really, but you can't tell 'em, and it wouldn't make any difference.
They have to try, it's the same instinct that makes a dog lick its nose if you smear cheese
on it. The western media would rush to interview and endorse a talking Russian toad if it
said "I hate Putin".
"... it turned out that the very people who were up in arms about "fake news" were the ones propagating their own version of it. WikiLeaks did much to expose their game by publicizing the key role played by the Legacy Media in acting as an extension of the Clinton campaign. However, the real unmasking came after the November election, when the rage of the liberal elites became so manifest that "reporters" who would normally be loath to reveal their politics came out of the closet, so to speak, and started telling us that the old journalistic standard of objectivity no longer applied. The election of Trump, they averred, meant that the old standards must be abandoned and a new, and openly partisan bias must take its place. In honor of this new credo, the Washington Post has adopted a new slogan: " Democracy dies in darkness "! ..."
"... Rep. Gabbard's "crime" was to challenge the US-funded effort to overthrow the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad as contrary to our interests and the prospects for peace in the region. For that she has been demonized in the media – and, not coincidentally, the very same media that is now an instrument in the hands of our "intelligence community." For ..."
"... And of course it's not just the Washington Post : the entire "mainstream" media is now colluding with the "intelligence community" in an effort to discredit and derail any efforts at a rapprochement with Russia. We haven't seen this kind of hysteria since the frigid winter of the cold war. ..."
"... My longtime readers will not be shocked by any of this: during the run up to the Iraq war, the media was chock full of fake news about Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons of mass destruction, which all the "experts" told us were certainly there and ready to rain death and destruction at any minute. Who can forget the series of articles by Judith Miller that adorned the front page of the New York Times – which were merely Bush administration talking points reiterated by Donald Rumsfeld & Co. on the Sunday talk shows? Miller has now become synonymous with the very concept of fake news – and yet how quickly we forget the lesson we should have learned from that shameful episode in the history of American journalism . ..."
"... Blinded by partisan bias, all too willing to be used as an instrument of the Deep State -- and determined to "control exactly what people think," which is, as Mika Brzezinski put it the other day, " our job " – the English-speaking media has become increasingly unreliable. This has become a big problem for us here at Antiwar.com: we now have to check and re-check everything that they report as fact. Not that we didn't do that anyway, but the difference is that, these days, we have to be more careful than ever before linking to it, or citing it as factual. ..."
"... The day of the "alternative media" has passed. We are simply part of the media, period: the increasingly tiny portion of it that doesn't fall for war propaganda, that doesn't have a partisan agenda, and that harkens back to the "old" journalistic standards of yesteryear – objective reporting of facts. That doesn't mean we don't have opinions, or an agenda – far from it! However, we base those opinions on what, to the best of our ability, we can discern as the facts. ..."
"... And we have a pretty good record in this regard. Back when everyone who was anyone was telling us that those "weapons of mass destruction" were lurking in the Iraqi shadows, we said it was nonsense – and we were right. As the "experts" said that war with Iraq would "solve" the problem of terrorism and bring enlightenment to the Middle East, we said the war would usher in the reign of chaos – and we were right. We warned that NATO expansion would trigger an unnecessary conflict with Russia, and we were proved right about that, too. The Kosovo war was hailed as a "humanitarian" act – and we rightly predicted it would come back to haunt us in the form of a gangster state riven by conflict. ..."
"... There's one way in which we are significantly different from the rest of the media – we depend on our readers for the financial support we need to keep going. The Washington Post has Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest men in the world – not to mention a multi-million dollar contract with the "intelligence community." The New York Times has Carlos Slim, another billionaire with seemingly bottomless pockets. We, on the other hand, just have you. ..."
We're not the alternative media – we're the best media you've got!
Posted on
August 06, 2019 August 4, 2019The more things change, the more they stay the same: the
sun comes up in the morning; another Hitler arises in the fantasies of the foreign-policy
establishment; and Josh Rogin writes
another column attacking Tusli Gabbard, the most pro-peace candidate in the Democratic
lineup. Justin blasted Rogin the first time he tried this, back in February of 2017, proving
that the whole story was "fake news". We think it's important to revisit Justin's analysis of
the media-enhanced demand for war. As Justin notes, the only real alternative to this, the only
real "alternative media," are sites like Antiwar. com and WikiLeaks.
If we look at the phrase itself, it seems to mean the media that presents itself as the
alternative to what we call the "corporate media," i.e. the New York Times , the
Washington Post , your local rag – in short, the Legacy Media that predominated in
those bygone days before the Internet. And yet this whole arrangement seems outdated, to say
the least. The Internet has long since been colonized by the corporate giants: BuzzFeed, for
example, is regularly fed huge dollops of cash from its corporate owners. And the Legacy Media
has adapted to the primacy of online media, however reluctantly and ineptly. So the alternative
media isn't defined by how they deliver the news, but rather by 1) what they judge to be news,
and 2) how they report it.
And that's the problem.
There's been much talk of "fake news," a concept first defined by the "mainstream" media
types as an insidious scheme by the Russians and/or supporters of Donald Trump to deny Hillary
Clinton her rightful place in the Oval Office. Or it was
Macedonian teenagers out to fool us into giving them clicks. Or something. Facebook and
Google announced a campaign to eliminate this Dire Threat, and the mandarins of the
"mainstream" reared up in righteous anger, lecturing us that journalistic standards were being
traduced.
Yet it turned out that the very people who were up in arms about "fake news" were the ones propagating
their own version of it.
WikiLeaks did much to expose their game by publicizing the
key role played by the Legacy Media in acting as an
extension of the Clinton campaign. However, the real unmasking came after the November
election, when the rage of the liberal elites became so manifest that "reporters" who would
normally be loath to reveal their politics came out of the closet, so to speak, and started
telling us that the old journalistic standard of objectivity no longer applied. The election of
Trump, they averred, meant that the old standards must be abandoned and a new, and openly
partisan bias
must take its place. In honor of this new credo, the Washington Post has adopted a new slogan:
"
Democracy dies in darkness "!
This from the newspaper that ran a front page story citing the anonymous trolls at
PropOrNot.com as credible sources for an account of alleged
"Russian agents of influence" in the media – a story that slimed Matt Drudge and
Antiwar.com, among others.
This from the newspaper that regularly publishes "news" accounts citing anonymous
"intelligence officials" claiming the Trump administration is rife with Russian "agents."
This from the newspaper that published
a piece by foreign affairs columnist Josh Rogin that falsely claimed Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's
trip to Syria was funded by a group that is "nonexistent" and strongly implied she was in the
pay of the Syrian government or some other foreign entity. Well after the smear circulated far
and wide, the paper posted the following correction:
" An earlier version of this op-ed misspelled the name of AACCESS Ohio and incorrectly
stated that the organization no longer exists. AACCESS Ohio is an independent non-profit
organization that is a member of the ACCESS National Network of Arab American Community
organizations but is currently on probation due to inactivity. The op-ed also incorrectly
stated that Bassam Khawam is Syrian American. He is Lebanese American. This version has been
corrected."
Rep. Gabbard's "crime" was to challenge the US-funded effort to overthrow the regime of
Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad as contrary to our interests and the prospects for peace in
the region. For that she has been demonized in the media – and, not coincidentally, the
very same media that is now an instrument in the hands of our "intelligence community." For it
is these spooks who, for years, have been canoodling with the Saudis in an effort to rid the
region of the last secular obstacle to the Sunni-ization of the Middle East. That they have
Tulsi Gabbard in their sights is no surprise.
And of course it's not just the Washington Post : the entire "mainstream" media is
now colluding with the "intelligence community" in an effort to discredit and derail any
efforts at a rapprochement with Russia. We haven't seen this kind of hysteria since the frigid
winter of the cold war.
My longtime readers will not be shocked by any of this: during the run up to the Iraq war,
the media was chock full of fake news about Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons of mass
destruction, which all the "experts" told us were certainly there and ready to rain death and
destruction at any minute. Who can forget the series of articles by Judith Miller that adorned
the front page of the New York Times – which were merely Bush administration
talking points reiterated by Donald Rumsfeld & Co. on the Sunday talk shows? Miller has now
become synonymous with the very concept of fake news – and yet how quickly we forget the
lesson we should have learned from that shameful episode in the history of American
journalism.
So fake news is nothing new, nor is the concept of the "mainstream" media as a megaphone for
war propaganda. What's different today is that many are waking up to this fact – and
turning to the "alternative." I've been struck by this rising phenomenon over the past year or
so: Matt Drudge gave Antiwar.com a permanent link. Our audience has increased by many
thousands. And I've been getting a steady stream of interview requests. I was quite pleased to
read the following in
a recent piece in The Nation about the media's fit of Russophobia and the key role
played by the journalist I. F. Stone during the 1950s:
"To conclude where I began, think for a moment about I.F. Stone during his haunted 1950s.
While he was well-regarded by a lot of rank-and-file reporters, few would say so openly. He was
PNG [persona non grata] among people such as [ New York Times publisher Arthur]
Sulzberger – an outcast .
"Now think about now.
"A few reporters and commentators advise us that the name of the game these days is to
sink the single most constructive policy the Trump administration has announced. The rest is
subterfuge, rubbish. This isprima faciethe case, though you can read it nowhere
in theTimesor any of the other corporate media. A few have asserted that we may
now be witnessing a coup operation against the Trump White House. This is a possibility, in my
view. We cannot flick it off the table. With the utmost purpose, I post
here one of
these pieces. "A Win for the Deep State" came out just after Flynn was forced from office. It
is by a writer named Justin Raimondo and appeared in a wholly out-of-bounds web publication
called Antiwar.com. I know nothing about either, but it is a thought-provoking piece."
Well, we aren't quite "wholly out of bounds," except in certain circles, but all in all this
is a great compliment – and it's illustrative of author Patrick Lawrence's point, which
is that
"We, readers and viewers, must discriminate among all that is put before us so as to make
the best judgments we can and, not least, protect our minds. The other side of the coin, what
we customarily call 'alternative media,' assumes an important responsibility. They must get
done, as best they can, what better-endowed media now shirk. To put this simply and briefly,
they and we must learn that they are not 'alternative' to anything. In the end there is no such
thing as 'alternative media,' as I often argue. There are only media, and most of ours have
turned irretrievably bad."
We here at Antiwar.com take our responsibility to you, our readers and supporters, very
seriously. We're working day and night, 24/7, to separate fact from fiction, knee-jerk
"analysis" from intelligent critique, partisan bullshit from truth. And we've had to work much
harder lately because the profession of journalism has fallen on hard times.
Blinded by partisan bias, all too willing to be used as an instrument of the Deep State --
and determined to "control exactly what people think," which is, as Mika Brzezinski put it the
other day, " our job " – the
English-speaking media has become increasingly unreliable. This has become a big problem for us
here at Antiwar.com: we now have to check and re-check everything that they report as
fact. Not that we didn't do that anyway, but the difference is that, these days, we have to be
more careful than ever before linking to it, or citing it as factual.
The day of the "alternative media" has passed. We are simply part of the media, period: the
increasingly tiny portion of it that doesn't fall for war propaganda, that doesn't have a
partisan agenda, and that harkens back to the "old" journalistic standards of yesteryear
– objective reporting of facts. That doesn't mean we don't have opinions, or an agenda
– far from it! However, we base those opinions on what, to the best of our ability, we
can discern as the facts.
And we have a pretty good record in this regard. Back when everyone who was anyone was
telling us that those "weapons of mass destruction" were lurking in the Iraqi shadows, we said
it was nonsense – and we were right. As the "experts" said that war with Iraq would
"solve" the problem of terrorism and bring enlightenment to the Middle East, we said the war
would usher in the reign of chaos – and we were right. We warned that NATO expansion
would trigger an unnecessary conflict with Russia, and we were proved right about that, too.
The Kosovo war was hailed as a "humanitarian" act – and we rightly predicted it would
come back to haunt us in the form of a gangster state riven by conflict.
I could spend several paragraphs boasting about how right we were, but you get the idea. Our
record is a good one. And we intend to make it even better. But we can't do it – we
can't do our job – without your help.
There's one way in which we are significantly different from the rest of the media
– we depend on our readers for the financial support we need to keep going. The
Washington Post has Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest men in the world – not to
mention a multi-million
dollar contract with the "intelligence community." The New York Times has Carlos
Slim, another billionaire with seemingly bottomless pockets. We, on the other hand, just have
you.
Okay, I'll cut to the chase: we've come to a crucial point in our current fundraising
campaign, and now it's make it or break it time for Antiwar.com.
A group of our most generous supporters has pledged $40,000 in matching funds – but
that pledge is strictly conditional . What this means is that we must match that
amount in the short time left in our campaign in order to get the entire $40,000.
There are some other big institutional failures playing into this. The press has for the
better part of the last 40 years pretended that both parties were both acting in good faith
and just had different ideas about what worked best - which clearly isn't true. They also
engaged in a false "it's both sides" narrative. The Dems took way too long to figure out that
the Rs are insurgent, anti-democratic, and unafraid to destroy the country to gain power. The
big internet companies knew what was going on with Cambridge and the Russians and did nothing
about it. Our voting infrastructure has been taken over by partisans that are actively
ensuring that votes can be meddled with. I mean - it is a huge convergence of events - and
while I think you are acting in good faith, there are a bunch of posters who are acting like
force multipliers for Russia and the Sarandon types. I don't see how anyone can ignore the
threat of foreign interference, the fact that Trump did in fact collude with Russia by any
definition of the word, the fact that the Mueller report all but says "there were crimes, but
we cant get the evidence because of obstruction," and the obvious fact that the R
establishment has gone full on anti-democracy and be pro democracy. We are in a much scary
place than I think most people understand or are willing to admit. Remember, Hitler was a
joke and then he wasn't.
The accusation that Dems have done nothing about voter security is belied by the fact that
TODAY there are 2 simple bills being held up by Moscow Mitch. It is belied by the fact that
Dems in all 50 states tried to enact paper trails. It is impossible to have a discussion
about anything when some people just insist on a set of facts that are not facts. It is
stupid and embarrassing. The interwebs are an fen sewer.
LOL!!! Two bill after 20 years??? And motivated by dubious fears of Russian meddling when
corporations, billionaires, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and others have been meddling for decades
without so much as a whimper from kurt's beloved Democrats!!!
And, of course, Team Pelosi finally gets around to introducing some bills only when it's
obvious to any idiot, even kurt, that they won't get past the Senate!!!
IMO, Team Pelosi is just grandstanding. I mean, who could take them seriously, when they
haven't bothered to try and do anything for decades?
But has Team Pelosi cared enough to do something about it until she got Putin Derangement
Syndrome? No, of course, not asleep at the wheel appeasing or complicit with the monied
interests who have ample resources to subvert elections.
And what did Ds do during the last 40 years to fix the voting infrastructure? Gore and Kerry
just shrugged and let Bush become President. And Ds never mounted any sort of effort to
secure the hackable, inauditable voting machines.
Simply put, Kurt's beloved Ds we're engaged in appeasement or complicity... take your
pick.
Barr now has goods to jail major conspirators for life. It is unlikely happened but we can hope.
Notable quotes:
"... "Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign country interfering in American affairs," former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the 'Russiagate' investigation. ..."
"... The Guardian reported on texts between former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, who now heads GCHQ. The two men met in 2016 to discuss "our strange situation" – an apparent reference to Russia's alleged interference in US domestic politics. ..."
"... British intelligence "appears to have played a key role in the early stages," the report said. ..."
"... Galloway said the revelation was not surprising because people "already knew" that British intelligence had played a part in the Russia-related investigations in the US. He recalled that it was former British spy Christopher Steele who drew up the now-infamous Steele dossier, which made multiple unverifiable and salacious claims about Trump and has since been largely discredited. Britain is "up to its neck in the whole Russiagate affair," he said. ..."
"... Asked what the UK stood to gain by trying to implicate Russia in a US election scandal at a time when then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was dismissing baseless claims of Russian interference in the Brexit campaign, Galloway noted that Johnson's comments on Russia have appeared to strangely sway between friendly and antagonistic. ..."
"... In June 2016, the FBI opened a covert investigation codenamed 'Crossfire Hurricane' into Trump's now disproven collusion with Moscow, which was later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller. ..."
While hysteria raged about possible Russian "interference" in the 2016 US election, British
intelligence officials were secretly playing a "key role" in helping instigate investigations
into Donald Trump, secret texts have shown. "Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign
country interfering in American affairs," former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about
the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the
'Russiagate' investigation.
The Guardian reported on texts between former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and Jeremy
Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, who now heads GCHQ. The two men met in 2016 to discuss
"our strange situation" – an apparent reference to Russia's alleged interference
in US domestic politics.
British intelligence "appears to have played a key role in the early stages," the
report said.
Galloway said the revelation was not surprising because people "already knew" that
British intelligence had played a part in the Russia-related investigations in the US. He
recalled that it was former British spy Christopher Steele who drew up the now-infamous Steele
dossier, which made multiple unverifiable and salacious claims about Trump and has since been
largely discredited. Britain is "up to its neck in the whole Russiagate affair," he
said.
The texts also reveal that the Brexit vote was viewed by some in the FBI as something that
had been influenced by Russia.
Asked what the UK stood to gain by trying to implicate Russia in a US election scandal at a
time when then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was dismissing baseless claims of Russian
interference in the Brexit campaign, Galloway noted that Johnson's comments on Russia have
appeared to strangely sway between friendly and antagonistic.
Johnson is like "a sofa that bears the impression of the last person to sit upon
him," the former MP quipped. What happens next will depend on who is leading the tango,
"the orange man in Washington or the blonde mop-head in London."
In June 2016, the FBI opened a covert investigation codenamed 'Crossfire Hurricane' into
Trump's now disproven collusion with Moscow, which was later taken over by special counsel
Robert Mueller.
Ultimately, the two-year-long probe that followed came up short, producing no evidence to prove a conspiracy or collusion
between Trump campaign officials and Russia
"... The ruling exposes the illegality of the conspiracy by the US government, backed by the governments of Britain, Ecuador, Australia and Sweden and the entire corporate media and political establishment, to extradite Assange to the US, where he faces 175 years in federal prison on charges including espionage. ..."
"... The dismissal of the civil suit exposes massive unreported conflicts of interest and prosecutorial misconduct and criminal abuse of process by those involved. The criminal prosecution of Assange has nothing to do with facts and is instead aimed at punishing him for telling the truth about the war crimes committed by US imperialism and its allies. ..."
"... The judge labeled WikiLeaks an "international news organization" and said Assange is a "publisher," exposing the liars in the corporate press who declare that Assange is not subject to free speech protections. Judge Koeltl continued: "In New York Times Co. v. United States ..."
"... New York Times Co. v. United States ..."
"... The DNC's baseless complaint cited the New York Times ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... Everyone seems to forget one thing.. Assange knows who gave Assange the DNC data. At some point you have to entertain the idea that eventually he'll play that card. ..."
"... The DNC never allowed a REAL cyber-inspection of it's servers, did they? They also never said the information contained in the supposedly 'stolen' E-Mails was "WRONG" or "INACCURATE", have they? It says volumes.... Occam's Razor points to disgruntled DNC employee Seth Rich using a large capacity flash drive to download the E-Mails, etc which he then passed to someone who got it to Wikileaks. For which he was killed!! ..."
"... No. they never did. Also, if you examine Mueller's BS indictments, the domain they claim was used to phish for Podesta's password (and others) was registered on the same day or perhaps the day before they unsealed the indictment. It's a total fabrication, start to finish! ..."
"... That's just one example of many. The Malware they allegedly 'discovered' (by a Ukranian owned security company Crowdstrike) was not Russian, it was Ukrainian and been floating around the internet for years prior to this alleged non-existent 'hack'.. The whole thing has more holes than proverbial swiss ..."
"... For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations ..."
"... Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match ..."
"... It is beyond astonishing that Democrats and the media have successfully shifted 99% of the public's attention AWAY FROM the actual content of what information was stolen from top ranking Democrats, especially the Hillary for President Campaign. ..."
"... beaglebailey > michiganderforfreedom ..."
"... ironically surely an equally damning 'leak' came from the DNCs own ex-Chair Donna Brazille in her self-serving 'memoir' Hacks ... in it she revealed Obama left DNC $24m in debt and Hillary Clinton then bailed it out and effectively bought the entire apparatus as her personal plaything. When that is understood all the 'corruption' about rigging the primaries against Sanders wasn't rigging at all, after all he was standing on Clinton's private property at the time. Blair and Brown dutifully followed the same NSA playbook and left Labour broke, presumably so Blair's 'charity' could then step in to buy it... but Corbyn then balanced the books in 6 months of his taking over ..."
"... The corporate media, having already gone to great lengths to convict Assange of such in the court of public opinion, would like to see that "conviction" stand. ..."
"... "The DNC's published internal communications allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election." That's precisely the kind of "problem" the bourgeoisie will no longer tolerate. ..."
"... Reporting the truth “undermined and distorted the DNC's ability to communicate the party's values and visions to the American electorate.” ..."
"... They're sick and tired of basic democratic rights almost as much as they're sick and tired of the working class ..."
In a ruling published late Tuesday, Judge John Koeltl of the US District Court for the
Southern District of New York delivered a devastating blow to the US-led conspiracy against
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
In his ruling, Judge Koeltl, a Bill Clinton nominee and former assistant special prosecutor
for the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, dismissed "with prejudice" a civil lawsuit filed
in April 2018 by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) alleging WikiLeaks was civilly liable
for conspiring with the Russian government to steal DNC emails and data and leak them to the
public.
Jennifer Robinson, a leading lawyer for Assange, and other WikiLeaks attorneys welcomed the
ruling as "an important win for free speech."
The decision exposes the Democratic Party in a conspiracy of its own to attack free speech
and cover up the crimes of US imperialism and the corrupt activities of the two parties of Wall
Street. Judge Koeltl stated:
If WikiLeaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning the DNC's political
financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because the DNC labels them 'secret' and
trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or other media outlet. But that would
impermissibly elevate a purely private privacy interest to override the First Amendment
interest in the publication of matters of the highest public concern. The DNC's published
internal communications allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of
the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election. This
type of information is plainly of the type entitled to the strongest protection that the
First Amendment offers.
The ruling exposes the illegality of the conspiracy by the US government, backed by the
governments of Britain, Ecuador, Australia and Sweden and the entire corporate media and
political establishment, to extradite Assange to the US, where he faces 175 years in federal
prison on charges including espionage.
The plaintiff in the civil case -- the Democratic Party -- has also served as Assange's
chief prosecutor within the state apparatus for over a decade. During the Obama administration,
Democratic Party Justice Department officials, as well as career Democratic holdovers under the
Trump administration, prepared the criminal case against him.
The dismissal of the civil suit exposes massive unreported conflicts of interest and
prosecutorial misconduct and criminal abuse of process by those involved. The criminal
prosecution of Assange has nothing to do with facts and is instead aimed at punishing him for
telling the truth about the war crimes committed by US imperialism and its allies.
The judge labeled WikiLeaks an "international news organization" and said Assange is a
"publisher," exposing the liars in the corporate press who declare that Assange is not subject
to free speech protections. Judge Koeltl continued: "In New York Times Co. v. United
States , the landmark 'Pentagon Papers' case, the Supreme Court upheld the press's right
to publish information of public concern obtained from documents stolen by a third
party."
As a legal matter, by granting WikiLeaks' motion to dismiss, the court ruled that the DNC
had not put forward a "factually plausible" claim. At the motion to dismiss stage, a judge is
required to accept all the facts alleged by the plaintiff as true. Here, the judge ruled that
even if all the facts alleged by the DNC were true, no fact-finder could "draw the reasonable
inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged."
Going a step further, the judge called the DNC's arguments "threadbare," adding: "At no
point does the DNC allege any facts" showing that Assange or WikiLeaks "participated in the
theft of the DNC's information."
Judge Koeltl said the DNC's argument that Assange and WikiLeaks "conspired with the Russian
Federation to steal and disseminate the DNC's materials" is "entirely divorced from the facts."
The judge further ruled that the court "is not required to accept conclusory allegations
asserted as facts."
The judge further dismantled the DNC's argument that WikiLeaks is guilty-by-association with
Russia, calling the alleged connection between Assange and the Russian government "irrelevant,"
because "a person is entitled to publish stolen documents that the publisher requested from a
source so long as the publisher did not participate in the theft."
Judge Koeltl also rejected the DNC's claim "that WikiLeaks can be held liable for the theft
as an after-the-fact coconspirator of the stolen documents." Calling this argument
"unpersuasive," the judge wrote that it would "eviscerate" constitutional protections: "Such a
rule would render any journalist who publishes an article based on stolen information a
coconspirator in the theft."
In its April 2018 complaint, the DNC put forward a series of claims that have now been
exposed as brazen lies, including that Assange, Trump and Russia "undermined and distorted the
DNC's ability to communicate the party's values and visions to the American electorate."
The complaint also alleged: "Russian intelligence services then disseminated the stolen,
confidential materials through GRU Operative #1, as well as WikiLeaks and Assange, who were
actively supported by the Trump Campaign and Trump Associates as they released and disclosed
the information to the American public at a time and in a manner that served their common
goals."
At the time the DNC filed its complaint, the New York Times wrote that the document
relies on "publicly-known facts" as well as "information that has been disclosed in news
reports and subsequent court proceedings." The lawsuit "comes amid a swirl of intensifying
scrutiny of Mr. Trump, his associates and their interactions with Russia," the Times
wrote.
It is deeply ironic that Judge Koeltl cited the Pentagon Papers case, New York Times Co.
v. United States , in his ruling.
The DNC's baseless complaint cited the New York Times eight times as "proof" of
Assange and WikiLeaks' ties to Russia, including articles by Times reporters Andrew
Kramer, Michael Gordon, Niraj Chokshi, Sharon LaFraniere, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Eric Lichtblau,
Noah Weiland, Alicia Parlapiano and Ashley Parker, as well as a July 26, 2016 article by
Charlie Savage titled "Assange, avowed foe of Clinton, timed email release for Democratic
Convention."
The first of these articles was published just weeks after the New York Times hired
James Bennet as its editorial page editor in March 2016. James Bennet's brother, Michael
Bennet, is a presidential candidate, a senator from Colorado and former chair of the DNC's
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. In 2018, Bennet signed a letter to Vice President
Mike Pence noting he was "extremely concerned" that Ecuador had not canceled asylum for
Assange, who was then trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
"It is imperative," the letter read, "that you raise US concerns with [Ecuadorian] President
[Lenin] Moreno about Ecuador's continued support for Mr. Assange at a time when WikiLeaks
continues its efforts to undermine democratic processes globally."
In April 2019, after the Trump administration announced charges against Assange, the New
York Times editorial board, under James Bennet's direction, wrote: "The administration has
begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime." Two weeks later, Michael Bennet
announced his presidential run and has since enjoyed favorable coverage in the Times
editorial page.
Additionally, the father of James and Michael Bennet, Douglas Bennet, headed the CIA-linked
United States Agency for International Development in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
On Wednesday, the Times published a brief, six-paragraph article on page 25 under
the headline, "DNC lawsuit against election is dismissed." In its online edition, the
Times prominently featured a link to its special page for the Mueller Report, which is
based on the same DNC-instigated threadbare lies that Judge Koeltl kicked out of federal court
LC • 9 hours ago
Everyone seems to forget one thing.. Assange knows who gave Assange the DNC data. At some point you have to entertain
the idea that eventually he'll play that card.
Liberalism Has Failed • 2 days ago
The DNC never allowed a REAL cyber-inspection of it's servers, did they? They also never said the information
contained in the supposedly 'stolen' E-Mails was "WRONG" or "INACCURATE", have they? It says volumes.... Occam's Razor points
to disgruntled DNC employee Seth Rich using a large capacity flash drive to download the E-Mails, etc which he then passed to
someone who got it to Wikileaks. For which he was killed!!
LC > Liberalism Has Failed • 9 hours ago
No. they never did. Also, if you examine Mueller's BS indictments, the domain they claim was used to phish for
Podesta's password (and others) was registered on the same day or perhaps the day before they unsealed the indictment. It's a
total fabrication, start to finish!
That's just one example of many. The Malware they allegedly 'discovered' (by a Ukranian owned security company
Crowdstrike) was not Russian, it was Ukrainian and been floating around the internet for years prior to this alleged
non-existent 'hack'.. The whole thing has more holes than proverbial swiss
Tradairn > SFWhite • a day ago
Then why does the US keep interfering in other countries' political processes? You've become the schoolyard bully of the
world.
SFWhite > Tradairn • 18 hours ago
Quoting from JFK's speech archived in the JFK Library:
THE PRESIDENT AND THE PRESS: ADDRESS BEFORE THE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION, APRIL 27, 1961
https://www.jfklibrary.org/...
If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say
that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I
can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.
It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions--by the government, by the people, by every
businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper.
***For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for
expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation
instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and
material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic,
intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not
praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a
war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.***
michiganderforfreedom • 2 days ago
It is beyond astonishing that Democrats and the media have successfully shifted 99% of the public's attention AWAY
FROM the actual content of what information was stolen from top ranking Democrats, especially the Hillary for President
Campaign.
Had the actual Content of what had been stolen was simply meeting schedules, work shift assignments, lawn sign purchase
orders and speech notes, NONE of this scandal would have happened!!
But, the CONTENT of what was stolen revealed the upper echelon of Democrat Party leadership to be nothing but lying,
conniving, cheating, law-breaking dirty politicians who are hell-bent on bringing down the American Federation at any cost.
If the actual Content had been cookie recipes and wedding plans, we would not have been put though this traumatic national
wringer!!
beaglebailey > michiganderforfreedom • 7 hours ago
This was the reason Hillary's campaign came up with the idea to blame it on Russia. This kept people from focusing on
their content and it worked. To this day Hillary's supporters think that her rigging the primary is a conspiracy theory. And
it's why they believe that Russia interfered with the election. How sad to see people who saw through the Saddam had WMDs
have fallen for the new WMDs scam.
Charlotte Ruse • 4 days ago
"The decision exposes the Democratic Party in a conspiracy of its own to attack free speech and cover up the crimes of US
imperialism and the corrupt activities of the two parties of Wall Street."
One should never forget that the corrupt political duopoly is controlled by the military/security/surveillance/corporate
state. Assange, published documents revealing to millions that the US committed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, murdered
innocent civilians, and slaughtered two Reuter Reporters.
Revealing atrocities is BAD MARKETING for the military industry which for decades has been robbing the US Treasury blind.
Assange's documents threatens the "official narrative" spread by the state-run mainstream news convincing the public to
passively accept the plundering of the US Treasury to enhance the wealth of a small cabal of war profiteer gangsters.
In other words, Assange is being attacked by the US Government because he revealed that a big CON GAME is being perpetuated
against the American public by the security state.
Dennis Stein > Charlotte Ruse • 3 days ago
“We’ll Know Our Disinformation Program Is Complete When Everything the American Public Believes Is False”
—CIA Director William Casey at an early February 1981 meeting of newly elected President Reagan.
Adrian • 4 days ago
Great news on Assange... but ironically surely an equally damning 'leak' came from the DNCs own ex-Chair Donna
Brazille in her self-serving 'memoir' Hacks ... in it she revealed Obama left DNC $24m in debt and Hillary Clinton then
bailed it out and effectively bought the entire apparatus as her personal plaything. When that is understood all the
'corruption' about rigging the primaries against Sanders wasn't rigging at all, after all he was standing on Clinton's
private property at the time. Blair and Brown dutifully followed the same NSA playbook and left Labour broke, presumably so
Blair's 'charity' could then step in to buy it... but Corbyn then balanced the books in 6 months of his taking over
Ed Bergonzi • 5 days ago
This is good news. But now the advantage is with Trump. What will the Democrats do if Trump presses for extradition
claiming "national security" concerns, i.e., Assange's exposure of US war crimes. I think their present silence regarding
Judge Koeltl's decision speaks volumes.
Greg • 5 days ago • edited
"Going a step further, the judge called the DNC’s arguments “threadbare,” adding: “At no point does the DNC allege any
facts” showing that Assange or WikiLeaks “participated in the theft of the DNC’s information.”
The corporate media, having already gone to great lengths to convict Assange of such in the court of public opinion,
would like to see that "conviction" stand.
"On Wednesday, the Times published a brief, six-paragraph article on page 25..."
Greg • 5 days ago • edited
"The DNC's published internal communications allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of
the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election." That's precisely the kind of
"problem" the bourgeoisie will no longer tolerate.
Reporting the truth “undermined and distorted the DNC's ability to communicate the party's values and visions to the
American electorate.”
They're sick and tired of basic democratic rights almost as much as they're sick and tired of the working class.
They practically come out and say it: "There was no attempt by other reporters to pursue the matter, and Conway then began to
rant about Trump's reasons for targeting the four congresswomen, saying, “He's tired, a lot of us are sick and tired of this
country—of America coming last, to people who swore an oath of office.”
Gotta love it! Democrats are beside themselves with outrage at Russian meddling but they
could care less about election meddling that cost them wins in 2000 (Florida), and 2004
(Ohio.) And they won't say a word about blatant meddling going on right now. In fact, they
want to turn the meddlers into censors to determine what information the American people can
use to make decisions about who will govern them:
"On June 28th, 2019 in the immediate hours following the first Democratic Presidential
debate, millions of Americans were searching online for information about Tulsi Gabbard. In
fact, according to multiple news reports, Tulsi was the most searched candidate on Google.
Then, without any explanation, Google suspended Tulsi's Google Ads account.
For hours, Tulsi's campaign advertising account remained offline while Americans
everywhere were searching for information about her. During this time, Google obfuscated and
dissembled with a series of inconsistent and incoherent reasons for its actions. In the end,
Google never explained to us why Tulsi's account was suspended.
Google controls 88 percent of all internet search in the United States – essentially
giving it control over our access to information. That's one reason why Tulsi has been a
vocal proponent of breaking up the tech monopolies. And no matter what the motivation was for
doing so, Google's arbitrary and capricious decision to suspend Tulsi's Google Ads account
during a critical moment in our campaign should be of concern to all political candidates and
in fact all Americans. Because if Google can do this to Tulsi, a combat veteran and four term
Congresswoman who is running for the nation's highest office, Google can do this to any
candidate, from any party, running for any office in the United States."
Vote for Tulsi! End election meddling by Big Tech, banksters, billionaires, and
multi-nationals, meddlers that the Democratic yield shields.
You cannot make up the effects of unaddressed angst (now mass psychosis) over Hillary (put
her in jail) losing to Trump!
Thy delude themselves to think that putting the deep state in the middle of election
campaigns and who they can talk to, might as well ask the Gestapo!
Does the New York Times Have an Editing Program that Automatically Puts "Free" Before
"Trade?"
By Dean Baker
Readers must be wondering because it happens so frequently in contexts where it is clearly
inappropriate. The latest example is in an article * about the state of the race for the
Democratic presidential nomination following the second round of debates.
The piece told readers:
"After a few candidates used the Detroit debate to demand that Mr. Biden account for Mr.
Obama's record on issues such as deportations and free trade, Mr. Biden was joined by some of
the former president's advisers, who chastised the critics for committing political
malpractice."
The word "free" in this context adds nothing and is in fact wrong. The Obama
administration did virtually nothing to promote free trade in highly paid professional
services, like physicians services, which would have reduced inequality. It only wanted to
reduce barriers that protected less educated workers, like barriers to trade in manufactured
goods.
And, it actively worked to increase patent and copyright protections, which are the
complete opposite of free trade. These protections also have the effect of increasing
inequality.
Given the reality of trade policy under President Obama it is difficult to understand why
the New York Times felt the need to modify "trade" with the adjective "free." Maybe it needs
to get this editing program fixed.
Stages of capitalist development explain more than white papers and
propaganda can conceal. The relevant comparative period is 1990 - present (China/Russia)
versus 1950-1980 (US/West).
Ex-communist countries like Russia and China have experienced the same decline in the share
of public property, but starting from a much higher level of public wealth. The share of
net public wealth was as large as 70–80 percent in both countries in 1980, and fell
to 20 percent (Russia) and 30–35 percent (China) in 2015.
The Chinese share is higher but not incomparable to that observed in Western high-income
countries during the "mixed economy" period (1950–1980).
In other words, China and Russia have ceased to be communist in that public ownership is
no longer the dominant form of property. However, these countries still have much more
significant public wealth than Western high-income economies, due largely to lower public
debts and greater public assets.
"... "After watching seven hours of a spectacle that felt much more cruel than enlightening, I cannot avoid pondering a question which honestly gives me no joy to ponder: just how much damage has MSNBC in particular done to the left?" The Hill's Rising star began, before excoriating her former employer's "fevered speculations" about an "Infowars conspiracy theory" and the way it hosted people like Jonathan "maybe Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s" Chait and "conspiracy gadfly Louise Mensch" in search of ratings bumps. ..."
"... "This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats' chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could ever have dreamed up," Ball argued. "Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories that, I don't know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers' movement, whether we're going to war with Iran? I'm just spitballing here. ..."
"... Ball argued that the fact that MSNBC is doing so much damage to the Democratic Party in the name of ratings proves that MSNBC isn't "on Team D in the same way that Fox News is on Team R", saying they're really just in it for the money. But this is where Ball gets it wrong. It is of course true that ratings are a factor, and that conspiracy theories can be used to sell advertising space, but MSNBC would have had a much easier time marketing conspiracy theories about Trump's loyalties to Israel and Saudi Arabia , both of which would have had vastly more factual evidence to back them up. The only difference is that the US-centralized empire doesn't have agendas that it wants to advance against those two countries. ..."
"... Ball is correct that MSNBC doesn't serve the Democratic party, but she's incorrect that it serves only money. MSNBC, which is now arguably a more aggressive war propaganda network than Fox News, serves first and foremost the US national security state. And so do all the other western mainstream news networks. ..."
"... From the Pentagon's point of view, US hegemony good, Russia-China alliance very, very bad. ..."
"... I t was determined with the help of influential neoconservative think tankers that the US must maintain this unipolar paradigm at all costs. As soon as that view became the establishment orthodoxy , any threat to US hegemony was now interpreted as a threat to national security. An "attack" on America was no longer limited to physical attacks on US soil, or even on US allies and assets: any attempt to escape unipolarity is now treated as a direct attack on the empire. ..."
"... This is why we've seen nations like Iraq, Libya and Syria spoken about by the propagandists as "enemies" as though they pose some kind of direct threat to the American people. There was never any actual threat to the physical United States, but those nations were not complying with the dictates of US hegemony, and that noncompliance was treated as a direct attack. ..."
"... This "if you're not obeying us you're attacking us" mentality is ridiculous on its face and no right-thinking citizen would ever consent to it, which is why the consent manufacturers need to promote imaginary nonsense like weapons of mass destruction, a Russian "attack" on American democracy, and a conspiracy theory about the Kremlin infiltrating the highest levels of the US government. It's got nothing to do with actual fears of those nations posing any threat to actual Americans. It's about continuing to rule the world. ..."
"After watching seven hours of a spectacle that felt much more cruel than enlightening, I cannot avoid pondering a question which
honestly gives me no joy to ponder: just how much damage has MSNBC in particular done to the left?" The Hill's Rising star began,
before excoriating her former employer's "fevered speculations" about an "Infowars conspiracy theory" and the way it hosted people
like Jonathan "maybe Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s" Chait and "conspiracy gadfly Louise Mensch" in search of ratings
bumps.
"This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats' chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could
ever have dreamed up," Ball argued. "Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories
that, I don't know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers' movement, whether we're
going to war with Iran? I'm just spitballing here.
I actually heard some pundit on Chris Hayes last night opine that independent women in middle America were going to be swayed
by what Mueller said yesterday. Are you kidding me? This is almost as bonkers and lacking in factual basis as that time Mimi Rocah
said that Bernie Sanders is not pro-women because that was what her feelings told her. Rocah, by the way, a political prosecutor
with no political background, is only opining at MSNBC because of her role in leading viewers to believe that any day now SDNY is
going to bring down Trump and his entire family."
Ball argued that the fact that MSNBC is doing so much damage to the
Democratic Party in the name of ratings proves that MSNBC isn't "on Team D in the same way that Fox News is on Team R", saying they're
really just in it for the money. But this is where Ball gets it wrong. It is of course true that ratings are a factor, and that conspiracy
theories can be used to sell advertising space, but MSNBC would have had a much easier time marketing conspiracy theories about Trump's
loyalties to
Israel and
Saudi Arabia , both of which would have had
vastly more factual evidence to back them up. The only difference is that the US-centralized empire doesn't have agendas that
it wants to advance against those two countries.
Ball is correct that MSNBC doesn't serve the Democratic party, but she's incorrect that it serves only money. MSNBC, which is
now arguably a more aggressive war propaganda network than Fox News, serves first and foremost the US national security state.
And so do all the other western mainstream news networks.
Consider the way the Syrian province of Idlib is being reported on right now, to pick one of many possible examples.
Al-Qaeda-controlled
Idlib is the final stronghold of the extremist militant groups that
the US and
its allies flooded Syria with in a
premeditated campaign to effect regime change, and Syria and its allies are fighting to recapture the region. They are using
methods that are identical to those commonly used by the US and its allies, yet the bombing campaigns of the US-centralized empire
receive virtually no critical coverage while western mainstream outlets like
CNN and
the BBC
are churning out brazenly propagandistic pieces about the evils of the Assad coalition's airstrikes.
"Civilians are dying in Idlib, just as they died in their thousands in recent US UK air strikes in eg Raqqa and Mosul," political
analyst Charles Shoebridge
observed on Twitter today. "The difference is that when it's (often unverified) claims that Russia or Syria are doing the killing,
US UK media make it front page news."
There are many gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative that outlets like MSNBC have been bashing everyone over the head
with, but the most obvious and easily provable of them is the indisputable fact that Donald Trump
has escalated tensions against Russia more than any US president in decades. You never hear anyone talk about this self-evident
fact in all the endless yammering about Russia, though, because it doesn't advance the agendas of either of America's two mainstream
parties, and it doesn't advance the interests of US imperialism. Democrats don't like acknowledging the fact that Trump has been
consistently and aggressively working directly against the interests of Moscow , and Trump supporters don't like acknowledging
that their president is just as much of a neocon-coddling globalist as those they claim to oppose, so the war machine has gone conveniently
unchallenged in manufacturing new cold war escalations against a nation they've had marked for destruction since the fall of the
Soviet Union.
In a very interesting new Grayzone
interview packed full of ideas that you'll never hear voiced on western mass media, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov
spoke openly about the various ways that Russia, China, and other nations who've resisted absorption into the blob of the US power
alliance have been working toward the creation of a multipolar world. Ryabkov said other nations have been watching the way the dominance
of the US dollar has been used to economically terrorize noncompliant nations into subservience by way of sanctions and other manipulations,
with Washington expecting that the dollar and the US financial system will remain "the cardiovascular system of the whole organism."
"That will not be the case," Ryabkov said. "People will bypass, in literal terms. And people will find ways how to defend themselves,
how to protect themselves, how to guarantee themselves against any emergencies if someone comes up at the White House or whatever,
at the Treasury, at the State, and says 'Hey guys, now we should stop what is going on in Country X, and let's squeeze them out.'
And this country sits on the dollar. So they will be done the moment those ideas will be pronounced. So China, Russia and others,
we create alternatives that we will most probably continue using not just national currencies, but baskets of currencies, currencies
of third countries, other modern barter schemes."
"We will use ways that will diminish the role of dollar and US banking system with all these risks of assets and transactions
being arrested, being stopped," Ryabkov concluded.
That, right there, is the real reason you're being sold Russia hysteria today.
And it isn't just on the matter of financial systems in which the unabsorbed powers are uniting against the imperial blob. Russia
and China
just carried out their first joint air patrol on Tuesday, drawing a hostile response from imperial vassals Japan and South Korea.
"Russian and Chinese bombers on 'first' joint patrol in the Asia-Pacific region. The China-Russia alliance has become a reality
and will last for long time,"
reads a post by one Russian Twitter commentator in response to the news.
The emergence of this alliance, which the Chinese government
has warned Washington is 'not vulnerable to interference', has been something the west has feared for a long time. A
Pentagon white paper published this past May titled "Russian Strategic Intentions" mentions the word "China" 108 times. Some
noteworthy excerpts:
The world system, and American influence in it, would be completely upended if Moscow and Beijing aligned more closely.
The allies' goal should be deterrence. At the same time, the US should bilaterally engage Russia to peel them away from China's
orbit.
He also encourages the development of the US's 'capability to effectively foster distrust and unease between the Russia Federation
and China.'
Along with Beijing, Moscow seeks a multipolar world in which US hegemony comes to an end. As Alexander Lukin recently pointed
out, the 'common ideal of a multipolar world [has] played a significant role in the rapprochement between Russia and China.'
Russia and China were explicitly mentioned in the 2018 National Defense Strategy as the great powers with which the US is
in competition. Both Russia and China have come a long way since the 1990s, and the 'friendship' that emerged in the immediate
post-Tiananmen period and continued to grow over the years now today appears to be one of the strongest bilateral alliances on
the planet.
Together, Russia's tentacles on its former Soviet neighbors and Moscow's strategic alliance with Beijing in pursuit of a multipolar
world (in which the US is no longer the global hegemon) form the two main pillars upon which Putin's grand strategy rests. All
other aspects of its foreign policy behavior can be traced back to this dual-pronged grand strategy.
I think you get the picture. From the Pentagon's point of view, US hegemony good, Russia-China alliance very, very bad.
Analysts like the white paper's authors, and even
The New York Times editorial board
, have urged the drivers of US foreign policy to attempt to lure Moscow away from Beijing, the latter rightly perceived as the greater
long-term threat to US dominance due to China's surging economic power. But diplomacy has clearly been ruled out toward this end,
with only a steadily escalating campaign to shove Russia off the world stage now deemed acceptable.
It
was determined with the help of
influential
neoconservative
think tankers that the US must maintain this unipolar paradigm at all costs. As soon as that view
became the establishment orthodoxy , any threat to US hegemony was now interpreted as a threat to national security. An "attack"
on America was no longer limited to physical attacks on US soil, or even on US allies and assets: any attempt to escape unipolarity
is now treated as a direct attack on the empire.
This is why we've seen nations like Iraq, Libya and Syria spoken about by the propagandists as "enemies" as though they pose
some kind of direct threat to the American people. There was never any actual threat to the physical United States, but those nations
were not complying with the dictates of US hegemony, and that noncompliance was treated as a direct attack.
This "if you're not obeying us you're attacking us" mentality is ridiculous on its face and no right-thinking citizen would
ever consent to it, which is why the consent manufacturers need to promote imaginary nonsense like weapons of mass destruction, a
Russian "attack" on American democracy, and a conspiracy theory about the Kremlin infiltrating the highest levels of the US government.
It's got nothing to do with actual fears of those nations posing any threat to actual Americans. It's about continuing to rule the
world.
"... Reds under the bed has been replaced with antisemites under the bed; this with the full and open complicity of a mainstream media whose dread over the prospect of transformational political change is entwined in tight embrace with that of an Establishment -- political and security -- in ensuring nothing but nothing will ever change in this country apart from the colour of the curtains on the windows in Downing Street. ..."
"... There is nothing more grotesque than being lectured to about antisemitism, or any other form of racism, by apologists for a racist apartheid state. Yet this grotesquerie is precisely where we have arrived at in response to Corbyn's unlikely elevation to the leadership of the Labour Party. ..."
"... I think one has to appreciate, despite all the 'far-left' labels stuck on him, that Corbyn only appeared to be a 'raving looney leftie' in comparison with the rightwing Blairite majority of MPs who've controlled the Labour Party for so long and capitulated to and followed a Thatcherite political agenda, for decades. ..."
"... Anti-semitism oldest form of gas lighting that was ever created in the western world especially after the second world war. If one were to go to Palestine it is not uncommon to find some ebraic semite wearing a t shirt with on it printed an IDF soldier taking aim at a pregnant arab semite. Israel has to be exposed for what it is. It is an anglo-zionist colonial outpost.. Zionism was born in England it pre dates Herzl. ..."
"... The key to the anti-Semitism problem is the conflation of Judaism with Zionism. This didn't happen by accident, it is a deliberate and relatively modern policy. (An old (Jewish) friend described the indoctrination he got to me growing up. That was quite a long time ago, its probably so ingrained now that nobody notices this process any more.) ..."
"... The comparison to a witch hunt is perfectly accurate. The attack works by mere accusation. The facts, evidence, criteria of evaluation are all irrelevant. ..."
This article was first published on March 1st of this year, however, it is given fresh relevance in the wake of Labour's reinstatement,
and then re-suspension, of Derby MP Chris Williamson
PUTNAM: Now look you, sir. Let you strike out against the Devil, and the village will bless you for it! Come down, speak to
them -- pray with them. They're thirsting for your word, Mister! Surely you'll pray with them.
PARRIS: (swayed) I'll lead them in a psalm, but let you say nothing of witchcraft yet. I will not discuss it. The cause is
yet unknown. I have had enough contention since I came; I want no more.
Arthur Miller – The Crucible
In his magisterial autobiography, Timebends , describing his motivation behind his classic work The Crucible (extracted
above) -- the most compelling and enduring allegorical piece of drama to grace the American theatre -- Arthur Miller reveals the
following:
What I sought was a metaphor, an image that would spring out of the heart, all-inclusive, full of light, a sonorous instrument
whose reverberations would penetrate to the centre of this miasma. For if the current degeneration of discourse continued, as
I had every reason to believe it would, we could no longer be a democracy, a system that requires a certain basic trust in order
to exist."
The 'miasma' referred to by Miller in the above passage was the atmosphere of censorious paranoia whipped up by the anti-Communist
witchhunts of the 1940s and 1950s, starting under the auspices of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), established
in 1938, joined thereafter by Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate hearings into alleged Communist infiltration from the late 1940s.
The period concerned, commonly referred to as McCarthyism, illuminated the parameters of free speech and expression in a country
and culture which prides itself on both. It drilled home the profound truth that tyranny is less the by-product of totalitarian political
systems and more the product of totalitarian ideas and nostrums that sustain political orthodoxy in a given space and time. And,
too, whenever those ideas and nostrums come under challenge, said democracy is exposed as a cloak behind which mendacity resides,
ruthlessly seeking malcontents to expose and miscreants to punish.
In Britain in 2019 we need no longer turn to US history for an understanding of McCarthyism and its execrable fruits.
For in Britain in 2019 McCarthyism is with us and among us, corroding our public and political discourse, poisoning it with the
untruths, lies and mendacious smears of some of the most malignant political forces that ever existed in these islands.
Reds under the bed has been replaced with antisemites under the bed; this with the full and open complicity of a mainstream
media whose dread over the prospect of transformational political change is entwined in tight embrace with that of an Establishment
-- political and security -- in ensuring nothing but nothing will ever change in this country apart from the colour of the curtains
on the windows in Downing Street.
Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party has to intents been usurped by his deputy Tom Watson, a man for whom Shakespeare's
"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!" line from The Tempest could have been written with in mind.
Labour Friends of Israel
Watson is the Labour Party's Matthew Hopkins, the infamous witch-hunter whose reign of terror in 17th century Britain finds its
metaphorical equivalent in the 21st century with the objective not of locating and hanging out to dry antisemites but instead anti-Zionists,
which means to say genuine anti-racists.
For what is Zionism if not racism, a species of white supremacy responsible for relegating the humanity of five million men, women
and children of the illegally occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip to that of latter-day Helots?
Adding to the mountain of intellectual and moral ordure erected in service to this miasma of untruth and base hypocrisy, are the
findings of a UN investigation into the Palestinians killed and wounded by Israeli snipers during last year's Great Return March
in Gaza.
According to the UN's Santiago Canton:
Israeli soldiers committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some of those violations may constitute
war crimes or crimes against humanity."
In diplomatic-speak, Mr Canton is here referencing the manner in which Israeli soldiers shot down dozens of unarmed Palestinians
-- among them children, medics and journalists -- like deer in a forest, with some of those Israeli soldiers caught on tape laughing
and celebrating their 'kills'.
It is to this monstrosity of an apartheid state Tom Watson and his friends are giving succour and sanction; and it this supremacist
juggernaut of oppression we are expected to accept as compatible with left-wing progressive values.
There is nothing more grotesque than being lectured to about antisemitism, or any other form of racism, by apologists for
a racist apartheid state. Yet this grotesquerie is precisely where we have arrived at in response to Corbyn's unlikely elevation
to the leadership of the Labour Party.
His legacy as a staunch supporter of Palestinian human rights and self-determination has been weaponised against him and his supporters
by a pro-Israel lobby within and without the Labour Party, plumbing depths of indecency last witnessed during the era of McCarthyism
across the Atlantic.
For those who doubt how deeply entrenched the pro-Israel lobby now is within the UK body politic, Al Jazeera's blistering documentary
The Lobby is required viewing.
Given the context and the stakes involved in this ongoing witch hunt and smear campaign, the lack of meaningful resistance on
the part of Corbyn is unconscionable; his refusal to mobilise his base in the face of it inexplicable. The result has not been to
see it disappear but for it to prosper and grow in ferocity.
Be under no illusion either of the complicity of key figures in and around the Labour leadership in whipping up and/or acquiescing
in this baseless hysteria -- Lansman, McDonnell et al. -- to the point where Corbyn has been rendered well nigh unelectable as a
prospective prime minister.
That this is a smear campaign and witchhunt conducted, regardless of the fog of obfuscation deployed to the contrary, on behalf
of a foreign power -- and an apartheid power at that -- compounds the offence.
But this issue is now bigger than Corbyn. It is about where we stand on matters of intellectual and moral integrity; and most
of all on the rights we accrue to an oppressed people and those of their oppressor. Future generations are watching and waiting for
the stance that we take.
Arthur Miller understood this, which is why his light will shine forever bright as a beacon of moral courage in an age of deceit.
I'll not supply any facts. None whatsoever,saying only: Corbyn( I believe) is made of better material. Blairites must be expelled,
or otherwise, go away!
MichaelK
I think one has to appreciate, despite all the 'far-left' labels stuck on him, that Corbyn only appeared to be a 'raving looney
leftie' in comparison with the rightwing Blairite majority of MPs who've controlled the Labour Party for so long and capitulated
to and followed a Thatcherite political agenda, for decades.
Corbyn himself isn't really a 'revolutionary' or even a radical. He's what half a century ago would have been described as
a pretty normal, middle-of-the-road, Labour social democrat, barely on the left of the Party at all. But some of this is debatable,
depending on where one stands on the spectrum personally. It's a sign of how far 'left' politics and 'left' discourse has degenerated
in the UK, and political culture's moved so far to the right, that Corbyn, like a relic of a bygone era, is perceived as far more
leftwing than he actually is, in reality.
What he is though, is ineffective as a leader. He lacks authority, I think, because he fundamentally lacks a set of strong
ideas that show what he stands for and where he wants the country to move. There's no real narrative that mobilises support for
him, and this is the curse of Labour; the leadership's fear of mobilising the membership and their supporters and votes in the
country, too much and too far, which could easily lead to them raising their expectations way beyond what's 'realistic' and possible
within the boundaries of bourgeois liberal democracy. Labour fought for political power in parliament; but didn't believe in openly
challenging economic power in society in any meaningful way, because that strategy was simply not allowed because it was 'revolutionary'
and not reformist.
mark
Of course Corbyn is a "raving loony lefty."
He wants to re nationalise the railways (maybe.)
And build a few council houses (maybe.)
How raving loony is that?
Obviously he's a raving loony.
Oh, and he objects to the genocide of the Palestinians.
Obviously a raving anti semite as well.
Just ask the Board of Deputies and Margaret Hodge and the Daily Mail. They'll explain it all to you.
More to the point; he's a (Labour) Party man. The Party comes first, regardless. For almost 130 years the Labour Party has been
an integral part of British capitalism and imperialism and the British state. Thus Corbyn, a run-of-the-mill social democrat is
concerned only with the survival of the Party and he will do whatever is necessary in its defence including defenestrating his
election manifesto (compare his draft with the one finally circulated in 2017)!
Should he by some chance actually end up as PM, what are the odds of him actually reversing austerity when he's already sold
out over every key part of his original manifesto?
There are going to be a lot of very disappointed and once more disconnected Labour voters.
mathias alexand
What is this "leadership" and "authority" thing? As for his ideas he could have any number of them that you will never hear about
in the MSM.
Maggie
True Mathias, but you can see and hear about them on the Jimmy Dore Show whose shows truly are a breath of fresh air:
Bernie Sanders of Britain and why he is widely loved, and sadly rare. July 2016
Anti-semitism oldest form of gas lighting that was ever created in the western world especially after the second world war.
If one were to go to Palestine it is not uncommon to find some ebraic semite wearing a t shirt with on it printed an IDF soldier
taking aim at a pregnant arab semite. Israel has to be exposed for what it is. It is an anglo-zionist colonial outpost.. Zionism
was born in England it pre dates Herzl.
Hence until more exposure of the brutal nature of the Israeli zionist and their parents the anglo-zionist becomes exposed then
the diluted term of anti semite will continue to be used. I find that with the dying western paradigm so will this gaslighting
term become irrelevant .If any intellectual honesty were to be used the real anti semites are the zionist.
Post Scriptum : Israel has a shelf life and it is omploding with in hence so will zionism.
Having experience racism first hand growing up and still being exposed to it today for mhy ethnicity I am not fortunate enough
as the ashkanazi /zionist to deflect and gaslight my oppressors.
harry law
Former South African Minister Ronnie Kasrils himself Jewish on Thursday accused Israel of conducting a policy against the Palestinians
that was "worse" than apartheid.
Speaking on the sidelines of a UN meeting on the situation in the Palestinian territories, Kasrils said South Africa's townships
had never been attacked by helicopter gunships and tanks, in contrast to the military means employed by Israel.
Labour Friends of Israel, Conservative Friends of Israel, Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel – all different organisations?
No, of course they are not, even if the ordinary man in the street may think so.
They are all controlled by the Israeli state, to do the bidding of that state, to demonise any person who shows empathy with
the plight of the Palestinian people, any person who dares criticise the actions of the Israeli state.
On the other hand, you have Jewish Friends of Labour, seen by the Israeli state as "self hating Jews", the "wrong type of Jew".
What we are seeing at the moment is – Zio-McCarthyism.
Capricornia Man
'McCarthyism' is exactly what I have been calling the witch-hunt for some time. It's surprising that the term is taking so long
to come into general use when it is the appropriate term based on historical analogy, as shown by the article. The pile-on against
anyone who dares to support the political and national rights of the Palestinians induces physical illness in anyone remotely
interested in justice and truth.
The rancid 'liberal' media frames its "coverage" by treating accusations of 'antisemitism' not as the thing which has to be
proved, but as the proof itself. A classic McCarthyite process.
The vast majority of Britons must be fed up having their politics held up to ransom in this manner. Stand up for yourselves
and by-pass the fifth column and the coward element in the Labour Party.
vwbeetle
To read the Guardian, one would think that Williamson has no supporters in Labour whatsoever. As far as the Guardian is concerned,
Jewish Voice for Labour and its condemnation of the witch hunt and smear campaign against Corbyn and Williamson and anyone who
supports Palestinian rights, does not exist. Up until a couple of years ago I was a regular contributor on CIF discussion threads,
largely rebutting Zionists and their propaganda and outright lies. I was eventually blocked, probably because large numbers of
Zionists reported me, despite the fact that I largely restricted my posts to historical facts. Over the past two years it is almost
impossible to make comments on CIF about any article about Israel/Palestine, or the anti-semitism smear campaign. What has happened
at the Guardian? Does anyone know why the paper seems to have changed course?
MichaelK
The lurch to the political right at the Guardian is linked to the Snowden and Assange revelations that challenged the cosy ideological
relationship between the media and the state, to a degree that is simply not allowed, if one wants to be seen as loyal and responsible.
There are consequences is one, as an individual, group or institution, is perceived as being illoyal by the Establishment and
the state.
Assange and Snowden pulled the Guardian over an invisible line, into a grey area, at the time, which was perceived as being
tantamount to treason, and now the Guardian has been successfully reined in once more and now co-opperates with the state on matters
relating to 'national security.' The damage, has been undone and a proper and reasonable relationship established.
Haltonbrat
The Guardian has been pro-Zionist since the days of editor CP Scott who introduced the Zionist leader to Looyd George and supported
the Zionists in his writings in the Manchester Guardian.
Shardlake
It all changed, and not for the better, after Alan Rusbridger left. It's as much a mouthpiece now for this appalling government
as the Murdoch press and their like. There's been a continual shift in centre ground politics to the right since the days of Thatcher.
We are seeing what Edward Bernays described in 1928 as the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and
opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of
our country.
We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of.
In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical
thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of
the masses.
It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
Stephen Morrell
PS. The Labour Party never fails to disappoint
Stephen Morrell
It's time to stop calling Israel an 'apartheid state'. Snipers today, missiles and bombs tomorrow, with deliberate and active
ruination of amenity, infrastructure and the means to live -- by siege, every day.
Israel's atrocities are not simply 'crimes against humanity'. They're crimes directed against a particular ethnic/national/racial
segment of humanity. That's called genocide. Netanyahu and his gang are genocidal, and consequently the garrison state of Israel
is also a 'genocide state'. Time to start applying the g-word.
Haltonbrat
Yes, The actions of Israel meet the UN definition of genocide.
mark
The Times of Israel, a national newspaper, quite openly advocated genocide. It called for the Palestinian people to be exterminated
at concentration camps in the desert. The "Justice" Minister, a woman called Shaked, called for Palestinian mothers to be exterminated,
so that no Palestinian children could be born. Two rabbis in Israel published a book called "The King's Torah." It called for
all Palestinian children to be murdered.
Killing a goy, any goy, is a Mitzvah, a praiseworthy act.
If the Jews get the war with Iran they have been trying to incite and agitate for for so long, they will use this as cover
to carry out actual genocide on a massive scale.
People need to give up completely on Labour. It is infested wall to wall with 30 shekel whores.
maggie
Hi Mark, Do you have links to the information you have posted please.
If we give up on Labour, then who do we rely on? I think what we should be doing is focussing all our energies on removing
(de selecting) the 90 "friends of Israhell" who have been baying for Chris Williamson and Jeremy Corbyn to be removed permanently
from the Labour Party. Beginning with the evil with Hodge, and her cronies headed by Tom Watson.
mark
The Times of Israel, 1/8/14.
"When Genocide Is Permissible", by Yochanan Gordon.
Openly advocates, endorses and justifies the genocide of the Palestinians.
Ayelet Shaked, 14/7/14.
"Mothers of all Palestinians should be killed. They have to die and their houses should be demolished. They are all our enemies
and their blood should be on our hands."
A day before Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khudair was kidnapped and burned alive by 6 Jew thugs, Shaked published a call
for the genocide of the Palestinians in Facebook.
"The entire Palestinian people is the enemy, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and
its infrastructure."
She called for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers. "to prevent them giving birth to little snakes."
The King's Torah, 230 page book published 2009 by Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva. Authors Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur.
Endorsed by many leading rabbis.
It openly incites and calls for the extermination of the Palestinians, and explains how this is morally justified.
It is a call for indiscriminate extermination.
The killing of children, en masse, responds to "the existence of an internal need for revenge."
"In the face of revenge, no one is innocent, be they old, young, children, men or women, and regardless of their health."
It rejects any notion of international law and the protection of civilians in time of war, or international humanitarian law on
the prevention of genocide. Israel is above international law, because Jews are superior to Gentiles and the lives of Gentiles
have no value.
Jews are indoctrinated from birth to hate all the goyim.
Israel is an openly genocidal, terrorist, racist state.
There is no doubt that in the event of a major war with Iran, it would use this as cover to commit genocide, which has been long
planned.
Stephen Morrell
I apologise for taking up so much space in replying to your very telling question about what alternative is there to Labour. First,
it should now be clear to everyone that Labour, whether led by Corbyn or any other 'left' social democrat, is no answer to the
dire situation we face. Right now there is no mass party on this planet that can provide the leadership necessary, let alone serve
as the instrument, for the revolutionary change so desperately needed to excise the malignancy of capitalism from the human social
organism. This is a crisis of revolutionary leadership.
The bourgeois Greens are not the answer either, and most of the traditional left and 'far' left are mired in one form or another
of opportunistic kow-towing to Corbyn and Labour or the Greens. This isn't to say that one should never vote Labour, the party
of the working class. It's to say that one should only give support to Labour, as 'a rope supports a hanging man' (Lenin), when
it furthers revolutionary and class consciousness in the working class. The working class, as politically backward as it might
be now in many ways, is the only class with the social power to overthrow the capitalists -- it can stop and start production
at will and, most importantly, if it had the political consciousness and leadership to do so, it could take over production and
overthrow capitalism. Such a consciousness is smothered and suppressed by Labour and the current leaders of the trade unions (such
as the latter currently exist).
Presently Labour deserves no vote because under Corbyn they've refused to support Brexit and are pushing for a second referendum.
Tony Benn, Corbyn's mentor, would have been railing against him over his betrayal of this fundamental class issue in Britain.
Corbyn is Blair lite. On the EU he's Blair quiet.
If in power, Corbyn would either be forced to bow to the diktats of capital and the ruling class or be pushed out, and pronto.
Already forces centred on MI6's The Guardian, the Zionist lobby, the aristocratic feudal relics, the military, 'the City' rentiers,
and of course the Blairites, have been undermining him because of his mild reformist and foreign policy stances. However, the
ruling class would rush to Corbyn and Labour, or another 'left' alternative, if their rule were seriously threatened by an awakened
working class. Before fascism, Corbyn would be their best and last hope.
What then of the left and far left? They're all still propaganda groups. We have the likes of the SP, SWP, Socialist Alternative
and so on, who've advocated a vote for Labour unconditionally at just about every election. And they've also supported the bourgeois
Greens. In doing so, they provide no alternative to Labour. Instead their strategy is to try to pressure Labour to the left. How's
that been working? Corbyn still supports the EU. How many times has he mentioned Julian Assange? Or the basic necessity to do
away with the monarchy and House of Lords and all the other 'traditions of the dead generations [that] weigh like a nightmare
upon the living' (Marx). At least in the US, the ISO (followers of the late Tony Cliff) have decided to sate their opportunistic
appetites and dissolve themselves to join the Democratic Socialists of America (ie, social democrats inside a bourgeois party,
the Democratic Party of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Then we have the Socialist Equity Party, ostensibly 'Trotskyist' and followers of David North, that declares trade unions in
principle to be an instrument for the subjugation of the working class. Imagine that: the prime defense organs of the working
class historically are written off in advance because their leaderships betray the rank and file (which they do, but not always,
not inevitably). Outfits like the SEP don't have a perspective to take these trade union leaderships on from within and fight
to replace them with a revolutionary leadership in the heat of struggle to turn the unions into real working class defense organs.
Consequently, a revolutionary consciousness cannot be developed from within the working class in struggle for it to act in
its own historic interests. The SEP have a slew of other programmatic issues that are awry as well, but their outlook boils down
to opportunism afraid of itself.
This isn't to say that the World Socialist Website is completely useless. It isn't, but its articles on workers and trade union
struggles in particular need to be taken with a large grain of salt.
In short, if there are only propaganda groups at the moment that pose an alternative to Labour, then it at least behoves those
looking for an alternative to Labour to not waste time or effort on any group that can't get even the basics of a program right,
let alone before they even dirty their hands in actual struggle.
What's left then? Right now, the first criteria to look out for is if an ostensibly revolutionary group advocates 'No vote
to Labour', and draws a class line for Brexit and against a new referendum; one that works consistently to destroy any illusions
in the bourgeois state and its parliament ever being 'reformed' to act in the interests of the working class -- which means also
exposing those who do. That's pretty fundamental, but it's a start.
Very shrewd assessment. But I'd say a re run of pre war Weimar is the most likely outcome. People are far more likely to turn
to far worse than Trump or Farage as things deteriorate. Expect to see more Zionist controlled opposition like the EDL.
maggie
Mmm.. Stephen, a very interesting reply.. and links, which I will read and try to digest, though I have to confess a lot of the
information contained therein, at 'first glance' I thought had been tried, tested and failed owing to the avarice of the capitalists
and their power to remove the ground from under our feet.
This may be the wrong interpretation? But I will read the links more thoroughly and try to get my head around the concepts.
What I think we could do immediately, is to have the one man one vote system, to elect the 'man/woman' we choose to represent
us and dispense with 'parties' altogether.
Surely, it can't be that difficult with today's technology, which would automatically dispense with the ballot box and the inherent
frauds that continually happen.
Or am I being too simplistic and naïve?
Then again.. isn't this just the Russian system, and was that of Libya?
Stephen Morrell
The organs of power that spring up during revolutions are what work at the time. They're not created a priori, but they go on
to serve the basis for the exercise of mass democracy. The Paris Commune had the The Committee of Public Safety, Russia had soviets
(Russian for workers' council) that first arose in 1905 and again in 1917. The basis for their power rests on a politically conscious
and armed constituency that has risen up which can recall elected representatives at any time (because they're armed).
Soviets elect representatives to higher soviet bodies (collegiate system), but their main purpose is to decide and vote on
what, not whom. On an economic plan for example.
In contrast, bourgeois democracy at most gives you the privilege of voting for which scumbag will oppress you for the next
4 or 5 years. This is not to denigrate democratic rights but it is the way capitalist rule is disguised and legitimated; and we're
made to feel responsible for outcomes because we participated in voting in elections. We help the executioner load his gun. One
should never confuse elections with democracy.
I can recommend the following reading list which might help:
EH Carr, "What is History" (a great, broad-brushed approach to understanding different stages in human history and development).
K Marx, F Engels, "The Communist Manifesto"
F Engels, "Socialism Utopian and Scientific"
VI Lenin, "What Is To Be Done" (On the need for a party of the Bolshevik type)
VI Lenin, "State and Revolution" (On why the existing state must be smashed replaced by a new one, and what happens to it after
a socialist revolution)
LD Trotsky, "Lessons of October" (On why the revolution occurred in backward Russia and not Germany)
LD Trotsky, "Results and Prospects" (On why backward countries in the epoch of imperialism not being able make a bourgeois
revolution whose tasks can only be accomplished by a proletarian revolution -- the theory of 'Permanent Revolution')
LD Trotsky, "The Revolution Betrayed" (Why Stalin arose and soviet democracy was smashed in the USSR)
Some of these are a little heavy going and polemical (eg, Lenin), and Marx is full of historical and literary references, but
patience will be rewarded. Except for EH Carr (available as a Penguin classic), these can all be accessed at:
https://www.marxists.org/
Too much ado about nothing It is very simple Socialism has NOTHING to do with religion Judaism, Christianism, Islamism or whatever.
They invite these kind problems because the bourgeois that control Labour, allowed every kind of minorities to infiltrate the
Party (and all other parties) to, eventually, destroy it through religious, racial and minority wars. What you see is what you
get when leftist minoritymongering has taken over politics. The solution is very simple, all religious groups should be thrown
out of the party, together with all the bourgeois. MP's first !!!
lundiel
I agree. We currently have MPs of all parties acting as agents for their countries of birth, or as agents of third countries (Ms
Smeeth). This worked when they (agents) had no real political power, they were limited to cultural exchange visits etc. The change
came with the growth in size and power of our security services .there's more than one way to skin a cat like Corbyn!
Maggie
Fear not Lundiel, the work is already begun . Jeremy will NEVER be allowed to lead.
Anonymous 'Civil Servants' (Deep State Operatives) have briefed the media regarding the allegedly frail condition of possible
PM-to-be Jeremy Corbyn on the basis of – no evidence whatever.
Understandably, Corbyn is very angry about this demanding an investigation into the leak.
Given the story is without foundation and knowing the threat the establishment sees in Corbyn, a leader whose policies include
the creation of a National Bank (aaaarghh the fiend the fiend) and the renationalisation of public utilities (including transport)
a leader whose knee-jerk reaction to Ashkenazi Jewish assaults against the Semitic population in Israel is to speak out loudly
and boldly in defence of Palestinians' rights
given all this, we know that the idea of Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister of Great Britain is absolutely unacceptable to our
ruling 'establishment'.
Let it be said then what Mr Corbyn and his inner circle must be thinking about the appearance of this non-story that the establishment
is 'creating the option to eliminate' Mr. Corbyn (by heart attack dart?) in the event of his winning or threatening to win a UK
general election.
Performing such a national service would be 'business as usual' for our "protectors" at MI5.
For example -Keith Mothersson: After he died in 2009, his obituary appeared in The Guardian.
The following facts are not included in the obituary of this heroic absolute gentleman:
"Keith created an organisation in 2008/9 called "ALL FAITHS FOR 9/11 TRUTH".
He, like most members of '9/11 Truth (UK & Ireland)', saw 9/11 truth as a spiritual (as much as a political) matter.
He went round the country meeting religious leaders and forming connections and bonds between the various groups he had organised.
There were C of E, Catholic, Muslim (the largest group based in a couple of the biggest mosques in the country), Buddhist, and
even a Jewish group.
I was involved with Keith, approaching 'Catholic' leaders (as an aside, the couple I tried to talk to [it was early days] were
hostile to the idea even engaging with the issue maybe, for someone who has taken vows of obedience, this is an issue for the
Pope alone)."
The thing is that Keith was the connection and bond between the groups he had started forming.
He lived in Perth, Scotland. On one evening during September 2009 Keith returned to his house in Perth. He arrived home in
a dishevelled state, exhausted and confused. He told his partner that he been accosted by a group of men on the walk home and
had "a terrible struggle in a van". He had been held down then released. He repeated "Why me?" to himself a few times before his
partner helped him to bed.
She told friends that when Keith woke up he didn't know who he was. He did not recognise her either. He was taken to hospital
where he lay silently in bed for two weeks before dying.
A multi-faith, well-organised, religious collective demanding answers re 9/11 represented a genuine threat to the "Deep State".
Keith had gone too far. He was "eliminated" and his nascent organisation along with him.
And there is no one to whom one can even report this terrible crime. Such is the nature of our society. https://wwwkevboyle.blogspot.com/2019/06/corbyns-health-and-keith-mothersson.html
Jeremy Corbyn is not a fool. He understands very well the 'options' for the Deep State such a story creates and what this leak
could possibly imply.. that is why I believe he may look as if he is indecisive?
Mucho
Very interesting Maggie, thanks
andyoldlabour
That is indeed correct. The various politicians who are involved in this disgraceful hounding of Corbyn and others, have pledged
alliegence to Israel and the interference of Israel in the politics of the UK.
Martin Usher
The key to the anti-Semitism problem is the conflation of Judaism with Zionism. This didn't happen by accident, it is a deliberate
and relatively modern policy. (An old (Jewish) friend described the indoctrination he got to me growing up. That was quite a long
time ago, its probably so ingrained now that nobody notices this process any more.)
I may have a very simplistic view of things but to me Judaism is an Abrahamic religion with deep roots going back thousands
of years. Zionism is a relatively modern European movement that dates from the latter half of the 19th century that has origins
and aims that are not unlike many other 'volk' movements from the same period. Most of these were relatively harmless, 'back to
the land' sorts of things but the racial undertones provided the underpinnings for, among others, the Nazis.
I know I'll probably get flamed for saying this but seriously there's a huge undercurrent of racism in some parts of Jewish
society. I was first made aware of this many years ago when and old (goy) friend made the mistake of marrying an Orthodox girl.
Up to that point I had only known secular/reform Jews so didn't think too much of it but the reaction from her family was quite
extreme, protracted and not at all nice. The culture's there if you look for it -- its actually not unlike radical Islam in mindset
so if it ever gets to a position of power (e.g. in modern Israel) then its going to be trouble for the untermensch!
Ramdan
"Israeli Zionism is the singular cancer that has been forcefully injected into the minds of world leaders across the globe; a
cancer that these similarly affected leaders would wantonly force upon what little remains of the moral, civilized and correct
conscience of man."
Zionism is a malevolent influence upon the body politic of the western world.
Francis Lee
The picture of Tom Watson and the other political 5th Columnists in the Labour party standing in front of a very large blue and
white star of David flag tells us all we need to know. A bit like a political group in the UK sporting a Hammer and Sickle flag
at Tory party conference. Labour Friends of Israel is of course a Zionist front in the LP. It's object is to further Israeli interests,
and therefore it necessarily means against British interests. What else would they be doing? Promoting socialism perhaps? LFI
has already been set in motion to get Corbyn and his co-thinkers to change their ways or else. In this sense also the British
elite are working hand-in-glove with LFI and the Israelis, and it wouldn't at all surprise me if the CIA were not also involved
at some level.
The trouble with Labour is that it doesn't want to be regarded as being 'extreme' or 'unrespectable'; oh dear no. We've even
done away with Clause 4. Now how much higher do you want us to jump? We want to be Her Majesty's loyal opposition. 'Pale pink
humbug' as Orwell called it. He called it right.
mathias alexand
Labour is hampered by a lack of internal democracy which goes back to its origins as an alliance of pre-existing groups like trade
unions, etc.
DunGroanin
The Obsessive Groaniads daily pile of AS mud slinging, Barbara Ellen froths
"maddening, mendacious, slippery, gormless, prevaricating'
she snarls NOT writing about the tory clowns.
"I've long been anti-Corbyn for reasons beyond Brexit (antisemitism, anybody?)"
She raves and slobbers not realising that she is projecting.
Another article there by a 'famous' author – ive never heard of – has his unnamed publicist getting lots of free advertising
for his 'great' writings for free because he thinks he has been subjected to AS!
Complete Utter Nonsensical Crappery by the shameless gormless Groaniad.
Ho hum – wait till the next government tasks the completion and implementation of Leveson 2.
DG . What do you expect from these presstitute stenographers. Full boycott of all mainstream media, including alleged 'progressive'
media. On a tangent, used to read Barbara Ellen many years ago (30?) when she wrote for the NME which was basically my 'bible'
back then. How sad the once great Babs Ellen has become a . Slug.
DunGroanin
Ah the NME – a bible for us back in the day – see how it was taken out and shot after it supported Corbyn in 2017.
A very accidental death it suffered.
Imagine what they would bave done to Russell Brand if he had had the same influence.
Yes i'm afraid most of the neolib con artiste creatures of the Obssezsive Groan are beyond saving. They will sizzle in the
light.
Thanks DG. I only know the NME is now online only, didn't know the reasons for its print demise. I wonder what the late Steven
Wells would have made of all this ludicrous crap? I just can't tolerate the cretinous craven presstitutes in the MSM anymore.
Gets me too fecked off knowing what they're loudly spouting is pro empire, pro imperialist bullshit in the service of the 0.01℅.
Good site for you to check is Neoliberalism Softpanorama. A vast treasure trove of info.
Francis Lee
What is difficult to forgive is the fact in times gone by, and occasionally today, the Jewish intelligentsia have made a huge
input into the development of western civilization. In terms of politics, Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, Greogy Lukacs, Eduard Bernstein,
Leon Trotsky, Leonard Woolf; in terms of social theory, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt; in terms of
literaure Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow. Contemporary intellectuals being Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and possibly a less well-known
and very courageous Jewish oppositionist, Gideon Levy, who writes for Haaretz. These were the guys I cut my teeth on as a student
and whom I still revere to a great extent. It was the Jewish intelligentsia who led the opposition against the forces of reaction,
particularly in Europe.
Times have changed it seems, Israel and Zionism are now the forces of reaction.
John Calvert
Yes. But how many of those great names would have willingly and proudly posed in front of the national flag of the state of Israel?
Philip Toal
Facts would be appreciated in light of the truth that G. levy, Finkelstein, Pappe etc. are indeed alive and well. It's apparently
a case of informed opinions based on pure facts as opposed to ignorance as to who is alive or dead that is issue important.
Chris W
Antinationalism for goyim and nationalism for jews – because goyim have these genocidal tendencies Many, many Jews deep down believe
that Non-Jews want to kill them, so pre-emptive strikes is the way to go. Most of all strikes against the ethnic and religious
identity of non-Jewish people, because those identities make a people strong. So socialist Jews in Europe and zionist ones everywhere
fight the same pro-Jewish/anti-goyim fight
harry law
John McDonnell encapsulates for me the pathetic spinelessness of the Labour Party, in a long interview with the Jewish news the
interviewer asked him why Corbyn shared platforms with Anti-semites "So when we're talking about sharing a platform with anti-Semites,
we're not talking about people who are just supportive of the Palestinian cause, do you think it might be time for an apology"?
JmD: "You have to look at why he was sharing platforms, it was not to endorse them, it was to try and engage with them".
There you have it, his friend Corbyn spent the past 30 years of his life traversing the country addressing Palestinian and antiwar
groups and offering them his support, then in one sentence McDonnell throws his friend under the bus "it was not to endorse them".
With a friend like McDonnell who needs enemies.
My advice to McDonnell is get on your belly and crawl and then ask for forgiveness from the Board of Deputies, it still will not
be enough. They will only be happy when Corbyn is destroyed.
mark
However much you grovel and appease these people, it is never enough. Give $10 billion to Israel and you're anti semitic because
you haven't given it $50 billion. Fight 5 wars for Israel, and you're anti semitic because you haven't fought 10 wars for Israel.
Netanyahu explained it all quite well.
"If we get caught, they will just replace us with persons of the same cloth. So it does not matter what you do. America
is a golden calf, and we will suck it dry, chop it up and sell it off piece by piece till there is nothing left but the world's
biggest welfare state that we will create and control. Why? Because it is the Will of God and America is big enough to take
the hit. So we can do it again and again and again. This is what we do to countries that we hate. We destroy them very slowly
and make them suffer for refusing to be our slaves."
The comparison to a witch hunt is perfectly accurate. The attack works by mere accusation. The facts, evidence, criteria of
evaluation are all irrelevant. Accuse emotively, and construe any dissent or even scepticism as proof of guilt. This is the
modus operandi of the witch hunters, the arbiters of truth and the only acceptable version of reality. This becomes a loyalty
test. Anyone who refuses to support the witch hunters is either already a witch or in imminent danger of becoming one.
https://viewsandstories.blogspot.com/2018/09/on-dog-whistles-and-witch-finders.html
Harry Stotle
'The attack works by mere accusation. The facts, evidence, criteria of evaluation are all irrelevant. Accuse emotively, and construe
any dissent or even scepticism as proof of guilt. This is the modus operandi of the witch hunters' – hammer, welcome to head of
nail.
Maggie
Right out of Goebel's hand book
"This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the
propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it."
"The truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained
only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.
It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy
of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney talks with PressTV about how the Israeli Lobby owns both the Congress and the Senate
and how AIPAC and the ADL took her out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_VNOk7Wv5A
On one hand Mueller supported and promoted the witch hunt which is the Russiagate. On the other water suddenly became a little bit
hot for him and his henchmen as there is a slight chance that Barr is not joking.
Mueller is the first prosecutor in the history of Justice Department who claimed that he does not exonerate the falsely accused
of Russian connections President. Which is 100% pure McCartuism-style witch hunt. Of course as he supported Iraw WDM and presided over
Anthrax investigation (or cover up to be more correct) this is easy for him to be legal innovator in this area.
Notable quotes:
"... the report was clear that members of Trump's team had been encouraged to lie to investigators, and this had been widely reported throughout the media and in several books. ..."
"... On many important questions, Mueller stated that he could not comment because those matters were under investigation by other departments, or they were not "in my purview." That was his response to questions about the Steele report and the FISA warrant used to spy on the Trump campaign, which are under investigation by the Department of Justice. But he also responded this way to questions on the Russia investigation. How can the special prosecutor charged with investigating whether Russia interfered with our elections decline comment on the topic? ..."
"... Well that proves it, I guess. After all, did Mueller testify to Congress as to the extent of Iraq's much-vaunted WMD program, and lo! there it was(n't)! ..."
"... Or for that matter, Mueller claimed that Concord Management had ties to the Russian government. Turns out that he had no evidence for his claim. ..."
"... Mueller is the god that failed. The Democrats considered him their savior. It was "wait til the Mueller report". "Soon it will be Mueller time". "Just wait on Mueller, you'll see." ..."
"... Then, in the Mueller hearing they quoted scripture from the book of Mueller, asking their savior to provide more divine wisdom on the scripture. But he was no god. He was a human whose mental faculties had declined due to the aging process all of us mortals must endure. And it became abundantly clear that he had been just a figurehead in a witch hunt by radical major Democratic party donor prosecutors. Mueller was shamelessly used by morally bankrupt Democrat apparatchiks. ..."
"... To all the Mueller supporters, he couldn't even answer simple questions like "when did you and your team conclude there was no collusion/conspiracy with Russia?" ..."
"... That question 1) fell under his purview, 2) arose from the four corners of his report, 3) not in anyway prohibited by the DoJ directive and 4) not about something that would be easy to forget. ..."
"... Yet he refused to answer. Some stand up guy he is. ..."
That answer appears to directly contradict page 180 of the report which states, "As defined in legal dictionaries, collusion is
largely synonymous with conspiracy as that crime is set forth in the general federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. 371," Collins
pointed out.
"Are you sitting here today testifying something different than what your report states?"
Mueller stuttered and appeared confused, flipped to the relevant page of the report, and said that he would defer to the report.
Throughout the hearing, Democratic members would read the definition of corruption or obstruction and then try to get Mueller
to explain how various actions did not qualify or why the report did not reach a finding. Each time, Mueller declined to comment.
To say that watching his testimony was painful is an understatement.
In an exchange with Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) that exemplifies the entire hearing, the Pennsylvania Republican asked, "You
made a decision not to prosecute, right?"
"No, we made a decision not to decide whether to prosecute or not."
In the afternoon intelligence committee hearing, Rep. John Ratcliffe asked Mueller to clear up confusion regarding his morning
testimony, where he appeared to contradict the report on the question of whether he had whiffed on an indictment because the Office
of Legal Counsel said it was not possible to indict a sitting president.
"What I wanted to say [in the morning] is that we did not make any determination with regard to culpability, in any way. We did
not start that process, down the road," said Mueller.
But in his morning testimony before the House Judiciary committee, he said: "The president was not exculpated for the acts that
he allegedly committed."
See if you can make sense of this exchange:
Democratic Rep. Andre Carson: "Would you agree that these acts demonstrated a betrayal of the democratic values our country rests
on?"
Mueller: "I can't agree with that. Not that it's not true, but I cannot agree with it."
This was typical of Mueller's bizarre testimony throughout the day.
Democrats used the hearing to read huge portions of the report, as well as Donald Trump's tweets and campaign utterances, as if
somehow they were covering new ground. In one such exchange, a member asked: "Trump and his campaign welcomed and encouraged Russian
interference?"
Mueller: "Yes."
Question: "And then Trump and his campaign lied about it to cover it up?"
Mueller: "Yes."
Anyone who has followed news coverage of the Mueller report knows that line of questioning is not breaking new ground, as
the report was clear that members of Trump's team had been encouraged to lie to investigators, and this had been widely reported
throughout the media
and in several books.
Even so, Democrats persisted in reading publicly available Trump statements aloud. During his portion of time, Rep. Mike Quigley
chose to read Trump's
campaign trail
statements about Wikileaks .
"I love Wikileaks."
"This Wikileaks is like a treasure trove."
"Boy, I love reading those Wikileaks."
He then asked Mueller to react to Trump's statements. "Problematic is an understatement, in terms of giving some hope or some
boost to what is and should be illegal activity," Mueller said. Did we really need Mueller's opinion on Trump's statements uttered
on the stump, all of which were made before he was elected president? How is this type of commentary valuable?
On many important questions, Mueller stated that he could not comment because those matters were under investigation by other
departments, or they were not "in my purview." That was his response to questions about the Steele report and the FISA warrant used
to spy on the Trump campaign, which are under investigation by the Department of Justice. But he also responded this way to questions
on the Russia investigation. How can the special prosecutor charged with investigating whether Russia interfered with our elections
decline comment on the topic?
Congressional hearings aren't like a court room. There's no judge that can order an uncooperative witness to answer. That's one
of the many reasons that highly politicized Congressional hearings often quickly descend into kangaroo-court style bludgeoning of
the witness.
Yet today, because the confused witness appeared flummoxed by rapid-fire questions and by the contents of his own report, his
evasions and memory lapses instead undermined the credibility of the report itself, and had people questioning
whether Mueller had really led the investigation or not.
Barbara Boland is 's foreign policy and national security reporter. Follow her on Twitter
@BBatDC.
In reference to Russia meddling in the 2016 election, he specifically said that Russia had meddled in the past, Russia was meddling
as of right now, and Russia would continue to meddle in the future.
I guess that qualifies as having nothing to say about Russia meddling if you want to believe that he had nothing to say about
Russia meddling in our elections.
Well that proves it, I guess. After all, did Mueller testify to Congress as to the extent of Iraq's much-vaunted WMD program,
and lo! there it was(n't)!
Mueller is the god that failed. The Democrats considered him their savior. It was "wait til the Mueller report". "Soon it
will be Mueller time". "Just wait on Mueller, you'll see."
Then, in the Mueller hearing they quoted scripture from the book of Mueller, asking their savior to provide more divine
wisdom on the scripture. But he was no god. He was a human whose mental faculties had declined due to the aging process all of
us mortals must endure. And it became abundantly clear that he had been just a figurehead in a witch hunt by radical major Democratic
party donor prosecutors. Mueller was shamelessly used by morally bankrupt Democrat apparatchiks.
But they will not stop just because their god failed. They will find another god and keep right on investigating.
To all the Mueller supporters, he couldn't even answer simple questions like "when did you and your team conclude there was
no collusion/conspiracy with Russia?"
That question 1) fell under his purview, 2) arose from the four corners of his report, 3) not in anyway prohibited by the
DoJ directive and 4) not about something that would be easy to forget.
Yet he refused to answer. Some stand up guy he is.
"... "You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty convincing.... ..."
"... Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system??? ..."
"... The Russians trying to rig the elections meme was a fallback for the failure of the “trump is a russianstooge" meme. ..."
Here are some insights into the minds of many movers and shakers in Russiagate:
Key US officials behind the Russia investigation have made no secret of their animus
towards Russia.
"I do always hate the Russians," Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer on the Russia probe,
testified to Congress in July 2018. "It is my opinion that with respect to Western ideals
and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous
threat to that way of life."
As he opened the FBI's probe of the Trump campaign's ties to Russians in July 2016,
FBI agent Peter Strzok texted Page: "fuck the cheating motherfucking Russians Bastards. I
hate them I think they're probably the worst. Fucking conniving cheating savages."
Speaking to NBC News in May 2017, former director of national intelligence James
Clapper explained why US officials saw interactions between the Trump camp and Russian
nationals as a cause for alarm: "The Russians," Clapper said, "almost genetically driven to
co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were
concerned."
In a May interview with Lawfare, former FBI general counsel Jim Baker, who helped
oversee the Russia probe, explained the origins of the investigation as follows: "It was
about Russia, period, full stop. When the [George] Papadopoulos information comes across
our radar screen, it's coming across in the sense that we were always looking at Russia.
we've been thinking about Russia as a threat actor for decades and decades."
"You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin
rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections
as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty
convincing....
My question for Larry Johnson requires some speculation on his part: How did the claims of
"Russia meddling" which began with the DNC and Hillary campaign, take root at the FBI, CIA
and NSA???
Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies???
And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system???
Mueller came across as an old man.... muddling.... confused.... He was out of his depth. One would have to conclude that he is
not remotely credible based on his inability to answer questions and apparent ignorance of a report he is supposed to have
authored. Embarrassingly inept!
FFS, I live in the UK and even I have heard the link between Fusion GPS and the dodgy
dossier. Has Mueller been working alone in a cave or something? Has he tried Wikipedia?
le"> The had the lesson taught to them, but I seriously doubt that they learned
anything. I also think that Mueller was largely playing dumb. His job is to continue to raise
doubt, not to bring clarity. He is till doing a great job in that regards. I hope it leads to
jail time.
Mueller's playing dum to cover his own hide and the democraps should be ashamed wasting
tax payers money & that bringing the only work they done in 2 years corrupt sorry
individuals
Well worth watching this just for Tucker's superb commentary alone! With this Mueller
fiasco, a stake has been driven deep into the Deep State's heart.
gjohnsit on Sat, 07/27/2019 - 5:21pm The ruling elites have compared Russiagate to
Pearl Harbor , 9/11 , and Kristallnacht.
Yet for some reason, the American public has refused to agree with it's importance .
In a recent Gallup poll on problems facing the country, the "Situation with Russia" was such
a marginal concern that it did not even register.
In fact, Republicans have flat out rejected
the konspiracy theory altogether. A fact that the elites refused to accept.
Fortunately, the MSNBC-watching Democrats were willing to give the investigation the benefit
of the doubt. Until
now .
Since the public release of a redacted version of the Mueller report, Democrats have grown
more skeptical that the Russia investigation was conducted fairly, according to a new
poll.
...Both Democrats and Republicans have tilted toward a belief that the inquiry, which wrapped
up this spring after almost two years, was not conducted fairly. An April survey -- conducted
shortly after the report's release -- found that 46 percent of voters thought the probe had
been fair, compared with 29 percent who felt it had been unfair.
But there was a much bigger swing among Democrats, the most recent poll found. Among
Democratic voters, the number who consider the investigation unfair shot up by 15 percentage
points since then, while the number who thought it had been a fair investigation dropped by 9
points.
It's unclear what accounts for Democrats' plummeting confidence -- it's possible that they
feel the investigation was unfair in that the outcome was too favorable to President Donald
Trump; believe that Mueller was boxed in by Trump's Justice Department; or feel that it's
unfair because the president has not faced any serious consequences as a result of the
investigation.
Right. It was unfair FOR Trump. ROTFL.
It's obvious that the elites in the media have completely lost touch with the vast majority
of the public. They don't even attempt to understand us. Nor do they give us any credit for
being able to come to logical conclusions different from what they are selling.
It's also obvious that the MSM has no Plan B, for what happens after Russiagate flops.
They've even started pointing
fingers at each other.
But the American political press found Mueller insufficiently dazzling.
The New York Times declared, in language Trump could have written himself, "Mueller's
Performance Was a Departure From His Much-Fabled Stamina." The Washington Post announced, "On
Mueller's Final Day on the National Stage, a Halting, Faltering Performance," and, in a
separate piece, dubbed Mueller a "weary old man."
Although other pieces from the same outlets covered the substance of Mueller's testimony,
the conclusion that he had failed to excite his audience framed the totality of coverage.
Maybe it's because Mueller didn't say anything new. Maybe because he refused to answer
nearly 200 questions.
Maybe it's because the whole thing feels like an artificial scandal designed to distract us
from things of importance. And it isn't working.
What a crock of pootie. Just like he lied about WMDs, he's lying to the country again. As
Jim Jordan pointed out Misfud was the person who got the whole thing rolling. Misfud told
Papadapolous that Russia had dirt on Hillary. Did Mueller interview Misfud and ask him how he
knew that? Of course not because Mueller knew that Misfud has ties to the state department. As
do most of the people sent out to try to entrap Trump. Mueller did get away with lying to
congress when he talked about the IRA and their connections to Russian intelligence after the
judge told him not to. But this pretty much sums it up.
@snoopydawg
Facebook ads instead of flying lessons for his followers.
What a crock of pootie. Just like he lied about WMDs, he's lying to the country again.
As Jim Jordan pointed out Misfud was the person who got the whole thing rolling. Misfud
told Papadapolous that Russia had dirt on Hillary. Did Mueller interview Misfud and ask him
how he knew that? Of course not because Mueller knew that Misfud has ties to the state
department. As do most of the people sent out to try to entrap Trump. Mueller did get away
with lying to congress when he talked about the IRA and their connections to Russian
intelligence after the judge told him not to. But this pretty much sums it up.
For their despicable insensitivity and wrongful appropriation of others' suffering, they
were subsequently eaten alive by social-warrior Twitter mobs, beaten into delivering sniveling,
shame-drenched public recantations, and passively accepted losing their jobs no matter how good
they might otherwise have been at them...Right? RIGHT?
Tucker Carlson: The Russia hoax is over and it's time to hold people accountable for years
of lies.
By Tucker Carlson | Fox News - July 26, 2019
The Russia hoax ended on Wednesday -- we can say that. It ended not with a bang, but with
the muddled half-memories of a fading old man slipping in and out of focus.
America sat transfixed by Robert Mueller's halting testimony before Congress. No honest
person could have come away at the end believing that the president of the United States
colluded with the Russian government to steal an election. That was the allegation, you'll
remember.
And then, after the most extensive investigation in modern American history, we found the
truth. And so, we can say conclusively, once again, what we told you the day this all
started, the whole thing is a crock. It never happened. They were lying to you. That's clear
now. The debate is over.
But that doesn't mean the Russia story has quite ended. There are loose ends. For two and
a half years, some of the most powerful people in America -- supposedly serious,
well-educated people, very smart people -- these people made wild and untrue and totally
reckless allegations about issues critical to the life of this country, all on the basis of
no evidence whatsoever. It's hard to believe they did that. But they did do it.
What should happen to these people now? Congressman Adam Schiff, for example. Schiff
claimed he possessed actual evidence of Russian collusion. And he didn't just say that one
time, he said it repeatedly.
... But what about his enablers? And there are a lot of them --the journalists, the
pundits, the fellow lawmakers who helped Adam Schiff tell his lies. These are the people
you'll remember who blithely accused the sitting president of the United States of
treason.
One of them was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has said, among other things, the
following: "Trump's eagerness to sell out America proves the Russians must have something
personally politically or financially on President Trump."
It proves that Trump is committing treason. Think about that. Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker
of the House, third in line for the presidency. She is the country's most powerful lawmaker,
supposedly a wise and sober person. And yet, there she was telling you it's been proved that
the president of the United States is working for a hostile foreign power.
Has any Speaker in American history ever said something that irresponsible? Maybe nothing
comes to mind. But if you think that's shocking, consider this: Pelosi is still saying that.
"Tucker Carlson Tonight's" investigative producer, Alex Pfeiffer, ran into Pelosi Thursday
afternoon on Capitol Hill and asked her. Listen to what she told our show.
Alex Pfeiffer, Fox News investigative producer: Speaker Pelosi, Alex Pfeiffer of "Tucker
Carlson Tonight." In January, you wondered what Putin had on Trump. After yesterday, are you
any closer to figuring that out?
Pelosi: We have it up on the courts right now.
Pfeiffer: Are you any closer to figuring out what Putin has on Trump?
Pelosi: That's why we need to have him to answer our subpoena.
Pfeiffer: You still think Putin might have some sort of blackmail on the president?
Pelosi: I wonder what Putin has politically, financially or personally.
Pfeiffer: So our president could be subject to blackmail, you think?
The exchange isn't long, but it really tells you everything you need to know. Pelosi told
our show President Trump is a traitor who is committing treason. And yet, she doesn't want to
impeach him. How does that make sense?
Well, it only makes sense when you understand that Pelosi doesn't mean a single word that
she says. Everything is political, meaning it's only about power.
That's not just annoying. It's also ominous. And here's why.
Fifteen years ago this spring, we invaded Iraq to stop a WMD program that didn't exist.
Thousands of American troops died in the process, trillions of dollars were wasted. It was
the single greatest mistake in this country in generations. And yet -- and here's the key --
nobody in Washington was ever punished for it.
The people who planned it went on to even better jobs. One of them is now our national
security adviser, John Bolton. Five years after the Iraq War, our economy collapsed. Remember
that? The subprime meltdown? The specific causes were complex, but the themes were instantly
recognizable -- greed and stupidity. And yet, once again, no one was ever punished.
Now, fast forward another 11 years to today, right now. America stands on the brink of yet
more foolish foreign entanglements, and on the brink of and potentially another financial
meltdown. Why is that? Because nobody in Washington has learned anything. And why would they
learn anything? When they screw up there are never any consequences. They skate by on the
usual mixture of aggression and BS. "Nothing to see here, keep moving."
Imagine for a second, what would happen if you let your kids act like that? Well, they'd
been in prison by now. So, maybe it's time to stop the cycle in Washington.
How about this? If you get caught lying about the big things, whether it's about weapons
of mass destruction, or subprime mortgages or Russian collusion, you have to admit it and
serve penance, -- not necessarily prison time, though we're open. But punishment of some
kind.
You can't stay in Washington, making six times the average American salary. You can't do
that. No, sorry.
You've got to leave. You've got to relocate to Camden, New Jersey, maybe or Gary, Indiana,
and do something useful. Like clean motel rooms for minimum wage, put the little "sanitized
for your protection" strips on toilets. Not forever, just for a decade or two, until you've
learned your lesson. Call us when you've done that, but not before.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on July 25,
2019.
I hate to say it, but corporate Democrats along with those who Maddow has totally
brainwashed are still true believers in the entire lie. You cannot get through to these
people, they will not come to terms with the fact that they've been hoodwinked and bamboozled
for the last three years. They read it in WaPo and the NYTimes and heard it on NPR so it's
gospel.
For the next 40 years these people will be writing essays, books and giving talks about
how the evil Russians interfered in our democracy [sic] to elect their preferred president.
It's maddening and perhaps beyond hope.
Rob , July 25, 2019 at 17:18
To your point, the NYT is warning that Russia will interfere AGAIN in the next election.
They take it as a given that they interfered in the last one, and so do many, if not most, of
their readers, notwithstanding the absence of evidence. This is a full-on, non-stop
propaganda effort. Facts will not get in the way.
anon4d2 , July 25, 2019 at 20:37
So we need evidence that Russia
1. Is interfering on both sides of every controversy;
2. Is representing the majority of the US better than the incumbents; or
3. Is plotting with Holland to take over the universe with UFOs and occult powers;
But perhaps it is better to concentrate on the influence of Israel, which is fact.
Drew Hunkins , July 26, 2019 at 10:24
“This is a full-on, non-stop propaganda effort. Facts will not get in the
way.”
@ "Mueller implied in his testimony that there was a link between the IRA and the Russian
government despite an order from a judge for him to stop making that connection."
There may be some fireworks with that judge because of Mueller's statements. He was
expressly warned by the judge that she would consider a range of sanctions were there any
repetition. On the other hand, as far as I could tell a few years ago when I had last
researched the topic, federal judges are very reluctant to sanction federal attorneys. I
could find only one published instance where that had occurred, and it was only a measly $500
penalty. (Rule 11 sanctions are supposed to compensate the other side for the expenses of
opposing an unjustifiable position, as measured by the reasonable billing rate of the other
side's lawyers, although judges do have authority for departures.)
Misbehavior by federal lawyers is exceedingly common, I suspect precisely because they are
so seldom held to account for unprincipled behavior. That Mueller conducted such a shoddy
investigation is no surprise to me.
Me Myself , July 25, 2019 at 13:31
Robert Mueller can easily be seen as carrying democrats hopes and dreams just like a good
Mueller.
Why does it matter where truth of damning information about our government officials comes
from ( rhetorical ).
I appreciate knowing it.
Watching what appears to be a modern day Coup d'état in this country is more than just
disappointing not surprising though.
No focus from congress on what was clearly demonstrated in the evidence provided by
publishing's of undisputed truth by (Chelsea Manning .Julian Assange and Others)
I thought it would be interesting living in the Middle Ages, once upon a time, Its not as
fun as thought it might.
Russia interfered on a massive scale and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how
massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a
photo with the evil mastermind!
How evil? Well do the math. $43,000 to $46,000 of that was spent during the election and
of those ads 8.4 percent were political. That's $3,684 dollars.
But the political ads were aimed in both directions so that's roughly $1,932 spent
"promoting" Trump.
And now Mueller tells us the evil mastermind is at it again -- as we sit here -- probably
spending even more this time. Let us know when he's spent a full thousand dollars Bob and
we'll start loading the bombs.
Oh, and we found all this out for around thirty million dollars.
think about it! with the myriad of problems we must contend with: growing social
inequality, huge tax breaks for the rich, government deregulation of private business, a
climate catastrophe, unending wars, nuclear annihilation spurred on especially by u.s.
imperialism, the gutting of what little social safety net we have left and so on and so so
on. and we are supposed to be outraged at supposed foreign interference with our supposed
democratic process? please, this is total insanity!!!
Of course, relatively speaking, it’s a nothing. Every knowledgeable person knows
that we in the US orchestrated both the financing and the strategy of the 1996 Yeltsin
campaign -- a political rescue so efficiently carried out that our operatives bragged
brazenly about it to Time Magazine, which made it the cover story for its July 14, 1996
edition (“Yanks to the Rescue”).
The Lamestream Corporate media always underplayed the fact that Yeltsin ordered the
execution of 1,100 demonstrators who protested the IMF backed “reforms”, and that
Clinton approved of his deadly and heavy hand in implementing a neoliberal economic order.
Clinton never threatened to suspend aid to the Russian Federation despite its numerous abuses
of human rights.
Also forgotten is that Yeltsin ordered the Russian Parliament (Duma) shelled before it
could vote on Yeltsin’s economic “reforms”, which were implemented at the
point of a gun. At various times between 1993 and 1997, it was Yeltsin who declared martial
law, suspended the Duma, and declared himself possessed of dictatorial powers.
How many Americans ever knew this? 20%? How many remember it today? Maybe 5%? That means
there is no context for gauging Muellers’ testimony.
But, it is, by MSNBC standards, Vladimir Putin who is Evil Incarnate. Has Maddow ever
mentioned Yeltsin, a tyrant of the first order? No, because at GE, Comcast, and NBC, tyranny
in the name of enforcing neoliberalism is perfectly acceptable.
This post is a bit off topic, and is a bit relativistic, as I know we should be concerned
if it is really true that Manafort was giving internal polling data to a Russian Federation
person so that the IRA could better target swing states in our Midwest.
Bob Van Noy , July 26, 2019 at 08:26
John Wolfe, your comment is not off topic at all, it’s crucial to further
understanding of the totality of the Russia did it mentality, and That is well documented in
a small but powerful book called “Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive
Dissonance” by F. William Engdahl which I will link.
The American People have been propagandized so thoroughly that they can hardly recognize
the truth any longer.
Too, I will link an article in Off Guardian this morning that is worth mentioning if one
wants to see Real Reporting On MH-17.
Evidence accumulates that Obama was the real leader of this color revolution against Trump with Brannan as his chief lieutenant
and Comey as a willing accomplice.
Now that the dust has settled, one must ask why the Deep State wanted Trump gone. Why does the Obama-Clinton mafia hates him so
much? Is this due to Trump committed an unforgivable sin in suggesting we “get along with Russia” and thus potentially cut the
revenues of military-industrial complex ? This is not true -- Trump inflated the Pentagon budget to astronomical height. Then
why ?
Notable quotes:
"... The full details of the plot to take out Donald Trump remain to be revealed. But there should now be no doubt that his effort was not the work of a few rogue intelligence and law enforcement officials acting on their own. This was a full blown covert action undertaken with the full knowledge and blessing of Barack Obama. ..."
"... Operation Crossfire Hurricane was launched the end of July 2016. CIA Director John Brennan briefed key Democrat members of Congress in early August on allegations that Donald Trump was colluding with Vladimir Putin. And Peter Strzok traveled to London in early August 2016 to meet with the CIA and with Alexander Downer, who was claiming that George Papadopolous was talking up the Russians. Following that trip Strozk texted the following to his mistress, Lisa Page : ..."
"... We also know that Senior Obama Administration officials, such as NSC Director Susan Rice and UN Ambassdor Samantha Power, were pushing to "unmask" Trump campaign officials who were named in US intelligence documents. ..."
"... Let us look at this from another angle. If the Russians were actually trying to interfere in the 2016 election, then it was known to both US intelligence and law enforcement. Hell, we are told in the Mueller report that the FBI detected the Russians trying to hack the DNC way back in 2015. If there really was intelligence on Russian efforts to meddle why did the Obama Administration do nothing other than sanction FBI's Crossfire Hurricane? ..."
"... On what basis did Barack Obama insist it was impossible to rig the US Presidential election? This is a critical anomaly. Why was the Obama team asleep at the switch, especially on the intel front, it the Russians actually were engaged in rigging the election to install Donald Trump? ..."
"... Obama seemed to have got a taste for spying on his domestic political opponents from monitoring Israeli attempts to block the Iran nuclear deal. I think the lock her up stuff really scared the Obama people, who had much to hide. ..."
The full details of the plot to take out Donald Trump remain to be revealed. But there should now be no doubt that his effort was
not the work of a few rogue intelligence and law enforcement officials acting on their own. This was a full blown covert action undertaken
with the full knowledge and blessing of Barack Obama.
As
I have written previously , the claim that Russia tried to hijack our election is a damn lie. But you do not have to take my
word for it. Just listen to Barack Obama speaking in October 2016 in response to Donald Trump's expressed concerns about
election meddling :
"There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America's elections, in part because they are
so decentralized. There is no evidence that that has happened in the past, or that there are instances that that could happen this
time," the president said to the future president in October 2016.
"Democracy survives because we recognize that there is something more important than any individual campaign, and that is making
sure the integrity and trust in our institutions sustains itself. Becasue Democracy works by consent, not by force," Obama said.
"I have never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections
and the election process before votes have even taken place. It is unprecedented. It happens to be based on no fact. Every expert
regardless of political party... who has ever examined these issues in a serious way will tell you that instances of significant
voter fraud are not to be found. Keep in mind elections are run by state and local officials."
It is important to remember what had transpired in the Trump/Russia collusion case by this point. Operation Crossfire Hurricane
was launched the end of July 2016. CIA Director John Brennan briefed key Democrat members of Congress in early August on allegations
that Donald Trump was colluding with Vladimir Putin. And Peter Strzok traveled to London in early August 2016 to meet with the CIA
and with Alexander Downer, who was claiming that George Papadopolous was talking up the Russians. Following that trip
Strozk texted
the following to his mistress, Lisa Page :
Strzok: And hi. Went well, best we could have expected. Other than [REDACTED] quote: " the White House is running this. " My answer,
"well, maybe for you they are." And of course, I was planning on telling this guy, thanks for coming, we've got an hour, but with
Bill [Priestap] there, I've got no control .
Page: Yeah, whatever (re the WH comment). We've got the emails that say otherwise.
The White House clearly knew. But Strzok's text is not the only evidence. We also know that Senior Obama Administration officials,
such as NSC Director Susan Rice and UN Ambassdor Samantha Power, were pushing to "unmask" Trump campaign officials who were named
in US intelligence documents.
There are only two possibilities:
Obama was being briefed by Susan Rice and DNI James Clapper and CIA Director about the project
to take out Trump, or
Obama was kept in the dark.
Let us look at this from another angle. If the Russians were actually trying to interfere in the 2016 election, then it was known
to both US intelligence and law enforcement. Hell, we are told in the Mueller report that the FBI detected the Russians trying to
hack the DNC way back in 2015. If there really was intelligence on Russian efforts to meddle why did the Obama Administration do
nothing other than sanction FBI's Crossfire Hurricane?
On what basis did Barack Obama insist it was impossible to rig the US Presidential election? This is a critical anomaly. Why was
the Obama team asleep at the switch, especially on the intel front, it the Russians actually were engaged in rigging the election
to install Donald Trump?
My wife was for many years an election official in Virginia. IMO Obama was right in saying that a US presidential election
is impossible to "rig." The US Constitution requires that federal elections be run by the states WITHOUT federal supervision.
As a result the methods and equipment in the states and the various parts of the states vary widely and the state systems are
not tied together with a national electronic network as, for example, the system is in France where the result of a national election
is reported on TeeVee immediately when the polls close.
Asking the question, "Can you cite one specific case where a single vote was definitively changed by Russian meddling?"
causes panic in a person who is declaiming about the evils of Russian meddling in our elections.
When you ask that question, the invariable retort is that the Russians are so clever that you wouldn't know that you were being
gulled; or, when I say that I have never seen a Russian produced facebook ad, the rejoinder is that the Russians concentrated
on Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio and, of course, I would have been privy to the bot-sent emails and facebook ads generated by
the Internet Research Agency.
You've maintained all along that the Russians interfered in the election, yet I believe it is your position that the Russians
did not change a single vote. Is that correct or do you believe the Russians changed the votes before tabulation?
What did the Russians do that the Trump and Hillary campaigns did not do? Did they also turnout the tens of thousands who showed
up for Trump rallies that Hillary could never muster? Are they still turning out thousands at recent Trump rallies? I'm curious
how come Brennan and Clapper could not turn out thousands to Hillary's rallies when according to our German friend "b", the omnipotent
US Intel services just turned out a quarter of the population of Hong Kong to protest CCP authoritarianism?
Did the Israeli, Saudi and Chinese governments interfere in the election? How would you compare what they did to what you believe
the Russians did?
uieter about it. All that is very different from the absolute covert nature of the Russian IO in the 2016 election. I have
no idea what China did or is doing.
You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication. The lies on this are enormous. If the FBI really had detected
GRU hacking of the DNC in 2015, which is claimed in the fabricated meme, then you would expect the FBI and the other counter intel
elements of the USG to take action. THEY DID NOTHING.
The issue of Russian hacking only emerged when Hillary and the DNC learned that DNC emails were going to be put out by WIKILEAKS.
Again, not one shred of actual evidence that the Russians did it, but blaming the Russians became a convenient excuse in a bid
to divert attention from the real story--i.e,. Hillary and the DNC colluded to defeat Bernie Sanders.
The only real solid evidence of colluding with foreigners, in this case the Ukraine, comes courtesy of Hillary and her campaign.
Hiring a foreign intel officer (ie. Steele) who then takes info from Russians of questionable background and spread it around
as "truth". That was not a Russian IO. Pure Clinton IO.
"What the Russians did was insert misattributed information and disinformation into the election cycle...That is what separates
the Russian IO from anything Clinton, Trump or any of their supporters did."
I believe supporters of both candidates did exactly what you say the Russians did - insert misattributed information & disinformation
into the media stream. If you watch MSNBC or Fox on any given day there is much assertion & opinion masquerading as news. And
the Twitter & Facebook and blog universe are teeming with stories and innuendo that are more fiction than fact all from anonymous
accounts.
The Russia Collusion hysteria is replete with examples of "misattributed information and disinformation". It seems that yellow
journalism is as American as apple pie.
The whole opaque PAC structure with names like "Americans for Democracy" funded by chain structures hiding the real financiers
and calling up down is something that we see growing in every election cycle and is already of significant scale both in terms
of financing and dubiousness.
It is also rather common that "experts" who are called upon to opine on issues routinely never disclose their conflicts of
interest. Jeffrey Sachs and so many others on the payroll of CCP entities never disclose those payments as they extoll the virtues
of offshoring our industrial base to China and are apologists for CCP espionage.
Blue peacock, supporters of Clinton and Trump did not put out misattributed info. They both put out truth, innuendo, exaggerations,
misleading info and even outright lies, but they put it out as themselves. They didn't represent themselves as someone other than
who they were. The PAC structure comes close to skirting this requirement for truthful attribution, but a quick internet search
blows away the facades of these PACs. What the Russians did was pure black propaganda.
You mean the kindly grandmother, Loretta Lynch, Attorney General of the United States, did not inform President Obama that
the FBI had obtained a FISA warrant to surveil the Republican candidate for the presidency and members of his staff becasue he
was working with Russians? Or do you mean that James Comey failed to tell his boss, Loretta Lynch; or do you mean John Brennan
failed to tell Obama about that Steele dossier from Fusion GPS that Mueller know anything about; or do you mean that James Clapper
failed to tell Jeh Johnson about that too? The Russians made them do all those things as part of an interference campaign, right?
It couldn't have been they were corrupt and incompetant.
"Instead, Obama...." made an "If you like your doctor, you can keep you doctor" statement that he knew was completely false.
Trump didn't win, Russians influenced Americans to vote for Trump, just ask the losers of the election, their paid sources and
their colleagues in Congress. In fact Americans love Hilary so much she's just where in the polls right now?
I continue to be astounded by the outrage at "Russian meddling". So some Russians used the internet to post true or false information
on candidates in a election.... so what?...millions of American partisan trolls were doing the same thing for or against a candidate.
We had tons of fake info written by American bloggers and posters all over the net, Facebook, twitter etc..
Its not like Putin came to the US and gave a speech to congress in favor of Trump ...as Netanyahu did in appearing before the
US congress and urging them to go against President Obama's Syria policy for heaven's sake.
It is so ridiculous I have given up hope of finding enough IQs above that of a cabbage to form a sane government.
Obama seemed to have got a taste for spying on his domestic political opponents from monitoring Israeli attempts to block
the Iran nuclear deal. I think the lock her up stuff really scared the Obama people, who had much to hide.
1. The FBI cannot be trusted to uphold defend and protect our Constitution, as they sought actively
to overturn a duly elected POTUS.; and
2 - Mueller's incompetence is astounding.
Is the only entity of the Defense Department called the U.S. Army the only ones left actually upholding, defending, and protecting
our Constitution and our Constitution processes? I don't see the other entities of the DOD called Navy and Air Force doing their
jobs upholding our Constitution!
Thumbs up to the Army, thumbs down to the Navy and Air Force!
I'm a little more charitable to the FBI. The Trumps lied their asses off to the FBI about their foreign contacts. Which IMO,
wrong or right, left the FBI all but no recourse but to investigate those lies. Even if the lies were simply based in long-seated
personal habits, it takes investigation to prove that is the case.
"You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly
saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty
convincing....
My question for Larry Johnson requires some speculation on his part: How did the claims of "Russia meddling" which began with
the DNC and Hillary campaign, take root at the FBI, CIA and NSA???
Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean
we are headed for a one-party system???
Larry, sorry to nitpick, but I have such regard for your work that it pains me to see the typographical error in your second sentence,
where you say "his error" shortly after referring to Trump. I'm guessing that you meant to say "this error", but it reads as if
it means "Trump's error".
And while I'm at it, your last sentence has "it" instead of "if".
Keep up your great work for this excellent website.
Sadly naive in that you think the conspirators were actually acting in good faith. You think they were right when they used
the Steele Dossier in applying for a FISA warrant in Colyyer's Star Chamber? Steele was a paid informant for the FBI as was Page.
"... He demonstrated a thin grasp of his own report's findings, even as he implored lawmakers in both parties to read it. He asked members of Congress to repeat their questions 48 times . ..."
"... That's not to say Mueller did nothing for Democrats. He said President Trump was not "exculpated" by his report. He raised the specter of falsified documents and all but said that he punted on obstruction of justice only because a sitting president cannot be indicted under existing Justice Department guidelines. He gamely testified his investigation was no "witch hunt." And some of his seeming confusion was likely strategic: he was trying to avoid giving partisans easy footage confirming their talking points. ..."
"... While Democrats have not totally given up on "collusion," moving the goalposts away from Hillary Clinton's detailed explanation of how the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to fix the election toward vaguer references to "contacts" and "foreign help," obstruction of justice was the name of the game. Mueller acknowledged that there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone in the Trump campaign with collusion-related crimes, even if he stopped short of calling that an exoneration of the president. Paul Manafort, George Papadopolous, Carter Page, Roger Stone -- these were not criminal masterminds. In fact, they were all incredibly sloppy. If they had colluded, they all could easily have been charged. ..."
"... No one who could be indicted was charged with aiding the president in obstructing the investigation either. ..."
"... The real answer Mueller declined to give appears to be that his obstruction allegations would have hinged heavily on Trump's use presidential powers under Article II of the Constitution. The Justice Department under Barr's leadership does not believe this amounted to obstruction in theory or practice. Thus the self-evidently never-fired Mueller was reduced to dropping breadcrumbs and hoping congressional Democrats would find them. ..."
"... Mueller's seeming lack of familiarity with his own investigation lessened the GOP's problem because it helps shift the focus to the "angry Democrats" in the special counsel's office -- people like Andrew Weissman, who attended Hillary's election night party -- rather than Mueller himself. The Democrats are still at square one, trying to dial back Manchurian candidate expectations among the base and shift the impeachment rationale to Trump's passive willingness to benefit from Russian interference without expressing a modicum of outrage. ..."
"... With 95 Democrats willing to impeach Trump over mean tweets, anything is possible. But it's going to take a lot more than Mueller to move House Speaker Nancy Pelosi into that camp. ..."
"... The Steele dossier, whether a truthful compilation or a complete fabrication, is itself an attempt by foreign spies to influence our election. "Collusion" staring us in the face right here. ..."
"... The public spectacle was heart-breaking. It was obvious that Mueller had lost some mental faculties. Surely his special investigative team had to know that, having worked with him for 2+ years, and so the Democrat leadership had to know that as well. And yet they insisted he testify, even though he basically begged to not testify and let him just go off into the twilight of retirement. But no, they threatened to subpoena him. ..."
"... Actually, Trump committed a lot of unforced errors, as well as being generally lazy, stupid and unprepared. ..."
"... With this in mind, to believe the RussiaGate conspiracy theories, one must simultaneously believe that the Russians have abilities that border on psychic mind control superpowers, but at the same time, these same evil geniuses cannot be bothered to plan what to do if their nefarious schemes actually worked out. ..."
"... One can easily accept that Trump is a roaring moron, but one also has to believe that his alleged puppetmaster cannot take the time to consult an attorney or a peruse a copy of the United States Code, available for free on the internet to anyone who bothers to take a peek. And that's just the legal requirements. I won't even go into the clownshow that was Trump's appointments and staffing. ..."
"... The testimony was a complete success because it maintained the status quo. Trump is not going anywhere, both Democrats and Republicans agreed that Russia tampered with the election rendering even more sanctions and increasing cold war tensions, and the only ones indicted were accused of process crimes. Meanwhile, the business of Goldman Sachs gets done in the halls of power. ..."
"... Robert "Saddam has WMD of Mass Destruction" Mueller has been the bag man for the establishment for a long time. Even his dotage, he still managed to perform his job flawlessly. ..."
"... 12 indictments against often former employees of a Russian clickbait farm for spectacularly laughable memes that will never amount to anything because there will never be a trial. One of the parties showed up in court and demanded actual evidence as part of discovery, causing Mueller to desperately ask for a continuance. The judge called Mueller out by denying it. The judge also called Mueller out by showing that he had no evidence that the defendant at issue had any ties tot he Russian government. ..."
"... A paltry $150k was spent for online ads over two years, by Russians, they tell you. They also tell you that about half those ads didn't run until after the election was over and that most of the ads didn't endorse a specific candidate or policy. Yet, you insist this Russian social media blitz altered the outcome of your election somehow. With well north of $3 billion spent on traditional advertising, leave it to MSM to float a turd of such odious girth. ..."
"... Next, Mueller indicts 13 Russian intelligence journeymen and it will never amount to anything. None of them will ever be extradited. There will never be a trial. Never a legal discovery process. No burden of proof that they actually hacked or colluded. No US intelligence agency has ever examined the servers in question. ..."
"... An impeachment is another word for "indictment", and as the saying goes you can indict a ham sandwich. Or impeach a baloney sandwich. If Trump were to wind up in the dock it would be "anything goes", including subpoenas being issued to Madame Hillary. There won't be any impeachment. Too much of a danger of overflowing sewage. ..."
"... Seth Rich could rise up from the dead and show us all, live on CNN, how he leaked the DNC emails, right after DWS confessed on MSNBC to ordering Seth Rich's murder and HRC admitted under oath that she invented russiagate on a bet with Podesta to see whether people really are that stupid and gullible, and CNN, MSNBC and the entire DNC and their cultists would keep pushing the conspiracy theory, never even missing a beat. ..."
"... I'm glad Mr. Mueller finally admitted publicly that he held the President to an Orwellian standard of "probably guilty, which we can't prove, until proven innocent, which we never do" that no American has ever been held to by law enforcement. ..."
Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testifies before the House Intelligence Committee about his report on Russian interference
in the 2016 presidential election in the Rayburn House Office Building July 24, 2019(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) The late Sen.
Arlen Specter ended the drive to impeach Bill Clinton by invoking Scottish law and voting "not proven" in the 42rd president's Senate
trial. Democrats hope to begin the drive to impeach Donald Trump with a finding by special counsel Robert Mueller that the worst
allegations against the 45th president are not proven.
Even this task was made more difficult by the former FBI director and Trump-Russia investigator's unimpressive public congressional
testimony. Mueller had trouble identifying questioners. He demonstrated a thin grasp of his own report's findings, even as he
implored lawmakers in both parties to read it. He asked members of Congress to repeat their questions
48 times .
The uber-competent G-man about whom liberals
sang Christmas carols was not on display Wednesday. "Mueller Time" gave way to Mr. Magoo.
A cursory glance at Politico 's homepage revealed the damage. "'Euphoria': White House, GOP exult after a flat Mueller
performance," blared the top headline. Another reads, "Bob Mueller is struggling." And another: "Impeachment drive slowed by Mueller's
troubles." Even the New York Times could only manage: "Mueller sticks to script but shows flashes of indignation."
"This is delicate to say, but Mueller, whom I deeply respect, has not publicly testified before Congress in at least six years,"
fretted Barack Obama's man David Axelrod. "And he does not appear as sharp as he was then."
That's not to say Mueller did nothing for Democrats. He said President Trump was not "exculpated" by his report. He raised
the specter of falsified documents and all but said that he punted on obstruction of justice only because a sitting president cannot
be indicted under existing Justice Department guidelines. He gamely testified his investigation was no "witch hunt." And some of
his seeming confusion was likely strategic: he was trying to avoid giving partisans easy footage confirming their talking points.
But Democrats wanted much more. Ever since Attorney General William Barr released his summary, they have wanted to challenge his
framing of the report. His testimony, like that 448-page document, contained plenty of damning information. The bottom line -- that
Mueller could not prove a Trump-Russia conspiracy to swing the 2016 presidential election and lacks a convincing explanation for
his obstruction equivocation -- remains unchanged.
While Democrats have not totally given up on "collusion,"
moving the goalposts away
from Hillary Clinton's
detailed explanation
of how the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to fix the election toward vaguer references to "contacts" and "foreign help,"
obstruction of justice was the name of the game. Mueller acknowledged that there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone in the
Trump campaign with collusion-related crimes, even if he stopped short of calling that an exoneration of the president. Paul Manafort,
George Papadopolous, Carter Page, Roger Stone -- these were not criminal masterminds. In fact, they were all incredibly sloppy. If
they had colluded, they all could easily have been charged.
If Justice Department regulations on presidential indictments did not prevent a finding of insufficient evidence to charge conspiracy,
why did these guidelines require Congress to make the final determination on obstruction? No one who could be indicted was charged
with aiding the president in obstructing the investigation either.
The real answer Mueller declined to give appears to be that his obstruction allegations would have hinged heavily on Trump's
use presidential powers under Article II of the Constitution. The Justice Department under Barr's leadership does not believe this
amounted to obstruction in theory or practice. Thus the self-evidently never-fired Mueller was reduced to dropping breadcrumbs and
hoping congressional Democrats would find them.
Both parties entered the hearings with a fundamental problem. For Republicans, how do you discredit Mueller for his negative
findings about the president while also affirming his failure to prove an election-related conspiracy as definitive? The Democrats'
dilemma was that they knew Trump had behaved badly in response to Russian election interference and the subsequent investigation,
but hoped Mueller would discover something worse. When he merely supplied color and a reliable narrator for what we largely already
knew, many Democrats wanted to pivot back to impeaching Trump over that unseemly behavior.
Mueller's seeming lack of familiarity with his own investigation lessened the GOP's problem because it helps shift the focus
to the "angry Democrats" in the special counsel's office -- people like Andrew Weissman, who attended Hillary's election night party
-- rather than Mueller himself. The Democrats are still at square one, trying to dial back Manchurian candidate expectations among
the base and shift the impeachment rationale to Trump's passive willingness to benefit from Russian interference without expressing
a modicum of outrage.
You can argue that we should expect more from a president than to simply have refrained from directly conspiring with a hostile
foreign power to reach the White House. Yet that case becomes harder to make when that is precisely what you have conditioned rank-and-file
Democrats to expect from the Mueller report. No dramatic reading of that report, least of all by a 74-year-old clearly no longer
accustomed to congressional testimony, will deliver on those expectations.
With
95 Democrats willing to impeach Trump over mean tweets, anything is possible. But it's going to take a lot more than Mueller
to move House Speaker Nancy Pelosi into that camp.
I would say this is by far the most charitable interpretation of Mueller's testimony I've seen. He didn't want to talk about the
'Steele Dossier' ... the whole basis for the Russiagate farce, and then claimed he didn't know who GPS Fusion was ... the outfit
hired by Clinton to write the dossier in the first place. That this whole pile of rubbish was not laughed out of existence is
a tribute to the ability of the media (who hated Trump), to convince a large number of people of a preposterous fantasy.
He reminds me a little bit of my dad, and a little bit of Cato the Younger. But to his fellow Republicans--he's Mr. Magoo.
The Steele dossier, whether a truthful compilation or a complete fabrication, is itself an attempt by foreign spies to influence
our election. "Collusion" staring us in the face right here.
Why haven't the Democrats been investigated for it?
Maybe because there's a little difference between hiring a private firm to do opposition research, and Russian military intelligence
stealing and releasing tens of thousands of private documents from one political party to help the other win the Presidency?
"You can argue that we should expect more from a president than to simply have refrained from directly conspiring with a hostile
foreign power to reach the White House."
Even after the spectacle, and the grueling two years of media hype, nothing has moved the dial from those who hate Trump, and
those who are Trump supporters. The 2020 election may again come down to the electoral college system. We already know where voters
on the upper east coast and California stand. Major populations.
The public spectacle was heart-breaking. It was obvious that Mueller had lost some mental faculties. Surely his special investigative
team had to know that, having worked with him for 2+ years, and so the Democrat leadership had to know that as well. And yet they
insisted he testify, even though he basically begged to not testify and let him just go off into the twilight of retirement. But
no, they threatened to subpoena him.
By all accounts, Mueller had a long a admirable career. Its disgusting that most people's memory of him and his legacy will
be of this last public embarrassing spectacle.
The Democratic Party has shown its complete lack of moral compass. When it comes to politics, anything goes, including the
destruction of people's lives. They even eat their own when its considered politically expedient. The Anita Hill hearings, Kavannah
hearings, me too movement, show me the man and the people around him, we'll find the crimes mentality. What's next? Murder? It
would not surprise me in the least.
Its clear now that the entire Russian collusion narrative was a set-up by the Democratic party. It was all about entrapment,
perjury traps, and selective media leaking.
The bottom line was, is, and always will be as follows: The Democrat Party expected their candidate to win in a cakewalk over
Trump. If she won we wouldn't have heard one word about these Russians (Oh, and by the way, do these "Russians" have names?).
It was Clinton's election to lose and she promptly went out and lost it! Period! End of story! In their eyes the candidate of
"The Deplorables" won and the Democrats are enraged--so enraged that since Election Day 2016 they have been doing all they can
do to delegitimize the election and Trump's status as POTUS. And all the while-- thanks to BOTH parties--the nation's infrastructure
steadily crumbles and the immigration crisis remains unresolved (to cite just two examples).
"On impeachment: Just imagine that Barak Obama had illegally spent $120,000 of his campaign cash for hush money to his prostitute.
What would happen?"--interguru
Democrats would rise in unison and begin shouting "It's only about sex!" And that time, they'd be correct.
Admit it, interguru, all the covering for Clinton that the Democrats conducted in order to yank his lying-under-oath balls
out of the fire rendered impotent their usual tactics of denigrate and defame.
Fine, but that has nothing to do with the russiagate conspiracy theory.
In fact, if Trump were really a puppet of Russia, they'd never let him commit an unforced error that pointless. Some money
could be funneled from any of a million sources, and nobody would be any the wiser.
Actually, Trump committed a lot of unforced errors, as well as being generally lazy, stupid and unprepared.
With this in mind, to believe the RussiaGate conspiracy theories, one must simultaneously believe that the Russians have
abilities that border on psychic mind control superpowers, but at the same time, these same evil geniuses cannot be bothered to
plan what to do if their nefarious schemes actually worked out.
Orwell wept.
One can easily accept that Trump is a roaring moron, but one also has to believe that his alleged puppetmaster cannot take
the time to consult an attorney or a peruse a copy of the United States Code, available for free on the internet to anyone who
bothers to take a peek. And that's just the legal requirements. I won't even go into the clownshow that was Trump's appointments
and staffing.
The testimony was a complete success because it maintained the status quo. Trump is not going anywhere, both Democrats and
Republicans agreed that Russia tampered with the election rendering even more sanctions and increasing cold war tensions, and
the only ones indicted were accused of process crimes. Meanwhile, the business of Goldman Sachs gets done in the halls of power.
Robert "Saddam has WMD of Mass Destruction" Mueller has been the bag man for the establishment for a long time. Even his
dotage, he still managed to perform his job flawlessly.
What utter nonsense, unless you believe that "Russia" wrote the DNC emails, or that a clickbait troll farm (see paragraph 95 of
the IRA indictment if you don't believe me) that has no discernable connection tot he Russian government has some amazing influence
over gullible American voters.
12 indictments against often former employees of a Russian clickbait farm for spectacularly laughable memes that will never
amount to anything because there will never be a trial. One of the parties showed up in court and demanded actual evidence as
part of discovery, causing Mueller to desperately ask for a continuance. The judge called Mueller out by denying it. The judge
also called Mueller out by showing that he had no evidence that the defendant at issue had any ties tot he Russian government.
A paltry $150k was spent for online ads over two years, by Russians, they tell you. They also tell you that about half
those ads didn't run until after the election was over and that most of the ads didn't endorse a specific candidate or policy.
Yet, you insist this Russian social media blitz altered the outcome of your election somehow. With well north of $3 billion spent
on traditional advertising, leave it to MSM to float a turd of such odious girth.
Next, Mueller indicts 13 Russian intelligence journeymen and it will never amount to anything. None of them will ever be
extradited. There will never be a trial. Never a legal discovery process. No burden of proof that they actually hacked or colluded.
No US intelligence agency has ever examined the servers in question.
Russians didn't write the emails and Julian Assange is emphatic that Russia had nothing to do with them. Yet, no one in our
vast and vaunted intelligence community has bothered to interview him. As they say, a smart lawyer never asks a question if he
might not want to hear the answer.
Everything, all of it, is based on intel supplied by a cyber security firm on the DNC payroll. You can't make this shit up.
The other indictments are thoroughly unrelated to hacking or collusion by anybody, much less Russia.
Sen Specter did NOT "end the drive to impeach Bill Clinton", as the opening sentence of this article declares. The drive to impeach
Bill Clinton ended when the House passed articles of impeachment. That's right: Bill Clinton was actually impeached. No, he wasn't
"convicted" in his senate trial (thanks to Specter) and so wasn't removed from office. But he was, actually, impeached.
Good question for trivia buffs: Only one of these presidents was impeached: Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Which one was it?
(Hint: Nixon resigned before the House impeached him.)
An impeachment is another word for "indictment", and as the saying goes you can indict a ham sandwich. Or impeach a baloney
sandwich. If Trump were to wind up in the dock it would be "anything goes", including subpoenas being issued to Madame Hillary.
There won't be any impeachment. Too much of a danger of overflowing sewage.
Seth Rich could rise up from the dead and show us all, live on CNN, how he leaked the DNC emails, right after DWS confessed
on MSNBC to ordering Seth Rich's murder and HRC admitted under oath that she invented russiagate on a bet with Podesta to see
whether people really are that stupid and gullible, and CNN, MSNBC and the entire DNC and their cultists would keep pushing the
conspiracy theory, never even missing a beat.
I'm thinking the Democrats just wanted Mueller to give them the go ahead on impeachment... that way they could always blame it
on him if the ploy failed... Too bad they are such cowards that none of the want to sign their name to impeachment proceedings...
I'm glad Mr. Mueller finally admitted publicly that he held the President to an Orwellian standard of "probably guilty, which
we can't prove, until proven innocent, which we never do" that no American has ever been held to by law enforcement.
I'll illustrate:
"If we had had confidence the President clearly committed a crime, we would have said so. We did not make a determination
as to whether the President did commit a crime."
"If we had had confidence the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not make a determination
as to whether the President did commit a crime."
Can anybody tell me the legal difference between those two statements? I really don't see any. Also, what was fascinating about
Mr. Mueller's press conference was when he said this:
"These indictments contain allegations and we are not commenting on the guilt or the innocence of any specific defendant.
Every defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty."
He actually paid indicted Russian nationals who will never stand trial in this country more constitutional lip service than
Trump. Absolutely gorgeous...
If the Democrats were using Mueller as their smoking gun to nail Trump it failed miserably. If they still want to impeach go ahead.
It guarantees Trump's reelection.
Mueller's investigation ended after all the subpoenas had been served, all the witnesses had been deposed, and all the evidence
analyzed. If, after that, he could not determine that the president had committed a crime, then, according to established jurisprudential
practice, the decision is that he is not guilty. It is singular that the 2 accusations, collusion and obstruction, were evaluated
differently.
In the case of conspiracy ("collusion") the final report says, "The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump
campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." In the case of obstruction
of justice, the final report says, "If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly
did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable
to reach that judgment."
So, in the case of conspiracy, the prosecutor had to prove that the President was guilty ("did not establish" conspiracy);
in the case of obstruction, they had to prove that he was innocent ("did not commit obstruction"). Why did different standards
apply to the two accusations?
Mueller said he didn't recommend that the grand jury indict the President for obstruction because one cannot indict a sitting
President. But the President either obstructed justice or he didn't. If he did, why didn't Mueller say so? He didn't have to recommend
as indictment in order to state a conclusion based on facts revealed in the investigation. What he appears to be saying is that
because he couldn't prove that the President did not commit obstruction, he would recommend that congress play impeachment politics
with the issue.
So, instead of a resolution of this matter, Mueller decided to bequeath to the nation a festering sore that, with that aid
of congressional Democrats, would continue to undermine the President's administration.
Russia interfered on a massive scale and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how
massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a
photo with the evil mastermind!
How evil? Well do the math. $43,000 to $46,000 of that was spent during the election and
of those ads 8.4 percent were political. That's $3,684 dollars.
But the political ads were aimed in both directions so that's roughly $1,932 spent
"promoting" Trump.
And now Mueller tells us the evil mastermind is at it again -- as we sit here -- probably
spending even more this time. Let us know when he's spent a full thousand dollars Bob and
we'll start loading the bombs.
Oh, and we found all this out for around thirty million dollars.
think about it! with the myriad of problems we must contend with: growing social
inequality, huge tax breaks for the rich, government deregulation of private business, a
climate catastrophe, unending wars, nuclear annihilation spurred on especially by u.s.
imperialism, the gutting of what little social safety net we have left and so on and so so
on. and we are supposed to be outraged at supposed foreign interference with our supposed
democratic process? please, this is total insanity!!!
Of course, relatively speaking, it’s a nothing. Every knowledgeable person knows
that we in the US orchestrated both the financing and the strategy of the 1996 Yeltsin
campaign -- a political rescue so efficiently carried out that our operatives bragged
brazenly about it to Time Magazine, which made it the cover story for its July 14, 1996
edition (“Yanks to the Rescue”).
The Lamestream Corporate media always underplayed the fact that Yeltsin ordered the
execution of 1,100 demonstrators who protested the IMF backed “reforms”, and that
Clinton approved of his deadly and heavy hand in implementing a neoliberal economic order.
Clinton never threatened to suspend aid to the Russian Federation despite its numerous abuses
of human rights.
Also forgotten is that Yeltsin ordered the Russian Parliament (Duma) shelled before it
could vote on Yeltsin’s economic “reforms”, which were implemented at the
point of a gun. At various times between 1993 and 1997, it was Yeltsin who declared martial
law, suspended the Duma, and declared himself possessed of dictatorial powers.
How many Americans ever knew this? 20%? How many remember it today? Maybe 5%? That means
there is no context for gauging Muellers’ testimony.
But, it is, by MSNBC standards, Vladimir Putin who is Evil Incarnate. Has Maddow ever
mentioned Yeltsin, a tyrant of the first order? No, because at GE, Comcast, and NBC, tyranny
in the name of enforcing neoliberalism is perfectly acceptable.
This post is a bit off topic, and is a bit relativistic, as I know we should be concerned
if it is really true that Manafort was giving internal polling data to a Russian Federation
person so that the IRA could better target swing states in our Midwest.
Bob Van Noy , July 26, 2019 at 08:26
John Wolfe, your comment is not off topic at all, it’s crucial to further
understanding of the totality of the Russia did it mentality, and That is well documented in
a small but powerful book called “Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive
Dissonance” by F. William Engdahl which I will link.
The American People have been propagandized so thoroughly that they can hardly recognize
the truth any longer.
Too, I will link an article in Off Guardian this morning that is worth mentioning if one
wants to see Real Reporting On MH-17.
Looks like Mueller is not currently mentally capable of programming his microwave, never mind to be the primary author of his
eport or supervise the investigation.
Shouldn't James Comey and Rod Rosenstein be sitting there, its obvious to me that Mueller is the patsy here.
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller : What page are you referencing? I can't find it" ..."
"... Rep: "Sir, you have the report upsidedown" ..."
I agree wholeheartedly with Tucker Carlson...This whole stupid Russia hysteria propagated
by most of the media made me, an old timer liberal, agree with Tucker. Well played Democratic
Party... well played.
Tucker's question about what should happen to the people who attempted to reverse the will
of the American people? The answer is very straightforward. Those found guilty of sedition
and treason should by law hanged by the neck until dead. This might discourage further
efforts to undermine the will of the American people.
Looks like Mueller is not currently mentally capable of programming his microwave, never mind to be the primary author of his
eport or supervise the investigation.
Shouldn't James Comey and Rod Rosenstein be sitting there, its obvious to me that Mueller is the patsy here.
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller : What page are you referencing? I can't find it" ..."
"... Rep: "Sir, you have the report upsidedown" ..."
When Alex Stamos announced that the Internet Research Agency's ad buys were a drop in
the ocean, Zuckerberg was promptly taken to the Congressional Woodshed and told to report
to the Atlantic Council. Those two billion-odd fake accounts may be a fraud perpetrated on
the advertisers, but they are invaluable to US "law" enforcement and to US propaganda, where
the ability to open a fake account on Facebook gives the illusion of privacy.
With all due respect to Mr. Greenspan and his Lowell House creds, I think he fails to
understand that Facebook is now an NSA asset.
This is a fascinating article and it certainly put a smile on my dial. As an asset for use
by governments around the world, Facebook may be too invaluable to just let sink. One guy
reported that he was in a meeting with Facebook’s top brass including the Zuck when a
head honcho of the FBI came into the meeting and sang Zuck’s praises for all the help
that Facebook gave the FBI. So the question remains. Just how many “real” Facebook
accounts does Facebook have? Ones that people check on daily. Now that is the killer
question.
That would be like Archibald Cox saying he never heard of Watergate! Does Mueller have Alzheimer's? If he doesn't know that
much, what's the point of even talking to him?
Dems should have adjourned right then, to save further embarrassment.
I have three Facebook accounts. The two I never ever look at are the one for my cat and
the one for my feminine alter ego. My own account is used for only one thing, watching
"People You May Know" to see how far they've penetrated my graph; occasionally disturbing,
occasionally hilarious. I've never looked at my "wall", issued or accepted a friend request,
posted anything, messaged anyone but they have my email, and wow do I hate this company!
May 2018, a woman I loved and was ultimately going to get to move in died (age 70, natural
causes). Twice a week on average I get emails from Facebook inviting me to read her most
recent messages. You can imagine how I feel about that. SHE DED!
Facebook has boasted on the order of 2-3 billion users, a significant percentage of the
world's population, and I don't believe a word of it. One may assume that the early adopters
were people with more tech savvy, affluence and most important, leisure time to screw around
on the internet, and the proles don't have a lot of leisure time. Moreover, the value to the
advertiser of a set of eyeball impressions is directly related to the amount of disposable
income those eyeballs have, and sure, India has about one and a half billion people, but a
lot of them have zero disposable income and zero leisure time.
"Based on a combination of publicly available research and Plaintiffs' own analysis, among
18-34 years-olds in Chicago, for example, Facebook asserted its Potential Reach was
approximately 4 times (400%) higher than the number of real 18-34 year-olds with Facebook
accounts in Chicago. Based on a combination of publicly available research and Plaintiffs'
own analysis, Facebook's asserted Potential Reach in Kansas City was approximately 200%
higher than the number of actual 18-54 year-olds with Facebook accounts in Kansas City. This
inflation is apparent in other age categories as well."
"These foundational representations are false. Based on publicly available research and
Plaintiffs' own analysis, Facebook overstates the Potential Reach of its advertisements. For
example, based on publicly available data, Facebook's purported Potential Reach among the key
18-34 year-
22 old demographic in every state exceeds the actual population of 18-34 year-olds ."
"... Russiagate, the most extensive disinformation/propaganda campaign since Iraqi WMD, has fallen/is falling apart without any need to reference fake Facebook accounts. ..."
"... The Collusion narrative/conspiracy theory was preposterous from the get-go, riven with internal inconsistencies, and the recent Federal court ruling that prevents Mueller from continuing to publicly accuse Concord management of "undermining our democracy" (that's a hot one) discredits the second of the three bases of the narrative. ..."
Russiagate, the most extensive disinformation/propaganda campaign since Iraqi WMD, has
fallen/is falling apart without any need to reference fake Facebook accounts.
The Collusion narrative/conspiracy theory was preposterous from the get-go, riven with
internal inconsistencies, and the recent Federal court ruling that prevents Mueller from
continuing to publicly accuse Concord management of "undermining our democracy" (that's a hot
one) discredits the second of the three bases of the narrative.
Someday the McResistance TM and unhinged liberals possessed by magical thinking must grapple
with the fact that Trump was elected in America, by Americans, and that there is no Santa
Claus.
"... "Russia" with respect to Facebook was "Internet Research Agency," a Russian troll farm that ran a teeny number of ads in terms of both volume and dollar spend. A Federal judge ordered Muller to quit trying to depict its principals as connected to the Russian government because it was prejudicial to their case. No connection has ever been established nor is it it likely to be established. The ads were stunningly amateurish, all over the map in terms of messages, and apparently 25% were never viewed, and IIRC, over half ran after the election. ..."
Yep, those "Buff Bernie" and "Jesus Arm Wrestling With Satan" pages, often written in
broken English and most of which appeared after the election, really did the job, didn't
they?
In case you didn't notice, Mueller has been enjoined from making any more claims about
those Facebook pages as products of Russian state actors, since the accused unexpectedly
showed up in court and demanded discovery of evidence, which Saint Santa Claus Mueller was
unable to provide.
Give it up, already: Trumpismo must be defeated politically, through traditional and
creative political methods, and not via wishful thinking based on an opportunistic
convergence of interests among the Clinton/Obama/Donor Class wing of the Democratic Party,
factions in the National Security State that don't consider him an effective steward of
empire, and a corporate media that gave him billions in free media but now wants us to think
it opposes him.
Leslie Moonves of CBS' quote about how Trump was bad for America, but great for CBS
shareholders, says far more about Trump's victory than all the hair-on-fire reports about
Russia and Putin.
If there isn't some kind of reckoning for this disgraceful episode, which has only
inoculated Trump against reports of what he actually is doing, and is an inestimable
political gift to him, the Next Trump is going to make far more sinister use of it.
I look at the "Facebook threw the election to Trump" story as equivalent to blaming the
camel's back breaking last piece of straw for the camel's injury without observing that the
entire prior heavy straw loading made this possible.
The exposure of HRC's "deplorables" comment, or her "public positions vs private
positions" comment or her selection of Tim Kaine as VP or her Wall Street speeches could have
all been far more significant in her loss than any liked/forwarded Russian Facebook
postings.
I have never done Facebook, so perhaps I am completely in the dark as far as its influence
on potential voters.
How does one know that actual votes were flipped via a Facebook posting?
For example, if the Facebook forwarding content served only for confirmation bias, perhaps
a very small number of voter minds were changed, as the voters were already Trump
leaning.
That is a fundamental problem of any advertising/influence campaign, getting an ad
possibly viewed is one thing, knowing that it was influenial is very difficult.
How exactly did Mueller determine, with any confidence, that voters' minds were changed
via the Facebook platform?
If Mueller determined that these Facebook postings were truly influential in changing
would be HRC voters to Trump voters, he could have a new, very profitable, career in the
advertising industry.
I find it hard to believe social media had more of an effect than constant mainstream
media coverage and as far as I know noone has accused them of being influenced by Russians.
Can you show otherwise on either of those points?
Because if the negative influence of Putin whatever it may be is less than the negative
influence of selling ad revenue on t.v. well then the problem is capitalism not Russian
oligarchy destroying democracy.
"Russia" with respect to Facebook was "Internet Research Agency," a Russian troll farm
that ran a teeny number of ads in terms of both volume and dollar spend. A Federal judge
ordered Muller to quit trying to depict its principals as connected to the Russian government
because it was prejudicial to their case. No connection has ever been established nor is it
it likely to be established. The ads were stunningly amateurish, all over the map in terms of
messages, and apparently 25% were never viewed, and IIRC, over half ran after the
election.
"... Imagine you are a horny 15 year old boy and you have been promised sex with an incredible Hollywood talent. Driven by surging hormones your anticipation and excitement are off the scale. You are taken to the place where the tryst will happen. And you open the door. Waiting of you is Barney Fife. ..."
Imagine you are a horny 15 year old boy and you have been promised sex with an incredible Hollywood talent. Driven by surging
hormones your anticipation and excitement are off the scale. You are taken to the place where the tryst will happen. And you open
the door. Waiting of you is Barney Fife.
That sort of sums up what is likely to happen tomorrow when Robert Mueller testifies before the House Judiciary and the House
Intelligence committees. I have shut off almost all cable news. I cannot stomach the relentless hype about tomorrow's supposed "big
day."
Hmmm, given how the legacy media has managed to completely misinterpret what Mueller's Report actually says, imagine what a field
day they will have interpreting "nothing" to mean something. Now, I wonder what that something might be...?
"The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist
class. Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it
serves it.
I know nothing that I may say can influence you. You have no souls to be influenced. You are
spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no
Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party.
There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House. You are lick-spittlers and panderers,
the creatures of the Plutocracy.
You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you
wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel."
"... Former FBI Director James Comey has been under investigation for misleading President Trump - telling him in private that he wasn't the target of an ongoing FBI probe, while refusing to admit to this in public. ..."
"... Comey was essentially "running a covert operation" against Trump - which began with a private "defensive briefing" shortly after the inauguration. RCI 's sources say that Horowitz has pored over text messages between the FBI's former top-brass and other communications suggesting that Comey was in fact conducting a "counterintelligence assessment" of the president during their January 2017 meeting in New York. ..."
"... What's more, the FBI couldn't treat Trump as a suspect - formally, as they didn't have the legal grounds to do so according to former FBI counterintelligence lawyer Mark Wauck. " They had no probable cause against Trump himself for 'collusion' or espionage ," he said, adding "They were scrambling to come up with anything to hang a hat on, but had found nothing." ..."
"... According to House Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), Comey and the rest of the FBI's top team (including Peter Strzok and Lisa Page) were attempting to "stop" Trump's presidency for political reasons. ..."
"... "You have the culmination of the ultimate spying, where you have the FBI director spying on the president, taking notes [and] illegally leaking those notes of classified information" to the MSM, said Nunes in a recent interview. ..."
"... Comey is just the political class operative who they brought in to save Scooter Libby's butt in the Valerie Flame leak. Then he got a seven figure job as a reward at a hedge fund (with no prior experience in the financial industry). Then, they took him off the bench to be FBI director. ..."
"... The larger problem is that the "five eyes" system is broken in favor of British surveillance and interference in our elections, and, the Patriot Act practice of "masking" is a complete violation of the fourth amendment and a fraud. From a fourth amendment analysis, it's like letting the police search everyone's house every day as long as they don't look at the name on the address. ..."
"... This investigation would explain why Comey, Brennan, and other members of Barry Obama's regime are very quiet, while Congressional Democrats are freaking out. ..."
"... Does the DOJ investigate British agents? Serious question. ..."
Former FBI Director James Comey has been under investigation for misleading President
Trump - telling him in private that he wasn't the target of an ongoing FBI probe, while
refusing to admit to this in public.
According to
RealClearInvestigations ' Paul Sperry, "Justice Department Inspector General Michael
Horowitz will file a report in September which contains evidence that Comey was misleading the
president " while conducting an active investigation against him.
Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was
secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an
investigative agent . -
RCI
According to two US officials familiar with Horowitz's upcoming report on FBI misconduct,
Comey was essentially "running a covert operation" against Trump - which began with a
private "defensive briefing" shortly after the inauguration. RCI 's sources say that Horowitz
has pored over text messages between the FBI's former top-brass and other communications
suggesting that Comey was in fact conducting a "counterintelligence assessment" of the
president during their January 2017 meeting in New York.
What's more, Comey had an FBI agent in the White House who reported the activities of Trump
and his aides, according to 'other officials familiar with the matter.'
The agent, Anthony Ferrante, who specialized in cyber crime, left the White House around
the same time Comey was fired and soon joined a security consulting firm, where he contracted
with BuzzFeed to lead the news site's efforts to verify the Steele dossier, in connection
with a defamation lawsuit. -RCI
According to the report, Horowitz and his team have examined over 1 million documents and
conducted over 100 interviews - including sit-downs with Comey and other current and former FBI
and DOJ employees. "The period covering Comey's activities is believed to run from early
January 2017 to early May 2017, when Comey was fired and his deputy Andrew McCabe, as the
acting FBI director, formally
opened full counterintelligence and obstruction investigations of the president."
McCabe's deputy, Lisa Page, appeared to dissemble last year when asked in closed-door
testimony before the House Judiciary Committee if Comey and other FBI brass discussed opening
an obstruction case against Trump prior to his firing in May 2017. Initially, she flatly
denied it , swearing: "Obstruction of justice was not a topic of conversation during the time
frame you have described." But then, after conferring with her FBI-assigned lawyer, she
announced: " I need to take back my prior statement ." Page later conceded that there could
have been at least "discussions about potential criminal activity" involving the president .
-RCI
Comey coordination
Sperry notes that Comey wasn't working in isolation on the Trump effort. In particular,
Horowitz has looked at the January 6, 2017 briefing on the infamous 'Steele Dossier' - a
meeting which was used by BuzzFeed, CNN and others to legitimize reporting on the dossier's
salacious and unsubstantiated claims .
Comey's meeting with Trump took place one day after the FBI director met in the Oval
Office with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to discuss how to brief Trump -- a
meeting attended by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh
Johnson, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and National Intelligence Director James
Clapper, who would soon go to work for CNN. -RCI
While Comey claims in his book, "A Higher Loyalty" that he didn't have "a
counterintelligence case file open on [Trump]," former federal prosecutor and National Review
columnist Andrew McCarthy notes that just because Trump's name wasn't on a formal file or
surveillance warrant doesn't mean that he wasn't under investigation.
"They were hoping to surveil him incidentally, and they were trying to make a case on him,"
said McCarthy. " The real reason Comey did not want to repeat publicly the assurances he made
to Trump privately is that these assurances were misleading . The FBI strung Trump along,
telling him he was not a suspect while structuring the investigation in accordance with the
reality that Trump was the main subject ."
What's more, the FBI couldn't treat Trump as a suspect - formally, as they didn't have
the legal grounds to do so according to former FBI counterintelligence lawyer Mark Wauck. "
They had no probable cause against Trump himself for 'collusion' or espionage ," he said,
adding "They were scrambling to come up with anything to hang a hat on, but had found
nothing."
What remains unclear is why Comey would take such extraordinary steps against a sitting
president . The Mueller report concluded there was no basis for the Trump-Russia collusion
conspiracy theories. Comey himself was an early skeptic of the Steele dossier -- the
opposition research memos paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign that were the road map of
collusion theories -- which he dismissed as "salacious and unverified." -RCI
According to House Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), Comey and
the rest of the FBI's top team (including Peter Strzok and Lisa Page) were attempting to "stop"
Trump's presidency for political reasons.
"You have the culmination of the ultimate spying, where you have the FBI director spying
on the president, taking notes [and] illegally leaking those notes of classified information"
to the MSM, said Nunes in a recent interview.
They will whitewash Comey. The deep state is alive and well, the DoJ and the FBI are as
corrupt as they were the day before Trump took office.
Why do I say this? Well, the canary hasn't fallen off her perch yet. Hillary Clinton is
still singing her song, and even making noises like she's going to run again, and she's not
in prison. They have her solid on over a hundred felony counts of mishandling classified
documents and they've not touched her. Proof of life that the Deep State is still in
power.
So, was the Steele dossier the ex post facto excuse for illegally spying on Trump, or was
it the ex post facto diversion for ALL of Obama's spying on politically powerful people,
which we know included spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, spying on reporters, and
spying on Trump. I'll bet Obama hopes the investigation doesn't get into all of his spying
activities, and I wouldn't be surprised government officials in charge of the spying
equipment are keeping it covered up because they don't want to lose their jobs (for either
allowing such to happen, or because they fear the spying apparatus will be eliminated).
Did Obama also spy on SCOTUS justices, Congressmen, other Senators and other rich and
powerful people? I'll bet he did, because we haven't seen all the unmasking documentation,
and Obama took it to his library so no one can see it (at least so he thinks). Further, look
at the way Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Rice are disparaging Trump (they protest too much).
And look at how all the allegations about Trump are blowing right back into the faces of the
Democrats who've shown their MO is to accuse their political opponents, of the illegal
activity in which the Democrats are engaged.
They need to go to jail, for a long time, if not be executed for treason.
Did Obama spy on SCOTUS justices, et al? - Yes. Look up project HAMR or "Hammer". MI5/6
was spying on all Americans comms to circumvent legal frameworks (5 eyes). Google is now
fully Chinese intelligence - TREASON. It's coming and it's gonna blow most people's
minds.
It started a very long time ago. 1913 was a notable date, so was JFK's assassination. So
was 9/11. So was Operation Paperclip. These monsters have been slithering around a while. Now
it's time for them to go bye-bye. Dark to Light. Execute.
Comey is just the political class operative who they brought in to save Scooter
Libby's butt in the Valerie Flame leak. Then he got a seven figure job as a reward at a hedge
fund (with no prior experience in the financial industry). Then, they took him off the bench
to be FBI director.
The larger problem is that the "five eyes" system is broken in favor of British
surveillance and interference in our elections, and, the Patriot Act practice of "masking" is
a complete violation of the fourth amendment and a fraud. From a fourth amendment analysis,
it's like letting the police search everyone's house every day as long as they don't look at
the name on the address.
That our broken secrecy system effectively legalized Watergate under Obama and the "five
eyes" is the real problem that needs fixing.
This investigation would explain why Comey, Brennan, and other members of Barry Obama's
regime are very quiet, while Congressional Democrats are freaking out. The end of the Deep
State is starting.
"... A couple of weeks ago, The Times of London published an article about senior civil servants fearing U.K. opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn was "too frail" to be prime minister. Reportedly they also thought he "lacks both a firm grasp of foreign affairs and the domestic agenda. ..."
"... This is the same civil service that is supposed to maintain complete neutrality and according to its code "must not act in a way that unjustifiably favours or discriminates against particular individuals or interests." ..."
"... Corbyn fought back, arguing that it was unacceptable that civil servants were briefing newspapers on an elected politician. He demanded an independent inquiry into who was spreading such fabrications in the press and "compromising the integrity of the civil service." ..."
"... Miller, who runs the Bristol-based Organisation for Propaganda Studies, said the scheme was found to be spreading its own disinformation and openly criticizing opposition leader Corbyn and his party. ..."
"... Miller said this was clear from the very beginning of the Integrity Initiative when it was regularly engaged in tweeting or retweeting attacks on Corbyn and his closest advisors. ..."
"... Miller calls the use of taxpayers' money to interfere in domestic politics an affront to democracy. ..."
"... Chris Williamson, a Labour MP and Corbyn supporter who was trying to investigate the Integrity Initiative, found himself suspended from the party after he was targeted with allegations of anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Corbyn's call for an independent investigation into the civil service leak to the press has also, as expected, been rejected by the government. ..."
"... If you enjoyed this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
"... Jews in Europe and the US have gone from being heavily discriminated against to having much more influence on government than their numbers warrant. I'm going to tell the Netanyahu joke to make my point. Don't know who to credit. Kudos anyway. "It is not anti-Semitic to disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu as he is as white as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan." ..."
"... If the Integrity Initiative really is shut down, the little Simon Bracey-Lane will be free to cross the pond and campaign for Bernie just like he did in 2015 / 2016. Nah, just kiddin', his cover is blown. But seriously, campaign managers for Tulsi Gabbard best be on guard against inflation from these snakes. ..."
"... This is a joke right. You say communist and you reference China, but in the last century it was ok to ship nearly the entire industrial base of Western Democracies to China so that a bunch of fat cat tycoons, investment bankers, hedge funders et al could become so rich they finally had enough money to purchase the U.S. Government, and it looks like the government of Britain too. ..."
"... This incessant accusation of antisemitism against anyone who supports justice for Palestinians does seem to be effective. A decade ago when I first noticed this smear tactic I assumed it would be self defeating on the part of the Zionists and their backers. It sort of seemed obvious that such a tactic would be self limiting with the broader world beginning to reject such slander. However, it seems the smear is more effective today than it was ten years ago. So depressing. Watching Corbyn's supporters ripping apart his own base in the Labour Party in an effort to appease the Israelis is appalling -- it seems the more that is conceded the more aggressive the Zionist become. Ten years ago it was proper to describe the West Bank as "occupied territory", soon it will be considered antisemitic to even go that far. ..."
"... in 2015, an unnamed, serving British general was quoted saying that if a Corbyn government implemented his well-established anti-imperial and anti-nuke agenda, "there would be mass resignations at all levels [of the military] and you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-army-could-stage-mutiny-under-corbyn-says-senior-serving-general-10509742.html ..."
"... As Mayhew noted, 'the turning point' was the speech of George Marshall the US Secretary of State in June 1947. From 'the middle of 1947 onwards, decisions were taken towards uniting the free world, at the expense of widening the gap with the Communist world our immediate objective changed, from "one world" to "one free world"'. ..."
"... . That is what all of this is about: this is all a campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to keep expandable, pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt slavery. ..."
The 'Unconstitutional Animus' Against UK Labour Leader July 16, 2019 •
39 Comments
Johanna Ross spoke with David Miller, a propaganda researcher, after the recent publicity of
U.K. civil service murmurings about Jeremy Corbyn's "fitness."
By Johanna
Ross
in Edinburgh, Scotland Special to Consortium News
A couple of weeks ago, The Times of London published an
article about senior civil servants fearing U.K. opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn was "too
frail" to be prime minister. Reportedly they also thought he "lacks both a firm grasp of
foreign affairs and the domestic agenda."
This is the same civil service that is supposed to maintain complete neutrality and
according to its code "must not act in a way that
unjustifiably favours or discriminates against particular individuals or interests."
Corbyn fought back, arguing that it was unacceptable that civil servants were briefing
newspapers on an elected politician. He demanded an independent inquiry into who was spreading
such fabrications in the press and "compromising the integrity of the civil service."
Controversial BBC graphic seeking to link Corbyn to Russia.
For David Miller, a professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, who
investigates concentrations
of power and ways to hold them accountable, the idea that the British civil service may not be
impartial in its operations is hardly surprising.
Far from ever being objective, he told Consortium News that the civil service now
clearly has "an unconstitutional animus against a potential Corbyn government and has been
briefing against it one way or another through various agencies for some time now."
Catalog of Smears
Indeed, the anti-Corbyn bias within the establishment has been obvious in the catalog of
smears on Corbyn and his team since he came to the Labour leadership; from allegations of being
a "Soviet sleeper" to being "anti-Semitic" and now to questions about his overall fitness.
David Miller: Faction fight against Corbyn. (University of Bristol)
Miller said most of the allegations were created by a number of organisations and
individuals who are "involved in a faction fight with the Corbyn leadership."
Noam Chomsky, a leading U.S. social critic, is among those who have spoken out against what
he termed a "witch hunt" against the Labour leader and his supporters.
Whether or not anti-Semitism exists in the party, Miller said the accusations are out of
hand. "Almost everyone who says anything which is either critical of Israel or critical of the
party's response to the anti-Semitism crisis is denounced as an anti-Semite," Miller said. "The
question is how long will it be before everyone sees that the people who are involved in this
have overreached themselves."
Attempts to undermine potential socialist governments are of course, not new.
Miller gives the example of the Zinoviev case – when a fake letter was published in
the Daily Mail in 1924 just prior to the general election, suggesting Communists in
Britain were taking orders from Moscow. The goal was clearly to undermine the British Labour
movement.
Miller also points to the case of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson. "Despite what may now
be said by some elements of the security state," Miller said that British agencies were engaged
in an active plot to
undermine Wilson's elected government.
As another example, Miller offered the "Information Research Department," first proposed in
1947 and sold to the cabinet as a bipartisan, anti-Communist and anti-American propaganda
operation. In fact, Miller described it as a "secret, covert, anti-Communist propaganda
operation which in the 70s was engaged in undermining the Wilson government."
Today, Miller said, similar agencies in the U.K. government are doing the same thing.
Harold Wilson in 1986. (Allan Warren, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Integrity Initiative
As an example, Miller cites the Integrity Initiative; organized by the government's
Institute for Statecraft, which has a stated mission of countering "Russian disinformation and
malign influence by harnessing existing expertise and establishing a network of experts,
opinion formers and policy makers to educate national audiences in the threat and to help build
national capacities to counter it." Its website is incidentally now empty pending an
investigation into the "theft of its data" – after a hack exposed detail of the extent to
which the government-funded program was itself engaged in disinformation.
Miller, who runs the Bristol-based Organisation for Propaganda Studies, said the scheme was
found to be spreading its own disinformation and openly criticizing opposition leader Corbyn
and his party.
"Corbyn has recently said in relation to the most recent criticism from the civil service
that there are people in the establishment that are trying to undermine Corbyn, his office, his
advisors and supporters of him," Miller said. "And that's what the Integrity Initiative was
doing."
Cartoon published by Punch after the Zinoviev letter was released, depicting a Bolshevik
campaigning for Ramsay MacDonald, head of the short-lived Labour government of 1924. (Wikimedia
Commons)
Miller said this was clear from the very beginning of the Integrity Initiative when it was
regularly engaged in tweeting or retweeting attacks on Corbyn and his closest advisors.
Miller calls the use of taxpayers' money to interfere in domestic politics an affront to
democracy.
"A government-funded project was engaged in attacking the leader of the opposition," Miller
said, "which is unconstitutional and something the U.K. civil service should not be involved in
they crossed the line when they started attacking Corbyn. And when we look back on this period,
the Integrity Initiative, its funding by the Foreign Office and its base in British military
intelligence will be one of the strands of the activities which will be seen to have been a
secret state campaign against the elected leader of the Labour party."
Miller would like to see an investigation into the attacks on Corbyn and whether they had
been effectively funded by the Foreign Office, but doesn't hold out much hope of that
happening.
Six months ago, Shadow Home Secretary Emily Thornberry demanded answers to how this could
have happened, with no result.
And Chris Williamson, a Labour MP and Corbyn supporter who was trying to investigate the Integrity
Initiative, found himself suspended from the party after he was targeted with allegations of
anti-Semitism.
Corbyn's call for an independent investigation into the civil service leak to the press has
also, as expected, been rejected by the government.
Johanna Ross is a freelance journalist based in the United Kingdom.
If you enjoyed this original article, please consider
making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
Michael McNulty , July 18, 2019 at 05:52
After he won the second round to remain Labour Party leader Corbyn should have left the
party to form a new socialist party, taking his large following and their subscriptions with
him. He would have had three years behind him with a new movement, one which would not have
had the back-stabbers and poisoners he's having to deal with daily. It would have been quite
established now and a real political force. I think the Labour Party is so polluted that the
left must break away; it's the only way we can overturn the excesses and failures of
neo-liberalism which for most people is a truly dreadful system.
Maz Palmer , July 17, 2019 at 15:02
They are all much worse than bozos (or Bezos); they are all plutocrats, oligarchs,
neo-liberal neo-fascist capitalists. That is what all of this is about: this is all a
campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to keep expandable,
pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt
slavery.
Hopelb , July 17, 2019 at 21:52
Upvote!
Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 14:55
"lacks both a firm grasp of foreign affairs and the domestic agenda."
It makes me wonder how Teresa May and her Cabinet, including the next PM, fares in such
assessment. Nincompoops, loud mouths, poodles, and worshipers of woodoo economics.
I get it. Corbyn is Pro-Palestinian, anti-war and Pro-Worker so they are trying to get rid
of him.
All I see are articles attacking him. Are there people/forces behind him supporting him?
Is his support significant among other Labour MP's and the Public at large?
Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 16:11
The problem is that UK public opinion is quite chaotic at this point and "everything is
possible". At some point, four parties had roughly the same poll numbers: Tories, Brexit,
Labour and LibDems. However, in the last two weeks Labour and Tories gained with Labour
ahead. In a system with single seat districts, "anything can happen", and a recent
by-election suggested that Labour may have an advantage in "foot soldiers", volunteers who
walk around a district chatting up voters. The internal fights in Labour attracted many new
members, and from the point of view of "sensible folks in the Establishment", this is the
worst type of rubble. No respect for monarchy, the Trident, necessity of low taxes on
business and the rich and so on. And anti-Semitic to boot.
So the meaning of "Corbyn is frail" is that while he himself seems mild mannered, his
victory will unleashed the unwashed hordes wrecking everything which is good and he hold
dear, like the monarchy, the Trident and so on.
Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 16:45
The problem is that UK public opinion is quite chaotic lately and "everything is
possible". At some point, four parties had roughly the same poll numbers: Tories, Brexit,
Labour and LibDems. However, in the last two weeks Labour and Tories gained with Labour
ahead. In a system with single seat districts, "anything can happen", and a recent
by-election suggested that Labour may have an advantage in "foot soldiers", volunteers who
walk around a district chatting up voters. The internal fights in Labour attracted many new
members, and from the point of view of "sensible folks in the Establishment", this is the
worst type of rabble. No respect for the monarchy, the Trident, the necessity of low taxes on
business and the rich and so on. And anti-Semitic to boot.
So the meaning of "Corbyn is frail" is that while he himself seems mild mannered, his
victory would unleashed unwashed hordes wrecking everything which is good and that we hold
dear, like the monarchy, the Trident and so on.
Jeff Ewener , July 17, 2019 at 13:26
Gob-smacking. To call a man with the intelligence, experience, sensitivity & integrity
of Jeremy Corbyn "unfit" to be the British Prime Minister, while a monstrosity like Boris
Johnson is standing on the doorstep of Number 10 – just takes the breath away.
rosemerry , July 17, 2019 at 15:45
Not to mention the former "New Labour" leaders whose policies fell far away from the
traditional policies Corbyn has held to and which caused so many Britons to support him as
leader.
Hayman Fan , July 18, 2019 at 11:49
Integrity? Are you joking? Corbyn has been anti-EU for 40 years. In fact, he is the only
main party leader who voted leave in the last people's vote (aka the referendum). But he has
tried to hid that fact. He has been sitting on the fence and playing politics with the issue.
Many fools in Britain believe Corbyn is a remainer. A man of integrity would have explained
to the British people his long held position on the EU and Brexit. But he didn't do that
because he isn't a man of integrity. He wants to con his way into power and if he gets there
(looking unlikely right now), he and his Stalinist henchpeople will wield that power
ruthlessly.
Fascinating article. May we repost it on jvl.org.uk?
Eddie , July 17, 2019 at 12:36
Comment that I posted on the Malware article do not post.
Zenobia van Dongen , July 17, 2019 at 11:39
In English-speaking countries anti-Semitic is just a code word for pro-Islamic. Miller
himself is deeply involved in efforts to make extremist Islam respectable and justifying
terrorist indoctrination.
Okay, I'll take your comment as made in good faith but you will need to back it up with
good evidence. Where is it?
Qui? , July 18, 2019 at 03:22
Palestinians are semites, as the rest of the Arabs. So who is the real antisemite now?
Truth first , July 17, 2019 at 11:37
A "communist" who is against war, nukes and massive inequality is OK by me.
Hayman Fan , July 18, 2019 at 07:28
Is it indeed. Then your are a fool. Pol Pot was a communist who was against war and nukes
and massive inequality. But implementing totalitarism by force didn't turn out well for the
Cambodian people. And it wouldn't turn out well for the British people either. Except for
Corbyn and his henchpeople of course.
dean 1000 , July 17, 2019 at 10:42
Jews in Europe and the US have gone from being heavily discriminated against to having
much more influence on government than their numbers warrant. I'm going to tell the Netanyahu joke to make my point. Don't know who to credit. Kudos
anyway. "It is not anti-Semitic to disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu as he is as white as the Grand
Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan."
Given the influence of US and European Jews it is well past time for them to stop
screaming anti-semitism when someone has a divergent opinion. They should stop using Semitic
people as human shields.
The left also likes to hurl anti-Semitism at political opponents when they don't have a
relevant answer.
Unfounded criticism of Jews is anti-Jewish rather than anti-Semitic. Call it what it
is.
As Albert Einstein says Capitalism is an Evil supported by those who are terrified of
Jeremy Corbyn because like Jesus he is a true Socialist
Que Nelle , July 17, 2019 at 05:52
To be accused of antisemitism by zionists that champion the racist entity israel, is a
badge of honor.
Vivian O'Blivion , July 17, 2019 at 03:30
If the Integrity Initiative really is shut down, the little Simon Bracey-Lane will be free
to cross the pond and campaign for Bernie just like he did in 2015 / 2016. Nah, just kiddin',
his cover is blown. But seriously, campaign managers for Tulsi Gabbard best be on guard
against inflation from these snakes.
Hayman Fan , July 17, 2019 at 02:51
Guys be careful with this. Corbyn is a communist. He is surrounded by Stalinists. Their
modus operandi is entryism + free stuff + perpetual attacks on cultural norms. They used to
laud the USSR. Then Venezuala. Now China. If they ever manage to grab power, they will stamp
on individual liberty. Just like China does. The Muslim vote is very important to them and
whilst they despise conventional religions, they will happily 'buy' Muslim votes with anti
Israeli and anti Semitic rhetoric. The loudest voices speaking up against Corbyn and his
henchpeople are on the left. Be a little bit circumspect.
Truth first , July 17, 2019 at 11:36
A "communist" who is against war, nukes and massive inequality is OK by me.
Errr what ? Israel does enough on its own to show how anti-Arab and undemocratic it is
without the need for Jeremy Corbyn to add anything. I'm a socialist. I support what Mr Corbyn
is doing to promote socialism in the UK. There's not the slightest evidence he's an
anti-Semite, and the tiny amount of anti-Semitism in the Labour party is dwarfed by what's
emanating from the right against Jews and Muslims.
Just say no , July 17, 2019 at 13:58
This is a joke right. You say communist and you reference China, but in the last century
it was ok to ship nearly the entire industrial base of Western Democracies to China so that a
bunch of fat cat tycoons, investment bankers, hedge funders et al could become so rich they
finally had enough money to purchase the U.S. Government, and it looks like the government of
Britain too. That's where we are today.
There may be "communists" lurking somewhere mostly in
the imagination who are trotted out whenever a left person obtains a plurality. What has
happened to Jeremy Corbyn is horrifying and we have our own issues in the U.S. with the
endless smears and lies regarding the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. We live in a world of
fabrication, sanctions enough to go around for everyone. Even the little state of RI is
sanctioned by Moody's for having the effrontery to pass a bill which "gives too much away to
labor" but Moody's and the other ratings agencies gave triple AAA ratings to junk during the
"great recession" plain and simple, and no one cared. We need a Nuremburg trial for
Capitalism and all its practioners.
You are wrong is several ways. First, "There may be "communists" lurking somewhere mostly
in the imagination who are trotted out whenever a left person obtains a plurality." Corbyn
was observed to be a threat the moment he was elected Labour leader, something that stumped
large segments of "informed public". Due to the surprise element, the anti-Semitic angle was
not exploited properly, with possible exception of some Zionist whack jobs who harranged him.
Instead, two points were raised that really jolted my attention.
First, Corbyn was sooo
extreme that he advocated discontinuation of Trident program and even, horror!, the entirety
of British nuclear arms program. You could as well raise huge signs ?????? ?y???? ???????! on
English shores.
Second, his bicycling habits were compared to China during the orthodox
Communist year, when riding on non-descript bikes was heavily supported by pre-Capitalist
leadership.
Mind you, a person of note may ride a bike without shame, but not the cheap and
aged specimen favored by Corbyn. Finally, compromising photos were found showing Corbyn
relaxing and revealing his red socks.
Sounds like you just couldn't stand not posting a troll comment on an article about your
own activities, yes?
ToivoS , July 16, 2019 at 22:54
This incessant accusation of antisemitism against anyone who supports justice for
Palestinians does seem to be effective. A decade ago when I first noticed this smear tactic I
assumed it would be self defeating on the part of the Zionists and their backers. It sort of
seemed obvious that such a tactic would be self limiting with the broader world beginning to
reject such slander. However, it seems the smear is more effective today than it was ten
years ago. So depressing. Watching Corbyn's supporters ripping apart his own base in the
Labour Party in an effort to appease the Israelis is appalling -- it seems the more that is
conceded the more aggressive the Zionist become. Ten years ago it was proper to describe the
West Bank as "occupied territory", soon it will be considered antisemitic to even go that
far.
" the 'Information Research Department,' first proposed in 1947 and sold to the cabinet as
a bipartisan, anti-Communist and anti-American propaganda operation."
"Anti-American" is a slip, right? I assume it was pro-American (or pro-USAian).
My apologies, I was paraphrasing the work of Lyn Smith in her article on IRD in Millennium
in 1980. It should really be 'anti capitalist'. According Smith the founder of IRD (Christopher
Mayhew) put forward a plan to set up a cold war propaganda agency:
'Mayhew put forward his ideas: the campaign should be as positive as possible laying
stress on the merits of Social Democracy but, he pointed out "we shouldn't appear as
defenders of the status quo but should attack Capitalism and Imperialism along with Russian
Communism" In fact at this early stage, the idea was more of a "third force" propaganda
attacking Capitalism as well as communism (this, however, was not to last for, as later
documents reveal, anti Communism soon cam to the fore).'(Covert British Propaganda: The
Information Research Department: 1947-77, Millennium, 9(1), p68-9)
In fact the idea that it would be anti capitalist was a ruse used by Mayhew to deceive the
left members of the British cabinet. As my colleague and I Will Dinan summarised in our book
A Century of Spin (Pluto Press, 2008, p130-1):
IRD was not created with the knowing support of the Labour Cabinet. The author of the
paper which went to the cabinet –
Christoper Mayhew – was a Labour right winger and cold warrior. He dissembled to the
cabinet about the purpose and function of the IRD by claiming that it was to be a 'Third
Force' campaign, understood as policy intended by the left to be independent of both the US
and the USSR. According to Mayhew himself:
I thought it was necessary to present the whole campaign in a positive way, in a way which
Dick Crossman and Michael Foot would fi nd it hard to oppose. And they were calling for a
Third Force so I recommended in the original paper I put to Bevin that we call it a Third
Force propaganda campaign.
As Mayhew noted, 'the turning point' was the speech of George Marshall the US Secretary of
State in June 1947. From 'the middle of
1947 onwards, decisions were taken towards uniting the free world, at the expense of widening
the gap with the Communist world our immediate objective changed, from "one world" to "one
free world"'.
It is interesting, in this light, to reflect what might/will happen once a Corbyn
government is elected with – how should we put this – a minority of leftists in
the cabinet.
David G , July 17, 2019 at 15:27
Very interesting! I guess the propagandists back then had a little more finesse than the
idiotic bludgeoning the US/UK establishment is laying on us these days. Thanks for the clarification, David Miller!
Jeff Harrison , July 16, 2019 at 21:05
The British Political Class has the same problem as the American Political Class –
No integrity, No Honesty, No ethics. Just the sort of bozos we need running countries.
Maz Palmer , July 17, 2019 at 14:59
They are all much worse than bozos (or Bezos); they are all plutocrats, oligarchs, neo-liberal neo-fascist capitalists.
That is what all of this is about: this is all a campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to
keep expandable, pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt slavery.
"... Moreover, if, as the memorandum asserted, 'British officials' were also aware that the 'most reliable intelligence' exonerated the Syrian government, rather fundamental questions arose as to how the JIC had felt able to claim precisely the reverse in support of David Cameron's unsuccessful attempt on 29 August to win Commons' support for British participation in air strikes. ..."
"... At the time, the Director General, Defence and Intelligence at the FCO was one Robert Hannigan, who in April 2014 would be appointed as Director of GCHQ. The National Security Adviser was a certain Sir Kim Darroch, whose appointment as Ambassador to the U.S. would be announced in August 2015. Both have been in the news, in relation to 'Russiagate.' ..."
"... Obviously, the same question arises about both of them as about Brennan: are they 'Gleiwitz types', who were actively complicit in preparing a murderous 'false flag', or were they simply part of a rather stupid Anglo-American 'dog', whom the 'tail', in the shape of the jihadists and their Turkish, Saudi and Qatari backers, could 'wag', as they chose? ..."
"... From the articles which Seymour Hersh published in the 'London Review of Books', and other materials, it became evident that the Defense Intelligence Agency, then headed by General Flynn, had been aware of the likelihood of fresh 'false flags' -- after the small scale incidents in spring 2013. ..."
"... An argument that 'Sundance' has repeatedly made is that a lot of what was happening in mid-2016, including the dossier attributed to Steele, had to do with the need to find justifications for these questionable surveillance operations. ..."
"... While I think there is something in this, I have long thought that the discovery that a mass of material exfiltrated from the DNC, and was going to be published by 'WikiLeaks', and the subsequent murder of Seth Rich, are likely to have been critically important triggers. ..."
"... panic-stricken improvisation found alike in the dossier, and the claims about the 'digital forensics' made by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'CrowdStrike', and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait. ..."
"... A week later, Butowsky filed a new action, in which the suggestion of a very-wide ranging conspiracy to suppress the truth about both the DNC leaks and Rich's murder was turned into a catalogue of defamation claims against a long list of people, including, as well as a variety of lawyers involved, CNN, the'Nw York Times', Vox, and the DNC. ..."
"... 'That Seth Rich was wacked because he stole the DNC emails and transferred them to Wikileaks is a conspiracy theory. It is possible and even plausible, but there is no evidence to confirm it. Many people seem to believe it because it makes more sense than the competing conspiracy theory, that Russia hacked the DNC and handed the emails to Wikileaks. Isikoff's claim, that Russia planted the Rich conspiracy theory, has no sound base. That theory existed before anything "Russian" mentioned it.' ..."
"... Reading the full text of Ms. Craven's report, I can see quite how well justified was Larry's suggestion in his post that Folkenflik and NPR were on a very sticky wicket indeed (as we say in England.) ..."
"... However, 'fools rush in', as the saying goes, so Isikoff decided to conspire with Deborah Sines, apparently the former U.S. assistant attorney in charge of investigating Seth Rich's murder, to suggest that suggestions that the victim had been the source of the material from the DNC published by 'WikiLeaks' originated as just another Russian plot. ..."
"... It appears that prior to the publication of his 'report', Isikoff talked to Butowsky, who in his efforts to dissuade him explained that his involvement in the whole affair began when Ellen Ratner, a news analyst with Fox, and sister of the late Michael Ratner, who had been an attorney for Assange, contacted him in Fall 2016 about a meeting she had with her that figure. ..."
"... And then, not particularly surprisingly, Butowsky and Clevenger abandoned their inhibitions about identifying Ellen Ratner as a source, and filled in a lot of 'blanks' in their 'narrative' about how Seth Rich lived and died. ..."
"... Among the many problems for Brennan and his co-conspirators -- among whom, on the British side, Hannigan and Darroch, and also Sedwill, are very important -- one relates to the way that the capabilities of 'scientific forensics', in all kinds of areas, have increased by leaps and bounds in recent years. ..."
"... This has meant that they have had little option but to corrupt the processes of investigation. The ludicrous claims by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait, which nobody but a fool -- congenital 'useful idiot' one might say -- or a knave would dare to defend in public, are only one of many cases in point. ..."
One does not like to admit to having been one of John Brennan's 'useful idiots' -- I had
thought I could see through any of the 'active measures' which he and his co-conspirators, on
both sides of the Atlantic, could dream up. But I had swallowed whole the notion that Michael
Flynn had been stupid enough knowingly to get involved in Erdoğan's feud with
Gülen.
In fairness, however, I do think that when dealing with spiders like the former head of
the CIA, a prudent fly needs to be sure he, or she, gets competent legal advice at the
outset.
It may perhaps be interesting to put your account together with a post by 'Sundance' on
the 'Conservative Treehouse' site on 14 July, headlined 'Devin Nunes Discusses Upcoming
Mueller Testimony '
This takes up the issue, on which its author has commented extensively, of illegitimate
access by contractors to the databases of NSA intercepts -- an issue which is clearly bound
up with that of the use of such material to create the 'web' in which Flynn found himself
hopelessly entangled.
The post by 'Sundance' suggests, just as you do, that the driving force behind what has
happened was actually John Brennan. The April 2017 ruling by FISA Court Presiding Judge
Rosemary Collyer does not definitely establish that the illegitimate access of contractors
started in 2012, but it definitely strongly suggests that it did.
Reading the 6 September 'Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity' memorandum to
Obama, entitled 'Is Syria a Trap?', whose signatories included both you and Colonel Lang, it
seemed overwhelmingly likely to some of us who were familiar with both your writings that
Brennan had to have been involved in a conspiracy with the Turks, Saudis, and Qataris.
One relevant question related to whether the role of the Americans involved in this
conspiracy was simply 'ex post facto' exploitation of the patent 'false flag' sarin atrocity
at Ghouta the previous 21 August to attempt to inveigle the United States into toppling
Assad, or whether there was 'ex ante' complicity.
Moreover, if, as the memorandum asserted, 'British officials' were also aware that the
'most reliable intelligence' exonerated the Syrian government, rather fundamental questions
arose as to how the JIC had felt able to claim precisely the reverse in support of David
Cameron's unsuccessful attempt on 29 August to win Commons' support for British participation
in air strikes.
At the time, the Director General, Defence and Intelligence at the FCO was one Robert
Hannigan, who in April 2014 would be appointed as Director of GCHQ. The National Security
Adviser was a certain Sir Kim Darroch, whose appointment as Ambassador to the U.S. would be
announced in August 2015. Both have been in the news, in relation to 'Russiagate.'
Obviously, the same question arises about both of them as about Brennan: are they
'Gleiwitz types', who were actively complicit in preparing a murderous 'false flag', or were
they simply part of a rather stupid Anglo-American 'dog', whom the 'tail', in the shape of
the jihadists and their Turkish, Saudi and Qatari backers, could 'wag', as they chose?
From the articles which Seymour Hersh published in the 'London Review of Books', and other
materials, it became evident that the Defense Intelligence Agency, then headed by General
Flynn, had been aware of the likelihood of fresh 'false flags' -- after the small scale
incidents in spring 2013.
And it was clear enough, if one bothered to study the 'open source' material at all
carefully, that the DIA had been a key locus of opposition to the strategies being pursued by
Brennan, together with his British co-conspirators.
Accordingly, the fact that an 'interagency memorandum of understanding', which according
to Collyer's judgement looks as though it may well date from 2012 -- the year Brennan was
appointed to head the CIA -- appears to have led, in that year, to the granting of access to
the material, through the FBI, to outside contractors, looks somewhat interesting. (This is
well covered by 'Sundance'.)
So, I find myself asking whether in fact this gross abuse of the role of the NSA was not
linked at the outset to the divisions within the American intelligence apparatus and military
about policy towards the Middle East, and also whether this may not be relevant to assessing
the role of Robert Mueller, who was FBI Director through until September 2013.
An argument that 'Sundance' has repeatedly made is that a lot of what was happening in
mid-2016, including the dossier attributed to Steele, had to do with the need to find
justifications for these questionable surveillance operations.
While I think there is something in this, I have long thought that the discovery that a
mass of material exfiltrated from the DNC, and was going to be published by 'WikiLeaks', and
the subsequent murder of Seth Rich, are likely to have been critically important
triggers.
Among other things, I do not think that the version given by 'Sundance' can explain the
air of panic-stricken improvisation found alike in the dossier, and the claims about the
'digital forensics' made by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'CrowdStrike', and the former GCHQ person
Matt Tait.
I see that there has now been a dramatic escalation in the legal battles which began when
Ed Butowsky bought his initial action against David Folkenflik and his 'NPR' colleagues in
June 2018. The discovery process in that action was followed by an 'Amended Complaint' on 5
March this year.
A week later, Butowsky filed a new action, in which the suggestion of a very-wide ranging
conspiracy to suppress the truth about both the DNC leaks and Rich's murder was turned into a
catalogue of defamation claims against a long list of people, including, as well as a variety
of lawyers involved, CNN, the'Nw York Times', Vox, and the DNC.
On 9 July, Michael Isikoff published a story alleging that the claims about Rich and his
murder were the result of a Russian 'active measures' operation -- to use a favourite phrase
of TTG's.
'That Seth Rich was wacked because he stole the DNC emails and transferred them to
Wikileaks is a conspiracy theory. It is possible and even plausible, but there is no evidence
to confirm it. Many people seem to believe it because it makes more sense than the competing
conspiracy theory, that Russia hacked the DNC and handed the emails to Wikileaks. Isikoff's
claim, that Russia planted the Rich conspiracy theory, has no sound base. That theory existed
before anything "Russian" mentioned it.'
As it happens, Butowsky and his lawyer, Ty Clevenger, obviously decided it was time to, as
it were, 'unmask their batteries', and provide some of the evidence they have been
accumulating.
There is another useful post by 'Sundance', which in turn links to a very interesting post
on the Gateway Pundit' site. From there, you can access both Clevenger's blog post, and the
text of the 'Amended Complaint.'
It seems likely that Butowsky and Clevenger were pushed into acting a bit sooner than they
had intended. The fact that the name of Ellen Ratner, clearly a pivotal participant, was
misspellled 'Rattner' in the 'Amended Complaint', is likely to be an indication of this.
However, I also think that Clevenger, who seems to me a first-class 'ferret', could do
with the services of an old-style secretary, who checked his productions before they went
out.
As I have previously mentioned, I testified several times in Collyer's Washington district
court on non-FISA matters. My impression was that she is a very ambitious woman who wishes
always to do DoJ's bidding.
Your recollections of Collyer had, unfortunately, slipped my mind when I posted my comment
above. So, unfortunately, had Larry's post on Judge Caroline M. Craven's denial in her report
dated 17 April 2019 of the Motion to Dismiss filed by David Folkenflik and his NPR colleagues
in the defamation case brought against them by Ed Butowsky.
At the time of his post, the full text of the judgement was only available on PACER, which
requires a subscription. However, looking at the 'Court Listener' site, I now see that both
it and some other key documents in the case are freely available.
Reading the full text of Ms. Craven's report, I can see quite how well justified was
Larry's suggestion in his post that Folkenflik and NPR were on a very sticky wicket indeed
(as we say in England.)
And I can also see more clearly why, following the judgement, Butowsky and Ty Clevenger
felt they were in a position to launch an action both against some of the major legal players
in the cover-up of the fact that the materials published by the DNC were leaked by Seth Rich,
not hacked by the Russians, and also key disseminators of the cover-up, CNN, the NYT, and
Vox.
What looks to have happened subsequently is a natural enough process of escalation.
Among those who rather actively promoted the hogwash attributed to Christopher Steele was
Michael Isikoff, who is, apparently, chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News. In
April, he was reported in 'Vanity Fair' conceding that 'I think it's fair to say that all of
us should have approached this, in retrospect, with more skepticism'.
Any 'investigative reporter' worth his or her salt would have done elementary checks on
the dossier immediately, and not touched it with a bargepole -- again, as we used to say in
England. Also, even among the incompetent and corrupt, common prudence might have suggested
caution.
However, 'fools rush in', as the saying goes, so Isikoff decided to conspire with
Deborah Sines, apparently the former U.S. assistant attorney in charge of investigating Seth
Rich's murder, to suggest that suggestions that the victim had been the source of the
material from the DNC published by 'WikiLeaks' originated as just another Russian
plot.
It appears that prior to the publication of his 'report', Isikoff talked to Butowsky,
who in his efforts to dissuade him explained that his involvement in the whole affair began
when Ellen Ratner, a news analyst with Fox, and sister of the late Michael Ratner, who had
been an attorney for Assange, contacted him in Fall 2016 about a meeting she had with her
that figure.
Although Butowsky intended the conversation to be 'off the record', and the idea was
emphatically not that Isikoff would contact Ellen Ratner, he did. It seems that -- not
particularly surprisingly, in the current climate -- she lied to him, and he was stupid
enough to think that this meant he could get away with publishing his story.
And then, not particularly surprisingly, Butowsky and Clevenger abandoned their
inhibitions about identifying Ellen Ratner as a source, and filled in a lot of 'blanks' in
their 'narrative' about how Seth Rich lived and died.
I am still in the process of digesting the new information. However, a couple of
preliminary observations about the implications may be worth making.
Among the many problems for Brennan and his co-conspirators -- among whom, on the
British side, Hannigan and Darroch, and also Sedwill, are very important -- one relates to
the way that the capabilities of 'scientific forensics', in all kinds of areas, have
increased by leaps and bounds in recent years.
This has meant that they have had little option but to corrupt the processes of
investigation. The ludicrous claims by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'Crowdstrike' and the former
GCHQ person Matt Tait, which nobody but a fool -- congenital 'useful idiot' one might say --
or a knave would dare to defend in public, are only one of many cases in point.
What is really dangerous for the conspirators, however, is when the problems they have in
contesting rational arguments about the 'scientific forensics' come together with problems
relating to more 'old-fashioned' kinds of evidence: crucially, 'witness testimony'.
This, I think, may now be happening.
It also seems to me quite likely that some of those 'in the know' -- including perhaps
Rosemary Collyer -- had seen what was liable to happen a good while ago, and decided that a
prudent 'rat' keeps its options open.
"... I originally published this as a satirical Facebook Note on February 21, 2018, after the New York Times reported on February 16, 2018 that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had indicted 13 Russians. ..."
I originally published this as a satirical Facebook Note on February 21, 2018, after the
New York Times reported on February 16, 2018 that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had indicted
13 Russians.
February 21, 2018
The Honorable Robert Swan Mueller III
Special Investigating Counsel
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530–0001
Dear Mr. Mueller:
I read with great interest your indictments of 13 Russian citizens and three Russian
corporations.
Please note that Russia encourages you to continue your investigatory efforts as we are
confident you will find that neither myself or any representatives of my office and government
have anything to do with what many of your politicians and media members are describing as
"Russian collusion" or "Russian meddling" with the US 2016 elections.
Also, as a side note, please know that we in Russia are completely surprised at how you
conducted your 2016 election. From the vantage point of anyone living outside of America those
elections did not appear fair at all. We in Russia are surprised by this as we thought you were
a better nation than what we saw from your 2016 national elections.
Although the United States of America and The Russian Federation hold no formal extradition
treaty agreement, please be advised I am willing to use the powers of my office to contact
those whom you've indicted and I will do my utmost to encourage them to come to America in
order to stand the trial of your indictments. We are confident that your jurisprudence system
for legal discovery will produce both remarkable and enlightening evidence for your
investigation.
On a mundane matter, would you be willing to pay for the costs of their travel and housing
expenses while they stand trial in America, or would you prefer that The Russian Federation to
cover this expense?
Finally, please find attached a copy of the Constitution of The Russian Federation. You are
welcome to share with your fellow citizens as we are confident they will become very surprised
by what they learn from reading the contents of our Constitution.
PS: I strongly recommend that your FBI, NSA and DHS departments thoroughly examine the DNC
computers in order to determine if they were actually "hacked." I'm confident you will discover
that the documents published by Wikileaks were the product of an inside "leak" onto a thumb
drive. Please note that I am shocked that the thoroughness of your investigation has not yet
accomplished this simple and obvious task.
"... I originally published this as a satirical Facebook Note on February 21, 2018, after the New York Times reported on February 16, 2018 that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had indicted 13 Russians. ..."
I originally published this as a satirical Facebook Note on February 21, 2018, after the
New York Times reported on February 16, 2018 that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had indicted
13 Russians.
February 21, 2018
The Honorable Robert Swan Mueller III
Special Investigating Counsel
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530–0001
Dear Mr. Mueller:
I read with great interest your indictments of 13 Russian citizens and three Russian
corporations.
Please note that Russia encourages you to continue your investigatory efforts as we are
confident you will find that neither myself or any representatives of my office and government
have anything to do with what many of your politicians and media members are describing as
"Russian collusion" or "Russian meddling" with the US 2016 elections.
Also, as a side note, please know that we in Russia are completely surprised at how you
conducted your 2016 election. From the vantage point of anyone living outside of America those
elections did not appear fair at all. We in Russia are surprised by this as we thought you were
a better nation than what we saw from your 2016 national elections.
Although the United States of America and The Russian Federation hold no formal extradition
treaty agreement, please be advised I am willing to use the powers of my office to contact
those whom you've indicted and I will do my utmost to encourage them to come to America in
order to stand the trial of your indictments. We are confident that your jurisprudence system
for legal discovery will produce both remarkable and enlightening evidence for your
investigation.
On a mundane matter, would you be willing to pay for the costs of their travel and housing
expenses while they stand trial in America, or would you prefer that The Russian Federation to
cover this expense?
Finally, please find attached a copy of the Constitution of The Russian Federation. You are
welcome to share with your fellow citizens as we are confident they will become very surprised
by what they learn from reading the contents of our Constitution.
PS: I strongly recommend that your FBI, NSA and DHS departments thoroughly examine the DNC
computers in order to determine if they were actually "hacked." I'm confident you will discover
that the documents published by Wikileaks were the product of an inside "leak" onto a thumb
drive. Please note that I am shocked that the thoroughness of your investigation has not yet
accomplished this simple and obvious task.
Mueller looks more and more like dirty Clinton fixer.
Notable quotes:
"... The Feb. 2018 indictment referred repeatedly to the IRA simply as a "Russian organization." But in Mueller's report 14 months later, the "Russian organization" had somehow morphed into "Russia." The IRA's lawyers argued, in effect, that Mueller's ipse-dixit "Russia did it" does not suffice as proof of Russian government involvement. Federal Judge Friedrich agreed and ordered Mueller to cease promoting his evidence-less charge against the IRA; she added that "any future violations of her order will trigger a range of potential sanctions." ..."
"... In testimony to Congress in October 2017, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch had cautioned earlier that from 2015 to 2017, "Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or 'served,' a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds." Shamefully misleading "analysis" by Times reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti in a 10,000-word article on September 20, 2018 made the case that the IRA's 80,000 posts helped deliver the presidency to Trump. ..."
"... Shane and Mazzetti neglected to report the 33 trillion number for needed context, even though the Times ' own coverage of Stretch's 2017 testimony stated outright: "Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users' News Feeds everyday." ..."
"... CrowdStrike, the controversial cybersecurity firm that the Democratic National Committee chose over the FBI in 2016 to examine its compromised computer servers, never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, the Justice Department admitted. ..."
"... With Erin Ratner being named as a conduit between Seth Rich and Wikileaks in a lawsuit yesterday – the second flimsy leg of Mueller's claims – gets cut off at the knees. ..."
Daniel Lazare's July 12 Consortium Newspiece
shatters one of the twin prongs in Mueller's case that "the Russian government interfered in
the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion." It was the prong dripping
with incessant drivel about the Kremlin using social media to help Trump win in 2016.
Mueller led off his Russiagate report, a redacted version of which was published on April
18, with the dubious claim that his investigation had
" established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election principally through two
operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored
presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against
entities, employees, and volunteers working in the Clinton campaign, and then released stolen
documents."
Judge to Mueller: Put Up or Shut Up
Mueller: Needs more time. (Flickr)
Regarding the social-media accusation, Judge Friederich has now told Mueller, in effect, to
put up or shut up. What happened was this: On February 16, 2018 a typically credulous grand
jury -- the usual kind that cynics say can be persuaded to indict the proverbial ham sandwich
-- was convinced by Mueller to return 16 indictments of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and
associates in St. Petersburg, giving his all-deliberate-speed investigation some momentum and a
much-needed, if short-lived, "big win" in "proving" interference by Russia in the 2016
election. It apparently never occurred to Mueller and the super-smart lawyers around him that
the Russians would outsmart them by hiring their own lawyers to show up in U.S. court and seek
discovery. Oops.
The Feb. 2018 indictment referred repeatedly to the IRA simply as a "Russian organization."
But in Mueller's report 14 months later, the "Russian organization" had somehow morphed into
"Russia." The IRA's lawyers argued, in effect, that Mueller's ipse-dixit "Russia did it"
does not suffice as proof of Russian government involvement. Federal Judge Friedrich agreed and
ordered Mueller to
cease promoting his evidence-less charge against the IRA; she added that "any future violations
of her order will trigger a range of potential sanctions."
More specifically, at the conclusion of a hearing held under seal on May 28, Judge Friedrich
ordered the government "to refrain from making or authorizing any public statement that links
the alleged conspiracy in the indictment to the Russian government or its agencies." The judge
ordered further that "any public statement about the allegations in the indictment . . . must
make clear that, one, the government is summarizing the allegations in the indictment which
remain unproven, and, two, the government does not express an opinion on the defendant's guilt
or innocence or the strength of the evidence in this case."
Reporting Thursday on Judge Friedrich's ruling, former CIA and State Department official
Larry C. Johnson
described it as a "potential game changer," observing that Mueller "has not offered one
piece of solid evidence that the defendants were involved in any way with the government of
Russia." After including a lot of useful background material, Johnson ends by noting:
"Some readers will insist that Mueller and his team have actual intelligence but cannot
put that in an indictment. Well boys and girls, here is a simple truth–if you cannot
produce evidence that can be presented in court then you do not have a case. There is that
part of the Constitution that allows those accused of a crime to confront their
accusers."
IRA Story a 'Stretch'
Last fall, investigative journalist Gareth Porter dissected and
debunkedThe New York Times 's far-fetched claim that 80,000 Facebook posts by the
Internet Research Agency helped swing the election to Donald Trump. What the Times story
neglected to say is that the relatively paltry 80,000 posts were engulfed in literally
trillions of posts on Facebook over the two-year period in question -- before and after the
2016 election.
Stretch and executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google hauled before a Senate Judiciary
subcommittee on crime and terrorism on Oct. 31, 2017.
In testimony to Congress in October 2017, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch had
cautioned earlier that from 2015 to 2017, "Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or
'served,' a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds." Shamefully misleading
"analysis" by Times reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti in a 10,000-word
article on September 20, 2018 made the case that the IRA's 80,000 posts helped deliver the
presidency to Trump.
Shane and Mazzetti neglected to report the 33 trillion number for needed context, even
though the Times ' own coverage of Stretch's 2017 testimony stated
outright: "Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount of
content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users' News Feeds everyday."
The chances that Americans saw any of these IRA ads -- let alone were influenced by them --
are infinitismal. Porter and others did the math and found that over the two-year period, the
80,000 Russian-origin Facebook posts represented just 0.0000000024 of total Facebook content in
that time. Porter commented that this particular Times contribution to the Russiagate
story "should vie in the annals of journalism as one of the most spectacularly misleading uses
of statistics of all time."
And now we know, courtesy of Judge Friederich, that Mueller has never produced proof, beyond
his say-so, that the Russian government was responsible for the activities of the IRA --
feckless as they were. That they swung the election is clearly a stretch.
The Other Prong: Hacking the DNC
The second of Mueller's two major accusations of Russian interference, as noted above,
charged that "a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against
entities, employees, and volunteers working in the Clinton campaign, and then released stolen
documents." Sadly for Russiagate aficionados, the evidence behind that charge doesn't hold
water either.
CrowdStrike, the controversial cybersecurity firm that the Democratic National Committee
chose over the FBI in 2016 to examine its compromised computer servers, never produced an
un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to,
the Justice Department
admitted.
The
revelation came in a
court filing by the government in the pre-trial phase of Roger Stone, a long-time
Republican operative who had an unofficial role in the campaign of candidate Donald Trump.
Stone has been charged with misleading Congress, obstructing justice and intimidating a
witness.
The filing was in response to a motion by Stone's lawyers asking for "unredacted reports"
from CrowdStrike challenging the government to prove that Russia hacked the DNC server. "The
government does not possess the information the defendant seeks," the DOJ filing says.
Small wonder that Mueller had hoped to escape further questioning. If he does testify on
July 24, the committee hearings will be well worth watching.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and a presidential briefer.
In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. His colleagues and
he have been following closely the ins and outs of Russiagate.
Carlos , July 17, 2019 at 12:52
With Erin Ratner being named as a conduit between Seth Rich and Wikileaks in a lawsuit
yesterday – the second flimsy leg of Mueller's claims – gets cut off at the
knees.
cletus , July 17, 2019 at 05:29
just read your article at lewrockwell on 7/17.
you gave all the facts that irrefutably condemn the mueller hoax and reveal what a con man
he is. I salute you for this.
unfortutunately, you then come to a conclusion that cannot be supported by an reasonable
person.
you think that mueller's con will be called out by the republicans on the committee.
what a joke. They will avoid like the plague revealling that the russia claims by mueller
are a hoax.
they'll focus completely on ' you did conclude that trump didn't collude with the russians,
right?"
anyone who's been paying attention at all knows this.
Robert G. Hilton , July 17, 2019 at 01:13
There was no expert report showing hacking because the expert had found that the Russians
did not hack. Simple as that. The way it works is, that an expert puts nothing in writing
until AFTER orally consulting with the attorney who hired him. If the news is bad for said
attorney, then the expert is instructed NEVER to put the bad news in writing. I used to hire
experts when I litigated patent infringement cases, and that is the way it works. If you pay
the expert, then you make the rules. The judge may understand this too. I'm pretty sure that
the Crowd Strike expert also gave Muller (Andrew Wiseman?) the same news about no
hacking.
michael weddle , July 16, 2019 at 22:41
Why, shortly after Random Juan claimed the presidency, was a Crowdstrike employee trying
to stoke the Venezuelan coup?
I wish that this constant debunking of Russia Gate would be doing some good. Sadly it's
not. Most of the members of daily kos believe everything about Russia Gate and even after
reading some of the great essays written here that debunks it they instead say that this
website has been bought out by Russia.
I once thought that if people really looked at the evidence or lack of it that they would
wake up and smell the propaganda. It has always been so obvious to me that there was never
any there there and I couldn't understand how people bought into it. But I think it has to do
with who people voted for in the last election. Hillary's supporters just can't believe that
she could have lost without outside interference. Sad.
ex-PFC Chuck , July 16, 2019 at 18:08
A post yesterday at The Conservative Treehouse expands on a Gateway Pundit post about an
amended filing to the court in a Texas libel suit that could blow the whole Russia-gate hoax
wide open, taking with it whatever shred of credibility the Mueller Report might still have.
Not to mention the rationale for silencing Assange, General Flynn's prosecution, and the
murder of Seth Rich.
It looks like this fraudulent fable has finally been debunked by the US judicial system.
Now the Hillary bots will have to come up with another excuse for her wealthy donors as to
why she lost the election to a much maligned TV host that spent a small fraction of her
campaign funding. This also takes some of the fuel out of using the Russiagate fraud for a
march to war with Russia that was accompanied by large defense spending increases. Russiagate
was the perfect gift to the Clinton campaign apologists and the MIC that needs a causus belli
to feed the public war machine. That gift box has now been unraveled to display an empty box.
I'm surprised Ray McGovern did not bring up the issue of the alleged hacking of DNC emails to
have been contrary to the capability of the internet at that time. The rate of transfer was
consistent with downloading to a flash drive but impossible for transfer of packets across an
IP network – further debunking the Russia hacking narrative. This whole house of cards
has crashed in and it seems that it will be impossible for the Russiagate fraudsters to
reconstruct their tawdry myth.
jaycee , July 16, 2019 at 14:08
Perceptive bloggers identified the IRA as a commercial clickbait operation two years ago.
Everything about that operation was consistent with that description. Describing the IRA as a
Russian government psy-op program, in turn, was inconsistent with the evidence at hand and so
required the assumption that its purpose was to "sow chaos", or similar guesswork. It should
be remembered that the Facebook / Twitter people were initially reluctant to go along with
the latter theory, and only came on board after a great deal of pressure from members of
Congress such as Mark Warner. So this whole nonsensical story was magnified at the insistence
of powerful Democratic congressional persons, and Mueller was simply bolstering their
arguments – which was his job it appears. The result has been not only a false
consciousness deliberately seeded through the public, but also a raft of social media and
alternative news censorship which has been silencing both alt-right and progressive
voices.
Jeff Harrison , July 16, 2019 at 13:45
Thanx, Ray. I've said from the outset that Russiagate was bullshit perpetrated by Three
Names who just couldn't stand the fact that this was the latest in a long string of failures
that this incompetent, arrogant woman perpetrated on the American people. It was bullshit
from jump street because Three Names won the election by 3M votes but in the American
presidential election you not only need the votes, you need the distribution. Distribution
she didn't have. Russia (or any other actor sufficiently large and determined) can sway votes
for one candidate or another but they can't sway distribution. I personally thought the claim
that Russia via the Internet Research Agency sought to sway the election by disparaging Three
Names and pumping up Thump. Three Names won by 3M votes. Looks like Russia's IRA did a
spectacularly poor job of meddling.
There are some take aways from this that the government should be looking into/doing
something about.
1. Russiagate never had any legs. The legs that it got came from an effort by the deep state
to create them out of thin air. The deep state tried to take on the role of the Praetorian
Guard in old Rome. Their role originally was to protect the emperor but it morphed over the
years into picking who would be the emperor. The likes of Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Struck
(however you spell it) and his femme fatale (at a minimum, there may be more) should all be
marched off to jail and locked up for a considerable period of time for their attempts to
destroy our democracy (or republic – a distinction without a difference).
2. Seth Rich's murder needs to be actually investigated now that he has been outed as the
source of the leak to Wikileaks.
3. The Republican party needs to be banned as a political party. Any clear eyed view of
the 2016 election will conclude that the decades old effort by the Republicans at voter
suppression and gerrymandering are what resulted in the 2016 results. 80,000 votes in three
states that the Republicans have invested great voter suppression efforts – Wisconsin,
Michigan, and Pennsylvania would have changed the election results. This should have been a
major neon sign that winner take all for electoral votes is a bad idea. If proportional EC
votes were mandated, third parties would have a chance and our presidential elections might
become actual contests. Otherwise, we'll continue to have elections that are between two
candidates – worse and worser.
John Puma , July 16, 2019 at 12:36
The proportion of IRA "stories" among total Facebook postings
in the period in question, can be expressed in manner a bit more
readily grasped: on average, one IRA posting appeared among
every 412 million total. For perspective the US population is now
about 330 million.
The FBIs bungling with Crowdstrike information is reminiscent
of its reported 9-11 careless incompetence.
Jill , July 16, 2019 at 13:06
This may be why NPR featured that story:
"Businessman Ed Butowsky filed a lawsuit on Monday that outed FOX News reporter Ellen
Ratner was his source for the Seth Rich information.
This comes after Michael Isikoff's report last week that labeled Butowsky as a Russian
source."
Yahoo's reporter Michael Isikoff is a sock puppet for the CIA/FBI that provided the info
to NPR and was one of the first to spread the lies told to him by Steele about Russian
interference. He must have tried to head off the lawsuit filed today. Ed Butowsky filed a
lawsuit against the liberal media claiming defamation and business disparagement. He claims
that Assange told Ellen Ratner (Fox News analyst and sister of Assange's lawyer who passed
away) that Seth and Aaron Rich provided the emails to Wikileaks.
I don't think anyone with a couple of brain cells would dismiss the idea that an insider
with the DNC having access to delicate, perhaps damaging material, being what seems on the
surface, to be the victim of a motiveless murder would ask the question, was there any
connection between Seth Rich's demise and the crap storm that ensued after the Wikileaks
release. Really hello !
LarcoMarco , July 16, 2019 at 17:46
"NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Michael Isikoff" – what a predictable farce! "We
talked to Deborah Sines, who was the federal prosecutor in charge of the investigation into
Seth Rich's death. She was an assistant U.S. attorney in the U.S. attorney's office in the
District of Columbia, which prosecutes local murders. And she would see these conspiracy
theories about her case circulating on the Web. She was – she wanted to find out where
they were coming from."
At least we now know that Seth Rich's death is/was a Federal case. No more claiming the
DCPD has jurisdiction. But no disclosures of the contents of Seth Rich's cell phone and
laptop.
Eric32 , July 16, 2019 at 10:38
The author seems consumed by this carnival of politicized legalized covert intelligence
operations, by people and entities trying to retain money and power.
What's important is that the system hasn't been working for decades, and there's going to
be increasingly serious problems, maybe fatal ones, rising if a big overhaul doesn't
occur.
Al Pinto , July 16, 2019 at 09:43
The DNC and MSM sold, and sold well, the Russiagate to the general public. Does it really
matter, if the "Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has now come
apart at the seams"? Neither the DNC, nor the MSM will report/mention either of the court
case, pretty much a blackout for the general public.
Even, if these court cases are widely reported, do you really believe that the majority of
the people would change their mind? After almost three years, there's no way that these
people will change their mind. The only change that widely reporting these court cases would
result in is, that Trump and HRC supporters would hate each other even more.
This Russiagate will be with us pretty much forever, it'll morph in to accusing people of
being Russian agents and/or Russian Bots. We already see this taking place and just wait,
until next year. It's not going to be pretty
michael , July 16, 2019 at 12:40
Aaron Mate has done a brilliant job researching and debunking Russiagate. Unfortunately
for him, he is now ostracized and has to survive on the margins, with other people with
critical thinking skills.
You're right. The truth doesn't matter, just the BS narrative that has been shoved down
our throats for the last few years. It never made any sense to anyone who really thought
about it but the media whores just keep spewing total nonsense and they surely won't change
their ways now. The fact that the entire crock is really irrelevant to the majority of our
citizens doesn't matter to them a bit.
AnneR , July 16, 2019 at 09:42
Thank you again Mr McGovern for another article on this never ending saga. While I hope
that sanity begins to dawn among the so-called progressives, I have serious doubts.
1. Neither the BBC World Service nor NPR have mentioned (at least while I've been
listening) Judge Friedrich's ruling vis a vis provide the evidence (discovery) to the IRA
12's lawyers or tear up the indictment (essentially). Indeed, I've not heard, on the MSM,
anything about those 12 IRA folks employing a lawyer and challenging Mueller's indictment.
Silence works as well as obfuscation, lies.
2. The Demrats simply will not let their Russophobia go. I gather (from RT – tut tut
I must be an RU bottle) that Ms Harris AIPAC schmoozer, keen and eager lock 'em up and throw
away the key, corporate-capitalist crony Kamala has been accusing the Russians of stirring up
the controversy surrounding Kaepernick's bending of the knee. The Russians and their bots did
it.
3. And then this morning on NPR – a Steve Inskip interview with Michael Isikoff
focusing on the Seth Rich "conspiracy theory" and of course the whole thing (or that segment
which I could stomach hearing) presumed as a matter of established, and thus true, fact that
everything that went wrong for the DNC's HRC campaign was caused by the Russians – for
which read Putin. Isikoff was there as an "investigative" journalist for "Yahoo News" –
and his "investigation" had shown that the Russians were – who else – behind the
conspiracy theory that Seth Rich was killed by HRC thugs in order to keep him permanently
quiet about corruption in the DNC. (Corruption – a rather mealy-mouthed way of avoiding
bringing into NPR daylight what the DNC were actually doing: determining who would be the Dem
candidate willy nilly of who the voters wanted. But this mealy-mouthedness is fully in
keeping with NPR's basic silence on what Wikileaks revealed via that insider download.)
Orwellian. Propaganda at its Bernays, Goebbels best. Despair . This business is *not*
going away. The Demrats – both in DC and their bourgeois/progressive supporters have
far too much invested in the whole confabulation for them to admit that the former
deliberately lied and the latter were willing? hoodwinked.
Thanks for your comment. I would like it if somehow "despair," could be disallowed.
There are enough of us, after all. And, as Annie Dillard put it, "There never was anybody
but us."
I also take some inspiration from the dismal-sounding, yet somehow uplifting words of I.
F. Stone:
"The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're going to lose, because somebody
has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do
wins."
THE CHALLENGE IS TO ACCEPT THAT, AND FIND JOY IN TRYING -- AND EVEN IN LOSING.
I believe the losing does not last forever; think we all need to do our part in the
"interim."
Best regards,
Ray
DW Bartoo , July 16, 2019 at 19:44
That sums things up precisely, Ray.
None of us may live to see a complete turn-around, yet it is the honest effort to
encourage and build the foundation for that fundamental systemic change to conscious and
principled human awareness which is the measure we must make of ourselves.
Your sense of moral presence, Ray, is very much appreciated.
It serves as inspiration for all, and especially the young, who already understand, and
encourages, as example, those who are coming to understand.
DW
AnneR , July 17, 2019 at 08:33
Dear Mr McGovern – thank you for reading and replying to my comment.
And, yes, I do understand the objection to despair – though not, might I add, any
thought that its frank expression be expunged!
Were it only the whole Russiagate fabrication, delusions, time and money waste (oh well,
only taxpayers' money) and fallout that was so dreadfully wrong, being heinously enacted.
Indeed were it all that our taxes were being wasted on.
Perhaps that's it – Russiagate while distracting from the things that the DNC and
HRC did, said, *also* makes for good deflection from the war crimes we are committing, the
never ending imperialist warmongering we are engaged in, from the fact that many Demrats
voted for those nice tax breaks given to the wealthiest tiers in our society, that many of
those Demrats voted to hand over to the MIC *even more* loot even as the Pentagon can't
account for the billions, or whatever fantastikal amount, it has already received over the
years, deflection from the fact that despite such a "good" economy increasing numbers of
people are living ever more economically precarious lives, rents rise astronomically,
healthcare is a joke (or would be were its lack not so serious for so many). And that's not
to mention the realities of climate change or the continuing (and MSM ignored) 70 plus year
plight of Palestinians, among so many others.
My late husband used to tell me to write to NPR, the BBC, to let them know that they
weren't codding everyone with their disinformation, non-information, lack of objectivity
– their propaganda. And I did, often and used to ask for a response. Did I even get
those? You must be joking
AnneR , July 17, 2019 at 14:08
In case someone might think that I expected either the BBC or NPR to alter their ways
because of my "letters" (interestingly the BBC only allows/ed for around 1000 characters or
something equally useless) – no. But when (in the case of the BBC) you can tick the
"please reply" box and get total silence, not even a "thank you for your blah blah we shan't
pay any attention to your complaints ," in response it is pretty frustrating.
As for NPR – I stopped our contributions. Why would we *pay* for the privilege of
being propagandized? I just wish we had stopped them years earlier
Anyway, thank you Mr McGovern for your continuing coverage of this whole affair. I just
wish my late partner in life and love had known of this website.
ML , July 16, 2019 at 09:24
Each morning when I arise, I get my coffee and settle down to read Consortium News. I also
make a habit of a quick perusal of what the stenographers are jawing about on CNN today,
there is a real doozy smearing Assange. The spinners are working overtime to patch over all
the holes in their hoax story. I couldn't get through the whole thing because it's another
smear piece and a long one including the old saw that Assange smeared feces on the Ecuadorian
embassy's walls. I had to stop reading. Gosh, I can't abide those people. Thanks Ray, for
telling the truth. We are drowning in $h** out there in la-la land. CN offers a much-needed
dose of reality medicine. Thank you kindly, all.
Skip Scott , July 16, 2019 at 10:19
Here's a good essay by Caitlin Johnstone regarding the Assange hit-piece.
Even worse news for the Russiahoaxers is the recent revelation , documented in a lawsuit ,
that Ellen Ratner , sister of deceased Wikileaks' lawyer Michael Ratner, met with Assange in
the fall of 2016 and was told by him that Aaron and Seth Rich provided the DNC leaks to
Wikileaks. Ed Butowsky was made aware of this , with instructions by Ms. Ratner for him to
relay the information to the Rich family. When he did so , in December 2016 , he was told by
Joel Rich , Seth's father , that he was already aware of his sons' involvement.
This is no longer conspiracy talk , folks. Ed Butowsky is not dumb enough to make these
claims on court documents without knowing he can back them up. Shit is about to get real for
Mueller and the DNC.
"BREAKING: Lawsuit Outs Reporter Ellen Ratner as Source for Seth Rich Information" @
Gateway Pundit
Well, Skip Scott, either this revelation will put "paid" to the "Russia-did-it!" charade,
or else the Voracious Memory Hole will act like a giant black hole and the event horizon will
be swallowed into total nothingness as a new Middle-Eastern Adventure captures the hearts and
minds of the happy warriors and consumers of U$ Imperialism.
Whatever happens, it will be wholey interesting times ahead.
DW
jmg , July 16, 2019 at 10:01
There was a related, extensive 2018 interview about Butowsky's private investigation into
the Seth Rich case to help the family, what they found, and what happened (the DNC assigned
someone to represent the family, etc.; the mentioned lawsuits were later dropped/dismissed).
It included, without naming Ratner, the unverified mention: "his friend came back from London
with information that he said he wanted to get to the Rich family." Since this alleged
private message appears to be not only doubtful, but of course also not confirmed by
WikiLeaks, we can't really know if it happened or not.
Seth Rich, disgruntled DNC worker, blows the whistle on HillBillary Clinton rigging the
Democratic presidential primary against Bernie Sanders, so he gives data supporting his
discovery of rigging to Wikileaks. Rich got the data on a thumdrive downloaded at DNC HQ
itself.
No Russians, no hacking, just a whistleblower on the fraud ironically called US
"democracy." We've all seen the data Rich leaked. Emails detailing HillBillary Clinton's
graft and fraud and collusion against Sanders.
No wonder no other candidates besides Sanders ran against HillBillary, for they all knew
the fix was in from its inception!
I dunno who killed Seth Rich, but I do know the Democratic party stole the election from
Bernie, then projected its own crimes onto Russia, same way a kid projects his own crime of
breaking a cookie jar on his brother when he tells Momma "He dit it –> He ate the
cookies and broke the jar!" Meanwhile, there's chocolate smeared all over the DNC's face.
We have evidence for this, the leaked emails themselves tell the story
Gregory Herr , July 16, 2019 at 18:15
Seth Rich copied and leaked the DNC e-mails and was murdered for it. For this to become
irrefutable common knowledge will be quite one godsend of a reality check. Maddow might not
be able to get out of bed for weeks.
Repeat after me Rachel there was no Russian hack, there was no Russian hack, there was no
Russian hack
jmg , July 16, 2019 at 07:13
From the Brennan–Comey–Rogers assessment/opinion (January 6, 2017):
"We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's
election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her
unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high
confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence. . . .
"- High confidence generally indicates that judgments are based on high-quality
information from multiple sources. High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the
assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.
"- Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and
plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher
level of confidence."
"When they say they have 'high confidence', that means they don't have any evidence!"
-- Bill Binney, former NSA Technical Director
DW Bartoo , July 16, 2019 at 07:10
Thank you, Ray McGovern for this splendid article laying out the facts which make clear
the absurdities of these last several years. One hopes, now that the "Russia-did-it" canard
is fully exposed, by US courts, that the truth may finally get through, over or around, the
media wall of enforced ignorance and Mueller hero-worship, and reach the ears and eyes of the
people.
Should that actually happen, it might even be possible that other truth, long subject to
media manipulation and distortion, the cases of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning come
readily to mind, could be seen in the honest light of day after an almost eight year
protracted nightmare of media driven deceit, psychological torture, and deliberately vicious
character assassination is revealed, in Assange's case, as it might well be, by Nils Melzer's
report to the UN.
The legacy U$ corporate media have much to answer for, from promulgating lies that led to
war, to missile attacks, and to brutal economic sanctions, a form of economic warfare, to
efforts to start a new Cold War, and to aggrandize intelligence agencies which have sought to
pervert justice and to illegally influence the political process by falsely accusing, on the
flimsy words of partisan political operatives, another nation of the very actions those
agencies have used, repeatedly and for many decades,to destroy the political processes of
other nations, including the very nation singled out to take the blame for Hillary Clinton's
abysmal and pathetic failure in the 2016 election.
What a waste of time, resources, trust, and energy it has bee, these last years, yet it
was all so very profitable and lucrative for the media, even if it were "not good" for the
country.
The media have damned and convicted themselves.
The U$ intelligence agencies have exposed themselves as corrupt, completely dishonest,
vindictive, petty, and thoroughly untrustworthy.
It remains to be seen if the people have learned anything, and whether they will do
anything with this costly, yet necessary, education.
DW
Allan , July 16, 2019 at 07:04
Will Adam Schiff spend the week with Bob Mueller to get their story straight
UserFriendly , July 16, 2019 at 05:18
?Unfortunately this is partially bunk. The first bit the judge didn't rule that there was
no evidence, she ruled that Mueller publicly saying that the IRA = kremlin and they did try
to help Trump win was prejudicial in the case against the IRA (quite obviously so). But him
not being able to say that during his testimony should go over well with the democrats. Of
course if he actually wanted to explain all he would have to do is drop the case against the
IRA because it's never going to trial anyways. Almost makes you wonder if he filed those
charges expressly so he wouldn't have to connect the imaginary dotts.
Aiya , July 16, 2019 at 11:03
What they called "trying to help Trump" was a miniscule amount of social media posts, 56%
of which were made AFTER the election. And Facebook had to look 3 times to come up with
ANYTHING–what they finally reported were posts coming from Russia or eastern Europe,
posts in Cyrillic language, and posts from people with Russian/European names.
"... This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of ..."
"... Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at ..."
"... War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate ..."
his
Wikipedia biography , he has -- or he had -- "a sterling reputation" both among Republicans
and Democrats. That changed when Barr announced his ongoing investigation into the origins of
Russiagate, a vital subject
I, too, have explored .
As Barr explained , "What we're looking at is: What was the predicate for conducting a
counterintelligence investigation on the Trump campaign. How did the bogus narrative begin that
Trump was essentially in cahoots with Russia to interfere with the U.S. election?" Still more,
Barr, who is empowered to declassify highly sensitive documents, made clear that his primary
focus was not the hapless FBI under James Comey but the CIA under John Brennan. Evidently this
was too much for leading Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who assailed Barr for having "just
destroyed the scintilla of credibility that he had left." Not known for a sense of irony,
Schumer accused Barr of using "the words of conspiracy theorists," as though Russiagate
itself is not among the most malign and consequential conspiracy theories in American political
history.
More indicative is the reaction of the generally liberal pro-Democratic New York
Times and Washington Post , the country's two most important political
newspapers, to Barr's investigation. Leaning heavily on the "expert" opinion of former
intelligence officials and McCarthy-echoing members of Congress such as Adam Schiff, both
papers went into outrage mode.
The Times bemoaned Barr's "drastic escalation of [Trump's] yearslong assault on
the intelligence community" while rejecting "the president's unfounded claims that his campaign
had been spied on," even though some forms of FBI and CIA infiltration and surveillance of the
2016 Trump campaign are now well documented. (See, for example,
Lee Smith's reporting .)
Unconcerned by the activities of either agency, the papers
warned ominously that Barr's probe "effectively strips [the CIA] of its most critical
power: choosing which secrets it shares and which remain hidden." It "could be tremendously
damaging to the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies." Not surprisingly, given the
Times ' three-year role in promulgating Russiagate allegations, it preempted Barr's
investigation
by declaring that US intelligence agencies' covert actions were part of "a lawful
investigation aimed at understanding a foreign power's efforts to manipulate an American
election." Considering what is now known, this generalization seems a whitewash both of the
Times ' coverage and the agencies' conduct. (In the Post , see coverage by
Toluse Olorunnipa and
Shane Harris .)
Hillary Clinton, also not surprisingly, agreed. As paraphrased by Matt Stevens
in the Times on May 3 , she accused Barr of diverting attention "from what the
real story is. The real story is the Russian interference in our election." According to the
defeated Democratic candidate, "the Russians were successful in sowing 'discord and
divisiveness' in the country, and helping Mr. Trump." But who has actually sowed more "discord
and divisiveness" in America -- the Russians or Mrs. Clinton and her supporters, by still
refusing to accept the legitimacy of her electoral loss and Trump's victory?
Unfortunately, but predictably, Barr's investigation has become polarizing, with Fox News,
for example, bannering each new unsavory Russiagate revelation and the Times and the
Post mostly ignoring them altogether. In particular, the Democratic Party, once
traditionally skeptical of intelligence agencies, is becoming the party of an intel cult and
thus of the new US-Russian Cold War. Only a few of the party's leaders, notably presidential
candidate Tulsi Gabbard, demur from this dangerous folly. (Might Democratic reticence also be
due to the circumstance that the intelligence chiefs now under investigation were appointees of
former President Obama, who has been remarkably silent about the entire Russiagate saga? What,
as I have asked previously, did Obama know, when did he know it, and what did he do?)
Everyone who cares about the quality of American political life, no matter what they think
about Trump, should encourage Barr's probe. To resort to a familiar cliché, Russiagate
allegations have become a spreading cancer in American politics, with Democratic congressional
candidates raising funds by promising, despite the exculpatory findings of Robert Mueller
regarding "collusion," to fight evil "Trump-Putin" forces in Washington. Meanwhile, some
Republicans, despite ample contrary evidence, preposterously blame Russia itself -- for the
infamous Steele Dossier, for example. (By the way, for more irony, Trump is regularly accused
in the above-cited news accounts of "siding with" Russian President Vladimir Putin in denying
that any "collusion" determined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, a conclusion
also reached by Mueller, thereby putting Trump, Putin, and Mueller on the same
"side.")
Ideally, we would have an investigation of the intelligence agencies entirely independent of
the White House and headed by an eminent political figure who is not a presidential appointee,
as was the 1975 Senate Church Committee. For now, we have only Trump's attorney general,
William Barr. Nonetheless, we should support him, however conditionally. Rogue intelligence
agencies subvert democracy, and the next candidate they target -- as they did Trump -- may be
yours.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the
host ofThe John Batchelor
Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are atTheNation.com .William Barr, a
two-time attorney general who served at the CIA in the 1970s, would seem to be an ultimate
Washington insider. According to his Wikipedia biography , he has -- or he had
-- "a sterling reputation" both among Republicans and Democrats. That changed when Barr
announced his ongoing investigation into the origins of Russiagate, a vital subject I, too, have
explored .
As Barr
explained , "What we're looking at is: What was the predicate for conducting a
counterintelligence investigation on the Trump campaign. How did the bogus narrative begin that
Trump was essentially in cahoots with Russia to interfere with the U.S. election?" Still more,
Barr, who is empowered to declassify highly sensitive documents, made clear that his primary
focus was not the hapless FBI under James Comey but the CIA under John Brennan. Evidently this
was too much for leading Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who assailed Barr for having "just
destroyed the scintilla of credibility that he had left." Not known for a sense of irony,
Schumer accused Barr of using "the words of conspiracy theorists," as though Russiagate
itself is not among the most malign and consequential conspiracy theories in American political
history.
More indicative is the reaction of the generally liberal pro-Democratic New York
Times and Washington Post , the country's two most important political
newspapers, to Barr's investigation. Leaning heavily on the "expert" opinion of former
intelligence officials and McCarthy-echoing members of congress such as Adam Schiff, both
papers went into outrage mode. The
Times bemoaned Barr's "drastic escalation of [Trump's] yearslong assault on the
intelligence community" while rejecting "the president's unfounded claims that his campaign had
been spied on," even though some forms of FBI and CIA infiltration and surveillance of the 2016
Trump campaign are now well documented. (See, for example,
Lee Smith's reporting .)
Support Progressive Journalism
If you like this article, please give today to help fund The Nation 's work.
Unconcerned by the activities of either agency, the papers warned
ominously that Barr's probe "effectively strips [the CIA] of its most critical power:
choosing which secrets it shares and which remain hidden." It "could be tremendously damaging
to the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies." Not surprisingly, given the Times '
three-year role in promulgating Russiagate allegations, it preempted Barr's investigation by
declaring
that US intelligence agencies' covert actions were part of "a lawful investigation aimed at
understanding a foreign power's efforts to manipulate an American election." Considering what
is now known, this generalization seems a whitewash both of the Times ' coverage and
the agencies' conduct. (Writing for the Post , see coverage
by Toluse Olorunnipa and
Shane Harris .)
Hillary Clinton, also not surprisingly, agreed. As paraphrased by Matt Stevens in the
Times on May 3 , she accused Barr of diverting attention "from what the real story
is. The real story is the Russian interference in our election." According to the defeated
Democratic candidate, "the Russians were successful in sowing 'discord and divisiveness' in the
country, and helping Mr. Trump." But who has actually sowed more "discord and divisiveness" in
America -- the Russians or Mrs. Clinton and her supporters, by still refusing to accept the
legitimacy of her electoral loss and Trump's victory?
Unfortunately, but predictably, Barr's investigation has become polarizing, with Fox News,
for example, bannering each new unsavory Russiagate revelation and the Times and
Post mostly ignoring them altogether. In particular, the Democratic Party, once
traditionally skeptical of intelligence agencies, is becoming the party of an intel cult and
thus of the new US-Russian Cold War. Only a few of the party's leaders, notably presidential
candidate Tulsi Gabbard, demur from this dangerous folly. (Might Democratic reticence also be
due to the circumstance that the intelligence chiefs now under investigation were appointees of
former President Obama, who has been remarkably silent about the entire Russiagate saga? What,
as I have asked previously, did Obama know, when did he know it, and what did he do?)
Everyone who cares about the quality of American political life, no matter what they think
about Trump, should encourage Barr's probe. To resort to a familiar cliché, Russiagate
allegations have become a spreading cancer in American politics, with Democratic congressional
candidates fund-raising by promising, despite the exculpatory findings of Robert Mueller
regarding "collusion," to fight evil "Trump-Putin" forces in Washington. Meanwhile, some
Republicans, despite ample contrary evidence, preposterously blame Russia itself -- for the
infamous Steele Dossier, for example. (By the way, for more irony, Trump is regularly accused
in the above-cited news accounts of "siding with" Russian President Vladimir Putin in denying
that any "collusion" determined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, a conclusion
also reached by Mueller, thereby putting Trump, Putin, and Mueller on the same "side.")
Ideally, we would have an investigation of the intelligence agencies entirely independent of
the White House headed by an eminent political figure who is not a presidential appointee, as
was the 1975 Senate Church Committee. For now, we have only Trump's attorney general, William
Barr. Nonetheless, we should support him, however conditionally. Rogue intelligence agencies
subvert democracy, and the next candidate they target -- as they did Trump -- may be yours.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the
host of The John Batchelor Show .
Now in their sixth year, previous installments are atTheNation.com . Ad PolicyStephen F. Cohen Stephen F. Cohen is a
professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton
University. A Nation contributing editor, his new book War With Russia? From Putin
& Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback and in an ebook
edition.
Alongside and consistent with other privilege- and power-serving missions, so-called
mainstream corporate media's role is to keep the populace focused as best it can on relatively
trivial matters and diverted from the most urgent topics of our time.
Kamala Harris Wants to Kill Your Health Insurance
Two Sundays ago, in a fit of masochistic media research, I watched some cable news talking
heads do their weekly news roundups. CNN had a panel of know-it-all neoliberals who reflected
on the Democratic Party's first two presidential debates. Everyone agreed that Kamala Harris
had been the big winner but had erred badly by embracing "the abolition of private health
insurance."
That's how CNN's "expert commentators" describe Medicare for All – not as high quality
and low-cost health care as a human right with great direct and collateral benefits resulting
from the eviction of corporate profit from coverage. Not as a great potential social and human
rights victory, but as destruction : the "abolition" of (unmentionably parasitic,
classist, exclusionary, inferior, and expensive, for-profit) health insurance.
Not that Senator Harris would seriously fight for Single Payer. She wouldn't. She's a
corporate
Democrat .
But I digress.
The chattering CNN craniums shifted to the United States Women's World Cup soccer team that
was triumphing in Paris. The panelists applauded the team's star, Megan Rapione, a lesbian who
refuses to visit the Donald Trump White House. (Good for her, but why not visit and spit in the
Malignant One's eye?).
Joy Reid Blames Russia for Anti-Kamala Birtherism
Over on the openly partisan-Democratic cable network MSNBC (hereafter "MSDNC"), morning host
Joy Reid was going off about the Huxwellian idiocy of Donald Trump's DMZ handshake with Kim
Jong-Un and the strange kind of love Trump has for the North Korean dictator and other
authoritarian heads-of-state. As usual with MSDNC, it was hard to detect the line separating
the network's proper criticism of Trump from its
deep investment in U.S. imperialism .
Consistent with the investment, Reid turned to the noxious racist vulgarity of online
rightists who claim that Kamala Harris isn't a "real African-American." Reid showed viewers a
copy of the Mueller Report and claimed without a hint of proof that the neo-Birther
Internet campaign against Harris was directed by the Russians? Her evidence? The Mueller
Report, completed prior to the Harris smear.
He is definitely a "CIA democrat" like Obama before him
Notable quotes:
"... In the media, Buttigieg is described as a 37-year-old "boy wonder," an "intelligent and worldly man" who speaks seven languages, whose speeches on the campaign trail exude intelligence and thoughtfulness, a former Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard and Oxford, who, driven by the ideal of public service, returned to his humble Midwestern roots to become mayor of his impoverished hometown, and who single-handedly sparked a renaissance in South Bend after a half-century of urban decay. ..."
"... Buttigieg has distinguished himself by his reluctance to take concrete positions on major political questions. His campaign website initially had no reference to policies, speaking only of the need to restore "values." ..."
"... As the campaign has developed, Buttigieg has taken substantive political positions that demonstrate he is a thoroughly establishment figure, aligned more with the "moderate" wing of the Democrats headed by former Vice President Joe Biden, and flatly opposed to the policies identified with Sanders ..."
"... Buttigieg was talent-spotted early and has moved in the top circles of the US national security establishment from the time he left college. From 2004 to 2005 (when he was 22 and 23), he worked as a conference director for the Cohen Group, a Washington-based consultancy that advises clients on international investment strategies. ..."
"... This aspect of Buttigieg's resumé closely resembles that of Barack Obama, who worked for CIA-connected Business International at age 21-22, making connections within the national security apparatus that stood him in good stead during his meteoric political rise. ..."
"... From 2007 to 2010, the year before his first mayoral campaign, Buttigieg served as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm with revenues of over $10 billion. ..."
"... Media comments suggest that the Democratic Party sees one of the functions of Buttigieg's campaign as preventing Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. ..."
"... However, from the standpoint of the American ruling class, Buttigieg's most important credential by far is his military record. Between 2009 and 2017, Buttigieg was a lieutenant and naval intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve. ..."
"... According to a report in the Hill , "Buttigieg's reserve training took place at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, where he studied to become an intelligence officer. There, Buttigieg's background as a McKinsey consultant and his Rhodes scholar pedigree earned him a direct commission into the Navy." ..."
"... Two of the seven languages in which Buttigieg claims fluency are Arabic and Dari (the Afghan dialect of Persian, spoken by about one-third of the population). Such language skills are likely the product of intensive military-intelligence training. ..."
"... The presence of ex-military officers in the Democratic field is part of a larger process, the direct incorporation of military and intelligence figures into the leading personnel of the Democratic Party, a phenomenon the World Socialist Web Site identified among Democratic candidates for Congress in 2018 (see: The CIA Democrats ). ..."
The World Socialist Web Site has begun an occasional series of articles
profiling the major candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the 2020
elections.WSWSwriters will examine the political history and program of each
candidate, making the case for a socialist alternative for the working class to both the
Democrats and the Trump administration. The first article, onElizabeth Warren ,
appeared on July 11.
Over the past six months, Pete Buttigieg has emerged as a potential dark horse candidate
in the Democratic Party presidential primaries. The two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana --
now referred to by the shorthand title "Mayor Pete" -- has gained extensive media coverage
and built a fundraising machine, raking in $24.8 million in the second quarter of 2019, the
most for any Democrat.
Buttigieg has been the most aggressive holder of high-dollar fundraisers, attending dozens
of such events, particularly in California and the northeast, and raising much of his money
from Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
His poll numbers have not responded in direct proportion to the build-up, however. He
regularly appears in fifth place, making him the lowest in the top tier of candidates. And
his campaign received a significant blow in mid-June with the killing of a black resident of
South Bend by a white cop, which forced Buttigieg to leave the campaign trail briefly to deal
with the crisis.
Three factors account for Buttigieg's rise. His age, 37, is in sharp contrast to the two
top candidates when he entered the race, Joe Biden, 76, and Bernie Sanders, 77, to say
nothing of the geriatric leadership of the House Democrats: Nancy Pelosi, 79, Steny Hoyer,
80, and Jim Clyburn, 79. He is the only openly gay candidate among the 24 primary
contestants, married to another gay man, Chasten Glezman. And most importantly -- from the
standpoint of his acceptability to the US ruling elite -- he is a veteran of naval
intelligence, having served a tour of duty in Afghanistan, where he helped identify targets
for assassination squads.
These attributes -- comparative youth, identity as a gay man and a background in military
intelligence, together with his public embrace of religion (he is a practicing Episcopalian)
-- make Buttigieg something of a made-to-order candidate from the standpoint of the
Democratic Party establishment. His candidacy ticks a number of boxes: anchoring the primary
campaign in a right-wing national security perspective; employing youth and identity to
appeal to the predominately youthful supporters of Sanders; and elevating a right-wing figure
as a "next-generation" leader of the Democrats, although perhaps a more likely candidate for
the vice presidency than the top job.
The American public could be forgiven for wondering why the mayor of a small Midwestern
city (306th largest in the country) has suddenly appeared on their television screens in
extensive and mostly favorable news reports that paint him as a serious candidate for the
Democratic nomination.
Buttigieg's only other foray into national politics was a failed 2017 bid for chair of the
Democratic National Committee (DNC), a position that attracts relatively little public
attention. A poll from late March found that 62 percent of respondents did not even know who
Buttigieg was, although extensive media coverage has caused that figure to fall rapidly.
In the media, Buttigieg is described as a 37-year-old "boy wonder," an "intelligent and
worldly man" who speaks seven languages, whose speeches on the campaign trail exude
intelligence and thoughtfulness, a former Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard and Oxford,
who, driven by the ideal of public service, returned to his humble Midwestern roots to become
mayor of his impoverished hometown, and who single-handedly sparked a renaissance in South
Bend after a half-century of urban decay.
As usual, the media depiction is largely at odds with reality.
One of the most noteworthy features of Buttigieg's campaign so far is its political
amorphousness. Even by the standards of American capitalist elections, where issues of
concern to the working class are systematically excluded from the public discussion,
Buttigieg has distinguished himself by his reluctance to take concrete positions on major
political questions. His campaign website initially had no reference to policies, speaking
only of the need to restore "values."
As the campaign has developed, Buttigieg has taken substantive political positions that
demonstrate he is a thoroughly establishment figure, aligned more with the "moderate" wing of
the Democrats headed by former Vice President Joe Biden, and flatly opposed to the policies
identified with Sanders. Buttigieg rejects the single-payer "Medicare for All" slogan
proposed by Sanders and taken up by many other Democrats in favor of the establishment of a
"public option" available on the health insurance exchanges set up under Obamacare.
One proposal that has garnered media attention is his plan to expand the Supreme Court to
15 judges, a cosmetic change that would not alter the fundamental character of the court as a
bastion of political reaction. He has also called for elimination of the Electoral College,
although this would require passage of a constitutional amendment, which is highly
unlikely.
Voters would certainly find little in Buttigieg's political record, consisting of a
two-term stint as mayor of South Bend, to inspire enthusiasm. In the press, Buttigieg is
touted as a "turnaround" mayor who has placed the ailing former factory town and site of the
University of Notre Dame on the road to economic recovery.
In actual fact, his main achievements include the bulldozing of hundreds of empty homes in
blighted working class neighborhoods, the sprucing up of the downtown area, and the
attraction of modest investment from IT corporations, measures whose impact is not to lift
working class residents out of poverty, but rather to gentrify the city and drive up real
estate values. Even a favorable review of "Mayor Pete's" time in office by an Indiana
economist was forced to admit that "other than sharing in the unemployment-rate reductions of
the national economic expansion, none of the top-line economic indicators for South Bend have
changed markedly over Buttigieg's mayoral stint."
The New York Times wrote in a profile: "Some of the data is dismal. Though the
overall poverty rate has fallen since Mr. Buttigieg took office, poverty among
African-Americans stubbornly remains almost twice as high as for African-Americans
nationwide. The city has one of the highest eviction rates in the country, which has doubled
under the mayor, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In households with
working adults, 54 percent do not earn enough to meet a 'survival budget,' according to the
United Way."
A glaring spotlight was placed on the actual state of affairs in South Bend on June 16,
when a white policeman shot to death a 53-year-old black man, Eric Logan. The cop, who had
been previously linked to reports of brutality, was equipped with a body camera but did not
turn it on when he confronted Logan in a parking lot and shot him fatally, claiming that
Logan had menaced him with a knife.
Buttigieg had to leave the campaign trail and return to South Bend, appearing at town hall
meetings where he and the police force were loudly denounced. While police killings are not
primarily a racial issue -- the largest number of those killed by police are white, and
minority police shoot people just as frequently as white police -- there is clearly a large
element of racial injustice in South Bend. The city is 40 percent nonwhite, but under
Buttigieg's leadership the proportion of African-American police has fallen from 10 percent
in 2011 to only 5 percent today. At the Democratic debate in Miami, Buttigieg claimed to have
tried and failed to recruit a more diverse police force.
Given this mediocre record, what recommends "Mayor Pete" for promotion to the highest
levels of the American state? Clearly, other factors are driving his buildup in the
media.
Buttigieg was talent-spotted early and has moved in the top circles of the US national
security establishment from the time he left college. From 2004 to 2005 (when he was 22 and
23), he worked as a conference director for the Cohen Group, a Washington-based consultancy
that advises clients on international investment strategies.
The Cohen Group is headed by former Republican Senator William Cohen, who was secretary of
defense under Democratic President Bill Clinton. Its principals, besides Cohen, include Marc
Grossman, undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Bush administration and
special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under Obama; retired General Joseph
Ralston, who concluded a 37-year Air Force career as chief of the European command and
supreme allied commander, Europe; and Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to NATO and Grossman's
successor as undersecretary of state for political affairs under Bush.
This aspect of Buttigieg's resumé closely resembles that of Barack Obama, who
worked for CIA-connected Business International at age 21-22, making connections within the
national security apparatus that stood him in good stead during his meteoric political
rise.
From 2007 to 2010, the year before his first mayoral campaign, Buttigieg served as a
consultant at McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm with revenues of over
$10 billion.
Media comments suggest that the Democratic Party sees one of the functions of Buttigieg's
campaign as preventing Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. An opinion piece in the
Washington Post headlined "Buttigieg might save the Democratic Party from Sanders,"
applauded Buttigieg's public criticism of Sanders' occasional use of the word "socialism."
Buttigieg said: "I think of myself as progressive. But I also believe in capitalism, but it
has to be democratic capitalism." The Post author commented: "In many ways, Buttigieg
is ideally suited to take on Sanders for the hearts, minds and political survival of the
Democratic Party."
While the Democrats know that Sanders poses no threat to American capitalism, they are
determined to prevent social opposition within the working class from finding even a
distorted reflection in their general election campaign, as in 2016, when the DNC attempted
to sabotage Sanders' primary campaign.
However, from the standpoint of the American ruling class, Buttigieg's most important
credential by far is his military record. Between 2009 and 2017, Buttigieg was a lieutenant
and naval intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve.
According to a report in the Hill , "Buttigieg's reserve training took place at
Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, where he studied to become an intelligence
officer. There, Buttigieg's background as a McKinsey consultant and his Rhodes scholar
pedigree earned him a direct commission into the Navy."
"We had group of young, accomplished civilians -- assistant US attorneys and FBI agents,"
Thomas Gary, a senior petty officer at the Great Lakes station at the time, told the
Hill . "Pete fit right in."
In 2014, during his first term as mayor, Buttigieg was deployed to Afghanistan, where he
was a member of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, a counter-terrorism group established in 2008
by then-commanding General David Petraeus. Through his work in this task force, Buttigieg was
involved in activities that placed individuals on the US military's "kill or capture list,"
targeting these opponents of the US occupation for assassination or extraordinary rendition
to a CIA black site.
Two of the seven languages in which Buttigieg claims fluency are Arabic and Dari (the
Afghan dialect of Persian, spoken by about one-third of the population). Such language skills
are likely the product of intensive military-intelligence training.
The presence of ex-military officers in the Democratic field is part of a larger process,
the direct incorporation of military and intelligence figures into the leading personnel of
the Democratic Party, a phenomenon the World Socialist Web Site identified among
Democratic candidates for Congress in 2018 (see: The CIA Democrats ).
Buttigieg is also on the board of directors of the Truman Center, an imperialist foreign
policy group. Other board members include former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and
Leon Panetta, former CIA director and secretary of defense. The Truman Center is a veritable
training center for CIA Democrats, offering workshops and messaging guidelines for
up-and-coming politicians. It boasts on its website: "Our community includes more than 1,700
post-9/11 veterans, frontline civilians, policy experts, and political professionals who
share a common vision of US leadership abroad."
Buttigieg's relative silence on foreign policy issues cannot be explained by a disinterest
or lack of knowledge. It can be explained only as a deliberate attempt to avoid airing views
he knows are widely unpopular, but which are mainstream within the Democratic Party.
When he finally delivered a significant foreign policy address, in May, it was at the
Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, which is
named in honor of former Democratic Congressman Lee H. Hamilton and former Republican Senator
Richard G. Lugar, both pillars of the foreign policy establishment.
Buttigieg denounced China for "authoritarian capitalism" and a poor record on human
rights, citing in particular the plight of Muslim Uighurs in Sinkiang, a longtime target of
CIA efforts to destabilize the Beijing regime. He called for stepped-up US investment in
infrastructure and education in order to "compete for the global economic future." And he
referred sarcastically to Trump's dealings with Moscow, calling Russia "not a real estate
opportunity but an adversarial actor."
In 2018, the Truman Center released a messaging pamphlet for elected officials and
candidates that completely coincides with the Democrats' right-wing campaign against Trump
over foreign policy. The first section, for example, declares Russia an "historic adversary"
of the United States and asserts that the intelligence community (which is directly
represented on the Truman Center's board) has "decisively confirmed" that Russia "interfered"
in the 2016 elections.
In light of Buttigieg's national security background, his campaign proposal for the
establishment of a "national service" program has particularly ominous implications.
Buttigieg argues that such a program is necessary to promote a feeling of unity and "social
cohesion" within the American population. In reality, such a program would amount to a return
to the draft, combined perhaps with labor conscription, which could be used to suppress wages
and living standards in the working class.
Whether or not Buttigieg ultimately wins the nomination, and at this point the possibility
seems remote, his sudden elevation in advance of the primaries flows from definite political
considerations within the Democratic Party itself. Whoever ultimately wins the nomination
must be acceptable to the corporate aristocracy and the military apparatus the Democrats
represent. However, the debacle of the Hillary Clinton campaign revealed, much to the
Democrats' surprise, that any figure publicly identified with social inequality and war is
liable to be deeply hated, particularly within the working class.
Within this context, Buttigieg has emerged as a figure whose particular combination of
personal characteristics -- his youth, his sexual identity as a gay man, his association with
the industrial Midwest where Clinton was wiped out by Trump, his media-concocted reputation
for intelligent public speaking, and, above all, his lack of a well-known political track
record -- might serve as a more suitable package for the same brand of politics.
One gets the sense that the Democratic Party is attempting replicate its success with
Barack Obama, whose formless demagogy about "hope" and "change" was able to divert popular
hostility to the political establishment, allowing the voters to see in him what they wanted
to see. Buttigieg's status as the first gay man to become a serious presidential hopeful
would thus parallel Obama's role as the "first black president."
In the context of popular disillusionment with eight bitter years under Obama, however, it
is unlikely the Democrats will be able to pull off the same trick twice.
"... The whole story of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election is "crazy," he says. Hillary Clinton had done everything wrong as a candidate, had led the Democratic Party into misfortune. There was no need for anything Russian. "Where is the evidence? There is none." ..."
"... Two years ago Hersh published a piece on Syria in Welt. He needs to go to Deutschland to get published, being banned from the MSM. ..."
"... Just like Col. Lang, Juan Cole and so many others. Our press is strictly controlled to focus on The Narrative. ..."
"... "Please watch this clip. It captures Russiagate perfectly: blaming Russian bots, neoliberals like Kamala Harris show ignorance about domestic injustices & contempt for those fighting it; while at the same time, sounding like deranged conspiracy theorists in the process." ..."
"... Lots of garbage trying to pollute our minds. Truth is the only antidote, but at times it's hard to find. Search for it and fight complacency. ..."
Form a
portrait of Seymour Hersh in the German weekly Die Zeit (my translation):
The whole story of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election is "crazy," he
says. Hillary Clinton had done everything wrong as a candidate, had led the Democratic Party
into misfortune. There was no need for anything Russian. "Where is the evidence? There is
none."
Use as open thread ...
Posted by b on July 14, 2019 at 13:16 UTC | Permalink
"Please watch this clip. It captures Russiagate perfectly: blaming Russian bots,
neoliberals like Kamala Harris show ignorance about domestic injustices & contempt for
those fighting it; while at the same time, sounding like deranged conspiracy theorists in the
process."
"This is really good -- from calling out U.S. foreign policy that causes ppl to migrate to
the history of the term 'concentration camps' to the larger tradition of racist, state
sanctioned violence against ppl from the Southern border region."
Lots of garbage trying to pollute our minds. Truth is the only antidote, but at times it's
hard to find. Search for it and fight complacency.
If you have ever traveled in Russia outside of Moscow, you certainly have some horrible
stories to tell about its atrocious roads, food and lodging or rather lack thereof. Things have
changed greatly, and they keep changing. Now there are modern highways, plenty of cafés
and restaurants, a lot of small hotels; plumbing has risen to Western standards; the old pearls
of architecture have been lavishly restored; people live better than they ever did. They still
complain a lot, but that is human nature. Young and middle-aged Russians own or charter motor
boats and sail their plentiful rivers; they own country houses ("dachas") more than anywhere
else. They travel abroad for their vacations, pay enormous sums of money for concerts of
visiting celebrities, ride bikes in the cities – in short, Russia has become as
prosperous as any European country.
This hard-earned prosperity and political longevity allows President Putin to hold his own
in the international affairs. He is one of a few experienced leaders on the planet with twenty
years at the top job. He has met with three Popes of Rome, four US Presidents, and many other
rulers. This is important: 93-years old Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad who ruled his Malaysia
for 40 years and has been elected again said the first ten years of a ruler are usually wasted
in learning the ropes, and only after first twenty does he becomes proficient in the art of
government. The first enemy a ruler must fight is his own establishment: media, army,
intelligence and judges. While Trump is still losing in this conflict, Putin is doing fine
– by his Judoka evasive action.
Recently a small tempest has risen in the Russian media, when a young journalist was
detained by police, and a small quantity of drugs was allegedly discovered on his body. The
police made many mistakes in handling the case. Perhaps they planted the evidence to frame the
young man; perhaps they had made the obvious mistakes to frame the government. The response has
been tremendous, as if the whole case had been prepared well in advance by the opposition
hell-bent to annoy and wake up the people's ire against the police and administration. Instead
of supporting the police, as Putin usually does, in this case he had the journalist released
and senior police officers arrested. This prompt evasive action undid the opposition's build-up
by one masterly stroke.
Recently he openly declared his distaste for liberalism in the interview for the FT . This is a major
heresy, like Luther's Ninety-five Theses. "The liberals cannot dictate Their diktat can be seen
everywhere: both in the media and in real life. It is deemed unbecoming even to mention some
topics The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of
the overwhelming majority of the population." Putin condemned liberals' drive for more
immigration. He called Angela Merkel's decision to admit millions of immigrants a "cardinal
mistake"; he "understood" Trump's attempt to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from
Mexico.
Putin is not an enemy of liberalism. He is rather an old-fashionable liberal of the 19
th century style. Not a current 'liberal', but a true liberal, rejecting
totalitarian dogma of gender, immigration, multiculturalism and R2P wars. "The liberal idea
cannot be destroyed; it has the right to exist and it should even be supported in some things.
But it has no right to be the absolute dominating factor."
In Putin's Russia liberalism is non-exclusive, but presents just one possible line of
development. Homosexuals are not discriminated against nor promoted. There are no gay parades,
no persecution of gays, either. Russian children aren't being brainwashed to hate their
fathers, taken away from their families and given to same-sex maniacs, as it happened in the
recent Italian case . Kids aren't
being introduced to joys of sex in primary schools. People are not requested to swear love to
transgenders and immigrants. You can do whatever you wish, just do not force others to follow
you – this is Putin's first rule, and this is true liberalism in my book.
There is very little immigration into Russia despite millions of requests: foreigners can
come in as guest workers, but this does not lead to permanent residency or citizenship. The
Police frequently check foreign-looking people and rapidly deport them if found in breach of
visa rules. Russian nationalists would want even more action, but Putin is a true liberal.
... ... ...
Why does Putin care about the US? Why can't he just stop taking dollars? This means he is an
American stooge! – an eager-for-action hothead zealot would exclaim. The answer is, the
US has gained a lot of power; much more than it had in 1988, when Reagan negotiated with
Gorbachev. The years of being the sole superpower weren't wasted. American might is not to be
trifled with.
New York Times insinuated.
True, Russia is big enough to survive even that treatment, but Russians have got used to a
good life, and they won't cherish being returned to the year 1956. They took action to prevent
these worst-case scenarios; for instance, they sold much of their US debt and
moved out of Microsoft , but these things are time-consuming and expensive. Putin hopes
that eventually the US will abandon its quest for dominance and assume a live-and-let-live
attitude as demanded by the international law. Until it happens, he is forced to play by
Washington rules and try to limit antagonism.
An experienced broker came in, promising to deliver the deal. It is the Jewish state,
claiming to have the means to navigate the US in the desired direction. This is a traditional
Jewish claim, used in the days of the WWI to convince the UK to enter the deal: you give us
Palestine; we shall bring the US into the European war on your side. Then it worked: the Brits
and their Aussie allies stormed Gaza, eventually took over the Holy Land, issued the Balfour
declaration promising to pass Palestine to the Jews, and in return, fresh American troops
poured into the European theatre of war, causing German surrender.
This time, the Jewish state proposed that Putin should give up his ties with Iran; in
return, they promised to assist in general warming of Russo-American relations. Putin had a
bigger counter-proposal: Let the US lift its Iran sanctions and withdraw its armed forces from
Syria, and Russia will try to usher Iranian armed forces out of Syria, too. The ensuing
negotiations around Iran-Syria deal would lead to recognition of the US and Israel interests in
Syria, and further on it could lead to negotiations in other spheres.
This was a clear win-win proposal. Iran would emerge free of sanctions; Israel and the US
would have their interests recognised in Syria; the much-needed dialogue between Russia and the
US will get a jump-start. But Israel does not like win-win proposals. The Jewish state wants
clear victories, preferably with their enemy defeated, humiliated, hanged. Israel rejected the
proposal, for it wanted Iran to suffer under sanctions.
... ... ...
Russia certainly wants to live in peace with the US, but not at the price Mr Netanyahu
suggested. Mr Patrushev condemned the US sanctions against Iran. He
said that Iran shot down the giant American drone RQ-4A Global Hawk worth more than a hundred
million dollars over Iranian territory, not in the international airspace as the Pentagon
claimed. He stated that American "evidence" that Iran had sabotaged tankers in the Persian Gulf
was inconclusive. Russia demanded that the United States stop its economic war against Iran,
recognize the legitimate authorities of Syria, led by President Bashar Assad, and withdraw its
troops from Syria. Russia expressed its support for the legitimate government in Venezuela.
Thus, Russia showed itself at this difficult moment as a reliable ally and partner, and at the
same time assured the staggering Israeli leadership of its friendship.
The problem is that the drive for war with Iran is not gone. A few days ago, the Brits
seized an Iranian super-tanker in the Straits of Gibraltar. The tanker was on its way to
deliver oil to Syria. Before that, the United States had almost launched a missile attack on
Iran. At the last moment, when the planes were already in the air, Trump stopped the operation.
It is particularly disturbing that he himself unambiguously hinted that the operation was
launched
without his knowledge . That is, the chain of commands in the US is now torn, and it is not
clear who can start a war. This has to be taken into account both in Moscow and in Tehran.
... ... ...
Russia wants to help Iran, not out of sheer love to the Islamic Republic, but as a part of
its struggle for multi-polar world, where independent states carry on the way they like. Iran,
North Korea, Venezuela – their fight for survival is a part and parcel of Russia's
struggle. If these states will be taken over, Russia can become the next victim, Putin
feels.
... ... ...
In this situation, Putin tries to build bridges to the new forces in Europe and the US, to
work with nationalist right. It is not the most obvious partner for this old-fashioned liberal,
but they fit into his idea of multi-polarity, of supremacy of national sovereignty and of
resistance to the world hegemony of Atlantic powers. His recent visit to Italy, a country with
strong nationalist political forces, had been successful; so was his meeting with the Pope.
In the aftermath of the audience with the Pope, Putin strongly defended the Catholic Church,
saying that "There are problems, but they cannot be over-exaggerated and used for destroying
the Roman Catholic Church itself. I get the feeling that these liberal circles are beginning to
use certain problems of the Catholic Church as a tool for destroying the Church itself. This is
what I consider to be incorrect and dangerous. After all, we live in a world based on Biblical
values and traditional values are more stable and more important for millions of people than
this liberal idea, which, in my opinion, is really ceasing to exist". For years, the Europeans
haven't heard this message. Perhaps this is the right time to listen.
The author is referring to WWI and the Balfour Declaration of Nov 1917 which indeed was
drafted on behalf of Jewish Zionist interests who in return did their level best in bringing
Wilson, who was long backed by NYC banking interests (hence the Federal Reserve Act of 1913
enacted on his watch), into the war which materially changed its dynamics and outcome.
The Ukraine in all this? I would think it a far bigger concern for Russia in any
trilateral meeting.
Do not expect anything on the Ukraine in the near future. Trump wants the DNC to nominate
guaranteed loser Biden. Then he can beat him senseless using 'Ukrainian tampering with U.S.
elections' via Biden's family business interests (1).
_____
Now that the Mueller exoneration is complete, the door is open to improved U.S. –
Russia relations. The important thing is looking at Putin's and Trump's actions , more
so than their words.
Trump's words sound 'officially concerned' about Crimea. However, this is primarily for EU
consumption. What actions has the Trump administration taken about Crimea? Little or nothing
depending on how you score the matter. So tacit acknowledgement pending a quid pro quo
.
Putin administration words (but not Putin himself) have said strong sounding things about
Iran. However, there are no actions that support a deep relationship.
-- Russia sells munitions to Iran on a 'cash & carry' basis along with many other nations
including Turkey. Russia and Israel have much stronger ties on the military equipment basis.
Look at their recent joint sale of AWACS to India (2).
-- Russia continues to let the Israeli air force freely strike Iranian al'Hezbollah and
al'Quds targets in Syria.
It looks like the quid pro quo arrangement will be Crimea for an Iranian exit from
Syria. It's a deal that would help peace throughout the region.
But he is hampered by his "deep state", by Pompeo and Bolton; about the latter, Trump
himself said that he wants to fight with the whole world. Presidents can't always remove
the ministers from whom they want to get rid of – even the absolute monarchs of the
past did not always succeed.
Actually, Trump is using Bolton against the deep state.
First and foremost, it is and advanced and skillful form of ' Good Cop – Bad
Cop '. When Bolton says something and Trump openly disagrees, it places the Fake Steam
Media complex in an untenable position. If they treat the story fairly, they embrace the
anathema of saying positive things about Trump. But they do not have any options to twist the
facts into their desired anti-American propaganda.
Secondarily, it also cleverly drives a wedge between two DNC factions:
-1- The true Clintonista believer, stricken by Trump Derangement Syndrome [TDS], will not
accept anything less than Impeachment. Preferably followed by turning him over to the Fascist
Stormtroopers of Antifa.
-2- Those with a less deranged view realise that a successful Impeachment process would
generate President Pence. And, he would be much more likely to accept Bolton's advice.
Perhaps Pence would pick Bolton to be Vice President.
Look at the circular firing squad that is forming up in the DNC nomination process to see
how Trump's deliberate agitation of various factions is working in his favor. The TDS faction
is winning and as a result the eventual DNC candidate will be unelectable.
@AghaHussain sts
plans have failed to materialise in Syria. The author here does a very good job of explaining
Russia's position and between his and Saker's analyses your argument is kaput and only fools
would buy it.
The Zionists went away empty handed with their visits to Russia and President Putin and if
anything Russia's resistance to the Zionists has hardened lately.
People who have two dimensional thinking and a limited box of clues seem to think it is as
simple as just saying no and digging their heels in but that way makes wars. Russia does not
have the sort of power nor an insane leadership that it would take for that.
The best hope for an internal Iranian solution is IRGC enlightened self interest. A fairly
bloodless replacement of Khameni with a general from the IRGC. It worked in Egypt and the
world welcomed that military solution. One can be 99% certain that replacing Khameni would be
just as welcome.
The new 'General Ayatollah in Chief' would have a free hand to disengage from Khameni's
extremism. The economic recovery from ending sanctions would guarantee internal popularity.
Think of it as MIGA, Make Iran Great Again , though they are unlikely to use that
exact phrase.
It's ludicrous to imagine that Russians are so wedded to the good life that they do not
dare antagonise Amerikastan. What "good life" is this? Ask the pensioners struggling on a few
thousand rubles a month how the hell they are supposed to manage. The luxuries enjoyed by the
yuppies in Moscow (most of whom, fluently English speaking and firmly pro-Amerikastani, are a
fifth column of Quislings) are not the life that the factory worker in Volgograd or the
farmer outside St Petersburg will recognise.
I want to sidetrack the thread to the matter of Edward Snowden.
Putin made a comment early on 'a strange young man'.
I understand exactly what he was saying. I am the same. No leaks. ht is a matter of
honour.
OTOH, confronted by wall-to-wal evil bullshit as he was, I think he was not in the wrong
(but have a little internal conflict on that, since the secrets 4 have to keep now are ooly
technical and at times commercial, such a dilemna never arises.
In no situation would such be ethical.
he was sorry for Sowden's girlfriend, he dumped her. but, not long after, she was with
him. Very romantic. Doubtless, Russian secret services had some role.
I like the happy ending there, it is very romantic.
Would make a great movie, but not possible from Hollywood, perhaps Russia could revive its
moribund film industry?
Oct 20, 2018 Putin: Russia Getting Rid Of US Dollar Matter Of National Security
Russian president Vladimir Putin: "That's what our American friends are doing. They're
undermining trust in the dollar as a universal payment instrument and the main reserve
currency."
@AmRusDebate t in
2014, and had gone so deep that there is no light at the end of the tunnel now. It is still
used by the Empire as an annoying sore right next to Russia, but that's all it can be. It did
not and could not deliver what the Empire was hoping for. The imperial planners never take
into account the critical condition for their "color revolutions" to bring US-friendly
compradores to power anywhere: the country in question must be rotten through and through.
Thus, instead of useful sharp tools they get worthless pieces of shit. They are still trying
to use an inevitable stink for their purposes, but that's the only use shit is good for.
It's not just Moscow yuppies. Visit any provincial city in Russia today and you'd see that
it looks way better than it ever did in the USSR. There are cafes everywhere and lots of
people in them spending serious money, because they can afford that. Drive on any road, in or
between the cities, and you can see that the roads are in a better shape than they ever were,
and there are lots of gas stations, cafes, and hotels along them, all doing brisk business.
Russians have ten times more cars now than they had in the USSR, and they drive a lot.
@A123 be deployed
right on Russia's border on yet another side. Russia would be readily bottled up and be
denied the freedom to navigate through the surrounding waters. And it would be more
vulnerable to land invasion from more points.
Russia should continue disentangling itself from US and US-Controller financial systems
and institutions. Keep becoming more able to sustain its people without so many imports of
foodstuffs and manufactured goods alike.
Far from giving up Crimea, Russia should bide its time and wait to retake the Donbass
region or more when Ukraine collapses, breaks up, and/or is outright occupied by the US.
I rather doubt you're in any position to judge whether Khameni is a sociopath.
And your fixation on regime change is noted. The ultimate expression of Western arrogance:
You, you benighted, retrograde, sociopathic worm, are not a fit chief executive of your
nation so we have decided you must go. If we have to kill hundreds of thousands of your
people that's just an unavoidable cost of our being the excellent people we are.
Liberalism in the West today is similar to communism in the SU in the late 80's: a
decrepit ideology that offers nothing to ordinary people and whose adherents are incapable of
anything but mouthing the same rubbish over and over. It will similarly die a well-deserved
death.
Looks like Mueller and his team were extremely sloppy and just milked the US government and try to feed rumors to the media.
Mueller emerged as a stooge of Clinton mafia.
Notable quotes:
"... In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin Stooge. ..."
"... The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as "fact" in the Mueller report. ..."
"... On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them. ..."
"... Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in contempt for violating rule 57.7. ..."
"... the Court has entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential sanctions. ..."
"... But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the Mueller Report and the actual indictment: ..."
"... By attributing IRA's conduct to "Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of, the Russian government. ..."
"... But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. ..."
"... Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence. ..."
"... I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out. ..."
"... The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more totalitarian sooner. ..."
"... a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html .) ..."
"... Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/ ) ..."
"... 'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.' ..."
"... Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.' ..."
"... It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017. ..."
"... Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding). ..."
"... Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's 'information operations' team. ..."
"... The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study 'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko. ..."
"... A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a very long way. ..."
Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by
Larry C Johnson
In the criminal case against alleged Russian operatives--Internet Research Agency and
Concord Management and Consulting LLC--a Federal judge has declared that Robert Mueller has not
offered one piece of solid evidence that these defendants were involved in any way with the
Government of Russia. I think this is a potential game changer.
The world of law as opposed to the world of intelligence is as different as Mercury and
Mars. The intelligence community aka IC can traffic in rumor and speculation. IC "solid"
intelligence may be nothing more than the strident assertion of a source who lacks actual first
hand knowledge of an event. The legal world does not enjoy that kind of sloppiness. If a
prosecutor makes a claim, i.e., Jack shot Jill, then said prosecutor must show that Jack owned
a firearm that matches the bullets recovered from Jill's body. Then the prosecutor needs to
show that Jack was with Jill when the shooting took place and that forensic evidence recovered
from Jack showed he had fired a firearm. Keep this distinction in mind as you consider what has
transpired in the case against the Internet Research Agency and Concord Management and
Consulting.
To understand why Judge Friedrich ruled as she did you must understand Local Rule 57.7.
That rule: restricts public dissemination of information by attorneys involved in criminal cases where
"there is a reasonable likelihood that such dissemination will interfere with a fair trial or
otherwise prejudice the administration of justice." It also authorizes the court "[i]n a widely
publicized or sensational criminal case" to issue a special order governing extrajudicial
statements and other matters designed to limit publicity that might interfere with the conduct
of a fair trial. . . .
The rule prohibits lawyers associated with the prosecution or defense
from publishing, between the time of the indictment and the commencement of trial, "[a]ny
opinion as to the accused's guilt or innocence or as to the merits of the case or the evidence
in the case."
In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for
example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without
presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin
Stooge.
The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant
discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as
"fact" in the Mueller report.
On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney
General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public
that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special
Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public
statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and
expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them.
Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in
contempt for violating rule 57.7.
Judge Friedrich gave Concord a partial victory:
Although the Court agrees that the government violated Rule 57.7 , it disagrees that
contempt proceedings are an appropriate response to that violation. Instead, the Court has
entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the
government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential
sanctions.
But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the
Mueller Report and the actual indictment:
The Special Counsel Report describes efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the
2016 presidential election. . . . But the indictment . . . does not link the defendants to the
Russian government. Save for a single allegation that Concord and Concord Catering had several
"government contracts" (with no further elaboration), id. ¶ 11, the indictment alleges
only private conduct by private actors.
. . . the concluding paragraph of the section of the [Mueller] Report related to Concord
states that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016
presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by"
Concord's co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA). By attributing IRA's conduct to
"Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the
activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of,
the Russian government.
Similarly, the Attorney General drew a link between the Russian government and this case
during a press conference in which he stated that "[t]he Special Counsel's report outlines two
main efforts by the Russian government to influence the 2016 election." . . . The "[f]irst"
involved "efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company with close ties to the
Russian government, to sow social discord among American voters through disinformation and
social media operations." Id. The "[s]econd" involved "efforts by Russian military officials
associated with the GRU," a Russian intelligence agency, to hack and leak private documents and
emails from the Democratic Party and the Clinton Campaign.
The Report explains that it used the term "established" whenever "substantial, credible
evidence enabled the Office to reach a conclusion with confidence." . . . It then states in its
conclusion that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the
2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by
the IRA." In context, this statement characterizes the evidence against the defendants as
"substantial" and "credible," and it provides the Special Counsel's Office's "conclusion" about
what actually occurred.
But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's
own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. Although
Mueller claims that it was "established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential
election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by" Concord's
co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), he provided no such evidence.
After two years and $35 million, Mueller apparently failed to uncover any direct evidence
linking the Prigozhin-controlled IRA's activities to the Kremlin. His best evidence is that
"[n]umerous media sources have reported on Prigozhin's ties to Putin, and the two have appeared
together in public photographs."
Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that
the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence.
Some readers will insist that Mueller and his team have actual intelligence but cannot put
that in an indictment. Well boys and girls, here is a simple truth--if you cannot produce
evidence that can be presented in court then you do not have a case. There is that part of the
Constitution that allows those accused of a crime to confront their accusers.
Minor quibble: Judge
Friedrich is a woman.
I expect that this will get no play from the MSM, since Judge Friedrich was appointed by
Trump, and "everyone" knows she's just covering up for him.
Under the conditions and in the environment that it was returned, this indictment was
Mueller and his partisan team throwing raw meat fo the media so as to prolong their mission,
nothing more. Once filed, no one involved ever expected to appear in a courtroom to prosecute
anyone, or defend any part of it. It was an abuse of process, pure and simple.
Consider it as a count against Mueller, his competence or his integrity, maybe both. He let
himself become a tool.
Johnson refers to "heartfelt beliefs" but i doubt Mueller believes his own bs. in this i
guess he distinguishes himself from earlier witch-hunters, who apparently sincerely believed
their targets were minions of satan.
I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They
believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election
by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out.
It seems on the current trajectory both the Trump colluded with Russia and our law
enforcement & IC attempted a soft-coup will die on the vine. The latter because Trump is
unwilling to declassify. It seems for him it was all just another reality TV show and him
tweeting "witch hunt" constantly was what the script called for.
The next time the IC &
law enforcement who now must believe that they are the real power behind the throne decide to
exercise that power it will be a doozie.
The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I
suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more
totalitarian sooner.
I think a large question is raised as to how far the kind of sloppiness in the handling of
evidence which Judge Friedrich identified in the Mueller report may have characterised a
great deal of the treatment of matters to do with the post-Soviet space by the FBI and others
– including almost all MSM journalists – for a very long time.
Unfortunately, one also finds this among some of the most useful critics of 'Russiagate'.
So, for example, in a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions
that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to
Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with
Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html
.)
He then however goes on to write: 'In other words, not only was the firm that hired
Steele, Fusion GPS, hired by the Russians, but Steele himself was hired directly by the
Russians.'
And Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and
puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with
Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/
)
Commenting on the fact that, in her scribbled notes, beside the names of Vladislav Surkov
and Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who are indeed a top Putin adviser and a former SVR chief
respectively, Kavalec writes 'source', McCarthy simply concludes that she meant that he had
said that these were his – indirect – sources, and that this was accurate. And he
goes on to write:
'Deripaska, Surkov, and Trubnikov were not informing on the Kremlin. These are Putin's
guys. They were peddling what the Kremlin wanted the world to believe, and what the Kremlin
shrewdly calculated would sow division in the American body politic. So, the question is: Did
they find the perfect patsy in Christopher Steele?'
If you look at Kavalec's typing up of the notes, among a good deal of what looks to me
like pure 'horse manure' – including the claim that 'Manafort has been the go-between
with the campaign' – the single reference to Surkov and Trubnikov is that they are said
to be 'also involved.'
As it happens, Surkov is a very complex figure indeed. His talents as a 'political
technologist' were first identified by Khodorkovsky, before he subsequently played that role
for Putin. It would obviously be possible that he and Steele still had common contacts.
The suggestion in Kavalec's notes that Sergei Millian 'may be involved in some way,' and
also that, 'Per Steele, Millian is connected Simon Kukes (who took over management of Yukos
when Khodorkovsky was arrested)' is interesting, but would seem to suggest that he would not
have been cited to Kavalec as an intermediary.
All this is obviously worth putting together with claims made in the 'New York Times'
follow-up on 9 July to the Reuters report on the same day breaking the story of the
interviews carried out with Steele by the Inspector General's team in early June.
'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr.
Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in
the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three
people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that
the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he
passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.'
Some observations prompted by all this.
Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has
been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that
Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but
everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including
that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.'
In trying to put together the accumulating evidence, it is necessary to realise, as so
many people seem to find it difficult to do, that in matters like these people commonly play
double games – often for very good reasons.
To say as Carlson does that Fusion and Steele were hired by 'the Russians' implies that
these are some kind of collective entity – and then, one is one step away from the
assumption that Veselnitskaya and Deripaska, as well as 'Putin's Cook', are simply puppets
controlled by the master manipulator in the Kremlin. (The fact that Friedrich applies serious
standards for assessing evidence to Mueller's version of this is one of the reasons why her
judgement is so important.)
As regards what McCarthy says, to lump Surkov and Deripaska together as 'Putin's guys' is
unhelpful. Actually, it seems to me very unlikely, although perhaps not absolutely
impossible, that, had he been implicated in any conspiracy to intervene in an American
election, Surkov would have been talking candidly about his role to anyone liable to relay
the information to Steele.
Likewise, however, the notion of a Machiachiavellian Surkov, feeding disinformation about
a non-existent plot through an intermediary to Steele, who swallows it hook, line and sinker,
does not seem particularly plausible.
A rather more obvious possibility is that the intermediaries who were supposed to have
conveyed a whole lot of 'smoking gun' evidence to Steele were either 1. fabrications, 2.
people whom without their knowledge he cast in this role, or 3. co-conspirators. It would,
obviously, be possible that Millian, although one can say no more than that at this stage,
was involved in either or both of roles 2. and 3.
It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent
Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given
a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence
Committee in November 2017.
Providing his version of what was going on following his move from the Washington office
of the 'Wall Street Journal' to its European headquarters in January 2005, Simpson told the
Committee:
'And the oligarchs, during this period of consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin, when I
was living in Brussels and doing all this work, was about him essentially taking control over
both the oligarchs and the mafia groups. And so basically everyone in Russia works for Putin
now. And that's true of the diaspora as well. So the Russian mafia in the United States is
believed bylaw enforcement criminologists to have – to be under the influence of the
Russian security services. And this is convenient for the security services because it gives
them a level of deniability.'
A bit less than two years after Simpson's move to Brussels, a similar account featured in
what appears to have been the first attempt by Christopher Steele and his confederates to
provide a 'narrative' in terms of which could situate the supposed assassination by polonium
poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.
This came in a BBC Radio 4 programme, entitled 'The Litvinenko Mystery', in which a
veteran presenter with the Corporation, Tom Mangold, produced an account by the former KGB
Major Yuri Shvets, supported by the former FBI Agent Robert Levinson, and an 'Unidentified
Informer', who is told by Mangold that he cannot be identified 'reasons of your own personal
security'.
This figure, whose credentials we have no means of assessing, explains:
'Well it's not well known to Western leaders or Western people but it is pretty well known
in Russia. Because essentially it is common knowledge in Russia that by the end of Nineties
the so called Russian organised crime had been destroyed by the Government and then the
Russian security agencies, primarily the law enforcement and primarily the FSB, essentially
assumes the functions and methods of Russian organised crime. And they became one of the most
dangerous organised crime group because they are protected by law. They're protected by all
power of the State. They have essentially the free hand in the country and this shadow
establishment essentially includes the entire structure of the FSB from the very top people
in Moscow going down to the low offices.'
The story Mangold told was a pathetic tale of how Litvinenko and Shvets, trying to turn an
honest penny from 'due diligence' work, identified damning evidence about the links of a
figure close to Putin to organised crime, who in return sent Andrei Lugovoi to poison the
former with polonium.
A few problems with this version have, however, subsequently, emerged. Among them is the
fact that, at the time, Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late
Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an
informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John
Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding).
Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important
figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's
'information operations' team.
Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the disappearance of Levinson, on the Iranian
island of Kish, the following March, was not as was claimed for years related to his private
sector work. His entrapment and imprisonment – from which we now know Deripaska was
later involved in attempting to rescue him – related to an undercover mission on behalf
of elements in the CIA.
The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study
'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson
in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information
operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko.
A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the
CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a
very long way.
And, among other things, that raises a whole range of questions about Mueller.
Great info, thanks. I admittedly don't watch the skeptics' comments closely enough, and
can be susceptible to twisted observations from guys like Carlson and Solomon.
"... You hypocrites! You build monuments for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, 'If we had lived in the days of our ancestors , we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of His messengers ..."
"... this entire Russian collusion meme seems as though it is an hysterical reaction to the spin put out by the Clinton political faction and their neoliberal enablers after their shocking loss in the 2016 Presidential election. ..."
"... the financial corruption and private pilfering using public power, money laundering and the kind of soft corruption that is rampant amongst our new elite is all there ..."
"... We are reassured and misled by the same kinds of voices that have always served the status quo and the monied interests, the think tanks, the so-called 'institutes,' and the web sites and former con men who offer a constant stream of thinly disguised propaganda and misstatements of principle and history. We are comforted by their lies. ..."
"... We wish to strike a deal with the Lord, and a deal with the Devil -- to serve both God and Mammon as it suits us. It really is that cliché. And it is so finely woven into the fabric of our day that we cannot see it; we cannot see that it is happening to us and around us. ..."
"... It has always been so, especially in times of such vanity and greed as are these. Then is now. There is nothing new under the sun. And certainly nothing exceptional about the likes of us in our indulgent self-destruction. ..."
"He drew near and saw the city, and he wept for it saying, 'If you had only recognized the things that make for peace.
But now you are blinded to them. Truly, the days will come when your enemies will set up barriers to surround you, and hem
you in on every side. Then they will crush you into the earth, you and your children. And they will not leave one stone
upon another, because you did not recognize the way to your salvation.'"
Luke 19:41-44
"You hypocrites! You build monuments for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, 'If
we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of His messengers.'"
Matthew 23:29-30
...the results of the Senate GOP finding no evidence of 'collusion' with Russia by the Trump Administration to influence the
results of the presidential election..
This last item is not surprising, because this entire Russian collusion meme seems as though it is an hysterical reaction
to the spin put out by the Clinton political faction and their neoliberal enablers after their shocking loss in the 2016 Presidential
election.
Too bad though, because the financial corruption and private pilfering using public power, money laundering and the kind
of soft corruption that is rampant amongst our new elite is all there. And by there we mean on both sides of the fence -- which
is why it had to take a back seat to a manufactured boogeyman.
... ... ...
There is a long road ahead before we see anything like a resolution to this troubling period in American political history.
We look back at other troubled periods and places, and either see them as discrete and fictional, a very different world apart,
or through some rosy lenses of good old times which were largely benign and peaceful. We fail to see the continuity, the similarity,
and the commonality of a dangerous path with ourselves. As they did with their own times gone by. Madness blinds its acolytes, because
they wish it so. They embrace it to hide their shame.
We are reassured and misled by the same kinds of voices that have always served the status quo and the monied interests,
the think tanks, the so-called 'institutes,' and the web sites and former con men who offer a constant stream of thinly disguised
propaganda and misstatements of principle and history. We are comforted by their lies.
People want to hear these reassuring words of comfort and embrace it like a 'religion,' because they do not wish to draw the
conclusions that the genuine principles of faith suggest (dare we say command in this day and age) in their daily lives.
They blind themselves by adopting a kind of a schizoid approach to life, where 'religion' occupies a discrete, rarefied space, and
'political or economic philosophy' dictates another set of everyday 'practical' observances and behaviors which are more pliable,
and pleasing to our hardened and prideful hearts.
We wish to strike a deal with the Lord, and a deal with the Devil -- to serve both God and Mammon as it suits us. It really is
that cliché. And it is so finely woven into the fabric of our day that we cannot see it; we cannot see that it is happening to us
and around us.
And so we trot on into the abyss, one exception and excuse and rationalization for ourselves at a time. And we blind ourselves
with false prophets and their profane theories and philosophies.
As for truth, the truth that brings life, we would interrupt the sermon on the mount itself, saying that this sentiment was all
very well and good, but what stocks should we buy for our portfolio, and what horse is going to win the fifth at Belmont? Tell us
something useful, practical! Oh, and can you please fix this twinge in my left shoulder? It is ruining my golf game.
"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves,
after a fashion; they cannot understand destitution. Capable of giving alms, perhaps, but incapable of stripping themselves
bare, they will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus's sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will
horrify them. They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, hanging from a woman's
beautiful throat."
Léon Bloy
No surprise in this. It has always been so, especially in times of such vanity and greed as are these. Then is now. There
is nothing new under the sun. And certainly nothing exceptional about the likes of us in our indulgent self-destruction.
"... Thus, the IRA played a major role in the vast Kremlin conspiracy to alter the outcome of the 2016 election and install Donald Trump in office. But now Judge Dabney Friedrich has ordered Mueller to stop pushing such stories because they're unfair to Concord Management and Consulting, another Prigozhin company, which astonished the legal world in May 2018 by hiring an expensive Washington law firm and demanding its day in court ..."
"... Without the IRA, the only argument left in Mueller's brief is that Russia stole some 28,000 emails and other electronic documents from Democratic National Committee computers and then passed them along to WikiLeaks , which published them to great fanfare in July 2016. ..."
"... But as Consortium News pointed out the day the Mueller report came out, that's dubious as well. [See " The 'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report ," April 18.] The reason: it rests on a timeline that doesn't make sense: ..."
"... why would Assange announce the leaked emails on June 12 before hearing from the source on June 22? ..."
"... How could that be enough time to review the contents and ensure they were genuine? "If a single one of those emails had been shown to be maliciously altered," blogger Mark F. McCarty points out , "WikiLeaks's reputation would have been in tatters." Quite right. So if Mueller's chronology doesn't hold up, then Assange's original statement that "our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party" still stands – which it plainly does. ..."
"... Bottom line: Russiagate is going up in smoke. The claim that Russian military intelligence fed thousands of emails to WikiLeaks doesn't stand up to scrutiny while Mueller is not only unable to a prove a connection between the Internet Research Agency and the Kremlin but is barred from even discussing it, according to Friedrich's ruling, without risking a charge of contempt. After 22 months of investigating the ins and outs of Russian interference, Mueller seems to have finally come up dry. ..."
"... "Revenge of the oligarchs" might be a good headline for this story. The IRA indictment initially seemed to be a no-lose proposition for Mueller. He got to look good in the press, the media got to indulge in yet another round of Russia-bashing, while, best of all, no one had to prove a thing. "Mueller's allegations will never be tested in court," noted Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor turned pundit for the rightwing National Review . "That makes his indictment more a political statement than a charging instrument." ..."
"... Then came the unexpected. Concord Management hired Reed Smith, a top-flight law firm with offices around the world, and demanded to be heard. ..."
"... then the firm demanded to exercise its right of discovery, meaning that it wanted access to Mueller's immense investigative file. Blindsided, Mueller's requested a delay "on the astonishing ground," according to McCarthy , "that the defendant has not been properly served – notwithstanding that the defendant has shown up in court and asked to be arraigned." ..."
"... Prigozhin was forcing the special prosecutor to show what he's got, McCarthy went on, at zero risk to himself since he was not on U.S. soil. What was once a no-lose proposition for Mueller was suddenly a no-lose proposition for Putin's unexpectedly clever cook. ..."
"... Now Mueller is in an even worse pickle because he's barred from mentioning a major chunk of his report. What will he discuss if Democrats succeed in getting him to testify before the House intelligence and judiciary committees next week – the weather? ..."
"... If his team goes forward with the Concord prosecution, he'll risk having to turn over sensitive information while involving himself in a legal tangle that could go on for years, all without any conceivable payoff. If he drops it, the upshot will be a public-relations disaster of the first order ..."
"... As skeptics have pointed out, the IRA's social-media campaign was both more modest and more ineffectual then the Mueller report's over-the-top language about a "sweeping and systematic" conspiracy would suggest. Yet after Facebook Vice President Rob Goldman tweeted that "the majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election," he was forced to beg for forgiveness like a defendant in a Moscow show trial for daring to play down the magnitude of the crime. ..."
"... Hard to believe, but it is possible that the dumb Dem leaders still -- to this day -- believe their story-line. How else to account for the incredible denseness of Pelosi and Nadler, both of whom should be down at the southern border rather than fiddling on a rusty Russia-gate Stradivarius -- fiddling while little kids burn. ..."
"... Trump may be vulgar and unorganized but his efforts to maintain our sovereign borders are welcomed and will secure his second term. 6 or 7 years ago, every senior Democrat (Biden, Hillary, Schumer, Pelosi, etc.) were against open borders and illegal immigrants. Their current stance is crass politics not concern for human welfare. ..."
"... The whole Mueller investigation was always "theatre" and not "law." And not just "theatre" by Mueller, but by the media and the Democratic Party as well. ..."
"... Only a few things were proven: Mueller has no credibility, the "Justice Department" is dysfunctional, the mainstream media is a joke and the the DNC was able to rig the primaries and effectively hide that fact using the fog of the Russiagate farce. ..."
"... What do you do now Mr Mueller, now that your bluff has been called? Another one of many nails in the coffin of this ridiculous, American, Hallucination Hoax called Russiagate! ..."
"... Mueller thought he was simply practicing the real government policy on fooling the public with endless iterations of horse hockey which Dubya tried to obscure with his "fool me once, fool me twice " razz-ma-tazz. ..."
"... You can bet that the likes of Rachel Maddow will never change their tune on the subject of Russiagate. However, with the election season heating up, it might seem wise for them to start singing a different tune altogether, such as Sanders and Warren are too radical to have any chance of defeating Trump. The saddest thing of all is that the Dems' fixation on Russia and Putin is now coming back to bite them in the ass. Trump could not have asked for a better gift. ..."
"... These indictments (including the 12 GRU) were all press releases to fuel the "I'm doing something" and "Russia's involved" noise. Not a lawyer but those who are commented that these Russian "indictments" were not only without evidence (which would have come out in a court had such been the intent) but they went way beyond a straightforward indictment to something approximating an OP ED for the WoPo or NYT. ..."
"... I watched the excellent movie "The Big Short" last night, it was my second viewing after seeing it at the theater. It was painful to watch because it's about the abject failure and corruption of Wall Street, but beyond that, it's about the failure of Our System and about how the People always are the essential losers. ..."
"... We here at Consortiumnews have basically known these facts since Robert Parry's death, why?, because Robert was an extraordinary reporter who actually looked into the underlying dynamic of the subject he reported on. And, relying on his honesty, we were brought along on the Real story leading up to this. ..."
"... What's needed to convince Americans that "Russia" did not interfere in the election and did not hack the DNC is not a judge but an exorcist. ..."
"... This profound belief based on DNC, HRC confabulated and paid for evidence is in so many ways, if not totally, akin to the belief in UFOs and little green men (why is it always "men"?). Yet the same people who are "Russia and Putin did it" frenetic are those who denounce as insane nutters those who believe in the existence of UFOs and those grass colored men ..."
"... It should be interesting to see how this plays out, if the judiciary has the fortitude to stand up to the Den of Spooks. ..."
Don't look now, but a federal judge in Washington, D.C., has just shut down half of Robert
Mueller's Russian-interference case.
In February 2018, the special prosecutor indicted a St. Petersburg troll farm called the
Internet Research Agency along with two other companies, their owner, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, and
12 employees. The charge: fraud, traveling to the United States under false pretenses, and
using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to "sow discord" and "interfere in US
political and electoral processes without detection of their Russian affiliation."
The charge was both legally dubious and heavy-handed, a case of using a sledge hammer to
swat a fly. But Mueller went even further in his report , an
expurgated version of which was made public in April. No longer just a Russian company, the IRA
was now an arm of the Russian government. "[T]he Special Counsel's investigation," it declared
on page one, "established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election principally through two
operations.
First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored
presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against
entities, employees, and volunteers working in the Clinton campaign and then released stolen
documents."
"Prigozhin," the report added, referring to the IRA owner, "is widely reported to have ties
to Russian President Vladimir Putin." A few pages later, it said that the IRA's efforts
"constituted 'active measures' a term that typically refers to operations conducted by Russian
security services aimed at influencing the course of international affairs."
Thus, the IRA played a major role in the vast Kremlin conspiracy to alter the outcome of the
2016 election and install Donald Trump in office. But now Judge Dabney Friedrich has ordered
Mueller to stop pushing such stories because they're unfair to Concord Management and
Consulting, another Prigozhin company, which astonished the legal world in May 2018 by hiring
an expensive Washington law firm and demanding its day in court.
Contrary to internet chatter , Friedrich
did not offer an opinion as to whether the IRA-Kremlin connection is true or false. Rather, she
told the special prosecutor to keep quiet because such statements go beyond the scope of the
original indictment and are therefore prejudicial to the defendant. But it may be a distinction
without a difference since the only evidence that Mueller puts forth in the public version of
his report is a New York Timesarticle
from February 2018 entitled "Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian Oligarch Indicted by US, Is Known as
'Putin's Cook.'"
It's a case of trial by press clip that should have been laughed out of court – and
now, more or less, it is. Without the IRA, the only argument left in Mueller's brief is that
Russia stole some 28,000 emails and other electronic documents from Democratic National
Committee computers and then passed them along to WikiLeaks , which published them to
great fanfare in July 2016.
But as Consortium News pointed out the day the Mueller report came out, that's
dubious as well. [See " The
'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report ," April 18.] The reason: it rests on a
timeline that doesn't make sense:
June 12, 2016: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
announces that "leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton" were on the way.
June 15: Guccifer 2.0,
allegedly a stand-in for Russian military intelligence, goes on line to claim credit for the
hack.
June 22: Guccifer and WikiLeaks establish contact.
July 14: Guccifer sends WikiLeaks an encrypted file.
July 18: WikiLeaks confirms that it's opened it up.
July 22: The group releases a giant email cache indicating that the DNC rigged the nominating
process in favor of Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders.
But why would Assange announce the leaked emails on June 12 before hearing from the source
on June 22? Was he clairvoyant? Why would he release a massive file just eight days after
receiving it and as a little as four days after opening it up?
How could that be enough time to
review the contents and ensure they were genuine? "If a single one of those emails had been
shown to be maliciously altered," blogger Mark F. McCarty
points out , "WikiLeaks's reputation would have been in tatters." Quite right. So if
Mueller's chronology doesn't hold up, then Assange's original
statement that "our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party" still
stands – which it plainly does.
Going Up in Smoke
Bottom line: Russiagate is going up in smoke. The claim that Russian military intelligence
fed thousands of emails to WikiLeaks doesn't stand up to scrutiny while Mueller is not
only unable to a prove a connection between the Internet Research Agency and the Kremlin but is
barred from even discussing it, according to Friedrich's ruling, without risking a charge of
contempt. After 22 months of investigating the ins and outs of Russian interference, Mueller
seems to have finally come up dry.
"Revenge of the oligarchs" might be a good headline for this story. The IRA indictment
initially seemed to be a no-lose proposition for Mueller. He got to look good in the press, the
media got to indulge in yet another round of Russia-bashing, while, best of all, no one had to
prove a thing. "Mueller's allegations will never be tested in court," noted Andrew C. McCarthy,
a former federal prosecutor turned pundit for the rightwing National Review . "That
makes his indictment more a political statement than a charging instrument."
Then came the unexpected. Concord Management hired Reed Smith, a top-flight law firm with
offices around the world, and demanded to be heard. The move was "a real head-scratcher," one
Washington attorney
toldBuzzfeed , because Concord was beyond the reach of U.S. law and therefore had
nothing to fear from an indictment and nothing to gain, apparently, from going to court. But
then the firm demanded to exercise its right of discovery, meaning that it wanted access to
Mueller's immense investigative file. Blindsided, Mueller's requested a delay "on the
astonishing ground," according to McCarthy
, "that the defendant has not been properly served – notwithstanding that the defendant
has shown up in court and asked to be arraigned."
Prigozhin was forcing the special prosecutor to show what he's got, McCarthy went on, at
zero risk to himself since he was not on U.S. soil. What was once a no-lose proposition for
Mueller was suddenly a no-lose proposition for Putin's unexpectedly clever cook.
Now Mueller is in an even worse pickle because he's barred from mentioning a major chunk of
his report. What will he discuss if Democrats
succeed in getting him to testify before the House intelligence and judiciary committees next
week – the weather?
If his team goes forward with the Concord prosecution, he'll risk
having to turn over sensitive information while involving himself in a legal tangle that could
go on for years, all without any conceivable payoff. If he drops it, the upshot will be a
public-relations disaster of the first order.
As skeptics have pointed out, the IRA's social-media campaign was both more modest and more
ineffectual then the Mueller report's over-the-top language about a "sweeping and systematic"
conspiracy would suggest. Yet after Facebook Vice President Rob Goldman tweeted that "the majority
of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election," he was forced to
beg for forgiveness like a defendant in a Moscow show trial for daring to play down the
magnitude of the crime.
But it wasn't Goldman who shaved the truth. Rather, it was Mueller. Thanks to the unexpected
appearance of Concord Management, he's now paying the price.
Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing
Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a
wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs
about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com .
If you value this original article, please considermaking a donationto Consortium News so we can bring you more stories
like this one.
David H , July 12, 2019 at 18:17
Does "prejudicial to the defendant" mean the same thing as prejudiced against the
defendant?
Stan W. , July 12, 2019 at 13:55
The myth regarding Russian influence in the 2016 election that enabled Donald Trump to
"steal" the presidency from Hillary Clinton would make a good sequel to a movie from 1966.
Its title: "THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!"
Jeff Harrison , July 12, 2019 at 12:33
The one thing I'd like to know is: did Mueller ever provide the requested discovery
documents or not?
BRAVO, Dan. AND, as you aware, the "hacking half" of Mueller's magnum opus also cannot
bear close scrutiny.
Remember where you heard this first, "Current and former intelligence officials" tell me
that Mueller has asked his mother to write a note to be excused from the field trip to
Congress next Thursday, the 17th.
In my view, the only sympathy Mueller should be able to elicit at this point is the cruel
reality that he chose to perform one last job for the Deep State after he had reached the age
of statutory senility. His handlers will try to prop him up to the extent possible, but the
die is now cast. The whipping-up of Russia-gate can now be seen -- at least by consortium
news readers -- as a "best-defense-is-a-good-offensive" operation to obfuscate the reality of
Deep-State-gate.
Hard to believe, but it is possible that the dumb Dem leaders still -- to this day --
believe their story-line. How else to account for the incredible denseness of Pelosi and
Nadler, both of whom should be down at the southern border rather than fiddling on a rusty
Russia-gate Stradivarius -- fiddling while little kids burn. They ought to do their
Constitutional duty to impeach -- not on the basis of evidence-less Russia-gate charges --
but because the President is treading heavily on KIDS, as well as the Constitution.
Let's hear more from Tulsi Gabbard.
Again, great job, Dan. I can almost see Bob Parry smiling.
Ray
Chet Roman , July 12, 2019 at 18:15
You've been right all along Ray. Appreciate all your accurate investigating and
reporting.
However, I must disagree with your suggestion of impeachment on two phony issues: kids and
the constitution. You should focus your wrath on the Democrats that will not correct our
immigration laws. The only reason there is a surge of children and families is because the
democrats and their radical liberals have made it clear to the world that if you bring
children you are free to illegally cross the border. You may be stopped but the kids you
bring with you (your own or rent-a-kiddie) are essentially a get out of jail card. We now
have Africans from the Congo crossing over with luggage, the latest group are Haitians,
WTF?
As an immigrant I support our immigrants that come here legally but not those that break
the law. Diversity is not our strength but just adds to the division and conflict within our
society. Trump may be vulgar and unorganized but his efforts to maintain our sovereign
borders are welcomed and will secure his second term. 6 or 7 years ago, every senior Democrat
(Biden, Hillary, Schumer, Pelosi, etc.) were against open borders and illegal immigrants.
Their current stance is crass politics not concern for human welfare.
Mike from Jersey , July 12, 2019 at 10:20
The whole Mueller investigation was always "theatre" and not "law." And not just "theatre"
by Mueller, but by the media and the Democratic Party as well. And the Republicans cannot
rejoice in the result since – not only did Mueller baselessly refuse to concede
"exoneration" – Mueller's report itself is a joke in the first place. This article
points that out.
So what are we left with?
Only a few things were proven: Mueller has no credibility, the "Justice Department" is
dysfunctional, the mainstream media is a joke and the the DNC was able to rig the primaries
and effectively hide that fact using the fog of the Russiagate farce.
In short, America's political system is completely broken.
We have heard the name of Judge Dabney Freidrich before. She is a bit of a wildcard here,
as she does not necessarily do what the powers that be expect of her. Here she pulls the rug
out from under Mueller when he and the Scooby Doo gang was no doubt expecting never to
actually have to go to court against the Russian meddling kids:
and here she has Kavanaugh's back during his Supreme Court nomination process as he
screams about his entitlement to do whatever he damned well pleases because he's entitled
rich folk who went to Yale part of the Club aristocracy:
About Prigozhin the oligarch, Wikipedia: "The Anti-Corruption Foundation accused Prigozhin
of corrupt business practices. They estimated his illegal wealth to be worth more than one
billion rubles.[11]" So the opposition outfit (and those exist in "dictatorial" Russia)
accuses Prigozhin of amassing 16 million dollars of "illegal wealth". Poor Russia. In USA, a
single doctor can get more by overbilling Medicare, Workers' Compensation etc.
KiwiAntz , July 12, 2019 at 09:16
Mueller, Mueller, Mueller- Class, anyone, anyone?? Ferris Mueller's Day Off is turning
into a nightmare & his Report is crashing & burning, faster than a US Drone, shot
down & blasted out of the Sky, by the IRG in the Sea of Homuz? It's all very well
accusing people of crimes & slandering reputations knowing or hoping that under normal
circumstances the accused wouldn't show up to defend the charges, but these accused Russians
are prepared to challenge Mueller's fictitious findings? What do you do now Mr Mueller, now
that your bluff has been called? Another one of many nails in the coffin of this ridiculous,
American, Hallucination Hoax called Russiagate!
Realist , July 12, 2019 at 16:08
Mueller thought he was simply practicing the real government policy on fooling the public
with endless iterations of horse hockey which Dubya tried to obscure with his "fool me once,
fool me twice " razz-ma-tazz.
Mr. Mueller will take the "A" train to Davy Jones' locker
trying to hoodwink the public on this fiasco, rather than getting religion and uttering the
more appropriate "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."
AnneR , July 12, 2019 at 09:07
Nice, Mr Lazare, very, very nice. One can only hope that Mueller and the rest of the
conspirators (for what else are they?) get their full comeuppance. However, I doubt that
given past history and the ability of all those with and in power to escape full scrutiny and
real punishment (a lengthy prison sentence).
Unfortunately and dishearteningly, I also doubt that the true believers, of which there
are all too many and among whom all too many are highly and expensively educated, will let
any of this alter by one iota their apparently adamantine position on "Russiagate," their
anti-Putin Russophobia. Or their equally apparent adoration of HRC.
Rob , July 12, 2019 at 12:27
You can bet that the likes of Rachel Maddow will never change their tune on the subject of
Russiagate. However, with the election season heating up, it might seem wise for them to
start singing a different tune altogether, such as Sanders and Warren are too radical to have
any chance of defeating Trump. The saddest thing of all is that the Dems' fixation on Russia
and Putin is now coming back to bite them in the ass. Trump could not have asked for a better
gift.
Antonio Costa , July 12, 2019 at 09:01
These indictments (including the 12 GRU) were all press releases to fuel the "I'm doing
something" and "Russia's involved" noise. Not a lawyer but those who are commented that these
Russian "indictments" were not only without evidence (which would have come out in a court
had such been the intent) but they went way beyond a straightforward indictment to something
approximating an OP ED for the WoPo or NYT.
The intel report ordered by Obama (2 of them) had no evidence, and the last one went on
and on about RT as if RT has conspired to infiltrate the minds of US voters (huge laugh given
their reach and those who watch, or listen generally don't need convincing of US government
nefarious doings).
I did read both reports and indictments, and as a lay person it was clear there was no
substance. In the case of the intel report even Obama concluded there was nothing.
Yet the 2+ year circus went on and on as a media ($$$) frenzy. No one really cared, nor do
they to this day.
This is what the unraveling of an empire looks like. Let's hope there's a truly new and
better day ahead after the collapse.
OlyaPola , July 12, 2019 at 08:58
When deflating a balloon care is required to ensure it doesn't shoot off in all directions
exposing the skill levels of would-be performers.
Bob Van Noy , July 12, 2019 at 08:05
I watched the excellent movie "The Big Short" last night, it was my second viewing after
seeing it at the theater. It was painful to watch because it's about the abject failure and
corruption of Wall Street, but beyond that, it's about the failure of Our System and about
how the People always are the essential losers.
We here at Consortiumnews have basically known these facts since Robert Parry's death,
why?, because Robert was an extraordinary reporter who actually looked into the underlying
dynamic of the subject he reported on. And, relying on his honesty, we were brought along on
the Real story leading up to this.
Now, much like the movie I mentioned, we know we were right to trust CN, but there is
little joy in watching the confirmation of a failed fourth estate and failed democratic
experiment. Now we are left with the anxiety of how to repair this mess
What's needed to convince Americans that "Russia" did not interfere in the election and
did not hack the DNC is not a judge but an exorcist.
AnneR , July 12, 2019 at 09:13
Truly. This profound belief based on DNC, HRC confabulated and paid for evidence is in so
many ways, if not totally, akin to the belief in UFOs and little green men (why is it always
"men"?). Yet the same people who are "Russia and Putin did it" frenetic are those who
denounce as insane nutters those who believe in the existence of UFOs and those grass colored
men
Realist , July 12, 2019 at 04:17
Maybe Mueller should ask Putin for asylum before he concedes the truth and implicates
Brennan, Clapper, Hillary and Obama as masterminds of Intelgate. I don't think he's getting a
pardon from Trump.
That Hillary was so clever in her design to fatally slur both the Donald
and the "New Hitler" in Moscow with one big lie, while deftly knifing Bernie in the back as
attentions were directed at the bigger fish. Not!
It should be interesting to see how this
plays out, if the judiciary has the fortitude to stand up to the Den of Spooks.
You have that right, as usual. "If the judiciary ." A very BIG "If." How many judges like Dabney Friedrich, I wonder, are still on the bench? We may be about
to see.
"... As Congress arrives back into town and the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees prepare to question ex-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller on July 17, partisan lines are being drawn even more sharply, as Russias-gate blossoms into Deep-State-gate. On Sunday, a top Republican legislator, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took the gloves off in an unusually acerbic public attack on former leaders of the FBI and CIA. ..."
"... "The media went along with this – actually, keeping this farcical, ridiculous thought going that the President of the United States was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Russia against his own country." ..."
"... Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. No fan of the current President, Ray has been trained to follow and analyze the facts, wherever they may lead. He spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, and prepared the President's Daily Brief for three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). ..."
"... Mr. McGovern you are right in your analysis. Obama is in this up to his neck, however there will be a limited investigation at best because the Jews and Israel don't want this. They are involved and a real investigation would show what control they have over the FBI and CIA. ..."
"... The world is controlled by the Corporate Fascist Military-Intelligence Police State in which governments are nothing more than Proxies with Intelligence Agencies who work against the average citizen and for the Corporations. Politicians like Trump are nothing more than figureheads who must "Toe the Line" or else. ..."
As Congress arrives back into town and the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees
prepare to question ex-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller on July 17, partisan lines are being
drawn even more sharply, as Russias-gate blossoms into Deep-State-gate. On Sunday, a top
Republican legislator, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took the gloves off in an unusually acerbic
public attack on former leaders of the FBI and CIA.
"There is no doubt to me there was severe, serious abuses that were carried out in the FBI
and, I believe, top levels of the CIA against the President of the United States or, at that
time, presidential candidate Donald Trump," according to The Hill.
King (image on the right), a senior congressman specializing in national security, twice
chaired the House Homeland Security Committee and currently heads its Subcommittee on
Counterterrorism and Intelligence. He also served for several years on the House Intelligence
Committee.
He asserted:
"There was no legal basis at all for them to begin this investigation of his campaign
– and the way they carried it forward, and the way information was leaked. All of this
is going to come out. It's going to show the bias. It's going to show the baselessness of the
investigation and I would say the same thing if this were done to Hillary Clinton or Bernie
Sanders It's just wrong."
The Long Island Republican added a well aimed swipe at what passes for the media today:
"The media went along with this – actually, keeping this farcical, ridiculous
thought going that the President of the United States was somehow involved in a conspiracy
with Russia against his own country."
According to King, the Justice Department's review, ordered by Attorney General William Barr
, would prove that former officials acted improperly. He was alluding to the investigation led
by John Durham , U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. Sounds nice. But waiting for Durham to complete
his investigation at a typically lawyerly pace would, I fear, be much like the experience of
waiting for Mueller to finish his; that is, like waiting for Godot. What about now?
So Where is the IG Report on FISA?
That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his
report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan , former FBI Director
James Comey , former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe , former Deputy Attorneys General Sally
Yates and Rod Rosenstein , and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA
applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at
last report, he is FBI General Counsel!).
The DOJ inspector General's investigation, launched in March 2018, has centered on whether
the FBI and DOJ filing of four FISA applications and renewals beginning in October 2016 to
surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page amounted to abuse of the FISA process.
(Fortunately for the IG, Obama's top intelligence and law enforcement officials were so sure
that Hillary Clinton would win that they did not do much to hide their tracks.)
The Washington Examiner
reported last Tuesday, "The Justice Department inspector general's investigation of
potential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is complete, a Republican
congressman said, though a report on its findings might not be released for a month." The
report continued:
"House Judiciary Committee member John Ratcliffe (R, Texas) said Monday he'd met with DOJ
watchdog Michael Horowitz last week about his FISA abuse report. In a media interview,
Ratcliffe said they'd discussed the timing, but not the content of his report and Horowitz
'related that his team's investigative work is complete and they're now in the process of
drafting that report. Ratcliffe said he was doubtful that Horowitz's report would be made
available to the public or the Congress anytime soon. 'He [Horowitz] did relay that as much
as 20% of his report is going to include classified information, so that draft report will
have to undergo a classification review at the FBI and at the Department of Justice,'
Ratcliffe said. 'So, while I'm hopeful that we members of Congress might see it before the
August recess, I'm not too certain about that.'"
Earlier, Horowitz had predicted that his report would be ready in May or June but there may,
in fact, be good reason for some delay. Fox News reported Friday that "key
witnesses sought for questioning by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz
(image on the left) early in his investigation into alleged government surveillance abuse have
come forward at the 11th hour." According to Fox's sources, at least one witness outside the
Justice Department and FBI has started cooperating -- a breakthrough that came after Durham was
assigned to lead a separate investigation into the origins of the FBI's 2016 Russia case that
led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe.
"Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie
investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or
reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge.
Judging by past precedent, Deep State intelligence and law enforcement officials will do all
they can to use the "but-it's-classified" excuse to avoid putting themselves and their former
colleagues in legal jeopardy. (Though this would violate Obama's executive order 13526 ,
prohibiting classification of embarrassing or criminal information).
It is far from clear that DOJ IG Horowitz and Attorney General Barr will prevail in the end,
even though President Trump has given Barr nominal authority to declassify as necessary. Why
are the the stakes so extraordinarily high?
What Did Obama Know, and When Did He Know It?
Recall that in a Sept. 2, 2016 text message to the FBI's then-deputy chief of
counterintelligence Peter Strzok, his girlfriend and then-top legal adviser to Deputy FBI
Director McCabe, Lisa Page , wrote that she was preparing talking points because the president
"wants to know everything we're doing." [Emphasis added.] It does not seem likely that
the Director of National Intelligence, DOJ, FBI, and CIA all kept President Obama in the dark
about their FISA and other machinations -- although it is possible they did so out of a desire
to provide him with "plausible denial."
It seems more likely that Obama's closest intelligence confidant, Brennan, told him about
the shenanigans with FISA, that Obama gave him approval (perhaps just tacit approval), and that
Brennan used that to harness top intelligence and law enforcement officials behind the effort
to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him.
Moreover, one should not rule out seeing in the coming months an "Obama-made-us-do-it"
defense -- whether grounded in fact or not -- by Brennan and perhaps the rest of the gang.
Brennan may even have a piece of paper recording the President's "approval" for this or that --
or could readily have his former subordinates prepare one that appears authentic.
Reining in Devin Nunes
That the Deep State retains formidable power can be seen in the repeated
Lucy-holding-then-withdrawing-the-football-for-Charlie Brown treatment experienced by House
Intelligence Committee Ranking Member, Devin Nunes (R-CA, image on the right). On April 5,
2019, in the apparent belief he had a green light to go on the offensive, Nunes
wrote that committee Republicans "will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous
individuals involved in the abuse of intelligence for political purposes. These people must be
held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future."
On April 7, Nunes was even more specific, telling Fox News that he was preparing to send
eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice "this week," concerning alleged
misconduct during the Trump-Russia investigation, including leaks of "highly classified
material" and conspiracies to lie to Congress and the FISA court. It seemed to be
no-holds-barred for Nunes, who had begun to
talk publicly about prison time for those who might be brought to trial.
Except for Fox, the corporate media ignored Nunes's explosive comments. The media seemed
smugly convinced that Nunes's talk of "referrals" could be safely ignored -- even though a new
sheriff, Barr, had come to town. And sure enough, now, three months later, where are the
criminal referrals?
There is ample evidence that President Trump is afraid to run afoul of the Deep State
functionaries he inherited. And the Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr
leans hard on the president to unfetter Nunes, IG Horowitz, Durham and like-minded
investigators, all hell may break lose, because the evidence against those who took serious
liberties with the law is staring them all in the face.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. No fan of the current President, Ray has been trained to
follow and analyze the facts, wherever they may lead. He spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, and
prepared the President's Daily Brief for three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Mr. McGovern you are right in your analysis. Obama is in this up to his neck, however
there will be a limited investigation at best because the Jews and Israel don't want this.
They are involved and a real investigation would show what control they have over the FBI and
CIA.
Trump by now realizes these agencies can make anything up and the Jewish owned and
controlled media will do their bidding. I have to assume that Trump has come to the
conclusion that he wasn't suppose to win and that the NWO wasn't happy with that because he
stands in their way especially on World Trade and Immigration.
The world is controlled by the Corporate Fascist Military-Intelligence Police State in
which governments are nothing more than Proxies with Intelligence Agencies who work against
the average citizen and for the Corporations. Politicians like Trump are nothing more than
figureheads who must "Toe the Line" or else.
I believe Trump knows he could be assassinated at any time. Obama the "God King" did his
part for NWO and that's why he gets a King's Ransom for his speeches for reading a
teleprompter and banging on his chest and saying, "I did that." What he is really saying is I
did that for you -- now where's my check!
"... "Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge. ..."
"... Judging by past precedent, Deep State intelligence and law enforcement officials will do all they can to use the "but-it's-classified" excuse to avoid putting themselves and their former colleagues in legal jeopardy. (Though this would violate Obama's executive order 13526 , prohibiting classification of embarrassing or criminal information). ..."
"... Recall that in a Sept. 2, 2016 text message to the FBI's then-deputy chief of counterintelligence Peter Strzok, his girlfriend and then-top legal adviser to Deputy FBI Director McCabe, Lisa Page, wrote that she was preparing talking points because the president "wants to know everything we're doing." [Emphasis added.] It does not seem likely that the Director of National Intelligence, DOJ, FBI, and CIA all kept President Obama in the dark about their FISA and other machinations -- although it is possible they did so out of a desire to provide him with "plausible denial." ..."
"... It seems more likely that Obama's closest intelligence confidant, Brennan, told him about the shenanigans with FISA, that Obama gave him approval (perhaps just tacit approval), and that Brennan used that to harness top intelligence and law enforcement officials behind the effort to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him. ..."
"... "That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at last report, he is FBI General Counsel!)." ..."
"... It will be a very interesting 2020 campaign if the Democratic candidate has to run with the ripe stinking dead albatross of Russiagate around her neck. ..."
"... The only outcome that could be more bizarre than the last go-round would be to see Trump favored by all the smart money and then lose to the latest corporate Democrat to shamelessly sell out the middle class in broad daylight. ..."
"... The Grabber in Chief vs Willie Brown's mistress – wonderful. ..."
"... Forgive my cynicism but the US government is so corrupt, has wielded illegitimate power for so long, and has covered the tracks of countless functionaries who have not upheld the constitution that I doubt this will go anywhere. I have been quoting Ben Franklin for some time "you have a republic, if you can keep it." I don't think we can. A reading of "A History of Venice" by John J. Norris would be appropriate here. The most serene republic lasted for essentially 1,000 years from roughly 800 to not quite 1800, first as a democracy, later as an oligarchy. Much like us, including having the most feared secret service in Europe at the time, Venice kept its power through trade but at least we don't hoist the new president up on a chair so that he can throw golden Ducats to the crowd on Wall Street the way that a new Doge would. ..."
"... I don't suppose anything will happen to anybody important about this. After all, nothing happened to anybody when they were caught mass spying on any and all american citizens, even before they made it legal. ..."
"... Unfortunately Webb and Parry exposed much of these gangster criminal "intel" savages for running guns and drugs to Central American pseudo fascist mercenary sadists throughout much of the late 1970s through the '80s. I say unfortunately b/c nothing much ever came along by way of true justice, by way of the criminal players rotting in maximum security jail cells for years on end, not unlike the crack or heroin addict who steals a $400 television. ..."
"... This has been one long crime against the American people. King should read what he knows into the Congressional Record. I have no sympathy for Trump's fear of the deep state. He has sent people to die knowing full well that his actions were based on lies, lies that would result in the deaths of civilians as well as our own military. If he is going to do that, then he should have the courage to face the deep state. That's partial penance for all the deaths he has caused. ..."
"... I also don't care about Trump's personal issue about being surveilled. He personally supports that against everyone else. That is why I feel this is a crime against our people as a whole. Our constitution has been stripped bare. We don't have the rule of law. Mass surveillance covering the globe is current reality. It is dangerous. It is wrong. It is lawless. It is a disaster. ..."
"... Further, Russiagate was used to keep real opposition away from Trump. His supporters doubled down on "liking" Trump because he appeared to be a victim of these lies. Democrats meanwhile learned to further worship the IC. They ignored Trump's actual unlawful behavior, and, in the case of war crimes, still support Trump on every war/regime change action etc. recommended to them by their IC "resistance" "leaders". ..."
"... This has been one of the most effective propaganda tools I have ever seen against our populace. It has created a divided, unthinking populace who is ripe for the picking by evil men and women. I am truly hoping that once this is exposed people will stop this madness and pull together for a common good. But I'm quite worried that, like most cults, when the leader is shown to be wrong, people cling to them even more. ..."
"... there have always been nefarious agents in one government or another for one gangster interest or another, whether was Milner's roundtable or Dulles's Gladio werewolves, these are nefarious individuals there is no gray area in that, however they may conduct themselves and their personal lives, it is not sloppy journalism, is to call something what it is, a this shadow government working in many instances against the direct interest of the American people ..."
"... It's the propaganda, the United States is one of the most heavily propagandize societies in the world, we make the Soviets look like children. No one wants you to have sympathy for Donald Trump, you do not have to agree or like a person to see that the cartel seeking to damage him is also simultaneously against your interests and they are against your interests whether you're from the left or the right because they do not have an ideology just it will to power. ..."
"... So reminiscent of the darker days of the Cold War. A stark education has just played out to this point. ..."
The Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr leans hard on Trump to
unfetter investigators, all hell may break lose, says Ray McGovern.
A s Congress arrives back into town and the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees
prepare to question ex-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller on July 17, partisan lines are being
drawn even more sharply, as Russias-gate blossoms into Deep-State-gate. On Sunday, a top
Republican legislator, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took the gloves off in an unusually acerbic
public attack on former leaders of the FBI and CIA.
King
told a radio audience: "There is no doubt to me there was severe, serious abuses that were
carried out in the FBI and, I believe, top levels of the CIA against the President of the
United States or, at that time, presidential candidate Donald Trump," according to The
Hill.
King, a senior congressman specializing in national security, twice chaired the House
Homeland Security Committee and currently heads its Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and
Intelligence. He also served for several years on the House Intelligence Committee.
He asserted:
"There was no legal basis at all for them to begin this investigation of his campaign
– and the way they carried it forward, and the way information was leaked. All of this
is going to come out. It's going to show the bias. It's going to show the baselessness of the
investigation and I would say the same thing if this were done to Hillary Clinton or Bernie
Sanders It's just wrong."
The Long Island Republican added a well aimed swipe at what passes for the media today: "The
media went along with this – actually, keeping this farcical, ridiculous thought going
that the President of the United States was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Russia
against his own country."
King: Lashes out.
According to King, the Justice Department's review, ordered by Attorney General William
Barr, would prove that former officials acted improperly. He was alluding to the investigation
led by John Durham, U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. Sounds nice. But waiting for Durham to
complete his investigation at a typically lawyerly pace would, I fear, be much like the
experience of waiting for Mueller to finish his; that is, like waiting for Godot. What about
now?
So Where is the IG Report on FISA?
That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his
report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James
Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates
and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA
applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at
last report, he is FBI General Counsel!).
The DOJ inspector General's investigation, launched in March 2018, has centered on whether
the FBI and DOJ filing of four FISA applications and renewals beginning in October 2016 to
surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page amounted to abuse of the FISA process.
(Fortunately for the IG, Obama's top intelligence and law enforcement officials were so sure
that Hillary Clinton would win that they did not do much to hide their tracks.)
The Washington Examiner
reported last Tuesday, "The Justice Department inspector general's investigation of
potential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is complete, a Republican
congressman said, though a report on its findings might not be released for a month." The
report continued:
"House Judiciary Committee member John Ratcliffe (R, Texas) said Monday he'd met with DOJ
watchdog Michael Horowitz last week about his FISA abuse report. In a media interview,
Ratcliffe said they'd discussed the timing, but not the content of his report and Horowitz
'related that his team's investigative work is complete and they're now in the process of
drafting that report. Ratcliffe said he was doubtful that Horowitz's report would be made
available to the public or the Congress anytime soon. 'He [Horowitz] did relay that as much
as 20% of his report is going to include classified information, so that draft report will
have to undergo a classification review at the FBI and at the Department of Justice,'
Ratcliffe said. 'So, while I'm hopeful that we members of Congress might see it before the
August recess, I'm not too certain about that.'"
Horowitz: Still waiting for his report
Earlier, Horowitz had predicted that his report would be ready in May or June but there may,
in fact, be good reason for some delay. Fox News reported Friday that "key
witnesses sought for questioning by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz
early in his investigation into alleged government surveillance abuse have come forward at the
11th hour." According to Fox's sources, at least one witness outside the Justice Department and
FBI has started cooperating -- a breakthrough that came after Durham was assigned to lead a
separate investigation into the origins of the FBI's 2016 Russia case that led to Special
Counsel Robert Mueller's probe.
"Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie
investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or
reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge.
Judging by past precedent, Deep State intelligence and law enforcement officials will do all
they can to use the "but-it's-classified" excuse to avoid putting themselves and their former
colleagues in legal jeopardy. (Though this would violate Obama's executive order 13526 ,
prohibiting classification of embarrassing or criminal information).
It is far from clear that DOJ IG Horowitz and Attorney General Barr will prevail in the end,
even though President Trump has given Barr nominal authority to declassify as necessary. Why
are the the stakes so extraordinarily high?
What Did Obama Know, and When Did He Know It?
Recall that in a Sept. 2, 2016 text message to the FBI's then-deputy chief of
counterintelligence Peter Strzok, his girlfriend and then-top legal adviser to Deputy FBI
Director McCabe, Lisa Page, wrote that she was preparing talking points because the president
"wants to know everything we're doing." [Emphasis added.] It does not seem likely that
the Director of National Intelligence, DOJ, FBI, and CIA all kept President Obama in the dark
about their FISA and other machinations -- although it is possible they did so out of a desire
to provide him with "plausible denial."
It seems more likely that Obama's closest intelligence confidant, Brennan, told him about
the shenanigans with FISA, that Obama gave him approval (perhaps just tacit approval), and that
Brennan used that to harness top intelligence and law enforcement officials behind the effort
to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him.
Moreover, one should not rule out seeing in the coming months an "Obama-made-us-do-it"
defense -- whether grounded in fact or not -- by Brennan and perhaps the rest of the gang.
Brennan may even have a piece of paper recording the President's "approval" for this or that --
or could readily have his former subordinates prepare one that appears authentic.
Reining in Devin Nunes
That the Deep State retains formidable power can be seen in the repeated
Lucy-holding-then-withdrawing-the-football-for-Charlie Brown treatment experienced by House
Intelligence Committee Ranking Member, Devin Nunes (R-CA). On April 5, 2019, in the apparent
belief he had a green light to go on the offensive, Nunes
wrote that committee Republicans "will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous
individuals involved in the abuse of intelligence for political purposes. These people must be
held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future."
On April 7, Nunes was even more specific, telling Fox News that he was preparing to send
eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice "this week," concerning alleged
misconduct during the Trump-Russia investigation, including leaks of "highly classified
material" and conspiracies to lie to Congress and the FISA court. It seemed to be
no-holds-barred for Nunes, who had begun to
talk publicly about prison time for those who might be brought to trial.
Except for Fox, the corporate media ignored Nunes's explosive comments. The media seemed
smugly convinced that Nunes's talk of "referrals" could be safely ignored -- even though a new
sheriff, Barr, had come to town. And sure enough, now, three months later, where are the
criminal referrals?
There is ample evidence that President Trump is afraid to run afoul of the Deep State
functionaries he inherited. And the Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr
leans hard on the president to unfetter Nunes, IG Horowitz, Durham and like-minded
investigators, all hell may break lose, because the evidence against those who took serious
liberties with the law is staring them all in the face.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. No fan of the current President, Ray has been trained to
follow and analyze the facts, wherever they may lead. He spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, and
prepared the President's Daily Brief for three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
If you enjoyed this original article, please considermaking a donationto Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
Joe T Wallace , July 8, 2019 at 20:24
I'm a great admirer of Ray McGovern's reporting. He exposes much that is never revealed by
the mainstream media. That said, I do have one quibble about this article. In the seventh
paragraph, just below the heading "So Where is the IG Report on FISA?" he writes:
"That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his
report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director
James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally
Yates and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant
FISA applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI
library; at last report, he is FBI General Counsel!)."
My immediate reaction was: Who is Horowitz? It was confusing not to know. Further down in
the article, I learned that Ray was referring to Michael Horowitz, a DOJ watchdog who is
preparing an IG report about FISA abuse, but readers should have been informed who he was
earlier in the article.
John , July 8, 2019 at 17:10
Peter King? Devin Nunes?
At one point the article says little effort was made to cover tracks because of certainty
that HRC would win but later that the FBI et al were planting land mines to either defeat
Trump or blow up his presidency. Seemed contradictory to me.
Perhaps you have the skinny on these machinations, if indeed there were machinations by
one person or group or another for this purpose or that.
But Peter King and Devin Nunes? If either ever was credible, their track record condemns
them to be received, if at all, with extreme skepticism.
Realist , July 8, 2019 at 16:59
It will be a very interesting 2020 campaign if the Democratic candidate has to run with
the ripe stinking dead albatross of Russiagate around her neck. Or will she be expected to
repudiate the Hitlery-run DNC? Where does the money and the ground game originate if the
latter?
The only outcome that could be more bizarre than the last go-round would be to see Trump
favored by all the smart money and then lose to the latest corporate Democrat to shamelessly
sell out the middle class in broad daylight. I won't like it, but I can see Trump Derangement
Syndrome pulling out the chestnuts for the Dems, what with all their celebrity spokespeople
constantly running and ranting like their hair is on fire underneath those pussy hats. My
poor gullible sister from Cali embraces that whole ball of wax as revealed truth holier than
the total dry weight of all the Abrahamic scriptures rolled into one big bale for the
recycling center. Kamala Harris seems to be emerging as the new messiah anointed to lead this
country back to Obamian gridlock and more prestidigitation like mandated insurance to ensure
the health of the insurance companies. Again, it will only be the illusion of "free
stuff."
The only way such a scenario won't cause four more years of turmoil for this country
(rinse and repeat in 2024) is if the victor is Gabbard and she ends all the illegal and
unconstitutional wars by edict, telling all the sure-to-be pissing and moaning Deep State
functionaries to pick up their severance pay and go pound sand. Then shut the world-wide
spider web of military bases and bring home the troops while we can still afford the carfare.
That would be "morning in America," and Gabbard would be the most heroic chief exec since
Lincoln and FDR made their marks in the history books, though such fantasies never play out
in the real world. More likely all the criminal evidence of treason remains classified, most
Americans pop the blue pill, the actual rabbit hole continues to grow ever deeper but the
masses are contentedly oblivious to it all, satisfied to blame select scapegoats from
Russia, China and other "malign" countries for our viewing entertainment.
Deniz , July 8, 2019 at 17:50
The Grabber in Chief vs Willie Brown's mistress – wonderful.
ML , July 8, 2019 at 20:12
You are really something, Realist. I love the way you flourish that pen of yours. Thank
you.
Rob Roy , July 8, 2019 at 20:13
Realist, well said, per usual. To add a bit the Dems probably gave Trump the gift of a
lifetime the next election. Wasting three years on Russiagate instead of hammering out a
decent platform for the party was beyond dumb. That reminds me. the Dems's next dumbest idea
choosing Joe Biden as their next candidate. Just like Hillary, he can't beat Trump. The
duopoly is dead, they just don't know it.
As for Tulsi, she's got my vote.
John Earls , July 8, 2019 at 16:55
Looks like Barry Eisler's John Rain (expert in "death by natural causes") will have a lot
of work in front of him if the investigation builds and a whole lot of "material witnesses"
begin to testify.
ricardo2000 , July 8, 2019 at 16:33
I'm supposed to feel sorry for the surveillance of a right-wing creep? OH PLEASE.
No one in government, or the right wing ReThugs, has ever suffered the intrusive, lying,
speculative 'investigations' that social justice, environmental, or human rights activists
have over the past 70 years.
When these buttheads suffer what MLK and Malcolm X have suffered then I might just wipe
away a few tears, after I stop roaring with laughter and get off the floor.
Realist , July 8, 2019 at 17:08
You prefer a race to the bottom of the cesspool?
You never win when you adopt the methods you claim to revile. The opponent who introduced
the tactics you condemn wins if you embrace them as your own. You didn't beat him, you joined
him.
LibertyBonBon , July 8, 2019 at 18:12
Must be nice to think the justice system should revolve around your particular emotions,
rather than equality and objectivity. Safe and easy.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 20:41
ricardo2000, nothing personal, I get the revulsion to Trump and entourage not to mention a
large portion of the Maga crowd but this right and left thing is really just an illusion, the
people doing the persecuting here regardless of how disgusting Trump is are the same ones
doing the persecuting to a large degree of everyone else from Assange to the Iranians, that
is this government deep state in combination with all of the various American alphabet soup
agencies as well as foreign deep states have cornered the market in State power, hate Trump
but don't confuse this with a good thing.
Thank you, Ray McGovern. You are a good man, Charlie Brown!
Thing is, all of this was predictable from the beginning. Many of us saw it coming.
No one really wanted an incompetent baboon running things – the song about Monkey
and the Engineer comes to mind – so Obama tried to hamstring Trump with this
investigation. I mean, Obama couldn't very well have not completed the transfer of power
because it is the most valuable thing about democracy. There is no ten year bloody hellified
civil war every time the crown changes hands from one inbred to the next.
So Obama did the next best thing on his way out the Oval Office doors, he put Brennan and
the boys on it. Seemed like a good idea at the time, I'm sure. But it backfired because he
couldn't call the dogs off once he was no longer president. Not Brennan, not anyone could
call them off after the snowball really got rolling because the spooks believed their own
story and the media made too much money off selling the mythology:
Only question left to answer now is whether or not Trump the carnival barker can milk his
opportunist Armageddon into a second term of fleecing the rubes.
This is a very serious Constitutional Law issue and MUST be pursued–and it makes no
difference the political party denomination of those breaking the law! The Current
Oligarchy–Deep State–is the adversary of the vast majority of US citizens and
humanity. With Epstein's arrest and the developments McGovern relates, some progress appears
to be happening.
Lydia , July 8, 2019 at 14:51
You summed it up perfectly, Jill.
Pablo Diablo , July 8, 2019 at 14:42
"the effort to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him." says
it all. Trump is a loose cannon. The so called "Deep State" has been "controlling" our
Presidents since at least the Dulles Brothers. Truman even admitted giving them power was a
BIG mistake. Still question the Kennedy Assassination.
In the 70's, the FBI mailed me a box of drugs, which I refused to take from a very
incompetent fake Mail Man, and three minutes later they showed up with a search warrant for
my house that listed all the drugs in the failed mailed box signed by a Federal Judge. So
much for FISA. The bullshit continues. I could reveal more if necessary.
robert e williamson jr , July 8, 2019 at 14:32
Sam F. whether you realize it or not you got it pretty much on the nose. Except for
this.
The judiciary has been compromised by the congresses refusal to hold CIA et. al.
accountable for their actions. Why? Those in congress remember what happened to JFK.
The number one reason is because the deep state ensures that if anyone goes after CIA
officials or designees that the persons career and life are ruined. Which is something else
that needs to be investigated. Something that if explored may very well put a stop to CIA's
B.S. of lying about everything and getting away with it.
Currently no deterrent exists. None.
Anytime some one or entity gets close the Deep State ends up with their guy as AG. See the
Bill Barr story.
Barr may get his chance to prove me right and at the same time prove "Lady Justice" has
little to do with the DOJ! I think he is a cowardly blowhard. Justice would be Trump and Barr
going to jail .
Justice in this country for the true scoundrels in government or billionaires is non-
existent at this point in time. Putting Epstein in prison for life is called for and if he is
threatened with that maybe his jaw will loosen up.
Until DOJ can become a deterrent to bad actors in government, all government the country
will be controlled by the Deep State. The SWETS, super wealthy elitists.
@ "Justice would be Trump and Barr going to jail ."
Are you suggesting that *any* of their living predecessors don't deserve the same? If so,
which do not and why?
Jay , July 8, 2019 at 14:18
Bif:
I agree something very suspect occurred.
And it's very likely the Obama White House knew that either the NSA or the FBI was tapping
into the communications of some of Trump's campaign team BEFORE Hillary lost in Nov.
2016.
However the xenophobic, lying, terrorist (IRA) supporting, Peter King is not a credible
messenger. (Right, Rep Steve King of Iowa is even worse than King of Long Island.)
Peter Dyer , July 8, 2019 at 14:09
Thanks, Ray.
DH Fabian , July 8, 2019 at 13:59
Actually, that deep split among the masses, and certainly within the Dem voting base, was
achieved in the 1990s -- middle class vs. poor, workers vs. those left jobless, further split
by race. The Obama years confirmed that this split is permanent. Russia had nothing to do
with the Democrats' 2016 defeat, nor will it be the reason for their 2020 defeat. Democrats
maintain their resistance against acknowledging the consequences of dividing and conquering
their own voting base.
EuGene Miller , July 9, 2019 at 00:24
DH, that's an interesting assessment. However, I doubt that any House or Senate Democrat
sought an advantage by "splitting their base". The elected Dems do not control the narrative.
So, who benefits by splitting the masses into rival factions?
Perhaps the narrative of social and political discourse is defined by the owners, boards,
and foundations that control the main-stream media and pop-culture.
Robert Reich wrote that an oligarchy divides-and-conquers the rest of us. I suspect that
controlling the narrative is not simply a propaganda tool; it is the basis of
divide-and-conquer strategy.
Is it possible that the DOJ, see the Sec. of Labor's problems developing with the Espstein
case, is about to have it's gloriously corrupt underbelly rolled over into the sunlight? (you
must roll the snake over to see its belly)
Please Ray tell me this is where we might be heading or instead will we end up with the
courts truncating investigation because they say it will be best for the country not to have
all this filthy laundry dragged out into the sunlight or someones bull shit sources and
methods might be exposed. The DOJ has become a really bad joke!
I'm hoping you know something I don't because Barr's past history pretty much speaks for
itself I'd say after be made sure he pardoned all of Bush 41 henchmen!
At this point I certainly do not have much faith in the DOJ doing the right thing. What
Acosta did in Florida with Epstein was hardly the right thing to do.
They all need to be locked up.
Eric32 , July 8, 2019 at 13:33
Very little "punishment" will occur, and no deep change cleanup will occur.
The US govt. is controlled by money and blackmail – not "voting" or public outrage.
So many high level people have so much dirt on other high level people that nothing major
will be done.
A series of very big events, including the JFK murder and the 9/11 charade went unexposed and
undealt with – there is no reason to think that this medium size event will wind up
making a big difference.
What will happen is that US "democracy" will continue on its downward course, but maybe
with a better facade.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 20:59
I personally believe that the empire will crash when it hits maximum overreach it will
also simultaneously go broke at the same time, as the money interests at that point Will
probably move east, this will partially be due to both the feds tendency to over inflate in
order to cover military acquisitions as well as the decline of swift and the ascendancy of
China in the rest. I actually think that this is what some American factions desire, it is
potentially good for all of us if we can regain a republic but it will mean the end of
American hegemony.
Gary Weglarz , July 8, 2019 at 13:22
This is the same "deep state" that assassinated a sitting president, then proceeded to
assassinate the next three most important and influential progressive leaders in the country
all over a five year period. Problem solved. And just when you thought Allen Dulles didn't
know what to do with all those oh so experienced Nazi war criminals he'd recruited to the
CIA.
When Congress investigated the CIA in the mid-1970's (before Congress became completely
"owned" by the deep state) right on cue witnesses began to "commit suicide" just before they
would be scheduled to testify. Problem solved. Hardly a raised eyebrow from the always
complicit MSM through all of this. Expecting anything more than a massive coverup of this
latest deep state corruption and abuse is beyond my abilities to even effectively fantasize
about.
herbert davis , July 8, 2019 at 14:12
Justice in the USA?
John Drake , July 8, 2019 at 13:20
The corporate Democrats strike out again. They run a corrupt, violent(war monger)
candidate, who loses to a buffoon-an election which was hers to lose. Meanwhile trying to
hedge their bets they play sleazeball with the investigative arm's authority in order to
sabotage said buffoon; which as it is revealed gives ammunition and the advantage to their
target. i.e. "They were illegally picking on me"
If Trump is smart-a very long stretch, but some advisor might suggest this- he will expose
all this slime closer to the election for maximum effect. What a distressing thought. All the
more reason to run a progressive Presidential candidate that can disavow the DNC clowns and
their corruption.
geeyp , July 8, 2019 at 12:37
It's past time for the Deep State to come up from the deep state of hell in which they
reside. At least to purgatory for some fresh air and a wee ray of light. I couldn't let the
Schumer warning keep me from giving the go ahead on this. If my coconut is shattered, someone
somewhere (not our current media) would have a clue as to what happened to me. Sic 'em,
President Trump and A.G. and Devin Nunes!
Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 12:14
The US needs to solve the underlying problem of corruption of secret agencies and
judiciary, otherwise the political wrongdoing of one faction will only be matched by that of
its opponents, regardless of a few prosecutions. I know from experience the extreme
corruption of the Repubs, and little doubt that the Dems do such things at least when
desperate.
The solution includes:
1. All secrets meaningfully shared among multiparty committees;
2. All politicians and top officials monitored for corrupt influence;
3. Entire federal judiciary fired, replaced, and monitored like the politicians; and
4. Amendments to protect elections and mass media from control by money power.
Until then all government acts are tribal gangsterism and little more.
Guy , July 8, 2019 at 13:50
You forgot about dual citizenship members of the senate and congress . Elected as a
representative for the country of the US should mean just that and not another country . And
while we are at it , major reform on monetary contributions to candidates running for
re-election . There is something terribly wrong with needing millions if not billions of
dollars to run the electoral races.There is much more that needs to be done but this would be
a good start .
Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:32
Yes, the proposed Amendments would restrict funding of mass media and elections to
registered individual contributions (some prefer government funding) limited to the average
day's pay annually (for example), with full reporting by candidates and all intermediaries.
We all can see the destruction of democracy that was caused by economic power controlling
elections, mass media, the judiciary, etc.
But of course we cannot get those amendments because those tools of democracy now belong
to the rich, etc. History suggests that we are in for generations of severe decline before
the people are hurting enough to turn off the tube and do something, and generations more
before they can re-establish democracy.
Ray McGovern writes:"Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite
tactics to stymie investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious
embarrassment or reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge"
On the matter of government reform classification there is a great need of public
discussion and radical reform. Why? Because the government is playing with an essential
right, the right to know. All the red herrings needed to be thrown in the trash and the
burden placed on the classifiers to justify why the public does not have a right to know.
Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:24
Yes, the facts and their significance (especially about false flags and scandals) need to
be publicly debated, as well as policy goals, and the policies derived from facts and goals.
We have far too many government secrets to sustain a democracy.
I suggest limiting secrets to ongoing investigations (with a time limit), defensive
military plans and operations (not alleged provocations or aggressive war schemes), and
personal IDs of those at risk. Beyond that secrets disguise tyranny.
Ida G Millman , July 8, 2019 at 16:02
Another path towards a solution to government corruption could be term limits for all
federal representatives. Limiting the number of terms would curtail the opportunities for
forming the uninterrupted years of long coalitions between public servants and government
officials that result in the abuses of power that have damaged the interests of ordinary less
wealthy citizens, in favor of corporate and military interests.
In the matter of the original intentions of the men who wrote our founding documents, we
should consider one of the enormous differences that technology has made between us: that our
representatives can travel between DC and their homes with enough ease that they can continue
reasonably, or nearly reasonably, satisfactory family lives – something that could not
be done in the 18th century. The forefathers did not foresee that being a member of
government would become a career for a lifetime. They assumed, I believe, that members of
government would always be citizens who would give our country a few years of their lives and
then return to private life to share their experience and knowledge with their neighbors.
Such a change would not magically reform government corruption. There will always be those
who will find a way – but it could slow things down and it would certainly engage an
increasing number of citizens who would participate in governing, as well as the circles of
people surrounding each of them whose interest in and understanding of government would
increase because everyone would know more of their representatives. Got that, kids?
L&B&L
Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:37
Term limits are useful and we should enact more. There seems to be a sufficient supply of
puppets for the rich/WallSt/Mic/zionists to ensure that all new candidates represent only
those interests, unless we go further and control funding of mass media and elections,
monitoring of politicians and judges for life, etc.
Rob Roy , July 8, 2019 at 20:28
Ida,
Term limits wouldn't be necessary if money were out of elections and all elections were
publicly funded. Next, a law should be passed to prevent retired congress people from
lobbying for any private company of any kind. Then people wouldn't have to spend all their
time in congress lining up money for the next election, nor would they owe favors to
anyone.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 21:19
Sam F, all of those goals seem very nice but it would probably be better if we just
dissolved back into 50 states save for an interstate system and a very small navy for common
defense, maybe four nuclear submarines total, the American people will be best off without a
government completely working it out for themselves, if some of them work it out in
completely different ways without hurting each other so be it. Besides even a libertarians
would have to acknowledge democracy best works for smaller populations. We may never be able
to curb the will to power of evil men but we can diminish their abilities to fleece the
public if we are not subject to them.
Jay , July 8, 2019 at 11:42
Peter King?
Really now.
Not a credible source, no matter how invention filled Russia-gate is. And no matter how
clear it is that in 2016 the FBI was poking around campaign Trump and likely telling the
White House what it found.
Bif Webster , July 8, 2019 at 13:28
I agree that King isn't the best of messengers, but we can also go to others who are not
right-wing to see something fishy went on.
Those text messages convinced me something was going on. And that was before all the other
stuff came to light.
I think this will be about who has more dirt on the other side you know, leverage?
Jeff Harrison , July 8, 2019 at 11:41
Thank you, Ray. Forgive my cynicism but the US government is so corrupt, has wielded
illegitimate power for so long, and has covered the tracks of countless functionaries who
have not upheld the constitution that I doubt this will go anywhere. I have been quoting Ben
Franklin for some time "you have a republic, if you can keep it." I don't think we can. A
reading of "A History of Venice" by John J. Norris would be appropriate here. The most serene
republic lasted for essentially 1,000 years from roughly 800 to not quite 1800, first as a
democracy, later as an oligarchy. Much like us, including having the most feared secret
service in Europe at the time, Venice kept its power through trade but at least we don't
hoist the new president up on a chair so that he can throw golden Ducats to the crowd on Wall
Street the way that a new Doge would.
I don't see that as necessarily much of a plus.
Steven Berge , July 8, 2019 at 11:40
I don't suppose anything will happen to anybody important about this. After all, nothing
happened to anybody when they were caught mass spying on any and all american citizens, even
before they made it legal.
Drew Hunkins , July 8, 2019 at 11:32
Unfortunately Webb and Parry exposed much of these gangster criminal "intel" savages for
running guns and drugs to Central American pseudo fascist mercenary sadists throughout much
of the late 1970s through the '80s. I say unfortunately b/c nothing much ever came along by
way of true justice, by way of the criminal players rotting in maximum security jail cells
for years on end, not unlike the crack or heroin addict who steals a $400 television.
Jill , July 8, 2019 at 11:15
This has been one long crime against the American people. King should read what he knows
into the Congressional Record. I have no sympathy for Trump's fear of the deep state. He has
sent people to die knowing full well that his actions were based on lies, lies that would
result in the deaths of civilians as well as our own military. If he is going to do that,
then he should have the courage to face the deep state. That's partial penance for all the
deaths he has caused.
I also don't care about Trump's personal issue about being surveilled. He personally
supports that against everyone else. That is why I feel this is a crime against our people as
a whole. Our constitution has been stripped bare. We don't have the rule of law. Mass
surveillance covering the globe is current reality. It is dangerous. It is wrong. It is
lawless. It is a disaster.
Further, Russiagate was used to keep real opposition away from Trump. His supporters
doubled down on "liking" Trump because he appeared to be a victim of these lies. Democrats
meanwhile learned to further worship the IC. They ignored Trump's actual unlawful behavior,
and, in the case of war crimes, still support Trump on every war/regime change action etc.
recommended to them by their IC "resistance" "leaders".
People won't speak to one another because of this division, all based on lies. Democrats
want Assange put to death because he exposed truthful information about Clinton. Neighbor has
turned against neighbor over this. We have stopped talking and stopped thinking about whether
claims make sense or have evidence behind them. Political parties have become cults with cult
leaders. Meanwhile, many who think it was wrong to use surveillance against Trump, accept
mass surveillance against everyone else, including themselves.
This has been one of the most effective propaganda tools I have ever seen against our
populace. It has created a divided, unthinking populace who is ripe for the picking by evil
men and women. I am truly hoping that once this is exposed people will stop this madness and
pull together for a common good. But I'm quite worried that, like most cults, when the leader
is shown to be wrong, people cling to them even more.
I cannot believe what Russiagate has done to our own people. I am terrified at the wars it
has/may yet cause and the cruelty against others, both foreign and domestic, which it has
wrought.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 21:51
What else would you call it, there have always been nefarious agents in one government or
another for one gangster interest or another, whether was Milner's roundtable or Dulles's Gladio werewolves, these are nefarious individuals there is no gray area in that, however
they may conduct themselves and their personal lives, it is not sloppy journalism, is to call
something what it is, a this shadow government working in many instances against the direct
interest of the American people, I'm not trying to be you over the head with this but Mr.
McGovern was once upon a Time swimming in the same waters and he knows what he is talking
about. The deep state maybe several different factions but all of it at least so far is
fairly I'm Accountable, this thing must be named.
AnneR , July 8, 2019 at 14:18
First the Disclaimer: I'm not a supporter of either side of the one party two headed
monster political machine, not of either HRC or DT, both, and their "parties," making me want
to puke.
I am curious about the following: "He [DT] has sent people to die knowing full well that
his actions were based on lies, lies that would result in the deaths of civilians as well as
our own military. If he is going to do that, then he should have the courage to face the deep
state. That's partial penance for all the deaths he has caused."
While I have no doubt that DT has been responsible for civilian deaths (I am far less
concerned about military deaths – join the military and you cannot expect not to have
to chance it, particularly in a warmongering nation state; if the recruit doesn't recognize
this reality, then they need to do some reading), *most* such deaths in those countries we
(the US and its vassal states and proxies) have been happily bombing, shelling, destroying
one way or another, even since the late 1980s (not therefore including the appalling and
illegal warring on Vietnam et al) are down, not to DT, but rather to presidents: BC, GHB,
GWB, BO. Pretty evenly divided betwixt the two heads, wouldn't you say?
That's not to excuse DT (and I wouldn't excuse HRC either – think Libya; as bad as
MA, if with different forms of warfare; but then they're buddies, like attracting like).
We – the US – need to stop killing other peoples (let's cry for the war-making
profiteers), stop destroying other countries (and for our corporate-capitalists who plunder
them); need to mind our own "shop" and business. And stop pretending that we're such a
wonderful, white-hatted, "good" nation.
Jill , July 8, 2019 at 15:15
AnneR,
We have had war criminal presidents from the legacy parties, period. Barr is a party to
war crimes so I share other's doubts that he will do anything about actual justice. He may be
in on the current winning side of the IC and they may be purging some enemies at this time.
That is the only thing I see Barr being involved in.
Speaking as someone who has done counter-recruitment in schools, I will just give you my
experience. Students are tracked from grade school. A file is kept on them with over a
thousand data points. These files are taken by recruiters and used to "pitch" the military to
young people. I don't know if you were sophisticated at 16. I was a little bit but not much.
So here's an example–they told one young woman who had a single mother that if she went
in the military she would not be a burden on her mother any longer. They understood the
family had few resources and they played on this young woman's "guilt" over being a financial
"drain" on her mother. No, recruiters do not tell the truth to those they meet. They lie and
they lie very well because they have excellent information to help them tell the correct
lies. That girl is dead and I mourn her death.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 22:05
AnneR, you have so much anger, I understand, it is terrible what our nation has done and
is continuing to do, it has gone on so long that many of the people currently perpetrating
the crimes against foreign populations are themselves of descendents of peoples the US has
victimized. It's the propaganda, the United States is one of the most heavily propagandize
societies in the world, we make the Soviets look like children. No one wants you to have
sympathy for Donald Trump, you do not have to agree or like a person to see that the cartel
seeking to damage him is also simultaneously against your interests and they are against your
interests whether you're from the left or the right because they do not have an ideology just
it will to power.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 22:09
Jill that was an incredibly cogent description of the mess we are currently in,
congratulations on such clarity, peace out.
David Otness , July 9, 2019 at 00:18
With you on all that you state, Jill. It's really exposed the U.S. population for what we
unfortunately are, if not what we've become. So reminiscent of the darker days of the Cold
War. A stark education has just played out to this point. I wonder how many have learned anything at all from it?
The signs are always there, it will always seem, in retrospect. Russian meddling in American
elections. You double-take as you hear President Obama admonish the Russians, shortly after the
2016 presidential election, "We can do stuff to you." I'm old enough to remember that such
'stuff' has been going on for awhile. In 1996, Americans crowed about having meddled in
the Russian presidential election. Well, you could argue that they can do stuff too.
Let's recount. Reagan told Gorbachev to "tear down that wall" in Berlin. He did, along with
the Iron Curtain. The neoliberals rushed in like RawdyYates in Rawhide with their bling and sto
ho ethos. The oligarchs took over in Russia. Clinton installed the dancing circus bear Boris
Yeltsin and laughed so hard at
the president's buffoonery that it looked for awhile like America would be friends-for-life
with the Russkies. Maybe they could do stuff together.
... ... ...
John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelancer based in Australia. He is a former
reporter for The New Bedford Standard-Times
"... It wasn't to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton, which the Russian lawyer did not have and never produced. That was a ploy by Robert Goldstone, a British music publicist whose job is to get what his clients want, in this case, a meeting. So, recklessly, he invented the idea of Clinton dirt as a bait-and-switch to get Trump's people to come to it. He got the lawyer the meeting for her to lobby a potentially incoming administration against the Magnitsky Act, which is why she was in the United States in the first place. ..."
"... The lawyer lobbying against the act, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort that Browder's story was fake, a smokescreen to block the Russians from going after him for multi-millions in tax evasion. She argued the Magnitsky Act was built on this fraud. Manafort's notes, included in the Mueller Report, trace what she said. ..."
"... The Mueller investigators appear not to have looked into her charges. The report promotes Browder's fabrications, citing "the Magnitsky Act, which imposed financial sanctions and travel restrictions on Russian officials and which was named for a Russian tax specialist who exposed a fraud and later died in a Russian prison." ..."
"... But instead of his "lawyer" Magnitsky exposing Russian fraud, for which he was jailed and killed in prison, Magnitsky was actually Browder's accountant who was detained under investigation for his part in Browder's tax evasion and died of natural causes in prison, as Magnitsky's own mother admits to filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov in the film "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes." ..."
"... The documents include a deposition where Browder admits that the alleged "lawyer" Magnitsky did not go to law school nor have a law degree. Magnitsky's own testimony file identifies him as an "auditor." ..."
"... I interviewed Veselnitskaya in New York in November 2016. She explained what she later told the Trump group, that Browder's clients the Ziff Brothers had invested in Russian shares in a way that routed the money through loans so that they could evade U.S. taxes. ["Not invest – loans" in Manafort's notes.] ..."
Natalia Veselnitskaya didn't have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton and when the Russian lawyer met
with Trump's people her focus was not on the 2016 campaign, writes Lucy Komisar.
By Lucy Komisar Special to Consortium News
A "key event" described in the Mueller
Report is the Trump Tower meeting where a Russian lawyer met with the president's son
Donald Trump Jr, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Russiagaters have been obsessed with the meeting saying it was the smoking gun to prove
collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to steal the 2016 election. Months after
Mueller concluded that there was no collusion at all, the obsession has switched to
"obstruction of justice," which is like someone being apprehended for resisting arrest without
committing any other crime.
Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump team members in Trump Tower,
and her interpreter, in background. (Lucy Komisar)
The Mueller report thus focuses instead on "efforts to prevent disclosure of information
about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Russians and senior campaign officials."
But the report on this topic is deceptive. Ironically, as it attacks Donald Trump and top
campaign officials for lying, the report itself lies about the issue the meeting addressed.
It wasn't to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton, which the Russian lawyer did not have and
never produced. That was a ploy by Robert Goldstone, a British music publicist whose job is to
get what his clients want, in this case, a meeting. So, recklessly, he invented the idea of
Clinton dirt as a bait-and-switch to get Trump's people to come to it. He got the lawyer the
meeting for her to lobby a potentially incoming administration against the Magnitsky Act, which
is why she was in the United States in the first place.
The Magnitsky Act is a 2012 U.S. law that was promoted by William Browder, an American-born
British citizen and hedge fund investor, who claimed his "lawyer" Sergei Magnitsky had been
imprisoned and murdered because he uncovered a scheme by Russian officials to steal $230
million from the Russian Treasury. It sanctioned Russians he said were involved or benefitted
from Magnitsky's death. It has since been used by the U.S. to put sanctions on other Russians
and nationals from other countries.
The lawyer lobbying against the act, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told Trump Jr., Kushner and
Manafort that Browder's story was fake, a smokescreen to block the Russians from going after
him for multi-millions in tax evasion. She argued the Magnitsky Act was built on this fraud.
Manafort's notes, included in the Mueller Report, trace what she said.
Nothing Illegal
The Trump people did nothing illegal to meet with her. Their problem was the exaggerating
communications Goldstone sent them about Veselnitskaya having "dirt" on Clinton. (While U.S.
election laws says it's illegal for a campaign to receive "a thing of value" from a foreign
source, it's never been established by a court that opposition research fits that description,
the Mueller Report admits. ) Veselnitskaya
testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that Browder's major
American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes and contributed
the "dirty money" to the Democrats.
The Mueller investigators appear not to have looked into her charges. The report
promotes Browder's fabrications, citing "the Magnitsky Act, which imposed financial sanctions
and travel restrictions on Russian officials and which was named for a Russian tax specialist
who exposed a fraud and later died in a Russian prison."
But instead of his "lawyer" Magnitsky exposing Russian fraud, for which he was jailed
and killed in prison, Magnitsky was actually Browder's accountant who was detained under
investigation for his part in Browder's tax evasion and died of natural causes in prison, as
Magnitsky's own mother admits to filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov in the film "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes."
Mueller's investigators might have started with documents filed in U.S. federal court in the
case of Veselnitskaya's client, Prevezon, a Russian holding company that settled a
civil-forfeiture claim by the U.S. government that linked it, without proof, to the tax
fraud.
The documents include a deposition where
Browder admits that the alleged "lawyer" Magnitsky did not go to law school nor have a law
degree. Magnitsky's own testimony
file identifies him as an "auditor."
Why does that matter? Because it was Browder's red herring. Magnitsky had worked as
Browder's accountant since 1997, fiddling on Browder's taxes on profits from sales of shares
held by Russian shell companies run by his Hermitage Fund. He was not an attorney hired in 2007
to investigate and then expose a tax fraud against the Russian Treasury.
That fraud was exposed by Rimma Starova, the Russian nominee director of a British Virgin
Islands shell company that held Hermitage's reregistered companies and who gave testimony to
Russian police on
April 9 and
July 10, 2008 . It was reported
by The New York Times and Vedomosti
on July 24, 2008, months before Magnitsky mentioned it in an Oct. 7 interrogation.
Kremlin-connected?
Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. (Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia
Commons)
The Mueller Report says Veselnitskaya promised dirt on Hillary Clinton as "part of Russia
and its government support for Trump." Two days before the meeting, Goldstone emailed Trump Jr.
and said "the Russian government attorney" was flying in from Moscow. She had not been a
government attorney since 2001, 15 years earlier.
I interviewed Veselnitskaya in New York in November 2016. She explained what she later
told the Trump group, that Browder's clients the Ziff Brothers had invested in Russian shares
in a way that routed the money through loans so that they could evade U.S. taxes. ["Not invest
– loans" in Manafort's notes.]
The report says, "Natalia Veselnitskaya had previously worked for the Russian government and
maintained a relationship with that government throughout this period of time." Later it says
that from 1998 to 2001, she had worked as a prosecutor for the "Central Administrative
District" of the Russian Prosecutor's office. "And continued to perform government-related work
and maintain ties to the Russian government following her departure." We are meant to presume,
with no evidence, as the media does – that means "a Kremlin-connected lawyer."
When Trump Jr asked for evidence, how the payments could be tied to the Clinton campaign,
she said she couldn't trace them, according to the Mueller Report.
Then she turned to the Magnitsky Act. The report repeats earlier fakery: "She lobbied and
testified about the Magnitsky Act, which imposed financial sanctions and travel restrictions on
Russian officials and which was named for a Russian tax specialist who exposed a fraud and
later died in a Russian prison." Magnitsky did not expose a fraud. Rimma Starova
did.
A footnote in the report said: "Browder hired Magnitsky to investigate tax fraud by Russian
officials, and Magnitsky was charged with helping Browder embezzle money." Browder did not hire
Magnitsky to investigate the fraud. Magnitsky had been the accountant in charge of Hermitage
since 1997, 10 years before the fraud. Embezzlement refers to Browder shifting assets out of
Russia without paying taxes.
But the investigation's focus was not on Browder's fakery -- the substance of the Trump
Tower meeting -- but on the communications organizing the event. The section on obstruction
says Trump became aware of "emails setting up the June 9, 2016 meeting between senior campaign
officials and Russians who offered derogatory information on Hillary Clinton as 'part of Russia
and its government's support for Mr. Trump.'"
That would have been inflated Goldstone's promises.
The report says "at the meeting the Russian attorney claimed that funds derived from illegal
activities in Russia were provided to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats." Trump Jr. told a
White House press officer that "they started with some Hillary thing, which was bs and some
other nonsense, which we shot down fast."
As Veselnitskaya told me, she knew the Ziffs made contributions to Democrats. She probably
started with that. Manafort's notes don't report a "Hillary thing," but are about Browder and
the Ziffs.
On the issue of Browder, the Magnitsky story and the essence of the Trump Tower meeting, the
Mueller Report is a deception intended to keep the myth of collusion in the air while
dismissing that any collusion took place.
Lucy Komisar is an investigative reporter who writes about financial corruption and
won a Gerald Loeb award, the most important prize in financial journalism, for breaking the
story about how Ponzi schemer Allen Stanford got the Florida Banking Dept to allow him to move
money offshore with no regulation. Her stories about William Browder focus on tax evasion. Find
out more on The Komisar Scoop and on
Twitter, @lucykomisar
.
If you enjoyed this original article, please considermaking a donationto Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
"... Somehow, I think Kevin's being too generous saying NY Times is moderate when it comes to political views. IMO, reactionary is more appropriate given its editorial stances and what it's championed over its history. ..."
Interesting observation of
NY Times attitude after first D-Party debate noted by Kevin Gosztola:
"'Moderates' seems to be the New York Times media company's euphemism for itself. Liberals
at the Democratic presidential debate made the Times company 'anxious.'"
Somehow, I think Kevin's being too generous saying NY Times is moderate when it
comes to political views. IMO, reactionary is more appropriate given its editorial stances
and what it's championed over its history.
"... Somehow, I think Kevin's being too generous saying NY Times is moderate when it comes to political views. IMO, reactionary is more appropriate given its editorial stances and what it's championed over its history. ..."
Interesting observation of
NY Times attitude after first D-Party debate noted by Kevin Gosztola:
"'Moderates' seems to be the New York Times media company's euphemism for itself. Liberals
at the Democratic presidential debate made the Times company 'anxious.'"
Somehow, I think Kevin's being too generous saying NY Times is moderate when it
comes to political views. IMO, reactionary is more appropriate given its editorial stances
and what it's championed over its history.
Less than four days after the Parkland school shooting, the New York Times has found
a way to turn a national tragedy that claimed the lives of 17 high school students into an
opportunity to escalate its unrelenting campaign of anti-Russian propaganda, involving the
continuous bombardment of the public with reactionary lies and warmongering.
Against the backdrop of a major escalation of military tensions between the two countries,
the Times seized upon the Justice Department indictment of Russian nationals over the
weekend to claim that Russia is at "war" with the United States. Now, the Times has
widened this claim into an argument that Russia somehow bears responsibility for social
divisions over the latest mass shooting in America.
Its lead headline Tuesday morning blared: "SHOTS ARE FIRED, AND BOTS SWARM TO SOCIAL DIVIDES
- Florida School Shooting Draws an Army Ready to Spread Discord"
According to the Times , Russian "bots," or automated social media accounts, sought
"to widen the divide" on issues of gun control and mental illness, in order to "make compromise
even more difficult." Russia sought to exploit "the issue of mental illness in the gun control
debate," and "propagated the notion that Nikolas Cruz, the suspected gunman" was "mentally
ill."
The absurd claim that Russia is responsible for the existence of social divisions in America
is belied by the shooting itself, which is a testament to the fact that American society is
riven by antagonisms that express themselves, in the absence of a progressive outlet, in
outpourings of mass violence.
The aim of this campaign is to target anyone who would criticize the underlying social
causes of the shooting -- the violence of American society, the nonexistence of mental health
services, or even the social psychology that gives rise to mass shootings -- as a "Russian
agent" seeking to "sow divisions" in American society.
The Times lead is based entirely on a "dashboard" called Hamilton 68 created by the
German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy, whose lead spokesman is Clint Watts,
the former US intelligence agent and censorship advocate who declared in November that social
media companies must "silence" sources of "rebellion."
Without naming any of the accounts it follows, Hamilton 68 claims to track content tweeted
by "Russian bots and trolls." But most of the trends leading the dashboard are news stories,
many posted by Russia Today and Sputnik News , that are identical with the
trending topics followed by any other news agency. Thus, Hamilton 68 provides an instant New
York Times headline generator: Any major news story can be presented as the result of
"Russian bots."
The New York Times is making its claims about "Russian meddling" with what is known
in the law as "unclean hands." That is, the Times practices the very actions of which it
accuses others.
Here is not the place to deal with the long and bloody history of American destabilization
campaigns and their horrific consequences in Latin America and the Middle East, or to review
the fact that many American journalists serving abroad had dual functions -- as reporters and
as agents.
But it is worth noting that, particularly in recent decades, and under the auspices of
Editorial Page editor James Bennet, there has been a remarkable integration of the Times
with the major operations of the US intelligence agencies.
This is particularly true with regard to Russia, in regard to which the Times acts as
an instrument of US foreign policy misinformation, practicing exactly what it accuse the
Kremlin of.
Take, for example, the so-called political "dissident" Aleksei Navalny. This proponent of
extreme nationalism and xenophobia, with deep ties to Russia's fascistic right, and extensive
connections to US intelligence agencies, has been championed by the Times as the voice
of social dissent in Russia. Despite his miniscule support within Russia, Navalny's activities
generate front-page headlines in the Times , which has mentioned him in over 400
separate articles.
Another example is the Times ' promotion of the "feminist" rock band Pussy Riot,
which makes a habit of getting themselves arrested by taking their clothes off in Russian
Orthodox churches, and whose fate the Times holds up as a horrific example of Russian
oppression. The very name "Pussy Riot," which in typical usage is not even translated into
Russian, expresses the fact that this operation aims to influence American, and not Russian,
public opinion.
In 2014, the Times met with members of Pussy Riot at their editorial offices, and
have since extensively promoted the group, having mentioned it in over 400 articles. The term
"anti-Putin opposition" is mentioned in another 600 articles.
The logic of the Times ' campaign was expressed most clearly by its columnist Thomas
Friedman, the personification of the pundit as state intelligence mouthpiece whose career was
aptly summed up in a biography titled Imperial Messenger . In a column published on
February 18 ("Whatever Trump is Hiding is Hurting All of US Now"), Friedman declares a "code
red" threat to the integrity of American democracy.
"At a time when the special prosecutor Robert Mueller -- leveraging several years of
intelligence gathering by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. -- has brought indictments against 13
Russian nationals and three Russian groups -- all linked in some way to the Kremlin -- for
interfering with the 2016 U.S. elections," Friedman writes, "America needs a president who will
lead our nation's defense against this attack on the integrity of our electoral democracy."
This "defense," according to Friedman, would include "bring[ing] together our intelligence
and military experts to mount an effective offense against Putin -- the best defense of all."
In other words, war.
The task of all war propaganda is to divert internal social tensions outwards, and the
Times ' campaign is no different. Its aim is to take the anger that millions of people
feel at a society riven by social inequality, mass alienation, police violence, and endless
war, and pin it on some shady foreign adversary.
The New York Times ' claims of Russian "meddling" in the Parkland shooting set the
tone for even more hysterical coverage in the broadcast evening news. NBC News cited Jonathan
Morgan, another collaborator on the Hamilton 68 project, who declared that Russia is "really
interested in sowing discord amongst Americans. That way we're not focused on putting a unified
front out to foreign adversaries."
The goal of the ruling class and its media accomplices is to put on "a unified front"
through the suppression of social opposition within the United States. Along these Lines, NBC
added, "Researchers tell us it's not just Russia deploying these attacks on social media,"
adding "many small independent groups are trying to divide Americans and create chaos."
Who are these "small independent groups" seeking to "create chaos"? By this, they no doubt
mean any news or political organization that dares question the official line that everything
is fine in America, and that argues that the horrendous levels of violence that pervade
American society are somehow related to social inequality and the wars supported and justified
by the entire US political establishment.
It is worth noting that these claims were made on the same day that Fox News ran a story
alleging that Michael Moore, the director of Bowling for Columbine , a film that related
the 1999 Columbine High School massacre to US wars abroad, had attended an anti-Trump
demonstration allegedly set up by Russia.
As the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly warned, the targets of this campaign
are left-wing, antiwar and progressive web sites, political organizations, and news outlets,
and, by extension, the freedom of the press and freedom of expression of the entire American
public. In the name of providing a "unified front" to "foreign adversaries," the conditions are
being created for the criminalization and banning of political dissent.
You have probably seen the bumper sticker that says: "Shit Happens." Some people are just
lucky, I suppose, and odd coincidences mark their lives.
When he was just out of Columbia College and working for a reputed CIA front company,
Business International Corporation, Barack Obama had a chance encounter with a young woman,
Genevieve Cook, with whom he had a 1-2 year relationship.
Like Obama and at about the same
time, Cook just happened to have lived in Indonesia with her father, Michael Cook, who just
happened to become Australia's top spook, the director-general of the Office of National
Assessments, and also the Ambassador to Washington.
Of course, Obama's mother, as is well-known, just happened to be living in Indonesia with
Barack and Obama's step-father, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian military officer, who had been
called back to Indonesia by the CIA supported General Suharto three months before the CIA coup
against President Sukarno. Suharto subsequently slaughtered over a million Indonesian
Communists and Indonesian-Chinese.
As is also well-known, it just so happened that Obama's
mother, Ann Dunham, trained in the Russian language, after teaching English in the US Embassy
in Jakarta that housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia, did her "anthropological" work
in Indonesia and Southeast Asia financed by the well-known CIA conduits, USAID and the Ford
Foundation.
Then there is Cook's stepfather, Philip C. Jessup, who just happened to be in
Indonesia at the same time, doing nickel-mining deals with the genocidal Suharto
government.
Anyway, "shit happens." You never know whom you might meet along the way of life.
First, let's look at Bellingcat involvement in Ukraine.
On July 11th 2014 an event happened that shook my world, literally. Bellingcat
reported that the Russians attacked Ukrainian armed forces from across the border in
Zelenopillya. The Ukrainians suffered traumatic losses. Once again, Eliot Higgins provides the
data to determine this. Once again Bellingcat was wrong about the origin of the attack.
This single battle marked the turning point for the entire war. The Donbass militia went on
a large offensive for the first time and destroyed a big Ukrainian encampment with a rocket
attack.
How can I afford to be so assertive? At 4:30 in the morning on July 11th every house in my
town started shaking because of the massive explosions going on at Zelenopillya. I did say it
shook my world, didn't I?
I was between the Russian border and the camp. We could see the smoke from the rockets and
the
sky was lit with the explosions . The
explosions were loud enough to wake the dead that morning. There were no rockets flying
over my head. For Russia to fire them, that's exactly where they would have been.
At that point we were under Ukrainian occupation for a couple of months. Two days before the
attack on Zelenopillya happened, a Ukrainian army officer told the post master to get the
children out of town within 2 days. The army was pulling out and a cleansing battalion (Donbas
battalion) was coming in to weed out "separatists and supporters." That was when I came face to
face with Mark
Paslowsky, the American nazi . The article gives his background and tells what was going
on.
Bellingcat misidentifies the weapon as artillery. Grad rockets were fired at Zelenopillya by
the Rovenki militia that day. I spoke with the militia that fired them about 1 week after the
fact. In the linked articles the Ukrainians state plainly that it was militia using Grad
rockets.
The Ukrainians took some of their wounded across the border to Russia. It's not quite
something you do if Russia was really attacking you. The worst injuries were treated locally.
Donbass people ran there after the battle to help the wounded and the Ukrainian soldiers were
treated at local hospitals. Ukraine abandoned them.
The story got a lot of play in the west in the west as a Russian attack on Ukraine thanks to
this event. It was added to the list of reasons to sanction Russia. If the attack on
Zelenopillya didn't happen, I probably wouldn't be here to write this.
For the third time on an important event, Bellingcat shows it cannot identify the origin or
firing location of a weapon and misidentifies both the weapon type and the direction of fire in
media.
Getting the facts straight about the MH-17 shoot down is the difference between hundreds of
families getting justice and closure for those deaths or never seeing it. Convict the wrong
party and justice is never served. New victims are made with false or erroneous evidence.
Bellingcat's importance to the JIT (Joint Investigative Team) investigation of MH-17 is
apparent through all the media Higgins and Toler are quoted in media as the independent
experts.
That last statement should grab your attention. Bellingcat and its founders Elliot Higgins
and Aric Toler's credibility rests on the fact that they are independent researchers. If they
are working for an interested party in any investigation, Bellingcat's credibility is destroyed
and their research means nothing. After all, it's been paid for.
Bellingcat really grabbed the public's attention and imagination after the shoot down of
flight MH-17 over Ukraine. Independent researchers Higgins and Toler went to work to find the
missile launch site and the responsible parties, or did they?
As early as February 2014, Higgins showed the beginning of a clear pattern regarding
Ukraine. In the tweet below this OSINT expert researcher was linking to a
1 month old blog started by
Sviatoslav Yurash . What's special about Yurash at this time is that he was Ukrainian
ultranationalist Dimitry Yarosh's English language spokesman. If that well known fact wasn't
enough to caution Higgins, what was?
In the next article to follow, starting with Yurash as the first example, I'll show you how
all these volunteer experts including Higgins get paid. The article will further cement and
establish the relationships between Bellingcat, Weisburd, Watts and other intel and news
headline providers with each other as well as their employers.
For now, the admission made by the Ukrainian Information Ministry and Aric Toler will have
to be enough.
In
addition, already 21 November Dmitry Zolotukhin met with his US counterpart, team
representative Bellingcat Arik Toler , who conducted a similar training for journalists in Kyiv
on the invitation of Media Development Foundation. They also discussed the possibility of
holding a conference in Kiev on thematic instruments OSINT-use techniques in the modern media."
One of the Media Development Center's
sponsors is NATO . It is a project of the US Embassy in Kiev because of the association
with the embassy's diplomatic paper, the Kyiv Post.
If that isn't enough, let's see how close Bellingcat's Aric Toler views the
relationship.
According to both Information Policy Advisor Dmitry Zolotukhin and Toler, they are partners.
Eric Toler and Eliot Higgins(Bellingcat), along with Aaron Weisburd, Clint Watts, and
Joel
Harding have been working with the same Ukrainian Information Ministry that started the
"Mytorovyets" or Peacekeeper website.
They help the SBU geo-locate people in Ukraine. As shown above, they also train people to
geo-locate anyone considered anti-Maidan or anti-nationalist in Ukraine. They didn't
disappoint.
I think this pretty well sums up how independent Bellingcat's investigation has been. To add
insult to injury, Higgins and Toler work directly with previously identified Ukrainian
Intelligence hackers and Pravy Sektor members (ultra-nationalist Ukrainians) to get Bellingcat
"independent research" information.
InformNapalm and its hackers are Ukrainian Intel agents working for the Information
Ministry. In their own words – The main activities of the project are
collecting and analysing OSINT-information , found in open
sources, including social networks. InformNapalm's investigation of 53rd Artillery Brigade
commander colonel Sergei Muchkayev, suspected of killing the MH17 passengers, was used in
the report of the Bellingcat research team .
Who was the information source for independent researchers at Bellingcat? Dimitry Yarosh's
best friend, Valentyn Nalivaychenko was one of them. In the spring of 2014, he replaced
SBU(Ukraine's Security Service) personnel with ultra-nationalists because they had the right
ideology. Another was Anton Gerashchenko who is responsible for persecuting the press in
Ukraine.
In
few days and hours after the crash of MH17 Ukrainian officials widely publicly discussed
all that data (except the photo of "Paris Match") anonymously downloaded by someone to social
nets. For example on July 17 Gerashchenko (The ministry of internal affairs) showed the photo
of Buk at Torez; on July 18 Avakov (The ministry of internal affairs) showed the video of Buk
at Luhansk; also on July 18 Nalivaychenko (the chief of Ukrainian security service) showed the
video of Buk at Snizhne, and on July 19 Vitaliy Naida (Ukrainian security service) showed shot
fragment of video frame (not the video itself) from Zugres.
Under the best circumstances Bellingcat's research can only be seen as a Ukrainian
Intelligence production. If neither Higgins or Toler were actively engaged with Ukrainian
operations on the many levels that they are, their source material is still very tainted. When
all your research material comes from a party under investigation, you are no longer a neutral
party. You can't pee in a blood sample and call it evidence. Are Higgins and Toler credible?
You decide.
Max van der Werff has become a go-to resource for understanding information about MH-17. I
have spoken at length with Max and his fellow researchers @bellingmouse. This linked article shows the strength of research
these REAL volunteers have brought to the MH-17 investigation . I had to ask Max the great
who-dun-it question. His response was after thousands of hours of research, he didn't know. Too
many people were withholding information and remaining uncooperative on all sides.
What he was sure of is that Bellingcat's research is shoddy and a lot of the evidence
appears fabricated.
Max van der Werf has been interviewed by the JIT investigative team on 4 occasions, given
over 6 hours of recorded interviews to them, as well as over 14GB of data.
Examples of this include the fact that all of the images and video are such low quality and
resolution, it's impossible to make definite determinations from them.
One of the chase vehicles (jeep) in Bellingcat's BUK convoy is driving with the door open.
In another image of the BUK transport supposedly taken by a local resident, the apartment was
not occupied in the summer of 2014. There was no one there to take the image. It was again so
grainy and low quality that even a military vehicle substitution was not noticeable. None of
the neighbors that were there saw a BUK on a trailer.
The route of travel according to Bellingcat would have taken the BUK launcher toward the
conflict zone twice while battles were being fought across the region. Anyone familiar with the
area or that had a map would take a direct route which would have made it much less noticeable
driving through unpopulated areas.
Images taken after the shoot down are just as bad. Some unimportant parts of the image are
in focus while it's almost impossible to make out the BUK even though it's right beside the
photographer.
The so-called wire-tapped conversation was proven to be a Ukrainian SBU production. How is
it still a part of the evidence chain?
What van der Werff and @bellingmouse have proven unequivocally is that another investigation
needs to take place that looks for real evidence. The JIT, for their part had the impossible
task of investigating a hostile shoot-down of a jetliner with no previous airline disaster
investigation experience in a war zone that was active. The problem with it is objectivity was
thrown out the window as soon as Ukraine got the right to reject evidence and control what
would be made public.
What has looking for Ruskies done? In the eyes of Congress it made you and every publication
that strives for neutral information or even writing from their political slant a Ruskie. You
work for Vladimir Putin.
It has taken away any hope of justice for people in Syria and the families of MH-17 victims
unless real neutral investigations take place.
It's taken away real news from the masses and replaced it with policy pieces from people
that get paid to hate you. You are after all, the Russian interference that they talk
about.
From
Unz
comment: "Tangentially related, but check out this great interview with Putin:
https://www.ft.com/content/878d2344-98f0-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36 The man's intelligence and seriousness is always impressive. The contrast with the nauseating rubbish that
comes out of Western politicians could not be more striking, no wonder they hate the guy."
Notable quotes:
"... "One of the things we must do in Russia is never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a better future ." ..."
"... Putin has recognized the influence of our "regime change" wars on the immigrant problem in Europe. He addressed it forcefully in his UN General Assembly speech in 2015 where he asks NATO "Do you know what you've done?" with regards to creating the immigration problems in Europe. Watch here https://youtu.be/q13yzl6k6w0. ..."
"... From Putin's 2007 Munich speech to this 2015 UN speech and many interviews along the way, I've learned to pay attention to what Putin says. He seems to have an extremely good handle on world events and where they are leading. ..."
"... The neoliberal economic plan is to suck the wealth out of the working class and funnel it up to the top 10%, especially the 1%. How to keep the working class from noticing the theft? ..."
"... neo-liberalism (aka "crony capitalism") is about compromising the state and the society that it protects in favor of wealthy, powerful interests. Thus, at it's core, it's against the people. ..."
"... Look at the whine ass, crying, warmongering. narcissist psychopathic bullies we get. I am envious of the Russians having a leader they can be proud of. ..."
"... Been about 60 years since I have had a president to be proud of, back when America WAS great,,, and they killed him. ..."
Putin said in an interview with the Financial Times Friday that the "[neo]liberal idea has
become obsolete," and referred to Germany's decision to welcome more than one million
refugees -- many fleeing savage urban warfare in Syria -- as a "cardinal mistake."
It is only the last part of the very long interview, where Putin indeed speaks of the
'obsolesce' of the '[neo]liberal idea', that seems to be of interest to the media. Most of the
interview is in fact about other issues. The media also do not capture how his 'obsolete'
argument is ingrained in the worldview Putin developed, and how it reflects in many of his
answers.
Here are excerpts that show that the gist of Putin's 'obsolete' argument is not against the
'[neo]liberal idea', but against what may be best called 'international
(neo-)[liberalism'.
Putin explains why U.S. President Donald Trump was elected:
Has anyone ever given a thought to who actually benefited and what benefits were gained from
globalisation, the development of which we have been observing and participating in over the
past 25 years, since the 1990s?
China has made use of globalisation, in particular, to pull millions of Chinese out of
poverty.
What happened in the US, and how did it happen? In the US, the leading US companies -- the
companies, their managers, shareholders and partners -- made use of these benefits. [..] The
middle class in the US has not benefited from globalisation; it was left out when this pie
was divided up.
The Trump team sensed this very keenly and clearly, and they used this in the election
campaign. It is where you should look for reasons behind Trump's victory, rather than in any
alleged foreign interference.
On Syria:
Primarily, this concerns Syria, we have managed to preserve Syrian statehood, no matter what,
and we have prevented Libya-style chaos there. And a worst-case scenario would spell out
negative consequences for Russia.
...
I believe that the Syrian people should be free to choose their own future.
...
When we discussed this matter only recently with the previous US administration, we said,
suppose Assad steps down today, what will happen tomorrow?
Your colleague did well to laugh, because the answer we got was very amusing. You cannot
even imagine how funny it was. They said, "We don't know." But when you do not know what
happens tomorrow, why shoot from the hip today? This may sound primitive, but this is how it
is.
On 'western' interventionism and 'democracy promotion':
Incidentally, the president of France said recently that the American democratic model
differs greatly from the European model. So there are no common democratic standards. And do
you, well, not you, but our Western partners, want a region such as Libya to have the same
democratic standards as Europe and the US? The region has only monarchies or countries with a
system similar to the one that existed in Libya.
But I am sure that, as a historian, you will agree with me at heart. I do not know whether
you will publicly agree with this or not, but it is impossible to impose current and viable
French or Swiss democratic standards on North African residents who have never lived in
conditions of French or Swiss democratic institutions. Impossible, isn't it? And they tried
to impose something like that on them. Or they tried to impose something that they had never
known or even heard of. All this led to conflict and intertribal discord. In fact, a war
continues in Libya.
So why should we do the same in Venezuela? ...
Asked about the turn towards nationalism and more rightwing policies in the U.S. and many
European countries, Putin names immigration as the primary problem:
What is happening in the West? What is the reason for the Trump phenomenon, as you said, in
the US? What is happening in Europe as well? The ruling elites have broken away from the
people. The obvious problem is the gap between the interests of the elites and the
overwhelming majority of the people .
Of course, we must always bear this in mind. One of the things we must do in Russia is
never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to
create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a
better future.
There is also the so-called [neo]liberal idea, which has outlived its purpose. Our Western
partners have admitted that some elements of the [neo]liberal idea, such as multiculturalism,
are no longer tenable.
When the migration problem came to a head, many people admitted that the policy of
multiculturalism is not effective and that the interests of the core population should be
considered. Although those who have run into difficulties because of political problems in
their home countries need our assistance as well. That is great, but what about the interests
of their own population when the number of migrants heading to Western Europe is not just a
handful of people but thousands or hundreds of thousands?
...
What am I driving at? Those who are concerned about this, ordinary Americans, they look at
this and say, Good for [Trump], at least he is doing something, suggesting ideas and looking
for a solution.
As for the [neo]liberal idea, its proponents are not doing anything. They say that all is
well, that everything is as it should be. But is it? They are sitting in their cosy offices,
while those who are facing the problem every day in Texas or Florida are not happy, they will
soon have problems of their own. Does anyone think about them?
The same is happening in Europe. I discussed this with many of my colleagues, but nobody
has the answer. The say they cannot pursue a hardline policy for various reasons. Why
exactly? Just because. We have the law, they say. Well, then change the law!
We have quite a few problems of our own in this sphere as well.
...
In other words, the situation is not simple in Russia either, but we have started working to
improve it. Whereas the [neo]liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. The
migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be
protected. What rights are these? Every crime must have its punishment.
So, the [neo]liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the
interests of the overwhelming majority of the population. Or take the traditional values. I
am not trying to insult anyone, because we have been condemned for our alleged homophobia as
it is. But we have no problems with LGBT persons. God forbid, let them live as they wish. But
some things do appear excessive to us.
They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles. I cannot even say exactly
what genders these are, I have no notion. Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with
that. But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional
family values of millions of people making up the core population.
While Putin says that [neo]liberalism is 'obsolete' he does not declare it dead. He sees it
as part of a spectrum, but says that it should not have a leading role:
You know, it seems to me that purely [neo]liberal or purely traditional ideas have never
existed. Probably, they did once exist in the history of humankind, but everything very
quickly ends in a deadlock if there is no diversity. Everything starts to become extreme one
way or another.
Various ideas and various opinions should have a chance to exist and manifest themselves,
but at the same time interests of the general public, those millions of people and their
lives, should never be forgotten. This is something that should not be overlooked.
Then, it seems to me, we would be able to avoid major political upheavals and troubles.
This applies to the [neo]liberal idea as well. It does not mean (I think, this is ceasing to
be a dominating factor) that it must be immediately destroyed. This point of view, this
position should also be treated with respect.
They cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do
over the recent decades. Diktat can be seen everywhere: both in the media and in real life.
It is deemed unbecoming even to mention some topics. But why?
For this reason, I am not a fan of quickly shutting, tying, closing, disbanding
everything, arresting everybody or dispersing everybody. Of course, not. The [neo]liberal
idea cannot be destroyed either; it has the right to exist and it should even be supported in
some things. But you should not think that it has the right to be the absolute dominating
factor. That is the point. Please.
There is much more in the interview - about Russia's relations with China, North Korea, the
Skripal incident, the Russian economy, orthodoxy and the [neo]liberal attack on the Catholic
church, multilateralism, arms control and the G-20 summit happening today.
But most '[neo]liberal' media will only point to the 'obsolete' part and condemn Putin for
his rallying against immigration. They will paint him as being in an alt-right corner. But even
the Dalai Lama, held up as an icon by many [neo]liberals, says that "Europe is for
Europeans" and that immigrants should go back to their own countries.
Moreover, as Leonid Bershidsky
points out , Putin himself is, with regards to the economy and immigration, a staunch
[neo]liberal:
Putin's cultural conservatism is consistent and sincere.
...
On immigration, however, Putin is, in practice, more [neo]liberal than most European leaders.
He has consistently resisted calls to impose visa requirements on Central Asian countries, an
important source of migrant labor. Given Russia's shrinking working-age population and
shortage of manual workers, Putin isn't about to stem that flow, even though Central Asians
are Muslims – the kind of immigrants Merkel's opponents, including Trump, distrust and
fear the most.
What Putin is aiming at, says Bershidsky, is the larger picture:
[W]hat Putin believes has outlived its usefulness isn't the [neo]liberal approach to
migration or gender, nor is it [neo]liberal economics – even though Russia has, in
recent months, seen something of a shift toward central planning. It is the [neo]liberal
world order. Putin wants to keep any talk of values out of international politics and forge
pragmatic relationships based on specific interests.
...
Putin's drive to put global politics on a more transactional basis isn't easy to defeat; it's
a siren song, and the anti-immigrant, culturally conservative rhetoric is merely part of the
music.
There is in my view no 'siren-song' there and nothing that has to be defeated. It is just
that Putin is more willing to listen to the people than most of the western wannabe
'elite'.
The people's interest is simply not served well by globalization, [neo]liberal
internationalism and interventionism. A transactional approach to international policies, with
respect for basic human decency, is in almost every case better for them.
Politicians who want the people's votes should listen to them, and to Vladimir Putin.
Posted by b on June 28, 2019 at 01:50 PM |
Permalink
It is hard to exaggerate Putin's accomplishments. He almost single-handedly saved Russia from
the chaos of the Yeltsin era and near collapse. He has reestablished Russia as a major power.
In the face of the American world rampage, he has helped stabilize MENA. By merging Russia's
Eurasian Union with China's OBOR, he has helped to set Eurasia on a road to peaceful economic
development. He has even managed to get China, India, and Pakistan talking to one another and
cooperating in a variety of Eurasian projects.
I doubt he has more than 10 years left as a Russian leader, and maybe not even that. When
he finally passes, he will be remembered as another Churchill or Bismarck.
Hmmm... Putin says the problem is 'multi-culturalism', 'migrants'? What kind of bullshit is
this?
Putin doesn't mention that the migrant crisis was caused by Western resource wars, in
Syria, Libya and elsewhere. That neoliberalism's impact on the poor countries has led to
the vast exodus into Europe and N. America.
I have a feeling that Putin is playing the 'RT game', targeting those disaffected people,
who have, in turn been the target of racist, islamaphobic propaganda by Western states,
states that for obvious reasons (self-incrimination) won't state the real reasons for
the exodus.
The page on [neo]liberalism in the classic sense the way it was envisioned in the late 18th
and 19th century has long been passed. [neo]liberalism as in nurturing the human soul and
intellect and allowing each individual to draw on their qualities and contribute to society
with their fullest potential has been supplanted by material and physical liberties alone
(Gender, Sexuality, Free Trade, Free Migration aka Free Movement of Slave Labor etc). What
today is called [neo]liberalism, which I like to equate with neo-[neo]liberalism and social
'progressivism', are both parts of post-modernism, a societal model that is falling and
failing under its own weight of hubris and inconsistencies.
The 'Do as thou wilt' mindset pushed on the people by the elites is deliberate with the
only end goal of creating their 'ideal' world. A world not based on morality, spirituality
and absolute truths, but relativism, materialism, loss of basic notions such as gender,
family, belonging, in short loss of identity and purpose for mankind to obtain ever greater
control over the masses. People are beginning to notice it, however, even if only
subconsciously and start to push back against it. Putin knows this, and that is what he is
laying out in his interview.
"They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles. I cannot even say exactly
what genders these are, I have no notion. Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with
that. But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional
family values of millions of people making up the core population.'
It has become la la land in the West in regards to gender...if a person wants to be gay,
be gay, but let's not force everyone else to pretend reality is not reality..nature choose
(dichotomy) for you to be male or female, sucks if that doesn't match your preferences but
better luck next life...accept the reality you are in and let's not force everyone one else
to pander to your delusions..
See also:
'Sex change' is biologically impossible," said McHugh. "People who undergo
sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become
feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and
encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental
disorder."
I'm reading the Kremlin's transcript I linked to at the Gabbard thread where I posted a very
short excerpt. I continue to read it but stopped to post another very short excerpt IMO is
very important:
"One of the things we must do in Russia is never to forget that the purpose of the
operation and existence of any government is to create a stable, normal, safe and predictable
life for the people and to work towards a better future ." [My Emphasis]
Here are excerpts that show that the gist of Putin's 'obsolete' argument is not against the
'[neo]liberal idea', but against what may be best called 'international
(neo-)liberalism'.
Just a matter of academic rigour: liberalism is extinct; neoliberalism is
literally the "new liberalism", it's successor doctrine. Therefore, when we speak of
"liberalism" after 1945, we're automatically referring to neoliberalism.
neoliberalism was created at Mont Pelerin in the 1930s, and its founding narrative
states that everything that happened between/since the death of liberalism (1914-1918)
and their own hegemony (1974-75) was an abortion of History and should've never happened.
Hence the name "neoliberalism": the new liberalism (adapted to the system of fiat
currency instead of the gold standard); the revival of liberalism; the return of
liberalism (the [neo]liberals).
It's also important to highlight that neoliberalism is not an ideology, but a
doctrine (which encompass mainly policies, but may also encompass ideals). It is wrong, for
example, to compare socialism with neoliberalism (socialism as anti-neoliberalism):
socialism is a scientific theory, and, as a social theory, encompasses a new socioeconomic
system, a new set of ideologies, a new set of cultures and a new set of political doctrines.
Neoliberalism, therefore, is just one aspect with which the capitalist elites engage
against socialism historically (in the doctrinal "front").
Generic question: How many of the 2020 candidates for US President could hold up their end of
an interview with such knowledge and style?
Personally I was impressed by Putin's bluntness in stating Merkel had made a "cardinal
mistake" when she opened the borders to the hundreds of thousands of illegals. And also
this:
And we set ourselves a goal, a task -- which, I am certain, will be achieved -- to adjust
pensions by a percentage that is above the inflation rate.
Compare that to the deliberate US policy if doing the exact opposite.
Can you imagine Trump writing like this? Or Obama, for that matter? Or Bush the Dimmer, or
Clinton, or Bush the Spook, or Reagan, or Carter...Hell, you'd have to go back to JFK to find
this sort of skill with language and deep analysis. And maybe not then. "They" say you get
the leaders you deserve. In that case the Russians have been nice and we Americans have been
very, very naughty.
Putin has recognized the influence of our "regime change" wars on the immigrant problem in
Europe. He addressed it forcefully in his UN General Assembly speech in 2015 where he asks
NATO "Do you know what you've done?" with regards to creating the immigration problems in
Europe. Watch here https://youtu.be/q13yzl6k6w0.
From Putin's 2007 Munich speech to this 2015 UN speech and many interviews along the way,
I've learned to pay attention to what Putin says. He seems to have an extremely good handle
on world events and where they are leading.
In the west our governments call Mr Putin a thug, a gangster. But, I've never seen any of our
politicians sit down and frankly and comprehensively lay out there views, goals, thoughts and
musings. To be a good leader or politician you have do have vision, but in the west here i
just see talking heads and soundbites, no soul.
Oh, yeah, the "[neo]liberals" are indignant over his pointing out that mass migration causes
social disruption.
He racist!
The neoliberal economic plan is to suck the wealth out of the working class and funnel
it up to the top 10%, especially the 1%. How to keep the working class from noticing the
theft?
How about divide and conquer? That seems to work. Take the native working class and divide it
any way that works in that society. In the US, traditionally, it was race, but they added sex
a couple of decades ago, then opened the doors to immigration and threw in national origin,
and now, just for kicks and giggles, everybody gets to define their own gender and sexual
preferences. Awesome. The US is now divided into 243,000,000 separate categories of
specialness. And if you don't accept everything someone else tells you as gospel, you are a
bigot of some sort (depending on their self identification. It varies.)
They divided up Yemen and Libya by tribes, Iraq and Yugoslavia by religion, it works the same
in every country.
When the US blows, it's going to be spectacular.
I'm always impressed with Putin's grasp and breadth a la Chirac, whom he admires and
emulates.
I posted a few excerpts I felt very important to this and the Gabbard threads; and at the
latter I now insist this interview be read, not just suggested. That BigLie Media chose to
pounce on Putin's critique of the [neo]liberal Idea displays its agenda and its extremely
sorry attempt to discredit/smear Putin yet again. IMO, such media smeared itself. The
give-and-take was very productive and informative, containing many lessons, a few of which I
pointed to.
Putin's now at the G-20 and has already had one bilateral meeting with TrumpCo.
Sputnik offers this recap that includes links to its additional articles published
during the day. Much has occurred, and Trump has yet to storm out. Some of the photos are
priceless, the May/Putin handshake perhaps being the most telling.
That there is a Putin that today leads a great country like Russia seems like a miracle and
he appeared at the very moment that Russia needed him.
Part of the West elite hate of Putin is that compared to them he gives off an aura of
honesty and truthfulness that is absent from leaders in the West.
The "multi-cultural" issue, to the extent that it is an issue, is only an issue as an
effect of the actual problem. It is effectively a scapegoat. No one would care about
"multiculturalism" if there was a fair economic order in which living standards were
increasing.
The problem is that western capitalism wants it both ways, it sees the
demographic problem it faces and it wants the labor of migrants but it does not want to
improve society, it wants to keep its slice of the pie. Hence things will get economically
worse while migrants will be an easy "cause" at which to point for the unthinking person. In
that sense it becomes a problem insofar as it contributes to fascism, nothing else
changing.
Putin is right about China utilizing globalization to the benefit of society while
the west is only interested in globalization insofar as it opens markets and creates profit
for those who own social production. But of course Marx predicted this all long ago, so it is
not perhaps surprising that the Chinese Communist Party would be more intelligent here. There
is nothing more symptomatic or demonstrative here than the fact that, while western countries
debate over a few tens of thousands of immigrants being "too many", China is capable of such
feats as eradicating poverty and building incredible and modern infrastructure while being a
land of over a billion people.
Reading over the Gabbard comments, I was reminded of another big divide in the US by party.
Americans treat their parties like their tribes and viciously attack heretics of other
tribes. The media fans the flames and keeps the "elections" going for years, without a
break.
Meanwhile, our ruling overlords pick their next puppet, let us all "vote" on computerized
machines, and then the talking heads announce the "winner".
And it all starts over.
neo-liberalism (aka "crony capitalism") is about compromising the state and the society
that it protects in favor of wealthy, powerful interests. Thus, at it's core, it's against
the people.
To compensate and distract from this corruption, the people are presented with the
'fruits' of a [neo]liberal society: quasi"-freedoms" like gender rights, civil rights, and
human rights. I say "quasi-" because these rights are abridged by the powerful elite as they
see fit (witness rendition and torture, pervasive surveillance, and Assange).
We fight among ourselves about walls and bathrooms as elites destroy the Commons. In this
way, they pick our pockets and kneecap our ability to fight back at the same time.
Boy did Russia luck out. Yeltsin was smart picking this man.... Look at the whine ass,
crying, warmongering. narcissist psychopathic bullies we get. I am envious of the Russians
having a leader they can be proud of.
Been about 60 years since I have had a president to be proud of, back when America WAS
great,,, and they killed him.
Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time
Such 'Error' HappensJOHN CHUCKMAN , Jun 26, 2019 2:10:12
PM |
23
Yesterday the news agencies Associated Press and Reuters mistranslated a
speech by Iran's President Hassan Rouhani. They made it sound as if Rouhani insulted U.S.
President Donald Trump as 'mentally retarded'. Rouhani never said that.
Iran's conservative new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Wednesday that Israel must be
"wiped off the map" and that attacks by Palestinians would destroy it, the ISNA press
agency reported.
...
Referring to comments by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution,
Ahmadinejad said, "As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."
Ever since he spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news
agencies at the time, it was that Israel "should be wiped off the map." Iran's nuclear
program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to
the infamous map remark.
Here, for example, is R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political
affairs, recently: "Given the radical nature of Iran under Ahmadinejad and its stated wish
to wipe Israel off the map of the world, it is entirely unconvincing that we could or
should live with a nuclear Iran."
"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom
exists in Persian," remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of
Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was
misquoted. "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying
Jerusalem, would collapse." Since Iran has not "attacked another country aggressively for
over a century," he said in an e-mail exchange, "I smell the whiff of war propaganda."
Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently
laid out the case this way: "The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by
Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that 'this regime occupying
Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,' just as the Shah's regime in Iran had
vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation
of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The 'page of time' phrase suggests he did not
expect it to happen soon."
Despite the above
and other explanations the false "wipe Israel off the map" translation never died. Years
later it still reappeared in Guardian pieces which required it to issuemultiple
corrections and clarifications.
Now, as the Trump administration is pushing for war on Iran, a similar mistranslation
miraculously happened. It were again 'western' news agencies who lightened the fire:
A lot of Western media is reporting that Iranian President Rouhani called Trump
"mentally retarded." This is inaccurate.
Regarding Trump, he just said "no wise person would take such an action [the new sanctions
imposed]."
Absolutely incorrect. There is a word for "retarded" in Persian & Rouhani didn't use
it. Prior to him saying "mental disability" he even prefaced his comment by saying "mental
weakness." Those who speak Persian can listen & judge for themselves. Here is a video
clip of Rouhani's comment: link
Iran leadership doesn't understand the words "nice" or "compassion," they never have.
Sadly, the thing they do understand is Strength and Power, and the USA is by far the most
powerful Military Force in the world, with 1.5 Trillion Dollars invested over the last two
years alone..
....The wonderful Iranian people are suffering, and for no reason at all. Their
leadership spends all of its money on Terror, and little on anything else. The U.S. has not
forgotten Iran's use of IED's & EFP's (bombs), which killed 2000 Americans, and wounded
many more...
.... Iran's very ignorant and insulting statement , put out today, only shows that they
do not understand reality. Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great
and overwhelming force. In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration. No more John
Kerry & Obama!
Reuters , which also peddled the mistranslation, gleefully
connected the dots :
This follows in the footsteps of a rich history of mistranslating and obfuscating which is
rarely, if ever, corrected by our Guardians of Truth. I will not hold my breath for AP to
pull its tweet out issue any sort of correction. The war machine is revving up, truth be
damned.
To add a few obfuscations to the list of mistranslations: the Palestinian intifada. Sounds
scary, no? Violence against the benevolent Israelis. Because what does intifada actually
mean? Uprising, which by its nature suggests oppression, something which just 'can't' be
happening in Palestine, hence the need for intifada.
Or take jihad, 'a pillor' of Islam. Again, very scary, as jihad 'means' suicide bombs and
killing infidels. What the Guardians of Truth never mention is that jihad in Islam is a very,
very broad term that includes such things as helping the poor or less fortunate, educating
oneself, quiet reflection, and prayer. Jihad as meaning 'holy war' was a sense meaning
derived much later than the founding of the religion, as a reaction to very real threats to
believers of the time, the Crusades and Mongol invasions. That this specific sense meaning
was essentially confined to history afterward, only to be revived by Wahhabists and takfiris,
and one not believed in by the vast majority of Muslims, is never explained. 'Cause all them
crazy Muslims believe in jihad!
In all cases where the boogeyman of the day needs concocting, rest assured the
'mainstream' press, with AP in the lead, will be there to build a gleaming edifice mistruths,
omissions, and lies.
In approximately 17 months, the american public can make strides to fix this mess.
I guess that is a long time for the iranians, but still maybe best option.
Just in case there is any doubt in American minds here is the Israeli Ambassador to the UN.
He thinks the sanctions are working well. Iran is panicking.
They mistranslate Trump all the time, or they spin what he says. It is amazing to watch.
For instance, at the Helsinki meeting, where he met with Putin and they discussed multiple
topics, but the press ignored any topic but demanding that Trump denounce Putin and "admit"
that Putin helped him steal the election, and that he was therefore not the legitimate
president.
Obviously, Trump was not going to say that, so he said that he was the legitimate
president, and the mockingbird media spun that into "the president is a traitor to America
because he said that 17 national intelligence agencies are lying".
.....The ministers lie, the professors lie, the television lies,
the priests lie .
These lies mean that the country wants to die.
Lie after lie starts out into the prairie grass,
like enormous caravans of Conestoga wagons .
And a long desire for death flows out, guiding the
enormous caravans from beneath,
stringing together the vague and foolish words.
It is a desire to eat death,
to gobble it down,
to rush on it like a cobra with mouth open
It's a desire to take death inside,
to feel it burning inside, pushing out velvety hairs,
like a clothes brush in the intestines --
This is the thrill that leads the President on to lie....
Robert Bly, The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, originally published by City Lights books
1970
Maybe the translation is inacurate but the message had the expected reaction from Trump:
Tweet furor.
It is good that Trump realizes that he does not have the monopole of insulting leaders.
The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war. How could it give a lesson to
Iran who won a 8 years war against Iraq despite the support that the USA, the Gulf countries
and Western countries gave to Iraq.
Loud noise and indecisive actions: The disaster of the USA foreign policy
I remember watching CNN translate Khamenei's "Nuclear Power" to "Nuclear Weapons" right on
live TV in 2013. This is not new.
/div> Virgile "The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war".
The US won a war against Grenada [population 95,000] I would go so far as to say they whupped
ass. True there were only 64 Cuban soldiers there [security guards] All members of the US armed
forces were involved and 5,000 medals were given out. Ra Ra USA.
Posted by: Harry Law , Jun 26, 2019 5:29:37 PM |
50
Virgile "The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war". The US won a war
against Grenada [population 95,000] I would go so far as to say they whupped ass. True there
were only 64 Cuban soldiers there [security guards] All members of the US armed forces were
involved and 5,000 medals were given out. Ra Ra USA.
Posted by: Harry Law | Jun 26, 2019 5:29:37 PM |
50
b-
I am a Persian speaker and is true that president Rouhani never said Trump is retarded, we
now have way passed the point that insults can matte. Nevertheless it was better if President
Rouhani would have called Trump and the rest of the ruling US regime like what the whole
world has now come to understand, a true and unique collection of retards on a shining hill.
Reminds me of when Nikita Khruschev attempted to explain in 1956 his view that that
capitalism would destroy itself from within by quoting Marx: "What the bourgeoisie therefore
produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers." This was notoriously
mistranslated into English as "We will bury you", as if the Soviets were out to kill all
westerners themselves. Of course this mistranslated was quoted time and time again in western
media, fueling Cold War paranoia for years to come.
blue @ 19 The news media are wedded to the state which is wedded to the banking system which
are all subsidiaries of global capitalism. They don't need to correct themselves. They may
have the occasional family feud, but they're all on the same team. They will admit to
"mistakes" being made, but only long after it makes no difference.
We have a FREE PRESS in America-Pravda on the Potomac, Izvestia on the Hudson.
Have a look sometime at the Venn Diagrams that portray the overlapping/interlocking
memberships of the regulatory/financial/corporate leadership class.
But more than that, whatever the idea of a free press once meant, with the rise of digital
corporate networking "platforms", not subject to any accountability, the barriers to entry of
any competing narratives to the mainstream discourse are nearly insurmountable. Except maybe
through subversion?
What is missing is a true public 'Marketplace of Ideas'
The deliberate mis-translations of non-english speaking "adversaries" of the US is common in
the msm. Putin is frequently and deliberately mis-translated to make him appear dictatorial
and aggressive.
I listened to Rohani's speech. He said that if JCPOA is bad, it is bad for all parties; and
if it is good, it is good for all parties. They cannot expect for JCPOA to be bad for them
and good for us. They withdrew from the JCPOA and expect us to stay with the agreement. This
is what he meant when he said: White house has been affected by mental inability and mental
disability.
ADKC
Iran is at war. US and gang are trying to destroy Iran as a nation. The biggest asset in
times of war is deception. Used by both the attacker and the attacked.
Khamenei
has Tweeted a series of tweets, and his scribe has posted what he tweeted along with
other words
at his website in English so there's no mistranslation. Here's one of the series of 6:
"The graceful Iranian nation has been accused & insulted by world's most vicious
regime, the U.S., which is a source of wars, conflicts & plunder. Iranian nation won't
give up over such insults. Iranians have been wronged by oppressive sanctions but not
weakened & remain powerful."
They were made 14+ hours ago, yet I'm the first to post notice of them here?!
The USA government excels at propaganda. It always has. Doesn't matter if it babies and
incubators, mistranslated leaders of targeted countries, or supposed mass graves. BTW... what
ever happened to all those mass graves in Iraq? HRW was going to dig them all up and document
them. Hundreds of thousands. Most Americans I talk to still believe in this. Was it true?
Saddam himself had claimed it wasn't true. That it was Kurdish propaganda to gain sympathy.
He claimed the Anfal campaign was only to push the Kurds off the border so he could control
arms smuggling and that casualties were minimal. Looking into the search. They are graves
with a few hundred here and there but where are the rest of the bodies? If you google Iraq
mass graves there are more articles about ISIS mass graves than the Anfal campaign. There
were people killed in the South during the Shia uprising after the first gulf war than there
was for the Anfal campaign. Was that a lie too? Nearly every American believes it still.
PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that
'400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses
have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence,
quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet
on Iraq's mass graves.
In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US
government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've
already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'
Anyone who can undestand Farsi ( Persian language) can litsen Rouhani's speech. He did not
name "Trump", he said " White House".
I have been watching CNN news channel who said that Rouhani made a personal attack on Trump!
That was not true.
There was no personal attack on Rouhani's speech.
Importantly, the context of the speech and conclusion is diffent from western media reports
and western translations.
I would like give few links of some Iranian news agencies, reporting Rouhani's speech for
International use, as reference here:
1) FrasNews Agency
Rouhani said:
"These days, we see the White House in confusion and we are witnessing undue and
ridiculous words and adoption of a scandalous policy,"
..."The US sanctions are crime against humanity. The US recent measures indicate their
ultimate failure. The new US measures are the result of their frustration and confusion over
Iran. The White House has mental disability,"
Le président iranien, affirmant que les États-Unis, malgré de
nombreuses tentatives de pression exercées par divers leviers sur l'Iran, ont
échoué dans leurs objectifs, a poursuivi : "Une étrange frustration et
une grande confusion règnent au sein du Corps dirigeant de la Maison Blanche. Ils se
sentent déçus car ils n'ont obtenu aucun résultat, ils s'attendaient
à voir l'Iran brisé dans l'espace de quelques mois, mais ils ont fini par
constater que les Iraniens agissent de plus en plus fermement, de manière plus
créative que jamais ".
The president also decried the new US sanctions against Iran, saying the White House has
been thrown into confusion as its officials are making "inappropriate and ridiculous"
comments and adopting the policy of disgrace.
Wow that's amazing! Probably the best known Khrushchev 'quote', presented as evidence of
his boorish nature, is an intentional mistranslation. And the Marx quote is not exactly
obscure, it's from Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto for eff sake! At least it makes a
change from the 'lets just make things up' cottage industry of Lenin & Stalin
'quotes'.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its
shoes."
Mark Twain (or some other student of wisdom)
... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotations.html
Apr 26, 2017 - Mark Twain is one of many who gets credit for famous quotations he never wrote
or said. ... credited with saying "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth
is still putting on its shoes" ... Proverbial wisdom, in which a quotation is elevated to the
status of a proverb because its source is unknown;.
Circe , Jun 27, 2019 10:19:52 AM |
136Noirette , Jun 27, 2019 10:50:17 AM |
137
Mistranslations are a classical cheap n easy way to sway opinion.
Interesting that the examples b quotes, and most of those promoted currently by the
US-uk-eu, afaik, understand, are intended to project into the voice of Iranians, Russians,
Syrians, utterances, declarations, to be labelled insults, slander, threats, impropriety,
even rage, coming from these parties, as
there is nothing much else to display!
(Spanish is too comprehensible > does not apply to Mexico, Cuba, S. America.)
Often cultural matters play a role, but are ignored. Ahmadinejad was endlessly vilified
and mocked by the W-MSM for saying what was translated as there are no homosexuals in
Iran (no idea what the original formulation was) - which 'obviously' can't be 'true.'
Besides homosexuality being unacceptable in conservative rule-books, Iran is, or was (to
2010) above (or with) Thailand the no. 1. practitioner / destination for sex change
operations. Iran had super educated docs, great hospitals, etc.
Ahmadinejad was relying on a kind of fundamentalist principle where the 'soul' or the
'essential quality' of a person is what is tantamount, what counts above all. The physical
manifestation, here the human body, can be transformed to be in harmony with the deep-felt or
'innately' ascribed orientation or 'spirit.' So, no homosexuals in Iran, or only a few who
are in 'transition.' (Not denying real suffering of gays in Iran, other story.)
The W, in first place the US, is doing precisely the same with its 'gender change'
promotion, as applied to children and young teens. Here too, 'feelings' and 'identity'
override 'nature' : the physical can be overturned, overcome, fixed.
Such cultural issues play a role in mis-translations, deliberate or not. It may appear
that I wandered far off topic, I just picked a topical comprehensible ex. Sharia law is more
complex..
"... Obviously , Russia is a threat to the US of A -- see the 1992 "Wolfowitz doctrine", where it stated directly. Consequently, Russia is also a threat to the major protectorates of the US, euphemistically described as "Euro-Atlantic community". The rest is propaganda, and demonizing the enemy is a trivial matter. ..."
"... The call to look for the root causes is very laudable, but often more than not is carried out in "7 blind men and an elephant" fashion. "Blind men" are also "biased men", some of whom, using their other senses instead of sight (e.g., olfactory organs) deliberately position themselves at poor elephant's derrière , perform (time and again – to the thunderous applause and approval of the Enlightened Western Public ™) an act of amateur colonoscopy and proclaim: "Behold! That's the essence of the Elephant!". ..."
"... Sometimes, the Elephants becomes annoyed – or enraged and tries to stomp on the irritant. Biased Blind Men promptly call for help from the professionals whose job is to kill all sorts of animals for fun and profit. That's my allegory to the Western Russia analysis. ..."
"... I will not pretend for a second that the Russians are either passive or angelic. However, since as the book you review and others have pointed out a lot of Western concepts are projected onto Russian thinking and actions that don't have much basis in how the Russians actually think, perhaps we also project some of our thinking onto them. In particular with what is happening in Iran and Venezuela, these seem to be actions very much in line with what we accuse the Russians of doing. ..."
"... Finally, I should also note that I think a huge factor in lowering the quality of Russia experts is exemplified by a Soviet joke "What is the difference between western Russia experts and western China experts? The China experts love China!" I myself was motivated to study Russia for what you might loosely call Military Industrial Complex reasons, but I conceived of the Russians less as an enemy to be feared and loathed and rather a country and people to be studied in its own right, and I also was moved by a profound respect for the people and the Army that saved Europe from the night of fascism. ..."
June 25, 2019PaulR14 Comments
'How do you deal with a problem like the Russians?' It's a question which seems to dominate public discourse nowadays, with the Russian
Federation elevated to the status of Enemy Number One in much of the Western world. Oxford University's Andrew Monaghan has an answer
– 'not like we've done so far'. In his last book, The New Politics of Russia , he attacked the mainstream Western view of
Russia as 'narrow, simplistic, and repetitive'. Now, in a new book Dealing with the Russians , he lambasts the Euro-Atlantic
security community for its approach to the 'Russia challenge'. 'The problem Russia poses is being misdiagnosed and the responses,
therefore, poorly framed,' he argues. It is time for the 'retirement of the worn-out and out-of-date repetitions, and the tired clichés
and template phrases that currently dominate the public policy lexicon.' What we need, says Monaghan, is 'fresh thinking.'
To make his case, Monaghan frames the book's problem in two parts: first, how to interpret its nature (is Russia a threat? and
if so, how big, and of what sort?); and second, how to respond to it (dialogue or deterrence?). He then rounds this off with a discussion
of what he thinks needs to be done to improve matters. This last section is directed primarily at a British audience, but most of
what Monaghan says could apply equally to other major Western states.
As far as the first of these issues is concerned, Monaghan is clear that, 'Russia poses a major challenge to the Euro-Atlantic
community.' He claims, however, that the nature of that challenge is misunderstood – 'The challenge is based, though, not on an expansive,
aggressive Russian plan, but instead on a series of contemporary (if long running) policy disagreements that are emphasized by different
understandings of today's international environment.'
Clearly, the responses required to combat an 'expansive, aggressive Russian plan' are rather different to those required to resolve
'different understandings of the international environment.' Interpreting the problem correctly is thus a matter of some significance.
Unfortunately, says Monaghan, most Western analyses of the 'Russia challenge' get it badly wrong. 'Thinking about Russia is stuck
in the twentieth century,' he writes. It is founded on outdated analogies of the Cold War and Munich/Hitler, but these are entirely
inappropriate for understanding the contemporary international environment. We need to start thinking about the world today, says
Monaghan, not the world of yesterday.
Another problem is that 'Russia is conceptualized through 'buzzwords and abstract labels'. As an example, Monaghan discusses the
idea of 'Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD)', an idea which, he says, has 'crossed the buzzword threshold'. A2/AD
refers to efforts to 'prevent or constrain
the deployment of opposing forces into a given theater of operations and reduce their freedom of maneuver once in a theater,' and
it is often claimed that the Russian military has been expanding its A2/AD capabilities in the Baltic region so as to prevent NATO
from deploying forces there in case of war. This supposedly seriously threatens European security. The problem with this idea, says
Monaghan, is that 'Russia has no new concept or doctrine that would correspond to Western understandings of A2/AD A2/AD is a concept
that is foreign to them. Thinking in these terms imposes a Western operational thought process onto the Russian one.'
Similarly, Monaghan denounces the entire industry which has developed in the past five years devoted to hyping the threat of Russia
'hybrid war'. 'Hybrid war' is another baseless buzzword, he says ; it 'does not relate to Russian concepts. [It] is not a Russian
construction – there is not a " Russian hybrid war" in the way it is conceived'. Talk of hybrid war produces 'an inaccurate
view of Russian defence and security thinking', and 'magnifies Russian capabilities, effectively asserting the omniscience and omnipotence
of the Russian leadership' (which, I suspect, is precisely the point!).
All in all, therefore, Monaghan concludes that thinking about the Russian threat 'is in the grip of exhausted metaphorical
shorthand introducing shibboleths and myths – not to say fantasies – to the debate. . This shorthand has thus introduced rigidity
and dogma'. This is pretty stern stuff. One has to agree with Monaghan that we need some new thinking about the nature of the threat.
The same applies to thinking about how the West should respond to the Russian challenge. Too often this is reduced to a choice
of two options – dialogue or deterrence. Both have their limitations. Given the depth of the disagreements between Russia and the
West, Monaghan believes that it is very unlikely that dialogue will produce meaningful results. That leaves deterrence. But to deter
effectively one has to know what it is one is deterring. That means having a proper understanding of the threat – i.e. of Russian
intentions and capabilities. Unfortunately, instead of being analysed realistically, the threat is generally 'framed as Russian foreign
policy adventurism, an unprovoked strike from a clear blue sky'. Deterring fantasies isn't of much value, but that's what we seem
intent on doing.
Monaghan concludes that 'Neither dialogue nor deterrence is an end in itself.' What is needed is a 'broader strategy'. For that,
'there is a need to develop a better understanding of Russian defence and security thinking.' And that brings us to Monaghan's main
point of what we have to do to 'deal with the Russians' – we have to understand them better. And that requires us to open our minds
to alternative points of view. He argues that the experience of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 showed the dangers of groupthink and
the need for 'real diversity of thought rather than shades of mainstream thinking'. Unfortunately at present,
Thinking about Russia fails to understand the social, economic, political and cultural factors on the ground in Russia. Instead,
as we have seen, there is a narrow, abstract and clichéd view of Russia. This has driven a narrative about Russia that has been
impervious to reasonable challenge. important sections of established Russia expertise are largely ignored.
From this, Monaghan concludes that the West needs 'a coherent, sustained and thorough reinvigoration of Russia expertise The point
is that there is too little sophisticated expertise on Russia and that which does exist is overwhelmed by simplistic and misguided
jingoism.'
This is all very true. Monaghan's critiques of Western perceptions of Russia are very apt. He deserves a lot of credit for having
the courage to say all this, especially as in the current climate anybody who says this kind of thing is liable to find himself denounced
as an 'agent of influence', 'Russian proxy', or ' Kremlin Trojan Horse'. But while Monaghan's attacks on current Western thinking
and policy are bang on the nail, his recommendations of what needs to be done instead are a little thin – strategy rather than tactics;
and more investment in Russia expertise. The first is valid in any situation; the second, in my view, is somewhat problematic. Monaghan
made the same recommendation in his last book. In my
review , I
cast doubt on it, noting that, 'the problems we have in understanding Russia today appear to have more to do with the quality of
analysis than the quantity of experts.' I still think that's a valid criticism. Simply churning out more Russia 'experts' won't necessarily
improve the quality of analysis, especially if education in things Russian is driven by demand from the military industrial complex.
Furthermore, even if better analysis does result, that won't necessarily produce better policy. There are already plenty of people
in academia, business, and so on, who know Russia well and have balanced, sensible views about it, whom governments could consult
if they wanted to. They don't want to. Take a look at the list of witnesses to the relevant parliamentary select committees, and
you'll understand this soon enough. You can have more and better experts, but if they're saying something politically unwelcome,
it probably won't make much difference.
In a sense, therefore, this book would be better titled How not to deal with the Russians since it's stronger as a critique
of existing policy than as a set of positive recommendations for a new one. I don't want to make that sound too negative. The critique
is excellent, and I'm well aware that this blog is guilty of much the same thing – lots of carping about all the nonsense which people
are saying, but not much by way of positive proposals. There's a good reason for that – the prevailing narrative is so strong that
until something is done to demolish it, alternative policies are never going to get a hearing. At some point, though, we're going
to have go one step further.
To be fair to Monaghan, though, he says upfront at the start of his book that it aims 'not so much to make specific policy recommendations
about how to "deal with the Russians" but to step back to make a bigger argument for a broader shift in terms of conceiving the nature
of the challenge Russia poses.' He achieves his aim, and for that we must thank him. It's a shift which is long overdue.
Obviously , Russia is a threat to the US of A -- see the 1992 "Wolfowitz doctrine", where it stated directly. Consequently,
Russia is also a threat to the major protectorates of the US, euphemistically described as "Euro-Atlantic community". The rest
is propaganda, and demonizing the enemy is a trivial matter.
If he wants a different approach, better understanding, peace, love, harmony and bubble gum, then what he needs to question
are the underlying assumptions, the root cause. For the US, it's the basic imperial strategies a-la "Wolfowitz doctrine", and
for the "Euro-Atlantic community" it's their acceptance of American domination.
In his final paragraphs Professor approaches dangerously close to the heart of the matter, but then, naturally, rushes back from
the precipice of the Abyss, which proximity alone began to sap his ideological resolve and sunny Western liberal disposish. Mao
Cheng Ji writes all right and obvious things, but commits a mortal unhandshakable sin of mentioning the Wolfowitz doctrine – meaning
that he will be ignored by "proper people".
The call to look for the root causes is very laudable, but often more than not is carried out in "7 blind men and an elephant"
fashion. "Blind men" are also "biased men", some of whom, using their other senses instead of sight (e.g., olfactory organs) deliberately
position themselves at poor elephant's derrière , perform (time and again – to the thunderous applause and approval of
the Enlightened Western Public ™) an act of amateur colonoscopy and proclaim: "Behold! That's the essence of the Elephant!".
Sometimes,
the Elephants becomes annoyed – or enraged and tries to stomp on the irritant. Biased Blind Men promptly call for help from the
professionals whose job is to kill all sorts of animals for fun and profit. That's my allegory to the Western Russia analysis.
No, instead of biased talk about "root causes" or "how to deal with [Outsiders X/Y/Z]", these authors in their books should
finally start asking the ur-question – how to deal with ourselves?
Professor Robinson writes:
"Simply churning out more Russia 'experts' won't necessarily improve the quality of analysis, especially if education in
things Russian is driven by demand from the military industrial complex . Furthermore, even if better analysis does result, that
won't necessarily produce better policy. There are already plenty of people in academia, business, and so on, who know Russia
well and have balanced, sensible views about it, whom governments could consult if they wanted to. They don't want to You can
have more and better experts, but if they're saying something politically unwelcome, it probably won't make much difference."
He also wrote in the same blogpost:
"At some point, though, we're going to have go one step further."
^This. You said "A", Professor – how about saying "B" and then the rest of the alphabet? Okay, here's a hint. Try to answer
the question – "who are you?". Who is Monaghan? Who are these "experts" and "Russia studying academia?". Here's another hint:
"The evidence suggests that foreign policymakers do not seek insight from scholars, but rather support for what they already
want to do . As Desch quotes a World War II U.S. Navy anthropologist, " the administrator uses social science the way the drunk
uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination ." Scholars' disinclination to be used in this way helps explain more of
the distance.
It also explains the rise of think tanks , which are more pliant than academics but provide similar marketing support. As
Benjamin Friedman and I wrote in a 2015 article on the subject, think tanks undertake research with an operational mindset: that
is, "the approach of a passenger riding shotgun who studies the map to find the ideal route, adjusts the engine if need be, and
always accepts the destination without protest ."
As former senator Olympia Snowe once put it, "you can find a think tank to buttress any view or position, and then you give
it the aura of legitimacy and credibility by referring to their report." Or consider the view of Rory Stewart, now a member of
parliament in the UK, but once an expert on Afghanistan who was consulted on the Afghan surge but opposed it:
"It's like they're coming in and saying to you, "I'm going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a
seatbelt?" And you say, "I don't think you should drive your car off the cliff." And they say, "No, no, that bit's already been
decided -- the question is whether to wear a seatbelt." And you say, "Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt." And then they
say, "We've consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart, and he says "
Or look at how policymakers themselves define relevance. Stephen Krasner, an academic who became a policymaker, lamented
the uselessness of much academic security studies literature because "[e]ven the most convincing empirical findings may be of
no practical use because they do not include factors that policy makers can manipulate."
The explicit claim here is that for scholarship to be of any practical use, it must include factors that policymakers can
manipulate. This reflects a strong bias toward action, even in relatively restrained presidencies." – Justin Logan, "
Cult of the Irrelevant: National Security Eggheads and Academics "
I remember when you posted your presentation and the following Q&A session on the topic of the history of Russian conservative
thought, professor. The questions being asked amounted to
a) Present day hot-button issues (aka "how Russia is baaaaad")
and
b) To what degree these conservative thinkers influence modern Russia (aka "How Russia has always been baaaaad")
None (NO ONE) of them, precious gentle students in the heartland of the West, ever thought that you just did what any scientist
have to do – carried out a research to further humanity's collective body of knowledge about us and the universe. No – they, these
precious children, want the real life application from the "Russian studies", i.e. it must help them wage the War. You, in this
regard, thoroughly failed them – and other, full grown, and even old and senile children that more often than not call all the
shots.
Or, screw it, TL;DR version – Professor, why can't you just admit that you as a member of intelligentsia belong to the
strata whose function is to serve the ruling class? That, despite all the illusions of the privilege and self-importance, no,
you, white-collar Western intellectual mass, are not "the power" – you are hired workers, hired to deliver a preset result. Maybe
after developing a certain conscience about yourself and your real status, you might then proceed to talk about how the
policymaking really works or how you (general "you") have so little impact on it despite your shiny Ivory Towers and data stuffed
brains.
P.S. Btw, case in study. Did Boris
answer your letter? Do you plan to write another one to him soon?
I remember that Roger McDermott wrote that the idea 'hybrid warfare' is alien to Russian defence thinking.
Another thing I think that maybe is missing – a bit adventuresome and without proof from the words of very high ranking policy
makers but with some from lower ranking persons – is that perhaps some of our thinking about Russia is us projecting our aggressive
and plotting tendencies onto the Russians.
I will not pretend for a second that the Russians are either passive or angelic. However, since as the book you review and
others have pointed out a lot of Western concepts are projected onto Russian thinking and actions that don't have much basis in
how the Russians actually think, perhaps we also project some of our thinking onto them. In particular with what is happening
in Iran and Venezuela, these seem to be actions very much in line with what we accuse the Russians of doing.
Finally, I should also note that I think a huge factor in lowering the quality of Russia experts is exemplified by a Soviet
joke "What is the difference between western Russia experts and western China experts? The China experts love China!" I myself
was motivated to study Russia for what you might loosely call Military Industrial Complex reasons, but I conceived of the Russians
less as an enemy to be feared and loathed and rather a country and people to be studied in its own right, and I also was moved
by a profound respect for the people and the Army that saved Europe from the night of fascism.
And as I read people like Herspring
and Glantz while comparing them to others such as Anthony Beevor or any number of German officers writing about the Soviet Army,
I realized much of the popular history, even taught history – which is what most politicians will be aware of to the extent they
are aware of history – was riddled with Patrick Armstrong wrote in THE FIRE BELOW "a series of memes."
To conclude this overly long comment, one example will do. One the one hand the Russians and Russian defense policymakers have
a perverse pride in the number of dead of WWII. To both William Odom and Herspring Russian military interviewees said a variation
of "the value of human life is not as high in Russia as it is in the West." One the other hand, post-Stalin Soviet Armed Forces
doctrine aimed to use firepower and materiel to cut down on casualties as far as possible, and the Soviet Army invested a lot
in its medical infrastructure. In the Afghan War the 40th Army was supplied with improved body armour to reduce fatalities. These
are not actions consistent with a set of policymakers utterly indifferent or uncaring to human life.
"On the one hand the Russians and Russian defense policymakers have a perverse pride in the number of dead of WWII."
We are not. Stop your gratitious Russophobia masquerading as "respect", dewittbourchier.
"On the other hand, post-Stalin Soviet Armed Forces doctrine aimed to use firepower and materiel to cut down on casualties
as far as possible, and the Soviet Army invested a lot in its medical infrastructure."
Fucking bullshit in lieu of "Stalin drowned the [racially superior proper European] enemy in [subhuman Asiatic] corpses" narrative.
One has just to analyze Red and then Soviet Army battle doctire, after action reports and results of various engagement during
the war.
It's just that other countries facing Hitler on their soil (with some rare exceptions) did not have to fight for their survavial
as human species, opting for a comfortable civilized occupation instead. Thus idea to sacrifice – continiously – their
own people in order for the rest to stay alive had never faced them. E.g. –
Soviet Army's Posnan's offensive
operation or, even earlier, near complete annihilation of 40-50 "Panthers" taskforce sent to
relieve of Ternopol's
siege – all with minimal casualties to own side. Or just one phrase – "Kessel von Halbe".
My comment as is stands. One of these reasons Khrushchev dismissed Zhukov was that Khrushchev believed Zhukov was too willing
to accept casualties in a future war, and Khrushchev wanted a Marshal who would focus more on developing a doctrine designed to
minimise casualties as far as possible without compromising the overall operational and strategic effectiveness of the Soviet
Armed Forces.
Also I would highly recommend you consider things such as the Ardeatine Massacre and Oradour Sur Glane before you call German
occupations civilized. They were anything but, they were deeply traumatic for the occupied countries and in places like France
and Italy resistance grew and grew. In both countries rations the Germans gave out were barely above the levels they gave to Poles.
This is hardly 'civilised.' It is barbarous.
It just means that what they did in the Soviet Union was so much worse.
The accusation played important role in unleashing neo-McCartyism campaign in the USA. So "The Moor has done his duty. The Moor
can go ...."
Notable quotes:
"... Russian information troll farm the Internet Research Agency spent just 0.05 percent as much on Facebook ads as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's campaigns combined in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, yet still reached a massive audience. While there might have been other Russian disinformation groups, the IRA spent $46,000 on pre-election day Facebook ads compared to $81 million spent by Clinton and Trump together, discluding political action committees who could have spent even more than that on the campaigns' behalf. ..."
"... So, the Lilliputian Russians, spending a pittance compared to the Goliaths of the Clinton and Trump campaigns, was the deciding factor in 2016? Bullshit. ..."
"... The pathetic and laughable U.S. intelligence community (aka IC) did not do a state-by-state breakdown of how these various social media campaigns operated in those states that swung the election to Trump. ..."
"... the IC is completely silent on the efforts of other countries, such as China and Israel. ..."
"... I had my own experience with Russian media influence, or the lack of such influence to be more precise. I was interviewed on Russia Today aka RT on March 4, 2017 to comment on Donald Trump's claim that the FBI had wiretapped Trump Towers. During that interview I noted that the Brits, not the FBI, were ones doing electronic surveillance of Trump. And how did the public and the media react to that bomb shell pronouncement by me? Crickets. No reaction. ..."
"... The crazy insistence that Russia grossly interfered in our 2016 election is a canard. Too bad the vast majority of America has bought into this absurd nonsense. Yes, there were groups linked to the Russian government that were pushing stories on social media. ..."
"... I think Iran/Contra was the watershed moment. The CIA became very politicized and the quality of analysis and spy trade craft declined significantly. John Brennan turned the place into a freak show. When you have "Dykes on Bikes" day at CIA Headquarters you know you have lost your way. ..."
"... Not only is the IC community discredited but so should most of the Democratic media operations and campaign advisors. ..."
Republicans and Democrats, along with almost all of the media, have accepted the lie that
the Russians engaged in unprecedented "interference" in the 2016 Presidential election. It is a
ridiculous proposition and is based on a presumption rather than actual evidence. The Intel
Community said it is true so, by definition, it must be true.
Let's focus on the actual numbers. How much money did the Russians spend? According to
Robert Mueller, $1.25
million per month . If you start that money clock in May of 2016, that means those pesky
Rookies spent $8.75 million. But let us be generous and add on the previous four months,
essentially starting the clock in January 2016 before the first primary votes. That brings the
total to $13 million.
Russian information troll farm the Internet Research Agency spent just 0.05 percent as much
on Facebook ads as
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's campaigns combined in the run-up to the 2016 U.S.
presidential election, yet still reached a massive audience. While there might have been other
Russian disinformation groups, the IRA spent $46,000 on pre-election day Facebook ads compared
to $81 million spent by Clinton and Trump together, discluding political action committees who
could have spent even more than that on the campaigns' behalf.
Trump and Clinton, when you factor in their various political action committees, spent
millions more.
A fuller analysis of the spending on the major social media platforms was provided by
Medium.com :
Surprisingly, Clinton's campaign was overall more active on Twitter and on Facebook than
Trump's , generating 19 percent more messages (11,475 messages by Clinton to 9,390 by Trump).
On Facebook, Clinton generated 500 more messages than Trump. While Trump's tweets seemed to
garner more news coverage, Clinton's campaign was actually substantially more active on social
media, generating 25 messages a day on average to Trump's 20.
Yet, Trump's social media following was larger than Clinton's . In November 2015, Clinton
had 1.7 million followers on Facebook. By Election Day that had grown to 8.4 million, a 394
percent increase. Trump had 4.2 million Followers on Facebook in November 2015. By Election
Day, that number jumped to 12.35 million, a 194 percent increase. So, while Clinton saw a
greater increase, Trump still had nearly 4 million more followers. . . .
All of this suggests that while Clinton's campaign was overall more active on its social
media accounts, it did not receive the same amount of attention and support on social media as
compared with Donald Trump. . . .
In the last months of the campaign, generally the focus shifted to voter registration and
then get-out-the vote efforts. Social media can be a useful starting place for helping give
supporters events and activities to do to be part of the campaign and to help with the effort
of winning the election. Although both campaigns, indeed, increased their calls-to-action in
the last two months of the campaign, Clinton beat Trump in volume of such messages on Facebook
and Twitter, producing a third more call-to-action type messages (See Figure 17). If we only
look at Facebook, however, Trump's campaign produced as many call-to-action type message as
Clinton in October.
When it came to asking people to vote, the Clinton campaign produced more than twice as many
messages asking for people to vote on election day on the two platforms (See Figure 18), but
most of that was on Twitter. On Facebook, both campaigns urged people to vote at the same rate,
but on Twitter, Clinton's campaign produces three times more appeals for votes than does
Trump.
So, the Lilliputian Russians, spending a pittance compared to the Goliaths of the Clinton
and Trump campaigns, was the deciding factor in 2016? Bullshit.
The pathetic and laughable U.S. intelligence community (aka IC) did not do a state-by-state
breakdown of how these various social media campaigns operated in those states that swung the
election to Trump. Nor did the IC look back at the Russian and Soviet Union covert propaganda
efforts over the previous 90 years. If you are going to do a comparison you need to have a
benchmark. This is what we know for certain--Russia and its predecessor, the USSR, ran
comprehensive and continuous information operations in the United States, including computer
network operations.
No one can say with any degree of certainty that what Russia did in 2016 was qualitatively
and quantitatively different. Also, the IC is completely silent on the efforts of other
countries, such as China and Israel. Nope, just accept on faith that the Russians committed an
attack worse than Pearl Harbor.
I had my own experience with Russian media influence, or the lack of such influence to be
more precise. I was interviewed on Russia Today aka RT on March 4, 2017 to comment on Donald
Trump's claim that the FBI had wiretapped Trump Towers. During that interview I noted that the
Brits, not the FBI, were ones doing electronic surveillance of Trump. And how did the public
and the media react to that bomb shell pronouncement by me? Crickets. No reaction.
The crazy insistence that Russia grossly interfered in our 2016 election is a canard. Too
bad the vast majority of America has bought into this absurd nonsense. Yes, there were groups
linked to the Russian government that were pushing stories on social media. The Chinese did the
same thing. So did the Israelis and the Brits. I am sure there are other countries who were
pushing their own agenda as well. But that is a truth American is too damn lazy to grasp.
Well, you're dead ass wrong. Shocker. I did not "leave" with a solid pension. I stayed four
years. No pension. But I did maintain clearances and continued to work with CIA, DIA and NSA
over the ensuing 25 years. My criticism is grounded in experience. I think Iran/Contra was
the watershed moment. The CIA became very politicized and the quality of analysis and spy
trade craft declined significantly. John Brennan turned the place into a freak show. When you
have "Dykes on Bikes" day at CIA Headquarters you know you have lost your way.
"...did not do a state-by-state breakdown of how these various social media campaigns
operated in those states that swung the election to Trump. "
Hilary's campaign staff didn't do this level of work when directing their own media efforts
either. At some point she, being the head of the campaign, should have been able to get
answers to the questions "what is the return for each advertising effort" and "what does that
do to the electoral vote count." Not only is the IC community discredited but so should most
of the Democratic media operations and campaign advisors.
"... Risen detailed how his editors had been "quite willing to cooperate with the government." In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, "How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?" ..."
"... Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had "secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency." ..."
"... Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune. ..."
"... However, he added, "By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc." ..."
"... These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government -- or at least for the US national security state. ..."
The New York Times casually acknowledged that it sends major scoops to the US government
before publication, to make sure "national security officials" have "no concerns."
By Ben Norton
June 25, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - The New York
Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for
approval from "national security officials" before publication.
This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The
American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing
reporting that top officials don't want made public.
On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber
attacks on Russia's power grid . According to the article, "the Trump administration is
using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively," as part of a larger "digital
Cold War between Washington and Moscow."
In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the
Times on Twitter, calling the article "a virtual act of Treason."
The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending
the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being
printed.
"Accusing the press of treason is dangerous," the Times communications team said. "We
described the article to the government before publication."
"As our story notes, President Trump's own national security officials said there were no
concerns," the Times added.
NY Times editors 'quite willing to cooperate with
the government'
The symbiotic relationship between the US corporate media and the government has been known
for some time. American intelligence agencies play the press like a musical instrument, using
it it to selectively leak information at opportune moments to push US soft power and advance
Washington's interests.
But rarely is this symbiotic relationship so casually and publicly acknowledged.
In 2018, former New York Times reporter James Risen published a 15,000-word article in
The Intercept providing further insight into how this unspoken alliance operates.
Risen
detailed how his editors had been "quite willing to cooperate with the government." In fact, a
top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was,
"How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?"
There is an "informal arrangement" between the state and the press, Risen explained, where
US government officials "regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop
the publication of sensitive national security stories."
"At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations," the former New York Times
reported said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to
the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and
asked him to kill the story.
"He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,"
Risen said. "I agreed."
Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. "If I had
reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a
public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,"
he wrote. "That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden
more seriously."
This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories.
"And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times," he
said.
"After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began asking the press to kill stories more
frequently," Risen continued. "They did it so often that I became convinced the administration
was invoking national security to quash stories that were merely politically embarrassing." In
the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently "clashed" with Times editors because he raised
questions about the US government's lies. But his stories "stories raising questions about the
intelligence, particularly the administration's claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda,
were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether."
The Times' executive editor Howell Raines "was believed by many at the paper to prefer
stories that supported the case for war," Risen said.
In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a
botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House,
where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.
Risen said Rice told him "to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make
another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone."
"The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national
security stories," Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated
the "war on the press."
CIA media infiltration and manufacturing consent
In their renowned study of US media, "
Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media," Edward S. Herman and
Chomsky articulated a "propaganda model," showing how "the media serve, and propagandize on
behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them," through "the
selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists'
internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the
institution's policy."
But in some cases, the relationship between US intelligence agencies and the corporate media
is not just one of mere ideological policing, indirect pressure, or friendship, but rather one
of employment.
In the 1950s, the CIA launched a covert operation called Project Mockingbird, in which it
surveilled, influenced, and manipulated American journalists and media coverage, explicitly in
order to direct public opinion against the Soviet Union, China, and the growing international
communist movement.
Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Post reporter who helped uncover
the Watergate scandal, published a major cover story for Rolling Stone in 1977 titled "
The CIA and
the Media : How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central
Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up."
Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in
the previous 25 years had "secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence
Agency."
Bernstein wrote:
"Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit.
There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of
clandestine services -- from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with
spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared
their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who
considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less
exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their
work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy
business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees
masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were
engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading
news organizations."
Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including
ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday
Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune.
However, he added, "By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA
officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc."
These layers of state
manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they
claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto
spokespeople for the government -- or at least for the US national security state.
Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer
of the Moderate Rebels podcast,
which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com , and he tweets at @ BenjaminNorton .
This article was originally published by " Grayzone
"
"... Harding's avowed contact with Steele may also have contributed to another high profile blunder in April this year. In the immediate wake of the apparent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, UK, the UK government issued a D(SMA) notice , blocking mention of Pablo Miller -- Skripal's MI6 recruiter -- in the media. ..."
On September 21, The Guardian ran an absolutely sensational exclusive, based on disclosures made by "multiple" anonymous sources
to Luke Harding, one of the paper's leading journalists - in 2017, Russian diplomats allegedly held secret talks in London with associates
of Assange, in an attempt to assist in the Wikileaks founder's escape from the UK.
The dastardly conspiracy would've entailed Assange being smuggled out of the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge under cover
of Christmas Eve in a diplomatic vehicle and transported to Russia, where he'd be safe from extradition to the US, ending his eight-years
of effective arbitrary detention in the process.
In any event, the audacious plot was eventually aborted after being deemed "too
risky" -- even for the reckless daredevils of Moscow -- mere days before its planned execution date.
Rommy Vallejo, head of Ecuador's
intelligence agency, is said to have travelled to the UK around December 15 to supervise the operation, and left when it was called
off.
'Extraordinary, Deliberate Lies'
The Russian Embassy in London
was quick to condemn the
article on Twitter, calling the claims "another example of disinformation and fake news" in the UK mainstream media, and noting the
paper violated national media standards by failing to ask the Russian side for a comment prior to the report's release. "This publication
has nothing to do with the reality. The Embassy has never engaged with Ecuadorian colleagues, or with anyone else, in discussions
of any kind on Russia's participation in ending Assange's stay within the diplomatic mission of Ecuador.
We're puzzled by the sensational
attitude of the authors. As recently as September 18, Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright called for increased efforts to combat media
and online disinformation. [The] Guardian piece is a brilliant example of the kind of journalism British reader should be protected
from," a spokesperson added in an official statement.
In a subsequent statement
, the Russian Foreign Ministry slammed the article for containing a "whole series of similar anti-Russia innuendos, and once again
made clear Russian diplomats did not contact staff of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London or Assange's associates in order to assist
in his escape from the UK.
However,
a
far more damning indictment of the article's extraordinary, evidence-free claims was provided by Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador
to Uzbekistan, who denounced the "quite extraordinary set of deliberate lies" in a September 23 blog post. In doing so, he revealed
he and Fidel Narvaez -- a close confidant of Assange fingered as the key point of contact between the Ecuadorian embassy and Moscow
in the article -- had engaged in discussions with Assange in 2017 regarding a possible departure from the UK capital, and debated
possible future destinations for the embattled Wikileaks founder.
"It's not only the case Russia didn't figure in those plans, Julian directly ruled out the possibility of going to Russia. I know
100% for certain the entire story is a complete and utter fabrication. I cannot find words enough to express the depth of my contempt
for Harding and [Editor] Katherine Viner, who've betrayed completely the values of journalism. The aim of the piece is evidently
to add a further layer to the fake news of Wikileaks' non-existent relationship to Russia as part of the "Hillary didn't really lose"
narrative. I am, frankly, rather shocked," Murray
wrote
.
Friends in Spooky Places
The identities of Harding's alleged anonymous sources aren't even hinted at in the article, but Murray made a striking suggestion
-- he "strongly suspect[ed]" that "MI6 tool" Harding's informants were the UK security services. If true, this would make the article
"entirely black propaganda" produced by British spies. Whether MI6 agents are the source of the story or not, it's certainly true
Harding enjoys a very close relationship indeed with British intelligence services -- a bond he has frequently, openly and proudly
advertised in articles and books.
For instance, in his highly controversial 2017 book Collusion, Harding argued Donald Trump
had a relationship with the Russian 'deep state' dating back to the 1980s, and colluded with the Kremlin to subvert US democracy.
To support this conclusion, he frequently cited claims fed to him directly by Christopher Steele, the ex-MI6 spy turned 'business
intelligence' professional, who authored the utterly discredited 'Trump-Russia' dossier for Fusion GPS.
When challenged to provide any evidence whatsoever for his book's assertions by Aaron Mate of The Real News, Harding was left mumbling
and stuttering -- he was also unable to defend
his claim that an individual's use of an emoji was proof they were working for Russian intelligence, and terminated the interview
prematurely.
Harding's avowed contact with Steele may also have contributed to another high profile blunder in April this year. In the immediate
wake of the apparent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, UK, the UK government
issued a D(SMA) notice , blocking mention of Pablo
Miller -- Skripal's MI6 recruiter -- in the media. Individuals who conducted internet searches for Miller afterwards quickly found
his LinkedIn profile, which identified him as a 'Senior Analyst' at Orbis Intelligence -- Steele's corporate espionage company.-
It is true, or was. As I say, this 2017 forum thread, which links to Pablo Miller's LinkedIn profile, states Orbis is listed on
Miller's CV -- https://t.co/Fx0vu1qorJ . Stop regurgitating anonymous claims
by your spook pals and do some research, Luke -- Kit Klarenberg (@KitKlarenberg)
March 12, 2018
Miller's page was quickly deleted though, and Harding took to Twitter to issue firm denials of a connection between Miller and the
firm, going so far as to suggest "someone" was using search engine optimization techniques to dishonestly associate Miller and Orbis.
However, enterprising Sputnik journalist Kit Klarenberg quickly and easily found an online forum thread dating from 2017 clearly
identifying Miller as an Orbis employee -- as of September, Harding is yet to respond, or retract his claims.
"... Standards of evidence have gone out the window when it comes to attacking President Trump. ..."
"... Asked if Trump was a Russian asset, as former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe had suggested was possible, Clapper said, "I completely agree with the way Andy characterized it." He added a "caveat" that it could have been "witting or unwitting." ..."
"... Here we get to a fundamental element of McCarthyism, which can be illustrated by an exploration of the real McCarthy and his followers back in the early 1950s. These days we often see, in Hollywood movies and intellectual history, a view of the Wisconsin senator as coming out of the blue, roiling a serene nation with utterly false and brutal accusations of communist activity when there was no such threat at all. ..."
Standards of evidence have gone out the window when it comes to attacking President Trump.
TO WHAT extent does the two-year political investigation into Donald Trump and his top aides and family members, based on suspicions
of treacherous "collusion" with the Russian government, represent a kind of McCarthyism? Most people involved in that investigation
no doubt would be aghast at the question. After all, they might say, they were only trying to save the country from an obviously
bad man who had both motive and opportunity to scheme with the Russians for his own nefarious purposes. Even after Special Counsel
Robert Mueller made clear that his two-year investigation could find no evidence of collusion to justify any legal action, many on
the anti-Trump Left continued to insist that it had happened and they would continue the assault.
But Mueller's finding of no collusion does raise questions about the propriety of an inquiry based on suspicions and fragments
of evidence that never added up to any serious proof of such cravenness. That was a frequent complaint about McCarthyism back in
the days of its greatest menacing influence. And, just as Senator Joseph McCarthy sought to leverage his allegations of communist
collusion into partisan political advantage, so too did Trump's accusers seek to bring down a president and curtail his range of
executive action.
TO EXPLORE the issue further, it's helpful to explore what is meant by McCarthyism. Webster's defines it as "the use
of indiscriminate, often unfounded, accusations, sensationalism, inquisitorial investigative methods, etc., ostensibly in suppression
of communism."
The motive of suppressing communism no longer applies, of course, as the primary sources of anticommunist anxiety in McCarthy's
day -- the expansionist Soviet empire and its Chinese counterpart -- no longer exist. But today's obsession with Russia as a threat,
although it represents hardly a fragment of the old postwar capacity for menace, could be considered a stand-in for the anti-Soviet
obsession of old.
What about "indiscriminate, often unfounded, accusations"? The Russia collusion episode certainly qualifies on that count. Adam
Schiff, the California Democrat and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee (now chairman), said he had "plenty of evidence
of collusion or conspiracy" -- and, he added, this was "more than circumstantial evidence." Given Mueller's ultimate conclusion on
the same question, with all of the investigative resources at his command, one has to wonder what evidence Schiff was talking about.
Meanwhile, another California Democrat, Eric Swalwell, accused Trump of being an "agent" of Russia. He added, by way of elaboration,
"he certainly acts on Russia's behalf."
These accusations also comport with Webster's definitional element of "sensationalism." But it's even more sensational
and damaging when coming from former top-level intelligence officials, such as James Clapper and John Brennan. Brennan said that
"Watergate pales really, in my view, compared to what we're confronting now." He described Trump's claim of no collusion as "hogwash,"
which was a roundabout accusation of treason. He dispensed with the circumlocution when he called Trump's performance in Helsinki,
Finland, following a summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin, "nothing short of treasonous."
Clapper, meanwhile, invoked the constitutional definition of treason when he said Trump was "essentially aiding and abetting the
Russians" though he later said he used the term "only in a...colloquial sense," whatever that means. Asked if Trump was a Russian
asset, as former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe had suggested was possible, Clapper said, "I completely agree with the way Andy
characterized it." He added a "caveat" that it could have been "witting or unwitting."
Here we get to a fundamental element of McCarthyism, which can be illustrated by an exploration of the real McCarthy and his
followers back in the early 1950s. These days we often see, in Hollywood movies and intellectual history, a view of the Wisconsin
senator as coming out of the blue, roiling a serene nation with utterly false and brutal accusations of communist activity when there
was no such threat at all.
Not so. A couple weeks before McCarthy's first anticommunism rant, Alger Hiss, accused of passing secret U.S. documents to a Soviet
spy when he was a high-level government official, was convicted of perjury. It was a signal victory for the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, the communist-hunting panel of Congress, and a great embarrassment for members of the country's Northeastern elite who
had testified on behalf of Hiss' integrity and patriotism. Two weeks later, the government reported that Klaus Fuchs, a British physicist
who had worked at the Los Alamos atomic-weapons facility during the war, had been arrested as a Soviet spy. This was powerful stuff
when most Americans believed, correctly, that the U.S. nuclear monopoly had been the margin of security in saving Western Europe
from being overrun by the Soviets.
"... You might think the Democratic Party would be horrified at this result, which one conservative analyst calls: "one of the greatest self-defeating acts in history." You might think Democrats would now move quickly and decisively toward a strategy of offering a substantive political alternative, and abandon this awful own-goal Mueller/Russiagate tack that has already helped Trump immensely (and which they are not going to turn their way). That is obviously what would happen if the Democrats' main goal was to defeat Trump. But it isn't. ..."
"... As discussed above, the Democratic establishment's' main goal throughout this was not to "get" Trump, but to channel its own voters' disgust with him into support for some halcyon, liberal, status quo ante-Trump, and away from left demands for a radical change to the social, economic, and political conditions that produced him and his clueless establishment opponent in 2016. The Democrats' goal was, and is, not to defeat Trump, but to stave off the left. ..."
"... The Democrats' main goal in all this is not to impeach, or stop the re-election of, Donald Trump; it's to prevent the nomination and election of Bernie Sanders, or anyone like him. ..."
"... You mean the five million people who voted for Obama in 2012, in the 90% of counties that voted for Obama either in 2008 or 2012, but would not vote for Hillary in 2019, aren’t streaming back into—are indeed still streaming out of—the Democratic Party, despite all the Mueller investigation has done for them? Imagine that. ..."
"... What has Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation wrought? It’s either a shrewd political gambit sure to take down Trump, or it’s ridiculous political theater leading Democrats, and the country, over another cliff. Double-down or leave that table? ..."
So the Mueller investigation is over. The official "Report on the
Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election" has been written,
and is in the hands of Attorney General William Barr, who has issued a summary of its findings.
On the core mandate of the investigation, given to Special Counsel Mueller by Rod Rosenstein as
Acting Attorney General in May of 2017 -- to investigate "any links and/or coordination between
the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump"
-- the takeaway conclusion stated in the Mueller report, as quoted in the Barr summary, is that
"[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or
coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.1"
In the footnote indicated at the end of that sentence, Barr further clarifies the
comprehensive meaning of that conclusion, again quoting the Report's own words: "In assessing
potential conspiracy charges, the Special Counsel also considered whether members of the Trump
campaign 'coordinated' with Russian election interference activities. The Special Counsel
defined 'coordination' as an 'agreement -- tacit or express -- between the Trump Campaign and
the Russian government on election interference'."
Barr restates the point of the cited conclusion from the Mueller Report a number of times:
"The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated
with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S.
presidential election the Special Counsel did not find that any U.S. person or Trump campaign
official or associate conspired or knowingly coordinated with the IRA [Internet Research
Agency, the indicted Russian clickbait operation] in its efforts."
Thus, the Mueller investigation found no "conspiracy," no "coordination," -- i.e., no
"collusion" -- "tacit or express" between the Trump campaign or any U.S. person and the Russian
government. The Mueller investigation did not make, seal, or recommend any indictment for any
U.S. person for any such crime.
This is as clear and forceful a repudiation as one can get of the "collusion" narrative that
has been insistently shoved down our throats by the Democratic Party, its McResistance, its
allied media, and its allied intelligence and national security agencies and officials.
Whatever one wants to say about any other aspect of this investigation -- campaign finance
violations, obstruction of justice, etc. -- they were not the main saga for the past two+ years
as spun by the Russiagaters. The core narrative was that Donald Trump was some kind of Russian
agent or asset, arguably guilty of treason and taking orders from his handler/blackmailer
Vladimir Putin, who conspired with him to steal the 2016 election, and, furthermore, that Saint
Mueller and his investigation team of patriotic FBI/CIA agents were going to find the goods
that would have the Donald taken out of the White House in handcuffs for that.
Keith Olbermann's spectacular rant in January 2017 defined the core narrative and
exemplified the Trump Derangement Syndrome that powered it: an emotional, visceral hatred of
Donald Trump wrapped in the fantasy -- insisted upon as "elemental, existential fact" -- that
he was "put in power by Vladimir Putin." A projection and deflection, I would say, of liberals'
self-hatred for creating the conditions -- eight years of war and wealth transfer capped off by
a despised and entitled candidate -- that allowed a vapid clown like Trump to be elected. It
couldn't be our fault! It must have been Putin who arranged it!
Here's a highlight of Keith's delusional discourse. But, please watch the whole six-minute
video below. They may have been a bit calmer, but this is the fundamental lunacy that was
exuding from the rhetorical pores of Rachel, Chris, and Co. day after day for two+ years:
The military apparatus of this country is about to be handed over to scum, who are
beholden to scum, Russian scum! As things are today January 20th will not be an inauguration
but rather the end of the United States as an independent country. Donald John Trump is not a
president; he is a puppet, put in power by Vladimir Putin. Those who ignore these elemental,
existential facts -- Democrats or Republicans -- are traitors to this country. [Emphases in
original. Really, watch it.]
This -- Trump's secret, treasonous collusion with Putin, and not hush money or campaign
finance violations or "obstruction of justice" or his obvious overall sleaziness -- was
Russiagate.
Russiagate is Dead! Long Live Russiagate!
And it still is. Here's the demonstration in New York last Thursday, convened by the
MoveOn/Maddow #Resistance, singing from "the hymnal" about how Trump is a "Russian whore" who
is "busy blowing Vladimir":
Here are the three lines of excuse and denial currently being fired off by diehard
Russiagaters in their fighting retreat, and my responses to them.
1. The Mueller Report is irrelevant, anyhow. 'Cause either A) Per Congressional blowhard
Adam Schiff: There already "is direct evidence" proving Trump-Russia collusion, dating from
before the Mueller Investigation, so who cares what that doesn't find; or B) (My personal
favorite) Per former prosecutor and CNN legal expert Renato Mariotti: Of course there is no
evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, and it's "your fault" for letting Trump fool you into
thinking Mueller's job was to find it. (The Mueller "collusion" investigation was a red herring
orchestrated/promoted by Trump! I cannot make this up.)
Mueller's report will almost certainly disappoint you, and it's not his fault. It's your
fault for buying into Trump's false narrative that it is Mueller's' job to prove "collusion,"
a nearly impossible bar for any prosecutor to clear.
This is, of course, the weakest volley. It's absurd, patent bad faith, for Russiagaters to
pretend that they knew, thought, or suggested the Mueller investigation was irrelevant. It is
they who have been insisting that the integrity and super-sleuthiness of the "revered" Robert
Mueller himself was the thing that would nail Donald Trump for Russian collusion. To now deny
that any of that was important only acknowledges how thoroughly they have been fooling the
American people and/or themselves for two years. Either Adam Schiff had the goods on Trump's
traitorous Russian collusion two years ago, in which case he's got a lot of explaining to do
about why he's been stringing us along with Mueller, or Schiff is just bluffing. Place your
bets.
Russiagaters in 2017: YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT MUELLER KNOWS
Russiagaters in 2018: YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT MUELLER KNOWS
Russiagaters in 2019: Shut up Mueller, what would you know.
2. The Mueller Report didn't exonerate Trump entirely. It was agnostic about whether
Trump was guilty of "obstruction of justice," and there are probably many nasty things in the
report that may not be provably criminal, but nonetheless demonstrate what a slimeball Trump
is.
No, Russiagaters will not get away with denying that the core purpose of the Mueller
investigation was to prove Trump's traitorous relation to Vladimir Putin and the Russian
government, which helped him win the 2016 election. They will not get away with denying that,
if the Mueller investigation failed to prove that, it failed in its main purpose, as they
constantly defined and reinforced it, with table-pounding, hyperventilating, and -- a few days
ago! -- disco-dancing to "the hymnal."
They will not get away with trying to appropriate, as if it were their point all along, what
the left critics of Russiagate have been saying for two+ years -- that Donald Trump is a
slimeball grifter whose culpability for politically substantive and probably legally actionable
crimes and misdemeanors should not be hard to establish, without reverting to the absurd
accusation that he's a Russian agent.
These are the left critics of Russiagate and Trump, whom Russiagaters deliberately excluded
from all their media platforms, in order to make it seem that only right-wing Trump supporters
could be skeptical of Russiagate -- the left critics Russiagaters then excoriated as "Trump
enablers" and "Putin apologists" for speaking on the only media platforms that would host them.
Among them, Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Maté (who just deservedly won the I.F. Stone prize
for his Russiagate coverage) were the most prominent, but many others, including me, made this
point week after week (Brian Becker, Dave Lindorff, Dan Kovalik, Daniel Lazare, Ted Rall, to
name a few). As I put it in an essay last year: "There are a thousand reasons to criticize
Donald Trump That Donald Trump is a Russian agent is not one of them. There are a number of
very good justifications for seeking his impeachment That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of
them."
So, it's a particularly slimy for Russiagaters to slip into the position that we Russiagate
skeptics have been enunciating, and they have been excluding, for two years, without
acknowledging that we were right and they were wrong and accounting for their effort to edit us
out.
3. But we haven't seen the whole Mueller Report! Barr may be fooling us! Mueller's own
team says so! You are now doing what you accused us of doing for two years -- abandoning proper
skepticism about Republicans like Barr and even Mueller (Yup. He's a suspicious Republican
now!), and assuming a final result we have not yet seen.
This is the one the Russiagaters like the most. Gotcha with your own logic!
Well, let's first of all thank those who are saying this for, again, recognizing that we
Russiagate critics had the right attitude toward such an investigation: cautious skepticism as
opposed to false certainty. And let's linger for a moment or more on how belated that
recognition is and what its delay cost.
But let's also recognize that what's being expressed here is the last-minute hope on the
part of the Russiagaters that the Mueller report actually does contain dispositive evidence of
Trump's treasonous Russian collusion. Because, again, that is the core accusation that hopeful
Russiagaters are still singing about, and nobody ever argued that evidence of other hijinks was
unlikely.
Well, that hope can only be realized if one or both of the following are true: 1) Barr's
quotes from the report exonerating Trump of collusion are complete fabrications, or 2) Mueller
both wrote those words even though they contradict the substance of his own report and declined
to indict a single U.S. person for such "collusion" even though he could have.
Sure, in the abstract, one or both of those conditions could be true. But there is no
evidence, none, that either is. The New York Times (NYT) report that set everyone aflutter
about the "concern" from "some members of Mr. Mueller's team" is anonymous, unspecified, and
second-hand. Read it carefully: The NYT did not report what any member of Mueller's team said,
but what "government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations" said.
Those "officials and others interviewed [not members of the Mueller team itself] declined to
flesh out" to the NYT what "some of the special counsel's investigators" were unhappy about. To
that empty hearsay, the NYT appends the phrase "although the report is believed to examine Mr.
Trump's efforts to thwart the investigation" -- suggesting, but not stating, that obstruction
of justice issues are the reasons for the investigators' "vexation." The NYT cannot state,
because it does not know, anything. It is reporting empty hearsay that is evidence of nothing,
but is meant to keep hope alive.
"[T]he report is believed to examine" is a particularly strange locution. Is the NYT
suggesting that the Mueller report might not have examined obstruction of justice
possibilities? Or is it just getting tangled up in its attempt to suggest this or that? Hey, it
could just as well be true that Barr's characterization of what the Mueller Report says about
"obstruction of justice" is a misleading fabrication. Maybe Mueller actually exonerated Trump
of that. If you mistrust Barr's version of what the Mueller Report says about collusion, why
not equally mistrust what it says about obstruction of justice?
There is no evidence that Barr's summary is radically misleading about the core collusion
conclusion of the Mueller Report. The walls are closing in, alright, on that story. The I'm
just being as cautious now as you were before! line is the opposite of the reasonable
skepticism is claims to be; it's Russiagaters clinging to a wish and a belief that something
they want to be true is, despite the determinate lack of any evidence.
It's not just the words; it's the melody, and the desperation in the voices. The core
Trump-blowing-Vladimir collusion song that #Resisters are still singing is a fantastical
fiction and the people still singing it are the pathetic choir on the Russiagate Titanic. And
while they're singing as they sink, Trump is escaping in the lifeboat they have provided him.
The single most definite and undeniable effect of the Mueller investigation on American
politics has been to hand Donald Trump a potent political weapon for his 2020 re-election
campaign. A real bombshell.
But it's worse than that. The falsity of the Trump-as-a-Russian-agent narrative does not
depend on any confidence in Mueller and his report or Barr and his summary. The truth is there
was no Russiagate investigation, in the sense of a serious attempt to find out whether Donald
Trump was taking orders from, or "coordinating" with, Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.
No person in their right mind could believe that. Robert Mueller doesn't believe it. Nancy
Pelosi doesn't believe it. Adam Schiff doesn't believe it. John Brennan, James Clapper, and the
heads of intelligence agencies do not believe it. Not for a second. No knowledgeable
international affairs journalist or academic who thinks about it for two minutes believes it.
Sure, some politicians and media pundits did work themselves up into a state where they
internalized and projected a belief in the narrative, but few of them really believed it. They
were serving the Kool-Aid. Only the most gullible sectors of their target audience drank
it.
With some exceptions, to be sure (Donald Trump among them), the people in the highest
echelons of the state-media-academic apparatus are just not that stupid. And, most obvious and
important, Vladimir Putin is not that stupid, and they know he is not. Vladimir Putin would
never rely on Donald Trump to be his operative in a complex operation that required shrewdly
playing and evading the US intelligence and media apparatuses. Nobody is that stupid. Thinking
about it that way for a second dissipates the entire ridiculous idea. (Not to mention that
Trump ended up enacting a number of policies -- many more than Obama! -- contrary to Russian
interests.)
The obvious, which many people in the independent media and none in the mainstream media
(because it is so obvious, and would have blown their game) have pointed out, is that any real
investigation of Russiagate would have sought to talk with the principals who had direct
knowledge of who is responsible for leaking the infamous DNC documents: Julian Assange and
former British ambassador Craig Murray ("I know who leaked them. I've met the person who leaked
them."). They were essentially two undisputed eyewitnesses to the crime Mueller was supposed to
be investigating, and he made no effort to talk to either of them. Ipso facto, it was not
really an investigation, not a project whole purpose was to find the truth about whatever the
thing called "Russiagate" is supposed to be.
The Eternal Witch-hunt
It was a theater of discipline. Its purpose, which it achieved, was to discipline Trump, the
Democratic electorate, and the media. Its method was fishing around in the muck of Washington
consultants, lobbyists, and influence peddlers to generate indictments and plea bargains for
crimes irrelevant to the core mandate. Not hard, in a carceral state where prosecutors can pin
three felonies a day on anyone.
The US establishment, especially its national security arm, was genuinely shocked that their
anointed candidate, Hillary, who was, as Glen Ford puts it "'all in' with the global military
offensive" that Obama had run through Libya, Syria, and the coup in Ukraine, was defeated by a
nitwit candidate who was making impermissibly non-aggressive noises about things like Russia
and NATO, and who actually wanted to lose. For their part, the Democrats were horrified, and
did not want to face the necessary reckoning about the complete failure of their candidate, and
the best-of-all-possible-liberaloid-worlds strategy she personified.
So, "within 24 hours of her concession speech" Hillary's campaign team (Robby Mook and John
Podesta) created a "script they would pitch to the press and the public" to explain why she
lost. "Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument." A few months later, a coalition of
congressional Democrats,, establishment Republicans, and intelligence/natsec professionals
pressured Trump (who, we can now see clearly, is putty in the hands of the latter) to initiate
a Special Counsel investigation. Its ostensible goal was to investigate Russian collusion, but
its real goals were:
1) To discipline Trump, preventing any backpedaling on NATO/imperialist war-mongering
against Russia or any other target. Frankly, I think this was unnecessary. Trump never had any
depth of principle in his remarks about de-escalating with Russia and Syria. He was always a
staunch American exceptionalist and Zionist. Nobody has forced him (that's a right-wing
fantasy) to attack Syria, appoint John Bolton, recognize Israeli authority over Jerusalem and
the Golan Heights, or threaten Iran and Venezuela. But the natsec deep state actors did (and
do) not trust Trump's impulsiveness. They probably also thought it would be useful to "send a
message" to Russia, which, in their arrogance, they think they can, but they cannot,
"discipline," as I've discussed in a previous essay.
2) To discipline the media, making "Russian collusion," as Off-Guardian journalist Kit
Knightly says, "a concept that keeps everyone in check." Thus, a Russophobia-related
McCarthyite hysteria was engendered that defined any strong anti-interventionist or
anti-establishment sentiment as Russian-sown "divisiveness" and "Putin apologetics." This
discipline was eagerly accepted by the mainstream media, which joined in the related drive to
demand new forms of censorship for independent and internet media. The epitome of this is the
mainstream media's execrable, tacit and sometimes explicit acceptance of the US government's
campaign to prosecute Julian Assange.
3) To discipline and corral the Democratic constituency. Establishment Dems riled up
outraged progressives with deceptive implied promises to take Trump down based on the collusion
fiction, which excused Hillary and diverted their attention from the real egregious failures
and crimes that led their party to political ruin, and culminated in the election of Trump in
the first place. This discipline also instituted a #Resistance to Trump that involved the party
doing nothing substantively progressive in policy -- indeed, it allowed embracing Trump's most
egregious militarism and promoting an alliance with, a positive reverence for, the most
deceptive and reactionary institutions of the state.
Finally, incorporating point 2, perhaps the main point of this discipline -- indeed of the
whole Mueller enterprise -- was to stigmatize the leftists and socialists in and around the
party, who were questioning the collusion fiction and calling critical attention to the party's
failures, as crypto-fascist "Trump enablers" or "Putin's useful idiots." It's all about fencing
out the left and corralling the base.
Note the point regarding the deceptive implications about taking down Trump. Though they
gave the opposite impression to rile up their constituents, Democratic Congressional leaders,
for the reasons given above and others I laid out in a previous essay, did not think for a
second they were going to impeach Trump. They were never really after impeaching Trump; they
were and are after stringing along their dissatisfied progressive-minded voters. They, not
Trump, were and are the target of the foolery.
We should recognize that Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation achieved all of these goals,
and was therefore a great success. That's the case whatever part of the Mueller Report is
summarized and released, and whoever interprets it. The whole report with all of the underlying
evidence cannot legally be released to the public, and the Democrats know that. So, even if the
House gets it, the public will only ever see portions doled out by various interested
parties.
Thus, it will continue to be a great success. There will be endless leaks, and
interpretations of leaks, and arguments about the interpretations of leaks based on speculation
about what's still hidden. The Mueller Investigation has morphed into the Mueller Report, a
hermeneutical exercise that will go on forever.
The Mueller Investigation never happened and will never end.
It wasn't an investigation. It was/is an act of political theater, staged in an ongoing
dramatic festival where, increasingly, litigation substitutes for politics. Neither party has
anything of real, lasting, positive political substance to offer, and each finds itself in
power only because it conned the electorate into thinking it offered something new. That
results in every politician being vulnerable, but to a politically vacuous opposition that can
only mount its attacks on largely politically irrelevant, often impossible to adjudicate,
legalistic or moralistic grounds. Prosecutorial inquiry becomes a substitute for substantive
political challenge.
It's the template that was established by the Republicans against Bill Clinton, has been
adapted by the Democrats for Trump and Russiagate, and will be ceaselessly repeated. What's
coming next, already hinted at in William Barr's congressional testimony, will be an
investigation of FISAGate -- an inquiry into whether the FISA warrants for spying on the Trump
campaign and administration were obtained legally ("adequately predicated"). And/or
UkraineGate, about the evidence "Ukrainian law enforcement officials believe they have of
wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging from 2016 election
interference to obstructing criminal probes," involving Tony Podesta (who worked right
alongside Paul Manafort in Ukraine), Hillary Clinton's campaign, Joe Biden and his son, et. al.
And/or CampaignGate, the lawsuit claiming that Hillary's national campaign illegally took $84
million of "straw man" contributions made to state Democratic campaigns. And/or CraigGate,
involving powerful Democratic fixer and Obama White House Counsel, Gregory Craig, who has
already been referred to federal prosecutors by Mueller, and whose law firm has already paid a
$4.6 million-dollar fine for making false statement and failing to register under the Foreign
Agents Registration Act -- for work he did in Ukraine with -- who else? -- Paul Manafort.
There are Gates galore. If you haven't heard about any of these simmering scandals in the
way you've heard incessantly about, you know, Paul Manafort, perhaps that's because they didn't
fit into the "get Trump" theme of the Mueller Investigation/Russiagate political theater. Rest
assured the Republicans have, and will likely make sure that you do. If you think the
Republicans do not have at least as much of a chance to make a serious case with some of these
as Mueller did with Trump, you are wrong. If you think the Republicans will pursue any of these
investigations because they have the same principled concern as the Democrats about foreign
collusion in US elections, or the legality of campaign contributions or surveillance warrants,
you are right. They have none. Like the Democrats, they have zero concern for the ostensible
issues of principle, and infinite enthusiasm for mounting "gotcha" political theater.
Neither party really wants, or knows how, to engage in a sustained, principled debate on
substantive political issues -- things like universal-coverage, single-payer health insurance,
a job guarantee, a radical reduction of the military budget, an end to imperialist
intervention, increasing taxes on the wealthy and lowering them for working people, a break
from the "overwhelming" and destructive influence of Zionism, to name a few of the policies the
Democratic congressional leadership could have insisted on "investigating" over the last two
years..
Instead, both parties' political campaigns rely on otherizing appeals based on superficial
identity politics (white-affirmative on the one hand, POC-affirmative on the other) and,
mainly, on bashing the other party for all the problems it ignored or exacerbated, and all the
terrible policies it enacted, when it was in power -- and for the version of superficial,
otherizing identity politics it supposedly based those policies on (the real determinants of
class power remaining invisible). What both parties know how and will continue to do is mount
hypocritical legalistic and moralistic "investigations" of illegal campaign contributions,
support from foreign governments, teenage make-out sessions, personal-space violations, et.
al., that they are just "shocked, shocked" about.
It's Investigation Nation. Fake politics in the simulacrum of a democratic polity. Indeed,
someone, of some political perspicuity, might just notice, if only for a flash, that the people
who do pretty well politically are often the ones who frankly don't give a crap about all that.
Maybe because they're talking to people who don't give a crap about all that. But we wouldn't
want to confuse ourselves thinking on that for too long.
Which brings us to the last point about Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation mentioned
above. It may not (or may!) have been an intended goal, but it has been its most definite
political effect: The Mueller Investigation has been a great political gift to Donald Trump.
#Resisters and Russiagaters can wriggle around that all they want. They can insist that, once
we get the whole Report, we'll turn the corner, the bombshell will explode, the walls will
close in -- for real, this time. Sure.
But even they can't deny that's the case right now. Trump is saying the Mueller
investigation was a political counterattack against the result of the election, masquerading as
a disinterested judicial investigation; that it was based on a flimsy fiction and designed to
dig around in every corner of his closets to find nasty and incriminating things that were
entirely irrelevant to the ostensible mandate of the investigation and to any substantive,
upfront political critique -- a "witchhunt," a "fishing expedition." And he is right. And too
many people in the country know he's right. At this point, even most Russiagaters themselves
know it -- though they don't care, and will never admit it.
So now Trump, who could have been attacked for two years politically on substance for
betraying most of the promises that got him elected -- more aggressive war, more tax cuts for
the wealthy, threatening Medicare and Social Security -- has instead been handed, by the
Democrats, the strongest arrow he now has in his political quiver. As Matt Taibbi says: "Trump
couldn't have asked for a juicier campaign issue, and an easier way to argue that 'elites'
don't respect the democratic choices of flyover voters. It's hard to imagine what could look
worse."
You might think the Democratic Party would be horrified at this result, which one conservative
analyst calls: "one of the greatest self-defeating acts in history." You might think Democrats
would now move quickly and decisively toward a strategy of offering a substantive political
alternative, and abandon this awful own-goal Mueller/Russiagate tack that has already helped
Trump immensely (and which they are not going to turn their way). That is obviously what would
happen if the Democrats' main goal was to defeat Trump. But it isn't.
As discussed above, the Democratic establishment's' main goal throughout this was not to "get"
Trump, but to channel its own voters' disgust with him into support for some halcyon, liberal,
status quo ante-Trump, and away from left demands for a radical change to the social, economic,
and political conditions that produced him and his clueless establishment opponent in 2016. The
Democrats' goal was, and is, not to defeat Trump, but to stave off the left.
What they are doing with the Mueller Investigation/Russiagate is what they did in the
primaries in 2016: Then, they deliberately promoted Trump as an opponent, while working
assiduously to cheat their own leftist candidate; now, they gin up a fictional spy story whose
inevitable collapse helps Trump, but on which they will double down, in order to continue
branding "divisive" leftists who challenge any return to their version of status-quo normalcy
as the Kremlin's "useful idiots."
The Democrats' main goal in all this is not to impeach, or stop the re-election of, Donald
Trump; it's to prevent the nomination and election of Bernie Sanders, or anyone like him.
Russiagate Forever
Here's Tim Ryan's presidential campaign kickoff speech in Youngstown, Ohio, a poster city of
late American capitalist deindustrialization, explaining to the voters what is causing the
destruction of their lives and towns. After complaining that "We have politicians and leaders
today that want to divide us. They want to put us in one box or the other. You know, you can't
be for business and for labor," he elaborates:
Yup, it’s those Russians, you see, sowing division through certain “politicians and leaders,” who are preventing us from
fixing our healthcare, education, economic and government systems. This—doubling down on Russiagate—is the centrist Democrats’
idea of a winning political appeal. I consider it utterly delusional.
I heard last week from a friend in Western Pennsylvania, not too far from Youngstown. She’s a good person who is trying to
organize Democrats in the area to beat Trump in 2020, and, pleading for advice, she expressed her exasperation: “They’re leaving
the party!”
You mean the five million people who voted for Obama in 2012, in the 90% of counties that voted for Obama either in 2008
or 2012, but would not vote for Hillary in 2019, aren’t streaming back into—are indeed still streaming out of—the Democratic
Party, despite all the Mueller investigation has done for them? Imagine that.
What has Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation wrought? It’s either a shrewd political gambit sure to take down Trump, or
it’s ridiculous political theater leading Democrats, and the country, over another cliff. Double-down or leave that table?
"... Early in any psychology course, students are taught to be very cautious about accepting people's reports. A simple trick is to stage some sort of interruption to the lecture by confederates, and later ask the students to write down what they witnessed. Typically, they will misremember the events, sequences and even the number of people who staged the tableaux. Don't trust witnesses, is the message. ..."
"... The three assumptions -- lack of rationality, stubbornness, and costs -- imply that there is slim chance that people can ever learn or be educated out of their biases; ..."
"... So, are we as hopeless as some psychologists claim we are? In fact, probably not. Not all the initial claims have been substantiated. For example, it seems we are not as loss averse as previously claimed. Does our susceptibility to printed visual illusions show that we lack judgement in real life? ..."
"... Well the sad fact is that there's nobody in the position to protect "governments" from their own biases, and "scientists" from theirs ..."
"... Long ago a lawyer acquaintance, referring to a specific judge, told me that the judge seemed to "make shit up as he was going along". I have long held psychiatry fits that statement very well. ..."
"... Here we have a real scientist fighting the nonsense spreading from (neoclassical) economics into other realms of science/academia. ..."
"... Behavioral economics is a sideline by-product of neoclassical micro-economic theory. It tries to cope with experimental data that is inconsistent with that theory. ..."
"... Everything in neoclassical economics is a travesty. "Rational choice theory" and its application in "micro economics" is false from the ground up. It basically assumes that people are gobbling up resources without plan, meaning or relevant circumstances. Neoclassical micro economic theory is so false and illogical that I would not know where to start in a comment, so I should like to refer to a whole book about it: Keen, Steve: "Debunking economics". ..."
"... As the theory is totally wrong it is really not surprising that countless experiments show that people do not behave the way neoclassical theory predicts. How do economists react to this? Of course they assume that people are "irrational" because they do not behave according to their studied theory. (Why would you ever change your basic theory because of some tedious facts?) ..."
"... The title of the 1st ed. of Keen's book was "Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences" which was simply a perfect title. ..."
Early in any psychology course, students are taught to be very cautious about accepting people's reports. A simple trick is
to stage some sort of interruption to the lecture by confederates, and later ask the students to write down what they witnessed.
Typically, they will misremember the events, sequences and even the number of people who staged the tableaux. Don't trust witnesses,
is the message.
Another approach is to show visual illusions, such as getting estimates of line lengths in the Muller-Lyer illusion, or studying
simple line lengths under social pressure, as in the Asch experiment, or trying to solve the Peter Wason logic problems, or the puzzles
set by Kahneman and Tversky. All these appear to show severe limitations of human judgment. Psychology is full of cautionary tales
about the foibles of common folk.
As a consequence of this softening up, psychology students come to regard themselves and most people as fallible, malleable, unreliable,
biased and generally irrational. No wonder psychologists feel superior to the average citizen, since they understand human limitations
and, with their superior training, hope to rise above such lowly superstitions.
However, society still functions, people overcome errors and many things work well most of the time. Have psychologists, for one
reason or another, misunderstood people, and been too quick to assume that they are incapable of rational thought?
He is particularly interested in the economic consequences of apparent irrationality, and whether our presumed biases really result
in us making bad economic decisions. If so, some argue we need a benign force, say a government, to protect us from our lack of capacity.
Perhaps we need a tattoo on our forehead: Diminished Responsibility.
The argument leading from cognitive biases to governmental paternalism -- in short, the irrationality argument -- consists
of three assumptions and one conclusion:
1. Lack of rationality. Experiments have shown that people's intuitions are systematically biased.
2. Stubbornness. Like visual illusions, biases are persistent and hardly corrigible by education.
3. Substantial costs. Biases may incur substantial welfare-relevant costs such as lower wealth, health, or happiness.
4. Biases justify governmental paternalism. To protect people from theirbiases, governments should "nudge" the public
toward better behavior.
The three assumptions -- lack of rationality, stubbornness, and costs -- imply that there is slim chance that people can ever
learn or be educated out of their biases; instead governments need to step in with a policy called libertarian paternalism (Thaler
and Sunstein, 2003).
So, are we as hopeless as some psychologists claim we are? In fact, probably not. Not all the initial claims have been substantiated.
For example, it seems we are not as loss averse as previously claimed. Does our susceptibility to printed visual illusions show that
we lack judgement in real life?
In Shepard's (1990) words, "to fool a visual system that has a full binocular and freely mobile view of a well-illuminated scene
is next to impossible" (p. 122). Thus, in psychology, the visual system is seen more as a genius than a fool in making intelligent
inferences, and inferences, after all, are necessary for making sense of the images on the retina.
Most crucially, can people make probability judgements? Let us see. Try solving this one:
A disease has a base rate of .1, and a test is performed that has a hit rate of .9 (the conditional probability of a positive
test given disease) and a false positive rate of .1 (the conditional probability of a positive test given no disease). What is
the probability that a random person with a positive test result actually has the disease?
Most people fail this test, including 79% of gynaecologists giving breast screening tests. Some researchers have drawn the conclusion
that people are fundamentally unable to deal with conditional probabilities. On the contrary, there is a way of laying out the problem
such that most people have no difficulty with it. Watch what it looks like when presented as natural frequencies:
Among every 100 people, 10 are expected to have a disease. Among those 10, nine are expected to correctly test positive. Among
the 90 people without the disease, nine are expected to falsely test positive. What proportion of those who test positive actually
have the disease?
In this format the positive test result gives us 9 people with the disease and 9 people without the disease, so the chance that
a positive test result shows a real disease is 50/50. Only 13% of gynaecologists fail this presentation.
Summing up the virtues of natural frequencies, Gigerenzer says:
When college students were given a 2-hour course in natural frequencies, the number of correct Bayesian inferences increased
from 10% to 90%; most important, this 90% rate was maintained 3 months after training (Sedlmeier and Gigerenzer, 2001). Meta-analyses
have also documented the "de-biasing" effect, and natural frequencies are now a technical term in evidence-based medicine (Akiet
al., 2011; McDowell and Jacobs, 2017). These results are consistent with a long literature on techniques for successfully teaching
statistical reasoning (e.g., Fonget al., 1986). In sum, humans can learn Bayesian inference quickly if the information is presented
in natural frequencies.
If the problem is set out in a simple format, almost all of us can all do conditional probabilities.
I taught my medical students about the base rate screening problem in the late 1970s, based on: Robyn Dawes (1962) "A note on
base rates and psychometric efficiency". Decades later, alarmed by the positive scan detection of an unexplained mass, I confided
my fears to a psychiatrist friend. He did a quick differential diagnosis on bowel cancer, showing I had no relevant symptoms, and
reminded me I had lectured him as a student on base rates decades before, so I ought to relax. Indeed, it was false positive.
Here are the relevant figures, set out in terms of natural frequencies
Every test has a false positive rate (every step is being taken to reduce these), and when screening is used for entire populations
many patients have to undergo further investigations, sometimes including surgery.
Setting out frequencies in a logical sequence can often prevent misunderstandings. Say a man on trial for having murdered his
spouse has previously physically abused her. Should his previous history of abuse not be raised in Court because only 1 woman in
2500 cases of abuse is murdered by her abuser? Of course, whatever a defence lawyer may argue and a Court may accept, this is back
to front. OJ Simpson was not on trial for spousal abuse, but for the murder of his former partner. The relevant question is: what
is the probability that a man murdered his partner, given that she has been murdered and that he previously battered her.
Accepting the figures used by the defence lawyer, if 1 in 2500 women are murdered every year by their abusive male partners, how
many women are murdered by men who did not previously abuse them? Using government figures that 5 women in 100,000 are murdered every
year then putting everything onto the same 100,000 population, the frequencies look like this:
So, 40 to 5, it is 8 times more probable that abused women are murdered by their abuser. A relevant issue to raise in Court about
the past history of an accused man.
Are people's presumed biases costly, in the sense of making them vulnerable to exploitation, such that they can be turned into
a money pump, or is it a case of "once bitten, twice shy"? In fact, there is no evidence that these apparently persistent logical
errors actually result in people continually making costly errors. That presumption turns out to be a bias bias.
Gigerenzer goes on to show that people are in fact correct in their understanding of the randomness of short sequences of coin
tosses, and Kahneman and Tversky wrong. Elegantly, he also shows that the "hot hand" of successful players in basketball is a real
phenomenon, and not a stubborn illusion as claimed.
With equal elegance he disposes of a result I had depended upon since Slovic (1982), which is that people over-estimate the frequency
of rare risks and under-estimate the frequency of common risks. This finding has led to the belief that people are no good at estimating
risk. Who could doubt that a TV series about Chernobyl will lead citizens to have an exaggerated fear of nuclear power stations?
The original Slovic study was based on 39 college students, not exactly a fair sample of humanity. The conceit of psychologists
knows no bounds. Gigerenzer looks at the data and shows that it is yet another example of regression to the mean. This is an apparent
effect which arises whenever the predictor is less than perfect (the most common case), an unsystematic error effect, which is already
evident when you calculate the correlation coefficient. Parental height and their children's heights are positively but not perfectly
correlated at about r = 0.5. Predictions made in either direction will under-predict in either direction, simply because they are
not perfect, and do not capture all the variation. Try drawing out the correlation as an ellipse to see the effect of regression,
compared to the perfect case of the straight line of r= 1.0
What diminishes in the presence of noise is the variability of the estimates, both the estimates of the height of the sons based
on that of their fathers, and vice versa. Regression toward the mean is a result of unsystematic, not systematic error (Stigler,1999).
Gigerenzer also looks at the supposed finding that people are over-confidence in predictions, and finds that it is another regression
to the mean problem.
Gigerenzer then goes on to consider that old favourite, that most people think they are better than average, which supposedly
cannot be the case, because average people are average.
Consider the finding that most drivers think they drive better than average. If better driving is interpreted as meaning fewer
accidents, then most drivers' beliefs are actually true. The number of accidents per person has a skewed distribution, and an
analysis of U.S. accident statistics showed that some 80% of drivers have fewer accidents than the average number of accidents
(Mousavi and Gigerenzer, 2011)
Then he looks at the classical demonstration of framing, that is to say, the way people appear to be easily swayed by how the
same facts are "framed" or presented to the person who has to make a decision.
A patient suffering from a serious heart disease considers high-risk surgery and asks a doctor about its prospects.
The doctor can frame the answer in two ways:
Positive Frame: Five years after surgery, 90% of patients are alive.
Negative Frame: Five years after surgery, 10% of patients are dead.
Should the patient listen to how the doctor frames the answer? Behavioral economists say no because both frames are logically
equivalent (Kahneman, 2011). Nevertheless, people do listen. More are willing to agree to a medical procedure if the doctor uses
positive framing (90% alive) than if negative framing is used (10% dead) (Moxeyet al., 2003). Framing effects challenge the assumption
of stable preferences, leading to preference reversals. Thaler and Sunstein (2008) who presented the above surgery problem, concluded
that "framing works because people tend to be somewhat mindless, passive decisionmakers" (p. 40)
Gigerenzer points out that in this particular example, subjects are having to make their judgements without knowing a key fact:
how many survive without surgery. If you know that you have a datum which is more influential. These are the sorts of questions patients
will often ask about, and discuss with other patients, or with several doctors. Furthermore, you don't have to spin a statistic.
You could simply say: "Five years after surgery, 90% of patients are alive and 10% are dead".
Gigerenzer gives an explanation which is very relevant to current discussions about the meaning of intelligence, and about the
power of intelligence tests:
In sum, the principle of logical equivalence or "description invariance" is a poor guide to understanding how human intelligence
deals with an uncertain world where not everything is stated explicitly. It misses the very nature of intelligence, the ability
to go beyond the information given (Bruner, 1973)
The key is to take uncertainty seriously, take heuristics seriously, and beware of the bias bias.
One important conclusion I draw from this entire paper is that the logical puzzles enjoyed by Kahneman, Tversky, Stanovich and
others are rightly rejected by psychometricians as usually being poor indicators of real ability. They fail because they are designed
to lead people up the garden path, and depend on idiosyncratic interpretations.
Critics of examinations of either intellectual ability or scholastic attainment are fond of claiming that the items are "arbitrary".
Not really. Scholastic tests have to be close to the curriculum in question, but still need to a have question forms which are simple
to understand so that the stress lies in how students formulate the answer, not in how they decipher the structure of the question.
Intellectual tests have to avoid particular curricula and restrict themselves to the common ground of what most people in a community
understand. Questions have to be super-simple, so that the correct answer follows easily from the question, with minimal ambiguity.
Furthermore, in the case of national scholastic tests, and particularly in the case of intelligence tests, legal authorities will
pore over the test, looking at each item for suspected biases of a sexual, racial or socio-economic nature. Designing an intelligence
test is a difficult and expensive matter. Many putative new tests of intelligence never even get to the legal hurdle, because they
flounder on matters of reliability and validity, and reveal themselves to be little better than the current range of assessments.
In conclusion, both in psychology and behavioural economics, some researchers have probably been too keen to allege bias in cases
where there are unsystematic errors, or no errors at all. The corrective is to learn about base rates, and to use natural frequencies
as a guide to good decision-making.
Don't bother boosting your IQ. Boost your understanding of natural frequencies.
Good concrete advice. Perhaps even more useful for those who need to explain things like this to others than for those seeking
to understand for themselves.
"intelligence deals with an uncertain world where not everything is stated explicitly. It misses the very nature of intelligence,
the ability to go beyond the information given (Bruner, 1973)"
"The key is to take uncertainty seriously, take heuristics seriously, and beware of the bias bias."
Actually I think this is an example of an increasingly common genre of malapropism, where the writer gropes for the right word,
finds one that is similar, and settles for that. The worst of it is that readers intuitively understand what was intended, and
then adopt the marginally incorrect usage themselves. That's perhaps how the world and his dog came to say "literally" when they
mean "figuratively". Maybe a topic for a future article?
In 2009 Google finished engineering a reverse search engine to find out what kind of searches people did most often. Seth Davidowitz
and Steven Pinker wrote a very fascinating/entertaining book using the tool called Everybody Lies
Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics
to sports to race to sex, gender, and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn't vote
for Barack Obama because he's black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly
favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie
about our sex lives, and who's more self-conscious about sex, men or women?
Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand
ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating
and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking
to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential – revealing biases deeply embedded
within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our
health – both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data every day, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody
Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.
I shall treat this posting (for which many thanks, doc) as an invitation to sing a much-loved song: everybody should read Gigerenzer's
Reckoning with Risk. With great clarity it teaches what everyone ought to know about probability.
(It could also serve as a model for writing in English about technical subjects. Americans and Britons should study the English
of this German – he knows how, you know.)
Inspired by "The original Slovic study was based on 39 college students" I shall also sing another favorite song. Much of Psychology
is based on what small numbers of American undergraduates report they think they think.
" Gigerenzer points out that in this particular example, subjects are having to make their judgements without knowing a key fact:
how many survive without surgery. "
This one reminds of the false dichotomy. The patient has additional options! Like changing diet, and behaviours such as exercise,
elimination of occupational stress , etc.
The statistical outcomes for a person change when the person changes their circumstances/conditions.
@Tom
Welsh A disposition (conveyance) of an awkwardly shaped chunk out of a vast estate contained reference to "the slither of
ground bounded on or towards the north east and extending two hundred and twenty four meters or thereby along a chain link fence "
Not poor clients (either side) nor cheap lawyers. And who never erred?
Better than deliberately inserting "errors" to guarantee a stream of tidy up work (not unknown in the "professional" world)
in future.
Good article. 79% of gynaecologists fail a simple conditional probability test?! Many if not most medical research papers use
advanced statistics. Medical doctors must read these papers to fully understand their field. So, if medical doctors don't fully
understand them, they are not properly doing their job. Those papers use mathematical expressions, not English. Converting them
to another form of English, instead of using the mathematical expressions isn't a solution.
Regarding witnesses: When that jet crashed into Rockaway several years ago, a high percentage of witnesses said that they saw
smoke before the crash. But there was actually no smoke. The witnesses were adjusting what they saw to conform to their past experience
of seeing movie and newsreel footage of planes smoking in the air before a crash. Children actually make very good witnesses.
Regarding the chart. Missing, up there in the vicinity of cancer and heart disease. The third-leading cause of death. 250,000
per year, according to a 2016 Hopkins study. Medical negligence.
1. Lack of rationality. Experiments have shown that people's intuitions are systematically biased.
2. Stubbornness. Like visual illusions, biases are persistent and hardly corrigible by education.
3. Substantial costs. Biases may incur substantial welfare-relevant costs such as lower wealth, health, or happiness.
4. Biases justify governmental paternalism. To protect people from theirbiases, governments should "nudge" the public toward
better behavior.
Well the sad fact is that there's nobody in the position to protect "governments" from their own biases, and "scientists"
from theirs.
So, behind the smoke of all words and rationalisations, the law is unchanged: everyone strives to gain and exert as much power
as possible over as many others as possible. Most do that without writing papers to say it is right, others write papers,
others books. Anyway, the fundamental law would stay as it is even if all this writing labour was spared, wouldn't it?
But then another fundamental law, the law of framing all one's drives as moral and beneffective comes into play the papers
and the books are useful, after all.
An interesting article. However, I think that the only thing we have to know about how illogical psychiatry is this:
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed
homosexuality to be a mental disorder. 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain
it.
The APA then compromised, removing homosexuality from the DSM but replacing it, in effect, with "sexual orientation disturbance"
for people "in conflict with" their sexual orientation. Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM.
The article makes no mention of the fact that no "new science" was brought to support the resolution.
It appears that the psychiatrists were voting based on feelings rather than science. Since that time, the now 50+ genders have
been accepted as "normal" by the APA. My family has had members in multiple generations suffering from mental illness. None were
"cured". I know others with the same circumstances.
How does one conclude that being repulsed by the prime directive of every
living organism – reproduce yourself – is "normal"? That is not to say these people are horrible or evil, just not normal. How
can someone, who thinks (s)he is a cat be mentally ill, but a grown man thinking he is a female child is not?
Long ago a lawyer acquaintance, referring to a specific judge, told me that the judge seemed to "make shit up as he was going
along". I have long held psychiatry fits that statement very well.
Thank you for this article. I find the information about the interpretation of statistical data very interesting. My take on the
background of the article is this:
Here we have a real scientist fighting the nonsense spreading from (neoclassical) economics into other realms of science/academia.
Behavioral economics is a sideline by-product of neoclassical micro-economic theory. It tries to cope with experimental
data that is inconsistent with that theory.
Everything in neoclassical economics is a travesty. "Rational choice theory" and its application in "micro economics" is
false from the ground up. It basically assumes that people are gobbling up resources without plan, meaning or relevant circumstances.
Neoclassical micro economic theory is so false and illogical that I would not know where to start in a comment, so I should like
to refer to a whole book about it:
Keen, Steve: "Debunking economics".
As the theory is totally wrong it is really not surprising that countless experiments show that people do not behave the
way neoclassical theory predicts. How do economists react to this? Of course they assume that people are "irrational" because
they do not behave according to their studied theory. (Why would you ever change your basic theory because of some tedious facts?)
We live in a strange world in which such people have control over university faculties, journals, famous prizes. But at least
we have some scientists who defend their area of knowledge against the spreading nonsense produced by economists.
The title of the 1st ed. of Keen's book was "Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences" which was simply
a perfect title.
"... Theresa May's immediate conclusion that the Russian government bears certain and sole responsibility for the nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals is logically, scientifically, and forensically impossible. ..."
"... Teresa May is lying, everyone who seconds her assertion of false certainty is lying, they all know they are lying, and the Russians know that they know they are lying. ..."
"... "War" is what they seem to want it to be. For the past 18 to 24 months, we've also been inundated with Morgan Freeman and Rob Reiner's ominous "We have been attacked. We are at war," video, as well as the bipartisan ( Hillary Clinton , John McCain ) insistence that alleged Russian election meddling should be considered an "act of war" equivalent to Pearl Harbor . Indeed, Trump's new National Security advisor, the warmongering lunatic John Bolton, calls it , explicitly "a casus belli , a true act of war." ..."
"... Even the military is getting in on the act. The nerve-agent accusation has been followed up by General John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, accusing Russia of arming the Taliban! It's noteworthy that this senior American military general casually refers to Russia as "the enemy": "We've had stories written by the Taliban that have appeared in the media about financial support provided by the enemy." ..."
"... The economic war against Russian is being waged through a series of sanctions that seem impossible to reverse, because their expressed goal is to extract confession, repentance, and restitution for crimes ascribed to Russia that Russia has not committed, or has not been proven to have committed, or are entirely fictional and have not been committed by anyone at all. We will only stop taking your bank accounts and consulates and let you play games with us if you confess and repent every crime we accuse you of. No questions permitted. ..."
It's a relentless economic, diplomatic, and ideological war, spiced with (so far) just a
dash of military war, and the strong scent of more to come.
I mean war with Russia, of course, although Russia is the point target for a constellation
of emerging adversaries the US is desperate to entame before any one or combination of them
becomes too strong to defeat. These include countries like Iran and China, which are developing
forces capable of resisting American military aggression against their own territory and on a
regional level, and have shown quite too much uppitiness about staying in their
previously-assigned geopolitical cages.
But Russia is the only country that has put its military forces in the way of a U.S. program
of regime change -- indirectly in Ukraine, where Russia would not get out of the way, and
directly in Syria, where Russia actively got in the way. So Russia is the focus of
attack, the prime target for an exemplary comeuppance.
Is it, then, a new Cold War, even more dangerous than the old one, as Stephen F. Cohen
says ?
That terminology was apt even a few months ago, but the speed, ferocity, and
coordination of the West/NATO's reaction to the alleged nerve-agent poisoning of the
Skripals, as well as the formation of a War Cabinet in Washington, indicates to me that we've
moved to another level of aggression.
It's beyond Cold. Call it the Warm War. And the temperature's rising.
The Nerve of Them
There are two underlying presumptions that, combined, make present situation more dangerous
than a Cold War.
One is the presumption of guilt -- or, more precisely, the presumption that the presumption
of Russian guilt can always be made, and made to stick in the Western mind.
The confected furor over the alleged nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals demonstrates this
dramatically.
Theresa May's immediate conclusion that the Russian government bears certain and sole
responsibility for the nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals is logically, scientifically, and
forensically impossible.
False certainty is the ultimate fake news. It is just not true that, as she says: "There is
no alternative conclusion other than the Russian state is culpable." This falsity of this
statement has been demonstrated by a slew of sources -- including the
developers of the alleged "Novichok" agent themselves, a thorough
analysis by a former UN inspector in Iraq who worked on the destruction of chemical
weapons, establishment Western scientific outlets like New Scientist ("
Other countries could have made 'Russian' nerve agent "), and the British government's own
mealy-mouthed, effective-but-unacknowledged disavowal
of that conclusion. In its own words, The British government found: "a nerve agent or
related compound," " of a type developed by Russia." So, it's absolutely,
positively, certainly, without a doubt, Russian-government-produced "Novichok" .or something
else.
Teresa May is lying, everyone who seconds her assertion of false certainty is lying, they
all know they are lying, and the Russians know that they know they are lying. It's a
It boggles the -- or at least, my -- mind how, in the face of all this, anyone could take
seriously her ultimatum, ignoring the procedures of the
Chemical Weapons Convention , gave Russia 24 hours to "explain" -- i.e., confess and beg
forgiveness for -- this alleged crime.
Indeed, it's noteworthy that France initially, and rather sharply, refused to assume Russian
guilt, with a government spokesman saying, "We don't do fantasy politics. Once the elements are
proven, then the time will come for decisions to be made." But the whip was cracked -- and
surely not by the weak hand of Whitehall -- demanding EU/NATO unity in the condemnation of
Russia. So, in an extraordinary show of discipline that could only be ordered and orchestrated
by the imperial center, France joined the United States and 20 other countries in the largest
mass expulsion of Russian diplomats ever.
Western governments and their compliant media have mandated that Russian government guilt
for the "
first offensive use of a nerve agent " in Europe since World War II is to be taken as flat
fact. Anyone -- like Jeremy Corbyn or Craig Murray -- who
dares to interrupt the "Sentence first! Verdict afterwards!" chorus to ask for, uh, evidence,
is treated to a storm of obloquy
.
At this point, Western accusers don't seem to care how blatantly unfounded, if not
ludicrous, an accusation is. The presumption of Russian guilt, along with the shaming of anyone
who questions it, has become an unquestionable standard of Western/American political and media
discourse.
Old Cold War McCarthyism has become new Warm War fantasy politics.
Helled in Contempt
This declaration of diplomatic war over the Skripal incident is the culmination of an
ongoing drumbeat of ideological warfare, demonizing Russia and Putin personally in the most
predictable and inflammatory terms.
For the past couple of years, we've been
told by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Marco Rubio, and
Boris Johnson that Putin is the new Hitler. That's a particularly galling analogy for the
Russians. Soviet Russia, after all, was Hitler's main enemy, that defeated the Nazi army at the
cost of 20+ million of its people -- while the British Royal Family was not
un-smitten with the charms of
Hitlerian fascism , and British footballers had a poignant moment in 1938 Berlin
saluting the Fuhre.:
"War" is what they seem to want it to be. For the past 18 to 24 months, we've also been
inundated with Morgan Freeman and Rob Reiner's ominous "We have been attacked. We are at war,"
video, as well as the bipartisan (
Hillary Clinton ,
John McCain ) insistence that alleged Russian election meddling should be considered an
"act of war"
equivalent to Pearl Harbor . Indeed, Trump's new National Security advisor, the
warmongering lunatic John Bolton,
calls it , explicitly "a casus belli , a true act of war."
Even the military is getting in on the act. The nerve-agent accusation has been followed up
by General John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, accusing Russia of arming the Taliban! It's
noteworthy that this senior American military general casually refers to Russia as "the enemy":
"We've had stories written by the Taliban that have appeared in the media about financial
support provided by the enemy."
Which is strange, because, since the Taliban emerged from the American-jihadi war against
Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and the Taliban and Russia have "enduring enmity" towards each
other, as Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network puts it . Furthermore, the sixteen-year-long
American war against the Taliban has depended on Russia allowing the U.S. to move
supplies through its territory, and being "the principal source of
fuel for the alliance's needs in Afghanistan."
So the general has to admit that this alleged Russian "destabilising activity" is a new
thing: "This activity really picked up in the last 18 to 24 months When you look at the timing
it roughly correlates to when things started to heat up in Syria. So it's interesting to note
the timing of the whole thing."
Yes, it is.
The economic war against Russian is being waged through a series of sanctions that seem
impossible to reverse, because their expressed goal is to extract confession, repentance, and
restitution for crimes ascribed to Russia that Russia has not committed, or has not been proven
to have committed, or are entirely fictional and have not been committed by anyone at all.
We will only stop taking your bank accounts and consulates and let you play games with us if
you confess and repent every crime we accuse you of. No questions permitted.
This is not a serious framework for respectful international relations between two sovereign
nations. It's downright childish. It paints everyone, including the party trying to impose it,
into an impossible corner. Is Russia ever going to abandon Crimea, confess that it shot down
the Malaysian jet, tricked us into electing Donald Trump, murdered the Skripals, is secretly
arming the Taliban, et. al .? Is the U.S. ever going to say: "Never mind"? What's the
next step? It's the predicament of the bully.
This is not, either, an approach that really seeks to address any of the "crimes" charged.
As Victoria Nuland (a Clintonite John Bolton) put it on NPR, it's about, "sending a message" to
Russia. Well, as Russia's ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov
said , with this latest mass expulsion of diplomats, the United States is, "Destroying what
little remained of US-Russian ties." He got the message.
All of this looks like a coordinated campaign that began in response to Russia's
interruption of American regime-change projects in Ukraine and especially Syria, that was
harmonized -- over the last 18 to 24 months -- with various elite and popular motifs of
discontent over the 2016 election, and that has reached a crescendo in the last few weeks with
ubiquitous and unconstrained " enemization " [1] of Russia.
It's hard to describe it as anything other than war propaganda -- manufacturing the
citizenry's consent for a military confrontation.
Destroying the possibility of normal, non-conflictual, state-to-state relations and
constituting Russia as "the enemy" is exactly what this campaign is about. That is its
"message" and its effect -- for the American people as much as for the Russia
government. The heightened danger, I think, is that Russia, which has for a long time been
reluctant to accept that America wasn't interested in "partnership", has now heard and
understood this message, while the American people have only heard but do not understand
it.
It's hard to see where this can go that doesn't involve military conflict. This is
especially the case with the appointments of Mike Pompeo, Gina Haspel, and John Bolton -- a
veritable murderers' row that many see as the core of a Trump War Cabinet. Bolton, who does not
need Senate confirmation, is a particularly dangerous fanatic, who tried to
get the Israelis to attack Iran before even they wanted to, and has
promised regime change in Iran by 2019. As mentioned, he considers that Russia has already
given him a " casus belli. " Even the staid New York Timeswarns
that, with these appointments, "the odds of taking military action will rise dramatically."
The second presumption in the American mindset today makes military confrontation more
likely than it was during the Cold War: Not only is there a presumption of guilt, there is a
presumption of weakness . The presumption of guilt is something the American imperial
managers are confident they can induce and maintain in the Western world; the presumption of
weakness is one they -- or, I fear, too many of them -- have all-too blithely
internalized.
This is an aspect of the American self-image among policymakers whose careers matured in a
post-Soviet world. During the Cold War, Americans held themselves in check by the assumption,
that, militarily, the Soviet Union was a peer adversary, a country that could and would defend
certain territories and interests against direct American military aggression -- "spheres of
interest" that should not be attacked. The fundamental antagonism was managed with grudging
mutual respect.
There was, after all, a shared recent history of alliance against fascism. And there was an
awareness that the Soviet Union, in however distorted a way, both represented the possibility
of a post-capitalist future and supported post-colonial national liberation movements, which
gave it considerable stature in the world.
American leadership might have hated the Soviet Union, but it was not contemptuous of it. No
American leader would have called the Soviet Union, as John McCain called Russia, just "a gas
station masquerading as a country." And no senior American or British leader would have told
the Soviet Union what British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson told Russia last week: to "go
away and shut up."
This is a discourse that assumes its own righteousness, authority, and superior power, even
as it betrays its own weakness. It's the discourse of a frustrated child. Or bully. Russia
isn't shutting up and going away, and the British are not -- and know they're not -- going to
make it. But they may think the Big Daddy backing them up can and will. And daddy may think so
himself.
Like all bullies, the people enmeshed in this arrogant discourse don't seem to understand
that it is not frightening Russia. It's only insulting the country, and leading it to conclude
that there is indeed nothing remaining of productive, non-conflictual, US-Russian "partnership"
ties. The post-Skripal worldwide diplomatic expulsions, which seem deliberately and desperately
excessive, may have finally convinced Russia that there is no longer any use trying. Those who
should be frightened of this are the American people.
The enemy of my enemy is me.
The United States is only succeeding in turning itself into an enemy for Russians. Americans
would do well to understand how thoroughly their hypocritical and contemptuous stance has
alienated the Russian people and strengthened Vladimir Putin's leadership -- as many of Putin's
critics warned
them it would. The fantasy of stoking a "liberal" movement in Russia that will install some
nouveau-Yeltsin-ish figure is dissipated in the cold light of a 77% election day. Putin is
widely and firmly supported in Russia because he represents the resistance to any such
scheme.
Americans who want to understand that dynamic, and what America itself has wrought in
Russia, should heed the passion, anger, and disappointment in this statement about
Putin's election from a self-described "liberal" (using the word, I think, in the intellectual
tradition, not the American political, sense), Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT TV
(errors in translation by another person):
Essentially, the West should be horrified not because 76% of Russians voted for Putin, but
because this elections have demonstrated that 95% of Russia's population supports
conservative-patriotic, communist and nationalist ideas. That means that liberal ideas are
barely surviving among measly 5% of population.
And that's your fault, my Western friends. It was you who pushed us into "Russians never
surrender" mode
[W]ith all your injustice and cruelty, inquisitorial hypocrisy and lies you forced us to
stop respecting you. You and your so called "values."
We don't want to live like you live, anymore. For fifty years, secretly and openly, we
wanted to live like you, but not any longer.
We have no more respect for you, and for those amongst us that you support, and for all
those people who support you.
For that you only have yourself to blame.
In meantime, you've pushed us to rally around your enemy. Immediately, after you declared
him an enemy, we united around him .
It was you who imposed an opposition between patriotism and liberalism. Although, they
shouldn't be mutually exclusive notions. This false dilemma, created by you, made us to chose
patriotism.
Even though, many of us are really liberals, myself included.
Get cleaned up, now. You don't have much time left.
In fact, the whole "uprising"/color revolution strategy throughout the world is over. It's
been fatally discredited by its own purported successes. Everybody in the Middle East has seen
how that worked out for Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and the Russians have seen how it worked out
for Ukraine and for Russia
itself . In neither Russia nor Iran (nor anywhere else of importance) are the Americans,
with their sanctions and their NGOs and their
cookies ,going to stoke a popular uprising that turns a country into a fractured client of
the Washington Consensus. More fantasy politics.
The old new world Washington wants won't be born without a military midwife. The U.S. wants
a compliant Russia ( and "international community") back, and it thinks it can force it
into being.
Fear Knot
Consider this quote from
The Saker , a defense analyst who was born in Switzerland to a Russian military family,
"studied Russian and Soviet military affairs all [his] life," and lived for 20 years in the
United States. He's been one of the sharpest analysts of Russia and Syria over the last few
years. This was his take a year ago, after Trump's cruise missile attack on Syria's Al Shayrat
airfield -- another instant punishment for an absolutely, positively, proven-in-a day, chemical
crime:
For one thing, there is no US policy on anything.
The Russians expressed their total disgust and outrage at this attack and openly began
saying that the Americans were
"недоговороспособны".
What that word means is literally "not-agreement-capable" or unable to make and then abide by
an agreement. While polite, this expression is also extremely strong as it implies not so
much a deliberate deception as the lack of the very ability to make a deal and abide by it.
But to say that a nuclear world superpower is "not-agreement-capable" is a terrible and
extreme diagnostic.
This means that the Russians have basically given up on the notion of having an adult,
sober and mentally sane partner to have a dialog with.
In all my years of training and work as a military analyst I have always had to assume
that everybody involved was what we called a "rational actor". The Soviets sure where. As
were the Americans.
Not only do I find the Trump administration "not agreement-capable", I find it completely
detached from reality. Delusional in other words.
Alas, just like Obama before him, Trump seems to think that he can win a game of nuclear
chicken against Russia. But he can't. Let me be clear here: if pushed into a corner the
Russian will fight, even if that means nuclear war.
There is a reason for this American delusion. The present generation of American leadership
was spoiled and addled by the blissful post-Soviet decades of American impunity.
The problem is not exactly that the U.S. wants full-on war with Russia, it's that
America does not fear it. [2]
Why should it? It hasn't had to for twenty years during which the US assumed it could bully
Russia to stay out of its imperial way anywhere it wanted to intervene.
After the Soviet Union broke up (and only because the Soviet Union disappeared) the
United States was free to use its military power with impunity. For some time, the U.S. had its
drunken stooge, Yeltsin, running Russia and keeping it out of America's military way. There was
nary a peep when Bill Clinton effectively conferred on NATO (meaning the U.S. itself) the
authority to decide what military interventions were necessary and legitimate. For about twenty
years -- from the Yugoslavia through the Libya intervention -- no nation had the military power
or politico-diplomatic will to resist this.
But that situation has changed. Even the Pentagon
recognizes that the American Empire is in a "post-primacy" phase -- certainly "fraying,"
and maybe even "collapsing." The world has seen America's social and economic strength
dissipate, and its pretense of legitimacy disappear entirely. The world has seen American
military overreach everywhere while winning nothing of stable value anywhere. Sixteen years,
and the mighty U.S. Army cannot defeat the Taliban. Now, that's Russia's fault!
Meanwhile, a number of countries in key areas have gained the military confidence and
political will to refuse the presumptions of American arrogance -- China in the Pacific, Iran
in the Middle East, and Russia in Europe and, surprisingly, the Middle East as well. In a
familiar pattern, America's resultant anxiety about waning power increases its
compensatory aggression. And, as mentioned, since it was Russia that most effectively
demonstrated that new military confidence, it's Russia that has to be dealt with first.
The incessant wave of sanctions and expulsions is the bully in the schoolyard clenching his
fist to scare the new kid away. OK, everyone's got the message now. Unclench or punch?
Let's be clear about who is the world's bully. As is evident to any half-conscious person,
Russia is not going to attack the United States or Europe. Russia doesn't have scores of
military bases, combat ships and aircraft up on America's borders. It doesn't have almost a
thousand military bases around the world. Russia does not have the military forces to rampage
around the world as America does, and it doesn't want or need to. That's not because of
Russia's or Vladimir Putin's pacifism, but because Russia, as presently situated in the
political economy of the world, has nothing to gain from it.
Nor does Russia need some huge troll-farm offensive to "destabilize" and sow division in
Western Europe and the United States. Inequality, austerity, waves of immigrants from
regime-change wars, and trigger-happy cops are doing a fine job of that. Russia isn't
responsible for American problems with Black Lives Matter or with the Taliban.
All of this is fantasy politics.
It's the United States, with its fraying empire, that has a problem requiring military
aggression. What other tools does the U.S. have left to put the upstarts, Russia first, back in
their places?
It must be hard for folks who have had their way with country after country for twenty years
not to think they can push Russia out of the way with some really, really scary threats, or
maybe one or two "bloody nose" punches. Some finite number of discrete little escalations.
There's already been some shoving -- that cruise missile attack, Turkey's downing of a Russian
jet, American attacks on Russian personnel (ostensibly private mercenaries) in Syria -- and,
look, Ma, no big war. But sometimes you learn the hard way the truth of the reverse Mike Tyson
rule: "Everyone has a game plan until they smack the other guy in the face."
Consider one concrete risk of escalation that every informed observer is, and every American
should be, aware of.
The place where the United States and Russia are literally, geographically, closest to
confrontation is Syria. As mentioned, the U.S. and its NATO ally, Turkey, have already attacked
and killed Russians in Syria, and the U.S. and its NATO allies have a far larger military force
than Russia in Syria and the surrounding area. On the other hand, Russia has made very
effective use of its forces, including what Reuters
calls "advanced cruise missiles" launched from planes,
ships , and
submarines that hit ISIS targets with high precision from 1000 kilometers.
Russia is also operating in accordance with international law, while the U.S. is not. Russia
is fighting with Syria for the defeat of jihadi forces and the unification of the Syrian state.
The United States is fighting with its jihadi clients for the overthrow of the Syrian
government and the division of the country. Russia intervened in Syria after Obama announced
that the U.S. would attack Syrian army troops, effectively declaring war. If neither side
accepts defeat and goes home, it is quite possible there will be some direct confrontation
over this. In fact, it's hard to imagine that there won't.
A couple of weeks ago Syria and Russia
said the U.S. was planning a major offensive against the Syrian government, including
bombing the government quarter in Damascus. Valery Gerasimov, head of Russia's General Staff,
warned: "In the event of a threat to the lives of our servicemen, Russia's armed forces will
take retaliatory measures against the missiles and launchers used." In this context,
"launchers" means American ships in the Mediterranean.
Also a couple of weeks ago, Russia announced a number of new, highly-advanced weapons
systems. There's discussion about whether some of the yet-to-be-deployed weapons announced
may or
may not
be a bluff, but one that has already been deployed, called Dagger ( Kinzhal, not the
missiles mentioned above), is an air-launched hypersonic cruise missile that files at 5-7,000
miles per hour, with a range of 1200 miles. Analyst Andrei Martyanov claims that: "no
modern or perspective air-defense system deployed today by any NATO fleet can intercept even a
single missile with such characteristics. A salvo of 5-6 such missiles guarantees the
destruction of any Carrier Battle Group or any other surface group, for that matter."
Air-launched. From anywhere.
The U.S. attack has not (yet) happened, for whatever reason (Sputnik reporter Suliman
Mulhem, citing "a military monitor," claims
that's because of the Russian warnings). Great. But given the current state of America's
anxiously aggressive "post-primacy" policy -- including the Russiamania, the Zionist-driven
need to destroy Syria and Iran, and the War Cabinet -- how unlikely is that the U.S. will, in
the near future, make some such attack on some such target that Russia considers crucial to
defend?
And Syria is just one theater where, unless one side accepts defeat and goes home, military
conflict with Russia is highly likely. Is Russia going to abandon the Russian-speaking people
of the Donbass if they're attacked by fascist Kiev forces backed by the U.S.? Is it going to
sit back and watch passively if American and Israeli forces attack Iran? Which one is going to
give up and accept a loss: John Bolton or Vladimir Putin?
Which brings us to the pointed question: What will the U.S. do if Russia sinks an American
ship? How many steps before that goes full-scale, even nuclear? Or maybe American planners (and
you, dear reader) are absolutely, positively sure that will never happen, because the U.S. has
cool weapons, too, and a lot more of them, and the Russians will probably lose all their ships
in the Mediterranean immediately, if not something worse, and they'll put up with anything
rather than go one more step. The Russians, like everybody, must know the Americans always
win.
Happy with that, are we? Snug in our homeland rug? 'Cause Russians won't fight, but the
Taliban will.
This is exactly what is meant by Americans not fearing war with Russia (or war in general
for that matter). Nothing but contempt.
The Skripal opera, directed by the United States, with the whole of Europe and the entire
Western media apparatus singing in harmony, makes it clear that the American producers have no
speaking role for Russia in their staging of the world. And that contempt makes war much more
likely. Here's The Saker again, on how
dangerous the isolation the U.S. and its European clients are so carelessly imposing on Russia
and themselves is for everybody:
Right now they are expelling Russian diplomats en mass e and they are feeling very
strong and manly.
The truth is that this is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. In reality, crucial
expert-level consultations, which are so vitally important between nuclear superpowers, have
all but stopped a long time ago. We are down to top level telephone calls. That kind of stuff
happens when two sides are about to go to war. For many months now Russia and NATO have made
preparations for war in Europe. Very rapidly the real action will be left to the USA and
Russia. Thus any conflict will go nuclear very fast. And, for the first time in history, the
USA will be hit very, very hard, not only in Europe, the Middle-East or Asia, but also on the
continental US.
Mass diplomatic expulsions, economic warfare, lockstep propaganda, no interest whatsoever in
respectfully addressing or hearing from the other side. What we've been seeing over the past
few months is the "kind of stuff that happens when two sides are about to go to war."
The less Americans fear war, the less they respect the possibility of it, the more likely
they are to get it.
Ready or Not
The Saker makes a diptych of a point that gets to the heart of the matter. We'd do well to
read and think on it carefully:
1/ The Russians are afraid of war. The Americans are not.
2/ The Russians are ready for war. The Americans are not.
Russia is afraid of war. More than twenty million Soviet citizens were
killed in WWII, about half of them civilians. That was more than twenty times the number of
Americans and British casualties combined. The entire country was devastated. Millions died in
the 872-day siege of Leningrad alone, including Vladimir Putin's brother. The city's population
was decimated by disease and starvation, with some reduced to cannibalism. Wikileaks calls it "one of the
longest and most destructive sieges in history [and] possibly the
costliest
in casualties." Another million-plus died in the nine-month siege of Stalingrad.
Every Russian knows this history. Millions of Russian families have suffered from it. Of
course, there was mythification of the struggle and its heroes, but the Russians, viscerally,
know war and know it can happen to them . They do not want to go through it
again. They will do almost anything to avoid it. Russians are not flippant about war. They fear
it. They respect it.
The Americans are not (afraid of war). Americans have never experienced anything
remotely as devastating as this. About 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War, 150 years ago.
(And we're still entangled in that!) The American mainland has not been attacked by a
significant military force since the War of 1812. Since then, the worst attacks on American
territory are two one-off incidents (Pearl Harbor and 9/11), separated by seventy years,
totaling about six-thousand casualties. These are the iconic moments of America Under
Siege.
For the American populace, wars are "over there," fought by a small group of Americans who
go away and either come back or don't. The death, destruction, and aroma of warfare -- which
the United States visits on people around the world incessantly -- is unseen and unexperienced
at home. Americans do not, cannot, believe, in any but the most abstract intellectual sense,
that war can happen here , to them. For the general populace, talk of war is just more
political background noise, Morgan Freeman competing for attention with Stormy Daniels and the
Kardashians.
Americans are supremely insouciant about war: They threaten countries with it incessantly,
the government routinely sells it with lies, and the political parties promote it
opportunistically to defeat their opponents -- and nobody cares. For Americans, war is part of
a game. They do not fear it. They do not respect it.
The Russians are ready for war. The Nazi onslaught was defeated -- in Soviet Russia,
by Soviet Citizens and the Red Army -- because the mass of people stood and fought together for
a victory they understood was important. They could not have withstood horrific sieges and
defeated the Nazis any other way. Russians understand, in other words, that war is a crisis of
death and destruction visited on the whole of society, which can only be won by a massive and
difficult effort grounded in social solidarity. If the Russians feel they have to fight, if
they feel besieged, they know they will have to stand together, take the hits that come, and
fight to the finish. They will not again permit war to be brought to their cities while their
attacker stays snug. There will be a world of hurt. They will develop and use any weapon they
can. And their toughest weapon is not a hypersonic missile; it's that solidarity, implied by
that 77%. (Did you read that Simonyan statement?) They may not be seeking it, but, insofar as
anybody can be, they are ready to fight.
Americans are not (ready for war): Americans experience the horror of wars as a
series of discrete tragedies visited upon families of fallen soldiers, reported in
human-interest vignettes at the end of the nightly news. Individual tragedies, not a social
disaster.
It's hard to imagine the social devastation of war in any case, but American culture wants
no part of thinking about that concretely. The social imagination of war is deflected into
fantastic scenarios of a super-hero universe or a zombie apocalypse. The alien death-ray may
blow up the Empire State Building, but the hero and his family (now including his or her
gender-ambivalent teenager, and, of course, the dog) will survive and triumph. Cartoon
villains, cartoon heroes, and a cartoon society.
One reason for this, we have to recognize, is the victory of the
Thatcherite/libertarian-capitalist "no such thing as society" ideology. Congratulations, Ayn
Rand, there is no such thing as American society now. It's every incipient entrepreneur
for him or herself. This does not a comradely, fighting band of brothers and sisters make.
Furthermore, though America is constantly at war, nobody understands the purpose of it.
That's because the real purpose can never be explained, and must be hidden behind some facile
abstraction -- "democracy," "our freedoms," etc. This kind of discourse can get some of the
people motivated for some of the time, but it loses its charm the minute someone gets smacked
in the face.
Once they take a moment, everybody can see that there is nobody with an army threatening to
attack and destroy the United States, and if they take a few moments, everybody can see how
phony the "democracy and freedom" stuff is and remember how often they've been lied to before.
There's just too much information out there. (Which is why the Imperial High Command wants to
control the internet.) Why the hell am I fighting? What in hell are we fighting
for? These are questions everybody will ask after, and too many people are now asking
before, they get smacked in the face.
This lack of social understanding and lack of political support translates into the
impossibility of fighting a major, sustained war that requires taking heavy casualties -- even
"over there," but certainly in the snug. American culture might be all gung-ho about Seal Team
Six kicking ass, but the minute American homes start blowing up and American bodies start
falling, Hoo-hah becomes Uh-oh , and it's going to be Outta here .
Americans are ready for Hoo-hah and the Shark Tank and the Zombie Apocalypse. They
are not ready for war.
You Get What You Play For
"Russiagate," which started quite banally in the presidential campaign as a Democratic arrow
to take down Trump, is now Russiamania -- a battery of weapons wielded by various sectors of
the state, aimed at an array of targets deemed even potentially resistant to imperial
militarism. Trump himself -- still, and for as long as he's deemed unreliable -- is targeted by
a legal prosecution of infinite reach (whose likeliest threat is to take him down for something
that has nothing to do with Russia). Russia itself is now targeted in full force by economic,
diplomatic, ideological -- and, tentatively, military -- weapons of the state. Perhaps most
importantly, American and European people, especially dissidents, are targeted by a unified
media barrage that attacks any expression of radical critique, anything that "sows division" --
from Black Lives Matter, to the Sanders campaign, to "But other countries could have made it"
-- as Russian treachery.
The stunning success of that last offensive is crucial to making a war more likely, and must
be fought. To increase the risk of war with a nuclear power in order to score points against
Donald Trump or Jill Stein -- well, only those who neither respect, fear, nor are ready for war
would do such a stupid and dangerous thing.
It's impossible to predict with certainty whether, when, or with whom a major hot war will
be started. The same chaotic disarray and impulsiveness of the Trump administration that
increases the danger of war might also work to prevent it. John Bolton may be fired before he
trims his moustache. But it's a pressure-cooker, and the temperature has spiked
drastically.
In a previous
essay , I said that Venezuela was a likely first target for military attack, precisely
because it would make for an easy victory that didn't risk military confrontation with Russia.
That's still a good possibility. As we saw with Iraq Wars 1 (which helped to end the "Vietnam
Syndrome") and 2 (which somewhat resurrected it), the imperial high command needs to inure the
American public with a virtually American-casualty-free victory and in order to lure them into
taking on a war that's going to hurt.
But the new War Cabinet may be pumped for the main event -- an attack on Iran. Trump,
Pompeo, and Bolton are all rabid proponents of regime-change in Iran. We can be certain
that the Iran nuclear deal will be scrapped, and everyone will work hard to implement the
secret agreementthe Trump administration already has with Israel to "to deal
with Iran's nuclear drive, its missile programs and its other threatening activities" -- or, as
Trump himself expresses it: "cripple the [Iranian] regime and bring it to collapse." (That
agreement, by the way, was negotiated and signed by the previous, supposedly not-so-belligerent
National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster.)
Still, as I also said in the previous essay, an attack on Iran means the Americans must
either make sure Russia doesn't get in the way or make clear that they don't care if it
does. So, threatening moves -- not excluding probing military moves -- against Russia will
increase, whether Russia is the preferred direct target or not.
The siege is on.
Americans who want to continue playing with this fire would do well to pay some respectful
attention to the target whose face they want to smack. Russia did not boast or brag or threaten
or Hoo-Hah about sending military forces to Syria. When it was deemed necessary -- when
the United States declared its intention to attack the Syrian Army -- it just did it. And
American10-dimensional-chess players have been squirming around trying to deal with the
implications of that ever since. They're working hard on finding the right mix of threats,
bluffs, sanctions, expulsions, "Shut up and go away!" insults, military forces on the border,
and "bloody nose" attacks to force a capitulation. They should be listening to their target,
who has not tired of asking for a "partnership," who has clearly stated what his country would
do in reaction to previous moves (e.g., the abrogation of the ABM Treaty and stationing of ABM
bases in Eastern Europe), whose country and family have suffered from wartime devastation
Americans cannot imagine, who therefore respects, fears, and is ready for war in ways Americans
are not, and who is not playing their game:
[2]
Though it's ridiculous that it needs to be said: I'm not talking here about the phony fear
engendered by the media presentation of the "strongman," "brutal dictator" Vladimir Putin. This
is part and parcel of comic-book politics -- conjuring a super-villain, who, we all know, is
destined to be defeated. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Jim Kavanagh
Leda Cosmides at the University of California, Santa Barbara, points to her work with her colleague
John Tooby on the use of outrage to mobilize people: "The campaign was more about outrage than
about policies," she says. And when a politician can create a sense of moral outrage, truth
ceases to matter. People will go along with the emotion, support the cause and retrench into
their own core group identities. The actual substance stops being of any relevance.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth University who studies false beliefs,
has found that
when false information is specifically political in nature, part of our political identity, it
becomes almost impossible to correct lies.
... ... ...
As the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain
put it, “The great master fallacy of the
human mind is believing too much.” False beliefs, once established, are incredibly tricky to correct. A leader who lies
constantly creates a new landscape, and a citizenry whose sense of reality may end up swaying far more than they think possible.
You can adopt a lot of things about society as given; people will always defend those they
know against those they don't. They will always defend their own even when they suspect or
even know they are in the wrong. People will mostly help those who are in trouble if it costs
them little or nothing to lend their support. And so on – people are mostly predictable
as examples of collective will.
And people will often champion the elevation to positions of power of radicals, so long as
that person's radical beliefs and policies further their own aims. Going beyond requires that
we examine that society for cynicism and naivete. A naive society assumes that once the
radical's aims have been achieved – in this case, the joining of the European Union and
NATO by Ukraine – the radical will be satisfied, and will become a peaceful and
productive servant of freedom and democracy rather than a fierce adherent to his or her own
radical policies, but now within European society, where they might not be so welcome. The
cynic assumes the radical will be used as long as he or she is useful to reaching the goals
the cynics have set for the country, and then shunted aside or otherwise marginalized if he
or she is no longer useful.
Which is it, do you think? I vote for cynicism, and I base that judgment on how smoothly
the west transitioned from Nadya Savchenko the heroic martyr to Nadya Savchenko the radical
anarchist who wanted to blow up the Rada.
Wonder if Yasha Levine has ever thought of discussing the points he raises in his above
linked article with his erstwhile and also present-day fellow country persons Maria Gessen
and Yulia
"I-can-pronounce-Шереметьево"
Ioffe?
[I absolutely refuse to call Gessen "Masha" (Molly)! She's not my pal!]
Yasha should not kvetch so much, the current anti-Russian witch hunt won't reach the likes of
him. I know some Jewish Russian émigré families in the U.S., they can still
skate by on their former "victimhood": They were required to whine about Soviet
anti-Semitism, now all that is needed is a supplementary "I hate Putin, Yankee Doodle Dandy",
and they're good to go.
These are the ones I actually despise the most, because they are ungrateful wretches. The
Soviet Union saved their collective asses from Hitler, and look how they repayed the debt
I don't begrudge them emigrating to the U.S. if they did so for career reasons, maybe they
could find better job opportunities, better conditions to raise their kids, etc. They could
do that, but nobody really forced them to slime their former country as viciously as they
did. And taught their kids to hate everything Russian. Ingrates!
"... "The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy's 'Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,' February 20, 2017. But what is more extraordinary is the uniformity with which the paper's regular columnists accept as a given the CIA's assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and 'non-partisan' investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this 'fake news' threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery. ..."
"... "The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post's piece by Craig Timberg, 'Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say,' which featured a report by a group of anonymous "experts" entity called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were 'routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.' While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance toward U.S. foreign policy, the 'experts' refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being 'targeted by legions of skilled hackers.' As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, 'You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to your claims? Take a hike.' ..."
"... But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.) ..."
"... "The success of the war party's campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically clear in the Trump administration's speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did not require evidence of Assad's guilt beyond their government's claims. The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served the rebels well. ..."
"It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and
spread of 'fake news.' These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based
reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating
false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate
power.
"An important form of mainstream media fake news is that which is presented while suppressing information that calls the preferred
news into question. [ ]
"The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement
with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa
Eddy's 'Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,' February 20, 2017. But what is more extraordinary is the
uniformity with which the paper's regular columnists accept as a given the CIA's assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission
to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and 'non-partisan'
investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times
and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this 'fake news' threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form
of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery.
"The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post's piece by Craig Timberg, 'Russian propaganda
effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say,' which featured a report by a group of anonymous "experts" entity
called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were 'routine peddlers of Russian
propaganda.' While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance
toward U.S. foreign policy, the 'experts' refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being 'targeted by legions
of skilled hackers.' As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, 'You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to
your claims? Take a hike.'
But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon
or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.)
"On December 23, 2016, President Obama signed the Portman-Murphy Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which will supposedly
allow the United States to more effectively combat foreign (namely Russian and Chinese) propaganda and disinformation. It will
encourage more government counter-propaganda efforts, and provide funding to non-government entities to help in this enterprise.
It is clearly a follow-on to the claims of Russian hacking and propaganda, and shares the spirit of the listing of two hundred
tools of Moscow featured in the Washington Post. (Perhaps PropOrNot will qualify for a subsidy and be able to enlarge its list.)
Liberals have been quiet on this new threat to freedom of speech, undoubtedly influenced by their fears of Russian-based fake
news and propaganda. But they may yet take notice, even if belatedly, when Trump or one of his successors puts it to work on their
own notions of fake news and propaganda.
"The success of the war party's campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically
clear in the Trump administration's speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and
other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did
not require evidence of Assad's guilt beyond their government's claims. The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served
the rebels well.
"But the mainstream media never ask cui bono? in cases like this. In 2013, a similar charge against Assad, which brought the
United States to the brink of a full-scale bombing war in Syria, turned out to be a false flag operation, and some authorities
believe the current case is equally problematic. Nevertheless, Trump moved quickly (and illegally), dealing a blow to any further
rapprochement between the United States and Russia. The CIA, the Pentagon, leading Democrats, and the rest of the war party had
won an important skirmish in the struggle over permanent war."
Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017
Articles like this are what make Ray McGovern sound like the limited-hangout artist of the
century, this era's Ellsberg.
You've got Barr, who functioned as DCI Bush's mob lip ever since Iran/Contra, who calls in
Durham, renowned for CIA's CAT-illegal torture whitewash. No sane professional expects
anything but a moist and well-consolidated sigmoid coil of exculpation. Ray is not nearly
stupid enough to believe this is for real. Ray himself has said there are two CIAs. These
guys are from the criminal one, and Ray knows it.
Russiagate is not the fever dream of lone bad apple Brennan. Russiagate is an
institutional initiative of CIA. Current DCI Gina Haspel was in London marshalling the
foreign intelligence cutouts for the anti-Russian war propaganda that got repackaged for
publication as Dem oppo research.
Ray has brass balls. But wake me up when he goes up against the CIA DO like he went up
against DoS or Israeli navy pussies.
hetro , June 13, 2019 at 20:23
Yeah but this flagrant in your face we're-going-to-fuck-with-you people (again), and now
with this particular fantasy, is rapidly un-entangling for all to see (and who can resist the
naked lady in the sky?):
they used their intelligence assets to frame the whole thing, starting with Brennan's
fixation on the juicy Steele thing. And why? A little more on why? What's beyond their
repugnance for Trump, in the money angle? Is that coming out too?
Imagery of these people in prison garb behind bars sends a shiver through me.
David Otness , June 13, 2019 at 17:36
"Our long national nightmare is finally over ?"
For those too young, that was for Nixon finally having abdicated after a quite similar in
national intrigue episode, his own imperial Presidency caught up short in impeachment. The
difference being here, albeit from a scenario contrived for impeachment, it is the
prosecutors of a sitting President who are in the spotlight, if not the crosshairs, for
having contrived the plot to impeach.
The image of a meddling foreign power, the ultimate "other" as manifested in the
decades-now-long demonizing of anything Putin from the CIA -- his Slavic-Asian features, a
'thug,' 'his oligarchs,' (versus our billionaire and quite as lawless 'tycoon/plutocrats')
and the ludicrous Russian 'territorial expansion ambitions' (that from the by-far world's
largest country and "Pssst, you're thinking of Israel) makes this transition back into the
land of approximate reality of 2019 a different kettle of fish.
Meaning the U.S./CIA's easily ginned-up exploitable Cold War 2.0 recidivism is going to be
a tenacious monkey to shake from the country's collective back. It's been drilled in --
intentionally -- hard and deep. And that isolates and nullifies the Dem true-believers who
won't let go of it. And they continue to show they don't want to.
They are likely the leading edge of the Biden-Believers too; stuck in an unimaginative world
that craves the Obama era even as its worse (liberal-approved) elements come back to haunt
with these brooding personages like Brennan and the predatory Clapper-Thing foremost. Why
does that matter? Because they both committed public perjury under oath. And walked.
Unscathed. What does that say about the rule of law? And what does that say about those who
lionize them, all the while knowing of that perjury?
Most people in the U.S. despised Nixon in 1974, and the D and R political parties had not
reached the unconscionable and corrupt nadir at which we now find them in the pig-sty they
have wrought for themselves and drug us into. And despising Trump is something most find easy
enough, but his defenders are in the right on this if Brennan is exposed for such infamy.
"And such a beautiful fantasy Rachel Maddow had woven for us. Why did it ever have to end
?"
If Dems had been honest with themselves, had critically-thought for themselves, had not
fallen for the cheapest of tricks and been lucid-enough to see they were but foils in a mass
psy-op they'd be well assured of regaining the Presidency almost by default.
But, as Mark Twain rightfully observed: "It's much easer to fool people than to convince them
they've been fooled."
To have observed so many 'leftish' Dems claiming-to-be-progressives lionizing the likes of
Brennan, Comey, and Clapper in their televised role-playing as saviors was hard enough to
take, but then we come to the specter of Mueller who kept up the act in the face of knowing
he had nothing from the get-go, but did his best to obfuscate for 2 years; likely all the
while knowing this was Brennan's Brains' 'love child.'
Now even as the msm/House aspersions and egging-on continue post-Mueller report, these
same plotters have only further-enfurled themselves in the flag and beckon for the Dem party
faithful to drench themselves in further delusions; anything but confront the fact they've
been so thoroughly used and abused already by Clinton Inc and its wholly-owned DNC. Silly
humans. Mendacious masochists too.
And what of the nation as it spirals ever-downward to the drain ?
Bush would tell you to go shopping.
Obama would lay one of his patented "folks" on you. And tell you to never forget how
"exceptional" you really are. It's your 'participation' trophy, mah fellow Americans. You
swept the Apathy and Complacency divisions! Congratulations!
Jeff B , June 13, 2019 at 17:09
What the government (Deep State) values more than the truth or global stability is faith
in government. They cannot afford to have the reality of this attempted coup come to light
because normal, everyday citizens will be more appalled that this could happen more than it
was revealed. The investigation may reach the grass roots reality of what transpired but I
doubt the public will ever know. Even the hint of a conniving, dishonest Deep State will
cause ripples even the media can gloss over. (Have you seen any of the network news programs
do any story on the fabrication of WMD intelligence?)
Abe , June 13, 2019 at 17:00
"John Brennan has always been a failure as an intelligence officer even as he successfully
climbed the promotion ladder. He was the CIA's Chief of Station (COS) in Saudi Arabia when
the Khobar Towers were bombed, killing 19 Americans, a disaster which he incorrectly blamed
on the Iranians. He was deputy executive director on 9/11 and was complicit in that
intelligence failure. He subsequently served as CIA chief of staff when his boss George Tenet
concocted phony stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He also approved of the
Agency torture and rendition programs and was complicit in the destruction of Libya as well
as the attempt to do the same to Syria.
"Barack Obama wanted Brennan to be his CIA Director but his record with the Agency torture
and rendition programs made approval by the Senate problematical. Instead, he became the
president's homeland security advisor and deputy national security advisor for
counterterrorism, where he did even more damage, expanding the parameters of the death by
drone operations and sitting down with the POTUS for the Tuesday morning counterterrorism
sessions spent refining the kill list of American citizens.
"After Obama was re-elected in 2012, he was able to overcome objections and appoint
Brennan CIA Director. Conniving as ever, Brennan then ordered the Agency to read the
communications of the congressional committee then engaged in investigating CIA torture, the
very program that he had been complicit in. Brennan then denied to Congress under oath that
any such intramural spying had occurred, afterwards apologizing when the truth came out."
"... "The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy's 'Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,' February 20, 2017. But what is more extraordinary is the uniformity with which the paper's regular columnists accept as a given the CIA's assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and 'non-partisan' investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this 'fake news' threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery. ..."
"... "The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post's piece by Craig Timberg, 'Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say,' which featured a report by a group of anonymous "experts" entity called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were 'routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.' While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance toward U.S. foreign policy, the 'experts' refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being 'targeted by legions of skilled hackers.' As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, 'You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to your claims? Take a hike.' ..."
"... But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.) ..."
"... "The success of the war party's campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically clear in the Trump administration's speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did not require evidence of Assad's guilt beyond their government's claims. The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served the rebels well. ..."
"It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and
spread of 'fake news.' These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based
reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating
false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate
power.
"An important form of mainstream media fake news is that which is presented while suppressing information that calls the preferred
news into question. [ ]
"The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement
with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa
Eddy's 'Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,' February 20, 2017. But what is more extraordinary is the
uniformity with which the paper's regular columnists accept as a given the CIA's assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission
to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and 'non-partisan'
investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times
and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this 'fake news' threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form
of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery.
"The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post's piece by Craig Timberg, 'Russian propaganda
effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say,' which featured a report by a group of anonymous "experts" entity
called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were 'routine peddlers of Russian
propaganda.' While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance
toward U.S. foreign policy, the 'experts' refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being 'targeted by legions
of skilled hackers.' As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, 'You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to
your claims? Take a hike.'
But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon
or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.)
"On December 23, 2016, President Obama signed the Portman-Murphy Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which will supposedly
allow the United States to more effectively combat foreign (namely Russian and Chinese) propaganda and disinformation. It will
encourage more government counter-propaganda efforts, and provide funding to non-government entities to help in this enterprise.
It is clearly a follow-on to the claims of Russian hacking and propaganda, and shares the spirit of the listing of two hundred
tools of Moscow featured in the Washington Post. (Perhaps PropOrNot will qualify for a subsidy and be able to enlarge its list.)
Liberals have been quiet on this new threat to freedom of speech, undoubtedly influenced by their fears of Russian-based fake
news and propaganda. But they may yet take notice, even if belatedly, when Trump or one of his successors puts it to work on their
own notions of fake news and propaganda.
"The success of the war party's campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically
clear in the Trump administration's speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and
other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did
not require evidence of Assad's guilt beyond their government's claims. The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served
the rebels well.
"But the mainstream media never ask cui bono? in cases like this. In 2013, a similar charge against Assad, which brought the
United States to the brink of a full-scale bombing war in Syria, turned out to be a false flag operation, and some authorities
believe the current case is equally problematic. Nevertheless, Trump moved quickly (and illegally), dealing a blow to any further
rapprochement between the United States and Russia. The CIA, the Pentagon, leading Democrats, and the rest of the war party had
won an important skirmish in the struggle over permanent war."
Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017
The Mueller Report, recently released, tried its best to imply that there was
collusion even as it stated baldly that the investigation had yielded no evidence of collusion.
But what struck me with the most force was the manner in which the Democrats – and the
entire crowd which has so much invested in having had an illegitimate president foisted upon
them by the Godless Russians – simply shook its head, took a deep breath and went right
on blathering the same lunatic narrative. The Russians interfered with our democracy. Nothing
is safe. Russia is the enemy of democracy, and will not suffer a democracy to live. Get the
kids and pack up enough food for traveling, Mabel; we're headed for the mountains – it's
"Red Dawn", babycakes.
Amazing as it will sound, America has learned nothing.
Part of it, of course, is America's belief in its own omnipotence; if something came out
differently from the way it was planned to come out, then America was tricked. Hoodwinked, by
unscrupulous actors. It cannot be that America is subject to the same vagaries and pressures
and caprices as the rest of the world; America decides, and so it shall be. Part of it is the
diligent pick-and-shovel work that America's political forces do to preserve that illusion;
that America is an unstoppable force, so much more than just a big rich country.
So, the premise endures. Russian trolls, acting on the personal orders of Vladimir Putin,
generated a storm of hateful social-media messages on race relations in America, in a
coordinated strike which included Russian release of Hillary Clinton's personal emails, and
America faltered. It scratched its head in doubt, and Donald Trump slipped past the worthy
– and oh, so wronged – Mrs. Clinton to seize the presidency with his soiled
hands.
Matt Taibbi did
some excellent work on the subject , which I admit grudgingly, as I hoped to get something
out on America's inability to learn from its mistakes before the heavyweights. Taibbi's writing
will make you wonder whether you should laugh or cry, as you wonder how an influential country
could survive the embarrassment of the past couple of years, encapsulated by a journalistic
mantra which holds that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Russia is guilty as
sin, and you can take that to the bank, so the very fact that Mueller will not leak any proof
to us must mean that his findings are so devastating, so jaw-dropping, so "shut up !!"
that they would break the media. The one possibility which was not considered a possibility at
all was that there was nothing, and that the accusations had been fabrication and desperate
damage control from the first.
But the frustrated narrative of Russian collusion is the only component which has been
discredited to the point that Democrats and Russophobes of all political persuasions must admit
there is no happy ending to the promise that Donald Trump was going to be fired so high he
would need to go on oxygen. Mueller – probably deliberately – continued to hint
that Russia had 'meddled' in the 2016 election, and that the effect had been important enough
that democracy is under attack. No longer listening to anyone outside the party-faithful echo
chamber, the Democrats now insist that US
Attorney-General William Barr resign , for 'misleading the American people about collusion
between the Trump campaign and Russia".
"Barr's news conference ultimately did nothing to help Trump, because the public has
eyes. Americans could read the damning evidence of obstruction of justice and communications
with Russians for themselves and make their own judgements."
Democrats continue to try to make up in volume and intensity for the fact that there is no
evidence at all of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, nor of obstruction of
justice by Trump. The Republicans shout that the Democrats are on a senseless witch hunt, that
the report makes clear there was no collusion between Trump and the Russians but are perfectly
happy to agree that Russia meddled in the election. For his part, Mueller is happy to drop
hints that both obstruction and collusion probably took place – he just couldn't find any
proof.
All are loony. Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election at all, at least no further
than Europe did. A
lengthy list of European political leaders and former leaders publicly expressed their
support for Mrs. Clinton's election to the office of President of the United States. In 2008,
just one is recorded as having done so ; Mona Sahlin, leader of Sweden's Social Democrats.
Interestingly, in the same list of endorsements of Mrs. Clinton in 2008 – right after
"Adult Entertainment Artists" – is this one: under "Well-Known Individuals",
"Businessman and television personality, Future Presidential Candidate & Rival for the
United States presidential election 2016, future President of the United States Donald
Trump" .
There's gratitude for you.
The Presidents of Taiwan, Chile, France and Ukraine, the former Presidents of Mexico,
France, Kosovo and Ecuador, the Prime Ministers of the Czech Republic, France, Italy, New
Zealand and Sweden and former Prime Ministers of Sweden, the UK, Canada, Australia and France
all openly expressed their hope that Mrs. Clinton would be elected President of the United
States. None of this was considered meddling. I don't recall any official endorsement from
Russia, although the international English-speaking media helpfully informed us that Putin
hoped Trump would win, because he felt Trump would be more approachable for concessions and
because he disliked Mrs. Clinton. When Trump did win, despite wrong guesses by just
about every political analyst on the planet, it was considered 'additional evidence' that
meddling had taken place, instigated by you-know-who.
Perhaps, in highlighting just how stupid America is making itself look with this painfully
stubborn insistence that Russia rolled it in 2016, it would be useful to take another look at
what American partisans claimed to already know, and could prove as easily as
demonstrating that if you put your hand on a hot stove, you will burn it.
One of my favourite American partisans is the Duchess of Displacement, the Baroness of Bulk,
Molly McKew . We
took a look at her work a long time ago , on the old blog – just before Trump
commenced his term, in fact – or perhaps I should say his first term, since the
barking madness of the political landscape in today's America makes it entirely possible he
will serve a second, unbelievable as that may sound. In that article, we closed out like this;
"Look, we're getting close to the end of this, and it's time for plain speaking. Americans
are confused and don't know fact from fiction because their own government feeds them bullshit
with a side of spin day in, day out, and you're part of it. There was no Russian interference
in the American elections, and you know it." My take on what happened has not changed a
bit.
McKew is still regarded – highly, I should imagine, by her feeble-minded peers –
as an 'information-warfare expert'. Hardly amazing that she sees information-warfare attacks
everywhere. Here's
what she claimed to know about Russian election interference and general friggin' in the
riggin', a little over a year ago. She bases her conclusions on Mueller's Grand Jury
indictment, which was issued more than a year in advance of his report – an indictment in
which Mueller claimed the Defendants (a variety of Russian advertising and research agencies
operating both in Russia and the United States) " knowingly and intentionally conspired with
each other (and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury) to defraud the United States
by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud
and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes,
including the presidential election of 2016."
You know the old quote about how easy it is to get a Grand Jury to indict someone or
something.
Something McKew claims is now – meaning as of early 2018 – "undeniable" is that
Russia had, and has "a broad, sophisticated system that can influence American opinion, which
cost tens of millions of dollars spent over several years to build." She must be talking about RT ,
although I suggest her cost estimate is a little low. RT, which the west considers a
'propaganda network', cost $30 million to set up, in 2005. Its operating costs now are in the
hundreds of millions annually, although 80% of the costs are incurred outside Russia, paying
for partner networks who distribute its channels.
We kind of have to give her that one, because it is true that RT's coverage is often at odds
with the bullshit du jour that CNN and NBC and FOX are spreading. Bullshit, for example,
like CNN's non-stop
yammering about the collusion that Mueller could find no evidence ever occurred, and said
so. Bullshit like NBC News anchor Brian Williams' recollections about his helicopter being shot
down in Iraq – echoes of Hillary 'sniper fire' Clinton
– ,
which never happened . Williams is not a nobody; he was the nation's longest-serving and
top-rated news anchor.
I submit, however, that the American people are not subjected to RT's 'propaganda and
disinformation' about American propaganda and disinformation against their will; there is a
button on the remote called "On/Off" that will free the American enslaved from malign Kremlin
influence. Alternatively, they can switch to another channel. I would just point out, though,
that if they switch to a popular US news channel, they are very likely to be listening to a
broadcast which has been curated by its corporate owners, and who " are unlikely to report
news that is broadly hostile to corporate capitalism and the American elite ." That's
according to a report entitled
"Corporate Control of the Media" (in the USA), printed in 2009.
Warming to her subject, McKew goes on to claim "The Russian efforts described in the
indictment focused on establishing deep, authenticated, long-term identities for individuals
and groups within specific communities. This was underlaid by the establishment of servers and
VPNs based in the US to mask the location of the individuals involved. US-based email accounts
linked to fake or stolen US identity documents (driver licenses, social security numbers, and
more) were used to back the online identities. These identities were also used to launder
payments through PayPal and cryptocurrency accounts. All of this deception was designed to make
it appear that these activities were being carried out by Americans."
This might be a good point at which to suggest there is every reason to believe 'these
activities' were carried out by Americans. Americans working for national intelligence
agencies.
In March 2017, The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima had an article published which
was entitled "WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency
hacking operations." It detailed, among other things, a cyber tool
called "Marble Framework" . This could be used, it was claimed, to re-assign attribution of
material posted on the internet so that it appeared, for forensic purposes, to have originated
from a different source. Test samples, it was reported, were included in Chinese, Russian,
Korean, Arabic and Farsi.
The report which encouraged President Trump to ask his CIA Director – Mike Pompeo, at
the time, who is currently the National Security Advisor – what he knew about this was
co-authored by Skip Folden, who for 25 years was the IT Program Manager for IBM. I think it is
safe to say he has some credibility in the field of cyber-forensics. The authors of the report
contended that the 'hack' of the DNC's server was not actually a hack at all, but the at-source
copying of data directly from the server using a storage device, probably a thumb drive. The
data transfer rate, the authors claimed, was far too rapid to have occurred over the
internet.
Since then I have seen a couple of 'rebuttals' which claimed that under certain conditions
– like if nobody else was using the internet during that time – such copying from a
remote source was possible. I never saw anything like proof. Like someone demonstrating how it
could be done. Much like the old 'clean pee swap' the completely-discredited McLaren Report
claimed the Russians performed on athletes' urine samples; he claimed to know how it was done,
but never demonstrated it, and appeared to be unable to do so, as it would have strongly
supported his allegations.
Having taken us such an eye-blurring distance on the blarney rollercoaster, Molly at last
falls apart. "So anyone trying to tell you there was little impact on political views from
the tools the Russians used doesn't know. Because none of us knows. No one has looked . Social
media companies don't want us to know, and they obfuscate and drag their feet rather than
disclosing information. The analytical tools to quantify the impact don't readily exist. But we
know what we see, and what we heard -- and the narratives pushed by the Russian information
operation made it to all of our ears and eyes" , she tells us.
So if you saw advertising by Black Lives Matter, or perhaps some other civil-rights
organization, pushing a false narrative that blacks are second-class citizens in their own
country, then you were exposed to Kremlin propaganda. And it affected how you voted, if you're
an American. How much? Nobody knows. What everybody does know, or should, is that Hillary
Clinton won the popular vote, although not the determinate vote in the electoral college
– quite a trick for the Russians to manage.
Let's summarize. Americans were supposedly pushed into voting for Donald Trump by the misuse
of stolen data which was all true. The DNC did conspire to rig the primary so that Clinton was
the Democratic candidate rather than Bernie Sanders; the Chair of the DNC
resigned in disgrace because of the revelations which came to light. Her replacement, Donna
Brazile, admitted to having
fed the primary debate questions to Clinton in advance , giving her an advantage over
Sanders, who was unaware of them as he should have been. At its very core, the Democratic party
is as corrupt as the Nigerian prince who keeps e-mailing me to help him hide his ill-gotten
fortune. American intelligence and technical professionals with no discernible benefit in
making their country look bad insist that no hacking of the DNC's server took place, and that
the stolen information which kicked the Democrats' feet out from under them on the eve of the
election was not hacked, but stolen by direct physical transfer from the server using a
portable storage device. Wikileaks insisted the information it released did not come from the
Russians. The serving American intelligence services at the time of the 2016 election had a
secret program which was capable of mimicking the origin of posted information on social media
so that forensic investigation would find traces of Russian authorship, or other non-American
authorship. The CIA has vigorously denied any involvement whatsoever in various international
events at the time they occurred, only to admit much later – when it would be pointless
to punish it – that they did in fact play an influential role. Data from 2014 established
that at that time, 27% of black Americans lived below the poverty line , compared
with 11% of all Americans; 38% of black children lived in poverty compared with 22% of all
American children. I have seen no compelling evidence that this situation has improved.
According to the perfidious Kremlin mouthpiece RT, citing American sources, American blacks are
incarcerated at a rate six times as high as the
national average .
Molly McKew, the information-warfare goddess, tells us that it is 'undeniable' that Russia
interfered in the 2016 election, by making Americans doubt the integrity of their political
candidates. In the case of the Democrats – which is by no means intended to spare the
Republicans – they were demonstrated by their own repeatedly-verified and admitted
shenanigans to understand 'integrity' about as well as the average crab fisherman understands
how to calculate the mass of the sun. Everything they were accused of doing, they did.
Candidate Hillary Clinton unambiguously lied – as she has done on other occasions –
about the security classification of her 'private' emails and completely fabricated consent of
the State Department for her to maintain a private email server for the sending and receiving
of official message traffic. America does have an uneven scale of justice, law enforcement and
standard of living based on race. There is no proof at all which has so far been made public
that any of those situations were reported, compelled, exacerbated or invented by Russia, or by
anyone from Russia. According to persistent revelations from Kiev, the American Democratic
party energetically sought dirt on candidate Trump from
Ukrainian sources , not Russian. McKew closes her soliloquy on election interference by
maintaining that while it is undeniable that Russian interference occurred, nobody knows the
extent to which it influenced the vote, which resulted in a popular win for the candidate who
lost the election.
Let me posit another reality. Russia played no part at all in the outcome of the 2016
election, although it certainly was a surprise to most. There is no proof even offered that
there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials of any description,
and no proof which could not have been fabricated that any coherent social-media campaign
originating with Russian operatives took place, or that any such imaginary social-media
campaign had anything to do with Trump's victory. The Democrats, by sticking to their
ridiculous and incredible narrative of Russian masterminds warping American democracy, are
setting themselves up for having their headlights sucked out again by the passing Trump
juggernaut in the next election, when they will be totally out of excuses if they do not wake
up and do some serious retrenching.
But we are probably going to have to wait for history to teach that lesson to Americans.
"... Never mind that to this day the DNC servers have not been examined by the FBI, nor indeed were they examined by the Special Counsel of Robert " Iraq has WMD " Mueller, preferring instead to go with the analyses of this extremely shady outfit with extensive and well-documented ties with the oligarchic leaders of the US-centralized empire. ..."
"... When the Romanian REAL Guccifer got Podesta password (password) by phishing, exposing his pizza and walnut sauce perversions, the US had him jailed. When WikiLeaks made a DNC dump, CrowdStrike concocted Guccifer 2.0, then more leaks Fancy Bear, and more leaks Cozy Bear. All these CrowdStrike fabrications used CIA Vault 7 fingerprints to frame Russia. It is time to execute our ruling demonic warlords. ..."
A
new article by Forbes reports that the CEO of Crowdstrike, the extremely shady
cybersecurity corporation which was foundational in the construction of the official CIA/CNN
Russian hacking narrative, is now a billionaire. George Kurtz ascended to the billionaire
rankings on the back of
soaring stocks immediately after the company went public, carried no doubt on the winds of
the international fame it gained from its central protagonistic role in the most well-known
hacking news story of all time.
Never mind that to this day the DNC servers have not been examined
by the FBI,
nor indeed were they examined by the Special Counsel of Robert "
Iraq has WMD " Mueller, preferring instead to
go with the analyses of this extremely shady outfit with extensive and well-documented ties with
the oligarchic leaders of the US-centralized empire.
The CEO of the Atlantic Council-tied Crowdstrike, which formed the foundation of the official
CIA/CNN Russian hacking narrative, is now a billionaire. I'm telling you, the real underlying
currency of this world is narrative and the ability to control it. https://t.co/XsBCvkIDzJ -- Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz)
June 12, 2019
As I never tire of saying, the real underlying currency in our world is not gold,
nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even raw military might.
The real underlying currency of our world is
narrative, and the ability to control it.
As soon as you really grok this dynamic, you start
noticing it everywhere.
George Kurtz is one clear example today of narrative control's central role in the maintenance and expansion of existing
power structures, as well as an illustration of how the empire is wired to reward those who advance pro-empire narratives and
punish those who damage them...
When the Romanian REAL Guccifer got Podesta password (password) by phishing, exposing his
pizza and walnut sauce perversions, the US had him jailed. When WikiLeaks made a DNC dump,
CrowdStrike concocted Guccifer 2.0, then more leaks Fancy Bear, and more leaks Cozy Bear. All
these CrowdStrike fabrications used CIA Vault 7 fingerprints to frame Russia. It is time to
execute our ruling demonic warlords.
I think it is oversimplification. It was the intelligence agencies that controlled Hillary,
not vise versa. The interests of intelligence agencies and Hillary campaign coincided, that's why
she got as much support form CIA and FBI: Trump represented a central danger to flow of funds to
"national security parasites" so their reaction was predictable reaction of any large bureaucracy
of the possibility of losing power -- they circle the wagons.
Notable quotes:
"... But Steele's first overture on July 5, 2016, failed to capture the FBI's imagination. So the Clinton machine escalated. Steele, a British national, went to senior Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr -- whose wife, Nellie, also worked for Fusion -- to push his Trump dirt to the top of the FBI. ..."
"... Nellie Ohr likewise sent some of her own anti-Trump research augmenting Steele's dossier to the FBI through her husband. Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann used his connection to former FBI general counsel James Baker to dump Trump dirt at the FBI, too. ..."
"... In short, the Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure -- and bad intel -- until an investigation of Trump was started. The bureau and its hapless sheriff at the time, James Comey, eventually acquiesced with the help of such Clinton fans as then-FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. ..."
"... The Clinton team's dirty trick was as diabolical as it was brilliant. It literally used house money and a large part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to carry out its political hit job on Trump. ..."
"... After two years of American discomfort, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent, it's time for the house to call in its IOU. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton owes us answers -- lots of them. So far, she has ducked them, even while doing many high-profile media interviews. ..."
"... Longtime Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen said Friday night on Fox News that it's time for Clinton to answer what she knew and when she knew it. ..."
"... John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists' misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports . ..."
During the combined two decades she served as a U.S. senator and secretary of State,
Hillary Clinton 's
patrons regularly donated to her family charity when they had official business pending before
America's most powerful political woman.
The pattern of political IOUs paid to the Clinton Foundation was so pernicious that the
State Department even tried to execute a special
agreement with the charity to avoid the overt appearance of "pay-to-play" policy.
Still, the money continued to flow by the millions of dollars, from foreigners and Americans
alike who were perceived to be indebted to the Clinton machine or in need of its help.
It's time for the American public to call in their own IOU on political transparency.
The reason? Never before -- until 2016 -- had the apparatus of a U.S. presidential candidate
managed to sic the weight of the FBI and U.S. intelligence community on a rival nominee during
an election, and by using a foreign-fed, uncorroborated political opposition research
document.
But Clinton's campaign, in concert with the Democratic Party and through their shared law
firm, funded Christopher Steele's unverified
dossier which, it turns out, falsely portrayed Republican Donald Trump as a treasonous asset colluding with
Russian President Vladimir Putin to hijack the U.S. election.
Steele went to the FBI to get an investigation started and then leaked the existence of the
investigation, with the hope of sinking Trump's presidential aspirations.
On its face, it is arguably the most devious political dirty trick in American history and
one of the most overt intrusions of a foreigner into a U.S. election.
It appears the Clinton machine knew that what it was doing was controversial. That's why it
did backflips to disguise the operation from Congress and the public, and in its Federal
Election Commission (FEC) spending reports.
Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)
used the law firm of Perkins Coie to hire Glenn Simpson's research firm, Fusion GPS, which
then hired Steele -- several layers that obfuscated transparency, kept the operation off the
campaign's public FEC reports and gave the Clintons plausible deniability.
But Steele's first overture on July 5, 2016, failed to capture the FBI's imagination. So
the Clinton machine escalated. Steele, a British national, went to senior Department of Justice
official Bruce Ohr -- whose wife, Nellie, also worked for Fusion -- to push his Trump dirt to
the top of the FBI.
Nellie Ohr likewise sent some of her own anti-Trump research augmenting Steele's dossier
to the FBI through her husband. Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann
used his connection to former FBI general counsel James Baker to dump Trump dirt at the
FBI, too.
In short, the Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure -- and bad intel -- until an
investigation of Trump was started. The bureau and its hapless sheriff at the time, James
Comey, eventually acquiesced with the help of such Clinton fans as then-FBI employees Peter
Strzok and Lisa Page.
To finish the mission, Simpson and Steele leaked the existence of the FBI investigation to
the news media to ensure it would hurt Trump politically. Simpson even
called the leaks a "hail Mary" that failed.
Trump won, however. And now, thanks to special counsel Robert Mueller, we know the
Russia-collusion allegations relentlessly peddled by Team Clinton were bogus. But not before
the FBI used the Clinton-funded, foreign-created research to get a total of four warrants to
spy on the Trump campaign , transition and presidency from October 2016 through the
following autumn.
The Clinton team's dirty trick was as diabolical as it was brilliant. It literally used
house money and a large part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to carry out its political hit
job on Trump.
After two years of American discomfort, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent,
it's time for the house to call in its IOU.
Hillary Clinton owes us answers -- lots of them. So far, she has ducked them, even while
doing many high-profile media interviews.
I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Longtime Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen said
Friday night on Fox News that it's time for Clinton to answer what she knew and when she knew
it.
Here are 10 essential questions:
Please identify each person in your campaign, including Perkins Coie lawyers, who were
aware that Steele provided information to the FBI or State Department, and when they learned
it.
Describe any information you and your campaign staff received, or were briefed on, before
Election Day that was derived from the work of Simpson, Steele, Fusion GPS, Nellie Ohr or
Perkins Coie and that tried to connect Trump, his campaign or his business empire with
Russia.
Did you or any senior members of your campaign, including lawyers such as Michael
Sussmann, have any contact with the CIA, its former Director John Brennan, current Director
Gina Haspel, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page or former FBI Deputy Director Andrew
McCabe?
Describe all
contacts your campaign had with Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal concerning Trump,
Russia and Ukraine.
Describe all contacts you and your campaign had
with DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukraine government, the Ukraine Embassy in the
United States or the U.S. Embassy in Kiev concerning Trump, Russia or former Trump campaign
chairman Paul Manafort.
Why did your campaign and the Democratic Party make a concerted effort to portray Trump as
a Russian asset?
Given that investigations by a House committee, a Senate committee and a special
prosecutor all have concluded there isn't evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, do you regret
the actions by your campaign and by Steele, Simpson and Sussmann to inject these unfounded
allegations into the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community and the news media?
Hillary Clinton owes us answers to each of these questions. She should skip the lawyer-speak
and answer them with the candor worthy of an elder American stateswoman.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has
exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists'
misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political
corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at
The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports .
Leaked documents reveal Russian effort to exert influence in Africa Exclusive: Kremlin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin leading push to turn continent into strategic
hub, documents show
by Luke Harding and Jason Burke
The only thing you really need to know about the exposé:
The leaked documents were obtained by the Dossier Center, an investigative unit based in
London. The centre is funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian businessman and exiled
Kremlin critic.
The Guardian obviously has no shame for publishing such an article but then it has never
explained the claims of Manafort meeting with Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. As for the
article, my reaction was "so fucking what?".
The British French and Americans have fucked up
large parts of Africa while the Soviet Union/Russia was indirectly responsible for
eradicating that cancerous growth, the apartheid state of South Africa, a single act that was
better than all the good things that the United Kingdom, France and the United States have
ever done in Africa
"... Despite special counsel Robert Mueller clearing Trump of collusion with Russia in 2016, Brennan still maintains the counterintelligence operation against the Republican nominee's campaign was more than justified. ..."
"... "I was there in the summer of '16 and it was very well predicated," the former intelligence official told MSNBC's Deadline host Nicole Wallace last month. "To launch this counterintelligence investigation about what the Russians were doing to interfere in our election and how among American citizens might have been working with them." ..."
"... Eventually 0bama will be asked when he authorized the spying on the 2012 election, and you can bet 0bama will toss Brennan under that proverbial bus. 0bama will have to answer the question, because there is a massive paper trail of evidence. ..."
"... President Trump weathered the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax storm. Those slow-moving wheels of real justice are finally starting to turn. ..."
Former CIA Director John Brennan has once against spoken out against President Donald
Trump, describing him in a recent interview as a "pathological deceiver" who "rankles" him "to
no end."
Speaking to the Irish Times over the weekend, Brennan discussed what he claims is the root of his
harsh and repeated criticism of President Trump. The longtime Deep Stater's attacks, he claims,
aren't driven as much by president's policy prescriptions but by his character.
"So my beef with Donald Trump is not because he has done some very foolish things –
like reneging on the Iran nuclear deal, or how he has handled the North Korea situation –
I find that many of his policies are deeply flawed and are purely tactical to give him a
political bounce," he
told interviewer Suzanne Lynch, the Times' Washington Correspondent.
"But if that was the only problem I had with him, I would be silent. What really just
rankles me to no end is his dishonesty, his lack of ethics and principles and character, the
way he demeans and degrades and denigrates individuals or institutions of government, what he
has done and said about the FBI and CIA and the former leadership, the fact that he wilfully
misleads not just the American people but the world," the former Obama spy chief
continued .
Brennan concluded his thoughts on Trump by
stating : "He is a pathological deceiver and that lack of ethical, principled behaviour is
something that I never thought I would see in the president of the United States who is the
most powerful person in the world, who should serve as a role model to all Americans.
Brennan's remarks come as his conduct during the U.S. government's Russia investigation is
under review by the Department of Justice. Last month, President Trump directed several federal
departments and agencies to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr's examination of the
Russia probe's origins, as well as the declassification of intelligence related to it.
Despite special counsel Robert Mueller clearing Trump of collusion with Russia in 2016,
Brennan still maintains the counterintelligence operation against the Republican nominee's
campaign was more than justified.
"I was there in the summer of '16 and it was very well predicated," the former
intelligence official
told MSNBC's Deadline host Nicole Wallace last month. "To launch this counterintelligence
investigation about what the Russians were doing to interfere in our election and how among
American citizens might have been working with them."
Brennan is worried about what President Trump is doing with the metric-tons of
#Spygate & #Obamagate evidence.
Eventually 0bama will be asked when he authorized the spying on the 2012 election, and you
can bet 0bama will toss Brennan under that proverbial bus. 0bama will have to answer the
question, because there is a massive paper trail of evidence.
They never thought Hillary could lose. Mueller's special counsel, was only a temporary
cover-up. President Trump weathered the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax storm. Those slow-moving
wheels of real justice are finally starting to turn.
"... Other than it is against the law for CIA to spy in the US. It is FBI's job. And Brennan lied to Congress under oath, a crime for which Clinton was impeached. And the fact that if they are coneding this crime, they must've been caught on something even bigger. ..."
"... They are way out of control. They need to take a step back and reevaluate their reason for being and their goals. You can't protect the people if you see them as the enemy. ..."
"... The intelligence agencies are civil servants who need to be reigned in whenever they exceed the instructions given to them by their civilian bosses. ..."
"... And the CIA torture? ..."
"... Who ever was over the hacking of the Senator's computer and the Senator's staffers computers should be invited to leave. If that extends all the way up to Brennan, so be it. ..."
"... Unfortunately, that corrective action has to come from those who are perpetrating these crimes in order for it to be legal. It's the classic Catch-22 of political corruption. ..."
"... "They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace." ― Tacitus (AD56 to after AD117) The Agricola and the Germania ..."
"... The problem with political power is that it proves to be a magnet to those with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and they are easily corrupted. ..."
"... Back in the day, the people of Russia knew that what they were being fed was propaganda, in the US and the UK we thought it was news. ..."
"... Intelligence Agencies have their own Agenda. The CIA spy on everyone including the Senate it seems. Meanwhile the Israeli Intelligence Agencies spy on many people Including the USA,the very people who give them the money... ..."
"... If the CIA are Spying on the Senate you have to ask the Question who are they working for ? ..."
There should be no discussion about this! However just like Mockingbird, National Students Ass., Tailwind, PBSUCCESS,and so many
others, they will stall until they get it dropped from the media and we will forget again.
John Brennan's next job should be in a orange jump suit earning pennies and hour.
But we all know that this will never happen. Brennan is the right hand of the commander and chief of death, destruction and torture.
and has been for a long time. This is the work of evil, plain and simple.
How can you have any faith or trust in a government like this? It's one damn thing after another. The Executive branch, the Congress,
the high courts, the Justice Dept. are all corrupt. Laws are broken, constitutional protections are laughed at, we are constantly
being spied on. No charges are brought. Nobody goes to jail.
A minor detail?
The CIA and security services have every right to know who is who on all and every politician and their staff.
That's why we are safe. :-)
Other than it is against the law for CIA to spy in the US. It is FBI's job.
And Brennan lied to Congress under oath, a crime for which Clinton was impeached. And the fact that if they are coneding this
crime, they must've been caught on something even bigger.
Sure, everything else is just fine. As far as we know, that is.
They are way out of control. They need to take a step back and reevaluate their reason for being and their goals.
You can't protect the people if you see them as the enemy.
So it appears that some in Congress will get upset if a Executive agency misuses its powers? Are these the same folks who seem
to be okay with the IRS focus on Conservative 501(c)(3) applicants?
Who ever was over the hacking of the Senator's computer and the Senator's staffers computers should be invited to leave. If that
extends all the way up to Brennan, so be it.
Unfortunately, that corrective action has to come from those who are perpetrating these crimes in order for it to be legal. It's
the classic Catch-22 of political corruption.
Don't fire Brennan. Arrest him and charge him violating the prohibition against domestic surveillance, lying under oath and,
arguably, treason. Maybe there is space in Guantanamo for him to reflect upon the meaning of the Constitution and the rule of
law.
And the reason that we never hear of these supposed 'facts' is what? That we're all too dumb to know? Dumbing down America is
getting mighty costly of late, n'est-pas?
Just because they say you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Remember: America is not a democracy. That's a
sideshow. It's an oligarchy and don't you forget it.
You can always trust some govts/agencies/people to always take the wrong path/back door. It would simply never occur to them to
take the right one. This is who they are.
Staffs carry out directives. I'm not buying that staff had cause to go looking otherwise.
Feinstein has problems with being spied on, yet heads the Intelligence Committee who for several years has been authorizing
spying on - well, everybody.
Feinstein shouldn't worry about spying, unless she's doing something wrong. Isn't that the proposition?
So why is it scandalous for public officials in our supposed western liberal democracies to spy on officials in other agencies,
and deserving of an apology, but it's Okay for officials to spy on fellow citizens?
What might a government of the people that does not trust the people it governs be properly called?
I would like to point out that beyond what is touted in the press as "the story" the nature of these sorts of things can remain
hidden for many years. Recent events in Germany and in Washington, if viewed from a different perspective may be connected. In
the past when such revelations come to light it is resultant from security issues that are of such magnitude that those tasked
with intelligence responsibilities remain in power because they are simply doing their job and are doing so at the command of
elected officials, who when made aware of covert matters go all quiet and allow the chips to fall as they may. Seldom does the
public ever hear of the actual facts in a timely way, and by the time that does happens they have long since moved on to more
pressing matters.
Has any politician asked them to explain why they spied, in terms of their motivations ? It seems the 'why' is surely more damaging
than the act of spying itself?
What else is new!...Corruption / deceit / fraud / theft, at the highest level of tax payers money is being conducted..War criminals
being sponsored by their own corrupt government ministers / agencies, to create carnage, by divide & rule tactics...Its a fatal
backfiring failure / disaster which is causing their downfall.
Not surprising...All these out of control "rogue agencies" I.E. CIA / NSA / MI5 / MI6 / GCHG / MOSAD, must be brought to book
for their corrupt / deceitful / fraudulent workings...Their most senior officers are involved in a worldwide cover up into illegal
involvement of creating criminal wars around the world, by using spying techniques upon government institutions & citizens...The
recent scandal of phone tapping / voice mail / email interception, goes to show the lengths they are prepared to conduct / cover
up their own war criminality acts. They are the REAL terrorists !!
"They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by
ambition, if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of
empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace."
― Tacitus (AD56 to after AD117) The Agricola and the Germania
They'll even eat their own... How this behaviour doesn't equate to criminal actions is part of the disgrace. The US government
have morphed in to a dystopian movement.
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA by Webster Griffin Tarpley (ISBN: 9780930852375) another good read and makes a plausible case
for a coup carried out on America.
In the reign of Elizabeth 1st a blacksmith was executed for treason because he was overhead saying that he believed the uncrowned
King Edward V was still alive.
A quick search on Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's Secretary of State will reveal for just how long and how sophisticated
state spying on state has been.
Yes, they don't like others to be in a position to know of their venality, their sexual deviances and assorted other human failings.
Else that knowledge be used to control them...............
The problem of how the rest of the world views the actions of the US is exacerbated by the seeming inability or disinterest of
its citizens in doing anything about it.
Admittedly, a frustration shared by many citizens/subjects in Western countries, that pretend to be functioning democracies but
are in fact anything but.
The problem with political power is that it proves to be a magnet to those with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and they
are easily corrupted.
We are politically and economically very poorly educated and are daily fed propaganda and mind filling mush by media that are
'on message'.
The media ownership needs to be broken up but politicians, corporations and the media are one self serving body and would resist
that and have the power to do so.
Back in the day, the people of Russia knew that what they were being fed was propaganda, in the US and the UK we thought it
was news.
Intelligence Agencies have their own Agenda.
The CIA spy on everyone including the Senate it seems.
Meanwhile the Israeli Intelligence Agencies spy on many people Including the USA,the very people who give them the money...
(Out of Control is the thought that springs to mind)
If the CIA are Spying on the Senate you have to ask the Question who are they working for ? Is it the American Government ? Is
it the American Military? Is it The American Citizen ? Or are we seeing the henchmen of the illuminati in action here !
Their fingers seem to be in every pie and no one seems to be able to control them .
"... A sincere question: who is running the CIA and on whose behalf? ..."
"... They consider us the people, their enemy. We are the 'enemy within', because as we become increasingly aware of our politicians' criminality any action we take may threaten the status quo. ..."
"... Just because Americans don't tend to care about anything that happens beyond their own borders doesn't mean the rest of the world can live with the same blissful ignorance. ..."
"... The NSA scandal has made us realize that the US regards us as second-rated citizens who are nondeserving of the 'special protections' that Anglo-speaking countries do. ..."
"... This is extremely telling about Obama's continued failure to discern good character in his aides and cabinet. His administration has been a shambles largely due to his inability to surround himself with good people. ..."
"... I guess so, as we all know that the CIA always tried to silent war opponents. This had been largely documented about Vietnam opponents to the War on US soil. ..."
"... The CIA is now a discredited organization run by proven liars. When will Congress do something about it? Answer -- never. They are all being blackmailed. ..."
"... The CIA is completely out of control. This begs the question, as to why do, or should, American citizen vote for candidates when those candidates are effectively being 'managed' and spied on by people in the CIA. Senators in both houses are not making 'decisions' the CIA is. ..."
"... Yes and the only politician who has called for the abolition of the CIA is Ron Paul. ..."
"... The NSA isn't hindering your movements as you are not a danger to the status quo. You can keep getting blasted at your BBQ's and coming online to defend the indefensible, you're not a threat. But it's not about you. It's about the people who are in a position to challenge the system. This can include anti-war activists, judges, politicians and journalists. ..."
They consider us the people, their enemy. We are the 'enemy within', because as we become increasingly aware of our politicians'
criminality any action we take may threaten the status quo.
leaders haven't been voted into office for a while now - they're rigged into office - from the lowly dog catcher to the president
- and its happening all over the world.
If you take the easy way now, you will take the easy way in the future. This not a sandlot baseball game here. These are high-
powered people , who are responsible for matters extremely operant to the people of our country, and it must be admitted, the
world.
To simply brush off these serious breaches of Government procedure (law) would serve to perpetuate the Executive Branch intrusions
into the business of the Legislative Branch.
Separation of the powers is a time-honored method of setting up a government that has kept us 'moving along' for quite
awhile now. Most of its problems stem from the populace placing too much trust in their elected officials .
It is everyone's responsibility to collectively maintain our government. It was never the intention of our founders that our
leaders become reclusive despots: from today's vantage point, we can see this. It is a short walk to realize where the blame should
be laid. Up and on your way to no future.
Just because Americans don't tend to care about anything that happens beyond their own borders doesn't mean the rest of the
world can live with the same blissful ignorance.
The NSA scandal has made us realize that the US regards us as second-rated citizens who are nondeserving of the 'special
protections' that Anglo-speaking countries do.
I find it absolutely shocking that this guy's dismissal is still debatable. Should be a no-brainer is any democracy
In the UK and USA these spooks backed by politicians and civil servants are getting way out of hand. Having the technology to
do things doesn't provide the need or right to do such things. They are getting to the point where they are "protecting" us from
the very people and system they have become.
although the White House indicated its support for a man who has been one of Barack Obama's most trusted security aides.
This is extremely telling about Obama's continued failure to discern good character in his aides and cabinet. His administration
has been a shambles largely due to his inability to surround himself with good people.
I guess so, as we all know that the CIA always tried to silent war opponents. This had been largely documented about Vietnam
opponents to the War on US soil.
They're all fuc@#$g rogue. Power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely. Who polices the police? No one apparently. They
and all their UK counterparts will walk away from this unscathed. If the heat gets a little too warm just play your joker, 'Terrorism'.
The CIA is now a discredited organization run by proven liars. When will Congress do something about it? Answer -- never.
They are all being blackmailed.
Your state can imprison anyone it wants, for as long as it wants, without having to justify it in any way... hell they are not
even required to let relatives know. That is a police state. The US is operating what effectively are concentration camps all
over the place, Guantanamo being the flagship.
The CIA is completely out of control. This begs the question, as to why do, or should, American citizen vote for candidates when
those candidates are effectively being 'managed' and spied on by people in the CIA. Senators in both houses are not making 'decisions'
the CIA is.
Quite how the CIA, White House or any other government body think that they have any credibility regarding any matter, is amazing.
I JUST PUT A LIST OF QUESTIONS ON MY TIME LINE THIS SHOULD KEEP THE SPY NETWORK BUSY FOR A WHILE ! BUT THEY NEVER DO ANYTHING
THAT MAKES SENSE ANYWAY ; THEY ONLY HAVE A 30 BILLION DOLLAR BUDGET ; BUT CANNOT TELL US WHAT HAPPENED TO MH370 MALAYSIAN AIRPLANE
! WOW ! SOME SPY NETWORK ! IT 'S EASY FOR THEM TO SCREW WITH US ; BECAUSE WE ARE EVERYDAY MARKS !
If the United States government doesn't even govern by popular mandate, it certainly won't give a fuck about anyone's respect,
dear fellow internet commentator.
The penalties for lying under oath are quite strict and can include up to 5 years of prison time. But nobody is willing to go
after these guys, they have too much information on too many people. The day the US congress voted for the patriot act was the
last day of their democracy.
What exactly does a CIA member have to do to get arrested, prosecuted and convicted for an action inside the USA?
It is not spying on Congress. It it spying on the Supreme court, or killing a Senator? Do they walk away free after assassinating
their own president? Do they need to do more?
The NSA isn't hindering your movements as you are not a danger to the status quo. You can keep getting blasted at your BBQ's and
coming online to defend the indefensible, you're not a threat. But it's not about you. It's about the people who are in a position
to challenge the system. This can include anti-war activists, judges, politicians and journalists.
Everyone who matters can be
kept inline with blackmail and for public figures it can be the smallest thing. Recently, during a primary, a candidate lost as
questions were raised about the fact he had checked in the a mental care facility. He probably had a breakdown and needed to be
observed for a couple of days. This piece of information would be easy to pick up with the various NSA programmes.
If this candidate
had the same views as you, this little fact would not have been released but I believe he was a defender of your constitution
and that could cause problems for the criminal regime you now live under.
Snooping is poison in a democracy. Your system was built so that it had self correction and could hence adapt to new situations
and constantly improve. This served Americans well for many years, but it has ended.
Feinstein and the word "hope" do not belong in one and the same sentence. She along with her fellow conspirators in the intelligence
committee are the ones that have been green-lighting this fascism for years. It's like expecting John McCain to repeal the Patriot
Act.
People like Feinstein are chosen to oversee mass surveillance for the simple reason that they are old, completely technologically
illiterates who can be easily fooled or if need be blackmailed through their extensive business empires
.
Yeah and let's take a look at the CIA's backing for Operation Gladio in post WW2 Europe. Yeah, you Americans were there but you
certainly weren't saving lives or making the aftermath bearable for the victims.
Notable quotes:
"... Don't fire Brennan. Arrest him and charge him violating the prohibition against domestic surveillance, lying under oath and, arguably, treason. Maybe there is space in Guantanamo for him to reflect upon the meaning of the Constitution and the rule of law. ..."
"... "What might a government of the people that does not trust the people it governs be properly called?" ..."
There should be no discussion about this! However just like Mockingbird, National Students Ass., Tailwind, PBSUCCESS,and so many
others, they will stall until they get it dropped from the media and we will forget again.
Get Smart Amarica
How can you have any faith or trust in a government like this? It's one damn thing after another. The Executive branch, the Congress,
the high courts, the Justice Dept. are all corrupt. Laws are broken, constitutional protections are laughed at, we are constantly
being spied on. No charges are brought. Nobody goes to jail. But Snowden is a traitor for revealing the truth.
A minor detail? The CIA and security services have every right to know who is who on all and every politician and their
staff.
That's why we are safe. :-)
Other than it is against the law for CIA to spy in the US. It is FBI's job. And Brennan lied to Congress under oath, a crime for
which Clinton was impeached. And the fact that if they are coneding this crime, they must've been caught on something even bigger.
Sure, everything else is just fine. As far as we know, that is.
They are way out of control. They need to take a step back and reevaluate their reason for being and their goals. You can't protect
the people if you see them as the enemy.
So it appears that some in Congress will get upset if a Executive agency misuses its powers? Are these the same folks who seem
to be okay with the IRS focus on Conservative 501(c)(3) applicants?
Um, no, Trevor Alfred, "the REAL terrorists" are still the folks who deliberately bomb civilians in areas where peace is supposed
to exist. The intelligence agencies are civil servants who need to be reigned in whenever they exceed the instructions given to
them by their civilian bosses.
Who ever was over the hacking of the Senator's computer and the Senator's staffers computers should be invited to leave. If that
extends all the way up to Brennan, so be it.
Unfortunately, that corrective action has to come from those who are perpetrating these crimes in order for it to be legal. It's
the classic Catch-22 of political corruption.
Don't fire Brennan. Arrest him and charge him violating the prohibition against domestic surveillance, lying under oath and,
arguably, treason. Maybe there is space in Guantanamo for him to reflect upon the meaning of the Constitution and the rule of
law.
And the reason that we never hear of these supposed 'facts' is what? That we're all too dumb to know? Dumbing down America is
getting mighty costly of late, n'est-pas?
Just because they say you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Remember: America is not a democracy. That's a
sideshow. It's an oligarchy and don't you forget it.
You can always trust some govts/agencies/people to always take the wrong path/back door. It would simply never occur to them to
take the right one. This is who they are.
Staffs carry out directives. I'm not buying that staff had cause to go looking otherwise.
Feinstein has problems with being spied on, yet heads the Intelligence Committee who for several years has been authorizing
spying on - well, everybody.
Feinstein shouldn't worry about spying, unless she's doing something wrong. Isn't that the proposition?
So why is it scandalous for public officials in our supposed western liberal democracies to spy on officials in other agencies,
and deserving of an apology, but it's Okay for officials to spy on fellow citizens?
What might a government of the people that does not trust the people it governs be properly called?
I would like to point out that beyond what is touted in the press as "the story" the nature of these sorts of things can remain
hidden for many years. Recent events in Germany and in Washington, if viewed from a different perspective may be connected. In
the past when such revelations come to light it is resultant from security issues that are of such magnitude that those tasked
with intelligence responsibilities remain in power because they are simply doing their job and are doing so at the command of
elected officials, who when made aware of covert matters go all quiet and allow the chips to fall as they may. Seldom does the
public ever hear of the actual facts in a timely way, and by the time that does happens they have long since moved on to more
pressing matters.
Has any politician asked them to explain why they spied, in terms of their motivations ? It seems the 'why' is surely more damaging
than the act of spying itself?
What else is new!...Corruption / deceit / fraud / theft, at the highest level of tax payers money is being conducted..War criminals
being sponsored by their own corrupt government ministers / agencies, to create carnage, by divide & rule tactics...Its a fatal
backfiring failure / disaster which is causing their downfall.
Not surprising...All these out of control "rogue agencies" I.E. CIA / NSA / MI5 / MI6 / GCHG / MOSAD, must be brought to book
for their corrupt / deceitful / fraudulent workings...Their most senior officers are involved in a worldwide cover up into illegal
involvement of creating criminal wars around the world, by using spying techniques upon government institutions & citizens...The
recent scandal of phone tapping / voice mail / email interception, goes to show the lengths they are prepared to conduct / cover
up their own war criminality acts. They are the REAL terrorists !!
"They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by
ambition, if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of
empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace."
― Tacitus (AD56 to after AD117) The Agricola and the Germania
They'll even eat their own... How this behaviour doesn't equate to criminal actions is part of the disgrace. The US government
have morphed in to a dystopian movement.
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA by Webster Griffin Tarpley (ISBN: 9780930852375) another good read and makes a plausible case
for a coup carried out on America.
In the reign of Elizabeth 1st a blacksmith was executed for treason because he was overhead saying that he believed the uncrowned
King Edward V was still alive.
A quick search on Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's Secretary of State will reveal for just how long and how sophisticated
state spying on state has been.
The problem of how the rest of the world views the actions of the US is exacerbated by the seeming inability or disinterest of
its citizens in doing anything about it. Admittedly, a frustration shared by many citizens/subjects in Western countries,
that pretend to be functioning democracies but are in fact anything but.
The problem with political power is that it proves to be a magnet to those with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and they
are easily corrupted.
We are politically and economically very poorly educated and are daily fed propaganda and mind filling mush by media that are
'on message'.
The media ownership needs to be broken up but politicians, corporations and the media are one self serving body and would resist
that and have the power to do so.
Back in the day, the people of Russia knew that what they were being fed was propaganda, in the US and the UK we thought it
was news.
Intelligence Agencies have their own Agenda. The CIA spy on everyone including the Senate it seems. Meanwhile the
Israeli Intelligence Agencies spy on many people Including the USA, the very people who give them the money... (Out of Control
is the thought that springs to mind)
If the CIA are Spying on the Senate you have to ask the Question who are they working for ? Is it the American Government ? Is
it the American Military? Is it The American Citizen ? Or are we seeing the henchmen of the illuminati in action here !
Their fingers seem to be in every pie and no one seems to be able to control them .
"... The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious and public denials. ..."
"... Brennan acknowledged that an internal investigation had found agency security personnel transgressed a firewall set up on a CIA network, which allowed Senate committee investigators to review agency documents for their landmark inquiry into CIA torture. ..."
"... CIA spokesman Dean Boyd acknowledged that agency staff had improperly monitored the computers of committee staff members, who were using a network the agency had set up, called RDINet. "Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between [the committee] and the CIA in 2009 regarding access to the RDINet," he said. ..."
"... If its considered 'extraordinary' that a man apologize for his actions, then that man is either a sociopath, a criminal, or both. ..."
"... The CIA has now clearly suborned the executive. Obama now works for the CIA. He's spineless, Obama. He is craven, before the very same intelligence agencies that are supposed to work for him. ..."
"... You people are so deluded. You think it matter who you vote for. Newsflash - the CIA killed JFK. The CIA runs America. ..."
"... American foreign policy is the same no matter which party is in power. They are all screwing you six ways from Sunday. ..."
"... If America was a just state, that would happen. But America is a neo-fascist - or more properly, corporatist - state. ..."
"... The NSA/CIA in recent hearings forcefully explained to the Judiciary Committee in Congress that they only spy on foreigners and not US citizens. I guess Congressmen/women are not US citizens and must be terrorists. ..."
"... 'The CIA spying on the people supposedly in charge of the CIA' sounds as if they are reaping what they sowed... ..."
CIA director apologises for improper conduct of agency staff One senator calls on John Brennan to resign in wake of scandal
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate
intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious
and public denials.
Brennan acknowledged that an internal investigation had found agency security personnel transgressed a firewall set up on
a CIA network, which allowed Senate committee investigators to review agency documents for their landmark inquiry into CIA torture.
Among other things, it was revealed that agency officials conducted keyword searches and email searches on committee staff while
they used the network.
The admission brings Brennan's already rocky tenure at the head of the CIA under renewed question. One senator on the panel said
he had lost confidence in the director, although the White House indicated its support for a man who has been one of Barack Obama's
most trusted security aides.
CIA spokesman Dean Boyd acknowledged that agency staff had improperly monitored the computers of committee staff members,
who were using a network the agency had set up, called RDINet. "Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common
understanding reached between [the committee] and the CIA in 2009 regarding access to the RDINet," he said.
Asked if Brennan had or would offer his resignation, a different CIA spokesman, Ryan Trapani, replied: "No."
Feinstein said the vindication, from CIA inspector general David Buckley, and Brennan's apology were "positive first steps," suggesting
that the director had further work to do before she would consider the matter closed.
She stopped short of calling for Brennan's resignation. But her committee colleague, Democrat Mark Udall of Colorado, said Brennan
should go. "I have no choice but to call for the resignation of CIA director John Brennan," Udall said after a briefing on the inspector
general's findings.
"The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate intelligence committee computers. This grave misconduct is
not only illegal, but it violates the US constitution's requirement of separation of powers. These offenses, along with other errors
in judgment by some at the CIA, demonstrate a tremendous failure of leadership, and there must be consequences.
Mark Udall (@MarkUdall)
. @CIA IG rprt shows John Brennan misled public, whose interests I have
championed. I will fight for change at the CIA: http://t.co/uQVsvV43nB
Boyd, the CIA spokesman, said Brennan has asked a former committee member, Evan Bayh, a former Indiana Democratic senator, to
lead an "accountability board" reviewing Buckley's report and to advise Brennan on next steps.
That advice, Boyd said, "could include potential disciplinary measures and/or steps to address systemic issues."
Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, a longtime observer of the CIA, called its Thursday statement a "conciliatory
gesture" to the committee's leaders. "If Senator Feinstein is satisfied with the apology then the affair is effectively over. If
she contends there was a fundamental breach that cannot be corrected with a mere apology then some further action might be needed,"
Aftergood said.
Feinstein, in her dramatic speech on the Senate floor in March, said the agency breached the firewall to obstruct the committee's
investigation of the agency's torture of post-9/11 terrorism detainees, a years-long effort expected to be partially declassified
in the coming days or weeks. That investigation was itself prompted by a different coverup: the destruction of videotapes of brutal
interrogations by a senior official, Jose Rodriguez.
"In March, the committee chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, accused the agency of violating constitutional boundaries
by spying on the Senate."
Aahahahhahhhhahaaa. What a hypocrite hag. She must have something to hide if she doesn't like being spied on. I think that
there should be a full investigation into what Dianne...if that is even her real name, has been hiding and bring it to the light
of day.
Good point, but wrong way round imho. The CIA has now clearly suborned the executive. Obama now works for the CIA. He's spineless, Obama. He is craven, before the very same intelligence agencies that are supposed to work for him.
Just imagine how the laugh at him, speak about him, behind his back. No wonder Putin treats him like a fool.
It is time to put all the DemPublicanCFR basterds in prison for life. From the BUSH II (The torturer) to bill clinton who initiated
the covert torture operation. The clearest signal that we are not living in a self governing democracy is that; excluding Watergate,
the DemPublicanCFR ruling elite do not go to prison, there is rarely any real investigation of their crimes; as in the recent
largest public swindle in human history....the DemPublicanCFR, Wall st/Rating Company Swindle that was orchestrated by the "boys"
from the bohemian grove.The level of corruption in this Country exceeds that of ancient Rome.The best way to combat "terrorism"
is to get the hell out of other peoples countries.and imprison the DemPublicanCFR members who intentionally mislead this Country
into a fossil fuel War in Iraq. George Bush II ( the coward draft dodger) is a moron on an epic scale comparable to the Roman
Emperor who named his horse a general. We are confronted with a monumental environmental emergency and these idiot myopic assholes
debate carbon emission controls instead of leading the way to a fossil fuel nuclear free world.by initiating the largest public
works program in human history....a massive energy conversion program funded by cutting the military budget in half.The conversion
program will also be funded by the profits made by all the fossil fuel and nuclear power companies. Just imagine all the AMERICAN
JOBS WILL BE CREATED. We need leaders who put the interests of the Americam people first and who do not march to the drumb beat
of the Rockefucker internationalist DemPublicanCFR elite. It is time to send David Rockyfucker to Iran to stand trial for the
crimes he has committed against the Iranian people....We are living in a state of environmental crisis and it is time for true
American patriots to rise and confront our Enemy within who, thanks to the great American patriot Edward Snowden, we now know
for certain has all or electronic communications under 24 hour surveillance. The DemPublicanCFR ruling elite must be held to pay
for their crimes or I fear the planet that our childen, grand children and great grandchildren will be living in is doomed to
cataclysmic events that we have yet to even imagine...
Boy, once you spy on a Democrat it becomes an issue. Lying seems to be what Obama and his appointees due best as there are no
consequences for lying, even under oath as Eric Holder has done several times. So let's just move along here as this is just another
day under Obama.
Agency security personnel had transgressed? And just what is that some kind of creepy code for? We, the bigwigs, did it, but we
have language that allows us to blame it on our innocent underlings...of course. This is the height of mental illness and corruption!
Just a simple excuse used to placate a supposedly mind dead public already hypnotized by their main stream media and under their
almost absolute control. That's you and I, of course...sound familiar? Well, I will be totally under their control when they come
and kill me, and not before that! "Agency staff had improperly monitored the computers of committee staff members", well who in
the hell is agency staff if not Brennan? Considering how far Obama has fallen since he stated how good he was at killing, I do
not see how any of us in a sound state of mind can see Mr. Brennan as anything other than a criminal and a traitor to the American
people. Same as our present president, supreme court, congress, and many more.
As long as you persist in your long held delusion that there are differences between democrats and republicans - differences that
matter - nothing will change.
Open you eyes. American foreign policy is the same no matter which party is in power. They are all screwing you six ways from
Sunday.
If America was a just state, that would happen. But America is a neo-fascist - or more properly, corporatist - state.
Democrats and republicans are two sides of the same coin. Political theater for the plebs to fight over while the real power
brokers hide in the shadows.
The free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip
on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse
has begun its rapid slide into despotism.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
The NSA/CIA in recent hearings forcefully explained to the Judiciary Committee in Congress that they only spy on foreigners and
not US citizens. I guess Congressmen/women are not US citizens and must be terrorists.
Nothing will change in America until someone actually starts losing their job, being forced to resign or go to jail - both politicians
and so called "leaders" in the agencies committing these horrific crimes.
You've won the HITS THE NAIL ON THE HEAD award.
But you did forget the DHS who also has a Prius type
program for surveillance. The name starts with a C
but I cannot remember off the top of my head. I do
recall that Boeing's employees were involved in doing
training of technicians.
Things are "out of hand". I fear the US government will
be using contracted mercenaries to keep us in line before
too much longer. Those guys will be coming home and
taking jobs in our local police departments.
Follow the Blackwater money. Erik Prince, and cohorts.
Names may change many times, but it is still all there.
It does not seem to be doing the US any good. Their army would seem to be a complete failure. Their so called intelligence seems
to know nothing about anything that matters. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan many trillions of dollars and abject failure and we see
a nation that brakes every law of decency.
Example,
The CIA agent who shot in the back 2 Pakistani men, and then
after reloading once, he fired 10 times. This occurred during the
day on a busy street in Lahore, Pakistan. He claimed first to be
a US Embassy Staff Member. He was ransomed by Kerry, who
was not yet Secretary of State, but was sent by Obama to do so.
2 other CIA agents, the killer's roommates, who the killer had called
for help, ran over a Pakistani bystander with their jeep on the way
to aid the killer, and killed the poor man. They were immediately airlifted out of Pakistan and returned to the United States,
never to
be heard of since, nor reported by the media.
But, this CIA killer just couldn't stop there. He has been arrested by Sheriff's Deputies, inside a Colorado bar for being
involved in a knife fight. This CIA killer and his wife own a United States contracted spy agency in Las Vegas.
These are the Agents who represent our United States of America.
Who can forget Obama's Secret Servicemen, one of which, while
a guest of a South American city, tried to rip off a Whore by short-
changing her. That hit the newspapers around the world.
These are the Agents who represent our United States of America.
Don't forget this is the same agency that enabled the capture and imprisonment of Mandela, and that only scratches the surface
of some of the stuff they've been up to.
The CIA is beyond reform now, it's no longer a matter of changing who heads it.
There are places in the world where these people would
be put on a wall and quickly dispensed with.
Spies and Surveillers hide the truth from us all, and the
United States Congress pays them to do so.
Voters need to Turn Out the Incumbents. Everyone of them.
Along with their Staffers. 100,000 lobbyists need to be
stripped of their licenses, and their political connections.
It is long past time for revolution or revolt.
It is time to clean house.
Susan, thank you. Seeing is believing.
In the US Intelligence Agencies, including the Military,
there are 850,000 men and women employees who
hold Top Secret clearances and more. That is a lot of
Secrets to hide. Only a few come freely forward to report
corruption to the public at large. Only a couple have had
the guts to paper the world with these corrupt agency's
offal.
Cut off the heads, and the tails.
The United States Intelligence Agencies are corrupted.
They are killers of innocent human beings.
Will Erik Holder send any of them to Prison? He did not prosecute
any of the people responsible for our nation's debacle. Not a one of
them went to prison. He and his boss Obama are also corrupted.
They both are killers of innocent human beings.
Every man of integrity who works for the United States government
should, when he sees corruption, report it to the media 1st, and to
his superior officers 2nd. Not to do so, is a criminal act itself.
We have to wonder if there are any besides Edward Snowden, who
work for the United States government, and have the guts to let us
know when they see corruption.
Great to see truth coming out in the wash.. Also brilliant to hear on the radio,whistleblowers in the UK are going to be protected,
there's progress now....
It seems to appear the spying business is a new democratic industry where money, power, and control are prime. Words like decency
and morality are flying out the windows. The head of a spy ring can retire to form a new enterprise to charge half million to
one million dollars for spy protection...
Flagrant Violations of U.S. Constitution & International Law Continue Unabated as CIA/Feinstein Row Over Senate Spying Lands on
Front Page and Elite Politely Decline to Prosecute Peers' Crimes
I don't know if the 9/11 panic has caused the relaxation of the LAW
The law was relaxed as soon as the Church Committee wrapped up. The CIA was offended at the very idea of having to obey the
law, and their allies in Congress, and the White House after Reagan was elected, obliged them.
Who cares about what they admit to that we all already suspected. Who is getting charged and going to jail? Of course the answer
is nobody because they are either all complicit or congress is intimidated by what other information they may know about them.
Time to purge the whole system.
one has to wonder how many politicians across the Five Eyes nations (US, UK, Canada, Australia and Canada), are being blackmailed,
co-erced and manipulated, by big business/government.
Many of the decisions (and statements from some politicians) that I witness in first world government, make no sense.
for example, is there even one investigatory committee in Westminster or Washington, that has/is not been hacked and controlled
by outsiders (big business often in cahoots with senior govt/intelligence people).
look at the antics of the disgraced News of the Wooorld, deliberately targetting members of the sub-committee investigating
their hacking.
For all the abuses by powerful men in history there are those, including American Presidents, who have demonstrated both leadership
and courage in the face of obstruction, opposition.
But hey, thanks for adding bluster and hot air to the debate. I guess you'd have us all pack up and go home.
The CIA spying on the people supposedly in charge of the CIA has nothing to do with fighting 'terrorism' and everything to do
with the CIA protecting itself from any such namby-pamby libtard delusions such as integrity, accountability, congressional oversight,
responsibility, and other such pesky nuisances.
But isn't spying what the CIA is supposed to do? And isn't this what we supported for so many years during the Cold War because
of "the threat of communism"?
There are certainly still threats out there (Al Queda and Boko Haram come to mind) but is the CIA geared to handle intelligence
in terrorist organizations or are they still fighting the Communists? Revamp the Agency to make it more adapted to the new reality
of terrorist threats world wide but don't fault somebody if they're just trying to do their job. Give them some direction or don't
complain when things go awry. Maybe they're just looking for something to do. Let's be sure to keep them busy fighting terrorists
not the US Senate.
Former CIA Director John Brennan warned Republicans who support President Trump that they
are on a sinking ship, in an appearance Wednesday morning on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"I'm waiting for the Republicans to realize that the Trump ship is a sinking one," he
said.
"There are still rats on that ship, and there are individuals who are not going to separate
themselves from Trump. They do so at their own peril. They need to fulfill their obligations,
irrespective of their political affiliations. This is now the presidency and institutions of
government we rely on to keep us safe and secure."
MIKE BARNICLE: Last week, there was another continued swipe ordered by the president of the
United States, who whatever he says is a megaphone and resonates throughout the country
because of the way it is carried, in which he basically said that people like you and several
other people in the intelligence community were responsible for trying to participate in a
coup, to undermine the presidency of the United States and to remove the president of the
United States. What does it do -- nevermind to you personally -- what does it do to
institutions like the NSA, the CIA, the FBI.
JOHN BRENNAN: It continues to show Mr. Trump's disdain for the intelligence and law
enforcement communities, who are trying to do their jobs irrespective of political winds that
might be blowing in Washington. It really is demoralizing for Mr. Trump to continue to say
there is this "deep state" that tried to launch a coup, and that he is trying to "clean the
swamp," while in fact, it is those professionals within the intelligence community, law
enforcement community, who are trying to carry out their duties and responsibilities to the
American people. Mr. Trump just continues to go down this road. I think it is having a very
damaging impact.
WILLIE GEIST: What do you think, Director Brennan, happens from here? I think people
watching want to know. They say, okay, Mueller didn't like how the report was characterized
by the attorney general. Fine, on the issue of obstruction of justice. Now, what? Is it
Mueller sitting before the Senate and answering specific questions about what is inside the
report? What is the outcome of this?
JOHN BRENNAN: Barr has to be interrogated.
WILLIE GEIST: That starts this morning at 10:00.
JOHN BRENNAN: And then Bob Mueller has to get in front of Congress, then Congress has to
do its job.
And I'm still waiting for the Republicans to realize that the Trump ship is a sinking one.
There are still rats on that ship, and there are individuals who are not going to separate
themselves from Trump. But they do so at their own peril. And they need to fulfill their
obligations, irrespective of their political affiliations. And to do it now rather than to
allow this continued sinking of not just the presidency, but of these institutions of
government that we rely on to keep us safe and secure.
Capitalists, with media in tow, demonized communists and anarchists. The Alien Registration
Act of 1940 aimed to preserve the status quo. Japanese-Americans were interred. Communists were
targeted.
The FBI was involved. Edgar Hoover had leftists monitored and surveilled by tactics
including wiretaps and break-ins. The anti-leftism was so extreme that a section of corporate
America supported fascism. The fascists supported Nazi Germany in WWII. 1
Post-WWII the top income tax rate was 91% until 1964. One-third of workers belonged to a
union. From 1940 to 1967 real wages doubled. Living standards doubled.
However, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 would attack workers, banning many types of
strikes, closed union shops, union political contributions, communists and radicals in union
leadership, and the compelled payment of union dues. The Supreme Court upheld Taft-Hartley, and
it remains in force today.
The film also examines McCarthyism, a witch hunt against communists or communist-leaning
types, as a psychological attack against Americans. No one was safe. Blacklisting was in vogue
and among the first blacklisted were the so-called Hollywood 10 for either communist
sympathies or refusal to aid Congress' House Un-American Activities Committee investigations
into the Communist party or having fought for the rights of Blacks and workers. The list
expanded much past 10. One celebrity given in-depth prominence in Subterranean Fire was
singer Paul Robeson who refused to back down before Congress, stated he was for Negro and
worker rights, and accused Congress of neo-fascism.
McCarthyism hit hysterical heights as exemplified by Texas proposing the death penalty for
communist membership and Indiana calling for the banning of Robin Hood.
McCarthyism was foiled when it bit off more than it could chew. When McCarthyism took on
the establishment, in particular the military, its impetus ground to an inglorious halt. The
Alien Registration Act was ruled unconstitutional, and the First Amendment right to political
beliefs was upheld.
Subterranean Fire notes that the damage to the labor movement was already done. A
permanent war economy was established: overtly through the military and covertly through the
CIA. Come 2001, union membership had dropped to 13.5%. Radicals were disconnected from their
communities; union democracy was subverted by a top-down leadership which avoided the tactic of
striking for collective bargaining; the court system was heavily backlogged with
labor-management issues, which usually were ruled in favor of management.
Some outcomes noted in the film,
In the early 21st century, Americans took on the dubious distinction of working more hours
than any other country .
There is no single county in America where a minimum wage earner can support a family.
The Rise
Grotesque income and wealth disparity signifies the current state of neoliberalism. Yet
Subterranean Fire finds glimmers of change for working men and women.
Despite relating the historical trampling of the working class, the film concludes on a
sanguine note. Union strength appears to be on the rebound with solidarity being a linchpin.
Labor strikes were on the upswing in the US, with teachers leading the way. Fast-food workers
are fighting for a decent wage. Labor, which has seen real wages stagnate in the age of
neoliberalism, is fighting back worldwide. Autoworkers in Matamoros, Mexico are striking and
colleagues in Detroit, Michigan have expressed support for their sisters and brothers. The
Gilet Jaunes in France have been joined by labor. A huge general strike took place in
India. The uptick of resistance was not just pro-labor but anti-global warming in Manchester,
UK; Tokyo, Japan; Cape Town, South Africa; Helsinki, Finland; Genoa, Italy; and, Nelson,
Aotearoa (New Zealand).
All this, however, must be considered through the lens of the current political context. A
virulent anti-socialist president and his hawkish administration occupy the White House in
Washington. Despite the nationwide strike actions, the right-wing BJP and prime minister
Narendra Modi won a recent huge re-election in India. The purportedly centrist Liberal Party in
Canada, rhetoric aside, has been, in large part, in virtual lockstep with the US
administration. 2
The Importance of Metanoia Films
Today, people with access to the internet have little excuse for continuing to depend on
state-corporate media sources. Why would anyone willingly subject himself to disinformation and
propaganda? Not too mention paying for access to such unreliable information and the
soul-sapping advertisements that accompany it.
It is important that we be cognizant of the search engine manipulations of Google, the
biased opinions parlayed by moneyed corporate media, and the censorship of social media
data-mining sites. The corporate-state media nexus wants to limit and shape what we know. The
current war on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is proof
positive of this. Assange and WikiLeaks exposed horrific war crimes. It is a no-brainer that a
person should be congratulated for bringing such evil perpetrated by the state to the public
awareness. Instead the establishment seeks to destroy WikiLeaks, the publisher Assange, and
Chelsea Manning who is accused of providing the information to WikiLeaks.
Given the corporate-state power structure's ideological opposition to WikiLeaks and freedom
on information as well as the preponderance of disinformation that emanates from monopoly
media, it seems eminently responsible that people seek out credible independent sources of
information. Metanoia Films stands out as a credible source.
There are plenty of independent news and information sites that provide analysis that treat
the reader/viewer with respect by substantiating information provided in reports and articles
with evidence, logic, and even morality. The reader/viewer who seeks veracity has an obligation
to consider the facts, sources, and reasoning offered and arrive at her own conclusions.
Metanoia documentaries lay out a historical context that helps us understand how we arrived
at the state of affairs we find ourselves in today. It is an understanding that is crucial to
come up with solutions for a world in which far too many languish in poverty, suffer in war
zones, and are degraded by the cruelties of inequality. It is an understanding that is crucial
for communicating, planning, and organizing the establishment of new societies in which all may
flourish and of which all may be proud.
Independent media is meant for independent thinkers and those who aspire to a better world.
Watch Plutocracy V: Subterranean Fire and the first four parts in the Plutocracy series
and become informed. Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of theDissident Voicenewsletter. He can be reached at: [email protected] .
Twitter: @kimpetersen .
Read other articles by
Kim .
If Barr represent different faction of CIA then Brennan, Brannan might pay with his head for his artistic inventions in
fomenting Russiagate color revolution and Steele dossier. Not very likely, though...
They spied on Trump because they thought it was a guaranteed win and Hillary could cover
it up. They started the witch hunt to make it look like it was a legit investigation.
"Surveillance". Would you buy a used car from Jim Comey?. Time for issuing a number of
orange jumpsuits and for the ones at the top?. A sharp drop and a sudden stop.
They spied on Trump because they thought it was a guaranteed win and Hillary could cover
it up. They started the witch hunt to make it look like it was a legit investigation.
"Surveillance". Would you buy a used car from Jim Comey?. Time for issuing a number of
orange jumpsuits and for the ones at the top?. A sharp drop and a sudden stop.
Spying Work for a government or other organization by secretly collecting information
about enemies or competitors. investigating Carry out a systematic or formal inquiry to
discover and examine the facts of (an incident, allegation, etc.) so as to establish the
truth. What a bunch of idiots
If you have to make up reasons to investigate, it becomes spying. With this logic, we can
investigate anyone! As long as we make sure to cover our tracks in lies! Perfect!
That's Judicial Watch's definition of the Deep State! It's not just a few politicians and
judges, it's almost all of Washington and many in government around the country. The Deep
State will just take its time, put it off, forget about it, make mistakes implementing it,
and so on and so forth.
"... Julian E. Barnes is obviously a long-term intelligence asset and his stories are not based on independent research but are just a repetition of the yarn that the CIA want to spin. Julian E. Barnes and the CIA obviously think Americans and other westerners are DAF. ..."
"... And should we be surprised that such false information about Gina Haspel and Donald Trump puts Trump in a bad light and somehow humanises a CIA director with a reputation for torturing prisoners? ..."
"... A week or 3 ago, a Barnes co-reported "article" flat out stated that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. This was done by pretending to quote someone in the the US Defense establishment as saying "we believe Iran will redouble its work on nuclear weapons". ..."
"... Julian Barnes is a well established liar. Sort of akin to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon. ..."
"... Now the Washington post's narrative is quite colorful too. So Trump really was concerned how many Russians Germany or France expelled? Why was he angry? The vassals did not follow his example as they should have? ..."
"... The CIA and MI6 boys must have blanked out to let this one slip through the cracks. We pay them billions to run false flag and cover-up operations. This makes those of us that believe their lying narratives look stupid. I guess we need to add more billions to their annual budgets. ..."
"... More believable that Julian Barnes performs no cross-referencing and zero research. Investigative reporting (or asking questions) is not the job of the modern MSM stenographer. His job - pushing the war machine agenda. He simply writes that which he is instructed to write. Probably emails all of his articles to his CIA liason for approval prior to publication. ..."
"... In the Skripnal psyop one can readily assess that the only truly "dead ducks" are the MSM journalists and the Western politicians who peddled this incredible slapstick nonsense story in order to further the "demonization of Russia" narrative of Western oligarchy. That these same media "dead ducks" appear to have not even the very slightest interest whatsoever in the current whereabouts or safety of said Skripnals speaks volumes about the true nature of this intelligence operation. ..."
"... both versions of the story expose Gina as a untrustworthy ratfucker ..."
"... At the moment the UK is run by MI6 which sees itself as the real political directorate of the CIA and the Deep State in the US. It seriously believes that it is on the verge of establishing global hegemony. ..."
"... Please note, everyone, that not all of these sad excuses for "journalists" are on the CIA payroll. In fact, very few of them are. Most work with the CIA out of warped senses of patriotism and duty to the empire. Most would never think of themselves as intelligence agency assets, and no small number of them probably think their relationships with the CIA are unique. They think that they are special and that their contacts on the inside at the CIA are unusual. Few would guess that they are just another propaganda mule in the CIA's stable, and that friendly guy who "leaks" to them is actually their handler; their "operator" in spook-speak. ..."
"... CIA did not control many of the Vietnam era journalists that had their pieces printed in mainstream media of the day. Not many left now and perhaps since the nineties they could no longer get their articles published. Regan brought in perception management which eventually brought all MSM 100% under US -CIA control. ..."
"... If you're a CIA guy, you get the editor and the ombudsman on the payroll and he will make certain that the desired propaganda gets published. If he's a Zionist, he's on the same page from the start, anyway. ..."
"... What a strange construction. Doesn't the CIA have PR staff? A decent PR team would review every item referencing their boss and issue clarifications and/or demand corrections immediately. There should have been no need for Julian E. Barnes to figure anything out as the CIA should have pointed out his mistake very quickly. This explanation/exculpation is utter bullshit! ..."
"... I doubt that Trump asked questions about how those ducks and kids were doing. More likely that MI5 was annoyed that they were exposed as the providers of the duck snuff pictures, and put pressure on the NY Times. ..."
"... Those who advocated the strong response to Russia are the intellectual authors of "Russia Gate" to thwart detente with Russia. ..."
A piece in the New York Times showed how in March 2018 Trump was manipulated by the
CIA and MI6 into expelling 60 Russian diplomats. Eight weeks after it was published the New
York Times 'corrects' that narrative and exculpates the CIA and MI6 of that manipulation.
Its explanation for the correction makes little sense.
On April 16 the New York Times published a report by Julian E. Barnes and Adam
Goldman about the relation between CIA Director Gina Haspal and President Donald Trump.
The piece described a scene in the White House shortly after the
contentious Skripal/Novichok incident in Britain. It originally said (emphasis added):
During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She
outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the
president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the
only victims of Russia's attack.
Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children
hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She
then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by
the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.
The 60 Russian diplomats were
expelled on March 26 2018. Other countries only expelled a handful of diplomats over the
Skripal incident. On April 15 2018 the Washington Post
reported that Trump was furious about this:
The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To
his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials --
far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on. The President, who seemed to believe
that other individual countries would largely equal the United States, was furious that his
administration was being portrayed in the media as taking by far the toughest stance on
Russia.
...
Growing angrier, Trump insisted that his aides had misled him about the magnitude of the
expulsions. 'There were curse words,' the official said, 'a lot of curse words.
In that context the 2019 NYT report about Haspel showing Trump dead duck pictures
provided by the Brits made sense. Trump was, as he himself claimed, manipulated into the large
expulsion.
The NYT report created some waves. On April 18 2019 the Guardian
headlined:
The report of the dead duck pictures in the New York Times was a problem for the CIA
and the British government. Not only did it say that they manipulated Trump by providing him
with false pictures, but the non-dead ducks also demonstrated that the official narrative of
the allegedly poisoning of the Skripals has some huge holes. As Rob Slane of the
BlogMirenoted
:
In addition to the extraordinary nature of this revelation, there is also a huge irony
here. Along with many others, I have long felt that the duck feed is one of the many achilles
heels of the whole story we've been presented with about what happened in Salisbury on 4th
March 2018. And the reason for this is precisely because if it were true, there would
indeed have been dead ducks and sick children .
According to the official story, Mr Skripal and his daughter became contaminated with
"Novichok" by touching the handle of his front door at some point between 13:00 and 13:30
that afternoon. A few minutes later (13:45), they were filmed on CCTV camera feeding
ducks, and handing bread to three local boys, one of whom ate a piece . After this they
went to Zizzis, where they apparently so contaminated the table they sat at, that it had to
be incinerated.
You see the problem? According to the official story, ducks should have died. According to
the official story children should have become contaminated and ended up in hospital. Yet as
it happens, no ducks died, and no boys got sick (all that happened was that the boys' parents
were contacted two weeks later by police, the boys were sent for tests, and they were given
the all clear).
After the NYT story was published the CIA and the British government had to remove
the problematic narrative from the record. Yesterday they finally succeeded. Nearly eight weeks
after the original publishing of the White House scene the NYT recanted and issued
a correction
(emphasis. added):
Correction: June 5, 2019
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the photos that Gina Haspel
showed to President Trump during a discussion about responding to the nerve agent attack in
Britain on a former Russian intelligence officer. Ms. Haspel displayed pictures illustrating
the consequences of nerve agent attacks, not images specific to the chemical attack in
Britain. This correction was delayed because of the time needed for research.
The original paragraphs quoted above were changed into this:
During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She
outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the
president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel tried to demonstrate the dangers of using a nerve agent like Novichok in
a populated area. Ms. Haspel showed pictures from other nerve agent attacks that showed their
effects on people.
The British government had told Trump administration officials about early intelligence
reports that said children were sickened and ducks were inadvertently killed by the sloppy
work of the Russian operatives.
The information was based on early reporting, and Trump administration officials had
requested more details about the children and ducks, a person familiar with the intelligence
said, though Ms. Haspel did not present that information to the president. After this article
was published, local health officials in Britain said that no children were harmed.
So instead of pictures of dead ducks in Salisbury the CIA director showed pictures of some
random dead ducks or hospitalized children or whatever to illustrate the effects consequences
of nerve agent incidents?
That the children were taken to hospital but unharmed was already reported in Britishmedia on
March 24 2018, before the Russian diplomats were expelled, not only after the NYT piece
was published in April 2019.
Yesterday the author of the NYT piece, Julian E. Barnes, turned to Twitter to
issue a lengthy 'apology':
I made a significant error in my April 16 profile of Gina Haspel. It took a while to
figure out where I went wrong. Here is the correction: 1/9
[...]
The intelligence about the ducks and children were based on an early intelligence report,
according to people familiar with the matter. The intelligence was presented to the US in an
effort to share all that was known, not to deceive the Trump administration. 7/9
This correction was delayed because conducting the research to figure out what I got
wrong, how I got it wrong and what was the correct information took time. 8/9
I regret the error and offer my apology. I strive to get information right the first time.
That is what subscribers pay for. But when I get something wrong, I fix it. 9/9
Barnes covers national security and intelligence issues for the Times Washington
bureau. His job depends on good access to 'sources' in those circles.
It is remarkable that the CIA spokesperson never came out to deny the original NYT
report. There was zero visible push back against its narrative. It is also remarkable that the
correction comes just as Trump is on a state visit in Britain.
The original report was sourced on 'people briefed on the conversation'. The
corrected version is also based on 'people briefed on the conversation' but adds 'a
person familiar with the intelligence'. Do the originally cited 'people' now tell a different
story? Are we to trust a single 'person familiar with the intelligence' more than those
multiple 'people'? What kind of 'research' did the reporter do to correct what he then and now
claims was told to him by 'people'? Why did this 'research' take eight weeks?
That the 'paper of the record' now corrects said 'record' solves a big problem for Gina
Haspel, the CIA/MI6 and the British government. They can no longer be accused of manipulating
Trump (even as we can be quite sure that such manipulations happen all the time).
In the end it is for the reader to decide if the original report makes more sense than the
corrected one.
---
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our work .
Posted by b on June 6, 2019 at 06:12 AM |
Permalink
Julian E. Barnes is obviously a long-term intelligence asset and his stories are not based on
independent research but are just a repetition of the yarn that the CIA want to spin. Julian
E. Barnes and the CIA obviously think Americans and other westerners are DAF.
Surely the time and effort Julian Barnes needed to check what information he had got wrong
and how he got it wrong should not have been as major as he makes out. Animals dying and
children falling sick to a toxin that could have killed them are incidents that should have
stuck out like sore thumbs and warranted careful checks with different and independent
sources before reporting that Gina Haspel apparently showed the US President pictures of dead
ducks and sick boys in Salisbury.
No wonder Barnes got such a roasting on Twitter after making his abject apology.
And should we be surprised that such false information about Gina Haspel and Donald Trump
puts Trump in a bad light and somehow humanises a CIA director with a reputation for
torturing prisoners?
During years I researched articles published in @nytimes we fact-checked BEFORE publication. Here it comes
AFTER bloggers, officials et al point out fatal flaws. That no children were poisoned, and no
ducks killed, by #novichok
in #Salisbury + was known
in Spring 2018. #propaganda
A week or 3 ago, a Barnes co-reported "article" flat out stated that Iran has a nuclear
weapons program. This was done by pretending to quote someone in the the US Defense
establishment as saying "we believe Iran will redouble its work on nuclear weapons".
Except in the Barnes construction it wasn't a quotation, or anything like a phrasing that
made clear that the Pentagon source was guessing, not stating, that Iran has a nuclear
weapons program.
This was NOT corrected.
Eric Schmitt was the other NY Times "reporter" who signed the article.
And here's what the two liars reported, pretending that an Iranian nuclear weapons program is
a real thing, first paragraph:
"Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons, administration officials said."
So Julian Barnes is a well established liar. Sort of akin to Judith Miller and Michael
Gordon.
Barnes provides the truth then provides a lie about the truth....par for the course at
NYT.
(Remember Judith Miller?) A fake news organization spreading fake news with revised fake
news.
can't really get excited by the fact that not everything in this type of creative writing is
taken serious. Did anyone expect otherwise?
During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr.
Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and
told the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the
only victims of Russia's attack.
It's pretty obvious that his/their narrative necessarily must be cobbled together by a lot
of sources. Some by phone. Those may not even share the same idea what image of the president
or Haspel they should convey. I always wonder with this type of newspaper reporting. Maybe
both writers should write novels.
Now the Washington post's narrative is quite colorful too. So Trump really was concerned
how many Russians Germany or France expelled? Why was he angry? The vassals did not follow
his example as they should have?
Superb analysis! Been coming here for 11 years now, and I just have to say that "b" is the
best propaganda analyst in the English language. He is the sturdiest anchor in these stormy
seas:)
The CIA and MI6 boys must have blanked out to let this one slip through the cracks. We pay
them billions to run false flag and cover-up operations. This makes those of us that believe
their lying narratives look stupid. I guess we need to add more billions to their annual
budgets.
Sarcasm is just about the last pleasure one can get from watching the horrific antics of
these morons.
More believable that Julian Barnes performs no cross-referencing and zero research.
Investigative reporting (or asking questions) is not the job of the modern MSM stenographer.
His job - pushing the war machine agenda.
He simply writes that which he is instructed to write. Probably emails all of his articles
to his CIA liason for approval prior to publication.
Perhaps, the liason can see what this fool types in real time. Who knows?
As the story of the dead ducks and sick children unraveled and fell apart, a sloppy patch
up had to be made. Now its fixed. Like a Boeing 737 MAX.
BoTh vErSioNs of the story (I checked with the "Wayback Machine") still include this
paragraph (6th paragraph of story):
Unusually for a president, Mr. Trump has publicly rejected not
only intelligence agencies' analysis, but also the facts they have gathered.
And that has created a perilous situation for the C.I.A.
As usual for the NYT, they did not publicly reject the intelligence agencies'
analysis,
but also the facts they had gathered.
That, of course, would have created a perilous situation for the NYT.
As the saying goes: "if it looks like a false-flag, walks like a false-flag, and talks like a
false-flag, it just might be a "duck."
In the Skripnal psyop one can readily assess that the only truly "dead ducks" are the MSM
journalists and the Western politicians who peddled this incredible slapstick nonsense story
in order to further the "demonization of Russia" narrative of Western oligarchy. That these
same media "dead ducks" appear to have not even the very slightest interest whatsoever in the
current whereabouts or safety of said Skripnals speaks volumes about the true nature of this
intelligence operation.
"I made a significant error in my April 16 profile of Gina Haspel. It took a while to figure
out where I went wrong".
It was only when I found the horses head next to me in bed when I woke up, that I realized
what a stupid mistake I had made.
Gina Haspel has to be as dumb and incompetent as I suspected: someone is paying good money to
make her look like an ordinary sociopath, not a depraved tart who sucked cock to climb to the
head of the organisation.
Slane is ++ on the Skirpals. One 'fact' that emerged early on, made public by Slane, is that
the proposed 'official' time-line ( > press, Gvmt between the lines) of the Skripal
movements - trivial as in a town, drinkies, lunch, feeding ducks, etc. -- was never reported
correctly, obfuscated.
Idk the reasons, but it is a vital point.
___________________________________
Trump, we see, is treated like the zombie public, flashed random photos, sold tearful
narratives about babies, children, recall incubator babies, horrific bio-weapons
threats...
The PTB loathes him, Pres. are supposed to be complicit like Obama - or at least keep
their resistance toned down, be ready to compromise. .. Obama objected to, and refused to act
on, at least two engineered / fake Syria chem. 'attacks.' (Just looked on Goog and can't find
links to support.)
The only EU figure who stated there is no evidence that the Russkies novichoked
Sergei and Yulia was Macron, afaik. He didn't get the memo in time (the Elysée is
inefficient, lots of screw-ups there) but soon caught up! and expelled the minimum. -- I have
heard, hush hush, one in F was a receptionist - gofer (an excellent + extremely highly paid
position) who is now at the Emb. in Washington! Most likely merely emblematic story (see
telephone game) .. but telling.
I like this story. It makes Trump look like a naif which wouldn't bother President Teflon in
the least. On the other hand, both versions of the story expose Gina as a untrustworthy ratfucker.
I'm hoping she said "cross my heart and hope to die" when he queried her advice...
I'm glad I checked to see if anyone had mentioned this hack's article about Russia
restarting nuclear testing. Using his name as one search item I tried a number of current
issues. Like the fellows at local intersections holding up signs "will work for money",
Barnes might as well have a tattoo saying "I'll write anything if the price is right.
That it took so long to come up with a half-assed "explanation" shows he's not the brightest
bulb in the lamp. I suppose people whose jobs consist of slightly re-writing Deep State
dictation don't have to be especially clever.
That "apology" by Barnes is completely nonsensical. How would you know that there was
something wrong with your story, that there was an error in it, without knowing what it was?
If the CIA, various bloggers, commenters, etc., alerted him to the errors, it's unlikely they
would say, "There's something wrong in this story but I'm not going to say what it is. You'll
have to re-research they whole thing to figure it out." I don't think that's how people
usually point out errors.
"Which narrative is unraveling and which is gathering momentum?"psychohistorian@19
One thing that seems to be unravelling is the tight political cartel that controls Foreign
Policy in the UK.
If it does unravel and Labour turns to an independent foreign policy while it reverses the
disaster of 'austerity' and neo-liberalism, cases such as that of Assange and the Skripal
affair, both products of extremists within the Establishment who regard themselves as
privileged members of the DC Beltway, are going to be re-opened.
At the moment the UK is run by MI6 which sees itself as the real political directorate of the
CIA and the Deep State in the US. It seriously believes that it is on the verge of
establishing global hegemony. And this at a time when the UK is falling apart and its
population teeters on the brink of economic disaster. It has fallen into this delusion over
the years as it has been able to offer the CIA services which it is afraid to initiate
itself. Hence, most recently, the entire Russiagate nonsense which has British fingerprints
all over it. Hence too the new aggressiveness in DC towards Assange. Hence the disappearance,
without explanation, of the Skripals.
Julian Barnes is like Winston Smith without the intellectual curiosity. He quote happily goes
about his work. lol. What is the matter with you people? You are supposed to embrace the new
narrative!
From wikidpeida... A memory hole is any mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of
inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, such as
from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression
that something never happened.[1][2] The concept was first popularized by George Orwell's
dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Party's Ministry of Truth systematically
re-created all potentially embarrassing historical documents, in effect, re-writing all of
history to match the often-changing state propaganda. These changes were complete and
undetectable.
@37 bevin... maybe they will do with assange what they have done with the skripals... the uk
is more then pathetic at this point in time.. craig murray had more to say on the assange
case yesterday - A
Swedish Court Injects Some Sense
Julian E. Barnes' humble confession (a self-incrimination) sounds like one made in a Gulag.
failure of imaginati , Jun 6, 2019 2:23:10 PM |
35
Further down the memory hole is the side tale of the daughter of Brutish Army Chief Nurse
helping Skirpals and getting an award without contaminating the news. Was the girl's father
Pablo Miller,(of Orbis Dossier MFG) and a pal of Skirpal? There's debunk in their poor
narrative. The public has a photogenic memory.
There are 2 Julian Barneses (at the very least!), one is an English writer, the other has
mostly been writing for the WSJ ( https://www.wsj.com/news/author/julian-e.-barnes)
but since recently again for the NYTimes .
Trump is a drug-addled, brain-damaged, hollowed-out shell of the dull con man he once
was.
But, he perceives himself to be a brilliant mastermind - a stable genius. So, he might
indeed, be prone to making inquiries (generally these would induce the toadies around him to
stifle their laughter).
It makes sense that he might ask, while in GB, about the Skirpal incident, since he pulled
60 people from their posts and he remembered the fantasy he was lead to believe about sick
children and dead ducks.
The fact that he overreacted without sufficient evidence, may have inspired a tiny amount
of self-reflection simply because it may have embarrassed him to have been caught on his back
foot. He was lead to believe that his contemporaries intended to react in equal measure. They
did not. Therefore - he was "fooled" or tricked.
This is the only way to embarrass the buffoon. That is to have someone fool him
personally. And to make him look stupid.
He doesn't mind that he is a fat oaf, a greed head and a pig, but that is the stuff of his
own doing. He is comfortable in this. Money is the end-all, etc.
He bought Mar A Lago, making it his own club, because the Palm Beach Club and its elite
snobs would not let him join.
Trump was betrayed by Gina Haskell, the CIA and the NYT.
All of Western media has been compromised by the CIA and friends since at least the 50s.
Remember what late CIA director William Casey said in 1981; "We'll know our disinformation
program is complete when everything the US public believes is false".
They 'CIA' controls every talking head you can name. Believe no one. Sad isn't it.
Please note, everyone, that not all of these sad excuses for "journalists" are on the
CIA payroll. In fact, very few of them are. Most work with the CIA out of warped senses of
patriotism and duty to the empire. Most would never think of themselves as intelligence
agency assets, and no small number of them probably think their relationships with the CIA
are unique. They think that they are special and that their contacts on the inside at
the CIA are unusual. Few would guess that they are just another propaganda mule in the CIA's
stable, and that friendly guy who "leaks" to them is actually their handler; their
"operator" in spook-speak.
Of course, there is also the incentive provided by just having to take the story their CIA
"friend" gives them, edit it a little to fit their employer's style guidelines, and
then submit it as their own. A whole day's worth of work and they can have it finished in
half an hour. What's not to like about that?
CIA did not control many of the Vietnam era journalists that had their pieces printed in
mainstream media of the day. Not many left now and perhaps since the nineties they could no
longer get their articles published. Regan brought in perception management which eventually
brought all MSM 100% under US -CIA control.
If you're a CIA guy, you get the editor and the ombudsman on the payroll and he will make
certain that the desired propaganda gets published. If he's a Zionist, he's on the same page from the start, anyway.
The self-important "journalists" are controlled and in fact, they are flattered by their
special relationships with informants and the owner/managers. After one has sucked his or her way to the upper level, kissing up and kicking down... Laziness is a bonus.
I made a significant error in my April 16 profile of Gina Haspel. It took a while to figure
out where I went wrong.
What a strange construction. Doesn't the CIA have PR staff? A decent PR team would review
every item referencing their boss and issue clarifications and/or demand corrections
immediately. There should have been no need for Julian E. Barnes to figure anything out as
the CIA should have pointed out his mistake very quickly. This explanation/exculpation is
utter bullshit!
Every day when I turn on my computer, I am enticed with offers to "see how the Brady Bunch
kids look today" or "what do the stars of the 80s look like today?".
Apparently, there is quite a demand for updates on celebrities and their current well
being.
So why would Julian Barnes do an article about the Skirpals without showing us how they look
today? And just where are they living? Enquiring minds want to know!
I doubt that Trump asked questions about how those ducks and kids were doing. More likely
that MI5 was annoyed that they were exposed as the providers of the duck snuff pictures, and
put pressure on the NY Times.
Using ducks is easier. Gina Haspel could always ask one of the bottom-feeding subordinates
to nip down the road to one of those Chinese BBQ shops and
photograph the display of roast ducks hanging in the shop window . The photos can be
uploaded and altered to remove the background of the chef and the cashier and then the actual
ducks can be altered or colored appropriately before the pictures are sent to Haspel. Anyone
looking at the altered pictures would never guess their actual provenance.
:-)
I'm not sure where Haspel can find hippos or any other large animals that might topple on
top of someone (with dire consequences) were s/he to apply a whiff of nerve agent.
Thanks b for a good laugh at Barnes and Goldman's expense. I note Goldman is silent and I
guess that is because he would likely get his apology wrong and contradict Barnes BS.
Here's my profile of Gina Haspal: war criminal
Here's my profile of Julian Barnes: Fwit and BShitter
Here's my profile of Adam Goldman: Fwit and BShitter.
"... In reality intelligence agencies control the nomination. ..."
"... Russiagate and the DNC hacking scandal were the attempts to reverse the presidential election. Essentially Russiagate was created to tame Trump, although I am not sure that such drastic measures were needed and I might be wrong. He betrayed his election promises with such an ease that Russiagate now looks like a paranoid overreaction of the USA intelligence agencies (and former FBI director Mueller of 9/11 and anthrax investigation fame) Which figuratively speaking moved tanks to capture the unnamed native village. ..."
"... Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers. And if the society preaches militarism it is outright impossible: any politician deviation from militaristic policies will be met with the counterattack of intelligence agencies which are intimately interested in maintaining the status quo. ..."
In reality intelligence agencies control the nomination.
Pics or it didn't happen.
I am very sorry and sincerely apologize. Please view this as a plausible hypothesis ;-)
Some considerations (neoliberals and neocons usually interpret those facts differently so this is a view from paleoconservative
universe; you are warned):
1. Exoneration of Hillary deprived Sanders of chances to lead Democratic ticket in 2016. This is as close to the proven fact as
we can get.
2. Russiagate and the DNC hacking scandal were the attempts to reverse the presidential election. Essentially Russiagate was created
to tame Trump, although I am not sure that such drastic measures were needed and I might be wrong. He betrayed his election promises
with such an ease that Russiagate now looks like a paranoid overreaction of the USA intelligence agencies (and former FBI director
Mueller of 9/11 and anthrax investigation fame) Which figuratively speaking moved tanks to capture the unnamed native village.
3. JFK and then Robert Kennedy assassination. The key role of the CIA in the JFK assassination now is broadly accepted in the
USA.
3. Obama connection to CIA was subject of many articles, especially in the alt-right press. He definitely was raised in a family
of CIA operatives.
4. Brennan spied on Congress and was not fired, which means that the CIA hieratically is above the Congress. Proven fact.
In short, nothing in the power structure of democratic societies prevents intelligence agencies from becoming key political actors,
the Pretorian guard which selects the Presidents by keeping dirt on politicians and controls the press (see Church commission). They
have both motivation (preservation and enhancement of their status as any large bureaucracy), means (weakly controlled, oversized
budget; access to shadow funds from arms and narcotics trading) and skills (covert operations, disinformation, sabotage. This triad
is inherent in their status as the legalized mafia which operates above the law. As Pompeo recently said in a recent speech at Texas
A&M University CIA operatives lie and cheat and steal.
When intelligence agencies control MSM that alone gives them considerable power to influence the political process. For example,
in the case of Russiagate, we saw well organized and timed series of leaks. So, in fact, they can be viewed as the "Inner Party"
in terms of Orwell dystopia 1984.
And the fact of media control is a proven fact. And not only via Church commission. Dr. Ulfkotte went on public television stating
that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding that noncompliance with these orders
would result in him losing his job.
Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies
is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping
its privileges then controllers. And if the society preaches militarism it is outright impossible: any politician deviation from
militaristic policies will be met with the counterattack of intelligence agencies which are intimately interested in maintaining
the status quo.
In any case, the problem of "the tail wagging the dog" is a problem for any country, not only for the USA. The fact that both
Brennan and Clapper become 'talking heads' after retirement tells something about the trend. Such things would be impossible 20 years
ago.
Some insights into the problem can be obtained by reading the article about the politicization of intelligence agencies in other
countries. For example:
Ultimately, making the intelligence agencies accountable amounts to a broader reevaluation of the larger framework of civil-military
relations. As a result, not only is intelligence reform an almost intractable political issue, but it also requires a complete
change of mentality for the actors involved. Reigning in the intelligence agencies is a problem of a deeper political culture,
one that requires a systemic change in the psychology of the organizations.
the lack of civilian oversight of intelligence agencies is a byproduct of the political imbalance between civilian and military
actors, a power structure that favors the latter.
As long as the military can get its way through seemingly constitutional means, the importance of the intelligence agencies
will remain relatively limited. Their role, however, becomes essential whenever the military meets some resistance
the military's domestic political power "has always derived from [its] ability to mediate confrontations among feuding political
leaders, parties or state institutions, invariably presented as threats to the political order and stability. The military [is]
of course the only institution empowered to judge whether such threats existed based on the assumption that a polity in turmoil
cannot sustain a professional military" (Rizvi 1998: 100). Yet whenever necessary, the military has not hesitated to generate
problems itself if it believes its institutional interests would be better served by a weak and divided polity. This is where
the intelligence agencies come into play.
the link between journalists and the intelligence agencies is a complex one, and cannot be reduced to a simple power dynamic
in which the journalists are merely the victim. Journalists need information, and thus have an interest in maintaining a good
relationship with intelligence agencies. In return, journalists are often asked to provide information themselves to intelligence
agencies.
"... Within America, the alphabet agencies from NSA to CIA to FBI had betrayed their country as obviously as Figuera did, though they didn't run away, yet. Our colleagues Mike Whitney and Philip Giraldi described the conspiracy organised by John Brennan of CIA with active participation of FBI's James Comey, to regime-change the US. ..."
"... The CIA spies in England and passes the results to the British Intelligence. MI6 spies in the US and passes the results to CIA. They became integrated to unbelievable extent in the worldwide network of spies. ..."
"... It is not the Deep State anymore; it is world spooks who had united against their legitimate masters. Instead of staying loyal to their country, the spooks betrayed their countries. They are not only strictly-for-cash – they think they know better what is good for you. In a way, they are a new incarnation of the Cecil Rhodes Society . Democratically-elected politicians and statesmen have to obey them or meet their displeasure, as Corbyn and Trump did. ..."
"... Everywhere, in the US, the UK, and Russia, the spooks became too powerful to handle. The CIA stood behind assassination of JFK and tried to take down Trump. The British Intelligence undermined Jeremy Corbyn, after assisting the CIA in pushing for the Iraq war. They created the Steele Dossier, invented the Skripal hoax and had brought Russia and the West to the brink of nuclear war. ..."
"... In the Ukraine, the heads of their state security, SBU had plotted against the last legitimate president Mr Victor Yanukovych. They helped to organise and run the Maidan 2014 manifestations and misled their President, until he was forced to escape abroad. The Maidan manifestations could be compared with the Yellow Vests movement; however, Macron, an appointee of the Network, had support of his spies, and stayed in power, while Yanukovych had been betrayed and overthrown. ..."
"... You'd ask me, were they so stupid that they believed their own propaganda of inevitable Clinton's victory? Yes, they were and are stupid. They are no sages, evil or benevolent. My main objection to the conspiracy theorists is that they usually view the plotters as omniscient and all-powerful. They are too greedy to be all-powerful, and they are too silly to be omniscient. ..."
"... Now, however, the secret services' cohesion and integration increased to the next level, making it difficult to deal with them. ..."
"... People are fickle and not always know what is good for them; there are many demagogues to mislead the crowd. And still, elected legitimate officials should have precedence in governing, while non-elected ones should obey – and it means the Network spooks and media men should know their place. ..."
"... How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy? ..."
"... These characters have indulged in an orgy of highly conspicuous partisan political meddling and ranting that has created the strong public impression that they engaged in an attempted coup to overthrow a sitting American president on the basis of a frame-up that was largely fueled by Russian disinformation. ..."
"... Brennan in particular: can you imagine any previous CIA director comporting himself in this manner? Throwing all caution to the winds? Inconceivable. Brennan, Comey and Clapper have inflicted serious damage on the reputation of the CIA, FBI and ODNI. ..."
"... It's not just illegal surveillance and blackmail that gives the spies power, it's impunity for even the gravest crimes. If you don't get the message of blackmail you can be tortured or shot, with a bullet like JFK and RFK and Reagan, or with illegal biological weapons like Daschel and Leahy. Institutionalized impunity stares us in the face from US state papers. ..."
"... It's not that CIA and other neo-Gestapos escaped control. They were designed from inception for totalitarian control. The one poor bastard in Congress who pointed that out, Tydings, had McCarthy sicced on him for his cheek. CIA is not out of control; it's firmly IN control. ..."
"... It was funny during the Cold war (the original one) – whenever each side unveiled that a spy from the other side has defected to them – they would say it was because of ideology – i.e. the spy defected to them because he "believed" in "democracy" or socialism – depending on the case. ..."
"... And in order to discredit their own spies when they defected to the other side – they would say that they did it for money, because they were greedy and that they betrayed "democracy" or socialism ..."
"... The other crucial role that spies usually play is that they allow the adversaries to keep technological balance via industrial espionage. By transferring top military secrets, they don't allow any side to gain crucial strategic advantage that might encourage them to do something foolish – like start a nuclear war. Prime example of this were probably the Rosenbergs – who helped USSR close the nuclear weapons gap with US and kept the world in a shaky nuclear arms balance. ..."
"... Profound analysis by Mr. Shamir. It confirms that one of the important reasons for the decline of freemasonry is the monopolization of political conspiracy by the intelligence services. Who needs the lodge when you have the CIA. ..."
"... Spooks are everywhere, from secretaries "losing" important communications to CNN news anchors roleplaying with crisis actors, but they are at their most powerful when they are appointed to powerful positions. President Trump's National Security Advisor is a spook and he does what he wants. ..."
"... John le Carre described it perfectly in "A Perfect Spy". The spooks form their own country. They are only loyal to themselves. ..."
"... A global supra-powerful, organized and united, privately directed, publicly backed society of high technology robin hood_mercenary_spooks who conduct sub-legal "scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back [in the nation of the other] routines"; who ignore duty to country, its constitutions, its laws and human rights. The are evil, global acting, high technology nomads with a monopoly on extortion and terror. ..."
"... Your statement "spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other countries than to their fellow citizens" fails makes clear the importance of containment-of-citizen access to information. Nation states are armed, rule making structures that invent propaganda and control access to information. Information containment and filtering is the essence of the political and economic power of a national leader and it is more import to the evil your article addresses. ..."
"... Control of the media is 50 times more important than control of the government? Nearly all actions of consequence are intended to drain the governed masses and such efforts can only be successful if the lobbying, false-misleading mind controlling privately owned (92% own by just 6 entities) centrally directed media can effectively control the all information environments. ..."
"... While understanding the mechanics is helpful don't neglect the purpose. Why is more important than how. The why is control. They don't care what you believe, but only what you do. You can be on the left, right, mainstream, or fringe and they won't care as long as you eat what they serve. Take a minute to think about what they want you to do and strongly consider not doing it. ..."
Conspiratorially-minded writers envisaged the Shadow World Government as a board of evil sages surrounded by the financiers and
cinema moguls. That would be bad enough; in infinitely worse reality, our world is run by the Junior Ganymede that went berserk.
It is not a government, but a network, like freemasonry of old, and it consists chiefly of treacherous spies and pens-for-hire, two
kinds of service personnel, that collected a lot of data and tools of influence, and instead of serving their masters loyally, had
decided to lead the world in the direction they prefer.
German Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the last head of the Abwehr, Hitler's Military Intelligence, had been such a spy with political
ambitions. He supported Hitler as the mighty enemy of Communism; on a certain stage he came to conclusion that the US will do the
job better and switched to the Anglo-American side. He was uncovered and executed for treason. His colleague General Reinhard Gehlen
also betrayed his Führer and had switched to the American side. After the war, he continued his war against Soviet Russia, this time
for CIA instead of Abwehr.
The spies are treacherous by their nature. They contact people who betrayed their countries; they work under cover, pretending
to be somebody else; for them the switch of loyalty is as usual and normal as the gender change operation for a Moroccan doctor who
is doing that 8 to 5 every day. They mix with foreign spies, they kill people with impunity; they break every law, human or divine.
They are extremely dangerous if they do it for their own country. They are infinitely more dangerous if they work for themselves
and still keep their institutional capabilities and international network.
Recently we had a painful reminding of their treacherous nature. Venezuela's top spy, the former director of the Bolivarian National
Intelligence Service (Sebin), Manuel Cristopher Figuera , had switched sides during the last coup attempt and escaped abroad
as the coup failed. He discovered that his membership on the Junior Ganymede of the spooks is more important for him than his duty
to his country and its constitution.
Within America, the alphabet agencies from NSA to CIA to FBI had betrayed their country as obviously as Figuera did, though
they didn't run away, yet. Our colleagues Mike
Whitney and Philip Giraldi described
the conspiracy organised by John Brennan of CIA with active participation of FBI's James Comey, to regime-change the US. In
the conspiracy, foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, played an important role. As by law, these spies aren't
allowed to operate on their home ground, they go into you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back routine. The CIA spies in England
and passes the results to the British Intelligence. MI6 spies in the US and passes the results to CIA. They became integrated to
unbelievable extent in the worldwide network of spies.
It is not the Deep State anymore; it is world spooks who had united against their legitimate masters. Instead of staying loyal
to their country, the spooks betrayed their countries. They are not only strictly-for-cash – they think they know better what is
good for you. In a way, they are a new incarnation of the
Cecil Rhodes Society . Democratically-elected politicians
and statesmen have to obey them or meet their displeasure, as Corbyn and Trump did.
Everywhere, in the US, the UK, and Russia, the spooks became too powerful to handle. The CIA stood behind assassination of
JFK and tried to take down Trump. The British Intelligence undermined Jeremy Corbyn, after assisting the CIA in pushing for the Iraq
war. They created the Steele Dossier, invented the Skripal hoax and had brought Russia and the West to the brink of nuclear war.
Russian spooks are in a special relations mode with the global network – for many years. In Russia, persistent rumours claim the
perilous Perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev had been designed and initiated by the KGB chief (1967 – 1982)
Yuri Andropov . He and his appointees
dismantled the socialist state and prepared the takeover of 1991 in the interests of the One World project.
Andropov (who had stepped into Brezhnev's shoes in 1982 and died in 1984) had advanced Gorbachev and his architect of glasnost,
Alexander Yakovlev . Andropov
also promoted the arch-traitor KGB General Oleg Kalugin
to head its counter-intelligence. Later, Kalugin betrayed his country, escaped to the US and delivered all Russian spies he knew
of to the FBI hands.
In late 1980s-early 1990s, the KGB, originally the guarding dog of the Russian working class, had betrayed its Communist masters
and switched to work for the Network. But for their betrayal, Gorbachev would not be able to destroy his country so fast: the KGB
neutralised or misinformed the Communist leadership.
They allowed Chernobyl to explode; they permitted a German pilot to land on the Red Square – this was used by Gorbachev as an
excuse to sack the whole lot of patriotic generals. The KGB people were active in subverting other socialist states, too. They executed
the Romanian leader Ceausescu and his wife; they brought down the GDR, the socialist Germany; they plotted with Yeltsin against Gorbachev
and with Gorbachev against Romanov. As the result of their plotting, the USSR fell apart.
The KGB plotters of 1991 had thought that post-Communist Russia would be treated by the West like the prodigal son, with a fattened
calf being slaughtered for the welcome feast. To their disappointment, the stupid bastards discovered that their country was to play
the part of the fattened calf at the feast, and they were turned from unseen rulers into billionaires' bodyguards. Years later, Vladimir
Putin came to power in Russia with the blessing of the world spooks and bankers, but being too independent a man to submit, he took
his country into its present nationalist course, trying to regain some lost ground. The dissatisfied spooks supported him.
Only recently Putin began to trim the wild growth of his own intelligence service, the FSB. It is possible the cautious president
had been alerted by the surprising insistence of the Western media that the alleged attempt on Skripal and other visible cases had
been attributed to the GRU, the relatively small Russian Military Intelligence, while the much bigger FSB had been forgotten. The
head of
FSB cybercrime department had been arrested and sentenced for lengthy term of imprisonment, and two FSB colonels had been arrested
as the search of their premises revealed immense
amounts of cash , both Russian and foreign currency. Such piles of roubles and dollars could be assembled only for an attempt
to change the regime, as it was demanded by the Network.
In the Ukraine, the heads of their state security, SBU had plotted against the last legitimate president Mr Victor Yanukovych.
They helped to organise and run the Maidan 2014 manifestations and misled their President, until he was forced to escape abroad.
The Maidan manifestations could be compared with the Yellow Vests movement; however, Macron, an appointee of the Network, had support
of his spies, and stayed in power, while Yanukovych had been betrayed and overthrown.
In the US, the spooks allowed Donald Trump to become the leading Republican candidate, for they thought he would certainly lose
to Mme Clinton. Surprisingly, he had won, and since then, this man who was advanced as an easy prey, as a buffoon, had been hunted
by the spooks-and-scribes freemasonry.
You'd ask me, were they so stupid that they believed their own propaganda of inevitable Clinton's victory? Yes, they were
and are stupid. They are no sages, evil or benevolent. My main objection to the conspiracy theorists is that they usually view the
plotters as omniscient and all-powerful. They are too greedy to be all-powerful, and they are too silly to be omniscient.
Their knowledge of official leaders' faults gives them their feeling of power, but this knowledge can be translated into actual
control only for weak-minded men. Strong leaders do not submit easily. Putin has had his quota of imprudent or outright criminal
acts in his past, but he never allowed the blackmailers to dictate him their agenda. Netanyahu, another strong man of modern politics,
also had managed to survive blackmail. Meanwhile, Trump defeated all attempts to unseat him, though his enemies had used his alleged
lack of delicacy in relation to women, blacks and Jews to its utmost. He waded through the deep pond of Russiagate like Gulliver.
But he has to purge the alphabet agencies to reach safety.
In Russia, the problem is acute. Many Russian spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other
countries than to their fellow citizens. There is a freemasonic quality in their camaraderie. Such a quality could be commendable
in soldiers after the war is over, but here the war is going on. Russian spooks are particularly besotted with their declared enemies;
apparently it is the Christian quality of the Russian soul, but a very annoying one.
When Snowden reached Moscow after his daring escape from Hong Kong, the Russian TV screened a discussion that I participated in,
among journalists, members of parliament and ex-spies. The Russian spooks said that Snowden is a traitor; a person who betrayed his
agency can't be trusted and should be sent to the US in shackles. They felt they belong to the Spy World, with its inner bond, while
their loyalty to Russia was a distant second.
During recent visit of Mike Pompeo to Sochi, the head of SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Mr Sergey Naryshkin
proposed the State Secretary Mike Pompeo, the ex-CIA director,
to expand contacts between Russian and US special services at a higher level. He clarified that he actively interacted with Pompeo
during the period when he was the head of the CIA. Why would he need contacts with his adversary? It would be much better to avoid
contacts altogether.
Even president Putin, who is first of all a Russian nationalist (or a patriot, as they say), who has granted Snowden asylum in
Moscow at a high price of seriously worsening relations with Obama's administration, even Putin has told Stone that Snowden shouldn't
have leaked the documents the way he did. "If he didn't like anything at his work he should have simply resigned, but he went further",
a response proving he didn't completely freed himself from the spooks' freemasonry.
While the spooks plot, the scribes justify their plots. Media is also a weapon, and a mighty one. In Richard Wagner's opera
Lohengrin , the protagonist is defeated by the smear campaign in the media. Despite his miraculous arrival, despite his glorious
victory, the evil witch succeeds to poison minds of the hero's wife and of the court. The pen can counter the sword. When the two
are integrated, as in the union of spooks and scribes, it is too dangerous tool to leave intact.
In many countries of Europe, editorial international policies had been outsourced to the spooky Atlantic Council, the Washington-based
think tank. The Atlantic Council is strongly connected with NATO alliance and with Brussels bureaucracy, the tools of control over
Europe. Another tool is
The
Integrity Initiative , where the difference between spies and journalists is
blurred
. And so is the difference between the left and the right. The left and the right-wing media use different arguments, surprisingly
leading to the same bottom line, because both are tools of warfare for the same Network.
In 1930s, they were divided. The German and the British agents pulled and pushed in the opposite directions. The Russian military
became so friendly with the Germans, that at a certain time, Hitler believed the Russian generals would side with him against their
own leader. The Russian spooks were befriended by the Brits, and had tried to push Russia to confront Hitler. The cautious Marshal
Stalin had purged the Red Army's pro-German Generals, and the NKVD's pro-British spooks, and delayed the outbreak of hostilities
as much as he could. Now, however, the secret services' cohesion and integration increased to the next level, making it difficult
to deal with them.
If they are so powerful, integrated and united, shouldn't we throw a towel in the ring and surrender? Hell, no! Their success
is their undoing. They plot, but Allah is the best plotter, – our Muslim friends say. Indeed, when they succeed to suborn a party,
the people vote with their feet. The Brexit is the case to consider. The Network wanted to undermine the Brexit; so they neutralised
Corbyn by the antisemitism pursuit while May had made all she could to sabotage the Brexit while calling for it in public. Awfully
clever of them – but the British voter responded with dropping both established parties. So their clever plot misfired.
People are fickle and not always know what is good for them; there are many demagogues to mislead the crowd. And still, elected
legitimate officials should have precedence in governing, while non-elected ones should obey – and it means the Network spooks and
media men should know their place.
How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage
to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy?
Spymasters are usually renowned for their inscrutability and for playing their cards close to their vests.
These characters have indulged in an orgy of highly conspicuous partisan political meddling and ranting that has created
the strong public impression that they engaged in an attempted coup to overthrow a sitting American president on the basis of
a frame-up that was largely fueled by Russian disinformation.
Brennan in particular: can you imagine any previous CIA director comporting himself in this manner? Throwing all caution
to the winds? Inconceivable. Brennan, Comey and Clapper have inflicted serious damage on the reputation of the CIA, FBI and ODNI.
Forthcoming books will no doubt get into all the remarkable and bizarre details.
Donald Trump has demonstrated the ability to troll and goad many of his opponents into a state of imbecility. It's a negotiating
tactic -- knock them off balance, provoke them to lose control. No matter how smart they are, some people take the bait.
I am sitting here pointing to my nose. Spies run the world – contemporary history in a nutshell. A few provisos:
– It's not just illegal surveillance and blackmail that gives the spies power, it's impunity for even the gravest crimes.
If you don't get the message of blackmail you can be tortured or shot, with a bullet like JFK and RFK and Reagan, or with illegal
biological weapons like Daschel and Leahy. Institutionalized impunity stares us in the face from US state papers.
– It's not that CIA and other neo-Gestapos escaped control. They were designed from inception for totalitarian control.
The one poor bastard in Congress who pointed that out, Tydings, had McCarthy sicced on him for his cheek. CIA is not out of control;
it's firmly IN control.
– There is a crucial difference between US and Russian spies. Russians can go over the head of their government to the world.
That's the only effective check on state criminal enterprise like CIA. Article 17 of the Russian Constitution says "in the Russian
Federation rights and freedoms of person and citizen are recognized and guaranteed pursuant to the generally recognized principles
and norms of international law and in accordance with this Constitution." Article 18 states that rights and freedoms of the person
and citizen are directly applicable, which prevents the kind of bad-faith tricks the USA pulls, like declaring "non-self executing"
treaties, or making legally void reservations, declarations, understandings, and provisos to screw you out of your rights. Article
46(3) guarantees citizens a constitutional right to appeal to inter-State bodies for the protection of human rights and freedoms
if internal legal redress has been exhausted. Ratified international treaties including the ICCPR supersede any domestic legislation
stipulating otherwise.
Isn't it just collusion that holds certain elite groups together, including in some businesses where a lot of chicanery goes on.
The most important thing is to be in on it as one of them, not as a person who can be trusted not to say anything, but as one
of the gang. It's exactly how absenteeism-friendly offices full of crony parents with crony-parent managers work.
The only problem for the guy at the tippy top is what would happen if such a tight group turned on him / her? Maybe, some leaders
see the value in protecting a few brave individuals, like Snowden, letting any coup-stirring spooks know that some people are
watching the Establishment's rights violators, too. Those with technical knowledge have more capacity than most to do it or, at
least, to understand how it works.
In a country founded on individual liberties, including Fourth Amendment privacy rights that were protected by less greedy
generations, the US should have elected leaders that put the US Constitution first, but that is too much to ask in an era when
the top dogs in business & government are all colluding for money.
In Russia, persistent rumours claim the perilous Perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev had been designed and initiated by the
KGB chief (1967 – 1982) Yuri Andropov.
FWIW, I have heard the exact same thing from Russian commenters myself. Some have insisted that, if Andropov had lived long
enough, he would have carried glasnost and perestroika himself.
Spies are loathsome bunch, with questionable loyalties and personal integrity. But I believe that overall they play a positive
role. They play a positive role because they help adversaries gain insight into their adversary's activities.
If it wasn't for the spies, paranoia about what the other side is doing can get out of hand and cause wrong actions to take
place. The problem with the spies is also that no one knows how much they can be trusted and on whose side they are really on.
It was funny during the Cold war (the original one) – whenever each side unveiled that a spy from the other side has defected
to them – they would say it was because of ideology – i.e. the spy defected to them because he "believed" in "democracy" or socialism
– depending on the case.
And in order to discredit their own spies when they defected to the other side – they would say that they did it for money,
because they were greedy and that they betrayed "democracy" or socialism.
The other crucial role that spies usually play is that they allow the adversaries to keep technological balance via industrial
espionage. By transferring top military secrets, they don't allow any side to gain crucial strategic advantage that might encourage
them to do something foolish – like start a nuclear war. Prime example of this were probably the Rosenbergs – who helped USSR
close the nuclear weapons gap with US and kept the world in a shaky nuclear arms balance.
Profound analysis by Mr. Shamir. It confirms that one of the important reasons for the decline of freemasonry is the monopolization
of political conspiracy by the intelligence services. Who needs the lodge when you have the CIA.
An aspect of the rule of spies that Mr. Shamir does not touch on is the legitimization of this rule through popular culture.
This started with the James Bond novels and movies and by now has become ubiquitous. Spies and assassins are the heroes of the
masses. While secrecy is still needed for tactical reasons in the case of specific operations, overall secrecy is not needed nor
even desirable. So you have thugs like Pompeo actually boasting of their villainy before audiences of college students at Texas
A&M and you have the Mossad supporting the publication of the book Rise and Kill First which is an extensive account of their
world-wide assassination policy. They have the power; now they want the perks that go with it, including being treated like rock
stars.
dear mr Shamir, the criminals are not only stupid but also utterly wicked. they will be stricken down in the twinkling of the
eye and will cry out why God? all the righteous will shout for joy and give thanks to the Almighty for judging Babylon. woe unto
them! they will have no place to hide or run to.
Ezekiel 9 (NKJV)
The Wicked Are Slain
9 Then He called out in my hearing with a loud voice, saying, "Let those who have charge over the city draw near, each with a
deadly weapon in his hand." 2 And suddenly six men came from the direction of the upper gate, which faces north, each with his
battle-ax in his hand. One man among them was clothed with linen and had a writer's inkhorn at his side. They went in and stood
beside the bronze altar.
3 Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub, where it had been, to the threshold of the temple. And He
called to the man clothed with linen, who had the writer's inkhorn at his side; 4 and the Lord said to him, "Go through the midst
of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and cry over all the abominations
that are done within it."
5 To the others He said in my hearing, "Go after him through the city and kill; do not let your eye spare, nor have any pity.
6 Utterly slay old and young men, maidens and little children and women; but do not come near anyone on whom is the mark; and
begin at My sanctuary." So they began with the elders who were before the temple. 7 Then He said to them, "Defile the temple,
and fill the courts with the slain. Go out!" And they went out and killed in the city.
8 So it was, that while they were killing them, I was left alone; and I fell on my face and cried out, and said, "Ah, Lord
God! Will You destroy all the remnant of Israel in pouring out Your fury on Jerusalem?"
9 Then He said to me, "The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great, and the land is full of bloodshed,
and the city full of perversity; for they say, 'The Lord has forsaken the land, and the Lord does not see!' 10 And as for Me also,
My eye will neither spare, nor will I have pity, but I will recompense their deeds on their own head."
11 Just then, the man clothed with linen, who had the inkhorn at his side, reported back and said, "I have done as You commanded
me."
E Michael Jones was just warning President Trump about the possibility of this in the Straits of Hormuz.
https://youtu.be/iIm3WuJAVEE?t=272
Spooks are everywhere, from secretaries "losing" important communications to CNN news anchors roleplaying with crisis actors,
but they are at their most powerful when they are appointed to powerful positions. President Trump's National Security Advisor
is a spook and he does what he wants.
John le Carre described it perfectly in "A Perfect Spy". The spooks form their own country. They are only loyal to themselves.
@Antares that's because the Mossad
isn't like "our" spy agencies. it's closer to the old paradigm of the hashishim or true assassins. Mossad "agents" don't gad around
wearing dark glasses and tapping phones; they run proper deep cover operations. "sleepers" is a term used in the USA. they have
jobs. they look "normal". They integrate
Do spies run the world? No not really, bankers run the world.
Bankers constitute most of the deep state in the US/UK in particular and most of Europe. It is the bankers/deep state which
control the intelligence agencies. The ethnicity of a hefty proportion of said bankers is plain to see for anyone with functioning
critical faculties. How else can a tiny country in the middle east have such influence in the US? How else do we explain why 2/3
of the UK parliament are "friends of Israel" How come financial institutions can commit felonies and no one does jail time? why
is Israel allowed to commit war crimes and break international law with total impunity? who got bailed out of their gambling debts
at the expense of inflicting "austerity" on most of the western world?
How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage
to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy?
A global supra-powerful, organized and united, privately directed, publicly backed society of high technology robin hood_mercenary_spooks
who conduct sub-legal "scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back [in the nation of the other] routines"; who ignore duty to country,
its constitutions, its laws and human rights. The are evil, global acting, high technology nomads with a monopoly on extortion
and terror.
Since winning, Trump has been hunted by the spooks-and-scribes freemasonry. <fallacy is that Trump could have gained the assistence
of every American, had Trump just used his powers to declassify all secret information and make it available to the public, instead
he chases Assange, and continues to conduct the affairs of his office in secret.
Propaganda preys on belief.. it is more powerful than an atomic weapon.. when the facts are hidden or when the facts are changed,
distorted or destroyed.
Your statement "spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other countries than to their
fellow citizens" fails makes clear the importance of containment-of-citizen access to information. Nation states are armed, rule
making structures that invent propaganda and control access to information. Information containment and filtering is the essence
of the political and economic power of a national leader and it is more import to the evil your article addresses.
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/08/josh-gottheimer-democrats-yemen/
<i wrote IRT to the article, that contents appearing in private media supported monopoly powered corporations and distributed
to the public, direct the use of military and the willingness of soldiers of 22 different countries.
Control of the media is 50 times more important than control of the government? Nearly all actions of consequence are intended
to drain the governed masses and such efforts can only be successful if the lobbying, false-misleading mind controlling privately
owned (92% own by just 6 entities) centrally directed media can effectively control the all information environments.
I am bothered by you article because it looks to be Trumped weighted and failes to make clear it is these secret apolitical,
human rights abusers, that direct the contents of the media distributed articles that appear in the privately owmed, media distributed
to the public. Also not explained is how the cost of advertising is shared by the monopoly powered corporations, and it is that
advertising that is the source of support that keeps the fake news in business, the nation state propaganda in line, and the support
of robin -hood terror.
Monopoly powered global corporation advertising funds the fake and misleading private media, that is why the open internet
has been shut in tight. In order for the evil, global acting, high technology nomads to continue their extortion and terror activities
they need the media, its their only real weapon. I have never meet a member of any of the twenty two agencies that was not a trained,
certified mental case terrorist.
I think the interplay between the spooks and scribes warrants a deeper explanation. Covert action refers to anything in which
the author can disclaim his responsibility, ie it looks like someone else or something else. The handler in a political operation
cannot abuse his agent because the agent is the actor. The handler in an intelligence gathering operation can abuse his agent
because the agent merely enables action.
The political operations in this case are propaganda. The Congress of Cultural Freedom is the most clearly described one to
date. Propaganda is necessary in any mass society to ensure that voters care about the right issues, the right way, at the right
time. Propaganda can be true, false, or a mix of the two. Black propaganda deals in falsehoods, ie the Steele Dossier. Black propaganda
works best when it enables a pre-planned operation, but it pollutes the intelligence gathering process with disinformation.
Intelligence gathering is colloquially called investigative reporting. If anyone knows about Gary Webb, Alan Frankovich, or
Michael Hastings they know you can't really do that job well for very long. So how do the old timers last so long? It's a back
and forth. The reporter brings all of his information on a subject to his intelligence source (handler). The source then says,
"print this, print that, sit on that, and since you've been a good boy here's a little something you didn't know." The true role
of the investigative reporter is to conduct counterintelligence and package it as a limited hangout.
While understanding the mechanics is helpful don't neglect the purpose. Why is more important than how. The why is control.
They don't care what you believe, but only what you do. You can be on the left, right, mainstream, or fringe and they won't care
as long as you eat what they serve. Take a minute to think about what they want you to do and strongly consider not doing it.
@Sean McBride And now Trump should
have then all rounded up and hung from the trees in the front of the Whitehouse. Anything less should be seen as encouragement.
The worst among us rule over the rest of us. As Plato said, this needs to change. How to do that? We don't know, but we desperately
need to find out ..
Obama was a very effective promoter of what might be called the "globalist" agenda. He of course didn't invent it but did appoint
those three.
Wayne Madsen gave a convincing account in his speculation that both Obama's parent's were CIA operatives. So it's "all
the family" and in the details one might conclude with the author that indeed "spies run the world."
Most of now-former special counsel Robert Mueller 's public
statement to the press last week seemed to fall under the category of "Fair enough." After all, the man did nearly two years of work,
he kept largely silent throughout, and he alternately was called a hero or a dog.
So the day Mueller resigns, he chooses to make a
fairly brief statement putting a button on all of it, and at the same time declining to take any questions, before gliding back
into private life.
But there's at least one comment Mueller made that nags at me. It's when he said, "If we had had confidence that the president
clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so."
Mueller must have had his reasons for shading his commentary in that way rather than in the other direction: If they'd found adequate
evidence to implicate Trump in a crime, or even "collusion," they would have said that, too.
The statement Mueller chose to give carries with it an implication that his team looked for evidence of
President Trump 's innocence but simply could not find it.
With that in mind, I thought of a short list of questions I'd like to ask Mueller, if ever permitted to do so:
What witnesses did you interview and what evidence did you collect in an attempt to exonerate Trump or prove him not guilty?
(I believe the answer would be, "None. It's not the job of a special counsel or prosecutor to do so." Therefore, was Mueller's
comment appropriate?)
Does it concern you that the FBI claimed "
collection tool failure " in
stating that 19,000 text messages between former FBI employees Lisa Page and Peter Strozk had been deleted and were unavailable
for review by the Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general? Is it worth investigating how the inspector general was
able to recover the messages , when the FBI said it could not? Does the FBI lack the technical expertise, or the will? Isn't
it a serious issue that should be addressed, either way?
Along the same lines, do you think it strange or inappropriate that the DOJ
wiped text messages between Strzok and Page from their special counsel cell phones? The deletions happened shortly after they
were ejected from the team and before the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General could review them -- at a time when all had been
informed that their actions were under review. Did technicians attempt to recover the messages? Were the circumstances of the
deletions thoroughly investigated?
When did you first learn that the FBI and DOJ signed off on and presented unverified, anti-Trump political opposition research
to a court
to get wiretaps on an innocent U.S. citizen? Doesn't this violate the
strict procedures enacted while you were FBI director,
intended to ensure that only verified information is seen by the court? Who will be held accountable for any lapses in this arena?
Do these issues point to larger problems within our intelligence community, in terms of how officials operate? Does that put
you in a position where there's a conflict of interest since you were in charge of the FBI when
prior surveillance abuses were identified by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court? Did you consider disclosing this
potential conflict and stepping aside, or referring any issues that overlap with your interests?
What steps did you take after Strzok and Page were exposed, to try to learn if other investigators on your team likewise were
conflicted? Did you take action to segregate the work of these agents and any potential biases they injected into your investigation
and team? Wasn't their behavior a beacon to call you to follow an investigative trail in another direction?
Did you become concerned about foreign influence beyond Russia when you learned that a foreign national, Christopher Steele,
claimed to have obtained opposition research from Russian officials connected to Putin -- and that the FBI and DOJ presented this
material to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain wiretap approvals?
Were you aware that some Democratic Party officials acknowledged
coordinating with Ukraine in 2016 to undermine Trump and his associates and to leak disparaging information to the news media?
Is it true that you
applied
for the job as FBI director but Trump rejected you, the day before then-Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed you
as special counsel to investigate Trump? Does that put you in a potentially conflicted position?
Do you think Donald Trump is guilty of a crime? If so, then do you believe he is perhaps the most clever criminal of our time
since he was able to conceal the evidence despite all the government wiretaps, investigations, informants, surveillance and hundreds
of interviews spanning several years?
Clearly, Robert Mueller hopes he has closed the book on his public statements about his investigation. If he has his way, he will
not discuss the case further on the record. But his parting shot raised plenty of questions.
1) You said DoJ policy prevented you from indicting a sitting president. Did anything prevent you from indicting any co-conspirators
in any obstruction efforts the president may have taken? Did anything prevent you from naming the president as an unindicted co-conspirator
if there were any obstruction?
2) You said that if you had found clear evidence the president was innocent of collusion or obstruction you would have said
so in the report. Would you have done the same if you found clear evidence the president did collude or obstruct even though you
were barred from indicting him?
3) Your report says Russian intelligence hacked into DNC servers and stole emails and then leaked the stolen emails through
Wikileaks in order to influence the election. Did your investigators ever examine the DNC servers? Did FBI investigators ever
examine the DNC servers? Did employess of any other government agency examin the servers? Did anybody other than a firm hired
by the DNC do a forensic examination of the DNC servers? What evidence do you have that the DNC servers were hacked? And what
evidence do you have that it was by Russian intelligence? How can you be certain that Wikileaks source was not Seth Rich or some
other disgruntled DNC employee?
4) Would you like to talk about Whitey Bulger you slimy son of a bitch?
She ignored the two most important questions of all: (1) that Mueller never confirmed that "Russians" hacked the DNC server
because they never looked at it and instead relied on CrowdStrike to tell them it was "Russians" and (2) that Mueller never confirmed
that "Russians" uploaded HillDog's, the DNC's and Podesta's emails to Wikileaks. Yet Mueller reaches these 2 conclusions in his
Report.
The Report is a total farce when it reaches the foregoing two conclusions as the basis for "the Russians interfering in our
elections" absent any evidentiary proof of the same admissible in a court of law. Would be hearsay if they tried to introduce
those two facts into evidence at a trial.
One of the oldest legal tactics, force your adversary to prove a negative, prove an event did not occur, prove a crime was
not committed. Won't work at bench trials, but in front of a jury of "peers" it stands a chance. Especially when you have the
dem congress/MSM-industrial complex willing to parrot the story.
In a different time, Mueller would be shredded in the editorials: two years, unlimited resources, and all you produce is an
insinuation? FU, bob.
Yes. Judge Sullivan alluded to it at the time of the Flynn sentencing. Since Muellers' hands were deliberately tied from
investigating the actual crimes of a treasonous nature - vis a vis the laundered money from the turco-talmudic gangsters -
he could not bring that element of the serious and flagrant abuses both pre and post election into the proceedings.
The "Steele Dossier" was a joint effort of Uk/USA intelligence operatives who colluded with several parties - including
the Clintons, to muddy the waters according to the plans of Urusalem.
Rhetorical. Ignore
When it became clear that the "Russian" government as such operates as a network of mafiyas doing for.... and receiving
from the state... favors which are more often than not part of the strategy of a criminal network known as Chabad. That later
party is the partner in 'collusion'... which took place in the interests of Urusalem.
Peripheral to the investigation.
Crimes have been committed by both Democrat and Republican operatives. Only those which are part of the specific mandate
of the SC were investigated.
Certain specific persons were placed "off limits" to the investigators. All of whom share in common a degree of allegiance
to/control by Urusalem
Seth Rich is alive and well, living in a small beacon of democracy in the middle east. The investigation was tasked with
investigating false flag operations staged by parties whose names can never be mentioned.
Folks, the fact that FISA courts are even "legal" on the books is so far outside the boundaries of fair play I don't even know
where to start. How is this not a civil war starting offense? We're fucked folks.
I'd add two more questions, if slightly off topic.
Why did you let 4 men rot in prison for murders they did not commit when you had evidence exonerating them and implicating
corrupt FBI agents. I guess that question answers itself.
Why did Whitey Bulger get transferred to a new Federal prison and conveniently murdered - out of the camera's view - just as
Rep. Lynch was seeking to expose the FBI's corrupt handling of informants. I guess that question answers itself too.
These questions are just a start. I would also include: "What sort of punishment should people who try to sponsor a coup to
overthrow a duly elected President be subject to?".
The problem is more complex than just CIA. The Deep state encompass more players and it replaced elected officials (surface
state) while elections now provide mostly function of legitimizing the rule of the Deep State
Notable quotes:
"... The truth is as the world's economy becomes free of the US and its think-tanks, the world gets richer but those of us in the USA who make our living by working and getting paid will become poorer. Our money will not be able to cover for a good lifestyle. ..."
"... Its sad to see the disastrous policies of the CIA's economic unit has to be paid by the hard working US citizens who only want a good life like everyone else. We did not ask for the CIA, the CIA imposed itself on us, making the decisions without our consent. Now we pay for their disastrous policies by becoming a third world country. ..."
The growth of the USA is going to depend on the ability of the people in government to
disband the Central Intelligence Agency which has become a bottleneck in the progress of the
USA. The USA cannot grow as long as you have such a powerful bottleneck similar to a dictator
with absolute power.
The truth is as the world's economy becomes free of the US and its think-tanks, the world
gets richer but those of us in the USA who make our living by working and getting paid will
become poorer. Our money will not be able to cover for a good lifestyle.
Its sad to see the disastrous policies of the CIA's economic unit has to be paid by the
hard working US citizens who only want a good life like everyone else. We did not ask for the
CIA, the CIA imposed itself on us, making the decisions without our consent. Now we pay for
their disastrous policies by becoming a third world country.
We are being left behind .... China is going to keep growing... there is nothing the USA
can do to stop her now. If war is used, the USA will lose, if economics of scale is compared
the USA loses. China is a giant with an almost monolithic population of over one billion. Can
you imagine what an educated country with over one billion people can do???
The USA has a lot of blacks, hispanics, asians, Arabs etc, we are not a single group of
people. While diversity is a good thing when you have a lot of money to keep everyone happy,
poverty will be the enermy of diversity. People will be at each other's jugulars fighting for
the little scraps of wealth left behind after the big and powerful grab all they can.
We are into a very hard future in the USA.... no thanks to the silly Central Intelligence
Agency. For heavens sake, cant the CIA learn from Chinese or Russian intelligence???? How do
the intelligence agencies of the Chinese or Russians operate? Learn instead of sitting on the
silly high horse thinking US intelligence is anything but primitive and third rate!
Now the entire USA has to pay for the silly inteliigence agencies which keep expanding
with acronyms like rats!
The systemwide US Russophobia that reached its nadir with Russiagate has created a "catastrophe" for both domestic politics and
foreign relations that threatens the future of the American system, professor Stephen Cohen
tells RT.
War with Russia could easily break out if the US insists on pursuing the policy of " demonization " that birthed Russiagate instead
of returning to detente and cooperation, New York University professor emeritus of Russian history Stephen Cohen argues on Chris
Hedges' On Contact. While NATO deliberately antagonized post-Soviet Russia by expanding up to its borders, the US deployed missile
defense systems along those borders after scrapping an arms treaty, leaving President Vladimir Putin devoid of " illusions " about
the goodwill of the West – but armed with " nuclear missiles that can evade and elude any missile defense system ."
" Now is the time for a serious, new arms control agreement. What do we get? Russiagate instead ."
Cohen believes the conspiracy theory – which remains front-page news in US media despite being thoroughly discredited, both by
independent investigators and last month by special counsel Robert Mueller's report – is the work of the CIA and its former director,
John Brennan, who are dead set against any kind of cooperation with Russia. Attorney General William Barr, who is investigating
the FBI over how the 2016 counterintelligence probe began, should take a look at Brennan and his agency, Cohen says.
" If our intelligence services are off the reservation to the point that they can first try to destroy a presidential candidate
and then a president we need to know it ," Cohen says.
" This is the worst scandal in American history. It's the worst, at least, since the Civil War ."
And the damage wrought by this " catastrophe " hasn't stopped at the US border.
The idea that Trump is a Russian agent has been devastating to " our own institutions, to the presidency, to our electoral system,
to Congress, to the American mainstream media, not to mention the damage it's done to American-Russian relations, the damage it
has done to the way Russians, both elite Russians and young Russians, look at America today , " Cohen declares.
"Russiagate is one of the greatest new threats to national security. I have five listed in the book. Russia and China aren't
on there. Russiagate is number one."
And the potential damage it could still cause is enormous.
Amazing, 30 million dollars spent for an investigation that produced nothing and some believe that Russiagate is still reality.
This paranoia is unbelievable except for a psychotic public - pathetic.
If the neo-con/Nazi assholes embedded in the M.I.C. and the US government continue down this road of demonizing and antagonizing
Russia it is not going to end well for the people of the US. Putin and the rest of the Russian leadership have made it crystal
clear that they are only going to be pushed so far. The problem is when Russia snaps they are going to do their damdest to try
to cut the head of the snake off in one shot. There's a good chance they could actually pull that off.
OPSW proved to be a gang of a despicable, completely bought by the USA bottomfeeders. Looks like they are now a part
of "Intergity Initiative"
At this point credibility of the USA and UK experts on the topic is not zero, it is negative: they systematically generate
false flags.
Truth be told after Skripals affair the level of credibility of the UK government and expects is far below zero in any case.
This is just a gang of despicable warmongers.
Notable quotes:
"... If SST readers are confused by OPCW's constantly shifting explanations for why the Final Report on the Douma incident excluded the Engineering Assessment, they're not the only ones. ..."
"... Unfortunately for whoever thought up this defence, it is explicitly contradicted by both the Interim Report (published last July) and the Final Report, which state that the objective of the engineering studies was to evaluate how the cylinders arrived in position. ..."
Comments on official response to the release of the Engineering
Assessment of the Douma cylinders Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Jake Mason, Piers
Robinson
This post comments on the response to our
release of the Executive Summary of the Engineering Assessment of the Douma cylinders on 13
May 2018. All emphases in quoted passages are added by us. After OPCW had confirmed the
document to be genuine, the story was covered extensively by Russian media.
An informed commentary by Professor
Hiroyuki Aoyama in Tokyo has been published on Yahoo News's Japanese site. The only coverage in
western corporate media has been by Peter Hitchens in the
Mail on Sunday , Robert Fisk in the
Independent and Tucker Carlson on
Fox .
Other journalists who have been in
touch with us have told us that their stories were spiked by editors. As expected, the story
has reached much larger numbers through websites and videos that have disseminated it.
2
OPCW's response to the release of the document
2.1 Official response
In an email dated 11 May and shown to us, Deepti Choubey, the head of OPCW Public Affairs,
wrote:
Thank you for reaching out to us. It is exclusively through the Fact-Finding Mission, set
up in 2014, that the OPCW establishes facts surrounding allegations of use of toxic chemicals
for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic. On 1 March 2019, the OPCW has issued its
final and only valid official report, signed by the Director-General, regarding the incident
that took place in Douma, Syrian Arab Republic, on 7 April 2018. The document you shared with
us is not part of any of the material produced by the FFM. The individual mentioned in the
document has never been a member of the FFM .
The OPCW establishes facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals for
hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic through the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM), which
was set up in 2014. The OPCW Technical Secretariat reaffirms that the FFM complies with
established methodologies and practices to ensure the integrity of its findings. The FFM
takes into account all available, relevant, and reliable information and analysis within the
scope of its mandate to determine its findings. Per standard practice, the FFM draws
expertise from different divisions across the Technical Secretariat as needed. All
information was taken into account, deliberated, and weighed when formulating the final
report regarding the incident in Douma, Syrian Arab Republic, on 7 April 2018. On 1 March
2019, the OPCW issued its final report on this incident, signed by the Director-General.
Per OPCW rules and regulations, and in order to ensure the privacy, safety, and security
of personnel, the OPCW does not provide information about individual staff members of the
Technical Secretariat. Pursuant to its established policies and practices, the OPCW Technical
Secretariat is conducting an internal investigation about the unauthorised release of the
document in question. At this time, there is no further public information on this matter and
the OPCW is unable to accommodate requests for interviews.
This was taken as confirmation that the document was genuine.
2.2 Unofficial
briefings
Following OPCW's confirmation on 16 May that the document we had released was genuine, two
individuals in the UK whose communications have supported UK government policy on Syria
favoring regime change – Professor Scott Lucas of Birmingham University, and the former
Guardian journalist Brian Whitaker – began reporting that they had inside information on
how the Engineering Assessment had been excluded from the Final Report.
Henderson was writing what was, in effect, a dissenting assessment from that of most of
the OPCW's team and consultant experts. His findings were considered but were a minority
opinion as final report was written.
He followed this with a remarkably indiscreet
tweet asserting that "I know
how OPCW review process was conducted and what place Henderson's assessment had in it." When
challenged to explain his
connection to OPCW, Lucas did not answer. Hitchens
reported on 24 May that OPCW
Public Affairs had refused to comment on whether Lucas was receiving authorised briefings from
OPCW.
2.2.2 Whitaker
Whitaker was at first more circumspect about his sources,
reporting on 16 May that:
One story circulating in the chemical weapons community (though not confirmed) is that
Henderson had wanted to join the FFM and got rebuffed but was then given permission to do
some investigating on the sidelines of the FFM.
Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat extended Whitaker's version
with:
This reporting by @Brian_Whit on the leaked Douma report that the conspiracy theorists and
chemical weapon denialists are so excited about is consistent with what I'm hearing . Looks
like they all got played by a disgruntled OPCW employee.
In an
article
posted on 24 May, Whitaker was more explicit in reporting the spin of "an informed source" on
the Engineering Assessment.
an informed source has now shed some light on it. The key point here is the FFM's terms of
reference. Its basic role was to establish facts about the alleged attack, and it was not
allowed to apportion blame -- that is the job of the OPCW's newly-created Investigation and
Identification Team (IIT). Although the FFM determined that the cylinders were probably
dropped from the air, the published report (in line with its mandate) omitted any mention of
the obvious implication that they had been dropped by regime aircraft. According to the
informed source, when Henderson's assessment was reviewed there were concerns that it came
too close to attributing responsibility, and thus fell outside the scope of the FFM's
mandate. Whether or not that was the right decision, there was no doubt that Henderson's
assessment did fall within the mandate of the new Investigation and Identification Team. For
that reason, according to the source, he was advised to pass it to the IIT instead -- and he
did so.
Unless this account was entirely fabricated, it could only have come from someone with close
knowledge of how the Final Report had been prepared. A subsequent
tweet from Whitaker on 25 May,
presumably channelling the same source, confirmed that "Henderson and others" had been in
Douma:
Henderson and others did go to Douma to provide temporary support to the FFM, but they
were not official members of the FFM.
2.3 What the channelling of off-the-record briefings tells us
It is likely that (at least on this occasion) Lucas and Whitaker are telling the truth, and
that they have been briefed by someone with close knowledge of how the FFM Final Report was
prepared. If these briefings had not been authorised, OPCW Public Affairs could easily have
responded to Hitchens's question with a standard statement reiterating that "there is no
further public information on this matter" and that this extended to off-the-record briefings.
We would expect OPCW press officers to be reluctant to issue further statements that could
subsequently be shown to be false.
Like cellular biologists who perturb a complex system and measure its outputs, we can infer
from these observations the existence of a pathway. This pathway connects the production of
OPCW reports on alleged chemical attacks in Syria with a network of communicators in the UK who
in different ways have promoted the cause of regime change in Syria since 2012. It is evident
that Lucas and Whitaker are output nodes of this pathway. From August 2012, Whitaker as the
Guardian's Middle East editor
promoted Higgins from obscure beginnings as a blogger to become a widely-cited source on
the Syrian conflict. Whitaker was the first journalist to devote an
article to
attacking the Working Group, in February 2018 when its only collective output had been a brief
blog post.
It is of course possible that OPCW management for some procedural reason was unable to
provide further information on the record, and sought to disseminate an accurate version of
events via off-the-record briefings. But the choice of such highly partisan commentators as
Lucas and Whitaker as channels inevitably calls into question the good faith of whoever
provided these briefings, and undermines any remaining pretence to impartiality on the part of
OPCW management.
2.4 Discrepancies between versions of OPCW's response
An established method in investigative journalism is to compare official versions and to
infer from discrepancies what they are trying to hide. On 11 May OPCW Public Affairs stated
that "The document you shared with us is not part of any of the material produced by the FFM.
The individual mentioned in the document has never been a member of the FFM". After we pointed
out that these two statements were provably false – the external collaboration on the
engineering assessment of the Douma cylinders must have been authorised by OPCW, and Henderson
could hardly have been in Damascus on a tourist visa – they were not repeated on the
record. By 16 May OPCW Public Affairs had formulated a new policy: "Per OPCW rules and
regulations the OPCW does not provide information about individual staff members of the
Technical Secretariat." A more subtle version of Henderson's role was then channelled through
Lucas and Whitaker: "minority opinion", "on the sidelines" and elaborated by Higgins as
"disgruntled OPCW employee"'. Between 16 May and 25 May the story channelled through Whitaker
changed from "Henderson had wanted to join the FFM and got rebuffed but was then given
permission to do some investigating on the sidelines of the FFM." to admitting that "Henderson
and others" were in Douma "to provide temporary support to the FFM".
On 24 May Whitaker's informed source admits that "Henderson's assessment was reviewed" for
the Final Report, no longer attempting to maintain that the Engineering Assessment was not part
of the FFM's process. If we strip away the flannel from this latest story, it appears to be
accurate. The "informed source" tells us that the Engineering Assessment was excluded from the
Final Report not because its technical analysis had been rebutted, but because the conclusion
that the cylinders had been placed in position rather than dropped from the air would
necessarily have attributed responsibility for the incident to the opposition .
The argument that the mandate of the FFM prevented it from endorsing the Engineering
Assessment's conclusion is easily refuted as a matter of logic. Announcing the release of the
Final Report, OPCW
stated that "The FFM's mandate is to determine whether chemical weapons or toxic chemicals
as weapons have been used in Syria." In Douma this could be reduced to deciding between two
alternatives: (1) the gas cylinders were dropped from the air, implying that they were used as
chemical weapons; (2) the cylinders were placed in position, implying that the incident was
staged and that no chemical attack had occurred. Although to conclude that alternative (2) was
correct would implicate the opposition, this would not be attribution of blame for a chemical
attack but rather a determination that chemical weapons had not been used.
Clearly a verdict that the alleged chemical attack had been staged would have been
unacceptable to the French government, which had joined in the US-led missile attack on 14
April 2018. We can surmise that the Chief of Cabinet of OPCW, Sébastien Braha, who
(according to his Linkedin profile ) is still in post as
a French diplomat, would have been in a difficult position if he had allowed the FFM to release
a report that reached this conclusion. He would be in an even more difficult position if he
were to allow the newly-established
Investigation and
Identification Team (IIT), which also reports to him, to overturn the conclusions of the
Final Report and report that the alleged chemical attack was staged. Even if Braha's failure to
update his online profile with the date of leaving his diplomatic post is an oversight, this
would still be a conflict of interest based on the OECD definition of what "a reasonable
person, knowing the relevant facts, would conclude". As we have noted, OPCW appears to have no
arrangements for managing conflicts of interest. Until the governance and working practices of
OPCW are radically reformed, it is hard to see how neutral observers can have confidence in the
impartiality of the FFM or the IIT.
3 Government responses to an alleged chlorine attack on
19 May3.1 Reports of the alleged attack
Possible allusions to the release of the Engineering Assessment on 13 May can be
discerned in government responses to a report of an alleged chlorine attack in Idlib on 19
May. The earliest report , mentioning three missiles or
shells loaded with chlorine was from an Arabic-language website named ebaa.news at
11.01 am Syrian time. The location was given as Kubina Hill in Kabbana village, on the border
with Lattakia. At 12.46 am Syrian time Hamish de Bretton-Gordon (HdBG)
tweeted
Appears to be a chlorine attack from Regime artillery shells in Jose Al Shugour village -
4 casualties being evacuated for treatment
"Jose Al Shugour village" is presumably the town of Jisr Al-Shughour. Rami Abdulrahman's
Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights reported on 22 May that four fighters were treated in hospital after they
"suffocated in the intense and violent shelling by the regime forces, within caves and
trenches" but did not endorse the claims of a chlorine attack, noting that the source of this
story was "the Media platform of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham". The story was
elaborated in
a Fox News report on 23 May that quoted a "Dr Ahmad" from Idlib, who reported that he had
treated the casualties. Fox News also quoted Nidal Shikhani of the Chemical Violations Documentation
Centre Syria (CVDCS).
A possible match for the identity of "Dr Ahmad" is Dr Ahmad al-Dbis,
quoted by Reuters on 4 May 2019 as Safety and Security Manager for the Union of Medical
Care and Relief Organisations (UOSSM), describing airstrikes on Idlib and northern Hama. Since
2016 both HdBG
and the
CBRN Task Force that he set up in 2013 have been affiliated to UOSSM. A
report from 2014 quotes a "Dr Ahmad" described as a medic trained by HdBG for the CBRN Task
Force. CVDCS is an
NGO that has worked closely with the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission since 2015 to provide
purported eyewitnesses for interview in Syria, originally established in 2012 as the
Office of Documentation of the Chemical File in Syria , and later registered in Brussels as
a non-profit company named Same Justice. This company never complied with the legal requirement
to file accounts, and went into
liquidation on 27 February 2019.
The ebaa.news site appears to be closely linked to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS),
frequently quoting HTS spokesmen and sometimes reporting exclusive stories obtained from HTS.
On 31 May 2018 HTS was
designated
by the US Department of State as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated
Global Terrorist. The Coordinator for Counterterrorism noted that this designation "serves
notice that the United States is not fooled by this al-Qa'ida affiliate's attempt to rebrand
itself." In conclusion, the provenance of this story of a chemical attack on 19 May is dubious,
and the extent to which the sources are independent of one another is not clear.
British experts are this morning investigating a suspected chlorine attack by al-Assad in
Idlib. If it is proved, will she lead the international response against the return of this
indiscriminate evil?
As expected, the Prime Minister gave a bellicose answer, but made no reference to OPCW.
We of course acted in Syria, with France and the United States, when we saw chemical
weapons being used there. We are in close contact with the United States and are monitoring
the situation closely, and if any use of chemical weapons is confirmed, we will respond
appropriately.
Woodcock's "British experts" appear to have included HdBG, who had suggested in a
tweet the day
before that Woodcock should ask the Prime Minister about Idlib, though not about a chemical
attack. In a subsequent tweet Woodcock stated that his
experts were "on the ground in Syria".
3.3 French response
The daily press from the French foreign ministry on 22 May responded to a question on the
alleged chemical attack on 19 May with:
We have noted with concern these allegations which must be investigated. We have full
confidence in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons .
3.4 US response
A press
statement from State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus on 21 May dealt with the
alleged chemical attack two days earlier:
Unfortunately, we continue to see signs that the Assad regime may be renewing its use of
chemical weapons, including an alleged chlorine attack in northwest Syria on the morning of
May 19, 2019. We are still gathering information on this incident, but we repeat our warning
that if the Assad regime uses chemical weapons, the United States and our allies will respond
quickly and appropriately.
She mentioned a " continuing disinformation campaign " to "create the false narrative that
others are to blame for chemical weapons attacks that the Assad regime itself is conducting".
The following day Mr James Jeffrey, the State Department's special representative to Syria,
testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that "So far we cannot confirm [the reports of
chemical weapons use] but we're watching it". The New York Times
reported
this to be a "carefully worded recalibration" of the announcement by Morgan Ortagus the day
before, and that American military officials had "expressed surprise over the State
Department's strong statement". 4 Comparison of the Engineering Assessment with the
published Final Report
A comparison of the Engineering Assessment and the Final Report have been reported in
outline form by McIntyre . As Larson has
noted
, there are indications in the
Final
Report that whoever drafted it had access to an earlier version of the Engineering
Assessment (the released version dated 27 February 2019 is marked Rev 1) and was attempting to
rebut it without overtly mentioning it. For instance the Engineering Assessment lists five
points supporting the opinion of experts that the crater at location 2 had been created by a
the explosion of a mortar round or artillery rocket rather than an impact from a falling
object. These points included:
"an (unusually elevated, but possible) fragmentation pattern on upper walls"
"(whilst it was observed that a fire had been created in the corner of the room) black
scorching on the crater underside and ceiling."
The Final Report states falsely that a fragmentation pattern, visible in open-source images,
was absent:
The FFM analysed the damage on the rooftop terrace and below the crater in order to
determine if it had been created by an explosive device. However, this hypothesis is unlikely
given the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristic of an explosion that
may have created the crater and the damage surrounding it.
This is followed by a paragraph that notes the blackening of the ceiling and attributes it
to the fire set in the room. The Final Report's allusion to the possibility of an explosive
device, with mention of fragmentation pattern and the setting of a fire in the room appears to
be an attempt to explain away the argument made in the Engineering Assessment.
We note that several of the key findings of the Engineering Assessment are based only on
examination of the cylinders. For instance the Engineering Assessment reports that the cylinder
at Location 2 bears no markings that would be consistent with the frame with fins (lying on the
balcony) ever having been attached to it, let alone the markings that would be expected if the
frame had been stripped off by impact. The Final Report records that the Syrian government
insisted on retaining custody of the cylinders for criminal investigation purposes.
Accordingly:
On 4 June, FFM team members tagged and sealed the cylinders from Locations 2 and 4, and
documented the procedure.
A useful way to take forward the investigation of the Douma incident would now be for the
Syrian government to invite an international team of neutral experts to examine the cylinders,
to assess whether the observations support the findings of the Engineering Assessment or the
conclusions of the published FFM Final Report, and to publish their findings in a form that
allows peer review and reproducibility of results from data. The next step would be a criminal
investigation of this incident, focusing on where, how and by whom were the 35 victims seen in
images at Location 2 killed.
If SST readers are confused by OPCW's constantly shifting explanations for why the Final
Report on the Douma incident excluded the Engineering Assessment, they're not the only
ones.
Yesterday OPCW released its official response (dated 21 May) to Russian criticisms (dated
26 April) of the Final Report of the Fact-Finding Mission on the Douma incident. In this
response OPCW made, officially and on the record, the same argument as that made by
Whitaker's "informed source: that to assess how the cylinders arrived in their positions was
outside the mandate of the FFM.
Unfortunately for whoever thought up this defence, it is explicitly contradicted by both
the Interim Report (published last July) and the Final Report, which state that the objective
of the engineering studies was to evaluate how the cylinders arrived in position.
Peter Hitchens is on the case, and has listed these contradictions and requested an
explanation from OPCW.
"... "All political analysis which favors either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is inherently worthless, because both parties are made of swamp and exist in service of the swamp. If you can't see that the entire system is one unified block of corruption and that ordinary people need to come together and unite against it, then you really don't understand what you're looking at." ..."
Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the
Earth. I recommend listening to the two-part interview of George Papadopoulos with Mark
Steyn, where he describes the convoluted plot to use him to bring down Trump.
What they did to this guy is truly disgusting. Brennan belongs in a prison cell, and he
should be sharing it with Mueller. Papadopoulos also has written a book about his
experiences called 'Deep State Target, How I got caught in the crosshairs of the plot to
bring down President Trump.
And, a final comment. Hillary Clinton proved beyond all doubt that she and not Trump was
not fit to be President. To engage in this scheme and then to raise tensions through the
roof with a nuclear superpower, which can destroy this country, is about as low and selfish
as it is possible to be.
As I stated on the open thread, to paraphrase Muller;
I don't give a s###. figure it out yourself, Im f***ing outta' here.
The whole point of impeachment, is to have a show trial, not actually impeach. If the
thing is on TV, the American people may watch it, and that would be interesting.
Not to worry though, Pelosi and Schumer won't let that happen. Appeasing their donors,is
all they care about.
psycho @ 2 quoting C. Johnston stated;
"All political analysis which favors either the Democratic Party or the Republican
Party is inherently worthless, because both parties are made of swamp and exist in service of
the swamp. If you can't see that the entire system is one unified block of corruption and
that ordinary people need to come together and unite against it, then you really don't
understand what you're looking at."
"... IMO it also became more apparent when the Deep State f*cked up by no bringing Russia on-side after the end of the Cold War while continuing to assist China's "peaceful rise". That caused the dislocation known as Trump. There's gonna be some turbulence when you turn a massive entity like USA. ..."
Mueller plays his criminal hand of innuendo until the end. Were he ever to submit to questions in a Congressional setting,
Mueller would be out-Giancana-ing Sam on taking the Fifth. The Special Counsel format is at this stage a superseded footnote.
The ball's now in Barr/Durham's court now and the theme is Hunt for Red Predicates.
Breaking news. The Russia Collusion time-zero may in fact lead to Rome as all roads are wont to do. Italy is not a Five Eyes
member. However that did not prevent Obama and Brennan from treating it like one. Both spent a lot of time there at opportune
moments.
As it turns out the oft-cited, oft-profaned Steele Dossier was the barest of predicates that was always meant to be hopped
over anyway. The Mother of all Predicates was a a failed effort on the the part of Italian intelligence and the FBI to frame
Trump in a stolen (Clinton) email scandal. How did the Italians get hold of these emails and who thwarted the frame-up attempt?
Hmm.
Just when you think the transnational plot is thick enough, it gets thickerer, and if Obama's Milan itinerary's any indication,
it may well reach the tippy-top.
Nine Days in May (2017) is where 90% of the action is.
@29 bruce... everyone here at moa is saying much the same which is why some of us are saying the cia is running the usa at this
point.. that and a confluence of other interests... mueller - ex cia... so, basically the mueller investigation was more cover
up and b.s. for the masses... it seems to have worked to a limited degree..
Some think the CIA has been running the show since the Kennedy assassination. But with the rise of the neocons and the
end of the Cold War, it became more apparent.
IMO it also became more apparent when the Deep State f*cked up by no bringing Russia on-side after the end of the Cold
War while continuing to assist China's "peaceful rise". That caused the dislocation known as Trump. There's gonna be some turbulence
when you turn a massive entity like USA.
Last thing that as become 'apparent' is this: the vast majority of people in the West (including many smart people in
alt-media) can't dislodge their thinking from the MSM narratives. Despite being skeptical of MSM and USA, they just can't bring
themselves to see the degree of manipulation that leads to the logical conclusion: "cia is running the usa".
Some think the CIA has been running the show since the Kennedy assassination. But with the rise of the neocons and the end
of the Cold War, it became more apparent.
IMO it also became more apparent when the Deep State f*cked up by no bringing Russia on-side after the end of the Cold War
while continuing to assist China's "peaceful rise". That caused the dislocation known as Trump. There's gonna be some turbulence
when you turn a massive entity like USA.
Last thing that as become 'apparent' is this: the vast majority of people in the West (including many smart people in
alt-media) can't dislodge their thinking from the MSM narratives. Despite being skeptical of MSM and USA, they just can't
bring themselves to see the degree of manipulation that leads to the logical conclusion: "cia is running the usa" .
"... He basically said in so many words "Russians hacked Hillary & I didn't find Trump didn't collude with them, I just came up short on proof, and I never said he didn't obstruct my probe, just that I wasn't allowed to charge it. However, Congress can charge him thru impeachment" ..."
"... Russian spin is the key to maintaining Russia as a fake enemy and using their fake involvement in the election to get support to suppress alt media and censor social media. This is a bipartisan agenda. Impeachment just serves to divide and distract, exactly what they want. ..."
"... Russia like China is a fake enemy. Fake conflict with the US serves them just as well as it does with the US. The people must have an enemy lest they focus attention on the government. So they all play along. ..."
"... we get the opportunity to vote for one clown or another, two max, is a mainstay (about the only one) of our "democratic" nation. And the wrong clown won! Damned Russians. ..."
What do you expect from the master of coverup himself?
He basically said in so many words "Russians hacked Hillary & I didn't find
Trump didn't collude with them, I just came up short on proof, and I never said he didn't
obstruct my probe, just that I wasn't allowed to charge it. However, Congress can charge
him thru impeachment"
Except for the Russian involvement that's the truth. But the Russian spin is the key
to maintaining Russia as a fake enemy and using their fake involvement in the election to
get support to suppress alt media and censor social media. This is a bipartisan agenda.
Impeachment just serves to divide and distract, exactly what they want.
Russia like China is a fake enemy. Fake conflict with the US serves them just as
well as it does with the US. The people must have an enemy lest they focus attention on the
government. So they all play along.
No wonder hollywood is producing crap now and messed up GOT finale. All the good writers
are engaged in scripting our reality under the guidance of the Deep State. Trumps nothing
more than an actor following a script.
The Dems can't believe Hillary lost all on her own. It must have been the Russians who
threatened US democracy and it's too bad we don't have the truth b/c Trump obstructed the
patriotic and sacred investigation according to a powerful person.
. . .Nancy Pelosi --
"The Special Counsel's report revealed that the President's campaign welcomed Russian
interference in the election, and laid out eleven instances of the President's
obstruction of the investigation. The Congress holds sacred its constitutional
responsibility to investigate and hold the President accountable for his abuse of power.
"The Congress will continue to investigate and legislate to protect our elections and
secure our democracy. The American people must have the truth. We call upon the Senate to
pass H.R. 1, the For The People Act, to protect our election systems.
"We salute Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team for his patriotic duty to seek
the truth." . . . here
After all, the quadrennial presidential election, when we get the
opportunity to vote for one clown or another, two max, is a mainstay (about the only one)
of our "democratic" nation. And the wrong clown won! Damned Russians.
"... Immigrant life was tough -- especially for the adults. People struggled to make ends meet and to fit into a totally new society ..."
"... Life was hard and integration was difficult. ..."
"... We were mostly Jewish and mostly seen as white. And we had a special, glorified place in American political culture: We were victims of Soviet repression and antisemitism, saved by an altruistic America. We were paraded around as a living example of American superiority and a symbol a Soviet barbarism. ..."
"... For nearly four years now, Soviet and Russian immigrants have watched America's liberal political elite shift the blame for their country's domestic political problems away from themselves and onto a fictitious, inscrutable foreign enemy: a xenophobic campaign that put people like us -- "the Russians" -- at the center of everything that's gone wrong in America. We've watched as this panic grew from a fear of the Russian government to an all-encompassing, irrational racist conspiracy theory that put a cloud over not just Russian nationals or Russian government officials, but anyone from the lands of the former Soviet union. ..."
"... Immigrants turned on the TV to see top American security officials, politicians, respected journalists, analysts, and pundits tell national viewers that they were right to be afraid of us: Russians are devious, untrustworthy, wired to hate democracy , and genetically driven to lie and cheat. People like us pose a threat. We are a possible fifth column -- whether we know it it or not, and that includes Russian pensioners and infants. In the words of Keith Olbermann, we were "Russian scum." ..."
"... In all of this, "Russian" has been a mutable category, flexible enough rope in Russian-Jews, Ukrainian-Jews, ethnic Russians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians and all sorts of other ethnicities. Any one of those could fit, depending on the need of the constantly evolving conspiracy theory. In America, this added up to something like three million people. ..."
"... This bigoted campaign has gone on non-stop for nearly four years -- and it's come from the very top: primed by American security services and pumped out by respectable liberal media institutions. To Soviet immigrants, it's been disorienting and confusing. It's the first time since coming to America that we have found ourselves targeted this way. ..."
"... And that's the funny thing about this Russia panic. For years, a huge chunk of America's political class has been screeching that "the Russians" are undermining trust in American institutions. But to many Soviet immigrants here in America, it's precisely this xenophobic panic that's been doing the undermining. ..."
"... Soviet immigrants have always had an implicit belief in the superiority of American institutions. It's been a religious thing for them. But seeing themselves get swept up and demonized in this way has bred disillusionment and revulsion with American politics on a level I have never seen. In that sense, Russiagate has been a coming of age moment: it has undermined their naive fresh-off-the-boat faith and gave them a personal glimpse into an America that's paranoid, venal, and unapologetically xenophobic. ..."
I was talking recently to
a Russian acquaintance of mine who lives in the New York area. Years ago, he had studied
engineering in Moscow and later transferred to a university here in the states. He told me that
not long after moved, he got an unexpected visit from a couple of FBI agents who tried to recruit
him. They came right to his apartment and seemed to know everything about him. They had a
detailed file which, among other things, included every application he had submitted to American
universities. They also had a dossier on his old academic advisor back in Moscow containing intel
about the research the professor was doing and the contracts he had with the Russian military.
They wanted to know what he knew about this military work and then asked him to identify
photographs of various equipment and instruments. He was stunned by their sudden appearance and
spooked by their efficiency and competence. He was also smitten with the female agent. "She was
gorgeous. I would have told her anything," he told me. But he didn't have anything to tell. Back
in Moscow he had been a nerdy kid studying engineering. He had no idea about any of the stuff
they were asking. After a while, the FBI agents left. They never contacted him again. But the
message was clear: they were watching, and they could pop in at any time again. His story is not
unique. The FBI does this kind of stuff on a regular basis. By some estimates, at least
a third of all international students get a similar visit from a friendly pair of agents.
And
given the national security panic about China and Russia being whipped up right now, I wouldn't
be surprised if that number is a helluva lot higher. Just the other week, the New York
Times reported that the FBI
has ramped up its surveillance, intimidation and deportation of Chinese academics in America.
As FBI director Christopher Wray explained, America's security apparatus isn't just worried about
the Chinese government. To them, all Chinese are suspect -- they pose a "whole-of-society
threat." Even progressive political strategists believe China is an existential threat to America
and are helping fan a bipartisan sinophobic campaign that's ensnared people I know .
With Russia and China convulsing our body
politic, my buddy's "unremarkable" story got me thinking about how easily and naturally
xenophobic panics fit into American political culture -- and how, until fairly recently, Russian
and Soviet immigrants like me had never really felt the brunt of these campaigns. From my
earliest days as Soviet immigrant kid in America, I've been primed to see this country as a
unique beacon of tolerance -- a place where bigotry and racism, if they exist at all, are
banished to the far dark edges of society. It was a truism to us that unlike the Soviet Union --
which was "closed," "bigoted," "paranoid," and "repressive" -- America was "open," "tolerant" and
"accepting." Later as an adult, I came to understand just much how bigotry and systemic racism
and exclusion are engrained in the politics and culture of modern America. Working as a
journalist and reporting on the darkest recesses of America, it was impossible not to.
But
growing up in an insular, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant community in sleepy San Francisco, it was
easy to believe in an idealized, whitewashed vision of the country that took us in. Immigrant
life was tough -- especially for the adults. People struggled to make ends meet and to fit into a
totally new society. There was the usual petty crime and a bit of violence. People hustled to
make money -- some succeeded, others failed and suffered. Life was hard and integration was
difficult. But compared to other immigrant and minority groups, we were a relatively privileged
bunch.
We were mostly Jewish and mostly seen as white. And we had a special, glorified place in
American political culture: We were victims of Soviet repression and antisemitism, saved by an
altruistic America. We were paraded around as a living example of American superiority and a
symbol a Soviet barbarism. For most the 20th century, American lawmakers had crafted laws to
specifically keep Jews out. We were "rats," according to Wisconsin Senator Alexander Wiley, who
helped craft a 1948 law to prevent victims of the Holocaust from immigrating to America. But with
us it was different. Americans protested outside Soviet embassies on our behalf. Lobbyists and
lawmakers from Washington DC championed our cause and put together sanctions to secure our
release. We were a bipartisan project -- supported by the might of the American empire.
Yasha Levine, Judeo-Bolshevik infiltrator. San Francisco, 1999
My immigrant community was privileged in that way. And because of that, we never really
worried about mass immigration raids. We weren't punitively targeted by cops just because of
the color of our skin. We weren't seen as a terrorist threat and targeted for infiltration and
entrapment by the FBI. We never turned on the TV to see ourselves dehumanized or branded as a
threat from within -- as enemies of the American way of life. Looking back on all the petty --
and not so petty -- crime we got into as kids, I'm amazed by how leniently the cops dealt with
us.
We occupied a special spot in the immigrant pyramid. And because of it, we had never been in
the crosshairs of a good ol' traditional American xenophobic panic. The anti-Russian hysteria
of the early 20th century and the Red Scare of the Cold War was a distant past that few us even
were even aware existed. We never knew what it was like to have the country's media and
political class brand people like you a possible threat. In fact, watching other minority and
immigrant groups get demonized only reinforced my community's feeling of superiority. My fellow
Soviet immigrants have never been known for their progressive racial politics -- well, when you
get down to it, quite a few are generic, down-the-line bigots. And so the general sense was,
"We're not like them. We're different. And anyway, if some ethnic groups are being targeted,
there must a good reason for it. America is a nation of laws, after all. People here aren't
hounded for bigoted political reasons like they are in repressive authoritarian countries."
But this belief in the infallibility of American institutions started taking a big nose dive
right around Donald Trump won the election.
For nearly four years now, Soviet and Russian immigrants have watched America's liberal
political elite shift the blame for their
country's domestic political problems away from themselves and onto a fictitious, inscrutable
foreign enemy: a xenophobic campaign that put people like us -- "the Russians" -- at the center
of everything that's gone wrong in America. We've watched as this panic grew from a fear of the
Russian government to an all-encompassing, irrational racist conspiracy theory that put a cloud
over not just Russian nationals or Russian government officials, but anyone from the lands of
the former Soviet union.
Immigrants turned on the TV to see top American security officials, politicians, respected
journalists, analysts, and pundits tell national viewers that they were right to be afraid of
us: Russians are devious, untrustworthy, wired to hate
democracy , and genetically driven to lie and cheat. People like us pose a threat. We are a
possible fifth column -- whether we know it it or not, and that includes Russian
pensioners and infants. In the words of Keith Olbermann, we were "Russian scum."
In all of this, "Russian" has been a mutable category, flexible enough rope in Russian-Jews,
Ukrainian-Jews, ethnic Russians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians and all sorts of other ethnicities.
Any one of those could fit, depending on the need of the constantly evolving conspiracy theory.
In America, this added up to something like three million people.
Putin's anchor babies, a ticking demographic time bomb that will blow up American
democracy.
This bigoted campaign has gone on non-stop for nearly four years -- and it's come from the
very top: primed by American security services and pumped out by respectable liberal media
institutions. To Soviet immigrants, it's been disorienting and confusing. It's the first time
since coming to America that we have found ourselves targeted this way.
At first it seemed like a joke. People laughed at it and mocked it. We were sure that this
weird bigoted panic would pass. But when it didn't, when it continued to grow and seep into
ever corner of our liberal media, we stopped being sure of what to do. We cycled through
various modes: from dismissive to angry to depressed, to repressing it altogether. But talking
to people about this, I get the sense that for many of us one feeling has stayed pretty much
constant: a growing contempt for America's hallowed institutions: its press, its politicians,
its national security elite.
And that's the funny thing about this Russia panic. For years, a huge chunk of America's
political class has been screeching that "the Russians" are undermining trust in American
institutions. But to many Soviet immigrants here in America, it's precisely this xenophobic
panic that's been doing the undermining.
Soviet immigrants have always had an implicit belief in the superiority of American
institutions. It's been a religious thing for them. But seeing themselves get swept up and
demonized in this way has bred disillusionment and revulsion with American politics on a level
I have never seen. In that sense, Russiagate has been a coming of age moment: it has undermined
their naive fresh-off-the-boat faith and gave them a personal glimpse into an America that's
paranoid, venal, and unapologetically xenophobic.
Is this coming of age a good thing? Well, I guess it had to happen at some point. But the
way this disenchantment has unfolded -- driven by America's liberal ruling class -- has pretty
much ensured that most Soviet immigrants will come out the other end even more reactionary than
they were before. And who knew that was even possible?
GCHQ has dismissed fresh allegations that it spied on Donald Trump's presidential campaign -
describing the claims as "utterly ridiculous".
Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst, has accused the British intelligence agency of helping
Barack Obama by spying on the billionaire businessman during the 2016 race.
The US president tweeted about the rumours on Wednesday after they were highlighted in a
report on the right-wing One America News Network.
Mr Trump wrote: "'Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson accuses United Kingdom Intelligence of
helping Obama Administration Spy on the 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign.' @OANN WOW!
"It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be
a beauty!"
GCHQ has dismissed fresh allegations that it spied on Donald Trump's presidential campaign -
describing the claims as "utterly ridiculous".
Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst, has accused the British intelligence agency of helping
Barack Obama by spying on the billionaire businessman during the 2016 race.
The US president tweeted about the rumours on Wednesday after they were highlighted in a
report on the right-wing One America News Network.
Mr Trump wrote: "'Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson accuses United Kingdom Intelligence of
helping Obama Administration Spy on the 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign.' @OANN WOW!
"It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be
a beauty!"
During a press conference in Japan U.S. President Donald Trump today
said ( video ):
And I'm not looking to hurt Iran at all. I'm looking to have Iran say, "No nuclear weapons." We have enough problems in this world
right now with nuclear weapons. No nuclear weapons for Iran.
And I think we'll make a deal.
Iran said: "No nuclear weapons." It said that several times. It continues to say that.
Iran does not have the intent to make nuclear weapons. It has no nuclear weapons program.
But Trump may be confused because the U.S. 'paper of the record', the New York Times, recently again began to falsely assert
that Iran has such a program.
A May 4 editorial in the Times claimed that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps was running such a nuclear weapons program.
After a loud public outrage the Times corrected the editorial. Iran's UN office wrote a letter to the Times which was
published on May 6:
In an early version of "Trump Dials Up the Pressure on Iran" (editorial, nytimes.com, May 4), now corrected, you referred to a
nuclear weapons program in describing the reach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
...
The editorial is correct in criticizing the punishing aspects of the Trump administration policy toward Iran -- one that has brought
only suffering to the Iranian people and one that will not result in any change in Iran's policies. But it was wrong to refer
to a weapons program -- a dangerous assertion that could lead to a great misunderstanding among the public .
Unfortunately that did not help. The NYT continues with the "dangerous assertion".
At a meeting of President Trump's top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented
an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces
or accelerate work on nuclear weapons , administration officials said.
One can not accelerate one's car, if one does not have one. The phrase "accelerate work on nuclear weapons" implies that Iran
has a nuclear weapons program. It may that the White House falsely claimed that but the authors use the phrase and never debunk it.
A May 14 NYT piece by Helene Cooper and Edward Wong
repeats the false claim
without pointing out that it is wrong:
The Trump administration is looking at plans to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American
forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons , The New York Times reported.
Also on May 14 the NYT 's editorial cartoon was published under the caption
Will Iran Revive Its Nuclear Program?
The caption of the orientalist cartoon falsely asserted that Iran had enriched Uranium to weapons grade. And no, Iran does not have
a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapons program in its freezer.
On May 16, after another public outcry, a correction was added to the cartoon:
An earlier version of a caption with this cartoon erroneously attributed a distinction to Iran's nuclear program. Iran has not
produced highly enriched uranium.
After this onslaught of false New York Times claims about Iran NYT critic Belen Fernandez asked:
Has the New York Times declared
war on Iran? She lists other claims made by the Times about Iran that are far from the truth.
Three days later, on May 25, Palko Karasz
reported in the
New York Times on Iran's reaction to Trump's
tiny
troop buildup in the Persian Gulf region. Again the obviously false "accelerate" phrase was used:
Under White House plans revised after pressure from hard-liners led by John R. Bolton, the president's national security adviser,
if Iran were to accelerate work on nuclear weapons , defense officials envision sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle
East.
Iran does not have a nuclear program. It can not "accelerate" one. The U.S. claims that Iran once had such a program but also
says that it was ended in 2003. The
standardformulation that
Reuters uses in its Iran reporting is thereby appropriate:
The United States and the U.N. nuclear watchdog believe Iran had a nuclear weapons program that it abandoned. Tehran denies ever
having had one.
Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transfer or whatsoever of nuclear
weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to
manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance
in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.
With that Iran said "No nuclear weapons". Iran also accepted the nuclear safeguards demand in Article III of the treaty in form
of routine inspections by the treaty's nuclear watchdog organization IAEA.
Article IV of the NPT gives all non-nuclear-weapon state parties like Iran the "inalienable right" to "develop research, production
and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination." After signing the NPT Iran launched several civil nuclear
projects. These started under the Shah in 1970s and continued after the 1979 revolution in Iran.
Ever since the Iranian revolution the U.S. expressed explicit hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran. It instigated the President
Saddam Hussein of Iraq to launch a war against the Islamic Republic and actively supported him throughout. It attempted and continues
to attempt to hobble Iran's development, nuclear and non-nuclear, by all possible means.
Under U.S. President George W. Bush the U.S. government claimed that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. The Islamic Republic
Iran rejected that claim and in 2004 signed the
Additional Protocol to the NPT which allows the IAEA
to do more rigorous, short-notice inspections at declared and undeclared nuclear facilities to look for secret nuclear activities.
With that the Islamic Republic of Iran said: "No nuclear weapons".
In a 2006 New York Times op-ed Javid Zarif, then the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations,
wrote :
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, has issued a decree against the development, production, stockpiling
and use of nuclear weapons.
With that Iran's highest political and religious leader said: "No nuclear weapons".
Not only did Iran sign the NPT and its Additional Protocol but its political leadership outright rejects the development and ownership
of nuclear weapons.
Zarif also pointed out that the IAEA found that Iran had missed to declare some nuclear activities but also confirmed that it
never had the nuclear weapons program the Bush administration claimed it had:
In November 2003, for example, the agency confirmed that "to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear
material and activities were related to a nuclear weapons program."
During the "previously undeclared nuclear material and activities" which the IAEA investigated, some Iranian scientists worked
on a 'plan for a plan' towards nuclear weapons. They seem to have discussed what steps Iran would have to take, what materials, and
what kind of organization it would need to launch a nuclear weapons program. The work was not officially sanctioned and no actual
nuclear weapons program was ever launched. It is believed that the Iranian scientists worked on a 'plan for a plan' because they
were concerned that Iran's then arch enemy Saddam Hussein, who had bombarded Iranian cities with chemical weapons, was working towards
nuclear weapons. In 2003, after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that concern proved to be unfounded and the 'plan for a plan' project was
shut down.
In December 2007 all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies
confirmed the shut down:
A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the
program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.
...
[T]he new [National Intelligence Estimate] declares with "high confidence" that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform
that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt "was directed
primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure."
The National Intelligence Estimate ended efforts by the Bush administration to threaten Iran with war. But the U.S. government,
under Bush and then under President Obama, continued its effort to deny Iran its "inalienable right" to civil nuclear programs.
Obama waged a campaign of ever increasing sanctions on Iran. But the country did not give in. It countered by accelerating its
civil nuclear programs. It enriched more Uranium to civil use levels and developed more efficiant enrichment centrifuges. It was
the Obama administration that finally gave up on its escalatory course. It conceded that Iran has the "inalienable right" to run
its civil nuclear programs including Uranium enrichment. It was this concession, not the sanctions, that brought Iran to the table
for talks about its nuclear programs.
The result of those talks was the The Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which was endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, adopted on July 20, 2015.
The JCPOA gives the IAEA additional tools to inspect
facilities in Iran. It restricts Iran's civil nuclear program to certain limits which will terminate in October 2025. The JCPOA also
reaffirms that Iran has full rights under the NPT. The IAEA since regularly inspects facilities in Iran and consistently reaffirms
in its reports that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.
The Trump administrations hostility to Iran has nothing to do with anything nuclear. The U.S. wants hegemony over the Persian Gulf
region. Iran rejects such imperial desires. The U.S. wants to control the flow of hydrocarbon resources to its competitors, primarily
China. Iran does not allow such controls over its exports. The U.S. wants that all hydrocarbon sales are made in U.S. dollars. Iran
demands payments in other currencies. Israel, which has significant influence within the Trump administration, uses claims of a non
existing Iranian nuclear weapons program to manipulate the U.S. public and to divert from its racist apartheid policies in Palestine.
Trump's talk - "I'm looking to have Iran say, "No nuclear weapons."" - is simply bullshit. Iran said so several times and continues
to say so. But Trump obviously believes that he can get away with making such idiotic claims.
The New York Times proves him right. It is again slipping into the role that it played during the propaganda run-up to
the war on Iraq in 2002/2003. False claims made by members of the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were
reported by the Times as true, even while diligent reporters at other outlets
debunked those claims again and again.
The Times later apologized and fired Judith Miller, one of its reporters who wrote several of the pieces that supported the
false claims.
But it was never a problem of one reporter who channeled false claims by anonymous administration officials into her reports.
It was the editorial decision by the Times , taken long before the war on Iraq began, to use its power to support such a war. That
editorial decision made it possible that those false claims appeared in the paper.
This month alone one NYT editorial, one editorial cartoon and at least five reporters in three pieces published in the New
York Times made false claims about an Iranian nuclear weapons program that, as all the relevant official institutions confirm, does
not exist. This does not happen by chance.
It it is now obvious that the Times again decided to support false claims by an administration that is pushing the U.S. towards
another war in the Middle East.
Having been practically a recluse since since the 'fake dossier' alleging links between Donald Trump and Russia that he produced
was published by BuzzFeed in January 2017, Christophe Steele has reportedly refused to cooperate with AG Barr's probes
Reuters reports that , according to a source with knowledge of the situation, Steele, a former Russia expert for the British
spy agency MI6, will not answer questions from prosecutor John Durham , named by Barr to examine the origins of the investigations
into Trump and his campaign team.
However, buried deep in
Reuters story is the same source claiming that Steele might cooperate with a parallel inquiry by the Justice Department's Inspector
General into how U.S. law enforcement agencies handled pre-election investigations into both Trump and Clinton.
In the past Steele has cooperated, willingly being interviewed twice in the special counsel's investigation, and submitting answers
in writing to the Senate Intelligence Committee, but apparently this time he is not willing.
With Steel refusing to cooperate, Joe DiGenova, former U.S. Attorney warned Monday on WMAL radio's
Mornings on the Mall radio show,
"this is full scale war," adding that "we are heading toward a gigantic, gigantic fight...
The intelligence community, which includes the FBI, is in full resistance to disclosing what they did during the presidential
campaign ."
Sara Carter reports that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz is expected to release his report on the FBI's handling of the
investigation into Trump within weeks.
These investigation will hold those in the intelligence and law enforcement community accountable, depending on what evidence
is discovered. This reporter is hearing from sources that it will be scathing. Those who abused their power and weaponized the tools
meant to target America's enemies against a political opponents should be held accountable . Tags
Politics Law Crime
It seems reasonable to demand Steele's extradition to America to explain his part in the conspiracy.
I mean is being a party to the conspiracy, attempted treason and sedition of the attempted overthrow of an elected President
not at least as important as Julian Assange who only made public some documents that someone else removed?
Oh these fuckers are scared to death. Comey lashing out at Trump...on and on. This is going to be great...and Trump will
play it perfect right into the election. And BIDEN was part of all of it. What a great next 6 years.
Funny, I was recently de-platformed on Twitter for tweeting to GCHQ (British Intelligence) that the UK's sordid involvement
in spying on the Trump campaign would be exposed and "no amount of British bluster could refute it...".
During a press conference in Japan U.S. President Donald Trump today
said ( video ):
And I'm not looking to hurt Iran at all. I'm looking to have Iran say, "No nuclear weapons." We have enough problems in this world
right now with nuclear weapons. No nuclear weapons for Iran.
And I think we'll make a deal.
Iran said: "No nuclear weapons." It said that several times. It continues to say that.
Iran does not have the intent to make nuclear weapons. It has no nuclear weapons program.
But Trump may be confused because the U.S. 'paper of the record', the New York Times, recently again began to falsely assert
that Iran has such a program.
A May 4 editorial in the Times claimed that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps was running such a nuclear weapons program.
After a loud public outrage the Times corrected the editorial. Iran's UN office wrote a letter to the Times which was
published on May 6:
In an early version of "Trump Dials Up the Pressure on Iran" (editorial, nytimes.com, May 4), now corrected, you referred to a
nuclear weapons program in describing the reach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
...
The editorial is correct in criticizing the punishing aspects of the Trump administration policy toward Iran -- one that has brought
only suffering to the Iranian people and one that will not result in any change in Iran's policies. But it was wrong to refer
to a weapons program -- a dangerous assertion that could lead to a great misunderstanding among the public .
Unfortunately that did not help. The NYT continues with the "dangerous assertion".
At a meeting of President Trump's top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented
an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces
or accelerate work on nuclear weapons , administration officials said.
One can not accelerate one's car, if one does not have one. The phrase "accelerate work on nuclear weapons" implies that Iran
has a nuclear weapons program. It may that the White House falsely claimed that but the authors use the phrase and never debunk it.
A May 14 NYT piece by Helene Cooper and Edward Wong
repeats the false claim
without pointing out that it is wrong:
The Trump administration is looking at plans to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American
forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons , The New York Times reported.
Also on May 14 the NYT 's editorial cartoon was published under the caption
Will Iran Revive Its Nuclear Program?
The caption of the orientalist cartoon falsely asserted that Iran had enriched Uranium to weapons grade. And no, Iran does not have
a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapons program in its freezer.
On May 16, after another public outcry, a correction was added to the cartoon:
An earlier version of a caption with this cartoon erroneously attributed a distinction to Iran's nuclear program. Iran has not
produced highly enriched uranium.
After this onslaught of false New York Times claims about Iran NYT critic Belen Fernandez asked:
Has the New York Times declared
war on Iran? She lists other claims made by the Times about Iran that are far from the truth.
Three days later, on May 25, Palko Karasz
reported in the
New York Times on Iran's reaction to Trump's
tiny
troop buildup in the Persian Gulf region. Again the obviously false "accelerate" phrase was used:
Under White House plans revised after pressure from hard-liners led by John R. Bolton, the president's national security adviser,
if Iran were to accelerate work on nuclear weapons , defense officials envision sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle
East.
Iran does not have a nuclear program. It can not "accelerate" one. The U.S. claims that Iran once had such a program but also
says that it was ended in 2003. The
standardformulation that
Reuters uses in its Iran reporting is thereby appropriate:
The United States and the U.N. nuclear watchdog believe Iran had a nuclear weapons program that it abandoned. Tehran denies ever
having had one.
Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transfer or whatsoever of nuclear
weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to
manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance
in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.
With that Iran said "No nuclear weapons". Iran also accepted the nuclear safeguards demand in Article III of the treaty in form
of routine inspections by the treaty's nuclear watchdog organization IAEA.
Article IV of the NPT gives all non-nuclear-weapon state parties like Iran the "inalienable right" to "develop research, production
and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination." After signing the NPT Iran launched several civil nuclear
projects. These started under the Shah in 1970s and continued after the 1979 revolution in Iran.
Ever since the Iranian revolution the U.S. expressed explicit hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran. It instigated the President
Saddam Hussein of Iraq to launch a war against the Islamic Republic and actively supported him throughout. It attempted and continues
to attempt to hobble Iran's development, nuclear and non-nuclear, by all possible means.
Under U.S. President George W. Bush the U.S. government claimed that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. The Islamic Republic
Iran rejected that claim and in 2004 signed the
Additional Protocol to the NPT which allows the IAEA
to do more rigorous, short-notice inspections at declared and undeclared nuclear facilities to look for secret nuclear activities.
With that the Islamic Republic of Iran said: "No nuclear weapons".
In a 2006 New York Times op-ed Javid Zarif, then the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations,
wrote :
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, has issued a decree against the development, production, stockpiling
and use of nuclear weapons.
With that Iran's highest political and religious leader said: "No nuclear weapons".
Not only did Iran sign the NPT and its Additional Protocol but its political leadership outright rejects the development and ownership
of nuclear weapons.
Zarif also pointed out that the IAEA found that Iran had missed to declare some nuclear activities but also confirmed that it
never had the nuclear weapons program the Bush administration claimed it had:
In November 2003, for example, the agency confirmed that "to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear
material and activities were related to a nuclear weapons program."
During the "previously undeclared nuclear material and activities" which the IAEA investigated, some Iranian scientists worked
on a 'plan for a plan' towards nuclear weapons. They seem to have discussed what steps Iran would have to take, what materials, and
what kind of organization it would need to launch a nuclear weapons program. The work was not officially sanctioned and no actual
nuclear weapons program was ever launched. It is believed that the Iranian scientists worked on a 'plan for a plan' because they
were concerned that Iran's then arch enemy Saddam Hussein, who had bombarded Iranian cities with chemical weapons, was working towards
nuclear weapons. In 2003, after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that concern proved to be unfounded and the 'plan for a plan' project was
shut down.
In December 2007 all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies
confirmed the shut down:
A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the
program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.
...
[T]he new [National Intelligence Estimate] declares with "high confidence" that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform
that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt "was directed
primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure."
The National Intelligence Estimate ended efforts by the Bush administration to threaten Iran with war. But the U.S. government,
under Bush and then under President Obama, continued its effort to deny Iran its "inalienable right" to civil nuclear programs.
Obama waged a campaign of ever increasing sanctions on Iran. But the country did not give in. It countered by accelerating its
civil nuclear programs. It enriched more Uranium to civil use levels and developed more efficiant enrichment centrifuges. It was
the Obama administration that finally gave up on its escalatory course. It conceded that Iran has the "inalienable right" to run
its civil nuclear programs including Uranium enrichment. It was this concession, not the sanctions, that brought Iran to the table
for talks about its nuclear programs.
The result of those talks was the The Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which was endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, adopted on July 20, 2015.
The JCPOA gives the IAEA additional tools to inspect
facilities in Iran. It restricts Iran's civil nuclear program to certain limits which will terminate in October 2025. The JCPOA also
reaffirms that Iran has full rights under the NPT. The IAEA since regularly inspects facilities in Iran and consistently reaffirms
in its reports that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.
The Trump administrations hostility to Iran has nothing to do with anything nuclear. The U.S. wants hegemony over the Persian Gulf
region. Iran rejects such imperial desires. The U.S. wants to control the flow of hydrocarbon resources to its competitors, primarily
China. Iran does not allow such controls over its exports. The U.S. wants that all hydrocarbon sales are made in U.S. dollars. Iran
demands payments in other currencies. Israel, which has significant influence within the Trump administration, uses claims of a non
existing Iranian nuclear weapons program to manipulate the U.S. public and to divert from its racist apartheid policies in Palestine.
Trump's talk - "I'm looking to have Iran say, "No nuclear weapons."" - is simply bullshit. Iran said so several times and continues
to say so. But Trump obviously believes that he can get away with making such idiotic claims.
The New York Times proves him right. It is again slipping into the role that it played during the propaganda run-up to
the war on Iraq in 2002/2003. False claims made by members of the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were
reported by the Times as true, even while diligent reporters at other outlets
debunked those claims again and again.
The Times later apologized and fired Judith Miller, one of its reporters who wrote several of the pieces that supported the
false claims.
But it was never a problem of one reporter who channeled false claims by anonymous administration officials into her reports.
It was the editorial decision by the Times , taken long before the war on Iraq began, to use its power to support such a war. That
editorial decision made it possible that those false claims appeared in the paper.
This month alone one NYT editorial, one editorial cartoon and at least five reporters in three pieces published in the New
York Times made false claims about an Iranian nuclear weapons program that, as all the relevant official institutions confirm, does
not exist. This does not happen by chance.
It it is now obvious that the Times again decided to support false claims by an administration that is pushing the U.S. towards
another war in the Middle East.
Russiagate is definitely connected to military industrial complex. But it is also connect to
the attempt of neoliberal elite to cements cracks in the neoliberal facade of the US global
empire by using external scapegoat. British elite was traditionally Russophobic as they competed
for influence with Russia and tried to prevent alliance of Germany and Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... The British aristocracy has a condescending view of the hoi polloi who voted for Brexit, regarding them as easily manipulated Pygmalion-like by smarter people. They assumed Vladimir Putin was somehow playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who voted to reject the EU, because that's how they see the world. Among the Cambridge class, this simple prejudice renders Russian collusion a first principle with no need for supporting evidence". ..."
"... Unconventional candidate Donald Trump " rattled Washington " to its core in March 2016 when he wondered about NATO's continued relevance and questioned America's foreign policy in Ukraine. ..."
"... That's when this "Putin's candidate" stuff started among both Republicans and Democrats " egged on by Ukrainians " who almost certainly fed Steele the fake kompromat " in the dossier. ..."
"... Russia may be a convenient boogeyman that serves as a necessary foil to both sides in the Washington establishment. But, for once, let's fight the real enemy: the global elites who started this nonsense. ..."
Attorney General William Barr has turned the attention of the Russia probe to its origin.
Who started this and why? The answer, as in all the best crime dramas, is probably hiding in
plain sight.
The British aristocracy has a condescending view of the hoi polloi who voted for
Brexit, regarding them as easily manipulated Pygmalion-like by smarter people. They assumed
Vladimir Putin was somehow playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who voted to
reject the EU, because that's how they see the world. Among the Cambridge class, this simple
prejudice renders Russian collusion a first principle with no need for supporting
evidence".
Without supporting evidence to prove their fantastical worldview, the global elite set out
to manufacture some.
...
President Eisenhower " the furthest thing from a conspiracy theorist America has ever
produced " famously warned in his farewell address to beware "the military industrial
complex"
The great funding pipeline that makes Washington D.C. the wealthiest region in America feeds
mostly on military spending which still, nearly thirty years removed from the Cold War,
requires a Russian enemy.
Unconventional candidate Donald Trump " rattled Washington " to
its core in March 2016 when he wondered about NATO's continued relevance and questioned
America's foreign policy in Ukraine.
Russia may be a convenient boogeyman that serves as a necessary foil to both sides in
the Washington establishment. But, for once, let's fight the real enemy: the global elites who
started this nonsense.
Why all the fuss about Russia? Liberal elites – who tended to love the Soviet
Union – hate present day Russia, which dares to assert nationality and culture
against the pieties of the one-world-order crowd.
I can confirm. This is what American Leftist Operatives who travel to Russia to organize
coops, etc have told me.
Also note that, while Russia is the designated Villain, the real threat since the 1980s
onward has actually been the Chinese. But the up until now had managed to co-opt both Parties
via the doctrine of constructive engagement and NeoLiberal Free Trade.
"Make China prosperous and the factory of the world and then it will adopt Republican
Democracy!", they said.
Ya. Not so much.
Russia was the excuse to build the high tech fighters but no one dared to name China for
fear of losing financial support coming from industries now dependent on the good graces of
the Chinese Communist Party.
Thank your lucky stars that someone had the ability and ego to step in and expose this
mess for what it was.
The word "hysteria" isn't used nearly enough in analyses like these. Hysteria is almost
defined by the complete absence of thought or rationality, which characterizes the useful
idiots who are the target of this propaganda.
Our government is too easily manipulated to serve narrow interest groups (with money)
rather than the interest of the nation (as constuted) or of the people (who generally dont
have money). Also the legal system does not seem to be serving the law - has dispensed with
the concept of intent.
Those who strive to serve and benefit from interests of industry or foreign governments
should be investigated and tried for treason (where warranted)
The Bushes and Cheney and Hitlary should be tried for war crimes.
Despicable neocons like Natasha Bertrand are cowards and attack people only because then feel the power on MIC and
intelligence agencies behind their backs
In normal circumstances and normal society she would be the history the next day. But politico is a slimy rag, so what to
expect of them
Notable quotes:
"... Politico's "Mueller report reveals Kushner's contacts with a 'pro-Kremlin' campaign adviser" (Politico, April 29, 2019), is dishonest, destructive, and should never have appeared in print. ..."
"... The author of the piece, Natasha Bertrand, initially refers to Dimitri Simes, CEO of the Center for the National Interest, not as an American citizen, although of course he is and has been for many years, nor as a leading representative of realist foreign policy thinking in the United States, which would have also been true. ..."
"... Instead, she initially frames him (in every sense of the word 'frame') as "a Russian willing to assist" the Trump campaign. This word choice rings, and is intended to ring, the Pavlovian bells of the Russia-gate narrative. Aside from being dishonest, her word choice smacks of racism -- a habit, to be sure, which is now widespread, as long as the object of that racism is Russia. ..."
"... 'Maybe Simes is a traitor -- although there are those who think he may not be.' If you accuse some Mr. X of being a rapist, and then add another opinion saying, 'Gosh, I don't think he is a rapist,' what is the impact on the reader? ..."
Politico's "Mueller report reveals Kushner's contacts with a 'pro-Kremlin' campaign adviser"
(Politico, April 29, 2019), is dishonest, destructive, and should never have appeared in
print.
The author of the piece, Natasha Bertrand, initially refers to Dimitri Simes, CEO of the
Center for the National Interest, not as an American citizen, although of course he is and has
been for many years, nor as a leading representative of realist foreign policy thinking in the
United States, which would have also been true.
Instead, she initially frames him (in every sense of the word 'frame') as "a Russian willing
to assist" the Trump campaign. This word choice rings, and is intended to ring, the Pavlovian
bells of the Russia-gate narrative. Aside from being dishonest, her word choice smacks of
racism -- a habit, to be sure, which is now widespread, as long as the object of that racism is
Russia.
If Ms. Bertrand has regularly watched the program The Great Game (Bol'shaia igra), and
understands it, and if she is familiar with Simes' writings and conferences and the
publications that appear in The National Interest, then she has no excuse for writing this
piece in the first place. The genre to which this piece belongs is clear.
It is called a hit piece.
Bertrand deploys, of course, a few fig leaves of pretend objectivity, which may have helped
assuage her conscience, but that is all that these fig leaves can do. What we have here is a
list of scurrilous attacks ("he [Simes] is completely pro-Kremlin and always has been"). These
attacks are then countered by opinions to the contrary, but without any suggestion as to where
the preponderance of evidence lies. There is insufficient detail.
And that is the whole point, isn't it? 'Maybe Simes is a traitor -- although there are those
who think he may not be.' If you accuse some Mr. X of being a rapist, and then add another
opinion saying, 'Gosh, I don't think he is a rapist,' what is the impact on the reader? In the
present context, the impact is this: if you take into consideration a Russian perspective in
any way, shape, or form, even for the purposes of avoiding war -- and this is precisely what Simes is constantly doing, and with considerable intelligence and courage -- then you are going
to get a nasty hit piece written about you by the likes of Politico and Ms. Bertrand.
I regularly watch The Great Game, which Mr. Simes co-hosts on Channel 1 with Vyacheslav
Nikonov, and I have seen how he not just once, but in virtually every single program defends US
interests, and disagrees when Russian colleagues try to make a one-sided case against the U.S.
Simes regularly invites Atlantic Council spokespersons, or their policy equivalent, to the
program, and there they have the freedom to make their case in great detail and without
interruption, and inevitably they make statements that are sharply critical of the Russian
government and its policies. It is Mr. Simes who sees to it that these voices from the Atlantic
Council are heard by the Russian side.
As a result, Simes is carrying out vitally important work of diplomacy that allows for a
two-way communication between policy elites on both sides, and he very adeptly is doing so in a
way that allows both sides to actually listen and hear what is being said. If he simply
screamed politically correct slogans, it would either shut this channel of communications down
or turn it into another pointless circus where no one really listens.
I find it baffling that Politico wants to undermine this virtually unique remaining channel
of diplomacy. For the sake of what? Would Politico prefer that there be no conversation
whatsoever between the US and Russia? Why? Isn't it obviously preferable that we make an effort
to understand a potential adversary's perspective, particularly when that potential adversary
is the other nuclear superpower? It is astonishing -- and foolish -- that no program anything
like The Great Game can be found anywhere in US media. In the US, we hear only variations on
our own perspective on our big news programs. Where do we allow voices from the other side to
make their case?
Simes should be thanked for his work. Instead what he gets is this hit piece. It is not only
disgusting and disheartening, it is frightening.
Paul R. Grenier is a co-founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. He
worked for many years as a simultaneous interpreter for the U.S. Defense and State Departments,
interpreting for Gen. Tommy Franks and serving as lead interpreter for US Central Command's
peacekeeping exercises with post-Soviet states.
Scripals's poisoning connected Prime Minister soon will be gone for good.
Novichok has lasting effects on British PM ;-) Now it will be much easier to investigate her role in spying on Trump,
British government role in creation of Steele dossier, and in launching neo-McCarthyism campaign against Russia (aka
Russiagate).
Notable quotes:
"... During her tumultuous tenure as PM, May survived two no-confidence votes. ..."
"... Crying May. What a Loser. Plus, she may have well co-conspired against Trump. ..."
May, the second - but certainly not the last - female prime minister in the UK, will
abandon her supremely unpopular withdrawal agreement instead of trying to force it through
the Commons for the fourth time. May's decision to call for a fourth vote on the withdrawal
agreement, this time packaging it in a bill that could have opened to door to a second
confirmatory referendum, was more than her fellow conservatives could tolerate. One of her
top cabinet ministers resigned and Graham Brady, the leader of the Tory backbenchers,
effectively forced May out by rounding up the votes for a rule change that would have allowed
MPs to oust her.
During her tumultuous tenure as PM, May survived two no-confidence votes.
Though May will stay on as caretaker until a new leader can be chosen, the race to succeed
May begins now...odds are that a 'Brexiteer' will fill the role. Whatever happens, the
contest should take a few weeks, and afterwards May will be on her way back to
Maidenhead.
"It is and will always remain a deep regret for me that I was not able to deliver
Brexit...I was not able to reach a consensus...that job will now fall to my successor," May
said.
Between now and May's resignation, May still has work to do: President Trump will travel
to the UK for a state visit, while Europe will also celebrate the 75th anniversary of
D-Day.
It's fitting that May touted the virtues of her moderate approach to governance during her
resignation speech, considering that her attempts to chart a middle path through Brexit ended
up alienating hard-core Brexiteers and remainers alike. Her fate was effectively sealed
nearly two years ago, after she called for a general election that cost the Tories their
majority in Parliament and emboldened Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The pound's reaction was relatively muted, as May's decision to step down had been
telegraphed well in advance.
She didn't cry for syrians when she declared bombing Syria and using the firm her
husband is involved in,. They made billion, and she didn't cry over her makeover afterwards
new hair clothes and big jewels and cuddles with her husband in the media.
Many women in esteemed positions are just affirmative action or window dressing to
placate the masses with supposed maternal love but they end up being wicked as heck.
Perhaps, but it's worse than that:
They are part of the Divide & Conquer strategy, while (((Global-lusts))) are
plundering the Wealth Of Nations and taking over the real reigns of power.
Americants are easily distracted or fooled.
ps. "...wicked as heck." Wicked? Heck? What's up with the careful avoidance of "cuss
words"? It's ok, you're safe... No "ladies or preachers" (bitches or scammers) nearby. And
the Tylers or NSA won't rat you out.
How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and
other Spygate principals manage to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy?
Because they serve those who dispense such power. That is their job.
And those whom they serve make sure that checky/balancey oversight–say in the form
of chief executive of the United States of America, or an honest Congressman or
journalist–is destroyed if it threatens not to align with those masters or even
questions/reveals these individuals or these structures.
Look at how they've reacted to Donald Trump's trolling both before and while in
office.
They make sure that "the intelligence bureaucracy" reifies that exclusionary principle in
every hire, every action, every policy. Like many bureaucracies and institutions it becomes a
factory for its own viral replication rather than anything that is traditionally considered
"intelligence."
Look at their prime creation of the new millennium: Barack Obama.
"... Tom Charles Huston testified before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee, on the 43-page plan he presented to the President Nixon and others on ways to collect information about anti-war and "radical" groups, including burglary, electronic surveillance, and opening of mail. ..."
9/23/1975 Tom Charles Huston Church Committee Testimony
Tom Charles Huston testified before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee,
on the 43-page plan he presented to the President Nixon and others on ways to collect
information about anti-war and "radical" groups, including burglary, electronic surveillance,
and opening of mail.
"... The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war." ..."
"... From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we -- not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever). ..."
"... Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing. ..."
"... Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall," provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help ..."
"... There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.) ..."
"... In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when the USSR existed. ..."
"... I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA) ..."
The Great Power Game is On and China is Winning If America wants to maintain any influence in Asia, it needs to wake
up. By Robert W. Merry •
May 22,
2019
President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, Thursday,
November 9, 2017, in Beijing, People's Republic of China. (
Official White House Photo
by Shealah Craighead) From across the pond come two geopolitical analyses in two top-quality British publications that lay out
in stark terms the looming struggle between the United States and China. It isn't just a trade war, says The Economist in
a major cover package. "Trade is not the half of it," declares the magazine. "The United States and China are contesting every domain,
from semiconductors to submarines and from blockbuster films to lunar exploration." The days when the two superpowers sought a win-win
world are gone.
For its own cover, The Financial Times ' Philip Stephens produced a piece entitled, "Trade is just an opening shot in a
wider US-China conflict." The subhead: "The current standoff is part of a struggle for global pre-eminence." Writes Stephens: "The
trade narrative is now being subsumed into a much more alarming one. Economics has merged with geopolitics. China, you can hear on
almost every corner in sight of the White House and Congress, is not just a dangerous economic competitor but a looming existential
threat."
Stephens quotes from the so-called National Defense Strategy, entitled "Sharpening the American Military's Competitive Edge,"
released last year by President Donald Trump's Pentagon. In the South China Sea, for example, says the strategic paper, "China has
mounted a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to the region and provide China a freer hand there."
The broader Chinese goal, warns the Pentagon, is "Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United
States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future."
The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more
intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war."
... ... ..
Russia: Of all the developments percolating in the world today, none is more ominous than the growing prospect of an anti-American
alliance involving Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran. Yet such an alliance is in the works, largely as a result of America's inability
to forge a foreign policy that recognizes the legitimate geopolitical interests of other nations. If the United States is to maintain
its position in Asia, this trend must be reversed.
The key is Russia, largely by dint of its geopolitical position in the Eurasian heartland. If China's global rise is to be thwarted,
it must be prevented from gaining dominance over Eurasia. Only Russia can do that. But Russia has no incentive to act because it
feels threatened by the West. NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been
part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries.
Given the trends that are plainly discernible in the Far East, the West must normalize relations with Russia. That means providing
assurances that NATO expansion is over for good. It means the West recognizing that Georgia, Belarus, and, yes, Ukraine are within
Russia's natural zone of influence. They will never be invited into NATO, and any solution to the Ukraine conundrum will have to
accommodate Russian interests. Further, the West must get over Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula. It is a fait accompli
-- and one that any other nation, including America, would have executed in similar circumstances.
Would Russian President Vladimir Putin spurn these overtures and maintain a posture of bellicosity toward the West? We can't be
sure, but that certainly wouldn't be in his interest. And how will we ever know when it's never been tried? We now understand that
allegations of Trump's campaign colluding with Russia were meritless, so it's time to determine the true nature and extent of Putin's
strategic aims. That's impossible so long as America maintains its sanctions and general bellicosity.
NATO: Trump was right during the 2016 presidential campaign when he said that NATO was obsolete. He later dialed back on
that, but any neutral observer can see that the circumstances that spawned NATO as an imperative of Western survival no longer exist.
The Soviet Union is gone, and the 1.3 million Russian and client state troops it placed on Western Europe's doorstep are gone as
well.
So what kind of threat could Russia pose to Europe and the West? The European Union's GDP is more than 12 times that of Russia's,
while Russia's per capita GDP is only a fourth of Europe's. The Russian population is 144.5 million to Europe's 512 million. Does
anyone seriously think that Russia poses a serious threat to Europe or that Europe needs the American big brother for survival, as
in the immediate postwar years? Of course not. This is just a ruse for the maintenance of the status quo -- Europe as subservient
to America, the Russian bear as menacing grizzly, America as protective slayer in the event of an attack.
This is all ridiculous. NATO shouldn't be abolished. It should be reconfigured for the realities of today. It should be European-led,
not American-led. It should pay for its own defense entirely, whatever that might be (and Europe's calculation of that will inform
us as to its true assessment of the Russian threat). America should be its primary ally, but not committed to intervene whenever
a tiny European nation feels threatened. NATO's Article 5, committing all alliance nations to the defense of any other when attacked,
should be scrapped in favor of language that calls for U.S. intervention only in the event of a true threat to Western Civilization
itself.
And while a European-led NATO would find it difficult to pull back from its forward eastern positions after adding so many nations
in the post-Cold War era, it should extend assurances to Russia that it has no intention of acting provocatively -- absent, of course,
any Russian provocations.
Pragmatic isolationalism is a better deal then the current neocon foreign policy. Which Trump is pursuing with the zeal similar
to Obama (who continued all Bush II wars and started two new in Libya and Syria.) Probably this partially can be explained by
his dependence of Adelson and pro-Israeli lobby.
But the problem is deeper then Trump: it is the power of MIC and American exeptionalism ( which can be viewed as a form of
far right nationalism ) about which Andrew Bacevich have written a lot:
From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we --
not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant
to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living
in or near Washington, D.C.
If doubts remained on that score, the end of the Cold War removed them. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse
of communism, politicians, journalists, and policy intellectuals threw themselves headlong into a competition over who could
explain best just how unprecedented, how complete, and how wondrous was the global preeminence of the United States.
Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification
for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore
required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever).
"If we have to use force," Secretary of State Albright announced on morning television in February 1998, "it is because
we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."
Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class
hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."
In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping. The 9/11 terrorist
attacks and the several unsuccessful wars of choice that followed offer prime examples. But so too did Washington's belated
and inadequate recognition of the developments that actually endanger the wellbeing of 21st-century Americans, namely climate
change, cyber threats, and the ongoing reallocation of global power prompted by the rise of China. Rather than seeing far into
the future, American elites have struggled to discern what might happen next week. More often than not, they get even that
wrong.
Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global
leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers,
including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent
counted for nothing.
Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful
run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely
approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall,"
provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether
irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help.
There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense
the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider
neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.)
In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia
and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when
the USSR existed.
I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat
suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in
China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA)
"... There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the truth. ..."
"... There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare. Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out "legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions. The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote against a defense spending increase. ..."
"... Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus. ..."
"... When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed. ..."
"... I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. ..."
"... If the Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global recession is a certainty. ..."
"... These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the president. ..."
"... The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want to puke. ..."
"I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. "I think the puppet on the
right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Hey, wait a
minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!"" – Bill Hicks
Anyone who frequents Twitter, Facebook, political blogs, economic blogs, or fake-news
mainstream media channels knows our world is driven by the "Us versus Them" narrative. It's
almost as if "they" are forcing us to choose sides and believe the other side is evil. Bill
Hicks died in 1994, but his above quote is truer today then it was then. As the American Empire
continues its long-term decline, the proles are manipulated through Bernaysian propaganda
techniques, honed over the course of decades by the ruling oligarchs, to root for their
assigned puppets.
Most people can't discern they are being manipulated and duped by the Deep State
controllers. The most terrifying outcome for these Deep State controllers would be for the
masses to realize it is us versus them. But they don't believe there is a chance in hell of
this happening. Their arrogance is palatable.
Their hubris has reached astronomical levels as they blew up the world economy in 2008 and
successfully managed to have the innocent victims bail them out to the tune of $700 billion,
pillaged the wealth of the nation through their capture of the Federal Reserve (QE, ZIRP),
rigged the financial markets in their favor through collusion, used the hundreds of billions in
corporate tax cuts to buy back their stock and further pump the stock market, all while their
corporate media mouthpieces mislead and misinform the proles.
There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social
issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The
real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it
appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the
Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare.
Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort
whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The
proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as
the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of
Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out
"legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions.
The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote
against a defense spending increase.
Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing
from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too
Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy
in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as
people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus.
When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are
bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed
billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge
tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in
every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no
legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed.
I've never been big on joining a group. I tend to believe Groucho Marx and his cynical line,
"I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". The "Us vs. Them" narrative
doesn't connect with my view of the world. As a realistic libertarian I know libertarian ideals
will never proliferate in a society of government dependency, willful ignorance of the masses,
thousands of laws, and a weak-kneed populace afraid of freedom and liberty. The only true
libertarian politician, Ron Paul, was only able to connect with about 5% of the voting public.
There is no chance a candidate with a libertarian platform will ever win a national election.
This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Bill Hicks somewhat foreshadowed the last
election by referencing another famous cynic.
"I ascribe to Mark Twain's theory that the last person who should be President is the one
who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking
and screaming into the White House." ― Bill Hicks
Hillary Clinton wanted to be president so badly, she colluded with Barack Obama, Jim Comey,
John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch and numerous other Deep State sycophants to ensure
her victory, by attempting to entrap Donald Trump in a concocted Russian collusion plot and
subsequent post-election coup to cover for their traitorous plot. I wouldn't say Donald Trump
was dragged kicking and screaming into the White House, but when he ascended on the escalator
at Trump Tower in June of 2015, I'm not convinced he believed he could win the presidency.
As the greatest self-promoter of our time, I think he believed a presidential run would be
good for his brand, more revenue for his properties and more interest in his reality TV
ventures. He was despised by the establishment within the Republican and Democrat parties. The
vested interests controlling the media and levers of power in society scorned and ridiculed
this brash uncouth outsider. In an upset for the ages, Trump tapped into a vein of rage and
disgruntlement in flyover country and pockets within swing states, to win the presidency over
Crooked Hillary and her Deep State backers.
I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. I hadn't voted for a Republican since
2000, casting protest votes for Libertarian and Constitutional Party candidates along the way.
I despise the establishment, so their hatred of Trump made me vote for him. His campaign
stances against foreign wars and Federal Reserve reckless bubble blowing appealed to me. I
don't worship at the altar of the cult of personality. I judge men by their actions and not
their words.
Trump's first two years have been endlessly entertaining as he waged war against fake news
CNN, establishment Republicans, the Deep State coup attempt, and Obama loving globalists. The
Twitter in Chief has bypassed the fake news media and tweets relentlessly to his followers. He
provokes outrage in his enemies and enthralls his worshipers. With millions in each camp it is
difficult to find an unbiased assessment of narrative versus real accomplishments.
I'm happy he has been able to stop the relentless leftward progression of our Federal
judiciary. Cutting regulations and rolling back environmental mandates has been a positive.
Exiting the Paris Climate Agreement and TPP, forcing NATO members to pay their fair share, and
renegotiating NAFTA were all needed. Ending the war on coal and approving pipelines will keep
energy costs lower. His attempts to vet Muslims entering the country have been the right thing
to do. Building a wall on our southern border is the right thing to do, but he should have
gotten it done when he controlled both houses.
The use of tariffs to force China to renegotiate one sided trade deals as a negotiating
tactic is a high-risk, high reward gamble. If his game of chicken is successful and he gets
better terms from the Chicoms, while reversing the tariffs, it would be a huge win. If the
Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global
recession is a certainty. Who has the upper hand? Xi is essentially a dictator for life
and doesn't have to worry about elections or popularity polls. Dissent is crushed. A global
recession and stock market crash would make Trump's re-election in 2020 problematic.
I'm a big supporter of lower taxes. The Trump tax cuts were sold as beneficial to the middle
class. That is a false narrative. The vast majority of the tax cut benefits went to
mega-corporations and rich people. Middle class home owning families with children received
little or no tax relief, as exemptions were eliminated and tax deductions capped. In many
cases, taxes rose for working class Americans.
With corporate profits at all time highs, massive tax cuts put billions more into their
coffers. They didn't repatriate their overseas profits to a great extent. They didn't go on a
massive hiring spree. They didn't invest in new facilities. They did buy back their own stock
to help drive the stock market to stratospheric heights. So corporate executives gave
themselves billions in bonuses, which were taxed at a much lower rate. This is considered
winning in present day America.
The "Us vs. Them" issue rears its ugly head whenever Trump is held accountable for promises
unkept, blatant failures, and his own version of fake news. Holding Trump to the same standards
as Obama is considered traitorous by those who only root for their home team. Their standard
response is that you are a Hillary sycophant or a turncoat to the home team. If you agree with
a particular viewpoint or position of a liberal then you are a bad person and accused of being
a lefty by Trump fanboys. Facts don't matter to cheerleaders. Competing narratives rule the
day. Truthfulness not required.
The refusal to distinguish between positive actions and negative actions when assessing the
performance of what passes for our political leadership by the masses is why cynicism has
become my standard response to everything I see, hear or he read. The incessant level of lies
permeating our society and its acceptance as the norm has led to moral decay and rampant
criminality from the White House, to the halls of Congress, to corporate boardrooms, to
corporate newsrooms, to government run classrooms, to the Vatican, and to households across the
land. It's interesting that one of our founding fathers reflected upon this detestable human
trait over two hundred years ago.
"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental
lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity
of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has
prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." – Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine's description of how moral mischief can ruin a society was written when less
than 3 million people inhabited America. Consider his accurate assessment of humanity when over
300 million occupy these lands. The staggering number of corrupt prostituted sociopaths
occupying positions of power within the government, corporations, media, military, churches,
and academia has created a morally bankrupt empire of debt.
These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans.
They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't
care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others.
They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their
unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of
controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every
politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head,
MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the
president.
The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households
around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them. The answer to that question
will strongly impact the direction and intensity of the climactic years of this Fourth Turning.
What I've noticed is the shunning of those who don't take an all or nothing position regarding
Trump. If you disagree with a decision, policy, or hiring decision by the man, you are accused
by the pro-Trump team of being one of them (aka liberals, lefties, Hillary lovers).
If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the Trumpeteers. I
don't want to be Us or Them. I just want to be me. I will judge everyone by their actions and
their results. I can agree with Trump on many issues, while also agreeing with Tulsi Gabbard,
Rand Paul, Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi on other issues. I don't prescribe to the cult of
personality school of thought. I didn't believe the false narratives during the Bush or Obama
years, and I won't worship at the altar of the Trump narrative now.
In Part II of this article I'll assess Trump's progress thus far and try to determine
whether he can defeat the Deep State.
"The scientific and industrial revolution of modern times represents the next giant
step in the mastery over nature; and here, too, an enormous increase in man's power over
nature is followed by an apocalyptic drive to subjugate man and reduce human nature to the
status of nature. Even where enslavement is employed in a mighty effort to tame nature, one
has the feeling that the effort is but a tactic to legitimize total subjugation. Thus,
despite its spectacular achievements in science and technology, the twentieth century will
probably be seen in retrospect as a century mainly preoccupied with the mastery and
manipulation of men. Nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, and militarism,
cartelization and unionization, propaganda and advertising are all aspects of a general
relentless drive to manipulate men and neutralize the unpredictability of human nature. Here,
too, the atmosphere is heavy-laden with coercion and magic." --Eric Hoffer
If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the
Trumpeteers
That's not true. When Trump kisses Israeli ***, most "Trumpeteers" are outraged. That does
not mean they're going to vote for Joe "I'm a Zionist" Biden, or Honest Hillary because of
it, but they're still pissed.
These predators (((them))) need to fear the Victims, us! That is what the 2ND Amendment is
for. It's coming, slowly for now, but eventually it speeds up.
Any piece like this better be littered with footnotes and cited sources before I'm
swallowing it.
I'll say it again: this is the internet, people. There's no "shortage of column space" to
include links back to primary sources for your assertions. Otherwise, how am I supposed to
distinguish you from another "psy op" or "paid opposition hit piece"?
"The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households
around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them."
If you still ponder this question, then you are pretty frickin' thick. It is obvious at
this point, that he betrayed everything he campaigned on. You don't do that and call yourself
one of "us".......damn sure aren't one of "me".
If I couldn't keep my word and wouldn't do what it takes to do what is right.....then I
would resign. But I would not go on playing politics in a world that needs some real
leadership and not another political hack.
The real battle is between Truth and Lie. No matter the name of your "team" or the "side"
you support. Truth is truth and lies are lies. We don't stand for political parties, we stand
for truth. We don't stand for national pride, we take pride in a nation that is truthful and
trustworthy. The minute a "side" or "team" starts lying.....and justifying it.....that is the
minute they become them and not one of us.
Any thinking person in this country today knows we are being lied to by the entire
complex. Until someone starts telling the truth.....we are on our own. But I be damned before
I am going to support any of these lying sons of bitches......and that includes Trump.
Dark comedy. All the elections have been **** choices until the last one. Take a look at
Arkancide.com and start counting the
bodies.
Anyone remember the news telling us how North Korea promised to turn the US into a sea of
fire?? Trump absolutely went to bat for every single American to de-escalate that
situation.
Don't tell me about Arkancide or the Clintons. I grew up in Arkansas with that sack of
**** as my governor for 12 years.
NK was never a real threat to anyone. Trump didn't do ****. NK is back to building and
shooting off missiles and will be teaming up with the Russians and Chinese. You are a duped
bafoon.
I don't think anybody thought NK was an existential threat to the US. It has still been
nice making progress on bringing them back into the world and making them less of a threat to
Japan and S. Korea. Trump did that.
Dennis Rodman did that, or that is to say, Trump an extension thereof ..
Great theater..
Look, i thought it was great that Trump went Kim Unning. I mean after all, i had talked
with a few elderly folks that get their news directly from the mainstream of mainstream,
vanilla news reportage. Propaganda central casting. I remember them being extremely
concerned, outright petrified about that evil menace, kim gonna launch nukes any minute now.
If the news would have been announced a major troop mobilization, bombing campaigns, to begin
immediately they would have been completely onboard, waving the flag.
Frankly, it is only a matter of time, and folks can speculate on the country of interest,
but it is coming soon to a theater near you. So many being in the crosshairs. Iran i suspect
.. that's the big prize, that makes these sociopaths cream in their panties.
Probably. In the second term .. and so far, if ones honestly evaluates the "brain trust" /
current crop of dimwit opposition, and in light of their past 2 plus years of moronic
posturing with their hair on fire, trump will get his second term ..
Until the last one? You are retarded, the last election was a masterpiece of Rothschilds
Productions. The Illuminati was watching you at their private cinema when you were voting for
Trump and they were laughing their asses off.
The author does not realize that everyone in America, except Native American Indians, were
immigrants drawn towards the false promise of hope that is the American Dream, turned
nightmare..
Owning your own home, car, & raising a family in this country is so damn expensive
& risky, that you'd have be on drugs or an idiot to even fall for the lies.
I don't see an us vs them, I see the #FakeMoney printers monetized every facet of life,
own everything, & it truly is RENT-A-LIFE USSA, complete with bills galore, taxes galore,
laws galore, jails & prisons galore, & the worst fkn country anyone would want to
live in poverty & homelessness in.
At least in many 3rd world nations there is land to live off of & joblessness does not
= a financial death sentence.
Sure. Lets all go back to living in huts.....off the land....no cars.....no
electricity.....no running water......no roads....
There is a price to pay for things and it is not always in the form of money. We have
given up some of our freedom for the ease and conveniences we want.
The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare
because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want
to puke.
There is a balance. Don't take the other extreme or we never find balance.
This article is moronic. One can easily prove that Trump is not like all the others in the
poster. Has this author been living under a rock for the last 2.5 yrs? The past 5 presidents
represent a group that has been literally trying to assassinate Trump, ruin his family, his
reputation, his buisness and his future, for the audacity to be an ousider to the power
network and steal (win) the presidency from under their noses. He's kept us OUT of war. He's
dissolved the treachery that was keeping us in the middle east through gaslighitng and a
proxy fake war that is ISIS, the globalists' / nato / fiveys / uk's fake mercenary army
The greatest threat to the USA is its own dumbed down drugged up citizens who cannot
compete with anyone. America is a big military powerhouse but that doens't make successful
countries
Notice how modern narrative is getting manipulated. What is being reported and referenced
is completely different from how things are. And knowing that we can assume that the entire
history is a fabricated lie, written by the ruling class to support its status in the minds
of obedient citizens.
This article is garbage propaganda that proves that they think we aren't keeping score or
paying attention. The gaslighting won't work when it relies on so much counterthink, willful
ignorance, counterfacts and weaponized omissions
The reality is the de-escalation of wars, the stability of our currency and our economy,
and the moral re-grounding of our culture does not occur until we do what over 100 countries
have done over the centuries, beginning in Carthage in 250AD.
The congress are statusquotarians. If they solved the problems they say they would,they'd
be out of a job. and that job is sitting there acting like a naddler or toxic post turtle
leprechaun with a charisma and skill level of zero. Their staff do all the work, half of them
barely read, though they probably can
I still think 1st and 2nd ammedment is predicated on which party rules the house. If a Dem
gets into the WH, we're fucked. Kiss those Iast two dying amendments goodbye for good.
If we rely on any party to preserve the 1st or 2nd Amendments, we are already fucked. What
should preserve the 1st and 2nd Amendments is the absolute fear of anyone in government even
mentioning suppressing or removing them. When the very thought of doing anything to lessen
the rights advocated in these two amendments, causes a politician to piss in their pants,
liberty will be preserved. As it is now citizens fear the government, and as a result tyranny
continues to grow and fester as a cancer.
You may very well be right. I still hold out hope, but upon seeing what our society is
quickly morphing into, that hope seems to fade more each and every day.
If you think the 1st and 2nd amendments are reliant on who is in office, then you are
already done. Why don't you try growing a pair and being an American for once in your
life.
I will always have a 1st and 2nd "amendment" for as long as I live. Life is meaningless
without them.....as far as I am concerned. Good thing the founders didn't wait for king
George to give them what they "felt" was theirs.....by the laws of Nature and Nature's
God.
I hope the democrats get the power......and I hope they come for the guns......maybe then
pussies like you will finally have to **** or get off the pot......for once in your life.
There are worse things than dying.
This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Unless we get rid of *** influencing
from abroad and domestically. Getting rid of English King few hundred years ago was a joke!
this would be a challenge because dual-citizens masquerading as locals.
Last revolution (1776) we targeted the WRONG ENEMY.
We targeted King George III instead of the private bankers who owned of the Bank of
England and the issued of the British-pound currency.
George III was himself up to his ears in debt to them by 1776, when the bankers installed
George Washington to replace George III as their middleman in the American colonies, by way
of the phony revolution.
Phony because ownership of the central bank and currency (Federal-Reserve Banks,
Federal-Reserve notes) we use, remains in the same banking families' hands to this day. The
same parasite remains within our government.
It is this strangely incomplete calculus that creates the shifting Loser world of
rifts and alliances. By operating with a more complete calculus, Sociopaths are able to
manipulate this world through the divide-and-conquer mechanisms. The result is that the
Losers end up blaming each other for their losses, seek collective emotional resolution,
and fail to adequately address the balance sheet of material rewards and losses.
To succeed, this strategy requires that Losers not look too closely at the non-emotional
books. This is why, as we saw last time, divide-and-conquer is the most effective means for
dealing with them, since it naturally creates emotional drama that keeps them busy while
they are being manipulated.
This was a color revolution run by consortium of intelligence agencies and the leadership of the Democratic Party, not "wild
goose chase". The key participants perfectly undersood that this is "regime change" operation.
And Russiagate was not about Trump but about profits of military industrial complex and control over US foreign policy. BTW
Trump folded just in three months after inauguration.
This is a very weak article, but some comments are excellent.
Notable quotes:
"... The damage the Democrats (and their allies in the FBI and media) have done to the country is incalculable, but even worse, is the damage they've done to their own party. ..."
"... the Democrats have betrayed the trust of the people who supported their respective campaigns with the implicit understanding that they would work for the progressive reforms that improve the lives of ordinary working people and not behave like hectoring, obstructionist crybabies who refuse to respect the outcome of elections if the winner is not to their liking ..."
"... What we've seen in the last few years is not only unacceptable, it's also degraded our politics and divided the country into rival camps ..."
"... Russiagate has shed light on the cozy relationship between the Democratic party, the Intelligence Agencies, the FBI and the media. ..."
"... Their relentless, but coordinated attacks on the president strongly suggest that there may be an alliance between the various groups of which the American people are completely unaware. This suspicion seems at least partially substantiated by an article that appeared in the World Socialist Web Site titled "The CIA Democrats". ..."
"... CIA ran this whole show. Not Brennan, CIA the institution. Gina Haspel was in London marshaling the foreign intelligence cutouts, and now she's DCI. ..."
"... In this day and age nobody swallows the CIA propaganda "CIA works for the president." Don Gregg stuck that into the Pike Report after he threatened the committees with martial law. So let's stop pretending that CIA rule is man bites dog. Your government is CIA. ..."
"... Far from mourning its failure to depose Trump, the Deep State is celebrating its own prowess in leading him by the nose. The Deep State has learned to stop worrying and love the bombastic orange clown. ..."
"... Lets not pretend Russia-phobia isn't bipartisan. Even Trump went along with it by placing sanctions on Russia for imaginary "meddling". Making RT register as foreign agent. ..."
"... Lets not forget that Trump admin also expelled Russian diplomats and closed their consulate in Seattle over the bogus Skripal attack in Britain. ..."
"... Trump also launched missiles on Syria over the false flag chemical attack staged by the White Helmets (ISIS), that Trump admin. is still funding. Further poking at Russia. ..."
"... The Trump-Russia collusion scandal was the Deep State's attempt at a coup. The Mueller investigation failed to deliver so they now move on to their next coup attempt. ..."
"... In the 2018 mid-terms some 70 percent of Democratic voters, along with a high number of Independents and even Republicans believed that Trump had colluded with Russia. Yet with so many voters basing their voting decisions on fake news and misinformation, once again, the Left doesn't seemed concerned at all. ..."
"... The "Democrats" – one half of the corrupt set of American bootlicking politicians – spent three years screaming and howling and wearing Trump down until now he is governing just like Hillary Clinton would have. Endless pointless winless wars that serve only to spread chaos and enrich defense contractors, continuing subsidies of Wall Street, tax cuts for big time-plutocrats and coming soon nice juicey regressive taxes for you and me! – and of course, more legal immigration and a government-enabled invasion of our southern border by central America because the rich like cheap labor. ..."
"... That Müeller found nothing to corroborate collusion is likely the result of NSA intercepts that would disprove anything his team and the other agencies might fabricate as proof of the charge. There are a couple serious dividing lines in the national security state that have made it difficult for the coup conspirators to succeed; what will be interesting is if they do in fact get away with trying. ..."
"... Bill Clinton's telecommunication act of 1996 did a lot of damage. Clinton was a CFR agent for the parasite. ..."
"... The fourth estate centralized and came under corporate control after 1996. Those who are remotely aware know that the press organs are owned by our favorite in-group which has messianic goals. This in-group, while small in number, has goals amplified by money power. ..."
"... The neoCONs won and have Trump under control and he's hiring Bush-men as fast as he can ..."
"... it looks like Trump will run in 2020 as a WAR President, in Venezuela and/or Iran. The Bush/Trump Crime Family has been born from the ashes of the Bush/Clinton Crime Family. ..."
"... A crime of obstruction would be something like the destruction subpoenaed evidence; such as taking Bleachbit to your e-mails, or smashing your smartphones with hammers ..."
"... They just go from one lie they're more than happy to believe to another – this time its "obstruction" and the media will push that lie too ..."
"... You can legally hire or fire your maid but if your motivation -- intention in either of those acts is to bribe her or threaten her because she knows something about you that could get you in legal trouble. Then it is obstruction. ..."
For the last two and a half years, the Democrats have led the country on a wild goose chase
that has been a complete waste of time and achieved absolutely nothing. The absurd conspiracy
theory that the President of the United States was an agent of the Kremlin has been thoroughly
debunked by the Mueller Report which states that there was neither "coordination" nor
"conspiracy with the Trump campaign and Russia." Even so, congressional Democrats– still
determined to destroy Trump by whatever means possible– have switched from the
"collusion" allegations to vicious attacks on Attorney General William Barr and demands for
Trump's tax returns.
The ease with which the Dems have shifted from their ridiculous claims that Trump was
"Putin's stooge" to this new round of vitriolic accusations and mud-slinging, shows that party
leaders have not only lost touch with reality, but also, that they have no interest in
governing the country. The Democratic party in its current form, is less a political
organization than it is a permanent inquisition led by duplicitous vipers (Adam Schiff, Eric
Swalwell, Jerry Nadler) who feel entitled to use the Justice System to pursue their own petty
political vendetta against a Beltway outsider who had the audacity to win the 2016 presidential
election and whose views on foreign policy do not jibe with those of their elite
paymasters.
The damage the Democrats (and their allies in the FBI and media) have done to the country is
incalculable, but even worse, is the damage they've done to their own party. By focusing
exclusively on Donald Trump and the fictitious Russian boogieman, the Democrats have betrayed
the trust of the people who supported their respective campaigns with the implicit
understanding that they would work for the progressive reforms that improve the lives of
ordinary working people and not behave like hectoring, obstructionist crybabies who refuse to
respect the outcome of elections if the winner is not to their liking.
These are the people who
have been hurt most by the Russiagate fiasco, the people who thought their Democratic
candidates actually wanted to run the country, but soon discovered that those same
representatives would rather spend all of their time chasing Russian ghosts down a rabbit
hole.
Here's an excerpt from an article by Andrew McCarthy that helps to explain what the Russia
probe was really all about:
"Russiagate has always been a political narrative masquerading as a federal investigation.
Its objective, plain and simple, has been twofold: first, to hamstring Donald Trump's
capacity to press the agenda on which he ran .and ultimately, to render him unelectable come
autumn 2020 .
The Russia counterintelligence probe, based on the fraudulent projection of a
Trump-Putin conspiracy, was always a pretext to conduct a criminal investigation despite the
absence of a predicate crime. The criminal investigation, in turn, was always a pretext
for congressional impeachment chatter. And the congressional impeachment chatter is a pretext
for the real agenda: Making Trump an ineffective president now, and an un-reelectable
president 18 months from now.
Indeed, Russiagate "has always been politics", but the quality of our politics has
deteriorated significantly in the last few years, a point that's worth mulling over for a
minute or two. For nearly three years we've seen one party rip up the rulebook and engage in a
full-blown, scorched earth, no-holds-barred blitzkrieg on the president of the United States.
At no time has there been any effort to discuss issues, ideals, policies, or competing visions
of the future. Instead, every ounce of energy has been devoted to inflicting maximum damage on
the man who, many Democrats think, is deserving of whatever horrendous reprisal they direct at
him.
The Democrats have made no secret of their hatred for Trump or their desire to drive him
from office. They have openly supported the dirty tricks, the hyper-ventilating headlines, and
the relentless smear campaigns that have been aimed at him from Day 1. Through Russiagate, the
Dems have tried to frame Trump as a backstabbing traitor who sold out his country to a foreign
power, but now that Mueller has proved that Trump was falsely accused, the Dems have deftly
switched to another line of attack altogether. This isn't how sincere liberals fight to
implement a plan for progressive change. This is how unprincipled mercenaries pursue the
politics of personal destruction. There's a big difference.
This isn't about Trump. Trump could be the worst president in history, and it still wouldn't
excuse the contemptible way he's been treated. Is it ever acceptable to spy on a presidential
campaign, to insert confidential informants who try to entrap campaign assistants to gather
information that can be used to intimidate, blackmail or impeach the president? Is it ever
acceptable to leak classified information to the media as part of a malignant scheme to destroy
a candidate's reputation? Is it ever acceptable to enlist senior-level officials at the FBI,
CIA and NSA to prevent a candidate from being elected or to engage in a stealth campaign of
slanders, smears and innuendo that cast a shadow over the legitimacy of the government?
No, it's not acceptable. Never.
What we've seen in the last few years is not only unacceptable, it's also degraded our
politics and divided the country into rival camps. We've come to expect that every morning will
bring some new crisis centered on Trump's latest tweet followed by hours of incendiary coverage
on the cable news channels, all aimed at throwing more gas on the raging fire that's engulfed
the country. And, of course, no one scandal has consumed more time or been more inflammatory
than the Russia probe. Here's how The Nation's Stephen Cohen sums it up in a recent
article:
"Now in its third year, Russiagate is the worst, most corrosive, and most fraudulent
political scandal in modern American history. these Russiagate allegations continue to
inflict grave damage on fundamental institutions of American democracy. They impugn the
integrity of the presidency and now the office of the attorney general. They degrade the many
Democratic members of Congress who persist in clinging to the allegations and thus the
Democratic Party and Congress. And they have enticed mainstream media into one of the worst
episodes of journalistic malpractice in modern times.
Cohen's piece cuts to the heart of the matter. Russiagate has not only undermined our
"fundamental institutions", it has also impacted our "national security." But I would argue
that the damage caused by the Trump-Russia investigation is even greater than Cohen describes,
mainly because Russiagate has shed light on the cozy relationship between the Democratic party,
the Intelligence Agencies, the FBI and the media. These are the institutions that have waged
war on Trump from the very beginning. Their relentless, but coordinated attacks on the
president strongly suggest that there may be an alliance between the various groups of which
the American people are completely unaware. This suspicion seems at least partially
substantiated by an article that appeared in the World Socialist Web Site titled "The CIA
Democrats". Here's an excerpt:
"An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA,
Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic
candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of
military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political
history.
If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as
widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as
many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power
in the lower chamber of Congress." ( "The CIA Democrats" , Patrick
Martin, World Socialist Web Site)
Would anyone be surprised to find out that the CIA was taking a more activist role in
domestic politics; that it's actually grooming its own candidates for elections, that it's
strengthening its influence in the media and its ties with one of the main political parties,
all in an effort to better control electoral outcomes and tighten its grip on power?
No, no one would be surprised at all. And although we don't yet know all the details, there
are signs that the Intel agencies, the FBI, the media and high-ranking Democrats may have been
working secretively for the same objectives, to either sabotage the 2016 presidential election
or gather incriminating information on Trump that could be used at some later date. All of this
coordinated activity hints at the emergence of a one-party political system that is guided by
agents and elites who the American people don't know and never voted for.
In any event, we're going to find out alot more about these illicit connections as the
Justice Department's three separate probes gain pace and reveal how "the FBI used one party's
'opposition research' as the basis to get a warrant from a secret court to spy on the other
party's campaign." That is the crux of the matter. That's the question that will throw open the
curtains and shed light on the suspicious ties between the DNC, the CIA, the FBI and the media,
all of who may have been directly involved in the dodgy plan to depose the president of the
United States.
THE DEMOGANGSTERS ARE THE REAL CRIMINALS; MUELLER WAS AN AGENT OF THE DEEP STATE, BUT STILL
FOUND NO EVIDENCE.
Thanks, Sir. You are so right -- Russiagate is a manufactured scam to get an elected
President out of office, to carry out a coup by using our criminal justice system as a
criminal enterprise. And to cover up the real crimes of the real criminals, the Demogangsters
like Hillary, etc.
Mueller was a member of the Deep State. If there was ANY collusion (whatever statute there
is that outlaws talking to somebody in a foreign country), Mueller would have found it or
invented it.
The fact that he could not shows that the the Demogangsters had no grounds whatsoever to
manufacture this fake "Russiagate" scandal.
In reality, this scandal should be called Demogangstergate.
The DOJ should now investigate the real criminals, the Demogansters. Hillary and Soros are
America's biggest criminals and they belongs in prison for life.
Two minutes – that would let you easily quantify how tired someone is, how badly they
are suffering from the flu, whether they are showing unusual intellectual decline with age,
If I were an employer I might like to learn how my staff's performance declined with
longer working days, with a view to telling them not to work excessive hours. Or with a view
to finding how best to intersperse the working day with breaks – for food, chat,
exercise, or whatever.
I've long wondered why corporations pay large sums to, for instance, management
consultants or lawyers, when much of the work will be done by novices, sobbing from
exhaustion at their desks.
Is it ever acceptable to spy on a presidential campaign ? Is it ever acceptable to leak
classified information to the media as part of a malignant scheme to destroy a candidate's
reputation? Is it ever acceptable to enlist senior-level officials at the FBI, CIA and NSA
to prevent a candidate from being elected ?
No, it's not acceptable. Never.
Sure it is! If you're Anastacio Somoza, and you're running a banana republic which is,
sadly, what we now are.
There's an odd relapse into statist indoctrination in this generally sound argument. The idea
that a rigidly-controlled centralized state party can "enlist senior-level officials at the
FBI, CIA and NSA" is bassackwards. CIA ran this whole show. Not Brennan, CIA the institution.
Gina Haspel was in London marshaling the foreign intelligence cutouts, and now she's DCI. As
for the litany of political interference in the paragraphs, CIA's been doing that for seven
decades now. In this day and age nobody swallows the CIA propaganda "CIA works for the
president." Don Gregg stuck that into the Pike Report after he threatened the committees with
martial law. So let's stop pretending that CIA rule is man bites dog. Your government is CIA.
And outrage over casting a shadow over the 'legitimacy' of government? Pul-leeease.
Legitimacy is a squishy term. Let's stick to the term of art, sovereignty. Sovereignty is
responsibility. One agency, CIA, is chartered with impunity. They do anything they they want
and get away with it. CIA's freedom from responsibility means the USA is not a sovereign
state but a criminal enterprise. Perhaps you want to defend the legitimacy of the criminal
enterprise that's got its hooks in you. Knock yourself out.
This is not to impugn your good faith. We all have to fight our way out of decades of CIA
brainwashing. It's simple. CIA has multiple redundant get-out-of-jail-free cards and secret
books for untrammeled power of the purse. That's the definition of arbitrary rule. The crux
of the matter is CIA runs your country.
Far from mourning its failure to depose Trump, the Deep State is celebrating its own prowess
in leading him by the nose. The Deep State has learned to stop worrying and love the
bombastic orange clown.
If they apologize, it will remove their Russian Trolls decoy, the one placed carefully in the
water to keep the corporate-owned media focused on just this one cluster of minor global
shenanigans, not all of the others, like the Biden's involvement in Ukraine or most of the US
Congress getting rich off of something It's not by building businesses than employ
underemployed US citizens. In addition to their multi six-figure salaries, they're all
getting rich off of placing bets on the rigged stock casino and the global-offshoring /
outsourcing / welfare-rigged-mass-immigration economy.
Lets not pretend Russia-phobia isn't bipartisan. Even Trump went along with it by placing
sanctions on Russia for imaginary "meddling". Making RT register as foreign agent. Its all a
distraction. Might have to actually do some real work if we weren't having this replay of the
red scare. People might start talking about Trumps, as well as most of DC's real owners if
they stop screaming about Putin.
Not everyone went along with it, Tulsi didn't, she even introduced legislation to require
paper ballots in future elections to prevent imaginary "meddling" or hacking, no one in DC is
interested, which either means there is no election meddling, or they don't actually care,
they just wanted to poke at Russia.
Lets not forget that Trump admin also expelled Russian diplomats and closed their
consulate in Seattle over the bogus Skripal attack in Britain.
Trump also launched missiles on Syria over the false flag chemical attack staged by the
White Helmets (ISIS), that Trump admin. is still funding. Further poking at Russia.
But I would argue that the damage caused by the Trump-Russia investigation is even
greater than Cohen describes, mainly because Russiagate has shed light on the cozy
relationship between the Democratic party, the Intelligence Agencies, the FBI and the
media.
nails it. You cannot call this a democracy when a political party, the federal police, the
intelligence agencies and the media all collude to invalidate an election. You can call it a lot of things, but you can't call it democracy.
The Trump-Russia collusion scandal was the Deep State's attempt at a coup. The Mueller
investigation failed to deliver so they now move on to their next coup attempt.
We know that the Left and the Democrats are insincere when they say they are outraged by
Trump colluding with Russia. They aren't. If it is treason to get "dirt" on your political
opponent from Russia then why isn't the Left and Democrats outraged by the DNC, the Clinton
campaign, and Fusion GPS. The Steele dossier which was used to get a FISA warrant to spy on
Carter Page and the Trump campaign came in part from Russian sources. So paid for political
opposition, with Russian sub-sources, was used to go after Trump and interfere in an
election. Yet they aren't the slightest bit bothered by any of this. In the 2018 mid-terms
some 70 percent of Democratic voters, along with a high number of Independents and even
Republicans believed that Trump had colluded with Russia. Yet with so many voters basing
their voting decisions on fake news and misinformation, once again, the Left doesn't seemed
concerned at all.
The Trump-Russia collusion narrative was just a pretext to start an investigation to
hamstring the Trump Presidency. It is the same story all over again. Why did we invade Iraq
in 2003? Was it because of Weapons of Mass Destruction(WMD) and links to Al-Qaeda? No, that
was just the pretext to start the war. The real reasons for the Iraq war and the Russian
Collusion conspiracy can never be stated publically.
The "Democrats" – one half of the corrupt set of American bootlicking politicians
– spent three years screaming and howling and wearing Trump down until now he is
governing just like Hillary Clinton would have. Endless pointless winless wars that serve
only to spread chaos and enrich defense contractors, continuing subsidies of Wall Street, tax
cuts for big time-plutocrats and coming soon nice juicey regressive taxes for you and me!
– and of course, more legal immigration and a government-enabled invasion of our
southern border by central America because the rich like cheap labor.
The "Democrats" do not exist as a coherent ideology, they are a collection of whores who
will do whatever they are paid to do. They have served their purpose in whipping up mindless
hysteria – really, wanting to save trillions by not fighting pointless foreign wars and
spending that on ourselves, that's racism and fascism and Literally Hitler? Really?
So I would say that, operationally, mission accomplished.
CIA ran this whole show. maybe, but I think it was all of the intelligence agencies.. British
M-16, Israeli Mossad, and the Saudi Arabian groups..French, and even the Egyptian.. .. Turkey
too.. they operate the functional parts of government everywhere.
That Müeller found nothing to corroborate collusion is likely the result of NSA
intercepts that would disprove anything his team and the other agencies might fabricate as
proof of the charge. There are a couple serious dividing lines in the national security state
that have made it difficult for the coup conspirators to succeed; what will be interesting is
if they do in fact get away with trying.
The essay's ending – we will: "find out a lot more" "reveal" "throw open the curtain"
"shed light". That's it??? Maybe this a deliberately subtle way of saying: there will be no real consequences; and so
all is lost; banana Republic, soft dictatorship. In fact, if it's merely an opened-up curtain, the result in the MSM will be plaudits for
the actors' patriotism.
The "Democrats" do not exist as a coherent ideology, they are a collection of whores who
will do whatever they are paid to do. They have served their purpose in whipping up
mindless hysteria – really, wanting to save trillions by not fighting pointless
foreign wars and spending that on ourselves, that's racism and fascism and Literally
Hitler? Really?
They think as a group and take their "lifestyle" cues from the likes of Rachel MadCow,
HRC, the Obamas and "their" opinion on foreign policy comes from 3 letter agency people who
"warn" them about treasonous Trump and foreign super villains. They wring their hands and
clutch their pearls over the laws of the land being enforced at the southern border and the
"Muslim ban" but nothing brings out the preemptive smelling salts quicker than Trump's
refusal to adhere to liberal speech codes and middle class fake politeness.
When Trump and his neocon attack dogs threaten war on multiple fronts, drone Muslim
wedding parties and goat herders, aid and abet the KSA and UAE war against Yemen, use
sanctions as a weapon of war against countries that present no threat to America and
prioritize Israel's interests over our own, the liberals breathe a secret sigh of relief and
commend "literally Hitler" for finally acting presidential. All the righteous "concern" about
POC, transfags and other "traditionally" oppressed groups is fake and a way for them to
soothe the cognitive dissonance between their own self-image as "caring" and fair minded
people and the reality that they don't care how many foreigners get killed by DC's foreign
policy or how many of their own countrymen are left to suffer in despair from the fallout of
their livelihoods being offshored.
What they do care about is their own material comfort and the illusion/delusion
that they are good, morally upright people who deserve all the good things life has to offer
because they work hard and are on the "right side of history." They have discovered that
letting Democrat propagandists and liberal celebrities do their thinking for them is a good
way for them to maintain their delusional world view and avoid thinking about the
mind-boggling hypocrisies and double-standards they unquestioningly accept.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of people on the political right who are just as crazy
(e.g. the dedicated race warriors who take the 'war' part literally) but everyone knows this
and few people take them seriously. It is old news that mainstream Republicans and Democrats
are pretty much in lockstep when it comes to terrible foreign policy the ideological space
between neocons like Bolton and Pompeo and neoliberal Democrats like Clinton and Biden is
slim and right now there is more pushback against them coming from the conservatives
side.
The disconcerting thing about deluded libtards is their unmatched ability to believe their
own bullshit and the global reach this bullshit has via the mainstream media. It is ironic
that the same people who made their "self-identities" as morally pure humanitarians and
protectors of the weak and downtrodden a status marker have turned out to be some of the most
arrogant, vapid and destructive hypocrites around, but it shouldn't be that surprising. In my
experience people who go out of their way to highlight their own do-goodery and moral
superiority sooner or later out themselves as virtue signalling bullshitters and hypocrites
who are just following a trend. If these people had no real influence they would be a minor
annoyance unfortunately they have quite a bit of influence. Not as much as they used to,
hence their panic, but still enough to cause all kinds of trouble.
This Russia collusion scam proved that ... the CIA and the FBI and the Justice dept. are all corrupt as hell and
all of these and more are under zionist control and there is no justice in America, justice
is gone with the wind!
Regarding Cohen's assertion that the MSM was "enticed" into one of the worst journalistic
malpractices of modern times, I am heartily skeptical of the portrayal of the MSM as being
seduced into acting like the whores they are.
You have to love the imaginations of these hoax writers. The CIA doesn't have time on their
various networks and news websites to post any truth. They have so many lies scripted for so
many years in advance the producers would lose it if someone tried to slip in a couple of
minutes of truth.
@C3H8NO5P Agree, see the book The Secret Team, the CIA and its allies in control of
America and the world, by Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, this is the most accurate book ever
written about the chain dogs who guard the world for their zionist masters!
Bill Clinton's telecommunication act of 1996 did a lot of damage. Clinton was a CFR agent for
the parasite.
The fourth estate centralized and came under corporate control after 1996. Those who are
remotely aware know that the press organs are owned by our favorite in-group which has
messianic goals. This in-group, while small in number, has goals amplified by money
power.
The parasite operates on multiple fronts. 1) Own the power to create bank credit as money
2) Collect interest on credit issued 3) Use debt slavery (expanding claims of debts) to make
populations servile 4) Buy out and own the press (see #2) 5) Push a narrative good for your
in-group. (see#4) 6) Messianic religion, where the people become their own god. An Oligarchy
is then sanctioned because after all – we are our own gods.
Meanwhile, false narrative and twisted scripture has created Zionist Christians, who do
the bidding of their masters.
The parasite is an evolutionary construct, with methods honed through the ages. His
weakness is the falsity of his claims, which require a tower of lies to maintain. The other
weakness is money power, which also relies on deception. The founders gave Congress the money
power, hence it was to be under control of the law (and the people), but through deception
the money power transferred to a private money trust in 1913.
A parasite needs fuel from the host, and this fuel is derived as usury from money power.
Funding then allows issuance of narrative and hypnosis (including towering lies) to control
the host.
The construct of secret services being part of control matrix goes back to Bank of England
in 1694 becoming first debt spreading bank, which soon put its population into debts, and
gained control over parliament. British East Indies company had its own mercenary soldiers
and was fore-runner to MI6. In other words, MI6 was patterned on East Indies Company, and MI6
was grandfather to CIA.
It should be no surprise at all that Zionist World Government emanates from London, Wall
Street, and Tel Aviv.
Returning the money power to law, is a simple law change. But, since Congress and
Parliaments are owned, it is an uphill battle.
Say, the Russians and Putin DID mess with our elections.
So, what is the big deal?
We get involved messing with other Nations interior affairs, since the 18th century, if not
earlier.
So, why these "ethical" bastards (dems and some republicans) are crying about?
Plus, WHO holds the license to determine WHO is our friend and WHO is our enemy?
CNN? CNBC? ABC? FOX?
I guess, I 'll come back to the phrase:
It's ALL about Benjamins, baby.
P.S.
And NO:
Hillary and Soros, ARE criminals but The REAL CRIMINALS and TRAITORS of the USA, are Israel
and it supporters.
@Squarebeard Yeah there's totally no race war going on, at all. Only crazy people would
think such a thing. It's not like the entire ruling class is in lockstep regarding laws and
policies that cripple and destroy whites.
They don't allow non whites to attack whites, with little to no accountability, they don't
bring them in by the millions, to swamp whites and "breed us out". They don't churn out
endless anti white propaganda, showing whites as weak, submissive, old, and needing strong
and vibrant non whites to "save" them from their own evil racism. They certainly don't shout
it from their official positions and gloat about how whites are soon to be minorities in
their own lands. They don't push endless race mixing propaganda, that somehow only shows
"white + non white", and rarely ever something like "black + Asian". They don't mock and
belittle whites every chance they get. They don't use "white" as a slur and a synonym for
"uncool, hopeless, nerdy, weak". They don't refuse to allow whites to have racially based
groups and institutions, while actively encouraging non whites to do just that. They don't
give preferential treatment in every walk of life, to non whites at the expense of the better
qualified and more intelligent whites.
They don't institute draconian and repressive "hate crime" laws designed to harshly punish
whites for any "wrong thought" or imagined transgression against a holy and sainted oppressed
non white. They certainly don't let non whites get away with racially targeted attacks
(Rotherham, etc), and force the police to ignore it and prosecute the victims and their
families when they seek justice.
If you don't think there's a race war happening, I can see that. Because really, only one
side is fighting. The other side is too busy pretending it isn't happening, or
enthusiastically groveling at the feet of the non whites, hoping to expiate their evil sin of
whiteness.
Ignoring reality isn't going to spare you from the consequences of ignoring reality. All
you have to do is look around whatever white country you're living in. It's not a secret.
@ABC 123 You got that dead right ABC 123. The evil group in the shadows that really runs
the government is called "the intelligence community." Some community! More like a giant
Mafia.
The CIA needs reform and oversight. It should be divided into pieces that cannot
communicate with each other, but only through oversight that is legally forbidden to ever
become part of or get paid by CIA. I would suggest a section for each continent, or maybe
even each country. Is have these sections in different buildings in different cities in
America.
They should be allowed zero media infiltration in the United States.
If that reform failed, Id build a rival CIA and slowly give it the CIAs current workload,
forcing the current brass into retirement. The new intel agency could be restricted from
hiring any current CIA management, only hiring active spooks.
@mike kThe neoCONs won and have Trump under control and he's hiring Bush-men as fast as
he can. NOTE: Both the new Attorney General and the newly announced Assistant Attorney
General are both Bush-men, and even worse, they're Bush Sr. Bush-men. So it looks like Trump
will run in 2020 as a WAR President, in Venezuela and/or Iran. The Bush/Trump Crime Family
has been born from the ashes of the Bush/Clinton Crime Family.
Thank you for bringing these facts, and the artful assembly of them, to public scrutiny.
The damage the Democrats (and their allies in the FBI and media) have done to the
country is incalculable, but even worse, is the damage they've done to their own party.
We're still discussing these things, and others, on the overall degradation of social
infrastructures, almost as if they are unrelated, but, these breakdowns have startling
similarities, and even superficial inspection suggests a pattern and affiliation between the
key controlling interests.
Is it " The FBI ", or an elite controlling faction, having hijacked the FBI?
Is it " The Democratic Party ", or an elite controlling faction, having hijacked the
Democratic Party?
Regardless, it will be the reputation/credibility of the entire FBI and Democratic Party,
which takes the hit, not the specific agent-provokateurs , in fact, " The Media
", will never get around to figuring it out, and airing them out, let alone, drawing
similarities between these agent-provokateurs and those agent-provokateurs
Oh and BTW, just who, precisely, is " The Media "?
And while the discussion about the " The Democrats " is liberal, the discussion
about " The Republicans Party ", is a bit on the conservative side.
But ultimately, what's the difference? Both these parties are dedicated to the 0.1% socio-economic elite , and their
traditional hanger-ons/henchmen.
In fact, much of the artificial delineations of people, are controlled by the same
people!
They are effectively different " brandings " of bullshit-artistry , to baffle
the minds of the 99%, and the first grift is that there is actually choice
between two meaningfully different options.
Made US tech a liability for everyone outside the US
Failed coup in Venezuela
Moron Whitney seems to think political parties matter. Why do the lower classes think any
difference exists between the scum that rules over them? Only the slow minded see a
difference between the republicans and the democrats. Trump supporters openly want a police
state with a giant military and more and more cops, so the Russian thing was a great
diversion. Obama supporters pretended they don't want the same, but voted for it anyway also
promoting fear, obedience and the Russian thing.
This is a classic case of Betteridge's Law of Headlines: "an adage that states: 'Any headline
that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.'"
@Peter Akuleyev It's obvious you haven't read the report Peter. Exactly what crimes did
Trump commit.? And don't repeat what every ignorant liberal moron has been chanting for the
last 3 years, "obstruction of justice"
Please note, a crime must be committed before any suspect, victim, witness anyone
obstructs justice also known as obstruction of the investigation of the alleged crime that
may or may not have been committed. The FBI investigated and investigated and investigated
Trump and found nothing to investigate.
Since he was plotting away in New York and the District of Columbia, you might want to
read the pertinent laws regarding obstruction of justice. No crime, no obstruction.
The demo's need to chill like you know man.not going to make 2020 because the carpet is ready
for a woman.madam president erect ek se.soft power.in like a banana out like a pineapple.
They need to go to prison for attempting to undemocratically overturn an election using an
invented narrative.
The press as well as the individuals associated with the special interest groups and
government who were involved in this effort must face severe consequences. We'll be waiting
until that happens, and we will not forget.
That's what they've created with this. A simmering nation awaiting justice.
@renfro So what's your point? The prosecutor "ultimately concludes one isn't guilty of
crime X" actually proves Alden's point: a prosecutor would have to identify "crime X". Since
"crime X" was fabricated, there was nothing to be guilty of, and since Trump knew that, there
could be no obstruction.
As for Mueller's report, it was a political document. All of the hearsay about what Trump
was thinking about means jackshit. Thinking about doing something isn't a crime – yet.
All of the bogus "conspiracy to commit " trials, when no illegal action was taken, are
Stalinist show trials – just like the Democrats and never Trumpers were hoping Mueller
could produce for them.
You can obstruct justice even if a prosecutor ultimately finds you were not guilty of
committing the crime that was the focus of the underlying investigation
Yes, but you still must commit a crime of obstruction. A crime of obstruction would be
something like the destruction subpoenaed evidence; such as taking Bleachbit to your e-mails,
or smashing your smartphones with hammers. However, the firing James Comey is completely
legal and allowed by the Executive. A prosecutor cannot event a crime of obstruction when the
action was perfectly legal. This is in effect what the Democrats and the Left are arguing
for, the invention of new crimes to impeach Trump.
Excellent article. I'm glad I read it.
Secret intelligence gathering agencies with huge budgets "to keep us safe" are a problem.
Always have been, always will be. Trump should be given credit for causing all this to be
brought to light.
The Democrats Just Led the Country on a Three Year-Long Wild Goose Chase. Will They
Apologize?
Of course not. They just go from one lie they're more than happy to believe to another – this time
its "obstruction" and the media will push that lie too
However, the firing James Comey is completely legal and allowed by the Executive. A
prosecutor cannot event a crime of obstruction when the action was perfectly legal
Wrong again ..its obvious none of you know how to find the legal cites on the elements of
obstruction. Whether Trump can 'legally' fire someone or not is immaterial .the court (and the
law) looks at the INTENT behind the act. Period.
You can legally hire or fire your maid but if your motivation -- intention in either
of those acts is to bribe her or threaten her because she knows something about you that
could get you in legal trouble. Then it is obstruction.
"... What he said is, 'I Donald Trump am going to be a champion of the working class I know you are working longer hours for lower wages, seeing your jobs going to China, can't afford childcare, can't afford to send your kids to college. I Donald Trump alone can solve these problems.' What you have is a guy who utilized the media, manipulated the media very well. He is an entertainer, he is a professional at that. But I will tell you that I think there needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business. It is not good enough to have a liberal elite. I come from the white working class and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from." ..."
"... when the Clinton team first learned that Wikileaks was going to release damaging Democratic National Party emails in June 2016, they "brought in outside consultants to plot a PR strategy for handling the news of the hack the story would advance a narrative that benefited the Clinton campaign and the Democrats: The Russians were interfering in the US election, presumably to assist Trump." ..."
"... After losing the election, Team Clinton doubled down on this PR strategy. As described in the book Shattered (p. 395) the day after the election campaign managers assembled the communication team "to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up and up . they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument." ..."
"... A progressive team produced a very different analysis titled Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis . They did this because "the (Democratic) party's national leadership has shown scant interest in addressing many of the key factors that led to electoral disaster." The report analyzes why the party turnout was less than expected and why traditional Democratic Party supporters are declining. ..."
"... Since the 2016 election there has been little public discussion of the process whereby Hillary Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee. It's apparent she was pre-ordained by the Democratic Party elite. As exposed in the DNC emails, there was bias and violations of the party obligations at the highest levels. On top of that, it should now be clear that the pundits, pollsters and election experts were out of touch, made poor predictions and decisions. ..."
"... The 2016 election is highly relevant today. Already we see the same pattern of establishment bias and "horse race" journalism which focuses on fund-raising, polls and elite-biased "electability" instead of dealing with real issues, who has solutions, who has appeal to which groups. ..."
"... The establishment bias for Biden is matched by the bias against Democratic Party candidates who directly challenge Wall Street and US foreign policy. On Wall Street, that would be Bernie Sanders. On foreign policy, that is Tulsi Gabbard. With a military background Tulsi Gabbard has broad appeal, an inclusive message and a uniquely sharp critique of US "regime change" foreign policy. ..."
"... Blaming an outside power is a good way to prevent self analysis and positive change. It's gone on far too long. ..."
An
honest and accurate analysis of the 2016 election is not just an academic exercise. It is very
relevant to the current election campaign. Yet over the past two years, Russiagate has
dominated media and political debate and largely replaced a serious analysis of the factors
leading to Trump's victory. The public has been flooded with the various elements of the story
that Russia intervened and Trump colluded with them. The latter accusation was negated by the
Mueller Report but elements of the Democratic Party and media refuse to move on. Now it's the
lofty but vague accusations of "obstruction of justice" along with renewed dirt digging. To
some it is a "constitutional crisis", but to many it looks like more partisan fighting.
Russiagate has distracted from pressing issues
Russiagate has distracted attention and energy away from crucial and pressing issues such as
income inequality, the housing and homeless crisis, inadequate healthcare, militarized police,
over-priced college education, impossible student loans and deteriorating infrastructure. The
tax structure was changed to benefit wealthy individuals and corporations with little
opposition. The Trump administration has undermined environmental laws, civil rights, national
parks and women's equality while directing ever
more money to military contractors. Working class Americans are struggling with rising
living costs, low wages, student debt, and racism. They constitute the bulk of the military
which is spread all over the world, sustaining continuing occupations in war zones including
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and parts of Africa. While all this has been going on, the Democratic
establishment and much of the media have been focused on Russiagate, the Mueller Report, and
related issues.
Immediately after the 2016 Election
In the immediate wake of the 2016 election there was some forthright analysis. Bernie
Sanders
said , "What Trump did very effectively is tap the angst and the anger and the hurt and
pain that millions of working class people are feeling. What he said is, 'I Donald Trump am
going to be a champion of the working class I know you are working longer hours for lower
wages, seeing your jobs going to China, can't afford childcare, can't afford to send your kids
to college. I Donald Trump alone can solve these problems.' What you have is a guy who utilized
the media, manipulated the media very well. He is an entertainer, he is a professional at that.
But I will tell you that I think there needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic
Party does business. It is not good enough to have a liberal elite. I come from the white
working class and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people
where I came from."
Days after the election, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled "
Hillary Clinton Lost. Bernie Sanders could have won. We chose the wrong candidate ." The
author analyzed the results saying , "Donald Trump's stunning victory is less surprising
when we remember a simple fact: Hillary Clinton is a deeply unpopular politician." The
writer analyzed why Sanders would have prevailed against Trump and predicted "there will be
years of recriminations."
Russiagate replaced Recrimination
But instead of analysis, the media and Democrats have emphasized foreign interference. There
is an element of self-interest in this narrative. As reported in "Russian Roulette" (p127),
when the Clinton team first learned that Wikileaks was going to release damaging Democratic
National Party emails in June 2016, they "brought in outside consultants to plot a PR
strategy for handling the news of the hack the story would advance a narrative that benefited
the Clinton campaign and the Democrats: The Russians were interfering in the US election,
presumably to assist Trump."
After losing the election, Team Clinton doubled down on this PR strategy. As described in
the book Shattered (p. 395) the day after the election campaign managers assembled the
communication team "to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up and up
. they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian
hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."
This narrative has been remarkably effective in supplanting critical review of the
election.
One Year After the Election
The Center for American Progress (CAP) was founded by John Podesta and is closely aligned
with the Democratic Party. In November 2017 they produced an analysis titled "
Voter Trends in 2016: A Final Examination ". Interestingly, there is not a single reference
to Russia. Key conclusions are that "it is critical for Democrats to attract more support from
the white non-college-educated voting bloc" and "Democrats must go beyond the 'identity
politics' versus 'economic populism' debate to create a genuine cross-racial, cross-class
coalition " It suggests that Wall Street has the same interests as Main Street and the working
class.
A progressive team produced a very different analysis titled Autopsy: The Democratic Party in
Crisis . They did this because "the (Democratic) party's national leadership has shown scant interest in addressing many of
the key factors that led to electoral disaster." The report analyzes why the party turnout was less than expected and why
traditional Democratic Party supporters are declining. It includes recommendations to end the party's undemocratic
practices, expand voting rights and counter voter suppression. The report contains details and specific recommendations lacking
in the CAP report. It includes an overall analysis which says "The Democratic Party should disentangle itself – ideologically
and financially – from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and other corporate interests that put profits ahead of
public needs."
Two Years After the Election
In October 2018, the progressive team produced a follow-up report titled "
Autopsy: One Year Later ". It says, "The Democratic Party has implemented modest reforms,
but corporate power continues to dominate the party."
In a recent phone interview, the editor of that report, Norman Solomon, said it appears some
in the Democratic Party establishment would rather lose the next election to Republicans than
give up control of the party.
What really happened in 2016?
Beyond the initial critiques and "Autopsy" research, there has been little discussion,
debate or lessons learned about the 2016 election. Politics has been dominated by
Russiagate.
Why did so many working class voters switch from Obama to Trump? A major reason is because
Hillary Clinton is associated with Wall Street and the economic policies of her husband
President Bill Clinton. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), promoted by Bill
Clinton, resulted in huge decline in manufacturing jobs in
swing states such as Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Of course, this would influence their
thinking and votes. Hillary Clinton's support for the Trans Pacific Partnership was another
indication of her policies.
What about the low turnout from the African American community? Again, the lack of
enthusiasm is rooted in objective reality. Hillary Clinton is associated with "welfare reform"
promoted by her husband. According to this study from
the University of Michigan, "As of the beginning of 2011, about 1.46 million U.S. households
with about 2.8 million children were surviving on $2 or less in income per person per day in a
given month The prevalence of extreme poverty rose sharply between 1996 and 2011. This growth
has been concentrated among those groups that were most affected by the 1996 welfare
reform. "
Over the past several decades there has been a huge increase in prison
incarceration due to increasingly strict punishments and mandatory prison sentences. Since
the poor and working class have been the primary victims of welfare and criminal justice
"reforms" initiated or sustained through the Clinton presidency, it's understandable why they
were not keen on Hillary Clinton. The notion that low turnout was due to African Americans
being unduly influenced by Russian Facebook posts is seen as "bigoted paternalism" by blogger Teodrose
Fikremanian who says, "The corporate recorders at the NY Times would have us believe that
the reason African-Americans did not uniformly vote for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats is
because they were too dimwitted to think for themselves and were subsequently manipulated by
foreign agents. This yellow press drivel is nothing more than propaganda that could have been
written by George Wallace."
How Clinton became the Nominee
Since the 2016 election there has been little public discussion of the process whereby
Hillary Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee. It's apparent she was pre-ordained by the
Democratic Party elite. As exposed in the DNC emails, there was bias and violations of the
party obligations at the highest levels. On top of that, it should now be clear that the
pundits, pollsters and election experts were out of touch, made poor predictions and
decisions.
Bernie Sanders would have been a much stronger candidate. He would have won the same party
loyalists who voted for Clinton. His message attacking Wall Street would have resonated with
significant sections of the working class and poor who were unenthusiastic (to say the least)
about Clinton. An indication is that in critical swing states such as Wisconsin and
Michigan Bernie
Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary race.
Clinton had no response for Trump's attacks on multinational trade agreements and his false
promises of serving the working class. Sanders would have had vastly more appeal to working
class and minorities. His primary campaign showed his huge appeal to youth and third party
voters. In short, it's likely that Sanders would have trounced Trump. Where is the
accountability for how Clinton ended up as the Democratic Party candidate?
The Relevance of 2016 to 2020
The 2016 election is highly relevant today. Already we see the same pattern of establishment
bias and "horse race" journalism which focuses on fund-raising, polls and elite-biased
"electability" instead of dealing with real issues, who has solutions, who has appeal to which
groups.
Mainstream media and pundits are already promoting Joe Biden. Syndicated columnist EJ
Dionne, a Democratic establishment favorite, is indicative. In his article "
Can Biden be the helmsman who gets us past the storm? " Dionne speaks of the "strength he
(Biden) brings" and the "comfort he creates". In the same vein, Andrew Sullivan pushes Biden in
his article "
Why Joe Biden Might be the Best to Beat Trump ". Sullivan thinks that Biden has appeal in
the working class because he joked about claims he is too 'hands on'. But while Biden may be
tight with AFL-CIO leadership, he is closely associated with highly unpopular neoliberal trade
deals which have resulted in manufacturing decline.
The establishment bias for Biden is matched by the bias against Democratic Party candidates
who directly challenge Wall Street and US foreign policy. On Wall Street, that would be Bernie
Sanders. On foreign policy, that is Tulsi Gabbard. With a military background Tulsi Gabbard has
broad appeal, an inclusive message and a uniquely sharp critique of US "regime change" foreign
policy. She calls
out media pundits like Fareed Zakaria for goading Trump to invade Venezuela. In contrast
with Rachel Maddow taunting
John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to be MORE aggressive, Tulsi Gabbard has been
denouncing Trump's collusion with Saudi Arabia and Israel's Netanyahu, saying it's not in
US interests. Gabbard's anti-interventionist anti-occupation perspective has significant
support from US troops. A
recent poll indicates that military families want complete withdrawal from Afghanistan and
Syria. It seems conservatives have become more anti-war than liberals.
This points to another important yet under-discussed lesson from 2016: a factor in Trump's
victory was that he campaigned as an anti-war candidate against the hawkish Hillary Clinton. As
pointed out
here, "Donald Trump won more votes from communities with high military casualties than
from similar communities which suffered fewer casualties."
Russiagate has distracted most Democrats from analyzing how they lost in 2016. It has given
them the dubious belief that it was because of foreign interference. They have failed to
analyze or take stock of the consequences of DNC bias, the preference for Wall Street over
working class concerns, and the failure to challenge the military industrial complex and
foreign policy based on 'regime change' interventions.
There needs to be more analysis and lessons learned from the 2016 election to avoid a repeat
of that disaster. As indicated in the
Autopsy , there needs to be a transparent and fair campaign for nominee based on more than
establishment and Wall Street favoritism. There also needs to be consideration of which
candidates reach beyond the partisan divide and can energize and advance the interests of the
majority of Americans rather than the elite. The most crucial issues and especially US military
and foreign policy need to be seriously debated.
Blaming an outside power is a good way to prevent self analysis and positive change. It's
gone on far too long.
Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who grew up in Canada but currently lives in
the San Francisco Bay Area of California. He can be reached at [email protected] . Read other articles by Rick .
"... what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers. ..."
"... the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people. ..."
Couple of factors not mentioned. one is Israel and the other is more sinister still and tied
to the conclusions to be drawn from the Mueller report.
it may be true that Skripal helped Steele with some elements of the dossier compiled by
Steele, via SKripals handler Pablo Miller. It may be true that Skripal went "stir crazy" and an
attempt was made to silence him and his daughter - permanently, because they simply cold not be
trusted. a similar motivation could be drawn up against Russia - with the two Russians visiting
Salisbury used as diversionary "stool pigeons". It may be true that the "poisoning" was self
inflicted and was in fact a murder/suicide attempt as a result of depression along the ines
"what's the point of it all".
what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the
poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of
the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community
"needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister
influences of foreign powers.
what ought to be apparent is
- the same tactics used by the special prosecutor to investigate the "Russia collusion"
smoke screen erected by the howler monkeys in the US intel agencies (aided and abetter by
howler monkeys in UK intel agencies) to stymie the US executive branch (Trump) are likely to be
used by the the UK government and some more as well - in true Le Carre fashion, but with much
dumber and less principled actors than Smiley's people.
these tactics prevented (and continue to prevent) investigation and prosecution of heinous
corruption within the obama administration of the previous 8 years - these howler monkey
intelligence agency tactics include(d) entrapment, honeypots, racketeering, blackmail, de facto
kidnapping (in the case of Skripals), bribery, wire fraud, unauthorized wire-tapping, breach of
authorized intel agency activities (like the FBI operating overseas and the CIA operating
domestically in the US, false and unverified claims in FISA warrants, NSA providing unauthorized
information to the CIA and FBI etc)
- given the howler monkey activities of the alphabet soup, it is not beyond the imagination
to draw parallels with the CIA's reporting and analysis of situations on the ground wherever
they operate to provide intel ahead of military activity. the DOD has already proved complicit
by hiring Halper (for hundreds of thousands of dollars) to assist with the entrapment of Trump
operative Papadopoulos. Mifsud is likely a CIA, not a Russian, asset.
- given that we have ample evidence of the howler monkeys in the alphabet soup seeking to
facilitate a coup against a sitting US president, it is certainly plausible that - as with the
US goverment sponsoring the mujaheedin, isis and al qaeda in afghanistan to fight the russians
in late 80's early 90's, Iraq yellow cake and WMD - that the howler monkeys paid the white
helmets to ovethrow assad and foment civil war in Syria - thus causing the migration of some 5
million syrians into europe, iraq, turkey, jordan, turkey and lebanon.
so , the case is that howler monkey activity in intel agencies of the UK and US (add
(F)rance to get FUKUS) are guilty of the manufacture of human conflict by fabricating evidence,
breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing
shitty analysis (howler monkeys are only good at swinging in trees and flinging ****) and
generally operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity.
this can only be brought into sharp relief if howler monkey activities were instead shown to
be powers for good rather than the geo-political risks that persist in Iran, North Korea,
Venezuela, Yemen, Libya and so on and so forth.
Never mind how much past conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and so on relied on
evidence and analysis thrown at us by the howler monkeys in the tree tops, how much of what we
we are doing now is a fabrication causing needless suffering by civilian (not politicians or
military engaged in conflict) populations?
the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE,
Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life
in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down",
reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of
people.
there are equivalents of strzok, page, ohr right throughout the US and UK government
"machines" operating overseas. think about that. crimes exposed by Barr et al in the US -
against a sitting president - are replicated wherever howler monkeys operate overseas as well.
"... In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire, who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts. ..."
"... Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones. ..."
"... The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy. ..."
"... Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was thought to be now. ..."
"... The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami. It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions. ..."
"... The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through austerity to make up for the loss of money. ..."
During the last days a right wing politician in Austria was taken down by using an elaborate sting. Until Friday Heinz-Christian
Strache was leader of the far right (but not fascist) Freedom Party of Austria (FPOe) and the Vice Chancellor of the country. On
Friday morning two German papers, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegelpublished
(German)
reports (English) about an old video that was made to take Strache down.
The FPOe has good connections with United Russia, the party of the Russian President Putin, and to other right-wing parties in
east Europe. It's pro-Russian position has led to verbal attacks on and defamation of the party from NATO supporting and neoliberal
circles.
In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to
a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire
plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire,
who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation
but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts.
Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones.
A scene from the video. Source: Der Falter (vid,
German)
During the six hour long party several schemes get proposed by the "Russian" and are discussed. Strache rejects most of them.
He insists several times that everything they plan or do must be legal and conform to the law. He says that a large donation could
probably be funneled through an endowment that would then support his party. It is a gray area under Austrian party financing laws.
They also discuss if the "Russian" could buy the Kronen Zeitung , Austria's powerful tabloid, and use it to prop up his party.
The evening goes on with several bottles of vodka on the table. Starche gets a bit drunk and boosts in front of the "oligarch
daughter" about all his connections to rich and powerful people. He does not actually have these.
Strache says that, in exchange for help for his party, the "Russian" could get public contracts for highway building and repair.
Currently most of such contracts in Austria go to the large Austrian company, STRABAG, that is owned by a neoliberal billionaire
who opposes the FPOe. At that time Strache was not yet in the government and had no way to decide about such contracts.
At one point Strache seems to understand that the whole thing is a setup. But his right hand man calms him down and vouches
for the "Russian". The sting ends with Strache and his companion leaving the place. The never again see the "Russian" and her co-plotter.
Nothing they talked about will ever come to fruition.
Three month later Strache and his party win more than 20% in the Austrian election and form a coalition government with the
conservative party OeVP led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Even while the FPOe controls several ministries, it does not achieve much
politically. It lacks a real program and the government's policies are mostly run by the conservatives.
Nearly two years after the evening on Ibiza, ten days before the European parliament election in which Strache's party is predicted
to achieve good results, a video of the evening on Ibiza is handed to two German papers which are known to be have strong transatlanticist
leanings and have previously been used for other shady 'leaks'. The papers do not hesitate to take part in the plot and publish extensive
reports about the video.
After the reports appeared Strache immediately
stepped down and the conservatives
ended the coalition with his party. Austria will now have new elections.
On Bloomberg Leonid Bershidsky
opines
on the case:
Strache's discussion with the Russian oligarch's fake niece shows a propensity for dirty dealing that has nothing to do with idealistic
nationalism. Nationalist populists often agitate against entrenched, corrupt elites and pledge to drain various swamps. In the
videos, however, Strache and Gudenus behave like true swamp creatures, savoring rumors of drug and sex scandals in Austrian politics
and discussing how to create an authoritarian media machine like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's.
I do not believe that the people who voted for the FPOe (and similar parties in other countries) will subscribe to that view.
The politics of the main stream parties in Austria have for decades been notoriously corrupt. Compared to them Strache and his party
are astonishingly clean. In the video he insists several times that everything must stay within the legal realm. Whenever the "Russian"
puts forward a likely illegal scheme, Starche emphatically rejects it.
Bershidsky continues:
Strache, as one of the few nationalist populists in government in the European Union's wealthier member states, was an important
member of the movement Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been trying to cobble together ahead of the European Parliament
election that will take place next week. On Saturday, he was supposed to attend a Salvini-led rally in Milan with other like-minded
politicians from across Europe. Instead, he was in Vienna apologizing to his wife and to Kurz and protesting pitifully that he'd
been the victim of a "political assassination" -- a poisonous rain on the Italian right-winger's parade.
...
This leaves the European far right in disarray and plays into the hands of centrist and leftist forces ahead of next week's election.
Salvini's unifying effort has been thoroughly undermined, ...
This is also a misreading of the case. The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy.
Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was
likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support
for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while
drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video
was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was
thought to be now.
But that Strache stepped down after the sudden media assault only makes him more convincing. The right-wing all over Europe will
see him as a martyr who was politically assassinated because he worked for their cause. The issue will increase the right-wingers
hate against the 'liberal' establishment. It will further motivate them: "They attack us because we are right and winning." The new
far-right block Natteo Salvini
will setup in the European Parliament will likely receive a record share of votes.
Establishment writers notoriously misinterpret the new right wing parties and their followers. This stand-offish sentence in the
Spiegel story about Strache's party demonstrates the problem:
In the last election, the party drew significant support from the working class, in part because of his ability to simplify even
the most complicated of issues and play the common man, even in his role as vice chancellor.
The implicit thesis, that the working class is too dumb to understand the "most complicated of issues", is not only incredibly
snobbish but utterly false. The working class understands very well what the establishment parties have done to it and continue to
do. The increasing vote share of the far-right is a direct consequence of the behavior of the neoliberal center and of the lack of
real left alternatives.
Last week, before the Strache video appeared, Craig Murray
put his finger on the wound:
The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting
almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami.
It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through
multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately
funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions.
...
The rejection of the political class manifests itself in different ways and has been diverted down a number of entirely blind
alleys giving unfulfilled promise of a fresh start – Brexit, Trump, Macron. As the vote share of the established political parties
– and public engagement with established political institutions – falls everywhere, the chattering classes deride the political
symptoms of status quo rejection by the people as "populism". It is not populism to make sophisticated arguments that undermine
the received political wisdom and take on the entire weight of established media opinion.
If one wants to take down the far right one has to do so with arguments and good politics for the working class. Most people,
especially working class people, have a strong sense for justice. The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What
was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded
with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through
austerity to make up for the loss of money.
While I consider myself to be a strong leftist who opposes the right wherever possible, I believe to understand why people vote
for Strache's FBOe and similar parties. When one talks to these people issues of injustice and inequality always come up. The new
'populist' parties at least claim to fight against the injustice done to the common men. Unlike most of the establishment parties
they seem to be still mostly clean and not yet corrupted.
In the early 1990s Strache actually flirted with violent fascists but he rejected their way. While he has far-right opinions,
he and his like are no danger to our societies. If we can not accept that Strache and his followers have some legitimate causes,
we will soon find us confronted with way more extreme people. The neoliberal establishment seems to do its best to achieve that.
Posted by b on May 19, 2019 at 01:10 PM |
Permalink
"... The neocon faction in the US is usually (and reasonably) regarded as the motivator behind much of the western aggression in the Middle East. ..."
"... Granted the US has been looking for excuses to intervene ever more overtly in Syria since 2013, and in that sense this Douma "initiative" is a continuation of their longterm policy. It's also true Russia was warning just such a false flag would be attempted in early March. But in the intervening month the situation on the ground has changed so radically that such an attempt no longer made any sense. ..."
"... A false flag in early March, while pockets of the US proxy army were still holding ground in Ghouta would have enabled a possible offensive in their support which would prevent Ghouta falling entirely into government hands and thereby also maintain the pressure on Damascus. A false flag in early April is all but useless because the US proxy army in the region was completely vanquished and nothing would be gained by an offensive in that place at that time. ..."
"... The US media has been similarly, and uncharacteristically divided and apparently unsure. Tucker Carlson railed against the stupidity of attacking Syria. Commentators on MSNBC were also expressing intense scepticism of the US intent and fear about possible escalation. ..."
"... The official story is a hot mess of proven falsehoods, contradictions, implausible conspiracy theories, more falsehoods and inexplicable silences were cricket chirps tell us all we need to know. ..."
"... The UK government has lied and evaded on every key aspect. ..."
"... Indeed if current claims by Russian FM Lavrov turn out to be true, a "novichok" (whatever that precisely means in this case) may not have been the only substance found in those samples, and a compound called "BZ", a non-lethal agent developed in Europe and America, has been discovered and suppressed in the OPCW report (more about that later). ..."
"... The Skripals themselves were announced to be alive and out of danger mere days after claims they were all but certain to die. Yulia, soon thereafter, apparently called her cousin Viktoria only to subsequently announce, indirectly through the helpful agency of the Metropolitan Police, that she didn't want to talk to her cousin – or anyone else – at all. ..."
"... She is now allegedly discharged from hospital and has "specially trained officers helping to take care of" her in an undisclosed location. A form or words so creepily sinister it's hard to imagine how they were ever permitted the light of day. ..."
"... If a false flag chemical attack had taken place in Syria at the time Russia predicted, just a week or two after the Skripal poisoning, a lot of the attention that's been paid to the Skripals over the last month would likely have been diverted. Many of the questions being asked by Russia and in the alt media may never have been asked as the focus of the world turned to a possible superpower stand-off in the Middle East. ..."
"... So, could it be the Skripal event was never intended to last so long in the public eye? Could it be that it was indeed a false flag, or a fake event, as many have alleged, planned as a sketchy prelude to, or warm up act for a bigger chemical attack in Syria, scheduled for a week or so later in mid-March – just around the time Russia was warning of such a possibility? ..."
"... This would explain why the UK may have been pushing for the false flag to happen (as claimed by Russia) even after it could no longer serve much useful purpose on the ground, and why the Douma "attack" seems to have been so sketchily done by a gang on the run. The UK needed the second part to happen in order to distract from the first. ..."
"... If this is true, Theresa May and her cabinet are currently way out on a limb even by cynical UK standards. Not only have they lied about the Skripal event, but in order to cover up that lie they have promoted a false flag in Syria, and "responded" to it by a flagrant breach of international and domestic law. Worst of all, if the Russians aren't bluffing, they have some evidence to prove some of the most egregious parts of this. ..."
"... But even if some or all of our speculation proves false, and even if the Russian claims of UK collusion with terrorists in Syria prove unfounded, May is still guilty of multiple lies and has still waged war without parliamentary approval. ..."
"... The UK were the most vocal about Syria, and desperately tried to drum up support over Skripal, but it all came to nothing much in the end. ..."
"... Theresa May's political career still hangs by a thread, and her "Falklands moment", at best, staved off the inevitable for a few months. A washout in the EU elections, a very real threat from Farage's Brexit party, and rumblings inside her own party, make her position as unstable as ever. ..."
"... In the US, generally speaking, it seems that the Trump admin – or at least whichever interested parties currently have control of the wheels of government – have called time on war in Syria. Instead, they've moved on to projects in Venezuela and North Korea, and even war with Iran. ..."
"... The failure of the Douma false flag to cause the war it was meant to cause, and the vast collection of evidence that suggests it was a false flag, should be spread far and wide. Not just because it's a truth which vindicates the smeared minority in the alternate media. ..."
In view of the latest revelations from the leaked report, which seem to prove that at least some elements of the Douma "chemical
attack" were entirely staged, we want to take look back at the chaotic events of Spring 2018.
What was the agenda behind the Douma false flag?
Why was the US response seemingly token and ineffective?
Why was the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson fired?
What agenda tied the Skripal case to the Douma attack?
The following is an extract from an article by Catte originally published April 14th last year, which takes on a greater weight
in light of certain evidence – not only that the Douma attack was faked, but that the OPCW is compromised.
The neocon faction in the US is usually (and reasonably) regarded as the motivator behind much of the western aggression
in the Middle East.
Since at least 2001 and the launch of the "War on Terror" the US has led the way in finding or creating facile excuses to fight
oil wars and hegemonic wars and proxy wars in the region. But this time the dynamics look a little different.
This time it really looks as if the UK has been setting the pace of the "response".
The fact (as stated above) that Mattis was apparently telegraphing his own private doubts a)about the verifiability of the
attacks, and b)about the dangers of a military response suggests he was a far from enthusiastic partaker in this adventure.
Trump's attitude is harder to gauge. His tweets veered wildly between unhinged threats and apparent efforts at conciliation.
But he must have known he would lose (and seemingly has lost) a great part of his natural voter base (who elected him on a no-more-war
mandate) by an act of open aggression that threatened confrontation with Russia on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Granted the US has been looking for excuses to intervene ever more overtly in Syria since 2013, and in that sense this
Douma "initiative" is a continuation of their longterm policy. It's also true Russia was warning just such a false flag would
be attempted in early March. But in the intervening month the situation on the ground has changed so radically that such an attempt
no longer made any sense.
A false flag in early March, while pockets of the US proxy army were still holding ground in Ghouta would have enabled
a possible offensive in their support which would prevent Ghouta falling entirely into government hands and thereby also maintain
the pressure on Damascus. A false flag in early April is all but useless because the US proxy army in the region was completely
vanquished and nothing would be gained by an offensive in that place at that time.
You can see why Mattis and others in the administration might be reluctant to take part in the false flag/punitive air strike
narrative if they saw nothing currently to be gained to repay the risk. They may have preferred to wait for developments and plan
for a more productive way of playing the R2P card in the future.
The US media has been similarly, and uncharacteristically divided and apparently unsure. Tucker Carlson railed against
the stupidity of attacking Syria. Commentators on MSNBC were also expressing intense scepticism of the US intent and fear about
possible escalation.
The UK govt and media on the other hand has been much more homogeneous in advocating for action. No doubts of the type expressed
by Mattis have been heard from the lips of an UK government minister. Even May, a cowardly PM, has been (under how much pressure?)
voicing sterling certitude in public that action HAD to be taken.
Couple this with the – as yet unverified – claims by Russia of direct UK involvement in arranging the Douma "attack", and the
claims by Syria that the perps are in their custody, and a tentative storyline emerges. It's possible this time there were other
considerations in the mix beside the usual need to "be seen to do something" and Trump's perpetual requirement to appease the
liberal Russiagaters and lunatic warmongers at home. Maybe this time it was also about helping the UK out of a sticky problem.
THE SKRIPAL CONSIDERATION
Probably the only thing we can all broadly agree on about the Skripal narrative is that it manifestly did not go according
to plan. However it was intended to play out, it wasn't this way. Since some time in mid to late March it's been clear the entire
thing has become little more than an exercise in damage-limitation, leak-plugging and general containment.
The official story is a hot mess of proven falsehoods, contradictions, implausible conspiracy theories, more falsehoods
and inexplicable silences were cricket chirps tell us all we need to know.
The UK government has lied and evaded on every key aspect.
It lied again and again about the information Porton Down had given it
Its lawyers all but lied to Mr Justice Robinson about whether or not the Skripals had relatives in Russia in an unscrupulous
attempt to maintain total control of them, or at least of the narrative.
It is not publishing the OPCW report on the chemical analyses, and the summary of that report reads like an exercise in
allusion and weasel-wording. Even the name of the "toxic substance" found in the Skripals' blood is omitted, and the only thing
tying it to the UK government's public claims of "novichok" is association by inference and proximity.
Indeed if current claims by Russian FM Lavrov turn out to be true, a "novichok" (whatever that precisely means in this
case) may not have been the only substance found in those samples, and a compound called "BZ", a non-lethal agent developed in
Europe and America, has been discovered and suppressed in the OPCW report (more about that later).
None of the alleged victims of this alleged attack has been seen in public even in passing since the event. There is no film
or photographs of DS Bailey leaving the hospital, no film or photographs of his wife or family members doing the same. No interviews
with Bailey, no interviews with his wife, family, distant relatives, work colleagues.
The Skripals themselves were announced to be alive and out of danger mere days after claims they were all but certain to
die. Yulia, soon thereafter, apparently called her cousin Viktoria only to subsequently announce, indirectly through the helpful
agency of the Metropolitan Police, that she didn't want to talk to her cousin – or anyone else – at all.
She is now allegedly discharged from hospital and has "specially trained officers helping to take care of" her in an undisclosed
location. A form or words so creepily sinister it's hard to imagine how they were ever permitted the light of day.
Very little of this bizarre, self-defeating, embarrassing, hysterical story makes any sense other than as a random narrative,
snaking wildly in response to events the narrative-makers can't completely control.
Why? What went wrong? Why has the UK government got itself into this mess? And how much did the Douma "gas attack" and subsequent
drive for a concerted western "response" have to do with trying to fix that?
IS THIS WHAT HAPPENED?
If a false flag chemical attack had taken place in Syria at the time Russia predicted, just a week or two after the Skripal
poisoning, a lot of the attention that's been paid to the Skripals over the last month would likely have been diverted. Many of
the questions being asked by Russia and in the alt media may never have been asked as the focus of the world turned to a possible
superpower stand-off in the Middle East.
So, could it be the Skripal event was never intended to last so long in the public eye? Could it be that it was indeed
a false flag, or a fake event, as many have alleged, planned as a sketchy prelude to, or warm up act for a bigger chemical attack
in Syria, scheduled for a week or so later in mid-March – just around the time Russia was warning of such a possibility?
Could it be this planned event was unexpectedly canceled by the leading players in the drama (the US) when the Russians called
them out and the rapid and unexpected fall of Ghouta meant any such intervention became pointless at least for the moment?
Did this cancelation leave the UK swinging in the wind, with a fantastical story that was never intended to withstand close
scrutiny, and no second act for distraction?
So, did they push on with the now virtually useless "chemical attack", botch it (again), leaving a clear evidence trail leading
back to them? Did they then further insist on an allied "response" to their botched false flag in order to provide yet more distraction
and hopefully destroy some of that evidence?
This would explain why the UK may have been pushing for the false flag to happen (as claimed by Russia) even after it could
no longer serve much useful purpose on the ground, and why the Douma "attack" seems to have been so sketchily done by a gang on
the run. The UK needed the second part to happen in order to distract from the first.
It would explain why the US has been less than enthused by the idea of reprisals. Because while killing Syrians to further
geo-strategic interests is not a problem, killing Syrians (and risking escalation with Russia) in order to rescue an embarrassed
UK government is less appealing.
And it would explain why the "reprisals" when they came were so half-hearted.
If this is true, Theresa May and her cabinet are currently way out on a limb even by cynical UK standards. Not only have
they lied about the Skripal event, but in order to cover up that lie they have promoted a false flag in Syria, and "responded"
to it by a flagrant breach of international and domestic law. Worst of all, if the Russians aren't bluffing, they have some evidence
to prove some of the most egregious parts of this.
This is very bad.
But even if some or all of our speculation proves false, and even if the Russian claims of UK collusion with terrorists
in Syria prove unfounded, May is still guilty of multiple lies and has still waged war without parliamentary approval.
This is a major issue. She and her government should resign. But it's unlikely that will happen.
So what next? There is a sense this is a watershed for many of the parties involved and for the citizens of the countries drawn
into this.
Will the usual suspects try to avoid paying for their crimes and misadventures by more rhetoric, more false flags, more "reprisals"?
Or will this signal some other change in direction?
We'll all know soon enough.
* * *
Back to today...
...and while things have moved on, we're still puzzling over all the same issues.
What was the purpose of the Skripal attack?
What was the original plan of the Douma attack?
Is there, as it appears, an internal power struggle in the Trump administration?
Has that resolved? Who is running the United States?
Seeing as the OPCW has been shown to cover-up evidence in Douma, can we trust them on Skripal? Or anything else?
Speaking of which, where on Earth IS Sergei Skripal?
All these questions stand, and are important, but more important than all of that is the lesson: They tried it before, and just
because it didn't work doesn't mean they won't try it again.
Last spring, the Western powers showed they will deploy a false flag if they need too, for domestic or international motives.
And they have the motives right now.
The UK were the most vocal about Syria, and desperately tried to drum up support over Skripal, but it all came to nothing
much in the end.
Theresa May's political career still hangs by a thread, and her "Falklands moment", at best, staved off the inevitable for
a few months. A washout in the EU elections, a very real threat from Farage's Brexit party, and rumblings inside her own party, make
her position as unstable as ever.
Britain had the most to gain, of all NATO countries, and that is still true. We don't know what they might do.
This time they might even receive greater support from France this time around – since Macron is facing a revolution at home and
would kill (possibly literally) for a nice international distraction.
In the US, generally speaking, it seems that the Trump admin – or at least whichever interested parties currently have control
of the wheels of government – have called time on war in Syria. Instead, they've moved on to projects in Venezuela and North Korea,
and even war with Iran.
That's not to say Syria is safe, far from it. They are always just one carefully place false-flag away from all-out war. Last
year, Mattis (or whoever) decided war with Syria was not an option – that it was too risky or complicated. That might not happen
next time.
Clearly, the US hasn't totally seen sense in terms of stoking conflict with Russia – as seen by the decision to pull out of the
INF Treaty late last year. And further demonstrated by their attempts to overthrow Russia's ally Nicolas Maduro. Another ripe candidate
for a false flag.
The failure of the Douma false flag to cause the war it was meant to cause, and the vast collection of evidence that suggests
it was a false flag, should be spread far and wide. Not just because it's a truth which vindicates the smeared minority in the alternate
media.
But because recognising what they were trying to do last time , is the best defense when they try it again next time .
lysias: A president doesn't have to obey the orders of the powers that be ...
Well, that's why they select the President beforehand to ensure there are no inconvenient
difficulties with a new President.
In fact, our President's have generally had a connection to CIA: Bush Sr. was CIA,
Clinton is said to allowed their flights into Arkansas, GW Bush was son of CIA, Obama is said
to have come from a CIA family (grandfather and probably mother) , and some have pointed to
Trump's first casino deal as a possible CIA tie (related to money laundering of CIA drug
money)
Pretending otherwise furthers the democracy works! narrative. Isn't it already
clear that the West is feudal and Empire First (aka globalist) - despite Trump's
faux populist pretense? US foreign policy has been remarkably consistent for over 20
years. US congressmen takes oaths to Israel. Western propaganda sing the Deep State tune.
Trump Administration Withholds Information That Could Debunk Russian Interference
Claims
Lavrov responded first to the question. He said that there is no evidence that shows any
Russian interference in the U.S. elections. He continued:
Speaking about the most recent US presidential campaign in particular, we have had in
place an information exchange channel about potential unintended risks arising in cyberspace
since 2013. From October 2016 (when the US Democratic Administration first raised this issue)
until January 2017 (before Donald Trump's inauguration), this channel was used to handle
requests and responses. Not so long ago, when the attacks on Russia in connection with the
alleged interference in the elections reached their high point, we proposed publishing this
exchange of messages between these two entities, which engage in staving off cyberspace
incidents. I reminded Mr Pompeo about this today. The administration, now led by President
Trump, refused to do so. I'm not sure who was behind this decision, but the idea to publish
this data was blocked by the United States. However, we believe that publishing it would
remove many currently circulating fabrications. Of course, we will not unilaterally make
these exchanges public, but I would still like to make this fact known.
The communication channel about cyber issues did indeed exist. In June 2013 the Presidents
of the United States and Russia issued a Joint Statement about "Information and
Communications Technologies (ICTs)". The parties agreed to establishing communication
channels between each other computer emergency response teams, to use the direct
communication link of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers for cyber issue exchanges, and to
have direct communication links between high-level officials in the White House and Kremlin
for such matter. A Fact Sheet published by the Obama White House detailed the implementation
of these three channels.
One inference from Lavrov's statement is that the "fundamental understanding on this
matter" between the two presidents that has "not been fully implemented" is the release of
the communications about cyberspace incidents. The Russians clearly think that a release of
the communications with the Obama administration would exculpate them. That would also
exculpate Trump from any further collusion allegations. Why then does the Trump
administration reject the release? Who is blocking it?
Cont. reading: Trump Administration Withholds Information That Could Debunk Russian
Interference Claims
US foreign policy under President Trump is remarkably similar to what it would have been
under Hillary...
except even she wouldnt have put a Chabad Orthodox *** in charge of a mideast 'peace'
plan, let alone a 'solution' for the illegal immigration crisis which Trump did nothing about
when the GOP controlled both House and Senate
I do not think Putin is an idiot...he has consistently made good decisions and judgements
and outsmarted both Obama and Trump on every occasion. For some reason I am worried that he
is palling up to the wrong guy. Trump and the US cannot be trusted to observe any agreement
or treaty and have displayed this over and over again.
Putin should be aligning with China who can be trusted to honour deals made. A military
alliance between Russia and China with mutual aid of attacked by a third party would make the
best strategic sense. If Putin doesn't;t do this he will get weakened economically and then
when he is weak, the US will invade.
As quoted by the Moon Of Alabama Lavrov claimed there were back channels between the US
and Russia from 2013 to Trumps taking office. Lavov claims these communications would shed
lots of light on the Russians not interfering in the election and other stuff the Russians
have been falsely accused of. Russia wants to release these communications and will only do
so if the US agrees which they have not. Pompeo was silent.
"... I don' know what are the revenues of NYT or The Guardian, but I know that the US government spends 750 million a year on the Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors). If you think US or France is under attack by warmongers, you can't imagine how many propagandists are these 750 million hiring in low-COL places like Serbia, Burma, Venezuela. ..."
"... The situation is even worse today as the CIA and Pentagon have massive propaganda budgets and have infiltrated the media at every level , the public is unaware that each day they are brainwashed by the MSM to support the agenda of the "deep State' and the MIC. ..."
"... No mention of the journalists as CIA assets who publish planted stories? Isn't Dr Udo Ulfkotte one who did that, repented, told all in his best-seller Bought Journalists, and as a warning to others unselfishly dropped dead of a heart attack within a couple of years? ..."
"... The best sentence was the one expressing the Establishment's collective faux shock that anything other than Russian spybots could be responsible for the serfs' rejection of the "two centrist parties" that have sponged up lobbyist money for 3 decades, cashing in on the globalist-Neoliberal economy, as rents rose and wages fell. ..."
"... Not too sure about the US even remaining important as a continent wide farm.. The aquifers in the West and Midwest are being inexorably drawn down to sustain the current rate of farming, so it's possible North America's value would primarily be as a source of pockets of human talent in the sciences and technologies. ..."
the hysteria emanating from the nyt, cnn and the rest of the msm is the result of a conscious
or subconscious grasp that socialism dying worldwide. the great ponzi scam of forcing future
generations to pay for the cookies and ice cream of the present generation has hit the math
of the complete dearth of unencumbered assets from which to emit more unpayable debt,
insufficient economic growth upon which to pretend the debt can be serviced forget about
repayment and the simple fact demographichs throughout the west are so negative the
government and public pension scheme blowup in the several years
the more intelligent members of the establishment know in their bones the jig is up. hence
the great and urgent need to turn up .lets over throw sovereign nations so the plunder model
..venezuela, syria, russia, china et al.can find more unencumbered assets to be brought into
the nyc, london orbit of banks from which new debt can be emitted.
the west is staring at its last decade of global rule, a rule that began 500 years ago. by
the 2030's finance, manufacturing and all the global power and prestige that goes with it
moves from ny, london to shanghai and moscow.
if the united states is lucky and remains intact, a giant IF, we may wind up as continent
size farm with a smidgen of non competitive industry here and there.
the west has only disinformation with which to go to war against the rising east. the
weapons of the west are powerful ONLY in their quantity. Russian weapons already are many
years beyond anything the pentagon has in the field and the gap is only increasing, ergo the
us treasury is forced to fight the battle using sanctions and other forms of restrictions, a
long term losing strategy irrespective of any short terms gains.
so, cj worry not, the disinformation campaign is backed by nothing but hot air and the
rage from being thwarted by china and russia as well as brave pipsqueakes like iran and
venezuela.
see it for what it is, transparent sound and fury signifying nothing
I don' know what are the revenues of NYT or The Guardian, but I know that the US government
spends 750 million a year on the Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting Board of
Governors). If you think US or France is under attack by warmongers, you can't imagine how
many propagandists are these 750 million hiring in low-COL places like Serbia, Burma,
Venezuela.
I don' know what are the revenues of NYT or The Guardian, but I know that the US
government spends 750 million a year on the Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting
Board of Governors). If you think US or France is under attack by warmongers, you can't
imagine how many propagandists are these 750 million hiring in low-COL places like Serbia,
Burma, Venezuela.
In 1917 US Congressman Calloway informed Congress that J.P. Morgan interests had purchased 25
of the nations leading newspapers and replaced their editors in order to control the mass
media for the benefit of the plutocrats/money interests who ran the country and who still do
. The situation is even worse today as the CIA and Pentagon have massive propaganda budgets
and have infiltrated the media at every level , the public is unaware that each day they are
brainwashed by the MSM to support the agenda of the "deep State' and the MIC.
See, half a century after McCarthy, wingers got their noses into some (not all) Soviet files,
and got to scream, nonstop and to this day, "See!@@#$% McCarthy was RIGHT!"
Betya in a half century, if we're still around, the same type people are going to get
nosing in some files somewhere and find incontrovertible evidence that: "See!@#%$%^^ The New
York Times was RIGHT!"
And then there's the evil Russian spywhale, which the disinformationists want us to
believe is just a harmless "therapy Beluga" for kids, but which has clearly been strapped
with some sort of monstrous, mind-controlling apparatus that enables the Kremlin to
remotely implant a host of dangerous "populist" ideas in the brains of defenseless
Norwegian fishermen, weaponizing them into a horde of neo-Odinist Viking berserkers who
will scream down out of Scandinavia and storm the EU Parliament in Brussels smelling of
akvavit and fermented shark.
You had me doing a cartoon spit-take with this beaut!
these enormous corporate media conglomerates, and the transnational corporations that
own them, and these intelligence agencies, and their fronts and cutouts, and corporate
lobbyists and PR firms, and councils, and think tanks, and research institutes, to
disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative
No mention of the journalists as CIA assets who publish planted stories? Isn't Dr Udo
Ulfkotte one who did that, repented, told all in his best-seller Bought Journalists, and as a
warning to others unselfishly dropped dead of a heart attack within a couple of years?
" that enables the Kremlin to remotely implant a host of dangerous "populist" ideas in
the brains of defenseless Norwegian fishermen, weaponizing them into a horde of neo-Odinist
Viking berserkers who will scream down out of Scandinavia and storm the EU Parliament in
Brussels smelling of akvavit and fermented shark "
It isn't the akvavit that does it, but you can't do it without the akvavit.
And then there's the evil Russian spywhale, which the disinformationists want us to
believe is just a harmless "therapy Beluga" for kids, but which has clearly been strapped
with some sort of monstrous, mind-controlling apparatus that enables the Kremlin to
remotely implant a host of dangerous "populist" ideas in the brains of defenseless
Norwegian fishermen, weaponizing them into a horde of neo-Odinist Viking berserkers who
will scream down out of Scandinavia and storm the EU Parliament in Brussels smelling of
akvavit and fermented shark.
I had a good laugh at the Spy Whale schtick. One look at the thing, and you get the
idea it should've been in a Pink Panther movie.
Made up shit that only a mind of a child could believe.
The best sentence was the one expressing the Establishment's collective faux shock that
anything other than Russian spybots could be responsible for the serfs' rejection of the "two
centrist parties" that have sponged up lobbyist money for 3 decades, cashing in on the
globalist-Neoliberal economy, as rents rose and wages fell.
The serfs have to love that. How
could they not embrace it? Only spybots beaming up doom-and-gloom messages from halfway
around the globe could persuade the thick-headed serfs that the part-time / churn / gig
economy is anything but nirvana.
@paraglider I think
you're probably right about the inevitable collapse of the West as the dominant global power.
Not too sure about the US even remaining important as a continent wide farm.. The aquifers
in the West and Midwest are being inexorably drawn down to sustain the current rate of
farming, so it's possible North America's value would primarily be as a source of pockets of
human talent in the sciences and technologies.
Also Russia has been making some progress, but unless that continues it may not reach the
level of competitiveness in science, industry and domestic product to be any more than a
junior partner to China.
Whatever happens, a sea change in history seems unavoidable and it won't be what our
present rulers think it will. I don't pretend to think I can reliably predict what is
coming.
I used to know Russian disinformation when I saw it because it was obvious when it came from
the USSR. Then the MSM peddled it as authentic as when, in response to Soviet deployment of
IRBM in Europe, pinkos magically appeared to protest the American deployment of similar
weapons. It was well funded too as Brezhnev had serious oil revenues to finance both his
military and his disinformation campaigns and the USSR had 125% of America's population and a
satellite Eastern Europe to boot.
Now I am to believe a motheaten "Russia' with less than half the US population, a hostile
Ukraine and no Eastern European satrapies is able to exert more 'influence' in the West than
the mighty USSR. Yet those same 'pinkos' would have me believe a castrated Russia is an
existential threat. Come on!
...what motive would they possibly have, these enormous corporate media conglomerates, and the transnational corporations that
own them, and these intelligence agencies, and their fronts and cutouts, and corporate lobbyists and PR firms, and councils, and
think tanks, and research institutes, to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative that allows them
to systematically stigmatize, marginalize, criminalize, deplatform, demonetize, and otherwise eliminate any type of speech they
deem to be "Russian disinformation," or "extremist content," or a "conspiracy theory," or simply too "dangerous," "divisive,"
or "confusing" to circulate among the general public?
No see? That makes no sense. That's just an example of the type of fascist disinformation these Putin-Nazi disinformationists
are trying to spread to confuse us to the point where we can't even concentrate long enough to think anymore, or parse the meaningless
jargon-laden nonsense they're trying to deceive us with, and just devolve into these Pavlovian imbeciles conditioned to respond
to specific trigger words, like "extremist," "terrorist," "fascist," "populist," "anti-Semitic," "Russians," "hackers," and whatever
other emotional stimuli we are being trained to instantly recognize and robotically react to like circus animals.
Or I don't know, maybe it isn't. I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say. Probably they've already got to me. I'd better get
back down into my anti-disinformation bunker, pull up The Guardian , or The Washington Post , or Der Spiegel
on my child-proof computer, and immerse myself in some objective journalism, before the Putin-Nazi spywhale makes its way up the
Landwehrkanal, takes control of what's left of my mind, and forces me into going out and trying to vote for Hitler or something.
I recommend you do the same, and I'll see you when this nightmare over.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published
by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel,
ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy,
Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or
consentfactory.org .
"... BREAKING: A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report... Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP. ..."
"... As one example, in its FISA application, the bureau repeatedly and incorrectly assured the court in a footnote that it "does not believe" British ex-spy Christopher Steele was the direct source for a Yahoo News article implicating Page in Russian collusion, and instead asserted that the Yahoo article provided an independent basis to believe Steele. - Fox News ..."
"... Graham noted a report by The Hill 's John Solomon that the FBI was specifically told that Steele was "keen" to leak his salacious dossier for the purpose of influencing the 2016 US election . The agency also knew that the document's claims were either unverified or disproven , yet it was used anyway against Trump and his campaign. ..."
"... Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are now blaming Loretta Lynch for the botched Hillary/email investigation. ..."
FBI-CIA Dispute Erupts Over Whether Comey Or Brennan Pushed Steele Dossier
by Tyler Durden Thu, 05/16/2019 - 10:25 0 SHARES
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A dispute has erupted over whether former FBI Director James Comey or his CIA counterpart, John Brennan, promoted the unverified
Steele dossier as the Obama-era intelligence community targeted the Trump campaign.
According to Fox News , an email chain exists which indicates that Comey told bureau subordinates that Brennan insisted on the
dossier's inclusion in the intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference . Also interesting is that the dossier
was referred to as "crown material" in the emails - a possible reference to the fact that Steele is a former British spy.
In a statement to Fox, however, a former CIA official "put the blame squarely on Comey ."
"Former Director Brennan, along with former [Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper, are the ones who opposed James
Comey's recommendation that the Steele Dossier be included in the intelligence report," said the official.
"They opposed this because the dossier was in no way used to develop the ICA," the official continued. "The intelligence analysts
didn't include it when they were doing their work because it wasn't corroborated intelligence, therefore it wasn't used and it wasn't
included. Brennan and Clapper prevented it from being added into the official assessment. James Comey then decided on his own to
brief Trump about the document. "
James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan are starting to publicly argue who was pushing the dossier that ended up in the
intelligence community assessment on Russian interference. The RATS are beginning to turn on each other.
Former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy - a longtime
defender
of the FBI - told Fox News ' Martha MacCallum on Tuesday night that "Comey has a better argument than Brennan, based on what
I've seen."
In March, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) suggested over Twitter that Brennan had "insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier"
be included in the January 2017 ICA .
BREAKING: A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included
in the Intelligence Report... Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP.
The dossier was ultimately not included in the ICA according to
previous testimony by Clapper. Meanwhile, word that Comey
had briefed President Trump personally on the dossier - "because he understood reporters already had that information and it could
become public soon if journalists had a "news hook," according to the
Associated Press . And as it so happens - the
fact that Comey briefed Trump is what CNN and Buzzfeed caim
legitimized
their decision to publicly release the salacious and unverified dossier.
Whether the FBI acted appropriately in obtaining the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to Trump campaign
aide Carter Page is now the subject not only of U.S. Attorney John Durham's new probe, but also the ongoing review by Justice
Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber has been conducting his own investigation separately,
although details of his progress were unclear.
As one example, in its FISA application, the bureau
repeatedly and incorrectly assured the court in a footnote that it "does not believe" British ex-spy Christopher Steele was
the direct source for a Yahoo News article implicating Page in Russian collusion, and instead asserted that the Yahoo article
provided an independent basis to believe Steele. -
Fox News
On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News that he was pushing to declassify documents which would expose the FBI's dismal
efforts to verify the claims within the dossier.
"There's a document that's classified that I'm gonna try to get unclassified that takes the dossier -- all the pages of it --
and it has verification to one side," said Graham. "There really is no verification, other than media reports that were generated
by reporters that received the dossier."
Graham noted a report by The Hill 's John Solomon that the FBI was specifically told that Steele was "keen" to leak his salacious
dossier for the purpose of influencing the 2016 US election . The agency also knew that the document's claims were either unverified
or
disproven , yet it was used anyway against Trump and his campaign.
The Italian prime minister has suddenly requested resignations from 6 deputy directors of Italian intelligence agencies: DIS,
AISI and AISE. This was all after I outed Mifsud in Rome and the president called the Italian prime minister. Italy has flipped
and are giving up Brennan.
The Italian prime minister has suddenly requested resignations from 6 deputy directors of Italian intelligence agencies:
DIS, AISI and AISE. This was all after I outed Mifsud in Rome and the president called the Italian prime minister. Italy has flipped
and are giving up Brennan.
U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber has been on the job for some months yet narry a peep out of him. There's not even any indication
that he gets out of bed in the morning.
He's a member of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, I imagine that should he ever get out of bed, he will whitewash whichever
agency has the most Mormons who might be affected by this scandal.
Back in the sixties, Jack Anderson, a serious investigative journalist and Mormon, noted that to Mormons the US Constitution
is a sacred document given to the founding fathers by God himself. Let's hope Huber honors this Mormon tradition.
Comey was going to blackmail Trump and be the white knight he thinks he is. Even if it were true (which it isn't) Trump didn't
give a ****. Especially after all the lies after lies of trash the Dems have sunk to (like with Kavanaugh). Never be ashamed of
**** you do, and you will be blackmail proof....except for the pedophiles in DC. We know they are there, and when we find out
who they are we will kill them. Comey's a douche.
If you kill all the pedophile in and associated with Washington, the streets will run with blood.
Imagine you or me. If we have a little sexual kink--even a little one--there is little we can do about it but fantasize or
find an occasional person/animal/or vegetable to accommodate us. But if you hold great power or are super-rich, you don't need
to fantasize. You can act out your little kink with impunity. If you hold great power or are super-rich and you have a very, very
evil kink, you can exercise it with impunity. I often thought of that looking at **** Cheney's eyes. They're the eyes of a madman.
He could have sliced and diced a man, woman, child or beast a day and gotten away with it. President Trump can grab them by the
***** (adult women) and why not. It's just a very personal way of shaking hands. But I see no insanity in his eyes at all. Hillary's
eyes remind me of Norman Bates on a bad day. And Biden. . . . Wow! A pervert of the first water but also a complete coward. Thank
God! One less sex monster in action.
Everyone knows that FBI, CIA, NSA etc., are all in the business of being in business. Helps that insider trading is not illegal
for Congress. Corporate America directs intelligence outfits. My opinion...well, ok, my chickens told me.
The hits just keep coming. It's not just Comey vs. Brennan. Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are now blaming Loretta Lynch for the
botched Hillary/email investigation. Bruce Ohr is blaming DOJ and FBI officials for ignoring his "warnings" about Christopher
Steele and the dossier.
Comey is bashing Strzok, Page, and now Rosenstein. Rosenstein is firing back at Comey. Andrew McCabe is attacking anyone pretty
much with a pulse.
She's trying to protect herself. She already testified and spilled the beans about herself and her husband. And they threw
a criminal referral at her anyway. MARK MEADOWS REFERS NELLIE OHR TO DOJ FOR INVESTIGATION
This just gets juicier and juicier. Adm. Rogers of the NSA had found that FBI contractors were overusing the NSA database to
run searches/spying so he shut them down. In April 2016! Friends, Fusion GPS wasn't hired just to fabricate dirt on Trump, they
were hired to create cover for the spying that was already happening when they knew they got caught by Rogers. They were terrified
of what Rogers would do. Enter Fusion/Steele/dossier/European & Australian intelligence. The cover-up will be the death of them.
Wait until we find out who else they were spying on during this time.
Admiral Michael S. Rogers is a hero. He has everything. He knows exactly who was being spied on and when.
EDIT: So who the hell approved the original spying? We know Brennan pushed the dossier but who pushed Brennan? I smell Barry.
...what motive would they possibly have, these enormous corporate media conglomerates, and the transnational corporations that
own them, and these intelligence agencies, and their fronts and cutouts, and corporate lobbyists and PR firms, and councils, and
think tanks, and research institutes, to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative that allows them
to systematically stigmatize, marginalize, criminalize, deplatform, demonetize, and otherwise eliminate any type of speech they
deem to be "Russian disinformation," or "extremist content," or a "conspiracy theory," or simply too "dangerous," "divisive,"
or "confusing" to circulate among the general public?
No see? That makes no sense. That's just an example of the type of fascist disinformation these Putin-Nazi disinformationists
are trying to spread to confuse us to the point where we can't even concentrate long enough to think anymore, or parse the meaningless
jargon-laden nonsense they're trying to deceive us with, and just devolve into these Pavlovian imbeciles conditioned to respond
to specific trigger words, like "extremist," "terrorist," "fascist," "populist," "anti-Semitic," "Russians," "hackers," and whatever
other emotional stimuli we are being trained to instantly recognize and robotically react to like circus animals.
Or I don't know, maybe it isn't. I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say. Probably they've already got to me. I'd better get
back down into my anti-disinformation bunker, pull up The Guardian , or The Washington Post , or Der Spiegel
on my child-proof computer, and immerse myself in some objective journalism, before the Putin-Nazi spywhale makes its way up the
Landwehrkanal, takes control of what's left of my mind, and forces me into going out and trying to vote for Hitler or something.
I recommend you do the same, and I'll see you when this nightmare over.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published
by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel,
ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy,
Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or
consentfactory.org .
"... "Instead," McConnell went on, "the previous administration sent the Kremlin a signal they could get away with almost anything, almost anything. So is it surprising that we got the brazen interference detailed in special counsel Mueller's report?" ..."
"... Yes, Russia kicked most US NGOs out of the country. With good reason. Most of them were deliberately undermining the host country (this is not limited to Russia, they do that in most of their host countries, especially those we want to mess with). The National Endowment for Democracy is a classic case in point. The counter point here isn't RT. It's a news outlet that has proven to be far more reliable than the US corporate media. Does Russia send NGOs around the world to infest other countries with their vision of government? ..."
"... It is exactly as Mr. Lazare says, Americans think that their country can do no wrong. ..."
"... Several of my late husband's FB friends fall well into these categories and they really believe, wholeheartedly, the propaganda against Russia (and to some extent against China – Huawei, 5G, and so on), almost to the point of paranoia. The Demrat politicos and their corporate-capitalist-imperialist funders together with the despicable, groupthinking Orwellian media have done a real number on these people – usually the ones who *vote.* ..."
"... Most are Democrats who embrace the 'neoliberal groupthink' you referred to. There was a time I believed one of the conclusions of a famous study on authoritarian personalities that claimed the vast majority of authoritarians (active and passive) were Republicans. Just as the Democratic Party has morphed into the 80's Republican Party, so too have these liberals. Their cognitive dissonance is more powerful than any I have encountered in my lifetime. Their core belief system now includes incrementalism, lesser-evilism and an overwhelming sense of goodness that at least they are 'doing something positive' by supporting all Democrats at all costs. ..."
"... I don't get why, supposedly intelligent, informed people are wondering why Russia is being blamed for so much. Let me remind you that the extremely powerful Israel Lobby is VERY BUSY supporting the agenda of the right wing Likud government in Israel. ..."
"... One of the goals of Likud is the Zionist agenda that includes Greater Israel which requires Israel to acquire more water and land in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Iran is a very strong supporter of the Palestinians and Syrian President Assad and Iraqi independence from US domination. ..."
"... Why, on this good earth, does anyone pay any attention to Schumer and Schiff and McConnell? Shills, do nothing crackpots and traitors to this nation; when you see that's what they are, you have to ignore them. ..."
Russia-gate has shed any premise of being about Russian interference, writes Daniel Lazare, but the idea that America may in anyway
be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable.
Americans used to think that Russia-gate was about a plot to hack the 2016 election. They were wrong. Russia-gate is really about
an immense conspiracy to do four things:
No. 1: Ratchet up tensions with Russia to ever more dangerous levels;
No. 2: Show that Democrats are even more useless than people imagined;
No. 3: Persecute Julian Assange;
No. 4: Re-elect Donald Trump as president.
This was the takeaway from Mitch McConnell's devastating "
case closed " speech last week in which the Senate majority
leader jeered at President Barack Obama for mocking Mitt Romney's claim (seven years ago now) that Russia was America's "number one
geopolitical
foe
." As Obama famously replied during that presidential debate:
"The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War's been over for 20 years."
But that was so 2012. Now, says McConnell, it looks like Romney was right:
"We'd have been better off if the administration hadn't swept [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's invasion and occupation
of Georgia under the rug or looked away as Russia forced out western NGO's and cracked down on civil society. If President Obama
hadn't let Assad trample his red line in Syria or embraced Putin's fake deal on chemical weapons, if the Obama administration
had responded firmly to Putin's invasion and occupation of Ukraine in 2014, to the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, and
to Russia intervention in Syria -- maybe stronger leadership would have left the Kremlin less emboldened, maybe tampering with
our democracy wouldn't have seemed so very tempting.
"Instead," McConnell went on, "the previous administration sent the Kremlin a signal they could get away with almost anything,
almost anything. So is it surprising that we got the brazen interference detailed in special counsel Mueller's report?"
Lies and Distortions
Like so much out of Congress these days, this was a farrago of lies and distortions. It wasn't Moscow that started the 2008 Russo-Georgian
War, but Tbilisi . While
Russia has indeed cracked down on U.S.-backed NGO's, Washington has done the same by forcing Russia's highly successful news agency
RT to register as a foreign
agent and by sentencing Maria Butina, a Russian national studying at American University, to
18 months in prison
for the crime of hobnobbing
with members of the National Rifle Association. The charge that Syrian President Bashar al Assad "trampled" Obama's red line by using
chemical weapons is hardly as clear-cut as imperial propagandists like to believe –
to say the least – while the agreement between Putin and former Secretary
of State John Kerry to rid Syria of chemical weapons was not fake at all, but an example, increasingly rare unfortunately, of diplomacy
being used to prevent an international crisis from getting out of hand.
And so on ad nauseum . But what could Democrats say in response given that they've spent the last three years trying to
out-hawk the GOP? Answer: nothing. All they could do was try to turn tables on McConnell by charging him with not being anti-Russian
enough. Thus, New York's Sen. Chuck Schumer accused him of "
aiding and abetting
" Moscow while Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin
accused
him of running interference for Putin because he "feels the Russians were on the side of the Republicans in 2016 and just might be
again in 2020."
Democrats Feed the Super Hawks
The result: a Democratic consensus that Russia can't be trusted and that America must put itself on a war footing to prevent Putin
from "toppl[ing] the mighty oak that has been our republic for two hundred years," as Schumer put it. It's an across-the-board agreement
that the long-awaited Mueller report has only strengthened by regurgitating the intelligence-community line that "[t]he Russian government
interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion" and then cherry-picking the facts to fit its preconceived
thesis. (See " Top Ten
Questions About the Mueller Report ," May 6.)
Democrats claim to oppose National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence,
but the anti-Russian hysteria they promote strengthens the hand of such super-hawks. It makes military conflict more likely, if not
with Russia then with perceived Russian surrogates such as Venezuela or Iran.
Schiff increasingly unhinged.
Simultaneously, it backfires on Democrats by making them look weak and foolish as they argue that even though the Mueller report
says "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government,"
somehow "significant evidence of collusion" still exists, as an increasingly unhinged Rep. Adam Schiff
maintains . In the
Alice-in-Wonderland world of congressional Democrats, no evidence does not mean no evidence. In fact, it means the opposite.
Voters are unmoved. Ten times more Americans – 80 versus 8 percent – care about healthcare than about Russia according to
a recent survey . When CNN pollsters asked a thousand people in mid-March to name the issues that matter most,
not one mentioned Russia or the Mueller
probe . If they didn't care when collusion was still an open question, they care even less now that the only issue is obstruction
plus a phony constitutional crisis that desperate Democrats have conjured up out of thin air.
Trump the Chief Beneficiary
Besides Fox News – whose ratings have
soared while Russia-obsessed CNN's have plummeted – the chief beneficiary is Trump. Post-Mueller, the man has the wind in his
sails. Come 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders could cut through his phony populism with ease. But if Jeff Bezos's Washington Post
succeeds in
tarring him with Russia the same way it tried to tar Trump, then the Democratic nominee will be a bland centrist whom the incumbent
will happily bludgeon. Former Vice President Joe Biden – the
John McCain-loving ,
speech-slurring ,
child-fondler who was
for a wall along the Mexican border before he was against
it – will end up as a bug splat on the Orange One's windshield.
Trump ready to take on challengers. (Caricature/DonkeyHotey via Flickr)
Beto O'Rourke, the rich-kid airhead who
declared shortly before the Mueller report was released that Trump, "beyond the shadow of a doubt, sought to collude with the
Russian government," will not fare much better. Sen. Elizabeth Warren meanwhile seems to be tripping over her own two feet as she
predicts one moment that Trump is
heading
to jail , declares the next that voters
don't care
about the Mueller report because they're too concerned with bread-and-butter issues, and then
calls for dragging Congress into the impeachment morass
regardless.
Such "logic" is lost on voters, so it seems to be a safe bet that enough will stay home next Election Day to allow the rough beast
to slouch towards Bethlehem yet again.
Assange Convicted in Eyes of Press
Then there's Julian Assange, currently serving a 50-week sentence in a supermax prison outside of London after being ejected from
the Ecuadorian Embassy. By claiming that the WikiLeaks founder was "dissembling" by denying that Russia was the source of
the mammoth Democratic National Committee leak in July 2016, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has effectively convicted him in the
eyes of Congress and the press.
The New York Times thus reports that Mueller has "
revealed " that
Russian intelligence was the source while, in
a venomous piece by Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger, The Washington Post declared that Assange "is neither
whistleblower nor journalist," but someone who helped Russian intelligence interfere in "the American electoral process."
Schumer thus greeted Assange's April 11 arrest by
tweeting his "hope [that] he will soon be
held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government," while, in
a truly chilling
statement , Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia declared that "[i]t will be really good to get him back on United States
soil [so] we can get the facts and the truth from him."
Now that Julian Assange has been arrested, I hope he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf
of Putin and the Russian government.
Assange is guiltier than ever. If Washington gets its hands on him, he'll no doubt be hauled before some sort of Star Chamber
and then clapped in a dungeon somewhere until he confesses that Russian intelligence made him do it, even though a careful reading
of the Mueller report strongly suggests the opposite. (See "
The 'Guccifer 2.0'
Gaps in Mueller's Full Report ," April 18.)
Assange languishing behind bars, war breaking out in Latin America or the Persian Gulf, Trump in the Oval Office for four years
more – it's the worst of all possible worlds, and the Democratic Party's bizarre fixation with Vladimir Putin is what's pushing it.
Ultimately, Russia-gate is yet a variation on the tired old theme of American innocence. If something goes wrong, it can't be
the fault of decent Americans who, as we all know, are too good for our deeply flawed world. Rather, it must be the fault of dastardly
foreigners trying to hack our democracy. It's a deep-rooted form of xenophobia that has fueled everything from the criminalization
of marijuana (smuggled in by evil Mexicans) to the 1950s Red Scare (a reaction to Communism smuggled in by evil Russians), and the
war on terrorism (the work of evil Muslims). The idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable.
But Russia-gate may be the greatest delusion of all. After decades of celebrating Donald Trump as the essence of American flash
and hustle, the corporate media have decided that the only way he could have gotten into the White House is if Putin put him there.
The upshot is a giant conspiracy to force Americans to turn their back on reality, an effort that can only end in disaster for all
concerned, Democrats first and foremost.
Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996)
and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique
and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com .
Tick Tock , May 15, 2019 at 11:30
Sorry Folks but both Mr Lazare's text and the majority of the comments here clearly illustrate that the major problem for America
and its Citizens is that they are way too full of themselves and easily manipulated because of that. Seriously, the vast majority
of the Worlds population Could Not Give a Rat's Ass about America except when they are being attacked either with Real Bombs or
Economically.
No normal Human Being wants to be Israel's Stooge. You have to think you are are really important for someone in another Country
to want to select your leaders. Oh yes that is what the US Deep State does and now it's been clearly exposed it does the same
thing at home.. Of course if your motto is that "You are god's chosen people!", it could get you into trouble now and then with
the rest of God's People. Like Bob Dylan wrote a few years ago, "I used to care!" Only a fool would care now.
Jeff Harrison , May 15, 2019 at 11:23
This is where we learn the importance of an objective press and one that can bring all the threads of a story together. And
it's also most likely to be a disaster.
Yes, Russia kicked most US NGOs out of the country. With good reason. Most of them were deliberately undermining the host country
(this is not limited to Russia, they do that in most of their host countries, especially those we want to mess with). The National
Endowment for Democracy is a classic case in point. The counter point here isn't RT. It's a news outlet that has proven to be
far more reliable than the US corporate media. Does Russia send NGOs around the world to infest other countries with their vision
of government?
The US/EU fomented the coup in Ukraine that resulted in Crimea deciding they didn't want to be associated with Ukraine any
longer. Did the US press tell the truth here? No. They made it sound as if Crimea was a part of Ukraine when, in fact, the Turkic
Muslims of Crimea were never a part of the Christian Slavs of Ukraine. They also didn't explain the terms by which Khrushchev
administratively slapped the two together in 1957 which give the Crimeans the ability to opt out.
It is exactly as Mr. Lazare says, Americans think that their country can do no wrong. We don't see the coups we foist on other
countries. We don't see the lies and fake news we spread in other countries we wish to undermine. They don't see the consequences
of our abuse of our economic power. The myopia is powerful in this one as my representatives tried to tell me that Venezuela was
a prosperous and happy country before Chavez and that their current travails are as a result of the socialism and not two coup
attempts and a long string of sanctions from the US. We are remarkably good at blaming the victim.
There's a good chance that this will rise up and bite us in the ass and the American people will have no idea why ..
AnneR , May 15, 2019 at 08:52
Mr Lazare, while I would certainly agree with much you have written, on one point at least I am much less certain: that most
Americans care less about Russia than about health care.
While this might be true for the majority of the population who are in the lower middle, working classes and poor, I am much
less certain about the "well" educated, comfortably off, well health insured, middling and upper bourgeoisie. The sort who, even
when on Medicare, are on the upper rungs of it (paying extra for better and more expansive treatment; and I do mean Medicare here).
The sort who frequently have been privately educated.
Several of my late husband's FB friends fall well into these categories and they really believe, wholeheartedly, the propaganda
against Russia (and to some extent against China – Huawei, 5G, and so on), almost to the point of paranoia. The Demrat politicos
and their corporate-capitalist-imperialist funders together with the despicable, groupthinking Orwellian media have done a real
number on these people – usually the ones who *vote.*
These same people evince absolutely, and I mean absolutely, NO concern or interest in the constant war-making and warmongering,
the illegal invasions, electoral meddling/coups/"regime" changes, destruction of peoples that this country (and its allies) engage
in. Not happening here, therefore not anything to do with "us."
I know that my late husband would be utterly devastated knowing that some of his students, with whom he worked assiduously
to develop real critical thinking (via much difficult reading in historiography, sociology and philosophy, discussion and writing),
have fallen hook, line and sinker for the neoliberal groupthink supporting the corporate-capitalist-imperialist (and of course,
orientalist) line. One can only imagine that they were already well primed for this mindset.
MattZ , May 15, 2019 at 11:43
Anne -- your post resonates deeply with me. I would guess you and I are of similar ages and have similar friends and acquaintances.
We certainly share the exact same experiences with these people. They are proud 'liberals' (lately donning the 'progressive' robe
with equal exuberance). None are members of the elite one-percenters, but all belong to what Nader refers to as the 'contented
class', that 9% buffer zone between the elite and the increasingly miserable lower 90%-ers.
Most are Democrats who embrace the 'neoliberal groupthink' you referred to. There was a time I believed one of the conclusions
of a famous study on authoritarian personalities that claimed the vast majority of authoritarians (active and passive) were Republicans.
Just as the Democratic Party has morphed into the 80's Republican Party, so too have these liberals. Their cognitive dissonance
is more powerful than any I have encountered in my lifetime. Their core belief system now includes incrementalism, lesser-evilism
and an overwhelming sense of goodness that at least they are 'doing something positive' by supporting all Democrats at all costs.
Appallingly, their new heroes are historically-proven liars, psychopaths and Deep State organizations like the CIA and FBI.
Their Trump Derangement Syndrome has destroyed all ability to think critically or accept transparent and obvious truths. They
accept no criticism of their actions and attack those who question them. To them, the 'end' of removing Trump justifies any evil.
Gaia help us all.
Skip Scott , May 15, 2019 at 08:04
The root of the Democrats problem is they feed from the same trough as the GOP. They can't do anything substantial about health
care or the declining middle class because they'd piss off their donors. Since they can't stand for "the working man" any longer,
they are trying to cobble together "Identity Politics" and "Political Correctness" to eke out a majority. Good luck with that!
They can give us non gender specific restrooms with our Forever War! Why aren't we feeling the love?
I think the time has never been more ripe for a serious third party challenge than 2020.
Realist , May 15, 2019 at 10:42
Perfect thumbnail obituary for the Democratic Party, Skip. It got hijacked by corporatists who saw an opportunity to push the
GOP agenda from both directions. Maybe that's what Hillary meant by "stronger together."
If you want to be entertained and titillated turn on the national evening news shows. The 2020 election circus has already
begun. Don't watch that, switch channels and watch the obstruction of justice infotainment. Want news, read between the lines
of the major newspapers. Go to PBS to be rescued, good luck.
Has it always been thus. Maybe, but it's a much better show today.
If I could figure out long ago Russia-gate was going to lead to Trump's reelection (see above link), you would think Brennan/
Clinton/ Pelosi could figure it out too. Which begs the questions:
Is Trump good for business for the Democratic party financial patrons? Do they really want him impeached? Did the Pied Piper
strategy ever end? Does Bernie Sanders scare them so much they'd rather promote Trump than have Sanders in the Oval Office?
Realist , May 15, 2019 at 10:35
Your last explanation is the one that Jimmy Dore seems to favor. The party string pullers are obviously desperate when they
back one near-octogenarian (Crazy Joe Biden) for the nomination against another near-octogenarian (Sanders). Counter move by the
GOPers may be to run Tricky Dick Nixon's head-in-a-bottle for the office, like in Futurama.
Realist , May 15, 2019 at 02:05
Wow, gotta hand it to McConnell. That man can shamelessly pack multiple whoppers into every single sentence uttered in his
public speaking. Quite a tour de force of pure undiluted bullshit by the turtle. With his rhetorical skills to deliver talking
points at a newly realised zenith, there's sure to be a job for him on Madison Avenue when he's finally kicked to the curb as
happens to every politician when a better snake oil salesman inevitably comes along.
John Sanguinetti , May 15, 2019 at 00:05
I don't get why, supposedly intelligent, informed people are wondering why Russia is being blamed for so much. Let me remind
you that the extremely powerful Israel Lobby is VERY BUSY supporting the agenda of the right wing Likud government in Israel.
One of the goals of Likud is the Zionist agenda that includes Greater Israel which requires Israel to acquire more water and land
in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Iran is a very strong supporter of the Palestinians and Syrian President Assad and Iraqi independence
from US domination.
Russia, with it's very effective support for Assad and collaboration with Iran is blocking progress on the
Zionist agenda. So, putting pressure on Russia is a way of trying to force them to back off from their support for Syria and Iran
or at least to scare them with the power of our military and a crazy unpredictable leader who might do anything. Israel has besides
it's VERY STRONG and active lobbies in the US and UK a large and VERY Active 5th column that spends a LOT of money and effort
influencing the people who run our government.
CitizenOne , May 14, 2019 at 23:43
I believe it but with some editing of the authors original four things. I have deleted the case against Assange as a sideshow
that does nor resonate with Americans any more than the nightly rumor mill about celebrities. Here goes.
Americans used to think that Russia-gate was about a plot to hack the 2016 election. They were wrong. Russia-gate is really
about an immense conspiracy to do four things:
No. 1: Ratchet up tensions with Russia to ever more dangerous levels;
No. 2: Show that Democrats are even more useless than people imagined;
No. 3: Win the 2020 elections and reelect Trump and preserve the republican majority in the Senate and win back the democrat
controlled House
No. 4: Wage wars in oil rich nations being Iran and Venezuela to fulfill the agenda of the energy companies via military action.
While McConnell rails against Obama for his weaknesses we have the historical record that Obama declared Venezuela as a national
security threat, levied massive sanctions against Russia for their presumed invasion of Ukraine, launched a war against the Syrian
government, preserved and supported our wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
We see today that Chuck Schumer is still committed to the theory that Russia is the single reason that the democrats lost the
last election which is absurd and is rejected by not only a significant number of liberal journalists but also by a majority of
Americans. Why do the democrats continue to promote conspiracy theories that the majority of Americans reject as nonsense?
The republicans have the democrats over a barrel and will push it over and watch the democrats wallow in the mud with much
amusement.
This could not have have happened to the democrats without a complete lack of foresight or even a slightest attempt to rely
on the truth to guide them.
From day one after the election, the democrats swallowed the bait hook line and sinker and now the hook is buried deep in their
gullets and they still insist that they are free swimming fish on a mission to prove Russia was responsible for the last election.
With every gulp they swallow the hook deeper apparently unaware that they are about to be reeled in and captured by their unfounded
beliefs that the bait is is a real meal they can sustain themselves on. Just like a fooled fish they are on the hook.
The announcement that the AG is launching an investigation led by republicans to investigate the Russia Gate investigation
will most certainly tarnish democrats and stain their efforts that will be seen as even more dull as the tarnish they try to put
on Trump. Even uninformed citizens will ask what is up with the democrats who are trying to bring down Trump even though their
reliable news sources tell them that Russia Gate is all a lie.
Meanwhile the democrats who have declared come up not only short on ideas but appear to be suicidal.
Elisabeth Warren has declared war on monopolies in an era where unlimited spending by corporations is legally protected as
free speech. How can she hope to win by pledging to breakup monopolies that are well equipped to outspend her in their bid for
survival?
The democrats have failed to do the math and their strategies for appealing to the masses will be shot down by the right wing
controlled "free press". It is not a liberal press. It is the enemy of liberals controlled by wealthy liberal hating, libertarian
loving billionaires. Public vows by democrats who pledge to destroy it will be met with the full force of their arsenal which
includes complete control over the microphone that steers debate and is the chief influence of elections. As Mark Twain put it,
" It is unwise to wage a war of words against men who buy ink by the barrel".
Howard Dean met his end when the major media outlets conspired to elevate "The Dean Scream" to levels questioning his sanity.
The nearly constant barrage of over 4,000 replays of the Dean Scream leading up to the democratic primaries effectively put an
end to his bid for nomination.
But why did all of the the major media outlets conspire to conduct a character assassination of the Howard Dean movement? Just
two weeks before the Dean Scream was endlessly broadcasted by the media with news commentators chiming in that he was likely an
insane man who must be exposed and stopped in his tracks he made a fatal flaw. He made a campaign speech where he said that if
he was elected he would impose regulations on the media. Boom Boom out went the lights.
How can any democrat win when they oppose corporations that include the media corporations in America? How can Elisabeth Warren
wither the name calling that she will suffer as Trump claims she has a Pocahontas syndrome while also alienating the largest campaign
contributors with her pledge to destroy them? How will her insistence that she has Indian blood possibly win her fans when the
majority of Americans will mock her. They have been honed on the strop of right wing money into believing that everything they
hear and see is factual even though it is not factual or real. Such is the suicidal gamble of the soon to be defeated democratic
party.
Why they continue to go down the path toward blind alleys where they will be trapped and defeated baffles me.
geeyp , May 15, 2019 at 11:32
Why, on this good earth, does anyone pay any attention to Schumer and Schiff and McConnell? Shills, do nothing crackpots and
traitors to this nation; when you see that's what they are, you have to ignore them.
jmg , May 14, 2019 at 19:57
Daniel Lazare: "( ) it must be the fault of dastardly foreigners trying to hack our democracy. It's a deep-rooted form of xenophobia
that has fueled everything ( ) The idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable."
Yes, that's the way it is. About WikiLeaks, as they have repeated many times:
"Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims 'bullshit',
adding: 'They are absolutely making it up.'
"'I know who leaked them,' Murray said. 'I've met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it's an
insider. It's a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.'"
Neocons and neolibs control the USA foreign policy. That's given. NYT just reflects foreign policy establishment talking points.
Links between Daniel Jones and Steele are really interesting and new information
Notable quotes:
"... "The goal here is bigger than any one election," said Daniel Jones, a former F.B.I. analyst and Senate investigator whose nonprofit group, Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities. ..."
"... According to a report published this morning, he notes that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has received "significant funding" from technology billionaires, funneled $500,000 to the non-profit group Advance Democracy. That organization shares a street address with The Democracy Integrity Project. ..."
"... That's because both organizations were founded by former Senate Intel staffer Daniel Jones, who at that time worked for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who hails from just down the road from Silicon Valley in San Francisco. As TruNews has previously reported, those connections to the Senate Intel Committee have played a significant role in the ongoing "Russia Narrative" drama in Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Jones has been previously identified as a central figure in the investigation who served as potential go-between with the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. ..."
"... The NYT is very much invested in the post Cold War status quo. ..."
"... That would be the Clintons and the Bushes. Both political parties and every POTUS since 1968. In fact, I believe this is the main reason why the Dems created and are pushing Russiagate so hard. They don't want us looking at what really gave us Trump: the neoliberal neoconservative fiasco of the past 40+ years. ..."
"... told about Russia and that they interfered with not only our elections, but in so many other countries too. I remember a time when people would insist on seeing the evidence on stuff the intelligence agencies tell them, but ever since Her lost the election they lost their minds. I'll see references to articles that say something, but offer no evidence. Like the one this essay is about. ..."
"... Plus they tried to kill the Skripals. And the GOP are also under Vlad's thumb. This is why Russia Gate has to be debunked. ..."
"... So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days. ..."
"... Dick Cheney is as evil as any human being I've ever heard of. I doubt whether he's done everything some folks believe he's done -- but not because he isn't evil enough, only because he lacked either the guts or the necessity. I believe he would have fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels, and he would enthusiastically embraced their approach to getting and wielding power. ..."
"... A few months ago, I made a comment to someone that it's like we're supposed to hate them (Russia) for their freedoms. ..."
gjohnsit on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:32pm The NY Times just posted one of the most atrocious pieces of
journalistic malpractice I have ever read.
Less than two weeks before pivotal elections for the European Parliament, a constellation of websites and social media accounts
linked to Russia or far-right groups is spreading disinformation, encouraging discord and amplifying distrust in the centrist
parties that have governed for decades.
European Union investigators, academics and advocacy groups say the new disinformation efforts share many of the same digital
fingerprints or tactics used in previous Russian attacks, including the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
That's a powerful statement. There's just one problem: the article doesn't present a single bit of proof. Just anecdotes. In fact,
it doesn't even quote anyone to back up these claims, but for one single exception.
"The goal here is bigger than any one election," said Daniel Jones, a former F.B.I. analyst and Senate investigator whose
nonprofit group, Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement
authorities.
"It is to constantly divide, increase distrust and undermine our faith in institutions and democracy itself. They're working
to destroy everything that was built post-World War II."
Russia is why people are losing faith in our government institutions. Not because they are owned by oligarchs. If you listen closely
you can hear President Bush.
So who is Daniel Jones and Advance Democracy? That's an
interesting story .
According to a report published this morning, he notes that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has received "significant
funding" from technology billionaires, funneled $500,000 to the non-profit group Advance Democracy. That organization shares a
street address with The Democracy Integrity Project.
That's because both organizations were founded by former Senate Intel staffer Daniel Jones, who at that time worked for
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who hails from just down the road from Silicon Valley in San Francisco. As TruNews has previously
reported, those connections to the Senate Intel Committee have played a significant role in the ongoing "Russia Narrative" drama
in Washington, D.C.
Jones has been previously identified as a central figure in the investigation who served as potential go-between with the
committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. That's because TDIP, which receives
significant funding from George Soros, funneled some of that money toward Steele's research for Fusion GPS that led to the infamous
dossier on President Donald Trump.
However, as Ross reports today: "Mystery surrounds both of Jones's operations. The identities of both groups' donors have largely
been kept secret, as Jones has avoided revealing his backers.
Nothing to see here. Just two sketchy political organizations sharing the same street address. Perfectly normal.
"The election has yet to come, and we are already suspected of doing something wrong?" the Russian prime minister, Dmitri A.
Medvedev, said in March. "Suspecting someone of an event that has not yet happened is a bunch of paranoid nonsense."
It's not nonsense. It's scapegoating. There's a difference.
CBS News (2/4/19) briefly interviewed Honolulu Civil Beats reporter Nick Grube regarding Gabbard's campaign announcement. The
anchors had clearly never encountered the term anti-interventionism before, struggling to even pronounce the word, then laughing
and saying it "doesn't roll off the tongue."
They're [the Kremlin] working to destroy everything that was built post-World War II.
That would be the Clintons and the Bushes. Both political parties and every POTUS since 1968. In fact, I believe this is
the main reason why the Dems created and are pushing Russiagate so hard. They don't want us looking at what really gave us Trump:
the neoliberal neoconservative fiasco of the past 40+ years.
It's also why so many people of my generation (over 60) are having trouble understanding and accepting what's going on. To
do so will require letting go of everything they thought was true. That kind of change does not come easy to many people.
I heard someone recently say "We have to elect a Dem or else our post-War advantages will disappear."
Got to wonder where he's been for the past 40 years. That horse left the barn a long time ago.
told about Russia and that they interfered with not only our elections, but in so many other countries too. I remember
a time when people would insist on seeing the evidence on stuff the intelligence agencies tell them, but ever since Her lost the
election they lost their minds. I'll see references to articles that say something, but offer no evidence. Like the one this essay
is about.
Plus they tried to kill the Skripals. And the GOP are also under Vlad's thumb. This is why Russia Gate has to be debunked.
People say that Mueller has put to rest the fact that Russia indeed interfered with the election, but all he showed was the
FBIs "belief' that they did and that some Russians will ties to Vlad hacked the DNC computers. He didn't interview anyone involved
with that as laid out in my recent essay.
I've even seen people who were once against our invasions being okay with them and repeating the party line. Unfuckingbelievable!
The Year 2000 was not that long ago, and we were bombarded for two decades beforehand with talk of all the dreadful things
that might happen, could happen, and some people firmly believed would happen - and then didn't happen. (As it turned out,
the most obvious sign of "Y2K" was the "19100" bug that plagued Web pages for months afterward. It was cosmetic and harmless,
but annoying.)
I expected it to take about ten years for sanity to return - but it looks like being more like fifty. And there will probably
be some cultists who construct their own "reality" around what didn't happen, like the 1840s Millerites (who spun off the still-extant
Seventh Day Adventists).
The NYT and WaPoo have new articles out about how bad the dastardly Russians are still interfering with the whole dang country
now. And WaPoo had some university do a study on how Russia tried to get people to vote for Bernie and blah, blah,...
I read an article last year saying that Bernie needs to knock off being with the Russia Gaters because he is going to be accused
of being in Vlad's pockets anyway. But he's still saying that Trump is under Russia's thumb and that Russia is doing all kinds
of bad stuff.
Then there's all the websites like DK, emptyhead, democratic underground and others saying that Mueller confirmed Russia did
bad things and maybe if the democrats work harder on their investigations they will find stuff that Mueller missed. I think 10
years is optimistic, but however long it's going to take its going to be too long.
I think 10 years is optimistic, but however long it's going to take it's going to be too long.
Consider how long it took for Cold War I to finally start to ebb. It took at least a decade, and that was with the memory of
a horrendous world war fresh on most minds. Now, we're so insulated from the reality of war, not even allowed reports from the
battlefields, much less accurate information and numbers, that we have lost touch with the horror. Evil men such as Bolton spend
every minute of every day trying to embroil us in deadly excursions and foreign entanglements. Our "intelligence" agencies are
no more than modern versions of the NAZI era Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive
ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end
result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days.
So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before
Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result
was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days.
Fortunately for us ordinary Americans, the Russians really do love their children too.....
@snoopydawg
Are they going to say they're both (Bernie and Trump) working with Russia? That would be amusing. I wonder if it would cause any
of them to vote third party or not vote at all.
...who was a software development consultant at the time, the reason nothing much happened was that's lot of people worked
their butts off for several years. COBOL programmers were dragged out of retirement and all kinds of goofy OS and library hacks
were implemented to reduce the amount of work and risk.
It's also why so many people of my generation (over 60) are having trouble understanding and accepting what's going on.
To do so will require letting go of everything they thought was true. That kind of change does not come easy to many people.
I spent several years grappling with my fall down the rabbit hole. I started freeing myself from the matrix during #Occupy
and towards the end of Obama's first term I was starting to really get it... at least get it enough to know I wasn't voting for
him a second time. Then Bernie arrived on the scene and it was music to my ears. That pretty much completed the process for me
but it STILL took time and I STILL have places where I "don't believe they are that evil" (twin towers anyone) yet I suspect that
in the fullness of time I may yet find that they are in fact that evil.
I have a lot of sympathy for those still caught in the matrix. It's a really good trap. That doesn't change the fact that I
see them as my enemy and the enemy of all mankind but I at least understand.
@SnappleBC Dick Cheney is as evil as any human being I've ever heard of. I doubt whether he's done everything some folks believe he's
done -- but not because he isn't evil enough, only because he lacked either the guts or the necessity. I believe he would have
fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels, and he would enthusiastically embraced their approach to getting and wielding
power.
Just this century this country has killed a million Iraqis and who knows how many people in the other countries we've invaded?
40,000 Venezuelans died last year because of our sanctions and no matter how many people in Yemen die every day because of the
Saudis we will continue supporting them.
Then there's Hiroshima and Nagasaki as aliasalias stated. Oh hell yes they are that evil.
killed and displaced around the Globe by the Empire in just this century alone, so many still can't believe this same government
could murder 3000 on 9/11.
Cognitive dissidence doesn't even start to explain it.
...is the intense access that these privatized propagandists have to the New York Times . And certainly the Times
should explain why it freely publishes radical divisive stories that cannot be verified from compromised sources that have previously
been exposed as disreputable. This is what Russia is accused of doing, sewing confusion and fear in the US, based on misinformation.
Now the New York Times is doing it for them. The fact that a US media outlet is deliberately sabotaging the domestic tranquility
with alarming lies is exactly what congress should be investigating. But any congressperson that did so would see their careers
destroyed. Congress surrendered to the media monopolies a long time ago.
What we can do is confirm for Americans that they must never trust anything they read in the New York Times and the
Washington Post . Remind them of the tragic facts in recent history. The lies that endangers people's lives and disables
their intelligence are written between the lines.
The NYT and WaPoo and other media are continuing to come up with new stories every day telling us something new that Russia
is doing. This is not going away any time soon. Unfortunately.
@Lookout@Lookout with
us all getting under our desks or along the walls if we are in the hallway and I don't think any one of us didn't treat this as
something critical for us to learn in order to survive.
As a kid that loved riding a bicycle one Public Service announcement I paid careful attention to was the instruction to do if
I saw that bright flash which was to throw the bike down and curl up along the curb, I even thought about that problem on unpaved
streets.
I remember bomb shelters were advertised a lot and I remember some tv dramas were about people fleeing to their bomb shelter
and the dilemma of being only fit to hold a small group but had neighbors, friends and strangers pleading to be let in.
The 'Twilight Zone' series even had one episode where a very wealthy man with a shelter picked certain important people in
his life, his school teacher, Priest and others were offered shelter only if they will apologize for things he'd caught criticism
for his behavior in his past. Trivial stuff, but he had a screen for them to watch the destruction live.
Long story short, they'd rather die than spend the rest of their lives with him. Especially with all their friends and family
gone, so he is alone, goes crazy, runs outside and is found by a policemen to be crying and babbling at a city fountain, in a
city that had not been bombed, but for him it had happened and all he could see was destruction around him.
All that aside considering we'd already dropped 'the' bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki those behind all the public warnings and
information that was needed in order for people to know how to survive couldn't really believe that nonsense.
Unless they could believe all those dead Japanese would've likely survived if they had ducked under their desks or curled up
along a curb, and if that were true they were as loony as the 'Twilight Zone' character.
Yeah if only all those schoolchildren had jumped under their desk before the building and everything around it was obliterated.
...if you see a light brighter than the sun. (1 min)
in the top of the ninth the screen goes black, the live stream has stopped because the electrical grid the Tropicana had shut
down and the stadium was without power for the lights, scoreboard, broadcast, etc. were down.
It took about forty-five minutes for power to be restored but right when it happened I thought it was the stream I was watching
so I clicked on other streaming sites and it was on a couple of them I read why all broadcasts were off.
But in the chat box I really couldn't tell if a few were joking or not when they blamed it on the Russians. One in particular
didn't look like they were joking as that person repeated the claim a few times. No kidding, and one lamented that (paraphrasing)
'now the Russians are messing with our National sport'.
Any time something happens now people will willingly accept that Russia did something that caused it. See the tweet I posted
above. Secret service agents and police are doing nothing as the Guaido goons keeps people from delivering food and stuff to the
embassy sitters. One goon tried taking the bag out of a guy's hands and they just watched. One person tried to throw a cucumber
and the cops pounced on him, pushed him to the ground and bloodied him up. But Russia is the one who put the embassy sitters into
the embassy and is supporting them. SMDH!
Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities."It
is to constantly divide, increase distrust and undermine our faith in institutions and democracy itself.
An organization that reports undesirable speech to law enforcement is worried about the undermining of democracy. Got it.
"... You know the ones: articles predicting whatever the news of the day will be The End of Democracy. Alongside The New York Times and The Washington Post , whose op-ed pages are pretty much a daily End of Days, practitioners include Chicken Little regulars Rachel Maddow , Lawrence Tribe, Malcolm Nance, David Corn, Benjamin Wittes, Charles Pierce, Bob Cesca, and Marcy Wheeler. ..."
"... We've gone from thinking the president is literally a Russian agent (since 1987, the last year your mom and dad dated!) to worrying the attorney general is trying to obstruct a House committee from investigating a completed investigation into obstruction by writing a summary not everyone liked of a report already released. But the actual content is irrelevant. What matters is there is another crisis to write about! The op-ed industry can't keep up with all the Republic-ending stuff Trump and his henchworld are up to. ..."
"... All persons with Russian-sounding names are Kremlin Agents(tm) *except* the alleged sources for The Dossier(tm). Those anonymous Russians can be trusted implicitly. ..."
"... Matt Tiabbi has a book out on hate, Hate Inc, and has done an excellent interview with Chris Hedges on RT. ..."
"... Rep. Eric Swalwell (D, California), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, before Mueller finished his investigation, on Hardball on MSNBC, Jan. 2019: ..."
"... Matthews: "Do you believe the president, right now, has been an agent of the Russians?" Swalwell: "Yes, I think there's more evidence that he is-" Matthews: "Agent?" Swalwell: "Yes. and I think all the arrows point in that direction, and I haven't seen a single piece of evidence that he's not." Matthews: "An agent like in the 1940s where you had people who were 'reds,' to use an old term, like that? In other words, working for a foreign power?" Swalwell: "He's working on behalf of the Russians, yes." ..."
"... One of the best things to come from Trump's election has been the lengths some of his opponents will go to discredit themselves in the court of public opinion: Brennan, Clapper, Clinton, Comey, McCabe, the list goes on and on, often merely to make a buck. Even Watergate figures like Carl Bernstein and John Dean have demolished their own reputations, or what was left of them to begin with. If they only knew, or cared, how badly they look in hindsight. ..."
"... @MM: >>One of the best things to come from Trump's election has been the lengths some of his opponents will go to discredit themselves in the court of public opinion << ..."
"... These people don't care about "public opinion." They operate inside a circle-jerk echo chamber whose membership includes the powers dominating the culture, the media (both mainstream and social), the government, and, increasingly, the major corporations. In short, the bulk of what some call the Ruling Class. ..."
"... Facts, evidence, and truth have nothing to do with it. So an investigation, rigged though it was, nonetheless clears Trump of conspiring with Moscow, but the story becomes how Trump is guilty anyway. Orwell, a man well ahead of his time, had the whole thing figured out long ago. ..."
"... "Now tell me again it's all 'sound and fury, signifying nothing.'" On the issue of Trump/Russia collusion, it is, and always was, because we now know it started with the Clinton campaign and a now-discredited dossier. ..."
"... These are the people who we elect to "govern" us. If one looks back upon the 230 years or so during which this thing of ours has been in existence, the overwhelming majority of our elected officials (federal, state and local) have probably been, to one degree or another, narcissistic, mendacious and just generally dishonest incompetents. ..."
"... Lynch, Holder, Obama as silent as church mice. i:e who gave Comey his marching orders ? ..."
"... What "illegal things" were revealed in the Mueller report? Trump was trying to obstruct an INJUSTICE, i.e. the "soft coup" done by the anti-American, lawless leftist Dems. ..."
"... On the Big Ugly Lie*, what's their excuse? * Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election, an attack on par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. ..."
You know the ones: articles predicting whatever the news of the day will be The End of
Democracy. Alongside TheNew York Times and TheWashington Post ,
whose op-ed pages are pretty much a daily End of Days, practitioners include Chicken Little
regulars Rachel
Maddow , Lawrence Tribe, Malcolm Nance, David Corn, Benjamin Wittes, Charles Pierce, Bob
Cesca, and Marcy Wheeler.
You'd have thought after almost three years of wrong predictions (no new wars, no economic
collapse, no Russiagate) this industry would have slam shut faster than a Rust Belt union hall.
You would have especially thought these kinds of articles would have tapered off with the
release of the Mueller Report. It turned out to be the opposite -- while Mueller found no
conspiracy and charged no obstruction, the dang report turns out to be chock-a-block with
hidden messages, secret road maps, and voices speaking in tongues (albeit only to Democrats)
about obstruction.
We've gone from thinking the president is literally a Russian agent (since 1987, the last
year your mom and dad dated!) to worrying the attorney general is trying to obstruct a House
committee from investigating a completed investigation into obstruction by writing a summary
not everyone liked of a report already released. But the actual content is irrelevant. What
matters is there is another crisis to write about! The op-ed industry can't keep up with
all the Republic-ending stuff Trump and his henchworld are up to.
Help has arrived. Now anyone can write their own fear-mongering article, using this handy
tool, the op-ed-o-Matic. The GoFundMe for the AI-driven app version will be up soon, but for
now, simply follow these simple steps to punditry!
Start with a terrifying cliche. Here are some to choose from: There is a clear and
present danger; Dark clouds gather, the center cannot hold; It is unclear the Republic will
survive; Democracy itself is under attack; We face a profound/unique/existential
threat/crisis/turning point/test. Also, that "First they came for "
poem is good. Be creative; The Washington Post
calls the present state of things "constitutional nihilism." Snappy!
Be philosophical and slightly weary in tone,
such as "I am in despair as I have never been before about the future of our experiment in
self-rule." Say you're
sad for the state of the nation. Claim time is short, but there just may be a chance to
stop this. Add " by any means necessary."
Then choose a follow-on quote to reinforce the danger, maybe from: The Federalist Papers,
especially Madison on tyranny; Lincoln, pretty much anything about "the people, government,
test for our great nation, blah blah;" the Jack Nicholson character about not being able to
handle the truth; something from the neocons like Bill Kristol or Max Boot who now hate Trump.
Start with "even" as in " even arch conservative Jennifer Rubin now says "
After all that to get the blood up, explain the current bad thing Trump did. Label it "a
high crime or misdemeanor if there ever was one." Use some legalese, such as proffer, colorable
argument, inter alia, sinecure, duly-authorized, perjurious, and that little law book squiggly
thingy (18 USC § 1513.) Be sure to say "no one is above the law," then a dramatic hyphen,
then "even the president." Law school is overrated; you and Google know as much as anyone about
emoluments, perjury, campaign finance regulations, contempt, tax law, subpoenas, obstruction,
or whatever the day's thing is, and it changes a lot. But whatever, the bastard is obviously
guilty. Your standard is
tabloid-level , so just make it too good to be true.
Next, find an old Trump tweet where he criticized someone for doing just what he is doing.
That never gets old! Reference burning the Reichstag. If the crisis you're writing about deals
with immigration or white supremacy (meh, basically the same thing, right?), refer to
Kristallnacht.
Include every bad thing Trump ever did as examples of why whatever you're talking about must
be true. Swing for the fence with lines like "seeks to destroy decades of LGBTQIXYZ progress"
or "built concentration camps to murder children." Cite Trump accepting Putin's word over the
findings of "our" intelligence community, his "very fine people" support for Nazi cosplayers,
the magic list of 10,000 lies, how Trump has blood on his hands for endangering the press as
the enemy of the people, and how Trump caused the hurricane in Puerto Rico.
And Nixon. Always bring up Nixon. The context or details don't matter. In case Wikipedia is
down, he was one of the presidents before Trump your grandpa liked for awhile and then didn't
like after Robert Redford showed he was a clear and present danger to Saturday Night Live, or
the Saturday Night Massacre, it doesn't matter, we all agree Nixon.
Focus on the villain, who must be unhinged, off the rails, over the edge, diseased, out of
control, a danger to himself and others, straight-up diagnosed
mentally ill , or under Trump/Putin's spell. Barr is currently the Vader-du-jour. The
New York Timescharacterized him as
"The transformation of William Barr from respected establishment lawyer to evil genius
outplaying and undermining his old friend Robert Mueller is a Grand Guignol spectacle." James
Comey went as far as
describing Trump people as having had their souls eaten by the president. That's not
hyperbole, it's journalism!
But also hold out for a hero, the Neo one inside Trumpworld who will rise, flip, or leak to
save us. Forget past nominees like the pee tape, Comey, Clapper, Flynn, Page, Papadopoulos,
Manafort, Cohen, Mattis, Kelly, Barr, Linda Sarsour (replace with Ilhan Omar,) Avenatti, and
Omarosa to focus on McGahn. He's gonna be the one!
Then call for everyone else bad to resign, be impeached, go to jail, have their old statues
torn down, delete their accounts, be referred to the SDNY, be smited by the 25th Amendment, or
have their last election delegitimized by the Night King. Draw your rationale from either the
most obscure corner of the Founding Founders' work ("the rough draft, subsection IIXX of the
Articles of Confederation addendum, Spanish language edition, makes clear Trump is unfit for
office") or go broad as in "his oath requires him to uphold the Constitution, which he clearly
is not doing." Like Nancy Pelosi, mention how Trump seems unlikely to voluntarily cede power if
he loses in 2020.
Cultural references are important. Out of fashion: Godfather memes especially about
who is going to be Fredo, 'bots, weaponize, Pussy Hats, the Parkland Kids, Putin homophobe
themes, incest "jokes" about Ivanka, the phrases the walls are closing in, tick tock, take to
the streets, adult in the room, just wait for Mueller Time, and let that sink in.
Things you can still use: abyss, grifter, crime family, not who we are, follow the money.
Also you may make breaking news out of Twitter typos. Stylistically anyone with a
Russian-sounding name must be either an oligarch, friend of Putin, or have ties to the Kremlin.
Same for anyone who has done business with Trump or used the ATM in the Deutsche Bank lobby in
New York. Mention Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez somewhere because every article has to mention AOC
somewhere now.
Finally, your op-ed should end either with this House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler
faux Kennedy-esque
quote, "The choice is simple: We can stand up to this president in defense of the country
and the Constitution and the liberty we love, or we can let the moment pass us by. History will
judge us for how we face this challenge" or, if you want to go old school, this one from
Hillary Clinton
saying, "I really believe that we are in a crisis, a constitutional crisis. We are in a
crisis of confidence and a crisis over the rule of law and the institutions that have weathered
a lot of problems over so many years. And it is something that, regardless of where you stand
in the political spectrum, should give real heartburn to everybody. Because this is a test for
our country."
Crisis. Test. Judgment of history. Readers love that stuff, because it equates Trump's dumb
tweets with Lincoln pulling the Union together after a literal civil war that killed millions
of Americans in brother-to-brother conflict. As long as the rubes believe the world is coming
to an end, you might as well make a buck writing about it.
Liberal journalists seem to think that Trump is either an ignorant oaf or an evil genius.
These views are oppositional, but many liberal journalists seem to hold both of them.
I pretty much lost all respect for the Washington Post during the last election. Each WaPo
anti-Trump op ed became increasingly apocalyptic until you imagined that the universe would
implode should he be elected. It was that silly.
But other media promote "end of the world as we know it "scenarios also. TAC included.
Seriously, if I read one more article about how flyover America is a drug infested,
impoverished wasteland inhabited by those not intelligent or ambitious enough to move to the
coasts.
Drama draws readers and online traffic.
I guess it's up to the reader to sift through the competing narratives for the truth.
On the one hand, I agree that it's laughable and ridiculous -- this flood of apocalyptic
predictions and articles, wherein Trump, a juvenile buffoon who in fact does not even control
the government he nominally heads, is depicted as some kind of unprecedented threat to
democracy and Everything We Hold Dear.
I mean, OK, the judgment of the libs and neocons writing this stuff is clearly addled by
their irrational and rabid hatred for Trump. Still, are they really that stupid or is it just
that they are hopelessly dishonest? I lean toward the latter explanation.
That said, the abiding irony is that there is in fact a deepening crisis in this country.
It's about an increasingly dysfunctional democracy, a bitterly alienated and divided
citizenry, a set of ruling elites who despise a large percentage of their countrymen and have
contrived an economic and political system that enriches themselves while consigning the
despised percentage to permanent struggling status, a cultural establishment that rejects the
traditional Judeo-Christian values that built Western civilization and, Jacobin-style, is
busily overturning and replacing those values with their own would-be New Moral Order.
And so forth.
So yeah, there most definitely is a crisis and it might even be apocalyptic in dimension
and character. (Heck, it put Trump in the White House.) But the actual crisis is not the one
the fools are writing about. In fact, not only are they not writing about it -- they're in
large part responsible for it.
Like I said: an abiding irony. One for the history books.
All persons with Russian-sounding names are Kremlin Agents(tm) *except* the alleged sources
for The Dossier(tm). Those anonymous Russians can be trusted implicitly.
Van Buren has apparently chosen to forget the apocalyptic rants from the right during the
Obama administration. As for today's alarmists, as I write this the Dow is down over 700
points due to Trump's foolish trade war, his administration is ignoring two centuries of
tradition by stonewalling Congress' legitimate oversight authority and John Bolton is trying
to provoke a war with Iran. Now tell me again it's all "sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D, California), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, before
Mueller finished his investigation, on Hardball on MSNBC, Jan. 2019:
Matthews: "Do you believe the president, right now, has been an agent of the
Russians?"
Swalwell: "Yes, I think there's more evidence that he is-"
Matthews: "Agent?"
Swalwell: "Yes. and I think all the arrows point in that direction, and I haven't seen a
single piece of evidence that he's not."
Matthews: "An agent like in the 1940s where you had people who were 'reds,' to use an old
term, like that? In other words, working for a foreign power?"
Swalwell: "He's working on behalf of the Russians, yes."
The same congressman, who makes Joseph McCarthy look moderate, after Mueller completed his
investigation, on Fox News, Mar. 2019:
Cavuto: "Would you say the president is not a Russian agent?"
Swalwell: "The president acts on Russia's behalf, I don't need to see the Mueller report for
that."
And this month, after he had annouced his presidential bid, on Face the Nation:
Brennan: "But I know you have been talking because you are also in an intelligence role on
that House committee saying a number of things that I want to quote back to you. Up until
this point you said when you were asked in January, 'do you believe the president right now
has been an agent of the Russians?' You said, 'yes,' you were asked again at the end of that
month by a questioner, 'I'm still not hearing any evidence that he's an agent of Russia.' And
you said, 'Yeah I think it's pretty clear it's almost hiding in plain sight.' The Mueller
report did not substantiate any conspiracy or coordination with Russia. Do you regret
prejudging the outcome?"
Swalwell: "No, actually I- I- I think I should have been louder."
And people say Denin Nunes politicized the House Intelligence Committee?
One of the best things to come from Trump's election has been the lengths some of his
opponents will go to discredit themselves in the court of public opinion: Brennan, Clapper,
Clinton, Comey, McCabe, the list goes on and on, often merely to make a buck. Even Watergate
figures like Carl Bernstein and John Dean have demolished their own reputations, or what was
left of them to begin with. If they only knew, or cared, how badly they look in
hindsight.
"Liberal journalists seem to think that Trump is either an ignorant oaf or an evil
genius."
You're missing the point, it's Trump's ignorance, his extreme sense of entitlement and
limitless ego that are a danger to our democracy. He doesn't understand the norms of
democracy, otherwise known as American principles. All he understands is what he wants and
his notion of American greatness, which has nothing to do with true American principles.
@MM: >>One of the best things to come from Trump's election has been the lengths some
of his opponents will go to discredit themselves in the court of public opinion <<
These people don't care about "public opinion." They operate inside a circle-jerk echo
chamber whose membership includes the powers dominating the culture, the media (both
mainstream and social), the government, and, increasingly, the major corporations. In short,
the bulk of what some call the Ruling Class.
In their minds, public opinion can be suppressed or at least controlled by their near
monopoly on major media. The stories they want told will get told. The stories they don't
want told will not get told. Except at more or less isolated right-wing websites and such
whose audience and reach are limited.
Facts, evidence, and truth have nothing to do with it. So an investigation, rigged though
it was, nonetheless clears Trump of conspiring with Moscow, but the story becomes how Trump
is guilty anyway. Orwell, a man well ahead of his time, had the whole thing figured out long
ago.
jhawk: "As I write this the Dow is down over 700 points."
This is the same Dow Jones that, even with today's drop is still 40% higher than it was
right before the 2016 election, correct?
"Now tell me again it's all 'sound and fury, signifying nothing.'" On the issue of Trump/Russia collusion, it is, and always was, because we now know it
started with the Clinton campaign and a now-discredited dossier.
These are the people who we elect to "govern" us. If one looks back upon the 230 years or
so during which this thing of ours has been in existence, the overwhelming majority of our
elected officials (federal, state and local) have probably been, to one degree or another,
narcissistic, mendacious and just generally dishonest incompetents. It seems that it's only
when we hit rock bottom and the country's very survival is at stake that the cream rises to
the top and the very best step to the plate, so given what we have in Washington now, maybe
we haven't reached that point–at least not yet.
This is a hoot. Little Pettie strikes again! Projecting his own myopia as always! His Greater
Leader, The Trumpster, and the sycophants who worship him daily (for a fee, of course) daily
tweets or shouts from a podium the impending doom of our nations due to hoards of the "other"
spreading disease and violence nationwide while supported by the great love of Evangelical
"Christians" who faith not merely predicts but yearns for the end of the world!!!
Can't quite tell. It is hypocrisy or grand delusions blooming brightly at TAC!
CT Farmer: "If one looks back upon the 230 years or so during which this thing of ours has
been in existence, the overwhelming majority of our elected officials have probably been, to
one degree or another, narcissistic, mendacious and just generally dishonest incompetents."
No doubt, I only picked on him because he represents the crappiest district in the Bay
Area, which I have personal experience on, and he's running for president on the "Trump is a
Russian agent" platform, which even Joseph McCarthy was too timid to attempt.
That's either saying something, or it's nothing. I could've quoted another presidential candidate who's claimed that law enforcement and
criminal justice in America is racist from top to bottom and front to back. Or I could've quoted a different presidential candidate who's stated unequivocally that
every human being, not just American citizen, is entitled to free education and health care,
without regard to cost or need.
Just a few thoughts about comments above: Who "yearns for the end of the world"?? Give names
please, stop slandering. What "illegal things" were revealed in the Mueller report? Trump was
trying to obstruct an INJUSTICE, i.e. the "soft coup" done by the anti-American, lawless
leftist Dems. The fact is that we are a nation of laws and illegals (no matter where they are
from, Mars, Supitor; whether they are green, purple, whatever color) are a threat to our
country. I heard report that about a third of the crimes in the USA are done by illegals, at
a cost of billions. Well, more crap from brain washed boobs above, but I'm done trying to
point them out ..
" you know, we're all at it, breathing apocalyptic fire and brimstone, left and right. No
point throwing stones at each other on this subject."
**************
My thoughts, too. It's difficult to sift through the hype on all sides & find anything
solid. Outrage generates traffic, thoughtful discussion-not so much. So we end up with
clickbait & tabloids.
Maybe the Dems and their supporters should spend more time trying to understand why they lost
and less time complaining about it. But then that's not nearly as much fun.
Thanks for the voice of reason. A couple of complaints on Trump: he hasn't accomplished much
on the border; budgets continue to bleed red ink. He at least could have vetoed the budgets.
Isn't it a bit rich to suggest that the outrage media started in 2016? How long have
Limbaugh, Coulter, Ingraham, Levin, Hannity, .. been milking the Republican multiverse.
Sean: "Isn't it a bit rich to suggest that the outrage media started in 2016?"
That's a bit like saying because my neighbor ran over my dog, I'll then bulldoze his
house. Besides, the left and the press are supposed to be superior to the right and the unwashed
masses. They always fact-based, logical, reasonable, non-ideological, and consistent.
On the Big Ugly Lie*, what's their excuse?
* Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election, an attack on par with Pearl Harbor and
9/11.
Neocons and neolibs control the USA foreign policy. That's given. NYT just reflects foreign policy establishment talking points.
Links between Daniel Jones and Steele are really interesting and new information
Notable quotes:
"... "The goal here is bigger than any one election," said Daniel Jones, a former F.B.I. analyst and Senate investigator whose nonprofit group, Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities. ..."
"... According to a report published this morning, he notes that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has received "significant funding" from technology billionaires, funneled $500,000 to the non-profit group Advance Democracy. That organization shares a street address with The Democracy Integrity Project. ..."
"... That's because both organizations were founded by former Senate Intel staffer Daniel Jones, who at that time worked for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who hails from just down the road from Silicon Valley in San Francisco. As TruNews has previously reported, those connections to the Senate Intel Committee have played a significant role in the ongoing "Russia Narrative" drama in Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Jones has been previously identified as a central figure in the investigation who served as potential go-between with the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. ..."
"... The NYT is very much invested in the post Cold War status quo. ..."
"... That would be the Clintons and the Bushes. Both political parties and every POTUS since 1968. In fact, I believe this is the main reason why the Dems created and are pushing Russiagate so hard. They don't want us looking at what really gave us Trump: the neoliberal neoconservative fiasco of the past 40+ years. ..."
"... told about Russia and that they interfered with not only our elections, but in so many other countries too. I remember a time when people would insist on seeing the evidence on stuff the intelligence agencies tell them, but ever since Her lost the election they lost their minds. I'll see references to articles that say something, but offer no evidence. Like the one this essay is about. ..."
"... Plus they tried to kill the Skripals. And the GOP are also under Vlad's thumb. This is why Russia Gate has to be debunked. ..."
"... So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days. ..."
"... Dick Cheney is as evil as any human being I've ever heard of. I doubt whether he's done everything some folks believe he's done -- but not because he isn't evil enough, only because he lacked either the guts or the necessity. I believe he would have fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels, and he would enthusiastically embraced their approach to getting and wielding power. ..."
"... A few months ago, I made a comment to someone that it's like we're supposed to hate them (Russia) for their freedoms. ..."
gjohnsit on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:32pm The NY Times just posted one of the most atrocious pieces of
journalistic malpractice I have ever read.
Less than two weeks before pivotal elections for the European Parliament, a constellation of websites and social media accounts
linked to Russia or far-right groups is spreading disinformation, encouraging discord and amplifying distrust in the centrist
parties that have governed for decades.
European Union investigators, academics and advocacy groups say the new disinformation efforts share many of the same digital
fingerprints or tactics used in previous Russian attacks, including the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
That's a powerful statement. There's just one problem: the article doesn't present a single bit of proof. Just anecdotes. In fact,
it doesn't even quote anyone to back up these claims, but for one single exception.
"The goal here is bigger than any one election," said Daniel Jones, a former F.B.I. analyst and Senate investigator whose
nonprofit group, Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement
authorities.
"It is to constantly divide, increase distrust and undermine our faith in institutions and democracy itself. They're working
to destroy everything that was built post-World War II."
Russia is why people are losing faith in our government institutions. Not because they are owned by oligarchs. If you listen closely
you can hear President Bush.
So who is Daniel Jones and Advance Democracy? That's an
interesting story .
According to a report published this morning, he notes that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has received "significant
funding" from technology billionaires, funneled $500,000 to the non-profit group Advance Democracy. That organization shares a
street address with The Democracy Integrity Project.
That's because both organizations were founded by former Senate Intel staffer Daniel Jones, who at that time worked for
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who hails from just down the road from Silicon Valley in San Francisco. As TruNews has previously
reported, those connections to the Senate Intel Committee have played a significant role in the ongoing "Russia Narrative" drama
in Washington, D.C.
Jones has been previously identified as a central figure in the investigation who served as potential go-between with the
committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. That's because TDIP, which receives
significant funding from George Soros, funneled some of that money toward Steele's research for Fusion GPS that led to the infamous
dossier on President Donald Trump.
However, as Ross reports today: "Mystery surrounds both of Jones's operations. The identities of both groups' donors have largely
been kept secret, as Jones has avoided revealing his backers.
Nothing to see here. Just two sketchy political organizations sharing the same street address. Perfectly normal.
"The election has yet to come, and we are already suspected of doing something wrong?" the Russian prime minister, Dmitri A.
Medvedev, said in March. "Suspecting someone of an event that has not yet happened is a bunch of paranoid nonsense."
It's not nonsense. It's scapegoating. There's a difference.
CBS News (2/4/19) briefly interviewed Honolulu Civil Beats reporter Nick Grube regarding Gabbard's campaign announcement. The
anchors had clearly never encountered the term anti-interventionism before, struggling to even pronounce the word, then laughing
and saying it "doesn't roll off the tongue."
They're [the Kremlin] working to destroy everything that was built post-World War II.
That would be the Clintons and the Bushes. Both political parties and every POTUS since 1968. In fact, I believe this is
the main reason why the Dems created and are pushing Russiagate so hard. They don't want us looking at what really gave us Trump:
the neoliberal neoconservative fiasco of the past 40+ years.
It's also why so many people of my generation (over 60) are having trouble understanding and accepting what's going on. To
do so will require letting go of everything they thought was true. That kind of change does not come easy to many people.
I heard someone recently say "We have to elect a Dem or else our post-War advantages will disappear."
Got to wonder where he's been for the past 40 years. That horse left the barn a long time ago.
told about Russia and that they interfered with not only our elections, but in so many other countries too. I remember
a time when people would insist on seeing the evidence on stuff the intelligence agencies tell them, but ever since Her lost the
election they lost their minds. I'll see references to articles that say something, but offer no evidence. Like the one this essay
is about.
Plus they tried to kill the Skripals. And the GOP are also under Vlad's thumb. This is why Russia Gate has to be debunked.
People say that Mueller has put to rest the fact that Russia indeed interfered with the election, but all he showed was the
FBIs "belief' that they did and that some Russians will ties to Vlad hacked the DNC computers. He didn't interview anyone involved
with that as laid out in my recent essay.
I've even seen people who were once against our invasions being okay with them and repeating the party line. Unfuckingbelievable!
The Year 2000 was not that long ago, and we were bombarded for two decades beforehand with talk of all the dreadful things
that might happen, could happen, and some people firmly believed would happen - and then didn't happen. (As it turned out,
the most obvious sign of "Y2K" was the "19100" bug that plagued Web pages for months afterward. It was cosmetic and harmless,
but annoying.)
I expected it to take about ten years for sanity to return - but it looks like being more like fifty. And there will probably
be some cultists who construct their own "reality" around what didn't happen, like the 1840s Millerites (who spun off the still-extant
Seventh Day Adventists).
The NYT and WaPoo have new articles out about how bad the dastardly Russians are still interfering with the whole dang country
now. And WaPoo had some university do a study on how Russia tried to get people to vote for Bernie and blah, blah,...
I read an article last year saying that Bernie needs to knock off being with the Russia Gaters because he is going to be accused
of being in Vlad's pockets anyway. But he's still saying that Trump is under Russia's thumb and that Russia is doing all kinds
of bad stuff.
Then there's all the websites like DK, emptyhead, democratic underground and others saying that Mueller confirmed Russia did
bad things and maybe if the democrats work harder on their investigations they will find stuff that Mueller missed. I think 10
years is optimistic, but however long it's going to take its going to be too long.
I think 10 years is optimistic, but however long it's going to take it's going to be too long.
Consider how long it took for Cold War I to finally start to ebb. It took at least a decade, and that was with the memory of
a horrendous world war fresh on most minds. Now, we're so insulated from the reality of war, not even allowed reports from the
battlefields, much less accurate information and numbers, that we have lost touch with the horror. Evil men such as Bolton spend
every minute of every day trying to embroil us in deadly excursions and foreign entanglements. Our "intelligence" agencies are
no more than modern versions of the NAZI era Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive
ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end
result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days.
So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before
Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result
was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days.
Fortunately for us ordinary Americans, the Russians really do love their children too.....
@snoopydawg
Are they going to say they're both (Bernie and Trump) working with Russia? That would be amusing. I wonder if it would cause any
of them to vote third party or not vote at all.
...who was a software development consultant at the time, the reason nothing much happened was that's lot of people worked
their butts off for several years. COBOL programmers were dragged out of retirement and all kinds of goofy OS and library hacks
were implemented to reduce the amount of work and risk.
It's also why so many people of my generation (over 60) are having trouble understanding and accepting what's going on.
To do so will require letting go of everything they thought was true. That kind of change does not come easy to many people.
I spent several years grappling with my fall down the rabbit hole. I started freeing myself from the matrix during #Occupy
and towards the end of Obama's first term I was starting to really get it... at least get it enough to know I wasn't voting for
him a second time. Then Bernie arrived on the scene and it was music to my ears. That pretty much completed the process for me
but it STILL took time and I STILL have places where I "don't believe they are that evil" (twin towers anyone) yet I suspect that
in the fullness of time I may yet find that they are in fact that evil.
I have a lot of sympathy for those still caught in the matrix. It's a really good trap. That doesn't change the fact that I
see them as my enemy and the enemy of all mankind but I at least understand.
@SnappleBC Dick Cheney is as evil as any human being I've ever heard of. I doubt whether he's done everything some folks believe he's
done -- but not because he isn't evil enough, only because he lacked either the guts or the necessity. I believe he would have
fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels, and he would enthusiastically embraced their approach to getting and wielding
power.
Just this century this country has killed a million Iraqis and who knows how many people in the other countries we've invaded?
40,000 Venezuelans died last year because of our sanctions and no matter how many people in Yemen die every day because of the
Saudis we will continue supporting them.
Then there's Hiroshima and Nagasaki as aliasalias stated. Oh hell yes they are that evil.
killed and displaced around the Globe by the Empire in just this century alone, so many still can't believe this same government
could murder 3000 on 9/11.
Cognitive dissidence doesn't even start to explain it.
...is the intense access that these privatized propagandists have to the New York Times . And certainly the Times
should explain why it freely publishes radical divisive stories that cannot be verified from compromised sources that have previously
been exposed as disreputable. This is what Russia is accused of doing, sewing confusion and fear in the US, based on misinformation.
Now the New York Times is doing it for them. The fact that a US media outlet is deliberately sabotaging the domestic tranquility
with alarming lies is exactly what congress should be investigating. But any congressperson that did so would see their careers
destroyed. Congress surrendered to the media monopolies a long time ago.
What we can do is confirm for Americans that they must never trust anything they read in the New York Times and the
Washington Post . Remind them of the tragic facts in recent history. The lies that endangers people's lives and disables
their intelligence are written between the lines.
The NYT and WaPoo and other media are continuing to come up with new stories every day telling us something new that Russia
is doing. This is not going away any time soon. Unfortunately.
@Lookout@Lookout with
us all getting under our desks or along the walls if we are in the hallway and I don't think any one of us didn't treat this as
something critical for us to learn in order to survive.
As a kid that loved riding a bicycle one Public Service announcement I paid careful attention to was the instruction to do if
I saw that bright flash which was to throw the bike down and curl up along the curb, I even thought about that problem on unpaved
streets.
I remember bomb shelters were advertised a lot and I remember some tv dramas were about people fleeing to their bomb shelter
and the dilemma of being only fit to hold a small group but had neighbors, friends and strangers pleading to be let in.
The 'Twilight Zone' series even had one episode where a very wealthy man with a shelter picked certain important people in
his life, his school teacher, Priest and others were offered shelter only if they will apologize for things he'd caught criticism
for his behavior in his past. Trivial stuff, but he had a screen for them to watch the destruction live.
Long story short, they'd rather die than spend the rest of their lives with him. Especially with all their friends and family
gone, so he is alone, goes crazy, runs outside and is found by a policemen to be crying and babbling at a city fountain, in a
city that had not been bombed, but for him it had happened and all he could see was destruction around him.
All that aside considering we'd already dropped 'the' bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki those behind all the public warnings and
information that was needed in order for people to know how to survive couldn't really believe that nonsense.
Unless they could believe all those dead Japanese would've likely survived if they had ducked under their desks or curled up
along a curb, and if that were true they were as loony as the 'Twilight Zone' character.
Yeah if only all those schoolchildren had jumped under their desk before the building and everything around it was obliterated.
...if you see a light brighter than the sun. (1 min)
in the top of the ninth the screen goes black, the live stream has stopped because the electrical grid the Tropicana had shut
down and the stadium was without power for the lights, scoreboard, broadcast, etc. were down.
It took about forty-five minutes for power to be restored but right when it happened I thought it was the stream I was watching
so I clicked on other streaming sites and it was on a couple of them I read why all broadcasts were off.
But in the chat box I really couldn't tell if a few were joking or not when they blamed it on the Russians. One in particular
didn't look like they were joking as that person repeated the claim a few times. No kidding, and one lamented that (paraphrasing)
'now the Russians are messing with our National sport'.
Any time something happens now people will willingly accept that Russia did something that caused it. See the tweet I posted
above. Secret service agents and police are doing nothing as the Guaido goons keeps people from delivering food and stuff to the
embassy sitters. One goon tried taking the bag out of a guy's hands and they just watched. One person tried to throw a cucumber
and the cops pounced on him, pushed him to the ground and bloodied him up. But Russia is the one who put the embassy sitters into
the embassy and is supporting them. SMDH!
Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities."It
is to constantly divide, increase distrust and undermine our faith in institutions and democracy itself.
An organization that reports undesirable speech to law enforcement is worried about the undermining of democracy. Got it.
Important article that shed some light on the methods of disinformation in foreign events used by neoliberal MSM
Notable quotes:
"... However, there is a simple reason why the global agencies, despite their importance, are virtually unknown to the general public. To quote a Swiss media professor: "Radio and television usually do not name their sources, and only specialists can decipher references in magazines." (Blum 1995, P. 9) The motive for this discretion, however, should be clear: news outlets are not particularly keen to let readers know that they haven't researched most of their contributions themselves. ..."
"... Much of our media does not have own foreign correspondents, so they have no choice but to rely completely on global agencies for foreign news. But what about the big daily newspapers and TV stations that have their own international correspondents? In German-speaking countries, for example, these include newspapers such NZZ, FAZ, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Welt, and public broadcasters. ..."
"... Moreover, in war zones, correspondents rarely venture out. On the Syria war, for example, many journalists "reported" from cities such as Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo or even from Cyprus. In addition, many journalists lack the language skills to understand local people and media. ..."
"... How do correspondents under such circumstances know what the "news" is in their region of the world? The main answer is once again: from global agencies. The Dutch Middle East correspondent Joris Luyendijk has impressively described how correspondents work and how they depend on the world agencies in his book "People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East" : ..."
"... The central role of news agencies also explains why, in geopolitical conflicts, most media use the same original sources. In the Syrian war, for example, the "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" – a dubious one-man organization based in London – featured prominently. The media rarely inquired directly at this "Observatory", as its operator was in fact difficult to reach, even for journalists. ..."
"... Ulrich Tilgner, a veteran Middle East correspondent for German and Swiss television, warned in 2003, shortly after the Iraq war, of acts of deception by the military and the role played by the media: ..."
"... What is known to the US military, would not be foreign to US intelligence services. In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts: ..."
"... "In all press systems, the news media are instruments of those who exercise political and economic power. Newspapers, periodicals, radio and television stations do not act independently, although they have the possibility of independent exercise of power." (Altschull 1984/1995, p. 298) ..."
"How does the newspaper know what it knows?" The answer to this question is likely to
surprise some newspaper readers: "The main source of information is stories from news agencies.
The almost anonymously operating news agencies are in a way the key to world events. So what
are the names of these agencies, how do they work and who finances them? To judge how well one
is informed about events in East and West, one should know the answers to these questions."
(Höhne 1977, p. 11)
A Swiss media researcher points out:
"The news agencies are the most important suppliers of material to mass media. No daily
media outlet can manage without them. () So the news agencies influence our image of the
world; above all, we get to know what they have selected." (Blum 1995, p. 9)
In view of their essential importance, it is all the more astonishing that these agencies
are hardly known to the public:
"A large part of society is unaware that news agencies exist at all In fact, they play an
enormously important role in the media market. But despite this great importance, little
attention has been paid to them in the past." (Schulten-Jaspers 2013, p. 13)
Even the head of a news agency noted:
"There is something strange about news agencies. They are little known to the public.
Unlike a newspaper, their activity is not so much in the spotlight, yet they can always be
found at the source of the story." (Segbers 2007, p. 9)
"The Invisible Nerve Center of the Media System"
So what are the names of these agencies that are "always at the source of the story"? There
are now only three global agencies left:
The American Associated Press ( AP ) with over 4000 employees worldwide.
The AP belongs to US media companies and has its main editorial office in New York. AP news
is used by around 12,000 international media outlets, reaching more than half of the world's
population every day.
The quasi-governmental French Agence France-Presse ( AFP ) based in Paris and with around
4000 employees. The AFP sends over 3000 stories and photos every day to media all over the
world.
The British agency Reuters in London, which is privately owned and employs just over 3000
people. Reuters was acquired in 2008 by Canadian media entrepreneur Thomson – one of
the 25 richest people in the world – and merged into Thomson Reuters , headquartered in New York.
In addition, many countries run their own news agencies. However, when it comes to
international news, these usually rely on the three global agencies and simply copy and
translate their reports.
The three global news agencies Reuters, AFP and AP, and the three national agencies of the
German-speaking countries of Austria (APA), Germany (DPA) and Switzerland (SDA).
Wolfgang Vyslozil, former managing director of the Austrian APA, described the key role of
news agencies with these words:
"News agencies are rarely in the public eye. Yet they are one of the most influential and
at the same time one of the least known media types. They are key institutions of substantial
importance to any media system. They are the invisible nerve center that connects all parts
of this system." (Segbers 2007, p.10)
Small abbreviation, great effect
However, there is a simple reason why the global agencies, despite their importance, are
virtually unknown to the general public. To quote a Swiss media professor: "Radio and
television usually do not name their sources, and only specialists can decipher references in
magazines." (Blum 1995, P. 9) The motive for this discretion, however, should be clear: news outlets are not particularly
keen to let readers know that they haven't researched most of their contributions
themselves.
The following figure shows some examples of source tagging in popular German-language
newspapers. Next to the agency abbreviations we find the initials of editors who have edited
the respective agency report.
News agencies as sources in newspaper articles
Occasionally, newspapers use agency material but do not label it at all. A study in 2011
from the Swiss Research Institute for the Public Sphere and Society at the University of
Zurich came to the following conclusions (FOEG 2011):
"Agency contributions are exploited integrally without labeling them, or they are
partially rewritten to make them appear as an editorial contribution. In addition, there is a
practice of 'spicing up' agency reports with little effort; for example, visualization
techniques are used: unpublished agency reports are enriched with images and graphics and
presented as comprehensive reports."
The agencies play a prominent role not only in the press, but also in private and public
broadcasting. This is confirmed by Volker Braeutigam, who worked
for the German state broadcaster ARD for ten years and views the dominance of these agencies
critically:
"One fundamental problem is that the newsroom at ARD sources its information mainly from
three sources: the news agencies DPA/AP, Reuters and AFP: one German/American, one British
and one French. () The editor working on a news topic only needs to select a few text
passages on the screen that he considers essential, rearrange them and glue them together
with a few flourishes."
Swiss Radio and Television (SRF), too, largely bases itself on reports from these agencies.
Asked by viewers why a peace march in Ukraine was not reported, the editors
said : "To date, we have not received a single report of this march from the independent
agencies Reuters, AP and AFP."
In fact, not only the text, but also the images, sound and video recordings that we
encounter in our media every day, are mostly from the very same agencies. What the uninitiated
audience might think of as contributions from their local newspaper or TV station, are actually
copied reports from New York, London and Paris.
Some media have even gone a step further and have, for lack of resources, outsourced their
entire foreign editorial office to an agency. Moreover, it is well known that many news portals
on the internet mostly publish agency reports (see e.g., Paterson 2007, Johnston 2011,
MacGregor 2013).
In the end, this dependency on the global agencies creates a striking similarity in
international reporting: from Vienna to Washington, our media often report the same topics,
using many of the same phrases – a phenomenon that would otherwise rather be associated
with "controlled media" in authoritarian states.
The following graphic shows some examples from German and international publications. As you
can see, despite the claimed objectivity, a slight (geo-)political bias sometimes creeps
in.
"Putin threatens", "Iran provokes", "NATO concerned", "Assad stronghold": Similarities in
content and wording due to reports by global news agencies.
The role of correspondents
Much of our media does not have own foreign correspondents, so they have no choice but to
rely completely on global agencies for foreign news. But what about the big daily newspapers
and TV stations that have their own international correspondents? In German-speaking countries,
for example, these include newspapers such NZZ, FAZ, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Welt, and public
broadcasters.
First of all, the size ratios should be kept in mind: while the global agencies have several
thousand employees worldwide, even the Swiss newspaper NZZ, known for its international
reporting, maintains only 35 foreign correspondents (including their business correspondents).
In huge countries such as China or India, only one correspondent is stationed; all of South
America is covered by only two journalists, while in even larger Africa no-one is on the ground
permanently.
Moreover, in war zones, correspondents rarely venture out. On the Syria war, for example,
many journalists "reported" from cities such as Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo or even from Cyprus. In
addition, many journalists lack the language skills to understand local people and media.
How do correspondents under such circumstances know what the "news" is in their region of
the world? The main answer is once again: from global agencies. The Dutch Middle East
correspondent Joris Luyendijk has impressively described how correspondents work and how they
depend on the world agencies in his book "People Like Us:
Misrepresenting the Middle East" :
"I'd imagined correspondents to be historians-of-the-moment. When something important
happened, they'd go after it, find out what was going on, and report on it. But I didn't go
off to find out what was going on; that had been done long before. I went along to present an
on-the-spot report. ()
The editors in the Netherlands called when something happened, they faxed or emailed the
press releases, and I'd retell them in my own words on the radio, or rework them into an
article for the newspaper. This was the reason my editors found it more important that I
could be reached in the place itself than that I knew what was going on. The news agencies
provided enough information for you to be able to write or talk you way through any crisis or
summit meeting.
That's why you often come across the same images and stories if you leaf through a few
different newspapers or click the news channels.
Our men and women in London, Paris, Berlin and Washington bureaus – all thought that
wrong topics were dominating the news and that we were following the standards of the news
agencies too slavishly. ()
The common idea about correspondents is that they 'have the story', () but the reality is
that the news is a conveyor belt in a bread factory. The correspondents stand at the end of
the conveyor belt, pretending we've baked that white loaf ourselves, while in fact all we've
done is put it in its wrapping. ()
Afterwards, a friend asked me how I'd managed to answer all the questions during those
cross-talks, every hour and without hesitation. When I told him that, like on the TV-news,
you knew all the questions in advance, his e-mailed response came packed with expletives. My
friend had relalized that, for decades, what he'd been watching and listening to on the news
was pure theatre." (Luyendjik 2009, p. 20-22, 76, 189)
In other words, the typical correspondent is in general not able to do independent research,
but rather deals with and reinforces those topics that are already prescribed by the news
agencies – the notorious "mainstream effect".
In addition, for cost-saving reasons many media outlets nowadays have to share their few
foreign correspondents, and within individual media groups, foreign reports are often used by
several publications – none of which contributes to diversity in reporting.
"What the agency does not report, does not take place"
The central role of news agencies also explains why, in geopolitical conflicts, most media
use the same original sources. In the Syrian war, for example, the "Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights" – a dubious one-man organization based in London – featured
prominently. The media rarely inquired directly at this "Observatory", as its operator was in
fact difficult to reach, even for journalists.
Rather, the "Observatory" delivered its stories to global agencies, which then forwarded
them to thousands of media outlets, which in turn "informed" hundreds of millions of readers
and viewers worldwide. The reason why the agencies, of all places, referred to this strange
"Observatory" in their reporting – and who really financed it – is a question that
was rarely asked.
The former chief editor of the German news agency DPA, Manfred Steffens, therefore states in
his book "The Business of News":
"A news story does not become more correct simply because one is able to provide a source
for it. It is indeed rather questionable to trust a news story more just because a source is
cited. () Behind the protective shield such a 'source' means for a news story, some people
are quite inclined to spread rather adventurous things, even if they themselves have
legitimate doubts about their correctness; the responsibility, at least morally, can always
be attributed to the cited source." (Steffens 1969, p. 106)
Dependence on global agencies is also a major reason why media coverage of geopolitical
conflicts is often superficial and erratic, while historic relationships and background are
fragmented or altogether absent. As put by Steffens:
"News agencies receive their impulses almost exclusively from current events and are
therefore by their very nature ahistoric. They are reluctant to add any more context than is
strictly required." (Steffens 1969, p. 32)
Finally, the dominance of global agencies explains why certain geopolitical issues and
events – which often do not fit very well into the US/NATO narrative or are too
"unimportant" – are not mentioned in our media at all: if the agencies do not report on
something, then most Western media will not be aware of it. As pointed out on the occasion of
the 50th anniversary of the German DPA: "What the agency does not report, does not take place."
(Wilke 2000, p. 1)
While some topics do not appear at all in our media, other topics are very prominent –
even though they shouldn't actually be: "Often the mass media do not report on reality, but on
a constructed or staged reality. () Several studies have shown that the mass media are
predominantly determined by PR activities and that passive, receptive attitudes outweigh
active-researching ones." (Blum 1995, p. 16)
In fact, due to the rather low journalistic performance of our media and their high
dependence on a few news agencies, it is easy for interested parties to spread propaganda and
disinformation in a supposedly respectable format to a worldwide audience. DPA editor Steffens
warned of this danger:
"The critical sense gets more lulled the more respected the news agency or newspaper is.
Someone who wants to introduce a questionable story into the world press only needs to try to
put his story in a reasonably reputable agency, to be sure that it then appears a little
later in the others. Sometimes it happens that a hoax passes from agency to agency and
becomes ever more credible." (Steffens 1969, p. 234)
Among the most active actors in "injecting" questionable geopolitical news are the military
and defense ministries. For example, in 2009, the head of the American news agency AP, Tom
Curley,
made public that the Pentagon employs more than 27,000 PR specialists who, with a budget of
nearly $ 5 billion a year, are working the media and circulating targeted manipulations. In
addition, high-ranking US generals had threatened that they would "ruin" the AP and him if the
journalists reported too critically on the US military.
Despite – or because of? – such threats our media regularly publish dubious
stories sourced to some unnamed "informants" from "US defense circles".
Ulrich Tilgner, a veteran Middle East correspondent for German and Swiss television, warned
in 2003, shortly after the Iraq war, of acts of deception by the military and the role played
by the media:
"With the help of the media, the military determine the public perception and use it for
their plans. They manage to stir expectations and spread scenarios and deceptions. In this
new kind of war, the PR strategists of the US administration fulfill a similar function as
the bomber pilots. The special departments for public relations in the Pentagon and in the
secret services have become combatants in the information war. () The US military
specifically uses the lack of transparency in media coverage for their deception maneuvers.
The way they spread information, which is then picked up and distributed by newspapers and
broadcasters, makes it impossible for readers, listeners or viewers to trace the original
source. Thus, the audience will fail to recognize the actual intention of the military."
(Tilgner 2003, p. 132)
What is known to the US military, would not be foreign to US intelligence services. In a
remarkable report
by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the
systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical
conflicts:
Former CIA officer and whistleblower John Stockwell said of his work in the
Angolan war,
"The basic theme was to make it look like an [enemy] aggression in Angola. So any kind of
story that you could write and get into the media anywhere in the world, that pushed that
line, we did. One third of my staff in this task force were covert action, were
propagandists, whose professional career job was to make up stories and finding ways of
getting them into the press. () The editors in most Western newspapers are not too skeptical
of messages that conform to general views and prejudices. () So we came up with another
story, and it was kept going for weeks. () [But] it was all fiction."
Fred Bridgland
looked back on his work as a war correspondent for the Reuters agency: "We based our reports on
official communications. It was not until years later that I learned a little CIA
disinformation expert had sat in the US embassy, in Lusaka and composed that communiqué,
and it bore no relation at all to truth. () Basically, and to put it very crudely, you can
publish any old crap and it will get newspaper room."
And former CIA analyst David MacMichael described his work in the
Contra War in Nicaragua with these words:
"They said our intelligence of Nicaragua was so good that we could even register when
someone flushed a toilet. But I had the feeling that the stories we were giving to the press
came straight out of the toilet." (Hird 1985)
Of course, the intelligence services also have a large number of direct contacts in our media,
which can be "leaked" information to if necessary. But without the central role of the global
news agencies, the worldwide synchronization of propaganda and disinformation would never be so
efficient.
Through this "propaganda multiplier", dubious stories from PR experts working for
governments, military and intelligence services reach the general public more or less unchecked
and unfiltered. The journalists refer to the news agencies and the news agencies refer to their
sources. Although they often attempt to point out uncertainties with terms such as "apparent",
"alleged" and the like – by then the rumor has long been spread to the world and its
effect taken place.
The Propaganda Multiplier: Governments, military and intelligence services using global
news agencies to disseminate their messages to a worldwide audience.
As the New York Times reported
In addition to global news agencies, there is another source that is often used by media
outlets around the world to report on geopolitical conflicts, namely the major publications in
Great Britain and the US.
For example, news outlets like the New York Times or BBC have up to 100 foreign
correspondents and other external employees. However, Middle East correspondent Luyendijk
points out:
"Dutch news teams, me included, fed on the selection of news made by quality media like
CNN, the BBC, and the New York Times . We did that on the assumption
that their correspondents understood the Arab world and commanded a view of it – but
many of them turned out not to speak Arabic, or at least not enough to be able to have a
conversation in it or to follow the local media. Many of the top dogs at CNN, the BBC, the
Independent, the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the NYT were more often than not dependent on
assistants and translators." (Luyendijk p. 47)
In addition, the sources of these media outlets are often not easy to verify ("military
circles", "anonymous government officials", "intelligence officials" and the like) and can
therefore also be used for the dissemination of propaganda. In any case, the widespread
orientation towards the Anglo-Saxon publications leads to a further convergence in the
geopolitical coverage in our media.
The following figure shows some examples of such citation based on the Syria coverage of the
largest daily newspaper in Switzerland, Tages-Anzeiger. The articles are all from the first
days of October 2015, when Russia for the first time intervened directly in the Syrian war
(US/UK sources are highlighted):
Frequent citation of British and US media, exemplified by the Syria war coverage of Swiss
daily newspaper Tages-Anzeiger in October 2015.
The desired narrative
But why do journalists in our media not simply try to research and report independently of
the global agencies and the Anglo-Saxon media? Middle East correspondent Luyendijk describes
his experiences:
"You might suggest that I should have looked for sources I could trust. I did try, but
whenever I wanted to write a story without using news agencies, the main Anglo-Saxon media,
or talking heads, it fell apart. () Obviously I, as a correspondent, could tell very
different stories about one and the same situation. But the media could only present one of
them, and often enough, that was exactly the story that confirmed the prevailing image."
(Luyendijk p.54ff)
Media researcher Noam Chomsky has described this effect in his essay "What makes the mainstream media mainstream" as
follows: "If you leave the official line, if you produce dissenting reports, then you will soon
feel this. () There are many ways to get you back in line quickly. If you don't follow the
guidelines, you will not keep your job long. This system works pretty well, and it reflects
established power structures." (Chomsky 1997)
Nevertheless, some of the leading journalists continue to believe that nobody can tell them
what to write. How does this add up? Media researcher Chomsky clarifies the apparent contradiction:
"[T]he point is that they wouldn't be there unless they had already demonstrated that
nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had
started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they
never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like. () They
have been through the socialization system." (Chomsky 1997)
Ultimately, this "socialization process" leads to a journalism that generally no longer
independently researches and critically reports on geopolitical conflicts (and some other
topics), but seeks to consolidate the desired narrative through appropriate editorials,
commentary, and interviewees.
Conclusion: The "First Law of Journalism"
Former AP journalist Herbert Altschull called it the First Law of Journalism:
"In all press systems, the news media are instruments of those who exercise political and
economic power. Newspapers, periodicals, radio and television stations do not act
independently, although they have the possibility of independent exercise of power."
(Altschull 1984/1995, p. 298)
In that sense, it is logical that our traditional media – which are predominantly
financed by advertising or the state – represent the geopolitical interests of the
transatlantic alliance, given that both the advertising corporations as well as the states
themselves are dependent on the US dominated transatlantic economic and security
architecture.
In addition, our leading media and their key people are – in the spirit of Chomsky's
"socialization" – often themselves part of the networks of the transatlantic elite. Some
of the most important institutions in this regard include the US Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR), the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission (see in-depth study of these networks
).
Indeed, most well-known publications basically may be seen as "establishment media". This is
because, in the past, the freedom of the press was rather theoretical, given significant entry
barriers such as broadcasting licenses, frequency slots, requirements for financing and
technical infrastructure, limited sales channels, dependence on advertising, and other
restrictions.
It was only due to the Internet that Altschull's First Law has been broken to some extent.
Thus, in recent years a high-quality, reader-funded journalism has emerged, often outperforming
traditional media in terms of critical reporting. Some of these "alternative" publications
already reach a very large audience, showing that the „mass" does not have to be a
problem for the quality of a media outlet.
Nevertheless, up to now the traditional media has been able to attract a solid majority of
online visitors, too. This, in turn, is closely linked to the hidden role of news agencies,
whose up-to-the-minute reports form the backbone of most news portals.
Will "political and economic power", according to Altschull's Law, retain control over the
news, or will "uncontrolled" news change the political and economic power structure? The coming
years will show.
Case study: Syria war coverage
As part of a case study, the Syria war coverage of nine leading daily newspapers from
Germany, Austria and Switzerland were examined for plurality of viewpoints and reliance on news
agencies. The following newspapers were selected:
For Germany: Die Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(FAZ)
For Switzerland: Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), Tagesanzeiger (TA), and Basler Zeitung
(BaZ)
For Austria: Standard, Kurier, and Die Presse
The investigation period was defined as October 1 to 15, 2015, i.e. the first two weeks
after Russia's direct intervention in the Syrian conflict. The entire print and online coverage
of these newspapers was taken into account. Any Sunday editions were not taken into account, as
not all of the newspapers examined have such. In total, 381 newspaper articles met the stated
criteria.
In a first step, the articles were classified according to their properties into the
following groups:
Agencies : Reports from news agencies (with agency code)
Mixed : Simple reports (with author names) that are based in whole or in part on agency
reports
Reports : Editorial background reports and analyzes
Opinions/Comments : Opinions and guest comments
Interviews : interviews with experts, politicians etc.
Investigative : Investigative research that reveals new information or context
The following Figure 1 shows the composition of the articles for the nine newspapers
analyzed in total. As can be seen, 55% of articles were news agency reports; 23% editorial
reports based on agency material; 9% background reports; 10% opinions and guest comments; 2%
interviews; and 0% based on investigative research.
Figure 1: Types of articles (total; n=381)
The pure agency texts – from short notices to the detailed reports – were mostly
on the Internet pages of the daily newspapers: on the one hand, the pressure for breaking news
is higher than in the printed edition, on the other hand, there are no space restrictions. Most
other types of articles were found in both the online and printed editions; some exclusive
interviews and background reports were found only in the printed editions. All items were
collected only once for the investigation.
The following Figure 2 shows the same classification on a per newspaper basis. During the
observation period (two weeks), most newspapers published between 40 and 50 articles on the
Syrian conflict (print and online). In the German newspaper Die Welt there were more
(58), in the Basler Zeitung and the Austrian Kurier , however, significantly less
(29 or 33).
Depending on which newspaper, the share of agency reports is almost 50% (Welt,
Süddeutsche, NZZ, Basler Zeitung), just under 60% (FAZ, Tagesanzeiger), and 60 to 70%
(Presse, Standard, Kurier). Together with the agency-based reports, the proportion in most
newspapers is between approx. 70% and 80%. These proportions are consistent with previous media
studies (e.g., Blum 1995, Johnston 2011, MacGregor 2013, Paterson 2007).
In the background reports, the Swiss newspapers were leading (five to six pieces), followed
by Welt , Süddeutsche and Standard (four each) and the other
newspapers (one to three). The background reports and analyzes were in particular devoted to
the situation and development in the Middle East, as well as to the motives and interests of
individual actors (for example Russia, Turkey, the Islamic State).
However, most of the commentaries were to be found in the German newspapers (seven comments
each), followed by Standard (five), NZZ and Tagesanzeiger (four each).
Basler Zeitung did not publish any commentaries during the observation period, but two
interviews. Other interviews were conducted by Standard (three) and Kurier and
Presse (one each). Investigative research, however, could not be found in any of the
newspapers.
In particular, in the case of the three German newspapers, a journalistically problematic
blending of opinion pieces and reports was noted. Reports contained strong expressions of
opinion even though they were not marked as commentary. The present study was in any case based
on the article labeling by the newspaper.
Figure 2: Types of articles per newspaper
The following Figure 3 shows the breakdown of agency stories (by agency abbreviation) for
each news agency, in total and per country. The 211 agency reports carried a total of 277
agency codes (a story may consist of material from more than one agency). In total, 24% of
agency reports came from the AFP; about 20% each by the DPA, APA and Reuters; 9% of the SDA; 6%
of the AP; and 11% were unknown (no labeling or blanket term "agencies").
In Germany, the DPA, AFP and Reuters each have a share of about one third of the news
stories. In Switzerland, the SDA and the AFP are in the lead, and in Austria, the APA and
Reuters.
In fact, the shares of the global agencies AFP, AP and Reuters are likely to be even higher,
as the Swiss SDA and the Austrian APA obtain their international reports mainly from the global
agencies and the German DPA cooperates closely with the American AP.
It should also be noted that, for historical reasons, the global agencies are represented
differently in different regions of the world. For events in Asia, Ukraine or Africa, the share
of each agency will therefore be different than from events in the Middle East.
Figure 3: Share of news agencies, total (n=277) and per country
In the next step, central statements were used to rate the orientation of editorial opinions
(28), guest comments (10) and interview partners (7) (a total of 45 articles). As Figure 4
shows, 82% of the contributions were generally US/NATO friendly, 16% neutral or balanced, and
2% predominantly US/NATO critical.
The only predominantly US/NATO-critical contribution was an op-ed in the Austrian
Standard on October 2, 2015, titled: "The strategy of regime change has failed. A
distinction between ‚good' and ‚bad' terrorist groups in Syria makes the Western
policy untrustworthy."
Figure 4: Orientation of editorial opinions, guest comments, and interviewees (total;
n=45).
The following Figure 5 shows the orientation of the contributions, guest comments and
interviewees, in turn broken down by individual newspapers. As can be seen, Welt,
Süddeutsche Zeitung, NZZ, Zürcher Tagesanzeiger and the Austrian newspaper
Kurier presented exclusively US/NATO-friendly opinion and guest contributions; this goes
for FAZ too, with the exception of one neutral/balanced contribution. The
Standard brought four US/NATO friendly, three balanced/neutral, as well as the already
mentioned US/NATO critical opinion contributions.
Presse was the only one of the examined newspapers to predominantly publish
neutral/balanced opinions and guest contributions. The Basler Zeitung published one
US/NATO-friendly and one balanced contribution. Shortly after the observation period (October
16, 2015), Basler Zeitung also published an interview with the President of the Russian
Parliament. This would of course have been counted as a contribution critical of the
US/NATO.
Figure 5: Basic orientation of opinion pieces and interviewees per newspaper
In a further analysis, a full-text keyword search for "propaganda" (and word combinations
thereof) was used to investigate in which cases the newspapers themselves identified propaganda
in one of the two geopolitical conflict sides, USA/NATO or Russia (the participant "IS/ISIS"
was not considered). In total, twenty such cases were identified. Figure 6 shows the result: in
85% of the cases, propaganda was identified on the Russian side of the conflict, in 15% the
identification was neutral or unstated, and in 0% of the cases propaganda was identified on the
USA/NATO side of the conflict.
It should be noted that about half of the cases (nine) were in the Swiss NZZ , which
spoke of Russian propaganda quite frequently ("Kremlin propaganda", "Moscow propaganda
machine", "propaganda stories", "Russian propaganda apparatus" etc.), followed by German
FAZ (three), Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung (two each) and the Austrian
newspaper Kurier (one). The other newspapers did not mention propaganda, or only in a
neutral context (or in the context of IS).
Figure 6: Attribution of propaganda to conflict parties (total; n=20).
Conclusion
In this case study, the geopolitical coverage in nine leading daily newspapers from Germany,
Austria and Switzerland was examined for diversity and journalistic performance using the
example of the Syrian war.
The results confirm the high dependence on the global news agencies (63 to 90%, excluding
commentaries and interviews) and the lack of own investigative research, as well as the rather
biased commenting on events in favor of the US/NATO side (82% positive; 2% negative), whose
stories were not checked by the newspapers for any propaganda.
*
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"... Historians will study this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any entente between Moscow and Washington. ..."
"... Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' ( 8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts. ..."
"... This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia. Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but by the Obama administration? ..."
"... Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute to Montenegro, NATO's newest member. ..."
"... At this stage, it doesn't matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own conclusions. ..."
Trump was after a good deal from Russia. A new partnership would have reversed deteriorating relations between the powers by encouraging
their alliance against ISIS and recognising the importance of Ukraine to Russia's security. Current US paranoia about everything
Kremlin-related has encouraged amnesia about what President Barack Obama said in 2016, after the annexation of the Crimea and Russia's
direct intervention in Syria. He too put the danger posed by President Vladimir Putin into perspective: the interventions in Ukraine
and the Middle East were, Obama said, improvised 'in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp' (
5 ).
Obama went on: 'The Russians can't change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country, they are a weaker country,
their economy doesn't produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms.' What he feared most about Putin was
the sympathy he inspired in Trump and his supporters: '37% of Republican voters approve of Putin, the former head of the KGB. Ronald
Reagan would roll over in his grave' ( 6 ).
By January 2017, Reagan's eternal rest was no longer threatened. 'Presidents come and go but the policy never changes,' Putin
concluded ( 7 ). Historians will study
this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing
of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any
entente between Moscow and Washington.
Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump
and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe
an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails
fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' (
8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts.
The media, especially the New York Times and Washington Post, eagerly sought a new Watergate scandal and knew their
middle-class, urban, educated readers loathe Trump for his vulgarity, affection for the far right, violence and lack of culture (
9 ). So they were searching for any information
or rumour that could cause his removal or force a resignation. As in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, everyone
had his particular motive for striking the same victim.
The intrigue developed quickly as these four areas have fairly porous boundaries. The understanding between Republican hawks such
as John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the military-industrial complex was a given. The architects
of recent US imperial adventures, especially Iraq, had not enjoyed the 2016 campaign or Trump's jibes about their expertise. During
the campaign, some 50 intellectuals and officials announced that, despite being Republicans, they would not support Trump because
he 'would put at risk our country's national security and wellbeing.' Some went so far as to vote for Clinton (
10 ).
Ambitions of a 'deep state'?
The press feared that Trump's incompetence would threaten the US-dominated international order. It had no problem with military
crusades, especially when emblazoned with grand humanitarian, internationalist or progressive principles. According to the press
criteria, Putin and his predilection for rightwing nationalists were obvious culprits. But so were Saudi Arabia or Israel, though
that did not prevent the Saudis being able to count on the ferociously anti-Russian Wall Street Journal, or Israel enjoying
the support of almost all US media, despite having a far-right element in its government.
Just over a week before Trump took office, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden story that revealed the mass
surveillance programmes run by the National Security Agency, warned of the direction of travel. He observed that the US media had
become the intelligence services' 'most valuable instrument, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with
hidden intelligence officials.' This at a time when 'Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as
well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing
-- eager -- to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging
those behaviours might be' ( 11 ).
The anti-Russian coalition hadn't then achieved all its objectives, but Greenwald already discerned the ambitions of a 'deep state'.
'There really is, at this point,' he said 'obvious open warfare between this unelected but very powerful faction that resides in
Washington and sees presidents come and go, on the one hand, and the person that the American democracy elected to be the president
on the other.' One suspicion, fed by the intelligence services, galvanised all Trump's enemies: Moscow had compromising secrets about
Trump -- financial, electoral, sexual -- capable of paralysing him should a crisis between the two countries occur (
12 ).
Covert opposition to Trump
The suspicion of such a murky understanding, summed up by the pro-Clinton economist Paul Krugman as a 'Trump-Putin ticket', has
transformed the anti-Russian activity into a domestic political weapon against a president increasingly hated outside the ultraconservative
bloc. It is no longer unusual to hear leftwing activists turn FBI or CIA apologists, since these agencies became a home for a covert
opposition to Trump and the source of many leaks.
This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses
the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia.
Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no
one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but
by the Obama administration?
The silence was once broken when the Republican representative for North Carolina, Tom Tillis, questioned former CIA director
James Clapper in January: 'The United States has been involved in one way or another in 81 different elections since World War II.
That doesn't include coups or the regime changes, some tangible evidence where we have tried to affect an outcome to our purpose.
Russia has done it some 36 times.' This perspective rarely disturbs the New York Times 's fulminations against Moscow's trickery.
The Times also failed to inform younger readers that Russia's president Boris Yeltsin, who picked Putin as his successor
in 1999, had been re-elected in 1996, though seriously ill and often drunk, in a fraudulent election conducted with the assistance
of US advisers and the overt support of President Bill Clinton. The Times hailed the result as 'a victory for Russian democracy'
and declared that 'the forces of democracy and reform won a vital but not definitive victory in Russia yesterday For the first time
in history, a free Russia has freely chosen its leader.'
Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining
resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President
Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute
to Montenegro, NATO's newest member.
No longer getting his way
But the Times, far from worrying about these provocative gestures coinciding with heightened tensions between great powers
(trade sanctions against Russia, Moscow's expulsion of US diplomats), poured oil on the fire. On 2 August it praised the reaffirmation
of 'America's commitment to defend democratic nations against those countries that would undermine them' and regretted that Mike
Pence's views 'aren't as eagerly embraced and celebrated by the man he works for back in the White House.'
At this stage, it doesn't
matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own
conclusions.
The Russian Foreign Ministry called the 18-month prison sentence for student Maria Butina a
"politically motivated" decision "in the spirit of McCarthyism," adding that her only crime was
being a Russian citizen in the US. "From the moment of her arrest we have pointed out that
the accusations against her of attempting to influence internal American political processes
were completely contrived and fabricated, " the ministry said in a statement on Friday. "
Her confession, which was coerced through harsh imprisonment conditions and threats of a
lengthy sentence, changes nothing."
Butina was sentenced on Friday to 18 months in
prison and deportation from the US by a federal judge in Washington, DC. She was arrested by
the FBI in June last year and charged with being an unregistered foreign agent. The nine months
she has already spent in jail – much of it in solitary confinement – will count
towards her sentence.
The American University graduate who sought to make connections with the National Rifle
Association ended up pleading guilty in December to
failing to register as an agent of the Russian government. Moscow has repeatedly said it had
nothing to do with Butina, who prior to her studies in the US campaigned for American-style gun
laws in Russia.
" Our compatriot's only crime was being a citizen of Russia. She became a victim of a
bitter battle between political forces inside the US, and an unbridled anti-Russian campaign in
the spirit of McCarthyism," the Foreign Ministry said on Friday, describing Butina's
sentence as a "shameful stain on the American judicial system " that put itself in the
service of a blatantly political agenda.
Butina's arrest came at the height of 'Russiagate' hysteria, as special counsel Robert
Mueller investigated claims by Democrats that President Donald Trump and his campaign
"colluded" with Russia during the 2016 US presidential election. Mueller's report, made public
last week, found no collusion, but claimed – without evidence –
that Russia did interfere in the election. Butina was not mentioned anywhere in its 448 pages
.
Breathless media reports about Butina's indictment smeared her as a spy who traded sex for
influence in order to embed herself into the US political establishment. That allegation
persisted
in the media even after prosecutors quietly dropped it and apologized for misreading one
of her text messages.
Good info. Very interesting. I was aware of Mike Rogers role but I discounted it
because:
1) It came too late (October 2016) and got little real media attention before the election.
2) Although NSA discovered irregularities in the Spring, they didn't get aired until
October? Maybe because he reports to the President?
3) It is said that Rogers informed Trump. Yet Trump didn't little if anything as a
result.
In the end, "Russiagate" continued despite Rogers info. Almost as though the Deep State
consensus was to initiate a new McCarthyism - which has been my operating theory for months.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Will anyone be prosecuted for "Russiagate"? I doubt it. Everyone involve will say they
were doing their jobs. Their "intent" based on patriotic duty.
"... The entire Mueller investigation is a smoke screen for the crimes of a cabal of people (of which Clinton, Biden and even possibly Obama by association are a part) that engaged in "pay to play" over many, many years. The Mueller report could have been completed in 6 months, instead it took 22 months and was released, after Barr's appointment and AFTER the mid-terms, when its conclusions would have supported the Republican vote. This is not a coincidence, the report is a political document that walked the tightrope between DNC interests and those of "fair play" to the POTUS. ..."
Papadopoulos was first targeted when he worked for the Carson campaign. The spying was obviously much broader. Bongino is killing
it on his podcast.
Paul Surovell, May 10, 2019 at 01:08
Two corrections:
Carter Page in his testimony before the House Intelligence committee said he had never met Igor Sechin. He said that he saw
Dmitry Peskov in an RT studio and "nodded" at him, but never spoke or otherwise interacted with him.
Regula, May 9, 2019 at 21:09
Great reporting, thank you.
There is one facet in this entire dirty scheme that gets overlooked: a number of the actions by the Dems and the FBI served
for the exclusive purpose to force Trump to fire his best campaign managers and secretary of defense and other persons in his
campaign and presidency:
The Dems were afraid Trump would win with Manafort as his campaign manager, and acted to force Trump to fire him just as earlier,
one of his managers who turned out to be effective, was besmeared by a reporter of having forced her to fall when she clearly
didn't, just to besmear Trump as being a mysogenist.
The same was done to Flynn, who was in favor of good relations with Russia. Flynn really didn't do anything wrong other than
to endanger the Dem's agenda to topple Putin. In the same vein, Bannon and two other of the more populist advisors who wanted
a more peaceful conduct for the US, got eliminated by the earlier chief of staff Kelly until he got fired himself.
The same repeated with AG Barr, who is clearly a threat to the entire Dem cabal, but hasn't been successfully far despite shameful
congressional inquiries during Barr's testimony.
Looked at in tandem with the Russiagate accusations and Mueller's investigations, it is obvious that this entire web of lies
and repeated attempts at entrapment of Trump employees was constructed by Clinton in complicity with not just the FBI and CIA,
but with the DNC and the entire deep state, to either oust, impeach or incarcerate Trump and, if that didn't work, to force him
and corner him into continuing Obama/Bush's agenda against Russia.
Sadly, Trump fell for it and the US policies which he pursues are the same now as always: hegemony with regime change wars
to keep the MIC in control of the entire US economy.
O Society, May 8, 2019 at 18:48
Excellent interview here with Aaron Mate and his father Gabor on the psychology of the mass hallucination we call Russiagate.
Same as Consortium News, Aaron was out in front of the propaganda snow machine calling the hoax like it is from its inception.
The truth about American and foreign Intelligence agencies did, indeed, interfere in both the 2016 Presidential election and
the Mid-term Congressional elections just last November. Russia's Intelligence agencies never interfered, but Britain's did.
Fortunately, MI5 and MI6 failed to get Hillary Clinton into the White House in the 2016 elections. Had Hillary won, the world
would've been totally destroyed in a 3rd World War with China, Russia, and Iran.
Both of these British Intelligence agencies are hostile to POTUS Donald J. Trump, and they don't hide it. They can't control
him like they could his predecessors going back to LBJ.
Peter Halligan, May 8, 2019 at 15:06
The entire Mueller investigation is a smoke screen for the crimes of a cabal of people (of which Clinton, Biden and even
possibly Obama by association are a part) that engaged in "pay to play" over many, many years. The Mueller report could have been
completed in 6 months, instead it took 22 months and was released, after Barr's appointment and AFTER the mid-terms, when its
conclusions would have supported the Republican vote. This is not a coincidence, the report is a political document that walked
the tightrope between DNC interests and those of "fair play" to the POTUS.
The "smoke screen" has diverted attention from the criminality of the cabal that engaged in all sorts of nefarious activity
during the DNC infiltration of important federal agencies, from State, through Justice and housing etc. You need only to think
about why Clinton instructed Bleachbit to violate a subpoena instructing the the persevration of all State emails by using "a
cloth", to now that soemthing is seriously wrong. Factor in the activities of Wasserman-Schuz and the Awan brothers ad then factor
in ACTUAL collusion with Russia by Obama and Clinton and the DNC cabal is guilty of collusion and obstruction of justice (remember
also how Bill got half a million for a short speect in an event in Moscow sponsored by a Kremlin owned bank and, of course, his
tarmac antics). The smoke screen consisted of the classic tactic of "projection" of a criminals crimes onto his rival. Hopefully,
those guilty of starting the smoke screen are not the last to face the consequences of breaing the law and the activities of the
crime cabal over the prior 10-15 years are also investigated, before we all get bored with the confirmation of political criminality.
Just because a poltical party has control of the DoJ and DoS, does not mean that these agencies become the tools for organized
crime.
Pablo Diablo, May 8, 2019 at 15:03
Trump is a "loose cannon". This whole Mueller investigation was an attempt to "control" him. It worked. Got the Neocons back
in power and fed The War Machine very well.
"... Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by the special counsel ; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed { Go Deep } where George Papadopoulos was approached by a known CIA operative named Charles Tawil. ..."
"... In interviews Papadopoulos said he was uncomfortable with the way the encounters had taken place. He became suspect of Tawil's motives; something didn't feel right. Instead of keeping the cash, Papadopoulos gave the money to an attorney in Greece before traveling back to the U.S. on July 27th, 2017. ..."
"... Upon arrival at Dulles airport on July 27th, 2017, Robert Mueller had FBI agents waiting. Papadopoulos was stopped and his bags were searched; however, he did not have the cash because he smartly left it in Greece with his lawyer. Papadopoulos was detained overnight by FBI agents, and questioned. ..."
"... [W]hen he was arrested [detained] at Dulles Airport on July 27 after coming off a flight from Munich, prosecutors had no warrant for him and no indictment or criminal complaint . The complaint would be filed the following morning and approved by Howell in Washington. ..."
"... All of it suggests something of a scramble, rather than a carefully prepared plan to take Papadopoulos into custody. ( more ) ..."
"... Papadopoulos has stated the special counsel threatened him with charges of acting as a unregistered agent for Israel. There's a clear picture here . ..."
"... #1) Papadopoulos was lured to Israel and paid in Israel to give the outline of a FARA premise (ie. Papadopoulos is an agent of Israel). #2) Bringing $10,000 (or more) in cash into the U.S., without reporting, is a violation of U.S. treasury laws. Add into that aspect the FARA violation and the money can be compounded into #3) laundering charges. ..."
"... Andrew Weissmann was conducting an entrapment scheme that would have ended up with three violations of law: (1) Treasury violation; (2) FARA violation; (3) Money laundering . All it needed was Papadopoulos to carry the undeclared cash into the U.S. ..."
"... Lastly, to repeat, this entire scenario was constructed by the DOJ/FBI team operation in 2017. The members of the Special Counsel were running the entrapment operation; the FBI agents were participating in the operation. This is not *investigating* criminal conduct; this is manufacturing criminal conduct. ..."
"... Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was in charge of the Mueller Special Counsel. ..."
"... The only way DAG Rosenstein and Robert Mueller didn't know about the operation is if they both claim that Andrew Weissmann was completely rogue and in control over the FBI agents. ..."
Recently release FOIA documents into the special counsel team of Robert Mueller reveal the remarkable trail of a 2017 entrapment
scheme conducted by Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann to target George Papadopoulos.
Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by
the special counsel ; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed {
Go Deep } where George Papadopoulos was approached by a
known CIA operative named Charles Tawil.
In 2017 George Papadopoulos and his wife Simona were approached in Greece by a
known CIA/FBI operative , Charles Tawil.
Mr. Tawil enlisted George as a business consultant, under the auspices of energy development interests, and invited him to Israel.
On June 8th, 2017, in Israel under very suspicious circumstances, where Papadopoulos felt very unnerved, Mr. Tawil hands him $10,000
in cash for future consultancy based on a
$10k/month retainer .
On June 9th, 2017, according to his book, Papadopoulos and Tawil fly back to Cyprus.
... ... ...
In interviews Papadopoulos said he was uncomfortable with the way the encounters had taken place. He became suspect of Tawil's
motives; something didn't feel right. Instead of keeping the cash, Papadopoulos gave the money to an attorney in Greece before traveling
back to the U.S. on July 27th, 2017.
Upon arrival at Dulles airport on July 27th, 2017, Robert Mueller had FBI agents waiting. Papadopoulos was stopped and his
bags were searched; however, he did not have the cash because he smartly left it in Greece with his lawyer. Papadopoulos was detained
overnight by FBI agents, and questioned.
[ ] Stanley said Papadopoulos arrived on a Lufthansa flight from Munich that touched down at about 7 p.m . on July 27, and
the FBI intercepted him as soon as he got off the plane.
"He was arrested [detained] before he got to Customs and he was then held at the airport before being brought to
a law enforcement office," Stanley recalled. (
link )
[W]hen he was arrested [detained] at Dulles Airport on July 27 after coming off a flight from Munich, prosecutors
had no warrant for him and no indictment or criminal complaint . The complaint would be filed the following morning and approved
by Howell in Washington.
And when prosecutors filed the complaint the next day they got a spoken order from Howell to seal it, but followed up with
a written request that they could take to the magistrate in Alexandria, where they showed up almost an hour later than she expected.
All of it suggests something of a scramble, rather than a carefully prepared plan to take Papadopoulos into custody. (
more )
Here's where the recent revelations come in. According to Andrew Weissmann's schedule on June 13th, 2017, he was in conversations
surrounding the basis of a Cyprus Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT):
6/8/17 US intelligence asset Charles Tawil gives George $10K cash in Israel 6/9/17 George Papadopoulos flies to Cyprus w $10K 6/13/17
Andrew Weissmann starts series of "Cyprus MLAT" meetings with FBI 6/13/17 Andrew Weissmann phone call w/ FBI Money Laundering and
Asset Recovery "MLARS" section of FBI.
It would appear Weissmann was well aware of the Cyprus "Tawil operation" and engaged in communication regarding Cyprus. Additionally,
he was discussing "Money Laundering and Asset Recovery" w/ FBI. [MLARS Link
]
Taken in combination with hindsight of the search for the cash, and lack of a pre-existing warrant at the airport, this is clear
evidence of a coordinated operation to entrap Papadopoulos.
Remember, the preferred approach toward targeting Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos surrounded FARA (Foreign Agent
Registration Act) lobbying violations. Papadopoulos has stated the special counsel threatened him with charges of acting as a
unregistered agent for Israel. There's a clear picture here .
#1) Papadopoulos was lured to Israel and paid in Israel to give the outline of a FARA premise (ie. Papadopoulos is an agent
of Israel). #2) Bringing $10,000 (or more) in cash into the U.S., without reporting, is a violation of U.S. treasury laws. Add into
that aspect the FARA violation and the money can be compounded into #3) laundering charges.
[A "laundering" charge applies if the money is illegally obtained. The FARA violation would be the *illegal* aspect making the
treasury charges heavier. Note: the use of the airport baggage-check avoids the need for a search warrant.]
Andrew Weissmann was conducting an entrapment scheme that would have ended up with three violations of law: (1) Treasury violation;
(2) FARA violation; (3) Money laundering . All it needed was Papadopoulos to carry the undeclared cash into the U.S.
However, because Papadopoulos suspected something, and left the money in Greece with his lawyers, upon arrival at the airport
the operation collapsed in reverse . No money means no treasury violation, no laundering and no evidence of the consultancy
agreement (which would have been repurposed in the DOJ filing to mean lobbying for Israel via Mr. Tawil who would have become
a confidential informant and witness).
That operational collapse is why the FBI agents were "scrambling" at the airport and why they had no pre-existing criminal complaint.
The entrapment's success was contingent upon the cash.
Lastly, to repeat, this entire scenario was constructed by the DOJ/FBI team operation in 2017. The members of the Special
Counsel were running the entrapment operation; the FBI agents were participating in the operation. This is not *investigating* criminal
conduct; this is manufacturing criminal conduct.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was in charge of the Mueller Special Counsel.
The only way DAG Rosenstein and Robert Mueller didn't know about the operation is if they both claim that Andrew Weissmann
was completely rogue and in control over the FBI agents.
Oh, wait, what does the Mueller report say about the FBI agents and their chain-of-legal guidance and command?
... ... ...
With events happening in June/July 2017 Rod Rosenstein, Robert Mueller, former FBI legal counsel Jim Baker, former Deputy FBI
Director McCabe, together with current FBI legal counsel Dana Boente and current FBI Director Wray were what? Hoodwinked?
It might well be that Trump treatment of 9/11 as unsolved investigation was one of the red flag for establishment
(and personally Brennan) which led to launching of Russiagate.
Notable quotes:
"... But why was Brennan so anti-Syria and anti-Ukraine? What personal motives did he have? ..."
"... Can someone please explain what it was about Donald Trump at the time that this all began, that Brennan would set all of this in motion? ..."
"... For one thing, Trump, early in his campaign stated that he had suspicions regarding official explanations of 9/11. ..."
But why was Brennan so anti-Syria and anti-Ukraine? What personal motives did he have? Why
target two regimes esp hated by Jews?
It seems he's like McCain. A mean nasty son of a bitch who likes to play world politics.
It's his bullying nature. But he has no vision or compass. Like a dog, he will hunt and maul
anything that is approved by the Power. And that Power is Jewish.
Dogs love to hunt but only get to hunt what the master orders it to. If the master orders
the dog to love rabbits and hunt raccoon, it will do just that. If the master orders it to
love raccoon and hunt rabbits, it will do that. In the end, the dog doesn't care what it
hunts as long as it's given a chance to hunt something.
Same with these goy cuck dogs. Their lives feel fulfilled only in Big Power bully mode.
They need to beat up on something. But they have no vision or compass, no agency. They look
over their shoulders to the Power to tell them what to love(Israel and Saudis) and what to
hate(Iran and Syria and Russia).
Dogs growl at dogs, not at their masters. When Trump came around, Brennan didn't see him
as the new master but as a bad dog(or even wolf) displeasing his master, the Jews. Like
McCain, a very loyal dog. Also, a dog feels jealousy that the master may take to a new dog
over him.
I have to think that the pyramid goes higher still Brennan working for Hillary and Hillary
working for the combined plutocratic imperialist elite that make up the core of the Clinton
Foundation's billions these scumbags will never be touched for buying Killary, but maybe
Killary will end up in an orange jumpsuit, right beside her gopher Brennan
And maybe Trump finally has his hands untied to start doing the things he promised time
will tell
But evidence of wrongdoing is not proof that Comey was the ringleader, he was just the
hapless sad sack who was left holding the bag. The truth is, Comey was just a reluctant
follower. The real architect of the Trump-Russia treachery was the boss-man at the nation's
premier intelligence agency, the CIA.
suspect you are correct
Brennan seems like the real evil, Comey just a doofus
@R Boyd
"Can someone please explain what it was about Donald Trump at the time that this all began,
that Brennan would set all of this in motion?"
He was not truly compromised thus controlled by the spooks. So they were trying to achieve
that, and it appears based on Trump's behavior, that they did achieve that
In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Two Minutes' Hate is a daily period in
which Party members of the society of Oceania must watch a film depicting the Party's enemies
(notably Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers) and express their hatred for them.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/0vvvPZd6_D8
In case anyone is interested, here is what Goldstein actually says in that scene (you
can't make it out, cause the crowd is shouting over it, but that's what he says according to
the subtitles)
"Nothing the Party says is true. Nothing the Party does is good. Even the war itself isn't
real. The Party wants you to believe we are at war so as to channel your aggression away from
their rightful target: the Party. Big Brother is not real. He is pure fiction, created by the
Party. The real rulers of the State are unknown, faceless manipulators who, because they are
not known are able to wield power without let or hindrance. People of Oceania, you are being
duped. The Party doesn't serve the people -- it serves itself. We are not at war with
Eurasia. You are being made into obedient, stupid slaves of the Party. Open your eyes. See
the evil that is happening to you. The Party drops bombs on its own citizens. It is the
Party, not the Eurasians, who are our enemies."
Don't underestimate the power of progressive self hate indoctrination reinforced by
decades of corruption.
There are no "good guys" but those professing our allegiance to empathy are voting for
suicide.
Yes it is important to understand the motivations of those who would do us harm, but
empathy suggests that we substitute the interests of others over our own.
If we are to understand anything, it is that humanity has been studied longer than
anything else on the planet, and as such, there are no alternatives not anticipated and
planned for.
From off the grid prepper to the head of Goldman Sachs, each plays a role.
This is a Matrix, but not by AI but by multigenerational planning, and a thorough
understanding of human behavior, as they would with every variety of plant and animal on the
planet.
CIA chief from the 80s William Casey said, "We know our job is complete when all the
information the American people get is 100% lies."
The only truth in this world comes from the Bible, which tells right from the get go how
the Earth was made, it's a special FIXED place, no where does it say we are a spinning ball,
everything spins around us. There is water above the firmament which are the heavens where
god lives and there are waters under the firmament on the Earth where man lives. The
Antarctic surrounds the flat plane and it is approx. 67,000 miles all the way around and the
north pole and Polaris are the center. In the 50s they tried to blast thru the firmament and
failed, with their rockets and all this NASA stuff is just another way to drain money from
you and you can never go to the moon, what you saw was made in a Hollywood basement. The evil
in this world wants to take you away from God because Lucifer was jealous God made you in his
imagine and he wants to prove you are no good and will take down as many of us as he can just
prove his point.
Whats difficult to understand here is who is driving who. The white house uses the media, the
media uses the white house. The CIA uses both. All of them use the Pentagon, which in turn
uses and serves the MIC. These stories that suddenly appear could be any one of those parties
using the press, or a drive by the press to prepare the stage for war on behalf of their
corporate overlords.
It is not " the job of the media to point that out", the job of the media is to serve
shareholders interest, whoever they may be. It is, however, the responsibility of a
conscientious public to discriminate very carefully between various consumable media outlets.
It is the duty of patriotic journalists to support their country's war efforts in times of
war, is it not? America has been at war for a very long time. For as long as the latest crop
of crappy "journalists" can remember (assuming they can remember anything beyond
yesterday's breakfast, which we see precious little evidence of).
Maybe in Europe and the rest of the world outside America there remains this idealized
conception of what journalism should be about, but that is long gone in the US. In America
the journalists consider themselves the "boots on the ground" in the psy-op
information war. They know that they are just as vital to America's imperial ambitions as the
Special Forces assassins and CIA covert operatives directing the death squads.
The CIA does the coordination of media narratives. You can think of them as the conductor
of the orchestra... the organist at the Mighty Wurlitzer . The CIA also
direct a lot of covert operations to strong-arm vassals into line and to knock states off
balance that try to resist the empire. They also do lots of assassinations of labor
organizers and the like.
But who is above the CIA? Who does the CIA work for? Certainly not the US Executive
Branch! The CIA kills presidents when they feel the need.
Just ask yourself who benefits. The corporate elites at Coca-Cola, Nestle, Exxon,
Monsanto, GE, and so on; and above them the elites at maybe a dozen giant financial
syndicates whose evils psychohistorian is always going on about (he is right, by the way).
These are the folks that gather at the Bilderberg and Bohemian Grove meet-ups where the large
scale plans are hatched and corrections to faltering plans are debated and that the CIA must
then fine tune and implement.
A really interesting discussion. the problem with discussion on new direction of the USA foreign policy is that forces that
control the current forign policy will not allow any changes. Russiagate was in part a paranoid reaction of the Deep State to the
possibility of detente with Russia and also questioning "neoliberal sacred truth" like who did 9/11 (to suggest that Bush is
guilty was a clear "Red Flag") and critical attribute to forrign wars which feed so many Imperial servants.
BTW Trump completely disappointed his supporters in the foreign policy is continuing to accelerate that direction
Here is how you chart a Progressive foreign policy stop treating the US intelligence
agencies of the CIA and FBI as orgs of integrity. Ban all foreign lobbying so no foreign
government can influence foreign policy.
Disband the Veto powers that the US holds over the UN
security council. Prosecute former Presidents and Government officials for the illegal regime
change wars.
Connect with other progressive politicians around the world such as Jeremy Corbyn,
Jean Luc Melenchon and Moon Jae In. End the arms race and begin a peaceful space race to
colonize the moon diverting funds from the military industrial complex into something
fulfilling.
What BULL while world under the fog of Berlin wall down, USA VP Bush attacks
Panama 8000 Marines kills 3500 panamanians , gives the banks to CIA, therefore Panama papers.
Another coup in Latin America. When V.P. Bush "we had to get over the Vietnam Syndrome". So
Killing 3500 people , to get over the loser spirit, suicidal influence from Vietnam. SHAME USA
more hate for Americans. And Now Venezuela, more Shame and Hate for Americans. Yankee go home,
Gringo stay home is chanted once more.
The audio is a little off especially for a couple speakers but this discussion is
great. Trump ran on a non-interventionist platform, but in his typical dishonest fashion, he
appointed people who are developing usable nukes like characters out of Dr. Strangelove.
Nuclear weapons and climate change are both existential threats that all the world needs to act
together to address.
17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6
trillion wars and the $750 billion annual Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving
Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the debate between Democratic
presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the
primary issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her
rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states.
Thanks for anything you can do.
Jim R2 months ago
President Eisenhower's farewell address warned us of the very thing that is happening today with the industrial military
complex and the power and influence that that entity weilds.
chickendinner2012, 2 months ago
End the wars, no more imperialism, instead have fair trade prioritizing countries that have a living wage and aren't
waging war etc. No more supporting massive human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE etc. and we need to get three
of the most aggressive countries the F UK US coalition that constantly invades and bombs everyone they want to steal from to
stop doing war, stop coups, stop covert sabotage, stop sanctions.
asbeautifulasasunset, 2 months ago
17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6 trillion wars and the $750 billion annual
Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the
debate between Democratic presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the primary
issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and
contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states. Thanks for anything you can do.
carol wagner sudol2 months ago
Israel today has become a nazi like state. period. That says it all. This is heart-breaking. Gaza is simply a
concentration camp.
Tom Hall, 2 months ago
All our post WWII foreign policy has been about securing maintaining and enhancing corporate commercial interests. What
would seem to progressives as catastrophic failures are in fact monumental achievements of wealth creation and concentration.
The billions spent on think tanks to develop policy are mostly about how to develop grand narratives that conceal the true
beneficiaries of US foreign policy and create fear, uncertainty and insecurity at home and abroad.
George Papadopoulos's story on why he thinks that the RussiaGate probe was started is something out of The Parallax View but,
alas, rings true: the Trans-Pacific Partnership, stopping Brexit, and abandoning an Atlanticist foreign policy were opposed by a
CIA and corporate political establishment, who created the fake Steele dossier to bring down Trump (the TPP, and also Brexit, I believe,
were in the dossier as reasons why "Putin" wanted Trump to win)
Saudi "Nawaf Al-Hamzi, one of the 9/11 hijackers," as mentioned by b above,
arrived in the US in January of 2000.
The CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was there in Saudi Arabia during what
would have been the early planning stages for 9/11.
He left this position and traveled back to the US to become chief of staff
to CIA director George Tenet in 1999. This was just before the 9/11 hijackers
themselves began arriving.
I have not been able to locate a time table. Was it days, weeks or months
before Nawaf Al-Hamzi arrived in the US that John Brennan, CIA station chief
in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, relocated to the US? **Anyone have John Brennan's arrival date in 1999?**
"... "The evidence is plain–there was a broad, coordinated effort by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments, to target Donald Trump and paint him as a stooge of Russia. The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called Russian collusion case against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the US and UK and organizations aligned with the Clinton Campaign." ( "How US and Foreign Intel Agencies Interfered in a US Election" , Larry C. Johnson, Consortium News) ..."
"... "Brennan was the key to the operation because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court refused to approve several requests by the FBI to initiate taps on Trump associates and Trump Tower as there was no probable cause to do so but the British and other European intelligence services were legally able to intercept communications linked to American sources. Brennan was able to use his connections with those foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, to make it look like the concerns about Trump were coming from friendly and allied countries and therefore had to be responded to as part of routine intelligence sharing. As a result, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Gen. Michael Flynn were all wiretapped. And likely there were others. This all happened during the primaries and after Trump became the GOP nominee." ( "The Conspiracy Against Trump" , Philip Giraldi) ..."
"... According to a report in The Guardian (where the story first appeared.): "GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters) played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016. One source called the British eavesdropping agency the "principal whistleblower". ("British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia ", The Guardian) ..."
"... Okay, so Brennan twisted a few arms and got his foreign Intel buddies to make uncorroborated claims that got the investigative ball rolling, but then what? If there was any meat to Brennan's foreign intel, then Mueller would have dug it up and used it in his report, right? But he didn't. Why? ..."
"... Because there was nothing there, the whole thing was a sham from the get go. Brennan probably "sexed up" the intelligence so it would sound like something it really wasn't. (Think: WMD) Again, if there was even a scintilla of hard evidence that Trump's campaign assistants were in bed with Russia, Mueller would have shrieked it from every mountaintop across America. But he didn't, because there wasn't any. There was no cooperation, no conspiracy and no collusion. Trump was falsely accused. End of story. ..."
Sometime in the next 4 weeks, the Justice Department's inspector general will release an internal review that will reveal the
origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. Among other matters, the IG's report is expected to determine "whether there was sufficient
justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place." Critics of the Trump-collusion
probe believe that there was never probable cause that a crime had been committed, therefore, there was no legal basis for launching
the investigation. The findings of the Mueller report– that there was no cooperation or collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump
campaign– seem to underscore this broader point and suggest that the fictitious Trump-Russia connection was merely a pretext for
spying on the campaign of a Beltway outsider whose political views clashed with those of the foreign policy establishment. In any
event, the upcoming release of the Horowitz report will formally end the the first phase of the long-running Russiagate scandal and
mark the beginning of Phase 2, in which high-profile officials from the previous administration face criminal prosecution for their
role in what looks to be a botched attempt at a coup d'etat.
Here's a brief summary from political analyst, Larry C. Johnson, who previously worked at the CIA and U.S. State Department:
"The evidence is plain–there was a broad, coordinated effort by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments,
to target Donald Trump and paint him as a stooge of Russia. The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called
Russian collusion case against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement organizations in
the US and UK and organizations aligned with the Clinton Campaign." (
"How US and Foreign Intel Agencies Interfered in a US Election" , Larry C. Johnson, Consortium News)
Bingo. Attorney General William Barr has already stated his belief that spying on the Trump campaign "did occur" and that, in
his mind, it is "a big deal". He also reiterated his commitment to thoroughly investigate the matter in order to find out whether
the spying was adequately "predicated", that is, whether the FBI followed the required protocols for such spying, or not. Barr already
knows the answer to this question as he is fully aware of the fact that the FBI used information that they knew was false to obtain
warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Having no hard evidence of cooperation with the Kremlin, senior-level FBI officials and their
counterparts at the Obama Justice Department used parts of an "opposition research" document (The Trump Dossier) that they knew was
unreliable to procure warrants that allowed them to treat a presidential campaign the same way the intelligence agencies treat foreign
enemies; using electronic surveillance, wiretapping, confidential informants and "honey trap" schemes designed to gather embarrassing
or incriminating information on their target. Barr knows all of this already which is why the Democrats are doing everything in their
power to discredit him and have him removed from office. His determination to "get to the bottom of this" is not just a threat to
the FBI, it's a threat to multiple agencies that may have had a hand in this expansive domestic espionage operation including the
CIA, the NSA, the DOJ, the State Department and, perhaps, even the Obama White House. No one knows yet how far up the political food-chain
the skulduggery actually goes, but Barr appears to be serious about finding out.
Here's Barr again: "Many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection that occurred was a single confidential informant
.I would like to find out whether that is in fact true. It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the counterintelligence
effort designed to stop the threat as it's being represented."
In other words, Barr knows that the Trump campaign was riddled with spies and he is going to do his damnedest to find out what
happened. He also knows that the FISA warrants were improperly obtained using the shabby disinformation from an opposition research
"hit piece" (The Steele Dossier) that was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, just like he knows that government agents had
concocted a strategy for leaking classified information to the media to fuel the public hysteria. Barr knows most of what happened
already. It's just a matter of compiling the research in the proper format and delivering it in a way that helps to emphasize how
trusted government agents abused their power by pursuing a vicious partisan plot to either destroy the president's reputation or
force him from office. Like Barr said, that's a "big deal".
The name that seems to feature larger than all others in the ongoing Trump-Russia saga, is James Comey, the former FBI Director
who oversaw the spying operations that are now under investigation at the DOJ. But was Comey really the central figure in these felonious
hi-jinks or was he a mere lieutenant following directives from someone more powerful than himself? While the preponderance of new
evidence suggests that the FBI was deeply involved, it does not answer this crucial question. For example, just this week, a report
by veteran journalist John Solomon, showed that former British spy Christopher Steele admitted to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
Kathleen Kavalec that his "Trump Dossier" was "political research", implying that the contents couldn't be trusted because they were
shaped by Steele's political bias. Kavalec passed along this information to the FBI which shrugged it off and then, just days later,
used the dossier to obtain warrants to spy on members of the Trump campaign. Think about that for a minute. The FBI had "written
proof . that Steele had a political motive", but went ahead and used the dossier to procure the warrants anyway. That's what I'd
call a premeditated felony.
But evidence of wrongdoing is not proof that Comey was the ringleader, he was just the hapless sad sack who was left holding the
bag. The truth is, Comey was just a reluctant follower. The real architect of the Trump-Russia treachery was the boss-man at the
nation's premier intelligence agency, the CIA. That's where the headwaters of this shameful burlesque are located, in Langley. More
on that in a minute, but first check out this excerpt from an article at The Hill which sums up Comey's role fairly well:
(There) "will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White
House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what's causing the 360-degree
head spin.
"There are early indicators that troubling behaviors may have occurred in all three scenarios. Barr will want to zero in on
a particular area of concern: the use by the FBI of confidential human sources, whether its own or those offered up by the then-CIA
director.
In addition, the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all appear to have their genesis as CIA
sources ("assets," in agency vernacular) shared at times with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher
Steele, to Carter Page himself, and now a mysterious "government investigator" posing as Halper's assistant and cited in The New
York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more
than an FBI counterintelligence case." (
"James Comey
is in trouble and he knows it" , The Hill)
Why is the Inspector General so curious as to whether Comey "was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous
White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director? And why did Comey draw from "a cast of characters " . that "all
appear to have their genesis as CIA sources"??
Could it be that Comey was just an unwitting pawn in a domestic regime change operation launched by former CIA Director John Brennan,
the one public figure who has expressed greater personal animus towards Trump than all the others combined? Could Trump's promise
to normalize relations with Russia have intensified Brennan's visceral hatred of him given the fact that Russia had frustrated Brennan's
strategic plans in Ukraine and Syria? Keep in mind, the CIA had been arming, training and providing logistical support to the Sunni
militants who were trying to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al Assad. Putin's intervention crushed the jihadist militias delivering
a humiliating defeat to Generalissimo Brennan who, soon after, left office in disgrace. Isn't this at least part of the reason why
Brennan hates Trump?
Regular readers of this column know that I have always thought that Brennan was the central figure in the Trump-Russia charade.
It was Brennan who first referred the case to Comey, just as it was Brennan who "hand-picked" the analysts who stitched together
the dodgy Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which said that "Putin and the Russian government aspired to help Trump's election
chances.") It was also Brennan who persuaded Harry Reid to petition Comey to open an investigation in the first place. Brennan was
chief instigator of the Trump-Russia fiasco, the omniscient puppet-master who persuaded Clapper and Comey to do his bidding while
still-unidentified agents strategically leaked stories to the media to inflame passions and sow social unrest. At every turn, Brennan
was there guiding the perfidious project along. According to journalist Philip Giraldi, the CIA may have even assisted in the obtaining
of FISA warrants on Trump campaign aids as this excerpt from an article at The Unz Review indicates:
"Brennan was the key to the operation because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court refused to approve
several requests by the FBI to initiate taps on Trump associates and Trump Tower as there was no probable cause to do so but the
British and other European intelligence services were legally able to intercept communications linked to American sources. Brennan
was able to use his connections with those foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, to make it look like the
concerns about Trump were coming from friendly and allied countries and therefore had to be responded to as part of routine intelligence
sharing. As a result, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Gen. Michael Flynn were all wiretapped.
And likely there were others. This all happened during the primaries and after Trump became the GOP nominee." (
"The Conspiracy Against Trump" , Philip
Giraldi)
Can you see how important this is? The FBI was having trouble getting warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, so Brennan helped
them out by persuading his foreign intelligence allies (the British and other European intelligence services) to come up with bogus
"intercepted communications linked to American sources," which helped to secure the FISA warrants. We have no idea of what these
foreign agents heard on these alleged intercepted communications, all we know is that they were effectively used to achieve Brennan's
ultimate objective, which was to acquire the means of taking down Trump via a relentless and expansive surveillance campaign.
According to a report in The Guardian (where the story first appeared.): "GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters)
played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016. One source called
the British eavesdropping agency the "principal whistleblower". ("British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia
", The Guardian)
Okay, so Brennan twisted a few arms and got his foreign Intel buddies to make uncorroborated claims that got the investigative
ball rolling, but then what? If there was any meat to Brennan's foreign intel, then Mueller would have dug it up and used it in his
report, right? But he didn't. Why?
Because there was nothing there, the whole thing was a sham from the get go. Brennan probably "sexed up" the intelligence
so it would sound like something it really wasn't. (Think: WMD) Again, if there was even a scintilla of hard evidence that Trump's
campaign assistants were in bed with Russia, Mueller would have shrieked it from every mountaintop across America. But he didn't,
because there wasn't any. There was no cooperation, no conspiracy and no collusion. Trump was falsely accused. End of story.
Here's more from the same article:
"The Guardian has been told the FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team
and Moscow ahead of the US election." (Guardian)
"The extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team and Moscow"???
Really? This is precisely the type of hyperventilating journalism that fueled the absurd conspiracy theory that the president
of the United States was a Russian agent. It's hard to believe that we're even discussing the matter at this point.
There was an interesting aside in John Solomon's article that suggests that he might be thinking along the same lines. He says:
"One legal justification cited for redacting the Oct. 13, 2016, email is the National Security Act of 1947, which can be used to
shield communications involving the CIA or the White House National Security Council."
Why would Solomon draw attention to "to shielding communications involving the CIA or the White House", after all, the bulk of
his article focused on the State Department and the FBI? Is he suggesting that the CIA and Obama White House may have been involved
in these spying shenanigans, is that why Kavalec's damning notes (which stated that Steele's dossier could not be trusted.) have
been retroactively classified?
Take a look at this email from the FBI's chief investigator in the Russia collusion probe, Peter Strzok, to his fellow agents
in April 2017.
"I'm beginning to think the agency (CIA) got info a lot earlier than we thought and hasn't shared it completely with us. Might
explain all those weird/seemingly incorrect leads all these media folks have. Would also highlight agency as source of some leaks."
-Peter Strzok.
Ha! So even the FBI's chief investigator was in the dark about the CIA's shadowy machinations behind the scenes. Clearly, Brennan
wanted to prevent the other junta leaders from fully knowing what he was up to.
All of this is bound to come out in the inspector general's report sometime in the next month or so. Both Attorney General William
Barr and IG Horowitz appear to be fully committed to revealing the criminal leaks, the illegal electronic surveillance, the improperly
obtained FISA warrants, and the multiple confidential human sources (spies) that were placed in the Trump campaign. They are going
to face withering criticism for their efforts, but they are resolutely moving forward all the same. Bravo, for that.
Bottom line: The agents and officials who conducted this seditious attack on the presidency never thought they'd be held accountable
for their crimes. But they were wrong, and now their day of reckoning is fast approaching. The main players in this palace coup are
about to be exposed, criminally charged and prosecuted. Some of them will probably wind up in jail.
"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine."
Unlike Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate, brainwashing does not turn people into hypnotized
zombies who would be ready to kill a presidential candidate at a command. Instead,
it
transforms them into the sort of people who would be willing to kill someone for political reasons.
The distinction is why so few people understand the sources of political radicalism and
violence.
Brainwashing isn't magic, but it can look like magic.
The sleight of hand that
causes us to think so is our firm belief in our reason and free will. It's easier to believe in
changing minds through hypnotism and drugs, than to understand, what the successful practitioners
of brainwashing do, that the human mind is more malleable than we like to think, and that the
subconscious is more powerful than the conscious.
The art and science of brainwashing is well known. We don't know it because we choose not to.
Brainwashing happens every day.
It doesn't have to mean a complete
transformation of identity. On the simplest level, it means compelling someone to believe something
that isn't true.
It's as simple as two cops browbeating an innocent suspect into believing that he's guilty. The
officers and the suspect won't see their interaction as brainwashing. The officers can honestly
believe in his guilt. And, at the end of the process, the suspect will also believe that he
committed the crime. He will even be able to describe in great detail how he committed it. That's
common, everyday brainwashing.
The key elements of brainwashing are present in that cold room with the peeling paint on the
walls. Those three elements are control, crisis and emotional resonance. To successfully brainwash
someone, you have to control their environment, force a crisis on them, and then tap into core
emotions, fear, love, guilt, hate, shame, and guide them through the crisis by accepting and
internalizing a new belief.
The belief can be anything, but the pseudo-religious ritual taps into an emotional core
requiring them to believe that they were bad people, and that by accepting this new belief, they
are now good people.
This false conversion is the essence of brainwashing and of leftist political awakening
narratives.
The human mind, like the human body, adapts to a crisis with a fight-or-flight response.
Brainwashing forces the mind into a flight response. Once in flight mode, the mind can rationalize
a new belief as a protective behavior that will keep it safe. Even when, as in the case of the
suspect, the new belief will actually destroy his life. Fight or flight mode inhibits long term
thinking. In panic mode, destructive and suicidal behaviors seem like solutions because they offer
an escape from unbearable chemical stresses.
There's a good biological reason for that. Our minds stop us from thinking too much in a crisis
so that we can take urgent action, like running into a fire or at a gunman, that our rational minds
might not allow us to do. But that same function can be 'hacked' by artificially putting people
into fight-or-flight mode to break them down and shortcut their higher reasoning functions.
Decisions reached subconsciously in fight-or-flight mode will then be rationalized and internalized
after the initial crisis has passed.
When that internalization happens, then the brainwashing is real.
Almost anyone can be compelled to say anything under enough stress. Many can be forced
to believe it. The acid test of brainwashing is whether they will retain that belief once
fight-or-flight mode passes.
Cults, abusive relationships and totalitarian movements maintain 'total crisis', shutting
down higher reasoning, creating a permanent state of stress by triggering fight-or-flight responses
unpredictably. This leads to Stockholm Syndrome, where the captive tries to control their fate
through total emotional identification with their captor, pack behavior, loss of identity and will,
and eventually suicide or death.
Total crisis leads to burnout, emotional exhaustion, detachment from friends and family, and
violence.
How do you brainwash a nation?
Control the national environment, force a crisis on the country, and tap into their fear
and guilt...
... ... ...
The panic over Trump is a micro-crisis of the sort that leftists detonate in the
political opposition, but the fear, anger, terror, stress and violence on display are typical of
the crisis mode of fight-or-flight.
The "Resistance" isn't a political movement. It's a political cult whose crisis was the 2016
election. Its irrational belief that Trump is a Russian agent is typical of the conspiratorial
mindset of cults. Its inability to understand that its convictions are completely irrational show
how brainwashing works.
The 2016 election inflicted on its members a loss of control. Trump became the crisis
embodying their loss of control. Their fear, guilt and anger induced stress that altered their
behavior and beliefs.
And, within the very recent past, millions came to believe that Trump was really working
for Moscow.
This is brainwashing on a timescale so immediate that we can easily recall it. Yet most of us
have trouble understanding how it works and why it works. And that lack of understanding is holding
us back.
How can smart people fall for minor variations of the same lie in generation after generation?
Smart people make the best brainwashing targets. Cults recruit bright students on college
campuses, they target aspiring executives looking for leadership training, and dissatisfied
professionals searching for meaning. Cults are rarely made up of stupid people. They're made up of
smart, vulnerable people.
Human beings don't behave rationally. We rationalize our behavior.
The more people rationalize, the more they can be brainwashed. Your old Casio digital watch
can't be hacked. Even if it were hacked, there's not much it could be made to do. Your smartphone
can be hacked and made to do more. Your desktop can be hacked and made to do even more.
Intelligence doesn't make us less vulnerable to being manipulated, it leaves us much more
vulnerable.
The political brainwashing campaign in this country targets the upper class and the
middle class. The best subjects for brainwashing are intelligent and emotionally vulnerable.
They're easier to manipulate by using the gap between their emotions and their reason, and
their emotional instability makes it easier to force them into crisis mode. The ideal subjects are
in their teens and their early twenties. In modern times, that's a period in which identity is
still developing, and can be fractured and remade.
... ... ...
The techniques aren't new. They're as evil and old as time itself.
The targets do have things in common, even
curiosity, but I believe the brainwashed have some social needs
that are handily exploited and money could be one of them. The
mode for communist brainwashing is rage for the enemies,
acceptance into a new just group, small operations at first that
guarantee success, then the big sell that usually gets the
activist committing a felony and if unlucky in prison. Then once
in prison, you have a soldier that works for no other cause. What
do you think is playing over those expensive headphones we see
every day, nursery rhymes?
Yep, it doesn't matter what side of the fence a person is on,
in fact, there are going to be people that let us down. We just
get back up and keep on going.
TV combines audio and visual components to render a very effective
method of brainwashing. It also doesn't provide the audience much
time to analyze a message before they are bombarded with the next
series of information. The presenters' personas are usually
appealing for target messages to be absorbed and accepted by the
masses.
And yet representatives from both
sides agree that the Pentagon should receive plenty of funding, do
plenty of murdering, and undergo no audits (despite a $20T
'accounting error').
Brainwashing is not confined to the left it seems.
Corruption is not related to either side but one side is ruled
far more by emotion, right? They're the ones who are most
easily sent into spasms of negative emotion that a "savior"
like Obama is to fix.
Pretty lengthy article to explain that even though "fly over"
country may have their "hold my beer" moments, large swaths of
urban America are dumb Schiffs.
That works both ways, as both parties are systems of brainwashing
that manifests itself into the divisions and cult like behavior
in the country that we see now.
That there are two distinct
parties is an illusion, the greatest sleight of hand and the elite
know it and that's why they exploit both 2 party cult followers in
the way that they do with racism, bigotry, xenophobia, identity
politics, etc, that keep followers at each other's throats.
The 2016 election was traumatic for many people. The Democratic
party fooled millions in exploiting their hope that change was at
hand through Bernie Sanders. His betrayal of millions who followed
him gave him million of dollars to be their voice, turned out to
be a complete fake and fraud. A shepherd for the very candidate
they HATED and would otherwise never vote for. Blaming Russia was
too convenient. Those millions of US who knew that the primary had
been rigged by Clinton & the DNC who had the GALL to cast blame on
a foreign power for the outright rejection of the DNC anointed
one, DemExited in the millions and refused to be brainwashed into
believing the blatant absurdity that in order to buy this ********
Russiagate narrative you had to believe that Russia influenced our
vote, MY VOTE. Think about that a minute. Did Russia influence the
idiots who voted for Clinton? Even I didn't believe that. But that
is indeed what you had to swallow if you remained within the
confines of the party of cult persuasion. Russiagate itself IS a
cult.
Those of us that knew Clinton/DNC rigged the primary against
Sanders yet who suspected Sanders was also in on it when he threw
voters under the bus for Clinton at the Convention in the most
malicious way, could not be brainwashed. We understood the source
of the trauma, keeping our heads clear through crisis.
I see the same in Trump followers. His ability to exploit
racism and bigotry keeps Trumptards enthralled. But Trump has
broken ever promise and is a SWINDLER. This Zionist stooge
betrayal of his base in such a profound way has them all clinging
to him MORE hoping that this round of 64735D chess is going to be
the one where he is the DC outsider he pretended to be. Just like
Bernie but in a different way.
To be clear means seeing you've been swindled. Admitting you're
vulnerable to exploitation is hard, especially when that
vulnerability lies in hate, through racism and bigotry or when it
simply stands to make you feel a damned fool.
Personally I tend to admire people who can admit they were
taken. The same happened to me with Prez Hopey Changey and again
in believing in Bernie.
Brainwashing can't work when you admit you were taken by a
psychopath or two. Doing so just leads to more growth I think. 100
million did not vote in 2016, the majority vote. They didn't much
care for the lesser of two evils level of brainwashing that keeps
people subservient to the 2 party cult like system
Good article however there is no connection between IQ and
susceptibility to propaganda. The idea that smarter people are
more susceptible is absurd. In college the radical leftists always
tended to be the stupidest. While highly intelligent people are
indeed brainwashed every day, the idea that being stupid protects
you is contrary to my entire life experience and to basic common
sense. For example, if only those with IQ's above 140 were allowed
to vote, the result would be a much freer republic because no
amount of propaganda can convince smart people that they are
better off being government slaves. It's the brainwashed dummies
that crave big brother ****.
Red baiting is very profitable. That's why it now imprinted in most common US citizens brains
and that's why we have on trillion (if counted from all sources)
sneezer1 month ago
Jimmy is great, hopefully they dont suicide him. Narratives of Old1
month ago (edited) mafia state...?? ridiculous.. in a 1000 years the mafia could not
kill as many people the US killed in Iraq in few years .. we are beyond
redemption.....
45 46
View 3 replies Hide replies Gypsy Jiver1 week
ago As George Carlin said the US is a oil company with a army. Ruly Tores1 week
ago You are right. The USA is a Criminal State, War Dependent Economy Carl Hopkinson5 days ago
Wow!! George Carlin would be proud of you, Jimmy Dore !!!! Premed19811 month
ago HOLY SHIT Ive never seen jimmy spitting so much fire and truth even on his own
show world peace1 week
ago Jimmy Dore is the greatest. God bless this man for his honesty and bravery. Chloe Lin1 week ago
(edited) Jimmy Dore a great and patriotic American who wants to save the nation!
👍👍👍 globalman1 week
ago Afshins becomes a bit uncomfortable when Jimmy includes former Prime Minister Tony
Blair in his list of war criminals. I salute Dore for the light shed on Obama. He was just
another tool of the Shadow government and I lament how so many were duped into believing that
Obama was a new hope. They played the black man card and the usamericans fell for it wanting to
show themselves as beyond racism. Another fallacy as racism is alive and well in the usa. There
have been NO legitimate presidential leaders since Eisenhower and JFK. They were the last ....
all the rest have been pawns and then to puppets. Just wish Jimmy was not quite so shrill and
hysterical because that tends to turn off those who would otherwise be in total agreement. I
understand his personality and character but too many people judge the superficial first
leaving them deaf to important content. The reference to the Mafia is very accurate. The USA
secret agencies learned most of what they know to carry out their clandestine and criminal
activities from two main sources. The Nazis and the 3 Mafia branches in the USA. That is, the
Mafia was the Italian families, Murder Inc. were the Jewish version and the Irish Mob. The very
close contact and raids, interrogations, torture of these men taught the government agencies
all they needed to know. The CIA has been training terrorists to overthrow governments since
many, many decades for the USA's own self serving desires. They never change their game plan
even when those very CIA trained terrorists turn around and bite the hands that fed them and
become enemies of the USA as we see around the globe. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and numerous
other places. Googazon Twitterberg5
days ago Jimmy's the only remotely sane progressive. Anne Wood2 days ago
(edited) Absolute truth spoken by Jimmy Dore and most people of the US and UK are in total
agreement. I can tell you as a Brit Tony Blair is known as a war criminal by the people in the
UK. multiplexed2 days
ago Corporatism at it's best... even the democrats don't realize they're corporatists.
Pasha
Pasovski1 week ago
Mafia used to have honor, US never did!
2 3 ArdaSu20081 month
ago (edited) I totally agree with Jimmy on his critics about corrupt US and European
governments, intelligence services and MSM. They all, both right and social democrats, have
been serving to the military industrial complex and big corporations and headed to a total
destruction of economy and the environment globally. Their failure is also the main reason to
those uprising ultra right wing populistic parties all over the Europe. Fucking bastards, liers
and disgusting puppets are all of them! Politis aziminas alétheia1 week ago
Jimmy Dore at his best! The arrogant and criminal U.S.-empire-rulers and their
corporate-news-media are in a process of disintegration! And Jimmy is right, "it's also the
European Union"! CandC681 month ago
(edited) So, Jimmy, how do you really feel? Our country has gone insane. Politics is a
beauty pageant. Business is organized crime. News (MSM) is disinformation. Comedians are the
best source for information. Our leaders want education to be eliminated so we are incapable of
thinking. What's not to like. Mrs Miggins2 days
ago Jimmy mentioned some very good journalists who are on his progressive wavelength, but
he didn't mention some of the serious conservative investigative reporters like John Solomon,
Sara Carter, Kimberly Strassel, Chuck Ross, Paul Sperry, Judicial Watch and Dan Bongino, all of
whom have done the hard work necessary to piece together names, places, dates, documentation
that exposes the RussiaRussiaRussia hoax. We owe all of these people respect for putting
themselves on the line to try and inform the public. AniishAu1 month
ago That's the best Jimmy Dore I've heard! He needs an extra to breath for him.
1 2 Mark
El1 month ago
Oligarchs used us veterans & continue to use service members as their "mafia
muscle."
47 48
View reply Hide replies Rossboe11 month
ago (edited) Jeremy Scahill , Mehdi Hassan and Matt Taibbi also great journalists.
Sometime in the next 4 weeks, the Justice Department's inspector general will release an internal review that will reveal the
origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. Among other matters, the IG's report is expected to determine "whether there was sufficient
justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place." Critics of the Trump-collusion
probe believe that there was never probable cause that a crime had been committed, therefore, there was no legal basis for launching
the investigation.
The findings of the Mueller report– that there was no cooperation or collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign– seem
to underscore this broader point and suggest that the fictitious Trump-Russia connection was merely a pretext for spying on the campaign
of a Beltway outsider whose political views clashed with those of the foreign policy establishment.
In any event, the upcoming release of the Horowitz report will formally end the the first phase of the long-running Russiagate
scandal and mark the beginning of Phase 2, in which high-profile officials from the previous administration face criminal prosecution
for their role in what looks to be a botched attempt at a coup d'etat.
Here's a brief summary from political analyst, Larry C. Johnson, who previously worked at the CIA and U.S. State Department:
" The evidence is plain–there was a broad, coordinated effort by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments,
to target Donald Trump and paint him as a stooge of Russia. The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called
Russian collusion case against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement organizations in
the US and UK and organizations aligned with the Clinton Campaign." (
"How US and Foreign Intel Agencies Interfered in a US Election" , Larry C. Johnson, Consortium News)
Bingo. Attorney General William Barr has already stated his belief that spying on the Trump campaign "did occur" and that, in
his mind, it is "a big deal". He also reiterated his commitment to thoroughly investigate the matter in order to find out whether
the spying was adequately "predicated", that is, whether the FBI followed the required protocols for such spying, or not. Barr already
knows the answer to this question as he is fully aware of the fact that the FBI used information that they knew was false to obtain
warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Having no hard evidence of cooperation with the Kremlin, senior-level FBI officials and their
counterparts at the Obama Justice Department used parts of an "opposition research" document (The Trump Dossier) that they knew was
unreliable to procure warrants that allowed them to treat a presidential campaign the same way the intelligence agencies treat foreign
enemies; using electronic surveillance, wiretapping, confidential informants and "honey trap" schemes designed to gather embarrassing
or incriminating information on their target. Barr knows all of this already which is why the Democrats are doing everything in their
power to discredit him and have him removed from office.
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4855
His determination to "get to the bottom of this" is not just a threat to the FBI, it's a threat to multiple agencies that may
have had a hand in this expansive domestic espionage operation including the CIA, the NSA, the DOJ, the State Department and, perhaps,
even the Obama White House. No one knows yet how far up the political food-chain the skulduggery actually goes, but Barr appears
to be serious about finding out.
Here's Barr again:
"Many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection that occurred was a single confidential informant .I would
like to find out whether that is in fact true. It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the counterintelligence effort
designed to stop the threat as it's being represented."
In other words, Barr knows that the Trump campaign was riddled with spies and he is going to do his damnedest to find out what
happened. He also knows that the FISA warrants were improperly obtained using the shabby disinformation from an opposition research
"hit piece" (The Steele Dossier) that was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, just like he knows that government agents had
concocted a strategy for leaking classified information to the media to fuel the public hysteria. Barr knows most of what happened
already. It's just a matter of compiling the research in the proper format and delivering it in a way that helps to emphasize how
trusted government agents abused their power by pursuing a vicious partisan plot to either destroy the president's reputation or
force him from office. Like Barr said, that's a "big deal".
The name that seems to feature larger than all others in the ongoing Trump-Russia saga, is James Comey, the former FBI Director
who oversaw the spying operations that are now under investigation at the DOJ. But was Comey really the central figure in these felonious
hi-jinks or was he a mere lieutenant following directives from someone more powerful than himself? While the preponderance of new
evidence suggests that the FBI was deeply involved, it does not answer this crucial question. For example, just this week, a report
by veteran journalist John Solomon, showed that former British spy Christopher Steele admitted to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
Kathleen Kavalec that his "Trump Dossier" was "political research", implying that the contents couldn't be trusted because they were
shaped by Steele's political bias. Kavalec passed along this information to the FBI which shrugged it off and then, just days later,
used the dossier to obtain warrants to spy on members of the Trump campaign. Think about that for a minute. The FBI had "written
proof . that Steele had a political motive", but went ahead and used the dossier to procure the warrants anyway. That's what I'd
call a premeditated felony.
But evidence of wrongdoing is not proof that Comey was the ringleader, he was just the hapless sad sack who was left holding the
bag. The truth is, Comey was just a reluctant follower. The real architect of the Trump-Russia treachery was the boss-man at the
nation's premier intelligence agency, the CIA. That's where the headwaters of this shameful burlesque are located, in Langley. More
on that in a minute, but first check out this excerpt from an article at The Hill which sums up Comey's role fairly well:
(There) "will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White
House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what's causing the 360-degree
head spin.
"There are early indicators that troubling behaviors may have occurred in all three scenarios. Barr will want to zero in on
a particular area of concern: the use by the FBI of confidential human sources, whether its own or those offered up by the then-CIA
director.
In addition, the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all appear to have their genesis as CIA
sources ("assets," in agency vernacular) shared at times with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher
Steele, to Carter Page himself, and now a mysterious "government investigator" posing as Halper's assistant and cited in The New
York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more
than an FBI counterintelligence case." (
"James Comey
is in trouble and he knows it" , The Hill)
Why is the Inspector General so curious as to whether Comey "was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous
White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director? And why did Comey draw from "a cast of characters " . that "all
appear to have their genesis as CIA sources"??
Could it be that Comey was just an unwitting pawn in a domestic regime change operation launched by former CIA Director John Brennan,
the one public figure who has expressed greater personal animus towards Trump than all the others combined? Could Trump's promise
to normalize relations with Russia have intensified Brennan's visceral hatred of him given the fact that Russia had frustrated Brennan's
strategic plans in Ukraine and Syria? Keep in mind, the CIA had been arming, training and providing logistical support to the Sunni
militants who were trying to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al Assad. Putin's intervention crushed the jihadist militias delivering
a humiliating defeat to Generalissimo Brennan who, soon after, left office in disgrace. Isn't this at least part of the reason why
Brennan hates Trump?
Regular readers of this column know that I have always thought that Brennan was the central figure in the Trump-Russia charade.
It was Brennan who first referred the case to Comey, just as it was Brennan who "hand-picked" the analysts who stitched together
the dodgy Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which said that "Putin and the Russian government aspired to help Trump's election
chances.") It was also Brennan who persuaded Harry Reid to petition Comey to open an investigation in the first place. Brennan was
chief instigator of the Trump-Russia fiasco, the omniscient puppet-master who persuaded Clapper and Comey to do his bidding while
still-unidentified agents strategically leaked stories to the media to inflame passions and sow social unrest. At every turn, Brennan
was there guiding the perfidious project along. According to journalist Philip Giraldi, the CIA may have even assisted in the obtaining
of FISA warrants on Trump campaign aids as this excerpt from an article at The Unz Review indicates:
"Brennan was the key to the operation because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court refused to approve several
requests by the FBI to initiate taps on Trump associates and Trump Tower as there was no probable cause to do so but the British
and other European intelligence services were legally able to intercept communications linked to American sources. Brennan was
able to use his connections with those foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, to make it look like the concerns
about Trump were coming from friendly and allied countries and therefore had to be responded to as part of routine intelligence
sharing. As a result, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Gen. Michael Flynn were all wiretapped.
And likely there were others. This all happened during the primaries and after Trump became the GOP nominee." (
"The Conspiracy Against Trump" , Philip
Giraldi)
Can you see how important this is? The FBI was having trouble getting warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, so Brennan helped
them out by persuading his foreign intelligence allies (the British and other European intelligence services) to come up with bogus
"intercepted communications linked to American sources," which helped to secure the FISA warrants. We have no idea of what these
foreign agents heard on these alleged intercepted communications, all we know is that they were effectively used to achieve Brennan's
ultimate objective, which was to acquire the means of taking down Trump via a relentless and expansive surveillance campaign.
According to a report in The Guardian (where the story first appeared.):
"GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters) played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI's Trump-Russia
investigation, which began in late July 2016. One source called the British eavesdropping agency the "principal whistleblower".
("British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia ", The Guardian)
Okay, so Brennan twisted a few arms and got his foreign Intel buddies to make uncorroborated claims that got the investigative
ball rolling, but then what? If there was any meat to Brennan's foreign intel, then Mueller would have dug it up and used it in his
report, right? But he didn't. Why?
Because there was nothing there, the whole thing was a sham from the get go. Brennan probably "sexed up" the intelligence so it
would sound like something it really wasn't. (Think: WMD) Again, if there was even a scintilla of hard evidence that Trump's campaign
assistants were in bed with Russia, Mueller would have shrieked it from every mountaintop across America. But he didn't, because
there wasn't any. There was no cooperation, no conspiracy and no collusion. Trump was falsely accused. End of story.
Here's more from the same article:
"The Guardian has been told the FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team
and Moscow ahead of the US election." (Guardian)
"The extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team and Moscow"???
Really? This is precisely the type of hyperventilating journalism that fueled the absurd conspiracy theory that the president
of the United States was a Russian agent. It's hard to believe that we're even discussing the matter at this point.
There was an interesting aside in John Solomon's article that suggests that he might be thinking along the same lines. He says:
"One legal justification cited for redacting the Oct. 13, 2016, email is the National Security Act of 1947, which can be used to
shield communications involving the CIA or the White House National Security Council."
Why would Solomon draw attention to "to shielding communications involving the CIA or the White House", after all, the bulk of
his article focused on the State Department and the FBI? Is he suggesting that the CIA and Obama White House may have been involved
in these spying shenanigans, is that why Kavalec's damning notes (which stated that Steele's dossier could not be trusted.) have
been retroactively classified?
Take a look at this email from the FBI's chief investigator in the Russia collusion probe, Peter Strzok, to his fellow agents
in April 2017.
"I'm beginning to think the agency (CIA) got info a lot earlier than we thought and hasn't shared it completely with us. Might
explain all those weird/seemingly incorrect leads all these media folks have. Would also highlight agency as source of some leaks."
-Peter Strzok.
Ha! So even the FBI's chief investigator was in the dark about the CIA's shadowy machinations behind the scenes. Clearly, Brennan
wanted to prevent the other junta leaders from fully knowing what he was up to.
All of this is bound to come out in the inspector general's report sometime in the next month or so. Both Attorney General William
Barr and IG Horowitz appear to be fully committed to revealing the criminal leaks, the illegal electronic surveillance, the improperly
obtained FISA warrants, and the multiple confidential human sources (spies) that were placed in the Trump campaign. They are going
to face withering criticism for their efforts, but they are resolutely moving forward all the same. Bravo, for that.
Bottom line : The agents and officials who conducted this seditious attack on the presidency never thought they'd be held accountable
for their crimes. But they were wrong, and now their day of reckoning is fast approaching. The main players in this palace coup are
about to be exposed, criminally charged and prosecuted. Some of them will probably wind up in jail.
"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine."
There is ZERO evidence that Russia played ANY role in the 2016 USSA election and yet are sanctioned to the max, threatened
with war etc. HOWEVER there IS proof of the UK/GCHQ involvement.
I am waiting to see if Trump still goes to the UK in June or if he tells them he is "busy with more important things at home"
aka F...off.
Apocalypse, I would say that word describes it pretty well.
Middle English Apocalipse "Revelation (the New Testament book)," borrowed from Anglo-French, borrowed from Late Latin
apocalypsis "revelation, the Book of Revelation," borrowed from Greek apokálypsis "uncovering, disclosure, revelation,"
from apokalyp-, stem of apokalưptein "to uncover, disclose, reveal" (from apo- APO- + kalưptein "to cover, protect,
conceal," of uncertain origin) + -sis -SIS
"No one knows yet how far up the political food-chain the skulduggery actually goes"
Too kind. We all know it is impossible that Susan Rice did not know -- she would have to authorize the FBI to conduct any foreign
spying operations.
And if Susan Rice knew, it is impossible that Barack Obama didn't know. And approved of it, if only by not putting a stop to
it.
The string that hasn't been pulled yet is the role of British intelligence. Brennan is obviously not a very bright man. He's
a post-turtle, so how a dull-witted former communist ended up as head of the CIA is yet another story that needs looking into.
Was he actually a British mole?
The intersection of British establishment political goals and donated assets in the operation of this plot is nakedly obvious.
It will be for Barr to expose that "angle", with the distinct possibility the ultimate origin of this scheme was the Blairite
UK civil service who wished to eliminate a potentially powerful political actor who repeatedly and strongly indicated his unreserved
support for Brexit.
All the things you mentioned were obfuscated by Clinton, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Cheney, several Generals, heads of
state, foreign intelligence. Do you think someone just snaps a finger and the MIC disappears?
You conflate 'past' leadership with the current. The deep state is crumbling. We need to keep digging and indicting until Rothschild
takes a one way rocket off planet Earth.
It will only end when treasonous traitor hang by their necks. I'm still hoping and informing others.
"I've talked to the members of the Israeli government at the highest levels. I know who they want elected here. It's not
Hillary Clinton." – Former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani
The TRUMP Collusion wasn't with the Russians , but with APARTHEID Israhell.
"... Breaking news today, courtesy of the New York Times , is that a man with a long history of working with the CIA and a female FBI Informant, traveled to London in September of 2016 and tried unsuccessfully to entrap George Papadopolous. The biggest curiosity is that US intelligence or law enforcement officials fully briefed British intelligence on what they were up to. ..."
"... The FBI disingenuously claims they ran Azra Turk at Papadopolous because they were alarmed ostensibly by Russia's attempts to disrupt the 2016 election. But Papadopolous was not seeking out Russian contacts. He was being baited. It was Mifsud and others tied to British and US intelligence who were bringing up the "opportunity" to work with the Russians. ..."
"... The boomerang from the Democratic Party's failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia's 2016 election meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow's pesky neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton . ..."
"... In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort 's dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress. ..."
"... It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey* interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg ..."
"... Neoliberals and neoconservatives (ie zionists) were behind it and continue to push it. Trump ran to the left of Clinton on both domestic and foreign policy. That's why he won, and why the establishment must present his election as de facto illegitimate, because otherwise they would be forced to admit that the bipartisan convergence around both finance driven economic policy and war on terror interventionism that has described elite politics since Clinton has been a disaster for most ordinary Americans -- of all types and political persuasions -- and needs to be destroyed root and branch. ..."
"... What's the likelihood that Carter Page was a plant in the Trump campaign? After all, he had a history with the US IC and was used as bait in an FBI case to prove Russian operatives' recruiting efforts. It's thought he's the Under Cover Employee alluded to in this case, which resulted in the successful prosecution of Russian spies: ..."
"... Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources (including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were employed by the bureau in this operation: ..."
Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson
The preponderance of evidence makes this very simple--there was a broad, coordinated effort
by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments, to target Donald Trump and
paint him as a stooge of Russia.
The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called Russian collusion case
against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement
organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom and organizations aligned with the
Clinton Campaign.
Breaking news today, courtesy
of the New York Times, is that a man with a long history of working with the CIA and a
female FBI Informant, traveled to London in September of 2016 and tried unsuccessfully to
entrap George Papadopolous. The biggest curiosity is that US intelligence or law enforcement
officials fully briefed British intelligence on what they were up to. Quite understandable
given what we now know about British spying on the Trump Campaign.
The Mueller investigation of Trump "collusion" with Russia prior to the 2016 Presidential
election focused on eight cases:
Proposed Trump Tower Project in Moscow
George Papadopolous --
Carter Page --
Dimitri Simes --
Veselnetskya Meeting at Trump Tower (June 16, 2016)
Events at Republican Convention
Post-Convention Contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak
Paul Manafort
One simple fact emerges--of the eight cases or incidents of alleged Trump Campaign
interaction with the Russians investigated by the Mueller team, the proposals to interact with
the Russian Government or Putin originated with FBI informants, MI-6 assets or people paid by
Fusion GPS, not Trump or his people. There is not a single instance where Donald Trump or any
member of his campaign team initiated contact with the Russians for the purpose of gaining
derogatory information on Hillary or obtaining support to boost the Trump campaign. Not
one.
Simply put, Trump and his campaign were the target of an elaborate, wide ranging covert
action designed to entrap him and members of his team as an agent of Russia.
Let's look in detail at each of the cases.
THE PROPOSED TRUMP TOWER PROJECT IN MOSCOW, according to Mueller's report, originated with an FBI Informant--Felix Sater.
Here's what the Mueller Report states:
In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a
Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted
Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a
Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov.
Sater had
known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov
during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and
proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would
license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own.
Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the
Mueller Report).
Mueller,
as I have noted previously , is downright dishonest in failing to identify Sater as an FBI
informant. Sater was not just a private entrepreneur looking to make some coin. He was a fully
signed up FBI informant. Sater's status as an FBI snitch was first exposed in 2012. Sater also
was a boyhood chum of Michael Cohen, the target being baited in this operation. Another
inconvenient fact excluded from the Mueller report is that one of Mueller's Chief Prosecutors,
Andrew
Weissman, signed the deal with Felix Sater in December 1998 that put Sater into the FBI
Informant business .
All suggestions for meeting with the Russian Government, including Putin, originated with
Felix Sater. The use of Sater on this particular project started in September 2015.
Papadopolous was targeted by British and U.S. intelligence starting in late December 2015,
when he is offered out of the blue a job with the
London Centre of International
Law and Practice Limited (LCILP) . The LCILP has all of the hallmarks of an
intelligence front company. LCILP began as an offshoot from another company -- EN
Education Group Limited -- which describes itself as "a global education
consultancy, facilitating links between students, education providers and organisations with an
interest in education worldwide".
EN Education and LCILP are owned and run by Nagi Khalid Idris, a 48-year-old British citizen
of Sudanese origin. For no apparent reason Idris offers Papadopolous a job as the Director of
the LCILP's International Energy and Natural Resources Division. Then in March of 2016, Idris
and Arvinder Sambei (who acted as an attorney for the FBI on a 9-11 extradition case in the
UK), insist on introducing Joseph Mifsud to Papadopolous.
It is Joseph Mifsud who introduces the idea of meeting Putin following a lunch in
London:
"The lunch is booked for March 24 at the Grange Holborn Hotel,. . . . "When I get there,
Mifsud is waiting for me in the lobby with an attractive, fashionably dressed young woman with
dirty blonde hair at his side. He introduces her as Olga Vinogradova." (p. 76)
"Mifsud sells her hard. "Olga is going to be your inside woman to Moscow. She knows
everyone." He tells me she was a former official at the Russian Ministry of Trade. Then he
waxes on about introducing me to the Russian ambassador in London." (p. 77)
"On April 12, "Olga" writes: "I have already alerted my personal links to our conversation
and your request. The embassy in London is very much aware of this. As mentioned, we are all
very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump. The Russian Federation
would love to welcome him once his candidature would be officially announced."
And it is Mifsud who raises the possibility of getting dirt on Hillary:
"Then Mifsud returns from the Valdai conference. On April 26 we meet for breakfast at the
Andaz Hotel, near Liverpool Street Station, one of the busiest train stations in London. He's
in an excellent mood and claims he met with high-level Russian government officials. But once
again, he's very short on specifics. This is becoming a real pattern with Mifsud. He hasn't
offered any names besides Timofeev. Then, he leans across the table in a conspiratorial manner.
The Russians have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, he tells me. "Emails of Clinton," he says. "They
have thousands of emails."
Here again we encounter the lying and obfuscation of the Mueller team. They falsely
characterize Mifsud as an agent of Russia. In fact, he has close and longstanding ties to both
British and US intelligence (
Disobedient Media lays out the Mifsud mystery in detail ).
Mifsud was not alone. The FBI and the CIA also were in the game of trying to entrap
Papadopolous. In September of 2016, Papadopolous was being wined and dined by Halper (who has
longstanding ties to the US intelligence community) and Azra Turk, an FBI Informant/researcher
( see NY
Times ).
The FBI disingenuously claims they ran Azra Turk at Papadopolous because they were alarmed
ostensibly by Russia's attempts to disrupt the 2016 election. But Papadopolous was not seeking
out Russian contacts. He was being baited. It was Mifsud and others tied to British and US
intelligence who were bringing up the "opportunity" to work with the Russians.
CARTER PAGE
The section of the Mueller report that deals with Carter Page is a total travesty. Mueller
and his team, for example, initially misrepresent Page's status with the Trump campaign--he is
described as "working" for the campaign, which implies a paid position, when he was in fact
only a volunteer foreign policy advisor. Mueller also paints Page's prior experience and work
in Russia as evidence that Page was being used by Russian intelligence, but says nothing about
the fact that Page was being regularly debriefed by the CIA and the FBI during the same period.
In other words, Page was cooperating with US intelligence and law enforcement. But this fact is
omitted in the Mueller report.
Mueller eventually accurately describes Page's role in the Trump campaign as follows:
In January 2016, Page began volunteering on an informal, unpaid basis for the Trump Campaign
after Ed Cox, a state Republican Party official, introduced Page to Trump Campaign officials.
Page told the Office that his goal in working on the Campaign was to help candidate Trump
improve relations with Russia. To that end, Page emailed Campaign officials offering his
thoughts on U.S.-Russia relations, prepared talking points and briefing memos on Russia, and
proposed that candidate Trump meet with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
In communications with Campaign officials, Page also repeatedly touted his high-level
contacts in Russia and his ability to forge connections between candidate Trump and senior
Russian governmental officials. For example, on January 30, 2016, Page sent an email to senior
Campaign officials stating that he had "spent the past week in Europe and had been in
discussions with some individuals with close ties to the Kremlin" who recognized that Trump
could have a "game-changing effect . .. in bringing the end of the new Cold War. The email
stated that " [t]hrough [his] discussions with these high level contacts," Page believed that
"a direct meeting in Moscow between Mr. Trump and Putin could be arranged.
The Mueller presentation portrays Carter Page in a nefarious, negative light. His contacts
with Russia are characterized as inappropriate and unjustified. Longstanding business
experience in a particular country is not proof of wrong doing. No consideration is given at
all to Page's legitimate concerns raising about the dismal state of US/Russia relations
following the US backed coup in the Ukraine and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by
Russia.
Page's association with the Trump campaign was quite brief--he lasted seven months, being
removed as a foreign policy advisor on 24 September. Page was not identified publicly as a
Trump foreign policy advisor until March of 2016, but the evidence presented in the Mueller
report clearly indicates that Page was already a target of intelligence agencies, in the US and
abroad, long before the FISA warrant of October 2016.
While serving on the foreign policy team Page continued his business and social contacts in
Russia, but was never tasked by the Trump team to pursue or promote contacts with Putin and his
team. In fact, Page's proposals, suggestions and recommendations were either ignored or
directly rebuffed.
The timeline reported in the Mueller report regarding Page's trip to Russia in early July
raises questions about the intel collected on that trip and the so-called "intel" revealed in
the Steele Dossier with respect to Page. Carter admits to meeting with individuals, such as
Dmitry Peskov and Igor Sechin, who appear in the Steele Dossier. Page's meetings in Moscow
turned out to be innocuous and uneventful. Nothing he did resembled clandestine activity. Yet,
the Steele report on that visit suggested just the opposite and used the tactic of guilt by
association to imply that Page was up to something dirty.
The bottomline for Mueller is that Page did not do anything wrong and no one in the Trump
Campaign embraced his proposals for closer ties with Russia.
DMITRI SIMES
The targeting and investigation of Dmitri Simes is disgusting and an abuse of law
enforcement authority. Full disclosure. I know Dmitri. For awhile, in the 2002-2003 time
period, I was a regular participant at Nixon Center events. For example, I was at a round table
in December 2002 on the imminent invasion of Iraq. Colonel Pat Lang sat on one side of me and
Ambassador Joe Wilson on the other. Directly across the table was Charles Krauthammer. Dmitri
ran an honest seminar.
The entire section on Dmitri Simes, under other circumstances, could be viewed as something
bizarre and amusing. But the mere idea that Simes was somehow an agent of Putin and a vehicle
for helping Trump work with the Russians to steal the 2016 election is crazy and idiotic. Those
in the FBI who were so stupid as to buy into this nonsense should have their badges and guns
taken away. They are too dumb to work in law enforcement.
Dmitri's only sin was to speak calmly, intelligently and rationally about foreign policy
dealings with Russia. We now know that in this new hysteria of the 21st Century Russian scare
that qualities such as reason and rationality are proof of one's willingness to act as a puppet
of Vladimir Putin.
TRUMP TOWER MEETING (JUNE 9, 2016)
This is the clearest example of a plant designed to entrap the Trump team. Mueller, once
again, presents a very disingenuous account:
On June 9, 2016, senior representatives of the Trump Campaign met in Trump Tower with a
Russian attorney expecting to receive derogatory information about Hillary Clinton from the
Russian government. The meeting was proposed to Donald Trump Jr. in an email from Robert
Goldstone, at the request of his then-client Emin Agalarov, the son of Russian real-estate
developer Aras Agalarov. Goldstone relayed to Trump Jr. that the "Crown prosecutor of Russia
... offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that
would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia" as "part of Russia and its government's
support for Mr. Trump." Trump Jr. immediately responded that "if it's what you say I love it,"
and arranged the meeting through a series of emails and telephone calls.
The meeting was with a Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya.
The Russian attorney who spoke at the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had previously worked
for the Russian government and maintained a relationship with that government throughout this
period oftime. She claimed that funds derived from illegal activities in Russia were provided
to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. Trump Jr. requested evidence to support those claims,
but Veselnitskaya did not provide such information.
Ignore for a moment that no information on Hillary was passed or provided (and doing such a
thing is not illegal). The real problem is with what Mueller does not say and did not
investigate. Mueller conveniently declines to mention the fact that Veselnitskaya was working
closely with the firm Hillary Clinton hired to produce the Steele Dossier. NBC News reported on
Veselnitskaya:
The information that a Russian lawyer brought with her when she met Donald Trump Jr. in June
2016 stemmed from research conducted by Fusion GPS, the same firm that compiled the infamous
Trump dossier, according to the lawyer and a source familiar with the matter.
In an interview with NBC News, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya says she first received
the supposedly incriminating information she brought to Trump Tower -- describing alleged tax
evasion and donations to Democrats -- from Glenn Simpson , the Fusion GPS owner, who had been
hired to conduct research in a New York federal court case.
Even a mediocre investigator
would recognize the problem of the relationship between the lawyer claiming to have dirty,
damning info on Hillary with the firm Hillary hired to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. This was
another botched set up and the Trump folks did not take the bait.
EVENTS AT THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION
This portion of the Mueller report is complete farce. Foreign Ambassdors, including the
Russian (and the Chinese) attend Republican and Democrat Conventions. Presidential candidates
and their advisors speak to those Ambassadors. So, where is the beef? Answer. There isn't any.
That this "event" was considered something worthy of a counter intelligence investigation is
just one more piece of evidence that law enforcement and intelligence were weaponized against
the Trump campaign.
POST-CONVENTION CONTACTS WITH RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR KISLYAK
Ditto. As noted in the previous paragraph, trying to criminalize normal diplomatic contacts,
especially with a country where we share important, vital national security interests, is but
further evidence of the crazy anti-Russian hysteria that has infected the anti-Trumpers.
Pathetic.
MANAFORT
If Paul Manafort had rebuffed Trump's offer to run his campaign, he would be walking free
today and still buying expensive suits and evading taxes along with his Clinton buddy, Greg
Craig. Instead, he became another target for DOJ and intel community and the DNC, which were
desperate to portray Trump as a tool of the Kremlin. Thanks to John Solomon of The Hill, we now
know the impetus to target
Manafort came from the DNC :
The boomerang from the Democratic Party's failed attempt to connect
Donald Trump to Russia's 2016 election meddling
is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow's pesky neighbor,
Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases
tried, to help Hillary
Clinton .
In its most detailed account yet, Ukraine's embassy in Washington says a Democratic National
Committee insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump's campaign chairman
and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.
In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor
Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on
Paul Manafort 's dealings inside the country, in
hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.
Manafort was not colluding, but the Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration most
certainly were.
Take these eight events as a whole a very clear picture emerges--US and foreign intelligence
(especially the UK) and US law enforcement collaborated in a broad effort to bait the Trump
team with ostensible Russian entreaties in order to paint Trump as a tool of the Kremlin. That
effort is now being exposed and those culpable will hopefully face justice. This should sicken
and alarm every American regardless of political party. Will justice be served?
I just read the following about special visas approved for some of the FBI "operatives"
(from SD at CTH): "It wasn't just the CIA that was using spies to "dirty up" Trump
associates. The FBI was doing it too. There was the infamous Natalia Veselnitskaya who is
known for her part in the Trump Tower meeting. She had been banned from the country but got a
special visa signed off by Preet Bahara of the FBI, Southern District of New York. Henry
Greenburg, the known FBI informant who tried to entrap Roger Stone, also got a special visa.
And I'm sure there are many more "
IMO, there is no coming back from this. Apart from this Deep State coup attempt, we have seen
that democracy is a shame, it's all theater. The Establishment (which includes GOP) is
constantly working to undermine Trump and thwart his plans to do what the American people
want and elected him for. What I've found quite disturbing is that the controlling puppet
masters have not let up in trying to remove or neutralize Trump. As if they can't wait even 4
years to again fully stack the deck and regain total control. They are not willing to concede
that 2016 was a political black swan event involving a celebrity billionaire American icon.
And conceding and allowing this fluke to be rectified I'm 4 short years is worse than their
pushback exposing the political system as a rigged game.
The events of the last 2.5 years have radically altered my views. I no longer have any
faith in democracy (voting), the government, the federal courts, law enforcement, et al. And
I can't see me regaining any faith in them. What I have seen in the past 2.5 years is kind of
like finding out my wife of decades, whom I idolized, has been cheating with my friend from
childhood, whom I would've laid down my life for. And all the other people close to me not
telling me.
It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and
was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were
intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about
U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey*
interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg
*Tracey, btw, is on the left. But like Glenn Greenwald and others on the left he is an
honest journalist interested in the truth.
The "left" was not behind and does not buy into this Russia psyop. Neoliberals and
neoconservatives (ie zionists) were behind it and continue to push it. Trump ran to the left
of Clinton on both domestic and foreign policy. That's why he won, and why the establishment
must present his election as de facto illegitimate, because otherwise they would be forced to
admit that the bipartisan convergence around both finance driven economic policy and war on
terror interventionism that has described elite politics since Clinton has been a disaster
for most ordinary Americans -- of all types and political persuasions -- and needs to be
destroyed root and branch.
To see how and why the "left" differs from corporate identity-politicking liberals in the
above regard consider how it is that Tulsi Gabbard is both the Dem candidate most respected
by principled Trump supporters on this site and others and the Dem candidate most reviled,
ignored, and slandered by DNC liberals and neocons alike.
The enemy to principled conservatives and the left in this country is the bipartisan
establishment corporate neoliberalism of the RNC and DNC alike.
What's the likelihood that Carter Page was a plant in the Trump campaign? After all, he had a
history with the US IC and was used as bait in an FBI case to prove Russian operatives'
recruiting efforts. It's thought he's the Under Cover Employee alluded to in this case, which
resulted in the successful prosecution of Russian spies:
Page is just a goofball grifter. He's not a plant. That is silly. When they saw names like
Page and Manafort the Democrats pounced because they knew the could cast aspersions.
I'm not sure about Mifsud. I think it would be hard for Mueller to knowingly indict
Papadop if Mifsud were an asset of the US (or even known to be an asset of allies). I think
it is more likely Mifsud was a free agent.
All these guys Mifsud, Page, Papadop were grifters, not doing real work. Just running
around trying to make a buck by claiming to facilitate meetings. It's a shame it bit them and
not a crime to do what they did. At the same time, I can't help but see some kharmic justice.
GET A JOB, you poly sci lightweights!
This anonymous commentator has never spent time in senior levels of business or government.
There is a whole class of people who do not see themselves as Grifters but more as "ideas
men".
The best offer valuable perspectives on the world, can really open doors and otherwise add
value. At the other end of the spectrum are con men. Political campaigns and large
corporations of any sort attract these people in droves. The skill in management is to sort
the wheat from the chaff. Trump is good at that.
Yes, Page often comes off as a bit crazy and incoherent. But he may be crazy like a fox. In
the end he was never charged with ANYTHING and it's my understanding he represented himself
legally throughout the investigation, opting not to hire counsel. I find it odd that others
were prosecuted for process crimes but he escaped even THAT fate.
His participation in the Trump campaign, limited as it was, was nevertheless KEY in
finally obtaining a FISA warrant after other attempts failed.
Consider it silly if you want. I view him at least worthy of suspicion. His hapless
demeanor could be his schtick , when his education, experience and IC connections are
taken into consideration.
Page represents himself poorly even when he knows a lot is on the line. Look at how
frustrated Gowdy got with him. Clearly Page didn't learn much from plebe year in terms of 5
basic responses. Compare the difference with Barr for instance.
While the Trident program is a big deal, every now and then USNA has mids that are
diligent about getting good grades but not very smart. I knew one my year. Page is clearly in
that vein. Don't miss that he didn't get into any elite program after graduation (SWO is the
default). And that he was a poly sci major. The saying is "poly sci, QPR high" (QPR is
quality point rating or GPA). Of course this is not to say there aren't some good SWOs or
poly sci majors. But there's a definite correlation I'm noting. It fits with what his
reputation is.
Furthermore, the guy has had an uneventful career, bouncing around. He went to a lower
bulge bracket (not Goldman) and didn't seem to stick. And his Russian colleagues said he was
an idiot and a boaster. We're not talking i-banker smart. Wouldn't trust him to do an NPV or
other economic analysis. And then after that we have the grifting and the shmoozing.
Kid is a lightweight. A slightly less coffee-boy coffee boy.
''They cannot convict based on a law that was passed after the act was committed''
Money laundering has always been against the law of course....the NY law just firmed up
the due diligence that is suppose to be done in transactions. I don't think there is a statute of limitations on things like
fraud, tax evasion and money laundering but I will check it out to see
Catherine, in current PC thinking, merely passing the salt to a Russian guest at a dinner
party makes you "an unregistered foreign agent" of Russia bent on implementing Putin's evil
plans.
As for certifying real estate deals, the same crowd would view buying someone a MacDonalds
hamburger as attempted bribery.
''As for certifying real estate deals, the same crowd would view buying someone a MacDonalds
hamburger as attempted bribery.''
Hardly. 7 million dollar cash deals for a condo thru a shell company is a red flag
however..as is buying property for 1 million and selling it unimproved the next year for 2
million...or buying a house in LA 11 million and selling it 9 months later for 8 million.
That 'in between money" is someone's pay off....that's how it works.
Money laundering is epidemic in the US and Europe....Israeli mafia, Russian oligarchs,
African dictators looting their country's treasury and running it through a real estate
washing machine deal. Far be from me to sweep the fairy dust out of Trump supporters eyes but, as I said,
Trump's troubles are far from over. We will see what comes out in the future.
The soft coup against Donald Trump failed. He has to run hard and sure to win in 2020 to
avoid an indictment in NY State when he leaves the Presidency. Corporate Democrats will do
their damnedst again to put forth their weakest pro war candidate like the aged, apparently
demented, Joe Biden. This fiasco and the recent coup attempt in Venezuela make the Keystone
Cops appear competent.
I put this all down to Washington DC being completely isolated inside their credentialed
bubble. It is just like corporate CEOs, who think they know exactly what they are doing. But,
in reality, they are destroying the stabilizing middle class by extracting and hording wealth
and turning mid-America into their colony. Globalist and nationalist oligarchs are after each
other's throat over who controls the flow of money.
We live on a very finite world dependent on one sun in an expanding universe. Just like
Boeing, Bayer or Volkswagen, the splintering world is starting to crash all around them. Even
as they deny it, this is a multi-polar world now. It is not going back without a world war
which would destroy civilization and could make the world uninhabitable for humans.
And the best that our government can do is warn us not to wash our chicken before cooking it
because washing merely spreads the salmonella that our food industry is unable to prevent
from infecting it.
The trouble is that those CEO's do know exactly what they are doing. Making money the
only way possible in a business environment in which outsourcing can sometimes be the only
thing that pays.
The idea was that Trump was going to change that environment. Bannon calls its "economic
nationalism" but in truth it's now just economic survival. Survival for those whose jobs are
outsourced. Survival for the country as a whole, ultimately. That was Trump's core programme. It was the programme that made him different from all
other Western politicians, "populist" or status quo. Do you see any sign that it's being
implemented, or has that programme too got bogged down in the swamp?
If we are speaking about criminal justice, there is some chance that we will see persons such
as Jim Comey, who persists in his smug higher calling act, prosecuted for what was a clear
cut violation in divulging classified material through a lawyer intermediary to the NYT. I
suspect the higher calling bit has been prompted in part because he knows that he screwed up
both on the facts and in law and he is justifying his screw up to himself, and possibly also
rehearsing his defense, with the rationale that he was only trying to do the right thing.
Yeah, he may have had the facts all wrong, the Russians, etc, etc, but the worst that can be
said is that he had been competent, there was no intent. That defense doesn't do much for the
FBI's once held reputation for competence, but that appears to be gone anyway.
With regard to what will be turned up concerning the actual roots of the travesty, the
heavily politicized faux investigation into the Clinton e mails and targeting of the Trump
campaign on a predicate that is somewhere between nebulous and non existant, I think a
criminal prosecution arising from that investigation, even if it is serious, is unlikely for
two main reasons. First, what will be the charged violations? As best I can see right now,
they will have to entail some imaginative application of fraud statutes, defrauding the FISC,
defrauding the US, informants and assets lying to their handlers, or process crimes like Bob
Mueller's partisan posse relied upon (ugly); and second, something like the Comey defense
will interpenetrate all the individuals and entities involved: we may have been incredible
bunglers, but that is the worst of it. We really believed these charlatans who conned us into
this debacle. Sorry, but we thought we were doing the right thing.
Now if we are talking about seeing some kind of political or moral justice, I'm not too
optimistic we will get much satisfaction there either and we will probably have to wait for
history. The reason is that Barr will conduct this investigation by the rule book. That means
that what we see developed through the process, indictment, prosecution, etc, is likely
all,that we will ever see. Barr is very unlikely to produce a politcized manifesto to be
employed as a smear weapon like the once reputable Mueller did.
Anyway, until we see a special FGJ empanelled, some search warrants executed, some tactical
immunities offered, everything is on the come.
What probability do you assign that any top official will be indicted and prosecuted? I
mean Brennan, Clapper, Comey & Lynch.
Second, what probability do you assign that Trump will declassify the relevant documents
and communications like the FISA application,the originating EC, the tasking orders for
FBI/CIA spying, etc.
The question really comes down to Trump. Does he really want to expose the Swamp and pay
the price or just use it for rhetorical & political purposes? When considering
probabilities and looking at his track record in office on foreign policy relative to his
campaign stance, I would say the probability is less than 30% that Brennan & Clapper will
be indicted.
The question is only very partly what Trump wants, in some abstract sense. Situations like
this commonly have a strong escalatory logic. So one needs to ask whether or not he has
rational reason to believe that unless he can destroy those who have shown themselves
prepared to stop at nothing to destroy him, they will eventually succeed.
If the answer is yes - and while I think it may very well be, I am not prejudging the
issue - then a key question becomes whether Trump will conclude that his most promising
loption is to go after the conspirators by every means possible.
Involved here are questions about who he is listening to, and how competent they are.
But the escalatory processes are not simply to do with what Trump decides. In particular,
a whole range of legal proceedings are involved. The referral in relation to Nellie Ohr is
likely to be the fist of a good few. In addition, Ed Butowsky's lawsuits, and those against
Steele, have unpredictable potentialities.
The intelligence & law enforcement apparatus in collusion with the media and the
establishment of both parties went after him hard. As Larry notes here, they went to
considerable effort to entrap those related to his campaign to impugn him. Mueller spent $35
million trying to find an angle. Even after the Mueller report stated there was no collusion
they're sill after him. So that's not going to end any time soon.
Trump may have good instincts but his judgment of people so far to staff his
administration is not very inspiring. He had Jeff Sessions as his AG and he let him hang in
there for nearly two years while Mueller ran riot. He's surrounded himself with neocons on
foreign policy. It seems his only real advisor is Jared. Everyone else he's got around him
are from the same establishment that's going after him. He hasn't taken advise from Devin
Nunes, who has done more to uncover the sedition than anyone else. If he had he would have by
now declassified all the documents & communications. The impression I have is his primary
motivation is building his brand & less about governance and wielding power. Take for
example his order to withdraw from Syria. Bolton & the Pentagon are thumbing their noses
at him.
Well, there have been several criminal referrals prior to the recent one on Nellie Ohr.
There's the McCabe referral and the 8 referrals by Devin Nunes. I've not read any report of
the empaneling of a grand jury yet. I agree with you that these law suits have the potential
for great embarrassment, however to hold those responsible for the sedition accountable will
require iron will & intense focus on the part of Trump to get his AG to assign
prosecutors who don't have the axe to "protect" the "institution" and to create an
opportunity for public awareness of the extent that law enforcement & intelligence became
a 4th branch of government. My opinion is that his skill is in his instinctual understanding
of the current political zeitgeist and his ability to manipulate the media including social
media to project his brand. He's not an operational leader making sure his team executes his
vision & strategy.
Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy
Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources
(including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were
employed by the bureau in this operation:
A foreign intelligence asset was used to justify surveillance of Trump[ and some of his associates
Notable quotes:
"... What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent? ..."
"... The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA) and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant"). ..."
"... The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their hand on the scale. ..."
"... Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power. ..."
"... I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors. ..."
"... if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know? ..."
"... Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost. ..."
"... Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance. ..."
"... From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. ..."
"... He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI. ..."
"... its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered. ..."
"... Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this? ..."
"... A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as 'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies. ..."
"... It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries ..."
"... If, as seems likely, both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary. ..."
"... An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him ..."
"... A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the supposed termination ..."
"... 'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence probes in American history.' ..."
"... I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief. ..."
"... Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it. ..."
"... Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense. So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs. ..."
"... Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly: ..."
"... Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. ..."
"... One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get 'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt on Trump...how is this not the same...? ..."
"... What role did Stefan Halper and Mifsud play as Confidential Human Sources in all this? ..."
"... Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation that may have already begun? ..."
"... British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete), his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy. ..."
"... British Intelligence is verifiably the foreign source with the most extensive and effective meddling in the 2016 election. Perfidious Albion. ..."
"... Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws they have that prohibits spying on their people. ..."
"... still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources ..."
"... I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia. ..."
"... Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these people think they are. ..."
"... It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things ..."
The revelations from US Government records about the FBI/Intel Community plot to take out Donald Trump continue to flow thanks
to the dogged efforts of Judicial Watch. The latest nugget came last Friday with the release of FBI records detailing their recruitment
and management of Britain's ostensibly retired Intelligence Officer, Christopher Steele. He was an officially recruited FBI source
and received at least 11 payments during the 9 month period that he was signed up as a Confidential Human Source.
You may find it strange that we can glean so much information from
a document dump that is almost
entirely redacted . The key is to look at the report forms; there are three types--FD-1023 (Source Reports), FD-209a (Contact
Reports) and FD-794b (Payment Requests). There are 15 different 1023s, 13 209a reports and 11 794b payment requests covering the
period from 2 February 2016 thru 1 November 2016. That is a total of nine months.
These reports totally destroy the existing meme that Steele only came into contact with the FBI sometime in July 2016. It is important
for you to understand that a 1023 Source Report is filled out each time that the FBI source handler has contact with the source.
This can be an in person meeting or a phone call. Each report lists the name of the Case Agent; the date, time and location of the
meeting; any other people attending the meeting; and a summary of what was discussed.
What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive
contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent?
The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA)
and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps
who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant").
We can be pretty sure this predates any alleged Russian "hacking" (unless it occurred as a result of alleged Russian hacking
of the DNC in 2015).
This needs to be pinned down if anyone is to be successfully prosecuted for creating this treasonous hoax.
A very closely related topic, Victor Davis Hanson is onto something but it is darker than he suggests,
https://www.nationalreview.... Paraphrasing, he gives the typical, rally around the flag we must stop the Russians intro but
then documents how govt flaks abused their power to influence our elections and then makes the point, 'this is why the public
is skeptical of their claims'.
The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their
hand on the scale.
Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are
trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the
mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't
support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power.
I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in
the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors.
What I can't figure out is: if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the
Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance
with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know?
Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them
to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost.
Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie
that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance.
From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole
thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews
by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. And of course the media narrative that Rep. Nunes, Goodlatte and others were endangering "national
security" by casting aspersions on the "patriotic" law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got
their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI.
Of course, he had most likely already done so and its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered
to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered.
Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was
not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this?
The point is not merely a quibble. A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law
enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as
'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies.
It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of
agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries.
Another related matter has to do with the termination of Steele as a 'Confidential Human Source.'
It has long seemed to me that it was more than possible that this was not to be taken at face value. If, as seems likely,
both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately
involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information
to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary.
An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back
channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him.
A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the
supposed termination.
When on 31 January 2017 – well after the publication of the dossier by BuzzFeed – Ohr provided reassurance that he could continue
to help feed information to the FBI, Steele texted back:
"If you end up out though, I really need another (bureau?) contact point/number who is briefed. We can't allow our guy to be
forced to go back home. It would be disastrous."
At that point, Solomon tells us that 'Investigators are trying to determine who Steele was referring to.' This seems to me
a rather important question. It would seem likely, although not certain, that he is talking about another Brit. If he is, would
it have been someone else employed by Orbis? Or someone currently working for British intelligence? What is the precise significance
of 'forced to go back home', and why would this have been 'disastrous'?
Another crucial paragraph:
'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in
London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence
probes in American history.'
The earlier contacts may be of little interest, but there again they may not be.
As it happens, it was following Berezovsky's arrival in London in October 2001 that the 'information operations' network he
created began to move into high gear. It is moreover clear that this was always a transatlantic operation, and also fragments
of evidence suggest that the FBI may have had some involvement from early on.
I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large
measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures
close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication
which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief.
The original attempt came in a radio programme broadcast by the BBC – which was to become known to some of us as the 'Berezovsky
Broadcasting Corporation' – on 16 December 2006, presented by Tom Mangold, a familiar 'trusty' for the intelligence services.
(A transcript sent out from the Cabinet Office at the time is available on the archived 'Evidence' page for the Inquiry, at
http://webarchive.nationala... , as HMG000513. There is an interesting and rather important question as to whether those who
sent it out, and those who received it, knew that it was more or less BS from start to finish.)
The programme was wholly devoted to claims made by the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets, who was presented as an independent
'due diligence' expert, without any mention of the rather major role he had played in the original 'Orange Revolution.'
Back-up was provided by his supposed collaborator in 'due diligence', the former FBI operative Robert 'Bobby' Levinson. No
mention was made of the fact that he had been, in the 'Nineties, a, if not the lead FBI investigator into the notorious Ukrainian
Jewish mobster Semyon Mogilevich.
The following March Levinson would disappear on the Iranian island of Kish, on what we now know was a covert mission on behalf
of elements in the CIA.
Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether
the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson
were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important
issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it.
Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including
McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense.
So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs.
Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem
to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly:
Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with
the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted
his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation
culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. His initial contact with old friends at the FBI Eurasian
Crime Task Force is awfully similar to his contacting these same friends in 2016 after deciding his initial Trump research was
potentially bigger than mere opposition research.
One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get
'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously
I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt
on Trump...how is this not the same...?
Even worse is that the FBI was using this same foreign agent that a presidential
candidate had hired to get dirt on an opponent... Even knowing nothing about legalities this just doesn't look very good...
Stupid question? As the Col. has explained, the President can declassify any document he pleases. So, why doesn't Donaldo unredact
the redacted portions of these bullcrap docs? What is he afraid of? That the Intel community will get mad and be out to get him?
Isn't time for him to show some cojones?
Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this
have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence
source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation
that may have already begun?
British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete),
his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated
desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting
others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has
not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too
big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy.
Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing
agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? And therefore without having to mess about with any formal FISA warrant
thingy's ... But, then use what might be found (or plausibly alleged) to try to get a proper FISA warrant later on (July 2016)?
'Parallel Discovery' of sorts; with Fusion GPS also a leaky cut-out: channelling media reports to be used as confirmation of Steele's
"raw intelligence" in the formal FISA application(s)?
Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they
would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates,
" Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching
him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, "
That's a good question, could it legally enable an end run around the FISC until enough evidence was gathered for a FISC surveillance
authorization?.
I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the
NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws
they have that prohibits spying on their people.
Only a matter of time until someone figured out the same method could be used to "meddle" in national affairs.
I understand, but still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources such as Steele about
a very high profile American citizen and businessman -- aren't our intelligence services competent enough to have known and discovered
as much if not more about Trump than other countries' intelligence services? I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years
ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In
my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia.
Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them
are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these
people think they are.
It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things.
This "shadowy Russian" might well be Sergey Skripal. This suggests that Steele dossier was CIA operation with British MI6 as transfer mechanism and
Steele as a cover. And implicates Brennan. So this is next level of leaks after "Stormy Daniel"...
Another NYT leak out of a set of well coordinated leans from anonymous intelligence officials ;-) Poor Melania...
Notable quotes:
"... But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to a fascinating report from The New York Times. ..."
"... If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries. ..."
"... More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia is still being stoked no matter what. ..."
"... Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine, McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down. ..."
"... the CIA has to turn America into a criminal totalitarian regime in order to make the world safe for democracy ..."
"... How much you wanna bet that Brennan, Obama's CIA Director, was behind ..."
"... You mean the same Brennan who is the godfather of ISIS? ..."
"... "U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can call off the hounds. ..."
"... Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it... ..."
"... Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big bad russkies tricked us. ..."
"... 'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope. Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a long shot. ..."
"... i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds. this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to trump. ..."
"... Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a cloth." ..."
"... And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works ..."
"... So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers for procurers of hosebags for him to screw? ..."
When they said "Russian collusion", few expected it to be between the CIA and a "shadowy
Russian operative." And yet, according to a blockbuster NYT report, that's precisely what
happened.
* * *
The CIA paid $100,000 last year to a Russian operative who claimed to have derogatory
information about President Trump, including a video tape of the Republican engaged with
prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. If the video showed Trump, it would support claims made in
the infamous Steele dossier, the salacious opposition research report financed by the Clinton
campaign and DNC.
But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other
information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to
a fascinating report from The New York Times.
American spies made contact with the Russia early in 2017 after he offered to sell the Trump
material along with cyber hacking tools that were stolen from the NSA that year, according to
The Times. U.S. intelligence officials told The Times they were so desperate to retrieve those
tools that they negotiated with the operative for months despite several red flags, including
indications that he was working in concert with Russian intelligence.
Another red flag was the Russian's financial request. He initially sought $10 million for
the information but dropped the asking price to $1 million.
After months of negotiations, American spies handed over $100,000 in cash in a brief case to
the Russian during a meeting in Berlin in September.
The operative also offered documents and emails that purported to implicate other Trump
associates, including former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But The Times viewed the
documents and reported that they were mostly information that is already in the public
domain.
The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers, showed the video
purported to be Trump to a Berlin-based American businessman who served as his intermediary to
the CIA. But according to the Times, the footage and the location of the viewing raised
questions about its authenticity.
The 15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was
Trump, and there was no audio. The Russian also showed the video to his American partner at the
Russian embassy in Berlin, a sign that the operative had ties to Russian intelligence.
The Russian stonewalled the production of the cyber tools, and U.S. officials eventually cut
ties, according to The Times. After the payout in Berlin, the man provided information about
Trump and his associates of questionable veracity.
The Americans gave him an ultimatum earlier in 2018 to either play ball, leave Western
Europe, or face criminal charges. He left, according to The Times, which interviewed U.S.
officials, the American intermediary and the Russian for its article.
The Times' U.S. sources -- who appear to paint the American side in a positive light -- said
that they were reluctant to purchase information because they did not want to be seen buying
dirt on the president.
The officials also expressed concern that the Russian operative was planting disinformation
on behalf of the Russian government. U.S. officials were worried that the Russian government
has sought to sow discord between U.S. intelligence agencies and Trump. The revelation that the
CIA purchased dirt on him would likely do the trick.
The Times report also has other new details.
Four other Russians with ties to the spy world have surfaced over the past year offering to
sell dirt on Trump that closely mirrors allegations made in the dossier, according to the
article. But officials have reason to believe that some of sellers have ties to Russian
intelligence agencies.
The Times also provides new details on Cody Shearer, a notorious operative close to the
Clintons. Shearer was recently revealed to have shopped
around a so-called "second dossier" prior to the campaign which mirrored the sex allegations of
the Steele report.
According to The Times, he has criss-crossed Europe over the past six months in an attempt
to find video footage of Trump from the Moscow hotel room. Shearer claimed to have information
from the FSB, Russia's spy service, that a video existed of Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow
hotel room.
He shared a memo making the allegations with his friend and fellow Clinton fixer, Sidney
Blumenthal. Blumenthal in turn passed the memo to his friend, Jonathan Winer, a Department of
State official. Winer then gave the information to Steele who provided it to the FBI in October
2016.
Steele also provided information to Winer, who wrote up a two-page memo that was circulated
within the State Department.
Trump has denied allegations that he used prostitutes in Moscow. He has called the dossier a
"hoax" and "crap."
* * *
On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted that "according to the @nytimes, a Russian sold phony
secrets on "Trump" to the U.S. Asking price was $10 million, brought down to $1 million to be
paid over time. I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here. It is
all now starting to come out - DRAIN THE SWAMP!
Of course, if Trump really wants to "drain the swamp", any such decision would have
originate with him. Tags PoliticsCommercial Banks
Release the pee pee video now! No one pee peed in the $100,000 video in question. The
15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was Trump,
and there was no audio. And how can anyone be more fascinated by the prospect of pee pee than
by the fact that US intelligence agencies were buying bad information from extremely shady
foreigners in an attempt to overthrow the President of the United States?
Trump is starting to assume that the people are dumber than Obowel did. Earth to Don, you
sir have the drain pump, you sir have surrounded yourself with Swamp creatures.... You sir
are.............
According to this, the Russians stole the hacking tools needed to cut through the Swamp
levee, which were developed by the NSA, and now the CIA cannot buy them back. Now, since the
USA wanted its Swamp, the Russians are more than happy to let the USA drown in its swamp.
Anyone have a link for the Qanon posts. I haven't seen them in a couple of weeks since he
left 8chan where he was posting. I don't want the Youtube BS, I just want the link... anyone
got one. Its strangely not googleable... LOLZ.
If you think that the CIA is a U.S. intelligence agency working on the best interests of
the United States, you better wake up and smell the treason. They only work for the best
interests of themselves.
Here is a question. Why does the CIA not come out and clear the air re: Trump?
I mean they were even paying people to come up with dirt. He is now your president and the
country is a fucking mess. Should the CIA not come out and say we tried but we got nothing?
They do have the ability to fix all this Trump shit and yet crickets.
And the best interests of clients. The CIA started out is the muscle for the Dulles
Brothers clients who were being booted out of various countries they were super-exploiting.
The Agency hasn't looked back since.
Nobody got whizzed on. That lurid fantasy came soley out of the head of Hillary Clinton,
given to Blumenthal, passed around and made to look like it came from Russia.
It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald
firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a
building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT
being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping
backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in
front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist
passports floating gently down from the sky.
RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had
CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban
hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief
of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn
Monroe.
The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a
thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b)
in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the
Cold War...
Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope
needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle
attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit
stationary targets reliably.
Drain the swamp! Townsquare justice for Odumbo and Hitlery! George Soros to bathe in the
Amazon River with 1 million Piranha Fish until it completely disappears. Drain the evil
Dumorat swamp. Drain the banana republic CIA and FBI. Our tax dollars and constitution did
not pay for this shit.
With today's technology, the CIA is most likely working on a fake video for you right now.
They might release it on Vimeo or Netflix to cover the costs and give themselves plausible
deniability. To add a finishing touch they will make a fake video of Julian Assange claiming
he is releasing it. You'll be in hog heaven. Which is where folks like you go just before
being slaughtered by your owners and turned into spam.
Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to
Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...
And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even
pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in
my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!
No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and
evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7
during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.
So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is
so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull
off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency?
You can't have it both ways.
We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all
day, where would we be without them?
Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to
Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...
And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even
pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in
my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!
No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and
evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7
during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.
So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is
so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull
off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency?
You can't have it both ways.
We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all
day, where would we be without them?
More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help
themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia
is still being stoked no matter what.
Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does
that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine,
McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to
Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the
rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down.
Good point in the last sentence. If someone is going to "drain the swamp" it is going to
have to be the president of the United States. I think I'm correct that he can fire anyone
that works in the executive department for cause. He can also order investigations or hire
people who will launch real investigations.
Mr. President, if you want to "drain the swamp," drain it.
If there was a video it would of been leaked during the election, they have nothing that
sticks on the guy.
All the evidence thus far states
Obama Hillary the FBI, DNC, CIA all spied on Trump and colluded with foreign governments
(U.K. , Ukraine , Russia) to try and dig up dirt to use against Trump (and they more or less
failed).
They turned over every rock they could, look at that stupid hot-mic video in the bus, how
many hours of video did they have to go through to dig up that crumb? they went back
searching through 30+ years of content and thats all they could come up with.... some locker
room talk lol
People have to just face it.
Your government was and still is corrupt and its a weaponized system of control, Your
government colluded with the enemy in a desperate attempt to stop Trump from becoming
president. Your government started a sham "Russia investigation" to cover up its own crimes.
Your government applied a different standard of justice to the clintons than it would have to
you or anyone else.
To date ZERO evidence has been brought forward that Trump or anyone in his campaign did
anything wrong, and the only people that have done anything wrong so far were picked by "the
swamp" to fill positions..... all the others fell into petty perjury Traps on meaningless
topics and insignificant factoids.
Isn't it lovely to find out that your money and mine is being used by government agents to
give us the government they want?
It's sort of like a thug robbing you and using part of your money to pay another thug to
rough you up from time time to time if you ask any questions with the thugs believing it's
for our own good.
Thanks, Hillary, for looking out for us. You and your best buds are the best. Such
bighearted givers! Meanwhile, give our regards to your partner in slime Obama, although it
must pain you to have been bested by 'Beavis' who thinks so much of himself to balance out
how little he impresses anyone who knows him.
"U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can
call off the hounds.
Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of
power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this
himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it...
As taxpayers can we sue the CIA for misusing our funds? Pretty sure that buying sex videos
for commercial release isn't part of the CIA's lawful mandate even at bargain prices.
Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US
intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on
their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own
treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big
bad russkies tricked us.
my sauces tell me that pink pussyhat wearing hollywood types have been called in because
they have a doppelganger for trump and access to 30,000 sexually abused victims that can act
as Russian prostitutes for just ten bucks each. snapchat has a trump emoji that can be transplanted onto any porn video star - male or
female - thus confirming that trump is a serial (serious?) user of ladies of the night
my sauces also tell me that the CIA offers a reward of 100,000 bucks (or 10 BTC) for every
photo-shopped (snap-shopped or porn-shopped) material.
of course, the CIA already owns many many porn movie studios and films, but it would
prefer third "party" movies - not from epstein's island where its operatives choose to rela
with a pizza.
the CIA "pink" budget for such movies is limited to just 5,000 clips or 5 billion of
taxpayers funds, whichever is the higher.
'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the
Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it
hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly
elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope.
Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a
long shot.
i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds.
this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to
trump.
Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I
copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a
cloth."
And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but
my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works.
So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and
more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers
for procurers of hosebags for him to screw?
I mean if they're so concerned about Trump and a couple of hookers... Better put some ice on that, CIA.
You all are so ridiculous and fooled with your "drain the swamp" bs. It's a great idea but
Trump doing it is a joke, I mean just look at who he has hired, what's wrong with you all are
you blind?!!
He can't even fill 1/3 of the government positions he's supposed to and the ones he has
have no business holding the positions given to them and are so incompetent, downright
criminal or just personally horrendous humans that they can't stay in office more than a few
months. All their blatant and moronically concocted lies are backing them into corners every
day that they just try and lie out of again. America is over if we really have gotten to the
point that a group like Trump's has support, it's just astonishing.
If prophecy does not happen, Russiagaters like typical members of "Doomsday
cults" just became more bound to their sect as admitting this means destroying self-respect.
Notable quotes:
"... What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues? ..."
"... I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one. ..."
"... Now, you may think that's a good thing to do. I'm not arguing about that. I'm not arguing politics. All I'm saying is projection is when we project onto somebody else the things that we do ourselves, and we refuse to deal with the implications of it. So there's denial and then there's projection. ..."
"... And I think there was this huge element of victimhood in this Russiagate process. ..."
"... ("The Resistance With Keith Olbermann", GQ, December 2016) ..."
"... ("The Rachel Maddow Show", MSNBC, March 2017) ..."
"... ("All In With Chris Hayes", MSNBC, February 2018) ..."
"... ("AM Joy", MSNBC, February 2018) ..."
"... GABOR MATÉ : And the assumption, that even if you take all the things that Russia was charged with in this whole Russiagate narrative over the last two and a half years, and if you multiply it by a hundred times, even then, you could not have possibly destroyed the United States. Even then, what is our self image if we think we're that weak, that that kind of external interference could undermine everything that you believed this country has built over the last few centuries?' ..."
"... (FBI Director Robert Mueller, Congressional Testimony, February 2003) ..."
"... ROBERT MUELLER : As Director Tenet has pointed out, Secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction and willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical or radiological material. ..."
"... GABOR MATÉ : So given the line supported by Mueller led to the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqi people and thousands of Americans, and has incurred costs that we all are fully aware of in terms of rise in terrorism and embroilment in multiple wars and situations, it takes an act of powerful historical amnesia for people to believe that this man is going to be our savior. That's the first point. Just incredible historical amnesia number one. ..."
"... ooking at how under the Bushes and under Obama, there was this massive transfer of wealth upwards. Instead of asking why Barack Obama gets $400,000 for an hour speech to Wall Street, which means that maybe our faith in how our system operates needs to be shaken a bit so we can actually look at what's really going on, let's just put our attention on some foreign devil again. ..."
"... How did the Democratic elite deliberately try to marginalize the progressive candidate? ..."
"... Like if he lacks discretion, let's assume that Russia did leak those Democratic e mails. Let's assume that. We don't know that they did. But we don't know that they didn't either. Let's assume that they did. Which is the greater assault on American democracy? The fact that the Russians leaked the document? Or that the American national Democratic leadership deliberately tried to marginalize one of their own candidates? ..."
"... We screwed up. We actually tried to undemocratically interfere with the Democratic nomination. We didn't pay attention to the people that were really hurting in the society because of our policies. We as the press gave this man all kinds of attention that he never deserved and never merited because he was interesting news and sold copies. ..."
"... AARON MATÉ: And there's a material incentive to do it. Because as you've talked about, if you're the Democrats and you look at the lessons of the election, you saw that people rejected your neoliberal economic legacy, that means you have to start challenging the powerful corporate sectors that you've been representing for a long time, actually posing real alternative policies to Donald Trump. ..."
"... If you do that, though, you risk losing your privileged status within the power structure. And the same thing if you're in the media and you identify with that faction of the power structure. ..."
AARON MATÉ : So we've just been through this two-year ordeal with
Russiagate. It's in a new phase now with Robert Mueller rejecting the outcome that so many were
expecting, that there would be a Trump-Russia conspiracy. Your sense of how this whole thing
has gone?
GABOR MATÉ : What's interesting is that in the aftermath of the Mueller thunderbolt
of no proof of collusion, there were articles about how people are disappointed about this
finding.
Now, disappointment means that you're expecting something and you wanted something to
happen, and it didn't happen. So that means that some people wanted Mueller to find evidence of
collusion, which means that emotionally they were invested in it. It wasn't just that they
wanted to know the truth. They actually wanted the truth to look a certain way. And wherever we
want the truth to look a certain way, there's some reason that has to do with their own
emotional needs and not just with the concern for reality.
And in politics in general, we think that people make decisions on intellectual grounds
based on facts and beliefs. Very often, actually, people's dynamics are driven by emotional
forces that they're not even aware of in themselves. And I, really, as I observed this whole
Russiagate phenomenon from the beginning, it really seemed to me that there was a lot of
emotionality in it that had little to do with the actual facts of the case.
... ... ...
What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in
believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions
and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do
we address those issues?
... ... ...
I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to
the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.
... ... ...
GABOR MATÉ : So even if it's true what the Russians have even if it's the worst thing
that's alleged about the Russians is true, it's not even on miniscule proportion of what
America has publicly acknowledged it has done all around the world. And so this rage that we
project, then, and this bad guy image that we project onto the Russians, it's simply a mirror a
very inadequate mirror of what America publicly and openly and repeatedly does all around the
world.
Now, you may think that's a good thing to do. I'm not arguing about that. I'm not arguing
politics. All I'm saying is projection is when we project onto somebody else the things that we
do ourselves, and we refuse to deal with the implications of it. So there's denial and then
there's projection.
And then, there's just something in people. I can tell you well, your mother can tell you
this that in relationships it's always easier to see ourselves as the victims than as the
perpetrators. So there's something comforting about seeing oneself as the victim of somebody
else. Nobody likes to be a victim. But people like to see themselves as victims because it
means they don't have to take responsibility for what we do ourselves.
AARON MATÉ : I can relate to that, too.
GABOR MATÉ : Yeah. I'm just saying the effect of somebody else. So this functions
beautifully in politics. And populist politicians and xenophobic politicians around the world
use this dynamic all the time. That whether it's Great Britain, or whether it's France with
their vast colonial empires, they're always the victims of everybody else. The United States is
always the victim of everybody else. All these enemies that are threatening us. It's the most
powerful nation on earth, a nation that could single handedly destroy the earth a billion times
over with the weapons that are at its disposal, and it's always the victim.
So this victimhood, there is something comforting about it because, again, it allows us not
to look at ourselves. And I think there was this huge element of victimhood in this
Russiagate process.
Noam Chomsky on Mass Media Obsession with Russia & the Stories Not Being Covered in the
Trump Era
("The Resistance With Keith Olbermann", GQ, December 2016)
KEITH OLBERMANN : The nation and all of our freedoms hang by a thread. And the military
apparatus of this country is about to be handed over to scum who are beholden to scum,
Russian scum. As things are today, January 20th will not be an inauguration but rather the
end of the United States as an independent country
("The Rachel Maddow Show", MSNBC, March 2017)
RACHEL MADDOW : But the important thing here is that that Bernie Sanders lovers page run
out of Albania, it's still there. Still running. Still operating. Still churning this stuff
out. Now. This is not part of American politics. This is not, you know, partisan warfare
between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country.
("All In With Chris Hayes", MSNBC, February 2018)
JERROLD NADLER : Imagine if FDR had denied that the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor
and didn't react, that's the equivalent.
CHRIS HAYES : Well, it's a bit of a different thing. I mean --
JERROLD NADLER : No, it's not.
CHRIS HAYES : They didn't kill anyone.
JERROLD NADLER : They didn't kill anyone, but they're destroying our country, our
democratic process.
CHRIS HAYES : Do you really think it's on par?
JERROLD NADLER : Not in the amount of violence, but I think in the seriousness it is very
much on par. This country exists to have a democratic system with a small D, that's what the
country's all about, and this is an attempt to destroy that.
("AM Joy", MSNBC, February 2018)
ROB REINER : We have been invaded in such a subtle way because we don't see planes hitting
the buildings. We don't see bombs dropping in Pearl Harbor. But we have been invaded as
Malcolm [Nance] points out. We are under attack, but we don't feel it. But it's like walking
around with high blood pressure and then all of a sudden you're not aware of it and you drop
dead.
So it's insidious, and it has affected our blood stream. And if we don't do something
about it – and that's why, guys like John Brennan and James Clapper are running around
with their hair on fire because they're trying to wake people up to tell them: We have to do
something about it. We have to protect ourselves and if we don't, our 241 years of democracy
and self-governance will start to collapse.
GABOR MATÉ : And the assumption, that even if you take all the things that Russia
was charged with in this whole Russiagate narrative over the last two and a half years, and if
you multiply it by a hundred times, even then, you could not have possibly destroyed the United
States. Even then, what is our self image if we think we're that weak, that that kind of
external interference could undermine everything that you believed this country has built over
the last few centuries?'
So it shows to me a real shock reaction. And what has been shocked here is our beliefs in
what this country is about.
And again, as I said before, it's in a sense more comforting. It's frightening, but at the
same time more comforting to see the problem as coming from the outside than to search for it
with amongst ourselves and within ourselves.
AARON MATÉ : How about then the aspect of this that puts so much hope into Robert
Mueller? Because Robert Mueller was supposed to be our savior.
GABOR MATÉ : First of all, if we actually look at who Mueller is, who is he?
He's a man who, amongst many others, was 100 percent convinced that Iraq had weapons of mass
discussion.
VIDEO CLIP
(FBI Director Robert Mueller, Congressional Testimony, February 2003)
ROBERT MUELLER : As Director Tenet has pointed out, Secretary Powell presented evidence
last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction and willfully
attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that
Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical or radiological
material.
GABOR MATÉ : So given the line supported by Mueller led to the deaths of several
hundred thousand Iraqi people and thousands of Americans, and has incurred costs that we all
are fully aware of in terms of rise in terrorism and embroilment in multiple wars and
situations, it takes an act of powerful historical amnesia for people to believe that this man
is going to be our savior. That's the first point. Just incredible historical amnesia number
one.
Number two, America, if you can judge by its TV shows, is very much addicted to the good
guy/bad guy scenario. So that reality is not complex. And it's not subtle. And it's not a build
up of multiple dynamics, internal and external. But, basically, there's evil and there's good.
And evil is going to be cut out by the good and destroyed by it. And that's really how the
American narrative very often is presented.
Now, the same thing is projected into politics. So now if there's a bad guy called Putin and
his puppet called Trump, then there has to be a good guy that is going to save us from it. Some
guy on a white charger that's going to move in here, and is silver haired, patrician looking
man who's going to find the truth and rescue us all, which again is a projection of people's
hopes for truth outside of themselves onto some kind of a benevolent savior figure.
Needless to say, when that savior figure doesn't deliver, then we have to argue that maybe
he was bought off or corrupt or stupid himself or insufficient himself. Or that there's
something secret that has yet to be uncovered that some day will come to the surface that
Mueller himself was unable to discover for himself.
But, again, this projection of hope onto some savior figure. Rather than saying, okay,
there's a big problem here. We've elected a highly traumatized grandiose, intellectually
unstable, emotionally unstable, misogynist, self aggrandizer to power. Something in our society
made that happen. And let's look at what that was. And let's clear up those issues if we can.
And let's look at the people on the liberal side who, instead of challenging all those issues,
put all their energies into this foreign conspiracy explanation. Because to have challenged
those issues would have meant looking at their own policies, which tended in the same
direction.
Rather than looking at how under the Clinton, they've jailed hundreds of thousands of people
who should never have been in jail. L ooking at how under the Bushes and under Obama, there
was this massive transfer of wealth upwards. Instead of asking why Barack Obama gets $400,000
for an hour speech to Wall Street, which means that maybe our faith in how our system operates
needs to be shaken a bit so we can actually look at what's really going on, let's just put our
attention on some foreign devil again.
... ... ...
GABOR MATÉ : .... How did the Democratic elite deliberately try to marginalize the
progressive candidate?
Like if he lacks discretion, let's assume that Russia did leak those Democratic e mails.
Let's assume that. We don't know that they did. But we don't know that they didn't either.
Let's assume that they did. Which is the greater assault on American democracy? The fact that
the Russians leaked the document? Or that the American national Democratic leadership
deliberately tried to marginalize one of their own candidates?
... ... ...
GABOR MATÉ : Let me just interrupt to say that if I were those people, then, then
quite apart from the shock defense that we've already talked about, it'd be so much more
convenient for me to go to the Russia narrative than to say publicly, you know what? We
screwed up. We actually tried to undemocratically interfere with the Democratic nomination. We
didn't pay attention to the people that were really hurting in the society because of our
policies. We as the press gave this man all kinds of attention that he never deserved and never
merited because he was interesting news and sold copies.
... ... ...
AARON MATÉ: And there's a material incentive to do it. Because as you've talked
about, if you're the Democrats and you look at the lessons of the election, you saw that people
rejected your neoliberal economic legacy, that means you have to start challenging the powerful
corporate sectors that you've been representing for a long time, actually posing real
alternative policies to Donald Trump.
If you do that, though, you risk losing your privileged status within the power
structure. And the same thing if you're in the media and you identify with that faction of the
power structure.
"... What is Russiagate? Is it when a foreign country interferes in our elections? Or is it Really Hillarygate? a Clinton campaign ploy to deflect from her own shortcomings (emails revelations, her own collusion, her loss to Donald Trump). ..."
"... Russiagate and it's associated delusional bullshit is a way for the establishment to avoid dealing with actual issues ..."
"... It's just another form of the xenophobia behind the cold war and the war on terrorism, used to distract the public and destroy those who would attempt to inform the public of what is really going on (you know, the endless looting of the Treasury and the poisoning of people and planets in the name of shareholder returns). ..."
"... It's antisemitism for 'enlightened' people. ..."
"... Darn it, I forgot the big kahuna in my list of disasters caused by Russiagate: Trump's possible re-election. My sense is that once Mueller files his report sans collusion charges, the Republicans are going to come after the "fake news" press, the Never-Trumpers, and the Dem conspiracy theorists with far more force than they are now. ..."
"... When that happens, all of Trump's endless stream of lies and stupidity will become nothing but confetti in his ticker-tape parade. He and his allies can crow loudly, and rightly, about the press being 100% biased against him, and being given to ridiculous conspiracy theories, which neutralizes the MSM's very accurate assessment of his endless lying (on matters other than Russiagate). ..."
"... Russiagate may have been the most successful dirty trick in American history for 2-1/2 years, but it may well explode into the biggest backfire in U.S. history, too. ..."
"... Mind you, the MSM will never concede they were absurdly, grossly, disgustingly wrong about the whole thing. They will vainly cling to their fantasy. Too big to fail. But I think the Trump people will gain a lot of leverage over swing voters when everyone realizes Russiagate was bullshit from the word go. ..."
"... Russiagate: Democrat's own version of Birthergate. ..."
"... Except that the Birthers had less FISA abuse. Although, funny story, it was started by Clinton toady, Sidney Blumenthal, as a dirty trick to hurt Obama in South Carolina. ..."
"... And RussiaRussiaRussiagate started by... Clinton ops to deflect from her own scandals and shortcomings. Jeez, it’s almost like Hillary Clinton is an incredibly poisonous and corrosive influrnce on American politics. ..."
"... So what if there are now more oligarchs than Communists in Russia these days? The name Russia still conjures up "enemy?" writ large. And then, there are all those US fellow travelers, meaning anyone to the right of Senator Graham--and sometimes even he is a little too left for my taste. ..."
"... Need to assess the massive damage of what was likely the biggest and most successful dirty political trick in U.S. history. (1) turned Democrats into shills for the CIA and FBI; (2) created a new Cold War; (3) pushed Trump into the arms of Bolton and Pompeo, partly because he had to prove he wasn't a Russian agent or dupe; (4) triggered a vast and largely unreported censorship campaign that is aimed mostly at progressive outlets and progressive social media, though purporting to be primarily against things like Infowars; (5) encouraged Trump to send lethal arms to Ukraine (again, to prove himself a patriot); (6) encouraged Trump to abandon the INF; (7) encouraged Trump to discuss abandoning SALT; (8) turned Dems into a pro-Syrian occupation party (any talk of leaving is dismissed as serving Putin); helped turn Dems into a pro-Venezuela putsch party (again, because not overthrowing Maduro would ostensibly be serving Putin); turned a huge chunk of the party more dramatically against anti-war Dems like Sanders and Gabbard, who are "Putin dupes"; made progressive news outlets hawkish, e.g., Democracy Now, which picked Marcy Wheeler from all the other kooks and grifters to be their expert on Russiagate; and of course turned MSNBC, NBC, CNN, the WaPo, the NYT, and other legacy media into conspiracy theory cesspools that made HUGE HUGE HUGE money on Russiagate grifting. ..."
"... as if Russiagate was a Shadow Hillary Clinton Government. ..."
That phrase has been swirling around my head all morning after watching MSNBC admit that
there was no evidence of collusion as they hedged and tried to keep the question of collusion
open a little longer. I won't expect Rachel-RussiaRussia-Maddow to retreat anytime time soon
either.
I'm a bit confused as to what the statement above really means because I'm not quite sure
what Russiagate means for everyone else. If you search DuckDuckGo, you come up with different
result and meanings.
What is Russiagate? Is it when a foreign country interferes in our
elections? Or is it Really Hillarygate? a Clinton campaign ploy to deflect from her own
shortcomings (emails revelations, her own collusion, her loss to Donald Trump).
People seem to define Russiagate differently. In it's simplest form, -gate denotes scandal,
so which one? What would the statement above mean?
So if I said Russiagate is Dead, Long Live Russiagate would mean...
A: Collusion with Russia has been debunked, Long live the real collusion with Israel
B: One Clinton campaign ploy fizzles, and yet another on comes in 2020
C: MSNBC has admitted they were wrong, but will keep on it anyway.
D: Russia is going to keep colluding in our 2020 elections
What does the statement above mean for you? See where I'm going here?
Russiagate and it's associated delusional bullshit is a way for the establishment to avoid
dealing with actual issues, like the death of the natural world, for starters. It's just
another form of the xenophobia behind the cold war and the war on terrorism, used to distract
the public and destroy those who would attempt to inform the public of what is really going
on (you know, the endless looting of the Treasury and the poisoning of people and planets in
the name of shareholder returns).
Anybody with any notion of equality before the law know that Clinton and Trump are guilty
of multiple crimes that any of us lesser mortals would be doing hard time for. The delusion
we are supposed to buy into is that neither is or was a criminal or guilty of criminal acts
and/or misconduct when the opposite is patently true. Furthermore we are supposed to believe
that the criminality on display is due solely to Russian malfeasance. One of the key elements
of brainwashing (ala 1984) is making you believe that the lie is truth. Things like
"billionaires EARNED their billions" is the same kind brainwashing. And fucking
advertising.
FThumb
Bernie or Bust isn't a demand, it's a prophecy 5 points 6 points 7 points 2 months ago
(0 children)
It's just another form of the xenophobia behind the cold war and the war on
terrorism
Darn it, I forgot the big kahuna in my list of disasters caused by Russiagate: Trump's
possible re-election. My sense is that once Mueller files his report sans collusion charges,
the Republicans are going to come after the "fake news" press, the Never-Trumpers, and the
Dem conspiracy theorists with far more force than they are now.
To some extent, Trump's allies have held their fire hitherto, in part because a lot of
them weren't completely sure whether there was something to the charges. But also, I think,
they've held their fire (to an extent) because nothing they say will have traction until
after Mueller reports.
When that happens, all of Trump's endless stream of lies and stupidity will become nothing
but confetti in his ticker-tape parade. He and his allies can crow loudly, and rightly, about
the press being 100% biased against him, and being given to ridiculous conspiracy theories,
which neutralizes the MSM's very accurate assessment of his endless lying (on matters other
than Russiagate).
The press comes out the loser here. So does the Democratic Party. So do Never-Trump
Republicans. So do progressives, for the reasons I gave in my previous comment.
And who comes out the possible winner is Donald Trump, who, after Mueller files, will be
in a much stronger position to get re-elected. Republicans, moreover, may well recover much
of the ground lost in the 2018 "blue wave."
Russiagate may have been the most successful dirty trick in American history for 2-1/2
years, but it may well explode into the biggest backfire in U.S. history, too.
Mind you, the MSM will never concede they were absurdly, grossly, disgustingly wrong about
the whole thing. They will vainly cling to their fantasy. Too big to fail. But I think the
Trump people will gain a lot of leverage over swing voters when everyone realizes Russiagate
was bullshit from the word go.
Russiagate: Democrat's own version of Birthergate.
Blackhalo Purity pony:
Российский бот 14
points 15 points 16 points 2 months ago (1 child)
Except that the Birthers had less FISA abuse. Although, funny story, it was started by
Clinton toady, Sidney Blumenthal, as a dirty trick to hurt Obama in South Carolina.
And RussiaRussiaRussiagate started by... Clinton ops to deflect from her own scandals and
shortcomings. Jeez, it’s almost like Hillary Clinton is an incredibly poisonous and corrosive
influrnce on American politics.
This country's fight against socialism began in the later 1800s and pivoted to this
country's fight against Communism/RUSSIA as soon as the American Communist Party formed, if
not sooner. That's almost 150 years and untold trillions of dollars, plus a cold war and
several hot ones invested in fighting the socialist/Communist/Russian/red menace. You cannot
expect America to waste all that investment.
So what if there are now more oligarchs than Communists in Russia these days? The name
Russia still conjures up "enemy?" writ large. And then, there are all those US fellow
travelers, meaning anyone to the right of Senator Graham--and sometimes even he is a little
too left for my taste.
Need to assess the massive damage of what was likely the biggest and most successful dirty
political trick in U.S. history. (1) turned Democrats into shills for the CIA and FBI; (2)
created a new Cold War; (3) pushed Trump into the arms of Bolton and Pompeo, partly because
he had to prove he wasn't a Russian agent or dupe; (4) triggered a vast and largely
unreported censorship campaign that is aimed mostly at progressive outlets and progressive
social media, though purporting to be primarily against things like Infowars; (5) encouraged
Trump to send lethal arms to Ukraine (again, to prove himself a patriot); (6) encouraged
Trump to abandon the INF; (7) encouraged Trump to discuss abandoning SALT; (8) turned Dems
into a pro-Syrian occupation party (any talk of leaving is dismissed as serving Putin);
helped turn Dems into a pro-Venezuela putsch party (again, because not overthrowing Maduro
would ostensibly be serving Putin); turned a huge chunk of the party more dramatically
against anti-war Dems like Sanders and Gabbard, who are "Putin dupes"; made progressive news
outlets hawkish, e.g., Democracy Now, which picked Marcy Wheeler from all the other kooks and
grifters to be their expert on Russiagate; and of course turned MSNBC, NBC, CNN, the WaPo,
the NYT, and other legacy media into conspiracy theory cesspools that made HUGE HUGE HUGE
money on Russiagate grifting.
The poll found that more than two-thirds of the public (69%) think the news media "is
more concerned with advancing its points of view rather than reporting all the facts." Only
29% of the public disagrees with that statement.
"Russia!"
No way should Rachel Maddow have a job after this plays out.
You can literally call for the murder of white people(Al Sharpton, multiple times) in
sermons, demand gays get killed or hispanic-Americans tossed out(Joy Reid)on a blog and keep
your job at MSNBC.
Yeah, that WaPo ad stands at the dizzying height of arrogance and hypocrisy. Democracy dies
in darkness, and the Post has helped created it.
And yes, Maddow should be forever banned from reporting, but she has too many admirers for
that to happen. She has made mountains of money for MSNBC; they love her. She'll just cling
to the fantasy of collusion no matter how much evidence comes out, and millions will stand by
her.
The Mouse That Roared is a 1959 British satirical Eastman Color comedy film based on
Leonard Wibberley's novel The Mouse That Roared (1955). It stars Peter Sellers in three
roles: Duchess Gloriana XII; Count Rupert Mountjoy, the Prime Minister; and Tully Bascomb,
the military leader; and co-stars Jean Seberg. The film was directed by Jack Arnold, and the
screenplay was written by Roger MacDougall and Stanley Mann.
When I say Russiagate I mean the conspiracy theory that Russia meddled in the 2016 election
in a meaningful way. It has varying levels of craziness, as the goal post has moved:
It started as "Russia hacked the DNC server and you should distrust the emails because
the messenger is a bad actor", followed closely by "you should distrust the emails because
they may have been tampered with", or even "we won't say if the emails are real and we'll
let the media imply that they may be fiction."
It progressed to Russia colluded with Trump to swing the election. This is apparently
the holy grail. Find evidence of this and Trump is finished. Or something. Apparently,
Trump is a mastermind and if Russia wanted to meddle they'd need his permission or his help
or something.
It progressed to Russia swung the election in close states by manipulating social
media. In fact, they did manipulate social media. What's missing from this narrative is the
scope ($100K on facebook ads, only half of it before the election, and $4700 in google ads)
and motive (the indictment itself says the purpose of the effort seems to have been to gain
viewership for ads, to earn money) and even the truth of the premise (by money spent, they
didn't target swing states at all).
In its current state, Russiagate is all and it is none of the above. None of it has gone
anywhere, so now the plan is to simply mention Russia or call people Putin puppets or bots,
and let the viewer conclude any of the above. It has been reduced to lying by implication.
Let the well-trained viewer lie to themselves when they are triggered by the right words.
Very close. We should have the final written report by late 2019. But based on zero
indictments/convictions related to collusion, zero evidence of collusion and the Senate
investigation finding no collusion we can safely say this whole thing was a witch-hunt. I
strongly dislike Trump as a person and the terrible direction he's taken this country in but
Russiagate was 100% a political witch-hunt. But just because Trump/Russia collusion is dead
doesn't mean the tactic is. It'll just be used against the left now.
We've had experts in the field exploring different and less transparent ways to say zero, but
the best we've been able to come up with is just producing a report that's so long and boring
and obtuse that nobody will ever read it. Then people can insinuate that it contains whatever
they want it to contain.
You can indict anyone. As the saying goes, you can indict a turnip. The Internet Research
Agency indictments, which Mueller trotted out, were not actually the result of the FBI
investigation. The information was publicly available and was published by a Russian
investigative news team. The IRA was the company responsible for the Google and Facebook
buys. What is not usually mentioned is that the IRA is a clickbait factory that makes money
by getting people to click on links that show news, etc. and adds. Clinton and Trump are
clickbait. The posts were not all pro-Trump and, as mentioned, many were well after the
election. It is an open question to me as to whether there was small and lame attempt to
influence the election, or just an attempt to make a few rubles (or both) by getting people
to click on anti-Trump or anti-Clinton items (or pro-Trump or pro-Clinton for that matter). I
read one of the indictments the other day and it was ridiculous. There was a lot of preamble,
trying to make the IRA effort seem sinister, but if one continued to read, it was obvious
that she was essentially being accused of being an accountant that might have been involved
in money transfers that were used for add buys. The FBI has depended on the fact that these
people will not come to the US to stand trial and, therefore, the FBI will not have to
produce any real evidence.
Also, these indictments against Russians, with whom we have no extradition treaty were
'safe', in that nobody would actually face charges, so they'd never have to make their
pathetic case. When some US lawyers showed up on behalf of one group of defendents demanding
discovery, Meuller panicked, tried to claim national security, delayed and finally handed the
case off to some lower profile lawyers who will suffocate the whole case quietly with a
pillow as soon as the 18 month American memory has lapsed.
Blackhalo Purity pony:
Российский бот 6
points 7 points 8 points 2 months ago (1 child)
The only arrests and pleas were for lying to the FBI on unrelated matters, acting as an
unregistered lobbyist for Ukraine and the troll farm where the charges will be quickly
dropped as the "evidence" won't stand up in court.
Inuma I
take the headspace of idiots 8 points 9 points 10 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Even lying to the FBI is a stretch when they lost the paperwork and manipulated and deleted
evidence to collude with their narrative...
I think that Dem morons are now rabidly anti-Russia. It is time to flip the script and get
the Rep morons to hate Russia because of collusion between Putin and the Clinton campaign.
Russia will continue to offer western critics of empire a platform, and war-loving westerners
will continue their tantrums over getting facts from outside of the propaganda bubble.
Blackhalo Purity pony:
Российский бот 10
points 11 points 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)
collusion between Putin and the Clinton campaign.
Podesta was literally acting as a foreign lobbyist for Russian toady Yanukovych
An example of this is the Podesta Group’s $200,000 contract with an entity called
the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine. Podesta Group is an American lobbying firm run by
Tony Podesta. And the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine? That just happens to be an
operation controlled by Yanukovych, according to Ukrainska Pravda.
Yeah the case for Clinton/Russia collusion around Uranium One and the election is a million
times stronger than trying to claim Trump colluded because he wanted oppo research. We at
least have the Steele Dossier which was provided mostly by Russia to Trump's opponents.
Nobody has ever shown any credible evidence Russia did any of the hacking, or that Saddam
killed babies or had WMD, or that we were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Russiagate is a psyop and there never was any evidence to begin with or even an alleged
crime. So us not finding evidence doesn’t end it because these guys are desperate for
this to be real. They have become fully propagandized and useful idiots of the permanent
state.
Inuma I
take the headspace of idiots 7 points 8 points 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)
Mueller is a career hit man lawyer with insider ties to the FBI/CIA as well as the Bush
Administration.
Ya gotta ask yourself, Who does Russiagate benefit? From every possible angle it benefits
the establishment in both parties. It checks off every box on the wishlist, distracts from
their bought off immorality, election rigging, and fraud, while propping up aggressive war
and military spending.
Thank God Almighty you never have to subject yourself to this sub again. Come to think of it,
you never had to subject yourself to it at all, did you, troll?
I don't think ratings or money have anything to do with it anymore. I leave as evidence that
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post without researching its market or its financials, and
he spent just 1/400th of his wealth to acquire it.
Do you think that with so little money at stake (to him), and without even knowing if
there was money to be earned, that he bought it to make money with it?
News media is no longer about making money. Not directly, anyway. It's now about
control.
It's handy that Trump is earning them money, but that's not what's going on. Trump wasn't
supposed to win. It was a mistake. They are trying to eject him. They are exercising their
control to rid the system of an untrusted president. They are exercising their control to
make sure a progressive doesn't replace him. The financials are secondary.
Or is it Really Hillarygate? a Clinton campaign ploy to deflect from her own
shortcomings (emails revelations, her own collusion, her loss to Donald Trump).
Its been this since the morning after the election, and it's only been this.
It was that long before the morning after the election. They cooked it up probably in like
March 2016, even before the DNC announced they were hacked. The Clinton campaign thought its
greatest weakness was her coziness with Russia (one of the Podesta emails released by
Wikileaks put this as their #1 weakness). Knowing that Trump also had tons of connections
with Russians, they hired Cody Shearer and Sid Blumenthal to put together dossiers charging
Trump with being a Russian agent. They later got Fusion GPS to hire Steele to give the final
product more heft and authenticity, since he was an actual retired MI6 spook. Then then they
made the rounds with media outlets and Deep State agencies, trying to get them to open an
investigation, and to report on it. The effort wasn't hugely successful at first, but they
did get Brennan and Clapper to buy it, then Comey, and also David Corn of Mother Jones, and
Michael Isikoff.
Biggest and most successful dirty political trick in all U.S. history.
Except it may backfire in the end, since Trump now can credibly charge the media with
"fake news" and bias against him. I think the Republicans are just waiting for Mueller to
file his report before making a huge stink about the whole thing, as they should.
A huge disaster for the American people and for progressives especially, even though it
worked as a political trick, at least for 2-1/2 years.
Don't forget the Veselnitskaya meeting with Trump Jr. It was set up by Fusion GPS and the
co-founder of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, met with her before and after the Trump tower
meeting. She was suddenly granted a special visa to allow her to enter the country. The
meeting was useless to Trump because Veselnitskaya only wanted to talk about the Magnitsky
act. It was a total set up to provide ammunition so that security agencies could go to the
FISA court and get permission to spy on the Trump campaign.
EvilPhd666 "The Spoiler" Führer Twinkle
Gypsy / межразмерная
контрразведка 37
points 38 points 39 points 2 months ago (2 children)
The next phase of Russiagate is to go directly after the anti war movement. Leftist,
progressives, non interventionist conservatives are going to get painted as "influenced by
Russia" or agents of the Kremlin.
Bingo. Tulsi's experience is the canary in the coal mine.
Trump is irrelevant. What matters is that through Russiagate, we now have a huge swath of
"progressive" liberals, including many public intellectuals, celebrities, and others with
good reputations in society- who are completely inoculated with cold war era propaganda and
paranoia, and most critically the authoritarian mindset (listen to authority, questioning is
treason, consensus is truth, etc).
Conservatives are already susceptible to that mindset, so there's plenty of them (the
anti-trump and/or pro-war factions) that are ready to swallow whatever they're told as
well.
To put it simply, we have a giant cross-section of the populace that cuts across
ideological lines and is completely prepped for authoritarianism.
Naturally, the people who gravitate towards this will be the more comfortable among us,
because they aren't faced with social decay every day. Less fortunate people have a harder
time maintaining the contradiction of a perfect society ruined by foreign interference, but
the petty bourgeois and above have no such issue.
We're seeing open declarations that any attempt to reduce American empire, or head off
further expansion- even when it's solely about helping Americans rather than justice for
victims of imperialism- must be a foreign plot. Why?
Well (X foreign rival) clearly would rather we don't run the whole world, so obviously,
any attempt to prevent us from doing so- even if it's just so we don't bankrupt ourselves and
fall apart from within- is a plot by the Kremlin or Beijing or (insert foreign rival
here).
All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for
lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any
country.
In light of these revelations, I've become more active in calling out and engaging facebook
friends for posting russiagate bs - like stupid memes about russian collusion, telling them
it is a dangerous game and we in Europe don't want to be the next Cuban Missile Crisis.
"... Particularly shameless was Florida Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, who went on Tucker Carlson's show to peddle half-baked innuendo as brazen as anything claimed in the lead up to the Iraq War. If Maduro's government survived, he claimed, it would be "a green light, an open door for the Russians and for the Chinese and for others to increase their activity against our national security interest right here in our hemisphere." ..."
Russiagate hysteria is already being used to push Trump into an act of armed aggression against Venezuela. It's a disastrous result
of a pointless delusion.
One of the things Russiagate skeptics found unsettling about the frenzy over supposed "collusion" was that it made war more likely.
Not only did the now-debunked conspiracy theories and resulting political climate push officials into a more aggressive posture toward
Russia, but once the Kremlin was returned to its status as the foreign policy elite's Big Bad, it was easy to imagine a situation
where the threat of a Russian bogeyman could be used to justify any number of unrelated foreign adventures. This appears to be exactly
what's happening with
Venezuela
right now.
First there was Fareed Zakaria, who two months ago
tried to goad Trump into attacking Venezuela by pointing to Russia's support for Maduro. "Putin's efforts seem designed to taunt
the United States," he said (it might also have something to do with the
billions of dollars Russia
sank into the country), making reference to the Monroe Doctrine. He asked if Washington would "allow Moscow to make a mockery of
another American red line," warning that "if Washington does not back its words with deeds" the country could become another Syria.
Zakaria concluded: "will Venezuela finally be the moment when Trump finally ends his appeasement?"
More recently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
charged that Russia had "invaded" Venezuela before claiming the Kremlin had dissuaded Maduro from fleeing the country at the
last moment, something Pompeo has provided no evidence for but much of the media has treated as fact since.
National Security Advisor
John Bolton has
said that "this is our hemisphere"
and "not where the Russians ought to be interfering." Democratic Sen. Doug Jones
echoed this sentiment on CNN, praising the Trump
administration for saying "all options are on the table" to deal with Venezuela, something he suggested may have to be acted on "if
there is some more intervention [by] Russia."
The national press, taking a break from warning about Trump being a dangerous authoritarian, has been
demanding to know why he hasn't been more aggressive toward the country over this.
Particularly shameless was Florida Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, who went on Tucker Carlson's show to
peddle half-baked
innuendo as brazen as anything claimed in the lead up to the Iraq War. If Maduro's government survived, he claimed, it would be "a
green light, an open door for the Russians and for the Chinese and for others to increase their activity against our national security
interest right here in our hemisphere."
He went on to claim that Russia had already placed nuclear missiles in the country, and that it could lead to a Cuban missile
crisis-like conflict. There is no evidence this is true, and Díaz-Balart didn't provide any.
Of course, no coverage of the Trump administration's relations with Russia would be complete without a trip into Rachel Maddow's
fractured psyche. After Trump repeated Putin's personal assurances that he wasn't interested in getting involved in Venezuela --
contradicting Pompeo and Bolton -- Maddow addressed the two
officials :
Hey John Bolton, hey Mike Pompeo, are you guys enjoying your jobs right now? You each thought your job this week was to name
and shame and threaten and counter Russian government involvement in Venezuela while saber-rattling about how everybody else better
get out of the way because the US is really mad about it. Guys, turns out your actual job is figuring out how and why you work
for a president who says whatever Vladimir Putin tells him.
Maddow went on to express her sympathy for one of the
most unhinged warmongers
in a city teeming with them ("I mean, John Bolton, God bless you"), and again seemed to suggest that Bolton's "job" of "push[ing]
Russia back because of what they're doing in Venezuela" was the correct course of action.
It's now clear there is nothing -- not Trump's years-long belligerence toward Russia's Venezuelan ally, not his
near-constant
bellicosity toward Russia since taking office, not
Robert Mueller's failure
to indict a single person for conspiring with Russia, not even his report's explicit and implicit denial that any such conspiracy
existed -- that will make these people give up the talking point that Trump is secretly in bed with Putin. If Mueller himself denied
it, they would claim he was a Russian in disguise. It's simply too convenient an attack line, and too professionally embarrassing
to admit otherwise.
There is also an Orwellian level of doublethink going on here. Russia, a Venezuelan ally, has sent personnel and equipment to
the country with the consent of its government at a time when it's being threatened by multiple hostile regional powers. Meanwhile
the US, one of those hostile powers, has for years been
laying siege to the country
and killing its people, trying to destabilize and oust its leadership, and even threatening to invade it.
Yet according to the media and political class, it's Russia's actions that are an unacceptable intrusion into another country's
affairs -- an "invasion," even. They are holding up four fingers to your face and telling you you're seeing five.
Meanwhile, these same quarters, after spending close to three years hyperventilating about Russia's meddling in domestic US affairs
-- an "act of war," in some minds -- have now seamlessly pivoted to cheering Trump as he attempts to
engineer a change
of Venezuela's government, even calling for him to possibly attack the country. This is glaringly hypocritical, but the
Russiagate
frenzy was never about principled outrage or any sort of moral consistency.
Lastly and most significantly, the rhetoric around Venezuela is now taking on an explicitly imperialistic character, in the most
literal sense of that word. Zakaria invoked the Monroe Doctrine to urge Trump to intervene in Venezuela; National Security Advisor
John Bolton "proudly proclaim[ed]" upon
launching
a fresh round of sanctions that "the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well," and one MSNBC guest
insisted the Trump administration was "right in being completely flabbergasted" at Russia's presence in the country because "this
is our hemisphere," echoing
Bolton
.
When these figures talk about "our hemisphere," they don't mean the hemisphere in which the US happens to be located; they mean
this is literally their hemisphere. The US is the imperial power with dominion over this part of the world, and only it has
the right to interfere in the countries that populate it.
Their objection is not that an outside power is involving itself in a Latin American country's business, but that this outside
power isn't the one in Washington. The fact that the US has been doing this very thing for years in Russia's part of the world --
expanding NATO right up to its
border, sending weapons to Ukraine -- goes conveniently unmentioned.
Russiagate skeptics were criticized for being hyperbolic in
comparing that scandal to the bogus
WMD tale that led to the Iraq War; the latter, after all, killed hundreds of thousands and destabilized an entire region. But the
full consequences of Russiagate will not be felt immediately; they will unfold over time. And while floating the specter of Russia
might not work this time, expect it to be used over and over in the coming years to justify all manner of
military aggression
.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not
understanding it."
― Upton Sinclair
As more evidence is being uncovered like the the Kathy Kavalec contemporaneous notes &
email to FBI on her meeting with Steele, it is getting more & more apparent that there
was a program to entrap and smear Trump as a Putin stooge by top officials in the Obama
administration, directly interfering in a presidential election.
Mueller was conflicted right from the very beginning. The fact that Strzok, Page &
Weisman were on his initial staff points to that conflict. Considering the inherent bias it
should be instructive that they could not find any evidence and had to conclude that the
Trump campaign did not collude with agents of the Russian government.
Rachel's the MSM poster child for aggressive and dedicated stupidity.
Notable quotes:
"... Funny how these people push Russiagate and then support regime change everywhere and most recently Venezuela. ..."
"... Rachel Maddow is an establishment "TOADIE." Is that right? ..."
"... As George Carlin said, "bipartisanship means a larger than usual deception is going on." ..."
"... What would happen if Zionists took the control of US Government? ... O, wait... ..."
"... Rachel's the MSM poster child for aggressive and dedicated stupidity. ..."
"... Maddow, like every other MSM propaganda bullhorn, is "manufacturing consent" for the neocon wars to come. ..."
"... Should Madame Walking Corruption decide to run again, Rachel is the perfect choice for VP. ..."
"... She's the neo lib version of Glen Beck ..."
"... Rachel Maddow is the Alex Jones of the left - Nothing but a controlled CIA tool. ..."
"... "The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five." ― Carl Sagan ..."
"... This Maddow segment will be referenced by future historians as "end-stage Russia-gate." ..."
"... Madcow disease is contagious. ..."
"... Maddow has lost her ever loving mind. She's the neolib answer to Alex Jones. ..."
"... If I was American, i would take any of these Russian scare stories as an assault of my intellect. These MSM clowns are basically saying their audience are a dumb as planks. ..."
The power grid in this country is more likely to be jeopardized because it's out of date and woefully neglected by the scare-mongering,
Russia-baiting idiots in charge; more concerned with dominating the planet than keeping our infrastructure maintained. Maddow
could mention that, but I guess then she'd piss her bosses(the fuel industry &MIC) off.
There actually was a story about there being a fire at a prison in NY and the inmates going without heat during the polar vortex.
Needless to say, it wasn't Russia but good ol' American disregard for people who see as worthless and so they are dragging their
feet in fixing the problem, plus they are pepper spraying the families of the inmates who are protesting the conditions inside
the prison. We don't need to make out Russia to be the boogey man when we are better at being that for our own citizens.
Omg so funny! You guys made my night. People like you give me hope that we can avoid the catastrophe. As a Russian, I want
to say, let's not kill each other.
She being a Rhodes Scholar, I often wonder if she wasn't recruited early on by the CIA. That's an investigation about collusion
between US corporate media and the deep state to influence US elections I'd like to see.
What if the Lucky Charm leprechaun breaks into my house and eats my magically delicious stars and moons and leaves just the
cereal? What will happen then?
How is she what she saying any different than conspiracies? She sounds like a flat eather who spent too much time clocking
hours in the crazy part of YouTube.
So who was it that said, "The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle
is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over"? Some guy named "Joseph"?
Rachel Maddow is a perfect example of what happens when you entrench yourself on the wrong side of the issues snuggling up
to those big corporate advertisers like big oil or Boeing before you know it you have painted yourself into a corner just like
fox news hosts as you make a complete fool of yourself sounding like a blithering idiot totally devoid of any shred of journalistic
integrity she is the old washed up sorcerer that has lost her power all she has left is a few old pieces of magic corn. she may
well indeed have the highest ratings but I don't believe the people are buying what she is trying to sell them!
How long until Jimmy Dore gets deplatformed? Anyone who rooted against Alex Jones is short-sighted. He was against the iraq
and afghan wars. He was the 1st to report the false flag in syria. He cried when Trump dropped that MOAB. Support Alex Jones!
This msnbc news is just how much American mainstream media are pure joke with zero credit😂. In the end, these "journalists"
owe their job to Russia, what would they do without it since they always talk about it😂😂😂😂😂
13:27 That's Senator John D. Rockefeller IV,
'Jay' Rockefeller. The Rockefeller family owns the world's biggest oil companies, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, the Amoco
in BP-Amoco all came from the companies created after the breakup of John D. Rockefellers' Standard Oil Trust.
I just figured out who/how they got to her: "Her paternal grandfather was from a family of Eastern European Jews (the original
family surname being "Medwedof")" Amazing how much that sounds like "Madoff", isn't it?
The huge elephant in the room is of course global weather engineering. None of our efforts to cut emissions will stop the current
climate collapse, until all weather-/geo-engineering programs have been terminated worldwide. We need to stop weather warfare
now.
What would happen? An army of privileged entitled white men would go out in the 50 below weather and work 24/7 in deadly conditions
to fix it and have the power back up in hours, like they do every winter.. Just like the white men who put on wetsuits and dive
into literal lakes of shit and piss to clear the tampons and pads out of the grates and pumps in the sewer treatment plants so
the toilets of people like Maddow continue to function.. The people who are completely invisible to morons like Maddow.
Our little boy Rachel Maddow still Russia-ing it! World's still waiting for Trump's taxes from our little boy! Maybe we could
ask her man Susan Mikula LAUD HAM MERCY 😲
Ottawa is the second coldest national capital city in the world (after first place coldes Ulan Bator, Outer Mongolia). Moscow
is NOT so cold as Ottawa is, guys!
"What if Russia cut the power while you were watching porn right before you came, and then you had blue balls forever?" That
line was the funniest in this whole video. Another one that had me laughing so hard was this: "So what's the purple area?"
If I was American, i would take any of these Russian scare stories as an assault of my intellect. These MSM clowns are
basically saying their audience are a dumb as planks.
Jimmy, I love your show and, even though I'm essentially conservative and think Trump is exactly the wrench needed to throw
into the works of the globalists who I believe almost took complete control of everything in 2016, I agree with you quite often
and share many of your videos with both far-leftist and right-wing nuts. That said, the fact of the matter is that a single international
ballistic missle loaded with a "nuclear" EMP device, exploded a couple hundred miles over the middle of our country, would totally
destroy the power infrastructure across our country and quite literally leave us in the dark ages for months. If this happened,
our country would be thrown total chaos and takeover by invasion would be very easy for any semi-powerful country who could get
here: Russia and China are basically it. I can't stand Rachel Maddow, but I have a feeling she may have been referring to this
extremely serious problem which, by the way, would cost very little to fix. Why we haven't fixed it, but continue to spend more
than what the fix would cost to stay Afghanistan every single month is beyond anything even resembling rational thought.
I wouldn't be surprised if Rachel Maddow were exposing a pre-programming agenda that OUR government is plotting -- not the
goddamn Russians. Remember: The Freemasons believe in "Order Out Of Chaos."
What if we decentralized the power grid by implimenting solar power and batteries on homes? Maddow - The Russians would go
house to house with wire cutters.
I'm from MN, you wouldn't believe how often I'm accused of being a Russian bot by coastal idiots. Note: Not everyone on the
coast is an idiot obviously but the idiots who say this always seem to live in CA or NY.
Are they SCREAMING to seem funny or is that the only way
#MAGA know how to communicate? This is like
that Guntfeld show on Fox but without a budget. Are we sure @jimmy_dore isn't actually @maddow in drag?
Brennan role in weaponizing dossier now became more clear.
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, Fusion GPS hiring of Nellie Ohr -- the wife of senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr -- also shows that Steele's role in producing the dossier may be exaggerated. Ohr is a Stanford Ph.D. whose expertise is Russia and she appears to be fluent in Russian. She may have conducted interviews or written parts of the dossier. ..."
"... The dossier, however, only has Steele's name on it -- helping to credential the research as an "intelligence product." ..."
"... A Democratic consultant and Ukrainian-American activist named Alexandra Chalupa, told the Clinton campaign about Manafort's work for Yanukovich. "I flagged for the DNC the significance of his hire," Chalupa told CNN in July of this year. ..."
"... Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS in April, shortly after Trump hired Manafort. Manafort's role now allowed Simpson to highlight corruption that he already knew to exist, from his reporting. A line from the dossier states: ..."
"... Steele -- it notes -- had not lived or worked in Russia for nearly 25 years, but his name "at a minimum" would be useful in marketing whatever his firm pulled together. Plus, Steele had a good relationship with the FBI and could "spill secrets" to journalists. ..."
"... it is likely that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook cited Fusion GPS's work in a July 22 interview after embarrassing leaks of Democratic National Committee emails. He told ABC News's George Stephanopoulos that "some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump." ..."
"... The FBI did launch an investigation into possible collusion, however, known by "only a dozen or so people at the FBI," including then-director James Comey and Peter Strzok, who was chosen to supervise the investigation. ..."
"... She said by August 2016, the CIA had "verified the key finding of the dossier" to the point that it was having "eyes only" top secret meetings with President Obama about it. ..."
"... CIA Director John Brennan had also briefed top lawmakers on Russian efforts to help Trump last summer and had said the CIA had limited legal ability to investigate Russian connections to Trump, prompting Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) to write a public letter to the FBI -- which collects domestic intelligence -- about the threat of Russian interference. ..."
"... It appears that Brennan was briefing Reid on the Steele dossier. ..."
"... Brennan apparently sent the dossier to the White House, prompting the "eyes only" meetings. ..."
"... The Post also writes that the "material was so sensitive that CIA Director John O. Brennan kept it out of the president's daily brief, concerned that even that restricted report's distribution was too broad." ..."
"... But as Tablet asks, "if the material was so sensitive that it had to be kept out of the PDB and withheld from the Senate majority leader, why was someone telling The Washington Post about it?" ..."
Did the Obama administration launch an investigation into the Trump campaign based solely off of unverified political opposition
research? And was that "research" dressed up and given more credibility than it should have? It appears that way
based on an
investigation of open-source information by Tablet.
The outlet's investigation begins with a June 24, 2017, Facebook post by Mary Jacoby, the wife of Glenn Simpson, the former
Wall Street Journal reporter who started Fusion GPS, the firm behind the dossier.
Jacoby, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who once shared bylines with Simpson, bragged how her husband was not getting
the credit he deserved for the dossier.
"It's come to my attention that some people still don't realize what Glenn's role was in exposing Putin's control of Donald Trump,"
she wrote on Facebook. "Let's be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn."
Until this day, the dossier is often referred to as the "Steele dossier," named after the former British spy Christopher Steele
who is believed to have authored the document.
Steele's background has been used by collusion-believers to argue that the document is credible. But Jacoby's post suggests that
Steele might not have played as big of a role in the dossier as he is given credit.
Indeed, Fusion GPS hiring of Nellie Ohr -- the wife of senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr -- also shows that Steele's
role in producing the dossier may be exaggerated. Ohr is a Stanford Ph.D. whose expertise is Russia and she appears to be fluent
in Russian. She may have conducted interviews or written parts of the dossier.
The dossier, however, only has Steele's name on it -- helping to credential the research as an "intelligence product."
Tablet also took a look at Simpson and Jacoby's work for the WSJ . In April 2007 -- in the lead-up to the 2008 election
-- they co-wrote a story about Republican links to Russians.
In that story, titled "How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington," they detail how prominent Republicans helped open doors
for "Kremlin-affiliated oligarchs and other friends of Vladimir Putin."
They reported on Viktor Yanukovich, who had paid political fixer Paul Manafort to introduce Yanukovich to powerful Washington,
DC, figures. They later reported on May 14, 2008, that Manafort's lobbying firm was escorting Yanukovich around Washington. Yanukovich
would later become president of Ukraine in 2010.
Tablet explains how their reporting may have been the origins of the Trump dossier:
So when the Trump campaign named Paul Manafort as its campaign convention manager on March 28, 2016, you can bet that Simpson
and Jacoby's eyes lit up. And as it happened, at the exact same time that Trump hired Manafort, Fusion GPS was in negotiations
with Perkins Coie, the law firm representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, to see if there was interest in the firm continuing
the opposition research on the Trump campaign they had started for the Washington Free Beacon. In addition to whatever sales pitch
Simpson might have offered about Manafort, the Clinton campaign had independent reason to believe that research into Manafort's
connections might pay some real political dividends: A Democratic consultant and Ukrainian-American activist named Alexandra
Chalupa, told the Clinton campaign about Manafort's work for Yanukovich. "I flagged for the DNC the significance of his hire,"
Chalupa told CNN in July of this year.
Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS in April, shortly after Trump hired Manafort. Manafort's role now allowed Simpson to highlight
corruption that he already knew to exist, from his reporting. A line from the dossier states:
Ex-Ukrainian President YANUKOVYCH confides directly to PUTIN that he authorised (sic) kick-back payments to MANAFORT, as alleged
in western media Assures Russian President however there is no documentary evidence/trail.
Tablet notes that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would later find corruption by Manafort related to money laundering (before he
joined the Trump campaign). It also points out that Tony Podesta -- Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's brother -- worked
for Manafort at the time he represented Yanukovich. (The Podesta Group disbanded this year after those connections were made public,
and the special counsel is reportedly investigating Podesta too.)
Tablet notes that while Simpson had begun working on the dossier on Trump collusion with Russia, he was also working for a Russian
lawyer to undermine an American law called the Magnitsky Act and that Steele may have been hired to disguise that contradiction.
Steele -- it notes -- had not lived or worked in Russia for nearly 25 years, but his name "at a minimum" would be useful in
marketing whatever his firm pulled together. Plus, Steele had a good relationship with the FBI and could "spill secrets" to journalists.
Ohr -- Simpson's next hire -- also hadn't lived in Russia for decades and was "not a spy, or even a journalist." "In this world,
she was definitely an amateur," Tablet writes.
"Presumably, as a result of all the above, much of the reporting in the dossier is recognizably the kind of patter that locals
in closed or semi-closed societies engage in to impress expats -- the kind of thing you hear in a bar, or on the cab ride from the
airport to the hotel," it says.
Tablet then goes into the bad shape of U.S. intelligence on Russia -- likely making officials less skeptical of the dossier even
though, to date, they have not been able to confirm any of its allegations on collusion.
And Tablet notes that it is likely that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook cited Fusion GPS's work in a July 22 interview
after embarrassing leaks of Democratic National Committee emails. He told ABC News's George Stephanopoulos that "some experts are
now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump."
At that point, a tech firm had attributed the leaks to Russia but was not able to explain why. The FBI was looking at the leak
but had not yet publicly determined political motivation.
"But the DNC and Clinton campaign did have an oppo-research firm under contract that was in the middle of putting together a file
that would claim that the Russians were trying to get Trump elected," Tablet notes.
The FBI did launch an investigation into possible collusion, however, known by "only a dozen or so people at the FBI," including
then-director James Comey and Peter Strzok, who was chosen to supervise the investigation.
But by late October, they had not yet found any evidence that showed Russia was working to elect Trump. So, ten days before the
election, angry Clinton supporters and unnamed intelligence officials
spoke to
the New York Times in an October 31, 2016, story about what the investigation had found so far.
Jacoby would post that story in her June 24 Facebook post, slamming the FBI and accusing it of "ineptitude," while the CIA "hopped
to and immediately worked to verify" the dossier.
She said by August 2016, the CIA had "verified the key finding of the dossier" to the point that it was having "eyes only"
top secret meetings with President Obama about it.
Thus, while the document could not be verified and was not used in any intelligence assessment because of its inability to be
verified, it was now the topic of meetings with the president.
CIA Director John Brennan had also briefed top lawmakers on Russian efforts to help Trump last summer and had said the CIA
had limited legal ability to investigate Russian connections to Trump, prompting Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) to write a public letter
to the FBI -- which collects domestic intelligence -- about the threat of Russian interference.
Reid then wrote another letter to Comey after he reopened the investigation into Clinton's emails -- accusing him of letting Trump
slide.
"It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his
top advisers, and the Russian government -- a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every
opportunity," he wrote.
"I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public and yet, you continue to resist calls
to inform the public of this critical information."
That "information" Reid was referring to was the dossier, according to Tablet:
According to David Corn's Oct. 31, 2016, article in Mother Jones , the Nevada lawmaker was referencing the findings
of "a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence."
Corn now explains that the "former Western intelligence officer -- who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters
and who now works with a U.S. firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients" is Christopher Steele. According
to Corn, Steele said that "in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources,
contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump."
It appears that Brennan was briefing Reid on the Steele dossier.
Brennan apparently sent the dossier to the White House, prompting the "eyes only" meetings.
"An envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried 'eyes
only' instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides," the
Washington
Post
reported on June 23, 2017.
"So was the Steele dossier in the envelope?" Tablet asks.
The Post writes that inside that envelope "was an intelligence bombshell" -- a report drawn from sourcing deep inside
the Russian government that detained Putin's direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the presidential race,
defeat or at least damage Hillary Clinton, and help elect Donald Trump.
The Post also writes that the "material was so sensitive that CIA Director John O. Brennan kept it out of the president's
daily brief, concerned that even that restricted report's distribution was too broad."
But as Tablet asks, "if the material was so sensitive that it had to be kept out of the PDB and withheld from the Senate majority
leader, why was someone telling The Washington Post about it?"
Tablet writes:
Sources and methods are the crown jewels of the American intelligence community. And yet someone has just told a major American
newspaper about a "report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that captured Putin's specific instructions."
If the CIA had a human intelligence source that close to Putin, publication of the Post article could have exposed that
source -- doing incalculable damage to American national security. He and many of his loved ones would then have presumably died
horrible deaths.
Or, as Mary Jacoby surmised, it was her husband's handiwork that landed on the president's desk.
The article is two years old now. Looks like Paul Craig Roberts was right. A very strange thing is that Trump proved to be
very good for weapon industry and not so bad for neocons. Still the coup is continuing.
Notable quotes:
"... There is an "elite" coup attempt underway against the U.S. President-elect Trump. ..."
"... The coup is orchestrated by the camp of Hillary Clinton in association with the CIA and neoconservative powers in Congress. ..."
"... The plan is to use the CIA's "Russia made Trump the winner" nonsense to swing the electoral college against him. The case would then be bumped up to Congress. Major neocon and warmonger parts of the Republicans could then move the presidency to Clinton or, if that fails, put Trump's vice president-elect Mike Pence onto the throne. The regular bipartisan war business, which a Trump presidency threatens to interrupt, could continue. ..."
"... The institutional Trump enemies are: ..."
"... The weapons industry which could lose its enormous sales to its major customers in the Persian Gulf should a President Trump reduce U.S. interference in the Middle East and elsewhere. ..."
"... The neoconservatives and Likudniks who want the U.S. as Israel's weapon to strong arm the Middle East to the Zionists' benefit. ..."
"... The general war hawks, military and "humanitarian interventionists" to whom any reduction of the U.S. role as primary power in the world is anathema to their believes. ..."
"... The CIA-controlled European media, the politicians in Washington's European vassal states, NATO officials, and the brainwashed European peoples will support the coup against Trump. ..."
"... PCR has gone senile. Trump IS the elite ..."
"... And Trump will continue the MidEast wars. He made it clear. ..."
"... The CIA, along with Boeing and all the other contractors, banks, insurers, and rabble of the Wall Street machine are the Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... Andrea Chalupa @AndreaChalupa Dec 11 ..."
"... 1.) Electoral College meets Dec. 19. If Electors ignore #StateOfEmergency we're in, & Trump gets elected, we can stop him Jan. 6 in Congress ..."
"... 2.) If any objections to Electoral College vote are made, they must be submitted in writing, signed by at least 1 House member & 1 Senator ..."
"... 3.) If objections are presented, House & Senate withdraw to their chambers to consider their merits under procedures set out in federal law. ..."
The below theses are thus far only a general outlay...
There is an "elite" coup attempt underway against the U.S. President-elect Trump.
The coup is orchestrated by the camp of Hillary Clinton in association with the CIA and neoconservative powers in Congress.
The plan is to use the CIA's "Russia made Trump the winner" nonsense to swing the electoral college against him. The
case would then be bumped up to Congress. Major neocon and warmonger parts of the Republicans could then move the presidency
to Clinton or, if that fails, put Trump's vice president-elect Mike Pence onto the throne. The regular bipartisan war business,
which a Trump presidency threatens to interrupt, could continue.
Should the coup succeed violent insurrections in the United States are likely to ensue with unpredictable consequences.
No general plan has been published. The scheme though is pretty obvious by now. However, the following contains some speculation.
The priority aim is to deny Trump the presidency. He is too independent and a danger for several power centers within the ruling
U.S. power circles. The selection of Tillerson as new Secretary of State only reinforces this (Prediction: Bolton will not get
the Deputy position.) Tillerson is for profitable stability, not for regime change adventures.
The institutional Trump enemies are:
The CIA which has become the Central Assassination Agency under the Bush and Obama administrations. Huge parts
of its budgets depend on a continuation of the war on Syria and the drone assassination campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan
and elsewhere. Trump's more isolationist policies would likely end these campaigns and the related budget troughs.
The weapons industry which could lose its enormous sales to its major customers in the Persian Gulf should a President
Trump reduce U.S. interference in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The neoconservatives and Likudniks who want the U.S. as Israel's weapon to strong arm the Middle East to the Zionists'
benefit.
The general war hawks, military and "humanitarian interventionists" to whom any reduction of the U.S. role as primary
power in the world is anathema to their believes.
The article is a documented and accurate description of a coup that is underway. The extraordinary lies that are being perpetrated
by the media and by members of the US government have as their obvious purpose the prevention of a Donald Trump presidency. There
is no other reason for the extraordinary blatant lies for which there is not a shred of evidence. Indeed, there is massive real evidence
to the contrary. Yet the coup proceeds and gathers steam.
President Eisenhower warned us more than a half century ago of the danger that the military/security complex presents to US democracy.
In the decades since Eisenhower's warning, the military/security complex has become more powerful than the American people and is
demonstrating its power by overturning a presidential election.
Will the coup succeed?
In my opinion, former and present members of the US government and the media would not dare to so obviously and openly participate
in a coup against democracy and an elected president unless they expect the coup to succeed.
It is an easy matter for the ruling interests to bribe electors to vote differently than their states. The cost of the bribes
is miniscule compared to the wealth and income streams that a trillion dollar annual budget provides to the military/security complex.
The fake news of a Putin/Trump election-stealing plot generated by unsupported allegations of present and former members of US intelligence,
the lame-duck President Obama, and the presstitute media provide the cover for electors to break with precedent "in order to save
America from a Russian stooge."
The CIA-controlled European media, the politicians in Washington's European vassal states, NATO officials, and the brainwashed
European peoples will support the coup against Trump.
The only ones speaking against the coup are the voters who elected Trump-all of whom are alleged to have been deceived by Russian
fake news -- the Russian government, and the 200 websites falsely described by the Washington Post and the secret organization PropOrNot
as Russian agents.
In other words, those objecting to the coup are the ones described by the coup leaders as those who made the coup necessary.
I do not know that the coup will succeed, but looking at the commitment so many high level people have made to the coup, I conclude
that those bringing the coup expect it to succeed.
Therefore, we should take very seriously the expectation of success that those who control levers of power are demonstrating.?
As usual, Paul Craig Roberts is dead-on correct. Just wish Mr. T. would hook him up in some way in the new admin as an economic
adivosor of some sorts. He could make a yuuuuuuuge difference.
Above and beyond what is going on behind the scenes they are pushing for all out civil war. If the electors vote for Trump then
it's on to Jan.20 where multiple sources are calling out for an outright riot. Michael Moore is calling for a not a protest but
a revolution. In response, Trump supporters are now being encouraged to be 2nd amendment patriots to defend against a left wing
radical takeover. No matter what happens you can sure you won't hear the truth on the MSM. In fact TPTB are making sure right
now they shut down the "alt- right" lest any more muppets awaken.
"A whole group of trolls has been assigned to denigrate PCR's warning, which underlines its importance."
Count me in as one of those trolls, because I find PCR to be a sensationalist. In less than two weeks, limp-dick Obama won't
have another word to say about the "Russian hack", aka bullshit, and nothing Hillbilery has to say about anything will make any
more noise than a goose flying backwards and farting in a thunderstorm.
The CIA, along with Boeing and all the other contractors, banks, insurers, and rabble of the Wall Street machine are the
Military Industrial Complex.
The Imperial City (D.C.) of Isengard and Mordor (Wall Street) want fresh bodies and blood to enrich themselves. No more pointless
wars! No more body bags for blood money!
When the hell will the U.S. Military cut off the head of the beast and restore the Republic?
We can hope Trump can hack his way there, but if not, step up soldiers!
This may be the last chance, tipping point is here.
I have believed PCR is controlled opposition for a while now. I also believe the electors will, like the American People, deliver
Trump to the Oval Office. I also believe this whole mess is mainly aimed at undermining Trump's mandate from the People so repugs
in CONgress can give him a hard time. That won't work either because they'll be inundated with demands from their constituencies.
Screw 'em.
I agree with the premise of this article, but disagree that the deep state expects to succeed in a coup via the Electors. Using
the tired metaphor, the deep state plays chess. They are merely laying the groundwork for something later.
Paul Craig Roberts...the Armed Forces are with Trump. The CIA are a bunch of effete college girly-boys that should be outed
and either be arrested or die for crimes against the state.
FUCK THE CIA and their contractors. Whores for sale to the highest bidder. Enemies of the Republic. Death to them all!
If the Defense-Industrial Complex does overturn the election, their victory will be their pyrrhic last stand and it will be the
end of its dominance. The American people will totally destroy it.
what the United States and NATO are doing on Russia's western frontier is similar to what the German Wehrmacht did in preparation
for Operation Barbarossa.
...but we lost because every POTUS since JFK is a show pony or he goes to the glue factory (and he knows it). The establishment
won again so we wait in the shadows for the aging angry beast to die...
So, all indications are that he will receive > 270 electoral votes on 12/19, so the next day of action for this cabal is Jan.
6th when they can again attempt to overturn?
So we will have a lot of propaganda thrown at us yet again trying to influence that, but a) how many people actually pay attention
to this crap expecially over the holiday season, and b) how many people pay attention to the MSM anymore anyhow.
That is a large part of their angst - nobody seems to be listening to their bullshit.
I think that's when the House actual gives there nihil obstat and impramatur to the electoral college votes, and so members can
attempt to hang the process up there as per this below which was in the original article.
Andrea Chalupa @AndreaChalupa Dec 11
1.) Electoral College meets Dec. 19. If Electors ignore #StateOfEmergency we're in, & Trump gets elected, we can stop him Jan.
6 in Congress
2.) If any objections to Electoral College vote are made, they must be submitted in writing, signed by at least 1 House member
& 1 Senator
3.) If objections are presented, House & Senate withdraw to their chambers to consider their merits under procedures set out
in federal law.
...
Once Trump gets in office the resultant corruption probe afterwards should be epic! We'll know by Monday if the electoral college
stays the course or steers the country towards anarchy.
Seems to me the CIA and the POTUS has made a complete mess of the world. Do the people really have a desire for them to solve
the problem when they caused the problem??? I think not!
I have CIA contacts.
They are freaked. .. It is even affecting some of them in the physical health department. (Not enough of them. IMHO.)
Now is NOT the time to fold to intimidation or threats. Now is the time to double down and make them back up threats and/or
expose themselves and show exactly which side they are on.
They DO NOT have enough manpower or assets in the states (or anywhere) to silence everyone.
If the Satanic Witch or other Ass Wipes Inc puppet other than Donald Trump (I'm not 100% sure about him but he is the best
shot we have, IMO.) gets put into office, shaking off these assholes will be much harder or impossible all together.
And BTW, in case you think you can just close your eyes and tuck back in a hole until the battle is over they have plans well
under way to kill you and your family anyway. .. I'm sure if you have read any of my previous posts you know what some of those
ways are.
That's my field report and firm recommendations for 12/17/16.
Live Hard, The CIA / CeyeA Are Not The Good Guys Here, Not Even Close, Die Free
I notice Trump has more than a few ex military people around him. A few generals. I wonder if the would call to active military
to stand down? Or to counter a coup?
My first thoughts after Trump selected the Generals was to organize a Military-lead counter coup. He has also aligned a massive
amount of wealth by his other appointments. I pray & hope I am correct.
The Republican electors their families and the GOP have way too much to lose. Republicans will never get elected again...and all
their lives would be in danger. Plus you would get domestic terror groups spring up across the country. Remember Trump won most
of the counties so his support is strong and getting stronger.
The soros and clintons of the world will not be able to control the backlash as they think..and you really would then see russia
and china stiring up big trouble in america.
Donald Trump, doesn't strike me as the type of person, that would lay down for such criminality... and if he puts up a fight,
like I think he will, anyone that supports him will fight with him. You can count me in that fighting group!
"... DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the Office of the Inspector General and associated FISA abuse to the FISA Court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702 compliance review. ..."
"... The following day, on Sept. 27, 2016, Carlin announced his resignation, effective Oct. 15, 2016. ..."
"... After receiving a briefing by the NSA compliance officer on Oct. 20, 2016, detailing numerous "about query" violations from the 702 NSA compliance audit, Rogers shut down all "about query" activity the next day and reported his findings to the DOJ. "About queries" are searches based on communications containing a reference "about" a surveillance target but that are not "to" or "from" the target. ..."
"... On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally informed the FISA Court of his findings. On Oct. 26, 2016, Rogers appeared formally before the FISA Court and presented the written findings of his audit. ..."
"... Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications in order to avoid raising suspicions at the FISA Court ahead of receiving the Page FISA warrant. ..."
"... The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page. ..."
"... While all this was transpiring, DNI James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter submitted a recommendation that Rogers be removed from his post as NSA director. ..."
Admiral Mike Rogers, while director of the NSA, was personally responsible for
uncovering an unprecedented level of FISA abuse that would later be documented in a 99-page
unsealed FISA
court ruling . As the FISA court noted in the April 26, 2017, ruling, the abuses had been occurring since at least November 2015:
"The FBI had disclosed raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information, to private contractors.
"Private contractors had access to raw FISA information on FBI storage systems.
"Contractors had access to raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBI's requests."
The FISA Court report is particularly focused on the FBI:
"The Court is concerned about the FBI's apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar
disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported."
The FISA Court
disclosed that illegal NSA database searches were endemic. Private contractors, employed by the FBI, were given full access to
the NSA database. Once in the contractors' possession, the data couldn't be traced.
In April 2016, after Rogers became aware of
improper
contractor access to raw FISA data on March 9, 2016, he
directed the NSA's Office
of Compliance to conduct a "fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702."
On April 18, 2016, Rogers shut down all outside contractor access to raw FISA information -- specifically outside contractors
working for the FBI.
DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin filed the government's proposed
2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was
part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016,
report by the Office
of the Inspector General and associated FISA abuse to the FISA Court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose
Rogers's ongoing Section 702 compliance review.
The following day, on Sept. 27, 2016, Carlin
announced his resignation, effective Oct. 15, 2016.
After receiving a briefing by the NSA compliance officer on Oct. 20, 2016, detailing
numerous "about query"
violations from the 702 NSA compliance audit, Rogers shut down all "about query" activity the next day and
reported his findings
to the DOJ. "About queries" are searches based on communications containing a reference "about" a surveillance target but that are
not "to" or "from" the target.
On Oct. 21, 2016, the DOJ and the FBI sought and received a Title I FISA probable-cause order authorizing electronic surveillance
on Carter Page from the FISA Court.
At this point, the FISA Court was still unaware of the Section 702 violations.
On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally
informed
the FISA Court of his findings. On Oct. 26, 2016, Rogers appeared formally before the FISA Court and presented the written findings
of his audit.
The FISA Court had been unaware of the query violations until they were presented to the court by Rogers.
Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications in order to avoid raising suspicions
at the FISA Court ahead of receiving the Page FISA warrant.
The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page.
While all this was transpiring, DNI James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter submitted a
recommendation that Rogers be removed from his post as NSA director.
The move to fire Rogers, which ultimately failed, originated sometime in mid-October 2016 -- exactly when Rogers was preparing
to present his findings to the FISA Court.
Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed
on Twitter @themarketswork.
The insurance policy was the false flag operation directed at establishing the Trump–Russia collusion
narrative. The key part was the appointment of Special Prosecutor in which McCabe played an important if not the decisive role.
Notable quotes:
"... The insurance policy was the actual process of establishing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. It encompassed actions undertaken in late 2016 and early 2017, including the leaking of the Steele dossier and James Clapper's leaks of James Comey's briefing to President Trump. The intent behind these actions was simple. The legitimization of the investigation into the Trump campaign. ..."
"... The strategy involved the recusal of Trump officials with the intent that Andrew McCabe would end up running the investigation. ..."
Ever since the release of FBI text messages revealing the existence of an "insurance
policy," the term has been the subject of wide speculation.
Some observers have suggested that the insurance policy was the FISA spy warrant used to
monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and, by extension, other members of the Trump
campaign. This interpretation is too narrow and fails to capture the underlying meaning of the
text.
The insurance policy was the actual process of establishing the Trump–Russia collusion
narrative. It encompassed actions undertaken in late 2016 and early 2017, including the leaking of the
Steele dossier and James Clapper's leaks of James Comey's briefing to President Trump. The
intent behind these actions was simple. The legitimization of the investigation into the Trump
campaign.
The strategy involved the recusal of Trump officials with the intent that Andrew McCabe
would end up running the investigation.
The Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Clinton presidential campaign and the
Democratic National Committee, served as the foundation for the Russia narrative.
The
intelligence community, led by CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper, used the
dossier as a launching pad for creating their Intelligence Community assessment.
This report, which was presented to Obama in December 2016, despite NSA Director Mike Rogers
having only moderate confidence in its assessment, became one of the core pieces of the
narrative that Russia interfered with the 2016 elections.
Through intelligence community leaks, and in collusion with willing media outlets, the
narrative that Russia helped Trump win the elections was aggressively pushed throughout
2017.
Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be
followed on Twitter @themarketswork.
"... On July 28, 2017, McCabe lied to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while under oath regarding authorization of the leaking to The Wall Street Journal. At this point, Horowitz knew McCabe was lying, but did not yet know of the May 9 INSD interview with McCabe. ..."
Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe held a pivotal role in what has become known as "Spygate."
He directed the activities of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and was involved in all aspects of the
Russia investigation. He was also mentioned in the infamous "insurance policy" text
message.
McCabe was a major component of the insurance policy.
On April 26, 2017, Rosenstein found himself appointed as the new deputy attorney general. He
was placed into a somewhat chaotic situation, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recluses
himself from the ongoing Russia investigation a little less than two months earlier, on March
2, 2017. This effectively meant that no one in the Trump administration had any oversight of
the ongoing investigation being conducted by the FBI and the DOJ.
Additionally, the leadership of then-FBI Director James Comey was coming under increased
scrutiny as the result of actions taken leading up to and following the election, particularly
Comey's handling of the Clinton email investigation.
On May 9, 2017, Rosenstein wrote a memorandum recommending that Comey be fired. The subject
of the memo was "Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI." Comey was fired that day.
McCabe was now the acting director of the FBI and was immediately under consideration for
the permanent position.
On the same day Comey was fired, McCabe would lie during an interview with agents from the
FBI's Inspection Division (INSD) regarding apparent leaks that were used in an Oct. 30, 2016,
Wall Street Journal article, "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe" by Devlin
Barrett. This would later be disclosed in the inspector general report, "A Report of
Investigation of Certain Allegations Relating to Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe."
At the time, nobody, including the INSD agents, knew that McCabe had lied, nor were the
darker aspects of McCabe's role in Spygate fully known.
In late April or early May 2016, McCabe opened a federal criminal investigation on Sessions,
regarding potential lack of candor before Congress in relation to Sessions's contacts with
Russians. Sessions was unaware of the investigation.
Sessions would later be cleared of any wrongdoing by special counsel Robert Mueller.
On the morning of May 16, 2017, Rosenstein reportedly suggested to McCabe that he secretly
record President Trump. This remark was reported in a New York Times article that was sourced
from memos from the now-fired McCabe, along with testimony taken from former FBI general
counsel James Baker, who relayed a conversation he had with McCabe about the occurrence.
Rosenstein issued a statement denying the accusations.
The alleged comments by Rosenstein occurred at a meeting where McCabe was "pushing for the
Justice Department to open an investigation into the president."
An unnamed participant at the meeting, in comments to The Washington Post, framed the
conversation somewhat differently, noting Rosenstein responded sarcastically to McCabe, saying,
"What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"
Later, on the same day that Rosenstein had his meetings with McCabe, President Trump met
with Mueller, reportedly as an interview for the FBI director job.
On May 17, 2017, the day after President Trump's meeting with Mueller -- and the day after
Rosenstein's encounters with McCabe -- Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel.
The May 17 appointment of Mueller in effect shifted control of the Russia investigation from
the FBI and McCabe to Mueller. Rosenstein would retain ultimate authority for the probe and any
expansion of Mueller's investigation required authorization from Rosenstein.
Interestingly, without Comey's memo leaks, a special counsel might not have been appointed
-- the FBI, and possibly McCabe, would have remained in charge of the Russia investigation.
McCabe was probably not going to become the permanent FBI director, but he was reportedly under
consideration. Regardless, without Comey's leak, McCabe would have retained direct involvement
and the FBI would have retained control.
On July 28, 2017, McCabe lied to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while under oath
regarding authorization of the leaking to The Wall Street Journal. At this point, Horowitz knew
McCabe was lying, but did not yet know of the May 9 INSD interview with McCabe.
On Aug. 2, 2017, Rosenstein secretly issued Mueller a revised memo on "the scope of
investigation and definition of authority" that remains heavily redacted. The full purpose of
this memo remains unknown. On this same day, Christopher Wray was named as the new FBI
director.
Two days later, on Aug. 4, 2017, Sessions announced that the FBI had created a new leaks
investigation unit. Rosenstein and Wray were tasked with overseeing all leak
investigations.
That Aug. 2 memo from Rosenstein to Mueller may have been specifically designed to remove
any residual FBI influence -- specifically that of McCabe -- from the Russia investigation. The
appointment of Wray as FBI director helped cement this. McCabe was finally completely
neutralized.
On March 16, 2018, McCabe was fired for lying under oath at least three different times and
is currently the subject of a grand jury investigation.
"... Hannigan's meeting was noteworthy because Brennan wasn't Hannigan's counterpart. That position belonged to NSA Director Mike Rogers. In the following year, Hannigan abruptly announced his retirement on Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration. ..."
"... Christopher Steele, who authored the dossier on Trump, was an MI6 agent while the agency was headed by Sir Richard Dearlove. Steele retains close ties with Dearlove. ..."
"... Dearlove has ties to most of the parties mentioned. It was he who advised Steele and his business partner, Chris Burrows, to work with a top British government official to pass along information to the FBI in the fall of 2016. He also was a speaker at the July 2016 Cambridge symposium that Halper invited Carter Page to attend. ..."
"... Dearlove knows Halper through their mutual association at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. Dearlove also knows Sir Iain Lobban, a former head of GCHQ, who is an advisory board member at British strategic intelligence and advisory firm Hakluyt , which was founded by former MI6 members and retains close ties to UK intelligence services. ..."
"... Halper has historical connections to Hakluyt through Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has co-authored two books. ..."
"... Downer, who met Papadopoulos in a May 2016 meeting established through a chain of two intermediaries, served on the advisory board of Hakluyt from 2008 to 2014. He reportedly still maintains contact with Hakluyt officials. Information from his meeting with Papadopoulos was later used by the FBI to establish the bureau's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. Downer has changed his version of events multiple times. ..."
"... Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations -- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia. ..."
"... Stefan Halper met with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page's July 2016 Moscow trip. As noted previously, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove was a speaker at the symposium. Halper and Dearlove have known each other for years and maintain several mutual associations. ..."
"... Page was already known to the FBI. The Page FISA warrant application references the Buryakov spy case and an FBI interview with Page. Current information suggests there was only one meeting between Page and the FBI in 2016. It happened on March 2, 2016. It was in relation to Victor Podobnyy, who was named in the Buryakov case. ..."
"... Page, who cooperated with the FBI on the case, almost certainly was providing testimony or details against Podobnyy. Page had been contacted by Podobnyy in 2013 and had previously provided information to the FBI. Buryakov pleaded guilty on March 11, 2016 -- nine days after Page met with the FBI on the case -- and was sentenced to 30 months in prison on May 25, 2016. On April 5, 2017, Buryakov was granted early release and was deported to Russia. ..."
"... House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said in August that exculpatory evidence on Page exists that wasn't included by the DOJ and the FBI in the FISA application and subsequent renewals. The exculpatory evidence likely relates specifically to Page's role in the Buryakov case. ..."
"... If the FBI failed to disclose Page's cooperation with the bureau or materially misrepresented his involvement in its application to the FISA Court, it means that the FBI's Woods procedures, which govern FISA applications, were violated. ..."
UK and Australian intelligence agencies also played meaningful roles during the 2016 presidential election.
Britain's GCHQ was involved in
collecting information regarding then-candidate Trump and transmitting it to the United States. In the summer of 2016, Robert
Hannigan, the head of GCHQ, flew from London to
meet personally
with then-CIA Director John Brennan, The Guardian reported.
Hannigan's meeting was noteworthy because Brennan wasn't Hannigan's counterpart. That position belonged to NSA Director Mike Rogers.
In the following year, Hannigan
abruptly announced
his retirement on Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration.
As GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted
after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant
Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly
so.
Christopher Steele, who authored the dossier on Trump, was an MI6 agent while the agency was headed by Sir Richard Dearlove. Steele
retains close ties with Dearlove.
Dearlove has ties to most of the parties mentioned. It was he who advised Steele and his business partner, Chris Burrows, to
work with a top British government official to pass along information to the FBI in the fall of 2016. He also was a speaker at
the July 2016 Cambridge symposium that Halper invited Carter
Page to attend.
Dearlove knows Halper through their
mutual association at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. Dearlove also knows Sir Iain Lobban, a former head of GCHQ, who is
an advisory board member at British strategic intelligence
and advisory firm Hakluyt , which was founded by former MI6 members and
retains close ties to UK intelligence services.
Halper has historical connections to Hakluyt through Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has
co-authored two books.
Downer, who
met Papadopoulos in a May 2016 meeting
established through a chain
of two intermediaries, served on the advisory board of Hakluyt
from 2008 to 2014. He reportedly still
maintains contact with Hakluyt officials. Information from his meeting with Papadopoulos was later used by the FBI to establish
the bureau's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. Downer has changed his version of events multiple times.
The Steele dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources. One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the former
British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood later
relayed information regarding the dossier to Sen. John McCain, who dispatched David Kramer, a fellow at the McCain Institute,
to London to meet with Steele in November 2016. McCain would later admit in a Jan. 11, 2017,
statement that he had personally passed on the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey.
Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations
-- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can
we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia.
In a Twitter post , Trump wrote that
the "key Allies called to ask not to release" the documents.
Questions to be asked are why is it that two of our allies would find themselves so opposed to the release of these classified
documents that a coordinated plea would be made directly to the president? And why would these same allies have even the slightest
idea of what was contained in these classified U.S. documents?
Britain and Australia appear to know full well what those documents contain, and their attempt to prevent their public release
appears to be because they don't want their role in events surrounding the 2016 presidential election to be made public.
Fusion GPS/Orbis/Christopher Steele
Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is co-founder of Fusion GPS, along with Peter Fritsch and Tom Catan. Fusion
was hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign through law firm Perkins Coie to produce and disseminate the Steele dossier used against
Trump. The dossier would later be the primary evidence used to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page on Oct. 21, 2016.
Christopher Steele, who retains close ties to UK intelligence, worked for MI6 from 1987 until his retirement in 2009, when he
and his partner, Chris Burrows, founded Orbis Intelligence. Steele
maintains contact with British intelligence,
Sir Richard Dearlove
, and UK intelligence firm Hakluyt.
Steele appears to have been
represented
by lawyer Adam Waldman, who also represented Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. We know this from
texts sent by Waldman. On April 10, 2017, Waldman sent this to Sen. Mark Warner:
"Hi. Steele: would like to get a bi partisan letter from the committee; Assange: I convinced him to make serious and important
concessions and am discussing those w DOJ; Deripaska: willing to testify to congress but interested in state of play w Manafort.
I will be with him next tuesday for a week."
Steele also appears to have
lobbied on behalf of Deripaska, who was discussed in
emails between Bruce Ohr and Steele that were recently
disclosed by the Washington Examiner:
"Steele said he was 'circulating some recent sensitive Orbis reporting' on Deripaska that suggested Deripaska was not a 'tool'
of the Kremlin. Steele said he would send the reporting to a name that is redacted in the email."
Fusion GPS was also employed by Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in a previous case. Veselnitskaya was involved in litigation
pitting Russian firm Prevezon Holdings against British-American financier William Browder. Veselnitskaya hired U.S. law firm BakerHostetler,
who, in turn, hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Browder. Veselnitskaya was one of the participants at the June 2016 Trump Tower
meeting, at which she discussed the
Magnitsky Act .
Fox News reported on Nov. 9, 2017, that Simpson
met with Veselnitskaya immediately before and after the Trump Tower meeting.
A declassified top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report released on April 26, 2017, revealed that government
agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and NSA, had improperly accessed Americans' communications. The FBI specifically provided outside
contractors with access to raw surveillance data on American citizens without proper oversight.
Communications and other data of members of the Trump campaign may have been accessed in this way.
Bruce and Nellie Ohr have
known Simpson since at least 2010 and have known Steele since at least 2006. The Ohrs and Simpson worked together on a
DOJ report in 2010 . In that report, Nellie Ohr's biography
lists her as working for Open Source Works, which is part of the CIA. Simpson met with Bruce Ohr
before and after the 2016 election.
Bruce Ohr had been in
contact repeatedly with Steele during the 2016 presidential campaign -- while Steele was constructing his dossier. Ohr later
actively shared information he received from Steele with the FBI, after the agency had terminated Steele as a source. Interactions
between Ohr and Steele stretched for months into the first year of Trump's presidency and were documented in a number of FD-302s
-- memos that summarize interviews with him by the FBI.
Spy Traps
In an effort to put forth evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it appears that several different spy traps
were set, with varying degrees of success. Many of these efforts appear to center around Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos
and involve London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, who has
ties to Western intelligence, particularly in the UK.
Papadopoulos and Mifsud
both worked
at the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP). Mifsud appears to have joined LCILP around
November
2015 . Papadopoulos reportedly
joined
LCILP sometime in late February 2016 after leaving Ben Carson's presidential campaign. However, some
reports indicate Papadopoulos joined LCILP in November
or December of 2015. Mifsud and Papadopoulos reportedly never crossed paths
until March 14, 2016, in Italy.
Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to several Russians, including Olga Polonskaya, whom Mifsud introduced as "Putin's niece," and
Ivan Timofeev, an official at a state-sponsored think tank called the Russian International Affairs Council. Both Papadopoulos and
Mifsud were interviewed by the FBI. Papadopoulos was ultimately charged with a process crime and was recently sentenced to 14 days
in prison for lying to the FBI. Mifsud was never charged by the FBI.
Throughout this period, Papadopoulos continuously pushed for meetings between Trump campaign officials and Russian contacts but
was ultimately unsuccessful in establishing any meetings.
Papadopoulos met with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer on May 10, 2016. The Papadopoulos–Downer meeting has been portrayed
as a
chance encounter in a bar. That does not appear to be the case.
Papadopoulos was introduced
to Downer through a chain of two intermediaries who said Downer wanted to meet with Papadopoulos. Another individual happened
to
be in London at exactly the same time: the FBI's head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap. The purpose of Priestap's visit
remains unknown.
The Papadopoulos–Downer
meeting was later used to establish the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. It was repeatedly
reported that Papadopoulos told Downer that Russia had Hillary Clinton's emails. This is incorrect.
According to Downer, Papadopoulos at some point
mentioned the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
"During that conversation, he [Papadopoulos] mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the
lead-up to the election, which may be damaging,'' Downer told
The Australian about the Papadopoulos meeting in an April 2018 article. "He didn't say dirt, he said material that could be damaging
to her. No, he said it would be damaging. He didn't say what it was."
Downer, while serving as Australia's foreign minister, was
responsible for one of the largest foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation: $25 million from the Australian government.
Unconfirmed media reports, including a Jan. 12, 2017,
BBC article , have suggested that the FBI attempted
to obtain two FISA warrants in June and July 2016 that were denied by the FISA court. It's likely that Papadopoulos was an intended
target of these failed FISAs.
Interestingly, there is no mention of Papadopoulos in the Steele dossier. Paul Manafort, Carter Page, former Trump lawyer Michael
Cohen, Gen. Michael Flynn, and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski are all listed in the Steele dossier.
Papadopoulos may have started out assisting the FBI or CIA and later discovered that he was being set up for surveillance himself.
After failing to obtain a spy warrant on the Trump campaign using Papadopoulos, the FBI set its sights on campaign volunteer Carter
Page. By this time, the counterintelligence investigation was in the process of being established, and we know now that it was formalized
with no official intelligence. The FBI needed some sort of legal cover. They needed a retroactive warrant. And they got one on Oct.
21, 2016. The Page FISA warrant would be renewed three times and remain in force until September 2017.
Stefan Halper met with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a
Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page's July 2016
Moscow trip. As noted previously, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove was a speaker at the symposium. Halper and Dearlove have known
each other for years and maintain several mutual associations.
Page was already known to the FBI. The Page FISA warrant application references the Buryakov spy case and an FBI interview with
Page. Current information suggests there was only
one meeting between Page and the FBI in 2016. It happened on March 2, 2016. It was in relation to Victor Podobnyy, who was named
in the Buryakov case.
Page, who
cooperated with the FBI on the case, almost certainly was providing testimony or details against Podobnyy. Page had been contacted
by Podobnyy in 2013 and had previously provided information to the FBI. Buryakov
pleaded guilty on March 11, 2016 -- nine days after Page met with the FBI on the case -- and was
sentenced to 30 months in prison on May 25, 2016. On April 5, 2017, Buryakov was granted early release and was
deported to Russia.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes
said in August that exculpatory evidence
on Page exists that wasn't included by the DOJ and the FBI in the FISA application and subsequent renewals. The exculpatory evidence
likely relates specifically to Page's role in the Buryakov case.
If the FBI failed to disclose Page's cooperation with the bureau or materially misrepresented his involvement in its application
to the FISA Court, it means that the FBI's Woods procedures, which govern FISA applications, were violated.
Page has not been arrested or charged with any crime related to the investigation.
Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed
on Twitter @themarketswork.
"... As Kunstler puts it, "The Special Prosecutor's main bit of mischief, of course, was his refusal to reach a conclusion on the obstruction of justice charge. What the media refuses to accept and make clear is that a prosecutor's failure to reach a conclusion is exactly the same thing as an inability to make a case, and it was a breach of Mr. Mueller's duty to dishonestly present that failure as anything but that in his report -- and possibly an act of criminal prosecutorial misconduct" on Mueller's part. ..."
"... But this is not the only dishonesty in Mueller's report. Although Mueller's report clearly obliterates the Russiagate conspiracy theory peddled by the military/security complex, the Democrats, and the presstitutes, Mueller's report takes for granted that Russia interfered in the election but not in collusion with Trump or Trump officials. Mueller states this interference as if it were a fact without providing one drop of evidence. Indeed, nowhere in the report, or anywhere else, is there any evidence of Russian interference. ..."
"... Mueller simply takes Russian interference for granted as if endless repeating by a bunch of presstitutes makes it so. For example, the Mueller report says that the Russians hacked the DNC emails, a claim for which no evidence exists. Moreover, it is a claim that is contradicted by the known evidence. William Binney and other experts have demonstrated that the DNC emails were, according to their time stamps, downloaded much more quickly than is possible over the Internet. This fact has been carefully ignored by Mueller, the Democrats and the presstitutes ..."
"... Indictments do not require evidence, and Mueller had none. Moreover, Mueller could not possibly know the identities of the Russian intelligence agents who allegedly did the hacking. This was of no concern to Mueller. He knew he needed no evidence, because he knew there would be no trial. The indictment was political propaganda, not real. ..."
"... The myth of Russian interference is so well established that even Glenn Greenwald in his otherwise careful and correct exposition of the Russiagate hoax buys into Russian interference as if it were a fact. Indeed, many if not most of Trump's supporters are ready to blame Russia for trying, but failing, to ensnare their man Trump. ..."
"... The falsity of Russiagate and the political purposes of the hoax are completely obvious, but even Trump supporters tip their hats to the falsehood of Russian interference so that they do not look guilty of excessive support for Trump. In other words, Russiagate has succeeded in constraining how far Trump's supporters can go in defending him, especially if he has any remaining intent to reduce tensions with Russia. ..."
"... Russiagate has succeeded in criminalizing in the American mind any contact with Russia. Thus has the military/security complex guaranteed that its budget and power will not be threatened by any move toward peace between nuclear powers. ..."
"... Just as Mueller indicted Russian intelligence agents without evidence, he could have indicted Trump without evidence, but a case against a president that is without evidence is not one a prosecutor wants to take to court as it is obviously an act of sedition. ..."
"... That the Democrats and the presstitutes want Trump indicted for obstructing a crime that did not occur shows how insane they have been driven by their hatred of Trump. What is operating in the Democratic Party and in the American media is insanity and hatred. Nothing else. ..."
"... Journalists who lie for the Establishment have no need of the First Amendment. Perhaps this is why they have no concern that Washington's attack on Julian Assange will destroy the First Amendment. They are helping Washington destroy Assange so that their self-esteem will no longer be threatened by the fact that there is a real journalist out there doing real journalism. Mueller Report ..."
One is to prevent President Trump from endangering the vast budget and power of the
military/security complex by normalizing relations with Russia.
Another, in the words of James Howard Kunstler, is "to conceal the criminal conduct of US
government officials meddling in the 2016 election in collusion with the Hillary Clinton
campaign," by focusing all public and political attention on a hoax distraction.
The third is to obstruct Trump's campaign and distract him from his agenda when he won the
election.
Despite the inability of Mueller to find any evidence that Trump or Trump officials colluded
with Russia to steal the US presidential election, and the inability of Mueller to find
evidence with which to accuse Trump of obstruction of justice, Russiagate has achieved all of
its purposes.
Trump has been locked into a hostile relationship with Russia. Neoconservatives have
succeeded in worsening this hostile relationship by manipulating Trump into a blatant criminal
attempt to overthrow in broad daylight the Venezuelan government.
Hillary's criminal conduct and the criminal conduct of the CIA, FBI, and Obama Justice (sic)
Department that resulted in a variety of felonies, including the FBI obtaining spy warrants for
partisan political purposes on false pretexts from the FISA court, were swept out of sight by
the Russiagate hoax.
The Mueller report was written in such a way that despite the absence of any evidence
supporting any indictment of Trump, the report refused to clear Trump of obstruction and passed
the buck to the Attorney General. In other words, Mueller in the absence of any evidence kept
the controversy going by setting up Attorney General Barr for cover-up charges.
It is evidence of Mueller's corruption that he does not explain just how it is possible for
Trump to possibly have obstructed justice when Mueller states in his report that the crime he
was empowered to investigate could not be found. How does one obstruct the investigation of a
crime that did not occur?
As Kunstler puts it, "The Special Prosecutor's main bit of mischief, of course, was his
refusal to reach a conclusion on the obstruction of justice charge. What the media refuses to
accept and make clear is that a prosecutor's failure to reach a conclusion is exactly the same
thing as an inability to make a case, and it was a breach of Mr. Mueller's duty to dishonestly
present that failure as anything but that in his report -- and possibly an act of criminal
prosecutorial misconduct" on Mueller's part.
But this is not the only dishonesty in Mueller's report. Although Mueller's report clearly
obliterates the Russiagate conspiracy theory peddled by the military/security complex, the
Democrats, and the presstitutes, Mueller's report takes for granted that Russia interfered in
the election but not in collusion with Trump or Trump officials. Mueller states this
interference as if it were a fact without providing one drop of evidence. Indeed, nowhere in
the report, or anywhere else, is there any evidence of Russian interference.
Mueller simply takes Russian interference for granted as if endless repeating by a bunch of
presstitutes makes it so. For example, the Mueller report says that the Russians hacked the DNC
emails, a claim for which no evidence exists. Moreover, it is a claim that is contradicted by
the known evidence. William Binney and other experts have demonstrated that the DNC emails
were, according to their time stamps, downloaded much more quickly than is possible over the
Internet. This fact has been carefully ignored by Mueller, the Democrats and the
presstitutes.
One reason for ignoring this undisputed fact is that they all want to get Julian Assange,
and the public case concocted against Assange is that Assange is in cahoots with the Russians
who allegedly gave him the hacked emails. As there is no evidence that Russia hacked the emails
and as Assange has said Russia is not the source, what is Mueller's evidence? Apparently,
Mueller's evidence is his own political indictment of Russian individuals who Mueller alleged
hacked the DNC computers. This false indictment for which there is no evidence was designed by
Mueller to poison the Helsinki meeting between Trump and Putin and announced on the eve of the
meeting.
Indictments do not require evidence, and Mueller had none. Moreover, Mueller could not
possibly know the identities of the Russian intelligence agents who allegedly did the hacking.
This was of no concern to Mueller. He knew he needed no evidence, because he knew there would
be no trial. The indictment was political propaganda, not real.
The myth of Russian interference is so well established that even Glenn Greenwald in his
otherwise careful and correct exposition of the Russiagate hoax buys into Russian interference
as if it were a fact. Indeed, many if not most of Trump's supporters are ready to blame Russia
for trying, but failing, to ensnare their man Trump.
The falsity of Russiagate and the political purposes of the hoax are completely obvious, but
even Trump supporters tip their hats to the falsehood of Russian interference so that they do
not look guilty of excessive support for Trump. In other words, Russiagate has succeeded in
constraining how far Trump's supporters can go in defending him, especially if he has any
remaining intent to reduce tensions with Russia.
Russiagate has succeeded in criminalizing in the American mind any contact with Russia. Thus
has the military/security complex guaranteed that its budget and power will not be threatened
by any move toward peace between nuclear powers.
The Democratic Party and the presstitutes cannot be bothered by facts. They are committed to
getting Trump regardless of the facts. And so is Mueller, and Brennan, and Comey, and a slew of
other corrupt public officials.
A good example of journalistic misconduct is James Risen writing in Glenn Greenwald's
Intercept of all places, "WILLIAM BARR MISLED EVERYONE ABOUT THE MUELLER REPORT. NOW DEMOCRATS
ARE CALLING FOR HIS RESIGNATION." Quoting the same posse of "hang Trump high" Democrats, Risen,
without questioning their disproven lies, lets the Democrats build a case that Mueller's report
proves Trump's guilt. Then Risen himself misrepresents the report in support of the Democrats.
He says there is a huge difference between Barr's memo on the report and the report itself as
if Barr would misrepresent a report that he is about to release.
Length is the only difference between the memo and the report. This doesn't stop Risen from
writing: "In fact, the Mueller report makes it clear that a key reason Mueller did not seek to
prosecute Trump for obstruction was a longstanding Justice Department legal opinion saying that
the Justice Department can't indict a sitting president." This is something Mueller threw in
after saying he didn't have the evidence to indict Trump. It is yet another reason for not
indicting, not the reason. Risen then backs up his misreport with that of a partisan Democrat,
Renato Mariotti who claims that Mueller could have indicted Trump except it is against US
Justice Department policy. Again, there is no explanation from Risen, Mariotti, or anyone else
how Mueller could have indicted Trump for obstructing what Mueller concludes was a crime that
did not happen.
Just as Mueller indicted Russian intelligence agents without evidence, he could have
indicted Trump without evidence, but a case against a president that is without evidence is not
one a prosecutor wants to take to court as it is obviously an act of sedition.
That the Democrats and the presstitutes want Trump indicted for obstructing a crime that did
not occur shows how insane they have been driven by their hatred of Trump. What is operating in
the Democratic Party and in the American media is insanity and hatred. Nothing else.
Risen also alleges that the unproven Russian hacks were passed over by Barr in his memo on
the report. Not only is this incorrect, but also Risen apparently has forgot that the
investigation was about Trump's collusion with Russia to do something illegal and the
investigation found that no such thing occurred. Risen, like the rest of the presstitutes and
even Greenwald himself, takes for granted that the unproven Russian hacks happened. Again we
see that the longer a lie is repeated the more it becomes true. Not even Greenwald can detect
that he has been bamboozled.
At one time James Risen was an honest reporter. He won a Pulitzer prize, and he was
threatened with prison by the Department of Justice when he refused to reveal his source for
his reporting on illegal actions of the CIA. But Risen discovered that in the new world of
journalism, telling the truth is punished while lying is rewarded. Risen, like all the others,
decided that his income was more important than the truth.
Journalists who lie for the Establishment have no need of the First Amendment. Perhaps this
is why they have no concern that Washington's attack on Julian Assange will destroy the First
Amendment. They are helping Washington destroy Assange so that their self-esteem will no longer
be threatened by the fact that there is a real journalist out there doing real journalism.
Mueller Report
Paul Craig Roberts has had careers in scholarship and academia, journalism, public service,
and business. He is chairman of The Institute for Political Economy.
In some respects, the media has played the most disingenuous of roles. Areas of investigation that historically would have proven
irresistible to reporters of the past have been steadfastly ignored. False narratives have been all-too-willingly promoted and facts
ignored. Fusion GPS personally made a
series of payments to several as-of-yet-
unnamed reporters .
The majority of the mainstream media has represented positions of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
Steele met with members of certain media with relative frequency. In
September 2016 ,
he met with a number of U.S. journalists for "The New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN," according
to The Guardian. It was during this period that Steele met with Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News.
In mid-October
2016, Steele returned to New York and met with reporters again. Toward the end of October, Steele spoke via Skype with Mother
Jones reporter David Corn.
Leaking, including felony leaking of classified information, has been widespread. The Carter Page FISA warrant -- likely the unredacted
version -- has been in the possession of The Washington Post and The New York Times since March 2017. Traditionally, the intelligence
community leaked to The Washington Post while the DOJ leaked to sources within The New York Times. This was a historical pattern
that stood until this election. The leaking became so widespread, even this tradition was broken.
On April 3, 2017, BuzzFeed reporter Ali Watkins wrote the article "
A Former Trump Adviser Met With a Russian Spy ." In the article, she identified "Male-1," referred to in
court documents
relating to the case of Russian spy Evgeny Buryakov, as Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who had provided the FBI with assistance
in the case. Just over a week later, on April 11, 2017, a Washington Post article, "
FBI Obtained FISA Warrant to Monitor Former Trump Adviser Carter Page ," confirmed the existence of the October 2016 Page FISA
warrant.
The information contained within both articles likely came via felony leaks from James Wolfe, former director of security for
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who was arrested on June 7, 2018, and
charged with one count of lying
to the FBI. Wolfe's indictment
alleges that he was leaking classified information to multiple reporters over an extended period of time.
Reporter
Ali Watkins likely received the undredacted FISA application on Carter Page from James Wolfe.
It appears probable that Wolfe leaked unredacted copies of the Page FISA application.
According to the indictment
, Wolfe exchanged 82 text messages
with Watkins on March 17, 2017. That same evening they engaged in a 28-minute phone call.
The original Page FISA application is 83 pages long, including one final signatory page.
In the public version of the application, there are 37 fully redacted pages. In addition to that, several other pages have redactions
for all but the header. There are only two pages in the entire document that contain no redactions.
Why would Wolfe bother to send 37 pages of complete redactions? It seems more than plausible that Wolfe took pictures of the original
unredacted FISA application and sent them by text to Watkins.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has repeatedly
stated that evidence within the FISA application
shows the counterintelligence agencies were abused by the Obama administration. Most of the mainstream media has known this.
Despite this, most major news organizations for over two years have promoted the Russia-collusion narrative. Despite ample evidence
having come out to the contrary, they have not admitted they were wrong, likely because doing so would mean they would have to admit
their complicity.
Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed
on Twitter @themarketswork.
The Obama administration provided a simultaneous layer of protection and facilitation for the entire effort. One example is provided
by Section
2.3 of Executive Order 12333 , also known as Obama's
data-sharing
order . With the passage of the order, agencies and individuals were able to ask the NSA for access to specific surveillance
simply by claiming the intercepts contained relevant information that was useful to a particular mission.
Section 2.3 had been expected to be finalized by early to mid-2016. Instead, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn't
sign off on Section 2.3 until Dec. 15, 2016. The order was finalized when Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed it on Jan. 3, 2017.
The reason for the delay could relate to the fact that while the executive order made it easier to share intelligence between
agencies, it also limited certain types of information from going to the White House.
An example of this was provided by Evelyn Farkas during a March 2, 2017,
MSNBC interview , where she detailed how the Obama administration
gathered and disseminated intelligence on the Trump team:
"I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill 'Get as much information as you can. Get as
much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.'
"The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, [they] would try
to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. That's why you have the
leaking."
Many of the Obama administration's efforts appear to have been structural in nature, such as establishing new procedures or creating
impediments to oversight that enabled much of the surveillance abuse to occur.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was appointed by Obama in 2011. From the very start, he found his duties throttled by the
attorney general's office. According to congressional
testimony by Horowitz:
"We got access to information up to 2010 in all of these categories. No law changed in 2010. No policy changed. It was simply
a decision by the General Counsel's Office in 2010 that they viewed, now, the law differently. And as a result, they weren't going
to give us that information."
These new restrictions were
put in place by Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole.
On Aug. 5, 2014, Horowitz and other inspectors general sent a
letter to Congress asking for unimpeded access to all records. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates responded on July 20, 2015,
with a 58-page
memorandum . The memo specifically denied the inspector general access to any information collected under Title III -- including
intercepted communications and national security letters.
The New York Times recently
disclosed that national security letters were used in the surveillance of the Trump campaign.
At other times, the Obama administration's efforts were more direct. The
Intelligence Community assessment was released
internally on Jan. 5, 2017. On this same day, Obama held an undisclosed White House meeting to discuss the dossier with national
security adviser Susan Rice, FBI Director James Comey, and Yates. Rice would later send herself an email
documenting
the meeting.
The following day, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey attached a written summary of the Steele dossier to the classified briefing they
gave Obama. Comey then met with President-elect Trump to inform him of the dossier. This meeting took place just hours after Comey,
Brennan, and Clapper formally briefed Obama on both the Intelligence Community assessment and the Steele dossier.
Comey would only inform Trump of the "salacious" details contained within the dossier. He later
explained on CNN in an April 2018 interview
why:
"Because that was the part that the leaders of the Intelligence Community agreed he needed to be told about."
Shortly after Comey's meeting with Trump, both the Trump–Comey meeting and the existence of the dossier were leaked to CNN. The
significance of the meeting was material, as Comey
noted in
a Jan. 7 memo he wrote:
"Media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write
that the FBI has the material."
The media had widely dismissed the dossier as unsubstantiated and, therefore, unreportable. It was only after learning that Comey
briefed Trump that
CNN reported
on the dossier. It was later
revealed that DNI James Clapper personally leaked Comey's meeting with Trump to CNN.
The Obama administration also directly participated in a series of
intelligence unmaskings
, the process whereby a U.S. citizen's identity is revealed from collected surveillance. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha
Power reportedly engaged in hundreds of unmasking requests. Rice has admitted to doing the same.
The Obama administration engaged in the ultimately successful effort to oust Trump's newly appointed national security adviser,
Gen. Michael Flynn. Yates, along with Mary McCord, head of the DOJ's National Security Division,
led that effort
.
Executive Order 13762
President Barack Obama issued a last-minute executive order on Jan. 13, 2017, that altered the line of succession within the DOJ.
The action was not done in consultation with the incoming Trump administration.
Acting Attorney General Sally Yates was fired on Jan. 30, 2017, by a newly inaugurated President Trump for refusing to uphold
the president's executive order limiting travel from certain terror-prone countries. Yates was initially supposed to serve in her
position until Jeff Sessions was confirmed as attorney general.
Obama's executive order placed the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia next in line behind the department's senior leadership.
The attorney at the time was Channing Phillips.
Phillips was first hired by former Attorney General Eric Holder in 1994 for a position in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office. Phillips,
after serving as a senior adviser to Holder, stayed on after he was replaced by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
It appears the Obama administration was hoping the Russia investigation would default to Channing in the event Sessions was forced
to recuse himself from the investigation. Sessions, whose confirmation hearings began three days before the order, was already coming
under intense scrutiny.
The implementation of the order may also tie into Yates's efforts to remove Gen. Michael Flynn over his call with the Russian
ambassador.
Trump ignored the succession order, as he is legally allowed to do, and instead appointed Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the
Eastern District of Virginia, as acting attorney general on Jan. 30, 2017, the same day Yates was fired.
Trump issued a new executive order on Feb. 9, 2017, the same day Sessions was sworn in, reversing Obama's prior order.
On March 10, 2017, Trump fired 46 Obama-era U.S. attorneys, including Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. These firings
appear to have been unexpected.
Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed
on Twitter @themarketswork.
This cartoon seems to me very apposite. The capacity of the mainstream media repeatedly to
promote the myth that Russia caused Clinton's defeat, while never mentioning what the
information was that had been so damaging to Hillary, should be alarming to anybody under the
illusion that we have a working "free media". There are literally hundreds of thousands of
mainstream media articles and broadcasts, from every single one of the very biggest names in
the Western media, which were predicated on the complete nonsense that Russia had conspired to
install Donald Trump as President of the United States.
I genuinely have never quite understood whether the journalists who wrote this guff believed
it, whether they were cynically pumping out propaganda and taking their pay cheque, or whether
they just did their "job" and chose to avoid asking themselves whether they were producing
truth or lies.
I suspect the answer varies from journalist to journalist. At the Guardian, for example, I
get the impression that Carole Cadwalladr is sufficiently divorced from reality to believe all
that she writes. Having done a very good job in investigating the nasty right wing British
Establishment tool that was Cambridge Analytica, Cadwalladr became deluded by her own fame and
self-importance and decided that her discovery was the key to understanding all of world
politics. In her head it explained all the disappointments of Clintonites and Blairites
everywhere. She is not so high-minded however as to have refused the blandishments of the
Integrity Initiative.
Luke Harding is in a different category. Harding has become so malleable a tool of the
security services it is impossible to believe he is not willingly being used. It would be
embarrassing to have written a bestseller called "Collusion", the entire premiss for which has
now been disproven, had Harding not made so much money out of it.
Harding's interview with Aaron Mate of The Real News was a truly enlightening moment. The
August elite of the mainstream media virtually never meet anybody who subjects their narrative
to critical intellectual scrutiny. Harding's utter inability to deal with unanticipated
scepticism descends from hilarious to toe-curlingly embarrassing.
In general, since the Mueller report confirmed that $50 million worth of investigation had
been unable to uncover any evidence of Russiagate collusion, the media has been astonishingly
unrepentant about the absolute rubbish they have been churning out for years.
Harding and the
Guardian's story about Manafort repeatedly calling on Assange in the Ecuador Embassy is one
of the most blatant and malicious fabrications in modern media history. It has been widely
ridiculed, no evidence of any kind has ever been produced to substantiate it, and the story has
been repeatedly edited on the Guardian website to introduce further qualifications and
acknowledgments of dubious attribution, not present as originally published. But still neither
Editor Katherine Viner nor author Luke Harding has either retracted or apologised, something
which calls the fundamental honesty of both into question.
Manafort is now in prison, because as with many others interviewed, the Mueller
investigation found he had been involved in several incidences of wrongdoing. Right up until
Mueller finalised his report, media articles and broadcasts repeatedly, again and again and
again every single day, presented these convictions as proving that there had been collusion
with Russia. The media very seldom pointed out that none of the convictions related to
collusion. In fact for the most part they related to totally extraneous events, like unrelated
tax frauds or Trump's hush-money to (very All-American) prostitutes. The "Russians" that
Manafort was convicted of lobbying for without declaration, were Ukrainian and the offences
occurred ten years ago and had no connection to Trump of any kind. Rather similarly the lies of
which Roger Stone stands accused relate to his invention, for personal gain, of a non-existent
relationship with Wikileaks.
The truth is that, if proper and detailed investigation were done into any group of wealthy
politicos in Washington, numerous crimes would be uncovered, especially in the fields of tax
and lobbying. Rich political operatives are very sleazy. This is hardly news, and if those
around Clinton had been investigated there would be just as many convictions and of similar
kinds. it is a pity there is not more of this type of work, all the time. But the Russophobic
motive behind the Mueller Inquiry was not forwarded by any of the evidence obtained.
My analysis of the Steele dossier, written before I was aware that Sergei Skripal probably
had a hand in it, has stood the test of time very well. It is a confection of fantasy concocted
for money by a charlatan.
We should not forget at this stage to mention the unfortunate political prisoner Maria
Butina, whose offence is to be Russian and very marginally involved in American politics at the
moment when there was a massive witchhunt for Russian spies in progress, that makes The
Crucible look like a study in calm rationality. Ms Butina was attempting to make her way in the
US political world, no doubt, and she had at least one patron in Moscow who was assisting her
with a view to increasing their own political influence. But nothing Butina did was covert or
sinister. Her efforts to win favour within the NRA were notable chiefly because of the irony
that the NRA has been historically responsible for many more American deaths than Russia.
Any narrative of which the Establishment does not approve is decried as conspiracy theory.
Yet the "Russiagate" conspiracy theory – which truly is Fake News – has been
promoted massively by the entire weight of western corporate and state media. "Russiagate", a
breathtaking plot in which Russia and a high profile US TV personality collude together to take
control of the most militarily powerful country in the world, knocks "The Manchurian Candidate"
into a cocked hat. A Google "news search" restricts results to mainstream media outlets. Such a
search for the term "Russiagate" brings 230,000 results. That is almost a quarter of a million
incidents of the mainstream media not only reporting the fake "Russiagate" story, but
specifically using that term to describe it.
Compare that with a story which is not an outlandish fake conspiracy theory, but a very real
conspiracy.
If, by contrast, you do a Google "news search" for the term "Integrity Initiative", the UK
government's covert multi million pound programme to pay senior mainstream media journalists to
pump out anti-Russian propaganda worldwide, you only get one eighth of the results you get for
"Russiagate". Because the mainstream media have been enthusiastically promoting the fake
conspiracy story, and deliberately suppressing the very real conspiracy in which many of their
own luminaries are personally implicated.
... ... ...
Furthermore – and this is a truly tremendous irony, which relates back to the cartoon
at the start – only two of the top ten news results for "Integrity Initiative" come from
the Western corporate media.
And this next fact comes nearly into the "too good to be true" category for my argument.
Those two MSM mentions, from Sky News and the Guardian, do not complain of the covert
anti-Russian propaganda campaign that is the Integrity Initiative. They rather complain that it
was an alleged "Russian hack" that made the wrongdoing public!! You could not make it up, you
really could not.
According to the mainstream media, it is not Hillary Clinton's fault for conspiring with the
DNC to cheat Bernie out of the nomination, it is Russia's fault for allegedly helping to reveal
it. It is not the British government's, or their media collaborators', fault for running a
covert propaganda scheme to dupe the public of the UK and many other countries, it is the
Russians' fault for allegedly helping to reveal it!
Which brings us full circle to the DNC leak that sparked Muellergate and the claims that it
was the Russians who lost Hillary the election. Robert Mueller repeats the assertion from the
US security services that it was Russian hackers who obtained the DNC emails and passed them on
to Wikileaks. I am telling you from my personal knowledge that this is not true.
Neither Mueller's team, not the FBI, nor the NSA, nor any US Intelligence agency, has ever
carried out any forensic analysis on the DNC's servers. The DNC consistently refused to make
them available. The allegation against Russia is based purely on information from the DNC's own
consultants, Crowdstrike.
William Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA (America's US$40 billion a year
communications intercept organisation),
has proven beyond argument that it is a technical impossibility for the DNC emails to have
been transmitted by an external hack – they were rather downloaded locally, probably on
to a memory stick. Binney's analysis is fully endorsed by former NSA systems expert Ed Loomis.
There simply are no two people on the planet more technically qualified to make this judgement.
Yet, astonishingly, Mueller refused to call Binney or Loomis (or me) to testify. Compare this,
for example, with his calling to testify my friend Randy Credico, who had no involvement
whatsoever in the matter, but Mueller's team hoped to finger as a Trump/Assange link.
The DNC servers have never been examined by intelligence agencies, law enforcement or by
Mueller's team. Binney and Loomis have written that it is impossible this was an external hack.
Wikileaks have consistently stressed no state actor was involved. No evidence whatsoever has
been produced of the transfer of the material from the "Russians" to Wikileaks. Wikileaks Vault
7 release of CIA documents shows that the planting of false Russian hacking "fingerprints" is
an established CIA practice . Yet
none of this is reflected at all by Mueller nor by the mainstream media.
"Collusion" may be dead, but the "Russiagate" false narrative limps on.
I should add it seems to me very probable Russia did make some efforts to influence the US
election. I worked a a British diplomat for 20 years and spent a lot of time trying to
influence political outcomes in the country in which I was posted, in Eastern Europe and in
Africa. It is part of the geopolitical game. The United States is of course the world leader by
a long way in attempting to influence elections abroad, spending hundreds of millions of
dollars to that effect in countries including Ukraine, Georgia, Ecuador and Venezuela recently,
and pretty well everywhere in Africa. It is a part of normal diplomatic life.
Mueller uncovered some high level influence-broking meetings. This is what states do. He
uncovered some sleazy deals. This is what rich people do. He uncovered some US $110,000 of
Facebook ad spending from Russia targeted on the USA, some of which promoted sex toys, some of
which was post-election, but some of which was apparently trying to assist Trump against
Clinton. Compared to the amount the USA pumps into similar arms length assistance to Putin
opponents in Russia alone, it was negligible. That this tiny bit of Facebook advertising
crucially impacted the US $13,000,000,000 PR campaigns of the candidates is a ludicrous
proposition.
That every country stay out of every other country's politics is arguably desirable. It is
not however the status quo, and the United States is in the worst position of all to
complain.
Stop fear-mongering and engaging in "acceptable" bigotry.-- Jimmy Dore , comedian, host of the Jimmy Dore Show
When Keith Olbermann
pounded his fist on his table, screaming, "SCUM! RUSSIAN SCUM!!!" I couldn't help but
thinking, that's the only nationality he could insert there and get away with it. He couldn't
scream "Mexican scum" or "Chinese scum" or "Indian scum." Russian bigotry is, I think, the only
acceptable bigotry among the liberal media. Totally acceptable to the liberal media.
Rachel Maddow
telling her audience in the middle of a polar vortex that Russia controls their power grid
and could freeze them all to death at a moment's notice was by far the most egregious example
of fear-mongering. But that's not the only bad thing the media's done. They're currently
pushing regime-change wars in Syria and Venezuela.
The corporate news will never regain my trust or redeem itself, because they are owned and
funded by the people they're supposed to be investigating and exposing, like the richest man in
the world, for instance, Jeff Bezos. He controls 51 percent of all the internet sales in the
United States, sits on a Pentagon board and has a $600 million deal with the CIA. That's the
guy running the news!
The thing is that America's media obsession with the Russian menace -- this idea that Russia
is the greatest threat to liberal civilization -- predates the Mueller investigation. It
predates the 2016 election, and it predates Trump. So this wasn't a sudden mistake about a
single investigation, but something that America's been moving towards for over a decade. The
Russian Menace has been a lucrative racket -- paying the mortgages, car loans, kids' college
tuitions, for thousands of think-tankers, military contractors, academics and journalists.
After Trump, the Russia hysteria hit a new level of paranoia and bigotry. There was a need
to blame America's domestic political turmoil, and the failure of its political establishment,
on someone or something -- to deflect responsibility for what happened. So suddenly liberal
media began to see "the Russians" everywhere -- part of a shadowy foreign conspiracy to
undermine America from within.
They weren't just threatening Europe and NATO. They were in the White House, in American
voting machines, in American electrical grids, in American children's cartoons. They were
hacking people's minds. They were controlling both the international left and the international
right -- against the respectable political center. That's how sneaky and devious and cynical
they are. That's how much they want to destroy America's liberal democracy.
The Mueller report may provide us some much-needed respite from this insanity for a few
weeks or months, but this focus on the Russian menace isn't going away any time soon. You can
already see Joe Biden's creepy behavior with women being blamed on a devious Russian plot to
help elect Bernie. So as we get closer to the election, this kind of stuff is gonna fire up
again big time.
To treat this issue as a media problem that we "can solve" and "get right" in the future is
a bit too optimistic, in my opinion. It assumes that our political and media establishment
wants to actually "get it right." What does getting it right mean, when they are the problem
that needs to be corrected? To "get it right," they'd have to admit that they've been wrong --
not just about Mueller, but about the decades of bankrupt neoliberal politics they've been
complicit in pushing on America and around the world. To get it right, our political and media
elite would have to voluntarily deplatform itself. And I don't see that happening anytime
soon.
4. Talk to people with an actual understanding of history and Russia, not fake
experts and uninformed pundits.
-- Carl Beijer , writer
It's remarkable how often the problems of Russiagate coverage came down to simple ignorance.
From references to Russia as a "Communist" nation to basic translation errors, we've seen
prominent pundits make mistakes that would embarrass a grade-school Muscovite.
This was in part a problem of people exaggerating their own credentials, but it was also a
problem of the media deciding that no real expertise was needed. I don't want to call for
academic entry exams, but I think it's clear that the media needs to move in the direction of
treating Russian studies as a field of knowledge like any other. Do you speak the language?
Have you spent more than a few weeks in the country? What and where have you published? Do you
have a directly relevant professional background?
There are so many people who could give extraordinary answers to all of these questions, so
it says everything about Russiagate when you look at who we heard from instead. From overt
operatives to media hacks, corporate news is now overrun by pundits who function as PR
professionals for the major parties. All of their professional and social incentives compel
them to carry water for their party; if they happen to be right about a given issue, it's
purely by accident.
And with Russiagate, we saw the worst-case scenario play out: Republicans, who will defend
Trump over anything, ended up being right -- while Democrats, desperate to believe they had
caught him in an impeachable crime, got it wrong. The only way around this problem, as far as I
can tell, is to talk to pundits who are acting against their own political interests.
In this case, there were plenty of people in liberal-left media who clearly want to see
Trump fail, but who were nevertheless Russiagate skeptics. Some of those voices were just being
contrarians, of course, but some of them were acting from a place of conviction.
5. Don't
manipulate the truth to justify war.-- Rania Khalek , journalist, host of In the Now
From the start, we were
warning people
that pushing this evidence-free conspiracy theory was ultimately going to empower Trump.
But even worse, it actually made the world a more dangerous place. In order to prove he wasn't
in bed with the Russians, the Trump administration pushed some of the most anti-Russia policies
in the post Cold War-era, moving us closer to nuclear war and increasing the likelihood of more
violence in places like Syria, Venezuela and Ukraine, all to prove that Trump isn't Putin's
puppet.
This entire affair has also resurrected the careers of the neocons, who, until Trump came
along, were largely disgraced for the horrors they inflicted on Iraq. Now they've been embraced
by liberals for being anti-Trump, and they have more influence than ever. Not to mention the
new McCarthyism that frames everything, from the NRA to white nationalism to even progressive
advocacy groups that challenge the Democratic Party, as agents of the Kremlin, distorting
everyone's understanding of what's going on today.
The Russiagate narrative has been a disaster, and it's going to continue to be a disaster,
because, despite being proven to be a sham, the corporate media and the corporate Democrats are
still pushing it, distracting everyone from the real reasons for our miserable status quo.
"... The Jimi Dore show is what the Daily Show used to be. ..."
"... NYTimes and Washington Post won the Pulitzer prizes for "thorough coverage" of 2016 Russia collusion ..."
"... The xenophobia towards Russia is higher than during the cold war. It's embarrassing imo. ..."
"... 14:52 Russian Troll farm: spends 15k on adds America: We lost the war we are no longer a sovereign nation ..."
"... Russiagate distracts from the very real Israelgate. #BDS ..."
"... so alex jones got banned from all platforms for being a conspiracy theorist while the MSM were pushing one for two years?! wow ..."
"... Pretty sure psychopaths will not feel embarrassment or humiliation, only rage and vengeance. ..."
"... CNN is actually a cult and It has a following. ..."
"... The funny thing about Dems claiming Trump wouldn't accept the result of the election - Cohen testified to Congress that Trump actually expected to lose and was running as a PR stunt. ..."
"... Keith Olbermann is Grandpa Maddow ..."
"... If somebody in power is after you, the feds will indict a ham sandwich... ..."
"... I kinda figured out myself that this Russia Gate was a load of lies and/or wishful thinking. Jimmy and his guests showed me that i wasn't wrong of nuts even. Thanks Jimmy, for hooking me up. ..."
"... We've known all along this has been a coup. This is not news to the informed. ..."
"... The Soviet Union moved from Russia, to the ruling class of DC and NYC. ..."
Now that Trump has agreed to go along with the war with Russia, they will back off on Trump and let him continue provoking
Russia in Syria, Venezuela and by flying US planes into Russian air space. Mueller helped Bush lie America into destroying Iraq.
US Empire wants military bases in more and more nations.
The funny thing about Dems claiming Trump wouldn't accept the result of the election - Cohen testified to Congress that Trump
actually expected to lose and was running as a PR stunt. LOL. Can't make this stuff up. The danger here is that the what really
happened was a deep state effort with mainstream media to overthrow a lawfully elected president of country. That's scarier than
any thing Trump may ever do.
I'm a conservative and have tremendous amount of respect for Jimmy Dore and Aaron Mate'. I may not agree with them on specific
policies but I know these two guys come from a sincere, honest place. I usually just blow off liberal rhetoric but I listen to
what Jimmy has to say. God bless them
FLYNN The FBI has concluded that Michael Flynn did not have any secret relationship with Russia and has cleared the retired
Lt. General of any wrongdoing. According to a U.S. intelligence official speaking with NPR, after reviewing the transcripts, FBI
agents found that Michael Flynn's forced resignation could only have been orchestrated from Obama insiders operating within the
White House.
"The FBI reviewed intercepts
of communications between the Russian ambassador to the United States and retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn -- national security
adviser to then-President-elect Trump -- but has not found any evidence of wrongdoing or illicit ties to the Russian government,
U.S. officials said."
Another current U.S Intelligence official agreed with the FBI and told NPR , "there is no evidence of criminal
wrongdoing in the transcripts of of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey
Kislyak, The official also said there was "absolutely nothing" in the transcripts that suggests Flynn was acting under instructions
"or that the trail leads higher." "I don't think [Flynn] knew he was doing anything wrong," the official said. "Flynn talked about
sanctions, but no specific promises were made. Flynn was speaking more in general 'maybe we'll take a look at this going forward'
terms."
So why aren't we listening to the officials who actually HEARD the calls? Don't be fooled, this isn't about Flynn discussing
sanctions or anything else with Russia for that matter. This is about delegitimizing a president. There is a reason why Democrats
are still determined to investigate Flynn even though he has already resigned. They are using this as a way to prove that Trump
was "in with Russia" and therefore an illegitimate president. Democrats will stop at nothing to get Trump out of the White House.
They don't care how many lives they have to ruin.
Communists on the Left colluded with Soviet Russia for decades and infiltrated politics, academia, education, media. Now
that Russia doesn't represent a threat and is now a growing Christian democracy...they hate it.
Jimmy: they (the globalist elite) want to defeat all of us. We all (Progressives, Christians, Conservatives, people who love
their country ) are on the same boat. The globalists want to destroy all of us. They are against the nation state, against people
having their own culture and defending it, they are against Christians (look at the way Obama referred to Catholics who were attacked
in Sri Lanka (Easter worshippers)), they are against true democracy meaning against a government that has the true interest of
their citizens in mind not the interest of the elite that controls all branches of the government. I might disagree with your
socialist policies and particularly what you said about Venezuela (I am from Colombia and saw the disastrous policies of Chavez
and Maduro destroying that nation) but we all have a common enemy and the Right and the true Left should come together in this
fight.
Because (CIA agent) Anderson "Cooper" Vanderbilt is the most trusted "NAME™" in News. Yeah, right. We already know the truth
about this porky mofo. His time is coming.
Remember this is the Special Counsel Investigation, the "Ultimate" Investigation. Which is also the 3rd Investigation. We already
had the House & then the Senate Investigate Russia Collusion & both came up with NO Evidence. So they started as Special Counsel
Investigation which has now come up with the same Conclusion as they did🤔
I always believed in you when it came to Russia Jimmy. I don't agree with you on everything, but you and Kyle are definitely
one of the new progressives that didn't go off the deep end with this conspiracy.
And yes, exactly what Aaron says. I kinda figured out myself that this Russia Gate was a load of lies and/or wishful thinking.
Jimmy and his guests showed me that i wasn't wrong of nuts even. Thanks Jimmy, for hooking me up.
It's only fair that "news journalists" start doing stand-up routines - it's your fault Jimmy for taking over the role of serious
news journalism from them, was probably inevitable, LOL.
I used to respect Keith Olberman (and Rachael Maddow as well!) when they were criticizing Bush for lying us into a war over
a non existent weapons of mass destruction program. I think these living colostomy bags are promoted to their positions to undermine
legitimate criticism of the criminal dirtbags that run this nation. They were right about Bush Jr, wrong about Obozo - and of
course, other...
The two of you are both great! I think so highly of Aaron, and the fact that he seems to have chosen Jimmy's show for his first
lengthy take on the "end of Russiagate" is telling! Both of you deserve our props and thanks for helping keep us ALL sane over
the past couple of years.
I'm sure they all still believe Trump will be indicted or impeached "any day now". These people are mentally unstable, they
are the textbook example of delusional.
Mon 29 Apr 2019 01.55 EDT Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian
navy as part of a programme to use underwater mammals as a special ops force.
1 week ago
The whale was the secret intermediary between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. The messages were transmitted during weekly 'Whales-R-Us'
peer support sessions. It's ironic it turns up now, after Mr. Mueller's report has already been issued.
1 week ago (Edited)
I'm pretty sure "Nessie" is a mobile underwater propoganda base used by the Russians since the time of the Bolshevic revolution.
Originally, it was merely a base to hide the Reds operating on the outskirts of the Capitalist capitol of London. Scotland was
the perfect hiding place.
Now however, it's outfitted with the most sophisticated internet hacking equipment, AI technology so advanced it can
alter your political ideology just by selling you a mailorder slavic blow-up doll.
Chris Hedges, host of "On Contact," joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the role of the Democratic establishment in the "Russiagate"
media frenzy. He argues that it was an unsustainable narrative given the actions of the White House but that the Democratic elite
are unable to face their own role in the economic and social crises for which they are in large part to blame. They also discuss
NATO's expansionary tendencies and how profitable it is for US defense contractors.
Years ago I kept hearing from the newsmedia that Russia was the "enemy".
Frontline had a show about "Putin's Brain". Even Free
Speech TV shows like Bill Press and "The Nation" authors like Eric Alterman push the Hillary style warmongering and do nothing
to expose the outright lies out there.
These are supposed to be thought outside of the corporate mainstream newsmedia. The emphasis
only on Trump and Fox News is totally hypocritical.
The Obama adminstration knew about the Russian attempts, yet did not alert the Trump
campaign. Instead the Obama administration sent spies to entrap low level operatives, with
the hope of eventually nailing Trump himself or a close advisor. Why?
Because the intelligence community wanted that insurance policy on Trump. Not to remove
him from office, but to control him in the event he won. The intelligence community and
defense community wants and needs perpetual war and conflict to justify themselves. Trump was
campaigning on better relations with Russia and pulling back the us global defense footprint.
This was not acceptable to them, so they needed to make sure they could control him. Do what
we want or certain information is released.
Somehow, they lost control over the operation, which resulted in the appointmemt of
Mueller. Forcing the plot against Trump out into the open is the best thing that could have
happened to Trump. Trump now holds all the cards in his control and possible retaliation
against the wrongdoers. I predict no action against any of the real wrongdoers, so Trump
maintains his control over a severly wounded intelligence community. He has the power over
them now, by threating prosecutions and disclosure of what they really did.
1 week ago
"Sprawling" How many CIA fucksticks, or boondoggle procuring disinformation spewing,
sell-their-own-mother contractors, like New Knowledge, are out there conspiring to screw
people over and install some goomed poodle puppet of the empire like Juan Guido? Jesus
titty-fucking Christ. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Look! Russians!
"[Risen and his ilk] are engaged in a calculated rear-guard campaign to prevent the public
from moving on to the next level of implications. Since the MSM and deep state PTB were so
clearly willing and able to fabricate 'collusion', what other articles of faith are
fabrications? WMDs of course.
But then there are the others: ISIS and Al Qaeda were our enemies? The news media tells
the truth? Syrian government gas attacks? Iran is a menace? Russian "invasion" of Ukraine?
[Anita Hill and Christine Blasey were 'abused' by being asked questions?]
Assertions that Qadafi and now Maduro were/are bad guys?
America is a free country? Mass immigration is AOK? The rich create wealth?
The 9/11 attacks were the work of a handful of Arab guys? Israel is our true friend and
wants peace?
The whole edifice is undermined and Congressional and media reciters [and deep state
shills posting here like Alberto, Lela, Felix95, and Mike5000] have the job of diverting the
public from thinking the unthinkable."
1 week ago
"Too little too late."
Not for all of us. A significant number of progressives who ardently rejected the
evidence-free hysteria retain credibility to press for all of those things.
1 week ago
"If you or Glenn cared about any of those things, you'd be writing incessantly about them,
but you don't."
Even if that were true, it would not alter that we were right about this Russiagate moral
panic, and many of you were recklessly wrong
"It's not a non sequitur to say so."
It is. (As is your peculiar fixation on Pierre Omidyar.) See above.
1 week ago
that's a reply to Mona above...
1 week ago
" let's look at gun control, climate change, immigration, infrastructure, medical needs,
college debt, abortion rights, justice for people of color, gerrymandering, voting
rights"
What progressives and Democrats should have been doing the last three years, not promoting
and agitating for a baseless -- and recklessly dangerous -- moral panic. Direction for how to
proceed should come from those who had the wisdom and reason to reject the evidence-free
mania.
1 week ago
Instead of telling others what they should be doing, why don't you do it yourself?
Too exhausted trying to control what you can't?
1 week ago
" why don't you do it yourself?"
I do. Part of that effort is making clear to one and all that many progressives never
promoted a baseless moral panic that made Democrats and the media look like Alex Jones. Some
of us can be trusted to be evidence-based.
1 week ago
And you dont think that was part of the purpose?
You think the DNC cares about any of those important things? Keeping the focus off the
democrats was the most important objective of Russiagate.That and starting another cold war
which makes them even more dangerous than Trump.
1 week ago
you won't find it on the 2020 Democratic Party platform either ... which is still stuck on
2016:
Hopefully, this the coda of the Russiagate saga. From my perspective it revealed more
about America's Deep State than it did about Russia's alleged malign intent.
The Deep State has entered into mainstream American politics. We know it is there and that
it is a potent threat to American self rule, far more dangerous than Russia or any of the
external challenges.
Many things remain unanswered. For example, in an interconnected, internet world, where
does big tech fit in? Are Google, Facebook et al American companies? Do they enforce American
policy? Is it just America or do they whore for anybody with money? Does it mean that people
in China and Russia are not allowed to use these platforms even though it is freely available
on the net? One thing remains the same. The Establishment likes a rigged game.
It's nasty mess and over all looms the specter of the Deep State.
1 week ago
Absolutely. Also, all this banter about Russia influence and Trump, will not change the
*fact* that Mueller did not recommend to indict Trump on the 'collusion/conspiracy' issue,
nor the 'obstruction' issue. It's fact. Fact. Meaning it can't go backwards. Meaning all the
howling and screaming is not going to change anything from that report. Mueller would have
nailed Trump to the proverbial wall if he could, but didn't, because he Just.Didn' t.Have.It .
Secondly, we have a much more serious issue. We have the Deep State who has infiltrated
our political system, to the point that they attempted a coup. Like they do in totalitarian
countries. Right here in the good ole USA.
While voters naively went to vote in 2016, the intelligence agencies coupled with the
strong arm of HRC and the DNC conspired to upend the election because they wanted their
favorite to win. And they were so sure she was going to win, that they all jumped on
it...gleefully.
They committed sedition. They all need to go to jail.
They did far more damage to this country and our laws, our Constitution, and our belief in
an honest voting system than all the Russian bots around. Add in a conspiring media, who
spewed lies and half truths and glaring omissions of facts to the American people..
What more do you folks need? This isn't about Trump. It's about the rule of law. If they
get away with this travesty, you can kiss our elections goodbye. Totalitarianism here we
come.
1 week ago (Edited)
"You can kiss our elections goodbye"
I did that back in 2004 when our voting system turned into a Black Box with
moronic/ignorant government officials overseeing a cabal of opportunistic, conflict of
interest ridden, behind-closed-doors contractors, running a back door littered, populace
duping sham.
1 week ago
How about December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court lawlessly intervened to hand the
presidency to Bush and the entire political establishment submitted with barely a peep? That
was a judicial coup, and we cannot escape the consequences.
1 week ago
Yes. That, too.
But now we have stinging evidence that the coup was attempted and they used false
information to obtain FISAs to unmask people in their scheme to get Trump to take him
down.
I don't like Trump. But I will stick up for any President who is duly elected by the
people. For the people, by the people, of the people. Anyone who tries to take away our
rights because THEY feel they are arbiters of who becomes President, needs to have their
proverbial heads on a platter. Put orange suits on all of them, and let them ponder about
their stupidity and arrogance behind bars.
And that goes also for Missy Hillary, the ringleader.
1 week ago
Understatement of the year - hell, the millennia:
The Deep State has entered into mainstream American politics. We know it is there and that
it is a potent threat to American self rule, far more dangerous than Russia or any of the
external challenges.
The U.S. Deep State most likely did that in November, 1963, and has been
ensconced in power ever since.
1 week ago
They dont even hide it anymore.Heck they are out front cheer leading this ruse...How do
criminals like Brennan and Clapper and Haden get jobs at MSNBC and CNN?
They belong in prison.
1 week ago
The classic rumor I remember was the Russians employing a killer whale with a bear trap
attached as an anti-personnel device esp. against SEAL types.
1 week ago
We need to address the Clientelist War Wing of the Dem Party that has formed an ugly
alliance with our intelligence apparatus, before we can even start confronting Trump.Repeat
after me, "The Russiagate Spin has actually worked in Trump's favor"..
Chomsky: "By Focusing On Russia, Democrats Handed Trump A "Huge Gift" And Possibly The
2020 Election"
Did Trump lie the world into wars?
That madman wanted to work with Russia and not start WW3.....
That madman wanted to pull out of Syria and Afghanistan and make peace with N korea
That madman hasnt started any new wars and wouldn't be in Venezuela if not for Russia
gate.
Trump is lot of unsavory thing but the real madmen are the people who pushed this
Russiagte ruse and another Cold War with Russia based on lies and there is this....
The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory The real Russiagate scandal
is the damage it has done to our democratic system and media. By Aaron Maté
Since, as Woody Allen once famously observed 90% of life is just showing up, I might
recommend you'd have a better sense of accomplishment if you didn't waste all your time on an
internet comment board. Then maybe you could earn some kind of descriptive label beyond TDS
victim.
1 week ago
THIS:
This dead end conspiracy theory is the only weapon Trump will have in 2020 and he will use
it mercilessly. Provided him by clowns like you.
Russiagters have handed Donald Trump a pretty package going into the 2020
election. Now he can accurately say the establishment media and Democrats traffic in
conspiracies and delusional lies. That he is also a deluded lying freak won't destroy the
value of the gift -- delivered with a big lovely bow called the Mueller Report.
1 week ago (Edited)
Even if every accusation, every hyped news story, every rumour of the Russian
"interference" in the US election, an "interference" that we are bizarrely told did not
influence the outcome of the election, were true, it would amount to an existential madness
by a species whose "sell by" date has long passed on this planet.
Prove that Russian "interference," as opposed to Israeli or Saudi or every other
interference, influenced the results of an election where lobbies and billionaires hold sway,
where political party corruption determines the candidate, where the loser refuses to concede
the results, where local corruption and disenfranchisement determine state results, where
corporations are considered human beings and where Americans cannot vote directly for
President in an undemocratic system and you will have grounds to fulfill the wish of
blindered journalists like James Risen whose unwitting obsession is to extinguish human life
on Earth, a consequence that, truth be told, is only conditionally negative.
1 week ago
More embarrassing, paranoid nonsense from Intercept's house Russiagater, James Risen. I
usually skim the works of Risen, just to make sure he's still as lunatic as ever. This is the
line that sums up the entire laughably dangerous farrago of Risen-think above:
"Manafort and Butina may have been on two sides of a complex new kind of spy game that few
outsiders understand."
Boy, you got that right, James. C'mon, Mr. Insider, explain it to us Outsiders again.
1 week ago
The first casualty of Russia's sprawling spy game seems to have been the mental health of
large swathes of America's 4th Estate.
Just because Sergei Millain is Johnny Foreigner (or Ivan Foreigner if you prefer), it
doesn't follow he is in Putin's pocket.
Sergei Millain offered money to George Papadopolous for the sole reason of justifying the
FBI's FISA warrant. Because Papadopolous refused Millain's offer they had to claim they
believed he was an agent of Israel.
1 week ago
Stephen F. Cohen: Mueller Probe Hysteria Endangers National Security By Preventing Trump
From Talking With Russia
And the Rachel Maddow prize for investigative conspiracy theorising goes to...
1 week ago
The point of these articles is not to make Liberals hate Trump, it is to make liberals
hate Russia. Why is that? Why did Obama and his admin, including Neocons Susan Powers, Susan
Rice, Victoria Nuland and Billary Clinton want to create a new cold war. Of all the nations
to be worried about influencing our elections, Russia is way down on the list.
Just embarrassing. Come out and say it. You are a voice for the lobbies and special
interests
1 week ago
When can we expect Mr. Risen's series of articles about Israel's documented and
undocumented interference in our elections, ongoing spy campaign and/or (much) worse?
We await with bated breath.
1 week ago
LOL. James Risen article with "Russia" in headline. Stopped reading went straight to
comments.
1 week ago
Same. Risen is a one-dimensional hack.
1 week ago
"Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
The above statement completely negates any impact from Risen's article, as the entire
wretched thing is innuendo.
1 week ago
Maddow shows how Russiagate borders on clinically significance delusion:
Glenn Greenwald Verified account @ggreenwald
Maddow is claiming the Republic is existentially threatened because YouTube recommended
a show hosted by Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer-winning ex-NYT reporter, talking to @aaronjmate,
Izzy Award winner, all because it's hosted on RT. Both have more journalistic achievements
then she. https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1122552675445420032
1 week ago (Edited)
Jesus Christ.....rather than let the Bush era neocon/rightwing nonsense peter out or
self-destruct, the so-called liberal corporate MIC/Wall Street-captured MSM and establishment
insiders have decided to fully discredit themselves too by doubling down on the Fox News
model. I doubt they or their followers really grasp the magnitude of the implications. And
they've been silent on the gubmint's big data approach to warehousing all of our
communications in any format which they've been illegally intercepting for at least two
decades. The Intercept is now silent on this, perhaps in part because of Omidyar's
conflicting financial interests.
Sadly, or perhaps mercifully, we will be put out of our collective misery by the AI
killer-bot army that will begin to exert its control within the next 10 years.
1 week ago
Watch Aaron Maté Destroy Russiagate Propagandist and "Collusion" Author Luke
Harding
What Risen is really proposing is that Obama ignored all this even while spying on
everyone
Thats called logic
1 week ago
Yes and No.
Risen, like a lot people I believe, is simply unable to accept the hard, cold reality that
his neighbors, friends, countrymen ~ Americans ~ actually, truly voted for the creature from
the black lagoon. It's too painful. The mind reels.
*therefore, in Risen's mind, Putin did it.
1 week ago
"The mind reels. *therefore, in Risen's mind, Putin did it."
This is true for a great many. I had my own rather severe emotional crisis in the weeks
after the 2016 election -- and a close friend who is a therapist reported that this was
virtually all that most of her clients wanted to discuss.
Fear and shock do odd things to the mind. None of us is immune, some just got particularly
afflicted and along came Russiagate into which to direct their distorted and distressed
minds.
1 week ago
If regurgitating the same theme over and over again is the game for Mr. Risen, well, we
can all play at that game, can't we? Here, however, is a fact-based narrative that nobody on
any side of Russiagate seems to want to discuss, not the RT-sector, not the
billionaire-foundation neoliberal sector (Intercept fits in here), the corporate
shareholder-military-industrial sectors (MSNBC, Fox, etc.). It's really very strange.
One of the more fundamental flaws in the Russiagate story that's important to understand
is that Trump really hasnʼt changed direction on the core US policy towards Russia - the
evidence for that is Trumpʼs assault on the Nordstream 2 pipeline deal that would bring
Russian gas to Germany via an undersea pipeline across the Baltic, bypassing Ukraine (which
is basically now a US client state, since the 2014 coup). That's been US policy on Russia
since about 2003, unchanged under Bush, Obama, and Trump - it's about who gets to sell gas to
Europe and oil to the world, basically, and where the money from those sales is parked.
What the likes of Risen will not go into is how the US and Wall Street had a positive view
of Putin up till about 2003. Steve Collʼs Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
outlines the break point in US-Russian relations, when ExxonMobil tried to acquire a majority
interest in Russian oil in 2003, and Putin rejected the offer and arrested Mikhail
Khodorkovsky on tax evasion charges; thatʼs officially when Russia became the bad guy,
as he was clearly not going to become a Saudi-like partner in the global petrodollar
recycling scheme.
This opened the door to the pipeline wars over who was going to deliver oil and gas to
European markets; this was a central story in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and continues to this
day with the US trying to sell LNG shipments to Europe while Russia tries to build Nordstream
2 to Germany, bringing us up to today. Clearly, US fossil fuel corporations want to ship LNG
to Europe, and Nordstream 2 is competition, and Trump, like Obama is a tool of US corporate
interests who really want that market:
However, there is a confounding factor - and also, one of the main reasons to distrust the
corporate media narrative on this story - i.e. the refusal to bring ExxonMobil into the
picture. ExxonMobil has lost several billion dollars over the Russia sanctions (over oil
deals more than gas), and as a private company, really wants a piece of the Russian oil
production:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/business/energy-environment/exxon-mobil-russia-sanctions-waiveroil.html
The PR monkeys in the corporate media (including Risen & Co.) and the "humanitarians"
in the State Department wonʼt touch this story, because it reveals too much about
whatʼs really going on - i.e. that this kind of oil/gas policy by Trump is largely what
Clinton would have done (i.e. opposed Nordstream), and that the whole Russiagate story is
merely political theater run on behalf of war profiteers and the diehard Hilllary Clinton
camp in the Democratic Party. Everything else - Manfort in the Ukraine, Trump Tower in
Moscow, etc. - is just business as usual in the American Empire, as seen in the Clinton
Foundation, Viktor Pinchuk, Uranium One, Frank Giustra, come on...
Leaving nothing but this hysterical spy game nonsense ... utter garbage, just like the
KGB-CIA private meeting rules story that Risen hyped recently - pure neocon propaganda
"President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev held three more private meetings today and
agreed to conclude their conference here with a joint appearance on Thursday morning, Larry
Speakes, the White House spokesman, announced tonight. . . Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev
began their second day of talks with a private meeting that had been scheduled to last 15
minutes but ran for nearly 70 minutes, with only interpreters present. They met in a small
room in the Soviet Mission, with the Soviet leader seated in a small armchair and Mr.
Reagan on a sofa. In the afternoon, they meet alone for a little over 20 minutes and then
again for 90 minutes. All told, the two leaders have spent 4 hours and 51 minutes alone,
except for interpreters, over the two days here."
These kind of private meetings at diplomatic events are entirely not unusual. In
fact anything that gets world leaders to talk to one another is a good idea, that can lead
to, for example, talks on nuclear weapons reductions.
Risen, turned into a PR monkey for the National Security State... that's just sad. Why
don't you parachute him into Yemen so he can see up close the results of what he's
cheerleading for?
1 week ago
Not a single American voter was influenced by Russian bots. No American voter was
strong-armed in the voting booth when they voted for Trump. Hillary lost after she ignored
great swathes of ordinary working class folks and called them 'irredeemable deplorables'....
because they voted for Trump.
She didn't even have the insight to understand that they voted for him over her because
she had a smug, condescending 'tude and it rankled.
The Democrats will have to unseat Trump under a strong economy. The average American
working class stiff is not spending sleepless nights worried about climate change. They are
worried about how they will pay their bills.
All the other issues are secondary to this. Democrats will have to get up at home base and
bat it out of the ballpark. Or they will lose again. Mocking religious people, particularly
Christians, is not a good idea, unless you think denigrating voters are going to make them
want to vote for you. The contempt for these white, Christian, Catholic, Jewish voters is
wide and long within the Democrat party.
Not wise.
1 week ago
The Democrats will have to unseat Trump under a strong economy. The average American
working class stiff is not spending sleepless nights worried about climate change. They are
worried about how they will pay their bills.
Partly true, but the economy is not actually very strong. The corporate media
won't tell you this - and that is proof that they're not "liberal" in any meaningful fashion,
but the indicators are being skewed and lied about.
But keep believing your "black unemployment" at a record low propaganda as such. At least
you might be retired and the inevitable crash that is coming after Trump's re-election won't
hurt you much. In any case, if it does you can bet that Trump will attack Iran, as he is a
complete stooge to Israel and Saudi Arabia at this point - just like his swamp neocon
cabinet.
1 week ago
I think Trump is pragmatic...financially. He ran on "no more wars' that leave our economy
in shreds and killing millions of innocents and thousands of our soldiers. He was explicit
about this, so if he turn now to attacking Iran, he will have lost his head completely.
Everyone knows a war in the ME will ignite another Holocaust, Armageddon if you will. It
will be certainly, WWIII.
No, I have no idea, nor anyone else, if the economy improve or plummets, but I still
believe it is the bread and butter issues that cause the American voter to push that lever.
And they one they trust most; that they feel understand them best.
1 week ago
Borrowing one from Tom Drake though he agrees with your conclusions more than I do,
Jim.
I'm old enough to remember when Jim Risen wrote about the sprawling American spy
game.
1 week ago
Fer chrissake, Jim, give it up! You are becoming like the Japanese soldier who didn't know
World War 2 ended 20 years earlier and his side LOST!
1 week ago
Butina was "not a spy in the traditional sense," the Justice Department now says.
This is true .. . traditional spies rarely "infiltrate the NRA (National Rifle
Association)" and various associated "right wing groups".
*what could the NRA possibly have of value?
1 week ago
She wanted to sell guns and make money.....You do know the USA is the biggest arms dealer
on the planet right ?......bar none?
1 week ago
Maybe I misunderstood? Did I miss the irony? I thought he was saying that Butina was a
Russian spy? And her association with the NRA was a link to that? Putin is vociferously
against gun rights and she was under constant surveillance from Putin.
1 week ago
Heres another unanswered question....
Why did the FBI allow a private company with proved Bias against Russia and worked for the
DNC to investigate the servers?......Wasnt this a crime scene and then hacking was blamed on
Russia based on this bogus and biased investigation?
"Both the DNC and the security firm Crowdstrike, hired to respond to the breach, have said
repeatedly over the years that they gave the FBI a "COPY"of all the DNC images back in 2016."
"The FBI was given" IMAGES" of servers, forensic "COPIES", as well as a host of other
forensic information we collected from our systems," said Adrienne Watson, the DNC's deputy
communications director.
"We were in close contact and worked cooperatively with the FBI and were always responsive
to their requests. Any suggestion that they were denied access to what they wanted for their
investigation is completely incorrect." The FBI declined comment for this story, but in
testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last year, then-director James Comey said
that Crowdstrike "ultimately shared with us their forensics.
"At that same hearing, Comey complained that the DNC didn't give the FBI direct access to
the DNC's servers" Comey: DNC denied FBI's requests for access to hacked servers
By Joe Lauria The two sources that originated the allegations claiming that Russia meddled
in the 2016 election -- without providing convincing evidence -- were both paid for by the
Democratic National Committee, and in one instance also by the Clinton campaign: the Steele
dossier and the CrowdStrike analysis of the DNC servers.
They always forget the disclaimer: "No animals were harmed in the writing of this story,
only humans."
1 week ago
You know what they are still pushing this right?.......to get Assange and criminalize real
journalism.
They have already tried to tie Assange to Stone....who is a liar and fraud
And they need this ruse to tie Assange to Russia and Trumps election....its about
criminalizing journalism and overturning a USA election.
1 week ago (Edited)
"Manafort and Butina may have been on two sides of a complex new kind of spy game that few
outsiders understand." - Risen
If that's so, why aren't you busting the chops of Mueller and our "intelligence"
agencies for not doing their job? Hell, the Mueller report cost more than the Russians
allegedly spent to influene both our election and Trump.
Also, specifically regarding Butina, who was actually quite overt in her activities during
the years preceding this imbroglio, the only "conspiracy" seems to be the "conspiracy" to act
as an agent for a foreign government (which is not being a "spy") and which has never
garnered this type of charge or sentencing based on the evidence that existed or what was
actually presented at trial.
It's this ongoing Russiagate hysteria that The Intercept, via Risen, Reed, Schwarz, et al
keep promoting for all the wrong reasons that gives us a world where journalists and
publishers like Assange are facing jail time in a foreign country; where Chelsea Manning is
in jail right now for refusing to cooperate with charades like this; and where harmless
foreigners like Butina are tortured in solitary confinement, then sentenced to prison by
misusing the law in order to punish them.
How in the world can the article here even approach the Intercepts own standards
of: "holding the powerful accountable...[with] in-depth investigations and unflinching
analysis..." when it starts with an unverified premise that hasn't been corroborated
independently and ends with the exact same theme?
"[Russiagate is] a complex new kind of spy game that few outsiders understand." - Risen
& The Intercept editors
Again - this type of "journalism" is what prevents me and many others from donating to
The Intercept. We simply won't pay for elaborate and unqualified hearsay.
1 week ago
Real journalism... The Spy who Wasnt
The U.S. government went looking for someone to blame for Russia's interference in the
2016 election -- and found Maria Butina, the perfect scapegoat. By James Bamford
But internally, some employees say Greenwald's presence undermines the site's work.
"People assume Glenn's tweets reflect some sort of internal consensus, but the truth is I
don't think there's a single other person here who agreed with him on Trump/Russia," says
one Intercept staffer. "I'd hope people don't view us as less legitimate just because of
one guy."
No they view TI as less legit because of James Risen, Mehdi Hasan, Juan
Thompson, Betsy Reed, and Beto Mackey.
Exactly...
1 week ago
The last sentence mentioning Manafort and Butina is unsettling.
Already Manafort, an acknowledged operative for hire, got the shaft.
Risen bringing in Butina, who already spent a good time in solitary confinement smells really
bad.
She got no justice.
She is the new symbol of mind-boggling Russophobia.
1 week ago
"Risen bringing in Butina, who already spent a good time in solitary confinement smells
really bad. She got no justice."
It really is a travesty of justice. James Bamford published this in The New Republic:
"The Russian Spy Who Wasn't: The U.S. government went looking for someone to blame for
Russia's interference in the 2016 election -- and found Maria Butina, the perfect
scapegoat."https://newrepublic.com/article/153036/maria-butina-profile-wasnt-russian-spy
Prosecutors were hoping to get her to plead guilty rather than go to trial, and had even
agreed to drop the major charge against her: acting as an unregistered foreign agent of
Russia. Born and raised in Siberia, she is terrified of solitary confinement. Fifteen days
later, still in solitary, she signed the agreement, pleading guilty to the lesser charge,
one count of conspiracy. During our interviews before her arrest, Butina told me
that she was "a huge fan" of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. "I love the story," she
said. "For some reason it fascinates me. It seems to be simple, but it's so complicated a
story." Stepping off the plane to begin grad school at the start of the Trump-Russia
maelstrom, she, like Alice, began her tumble down the rabbit hole.
1 week ago
It is mind boggling. I would expect a man of Risen' s experience to have the nous to start
rowing back now. Instead he's doubling down, getting wilder, allowing the very last vestiges
of his credibility to circle the drain. Very sad to witness.
1 week ago
Maybe he is crying for help....his hysteria and hyperbole are almost comical.
the deep state seems to have gotten him and good
1 week ago
It's reminiscent of what Risen did to Mr Wen Ho Lee who also served time in solitary and
did so because Risen had singled him out to be the spy of the century.
Ultimately Risen's former employer, The New York Times, apologized for their coverage of
Lee but that may have had something to do with Lee's lawsuit against the Times and other
major outlets in which he ultimately won.
But having a 1.3 million in legal fees, loss of his job, 9 months in solitary, reputation
obliterated does make the 1.6 million award seem merely symbolic. Risen's career continued
and now he's doing the same thing to others here. In this country, scoundrels are rewarded
while their victims suffer more under the system.
Butina's treatment under our "justice" system is even worse than Lee's and being a non
citizen, she may have fewer recourse available to her to address this injustice.
1 week ago
Democrats didnt protest when Obama tortured Manning to try to get her to lie about
Assange....this is the new normal
Washington Has Destroyed Western Liberty: The Era of Tyranny Has Begun
"The entire Western world is adopting Washington's approach to Assange and criminalizing
the practice of journalism, thus protecting governments' criminality. If you reveal a
government crime, as Wikileaks did, you will be prosecuted by the criminal government for
doing so. It is like permitting a criminal to prosecute the police and prosecutor who want
him arrested."
The "war on terror" was a disguise for an attack on the US Constitution, an attack that
has succeeded. The worst act of treason in history is the US government's destruction of the
US Constitution. The era of tyranny has begun. Elections cannot stop it. "
Risen is desperately trying to revive his career by reanimating this Russia zombie.
His sprawling narrative has gone from "Trump committed treason" to "Trump conspired" to
"Trump and co made illicit contacts". At each step, what has motivated the change in
narrative is cold hard reality.
He's a grifter. We can all see this.
1 week ago
Risen is right that there are plenty of unanswered questions. Just not the ones he is
asking
Special Counsel Mueller: Disingenuous and Dishonest Larry C. Johnson "The impetus, the
encouragement for the Moscow project came from one man -- Felix Sater. This produced nothing.
No deal, no trip. But Sater persisted, targeting Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer and
an executive in the Trump Organization To reiterate -- if the Steele Dossier were based on
truthful intelligence then the Trump Organization only had to sit back, stretch out its hands
and seize the moment. Instead, little Felix Sater keeps coming back to the well. "Why was
Felix Sater the one repeatedly identified pushing to arrange deals with the Russians and yet
did not face any subsequent charges by the Mueller team? Sater had been working as part of
the Trump team since 2003. Why is it that the proposed deals and travel to Moscow came
predominantly from Felix Sater? As I noted in my previous piece -- The FBI Tried and Failed
to Entrap Trump -- Sater was an active FBI undercover informant. He had been working with the
FBI since 1998. When he agreed to start working as an undercover informant aka cooperator in
December 1998 guess who signed off on the deal? Andrew Weissman, a member of Mueller's
special counsel team.You can see the deal here.
It was signed Dec. 10, 1998." "An honest prosecutor would have and should have disclosed this
fact. He, Sater, was the one encouraging the Trump team to cozy up to Russia. Mueller does
not disclose one single instance of Trump or Cohen or any of the Trump kids calling Sater on
the carpet and chewing his ass for not bringing them deals and not opening doors in Russia.
Omitting this key fact goes beyond simple disingenuity. It is a conscious lie. The
circumstantial evidence indicates that Sater was doing this at the behest of FBI handlers. We
do not yet know who they are."
Larry C. Johnson is a former CIA analyst and counterterrorism official at the State
Department.
1 week ago
Stefan Halper was also an FBI 'player' who was feeding information to Papadopoulos, and
Joseph Midsuf, Alexander Downer and Christopher Steele were also working for the Brits and
American intelligence groups (although the FBI cut off paying Steele for lying to them).
Natalya Veselnitskaya was the Russian lawyer who met with the Trump people. She had meetings
with Fusion GPS both before and after her meetings with Trump's campaign, and since Fusion
GPS was also working with the Ohrs and FBI/Justice department with the Kremlin dossier, it
seems Russiagate was an elaborate entrapment scheme by the DNC/ Obama administration that
failed. Once Hillary stated that Trump was a Putin puppet, that made it official and the
wheels started turning.
Moreover as Risen notes Manafort and Kelly went to jail for lying under oath. Mueller lied
under oath about WMD in Iraq, and Clapper and Brennan also lied under oath about illegally
surveilling Americans. Hopefully they'll also be in jail soon.
1 week ago
Dont hold your breath.....Criminals are now in complete control.No matter how much "evidence" is provided there is no
consequence for them.
ask Bush and Cheney who lied the world into war.....and worse.....
Clapper and Brennan and Haden and Haskel were all promoted FOR LYING....{As was
Mueller.}.. and even given jobs on MSNBC and CNN........!!
Apparently the more heinous the crime the higher you get in the USA government.Isnt that
the only lesson here?And democrats are the cheerleader for the Bush criminals?
I afraid the only people who will see the inside of a jail cell are the ones who go
against them....and they are being purged from the internet left and right!!
1 week ago
The real sprawling Russian spy games were on the democrats side.
The bogus Steele Dossier was compiled from top Russian government officials and used to
illegally spy on the Trump campaign.
Halper a FBI Informant in the U.K. pushed Trump advisors to seek out dirt on Hillary as
did FBI Informant Felix Sater
The Russian lawyer who met with Trump jr worked for Fusion GPS and had nothing.
The FBI never saw the servers but used the company that worked for the DNC and has proved
anti Russia bias to do the "investigation "
Wasnt this a crime scene?
Now all the "evidence " of Russian "hacking " is tainted and can't be used in any trials
or court.
Both Assange and Ambassador Craig Murray say that it was a leak and not a hack and neither
of them have ever been interviewed by the FBI even though they both offered to.
Worse than Watergate and it went to the very Top!
FBI texts: Obama 'wants to know everything we're doing'
Thats the only spy games and Russian collusion that can be proved.
1 week ago
So, Mike5000, why do you think millions of Democratic-leaning and Democratic voters
didn't turn out to vote for Hillary Clinton? Was it all the "Buff Bernie" coloring books St.
Petersberg trolls were pitching on FB?
1 week ago
Mueller is a bush criminal who hates Trump
FBI texts: Obama 'wants to know everything we're doing'
A rather significant "unanswered question" that predates Trump slightly is why Obama
didn't initiate both investigation and counter measures to attempts he claimed had been going
on for years .... (because the internet is porous and hackers will hack, regardless of
"motive" (like the bear and the mountain**) or even reward.
** The bear went over the mountain to see what he could see.
1 week ago
Risen omitting the fact that Manafort was working with the Podesta Group seems quite the
oversight.
Obama and Biden were well aware of Manaforts efforts in the Ukraine. Manafort was working
against Russian interests. Remember that the USA backed a coup in the Ukraine with Nazis with
PNAC Victoria " F the EU" Nuland support. Manafort's pro-Ukraine lobbying campaign reached
Obama, Biden
"Alan Friedman, a former journalist based in Europe who helped Manafort launch the group,
told Manafort after the meeting that the member of the Hapsburg Group "delivered the message
of not letting 'Russians steal Ukraine from the West,'" prosecutors say."
What the USA did in the Ukraine was the real crime.
1 week ago
yes, Trump in a crook, a conman, a liar and a racist and is oddly "collateral damage", a
bit part, in this passion play that began when Putin took office and eventually took the
reins to the Russian economy back from the wanna-be American rulers of the universe. I
saw/heard a day or so ago a brilliant Max Blumental 3 minute oral summary of this ongoing
vendetta against Putin for thwarting American interests in gutting Russia.
There probably is a real scandal here ... just not the one the media is interested in
...
1 week ago
Exactly!!
Putin dares to fight back against the looting and starvation of the Russian people.
Start here
The usual suspects
Can We Blame Larry Summers for the Collapse of Russia?
Man, this Risen guy sure has a serious case of TDS.
GIVE IT UP, RISEN; THERE'S NO GOOD REASON TO TREAT RUSSIA AS AN ENEMY, and LOTS of good
reasons NOT to!
It's called THERMONUCLEAR WAR, silly.
Don't beat the drum of war with them, you just might get it!
1 week ago
Trump couldn't even get the tower project through and never talked to anyone above a
secretary and asked Stone to connect with Wikileaks
If he was at all colluding with Putin he wouldn't have needed Wikileaks
All Logic has disappeared from these people.
1 week ago
Russian ruling class oligarchs colluding with American ruling class oligarchs? Oh so
unbelievable! Ties and lies --- shocking, just shocking. I'm sure we will have the
oligarchy-owned mainstream media to black this rumor out and telling us it just ain't so.
1 week ago
Much of this is being pushed by the olygarchs Putin kicked out!
They went to the UK and USA and are working to depose Putin.
1 week ago
The problem with your thinking is that the American oligarchs hate Trump, and loved
Hillary, while the Russian oligarchs hate the American oligarchs because the American
oligarchs want to crush them.
And the best way for AMERICAN oligarchs to keep the American public from voting in an
antiTrump (not a pseudoliberal of the Clinton and Obama type, but an ACTUAL liberal of the
MLK type, whose antioligarch stances have been almost edited away) is to divert attention
away from the flaws in the American system he lays bare (the cheating, thieving, and racism
endemic amongst the oligarchs) is to create a 'hidden enemy of the people' (The same tactic
that a certain short Austrian used in Germany)
1 week ago
Like the one Israeli govt has been doing, especially as uncovered in the Al Jazeera
documentary?
In the end, Mueller's investigators could not find evidence that Manafort coordinated his
actions with the sophisticated Russian cybercampaign to help Trump win. But the report
makes clear that there were many instances in which Mueller wasn't able to get to the
bottom of things and often couldn't determine the whole story behind the Trump-Russia
contacts.
For whatever reason, the pro-Trump narrative leaves out the fact that Mueller
was repeatedly stonewalled or lied to by members of the Trump team.
I think they leave out this crucial bit of information because they think it's fine for
their side to lie, dissemble and stonewall investigations, but not for the
other side. It's hypocritical and a double standard, but it's worse than that because it
makes clear that lying, stonewalling and all the rest is OK and getting away with it is
admirable -- depending of course on who gets away with it. If it's Trump,
whoo-hoo! If it's Hillary or Obama, booooooooo! These are examples of pure
partisanship but the process extends well beyond political calculations.
Risen, of all people, should be all too familiar with the process, as he was very deeply
involved as a reporter and conduit of misinformation and scapegoating in the Wen Ho Lee
debacle. A reporter is in a tough position when s/he is lied to and stonewalled, but as I
often say, "skepticism is a virtue," regardless of who is doing the lying and
stonewalling.
Instead of normalizing this behavior, we should be refusing to accept the lack of
accountability by our leaders, whoever they are, and we should reject a double standard that
encourages impunity and immunity depending on one's status.
1 week ago
"Manafort coordinated his actions with the sophisticated Russian cybercampaign to
help Trump win."
Yes, we know your pro-Trump narrative is one of denial about what was going on during the
2016 campaign and what is documented in the Mueller Report -- which itself is incomplete.
Yes, it's objectively "pro-Trump" to have panic attacks about Facebook ads advising that
Jesus will help masturbating young lads "beat it together." pfffft
Oh, I'm sure Kellyanne is deeply concerned about the dread scourge of masturbating
American youth. Just so long as she doesn't also support the dire Russian threats Risen
alludes to, the ones that seek to exploit those poor suffering, self-abusing children of god.
Lured to the Kremlin's lair by Yosemite Sam!
1 week ago
If you ever bother to read the report -- or even if you have more than superficial
memories of what was going on during the 2016 election campaign -- you'll find out that your
continued denials are simply stupid. You really should be skeptical of the White House's
spin, Greenwald's triumphalism, Maté's authority, and yes, Mueller's incomplete
report.
Laugh while you can. Blowback is a bitch.
1 week ago
A wee-tad over the top, Felix
phase two of the Kubler Ross "Five Stages of Grief".
Sadly, there is no one in the Cult of Mueller who can help you.
You need to understand that many good progressives contend that Russiagate actually served
Trump; so, please chill it.
1 week ago
Whut? You're really out of your depth.
Reread:
You really should be skeptical of the White House's spin, Greenwald's triumphalism,
Maté's authority, and yes, Mueller's incomplete report.
Then tell me again about the Cult of Mueller.
Mona, Glenn, Barr, Trump and many others like to mischaracterize what's in the Mueller
Report in order to keep their "exoneration" narrative going. They would be delighted if Trump
were kept in the White House after the 2020 election. If they can celebrate his
invincibility, so much the better.
Whether or not the myriad investigations into Trump's corruption and criminality are
helping him is beside the point.
If he didn't have the kind of help he needs from the right people who matter, whether
media, politicians, billionaires or the smartest people in the room, he wouldn't be in
office. So long as those people are happy enough with Trump, he stays, no matter what the
Dems do or don't do.
"Progressives" have no say in the matter.
Well, maybe except for that "progressive" named "Pierre."
Have a nice day.
1 week ago
Now see, Felix, this is no the product of a temperate mind with a capacity for sound
reasoning:
Mona, Glenn, Barr, Trump and many others like to mischaracterize what's in the Mueller
Report in order to keep their "exoneration" narrative going. They would be delighted if
Trump were kept in the White House after the 2020 election.
I've read the Mueller Report -- parts of it multiple times. Nothing therein salvages the
Russian trolls as anything but the silly, financially motivated goofballs my quotes of
their adolescent output show them to be. That you take their childish junk with the
utmost seriousness suggests disturbing things about your emotional health.
1 week ago
Guess what? I don't believe you have read the report. I think you're lying again. If you
think the only thing Mueller describes Russian interests doing is buying a few ads on
Facebook (just as Jared was saying the other day) you couldn't have read it, nor could you
have any memory at all what was taking place during the 2016 campaign.
Losing one's mind to perpetuate a false narrative is a terrible thing. Watching your
deterioration as Mueller's report makes mincemeat of your pathetic revisionism and Glenn's
triumphalism is sad.
1 week ago
This is...like arguing evolution with a creationist fundamentalist:
"Watching your deterioration as Mueller's report makes mincemeat of your pathetic
revisionism and Glenn's triumphalism is sad."
"Mueller describes Russian interests doing is buying a few ads on Facebook"
Like what, and please be specific about the three most serious.
1 week ago
What happened during the campaign was Hillary Clinton picked Trump and cheated Sanders and
conspired with the FBI and DOJ to blackmail and illegally spy on the Trump campaign and put
moles in his campaign and with the help of Fusion GPS and FBI informants Halper I'm the UK
and Felix Sater pushed meetings with Russians.
Not a mention of Fusion GPS and the bogus Steele Dossier that the FBI used to lie to the
FISA court and illegally spy on Trump campaign.
Thats quite the omission.
We need to get Steele and Halper and Fusion GPS CEO under oath to testify.
1 week ago
None of the " lies" had anything to do with Russia collusion.Most of the "Lies" didn't
even have an underlying crime.
Gen Flynn didn't lie but they did bankrupt him and blackmail him and destroy his life.And
got him to plea guilty to make it stop.
Comey Told Congress FBI Agents Didn't Think Flynn Lied
In the end, Mueller's investigators could not find evidence that Manafort coordinated his
actions with the sophisticated Russian cybercampaign to help Trump win.
Narrator: "Risen never mentioned in his piece that Manafort was found in
the investigation to have been working with the Ukrainian government, trying to get them to
move away from Russia, and embrace the West in economic policies. That the reality of what
Manafort was doing undercut the core Russiagate allegation that Manafort was working as a
go-between for Russia and Trump didn't seem to perturb Risen one bit."
The report doesn't offer any other explanation for the release of the Podesta emails on
what turned out to be one of the most important days of the 2016 campaign.
Narrator: "Risen seems to argue that, in the absence of any evidence that
his conspiracy theory is true, the absence of any counter-explanation is nonetheless evidence
in favor of his conspiracy theory."
1 week ago
"In the end, Mueller's investigators could not find evidence [of] the sophisticated Russian
cybercampaign to help Trump win."
It's garbage journalism that allows this uncorroborated assertion to take
what has always been the first step in the downward spiral of hysteria that is Russiagate.
Everything that follows this argument is based on this claim being true. Without this
claim there would be no Russiagate.
Again, it's journalistic malpractice to allow this claim to remain unchallenged - yet Jim
Risen, Jon Schwarz, and the Intercept editorial staff just continue the ruse.
I'm not saying it didn't happen; I'm saying there's not enough independent
corroboration to allow for the amount of coverage here (of all places) and elsewhere
based on the single-source- consensus (our intelligence agencies) that this continues to
receive.
Is The Intercept is buying into the gateway drug of "Russia Attacks!" because they either
want to be "fair and balanced" or they want the traffic generated by the articles to attract
readership?
Creating content that, whatever the subject, 1) assumes an allegation to be true, 2)
posits further possible outcomes based on that assumption is not journalism, it's reading tea
leaves.
Aaron reports he's been blackballed from this site since his one piece (on Rachel Maddow
and Russigate) in 2017. (Scahill had Aaron on a podcast, but the site refused to publish
anything Aaron submitted.) Instead we get the dreck above, notwithstanding that Aaron won
an Izzy Award for his Russigate reporting.
1 week ago
Greenwald extensively addresses the dynamics with his Intercept colleagues -- and with the
world of journalism more broadly -- in this podcast with Michael Tracey from a few days ago:
"Glenn Greenwald on Mueller Report fallout and media corruption - Glennzilla shares his
insights on the horrendous conduct of the American media in relation to the spellbindingly
deluded fallout from the Mueller Report."https://www.patreon.com/posts/26365124
1. RUSSIAGATE WITHOUT RUSSIA
2. RUSSIAGATE'S PREDICATE LED NOWHERE
3. SERGEY KISLYAK HAD "BRIEF AND NON-SUBSTANTIVE" INTERACTIONS WITH THE TRUMP CAMP
4. TRUMP TOWER MOSCOW HAD NO HELP FROM MOSCOW
5. AND TRUMP DIDN'T ASK COHEN TO LIE ABOUT IT
6. THE TRUMP TOWER MEETING REALLY WAS JUST A "WASTE OF TIME"
7. MANAFORT DID NOT SHARE POLLING DATA TO MEDDLE IN THE US ELECTION
8. THE STEELE DOSSIER WAS FICTION
9. THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN HAD NO SECRET CHANNEL TO WIKILEAKS
10. THERE WAS NO COVER-UP
About Point 1, Aaron writes:
The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin
representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador
and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a
conspiracy (more on them later).
It should be no surprise, then, to learn from Mueller that, when "Russian government
officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new
administration" after Trump's election victory, they did not know whom to call.
These powerful Russians, Mueller noted, "appeared not to have preexisting contacts and
struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect." If top Russians
did not have "preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with" the people that they
supposedly conspired with, perhaps that is because they did not actually conspire.
Re: my above link (you're welcome those of you who have problems with long URLs!):
Contrast Maddow's "Trump is making John Bolton act too nice" monologue with a recent
segment on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight, conducted in the aftermath of last week's
attempt at a military coup by opposition leader Juan Guaido. Journalist Anya Parampil
appeared on the show and delivered a scathing criticism of the Trump administration's
heinous actions in Venezuela based on her findings during her recent visit to that country.
She was allowed to speak uninhibited and without attack, even bringing up the Center for
Economic and Policy Research study which found Trump administration sanctions responsible
for the deaths of over 40,000 Venezuelans, a story that has gone completely ignored by
western mainstream media.
Carlson introduced the interview with a clip from an earlier talk he'd had with Florida
Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, who supports direct military action to overthrow Maduro and
whose arguments Carlson had attacked on the basis that it would cost American lives and
cause a refugee crisis. Parampil said the media is lying about what's happening in
Venezuela and compared Guaido's coup attempt to a scenario in which Hillary Clinton had
refused to cede the election, banded together 24 US soldiers and attempted to take the
White House by force.
"I was there for a month earlier this year," Parampil said. "The opposition has no
popular support. Juan Guaido proved today, once again, that he will only ride in to power
on the back of a US tank. And what's more, we hear about a humanitarian crisis there,
Tucker, but what we never hear is that is the intended result of US sanctions that have
targeted Venezuelans since 2015, sanctions which according to a report that was released
just last week by the Center for Economic and Policy Research has led to the deaths of
40,000 Venezuelans, and will lead to the death of thousands more if these sanctions aren't
overturned. President Trump, if he truly cared for the Venezuelan people, and the American
people for that matter, he would end this disastrous policy. He would end the sanctions,
and he would look into John Bolton's eyes, into Elliott Abrams' eyes, into Mike Pompeo's
eyes, and say you are fired. You are leading me down a disastrous path, another war for
oil. Something the president said–he was celebrated by the American people when he
said Iraq was a mistake, and now he's willing to do it again."
"I believe in an open debate," Carlson responded. "And I'm not sure I agree with
everything you've said, but I'm glad that you could say it here. And you were just there,
and I don't think you'd be allowed on any other show to say that."
"No I certainly don't," Parampil replied. "And I really appreciate you giving me the
opportunity, because
President Trump promised to drain the swamp, and he flooded his national security team
with that exact swamp
Maddow is the MSM version of a liberal. She's a DNC warmonger's warmonger - the blue flavor
warmonger to counter the red flavor warmonger. This became apparent 10 years ago. She is the
MSM version of a lefty. Not leftist really, just a 1969 Nixon to put up against all the late
model Bush Clinton Obama Trump lunatics.
I get paranoid real fast when unexpected URL difficulties arise. I cut/pasted your first
link, then one I found myself into a word processor, and both of them had a string of numbers
at the end. Different numbers! Finally learned those numbers were unnecessary and I had
something which worked.
I can sometimes navigate the internet, but I'm aware there are people out there who can
tie it in knots. Corporate meddling is becoming an issue as well. Yesterday or day before my
Firefox browser suddenly had all the addons disabled. The Mozilla company must have gotten an
earful, so they've half-fixed it. Now the addons are working again, but have a big warning
label on each and every one of them.
Back to Maddow. There are people who adore her, and I believe I've mentioned being taken
to task by one of them. Seems I hang out at "weird" sites like this one when I could be
getting ALL my news from Maddow - just as this person bragged about doing.
That's all there is to it. No corporate trackers (such as FB or IG adding crap onto the
end). That's as simple as they get, unfortunately, but still long enough to prompt me to
shorten it for Circe and those who apparently have major issues with links.
"... "What if you substituted 'Israel' for 'Russia'?" (The moderator, who apparently knows me, had to look right at me with my hand raised whenever he called on someone but never called on me). ..."
"... "Has there ever been an investigation on the scale of the Mueller investigation into possible collusion with Israel?" ..."
"... The surprising thing about the Mueller report is that he found nothing. That’s impossible because when the government wants to find something, they find it. Why Mueller pulled the plug, I can’t say. ..."
Second hour: Journalist and TV host Ken Meyercord (also based in Washington, DC)
writes:
"I attended an event at the Brookings Institution yesterday on the Mueller Report. As is
sadly customary at DC think tanks, the panelists and the moderator were all of one mind.
Nevertheless, one panelist, a former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia (a
court notorious for rubber-stamping any charge the government brings against those who
disrupt the smooth functioning of our foreign policy apparatus), made a curious analogy,
arguing that the contacts Trump and his associates had with Russians would be culpable even
if the contacts were with some other, less hostile country:
His remark got me to thinking, so in the Q & A I sought to ask him "What if you
substituted 'Israel' for 'Russia'?" (The moderator, who apparently knows me, had to look
right at me with my hand raised whenever he called on someone but never called on me).
I don't know what his response would have been; but if he said it would still apply, I
would have followed up with "Has there ever been an investigation on the scale of the Mueller
investigation into possible collusion with Israel?"
"The more I think about it, the more intriguing I find Mr. Rosenberg's remark. He seemed
to think the sheer number of contacts by Trump folks with Russians proved culpability. It
might be interesting to compare Trump's contacts with the Russians during the campaign with
his contacts with Israelis. I suspect the latter were more numerous and of greater
significance. Certainly, Trump's acts as President would seem to indicate he's more
Netanyahu's puppet than Putin's: moving the embassy to Jerusalem, cutting off aid to the
Palestinians, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Imagine if Putin
proposed naming a village in Russia after Trump in appreciation, as Netanyahu has proposed
doing in the Golan Heights!
"P.S. Ueli Maurer is the President of the Swiss Confederation."
The entire Western media is the enemy of the people. The Demogangsters and the mediocrats,
Public Enemy #1, were angry that Trump won the election, so they fabricated a scam called
contacts with Russians.
They are saying that Trump and his people talked to the Russians as private citizens
before the election, so it is illegal.
What? Talking to Russians is illegal? Really? Says who?
They will not tell you the law that was allegedly broken, because the law that was
allegedly broken itself is illegal.
It is the Logan Act which “criminalizes negotiations by unauthorized persons with
foreign governments having a dispute with the United States.”
Only in America—the criminal Democrats have investigated an innocent man for a
non-existent crime of violating an unconstitutional law.
While I would not say this happens only in America, this sort of thing is actually
long-standing policy in the US. As long ago as 1944 in Wickard vs. Filburn, the Democrat
Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a man for not merely raising food on his own land, but
for failing to offer the food for sale, on the rationale that the non-sale affected
Interstate Commerce as much as if he had offered it for sale. Since then it has been
‘constitutional’ to find federal jurisdiction over even private vegetable gardens
grown exclusively for domestic consumption. Under this theory, even breathing oxygen places
one under federal jurisdiction because it is followed by exhaling CO2.
One of the most surprising things I discovered when I began to practice law was the fact
that no one is ‘innocent’. I.e, there is always some law somewhere that is being
‘broken’ no matter what one does, which means that if the government wants
someone, they can always convict him because the government can always find some law he has
broken. I’m speaking ironically, of course. Many of these laws should be
unconstitutional. Just don’t bet that SCOTUS will ever rule that way because, as
Gorsuch recently pronounced, “that’s all been settled.”
The surprising thing about the Mueller report is that he found nothing. That’s
impossible because when the government wants to find something, they find it. Why Mueller
pulled the plug, I can’t say.
"... Remember, historically The Washington Post is the preferred outlet for the CIA and Intelligence Community within Deep State to dump their "leaks" and stories. The State Department "leaks" to CNN for the same purposes. ..."
Did NSA Admiral Mike Rogers Warn Trump On
November 17th, 2016?
Sometimes the utilization of Timelines means you have to look at the new information with
a keen awareness of specific events. In hindsight, NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers may
have notified Team Trump of Obama's Intelligence Community (James Clapper and John
Brennan) spying on their activity.
As you look at the FISA request dates below, it's important to note that NSA Director
Admiral Mike Rogers would be keenly aware of both the June request – Denied, and the
October request – Granted. Pay specific attention to the October request.
"October"!
.
June 2016: FISA request.
The Obama administration
files a request
with the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump
and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.
October 2016: FISA request.
The
Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a
computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found --
but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at
National
Review
later
notes
.
The
Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the
high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.
♦
On Tuesday November 8th, 2016 the election was held. Results announced Wednesday November
9th, 2016.
♦
On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York and met
with President-Elect Donald Trump.
♦
On Friday November 18th
The Washington Post reported
on a
recommendation in "October"
that Mike Rogers be removed from his NSA position:
The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to
President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers,
be removed.
The recommendation, delivered to the White House
last month
, was made by Defense
Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.,
according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
[ ]
In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer,
Rogers, without
notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower
.
That caused consternation at senior levels of the administration, according to the
officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel matters.
(
link
)
Remember, historically The Washington Post is the preferred outlet for the CIA and
Intelligence Community
within Deep State
to dump their "leaks"
and stories. The State Department "leaks" to CNN for the same purposes.
On Saturday November 19th
Reuters reported
on the WaPo Story and
additional pressure by Defense Secretary Ash Carter and DNI James Clapper to fire Mike
Rogers.
[ ]
The Washington Post reported that a decision by Rogers to travel to New York to meet
with Trump on Thursday without notifying superiors caused consternation at senior levels
of the administration, but the recommendation to remove him predated his visit. (
link
)
The Intelligence Community -at the direction of President Obama- made a request to
a FISA court for the NSA to spy on Donald Trump in June 2016. It was denied.
In October the Intelligence Community (NSA) -at the direction of President Obama-
made a second request to the FISA court for the NSA to spy on Donald Trump. It was
approved.
At around the same time (October), as the second request to FISA, (Def Sec) Ash
Carter and (DNI) James Clapper tell President Obama to dump NSA Director Mike Rogers.
A week after the election, Mike Rogers makes a trip to Trump Tower without telling
his superior, James Clapper; which brings about new calls (November media leaks to WaPo)
for President Obama to dump Mike Rogers.
Occam's Razor
.
NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers didn't want to participate in the spying scheme (Clapper,
Brennan, Etc.), which was the baseline for President Obama's post presidency efforts to
undermine Donald Trump and keep Trump from digging into the Obama labyrinth underlying his
remaining loyalists. After the October spying operation went into effect, Rogers unknown
loyalty was a risk to the Obama objective. 10 Days after the election Rogers travels to
President-Elect Trump without notifying those who were involved in the intel scheme.
Did NSA Director Mike Rogers wait for a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information
Facility) to be set up in Trump Tower, and then notify the President-elect he was being
monitored by President Obama?
.Seems likely.
"... It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey* interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg ..."
"... The question really comes down to Trump. Does he really want to expose the Swamp and pay the price or just use it for rhetorical & political purposes? When considering probabilities and looking at his track record in office on foreign policy relative to his campaign stance, I would say the probability is less than 30% that Brennan & Clapper will be indicted. ..."
"... Situations like this commonly have a strong escalatory logic. So one needs to ask whether or not he has rational reason to believe that unless he can destroy those who have shown themselves prepared to stop at nothing to destroy him, they will eventually succeed. ..."
"... But the escalatory processes are not simply to do with what Trump decides. In particular, a whole range of legal proceedings are involved. The referral in relation to Nellie Ohr is likely to be the fist of a good few. In addition, Ed Butowsky's lawsuits, and those against Steele, have unpredictable potentialities. ..."
"... The intelligence & law enforcement apparatus in collusion with the media and the establishment of both parties went after him hard. As Larry notes here, they went to considerable effort to entrap those related to his campaign to impugn him. Mueller spent $35 million trying to find an angle. Even after the Mueller report stated there was no collusion they're sill after him. So that's not going to end any time soon. ..."
"... Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources (including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were employed by the bureau in this operation: ..."
IMO, there is no coming back from this. Apart from this Deep State coup attempt, we have seen
that democracy is a shame, it's all theater. The Establishment (which includes GOP) is
constantly working to undermine Trump and thwart his plans to do what the American people
want and elected him for.
What I've found quite disturbing is that the controlling puppet
masters have not let up in trying to remove or neutralize Trump. As if they can't wait even 4
years to again fully stack the deck and regain total control. They are not willing to concede
that 2016 was a political black swan event involving a celebrity billionaire American icon.
And conceding and allowing this fluke to be rectified I'm 4 short years is worse than their
pushback exposing the political system as a rigged game.
The events of the last 2.5 years have radically altered my views. I no longer have any
faith in democracy (voting), the government, the federal courts, law enforcement, et al. And
I can't see me regaining any faith in them. What I have seen in the past 2.5 years is kind of
like finding out my wife of decades, whom I idolized, has been cheating with my friend from
childhood, whom I would've laid down my life for. And all the other people close to me not
telling me.
It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and
was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were
intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about
U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey*
interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg
*Tracey, btw, is on the left. But like Glenn Greenwald and others on the left he is an
honest journalist interested in the truth.
The "left" was not behind and does not buy into this Russia psyop. Neoliberals and
neoconservatives (ie zionists) were behind it and continue to push it. Trump ran to the left
of Clinton on both domestic and foreign policy. That's why he won, and why the establishment
must present his election as de facto illegitimate, because otherwise they would be forced to
admit that the bipartisan convergence around both finance driven economic policy and war on
terror interventionism that has described elite politics since Clinton has been a disaster
for most ordinary Americans -- of all types and political persuasions -- and needs to be
destroyed root and branch.
To see how and why the "left" differs from corporate identity-politicking liberals in the
above regard consider how it is that Tulsi Gabbard is both the Dem candidate most respected
by principled Trump supporters on this site and others and the Dem candidate most reviled,
ignored, and slandered by DNC liberals and neocons alike.
The enemy to principled conservatives and the left in this country is the bipartisan
establishment corporate neoliberalism of the RNC and DNC alike.
The soft coup against Donald Trump failed. He has to run hard and sure to win in 2020 to
avoid an indictment in NY State when he leaves the Presidency. Corporate Democrats will do
their damnedst again to put forth their weakest pro war candidate like the aged, apparently
demented, Joe Biden. This fiasco and the recent coup attempt in Venezuela make the Keystone
Cops appear competent.
I put this all down to Washington DC being completely isolated inside their credentialed
bubble. It is just like corporate CEOs, who think they know exactly what they are doing. But,
in reality, they are destroying the stabilizing middle class by extracting and hording wealth
and turning mid-America into their colony. Globalist and nationalist oligarchs are after each
other's throat over who controls the flow of money.
We live on a very finite world dependent on one sun in an expanding universe. Just like
Boeing, Bayer or Volkswagen, the splintering world is starting to crash all around them. Even
as they deny it, this is a multi-polar world now. It is not going back without a world war
which would destroy civilization and could make the world uninhabitable for humans.
The trouble is that those CEO's do know exactly what they are doing. Making money the
only way possible in a business environment in which outsourcing can sometimes be the only
thing that pays.
The idea was that Trump was going to change that environment. Bannon calls its "economic
nationalism" but in truth it's now just economic survival. Survival for those whose jobs are
outsourced. Survival for the country as a whole, ultimately.
That was Trump's core programme. It was the programme that made him different from all
other Western politicians, "populist" or status quo. Do you see any sign that it's being
implemented, or has that programme too got bogged down in the swamp?
If we are speaking about criminal justice, there is some chance that we will see persons such
as Jim Comey, who persists in his smug higher calling act, prosecuted for what was a clear
cut violation in divulging classified material through a lawyer intermediary to the NYT. I
suspect the higher calling bit has been prompted in part because he knows that he screwed up
both on the facts and in law and he is justifying his screw up to himself, and possibly also
rehearsing his defense, with the rationale that he was only trying to do the right thing.
Yeah, he may have had the facts all wrong, the Russians, etc, etc, but the worst that can be
said is that he had been competent, there was no intent. That defense doesn't do much for the
FBI's once held reputation for competence, but that appears to be gone anyway.
With regard to what will be turned up concerning the actual roots of the travesty, the
heavily politicized faux investigation into the Clinton e mails and targeting of the Trump
campaign on a predicate that is somewhere between nebulous and non existant, I think a
criminal prosecution arising from that investigation, even if it is serious, is unlikely for
two main reasons. First, what will be the charged violations? As best I can see right now,
they will have to entail some imaginative application of fraud statutes, defrauding the FISC,
defrauding the US, informants and assets lying to their handlers, or process crimes like Bob
Mueller's partisan posse relied upon (ugly); and second, something like the Comey defense
will interpenetrate all the individuals and entities involved: we may have been incredible
bunglers, but that is the worst of it. We really believed these charlatans who conned us into
this debacle. Sorry, but we thought we were doing the right thing.
Now if we are talking about seeing some kind of political or moral justice, I'm not too
optimistic we will get much satisfaction there either and we will probably have to wait for
history. The reason is that Barr will conduct this investigation by the rule book. That means
that what we see developed through the process, indictment, prosecution, etc, is likely
all,that we will ever see. Barr is very unlikely to produce a politcized manifesto to be
employed as a smear weapon like the once reputable Mueller did.
Anyway, until we see a special FGJ empanelled, some search warrants executed, some tactical
immunities offered, everything is on the come.
The question really comes down to Trump. Does he really want to expose the Swamp and pay
the price or just use it for rhetorical & political purposes? When considering
probabilities and looking at his track record in office on foreign policy relative to his
campaign stance, I would say the probability is less than 30% that Brennan & Clapper will
be indicted.
The question is only very partly what Trump wants, in some abstract sense. Situations like
this commonly have a strong escalatory logic. So one needs to ask whether or not he has
rational reason to believe that unless he can destroy those who have shown themselves
prepared to stop at nothing to destroy him, they will eventually succeed.
If the answer is yes - and while I think it may very well be, I am not prejudging the
issue - then a key question becomes whether Trump will conclude that his most promising
loption is to go after the conspirators by every means possible.
Involved here are questions about who he is listening to, and how competent they are.
But the escalatory processes are not simply to do with what Trump decides. In particular,
a whole range of legal proceedings are involved. The referral in relation to Nellie Ohr is
likely to be the fist of a good few. In addition, Ed Butowsky's lawsuits, and those against
Steele, have unpredictable potentialities.
The intelligence & law enforcement apparatus in collusion with the media and the
establishment of both parties went after him hard. As Larry notes here, they went to
considerable effort to entrap those related to his campaign to impugn him. Mueller spent $35
million trying to find an angle. Even after the Mueller report stated there was no collusion
they're sill after him. So that's not going to end any time soon.
Trump may have good instincts but his judgment of people so far to staff his
administration is not very inspiring. He had Jeff Sessions as his AG and he let him hang in
there for nearly two years while Mueller ran riot. He's surrounded himself with neocons on
foreign policy. It seems his only real advisor is Jared. Everyone else he's got around him
are from the same establishment that's going after him. He hasn't taken advise from Devin
Nunes, who has done more to uncover the sedition than anyone else. If he had he would have by
now declassified all the documents & communications. The impression I have is his primary
motivation is building his brand & less about governance and wielding power. Take for
example his order to withdraw from Syria. Bolton & the Pentagon are thumbing their noses
at him.
Well, there have been several criminal referrals prior to the recent one on Nellie Ohr.
There's the McCabe referral and the 8 referrals by Devin Nunes. I've not read any report of
the empaneling of a grand jury yet. I agree with you that these law suits have the potential
for great embarrassment, however to hold those responsible for the sedition accountable will
require iron will & intense focus on the part of Trump to get his AG to assign
prosecutors who don't have the axe to "protect" the "institution" and to create an
opportunity for public awareness of the extent that law enforcement & intelligence became
a 4th branch of government. My opinion is that his skill is in his instinctual understanding
of the current political zeitgeist and his ability to manipulate the media including social
media to project his brand. He's not an operational leader making sure his team executes his
vision & strategy.
Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy
Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources
(including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were
employed by the bureau in this operation:
"... As Bongino lays out, there are two working theories about Mifsud . The first is that he's a Russian asset who tried to bait the Trump campaign . The second is that Mifsud was working for US intelligence services and seeded Papadopoulos with the 'dirt' rumor in order to kick off the FBI's counterintelligence operation. ..."
For over two years, anyone who suggested that the Russia investigation was a sham was harshly ridiculed by establishment
mouthpieces as a conspiracy theorist. The notion that the Obama Justice Department (led by Eric "
wingman
"
Holder and then Loretta "
tarmac
"
Lynch) could have conspired with other US intel agencies and foreigners to paint Donald Trump as a Russian stooge was
considered beyond the pale.
Then we found out that virtually the entire FBI's top brass
absolutely hate Donald Trump
and supported Hillary
Clinton; the former of whom the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation against, while giving Hillary a pass despite
the fact that she
destroyed evidence
from her homebrew basement server while under subpoena. We were asked to believe that the FBI's extreme biases played no role
in their investigations, while the left insisted that special counsel Robert Mueller was going to confirm fairy tales of
Russian collusion peddled by a Clinton-funded dossier.
And then the Mueller report came out
- blowing the Russian collusion narrative out of the water, while
painting
a damning picture that suggests the entire genesis of the FBI's counterintelligence investigation,
Crossfire Hurricane
, was a setup
.
One of those brave enough to risk his reputation laying out what was going on
before
the Mueller report dropped is
conservative commentator
and former US Secret Service agent
Dan Bongino
- who has repeatedly mentioned the suspicious role of self-described
Clinton Foundation member
Joseph Mifsud,
who
seeded the rumor that Russia
had 'dirt' on Hillary Clinton
to Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos on April 26, 2016 -
shortly after
returning from Moscow,
according to the Mueller report.
Two weeks later
,
Papadopoulos
would be bilked for information by Australian diplomat (another
Clinton ally
)
Alexander Downer at a London bar, who relayed the Kremlin 'dirt' rumor to Australian authorities, which alerted the FBI (as
the story goes), and operation Crossfire Hurricane was thus hatched.
We have now pinned Peter Strzok's boss, Bill Priestap, in London the week of May 6th,
2016 and on the 9th. The day before Alexander Downer was sent to spy on me and record our meeting. Congress must release
the transcripts and embarrass the deep state.
As Bongino lays out, there are
two working theories about Mifsud
. The first is that he's a
Russian
asset who tried to bait the Trump campaign
. The second is that Mifsud
was working for US intelligence services
and
seeded Papadopoulos with the 'dirt' rumor in order to kick off the FBI's counterintelligence operation.
"So either we have a Russian asset who's infiltrated the highest echelons of friendly Intelligence Services, or we have a
friendly who was setting up
@GeorgePapa19
- That's the
real scandal. This was not spying, this was entrapment."
pic.twitter.com/wGnV8HHur1
Bongino went into greater detail last month on
Fox News -
including that Mifsud's lawyer says he's
connected to western, "friendly" intelligence
:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/2oNPsRGxNhg
We know that Papadopoulos met multiple times with Mifsud in the first half of 2016:
March 14 2016
– Papadopoulos
first
meets Mifsud in Italy
– approximately one week after finding out he will be joining the Trump team.
March 24 2016
– Papadopoulos, Mifsud,
Olga Polonskaya and unknown fourth party meet in a London cafe.
April 18 2016
– Mifsud
introduces Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev, an official at a state-sponsored think tank called Russian International
Affairs Council.
April 26 2016
– Mifsud tells
Papadopoulos he's met with high-level Russian government officials who have "dirt" on Clinton. Papadopoulos will
tell
the FBI
he learned of the emails prior to joining the Trump Campaign.
May 13 2016
– Mifsud emails Papadopoulos an update of
"recent conversations".
Note:
Papadopoulos and Mifsud reportedly
both
worked
at the London Centre of International Law Practice. -
The
Markets Work
In short - based on what we know, it appears that Joseph Mifsud was part of a setup by Western intelligence
services on then-candidate Donald Trump.
Did You Know:
A Company Whose Director Represents Joseph Mifsud Changed Its Name To "No Vichok Ltd" After The Salisbury Attack
"Novichok" was the nerve agent used to poison fmr GRU agent Sergei Skripal when the UK govt was caught lying about the
analysis from Porton Down
Great claims require great evidence, however,
which is why Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has requested a wide swath of
documents about Mifsud from several federal agencies.
As the
Washington
Examiner
reports, Nunes - the House Intelligence Committee ranking member, "
seeks information about who
Mifsud was working for at the time
and wrote in a letter that special counsel Robert
Mueller "omits any
mention of a wide range of contacts Mifsud had with Western political institutions and individuals"
in his report on
Russian interference in the 2016 election."
The special counsel's
sentencing
memo
to the District Court for the District of Columbia said Papadopoulos hindered the FBI's ability to get to Mifsud.
"The defendant's lies undermined investigators' ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him
while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States on February
11, 2017 and he has not returned to the United States since then," the memo said.
In his letter, Nunes says it is "
still a mystery how the FBI knew to ask Papadopoulos specifically about Hillary
Clinton's emails
" if the bureau had not spoken with Mifsud. -
Washington
Examiner
"If he is in fact a Russian agent,
it would be one of the biggest intelligence scandals for not only the United
States
, but also our allies like the Italians and the Brits and others. Because if Mifsud is a Russian agent, he
would know all kinds of our intelligence agents throughout the globe," said Nunes during a recent interview with
Fox News
'
Sean Hannity.
Look deeper at the Report re: Mifsud. One interesting omission --
Why are there zero citations to Mifsud's 302 in the Mueller Report?
"... The Senate minority leader–Deep Stater par excellence –knew whereof he spoke. But Trump somehow survived the storm, although sometimes it seemed as if he wouldn't. Now, some of the obvious parties –John K. Brennan and James Clapper with their apparatchik miens -- have suddenly found themselves in the crosshairs, as the Washington Times notes: ..."
"... Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also leveled up highly publicized comments that President Trump could even be an "asset" of Russian President Vladimir Putin , part of a slew of remarks that critics say went far beyond the usual partisan sniping that can accompany a change of administrations. ..."
"... More's afoot here, however, considerably more because the entire American intelligence system and the unique power referred to by Schumer are also now in those same crosshairs, as they should be. But many of the men and women involved are less overtly Stalinist in their style than Mssrs. Brennan and Clapper and slip more easily under the radar. ..."
"... A top FBI official admitted to Congressional investigators last year that the agency had contacts within the Trump campaign as part of operation "Crossfire Hurricane," which sounds a lot like FBI "informant" Stefan Halper – a former Oxford University professor who was paid over $1 million by the Obama Department of Defense between 2012 and 2018, with nearly half of it surrounding the 2016 US election. ..."
"... "Crossfire Hurricane," as most know, is the codename the wannabe hipsters at the FBI gave the Trump-Russia investigation. But more important is the word "before" in Ms. Cleveland's title. ..."
"... Papadopoulos and Page are the two naifs of the most obvious sort (sorry, guys) we have all seen on television who spent the last couple of years having to defend themselves against absurd charges. Considering the timing, it's pretty obvious they were being set up (i. e. entrapped) on some level well back during the Obama administration. ..."
"... I suggest that an attempt was being made to implant Halper in the Trump campaign, one way or another, not just for spying purposes but actually to help create this collusion of the campaign with Russia–that is, to help manufacture it. ..."
"... Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election , in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter's foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering. ..."
"... We need Halper, under oath and unredacted. Whether that's possible is another question. ..."
It's bad enough, as has been evident for some time, that Donald Trump and his campaign
were being spied upon by our own government, but it's highly likely they were also subject to
literal entrapment–at least a serious attempt was made.
I don't mean the entrapment of promulgating the salacious Steele dossier both to the public
and the FISA court as if it were the truth. That was more of a smear to justify a phony
investigation. I mean something more subtle and LeCarré-like coming from the depths of
our intelligence communities. It raises once more the question of the power of such agencies in
a free society, a conundrum with no easy answers but of great significance to our lives.
For all his New York rough-and-tumble, Trump was an innocent abroad when he arrived in
Washington. Way back in January 2017, he was warned by old-timer
Chuck Schumer that "intel officials have six ways from Sunday at getting back at
you."
The Senate minority leader–Deep Stater par excellence –knew whereof he
spoke. But Trump somehow survived the storm, although sometimes it seemed as if he wouldn't.
Now, some of the obvious parties –John K. Brennan and James Clapper with their
apparatchik miens -- have suddenly found themselves in the crosshairs, as the
Washington Times notes:
Special counsel Robert Mueller's finding that there was no Trump campaign conspiracy with
Russia to steal
the 2016 election has unleashed a tsunami of outrage toward Obama-era intelligence chiefs,
particularly former CIA
Director John
O. Brennan and former FBI Director James B. Comey, who are accused of pushing the
allegation during congressional hearings, in social media posts and in highly charged
interviews on television over the past two years.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also leveled up
highly publicized comments that President Trump could even be an "asset" of
Russian President Vladimir Putin , part of a slew of
remarks that critics say went far beyond the usual partisan sniping that can accompany a change
of administrations.
More's afoot here, however, considerably more because the entire American intelligence
system and the unique power referred to by Schumer are also now in those same crosshairs, as
they should be. But many of the men and women involved are less overtly Stalinist in their style
than Mssrs. Brennan and Clapper and slip more easily under the radar.
Notable among these, and perhaps able to reveal much of the McGuffin to the mystery of where
this all started and how, is Stefan Halper. Mr. Halper is "an American foreign policy scholar and Senior Fellow at
the University
of Cambridge where he is a Life Fellow at Magdalene College and directs the
Department of Politics and International Studies ." He is also a spook who worked for
Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, no less, and was a principle American connection to the UK's MI-6.
A top FBI official admitted to Congressional investigators last year that the agency had
contacts within the Trump campaign as part of operation "Crossfire Hurricane," which sounds a
lot like FBI "informant" Stefan Halper – a former Oxford University professor who was
paid over $1 million by the Obama Department of Defense between 2012 and 2018, with nearly
half of it surrounding the 2016 US election.
"Crossfire Hurricane," as most know, is the codename the wannabe hipsters at the FBI gave
the Trump-Russia investigation. But more important is the word "before" in Ms. Cleveland's
title.
The Post further noted that the academic, since identified as Stefan
Halper, first met with Trump campaign advisor Carter Page "a few weeks before the opening of
the investigation," and then after Crossfire Hurricane's July 31, 2016, start, he met again
with Carter Page and "with Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis," offering the latter his
"foreign-policy expertise" for the Trump team. Then in September, Halper "reached out to George
Papadopoulos, an unpaid foreign-policy adviser for the campaign, inviting him to London to work
on a research paper."
Papadopoulos and Page are the two naifs of the most obvious sort (sorry, guys) we have all
seen on television who spent the last couple of years having to defend themselves against
absurd charges. Considering the timing, it's pretty obvious they were being set up (i. e.
entrapped) on some level well back during the Obama administration.
Who ordered it is the obvious question, but I'm not going to leave it there.
I
suggest that an attempt was being made to implant Halper in the Trump campaign, one way or
another, not just for spying purposes but actually to help create this collusion of the
campaign with Russia–that is, to help manufacture it.
Putting it another way, someone or some group wanted to create -- or, more subtly, to
encourage the creation -- of Trump-Russia collusion from the inside in order to destroy
Trump before, or failing that, after he was elected.
How's that for a nefarious plot? Worthy of LeCarré or maybe even Graham Greene. But
is it true? I wouldn't bet against it. Something close anyway.
By the way, if I am right, this won't be the first time for Halper. And unfortunately for
Republicans, the shoe was then on the proverbial other foot. As
Glenn Greenwald wrote last year:
Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for
a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election , in which the Reagan campaign
– using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA
Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a
spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives
passing classified information about Carter's foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in
order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was
considering.
Republicans can console themselves that their malfeasance was more benign, relatively. This
new one was outright sedition involving a foreign power. It is a blow to the heart of our
democratic republic. We need Halper, under oath and unredacted. Whether that's possible is
another question.
Robert Mueller reportedly knew a year ago that there was no Russia collusion but left
President Trump dangling, Geraldo Rivera says. #FoxandFriends#FoxNews
The "Russia election interference" was an excuse to cover their spying. The real
interference was the DNC, CIA, FBI, and DOJ...all weaponized agencies under Obama. The
Mueller investigation knew day one there was no Trump/Russia collusion...their goal was to
hide, cover, and obstruct for the Deep State. I have no doubt that trying to pin obstruction
on Trump became one of their goals.
The FBI "meddled with our elections". Particularly the midterms. Mueller knew 19 months
ago that there was no collusion. Thats almost two years. He and his team didnt tell anybody.
He let Trump getting destroyed by CNN, NBC 24/7. The DNC stole the House.
Geraldo, Mueller was waiting until after the 2018 midterm election to disclose his report.
In other words, Mueller interfered with the 2018 midterms and gave the Dems a huge win in
Congress. When he testifies to Congress, I hope some Republicans rip him apart on this
point.
"... Well. There you have Andrew McCabe calling Rod Rosenstein a liar. Can't wait for the Inspector General's report. Apparently some doo-doo is hitting the fan. ..."
"... The FBI has history of sedition, how do you J. Edgar Hoover stayed in charge for long? The FBI (Deepthroat, Deputy Director Mark Felt) brought down Nixon by leaking to the Washing Post. This stuff going on now is part of a long standing tradition at the FBI. ..."
"... McCabe and Rosenstein are enemies within! ..."
"... When law enforcement is involved in politics that is just like banana republics and communist countries. If these people can plan to remove a Republican President they can do it to a democrat president. THAT should alarm CNN and all the democrats, but it won't. These FBI folks were acting under the orders of Obama and probably through Hillary. The FBI big-shots only work under orders they don't think on their own. ..."
"... Mccabe is a weasel beyond a doubt, and the FBI is complicit in there doing nothing about it until the fool admits to it on primetime TV for the whole world to see!! He tarnished your agency along with comey, strozk, and the other traitors. Own it FBI he is one of yours. ..."
"... The bureaunazis are so protected in their deep state they have no fear of admitting their collusion efforts against Trump. A special counsel needs to investigate the FBI and DOJ connections to Russia and Democrats. Nothing changes if no one goes to jail. These bureaunazis watch too much Game of Thrones and House of Cards. ..."
"... Mueller, while FBI Director, turned the FBI into an intelligence agency from that of a crime fighting agency. Which was then used by the political class to support their positions of power. ..."
"... Deep State poster boy. Full of hubris and entitlement. Power corrupts. ..."
"... McCabe has totally self admited for a deep state coup attempt against a duly elected president. ..."
"... So McCabe appointed himself the FBI, Pratorian Guard, to protect us against Russia? ..."
Kevin Brock, former FBI assistant director for intelligence, and Terry Turchie, former
deputy assistant director of the counterterrorism division, fire back at former FBI Director
Andrew McCabe.
Well. There you have Andrew McCabe calling Rod Rosenstein a liar. Can't wait for the
Inspector General's report. Apparently some doo-doo is hitting the fan.
The FBI has history of sedition, how do you J. Edgar Hoover stayed in charge for long?
The FBI (Deepthroat, Deputy Director Mark Felt) brought down Nixon by leaking to the Washing
Post. This stuff going on now is part of a long standing tradition at the
FBI.
When law enforcement is involved in politics that is just like banana republics and
communist countries. If these people can plan to remove a Republican President they can do it
to a democrat president. THAT should alarm CNN and all the democrats, but it won't. These FBI
folks were acting under the orders of Obama and probably through Hillary. The FBI big-shots
only work under orders they don't think on their own.
Mccabe is a weasel beyond a doubt, and the FBI is complicit in there doing nothing
about it until the fool admits to it on primetime TV for the whole world to see!! He
tarnished your agency along with comey, strozk, and the other traitors. Own it FBI he is one
of yours.
The fix was in. The bureaunazis are so protected in their deep state they have no fear of
admitting their collusion efforts against Trump. A special counsel needs to investigate the
FBI and DOJ connections to Russia and Democrats. Nothing changes if no one goes to jail.
These bureaunazis watch too much Game of Thrones and House of Cards.
Mueller, while FBI Director, turned the FBI into an intelligence agency from that of a
crime fighting agency. Which was then used by the political class to support their positions
of power. Mr Trump upset their world with his electoral victory. President Trump is hated by
the political class because he has come as the destroyer of their world.
McCabe has totally self admited for a deep state coup attempt against a duly elected
president. He should be behind bars rather than selling his book on TV. Lock up McCabe,
Rosenstein and the rest of the Deep State coup gang and DRAIN-THE-SWAMP.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe discussed his career, the FBI, and his firing from
the Bureau. He was interviewed by New York Times reporter Adam Goldman.
"... On June 14th, the DNC, in conjunction with the Crowdstrike cybersecurity firm that they had hired, announced that its servers had been hacked, and that a file on Trump opposition research had been taken. An entity dubbed "Guccifer 2.0" popped up online a day later, claiming to be the source for the soon-to-be-released Wikileaks DNC material, and obligingly posting a file on Trump opposition research, as well as several other files. Forensic analyses have indicated that the posted documents had had their metadata intentionally altered to leave "Russian fingerprints". ..."
"... We need to determine who created the Guccifer 2.0 hoax, and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. The "intelligence agents" who concluded "with high confidence" that Guccifer 2.0 was a Wikileaks source need to be fired or demoted. If the FBI has known all along that Seth was a Wikileaks source, those who shielded the public from this crucial information need to be unmasked. The "journalists" who have been credulously spreading the "Russia interfered" narrative 24/7 for most of a year, without making the least effort to question the veracity of these assertions, should be recognized by the public as the willing tools of lying warmongers that they are, and their future work studiously ignored. The sanctions recently implemented on Russia should be lifted, and the politicians who played the most egregious role in hyping the Russian interference narrative and pushing the sanctions should be repudiated at the polls when they come up for re-election. (I confess, however, that I will not hold my breath waiting for any of these things to happen.) ..."
"... Why do you not see this as our intelligence agencies working with the DNC and providing them with bogus clues to work with? Doesn't the record now show that the CIA provided the premise for starting the FBI counterintelligence investigation into collusion? And doesn't the record now show that the premise was based on the activities of CIA and FBI informant actors infiltrated into the Trump campaign? ..."
"... With new information about the "U.K. operation" using Stefan Halper (CIA asset and FBI informant); and the details of the contacts by U.S. intelligence operative Azra Turk; we can overlay the timeline and see a clear picture ..."
veganmark on Fri, 05/03/2019 - 8:00am Originally published Aug 11, 2017
I have written a rather comprehensive debunking of the "Russia interfered in our election" narrative that has obsessed the MSM
for most of a year. Since its first posting, I have been updating it; its expanded form is available here:
I don't pretend to be an investigative journalist -- rather, what I have done is to assemble the findings of respected journalists,
intelligence experts, and cyberanalysts who have examined the interference narrative with a critical eye. The links are the best
part of my essay, and I refer you to them if you want verification for the views I express below.
What I would like to do here is present, in summary form, my own best guess as to what actually happened, in light of the evidence
and analyses I cite. Other interpretations are possible, but most of these have a Rube Goldberg-type complexity and illogic that
render them quite dubious. Whereas this interpretation fits the known evidence rather straightforwardly:
Seth Rich was the source for the DNC emails which Wikileaks published; Assange has been silently screaming this for months, both
through statements and tweets, while strenuously denying that the Russian government played any role in this regard. How Seth obtained
these emails, and how he conveyed them to Wikileaks, remain to be determined. If the FBI inside source which Sy Hersh discussed in
his taped conversation with Ed Butowski is accurate, Seth provided them by drop box, giving Wikileaks the password. There is a recent
claim that Seth had had a raucous argument with Donna Brazile regarding DNC unfairness to Bernie; this concern may have motivated
Seth's leaking, though he may also have sought payment for his risky efforts.
On June 12th of last year, Wikileaks announced that it would soon be releasing material pertinent to Hillary's campaign. Whether
the DNC knew at this time that Seth was the source is unclear. What is clear is that DNC officials, who had previously been informed
that their server had been hacked, quickly decided to convince our intelligence agencies, the press, and the public that Russian
hackers, acting at the behest of the Russian government, were the source of the damaging material to be released -- in that way,
focusing attention on the evil machinations of the Russians, slamming Wikileaks, and detracting attention from the content of the
released material.
On June 14th, the DNC, in conjunction with the Crowdstrike cybersecurity firm that they had hired, announced that its servers
had been hacked, and that a file on Trump opposition research had been taken. An entity dubbed "Guccifer 2.0" popped up online a
day later, claiming to be the source for the soon-to-be-released Wikileaks DNC material, and obligingly posting a file on Trump opposition
research, as well as several other files. Forensic analyses have indicated that the posted documents had had their metadata intentionally
altered to leave "Russian fingerprints".
On July 5th, Guccifer 2.0 downloaded from the DNC server a number of additional documents, some of which -- all of them relatively
innocuous -- he subsequently posted on his own website. Forensic analysis of this download indicated that it occurred locally,
most likely via USB port, and that it took place on the East Coast.
An overview suggests that the Guccifer 2.0 persona was created by people with inside connections to the DNC. The evident intent
of this charade was to trick our intelligence agencies into concluding that Guccifer 2.0 was the Wikileaks source and was acting
at the behest of the Russian government. The fact that he released Trump opposition material a day after the DNC proclaimed that
it had been taken by hackers strongly suggests collusion between top people in the DNC and the people concocting Guccifer 2.0. As
Adam Carter notes, it is not at all clear how the DNC/Crowdstrike could have known that this particular file had been taken. Carter
suspects that principals at Crowdstrike played a key role in creating Guccifer 2.0, as they would have had the expertise required
to pull off such a scam. (Whether Imran Awan possesses such skill is not clear.)
Five days later (July 10th), Seth Rich was murdered, most likely by hitmen. The DNC might have known by this point that Seth was
the leaker to Wikileaks -- and that he therefore would have been in a position to completely destroy the Russian interference hoax
if he had chosen to do so.
Crowdstrike, whose founders are known to despise the Russian government, rapidly concluded that the DNC server had been hacked
by Russians affiliated with Russian intelligence. According to experts who have examined this claim, the logic behind this conclusion
is unconvincing and puerile. Moreover, Crowdstrike's previous effort to implicate Russian intelligence in a hack had been shown to
be bogus. Nonetheless, the FBI chose to accept the Crowdstrike conclusions, even though they had never been able to examine the DNC
servers themselves because the DNC had refused to turn them over, and the FBI had failed to subpoena them.
If Hersh's source inside the FBI is to be believed, the FBI has known for over a year that Seth Rich was a Wikileaks source, and
has kept this knowledge secret. The FBI states that they have not participated in the investigation of Seth's murder -- thereby
tacitly implying, without saying so directly, that they have not examined his computer. Given that Assange, who presumably has direct
knowledge on the issue, has hinted as strongly as possible that Seth was one of his sources, the FBI would be severely derelict if
indeed it has not examined Seth computer(s).
The Obama administration was soon fully on board with the "Russia interfered" narrative, which initially shielded Hillary from
the full import of the Wikileaks revelations, and, after the election, provided Hillary's campaign with an excuse for its failure
while enabling an ancillary "Trump colluded in the interference" narrative that could be employed to disable the Trump presidency.
Despite Hillary's concocted claim about "17 intelligence agencies" verifying the Russian interference story, the Obama administration
made sure that the standard appropriate process for our intelligence agencies to provide a balanced evaluation -- a National Intelligence
Assessment, entailing participation by a number of agencies and including any dissenting judgements -- was NOT FOLLOWED. Rather,
the histrionic Russophobes James Clapper and John Brennan were allowed to hand-pick a group of a couple dozen intelligence personnel
from just 3 agencies. The declassified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which they drafted, free of any dissents,
accused the Russian government of a conscious campaign to support the candidacy of Trump by hacking several key political websites
and providing their contents to Wikileaks and other outlets. Guccifer 2.0 was specifically cited as a Wikileaks source.
Critics immediately noted that the declassified ICA provided no hard evidence whatever to document its claims, and that over half
its length was devoted to a criticism of the RT television network as a supposed propaganda outlet. In particular, no insight was
provided as to how the authors of the report had concluded that the hacked documents had been transferred to Wikileaks. The conclusions
of this report evidently fit seamlessly into a broader strategy of demonizing Russia, the intent being to insure that our military-industrial
complex and NATO continue to receive an outrageous level of funding, and that the warped policy agendas of the neo-cons are satisfied.
Our MSM immediately embraced the conclusions of the ICA as Gospel truth, frequently referring to "our 17 intelligence agencies"
as the source for this report. They completely ignored the fact that the "assessments" of this report are in effect just "best guesses",
that the preamble of the report pointed out that "assessments" should not necessarily be equated to "facts", and that the NSA --
which, as William Binney notes, should have been able to obtain definitive proof for any actual hacking that had occurred -- expressed
only "moderate confidence" in the conclusions. This sycophantic credulity is particularly inexcusable in the context of the previous
"Saddam's WMDs" hoax which they likewise had swallowed uncritically, resulting in an illegal war with utterly catastrophic consequences.
The initial claims of Russian interference were soon embellished by media reports claiming that, according to anonymous intelligence
sources, the Russian government had attempted to hack into the voter registration files of 21 states, had conducted hacking operations
intended to interfere in German and French elections, and had hacked into the Qatari state news agency to plant a fake news story.
The veracity of each of these unsourced claims has been called into question, and in some cases disproved, by cyberanalysts, intelligence
experts, and journalists. The conclusions of the NSA document leaked by Reality Winner have likewise been shown to be purely speculative.
Claims that Russian bots and paid trolls assaulted our social media in the months prior to the election are poorly documented, and,
in any case, rather comical.
Following the election, the Russian interference narrative was echoed unceasingly by the Democratic establishment, as this was
the necessary concomitant of the "Trump collusion" claims that they were using to slam and cripple Trump -- in the hopes of eventually
impeaching him. (It presumably would have been hard for Trump to collude in Russian election interference if in fact there had been
no Russian interference.) Hysterical attacks on Russia accelerated to the point that some pols referred to the "Russian interference"
as "an act of war". This New McCarthyism ultimately led to our Congress placing severe new sanctions on Russia which also harm our
European allies, and which these allies decry as illegal. In other words, we are punishing Russia for a crime they almost certainly
did not commit, alienating key allies in the process, and amping up a Second Cold War, with all the expense and severe danger which
this may entail.
All because the DNC and its associates concocted an overt fraud to protect and excuse Hillary, and to use as a cudgel over Trump
-- a fraud that was readily lapped up and sold to the public by hand-picked Russophobes in our intelligence community, and by a
MSM that cares far less about truth than about access and ratings.
We need to determine who created the Guccifer 2.0 hoax, and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. The "intelligence
agents" who concluded "with high confidence" that Guccifer 2.0 was a Wikileaks source need to be fired or demoted. If the FBI has
known all along that Seth was a Wikileaks source, those who shielded the public from this crucial information need to be unmasked.
The "journalists" who have been credulously spreading the "Russia interfered" narrative 24/7 for most of a year, without making the
least effort to question the veracity of these assertions, should be recognized by the public as the willing tools of lying warmongers
that they are, and their future work studiously ignored. The sanctions recently implemented on Russia should be lifted, and the politicians
who played the most egregious role in hyping the Russian interference narrative and pushing the sanctions should be repudiated at
the polls when they come up for re-election. (I confess, however, that I will not hold my breath waiting for any of these things
to happen.)
And let's do our best to find out who murdered Seth Rich, and why. The DNC and its media acolytes have been heaping hysterical
abuse on anyone who entertains the possibility that Seth may have been a Wikileaks source, or who undertakes to investigate his murder.
Donna Brazile and Seth's brother Aaron have done their best to impede the investigative efforts of Rod Wheeler. There is reason to
suspect that the DC police have backed off the investigation of the murder, accepting the very dubious view that Seth's murder was
just a "botched robbery". And why did Democratic operatives feel it necessary to supply the Rich family with a "crisis consultant"
after Assange mentioned Seth -- when they couldn't be bothered to offer an award for apprehension of Seth's murderer? This behavior
is highly suspicious -- if Seth was indeed the victim of random street violence, what would the DNC have to fear from further investigation?
Let's get to the bottom of this!
I appreciate your presenting and thoroughly examining the facets of this issue, and I think the more we look at it the better
equipped we'll be to deal with whatever happens when the Attorney General or the Republicans begin to address what happened, if
they do.
The part of your essay I question is this:
The evident intent of this charade was to trick our intelligence agencies into concluding that Guccifer 2.0 was the Wikileaks
source and was acting at the behest of the Russian government.
Why do you not see this as our intelligence agencies working with the DNC and providing them with bogus clues to work with?
Doesn't the record now show that the CIA provided the premise for starting the FBI counterintelligence investigation into collusion?
And doesn't the record now show that the premise was based on the activities of CIA and FBI informant actors infiltrated into
the Trump campaign?
Big Puzzle Pieces Connecting – The CIA, FBI, and 2016 Political Surveillance is Merging
Posted on May 2, 2019 by sundance
The admissions within the New York Times story today -outlining how President Obama's intelligence apparatus ran simultaneous
intelligence operations against the Trump campaign- are starting to merge the FBI and CIA operations. CTH anticipated this.
With new information about the "U.K. operation" using Stefan Halper (CIA asset and FBI informant); and the details of
the contacts by U.S. intelligence operative Azra Turk; we can overlay the timeline and see a clear picture
Papadopoulos Responds to Admissions the FBI/CIA Ran "Operations" Against Him .
Posted on May 2, 2019 by sundance
Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos appears on Fox with Tucker Carlson to discuss the revelations of the FBI/CIA
running spy operations against him during the 2016 election. Papadopoulos says the FBI spy wanted him to slip up and say something;
however, he had no information...
I have not followed this as closely as others, so I greatly appreciate this review. I think Linda may have a point about our
"seventeen" intelligence agencies working with the guilty. Everyone from Hillary to Morning Joe has mentioned so many times what
our intelligence agencies have said about Russia. The universal repetition makes it smell coordinated and therefore fishy.
And all America, if not the world, knows that Clapper had no compunction about lying to Congress about an unrelated subject.
Nor did he need to have any compunction about it. At the very least, he should have been fired for it, if not prosecuted. Neither
happened, even though he served "at the pleasure of the President."
I don't want to say # AGBarr is positively engaged
on the Dem(on)rats. His mere level headed and professionalism exposed the Dem(on)rats' circus act.
Notable quotes:
"... You might remember that McCabe picked Goldman of all people to interview him about the use of 'Confidential Human Sources' in Operation Crossfire Hurricane - funny that! ..."
"... Goldman's (McCabe's) argument is that the President was a national security risk because he fired Comey. "Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security." ..."
"... 3 years and at least 33 million have been wasted in attempt to link Trump campaign to Russian intelligence ..."
"... Brennan used any Russian talking to a U.S. person as a reason to surveillance the U.S. person. Red scare...the century old excuse used by the FBI to illegally spy on Americans. The history books won't describe his actions as honorable ..."
"... What was it that prompted Goldman (ie McCabe) to publish his latest article on the FBI Russia investigation? Answer: Barr's criticism's of the FBI. ..."
"... CIA/FBI helping each other out. Informally of course. Standard off the books quid pro quo. ..."
"... The F.B.I. received the information from the Australian government on July 26, 2016, the special counsel's report said, and the bureau code-named its investigation Crossfire Hurricane . ..."
Both the Washington Post and CNN - which breathlessly reported on their peers' anonymously-sourced anti-Trump propaganda for two
years - have somehow failed to write a single article mentioning Azra Turk . As the Times revealed on Thursday, the FBI operative
who went by the name Azra Turk repeatedly flirted with Trump aide George Papadopoulos during their encounters as well as in email
exchanges according to an October, 2018
Daily Caller report, confirmed by
the Times.
While in London in 2016, Ms. Turk exchanged emails with Mr. Papadopoulos, saying meeting him had been the " highlight of my
trip ," according to messages provided by Mr. Papadopoulos.
" I am excited about what the future holds for us :), " she wrote. -
New York Times
And as the Times makes clear, "the FBI sent her to London as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer" to investigate
the Trump campaign. Verified account @ ByronYork May 2 Follow Follow @ ByronYork Following
Following @ ByronYork Unfollow Unfollow @ ByronYork Blocked Blocked @ ByronYork Unblock Unblock @ ByronYork Pending Pending follow
request from @ ByronYork Cancel Cancel your follow request to @ ByronYork More
In his House testimony, George Papadopoulos described undercover FBI informant Stefan Halper introducing him to undercover FBI
informant 'Azra Turk.' pic.twitter.com/8jO4lK6Ldt
So I get there. I get to
London. And he introduces -- or he does not introduce me to, but I can't remember exactly how I came into contact with his assistant,
this young lady named Azra Turk, which I think is a fake name, by the way. My --
Mr. Meadows. Why do you believe it's a fake name?
Mr. Papadopoulos. Reading -- reading Twitter and people saying that Azra in Turkish means pure and then Turk. So unless she has
the name of pure Turk. I don't know. Maybe that's -- those are common names in Turkey. I don't know. But it just seems that it was
probably a fake alias.
Another beautiful young lady -- you know, I had many young beautiful ladies coming into my life with Joseph Mifsud and now another
professor. The professors liked to introduce me to young beautiful women.
And we're sitting there, and she didn't strike me as a Cambridge associate at all. So right away, I was suspicious that there
was something not right here. She -- her English was very bad. She spoke with -- I think she was a Turkish national, but she also
might have been a dual American citizen. I'm not sure. And she took me to -- out for drinks in London and was probing me a lot.
Meanwhile, a Russian-born academic falsely accused of being a Kremlin 'honeypot' operative against Mike Flynn, Svetlana Lokhova,
has an interesting theory as to why the Times published the '2nd spy' revelation in the first place.
I am a 'veteran' of reading Adam Goldman (NYT) articles about Halper's role with the FBI so here are pointers. You always have
to ask: 1) Why did he write the article? 2) When did he write the article? 3) What is the narrative he is placing? 4) What has
he left out? THREAD
2/ You might remember that McCabe picked Goldman of all people to interview him about the use of 'Confidential Human Sources'
in
Operation Crossfire Hurricane - funny that!
Andrew McCabe intervied by NYT's Adam Goldma...
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe discussed his career, the FBI, and his firing from the Bureau. He was interviewed
by New York Times reporter Adam Go...
4/ Goldman's (McCabe's) argument is that the President was a national security risk because he fired Comey. "Counterintelligence
investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security."
3 years and at least 33 million have been wasted in attempt to link Trump campaign to Russian intelligence. As I stated 2 years
ago, I am not A Russian honeytrap for Gen Flynn.
Brennan used any Russian talking to a U.S. person as a reason to surveillance the U.S. person. Red scare...the century
old excuse used by the FBI to illegally spy on Americans. The history books won't describe his actions as honorable
Svetlana Lokhova @RealSLokhova • 7h v
7/ This is Goldman's implausible explanation for spying. The President is portrayed as nuts, nytimes.com/2018/05/18/us/...
President Trump accused the without evidence, of planting a mole inside his campaign to undermine his presidential run. But
the F.B.I. in fact dispatched a confidential informant to meet with Trump campaign advisers as it began its investigation into
possible links between his campaign and Russia.
8/ What was it that prompted Goldman (ie McCabe) to publish his latest article on the FBI Russia investigation? Answer:
Barr's criticism's of the FBI.
Barr: One of the things I want to look -- there are people -- many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection
that occurred was a single confidential informant and a FISA warrant. I would like to find out whether that is, in fact, true.
It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the counterintelligence effort designed to stop the threat as it's being represented.
9/ The message by NYT (McCabe) is that the FBI threw their best guys at this, hence sudden reference to Operation 'Ghost Stories'.
10/ The main message is that the Russia investigation was legally predicated,
CNN law enforcement analyst and retired FBI agent James A. Gagliano opined on Twitter that perhaps the Times was helping the intelligence
community get out in front of the upcoming Inspector General report on the FBI's conduct during the 2016 election.
James A. Gagliano @JamesAGagliano
Must caveat with -- would have had to have been a "CERTIFIED" FBI Undercover Agent (UCA), who had passed the UCA course,
been pre-screened (psychologicals) and been handpicked by FBI HQ for a high-profile overseas assignment. Also, Legat London
would've assuredly coordinated w/MI5.
James A. Gagliano @JamesAGagliano
Unless it was foreign intelligence service supplying the "honey trap.'' Papadopoulos argued *Azra Turk* had thick accent
-- which wouldn't preclude her from FBI service, if US citizen. Some argue Agency employee. Surmise, absent heavy redaction,
pending IG report lays this bare.
James A. Gagliano @JamesAGagliano
MAYBE this is why @nytimes helped get out in front of the news cycle that will roil following IG report that may be released
this month or next.
As I understand it, the CIA is not supposed to be involved with spying on American citizens, but the FBI has wide ranging latitude.
This article says she was presumed to be FBI, but Papadoploulos says he thinks she was CIA. So, it would be a graver offense if
she was CIA and busy performing illegal spying activities on an American citizen.
If I am fuzzy on this, maybe someone can clarify who knows the rules a little better.
MSM burying the truth? Well imagine my shock. I'm surprised the likes of CNN and Facebook are still trying to hide their ban
on truth and just openly claim truth is hate speech.
If you work at the CIA, do you get "honeypot" privileges ?
They must have a lot of downtime.
Wonder if "honeypot" is a line item in the CIA budget and how they forecast that. Do their rates decline over time, maybe with
an associated depletion account set up like for petroleum reserves. Lots of questions here.
"Mr. Barr reignited the controversy last month when
he told
Congress , "I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal." He backed off the charged declaration later in the same
hearing, saying: "I think spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I'm not suggesting that
it wasn't adequately predicated. But I need to explore that." "
......
Mr. Barr again defended his use of the term "spying" at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, saying he wanted
to know more about the F.B.I.'s investigative efforts during 2016 and explained that the early inquiry most likely went beyond
the use of an informant and a court-authorized wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, who had interacted with
a Russian intelligence officer.
.....
Weeks before Mr. Papadopoulos met with Ms. Turk and Mr. Halper, the F.B.I. had opened its investigation into the Russia effort
-- based largely on information that Mr. Papadopoulos had relayed to an Australian diplomat about a Russian offer to help the
Trump campaign by releasing thousands of hacked Democratic emails.
The F.B.I. received the information from the Australian government on July 26, 2016, the special counsel's report said, and
the bureau code-named its investigation
Crossfire Hurricane .
Investigators scrambled to determine whether Mr. Papadopoulos had any Russian contacts while deciding to scrutinize three additional
Trump campaign aides who had concerning ties to Russia: Paul Manafort, its chairman; Michael T. Flynn, who went on to be the president's
first national security adviser; and Mr. Page.
His response: "I'm just going to leave it right now as a 'government investigator.' I use that wording for a reason, and
I'm going to leave it at that."
Priceless!
Not FBI, just a 'government investigator.' and "I use that wording for a reason," and people on Twitter all trying to solve
that complicated puzzle ! LOL.
A mysterious Turkish woman who "assisted" FBI spy Stefan Halper in a London operation targeting
Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos has been revealed
as yet another FBI operative
sent
to spy on the Trump campaign during the 2016 US election, according to the
New
York Times
.
The woman, who went by the name Azra Turk,
repeatedly flirted with Papadopoulos
during their encounters as well as in email exchanges according to an October, 2018
Daily Caller
report,
confirmed today by the
Times.
"Turk," posed as Halper's assistant according to the report.
While in London in 2016, Ms. Turk exchanged emails with Mr. Papadopoulos, saying meeting him
had been the "
highlight of my trip
," according to messages provided by Mr.
Papadopoulos.
"
I am excited about what the future holds for us :),
" she wrote. -
New
York Times
And as the
Times
makes clear, "the FBI sent her to London as part of the
counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer" to investigate the Trump campaign.
The conversation at a London bar in September 2016 took a strange turn when the woman sitting
across from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, asked a direct question:
Was
the Trump campaign working with Russia?
...
Ms. Turk went to London to help oversee the politically sensitive operation, working
alongside a longtime informant, the Cambridge professor Stefan A. Halper. The move was a sign
that
the bureau wanted in place a trained investigator for a layer of oversight
,
as well as someone who could gather information for or serve as a credible witness in any
potential prosecution that emerged from the case. -
New
York Times
Halper - who was paid
more than $1 million
by the Pentagon while Obama was president - contacted Papadopoulos on
September 2, 2016 according to
The Caller
- and would later fly him out to London under
the guise of working on a policy paper on energy issues in Turkey, Cyprus and Israel - for which he
was ultimately paid $3,000. Papadopoulos met Halper several times during his stay, "having dinner
one night at the Travellers Club, and Old London gentleman's club frequented by international
diplomats."
As the
Times
notes, the London operation "yielded no fruitful information," while the
FBI has called their activities in the months before the 2016 election as both "legal and carefully
considered under extraordinary circumstances," according to the report.
Mr. Papadopoulos was baffled. "
There is no way this is a Cambridge professor's
research assistant
," he recalled thinking, according to his book. In recent weeks, he
has said
in
tweets
that
he
believes
Ms. Turk may have been working for Turkish intelligence but provided no evidence.
The day after meeting Ms. Turk, Mr. Papadopoulos met briefly with Mr. Halper at a private
London club, and Ms. Turk joined them. The two men agreed to meet again, arranging a drink at
the Sofitel hotel in London's posh West End.
During that conversation, Mr.
Halper immediately asked about hacked emails and
whether Russia was helping the campaign
, according to Mr. Papadopoulos's book. Angry
over the accusatory questions, Mr. Papadopoulos
ended the meeting
. -
New
York Times
Also of interest,
the British government was informed of the spy operation on their soil
,
according to the
Times
, however it is unclear whether they participated.
As for the FBI,
the agency's actions are now under investigation by the Justice
Department's Inspector General, Michael Horowitz.
He could make the results public in May or June, Attorney General William P. Barr has said.
Some of the findings are likely to be classified.
It is unclear whether Mr. Horowitz will find fault with the F.B.I.'s decision to have
Ms. Turk, whose real name is not publicly known, meet with Mr. Papadopoulos.
Mr.
Horowitz has focused among other things on the activities of Mr. Halper, who accompanied Ms.
Turk in one of her meetings with Mr. Papadopoulos and also met with him and other campaign aides
separately.
The bureau might also have seen Ms. Turk's role as essential for protecting
Mr. Halper's identity as an informant
if prosecutors ever needed court testimony about
their activities. -
New
York Times
During Congressional testimony last month, Attorney General Barr told Congress "I think spying
on a political campaign is a big deal," adding "I think spying did occur. The question is whether
it was adequately predicated. And I'm not suggesting that it wasn't adequately predicated. But I
need to explore that."
Maybe he could explore the role of Joseph Mifsud - a Maltese professor and
self-professed
member of the Clinton Foundation, who reportedly seeded Papadopoulos with the
rumor that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that Mifsud seeded the information with
Papadopoulos, who was pumped for that same information during a "drunken" encounter at a London Bar
with Clinton-associate and Australian diplomat Alexander Downer - who told authorities about the
"dirt" rumor, which launched the FBI/DOJ counterintelligence operation that included
Halper
and "Azra Turk" spying on Papadopoulos
.
Mr. Barr again defended his use of the term "spying" at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing
on Wednesday, saying he wanted to know more about the F.B.I.'s investigative efforts during 2016
and explained that the early inquiry likely went beyond the use of an informant and a
court-authorized wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, who had interacted
with a Russian intelligence officer. -
New
York Times
"Many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection that occurred was a single
confidential informant," and the warrant to surveil Carter Page, said Barr. "I would like to find
out whether that is in fact true.
It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the
counterintelligence effort designed to stop the threat as it's being represented
."
Nice hedge, Barr, but what happened appears to be anything but "fairly anemic."
Ukrainian embassy confirms DNC contractor solicited Trump dirt in 2016
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR -- 05/02/19 07:00 PM EDT
397
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
The boomerang from the Democratic Party's failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia's 2016 election
meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow's pesky
neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in
some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton .
In its most detailed account yet, Ukraine's embassy in Washington says a Democratic
National Committee insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump's campaign
chairman and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.
"She said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort
were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with Putin against the U.S.
interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in
September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the
election," he recalled.
After the meeting, Telizhenko said he became concerned about the legality of using his
country's assets to help an American political party win an U.S. election. But he proceeded
with his assignment.
Telizhenko said that, as he began his research, he discovered that Fusion GPS was nosing
around Ukraine, seeking similar information, and he believed they, too, worked for the
Democrats.
One of the biggest revelations to understanding the news related to the Trump-Russia
Collusion narrative is the status of Donald J. Trump as a long-time undercover asset of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation!
Myself and my friends on Twitter have uncovered evidence showing that President Trump
& the Trump organization have helped the FBI in sting operations going back to at least
1981 & probably earlier. Many scratched their heads and said it wasn't possible when I
published threads on the topic almost one year ago. Fortunately, the evidence for this has
continued to build with much of it based on FBI documents released under Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The illegal spying of the anti-American Obozo Admin goes all the way back to the 2012
campaign when they spied on the Globalist Neocon fraud Romney's campaign. Fire up the
electric chairs! Traitor Brennen first to Ride the Lightning!
Despite Robert Muller's (one the US DARK STATE/WAR STATE 's special Hatchet man) 2 years,
50 millions dollar extensive investigations effort, he has not uncovered any evidences that
will exonerate Donald Trump, and prove his innocence, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Donald
Trump did not colluded with the Russians and did not obstructed justice.
This means undeniable complicity in Donald Trump's part, in colluding with the Russians
and obstructing justice.
Attorney General Barr should extend Special Hatchetman Robert Muller's mandate to
Investigate Donald Trump's collusion with Communist Leaders to influence the 2020
Election.
There is a vast amount of evidences that Trump has COLLUDED the communists countries such
China, N. Korea, Vietnam and Russia, during his two years in Office, in order, to influence
public opinions and attempt to swing the results of 2020 elections.
Trump has frequently visited those COMMUNIST countries, and meet with North Korean
Dictator Kim Jun-En for multiple times.
Trump has dinner with the Commie Emperor/Dictator Xi, in Argentina, and talk with him on
the phones many times.
And Trump has meet in Russian Dictator Putin, many times.
In short, the overwhelming evidences of Trump's COLLUSION with those COMMUNIST countries
to influence the 2020 election, leaves NO room for doubt.
Therefore, the IMPEACHMENT of Donald Trump must proceed, immediately, from Muller's
conclusion of his investigations.
A length JAIL TERM is appropriate for his BRUTAL BETRAYAL of THE TRUST, the American
People, has placed upon him.
And it is time to restore Hitlery as our lawfully elected POTUS, in the White House.
* * *
For the Trumpards, who might be too stupid, to get this post as a Satire , let me state
explicitly that this a Sarcastic Satire . So no more stupid comments on my state of mind.
Sarcastic - Someone, who is sarcastic says or does, the opposite, of what they really
mean, in order, to mock or insult someone.
Satire - a technique used by writers to expose and criticize foolishness and corruption of
an individual or a society, by using humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule. It intends to
improve humanity by criticizing its follies and foibles.
The FISA court is their unraveling, it's already underway...............
Here is a short take away.......
==================
Joe diGenova: John Brennan Isn't Going to Need One Lawyer, He's Going to Need Five
In an appearance on FNC's "The Ingraham Angle" last week, former federal prosecutor Joe
DiGenova claimed that evidence of widespread FISA abuse by members of the Obama
administration is forthcoming and that "there are going to be indictments; there's going to
be grand juries."
Former CIA Director "John Brennan isn't going to need one lawyer, he's going to need
five," diGenova said.
And a full report on zero hedge. Locate the podcast with Joe D. well worth the 15 minutes
and all coming out now..........Just as Dan Bongino and others have been saying all
along.
Joe DiGenova Explains Where The Russia Hoax Is Headed
"... That report is going to be a bombshell. It is going to open up the investigation on a very high note, and there are going to be criminal referrals in it. ..."
"... The FISA court abuse is the center of this entire abuse of governmental power, and the chief judge in that court has already ruled that the FBI broke the law and that the people at the head of the justice department, Sally Yates, John Carlin, the assistant attorney general for national security all knew about it and lied to the FISA court about it... ..."
"... He [Rogers] discovered the illegal spying. He went personally to the FISA court and briefed the Chief Judge and worked with her for months to uncover the people who did it. The FISA court has already told the Justice Department who lied to that court and that has been given to [Attorney General] Bill Barr already. ..."
It is about the rule of law and privacy. The Obama administration for more than four years
before the 2016 election allowed four contractors working for the FBI to illegally surveil
American citizens -- illegally. The FISA court has already found that. There is the Horowitz
report coming out in May or possibly early June. There's another report that everyone has
forgotten about involving James Comey alone. That will be out in two weeks. That report is
going to be a bombshell. It is going to open up the investigation on a very high note, and
there are going to be criminal referrals in it.
The FISA court abuse is the center of this entire abuse of governmental power, and the chief
judge in that court has already ruled that the FBI broke the law and that the people at the
head of the justice department, Sally Yates, John Carlin, the assistant attorney general for
national security all knew about it and lied to the FISA court about it...
There's a hero in this story and it is not a lawyer. There is a hero. His name is Admiral
Mike Rogers. He was the head of the National Security Agency.
He [Rogers] discovered the illegal spying. He went personally to the FISA court and briefed
the Chief Judge and worked with her for months to uncover the people who did it. The FISA court
has already told the Justice Department who lied to that court and that has been given to
[Attorney General] Bill Barr already.
There Was Spying: NYT Admits Obama Admin Used 'Honeypot' To Spy Against Trump Campaign In
2016
My response: Why would the MSM want to get out in front of what is coming by issuing this
news story? May be they are implicated as well! Below is the list of MSM career criminals who
are facing the real possibility of jail time.
=== List of MSM Career Criminals Guilty of TREASON, SEDITION and/or SUBVERSIVE
activities!! ===
These reporters and networks have been named in the WikiLeaks to have colluded with the
DNC or Hillary campaign during the 2016 election cycle:
ABC – Cecilia Vega ABC - David Muir ABC – Diane Sawyer ABC – George Stephanoplous ABC – Jon Karl ABC – Liz Kreutz AP – Julie Pace AP – Ken Thomas AP – Lisa Lerer AURN – April Ryan Bloomberg – Jennifer Epstein Bloomberg – John Heillman Bloomberg/MSNBC – Jonathan Alter Bloomberg – Mark Halperin Buzzfeed – Ben Smith Buzzfeed – Ruby Cramer CBS – Gayle King CBS – John Dickerson CBS – Norah O'Donnell CBS – Steve Chagaris CBS – Vicki Gordon CNBC – John Harwood CNN – Brianna Keilar CNN – Dan Merica CNN – David Chailan CNN – Erin Burnett CNN – Gloria Borger CNN – Jake Tapper CNN – Jeff Zeleny CNN - Jeff Zucker CNN – John Berman CNN – Kate Bouldan CNN – Maria Cardona CNN – Mark Preston CNN – Sam Feist Daily Beast – Jackie Kucinich GPG – Mike Feldman HuffPo – Amanda Terkel HuffPo – Arianna Huffington HuffPo – Sam Stein HuffPo – Whitney Snyder LAT – Evan Handler LAT – Mike Memoli McClatchy – Anita Kumar MORE – Betsy Fisher Martin MSNBC – Alex Seitz-Wald MSNBC – Alex Wagner MSNBC – Andrea Mitchell MSNBC - Beth Fouhy MSNBC – Ed Schultz MSNBC – Joe Scarborough MSNBC – Mika Brzezinski MSNBC – Phil Griffin MSNBC – Rachel Maddow MSNBC – Rachel Racusen MSNBC – Thomas Roberts National Journal – Emily Schultheis NBC – Chuck Todd NBC – Mark Murray NBC – Savannah Gutherie New Yorker – David Remnick New Yorker – Ryan Liza NPR – Mike Oreskes NPR – Tamara Keith NY Post – Geofe Earl NYT – Amy Chozik NYT – Carolyn Ryan NYT – Gail Collins NYT – John Harwoodje NYT – Jonathan Martin NYT – Maggie Haberman NYT – Pat Healey PBS – Charlie Rose People – Sandra Sobieraj Westfall Politico – Annie Karni Politico – Gabe Debenedetti Politico – Glenn Thrush Politico – Kenneth Vogel Politico – Mike Allen Reuters – Amanda Becker Tina Brown – Tina Brown The Hill – Amie Parnes Univision – Maria-Elena Salinas Vice – Alyssa Mastramonoco Vox – Jon Allen WaPo – Anne Gearan WaPo – Greg Sargent WSJ – Laura Meckler WSJ – Peter Nicholas WSJ – Colleen McCain Nelson Yahoo – Matt Bai
Here is my take, on this entire Sh*tshow, running in Washington DC, for the last two
years.
1. All the evidences are pointing the most likely scenario that Donald Trump is a
Manchurian Candidate ordered by the Kremelin to run for Office, in 2016.
2. Then, Donald Trump COLLUDED with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service to win the
Presidency of United States, with shocking easy.
3. This was because Hitlery Clinton and Joe Biden , was bribed by Putin, through the
Ukrainians, with hundred of millions of dollars, so she would purposely lose the "sure win"
race, to a political nobody, Donald Trump.
4. Then, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, produced the Steele Dossier, a
political disinformation tool, in collaboration with Britain's Mi6 and CIA.
5. Then the Russians leaked the COLLUSION story to the CIA controlled MSM such as New York
Time, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, etc . . ., so they would predictably kicked a storm of
controversy over the COLLUSION, and demand the DOJ to appoint a Special Prosecutor to initial
an investigation.
6. This diabolically devilish Special PsyOps by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service
has succeeded in tying up Washington DC, in a Sh*tshow, for the last two years, and divided
the Country in bitter controversy.
7. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service and Chinese Communists' Intelligence Service
have thoroughly infiltrated America's Department of Justice, FBI, and CIA, and NSA, and use
their high levels agents, such as O'bomer, Hitlery, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Strozk, Page,
and rosenstein to stirred up this COLLUSION storm, to paralyze America's political system
for as long as possible.
In Summary, the entire sh*tshow is a production of a Special PsyOps by the Russkies and
ChiComs' Intelligence Services. It has nothing to do with America's dysfunctional government,
called DemoCrazy .
"... Zero Percent of Elite Commentators Oppose Regime Change in Venezuela ..."
"... It's so frustrating to see the current lunacy in the mainstream media, and the idiotocracy at work in Washington DC, regardless of political party or who's fat ass sits in the oval office. Tulsi Gabbard is about the only sane person in DC right now on foreign affairs - forget Sanders, Warren and 'regular guy' Joe Biden ..."
< somewhat surprising to me at first glance, but with a little further thought, as to be
expected - the US media is corporate controlled, pro-militarism, pro-interventionism,
pro-armaments sales, and totally pro-regime change - anywhere in the world. All
editorialists are neo-colonialists and imperialists at heart, regardless of who occupies
the white house>
Zero Percent of Elite Commentators Oppose Regime Change in Venezuela
A FAIR survey of US opinion journalism on Venezuela found no voices in elite corporate
media that opposed regime change in that country. Over a three-month period (1/15/19 --
4/15/19), zero opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post took an anti --
regime change or pro-Maduro/Chavista position.
Not a single commentator on the big three
Sunday morning talkshows or PBS NewsHour came out against President Nicolás Maduro
stepping down from the Venezuelan government.....
Let's make a mess of Venezuela, you know, like the US has done across the middle
east/north Africa since.... well since almost forever....
It's so frustrating to see the current lunacy in the mainstream media, and the idiotocracy
at work in Washington DC, regardless of political party or who's fat ass sits in the oval
office. Tulsi Gabbard is about the only sane person in DC right now on foreign affairs -
forget Sanders, Warren and 'regular guy' Joe Biden
Here is my take, on this entire Sh*tshow, running in Washington DC, for the last two
years.
1. All the evidences are pointing the most likely scenario that Donald Trump is a
Manchurian Candidate ordered by the Kremelin to run for Office, in 2016.
2. Then, Donald Trump COLLUDED with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service to win the
Presidency of United States, with shocking easy.
3. This was because Hitlery Clinton and Joe Biden , was bribed by Putin, through the
Ukrainians, with hundred of millions of dollars, so she would purposely lose the "sure win"
race, to a political nobody, Donald Trump.
4. Then, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, produced the Steele Dossier, a
political disinformation tool, in collaboration with Britain's Mi6 and CIA.
5. Then the Russians leaked the COLLUSION story to the CIA controlled MSM such as New York
Time, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, etc . . ., so they would predictably kicked a storm of
controversy over the COLLUSION, and demand the DOJ to appoint a Special Prosecutor to initial
an investigation.
6. This diabolically devilish Special PsyOps by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service
has succeeded in tying up Washington DC, in a Sh*tshow, for the last two years, and divided
the Country in bitter controversy.
7. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service and Chinese Communists' Intelligence Service
have thoroughly infiltrated America's Department of Justice, FBI, and CIA, and NSA, and use
their high levels agents, such as O'bomer, Hitlery, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Strozk, Page,
and rosenstein to stirred up this COLLUSION storm, to paralyze America's political system
for as long as possible.
In Summary, the entire sh*tshow is a production of a Special PsyOps by the Russkies and
ChiComs' Intelligence Services. It has nothing to do with America's dysfunctional government,
called DemoCrazy .
"Russiagate without Russia" actually means "Isrealgate". This individual points that he mentions below does not matter. Russiagate was a carefully planned and
brilliantly executed false flag operation run by intelligences
agencies (with GB agencies playing an important in some episodes decisive role) and headed probably by Obama himself via Brennan. There
were two goals: (1) to exclude any possibility of detente with Russia and (2) to block any Trump attempts to change the USA foreign
policy including running foreign war that enrich Pentagon contractors and justify supersized budget for intelligence agencies. As such
is was a great success.
The fact that no American was indicted and that Mueller attempt to prosecute Russian marketing agneces failed does not matter. The
atmosphere is now posoned for a generation. Americans are brainwashed and residue of Russiagate will stay for a long, long time. Neocons
Bolton and Pompeo now run Trump administration foreign policy with Trump performing most ceremonial role in foreign policy domain.
In this sense Skripals poisoning was another false flag operation, which was the logical continuation of Russiagate. And Magnitsky
killing (with Browder now a primary suspect) was a precursor to it. Both were run from Great Britain.
It is actually interesting how Mueller report swiped under the carpet the role of Great Britain in unleashing the Russiagate hysteria.
Two important foreign forces in the 2016 US Presidential elections was the Israel lobby and Great Britain. Trump proved to be a
marionette not of Russia but of Israeli lobby. so sad...
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later). ..."
For more than two years, leading US political and media voices promoted a narrative that Donald Trump conspired with or was compromised
by the Kremlin, and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would prove it. In the process, they overlooked countervailing evidence and
diverted anti-Trump energies into fervent speculation and prolonged anticipation. So long as Mueller was on the case, it was possible
to believe that " The Walls Are Closing In " on the
traitor /
puppet / asset in the
White House
.
The long-awaited completion of Mueller's probe, and the release of his redacted report, reveals this narrative -- and the expectations
it fueled -- to be unfounded. No American was indicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Mueller's report
does lay out extensive evidence that Trump sought to impede the investigation, but it declines to issue a verdict on obstruction.
It presents no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with an alleged effort by the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton,
and instead renders this conclusion: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the [Trump] Campaign coordinated or conspired
with the Russian government in its election-interference activities." As a result, Mueller's report provides the opposite of what
Russiagate promoters led their audiences to expect: Rather than detailing a sinister collusion plot with Russia, it presents what
amounts to an extended indictment of the conspiracy theory itself.
1. Russiagate Without Russia
The most fundamental element of a conspiracy is contact between the two parties doing the conspiring. Hence, on the eve of the
report's release, The New York
Times noted that among the "outstanding questions" that Mueller would answer were the nature of "contacts between Kremlin
intermediaries and the Trump campaign."
Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence
that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian
ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later).
It should be no surprise, then, to learn from Mueller that, when "Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen
began trying to make inroads into the new administration" after Trump's election victory, they did not know whom to call. These powerful
Russians, Mueller noted, "appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect."
If top Russians did not have "preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with" the people that they supposedly conspired with,
perhaps that is because they did not actually conspire.
To borrow a phrase from Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, when it comes to the core question of contacts between
Trump and the Russian government, we are left with a "Russiagate without Russia." Instead we have a series of interactions where
Trump associates speak with Russian nationals, people with ties to Russian nationals, or people who claim to have ties to
the Russian government. But none of these "links," "ties," or associations ever entail a member of the Trump campaign interacting
with a Kremlin intermediary. Russiagate promoters have nonetheless fueled a dogged media effort to track
every
known instance in which someone in Trump's orbit
interacted with " the Russians ," or
someone who can be linked
to them . There is nothing illegal or inherently suspect about speaking to a Russian national -- but there is something xenophobic
about implying as much.
2. Russiagate's Predicate Led Nowhere
The most glaring absence of a Kremlin intermediary comes in the case that ostensibly prompted the entire Trump-Russia investigation.
During an April 2016 meeting in Rome, a London-based professor named Joseph Mifsud reportedly informed Trump campaign aide George
Papadopoulos that "the Russians" had obtained "thousands of emails" containing "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. That information made its
way to the FBI, which used it as a pretext to open the "Crossfire Hurricane" probe on July 31, 2016. Papadopoulos was later indicted
for lying to FBI agents about the timing of his contacts with Mifsud. The case stoked speculation that Papadopoulos acted as an
intermediary between
Trump and Russia
.
But Papadopoulos played no such role. And while the Mueller report says that Papadopoulos "understood Mifsud to have substantial
connections to high-level Russian government officials," it never asserts that Mifsud actuall y had those connections.
Since Mifsud's suspected Russian connections were the purported predicate for the FBI's initial Trump-Russia investigation, that
is a conspicuous non-call. Another is the revelation from Mueller that
Mifsud made false statements to FBI investigators
when they interviewed him in February 2017 -- but yet, unlike Papadopoulos, Mifsud was not indicted. Thus, even the interaction that
sparked the Russia-collusion probe did not reveal collusion.
3. Sergey Kislyak Had "Brief and Non-Substantive" Interactions With the Trump Camp
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak's conversations with Trump campaign officials and associates during and after the 2016 election
were the focus of intense controversy and speculation, leading to the recusal of
Jeff Sessions, then attorney
general, and to the indictment of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
After an exhaustive review, Mueller concluded that Kislyak's interactions with Trump campaign officials at public events "were
brief, public, and non-substantive." As for Kislyak's
much –
ballyhooed meeting which Sessions in September 2016, Mueller saw no reason to dispute that it "included any more than a passing
mention of the presidential campaign." When Kislyak spoke with other Trump aides after the August 2016 Republican National Convention,
Mueller "did not identify evidence in those interactions of coordination between the Campaign and the Russian government."
The same goes for Kislyak's post-election conversations with Flynn. Mueller indicted Flynn for making "false statements and omissions"
in an interview with the FBI about his contacts with Kislyak during the transition in December 2016. The prevailing supposition was
that Flynn lied in order to hide from the FBI an
election-related payoff or "
quid pro quo
" with the Kremlin. The report punctures that thesis by reaffirming the facts in Flynn's indictment: What Flynn hid from agents
was that he had "called Kislyak to request Russian restraint" in response to sanctions imposed by the outgoing Obama administration,
and that Kislyak had agreed. Mueller ruled out the possibility that Flynn could have implicated Trump in anything criminal by noting
the absence of evidence that Flynn "possessed information damaging to the President that would give the President a personal incentive
to end the FBI's inquiry into Flynn's conduct."
4. Trump Tower Moscow Had No Help From Moscow
The November 2018 indictment of Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was widely seen as damning, possibly impeachment-worthy,
for Trump. Cohen admitted to giving false written answers to Congress in a bid to downplay Trump's personal knowledge of his company's
failed effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. To proponents of the collusion theory, Cohen's admitted lies were proof that "
Trump is compromised by
Russia ," " full stop ."
But the Mueller report does not show any such compromise, and, in fact, shows there to be no Trump-Kremlin relationship. Cohen,
the report notes, "requested [Kremlin] assistance in moving the project forward, both in securing land to build the project and with
financing." The request was evidently rejected. Elena Poliakova, the personal assistant to Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov,
spoke with Cohen by phone after he e-mailed her office for help. After their 20-minute call, the report says, "Cohen could not recall
any direct follow-up from Poliakova or from any other representative of the Russian government, nor did the [Special Counsel's] Office
identify any evidence of direct follow-up."
5. and Trump Didn't Ask Cohen to Lie About It
The Mueller report not only dispels the notion that Trump had secret dealings with the Kremlin over Trump Tower Moscow; it also
rejects a related impeachment-level "bombshell." In January, BuzzFeed News
reported that Mueller had evidence that Trump "directed" Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow project. But according to
Mueller, "the evidence available to us does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen's false testimony," and that
Cohen himself testified "that he and the President did not explicitly discuss whether Cohen's testimony about the Trump Tower Moscow
project would be or was false." In a de-facto retraction, BuzzFeed updated its story with an
acknowledgment
of Mueller's conclusion .
6. The Trump Tower Meeting Really Was Just a "Waste of Time"
The June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower was
widely
dubbed
the
" Smoking
Gun ." An e-mail chain showed that Donald Trump Jr. welcomed an offer to accept compromising information about Clinton as "part
of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." But the pitch did not come from the meeting's Russian participants, but instead
from Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist acting on their behalf. Goldstone said that he invented "publicist puff" to secure
the meeting, because in reality,
as he told NPR , "I had no idea what I was talking about."
Mueller noted that Trump Jr.'s response "showed that the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist
candidate Trump's electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer's presentation did not provide such information [emphasis mine]."
The report further recounts that during the meeting Jared Kushner texted then-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort that it was a "waste
of time," and requested that his assistants "call him to give him an excuse to leave." Accordingly, when "Veselnitskaya made additional
efforts to follow up on the meeting," after the election, "the Trump Transition Team did not engage."
7. Manafort Did Not Share Polling Data to Meddle in the US Election
In January, Mueller accused Manafort of lying to investigators about several matters, including sharing Trump polling data and
discussing a Ukraine peace plan with a Ukrainian-Russian colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik, during the 2016 campaign. According to Mueller,
the FBI "assesses" that Kilimnik has unspecified "ties to Russian intelligence." To collusion proponents, the revelation was dubbed
" the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual
collusion " and even the "
Russian collusion smoking gun ."
Mueller, of course, reached a different conclusion: He "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling
data and Russia's interference in the election," and, moreover, "did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian
government on its election-interference efforts." Mueller noted that he "could not reliably determine Manafort's purpose in sharing"
the polling data, but also acknowledged (and bolstered) the explanation of his star witness, Rick Gates, that Manafort was motivated
by proving his financial value to former and future clients.
Mueller also gave us new reasons to doubt the assertions that Kilimnik himself is a Russian intelligence asset or spy. First,
Mueller did not join
media pundits in asserting such about
Kilimnik. Second, to support his vague contention that Kilimnik has, according to the FBI, "ties to Russian intelligence," Mueller
offered up a list of " pieces of the Office's
Evidence" that contains no direct evidence. For his part, Kilimnik has repeatedly stated that he has no such ties, and recently
told The Washington Post that Mueller never attempted to interview him.
8. The Steele Dossier Was Fiction
The Steele dossier -- a collection of Democratic National Committee-funded opposition research alleging a high-level Trump-Russia
criminal relationship -- played a critical role in the Russiagate saga. The FBI relied on it for leads and evidentiary material in
its investigation of the Trump campaign ties to Russia, and prominent
politicians ,
pundits , and
media
outlets promoted it as
credible .
The Mueller report,
The New York Times
noted last week , has "underscored what had grown clearer for months some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared
to be false, and others were impossible to prove." Steele reported that low-level Trump aide Carter Page was offered a 19 percent
stake in the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft if he could get Trump to lift Western sanctions. In October 2016 the FBI, citing
the Steele dossier, told the FISA court that it "believes that [Russia's] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other
individuals associated with" the Trump campaign. The Mueller report, however, could "not establish that Page coordinated with the
Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."
The Steele dossier claimed that Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet Russian agents in the summer of 2016. In April 2018, McClatchy
reported to much fanfare that Mueller's team "has evidence" that placed Cohen in Prague during the period in question. Cohen later
denied the claim under oath, and Mueller agreed, noting that Cohen "never traveled to Prague."
After reports emerged in August 2016 that the Trump campaign had rejected an amendment to the Republican National Committee platform
that called for arming Ukraine, Steele claimed that it was the result of a quid pro quo. The Mueller report "did not establish that"
the rejection of the Ukraine amendment was "undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia."
9. The Trump Campaign Had No Secret Channel to WikiLeaks
In January, veteran Republican operative and conspiracy theorist Roger Stone caused a stir when he was indicted for lying to Congress
about his efforts to make contact with WikiLeaks. But Mueller's indictment actually showed that Stone
had no communications with WikiLeaks
before the election and no privileged information about its releases . Most significantly, it revealed that Trump officials were
trying to learn about the WikiLeaks releases through Stone -- a fact that underscored that the Trump campaign neither worked with
WikiLeaks nor had advance knowledge of its e-mail dumps.
Mueller's final report does nothing to alter that picture. Its sections on Stone are heavily redacted, owing to Stone's pending
trial. But they do make clear that Mueller conducted an extensive search to establish a tie between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign,
and Stone -- and came up empty. New
reporting from The Washington Post underscores just how far their farcical efforts went. The Mueller team devoted
time and energy to determine whether far-right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, best known for promoting the false claim that Barack
Obama was born outside the United States, served as a link between Stone and WikiLeaks. Mueller's prosecutors "spent weeks coaxing,
cajoling and admonishing the conspiracy theorist, as they pressed him to stick to facts and not reconstruct stories," the Post
reports. "At times, they had debated the nature of memory itself." It is unsurprising that this led Mueller's prosecutors to
ultimately declare, according to Corsi's attorney, "We can't use any of this."
10. There Was No Cover-Up
The Mueller report does not just dispel the conspiracy theories that have engulfed political and media circles for two years;
it puts to rest the most popular, recent one: that Attorney General William Barr engaged in a
cover-up . According to the dominant narrative, Barr was
somehow concealing Mueller's damning evidence
, while Mueller, even more improbably, stayed silent.
One could argue that Barr's summary downplays the obstruction findings, though it accurately relays that Mueller's report does
"not exonerate" Trump. It was Mueller's decision to leave the verdict on obstruction to Barr and make clear that if Congress disagrees,
it has the power to indict Trump on its own. Mueller's office assisted with Barr's redactions, which proved to be, as Barr had pledged,
extremely limited. Despite containing numerous embarrassing details about Trump, no executive privilege was invoked to censor the
report's contents.
In the end, Mueller's report shows that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative embraced and evangelized by the US political and
media establishments to be a work of
fiction . The American public
was presented with a far different picture from what was expected, because leading pundits, outlets, and politicians ignored the
countervailing facts and promoted maximalist interpretations of others. Anonymous officials also leaked explosive yet uncorroborated
claims, leaving behind many stories that were subsequently discredited, retracted, or remain unconfirmed to this day.
It is too early to assess the damage that influential Russiagate promoters have done to their own reputations; to public confidence
in our democratic system and media; and to the prospects of defeating Trump, who always stood to benefit if the all-consuming conspiracy
theory ultimately collapsed. The scale of the wreckage, confirmed by Mueller's report, may prove to be the ultimate Russiagate scandal.
Consortium News' Record on Russiagate -- How CN Covered the 'Scandal': No. 7: 'Russiagate
Is No Watergate or Iran-Contra' April 26, 2019 • 108
Comments
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Many comparisons have been made between Russiagate and the earlier scandals of Watergate and
Iran-Contra, but the similarities are at best superficial, explained Robert Parry on June 28,
2017.
On CNN last week Carl Bernstein astonishingly said that the Mueller report uncovered a
scandal bigger than Watergate. No one died in either Watergate or Russiagate. But they did in
Iran-Contra, when the Reagan White House skirted Congress'decisionto cut off
funding for the Contras, which led to many more deaths in Nicaragua. It was a scandal uncovered
by CN's founder Bob Parry for the Associated Press. Parry, who was ahead of thepackin debunking Russiagate, filed this report for CN on June 28, 2017.
The bugged phone from the Watergate office of Democratic Party official Spencer Oliver.
Placed on the phone during a May 1972 break-in, the bug was the only device that worked. A
second break-in on June 17. 1972, led to the capture of Richard Nixon's Watergate burglars.
Yet what is perhaps most remarkable about those two Twentieth Century scandals is how little
Official Washington really understands them – and how these earlier scandals
significantly contrast, rather than compare, with what is unfolding now.
Although the historical record is still incomplete on Watergate and Iran-Contra, the
available evidence indicates that both scandals originated in schemes by Republicans to draw
foreign leaders into plots to undermine sitting Democratic presidents and thus pave the way for
the elections of Richard Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980.
As for Russia-gate, even if you accept that the Russian government hacked into Democratic
emails and publicized them via WikiLeaks, there is still no evidence that Donald Trump or his
campaign colluded with the Kremlin to do so. By contrast, in the origins of Watergate and
Iran-Contra, it appears the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, respectively, were the instigators of
schemes to enlist foreign governments in blocking a Vietnam peace deal in 1968 and negotiations
to free 52 American hostages in Iran in 1980.
Though Watergate is associated directly with the 1972 campaign – when Nixon's team of
burglars was caught inside the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building
– Nixon's formation of that team, known as the Plumbers, was driven by his fear that he
could be exposed for sabotaging President
Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam peace talks in 1968 in order to secure the White House that
year.
After Nixon's narrow victory over Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election, FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover informed Nixon that Johnson had a secret file, complete with
wiretapped phone calls, detailing the Nixon campaign's backchannel messages to South Vietnamese
officials convincing them to boycott Johnson's Paris peace talks. Later, Nixon learned that
this incriminating file had disappeared from the White House.
So, in 1971, after the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, which recounted the lies that had
been used to justify the Vietnam War through 1967, Nixon fretted that the missing file about
his peace-talk gambit in 1968 might surface, too, and would destroy him politically. Thus, he
organized the Plumbers to find the file, even contemplating fire-bombing the Brookings
Institution to enable a search of its safe where some aides thought the missing file might be
found.
In other words, Watergate wasn't simply a break-in at the Democratic National Committee on
June 17, 1972, in pursuit of useful political intelligence and Nixon's ensuing cover-up;
the scandal had its
origins in a far worse scandal , the derailing of peace talks that could have ended the
Vietnam War years earlier and saved the lives of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and
possibly more than 1 million Vietnamese.
Iran-Contra Parallels
Similarly, the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in 1986 with revelations that President Reagan
had authorized secret arms sales to Iran with some of the profits going to fund the Nicaraguan
Contra rebels, but the evidence now indicates that the connections between Reagan's team and
Iran's revolutionary regime traced back to 1980 when emissaries from Reagan's campaign worked
to stymie President Jimmy Carter's negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in
Iran.
PBS Frontline's 1991 documentary, entitled "The Election Held Hostage," co-written by Robert
Parry
According to multiple witnesses, including former Assistant Secretary of State for Middle
Eastern Affairs Nicholas Veliotes, the pre-election contacts led to the opening of a weapons
pipeline to Iran (via Israel), after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981, which was the
precise moment when Iran finally released the American hostages after 444 days.
Some key players in the 1980 Reagan-Iran contacts reappeared four years later at the start
of direct (again secret) U.S. arms shipments to Iran in 1985, which also involved Israeli
middlemen. These key players included Iranian CIA operative Cyrus Hashemi, former CIA
clandestine services chief Theodore Shackley, Reagan's campaign chief and then-CIA Director
William Casey, and former CIA Director and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.
In other words, the Iran-Contra weapons shipments of 1985-86 appear to have been an
outgrowth of the earlier shipments dating back to 1980 and continuing under Israeli auspices
until the supply line was taken over more directly by the Reagan administration in 1985-86.
Honor the Legacy of Bob Parry with a
Donation to Our Spring Fund Drive.
Thus, both the Watergate scandal in 1972 and the Iran-Contra Affair in 1986 could be viewed
as "sequels" to the earlier machinations driven by Republican hunger to seize the enormous
powers of the U.S. presidency. However, for decades, Official Washington has been hostile to
these underlying explanations of how Watergate and Iran-Contra began.
For instance, The New York Times, the so-called "newspaper of record," treated the
accumulation of evidence regarding Nixon's 1968 peace-talk gambit as nothing more than a
"rumor" until earlier this year when a scholar, John A.
Farrell, uncovered cryptic notes taken by Nixon's aide H.R. Haldeman, which added another
piece to the mosaic and left the Times little choice but to pronounce the historical reality
finally real.
Grasping the Watergate Narrative
Still, the Times and other major news outlets have failed to factor this belated admission
into the larger Watergate narrative. If you understand that Nixon did sabotage President
Johnson's Vietnam War peace talks and that Nixon was aware that Johnson's file on what LBJ
called Nixon's "treason" had disappeared from the White House, the early "Watergate tapes" from
1971 suddenly make sense.
President Richard Nixon with his then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in 1972.
Nixon ordered White House chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and National Security Adviser
Henry Kissinger to locate the missing file but their search came up empty. Yet, some Nixon
aides thought the file might be hidden at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank in
Washington. So, in his desperate pursuit of the file, Nixon called for a break-in at Brookings,
possibly even fire-bombing the building as a cover for his team of burglars to slip in amid the
confusion and rifle the safe.
The old explanation that Nixon simply wanted to find some file related to Johnson's 1968
pre-election Vietnam bombing halt never made sense given the extreme steps that Nixon was
prepared to take.
The relevant portions of Nixon's White House tapes include an entry on June 17, 1971,
coincidentally one year to the day before the Watergate burglars were caught. Nixon summoned
Haldeman and Kissinger to the Oval Office and pleaded with them again to locate the file.
"Do we have it?" Nixon asked Haldeman. "I've asked for it. You said you didn't have it."
Haldeman: "We can't find it."
Kissinger: "We have nothing here, Mr. President."
Nixon: "Well, damn-it, I asked for that because I need it."
Kissinger: "But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together."
Haldeman: "We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a file on it."
Nixon: "Where?"
Haldeman: "[Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God that there's a file on it
and it's at Brookings."
Nixon: "Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston's plan [for White House-sponsored break-ins as
part of domestic counter-intelligence operations]? Implement it."
Kissinger: "Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents."
Nixon: "I want it implemented. Goddamn-it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get
it."
Haldeman: "They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need to "
Kissinger: "I wouldn't be surprised if Brookings had the files."
Haldeman: "My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn't know for sure
that we don't have them around."
But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at the White House because he had ordered
his national security adviser, Walt Rostow, to remove it in the final days of Johnson's
presidency.
Forming the Burglars
On June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into Brookings and
"take it [the file] out." Nixon suggested using former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to conduct
the Brookings break-in.
"You talk to Hunt," Nixon told Haldeman. "I want the break-in. Hell, they do that. You're to
break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. Just go in and take it. Go in around
8:00 or 9:00 o'clock."
Haldeman: "Make an inspection of the safe."
Nixon: "That's right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up ."
For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the Brookings break-in never took place
(nor did the fire-bombing), but Nixon's desperation to locate Johnson's peace-talk file was an
important link in the chain of events that led to the creation of Nixon's burglary unit under
Hunt's supervision. Hunt later oversaw the two Watergate break-ins in May and June of 1972.
While it's possible that Nixon was still searching for the file about his Vietnam-peace
sabotage when the ill-fated Watergate break-ins occurred a year later, it's generally believed
that the burglary was more broadly focused, seeking any information that might have an impact
on Nixon's re-election, either defensively or offensively.
However, if you think back on 1971 when the Vietnam War was tearing the country apart and
massive antiwar demonstrations were descending on Washington, Nixon's desperation to locate the
missing file suddenly doesn't seem quite so crazy. There would have been hell to pay if the
public learned that Nixon had kept the war going to gain a political advantage in
1968.
Through 1972 – and the early days of the Watergate scandal – former President
Johnson had stayed silent about Nixon's sabotage of the Paris peace talks. But the ex-President
became livid when – after Nixon's reelection in 1972 – Nixon's men sought to
pressure Johnson into helping them shut down the Watergate investigation, in part, by noting
that Johnson, too, had deployed wiretaps against Nixon's 1968 campaign to obtain evidence about
the peace-talk sabotage.
While it's not clear whether Johnson would have finally spoken out, that threat to Nixon
ended two days after Nixon's second inaugural when on Jan. 22, 1973, Johnson died of a heart
attack. However, unbeknownst to Nixon, Johnson had left the missing file, called "The
X-Envelope," in the care of Rostow, who – after Johnson's death – gave the file to
the LBJ presidential library in Austin, Texas, with instructions that it be kept under wraps
for at least 50 years. (Rostow's instructions were overturned in the 1990s, and I found the now
largely declassified file at the library in 2012.)
So, with the "The X-Envelope" squirreled away for more than two decades at the LBJ library
and with the big newspapers treating the early sketchy reports of Nixon's peace-talk sabotage
as only "rumors," Watergate remained a scandal limited to the 1972 campaign.
Still, Nixon's cover-up of his campaign's role in the Watergate break-in produced enough
clear-cut evidence of obstruction of justice and other offenses that Nixon was forced to resign
on Aug. 9, 1974.
A Failed Investigation
The 1979-81 hostage confrontation with Iran was not nearly as devastating a crisis as the
Vietnam War but America's humiliation during the 444-day-long ordeal became a focus of the 1980
election, too, with the first anniversary of Iran's seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran
coincidentally falling on Election Day 1980.
Carter signing Camp David peace agreement with Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem
Begin.
President Carter's failure to gain freedom for the 52 embassy personnel turned what had been
a close race into a landslide for Ronald Reagan, with Republicans also gaining control of the
U.S. Senate and ousting some of the most influential Democratic senators.
In 1984, Reagan won reelection in another landslide, but two years later ran afoul of the
Iran-Contra scandal. Reagan's secret arms sales to Iran and diversion of profits to the Contras
"broke" in November 1986 but focused only on Reagan's 1985-1986 arms sales and the diversion.
Still, the scandal's crimes included violations of the Arms Export Control Act and the
so-called Boland Act's prohibitions on arming the Contras as well as perjury and obstruction of
justice. So there was the prospect of Reagan's impeachment.
But – from the start of Iran-Contra – there was a strong pushback from
Republicans who didn't want to see another GOP president driven from office. There was also
resistance to the scandal from many mainstream media executives who personally liked Reagan and
feared a public backlash if the press played an aggressive role similar to Watergate.
And, moderate Democrats, such as Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana who co-chaired the
congressional investigation, sought to tamp down the Iran-Contra fires and set up firebreaks to
prevent the investigation from spreading to related crimes such as the Reagan administration's
protection of Contra
cocaine traffickers .
"Ask about the cocaine," pleaded one protester who was dragged from the Iran-Contra hearing
room, as the congressional investigators averted their eyes from such unseemly matters,
focusing instead on stilted lectures about the Congress's constitutional prerogatives.
It was not until 1990-91 that it became clear that secret U.S.-approved arms shipments to
Iran did not start in 1985 as the Iran-Contra narrative claimed but traced back to 1981 with
Reagan's approval of arms sales to Iran through Israel.
Reagan's politically risky move of secretly arming Iran immediately after his inauguration
and the hostage release was nearly exposed when one of the Israeli flights strayed into Soviet
airspace on July 18, 1981, and crashed or was shot down.
In a PBS interview nearly a decade later, Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan's assistant secretary of
state for the Middle East, said he looked into the incident by talking to top administration
officials.
"It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed
that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment," Veliotes
said.
In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan camp's dealings
with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election. "It seems to have started in earnest in the
period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become
the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration," Veliotes said.
"And I understand some contacts were made at that time."
This is why Russia Gate is never going away. People who bought into from the start will
probably buy anything else that gets thrown at them. I think this smear about Russia helping
him came from some of the Facebook ads. Russia was very busy during the last election and
since it worked so well they're going to do it again.
But did you notice that up to a few weeks before the midterms we heard that Russia was
busy doing hanky panky, but then for some reason they stopped and let democrats take back the
house. You'd think that they would want the GOP to stay in control because of reasons....
like it would have been better for Trump? But hey I guess Putin threw democrat a bone. I
think.
Seriously though you would be surprised that so many people believe that.
#4 What in
the hell does that mean? I think the Great One was just trying to associate Russians with
Bernie. A harbinger of things to come.
https://c.deployads.com/sync?f=html&s=2297&u=https%3A%2F%2Fangrybearblog.com%2F2019%2F04%2Fpanetta-and-trump-who-are-you-calling-chumps.html%23comments
Panetta
and Trump: Who are You Calling Chumps?
Check out the entire interview as it was excellent. But I had to look up this old fashion
word :
a person who is easily tricked : a stupid or foolish person
OK – Trump supporters are easily tricked. But Trump wants to pretend he is a young
vigorous man! Chris Matthews did talk about young people who are more likely to check out
Urban
Dictionary than the old fashion Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Someone who does not understand the basics of life on earth. Confused easily.
Actually this is the perfect description for Trump supporters. There are more definitions at
Urban Dictionary that I would submit also apply!
ilsm , April 28, 2019 9:18 am
Who does Panetta think is "easily tricked"?
Those who believe that Russia had a impact on dumping Clinton are very easily tricked.
Sad that Krugman, among the media blizzard against the presidency, is one selling the
.00000001 chance that Russia effected the election as if it were truth.
"Easily tricked" is buying Mueller's top cover for the Russia gate operation.
https://c.deployads.com/sync?f=html&s=2297&u=https%3A%2F%2Fangrybearblog.com%2F2019%2F04%2Fpanetta-and-trump-who-are-you-calling-chumps.html%23comments
Panetta
and Trump: Who are You Calling Chumps?
Check out the entire interview as it was excellent. But I had to look up this old fashion
word :
a person who is easily tricked : a stupid or foolish person
OK – Trump supporters are easily tricked. But Trump wants to pretend he is a young
vigorous man! Chris Matthews did talk about young people who are more likely to check out
Urban
Dictionary than the old fashion Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Someone who does not understand the basics of life on earth. Confused easily.
Actually this is the perfect description for Trump supporters. There are more definitions at
Urban Dictionary that I would submit also apply!
Those who believe that Russia had a impact on dumping Clinton are very easily tricked.
Sad that Krugman, among the media blizzard against the presidency, is one selling the
.00000001 chance that Russia effected the election as if it were truth.
"Easily tricked" is buying Mueller's top cover for the Russia gate operation.
"... In the case of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser, acting Attorney General Sally Yates used the archaic Logan Act of 1799 to create a predicate for the FBI to interrogate Flynn about a Dec. 29, 2016 conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, i.e., after Trump's election but before the Inauguration. ..."
"... Yates also concocted a bizarre argument that the discrepancies between Flynn's account of the call and the transcript left him open to Russian blackmail although how that would work – since the Russians surely assumed that Kislyak's calls would be monitored by U.S. intelligence and thus offered them no leverage with Flynn – was never explained. ..."
"... So, perhaps the biggest similarity between Russia-gate and Watergate is that Richard Nixon and Donald Trump were both highly unpopular with the Washington establishment and thus had few influential defenders, while an important contrast with Iran-Contra was that Reagan and Bush were very well liked, especially among news executives such as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham who, by all accounts, did not care for the uncouth Nixon. Today, the senior executives of The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major news outlets have made no secret of their disdain for the buffoonish Trump and their hostility toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... In other words, what is driving Russia-gate – for both the mainstream news media and the Democrats – appears to be a political agenda, i.e., the desire to remove Trump from office while also ratcheting up a New Cold War with Russia, a priority for Washington's neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks. ..."
"... If this political drama were playing out in some other country, we would be talking about a "soft coup" in which the "oligarchy" or some other "deep state" force was using semi-constitutional means to engineer a disfavored leader's removal. ..."
In the case of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser,
acting Attorney General Sally Yates used the archaic Logan Act of 1799 to create a predicate
for the FBI to interrogate Flynn about a Dec. 29, 2016 conversation with Russian Ambassador
Sergey Kislyak, i.e., after Trump's election but before the Inauguration.
The Logan Act, which has never resulted in a prosecution in 218 years, was enacted during
the period of the Alien and Sedition Acts to bar private citizens from negotiating on their own
with foreign governments. It was never intended to apply to a national security adviser of an
elected President, albeit before he was sworn in.
But it became the predicate for the FBI interrogation -- and the FBI agents were armed with
a transcript of the intercepted Kislyak-Flynn phone call so they could catch Flynn on any gaps
in his recollection, which might have been made even hazier because he was on vacation in the
Dominican Republic when Kislyak called.
Yates also concocted a bizarre argument that the discrepancies between Flynn's account of
the call and the transcript left him open to Russian blackmail although how that would work
– since the Russians surely assumed that Kislyak's calls would be monitored by U.S.
intelligence and thus offered them no leverage with Flynn – was never explained.
Still, Flynn's failure to recount the phone call precisely and the controversy stirred up
around it became the basis for an obstruction of justice investigation of Flynn and led to
President Trump's firing Flynn on Feb. 13.
Trump may have thought that tossing Flynn overboard to the circling sharks would calm down
the sharks but the blood in the water only excited them more. According to then-FBI Director
James Comey, Trump talked to him one-on-one the next day, Feb. 14, and said, "'I hope you can
see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can
let this go."
Trump's "hope" and the fact that he later fired Comey have reportedly led special prosecutor
Mueller to look at a possible obstruction of justice case against Trump. In other words, Trump
could be accused of obstructing what appears to have been a trumped-up case against Flynn.
Of course, there remains the possibility that evidence might surface of Trump or his
campaign colluding with the Russians, but such evidence has so far not been presented. Or
Mueller's investigation might turn over some rock and reveal some unrelated crime, possibly
financial wrongdoing by Trump or an associate.
(Something similar happened in the Republican investigation of the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi
attack, a largely fruitless inquiry except that it revealed that Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton sent and received official emails over a private server, which Comey decried during
last year's campaign as "extremely careless" but not criminal.)
Curb the Enthusiasm
Another contrast between the earlier scandals (Watergate and Iran-Contra) and Russia-gate is
the degree of enthusiasm and excitement that the U.S. mainstream media and congressional
Democrats have shown today as opposed to 1972 and 1986.
The Washington Post's Watergate team, including from left to right, publisher Katharine
Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Howard Simons, and executive editor Ben Bradlee.
Though The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein aggressively pursued the
Watergate scandal, there was much less interest elsewhere in major news outlets until Nixon's
criminality became obvious in 1973. Many national Democrats, including DNC
Chairman Bob Strauss , were extremely hesitant to pursue the scandal if not outright
against it.
Similarly, although Brian Barger and I at The Associated Press were pursuing aspects of
Iran-Contra since early 1985, the big newspapers and networks consistently gave the Reagan
administration the benefit of the doubt – at least before the scandal finally burst into
view in fall 1986 (when a Contra-supply plane crashed inside Nicaragua and a Lebanese newspaper
revealed U.S. arms shipments to Iran).
For several months, there was a flurry of attention to the complex Iran-Contra scandal, but
the big media still ignored evidence of a White House cover-up and soon lost interest in the
difficult work of unraveling the convoluted networks for arms smuggling, money laundering and
cocaine trafficking.
Congressional Democrats also shied away from a constitutional confrontation with the popular
Reagan and his well-connected Vice President George H.W. Bush.
After moving from AP to Newsweek in early 1987, I learned that the senior executives at
Newsweek, then part of The Washington Post Company, didn't want "another Watergate"; they felt
another such scandal was not "good for the country" and wanted Iran-Contra to go away as soon
as possible. I was even told not to read the congressional Iran-Contra report when it was
published in October 1987 (although I ignored that order and kept trying to keep my own
investigation going in defiance of the wishes of the Newsweek brass until those repeated
clashes led to my departure in June 1990).
So, perhaps the biggest similarity between Russia-gate and Watergate is that Richard Nixon
and Donald Trump were both highly unpopular with the Washington establishment and thus had few
influential defenders, while an important contrast with Iran-Contra was that Reagan and Bush
were very well liked, especially among news executives such as Washington Post publisher
Katharine Graham who, by all accounts, did not care for the uncouth Nixon. Today, the senior
executives of The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major news outlets have made no
secret of their disdain for the buffoonish Trump and their hostility toward Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
In other words, what is driving Russia-gate – for both the mainstream news media and
the Democrats – appears to be a political agenda, i.e., the desire to remove Trump from
office while also ratcheting up a New Cold War with Russia, a priority for Washington's
neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks.
If this political drama were playing out in some other country, we would be talking about a
"soft coup" in which the "oligarchy" or some other "deep state" force was using
semi-constitutional means to engineer a disfavored leader's removal.
Of course, since the ongoing campaign to remove Trump is happening in the United States, it
must be presented as a principled pursuit of truth and a righteous application of the rule of
law. But the comparisons to Watergate and Iran-Contra are a stretch.
The late investigative reporter Robert Parry, the founder of Consortium News, broke
many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
"... Americans - stop whining, that you will not help. You have a main problem with lobbyists and officials who are well able to promote the interests of lobbyists at the expense of national interests. Replace the word Russian with the word Israeli and get the exact name of the problem. ..."
"... The Russians did not interfere more or less than any other country in U.S. elections. What interferes in the all election in the world is "Money", the great un-equalizer. Lobbyists the evil that keeps giving. F them all. ..."
"... The whole narrative was made up propaganda by Clinton spin doctors and Obama admin to change discussion from content of emails and cover up crimes using domestic intell to illegally spy on Trump. Joke, no examination of DNC or Podesta servers, just take word of Crowdstrike hired by Perkins Coie, same people who hired and paid Fusion GPS to write dossier. ..."
"... Better yet let's just let Israel interfere......oh wait. ..."
"... Mueller wasn't running an investigation . . . It was a "Coverup Operation" and one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on the American people. "A complete and total fraud" ..."
"... Except [neo]liberal f-wits that don't want to know. Might upset their fragile grip on reality. ..."
"... I don't see (in the immortal words of G Dubya) how this sucker doesn't go down. This **** is bad, very bad .. ..."
"... I mean, this doesn't even come as a controlled demolition anymore. It is merely shredding any and all vestige of hope of ever ( at least n my lifetime) righting the ship of state, proper. There ain't no winners in this, none .. ..."
"... If they did, it was a blessing in disguise. Maybe the Russians didn't relish the idea of going to war with the US. I'm convinced to the marrow of my bones that Hitlery would have poked the Bear. It would not have been pretty. ..."
"... Election interference? You wanna see some interference, watch Obama, Hillary and Merkel laser bomb Gaddafi after putting him on a "most loved dictator" list just prior. Election interference, this is some stupid **** for stupid people. Some Russians on Facebook may have...gimme a break. ..."
"... Then...there's Kiev in 2014... ..."
"... Somewhat related to the media's lies. They dripped/leaked damaging information for 2 years but not a word on when Mueller knew the investigation was over, what, 18 months ago? Not a single leak or drip saying Trump was innocent nor any leaked evidence. Completely complicit. ..."
"... Given the history of lies by Blo's administration against Putin's Russia... and without hard, corroborated evidence to the contrary...it didn't happen. On the other hand, we read recently about heavy outside (western) money trying to influence the outcome of the recent Ukraine election.. ..."
"... In court a befuddled prosecution team (who never dreamed anyone would step up to face the charges) listed the date of the supposed crimes a Russian company had committed... at the time, the company did not exist! ..."
"... How I would love to see THIS honest headline... "Did The Israelis (AIPAC) Interfere In U.S. Elections?" The answer is as obvious as the 600-pound gorilla in the room. ..."
"... The 600-pound gorilla headline would be killed by the third-rail, and then trampled by an elephant. If it somehow survived, it would be convicted of a hate crime for attacking the gorilla, charged with animal abuse for hurting the elephant's foot, and convicted of rape for touching the third-rail. ..."
"... A much bigger question is, Did/does Israel interfere in U.S. elections? ..."
It is more probable that some patriots at NSA seeing what was going on hacked and leaked
emails not wanting corrupt Hillary and criminal empire taking hold of US gov rather than
Russians doing such.
Americans - stop whining, that you will not help. You have a main problem with lobbyists
and officials who are well able to promote the interests of lobbyists at the expense of
national interests. Replace the word Russian with the word Israeli and get the exact name of
the problem.
The Russians did not interfere more or less than any other country in U.S. elections. What
interferes in the all election in the world is "Money", the great un-equalizer. Lobbyists the
evil that keeps giving. F them all.
If Hillary was elected, she would have been owned. Clintons met with Putin right before
Uranium 1 deal went through and Bill got his half million dollar one night speaking fee and
millions to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary used unsecured communications while Secratary of
State. She is the most corrupt person ever to run for POTUS. Plenty more dirt under her ***,
bribery, corruption. Hey, what about husband's phone sex tape with Lewinski Russians
supposedly had which is more beleiveable than made up Russian prostitute pissing on bed.
The whole narrative was made up propaganda by Clinton spin doctors and Obama admin to
change discussion from content of emails and cover up crimes using domestic intell to
illegally spy on Trump. Joke, no examination of DNC or Podesta servers, just take word of
Crowdstrike hired by Perkins Coie, same people who hired and paid Fusion GPS to write
dossier.
With all this flap, hell, let't just let the Russians vote in the next one. Then, in time,
we could vote in their elections, kinda like a collusion cultural exchange program.
I mean, stuff like this just begs the question, why not just go right to jumping the
shark, and call it a day .,
There's much more reason to believe the prog left deliberately fucked with the midterm
vote in Florida last year...than there is actual evidence of Russian interference in
the 2016 election...
Mueller wasn't running an investigation . . . It was a "Coverup Operation" and one of the
biggest scams ever perpetrated on the American people. "A complete and total fraud"
We have been an evidence free idiocracy for 20 years now. I am hopeful that we are
witnessing the end of that now. "The Trump campaign was spied upon" represented a critical
turning point...
Or maybe a critical implosion point. I do not believe it is clear, meaning who will be
left standing, either way. Someone, or a whole lot of someone's need's to pay for these sins,
and as is painfully obvious, the ******** slinging and screeching rhetoric meter, is red
lining. I don't see (in the immortal words of G Dubya) how this sucker doesn't go down. This
**** is bad, very bad ..
I mean, this doesn't even come as a controlled demolition anymore. It is merely shredding
any and all vestige of hope of ever ( at least n my lifetime) righting the ship of state,
proper. There ain't no winners in this, none ..
If they did, it was a blessing in disguise. Maybe the Russians didn't relish the idea of going to war with the US. I'm convinced to the marrow of my bones that Hitlery would have poked the Bear. It would not have been pretty.
Election interference? You wanna see some interference, watch Obama, Hillary and Merkel
laser bomb Gaddafi after putting him on a "most loved dictator" list just prior. Election
interference, this is some stupid **** for stupid people. Some Russians on Facebook may
have...gimme a break.
Somewhat related to the media's lies. They dripped/leaked damaging information for 2 years
but not a word on when Mueller knew the investigation was over, what, 18 months ago? Not a
single leak or drip saying Trump was innocent nor any leaked evidence. Completely
complicit.
" But that assertion - is it truly backed up factually? Where is the evidence, other than
largely questionable information sourced from our largely discredited intelligence agencies
which, as we know, had a determined goal of overthrowing the president by any means
possible?"
Precisely.
Given the history of lies by Blo's administration against Putin's Russia... and
without hard, corroborated evidence to the contrary...it didn't happen. On the other hand, we read recently about heavy outside (western) money trying to
influence the outcome of the recent Ukraine election..
In court a befuddled prosecution team (who never dreamed anyone would step up to face the
charges) listed the date of the supposed crimes a Russian company had committed... at the
time, the company did not exist!
Some kind of catering business (not sure of the connection to the hacking team but the
lawyer commented in court it appeared the Mueller had indeed indicted the proverbial "Ham
Sandwich!"
How I would love to see THIS honest headline... "Did The Israelis (AIPAC) Interfere In U.S. Elections?" The answer is as obvious as the 600-pound gorilla in the room.
The 600-pound gorilla headline would be killed by the third-rail, and then trampled by an
elephant. If it somehow survived, it would be convicted of a hate crime for attacking the
gorilla, charged with animal abuse for hurting the elephant's foot, and convicted of rape for
touching the third-rail.
"... The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks. ..."
"... Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done. ..."
"... President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. ..."
"... The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence, ..."
"... According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. ..."
"... This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. ..."
"... Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control. ..."
"... In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department. ..."
"... The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA. ..."
"... As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. ..."
"... Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia. ..."
"... The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected. ..."
"... This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest. ..."
"... Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know: ..."
"... War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff. ..."
"... The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages. ..."
"... That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers. ..."
The British Role in 'Russiagate' Is About to Be Fully Exposed April 8, 2019
20190408-russiagate-exposed-brits.pdf
The "fake news" media has now dropped its pretense of having ever had any intention of allowing the truth -- as documented in
U.S. Attorney General Barr's summary of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's report, exonerating President Donald Trump of having
"conspired or coordinated with the Russian government" -- to thoroughly refute the Russiagate "Big Lie." Soon, however, it is certain
that the deliberate, British Intelligence-originated, military-grade disinformation campaign carried out against the United States,
including to this day, will be exposed.
The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix
the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth,
along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all
that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental
stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks.
"It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat," says the Chinese proverb. Yet, although the Mueller
report was called a "nothing burger," it was not: it still presented the potentially lethal lie that twelve Russian gremlins, code-named
Guccifer 2.0, hacked the DNC. Sundry media meatheads thus continue to blog and broadcast about "what else is really there."
The false Russian hack story, still being repeated, marches on, undeterred, like the emperor without any clothes. One lame-brained
variation, promoted in order to cover up the British role, states that Hillary Clinton, rather than Trump, colluded with the Russians.
It is being repeated by Republicans and Democrats alike, some of them malicious, some of them confused, and all of them completely
wrong. The media, such as the failed New York Times and various electronic media, must be forced to either admit the truth,
or be even more thoroughly discredited than they already have been. They must stop their constant repetition of this Joseph Goebbels-like
Big Lie. There must be a vigorous dissemination of the truth by all those journalists, politicians, activists and citizens that love
truth more than their own assumptions, including about President Trump, or other dearly-held systems of false belief.
Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard
Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several
years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper
policy motivation: why it was done.
A New Cultural Paradigm
The world is actually on the verge of ending the military conflicts among the major world powers, such as Russia, China, the United
States, and India. These four powers, and not the City of London, are the key fulcrum around which a new era in humanity's future
will be decided. A new monetary and credit system brought into being through these four powers would foster the greatest physical
economic growth in the history of humanity. In addition, discussions involving Italy working with China on the industrialization
of the African continent (discussions which could soon also involve the United States) show that sections of Europe want to join
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and leave the dying trans-Atlantic financial empire behind.
The recent announcement of a United States commitment to return to the Moon by 2024 can, in particular, become the basis for a
proposal to other nations -- for example, China, Russia, and India, all of whom are space powers of demonstrated capability -- to
resolve their differences on Earth in a higher, joint mission. As Russia's Roscosmos Director Dmitry Rogozin said in a recent interview:
"I am a fierce proponent of international cooperation, including with Americans, because their country is big and technologically
advanced, and they can make good partners Especially since personal and professional relations between Roscosmos and NASA at the
working level are great."
There is also the possibility of ending the danger of thermonuclear war. President Trump, speaking on April 4 of the prospects
for world peace, stated:
"Between Russia, China, and us, we're all making hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is
ridiculous. I think it's much better if we all got together and didn't make these weapons those three countries I think can come
together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace."
This is a statement of real importance. Such an outlook is a rejection of the "perpetual crisis/perpetual war" outlook of the
Bush-Obama Administration, a four-term "war presidency" which was abruptly, unexpectedly ended in 2016. The British were not amused.
It is to stop this new cultural paradigm, pivoted on the Pacific and the potential Four Powers alliance, that British imperial
forces have deployed. The 2016 election of President Trump, and his personal friendship with President Xi Jinping and desire to work
with President Putin, are an intolerable strategic threat to the eighteenth-century geopolitics of the British empire. They have
repeatedly used Russiagate to disrupt the process of deliberation among Presidents Xi, Trump, and Putin, thus increasing the danger
of war. Russiagate, in the interest of international security, must be ended by exposing it for the utter fraud that it is.
The Truth Set Free
President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office,
Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of
America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American
people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again
to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and
Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth,
and the truth would set them free.
The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican
forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street,
or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection
against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase
the American Declaration of Independence,
"The history of the present Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the
undermining of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
DOCUMENTATION
While Robert Mueller found that there was "no collusion" between Donald Trump or the Trump Campaign and Russia, he also filed
two indictments regarding alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The first alleges that 12 members of Russian Military
Intelligence hacked the DNC and John Podesta and delivered the purloined files to WikiLeaks for strategic publication before the
July 2016 Democratic National Convention and in October 2016, one month before the election. The second indictment charges the Internet
Research Agency, a Russian internet merchandising and marketing firm, with running social media campaigns in the U.S. in 2016 designed
to impact the election. When the fuller version of the Mueller report becomes public, it is certain to recharge the claims of Russian
interference based on the so-called background "evidence" supporting these indictments.
The good news, however, is that investigations in the United States and Britain, have unearthed significant contrary evidence
exposing British Intelligence, NATO, and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine, as the actual foreign actors in the 2016 U.S. presidential
election. We provide a short summary of the main aspects of that evidence to spark further investigations of the British intelligence
networks, entities, and methods at issue, internationally. More detailed accounts concerning specific aspects of what we recite here
can be found on our website.
The Russian Hack That Wasn't
The Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an association of former U.S. intelligence officials, have demonstrated that
the Russian hack of the DNC alleged by Robert Mueller, was more likely an internal leak,
rather than a hack conducted
over the internet. William Binney, who conducted the main investigations for the VIPS, spent 30 years at the National Security Agency,
becoming Technical Director. He designed the sorts of NSA programs that would detect a Russian hack if one occurred. Binney conducted
an actual forensic examination of the DNC files released by WikiLeaks, and the related files circulated by the persona Guccifer 2.0,
who Robert Mueller claims is a GRU creation. Binney has demonstrated that the calculated transfer speeds and metadata characteristics
of these files are consistent with downloading to a thumb drive or storage device rather than an internet-based hack. This supports
the account by WikiLeaks of how it obtained the files. According to WikiLeaks and former Ambassador Craig Murray, they were obtained
from a person who was not a Russian state actor of any kind, in Washington, D.C. WikiLeaks offered to tell the Justice Department
all about this, and actual negotiations to this effect were proceeding in early 2017, when Senator Mark Warner and FBI Director James
Comey acted to sabotage and end the negotiations.
Further, as opposed to the hyperbole in the media and in Robert Mueller's indictment, analysis of the Internet Research Agency's
alleged "weaponization" of Facebook in 2016 involved
a paltry total of $46,000 in Facebook
ads and $4,700 spent on Google platforms . In an election in which the major campaigns spend tens of thousands of dollars every
day on these platforms, whatever the IRA thought it was doing in its amateurish and juvenile memes and tropes was like throwing a
stone in the ocean. Most of these activities occurred after the election and never mentioned either candidate. The interpretation
that these ads were designed to draw clicks and website traffic, rather than influence the election, must be considered.
The "evidence" for Mueller's GRU hacking indictment was provided, in part, by CrowdStrike, the DNC vendor that originated the
claims that the Russians had hacked that entity. CrowdStrike is closely associated with the Atlantic Council's Digital Research Lab
(DRL), an operation jointly funded by NATO's Strategic Communications Center and the U.S. State Department, to counter Russian "hybrid
warfare." CrowdStrike has been caught more than once falsely attributing hacks to the Russians and the Atlantic Council's DRL is
a font of anti-Russian intelligence operations.
The British Target Trump
According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump
and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence
leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. The former head
of the Russia Desk for MI6 and protégé of Sir Richard Dearlove, Christopher Steele, fresh from working for British Intelligence,
the FBI, and U.S. State Department in the 2014 Ukraine coup, assembled in 2016 a phony dossier called Operation Charlemagne, claiming
widespread Russian interference in European elections, including in the Brexit vote. By the spring of 2016, Steele was contributing
to a British/U.S. intelligence task force on the Trump Campaign which had been convened at CIA headquarters under John Brennan's
direction.
This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British
soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. The personnel employed in these operations all had multiple
connections to the British firm Hakluyt, to Steele's firm Orbis, and to the British military's Integrity Initiative. Sometime in
the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then head of GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief John Brennan personally. Hannigan abruptly
resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage
control.
Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort were already on the radar and under investigation by the same British, Dearlove-centered intelligence
network and by Christopher Steele specifically. Flynn had been defamed by Dearlove and Stefan Halper, as a possible Russian agent
way back in 2014 because he spoke to Russian researcher Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner sponsored by Dearlove's Cambridge Security Forum.
Or, at least that was the pretext for the targeting of Flynn, who otherwise defied British intelligence by exposing Western support
for terrorist operations in Syria and sought a collaborative relationship with Russia to counter ISIS. Manafort was under FBI investigation
throughout 2014 and 2015, largely in retaliation for his role in steering the Party of the Regions to political power in Ukraine.
In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian
state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine.
Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department.
In or around June 2016, Christopher Steele began writing his dirty and bogus dossier about Trump and Russia. This is the dossier
which claimed that Trump was compromised by Putin and that Putin was coordinating with Trump in the 2016 election. The main "legend"
of this full-spectrum information warfare operation run from Britain, was that Donald Trump was receiving "dirt" on Hillary Clinton
from Russia. The operations targeting Page and Papadopoulos consisted of multiple attempts to plant fabricated evidence on them which
would reflect what Steele himself was fabricating in the dirty dossier. At the very same time, the infamous June 2016 meeting at
Trump Tower was being set up. That meeting involved the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who, it was alleged in a series of
bizarre emails written by British publicist Ron Goldstone to set up the meeting, could deliver "dirt" on Hillary Clinton direct from
the Russian government. Veselnitskaya didn't deliver any such dirt. But the entire operation was being monitored by State Department
intelligence agent Kyle Parker, an expert on Russia. Parker's emails reveal deep ties to the highest levels of British intelligence
and much chatter between them about Trump and Russia.
A now-changed version of the website for Christopher Steele's firm, Orbis, trumpeted an expertise in information warfare operations,
and the networks in which Steele runs are deeply integrated into the British military's Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative
is a rapid response propaganda operation using major journalists in the United States and Europe to carry out targeted defamation
campaigns. Its central charge, according to documents posted by the hacking group Anonymous, is selling the United States and Western
Europe on the immediate need for regime change in Russia, even if that involves war.
Much has been made by Republicans and other lunkheads in the U.S. Congress of Steele's contacts with Russians for his dossier.
They claim that such contacts resulted in a Russian disinformation operation being run through the duped Christopher Steele. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
MI6's Dirty Dossier on Donald Trump: Full-Spectrum Information Warfare
On its face, Steele's dossier would immediately be recognized as a complete fabrication by any competent intelligence analyst.
He cites some 32 sources inside the Russian government for his fabricated claims about Trump. What they allegedly told him is specific
enough in time and content to identify them. To believe that the dossier is true or that actual Russians contributed to it, you must
also believe that that the British government was willing to roll up this entire network, exposing them, since the intention was
for the dossier's wild claims to be published as widely as possible. By all accounts, Britain and the United States together do not
have 32 highly placed sources inside the Russian government, nor would they ever make them public in this way or with this very sloppy
tradecraft. Steele's fabrication also uses aspects of readily available public information, such as the sale of 19% of the energy
company Rosneft, (the alleged bribe offered to Carter Page for lifting sanctions) to concoct a fictional narrative of high crimes
and misdemeanors.
Other claims in the dossier were published, publicly, in various Ukrainian publications. The famous claim that Trump directed
prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama seems to be plagiarized from similarly fake 2009 British propaganda
stories about Silvio Berlusconi spending the night with a prostitute in a hotel room in Rome, "defiling" Putin's bed. According to
various sources in the United States, this outrageous claim was made by Sergei Millian. George Papadopoulos has stated that he believes
Millian is an FBI informant, recounting in his book how a friend of Millian's blurted this out when Millian, Papadopoulos and the
friend were having coffee.
The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate
Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former
senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is
no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA.
Despite its obvious fake pedigree, Steele's dossier was laundered into the Justice Department repeatedly, by the CIA and State
Department and the Obama White House. It was used to obtain FISA surveillance warrants turning key members of the Trump Campaign
into walking microphones. It was circulated endlessly by the Clinton Campaign to a network of reporters in the U.S. known to serve
as scribes for the intelligence community. John Brennan used it to conduct a special emergency briefing of the leading members of
the U.S. Congress charged with intelligence responsibilities in August of 2016 and to brief Harry Reid, who was Senate Majority Leader
at the time. All of this activity meant that the salacious accusation that Trump was a Putin pawn and the FBI was investigating the
matter, leaked out and was used by the Clinton Campaign to defame Trump for its electoral advantage. When Trump won, Steele's nonsense
received the stamp of the U.S. intelligence community and official currency in the campaign to take out the President.
As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against
Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the
National Endowment for Democracy. The individuals involved might be named Veterans of the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, since all of
them also worked on this operation. It is no accident that Victoria Nuland, the case agent for the Ukraine coup, played a major role
in bolstering Steele's credentials for the purpose of selling his dirty dossier to the media and to the Justice Department. This
went so far as Steele giving a full scale briefing on his fabricated dossier at the State Department in October 2016.
Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there
to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda,
against Russia.
The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications
Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department.
Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly,
in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected.
This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the
attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That
is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with
ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest.
"in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe"
Perhaps add mainstream media to the list of such sincere believers, they will fire their own real journalists.
David Walters , April 24, 2019 at 13:14
"This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some
sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated
assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies."
Absolutely correct.
Anyone who still believes what the IC says if a moron. As Pompeo recently said to the student body of Texas A&M University,
my alma matta, the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steel. He went on the explain that the CIA has courses to teach their agent
that dark "art".
Right, David Walters, and see Pompous Pompeo now. The only truths he's told was to a student body of Texas A&M University –
his own alma mater – the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steal.
Even though he's left his post as CIA Director and assumed his current post of Secretary of State. Pompous Pompeo continues his
CIA traits of lying, cheating, and stealing. It's in a way similar to a phrase, "A leopard never changes its spots". This is why
the DPRK govt issued a Persona Non Grata on Pompous Pompeo – that he isn't a bona fide diplomat, but a CIA official.
CWG , April 22, 2019 at 17:15
Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.
There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably, Putin would have favored Clinton, since
she could be bought. Trump can't.
What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT a FISA warrant. They only obtained
that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.
Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That was apparent ever after Devin Nunes
did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying on him.
Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason) they needed to cover that up as quickly
as possible.
So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying till this very day. The same lie through
which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign was being pushed openly.
The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential Election'.
They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump through lying to the FISA Court, which
again, is treason. According to the Constitution, lying to the FISA court= Treason.
In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the Attorney General. At all costs, they
needed to try and hide what really happened.
So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire Trump campaign!'.
'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.
Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire story. It was only later on that Sarah
Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.
The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be able to achieve three main objectives.
1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential Election.
2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order to 'take them down'.
Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a crime that had ANYTHING to with with
the elections. NONE.
They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people are willing to believe the lie'.
So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many people as possible. 'Russian Collusion,
Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia. Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..
Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?
Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign.
There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the Presidential Election.
That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama regime!!
So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?
He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with Russia.
The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.
His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude with the Russians'.
Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.
They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about. Yet it was not.
The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.
It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.
The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.
"Russia'.
So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?
A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY Russians.
And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was only a distraction)
B: Russians hacked the DNC.
That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.
Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.
It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire regime in order to let Clinton win the
Presidency.
That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!
In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad things.
That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence' that Russia somehow did bad things.
Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question 'why did Obama spy on the Trump
Campaign'.
Let's go a bit deeper still.
Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push? The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?
After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.
If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP
the real crime', what would happen?
They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately
proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.
They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing anything wrong, it would show us all
THEY were the criminals.
They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.
That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon still don't seem to see all
that.
They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is simply not true. It's a Mueller created
LIE.
That LIE = the Insurance Policy.
What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about preventing Trump from being elected.
Although true, that is only A.
They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and would find out they were illegally spying
on him!
The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected President.
What's the punishment for Treason?
About Assange and Seth Rich.
Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which seems to be succesfull, the Deep
State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that lie.
Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.
If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be exposed.
No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for his life.
Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48
While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is
that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the
overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not
have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.
Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.
boxerwars , April 22, 2019 at 17:13
RE: "A Russian Agent Smear"
:::
Was Pat Tillman Murdered?
JUL 30, 2007
I don't know, but it seems increasingly conceivable. Just absorb these facts:
O'Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman
was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!" again and again when he was killed,
O'Neal said
In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman's head were so close together that it appeared the
Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
The motive? I don't know. It's still likeliest it was an accident. But there's some mysterious testimony in the SI report about
nameless snipers. A reader suggests the following interpretation:
News this weekend said that there were "snipers" present and the witnesses didn't remember their names. I believe that's code
in the Army–these guys were Delta. In the Tillman incident, these snipers weren't part of the unit and they were never mentioned
publicly before. That's a key indicator that they weren't supposed to be acknowledged.
If you've ever read Blackhawk Down, Mark Bowden explains how he grew frustrated because interviewed Rangers kept referring
to "soldiers from another unit" while claiming they didn't know the unit ID or the soldiers' names. It took him months to crack
the unit ID and find people from Delta who were present at the fight.
Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, the Delta operators who earned Medals of Honor in Mogadishu, have always been identified as
snipers, too.
If my theory is correct, the Delta guys could have fired the shots – a three-round burst to the forehead from 50 yards is impossible
for normal soldiers and Rangers, but is probably an easy shot for those guys. But because Delta doesn't officially exist and Tillman
was a hero, nobody in the Army would want to have to explain exactly how the event went down. Easier just to claim hostile fire
until the family forced them to do otherwise.
This makes some sense to me, although we shouldn't dismiss the chance he was murdered. Tillman was a star and might have aroused
jealousy or resentment. He also opposed the Iraq war and was a proud atheist. In Bush's increasingly sectarian military, that
might have stirred hostility. I don't know. But I know enough to want a deeper investigation. My atheist readers will no doubt
admire the way Tillman left this world, according to the man who was with him:
As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman's side started praying. "I thought I was praying to myself,
but I guess he heard me," Sgt. Bryan O'Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. "He said something like,
'Hey, O'Neal, why are you praying? God can't help us now."'
(Maybe the Congress can )
////// The USA is aghast with "smears" and "internal investigations" and promised but never produced "White Papers" 'as the
world turns' and circles continents Dominated by American Military Power / Predominantly Barbarous / Uncivilized Use of Force
/ and Arrogantly Effective in it's use of Dominating Military Power.
\\\\ The Poorer Peoples of the World accept their lots-in-life with some acceptance of reality vis-a-vis the "lot-in-life"
they've been alleged/assigned.
/// But How Do We Accept The Fact that our Self-Sacrificiing Hero,Pat Tillman, was slaughtered in Afghanistan,
(WITH POSITIVE PROOF) – by his own Fellow American soldiers – ???
!!!! What i'm say'n is, if Tillman represents the Life Surrendering "American Hero"
WHY DID HIS FELLOW "AMERICAN SOLDIERS" ASSASSINATE & MURDER HIM ???????
AND WHY IS THIS STORY BURIED ALONG WITH MANY OTHER SMEAR Stories
that provide prophylactic protection for all the Trump pianist prophylaxis cover
Up for the Right Wing theft of American Democracy under FDR
In favor of Ayn Rand's prevalent OBJECTIVISM under Trump.
"Capitalism and Altruism
are incompatible
capitalism and altruism
cannot coexist in man,
or in the same society".
President Trump represents
Stark & Total Capitalism
Just as "Conservative Party"
Core is in The Confederacy
AKA; The RIGHT WING
The Right Wing of US Gov't
Is All About PRESERVING
Confederate States' Laws
Written by Thomas Jefferson
Prior to The Constitution, which
became the Received/Judicial
Constitutional Law of the Land in
The Republic of the "United States"
It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to deteriorate the more his actions
and statements are attacked and countered? You know what happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them
down? They get weapons and start killing people.
There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the least being he's clearly mentally unfit.
Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation".
Nancy Pelosi stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda "for now". She's now
making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are: noise.
The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one issue to run on next year: getting
rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters,
the same ones they were positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip service to progressive
policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions once the donations start coming, but the common underlying
theme was and continues to be "Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."
In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because
Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton
campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they
disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November.
Eddie S , April 24, 2019 at 21:14
Exactly right, EKB -- - you can't ballroom dance without a partner! Also reminds me of the couples you occasionally run into
where one partner repeatedly runs-down the other, and you get the feeling that the critical partner doesn't have much going on
in his/her life so they deflect that by focusing on the other partner
Johnny Ryan S , April 22, 2019 at 13:38
Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did
you know:
1)Obama Appoints CrowdStrike Officer To Admin Post Two Months Before June 2016 Report On Russia Hacking DNC
2) CrowdStrike Co-Founder Is Fellow On Russia Hawk Group, Has Connections To George Soros, Ukrainian Billionaire
3) DNC stayed that the FBI never asked to investigate the servers – that is a lie.
4) CrowdStrike received $100 million in investments led by Google Capital (since re-branded as CapitalG) in 2015. CapitalG is
owned by Alphabet, and Eric Schmidt, Alphabet's chairman, was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. More than just
supporting Clinton, leaked emails from Wikileaks in November 2016 showed that in 2014 he wanted to have an active role in the
campaign.
-daily caller and dan bongino have been bringing these points up since 2016.
Deniz , April 22, 2019 at 12:36
The Right is currently salivating over the tough law enforcement rhetoric coming out of Barr and Trump.
It reminds me of when Obama was running for office in 2008 when everyone, including myself, was in awe of him. What kept slipping
into his soaring anti-intervention speeches, was a commitment to the good war in Afghanistan, which seemed totally out of place
with the rest of his rhetoric. The fine print was far more reflective of his administration actions as the rest of it his communications
turned out to be just telling people what they wanted to hear.
War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff.
The argument about not inserting Rich and the download is a good one as a defense strategy but doesn't help with finding the
truth about the emails. We can only hope that pursuing the truth and producing it will have a cumulative effect and the illusory
truth effect will include this truth.
Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:00
>>> ". . . doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails."
The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that
they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages.
Why should we much care how they were acquired and provided to the publisher?
Lily , April 22, 2019 at 17:55
That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about
the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony
Blair are lyers and mass murderers.
All three of them are free, earning millions with their publicity whereas two brave persons who were telling the truth have
been tortured and are still in jail. Reality has become like the most horrible nightmare. Everything simply seems to have turned
upside down. No writer would invent such a primitive plot. And yet it is the unbelievable reality.
Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21
I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out
JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John
Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be
a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create.
It's a dog & pony show. Trump folded very quickly, in april 2017 or three moth after inauguration. He proved
to be no fighter, a weakling, a marionette. Appointment of Bolton and Pompeo just added insult to injury. this is classic bait and
switch similar to what was executed by Obama after then election. In a way Trump is a Republican version of Obama.
I wonder if he did not want to fight to the death and sacrifice himself for the course, why he entered the Presidential race at
all ? He is not stupid enough not to understand the he will be covered with dirt and all skeletons in his closet will be dug
out for display by the US intelligence agencies, which protect that interest of Wall Street and MIC (Israel is a part of the
US MIC -- its biggest lobbyist and beneficiary) , not the USA as a sovereign state.
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller did none of these things which simply proves that his final report was what many people had expected from the very beginning; a purely political document that twists the truth to achieve Mueller's particular objectives. But to understand what those objectives are, we need to determine what the real goals of the investigation were. ..."
"... To help sabotage Trump's political agenda ..."
"... To create a cloud of illegitimacy over Trump's election ..."
"... And to prevent Trump from implementing his plan to normalize relations with Russia. ..."
"... These were the real objectives of the investigation, to create a forth branch of government (Special Counsel) that had the power to keep Trump permanently on the defensive while the media made him out to be either an unwitting accomplice in Russian espionage or, even worse, a traitor. ..."
"... The aim was to reign him in and keep the pressure on until a case could be made for his impeachment. Mueller played a key role in this travesty. His assignment was undermine Trump's moral authority by brandishing the cudgel of criminal indictment over his head. This is how a D.O.J. appointee, who had never held public office in his life, became the most powerful man in Washington. ..."
"... "We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments . Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States] We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will." ..."
"... Imagine how terrified the foreign policy establishment must have been when they heard Trump utter these words. No more regime change wars? Are you kidding me? That's what we do: Regime-Change-Is-Us., ..."
"... Interesting, isn't it? Here's Hillary, the "liberal" Democrat, pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, stated clearly that "Right now for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia." In other words, if Hillary had been elected, she was all ready to flip the switch and start WW3 ASAP. Is it any wonder why the establishment loved her? ..."
"... War, war and more war, that's the Hillary Doctrine in a nutshell. It was Hillary's relentless hawkishness that pushed leftists into the Trump camp, not that they ever believed that Trump was anything more than what he appeared to be, an unprincipled narcissist with an insatiable lust for power. But they did hope that his dovish comments would steer the country away from nuclear annihilation. That was the hope at least, but then everything changed. And after it changed, Mueller released his report saying: "Trump is not guilty after all!" ..."
"... Think about it: In mid December 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Syria within 30 days. But instead of withdrawal, the US has been sending hundreds of trucks with weapons to the front lines. The US has also increased its troop levels on the ground, the YPG (Kurdish militia, US proxies) are digging in on the Syria-Turkish border, and the US hasn't lifted a finger to implement its agreements with NATO-ally Turkey under the Manbij Roadmap. The US is not withdrawing from Syria. Washington is beefing up its defenses and settling in for the long-haul. But, why? Why did Trump change his mind and do a complete about-face? ..."
"... Trump made these outrageous demands knowing that they would never be accepted. Which was the point, because the foreign policy establishment doesn't want a deal. They want regime change, they've made that perfectly clear. But wasn't Trump supposed to change all that? Wasn't Trump going to pursue "a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past"? ..."
"... There are other signs of capitulation too; like providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi's genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and "stop toppling regimes and overthrowing governments." ' At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the warhawks he once criticized. ..."
"... Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon, he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump "the peacemaker" is no where to be found, while Trump the 'madman with a knife' is on the loose. ..."
Why did Robert Mueller end the Russia investigation when he did? He could have let it drag it out for another year or so and severely
hurt Trump's chances for reelection. But he didn't do that. Why?
Of course, we're assuming that the investigation was never intended to uncover the truth. If it was, then Mueller would have interviewed
Julian Assange, Craig Murray and retired members of the Intelligence Community (Ray McGovern, Bill Binney) who have shown that the
Podesta emails were leaked by an insider (on a thumbdrive) not hacked by foreign agents. Mueller would have also seized the servers
at DNC headquarters and done the necessary forensic investigation, which he never did.
He also would have indicted senior-level agents
at the FBI and DOJ who improperly obtained FISA warrants by withholding critical information from the FISA court. He didn't do that
either.
Mueller did none of these things which simply proves that his final report was what many people had expected from the very
beginning; a purely political document that twists the truth to achieve Mueller's particular objectives. But to understand what those
objectives are, we need to determine what the real goals of the investigation were. So, here they are:
To help sabotage Trump's political agenda
To create a cloud of illegitimacy over Trump's election
And to prevent Trump from implementing his plan to normalize relations with Russia.
These were the real objectives of the investigation, to create a forth branch of government (Special Counsel) that had the power
to keep Trump permanently on the defensive while the media made him out to be either an unwitting accomplice in Russian espionage
or, even worse, a traitor.
The aim was to reign him in and keep the pressure on until a case could be made for his impeachment. Mueller
played a key role in this travesty. His assignment was undermine Trump's moral authority by brandishing the cudgel of criminal indictment
over his head. This is how a D.O.J. appointee, who had never held public office in his life, became the most powerful man in Washington.
My question is simply this: Why did Mueller give up all that power when he did?
I think I can answer that, but first, we need a little more background. Check out this quote from candidate Trump in 2016:
"We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past We will stop looking to topple regimes
and overthrow governments . Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States] We will
partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism In our dealings
with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will."
Imagine how terrified the foreign policy establishment must have been when they heard Trump utter these words. No more regime
change wars? Are you kidding me? That's what we do: Regime-Change-Is-Us., and now this upstart, New York real estate tycoon is promising
to do a complete 180 and move in another direction altogether. No more destabilizing coups, no more bloody military interventions,
instead, we're going to work collaboratively with countries like Russia and China to see if we can settle regional disputes and fight
terrorism together? Really?
At the same time Trump was promising this new era of "peace, understanding, and good will," Hillary Clinton was issuing her war
whoop at every opportunity. Here's candidate Hillary trying to drum up support for taking on the Russians in Syria:
"The situation in Syria is catastrophic. And every day that goes by, we see the results of the Assad regime in partnership
with the Iranians on the ground, and the Russians in the air When I was Secretary of State, I advocated and I advocate today a
no-fly zone and safe zones."
Interesting, isn't it? Here's Hillary, the "liberal" Democrat, pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria even though the Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, stated clearly that "Right now for us to control all of the airspace in Syria
would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia." In other words, if Hillary had been elected, she was all ready to flip the
switch and start WW3 ASAP. Is it any wonder why the establishment loved her?
"We have to work more closely with our partners and allies on the ground," boomed Hillary, meaning that she fully supported
the continued use of jihadist proxies in the fight against Assad. "I do think the use of special forces, the use of enablers and
trainers in Iraq, which has had some positive effects, are very much in our interests, and so I do support what is happening."
War, war and more war, that's the Hillary Doctrine in a nutshell. It was Hillary's relentless hawkishness that pushed leftists into the Trump camp, not that they ever believed that Trump was anything
more than what he appeared to be, an unprincipled narcissist with an insatiable lust for power. But they did hope that his dovish
comments would steer the country away from nuclear annihilation. That was the hope at least, but then everything changed. And after
it changed, Mueller released his report saying: "Trump is not guilty after all!"
So, what changed? Trump changed.
Think about it: In mid December 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Syria within 30 days. But instead of
withdrawal, the US has been sending hundreds of trucks with weapons to the front lines. The US has also increased its troop levels
on the ground, the YPG (Kurdish militia, US proxies) are digging in on the Syria-Turkish border, and the US hasn't lifted a finger
to implement its agreements with NATO-ally Turkey under the Manbij Roadmap. The US is not withdrawing from Syria. Washington is beefing
up its defenses and settling in for the long-haul. But, why? Why did Trump change his mind and do a complete about-face?
The same thing happened in Korea. For a while it looked like Trump was serious about cutting a deal with Kim Jong un. But then,
sometime after the first summit, he began to backpeddle. He never honored any of his commitments under the Panmunjom Declaration
and he never reciprocated for Kim's cessation of all nuclear weapons and ballistic missile testing. Trump has made no effort to "build
a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula" or to strengthen trust between the two leaders. Then, at the Hanoi Summit,
Trump blindsided Kim by making demands that had never even been previously discussed. Kim was told that the North must destroy all
of its chemical and biological weapons as well as its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs before the US will take reciprocal
steps. In other words, Trump demanded that Kim completely and irreversibly disarm with the feint hope that the US would eventually
lift sanctions.
Trump made these outrageous demands knowing that they would never be accepted. Which was the point, because the foreign policy
establishment doesn't want a deal. They want regime change, they've made that perfectly clear. But wasn't Trump supposed to change
all that? Wasn't Trump going to pursue "a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past"?
Yes, that was Trump's campaign promise. So, what happened?
There are other signs of capitulation too; like providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range
nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi's genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring
up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and "stop toppling
regimes and overthrowing governments." ' At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the warhawks he once criticized.
Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon,
he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump "the peacemaker" is no where to be found, while Trump the 'madman with a knife'
is on the loose.
Is that why Mueller let Trump off the hook? Was there a quid pro quo: "You follow our foreign policy directives and we'll make
Mueller disappear?
It sure looks like it. play_arrow 2 Reply reply Report flag
the report was finished last august. hed got all the juice in that squeeze. but i also guess he got a call from somebodys in
the GOG mafia[continuity of .gov] deepstate after all is their little bitch
He had to stop before he implicated himself. For instance, still waiting on "the why" he never put Steele or McCabe or Hillary
or Perkins Coie or Rosenstein or Comey etc under oath when it was...THEY... who supplied false evidence to a FISA court
, "evidence gathered" (according to Steele) from...ta daaah!...Russians ;-)
You can drive yourself crazy wondering whether it was all theater from the start, or whether they put a gun to the head of
the guy who was going to expose it was theater until he started playing along. End result, theater.
exactly. Just like you can wonder why Justice John Roberts turned on Obamacare and **** on conservatives. Was he sincere or
did he get a 3:00 am phone call that if he didn't uphold it, his wife and kids would die in an unfortunate accident?
Oh, I dunno...maybe because even with a crack team of demoncraft operatives, Deep State Hillary deadenders and a limitless
supply of federal funding even they couldn't come up with "Russian collusion" because...none ever existed? ;-)
In case after case, Maddow and others in corporate media used crafted language that was
speculation designed to appear as cold hard facts to the the viewer. This was no only bad
reporting, It was a conspiracy of sorts. Maddow regularly would say, "If Russia did this, it
would be an attack on the US..." Leaving the viewer with the impression that "Russia did
this!". Then she would go to stir the cauldron for war.. This rises to the level of a
crime.
Since when is Hilary Clinton on the left? Since when are the are e-mails of the democratic
party protected government secrets? Are the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs important? Is it
strange that after 18 long years of war there is no anti-war movement? Are the people
reporting on Cable News real journalists? Well done Aaron and Chris!
democrats would rather Turmp be president than Bernie, they will throw the election before
they let Bernie create change... but then even if he is elected, it wont do much good with
corporate shills in congress in senate
I enjoy listening to Aaron, a person of integrity and also a down to earth, interesting
journalist who has worked hard to uncover the truth on this subject and knows it backwards
and forwards. I like when he can't help but laugh at certain absurdities in mainstream media
coverage of Russiagate.
I've got to admit,I get a massive dopamine rush hearing these two
sane, intelligent, critical thinkers, skillfully dissect this convoluted quadrafuck that has
wasted some much of our precious time. I literally feel washed clean for a
moment.
You can count the number of real journalists left in the US on two hands. Here are two of
the best and the bravest. Thank you, RT, for providing us with a platform for real
journalists.
as an outsider.....i view the whole thing as a smokescreen...........keeping people
occupied while planning & carrying out worse things that are being done in the
dark..........
Aaron Mate's courageous stance regarding Palestinians deserves all my respect and support.
His analysts of Rusiagate and all the fanfare associated with the so called investigations
seems most accurate.
SBS broadcast a 4 part doco called The Fourth Estate in June last year. It's about the NYT unhealthy obsession with Trump.
Episode 1 begins with his swearing in and cuts to stunned(?) NYT staffers watching the speech in which he says "For too long,
our politicians have prospered while (blah blah blah) and this stops, right here, and right now."
From then on it consists of an endless stream of huddles as various groups of staffers ponder the best way to spin various 'angles'
and approaches, or solo senior staffers pontificating on all manner of hypotheticals. There are lots of opinionated people working
at the NYT and none of them is 'stupid'.
I recorded Episode 1 and my conclusion from watching it is that NOTHING the NYT publishes is accidental. I began recording Episode
2 but aborted the mission after 30 minutes or so because the repetitive self-worship and drivel was eerily similar to Episode
1.
Wikipedia has an entry devoted to the series and it's freely available on the www. I recommend watching the first few minutes
of Episode 1 just to get a feeling for the tone.
The cartoon in question was published in an International Edition as a gloat or a public (private) joke, imo. I remain unconvinced
that the Editorial Staff at the Jew York Times was blissfully unaware that the cartoon 'might' create an opportunity for the "Anti-Semitism!!?"
crowd to stir up, and capitalise upon, the ensuing indignation and outrage.
While I knew about Nellie Ohr and her DOJ husband , what I didn't know was that while she
worked for Fusion GPS , fusion was a FBI contractor that had access to NSA database until
Admiral Rogers shut it down .
Sounds Like Brennan's CIA laundered information to EX-CIA Nellie Ohr when she was working
for Fusion GPS who then laundered this info to Steele , another person employed by Fusion who
then gave this back to Bruce Ohr of DOJ who then gave it to the FBI . And they all got paid
for their " research " . This then was used to deceive the FISA court . But Admiral Rogers
went to this court and warned Trump of the spying and violations of constitutional rights .
Shortly after Obama fired admiral Rogers . Sounds fishy to me ? what do you think ?
Journalist Aaron Mate has eviscerated MSNBC's Rachel Maddow for peddling "Trump-Russia
conspiracy theories, falsehoods & innuendo," after Maddow threw a tantrum when YouTube
dared to recommend an RT video. Mate, a longtime skeptic of the mainstream media's beloved
'Russiagate' narrative, was the subject of a recent interview with RT. When MSNBC's
Russiagater-in-chief Rachel Maddow found out that YouTube's algorithm had actually suggested
the interview to viewers, she saw more Russian meddling and proclaimed the recommendation
"death by algorithm."
Death by algorithm. "YouTube recommended Russia Today for understanding Mueller report."
https://t.co/q6McajcNo3
Mate unloaded on Maddow on Sunday, systematically destroying the MSNBC host for her two
years as "the leading purveyor of now debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, falsehoods
& innuendo." Buckle up.
1/ If YouTube were to recommend your show, it'd be recommending the leading purveyor of
now debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, falsehoods & innuendo of the last 2+
years. Here's a sample:
"Just recently you were caught in real-time lying to your audience," he began.
"You claimed Barr was handling the redactions by himself. But the chyron -- on screen right
below -- told viewers the truth, that Mueller was in fact 'assisting' w/ the
redactions."
2/ Just recently you were caught in real-time lying to your audience. You claimed Barr was
handling the redactions by himself. But the chyron -- on screen right below -- told viewers
the truth, that Mueller was in fact "assisting" w/ the redactions: pic.twitter.com/rTSAABngp2
With Maddow seemingly content to lie on live television, it fell upon her show's producers
to flash the truth on viewers' screens.
Mate then recalled the time Maddow suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin would use
the 'pee tape' (the most far-fetched allegation in the Democrat-commissioned, internet-sourced Steele
dossier) to force Trump into withdrawing US troops stationed near Russia. Of course, this never
happened, and Trump recently announced plans to ramp up deployments to Poland. A swing and a
miss for Maddow.
3/ There was that time in Jan 2017 when you speculated that Putin may use the pee tape
& other kompromat to force Trump into withdrawing US troops near Russia. How did that one
turn out? pic.twitter.com/XuXXagyCNb
Maddow contradicted herself on the 'pee tape' only last week, telling viewers she
"refused" to let herself "think about" the possibility of these tapes
existing.
4/ BTW, just last week you falsely said that "the one thing I refused to let myself think
about" was that Putin had tapes of Trump -- the very prospect you had previously floated to
posit that Putin may blackmail Trump into withdrawing troops. pic.twitter.com/xMC4uPrjSK
"Who could forget that time this past winter when you seized on life-threatening cold
temperatures to fear-monger that Russia could kill Americans by knocking out their heat?"
Mate continued, mocking Maddow's claim that the Kremlin could "kill the power" and
freeze Americans to death.
5/ Who could forget that time this past winter when you seized on life-threatening cold
temperatures to fear-monger that Russia could kill Americans by knocking out their heat?
pic.twitter.com/deo2H4SBBQ
"There was that time when you explored the scenario under which Putin 'gives orders' to
his puppet Trump at an upcoming meeting," Mate continued. "Do you think Putin ordered
Trump to stage a coup in Venezuela/try to kill the German-Russia gas pipeline/nix the INF
treaty?"
6/ There was that time when you explored the scenario under which Putin "gives orders" to
his puppet Trump at an upcoming meeting. Do you think Putin ordered Trump to stage a coup in
Venezuela/try to kill the German-Russia gas pipeline/nix the INF treaty? pic.twitter.com/cbSrGt2xR3
Mate ridiculed Maddow for suggesting that the Trump campaign set aside funds to pay for the
services of "Russian hackers."
7/ How about that time when you speculated -- citing the Steele dossier -- that Cohen
billed Trump $50k for "tech services" to pay off Russian hackers? It was actually to pay a US
firm ( https://t.co/GGK6FQLvRJ ).
pic.twitter.com/TcqdN8mC4z
And that the existence of an Albanian Bernie Sanders fan page on Facebook was an act of
"international warfare against our country."
14/ Looking back, do you think maybe that declaring that a fake Bernie Sanders fan page
run out of Albania amounted to "international warfare against our country" was perhaps a
little hyperbolic? pic.twitter.com/5Meg0xLNqg
Despite peddling baseless conspiracies and flagrant Russophobia every night, Maddow remains
one of the US' most popular news anchors, and one of the best paid. The MSNBC host regularly
vies with Fox News' Sean Hannity for the top spot on the cable news ratings, and earns a cool
$7 million per year for her work.
Although Maddow has been perhaps the most fervent promoter of Russiagate hysteria on
television, her ratings have clumped after Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report put most of
her theories to bed last month. Maddow's show slipped from its number one position after the
report dropped, and lost half a million
viewers in the space of a week.
Mate, although reporting to a far smaller audience, has received an Izzy Award for his
"meticulous reporting" that "challenged the way the public was being informed about
the Mueller investigation."
"... Now, conflating any individual with Russia, will always immediately result in that person becoming, in the US, in the U.K. and in other US-kept vassal nations totally tarred with all sorts of nefarious and always unexamined assumptions. ..."
"... Mark Twain once suggested that the deity created war that USians might learn geography. Clearly, it is a laborious process and has failed to create much global geographical awareness among the millions, most of whom are content to think whatever nation is correctly being ministered to or in the sights of "everything is on the table" as simply being, vaguely, "over there". ..."
"... Thanks to the intelligence community, the political elite, notably in the Democratic "wing" of the War Party, but with the support of the Republican wing of that party, and certain individual players aligned with the US policy "Full Spectrum Dominance" which, of course, is compassionate goodness and not to be confused with the vile aims of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and a whole host of other "bad guy" nations or amorphous groups known as "terrorists. ..."
"... Clearly, the consensus opinion is shaped, not inside the minds of millions of people, all projecting their very worst fears or even their own worst proclivities on individuals like Putin or whoever is the "Hitler" of the convenient moment, but rather on the efforts of, let us call them "entities" who plan to benefit from a populous aroused to anxiety or even fear itself. ..."
"... The list of beneficiaries includes the financial elites who always profit from war and "confusion", the political elites who serve those monied interests, the media, academia, the military, intelligence, weapons manufacturers, energy producers, military contractors and so on. ..."
When vilification occurs a very necessary question that critical thought must ponder is
who benefits from such scapegoating?
However, for the moment, let us ponder, again in service to actual critical thought, why
aligning Assange with Russia is expected by those who will and intend to benefit from that
association. Why is suggesting that Assange is "a Russian agent" expected to convince
millions of USians that Assange is "a bad person"?
Why would millions accept that assertion without questioning it at all?
Caitlin suggest that those millions are "herd animals", implying that they are led into
believing two things. The first is that Russia and the Russian people are "bad", we have even
recently had a much trusted official suggest that Russians are "genetically" predisposed to
badness with a malignant tendency to single out the innocent, and one indispensable nation,
the United States for the most nefarious of Russian "interventions", amounting, according to
a famous Hollywood actor, who occasionally portrays a certain deity in the movies, to "an
attack".
In the meager interest of context and history, stretching back a bit more than a century,
some USians who are aware of that history, recognize that the US, under President Woodrow
Wilson sent US military troops into Russia in order to end the rise of the Bolshevik
rebellion/revolution.
Thus began the official demonization of Russia. A demonization very convenient to the
necessity of having an implacable enemy always ready to pounce on the good, moral,
humanitarian, and freely enterprising United States.
Now, conflating any individual with Russia, will always immediately result in that person
becoming, in the US, in the U.K. and in other US-kept vassal nations totally tarred with all
sorts of nefarious and always unexamined assumptions.
Mark Twain once suggested that the deity created war that USians might learn geography.
Clearly, it is a laborious process and has failed to create much global geographical
awareness among the millions, most of whom are content to think whatever nation is correctly
being ministered to or in the sights of "everything is on the table" as simply being,
vaguely, "over there".
That is why the US must strike "them" "over there" so as to avoid the frightening thought
of having "them" have to be dealt with "here" in the "Homeland" of "the free and the
brave".
This suggests that the "herd" has to be led to certain conclusions.
Unlike horses, the herd HAS to drink.
If the herd does not consume the elixir, then it may not be willing to joyfully send the
"flower of its youth" off to become cannon fodder should the Table of Everything so
demand.
I grew up in the nineteen fifties when the first Cold War was in full blossom. We school
students were told and taught that Russia hated us, wanted to attack and kill us all,
intended to rule the world with an iron hand and ruthless godlessness.
Thanks to the intelligence community, the political elite, notably in the Democratic
"wing" of the War Party, but with the support of the Republican wing of that party, and
certain individual players aligned with the US policy "Full Spectrum Dominance" which, of
course, is compassionate goodness and not to be confused with the vile aims of Russia, China,
Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and a whole host of other "bad guy" nations or amorphous
groups known as "terrorists.
Now, by tying Assange to that hodge-podge of baddies, the many may rest assured that he
has been put in his proper place.
Clearly, the consensus opinion is shaped, not inside the minds of millions of people, all
projecting their very worst fears or even their own worst proclivities on individuals like
Putin or whoever is the "Hitler" of the convenient moment, but rather on the efforts of, let
us call them "entities" who plan to benefit from a populous aroused to anxiety or even fear
itself.
The list of beneficiaries includes the financial elites who always profit from war and
"confusion", the political elites who serve those monied interests, the media, academia, the
military, intelligence, weapons manufacturers, energy producers, military contractors and so
on.
Assange, to his great and everlasting credit, exposed a very large amount of this
including, with the invaluable efforts
of Chelsea Manning, actual war crimes perpetrated by the US, even beyond beginning wars based
on lies.
Fortunately, the media, having overplayed it hand in the manipulation has exposed itself
to many as being but a propaganda industry.
A very real question for those concerned with engaging critical thought processes is just
how many humans are still being led, rather easily, around by the fallacious and very
dangerous concoctions of the opinion "shapers" in think tanks, media echo chambers, corporate
boardrooms, and academic snake pits?
Perhaps there comes a time for humanity, if it is not to trot along in the footsteps of
the dodo bird to look not where the fingers of deceit are pointing, but at those to whom the
fingers are attached?
AnneR , April 22, 2019 at 09:33
DWB – as a USian of English birth (of about the same age, I would imagine) I am
amazed at the fear the US had of the USSR back in the 1950s. When my husband told me, in the
1980s, about how he and his schoolmates had had nuclear air raid attack drills (sheltering
under desks and so on!) I'm sure that I gawped, fly-catchingly. What??? Nowt remotely similar
occurred in the UK during the 1950s in schools or elsewhere.
It was only since I began studying history (late in life) that I learnt that the British
ruling elites have hated the Russians for well over a hundred years. Still not quite sure
why, nor yet why whatever the Russians did (Crimean War in the 1850s?) that pissed them off
so royally should have any bearing on Russia-UK relations nowadays. But that could be because
I'm dim. And because I've no hatred, dislike, fear of Russians (or Chinese or Iranians) at
all. My fears revolve around the hubris-arrogance and determination to retain economic and
more general world domination by the US and its poodles in the UK-FR-NATO and Israel (though
their status as dog or leash is debatable). These are the countries to be afraid of.
Sam F , April 22, 2019 at 20:34
Yes, the remarkably unprovoked hatred of Russia among the UK aristocracy, regardless of
era or government there, is a great wonder. They did not even have eras of invasion threats,
colonial competition, or competing navies, as with France, Spain, and Portugal. Britain's
19th century invasions of Afghanistan were apparently provoked by nothing but fear, and their
several lost wars there apparently did not even engage Russians. Even complete transitions of
Russian government from monarchy to communism to capitalism failed to affect UK's fears. If
the cause were mere cultural difference, they would have feared the orient.
Perhaps their aristocracy was not polite enough, or those backwards Ns, upside down Rs,
and Pi symbols terrified the British.
geeyp , April 22, 2019 at 23:49
Anne R. – For more on your second paragraph, visit Larouchepac.org The late Lyndon
Larouche's site has a lot of info on this.
Zhu , April 23, 2019 at 00:50
Britain & Russia were rivals for empire. Both were expanding in Asia – The Great
Game. Russia got Turkestan, Britain got India, both wanted China. Hence the elite's hatred,
although now it's probably traditional and automatic.
Keep studying history – it's ales ts enlightening!
AnneR , April 23, 2019 at 09:22
Yes Zhu – I do continue with history, although of course no historian and thus
history is ever free (as with all scholars) of their personal worldview. And yes I realize
that the UK, when an imperial power, viewed the world pretty much as the US does now: its
domain. So obviously any and all contenders were up for vitriolic loathing and war. But it
still doesn't explain the particularly vicious attitude toward Russia on the part of the
British ruling elites. After all the Brits also had France, Holland and Germany (earlier
Spain and Portugal) as competitors, admittedly at different time periods, and no they weren't
"liked" and were often at war with each other. But there was never the same bitterness toward
western European rivals as there was and continues to be toward Russia.
That the USSR provoked deep, undying hatred among the aristos and their hangers' on does
not surprise: can't have anything remotely similar happening in our cushy backyard, can't
have the unwashed, ignorant, prole herd actually learning any lessons from the Soviets.
Yet even so – no nuclear air raid drills in schools or anywhere during red-baiting
season. Nothing kindred.
The truth is Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Rachel Maddow, and the rest if the Scooby Doo
gang handed Agent Orange the victimhood script he needs to feed his Trumpets to win the 2020
election.
They've also guaranteed no matter what heinous gangster scam shit he has done in the past
or will do in the future, none of it will stick because he'll play the falsely accused
card.
For the idiot Americans watching White House reality TV at home, this means celebrity
Trump now has immunity and can't be voted off the island this season or next.
Assange publishes hacks from Snowden, Manning, and Russia. Do they publish anything on
Russia?
Nope.
Assange and you are tools of Russia. Obvious to anyone
Skip Scott , April 22, 2019 at 12:01
Ah yes, the evil Rooskies.
From the article you obviously didn't read:
In fact, WikiLeaks has published hundreds of thousands of documents pertaining to Russia,
has made critical comments about the Russian government and defended dissident Russian
activists, and in 2017 published an entire trove called the Spy Files Russia exposing Russian
surveillance practices.
"The only people claiming that Assange is a Russian agent are those who are unhappy with
the things that WikiLeaks publications have exposed, whether that be U.S. war crimes or the
corrupt manipulations of Democratic Party leaders."
Perhaps fuller understanding would be gained by considering the following pathway.
People who who think that "Assange is a Russian agent" is a plausible belief are the
audience encouraged in the view that "Assange is a Russian agent".
Much of this notion of plausible belief is founded on the creation of holograms consisting
in large part of projections of the believer's expectations/experiences of the evaluation
criteria used in choosing agents to recruit (for the public largely projected from their
experience of creating resumes and attending job interviews) , what motivates an agent to be
recruited, how such motivation can facilitate the purpose of the recruiter of the agent, what
are the potential dangers of recruiting the agent, and most importantly what is the purpose
of and reasons why the recruiter considers recruiting an agent to achieve her/his
purpose.
On projection catalysing plausible belief you will be aware that some encourage the belief
that Mr. Putin is the richest man on the planet since in all societies there are
assumptions/expectations on motivations.
However in the presently self-designated "The United States of America" as functions of
"exceptionalism", "we the people hold these truths to be self-evident" and lack of direct
experience of foreign cultures by many, the population are particulrly prone to projection
giving rise to the paradox of "exceptionalists" engaging in the them/us conflation.
SBS broadcast a 4 part doco called The Fourth Estate in June last year. It's about the NYT unhealthy obsession with Trump.
Episode 1 begins with his swearing in and cuts to stunned(?) NYT staffers watching the speech in which he says "For too long,
our politicians have prospered while (blah blah blah) and this stops, right here, and right now."
From then on it consists of an endless stream of huddles as various groups of staffers ponder the best way to spin various 'angles'
and approaches, or solo senior staffers pontificating on all manner of hypotheticals. There are lots of opinionated people working
at the NYT and none of them is 'stupid'.
I recorded Episode 1 and my conclusion from watching it is that NOTHING the NYT publishes is accidental. I began recording Episode
2 but aborted the mission after 30 minutes or so because the repetitive self-worship and drivel was eerily similar to Episode
1.
Wikipedia has an entry devoted to the series and it's freely available on the www. I recommend watching the first few minutes
of Episode 1 just to get a feeling for the tone.
The cartoon in question was published in an International Edition as a gloat or a public (private) joke, imo. I remain unconvinced
that the Editorial Staff at the Jew York Times was blissfully unaware that the cartoon 'might' create an opportunity for the "Anti-Semitism!!?"
crowd to stir up, and capitalise upon, the ensuing indignation and outrage.
"... Significantly, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing on December 11th, 2018 that "ad accounts linked to Russia" spent about $4,700 in advertising" to politically influence Americans during the 2016 presidential election season. ..."
The Mueller Report is now public, and our Mainstream Media have filled the airways with all sorts of commentaries and interpretations.
We know that - despite the very best efforts of the dedicated Leftist attorneys on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff - there
was absolutely no coordination between members of the Trump campaign, or any of his staffers, with Russians. No additional charges
have come as a result, other than accusations made earlier of "process crimes" (e.g. failure to report earnings on tax forms, failure
to report lobbying work, or not telling investigators what they demanded to hear -- "crimes" that practically every politician in
Washington has been guilty of at one time or another and would normally not cause much of a stir). None of these involved Russia.
Of course, that finding has not satisfied many Democrats or the unhinged Leftist crazies in the media, who continue to have visions
of "collusion" -- a kind of communications Alzheimers that has poisoned our media now for years. Thus, Representative Eric Swalwell
(who is one of nearly two dozen Democrats running for president) continues to assert that there was "collusion," as does the irrepressible
(and irresponsible) Adam Schiff: "it's there in plain sight," they insist, "if you just look hard enough, and maybe squint just a
bit -- or maybe have those specialized 3-D Russia glasses!"
Such political leaders -- along with those further out in the Leftist loonysphere like Representatives Maxine Waters and Alexandra
Ocasio-Cortes -- continue down their Primrose path of post-Marxist madness.
But beyond the collusion/coordination issue, the past couple of weeks have been filled with a swirling controversy concerning
what is called "obstruction of justice." And once again, the fundamental issues have been incredibly politicized. Special Counsel
Robert Mueller had an obligation, if he and his minions discovered "obstruction of justice," that is, concerted and illegal attempts
to obstruct the investigations by the president or his staff, to present charges to the Department of Justice. Yet, all he was able
to do was assemble a farrago of "he said/she said" instances, none of which rose to the level of criminal activity. Apparently President
Trump told a subaltern "I wish would you fire Mueller," or he wished in a speech in his joking style that "if the Russians had Hillary's
emails, they would release them," or he had a private conversation with Vladimir Putin when they met (as all national leaders do!),
or his son met with a Russian attorney who supposedly had some "dirt" on the Hillary Clinton campaign (which did not turn out to
be the reason for the Trump Tower meeting at all).
None of the ten or eleven cited instances came anywhere close to being actionable or criminal under settled law. In each instance
cited, the president's actions (or desires) fell within his purview and authority under Article II of the Constitution. And regarding
Trump's desire to fire Mueller, he was on solid legal ground; the Supreme Court in its 1997 decision, Edmonds vs. the United States
, declared that "inferior" officials, including an independent counsel, could be removed by presidential action as part of
his delegated powers . And, in any case, Mueller
was not dismissed.
Mueller had an obligation after examining these situations to make a finding; he did not. By so doing, by avoiding decisions and
stringing out such instances in an obviously political sense, he abdicated his responsibility and did his best to impugn Donald Trump
and his administration and thus offer grist for continued Democrat attacks on the president all the way through the 2020 election.
Mueller left it up to the Attorney General William Barr and Congress to decide how to proceed. And that is where we are today.
The one issue that both Democrats and most Republicans seem to agree on, the issue which both say is "proven conclusively" by
Mueller is that the Russians "attempted to interfere and did interfere" in our 2016 election.
Interesting, is it not, that the Republicans who zealously defend the president and attack the obviously political nature of the
Mueller Report would accept, as if on faith and without question, the accusations of Russian interference, also contained in the
report?
Turn on Fox and watch, say, Martha MacCallum (e.g., "The Story," April 24, 2019) declare "we all know now without doubt that the
Russians tried to interfere" in our elections, or listen to most any GOP congressman repeat that same narrative with unquestioning
certitude.
But that assertion - is it truly backed up factually? Where is the evidence, other than largely questionable information sourced
from our largely discredited intelligence agencies which, as we know, had a determined goal of overthrowing the president by any
means possible?
Almost three years have passed from the first fake news that appeared in the media on the subject of "Russian collusion," a concerted
effort launched to discredit at first the Donald Trump candidacy and then sabotage his presidency, including his efforts to stabilize
Russian-American relations.
As proof of Russian actions, the Mueller Report cites the indictments against twenty-five Russian citizens who were indicted for
attempted "interference" (those Russians are, let us add, quite conveniently out of the country and thus not prosecutable). When
those indictments were issued, Russia pointed out the flimsy, unsupported and transparently made-up nature of the charges, and demanded
that American authorities provide conclusive proof. Such requests were rebuffed.
In order to evaluate the evidence, the Russian government proposed reestablishing the bilateral expert group on information security
that the Obama Administration had terminated, which could have served as a platform for conversation on these matters. The American
side was also invited to send Justice Department officials to Russia to attend the proposed public questioning of the Russian citizens
named by Mueller. Additionally, Russia offered to publicize the exchanges between the two countries following the publication of
the accusations of cyberattacks, exchanges which were conducted through existing channels between October 2016 and January 2017.
Our government refused every offer.
A careful analysis, in fact, fails to show any substantial evidence of Russian cyberattacks and attempts to "subvert democracy."
By some estimates, possibly $160,000 -- a paltry sum -- was spent by the Russians during 2016 on social media activities in the United
States. Does anyone wish to discover and compare the amount the Chinese Communists or the Saudis would have expended during the same
period, for their continued influence and power in Washington and inside-the-Beltway?
It is helpful to examine the charges that have been made, some included in the Mueller Report and accepted blindly by most pundits
and politicians, both on the Left and by establishment conservatives.
The Russian government, via their embassy in Washington, has published
a 120 page "white paper,"
The Russiagate Hysteria: A Case of Severe Russiaphobia , responding to the accusations made against them since 2016. Obviously,
the Russian document has a particular viewpoint and very specific goal, but that should not deter us from examining it and evaluating
its arguments. (I have written on Russia and its relations with the United States on a number of occasions since 2015 and had pieces
published by The Unz Review , Communities Digital News , and elsewhere.
On my blog , "MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey," I have authored
a dozen columns addressing this question).
Here following I list twenty-one claims made regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election and in American domestic affairs.
I follow each claim with the Russian response and how others, as noted, have also responded. In most cases I retain the original
text, at times with my editing, but, in every case, with all the referenced sources.
These twenty-one claims should be examined more closely and more calmly, and the "Russophobic" hysteria we have experienced during
the past several years needs to be put aside for the sake of rational investigative inquiry -- and discovering how the Managerial
State and global elites have attempted a "silent coup" against what's left of our republic.
These claims and the responses deserve respectful consideration and detailed responses:
CLAIM: Russia "meddled" in the U.S. elections by conducting influence operations, including through social media.
FACT
All of the claims of Russian trolls that surfaced over the last few years (such as Russians using the Pokémon Go mobile
game and sex toy ads
to meddle in the elections
– ) are so preposterous and contradictory that they virtually disprove themselves.
Not to mention the absurdity of the whole notion of 13 persons and 3 organizations (whichever country they might represent)
charged on February 16, 2018, by Robert Mueller with criminally interfering with the elections, affecting in any way electoral
processes in a country of more than 300 million people.
It is telling that when pressed about the scope of the alleged influence campaign, representatives of American social media
companies give numbers, that even if they were valid (and there's no evidence of a connection to the Russian government), are
so minuscule as to be basically non-existent. For example, Facebook has identified 3,000 Russia-linked ads costing a total
of about $100,000. That's a
miniscule number of ads
and a fraction of Facebook's revenues, which totaled $28 billion. Facebook estimates that 126 million people might – the
emphasis is on the word "might" – have seen this content. But this number represents just 0.004% of the content those people
saw on the Facebook platform.
Significantly, Google CEO Sundar Pichai
testified
to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing on December 11th, 2018 that "ad accounts linked to Russia" spent
about $4,700 in advertising" to politically influence Americans during the 2016 presidential election season.
To further cast doubt on the allegations, an American watchdog group "Campaign for Accountability" ("CFA") admitted on September
4th, 2018, that it deliberately posted propaganda materials on Google disguised as "Russian hackers from the Internet Research
Agency" to check how they would be filtered for "foreign interference". Google officials then accused the CFA as having ties
to a rival tech company "Oracle". In other words,
corporate intrigues disguised
as "Russian interference".
As American media has admitted, out of several dozen pre-election rallies supposedly organized by Russians, Special Counsel
Mueller mentions in his indictment that only a couple actually appear to have successfully attracted anyone, and those that
did were sparsely attended and, almost without exception, in deep-red enclaves that
would have voted for Trump anyway
.
Amidst all the hysteria about the alleged Russian meddling it is worth reading various research studies which show, quoting
"The Washington Post", that it is Americans, in particular our intelligence service,
that peddle disinformation
and hate speech.
According to Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, the scale and scope of domestic
disinformation is much larger than any foreign influence operation. And academics from the Harvard's Shorenstein Center on
Media, Politics and Public Policy document in their study that there had been major spikes in outright fabrication and misleading
information proliferating online before the 2018 U.S. election. A "significant portion" of the disinformation appeared to come
from Americans, not foreigners, the Harvard researchers said.
CLAIM:Russian hackers accessed computer servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and leaked materials through Wikileaks
and other intermediaries
FACT
As President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin noted in his interview with NBC on June 5, 2017, when flatly denying
any allegations of Russia interfering in internal affairs of the U.S., that today's technology is such that the final internet
address can be masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one will be able to understand the origin of that address. It is possible
to set up any entity that may indicate one source when, in fact,
the source is completely different .
No evidence has been presented linking Russia to leaked emails. In fact, there are credible studies arguing that DNC servers
are much more likely to have been breached by someone with immediate and physical access. In 2017 a group of former officers of
the U.S. intelligence community, members of the "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity" (VIPS), met with then-CIA Director
Mike Pompeo to present their findings.
Another counterargument to the "Russian hackers" claim is that the DNC files published by Wikileaks were initially stored under
the FAT (File Allocation System) method which is not related to internet transfers and can only be forwarded to an external device
such as a thumb drive.
It is also suspicious that the DNC prohibited the FBI from examining the servers. Instead, a third-party tech firm was hired,
"Crowd Strike", which is known for peddling the "Russian interference" claims. And soon enough it, indeed, announced that "Russian
malware" has been found, but again no solid evidence was produced.
According to the respected former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter,
the indictment by the Mueller
team on July 13, 2018 of the 12 supposed Russian operatives was
a politically motivated fraud . As Ritter explains, Mueller seems to have borrowed his list from an organizational chart of
a supposed Russian military intelligence unit, contained in a classified document from the NSA titled "Spear-Phishing Campaign
TTPs Used Against U.S. And Foreign Government Political Entities", which
was published by The Intercept online. As stated in that document, this is just a subjective judgement, not a known fact.
Ritter concludes, that this is a far cry from the kind of incontrovertible proof that Mueller's team suggests as existing to support
its indictment.
Moreover, it is telling that the indictment
was released just before the
meeting between President Putin and Trump in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, seemingly as if the aim was to intentionally derail the
bilateral summit.
CLAIM: Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.
FACT
As concluded in the summary of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, the investigation did not find that the Trump campaign
or anyone associated with
it conspired
or coordinated with Russia
If the Mueller team, having all the resources of the U.S. government, after 22 months of work,
many millions
of dollars spent , more than 2800 subpoenas issued, nearly 500 search warrants and 500 witness interviews, didn't find any
evidence of "collusion", it is simply because there was never any. The whole claim of collusion was launched and peddled by the
same group of Democrats, liberal-leaning media and the so-called "Never Trump Republicans", as it became clear that Donald Trump
had real chances of winning the election. And later it morphed into a campaign to derail the newly-elected President agenda, including
his efforts to mitigate the damage done to U.S.-Russian relations.
CLAIM: Hacking of American political institutions was personally ordered by the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
FACT
This claim is based on nothing else but the infamous fraudulent
"Steele Dossier" , paid for by political opponents [i.e., the Hilary Clinton campaign] of Donald Trump, and
wild conjectures that "nothing in Russia happens without Putin's approval" .
Needless to say, zero proof is presented. By the same logic, nothing in the U.S. happens without the President's approval.
For example, is he also responsible for Edward Snowden? After all, Mr. Snowden was doing work for the U.S. intelligence services.
Or the deaths of all the civilians killed abroad by U.S. drone strikes? Every minute detail approved by the President?
CLAIM: Russia did not cooperate with the U.S. in tracing the source of the alleged hacking.
FACT
Russia has repeatedly offered to set up a professional and de-politicized dialogue on international information security only
to be rebuffed by the U.S. State Department. For instance, following the discussion between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald
Trump in Hamburg on July 7, 2017, Russia forwarded to the U.S. a proposal to reestablish a bilateral working group on cyber threats
which would have been a perfect medium to discuss American concerns. Moreover, during his meeting with Donald Trump in Helsinki
on July 17, 2018, Vladimir Putin offered to allow U.S. representatives to be present at an interrogation of the Russian citizens
who were previously accused by the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller of
being guilty of electoral interference.
Furthermore, in February 2019 the Russian government suggested publishing bilateral correspondence on the subject of unsanctioned
access to U.S. electronic networks, which was conducted between Washington and Moscow through the Nuclear Threat Reduction Centers
in the period from October 2016 to the end of January 2017.
Needless to say, all Russian offers were rejected. A conclusion is naturally reached that American State Department officials
have little interest in hearing anything that contradicts their own narrative or the discredited version of the CIA.
CLAIM: Russia is interfering in elections all over the world
FACT
No credible evidence has been produced not only of Russia's supposed meddling in the U.S. political processes, but to support
similar allegations made by the U.S. in respect to other countries. For example, former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster
insinuated that Russia was interfering in
the Mexican presidential elections of 2018. However, Mexican officials,
including
the president of the Mexican Senate Ernesto Cordero Arroyo, and Ambassador to Russia Norma Pensado
during a press conference in Moscow in February, 2018, debunked
this baseless claim.
Another example of fake news were reports saying that U.S.
was increasingly convinced that Russia hacked French election on May 9, 2017. However, on June 1, 2017, the head of the French
government's cyber security agency said no trace
was found of the claimed Russian hacking group behind the attack. On the other hand, the history of U.S. interfering in other
countries' elections
is well documented by American sources (see: ).
For example, a Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H. Levin, has scoured the historical record and
found 81 examples of U.S. election influence operations from 1946- to 2000. Often cited examples include Chile in 1964, Guyana
in 1968, Nicaragua in 1990, Yugoslavia in 2000, Afghanistan in 2009, Ukraine in 2014, not to mention Russia in 1996! And how else
could the current situation in Ukraine and Venezuela be described, with U.S. representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker openly pressuring
Ukrainian voters
to support the incumbent , and Washington
possibly plotting a
coup in Caracas?
CLAIM: The lawsuit of the Democratic National Committee against the Russian Federation related to "interference in the election"
has a legal standing.
FACT
The DNC filed a civil lawsuit on April 20, 2018 against the Russian Federation and other entities and individuals. Named as
defendants in the lawsuit are the Russian Federation; the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU); the
GRU operative using the pseudonym "Guccifer 2.0"; Aras Iskenerovich Agalarov; Emin Araz Agalarov; Joseph Mifsud; WikiLeaks; Julian
Assange; the Trump campaign (formally "Donald J. Trump for President, Inc."); Donald Trump, Jr.; Paul Manafort; Roger Stone; Jared
Kushner; George Papadopoulos; Richard W. Gates; and unnamed defendants sued as John Does 1–10. The DNC's complaint accuses the
Trump campaign of engaging in a racketeering enterprise in conjunction with Russia and WikiLeaks.
Even irrespective of the fact that there was no "interference" in the first place, the case has no legal standing. Exercise
of U.S. jurisdiction over the pending case with respect to the Russian Federation is a violation of the international law, specifically,
violation of jurisdictional immunities of the Russian Federation arising from the principle of the sovereign equality of states.
CLAIM: Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak was a spy.
FACT
In March of 2017 U.S. media
began libeling
Sergey Kislyak a "top spy and spy-recruiter" This preposterous claim was based on nothing but his contacts with Trump confidant
Senator Jeff Sessions – carrying out work any ambassador would do. Per the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961,
among core diplomatic functions is ascertaining
by all lawful means conditions
and developments in the receiving state, and that certainly includes openly meeting leaders of Congress on Capitol Hill. Even
former CIA Director John McLaughlin
noted that Mr. Kislyak is an experienced diplomat, not a spy.
CLAIM: Russian Embassy retreat in Maryland was an intelligence base
FACT.
Among the unlawful acts that U.S. administrations undertook was the expropriation of a legal Russian property in Maryland,
a summer retreat near the Chesapeake Bay under the pretext
it was used for intelligence gathering. But where is the supposed-treasure trove of alleged spy equipment that U.S. authorities
reportedly found there? Why not show them publicly to back up the claim? After the expropriation and the claims, not a word –
silence.
The retreat, "dacha" as Russians would call it, was bought by the former Soviet Union in 1972. Since then, it was used for
recreation, including hosting a children's summer camp and regularly entertaining American visitors. One of the more popular events
was the stop-over during the annual Chesapeake Regatta, completed with an expansive tour of the property. Presumably U.S. intelligence
services could have used this for years to inspect the property. Why was nothing ever mentioned before the Obama Administration
action?
CLAIM: The meeting in Trump Tower in New York on June 9, 2016 between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya
was to discuss compromising materials that Russian had on Hillary Clinton.
FACT
According
to testimony provided to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Ms. Veselnitskaya focused on explaining the illicit activities
of U.S.-British investor Bill Browder, wanted in Russia for crimes, and brought attention to the adverse effects of the so-called
"Magnitskiy Act", adopted by U.S. Congress in 2012 and lobbied for by Browder.
CLAIM: Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, met with Russians in Prague to "collude".
FACT
It was reported in American media that the Justice Department special counsel had evidence that Donald Trump's personal lawyer,
Michael Cohen, secretly made a trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign to meet with Russian representatives,
a fact also mentioned
in the discredited "Steele Dossier". This was given as further evidence of "collusion". But Cohen vehemently denied this –
under oath. Passport records
indicate
that he never was in Prague. He was actually on vacation with his son at the supposed time. Given that he publicly turned
on his former boss and still denied the fact of ever going to Prague disproves this claim further.
CLAIM: Former member of the Trump campaign team Carter Page was a Russian intelligence asset.
FACT
According to members of Congress and journalistic investigations, the redacted declassified documents of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISC, also called the FISA Court)
show that the main source used by U.S. counterintelligence to justify spying on Mr. Page was the fraudulent so-called "Steele
Dossier".
Thus, Mr. Page for obvious reasons was not accused by the team of Robert Mueller of being involved in a "Russian conspiracy".
CLAIM: On August 22, 2018, The Democratic National Committee filed a claim with the FBI, accusing the "Russian hackers" of
infiltrating its electoral database.
FACT
Several days later members of the Democratic Party
admitted that it was a "false alarm", as it was simply a security check-up performed at the initiative of the Democratic Party's
affiliate in Michigan.
CLAIM: On August 8, 2018 U.S. Senator Bill Nelson accused Russia of breaching the infrastructure of the voter registration
systems in several local election offices of Florida.
FACT
Florida's Department of State spokesperson, Sarah Revell, stated on August 9, 2018, that Florida's government had not received
any evidence from competent authorities that Florida's voting systems or election records had been compromised. The U.S. Department
of Homeland Security and the FBI also
could not confirm in any manner the accusations.
CLAIM: In September, 2017 the U.S. media, referring to the Department of Homeland Security, accused Russia of "cyberattacks"
on electoral infrastructure in 21 states during the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.
FACT
On September 27, 2017, Wisconsin and California authorities stated that their electoral systems were not targeted by cyberattacks.
On November 12, 2017, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said in a CBS interview that the "hackers' activity" had
no significant consequences and did not influence the outcome of the elections. And, indeed, the
source of those attacks was not clear.
CLAIM: Russia meddled in the Alabama 2017 Senate elections to help the Republican candidate.
FACT
Despite
the initial claims , it turned out that a group of Democratic tech experts decided to imitate so-called "Russian tactics"
in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate racе. Even more jarring is the fact that one participant in the "Alabama project", Jonathon
Morgan, is chief executive of "New Knowledge", a cyber security firm that
wrote a scathing account
of Russia's social media operations in the 2016 election that was released in 2018 by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Once
again, we have one of the main private sector players in hyping the Russian threat caught red-handed.
CLAIM: Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's presidential campaign chairman, was a secret link to Russian intelligence.
FACT
Trump's former campaign chairman was hit with two indictments from Mueller's office. However, even as American media notes,
both cases have nothing to do with Russia and stemmed from his years as a political consultant for the Ukrainian government and
his failure to pay taxes on the millions he earned, his failure to report the foreign bank accounts he used to stash that money,
and his failure to report his work to the US government. In his second case in Virginia,
he was also charged with committing bank fraud to boost his assets when the Ukraine work dried up.
In fact, serious concerns have been raised in the U.S. that it was Ukrainian officials who tried to influence the 2016 elections
by leaking compromising
materials on Mr. Manafort.
The Ukrainian connection is also prevalent in the case of money transferred to accounts of American politicians. For instance,
according to a "New York Times" article, Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk
donated over
10 million dollars to the "Clinton Foundation while just 150 thousand dollars to the "Trump Foundation".
CLAIM: Russia compromised the Vermont power grid.
FACT
On December 31, 2016, "The Washington Post", accused "Russian hackers" of compromising the Vermont power grid. The local company,
"Burlington Electric", allegedly traced a malware code in a laptop of one of its employees. It was stated that the same "code"
was used to hack the Democratic Party servers in 2016. However, the "Wordfence" cybersecurity firm checked "Burlington Electric"
for hacking, and said that the malware code was openly available, for instance, on a web-site of Ukrainian hackers . The attackers
were using IP-addresses from across the world. "The Washington Post"
later admitted that conclusions on Russia's involvement were false.
CLAIM: Russian Alfa Bank was used as a secret communication link with the Trump campaign .
FACT
In October 2016 a new "accusation" appeared,
alleging that a message exchange between the Alfa Bank server and Trump organizations indicated a "secret" Trump – Russia
communication channel.
CLAIM: Russia cracked voter registration systems during the 2016 U.S. elections.
FACT
In July 2016 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security accused Russia of gaining unauthorized access to electronic voter registration
systems in Arizona. But on April 8, 2018, "Reuters",
referring to a high-ranking U.S. administration official, wrote there was no proof Russia had anything to do with the mentioned
cyberattack.
CLAIM: Russian Embassy bank transactions were linked to "election interference".
FACT
American publication "Buzzfeed"
repeatedly claimed that U.S. authorities flagged Russian Embassy financial transfers as suspicious, many of them dated around
the 2016 election. In reality, the media outlet, by twisting the facts and placing them out of context, made routine banking transactions
– salary transfers, payments to contractors – look nefarious.
It is not
uncommon for embassy personnel to receive larger payouts, transfer or withdraw larger sums of money at the end of their work.
Furthermore, leaking of confidential banking information of persons and organizations protected by diplomatic immunity raised
concerns about the likely involvement of security services.
The
arrest in October 2018 of a U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network official, charged with leaking
information both about the Russian Embassy accounts and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, provides further proof to
the theory of political skullduggery.
* * *
Most of these responses have not been fully examined or addressed by major media, nor, for that matter, by Fox News, dominated
as it is by an almost instinctive Neoconservative Russophobia (the one possible exception being Tucker Carlson).
For the American Left, since the collapse of Communism and the growth of a traditionalist nationalism (under Vladimir Putin),
Russia has become a convenient target. When the Soviets were in power prior to 1991, the USSR was seen as a "progressive" presence
in the world, even if by the requirements of American politics the Left was forced to make ritualistic condemnations of the more
extreme elements of Soviet statecraft. Now that post-Communist Russia bans same sex marriage, glorifies the traditional family,
and the conservative Russian Orthodox Church occupies a special position of esteem and prominence, that admiration has turned
to fear and loathing. And that Russia and its president have been viewed as favorable to the hated Donald Trump doubly confirms
that hostility and targeting.
For the dominant Neoconservatives and many Republicans, contemporary Russia is seen as "anti-democratic," "reactionary," and
a threat to American world hegemony (and the refusal to bow to that hegemony, whether economically, politically, or culturally).
Indeed, as a major intellectual force, Neoconservatism owes much of its origins to Eastern European and Russia Jews, many of whose
ancestors were at direct odds with the old pre-1917 Tsarist state. That animus, those nightmares of pogroms and oppression, have
never completely subsided. A modern traditionalist, Orthodox Russia is viewed as antithetical to their more liberal, even Leftwing
ideas (e.g., increasing "conservative" acceptance of same sex marriage, "moderate" feminism, and a whole panoply of "forward looking"
views on civil rights issues -- all of which are present on Fox News.)
Memory of "the bad old days" has never disappeared.
None of this history should prevent a close examination of the current accusations against Russia, nor our search for the truth.
Much -- perhaps the future of Western civilization itself -- depends on it.
"... Russia, and specifically President Putin, were presented as the ultimate global bogeyman after Crimea's 2014 reunification and Moscow's 2015 anti-terrorist military intervention in Syria changed the balance of power around the world and unquestionably ushered in the multipolar era after two and a half decades of American unipolarity. ..."
"... It was therefore thought by the ruling anti-Trump faction of the US' permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies ("deep state") at the time that they could easily convince the electorate to vote against the seemingly "anti-systemic" political insurgent by implying that he's a "Russian puppet" and then later, after that didn't work, manufacturing so-called "evidence" purporting to prove this through unverified fake news claims designed to defame him. ..."
Mueller report proved that Russiagate was one long series of hoaxes designed to discredit
Trump and pave the way for his impeachment
It's finally official -- Trump and his team didn't "collude" with Russia like the Democrats
and their supporters incessantly claimed for nearly the past three years. Positive coverage of
candidate Trump's promising foreign policy platform by Russian international media and truthful
reporting about Clinton's aggressive one don't amount to "hacking" an election, nor do some
internet researchers from Russia supposedly sharing some political memes on Facebook. It's now
been revealed that Russiagate was one long series of hoaxes designed to discredit Trump and
pave the way for his impeachment after it first failed to stop him from winning the presidency.
Like the American leader himself has said on several occasions already, Russiagate was an
unconstitutional coup attempt against the country's democratically elected leadership, which
deserves to be analyzed more in depth.
Russia, and specifically President Putin, were presented as the ultimate global bogeyman
after Crimea's 2014 reunification and Moscow's 2015 anti-terrorist military intervention in
Syria changed the balance of power around the world and unquestionably ushered in the
multipolar era after two and a half decades of American unipolarity.
It was therefore thought by the ruling anti-Trump faction of the US' permanent military,
intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies ("deep state") at the time that they could easily
convince the electorate to vote against the seemingly "anti-systemic" political insurgent by
implying that he's a "Russian puppet" and then later, after that didn't work, manufacturing
so-called "evidence" purporting to prove this through unverified fake news claims designed to
defame him.
Psyops and propaganda have a cumulative effect on the thought processes of the target
populations. After 9/11 it became legal for our intelligence services to turn these insidious
weapons on our own people. The result is a metastasis of political polarization into fear and
loathing in more vulnerable minds. These Dark State practitioners are manipulating the
outcomes and expect cult-like (or occult) spasms of mass murder. The crude scapegoating, the
Orwellian menagerie of enemies, the contamination of public forums with trolls, the false
flags, and constant promotion of political hysteria, has a methodology that we have seen in
the 20th Century. I am always grateful when b reminds us of this danger.
Mediastan: A Wikileaks Road Movie: Due to the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the
arrests of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, Sixteen Films and Journeyman Pictures are
providing a time-limited free access to the Wikileaks road movie Mediastan. Mediastan is a
documentary film directed by Johannes Wahlström and co-produced by Julian Assange,
detailing the publication of the very documents for which both Assange and Manning have
been incarcerated.
"... Deerlove was also directly involved in setting up several Trump Campaign operatives for fake links to Russia (George Papadopolous, Carter Page, Gen. Flynn), together with British intelligence assets Joseph Mifsud and CIA asset Stefan Halper, a close ally of Deerlove at Cambridge. ..."
"... Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News Tuesday that he will immediately investigate three cases of suspected "set ups," efforts to create fake connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians, all directly run by British operatives: the Mifsud role with Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer in falsely connecting George Papadopoulos to Russian spies; Halper and Deerlove setting up Gen. Flynn with fake Russian connections; and the infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, set up by the slimy British operative Rob Goldstone. ..."
On Thursday morning, Attorney General William Barr is scheduled to release the Mueller
report, with redactions, according to laws regarding security and the privacy of Grand Jury
proceedings. While the Trump haters and conspirators are preparing various operations to keep
Russiagate going, despite the report's exoneration of Trump's imagined "collusion," the reality
that the British ran the entire operation, as identified from the beginning by EIR, is now
bursting out into the open, and is threatening to be the subject of criminal investigations in
the Department of Justice and in the Congress.
The Daily Caller's Chuck Ross on Tuesday ran an article titled: "Former British Spymaster
Has Flown Under the Radar in Russia Probe, Despite Links to Key Figures." He names Richard
Deerlove, MI6 chief from 1999 to 2004, as a key operative working with fellow MI6 operative
Christopher Steele, the author of the now discredited dossier on Trump's supposed collusion
with Russia. Deerlove was also directly involved in setting up several Trump Campaign
operatives for fake links to Russia (George Papadopolous, Carter Page, Gen. Flynn), together
with British intelligence assets Joseph Mifsud and CIA asset Stefan Halper, a close ally of
Deerlove at Cambridge.
Meanwhile, Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told
Fox News Tuesday that he will immediately investigate three cases of suspected "set ups,"
efforts to create fake connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians, all directly
run by British operatives: the Mifsud role with Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer in
falsely connecting George Papadopoulos to Russian spies; Halper and Deerlove setting up Gen.
Flynn with fake Russian connections; and the infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian
lawyer, set up by the slimy British operative Rob Goldstone.
What's more, the VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) issued a public
Memorandum for President Trump on Tuesday, called "The Fly in the Mueller Ointment," warning
him that the Mueller report, despite finding no evidence of collusion, maintains the lie that
the Russians hacked leading Democratic Party computers and provided their emails to Wikileaks,
falsely described as a Russian front. Detailing their forensic proof that the emails were
downloaded, not hacked, the VIPS warn the President that if these lies are allowed to stand,
the idea that Trump was elected due to Russian "interference" in the election will remain, "and
that melody will linger on for the rest of your presidency, unless you seize the moment.... You
are the President, and there may be no better time than now to face them down." (see Bill Binney interview with
LPAC.)
"... As Attorney General Barr has pointed out, including in his testimony on Capitol Hill, investigating an American presidential candidate is "a very big deal" and the Mifsud/Papadopoulos/Australian Ambassador hearsay hardly serves as adequate justification or predication. This is particularly egregious since the FBI knew that Papadopoulos never repeated to anyone in the Trump Campaign what Mifsud told him. And Mifsud is also a British intelligence asset, not a Russian intelligence asset, as suggested by Mueller's rambling legal partisans. ..."
"... Mueller, of course, never references the fact that Russiagate actually started way back in late 2015 when the British government started demanding Donald Trump's head because of his sane view of Russia, a fact acknowledged by Obama CIA chief John Brennan in his Congressional testimony ..."
"... MI6's Christopher Steele's dirty dossier was the driver of Russiagate and that Steele was a joint MI6, U.S. State Department, and FBI asset dating back to collaboration on the 2014 Ukraine coup conducted jointly by the Obama State Department, CIA, and British intelligence ..."
"... the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, were transparent British/State Department operations designed to plant and fabricate evidence, namely, Russian generated "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... Mueller completely avoided the real story, despite its public availability, in order to concoct his hit job. Each of these operations involved British intelligence personnel collaborating with Obama White House, the CIA and State Department. These entrapment efforts were designed as the pretext for creating and maintaining an FBI investigation. The FBI investigation in turn made the preposterous claims in Christopher Steele's dirty dossier, that Donald Trump had been compromised by the Russians, palatable to the journalists who repeated Steele's claims both before and after the election ..."
"... The Moscow Trump Tower project also consumes hundreds of words in Mueller's screed. It was created by long-time FBI and CIA informant Felix Sater and his childhood friend, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and was presented in emails by Sater in September of 2015 as a Russian project which would help elect Donald Trump President with Putin's assistance. ..."
"... Instead, Mueller's argument is essentially this: "if you take all of this together, maybe it amounts to something, but I can't decide, so Congress should just stick the knife in already." There is not sufficient evidence to charge a crime, Mueller says, but Trump has also not proved his innocence. ..."
"... Here's the CliffsNotes summary of the entire 448 pages: The President was under constant attack, including from within his own White House, in an obvious attempt to frame him up while claiming he was committing treason. He got angry and didn't sit silently by while Mueller and his minions tried to frame him up. He complained loudly. Sometimes he even asked his staff to figure out how to proclaim his innocence. Under no conceivable construction is that obstruction of justice. ..."
"... When Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia in the waning days of his Administration, in retaliation for what his intelligence chiefs claimed was Russian "interference" in the 2016 election, the sanctions included implantation of a Stuxnet type worm in Russian state infrastructure. This might be considered by the Russians as a very hot potential act of war. ..."
"... First, someone from a tight circle who had viewed these transcripts, leaked the classified transcripts to the Washington Post's David Ignatius who wrote a loud column about Flynn colluding with the Russians to undermine Obama. That leak was a felony. McCabe then called Flynn as the article hit, saying that he was sending over two agents to talk to him about what this was about and telling him that involving any lawyers would be an encumbrance to a relaxed conversation. ..."
"... each time Comey met with the President he returned to compose contemporaneous memos of his conversations and to plan future encounters with a close group of associates who he characterized as a "murder board." Such activities clearly indicate that Comey was engaged in attempting to set the President up. ..."
"... Furthermore, the firestorm following Comey's firing illuminated the level of plotting against the President at the top levels of the Department of Justice -- Rod Rosenstein seriously offered to wear a wire to record the President and participated in discussions centered on organizing the cabinet to orchestrate the President's removal. ..."
"... Trump called White House Counsel Don McGahn and told him to raise Mueller's conflicts of interest with the Department of Justice and -- according to McGahn -- that Mueller could not be Special Counsel. ..."
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has written a 448-page fictional novel, grounded in treason, about the British/Obama Administration
intelligence hoax known as Russiagate. It is intended to preoccupy your mind for the next two years, at least through the 2020 elections.
It is intended to stir your passions to support your absolutely mad Representative or Senator in enacting further sanctions and supporting
the British drive to overthrow Putin's government in Russia based on fictional events which, for the most part, never happened.
The British sponsored and oriented intelligence services that sponsored this hoax have also started a campaign to ensure that
the same mad passions will destroy Donald Trump's quest for new and peaceful relationships with China. Congressional investigations
based on the "road map" provided by Robert Mueller are supposed to provide, on your taxpayer dollar, possible impeachment and, at
the very least, opposition research for the 2020 Presidential campaign. This would fulfill the British vow, openly set forth in the
December 2018 House of Lords Report,
"British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order," that Donald Trump must not have a second term.
But, most of all, it is intended to get you to doubt what is coming next. The President's allies have promised an investigation
of the investigators and a full accounting of how this sordid affair came to be. As
Conrad Black explains in
the National Interest , what is now known is that
"senior intelligence and FBI and Justice Department officials lied under oath to Congress, or lied to federal officials in
order to influence the result, and then reverse the result, of a presidential election. In terms of subversion of the highest
constitutional process, the selection of the president and vice president of the United States, this sort of activity, that Brennan,
Clapper, Comey, McCabe, former attorney general Loretta Lynch and others appear to have engaged in, is the last stop before there
are tanks on the White House lawn and military control of the media outlets. Mueller, having failed to do anything to address
the real crisis that threatened the country, failed altogether, and compounded his failure by his sadistic entrapment of General
Michael Flynn, and hounding of Paul Manafort and others, far beyond what was necessary or excusable, in an effort to extort a
false inculpation of the president."
As most know by now, the first part of the Mueller report concludes that there was no collusion between the Russian government
and Donald Trump's campaign to swing the election to Donald Trump. This conclusion occurred despite thousands upon thousands of hours
of fake media claims, fed by British and American intelligence leaks, which made it an article of fanatical religious faith to many,
that Donald Trump was a Putin dupe. According to Mueller's report, while the Russians tried endlessly to infiltrate and steer the
Trump Campaign, they didn't succeed. Undaunted, Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on television on April
18 to claim that Mueller found "passive collusion." That is not an unfair characterization of the McCarthyite premises of Mueller's
report. According to Mueller, investigation of an American Presidential campaign was justified because Trump refused to toe the British
line on Putin and Russia.
Here is how Mueller blithely reports it:
"On June 16, 2015 Donald J. Trump declared his intent to seek nomination as the Republican candidate for President.
By early 2016, he distinguished himself among Republican candidates by speaking of closer ties with Russia, saying he would get
along well with Russian President Vladimir Putin, questioning whether the NATO alliance was obsolete, and praising Putin as a
'strong leader.' The press reported that Russian political analysts and commentators perceived Trump as favorable to Russia."
Beginning in February 2016, the Report continues, the "press" began to report the connections of various campaign figures
with Russia, namely, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Carter Page. According to Mueller's report, Trump pursued WikiLeaks during
the campaign regarding the timing of further releases of Clinton Campaign and State Department documents, he said that he doubted
that the Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta, he falsely claimed that he had no business dealings in Russia, and the Campaign
was involved in changing a plank in the Republican Party platform about providing lethal assistance to Ukraine. Contrary to this
lying account by Saint Mueller, we know that the "press" were being steered by a British intelligence originated propaganda campaign
aimed at preventing any U.S. accommodation with Russia.
Now that we know that the President is not a traitor, can we move on to address the thousands of opioid deaths, adolescent and
other suicides, flooded farmlands, and crumbling infrastructure which have been pushed aside as we were trapped within the walls
of this British created delusion? Well, no, according to Mueller and his Congressional toadies, Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff. Nadler,
who looks and acts like a venomous toad, stuffing himself into over-sized suits which have that oh so subtle Manhattan mafia cut,
vows to spend from now until 2020 redoing the Russiagate investigation. Schiff, who has constantly propounded the most fictitious
crap possible about Russiagate, is just too invested to ever be sane, if he ever was. Thus, the second part of Mueller's report attempts
to seamlessly switch the anti-Trump political narrative by presenting an entirely novel theory of obstruction of justice in which
the President knew he was innocent, while those investigating him, knowing he was innocent, sought to exploit Trump's emotions as
they rolled a full scale coup right over him, hoping he would cross the line into illegal acts. He did not, according to both Attorney
General Barr and Mueller's boss throughout this escapade, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Mueller also acknowledges this
by saying he can't charge Trump with obstruction of justice. But Mueller also takes a cheap shot, designed to inflame the Congress
and the public, saying he cannot "exonerate" the President either. In doing so, he impermissibly shifts the burden of proof, under
our Constitution, to imply that Trump must now prove his innocence. This is, of course, reminiscent of the Star Chamber.
When Donald Trump was informed by Jeff Sessions that a Special Counsel was being appointed, he said, according to Mueller,
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked. Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent
counsels it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won't be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever
happened to me."
Perversely, this absolutely true statement by the President, borne out by months of an insane inquisition which crippled his ability
to act, is cited by Robert Mueller's crew of biased prosecutors for the proposition that the President repeatedly skirted obstructing
justice. On April 17, Attorney General Barr said that Donald Trump confronted an unprecedented situation at the beginning of his
presidency. The President was attempting to form an administration, while his own intelligence community was investigating him as
an agent of a foreign power. Barr might have added that Trump knew -- and everyone else knew -- that "collusion" nonsense was just
that. They knew it all along. In such circumstances, there was never any ability, in reality, to charge obstruction of justice, which
requires a corrupt intent or motive. There can be no corrupt intent or motive where a President believes, rightly, that he is innocent,
that he is being framed up, and that a coup is underway. He fights back, to preserve both the Presidency and the Constitution itself,
breaking the rules of what Saint Robert Mueller considers to be appropriate conduct by those he targets – don't say or do anything,
just let us slice you up. All the while, the Mueller report makes clear, Trump's emotions about the coup are being recorded and/or
falsely portrayed, minute by minute by those who would sell him out -- some as traitors within, others, if only to save themselves.
That is the reality. It was never obstruction of justice. It was a psyop against the President attempting to drive him mad.
The British, Not the Russians, Tried to Swing the 2016 Election
Mueller makes three significant claims about Russian interference in the 2016 election. First, page after page of his report attempts
to paint an amateurish and small bore social media campaign conducted by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian internet marketing
and click bait operation, as exercising a hugely powerful lure on the American mind. Despite Mueller's indictment of the IRA, which
is pending now in Washington, D.C., and despite British intelligence's five year fixation on the IRA as the essence of newfound Russian
powers in hybrid warfare, this is a hoax.
Aaron Maté ,
Gareth Porter and others have demonstrated, conclusively, that the IRA spent minimal amounts of money on Facebook and Google
in 2016, for a campaign which barely mentioned either candidate. Only 11% of the IRA activity even occurred during the election period.
The IRA effort spent a grand total of $46,000 on Facebook Ads, compared to $81 million by the Trump and Clinton campaigns combined,
and $4,700 on Google platforms. Its most liked Facebook post was a gun-toting image of Yosemite Sam; its most shared Instagram post
said, "Click here if you like Jesus." Another favored meme featured Jesus counseling a young man how to stop masturbating. Otherwise,
the IRA's campaign was dedicated to creating revenue from themed t-shirts and LGBT positive sex toys. Mueller never explains how
this ad content impacted the election in any way, nor could he.
Mueller next focuses on the alleged Russian military intelligence hacks of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta,
for which he has indicted 12 Russian GRU officers, secure in the knowledge that they will never appear in a U.S. courtroom to contest
the charges. The first fact lost in the sauce here is the fact that the files the Russians allegedly sent to WikiLeaks for publication
demonstrated, truthfully, that Hillary Clinton was a craven tool of Wall Street and that her campaign was illegally rigging the Democratic
primaries against Bernie Sanders's insurgent campaign. Further, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, led by former
NSA Technical Director William Binney and former NSA cryptologist Ed Loomis, have exploded Mueller's entire theory that the Russians
hacked the DNC.
They conducted forensic studies demonstrating that what Mueller says about Guccifer 2.0 is fraudulent and that the claim that
a GRU hack of the DNC computers resulted in the WikiLeaks releases does not square with any science known currently to man. The download
speeds and file metadata point to a thumb drive or similar storage device and a human source, rather than a Russian cyber attack
conducted over the internet.
You might also ask
why Julian Assange and/or WikiLeaks were not indicted in Mueller's grand GRU conspiracy indictment . Instead, Assange was indicted
on a highly dubious charge involving the 2010 Chelsea Manning leaks which may not even survive a challenge under the statute of limitations.
Obviously, Mueller's proof of his indicted Russiagate conspiracy falls short. Indicting Assange for the claimed DNC and Podesta hack
conspiracy would necessarily allow Assange to prove that the Russian hack never happened, as he has long contended. It would expose
how James Comey and Senator Mark Warner intervened in Assange's early 2017 negotiations with the Justice Department, to ensure that
the truth would never come out. It was Comey, after all, who never secured the DNC servers for FBI forensic analysis, relying instead
on the forensics provided to him by Atlantic Council's Russia-hating CrowdStrike, the unreliable vendor to the DNC and the Clinton
Campaign. And it was Comey, it is reliably claimed, who relentlessly pushed the Russiagate narrative even after his lead case agent
told him after months of investigation, "there is no there, there." If Mueller pursued the logic of his own indictment and included
Assange in his fabricated GRU conspiracy, it would also have exposed exactly what happened after Bill Binney met with then CIA Director
Mike Pompeo at Donald Trump's direction on October 24, 2017, explaining exactly how the intelligence community was lying to the American
President. Binney's offer to collaborate in demonstrating what actually happened with the DNC and John Podesta has been successfully
blocked to date.
The last prong of Mueller's Russiagate plot involves all sorts of contacts with Russians who allegedly unsuccessfully reached
out to the Trump campaign, in order to seduce them. Here the report just lies egregiously. We are told that Russiagate started as
the result of a July 2016 report by the Australian Ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, to the FBI about a conversation he had
with a 28 year old Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, in London. According to Mueller, Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor
with "connections to Russia" told Papadopoulos that the Russians had thousands of Hillary Clinton's State Department emails, and
Papadopoulos repeated this information in a meeting initiated by Downer. According to Mueller, when the DNC's computers were hacked,
the former Australian Ambassador to London remembered his early 2016 meeting with Papadopoulos in which Papadopoulos recounted Mifsud's
claim about Clinton's emails. This tidbit, according to Mueller, launched a full scale FBI counterintelligence investigation of a
U.S. presidential nominee. As Attorney General Barr has pointed out, including in his testimony on Capitol Hill, investigating
an American presidential candidate is "a very big deal" and the Mifsud/Papadopoulos/Australian Ambassador hearsay hardly serves as
adequate justification or predication. This is particularly egregious since the FBI knew that Papadopoulos never repeated to anyone
in the Trump Campaign what Mifsud told him. And Mifsud is also a British intelligence asset, not a Russian intelligence asset, as
suggested by Mueller's rambling legal partisans.
Mueller, of course, never references the fact that Russiagate actually started way back in late 2015 when the British government
started demanding Donald Trump's head because of his sane view of Russia, a fact acknowledged by Obama CIA chief John Brennan in
his Congressional testimony.
Nor does Mueller reference the fact that MI6's Christopher Steele's dirty dossier was the driver of Russiagate and that Steele
was a joint MI6, U.S. State Department, and FBI asset dating back to collaboration on the 2014 Ukraine coup conducted jointly by
the Obama State Department, CIA, and British intelligence. The Ukraine coup began a British march toward regime change in Russia,
risking nuclear war, a march which was rudely interrupted by the Brexit vote in Britain and by the candidacy and election of Donald
Trump.
The real story, the one now being promised by Trump's allies and others, is that many of the alleged Russian outreach efforts
cited in Mueller's report, such as multiple entrapment efforts conducted against Papadopoulos and Carter Page, as well as the
June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, were transparent British/State Department operations
designed to plant and fabricate evidence, namely, Russian generated "dirt" on Hillary Clinton.
Mueller completely avoided the real story, despite its public availability, in order to concoct his hit job. Each of these
operations involved British intelligence personnel collaborating with Obama White House, the CIA and State Department. These entrapment
efforts were designed as the pretext for creating and maintaining an FBI investigation. The FBI investigation in turn made the preposterous
claims in Christopher Steele's dirty dossier, that Donald Trump had been compromised by the Russians, palatable to the journalists
who repeated Steele's claims both before and after the election.
Like the Steele dossier itself, the dirt and allegedly Russian-sourced information about Putin and Trump did not originate with
actual Russian "dirt" or with actual Russian sources. According to well-placed Congressional sources, Christopher Steele's main source
for his dodgy dossier is a former Russian intelligence officer living in the United States. But, no former Russian intelligence officer
lives in the United States without reporting to the CIA. That is just a simple fact. There is also evidence that the Trump Campaign
was being flooded with FBI informants acting as "pretend" Russian agents as early as May. Mike Caputo has documented just such as
approach by FBI informant and Russian criminal Henry Greenberg to himself and Roger Stone offering "dirt on Hillary Clinton." Papadopoulos
claims that Sergei Millian, the alleged source of the infamous Ritz Hotel prostitute claim in Steele's dirty dossier, sat silently
as Millian's friend told Papadopoulos that Millian was working for the FBI.
The Moscow Trump Tower project also consumes hundreds of words in Mueller's screed. It was created by long-time FBI and CIA
informant Felix Sater and his childhood friend, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and was presented in emails by Sater in September of
2015 as a Russian project which would help elect Donald Trump President with Putin's assistance. It was pushed, and pushed,
and pushed by Sater, whose agreement to become an informant, was signed by none other than Andrew Weissman, Mueller's chief henchman.
Former CIA and State Department analyst Larry Johnson
has fully demonstrated this chain of fabrications .
As for the last portion of Part I of Mueller's Report, portraying efforts to secure peace with Russia and in Ukraine during the
transition as some sort of diabolical plot -- wow, just think about that. Can you seriously join Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller
in treating efforts to establish the foundations for peace with Russia, as some form of criminal act? Or, as crazy former DNI Jim
Clapper calls it, "passive collusion"? This is, of course, the same Jim Clapper who claims that Russians are genetically predisposed
to attack the United States. As Professor Stephen Cohen, of NYU and Princeton, continues to reiterate, there are
immense nuclear dangers in stoking hatred of Russia rather than seeking
a just accommodation. Professor Cohen noted recently that in the history of election interventions by the United States into Russia,
even if you accept all of Mueller's preposterous claims, what the Russians are accused of doing here is equivalent to jay-walking.
Compare the publication of truthful information about Hillary Clinton rigging the Democratic primaries, a juvenile and largely ineffective
social media campaign, and numerous attempts to improve U.S. Russian relations, with the $10 billion the Clinton Administration provided
to re-elect Boris Yeltsin, in 1996, for example.
Obstruction of Justice
Mueller's 250 page plus screed about obstruction of justice focuses on 10 "episodes" where he says the President almost crossed
the line into what he considers to be obstructive conduct. Mind you, he admits that as opposed to most obstruction cases, there was
no underlying crime which the President was trying to cover up. There were also never ever any acts like those Hillary Clinton's
crew committed, such as smashing cell phones with hammers and BleachBitting computers. In fact, the White House gave the Special
Counsel everything he asked for, including notes of President Trump's discussions with White House Counsel Don McGahn, over which
Executive Privilege could rightly have been claimed -- and many lawyers believe such privilege should have been exercised. Mueller
interviewed just about everyone in the White House and on the Trump Campaign, with the President's blessing and his urging them to
"cooperate." From this cooperation, Mueller's minions concocted a hit job, designed to portray the President as unstable and irrational
and out solely to protect himself, concealing derogatory facts from the American people in statements on his Twitter account and
to the press. Nowhere, however, even in this entire rabid prosecutor's screed is there any act which the courts have recognized as
obstruction of justice.
Instead, Mueller's argument is essentially this: "if you take all of this together, maybe it amounts to something, but I can't
decide, so Congress should just stick the knife in already." There is not sufficient evidence to charge a crime, Mueller says, but
Trump has also not proved his innocence.
Here's the CliffsNotes summary of the entire 448 pages: The President was under constant attack, including from within his
own White House, in an obvious attempt to frame him up while claiming he was committing treason. He got angry and didn't sit silently
by while Mueller and his minions tried to frame him up. He complained loudly. Sometimes he even asked his staff to figure out how
to proclaim his innocence. Under no conceivable construction is that obstruction of justice.
Three incidents make the fraud in Mueller's tedious novel very clear. First, Mueller babbles on about the President's conduct
concerning Michael Flynn's firing, but he never references that Michael Flynn had been targeted by the British authors of the Russiagate
hoax, the circles of Sir Richard Dearlove and his friend Stefan Halper, way back in 2014. They falsely accused Flynn of a dalliance
with Russian historian Svetlana Lokhova at a Cambridge event both attended. What really flipped the British out about Flynn, however,
was his exposure of support for Al Qaeda and similar groups in Syria by both the U.S. and British governments. Flynn had been a target
of FBI investigation and surveillance based on British demands for his head since early 2016, if not much earlier.
When Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia in the waning days of his Administration, in retaliation for what his intelligence
chiefs claimed was Russian "interference" in the 2016 election, the sanctions included implantation of a Stuxnet type worm in Russian
state infrastructure. This might be considered by the Russians as a very hot potential act of war. Flynn, the incoming National
Security Adviser, had conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak to the effect that the Russians should not overreact to Obama's
sanctions, among other things. These conversations were intercepted, and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and Mary McCord of the
National Security Division at DOJ, along with Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, plotted how to set Flynn up for undermining Obama's
dangerous threats and actions.
First, someone from a tight circle who had viewed these transcripts, leaked the classified transcripts to the Washington
Post's David Ignatius who wrote a loud column about Flynn colluding with the Russians to undermine Obama. That leak was a felony.
McCabe then called Flynn as the article hit, saying that he was sending over two agents to talk to him about what this was about
and telling him that involving any lawyers would be an encumbrance to a relaxed conversation. Flynn couldn't remember certain
things the agents asked him about. They had the transcript of Flynn's conversation and never showed it to him. In the course of the
interview, Flynn made statements at variance with what he was known to have said in the transcripts. Nonetheless, the agents themselves
said that Flynn had not deliberately lied to them when they reported back to the FBI.
After Flynn was fired for lying to Vice President Pence and others about the Kisylak conversations, FBI Director James Comey claims
that President Trump pulled him aside and said he "hoped" Comey would let the Flynn thing go because Flynn was a good guy. The maniacal
Comey insists that the President's "hope" was an "order." Comey, the fabricator, had previously insisted that the President's alleged
request for "loyalty," at a point where all of Washington was talking about RESIST members covertly acting against the President
from within his Administration, was somehow equivalent to a mafia induction ceremony. Michael Flynn was subsequently convicted by
Mueller of lying to the FBI in his White House interview despite the fact that the original agents concluded that no such lying even
occurred. This was part of a coerced plea deal resulting from the fact that Flynn was bankrupted by the legal fees necessary to defend
himself against Mueller's inquisition, and threats by Mueller to indict Flynn's son.
Then there is the Comey firing itself. Comey's Congressional testimony, which Mueller never mentions, lays out that each time
Comey met with the President he returned to compose contemporaneous memos of his conversations and to plan future encounters with
a close group of associates who he characterized as a "murder board." Such activities clearly indicate that Comey was engaged in
attempting to set the President up. Comey told Congress and Trump that he was not under investigation in Russiagate but refused
to tell the public that, knowing full well that the President felt it was completely hindering his ability to act, particularly with
respect to Russia.
Mueller does disclose that, from the beginning, Trump railed against Comey because he was blocking what Trump he wanted to do
with Russia on trade and ISIS. In fact, Trump dictated a letter to Steven Miller firing Comey because he would not tell the public
the truth about Russiagate and because it was hindering his ability to deal with Russia. Trump's letter was rejected by White House
staff, including White House Counsel Don McGahn, who came up with the idea of firing Comey based on Comey's misconduct in the Clinton
investigation. The President repeated the real reasons he was firing Comey publicly and almost immediately after Rod Rosenstein's
letter detailing Comey's misconduct in the Clinton investigation was released, and did so again, in an oval office meeting with Russian
Foreign Minister Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak. This is hardly the concealment associated with obstruction of justice.
Furthermore, the firestorm following Comey's firing illuminated the level of plotting against the President at the top levels
of the Department of Justice -- Rod Rosenstein seriously offered to wear a wire to record the President and participated in discussions
centered on organizing the cabinet to orchestrate the President's removal. Mueller never mentions any of this in his report.
Instead he adopts, wholesale, James Comey's claim that Trump fired him to hinder the Russia investigation, despite the fact that
the investigation was never hindered. Mueller also never references Comey's leaks of classified materials to a friend for media publication,
in order to trigger Mueller's own appointment as Special Counsel, or that everyone already knew, at that point, that there was "no
there, there" with respect to collusion with Russia.
Instead, the game was on to frame the President, to build the case Comey had not been able to make about obstruction of justice.
This proceeded through a series of calculated provocations and media leaks all designed to provoke the President into overreaction.
One of these is found in the episode involving the so-called attempt to "fire Mueller" which the media and Congress are salivating
about. According to Mueller's report, Trump called White House Counsel Don McGahn and told him to raise Mueller's conflicts of
interest with the Department of Justice and -- according to McGahn -- that Mueller could not be Special Counsel.
This call occurred soon after the Washington Post published a leak that the President himself was under investigation by Mueller
for obstruction of justice. McGahn construed Trump's words as an order to fire Mueller, even though, by his own account, no such
order to fire Mueller was stated. McGahn claims that he immediately decided to resign, although he never informed the President of
this. No call was ever placed to the Justice Department, Mueller was not fired, and Trump never repeated what he allegedly said on
one heated occasion to Don McGahn. Based on his drama queen account of this alleged aborted attempt at some undetermined act of obstruction,
however, McGahn is being hailed by the anti-Trump media as a modern Sir Thomas More.
The President denies ever saying anything like this and there is considerable evidence in the Mueller report itself demonstrating
that Trump's repeatedly pronounced distrust of McGahn was fully justified. The kicker here is that even if Trump had followed through
and fired Mueller, he would have been within his Constitutional powers to do so. There would have been plenty of political heat,
but no obstruction of justice, despite McGahn's ridiculous fantasy that he was being asked to re-enact Nixon's Saturday night massacre.
Mueller's report otherwise shows White House Counsel McGahn, a total creature of the Washington Republican establishment who attached
himself to Trump early in the campaign, keeping book on the President and taking notes on everything the President allegedly said
-- hardly something typical of normal lawyering.
So, despite this weekend's huffing and puffing of the Democrats and the media about the Mueller Report, it is important to remember,
first and foremost, that they suffered a bone-crushing defeat when Saint Robert Mueller's magical curtain was pulled back, revealing
a tale, full of sound and fury, but signifying absolutely nothing. Attorney General Barr will conduct a seminar for the children
in Congress when he testifies about the actual law shortly.
The real story, the one about the attempted coup and treason against this President and its perpetrators is coming, and it will
come fast. A big opportunity is presenting itself to crush the British apparatus which has haunted this country since the end of
World War II.
Act now, don't get confused by the heat of battle, and we can take the country back.
She had cast herself as a comparative innocent caught up in a massive geopolitical power
game and at Friday's sentencing hearing, Butina appealed to Judge Tanya Chutkan to release her
with nine months of time served.
"My reputation is ruined, both here in the United States and abroad," she said, asking for
"a chance to go home and restart my life".
Chutkan, however, fully complied with the government's recommendation and sentenced Butina
to spend an additional nine months behind bars, before being deported. The judge said the
sentence was meant "to reflect the seriousness of [Butina's actions] and to promote
deterrence".
Butina's lawyers decried the judgment as overly harsh; they had characterized Butina as a
naive but ambitious international affairs student who simply didn't realize her actions
required her to register as an agent of a foreign government.
The Russian embassy in Washington responded to the sentence in a Facebook post that Butina
"is a political prisoner, a victim of provocations by special services and the arbitrary use of
repressive US legislation. We insist on the innocence of our compatriot. We demand her
immediate release. We will continue to provide her with comprehensive consular and legal
assistance."
Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of the Russian
parliament, said the case was "political and fabricated from air poisoned with
Russophobia".
"It is necessary to continue the fight, to file an appeal and to do everything in our power
for Maria Butina to return to Russia as soon as possible," Slutsky was quoted
as saying by the state news agency Tass.
03/28/2016 With the increasing propaganda wars, we thought a reminder of just how naive many
Westerners are when it comes to their news-feed. As
Arjun Walia, of GlobalResearch.ca, notes, Dr. Ulfkotte went on public television stating
that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding
that noncompliance with these orders would result in him losing his job.
He recently made an appearance on RT news to share these facts:
I've been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not
to tell the truth to the public.
But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to
bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia -- this is a point of no return and
I'm going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate
people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have
done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over
Europe.
"... FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts. Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and assessing." ..."
"... Selective enforcement of FARA was, ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned. ..."
"... Kushner reportedly aggressively pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government. ..."
"... Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to do nothing about it. ..."
The Mueller Special Counsel inquiry is far from over even though a
final report on its findings has been issued. Although the investigation had a mandate to
explore all aspects of the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, from the start
the focus was on the possibility that some members of the Trump campaign had colluded with the
Kremlin to influence the outcome of the election to favor the GOP candidate. Even though that
could not be demonstrated, many prominent Trump critics, to include Laurence Tribe of the
Harvard Law School,
are demanding that the investigation continue until Congress has discovered "the full facts
of Russia's interference [to include] the ways in which that interference is continuing in
anticipation of 2020, and the full story of how the president and his team welcomed, benefited
from, repaid, and obstructed lawful investigation into that interference and the president's
cooperation with it."
Tribe should perhaps read the report more carefully. While it does indeed confirm some
Russian meddling, it does not demonstrate that anyone in the Trump circle benefited from it or
cooperated with it. The objective currently being promoted by dedicated Trump critics like
Tribe is to make a case to impeach the president based on the alleged enormity of the Russian
activity, which is not borne out by the facts: the Russian role was intermittent, small scale
and basically ineffective.
One interesting aspect of the Mueller inquiry and the ongoing Russophobia that it has
generated is the essential hypocrisy of the Washington Establishment. It is generally agreed
that whatever Russia actually did, it did not affect the outcome of the election. That the
Kremlin was using intelligence resources to act against Hillary Clinton should surprise no one
as she described Russian President Vladimir Putin as Hitler and also made clear that she would
be taking a very hard line against Moscow.
The anti-Russia frenzy in Washington generated by the vengeful Democrats and an
Establishment fearful of a loss of privilege and entitlement claimed a number of victims. Among
them was Russian citizen Maria Butina, who has a court date and will very likely be
sentenced tomorrow .
Regarding Butina, the United States Department of Justice would apparently have you believe
that the Kremlin sought to subvert the five-million-member strong National Rifle Association
(NRA) by having a Russian citizen take out a life membership in the organization with the
intention of corrupting it and turning it into an instrument for subverting American democracy.
Maria Butina has, by the way, a long and well documented history as an advocate for gun
ownership and was a co-founder in Russia of Right to Bear Arms, which is not an intelligence
front organization of some kind. It is rather a genuine lobbying group with an active
membership and agenda. Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media, Russians can
own guns but the licensing and registration procedures are long and complicated, which Right to
Bear Arms, modeling itself on the NRA, is seeking to change.
Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in a federal prison, having been
charged with collusion and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. She was
arrested on July 15, 2018. It is decidedly unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed
to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) , but she has not been granted bail because, as a
Russian citizen, she is considered to be a "flight risk," likely to try to flee the US and
return home.
FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to
registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts.
Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while
deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to
advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and
assessing."
Maria eventually pleaded guilty of not registering under FARA to mitigate any punishment,
hoping that she would be allowed to return to Russia after a few months in prison on top of the
nine months she has already served. She has reportedly fully cooperated the US authorities,
turning over documents, answering questions and undergoing hours of interrogation by federal
investigators before and after her guilty plea.
Maria Butina basically did nothing that damaged US security and it is difficult to see where
her behavior was even criminal, but the prosecution is asking for 18 months in prison for her
in addition to the time served. She would be, in fact, one of only a handful of individuals
ever to be imprisoned over FARA, and they all come from countries that Washington considers to
be unfriendly, to include Cuba, Saddam's Iraq and Russia. Normally the failure to comply with
FARA is handled with a fine and compulsory registration.
Butina was essentially convicted of the crime of being Russian at the wrong time and in the
wrong place and she is paying for it with prison. Selective enforcement of FARA was,
ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to
the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump
Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should
have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law
Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no
extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned.
Kushner reportedly aggressively
pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United
Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United
Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed
when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National
Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice
and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York
City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government.
Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser
George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately
determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that
Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli
government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to
do nothing about it.
As so often is the case, inquiries that begin by looking for foreign interference in
American politics start by focusing on Washington's adversaries but then comes up with Israel.
Noam Chomsky
described it best "First of all, if you're interested in foreign interference in our
elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as
compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Netanyahu
goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with
overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president's policies -- what happened with Obama
and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress
trying to -- calling on them to reverse US policy, without even informing the president? And
that's just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence."
Maria Butina is in jail for doing nothing while Jared Kushner, who needed a godfathered
security clearance due to his close Israeli ties, struts through the White House as senior
advisor to the president in spite of the fact that he used his nepotistically obtained access
to openly promote the interests of a foreign government. Mueller knows all about it but
recommended nothing, as if it didn't happen. The media is silent. Congress will do nothing. As
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi put it "We in Congress stand by
Israel. In Congress, we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel." Indeed.
"... How is it that the Deep State made it possible for Trump to win when it did almost everything it could to derail his chances, including the use of Obama, FBI, CIA, MI6, NSA, etc? ..."
"... Regardless one's feelings about Trump, what was done as Whitney points out is a massive danger to the fundamental aspects of the democratic process, and that's not being shown the light-of-day by BigLie Media. ..."
Mike Whitney
writes about one aspect of Russiagate that several of us have noted--the use of the FBI
and CIA to meddle in the 2016 campaign in an attempt to aid Clinton--an aspect that blows up
some of the hypotheses floated here. He begins thusly:
"Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign?-- Yes
"Did the FBI place spies in the Trump campaign?-- Yes
"Do we know the names of the spies and how they operated?-- Yes
"Were the spies trying to entrap Trump campaign assistants in order to gather information
on Trump?-- Yes
"Did the spies try to elicit information from Trump campaign assistants in order to
justify a wider investigation and more extensive surveillance?-- Yes
"Were the spies placed in the Trump campaign based on improperly obtained FISA warrants?--
Yes
"Did the FBI agents procure these warrants based on false or misleading information?--
Yes
"Could the FBI establish 'probable cause' that Trump had committed a crime or 'colluded'
with Russia?-- No
"So the 'spying' was illegal?-- Yes
"Have many of the people who authorized the spying, already been identified in criminal
referrals presented to the Department of Justice?-- Yes
"Have the media explained the importance of these criminal referrals or the impact that
spying has on free elections?-- No
"Is the DOJ's Inspector General currently investigating whether senior-level agents in the
FBI committed crimes by improperly obtaining warrants to spy on members of the Trump team?--
Yes
"Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign to give Hillary Clinton an unfair advantage in the
presidential race?-- Yes
"Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign to gather incriminating information on Trump that
could be used to blackmail, intimidate or impeach him in the future?-- Yes
"Does spying pose a threat to our elections and to our democracy?-- Yes
"Do many people know that there were spies placed in the Trump campaign?-- Yes
"Have these people effectively used that information to their advantage?-- No
"Have they launched any type of public relations offensive that would draw more attention
to the critical issue of spying on a political campaign?-- No
"Have they saturated the airwaves with the truth about 'spying' the same way their rivals
have spread their disinformation about 'collusion'?-- No" [Emphasis in Original]
That's a little more than half of what Whitney lists that's quite damning as we must
admit. That it's not being discussed anywhere outside of a few social media accounts means
Trump could use the "precedent" set by Obama to do the same in 2020. Shouldn't we be
concerned about that possibility? How is it that the Deep State made it possible for Trump to
win when it did almost everything it could to derail his chances, including the use of Obama,
FBI, CIA, MI6, NSA, etc?
Regardless one's feelings about Trump, what was done as Whitney points out is a massive
danger to the fundamental aspects of the democratic process, and that's not being shown the
light-of-day by BigLie Media. And we can also see why Pelosi and Clinton don't want
Impeachment proceedings to occur as the above information would finally become far more
overt/public than it is currently.
"... Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine's chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me he attended some but not all of the January 2016 Washington meetings and couldn't remember the specific cases, if any, that were discussed. ..."
"... But he said he soon saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election . Kholodnytskyy said the key evidence against Manafort -- a ledger showing payments from the Party of Regions -- was known to Ukrainian authorities since 2014 but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the U.S.-friendly NABU, after Manafort was named Trump's campaign chairman: "Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it to the public and the U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious." ..."
"... "I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they had broken my order and published themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding Paul Manafort." ..."
"... Kulyk said Ukrainian authorities had evidence that other Western figures , such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig, also received money from Yanukovych's party. But the Americans weren't interested: "They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else." ..."
"... According to Telizhenko, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. But then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Ukraine's chief prosecutor in March 2016, as I previously reported. The Burisma case was transferred to NABU, then shut down. ..."
"... The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington on Thursday confirmed the Obama administration requested the meetings in January 2016, but embassy representatives attended only some of the sessions. ..."
"... But Telizhenko's claim that the DOJ reopened its Manafort probe as the 2016 election ramped up is supported by the DOJ's own documents, including communications involving Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, his wife, Nellie, and ex-British spy Christopher Steele. ..."
"... DOJ emails show Nellie Ohr on May 30, 2016, directly alerted her husband and two DOJ prosecutors specializing in international crimes to the discovery of the "black ledger" documents that led to Manafort's prosecution. ..."
"... The efforts eventually led to a September 2016 meeting in which the FBI asked Deripaska if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia. Deripaska laughed off the notion as preposterous. ..."
"... Now we have more concrete evidence that the larger Ukrainian government also was being pressed by the Obama administration to help build the Russia collusion narrative. And that onion is only beginning to be peeled. ..."
"... But what is already confirmed by Ukrainians looks a lot more like assertive collusion with a foreign power than anything detailed in the Mueller report . ..."
As Donald Trump began his meteoric rise to the presidency,
the Obama White House summoned Ukrainian authorities to Washington to coordinate ongoing anti-corruption efforts inside Russia's
most critical neighbor.
The January 2016 gathering, confirmed by multiple participants and contemporaneous memos, brought some of Ukraine's top corruption
prosecutors and investigators face to face with members of former President Obama's National Security Council (NSC), FBI, State Department
and Department of Justice (DOJ).
That makes the January 2016 meeting one of the earliest documented efforts to build the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative
and one of the first to involve the Obama administration's intervention.
Spokespeople for the NSC, DOJ and FBI declined to comment. A representative for former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice
did not return emails seeking comment.
Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine's chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me he attended some but not all of the January 2016
Washington meetings and couldn't remember the specific cases, if any, that were discussed.
But he said he soon saw evidence in Ukraine of
political meddling in the U.S. election . Kholodnytskyy said the key evidence against Manafort -- a ledger showing payments from
the Party of Regions -- was known to Ukrainian authorities since 2014 but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the U.S.-friendly
NABU, after Manafort was named Trump's campaign chairman: "Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it
to the public and the U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious."
Kholodnytskyy said he explicitly instructed NABU investigators who were working with American authorities not to share
the ledger with the media. "Look, Manafort's case is one of the cases that hurt me a lot," he said.
"I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they had broken my order and published
themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding Paul Manafort."
"For me it was the first call that something was going wrong and that there is some external influence in this case. And there
is some other interests in this case not in the interest of the investigation and a fair trial," he added.
Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Ukraine prosecutor general's international affairs office, said that, shortly after Ukrainian
authorities returned from the Washington meeting, there was a clear message about helping the Americans with the Party of the Regions
case.
"Yes, there was a lot of talking about needing help and then the ledger just appeared in public," he recalled.
Kulyk said Ukrainian authorities had evidence
that other Western figures , such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig, also received money from Yanukovych's party.
But the Americans weren't interested: "They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else."
Manafort joined Trump's campaign on March 29, 2016, and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016.
NABU leaked the existence of the ledgers on May 29, 2016. Later that summer, it told U.S. media the ledgers showed payments to
Manafort, a revelation that forced him to resign from the campaign in August 2016.
A Ukrainian court in December concluded NABU's release of the ledger was an illegal attempt to influence the U.S. election. And
a member of Ukraine's parliament has released a recording of a NABU official saying the agency released the ledger to help Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign.
The other case raised at the January 2016 meeting, Telizhenko said, involved
Burisma Holdings , a
Ukrainian energy company under investigation in Ukraine for improper foreign transfers of money. At the time, Burisma allegedly was
paying then-Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter as both a board
member and a consultant. More than $3 million flowed from Ukraine to an American firm tied to Hunter Biden in 2014-15,
bank records show .
According to Telizhenko, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the
FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. But then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to
fire Ukraine's chief prosecutor in March 2016, as I previously reported. The Burisma case was transferred to NABU, then shut
down.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington on Thursday confirmed the Obama administration requested the meetings in January 2016,
but embassy representatives attended only some of the sessions.
"Unfortunately, the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, D.C., was not invited to join the DOJ and other law enforcement-sector meetings,"
it said. It said it had no record that the Party of Regions or Burisma cases came up in the meetings it did attend.
Ukraine is riddled with corruption, Russian meddling and intense political conflicts, so one must carefully consider any Ukrainian
accounts.
But Telizhenko's claim that the DOJ reopened its Manafort probe as the 2016 election ramped up is supported by the DOJ's own
documents, including communications involving Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, his wife, Nellie, and ex-British spy Christopher
Steele.
Nellie Ohr and Steele worked in 2016 for the research firm, Fusion GPS, that was hired by Clinton's campaign and the Democratic
National Committee (DNC) to find Russia dirt on Trump. Steele wrote the famous dossier for Fusion that the FBI used to gain a warrant
to spy on the Trump campaign. Nellie Ohr admitted to Congress that she routed Russia dirt on Trump from Fusion to the DOJ
through her husband during the election.
DOJ emails show Nellie Ohr on May 30, 2016, directly alerted her husband and two DOJ prosecutors specializing in international
crimes to the discovery of the "black ledger" documents that led to Manafort's prosecution.
"Reported Trove of documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions' Black Cashbox," Nellie Ohr
wrote to her husband and federal prosecutors
Lisa Holtyn and Joseph Wheatley, attaching
a news article
on the announcement of NABU's release of the documents.
Bruce Ohr and Steele worked on their own effort to get dirt on Manafort from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who had a soured
business relationship with him. Deripaska was "almost ready to talk" to U.S. government officials regarding the money that "Manafort
stole," Bruce Ohr wrote in notes from his conversations with Steele.
The efforts eventually led to a September 2016 meeting in which the
FBI asked Deripaska if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia. Deripaska laughed off the notion as
preposterous.
Previously, Politico reported
that the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington assisted Clinton's campaign through a DNC contractor. The Ukrainian Embassy acknowledges
it got requests for assistance from the DNC staffer to find dirt on Manafort but denies it provided any improper assistance.
Now we have more concrete evidence that the larger Ukrainian government also was being pressed by the Obama administration
to help build the Russia collusion narrative. And that onion is only beginning to be peeled.
But what is already confirmed by Ukrainians looks a lot more like assertive collusion with a foreign power than anything detailed
in the Mueller report .
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence
failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists' misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous
cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow
him on Twitter @jsolomonReports
Donald Trump
has apparently accused the UK of conspiring to help the Obama administration spy on his presidential
campaign, saying "when the truth comes out, it will be a beauty!".
The US president promoted the conspiracy
theory on Twitter by quoting a right-wing US news organisation's headline, which according to Mr Trump read: "Former
CIA analyst Larry Johnson accuses United Kingdom Intelligence of helping Obama Administration Spy on the 2016 Trump
Presidential Campaign."
Mr Trump added: "WOW! It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be a
beauty!"
GCHQ, the UK government's chief digital spying organisation, branded the allegation "utterly ridiculous".
"As we have previously stated, the allegations that GCHQ was asked to conduct 'wire tapping' against the then
President Elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored," the agency told Reuters.
The claim appears to stem from Mr Johnson, a former CIA analyst who is a longtime critic of US intelligence and a
defender of Russia.
Mr Johnson has previously claimed without providing evidence the CIA, and not Moscow, may have been behind
the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, and has frequently appeared on Russian state media to reject US
intelligence conclusions of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Guardian
reported in 2017 Britain's intelligence agencies had alerted their US counterparts to
suspicious "interaction" between figures connected to the Trump campaign and Russian agents, but that it was part of
a "routine exchange" of information and that CGHQ never carried out a targeted operation against Mr Trump or his
team. There is no evidence the Obama administration conducted a spying operation against the Trump campaign.
Mr Trump's tweet followed one last month in which he suggested Britain had
invented Russian election interference
in order to "bait" the US into taking a hard line against Moscow.
It comes two years after GCHQ was
forced to deny it "wire tapped" Trump Tower
in 2016, after the White House promoted a Fox News pundit's
allegation Barack Obama bypassed US intelligence by using the UK's spy centre to obtain details of Mr Trump's
conversations.
"They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored," GCHQ said at the time.
The president, who has access to information provided by the world's most powerful intelligence agencies, later
told reporters "you should be talking to Fox" when asked about the claim.
Mr Trump's tweet comes just 40 days before he is due in the UK on a state visit.
There is also the question of Russiagate. It goes without saying that Trump would covet an
opportunity to settle scores with the Democratic Party over that witch hunt, which, in cahoots
with the mainstream media, stalked the US leader and his administration for two painstaking
years. And even now, after the release of the Mueller Report, the Democrats refuse to throw in
the towel and are plotting to
interrogate the interrogator himself, Robert Mueller. This is where Julian Assange might
help halt the madness, although that is not to suggest, of course, that he is necessarily
predisposed to such an opportunity. Yet he may find himself with no choice in the matter.
Before continuing with that line of discussion, there are some rather strange things about the
Assange case that need mentioning.
For those who may have forgotten, and it seems that many have, Rich, 27, was the Director of
Voter Expansion Data at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at the time of his death. In
other words, he would have been in the loop to view emails showing foul play inside of the DNC.
What kind of foul play? Well, for starters, deliberate efforts to marginalize Bernie Sanders in
favor of Hillary Clinton, who responded to the arrest of Julian Assange with her trademark
cackle before remarking, "The bottom line is that he has to answer for what he has done, at
least as it has been charged." For Hillary Clinton that means wrecking her chances at the White
House.
Incidentally, it was at this time in history, in July 2016 during the release of the
incriminating DNC emails, when the perennial bogeyman Russia was
wheeled out as not only the source of the emails, but the kingmaker in the US election as
well.
At this point, it is important to emphasize that there is no proof to suggest that Rich had
anything to with leaking the DNC emails to WikiLeaks. In fact, to merely suggest such a thing
has been given the 'conspiracy theory' stamp of disapproval by the establishment. Yet that has
not stopped the flow of mysteries. For example, Rod Wheeler, a private investigator hired by
the Rich family to investigate the death of their son, said he had sources at the FBI who
"absolutely" confirmed that there was evidence on Rich's laptop that indicates he was
communicating with WikiLeaks prior to his death. However, just days after divulging this
explosive information, Wheeler backtracked on his statement,
calling his on-air comments a "miscommunication."
For what it is worth, Snopes has called the claims that
Rich leaked the emails as "false."
Yet, there remains the circumstantial evidence, namely Rich's untimely death, as well as its
uncanny timing. There also remains the question of his supervisory position inside of the DNC,
and the assertion that the DNC emails were not discovered by hackers, but rather a leaker. In
other words, an internal source at the DNC. Whether or not Mr. Rich was that source remains
questionable, however, Julian Assange not only referred to Seth Rich during an interview, he
offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of his killer or
killers.
"Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant
risks," Assange said
in an interview with a Dutch television station. "There's a 27-year-old who works for the
DNC, who was shot in the back, murdered, just two weeks ago, for unknown reasons as he was
walking down the street in Washington."
When pressed for more information, he said, "I'm suggesting that our sources take risks and
they become concerned to see things occurring like that."
On the basis of that comment, Assange could potentially be called to testify as a witness
should the authorities decide to reopen the case of Seth Rich's murder.
This leads us to the million-dollar question: were the DNC computers hacked by the Russians
or was the data leaked by an internal source at the organization and forwarded to WikiLeaks?
The answer to that question would not only settle the 'Russian meddling' mystery once and for
all, it would determine how the DNC/Clinton emails were compromised.
Many people are of the opinion it was not the Russians.
William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower and member
of Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), co-authored
a report (entitled, "Why the DNC was not hacked by the Russians") that says the
WikiLeaks dump was the result of a leak by "a person with physical access to the DNC's computer
system."
"The NSA had an opportunity to make it clear that there was irrefutable proof of Russian
meddling, particularly with regard to the DNC hack, when it signed on to the January 2017
'Intelligence Community Assessment,'" Binney wrote.
Instead, the NSA could only say it has "moderate confidence," which means, in intelligence
speak, "we have no hard evidence," the pair concluded.
Meanwhile, there remains the question as to how any conclusion could have been made when the
DNC refused to hand over the compromised computer servers to the FBI.
"We'd always prefer to have access hands-on ourselves if that's possible," former FBI head
James Comey
told lawmakers in October 2017. He added that he didn't know why the DNC refused the FBI,
which was forced to rely on data provided by CrowdStrike, a private security firm hired by the
DNC.
Following the release of the Mueller Report, which failed to find any proof that Trump
colluded with the Russians, there remains a glaring yet unproven accusation that needs
addressed: that is the allegation that the Russians somehow fixed the election in Trump's
favor.
Although the mainstream media may be ignoring Binney's findings, that doesn't mean everyone
is. In October 2017, Binney paid a visit to CIA headquarters, at the invitation of Donald
Trump, where he met with then agency director Mike Pompeo, as cited
by The Intercept.
Any guesses whose name was brought up in the course of the meeting between Binney and
Pompeo? Yes, that of Seth Rich. Again, whether or not that proves to be significant remains an
open question.
But make no mistake. Donald Trump would like nothing more than to remove the ugly footnote
that the Democrats have tacked to his presidency that says the Russians "succeeded beyond their
wildest dreams," to
quote former intelligence chief James Clapper, by stealing the White House from Hillary
Clinton. In other words, Trump does not deserve to be president, the Democrats continue to
chant mindlessly. And even after the Mueller Report talk of impeachment continues to hang in
the air. The only way to confront the insanity is to have Mr. Assange testify in the United
States, possibly as the result of a plea bargain, about his knowledge of Russiagate.
In fact, such an arrangement had been made before. In January 2017, Assange's lawyer Adam
Waldman "negotiated with the Justice Department on a possible deal to get the WikiLeaks founder
limited immunity and safe passage out of a London embassy to talk with U.S. officials,"
according to a
report by The Hill.
Among other things, Assange would have been expected to "provide technical information to
the U.S. ruling out certain suspects in the release of hacked DNC emails key to the Russia case
"
But the negotiations hit a snag and –
according to a source cited by John Solomon of The Hill – James Comey told Assange's
lawyer to "stand down" on the offer.
Now, considering that many of the 'old Obama guard' – like James Comey, the fired FBI
director, and Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr – are no longer steering the
investigation, there remains the possibility that the Trump administration will be willing to
hear what WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has to say about the greatest witch hunt in the
history of US politics . Assange's testimony, should it happen, may even help solve the mystery
of the Seth Rich murder.
In other words, don't believe that Russiagate has concluded. Indeed, it may have only just
begun.
Or, if the British keep holding onto him, it might be the Deep Estate and the
Obola/Clinton cabals want to keep Assange on ice so that he won't put the kabosh on the
Russia Gate narrative.
The real Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy right within the bowels of the US
Government.
And we have this from August 2017:
Republican California Representative Dana Rohrabacher met with WikiLeaks Founder Julian
Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London this week.
According
to Rohrabacher, Assange "reaffirmed his aggressive denial that the Russians had anything to
do with the hacking of the DNC during the election," in the meeting, adding, "He has given
us a lot of information. He said there's more to come. We don't have the entire picture
yet."
Rohrabacher further claimed that the information he received would have "an
earth-shattering political impact."
I believe its been determined that the DNC emails were leaked, not hacked by Russians.
According to different reports the emails were downloaded to a thumbdrive as a fantastic
speed, much to fast for it to be a hack.
I was running one of the largest Bernie Groups and I was Bernie or Bust. I really believe
that Seth Reich did leak the info to Julian Assange and he was killed as a hero. DWS who is a
criminal was definitely involved and I wouldn't doubt about Mossad's involvement. Mossad is
very sneaky and professional in killing. All we need is DNC Fraud Lawsuit. But even Becks
were threatened and the case didn't go anywhere.
Trump is just extremely selfish and he used Wikileaks in his campaign by defending him.
But he doesn't give a damn about Julian Assange.
I agree. I'm ******* tired of dumbasses trying to paint Trump as a swamp-drainer when he
has already proven he's a swamp creature himself, surrounded by zios and neocons.
The neocons are bad, but it is the failure on the border, with hundreds of thousands of
visa overstays, and legal immigration increases of third world refugees, h1bs, and h2bs that
most egregious of the Trump administration.
"This leads us to the million-dollar question: were the DNC computers hacked by the
Russians or was the data leaked by an internal source at the organization and forwarded to
WikiLeaks? The answer to that question would not only settle the 'Russian meddling' mystery
once and for all, it would determine how the DNC/Clinton emails were compromised."
This author is off his nut
This is exactly why Julian is being shut down. Unable to see even his lawyers, being
denied medical treatment and likely being tortured.
This is why Comey sabotaged the deal..
Russia hack = IRAQI WMD. The elite are determined to manufacture public consent for war on
Russia.
They know Julian would not only destroy this narrative but that he would create a mass
back lash for all of US who knew Russiagate was ******** in the first place.
Trump is a Zionist stooge is arming and funding the NEONAZI THUGS in Ukraine right along
with Israhsll.
He has ZERO intention of doing what the author suggest. This is pure fantasy with
absolutely ZERO to back it up.
"... While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC. ..."
"... In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November. ..."
"... I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create. ..."
"... Thus began the official demonization of Russia. A demonization very convenient to the necessity of having an implacable enemy always ready to pounce on the good, moral, humanitarian, and freely enterprising United States. ..."
"... Now, conflating any individual with Russia, will always immediately result in that person becoming, in the US, in the U.K. and in other US-kept vassal nations totally tarred with all sorts of nefarious and always unexamined assumptions. ..."
"... Thanks to the intelligence community, the political elite, notably in the Democratic "wing" of the War Party, but with the support of the Republican wing of that party, and certain individual players aligned with the US policy "Full Spectrum Dominance" which, of course, is compassionate goodness and not to be confused with the vile aims of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and a whole host of other "bad guy" nations or amorphous groups known as "terrorists. ..."
"... Clearly, the consensus opinion is shaped, not inside the minds of millions of people, all projecting their very worst fears or even their own worst proclivities on individuals like Putin or whoever is the "Hitler" of the convenient moment, but rather on the efforts of, let us call them "entities" who plan to benefit from a populous aroused to anxiety or even fear itself. ..."
"... the British ruling elites have hated the Russians for well over a hundred years. ..."
"... The truth is Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Rachel Maddow, and the rest if the Scooby Doo gang handed Agent Orange the victimhood script he needs to feed his Trumpets to win the 2020 election. ..."
"... They've also guaranteed no matter what heinous gangster scam shit he has done in the past or will do in the future, none of it will stick because he'll play the falsely accused card. ..."
"... There is an inability to accept the fact that people in DC and NYC and Boston and San Francisco and other Financial/ MIC-driven areas were doing well relative to the bulk of Americans and life was wonderful until the 2016 Election. For these people "America Has Never Stopped Being Great!" (Similar to the "I've got mine, Jack! " attitude of Great Britain, as their labor unions lost unity with rest of the working class.) ..."
Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.
There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably,
Putin would have favored Clinton, since she could be bought. Trump can't.
What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT
a FISA warrant. They only obtained that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis
for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.
Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That
was apparent ever after Devin Nunes did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying
on him.
Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason)
they needed to cover that up as quickly as possible.
So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying
till this very day. The same lie through which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the
Trump campaign was being pushed openly.
The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential
Election'.
They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump
through lying to the FISA Court, which again, is treason. According to the Constitution,
lying to the FISA court= Treason.
In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the
Attorney General. At all costs, they needed to try and hide what really happened.
So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire
Trump campaign!'.
'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.
Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire
story. It was only later on that Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary
who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.
The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be
able to achieve three main objectives.
1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential
Election.
2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order
to 'take them down'.
Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a
crime that had ANYTHING to with with the elections. NONE.
They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people
are willing to believe the lie'.
So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many
people as possible. 'Russian Collusion, Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia.
Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..
Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?
Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with
the Trump campaign.
There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the
Presidential Election.
That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama
regime!!
So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?
He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with
Russia.
The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.
His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude
with the Russians'.
Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.
They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about.
Yet it was not.
The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.
It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.
The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.
"Russia'.
So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?
A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY
Russians.
And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was
only a distraction)
B: Russians hacked the DNC.
That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.
Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.
It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire
regime in order to let Clinton win the Presidency.
That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!
In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad
things.
That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence'
that Russia somehow did bad things.
Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question
'why did Obama spy on the Trump Campaign'.
Let's go a bit deeper still.
Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push?
The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?
After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.
If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I
think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP the real crime', what would happen?
They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept
Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.
They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing
anything wrong, it would show us all THEY were the criminals.
They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.
That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon
Solomon still don't seem to see all that.
They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is
simply not true. It's a Mueller created LIE. That LIE = the Insurance Policy.
What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about
preventing Trump from being elected.
Although true, that is only A.
They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and
would find out they were illegally spying on him!
The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected
President.
What's the punishment for Treason?
About Assange and Seth Rich.
Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which
seems to be succesfull, the Deep State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that
lie.
Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.
If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be
exposed.
No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for
his life.
Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48
While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less
convincing part of your argument is that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests.
Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the overthrow of Madura are
all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump
may not have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia,
Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.
Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.
It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to
deteriorate the more his actions and statements are attacked and countered? You know what
happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them down? They get
weapons and start killing people.
There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the
least being he's clearly mentally unfit. Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a
promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation". Nancy Pelosi
stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda
"for now". She's now making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are:
noise.
The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one
issue to run on next year: getting rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion
they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters, the same ones they were
positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip
service to progressive policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions
once the donations start coming, but the common underlying theme was and continues to be
"Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."
In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform.
They need him there as a target, because Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat.
They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton campaign, to
block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash
and burn before they disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is
through next November.
Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21
I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind
numbing circus has been played out JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails
actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John Pedesta as she has
on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the
election" ? We'd be a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp
she helped create.
Jeff Harrison , April 22, 2019 at 10:50
Thank you, Three Names. The so-called "most qualified presidential candidate ever" who's
only actual qualifications are the destruction of what had formerly been a peaceful, secular
state into a failed state riven with religious rivalry and racking up a billion frequent
flyer miles has left us with a Gordian knot of misinformation, disinformation, and outright
lies that will bedevil the country and our relations with other countries for some time to
come.
There's a special place in hell for people like you.
Charron , April 22, 2019 at 10:04
I see that the very liberal Noam Chomsky has recently stated that he was sure the Russians
did not to do the hacking of the DNC emails and that accusing Trump of being a party to this
was only going to help him in the 2020 elations because it wasn't true.
AnneR , April 22, 2019 at 09:20
Thank you Caitlin for providing a most necessary corrective to the incessant drone that I
– unwillingly but have no other radio station available (and it is, however nauseating
and rant inducing, necessary to know what propaganda the corporate-capitalist-imperialist
state media are disseminating) – hear on both the BBC World Service and NPR. (We
refused to pay to watch television and I have continued that partnership tradition since my
husband died. So thankfully I've not seen the Maddow money raking insanity.)
And thank you for suggesting some clear ways to counter the Kool Aid infected codswallop.
It amazes just how much even the highly educated have completely accepted the
corporate-capitalist-imperialist propaganda, just as I am amazed that the same people
(friends of my husband, though what he'd think about their swallowing it all ) really seem to
be completely unconcerned about what the US has done and is doing to other peoples in other
countries (you know, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine – ah yes that coup – Yemen and
so on and on). And they clearly are more afraid of Russia than of their (our) own
military-deep state-police
DW Bartoo , April 22, 2019 at 08:16
Julian Assange is a vilified human being.
When vilification occurs a very necessary question that critical thought must ponder is
who benefits from such scapegoating?
However, for the moment, let us ponder, again in service to actual critical thought, why
aligning Assange with Russia is expected by those who will and intend to benefit from that
association. Why is suggesting that Assange is "a Russian agent" expected to convince
millions of USians that Assange is "a bad person"?
Why would millions accept that assertion without questioning it at all?
Caitlin suggest that those millions are "herd animals", implying that they are led into
believing two things. The first is that Russia and the Russian people are "bad", we have even
recently had a much trusted official suggest that Russians are "genetically" predisposed to
badness with a malignant tendency to single out the innocent, and one indispensable nation,
the United States for the most nefarious of Russian "interventions", amounting, according to
a famous Hollywood actor, who occasionally portrays a certain deity in the movies, to "an
attack".
In the meager interest of context and history, stretching back a bit more than a century,
some USians who are aware of that history, recognize that the US, under President Woodrow
Wilson sent US military troops into Russia in order to end the rise of the Bolshevik
rebellion/revolution.
Thus began the official demonization of Russia. A demonization very convenient to the
necessity of having an implacable enemy always ready to pounce on the good, moral,
humanitarian, and freely enterprising United States.
Now, conflating any individual with Russia, will always immediately result in that person
becoming, in the US, in the U.K. and in other US-kept vassal nations totally tarred with all
sorts of nefarious and always unexamined assumptions.
Mark Twain once suggested that the deity created war that USians might learn geography.
Clearly, it is a laborious process and has failed to create much global geographical
awareness among the millions, most of whom are content to think whatever nation is correctly
being ministered to or in the sights of "everything is on the table" as simply being,
vaguely, "over there".
That is why the US must strike "them" "over there" so as to avoid the frightening thought
of having "them" have to be dealt with "here" in the "Homeland" of "the free and the
brave".
This suggests that the "herd" has to be led to certain conclusions.
Unlike horses, the herd HAS to drink.
If the herd does not consume the elixir, then it may not be willing to joyfully send the
"flower of its youth" off to become cannon fodder should the Table of Everything so
demand.
I grew up in the nineteen fifties when the first Cold War was in full blossom. We school
students were told and taught that Russia hated us, wanted to attack and kill us all,
intended to rule the world with an iron hand and ruthless godlessness.
Thanks to the intelligence community, the political elite, notably in the Democratic
"wing" of the War Party, but with the support of the Republican wing of that party, and
certain individual players aligned with the US policy "Full Spectrum Dominance" which, of
course, is compassionate goodness and not to be confused with the vile aims of Russia, China,
Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and a whole host of other "bad guy" nations or amorphous
groups known as "terrorists.
Now, by tying Assange to that hodge-podge of baddies, the many may rest assured that he
has been put in his proper place.
Clearly, the consensus opinion is shaped, not inside the minds of millions of people, all
projecting their very worst fears or even their own worst proclivities on individuals like
Putin or whoever is the "Hitler" of the convenient moment, but rather on the efforts of, let
us call them "entities" who plan to benefit from a populous aroused to anxiety or even fear
itself.
The list of beneficiaries includes the financial elites who always profit from war and
"confusion", the political elites who serve those monied interests, the media, academia, the
military, intelligence, weapons manufacturers, energy producers, military contractors and so
on.
Assange, to his great and everlasting credit, exposed a very large amount of this
including, with the invaluable efforts
of Chelsea Manning, actual war crimes perpetrated by the US, even beyond beginning wars based
on lies.
Fortunately, the media, having overplayed it hand in the manipulation has exposed itself
to many as being but a propaganda industry.
A very real question for those concerned with engaging critical thought processes is just
how many humans are still being led, rather easily, around by the fallacious and very
dangerous concoctions of the opinion "shapers" in think tanks, media echo chambers, corporate
boardrooms, and academic snake pits?
Perhaps there comes a time for humanity, if it is not to trot along in the footsteps of
the dodo bird to look not where the fingers of deceit are pointing, but at those to whom the
fingers are attached?
AnneR , April 22, 2019 at 09:33
DWB – as a USian of English birth (of about the same age, I would imagine) I am
amazed at the fear the US had of the USSR back in the 1950s. When my husband told me, in the
1980s, about how he and his schoolmates had had nuclear air raid attack drills (sheltering
under desks and so on!) I'm sure that I gawped, fly-catchingly. What??? Nowt remotely similar
occurred in the UK during the 1950s in schools or elsewhere.
It was only since I began studying history (late in life) that I learnt that the British
ruling elites have hated the Russians for well over a hundred years. Still not quite sure
why, nor yet why whatever the Russians did (Crimean War in the 1850s?) that pissed them off
so royally should have any bearing on Russia-UK relations nowadays. But that could be because
I'm dim. And because I've no hatred, dislike, fear of Russians (or Chinese or Iranians) at
all. My fears revolve around the hubris-arrogance and determination to retain economic and
more general world domination by the US and its poodles in the UK-FR-NATO and Israel (though
their status as dog or leash is debatable). These are the countries to be afraid of.
Sam F , April 22, 2019 at 20:34
Yes, the remarkably unprovoked hatred of Russia among the UK aristocracy, regardless of
era or government there, is a great wonder. They did not even have eras of invasion threats,
colonial competition, or competing navies, as with France, Spain, and Portugal. Britain's
19th century invasions of Afghanistan were apparently provoked by nothing but fear, and their
several lost wars there apparently did not even engage Russians. Even complete transitions of
Russian government from monarchy to communism to capitalism failed to affect UK's fears. If
the cause were mere cultural difference, they would have feared the orient.
Perhaps their aristocracy was not polite enough, or those backwards Ns, upside down Rs,
and Pi symbols terrified the British.
geeyp , April 22, 2019 at 23:49
Anne R. – For more on your second paragraph, visit Larouchepac.org The late Lyndon
Larouche's site has a lot of info on this.
Zhu , April 23, 2019 at 00:50
Britain & Russia were rivals for empire. Both were expanding in Asia – The Great
Game. Russia got Turkestan, Britain got India, both wanted China. Hence the elite's hatred,
although now it's probably traditional and automatic.
Keep studying history – it's ales ts enlightening!
AnneR , April 23, 2019 at 09:22
Yes Zhu – I do continue with history, although of course no historian and thus
history is ever free (as with all scholars) of their personal worldview. And yes I realize
that the UK, when an imperial power, viewed the world pretty much as the US does now: its
domain. So obviously any and all contenders were up for vitriolic loathing and war. But it
still doesn't explain the particularly vicious attitude toward Russia on the part of the
British ruling elites. After all the Brits also had France, Holland and Germany (earlier
Spain and Portugal) as competitors, admittedly at different time periods, and no they weren't
"liked" and were often at war with each other. But there was never the same bitterness toward
western European rivals as there was and continues to be toward Russia.
That the USSR provoked deep, undying hatred among the aristos and their hangers' on does
not surprise: can't have anything remotely similar happening in our cushy backyard, can't
have the unwashed, ignorant, prole herd actually learning any lessons from the Soviets.
Yet even so – no nuclear air raid drills in schools or anywhere during red-baiting
season. Nothing kindred.
The truth is Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Rachel Maddow, and the rest if the Scooby Doo
gang handed Agent Orange the victimhood script he needs to feed his Trumpets to win the 2020
election.
They've also guaranteed no matter what heinous gangster scam shit he has done in the past
or will do in the future, none of it will stick because he'll play the falsely accused
card.
For the idiot Americans watching White House reality TV at home, this means celebrity
Trump now has immunity and can't be voted off the island this season or next.
Ah yes, the evil Rooskies. From the article you obviously didn't read: In fact, WikiLeaks has published hundreds of thousands of documents pertaining to Russia,
has made critical comments about the Russian government and defended dissident Russian
activists, and in 2017 published an entire trove called the Spy Files Russia exposing Russian
surveillance practices. wikileaks russia files: https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/
I think we can tell who the "tool" is.
AnneR , April 22, 2019 at 12:30
Did you not actually read Caitlin's article? And other similar ones? YES Wikileaks has
published thousands of documents regarding Russian secret activities – and the Russian
government has not been at all happy about it. However, unlike the USian government it hasn't
trampled all over people's rights under international law to persecute Assange.
Frankly – if the USian government and its "comrades" in the UK don't like their
filthy linen being revealed for what it is – perhaps they should stop creating it in
the first place.
Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:08
>>> " Do they publish anything on Russia?"
Yes, as you and all of the many, many others who ignorantly and endlessly repeat this
question would know, if you had ever bothered to review WikiLeaks' work. In this case, you
would know if you had even bothered to read the article above your comment.
Likewise, the sky is green, the grass is blue and the sun rises in the West
michael , April 22, 2019 at 07:06
"People take this repetition as a substitute for proof due to a glitch in human psychology
known as the illusory truth effect, a phenomenon which causes our brains to tend to interpret
things we've heard before as known truths." I think it is a deeper phenomenon than repetition
of lies (which have been legal since 2014 with the 'modernization' of Smith-Mundt, our
anti-propaganda law).
The #resistence seems to fulfill people who have never accepted any religions
whole-heartedly; there is something in the human psyche which demands an intuitive
evidence-free, faith-based acceptance of beliefs which go beyond facts and evidence. This is
a powerful dream world where their illusions are more powerful than reality.
There is an inability to accept the fact that people in DC and NYC and Boston and San
Francisco and other Financial/ MIC-driven areas were doing well relative to the bulk of
Americans and life was wonderful until the 2016 Election. For these people "America Has Never
Stopped Being Great!" (Similar to the "I've got mine, Jack! " attitude of Great Britain, as
their labor unions lost unity with rest of the working class.)
Their comments have moved away from ad hominem "You are a Putin stooge!" arguments to appeals
to Authority fallacies: "All our Intelligence Agencies Know that Assange worked with Russians
to embarrass Hillary and cost her the Election". Religiosity is largely Authority-driven, and
avoids the angst of critical thinking and putting facts together that (thanks to our
Intelligence Agencies!) don't fit together.
OlyaPola , April 22, 2019 at 03:23
"The only people claiming that Assange is a Russian agent are those who are unhappy with
the things that WikiLeaks publications have exposed, whether that be U.S. war crimes or the
corrupt manipulations of Democratic Party leaders."
Perhaps fuller understanding would be gained by considering the following pathway.
People who who think that "Assange is a Russian agent" is a plausible belief are the
audience encouraged in the view that "Assange is a Russian agent".
Much of this notion of plausible belief is founded on the creation of holograms consisting
in large part of projections of the believer's expectations/experiences of the evaluation
criteria used in choosing agents to recruit (for the public largely projected from their
experience of creating resumes and attending job interviews) , what motivates an agent to be
recruited, how such motivation can facilitate the purpose of the recruiter of the agent, what
are the potential dangers of recruiting the agent, and most importantly what is the purpose
of and reasons why the recruiter considers recruiting an agent to achieve her/his
purpose.
On projection catalysing plausible belief you will be aware that some encourage the belief
that Mr. Putin is the richest man on the planet since in all societies there are
assumptions/expectations on motivations.
However in the presently self-designated "The United States of America" as functions of
"exceptionalism", "we the people hold these truths to be self-evident" and lack of direct
experience of foreign cultures by many, the population are particulrly prone to projection
giving rise to the paradox of "exceptionalists" engaging in the them/us conflation.
"This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political
affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a
post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated
assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are
oppositional to those same agencies."
Absolutely correct.
Anyone who still believes what the IC says if a moron. As Pompeo recently said to the
student body of Texas A&M University, my alma matta, the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and
steel. He went on the explain that the CIA has courses to teach their agent that dark
"art".
"... RT has been able to capitalise on growing mistrust of western media among westerners. During the breaking of the coverage of many political scandals, RT articles aggressively raised issues that many felt were not being pursued by the western media, which is frequently seen as covering up non-PC stories. Many users believe that RT is willing to talk about incidents that western media will not, a belief that RT actively encourages. As such, many users of a both far-right and far-left disposition are willing to listen to RT, even being aware of RT's control by the government, rather than western media. ..."
"... On page four of this this interesting sentence we find the following sentence: " Driving a wedge between Russians and government is key. " ..."
"... It is interesting to see that Integrity Initiative was ahead of the game when it came to punishing Russia for its involvement in Crimea's move to independence from Ukraine to the point that their greatest hope was that there would be regime change in Russia. ..."
"... As you can see from these documents, Integrity Initiative, a government-funded, not-for-profit charity has a mandate to ensure that the West is immune to Russia's ongoing propaganda campaign by providing propaganda of its own. ..."
While
it received relatively little coverage from the Western mainstream media establishment, a
recent 42 megabyte upload on an Anonymous server provides us with an inside glimpse into
the genesis of the Western anti-Russia narrative.
According to the documents, an organization (rather ironically) named Integrity Initiative with the moniker
"Defending Democracy Against Disinformation" was organized to mobilize global public opinion
against Russia and its agenda as you can see on the organization's "About" webpage:
The non-for-profit charity was set up in 2015 as a partnership of several independent
organizations led by The Institute for Statecraft. It claims that it is dedicated to "
education in good governance and to enabling societies to adapt to a rapidly changing
world. ", a rather benign mission statement. In its first two years, it was funded by
private individuals, however, funding for 2017 and 2018 was largely provided by governments,
particularly the United Kingdom, reflecting the U.K.'s appreciation of the " importance of
the threat, and a wish to support civil society programmes seeking to rebuild the ability of
democratic societies to resist large scale, malicious disinformation and influence
campaigns."
According to the documents a number of organizations including the United States Department of
State, the U.K.'s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), NATO, Facebook and the Lithuanian
Ministry of Defense were looking to fund the Integrity Initiative as you can see here:
Integrity Initiative
states the following about its services:
" It is inevitable that a programme tackling disinformation in Europe finds itself spending
much of its time addressing the activities of the Russian State, including those carried out
through its intelligence services. The Kremlin has invested more operational thought, intent
and resource in disinformation, in Europe and elsewhere in the democratic world, than any other
single player. "
Not surprisingly, Integrity Initiative has comments on the leaking of its own documents by
Anonymous:
" We note both the attempts by Russian state propaganda outlets to amplify the volume of
this leak; and the suggestion by a major Anonymous-linked Twitter account that the Kremlin
subverted the banner of Anonymous to disguise their responsibility for it...
It is of course a matter of deep regret that Integrity Initiative documents have been stolen
and posted on line, still more so that, in breach of any defensible practice, Russian state
propaganda outlets have published or re-published a large number of names and contact details.
We have not yet had the chance to analyse all of the documents, so cannot say with confidence
whether they are all genuine or whether they include doctored or false material.
Although it is clear that much of the material was indeed on the Integrity Initiative or
Institute systems, much of it is dated and was never used. In particular, many of the names
published were on an internal list of experts in this field who had been considered as
potential invitees to future cooperation. In the event, many were never contacted by the
Integrity Initiative and did not contribute to it. Nor were these documents therefore included
in any funding proposals. Not only did these individuals have nothing to do with the programme
– they may not even have heard of us. We are of course trying to contact all named
individuals for whom we have contact details to ensure that they are aware of what has
happened. "
With that background, let's look at four of the documents that were posted.
1.) A undated document discussing Russia's use of social media as a proxy for
propaganda:
Note the following comments regarding Russia Today aka RT:
" RT has been able to capitalise on growing mistrust of western media among westerners.
During the breaking of the coverage of many political scandals, RT articles aggressively raised
issues that many felt were not being pursued by the western media, which is frequently seen as
covering up non-PC stories. Many users believe that RT is willing to talk about incidents that
western media will not, a belief that RT actively encourages. As such, many users of a both
far-right and far-left disposition are willing to listen to RT, even being aware of RT's
control by the government, rather than western media. "
Here is a page from the document which discusses the target audiences for Russian social
media propaganda:
Note that the memo clearly states that Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik are
targeting an audience that is "distrusting of statecraft and major media groups.". I wonder why
Westerners would be distrusting of their own media?
2.) A 2017 document outlining plans for developing an American arm of Integrity
Initiative:
Note that the writer of the memo states that the West is badly in need of a reassertion of
U.S. leadership and that America needs to rebuild its understanding of Russia and how to deal
with it. It also notes that the international community needs to rebuild its understanding of
Russia to ensure that Western governments get the popular support that democracies require
(i.e. a strongly anti-populist movement).
3.) An undated document showing how Integrity Initiative is planning to expand "expert
clusters" to other nations including Austria, Canada, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland
among others:
4.) A
January 2015 document showing Integrity Initiative's views on setting up anti-Russia
sanctions with the goal of changing Russia's behaviour, peace in Ukraine, a return of Crimea
and, most importantly, possible regime change in Russia:
On page four of this this interesting sentence we find the following sentence:
" Driving a wedge between Russians and government is key. "
It is interesting to see that Integrity Initiative was ahead of the game when it came to
punishing Russia for its involvement in Crimea's move to independence from Ukraine to the point
that their greatest hope was that there would be regime change in Russia.
As you can see from these documents, Integrity Initiative, a government-funded, not-for-profit
charity has a mandate to ensure that the West is immune to Russia's ongoing propaganda campaign
by providing propaganda of its own. It's certainly a good thing that Integrity Initiative has
the "real truth" and is willing to pressure us into seeing the global geopolitical quagmire
with its 20/20 vision. Apparently, integrity in this post-truth era is in the eye of the
beholder/purveyor.
@Sean "Trump
owes the Russians nothing, he was their way to stop Clinton."
-- Sean, you seem as taking really seriously the $4.700 spent by Russians on the Google
ads as well as the indictment of Russian "hackers and trolls" (the alleged army of Kremlin)
in absentia. Why then Mueller backed off (in panic) from the indicted' readiness to show up
in court?
You may have some special grievances against Russia and Russians, but why such obvious
depreciation of your intelligence by repeating after Adam Schiff?
"... In May, the company, Crowdstrike, determined that the hack was the work of the Russians. As one unnamed intelligence official told BuzzFeed, "CrowdStrike is pretty good. There's no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate ..."
"... Perhaps not. Yet Crowdstrike is hardly a disinterested party when it comes to Russia. Crowdstrike's founder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch , is also a senior fellow at the Washington think tank, The Atlantic Council, which has been at the forefront of escalating tensions with Russia. ..."
"... As I reported in The Nation in early January , the connection between Alperovitch and the Atlantic Council is highly relevant given that the Atlantic Council is funded in part by the State Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. In recent years, it has emerged as a leading voice calling for a new Cold War with Russia. ..."
"... But meanwhile the steady drumbeat of "blame Russia" is having an effect. According to a recent you.gov/Economist poll, 58 percent of Americans view Russia as "unfriendly/enemy" while also finding that 52 percent of Democrats believed Russia "tampered with vote tallies." ..."
Today something eerily similar to the pre-war debate over Iraq is taking place regarding the
allegations of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. Assurances from the
intelligence community and from anonymous Obama administration "senior officials" about the
existence of evidence is being treated as, well, actual evidence.
State
Department spokesman John Kirby told CNN that he is "100% certain" of the role that Russia
played in U.S. election. The administration's expressions of certainty are then uncritically
echoed by the mainstream media. Skeptics are likewise written off, slandered as " Kremlin
cheerleaders " or worse.
Unsurprisingly, The Washington Post is reviving its Bush-era role as principal publicist for
the government's case. Yet in its haste to do the government's bidding, the Post has published
two widely debunked stories relating to Russia (one on the scourge of Russian inspired "fake
news", the other on a non-existent Russian hack of a Vermont electric utility) onto which the
paper has had to append "editor's notes" to correct the original stories.
Yet, those misguided stories have not deterred the Post's opinion page from being equally
aggressive in its depiction of Russian malfeasance. In late December, the Post published an
op-ed by Rep. Adam Schiff and former Rep. Jane Harmon claiming "Russia's
theft and strategic leaking of emails and documents from the Democratic Party and other
officials present a challenge to the U.S. political system unlike anything we've
experienced."
On Dec. 30, the Post editorial board
chastised President-elect Trump for seeming to dismiss "a brazen and unprecedented attempt
by a hostile power to covertly sway the outcome of a U.S. presidential election." The Post
described Russia's actions as a "cyber-Pearl Harbor."
On Jan. 1, the neoconservative columnist Josh Rogin
told readers that the recent announcement of
sanctions against Russia "brought home a shocking realization that Russia is using hybrid
warfare in an aggressive attempt to disrupt and undermine our democracy."
Meanwhile, many of the same voices who were among the loudest cheerleaders for the war in
Iraq have also been reprising their Bush-era roles in vouching for the solidity of the
government's case.
Jonathan Chait, now a columnist for New York magazine, is clearly convinced by what the
government has thus far provided. "That Russia wanted Trump to win has been obvious for
months," writes Chait.
"Of course it all came from the Russians, I'm sure it's all there in the intel," Charles
Krauthammer told Fox News on Jan. 2. Krauthammer is certain.
And Andrew Sullivan is certain as to the motive. "Trump and Putin's bromance," Sullivan told MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Jan. 2, "has
one goal this year: to destroy the European Union and to undermine democracy in Western
Europe."
David Frum,
writing in The Atlantic , believes Trump "owes his office in considerable part to illegal
clandestine activities in his favor conducted by a hostile, foreign spy service."
Jacob Weisberg agrees, tweeting: "Russian covert action threw the election to Donald Trump.
It's that simple." Back in 2008, Weisberg
wrote that "the first thing I hope I've learned from this experience of being wrong about
Iraq is to be less trusting of expert opinion and received wisdom." So much for that.
Foreign Special Interests
Another, equally remarkable similarity to the period of 2002-3 is the role foreign lobbyists
have played in helping to whip up a war fever. As readers will no doubt recall, Ahmed Chalabi,
leader of the Iraqi National Congress, which served, in effect as an Iraqi government-in-exile,
worked hand in hand with the Washington lobbying firm Black, Kelly, Scruggs & Healey (BKSH)
to sell Bush's war on television and on the op-ed pages of major American newspapers.
Chalabi was also a trusted source of Judy Miller of the Times, which, in an apology to its
readers on May 26,
2004, wrote : "The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been
named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced
reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration
and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles." The pro-war lobbying of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee has also been exhaustivelydocumented .
Though we do not know how widespread the practice has been as of yet, something similar is
taking place today. Articles calling for confrontation with Russia over its alleged "hybrid
war" with the West are
appearingwithincreasingregularity
. Perhaps the most egregious example of this newly popular genre appeared on Jan. 1 in
Politico
magazine. That essay, which claims, among many other things, that "we're in a war" with
Russia comes courtesy of one Molly McKew.
McKew is seemingly qualified to make such a pronouncement because she, according to her bio
on the Politico website, served as an "adviser to Georgian President Saakashvili's government
from 2009-2013, and to former Moldovan Prime Minister Filat in 2014-2015." Seems reasonable
enough. That is until one discovers that McKew is actually registered with the
Department of Justice as a lobbyist for two anti-Russian political parties, Georgia's UMN
and Moldova's PLDM.
Records show her work for the consulting firm Fianna Strategies frequently takes her to
Capitol Hill to lobby U.S. Senate and Congressional staffers, as well as prominent U.S.
journalists at The Washington Post and The New York Times, on behalf of her Georgian and
Moldovan clients.
"The truth," writes McKew, "is that fighting a new Cold War would be in America's interest.
Russia teaches us a very important lesson: losing an ideological war without a fight will ruin
you as a nation. The fight is the American way." Or, put another way: the truth is that
fighting a new Cold War would be in McKew's interest -- but perhaps not America's.
While you wouldn't know it from the media coverage (or from reading deeply disingenuous
pieces like McKew's) as things now stand, the case against Russia is far from certain. New
developments are emerging almost daily. One of the latest is a report from the
cyber-engineering company Wordfence, which concluded that "The IP
addresses that DHS [Department of Homeland Security] provided may have been used for an attack
by a state actor like Russia. But they don't appear to provide any association with
Russia."
Indeed, according to Wordfence, "The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be
Ukrainian. It has no apparent relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an
indicator of compromise for any website."
On Jan. 4,
BuzzFeed reported that, according to the DNC, the FBI never carried out a forensic
examination on the email servers that were allegedly hacked by the Russian government. "The
FBI," said DNC spokesman Eric Walker, "never requested access to the DNC's computer
servers."
What the agency did do was rely on the findings of a private-sector, third-party vendor that
was brought in by the DNC after the initial hack was discovered. In May, the company,
Crowdstrike, determined that the hack was the work of the Russians. As one unnamed intelligence
official told BuzzFeed, "CrowdStrike is pretty good. There's no reason to believe that anything
that they have concluded is not accurate. "
Perhaps not. Yet Crowdstrike is hardly a disinterested party when it comes to Russia.
Crowdstrike's founder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch , is also a senior fellow at the
Washington think tank, The Atlantic Council, which has been at the forefront of escalating
tensions with Russia.
As I
reported in The Nation in early January , the connection between Alperovitch and the
Atlantic Council is highly relevant given that the Atlantic Council is funded in part by the State
Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and
the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. In recent years, it has emerged as a leading voice
calling for a new Cold War with Russia.
Time to Rethink the 'Group Think'
And given the rather thin nature of the declassified evidence provided by the Obama
administration, might it be time to consider an alternative theory of the case? William Binney,
a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency and the man responsible for creating many of
its collection systems, thinks so. Binney believes that the DNC emails were leaked, not hacked,
writing
that "it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian
government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack."
None of this is to say, of course, that Russia did not and could not have attempted to
influence the U.S. presidential election. The intelligence community may have
intercepted damning evidence of the Russian government's culpability. The government's
hesitation to provide the public with more convincing evidence may stem from an
understandable and wholly appropriate desire to protect the intelligence community's sources
and methods. But as it now stands the publicly available evidence is open to question.
But meanwhile the steady drumbeat of "blame Russia" is having an effect. According to a
recent you.gov/Economist
poll, 58 percent of Americans view Russia as "unfriendly/enemy" while also finding that 52
percent of Democrats believed Russia "tampered with vote tallies."
With Congress back in session, Armed Services Committee chairman John McCain is set to hold
a series of hearings focusing on Russian malfeasance, and the steady drip-drip-drip of
allegations regarding Trump and Putin is only serving to box in the new President when it comes
to pursuing a much-needed detente with Russia.
It also does not appear that a congressional inquiry will start from scratch and critically
examine the evidence. On Friday, two senators -- Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrat Sheldon
Whitehouse --
announced a Senate Judiciary subcommittee investigation into Russian interference in
elections in the U.S. and elsewhere. But they already seemed to have made up their minds about
the conclusion: "Our goal is simple," the senators said in a joint statement "To the fullest
extent possible we want to shine a light on Russian activities to undermine democracy."
So, before the next round of Cold War posturing commences, now might be the time to stop,
take a deep breath and ask: Could the rush into a new Cold War with Russia be as disastrous and
consequential -- if not more so -- as was the rush to war with Iraq nearly 15 years ago? We
may, unfortunately, find out.
James W Carden is a contributing writer for The Nation and editor of The American
Committee for East-West Accord's eastwestaccord.com. He previously served as an advisor on
Russia to the Special Representative for Global Inter-governmental Affairs at the US State
Department.
Don G. , February 5, 2017 at 14:29
Questioning whether the Russians hacked or didn’t hack is playing into the US
narrative to demonize Russia. (Putin)
It simple doesn’t matter as all nations hack as much as possible to enhance and protect
their national interests. Surely Russia has hacked against the US no more than a tenth of
what the US had done against Russia.
The narrative is nothing but a propaganda lie but it’s been accepted by the American
people and mostly because of the fight that goes on due to domestic politics, one major party
against the other.
There’s a very good reason to stop promoting the narrative because it only helps to
bring Americans onside with more efforts to demonize Putin and to keep all sides in the US
promoting their aggression worldwide. Americans are likely easily 90% prowar now and will
show little or no resistance to the coming war on Iran. <img alt=''
src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/f05d2bb98b641e9e9ab8f3dc738e31a0?s=60&d=identicon&r=pg'
srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/f05d2bb98b641e9e9ab8f3dc738e31a0?s=120&d=identicon&r=pg
2x' class='avatar avatar-60 photo' height='60' width='60' />
yugo , February 4, 2017 at 13:54
Hysteria has reached fever pitch. Russia’s fake news is apparently so beguiling that
it even threatens western democratic discourse. Combine this with its cyber weaponry and
Moscow, so we are told, may interfere in this year’s German elections to benefit the
hard-right. Such incessant fear mongering has already prompted calls for the censorship of
Russian propaganda. It won’t be long before a witch-hunt emerges, directed against
‘fellow travellers’, those who dare to doubt the Russian threat.
They insist the west made matters worse in Ukraine by not acknowledging that it was a
classic example of a young state that didn’t naturally command the allegiance of all
its peoples. Other examples are Georgia’s Abkhazians and South Ossetians,
Moldova’s Trans-Dniester Slavs and Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians.
They also doubt the Russian threat to the Baltic states. What is amazing is Moscow’s
temperate response to Estonia and Latvia’s gross violation of international norms in
denying citizenship to those of its Russian minority who are not conversant in Estonian and
Latvian respectively. Nato and the EU turned a blind eye when membership was granted to these
two states.
Fellow travellers furthermore claim the west will keep on floundering in the Middle East
as long as it persists in treating Saudi Arabia as a valued ally, while viewing Iran as a
permanent enemy. We have for far too long ignored Saudi Arabia’s promotion of Wahhabism
and its playing of the destructive sectarian card against ‘apostate’ Shiites.
Take the merciless attacks on Shiite worshippers by Sunni jihadis of a Wahhabist persuasion.
It occurs with sickening regularity throughout the Middle East. The terrorists attacking
westerners are invariably Sunni jihadis, not Shiites. Worse still, Saudi Arabia together with
Nato member Turkey facilitated the emergence of Isis. We bizarrely gave priority to toppling
Syria’s secular regime.
The first loyalty of these fellow travellers is to their nation state rather than
unfettered globalism. No wonder the western elite disparage their national patriotism,
calling it populism. It was, after all, the Achilles Heel of Homo Sovieticus. The elite fear
the same fate awaits Homo Europaeus and globalist Homo Economicus.
Michael K Rohde , February 3, 2017 at 15:12
This is beginning to look exactly like Iraq 2 and why the same players that led us into
that fake war which is still not paid for because the initiators made sure and get themselves
a tax cut before they launched it are still being listened to makes it clear. Even with a
change in administrations and party our government continues in the same wrong headed
direction, to war with the enemies of Israel. When will it stop? When will we take back
control of our foreign policy and destiny. <img alt=''
src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/cc900a84653501242923790946494dbc?s=60&d=identicon&r=pg'
srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/cc900a84653501242923790946494dbc?s=120&d=identicon&r=pg
2x' class='avatar avatar-60 photo' height='60' width='60' />
Michael Hoefler , February 3, 2017 at 23:29
As Ray McGovern said several times (not quoting): that Israel is the elephant in the room.
Netayahu will not rest until he has all of the Arab states fighting among themselves. IMO he
thinks that that will guarantee Israel protection.
IMO – all that does is put Israel into a continuing worse situation. There will always
be someone stronger to come along to overcome them – someday – sometime. If they
made peace with those nations and worked with them, traded with them – they would be
much safer in the long run.
The mainstream media in th USA and, increasingly in the rest of the West are vehicles for
propaganda from various factions within the Imperial Deep State. All these outlets are good
for is to map the power relations between these factions at least this the case in the major
issues of the day.
This misbehavior going on right now. One factions close to Trump wants to go to war with
Iran because, of course there has to be war or the Deep State as a whole stuffers and the
people will begin to look at their shakles. The other faction wishes to go to a brinksmanship
sort of Cold War situation. The Trumpists believe that making friends with Russia and then
destroying Iranian power is the best approach to controlling the MENA region by creating a
loose alliance of KSA, Israel, Turkey and Russia in which a weak Iran would be forced to
enter the Empire and Russia in return would be given more control of Ukraine and Eastern
Europe. I suspect Trump may also want to undercut NATO and the EU. That is my guess. To put
it another way, Russia is strong and well led and Iran is not.
stan , February 3, 2017 at 14:17
You can read chapter 6 of Mein Kampf if you want to see how this war propaganda stuff
works. It is not group think or mistaken ideas. It is deliberate lies to scare you and a
carefully crafted false narrative to make it all seem reasonable. People cannot believe that
their leaders would tell such a big lie, and that’s why it works. The goal is murder
and conquest to get territory, natural resources, and control of business and commerce.
Controlling markets for drugs, gambling, and prostitution is for nickel and dime crooks.
Controlling markets for natural resources, banking, and consumer and industrial goods is
where the real money is. Think of governments as criminal business syndicates and you
aren’t far off. Remember, President Obama had a hit list, flew around plane loads of
secret cash to make illegal payoffs, and bragged about offing his opponent in the head and
dumping his body in the river.
Jeremy , February 4, 2017 at 11:33
Yes, Stan,well put! you will never see this sort of talk in the articles here, as the
consipiracy theorist label is always one to avoid, but I agree that when we think in terms of
a group of people trying to attain “security” the same way any other gangster
does, it becomes much less far fetched. George Carlin said, “It’s a big club, and
you ain’t in it!” Men and women of power and wealth will always do what they have
to in order to preserve that power and wealth for their children. There is really no
conspiracy needed, just a bunch of people at the top looking after themselves and their
families.
Tania Messina , February 3, 2017 at 14:13
Ah, yes, we’ve always needed a boogeyman to keep us all crazed with fear and the
neocons busy with their destruction of society. If there is a crazy out there today, it is
those neocons and their puppets who were so intent on destroying “seven countries in
five years” and not being able to achieve that diabolical end as so neatly planned.
And, now, they’re throwing temper tantrums, because, surprise of surprises! a non
career politician comes along who uses common sense for a change and dares to say, “Why
can’t we be friends with Russia?” With that comment many exhausted Americans
perked up and listened while the Dulles boys turned somersaults in their graves!
The arrogance and superiority of those who constantly blame Russia for their alleged
expansionist ambitions seem blinded to our own aggressions. Fifteen years in Iraq? We finally
have a president who talks of peace and we demonize him as the warmonger ready to press the
button, while I seem to remember that it was the other candidate who arrogantly referred to
Putin as Hitler!
It is articles like this one by James Carden that we should be teaching in our schools,
researching the facts and discussing in our classrooms so that hopefully a new generation
might grow up with intelligent exchange rather than the brainwash that has been strangling
our society for too many years.
Mark Thomason , February 3, 2017 at 13:04
This controversy is driven by Democratic denial of defeat, and infighting in which those
defeated seek to hang on to power inside the Democratic Party. It is the Hillary crowd. It
can be evidence free because it is driven by political calculation of private power needs,
not truth.
And the WMD fiasco is a perfect comparison, because the same people drove the same sort of
fact-free theme for private reasons, as Wolfowitz put it, the story around which varying
separate interests could be rallied.
We've discarded real historical and political analysis for a kind of Russophobia that I
actually never experienced in my lifetime before. But this is the second stage. The first stage
was demonization of Putin.
PAUL JAY Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. And
we're continuing our discussions with Stephen Cohen about Russia and the United States, Trump
and Putin. Thanks for joining us again.
STEPHEN COHEN Thank you. For Steven's bio, just look under the video player. Watch the
earlier segments. But I'll plug your book. People should read this book. It's important. It's
called War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate. And let me say, while
in the last segment I am arguing with you about how to characterize Trump–and I don't
know, maybe we'll argue again–I think your contribution on this issue is extremely
important. I know you've been under incredible pressure and getting isolated on this point. And
I think it's brave of you to take the stance you do.
OK, let's just move on. In the early years of Putin's presidency the West quite liked him. I
guess they thought he would be a continuation of Yeltsin. I think they had expectations that he
would help facilitate an American–I don't know what the word–'takeover' is too
strong–but allowing American mining companies and energy companies and finance to come
in. And instead what emerged was a state with real laws. And an oligarchy emerged, which I
think at some point the Russian people will have to deal with, because I don't think it's good
for them, but it's up to them. That being said, America didn't get a free-for-all.
But as this relationship with the West became more and more tense–and I think to a
large extent for these reasons. The Americans didn't get everything they wanted out of Russia.
I don't understand why Putin didn't take more of the Chinese stance, which is avoid direct
confrontation as much as you can and build up your strength. And I don't get Crimea. Crimea
was–and you suggest in your book–wasn't there an alternative to the annexation?
There wasn't, like, an immediate threat. I know there was a right-wing takeover, a far-right
takeover of Ukraine. The Americans certainly facilitated and helped engineer it. It is a kind
of strategic threat. I mean, I think that's clear, and you've made the case very eloquently.
But still, why poke Europe and the United States in the eye and kind of make the case of the
anti-detente forces? Oh, look, you know, Russia's on the move. It starts with Crimea, and
Georgia will be next, and then it will be the whole of Ukraine.
STEPHEN COHEN Of course they didn't with Crimea, and that's just the argument that people
who don't wish to understand the Russian point of view make. It didn't start with Crimea. It
began with the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders.
PAUL JAY No doubt.
STEPHEN COHEN Well, not only no doubt, but for Putin and for the Russian political class
that was the context and the prism through which they viewed Western–and particularly
American–policy toward Russia. So when the Ukrainian crisis began in 2013, let's remember
what happened, because it does lead to the annexation of Crimea.
In 2013 the European Union told the then-president of Ukraine, Yanukovych–and he may
have been a rotter, but he was constitutionally and legally elected. It would have been a clean
election. He was the president–that he needed to sign a economic partnership with the
European Union. It meant, in effect, losing his preferred trade status with Russia, which
constituted about 40 percent of Ukrainian trade. Not to mention about 3 to 4 million Ukrainians
who worked in Russia to support their families were allowed to do so, and allowed to send their
salaries back to Ukraine to support their families.
So Ukraine was heavily dependent on Russia economically, and along comes the European Union
that wants to exclude Russia from this new arrangement. So Putin says, Putin and his Foreign
Minister Lavrov say, look, guys, why not a tripartite arrangement? It would be good for
everybody. We'll have an economic preferred agreement with Russia, Ukraine, and the European
Union. And Washington and Brussels said no. Russia can't participate. Yanukovych for that
reason declined to sign the agreement, and that led to the Maidan uprising. And Yanukovych
flees from office to Russia.
So Putin now is sitting in Moscow, and Crimea comes to the fore, because you've got a very
right-wing, and I would say crazy, government in power, saying outlandish things. Including,
you know, Crimea is ours, and we're going to expel the Russian naval base there, which was
there by treaty. They had a lease, I think, 25 years on the base. There were 22,000, by law,
Russian soldiers on the Crimean base. They were already there. All right.
So Putin's sitting here. He sees some kind of threat–maybe it's rhetorical. But bad
things are happening. This was a very violent uprising. You remember the burning buildings in
Kiev and Maidan. If you watched this on TV, this was violence. It was very serious. Snipers
killed, I think, 85 to 100 people in Maidan just before Yanukovych fled. They said that the
snipers were sent by Yanukovych, but we now know they weren't. They were sent by neofascists,
Ukrainian neofascists, on Maidan. But remember, Putin is operating in a context that's moving
very fast, very dangerous. Intelligence is sparse, not clear. But there is clearly a new
government in Kiev that's laying claim not only to Crimea forever, but to expelling the Russian
naval base there. So Putin has to decide.
The back history is Putin never showed any interest in Crimea until that moment. However, it
had been an issue in Russian politics when Putin ran for president in 2000. There was a party
headed by two very influential men, the former mayor of Moscow, Luzhkov, and the former foreign
minister Primakov, who had advocated reuniting Crimea with Russia, because Crimea had
traditionally been a Russian province, I think somewhere like–don't speak of ethnicity,
speak of language. Something like 85 percent of the population speaks Russian as a native
language. I mean, enormous number. It's a Russian province. And it was only an act of accident
under Khrushchev that had been assigned administratively when the Soviet Union existed to
Ukraine, because Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.
So what was Putin supposed to do? To the extent that we know how he made the decision, he
was told by his intelligence people–all leaders in crisis depend on intelligence
people–take Crimea today through a referendum, and peacefully. And by the way, they were
polling like crazy. They knew they'd get 85-plus. They knew this. If they had it–and the
referendum was completely open. All this crap about 'at gunpoint' is nonsense. I mean, it was a
fair referendum. And Gallup has been going back to Crimea and polling. They get the same
number; 85 percent want to be with Russia.
Putin is told do it by the ballot, the box, today, or fight a war there tomorrow. That's
what he was told. What would you have done in his place? See, it's easy for you, Paul, and me,
Steve, to sit here and debate what leaders–Trump, any leader–Kennedy, Putin, should
do in a crisis situation without knowing the circumstances, or what we would do in that
situation. I mean, they have to act and they have to act fast. And they're dependent on this
intelligence.
PAUL JAY OK, but in the book you suggest there might have been an alternative.
STEPHEN COHEN Well, I can just simply tell you what Putin was told as an alternative. One
group said "You have to take Crimea now. The polls show Crimeans will vote to join Russia.
There is an international law that referendums are binding and legal. We'll have a referendum,
we'll get the result, and they'll vote to join Russia and we'll take them in. Do that.".
The other view was "Hold the referendum, but don't welcome them into Russia. Use it as a
bargaining card with the West and Kiev when we see how the Maidan so-called revolution–it
wasn't a revolution, but the Maidan coup, it was a coup against Yanukovych–let's see what
comes next. But that'll be a diplomatic card we could play. Go ahead and have the referendum.
They will vote to join Russia, but that doesn't mean because they've requested to join Russia
we have to say OK. Just take that and say to the West, look, the Crimean people want to join
Russia. We understand that that may be, you know, difficult for you. Can we find a way to solve
this problem short of annexation?" In other words, can we get guarantees for Crimea?
So Putin was told that was an option, and he didn't choose it. And I try to put myself in
his shoes and see what would I have done? And the problem is I don't know the intelligence. For
example, there is a report, I don't believe or disbelieve it, that NATO commandos were found on
Crimea, on the peninsula. I don't know if that's true. Maybe it was scuttlebutt. Did Putin know
it to be true? I don't know. But we have yet to be told the whole story of what happened
between the coup in Kiev–because it was a coup. It overthrew the president–and the
decision, Russians don't say 'annex,' they say 'rejoined with,' or 'welcomed Crimea home,' to
make that decision. One day we'll know more, and then we'll be able to decide if Putin really
had a choice.
PAUL JAY Do you–and I don't, one, have any–I don't have any detailed knowledge
about the situation.
STEPHEN COHEN I don't have enough.
PAUL JAY Never mind not knowing the intelligence.
STEPHEN COHEN You understand that's a question mark by what I say. We don't know for
sure.
PAUL JAY Yeah. But was–Do you think there might have been an option to have a
referendum that took a little–there was more time, maybe get the United Nations involved?
Something that gives a little more recognition to it?
STEPHEN COHEN Without naming names-
PAUL JAY And I'm not talking the morality, here. I'm talking tactically.
STEPHEN COHEN Practical politics. The point is that Putin was told–now, mind you, this
is–I mean, it's a good thing that he's a former KGB officer, by the way. Henry Kissinger,
when he first met Putin, and he learned–this was when Putin was working as deputy mayor
in St. Petersburg, and Kissinger met him. And Putin said to Kissinger, "You know, I began in
intelligence." And Kissinger said, "That's the best way to start a political career." Kissinger
had started in intelligence during the war, right. Because these guys think, and maybe they're
right, that if you're trained in intelligence, or you're able to evaluate
intelligence–that is, you aren't going to be fooled by your own intelligence
people–that you can sort out false intelligence from legitimate intelligence. Putin was
in a position, I think, to evaluate the intelligence. So the question that you raise is true.
Why didn't they wait? And he was told we can't wait; events are moving too fast.
PAUL JAY In the earlier–last segment–you talked about the pressure on him that
he's not proactive enough. Is this partly responding to that kind of pressure?
STEPHEN COHEN Yes. And that's why I want to return to this issue that only once before had
Crimea been an issue in Russian politics, when a political party ran against Putin on a
platform that we should somehow get Crimea back. They got, I think, two percent of the vote.
There was no popular support for this. Putin was disdainful of the idea. In other words, this
was something–this was not aggression. This is ridiculous. This was a decision imposed
upon him by circumstances that he did not create, but to which he now had to react. And I don't
know whether he knew it or not, but that was probably his most historic decision. And I
mean–it's not his most historic, but it is part of what will forever define his role for
Russians in Russian history forever.
PAUL JAY So let's get to the big underlying question here-
STEPHEN COHEN You can go to Moscow and buy a poster in a shop. At the top is a map of
Crimea, a very distinctive peninsula, right? On one side is Krushchev, who signed Crimea over
to Ukraine, right, when–in 1954-'55, when the Soviet Union existed. On the other side is
a picture of Putin. And it simply says "He gave away. He took back." You can see these in the
shops. These were–Khrushchev frivolously, on some anniversary, said OK, Crimea is part of
Ukraine. And Putin [got it back].
PAUL JAY In your book [crosstalk] Kissinger saying he might have been drunk that night when
he did it.
STEPHEN COHEN Who?
PAUL JAY I think in your book you say that, don't you?
STEPHEN COHEN That's not me.
PAUL JAY Somebody said that Khrushchev might have been drunk the night that he gave Crimea
[crosstalk].
STEPHEN COHEN No, I didn't say that. I don't know. But-
PAUL JAY Somebody quotes Kissinger.
STEPHEN COHEN Possibly. But you know, these are–if you're a student of history, and
particularly of political leadership, as I like to think I am, this is a Graham Allison
practically made a career of writing about the Cuban missile crisis and how the Kennedy
team–right? He's famous for studying that. It's a case study in crisis leadership. And
Kennedy comes out looking pretty good. By the way, I would say Khrushchev comes out looking
pretty good, too, because the Russian reaction could have been different. But now we have Putin
in Crimea. He had to make a decision that was imposed upon him. Now, we don't have all the
information. But we should be fascinated to study and understand this rather than demonize
Putin for doing it.
PAUL JAY OK. Let me–this sort of big, underlying question. Because I mean, Kissinger
said that what Putin did in Crimea was an anomaly; that you can't extend anything from that.
That does not prove that Russia is on the march and they're going to start threatening other
Baltic states, and all this. The Crimea is a very particular situation. Clearly that was not
the predominant attitude of the West towards Crimea. So why–it began under Yeltsin, but
with Putin–and Putin seemed ready for it. Why didn't the West assimilate Russia into
Western capitalism?
... ... ...
STEPHEN COHEN Yeah. Clinton unwisely–not only Clinton. Bill Clinton, not Hillary. And
Bill Clinton was president then in the '90s–believed that he was assimilating Russia with
his policy toward Yeltsin. That's what he thought. And he was so advised by people such as
Strobe Talbott, all of whom should have known better. In fact, Russia descended in the 1990s
into the worst and most corrosive economic depression ever in peacetime. Men were dying at 57.
I think the collapse of industrial production was greater than it was during our own Great
Depression. People were not receiving their wages or their social benefits. The middle class
was being vaporized. Gangs were controlling large parts of the economy. Some people even think
it was what people call state capture, that private oligarchs had captured the state. Russia
was on the verge, if not of actually breaking up, of collapsing.
Now, flash back to that moment, 1999. Russia, the largest territorial country in the world,
even after the end of the Soviet Union, laden, laden, stockpiled with every conceivable weapon
of mass destruction, from germ, bacterial, chemical, nuclear. What if Russia had broken up?
What if? We're talking Apocalypse Now. I would think that people would give Putin a little
credit for holding Russia together, reestablishing control over the regions that had these
weapons. But he's never given any any, any credit. Russians themselves do. But in the
West–Imagine what would have happened. It wasn't just Putin alone. He put together a
team, a komanda, as it's called in Russia. No one man can do this. But he chose advisers who
understood the situation.
At the time–at the time–this was semi-welcomed in Washington. You remember that
Putin came to see the second President Bush, and they went to the ranch. And Bush said "I
looked into his eyes and I saw a good soul." And other things like that. And I think you, Paul,
are right when you say that they, meaning the people who control our foreign policy, thought
that this would be the continuation of the 1990s, except that Putin would be a healthy and
sober Yeltsin; that Yeltsin had become dysfunctional, unable to govern the country that the
West wanted to assimilate. And when it turned out that Putin wasn't Yeltsin, even though
Yeltsin put him in power–indeed, historically speaking Putin could not have been Yeltsin,
though he's never given his anti-Yeltsin speech the way Khrushchev gave his anti-Stalin speech.
This is interesting. He's been urged to give this speech, by the way; the de-Yeltsinization
speech, analogous to Khruschev's de-Stalinization speech. He's never done that. People say he's
too loyal, to a fault. Too loyal. Putin. Some trait he's got. They criticize him for it.
But nonetheless, very soon American disillusion in Putin set in. And we can date it. There
is there was, and even remains today a New York Times columnist, Nick Kristof. Nicholas
Kristof. Who wrote–I think it was 2003. Maybe I'm off a year, year and a half–that
he was greatly disillusioned, he, Kristof, that Putin had not turned out to be a sober Yeltsin.
Imagine this. In other words, they, to the extent that columnists speak for these great powers,
wanted Yeltsin, a person who by then had positive ratings in Russia of about 3 percent, who was
hated in Russia for what had happened to the country. But the only grievance in Washington was
he wasn't sober and healthy enough to continue the policy. And Putin, they thought at the
beginning was a sober healthy Yeltsin. Look at him. And Yeltsin–on what Yeltsin is. They
say he's from Yeltsin. He's got to be. But it was clear. If you'd been paying attention it
would have been clear it was impossible.
And when it dawned on them they were bitter. And I'm not sure that they started hating on
Putin because they personally had been so wrong, their analysis had been wrong, or because they
couldn't stand the thought of a non-Yeltsin to this day. Because even today you could read in
the New York Times and other analyses, so-called, how great it was under Yeltsin. It wasn't
great. It was a country in agony. And it was dangerous to us, with all those weapons.
So you know, we've discarded history. We've discarded real historical and political analysis
for a kind of Russophobia that I actually never experienced in my lifetime before. It's much
worse now. And remember one thing, as we all go forward and think about Russiagate, which I
think is going to be with us in one way or another for decades. But the Putin-phobia, the
hating on Putin, began long before Trump was a presidential candidate. Long before. The two got
fused together in Russiagate. The loathing for Putin and the loathing for Trump was fused into
this thing called Russiagate. Now, who did the initial fusing? In my book I argued it was our
intelligence services, and particularly the CIA. We will see. I think we're going to have some
investigations now. I may be wrong. I don't think it was the FBI, as people think. I think was
Brennan and Obama's CIA that got all this started.
But these–this didn't come out of nowhere. This had been developing, this demonizing
of Putin had been going on for years before Trump appeared on the scene. And then bingo, it
came together. And we're stuck with it. And it ain't going to go away. And I think it's the
worst threat to our national security. I've said Russiagate is the great number one threat to
our national security. In the book I do the five greatest threats for our national security.
The book is all short pieces. And Russia–Russia and China don't make the top five.
Russiagate's number one. Unfortunately you're younger than I am so we can't share these moments
together. But there was the Cuban missile crisis, correct?
PAUL JAY Well, I–you know, I was alive. I was very aware of it.
STEPHEN COHEN All right. But it is said that in the history books, in the textbooks, that
it's the closest we ever came to nuclear war with Russia, Soviet Russia. Correct?
PAUL JAY If you listen Ellsberg we were seconds from it.
STEPHEN COHEN OK. And yet because of the leadership of Kennedy, and I would add Khrushchev,
because it takes two to tango, as Reagan said, these two guys averted Armageddon. Correct? And
that's the lesson we've taught our kids and we teach in our textbooks. OK. Imagine
today–and it doesn't take a lot of imagining–that we have a Cuban missile
crisis-like confrontation. Could be in Venezuela. Could be in Syria. Could be in former Soviet
Georgia. Could be in Ukraine. Lots of places. It happens, suddenly. The two nuclear superpowers
are eyeball to eyeball like the Cuban missile crisis. Everybody credits Kennedy and Khrushchev
for averting the crisis.
This happens tomorrow, do you think the American political class and its media are going
to invest Trump with the authority to negotiate a way out of nuclear war? The guy they called
the Kremlin puppet? And are they going to credit Putin, the guy they've so demonized, as a
partner to avert nuclear war? They will not. And what happens then? The answer is nuclear
war. That's why I say we're walking on a razor's edge with this Russiagate demonizing Putin
nonsense. We need these two guys, whether we like them or not, to avoid nuclear war. And we
are–we have too many situations fraught with war with Russia which could become nuclear
war, more than we've ever had before. And the people who've contributed to these situations
refuse to acknowledge what they've done. Above all, the mainstream media. What you and I are
discussing today should be discussed in the major newspapers and television talk shows in this
country nightly. And I guarantee you decades ago it would have been. We've lost our way. And
the new way is exceedingly dangerous.
"Carnage needs to destroyed" mentality is dominant among the USA neoliberal elite and drives the policy toward Russia.
They all supported neoconservative extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda directed on weakening Russian and
establishing of world dominance. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya. ..."
"... And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'
In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background,
which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate
about him not being president.'
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion
GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.
This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or
some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both
in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.
And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it
was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the
area.
Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which
clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander
Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on
your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.
The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.
In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry
– the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.
Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier,
which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein
in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.
Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling
attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio
4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets,
backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.
The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available
– evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes
of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played
a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.
Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind
of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction
of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.
What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest
a sale had been completed.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very
happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent
spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.
All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich
and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder.
For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.
(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews
both with Mogilevich and Levinson at
In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to
prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.
Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential
threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions
north of the Litani.
These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that
somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later
to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.
What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the
part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian
side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.
Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking
'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.
Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic
downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William
Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.
So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that
material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem
that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.
All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen
for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella
was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's
personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was
sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who
then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence
which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate
Russia in supplying materials.
There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether
Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears
that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian
intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)
It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which
claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional,
Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's
offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.
It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here,
a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.
Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called
Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.
In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe
World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the
Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.
Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's
death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain,
but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as
Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)
That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase
nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:
'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve
year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents
state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear
limited life components and you can read for weeks).'
What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility,
in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of
ones which lasted longer.
For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.
What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily
smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide
to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring
to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.
In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited
for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'
According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would
you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?
As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned
with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to
ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.
In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been
describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties,
and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another
day.
A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according
to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious
of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.
Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full
dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation
suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.
thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..
it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy
and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..
Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone
I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.
Re: Levinson
# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier
by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved
he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.
# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson
went to Jablonski with it.
# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum
czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson?
The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing
came of it.
I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.
As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg
is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.
I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive
solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that
the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields.
Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have
been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. "
David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making.
Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf
of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration
cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but
not fundamentally.
I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their
policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.
It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing
themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace
to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of
defiance which they will not tolerate.
And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear.
That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to
defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.
So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a
counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.
Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.
In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry
favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness
would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two
birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage
and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.
Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming
media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century
endorsed her.
Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in.
Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything
possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is
clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling
the Borg pundits.
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.
Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called
consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda
in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp.
This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous
American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously
and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier
on atlantic side.
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''
The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.
'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'
In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG)
dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded
as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that
with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a
former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski
favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241,
251 - 256]
'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'
State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used
against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the
Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task
force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition
of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization
of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis"
and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time."
Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since
he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know
how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion,
did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental
people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan
back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that
in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting,
even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports
and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the
terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start
to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such
an escalation.
I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain
more pointers.
It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.
An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander
Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian
attempts to get hold of him. An extract:
'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and
afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the
largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'
Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which
Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.
Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:
'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge
on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing
charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly
smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to
win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'
So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has
changed.
For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always
judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial
Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:
'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [£1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent
political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign
passports for its "very, very special clients".
'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that
it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars
stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".
Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us
think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter,
Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:
'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He
said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he
must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko
by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would
have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'
When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about
the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was
immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.
She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator,
David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting
the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.
Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as
a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.
What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary
claim about Shvets:
'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government
quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically
motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable
posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq,
Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.
'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the
National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll
at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general
who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding
Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.
'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated
the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky
and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's
Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky
contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia
Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb
in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'
Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many
things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What
later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling
her as to the side for which he was working.
It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the
Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like
others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.
An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation
specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria'
was actually credible.
This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of
the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have
been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking,
and for similar action against Syria.
Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with
Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.
There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been
another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.
A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing.
This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or
indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High')
might be a start.
Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story
had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that
is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')
The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one
feel as though one wanted to throw up.
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.}
No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the
fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian
Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy
of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were
spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George
Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.
Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it
is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat
it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.
Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered
a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving
forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before
any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914.
Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information
on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention
of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the
matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption
the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the
memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and
dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.
The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem
for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At
that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones
in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems
ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They
are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet
and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google
also allows searches with more than one term. This link -
- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories"
on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.
If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what
you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.
"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in
the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.
The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations"
(hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping
boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many
of the contributors know it from inside.
In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle
between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product
of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible,
but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never
going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the
Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for
the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative
Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.
So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly
not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact
with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government
pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.
The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the
Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.
Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will
be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative
appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat
of the BEF.
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break
- David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname
comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament
names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
The hard, blinding truth:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it,
and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting
their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out
all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and
even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.
And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments
being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.
Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article
he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions
by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."
Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case
being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information
to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.
"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily
redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department
last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "
I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress
will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's
court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI
is lying.
What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos
on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that
are based on classified documents.
We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status.
You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am
thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak
their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are
anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a
political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.
Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are,
in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you.
You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant
to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from
Northeestern
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist.
I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians
- they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.
David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of
material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though
not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That
you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities
are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the
States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because
of that.
The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as
"salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other
professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling
around unsupervised?
The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't
seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm
boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever
they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon
might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about
what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced
with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but
for the general public, that bit more untenable.
So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he
was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have
to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far
as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group
then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.
I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up
on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out
so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least
as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type,
they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to
pay him until he left UK service. pl
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.
Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of
the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet
I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK
side.
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about
the "golden showers"? "
I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations
and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public
wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.
So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media
is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.
Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I
doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.
But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK
get mixed up in it?
When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on
SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised
and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.
A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played
a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact
that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario
Scaramella.
When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European
Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.
His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques,
and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium
forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.
So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case
as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract
from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their
prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'
The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive
summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.
The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and
Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December
2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:
'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War
to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic-
Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'
Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet
Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:
'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references
to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations
made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them
[presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had
been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti
warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say
that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company
of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange
Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'
The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':
'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's
sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations
made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news
and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI.
Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there
were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the
assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella
notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for
the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini.
Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'
In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward
Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation
had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography
– which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella
which had been described in the wiretap request.
As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who
could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the
three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.
In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from
Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.
Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes
to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.
'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to
the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies
implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed
by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with
him.'
From a fax dated 7 November 2005:
'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged
sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document
file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get
him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re:
Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even
then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'
From a fax dated 5 December 2005:
'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with
regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who
gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA
disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to
London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella
on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling
file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'
In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was
unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be
in a chaotic state.
However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp
unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed
to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves
for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus
justifications.
Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on
the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June
and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.
(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)
And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided
to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence
in the Inquiry.
Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come
from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.
Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin
years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the
supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.
The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged
about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame
Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')
I know something of spectroscopy. The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis
itself or its instrumentation. The paragraph that you have quoted:
"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his
team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to
brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."
And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics
- which did not and could not exist in this situation.
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was
managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there
is to know?
I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too
complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri
Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele
Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.
Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality?
Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.
By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the
date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage
in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.
Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to
obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.
Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those? The German link is different. How about the Iranian? or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?
another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime
and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s
"... North Stream is a problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support
our new client state -- Ukraine. ..."
"... But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of this
alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad ..."
Best bet is for Russia to want to trade with the US and Europe. The gas pipeline will not be enough leverage on Germany
as it provides 9% of their needs.
Yes. And that's against the USA interests (or more correctly the US-led neoliberal empire interests). North Stream is a
problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support our new client state
-- Ukraine.
As you know, nothing was proven yet in Russiagate (and DNC hacks looks more and more like a false flag operation, especially
this Guccifer 2.0 personality ), but sanctions were already imposed. And when the US government speaks "Russia" in most cases
they mean "China+Russia" ;-). Russia is just a weaker link in this alliance and, as such, it is attacked first. Russiagate is
just yet another pretext after MH17, Magnitsky and such.
To me the current Anti-Russian hysteria is mainly a smokescreen to hide attempt to cement cracks in the façade of the USA neoliberal
society that Trump election revealed (including apparent legitimization of ruling neoliberal elite represented by Hillary).
And a desperate attempt to unite the society using (false) war propaganda which requires demonization of the "enemy of the
people" and neo-McCarthyism.
But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of
this alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad (for example, military alliance means the end of the USA global
military domination; energy alliance means that is now impossible to impose a blockade on China energy supplies from Middle East
even if Iran is occupied)
In this sense the recent descent into a prolonged fit of vintage Cold War jingoistic paranoia is quite understandable. While,
at the same time, totally abhorrent. My feeling is that unless Russia folds, which is unlikely, the side effects/externalities
of this posture can be very bad for the USA. In any case, the alliance of Russia and China which Obama administration policies
forged spells troubles to the global neoliberal empire dominated by the USA.
Trump rejection of existing forms of neoliberal globalization is one sign that this process already started and some politicians
already are trying to catch the wind and adapt to a "new brave world" by using preemptive adjustments.
Which is why all this Trump-Putin summit hysteria is about.
Neither hard, nor soft neoliberals want any adjustments. They are ready to fight for the US-led neoliberal empire till the
last American (excluding, of course, themselves and their families)
That's a great interview that summarizes Russiagate in a very assessable way. This is exactly repetition of Iraq WDM and
subsequent cover up. The consequence is a new higher level of discreditation of neoliberal MSM, at least by Trump supporters They
will just ignore those bottomfeeders like Clapper and Brennan.
Endemic of Russophobia is the biggest net result of Russiagate. This is also a big election gift to Trump.
The Deep State did not view Trump as a reliable steward of neoliberal empire and that's why Russiagate was unleashed. And Trump
is an embarrassment to the empire, no questions about it.
MadCow spend two year rabidly promoting Russiagate nonsense and she still has her job. That's suggest whom she
serves. In other cased she would be discarded like used condom.
Chris Hedges discusses with Nation reporter Aaron Mate how despite the categorical statement in Robert Mueller's report that Donald
Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia, the conspiracy theories by the nation's mainstream media show little sign of
diminishing.
We're all still waiting for MSDNC to bring on Aaron, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Michael Tracey and others on any of their
programs. MSDNC has not had on one single lefty who got this fraudulent and disgraceful Stalinesque political investigation right
from day one since December of 2016. Not one.
I've got to admit, I get a massive dopamine rush hearing these two sane, intelligent,critical thinkers, skillfully dissect
this convoluted quadrafuck that has wasted some much of our precious time. I literally feel washed clean for a moment.
But,
for the past three years, elite Democratic Party partisans, along with their media partners,
force-fed thousands of "Bombshell" headlines to millions of Americans, without ever providing a
lick of evidence. The absence of evidence supporting their outrageous lies coupled with the
results of Mueller's investigation and Barr's conclusions establishes collusion – not
between Russia and the Trump family to influence the 2016 presidential election, but amongst
the Democrats and mass media to delegitimize the
Trump presidency.
The Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, "We saw cold, hard evidence of the Trump
campaign, and indeed the Trump family, eagerly intending to collude with Russia." Pelosi has
never presented any evidence to support this claim or any of the many other suspect claims the
speaker has made.
The Chairman of House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff said, "I have evidence of collusion
with Russia and kompromat. It's all in plain sight." Schiff regularly repeated this claim to
the public yet never provided any evidence. He appeared on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and ABC over 150
times and was never called out for repeating these lies over and over again.
Congressman Eric Swalwell on MSNBC said, "Donald Trump is a Russian agent; we have evidence
Trump and his family colluded with Russia." Swalwell has parroted this and many other claims
since 2016. Evidence provided: none.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters stated, "Trump and his buddies are scumbags who are all Putin's
puppets; we will Impeach 45." Waters has been shrieking "Impeach 45" since election day in
2016. Water's reason: she hates Trump and the entire Grand Old Party "GOP."
Many other Democratic members of Washington DC's swamp echoed similar propaganda that
mobilized the Trump "resistance." Their hit list of frequent salacious claims included "Trump
in handcuffs;" "The entire Trump family, frog-marched, and jailed forever;" "Treason, much
worse than Watergate, we have evidence;" "Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987;" "Trump is
a racist, sexist, misogynist, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, xenophobic,
white-national, white-supremacist;"
and let's not forget "He's the next Hitler." This "hit list" has become the Democratic party
mantra since Donald trump announced his candidacy in 2015.
Ex-Central Intelligence Agency "CIA" director John Brennan, who just so happens to be on
MSNBC's payroll, also weighed in on Trump. "Trump's behavior is treasonous. He committed high
crimes and misdemeanors. There is evidence that proves many people in Trump's orbit are guilty
of serious crimes and indictments are coming, and soon. Trump committed Treason" The penalty
for committing "treason" in America, death. Brennan never provided any evidence. Brennan's lies
have destroyed the CIA's reputation and credibility.
Viewers of CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and ABC were inundated with purposeful misrepresentations that
continuously promised faithful audiences that Mueller and his team had "mountains" of evidence
of Trump's collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. Day after day, these media outlets
repeated how Mueller would deliver an indictment of President Trump, who had committed "treason
and high crimes and misdemeanors" that would lead to his impeachment and jail time. The corrupt
media represented that Trump's family members, who were also guilty of similar crimes, would be
sent to prison. All the above were outrageous lies.
In fact, the only convictions that arose through the Mueller investigation were low-level
process crimes which had NOTHING to do with Trump. $25 million wasted, bravo! These salacious
accusations proved to be part of an elaborate scheme to delegitimize the sitting president and
his administration in order to remove him from office. However, the Democrats and mass media
could not have done it without FBI Director James Comey's exploitation of the United States
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
We know the whole coup d'état was facilitated by FBI Director James Comey's October 20,
2016 submission of a 66-page application to the FISA court.
Comey and Sally Quillian Yates, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, signed
this application. Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, the presiding judge of the secret FISA court,
granted an order that led to our intelligence agencies spying on the presidential campaign of
Donald J. Trump. The FBI ran a counter-intelligence investigation named "Crossfire Hurricane"
on Trump's campaign.
Comey's FISA application was largely based on information contained in the Steele dossier, a
dossier written by a disgraced MI6 agent named Christopher Steele. The dossier made wild,
unsubstantiated claims and was financed by the campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic
National Committee via Clinton's law firm Perkins Coie through a company named Fusion GPS.
In a meeting with President Trump in early January 2017, James Comey told President Trump
about the existence of the Steele dossier and told him not to worry about it. Comey stated that
the dossier's contents were salacious, unverified, and untrue. Apparently, James Comey knew,
yet never disclosed to Judge Collyer, that the Steele dossier was garbage prepared by political
partisans that did not want Trump to be
elected and financed by Hillary Clinton's campaign. Three days after Comey's meeting with Trump
the entire Steele dossier was "leaked" to numerous media sources and published in it's entirety
on Buzzfeed with no mention that none of the claims in the Steele dossier had been
verified.
Comey signed and submitted two more FISA applications, one in Jan 2017, and another in April
2017 which relied upon the Steele dossier. FISA Judge Michael W. Mosman signed the January
renewal, and Judge Anne C. Conway signed the April renewal.
Apparently, Comey never disclosed, to any of the FISA judges, that the Steele dossier was:
paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, and the DNC, or that the Department of Justice's
Bruce Ohr had warned on the credibility of the unverified Steele Dossier, or that Bruce Ohr's
wife worked for Fusion GPS and helped back door the Steele dossier into the FBI, or that the
dossier was filled with baseless allegations, lies, and
propaganda. It appears that four secret court, FISA, judges were lied to in order to kick- off
the biggest scandal in history.
FBI's Deputy Director Andrew McCabe recently stated during Congressional testimony that
"without the Steele dossier, the FISA warrants would have never been granted." Recent reports
suggest that it was ex-CIA director John Brennan who insisted that the Steele dossier be
included in the intelligence report used to request the FISA warrants. Senator Rand Paul has
issued a call that Brennan be called to testify under oath in Congress.
The entire Mueller investigation would have never been possible without this fake dossier
being used to illegally obtain FISA warrants by the omission of material facts within the
original FISA application and the three subsequent renewal applications.
Why is Judge Collyer not looking into these and other material misrepresentations used in
the FISA application to obtain search warrants to spy on Americans and on a presidential
campaign by its opposition and enabled by a weaponized Obama Department of Justice? The silence
of secret FISA court Judges Mosman, Conway, and Dearie is frightening. America's secret courts
should be abolished.
"... Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender. That would explain Sater's early attempts at apparent entrapment. Since that didn't work, a different strategy had to be devised to deny the presidency to someone over whom the intelligence services lacked sufficient leverage. ..."
"... Hillary gladly cooperated and raised the specter of collusion with Russia, which she trumpeted in the debates, downplaying other issues that could have resonated more with voters. Since she thought she was a slam dunk, she thought she could afford to cooperate. It could only help ingratiate her with the borg. ..."
"... On the other hand, Brennan and others in the borg used their allies in the media to promote and propagate the story, which mushroomed when Trump defied the odds and won. Hillary was eager to play the victim as a way to excuse her failure. And the borg began hyping the story to cripple Trump unless he heeled. Initially Trump resisted, firing Comey. But with Bolton now ensconced as the National Security Advisor, it is clear that the borg has won, and the lack of any conspiracy could now be revealed. ..."
"... IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO apparatus to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position. ..."
"... Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss. ..."
"... Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation. ..."
"... both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference. ..."
"... It appears that Bill Barr's light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team. ..."
"... The most farcical thing in the Mueller report is that he did not fill obstruction charges or even recommend that it should be filled, but yet he did not "exonerate" Trump. ..."
"... In other words, Mueller did not think that he had enough to make an obstruction case in the courts of justice, and keep in mind that an indictment requires only "probable cause", not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction, but nevertheless he went out of his way to leave the obstruction sword hanging over Trump`s head so the political infighting does not end. ..."
Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender. That would
explain Sater's early attempts at apparent entrapment. Since that didn't work, a different strategy had to be devised to deny
the presidency to someone over whom the intelligence services lacked sufficient leverage.
Hillary gladly cooperated and raised the specter of collusion with Russia, which she trumpeted in the debates, downplaying
other issues that could have resonated more with voters. Since she thought she was a slam dunk, she thought she could afford to
cooperate. It could only help ingratiate her with the borg.
On the other hand, Brennan and others in the borg used their allies in the media to promote and propagate the story, which
mushroomed when Trump defied the odds and won. Hillary was eager to play the victim as a way to excuse her failure. And the borg
began hyping the story to cripple Trump unless he heeled. Initially Trump resisted, firing Comey. But with Bolton now ensconced
as the National Security Advisor, it is clear that the borg has won, and the lack of any conspiracy could now be revealed.
Such a scenario would explain why Sater, Mufid, Steele and apparent attempts at entrapment got buried. And, with obstruction
still hanging over Trump's head, the borg's leverage is still there if needed.
IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO
apparatus
to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position.
Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the
new boss same as the old boss.
It was obvious from way back in June 2016 when most of the fabricated /novella known as the
Steele Dossier was floating around and the role Fusion GPS played in the Clinton POTUS machine. There is a lot out there but as
per usual smokey mirrors and deception.
I live you with this one thought.
Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and
the Russian Federation.
THe IRGC being labeled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce
a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence
conference.
Special Relationship? All it's possible for the outsider to see in that are questions.
The UK stands shoulder to shoulder with the US in repelling the Russian threat. Also, along with France, helps with any R2P
that needs doing. That's a consistent if by now bedraggled story.
But Europe, including the UK, is now going hell for leather at the "European Army" project. How long will it be before that
becomes a respectable independent force? A decade?
In the meantime all recognise that the US is the only significant European defence force. It's not just the money. The US ties
the European components of NATO together and provides the big reserves of men and equipment. Even Mr Blair accepts that reality.
I've been listening to his talk at the Munich Security Conference.
So the US is to hold the fort in Europe while the Europeans prepare to supplant NATO? Do the Europeans plan to be a military
superpower themselves eventually?
And where does Trump fit in? Trumpphobia is as strong as Russophobia in the UK and stronger than Russophobia in continental
Europe. So Trump is supposed to sit there placidly defending Europe until the Europeans are strong enough to dispense with the
American alliance, and that while the Europeans, including the UK, throw mud at him?
Neither in neocon terms nor in terms of sensible defence are these various stories compatible. Is there any sort of coherent
defense policy in this respect on either side of the Atlantic? Or are they all just winging it and ignoring the inconsistencies?
Bravo ! One word "Bravo!!!" This is a very good, probably the best so far in depth analysis of Mueller's final report. And your phase "disingenuous and dishonest" is like a stamp on Mueller's hatchet job:
A careful reading of the report reveals that Mueller has issued findings that are both disingenuous and dishonest. The report
is a failed hatchet job.
Part of the failure can be attributed to the amount of material that Attorney General Barr allowed to be released.
It appears that Bill Barr's light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team.
The most farcical thing in the Mueller report is that he did not fill obstruction charges or even recommend that it should be
filled, but yet he did not "exonerate" Trump.
In other words, Mueller did not think that he had enough to make an obstruction case in the courts of justice, and keep in
mind that an indictment requires only "probable cause", not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction,
but nevertheless he went out of his way to leave the obstruction sword hanging over Trump`s head so the political infighting does
not end.
IMO, that is the biggest evidence that the whole thing was an attempt at facilitating a political power grab instead of a serious
criminal investigation.
"... Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers. ..."
"... Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him to act. This was the beginning of downward slope. ..."
"... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer. ..."
"... The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have been there anyway. ..."
"... No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful way ..."
"... " ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people." ..."
"... All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests. ..."
"... A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated the 98% poor, to stay rich. When there were insurrections federal troops restored order. Also FDR put down strikes with troops. ..."
"... The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter. ..."
"... "The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story after another would achieve the desired result " ..."
"... But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world. ..."
"... I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and facts don't matter! ..."
"... Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about intimidating them. ..."
"... The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was, and that means as bad as Hell itself. ..."
"... Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the 60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally flawed. I would say more so. ..."
"... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. ..."
"... That pre-9/11 "cooperation" nearly destroyed Russia. Nobody in Russia (except, perhaps, for Pussy Riot) wants a return to the Yeltsin era. ..."
"... The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it. ..."
"... [The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank. ..."
"... Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran. ..."
"... Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington. ..."
"... Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who dictates what they can and can't say. ..."
"... Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt, compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into something much worse. ..."
"... Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six month actions – they go on and on.) ..."
"... Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are we attacking with drones? Where is congress? ..."
"... Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies. ..."
Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call
the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a
brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers.
Again Mike Whitney does not get it. Though in the first part of the article I thought he
would. He was almost getting there. The objective was to push new administration into the
corner from which it could not improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he
wanted to during the campaign.
Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion
with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of
paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which
the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe
or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him
to act. This was the beginning of downward slope.
Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than
during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by
all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the
zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer.
The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine
with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have
been there anyway.
No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The
Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they
have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful
way
The one thing I am not positive about. If the elite really believe that Russia is a
threat, then Americans have done psych ops on themselves.
The US was only interested in Ukraine because it was there. Next in line on a map. The
rather shocking disinterest in investing money -- on both sides -- is inexplicable if it was
really important. Most of it would be a waste -- but still. The US stupidly spent $5 billion
on something -- getting duped by politicians and got theoretical regime change, but it was
hell to pry even $1 billion for real economic aid.
" ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American
people."
All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were
the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests.
I am reading Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the USA, 1492 to the Present.
A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated
the 98% poor, to stay rich.
When there were insurrections federal troops restored order.
Also FDR put down strikes with troops.
You should be aware that Zinn's book is not, IMO, an honest attempt at writing history. It
is conscious propaganda intended to make Americans believe exactly what you are taking from
it.
The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America
and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and
Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter.
Until that fact changes Americans will continue to fight and die for Israel.
"The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and
unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident
Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story
after another would achieve the desired result "
But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out
neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions
fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world.
I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's
not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of
brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and
facts don't matter!
Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about
intimidating them.
Whitney is another author who declares the "Russians did it" narrative a psyop. He then
devotes entire columns to the psyop, "naww Russia didn't do it". There could be plenty to write about – recent laws that do undercut liberty, but no,
the Washington Post needs fake opposition to its fake news so you have guys like Whitney in
the less-mainstream fake news media.
So Brennan wanted revenge? Well that's simple enough to understand, without being too
stupid. But Whitney's whopper of a lie is what you're supposed to unquestionably believe. The
US has "rival political parties". Did you miss it?
The US is doing nothing more than acting as the British Empire 2.0. WASP culture was born of a Judaizing heresy: Anglo-Saxon Puritanism. That meant that the
WASP Elites of every are pro-Jewish, especially in order to wage war, physical and/or
cultural, against the vast majority of white Christians they rule.
By the early 19th century, The Brit Empire's Elites also had a strong, and growing, dose
of pro-Arabic/pro-Islamic philoSemitism. Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and
most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which
means being pro-Wahhabi and permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite
Mohammedans.
So, by the time of Victoria's high reign, the Brit WASP Elites were a strange brew of
hardcoree pro-Jewish and hardcore pro-Arabic/islamic. The US foreign policy of today is an
attempt to put those two together and force it on everyone and make it work.
The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the
Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless
lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was,
and that means as bad as Hell itself.
Fair enough. I didn't know that about the foreword. If accurate, that's a reasonable
approach for a book.
Here's the problem.
Back when O. Cromwell was the dictator of England, he retained an artist to paint him. The
custom of the time was for artists to "clean up" their subjects, in a primitive form of
photoshopping.
OC being a religious fanatic, he informed the artist he wished to be portrayed as God had
made him, "warts and all." (Ollie had a bunch of unattractive facial warts.) Or the artist
wouldn't be paid.
Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the
60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major
role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally
flawed. I would say more so.
All I am asking is that American (and other) history be written "warts and all." The
triumphalist version is true, largely, and so is the Zinn version. Gone With the Wind
and Roots both portray certain aspects of the pre-war south fairly accurately..
America has been, and is, both evil and good. As is/was true of every human institution
and government in history. Personally, I believe America, net/net, has been one of the
greatest forces for human good ever. But nobody will realize that if only the negative side
of American history is taught.
"There must be something really dirty in Russigate that hasn't yet come out to generate
this level of panic."
You continue to claim what you cannot prove.
But then you are a Jews First Zionist.
Russia-Gate Jumps the Shark
Russia-gate has jumped the shark with laughable new claims about a tiny number of
"Russia-linked" social media ads, but the US mainstream media is determined to keep a
straight face
Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually
coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which means being pro-Wahhabi and
permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite Mohammedans.
Thanks for the laugh. During the 19th century, the Sauds were toothless, dirt-poor hicks
from the deep desert of zero importance on the world stage.
The Brits were not Saudi proponents, in fact promoting the Husseins of Hejaz, the guys
Lawrence of Arabia worked with. The Husseins, the Sharifs of Mecca and rulers of Hejaz, were
the hereditary enemies of the Sauds of Nejd.
After WWI, the Brits installed Husseins as rulers of both Transjordan and Iraq, which with
the Hejaz meant the Sauds were pretty much surrounded. The Sauds conquered the Hejaz in 1924,
despite lukewarm British support for the Hejaz.
Nobody in the world cared much about the Saudis one way or another until massive oil
fields were discovered, by Americans not Brits, starting in 1938. There was no reason they
should. Prior to that Saudi prominence in world affairs was about equal to that of Chad
today, and for much the same reason. Chad (and Saudi Arabia) had nothing anybody else
wanted.
'Putin stopped talking about the "Lisbon to Vladivostok" free trade area long ago" --
Michael Kenney
Putin was simply trying to sell Russia's application for EU membership with the
catch-phrase "Lisbon to Vladivostok". He continued that until the issue was triply mooted (1)
by implosion of EU growth and boosterism, (2) by NATO's aggressive stance, in effect taken by
NATO in Ukraine events and in the Baltics, and, (3) Russia's alliance with China.
It is surely still true that Russians think of themselves, categorically, as Europeans.
OTOH, we can easily imagine that Russians in Vladivostok look at things differently than do
Russians in St. Petersburg. Then again, Vladivostok only goes back about a century and a
half.
Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than
during Obama administration.
I generally agree with your comment, but that part strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration.
While relations with Russia certainly haven't improved, how have they really worsened? The
second round of sanctions that Trump reluctantly approved have yet to be implemented by
Europe, which was the goal. And apart from that, what of substance has changed?
It's not surprising that 57 percent of the American people believe in Russian meddling.
Didn't two-thirds of the same crowd believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, too? The American
public is being brainwashed 24 hours a day all year long.
The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst
has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton
gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it.
This disinformation campaign might be the prelude to an upcoming war.
Right now, the US is run by jerks and idiots. Watch the video.
Only dumb people does not know that TRUMP IS NETANYAHU'S PUPPET.
The fifth column zionist jews are running the albino stooge and foreign policy in the
Middle East to expand Israel's interest against American interest that is TREASON. One of
these FIFTH COLUMNISTS is Jared Kushner. He should be arrested.
[The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held
views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist
line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign
policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also
long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.
Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of
state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not
appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on
Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with
Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete
withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran.
Bolton spoke with Trump by phone on Thursday about the paragraph in the deal that vowed it
would be "terminated" if there was any renegotiation, according to Politico. He was calling
Trump from Las Vegas, where he'd been meeting with casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the third
major figure behind Trump's shift towards Israeli issues. Adelson is a Likud supporter who
has long been a close friend of Netanyahu's and has used his Israeli tabloid newspaper Israel
Hayomto support Netanyahu's campaigns. He was Trump's main campaign contributor in 2016,
donating $100 million. Adelson's real interest has been in supporting Israel's interests in
Washington -- especially with regard to Iran.]
Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It
means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources
and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital
the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US
debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will
steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in
Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple
Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington
must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate
their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain
its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to
success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington.
American dominance is very much tied to the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency,
and the rest of the world no longer want to fund this bankrupt, warlike state –
particularly the Chinese.
First, it confirms that the US did not want to see the jihadist extremists
defeated by Russia. These mainly-Sunni militias served as Washington's proxy-army
conducting an ambitious regime change operation which coincided with US strategic
ambitions.
The CIA run US/Israeli/ISIS alliance.
Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news
gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who
dictates what they can and can't say.
They are given the political line and they broadcast it.
The loosening of rules governing the dissemination of domestic propaganda coupled with
the extraordinary advances in surveillance technology, create the perfect conditions for
the full implementation of an American police state. But what is more concerning, is
that the primary levers of state power are no longer controlled by elected officials but by
factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American
people. That can only lead to trouble.
At some point Americans are going to get a "War on Domestic Terror" cheered along by the
media. More or less the arrest and incarceration of any opposition following the Soviet
Bolshevik model.
On the plus side, everyone now knows that the Anglo-US media from the NY Times to the
Economist, from WaPo to the Gruniard, and from the BBC to CNN, the CBC and Weinstein's
Hollywood are a worthless bunch of depraved lying bastards.
Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt,
compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most
people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of
mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into
something much worse.
The thing is, no matter how thick the mental cages are, and how carefully they are
maintained by the daily massive injections of "certified" truth (via MSM), along with
neutralizing or compromising of "troublemakers", the presence of multiple alternative sources
in the age of Internet makes people to slip out of these cages one by one, and as the last
events show – with acceleration.
It means that there's a fast approaching tipping point after which it'd be impossible for
those in power both to keep a nice "civilized" face and to control the "cage-free"
population. So, no matter how the next war will be called, it will be the war against the
free Internet and free people. That's probably why N. Korean leader has no fear to start
one.
All government secrecy is a curse on mankind. Trump is releasing the JFK murder files to the public. Kudos! Let us hope he will follow up with a full 9/11 investigation.
The objective was to push new administration into the corner from which it could not
improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he wanted to during the campaign.
Good point. That was probably one of the objectives (and from the point of view of the
deep-state, perhaps the most important objective) of the "Russia hacked our democracy"
narrative, in addition to the general deligitimization of the Trump administration.
And, keep in mind, Washington's Sunni proxies were not a division of the Pentagon; they
were entirely a CIA confection: CIA recruited, CIA-armed, CIA-funded and
CIA-trained.
Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign
nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's
that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six
month actions – they go on and on.)
Are committees of six congressman and six senators, who meet in secret, just avoiding the
grave constitutional questions of war? We the People cannot even interrogate these
politicians. (These politicians make big money in the secrecy swamp when they leave
office.)
Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are
we attacking with drones? Where is congress?
Spying is one thing – covert action is another – covert is wrong – it
goes against world order. Every year after 9/11 they say things are worse – give them
more money more power and they will make things safe. That is BS!
9/11 has opened the flood gates to the US government attacking at will, the various
peoples of this Earth. That is NOT our prerogative.
We are being exceptionally arrogant.
Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies.
"... As I noted in my previous piece-- The FBI Tried and Failed to Entrap Trump --Sater was an active FBI undercover informant. ..."
"... An honest prosecutor would have and should have disclosed this fact. He, Sater, was the one encouraging the Trump team to cozy up to Russia. Mueller does not disclose one single instance of Trump or Cohen or any of the Trump kids calling Sater on the carpet and chewing his ass for not bringing them deals and not opening doors in Russia. Omitting this key fact goes beyond simple disingenuity. It is a conscious lie. ..."
"... The circumstantial evidence indicates that Sater was doing this at the behest of FBI handlers. We do not yet know who they are. ..."
"... We also have the case of Michael Caputo and Roger Stone being approached by a Russian gangster named Henry Greenberg. ..."
"... How does a guy like Vorkretsov/Greenberg, with an extensive criminal record and circumstantial ties to the Russian mob gain entrance into the United States? Very simple answer. He too was an FBI informant : ..."
"... Please take time to read the full dossier at democrat dossier . This is more than an odd coincidence. This is a pattern. The FBI was targeting the Trump campaign and personnel in a deliberate effort to implicate them in wanting to work with Russians. ..."
"... Once again, the Mueller team treats the provocateur -- -i.e., Joseph Mifsud -- -as some simple guy with ties to Russia's political elites. Another egregious lie. Mifsud was not working on behalf of Russia. He was deployed by MI-6. Disobedient Media has been on the forefront of exposing Mifsud's ties to western intelligence in general and the Brits in particular . ..."
"... A number of Twitter users recently observed that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud’s LINK campus in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed later reported that the professor’s name and biography had been removed from the campus’ website, writing that the mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for “years.” ..."
"... WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: “[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo].” ..."
"... This is not a mere matter of Mueller and his team "failing" to disclose some important facts. If they were operating honestly they should have investigated Mifsud, Greenberg and Sater. But they did not. Two of the three--Sater and Greenber--alleged Russian stooges have ties to the FBI. And Mifsud has been living and working in the belly of the intelligence community. ..."
"... Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss. ..."
"... Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation . THe IRGC being labelled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. ..."
"... You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference. ..."
"... The Special Relationship is hopefully entering the divorce stage. None too soon. Great work, Mr. Johnson. ..."
While President Trump is correct to celebrate the Mueller Report’s conclusion that no one on Trump’s side of the ledger attempted
to or succeeded in collaborating or colluding with the Russian Government or Russian spies, there remains a dark cloud behind the
silver lining. And I am not referring to the claims of alleged obstruction of justice. A careful reading of the report reveals
that Mueller has issued findings that are both disingenuous and dishonest. The report is a failed hatchet job. Part of the failure
can be attributed to the amount of material that Attorney General Barr allowed to be released. It appears that Bill Barr's light
editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team.
Let us start with the case of trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. If you were to believe that the Steele Dossier accurately
reported Vladimir Putin's attitude towards Trump, then a Trump real estate deal in Moscow was a slam dunk. According to one of Steele's
breathless reports:
The Kremlin's cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business
deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament.
How ever, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.
Then there is reality. The impetus, the encouragement for the Moscow project came from one man--Felix
Sater.
In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately
September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate
development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov.J07 Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014,
had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City.30S Sater later contacted Rozov
and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the
Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert.
(see page 69 of the Mueller Report).
To reiterate--if the Steele Dossier was based on truthful intelligence then the Trump organization only had to sit back, stretch
out their hands and seize the moment. Instead, little Felix Sater keeps coming back to the well. In January 2016, according to the
Mueller report,
Sater then sent a draft invitation for Cohen to visit Moscow to discuss the Trump Moscow project,along with a note to "[t]ell
me if the letter is good as amended by me or make whatever changes you want and send it back to me."
After a further round
of edits, on January 25, 2016, Sater sent Cohen an invitation -- signed by Andrey Ryabinskiy of the company MHJ -- to travel to
"Moscow for a working visit" about the "prospects of development and the construction business in Russia," "the various land plots
available suited for construction of this enormous Tower," and "the opportunity to co-ordinate a follow up visit to Moscow by
Mr. Donald Trump..
This produced nothing. No deal, no trip. But Sater persisted:
Beginning in late 2015, Sater repeatedly tried to arrange for Cohen and candidate Trump, as representatives of the Trump Organization,
to travel to Russia to meet with Russian government officials and possible financing partners. . . .
Into the spring of 2016, Sater and Cohen continued to discuss a trip to Moscow in connection with the Trump Moscow project.
On April 20, 2016, Sater wrote Cohen, " [t)he People wanted to know when you are coming?,,
On May 4, 2016, Sater followed up:
“I had a chat with Moscow. ASSUMING the trip does happen the question is before or after the convention. I said I believe,
but don't know for sure, that's it's probably after the convention. Obviously the pre-meeting trip (you only) can happen anytime
you want but he 2 big guys where [sic) the question. I said I would confirm and revert.”
On May 5, 2016, Sater wrote to Cohen:
“Peskov would like to invite you as his guest to the St. Petersburg Forum which is Russia's Davos it's June 16-19. He wants
to meet there with you and possibly introduce you to either Putin or Medvedev, as they are not sure if 1 or both will be there.
This is perfect. The entire business class of Russia will be there as well.”
On June 14, 2016, Cohen met Sater in the lobby of the Trump Tower in New York and informed him that he would not be traveling
at that time.
Why was Felix Sater the one repeatedly identified pushing to arrange deals with the Russians and yet did not face any subsequent
charges by the Mueller team? Sater had been working as part of the Trump team since 2003. Why is it that the proposed deals and travel
to Moscow came predominantly from Felix Sater?
As I noted in my previous piece--The
FBI Tried and Failed to Entrap Trump--Sater was an active FBI undercover informant. He had been working with the
FBI since 1998. When he agreed to start working as an undercover informant aka cooperator in December 1998 guess who signed off on
the deal? Andrew Weissman. You can see the
deal here. It was signed 10
December 1998.
An honest prosecutor would have and should have disclosed this fact. He, Sater, was the one encouraging the Trump team to
cozy up to Russia. Mueller does not disclose one single instance of Trump or Cohen or any of the Trump kids calling Sater on the
carpet and chewing his ass for not bringing them deals and not opening doors in Russia. Omitting this key fact goes beyond simple
disingenuity. It is a conscious lie.
The circumstantial evidence indicates that Sater was doing this at the behest of FBI handlers. We do not yet know who they are.
But Sater's behavior and status as an FBI Informant was not an isolated incident. We also have the case of Michael Caputo and
Roger Stone being approached by a Russian gangster named Henry Greenberg. According to
democratdossier.com:
Greenberg's birth name is Gennady Vasilievich Vostretsov, the son of Yekatrina Vostretsova and Vasliy Vostretsov. He later adopted
new names twice as a result of two different marriages and became Gennady V. Arzhanik and later Henry Oknyansky. Henry Greenberg
is not a legal alias, but he uses it quite commonly in recent years.
But you would not know this from reading the Mueller report. Mr. Disingenuous strikes again:
In the spring of 2016, Trump Campaign advisor Michael Caputo learned through a Florida-based Russian business partner that another
Florida-based Russian, Henry Oknyansky (who also went by the name Henry Greenberg), claimed to have information pertaining to
Hillary Clinton . Caputo notified Roger Stone and brokered communication between Stone and Oknyansky.
Oknyansky and Stone set
up a May 2016 in-person meeting. 260 Oknyansky was accompanied to the meeting by Alexei Rasin, a Ukrainian associate involved
in Florida real estate. At the meeting, Rasin offered to sell Stone derogatory information on Clinton that Rasin claimed to have
obtained while working for Clinton. Rasin claimed to possess financial statements demonstrating Clinton's involvement in money
laundering with Rasin's companies. According to Oknyansky, Stone asked if the amounts in question totaled millions of dollars
but was told it was closer to hundreds of thousands. Stone refused the offer, stating that Trump would not pay for opposition
research.
How does a guy like Vorkretsov/Greenberg, with an extensive criminal record and circumstantial ties to the Russian mob gain entrance
into the United States? Very simple answer. He too
was an FBI informant:
In an affidavit, Vostretsov explained to an immigration judge he worked for the FBI for 17 years throughout the world, including
in the US, Iran and North Korea. He explained in the same paperwork the FBI granted him several temporary visas to visit the US in
exchange for information about criminal activities.
Please take time to read the full dossier at
democrat dossier. This is more than
an odd coincidence. This is a pattern. The FBI was targeting the Trump campaign and personnel in a deliberate effort to implicate
them in wanting to work with Russians.
And there is more. George Papodopoulus was entrapped by individuals linked to British MI-6 and the CIA with offers to provide
meetings with Russians and Putin. The Mueller account is a lie:
In late April 2016, Papadopoulos was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, immediately after Mifsud 's return from a trip
to Moscow, that the Russian government had obtained "dirt" on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. One week later,
on May 6, 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications
from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging
to candidate Clinton.
Papadopoulos shared information about Russian "dirt " with people outside of the Campaign, and the Office
investigated whether he also provided it to a Campaign official. Papadopoulos and the Campaign officials with whom he interacted
told the Office that they did · not recall that Papadopoulos passed them the information. Throughout the relevant period of time
and for several months thereafter, Papadopoulos worked with Mifsud and two Russian nationals to arrange a meeting between the
Campaign and the Russian government. That meeting never came to pass.
Once again, the Mueller team treats the provocateur -- -i.e., Joseph Mifsud -- -as some simple guy with ties to Russia's political
elites. Another egregious lie. Mifsud was not working on behalf of Russia. He was deployed by MI-6. Disobedient Media has been on
the forefront of exposing Mifsud's ties to
western intelligence in general and the Brits in particular.
Mifsud’s alleged links to Russian intelligence are summarily debunked by his close working relationship
with Claire Smith, a major figure in the upper echelons of British intelligence. A number of Twitter users recently observed
that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud’s LINK campus
in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed later reported that the professor’s name and biography had been removed from the campus’ website, writing
that the mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for “years.”
WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith
in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: “[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint
Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link
University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo].”
The photograph in question originated on Geodiplomatics.com, where it specified that Joseph Mifsud
is indeed standing next to Claire Smith, who was attending a: “…Training program on International Security which was organised by
Link Campus University and London Academy of Diplomacy.” The event is listed as taking place in October, 2012. This is highly significant
for a number of reasons.
This is not a mere matter of Mueller and his team "failing" to disclose some important facts. If they were operating
honestly they should have investigated Mifsud, Greenberg and Sater. But they did not. Two of the three--Sater and Greenber--alleged
Russian stooges have ties to the FBI. And Mifsud has been living and working in the belly of the intelligence community.
When you put these facts together it is clear that there is real meat on the bone for Barr's upcoming investigation of the "spying"
that was being done on the Trump campaign by law enforcement and intelligence. These facts must become a part of the public consciousness.
The foreign country that worked feverishly to meddle in the 2016 Presidential election and the subsequent rule of Donald Trump is
the United Kingdom. Russia is the patsy.
turcopolier, 20 April 2019 at 10:44 PM
IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO apparatus
to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position.
falcemartello, 20 April 2019 at 11:28 PM
Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look
at the new boss same as the old boss.
It was obvious from way back in June 2016 when most of the fabricated /novella known as the Steele Dossier was floating around
and the role Fusion GPS played in the Clinton POTUS machine. There is a lot out there but as per usual smokey mirrors and deception.
I live you with this one thought.
Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME
and the Russian Federation . THe IRGC being labelled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying
to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism.
You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a
racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence
conference.
Rick Merlotti
The Special Relationship is hopefully entering the divorce stage. None too soon. Great work, Mr. Johnson.
Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power
structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us
know how evil and disgusting that person is? It's true of the leader of every nation which
refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it's
true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it's true of WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange.
Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its
political and
media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and
unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If
everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they'll be far less likely to
take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they'll be far more likely to consent to Assange's
imprisonment, thereby
establishing a precedent for the future prosecution of leak-publishing journalists around
the world. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you're suspicious of him
you won't believe anything he's saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or
near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it's as good as putting a bullet
in his head.
Those of us who value truth and light need to fight this smear campaign in order to keep our
fellow man from signing off on a major leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia, and a big
part of that means being able to argue against those smears and disinformation wherever they
appear. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any kind of centralized source of information
which comprehensively debunks all the smears in a thorough and engaging way, so with the help
of hundreds of
tips from my
readers and social media followers
I'm going to attempt to make one here. What follows is my attempt at creating a tool kit people
can use to fight against Assange smears wherever they encounter them, by refuting the
disinformation with truth and solid argumentation.
This article is an ongoing project which will be updated regularly where it appears on
Medium and caitlinjohnstone.com as new information comes in and new smears spring up in need of
refutation.
"... Alex Carey explains is his excellent book "Taking the Risk out of Democracy" that the remarkable susceptibility of the American people to propaganda has to do with the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. Famous scholars like William James and John Dewey said things like: "What is true is that what is useful in our lives" and "Believing something helps to make that thing become true". So you want to believe because you think it serves your purposes. ..."
"... This whole Russiagate is a sort of orgy of pragmatism. This could not happen in any other country, I'm sure. The only bright lining is that apparently large parts of the US population do not care one whit about Russiagate. The thing only has traction among the educated classes. But still! Amazing to see how so many evidently smart people mislead themselves into believing this shoddy story or at least taking it way too serious. ..."
My God you Americans are so strange! (I'm from the Netherlands)
Alex Carey explains is his excellent book "Taking the Risk out of Democracy" that the remarkable susceptibility of the American
people to propaganda has to do with the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. Famous scholars like William James and John Dewey
said things like: "What is true is that what is useful in our lives" and "Believing something helps to make that thing become
true". So you want to believe because you think it serves your purposes.
Betrand Russell considered this attitude to represent
a kind of madness. Truth is the objective correspondence to the facts, was his position.
This whole Russiagate is a sort of orgy
of pragmatism. This could not happen in any other country, I'm sure. The only bright lining is that apparently large parts of
the US population do not care one whit about Russiagate. The thing only has traction among the educated classes. But still! Amazing
to see how so many evidently smart people mislead themselves into believing this shoddy story or at least taking it way too serious.
As to the title you gave these two items: "Will the Mueller Report Help Defeat Trump in 2020?" Of course not ! TO THE CONTRARY!
Sad that the Real News also has gone under in this intellectual morass. You really should have kept on Aaron Maté.
"... Nevertheless, while it appeared to the Clinton partisans in the Obama White House, in the DoJ, the CIA, the FBI and overseas in the UK, that the e-mail case had been quashed sufficiently to preserve the likelihood of Clinton's accession, they had enough reservations to exploit a garbage pail of political dirt to take out an "insurance policy." ..."
Who is taking the over/under on whether Barr will actually investigate the origins of the attempted entrapment of Trump in Russia
collusion and the roles played by key players in US law enforcement and intelligence agencies as well as the Brits & Aussie government
agencies therein?
I'm willing to bet that it will all be swept under the rug and that Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Lynch & Rice will not be testifying
to any grand jury. Barr has received multiple criminal & conspiracy referrals from Rep. Devin Nunes. However, Trump himself disregarded
Nunes recommendation to declassify several documents & communications including the FISA application on Carter Page. The question
is does Trump want to get to the bottom of the conspiracy? So far all he's done is tweet. IMO, Barr is the epitome of a Swamp
Rat.
"Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt." – Sun Tzu
I have a feeling that President Trump will declassify and release the relevant documents in a manner that they will have maximum
effect. It is stunning that the entirety of federal law enforcement, intelligence, and State department embraced and fortified
Russian misinformation in their jihad against Trump.
This must never happen again. At least the operation was run by political hacks, former analysts who fancied themselves as
operators. Their ham- fisted prints are over this shit storm. Thank you God for Comey, Brennan, and Clapper -- the three stooges
of espionage.
I suppose that it's possible that AG Barr's DoJ will mount a serious investigation into the many tentacles ongoing governmental
debacle that began with the Lynch DoJ providing political direction and cover for Comey's FBI to lie down on the Clinton e-mail
investigation. Which came first, the cover up, or the capitulation, is not completely clear. Perhaps it was a hand in glove affair.
Suffice it to say that by any standard of competence, it was a faux effort.
In my opinion, what was not done should constitute the elements of an obstruction violation. It would be a difficult charge
to argue before a jury. Was the level of incompetence such that a reasonable person could not believe that it could not exist
in the FBI, that there had to be malicious intent?
Nevertheless, while it appeared to the Clinton partisans in the Obama White House, in the DoJ, the CIA, the FBI and overseas
in the UK, that the e-mail case had been quashed sufficiently to preserve the likelihood of Clinton's accession, they had enough
reservations to exploit a garbage pail of political dirt to take out an "insurance policy."
Once again the question, could they possibly have been so incompetent. "What the heck" appears to have been the launching pad;
Clinton's going to win anyway, Trump will be crushed under the unmaskings, leaks, and innuendo; and no one will ever find out.
But Trump wins, and the unwholesome political cabal is now stuck with an investigation of an incoming President whom they had
tried to frag on the skimpiest evidentiary grounds imaginable. And worse, he appears to be sensing there is something rotten in
the state of Denmark, and Cardinal Jim Comey is a shitty liar, and now he's out, and what is going to happen to this garbage scow
they've launched, now with Comey gone. How do they kill this thing? Worse, how do they kill the political riot this thing has
caused. They can't; they double down; they take out another insurance policy - Jim Comey's good bud, Bob Mueller with a posse
of partisan attorneys, many vets of the Obama DoJ, a couple of squads of FBI Agents, including two who were prominent in the e
mail case and the Steele inquiry, and a set up akin to a shadow DoJ. What could go wrong? They would hound the bastard out of
office.
Which returns us to the question of whether Barr will mount a serious investigation into the political scandal of the last
100 years, at least. I suppose it is possible, but right now I'm not optimistic. For one thing Barr appeared at the big press
conference with Rod Rosenstein. Rod Rosenstein is at minimum a critical witness. There is every reason to suspect that Comey,
McCabe, Mueller, and Rosenstein conferred before Comey's leak to the NYT via a lawyer friend in furtherance of Mueller's appointment.
Going side by side with Rosenstein at this juncture doesn't augur well.
On the other hand, the continuing lunatic behavior of the demented left may give Barr no other choice but to sort the mess
out once and for all for the good of the country. We'll see.
The biggest take I got out of the Mueller report is that Trump is a sleazy character and that is not what I want from the president,
the Face of America to the rest of the world. Whether the Deep State went after Trump in an organized fashion is just noise in
my ears. To me that is just normal political infighting the same as Trump and other Republicans went after Obama for being an
illegitimate President as a non-citizen.
Sorry, but it IS NOT "normal political infighting" for the cabal to have sought and still to seek the overthrow of of the legitimate
head of state and government.
The fact that one has to go to RT for such professional journalism is telling. A pundit on
Vesti is arguing that the current situation is "USSR reversed", in that the US now feels the
need to "mute" Russia but Russia does not feel the need to "mute" the US. Because Russia is
the country whose leadership is being more truthful, this results in Russia being more open
to foreign media and dissident opinion. He says "openness is beneficial for us", "openness
makes us the winning side", and "there is nothing they can tell us about us that we don't
already know". I have been thinking along the same lines. From the 3:00 mark onwards
here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JkAKYLklYI
The country was divided before Mueller Report. Now it is even more divided.
Notable quotes:
"... We wouldn't know that a Clinton-linked operative, Joseph Mifsud, seeded Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos with the rumor that Russia had 'Dirt' on Hillary Clinton - which would later be coaxed out of Papadopoulos by a Clinton-linked Australian ambassador, Alexander Downer, and that this apparent 'setup' would be the genesis of the FBI's " operation crossfire hurricane " operation against the Trump campaign. ..."
"... We wouldn't know about the role of Fusion GPS - the opposition research firm hired by Hillary Clinton's campaign to commission the Steele dossier. Fusion is also linked to the infamous Trump Tower meeting , and hired Nellie Ohr - the CIA-linked wife of the DOJ's then-#4 employee, Bruce Ohr. Nellie fed her husband Bruce intelligence she had gathered against Trump while working for Fusion , according to transcripts of her closed-door Congressional testimony. ..."
"... Now the dossier -- financed by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee , and compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele -- is likely to face new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries . - NYT ..."
"... The report was debunked after internet sleuths traced the IP address to a marketing server located outside Philadelphia, leading Alfa Bank executives to file a lawsuit against Fusion GPS in October 2017, claiming their reputations were harmed by the Steele Dossier. ..."
"... And who placed the Trump-Alfa theory with various media outlets? None other than former FBI counterintelligence officer and Dianne Feinstein aide Dan Jones - who is currently working with Fusion GPS and Steele to continue their Trump-Russia investigation funded in part by George Soros . ..."
"... Of course, when one stops painting with broad brush strokes, it's clear that the dossier was fabricated bullshit. ..."
"... after a nearly two-year investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and roughly 40 FBI agents and other specialists, no evidence was found to support the dossier's wild claims of "DNC moles, Romanian hackers, Russian pensioners, or years of Trump-Putin intelligence trading ," as the Times puts it. ..."
"... As there was spying, there must necessarily also have been channels to get the information thus gathered back to its original buyer - the Clinton campaign. Who passed the information back to Clinton, and what got passed? ..."
"... the NYTt prints all the news a scumbag would. remember Judith Miller, the Zionazi reporter the NYT ..."
"... There was no 'hack.' That is the big, anti-Russia, pro-MIC lie which all the other lies serve. ..."
"... Seth Rich had the means and the motive. So did Imran Awan, but it would make no sense for Awan to turn anything over to wikileaks . . .he would have kept them as insurance. ..."
"... Until the real criminals are processed and the media can be restored you don't have a United States. This corruption is beyond comprehension. You had the (((media)) providing kickbacks to the FBI for leaked information. These bribes are how CNN was on site during Roger Stones invasion. ..."
"... So now the narrative is, "We were wrong about Russian collusion, and that's Russia's fault"?! ..."
As we now shift from the "witch hunt" against Trump to 'investigating the investigators' who spied on him - remember this; Donald
Trump was supposed to lose the 2016 election by almost all accounts. And had Hillary won, as expected, none of this would have seen
the light of day .
We wouldn't know that a Clinton-linked operative, Joseph Mifsud,
seeded Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos with the rumor that Russia had 'Dirt' on Hillary Clinton - which would later be
coaxed out of Papadopoulos by a Clinton-linked Australian ambassador, Alexander Downer, and that this apparent 'setup' would be the
genesis of the FBI's "
operation crossfire hurricane " operation against the Trump campaign.
We wouldn't know about the role of Fusion GPS - the opposition research firm hired by Hillary Clinton's campaign to commission
the Steele dossier. Fusion is also linked to the infamous
Trump Tower meeting , and hired
Nellie Ohr - the CIA-linked wife of the DOJ's then-#4 employee, Bruce Ohr. Nellie fed her husband Bruce intelligence she had
gathered against Trump while working for Fusion ,
according to transcripts of her closed-door Congressional testimony.
And if not for reporting by the Daily
Caller 's Chuck Ross and others, we wouldn't know that the FBI sent a longtime spook, Stefan Halper, to infiltrate and spy on
the Trump campaign - after the Obama DOJ paid him over $400,000
right before the 2016 US election (out of more than $1 million he received while Obama was president).
According to the New
York Times , the tables are turning, starting with the Steele Dossier.
[T]he release on Thursday of
the report
by the special counsel , Robert S. Mueller III, underscored what had grown clearer for months -- that while many Trump aides
had welcomed contacts with the Russians, some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were
impossible to prove . Mr. Mueller's report contained over a dozen passing references to the document's claims but no overall assessment
of why so much did not check out.
While Congressional Republicans have vowed to investigate, the DOJ's Inspector General is considering whether the FBI improperly
relied on the dossier when they used it to apply for a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The IG also wants
to know about Steele's sources and whether the FBI disclosed any doubts as to the veracity of the dossier .
Attorney General Barr, meanwhile, said he will review the FBI's conduct in the Russia investigation after saying the agency
spied on the Trump
campaign .
Doubts over the dossier
The FBI's scramble to vet the dossier's claims are well known. According to an April, 2017
NYT report , the FBI agreed
to pay Steele $50,000 for "solid corroboration" of his claims . Steele was apparently unable to produce satisfactory evidence - and
was ultimately not paid for his efforts:
Mr. Steele met his F.B.I. contact in Rome in early October, bringing a stack of new intelligence reports. One, dated Sept.
14, said that Mr. Putin was facing "fallout" over his apparent involvement in the D.N.C. hack and was receiving "conflicting advice"
on what to do.
The agent said that if Mr. Steele could get solid corroboration of his reports, the F.B.I. would pay him $50,000 for his efforts,
according to two people familiar with the offer. Ultimately, he was not paid . -
NYT
Still, the FBI used the dossier to obtain the FISA warrant on Page - while the document itself was heavily shopped around to various
media outlets . The late Sen. John McCain provided a copy to Former FBI Director James Comey, who already had a version, and briefed
President Trump on the salacious document. Comey's briefing to Trump was then used by CNN and BuzzFeed to justify reporting on and
publishing the dossier following the election.
Let's not forget that in October, 2016, both Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta promoted the conspiracy theory
that a secret Russian server was communicating with Trump Tower.
The report was debunked after internet sleuths traced the IP address to a marketing server located outside Philadelphia, leading
Alfa Bank executives to file a lawsuit against Fusion GPS in October 2017, claiming their reputations were harmed by the Steele Dossier.
And who placed the Trump-Alfa theory with various media outlets? None other than former FBI counterintelligence officer and Dianne
Feinstein aide Dan Jones - who is currently working with Fusion GPS and Steele to continue their Trump-Russia investigation funded
in part by
George Soros .
Russian tricks? The Times notes that Steele "has not ruled out" that he may have been fed Russian disinformation while assembling his dossier.
That would mean that in addition to carrying out an effective attack on the Clinton campaign, Russian spymasters hedged their
bets and placed a few land mines under Mr. Trump's presidency as well.
Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who now lives outside Washington, saw that as plausible. "Russia has huge experience
in spreading false information," he said. -
NYT
In short, Steele is being given an 'out' with this admission.
A lawyer for Fusion GPS, Joshua Levy, says that the Mueller report substantiated the "core reporting" in the Steele memos - namely
that "Trump campaign figures were secretly meeting Kremlin figures," and that Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, had directed
"a covert operation to elect Donald J. Trump."
Of course, when one stops painting with broad brush strokes, it's clear that the dossier was fabricated bullshit.
The dossier tantalized Mr. Trump's opponents with a worst-case account of the president's conduct. And for those trying to
make sense of the Trump-Russia saga, the dossier infused the quest for understanding with urgency.
In blunt prose, it suggested that a foreign power had fully compromised the man who would become the next president of the
United States.
The Russians, it asserted, had tried winning over Mr. Trump with real estate deals in Moscow -- which he had not taken up --
and set him up with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013, filming the proceedings for future exploitation. A handful of aides
were described as conspiring with the Russians at every turn.
Mr. Trump, it said, had moles inside the D.N.C. The memos claimed that he and the Kremlin had been exchanging intelligence
for eight years and were using Romanian hackers against the Democrats , and that Russian pensioners in the United States were
running a covert communications network . -
NYT
And after a nearly two-year investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and roughly 40 FBI agents and other specialists, no
evidence was found to support the dossier's wild claims of "DNC moles, Romanian hackers, Russian pensioners, or years of Trump-Putin
intelligence trading ," as the Times puts it.
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, and key Democrats backing away from talks of impeachment, let's see if lady justice will
follow the rest of us down the rabbit hole.
This is why the whole FISA court is a joke. What is their remedy if their power is abused? What happens. Well,... the FISA
courts was lied to and found out about it in the early 2000's. Mueller was FBI chief. So they got a strongly worded dressing-down,
a mark in their permanent record from high school, and NO ONE was fired... no one was sanctioned, no agent was transferred to
Alaska.
Fast forward 10 or 12 years and the FBI is doing this **** again. Lying to the court... you know the court where there are
no Democrat judges or Republican judges.. they are all super awesome.... and what is the remedy when the FISA court is told they've
been lied to by the FBI and used in a intel operation with MI6, inserting assets, into a freaking domestic Presidential campaign!!!
and then they WON. Good god.
And what do we hear from our court? Nadda. Do we hear of some Federal Judges hauling FBI and DOJ folks in front of them and
throwing them in jail? Nope. It appears from here... that our Federal Justices are corrupt and have no problem letting illegal
police-state actions go on with ZERO accountability or recourse. They could care less evidently. It's all secret you know... trust
us they say.. Why aren't these judges publicly making loud noises about how the judiciary is complicit , with the press, in wholesale
spying and leaking for political reasons AND a coup attempt when the wrong guy won.???
Where is awesome Justice Roberts? Why isn't he throwing down some truth on just how compromised the rule of law in his courts
clearly are in the last 10 years? The FISA court is his baby. It does no good for them to assure us they are concerned too, and
they've taken action and sent strongly worded letters. Pisses me off. ? Right? heck of rant...
When did Russians interfere in our elections?? 2016. Who was president when Russians interfered with elections?? oobama. Who
was head of the CIA?? Brennan. Who was National Intelligence director?? Clapper. Who was head of the FBI when the Russians interfered
in our elections?? Comey. The pattern is obvious. When Trump was a private citizen the oobama and all his cabinet appointees and
Intel Managers had their hands on all the levers and instruments of Government..and did nothing . Your oobama is guilty of treason
and failing his Oath Of Office...everybody knows this.
This article is still a roundabout gambit to blame Russia.
Fair enough, where's Bill Browder? In England. Browder's allegations were utilized to try and damage Russia, even though Russia
(not the USSR), is about the most reliable friend America has.
Russia helped Lincoln, and were it not for that crucial help, there'd be no America to sanction Russia today. The Tsar paid
for that help with his dynasty, when Nicholas II was murdered, and dethroned.
Americans are truly ungrateful brutes..
Now, sanctions, opprobrium, and hatred are heaped on Russia, most cogently by chauvinistic racists, who look down their noses
at Rus (Russ) and yet, cannot sacrifice 25 millions of their own people, for the sake of others.
Russians are considered subhuman, and yet, the divine spark of humanity resides solely in their breasts. The zionists claim
a false figure of 6 million for a faux holocaust, and yet, nobody pays attention to the true holocaust of 25 millions, or the
many millions before that disastrous instigated war.
That the Russians are childlike, believing others to be like them, loyal, self sacrificing, and generous, has now brought the
world to the brink of armageddon, and still, they bear the burden of proof, though their accusers, who ought provide the evidence,
are bereft of any..
Thomas Jefferson it was, who observing whatever he observed, exclaimed in cogent agitation, that "I fear for my countrymen,
when I remember that God is Just, and His Justice does not repose forever".
Investigate Jared and Ivanka Kushner, along with Charles Kushner, and much ought be clear, no cheers...
I don't buy that "Few bad apples at the top", "Good rank and file" Argument. I have never seen one. We should assume everyone
from the top to the bottom of FBI, DOJ, and State, just to get started, probably every other three better agency is bad. At least
incompotent, at worst treasonous.
As there was spying, there must necessarily also have been channels to get the information thus gathered back to its original
buyer - the Clinton campaign. Who passed the information back to Clinton, and what got passed?
the NYTt prints all the news a scumbag would. remember Judith Miller, the Zionazi reporter the NYT used to push
the Iraq war with all sorts of ********? after the war was determined to be started under a false premise and became common knowledge
there were no wmds in iraq the nyt came forward and reported the war was ******** as if they were reporting breaking news.
they have done the same thing here. they pushed the russiagate story with both barrels even though the informed populace knew
it was ******** before trump was sworn in as potus. now that the all the holes in the story are readily apparent the nyt comes
forward with breaking revelation that something is wrong with the story.
The Seth Rich investigation; where is it now? Murder of a campaign staffer; tampering with or influencing an election, is it
not? Hmmm... When nine hundred years old you become, look this good you will not.
Once upon a time there was a Bernie supporter. And his name was Seth Rich. Then there was a "botched robbery", which evidence
that was concluded on, I have no idea. Do you? Anyhow, The End.
Seth Rich had the means and the motive. So did Imran Awan, but it would make no sense for Awan to turn anything over to
wikileaks . . .he would have kept them as insurance.
Why wouldn't Assange name the source for the DNC emails? Is this a future bargaining chip? And what if he did name Seth Rich?
He would have to prove it. Could he?
They've got Assange now...Maybe they should ask him if it was Seth Rich who gave him the emails?
Maybe even do it under oath and on national television. I don't think it's still considered "burning a source" if your source
has already been murdered....
Until the real criminals are processed and the media can be restored you don't have a United States. This corruption is
beyond comprehension. You had the (((media)) providing kickbacks to the FBI for leaked information. These bribes are how CNN was
on site during Roger Stones invasion.
Treason and Sedition is rampant in America and all SPY roads lead to Clapper, Brennan and Obama...This needs attention.
The media is abusive and narrating attacks on a dully elected president
Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who now lives outside Washington, saw that as plausible. "Russia has huge experience
in spreading false information," he said. -
NYT
You have got to be ******* kidding me. So now the narrative is, "We were wrong about Russian collusion, and that's
Russia's fault"?!
"... John Pilger, among few others, has already stressed how a plan to destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was laid out as far back as 2008 – at the tail end of the Cheney regime – concocted by the Pentagon's shady Cyber Counter-Intelligence Assessments Branch. ..."
"... But it was only in 2017, in the Trump era, that the Deep State went totally ballistic; that's when WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 files – detailing the CIA's vast hacking/cyber espionage repertoire. ..."
"... This was the CIA as a Naked Emperor like never before – including the dodgy overseeing ops of the Center for Cyber Intelligence, an ultra-secret NSA counterpart. ..."
"... The monolithic narrative by the Deep State faction aligned with the Clinton machine was that "the Russians" hacked the DNC servers. Assange was always adamant; that was not the work of a state actor – and he could prove it technically. ..."
"... The DoJ wanted a deal – and they did make an offer to WikiLeaks. But then FBI director James Comey killed it. The question is why. ..."
"... Some theoretically sound reconstructions of Comey's move are available. But the key fact is Comey already knew – via his close connections to the top of the DNC – that this was not a hack; it was a leak. ..."
"... Ambassador Craig Murray has stressed, over and over again (see here ) how the DNC/Podesta files published by WikiLeaks came from two different US sources; one from within the DNC and the other from within US intel. ..."
"... he release by WikiLeaks in April 2017 of the malware mechanisms inbuilt in "Grasshopper" and the "Marble Framework" were indeed a bombshell. This is how the CIA inserts foreign language strings in source code to disguise them as originating from Russia, from Iran, or from China. The inestimable Ray McGovern, a VIPS member, stressed how Marble Framework "destroys this story about Russian hacking." ..."
"... No wonder then CIA director Mike Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a "non-state hostile intelligence agency" ..."
"... Joshua Schulte, the alleged leaker of Vault 7, has not faced a US court yet. There's no question he will be offered a deal by the USG if he aggress to testify against Julian Assange. ..."
"... George Galloway has a guest who explains it all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VvPFMyPvHM&t=8s ..."
"... Escobar is brain dead if he can't figure out that Trumpenstein is totally on board with destroying Assange. As if bringing on pukes like PompAss, BoltON, and Abrams doesn't scream it. ..."
The Made-by-FBI indictment of
Julian Assange does look like a dead man walking. No evidence. No documents. No surefire
testimony. Just a crossfire of conditionals...
But never underestimate the legalese contortionism of US government (USG) functionaries. As
much as Assange may not be characterized as a journalist and publisher, the thrust of the
affidavit is to accuse him of conspiring to commit espionage.
In fact the charge is not even that Assange hacked a USG computer and obtained classified
information; it's that he may have discussed it with Chelsea Manning and may have had the
intention to go for a hack. Orwellian-style thought crime charges don't get any better than
that. Now the only thing missing is an AI software to detect them.
Assange legal adviser Geoffrey Robertson – who also happens to represent another
stellar political prisoner, Brazil's Lula – cut
straight to the chase (at 19:22 minutes);
"The justice he is facing is justice, or injustice, in America I would hope the British
judges would have enough belief in freedom of information to throw out the extradition
request."
That's far from a done deal. Thus the inevitable consequence; Assange's legal team is
getting ready to prove, no holds barred, in a British court, that this USG indictment for
conspiracy to commit computer hacking is just an hors d'oeuvre for subsequent espionage
charges, in case Assange is extradited to US soil.
All about Vault 7
John Pilger, among few others, has already stressed how a plan to
destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was laid out as far back as 2008 – at the tail end
of the Cheney regime – concocted by the Pentagon's shady Cyber Counter-Intelligence
Assessments Branch.
It was all about criminalizing WikiLeaks and personally smearing Assange, using "shock
troops enlisted in the media -- those who are meant to keep the record straight and tell us the
truth."
This plan remains more than active – considering how Assange's arrest has been covered
by the bulk of US/UK mainstream media.
By 2012, already in the Obama era, WikiLeaks detailed the astonishing "scale of the US Grand
Jury Investigation" of itself. The USG always denied such a grand jury existed.
"The US Government has stood up and coordinated a joint interagency criminal investigation
of Wikileaks comprised of a partnership between the Department of Defense (DOD) including:
CENTCOM; SOUTHCOM; the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); Defense Information Systems Agency
(DISA); Headquarters Department of the Army (HQDA); US Army Criminal Investigation Division
(CID) for USFI (US Forces Iraq) and 1st Armored Division (AD); US Army Computer Crimes
Investigative Unit (CCIU); 2nd Army (US Army Cyber Command); Within that or in addition,
three military intelligence investigations were conducted. Department of Justice (DOJ) Grand
Jury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of State (DOS) and Diplomatic
Security Service (DSS). In addition, Wikileaks has been investigated by the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Office of the National CounterIntelligence
Executive (ONCIX), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); the House Oversight Committee; the
National Security Staff Interagency Committee, and the PIAB (President's Intelligence
Advisory Board)."
But it was only in 2017, in the Trump era, that the Deep State went totally ballistic;
that's when WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 files – detailing the CIA's vast
hacking/cyber espionage repertoire.
This was the CIA as a Naked Emperor like never before – including the dodgy
overseeing ops of the Center for Cyber Intelligence, an ultra-secret NSA counterpart.
WikiLeaks got Vault 7 in early 2017. At the time WikiLeaks had already published the DNC
files – which the unimpeachable Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
systematically proved was a leak, not a hack.
The monolithic narrative by the Deep State faction aligned with the Clinton machine was
that "the Russians" hacked the DNC servers. Assange was always adamant; that was not the work
of a state actor – and he could prove it technically.
There was some movement towards a deal, brokered by one of Assange's lawyers; WikiLeaks
would not publish the most damning Vault 7 information in exchange for Assange's safe passage
to be interviewed by the US Department of Justice (DoJ).
The DoJ wanted a deal – and they did make an offer to WikiLeaks. But then FBI
director James Comey killed it. The question is why.
It's a leak, not a hack
Some theoretically sound
reconstructions of Comey's move are available. But the key fact is Comey already knew
– via his close connections to the top of the DNC – that this was not a hack; it
was a leak.
Ambassador Craig Murray has stressed, over and over again (see
here ) how the DNC/Podesta files published by WikiLeaks came from two different US sources;
one from within the DNC and the other from within US intel.
There was nothing for Comey to "investigate". Or there would have, if Comey had ordered the
FBI to examine the DNC servers. So why talk to Julian Assange?
T he release by WikiLeaks in April 2017 of the malware mechanisms inbuilt in
"Grasshopper" and the "Marble Framework" were indeed a bombshell. This is how the CIA inserts
foreign language strings in source code to disguise them as originating from Russia, from Iran,
or from China. The inestimable Ray McGovern, a VIPS member, stressed how Marble Framework
"destroys this story about Russian hacking."
No wonder then CIA director Mike Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a "non-state hostile
intelligence agency", usually manipulated by Russia.
Joshua Schulte, the alleged leaker of Vault 7,
has not faced a US court yet. There's no question he will be offered a deal by the USG if he
aggress to testify against Julian Assange.
It's a long and winding road, to be traversed in at least two years, if Julian Assange is
ever to be extradited to the US. Two things for the moment are already crystal clear. The USG
is obsessed to shut down WikiLeaks once and for all. And because of that, Julian Assange will
never get a fair trial in the "so-called 'Espionage Court'" of the Eastern District of
Virginia, as
detailed by former CIA counterterrorism officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou.
Meanwhile, the non-stop demonization of Julian Assange will proceed unabated, faithful to
guidelines established over a decade ago. Assange is even accused of being a US intel op, and
WikiLeaks a splinter Deep State deep cover op.
Maybe President Trump will maneuver the hegemonic Deep State into having Assange testify
against the corruption of the DNC; or maybe Trump caved in completely to "hostile intelligence
agency" Pompeo and his CIA gang baying for blood. It's all ultra-high-stakes shadow play
– and the show has not even begun.
Not to mention the Pentagram has silenced 100,000 whistleblower complaints by
Intimidation, threats, money or accidents over 5 years . A Whistleblower only does this when
know there is something seriously wrong. Just Imagine how many knew something was wrong but
looked the other way.
Maybe President Trump will maneuver the hegemonic Deep State into having Assange testify
against the corruption of the DNC; or maybe Trump caved in completely to "hostile
intelligence agency" Pompeo and his CIA gang baying for blood.
Escobar is brain dead if he can't figure out that Trumpenstein is totally on board with
destroying Assange. As if bringing on pukes like PompAss, BoltON, and Abrams doesn't scream it.
assange and wikileaks are the real criminals despite being crimeless. the **** is a
sanctioned criminal, allowed to be criminal with the system because the rest of the
sanctioned criminals would be exposed if she was investigated.
this is not the rule of laws. this is the law of rulers.
GREG WILPERT: Yeah. I mean, I think it's also important to note that the Internet
Research Agency only spent, according to the report itself, only spent $100,000, actually, on
their activity in terms of buying advertising in Facebook and Twitter.
And that's really absolutely nothing compared to what the campaigns more generally spend in
those areas in terms of advertising.
And so the idea that they somehow influence the election just based on social media seems
mind boggling to believe...
Yet another delusional remark at odds with reality. Haven't these people learned anything from the implosion of their pathetic
Russiagate hysteria? The Russophobes won't be happy until we're at war with a nuclear power and the nukes are about to land.
Here are things Trump has actually done, as opposed to red-limned fantasies drawn from the fever-dreams of Putin haters:
"... It is quite distressing that in may so called “progessive” or “left liberal” – self designated of course – circles in the USA and the UK such a statement will lead to your being labelled a Russian Troll or the suggestion you are being on Putin’s payrol ..."
"... “…In the era of weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear, but primarily nuclear, ever more sophisticated, the Russians now have a new generation of nuclear weapons -- Putin announced them on March 1, they were dismissed here, but they’re real -- that can elude any missile defense. .. ..."
"... Russia has now thwarted us; they now have missile defense-evading nuclear weapons from submarines, to aircraft, to missiles. And Putin has said, ‘It’s time to negotiate an end to this new arms race,’ and he’s 100 percent right. ..."
"... So when I heard Trump say, in 2016, we have to cooperate with Russia, I had already become convinced… ..."
"... When I see the right-of-center DNC supporters saying, “Our democracy has been attacked,” I an reminded of the interview Hermann Goering gave while he was waiting to be executed. ..."
"... Perhaps the assumption of Russia meddling in our election is a simple case of projection. As has been documented, the USA has frequently meddled in other countries’ elections or election outcomes (Iran, Russia, Chile, Central America). ..."
"... To paraphrase the late Leona Helmsley, “Democracy is for little people”, not for the meddling-in-foreign-democracies policymakers of the Boston-Washington corridor. ..."
"... We live in a multi-polar world and if Washington can’t get used to it, we are the ones who may pay for their willful stubborn blindness, their inability to come to terms with a perfectly obvious developing reality. ..."
"... The neocons have not had a new idea in 30 years. I continue to be baffled by their obsession with Iran. Iran is a fact; the enmity goes back to our support for the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 and only made worse by our support of the Shah as our-guy-in-Tehran. ..."
"... The USA is in disarray internally and in its approach to the rest of the world. ..."
The DNC had the biggest influence on the 2016 outcome; they insisted on running a disliked candidate who was a terrible campaigner
so disliked the DNC cleared the field for her ahead of time (got Biden and others to not declare in 2016) and had to club dissenters
in their own party to make sure she got the nomination. imo. But sure, blame "those guys over there". That's the ultimate "the
dog ate my homework" excuse. meh.
Good analysis. This even makes the insanity of “Russiagate” seem strategic. (But as overwrought as saying ‘give us liberty
or give us death’. The solution to everything is somewhere in the middle.) We know that such dedicated souls as the very fatuous
Mr. Brennan cooked it all up and pretended it was because Trump was “treasonous”.
Brennan in his dotage might actually be thinking that.
I’ve always thought that Putin, like Yeltsin, was pro West. Possibly an atlanticist. Tho’ being as chauvinistic as an atlanticist
today is a little offensive to the rest of the world. Cohen’s statement that Putin is pro Russian-anti communism might be a simplification.
Russia is certainly positioning itself to be safe from our aggression. I think there are remnants of good social management that
the commies learned over the years that Russia/Putin still employs.
It’s too simplistic to say Putin is anti-communist. He’s just a realist. And he’s a nationalist. Being a nationalist-protectionist
is the worst sin against neoliberal advancement. That’s another propaganda bullet point – you never hear a rational discussion
of nationalism – it’s all trash, “Marine LePen is a fascist” exaggeration.
It is quite distressing to see the Mueller report take up as if it were settled fact the idea that Russia influenced the
2016 Presidential election, particularly since his investigation didn’t provide any information that supported this theory.
It is quite distressing that in may so called “progessive” or “left liberal” – self designated of course – circles in the
USA and the UK such a statement will lead to your being labelled a Russian Troll or the suggestion you are being on Putin’s payroll.
That is the level of rational discussion in many those circles today when it comes to the discussion about the west's relationship
to Russia.
This of course led in Russia to the conclusion that to engage with the west at present in an attempt to ease the tensions is
futile and rather counterproductive.
I think Professor Cohen has a real point in the following statements:
“…In the era of weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear, but primarily nuclear, ever more sophisticated, the Russians
now have a new generation of nuclear weapons -- Putin announced them on March 1, they were dismissed here, but they’re real --
that can elude any missile defense. ..
Russia has now thwarted us; they now have missile defense-evading nuclear weapons from submarines, to aircraft, to missiles.
And Putin has said, ‘It’s time to negotiate an end to this new arms race,’ and he’s 100 percent right.
So when I heard Trump say, in 2016, we have to cooperate with Russia, I had already become convinced…
So I began to speak positively about Trump at that moment–that would have been probably around the summer of 2016–just on this
one point, because none of the other candidates were advocating cooperation with Russia…”
Then, when he goes on to elaborate on China’s weaponry and posit including them in the next round of draw-down negotiations,
as far off as that may look – that to me is what Trump can use for his re-election. I do believe his attitude towards Russia won
him his first term.
Those Russia-gate kooks need to focus on the American people, not on Trump. Well, maybe they did, and still do. It’s really
about us, not him.
When I see the right-of-center DNC supporters saying, “Our democracy has been attacked,” I an reminded of the interview
Hermann Goering gave while he was waiting to be executed.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Perhaps the assumption of Russia meddling in our election is a simple case of projection. As has been documented, the USA has frequently meddled in other countries’ elections or election outcomes (Iran, Russia, Chile,
Central America).
One recent Democratic presidential candidate was taped asserting “we should not have held the election unless we could determine
the outcome” in another foreign country.
If Russia did not meddle significantly in the US election, the political class may have had to ponder that possibly the Russians
believed that the decline of the US in the world stage did not merit the effort.
To paraphrase the late Leona Helmsley, “Democracy is for little people”, not for the meddling-in-foreign-democracies policymakers
of the Boston-Washington corridor.
The thrust of Cohen’s position is correct. Quibble all you wish with the details. We live in a multi-polar world and if Washington
can’t get used to it, we are the ones who may pay for their willful stubborn blindness, their inability to come to terms with
a perfectly obvious developing reality.
The neocons have not had a new idea in 30 years. I continue to be baffled by their obsession
with Iran. Iran is a fact; the enmity goes back to our support for the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 and only made worse by our
support of the Shah as our-guy-in-Tehran.
The Russians really do have a new generation of weapons. The Chinese are re-assuming
a leading position in the world that has been theirs most of the time for two thousand years.
Europe is not a rising power.
The
USA is in disarray internally and in its approach to the rest of the world. I do not consider these to be opinions but objective
statements. I am not prepared to suffer for illusions and vanity among the “elite.”
"... My reasoning starts with a desire to counter Russian and Chinese assertiveness as proposed by Kissinger in an WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 in which Kissinger expressed a desire for a strengthened USA - very much aligned with what one might expect a MAGA nationalist President to achieve. ..."
"... Kissinger is considered to be the "dean" of US FP establishment and his opinions are respected by 'Deep State' leaders that I mentioned. ..."
Did he order the new McCarthyism (aka "Code Red") which included electing Trump as
President, setting up Wikileaks to be smeared as a foreign agent, and settling scores with
Michael Flynn?
Acting on 'Deep State' approval from the likes of Clinton, McCain, Mueller, Bush Sr., et
al.
"Brennan on trial" is an imagined future occurrence based on informed speculation that
I've previously described.
My reasoning starts with a desire to counter Russian and Chinese assertiveness as
proposed by Kissinger in an WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 in which Kissinger expressed a desire
for a strengthened USA - very much aligned with what one might expect a MAGA nationalist
President to achieve.
Kissinger is considered to be the "dean" of US FP establishment and his opinions are
respected by 'Deep State' leaders that I mentioned.
"... Trump's main problem in this respect is that the diversity of viewpoints within the military, the NSA or other government agencies might already be too narrow and he needs a Republican version of Stephen Cohen who has always advocated for engagement with Russia, along with other people from outside Washington DC but with experience in state legislatures for the various departments. ..."
"... I agree and I suspect Trump regards Putin as a fellow CEO and perhaps the best one on the planet. ..."
"... A more fundamental problem is that the US has not yet reached rock bottom. So, its delusions remain strong. Trump, as said before, may be a false dawn unless the bottom is closer than suspected and he has new allies (perhaps foreign allies). ..."
It is not about politics, but Trump's peculiar management style, Timofey Bordachev, Director
of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies of the Faculty of World Economy
and International Affairs at Russia's High School of Economics, told RIA Novosti.
"Those who have been studying the business biography of the newly elected president have
noted that he has always played off his high-ranking employees against each other. While doing
so he remained above the fight," he said.
And
Gevorg Mirzayan, an assistant professor of the Political Science department at the Financial
University in Moscow pointed out two purposes for the nominations.
The above brings rationality to the diverse selections made by Trump.
However, the black swan event will be an economic collapse (fast or protracted over several
years). That will be the defining event in the Trump presidency. I have no inkling how he or those
who may replace him would respond.
I had guessed myself that Trump was going to run the government as a business corporation. Surrounding
himself with people of competing viewpoints, and hiring on the basis of experience and skills
(and not on the basis of loyalty, as Hillary Clinton might have done) would be two ways Trump
can change the government and its culture. Trump's main problem in this respect is that the diversity
of viewpoints within the military, the NSA or other government agencies might already be too narrow
and he needs a Republican version of Stephen Cohen who has always advocated for engagement with
Russia, along with other people from outside Washington DC but with experience in state legislatures
for the various departments.
If running the US government as a large mock business enterprise brings a change in its culture
so it becomes more open and accountable to the public, less directed by ideology and identity
politics, and gets rid of people engaged in building up their own little empires within the different
departments, then Trump might just be the President the US needs at this moment in time.
Interesting that Russian academics have noted the outlines of Trump's likely cabinet and what
they suggest he plans to do, and no-one else has. Does this imply that Americans and others in
the West have lost sight of how large business corporations could be run, or should be run, and
everyone is fixated on fake "entrepreneurship" or "self-entrepreneur" (whatever that means) models
of running a business where it's every man, woman, child and dog for itself?
I agree and I suspect Trump regards Putin as a fellow CEO and perhaps the best one on the planet.
Trump may have noted how Putin did an incredible turnaround of Russia and it all started with
three objectives: restore the integrity of the borders, rebuild the industrial base and run off
the globalists/liberals/kreakles. I am certainly not the first one to say this and I think that
there is a lot of basis for that analysis. However, Trump will have a far more difficult challenge
and frankly I don't think he has enough allies or smarts to pull it off.
A more fundamental problem is that the US has not yet reached rock bottom. So, its delusions
remain strong. Trump, as said before, may be a false dawn unless the bottom is closer than suspected
and he has new allies (perhaps foreign allies).
Originally from: The 'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report April 18, 2019 •
12 Commentsave
Like Team Mueller's indictment last July of Russian agents, the full report reveals questions about Wikileaks' role that
much of the media has been ignoring, writes Daniel Lazare.
The five pages that the special prosecutor's report devotes to WikiLeaks are essentially lifted from Mueller's
indictment last July of 12 members of the Russian military
intelligence agency known as the GRU. It charges that after hacking the Democratic National Committee, the GRU used a specially-created
online persona known as Guccifer 2.0 to transfer a gigabyte's worth of stolen emails to WikiLeaks just as the 2016 Democratic
National Convention was approaching. Four days after opening the encrypted file, the indictment says, "Organization 1 [i.e. WikiLeaks]
released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network by the Conspirators [i.e. the GRU]."
Attorney General William Barr holding press conference on full Mueller report, April 18, 2019. (YouTube)
Mueller's report says the same thing, but with the added twist that Assange then tried to cover up the GRU's role by
suggesting that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich may have been the source and by telling a congressman
that the DNC email heist was an "inside job" and that he had "physical proof" that the material was not from Russian.
All of which is manna from heaven for corporate news outlets eager to pile on Assange, now behind bars in London. An April 11,
2019, New York Timesnews analysis ,
for instance, declared that "[c]ourt documents have revealed that it was Russian intelligence – using the Guccifer persona – that
provided Mr. Assange thousands of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee," while another Timesarticle published shortly after
his arrest accuses the WikiLeaks founder of "promoting a false cover story about the source of the leaks."
But there's a problem: it ain't necessarily so. The official story that the GRU is the source doesn't hold water, as a timeline
from mid-2016 shows. Here are the key events based on the GRU indictment and the Mueller report:
June 12: Assange
tells
Britain's ITV that another round of Democratic Party disclosures is on the way: "We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton,
which is great. WikiLeaks is having a very big year." June 14: The Democratic National Committee
accuses Russia of hacking its computers. June 15: Guccifer 2.0 claims credit for the hack. "The main part of the papers, thousands
of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks ," he
brags . "They will publish them soon."
June 22: WikiLeaks tells Guccifer via email: "Send any new material here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact
than what you are doing." July 6: WikiLeaks sends Guccifer another email: "if you have anything hillary related we want it
in the next tweo [ sic ] days prefable [ sic ] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and
she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after."Replies Guccifer: "ok . . . i " July 14: Guccifer sends WikiLeaks an
encrypted file titled "wk dnc link1.txt.gpg." July 18: WikiLeaks confirms it has opened "the 1Gb or so archive" and will release
documents "this week." July 22: WikiLeaks
releases more than 20,000 DNC emails and 8,000 other attachments.
According to Mueller and obsequious news outlets like the Times , the sequence is clear: Guccifer sends archive, WikiLeaks
receives archive, WikiLeaks accesses archive, WikiLeaks publishes archive. Donald Trump may not have colluded with
Russia, but Julian Assange plainly did. [Attorney General Will Barr, significantly calling WikiLeaks a publisher, said at
his Thursday press conference: " Under applicable law, publication of these types of materials would not be criminal unless the publisher
also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy."]
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announcing in 2018 the grand jury indictment of 12 GRU agents. (Wikimedia Commons)
Avoiding Questions
The narrative raises questions that the press studiously avoids. Why, for instance, would Assange announce on June 12 that a big
disclosure is on the way before hearing from the supposed source? Was there a prior communication that Mueller has not disclosed?
What about the reference to "new material" on June 22 – does that mean Assange already had other material in hand? After opening
the Guccifer file on July 18, why would he publish it just four days later? Would that give WikiLeaks enough time to review some
28,000 documents to insure they're genuine?
Honor Bob Parry's legacy by
donating
to our Spring Fund Drive.
"If a single one of those emails had been shown to be maliciously altered," blogger Mark F. McCarty
observes , "Wikileaks' reputation would have been in tatters." There's also the question that an investigator known as Adam Carter
poses in Disobedient
Media : why would Guccifer brag about giving WikiLeaks "thousands of files" that he wouldn't send for another month?
The narrative doesn't make sense – a fact that is crucially important now that Assange is fighting for his freedom in the U.K.
New Yorker staff writer Raffi Khatchadourian sounded
a rare note of caution last summer when he warned that little about Guccifer 2.0 adds up. While claiming to be the source for
some of WikiLeaks ' most explosive emails, the material he released on his own had proved mostly worthless – 20 documents
that he "said were from the DNC but which were almost surely not," as Khatchadourian puts it, a purported Hillary Clinton dossier
that "was nothing of the sort," screenshots of emails so blurry as to be "unreadable," and so forth.
John Podesta: Target of a phishing expedition. (Voice of America via Wikimedia Commons)
While insisting that "our source is not the Russian
government and it is not a state party, Assange told Khatchadourian that the source was not Guccifer either. "We received quite a
lot of submissions of material that was already published in the rest of the press, and people seemingly submitted the Guccifer archives,"
he said somewhat cryptically. "We didn't publish them. They were already published." When Khatchadourian asked why he didn't put
the material out regardless, he replied that "the material from Guccifer 2.0 – or on WordPress – we didn't have the resources to
independently verify."
No Time for Vetting
So four days was indeed too short a time to subject the Guccifer file to proper vetting. Of course, Mueller no doubt regards this
as more "dissembling," as his report describes it. Yet WikiLeaks has never been caught in a lie for the simple reason that honesty
and credibility are all-important for a group that promises to protect anonymous leakers who supply it with official secrets. (See
"Inside WikiLeaks : Working with the Publisher that Changed the World,"
Consortium News , July 19, 2018.) Mueller, by contrast, has a rich history of mendacity going back to his days as FBI
director when he sought to cover up
the Saudi role
in 9/11 and assured Congress on the eve
of the 2003 invasion that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction pose "a clear threat to our national security."
Mueller with President George W. Bush on July 5, 2001, as he is being appointed FBI director. (White House)
So if the Mueller narrative doesn't hold up, the charge of dissembling doesn't either. Indeed , as ex-federal prosecutor Andrew
C. McCarthy
observes in The National Review , the fact that the feds have charged Assange with unauthorized access to a government
computer rather than conspiring with the Kremlin could be a sign that Team Mueller is less than confident it can prove collusion
beyond a reasonable doubt. As he puts it, the GRU indictment "was more like a press release than a charging instrument" because the
special prosecutor knew that the chances were
zero that Russian intelligence agents would surrender to a U.S. court.
Indeed, when Mueller charged 13 employees and three companies owned by Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin with interfering
in the 2016 election, he clearly didn't expect them to surrender either. Thus , his team seemed taken aback when one of the alleged
" troll farms
" showed up in Washington asking to be heard. The prosecution's initial response, as McCarthy
put it , was to seek
a delay "on the astonishing ground that the defendant has not been properly served – notwithstanding that the defendant has shown
up in court and asked to be arraigned." When that didn't work, prosecutors tried to limit Concord's access to some 3.2 million pieces
of evidence on the grounds that the documents are too "
sensitive " for Russian eyes to see. If they are again unsuccessful, they may have no choice but to drop the charges entirely,
resulting in yet another " public relations
disaster " for the Russia-gate investigation.
None of which bodes well for Mueller or the news organizations that worship at his shrine. After blowing the Russia-gate story
all these years, why does the Times continue to slander the one news organization that tells the truth?
Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and
other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique
and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com .
Given that Russia's economy today is smaller than Italy's and its military budget wouldn't
buy a toilet seat or hammer in the U.S. military procurement system, the question of why Russia
would seem a great mystery outside of history. And left unstated is that the U.S. defense
industry needs enemies to survive. 'Radical Islam,' an invention of oil and gas industry flacks
that turned out to be serviceable for marketing Tomahawk missiles and stealth fighter jets as
well, lost some of its luster when ISIS and Al Qaeda came over to 'our side.' And humanitarian
intervention ain't what it used to be with Libya reduced to rubble and open-air slave markets
now dotting the landscape.
From 1948 through the early 1990s Russia was Pennywise the evil clown, helping to sell
bananas, nuclear weapons and cut-rate underwear around the globe wherever American empire
alighted. Costumed 'communists,' locals paid a day-rate to dress up and shout whatever slogans
conveyed evil most effectively, were a staple of CIA interventions from Iran to Guatemala to
the streets of New York, Boston and Los Angeles. Never mind that the slayer of monsters is more
monstrous than an army of evil clowns, as the Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians,
Nicaraguans, El Salvadorans, Chileans, Iraqis, Afghanis, Yemenis and on and on, were to
learn.
The big why (?) here would suggest an eternal mystery were it not for the arithmetic we
learned as tykes. The U.S. has an annual military budget that is larger than the next seven
evil empires combined. Killing people and blowing shit up is what America does. Stated
reverse-wise, what is the point of being able to end all human life on earth more than once?
Yet the U.S. can do it 3X -- 5X or 30X -- 50X, depending on which analysis is chosen. And while
it would be anti-historical to remove mal-intent as motive, an alternative explanation of the
militarization of the police is 'overstock,' that there is nothing else to do with the stuff
that the Pentagon produces.
This would seem a tremendous waste of resources under any reasonable theory of their
efficient use (e.g. capitalism). The explanation of 'national defense' reads as legitimate
until history is brought back in. For a few thousand years, the argument against maintaining a
standing army was that standing armies tend to get used. Preparations for armed conflict
facilitate armed conflict. The mobilizations for WWI and WWII were mobilizations, not drawdowns
from existing military inventory. There is something to be said for wars requiring large
expenditures of time, effort and resources from everyone for whom they are undertaken.
Otherwise, they are likely to be started lightly.
The U.S. has long been the most militaristic
nation in the world. This probably doesn't read right to most Americans. 'We' are a
peace-loving nation that only sends in the military as a last resort, goes the myth. And 'we'
changed the name from the Department of War to the Department of Defense. It was early in the
twentieth century that U.S. General Smedley Butler proclaimed that 'war is a racket' (racket =
organized crime) as he described his military career as a ' gangster for capitalism .' The business of war in support
of capitalism had long been a business in its own right, just ask Wall Street.
When the George W. Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security following
9/11, the obvious question from people who thought about such things was: what are these people
going to do all day? With daily briefings presented to Mr. Bush entitled ' Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.
'before 9/11, the only intelligence failure, if that is what it was, occurred in the White
House. Mr. Bush's entourage had been rumbling about going back to Iraq to 'finish the job'
since the end of his father's war. How much of a leap was it then to assume that Mr. Bush's WMD
scam was a pretext for re-invading Iraq?
But the question isn't rhetorical. With 240,000 people employed by DHS to find terrorists,
terrorists will be found. The basic insight is that justifying one's employment is crucial to
keeping it. In this light, the FBI counter-terrorism unit spent its time since 2001 enticing
poor and desperate people to claim each other as terrorists. The first person to point out that
there are no terrorists would be the first to receive a pink slip. And the same is true of
government contracting. Brave entrepreneurs who feed at the trough of military largesse need to
justify their existences. If they don't, some other proud patriot will step forward and do so.
A logic of necessity becomes a legitimating belief system More broadly, one could argue that
manufacturing terrorists has been the strategic goal of U.S. military operations for much of
the last century. If you bomb enough villages and wedding parties, people will fight back.
Wasn't this the implied storyline of anti-communist agitprop like Red Dawn and anti-Muslim
agitprop like Zero Dark Thirty -- if you invade 'our' country and / or bomb 'our' villages and
wedding parties, we will fight back. As a business proposition, the more people that are
killed, the more legitimate the operation is made to appear. Make the weapons, then employ
hundreds of thousands of people to explain why 'we' need to bomb villages. Then make more
weapons.
Graphic: Time Magazine was the voice of post-War liberalism in the 1970s -- it reflected
the opinions emanating from American officialdom through a faux-critical lens. This cover
featuring Muammar Gaddafi presaged the Obama administration's destruction of Libya by 35 years.
The main difference then was relative honesty about U.S. motives -- 'Oil' was the lede in 1973,
where 'humanitarian' concerns drove the American propaganda effort in 2011. Note: 'Arab' was
replaced by 'Muslim extremist' following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Source: Time,
Inc.
Propaganda theory is relevant here because of the ease with which the Russiagate story was
sold -- all evidence, no matter how contradictory, was claimed to point in only one direction.
Contrariwise, Russia isn't the Soviet Union. America's political leaders have long supported
strongmen and dictators. The biggest threat to free and fair elections in the U.S. is American
oligarchs followed by Israel. The Democrat running in the 2016 presidential election openly
manipulated the 1996 Russian presidential election. Russia today is a neoliberal petrostate.
Vladimir Putin is admired in Russia because he booted out corrupt American 'advisors' who were
looting the country. In other words, Russia today isn't Russia!
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and ostensible end of the first Cold War, a '
peace dividend ' of
reduced military spending was expected to fund increased domestic spending, the classic 'guns
versus butter' formulation shifted in favor of butter. A drop to pre-WWII levels of military
spending would have meant 95%+ of the military-industrial complex went away. Following a very
brief drop in the rate of growth of military spending in the early 1990s, a recession caused by
the looting of Savings & Loans and its aftermath led to the argument that 'the economy'
couldn't withstand a reduced military. September 11 th , 2001 was the best day ever
for U.S. military contractors. America was back in the business of industrial-scale
slaughter.
Early on, the American defense industry tried a few new enemies on for size. The George W.
Bush administration's WMD scam targeted an audience that had been primed by several decades of
anti-Muslim propaganda (see Time cover above) tied to oil geopolitics. The only WMDs found in
Iraq had come from the Reagan administration in its effort to keep Iraq warring with Iran in
the Iran-Iraq war. Current American amnesia over the genesis of Islamophobia is quaint. The New
York Times has been demonizing
Muslims since the 1970s . It was hardly incidental that 'reporting' on the Iraq war
contained breathless descriptions of newly created instruments of mass slaughter.
However, there were two tacks that propelled the Iraq War forward. Humanitarian intervention
had been the liberal formulation for selling the carpet bombing of civilian populations as in
the interest of those being bombed. The term was used for the aerial bombardment of civilian
populations in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s. And it was the back-up explanation for the
American war against Iraq -- to remove an evil dictator in order to liberate the people of
Iraq. It was also used to justify the U.S. / NATO bombing of Libya in 2011. To the certain
dismay of the defense industry, none of those interventions retained the patina of good
intentions once it became known that the target nations had been functionally destroyed.
Russiagate has been a godsend for those who profit from destruction. As the story goes, the
wily Russian bear, led by an evil dictator and newly trained in the technologies of modernity,
set loose a witch's brew of inter-continental ballistic internet messages to sow dissent
amongst the brothers and sisters of die Vaterland united by their common bond of loving
America. For younger readers, the claim that foreign 'agitation' motivated the Civil Rights and
anti-War movements, and more broadly, the American Left, has been a mainstay of CIA and FBI
propaganda since these agencies were created. Old playbooks are good playbooks?
Those with a sense of humor, if humor includes installing a drunken buffoon to head a
nuclear armed foreign power, might offer that 'Trump' is the English translation of 'Yeltsin.'
In 1996 the American President colluded with people inside the Russian government to overturn
the democratic will of the Russian people to install Boris Yeltsin as President of Russia. Yuk,
yuk -- an unstable jackass was installed to head a foreign government. The 'payback' narrative
no-doubt motivated true belief amongst some American officials after 2016. But alas, as with
bombed villages and wedding parties, unless you just will not stop fucking with other people,
they generally have other things to do than plot revenge.
None of the propagators of the phony WMD stories suffered from passing off state propaganda
as news. The New York Times and Washington Post found themselves on the winning side of the
'fake news' scam to shut down the opposition press. Even Judith Miller, brief heroine of the
free press for being 'stove-piped' by Dick Cheney, went on to a well-paid gig at Fox News,
wrote an autobiography that more than just her immediate family read and now lives as a
'celebrity.' Heroes of the #Resistance like David Corn, Rachel Maddow and Michael Isikoff have
the proceeds from book sales and television appearances to sustain them until their services
are needed to sell the next scam-with-a-purpose.
The economic role of American defense spending will lead to endless iterations of WMD and
Russiagate scams until the Pentagon is shut down. And that's the good part. The wars that these
scams support are the bane of humanity. Their true costs, in terms of lives destroyed, appear
to be meaningless to people living in twenty-room houses who want to live in thirty room
houses. Winding down the warfare state would be less politically fraught if people had
non-murderous ways of paying their bills. But how was this not understood as the warfare state
was being built?
Finally,
apologists for Russiagate claim that it has been nowhere near as dangerous as WMD lies.
Let's see: a cadre of national security officials spent two-and-one-half years claiming that it
has secret evidence that the President of the U.S. colluded with the leader of a foreign
government to assume power and then use his office for the benefit of that foreign leader.
Following, the domestic press claimed that the U.S. 'was under attack' and 'was at war' with
this foreign power. Meanwhile, the U.S. went about arming anti-Russian militias on Russia's
border while unilaterally abrogating a short-and-intermediate range nuclear weapons treaty
after publicly announcing that it was 'modernizing' its stockpile of
short-and-intermediate-range nuclear weapons.
Respectfully, this has all been a tad less than constructive.
Not only they lost all moral authority. UK MSM became openly neofascist in some areas exceeeding the press of Third Riech and the
USSR in distortions and falsifications. .
Notable quotes:
"... Corruption of government and media, is also exceedingly dangerous, for everyone's mental health. People begin to subconsciously know that they are being lied to, but they cannot accept it, because the lies conflict with their worldview, which quite naturally is based on trust for authority, and that nice man reading the news on TV. ..."
"... In 2004, Karl Rove in The Bush Government " Guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [ ] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do' ..."
Even if the Skripal affair WAS staged, you shouldn't get too excited about it. In fact, you should be rather pleased because
it would demonstrate that the tired, incompetent old UK is still capable of mounting an operation of which young, vigorous, competent
Russia would be proud.
The UK can fake events with the best of them! I would find that reassuring rather than deplorable because it's a nasty world
out there.
The Government and the media, have not been telling the whole truth for a long time. Sometimes they blatantly lie. Most people
still believe most of what they say, as there is an in-built trust of authority, for some very good historical reasons. The Skripal
story, made it obvious to a large number of people, that some of it could not be true. Most still believe it or din't take much
notice. The arrest of Julian Assange made it clearer, to an even larger number of people, that the government and the media, had
lost all moral authority. Still many people didn't take much notice, or were convinced by the lies in the media, that he was a
rapist and should be in jail.
The lies and corruption from government, is now increasingly out in the open. I believe that this is deliberate. I also think
that it is exceedingly dangerous for society for multiple reasons. We are conditioned to accept authority as our moral guide.
They act as an example of acceptable behaviour. If society as a whole, behaved like government, all trust would break down. Virtually
all functions of society are based on trust. Without such trust, nothing will work.
Corruption of government and media, is also exceedingly dangerous, for everyone's mental health. People begin to subconsciously
know that they are being lied to, but they cannot accept it, because the lies conflict with their worldview, which quite naturally
is based on trust for authority, and that nice man reading the news on TV.
I believe this has all been pre-planned, and it will result in a disastrous effect on all society, unless something happens
to bring the governments and media back to truth and sanity. I have no idea what that might be, but I expect it will not be pleasant.
The following was an early warning of the mass insanity affecting The US Government. It has spread like a highly infectious
disease.
In 2004, Karl Rove in The Bush Government " Guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined
as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [ ] 'That's not the way the world
really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying
that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's
how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'
Now that Mueller's $40
million Humpty Trumpty investigation is over and found wanting of its original purpose (to retire
Trump), perhaps the ruling class can return without interruption to the business of destroying the
world with ordnance, greenhouse gases, and regime changes.
A few more CIA-organized
blackouts in Venezuela (it's a simple trick if one follows the Agency's "
Freedom
Fighter's Manual
"), and the US will come to the rescue, Grenada style, and set up yet another
neoliberal regime. There is a small solace that with Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton, there is at least a
semblance of transparency in their reckless interventions. The assessed value of Guaido and Salman,
they forthrightly admit, is in their countries' oil reserves. And Russians better respect the
Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny if they know what's good for them. Crude as they may be,
Trump's men tell it like it is.
And when
Bolton
speaks
of "the Western Hemisphere's shared goals of democracy, security, and the rule of law," he is of
course referring to US-backed coups, military juntas, debt bondage, invasions, embargoes,
assassinations, and other forms of gunboat diplomacy.
That the US is not already formally at war with Russia (even with NATO forces all along
its borders) has only to do with the latter's nuclear arsenal deterrent.
Since World War
II, a period some describe as a "
a
period of unprecedented peace,
" the US war machine has wiped out some 20 million people,
including more than 1 million in Iraq since 2003, engaged in regime change of at least 36
governments, intervened in at least 82 foreign elections, including Russia (1996), planned more
than 50 assassinations of foreign leaders, and bombed over 30 countries. This is documented
here
and
here
.
Despite unending US and US-supported assaults on Africa and western and central Asia,
the authors who see postwar unprecedented peace argue that it's Russia and China, not the US, that
represent the real threats to peace and deserve to be treated as "outcasts."
That NATO has
warships plying the Black Sea and making port calls at the ethnically Russian Ukraine city of
Odessa and is conducting war games from Latvia to Bulgaria and Ukraine represents unprecedented
peace? While NATO, which together has 20 times the military spending of Russia and includes member
states along virtually the entire perimeter of Russia, in Western propaganda Russia is the
aggressor.
Although the US corporate media may have missed the news, the rest of the world gets the
fact that the greatest threat to peace on the planet is Uncle Sam.
In 2013, a
WIN/Gallup
International poll
of 66,000 people in 65 countries found that the US was considered by far the
most dangerous state on earth (24% of respondents), while Russia didn't even register statistically
on that poll. In 2017, a
Pew
poll
found the same perception of US power and that such a view had increased to 38% and had grown in 21
of 30 countries compared to 2013. Even America's neighbors, Canada and Mexico, see the US as a
major threat to their countries, worse than either China or Russia. The mainstream media (MSM)
stenographers' myopia in failing to cover this story is not an oversight. Carl Bernstein, of
Watergate exposé fame,
documented
in
1977 the fact that from the early 1950s to the late 1970s, the MSM (
New York Times
,
Washington
Post
, NBC, ABC, CBS, and the rest) had regularly served as overseas informers for the CIA.
It would be hard to believe that those ties are not still intact given the level of collaboration
among the CIA, the MSM, and the Democratic Party in the Russiagate conspiracy drama.
Context is everything.
In blaming others for the instability of the Middle East, it is important to bear in
mind that for 36 years since Reagan launched air attacks on Beirut and parts of Syria, the US, and
its ally Israel, has been using the greater Middle East region as a testing ground for its weapons
systems.
This has meant repeated bombing and droning of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan,
Libya, Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Kuwait, and Sudan, and increased weapons sales to the region to assure
continuous instability and profits. The US has "special forces" operating in two-thirds of the
world's countries and non-special forces stationed in three-quarters of them, altogether over 800
military bases and installations in as many as 130 countries (the Pentagon refuses to give the
exact number). By comparison, apart from several bases in some of the former Soviet republics,
Russia has a naval resupply facility in Vietnam and small temporary leased naval and airport
stations in Syria. China opened a combined naval and army base in Djibouti in 2017 and an
"unofficial military presence" in Tajikistan. There is nothing remotely close to equivalence.
We can expect a continuing outcasting of Russia, either under a second Trump presidency
or, if the long dark shadow of the Clintons prevails, a Joe Biden White House.
Biden
claims without the benefit of evidence that currently "
the
Russian government is brazenly assaulting the foundations of Western democracy around the world
,"
as if the huge imbalance of military forces and the long history of US interventions against
liberal democracies and socialist states were unknown or irrelevant. In his (and the
establishment's) heavy-handed uses of propaganda, Biden has learned well the tactics of Goebbels –
repeat the lies often enough to make the imperial state appear as the victim.
With regard to a brazen assault on democracy, Biden might take a cue from Clinton, who knew how
to capitalize on her power position by signing off on huge arms sales to the Saudis (e.g., a
$29
billion sale
of fighter jets to that country to be used against Yemen) and other Gulf States
while securing tens of millions of dollars in donations from the sheikhs ($25 million from Saudi
Arabia alone) to her private foundation, run by her husband. This is all the more contemptuous
given that
she
acknowledged
in 2013: "The Saudis and others are shipping large amounts of weapons clandestine
financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region and pretty
indiscriminately – not at all targeted toward the people that we think would be the more moderate,
least likely, to cause problems in the future."
In other words, she knew the Saudis and other Gulf dictators were arming ISIS (ISIL) and other
caliphate actors but continued to keep them as allies and patrons. She also took $800 thousand for
her 2016 campaign (almost double what Trump received) and some $3 million for her private
foundation from
oil and
gas companies
after approving lucrative gas pipeline in the Canadian tar sands. Part of the
foundation staff's business was to arrange meetings of top donors meetings with the then secretary
of state. Following Clinton and Obama's lead and without a second thought, Trump has authorized US
energy companies to sell the Saudi monarchy nuclear power technology and assistance.
In foreign policy, indeed, it's hard to see any meaningful difference between Republican
and Democratic administrations.
Obama and John Kerry sent Undersecretary of State for
Europe and Eurasia
Victoria Nuland
to
Kiev's Maidan to cheer on the 2014 coup, hand out sandwiches to protesters, and give marching
orders to her ambassador there to arrange for Yatsenyuk to be prime minister and to "fuck the EU."
Poroshenko, a regular informer at the US embassy, as WikiLeaks revealed, was already in the bag for
president. Biden was brought in to "midwife" and "help glue this thing" by pressuring the
still-ruling Yanukovych to step down in favor of the US-designated coup leaders. Along the same
lines, Trump's then ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, joined Venezuelan protesters outside UN
headquarters in New York, using a megaphone to publicly call for a coup against Maduro. "I will
tell you," she told the group, "the U.S. voice is going to be loud."
Both the Ukraine and Venezuela interventions are in part a grand strategy to isolate Russia.
However, the orchestration of a new Cold War against Russia and to implicate Trump as a
Kremlin puppet has failed, and the problem for Russiagate propagandists is how to keep the
conspiracy theory alive now that Mueller's unsuccessful hunt for 5thcolumnists is in the dustbin
.
The leading Russia scholar,
Stephen
Cohen
, who has been professionally marginalized because of his skepticism toward the CIA
narrative, sees the impact of a larger scandal – the corruption of the Democratic Party and its
minions in the media that formed an alliance with the spooks. He asks:
"what about the legions
of high-ranking intelligence officials, politicians, editorial writers, television producers, and
other opinion-makers, and their eager media outlets that perpetuated, inflated, and prolonged this
unprecedented political scandal in American history ?"
Another question is, how would the mainstream media financially survive an ending of
Russiagate, if indeed the media moguls allow it to end?
This spectacular failure of the
"fourth estate" in covering the Clinton and Democrats' defeat in 2016 greatly weakened their trust
status, which has been in quite steady decline since the 1970s, especially among Republicans.
Democrats tend to look more favorably on the largely partisan liberal MSM for obvious reasons.
However, as of December 2018, according to an
IPSOS/Reuters
poll
, only 44% of Americans has much (16%) or some (28%) confidence in the MSM, compared to
hardly any (48%). On whether MSM news organizations are more interested in making money than
telling the truth, 59% agreed with the former assessment. No known organization has published
findings on MSM trust since the completion of the Mueller debacle.
What is to be made politically of the Russia obsession?
Russiagate, which Matt
Taibbi calls "this generation's WMD," can be seen as serving three broad major purposes.
It has given the Democratic Party leadership and its partners in the CIA and MSM a
cause célèbre inorder to salvage the status and image of the party and distract from its
disastrous electoral defeats from 2008 to 2016.
It thereby serves as an alternative
reality to the widespread recognition that the ruling forces in the party have no genuine
popular agenda and represent corporate, banking, neoliberal, and neoconservative militarist
projects designed under Bill Clinton's New Democrat agenda.
On foreign policy, Russiagate puts the Democrats to the right of the Republicans,
similar to the way that John Kennedy in the 1960 campaign accused the Eisenhower (and VP Nixon)
administration of weakening America's defenses, which presently enables the energy and defense
industries and their lobbyists to unduly influence the perception of international threats and
flashpoints. Democrats in the House and Senate voted overwhelmingly for the 2019 $716 billion
defense budget, over and above what even Trump requested. In 2018, five military contractors –
Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon – provided key
political leaders in both parties with $14.4 million in addition to $94 million spent on
lobbying efforts that year. Oil & gas spent $89 million on the election campaign and $125
million on lobbying.
And, third, it serves to stifle the political left in and outside the party
and the demands for progressive legislative changes activated by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and by
newer members like Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Tulsi Gabbard.
Where is the center of public political confidence these days?
Certainly not
with the mainstream media, which is even lower than that for Trump. Even in terms of its vaunted
claims of press freedom, the US fares quite badly. Reporters Without Borders ranked the US number
45th worldwide (of 180 countries cited) in press freedom in its 2018 report. Tory-led Britain slid
from 33rd in 2014 to 40th– only Italy and Greece were behind the UK among western European
countries. And although Trump hasn't helped with his attacks on the media (and more than
reciprocated by the media's extraordinarily hostile coverage of the president), the situation
wasn't much better under Obama, who threatened whistle blowers in the press with enforcing the 1917
Espionage Act. This is law that may be pressed against the journalist Julian Assange. There still
exists no "shield law" guaranteeing journalists the right to protect their sources' identities.
Journalism students should be concerned for another reason as well:Newspaper employment between
2001 and 2016 has been cut by more than half, from 412,000 to 174,000, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics.
William Arkin, who quit NBC News as a political commentator last January, accused the station of
peddling "ho-hum reporting" that "essentially condones" an endless US war presence in the Middle
East and Africa. He also took the network to task for not reporting "the failures of the generals
and national security leaders," and essentially becoming "a defender of the government against
Trump" and a "cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering."
In his parting comments, he wrote:
"I'm alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically
be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Even on Russia, though we
should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to
manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War?"
It may be whistling in the wind, but there are more important things to worry about than whether
"the Russians" exposed the DNC's perfidious behavior in 2016. It would be more worthwhile for
Democrats to demand programs that eliminate child poverty, which is at 20% in the US, compared to
an OECD average of 13%. It might also be useful to concentrate a bit more on the white working
class and working poor that went to Trump in 2016, whose kids make up 31% of the child poverty
bracket (black children are 24%, and Latino children are 36%).
And while they're at it, they might try to change the fact that
the US ranks 25thout of
29 industrialized countries in investments in early childhood education or the fact that the
disgraceful American infant mortality rate at 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births is 50% higher than
the OECD average (3.9%)
. Many of the parents of these less privileged children are serving
long sentences in prison for non-violent crimes, the discarded citizens who form the highest
incarceration rate in the world. Overall, the Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranked the
US 18th out of 21 wealthy countries on measures of labor markets, poverty rates, safety nets,
wealth inequality, and economic mobility. On the other hand, the US has more than 25% of the
world's 2,208 billionaires. This is American exceptionalism at its worst.
The corporate-run market system and the calamities it is bringing to the world depends
on such distractions.
As the
New York Times
journalist and defender of US global
supremacy, Thomas Friedman, has noted, "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a
hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air
Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to
flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." In his view, the system needs
protecting, for which his "journalism" and most of the MSM are certainly doing their part.
Unless the rather soft left within the Democratic Party can somehow capture the public
imagination, the Democrats' political agenda,
the MSM and their cohorts in the deep state
will likely continue to report fake Russian conspiracies
around the world.
Russiagate is a propaganda industry that keeps on giving.
In the
longue
durée
of American elections, the question is what discourse will dominate the next campaign –
social justice and a rational foreign policy or more aggressive polemics about Russia aimed at a
steady pathway to nuclear war?
There is so much obvious
obfuscation and deflection taking place by the (((MSM))) as to
real issues and guilty parties in world and domestic affairs.
People... PLEASE... use the internet... with all of its
remaining free and accessible qualities to glean truth. Yes...
you will come across countless contradictions, but if you have
half a brain to use in the processing of data, you won't find it
hard to ascertain what is really going on. It is up to YOU to
figure it out... not Tucker Carlson, not Laura Ingraham, not
Rachel Maddow. No. YOU.
Do it. Be confident in your conclusions. Pass along to those
you know and love those conclusions. If you do this, the
tentacles of truth will spread within this body of jewish lies
and serve as our leukocytes.
He's turned out to be a ziocon and Bibi's bitch instead. He's surrounded himself with
neocons. And he's also Wall St's bitch as his primary concern is stock prices. He wants the Fed
to lower already low rates and grow its multi-trillion dollar "emergency" balance sheet even
more. The federal government will add a trillion dollars to the national debt each year of his
term. Isn't this exactly what the establishment of both parties want?
In any case, the hammer needs to come down hard on the putschists, so that law enforcement
& the intelligence agencies don't become an extra-constitutional 4th branch of government
accountable only to themselves. We'll see how far the Trump administration will go in holding
these seditionists to account?
"... One of the many critical questions that need to be asked is who at the FBI directed Felix Sater to try to bait the Trump team with the Putin/Moscow opportunity. Felix Sater, given his long track record with the FBI, did not come up with this idea on his own. He was put into play as part of a fishing expedition to hook Trump into a Russian collusion narrative. Fortunately for Trump, he did not take the bait. ..."
"... This certainly appears to be part of a broader, orchestrated effort to ensnare Trump. As I noted with respect to the Steele Dossier, the theme of Russian Real Estate deals appeared early on: ..."
"... Thanks to Mueller, we now know that the cultivation operation did not originate in Moscow nor the Kremlin. It came via Felix Sater who was working for the FBI. Do you think that is a mere coincidence? Jack said... Since I don't plan to read the Mueller report, I would like to ask a question of those SST correspondents who have read the report? What evidence was provided that the Russians hacked the DNC servers and provided the contents to Wikileaks? ..."
"... If the Russian interference in the election was of the magnitude asserted to change the election, then the failure to prevent this interference belongs to the Obama administration under whose watch it took place. That would imply that Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Lynch and Rogers failed in their jobs. Why are there no calls to investigate this failure? ..."
"... I think you are on to something important. I suspect the Brits collected on them as well, just in case. When it became clear that Trump was on the road to the nomination, the effort focused on him. ..."
The Mueller Report is damning of the FBI and reveals circumstantial evidence that the FBI
was engaged actively as early as September 2015 in trying to entrap Donald Trump in a web of
Russian conspiracy. Let's
go to the report and you can read the evidence yourself .
In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a
Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater , a New York based
real estate advisor, contacted Michael Cohen, then-executive vice president of the Trump
Organization and special counsel to Donald J. Trump. Sater had previously worked with the Trump
Organization and advised it on a number of domestic and international projects. Sater had
explored the possibility of a Trump Tower project in Moscow while working with the Trump
Organization and therefore knew of the organization 's general interest in completing a deal
there. Sater had also served as an informal agent of the Trump Organization in Moscow
previously and had accompanied Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. to Moscow in the
mid-2000s.
Sater contacted Cohen on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian
real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known
Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during
Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that
I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and
brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the
deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert.
Cohen was the only Trump Organization representative to negotiate directly with I.C. Expert
or its agents.
Please pay attention. It was not Trump that directed Felix Sater to go get a deal in Russia.
IT WAS SATER BRINGING THE DEAL (or trying to) to Donald Trump. A key fact not included in this
paragraph was the fact--yes, established fact--that Sater was a fully signed up FBI informant.
He helped the FBI make multiple cases against the Russian mob and Russian spies. Please go back
and re-read the pieces I wrote on Sater:
My eyes bugged out with the next revelation from Mueller. Here is what Sater says to Michael
Cohen, his old childhood buddy:
On November 3,2015, the day after the Trump Organization transmitted the LOI (i.e., Letter
Of Intent), Sater emailed Cohen suggesting that the Trump Moscow project could be used to
increase candidate Trump's chances at being elected, writing:
Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of
Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process .... Michael, Putin gets on stage
with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow, and Donald owns the republican nomination.
And possibly beats Hillary and our boy is in . ... We will manage this process better than
anyone. You and I will get Donald and Vladimir on a stage together very shortly. That the game
changer.
One of the many critical questions that need to be asked is who at the FBI directed Felix
Sater to try to bait the Trump team with the Putin/Moscow opportunity. Felix Sater, given his
long track record with the FBI, did not come up with this idea on his own. He was put into play
as part of a fishing expedition to hook Trump into a Russian collusion narrative. Fortunately
for Trump, he did not take the bait.
This certainly appears to be part of a broader, orchestrated effort to ensnare Trump. As I
noted with respect to the Steele Dossier, the theme of Russian Real Estate deals appeared early
on:
The Kremlin's cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various
lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the
ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not
taken up any of these.
Thanks to Mueller, we now know that the cultivation operation did not originate in Moscow
nor the Kremlin. It came via Felix Sater who was working for the FBI. Do you think that is a
mere coincidence? Jack said... Since I don't plan to read the Mueller report, I would like to
ask a question of those SST correspondents who have read the report? What evidence was provided
that the Russians hacked the DNC servers and provided the contents to Wikileaks?
Since I don't plan to read the Mueller report, I would like to ask a question of those SST correspondents who have read
the report? What evidence was provided that the Russians hacked the DNC servers and provided the contents to Wikileaks?
If the Russian interference in the election was of the magnitude asserted to change the
election, then the failure to prevent this interference belongs to the Obama administration
under whose watch it took place. That would imply that Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Lynch and
Rogers failed in their jobs. Why are there no calls to investigate this failure?
Wow, what an
absolutely smarmy, laughable proposal made to Cohen by Felix Sater. If Cohen didn't stand to
personally profit from services rendered to facilitate such a deal, I'd consider it very
suspicious that he promoted it to Trump for as long as he did. As it is, knowing how much money
lawyers can make in matters like this, the potential for profit can't be discounted enough as
motivation.
I recall a strategy of the Clinton campaign called "Pied Piper", revealed in Wikileaks'
Podesta dump, in which an email dated April 7, 2015 discussed the goal of "elevating" Trump's
candidacy (along with Ted Cruz and Ben Carson), thinking they would be easiest for Hillary to
beat. I wonder if we'll ever learn of a connection with efforts to entrap Trump like this Sater
offer, the Trump Tower meeting, etc?
In mentioning the inclusion of Cruz and Carson in the 'Pied Piper' scheme, akaPatience rightly
brings up the question as to whether those persons experienced anything similar to Trump
regarding 'entrapment.' Are there 'compromising' files in the FBI archives relating to those
other politicians? If so, a broad strategy to 'foam the runway' for the presumed Democrat Party
candidate in 2016 could be surmised and the "case" for Trump Russian "collusion" as a specific
and sinister plot will be demolished. (At least as far as persons with some shreds of
attachment to rationality are concerned.)
I think you are on to something important. I suspect the Brits collected on them as
well, just in case. When it became clear that Trump was on the road to the nomination, the
effort focused on him.
Given the absence of evidence of the Kremlin trying
to cultivate Trump or offer lucrative real estate development deals - Irecall hearing that one
of the Cohen trial documents had him emailing the Kremlin with regard to the Trump Tower idea
at an email address taken from its public website, and the Kremlin replying with a pro forma
"thank you for your interest in doing business in Russia" and an offer of two free tickets to
Valdai - and given the abundance of evidence for a wide-ranging FBI entrapment operation in
coordination with foreign intelligence operatives, the association between the latter and the
specific form the disinformation took is practically obvious.
I haven't read the Papadopoulos book yet (though I have it on hand), but in lieu of that I
would recommend the long interview Michael Tracey did with him the other day for an overview of
another large chunk of these entrapment operations.
Reply
And the characters in this hall of mirrors; Steele, Mifsud
and Sater. What of them?
The entire report is a chronicle of the grubby dealings of the courtiers surrounding any
great man, nothing more. My opinion is that President Trump and his organisation successfully
navigated through the Russian collusion mine field with only minimal casualties. A minefield
laid by Hilary Clinton and her acolytes.
It almost succeeded - Trump, the Republican Presidential nominee, appearing on stage with his good friend Putin? Imagine
what Clinton would have done with that...
What were they so concerned about Trump that they'd go
to such an extent to entrap him and smear him as Putin's bitch?
He's turned out to be a ziocon and Bibi's bitch instead. He's surrounded himself with
neocons. And he's also Wall St's bitch as his primary concern is stock prices. He wants the Fed
to lower already low rates and grow its multi-trillion dollar "emergency" balance sheet even
more. The federal government will add a trillion dollars to the national debt each year of his
term. Isn't this exactly what the establishment of both parties want?
In any case, the hammer needs to come down hard on the putschists, so that law enforcement
& the intelligence agencies don't become an extra-constitutional 4th branch of government
accountable only to themselves. We'll see how far the Trump administration will go in holding
these seditionists to account?
Barr says that the Mueller report insists that Russia attempted to interfere in U.S.
elections:
First, the report details efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company with
close ties to the Russian government, to sow social discord among American voters through
disinformation and social media operations.
How exactly was it established that the IRA intended to "sow social discord". Is there any
IRA witness that said so? Any documents? No. It is a made up reasoning. The IRA activities
were driven by commercial interests. To get as many page-views as possible IRA personnel
posted memes on both sides of the political spectrum simply because that is where the
viewership is. Just ask Foxnews or CNN. There was no political intent in the IRA's activity.
To claim that it intended to "sow social discord" is baseless nonsense.
The claims by social networks that "Russians" did this or that are dubious. Twitter for
example recently
revised its count of "Russian trolls":
On Feb. 8, Twitter removed 228 accounts from the Russian IRA dataset because the
social-media company now believes these accounts were operated by a different trolling
network located in Venezuela. "We initially misidentified 228 accounts as connected to
Russia," Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of site integrity, wrote in an online post. "As our
investigations into their activity continued, we uncovered additional information allowing
us to more confidently associate them with Venezuela."
...
Twitter's change to its data undercuts all of these analyses of the troll farm's 2017
activity , Clemson researchers said. There was no surge in IRA Twitter activity in
mid-2017, and the high-volume accounts that churned out links to ReportSecret were, in
fact, being operated by a different, unknown group operating out of Venezuela, according to
the updated data.
Twitter is reluctant to discuss how it connects accounts to trolling networks.
Twitter "is reluctant" because the company has simply no way to find that some real person
driven account is a "troll". It is a completely subjective judgement.
How exactly was it established that the IRA intended to "sow social discord". Is
there any IRA witness that said so? Any documents? No. It is a made up reasoning. The IRA
activities were driven by commercial interests. To get as many page-views as possible IRA
personnel posted memes on both sides of the political spectrum simply because that is where
the viewership is. Just ask Foxnews or CNN. There was no political intent in the IRA's
activity. To claim that it intended to "sow social discord" is baseless nonsense
That does not answer who paid for the clicks, and what was the information the clicks
led to. Basically a foreign power is not supposed to run election adverts.
Memes on both sides of the political spectrum could very well have been anti-Hillary ads
for Republicans, DNC leaks for Democrats, and pro Hillary/anti Sanders stuff for Sanders
supporters, the idea being to motivate Republicans to vote and disgust Democrats to keep
them from voting.
Facebook is THE tool you would use to create confusion and cause a break up of social
relations, simply by its psychological user profiles and the ability to spread news to some
groups but not to others unchecked from the outside.
Any professional in psychological warfare would have a go just for testing.
Cambridge Analytics was a British psychological warfare company - and
they cooperated with Russia .
Either business is global or it is not, and if you privatise secret service it is global
business :-))
thanks b... i look forward to your comments after reading the full report...
"the IRA intended to "sow social discord""... it could be argued social networks -
facebook, twitter, instagram and etc. etc. "sow social discord"... is that russias fault
too?
obviously there is way too much subjectivity in all of this.. the fact they cia/fbi are
unwilling, or unable to define how the clinton e mails came out is another way to add to
the subjectivity here.. nothing concrete - just specualation.. russia released them and
etc. etc. speculation... where is the proof as b asks? there is none, but there is plenty
of subjective speculation and innuendo - all abusing a foreign country... how ethnocentric
and convenient that is!
here is a subjective thought.. this is just what the usa deep state wants and just what
the western msm is happy to fulfill..
A federal judge has rejected special counsel Robert Mueller's request to delay the first
court hearing in a criminal case charging three Russian companies and 13 Russian citizens
with using social media and other means to foment strife among Americans in advance of
the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
What was not yet available until last night was the transcript of the hearing. The reason
the Concord Management attorneys called the case a 'proverbial ham sandwich' was because
one of the entities indicted by the Mueller team, Concord Catering, was not in existence
at the time the crimes were alleged to have taken place.
One of the Russian companies charged by Mueller, Concord Management and Consulting LLC,
hired American lawyers to defend it an American court -- the US prosecutors are fighting
tooth and nail to to prevent the obtaining o pre-trial discovery of documents ... 3 million
documents have been declared by the prosecutors as being "sensitive" and non-discoverable
... the battle continues.
British propaganda is clearly as close to neofascist propaganda as one can get... British neocons are even closer to neofascists then the US neocons. And British security services are closer to
the Third Reich security services then any other.
Skripals is a such a grandiose false flag operation that Gellen (of operation Gladio fame) probably would be amazed and humbled.
Notable quotes:
"... The official narrative of the Salisbury incident is ever-fluctuating. Seemingly each and every article, news segment, official statement or documentary about any element of the case contains new information, requiring the established account to be at least partially rewritten and/or contradicting established elements of the story.... ..."
"... If nothing else, that Haynes was willing to transmit an apparently obvious fiction speaks volumes about the willingness of mainstream journalists to parrot each and every fresh claim in the Skripal case, even if it wildly conflicts with what they themselves have written previously. ..."
"... Oh dear oh dear.. It appears the UK may be denying there were any poor ducks involved... https://twitter.com/haynesdeborah/status/1118409471754153984 ..."
It seems highly reasonable to conclude the NY Times item has blown away any remaining
truthfulness to the Skripal Saga and the entire Saga--like Russiagate--can be concluded to be
a very serious hoax, and that there's no reason whatsoever to trust anything said by UK's
Tory government.
"The official narrative of the Salisbury incident is ever-fluctuating. Seemingly each and
every article, news segment, official statement or documentary about any element of the case
contains new information, requiring the established account to be at least partially
rewritten and/or contradicting established elements of the story....
"If nothing else, that Haynes was willing to transmit an apparently obvious fiction speaks
volumes about the willingness of mainstream journalists to parrot each and every fresh claim
in the Skripal case, even if it wildly conflicts with what they themselves have written
previously."
"Difficult to verify your version of events given it involves nameless officials. Knowing
you're often used by security services to peddle propaganda seemed a reasonable assumption
they'd urged you to backtrack your earlier advocacy as story detonates official #Skripal
narrative."
It seems highly reasonable to conclude the NY Times item has blown away any
remaining truthfulness to the Skripal Saga and the entire Saga--like Russiagate--can be
concluded to be a very serious hoax, and that there's no reason whatsoever to trust anything
said by UK's Tory government.
Regarding the likely continuance of anti-Russian rhetoric,
this Philip Giraldi item informs us of the following:
"A current bill originally entitled the 'Defending American Security from Kremlin
Aggression Act (DASKA) of 2019,' is numbered S-1189 [linked to within item]. It has been
introduced in the Senate which will ' require the Secretary of State to determine whether the
Russian Federation should be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism and whether
Russian-sponsored armed entities in Ukraine should be designated as foreign terrorist
organizations.' The bill is sponsored by Republican Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado and is
co-sponsored by Democrat Robert Menendez of New Jersey.
"The current version of the bill was introduced on April 11th and it is by no means clear
what kind of support it might actually have, but the fact that it actually has surfaced at
all should be disturbing to anyone who believes it is in the world's best interest to avoid
direct military confrontation between the United States and Russia."
Giraldi generally concludes the sponsoring Senators are insane--"The Senatorial commentary
is, of course, greatly exaggerated and sometimes completely false regarding what is going on
in the world, but it is revealing of how ignorant American legislators can be and often
are"--but we just finished a witch hunt fueled by such insanity. Some anti-Projection
medication is drastically needed for all too many people wielding power in The Swamp.
One wonders if Halper, Dearlove, and Haspel ran the 'op' to initiate a new McCarthyism.
Reinforced by US IC "findings" (17 intelligence agencies agree!! Except not - that was a lie)
pushed by Brennan and Clapper.
Then consider what appears to be a cover-up by Mueller, Comey, and Barr (Note: Mueller is
Comey's mentor and Barr is close friends with Mueller) as outlined here: New
VIPS Memo :
So, if it wasn't the Russians, [then] who left the "Russian" bread-crumb "fingerprints?"
We do not know for sure; on this question we cannot draw a conclusion based on the
principles of science -- at least not yet. We suspect, however, that cyber warriors closer
to home were responsible for inserting the "tell-tale signs" necessary to attribute "hacks"
to Russia....
Binney, a plain-spoken, widely respected scientist, began by telling Pompeo that his
(CIA) people were lying to him about Russian hacking and that he (Binney) could prove it.
Pompeo reacted with disbelief, but then talked of following up with the FBI and NSA. We
have no sign, though, that he followed through.... [Furthermore[ we told Attorney General
Barr five weeks ago, [that] we consider Mueller's findings fundamentally flawed on the
forensics side and ipso facto incomplete. We also criticized Mueller for failing to
interview willing witnesses with direct knowledge, like WikiLeaks' Julian Assange.
If, as we strongly suspect, Mueller is relying for forensics solely on CrowdStrike,
the discredited firm hired by the DNC in the spring of 2016, he is acting more in the mold
of Inspector Clouseau than the crackerjack investigator he is reputed to be....
You [addressing Pres. Trump] may be unaware that in March 2017 lawyers for Assange
and the Justice Department (acting on behalf of the CIA) reportedly were very close to an
agreement under which Assange would agree to discuss "technical evidence ruling out certain
parties" in the leak of the DNC emails" and agree to redact some classified CIA
information, in exchange for limited immunity. According to the investigative reporter John
Solomon of The Hill, Sen. Mark Warner, D,VA, Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, learned of the incipient deal and told then-FBI Director Comey, who ordered an
abrupt "stand down"and an end to the discussions with Assange.
Lastly, given the above, isn't it curious that Trump himself happened to further
Russiagate suspicions and the Wikileaks sting by: hiring Manafort, appealing to Wikileaks and
Russia to release emails, frequently praising Putin?
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
IMO the Deep State had two main objectives in the 2016 Presidential election: elect a
nationalist President and initiate a new McCarthism. Discrediting Wikileaks ran a close
third. And settling scores with Flynn was also important to them (Flynn had told the world
that the Obama Administration made a "willful decision" to support ISIS).
I am not sure if it is clear for folks on the far side of NYT paywall that NYT reported on "children and ducks" not merely
as a quote of CIA director, but as a straight fact. This is the caption of one of the photos illustrating the article: "A former
Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter were poisoned last year in Britain in a slipshod attack that also
sickened children, killed ducks and required careful cleanup.CreditWill Oliver/EPA, via Shutterstock"
I'm willing to believe a lot of things about the Brits and Haspel, but "stupid" isn't one of them. That they tried the Skripal
stunt demonstrates they had great confidence in their control of the UK and US press, and I'll concede that confidence was justified.
Note Haspel hasn't denied any aspect of the news item.
Why perpetrate a hoax like the Skripal Saga, which was all too real for the one confirmed dead.
Taregt: Russia
Why? Previous sanctions not performing as anticipated--indeed, they are actually backfiring.
But if that policy line's already a proven failure, why double-down?
When faced with failure, Neocons always double-down.
Meanwhile, sanctions employed for almost 4 years when Skripal Act 1 begins clearly aren't working, which brings up the question
of how Russia is actually perceived by the genuine International Community--did the provocations and sanctions diminish Russia's
standing in the world prior to March 2018?
Given ever growing attendance to Russian sponsored and located symposiums, Russia's reputation seems to be growing at the expense
of the smearing nations.
Motive for Skripal Hoax: To do what sanctions couldn't.
Outcome of Skripal Hoax: Russian reputation higher than ever. Indeed, the two hoaxes have had the opposite affect on Russia's
international standing and the entire sanctions regime helped to make Russia stronger than it otherwise would be without their
imposition.
"The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional
to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely
proportional to its enemy status."--John McEvoy
So, lets employ this maxim to Russiagate and the Skripal Saga and the respective national
media. In the first case, the Russian public's completely ignored unless it's a member of the
so-called opposition while Putin and Russia get slandered constantly. The same treatment goes
for the UK media and a case could be made that the two act in tandem, implying
innerconnectivity between their spy agencies as suspected.
"Here is what we now know, per intelligence gleaned form federal law enforcement sources with insider knowledge of what amounts
to a plot by U.S. intelligence agencies to secure back door and illegal wiretaps of President Trump's associates:
Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA’s Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and
possibly Trump himself. To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of
Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ. The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial
of two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump associates. GCHQ did not work from London or the
UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping
surveillance on Trump associates. The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier compiled by former
British spy Christopher Steele. The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and
Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump’s associates appear compromised. Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ
began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner. After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency
could officially justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian lawyer at the meeting
Natalia Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into
the United States or the UK, federal sources said. By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole
to wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones and emails of U.S. citizens inside the
United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil
at Fort Meade. The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged
Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the evidence is considered “poisoned fruit.”
-----------.
Someone left this link in a comment to LJ, but as ringmaster of this circus, I choose to publish this as the best summary of all
the threads of the supposed conspiracy that I have seen thus far. pl
Wikipedia page on Paul Manafort says that the FBI began a criminal investigation into him in 2014, associated with his previous
dealings in Ukraine. He could have been a target of surveillance and wiretapping since then.
I therefore think Manafort was the key the intelligence agencies used to get to into Trump's organisation. It may have been
initially incidental to their ongoing, and much earlier surveillance of Manafort.
Robert Poling said...
Thank-you for this summary. If confirmed, Brennan (and others in the group he formed to spy on Trump and Trump's campaign)
should go to jail. Congress specifically forbid American spy agencies spying on American citizens in the U.S. Since that Congressional
action, the CIA and NSA have gotten around it by having foreign partners among the 'five eyes' do the collecting and then passing
the information back to us.
The spying on Trump was done at the behest of Obama and his minions. I'm reminded of an American president who was hounded
from office by the mainstream press for sending minions to spy and collect dirt at the opposition's political headquarters. He
had to resign and leave office. Several involved in the burglary went to jail and lost their livelihoods. Why is this situation
today any different and why is there a delay in prosecuting them? It's because the major media is bought out and controlled by
Trump's political opponents and not demanding justice, indeed is providing cover and excuses for them
Intelligence agencies, once created, has their own development dynamics and tend to escape from the control of
civilians and in turn control them. Such an interesting dynamics. In any case, the intelligence agencies and first of all top
brass of those agencies constitute the the core of the "deep state". Unlike civiliant emplorres they are protected by the veil of
secrecy and has access to large funds. Bush the elder was probably the first deep state creature who became the president of the
USA, but "special relationship" of Obama and Brennan is also not a secret.
Another problem is that secrecy and access to surveillance, Which gives intelligence agencies the ability to blackmail politicians.
Availability of unaccounted financial
resources make them real kingmakers. In a sense, as soon as such agencies were created the tail started waging the dog.
Notable quotes:
"... Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry Truman (1943-53) reportedly characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five decades – as the nation's top law enforcer? ..."
"... One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb. ..."
"... JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ. Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ into the White House. ..."
"... However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald – a cover-up that persists to this day. ..."
"... But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career. ..."
"... Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others ..."
No other individual in modern US history has a more sinister legacy than John Edgar Hoover,
the founder and lifetime director of the FBI. He founded the bureau in 1924 and was its
director until his death in 1972 at the age of 77.
Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned
into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry
Truman (1943-53) reportedly
characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five
decades – as the nation's top law enforcer?
J Edgar Hoover and his henchmen kept files on thousands of politicians, judges, journalists
and other public figures, according to
biographer Anthony Summers. Hoover ruthlessly used those files on the secret and often sordid
private lives of senior public figures to control their career conduct and official decisions
so as to serve his interests.
And Hoover's interests were of a rightwing, anti-communist, racist bigot.
Ironically, his own suppressed homosexuality also manifested in witch-hunts against
homosexuals in public life.
It was Hoover's secret files that largely informed the McCarthyite anti-communist
inquisitions of the 1950s, whose baleful legacy on American democracy, foreign policy and
freedom of expression continues to this day.
One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots
of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is
suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual
tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb.
Absurdly, the FBI chief maintained that there was "no such thing as the Mafia" in public
statements.
Two notorious cases of how FBI wiretapping worked under Hoover can be seen in the
presidencies of John F Kennedy (1961-63) and Richard Nixon (1969-74).
As recounted by Laurent Guyénot in his 2013 book , 'JFK to 9/11: 50
Years of Deep State', Hoover made a point of letting each new president know of compromising
information he had on them. It wouldn't be brandished overtly as blackmail; the president would
be briefed subtly, "Sir, if someone were to have copies of this it would be damaging to your
career". Enough said.
JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and
extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once
confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made
the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ.
Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ
into the White House.
However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly
anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy
pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt
led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample
evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep
State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald –
a cover-up that persists to this day.
As for Richard Nixon, it is believed that "Tricky Dicky" engaged in secret communications
with the US-backed South Vietnamese regime on the cusp of the presidential elections in 1968.
Nixon promised the South Vietnamese stronger military support if they held off entering peace
talks with communist North Vietnam, which incumbent President Johnson was trying to organize.
LBJ wanted to claim a peace process was underway in order to boost the election chances of his
vice president Hubert Humphrey.
Nixon's scheming prevailed. The Vietnam peace gambit was scuttled, the Vietnam war raged on,
and so the Democrat candidate lost. Nixon finally got into the White House, which he had long
coveted from the time he lost out to JFK back in 1960.
But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was
classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is
possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating
in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career.
These are but only two examples of how Deep State politics works in controlling and
subverting American democracy. The notion that lawmakers and presidents are free to serve the
people is a quaintly naive one. For the US media to pretend otherwise, and to hail the FBI as
some kind of benign bastion of justice, while also deprecating claims of "Deep State" intrusion
as "conspiracy theory", is either impossibly ignorant of history – or a sign of the
media's own compromised complicity.
Nonetheless, to blame this culture of institutionalized blackmail and corruption on one
individual – J Edgar Hoover – is not fair either.
Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not
alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not
just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the
Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others.
Once formed, the Deep State – as an alternate, unaccountable, unelected government
– does not surrender its immense power willingly. It has learnt to hold on to its power
through blackmail, media control, incitement of wars, and, even ultimately, assassination of
American dissenters.
The illegal tapping of private communications is an oxygen supply for the depredations of
the American Deep State.
Thinking that such agencies are not actively warping and working the electoral system to fix
the figurehead in the White House is a dangerous delusion.
So too are claims that American democracy is being "influenced" by malign Russian enemies,
as the US intelligence chiefs once again
chorused in front of the Senate this past week. The consummate irony of it!
The real "influence campaigns" corrupting American democracy are those of the "All-American"
agencies who claim to be law enforcers and defenders of national security.
US citizens would do well to refresh on the untold history of their country to appreciate
how they are being manipulated.
We might even surmise that a good number of citizens are already aware, if only vaguely, of
the elite corruption – and that is why Washington DC is viewed with increasing contempt
by the people.
"... The CIA fabricated a story that the Russians in Afghanistan made plastic bombs in the shape of toys, to blow up children. Casey repeated this story, knowing it to be disinformation, as fact to US journalists and politicians. ..."
Bill Bray , Former (Retired) Research Scientist at Central
Intelligence Agency
Updated Dec 14 2017 · Author has 509 answers and 261.9k answer views
I am not familiar with that particular quote, but that sounds like the hubris of the CIA. You have to understand, you put a janitor
in charge of the other janitors, and he becomes king shit of the janitors. And so it goes all the way to the point where you put
someone in charge of an agency which no longer answers to the president, the senate, congress, the UN, or any force on Earth, there
is no way you are not going to have anything but a problem. JFK wanted to dissolve them for that reason, 6 months later
If you really want to take the Dr. Bill acid test, go into Google AdWords. That is where they sell key words to the highest bidder
so that their site floats to the top (no it is not 'free information highway,' that's how Google became a multi-billion organization).
Watch the key words that are floating to the top. Then, look at tomorrow morning's headlines in Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. You will
find that magically the minds of Americans predicted the next day's news.
This of course is not the case. The multi-trillion dollar surveillance of Americans that they told you is to 'protect you from
terrorists,' and so on is not what they are doing. All cell phone calls (the verbal content, referred to as meta-data), emails, text,
are monitored. Since the Patriot Act portion that allowed this to expire, they used the clause 'on American soil,' literally and
monitor everything via the communications satellites. There are also an estimated 20,000 drones OVER (BUT NOT ON) US soil, monitoring
verbal communications that are not electronic. This can be done via unidirectional microphone, or by bouncing a laser off your window.
That includes car window.
The Welcome to FBI.gov web site collects information, but is easier to access at
Mass Shootings . In 2016 there were 384 mass shootings, almost 100
of which were listed as 'terrorist motivated.' So, the multi-trillion dollar surveillance network is not to 'protect you.'
The system is designed to gather information on the 'collective thinking,' like the Borg, of the American public, and then design
tomorrow's news and media, literally overnight, to cattle herd you into a nice neat profile of behavior and commerce.
Again, take the acid test. Look at what you have access to, AdWords, and then watch tomorrow's headlines magically appear. At
first you might think, well that's what people are interested in so that's what's in the news. Then, as you look at the flow of headlines
regarding international campaigns, what the President said yesterday, what the senators and congressmen are doing or being accused
of, it starts to get a bit freaky. Do this for several days, and you will see.
If this doesn't convince you, you fit a nice neat profile of behavior and commerce.
Otherwise, explain the multi-trillion dollar surveillance network's failure to prevent 384 mass shootings last year, of which
about 1 in 4 were 'terrorist motivated,' and I think we already passed that number this year.
You know the system is in place, the NSA admitted it publicly. The reason they say it is there is obviously not true, as per a
hundred terrorist motivated events each year, hundreds of mass shootings, most of which never make it into the 'fake news.'
Every time the President says 'fake news,' your brain says 'conspiracy theory,' and hardens your cognitive belief, your religion,
the media.
Keeping you stupid keeps you under control. If this were not the case, disinformation would not be a goal. 1.7k Views ·
View Upvoters ·
It does appear he said something very much along those lines, though I doubt it meant what it appears to mean absent the context.
He made the statement not long after he became the Director of Central Intelligence, during a discussion of the fact that, to his
amazement, about 80 percent of the contents of typical CIA intelligence publications was based on information from open, unclassified
sources, such as newspapers and magazines. Apparently, and reasonably, he judged that about the same proportion of Soviet intelligence
products was probably based on open sources, as well. That meant that CIA disinformation programs directed at the USSR wouldn't work
unless what was being disseminated by US magazines and newspapers on the same subjects comported with what the CIA was trying to
sell the Soviets. Given that the CIA could not possibly control the access to open sources of all US publications, the subjects of
CIA disinformation operations had to be limited to topics not being covered by US public media. To be sure, some items of disinformation
planted by the CIA in foreign publications might subsequently be discovered and republished by US media. I'm guessing the CIA would
not leap to correct those items.
But that is a far cry from concluding that the CIA would (or even could) arrange that "everything the American public believes
is false."
The American public has never been the primary target
of any disinformation campaign.
The CIA once had influence in a number of English language publications abroad, some of which stories were reprinted in the US
media. This was known as "blowback", and unintended in most cases.
The CIA fabricated a story that the Russians in Afghanistan made plastic bombs in the shape of toys, to blow up children. Casey
repeated this story, knowing it to be disinformation, as fact to US journalists and politicians.
"... The Steele dossier is British, Orbis intelligence = British, Institute for statecraft / Integrity Initiative =
British, Skripal defection. Location, evidence, statements = British, the list goes on and on. ..."
"... The UK's propaganda machine rivals and even surpasses Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. ..."
The Steele dossier is British, Orbis intelligence = British, Institute for statecraft / Integrity Initiative = British,
Skripal defection. Location, evidence, statements = British, the list goes on and on.
You'd think someone might have noticed something of a trend by now.
They just don't bother anymore, the level of double black psy-ops and gaslighting is a mine field of disinformation. That's what
you get when Washington - Obama, gives the green light to propagandizing their people. It's escalated, like we haven't noticed,
under Trump despite his pathetic attempts at assuring folks it's fake news.
The UK's propaganda machine rivals and even surpasses Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. I watched about 10 minutes of a
documentary about Easter Island, as an example, and it was revisionist to the nth degree. Just absolute rubbish insinuating that
white European travelers destroyed the Island. This is what British kids are now being marinated in, "He who controls the past"
Highly recommenced to listen. Judge Napolitano is an interesting speaker (start at 41 min)
As CIA in the USA government organizational chart stands above the Presidential Office Hillary is really untouchable, unless the
Presidential Office is also occupied by CIA-democrat like Obama.
Notable quotes:
"... She absolutely thinks she is untouchable ..."
"... Every corrupt person was praised and given more power!!! Hillary sat back and knew of all the raping that bill was doing to kids teenagers young ladies boys young men and she never blinked an eye!!! If a simple tax paying citizen was to pull the bullshit that Hillary has pulled in front of Howdy that citizen would be see the lights day until Jesus came and took us home to Heaven!! ..."
"... Hillary Clinton actually says in this video that half of Trump supporters are "deplorable". That is equivalent to roughly 25% of the American population! That constitutes a very strong statement from someone who wants to be president of The United States. ..."
Congress is a waste of tax money, they have no power, so obvious! Criminal leaders just lie to them, knowing they can't do
a thing and most of them are paid off anyway, they don't want to do anything! Elections are rigged, so they don't have to worry
about, "we the poor, lowly people!" We are not even in the equation!
Why is this pathological liar Hillary still running around free ?? Isn't lying to Congress a felony ??? If this lowlife is
simply above the law lets change the laws !
Prosecute everyone of them that knew and allowed even the smallest bit of knowledge and make every one of them ineligible for
their pensions. They do not deserve those pensions, they stole them, treasonous acts against your government does not make you
eligable..they do not deserve it!!
Not only a habitual serial liar but a career Criminal! Hillary and Bill have been involved in illegal manners for over 40 years!
Hillary stated it best last year during the time of the election!. " If Donald Trump becomes president, WE WILL ALL HANG!" She
finally told the truth!
She absolutely thinks she is untouchable because not one person has been brave enough and bold enough to take her
down the Clinton's have been corrupt and evil from child good and they were taught from NWO that they will never be taken down
go child rob steel kill do everything in the power we Give you both and bring me all glory!!! We will let you control the United
States as long as you want!!!
All the connected deaths that embrace the Clinton's and not single piece of evidence is kept found
or stored that it doesn't come up missing so they sit back and allow these foreign governments to take over major areas and promote
child sex trafficking who're houses with kids being sold to any man with air in his lungs!
Every corrupt person was praised and
given more power!!! Hillary sat back and knew of all the raping that bill was doing to kids teenagers young ladies boys young
men and she never blinked an eye!!! If a simple tax paying citizen was to pull the bullshit that Hillary has pulled in front of
Howdy that citizen would be see the lights day until Jesus came and took us home to Heaven!!
She gas lied straight face looked him dead in the eyes and laughed at the bengahzi deaths that She is on record having him
killed she laughed and she didn't Give a f*** about killing him and leaving his remains behind but my question is why hasn't she
been arrested booked finger printed and mugshot took with a huge bond or mot and put behind bars until you beat the f******truth
out if her??? I would get the death penalty she wouldn't and hasn't gotten a contempt of court for not complying with mr. Gowdy
Hillary Clinton actually says in this video that half of Trump supporters are "deplorable". That is equivalent to roughly 25%
of the American population! That constitutes a very strong statement from someone who wants to be president of The United States.
To say that 80 million people are "deplorable" IS TRULY DEPLORABLE!!! After hearing this I can't really understand WHY she got
even a single vote!
This is a fantastic mosaic of the state of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. It is absolutely clear that she is an
habitual liar, corrupt to the extreme and has absolutely no credibility.
I'd love to see Mr Gowdy take the gloves off and take
her down. She must be removed from the public as she is a menace. She is the mother of deplorable.
"Many in the USA have come to realize this stealth organization does not work on the behalf of the USA but rather to its own
ends."
CIA probably was involved in Skripals false flag operation as well. Because the behaviour of Theresa May suggest that she from
the very beginning was sure about the USA full and unconditional support and putting pressure on EU allies. Then now we know
that Gina Haspel, who was also involved in Steele dossier and handled most oversees assets involved in entrapment of Trump, misled
Trump and pervaded him to expel 80 Russian diplomats.
Notable quotes:
"... Then there is 9/11. This one also has a USA government narrative that defies logic. This time it is so blatant and egregious that an organization called "Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth" was founded by Richard Gage, an architect with vast experience in steel structured buildings and fire. The organization demands on official investigation by Congress into exactly how the buildings came down. ..."
"... According to a statement reported by the BBC , Loose Change film producer Dylan Avery thinks the destruction of the building was suspicious because it housed some unusual tenants, including a clandestine CIA office on the 25th floor, an outpost of the U.S. Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and New York City's emergency command center." Wikipedia ..."
"... So now we have Prime Minister, Teresa May, accusing Putin and Russia of the May 4 nerve agent attack of Sergei V. Skripal (66) and his daughter, Yulia (33), in Salibury, England. Both are in critical condition after being found unconscious on a bench outside The Maltings Shopping Center in Salibury. As we all know Russia is the new Antichrist. The harbinger of all evil. The enemy we all must view with the utmost fear and loathing. Daily, the MSM in USA recoils as they report story after story of Russia meddling in our elections, shaking the very foundations of our democracy. ..."
"... Let's get this straight. Mr. Skripal was convicted of high treason in Russia in 2004. He was not tortured, killed or murdered, rather he was allowed to settle in Britain after a spy swap in 2010. Sounds pretty friendly to me, considering that Putin is portrayed as a sadistic monster out to settle scores with those who cross him, by the Western media. ..."
"... So, why now? Why this attempted assassination now? This is the question, dear reader. Why attempt to assassinate Mr. Skripal now? He was convicted of high treason 14 years ago. He has been in England for eight years. Russia knew at this point he was no threat to them with no new secrets to betray. What would be gained at this point by assassinating the man? ..."
"... None. However, if the CIA took him out, or paid unscrupulous foreign mercenaries to take him out, much could be gained. The narrative of big bad Putin, in his big bad Russia, would be reinforced. Now, not only is he meddling in elections, getting the dastardly Trump elected, he is using nerve gas to take out enemies on foreign soil. My god, what will be next? ..."
"... "If we don't take immediate concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be the last place we see chemical weapons used," said Haley. "They could be used here in New York or in cities of any country that sits on this council." CNN Politics ..."
Many in the USA have come to realize this stealth organization does not work on the behalf
of the USA but rather to its own ends. And, in this realization, comes a jaded view of both the
CIA and the government it represents.
This realization may have begun with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Warren
Commission, a congressional investigation was convened. The commission concluded there was a
single lone shooter, a fringe outcast, Lee Harvey Oswald who acted alone in the assassination
of the president. Many felt, in light of the facts, that the Warren Commission was a cover up
of what really went down on November 22, 1963, in Houston, Texas.
In 1976, the Congress reopened the Kennedy investigation. They created The United States
House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to investigate the
assassination of John F. Kennedy (and Martin Luther King Jr.).
The HSCA completed its investigation in 1978 and determined the Warren Commission was faulty
and there was more than one shooter and there was indeed a conspiracy to kill the president. So
much for the official narrative of the Warren Commission.
Why the Warren Commission cover up back then that even the Congress in 1976 (HSCA) reported
was bogus? One theory April 25, 1966, The New York Times wrote, "And, President Kennedy, as the
enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of
his Administration, that he wanted to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it
to the winds."
Kennedy was no fan of the Director of the C.I.A. Allen Dulles or his agency, and in the
autumn of 1961 he purged the C.I.A. of Dulles and his entourage. This included Deputy Director
for Plans Richard M. Bissell Jr. and and Deputy Director Charles Cabell. You do not mess with
Allen Dulles and the C.I A. Let's leave it at that. Kennedy was dead within two years.
Then there is 9/11. This one also has a USA government narrative that defies logic. This
time it is so blatant and egregious that an organization called "Architects & Engineers for
9/11 Truth" was founded by Richard Gage, an architect with vast experience in steel structured
buildings and fire. The organization demands on official investigation by Congress into exactly
how the buildings came down.
By December 2014, over 2,300 architectural and engineering professionals had signed a
petition for this investigation. If one looks at controlled demolitions and how the buildings
actually came down it is obvious the collapse was not due to an airplane flying into the
buildings, but rather a controlled demolition. 2,300 architects and engineers with verified
credentials all testify that the narrative of the government is patently false and
scientifically implausible if not impossible.
At about nine a.m. the Twin Towers are crashed into and collapse. At about five twenty p.m.
that same day, Building Seven collapses. No planes fly into Building 7, it just collapses.
Again, the videos show a controlled demolition.
There are various theories as to why 7 WTC was taken down. Theories range from 7 WTC being
the operation center for the demolition of the Twin Towers to more nefarious motives. "
According to a statement reported by the BBC , Loose Change film producer Dylan Avery thinks the
destruction of the building was suspicious because it housed some unusual tenants, including a
clandestine CIA office on the 25th floor, an outpost of the U.S. Secret Service, the Securities
and Exchange Commission, and New York City's emergency command center." Wikipedia
What is important to remember is that NO STEEL FRAME HIGH RISE HAS EVER TOTALLY COLLAPSED
DUE TO FIRE.
These are but two examples of hundreds where we have been mislead by the official narrative
of the government and its MSM news. Remember the Trump Dossier that was leaked and printed as
fact? Or, the death of Seth Rich, a "botched" robbery? Or, the list of 200 news outlets in the
USA that were Russian Propaganda fronts? All reported as fact by the New York Times and
Washington Post. All fake news by the MSM fed to an unsuspecting American people.
So now we have Prime Minister, Teresa May, accusing Putin and Russia of the May 4 nerve
agent attack of Sergei V. Skripal (66) and his daughter, Yulia (33), in Salibury, England. Both
are in critical condition after being found unconscious on a bench outside The Maltings
Shopping Center in Salibury. As we all know Russia is the new Antichrist. The harbinger of all evil. The enemy we all
must view with the utmost fear and loathing. Daily, the MSM in USA recoils as they report story
after story of Russia meddling in our elections, shaking the very foundations of our
democracy.
Let's get this straight. Mr. Skripal was convicted of high treason in Russia in 2004. He was
not tortured, killed or murdered, rather he was allowed to settle in Britain after a spy swap
in 2010. Sounds pretty friendly to me, considering that Putin is portrayed as a sadistic
monster out to settle scores with those who cross him, by the Western media.
Teresa May called the act "reckless" and "indiscriminate", and basically said Putin put
innocent English bystanders at risk. She upped the ante by dismissing 23 Russian diplomats, the
largest such expulsion in thirty years.
On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused May of grandstanding in her
response to the incident. Russian news agency Interfax reported that The Kremlin denies
involvement in the nerve agent poisoning, insisting one motive was to complicate Russia's
hosting of the World Cup this summer. Ah, dear Kremin, the motive was much deeper than the
World Cup games, which were only a bonus to the attack.
So, why now? Why this attempted assassination now? This is the question, dear reader.
Why attempt to assassinate Mr. Skripal now? He was convicted of high treason 14 years ago. He
has been in England for eight years. Russia knew at this point he was no threat to them with no
new secrets to betray. What would be gained at this point by assassinating the man?
None. However, if the CIA took him out, or paid unscrupulous foreign mercenaries to take
him out, much could be gained. The narrative of big bad Putin, in his big bad Russia, would be
reinforced. Now, not only is he meddling in elections, getting the dastardly Trump elected, he
is using nerve gas to take out enemies on foreign soil. My god, what will be next?
Nikki Haley, Ambassador to the UN tells us, "The United States of America believes that
Russia is responsible for the attack on two people in the United Kingdom using a military-grade
nerve agent," Haley said in her remarks at a UN Security Council emergency session, blasting
the Russian government for flouting international law.
"If we don't take immediate concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be
the last place we see chemical weapons used," said Haley. "They could be used here in New York
or in cities of any country that sits on this council." CNN Politics
The USA needs an enemy to foment fear to justify it's astronomical defense budget. It just
loves a good cold war. However, now that Russia is no longer a pinko commie nation to be
demonized, and is indeed a capitalist democracy, we have to resurrect a new straw man to
hate.
It is remarkable the degree to which the liberal left has bought into this
industrial-military-complex narrative. The USA always has to be bombing someone, droning
someone or napalming someone to keep the monies flowing into the defense budget. Take a look at
our spending compared to Russia or other nations.
Alas, it is certainly not out of the question that the CIA was behind the attack. After this
amount of time Mr. Putin had nothing to gain in assassinating Mr. Skripal and his daughter. In
fact, he had a lot to lose. The CIA? They had a lot to gain, and nothing to lose. Never
underestimate the CIA and its brilliance in setting the narrative for its agenda. And, never
underestimate Mr. Putin in his resolve not to become their lapdog.
Ms. Simpson was a radio personality in New York. She was a staff writer for The Liberty Report.
A PBS documentary was done on her activism for human rights. She is a psychotherapist and
political commentator.
B, here's a remarkable fact: The Skripal Novichok perfume bottle assassination story is is
eerily similar to episode 2 of BBC show 'Killing Eve' where an assassin uses a perfume bottle
to kill her target and where later an innocent person accidentally dies after coming into
contact with said perfume bottle.
The episode aired around a month after the Skripal attack but well before the other 2
people fell ill and the perfume bottle theory emerged.
"... The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene: ..."
"... Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose: ..."
"... Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. ..."
"... Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option. ..."
"... If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked. ..."
"... The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him: ..."
"... The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. ..."
"... The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men. ..."
"... The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead. ..."
"... It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing. ..."
"... Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter. ..."
"... Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss. ..."
"... Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War. ..."
"... after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative.. ..."
"... once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible. ..."
"... Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians. ..."
"... The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both. ..."
"... Haspel will not be fired. ..."
"... It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). .. ..."
"... The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. ..."
An ass kissing portrait of Gina Haspel,
torture
queen and director of the CIA, reveals that she lied to Trump to push for more
aggression against Russia.
In March 2018 the British government asserted, without providing any evidence, that the
alleged 'Novichok' poisoning of Sergej and Yulia Skripal was the fault of Russia. It urged
its allies to expel Russian officials from their countries.
The U.S. alone expelled
60 Russian officials. Trump
was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year
ago the Washington Post described the scene:
President Trump seemed distracted in March as his aides briefed him at his Mar-a-Lago
resort on the administration's plan to expel 60 Russian diplomats and suspected spies.
The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of
Russians as its European allies -- part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the
poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.
"We'll match their numbers," Trump instructed, according to a senior administration
official. "We're not taking the lead. We're matching."
The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials
said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian
officials -- far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.
The president, who seemed to believe that other individual countries would largely
equal the United States, was furious that his administration was being portrayed in the
media as taking by far the toughest stance on Russia.
The expulsion marked a turn in the Trump administration's relation with Russia:
The incident reflects a tension at the core of the Trump administration's increasingly
hard-nosed stance on Russia: The president instinctually opposes many of the punitive
measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close
relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The past month, in particular, has marked a major turning point in the
administration's stance, according to senior administration officials. There have been
mass expulsions of Russian diplomats, sanctions on oligarchs that have bled billions of
dollars from Russia's already weak economy and, for the first time, a presidential tweet
that criticized Putin by name for backing Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Today the New York Timesportraits Gina
Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position.
They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her
shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its
own purpose:
Last March, top national security officials gathered inside the White House to discuss
with Mr. Trump how to respond to the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal,
the former Russian intelligence agent.
London was pushing for the White House to expel dozens of suspected Russian
operatives, but Mr. Trump was skeptical. ... During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump.
She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told
the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not
the only victims of Russia's attack.
Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children
hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals.
She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently
killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.
Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but
pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the
pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he
embraced the strong option.
The Skripal case was widely covered and we
followed it diligently (scroll down). There were no reports of any children affected by
'Novichok' nor were their any reports of dead ducks. In the official storyline the
Skripals, before visiting a restaurant,
fed bread to ducks at a pond in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury.
They also
gave duck-bread to three children to do the same. The children were examined and their
blood was tested.
No
poison was found and none of them fell ill . No duck died. (The duck feeding episode
also disproves
the claim that the Skripals were poisoned by touching a door handle.)
If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British
government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced
policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked.
The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were
fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to
manipulate him:
The outcome was an example, officials said, of how Ms. Haspel is one of the few people
who can get Mr. Trump to shift position based on new information.
Co-workers and friends of Ms. Haspel push back on any notion that she is manipulating
the president. She is instead trying to get him to listen and to protect the agency,
according to former intelligence officials who know her.
The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own
policies. Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game:
Ms. Haspel won the trust of Mr. Pompeo, however, and has stayed loyal to him. As a
result, Mr. Trump sees Ms. Haspel as an extension of Mr. Pompeo, a view that has helped
protect her, current and former intelligence officials said.
Posted by b on April 16, 2019 at 08:37 AM |
Permalink
I don't see how it's possible to manipulate someone (and especially the US president) into
doing something they don't want to do with lies like the ones described here. On the
contrary presidents, CEOs etc. favor the staffers who tell them the kind of lies they want
to hear in order to reinforce what they wanted to do in the first place.
I've never seen any reason to alter my first position on Trump, that like any other
president he does what he wants to do.
The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create
trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life
with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma
all agency owned men.
The joke 7in the final scene Robert Redford tells See Eye A man Cliff Robertson that he
gave all the evidence to the NY Times. What a joke. The NY Times and the Wash Post are the
mouthpieces for the SEE Eye A. The AP news sources most of their stories from those two
papers and other lackey See Eye A newspapers.
One final criticism in moon's story. The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the
President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead.
After this, she got the top job, so what is the real lesson here? Sociopathic liars get
promoted....or you can tell the truth, try to be honorable and fade into obscurity.. In a nest of psychos, you have to really be depraved to become the top psycho...
Nuke it for orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
Backing up Russ's point, when will you realise the "buck stops" on Trump's desk for any
and all departments he oversees, which are run by his appointees? Trump is dedicated to
creating a neoconservative foreign policy melded to a neoliberal economic policy favouring
his corporate fascist sponsors. Recently, you've been all over the Assange indictment,
Trump's relationship with Nuttyahoo and the related rollback of JCPOA. Is this what you
want to see continued into a second term?
There is much evidence to show Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy"
where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing
candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the
point where no one can tell the difference.
They haven't got there quite yet but once the judiciary is controlled by GOP ideologues
it's game over. And McConnell is dedicating his life to make that the reality ASAP.
Meanwhile back at the ranch we are dedicated to knocking down any and all potential
opposition to this GOP hostile takeover for some reason I've yet to fathom.
Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire
Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game[Pompeo]
Hopefully yes to all four propositions. Why am I sceptical though (except conceivably
the first)?
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. He's the first POTUS in decades I
believe to not even pretend to like dogs by having an official White House dog and every
policy his Administration can take against animals, they have taken. I'm not even sure I
buy the spin that he cared about dead kids either. And NYT readers know this about him, so
I don't understand what the point of peddling this fiction is other than to paint Torture
Queen in some kind of good light (and we KNOW that she certainly doesn't care about dead
anything).
another example of trump's stupidity and pathological inability to think for himself. he
gets his views from fox and his policy from bolton. his equally vapid daughter and kushner
whine to him about sooper sad syria pictures they saw in a sponsored link while googling
for new tmz gossip.
even worse that this is the twat in charge of one of russiagate's main instigating "deep
state" agencies. he spent the entirety of his presidency railing against their various lies
then takes this wankery at face value. it's just like the "chinese soldiers in venezuela";
if those pictures were legit they'd have been splattered over every front page and
permanently attached to screeching cnn and msnbc segments demanding trump "finally get
tough" on "putin's russia".
my only surprise is that she didn't tell him about british babies ripped from incubators
and dipped in anthrax powder.
the nyt shilling for a soCIopAth? not that surprising.
The consultant in emergency medicine at Salisbury hospital wrote to The Times, shortly
after the Skripal incident. His choice of words was odd, and some have said they indicate
no novichok poisoning occurred. Leaving that to one side, his letter certainly puts paid to
the idea that more than three people (the Skripals and the policeman, DCI Bailey) were
poisoned.
https://www.onaquietday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/DocSaysNoNerveAgentInSalisbury.jpg
" the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, "
There was no attack on the Skripals. or on anyone else.
The Russophobia in whose context it falls, is of a higher order, in which a fabricated
narrative of a Skripal-like attack had an important function.
The Skripals were perfectly happy to lend their name to the fabrication, and are living
happily, probably in New Zealand.
The Daily Beast article that b linked to describes how many serious, well-informed people
felt that Haspel was unsuitable to lead the CIA. Even more strange and troubling was that Haspel was supported by Trump's nemesis,
John Brennan.
Despite all that, MAGA Trump still nominated her. Any notion that Trump is at odds with, or "manipulated" by, Haspel, Bolton, or Pompeo is
just propaganda. We've seen such reporting before (esp. wrt Bolton) and Trump has taken no
action.
I see that Trump derangement is alive and well here at MoA. Commenters talk as if Trump is
the first president stupid enough to be manipulated by the security agencies and shadow
government sometimes referred to as a "deep state". People don't have to be historians or
look back to Rome, just read the books about how the great general who "won WWII" was used
by the oligarchy which had full control of US foreign policy throughout Eisenhower's term in
office.
Works produced after WWII, C. Wright Mills, The Power elite was written in 1956,The
Brothers and The Divil's Chessboard each about the Dulles Brothers and how they operated US
foreign policy for the interests of the oligarchy, and the work Peter Phillips, GIANTS: The
Global Power Elite and the work of David Rothkopf which thoroughly describes the feudal
system under which the Western cultures are ruled.
The US government is a pantomime it is a show it has no power.
How many here can honestly say they understand that the US dollar itself and the ENTIRE
GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM is privately owned. Why do you think the "banks were bailed out"?
because the banks were in power not the government. The US is 22 trillion in debt - the
oligarchy is the creditor - take over the US gov. and you have a powerless pile of
debt.
Around 6,000 people control 85% of global assets until that changes nothing will change.
The oligarchy won virtually all the mines and control the price of all basic commodities
necessary for modern life, the internet, oil of course and more.
What is failing and what has failed over and over for 500 years is Western Civilization and
its three "great religions" which preach obedience, oppression, domination by a one god
suffocating mythology.
But the oligarchy doesn't own just the basic commodities, it owns the religions and it owns
the drugs and all illegal trade as well.
Western "civilization" is really nothing more than one vast feudal kingdom, with royal
courts in DC, Tel Aviv and Ryiadh. Wheather there is a god or not, religion is made of
flesh and blood not miracles. No Rabbi or Priest or Imam claims visitations by god to
instruct them on doctrine - they are flesh and blood and they want power so they behave
like sycophants to the money they need to expand their power...all for the good souls under
their care.
Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired
to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more
likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter.
What can we expect from a tv personality who became a US president? A man who ran with an
advertisement worthy of a business man like him, "Make America Great Again." How does he go
about doing it? Giving more money to the military industrial-Congressional complex, even
though we are really flat broke. Using aggressive tactics used by Wall Street in hostile
company takeovers to really intimidate other nations. And hire and place those he really
agrees with in important positions who really reflect his true feelings. I'm sure when he
spoke with Haspel before offering her the job, he brought up the topic of torture and
agreed with her on its use on terrorists.
I think there's a reasonable case to be made that they conspired not to stop Trump but
to further speculation of Trump's "collusion" with Russia (what would later be known as
Russiagate). The "collusion" and "Russia meddled" accusations are what fueled the new
McCarthyism.
I'll just add to Jerry's comment at #3 that the final line in the movie "Day of the Condor"
is something like "But will they print it?" which really spoke to the message of the film
in its entirety. The condor being an endangered bird for whom the hero is named, and the
beginning outrage being the brutal murder of book lovers researching useable plot details
for the 'company'makes this message current and applicable to what we see in the Skripal
case. And instead of librarians, we now have online commenters, a doughty breed, and we
have Assange.
Instead of 'Will they print it?' I am wondering 'Will they make another movie about
it?'
Remind me, where is Yulia Skripal these days? Well and truly 'disappeared' it seems. The
mask is off. the snarling face of the beast is there for all to see.
What a total waste of an article discussing a story published in NYT or WaPo.
b, the World has divided itself into those who consume alternative media such as this
and stupidos who consume MSM. There is nothing in-between that you are attempting to
discuss and dissect here. NYT = cognitive value zero.
Fake News not worth one millisecond of our time, not even to decode what the regime
wants us to know, we know all that already. Personally, I am only interested in the new
methods of domestic repression, what is next after the warning of Assange arrest, future
rendition and torture. The Deep Stare appears to be coming out into open, will it soon get
rid of the whole faux democracy construct and just use iron fist to rule? It already impose
its will as the rule of law. All of the Western block is heading in this direction.
Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn,
completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its
contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold
for their putative boss.
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. Mataman | Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM
This assumes that Trump would primarily care about the ducks (and children) when he
approved a massive expulsion, rather that his image and "ah, in that case it would look bad
if we do not do something really decisive".
In any case, I was thinking why NYT would disclose something like that. The point is
that readers of Craig Murray (not so few, but mostly Scottish nationalists who are also
leftist and have scant possibilities and/or inclination to vote in USA) and MoonOfAlabama
would quickly catch a dead fish here, but 99.9% of the public is blissfully unaware of any
incongruences in the "established" Skripal narrative.
BTW, it is possible that the journalist who scribbled fresh yarn obtained from CIA did it
earnestly. Journalists do not necessarily follow stories that they cover -- scribbling from
given notes does not require overtaxing the precious attention span that can be devoted to
more vital cognitive challenges. I am lazy to find the link, but while checking for news on
Venezuela, I stumbled on a piece from Express, a British tabloid, where Guaido was named a
"figurehead of the oposition" supported by "450 Western countries". My interpretation was
that more literate journalists were moved for to more compelling stories as Venezuela went
to the back burner.
Yes, indeed, the Skripal Affair is one of the obviously contrived stunts we've seen.
Just outrageous in its execution. On a par with the US having a man who didn't even run for president of Venezuela swear
himself in and then pressure everyone to accept him as president.
Interesting, I had no idea Gina Haspel - aka, The Queen of Blood - played a role. I
thought it was all original dirty work by Britain's Theresa May. Boy, I hope people are through with the false notion that if women just get into
leadership, the world will become a better gentler place.
Macron was (afaik?) the only EU 'leader' who was quoted in the MSM as bruiting re. the
Skripal affair a message like:
.. no culpability in the part of Russia has been evidenced .. for now...
I suppose he was enjoined to shut his gob right quick (have been reading about brexit so
brit eng) as nothing more in that line was heard.
Hooo, the EU expelled a lot of Russ. diplomats, obeying the USuk, which certainly
created some major upsets on the ground.
Some were expelled, went into other jobs, other places, but then others arrived, etc.
The MSM has not made any counts - lists - of names numbers - etc. of R diplos on the job -
anywhere. As some left and then others arrived.
Once more, this was mostly a symbolic move, if extremely nasty, insulting, and
disruptive.
Theresa May's speech re. Novichok, Independent 14 March 2018:
.. on Monday I set out that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a
Novichok: a military grade nerve agent developed by Russia. Based on this capability,
combined with their record of conducting state sponsored assassinations – including
against former intelligence officers whom they regard as legitimate targets – the UK
Government concluded it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for this reckless and
despicable act. ..
imo, the media has, once again, simply taken its lead from trump himself, & started
making things up completely. & you're absolutely correct in pointing out that, much
like trump's true believers, the msm's targeted audience never even notices...
Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY
Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of
which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power
sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter
hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War.
after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the
msm will not be talking about integrity initiative..
what i didn't know is what @18 lysias pointed out.."Haspel was CIA station chief in
London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In
her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it.
That Brennan supported her argues for the latter." ditto jr's speculation @20 too...
so gaspel shows trump some cheap propaganda that she got from who??
my main problem with b's post - i tend to see it like kiza @23) is maintaining the idea
trump isn't in on all of this.. the thought trump is being duped by his underlings.. if he
was and it mattered, he would get rid of them.. the fact he doesn't says to me, he is in on
it - get russia, being the 24/7 game plan of the west here still..
Please stop listening to idiot libertarians and their "US is flat broke" meme.
The reality is that: so long as Americans transact in dollars, the United States government
can tax anytime it feels like by issuing new dollars via the Fed.
Equally, so long as 60% of the world's trade is conducted in dollars, this is tens to
hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxation surface area.
The MMT people - I don't agree 100% with everything they say, but they do understand the
actual operation of fiat currency.
The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to
hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency
devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy.
I doubt Haspel knew the ducks were fake - she was probably just given stuff to pass up
the chain.
It is a lot like John Kerry who was shown convincing satellite data of the BUK launch that
hit MH17 - but no one could be bothered to pass on even the launch site coordinates to the
JIT. I'm sure this stuff goes on all the time, and of course, once Teresa May has spoken in
Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative
version of the truth is possible.
Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to
get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might
have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger
one to blame the Russians.
The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both
originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about
both.
"The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion
to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that
currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy."
The useful idiocy is most surprising among US farmers. In the 19th century they broadly
understood that fiat money was good for chronic low-wealth debtors like themselves, while
hard money was bad and a gold standard lethal. This was the basis of the Populist movement.
Nothing has changed financially, but today's farmers, and the low-wealth debtor class in
general, seem more likely to be goldbuggers than to have any knowledge of economics or of
their own political history.
karlof1 36
Once a faction becomes submerged in the Mammon theocracy and becomes nothing but
mercenary nihilists, thinking is no longer necessary or desirable, except to come up with
attractive, pseudo-plausible lies.
This certainly characterizes "the right" (including liberals), but they have no monopoly
on it. By now "the left" is nearly as thoughtless and instrumental on behalf of Mammon,
except to the extent that a few people are starting to really grapple with what it means to
have an intrinsically ecocidal and therefore suicidal civilization. That's really the only
thought frontier left, all else has been engulfed in Mammon, productionism, scientism and
technocracy.
I remind that Mussolini wasted his legislature.. 1 balmy after noon @ a roadside spot.
it made his government stronger.?
It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no
one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes
anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). ..
The actors in
government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the
rest of the world. Everyone in the government is covering for the behaviors of someone else
in government, the MSM has raised the price of a pencil to just under a million, stock
markets are bags of hot thin air, and everyone in side and outside of the centers of power
at all levels of government have lied thru their teeth so much that their teeth are melting
from the continuous flow of hot deceitful air.
Corrupt is now the only qualification for
political office, trigger happy screwball the only qualification for the police and the
military and . making progress is like trying to conduct a panty raid at a female nudist
camp.
John Anthony La Pietra , Apr 16, 2019 3:47:03 PM |
link
span y Bob In Portland on Mon, 04/15/2019 - 3:59pm Under the general rubric of
conspiracy theory is the subset called "coincidence theory", which dismisses connections
between people as mere happenstance in order to dismiss any thought of networks that exist
beyond public scrutiny. But these networks do exist. Sometimes history takes decades to find
them, but they exist. Let's take a peek at networks in Paul Manafort's life.
Manafort was an advisor for four Republican presidential candidates: Gerald Ford, Ronald
Reagan, George HW Bush, and Bob Dole. Three of these men were connected to the CIA. Gerald Ford
was on the Warren Commission and helped its conclusions of a single assassin by moving the
bullet hole several inches up from JFK's back to the back of JFK's neck. It was an obvious
fraud, and he should have been prosecuted as an accessory after the fact. There are other
indications that he was involved with the CIA's mind control program prior to his political
career. Ronald Reagan while governor of California blocked extradition requests from New
Orleans DA Jim Garrison in the investigation into President Kennedy's murder. Reagan was
governor at the time of JFK's brother's assassination in Los Angeles. I'll refer readers to
Lisa Pease's A LIE TOO BIG TO FAIL about Reagan during that time. Reagan was also the spokesman
for the Crusade For Freedom, a CIA psyop started in the 1950s which in conjunction with Radio
Free Europe promoted former Nazis and fascists allied with Hitler during WWII and which
imported many of these Nazis into the US. George HW Bush was the CIA Director under Ford, and
investigations put him as a CIA agent or asset since his college days at Yale. I haven't looked
at Bob Dole's history. But three out of four of Manafort's presidential employers had roots in
the CIA.
If you look at Paul Manafort's history, he seems to work for sleazy dictators who were
either put into power by the CIA, supported while in power by the CIA or taken out of power by
the CIA. And sometimes killed by the CIA. I would suggest that Manafort's ultimate employer was
the CIA. After the sitting president of the Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich was ousted in a US-backed
coup in Ukraine back in 2014 (under Secretary of State John Kerry) Manafort stuck around there
and helped the people who ousted Yanukovich. Even though Yanukovich was the duly elected
president of Ukraine, he has been dismissed as a Russian agent because he saw that the terms of
Russian treaties with Ukraine would be better for the economy than treaties with the European
Union. Therefore, the US branded Yanukovich as a Russian agent.
Just to refresh everyone's memory William Barr worked for the CIA in the seventies until he
got his law degree. He was named Attorney General by President GHW Bush (the first Bush
president) during congressional and court investigations of Iran-contra, which was a CIA
operation to illegally support the contras' attempt to overthrow the Nicaraguan government
while also illegally arming both Iraq and Iran, allegedly in exchange for releasing hostages in
Beruit. The interagency team investigating the kidnappings in Beruit was on Pan Am 103 and
perished returning to the US.
Robert Mueller was the prosecutor in the Pan Am 103 case. He shifted the case to a couple of
Libyan jamokes and away from a group of Palestinian terrorists operating in Frankfurt, Germany
who allegedly were supplied the bomb used to bring down the airliner by Syrian arms and heroin
smuggler Monzer al-Kassar. Al-Kassar was a major arms supplier for the Iran-contra operation.
Robert Swan Mueller III has never himself been specifically identified as being a CIA employee.
However, his uncle, Richard Bissell, was an officer high in the CIA ranks. Mueller's wife, Ann
Cabell Standish, whom he married three years after the John F Kennedy assassination, was the
granddaughter of Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA at the time of the Bay of Pigs
fiasco, who was fired by JFK along with the above-mentioned Bissell and Allen Dulles. Ann
Mueller's granduncle, Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas at the time of President Kennedy's
assassination there, was revealed to have been a CIA asset in a recent declassification of JFK
papers.
Curiously, Mueller's career has been marked with prosecuting cases that touch on CIA
covert activities. He prosecuted John Gotti, who was on trial for distribution of cocaine which
has been identified as having arrived in the US via Mena, Arkansas as part of the Iran-contra
drug importation operation. Bill Clinton was the governor of Arkansas at the time.
Mueller prosecuted Noriega, who was the CIA's point man in Panama, where the CIA laundered
money and moved cocaine and weapons for the contras during Iran-contra. The federal prosecutor
in the Mena corner of Arkansas at the time of the Mena operations who steered clear of it was
Asa Hutchinson, who went on to become George W Bush's first "drug czar". (More curiously, the
person leading the failed attempt to uncover Iran-contra in the US Senate was John Kerry, who
just happened to be a teammate of Mueller on their prep school lacrosse team many years
earlier.)
Mueller prosecuted BCCI (the international bank which laundered mob and intelligence money)
without seeing CIA fingerprints. Mueller became the Director of the FBI a week before 9/11.
Look it up.
Some more: Go read Gregory Craig's Wiki page. Robert Mueller just indicted Craig along
the lines of Manafort, a la aiding Russians (actually representing Ukrainians). Craig himself
has an interesting past. He was the lawyer defending John Hinckley for the assassination
attempt on Ronald Reagan, which, if succcessful, would have put GHW Bush into the White House;
Craig defended CIA Director Richard Helms for his part in the coup of Salvador Allende; he was
the State Department's director of policy planning under Madeleine Albright; Craig worked with
Bill Clinton on his impeachment proceedings; he represented the Cuban father in the Elian
Gonzalez case. Craig was on the other side of the Noriega case.
Mueller prosecuted Noriega and Craig defended him. Craig helped Obama flipflop his position
over the FISA court and the big communications corporations who cooperated with them. Craig
represented John Edwards. And, of course, he did work in UKRAINE.
I realize that some people in the left-right political universe will rejoice that a
"Democrat" is being indicted, but Craig's history suggests that like Manafort, Mueller, Barr
and others he represents a party across the river in Langley, Virginia. Very interesting, he
and Mueller going toe to toe as Noriega was put behind bars without a hint of Noriega's
Iran-contra work for Bush and the CIA. If you've got both the prosecutor and the defense
attorney you're going to win the trial.
It's a small world after all, but you won't hear Rachel Maddow repeat long-winded linkages
among these characters in her stories.
CIA psyops where ever you look. Curious or should I say Q reous? Cause Q sure seems CIA to
me....or so says Seth Rich...no he said DNC=CIA. up 8 users have voted. —
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty
stream.”
@Lookout
At some point the Democratic Party was rolled. Bill Clinton got the big speech at the 1988
convention. He certainly wasn't the speaker he became. That speech went on and on. Then next
time around he won the presidency in a three-way race with a funny Texas billionaire and
George Bush.
When Bill went to Oxford his classmates presumed he was CIA.
Our election of 1992 may have been to promote Clinton while taking the heat away from GHW
Bush.
"... Therefore, both individuals were both an admission that the change in the system is needed and that the ruling regime is into life-extension by means of "whatever it takes". Once the "change" potential is exhausted, repression must take over as the principal life extension mechanism; clearly, these methods do not have a sharp start-over points in time - they overlap. ..."
"... It is an interesting connection of dots that Bloody Gina is Brennan's protégée and thus that Trump has truly stacked up his administration with former i.e. current enemies, But this only shows that Trump works for the same masters as his political enemies. Again, nothing new. ..."
Trump is like a voodoo doll into which every sh**bag sticks pins. Firstly, it is
irrelevant whether he was a swamp creature before election or was coopted into it after.
Secondly, Trump was transparently chosen to be the "agent of change" for the other half of
the US population, just as Obama before.
Therefore, both individuals were both an admission that the change in the system is needed
and that the ruling regime is into life-extension by means of "whatever it takes". Once the
"change" potential is exhausted, repression must take over as the principal life extension
mechanism; clearly, these methods do not have a sharp start-over points in time - they
overlap.
This is where we are now, Assange was the most prominent member of the real
opposition to the regime, where they try to confuse with plenty of faux opposition.
Therefore, the Assange's head had to be chopped off publicly and his slowly rotting corpse
will now be on display through "courts of justice" for the next couple of years as a warning
to the consumers of alternative media. Go back to reading the approved "journalism" or ... To
understand better one just needs to read/re-read Solzhenitsyn.
The other major ongoing life-extension activity, overlapping with repression, is the
confiscation of guns from the last remaining armed Western population (lots of leftist oxen
pulling that cart). Having too many guns amongst the population is bad for resolving personal
conflicts peacefully, but it is even worse for the abusive, exploitative regime. Thus, taking
the guns away is doing the right thing for a totally wrong reason.
It is an interesting connection of dots that Bloody Gina is Brennan's
protégée and thus that Trump has truly stacked up his administration with
former i.e. current enemies, But this only shows that Trump works for the same masters as his
political enemies. Again, nothing new.
Therefore, where is a Western Solzhenitsyn to document artistically what transpires in a
society deeply in debt and in social & moral decline?
"... For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork??? ..."
"... I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy ..."
"... To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president. ..."
"... Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors. ..."
"... Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors. ..."
"... "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands." ..."
"... Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side. ..."
"... It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times! ..."
"... The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible. ..."
The invasion of Iraq was a mistake of historic dimensions. The "weapons of mass destruction" excuse was a lie. When I see George
W. Bush smiling on TV, I want to puke. Likewise, I cannot view an image of Lyndon Johnson without revulsion. They are both responsible
for much death and suffering. I have heard people try to excuse both of them, with the statement that "they meant well." The road
to Hell is paved with good intentions.
For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional
sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to
need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork???
I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with
more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy.
The war In Afghanistan would have ended 15 years ago if the sons of members of Congress were being drafted. "It's easy to send
someone else's sons to war."
You left out the phrase "anything other than" following the phrase "have served this nation with" in your last sentence.
You forgot to express your confidence in John McCain. Good luck with that. McCain's top aide flew to a foreign city to receive
the Steele dossier, gave it to the senator, who then gave it to the FBI–as per Steele's script, I assume. It's another reason
why we need a special counsel to look into the FBI's role. A special counsel can hardly omit the McCain piece of the puzzle, whereas
a regular prosecutor can easily ignore it and cover McCain's keister.
To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able
to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't
be president.
More than anything else concerning the FBI's election shenanigans, the McCain-Steele nexus–specifically the report written
about it by a special counsel–could expose the deep state's modus operandi. Not even an inspector general's report can do that
as well as a special counsel's report.
Your book will go out of print. In 10 to 20 years it will be reprinted and sell well. It takes that long for people to remove
their heads from their nether regions and be willing to contemplate the errors made.
The real irony is that we know better. There is a vast body of literature on major cognitive errors, and the whole catalog
is on display in the debacle described. Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field
(medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though
systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you
have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that
catch the errors.
Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional
complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors.
I commiserate with your disillusioning journey because I went through a similar odyssey into self-awareness like yours many decades
ago. I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 – 31 May 1968). It's all been downhill from there. A gradual slide
down the slippy slope of history in our decline as a nation. There's not much one can really do. But at my age, I will be long
gone when our country hits burns and crashes as it hits bottom.
"Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world
and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't
matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did
not come home; all died at their own hands."
Enough books and movies about those poor damaged American boys yet?
The navel gazing never stops.
Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions
of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government
in the world on their side.
Get over yourselves! Honestly! It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many
times!
The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did
you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way?
Not possible.
"... Assange accomplished more in 2010 alone than any of his preening media antagonists will in their entire lifetime, combined. Your feelings about him as a person do not matter. He could be the scummiest human on the face of Earth, and it would not detract from the fact that he has brought revelatory information to public that would otherwise have been concealed. He has shone light on some of the most powerful political factions not just in the US, but around the world. This will remain true regardless of whether Trump capitulates to the 'Deep State' and goes along with this utterly chilling, free speech-undermining prosecution. ..."
"... My support was based on the fact that Assange had devised a novel way to hold powerful figures to account, whose nefarious conduct would otherwise go unexamined but for the methods he pioneered. ..."
The nine-year gap – long after Manning had been charged, found guilty, and released from prison – suggests that there is something
ulterior going on here. The offenses outlined in the indictment are on extraordinarily weak legal footing. Part of the criminal 'conspiracy,'
prosecutors allege, is that Assange sought to protect Manning as a source and encouraged her to provide government records in the
public interest.
This is standard journalistic practice.
And it is now being criminalized by the Trump DoJ, while liberals celebrate from the sidelines – eager to join hands with the
likes of Mike Pompeo and Lindsey Graham. You could not get a more sinister confluence of political fraudsters.
They – meaning most Democrats – will never get over their grudge against Assange for having dared to expose the corruption of
America's ruling party in 2016, which they believed help deprive their beloved Hillary of her rightful ascension to the presidential
throne. Once again, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is among the few exceptions.
The DNC and Podesta email releases, now distilled reductively into the term 'Russian interference,' contained multitudinous newsworthy
revelations, as evidenced by the fact that virtually the entire US media reported on them. (Here, feel free to refresh your memory
on this as well.) But for no reason other than pure partisan score-settling, elite liberals are willing to toss aside any consideration
for the dire First Amendment implications of Assange's arrest and cry out with joy that this man they regard as innately evil has
finally been ensnared by the punitive might of the American carceral state.
Trump supporters and Trump himself also look downright foolish. It takes about two seconds to Google all the instances in which
Trump glowingly touted WikiLeaks on the 2016 campaign trail. 'I love WikiLeaks!' he famously proclaimed on October 10, 2016 in Wilkes-Barre,
Penn.
Presumably this expression of 'love' was indication that Trump viewed WikiLeaks as providing a public service. If not, perhaps
some intrepid reporter can ask precisely what his 'love' entailed. He can pretend all he wants now that he's totally oblivious to
WikiLeaks, but it was Trump himself who relayed that he was contemporaneously reading the Podesta emails in October 2016, and reveling
in all their newsworthiness. If he wanted, he could obviously intercede and prevent any unjust prosecution of Assange. Trump has
certainly seen fit to complain publicly about all matter of other inconvenient Justice Department activity, especially as it pertained
to him or his family members and associates. But now he's acting as though he's never heard of WikiLeaks, which is just pitiful:
not a soul believes it, even his most ardent supporters.
Sean Hannity became one of Assange's biggest fans in 2016 and 2017, effusively lavishing him with praise and even visiting him
in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for an exclusive interview. One wonders whether Hannity, who reportedly speaks to his best buddy
Trump every night before bedtime, will counsel a different course on this matter. There's also the question of whether Trump's most
vehement online advocates, who largely have become stalwart defenders of WikiLeaks, will put their money where their mouth is and
condition their continued support on Assange not being depredated by the American prison system.
Assange accomplished more in 2010 alone than any of his preening media antagonists will in their entire lifetime, combined.
Your feelings about him as a person do not matter. He could be the scummiest human on the face of Earth, and it would not detract
from the fact that he has brought revelatory information to public that would otherwise have been concealed. He has shone light on
some of the most powerful political factions not just in the US, but around the world. This will remain true regardless of whether
Trump capitulates to the 'Deep State' and goes along with this utterly chilling, free speech-undermining prosecution.
I personally have supported Assange since I started in journalism, nine years ago, not because I had any special affinity for
the man himself (although the radical transparency philosophy he espoused was definitely compelling). My support was based on
the fact that Assange had devised a novel way to hold powerful figures to account, whose nefarious conduct would otherwise go unexamined
but for the methods he pioneered. As thanks, he was holed up in a tiny embassy for nearly seven years – until yesterday, when
they hauled him out ignominiously to face charges in what will likely turn out to be a political show trial. Donald Trump has the
ability to stop this, but almost certainly won't. And that's all you need to know about him.
That was Neo-McCarthyim hysteria plain and simple; and it still is continuing as "FullOfSchiff" fqrse.
Notable quotes:
"... Can you think of a more vulgar and disgraceful manifestation of Trump-Russia media malfeasance than Rachel Maddow? Her deluded nightly conspiratorial rants may have been lucrative for MSNBC, but she fed viewers a complete fraud for three years. Now her show is undergoing a genuine existential crisis after Robert Mueller's exoneration of Trump . ..."
"... The harm Maddow inflicted is unforgivable and she should obviously resign, go into exile, and take up some other line of work: perhaps gardening. That said, she has also become something of a scapegoat. ..."
"... As contemptible as Rachel undoubtedly is, dwelling on her absolves the rest of the industry from acknowledging what really happened: a structural calamity of epic proportions, implicating almost all of them, which has utterly destroyed the reputation of the media writ large. And for good reason. ..."
"... (Brennan infamously declared Trump guilty of treason on Twitter following the Helsinki summit). ..."
"... Last week, Wheeler finally admitted her suspicion that the FBI may have just decided she is 'crazy.' Yes, sounds plausible. ..."
"... Sadly, all the media figures who might have been assigned to legitimate evidence-based inquiries were wrapped up in the never-ending Russia melodrama, based on the hunch that it would result in the revelation of treasonous collusion, followed by the arrest of Trump's family and his swift impeachment. None of this happened. So what was the point? ..."
"... Most disturbing of all is how otherwise-smart journalists and commentators lost their minds and integrity throughout the debacle. It was all a joke, a scam, and I've barely even scratched the surface here. It will take years to fully sift through the wreckage ..."
'Boom!': an autopsy of the
media after the Mueller bombshellDunking on Rachel Maddow may be fun, but she's far
from the sole perpetratorMichael
Tracey Rachel Maddow
Can you think of a more vulgar and disgraceful manifestation of Trump-Russia media
malfeasance than Rachel Maddow? Her deluded nightly conspiratorial rants may have been
lucrative for MSNBC, but she fed viewers a complete fraud for three years. Now her show is
undergoing a genuine existential crisis after Robert Mueller's exoneration of Trump .
The harm Maddow inflicted is unforgivable and she should obviously resign, go into exile,
and take up some other line of work: perhaps gardening. That said, she has also become
something of a scapegoat. It's convenient to disavow Maddow's excesses if you're a journalist
who wants to pretend that the media failures which gave rise to Trump-Russia weren't a
full-scale indictment of their entire profession. To act as though the misconduct was somehow
confined to one unhinged cable news personality would be a gross distortion.
As contemptible as Rachel undoubtedly is, dwelling on her absolves the rest of the industry
from acknowledging what really happened: a structural calamity of epic proportions, implicating
almost all of them, which has utterly destroyed the reputation of the media writ large. And for
good reason.
Easy as it might be to pooh-pooh Maddow as some zany outlier, the undeniable reality is that
the sick conspiratorial mindset she embodied was thoroughly mainstream: it infected virtually
every sector of elite American culture, from journalism, to entertainment, to the professional
political class. Rachel is just the tip of the rotten iceberg.
Take, for instance, Keith Olbermann. Keith was the most influential host on MSNBC during the
George W. Bush years, when audiences ate up his furious denunciations of the Iraq War, which
scratched a genuine itch because of the prevailing pro-war media conformity of the time.
Olbermann gave voice to frustrated liberals who felt that their well-founded grievances were
not being represented in the popular media, and his style came to be emulated across the
industry (including by the host he recruited for a top spot on the network, Rachel Maddow.)
Then came the Trump era, when Olbermann's brain appeared to explode. He began recording
short video rants for GQ magazine, which rank among the most mind-bendingly deranged
content produced throughout the entire Russiagate ordeal. Please, just watch this unbelievable
screed from December 2016:
'We are at war with Russia,' Olbermann gravely proclaims. The inauguration of Donald Trump,
he prophesies, will mark 'the end of the United States as an independent country.' Anyone who
rejects this analysis is a 'traitor' says Olbermann, and in league with 'Russian scum.' His
recommendation is to thwart Trump via some harebrained Electoral College scheme where electors
are intimidated into violating their duty to vote according to the election outcome in their
respective states and districts.
I covered this attempted coup at the time, which failed, but was
supported by leading Democrats ranging from Hillary Clinton campaign communications
director Jennifer Palmieri to Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe; as well as Michael Moore,
Lawrence Lessig, Peter Beinart, DeRay McKesson, Paul Krugman, and Neera Tanden. Prominent
liberals had been melodramatically whinging for months about how appalled they were by Trump's
alleged propensity to violate 'norms,' but the next minute they turned around and demanded that
all norms governing the centuries-old Electoral College process be thrown out the window. The
wild propaganda promoted by Olbermann had become the standard, mainstream view among American
liberals: fundamentally corrupting their capacity to view subsequent political events with any
semblance of rationality.
Despite their truly insane offerings, focusing solely on demented opinionators like
Olbermann and Maddow still lets ostensibly 'neutral' journalists off the hook. The amount of
journalistic resources squandered on the Trump-Russia boondoggle, for instance by the New
York Times and the Washington Post , will never be fully quantified. Both newspapers
were lavished with Pulitzer Prizes and every other pointless accolade for their supposedly
intrepid journalism. Their constant 'bombshell scoops' routinely ricocheted across Twitter
before they were injected into the rest of the turbocharged media ecosystem, each one
breathlessly touted on cable news for hours at a time. The harsh truth is that most all of
these 'scoops' were predicated on a fiction. There was supposed to be a core conspiracy, which
was meant to explain why Trump associates kept getting caught in lies – why their
communications were extrajudicially intercepted, why they were surveilled on dubious pretenses.
But no underlying conspiracy was ever revealed. The whole thing was based on a fairytale.
Shouldn't the Times and WaPo therefore apologize and give back their Pulitzers?
Or at very least toss them in the dumpster.
Benjamin Wittes, the LawFare website guru and arguably the most lauded Twitter authority on
the Trump-Russia scam, became well-known for his fun slogan, 'BOOM!,' which he would gleefully
tweet every time a supposed bombshell article burst on the scene. Here's a Washington
Post
story from October 21 last year headlined 'Special counsel examines conflicting accounts as
scrutiny of Roger Stone and WikiLeaks deepens,' which got the Wittes 'boom'
treatment. Wow, very dramatic! Sounds a lot like Mueller and his squad were closing in on Stone
as the evil mastermind behind some grand Trump-Russia conspiracy plot, given his suspicious
ties to WikiLeaks, right? The only problem is, when Stone was indicted three months later,
Mueller not only brought zero charges alleging Stone as party to any conspiracy, he
dispelled such notions.
All the correspondence cited in Mueller's indictment showed that
Stone had no
advanced knowledge of WikiLeaks releases or any privileged access to its operations. Roger
Stone was just doing what Roger Stone does best: bullshitting.
Stone was eventually charged by Mueller for making false statements, but again: none of
those statements pertained to a conspiracy cover-up. They pertained to the dirty trickster
being who he's been for decades: a fabulist who frequently misrepresents himself and gets in
stupid feuds with fellow political hucksters. The October 2018 story about which Wittes tweeted
'boom' ultimately had no real significance. Like so many other stories touted at the time as an
incredible BOMBSHELL, everyone got amped up over a total fantasy. The story had no serious
value, other than to temporarily scintillate now-discredited obsessives like Wittes.
Special scorn should be reserved for those in prominent media positions who ought to have
known better, but indulged day after day in conspiratorial nonsense anyway. Take Chris Hayes,
the popular 8pm MSNBC host, who unlike Maddow has a journalistic background (he was formerly
the Washington Editor of The Nation magazine). Theoretically, Hayes should have been imbued
with a greater sense of ingrained skepticism regarding CIA and FBI claims, which are what drove
the entire Trump-Russia investigation to begin with. He is also a genuinely intelligent person,
having (ironically) written the excellent Twilight of
the Elites (2012), a book which examined the propensity for upper-crust society to
engage in self-defeating groupthink.
But Hayes too ended up witlessly amplifying the most
obscene Russiagate antics – no doubt influenced by the pressure of having to turn in big
ratings every night. His shows were always brimming with security state spooks like John Brennan
, the former CIA Director and proven
fantasist . Brennan was eventually hired by NBC, becoming one of Hayes's colleagues
despite having played a central role in instigating the original Trump-Russia investigation in 2016 and inflaming its most
incendiary elements (Brennan infamously declared Trump guilty of treason on Twitter following
the Helsinki summit).
For further insight on the subject, Hayes generally turned to pseudo-journalistic figures
like Natasha Bertrand of The Atlantic , whose frenetically conspiratorial Russia
coverage has also proven to have been total bunk – as well as former prosecutors and
FBI
officials like Chuck Rosenberg, disreputable security state apparatchiks like former NSA
lawyer Susan Hennessey, and outright charlatans like purported 'intelligence expert' Malcolm
Nance. (Here's an example from 2016 of the esteemed Nance getting tricked by a Twitter
troll.)
Hayes even went so far as to promote the theory that Trump had been colluding with
Russia since 1987, a story somehow featured on the cover of New
York magazine despite drawing on source material that literally originated with the
recently deceased, notorious madman Lyndon LaRouche. Hayes's descent into fact-free mania
culminated with his
declaration to Stephen Colbert on March 8 last year that Trump and his associates were
'super guilty' of collusion. Whoops!
While many once-respectable media figures like Hayes have seen their reputations inserted
directly into the toilet, maybe the most bizarre case of all is Marcy Wheeler, the independent
journalist known as @emptywheel .
Wheeler appeared on Hayes's first show after Mueller decisively cleared Trump of collusion
– you know, the central tenet of the Special Counsel's mandate. The fact that Hayes would
have Wheeler on at that moment – after the entire Trump-Russia drama was definitively
exposed as a ludicrous fantasy – showed that Hayes was committed to perpetuating the
deceit even in the face of all countervailing evidence, whether unconsciously or consciously.
That's because Marcy Wheeler is almost certainly a deluded basket case.
The most obvious evidence for this is Wheeler's sensational admission in July 2018 that she
burned a source to the FBI, voluntarily and proactively, thereby committing one of
journalism's mortal sins. Wheeler justified her demented action on numerous fronts. First, she
claimed that she possessed bombshell, smoking gun info that proved a Trump-Russia conspiracy,
and felt a patriotic duty to hand this over to the FBI – in retribution for what she
called Russia's 'attack' on the United States. Let's remember, shall we, that said attack at
most amounted to some Twitter bots, goofy Facebook memes, and spear-phished Gmail accounts:
John Podesta famously clicked on a phony link, which led to his emails being swiped. Hardly
9/11 or Pearl Harbor, wouldn't you say? However, those comparisons have been seriously made by
various prominent elected officials, including Rep.
Jerrold Nadler of New York, who would have presided over impeachment proceedings had things
panned out differently.
When pressed – even after the Mueller clearly asserted that no such Trump-Russia
conspiracy ever existed – Wheeler still refuses to divulge any details about the
extraordinary dispositive evidence she mysteriously claims to possess. Second, Wheeler further
justified her insane conduct by insisting she could literally be killed by some unknown
sinister alliance of Russians and Trump-backed mafia figures, or something ( I'm not making this up .).
Shamefully, Wheeler's outlandish assertions were treated as gospel by members of the media who
failed to apply even a modicum of critical scrutiny; Margaret Sullivan of the Washington
Post
heralded Wheeler as following her conscience and wrote this about the supposed Russian hit
squad out to get her: 'Overly dramatic? Not really. The Russians do have a penchant for
disposing of people they find threatening.' Utter lunacy. Since the Mueller finding, Wheeler
has strangely not revealed any additional information about the nature of these would-be
assassins.
Think about it. For months, Wheeler dangled cryptic hints about the explosive info that she
alone supposedly knew about, enthralling blog readers and Twitter followers – and earning
her major platforms not just on MSNBC but even the New York Times , where she
contributed columns
that contained blatant falsehoods. In the pages of the world's most influential newspaper, she
claimed that Mueller had been 'hiding' evidence showing Trump's participation in a Russia
conspiracy, and it would all come out once Mueller issued his final verdict. No dice.
Last week, Wheeler finally admitted her suspicion that the FBI may have just decided
she is 'crazy.' Yes, sounds plausible.
So much journalistic energy was wasted chronicling the ins-and-outs of the Russiagate
non-story. Imagine if instead that time was devoted to reporting in the public interest: like,
say, I don't know – investigating the militaristic think tanks which attempted to
undermine Trump's key diplomatic initiatives (such as North Korea), or how Trump was co-opted
by the Republican donor class, or his various actual corruptions that didn't happen to involve
any international espionage conspiracy.
Sadly, all the media figures who might have been
assigned to legitimate evidence-based inquiries were wrapped up in the never-ending Russia
melodrama, based on the hunch that it would result in the revelation of treasonous collusion,
followed by the arrest of Trump's family and his swift impeachment. None of this happened. So
what was the point?
Most disturbing of all is how otherwise-smart journalists and commentators lost their minds
and integrity throughout the debacle. It was all a joke, a scam, and I've barely even scratched
the surface here. It will take years to fully sift through the wreckage.
-- The gang is also very stupid. From Halper-the-spy and his incompetent handler Brennan
to the obnoxious zionists of Ledeen kind they, the members of the "gang", show incompetence
and the self-endangering and stupid amorality.
By destroying whatever decent has been in the western civilization so far, and by
spreading the rot around, the gangsters have been destroying their children's &
grandchildren's future.
Vindictiveness not always play in the vindictive party favour.
You may love Assange you may hate Assange for his WikiLeaks revelation (And Vault 7 was a
real bombshell), but it is clear that it will cost Trump some reputation out of tini share that
still left, especially in view of Trump declaration "I love Wikileaks"
For seven years, we have had to listen to a chorus of journalists, politicians and "experts"
telling us that Assange was nothing more than a fugitive from justice, and that the British and
Swedish legal systems could be relied on to handle his case in full accordance with the law.
Barely a "mainstream" voice was raised in his defence in all that time.
... ... ...
The political and media establishment ignored the mounting evidence of a secret grand jury
in Virginia formulating charges against Assange, and ridiculed Wikileaks' concerns that the
Swedish case might be cover for a more sinister attempt by the US to extradite Assange and lock
him away in a high-security prison, as had happened to whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
... ... ...
Equally, they ignored the fact that Assange had been given diplomatic status by Ecuador, as
well as Ecuadorean citizenship. Britain was obligated to allow him to leave the embassy, using
his diplomatic immunity, to travel unhindered to Ecuador. No "mainstream" journalist or
politician thought this significant either.
... ... ...
They turned a blind eye to the news that, after refusing to question Assange in the UK,
Swedish prosecutors had decided to quietly drop the case against him in 2015. Sweden had kept
the decision under wraps for more than two years.
... ... ...
Most of the other documents relating to these conversations were unavailable. They had been
destroyed by the UK's Crown Prosecution Service in violation of protocol. But no one in the
political and media establishment cared, of course.
Similarly, they ignored the fact that Assange was forced to hole up for years in the
embassy, under the most intense form of house arrest, even though he no longer had a case to
answer in Sweden. They told us -- apparently in all seriousness -- that he had to be arrested
for his bail infraction, something that would normally be dealt with by a fine.
... ... ...
This was never about Sweden or bail violations, or even about the discredited Russiagate
narrative, as anyone who was paying the vaguest attention should have been able to work out. It
was about the US Deep State doing everything in its power to crush Wikileaks and make an
example of its founder.
It was about making sure there would never again be a leak like that of Collateral Murder,
the military video released by Wikileaks in 2007 that showed US soldiers celebrating as they
murdered Iraqi civilians. It was about making sure there would never again be a dump of US
diplomatic cables, like those released in 2010 that revealed the secret machinations of the US
empire to dominate the planet whatever the cost in human rights violations.
Now the pretence is over. The British police invaded the diplomatic territory of Ecuador --
invited in by Ecuador after it tore up Assange's asylum status -- to smuggle him off to jail.
Two vassal states cooperating to do the bidding of the US empire. The arrest was not to help
two women in Sweden or to enforce a minor bail infraction.
No, the British authorities were acting on an extradition warrant from the US. And the
charges the US authorities have concocted relate to Wikileaks' earliest work exposing the US
military's war crimes in Iraq -- the stuff that we all once agreed was in the public interest,
that British and US media clamoured to publish themselves.
Still the media and political class is turning a blind eye. Where is the outrage at the lies
we have been served up for these past seven years? Where is the contrition at having been
gulled for so long? Where is the fury at the most basic press freedom -- the right to publish
-- being trashed to silence Assange? Where is the willingness finally to speak up in Assange's
defence?
It's not there. There will be no indignation at the BBC, or the Guardian, or CNN. Just
curious, impassive -- even gently mocking -- reporting of Assange's fate.
And that is because these journalists, politicians and experts never really believed
anything they said. They knew all along that the US wanted to silence Assange and to crush
Wikileaks. They knew that all along and they didn't care. In fact, they happily conspired in
paving the way for today's kidnapping of Assange.
They did so because they are not there to represent the truth, or to stand up for ordinary
people, or to protect a free press, or even to enforce the rule of law. They don't care about
any of that. They are there to protect their careers, and the system that rewards them with
money and influence. They don't want an upstart like Assange kicking over their applecart.
Now they will spin us a whole new set of deceptions and distractions about Assange to keep
us anaesthetised, to keep us from being incensed as our rights are whittled away, and to
prevent us from realising that Assange's rights and our own are indivisible. We stand or fall
together.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include
"Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East"
(Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books).
His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
This should be an uncomfortable time for the “journalists” of the
Establishment. Very few will speak up as does Mr. Cook. Watch how little is said about the
recent Manning re-imprisonment to sweat out grand jury testimony. Things may have grown so
craven that we’ll even see efforts to revoke Mr. Assange’s awards.
This is also a good column for us to share with those people who just might want not to
play along with the lies that define Exceptionalia.
… from the moment Julian Assange first sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in
London, they have been telling us we were wrong, that we were paranoid conspiracy
theorists. We were told there was no real threat of Assange’s extradition to the
United States, that it was all in our fevered imaginations.
It all reminds me of Rod Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility: “That’ll
never happen. And when it does , boy won’t you deserve it!”
Equally, they ignored the fact that Assange had been given diplomatic status by Ecuador,
as well as Ecuadorean citizenship. Britain was obligated to allow him to leave the embassy,
using his diplomatic immunity, to travel unhindered to Ecuador. No “mainstream”
journalist or politician thought this significant either.
Why would they? They don’t even recognize diplomatic status for heads of state who
get in their way! Remember what they did to President Evo Morales of Bolivia back when he was
threatening to grant asylum to Ed Snowden? Here’s a refresher:
People who just watch corporate media think Julian Assange is a bad guy who deserves life
in prison, except those who watch the great Tucker Carlson. Watch his recent show where he
explains why our corporate media and political class hate Assange.
He is charged with encouraging Army Private Chelsea Manning to send him embarrassing
information, specifically this video of a US Army Apache helicopter gunning down civilians in
broad daylight in Baghdad.
But there is no proof of this, and Manning has repeatedly said he never communicated to
Assange about anything. Manning got eight years in prison for this crime; the Apache pilots
were never charged. and now they want to hang Assange for exposing a war crime. I have
recommend this great 2016 interview twice, where Assange calmly explains the massive
corruption that patriotic FBI agents refer to as the “Clinton Crime Family.”
This gang is so powerful that it ordered federal agents to spy on the Trump political
campaign, and indicted and imprisoned some participants in an attempt to pressure President
Trump to step down. It seems Trump still fears this gang, otherwise he would order his
attorney general to drop this bogus charge against Assange, then pardon him forever and
invite him to speak at White House press conferences.
“… they ignored the fact that Assange was forced to hole up for years in
the embassy, under the most intense form of house arrest, even though he no longer had a
case to answer in Sweden.”
Meh! Assange should have walked out the door of the embassy years ago. He might have ended
up in the same place, but he could have seized the moral high ground by seeking asylum in
Britain for fear of the death penalty in the US, which was a credible fear given public
comments by various US officials. By rotting away in the Ecuadorian embassy, be greatly
diminished any credibility he might have had to turn the UK judicial system inside out to his
favour. Now he’s just a creepy looking bail jumper who flung faeces against the wall,
rather than being a persecuted journalist.
@Johnny Rottenborough Millionaire politicians on both sides of the political fence get
very emotional about anything that impacts their own privacy & safety and the privacy
& safety of their kin, while ignoring the issues that jeopardize the privacy & safety
of ordinary voters. While corporate-owned politicians get a lot out of this game,
ordinary voters who have never had less in the way of Fourth Amendment privacy rights, and
whose First Amendment rights are quickly shrinking to the size of Assange’s, do not get
the consolation of riches without risk granted to bought-off politicians in this era’s
pay-to-play version of democracy. It’s a lose / lose for average voters.
Mr Cook’s criticism of the mainstream media (MSM) is absolutely justified.
It seems to me that their hatred of Mr Assange reflects the unfortunate fact that, while
he is a real journalist, they actually aren’t. Instead, they are stenographers for
power: what Paul Craig Roberts calls “presstitutes” (a very happy coinage which
exactly hits the bull’s eye).
The difference is that real journalists, like Mr Assange, Mr Roberts and Mr Cook, are
mainly motivated by the search for objective truth – which they then publish, as far as
they are able.
Whereas those people who go by the spurious names of “journalist”,
“reporter”, “editor”, etc. are motivated by the desire to go on
earning their salaries, and to gain promotion and “distinction” in society. (Sad
but true: social distinction is often gained by performing acts of dishonesty and downright
wickedness).
Here are some interesting quotations that cast some light on this disheartening state of
affairs. If you look carefully at their dates you may be surprised to find that nothing has
changed very much since the mid-19th century.
‘Marr: “How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that
journalists are…”
‘Chomsky: “I’m not saying you’re self censoring. I’m sure
you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed
something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re
sitting”’.
‘If something goes wrong with the government, a free press will ferret it out and it
will get fixed. But if something goes wrong with our free press, the country will go straight
to hell’.
‘There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in
country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who
dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it
would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am
connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should
allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before
twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write
honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New
York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at
the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is
about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be
toasting an “Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind
the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents,
our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual
prostitutes’.
‘The press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with
journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier
obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader
neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role
that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined.
Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is
only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty’.
– Oswald Spengler, “The Decline of the West” Vol. II, trans. C.F.
Atkinson (1928), p. 462
‘How do wars start? Wars start when politicians lie to journalists, then believe
what they read in the press’.
Very good article. There is one point that I would like to make: Assange asked for asyl
before he went to the embassy of Ecuador and Ecuador gave him asylum. This meant that they
had an obligation to protect him. It’s really unbeliavable that a country gives asylum
to someone and half way tells that they have changed their mind and will let the person be
arrested. ” We told you you would be safe with us, but now we just changed our
mind”. Assange also became a citizen of Ecuador and this possibly means that Ecuador
couldn’t have let him been arrested in their embassy by the police of another country
without a process against him in Ecuador and without him having the right to defend himself
in a court. Many countries don’t extradit their citizens to other countries.
Another remark. For years there were uncountable articles about Assange in The Guardian.
Those articles were read by many people and got really many comments. There were very fierce
discussions about him with thousends of comments. With time The Guardian turned decisively
against him and published articles againt him. There were people there who seemed to hate
him. In the last days there were again many articles about him. They pronounce themselves
discretely against his extradition to the US even if showing themselves to be critical of him
as if trying to justify their years of attacks against him. But one detail: I didn’t
find even one article in The Guardian where you can comment the case. Today for instance you
can comment an article by Gaby Hinsliff about Kim Kardashian. Marina Hyde talks in an article
about washing her hair (whatever else she wants to say, with 2831 comments at this moment).
But you don’t find any article about Assange that you can comment. 10 or 8 or 5 years
ago there were hundreds of articles about him that you could comment.
UK PM May said about Assange – “no one is above the law” –
proving she is a weak sister without a clue.
No one is above the law except the British government, which ignored the provisions of the
EU Withdrawal Act requiring us to leave on March 29th.
No one is above the law except for the US and the UK which have illegally deployed forces
to Syria against the wishes of the government in Damascus.
And Tony Blair, a million dead thanks to his corruption. He should be doing time in a
Gulag for his evil crimes.
And of course, the black MP for Peterborough – Fiona Onasanya – served a mere
three weeks in jail for perverting the course of justice, normally regarded as a very serious
offence. But she was out in time – electronic tag and curfew notwithstanding – to
vote in the House of Commons against leaving the EU.
"... My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). ..."
"... Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017). ..."
"... "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) ..."
"... Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today." ..."
"... From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma. ..."
"... So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis. ..."
"... And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. ..."
"... Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not? ..."
"... So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers ..."
Russophobia, as psycho-social-political pathology, is diagnosed as a disorder in The West since before the 1000-year-old Roman-Orthodox
religious schism and most recently manifested with a vengeance in the course of the 2013-14 with Edward Snowden's revelations of
mass surveillance by the US and its covert activities leading to the Ukraine coup with Russophobia used thereafter as a weapon of
mass deception to inflame this latent pathology in the public.
After more than a year since we first heard the BBC "breaking news" about the "Russians Poisoning the Skipals", all we have are
allegations, but there is still no real evidence to present before a judge and jury for a just trial, only media propaganda which
has provoked even more fear and hysteria meant to distract people from the government's bungling and high level of anxiety over Brexit
by once again blaming Russia . Never-the-less, it prompted politicians to administer instant sanctions against Russia as punishment.
That first day, the "evidence", presented in the usual clipped, "authoritative" British accents, included interviews with a conservative
British MP, then the former US Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow (2001-05), now with the notoriously hawkish US-based think
tank, the Atlantic Council. Thus, the three of them: the BBC "journalist" and the two "experts", colluded to transform false allegations
into "facts"... fueled, as always, by their perpetual prejudice, RUSSOPHOBIA, in the course of their propaganda war to force Russia
to surrender to American-led Western Domination or else: have their economy destroyed & their people suffer. Indeed, it is a threat
to the whole world played to the discord of rattling nuclear swords with a chorus of vindictive Russian oligarchs, whom Putin expelled
for robbing the Russian people. So, now living in London as expats, they would seem to be the more likely culprits. All the while
elsewhere in London, thanks to our "special US-UK relationship", Julian Assange has been excommunicated and imprisoned in a tiny
"cell" at the Ecuador embassy for revealing embarrassing American secrets via Wikileaks.
There we have it: the poisoning of our minds by the media and politicians which are owned and controlled by the US-UK-EU 1%, who
benefit from Western Hegemony. So, these deluded few are now desperately defending it from the rising powers led by Russia and China
with India not far behind demanding a multi-polar, democratic world order.
My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian
Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State
University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). And there, the detoxification of my mind began as I studied his deft, well-documented
deconstruction of the political propaganda disseminated "by various think tanks, congressional testimonials, activities of NGOs and
the media" (preface p. XIII)
Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal,
LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017).
There, Mettan
informs us that this psycho-social pathology in Western Civilization" goes back more than 1000 years: to the division of Christendom
between the Orthodox and Roman churches. Indeed, his research into the depths of history confirms the diagnosis by our renowned American
psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, in his 2003 book, "Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World".
Therein, Lifton states: "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied
by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) And Mettan's analysis of Russophobia
also underscores the work of University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer, our leading international relations "realist" in
his three Henry L. Stimson lectures at Yale University November 2017: "The Roots of Liberal Hegemony", "The False Promises of Liberal
Hegemony" and "The Case for Restraint": with
his book
, "The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams, International Realities" published in 2018.
But what about "Russian Aggression" in Ukraine & Crimea?
In the first place, it was the astute Mearsheimer, who, in the Sept-Oct 2014 Foreign Affairs, informed us "Why the Ukraine Crisis
is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin" (pp 77-89), but the American foreign policy establishment, together
with ambitious politicians and the me-too media, paid no heed and continues to repeat its fabricated "facts".
Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent.
In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars
and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided
by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences
between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker
perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as
NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much
legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and
concerns of Russia today."
Karl Rove: "We're an empire now; we create our own reality."
[In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White House strategist for President George W.
Bush -- identified later as Karl Rove, Bush's Deputy White House Chief of Staff -- told him, "We're an empire now, we create our
own reality."]
Thus, we've become trapped in a contrived "reality" promulgated by neo-conservative warriors under cover of neo-liberal "democracy-spreading-humanitarian-interventionists"
to justify an American Empire promoting itself as the indispensable "Liberal World Order". However, under that global order, as Sakwa
points out on p. 219: "If a foreign power is considered to have violated 'international order', then it can be overthrown" as a rationale
for American "regime change" anywhere around the world: whether to control the supply of copper in Chile or oil in Iran. And, with
its eye on Russia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources, America claims the right to threaten Russia by ringing it with weapons
which we would not abide were the Russians to place missiles in Mexico as the Soviets did in Cuba to defend it after our "Bay of
Pigs" invasion that brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war. Thus, Russia was defending itself in Ukraine against further NATO
expansion while Crimean citizens, by majority vote in a democratic referendum, chose to rejoin Russia as they had been one country
ever since Catherine the Great except for an interval in the '50s when Crimea was" gifted" to Ukraine while they were all members
of the Soviet Union.
"Ditching Solzhenitsyn, Defender of Russia"
And not to forget that in 1974, after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his family fled first to
Zurich then to Vermont in 1976 and lived on a farm near Cavendish, where he continued to write and publish his work. Meanwhile, Mettan,
as a journalist covering events related to Russia, became quite distressed over "the widespread prejudices, cartloads of clichés
and systematic anti-Russian biases of most western media." And he went on to say that "the more I traveled, discussed and read, the
wider I perceived, the more the gap of incomprehension and ignorance between Western Europe and Russia became evident.
"That was why, during the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn. For decades, we had published, celebrated,
and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence. We had praised Solzhenitsyn to the skies as long as
he criticized his native country, communist Russia. But as soon as he emigrated, realizing that he preferred to isolate himself in
his Vermont retreat to work rather than attending anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves
from the great writer.
"The idol no longer matched the image they had built and was becoming a hindrance to their academic and journalistic career plans.
And once Solzhenitsyn had left the United States to go back to Russia and defend his humiliated, demoralized motherland that was
being sold at auction, raising his voice against the Russian 'Westernizers' and pluralist liberals who denied the interests of Russia
to better revel in the troughs of capitalism, he became a marked man, an outdated, senile writer, even though he himself had not
changed in the least, denouncing with the same vigor the defects of market totalitarianism as those of communist totalitarianism.
"He was booed, despised, his name was dragged through the mud for his choices, often by the very people who had praised his first
fights. Despite that, against all odds, against the most powerful powers that were trying to dissuade him, Solzhenitsyn defended
his one and only cause, that of Russia. He was not forgiven for having turned his pen against that West that had welcomed him and
felt it was owed eternal gratitude. A dissident today, a dissident wherever truth compelled, such was his motto. This deserves to
be remembered." Mettan, pp. 15-16 in "Creating Russophobia".
Russophobia: akin to Racism
From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural
pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma.
Until in high school, I
became so perplexed and appalled by the curtain of hate and "justifications" in which we were smothered: the Negro schools on the
other side of town? and why were there separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains & restrooms in bus and train stations?...that I
began poking holes in the curtain to see what was outside...and found a book in the library: "South of Freedom" by Carl Rowan, an
African-American Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist, describing his journey from South to North. So, thanks to what I learned from
Rowan, I began to tear the whole damned curtain down...at least in my mind.
Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive mad?
So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are
reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America
and Russia from the Nazis.
These are not poor "niggers" from the Eurasian ghetto we've been trying to club into submission as second-class
citizens of "The Liberal World Order" dominated by US; they're nuclear-armed and no longer willing to sit at a separate, inferior
table with no vote and no voice over who makes the rules...nor are China, India and Brazil. And last year, while the wave of Russophobic
hysteria over alleged "Russian poisoning" was rolling out of the UK and engulfing the Western world in the latest siege of mass madness
with only Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labor party, having the courage to stand up in Parliament on the Ides of March and
demand Evidence! only to be pilloried by the mindless politicians and media led by the once esteemed BBC.
And the week following
the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political
delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.
Meanwhile, not to forget that it was Hearst newspaper propaganda that whipped the American public into a war frenzy to support
our first step in empire-building: our 1898 intervention in Cuba's war for independence from the Spanish Empire which had dominated
all of Latin America for 500 years. As the former NYTimes journalist/bureau chief in Istanbul, Berlin & Central America, Stephen
Kinzer reminds us in his latest book "The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire", Twain, Booker
T. Washington and even Andrew Carnegie leading a handful of other anti-imperialists...were not able to prevail against Roosevelt
with his Rough Riders and the Hearst newspapers' war propaganda.
Regime Change Comes Home
Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships
and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh
to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back
for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not?
In the Middle East where our regime-change machine managed to plow its
way through Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya before breaking down in Syria. Until now it's been brought home again, renovated and renamed
"RussiaGate" for another attempt at removing a President for trying to mend US relations with Russia. Though even after more than
a year of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigations accompanied by such cinematic support as the movie, "Felt", another
"Watergate" re-run. Did anyone else notice the resemblance between "Felt" and Mueller? And despite the media's commemoration of its
44-year-old "moment of courage" with the movie "The Post" to promote Trump's ouster, our democratically-elected President, as of
this writing, remains in power. However, in this rush to "regime change", didn't the our "ruling elite" read Jane Mayer's "The Danger
of President Pence" in the 10/23/17 New Yorker? At least the 70s' "ruling class" was smart enough to remove an unqualified Vice President
Spiro (who?) Agnew before "regime changing" Nixon and replacing him with the more or less benign Gerald Ford.
A Florentine Epiphany
But back to last January in Florence, Italy, when I was hiking in the hills beyond the Piazzale Michelangelo, with its spectacular
view of that Renaissance city and its centerpiece, the Duomo, I came across the Villa Galileo, which had been his last home after
his trial as a "heretic", during which to save himself from torture and execution, he was forced to deny his helio-centric vision
and henceforth lived under "villa arrest", from 1631 until his natural death in 1642. While pondering his fate, I continued walking
along the gently rising, ever-narrowing road between ancient stone walls overlooking villas and olive groves until I reached the
peak, where I felt as if I were standing on top of the world as I contemplated both the Arno and Ema river valleys far below and
where I swear I heard Galileo declare: "The world does not turn on an American axis!"
The 21st Century Inquisition
So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers such as Edward Snowden, our electronic
age "Solzhenitsyn?" in Russian exile; Chelsea Manning, imprisoned some 7 years for revealing US brutality in Iraq; Julian Assange
confined to his Ecuadorian Embassy exile in London since August 2012; Katharine Gun, a whistleblower attempting to stop the Iraq
invasion, who faced 2 years of British imprisonment before her case was dropped; James Risen, former New York Times journalist who
was persecuted by our "justice" system for revealing our government's surveillance of US!
Any Good Sense Left?
So, do we the people have enough good sense & independent thinking left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau?
"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition,
and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and
Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place,
which we can call reality."
"Walden" 1854
If not, the Doctor prescribes Shock Therapy:
For a week, a month, or however long it takes to cleanse and open the mind, one must adhere to strict abstinence from Mainstream
Media propaganda, junk news, pseudo analysis, fake photos, TV & videos including absolutely NO phony "for, by & of the people" NPR,
PBS, BBC or other Government-funded Neo or LibCon Imperial tranquilizer.
@UncommonGround Many years ago The Guardian was a left leaning newspaper and reported the news in a fairly unbiased manner.
It was always quite critical of the Zionists and Israel and supported good causes but then suddenly, a few years ago, it became
very defensive of Israel and started to censor readers comments about Israeli news stories, then it stopped publishing any story
criticizing Israel.
There must have a change of ownership or some kind of right wing or Zionist takeover.
Then it started really blocking comments to news articles which didn't agree with the opinion of the Guardian editors.
Then Wikileaks published its leaks through the Guardian, and others, who used the info to sell news.
Then it quite shockingly turned around and stabbed Wikileaks and Assange in the back.
I think now it is operated as a controlled media outlet in favour of the UK security services and the Israelis, it's a real
shame as it has the potential to be an excellent news source but it's reputation is now trashed in my opinion.
"Assange was reduced from one of the few towering figures of our time – a man who will
have a central place in history books, if we as a species live long enough to write those
books "
-- The presstituting crowd of stenographers (MSM) and the zionized X-tian war profiteers
have made everything in their power (inadvertently) to ensure that Assange is and will be a
towering figure of our time.
Even in distress, Assange has been fighting for truth and dignity; the ongoing show of
lawlessness exposes the rot. The moral and creative midgets constituting the core of MSM and
the satanic deciders are upset. Good!
The idiotic Senior District "Judge" Emma Arbuthnot (a wife and beneficiary of a mega-war
profiteer Lord Arbuthnot -- Arbuthnot served as Chairman of the Defence Select Committee from
2005 to 2014) and the no less idiotic District "Judge" Michael Snow have entered the history
books as well. As scoundrels: http://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1555064882.html
Snow does his best to bring the Judiciary into disrepute by playing to the gallery. He
comments on the extradition in the same vein in a totally unprofessional manner. He is of
course in a long line of disreputable members of the judiciary Snow's place in history is
now secured – he chose to abuse the defendant rather than perform his role which was
really quite straightforward. He is the narcissist and guilty of self interest not Julian
Assange.
April 2, 2019 The CIA Takeover of America in the 1960s Is the Story of Our Times. The Killing of the Kennedys and Today's
New Cold War
'We're all puppets,' the suspect [Sirhan Sirhan] replied, with more truth than he could have understood at that moment."
– Lisa Pease, quoting from the LAPD questioning of Sirhan
March 19, 2017 The CIA's 60-Year History of Fake News How the Deep State Corrupted Many American Writers
Whitney's new book, "Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers," explores how the CIA influenced acclaimed
writers and publications during the Cold War to produce subtly anti-communist material.
During the interview, Scheer and Whitney
discuss these manipulations and how the CIA controlled major news agencies and respected literary publications (such as the
Paris Review).
Caitlin nailed it This part
goes for all those who cheer what is happening to Assange. You all are short sighted fools. you
are cheering for your own demise. I have posted something similar in the past over at the other
place and have watched the idiots over there tie themselves into knots defending their blood
thristy anti-Assange positions. It is unconscionable.
8 -- The precedent set by imprisoning a foreign journalist under the
Espionage Act will enable the US government to arrest leak publishers anywhere in the world
who expose its crimes. This will cripple our ability to hold the most powerful institution on
the planet to account in any way. There is no excuse for any journalist anywhere not to
oppose this tooth and claw. If you see anyone calling themselves a journalist but
failing to oppose Assange's extradition, you should call them out for the frauds that they
are.
I would add to Caitlin's point above. There is no excuse for any free thinking human
being to oppose this tooth and claw. Without freedom of speech and freedom to share
information, we are no longer a free people.
People scream about protecting the second amendment, but for me without the first amendment,
there is nothing left to protect. up 11 users have voted. --
"I don't want to run the empire, I want to bring it down!" ~Dr. Cornel West
"There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare." Sun Tzu
The fact that Glenn Greenwald proved to be a despicable pressitute cast a long shadow of
Snowden and Assange.
Notable quotes:
"... Not mentioned by any of the major news media is the fact that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (sic), renowned for its interference in foreign elections, funding terrorists and overthrowing governments the US doesn't approve of. ..."
A quick comment about the two Russian alleged assassins, exposed, we are told by the
'investigative' Website, Bellingcat. Not mentioned by any of the major news media is the fact
that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (sic), renowned for its
interference in foreign elections, funding terrorists and overthrowing governments the US
doesn't approve of.
Media Lens picked up on this awhile back in reference to another Western financed
outfit, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), funded by the UK Foreign Office. I've
also expanded this by quoting from Media Lens' other article that deals with Western-funded
disinfo, ' Douma: Part 1
– Deception In Plain Sight':
Liberal corporate journalists and politicians have been impressed by the fact that SOHR
and White Helmets claims have been supported by ostensibly forensic analysis supplied by the
Bellingcat website, which publishes 'citizen journalist' investigations. As we noted
in a recent alert, Bellingcat is funded by the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is funded by the US government and is 'a notorious
vehicle for US soft power'. – '
The Syrian Observatory – Funded By The Foreign Office ', Media Lens, June 4
2018
It's worth quoting more of the Media Lens article as it exposes the nature of Western
so-called lefties and their attachment to Western (funded) propaganda outfits:
In the New Statesman, Paul Mason
offered a typically nonsensical argument, linking to the anti-Assad website,
Bellingcat:
'Despite the availability of public sources showing it is likely that a regime Mi-8
helicopter dropped a gas container onto a specific building, there are well-meaning people
prepared to share the opinion that this was a "false flag", staged by jihadis, to pull the
West into the war. The fact that so many people are prepared to clutch at false flag theories
is, for Western democracies, a sign of how effective Vladimir Putin's global strategy has
been.'
Thus, echoing Freedland's reference to 'denialists and conspiracists', sceptics can only
be idiot victims of Putin's propaganda. US media analyst Adam Johnson of FAIR accurately
described Mason's piece as a 'mess', adding :
'I love this thing where nominal leftists run the propaganda ball for bombing a country 99
yards then stop at the one yard and insist they don't support scoring goals, that they in
fact oppose war.'
Surprisingly, the Bellingcat website, which publishes the findings of 'citizen journalist'
investigations, appears to be taken seriously by some very high-profile progressives.
In the Independent, Green Party leader Caroline Lucas also
mentioned the Syrian army 'Mi-8' helicopters. Why? Because she had read the same
Bellingcat blog as Mason, to which she linked:
'From the evidence we've seen so far it appears that the latest chemical attack was likely
by Mi-8 helicopters, probably from the forces of Syria's murderous President Assad.'
On Democracy Now!, journalist Glenn Greenwald said of
Douma:
'I think that it's -- the evidence is quite overwhelming that the perpetrators of this
chemical weapons attack, as well as previous ones, is the Assad government '
This was an astonishing comment. After receiving fierce challenges (not from us),
Greenwald partially retracted, tweeting :
'It's live TV. Something [sic – sometimes] you say things less than ideally. I think
the most likely perpetrator of this attack is Syrian Govt.'
We wrote to Greenwald asking what had persuaded him of Assad's 'likely' responsibility for
Douma. (Twitter, April 10, direct message)
The first piece of evidence he sent us (April 12) was the Bellingcat blog mentioning
Syrian government helicopters cited by Mason and Lucas. Greenwald also sent us a
report from Reuters, as well as a
piece from 2017, obviously prior to the alleged Douma event.
This was thin evidence indeed for the claim made. In our discussion with him, Greenwald
then completely retracted his claim (Twitter, April 12, direct message) that there was
evidence of Syrian government involvement in the alleged attack. [My emph. WB] – '
Douma: Part
1 – Deception In Plain Sight'
Correspondence with Edward Snowden, and
the key to freedom for Julian Assange
A member of our Belgian Jewish community is in touch with Edward Snowden in Russia, both
sharing the role of being significant global dissidents who used to live in the USA.
We are publishing here a copy of some of that correspondence between those two figures,
as it discusses the likelihood of how both Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are being betrayed
and actively harmed by the American lawyers and US-UK media companies claiming to 'represent'
them, including America's ACLU (America's Civil Liberties Union), the UK Guardian and New York
Times newspapers, and Glenn Greenwald.
All these groups and journalists, are apparently hiding thousands of pages of legal files,
about the corruption and bribery of US federal (national) judges who are the same judges who
would put Julian Assange or Edward Snowden on trial ... even though these lawyers and
journalists all know that exposing the crimes of the bribed US judges, is the quick key to
releasing Julian Assange from threats that confine him to his refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy
in London, and key to more safety and freedom for Snowden as well.
US Attorney General Eric Holder is accused of sponsoring criminal acts of deception against
the UK, Sweden, Russia and other countries, hiding 'smoking gun' evidence of US judge bribery,
in order to harm and destroy both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Google Inc has agreed to
censor and hoax the internet and hide dozens of web pages about this.
This bribery is said to be funded by Britain's Pearson plc, with the Guardian and New York
Times accused of accepting Pearson-funded bribes to print fake 'news' to obstruct and pervert
justice so that the UK will not prosecute Pearson's bribery of US high judges and
government.
Mr Snowden is also facing the terrifying possibility that his name is being abused by
these parties, New York Times, Guardian and Greenwald, for the sake of entrapping other
dissidents and whistleblowers into 'trusting' these journalists, who might then convey
dissident names to the US regime in order to silence and murder them. It seems possible the
Guardian and New York Times have already given Snowden files back to the US regime.
The correspondence with Edward Snowden makes reference to the police file with several EU
countries, who are beginning investigations and prosecutions, starting in Finland, of the
CIA-tied Wikipedia website, for fundraising fraud ... that police file significantly discusses
the evidence of bribery of US federal judges who are the same judges who would put Edward
Snowden and Julian Assange on trial in America, and how Wikipedia, actually an American
CIA-controlled 'Trojan horse' for inserting lies on targeted topics, has been used to plant
lies about that judicial bribery - the police dossier text is here:
Here is a screenshot of a Google Inc 'search results' page, with tiny text at the bottom
admitting that Google is censoring a large number of search results, about Edward Snowden's
correspondent, a major witness to the crimes involving the same US judges who would put Edward
Snowden or Julian Assange on trial:
'So the Mueller report is finally in, and it appears that hundreds of millions of Americans
have, once again, been woefully bamboozled. Weird, how this just keeps on happening. At this
point, Americans have to be the most frequently woefully bamboozled people in the entire
history of woeful bamboozlement. If you didn't know better, you'd think we were all a bunch of
hopelessly credulous imbeciles that you could con into believing almost anything, or that our
brains had been bombarded with so much propaganda from the time we were born that we couldn't
really even think anymore.'
Brilliant. That really is the central message of '1984'. A lot of the brainwashing,
particularly to liberals is ego massaging.They are led to believe they have superior education,
intelligence and information.Even in the slipstream of this insanity, it's unlikely you will
find a liberal whose confidence in his cultural superiority is even slightly dented.
'If there is hope,' wrote Winston, 'it lies in the proles.' .
'The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes'.
Thanks so much CJ for putting my mind at ease. I feel much better now knowing it was all just
a big mistake. Actually, in corporate management courses they don't use the term "mistake".
They prefer "learning experience". I have certainly learned a lot during this McCarthy rerun
episode.
Whew. Now we can all turn our attention to Saddam Maduro who is most surely some kind of a
Hitler, or Stapn, or, SOMETHING. Even Trump haters can agree with him on that one, lead by
the Bezos Post and the New York peTimes.
Is Mueller another of Putin's puppets? I ask because it simply isn't credible that he
couldn't find any evidence of collusion, as Adam Schiff has seen it and he has said so
repeatedly. So all Mueller had to do was ask Schiff – hey, even Tucker Carlson
asked.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Attorney General William Barr said on Wednesday he would look into
whether U.S. agencies illegally spied on President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, sparking
criticism from Democrats who accused him of promoting a conspiracy theory.
Barr, who was appointed by Trump, is already facing criticism by congressional Democrats for
how he has handled the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on the probe of
Russian interference in the 2016 election, and his comments about surveillance brought more
derision from Democratic senators.
His testimony echoed longstanding allegations by Trump and Republican allies that seeks to
cast doubt on the early days of the federal investigation in an apparent attempt to discredit
Mueller, law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
IMO the notion that a few senior Intelligence officials (mostly FBI) tried to overthrow Trump
is silly to the point of being laughable.
Not to all of us, it isn't. The part I don't understand is the Why of their effort. Did
they have some scheme to get rid of Pence too? Or was it all mindless blind hatred because he
took down their Goddess Hillary?
Posted by: Zachary Smith | Apr 10, 2019 11:49:22 PM |
71 ZS @ 68 said in part;"assuming the Corporate Democrats don't force one of their candidates
Big Corporations want on the ballot. Which is, of course, most of them."
I assume what you speculated on above, will happen.
The democratic party is irredeemable as it operates as one arm of the duopoly. I don't see any
meaningful distinction between "Corporate Democrats" and progressive Democrats except this:
progressive Democrats give the Democratic Party cover to support the establishment.
IMO domestic policy can no longer be considered separately from Empire. "Progressive
Democrats" are forced encouraged by their Party to support the military and
ignore foreign policy.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
IMO the only grouping that is currently viable/strong alternative is the libertarians. If they
could bring conservatives and (real) progressives together, then we could see a real challenge to
the "radical center" (which actually rules as center-right).
But conservatives, (real) progressives, and libertarians are underfunded and constantly get
played.
Posted by: librul | Apr 11, 2019 12:06:23 AM |
74 Zachary Smith @71:
Not to all of us, it isn't. The part I don't understand is the Why of their effort.
Well of course the WHY baffles you, because the only WHY that makes sense is what I described
and that will never be allowed to come out publicly because then people will see that their
democracy is a sham.
The "managed democracy" that we have in USA subverts the will of the people to the Empire.
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 11, 2019
12:08:56 AM |
75"Germany still owes Israel $19 billion for the Holocaust. The new estimate was
calculated by independent American economist Sidney Zabludoff, a former CIA, White House and U.S.
Treasury official."
Posted by: John Smith | Apr 11, 2019 12:13:27 AM |
76 @ 74: Why did Russiagate start in the first place? The short answer is IMO, diversion.
Another answer could be, that DJT stood on a stage, and asked another country to find his
opponents e-mails.
Posted by: ben | Apr 11, 2019 12:34:51 AM |
77 @ librul #74
Though I hadn't seen that before, the general theme is in agreement with what I believe is the
truth. Even ignorant and thuggish goons like Trump can be victims of a crime, and I believe
that's what happened here.
Posted by: Zachary Smith | Apr 11, 2019 12:52:57 AM |
78 I find it piquant that the vice president of the US attacks a Venezuelan ambassador at the
UN and then ramps up his aggression...by retreating.
Pence is so certain that the other guy doesn't belong, that he himself walks away. Every
schoolyard would see this behavior for exactly what it is. Animals would understand it clearly
also, in terms of pecking order.
How perfect this action is in matching precisely what we've been watching the US do in several
military theaters for some time now. The louder and the ruder the bluster, the more certain we
can be that it covers pure emptiness. And that the US is tangibly retreating under cover of the
smoke.
The cowardice is becoming palpable.
Posted by: Grieved | Apr 11, 2019 12:53:10 AM |
79 ben
Well, why did "America First" Trump ask Russia to do that? (And later ask Wikileaks to release
the DNC emails!)
And why did "America First" Trump hire Manafort who had extensive Russian contacts and
pro-Russian activities that drew the ire of US officials?
These (and more) played into Russiagate hysteria that followed the election and were not in
keeping with Trump's "America First" rhetoric.
Now, long after the election, we see additional strangeness like Roger Stone's claims of a
contact at Wikileaks.
"IDF's chief rabbi-to-be permits raping women in wartime."
Just how does that differ from Daesh's behavior? Or was it the IDF that told Deash such
behavior was okay? I'm pretty certain that rabbi is afoul of fundamental Mosaic Law and thus
shouldn't be a rabbi.
----------------------
"The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition," Ketubot 11b, vol. 7 (NY: Random House, 1991), p.
145:
"If a grown man has intercourse with a little girl less than three years old, all agree that
it is not a significant sexual act "
"If a man engages in homosexual intercourse with a minor who is under the age of nine,
whether actively or passively, he is exempt as with regard to ritual law..."
.
Posted by: John Smith | Apr 11, 2019 1:02:54 AM |
81 @ Grieved with the UN/Pence story....here is China's take on the situation
"
UNITED NATIONS, April 10 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese ambassador to the United Nations on Wednesday
rejected U.S. Vice President Mike Pence's accusation against China over Venezuela.
"China categorically rejects the accusation," Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to
the United Nations, told a Security Council meeting on the situation in Venezuela.
"Earlier in his intervention, the U.S. representative leveled an unfounded accusation on
China's position on Venezuela in the Security Council," he said, referring to Pence's remarks
that Russia and China obstructed Council action on Venezuela with their veto power.
China has all along maintained friendly and cooperative relations with other countries around
the world, including Venezuela, on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, he
said.
"We support peoples of all countries in independently choosing their development paths that
cater to their national conditions. We never interfere in other countries' internal affairs, nor
do we impose anything on other countries," Ma added.
Members of the Security Council should faithfully abide by the purposes and principles of the
UN Charter and the universally recognized norms of international relations, genuinely respect the
choices of peoples of other countries, and do more positive and practical things for the people
of Venezuela rather than the opposite, said the Chinese envoy.
"
Posted by: psychohistorian | Apr
11, 2019 1:02:58 AM |
82 WJ @51 ... FWIW, as of this writing I'm having no trouble accessing the naked capitalism
site.
Posted by: John Anthony La Pietra | Apr 11, 2019 1:05:26 AM |
83 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Instagram March 10, 2019:
"Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law that we
passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People -- and them alone."
Posted by: John Smith | Apr 11, 2019 1:07:35 AM |
84 @ Jackrabbit #75
I"m not sure we disagree very much, for I also believe our "democracy" is thoroughly managed,
and "sham" is quite a good word for it. The part I don't understand is why you seem to object to
pointing out efforts by the 'managers' to correct the error of a slam dunk election going bad.
Hillary was supposed to be in the White House. More than one nation had been making
advance payments to the Clinton Foundation to purchase her goodwill. She was the dream for Big
Banking, the apartheid Jewish state, and probably a lot more folks. That didn't happen, and some
people became unhinged.
It is a fascinating, though rather grim, story, spanning the First World War, the creation of
the states of Israel, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, and taking in Lawrence of Arabia, all the way
to the fall of Gadaffi in Libya, the Syria Civil War and Rise of the so-called Islamic State,
among other things. It's a story of long-term manipulation, insidious indoctrination, and secret,
almost 'mythical' works of literature.
These two ideologies – Wahhabism in Islam and Zionism which is linked primarily to the
Jewish religion – may seem like unrelated entities on the surface of it
Posted by: John Smith | Apr 11, 2019 1:16:39 AM |
86 @ Zachary Smith who wrote about Clinton II
"
She was the dream for Big Banking, the apartheid Jewish state, and probably a lot more folks.
"
So that makes Trump a nightmare for Big Banking, the apartheid Jewish state, etc., right?
I encourage you to understand how much you are being played. If Big Banking has both of them,
whom is being played?
Posted by: psychohistorian | Apr
11, 2019 1:17:13 AM |
87 Zachary Smith @78:
Though I hadn't seen that before, the general theme is in agreement with what I believe is
the truth.
I think that you're not thinking this through.
You're question of WHY, is still unanswered.
> WHY did the hold back on Russian-influence allegations during the election? Hillary was suppose to win, sure. But why not ENSURE that win?
> WHY did they continue with Russiagate after the election? They engaged in Treasonous behavior because Hillary was butthurt?
She supposedly got 3 million more votes than Trump; how badly could her ego be bruised?
> WHY did the establishment hate Trump so much? He's delivered all they could want and more.
> Why did Russiagate force Trump to bend to Deep State wishes? Ha! It didn't! Trump has always maintained that there was no Russia collusion. And now the
Mueller Report confirms this. Trump's Cold War policy continues the Deep State's same policy -
because Trump is part of the team.
This is not meant to be exhaustive. There are many other questions that you could ask because
there's a lot that doesn't add up - unless Russiagate was a Deep State psyop with bi-partisan
support (as I've described).
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 11, 2019
1:21:14 AM |
88 Zachary Smith @85: efforts by the 'managers' to correct the error
Because it makes no sense.
If they got their wish and "corrected" the error by overthrowing Trump, there would be a civil
war. Which is counter-productive in the extreme.
But they don't need to take such drastic action 'cause Trump does that the Deep States wants
anyway! So what are they trying to "correct"?!?
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 11, 2019
1:29:31 AM |
89 correction: ... what the Deep State wants ...
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 11, 2019
1:30:30 AM |
90 Alleged ongoing Military Coup in Sudan today, another just happened in Algeria... Haftar
making moves in Libya, could all just be a coincidence, then again, maybe not? Anyone got
anything? Wondering what Mr B. thinks..
Posted by: EtTuBrute | Apr 11, 2019 5:08:30 AM |
91 Assange has just been expelled from the embassy and arrested
Posted by: Kadath | Apr 11, 2019 5:53:11 AM |
92 @ 92 * time for everyone to stand up for human rights promoter Assange?
The end of capitalism, in disguise. US pol structure does not allow for such, as the US (and
other West, the US is just a stellar ex.) are ruled by rapacious coproratist (typo) oligarchs.
Won't happen.
Posted by: Noirette @ 7
I don't think the issue is to end capitalism, but economic Zionism (all known as capitalism
changed into monopoism) is on its way out. Revolutionaries, all over the world, are in place to
revert monopolism back to capitalism and democracy back to human rights.**
She [Hillary] was the dream for Big Banking, the apartheid Jewish state, and probably a lot
more folks. That didn't happen, and some people became unhinged. by Zachary Smith @85 As things
have turned out.. we might have all been better off with Hillary than Trump.. Next time around I
am going to vote for the most obvious liar, and the candidate with the most stinking capaign
promises. looking back over the elections since Abe Lincolm was assassinated by the city of
London.. because Lincoln was moving to make USA its own bank and to issue its own currency..
**
At http://representativepress.org/IsraelViolatesResolution.html
c/b found the pre conditions, all of which Israel agreed to,
for admission of Israel into the UN..
1. he status of jerusalem w/n/b altered
2. Palestinans w/b permitted to return
3. The partition agreement w/become the final borders.
Text of General Assembly Resolution 273 of May 11, 1949 admitting Israel into the UN, notes
Israel agreed to comply with Resolution 194 : UNITED NATIONS General Assembly A/RES/273 (III) 11
May 1949
what is really interesting is to take a look at the low life supporting this UN action at the
press, in the white house and at the MIC. Many supporters there played at hugmongous part in the
rest of the rise of Economic Zionism which depends on leg breaker USA to get its way..
Posted by: snake | Apr 11, 2019 6:18:53 AM |
93
Julian Assange has been arrested and dragged out of the embassy. he does not look well.
"I went to the Black Agenda link and saw nothing more than "sheepdog" being used as an insult
and as a reason not to consider that candidate. Do you have any specifics for Gabbard not being
sincere in wanting to stop endless wars?"
She's a Democrat, a leading cadre of an indelibly war-mongering political party (in addition
to being the oldest, longest-running pro-capitalist party on Earth; by definition a socialist
also could never be a Democrat).
Therefore by definition she has to be pro-war, just as anyone who's anti-war could never be a
Democrat. (That's just one of many, many reasons I could never possibly even consider the
Democrats; it's a non-starter.)
"Sheepdog" is not an insult. (Well, not just an insult.) It's a technical term for a
pro-system politician who pretends to be "progressive", "socialist", "radical" etc. but is really
no such thing where it comes to any real action. The purpose is to keep people from straying
outside the fold of the Democrat Party (Sanders is the most notorious example, a con artist his
entire career), or of electoralism as such (the "Green Party" version).
"I'm aware the woman is totally in bed with the apartheid Jewish State, but then, who
isn't?"
And still you ask if it's possible even in principle for her to be anti-war?
Posted by: Russ | Apr 11, 2019
6:32:23 AM |
95 On Assange -
So where are the NGO/MSM/liberals human rights supporters now defending Assange?! What a
joke.
Extradition to the US is a no brainer, apparently Assange was right about residing in the
embassy.
Is this a Trump or rather what I believe - a deep state/CIA/FBI operation? Trump have after
all been quite positive on Assange as far as the clinton email leak.
Posted by: Zanon | Apr 11, 2019 6:33:55 AM |
96 whatever happened to that old "insurance" file WikiLeaks put out way back in 2011 when
this whole thing started which they threaten to release the encryption keys for if Assange was
arrested/harmed. Did they already release the contents through WikiLeaks. I recall that one of
Assange's old partners turned traitor after he was bribed by the US and stole thousands of
documents and passwords in an effort to sabotage WikiLeaks. If Wikileaks does have anything
they've been holding back, now is the time to release it. Wikileaks may have western legal
tradition on it's side, but in the Outlaw empire the law means nothing, only force and bribery
hold sway.
In a larger sense, while the US empire may have won this round, they may end up rueing this
day, as I am certain there are dozens of closet Wikileaks supporters within the US/British
governments who will be outraged by these actions and they will strike back in their own ways. At
the very least I suspect that Moreno will suffer severe consequences from this action. We already
know that some of his own diplomats leaked this expulsion in advance in hopes of sabotaging it
and the former President Correa has just declared Moreno the 'Greatest traitor in Ecuadorian
history', so I gleefully expect some daggers to find their way into his backside in the near
future (most probably leaking documents to WikiLeaks showing Moreno's involvement in massive
corruption - not that there's anything unique about corruption in South American governments)
Posted by: Kadath | Apr 11, 2019 7:38:34 AM |
97 @45 Zachary Smith
I would like to see Tulsi (or any other anti-war candidate) take the mantle of the democratic
party on an anti-war platform.
I posted the link to bring attention to the efforts being made (and coincidentally mentioned
by wendy davis @42) of efforts to create a true anti-war 3d party. I think it would be easier at
this point in time to create a new 3d party focused on reducing military spending than to urge
the democrat or republican party to adopt a half hearted effort at limiting us military
misadventures. Both parties are fragile and susceptible to splintering in the current environment
and this does improve the chances for a viable 3d party to emerge.
I don't think the author was insulting to Gabbard. It read to me like he was explaining the
role any anti-war candidate would play in a party controlled by the established democratic party.
You can already see the obstacles being put in her way by the way she is being down-played in the
press.
b4real
Posted by: b4real | Apr 11, 2019 8:22:00 AM |
98 @43 Dadda: " A true Zen saying!"
"... The Dems, of course, will cherry-pick passages from the report that can most effectively be spun together into a fantastic web of collusion. And like most conspiracy theorists, they will allege things that can never be proven or disproven. That basic fact alone will allow them to keep expressing outrage and carry on with their accusations about collusion and obstruction for as long as they choose. ..."
"... Different Democrats will parrot one or more of these, depending on whether they are in a safe or vulnerable district. For example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), in the heart of an overwhelmingly Democratic region, will likely employ all four points, while a newly elected Democrat in a district won by Trump might focus only on the first. ..."
"... Oh, one last thing. Here is what the Democrats will not say: We appreciate all the work that went into this report. This counterintelligence investigation was very thorough, there is no evidence of collusion or obstruction of justice, so we look forward to going back to the job we were elected to do: legislating for the benefit of the American people. ..."
Now that Attorney General William Barr has promised to release the Mueller report in all its glory within the next few days, we
thought it considerate to save you time you'll never get back watching the establishment media's reaction by informing you in advance
of just how the Democrats are going to respond.
But, you say, the report has not even been released, so how could you know what the Democrats will say? Well, they have been at
this collusion delusion for more than two years now, we have witnessed the lengths to which they are willing to go in an effort to
take down President Trump, and they have only a few bullets left in their chamber. We can state with overwhelming confidence that
they will fire all of them.
But let's start by reaffirming something as certain as the sun rising in the east: The Democrats will not accept the
validity
of the report in whatever form they receive it. That would, after all, require them to stop spinning their conspiracy theories, and
we can't have that.
From there, we move seamlessly to a preview of the four prefabricated talking points that will launch the Democrats' spin cycle.
We call them the Mueller final four, because this is the last chance to demagogue the issue of Trump-Russia collusion. You need only
to fill in the blanks using yet-to-be-determined passages from the report.
So without further ado, we present the talking points Democrats will provide for the elite media to dutifully repeat and amplify:
Talking Point 1 (mildest of the four): While we thank and commend Mr. Mueller for his work, the scope of his investigation
was necessarily limited by his specific mandate and the special counsel law itself. There are just so many areas Mueller was not
able to probe, thus at least six, and perhaps as many as nine, of our congressional committees must take the baton and continue
running down the track. It is undoubtedly the highest and best use of our time, because as legislators we are elected to investigate
(LINOs – legislators in name only?). After all, even though the financial disclosure forms Trump filed during the presidential
campaign are far more revealing than any tax return, we must do everything possible to force the release of Trump's tax returns
anyway. He is the first presidential candidate in 40 years not to release his tax returns, so he must be hiding something. And,
of course, we need to dig into the entire history of the Trump organization, because we have deep suspicions all manner of crookedness
is hidden in there.
Talking Point 2 : While the conduct outlined does not quite rise to the level of criminality, the report details events
and conversations that are deeply disturbing, primarily (fill in most easy-to-spin passages of report). Remember that not all
improper, shameful, and traitorous conduct is felonious. Though the special counsel falls just short of uncovering collusion,
he also refused to issue a recommendation on
obstruction of justice . We
all know that the attorney general is little more than a bootlicking hack taking orders from Trump, ipso facto his finding of
no obstruction is likely some sort of coverup. And even though we lauded Rod Rosenstein for his stewardship of the special counsel
investigation, even Rosenstein, in concurring with Barr's judgment on obstruction, has evidently fallen under the spell of the
president and, like Barr, cannot be trusted.
Talking Point 3 : Yes, the report contains no direct evidence of anything other than process and financial crimes that
occurred either during the special counsel investigation itself or before Trump ran for president, and those have already been
litigated. But there is ample circumstantial evidence of conspiracy between Trump operatives and the Russians to interfere in
the election. For example, (fill in name of alleged conspirator) and (fill in name of another alleged conspirator) spoke to (fill
in name of alleged Russian conspirator) less than two weeks apart. Mueller is by nature conservative in his judgments, no matter
that an overwhelming majority of the lawyers he hired are politically active, anti-Trump Democrats who contributed to Hillary
Clinton, Barack Obama, or both. And regardless of whether he felt it appropriate to launch military-style raids on Michael Flynn
and Roger Stone. So we must investigate this circumstantial evidence and connect the dots ourselves.
Talking Point 4 : The redactions in this report are clear evidence that someone is trying to hide the parts that likely
reveal actual collusion. The crooked attorney general and deplorable president used the cover of (choose one: grand jury testimony/classified
information/interviews with completely innocent subjects) to redact the truth. Yes, all of that testimony and information must
be redacted by law or by long-standing department regulations and precedent, but we nevertheless repeat our demand that the entire
report, unredacted, be released, or we will launch yet more investigations on the cover-up by Barr and, of course, Trump. What
are you hiding with these redactions, Mr. Barr?
The Dems, of course, will cherry-pick
passages
from the report that can most effectively be spun together into a fantastic web of collusion. And like most conspiracy theorists,
they will allege things that can never be proven or disproven. That basic fact alone will allow them to keep expressing outrage and
carry on with their accusations about collusion and obstruction for as long as they choose.
Different Democrats will parrot one or more of these, depending on whether they are in a safe or vulnerable district. For
example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), in the heart of an overwhelmingly Democratic region, will likely employ all four points,
while a newly elected Democrat in a district won by Trump might focus only on the first.
Oh, one last thing. Here is what the Democrats will not say: We appreciate all the work that went into this report. This counterintelligence
investigation was very thorough, there is no evidence of collusion or obstruction of justice, so we look forward to going back to
the job we were elected to do: legislating for the benefit of the American people.
So there you go. Everything you need to know about the Democrats' response to the Mueller report before it is even released.
"... In 2016 Hillary Clinton lost a sure-fire election to Donald Trump and, looking for an excuse, jumped on the Russia claim. Putin Derangement Syndrome was ramped up to a much more dangerous level. War-level dangerous. ..."
In an especially imbecile display in 2015, Western reporters (unable to find his website)
thinking he hadn't been
seen for several days started a contest of speculation about coups, death, wars, plastic
surgery, secret births and other nonsense; when he "re-appeared", the story went down the
Memory Hole.
For some reason, Americans personalise everything. In meetings with US intelligence agencies
I was always fascinated how they would reduce every complicated reality to a single individual.
But it isn't Saddam, or Assad, or Qaddafi, or Osama, or Aidid, or Milosevic, or Maduro, or
Castro or any of the other villains-of-the-day, it's a whole country : these people got
to the top for good reasons. Removing the boss makes some difference but never all the
difference. They go but they never leave a Washington-friendly country behind and Washington
does it all over again somewhere else. This peculiar blindness drives Putin Derangement
Syndrome and has infected everybody else.
But Putin is much worse than the others. The other enemies had relatively weak countries but
Russia could obliterate the USA. But worse, Putin's team has steadily become more powerful and
more influential. And worst of all, he's still there: huffing and puffing has not blown him
down, sanctions strengthen the economy and there is nothing to suggest he won't be succeeded by
someone who carries on the same policies. It's a whole country, not just one man.
But laughing has passed – Putin Derangement Syndrome has become dangerous.
In 2016 Hillary Clinton lost a sure-fire election to Donald Trump and, looking for an
excuse, jumped on the Russia claim. Putin Derangement Syndrome was ramped up to a much more
dangerous level. War-level dangerous.
Clinton's victory was
99% certain until it wasn't and excuses were needed. Clinton
went through a lot of them but "Russian interference" was always the big one.
That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. [9 November
2016] Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to
engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours,
with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to
the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument. (From
Shattered
, quoted
here .)
In What Happened, Clinton also says Russian President Vladimir Putin's support for Trump was
driven by his own anti-women sentiment, stacking the deck against her: "What Putin wanted to do
was...influence our election, and he's not exactly fond of strong women, so you add that
together and that's pretty much what it means." At press events for her memoir, Clinton
continues to warn Americans against Russia's power over Trump and the country. "The Russians
aren't done. This is an ongoing threat, and that is one of the reasons why I wrote the book and
one of the reasons I'm talking about it," she said on Sunday at Southbank Centre's London
Literature Festival. (
Newsweek )
(None of these "experts" ever seem to wonder why Putin's influence, so decisive far away,
is so ineffective in Ukraine or Georgia. But then, it's not actually a rational, fact-based
belief, is it?)
The entire ramshackle construction is collapsing: if Mueller says there was no collusion
then even the last ditch believers will have to accept it:
Robert Mueller Prayer Candles are out of stock, time to
toss the other tchotchkes , it wasn't a Mueller Christmas after all . Clinton's
fabrication had two parts to it: 1) Putin interfered/determined the election 2) in collusion
with Trump. When the second part is blown up, so must the first be. And then what will happen
to all the loyal little allies crying "ours were interfered with too"!? The two halves of the
story had the same authors and the same purpose: if one dies, so must the other. Now that Trump
is secured from the
obstruction charges that hung there as long as Mueller was in session , he is free to
declassify the background documents that will show the origin, mechanics, authors and extent of
the conspiracy.
And he has said he will . In the process, both halves of the story will be destroyed:
they're both lies.
Will the exposure of the plot and the plotters end the war-talk stage of Putin Derangement
Syndrome? In a rational world, it would (but can its believers be embarrassed by the exposure
of their credulity? Can they be made to think it all over again from the beginning?). It is
true that Russia stands in the way of the neocons and liberal interventionists who have been
guiding Washington this century, but that hardly means that Putin is the enemy of the American
people. Because, properly considered, it's the neocons/liberal interventionists and their
endless wars burning up lives, money and good will that are the enemies of Americans; in that
respect Putin (unintentionally) stands with the true best interests of the American people. But
the propaganda is so strong and the hysteria so unrestrained, that anyone who suggests that
blocking the war party is in the best interests of Americans would be run out of town on a
rail. (
As the attacks on Tulsi Gabbard show .) The USA is far down the rabbit hole. (Although I
should say US elites: a
Rasmussen poll shows that slightly more Americans think Clinton colluded with a foreign power
than think Trump did . Considering the news coverage of the last two and a half years,
that's a very interesting finding.)
So, the sad conclusion is that Putin Derangement Syndrome will probably endure and the best
we can hope for is that it is dialled down a bit and the "act of war" nonsense is quietly
forgotten. Derangement was strong before the interference/collusion lie and it will exist as
long as Putin does: the war party is too invested in personalities ever to realise that it's
Russia, not its president, that's the obstacle. Let alone ever understand that much of what
Moscow does is a pushback against Washington's aggression.
"What the hell? I worked so hard on this -- if I wasn't colluding with the Trump
campaign, who the hell was I colluding with?" said the dumbfounded Russian president, growing
increasingly angry as he scrolled through his email inbox and recounted his numerous efforts at
covert communication with individuals who he had thought were high-ranking Trump officials, but
now he suspected were bots or anonymous internet trolls."
"... Attorney General Barr stated the obvious--law enforcement and intelligence agencies spied on Donald Trump's campaign ..."
"... I had learned in December 2016 from friends inside the intelligence community that there was collaboration with the Brits to collect and disseminate intel on persons on the Trump campaign. With Trump's tweet making news, I was invited by RT (i.e., Russia Today) to come on one of their news programs and discuss the matter that same afternoon. ..."
"... I then shared what I had learned about British intelligence ops to intercept U.S. communications on people affiliated with the Trump campagin with members of VIPS—i.e., Veteran Intelligence Professionals. One of these colleagues shared my analysis without my knowledge with Judge Andrew Napolitano. ..."
"... The Brits reportedly initiated collection on their own. The “collection” from those intercepted conversations and emails were shared with the Obama Administration through normal intelligence channels—i.e., principally the NSA. It is important to note that the Brits targeting and collecting on Americans is not illegal. We are foreigners as far as they are concerned. They can collect anything. ..."
"... The Independent ..."
"... I felt sorry for the Judge and knew he was being railroaded. But I did not expect a phone call from him, asking for my help. He called and asked me to help. Prior to the phone call on Thursday, March 16, 2017, I had never spoken to the Judge. We were not even casual acquaintances. ..."
"... Grynbaum is a classic example of what is wrong with the journalism today. For starters, he manufactured the “Frederick Forsyth” quote. I said no such thing. Besides fabricating a quote, he refused to address the substance of my information regarding the activities and conduct of British GCHQ. Instead, he went for the “Whitey” smear. ..."
"... This was a dark period for me. People I thought I could rely on abandoned me. I was on my own. But not for long. Rescue came via Judge Napolitano and an unlikely source, The Guardian—a left leaning British newspaper. The Judge was brought back on air at Fox on March 29, 2017 and stood his ground: ..."
"... On Wednesday morning, Napolitano returned to the network, making an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” His first order of business? Doubling down on the claims that got him suspended in the first place. (From the Washington Post, 29 March 2017, Amy Wang). ..."
"... Two weeks later, on April 13 th , The Guardian not only confirmed what I had said about GCHQ (note, in some of my on air interviews I stupidly and mistakenly called the British spy agence GHCQ) but identified other countries as well who were collecting intelligence, i.e., intercepting communications : ..."
"... There is a simple bottomline—My information was accurate and reliable. Also, I had the story before anyone else. Journalists and pundits were unwilling to listen. ..."
"... Former national security adviser Susan Rice privately told House investigators that she unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates was in New York late last year, multiple sources told CNN. ..."
"... Do you understand what this means? If you have never had a clearance and had access to NSA material then you probably fail to understand how profound this is. Let me explain. There were multiple intelligence reports released by the NSA. I am pretty certain all were classified as Top Secret. Some of these may have been generated by NSA, but most, according to the Guardian piece I mentioned above, were from foreign liaison. The names of the American citizens were initially obscured--e.g., Subject 1 or Subject 2. Hence the "request" to unmask. In other words, identify the nameless person by name. That, boys and girls, is known as spying. ..."
"... Bill Barr is now getting the Larry Johnson treatment for daring to speak a simple, self-evident truth. One big difference. Barr can set in motion the legal process to indict and prosecute those American traitors in the law enforcement and intelligence community who violated their oath to uphold the Constitution and used their positions to launch a political witch-hunt. Stay tuned. ..."
"... Thank you for this clarifying account. I used to read NoQuarter back in the day, and had been mystified when it was taken down. Now I understand, and am glad that Col. Lang has facilitated your return to blogging. ..."
Attorney General Barr stated the obvious--law enforcement and intelligence agencies spied on Donald Trump's campaign -- and touched
off an incredible display of stupidity and obtuseness among the Trump haters. Me? I was cheering because Bill Barr confirmed what
I said two years ago. Unfortunately, for daring to speak a simple truth in the spring of 2017 I immediately was a target of the hate
Trump media mob.
I was attacked for telling the public the truth that foreign intelligence--the British to be precise--were spying on the Trump
campaign and passing this info along to US intelligence. But the Brits were not acting unilaterally. There was full cooperation and
activity by U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI. Another word for this is "COLLUSION."
My speaking out brought about a furious counter attack by the media. People inside the Department of Justice reached out to my
business partner and denounced me as a crank and conspiracy theorist. Because of that backlash I took down my blog, NoQuarter, and
"retired" from blogging. Thanks to generosity of Colonel Lang, I eventually climbed back onto the blogging saddle.
Let me take you back to the events that unfolded after Donald Trump tweeted on March 4, 2017 that he was being wiretapped by the
FBI. The media establishment erupted in laughter and saw this as just one more piece of evidence proving Trump's mental instability.
But I had a different take.
I had learned in December 2016 from friends inside the intelligence community that there was collaboration with the Brits to collect
and disseminate intel on persons on the Trump campaign. With Trump's tweet making news, I was invited by RT (i.e., Russia Today)
to come on one of their news programs and discuss the matter that same afternoon.
Worth noting that my appearance on RT made no waves and generated no pushback. That tells you everything you need to know about
RT’s alleged influence over public and punditry opinion as an alleged arm of Russian propaganda.
I then shared what I had learned about British intelligence ops to intercept U.S. communications on people affiliated with the
Trump campagin with members of VIPS—i.e., Veteran Intelligence Professionals. One of these colleagues shared my analysis without
my knowledge with Judge Andrew Napolitano.
Napolitano went on Fox on Monday, March 13, 2017 and declared:
On Monday, Fox News Channel judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano alleged that three intelligence sources
had confirmed to him that the Obama administration used GCHQ (Britain's NSA) to spy on President Trump during the 2016 election so
that there would be no paper trail.
"Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the 'chain of command' to conduct the surveillance
on Trump," he said. "Obama didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of
Justice."
"What happened to the guy who ordered this? Resigned three days after Trump took office," he added.
The Judge got some key nuances wrong. Obama, to my knowledge, did not ask the Brits/GCHQ to do anything on his behalf. The Brits
reportedly initiated collection on their own. The “collection” from those intercepted conversations and emails were shared with the
Obama Administration through normal intelligence channels—i.e., principally the NSA. It is important to note that the Brits targeting
and collecting on Americans is not illegal. We are foreigners as far as they are concerned. They can collect anything.
The Judge’s comments set off a firestorm. In a matter of hours, Fox News Corporation, responding to pressure from the British
Government, took Napolitano off the air.
The Independent, a British newspaper, reported as follows:
A legal analyst who claimed British intelligence could have helped spy on
Donald Trump during his bid to become US president has been taken off
the air.
The Independent understands that Mr Napolitano is not expected to appear on the Fox News
Channel anytime in the near future.
The analyst's claim that GCHQ had helped former
president Barack Obama bug Trump Tower was cited last week by White
House press secretary Sean Spicer, sparking a diplomatic incident.
I felt sorry for the Judge and knew he was being railroaded. But I did not expect a phone call from him, asking for my help. He
called and asked me to help. Prior to the phone call on Thursday, March 16, 2017, I had never spoken to the Judge. We were not even
casual acquaintances.
Judge Napolitano, clearly smarting over the public lashing he was receiving, asked if I would be willing to speak to a New York
Times reporter, Michael Grynbaum, about the matter. I agreed to do so. That was a mistake. Here is how Grynbaum reported
what I did not say:
Mr. Napolitano also has a taste for conspiracy theories, which led him to Larry C. Johnson, a former
intelligence officer best known for spreading a hoax about Michelle Obama. . . .
But Mr. Johnson, who was himself once a Fox News contributor, said in a telephone interview that Mr.
Napolitano called him on Friday and requested that he speak to The New York Times. Mr. Johnson said he was one of the sources for
Mr. Napolitano’s claim about British intelligence.
Mr. Johnson became infamous in political circles after he spread false rumors in 2008 that Michelle
Obama had been videotaped using a slur against Caucasians. In the interview on Friday, Mr. Johnson acknowledged his notoriety, but
said that his knowledge of surveillance of Mr. Trump came from sources in the American intelligence community. Mr. Napolitano, he
said, heard about his information through an intermediary.
“It sounds like a Frederick Forsyth novel,” Mr. Johnson said.
Grynbaum is a classic example of what is wrong with the journalism today. For starters, he manufactured the “Frederick Forsyth”
quote. I said no such thing. Besides fabricating a quote, he refused to address the substance of my information regarding the activities
and conduct of British GCHQ. Instead, he went for the “Whitey” smear.
If you are not familiar with that episode, permit me to refresh your memory or create a new one for you. It is a simple story—I
allowed myself to be used by Clinton campaign, Sid Blumenthal in particular, to spread a rumor that turned out to be untrue.
I was an ardent supporter of Hillary in 2007 and 2008. I had previously briefed her in 2007 on the war in Iraq and found her,
at least in a one-on-one setting, to be very intelligent and very well informed. But that was then. Her subsequent conduct as the
Secretary of State, especially how she mishandled the Benghazi incident, ended any chance that I would ever support her for any role
in which the lives of American military, diplomats or intelligence officers are on the line.
After that briefing, I found myself as an unofficial member of the Clinton for President team via my friendship with Sid Blumenthal.
I had enormous respect for Sid and his wife. I thought they were good people. The only thing I now know for certain is that they
are fiercely loyal to the Clintons.
As the contest between Hillary and Barach Obama heated up, Sid would call me from time to time with suggestions of articles I
could write or pieces that could be run on my now defunct blog--NoQuarterUSa.net. I was more than happy to help. I believed then
(and have been vindicated by the passage of time) that Barack Obama was just a pretty face with no significant experience and he
would be a terrible President.
Then came the fateful phone call from Sid Blumenthal in late May 2008. He told me he had learned of a tape that was circulating
in restricted circles that featured Michelle Obama using the derogatory phrase, “whitey.” Armed with that tidbit of gossip I turned
to an old friend in the media community and he too confirmed he had heard the same thing (stupidly, I never considered the possibility
that Sid was spreading this far and wide and that I was getting blowback).
When I mentioned the possible existence of this tape to a Republican friend of mine and former CIA colleague in California, I
was shocked when he said, “I have a friend who has seen and heard the tape. That was enough for me. Based on these two sources, I
wrote the story up at NoQuarterUSA.net.
It went viral. But nothing surfaced. I became uneasy. So I went back to Sid and pressed him for more information. He in turn sent
me to David Brock of Media Matters. (I had met Brock previously at the Blumenthal home watching election returns in 2006.) Brock
told me that the information came from female friend who insisted she had seen and heard the slur by Michelle Obama.
The matter became more confused when the Obama campaign sent out an email to their campaign workers claiming that Michelle said
“WHY DID HE” rather than the pejorative, “WHITEY.” That led me to believe there was substance to the Blumenthal/Brock rumor.
Ultimately the story died out. No tape surfaced, but I bore the blame as the “Whitey” guy. With the benefit of hindsight I now
understand that I was an unwitting but willing tool in a David Brock dirty trick. No such tape ever surfaced. I can only conclude
that the desperation of the Clinton campaign to win was so extreme that they would stoop to use a racist meme to smear Obama.
I regret what I did in writing the story up. But it did not originate with me. It started with David Brock. Which brings me back
to the Napolitano affair.
After Grynbaun identified me as one of Judge Napolitano’s sources, it was open season on me. Not one of the media outlets—except
for CNN and the Politico — even took the time to reach out to me and ask me to tell my side of the story. Instead, they recirculated
talking points from Media Matters.
Here is what I told Brian Stelter during this period:
Talk about Chutzpah. David Brock started the Whitey rumor (I will happily take a polygraph on that point) and then has the audacity
to attack me and dismiss my information (via Media Matters) simply because I had passed on rumors where he was the original source:
Media Matters first traced Napolitano's wiretapping conspiracy back to an interview on the state-sponsored Russian television
network RT with the former CIA analyst and discredited conspiracy theorist Larry C. Johnson, who previously promoted false claims
that Michelle Obama used a racial slur against Caucasian people.
This was a dark period for me. People I thought I could rely on abandoned me. I was on my own. But not for long. Rescue came via
Judge Napolitano and an unlikely source, The Guardian—a left leaning British newspaper. The Judge was brought back on air at Fox
on March 29, 2017 and stood his ground:
On Wednesday morning, Napolitano returned to the network, making an appearance on “Fox & Friends.”
His first order of business? Doubling down on the claims that got him suspended in the first place. (From the Washington Post, 29
March 2017, Amy Wang).
Two weeks later, on April 13th, The Guardian not only confirmed what I had said about GCHQ (note, in some of my on
air interviews I stupidly and mistakenly called the British spy agence GHCQ) but identified other countries as well who were collecting
intelligence, i.e.,
intercepting communications:
Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts
between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.
GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious
“interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said.
This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.
Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information
on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said.
There is a simple bottomline—My information was accurate and reliable. Also, I had the story before anyone else. Journalists and
pundits were unwilling to listen.
We know a lot more today then we did in the Spring of 2017. George Papadopoulos was targeted by a MI-6 covert action designed
to portray him as a lackey of Russia and promoting Russia to the Trump campaign. Carter Page was spied upon under four separate FISA
warrants that were based on the fictitious Steel Dossier. And a CIA "contractor", Stefan Halper, played the role of an agitator trying
to lure Papadopoulos into implicating himself in a Russian plot.
Former national security adviser Susan Rice privately told House
investigators that she unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates
was in New York late last year, multiple sources told CNN.
The New York meeting preceded a separate effort by the UAE to facilitate a back-channel communication between Russia and the incoming
Trump White House.
Do you understand what this means? If you have never had a clearance and had access to NSA material then you probably fail to understand
how profound this is. Let me explain. There were multiple intelligence reports released by the NSA. I am pretty certain all were
classified as Top Secret. Some of these may have been generated by NSA, but most, according to the Guardian piece I mentioned above,
were from foreign liaison. The names of the American citizens were initially obscured--e.g., Subject 1 or Subject 2. Hence the "request"
to unmask. In other words, identify the nameless person by name. That, boys and girls, is known as spying.
Bill Barr is now getting the Larry Johnson treatment for daring to speak a simple, self-evident truth. One big difference. Barr can
set in motion the legal process to indict and prosecute those American traitors in the law enforcement and intelligence community
who violated their oath to uphold the Constitution and used their positions to launch a political witch-hunt. Stay tuned.
Thank you for this clarifying account. I used to read NoQuarter back in the day, and had been mystified when it was taken down.
Now I understand, and am glad that Col. Lang has facilitated your return to blogging.
And just in time to see some of your tormentors - and unsurprisingly the very same tormentors of our constitutional republic
- be (hopefully) called to account for their actions.
The Lame Stream Media have much for which to answer concerning their part in all of this; they have abrogated their role as
even-handed watchdogs through their open-eyed and monolithic dissemination of hyper-partisan, cultural marxist agitprop, much
of it focused on character assassination of those who did not share their beliefs, and yet more noxiously by throttling the expression
of contrary argumentation across the board.
But the genuine opprobium should be reserved for those officers and officials, sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution,
who determinedly worked to instead disregard and undermine the Constitution, and the constitutional republic which it undergirds.
Money quote: "The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from
the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White
House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. There are clear parallels between the end stages
of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from
reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against
the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not
lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate."
Notable quotes:
"... Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’ ..."
"... Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .) ..."
"... Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them. ..."
"... ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’ ..."
"... The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same. ..."
"... A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation. ..."
"... In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’) ..."
"... The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief. ..."
"... There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from ‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller." ..."
"... I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language. ..."
"... The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. ..."
"... There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate. ..."
"Dan, Thanks for the reference, which I will follow up. Unfortunately, although Bongino has produced a lot of extremely valuable
material, a lot of it is buried in the 'postcasts', searching through which is harder than with printed materials. It would greatly
help if there were transcripts, but of course those cost money.
I am still trying to fit the exploding mass of information which has been coming out into a coherent timeline. Part of the
problem is that there is so much appearing in so many different places. In addition to trying to think through the implications
of the information in this post and the subsequent exchanges of comments, I have been trying to make sense of evidence coming
out about the British end of the conspiracy.
An important development here has been rather well covered by Chuck Ross, in a recent ‘Daily Caller’ piece headlined ‘Cambridge
Academic Reflects On Interactions With 'Spygate’ Figure’ and one on ‘Fox’ by Catherine Herridge and Cyd Upson, entitled ‘Russian
academic linked to Flynn denies being spy, says her past contact was “used” to smear him.’ However, the evidence involved has ramifications
which they cannot be expected to understand, as yet at least.
At issue is the attempt to use the – apparently casual – encounter between Lieutenant-General Flynn and Svetlana Lokhova at a
dinner in Cambridge (U.K.) in February 2016 to smear him by, among other things, portraying her as some kind of ‘Mata Hari’ figure.
Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016
– a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with
Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’
This suggests that this was not simply a case Halper acting on his own. It also I think brings us back to the central importance
of Flynn’s visit to Moscow in December 2015.
Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come.
It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk
.)
Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This
points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians
might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic,
with Dearlove certainly among them.
Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An example, with which I have much sympathy:
‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to
cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes
#Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’
Meanwhile, another interesting recent ‘tweet’ comes from Eliot Higgins, of ‘Bellingcat’ fame. He is known to some skeptics as
‘the couch potato’ – perhaps he should be rechristened ‘king cockroach.’ It reads:
‘Looking forward to gettin g things rolling with the Open Information Partnership, with @bellingcat, @MDI_UK, @DFRLab, and @This_Is_Zinc
https://www.openinformation...’
There is an interesting ‘backstory’ to this. The announcement of an FCO-supported ‘Open Information Partnership of European Non-Governmental
Organisations, charities, academics, think-tanks and journalists’, supposedly to counter ‘disinformation’ from Russia, came in a
written answer from the Minister of State, Sir Alan Duncan, on 3 April.
In turn this followed the latest in a series of releases of material either leaked or hacked from the organisations calling themselves
‘Institute for Statecraft’ and ‘Integrity Initiative’ by the group calling themselves ‘Anonymous’ on 25 March.
The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium
whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium
member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same.
A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian
organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible
explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation.
An interesting paragraph reads as follows:
‘An expanded research component could generate better understanding of the drivers (psychological, sociopolitical, cultural
and environmental) of those who are susceptible to disinformation. This will allow us to map vulnerable audiences, and build scenario
planning models to test the efficiency of different activities to build resilience of those populations over time.’
They have not yet got to the point of recommending psychiatic treatment for ‘dissidents’, but these are still early days. The
‘Sovietisation’ of Western life proceeds apace.
In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different
countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright
to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they
need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’)
Study of the proposal hacked/leaked by ‘Anonymous’ bring out both the ‘boondoggle’ element – there is a lot of state funding available
for people happy to play these games – and also the strong transatlantic links.
A particularly significant presence, here, is the ‘DFRLab’. This is the ‘Digital Forensic Research Lab’ at the ‘Atlantic Council’,
where Eliot Higgins is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’ The same organisation has a ‘Cyber Statecraft Initiative’ where Dmitri Alperovitch
is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’
It cannot be repeated often enough that it is difficult to see any conceivable excuse for the FBI to fail to secure access to
the DNC servers. One would normally moreover expect that, on an issue of this sensitivity, they would have the ‘digital forensics’
done by their own people.
There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been
a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that
organisation.
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic ‘Atlantic Council’ is even more preposterous.
The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored
by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief.
There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from
‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly
goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller."
OT but related, just watched a former naval Intelligence officer, now working for the Hoover Institute interviewed on FOX about
the Rooshins in Venezuela. Said, the 100 Russians are there to protect Maduro because he cannot trust his own army. Maduro's days
are numbered because he is toxically unpopular.
Got me thinking, our Intelligence services are good at psy-ops and keeping our gullible MSM in line but God help us if we ever
actually needed real Intelligence about a country. I remember about a month ago how all of these 'Think Tank Guys' were predicting
how the only people loyal to Maduro were a few of his crony Generals, that the rank and file military hated him and there were
going to be mass defections.
It didn't happen and we are all just supposed to forget that.
[not a socialist, don't have any love for Maduro, I just know that I will never learn anything of about Venezuela from these think
tank dudes, we are just getting groomed]
Venezuela isn't about "socialism," or even Maduro--it's about the oil. They have the largest proven reserves in the world, though
much of it is non-conventional and would need a ton of investment to exploit. But it's their oil, not ours, and we have no right
to meddle in their internal affairs.
Venezuela is neither about socialism nor oil in my opinion. It is everything to do with the neocons. And Trump buying into their
hegemonic dreams. Notice the resurrection of Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame as the man spearheading this in a triumvirate
with Bolton & Pompeo. IMO, a perfect foil for Putin & Xi to embroil the US in another regime change quagmire that further weakens
the US.
"There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has
been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating
for that organisation.
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic 'Atlantic Council' is even more preposterous."
True; and true. It is also true that the Clinton e-mail investigation was faux, a limp caricature of what an investigation
would look like when it is designed to uncover the truth. Allowing a subject's law firm to review the subject's e-mails from when
she was in government for relevancy is beyond preposterous. An investigation conducted in the normal way by apolitical Agents
in a field office would not walk away from a trove of evidence empty handed.
The inter-relatedness and overlapping of DoJ, CIA, and FBI personnel assigned to the Clinton e-mail case, the Russophobic nightmare
of a 'case' targeting Carter Page, and by extension, the Trump presidential campaign, and yes, the Mueller political op, all reek
of political bias and ineptitude followed by more political bias; and then culmination in a scorched earth investigation more
characteristic of something the STASI might have undertaken than American justice.
Early morning raids, gag orders, solitary confinements, show indictments that will never see adjudication in a court room - truly
unbelievable.
In your opinion was this surveillance, criminal & counter-intelligence investigation as well as information operations against
Trump centrally orchestrated or was it more reactive & decentralized?
There are so many facets. Fusion GPS & Nellie Ohr with her previous CIA connection. Her husband Bruce at the DOJ stovepiping
the dossier to the FBI. Brennan and his EC. Clapper and his intelligence assessment. Halper, Mifsud, Steele along with Hannigan
and the MI6 + GCHQ connection. Downer and the Aussies. FISA warrants on Page & Papadopolous. The whole Strzok & Page texting.
Comey, Lynch & the Hillary exoneration. McCabe. Then all the Russians. And the media leaks to generate hysteria.
I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its
about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal
had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary,
increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language.
And yet the chatterati
continued to chatter and invent ludicrously unreal worlds and analyses of the actual world they lived in until... bang... it was
no more.
I'd skip the first few chapters which are full of impenetrable marxist jargon.
The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go.
This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House.
It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler.
There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion
is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their
facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising
inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire
crashes we may not be so fortunate.
Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An
example, with which I have much sympathy:
‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn
and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize
to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate
hoaxers. Sorry!’
Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An
example, with which I have much sympathy:
‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn
and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize
to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate
hoaxers. Sorry!’
In its Russiagate coverage, The New York Times has repeatedly offered a
graphic accusing the President's retinue of "more than 100 contacts with Russian nationals." This decision to question the loyalty
of people who have had contact with a Russian national -- so, for just knowing or meeting a Russian -- has been a staple of
New York Times coverage.
"More than 100 contacts with Russian nationals." It's incredible that this can even be an allegation -- in our paper of record
-- there in explainer graphics almost every day, for more than two years now.
It smacks of the famous Senator Joseph
McCarthy speeches
in the 1950s: "I have in my hand a list of 205 [or 57, or 81] "
And yet no one ever seemed to mind.
After all, as former intelligence chief (and
liar to Congress ) James Clapper has
asserted on television, "Russians
are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor." Worse, I may have already been co-opted and penetrated without even
knowing it! As Clapper
said
recently on CNN when asked if Trump could be "a Russian asset," it is "a possibility, and I would add to that a caveat, whether
witting or unwitting."
Unwitting!
So you can be an unwitting traitor?
Infected with Russian mind-control, like a zombie?
Yes. As mainstream media have argued repeatedly and quite explicitly.
Over a sinister animation of black and white human cells being penetrated by bright red virus particles, the narration begins:
"The thing about a virus is it doesn't destroy you head-on. Instead, it brings you down -- from the inside. Turning your own cells
into enemies."
This incredible film is well worth watching to see how ill our body politic has become. As the red virus invades cell after cell,
the narration goes on: "This story is about a virus -- a virus created five decades ago by a government, to slowly and methodically
poison its enemies. But it's not a biological virus, it's more like a political one. And chances are, you've already been infected."
Animation cuts abruptly to Donald Trump.
The evil genius behind this virus? The Leonid Brezhnev-era KGB. (Really! I'm not making this up!)
"If you feel like you don't know who to trust anymore, this might be the thing that's making you feel that way," the narrator
says, as the animation shows more and more black and white
cells hopelessly succumbing to the red virus -- reds spreading everywhere, bringing us down from within, as it were. "If you feel
exhausted by the news, this could be why. And if you're sick of it all and you just want to stop caring, then we really need to talk."
Animation cuts to a human eye, now filled like a zombie's with infected red sclera.
Amazing. I thought I was exhausted by the news and sick of it all because the journalists have all become exhausting and sickening;
because whenever I turn on NPR or open up The New York Times , I feel like Jennifer Connelly in "A Beautiful Mind"when
she walks into the garage and discovers it's a shrine to
paranoid schizophrenia, and realizes with horror that Russell Crowe's back home with the baby about to give it a bath.
But no. "Chances are," I'm already infected by a KGB virus. Cut to face of Donald Trump.
Makes sense. After all, I have personally had "more than 100 contacts with Russian nationals." I guess I better turn myself in.
(For anti-viral treatments? Re-education? A struggle session?)
by Scott |
Interviews Aaron Maté discusses the aftermath of the Russia investigation
and what it's revealed about mainstream American journalists. In addition to seriously undermining media credibility, the obsession
with possible Russian influence over the president has made it next to impossible for Trump to do anything that might be seen as
helpful for Putin, like pulling troops out of Syria or pushing for nuclear detente.
Russiagate is about keeping Russian down via additional sections. As simple as that. Epidemics of Neo-McCarthyism also
helps to cement cracks in the US neoliberal facade and, as such, is very helpful for the US elite.
It also absolves Neoliberal Democrats of the political fiasco of the century -- rejection of establishment candidate by
the majoring of working Americans which happened when Hillary Clinton was defeated by a person with zero political experience and no
political patty behind him.
Notable quotes:
"... "The results of Mueller's investigations are a disgrace to the U.S. and their political elite. It's now confirmed that all their allegations have been plucked out of thin air. The media have played a shameful role of lie-mongers in a campaign built on lies. The adherents of this conspiracy theory are discredited. Only an idiot can believe them now." ..."
"... We've seen anti-Russian xenophobia spread into the American mainstream. Etched in our minds are comments like the one James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, made in an interview when he said that Russians are "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever." ..."
"... To those of us who paid attention to American media and politics over the past two years, it quickly became clear that too many in the United States know nothing about our country. ..."
Alexey Pushkov, a former diplomat and a political analyst,
tweeted to his 360,000 followers on Tuesday
, following the release of Attorney General William Barr's summary of the report:
"The results of Mueller's investigations are
a disgrace to the U.S. and their political elite. It's now confirmed that all their allegations have been plucked out of thin air.
The media have played a shameful role of lie-mongers in a campaign built on lies. The adherents of this conspiracy theory are discredited.
Only an idiot can believe them now."
To the Kremlin and its supporters, Russia is the aggrieved party here, and the government's consistent denials of interfering
in America's internal affairs have been fully vindicated. Appearing on the Russian talk show "60 Minutes," Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman
for the foreign ministry, said the ministry was preparing a report to name and shame the "brigade of propagandists" -- pointing at,
among others, Fareed Zakaria -- who tried to tie Mr. Trump to Russia. She added that "apologies are expected."
... ... ...
...it becomes clear that whatever the outcome of
the Mueller investigation, our relationship with America has changed.
We've seen anti-Russian xenophobia spread into the American mainstream. Etched in our minds are comments like the one James
Clapper, the former director of national intelligence,
made in an interview when he
said that Russians are "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever."
... ... ...
In the atmosphere where "contacts with Russians" has become cause for suspicion, every bank transaction and visa application faces
extra scrutiny. I've heard from people I know about how exchange programs, conferences and businesses are suffering.
To those of us who paid attention to American media and politics over the past two years, it quickly became clear that too many
in the United States know nothing about our country. Ominous images of onion-shaped domes
taking over the
White House baffled us; St. Basil's Cathedral is not part of the Kremlin complex and has no political connotation. The ubiquity
of hammers and sickles in visuals accompanying Trump-Russia reports seemed likewise absurd. Our country hasn't been Communist for
about 30 years.
"... Nice group shot of the three stooges. The most dishonest, disloyal, dipshitted psychopaths a country should never have to endure. ..."
"... The likelihood of anyone being convicted let alone indicted is rather slim. Why? These people know where too many dead bodies are buried. ..."
"... There is an understanding in their circles that certain individuals on both sides of the spectrum are bulletproof. You can't run such a large criminal enterprise without it being this way. Why else would Mueller not talk to Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Steele, the heads of Fusion GPS, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr., the promoter who set that up, etc., etc. ..."
"... This whole ordeal was meant to die an uneventful death. It's unlikely Barr will act on any recommendations from Nunes becuase it would start a partisan war that would snare GOP never Trumpers too. It's how Washington works. Like Carlin says - it's a great big club and you ain't in it. They are, and they don't do time. ..."
As the Russia collusion hoax hurtles toward its demise, it's important to consider how this destructive information operation
rampaged through vital American institutions for more than two years , and what can be done to stop such a damaging episode from
recurring.
While the hoax was fueled by a wide array of false accusations, misleading leaks of ostensibly classified information, and bad-faith
investigative actions by government officials, one vital element was indispensable to the overall operation: the Steele dossier.
<
Funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee, which hid their payments from disclosure by funneling
them through the law firm Perkins Coie, the dossier was a collection of false and often absurd accusations of collusion between Trump
associates and Russian officials. These allegations, which relied heavily on Russian sources cultivated by Christopher Steele, were
spoon-fed to Trump opponents in the U.S. government, including officials in law enforcement and intelligence.
The efforts to feed the dossier's allegations into top levels of the U.S. government, particularly intelligence agencies, were
championed by Steele, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, and various intermediaries. These allegations were given directly to the
FBI and Justice Department, while similar allegations were fed into the State Department by long-time Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal.
Their efforts were remarkably effective. Officials within the FBI and DOJ, whether knowingly or unintentionally, provided essential
support to the hoax conspirators, bypassing normal procedures and steering the information away from those who would view it critically.
The dossier soon metastasized within the government, was cloaked in secrecy, and evaded serious scrutiny.
High-ranking officials such as then-FBI general counsel James Baker and then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr were
among those whose actions advanced the hoax. Ohr, one of the most senior officials within the DOJ, took the unprecedented step of
providing to Steele a back door into the FBI investigation. This enabled the former British spy to continue to feed information to
investigators, even though he had been terminated by the FBI for leaking to the press and was no longer a valid source. Even worse,
Ohr directly briefed Andrew Weissmann and Zainab Ahmad, two DOJ officials who were later assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller's
investigation. In short, the investigation was marked by glaring irregularities that would normally be deemed intolerable.
According to Ohr's congressional testimony, he told top-level FBI officials as early as August or September 2016 that Steele was
biased against Trump, that Steele's work was connected to the Clinton campaign, and that Steele's material was of questionable reliability.
Steele himself confirmed that last point in a British court case in which he acknowledged his allegations included unverified information.
Yet even after this revelation, intelligence leaders continued to cite the Steele dossier in applications to renew the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
It is astonishing that intelligence leaders did not immediately recognize they were being manipulated in an information operation
or understand the danger that the dossier could contain deliberate disinformation from Steele's Russian sources . In fact, it is
impossible to believe in light of everything we now know about the FBI's conduct of this investigation, including the astounding
level of anti-Trump animus shown by high-level FBI figures like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, as well as the inspector general's discovery
of a shocking number of leaks by FBI officials.
It's now clear that top intelligence officials were perfectly well aware of the dubiousness of the dossier, but they embraced
it anyway because it justified actions they wanted to take - turning the full force of our intelligence agencies first against a
political candidate and then against a sitting president.
The hoax itself was a gift to our nation's adversaries, most notably Russia. The abuse of intelligence for political purposes
is insidious in any democracy. It undermines trust in democratic institutions, and it damages the reputation of the brave men and
women who are working to keep us safe. This unethical conduct has had major repercussions on America's body politic, creating a yearslong
political crisis whose full effects remain to be seen.
Having extensively investigated this abuse, House Intelligence Committee Republicans will soon be submitting criminal referrals
on numerous individuals involved in these matters.
These people must be held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future. The men and women of our intelligence
community perform an essential service defending American national security, and their ability to carry out their mission cannot
be compromised by biased actors who seek to transform the intelligence agencies into weapons of political warfare.
All 3 of them have been confirmed to by lying through their teeth by their own people. They are all going down. We just need
the Mueller report to come out to get the ball rolling. Can't do it before the report comes out as they would call it obstruction.
So we wait another 9 days, or less, according to AG Barr.
Could be, PapaGeorge. Maybe this time it's different because it could be argued that the TPTB don't want Trump pulling the
same thing on the DNC--and get away with it like the Usual Suspects just did. In legal terms, a bar has been set. BARR? Get it?
Buwhahahahahahahahahha!!!
The likelihood of anyone being convicted let alone indicted is rather slim. Why? These people know where too many dead bodies
are buried. There is an understanding in their circles that certain individuals on both sides of the spectrum are bulletproof.
You can't run such a large criminal enterprise without it being this way. Why else would Mueller not talk to Comey, Clapper, Brennan,
Steele, the heads of Fusion GPS, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr., the promoter who set that up, etc., etc.
This whole ordeal was meant to die an uneventful death. It's unlikely Barr will act on any recommendations from Nunes becuase
it would start a partisan war that would snare GOP never Trumpers too. It's how Washington works. Like Carlin says - it's a great
big club and you ain't in it. They are, and they don't do time
The likelihood of anyone being convicted let alone indicted is rather slim. Why? These people know where too many dead
bodies are buried.
There is an understanding in their circles that certain individuals on both sides of the spectrum are bulletproof. You
can't run such a large criminal enterprise without it being this way. Why else would Mueller not talk to Comey, Clapper, Brennan,
Steele, the heads of Fusion GPS, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr., the promoter who set that up, etc., etc.
This whole ordeal was meant to die an uneventful death. It's unlikely Barr will act on any recommendations from Nunes becuase
it would start a partisan war that would snare GOP never Trumpers too. It's how Washington works. Like Carlin says - it's a great
big club and you ain't in it. They are, and they don't do time.
<<<House Intelligence Committee Republicans will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous individuals involved in
these matters<<< We shall see now, won't we? I won't believe this, till I see It!
Money quote: "Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots
that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets
should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion.
But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union. "
Notable quotes:
"... Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally. ..."
"... There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge. ..."
In 2016, Andrei Lvovich Nekrasov, a well-known Russian film-maker, playwright, theater director, and actor, released a docudrama
entitled, The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes . Although the film won many artistic accolades, including a special commendation
from the Prix Europa Award for a Television Documentary, public screenings were abruptly canceled in both Europe and the United States.
Political pressure from various constituents and the threat of lawsuits from William Browder, the American-British billionaire and
human-rights activist, ensured the limitation of the film to a single website. To the knowledge of this author, there has been only
one public screening of The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes in the United States. In June 2016, Seymour Hersch, a renowned investigative
journalist, presided over a showing of the film at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that generated much controversy. The American press
has not been kind to either the film or the director, Andrei Nekrasov. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker,
and The Daily Beast all seem to agree that the film is an overt work of Russian propaganda that aims to introduce confusion
about the circumstances leading to the death of tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, in the minds of the viewers. The Putin administration,
which has been the prime target of both the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Accountability Act and the 2016 Global Magnitsky Human
Rights Accountability Act, has good reason to promote a film that questions the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky's untimely death
in Moscow's Butyrka Prison in 2009.
Despite a flood of persuasive articles and editorials by well-known journalists suggesting that this inconvenient film deserves
no more than a quick burial, I was drawn to reconsider both the film and the political controversy that it continues to create for
two main reasons. First, as the collapse of the Soviet Union and our own recent presidential campaigns show, we can never entirely
prohibit the intrusion of propaganda or politically slanted content into the public sphere. Instead, as a historian and faculty member
who serves at a public university, I believe that it is my job to teach our students how to diagnose an issue, and how to consider
the many sides that a story necessarily involves. As an intellectual process this has immense value both in and of itself. Source
criticism is a time tested and reliable means through which we can make sense of an event or a phenomenon. Our students need to learn
both the mechanics and the intellectual value of analyzing a source and should be able to evaluate the nature of political content
whether it is embedded in a Facebook post, a scholarly article, or a documentary.
The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes can serve as an important vehicle to introduce the contested nature of historical
truth, and as a prism, it allows us to view the multiple modes through which various versions of the truth are disseminated in the
twenty-first century. Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a
real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating
analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative.
The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's
death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary.
Second, I am concerned by the fact that both critics and supporters have turned the debate about the film into a referendum on
William Browder, his business dealings as well as his global human rights activism, and the Putin administration. In this interview
with Andrei Nekrasov, I turn the spotlight back on the film-maker, his motivations for making the film, and on his political experiences
since the release of the film. It is important to remember that in the past Nekrasov has made several politically charged films including
Disbelief (2004), and Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (2007) -- films that are extremely critical of the
Putin administration. Nekrasov, a student of philosophy and literature, is in the unique position of having experienced censorship
in the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia, and in the democratic countries of Western Europe and the United States.
1) Why did you want to make a film about the Magnitsky Act? What drew you to this project?
Andrei Nekrasov : I felt that the story of Magnitsky, in its accepted version, was very powerful and important. I thought that
Sergei Magnitsky was a hero, and I wanted to tell the story of the modern hero, my compatriot. His case seemed very special because
Magnitsky, a tax lawyer (in reality, an accountant) had come from the world of capitalism, to symbolize all that is good and moral
in modern Russia. I believed that Magnitsky did not surrender under torture and sacrificed his life fighting corruption.
2) Who has funded the making of this film and what motivated them to invest in this production?
AN : The film was produced by Piraya Film, a Norwegian company. There is a long list of funders, and none are from Russia. (Please
visit www.magnitskyact.com for further information). And they are all
very "mainstream." I believe in the United States and Russia it is easier to construe the specific reasons that motivate funders,
who are mostly private, to support a project. In Europe, where more public money is available for the arts, the state is more or
less obliged to fund the cultural process. So I submit an idea to a producer, and if they like it, they introduce it into a complex
system of funding that is supposed to be politically neutral. Only quality matters, in theory. In practice "quality" has political
aspects, and its interpretation is open to prejudices.
But it would be a simplification to say the film was funded because I had set out to tell Browder's version of the Magnitsky case.
Those funders who were (through their commissioning editors) monitoring the editing process, ZDF/ARTE, for example, became aware
of the inconsistencies in Browder's version and supported my investigation into the truth. What they did not realize was who, and
what, we were all dealing with. They did not realize that Browder was supported by the entire political system of North America and
Western Europe. They realized that only when they were told by politicians to stop the film. And they obeyed, contrary to what I
thought was their principles.
3) How has the role of censorship, both in Russia and the West, affected your artistic career?
AN : Censorship has had a very strong and damaging impact on my career. But while censorship in Russia had never been something
surprising to me, the way that the film T he Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes was treated by western politicians was totally
unanticipated and shocking. Yet, intellectually, the experience was very illuminating. The pro-Western intelligentsia of Russia,
a class to which I have belonged, idolizes the West and believes that the freedom of expression is an essential and even intrinsic
part of Western culture. The notion that the interests of economically powerful groups can set a geopolitical agenda and that easily
overrides democratic freedom of expression is considered to be a remnant of Soviet era thinking. So I had to have a direct and personal
experience of Western censorship to realize that that notion is rooted in reality.
The issue of censorship in Russia is, on the other hand, often misunderstood in the West. There is no direct political censorship
of the kind that existed in the Soviet Union, and that possibly exists in countries like China today. Many popular Russian news outlets
are critical of the government, and of Putin personally as evidenced by the content in media outlets such as Ekho Moskvy, Novaya
Gazeta, Dozhd TV, New Times, Vedomosti, Colta. ru, and others. The internet is full of mockery of Putin, his ministers and of
his party's representatives. There is neither a system nor the kind of wellresourced deep state structures that control the flow
of information. Many Russian media outlets, for example, repeat Browder's story of Magnitsky killed by the corrupt police with the
state covering it up. All that is perfectly "allowed" while Putin angrily condemns Browder as a criminal and Browder calls himself
Putin's number one enemy. In reality, it is not allowed but simply happens because of the lack of consistent political censorship.
However, you will hardly ever hear a proper analysis and criticism in the Russian media of the big corporations, and of the oligarchs
that make up the state. It is also true that such acute crises as military operations, such as Russian-Georgian war of 2008 produce
intolerance to the voices of the opposition. My film Russian Lessons (2008) about the suffering of the Georgians during that
short war and its aftermath wasbanned in Russia. But nationalism is not only a government policy. It's the prevailing mood. The supposedly
democratic leader of the opposition, that the West seems to praise and support, Alexei Navalny, was on the record insulting Georgians
in jingo-nationalistic posts during the war. The film industry is, of course, easier to steer in the "right direction" as films,
unlike articles and essays, are very expensive to produce. But Russia is a complex society, deeply troubled, but also misunderstood
by the West. If my films, such as Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File , and Russian Lessons (2010) were attacked
by pro-government media, then some of my articles were censored by the independent, "opposition" outlets, such as Ekho Moskvy
.
4) Did you actually begin filming the movie with an outcome of supporting Browder's story in mind, as you represent in the
film, or did you plan from the start of the filming process to end the film as it now stands?
AN : I started filming the story. I totally believed in the story that Browder had told me, and all the mainstream media repeated
after him.
5) You know that there are many more "disappeared" journalists and others listed in the formal US Congress Magnitsky Act
who have suffered from the effects of corrupt power in Russia. Why did you not address the fates of some of those others as well
in your film?
AN : I may be misunderstanding this question, but I do not see how addressing the fates of "disappeared" journalists and others'
would be relevant to the topic of my film in its final version. I obviously condemn the "disappearance" of journalists and others.
In Russia journalists disappear usually by being "simply" shot (not in "sophisticated" Saudi ways), and as far as I remember only
one is referred to in The Magnitsky Act , Paul Khlebnikov. He was the editor of Forbes, Russia , and was shot in 2004
when Bill Browder was a great fan of Vladimir Putin and continued to be for some time. I have not seen any evidence or even claim,
that Putin may have been behind that murder. I was a friend of Anna Politkovskaya, perhaps the most famous of all Russian journalists
who was assassinated in the recent past. She is featured in my film, Poisoned by Polonium .
The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a
fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally
sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international
organizations.
6) Does William Browder's role in the formulation of the Magnitsky Act invalidate its value and that of the Global
Magnitsky Act, in seeking to provide protection for those suffering from the effects of deadly and corrupt power such as the recently
deceased Saudi Arabian journalist, Jamal Khashoggi?
AN : Let me, for the argument's sake, pose myself what would seem like a version of your question: "Would Browder's role in creating
a weapon that could protect someone like Khashoggi from deadly and corrupt power invalidate that weapon?" My answer would be, no,
it would not invalidate that weapon. However, we are dealing with a fallacy here, in my humble opinion. The Magnitsky Act, in
my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of
Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was
he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never
mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people
named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen
and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights
of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent
investigator or judge.
Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West
is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be
built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But
the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union.
Choi Chatterjee is a Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. Chatterjee, along with Steven Marks,
Mary Neuberger, and Steve Sabol, edited The Wider Arc of Revolution in three volumes (Slavica Publishers).
Relationship with the only nation on Earth besides US is the main casualty of Russiagate. Ever since the religious schism of 1054,
the West has failed to understand Russia. In the 19th Century only Harvard even offered a Russian language course. Our main ally,
Britian, has been irrationally Russophobic since Benjamin Disraeli. There is no evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Internet Research Institute was a commercial click bait business, staffed by underpaid grad students, not KGB spies. The DNC
files were not hacked, they were downloaded by disgruntled Bernie Bros and given to Wikileaks.
Trump gave Putin the respect he deserves at Helsinki. Putin has done much for his country, and the world, by checking Western
Imperialism in the Ukraine, Syria, and now Venezuela. History will recognize Putin as the preeminent statesman of the early 21
Century, and will honor Trump to the extent Trump recognizes that.
"Were these gun rights folks potentially a conduit for Russian money alongside other forms of
Russian government influence on our 2016 campaign?" -- Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, July 25, 2018
Let me add my two cents. If you accuse someone of wrong-doing, and the accusation is serious,
then two points:
1. A basic moral principle undergirding what we call "civilization" is the notion that the
burden of proof is on the accuser. It is the accuser that must prove the accusation. The
accused, or any of the accused defenders, DO NOT HAVE TO "PROVE" ANYTHING, PERIOD.
2. The more serious the accusation, the stiffer the burden of proof. Period.
Because of their flagrant disregard for these basic principles, what we call the
"mainstream media" in the U.S. has shown itself to be utterly worthless and untrustworthy.
And the MORE serious the issue, the LESS trustworthy it is!
Just like the Muslim freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's courageous stand against the
fascist duopoly's attempt to crush her for daring to not back down from calling AIPAC a foreign
lobby was a watershed moment in confronting the uncritical support of a RW Israeli government,
Greenwald's blistering takedown of fellow journalist David Cay Johnston, and by extension the
entire American MSM, is another watershed moment in the growing divide between media
corporatists (Neoliberals & Neocons), who are straining themselves to keep afloat a Duopoly
system that could arguably be called fascism which has been in place since at least the turn of
the century (if not longer), and the surging dissidents who see this as the fundamental problem
above all else.
The Red Herring Russia Hysteria Meltdown turned out to be a proxy battle between the few
dissenters who believe that the capitalist Duopoly is the real problem (with Money In Politics
being the cement that keeps it together) and have never bought into this farce; and the many
mainstream media lapdogs, $hillary zombies and Democratic Party loyalists who concocted and
desperately wanted needed to believe it. They completely melted down to lose all
sense of reason and rationale in their hyperventilation to keep propped up the rotting edifice
of a party and system within which those players have been able to continue getting rich from
and to go merrily believing that dutifully voting for the Lesser of Two Evils is the full
enshrinement of the Greatest Democracy Money Can Buy In The World .
The idea that electioneering, which is what placing ads is (even a minuscule amount), could
be conflated with collusion by a foreign government to steal an election, was so laughably
outrageous. Furthermore, to imply that our elections were so pure and that we didn't do such
things around the world ourselves (despite that the CIA had brutally intervened in over 50 elections
globally ), just put the icing on our incredulity. As for Trump's criminality, there was
plenty of that to go around. But where was the media to thoroughly vet him during the campaign?
Nowhere in sight, or rather televising gawking at his non-stop, car crash porn of a
campaign which was driving advertising dollars into their pockets. But we were supposed to
believe they suddenly got into gear once he was elected and became these super sleuths? What a
fucking joke.
There were only a relative handful of us who never believed this infuriating garbage.
Virtually the entire MSM engaged in one of the worst, most embarrassing examples of propaganda
the country has ever seen, as Taibbi writes here and
here. It confoundingly gripped even some of the smarter people we all knew. Lost to
propaganda. But then they ultimately lost, big-time.
What was at risk? Only nuclear war with Russia. And, just as consequential, this farce took
up all the air in the room, spreading false hope to demented $hillary losers who could be found
whimpering on their couches curled up in the fetal position in front of MSNBC every night, a
bottle of white wine atop the magazines on the coffee table. One could gather up a trove of
issues that weren't talked about at all by the MSM, including the massive teacher's strikes
happening all over the country, continued health insurance nightmares, the existential threat
of climate change, rampant poverty, widespread depressed wages and overworking, Yemen, Trump's
outrageously corrupt cabinet and their massive power grabs, etc., etc., etc.
It is right now that this country, and especially its journalists, have to have a
completely honest existential dialogue about what has been going on, how we got here, who is
responsible and what is driving it (which we know will probably never come, though there are
some signs of admission, which I've started to compile for another essay).
For this reason, the interview really has to be seen to be experienced. The anger at all
this just wells up in Greenwald and he really doesn't hold back. As we know he's long been one
of the very quickest-minded, most cogent and incisive journalists of this era. Under normal
circumstances few can withstand his sheer power of his lightning intellect. This poor shlub,
who has written some really good things about income inequality and Wall St criminality but
carried on the lie, was so justifiably exposed for his dumb stance and continued obstinacy
about it.
But if you're short for time here's some of the best segments (though you really should see
Greenwald's disgust).
He lit into Rachel Maddow, the MSM and the Democratic Party. He slammed the highest rated
liberal show host who "every single night misled millions of liberals into believing something
that was totally false," calling that decision "extremely grave and serious," and saying that
"there will be no reckoning and consequences for this story that the media got radically,
fundamentally and deliberately wrong for almost three years now in a very dangerous way."
(all emphasis mine)
This is the saddest media spectacle I've ever seen, since I began practicing journalism in
2005. And what makes it even sadder is to watch all of the people who vested their
journalistic credibility into what proved to be a complete and total fraud and scam continue
to try and cling to some vestige of credibility by continuing to spin conspiracy theories
that are even more reckless and more unhinged than the ones to which we've been subjected for
three years .
... I believe that Donald Trump is one of the most corrupt people ever to occupy the White
House. I am certain that he's guilty of all kinds of crimes -- war crimes as president,
financial crimes as a business person. One of the reasons why those of us who were so angry
about this obsession on Russia and collusion, aside from the fact that it was so dangerous to
ratchet up tensions between two nuclear-armed powers this way instead of trying to forge a
peace between these two countries, is precisely because it took the oxygen away from all of
the things that the Trump administration is doing that is so damaging, in lieu of this
idiotic, moronic, Tom Clancy-type espionage thriller, where we were talking about Putin
blackmailing Donald Trump with pee-pee tapes and Donald Trump being a Russian agent since
1987, which was a cover story that was on New York magazine, that Chris Hayes put on MSNBC.
Just all kinds of moronic conspiracies, that we love to mock other countries' medias for
circulating and disseminating, drowned out our airwaves and our discourse for three years,
preventing us from focusing on the real, substantive damage that the Trump administration is
doing and that Donald Trump's corruption entails.
He eviscerated Johnston's mealy-mouthed walk backs and continued spinning of this through
the course of the interview, and the proxy MSM:
But the reality is, the media chose to focus on this. Everybody knows this. David Cay
Johnston was on your show, Amy, a week ago, and he said, "Donald Trump, I believe, is a
Russian agent." We now have a full-scale, 20-month investigation by somebody that everybody
agreed was a man of great integrity who would get to the bottom of all of this, who had full
subpoena power. And David keeps trying to imply, which is totally false, that all that
Mueller said was, "Oh, it just doesn't rise to the level of criminality." That is not what he
said. He said, after 20 months of a full-scale investigation -- which, by the way, included
hours of interrogating Donald Trump Jr. before Congress, all of the transcripts of which were
made available to Mueller, which he could have prosecuted Trump Jr. on for perjury and
obstruction had Donald Trump Jr. lied about anything, but he chose not to. He said, "After
reviewing all of this evidence, I am concluding that this did not happen," not that it
doesn't rise to the level where I can criminally prosecute. He's saying there was no
collusion.
The game is over, and it's time to be honest about it. And the more we try to cling to
this and invent new -- you know what it reminds me of? In 2003, when the neocons finally had
to face the truth that there were no WMDs, that they had fabricated that, that the media had
misled millions of people around the world for years, and they started saying, "Um, maybe
Saddam hid them in Syria. Maybe they're buried in places we just haven't looked yet." It's
time to face the truth. The media got this story wrong. They obsessed on this for three
years, and all this time there was no evidence for it. It was just a conspiracy theory.
Rachel Maddow, the most influential liberal TV host in the country, every single night misled
millions of liberals into believing something that was totally false, and there will be no
media consequences for it. And that is extremely grave and serious, no matter how much is
true about how corrupt Donald Trump is in his financial dealings or any of the other stuff
that people are now trying to deflect our attention onto.
Then he turned to the fundamental questions of the actual election, never discussed in the
MSM:
Why did millions of people vote for a complete joke of a game show host? And how did the
Democrats lose the presidency to one of the most embarrassing spectacles of a candidate in
U.S. history? What is the prevailing ideology of the ruling class that has turned millions
and millions of people, and to this country, into such angry citizens that they either refuse
to vote or vote for the person who promises to burn down the entire system? Why are they so
angry? What has happened to their economic security? What ideology and what group of people
are responsible for that? What has Donald Trump been doing in realigning the United States
away from the Western Europe and to Saudi despots, and the collusion that actually happened,
which was from the Israeli government during the election in order to undermine Obama's
policies? All those kinds of questions could have been asked and should have been asked, but
it all got drowned out because we were all so much more fascinated by this superficial, kind
of very appealing and melodramatic espionage thriller, that has completely destroyed the
credibility of the U.S. media and so tragically vindicated Donald Trump in a way that
probably is the greatest gift that has been given to him throughout his entire
presidency.
When reminded that last year Chomsky said the rest of the world was looking at our media's
obsession that Russia's meddling in the election helped Trump was a "joke", he said this:
Well, that's been the other critical point this entire time, is this kind of melodrama
over the outrage that any country would dare to interfere in our sacred and glorious
democracy, when, as Noam Chomsky just pointed out and has spent the last 40 years pointing
out, the United States has done very little since the end of World War II but going around
the world and interfering in every single democracy that they can find , literally, including
the country in which I'm currently living, which is Brazil, where they overthrew a
democratically elected government in 1964 and then proceeded to impose a military regime for
21 years, and also Russia, where they openly boasted about helping to elect Boris Yeltsin
because he would privatize everything and that would be good for U.S. industry, or even
agitating anti-Putin resistance in parliamentary elections under Hillary Clinton's reign as
secretary of state .
This doesn't make it right for Russia to do it, but we've never kept in perspective the
fact that interfering or meddling in other countries' elections or governance is not some
grave, aberrational, never-before-heard drama that the entire world has to stop and lament
and put an end to. It's normal business. We're currently, right now, in the process of trying
to change the government of Venezuela openly, and have done so over and over around the
world. And that's why Noam Chomsky says that all of this moral outrage of Americans at the
idea that somebody would interfere in or meddle in our democracy has made the U.S. a
laughingstock to the hundreds of millions of people -- billions, in fact -- who live in
countries where the U.S. has done this and far, far worse for decade after decade after
decade .
Painting the pig's face
1. The left never had a dog in this race. This was always an in-house squabble between
different wings of the establishment. Late-stage capitalism is in terminal crisis, and the
biggest problem facing our corporate elites is how to emerge from this crisis with their
power intact. One wing wants to make sure the pig's face remains painted, the other is happy
simply getting its snout deeper into the trough while the food lasts...
The leaders of the Democratic party are less terrified of Trump and what he represents
than they are of us and what we might do if we understood how they have rigged the political
and economic system to their permanent advantage.
It may look like Russiagate was a failure, but it was actually a success. It deflected the
left's attention from endemic corruption within the leadership of the Democratic party, which
supposedly represents the left. It rechannelled the left's political energies instead towards
the convenient bogeymen targets of Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Mired in corruption
What Mueller found -- all he was ever going to find -- was marginal corruption in the
Trump camp. And that was inevitable because Washington is mired in corruption. In fact, what
Mueller revealed was the most exceptional forms of corruption among Trump's team while
obscuring the run-of-the-mill stuff that would have served as a reminder of the endemic
corruption infecting the Democratic leadership too.
An anti-corruption investigation would have run much deeper and exposed far more. It would
have highlighted the Clinton Foundation, and the role of mega-donors like James Simons,
George Soros and Haim Saban who funded Hillary's campaign with one aim in mind: to get their
issues into a paid-for national "consensus".
Further, in focusing on the Trump camp -- and relative minnows like Paul Manafort and
Roger Stone -- the Russiagate inquiry actually served to shield the Democratic leadership
from an investigation into the much worse corruption revealed in the content of the DNC
emails.
Trump empowered
2. But it's far worse than that. It is not just that the left wasted two years of
political energy on Russiagate. At the same time, they empowered Trump, breathing life into
his phoney arguments that he is the anti-establishment president, a people's president the
elites are determined to destroy...
The other wing of the neoliberal establishment, the one represented by the Democratic
party leadership, fears that exposing capitalism in this way -- making explicit its
inherently brutal, wrist-slitting tendencies -- will awaken the masses, that over time it
will risk turning them into revolutionaries. Democratic party leaders fear Trump chiefly
because of the threat he poses to the image of the political and economic system they have so
lovingly crafted so that they can continue enriching themselves and their children.
The whole thing is excellent. You should read it.
There is a serious reckoning going on right now. Call 'em what you will,
Neoliberals/Corporatists/Beltway/Necons, are being exposed for all-time. The curtain is off the
hooks on its way down.
The whole Red Herring RussiaGate Hysteria Meltdown strikes me as this:
It was concocted first and foremost as a distraction from the shock suffered by Hillary
fans and the MSM that HRC was such a horrible, highly disliked and untrustworthy candidate,
and that she pathetically lost to a candidate with the same characteristics in a contest of
who was absolutely just a little less detested than the other. The scorned $hillary
sycophants, who willfully refused to step outside the bubble of It's Her Turn - All Things
Hillary world, had their hubris so shaken, rattled and rolled that for their sanity, and by
extension the rest of the country who also believed that ours wasn't such a rotting system
that could upchuck a demented clown like Trump, they had to insist blame lie elsewhere
(racism, Russia, etc) than their laughably horrible campaign and a roiling disgust with
politics as usual.
The mass hysteria of Trump/Russia shooting out like a fire hydrant every night on cable
tv and social media was also designed as the perfect foil for covering up the flagrant and
brazen collusion to cheat Bernie out of the nomination. "Who cares about that, when we have a
president illegally occupying the White House as a puppet of Putin?" All of the legitimate
evidence of electoral fraud, voter roll purges, caucus cheating, insider collusion, paid
media hatchet jobs, etc (in other words, everything the Repubs are charged with but that the
DNC did to Bernie) got buried under this avalanche. This is probably the thing that'll remain
most enraging to me: all of that massive, genuine support for a movement candidate viciously
torn to pieces, having the effect of a whole next generation of folks crippled in their
belief about electoral politics.
Secondarily, this also served as the perfect cover, taking up all the air in the room, to
having the discussion about our entire election process. Beginning with the elephant in the
room: "how did it come this - first of all, that the two most hated candidates were our only
choices (most people never consider a third party, which is a whole other subject)? The 2016
election process should have ripped the mask off of the false pride we have in our decrepitly
corrupt elections, in which the whole process has been nothing more than an Auction House to
the Highest Bidder, at every level. Then there's the "electoral college," the private
national committees running the parties' elections, the debate limitations, "superdelegates,"
gerrymandering, no active and real membership in either party (only an expectation usually
driven by fear and threat, that you blindly keep showing up to vote for your party).
It was also a huge, wildly lame gambit to inure the Democrats from having to address the
real issues that are effecting people, hoping instead to be able to run again only as "We're
Not Trump." Poll after poll showed most Americans could care less about Russia , with almost
every issue polling higher.
The Mueller deification was also a natural reaction by a soft and pampered American
people who have been conditioned to look for heroes to swoop in and make everything ok
again, as can be found in a child's fable. Nobody wants to do the hard work anymore of
being civilly engaged, informed and asking questions. Consumerism, social media
self-aggrandizement and 24/7 entertainment have replaced it.
This was the Democrats lazy way out, which was the perfect foil for a lazy citizenry who
have come to expect coddling in every aspect of their lives. It was also what they're
expected to do on behalf of their donors. Few can be bothered to be involved civically in
any way, show up in person to support an oppressed or marginalized faction (not just sign
an online petition). A lot of this simply boiled down to a salient truth few wanted to
accept: that almost all politicians are paid to do as little as possible for the people,
biding their time in office ruffling as few feathers as possible, for the express purpose
of then re-entering the political world as lobbyists so that they can enrich their campaign
donors exponentially after they've learned the ropes inside.
It's so obvious why most Bernie supporters, but not all - because a good bit fell into
the all-consuming MSM trap of Russia propaganda and became afflicted with Trump Derangement
Syndrome, never bought into this ludicrous bullshit. They had endured being firsthand
witnesses to the rampant election fraud being pulled by the DNC during the 2106 primary, of
which the MSM completely and utterly turned a blind eye. If it was possible that the media
could collude in that way, then it was possible that the media could do the same for the
opposite.
The irony of it still stings: the media with its resources could have easily turned up
easily verifiable evidence of tampering and kinds of fraud during the DNC primary; but
instead they went all in for the most absurd and ridiculous hare-brained scheme that the
Orange Buffoon was the one who colluded with Russia to steal the election. If any of these
Beltway, cocktail party lapdogs had just once ventured out of their gated communities and
conventional thinking to be bothered to visit the heartland they would have seen that the
country was in the midst of a populist revolution, most prominently dominated by support
for Bernie Sanders but also to a slightly lesser degree for Drumpf.
There's a major chasm starting to split the land, between those who cling to the myth of
American Exceptionalism and fealty to the two political parties of the Duopoly, and a
burgeoning movement of people distrustful of the power structure and its propaganda to hide the
truth about a dying system.
Fred - I don't think it's going to go away that easily. This is the BBC web site today, again
keeping alive much the same theme as your man of courage. We're moving on from whether Trump
was a Russian agent to whether Trump deliberately attempted to stop us finding out whether he
was a Russian agent -
"But Mr Mueller declined to draw a conclusion on whether Mr Trump had obstructed
justice, saying only that the president could not be exonerated.
Attorney General Barr, who was appointed by the president, concluded in his summary of
the report that there was not enough evidence to determine if the president had committed the
offence."
So it's too useful a theme to be let go entirely, and fits with the general suspicion of
Russian interference.
It's a difficult one, that. Looking at the Integrity Initiative and 77 Brigade it's clear
that information warfare at all levels - academia, the media, on down to the little
subsidized web sites and right on down to the individuals who are paid to insert comments on
social media - is now regarded in England as an integral part of Intelligence work.
Presumably everyone else is doing it too so why not the Russians? But to trace the huge
political movements of our time back to Moscow, as if they were due to sinister Russians
cleverly playing us via social media and other propaganda outlets, seems to me to be grossly
overdone. After all, if it were that easy it would have worked for the West too. Iran would
now be another Syria and Syria long since gone.
No, even the most ardent Russophobes on our side of the Atlantic might have to admit
sometimes that the reason we're screwed up in Europe at present is that we've screwed
ourselves up. We are not uniformly happy prosperous peoples who would continue to be
uniformly happy and prosperous were it not for Moscow. So it must be in the States.
Even so, the Russians are still the get-out for many. On English web sites "Putin done it"
surfaces regularly as the reason for us voting Brexit. There were suggestions that he had
stirred up the Yellow Vests in France. The Italians are sometimes viewed with suspicion for
the same reason.
And I got caught up in an unusual traffic hold-up just this morning. I can't prove to you
it was the Russians. But can you prove to me it wasn't?
The best defense, the saying goes, is a good offense.
The key orchestrators of the Big Trump-Russia Collusion Lie seem to have hewed tightly to that tactical advice.
Over the past two years, one of their biggest "tells" has been their hyper-aggressive and gratuitous attacks on the president.
Given that special counsel Robert Mueller 's
investigation found no collusion or obstruction of justice, their constant broadsides now look, in retrospect, like calculated pre-emptive
strikes to deflect attention and culpability away from themselves.
By accusing Mr. Trump of what they themselves
were guilty of, they created a masterful distraction through projection.
We now know that former FBI
Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew
McCabe, are hip-deep in the conspiracy. Both wrote supposed "tell-all" books and carpet-bombed the media with interviews in which
they regularly flung criminal accusations against the president. Whenever asked about their own roles, they reverted to denouncing
Mr. Trump .
With Mr. Mueller 's findings,
Mr. Comey 's and Mr. McCabe's media benders look
increasingly suspicious.
As do those of their comrades in the Obama national security apparatus, including former Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper and his partner in possible crime, former
CIA Director
John Brennan , who, apart from former President
Barack Obama himself, may be the biggest player
of them all.
Any investigation into the origins and execution of the Big Lie must focus on Mr.
Brennan , whose job as the nation's chief spook
would have prohibited him, by law, from engaging in any domestic political spy games.
Of course, the law didn't stop him from illegally spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee by hacking into its computers and
lying repeatedly about it, prompting Democratic senators to call for his resignation.
Once out of Langley, Mr. Brennan tore into
Mr. Trump, accusing him of "treason" (among other crimes) in countless television appearances and bitter tweets. It got so vicious
that Mr. Trump pulled his security clearance.
Consider a few critical data points.
The Obama Department of Justice and
FBI targeting of two low-level
Trump aides, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, was carried out in the spring of 2016 because they wanted to spy on the Trump campaign
but needed a way in. They enlisted an American academic and shadowy
FBI informant named Stefan
Halper to repeatedly sidle up to both Mr. Papadopoulos and Mr. Page. But complementing his work for the
FBI , Mr. Halper had a side
gig as an intelligence operative with longstanding ties to the
CIA and British intelligence
MI6.
Another foreign professor, Joseph Mifsud, who played an important early part in targeting Papadopoulos, also had abiding ties
to the CIA , MI6
and the British foreign secretary.
A third operative, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, targeted Mr. Papadopoulos in a London bar. It was Mr. Downer's "tip"
to the FBI that provided the
justification for the start of Russia counterintelligence investigation, complete with fraudulently-obtained FISA warrants to spy
on the Trump campaign.
All of these interactions reek of entrapment. Mr. Papadopoulos now says, "I believe Australian and UK intelligence were involved
in an active operation to target Trump and his associates." Like Mr. Halper and Mr. Mifsud, Mr. Downer had ties to the
CIA , MI6 and (surprise!)
the Clintons.
Given the deep intelligence backgrounds of these folks, it's difficult to believe that former DOJ/
FBI officials such as Peter
Strzok or even James Comey and Andrew McCabe
on their own devised the plan to deploy them.
So: who did? How did the relationships with Messrs. Halper, Mifsud and Downer come about? Who suggested them for these tasks?
To whom did they report? How were they compensated?
Any investigation must follow the money -- and the personnel. There were plenty of DOJ/
FBI officials involved, but
what about intelligence officials? Was Mr. Brennan
a central player in the hoax, which would help explain the participation of Mr. Halper, Mr. Mifsud and Mr. Downer? Intel officials
are likely to draw on other intelligence operatives.
There is also a glimpse of a paper trail.
Fox News' Catherine Herridge reported last week that "in a Dec. 12, 2016 text, [
FBI lawyer Lisa] Page wrote
to McCabe: "Btw, Clapper told Pete that he was meeting with
Brennan and Cohen for dinner tonight. Just
FYSA [for your situational awareness ]."
"Within a minute, McCabe replied, "OK."
Ms. Herridge notes that those named are likely Peter Strzok and
Mr. Brennan 's then-deputy, David Cohen. Ms. Herridge
also notes that while we don't yet know what was discussed during the dinner, government sources thought it "irregular" for Mr. Clapper
to be in contact with the more junior-level Mr. Strzok. She also points out that the text came "during a critical time for the Russia
probe."
Indeed. It was right before the publication of the ICA, the official Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian 2016 election
interference.
As Paul Sperry has reported, "A source close to the House investigation said
Brennan himself selected the
CIA and
FBI analysts who worked on
the ICA, and that they included former
FBI counterespionage chief
Peter Strzok.
"Strzok was the intermediary between Brennan
and Comey , and he was one of the authors
of the ICA," according to the source." Recall that the dossier-based ICA was briefed to
Obama , Trump and Congress ahead of Trump's
inauguration.
Post- Mueller report,
Mr. Brennan is spinning wildly that perhaps his
early condemnations of Mr. Trump were based on
"bad information."
These are just some of the threads suggesting Mr.
Brennan may be one of the Masters of the Big Lie, requiring full investigation.
If the devil is in the details, Mr. Brennan
is all over the details.
No wonder he -- and his fellow caballers -- have been so loud. They doth protest too much.
By accusing Mr. Trump of what they themselves
were guilty of, they created a masterful distraction through projection.
Hillary setup a unsecured server and had confidential government information on it, including 20 emails with Obama suspiciously
using an alias. If you're in law enforcement, and get a tip that Papadopolous may get some of those emails from Russians, what
crime has been committed by Papadopolous? Isn't Papadopolous doing the US a favor by obtaining those emails from those who hacked
her server?
If you believe Hillary that her server wasn't hacked (and you don't have any evidence because Obama's people allowed practically
all the evidence to be destroyed) then there's no reason to investigate Papadopolous. If you think Hillary's server was hacked,
shouldn't you be investigating her and examining her server to see who hacked her and what damage was done, such as blackmailing
her and Obama into appeasement and flexibility, like selling 20% of the US's uranium reserves to Russians just before an election?
John Brennan, James Clapper, Strozk, Ohr, Page were only some of Obama's political pythons operating in the jungle of Washington.
Obama orchestrated a symphony of harmful actions that will take the US a generation to recover from. That is if Obama's criminal
actions can be undone and then we get to recover.
"... "You know all of this has been invented, made up by people who are in opposition to President Trump with a view to shedding a negative light on what Trump is doing," ..."
"... Meetings between Russian diplomatic officials and Trump's campaign team before the election were routine and normal, and part of a process to figure out what a potential U.S. candidate will do should he or she come to power, Putin said. But those meetings, particularly those involving the former Russian ambassador to the U.S., were twisted by Trump's opponents. ..."
"... "For me, it's very bizarre," Putin said. "I don't understand what someone saw there that was out of place in those meetings, and why all this should turn into a kind of 'spymania.'" ..."
Accusations that Donald Trump's team colluded with the Kremlin during the 2016 U.S.
presidential election campaign are an invention of the American president's opposition that has
sparked "spymania" in Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday.
"You know all of this has been invented, made up by people who are in opposition to
President Trump with a view to shedding a negative light on what Trump is doing," Putin said,
responding to a U.S. journalist's question during his annual marathon news conference in
Moscow.
Meetings between Russian diplomatic officials and Trump's campaign team before the election
were routine and normal, and part of a process to figure out what a potential U.S. candidate
will do should he or she come to power, Putin said. But those meetings, particularly those
involving the former Russian ambassador to the U.S., were twisted by Trump's opponents.
"For me, it's very bizarre," Putin said. "I don't understand what someone saw there that was
out of place in those meetings, and why all this should turn into a kind of 'spymania.'"
This article by late Robert Parry is from 2016 but is still relevant in context of the
current Ukrainian elections and the color revolution is Venezuela. The power of neoliberal
propaganda is simply tremendous. For foreign events it is able to distort the story to such an
extent that the most famous quote of CIA director William Casey "We'll know our disinformation
program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" looks like
constatation of already accomplished goal.
Exclusive: Several weeks before Ukraine's 2014 coup, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State
Nuland had already picked Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the future leader, but now "Yats" is no
longer the guy, writes Robert Parry.
In reporting on the resignation of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the major
U.S. newspapers either ignored or distorted Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's
infamous intercepted
phone call before the 2014 coup in which she declared "Yats is the guy!"
Though Nuland's phone call introduced many Americans to the previously obscure Yatsenyuk,
its timing – a few weeks before the ouster of elected Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych – was never helpful to Washington's desired narrative of the Ukrainian people
rising up on their own to oust a corrupt leader.
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the
Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.
Instead, the conversation between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt
sounded like two proconsuls picking which Ukrainian politicians would lead the new government.
Nuland also disparaged the less aggressive approach of the European Union with the pithy
put-down: "Fuck the E.U.!"
More importantly, the intercepted call, released onto YouTube in early February 2014,
represented powerful evidence that these senior U.S. officials were plotting – or at
least collaborating in – a coup d'etat against Ukraine's democratically elected
president. So, the U.S. government and the mainstream U.S. media have since consigned this
revealing discussion to the Great Memory Hole.
On Monday, in reporting on Yatsenyuk's Sunday speech in which he announced that he is
stepping down, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal didn't mention the Nuland-Pyatt
conversation at all. The New York Times did mention the call but misled its readers regarding
its timing, making it appear as if the call followed rather than preceded the coup. That way
the call sounded like two American officials routinely appraising Ukraine's future leaders, not
plotting to oust one government and install another.
The Times
article by Andrew E. Kramer said: "Before Mr. Yatsenyuk's appointment as prime minister in
2014, a leaked recording of a telephone conversation between Victoria J. Nuland, a United
States assistant secretary of state, and the American ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt,
seemed to underscore the West's support for his candidacy. 'Yats is the guy,' Ms. Nuland had
said."
Notice, however, that if you didn't know that the conversation occurred in late January or
early February 2014, you wouldn't know that it preceded the Feb. 22, 2014 coup. You might have
thought that it was just a supportive chat before Yatsenyuk got his new job.
You also wouldn't know that much of the Nuland-Pyatt conversation focused on how they
were going to "glue this thing" or "midwife this thing," comments sounding like prima facie
evidence that the U.S. government was engaged in "regime change" in Ukraine, on Russia's
border.
The 'No Coup' Conclusion
But Kramer's lack of specificity about the timing and substance of the call fits with a long
pattern of New York Times' bias in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis. On Jan. 4, 2015, nearly
a year after the U.S.-backed coup, the Times published an "investigation" article declaring
that there never had been a coup. It was just a case of President Yanukovych deciding to leave
and not coming back.
That article reached its conclusion, in part, by ignoring the evidence of a coup, including
the Nuland-Pyatt phone call. The story was co-written by Kramer and so it is interesting to
know that he was at least aware of the "Yats is the guy" reference although it was ignored in
last year's long-form article.
Instead, Kramer and his co-author Andrew Higgins took pains to mock anyone who actually
looked at the evidence and dared reach the disfavored conclusion about a coup. If you did, you
were some rube deluded by Russian propaganda.
"Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych's ouster to what it portrays as a violent,
'neo-fascist' coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular
uprising," Higgins and Kramer
wrote . "Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin's
line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych's government, questions remain about
how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely."
The Times' article concluded that Yanukovych "was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by
his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone
else. The allies' desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by the seizing by
protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the country. But just as important, the
review of the final hours shows, was the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych's
own efforts to make peace."
Yet, one might wonder what the Times thinks a coup looks like. Indeed, the Ukrainian coup
had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in
1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.
The way those coups played out is now historically well known. Secret U.S. government
operatives planted nasty propaganda about the targeted leader, stirred up political and
economic chaos, conspired with rival political leaders, spread rumors of worse violence to come
and then – as political institutions collapsed – watched as the scared but duly
elected leader made a hasty departure.
In Iran, the coup reinstalled the autocratic Shah who then ruled with a heavy hand for the
next quarter century; in Guatemala, the coup led to more than three decades of brutal military
regimes and the killing of some 200,000 Guatemalans.
Coups don't have to involve army tanks occupying the public squares, although that is an
alternative model which follows many of the same initial steps except that the military is
brought in at the end. The military coup was a common approach especially in Latin America in
the 1960s and 1970s.
' Color Revolutions'
But the preferred method in more recent years has been the "color revolution," which
operates behind the façade of a "peaceful" popular uprising and international pressure
on the targeted leader to show restraint until it's too late to stop the coup. Despite the
restraint, the leader is still accused of gross human rights violations, all the better to
justify his removal.
Later, the ousted leader may get an image makeover; instead of a cruel bully, he is
ridiculed for not showing sufficient resolve and letting his base of support melt away, as
happened with Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
But the reality of what happened in Ukraine was never hard to figure out. Nor did you have
to be inside "the Russian propaganda bubble" to recognize it. George Friedman, the founder of
the global intelligence firm Stratfor, called Yanukovych's overthrow "the most blatant coup
in history."
Which is what it appears if you consider the evidence. The first step in the process was to
create tensions around the issue of pulling Ukraine out of Russia's economic orbit and
capturing it in the European Union's gravity, a plan defined by influential American neocons in
2013.
On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a
major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and
called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian
President Vladimir Putin.
At the time, Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100
million a year, was financing scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for
journalists and organizing business groups.
As for the even bigger prize -- Putin -- Gershman wrote: "Ukraine's choice to join Europe
will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.
Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near
abroad but within Russia itself."
At that time, in early fall 2013, Ukraine's President Yanukovych was exploring the idea of
reaching out to Europe with an association agreement. But he got cold feet in November 2013
when economic experts in Kiev advised him that the Ukrainian economy would suffer a $160
billion hit if it separated from Russia, its eastern neighbor and major trading partner. There
was also the West's demand that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International
Monetary Fund.
Yanukovych wanted more time for the E.U. negotiations, but his decision angered many western
Ukrainians who saw their future more attached to Europe than Russia. Tens of thousands of
protesters began camping out at Maidan Square in Kiev, with Yanukovych ordering the police to
show restraint.
Meanwhile, with Yanukovych shifting back toward Russia, which was offering a more generous
$15 billion loan and discounted natural gas, he soon became the target of American neocons and
the U.S. media, which portrayed Ukraine's political unrest as a black-and-white case of a
brutal and corrupt Yanukovych opposed by a saintly "pro-democracy" movement.
Cheering an Uprising
The Maidan uprising was urged on by American neocons, including Assistant Secretary of State
for European Affairs Nuland, who passed out cookies at the Maidan and reminded Ukrainian
business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their "European
aspirations."
A screen shot of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland
speaking to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, at an event sponsored by
Chevron, with its logo to Nuland's left.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, also showed up, standing on stage with right-wing extremists
from the Svoboda Party and telling the crowd that the United States was with them in their
challenge to the Ukrainian government.
As the winter progressed, the protests grew more violent. Neo-Nazi and other extremist
elements from Lviv and other western Ukrainian cities began arriving in well-organized brigades
or "sotins" of 100 trained street fighters. Police were attacked with firebombs and other
weapons as the violent protesters began seizing government buildings and unfurling Nazi banners
and even a Confederate flag.
Though Yanukovych continued to order his police to show restraint, he was still depicted
in the major U.S. news media as a brutal thug who was callously murdering his own people. The
chaos reached a climax on Feb. 20 when mysterious snipers opened fire, killing both police and
protesters. As the police retreated, the militants advanced brandishing firearms and other
weapons. The confrontation led to significant loss of life, pushing the death toll to around 80
including more than a dozen police.
U.S. diplomats and the mainstream U.S. press immediately blamed Yanukovych for the sniper
attack, though the circumstances remain murky to this day and some investigations have
suggested that the lethal sniper fire came from buildings controlled by Right Sektor
extremists.
To tamp down the worsening violence, a shaken Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal on
Feb. 21, in which he accepted reduced powers and an early election so he could be voted out of
office. He also agreed to requests from Vice President Joe Biden to pull back the police.
The precipitous police withdrawal opened the path for the neo-Nazis and other street
fighters to seize presidential offices and force Yanukovych and his officials to flee for their
lives. The new coup regime was immediately declared "legitimate" by the U.S. State Department
with Yanukovych sought on murder charges. Nuland's favorite, Yatsenyuk, became the new prime
minister.
Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted
protesters versus a black-hatted president. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who
fired on unarmed supporters of "democracy." The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American
people heard from the major media.
The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and
simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times
report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: "More than 80 protesters were shot to death
by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February."
The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that
an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as
simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and
peaceful Maidan protests.
Any reference to a "coup" was dismissed as "Russian propaganda." There was a parallel
determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had
played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup
resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians
simply became "Russian aggression."
Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As filmed by a
Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)
This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing
of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II –
reached absurd levels as The New York Times and The Washington Post buried references to the
neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.
The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by
quoting one militia commander as calling them "romantic" gestures by impressionable young men.
[See Consortiumnews.com's " Ukraine's
'Romantic' Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers ."]
But today – more than two years after what U.S. and Ukrainian officials like to
call "the Revolution of Dignity" – the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government is sinking into
dysfunction, reliant on handouts from the IMF and Western governments.
And, in a move perhaps now more symbolic than substantive, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is
stepping down. Yats is no longer the guy.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The
Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen
Narrative, either in print here or
as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
Khalid Talaat , April 16, 2016 at 20:39
Is it too far fetched to think that all these color revolutions are a perfection of the
process to unleash another fake color revolution, only this time it is a Red, White and Blue
revolution here at home? Those that continue to booze and snooze while watching the tube will
not know the difference until it is too late.
The freedom and tranquility of our country depends on finding and implementing a
counterweight to the presstitutes and their propaganda. The alternative is too
destructive in its natural development.
Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:49
Yats and Porko are the guys who broke Ukraine. By the end of December 2015, Ukraine's
gross domestic product had shrunk around 19 percent in comparison with 2013. Its decimated
industrial sector needs less fuel. Yatsie did a heck of a job.
The timing of "Yats" departure is ominous. Mid-April, six weeks from now would be the
first chance to renew the invasion of DPR Donesk/Lugansk."Yats" failed in 2014, and didn't
try in 2015. Who is "the new guy"? Will the new Prime Minister begin raving about renewing
the holy war to recover the lost oblasts? 2016 is really Ukraine's last chance. Ukraine
refuses to implement Minsk2, and they have been receiving lots of new weapons. I believe
President Putin put the Syrian operation on " standby" not only to avoid approaching the
border, provoking a Turkish intervention, but also so he can give undistracted attention to
DPR Donesk/Lugansk.
Bill Rood , April 12, 2016 at 11:50
I guess I must be inside the Russian propaganda bubble. It was obvious to me when I
looked at the YouTube videos of policemen burning after being hit with Molotov
cocktails.
We played the same game of encouraging government "restraint" in Syria, where we
demanded Assad free "political prisoners," but we now accuse him of deliberately encouraging
ISIS by freeing those people, so that he can point to ISIS and ask, "Do you want that?"
Targeted leaders are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Andrei , April 12, 2016 at 10:26
"the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the
CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954", Romania 1989 Shots
were fired by snipers in order to stirr the crowds (sounds familiar?) and also by the army
after Ceasescu ran away, which resulted in civilians getting murdered. Could it possibly be
that it was said : "Iliescu (next elected president) is the guy!" ?
Joe L. , April 12, 2016 at 11:00
Check out the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela 2002, that is very
similar with protesters, snipers on rooftops, IMF immediately offering loans to the new coup
government, new government positions for the coup plotters, complacency with the media
– propaganda, funding by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy etc. John
Pilger documents how the coup occurred in his documentary "War on Democracy" –
https://vimeo.com/16724719 .
archaos , April 12, 2016 at 09:45
It was noted in the minutes of Verkhovna Rada almost 2 years before Maidan 2 , that
Geoffrey Pyatt was fomenting and funding destabilisation of Ukraine.
All of Svoboda Nazis in parliament (and other fascisti) then booed the MP who stated
this.
Mark Thomason , April 12, 2016 at 06:57
Also, the Dutch voted "no" on the economic agreement the coup was meant to force through
instead of the Russian agreement accepted by the President it overthrew. Now both "Yats" and
the economic agreement are gone. All that is left is the war. Neocons are still happen.
They wanted the war. They really want to overthrow Putin, and Ukraine was just a tool in
that.
Realist , April 12, 2016 at 05:51
You're right, it doesn't have to be the military that carries out a coup by deploying
tanks on the National Mall. In 2000, it was the United States Supreme Court that exceeded
its constitutional authority and installed George W. Bush as president, though in reality he
had lost that election. I wonder when that move will rightfully be characterized as a coup by
the historians.
"On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has
been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington
Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling
Russian President Vladimir Putin."
It should be remembered that Victoria Nuland took up the post of Assistant Secretary of
State for European and Eurasian Affairs in Washington on September 18, 2013.
Coincidentally, two other women closely connected to events in Ukraine were also in
Washington during September 2013.
Friend of Nuland and boss of the IMF, which has its own HQ in Washington, Christine
Lagarde was swift to respond to a Ukraine request for IMF loans on February 27th 2014, just
five days after the removal of Yanukovych on February 22nd. Lagarde is pictured with
Baronness Catherine Ashton in Washington in a Facebook entry dated September 30th 2013.
Ashton was High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy at the
time.
Though visiting Kiev at the same time as Nuland in February 2014 Catherine Ashton never
appeared in public with her, which seems a little odd considering the women were on the same
mission, and talking to the same people. Nevertheless, despite appearing shy of being
photographed with each other the two women weren't quite so shy of being pictured with
leaders of the coup, including the right wing extremist, Oleh Tyahnybok.
Ashton refused to be drawn into commenting on Nuland's "Fuck the E.U.!" outburst,
describing Nuland as "a friend of mine." The two women certainly weren't strangers, they had
worked closely together before. September 2012 saw them involved in discussions with Iran
negotiator Saeed Jalili over the country's supposed nuclear arms ambitions.
The question is not so much whether the three women talked about Ukraine's future –
it would be ridiculous to think they did not – but how closely they worked together,
and exactly how closely they might have been involved in events leading up to the overthrow
of the legitimate government in Kiev. More on this here:
Another failed "regime change". Aren't these guys (Neoconservatives) great. They fail,
piss off/kill millions, yet seem to keep making money and retaining power. Time to WAKE UP
AMERICA.
Skip Edwards , April 11, 2016 at 20:06
Read "The Devil'Chessboard" by David Talbot to understand what has been occurring as a
result of America's Dark, Shadow government, an un-elected bunch of vicious psychopaths
controlling our destiny; unless stopped. Get a clue and realize that "Yats is our guy"
Victoria Nuland was Hillary Clinton's "gal." Hillary Clinton is Robert Kagen's "gal." Time to
flush all these rats out of the hold and get on with our lives.
Joe L. , April 11, 2016 at 18:40
Mr. Parry thank you for delving into the proven history of coups and the parallels with
Ukraine. It amazes me how anyone can outright deny this was a coup especially if they know
anything about US coups going back to WW2 (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, attempt in
Venezuela 2002 etc. – and there are a whole slew more). I read before, as you have
rightly pointed out, that in 1953 the CIA led a propaganda campaign in Iran against Mossadegh
as well as financing opposition protesters and opposition government officials. Another
angle, as well, is looking historically back to what papers such as the New York Times were
reporting around the time of the coup in Iran – especially when we know that the
US/Britain overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh for their own oil interests
(British Petroleum):
New York Times: "Mossadegh Plays with Fire" (August 15, 1953):
The world has so many trouble spots these days that one is apt to pass over the odd one
here and there to preserve a little peace of mind. It would be well, however, to keep an eye
on Iran, where matters are going from bad to worse, thanks to the machinations of Premier
Mossadegh.
Some of us used to ascribe our inability to persuade Dr. Mossadegh of the validity of our
ideas to the impossibility of making him understand or see things our way. We thought of him
as a sincere, well-meaning, patriotic Iranian, who had a different point of view and made
different deductions from the same set of facts. We now know that he is a power-hungry,
personally ambitious, ruthless demagogue who is trampling upon the liberties of his own
people. We have seen this onetime champion of liberty maintain martial law, curb freedom of
the press, radio, speech and assembly, resort to illegal arrests and torture, dismiss the
Senate, destroy the power of the Shah, take over control of the army, and now he is about to
destroy the Majlis, which is the lower house of Parliament.
His power would seem to be complete, but he has alienated the traditional ruling classes
-the aristocrats, landlords, financiers and tribal leaders. These elements are
anti-Communist. So is the Shah and so are the army leaders and the urban middle classes.
There is a traditional, historic fear, suspicion and dislike of Russia and the Russians. The
peasants, who make up the overwhelming mass of the population, are illiterate and
nonpolitical. Finally, there is still no evidence that the Tudeh (Communist) party is strong
enough or well enough organized, financed and led to take power.
All this simply means that there is no immediate danger of a Communist coup or Russian
intervention. On the other hand, Dr. Mossadegh is encouraging the Tudeh and is following
policies which will make the Communists more and more dangerous. He is a sorcerer's
apprentice, calling up forces he will not be able to control.
Iran is a weak, divided, poverty-stricken country which possesses an immense latent wealth
in oil and a crucial strategic position. This is very different from neighboring Turkey, a
strong, united, determined and advanced nation, which can afford to deal with the Russians
because she has nothing to fear -and therefore the West has nothing to fear. Thanks largely
to Dr. Mossadegh, there is much to fear in Iran.
My feeling is that the biggest sin that our society has is forgetting history. If we
remembered history I would think that it would be very difficult to pull off coups but most
media does not revisit history which proves US coups even against democracies. I actually
think that the coup that occurred in Ukraine was similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela
in 2002 with snipers on rooftops, immediate blame for the deaths on Hugo Chavez where media
manipulated the footage, immediate acceptance of the temporary coup government by the US
Government, immediately offering IMF loans for the new coup government, government positions
for many of the coup plotters, and let us not leave out the funding for the coup coming from
USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. I also remember seeing the New York Times
immediately blaming Chavez and praising the coup but when the coup was overturned and US
fingerprints started to become revealed (with many of the coup plotters fleeing to the US)
then the New York Times wrote a limited retraction buried in their paper. Shameless.
SFOMARCO , April 11, 2016 at 15:16
How was NED able to finance "scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists,
paying for journalists and organizing business groups", not to mention to host such
dignitaries as Cookie Nuland, Loser McCain and assorted Bidens? Seems like a recipe for a
coup "hidden in plain sight".
Bob Van Noy , April 11, 2016 at 14:36
Ukraine, one would hope, represents the "Bridge Too Far" moment for the proponents of
regime change. Surely Americans must be catching on to what we do for selected nations in the
name of "giving them their freedoms". The Kagan Family, empowered by their newly endorsed
candidate for President, Hillary Clinton, will feel justified in carrying on a new cold war,
this time world wide. Of course they will not be doing the fighting, they, like Dick Cheney
are the self appointed intellects of geopolitical chess, much like The Georgetown Set of the
Kennedy era, they perceive themselves as the only ones smart enough to plan America's
future.
Helen Marshall , April 11, 2016 at 17:11
I wish. How many Americans know ANYTHNG about what has happened in Ukraine, about Crimea
and its history, and/or could even locate them on a map?
Pastor Agnostic , April 12, 2016 at 04:11
Nuland is merely the inhouse, PNAC female version of Sidney Blumenthal. Which raises the
scary question. Who would she pick to be SecState?
"... Among the scope memo's few unredacted lines are allegations regarding Paul Manafort's "colluding with Russian government officials to interfere with the 2016 elections." The only known source for those allegations is the Steele dossier. What that strongly suggests is that under those redactions are other fabricated allegations that were also drawn from the Clinton-funded smear campaign -- a dirty-tricks operation that was led by Fusion GPS founder and conspiracy theorist Glenn Simpson. ..."
"... Saturday Night Live ..."
"... While the length of Mueller's investigative process may have protected the FBI from the president's immediate rage, the release of the report has exposed the deep corruption and personal narcissism of the press and its professional networks of "experts" and "sources." ..."
"... Russiagate was an information operation from the beginning, in which dozens of individual reporters and institutions actively partnered with paid political operatives like Glenn Simpson and corrupt law enforcement and intelligence officials like former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr to smear Trump and his circle, and then to topple him. None of what went on the last two years would have been possible without the press, an indispensable partner in the biggest political scandal in a generation. ..."
It will take weeks for the elite pundit class to unravel all the
possible implications and subtexts embedded in Robert Mueller's final report on the charge that
Donald Trump and his team colluded with Russia to fix the 2016 election. The right claims that
the report exonerates Trump fully, while the left contends there are lots of nuggets in the
full text of the final report that may point to obstruction of justice, if not collusion.
But here's all you need to know about the special counsel probe:
First, after nearly two years, the special counsel found no credible evidence of collusion.
It found no credible evidence of a plot to obstruct justice, to hide evidence of collusion. The
entire collusion theory, which has formed the center of elite political discourse for over two
years now, has been publicly and definitely proclaimed to be a hoax by
the very person on whom news organizations and their chosen "experts" and "high-level sources"
had so loudly and insistently pinned their daily, even hourly, hopes of redemption.
Mueller should have filed his report on May 18, 2017 -- the day after the special counsel
started and he learned the FBI had opened an investigation on the sitting president of the
United States because senior officials at the world's premier law enforcement agency thought
Trump was a Russian spy. Based on what evidence? A dossier compiled by a former British spy,
relying on second- and third-hand sources,
paid for by the Clinton campaign .
Instead, the special counsel lasted 674 days, during which millions of people who believed
Mueller was going to turn up conclusive evidence of Trump's devious conspiracies with the
Kremlin have become wrapped up in a collective hallucination that has destroyed the remaining
credibility of the American press and the D.C. expert class whose authority they promote.
Mueller knew that he wasn't ever going to find "collusion" or anything like it because all
the intercepts were right there on his desk. As it turned out, two of his prosecutors,
including Mueller's so-called "pit bull," Andrew Weissman, had been briefed on the
Steele dossier prior to the 2016 election and were told that it came from the Clintons, and was
likely a biased political document.
Weissman left, or was pushed out of, his employment with the special counsel a few weeks
ago, after the arrival of a new attorney general, William Barr, who had deep experience in
government, including stints at the Justice Department and the CIA. Knowing what we know now,
here's what seems most likely to have just happened: Barr looked at the underlying documents on
which Mueller's investigation was based. First, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's May
17, 2017, memo appointing the former FBI director to take supervision of the FBI's
investigation of Trump. And more importantly, the Aug. 2, 2017,
memo from Rosenstein outlining the scope of the investigation.
Among the scope memo's few unredacted lines are allegations regarding Paul Manafort's
"colluding with Russian government officials to interfere with the 2016 elections." The only
known source for those allegations is the Steele dossier. What that strongly suggests is that
under those redactions are other fabricated allegations that were also drawn from the
Clinton-funded smear
campaign -- a dirty-tricks operation that was led by Fusion GPS founder and conspiracy
theorist Glenn Simpson.
And now, after all the Saturday Night Live skits, the obscenity-riddled Bill Maher
and Stephen Colbert routines, the half a million news stories and tens of millions of tweets
all foretelling the end of Trump, the comedians and the adult authority figures are exposed as
hoaxsters, or worse, based on evidence that was always transparently phony.
The Mueller report is in. But the abuse of power that the special counsel embodied is a
deadly cancer on American democracy. Two years of investigations have left families in ruins,
stripping them of their savings, their homes, threatening their liberty, and dragging their
names through the mud. The investigation of the century was partly based on the possibility
that Michael Flynn, a combat veteran who served his country for more than three decades, might
be a Russian spy -- because of a dinner he once attended in Moscow, and because as incoming
national security adviser he spoke to the Russian ambassador to Washington. What rot.
While the length of Mueller's investigative process may have protected the FBI from the
president's immediate rage, the release of the report has exposed the deep corruption and
personal narcissism of the press and its professional networks of "experts" and "sources."
Instead of providing medicine, the press chose instead to spread the disease through a body
that was already badly weakened by the advent of "free" digital media
. Only, it
wasn't free .
* * *
The media criticism of the media's performance covering Russiagate is misleadingly anodyne
-- OK, sure the press did a bad job, but to be fair there really was a lot of suspicious stuff
going on and now let's all get back to doing our important work. But two years of false and
misleading Russiagate coverage was not a mistake, or a symptom of lax fact-checking.
Russiagate was an information operation from the beginning, in which dozens of individual
reporters and institutions actively partnered with paid political operatives like Glenn Simpson
and corrupt law enforcement and intelligence officials like former FBI Deputy Director Andrew
McCabe and senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr to smear Trump and his circle, and then to topple him.
None of what went on the last two years would have been possible without the press, an
indispensable partner in the biggest political scandal in a generation.
The campaign was waged not in hidden corners of the internet, but rather by the country's
most prestigious news organizations -- including, but not only, The New York Times , the
Washington Post , CNN, and MSNBC. The farce that has passed for public discourse the
last two years was fueled by a concerted effort of the media and the pundit class to
obscure gaping holes in logic as well as law. And yet, they all appeared to be credible
because the institutions sustaining them are credible .
... ... ...
Americans still want and need accurate information on which to base their decisions about
their own lives and the path that the country should take. But neither the legacy media nor the
expert class it sustains is likely to survive the post-dossier era in any
recognizable form . For them, Russiagate is an extinction level event.
"... Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. ..."
"... As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive relationship."' ..."
"... But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'. ..."
"... In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin. Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West. ..."
"... Putin is not the man who, after coming to power in 2000, "de-democratized" a Russian democracy established by President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and restored a system akin to Soviet "totalitarianism." ..."
"... Nor did Putim then make himself a tsar or Soviet-like autocrat, which means a despot with absolute power to turn his will into policy, the last Kremlin leader with that kind of power was Stalin, who died in 1953, and with him his 20-year mass terror. ..."
"... Putin is not a Kremlin leader who "reveres Stalin" and whose "Russia is a gangster shadow of Stalin's Soviet Union." 13 , 14 These assertions are so far-fetched and uninfoimed about Stalin's terror-ridden regime, Putin, and Russia today, they barely warrant comment. ..."
"... Nor did Putin create post-Soviet Russia's "kleptocratic economic system," with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption. This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin's shock-therapy "privatization" schemes of the 1990s, when the "swindlers and thieves" still denounced by today's opposition actually emerged. ..."
"... Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as "a KGB thug," regularly orders the killing of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a "mafia state boss." ..."
"... More recently, there is yet another allegation: Putin is a fascist and white supremacist. The accusation is made mostly, it seems, by people wishing to deflect attention from the role being played by neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine. ..."
"... Finally, at least for now. there is the ramifying demonization allegation that, as a foreign-policy leader. Putin has been exceedingly "aggressive" abroad and his behavior has been the sole cause of the new cold war. ..."
"... Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians. ..."
"... The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America." ..."
"... Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations, he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States." 3 " ..."
"... A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy, without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34 ..."
"... <img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png"> P. Philips ..."
"... "In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" ..."
"... Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation. ..."
"... If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris. ..."
THE SPECTER OF AN EVIL-DOING VLADIMIR PUTIN HAS loomed over and undermined US thinking about Russia for at least a decade. Inescapably,
it is therefore a theme that runs through this book. Henry' Kissinger deserves credit for having warned, perhaps alone among prominent
American political figures, against this badly distorted image of Russia's leader since 2000: "The demonization of Vladimir Putin
is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one." 4
But Kissinger was also wrong. Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal
vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. Those policies spread from growing complaints
in the early 2000s to US- Russian proxy wars in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and eventually even at home, in Russiagate allegations.
Indeed, policy-makers adopted an earlier formulation by the late Senator .Tolm McCain as an integral part of a new and more dangerous
Cold War: "Putin [is] an unreconstructed Russian imperialist and K.G.B. apparatchik.... His world is a brutish, cynical place....
We must prevent the darkness of Mr. Putin's world from befalling more of humanity'." 3
Mainstream media outlets have play'ed a major prosecutorial role in the demonization. Far from aty'pically', the Washington Post's
editorial page editor wrote, "Putin likes to make the bodies bounce.... The rule-by-fear is Soviet, but this time there is no ideology
-- only a noxious mixture of personal aggrandizement, xenophobia, homophobia and primitive anti-Americanism." 6 Esteemed
publications and writers now routinely degrade themselves by competing to denigrate "the flabbily muscled form" of the "small gray
ghoul named Vladimir Putin." 7 , 8 There are hundreds of such examples, if not more, over many years. Vilifying
Russia's leader has become a canon in the orthodox US narrative of the new Cold War.
As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's
anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New
York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building
a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive
relationship."'
But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently
explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version
of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start
thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'.
Who has Putin really been during his many years in power? We may' have to leave this large, complex question to future historians,
when materials for full biographical study -- memoirs, archive documents, and others -- are available. Even so, it may surprise readers
to know that Russia's own historians, policy intellectuals, and journalists already argue publicly and differ considerably as to
the "pluses and minuses" of Putin's leadership. (My own evaluation is somewhere in the middle.)
In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin.
Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including
those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West.
By identifying and examining, however briefly, the primary "minuses" that underpin the demonization of Putin, we can understand
at least who he is not:
Putin is not the man who, after coming to power in 2000, "de-democratized" a Russian democracy established by President
Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and restored a system akin to Soviet "totalitarianism." Democratization began and developed in
Soviet Russia under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the years from 1987 to 1991.
Yeltsin repeatedly dealt that historic Russian experiment grievous, possibly fatal, blows. Among his other acts, by using tanks,
in October 1993, to destroy Russia's freely elected parliament and with it the entire constitutional order that had made Yeltsin
president. By waging two bloody' wars against the tiny breakaway province of Chechnya. By enabling a small group of Kremlin-connected
oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its people into poverty' and misery',
including the once-large and professionalized Soviet middle classes. By rigging his own reelection in 1996. And by' enacting a
"super-presidential" constitution, at the expense of the legislature and judiciary but to his successor's benefit. Putin may have
furthered the de-democratization of the Yeltsin 1990s, but he did not initiate it.
Nor did Putim then make himself a tsar or Soviet-like autocrat, which means a despot with absolute power to turn his
will into policy, the last Kremlin leader with that kind of power was Stalin, who died in 1953, and with him his 20-year mass
terror. Due to the increasing bureaucratic routinization of the political-administrative system, each successive Soviet leader
had less personal power than his predecessor. Putin may have more, but if he really is a "cold-blooded, ruthless" autocrat --
"the worst dictator on the planet" 1 " -- tens of thousands of protesters would not have repeatedly appeared in Moscow
streets, sometimes officially sanctioned. Or their protests (and selective arrests) been shown on state television.
Political scientists generally agree that Putin has been a "soft authoritarian" leader governing a system that has authoritarian
and democratic components inherited from the past. They disagree as to how to specify, define, and balance these elements, but
most would also generally agree with a brief Facebook post, on September 7, 2018, by the eminent diplomat-scholar Jack Matlock:
"Putin ... is not the absolute dictator some have pictured him. His power seems to be based on balancing various patronage networks,
some of which are still criminal. (In the 1990s, most were, and nobody was controlling them.) Therefore he cannot admit publicly
that [criminal acts] happened without his approval since this would indicate that he is not completely in charge."
Putin is not a Kremlin leader who "reveres Stalin" and whose "Russia is a gangster shadow of Stalin's Soviet Union."
13 , 14 These assertions are so far-fetched and uninfoimed about Stalin's terror-ridden regime, Putin, and Russia
today, they barely warrant comment. Stalin's Russia was often as close to unfreedom as imaginable. In today's Russia, apart from
varying political liberties, most citizens are freer to live, study, work, write, speak, and travel than they have ever been.
(When vocational demonizers like David Kramer allege an "appalling human rights situation in Putin's Russia," 1 " they
should be asked: compared to when in Russian history, or elsewhere in the world today?)
Putin clearly understands that millions of Russians have and often express pro-Stalin sentiments. Nonetheless, his role in
these still-ongoing controversies over the despot's historical reputation has been, in one unprecedented way, that of an anti-Stalinist
leader. Briefly illustrated, if Putin reveres the memory of Stalin, why did his personal support finally make possible two memorials
(the excellent State Museum of the History of the Gulag and the highly evocative "Wall of Grief') to the tyrant's millions of
victims, both in central Moscow? The latter memorial monument was first proposed by then-Kremlin leader Nikita Khrushchev, in
1961. It was not built under any of his successors -- until Putin, in 2017.
Nor did Putin create post-Soviet Russia's "kleptocratic economic system," with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption.
This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin's shock-therapy "privatization" schemes of the 1990s, when the "swindlers
and thieves" still denounced by today's opposition actually emerged.
Putin has adopted a number of "anti-corruption" policies over the years. How successful they have been is the subject of legitimate
debate. As are how much power he has had to rein in fully both Yeltsin's oligarchs and his own, and how sincere he has been. But
branding Putin "a kleptocrat" 16 also lacks context and is little more than barely informed demonizing.
A recent scholarly book finds, for example, that while they may be "corrupt," Putin "and the liberal technocratic economic
team on which he relies have also skillfully managed Russia's economic fortunes." 1 ' A former IMF director goes further,
concluding that Putin's current economic team does not "tolerate corruption" and that "Russia now ranks 35th out of 190 in the
World Bank's Doing Business ratings. It was at 124 in 2010." 18
Viewed in human teims, when Putin came to power in 2000, some 75 percent of Russians were living in poverty. Most had lost
even modest legacies of the Soviet era -- their life savings; medical and other social benefits: real wages; pensions; occupations;
and for men life expectancy, which had fallen well below the age of 60. In only a few years, the "kleptocrat" Putin had mobilized
enough wealth to undo and reverse those human catastrophes and put billions of dollars in rainy-day funds that buffered the nation
in different hard times ahead. We judge this historic achievement as we might, but it is why many Russians still call Putin "Vladimir
the Savior."
Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as "a KGB thug," regularly orders the killing
of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a "mafia state boss." This should be the easiest demonizing axiom to dismiss
because there is no actual evidence, or barely any logic, to support it. And yet, it is ubiquitous. Times editorial writers and
columnists -- and far from them alone -- characterize Putin as a "thug" and his policies as "thuggery" so often -- sometimes doubling
down on "autocratic thug" 19 -- that the practice may be specified in some internal manual. Little wonder so many politicians
also routinely practice it, as did US Senator Ben Sasse: "We should tell the American people and tell the world that we know that
Vladimir Putin is a thus. He's a former KGB aaent who's a murderer." 20
Leaving aside other world leaders with minor or major previous careers in intelligences services. Putin's years as a KGB intelligence
officer in then -East Germany were clearly formative. Many years later, at age 67. he still spoke of them with pride. Whatever
else that experience contributed, it made Putin a Europeanized Russian, a fluent Geiman speaker, and a political leader with a
remarkable, demonstrated capacity for retaining and coolly analyzing a very wide range of information. (Read or watch a few of
his long interviews.) Not a bad leadership trait in very fraught times.
Moreover, no serious biographer would treat only one period in a subject's long public career as definitive, as Putin demonizers
do. Why not instead the period after he left the KGB in 1991, when he served as deputy to the mayor of St. Petersburg, then considered
one of the two or three most democratic leaders in Russia? Or the years immediately following in Moscow, where he saw first-hand
the full extent of Yeltsin-era corruption? Or his subsequent years, while still relatively young, as president?
As for being a "murderer" of journalists and other ''enemies." the list has grown to scores of Russians who died, at home or
abroad, by foul or natural causes -- all reflexively attributed to Putin. Our hallowed tradition puts the burden of proof on the
accusers. Putin's accusers have produced none, only assumptions, innuendoes, and mistranslated statements by Putin about the fate
of "traitors." The two cases that firmly established this defamatory practice were those of the investigative journalist Anna
Politkovskaya, who was shot to death in Moscow in 2006; and Alexander Litvinenko, a shadowy one-time KGB defector with ties to
aggrieved Yeltsin-era oligarchs, who died of radiation poisoning in London, also in 2006.
Not a shred of actual proof points to Putin in either case. The editor of Politkovskaya's paper, the devoutly independent Novaya
Gazeta. still believes her assassination was ordered by Chechen officials, whose human-rights abuses she was investigating. Regarding
Litvinenko, despite frenzied media claims and a kangaroo-like "hearing" suggesting that Putin was "probably" responsible, there
is still no conclusive proof even as to whether Litvinenko's poisoning was intentional or accidental. The same paucity of evidence
applies to many subsequent cases, notably the shooting of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, "in [distant] view of the Kremlin,"
in 2015.
About Russian journalists, there is, however, a significant overlooked statistic. According to the American Committee to Protect
Journalists, as of 2012, 77 had been murdered -- 41 during the Yeltsin years, 36 under Putin. By 2018, the total was 82 -- 41
under Yeltsin, the same under Putin. This strongly suggests that the still -- pairtially corrupt post-Soviet economic system,
not Yeltsin or Putin personally, led to the killing of so many journalists after 1991, most of them investigative reporters. The
former wife of one journalist thought to have been poisoned concludes as much: "Many Western analysts place the responsibility
for these crimes on Putin. But the cause is more likely the system of mutual responsibility and the culture of impunity that began
to form before Putin, in the late 1990s.""
More recently, there is yet another allegation: Putin is a fascist and white supremacist. The accusation is made mostly, it
seems, by people wishing to deflect attention from the role being played by neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine. Putin no doubt regards
it as a blood slur, and even on the surface it is, to be exceedingly charitable, entirely uninformed. How else to explain Senator
Ron Wyden's solemn warnings, at a hearing on November 1, 2017, about "the current fascist leadership of Russia"? A young scholar
recently dismantled a senior Yale professor's nearly inexplicable propounding of this thesis.' 3 My own approach is
compatible, though different.
Whatever Putin's failings, the fascist allegation is absurd. Nothing in his statements over nearly 20 years in power are akin
to fascism, whose core belief is a cult of blood based on the asserted superiority of one ethnicity over all others. As head of
a vast multi-ethnic state -- embracing scores of diverse groups with a broad range of skin colors -- such utterances or related
acts by Putin would be inconceivable, if not political suicide. This is why he endlessly appeals for harmony in "our entire multi-ethnic
nation" with its "multi-ethnic culture," as he did once again in his re-inauguration speech in 2018. 24
Russia has, of course, fascist-white supremacist thinkers and activists, though many have been imprisoned. But a mass fascist
movement is scarcely feasible in a country where so many millions died in the war against Nazi Geimany, a war that directly affected
Putin and clearly left a formative mark on him. Though he was born after the war, his mother and father barely survived near-fatal
wounds and disease, his older brother died in the long German siege of Leningrad, and several of his uncles perished. Only people
who never endured such an experience, or are unable to imagine it, can conjure up a fascist Putin.
There is another, easily understood, indicative fact. Not a trace of anti-Semitism is evident in Putin. Little noted here but
widely reported both in Russia and in Israel, life for Russian Jews is better under Putin than it has ever been in that country's
long history."
Finally, at least for now. there is the ramifying demonization allegation that, as a foreign-policy leader. Putin has been
exceedingly "aggressive" abroad and his behavior has been the sole cause of the new cold war.26 At best, this is an
"in-the-eve-of-the-beholder" assertion, and half-blind. At worst, it justifies what even a German foreign minister characterized
as the West's "war-mongering" against Russia."
In the three cases widely given as examples of Putin's "aggression," the evidence, long cited by myself and others, points
to US-led instigations, primarily in the process of expanding the NATO military alliance since the late 1990s from Germany to
Russia's borders today. The proxy US-Russian war in Georgia in 2008 was initiated by the US-backed president of that country,
who had been encouraged to aspire to NATO membership. The 2014 crisis and subsequent proxy war in Ukraine resulted from the longstanding
effort to bring that country, despite large regions' shared civilization with Russia, into NATO.
And Putin's 2015 military intervention
in Syria was done on a valid premise: either it would be Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus or the terrorist Islamic
State -- and on President Barack Obama's refusal to join Russia in an anti-ISIS alliance. As a result of this history, Putin is
often seen in Russia as a belatedly reactive leader abroad, as a not sufficiently "aggressive" one.
Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet
Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union
was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually
said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians.
Though often critical of the Soviet system and its two formative leaders, Lenin and Stalin, Putin, like most of his generation,
naturally remains in part a Soviet person. But what he said in 2010 reflects his real perspective and that of very many other Russians:
"Anyone who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants its rebirth in its previous form has
no head." 28 , 29
The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed
the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America."30
, 31 A simple reading of his years in power tells us otherwise. A Westernized Russian, Putin came to the presidency in
2000 in the still prevailing tradition of Gorbachev and Yeltsin -- in hope of a "strategic friendship and partnership" with the United
States.
How else to explain Putin's abundant assistant to US forces fighting in Afghanistan after 9/1 1 and continued facilitation of
supplying American and NATO troops there? Or his backing of harsh sanctions against Iran's nuclear ambitions and refusal to sell
Tehran a highly effective air-defense system? Or the information his intelligence services shared with Washington that if heeded
could have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2012?
Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was
a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations,
he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital
from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States."
3 "
Given all that has happened during the past nearly two decades -- particularly what Putin and other Russian leaders perceive to
have happened -- it would be remarkable if his views of the W^est, especially America, had not changed. As he remarked in 2018, "We
all change." 33
A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy,
without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West
is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34
"In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" is a well known quotation (but probably not of
George Orwell). And in telling the truth about Russia and that the current "war of nerves" is not in the interests of either the
American People or national security, Professor Cohen in this book has in fact done a revolutionary act.
Like a denizen of Plato's cave, or being in the film the Matrix, most people have no idea what the truth is. And the questions
raised by Professor Cohen are a great service in the cause of the truth. As Professor Cohen writes in his introduction To His
Readers:
"My scholarly work -- my biography of Nikolai Bukharin and essays collected in Rethinking the Soviet Experience and Soviet
Fates and Lost Alternatives, for example -- has always been controversial because it has been what scholars term "revisionist"
-- reconsiderations, based on new research and perspectives, of prevailing interpretations of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian
history. But the "controversy" surrounding me since 2014, mostly in reaction to the contents of this book, has been different
-- inspired by usually vacuous, defamatory assaults on me as "Putin's No. 1 American Apologist," "Best Friend," and the like.
I never respond specifically to these slurs because they offer no truly substantive criticism of my arguments, only ad hominem
attacks. Instead, I argue, as readers will see in the first section, that I am a patriot of American national security, that
the orthodox policies my assailants promote are gravely endangering our security, and that therefore we -- I and others they
assail -- are patriotic heretics. Here too readers can judge."
Cohen, Stephen F.. War with Russia (Kindle Locations 131-139). Hot Books. Kindle Edition.
Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional
United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this
important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation.
Indeed, with the hysteria on "climate change" isn't it odd that other than Professor Cohen's voice, there are no prominent
figures warning of the devastation that nuclear war would bring?
If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson
on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods
by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a
loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional
nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris.
I cannot recommend Professor Cohen's work with sufficient superlatives; his arguments are erudite, clearly stated, supported
by the facts and ultimately irrefutable. If enough people find Professor Cohen's work and raise their voices to their oblivious
politicians and profiteers from war to stop further confrontation between Russia and America, then this book has served a noble
purpose.
If nothing else, educate yourself by reading this work to discover what the *truth* is. And the truth is something sacred.
America and the world owe Professor Cohen a great debt. "Blessed are the peace makers..."
"... "I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles, stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers, oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and oxygen, and an embarrassment to the human species" ..."
"... " He then put on a pair of sunglasses and rode off on a motorcycle due east into the rising sun, while the smooth notes of a single saxophone resounded through the D.C. cityscape." ..."
The report contains many shocking revelations which prove that Attorney General William Barr
deceived the world in his summary of its contents, as astute Trump-Russia collusion theorists
have been
claiming since it emerged .
For example, while Barr's excerpted quote from the report may read like a seemingly
unequivocal assertion, "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump
Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference
activities," it turns out that the full sentence reads very differently:
" It is totally not the case that the investigation did not establish that members of
the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election
interference activities."
The following sentence is even more damning: "It definitely did establish that that
happened."
The report goes on to list the evidence for numerous acts of direct conspiracy between
Trump allies and the Russian government, including a detailed description of the footage from
an obtained copy of the notorious "kompromat" video, in which Trump is seen paying Russian
prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept in by Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as other
documents fully verifying the entire Christopher Steele dossier which was published by
BuzzFeed in January 2017.
Other evidence listed in the report includes communication transcripts in which Russian
President Vladimir Putin is seen ordering President Trump to bomb Syria, stage a coup in
Venezuela, arm Ukraine, escalate against Russia in America's Nuclear Posture Review, withdraw
from the INF treaty and the Iran deal, undermine Russia's fossil fuel interests in Germany,
expand NATO, and maintain a large military presence near Russia's border.
... ... ...
Obviously I owe the world a very big apology. I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles,
stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold
war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers, oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and
oxygen, and an embarrassment to the human species. Clearly, because of their indisputable vindication this April the first 2019,
they are definitely none of these things.
RightLineBacker, (Edited)
After recovering from a near heart attack...and loading my weapons in preparation of taking to the streets... I noticed it
was April 1st. Funny & not funny at the same time.
Damn! Back to my beer & popcorn.
desertboy
"I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles, stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human
livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers,
oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and oxygen, and an embarrassment to the
human species"
Me too. It's worth repeating.
noshitsherlock
" He then put on a pair of sunglasses and rode off on a motorcycle due east into the rising sun, while the smooth
notes of a single saxophone resounded through the D.C. cityscape."
Schiff is a typical witch hunter (or Cheka goon, if you wish ;-) , much like Mueller staff was. What is unclear why
theywant to unseat Trump with his complete falding to neocons and strong pro-Israel stance?
Notable quotes:
"... It was the DNC and Ukraine. They wanted HRC to win. No collusion was on President Trump's side. All the top players in the FBI and DOJ played games and lost. President Trump won and plays the game better than those on the DNC. Their game book has been showed to be stupid. ..."
"... Brennan thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. He spins lies like a hungry spider. Brennan, Clapper, Schiff, Swalwell, and some others need to go. ..."
Trump HATER Brennan - says: "U.S. PERSONS" - meaning Schiff, Comey, Obama, Strozk, His
Lover, The OBAMAS, - are all THOSE "U.S. PERSONS" who gave him the so-called "INTELLIGENCE" -
at WHAT POINT does "UN-VERIFIED INFO" become a TREASONOUS WEAPONIZED INSTRUMENT of an
ATTEMPTED COUP D'eta against the President Of The United States of America.
Seditious liar Schifty Adam Schiff was involved in criminal leaking of classified
information to Democrat propaganda machines CNN and MSNBC -- Should not just resign but held
accountable for his crimes and major role he played in the Coup attempt against the duly
elected US president
If Brennan didn't know, he admits to being incompetent. If he did know, he is complicit.
He accused someone of treason without evidence. Losing his security clearance is not justice.
He needs to pay a bigger price.
Gowdy is correct. Had there been something there, yes perhaps then people should see it.
When there results yield "not even probable cause", it probably shouldn't be released in it's
entirety.
It was the DNC and Ukraine. They wanted HRC to win. No collusion was on President Trump's
side. All the top players in the FBI and DOJ played games and lost. President Trump won and
plays the game better than those on the DNC. Their game book has been showed to be
stupid.
Adam Schiff claims there is clear evidence, yet never states what this evidence is. Yet it
is so clear that Muller, the FBI, the Senate investigation and the House spent two years and
never found it. Must be extremely transparent to the point of not existing period. I think
Schiff needs to not only step down, but he needs to see a psychitatrist.
"... "I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles, stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers, oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and oxygen, and an embarrassment to the human species" ..."
"... " He then put on a pair of sunglasses and rode off on a motorcycle due east into the rising sun, while the smooth notes of a single saxophone resounded through the D.C. cityscape." ..."
The report contains many shocking revelations which prove that Attorney General William Barr
deceived the world in his summary of its contents, as astute Trump-Russia collusion theorists
have been
claiming since it emerged .
For example, while Barr's excerpted quote from the report may read like a seemingly
unequivocal assertion, "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump
Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference
activities," it turns out that the full sentence reads very differently:
" It is totally not the case that the investigation did not establish that members of
the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election
interference activities."
The following sentence is even more damning: "It definitely did establish that that
happened."
The report goes on to list the evidence for numerous acts of direct conspiracy between
Trump allies and the Russian government, including a detailed description of the footage from
an obtained copy of the notorious "kompromat" video, in which Trump is seen paying Russian
prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept in by Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as other
documents fully verifying the entire Christopher Steele dossier which was published by
BuzzFeed in January 2017.
Other evidence listed in the report includes communication transcripts in which Russian
President Vladimir Putin is seen ordering President Trump to bomb Syria, stage a coup in
Venezuela, arm Ukraine, escalate against Russia in America's Nuclear Posture Review, withdraw
from the INF treaty and the Iran deal, undermine Russia's fossil fuel interests in Germany,
expand NATO, and maintain a large military presence near Russia's border.
... ... ...
Obviously I owe the world a very big apology. I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles,
stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold
war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers, oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and
oxygen, and an embarrassment to the human species. Clearly, because of their indisputable vindication this April the first 2019,
they are definitely none of these things.
RightLineBacker, (Edited)
After recovering from a near heart attack...and loading my weapons in preparation of taking to the streets... I noticed it
was April 1st. Funny & not funny at the same time.
Damn! Back to my beer & popcorn.
desertboy
"I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles, stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human
livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers,
oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and oxygen, and an embarrassment to the
human species"
Me too. It's worth repeating.
noshitsherlock
" He then put on a pair of sunglasses and rode off on a motorcycle due east into the rising sun, while the smooth
notes of a single saxophone resounded through the D.C. cityscape."
Since the dawn of civilization, powerful individuals have controlled the stories people tell
themselves about who they are, who's in charge, how a good citizen behaves, what groups should
be loved, what groups should be hated, and what's really going on in the world.
When you
study what we call history, you're mostly just reading the ancient proto-propaganda of whatever
kingdom happened to win the last war during that period of time.
When you study what we
call religion, you're mostly reading stories that were advanced by ancient governments
explaining why the people should be meek, forgiving taxpayers instead of rising up and killing
their wealthy exploiters.
This continues to this day.
We fill our children's heads
with lies about how the world works, how the government works, how the media works, and, on a
deeper level,
how their
own consciousness works
, and the entire process is shaped to funnel power toward the people
who control our stories.
The modern schooling system was
largely
formed by John D Rockefeller
, widely considered
the
wealthiest person in modern history
, in order to create generations of docile gear-turners
for the industrial plutocratic machine.
Modern schooling is essentially mainstream
media in a building; it promotes authorized narratives day in and day out to ensure that
children will have a reaction of cognitive dissonance and rejection when confronted with
information which contradicts those narratives.
This funnels the populace seamlessly into the narrative control matrix of adulthood,
where childhood indoctrination into mainstream narratives lubricates the way for continual
programming of credulous minds with mass media propaganda.
All the print, TV and online
media they are presented with supports the status quo-supporting agendas of the same plutocratic
class that John D Rockefeller dominated all those years ago.
This ensures that no matter
how bad things get, no matter how severely our spirits are crushed by end-stage metastatic
neoliberalism, no matter how many stupid, pointless wars we're duped into, no matter how much
further we are drawn along
the
path toward extinction
via climate chaos or nuclear war, we will never revolt to overthrow
our rulers.
That's three paragraphs. Our predicament is simple to describe and easy to understand.
But that doesn't mean it's easy to solve.
Everyone has at some point known someone in some kind of an abusive relationship, whether it be
with a partner, a family member, or a job, and we all know that helpless feeling of being unable to
help someone who refuses to walk away from the source of their abuse.
"Just leave him!" we say in exasperation. "The door's right there! It's not locked!"
But it's never that simple. It's never that simple because, although the abusee is
indeed physically capable of walking out the door, the thoughts that are in their head keep them
from choosing that option.
This is because no abuser is simply violent or cruel: they are also necessarily
manipulative.
If they weren't manipulative, there wouldn't be any "abusive relationship";
there'd just be someone doing something horrible one time, followed by a hasty exit out the door.
There can't be an ongoing relationship that is abusive unless there's some glue holding the abusee
in place, and that glue always consists primarily of believed narrative.
"I didn't mean it. I love you. I just get frustrated sometimes because of your
stupidity."
"You can't leave; you'll never make it out there on your own. You need me."
"I'm the only one who'll ever be there for you. Nobody else will ever love you because
you're so disgusting."
"Your children need their father. You have to stay."
"I need you! I'll die without you!"
"I'm not doing that. You're paranoid and crazy."
"Your inability to forgive me means something is wrong with you."
They seldom say it so overtly, because if they did its malignancy would be easy to spot, but
those are the ideas which get subtly implanted into the abusee's head day after day after day by
way of skillful manipulation.
"It's her own fault for staying,"
someone will inevitably say.
No it isn't. Not really. The abuser is at fault for the overt abuse, and the abuser is also at
fault for the psychological manipulations which keep the abusee in place in spite of terrible
cruelty. It's all one thing, and it's entirely the abuser's fault.
Humanity's predicament is the same. I often hear revolutionary-minded thinkers voicing
frustration at the mainstream public for choosing to stay within this transparently abusive dynamic
instead of rising up and forcing change, and yes, it is self-evident that the citizenry could
easily use its vastly superior numbers to do that if it collectively chose to. The door is right
there. It's not even locked.
But the people aren't failing to choose the door because they love being abused, they're
failing to choose the door because they've been manipulated into not choosing it.
From
cradle to grave they're pummeled with stories telling them that this is the only way things can be,
in exactly the same way a battered wife or a cult member are pummeled with stories about how
leaving is impossible.
The difficulty of our times is not that we are locked up; we aren't. The
difficulty is that far too many of us are manipulated into choosing a prison cell over freedom.
The fact of the matter is that a populace will never rise up against its oppressors as long as
it is being successfully propagandized not to. It will never, ever happen. The majority will choose
the prison cell every time.
You'd expect that more dissident thinking would be pouring into solving this dilemma, but not
much is. People talk about elections and political strategies, they talk about who has the most
correct ideology, they talk about rising up and seizing the means of production due to unacceptable
material conditions, they wax philosophical about the tyranny of the state and the immorality of
coercion, but they rarely address the elephant in the room that you can't get a populace to oust
the status quo when they do not want to.
Nothing will ever be done about our predicament as long as powerful people are controlling the
stories that the majority of the public believe. This is as true today as it was in John D
Rockefeller's time, which was as true as when Rome chose to spread the "render unto Caesar what is
Caesar's" submissiveness of Christianity throughout the Empire. The only difference is that now the
powerful have
a
century of post-Bernays propaganda science
under their belt, and a
whole
lot of research and development
can happen in a hundred years.
So what's the solution? How do you awaken a populace that is not just manipulated
into choosing its prison cell every time, but is also manipulated into believing that any
suggestion that they're in a prison cell is a crazy conspiracy theory?
Well, what do you do when a loved one is in an abusive relationship? It never works to shake
them and scream "You're being abused!"; that just causes them to tighten up and dig in deeper with
their abuser's narratives about how this is the only way things can be and anyone who says
otherwise is crazy. What works is to lovingly help that sovereign spark within them gather evidence
that the narratives they're being fed by their abuser are lies. Point out every time where reality
contradicts the stories they've been told. Weaken their trust in the old stories while
strengthening their confidence in their own perception and their sense of entitlement and
worthiness. Help them to see that they're being lied to, and that they deserve better.
This breaking of trust needs to happen within the respective partisan echo chambers of
those who are being propagandized.
It's useless to increase the distrust of CNN and MSNBC
among Trump's base, for example, but it's very useful to increase their distrust in right-wing
narratives. It's useless to increase Democrats' distrust in Trump and Fox News, but it's very
useful to get them skeptical of the narrative control machine they've been plugged into. Each head
of the two-headed one-party system needs to be attacked in a way that makes sense inside each of
its respective echo chambers.
Mostly, though, what we need is we need is for more thinkers to be more focused on the real
problem. I know some influential minds read this blog; if they can help seed the idea out among the
movers and shakers of dissident thought that propaganda is our first and foremost problem, we just
might get somewhere. We need a major shift of focus onto the narrative control matrix and the
obstacle that it poses to revolution, and everyone can help shift us there in their own way.
The propaganda machine won't be adequately disrupted without intensive effort, and
until it is we're going to keep selecting the prison cell every time.
That is why Q is in play... it makes people complacent so they
don't rebel because they think an insider already has it in
hand... here is a list of some of the Q posts that were wrong:
Drop #1
"claimed that "HRC extradition [was] already in
motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross
border run" with
Drop #2
alleging "HRC detained, not
arrested (yet)" and that there would be "massive riots organized
in defiance and others fleeing the US."
After a stretch of posts full of rhetorical questions and vague
claims, Q used
Drop #15
to predict that John Podesta would
be indicted on Nov. 3, and Clinton aide Huma Abedin indicted on
Nov. 6.
Drop #16,
posted the same day, claimed that "Friday &
Saturday will deliver on the MAGA promise" with a thorough
house-cleaning of the government. That Friday, Nov. 3, saw
the president leave
for a tour of Asia, and no firings,
but the predictions continued.
After a series of vague insinuations about the National Guard
being activated in various major cities (which was not true), Q
again claimed in
Drop #25
that proof of his predictions
would "begin 11.3." Again, the only significant event of this day
was the president leaving for Asia.
In
Drop #32,
Q claimed that the "initial wave [of
arrests] will be fast and meaningful," with many members of the
media "jailed as deep cover agents."
Finally,
Drop #34
unveiled a host of predictions for
what Q claimed would happen imminently. He claimed that "over the
course of the next several days you will undoubtedly realize that
we are taking back our great country." He claimed that everything
he'd been talking about in secret "will then be revealed and will
not be openly accepted," resulting in "public riots."
Q claimed that because of the imminent unrest of Nov. 3 and the
announcement of John Podesta's arrest the next day, "a state of
temporary military control will be actioned," and that "we will be
initiating the Emergency Broadcast System (EMS) during this time
in an effort to provide a direct message (avoiding the fake news)
to all citizens."
Drop #38
continued with the conspiracy fantasizing,
predicting "other state actors attempting to harm us during this
transition," along with "increased military movement," "[National
Guard] deployments starting tomorrow, and "false flags."
As part of the "imminent event" of the 3, Q claimed in
Drop
#44
that "before POTUS departs on Friday he will be sending an
important message via Twitter," used
Drop #47
to warn his
readers to "be vigilant today and expect a major false flag," and
claimed in
Drop #55
that President Trump would unleash the
massive military purge (now nicknamed "The Storm") with a tweet
reading "My fellow Americans, the Storm is upon us ."
continued to ratchet up the tension, predicting in
Drop #61:
that there would be "Twitter and other social media blackouts"
that would accompany the massive deep state purge.
Finally, in
Drop #65
, Q claimed "it has begun," with
Drop #67
predicting that news of John Podesta's military plane
being "forced down" "will be leaked" with a prominent "fake news
anchor" being pulled off the air.
Needless to say, none of what Q predicted in his first 60+
posts took place. The National Guard was never called up, mass
arrests never took place, Hillary Clinton and John Podesta weren't
detained, Donald Trump never sent a tweet mentioning "The Storm,"
and the Emergency Alert System wasn't activated.
But that didn't stop the movement.
However, Q seemed to learn from his mistakes and mostly stopped
making specific predictions about events to come, shifting to
vague statements about world events, terror attacks, and political
intrigue.
On Dec. 10, Q predicted in
Drop #326
that "false
flag(s)" would occur, with "POTUS 100% insulated" and to "expect
fireworks." Q believers seized on a partially detonated pipe bomb
at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, and Q took credit the
next day for "thwarting" the attack.
In
Drop #647,
Q seemed to predict a major event
involving the Department of Defense for Feb. 1, calling it the
"[D]ay [Of] [D]ays." Nothing of note happened either to that
agency or the federal government in general that day.
A few days after that fizzled, Q insinuated in
Drop #700
that the weekend of Feb. 10 and 1 would be a "suicide weekend" for
individuals targeted by the president. There were no high-profile
suicides by public figures that weekend.
Drop #796
was a post full of quasi-military chatter that
seemed to predict a possible car bombing in London around Feb. 16.
No terrorist attack of any type happened in London at all that
month.
As talk of President Trump's military parade ramped up, Q
predicted in
Drop #856
that "a parade that will never be
forgotten" would take place on 11/11/18. That parade has now been
postponed until next year
due to costs, and likely won't take
place at all.
Then, in
Drop #912,
Q claimed that the intelligence
sharing alliance known as "Five Eyes" "won't be around much
longer." As of August, it is still in effect.
Drop #997
predicted on April 3 that the Pope would "have
a terrible May." The closest to this that happened was the
resignation of several Chilean bishops
in June after Pope
Francis criticized them over their handling of a sex abuse
scandal.
On April 7, Q made a cryptic post in
Drop #1067
that
read simply "China. Chongqing. Tuesday." The next Tuesday was
April 10, and no newsworthy event took place on that day in that
city.
Finally, in
Drop #1302
on April 27, Q claimed a "Mother
of All Bombs" related to negotiations with North Korea would be
"dropped" in the next week.
Some Q believers took this to be the North Korea/United States
summit announcement on the 28, but the negotiations had already
been reported, and only the location and exact date remained to be
set -- neither of which Q provided.
Even as he was seeming to reveal world events that never took
place, Q kept up his hammering of favored foes Hillary Clinton,
Barack Obama, and John McCain.
Even though she wasn't indicted or arrested, Q predicted on
March 5
in Drop #854
that "HRC +++ + +++++(raw vid 5:5)"
[sic] would soon emerge, and that it would be the "nail in many
coffins."
Using Barack Obama's
middle name
, Q predicted in
Drop #1043
that "pics will
surface of Hussein holding AK47 in tribal attire," and insinuated
in two April drops that photos of Obama with a young girl named
"Wendy" would appear and open him up to charges of pedophilia. No
such pictures have ever appeared.
Finally, again using a nickname, Q predicted John McCain's
resignation from the Senate as "imminent" several times, including
Drop #1319
and
Drop #1850
, as well as predicting the
"end near" in
Drop #1555.
Only this week did McCain
announce he would stop seeking treatment for cancer.
Politicians aren't the only suspected deep state members that Q
has made failed predictions about.
On April 4, Q claimed in
Drop #1014
that Mark Zuckerberg
was going to step down as chair of Facebook and flee the United
States. The same day Q predicted this,
Zuckerberg reiterated
that he was NOT going to step down -- and
he still hasn't.
Q has also made some fizzled predictions about Twitter CEO Jack
Dorsey, saying "goodbye" to him in
Drops #525
and
#598
,
insinuating that Dorsey would be removed from Twitter in
Drop
#799
, predicting in
Drop
#1102
that Dorsey was
"next"
It's not surprising that as Q's predictions fizzled, he became
less specific and more generalized with what he claimed would
happen. It's here that QAnon truly began taking on the language of
prosperity scams, substituting vague claims of "next week" or
"soon" in place of anything more specific.
Q's use of the phrase "next week" to denote the occurrence of
something important started with
Drop #243
when Q told his
followers "just wait until next week" without making any kind of
claim as to what was going to happen. It would be the first of
over a dozen times Q would kick the can down the road to "next
week."
In Drop #464:
Q vaguely predicted a "BIG NEXT WEEK" on
Jan. 5, doubling down in
Drop #527,
predicting "Next Week –
BIGGER," repeating the claim three drops later.
If you still belive in Q in the face of all of these failed
predictions you should sterialize yourself... And no... not a
libtard... I put libtards and qtards in the same basket of
stupid../
This crazy bitch is hit or miss for me. She completely misses
on "climate chaos" which is part of the mind control narrative.
Most obvious and discredited government and corporate funded hoax
of our era. Post religious eschatology to tax and control the
serfs to the satisfaction of the powerful.
This lady is an enemy agent. Why do you continue posting her
articles?
Yeah. I don't think nuclear war and fukishima are
good ideas also.
What needs sorely addressing, and why Trump was elected, is the
complete deviousness and near stranglehold, outright, that America
hating marxists wield.
We are possibly a hair's breath away from something so
sobering. That a vicious civil war may sound quite refreshing in
contrast.
But, bring it on crazy. Just don't think I at least, can't see
who you represent. And it isn't tree hugging, American ultra pot
smoking nice boys and girl hippies. Who also sideline as cia
operators and super stealth super agents. Kidding. Interesting
movie. And somewhat funny. Unlike most of this. Sitch.
God is in charge. Jesus is the way. If there be fighting or
calamity. If there be peace and prosperity. Rest, when possible
in the Lord. And fight like lions when, and if called to do so.
It only takes 5% of the population to become sufficiently agitated
in order to affect social and political change. The requisite
force is already in place. All they are waiting for is an
impetus.
What was Trump if not the biggest "**** you" in history. It's
true these haven't gone anywhere, or accomplished anything, but
this is far different thing than "not rebelling". Half the
population is rebelling within the system as much as they can. The
other half the population also feel they are rebelling to, but in
the opposite direction. Cancel 1st and 2nd amendments, ban
conservative voices, impeach Trump. If/when civil war breaks out
you will long for these halcyon days of peaceful rebellion.
I see how they fooled so many with Trump. In no way whatsoever
are elections left up to the citizens. They all have to be
portrayed as being close to hide the fact that those at the top
choose the president and the president has no real power
anyway.
There's a pseudo-everything phenomena occurring, lots of phoney
stuff going on out there.. All you can do really is not believe
everything you read, hear and/or see and be careful what you take
as truth/fact. We have been lied to about our money, our history
and even much of the food we eat is suspect and possibly the
creation(or part) of some laboratory experiment.
If people were
to find out that they were all subjects of the oligarchs and being
preyed on, ripped off, experimented on or were products of their
creations in a world built on lies things might not turn out so
great for the oligarchs.
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell
Blue skies from pain
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?
90% of humanity is basically livestock, 2% are sociopaths enjoying
to control the human livestock, and the remaining few are left to
wonder wtf is wrong with those 2 groups. It has been like this
since the dawn of time. Note that the actual revolutions happen
very rarely, and they only happen when the elites screw up badly.
Most of the time things change simply because the elites have
finally realized they could not continue the status quo.
Not enough suffering going on for there to be enough people
demanding real change. Self policing prisoners will keep the rest
in line. It is what it is. Point of no return has come and gone.
Now we just have to play the hand we've been dealt.
I believe a less violent and more highly effective way of making
change is to stop being a consummate consumer.
Forget Amazon,
cease consumer loans and pay for what you need in cash. Stop
frivolous spending. The effect from deflation would be far more
painful to the 1% than anyone else and core prices would drop like
a rock.
Say we overthrew our respective governments - I give it a year,
nay... A week, and a new batch of psychopaths will be vying for
top job - and we're back to square one again. Two options;
1.
Shoot/hang psychos (the fun/gratifying option)
2. Place four of these assoles in charge instead of one
What does a psycho hate moar than us peasants - competition.
They will fight and kill each other, never agreeing on any new
laws (see where i'm going with this) Basically reversing the
situation we're in now.
Medium is a website that tries to funnel you into google or
facebook. Do we need to say more? I haven't yet done a blog about
the fear factor. All those cell tower pump fear into the masses.
The side effect
s
of wireless technology will never be
officially admitted to.
In fact, this is surprisingly simple to counter - don't tell lies.
The difficulties experienced with this choice, this exercise of
will, lend a contempt in the assessment of the mouthings of the
liars - system wide (i.e. at the societal level) it is a
self-reinforcing behaviour because not many people are prepared to
embrace the social status associated with open displays of
contempt for their person. Of course, if you are not conditioned
to exercising your will you have no reason to be upset with the
outcome, you are in some sense as worthy as my coffee cup and have
as much influence on the world as any other unconsciousness - why
worry?
And yet, when the Obama Administration "legalized" Domestic Use of
Propaganda,it went by the MSM without so much as a ******* sound
(but that was to be expected, as we knew who would be delivering
it).
There is a new series on Netflix called Dirty Money, the First
Episode is on the VW scandal. In it VW decided to counter with a
scientific study where they use MONKEYS TRAINED TO WATCH TV while
they breath car exhaust. And I thought...OMG I've allowed myself
to become a trained monkey, presented with information to believe.
You need to take out the media and Internet, if there's no social
media or brain-numbing "entertainment", people get bored and
restless, an excellent precursor to revolution.
Like many who claim to be totally awake and resistant to the
propaganda dear Caitlin is a true believer in man made climate
change. Also a socialist although lately she is has been trying
distance herself from it. These people spend their career exposing
the lies from government and the compliant press but are all on
board with the we're all gonna die from climate change bunk as if
the government and it's shills are suddenly telling the truth.
Lesson here is even those you trust can fall victim to the
propaganda so it's best to not take everything they say as gospel.
It only takes 5% of the population to become sufficiently agitated
in order to affect social and political change. The requisite
force is already in place. All they are waiting for is an
impetus.
What was Trump if not the biggest "**** you" in history. It's
true these haven't gone anywhere, or accomplished anything, but
this is far different thing than "not rebelling". Half the
population is rebelling within the system as much as they can. The
other half the population also feel they are rebelling to, but in
the opposite direction. Cancel 1st and 2nd amendments, ban
conservative voices, impeach Trump. If/when civil war breaks out
you will long for these halcyon days of peaceful rebellion.
There's a pseudo-everything phenomena occurring, lots of phoney
stuff going on out there.. All you can do really is not believe
everything you read, hear and/or see and be careful what you take
as truth/fact. We have been lied to about our money, our history
and even much of the food we eat is suspect and possibly the
creation(or part) of some laboratory experiment.
If people were
to find out that they were all subjects of the oligarchs and being
preyed on, ripped off, experimented on or were products of their
creations in a world built on lies things might not turn out so
great for the oligarchs.
90% of humanity is basically livestock, 2% are sociopaths enjoying
to control the human livestock, and the remaining few are left to
wonder wtf is wrong with those 2 groups. It has been like this
since the dawn of time. Note that the actual revolutions happen
very rarely, and they only happen when the elites screw up badly.
Most of the time things change simply because the elites have
finally realized they could not continue the status quo.
"... The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years. ..."
"... It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land. ..."
"... Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans. ..."
"... The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other. ..."
"... The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system. ..."
The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates
the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people
will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been
systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years.
It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people.
Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any
kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land.
Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum
level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because
Russians are subhumans.
Whatever they do, it's always wrong, bad, oppressive, etc. Russians are bad because they're bad. They must be "taught a lesson",
"put into their place". It would, of course, be beneficial and highly profitable for Europeans to break with Anglo-Saxons and
to live in peace and harmony with Russia, but Europeans simply can not overcome their racism towards Russians. The young Europeans
are just as racist, with their incessant memes about "squatting Russians in tracksuits", "drunken Russians", etc., as if there's
nothing else that is notable about a country of 147 million people.
The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of
Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored,
as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring
with each other.
The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call
their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course,
endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language
with the same Cyrillic writing system.
Yes, "Trump was selling himself as a traitor to a corrupt class, someone who knew how soulless and greedy the ruling elite was because
he was one of them. " But he turned to be a fake, a marionette who is controlled by neocons like hapless Bush II.
Notable quotes:
"... Last weekend, I published a book chapter criticizing the Russiagate narrative, claiming it was a years-long press error on the scale of the WMD affair heading into the Iraq war. ..."
"... The overwhelming theme of that race, long before anyone even thought about Russia, was voter rage at the entire political system. ..."
"... The anger wasn't just on the Republican side, where Trump humiliated the Republicans' chosen $150 million contender , Jeb Bush (who got three delegates, or $50 million per delegate ). It was also evident on the Democratic side, where a self-proclaimed "Democratic Socialist" with little money and close to no institutional support became a surprise contender . ..."
"... Trump was gunning for votes in both parties. The core story he told on the stump was one of system-wide corruption, in which there was little difference between Republicans and Democrats. ..."
"... Perhaps just by luck, Trump was tuned in to the fact that the triumvirate of ruling political powers in America – the two parties, the big donors and the press – were so unpopular with large parts of the population that he could win in the long haul by attracting their ire, even if he was losing battles on the way. ..."
"... The subtext was always: I may be crude, but these people are phonies, pretending to be upset when they're making money off my bullshit . ..."
"... Trump was selling himself as a traitor to a corrupt class, someone who knew how soulless and greedy the ruling elite was because he was one of them. ..."
Faulty coverage of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign later made foreign espionage a more plausible explanation for his ascent to power
Last weekend, I published a book chapter criticizing the Russiagate
narrative, claiming it was a years-long press error on the scale of the WMD affair heading into the Iraq war.
Obviously (and I said this in detail), the WMD fiasco had a far greater real-world impact, with hundreds of thousands of lives
lost and trillions in treasure wasted. Still, I thought Russiagate would do more to damage the reputation of the national news media
in the end.
A day after publishing that excerpt, a
Attorney General
William Barr sent his summary of the report to Congress, containing a quote filed by Special Counsel
Robert Mueller : "[T]he investigation did not establish
that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."
Suddenly, news articles appeared arguing people like myself and Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept were
rushing to judgment
, calling us bullies whose writings were intended to leave reporters "cowed" and likely to "
back down from aggressive coverage of Trump ."
This was baffling. One of the most common criticisms of people like Greenwald, Michael Tracey, Aaron Mate, Rania Khalek, Max Blumenthal,
Jordan Chariton and many others is that Russiagate "skeptics" - I hate that term, because it implies skepticism isn't normal and
healthy in this job - were really secret Trump partisans, part of a "horseshoe" pact between far left and far right to focus attention
on the minor foibles of the center instead of Trump's more serious misdeeds. Even I received this label, and I once wrote a book
about Trump called Insane Clown President .
A typical social media complaint:
@mtaibbi and all his deplorable followers. The truth will come out
and your premature celebrations are embarrassing.
It's irritating that I even have to address this, because my personal political views shouldn't have anything to do with how I
cover anything. But just to get it out of the way: I'm no fan of
Donald Trump .
I had a well-developed opinion about him long before the 2016 race started. I once interned for Trump's nemesis-biographer, the
late, great muckraker Wayne Barrett
. The birther campaign
of 2011 was all I ever needed to make a voting decision about the man.
I started covering the last presidential race in 2015 just as I was finishing up a book about the death of Eric Garner called
I Can't Breathe . Noting that
a birther campaign started by "peripheral political curiosity and reality TV star Donald Trump" led to 41 percent of respondents
in one poll believing Barack Obama was "not even American," I wrote:
If anyone could communicate the frustration black Americans felt over Stop-and-Frisk and other neo-vagrancy laws that made
black people feel like they could be arrested anywhere, it should have been Barack Obama. He'd made it all the way to the White
House and was still considered to be literally trespassing by a huge plurality of the population.
So I had no illusions about Trump. The Russia story bothered
me for other reasons, mostly having to do with a general sense of the public being misled, and not even about Russia.
The problem lay with the precursor tale to Russiagate, i.e. how Trump even got to be president in the first place.
The 2016 campaign season brought to the surface awesome levels of political discontent. After the election, instead of wondering
where that anger came from, most of the press quickly pivoted to a new tale about a Russian plot to attack our Democracy. This conveyed
the impression that the election season we'd just lived through had been an aberration, thrown off the rails by an extraordinary
espionage conspiracy between Trump and a cabal of evil foreigners.
This narrative contradicted everything I'd seen traveling across America in my two years of covering the campaign. The overwhelming
theme of that race, long before anyone even thought about Russia, was voter rage at the entire political system.
The anger wasn't just on the Republican side, where Trump humiliated the Republicans' chosen
$150 million
contender , Jeb Bush (who got three delegates, or
$50 million per delegate ). It was also evident on the Democratic side, where a self-proclaimed "Democratic Socialist" with little
money and close to no institutional support became
a surprise contender
.
Because of a series of press misdiagnoses before the Russiagate stories even began, much of the American public was unprepared
for news of a Trump win. A cloak-and-dagger election-fixing conspiracy therefore seemed more likely than it might have otherwise
to large parts of the domestic news audience, because they hadn't been prepared for anything else that would make sense.
This was particularly true of upscale, urban, blue-leaning news consumers, who were not told to take the possibility of a Trump
White House seriously.
Priority number-one of the political class after a vulgar, out-of-work game-show host conquered the White House should have been
a long period of ruthless self-examination. This story delayed that for at least two years.
It wasn't even clear Trump whether or not wanted to win. Watching him on the trail, Trump at times went beyond seeming disinterested.
There were periods where it looked like South Park's "
Did I offend you? " thesis was true, and he was
actively trying to lose, only the polls just wouldn't let him.
Forget about the gift the end of Russiagate might give Trump by allowing him to spend 2020 peeing from a great height on the national
press corps. The more serious issue has to be the failure to face the reality of why he won last time, because we still haven't done
that.
... ... ...
Trump, the billionaire, denounced us as the elitists in the room. He'd call us "bloodsuckers," "dishonest," and in one line that
produced laughs considering who was saying it, "
highly-paid ."
He also did something that I immediately recognized as brilliant (or diabolical, depending on how you look at it). He dared cameramen
to turn their cameras to show the size of his crowds.
They usually wouldn't – hey, we don't work for the guy – which thrilled Trump, who would then say something to the effect of,
"See! They're
very dishonest people ." Audiences would turn toward us, and boo and hiss, and even throw little bits of paper and other things
our way. This was unpleasant, but it was hard not to see its effectiveness: he'd re-imagined the lifeless, poll-tested format of
the stump speech, turning it into menacing, personal, WWE-style theater.
Trump was gunning for votes in both parties. The core story he told on the stump was one of system-wide corruption, in which there
was little difference between Republicans and Democrats.
...
Perhaps just by luck, Trump was tuned in to the fact that the triumvirate of ruling political powers in America – the two parties,
the big donors and the press – were so unpopular with large parts of the population that he could win in the long haul by attracting
their ire, even if he was losing battles on the way.
...
The subtext was always: I may be crude, but these people are phonies, pretending to be upset when they're making money off my
bullshit .
I thought this was all nuts and couldn't believe it was happening in a real presidential campaign. But, a job is a job. My first
feature on candidate Trump was called "
How
America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable ." The key section read:
In person, you can't miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future.
The pundits don't want to admit it, but it's sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won:
President Donald Trump
It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with
the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.
And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He's way better than average.
Traditional Democratic audiences appeared thrilled by the piece and shared it widely. I was invited on scads of cable shows to
discuss ad nauseum the "con man" line. This made me nervous, because it probably meant these people hadn't read the piece, which among other things posited the failures
of America's current ruling class meant Trump's insane tactics could actually work.
Trump was selling himself as a traitor to a corrupt class, someone who knew how soulless and greedy the ruling elite was because
he was one of them.
...
The only reason most blue-state media audiences had been given for Trump's poll numbers all along was racism, which was surely
part of the story but not the whole picture. A lack of any other explanation meant Democratic audiences, after the shock of election
night, were ready to reach for any other data point that might better explain what just happened.
Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in
what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither
Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing
to vote for Donald Trump."
Post-election, Russiagate made it all worse. People could turn on their TVs at any hour of the day and see anyone from Rachel
Maddow to Chris Cuomo openly reveling in Trump's troubles. This is what Fox looks like to liberal audiences.
Worse, the "walls are closing in" theme -- two years old now -- was just a continuation of the campaign mistake, reporters confusing
what they wanted to happen with what was happening . The story was always more complicated than was being represented.
What sets disinformation apart from other forms of manipulative or persuasive
content
Why today's information environment amplifies disinformation
What is Disinformation? Is it Different from Propaganda?
Disinformation is a relatively new word. Most observers
trace it back to the Russian word dezinformatsiya , which Soviet planners in the
1950s defined as "dissemination (in the press, on the radio, etc.) of false reports intended
to mislead public opinion." Others suggest that the
earliest use of the term originated in 1930s Nazi Germany. In either case, it is much younger
(and less commonly used) than ' propaganda, ' which originated in
the 1600s and generally connotes the selective use of information for political effect.
Whether and to what degree these terms overlap is subject to debate. Some define propaganda
as the use of non-rational arguments to either advance or undermine a political ideal, and
use disinformation as an alternative name for undermining propaganda. Others consider
them to be separate concepts altogether. One popular distinction holds that disinformation
also describes politically motivated messaging designed explicitly to engender public
cynicism, uncertainty, apathy, distrust, and paranoia, all of which disincentivize citizen
engagement and mobilization for social or political change. "Misinformation," meanwhile,
generally refers to
the inadvertent sharing of false information.
Analysts generally
agree that disinformation is always purposeful and not necessarily composed of outright
lies or fabrications. It can be composed of mostly true facts, stripped of context or blended
with falsehoods to support the intended message, and is always part of a larger plan or
agenda. In the Russian context, observers
have described its use to pursue Moscow's foreign policy goals through a "4D" offensive:
dismiss an opponent's claims or allegations, distort events to serve political
purposes, distract from one's own activities, and dismay those who might
otherwise oppose one's goals.
Analysts generally agree that disinformation is always purposeful and not necessarily
composed of outright lies or fabrications. It can be composed of mostly true facts,
stripped of context or blended with falsehoods to support the intended message, and is
always part of a larger plan or agenda."
Disinformation in the Digital Age
The reemerging interest in disinformation is
not because such techniques are novel. There are similarities between the contemporary 4D
model and, for example, Soviet active
measures . Rather, a
growingconsensus
asserts that while the use of disinformation is not new, the digital revolution has
greatly enhanced public vulnerability to manipulation by information -- a trend which is
predicted to continue .
In part, these changes have been wrought by the advent of
new social media platforms and their growing dominance over advertising revenues.
This shift in the media funding environment has weakened traditional media gatekeepers,
changed incentives for content providers, and promoted the rise of unprofessional and/or
unscrupulous outlets capable of drawing large audiences at a low cost. As digital advertising
assumes an ever-larger role in shaping news consumption, targeted advertising allows for more
sophisticated forms of propaganda: for example, in September of 2017, Facebook
disclosed that roughly 3,000 ads related to divisive US political issues were purchased
by a network of 470 accounts and pages suspected to be run out of Russia. The company says
that at
least a quarter of those ads were geographically targeted. Twitter
later deleted two hundred accounts linked to those same Facebook accounts and pages and
revealed that in 2016, the Russian state-funded broadcaster RT spent $274,100 on advertising
targeting users in the United States.
Research suggests the total scale of "low quality political information" on those
platforms during the 2016 US elections was much larger, particularly in swing states. The
degree of Russian influence on this market for digital disinformation is unknown;
post-election, researchers are launching new efforts to track and analyze
it.
Although there is no universal definition, fake news generally refers to misleading
content found on the internet, especially on social media."
The Rise of 'Fake News'
The role of disinformation in recent elections has given rise to another distinct, but
related, term: '
fake news .'
Although there is no universal definition, fake news generally refers to misleading
content found on the internet, especially on social media. One analysis lays
out five types of fake news, including intentionally deceptive content, jokes taken at face
value, large-scale hoaxes, slanted reporting of real facts, and coverage where the truth may
be uncertain or contentious. These are not new: an
example of fake news from 2011 involves websites masquerading as real news organizations
to spread false information about the health benefits of acai berries.
Much of this content is produced by for-profit websites and Facebook pages
gaming the platform for advertising revenue. By producing tailored false content targeted
at the views, concerns, and preferences of social media users, these pages can generate tens
of thousands of interactions and thousands of dollars a month. In 2015, Facebook began
taking steps
to curtail this content, which it called a form of "news feed spam." By 2016, it became clear
the problem was growing out of control. Fabricated and fiercely partisan political content --
much of it
produced abroad for profit -- in some instances
outpaced engagement with credible mainstream news outlets.
Facebook initially downplayed the
potential influence of fake news, although it also pledged to pursue a response involving
expanded partnerships with fact-checkers, increased emphasis on detection and reporting,
warning labels for untrustworthy stories, and a crackdown on for-profit fake news pages.
Twitter
also reacted , developing an experimental prototype feature to allow users to report
"fake news" and exploring the use of machine learning to detect automated accounts spreading
political content.
Is Fake News Disinformation?
More often than not, fake news does not meet the definition of disinformation or
propaganda. Its motives are usually financial, not political, and it is usually not tied to a
larger agenda. One attempt to classify
various types of misleading and manipulative news content separates misinformation
(inadvertent sharing of false information) from disinformation, which is deliberate, and
arranges examples by motivation and degree of deception. Most of the fake news described
above falls somewhere in the middle: not inadvertent, but motivated by profit rather than
influence. To the degree that its purpose can be described as political, fake news begins to
resemble more insidious content.
Fake news' political prominence does have lessons for analysts of disinformation. Fake
news draws audiences because it validates their political preconceptions and worldviews,
capitalizing on media consumers' confirmation
bias . Many argue that because social media curates content according to user
preferences, it has a
polarizing effect that leaves consumers more vulnerable to manipulation in this way.
Political actors have been able to use this to their advantage by producing incendiary
content that spreads rapidly through grassroots online networks (some call this "
political astroturfing ").
More often than not, fake news does not meet the definition of disinformation or
propaganda. Its motives are usually financial, not political, and it is usually not tied to
a larger agenda."
Marketing, Public Affairs, Public Diplomacy, and other "Information
Campaigns"
Some analysts also differentiate
between various types of "information campaigns" -- organized attempts to communicate with
large groups of individuals -- which may include marketing, public affairs, and public
diplomacy. All of these terms are worth disentangling from each other and from propaganda and
disinformation writ large.
Marketing and public relations rely on a mix of facts, opinions, and emotional cues to
persuade audiences and build affinity between individuals and brands or organizations. As
promotional activities meant to augment or protect the reputation of the messenger, their
goals may be commercial or political, or they may simply aim to generate publicity. Similarly
promotional is public diplomacy, which states utilize to represent their viewpoints to
foreign audiences and promote positive associations with that country among foreign publics.
Done well, public diplomacy distinguishes
itself from propaganda by never intentionally spreading false information or relying on
non-rational means of persuasion (though marketing and public relations, of course, may rely
on such non-rational devices).
Marketing, public relations, public diplomacy, and similar information campaigns are all
related to the field of " strategic
communication ," broadly defined as the purposeful use of information and messaging to
advance the mission of a given organization, be it a corporate, government, non-profit, or
military actor. In the military context, a 2007 paper
from the U.S. Army War College emphasizes that strategic communication in a military
context aims to influence adversaries, reassure allies, and persuade publics. Because it may
be impossible to deceive one of these audiences without deceiving others, some
advocate that "deception should be rigorously forbidden in strategic communication" and
that the use of disinformation should never fall under the rubric of strategic
communication.
Done well, public diplomacy distinguishes itself from propaganda by never intentionally
spreading false information or relying on non-rational means of persuasion."
Intent as a Distinguishing Feature
Some
argue the intent of the messenger is crucial to distinguishing between different types of
messages. This makes it difficult to draw a bright, clear line between marketing, public
relations, and public diplomacy, on one side, and propaganda and disinformation on the other.
This is especially true when the content in question includes both objective fact and
subjective interpretation but no clear falsehood, because it may be unclear whether the
message reflects a genuine perspective or an intent to mislead. When content does include
falsehoods, it may be unclear whether they are accidental or purposeful.
If an information campaign uses falsehoods and emotional appeals not to persuade or
attract but to disrupt, divide, confuse, or otherwise damage target audiences' understanding
or political cohesion, it more closely aligns with disinformation and its undermining
function. This is not solely the realm of the state:
many activities undertaken by
non-state actors may also fit this description.
If an information campaign uses falsehoods and emotional appeals not to persuade or
attract but to disrupt, divide, confuse, or otherwise damage target audiences'
understanding or political cohesion, it more closely aligns with disinformation and its
undermining function."
Information Operations as a Tool of Political Influence
Information campaigns with these goals in mind are now sometimes referred to as
"information operations," a term until recently used primarily by defense officials in
referring broadly to the use of communications in military operations. In April 2017,
Facebook
described "information (or influence) operations" on the platform, which aim "to achieve
a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome" using "a combination of methods, such as false news,
disinformation, or networks of fake accounts (false amplifiers) aimed at manipulating public
opinion." In the run-up to the 2017 French presidential election, Facebook deleted 30,000
fake French accounts from the platform, providing a sense of the scale these operations can
reach.
In that election, an information operation (
likely of Russian origin ) released
hacked documents just before the beginning of a legally mandated election news blackout
in order to damage the campaign of Emmanuel Macron, the eventual winner. The manipulation of
information has been a
feature of Syria's civil war since the conflict's beginning.
Research from a diverse set of country case studies suggests that a wide array of
political, military, and private actors now routinely use social media to manipulate public
opinion. Italy's populist Five Star Movement, for instance,
is tied to a large constellation of online disinformation outlets. Taiwanese democracy
must grapple with both
domestic and cross-strait sources of disinformation. Information operations, including
those involving the use of disinformation during elections, are likely to remain a tool of
political influence well into the foreseeable future.
Brief prepared by Dean Jackson, International Forum for Democratic Studies.
It is now apparent with the
release
of the Mueller investigation findings
, that the great storm that has embattled the US
government and establishment since 2016 over supposed Russia-Trump collusion during the US
elections,
originates not from a genuine tangible source, but a constant stream of
rhetoric driven by partisan corporate media.
One certainty though is the Western
narrative of Russia as a 'malign influence' will not go away.
While America's liberal establishment continues to rage at Trump, Europe allies, under the
influence of Washington, maintain their aggressive stance towards Russia following the
catastrophic
US
meddling in Ukraine
in 2014 and the subsequent
reunification
of Crimea with Russia
.
The question is how can the narrative of 'malign Russian influence' be kept going?
Mainstream media will continue its role in this, but Western governments are also pouring
resources into promulgating certain narratives while containing others.
This week, hackers released more documents from the UK government-funded project
known as the
Integrity
Initiative
, revealing British government plans to build an umbrella network of
organisations across Europe to counter 'Russian disinformation'.
The following is a look at one of the EU projects already operating to ensure European
populations do not stray from this constructed narrative that at times crosses over into real
xenophobic racism, or Russophobia.
While researching this phenomenon, it was impossible not
to find some of the EU's counter-propaganda material quite funny.
If we want to know the meaning of disinformation, the American think tank known as the
National
Endowment for Democracy
which
funds
regime change
in the service of US corporate interests, has its own
definition
,
but it's not important – so long as we believe Russia or the Nazis invented the problem. In fact,
if we search the word 'disinformation,' a good number of the results tell us it originated in
Russia and is the baby of Stalin or the KGB. If we are not careful, we could end up thinking that
dishonesty is an inherent characteristic of Russians, a view actually
promoted
by
the former US Director of National Intelligence,
James Clapper
, who,
coincidentally was caught '
wilfully
'
lying
to
Congress.
The view of Russians being hard-wired for corruption was also promoted by the
New York Times
in
an article published in February,
The
Putin I knew; the Putin I know
, written by Franz J Sedelmeyer, exposing deep prejudice
behind the corporate media's shallow identity politics.
But this narrative fails to credit the CIA, which has spent decades crafting skills
carrying out the most grotesque deceptions in history targeted abroad and at home.
To
leave out the role of the CIA in disinformation must be the equivalent of writing an omelette
recipe and leaving out the eggs. In fact, the CIA doesn't just carry out disinformation campaigns,
as Victor Marchetti, former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA described it:
the
CIA manufactures history
. Not to recognise American intelligence services or government in
the history of disinformation while painting Russia as its mother is to deprive America of the
recognition it deserves for one of its most notable institutions. Somewhat ironically, you can
learn all about the history of disinformation from both
Google
and
the
National
Endowment for Democracy
which are two entities which have received financial support from the
CIA.
What about the EU? Does Brussels think that Russia is an inherently dishonest nation? Are they
aware that the CIA could be manufacturing Europe's history this very moment? Members of the
European Parliament (MEPs) so concerned about disinformation might want to study the documented
atrocities
of
the CIA, some of which were carried out in Europe. Perhaps they are not aware of the
US
intelligence services' role
in the history of subterfuge in Europe:
memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a
fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American
wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.
Paradoxically, given the probability rate of the CIA meddling in the EU, MEPs should consider
putting out a public warning:
The CIA is the most likely source of disinformation in Europe today. It manufactures
crises – and we've plenty of those.
But none of it. Instead, the European Parliament is fixated on ensuring its populations
fear
Russia
and are accepting of the narratives pushed on them. The EU released a new
report
this
month repeating the narratives it has been accumulating to justify increasing actions against
Russia, particularly since 2014 following the reunification of Crimea. It has passed a resolution
stating that Russia could no longer be considered a strategic partner of the EU:
While condemning the illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea, as well as Russia's
continued violation of the territorial integrity of Georgia and Moldova, Members stressed that
the EU cannot envisage a gradual return to business as usual until Russia fully implements the
Minsk Agreement and restores the territorial integrity of Ukraine
Members condemned Russia's involvement in the Skripal case, and in disinformation
campaigns and cyberattacks carried out by the Russian intelligence services aimed at
destabilising public and private communications infrastructure and at increasing tensions within
the EU and its Member States
They are concerned about the relations between the Russian government and the extreme
right-wing and populist nationalist parties and governments in the EU, such as in Hungary. They
also recalled that the interference of Russian state actors in the referendum campaign on Brexit
is currently under investigation by the UK authorities
As Russia can no longer be considered a strategic partner in the current circumstances,
Members believe that the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement should be reconsidered
As well as the coordinated strategic isolation of Russia by the EU, members of the G7 have
signed up to a
Rapid
Response Mechanism
(RRM) designed to:
see hostile states publicly 'called out' for their egregious behaviour – with coordinated
international attribution of cyber and other attacks.
The agreement involves
sharing intelligence
,
attribution of hostile activity
and
forming a
common narrative and response,
effectively a military-like propaganda
coordination between the countries that can be applied for a chosen agenda.
To protect its version of history the EU has created
mechanisms
to
fight off alternative realities, narratives, or truths – which ever word fits – claiming any fact
or opinion contrary to those of the stated EU decree must be condemned as pro-Kremlin, pro-Russian,
or 'Putinist', a derogatory depiction presently supported by the corporate media. The EU claims
these 'alternative narratives' are the product of a Russian disinformation campaign and has
developed resources to 'disprove' that disinformation. These are the EU vanguards of
truth
set
up and funded by the European Council in 2015: the
European External Action Service East
Stratcom Task Force
or unaffectionately known here as Team
East
Stratcom
. A brief study of their work only leads to further concerns about who is
manufacturing history, but also to the likely conclusion that Team East Stratcom is made up of
media studies students who drink beer and watch RT all day.
Here's how Team East Stratcom describes itself in a Q&A:
Does the team engage in counter-propaganda?
No. It identifies and corrects disinformation
Counter-propaganda vs correct disinformation (you say tomatto, I say tomayto).
Julian King, the EU's security commissioner, has described it as a
counter-propaganda
cell
. Come on Brussels, make up your mind.
What does Team East StratCom do, and what is the role of its website
EUVDisinfo
?
The Task Force reports on and analyses disinformation trends, explains and exposes
disinformation narratives, and raises awareness of disinformation coming from Russian State,
Russian sources and spread in the Eastern neighbourhood media space
RUSSIAN MEMES: Official EU conspiracy theory diagram explains how 'Russian disinfo'
permeates mainstream western discourse (
EU
External Action
2017)
Firstly, who defines what is disinformation? Is it just assumed that any information emanating
from a Russian media outlet is automatically disinformation?
Narratives and sources. Does this mean that any narrative which matches a Russian one is then
classed as
Russian
in origin? If a Western alternative media outlet publishes a narrative
which happens to match that of a Russian media outlet, does this then mean that the said
alternative media outlet is 'under Russian influence', or 'in league with the Kremlin'? Could such
a politicized method of labelling lead to potential McCarthyite targeting of independent
journalists?
The Task Force does not target opinions and does not seek to "blacklist" anyone. It
checks facts and identifies disinformation coming from Russian State, Russian language and
Eastern
Neighbourhood
media. It focuses on the disinformation message, not the messenger.
Yet, individual journalists are identified in many of these so-called 'disinformation cases' and
described as supporters of one leader or other on the EU's list of bogeymen. Team East StratCom –
there is no need to be shy about McCarthyism. Certain mainstream media stalwarts of establishment
narratives are more upfront about whom they do and do not want in the club, as Oliver Kamm of
The
Times
has demonstrated:
For an agency already struggling with the concept of truth, Team
East StratCom
is
not off to a great start.
So how does Team East StratCom protect EU narratives? The European Council made it
clear
in
2015 they wanted to counter narratives about
regime
change
in
Ukraine
and
its consequences. In fact, about half of its 'disinformation cases' are about Ukraine:
Ukraine tops the EUvsDisinfo database as the most frequent target with 461 references among
a total of 1,000 disinformation cases reported in the course of 2018.
So how does Team East StratCom counter propaganda sorry correct disinformation? The following
are a few case samples that help to illuminate their methodologies (although with a budget increase
from €1.1 million in 2018 to €3 million in 2019, it may find new and diverse ones):
Disinformation Example 1: Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe
Team East StratCom argues that undermining the credibility of Ukraine benefits Russia. It
reports that RT Deutsch described Ukraine as the most corrupt country in Europe. It then tries to
debunk this using
Transparency International
's
corruption perception index, a chart which is created and paid for by Western neoliberal
governments – the same ones that help to keep corrupt governments in power so long as they provide
opportunities to serve Western corporate interests.
Team East StratCom tries to disprove this case by drawing our attention away from corruption in
Europe to corruption worldwide. This puts 60 countries ahead of Ukraine. That is sneaky Team East
StratCom because, aside from Russia, which we must believe is the most corrupt country in Europe,
Ukraine actually tops the list. So why does the EU want to hide the extent of corruption in
Ukraine and is it the only thing being hidden about the country? According to Russian Foreign
Ministry Spokeswoman
Maria Zakharova
the West wants
to stop the world from recognising Crimea as part of Russia's territory. In order to do this it
must maintain a manufactured reality; the narrative of Ukraine being a victim of Russian aggression
and in no way a liability due, at least in part, to the West's meddling. This approach also entails
downplaying any suggestion that
the
West planned and orchestrated
a
coup d'etat
in Kiev in February 2014.
Disinformation Example 2: Far-right groups in Ukraine
This extract by Team East StratCom criticises the reporting of far-right groups in Ukraine:
Dehumanise, demoralise, make Ukraine the guilty party
Pro-Kremlin disinformation about Ukraine targets audiences in Russia, in Ukraine and in
third countries, including the West. Domestic audiences in Russia are e.g. faced with
narratives which dehumanise Ukrainians and show the authorities in Kyiv as a cynical modern heir
to 20th century Nazism. Such a strategy can turn Ukraine into an acceptable target of the
Kremlin's military aggression.
The involvement of far right groups in the run-up to and during 2014 Maidan events and
since
,
has already been widely reported across much of the global mainstream media, for example,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
and
here
,
as well as in alternate media. To suggest that this narrative is Russian disinformation is
ludicrous. What's more, the
European
Parliament
have already recognised in 2012 the threat of the far-right parties like Svoboda and
Pravi Sektor in Ukrainian politics:
Parliament goes on to express concern about the rising nationalistic sentiment in
Ukraine, expressed in support for the Svoboda Party, which, as a result, is one of the two new
parties to enter the Verkhovna Rada. It recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views
go against the EU's fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic
parties in the Verkhovna Rada not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with this party.
Team East StratCom, you are implying the EU dehumanised Ukraine! But then the EU did later
drop
its
objection as members of the same racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic party
gained
positions in Ukraine's government
, so perhaps you will be forgiven. Perhaps sowing a little
confusion of its own, is Brussels.
Disinformation Example 3: Russia is depicted as a 'defender' and a 'peacekeeper' and
the West – as the villain
.
Team East Stratcom likes using Twitter graphics as evidence when 'disproving pro-Kremlin
disinformation.' Never mind history, reason and common sense – just bring out a nice Twitter
graphic! According to disinfo mavens, any spike in Twitter activity with the words 'Russia'
'Moscow' or 'Putin' in reference to Venezuela is proof of a 'pro-Kremlin' disinformation campaign,
says Team East StratCom. Here is
their
graphical chart
of Twitter traffic:
But Russia is an ally of Venezuela so why would this not be reflected on Twitter when there is a
blatant attempt by a Western aggressor to impose its military and economic will on Venezuela? Such
was the situation in February when the US tried to pressure the Venezuelan government into allowing
in trucks, supposedly carrying humanitarian aid, into the country. Aid as a Trojan Horse for
weapons has historical context, especially with regards to the US and its new special envoy to
Venezuela,
Elliot Abrams
, a
convicted
war criminal
who illicitly supplied weapons to death squads in Nicaragua, El Salvador and
Guatemala on behalf of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s. Now that he is special envoy to
Venezuela, it is common sense to suspect foul play. Can such people really be seen as peacekeepers,
Team East Stratcom? And using a Twitter graphic to divert attention from a flagrant coup attempt by
an aggressive power is more than a little contemptible. What's more, a few days afterwards, one of
those trucks carrying supplies was found to contain nails and other materials useful for making
barricades:
And so to sum up the tactics used by Team East StratCom for 'disproving pro-Kremlin
disinformation', based on the above cases alone, a list could include for starters:
Categorical denial of any wrongdoing by Western powers or NATO members
Label any information emanating from a Russia media outlet as 'disinformation' or
'Kremlin propaganda'
Discredit alternate media journalists who stray from Official
Washington/London/Brussels position
Diversion and distraction – dazzle the public with colourful Twitter graphics
Remove any key political, geopolitical context
Obscure or erase history
Use of online tools like the Corruption Index promoted by same Western governments
that fund bloody imperialist wars
Use emotive, jingoistic themes
Associate perceived ideological opponents with leaders on Western bogeyman list
Repetition of pejorative terms and ad hominem smears such as 'pro-Kremlin' and'
'Putinist' to create division
Infer that any dissenter in the West is a 'traitor.'
But Team East StratCom can't erase history or delete context or bore us half to death
with those Twitter graphics and still expect to retain their credibility.
What's more, given the Russia-Trump collusion narrative has been exposed as a hoax, Team East
StratCom really ought to
let
that one go
.
OMG! How far the mighty MSM doyen The Washington Post has fallen. Those halcyon days of
Woodward and Bernstein are now but a distant memory. The shinning victory of driving the
hated President Richard Nixon from high office ... a ... myth ... morons ... We the people
...
And then Stephen Cohen of The Nation , another voice of reason, sent me a copy of his
book, "
War With Russia? " It's a collection of his heretical writings about our new, unnecessary
Cold War, and the opening essay ,
adapted from a talk he gave in Washington D.C., made me ashamed of my silence.
"Some people who privately share our concerns -- again, in Congress, the media,
universities and think tanks -- do not speak out at all. For whatever
reason -- concern about being stigmatized, about their career, personal
disposition -- they are silent. But in our democracy, where the cost of dissent
is relatively low, silence is no longer a patriotic option," Cohen wrote, adding, "We
should exempt from this imperative young people, who have more to lose. A few have sought my
guidance, and I always advise, 'Even petty penalties for dissent in regard to Russia could
adversely affect your career. At this stage of life, your first obligation is to your family
and thus to your future prospects. Your time to fight lies ahead'."
Well, what was my excuse?
Special Prosecutor Robert S. Mueller has now turned in his findings, and there's not much
there. For weeks beforehand, mainstream media warned about this -- exhorting
readers against succumbing to feeling "disappointed".
Disappointed? I guess, as my friend Taibbi has noted , it would have
been an immense relief had the U.S. president been found to be a high-level traitor. We
could have all brought picnic lunches to his execution.
Right before the species-ending war with Russia.
In their fanatic loyalty to the narrative, what used to be my favorite media have stridently
reminded us that, Mueller aside, "it's not over!" The "focus of the investigation" will move
now to the New York prosecutors, to House committees. The American intelligentsia will
continue to dream up wild theories -- they'll be Scotch-taped on every vertical
surface, connected by bits of yarn and magic marker scribbles and hyperverbal mania.
The question now is, has the Mueller report finally freed up the rest of us to challenge the
more insane flights of fantasy? Or is it instead so close to the 2020 presidential
elections -- and so legally dangerous for some of the intelligence insiders who
have tried to bring down the president -- that skeptical journalists more than
ever will be bullied to keep silent?
Rootless Whataboutism
As a test case -- a first step on the road to journalistic recovery --
can I suggest we at least retire the insane, Orwellian term "whataboutism?"
Whataboutism really deserves consideration as a "Word of the Year", and not in a good way.
There have been multiple non-ironic media reports about this odious concept,
on NPR , in the
Huffington Post ,
in The Washington Post , you name it.
"His campaign may or may not have conspired with Moscow," The Washington Post
told us awhile back, "but President Trump has routinely employed a durable old Soviet
propaganda tactic 'whataboutism,' the practice of short-circuiting an argument by asserting
moral equivalency between two things that aren't necessarily comparable."
NPR's version also claims that whataboutism is a Soviet-tainted practice. "It's not exactly
a complicated tactic -- any grade-schooler can master the
'yeah-well-you-suck-too-so-there' defense," NPR says. "But it came to be associated with the
USSR because of the Soviet Union's heavy reliance upon whataboutism throughout the Cold War and
afterward, as Russia."
Yet in my experience, it's not so much a Soviet tactic as an American one --
specifically, it's a way of demanding a loyalty oath to the anti-Trump resistance.
I have occasionally dared express skepticism about the entire overblown story that Russia
was involved in our 2016 elections at all. That's right. I don't buy it. I am not
entirely convinced that "Russian bots and trolls" infected anyone's mind by, say, taking
positions both for and against gun control after the Parkland high school mass shooting, or
by setting up
anti-masturbation hotlines , or by
giving bad reviews to "Star Wars: the Last Jedi."
I am also not entirely convinced that the Russians, having supposedly decided at the highest
levels of their government to try to sink Hilary Clinton's candidacy, couldn't think of
anything more clever than to spear-phish campaign manager John Podesta's G-mail.
Nor do I
share the concerns of The Times of London that the Russian animated cartoon "Masha
and the Bear" is part of a soft propaganda drive to weaken the minds of Estonian children ahead
of their eventual annexation by Red Army tanks.
Yet before I can even offer any subtler qualification of all this -- sure,
there is Russian-government, let's say, "illicit computer and social media activity" out there,
mixed with a lot of other noise signals (click-bait farms, which explains at least some of the
infamous Internet Research Agency's activities; ordinary Russians with pro-Kremlin positions
and personal Facebook accounts; and yes, people sitting on their beds who weigh 400 pounds),
but it has to be weighed against -- I'll be cut off.
"That's whataboutism ," I've been told flatly.
It's actually not -- that doesn't even meet the absurd quasi-official
definitions of this new Kafkaesque term -- but that's the whole point.
Disagreement is by its very nature whataboutist . Every skeptical question, after all,
could technically begin, "But what about ?"
Of course, it's far, far worse if I truly commit a whataboutism and -- God
forbid! God forbid! – I express curiosity about The New York Times
reporting about millions flowing to the Clintons and associated with the Russian purchase
of American uranium mines.
Whataboutism! It's so comparable to the old Soviet thought crimes --
Trotskyite, wrecker, cosmopolitan, rootless cosmopolitanism Every time I hear someone
flag a statement as guilty of whataboutism, I mentally add " rootless whataboutism."
People tell me Mueller missed the point. It's about Russian oligarch and Kremlin money,
invested in Trump real estate -- it's not over! All hail the Southern District
prosecutors! OK, let's see it, I'm open to that possibility. But if all Russian money is
tainted just because it's "oligarchical" -- good luck defining that
! -- then is it O.K. for the spouse of then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to
take $500,000 for a single hour's work, a speech in Moscow, for one of the most famous
"oligarch" banks?
"That's whataboutism! NPR and The Washington Post say that's a
Soviet-favored tactic! Your loyalty is thus suspect two-fold. Have you had contact with
any Russian nationals?"
Communists and Crickets
"EVIDENCE POINTS TO RUSSIA AS MAIN SUSPECT IN BRAIN INJURY ATTACKS ON DOZENS OF U.S.
DIPLOMATS" was the report by
MSNBC in September 2017, and they flogged that big scoop for months, and have never
really apologized for it.
Two dozen American diplomats in Cuba suffered headaches, dizziness and other vague symptoms
they blamed on strange sounds -- sounds some of them tape-recorded and supplied
to journalists, doctors and the government. "It sounds sort of like a mass of crickets," was
the opening line of the Associated Press report about the recordings (which you can
listen to yourself here ).
But no. Not crickets. As MSNBC reported, our intelligence services had intercepted
Russian communications (!) revealing the sounds were "some kind of microwave weapon,"
one so sophisticated that our top government minds were at a loss.
We might not know how it works, MSNBC reported, but we did know it was a weapon, and
"now Russia is the leading suspect."
"This is not an accident," reported anchorwoman Andrea Mitchell then. "This is not a
microwave listening device gone bad. This is an attack -- against American
diplomats and intelligence officers, and this was targeting."
What an amazing allegation. The Russian government was beaming a mysterious, high-tech
weapon at our citizens ; we had intercepted communications that made this
clear.
For more than a year, I and colleagues with Russia-reporting experience would be grilled
about this, and would just have to shrug apologetically. We just didn't know what to say. It
didn't make a lot of face-value sense -- why exactly would Russian agents, amid
all this rabid anti-Russia hysteria, beam a secret brain-frying weapon at two-dozen random
American diplomats and their family members in Cuba, for weeks apparently? What would be the
logic behind giving these random-seeming people headaches and making them dizzy and even
causing "brain injuries similar to concussions"?
As a physician, I also shared the s
kepticism of colleagues published about this in the Journal of the American Medical
Association. Playing odds, I agreed with those critics that I would have assumed either a
mass psychogenic illness or a viral infection more likely etiologies than a secret Siberian
death ray. I also read "brain injuries similar to concussions" as, "brain injuries that don't
show up on objective testing." (Of course, I've not examined any of these patients or reviewed
their cases so it's not for me to say.)
But in our fevered Russophobic environment, no one wanted to entertain alternative
scenarios -- after all, we don't even understand this sophisticated
weapon, which our intelligence agencies assure us (anonymously) they have intercepted Russian
communications bragging about, so how dare we debate the logic behind its use? (Maybe
this is how they control the president!)
Then three months ago, American scientists published in a peer-review journal their analysis
of the dastardly recordings and
identified the sounds : Crickets. Caribbean crickets.
Specifically, the echoing call of the male, short-tailed indies. During mating season.
But did MSNBC apologize, or retract?
Crickets.
Instead, during a historically cold week this winter, MSNBC star Rachel Maddow used
the excuse of a government panel about energy security to go on a Jack D. Ripper about Russia
someday deciding to freeze middle America to death.
"It is like negative 50 degrees in the Dakotas right now. What would happen if Russia killed
the power in Fargo today? What would happen if all the natural gas lines that service Sioux
Falls just 'poofed', on the coldest day in recent memories, and it wasn't in our power
whether or not to turn them back on?" Maddow asked. "What would you do if you lost heat indefinitely --
as the act of a foreign power! -- on the same day the temperature in
your front yard matched the temperature in Antarctica? I mean, what would you and your family
do?"
Gee, I don't know Rachel. What would my family and I do if Russia launched a nuclear weapon
at my front yard? I guess we'd all die. I guess I don't know who to trust anymore, I feel
exhausted by the news, sick of it all, I just want to stop caring, and you seem to feel the
same, and omigosh Rachel, we've been infected by the red virus!
'They Hate our Freedoms'
James Comey, the former FBI director, testified before the Senate after his firing that the
Russians are "coming after America," because, "They think that this great experiment of ours is
a threat to them, and so they're going to try to run it down and dirty it up as much as
possible."
Right. It's because "they hate our freedoms."
Where have I heard that before?
People had been waiting breathlessly for Mueller's report, but in reality, everything we
needed to know was right there in the first report -- the January 6, 2017, grand
announcement, the big reveal by our Intelligence Community -- the consensus of
CIA, FBI and NSA -- "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S.
Elections."
I remember finishing that report at the time and thinking:
Holy Cow, they have nothing.
Nothing!
Of the 15 pages with any meat to them in that report, seven were a long, bizarre complaint
about the existence and activities of RT (formerly RussiaToday ), the
Kremlin-sponsored English-language news channel.
Our intelligence agencies reported that RT has become "the most-watched foreign news
channel in the UK," had more YouTube viewers than the BBC or CNN , and was
surpassing al-Jazeera in New York and Washington D.C. ( Voice of America , which
is the U.S. government version of RT , has no sense of humor or passion and so no
viewers anywhere outside of Foggy Bottom.)
RT's success was, per the intelligence report, thanks to a combination of lavish
Kremlin funding and an alluring editorial slant. The intelligence report quoted RT's
editor as saying her station got lots of new viewers after offering sympathetic coverage of the
Occupy Wall Street movement. The intelligence report continued:
In an effort to highlight the alleged "lack of democracy" in the United States, RT broadcast,
hosted, and advertised third-party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the
political agenda of these candidates. The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does
not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a "sham." RT's reports
often characterize the United States as a "surveillance state" and allege widespread
infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use RT has also focused on
criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the
US national debt. Some of RT's hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and
have predicted that government corruption and "corporate greed" will lead to US financial
collapse RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts
on public health
This was hilarious of course -- a public snit by our intel communities about
Russians racking up big numbers among American viewers in Washington and New York , just
by offering mildly critical takes on drone killings and fracking and "alleged Wall Street
greed" ("alleged"? Really ?). We were promised a major assessment of any improper
Russian influences on our 2016 electoral process and we got -- this? A formal
complaint that Russian TV gave Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein too much air time?
All this bitching and moaning about RT -- which, remember, is not some
secret plot, but just a public TV station you can go watch on YouTube or not watch
-- takes up well more than half of that grand intelligence community assessment.
It really speaks volumes about what was on their minds. And again, my conclusion reading it two
years ago was: So, they've got nothing.
The one caveat, though, was that there was a classified appendix. There's always a
classified appendix. So, who knew what was in that ? After all, immediately and in the
two years since, intelligence officials have occasionally been cited -- always
anonymously! --
in The Guardian ,
The New Yorker , and The
New York Times -- as claiming to have intercepted communications between the
Trump team and the Russian government.
Well, by now, we should realize the appendix is a myth.
First, we now know that
at least part of it -- and, I would guess, probably all of it --
was nothing more than the Steele report, the infamous document first posted on
BuzzFeed , that collection of anti-Trump opposition research paid for by the Hilary Clinton
campaign. (You know -- the pee tape stuff.)
And we now also know, courtesy of Robert Mueller's report, that there are no "intercepted
communications" between Russians and the Trump campaign teams. Just like there are no Russian
intercepts about secret Siberian brain-frying rays in Cuba, because that, again, was the mating
call of a short-tailed Caribbean cricket.
I don't know what's funnier about all of this -- and it is damned funny,
really -- the fact that all of this has actually happened , or the fact
that I feel the need to come out of journalistic retirement to help point it out.
A
President With a Traitor's Heart -- for Six More Years
And that's the way it is, and has been, all along for these past two years. There have been
non-stop media allegations that, one way or another, our narcissistic, loud-mouthed, overtly
racist U.S. president has a traitor's heart. Any errors or inaccuracies -- and
there have been a shocking number of retracted "scoops," as well as screwups like the Caribbean
crickets that have just been ignored -- are excused in service of this larger
truth: Our president has a traitor's heart.
But I already knew that! We all did!
We knew it the moment he said , "Russia, if you're listening, I
hope you'll be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing" -- referencing
some official e-mails of Hilary Clinton's that were improperly handled and got deleted. (Among
the onion layers of irony to this political season is that Trump pioneered the 21st century
witch hunt. There has never been any evidence that Clinton's deleted emails represent anything
at all -- yet Trump hammered away at this as if it mattered, until one day it
did. And he didn't even suggest investigations, he skipped straight to "lock her up!").
Being racist, or stupid, or sexist, or a bully, or a New York real estate developer
-- all of these are deep character flaws. They are not always crimes. (Sexually
assaulting someone is always a crime, however, even if you are a TV star and remember
your breath mints.)
And yet, again, we already knew all of this. Remember this transcript
from The New York Times ?
Trump : I did try and fuck her. She was married and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I
took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, "I'll show you
where they have some nice furniture." I took her out furniture -- I moved on
her like a bitch. But I couldn't get there.
Trump : Yeah, that's her [peeking out a trailer window at a different target, an
approaching actress] . I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You
know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful -- I just start kissing them.
It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it.
You can do anything.
Billy Bush [a fawning minor TV personality] : Whatever you want.
Trump : Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
I share your pain. And I have no doubt he'd trade his own son for majority ownership of a
moderately nice golf course. But I'm also, frankly, no longer very interested in him. I'm much
more interested in us -- the rest of us.
What happened to us?
Well, I'll amend that slightly. I am of course quite interested in seeing Donald Trump leave
office. I suspect, however, that these two-plus years of journalistic malpractice --
a politically-motivated Red Scare at a time when we don't even have any Reds anymore,
just Russians -- has locked in his second term. (What's that? Impeachment
you say? Oh please. He'd set up a government-in-exile in Mar-a-Lago and then he'd be around for
twenty more years instead of six. And he'd have half the nation with him the entire
time.) So thank you for that, MSNBC and NPR and New York Times.
"... Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, tweeted: "Time to investigate the Obama officials who concocted and spread the Russian conspiracy hoax!" Representative Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican, said "underlying documents" supporting what became Mueller's probe should be released to the public. ..."
"... A McCain associate, David Kramer, acknowledged in a deposition in a libel case that he spread word of the dossier to several news organizations. ..."
President Donald Trump and a key ally, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, said Monday that after Robert Mueller closed
his Russia probe, they want an investigation of the investigators.
Graham said at a news conference that Attorney General William Barr should appoint a new special counsel to examine why the U.S.
government, under President Barack Obama, decided to open an investigation into Russian election interference in 2016, and whether
it was an excuse to spy on Trump's campaign.
"Was it a ruse to get into the Trump campaign?" Graham said at the news conference. "I don't know but I'm going to try to find
out."
Trump told reporters at the White House that unspecified "people" behind the Russia probe would "be looked at."
The remarks show that Trump and some of his allies have retribution and score-settling on their minds after Mueller found no evidence
that the president or his campaign colluded with the Kremlin's election interference. It's unclear whom Trump wants investigated,
but possibilities include former FBI Director James Comey, whom he fired in May 2017; Obama's CIA Director John Brennan, whom Trump
stripped of his security clearance last year; and other former intelligence and Justice Department officials who have vocally criticized
the president.
The stage is also set for dueling and contradictory congressional investigations. In the House, controlled by Democrats, several
committees have opened investigations into the president's financial and business affairs, and Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler
said Sunday he wants Barr to testify soon on his finding that Mueller didn't produce sufficient evidence that Trump obstructed justice
by interfering in the Russia inquiry.
The Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, on Monday blocked a vote on a measure by the Democratic leader, Chuck
Schumer of New York, calling for Mueller's report to be made public. McConnell said Barr should have time to consider which portions
of the report can be publicly released given concerns about classified information, ongoing investigations and other information
protected by law.
Republican Allies
Several other Republicans backed Graham and Trump on Monday. Senate Oversight Committee Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said
he'd like to work with Graham "to get those answers for the American public."
"We need to find out what happened," he said in an interview.
Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, tweeted: "Time to investigate the Obama officials who concocted and spread the Russian
conspiracy hoax!" Representative Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican, said "underlying documents" supporting what became Mueller's
probe should be released to the public.
"Let them decide for themselves whether this investigation was warranted -- or whether it was a two-year long episode of political
targeting, driven by FBI and DOJ executives who wanted to retaliate against a legitimately elected president," Meadows said in an
interview.
Graham said his committee would also look into the FBI's handling of the inquiry into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's
use of a private email server, saying that Comey's actions in that investigation "did affect" the 2016 election. Comey held a news
conference in July 2016 to announce that Clinton wouldn't be charged with a crime, and then announced less than two weeks before
the election that the investigation had been re-opened after additional emails were discovered.
'Evil Things'
Trump's indication that unnamed people responsible for the probe would be investigated was vague. He didn't name anyone, and after
he made similar remarks on Sunday, White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley told reporters that Barr hadn't been directed
to open any investigations of Democrats.
"People that have done such harm to our country," Trump complained on Monday. "We've gone through a period of really bad things
happening. Those people will certainly be looked at. I've been looking at them for a long time and I'm saying, why haven't they been
looked at. They lied to Congress. Many of them. You know who they are. They've done so many evil things."
Trump added that he hasn't considered pardoning anyone convicted in connection to Mueller's probe.
Graham said he planned to talk with Barr on Monday and hoped to hold a public hearing with the attorney general to explain his
findings in the Mueller probe. Barr sent a four-page letter to Congress on Sunday summarizing Mueller's findings, which have not
been publicly released.
"I'm asking him to lay it all out," Graham said.
Both Trump and Graham said they support Barr publicly releasing as much of Mueller's report as possible. The investigation turned
out "100 percent" as it should have, Trump told reporters.
Dossier Distribution
Trump has previously singled out individuals over their role in the probe, calling for an investigation into the "
other side " of the investigation. He's mentioned Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI employees Peter
Strzok and Lisa Page, and Justice Department attorney Bruce Ohr.
Graham also said he advised his friend and Senate colleague John McCain to give the FBI the so-called Steele dossier on Trump,
rebutting the president's accusations that McCain tried to hinder his 2016 election.
Graham told reporters that McCain, an Arizona Republican who died last year, had shown him the unverified collection of intelligence
reports on Trump's links to Russia that was put together by a former British spy, Christopher Steele. Steele was commissioned to
compile the information by an opposition research firm hired by Democrats.
McCain put the dossier in his safe and handed it over to the FBI the next day, Graham said.
A McCain associate, David Kramer, acknowledged in a deposition in a libel case that he spread word of the dossier to several news
organizations.
-- With assistance by Billy House
( Updates with McConnell blocking Schumer measure in seventh paragraph. ) Published on March 25, 2019 12:37 PM
Updated on March 25, 2019 5:58 PM
Seems to me what that BigLie's about is this tale: Relations with Russia during the
post-USSR age were going along swell until Russia began involved in the Venezuelan
Crisis.
The attempt is to try a new narrative using a different angle to blame Russia which is the
goal of the BigLie. Signal a new line of approach in dealing with the attitude toward Russia
to the trusty echoers of His Master's Voice.
So Russiagate smoothly transferred in Neo-McCarthyism and it will poison the US political atmosphere for a decade or two.
Notable quotes:
"... But as I foresaw well before the summary of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." ..."
"... Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections ..."
"... Persistent demands to "secure our elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process ..."
"... Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people? ..."
"... Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. ..."
"... Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, " have no regrets ." ..."
"... Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance." With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional damage being done by Russiagate allegations. ..."
"... Rachel Maddow continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.) ..."
"... Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be " derisive and scornful " toward our political life. ..."
But as I foresaw well before the summary
of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests
are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent
of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." Joy Reid of MSNBC, which has been
a citadel of Russiagate allegations along with CNN, even suggested that Mueller and Attorney General William Barr were themselves
engaged in " a cover-up
."
Contrary to a number of major media outlets, from Bloomberg News to The Wall Street Journal , nor does Mueller's
exculpatory finding actually mean that "
Russiagate
is dead " and indeed that " it expired
in an instant ." Such conclusions reveal a lack of historical and political understanding. Nearly three years of Russiagate's
toxic allegations have entered the American political-media elite bloodstream, and they almost certainly will reappear again and
again in one form or another.
This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25–40 million spent on the Mueller
investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy -- damage done not by an alleged
"Trump-Putin axis" but by Russsigate's perpetrators themselves. Having examined this collateral damage in my recently published book
War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate , I will only note them here.
§ Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack
of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections everywhere -- national, state, and local. If true, or even
suspected, how can voters have confidence in the electoral foundations of American democracy? Persistent demands to "secure our
elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate
declining confidence in the entire electoral process.
Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites,
which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people?
§ Defamatory Russsiagate allegations that Trump was a "Kremlin puppet" and thus "illegitimate" were aimed at the president but
hit the presidency itself, degrading the institution, bringing it under suspicion, casting doubt on its legitimacy. And if an "agent
of a hostile foreign power" could occupy the White House once, a "Manchurian candidate," why not again? Will Republicans be able
to resist making such allegations against a future Democratic president? In any event, Hillary Clinton's failed campaign manager,
Robby Mook, has already told us that there will be a "
next time ."
§ Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers
and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate
media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. No mainstream media
did anything to expose, for example, two crucial and fraudulent Russiagate documents -- the so-called Steele Dossier and the January
2017 Intelligence Community Assessment -- but instead relied heavily on them for their own narratives. Little more need be said here
about this institutional self-degradation. Glenn Greenwald and a few others followed and exposed it throughout, and now Matt Taibbi
has given us a meticulously documented
account of that systematic malpractice , concluding that Mueller's failure to confirm the media's Russiagate allegations "is
a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media."
Nor, it must be added, was this entirely inadvertent or accidental. On August 8, 2016, the trend-setting New York Times
published on its front page
an astonishing editorial manifesto by its media critic. Asking whether "normal standards" should apply to candidate Trump, he
explained that they should not: "You have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the
past half-century." Let others decide whether this Times proclamation unleashed the highly selective, unbalanced, questionably
factual "journalism" that has so degraded Russiagate media or instead the publication sought to justify what was already underway.
In either case, this remarkable -- and ramifying -- Times rejection of its own professed standards should not be forgotten.
Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the
Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, "
have no regrets ."
§ For better or worse, America has a two-party political system, which means that the Democratic Party is also a foundational
institution. Little more also need be pointed out regarding its self-degrading role in the Russiagate fraud. Leading members of the
party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell
from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance."
With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional
damage being done by Russiagate allegations.
As for Mueller's finding, the party's virtual network, MSNBC, remains undeterred.
Rachel Maddow
continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it
did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other
Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous
absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.)
§ Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political,
economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived,
as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's
necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts
with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle
has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be "
derisive and scornful
" toward our political life.
"... All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population. ..."
"... Decades ago while in a leftist organization debate was raised as to how to find valid information to inform ourselves with. It was well understood that the vast majority of the western corporate mass media was a brainwashing operation to keep the masses clueless and supporting imperialist war but, we reasoned, the ruling class itself would need to be kept informed with quality information in order to feel confident that they were making good decisions. ..."
"... But things change. Note how the Russiagate skeptics in the US were attacked by the desperately faithful: If you focused attention on flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory then the general consensus was that you were defending Trump. ..."
"... This condition has arisen from literally generations of propaganda instilling as reality in American media consumers the myth of "American Exceptionalism" . The current crop of American adults have been raised by parents who themselves have been thoroughly indoctrinated in this alter reality. The disease is literally universal across the nation, from lowliest and most oppressed Black transvestites to the CEOs of the biggest corporations. ..."
"... The Washington Post used to be one of the journals that the elites looked to in order to help inform their decisions, but now in the post-truth, or relative truth, world these information sources have increasingly sought to align their information products with the "proper" relative truths that reinforce the myth of "American Exceptionalism" , even if that is in conflict with objective and empirical reality. ..."
"... In short, Washington Bezos Post writers are not moronic or drunk. They are delusional . They are in the grips of a delusion that afflicts the entire United States, and portions of the rest of the world as well ..."
"... WashingtonBezos Post writers are moronic or
drunk."
What ails them is far more complicated and vastly more sinister.
One often hears people say of other countries "It isn't the people of Elbonia whom I
hate, it is their government." It may be difficult for some in Europe, where there
remains a vestige of an imperative to foster a worldview based upon objective reality, to
come to grips with the fact that the problem with America has metastasized and spread to the
level of the individual citizens... all of them, to one degree or another. You don't
like Trump? Bolton? Clinton?
All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are
entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking
cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is
quite real and extends to the entire population.
How did this happen to America?
Decades ago while in a leftist organization debate was raised as to how to find valid
information to inform ourselves with. It was well understood that the vast majority of the
western corporate mass media was a brainwashing operation to keep the masses clueless and
supporting imperialist war but, we reasoned, the ruling class itself would need to be kept
informed with quality information in order to feel confident that they were making good
decisions.
With this in mind we identified journals and sources that the capitalist elites
themselves relied upon to inform their decisions.
Things like the CIA World Factbook,
for instance, even though created by an organization devoted to disinformation, could be
trusted back then to be relatively dependable.
But things change. Note how the Russiagate skeptics in the US were attacked by the
desperately faithful: If you focused attention on flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory
then the general consensus was that you were defending Trump. The possibility that you could
be defending reason and truth is still dismissed out of hand. Why is that? Because in America
(it's a mind disease spreading to Europe, apparently) truth is relative and reason has become
just whatever justifies what you wish to be the truth; therefore, those who propose a
"truth" that conflicts with what people want to believe are agents of some enemy.
This condition has arisen from literally generations of propaganda instilling as reality
in American media consumers the myth of "American Exceptionalism" . The current crop
of American adults have been raised by parents who themselves have been thoroughly
indoctrinated in this alter reality. The disease is literally universal across the nation,
from lowliest and most oppressed Black transvestites to the CEOs of the biggest corporations.
As prior generations of the ruling elites from the post WWII era who still retained some
sense for the importance of objective reality have died off they have been replaced by the
newer generation for whom reality is entirely subjective. If they want to believe their
gender is mountain panda then that's their right as Americans! Likewise if they want to
believe that America's bombing is humanitarian and god's gift to the species, then anyone who
suggests otherwise is obviously a KGB troll.
The Washington Post used to be one of the journals that the elites looked to in order to
help inform their decisions, but now in the post-truth, or relative truth, world these
information sources have increasingly sought to align their information products with the
"proper" relative truths that reinforce the myth of "American Exceptionalism" ,
even if that is in conflict with objective and empirical reality.
To do otherwise would be to
aid and give comfort to America's "enemies" (do keep in mind that America is a nation
at war - has been for decades - and that workers in the corporate mass media are very much
conscious of their roles in that ongoing war effort, to the point that they see themselves as
information warriors fighting shadowy enemies that only exist in their own relative reality
bubbles).
In short, WashingtonBezos Post writers are not moronic or drunk.
They are delusional . They are in the grips of a delusion that afflicts the
entire United States, and portions of the rest of the world as well.
Some Americans have
broken free from this Matrix-like delusion, but the numbers remain somewhat small...
certainly less than one or two percent of the population, and those who have broken free of
the delusion will never be given a soapbox to speak to the rest of the population from by the
corporate elites.
I think you have wildly underestimated the number of Americans who are very aware of what is
going on with our country and the world. More than 40% of eligible voters elect not to
participate in elections realizing the futility of it, and withholding their consent to this
regime. It's a feature of propaganda to engender feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and
feelings of isolation by falsely portraying a consensus among the population for the policies
of the regime. Resist!
"... Brennan, whose security clearance has been revoked and who this week admitted he may have "received bad information" while opining about the Russia investigation in his role as an MSNBC analyst, discussed a wide range of national security issues with Democrats, an official familiar with the meeting told Fox News. ..."
"... Brennan's meeting with Democrats comes amid a reexamination of his role in the launching and furthering of the narrative that President Trump's campaign colluded with Russia. ..."
"... Paul added: "Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP." The next day, Brennan was just steps from the Senate -- but as part of the Hoyer meeting. ..."
"... Brennan on Monday issued one of the few mea culpas offered by members of the media in the aftermath of Barr's letter, in which he quoted Mueller as having found no evidence of any collusion or coordination between the Trump team and Russia. Prior to that finding, Brennan, the CIA Director from 2013-2017, had adamantly insinuated in tweets and on TV that Mueller would put Trump's "political & financial future in jeopardy." ..."
"... "I don't know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was," Brennan said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." ..."
"... Trump has frequently hit back at Brennan's broadsides. "I think Brennan is a very bad guy and, if you look at it, a lot of things happened under his watch," Trump once told Fox News' Tucker Carlson. "I think he's a very bad person." ..."
Former CIA Director John Brennan –
who's come under fire in recent days for his alleged role in pushing the unverified
anti-Trump dossier
– met with House Majority Leader
Steny Hoyer and other House Democrats on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Fox News has learned.
Brennan, whose security clearance has been revoked and who this week admitted he may have "received bad information" while opining
about the Russia investigation in his role as an MSNBC analyst, discussed a wide range of national security issues with Democrats,
an official familiar with the meeting told Fox News.
Brennan was invited "long before" the Mueller investigation was reportedly concluded last Friday, the official told Fox News,
but it was not clear if the Mueller report or the four-page summary letter of it released by Attorney General Bill Barr on Sunday
were discussed during the "Leader's Council" meeting.
The council is composed of a "diverse group of members of the caucus" and meet on a regular basis with a wide range of guests,
the official said.
Brennan's meeting with Democrats comes amid a reexamination of his role in the launching and furthering of the narrative that
President Trump's campaign colluded with Russia.
The day before his Capitol Hill meeting, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., tweeted he'd been told by a "high-level source" that Brennan "insisted
that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report "
Paul added: "Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP." The next day, Brennan was just steps from the Senate -- but as part of the Hoyer meeting.
Brennan on Monday issued one of the few mea culpas offered by members of the media in the aftermath of Barr's letter, in which
he quoted Mueller as having found no evidence of any collusion or coordination between the Trump team and Russia. Prior to that finding,
Brennan, the CIA Director from 2013-2017, had adamantly insinuated in tweets and on TV that Mueller would put Trump's "political
& financial future in jeopardy."
Going even beyond that, Brennan said Trump's July 2018 Helsinki press conference alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin "rises
to & exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes & misdemeanors.' It was nothing short of treasonous." Brennan later doubled-down on the
"treasonous" line during a television appearance.
But he struck a different tone Monday in the wake of the Mueller news.
"I don't know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was," Brennan said on
MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
Trump has frequently hit back at Brennan's broadsides. "I think Brennan is a very bad guy and, if you look at it, a lot of things happened under his watch," Trump once told Fox News'
Tucker Carlson. "I think he's a very bad person."
To that end, in 2018, the Trump administration revoked Brennan's security clearance, saying the former Obama official had been
"leveraging" his clearance to make "wild outbursts" about the president.
TheOutlawJoseyWales518 1h
Old Johnny is in a bunch of trouble....hopefully he will take all the Obama/Clinton Cabal down with him. F him.
Lugnuts30Leader
John Brennan is as crooked as Adam Schiff. Actually he is worse. He is guilty of everything that he adamantly accused
President Trump of doing. The Democrats are about to find out what happens when you are caught lying and committing treasons'
crimes. They are running around like the rats they are.
nationalist70Leader
Brennan is everything he accusesTrump of being!! That goes for the rest of the democrats too!!!
"... Woodward was Naval intelligence. Watergate was the coup that established the Bush cabal. ..."
"... "What, then, is the US doing in Syria, Iraq, Poland, Lithuania, South Korea, Japan, etc ad nauseam?" Full Spectrum Dominance is ubiquitous like an atmosphere i.e. you're not supposed to notice. Are you this persnickety with oxygen too? ..."
"... Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ..."
In an era of generally warming ties between the Trump administration and Moscow , Russia's
deepening involvement in Venezuela is creating a flash point by challenging the U.S. effort
to force Maduro from office.
What please are the signs that we are in an "in an era of generally warming ties between
the Trump administration and Moscow" ?
The piece includes nothing that supports that claim.
The U.S. is occupying parts of Syria against Russia's will. It is threatening Russia by
positioning ever more NATO forces at its borders. Trump left the INF treaty with Russia. He
opposed Russia
wherever he could . Nothing of that has changed.
In fact yesterday Bloomberg
reported that the U.S. is reading new sanctions against Russia for the MI6 stunt of
vanishing Sergej Skripal:
The White House has received a long-awaited package of new sanctions on Russia, intended to
punish the Kremlin for a 2018 nerve-agent attack on a former Russian spy in the U.K.
Last week Russia deployed some 100 military technicians and cyber-defense specialists to
Venezuela. They will test and probably upgrade Venezuela's S-300 air defense systems. They
will also help to check the control systems of Venezuela's Simón Bolívar
Hydroelectric Plant and the Guri Dam that trice led to large scale electricity outages during
the last month. Venzuela suspects that U.S. cyber attacks led to those failures.
Also yesterday Trump's special envoy for Venezuela Elliot Abrams and National Security
Advisor John Bolton
threatened even more sanctions against Russia for its hardly existing footprint in
Venezuela:
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been given a list of options to respond to Russia's
growing presence in Venezuela in support of Maduro, including new sanctions, said Elliott
Abrams, the U.S. special representative for Venezuela.
"We have options and it would be a mistake for the Russians to think they have a free
hand here. They don't," Abrams told reporters at the State Department.
U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this week said "Russia has to get out" of Venezuela
and said "all options" were open to force Russia to do so after two Russian air force
planes carrying nearly 100 military personnel landed outside Caracas.
Trump's national security adviser John Bolton issued a second warning on Friday in a
strongly worded formal statement.
"We strongly caution actors external to the Western Hemisphere against deploying
military assets to Venezuela, or elsewhere in the Hemisphere, with the intent of
establishing or expanding military operations," Bolton said.
"We will consider such provocative actions as a direct threat to international peace and
security in the region. We will continue to defend and protect the interests of the United
States, and those of our partners in the Western Hemisphere," he said.
Again we ask: What please are the signs that we are "in an era of generally warming ties
between the Trump administration and Moscow"?
What is the purpose of making that claim?
Posted by b on March 30, 2019 at 01:17 PM |
Permalink
Comments Anything less than a war against Russia, somewhere, anywhere, is "warming
relations" to the psycho-Russophobes.
Never Mind the Bollocks , Mar 30, 2019 1:29:10 PM |
link
John Anthony La Pietra , Mar 30, 2019 1:46:52 PM |
link
My first thought is that they still haven't caught on to (or caught up with) the sarcasm in
b's list of things the Common Orange-Crested Dotard and his flock have "done for" Russia, and
are continuing to try to link Trump and Putin even in the absence of help from Mueller.
it is stretching it to say because the mueller investigation can up ziltch, that the ties are
warming with russia.. more warm milk with arsenic in it as i see it... it's not like the wapo
has never offered arsenic before is it??
Warming ties? It is an extraordinary way to describe things. I can only see the choice of
words as yet another attempt to blame Russia for the deterioration in relations. i.e. Trump
is trying to mend fences and look what they do!
"We strongly caution actors external to the Western Hemisphere against deploying military
assets to Venezuela, or elsewhere in the Hemisphere, with the intent of establishing or
expanding military operations," Bolton said.
"We will consider such provocative actions as a direct threat to international peace
and security in the region.
What, then, is the US doing in Syria, Iraq, Poland, Lithuania, South Korea, Japan, etc ad
nauseam? Are all of these countries also in the US backyard? When the US is creating
provocations on the Russian and Chinese borders many thousands of miles from the US, are
Russia and China to blame for "threatening" the US's backyard in Lithuania and South Korea
etc?
The US have not noticed that the virtual world they have created for themselves conflicts
with the reality on the ground. Instead of correcting their erroneous world-view they try to
imagine changes in the world into conformation with their erroneous world-view, thereby
making the error even greater. They are descending into ever increasing madness.
The Russians don't realize that the US are the unassailable Masters of the Universe, if more
countries like Germany and Russia ignore their sanctions they will look like a paper tiger
and lose their credibility, I look forward to that day.
OMG! How far the mighty MSM doyen The Washington Post has fallen. Those halcyon days of
Woodward and Bernstein are now but a distant memory. The shinning victory of driving the
hated President Richard Nixon from high office has dimmed to the level of a fading myth. Sic
transit gloria! That vaunted stable of journalists that once terrified and bedeviled those at
the acme of political power, has sunk to the nadir of the profession, to wit: supermarket
tabloids! We will miss you Walter Cronkite! Farewell Edward R. Murrow! Good bye H.L. Mencken.
The Fourth Estate is in the hands of morons and drunks. We the people have lost.
For the globalist hawk, Bolton's grasp on geography is quite limited.
The far eastern part of Russia is actually in the western hemisphere. So, Russia is
technically part of western hemisphere too.
BTW, only 3 European countries are completely in western hemisphere: Iceland, Ireland and
Portugal.
UK, France and Spain are partly in both. The rest of Europe is in the eastern hemisphere, and
no part of the US is in it.
@ BM | Mar 30, 2019 2:26:15 PM | 9
" The US have not noticed that the virtual world they have created for themselves
conflicts with the reality on the ground. Instead of correcting their erroneous world-view
they try to imagine changes in the world into conformation with their erroneous world-view .
. . "
And it's not just the so-called "leadership." There is, for example, a once-pretty-good
left-wing site that has become a groveling pseudo-left site, with a significant number of
members who think of something that they wish were true, and then just post comments stating
that it is true, and absolutely refuse to acknowledge any evidence to the
contrary.
@15
I should have said that they WON'T walk away from the table. They sit there begging for
credit to play another hand, and too many Americans will be only to happy to extend that
credit.
The Americans believe they have full spectrum dominance. They believe they can dictate terms
to Russia. They are probably right. I worry about them being wrong.
The answer is that WaPo wants to cast doubt on Mueller's reluctant finding of no collusion.
If WaPo did not hint at friendly relations between the Trump White House and the Kremlin, it
would be admitting that its Russiagate reporting has been fake news for years. As WaPo
reports it, it's just the same old Trump-Putin bromance.
They won't walk away from the table.. by: mourning dove @ 16; <= it more like they will
continue to hide under the table.. i have yet to see a competent accurate list of events and
concerns that justify.. invasion.... if anyone knows of one, please post it.
A set up? <= "Generally warning ties" will soon give way to OUTRAGE
that "Trump's Syrian appeasement encouraged Putin to meddle in Venezeula!!!"by: Jackrabbit |
@ 6
The fact that the current US administration is reviving the nearly two century old Monroe
Doctrine speaks volumes. I'm curious as to how much success they are going to have with
'whipping' the dissenters
back in line?
When Hollywood no longer produces anything remotely resembling genuine comedy and all that
the US film industry is useful for is generating live-action cartoon propaganda trash like
"Captain Marvel" to recruit more cannon fodder for US wars around the planet, the world is in
serious need of true stand-up comedy and outlets like Jeff Bozo's The Washington Post bravely
step in to fill the breach.
Maybe if WaPo wants to report any real news its readers can take seriously, it should
advertise for another Saudi journalist to write op-eds for it and then send that journalist
to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.
B asked why the purpose of the claim
"
In an era of generally warming ties between the Trump administration and Moscow,
"
Era is a term usually associated with geologic time but can be abused to mean any time frame
as it is here to say that black is white in State Dept. speak but to answer the why look at
the rest of the sentence
"
Russia's deepening involvement in Venezuela is creating a flash point by challenging the U.S.
effort to force Maduro from office.
"
To me the US is saying the we have done regime change before and got away with it ( within
the era) but are being opposed now and bullying is our modus operendi if we can't use force
so get out of our way.
So far as the Monroe Doctrine is concerned, the US is breaching it while Russia appears to be
upholding it. Monroe was protecting Latin American countries, and none more than Venezuela,
from imperialism; asserting their right to independence and self rule. Trump is denying them
those rights by insisting on its power to determine what form their government should take
and who should compose it.
While it seems unlikely that the US will actually invade Venezuela it seems extremely
probable that the US will employ, train, arm and direct mercenary terrorists to make life in
Venezuela as difficult as it can. In this enterprise it will have the support of most of
Venezuela's corrupt neighbours, who fear the spirit of the Bolivarian experiment much more
than Washington does. This means that, with idiots like Bolsonaro and Duque in nominal
command, anything might happen and that blood will flow.
Today there is news that Trump has cut off aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. What
is to be made of that?
OMG! How far the mighty MSM doyen The Washington Post has fallen. Those halcyon days of
Woodward and Bernstein are now but a distant memory. The shinning victory of driving the
hated President Richard Nixon from high office ... a ... myth ... morons ... We the people
...
Posted by: GeorgeV | Mar 30, 2019 2:43:57 PM | 12
Woodward was Naval intelligence. Watergate was the coup that established the Bush
cabal.
[aside for b: thank you for forcing us to beacon to Google our presence and comments on
your site. The "secret team" says danke.]
They lost control of Saudi Arabia, after trying to take down MBS and then betraying him by
unexpectedly allowing waivers on Iranian oil in November.
The U.S. cannot take down Iran without Venezuelan oil. What is worse, right now they don't
have access to enough heavy oil to meet their own needs.
Controlling the world oil trade is central to Trump's strategy for the U.S. to continue
its empire. Without Venezuelan oil, the U.S. is a bit player in the energy markets, and will
remain so.
Having Russia block the U.S. in Venezuela adds insult to injury. After Crimea and Syria,
now Venezuela, Russia exposes the U.S. as a loud mouthed-bully without the capacity to back
up its threats, a 'toothless tiger', an 'emperor without clothes'.
If the U.S. cannot dislodge Russia from Venezuela, its days as 'global hegemon' are
finished. For this reason the U.S. will continue escalating the situation with ever-riskier
actions, until it succeeds or breaks.
In the same manor, if Russia backs off, its resistance to the U.S. is finished. And the
U.S. will eventually move to destroy Russia, like it has been actively trying to do for the
past 30 years. Russia cannot and will not back off.
Venezuela thus becomes the stage where the final act in the clash of empires plays out.
Will the world become a multi-polar world, in which the U.S. becomes a relatively isolated
and insignificant pole? Or will the world become more fully dominated by a brutal, erratic
hegemon?
Trump campaigned on detente with Russia. Trump has made an effort to stand by his promises,
no matter how ill conceived or misguided.
Looks like a shot across his bow, warning him not keep the one campaign promise that could
actually lead away from the abyss?
As for the WaPo, Bezos dependence on military contracts is an obvious motivation plus
whatever the NSA has collected on him.
As for his editors, journalists and many of the most irrational in government, something in
the amphetamine family. Euphoria trumps conscience and gives the false impression that you
are the smartest guy in the room. Makes logic and reasoning by cooler heads impossible.
The next day let down invites repeat ingestion.
Most unfortunate of all is the willingness of readers to swallow this sort of fear mongering
and fairy stories without question, even to the point of defending them.
I wonder what the eventual outcome will be when enough of us realize that the social contract
between ourselves, our government and those institutions that are meant to support us are
well and truly broken.
Thaks b, now that is a delightful question to pose on the eve of April fool's day.
My suggestion is that Cambridge Analytica and others backing Trump and the yankee imperial
machine have been taking measurements of USA citizens opinions and are staggered by the
results. They are panicked!
I suspect that the cool aid is not working effectively these days and that far too many
people see through the charades and lies. An interesting story lurks behind this and the
entire 'hate russia' and 'monkey mueller' episode.
The attitudes of the masses are spinning out of the manipulative hands of the deep state
and the oligarchs. Do any of our comrades have a handle on this type of research and the
implication for voter attitudes?
"... WashingtonBezos Post writers are moronic or drunk."
What ails them is far more complicated and vastly more sinister.
One often hears people say of other countries "It isn't the people of Elbonia whom I
hate, it is their government." It may be difficult for some in Europe, where there
remains a vestige of an imperative to foster a worldview based upon objective reality, to
come to grips with the fact that the problem with America has metastasized and spread to the
level of the individual citizens... all of them, to one degree or another. You don't
like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership
positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may
imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes,
but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.
How did this happen to America?
Decades ago while in a leftist organization debate was raised as to how to find valid
information to inform ourselves with. It was well understood that the vast majority of the
western corporate mass media was a brainwashing operation to keep the masses clueless and
supporting imperialist war but, we reasoned, the ruling class itself would need to be kept
informed with quality information in order to feel confident that they were making good
decisions. With this in mind we identified journals and sources that the capitalist elites
themselves relied upon to inform their decisions. Things like the CIA World Factbook,
for instance, even though created by an organization devoted to disinformation, could be
trusted back then to be relatively dependable.
But things change. Note how the Russiagate skeptics in the US were attacked by the
desperately faithful: If you focused attention on flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory
then the general consensus was that you were defending Trump. The possibility that you could
be defending reason and truth is still dismissed out of hand. Why is that? Because in America
(it's a mind disease spreading to Europe, apparently) truth is relative and reason has become
just whatever justifies what you wish to be the truth; therefore, those who propose a
"truth" that conflicts with what people want to believe are agents of some enemy.
This condition has arisen from literally generations of propaganda instilling as reality
in American media consumers the myth of "American Exceptionalism" . The current crop
of American adults have been raised by parents who themselves have been thoroughly
indoctrinated in this alter reality. The disease is literally universal across the nation,
from lowliest and most oppressed Black transvestites to the CEOs of the biggest corporations.
As prior generations of the ruling elites from the post WWII era who still retained some
sense for the importance of objective reality have died off they have been replaced by the
newer generation for whom reality is entirely subjective. If they want to believe their
gender is mountain panda then that's their right as Americans! Likewise if they want to
believe that America's bombing is humanitarian and god's gift to the species, then anyone who
suggests otherwise is obviously a KGB troll.
The Washington Post used to be one of the journals that the elites looked to in order to
help inform their decisions, but now in the post-truth, or relative truth, world these
information sources have increasingly sought to align their information products with the
"proper" relative truths that reinforce the myth of "American Exceptionalism" ,
even if that is in conflict with objective and empirical reality. To do otherwise would be to
aid and give comfort to America's "enemies" (do keep in mind that America is a nation
at war - has been for decades - and that workers in the corporate mass media are very much
conscious of their roles in that ongoing war effort, to the point that they see themselves as
information warriors fighting shadowy enemies that only exist in their own relative reality
bubbles).
In short, WashingtonBezos Post writers are not moronic or drunk.
They are delusional . They are in the grips of a delusion that afflicts the
entire United States, and portions of the rest of the world as well. Some Americans have
broken free from this Matrix-like delusion, but the numbers remain somewhat small...
certainly less than one or two percent of the population, and those who have broken free of
the delusion will never be given a soapbox to speak to the rest of the population from by the
corporate elites.
To bevin@27, I suggest you review your history of the 1902 and 1903 blockade of
Venezuela, particularly with regards to the enactment of the Roosevelt Corollary to the
Monroe Doctrine.
@ Maracatu with the Engdhal link saying the real threat to the US is China
The real threat to the Western empire (which owns the US) is the concept of socialistic
finance which China is evolving. The West wants China to evolve to be the next host for private finance empire.....
And its not working so we get this show we see as the bully of private finance is allowed
to die of its own cancer....total erosion of public trust.
Assuming the West will not go nuclear over Venezuela, when that loss of Venezuela becomes
apparent to the rest of the world, the knives will come out and empire will eviscerate itself
as former colonies cut themselves loose.
"What, then, is the US doing in Syria, Iraq, Poland, Lithuania, South Korea, Japan, etc ad
nauseam?" Full Spectrum Dominance is ubiquitous like an atmosphere i.e. you're not supposed to
notice. Are you this persnickety with oxygen too?
I think you have wildly underestimated the number of Americans who are very aware of what is
going on with our country and the world. More than 40% of eligible voters elect not to
participate in elections realizing the futility of it, and withholding their consent to this
regime. It's a feature of propaganda to engender feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and
feelings of isolation by falsely portraying a consensus among the population for the policies
of the regime. Resist!
YES. I totally support that and would add that the response to the lucid campaign of the
Sanders run for presidency and the current rising wave from that has the oligarchy
spooked.
In addition the 'one belt one road' infrastructure scheme has the Yankees totally out
foxed. That is why the USA continue to meddle in Afghanistan and the western Islamic province
of China plus threaten Iran etc etc. There is likely to be no future if oil and coal are
pursued and even if there were no global warming from those sources they are soon (within a
century) to be eclipsed by solar/hydro energy systems.
The oligarchy has lost its grip, its credibility and soon its masses: see Gillet
Jaunes.
By regime, I'm not referring to whoever sits in the Oval Office, but rather this system of
domination. MSM does not accurately depict the attitudes and opinions of Americans, or anyone
else. It only represents what they want us to think.
One though I should add is that the future for rapid retrofit of energy and hydro Computer
Numerically Controlled machine networks. After Stuxnet attack in Iran and now the same in
Venezuela there will be few nation states that will be satisfied with the older systems.
New technology will oust the old and likely from China or Russia.
Seems to me what that BigLie's about is this tale: Relations with Russia during the
post-USSR age were going along swell until Russia began involved in the Venezuelan
Crisis. The attempt is to try a new narrative using a different angle to blame Russia
which is the goal of the BigLie. Signal a new line of approach in dealing with the
attitude toward Russia to the trusty echoers of His Master's Voice. That's what it
seems, b.
"Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political
establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it
coming. Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor
any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much
they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump."
As a peedupon all I can see is that the elite seem to be fighting amongst themselves or
(IMO) providing cover for ongoing elite power/control efforts. It might not be about
private/public finance in a bigger picture but I can't see anything else that makes sense
Thanks for the tip. Coincidentally I have just been reading Mark Twain's autobiography on
that matter.
But I was talking not of the Roosevelt corollary nor of the post Spanish War era but Monroe
and 1823. It is instructive that Monroe's Secretary of State at the time was John Q Adams
who, it is generally held, was largely responsible for its wording. It was undoubtedly aimed
in the first instance at Spain and intended to deter it from attempting to re-establish its
influence, militarily.
Of course the Doctrine depended upon the co-operation of the British who, through the Royal
Navy, supplied the force needed to prevent Spain, or possibly France acting as its proxy,
from foing then what the US is doing now.
Thanks for the Taibbi link. I hadn't seen it, and found him to be in good form. I do think
he ought to have spoken more about how bad Trump's Primary opponents were.
Most of those reporters were going to slant their stories the way their bosses wanted.
Their jobs are just too nice to do otherwise. Getting Trump as Hillary's opponent had to have
been a goal for the majority of them. He was the patsy who would become squished roadkill in
the treads of The Most Experienced Presidential Candidate In History. More on that for people
with strong stomachs:
Hillary Clinton is a knowledgeable, well-prepared, reasonable, experienced, even-tempered,
hardworking candidate, while her opponent is a stubbornly uninformed demagogue who has been
proven again and again to be a liar on matters big and small. There is no objective basis
on which to equate Hillary Clinton to her opponent.
The author had it half right. Turns out the voters knew quite a bit about Trump,
and still preferred him to the Butcher of Libya.
In an article entitled Why the
double standard on justice for Canadians, Chinese? Ambassador Lu cut through the noise
being created by the media and western political class by exposing the over bloated western
surveillance state known as the Five Eyes which he properly identified as the outgrowth of the
unconstitutional Patriot Act, the Prism surveillance system which has annihilated all semblance
of privacy among trans-Atlantic nations.
After describing the double standard applied by Canadian elites who have constructed a
narrative that always paints China as the villain of the world while portraying the west as
"free and democratic" Ambassador Lu stated :
"these same people have conveniently ignored the PRISM Program, Equation Group, and
Echelon -- global spying networks operated by some countries that have been engaging in
large-scale and organized cyber stealing, and spying and surveillance activities on foreign
governments, enterprises, and individuals. These people also took a laissez-faire attitude
toward a country that infringes on its citizens' privacy rights through the Patriot Act. They
shouted for a ban by the Five Eyes alliance countries . on the use of Huawei equipment by these
countries' own enterprises"
For those who may not be aware, the Five Eyes is the name given to the British
GCHQ-controlled surveillance structure that involves the four primary Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth
countries (Britain, Canada, Australian and New Zealand) along with the United States. This is
the deep state that has been dedicated to overthrowing American President Donald Trump since
MI6 and their junior partners in America began organising Russia-gate in 2015-when it became
apparent that Trump had a serious chance of defeating the Deep State candidate Hillary
Clinton.
As many patriotic whistle blowers such as Bill Binney, Ray McGovern, and Edward Snowden
have
exposed throughout recent years , the Five Eyes system that the Ambassador referenced was
formed in the "post-911 world order" as a means of overriding each nations' constitutional
protection of its own citizens' by capitalising on a major legal loop hole (viz: Since it is
technically illegal for American intelligence agencies to spy on Americans without warrant, and
for CSIS to do the same to Canadians, it is claimed that it is okay for British/Canadian
intelligence agencies to spy on Americas and visa versa).
The Chinese Ambassador didn't stop there however, but went one step further, ending his
op-ed with a controversial claim which has earned him much criticism in the days since its
publication. It was in his closing paragraph that Ambassador Lu made the uncomfortable point
that the double standards employed against China and the west's willingness to ignore the Five
Eyes "is due to Western egotism and white supremacy" . Is this the "belligerent and
unfounded name calling" that his detractors are labelling it, or is there something more to
it?
When we look to the origins of the Five Eyes, which goes back MUCH further than September
11, 2001 , we can clearly see that Lu Shaye is touching a very deep and truthful nerve.
Cecil Rhodes and the Racist Roots of the Deep State
19 th Century spokesman for the British Empire, Cecil Rhodes wrote his infamous
"Seventh
Will" in 1877 where, speaking on behalf of an empire dying in the midst of the global
spread of republican institutions, called for the formation of a new plan to re-organise the
Empire, and re-conquer all colonial possessions that had been contaminated by republican ideas
of freedom, progress, equality and self-determination
[1] . Rhodes stated:
"I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we
inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present
inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if
they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country
added to our dominions gives. I contend that every acre added to our territory means in the
future birth to some more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence
. Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British
Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of
the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire "
[2]
Race Patriot" Cecil Rhodes from Punch Magazine lording over Africa
The Rhodes Trust was set up at his death in 1902 to administer the vast riches accrued
during Rhodes' exploitation of diamond mines in Africa. Steered by Lord Alfred Milner, it was
this Trust which gave birth to the Round Table Movement and Rhodes Scholarship Fund which
themselves have been behind the creation of a century's worth of indoctrinated technocrats who
have permeated all branches of government, finance, military, media, corporate and academia-
both in America and internationally
[3] .
The Round Table Movement, (working in tandem with London's Fabian Society) didn't replace
the old British Empire's power structures, so much as re-define their behaviour based upon the
re-absorption of America back into the Anglo-Saxon hive. This involved centralising control of
the education of their "managerial elite" with special scholarship's in Oxford and the London
School of Economics- then sending the indoctrinated victims in droves back into their
respective nations in order to be absorbed into the British Empire's governance structures in
all domains of private and public influence. In Fabian Society terms, this concept is known as
"permeation theory"
[4] .
Although it sometimes took the early removal of nationalist political leaders from power,
via intrigue, coups or assassination, the 20 th century was shaped in large measure
by the cancerous growth of this British-directed network that sought to undo the republican
concept that progress and cooperation were the basis for both sovereignty and international law
as laid out in the
Treaty of Westphalia of 1648
[5] .
This is the deep state that President Roosevelt warned of when
he said in 1936"The economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the
institutions of America. What they really complain about is that we seek to take away their
power." This is the deep state that outgoing President Eisenhower warned of when he spoke of the
"acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military
industrial complex" in 1961 and that John Kennedy fought against when he fired Allen Dulles
and threatened to"splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter into the winds" . It is what Ronald
Reagan contended with when he attempted to break the world out of the Cold War by working with
Russia and other nations on Beam defense in 1983. It is this structure that owned
Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's entire career , from his 1980s railroading of Lyndon
LaRouche into prison to his cover up of the Anglo-Saudi role in 911 as CIA director to his
efforts to impeach President Donald Trump today
[6] .
It is this same complex which is the direct outgrowth of the racist British-run drug wars on
China and suppression of India and Africa throughout the 19 th and 20 th
centuries.
In Canada, this was the network that destroyed the plans of nationalist Prime Minister John
Diefenbaker after he fired the Rhodes Scholar Governor of the Bank of Canada in 1959 during a
desperate struggle to take control of the national bank in order to fund his
Northern Vision
[7] . Earlier, it was this group that Lincoln-admirer Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier warned
of after his defeat in 1911 when he said "Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at
London, known as "The Round Table", with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria,
with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London and insidiously forcing them on their
respective parties."
[8]
The lesson to be learned is that the Deep State is not "American" as many commentators have
assumed. It is the same old British Empire from which America brilliantly broke free in 1776
and which Cecil Rhodes and Milner led in re-organising on behalf of the monarchy at the
beginning of the 20 th century. It was racist when Lords Palmerston and Russell ran
it in the 19 th century and it continues to be racist today.
So when Ambassador Lu says "the reason why some people are used to arrogantly adopting
double standards is due to Western egotism and white supremacy – in such a context, the
rule of law is nothing but a tool for their political ends and a fig leaf for their practising
hegemony in the international arena" he is not being "belligerent or provocative", but is
rather hitting on a fact which must be better understood if the deep state will finally be
defeated and nations liberated to work with the new spirit of progress and cooperation
exemplified by China's Belt and Road
Initiative which is quickly spreading across the earth.
Footnotes
[1] By 1876, the American Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia showcased to a world
audience the success of the "American System of Political Economy" which asserted that the
value and behaviour of money was contingent upon the physical productive growth of the nation
rather than "British-system free markets". Lincoln's system was being adopted across South
American nations, Japan, China, India and many European powers as well (including Russia) which
had grown tired of being manipulated by British imperial intrigues.
[4] For anyone in Canada wishing to learn about this in greater depth, they may wish to ask
Canadian technocratic Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland how her experience as a Rhodes Scholar
shaped her career.
[6]
Robert Mueller Is an Amoral Legal Assassin: He Will Do His Job If You Let Him by Barbara
Boyd , October 1, 2017 larouchepac.com. A common denominator among all of the mentioned
American leaders is not only that they waged war on the deep state structures but made constant
attempts to work constructively with Russia, China, India and other nations for industrial and
scientific development. This policy of "win-win cooperation" is antagonistic to all systems of
empire and is the reason why the Empire hates China and the potential created with Trump's
intention to work with both China and Russia.
[8] O.D. Skelton, The Life of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, p. 510
BIO: Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review. His works have been
published in Executive Intelligence Review, Global Resesarch, Global Times, Nexus Magazine, Los
Angeles Review of Books, Veterans Today and Sott.net. Matthew has also published the book
"The Time has Come for Canada to Join the New Silk Road " and three volumes of the Untold
History of Canada (available on untoldhistory.canadianpatriot.org). He has been associated with
the Schiller Institute since 2006.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Duran on Patreon!
President Donald
Trump and his White House team have been cleared of collusion with the Kremlin in the 2016
presidential election. That startling conclusion by Special Counsel Robert Mueller after nearly two
years of investigation,
might be
viewed
by
some as giving Trump freedom to now get on with normalizing relations with Moscow. Don't bet on it.
Mueller's report, and US attorney general William Barr's appraisal of it, only partially
vindicate Trump's long-held claims that the whole so-called "Russiagate" story is a "hoax".
Yes, Mueller and Barr conclude that neither Trump nor his campaign team "conspired" with Russia
to win the presidential race.
But Democrat opponents are now dredging up the possibility
that Trump "unwittingly" facilitated Kremlin cyber operations to damage his 2016 rival for the
White House, Hillary Clinton.
In his
summary
of Mueller's
report, Barr unquestioningly accepts as fact the otherwise contentious claim that Russia interfered
in the US election. Democrats and the anti-Trump US news media have not been deterred from pursuing
their fantasy that the Kremlin allegedly meddled in US democracy.
Trump has been cleared,
but Russia has certainly not. It very much continues to have the smear of interference slapped all
over its image.
At the heart of this narrative – bolstered by Mueller and Barr – is the false claim that Russian
cyber agents hacked into the Democrat party computer system during 2016 and released emails
compromising Clinton to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. That whole claim has been reliably
debunked
by
former NSA technical expert William Binney and other former US intelligence officials who have
shown indisputably that the information was not hacked from outside, but rather was released by an
insider in the Democrat party, presumably based on indignation over the party's corruption
concerning the stitch-up against Clinton's rival nomination for the presidential ticket, Bernie
Sanders.
That is real scandal crying out to be investigated, as well as the Obama administration's
decision to unleash FBI illegal wiretapping and dirty tricks against Trump as being a "Russian
stooge". The Russian collusion charade was always a distraction from the really big serious crimes
carried out by the Obama White House, the FBI and the Democrat party.
In any case, the notion that Russia interfered in the US elections – even without
Trump's collusion – has become an article of faith among the American political and media
establishment.
That lie will continue to poison US-Russia relations and be used to justify more economic
sanctions being imposed against Moscow. Trump may be cleared of being a "Kremlin stooge". But he
will find no political freedom to pursue a normalization in bilateral relations because of the
predictable mantra about Russia interfering in American democracy.
But there is a deeper reason why there will be no reset in US-Russia relations.
And it has nothing to do with whether Trump is in the White House. The problem is a strategic one,
meaning it relates to underlying geopolitical confrontation between America's desired global
hegemony and Russia's rightful aspiration to be an independent foreign power not beholden to
Washington's dictate.
"... Nowhere in any corporate media coverage will you see the collapse of the collusion narrative used as an opportunity to re-examine the Russian attack narrative, based as it is unassailably (they would have us believe) on the twin pillars of the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and Mueller's never-to-be-tried indictments of a raft of obscure Russians. ..."
"... Yes. The Dismal Faking MSM are NOT going to let go of their Russophobic Orwellian propaganda – it clearly serves purposes (the MIC's being one, surely). ..."
"... Trump the Siberian Candidate was a useful part of the hate campaign against Russia, but ultimately expendable, like one stage in a multi-stage rocket booster ..."
"... The important work goes on, regardless of what happens to one individual like Donald, or one species like Homo sapiens. ..."
"... This Russia-Trump collusion thing is and has been a criminal conspiracy to undermine and possibly remove from office an elected President, and it has taken Russian-American relations down to a plainly dangerous level. ..."
"... I think there's evidence that this conspiracy was a product of Hillary Clinton, her staff, the DNC, elements of the FBI, FBI director Comey, CIA director Brennan, other elements of the CIA, elements of British intelligence, possibly elements of the Ukrainian govt., and possibly persons tied into the corrupt Clinton "charity" foundation and its networks. ..."
"... The US govt. is deeply corrupt – murderously corrupt – that's been plain at least since the Kennedy assassination in 1963, followed by the murders of a number of other prominent American political figures. ..."
"As the clamoring din of Russia-gate falls into the memory hole, a large empty space will
open up. So why not use this space to push forward some new exciting ideas. Space means
possibilities."
It's sad, but in a very important way, I don't think that's true.
One of the neat tricks of Russia-gate all along has been that while such prolonged and
sententious effort has been devoted to the question of "collusion" – i.e. TrumpWorld's
alleged disloyal canoodling with Russia – which was always destined to come up dry in
the end, the underlying allegation of the Russian "attack on our democracy" – i.e. the
thing Trump was supposedly colluding *in* – has been allowed to solidify into an
undisputed fact, despite being likewise unproven, and in reality just as false, or at best
wildly overblown.
Nowhere in any corporate media coverage will you see the collapse of the collusion
narrative used as an opportunity to re-examine the Russian attack narrative, based as it is
unassailably (they would have us believe) on the twin pillars of the January 2017
Intelligence Community Assessment and Mueller's never-to-be-tried indictments of a raft of
obscure Russians.
Rather, the Russian attack story is getting all the more play now in corporate media as
they try to salvage the Russia-gate debacle from the Mueller disappointment.
(This has been playing out on MSNBC as I have been composing this comment: Chris Hayes
just had on a congressman who used the very phrase "attack on our democracy" referring to
what he considers an undisputed fact, and now David Corn and Michael Isikoff are on,
energetically moving the goalposts away from the collapsing collusion fairy tale. For what
it's worth, Isikoff and Hayes are showing a little more discomfort than Corn, who is
full-steam-ahead on perfidious Muscovy.)
That has always been the main event: convincing the U.S. public of Russian enmity and
aggression – the Threat – to ensure the diametrically opposed reality remains
outside the mainstream.
There will be some dead-enders who will try to keep the Trump side of Russia-gate alive
(obstruction of justice!), but most of that energy will eventually be diverted to the vast
cesspool of Trump's financial dealings, which has always been the more promising and
legitimate route for exposing the Orange Schmegegge's corruption.
Meanwhile the campaign to keep the U.S. public squarely behind the drive to Make Earth
Great Again (for the subterranean archaea prokaryotes that will survive the nuclear exchange
unscathed, that is) continues, and has even been strengthened by Russia-gate's sinister
propagandistic sleight-of-hand.
Zhu , March 26, 2019 at 02:02
Soon it'll be "China, China, China!"
AnneR , March 26, 2019 at 09:32
Yes. The Dismal Faking MSM are NOT going to let go of their Russophobic Orwellian
propaganda – it clearly serves purposes (the MIC's being one, surely).
This morning on NPR (don't recall the Beeb World Service, but all too likely there as
well) while the presenters, facilitators – whatever they're called – were
presenting the non-existence of *collusion* they continued with their assertions, at some
length, that Russia *had meddled* in the 2016 election, had hacked the DNC server etc.,
etc.
No if, ands or buts, evidence lacking or not. And they proceeded to 'warn' about the
'strong likelihood' of both Russia (read the Kremlin, read Putin) and China doing the same
for the 2020 election: so be warned, folks if the Strumpet gets re-elected it won't be
because of anything the Demrats have done or not done, won't be because the Demrats'
candidate is HRC in drag, attractively turned out. No. It will be Putin's and Xi's doing.
Meanwhile, the country that really does interfere in our elections and policies –
via oodles of money contributed by its lobbying group supporters (and I gather there will be
another such "legal" lobbying entity established in DC for smaller donors to continue to, see
Alison Weir's article at Mint Press News) – neither has to register as a foreign agent
nor cease and desist its influence over our politicians (who are all too clearly buyable).
Nor is the UK getting hauled over the coals, or threatened with war, being beleaguered by
sanctions for its real interference in our politics.
Thank you Caitlin for your usual good work.
David G , March 26, 2019 at 11:02
Trump the Siberian Candidate was a useful part of the hate campaign against Russia, but
ultimately expendable, like one stage in a multi-stage rocket booster .
The important work goes on, regardless of what happens to one individual like Donald,
or one species like Homo sapiens.
Pft , March 25, 2019 at 20:04
So you have obstruction preventing the finding of evidence. Mueller proclaims no evidence
found, punts on obstruction charges, presenting only the facts indicating obstruction. New AJ
Barr, a relic from Iran Gate and close to Mueller, concludes there is not sufficient evidence
of obstruction.
Mueller and Barr cover it up as they have been doing for 30-40 years. Why is anyone
surprised? I never was big on Russia gate but collusion with Russian Mafia and Israel and
certainly conflict of interest over the proposed Trump Tower in Moscow certainly should have
been exposed, as should a DNC insiders complicity in releasing the emails
Tom Kath , March 25, 2019 at 19:30
Caitlin, I get the overwhelming message that you consider Trump the worst possible POTUS
and that Hilary, Sanders, or any other POSSIBLE alternatives would be even worse.
When it comes to the realistically POSSIBLE, we do have to settle for the lesser of two
evils. I believe the Yanks have actually done just that, and it seems pointless to argue so
vehemently against all possibilities.
Could you be making a case for Tulsi by omission?
mauisurfer , March 25, 2019 at 18:54
I have never worked as a prosecutor, but I have taught criminal law at an accredited state
university law school.
Mueller's report states: "While this report does not conclude that the president committed
a crime, it also does not exonerate him."
This is the first time I ever heard such a statement. I have never heard of a criminal
investigation that concluded that the defendant was "not exonerated".
The prosecutor is not empowered to make statements intended to influence public opinion.
It seems to be a 100% political statement, 100% extralegal comment. The purpose of a criminal investigation is to find crime and prosecute it. It is NOT to
exonerate or "not exonerate". If insufficient evidence is found to proceed with criminal
prosecution, then the job is done, the prosecutor is not empowered to comment about ifs,
buts, or maybes, or about exoneration.
Such comments are contrary to our system of criminal justice, which supposedly assumes
innocence until guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Reply
Maxwell Quest , March 25, 2019 at 22:27
Yes, Mueller's statement: "while this report does not conclude that the President
committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him" appears to be a sop thrown to the media
and the DNC, in short, those that hired him to prosecute Trump er, I mean investigate Trump's
supposed crime of collusion.
It certainly muddies the waters, and is a wishy-washy, cowardly declaration. It's outside
his mandate as Special Counsel and borders on slander. In his blog today Howard Kunstler
referred to Mueller's parting aspersion as a "nice red poison cherry" on top of the
report.
I've always felt that Mueller knew from the very beginning that this was a witch hunt, and
the sloppy commentary added to his report only confirms it in my mind.
Mike Lamb , March 26, 2019 at 12:16
Could it be that this is Mueller's "Comey moment"?
A lot of voters are fed up with the continuous barrage of hate coming from the Left
towards President Trump. If the Left keeps on coming up with more and more investigations
after the Mueller report found no collusion on the president's part voters are going to get
fed up with the whole debacle this could well backfire on Democrats and conservative
Republicans might just take back the House.
Eric32 , March 25, 2019 at 17:41
>people will be left to their own devices for a few precious moments. They won't know
what to think. <
Well, here's what I think
This Russia-Trump collusion thing is and has been a criminal conspiracy to undermine
and possibly remove from office an elected President, and it has taken Russian-American
relations down to a plainly dangerous level.
Why not get something positive out of it?
I think there's evidence that this conspiracy was a product of Hillary Clinton, her
staff, the DNC, elements of the FBI, FBI director Comey, CIA director Brennan, other elements
of the CIA, elements of British intelligence, possibly elements of the Ukrainian govt., and
possibly persons tied into the corrupt Clinton "charity" foundation and its networks.
The US govt. is deeply corrupt – murderously corrupt – that's been plain at
least since the Kennedy assassination in 1963, followed by the murders of a number of other
prominent American political figures.
Why not use this recent obvious conspiracy to start a real investigation using a newly
created, large well funded investigative organization independent of the above mentioned
corrupted organizations, to investigate what has going on?
If this most recent deep state operation is allowed to pass un-investigated, without
punishment and a long overdue rooting out of what's been making this country's government
sick and corrupt, it's going to be taken as a sign of encouragement by certain actors, with
future actions that will make past ones look mild.
Deniz , March 25, 2019 at 17:41
You are putting far too much faith in the American people's attention span. Omar's
comments on AIPAC were erased in a matter of days by a conveniently timed terror attack. We
are in the middle of March Madness, currently the single most important event in the majority
of American's lives. This is why Assange was so brilliant in waiting until weeks before the
election to release the Clinton emails.
"... This was artificially created Saddam WDM II hysteria and many people became hooked. MSM honchos with some integrity should publicly commit hara-kiri, but that's too much to ask as they are mostly chickenhawks that have no honor. They never spent time in rat infested foxholes under bombardment. ..."
It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, if there is none 😉
Despite being a Professor of Economics, and having a Russian speaking wife you are utterly incompetent in this area and are
completely brainwashed by the neoliberal/neocon MSM. You tend to subconsciously equate Russia and the USSR. For your
information, Russia is a neoliberal state; much like the USA and Putin is promoter of neoliberal capitalism, although in less
man-eating mutation than in the USA.
For your information Mueller investigation was a part of color revolution against Trump launched by intelligence services in
the same way they launch color revolution in other countries. It is unclear to me why they did that, but that fact if provable
And the sequence of event, especially questioning the legitimacy of election, and Mueller appointment gambit with Comey as a
sacrificing pawn, corresponds to what you can learn from the books of CIA-connected writer Gene Sharp - the reference source
on color revolution mechanics. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sharp
It is not clear to me why the Deep State in the USA (as well as in GB) has such an allergic reaction and viewed Trump as a
threat to the US governed world neoliberal empire, because Trump, as corrupt as he is, he is a part of NYC neoliberal elite
and in no way a revolutionary. And it was clear that he will execute the same "bait and switch" maneuver as Obama betraying
his election promises.
Which actually happened three months after inauguration when he bombed Syria targets without any investigation of a
chemical attack - which most probably was stages by jihadists (supposedly he was influenced by Ivanka; actually Javanka is
another problem of this corrupt administration and suggest completely different course of the investigation; hopefully by the
Southern District of NY - I would like Jared Kushner going to jail with or without Trump)
But it was a color revolution. Which so far failed.
So you better stop writing such detached from reality statements as "But on the matter of collusion we have piles of
evidence that this has occurred, and the evidence is the large pile of indictments that Mueller has brought forward against a
lot of people, with many of those charged with having unreported meetings and dealings with Russians," This is such a low
level of IQ that it hurts. Naivety unacceptable for a Professor pretending to be a political analyst.
In reality this was a false flag operation to present Russia as the culprit. Highly successful operation I would say.
Russia serves as a very convenient scapegoat for such things.
And having an external scapegoat and projecting into it all the ills helped to cement cracks in the neoliberal façade, when
the US population rejected neoliberal's elite candidate. In addition, it allowed to launch NeoMcCartyism campaign in MSM for
the suppressing the internal dissent, when anybody who question the US foreign wars or the rule of financial oligarchy can be
framed as Putin's agent.
So this is another classic method of suppressing the dissident voices including whose who argue for the return of the New
Deal Capitalism and/or are against foreign wars. Looks at how MSMs treat Tulsi Gabbard visit to Syria. Does not it remind you
something ?
So most of your writings on this particular topic are just an implicit repetition of State Department taking points infused
into your brain via MSMs you read. You have no first hand sources about Russia. That's why I would strongly recommend you to
stop writing on this topic. You just disgrace yourself.
ilsm , March 28, 2019 6:35 pm
merde,
Let the Russiagate foul ball fly out of bounds in to the stands!
Oening day is soon and US don't need any more conspiracy theories over Russia and Putin beating Clinton.
Mueller brought no indictments against Trump or any US citizen for conspiracy with Russians. The reason the Mueller report is "confidential" has nothing to do with national security. It has to do with federal grand jury
legal process. No indictments means the grand juries that prosecutors have plead to with under cooked nothing burgers returned no indictments!
Not getting an indictment may not be an exoneration for media propagandists who have pounded conspiracy theories for 28 months,
but it is pretty close for anyone tired of the moral equivalent of seeing Saddam doing 9/11 perpetrated over and over again.
All those indictments associated with Russiagate are 'procedural' like misspeaking to inquisitors.
Get over it Clinton lost to Trump!
likbez , March 28, 2019 10:35 pm
ilsm.
"Not getting an indictment may not be exoneration for media propagandists who have pounded conspiracy theories for 28 months,
but it is pretty close for anyone tired of the moral equivalent of seeing Saddam doing 9/11 perpetrated over and over again."
This is a very apt observation. This was artificially created Saddam WDM II hysteria and many people became hooked. MSM honchos
with some integrity should publicly commit hara-kiri, but that's too much to ask as they are mostly chickenhawks that have no honor.
They never spent time in rat infested foxholes under bombardment.
How idiotic it would be if the Earth were destroyed because this crazy neocon warmonger Hillary Clinton lost, couldn't accept
it, and invented a story for lying liars to lie about, while the Deep State launched a color revolution to depose Trump because
he did not fully conform to Washington neocons foreign policy script
In retrospect he changed nothing; Trump foreign policy is just a continuation of "Full spectrum dominance" madness ( Bolton
and Pompeo would be perfect for Hillary Administration after routine sex change operation )
Academic stooges of this new Iraq WDM II hysteria should at least repent, but as Barkley demonstrated in his response this
is way too difficult for them.
He is still, as Trump Jr put it, "FullOfSchiff"
Immense damage has been done to Russo-Us relations. Will it be repaired? Can it be repaired?
"... When the mainstream news is a joke, the court jesters are the only ones allowed to tell the truth. But Jimmy is exceptionally well informed. ..."
"... So, now the nation is in the midst of a New Cold War and a renewed arms race between two world powers -- all because this woman and her criminally liable hordes in the Democratic Party and the idiotic corporate media pedalled this insanity. I only hope there is a special place in the ninth circle of Hell for Mdm. Clinton and her lickspittles. ..."
"... This is right on point. There were two main reasons for this (perhaps fatal) error on the Democrats' part. First, they made common cause with neo-cons, retired intelligence chiefs, Congressional hawks, Pentagon officials, and other advocates of a revived American Empire. ..."
"... Second, they let Donald Trump dictate the mode of political discourse (ultra-personal, characterological, conspiracy-minded, etc.) and thought that they could beat him at his own game. The first error was criminal and the second stupid. We may have to support some Democrat in 2020 to get rid of Mr. Trump, but we clearly need a new political party to represent the interests of working people in social justice and peace. ..."
You neglected to mention American comedian Jimmy Dore who practically single-handedly
spent the past two and a half years ferociously combating the Russiagate conspiracy myth with
some of the best amateur investigative journalism in the world essentially alone while
building up his base of a half-million subscribers.
He has been praised by the likes of Aaron Maté, Tulsi Gabbard, and Glen Greenwald
for his incredible work.
He has been such a force for truth that even Bernie Sanders has timidly ignored and
avoided his show.
The Jimmy Dore Show on YouTube ranks up there with The Intercept in journalistic integrity
and diligence. In a sane world, Jimmy Dore would be deserving of a Presidential Medal of
Freedom.
JRGJRG , March 26, 2019 at 11:19
When the mainstream news is a joke, the court jesters are the only ones allowed to tell
the truth. But Jimmy is exceptionally well informed.
Eddie , March 26, 2019 at 13:59
Indeed, Jimmy Dore the self-styled "jag-off" comedian working out of his garage informed
growing numbers of us of us who were willing to peel our eyeballs away from the cavalcade of
celebrity ravings on MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, et al. Hillary Clinton, in
her vainglorious attempt to find a scapegoat for her political ineptitude blamed her loss on
her invented Trump-Putin "collusion."
So, now the nation is in the midst of a New Cold War and a renewed arms race between two
world powers -- all because this woman and her criminally liable hordes in the Democratic
Party and the idiotic corporate media pedalled this insanity. I only hope there is a special
place in the ninth circle of Hell for Mdm. Clinton and her lickspittles.
This is right on point. There were two main reasons for this (perhaps fatal) error on the
Democrats' part. First, they made common cause with neo-cons, retired intelligence chiefs,
Congressional hawks, Pentagon officials, and other advocates of a revived American Empire.
Second, they let Donald Trump dictate the mode of political discourse (ultra-personal, characterological, conspiracy-minded, etc.) and thought that they could beat him at his own
game. The first error was criminal and the second stupid. We may have to support some
Democrat in 2020 to get rid of Mr. Trump, but we clearly need a new political party to
represent the interests of working people in social justice and peace.
Mueller knows
became the cornerstone
belief of nearly all reporters who covered the Russia investigation. Journalists reveled in the idea of being kept
out of the loop, thrilled to defer to the impenetrable steward of national secrets, the interview-proof Man of
State. He was no blabbermouth Donald Trump, this Mueller! He won't tell us a thing!
"... "How idiotic it would be if the Earth were destroyed because Hillary Clinton lost, couldn't accept it and invented a story for lying liars to lie about." ..."
What's next week's answer going to be? A free, skeptical and challenging media is important; what happens when it's just a big
typing pool waiting for Big Brother's Dictaphone?
"How idiotic it would be if the Earth were destroyed because Hillary Clinton lost, couldn't accept it and invented a story
for lying liars to lie about."
That sums it up for me. "Do not go gentle delusionally into that good night"
RUSSIA RELATIONS. Immense damage has been done.
Will it be repaired? Can it be repaired? Russia is not a joke country in Disneyland and we're
not characters in a Marvel comic.
How idiotic it would be if the Earth were destroyed because Hillary Clinton lost,
couldn't accept it and invented a story for lying liars to lie about. Much will depend on
whether Trump starts a real investigation so that the falsity is exposed.
Amazing level of polemic and diplomatic skills. That's really high class my fiends. Rare for
any US politician: most are suckers that can answer only prepared questions. MSNBC presstitutes
should be ashamed, but they have not shame. amasing !!!
In this segment, we look at Tulsi's savvy and brutally honest rebuttal when the Morning
Show hosts allege that "Russia" is looking to help Tulsi when the 2020 Democratic Primary
election
"Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia
Conspiracy",
read
the
front page headline of Sunday's
New York Times.
Bit by bit, mainstream American
consciousness is slowly coming to terms with the death of the thrilling conspiracy theory that the
highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin,
and with the
stark reality that the mass media and the Democratic Party spent the last two and-a-half years
monopolizing public attention with a narrative which never had any underlying truth to it.
There are still holdouts, of course.
Many people invested a tremendous
amount of hope, credibility, and egoic currency in the belief that Robert Mueller was going to
arrest high-ranking Trump administration officials and members of Trump's own family, leading seedy
characters to "flip" on the president in their own self-interest and thereby providing evidence
that will lead to impeachment.
Some insist that Attorney General William Barr is holding
back key elements of the Mueller report,
a claim which is premised on the absurd belief
that Mueller would allow Barr to lie about the results of the investigation without speaking up
publicly. Others are still holding out hope that other investigations by other legal authorities
will turn up some Russian shenanigans that Mueller could not, ignoring Mueller's sweeping subpoena
powers and unrivaled investigative authority. But they're coming around.
The question still remains, though:
what the hell happened? How did a fact-free
conspiracy theory come to gain so much traction among mainstream Americans? How were millions of
people persuaded to invest hope in a narrative that anyone objectively analyzing the facts knew to
be completely false?
The answer is that they were told that the Russiagate narrative was legitimate over and over
again by politicians and mass media pundits, and,
because of
a
peculiar phenomenon
in the nature of human cognition,
this repetition made it seem
true.
The rather uncreatively-named
illusory
truth effect
describes the way
people are more likely to believe something is true
after hearing it said many times.
This is due to the fact that the familiar feeling we
experience when hearing something we've heard before feels very similar to our experience of
knowing that something is true. When we hear a familiar idea, its familiarity provides us with
something called
cognitive
ease
, which is the relaxed, unlabored state we experience when our minds aren't working hard at
something. We also experience cognitive ease when we are presented with a statement that we know to
be true.
We have a tendency to select for cognitive ease, which is why
confirmation
bias
is a thing; believing ideas which don't cause cognitive strain or dissonance gives us more
cognitive ease than doing otherwise.
Our evolutionary ancestors adapted to seek out
cognitive ease so that they could put their attention into making quick decisions essential for
survival, rather than painstakingly mulling over whether everything we believe is as true as we
think it is. This was great for not getting eaten by saber-toothed tigers in prehistoric times, but
it's not very helpful when navigating the twists and turns of a cognitively complex modern world.
It's also not helpful when you're trying to cultivate truthful beliefs while surrounded by screens
that are repeating the same bogus talking points over and over again.
I'm dealing with a perfect example of the perils of cognitive ease right now. Writing this essay
has required me to move outside my familiar comfort zone of political commentary and read a bunch
of studies and essays, think hard about new ideas, and then figure out how to convey them as
clearly and concisely as possible without boring my audience.
This movement away from
cognitive ease has resulted in my checking Twitter a lot more often than I usually do, and seeking
so much distraction that this essay will probably end up getting published about twelve hours later
than I had intended.
Having to read a bunch of scholars explaining the precise reasons why
I'm acting like such an airhead hasn't exactly helped my sense of cognitive ease any, either.
Science has been aware of the illusory truth effect since 1977,
when
a
study found
that subjects were more likely to evaluate a statement as true when it's been
repeatedly presented to them over the course of a couple of weeks, even if they didn't consciously
remember having encountered that statement before. These findings
have
been replicated
in numerous studies since, and new research in recent years has shown that the
phenomenon is even more drastic than initially believed. A 2015 paper titled "
Knowledge
Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth
" found that the illusory truth effect is so strong that
sheer repetition can change the answers that test subjects give,
even when they had been in
possession of knowledge contradicting that answer beforehand
. This study was done to test the
assumption which had gone unchallenged up until then that the illusory truth effect only comes into
play when there is no stored knowledge of the subject at hand.
"Surprisingly, repetition increased statements' perceived truth, regardless of
whether stored knowledge could have been used to detect a contradiction,"
the paper
reads.
"Reading a statement like 'A sari is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by Scots'
increased participants' later belief that it was true, even if they could correctly answer the
question 'What is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by Scots?'"
Stored knowledge tells pretty much everybody that the "short, pleated skirt worn by Scots" is a
kilt, not a sari, but simply repeating the contrary statement can convince them otherwise.
This explains why we all know people who are extraordinarily intelligent, but still
bought into the Russiagate narrative just as much as our less mentally apt friends and
acquaintances.
Their intelligence didn't save them from this debunked conspiracy theory,
it just made them more clever in finding ways of defending it. This is because the illusory truth
effect largely bypasses the intellect, and even one's own stored knowledge, because of the way we
all reflexively select for cognitive ease.
You can understand, then, how a populace who is consuming repetitive assertions,
innuendo, and incriminating questions on a daily basis through the screens that they look at many
times a day could be manipulated into believing that Robert Mueller would one day reveal evidence
which will lead to the destruction of the Trump administration.
The repetition leads to
belief, the belief leads to trust, and before you know it people who are scared of the president
are reading the
Palmer Report
every day and parking themselves in front of Rachel Maddow
every night and letting everything they say slide right past their skepticism filters, marinating
comfortably in a sedative of cognitive ease.
And that repetition has been no accident. CNN producer John Bonifield was
caught
on video
nearly two years ago admitting that CNN's CEO Jeff Zucker was personally instructing
his staff to stay focused on Russia even in the midst of far more important breaking news stories.
"My boss, I shouldn't say this, my boss yesterday we were having a discussion about this
dental shoot and he goes and he was just like I want you to know what we are up against here,"
Bonifield told an undercover associate of James O'Keefe's
Project Veritas
.
"And he goes, just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate
accords and for a day and a half we covered the climate accords.
And the CEO of CNN said
in our internal meeting, he said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we're done
with it, let's get back to Russia.
"
(And before you get on me about O'Keefe's shady record, CNN
said
in a statement
that the video was legitimate and disputed none of its content, saying only that
it stands by Bonifield and that "Diversity of personal opinion is what makes CNN strong, we welcome
it and embrace it.")
Zucker, for his part,
told the
New York Times
in
an article published yesterday that
he was "entirely comfortable" with CNN's role in
promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory the way that it did.
"We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as
we know them, which is exactly what we did,"
Zucker said.
"A sitting president's own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a
hostile nation. That's not enormous because the media says so. That's enormous because it's
unprecedented."
"We are not investigators"? What the fuck kind of dumbass shit is that?
So it's
not your job to investigate whether what you're reporting is true or false? It's not your job to
investigate whether the anonymous sources you're basing your reports on might be lying or not? It's
not your job to investigate whether or not you'd be committing journalistic malpractice with the
multiple
completely bullshit stories
your outlet has been humiliated by in the last two years? It's not
your job to weigh the consequences of deliberately monopolizing public attention on a narrative
which consists of nothing but confident-sounding assertions and innuendo?
"We are not investigators." So? You're not dentists or firefighters either, what's your
point?
That has nothing to do with the mountains of journalistic malpractice you've been
perpetrating by advancing this conspiracy theory, nor with the inexcusable brutalization you've
been inflicting upon the American psyche with your deliberate nonstop repetition of bogus
assertions, innuendo, and incriminating questions.
The science of modern propaganda has been in research and development
for
over a century
.
If you think about how many advances have been made in other military
fields over the last hundred years, that gives you a clear example of how sophisticated an
understanding the social engineers must now have of the methods of mass manipulation of human
psychology. We may be absolutely certain that there are people who've been working to drive the
public narratives about western rivals like Russia, and that they are doing so with a far greater
understanding of the concepts we've touched on in this essay than we have at our disposal.
The manipulators understand our psyches better than we understand them ourselves, and
they're getting more clever, not less.
The only thing we can do to keep our heads while
immersed in a society that is saturated with propaganda is be as relentlessly honest as possible,
with ourselves and with the world. We'll never be able to out-manipulate the master manipulators,
but we can be real with ourselves about whether or not we're selecting for cognitive ease rather
than thinking rigorously and clearly. We can be truthful with our friends, family, coworkers and
social media followers wherever untruth seems to be taking hold. We can do our very best to shine
the light of truth on the puppeteers wherever we spot them and ruin the whole goddamn show for
everyone.
It may not seem like a lot, but truth is the one thing they can't manipulate,
whether it's truth about them, truth about the world, or truthfulness with yourself. The lying
manipulators got us into this mess, so only truth can get us out.
Almost from the start, Democrats
and their media echo chamber have moved the goal posts on collusion
. The original allegation – the political narrative that the Clinton campaign, through
Obama administration alchemy, honed into a counterintelligence investigation – was that
that the Trump campaign was
complicit in Russia's "cyberespionage" attacks on the 2016 election.
But there was no evidence that candidate Trump and his surrogates
had anything to do with the Kremlin's hacking and propaganda schemes. And no supporting logic.
The Russians are very good at espionage. They neither needed nor wanted American help, their
operations predated Trump's entry into the campaign, and some of those operations were
anti-Trump.
Nevertheless, in short order, that endlessly elastic word, collusion , was being
stretched to the breaking point – covering every conceivable type of association between
Trump associates and Russia.
Some of these were unseemly, such as the Trump Tower meeting, an apparently unsuccessful
effort to obtain campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton. More of them were routine, such as incoming
national-security adviser Michael Flynn's communications with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak
during the post-election transition. But none of these collusion episodes were criminal. The
only "collusion" prosecutors care about is conspiracy; a criminal agreement to violate a
federal penal statute – such as the laws against hacking.
There was never any such evidence. There was just unverified, sensational, hearsay nonsense
– the Steele dossier generated by the Clinton campaign.
Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has concluded that there was no criminal collusion,
the question arises: When during their exhaustive 22-month investigation did prosecutors
realize they had no case? I put it at no later than the end of 2017. I suspect it was in the
early autumn.
By the time Mueller was appointed on May 17, 2017, the FBI had been trying unsuccessfully
for nearly a year to corroborate the dossier's allegations. Top bureau officials have conceded
to congressional investigators that they were never able to do so – notwithstanding that,
by the time of Mueller's appointment, the Justice Department and FBI had relied on the dossier
three times, in what they labeled "VERIFIED" applications, to obtain warrants from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court.
And make no mistake about what this means. In each and every application, after describing
the hacking operations carried out by Russian operatives, the Justice Department asserted:
The FBI believes that the Russian Government's efforts to influence the 2016 U.S.
presidential election were being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals
associated with [Donald Trump's] campaign.
Yes, the Justice Department continued to make that allegation to the secret federal court
for months after Trump was sworn in as president.
Notably, in June 2017, about a month after Mueller took over the investigation, while he was
still getting his bearings, the Justice Department and the FBI went on to obtain a fourth FISA
warrant. Yet again, they used the same unverified information. Yet again, they withheld from
the court the fact that this information was generated by the Clinton campaign; that the
Clinton campaign was peddling it to the media at the same time the FBI was providing it to the
court; and that Christopher Steele, the informant on whom they were so heavily relying, had
misled the bureau about his media contacts.
You know what's most telling about this fourth FISA warrant? The fact that it was never
renewed. The 90-day authorization lapsed in September 2017. When it did, Mueller did not seek
to extend it with a new warrant.
Think about that for a moment. President Trump fired FBI Director Comey on May 9, 2017.
Eight days later, on May 17, Mueller was named special counsel. This appointment effectively
wrested control of the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation from acting FBI director
Andrew McCabe, transferring it to the special counsel.
By August 2017, Mueller had removed the lead investigator, Agent Peter Strzok over the
rabidly anti-Trump texts he'd exchanged with Lisa Page, a top FBI lawyer who served as McCabe's
counsel. Page herself had resigned in May. Meanwhile, the FBI reassigned its top counsel, James
Baker (who later resigned); and the bureau's inspection division referred McCabe to the Justice
Department's inspector general for leaking investigative information and then lying about it
(and McCabe was later fired and referred to the Justice Department for possible
prosecution).
This means that by autumn 2017 when it would have been time to go back to the court and
reaffirm the dossier's allegations of a Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy, the major FBI
officials involved in placing those unverified allegations before the court had been sidelined.
Clearly up to speed after four months of running the investigation, Mueller decided not to
renew these allegations.
Once the fourth warrant lapsed in September, investigators made no new claims of a
Trump-Russia conspiracy to the court. The collusion case was the Clinton campaign's Steele
dossier, and by autumn 2017, the investigators now in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation
were unwilling to stand behind it.
In order to get the FISA warrants, the Justice Department and the FBI had had to allege that
there was probable cause to believe former Trump adviser Carter Page was an agent of Russia.
Under FISA law, that requires alleging that he was knowingly involved in clandestine activity
on behalf of Russia, and that this clandestine activity involved probable violations of
American criminal law – offenses such as espionage. Yet, despite the fact that this
representation was made four times in sworn "verified" applications, Mueller never charged Page
with a crime – not espionage, not false statements, nothing.
When Special Counsel Mueller closed his investigation last week, he almost certainly knew
for about a year and a half that there was no collusion case. Indeed, the indictments that he
did bring appeared to preclude the possibility that the Trump campaign conspired with the
Kremlin.
For those that remember all the statements that former Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, John Brennan made on Trump-Russia investigation, his latest appearance on MSNBC this
morning might come as a huge surprise:
Brennan on MSNBC: Well, I don't know if I received bad information but I think I suspected
there was more than there actually was. I am relieved that it's been determined there was not a
criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election.
"... Namely, that America is suffering Regime Failure. Thus, wrong-headed Washington policies have brought prosperity to Wall Street but not main street, which is what actually explains why Trump won the left-behind precincts of Flyover America. ..."
"... Regime Failure has also fostered confrontation with Russia when it is no threat to homeland security at all, but so doing has vilified Putin and Russia to the point that random dots of RussiaGate got woven into a preposterous theory of collusion. ..."
"... The foundation document which turned these random developments into the Russia Collusion story, of course, was the January 6, 2017 report entitled, "Assessing Russian Activities And Intentions in Recent US Elections". The report was nothing of the kind, of course, and is now well-understood to have been written by outgoing CIA director John Brennan and a hand-picked posse of politicized analysts from the CIA, FBI and NSA. It was essentially a political screed thinly disguised as the product of the professional intelligence community and was designed to discredit and sabotage the Trump presidency. ..."
"... William Binney, who is the father of modern NSA internet spying technologies, says that the DNC emails were leaked on a thumb-drive and couldn't have been hacked as a technical matter; and equally competent analysts have shown that Guccifer 2.0 is almost surely a NSA contrived fiction based on the oldest trick in the police precinct station house – planting evidence, in this case telltale Cyrillic letters and the name of a notorious head of the Soviet secret police. ..."
"... So what we are left with is the fact that Binney, a NSA veteran and actually the father of much of today's NSA internet spying capability, says that the recorded download speed of the DNC emails could only have been done by plugging a thumb-drive into the machines on site. That is, nothing downloads across 5,000 miles of digital expanse at the recorded 22.7 megabytes per second. ..."
"... The pure grandstanding nature of this blow against the purported election meddling of the nefarious Russians is more than evident in the 3,000 ads IRA bought on Facebook for about $100,000 – more than half of which were posted after the election. ..."
"... Yet here's a typical example of how the Russians stormed into America's sacred election space – even if according to Facebook this particular ad got less than 10,000 "impressions" and the mighty sum of 160 "shares" . For crying out loud, it didn't take any nefarious Russian intelligence agent to post this kind of cartoonish Islamophobia. There are millions of American xenophobes more than happy to do it with their own dime, time and bile. ..."
Now that the giant Mueller Nothingburger (with a side of
crow-flavored fries, per Jim Kunstler) has been officially delivered unto the mainstream
media's wailing and gnashing of teeth, the essence of the matter should be obvious: To wit,
the RussiaGate Collusion story was always way above the pay grade of the legal sleuths and
gunslingers who wasted $25 million on it – and notwithstanding 2,800 subpoenas, 500
witnesses, 40 FBI agents and 21 lawyers.
This prosecutorial blitzkrieg had no chance of discovering the nefarious facts of
conspiracy, however, because there never were any worthy of adult consideration. To the
contrary, from day #1 the whole cock-and-bull story was based on a syllogism which held that
Trump's very election victory and support for rapprochement with Russia were in themselves
proof of a conspiracy with the Kremlin to steal the election.
That is to say, by the lights of the Dems, official Washington and their mainstream media
echo chamber, Hillary Clinton could not have lost the 2016 election to the worst GOP
candidate in history including Barry Goldwater and Alf Landon (true) without the sinister
intervention of a foreign power hostile to Hillary.
Therefore, Putin and the Russians elected Trump. Q.E.D.
Likewise, Russia is perforce the enemy that Washington needs in order to stay in the
business of Empire. So advocacy of rapprochement with Moscow was per se evidence that the
Kremlin had blackmail (kompromat for the RussiaGate cognoscenti) on Trump and his
campaign.
Once these predicates were established, of course, any old dog-eared "facts" could be hung
on the frame in order to establishment an air of verisimilitude.
But now we know. Strip away the false predicates and the flotsam and jetsam of the case
fall flat on their face. Even 22 months of Mueller Time couldn't stich together a
Humpty-Dumpty that never was.
As it happens, however, there has been all along a perfectly plausible alternative
explanation for why Trump won and why repairing relations with Russia made eminent good
sense.
Namely, that America is suffering Regime Failure. Thus, wrong-headed Washington
policies have brought prosperity to Wall Street but not main street, which is what actually
explains why Trump won the left-behind precincts of Flyover America.
Regime Failure has also fostered confrontation with Russia when it is no threat to
homeland security at all, but so doing has vilified Putin and Russia to the point that random
dots of RussiaGate got woven into a preposterous theory of collusion.
What is left without the syllogistic predicates, of course, are the ludicrous threadbare
facts of the case.
After all, can there be anything more pitiful after 22 months of prosecutorial scorched
earth on the Russian collusion file than Mueller's list of indictments. These include:
13 Russian college kids for essentially practicing English as a third language at a St.
Petersburg troll farm for $4 per hour;
12 Russian intelligence operatives who might as well have been picked from the GRU
phonebook;
Baby George Papadopoulos for mis-recalling an irrelevant date by two weeks;
Paul Manafort for standard Washington lobbyist crimes committed long before he met
Trump;
Michael Cohen for shirking taxes and running Trump's bimbo silencing operation;
Michael Flynn for doing his job talking to the Russian Ambassador and confusing the
confusable Mike Pence on what he said and didn't say about Obama's idiotic 11th hour
Russian sanctions;
Rick Gates for helping Manafort shakedown the Ukrainian government and other oily
Washington supplicants.;
Sam Patten, another Manafort operative who forgot to register correctly as a foreign
agent;
Richard Pinedo, a grifter who never met Trump and got caught selling forged bank
accounts on-line to Russians for a couple bucks each;
Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyers who wrote a report for Manafort in 2012 and
misreported to the FBI what he told Gates about it.
That's all she wrote and it's about as pathetic as it gets. Mueller should have been
guffawed out of town on account of this tommyrot long before belatedly delivering a report
that proved exactly that.
So it is perhaps a measure of the degree to which the Imperial City has fallen prey to the
Trump Derangement Syndrome that the five core events of the case survived as long as they
did. In fact, it has long been evident from public information that there was nothing
nefarious about any of these ragged building blocks of the case:
Baby George Papadopoulos's drunken conversation with a London professor who has long
since disappeared and was likely a CIA asset;
Carter Page's self-promotion into a bogus FISA warrant;
the completely innocent June 2016 Trump Tower meeting;
the disputed case regarding whether the DNC was the victim of a hack or a leak;
and
the ludicrous efforts of the Russian troll farm in St. Petersburg.
The foundation document which turned these random developments into the Russia Collusion
story, of course, was the January 6, 2017 report entitled, "Assessing Russian Activities And
Intentions in Recent US Elections". The report was nothing of the kind, of course, and is now well-understood to have been
written by outgoing CIA director John Brennan and a hand-picked posse of politicized analysts
from the CIA, FBI and NSA. It was essentially a political screed thinly disguised as the
product of the professional intelligence community and was designed to discredit and sabotage
the Trump presidency.
And it was lied about over and over by the MSM who called it an assessment of the 17 US
intelligence agencies when it was nothing of the kind, and said so right on the cover
page.
In fact, when we first read this ballyhooed report our thought was that someone at the
Onion had pilfered the CIA logo and published a sidesplitting satire.
The 9-pager on RT America, which is presented as evidence of "Kremlin messaging", is so
sophomoric and hackneyed that it could have been written by a summer intern at the CIA. It
consists entirely of a sloppy catalogue of leftist and libertarian based dissent from
mainstream policy that has been aired on RT America on such subversive topics as Occupy Wall
Street, anti-fracking, police brutality, foreign interventionism and civil liberties.
Actually, your editor has appeared dozens of times on RT America and advocated nearly
every position cited by the CIA as evidence of nefarious Russian propaganda.
And we thought it up all by ourselves!
So, yes, we do think US intervention in Syria was wrong; that Georgia was the aggressor
when it invaded South Ossetia; that the American people have been disenfranchised and need to
"take this government back"; that Washington runs a "surveillance state" where civil
liberties are being ridden roughshod upon; that Wall Street is riven with "greed" and the "US
national debt" is out of control; that the two-party system is a "sham "and that it doesn't
represent the views of "one-third of the population" (at least!); and that most especially
after killing millions in unnecessary wars Washington has "no moral right to teach the rest
of the world".
So there you have it: Policy views on various topics that are embraced in some instances
by both your libertarian editor and the left-wing Nation magazine were held to be examples of
Russian messaging, and alarming evidence of nefarious meddling in our electoral process at
that.
In fact, the single proposition in the entire ten-pages of political opinionating that
relates to an actual Russian intrusion (other than the hideous St. Petersburg troll farm
which we debunk below) in the American electoral process is the completely discredited notion
that the Russian GRU hacked the DNC emails and handed them off to WikiLeaks
No, not at all.
William Binney, who is the father of modern NSA internet spying technologies, says that
the DNC emails were leaked on a thumb-drive and couldn't have been
hacked as a technical matter; and equally competent analysts have shown that
Guccifer 2.0 is almost surely a NSA contrived fiction based on the oldest trick in the police
precinct station house – planting evidence, in this case telltale Cyrillic letters and
the name of a notorious head of the Soviet secret police.
Indeed, if the Russians did it – from a troll farm in St. Petersburg or the Kremlin
itself – the fingerprints from any remote hacking operation would be all over the
computers involved. Moreover, the National Security Agency (NSA) would have a record of the
breach stored at one of its server farms because it does capture and store everything that
comes into the US over the internet.
Said record, of course, would amount to the Smoking Intercept. So the only thing Mueller
really needed to do was to call the head of NSA and request the NSA intercept –
something he obviously didn't do or it would have leaked long ago.
In the alternative, if NSA has no such record, he could have confiscated the DNC computers
– which had never even been inspected by the FBI, let alone taken into custody –
to determine whether William Binney is right.
That didn't happen, either, or it too would have leaked in a heartbeat.
So what we are left with is the fact that Binney, a NSA veteran and actually the father of
much of today's NSA internet spying capability, says that the recorded download speed of the
DNC emails could only have been done by plugging a thumb-drive into the machines on site.
That is, nothing downloads across 5,000 miles of digital expanse at the recorded 22.7
megabytes per second.
In short, if the Russians hacked them, the evidence is all there in the hard drives; and
if they didn't, the entire RussiaGate hoax should have been shutdown long ago.
That's because the only thing that remotely smacks of untoward meddling by the Kremlin is
the DNC emails – and even then, they only concerned intra-party squabbles between the
Clinton and the Sandernista factions of the Dem party that were already well advertised and
known to the American electorate.
Cyber Garbage From the St. Petersburg Troll Farm
By contrast, another prime exhibit in the meddling narrative is the pitiful efforts of the
Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency (IRA). This is was cited over and over
by the RussiaGaters as evidence of Putin's nefarious hand at work, but did they ever
investigate the matter?
The fact is, the IRA was such a belly-splitting joke that they only thing it proved is
that prosecutor Mueller did actually indict 13 Russian-speaking ham sandwiches.
Indeed, the joker in the whole deck is that the nefarious"troll farm" in St. Petersburg
was not even a Russian intelligence agency operation at all.
It was just "Russian" even by the careful terminology of Barr's summary. As it happened,
the RussiaGate hysteria had reached such a point that any contact with any of Russia's 144
million citizens became inherently suspect, as if that beleaguered nation had become a race
of evildoers.
Actually, the IRA was the relatively harmless Hobby Farm of a fanatical Russian oligarch
and ultra-nationalist, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has a great big beef against Imperial
Washington's demonization of Russia and Vlad Putin. Apparently, the farm was
(it's apparently being disbanded) the vehicle through which he gave Washington the middle
finger and buttered up his patron.
Prigozhin is otherwise known as "Putin's Cook" because he made his fortune in St.
Petersburg restaurants that Putin favored and via state funded food service operations at
Russian schools and military installations.
Like most Russian oligarchs not in jail, he apparently tithes in gratitude to the Kremlin:
In this case, by bankrolling the rinky-dink operation at 55 Savushkina Street in St.
Petersburg that was the object of Mueller's pretentious foray into the flotsam and jetsam of
social media low life.
Prigozhin's trolling farm was grandly called the Internet Research Agency (IRA), but what
it actually did was hire (apparently) unemployed 20-somethings at $4-8 per hour to pound out
ham-handed political messaging on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
YouTube, etc. They banged away twelve hours at a shift on a quota-driven
paint-by-the-internet-numbers basis where their output was rated for engagements, likes,
retweets etc.
Whatever these keyboard drones might have been, they were not professional Russian intel
operators. And the collection of broken English postings strewn throughout Mueller's
indictment were not one bit scary.
The pure grandstanding nature of this blow against the purported election meddling of the
nefarious Russians is more than evident in the 3,000 ads IRA bought on Facebook for about
$100,000 – more than half of which were posted after the election.
Yet here's a typical example of how the Russians stormed into America's sacred election
space – even if according to Facebook this particular ad got less than 10,000
"impressions" and the mighty sum of 160 "shares" . For crying out loud, it didn't take any nefarious Russian intelligence agent to post this
kind of cartoonish Islamophobia. There are millions of American xenophobes more than happy to
do it with their own dime, time and bile.
So how do these things differ? Conspiracy and cooedination both imply some amount of
planning and direction, with for conspiracy some sort of communication and agreement on the
plan with the other conspiring party, namely the Russians. What apparently the Mueller report
finds is none of that: no central plan or direction or the making of such a plan with the
Russians. This indeed looks like it is true, although some of what went on around the Trump
Tower meeting gets pretty borderline, even as that seems to have been sort of a mutually
botched meeting.
But on the matter of collusion we have piles of evidence that this has occurred, and the
evidence is the large pile of indictments that Mueller has brought forward against a lot of
people, with many of those charged with having unreported meetings and dealings with Russians,
including passing of information back and forth, with many of these then lying about all this,
and with some of these people pleading guilty of what they were charrged with. These actions
have involved very clearly in many cases collusion with the Russians rhese people were dealing
with. The crucial diffeeence is that it appears that all this collusion was unplanned and
undirected. It was disorganized and spontaneous collusion, although serious enough to bring
about efforts to cover up what was going on by many, including apparently Trump himself, even
if AG Barr has decided he did not commit obstruction of justice.
Six of Trump's closest associates have been indicted in connection with this. I only note
that Dana Milbank of WaPo agrees with me: lots of collusion, which is different from
conspiracy, which Trump is too stupid to actually engage in.
As it is, Anonymous, I happen to be very well informed about Russia and pay close
attention to it, probably more than you on both counts. So spouting about "Russian-itis" just
makes you poorly informed and stupid.
As it is, I am increasingly disgusted that most of the media has simply rolled over and
bought the Trump/Hannity line that "no collusion" is what has been shown. It has not. Again,
the word does not appear in the Bar letter.
It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, if there is none
Despite being a Professor of Economics, and having a Russian speaking wife you are
utterly incompetent in this area and are completely brainwashed by the neoliberal/neocon
MSM. You tend to subconsciously equate Russia and the USSR. For your information, Russia is
a neoliberal state; much like the USA and Putin is promoter of neoliberal capitalism,
although in less man-eating mutation than in the USA.
For your information Mueller investigation was a part of color revolution against Trump
launched by intelligence services in the same way they launch color revolution in other
countries. It is unclear to me why they did that, but that fact is provable
And the sequence of event, especially questioning the legitimacy of election, and
Mueller appointment gambit with Comey as a sacrificing pawn, corresponds to what you can
learn from the books of CIA-connected writer Gene Sharp -- the reference source on color
revolution mechanics. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sharp
It is not clear to me why the Deep State in the USA (as well as in GB) has such an
allergic reaction and viewed Trump as a threat to the US governed world neoliberal empire,
because Trump, as corrupt as he is, is a part of NYC neoliberal elite and in no way a
revolutionary. And it was clear that he will execute the same "bait and switch" maneuver as
Obama betraying his election promises.
Which actually happened three months after inauguration when he bombed Syria targets
without any investigation of a chemical attack -- which most probably was staged by
jihadists (supposedly he was influenced by Ivanka; actually Javanka is another problem of
this corrupt administration and suggest completely different course of the investigation;
hopefully by the Southern District of NY -- I would like Jared Kushner going to jail with
or without Trump)
But it was a color revolution. Which so far failed.
So you better stop writing such detached from reality statements as "But on the matter
of collusion we have piles of evidence that this has occurred, and the evidence is the
large pile of indictments that Mueller has brought forward against a lot of people, with
many of those charged with having unreported meetings and dealings with Russians," This is
such a low level of IQ that it hurts. Naivety unacceptable for a Professor pretending to be
a political analyst.
In reality this was a false flag operation to present Russia as the culprit. Highly
successful operation I would say. Russia serves as a very convenient scapegoat for such
things.
And having an external scapegoat and projecting into it all the ills helped to cement
cracks in the neoliberal façade, when the US population rejected neoliberal's elite
candidate. In addition, it allowed to launch NeoMcCartyism campaign in MSM for the
suppressing the internal dissent, when anybody who question the US foreign wars or the rule
of financial oligarchy can be framed as Putin's agent.
So this is another classic method of suppressing the dissident voices including whose
who argue for the return of the New Deal Capitalism and/or are against foreign wars. Looks
at how MSMs treat Tulsi Gabbard visit to Syria. Does not it remind you something ?
So most of your writings on this particular topic are just an implicit repetition of
State Department taking points infused into your brain via MSMs you read. You have no first
hand sources about Russia. That's why I would strongly recommend you to stop writing on
this topic. You just disgrace yourself.
"... What this implies is that the received wisdom amongst bourgeois Democrats -- the bosses, bank managers, academics, realtors and administrative class, looks to be what it is: a combination of class loathing that their 'lessors' didn't perceive the munificent blessing of their electoral choice; mass delusion on the part of self-styled 'high-information voters' about who really controls American 'democracy;' and studied ignorance of the consequences of the last half-century of bi-partisan neoliberal governance. ..."
"... Most damaging to the burgeoning left in the U.S. is the deeply ugly character assassination of poor and working-class voters carried out by the urban bourgeois, many from the self-described radical left. People I know and like, but with whom I disagree politically but am working hard to convert, have spent the last three years being derided as traitorous, marginally literate hicks too stupid to know they are pawns of the Kremlin. The irony, if you care to call it that, is that they knew the Russian interference story was cynical bullshit all along while the graduate degree crowd was following every twist and turn as if it were true knowledge. ..."
"... The New York Times and Washington Post have been publishing politically motivated 'fake news' in support of establishment interests since their inceptions. Their service to powerful interests is why they are still around. The FBI, CIA and NSA have been putting out politically motivated bullshit since their respective inceptions. They exist to serve the rich and powerful against all comers. To claim these as bastions of integrity was always a tough sell. To continue to claim it is the stuff from which revolutions are made. In this case, right-wing revolutions. ..."
"... While the urban bourgeois have long been dismissive of the 'burn it down' contingent of Trump voters, they seem incapable of seeing their own roles as defenders of the establishment as corrupt and ultimately, politically suicidal. ..."
"... . Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election because she is a corrupt, neoliberal, militaristic piece of shit ..."
"... Lying sacks of shit like James Clapper and John Brennan will tie their lots to whomever will fund their adventures in mal-governance as the world burns and species become extinct. The tragedy here is that there are real issues in need of resolution. ..."
Two years ago authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
wrote in their book
Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign that within 24 hours
of her 2016 electoral loss, Hillary Clinton's senior campaign staff decided
to blame the loss on Russian interference. Given the apparent source of the
charge in
opposition research
funded by the Clinton campaign , the move seemed both desperate and pathetic
-- a thread for Clinton's true believers to hang onto, an effort to keep campaign
contributions rolling in and a ploy to cleave liberals from the left through
red-baiting.
For perspective, from the time leading up to the 2016 election through today,
I chose to live amongst poor and working-class people of color, with occasional
forays into the rural working and middle classes and the urban bourgeois. What
became apparent early on is that the audience for the Russian interference story
was the urban and suburban bourgeois who had seen their lots by-and-large restored
by Barack Obama's bank bailouts and who had no knowledge of, or interaction
with, the 90% of the country that is living, by degree, hand-to-mouth.
What this implies is that the received wisdom amongst bourgeois Democrats
-- the bosses, bank managers, academics, realtors and administrative class,
looks to be what it is: a combination of class loathing that their 'lessors'
didn't perceive the munificent blessing of their electoral choice; mass delusion
on the part of self-styled 'high-information voters' about who really controls
American 'democracy;' and studied ignorance of the consequences of the last
half-century of bi-partisan neoliberal governance.
"Prior to the 2016 presidential election, if one were to ask what single
act could seal a new Cold War with Russia, align liberals and progressives
with the operational core of the American military-industrial-surveillance
complex, expose the preponderance of left-activism as an offshoot of Democratic
Party operations and consign most of what remained to personal invective
against an empirically dangerous leader, consensus would likely have it
that doing so wouldn't be easy."
The Clinton campaign's decision to blame her electoral loss on Russian interference
demonstrates why she was, and still is, unqualified to hold elected office.
In the first, the U.S. – Russian rivalry is backed-up by hair-trigger nuclear
arsenals that could end the world in a matter of minutes. Inciting tensions
based on self-serving lies is stunningly reckless. In the second, the claim
demonstrates utter contempt for her most loyal followers by feeding them purposely
misleading explanations of the loss. And most damagingly for political opponents
of Donald Trump, these actions give credence to the insurgent status of his
retro-Republicanism against liberal and left defenders of the political establishment.
Most damaging to the burgeoning left in the U.S. is the deeply ugly character
assassination of poor and working-class voters carried out by the urban bourgeois,
many from the self-described radical left. People I know and like, but with
whom I disagree politically but am working hard to convert, have spent the last
three years being derided as traitorous, marginally literate hicks too stupid
to know they are pawns of the Kremlin. The irony, if you care to call it that,
is that they knew the Russian interference story was cynical bullshit all along
while the graduate degree crowd was following every twist and turn as if it
were true knowledge.
The Democratic Party 'leadership' that pursued this story is as stupid as
it is corrupt. The purpose of Russia-gate was apparently to keep the Party faithful,
faithful. But as was demonstrated in 2016, the faithful alone can't win an election.
This leadership turned what could have been an effective 'give 'em enough rope'
strategy against arrogant jackass Trump back on itself. The establishment-left
had been in the process of giving self-described socialists someone to vote
for in 2020. Too-clever-by-half liberal twaddle about 'post-truth' now has liberals
-- universally conflated with the left, perceived as both idiots and liars.
And rightly so.
Democrats who spent the last three years making less than plausible (and
politically retrograde) accusations against Mr. Trump likely still don't understand
their current position. Their call for an exhaustive investigation carried out
by people they trust was honored. While the investigation was underway, the
mainstream press put one ludicrous fantasy after another forward as news. This
while a host of real issues affecting real people's lives were studiously ignored.
As incredulous as I am that it could be done, liberal Democrats have made corrupt
oligarch Trump appear to be righteously aggrieved. Who says these people have
no talent?
The New York Times and Washington Post have been publishing politically
motivated 'fake news' in support of establishment interests since their inceptions.
Their service to powerful interests is why they are still around. The FBI, CIA
and NSA have been putting out
politically motivated bullshit since their respective inceptions. They exist
to serve the rich and powerful against all comers. To claim these as bastions
of integrity was always a tough sell. To continue to claim it is the stuff from
which revolutions are made. In this case, right-wing revolutions.
While the urban bourgeois have long been dismissive of the 'burn it down'
contingent of Trump voters, they seem incapable of seeing their own roles as
defenders of the establishment as corrupt and ultimately, politically suicidal.
I voted for a woman for president and a black man for vice president in
2016. But they weren't Democrats. Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election
because she is a corrupt, neoliberal, militaristic piece of shit. Ironically,
or not, most of Trump voters I've spoken with know more about the Democrats'
actual record than the highly educated urban bourgeois pontificating on NPR
or in the New York Times.
A quick bet is that the 2020 presidential election is now Donald Trump's
to lose. Lying sacks of shit like James Clapper and John Brennan will tie
their lots to whomever will fund their adventures in mal-governance as the world
burns and species become extinct. The tragedy here is that there are real issues
in need of resolution. The Democrats' three-year adventure in red-baiting
served to legitimate a financial-military-industrial complex that apparently
intends to end the planet as it makes as many people miserable in the process
as is possible. Congratulations assholes.
Join the debate on Facebook More articles by:
Rob Urie
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book
Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.
Russiagate is a story about greed and lust for power manifesting as treachery and corruption.
As a hoax it is notable for it's size and duration and damage done. But it is nothing at all
compared to 9/11. I am impressed by the sheer silliness of Russiagate and the tenacious
ignorance of those who still believe the corporate media.
This is probably the most comprehensive outline of the color revolution against Trump. Bravo, simply bravo !!!
Reads like Agatha Christi Murder on the Orient
Express ;-) Rosenstein role is completely revised from a popular narrative. Brennan role clarifies and detailed. Obama
personal role hinted. Victoria Nuland role and the role of the State Department in Russiagate is documented for the first
time, I think.
Notable quotes:
"... The "insurance policy" appears to have been the effort to legitimize the Trump–Russia collusion narrative so that an FBI investigation, led by McCabe, could continue unhindered. ..."
"... Ohr, one of the highest-ranking officials in the DOJ, was communicating on an ongoing basis with Steele, whom he had known since at least 2006 , well into mid-2017. He is also married to Nellie Ohr, an expert on Russia and Eurasia who began working for Fusion GPS sometime in late 2015 . Nellie Ohr likely played a significant role in the construction of the dossier. ..."
"... The Obama administration provided a simultaneous layer of protection and facilitation for the entire effort. One example is provided by Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333 , also known as Obama's data-sharing order . With the passage of the order, agencies and individuals were able to ask the NSA for access to specific surveillance simply by claiming the intercepts contained relevant information that was useful to a particular mission. ..."
"... Leaking, including felony leaking of classified information, has been widespread. The Carter Page FISA warrant -- likely the unredacted version -- has been in the possession of The Washington Post and The New York Times since March 2017. Traditionally, the intelligence community leaked to The Washington Post while the DOJ leaked to sources within The New York Times. This was a historical pattern that stood until this election. The leaking became so widespread, even this tradition was broken. ..."
"... The information contained within both articles likely came via felony leaks from James Wolfe, former director of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who was arrested on June 7, 2018, and charged with one count of lying to the FBI. Wolfe's indictment alleges that he was leaking classified information to multiple reporters over an extended period of time. ..."
"... The Steele dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources. One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood later relayed information regarding the dossier to Sen. John McCain, who dispatched David Kramer, a fellow at the McCain Institute, to London to meet with Steele in November 2016. McCain would later admit in a Jan. 11, 2017, statement that he had personally passed on the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey. ..."
"... Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations -- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia. ..."
"... Questions to be asked are why is it that two of our allies would find themselves so opposed to the release of these classified documents that a coordinated plea would be made directly to the president? And why would these same allies have even the slightest idea of what was contained in these classified U.S. documents? ..."
Spygate: The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] How America's most powerful agencies were weaponized against President
Donald Trump
Although the details remain complex, the structure underlying Spygate -- the creation of the false narrative that candidate Donald
Trump colluded with Russia, and the spying on his presidential campaign -- remains surprisingly simple:
CIA Director John Brennan, with some assistance from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, gathered foreign intelligence
and fed it throughout our domestic Intelligence Community.
The FBI became the handler of Brennan's intelligence and engaged in the more practical elements of surveillance.
The Department of Justice facilitated investigations by the FBI and legal maneuverings, while providing a crucial shield of
nondisclosure.
The Department of State became a mechanism of information dissemination and leaks.
Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee provided funding, support, and media collusion.
Obama administration officials were complicit, and engaged in unmasking and intelligence gathering and dissemination.
The media was the most corrosive element in many respects. None of these events could have transpired without their willing
participation. Stories were pushed, facts were ignored, and narratives were promoted.
Let's start with a simple premise: The candidacy of Trump presented both an opportunity and a threat.
Initially not viewed with any real seriousness, Trump's campaign was seen as an opportunistic wedge in the election process. At
the same time, and particularly as the viability of his candidacy increased, Trump was seen as an existential threat to the established
political system.
The sudden legitimacy of Trump's candidacy was not welcomed by the U.S. political establishment. Here was a true political outsider
who held no traditional allegiances. He was brash and boastful, he ignored political correctness, he couldn't be bought, and he didn't
care what others thought of him -- he trusted himself.
Governing bodies in Britain and the European Union were also worried. Candidate Trump was openly challenging monetary policy,
regulations, and the power of special interests. He challenged Congress. He challenged the United Nations and the European Union.
He questioned everything.
Brennan played a crucial role in the creation of the Russia-collusion narrative and the spying on the Trump campaign. (Don Emmert/AFP/Getty
Images)
Brennan became the point man in the operation to stop a potential Trump presidency. It remains unclear whether his role was self-appointed
or came from above. To embark on such a mission without direct presidential authority seems both a stretch of the imagination and
particularly foolhardy.
Brennan took unofficial foreign intelligence compiled by contacts, colleagues, and associates --
primarily from the UK , but also from other Five Eyes members, such as Australia.
Individuals in official positions in UK intelligence, such as Robert Hannigan -- head of the UK Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ, Britain's equivalent of the National Security Agency) -- partnered with former UK foreign intelligence members. Former MI6
head Sir Richard Dearlove
, former Ambassador Sir Andrew Wood, and private UK intelligence firm
Hakluyt all played a role.
In the summer of 2016, Hannigan traveled to Washington to
meet with Brennan
regarding alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. On Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration
-- Hannigan abruptly announced
his retirement. The Guardian openly
speculated that Hannigan's
resignation was directly related to the sharing of UK intelligence.
One method used to help establish evidence of collusion was the employment of "spy traps." Prominent among these were ones set
for Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. The intent was to provide or establish connections between the Trump
campaign and Russia. The content and context mattered little as long as a connection could be established that could then be publicized.
The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting was another such attempt.
Western intelligence assets were used to initiate and establish these connections, particularly in the cases of Papadopoulos and
Page.
Ultimately, Brennan formed an inter-agency task
force comprising an estimated six agencies and/or government departments. The FBI, Treasury, and DOJ handled the domestic inquiry
into Trump and possible Russia connections. The CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency
(NSA) handled foreign and intelligence aspects.
Brennan's inter-agency task force is not to be confused with the July 2016 FBI counterintelligence investigation, which was formed
later at Brennan's urging.
During this time, Brennan also employed the use of
reverse targeting , which relates to the targeting of a foreign individual with the intent of capturing data on a U.S. citizen.
This effort was uncovered and
made public by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) in a March 2017
press conference :
"I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show the president-elect and his team were monitored and disseminated out in
intelligence-reporting channels. Details about persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little apparent
foreign-intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.
"From what I know right now, it looks like incidental collection. We don't know exactly how that was picked up but we're trying
to get to the bottom of it."
As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of any traditional channels -- was gathered, Brennan began a
process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director pushed
the FBI toward the establishment of a formal counterintelligence investigation. Brennan repeatedly noted this during
a May 23, 2017, congressional testimony :
"I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump
campaign, was shared with the [FBI]."
Brennan also admitted that his intelligence helped establish
the FBI investigation:
"I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in
my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and
it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred."
Once the FBI began its counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, Brennan shifted his focus. Through a series of meetings
in August and September 2016, Brennan informed the congressional Gang of Eight regarding intelligence and information he had gathered.
Notably, each Gang of Eight member was briefed separately, calling into question whether each of the members received the same information.
Efforts to
block the release of the transcripts from each meeting remain ongoing.
This final report was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of President Donald Trump.
Notably, Admiral Mike Rogers of the NSA publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning only a moderate confidence level.
Although the FBI is technically part of the DOJ, it is best for the purposes of this article that the FBI and DOJ be viewed as
separate entities, each with its own related ties.
The FBI itself was comprised of various factions, with a particularly active element that has come to be known as the "insurance
policy group." It appears that this faction was led by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and comprised other notable names such as
FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and FBI general counsel James Baker.
The FBI established the counterintelligence investigation into alleged Russia collusion with the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016.
Comey initially refused to say whether the FBI was investigating possible connections between members of the Trump campaign and Russia.
He would continue to refuse to provide answers until March 20, 2017, when he disclosed the existence of the FBI investigation
during congressional testimony.
Comey also testified that he did not provide notification to the Gang of Eight until early March 2017 -- less than one month earlier.
This admission was in stark contrast to actions taken by Brennan, who had notified members of the Gang of Eight individually during
August and September 2016. It's likely that Brennan never informed Comey that he had briefed the Gang of Eight in 2016. Comey did
note that the DOJ "had been aware" of the investigation all along.
Comey opened the counterintelligence investigation into Trump on the urging of CIA Director John Brennan.
Following Comey's firing on May 9, 2017, the FBI's investigation was transferred to special counsel Robert Mueller. The
Mueller investigation remains ongoing.
The FBI's formal involvement with the
Steele dossier began on July 5, 2016,
when Mike Gaeta, an FBI agent and assistant legal attaché at the US Embassy in Rome, was dispatched to visit former MI6 spy Christopher
Steele in London. Gaeta would return from this meeting with a copy of Steele's first memo. This memo was given to Victoria Nuland
at the State Department, who passed it along to the FBI.
Gaeta, who also headed the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime unit, had known Steele since at least 2010, when Steele had provided
assistance to the FBI's investigation into the
FIFA corruption
scandal .
Prior to the London meeting, Gaeta may also have met on a less formal basis with Steele
several weeks earlier.
"In June, Steele flew to Rome to brief the FBI contact with whom he had cooperated over FIFA," The Guardian reported. "His information
started to reach the bureau in Washington."
It's worth noting that there was no "dossier" until it was fully compiled in December 2016. There was only a sequence of documents
from Steele -- documents that were passed on individually -- as they were created. Therefore, from the FBI's legal perspective, they
didn't use the dossier. They used individual documents.
For the next month and a half, there appeared to be little contact between Steele and the FBI. However, the FBI's interest in
the dossier suddenly accelerated in late August 2016, when the bureau
asked Steele "for all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify
his sources."
In September 2016, Steele traveled back to Rome to meet with the FBI's Eurasian squad once again. It's likely that the meeting
included several other FBI officials as well. According to a
House Intelligence Committee
minority memo , Steele's reporting reached the FBI counterintelligence team in mid-September 2016 -- the same time as Steele's
September trip to Rome.
The reason for the FBI's renewed interest had to do with an adviser to the Trump campaign -- Carter Page -- who had been in
contact with Stefan Halper, a CIA
and FBI source, since July 2016. Halper
arranged to meet with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a
Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page took a trip
to Moscow. Speakers at the symposium included Madeleine Albright, Vin Webber, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6.
Page was now the FBI's chosen target for a FISA warrant that would be obtained on Oct. 21, 2016. The Steele dossier would be the
primary evidence used in obtaining the FISA warrant, which would be renewed three separate times, including after Trump took office,
finally expiring in September 2017.
Former volunteer Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on Nov. 2, 2017. The FBI obtained a retroactive FISA spy warrant
on Page.
After being in contact with Page for 14 months, Halper stopped contact exactly as the final FISA warrant on Page expired. Page,
who has steadfastly maintained his innocence, was never charged with any crime by the FBI. Efforts for the declassification of the
Page FISA application are currently ongoing through the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were two prominent members of the FBI's "insurance policy" group. Strzok, a senior FBI agent, was the
deputy assistant director of FBI's Counterintelligence Division. Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, served as special counsel to FBI Deputy
Director Andrew McCabe.
Strzok was in charge of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for government business. He helped
FBI Director James Comey draft the statement exonerating Clinton and was personally responsible for changing specific wording within
that statement that reduced Clinton's legal liability. Specifically, Strzok changed the words "grossly negligent," which could be
a criminal offense, to "extremely careless."
Strzok also personally led the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into the alleged Trump–Russia collusion and signed the
documents that opened the investigation on July 31, 2016. He was one of the FBI agents who interviewed Trump's national security
adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn. Strzok met multiple times with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and received information from Steele at those
meetings.
Following the firing of FBI Director James Comey, Strzok would join the team of special counsel Robert Mueller. Two months later,
he was removed from that team after the DOJ inspector general discovered a lengthy series of texts between Strzok and Page that contained
politically charged messages. Strzok would be fired from the FBI in August 2018.
Both Strzok and Page engaged in strategic
leaking to the press. Page did so at the direction of McCabe, who directly
authorized Page to share information with Wall Street
Journal reporter Devlin Barrett. That information was used in an Oct. 30, 2016, article headlined
"FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe ." Page leaked to Barrett thinking she had been granted legal and official authorization
to do so.
McCabe would later initially deny providing such
authorization to the Office of Inspector General. Page, when confronted with McCabe's denials, produced texts refuting his statement.
It was these texts that led to the inspector general uncovering the texts between Strzok and Page.
The two exchanged thousands of texts, some of them indicating surveillance activities, over a two-year period. Texts sent between
Aug. 21, 2015, and June 25, 2017, have been made
public . The series comes
to an end with a final text by Page telling Strzok, "Don't ever text me again."
On Aug. 8, 2016, Stzrok wrote that they would prevent candidate Trump from becoming president:
Page: "[Trump is] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!"
Strzok: "No. No he won't. We'll stop it."
On Aug. 15, 2016, Strzok sent a text referring to an "insurance policy":
"I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office -- that there's no way [Trump] gets elected --
but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."
The "insurance policy" appears to have been the effort to legitimize the Trump–Russia collusion narrative so that an FBI investigation,
led by McCabe, could continue unhindered.
Department of Justice
The Department of Justice, which comprises 60 agencies , was transformed
during the Obama years. The department is forbidden by federal law from hiring employees based on political affiliation.
However, a
series
of investigative articles by PJ Media published during Eric Holder's tenure as attorney general revealed an unsettling pattern
of ideological conformity among new hires at the DOJ: Only lawyers from the progressive left were hired. Not one single moderate
or conservative lawyer made the cut. This is significant as the DOJ enjoys significant latitude in determining who will be subject
to prosecution.
The DOJ's job in Spygate was to facilitate the legal side of surveillance while providing a protective layer of cover for all
those involved. The department became a repository of information and provided a protective wall between the investigative efforts
of the FBI and the legislative branch. Importantly, it also served as the firewall within the executive branch, serving as the insulating
barrier between the FBI and Obama officials. The department had become legendary for its stonewalling tactics with Congress.
DOJ Official Bruce Ohr on Aug. 28, 2018. Ohr passed on information from Christopher Steele to the FBI.
The DOJ, which was fully aware of the actions being taken by James Comey and the FBI, also became an active element acting against
members of the Trump campaign. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, along with Mary McCord, the head of the DOJ's National Security
Division, was actively
involved in efforts to remove Gen. Michael Flynn from his position as national security adviser to President Trump.
To this day, it remains unknown which individual was responsible for making public Flynn's call with the Russian ambassador. Flynn
ultimately pleaded guilty to a process crime: lying to the FBI. There have been
questions raised in Congress regarding the possible alteration of FD-302s, the written notes of Flynn's FBI interviews. Special
counsel Robert Mueller has repeatedly deferred Flynn's sentencing hearing.
David Laufman, deputy assistant attorney general in charge of counterintelligence at the DOJ's National Security Division, played
a key role in both the Clinton email server and Russia hacking investigations. Laufman is currently the attorney for Monica McLean,
the long-time friend of Christine Blasey Ford, who recently accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her while in high
school. McLean was also
employed
by the FBI for 24 years.
Bruce Ohr was a significant DOJ official who played a
key role in Spygate. Ohr held
two important positions at the DOJ: associate deputy attorney general, and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task
Force. As associate deputy attorney general, Ohr was just four offices away from then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and he
reported directly to her. As director of the task force, he was in charge of a program described as "the centerpiece of the attorney
general's drug strategy."
Ohr, one of the highest-ranking officials in the DOJ, was communicating on an ongoing basis with Steele, whom he had known
since at
least 2006 , well into mid-2017. He is also married to Nellie Ohr,
an expert on Russia and Eurasia who began working
for Fusion GPS sometime in
late 2015 . Nellie Ohr likely played a significant role in the construction of the dossier.
According to testimony from FBI agent Peter Strzok, he and Ohr met at least five times during 2016 and 2017. Strzok was working
directly with then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
Additionally, Ohr met with the FBI at least
12 times between late November 2016 and May 2017 for a series of interviews. These meetings could have been used to
transmit information from Steele to the FBI. This came after the FBI had formally severed contact with Steele in late October
or early November 2016.
John Carlin is another notable figure with the DOJ. Carlin was an assistant attorney general and the head of the DOJ's National
Security Division until October 2016. His role will be discussed below in the section on FISA abuse.
The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe
Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe held a pivotal role in what has become known as "Spygate." He directed the activities of Peter
Strzok and Lisa Page and was involved in all aspects of the Russia investigation. He was also mentioned in the infamous "insurance
policy" text message.
McCabe was a major component of the insurance policy.
On April 26, 2017, Rosenstein found himself appointed as the new deputy attorney general. He was placed into a somewhat chaotic
situation, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from the ongoing Russia investigation a little less than two months
earlier, on March 2, 2017. This effectively meant that no one in the Trump administration had any oversight of the ongoing investigation
being conducted by the FBI and the DOJ.
Additionally, the leadership of then-FBI Director James Comey was coming under increased scrutiny as the result of actions taken
leading up to and following the election, particularly Comey's handling of the Clinton email investigation.
On May 9, 2017, Rosenstein wrote a memorandum recommending that Comey be fired. The subject of the memo was "Restoring Public
Confidence in the FBI." Comey was fired that day. McCabe was now the acting director of the FBI and was immediately under consideration
for the permanent position.
On the same day Comey was fired, McCabe would lie during an interview with agents from the FBI's Inspection Division (INSD) regarding
apparent leaks that were used in an Oct. 30, 2016, Wall Street Journal article, "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe"
by Devlin Barrett. This would later be disclosed in the inspector general report, "A Report of Investigation of Certain Allegations
Relating to Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe."
At the time, nobody, including the INSD agents, knew that McCabe had lied, nor were the darker aspects of McCabe's role in Spygate
fully known.
In late April or early May 2016, McCabe opened a federal criminal investigation on Sessions, regarding potential lack of candor
before Congress in relation to Sessions's contacts with Russians. Sessions was unaware of the investigation.
Sessions would later be cleared of any wrongdoing by special counsel Robert Mueller.
On the morning of May 16, 2017, Rosenstein reportedly suggested to McCabe that he secretly record President Trump. This remark
was reported in a New York Times article that was sourced from memos from the now-fired McCabe, along with testimony taken from former
FBI general counsel James Baker, who relayed a conversation he had with McCabe about the occurrence. Rosenstein issued a statement
denying the accusations.
The alleged comments by Rosenstein occurred at a meeting where McCabe was "pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation
into the president." An unnamed participant at the meeting, in comments to The Washington Post, framed the conversation somewhat
differently, noting Rosenstein responded sarcastically to McCabe, saying, "What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"
Later, on the same day that Rosenstein had his meetings with McCabe, President Trump met with Mueller, reportedly as an interview
for the FBI director job. On May 17, 2017, the day after President Trump's meeting with Mueller -- and the day after Rosenstein's
encounters with McCabe -- Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel.
The May 17 appointment of Mueller in effect shifted control of the Russia investigation from the FBI and McCabe to Mueller. Rosenstein
would retain ultimate authority for the probe and any expansion of Mueller's investigation required authorization from Rosenstein.
Interestingly, without Comey's memo leaks, a special counsel might not have been appointed -- the FBI, and possibly McCabe, would
have remained in charge of the Russia investigation. McCabe was probably not going to become the permanent FBI director, but he was
reportedly under consideration. Regardless, without Comey's leak, McCabe would have retained direct involvement and the FBI would
have retained control.
On July 28, 2017, McCabe lied to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while under oath regarding authorization of the leaking to
The Wall Street Journal. At this point, Horowitz knew McCabe was lying, but did not yet know of the May 9 INSD interview with McCabe.
On Aug. 2, 2017, Rosenstein secretly issued Mueller a revised memo on "the scope of investigation and definition of authority"
that remains heavily redacted. The full purpose of this memo remains unknown. On this same day, Christopher Wray was named as the
new FBI director.
Two days later, on Aug. 4, 2017, Sessions announced that the FBI had created a new leaks investigation unit. Rosenstein and Wray
were tasked with overseeing all leak investigations.
That Aug. 2 memo from Rosenstein to Mueller may have been specifically designed to remove any residual FBI influence -- specifically
that of McCabe -- from the Russia investigation. The appointment of Wray as FBI director helped cement this. McCabe was finally completely
neutralized.
On March 16, 2018, McCabe was fired for lying under oath at least three different times and is currently the subject of a grand
jury investigation.
State Department
The State Department, with its many contacts within foreign governments, became a conduit for the flow of information. The transfer
of Christopher Steele's first dossier memo was personally
facilitated by Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. Nuland gave approval for
FBI agent Michael Gaeta to travel to London to obtain the memo from Steele. The memo may have passed directly from her to FBI leadership.
Secretary of State John Kerry was also given a copy.
Steele was already well-known within the State Department. Following Steele's involvement in the FIFA scandal investigation, he
began to provide reports
informally to the State Department. The reports were written for a "private client" but were "shared widely within the U.S. State
Department, and sent up to Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of
the U.S.
response to Putin's annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine," the Guardian reported.
Nuland passed on parts of the Steele dossier to the FBI. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
In July 2016, when the FBI wanted to send Gaeta to visit Steele in London, the bureau
sought permission from the office of Nuland, who provided this version of events during a Feb. 4, 2018,
appearance on CBS's "Face the Nation":
"In the middle of July, when [Steele] was doing this other work and became concerned, he passed two to four pages of short
points of what he was finding and our immediate reaction to that was, this is not in our purview. This needs to go to the FBI
if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian Federation. That's
something for the FBI to investigate."
Steele also
met with Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement and former special envoy
for Libya. Steele and Winer had known each other since at least 2010. In an opinion article in The Washington Post, Winer wrote the
following:
"In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the 'dossier.' Steele's sources
suggested that the Kremlin not only had been behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign
but also had compromised Trump and developed ties with his associates and campaign."
In a strange turn of events, Winer also received a
separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from long-time Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. This "second dossier" had been
compiled by another longtime Clinton operative, former journalist Cody Shearer, and echoed claims made in the Steele dossier. Winer
then met with Steele in late September 2016 and gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele went on to
share this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it to corroborate his dossier.
Winer passed on memos from Christopher Steele to Victoria Nuland. (State Department)
Other foreign officials also used conduits into the State Department. Alexander Downer, Australia's high commissioner to the UK,
reportedly funneled his conversation
with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos -- later used as a reason to open the FBI's counterintelligence investigation --
directly to the U.S. Embassy in London.
"The Downer details landed with the embassy's then-chargé d'affaires, Elizabeth Dibble, who previously served as a principal deputy
assistant secretary in Mrs. Clinton's State Department," The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel wrote in a May 31, 2018,
article .
If true, this would mean that neither Australian intelligence nor the Australian government alerted the FBI to the Papadopoulos
information. What happened with the Downer details, and to whom they were ultimately relayed, remains unknown.
Curiously, details surprisingly similar to the Papadopoulos–Downer conversation show up in the
first memo written
by Steele on June 20, 2016:
"A dossier of compromising information on Hillary Clinton has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many
years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls. It has not yet
been distributed abroad, including to Trump."
Clinton Campaign and the DNC
The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee both occupied a unique position. They had the most to gain but they
also had the most to lose. And they stood willing and ready to do whatever was necessary to win. Hillary Clinton's campaign manager,
Robby Mook, is credited with being the first to raise the specter of candidate Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia.
The entire Clinton campaign willfully promoted the narrative of Russia–Trump collusion despite the uncomfortable fact that they
were the ones who had engaged the services of Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele through their law firm Perkins Coie. Information
flowed from the campaign -- sometimes through Perkins Coie, other times through affiliates -- ultimately making its way into the
media and sometimes to the FBI. Information from the Clinton campaign may also have ended up in the Steele dossier.
Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, in tandem with Jake Sullivan, the senior policy adviser
to the campaign,
took the lead in briefing the press on the Trump–Russia collusion story.
Another example of this behavior can be seen from an instance when Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann
leaked information from Steele and Fusion GPS to Franklin Foer of Slate magazine. This event is described in the House Intelligence
Committee's final report on
Russian active measures
, in footnote 43 on page 57. Foer then published the article
"Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia? " on Oct. 31, 2016. The article concerns allegations regarding a server in the
Trump Tower.
The Slate article managed to attract the immediate attention of Clinton, who posted a
tweet on the same day the article was
published:
"Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank."
Attached to her tweet was a
statement from Sullivan:
"This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert
server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.
"This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization
felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists."
These statements, which were later proven to be incorrect, are all the more disturbing with the hindsight knowledge that it was
a senior Clinton/DNC lawyer who helped plant the story. And given the prepared statement by Sullivan, the Clinton campaign knew this.
This type of behavior would be engaged in repeatedly -- damning leaks leading to media stories, followed by ready attacks from
the Clinton campaign.
Alexandra Chalupa is a Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee. Chalupa
met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, Paul Manafort, and Russia.
Chalupa began investigating
Manafort in 2014. In late 2015, Chalupa expanded her opposition research on Manafort to include Trump's ties to Russia. In January
2016, Chalupa shared her information with a senior DNC official.
Chalupa's meetings with DNC and Ukrainian officials would continue. On April 26, 2016, investigative reporter Michael Isikoff
published a story
on Yahoo News about Manafort's business dealings with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It was later learned from a DNC email leaked
by Wikileaks that Chalupa had been working with Isikoff
-- the same journalist Christopher Steele
leaked to
in September 2016. Manafort would later be indicted for Foreign Agents Registration Act violations that occurred during the Obama
administration.
Perkins Coie
International law firm Perkins Coie served as the legal arm for both the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Ties to Perkins Coie extended
beyond the DNC into the Obama White House.
Bob Bauer, a partner at the law firm and founder of its political law practice, served as
White House counsel to President Barack Obama throughout 2010 and 2011. Bauer was also
general counsel to Obama's campaign organization, Obama for America, in 2008 and 2012.
Perkins Coie partners Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann each played critical roles and were the ones who hired Fusion GPS and Steele.
Sussmann
personally handled the alleged hack of the DNC server. He also transmitted information, likely from Steele and Fusion GPS, to
James Baker, then-chief counsel at the FBI, and to several members of the press.
Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann. Sussmann transmitted information to FBI chief counsel James Baker and several
journalists. (Courtesy Perkins Coie)
According to a
letter
dated Oct. 24, 2017, written by Matthew Gehringer, general counsel at Perkins Coie, the firm was approached by Fusion GPS founder
Glenn Simpson in early March 2016 regarding the possibility of hiring Fusion GPS to continue opposition research into the Trump campaign.
Simpson's overtures were successful, and in April 2016, Perkins Coie
hired
Fusion GPS on behalf of the DNC.
Sometime in April or May 2016, Fusion GPS
hired Christopher Steele. During
this same period, Fusion also reportedly
hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr. Steele would complete his first memo on June 20, 2016,
and send it to Fusion via enciphered mail.
Perkins Coie appears to have also been acting as a conduit between the DNC and the FBI.
Documents suggest that Sussmann was feeding information to FBI general counsel James Baker and at least one journalist ahead
of the FBI's application for a FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.
The information provided by Sussmann may have been used by the FBI as "corroborating information."
Obama Administration
The Obama administration provided a simultaneous layer of protection and facilitation for the entire effort. One example is
provided by
Section
2.3 of Executive Order 12333 , also known as Obama's
data-sharing
order . With the passage of the order, agencies and individuals were able to ask the NSA for access to specific surveillance
simply by claiming the intercepts contained relevant information that was useful to a particular mission.
Section 2.3 had been expected to be finalized by early to mid-2016. Instead, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn't
sign off on Section 2.3 until Dec. 15, 2016. The order was finalized when Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed it on Jan. 3, 2017.
The reason for the delay could relate to the fact that while the executive order made it easier to share intelligence between
agencies, it also limited certain types of information from going to the White House.
An example of this was provided by Evelyn Farkas during a March 2, 2017,
MSNBC interview , where she detailed how the Obama administration
gathered and disseminated intelligence on the Trump team:
"I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill 'Get as much information as you can. Get as
much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.'
"The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, [they] would try
to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. That's why you have the
leaking."
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia Evelyn Farkas on May 6, 2014. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Many of the Obama administration's efforts appear to have been structural in nature, such as establishing new procedures or creating
impediments to oversight that enabled much of the surveillance abuse to occur.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was appointed by Obama in 2011. From the very start, he found his duties throttled by the
attorney general's office. According to congressional
testimony by Horowitz:
"We got access to information up to 2010 in all of these categories. No law changed in 2010. No policy changed. It was simply
a decision by the General Counsel's Office in 2010 that they viewed, now, the law differently. And as a result, they weren't going
to give us that information."
These new restrictions were
put in place by Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole.
On Aug. 5, 2014, Horowitz and other inspectors general sent a
letter to Congress asking for unimpeded access to all records. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates responded on July 20, 2015,
with a 58-page
memorandum . The memo specifically denied the inspector general access to any information collected under Title III -- including
intercepted communications and national security letters.
The New York Times recently
disclosed that national security letters were used in the surveillance of the Trump campaign.
At other times, the Obama administration's efforts were more direct. The
Intelligence Community assessment was released
internally on Jan. 5, 2017. On this same day, Obama held an undisclosed White House meeting to discuss the dossier with national
security adviser Susan Rice, FBI Director James Comey, and Yates. Rice would later send herself an email
documenting
the meeting.
The following day, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey attached a written summary of the Steele dossier to the classified briefing they
gave Obama. Comey then met with President-elect Trump to inform him of the dossier. This meeting took place just hours after Comey,
Brennan, and Clapper formally briefed Obama on both the Intelligence Community assessment and the Steele dossier.
Comey would only inform Trump of the "salacious" details contained within the dossier. He later
explained on CNN in an April 2018 interview
why:
"Because that was the part that the leaders of the Intelligence Community agreed he needed to be told about."
Shortly after Comey's meeting with Trump, both the Trump–Comey meeting and the existence of the dossier were leaked to CNN. The
significance of the meeting was material, as Comey
noted in
a Jan. 7 memo he wrote:
"Media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write
that the FBI has the material."
Clapper leaked information to CNN, after which he publicly condemned the leaks. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The media had widely dismissed the dossier as unsubstantiated and, therefore, unreportable. It was only after learning that Comey
briefed Trump that
CNN reported
on the dossier. It was later
revealed that DNI James Clapper personally leaked Comey's meeting with Trump to CNN.
The Obama administration also directly participated in a series of
intelligence unmaskings
, the process whereby a U.S. citizen's identity is revealed from collected surveillance. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha
Power reportedly engaged in hundreds of unmasking requests. Rice has admitted to doing the same.
The Obama administration engaged in the ultimately successful effort to oust Trump's newly appointed national security adviser,
Gen. Michael Flynn. Yates, along with Mary McCord, head of the DOJ's National Security Division,
led that effort
.
Executive Order 13762
President Barack Obama issued a last-minute executive order on Jan. 13, 2017, that altered the line of succession within the DOJ.
The action was not done in consultation with the incoming Trump administration.
Acting Attorney General Sally Yates was fired on Jan. 30, 2017, by a newly inaugurated President Trump for refusing to uphold
the president's executive order limiting travel from certain terror-prone countries. Yates was initially supposed to serve in her
position until Jeff Sessions was confirmed as attorney general.
Obama's executive order placed the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia next in line behind the department's senior leadership.
The attorney at the time was Channing Phillips.
Phillips was first hired by former Attorney General Eric Holder in 1994 for a position in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office. Phillips,
after serving as a senior adviser to Holder, stayed on after he was replaced by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
It appears the Obama administration was hoping the Russia investigation would default to Channing in the event Sessions was forced
to recuse himself from the investigation. Sessions, whose confirmation hearings began three days before the order, was already coming
under intense scrutiny.
The implementation of the order may also tie into Yates's efforts to remove Gen. Michael Flynn over his call with the Russian
ambassador.
Trump ignored the succession order, as he is legally allowed to do, and instead appointed Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the
Eastern District of Virginia, as acting attorney general on Jan. 30, 2017, the same day Yates was fired.
Trump issued a new executive order on Feb. 9, 2017, the same day Sessions was sworn in, reversing Obama's prior order.
On March 10, 2017, Trump fired 46 Obama-era U.S. attorneys, including Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. These firings
appear to have been unexpected.
Media
In some respects, the media has played the most disingenuous of roles. Areas of investigation that historically would have proven
irresistible to reporters of the past have been steadfastly ignored. False narratives have been all-too-willingly promoted and facts
ignored. Fusion GPS personally made a
series of payments to several as-of-yet-
unnamed reporters .
The majority of the mainstream media has represented positions of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
Steele met with members of certain media with relative frequency. In
September 2016 ,
he met with a number of U.S. journalists for "The New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN," according
to The Guardian. It was during this period that Steele met with Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News.
In mid-October
2016, Steele returned to New York and met with reporters again. Toward the end of October, Steele spoke via Skype with Mother
Jones reporter David Corn.
Leaking, including felony leaking of classified information, has been widespread. The Carter Page FISA warrant -- likely the
unredacted version -- has been in the possession of The Washington Post and The New York Times since March 2017. Traditionally, the
intelligence community leaked to The Washington Post while the DOJ leaked to sources within The New York Times. This was a historical
pattern that stood until this election. The leaking became so widespread, even this tradition was broken.
On April 3, 2017, BuzzFeed reporter Ali Watkins wrote the article "
A Former Trump Adviser Met With a Russian Spy ." In the article, she identified "Male-1," referred to in
court documents
relating to the case of Russian spy Evgeny Buryakov, as Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who had provided the FBI with assistance
in the case. Just over a week later, on April 11, 2017, a Washington Post article, "
FBI Obtained FISA Warrant to Monitor Former Trump Adviser Carter Page ," confirmed the existence of the October 2016 Page FISA
warrant.
The information contained within both articles likely came via felony leaks from James Wolfe, former director of security
for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who was arrested on June 7, 2018, and
charged with one count of lying
to the FBI. Wolfe's indictment
alleges that he was leaking classified information to multiple reporters over an extended period of time.
Reporter Ali Watkins likely received the undredacted FISA application on Carter Page from James Wolfe.
It appears probable that Wolfe leaked unredacted copies of the Page FISA application. According to the
indictment , Wolfe
exchanged 82 text messages with
Watkins on March 17, 2017. That same evening they engaged in a 28-minute phone call. The original Page FISA application is 83 pages
long, including one final signatory page.
In the public version of the application, there are 37 fully redacted pages. In addition to that, several other pages have redactions
for all but the header. There are only two pages in the entire document that contain no redactions.
Why would Wolfe bother to send 37 pages of complete redactions? It seems more than plausible that Wolfe took pictures of the original
unredacted FISA application and sent them by text to Watkins.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has repeatedly
stated that evidence within the FISA application
shows the counterintelligence agencies were abused by the Obama administration. Most of the mainstream media has known this.
Despite this, most major news organizations for over two years have promoted the Russia-collusion narrative. Despite ample evidence
having come out to the contrary, they have not admitted they were wrong, likely because doing so would mean they would have to admit
their complicity.
Foreign Intelligence
UK and Australian intelligence agencies also played meaningful roles during the 2016 presidential election.
Britain's GCHQ was involved in
collecting information regarding then-candidate Trump and transmitting it to the United States. In the summer of 2016, Robert
Hannigan, the head of GCHQ, flew from London to
meet personally
with then-CIA Director John Brennan, The Guardian reported.
Former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan in this file photo. Hannigan transmitted information regarding Donald Trump to John
Brennan in the summer of 2016. (Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images)
Hannigan's meeting was noteworthy because Brennan wasn't Hannigan's counterpart. That position belonged to NSA Director Mike Rogers.
In the following year, Hannigan
abruptly announced
his retirement on Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration.
As GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted
after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant
Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly
so.
Christopher Steele, who authored the dossier on Trump, was an MI6 agent while the agency was headed by Sir Richard Dearlove. Steele
retains close ties with Dearlove.
Dearlove has ties to most of the parties mentioned. It was he who advised Steele and his business partner, Chris Burrows, to
work with a top British government official to pass along information to the FBI in the fall of 2016. He also was a speaker at
the July 2016 Cambridge symposium that Halper invited Carter
Page to attend.
Dearlove knows Halper through their
mutual association at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. Dearlove also knows Sir Iain Lobban, a former head of GCHQ, who is
an advisory board member at British strategic intelligence
and advisory firm Hakluyt , which was founded by former MI6 members and
retains close ties to UK intelligence services.
Halper has historical connections to Hakluyt through Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has
co-authored two books.
Downer, who
met Papadopoulos in a May 2016 meeting
established through a chain
of two intermediaries, served on the advisory board of Hakluyt
from 2008 to 2014. He reportedly still
maintains contact with Hakluyt officials. Information from his meeting with Papadopoulos was later used by the FBI to establish
the bureau's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. Downer has changed his version of events multiple times.
The Steele dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources. One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the
former
British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood later
relayed information regarding the dossier to Sen. John McCain, who dispatched David Kramer, a fellow at the McCain Institute,
to London to meet with Steele in November 2016. McCain would later admit in a Jan. 11, 2017,
statement that he had personally passed on the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey.
Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations
-- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can
we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia.
In a Twitter post , Trump wrote that
the "key Allies called to ask not to release" the documents.
Questions to be asked are why is it that two of our allies would find themselves so opposed to the release of these classified
documents that a coordinated plea would be made directly to the president? And why would these same allies have even the slightest
idea of what was contained in these classified U.S. documents?
Britain and Australia appear to know full well what those documents contain, and their attempt to prevent their public release
appears to be because they don't want their role in events surrounding the 2016 presidential election to be made public.
Fusion GPS/Orbis/Christopher Steele
Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is co-founder of Fusion GPS, along with Peter Fritsch and Tom Catan. Fusion
was hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign through law firm Perkins Coie to produce and disseminate the Steele dossier used against
Trump. The dossier would later be the primary evidence used to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page on Oct. 21, 2016.
The company was hired by the Clinton campaign and the DNC–through law firm Perkins Coie–to produce the dossier on Trump.
Christopher Steele, who retains close ties to UK intelligence, worked for MI6 from 1987 until his retirement in 2009, when he
and his partner, Chris Burrows, founded Orbis Intelligence. Steele
maintains contact with British intelligence,
Sir Richard Dearlove
, and UK intelligence firm Hakluyt.
Steele appears to have been
represented
by lawyer Adam Waldman, who also represented Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. We know this from
texts sent by Waldman. On April 10, 2017, Waldman sent this to Sen. Mark Warner:
"Hi. Steele: would like to get a bi partisan letter from the committee; Assange: I convinced him to make serious and important
concessions and am discussing those w DOJ; Deripaska: willing to testify to congress but interested in state of play w Manafort.
I will be with him next tuesday for a week."
Steele also appears to have
lobbied on behalf of Deripaska, who was discussed in
emails between Bruce Ohr and Steele that were recently
disclosed by the Washington Examiner:
"Steele said he was 'circulating some recent sensitive Orbis reporting' on Deripaska that suggested Deripaska was not a 'tool'
of the Kremlin. Steele said he would send the reporting to a name that is redacted in the email."
Fusion GPS was also employed by Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in a previous case. Veselnitskaya was involved in litigation
pitting Russian firm Prevezon Holdings against British-American financier William Browder. Veselnitskaya hired U.S. law firm BakerHostetler,
who, in turn, hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Browder. Veselnitskaya was one of the participants at the June 2016 Trump Tower
meeting, at which she discussed the
Magnitsky Act .
Fox News reported on Nov. 9, 2017, that Simpson
met with Veselnitskaya immediately before and after the Trump Tower meeting.
A declassified top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report released on April 26, 2017, revealed that government
agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and NSA, had improperly accessed Americans' communications. The FBI specifically provided outside
contractors with access to raw surveillance data on American citizens without proper oversight.
Communications and other data of members of the Trump campaign may have been accessed in this way.
Nellie Ohr, the wife of high-ranking DOJ official Bruce Ohr, was hired by Fusion GPS to work on the dossier on Trump.
Bruce and Nellie Ohr have
known Simpson since at least 2010 and have known Steele since at least 2006. The Ohrs and Simpson worked together on a
DOJ report in 2010 . In that report, Nellie Ohr's biography
lists her as working for Open Source Works, which is part of the CIA. Simpson met with Bruce Ohr
before and after the 2016 election.
Bruce Ohr had been in
contact repeatedly with Steele during the 2016 presidential campaign -- while Steele was constructing his dossier. Ohr later
actively shared information he received from Steele with the FBI, after the agency had terminated Steele as a source. Interactions
between Ohr and Steele stretched for months into the first year of Trump's presidency and were documented in a number of FD-302s
-- memos that summarize interviews with him by the FBI.
Spy Traps
In an effort to put forth evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it appears that several different spy traps
were set, with varying degrees of success. Many of these efforts appear to center around Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos
and involve London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, who has
ties to Western intelligence, particularly in the UK.
Papadopoulos and Mifsud
both worked
at the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP). Mifsud appears to have joined LCILP around
November
2015 . Papadopoulos reportedly
joined
LCILP sometime in late February 2016 after leaving Ben Carson's presidential campaign. However, some
reports indicate Papadopoulos joined LCILP in November
or December of 2015. Mifsud and Papadopoulos reportedly never crossed paths
until March 14, 2016, in Italy.
Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to several Russians, including Olga Polonskaya, whom Mifsud introduced as "Putin's niece," and
Ivan Timofeev, an official at a state-sponsored think tank called the Russian International Affairs Council. Both Papadopoulos and
Mifsud were interviewed by the FBI. Papadopoulos was ultimately charged with a process crime and was recently sentenced to 14 days
in prison for lying to the FBI. Mifsud was never charged by the FBI.
Throughout this period, Papadopoulos continuously pushed for meetings between Trump campaign officials and Russian contacts but
was ultimately unsuccessful in establishing any meetings.
Papadopoulos met with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer on May 10, 2016. The Papadopoulos–Downer meeting has been portrayed
as a
chance encounter in a bar. That does not appear to be the case.
Papadopoulos was introduced
to Downer through a chain of two intermediaries who said Downer wanted to meet with Papadopoulos. Another individual happened
to
be in London at exactly the same time: the FBI's head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap. The purpose of Priestap's visit
remains unknown.
The Papadopoulos–Downer
meeting was later used to establish the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. It was repeatedly
reported that Papadopoulos told Downer that Russia had Hillary Clinton's emails. This is incorrect.
Foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign was approached by several individuals with ties to UK and U.S. intelligence
agencies. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
According to Downer, Papadopoulos at some point
mentioned the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
"During that conversation, he [Papadopoulos] mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the
lead-up to the election, which may be damaging,'' Downer told
The Australian about the Papadopoulos meeting in an April 2018 article. "He didn't say dirt, he said material that could be damaging
to her. No, he said it would be damaging. He didn't say what it was."
Downer, while serving as Australia's foreign minister, was
responsible for one of the largest foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation: $25 million from the Australian government.
Unconfirmed media reports, including a Jan. 12, 2017,
BBC article , have suggested that the FBI attempted
to obtain two FISA warrants in June and July 2016 that were denied by the FISA court. It's likely that Papadopoulos was an intended
target of these failed FISAs.
Interestingly, there is no mention of Papadopoulos in the Steele dossier. Paul Manafort, Carter Page, former Trump lawyer Michael
Cohen, Gen. Michael Flynn, and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski are all listed in the Steele dossier.
Papadopoulos may have started out assisting the FBI or CIA and later discovered that he was being set up for surveillance himself.
After failing to obtain a spy warrant on the Trump campaign using Papadopoulos, the FBI set its sights on campaign volunteer Carter
Page. By this time, the counterintelligence investigation was in the process of being established, and we know now that it was formalized
with no official intelligence. The FBI needed some sort of legal cover. They needed a retroactive warrant. And they got one on Oct.
21, 2016. The Page FISA warrant would be renewed three times and remain in force until September 2017.
Stefan Halper met with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a
Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page's July 2016
Moscow trip. As noted previously, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove was a speaker at the symposium. Halper and Dearlove have known
each other for years and maintain several mutual associations.
Page was already known to the FBI. The Page FISA warrant application references the Buryakov spy case and an FBI interview with
Page. Current information suggests there was only
one meeting between Page and the FBI in 2016. It happened on March 2, 2016. It was in relation to Victor Podobnyy, who was named
in the Buryakov case.
Page, who
cooperated with the FBI on the case, almost certainly was providing testimony or details against Podobnyy. Page had been contacted
by Podobnyy in 2013 and had previously provided information to the FBI. Buryakov
pleaded guilty on March 11, 2016 -- nine days after Page met with the FBI on the case -- and was
sentenced to 30 months in prison on May 25, 2016. On April 5, 2017, Buryakov was granted early release and was
deported to Russia.
FBI informant Stefan Halper approached Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes
said in August that exculpatory evidence
on Page exists that wasn't included by the DOJ and the FBI in the FISA application and subsequent renewals. The exculpatory evidence
likely relates specifically to Page's role in the Buryakov case.
If the FBI failed to disclose Page's cooperation with the bureau or materially misrepresented his involvement in its application
to the FISA Court, it means that the FBI's Woods procedures, which govern FISA applications, were violated.
Page has not been arrested or charged with any crime related to the investigation.
FISA Abuse
Admiral Mike Rogers, while director of the NSA, was personally responsible for
uncovering an unprecedented level of FISA abuse that would later be documented in a 99-page
unsealed FISA
court ruling . As the FISA court noted in the April 26, 2017, ruling, the abuses had been occurring since at least November 2015:
"The FBI had disclosed raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information, to private contractors.
"Private contractors had access to raw FISA information on FBI storage systems.
"Contractors had access to raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBI's requests."
The FISA Court report is particularly focused on the FBI:
"The Court is concerned about the FBI's apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar
disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported."
The FISA Court
disclosed that illegal NSA database searches were endemic. Private contractors, employed by the FBI, were given full access to
the NSA database. Once in the contractors' possession, the data couldn't be traced.
In April 2016, after Rogers became aware of
improper
contractor access to raw FISA data on March 9, 2016, he
directed the NSA's Office
of Compliance to conduct a "fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702."
On April 18, 2016, Rogers shut down all outside contractor access to raw FISA information -- specifically outside contractors
working for the FBI.
Then-NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers on May 23, 2017. Rogers uncovered widespread abuse of FISA data by the FBI. (Saul
Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin filed the government's proposed
2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was
part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016,
report by the Office
of the Inspector General and associated FISA abuse to the FISA Court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose
Rogers's ongoing Section 702 compliance review.
The following day, on Sept. 27, 2016, Carlin
announced his resignation, effective Oct. 15, 2016.
After receiving a briefing by the NSA compliance officer on Oct. 20, 2016, detailing
numerous "about query"
violations from the 702 NSA compliance audit, Rogers shut down all "about query" activity the next day and
reported his findings
to the DOJ. "About queries" are searches based on communications containing a reference "about" a surveillance target but that are
not "to" or "from" the target.
On Oct. 21, 2016, the DOJ and the FBI sought and received a Title I FISA probable-cause order authorizing electronic surveillance
on Carter Page from the FISA Court.
At this point, the FISA Court was still unaware of the Section 702 violations.
On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally
informed
the FISA Court of his findings. On Oct. 26, 2016, Rogers appeared formally before the FISA Court and presented the written findings
of his audit.
The FISA Court had been unaware of the query violations until they were presented to the court by Rogers.
Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications in order to avoid raising suspicions
at the FISA Court ahead of receiving the Page FISA warrant.
The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page.
While all this was transpiring, DNI James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter submitted a
recommendation that Rogers be removed from his post as NSA director.
The move to fire Rogers, which ultimately failed, originated sometime in mid-October 2016 -- exactly when Rogers was preparing
to present his findings to the FISA Court.
The Insurance Policy
Ever since the release of FBI text messages revealing the existence of an "insurance policy," the term has been the subject of
wide speculation.
Some observers have suggested that the insurance policy was the FISA spy warrant used to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter
Page and, by extension, other members of the Trump campaign. This interpretation is too narrow and fails to capture the underlying
meaning of the text.
The insurance policy was the actual process of establishing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative.
It encompassed actions undertaken in late 2016 and early 2017, including the leaking of the Steele dossier and James Clapper's
leaks of James Comey's briefing to President Trump. The intent behind these actions was simple. The legitimization of the investigation
into the Trump campaign.
The strategy involved the recusal of Trump officials with the intent that Andrew McCabe would end up running the investigation.
The Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, served as the
foundation for the Russia narrative.
The intelligence community, led by CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper, used the dossier as a launching pad for creating
their Intelligence Community assessment.
This report, which was presented to Obama in December 2016, despite NSA Director Mike Rogers having only moderate confidence in
its assessment, became one of the core pieces of the narrative that Russia interfered with the 2016 elections.
Through intelligence community leaks, and in collusion with willing media outlets, the narrative that Russia helped Trump win
the elections was aggressively pushed throughout 2017.
Spygate
Spygate represents the biggest political scandal in our nation's history. A sitting administration actively colluded with a political
campaign to affect the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Government agencies were weaponized and a complicit media spread
intelligence community leaks as facts.
But a larger question remains: How long has the United States been subject to interference from the intelligence community and
our political agencies? Was the 2016 presidential election a one-time aberration, or is this episode symptomatic of a larger pattern
extending back decades?
The intensity, scale, and coordination suggest something greater than overzealous actions taken during a single election. They
represent a unified reaction of the establishment to a threat posed by a true outsider -- a reaction that has come to be known as
Spygate.
Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed
on Twitter @themarketswork.
In Ber 2018 Kusher security clearance wasdongraded.
Notable quotes:
"... Among those nations discussing ways to influence Kushner to their advantage were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico, the current and former officials said. ..."
"... Kushner's interim security clearance was downgraded last week from the top-secret to the secret level, which should restrict the regular access he has had to highly classified information, according to administration officials. Washpost ..."
" Officials in at least four countries have privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law
and senior adviser, by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience,
according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports on the matter.
Among those nations discussing ways to influence Kushner to their advantage were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico,
the current and former officials said.
It is unclear if any of those countries acted on the discussions, but Kushner's contacts with certain foreign government officials
have raised concerns inside the White House and are a reason he has been unable to obtain a permanent security clearance, the officials
said.
Kushner's interim security clearance was downgraded last week from the top-secret to the secret level, which should restrict the
regular access he has had to highly classified information, according to administration officials. Washpost
------------------
Most people will probably be struck by the fall from grace of Kushner and other WH staff dilettantes. I am not terribly interested
in that. What strikes me is that this is the third major compromise of US SIGINT products in the last year. The first was the felonious
disclosure to the press of US intelligence penetration of Russian diplomatic communications. the second was the disclosure to the
press of penetration of GRU communications. In this one the oral or written discussions among the officials of several foreign countries
are revealed. These conversations were probably encrypted.
Is Jeff Sessions still alive? Why are there no prosecutions for these felonies? pl
Doubling down is just stupid. And that war pig Rachel Maddow lost 500k viewers. That's why she cries. she
sries about lst money.
She does not cry about deceived and brainwashed public, which was subjected to unprecedented Neo-McCarthyism complagn for more
then a year.
Notable quotes:
"... The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments ..."
"... Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something." ..."
"... "Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted radio host Mark Simone. ..."
"... "This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson. ..."
"... "#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history," quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods. ..."
"... "So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years, @maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr. ..."
"... Later on Saturday, Maddow mocked the suggestion that she was watery-eyed and might have held back tears. ..."
Crying for indictments? Maddow 'holds backs tears' as she discusses end of Mueller probe (VIDEO)
The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump
and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which
wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments.
According to the Daily Caller, Maddow came
close to crying as she commented
on the Russiagate-deflating development. Many on Twitter insisted that she actually shed tears. A clip of the broadcast shows a watery-eyed
Maddow seemingly grappling with the reality that Donald Trump and his family will not be frog-marched out of the White House.
Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not
to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something."
The internet laughed and laughed.
"Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted
radio host Mark Simone.
Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up.
"This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the
bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson.
This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill
comes due. @maddowhttps://t.co/4bkBUEwx8y
"#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history,"
quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods.
"What's going on with Maddow? Has she been hospitalized? Sedated?" inquired journalist Michael Tracey.
Others expressed exasperation at Maddow's refusal to face the music, accusing the MSNBC host of ignoring real, pressing issues
as she leads her Russiagate crusade.
"So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years,
@maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually
do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr.
So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on
#Russiagate ?
For 2 years, @maddow has lead
@MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded
w/ Russia
What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually
do journalism?
Doubling down is just stupid. And that war pig Rachel Maddow lost 500k viewers. That's why she cries. she
sries about lst money.
She does not cry about deceived and brainwashed public, which was subjected to unprecedented Neo-McCarthyism complagn for more
then a year.
Notable quotes:
"... The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments ..."
"... Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something." ..."
"... "Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted radio host Mark Simone. ..."
"... "This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson. ..."
"... "#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history," quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods. ..."
"... "So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years, @maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr. ..."
"... Later on Saturday, Maddow mocked the suggestion that she was watery-eyed and might have held back tears. ..."
Crying for indictments? Maddow 'holds backs tears' as she discusses end of Mueller probe (VIDEO)
The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump
and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which
wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments.
According to the Daily Caller, Maddow came
close to crying as she commented
on the Russiagate-deflating development. Many on Twitter insisted that she actually shed tears. A clip of the broadcast shows a watery-eyed
Maddow seemingly grappling with the reality that Donald Trump and his family will not be frog-marched out of the White House.
Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not
to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something."
The internet laughed and laughed.
"Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted
radio host Mark Simone.
Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up.
"This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the
bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson.
This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill
comes due. @maddowhttps://t.co/4bkBUEwx8y
"#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history,"
quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods.
"What's going on with Maddow? Has she been hospitalized? Sedated?" inquired journalist Michael Tracey.
Others expressed exasperation at Maddow's refusal to face the music, accusing the MSNBC host of ignoring real, pressing issues
as she leads her Russiagate crusade.
"So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years,
@maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually
do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr.
So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on
#Russiagate ?
For 2 years, @maddow has lead
@MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded
w/ Russia
What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually
do journalism?
What actually happened with RussiaGate? A cabal of government officials colluded with the
Hillary Clinton campaign to interfere in the 2016 election and, failing to achieve their
desired outcome, engineered a two-years-plus formal inquisition to deflect attention from their
own misconduct and attempt to overthrow the election result.
The Cable News characters, quite a few of them lawyers, were litigating the living shit out
of the story on Sunday night in their usual spirit of obdurate rank dishonesty. For instance,
Jeffrey Toobin, who plays Attorney General on CNN, went off on the infamous 2016 Trump Tower
Meeting in which the president's son, Donald, Jr., met with Russian lawyer Natalia V.
Veselnitskaya. Toobin omitted to mention that Ms. Veselnitskaya was, at that very time, on the
payroll of Fusion GPS, Hillary Clinton's "oppo" research contractor. In other words, Trump
Junior was set up.
That was characteristic of the collusion that actually occurred between
the Hillary campaign, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, the UK's MI6 intel agency, and the
Obama White House, striving to prevent the election of a TV reality show star, and to disable
him afterwards -- also of the news media's role in the whole interminable scam of RussiaGate.
Their fury and despair were as vivid the night of March 24, 2019, as on November 8, 2016. And
now they will attempt to spark off a sequel.
Rachel Maddow, for instance, struggling to maintain her dignity after two years playing
Madame DeFarge on MSNBC, tried to console her fans with the prospect of Mr. Trump getting raked
over the coals by the DOJ's Southern District of NY prosecutors for crimes as yet unpredicted
-- really, whatever they might find if they turn over enough rocks in Manhattan. Perhaps she
doesn't know how the justice system actually works in this country: we prosecute crimes not
persons. In places like Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany, you first choose a person
to eliminate and then fit them to a crime. If no crime can be found, one is easily
manufactured. In the USA, a predicate crime is required before you can launch a prosecution.
Perhaps the actual Attorney General, Mr. Barr, will advise the avid staff of the Southern
District of NY how this works.
There remains also, the rather sweeping panorama of misconduct and probable crime among the
government (and former government) players in the agencies mentioned above. Does the full
Mueller Report mention, for instance, that the animating document claiming that Trump colluded
with Russia was manufactured by Mrs. Clinton's employees? And that this document was used time
and again improperly and illegally to prolong the inquisition? How could Mr. Mueller not
acknowledge that? And if not, what sort of investigation was this?
You are forced to ask: did Mr. Mueller play an honorable role in this epic, multilayered
scandal? And is Mr. Mueller himself an honorable character, or something less than that? I
believe we'll find out. The other team is coming to bat now -- and just in time for MLB's
opening day, too. The Mueller report has been a shocking disappointment to the so-called
"resistance," but what about the as-yet-unreleased DOJ Inspector General's report on these very
matters ? Or the parallel investigation of federal prosecutor John Huber, who is charged
specifically with looking into the malfeasance of the RussiaGate investigators? Or whatever
action the Attorney General himself launches in the wake of all this? Or whether Mr. Trump
finally declassifies the mountains of documents behind the simple failure to find him guilty of
any crime? My favorite college professor and mentor, David Hamilton, once put a curious
question to us when we were vexing him for some reason now forgotten: "Why," he asked, "Did
Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three times?"
So, If they would trample Trump's constitutional rights by abusing this bogus fisa warrant
system, shouldn't we assume they are 10 times as likely to abuse it to spy on average
americans, who have no chance of protecting themselves from the police state they have built
since 9-11? Revoke the patriot act. It is unconstitutional anyway, though Trump rewarded the
man who helped write it with the Supreme court position. We have a small window to claw back
the rights they stripped from us. If we don't do it now, when these programs are called into
question, these deep state turds will do whatever they can to consolidate their hold on the
US. I'm not too hopeful, myself. Seeing the blatant piracy they are attempting in Venezuela,
even after the failures in Iraq and Syria, doesn't do much to console me as to America's
future. My relatives came here from England and Germany with little more than the clothes on
their backs. It may be time to look for greener pastures if we are going to be a proxy of
Israel, and a deep state, stripped of our inherent rights bit by bit until we aren't allowed
to leave.
First is the multipart crime committed by Hillary Clinton and her cabal of deep state
co-conspirators to rig a primary, which they did against Bernie Sanders, then attempt to
steal an election by using various intelligence connections in the FBI and CIA to dig up dirt
on candidate Trump in the form of a fake Russia dossier, then petition the DOJ with only
parts of it, to get a warrant to spy on him and ultimately discredit him. Then in the event
he won, use that dossier to concoct a fake Trump/Russia collusion scandal in order to
delegitimize and hopefully reverse the Trump Presidential victory. This was treasonous and
seditious to its core and those conspirators should be investigated as thoroughly as Mueller
investigated Trump and all of his acquaintances.
The second was the Mainstream media's part in all of this mess. They so eagerly bought
into the false narrative and went out of their way, like good little bolsheviks, and
disseminated unproven and unsubstantiated "fake news" that was fed to them each morning by
democrat operatives and consultants, 24/7/365 . Every mainstream media reporter (and I use
that term loosely), and every late night talk host on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, NY
Times, Washington Post, and others, as well as every guest pundit opined without proof, and
pounded the table to every lemming who would listen, that Trump had to be guilty and was in
fact guilty because, well, they didn't like him. These reporters and pundits spread rumors,
called him names such as racist and nazi, etc, etc, with no basis in fact, which was an
historically new low, even for state based propaganda. (FOX news, to their credit, did not).
This agenda driven media overstepped the boundaries of good reporting and journalistic
ethical standards and set the news business back 250 years. What American journalists,
reporters and pundits did in the name of the first amendment "free press" was a national and
global disgrace.
Well said. You forget to mention, as did the article, Mueller's seditious criminal past.
Worst of all - Madcow and the rest of the MSM did a serious smear job on the Russian
government, at a time of already heightened propaganda against a country that could reduce
the USA to ashes. Also - there is the collusion of the UK government and the equally
ridiculous Skripal affair.
It is profoundly sad none of the ringleaders and real provocateurs will be prosecuted, and
things will continue to deteriorate until there is a nuclear war. Because the entire system
is rotten to the core and the citizens don't care about truth or justice.
Thanks for your additional comments. While I'm hopeful Hillary and her co-conspirators
will be investigated, indicted, tried and found guilty of sedition and treason in breaking
laws of at least 6 different acts, I don't believe Republicans have the spine or intestinal
fortitude to make their case, even if they have proof beyond any reasonable doubt to the
extent a first year law student could argue and win the case open and shut.
Also, I do not believe, even for one Milli-second, that public verbal sparring of
political leaders or their hyperbole in the midst of tough negotiations, will ever lead
civilized nations of the world to a nuclear war. it is done purely for effect and political
strategy in their home nations.
That said, you are correct that the media's continuously negative anti-Trump, anti-America
tone for two straight years, did not help trade negotiations or international relations, and
in fact, put the US at a distinct disadvantage. It's a small wonder President Trump has
achieved all the successes he has in spite of this. He deserves great credit.
Mueller knew this was all lies and BS within weeks of taking the job and put on this
charade for 2 YEARS and ruined the lives of innocent people. Mueller is not the good guy here
at all.
That was characteristic of the collusion that actually occurred between the Hillary
campaign, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, the UK's MI6 intel agency, and the Obama White
House...
After the IG report is released in April, we need to start real investigations.
Congressional and Senate hearings are kabuki! President Trump needs to hire outside lawyers
as a special counsel to get to the bottom of this treason! I don't trust anyone in DOJ to do
that!
It's on..Trump just made an extremely strong statement about "this must NEVER happen to
ANY President EVER again" in response to a question from a journo..
This implies they have any concept of decency or shame to begin with.
They've been planning the SpecialCounsel-Russiagate to Congressional-Obstruction pivot
since 2017... as continued albatross around Trump & MAGA's neck.
Trump better get voter fraud under control to win 2020.
"... Is it even possible to have any sense of NUANCE to debating investigations of Trump & his "Russian connections"? It's actually possible to OPPOSE Cold War II with Russia and yet, still be suspicious of Trump's dealings with foreign powers–including Russia (how about all the MONEY LAUNDERING for Russian OLIGARCHS Trump's done by selling them real estate?) ..."
"... But, REGARDLESS if "Russian interference" had ANY role in the 2016 Election, Donald Trump is being revealed as a CORRUPT LIAR who raises the WORST elements in American life: to quote a famous witness: he's a racist, a con man and a cheat. ..."
"... The USA has become a theater state. Concrete achievements, concrete evidenve, do no matter. All that matters is theatrical statements, dramatic actions. ..."
"... Of course, the US Empire is waning, its capacity to dominate gone, it will behave rather badly. However, if sufficient fervor may be stirred, the populace may yet embrace an end-times crusade and rally round the flag, once more, to deal with foul and evil Russia, with China thrown in, just for good measure. ..."
There are two certainties we can rely upon as we await Mueller's final word, none a cause for relief.
The special counsel's office did not undertake a credible investigation of the two core charges related to the 2016 elections
-- that Russian intelligence hacked Democratic National Committee email servers while colluding with Donald Trump as he sought
the presidency. Mueller failed to call numerous key witnesses, and failed to pursue alternative theories, a duty of any investigator
in Mueller's position. These omissions are more or less fatal to the legitimacy of Mueller's work.
Among the mainstream Democrats who have incessantly hyped the "Russia-wrecked-our-elections" story, there is no remorse for
the damage it has done to our governing institutions, our foreign policy, and our national security. Russia-gate has consolidated
Cold War II. The chance to rebuild mutually beneficial relations with Moscow has been damaged.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist,
author, and lecturer. His most recent book is "Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale). Follow him @thefloutist.
His web site is www.patricklawrence.us. Support his work via www.patreon.com/thefloutist
.
" The chance to rebuild mutually
beneficial relations with Moscow has been damaged. "
Why else was this narrative initiated by the Corporate Democrats? Expecting
the person who lead the cover up of the crimes of 9/11 was great comedy, indeed.
Is it even possible to have any sense of NUANCE to debating investigations of Trump & his "Russian connections"? It's actually
possible to OPPOSE Cold War II with Russia and yet, still be suspicious of Trump's dealings with foreign powers–including Russia
(how about all the MONEY LAUNDERING for Russian OLIGARCHS Trump's done by selling them real estate?)
How do any of the nay-sayers of investigating them feel about Trump's (seemly obvious) CORRUPTION of campaign & post-election
trolling for Putin's permission to build his decades long dream of a TRUMP TOWER MOSCOW? or Son-In-Law-In-Charge-of-Middle-East-Peace
Jared Kushner's attempts at "back channel" (NON-transparent) communications with Russian government? or Trump himself making sure
there's NO RECORD of any of his one-0on-one conversations with Putin?
At the very least, it appears thta Donald Trump has more interests in HIS MONEY than in U.S. foreign policy.
That any progresisve/leftist could see Trump as a "peace activist" is a joke! He's had TWO YEARS to bring the troops home from
Iraq & Afghanistan & the other 5 countries that President Obama started wars on & he hasn't done it. Trump has RAISED Pentagon
budget & put people with ECONOMIC CONFLICTS OF INTEREST into his Cabinet–like the BOEING executive now as Sec. of Defense.
I DISLIKE Hillary Clinton & did NOT vote for her–or Trump. I think there are MANY reasons she lost the election -- not the
least of which is her long terrible record when it comes to EVERYONE–except the 1%.
The rooted-in-PRESERVING-SLAVERY/Antiquated Electoral College was another reason. James Comey's announcements in both JULY
& OCT. 106 didn't help -- nor did, what looks like Russian targeting of specific white working class Midwest voters.
But, REGARDLESS if "Russian interference" had ANY role in the 2016 Election, Donald Trump is being revealed as a CORRUPT
LIAR who raises the WORST elements in American life: to quote a famous witness: he's a racist, a con man and a cheat.
nomad March 24, 2019 at 09:57 Lydia,
If you had disconnected yourself from the 2 party system, what do you see?
You will see one party, not two, that associates itself with the elites, not the regular voters.
The regular voters are just pawn pieces on the political chess board that is played with or removed.
I see a corrupt system that both parties belong to, and its members serve it for their own interests.
If both parties were good, where are the business, military, educational, political, financial, legal, and medical reforms that
apply to everyone?
Why are most government politicians above the law?
Why do executive-level government get executive healthcare while the majority of its citizens get
less than this?
Why is the U.S hated by some countries?
Why is the U.S. government so corrupt? If you look at the corruption index, the U.S. is negatively trending downwards over time. https://www.transparency.org/cpi2018?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIlvH8gvOa4QIVZBh9Ch0usQonEAAYASAAEgIfj_D_BwE
Why does the U.S. still have so much debt from the past, the present, and going towards the future? http://www.usdebtclock.org/
For our government system, it does not make a difference who is in charge after this president and its congress.
If you had watched the movie Matrix, don't be a battery.
William March 22, 2019 at 17:47
Mueller's failure to interview the absolutely vital witnesses is obvious to those who have kept up with related events and
information since the beginning. This, however, amounts to such an extremely small number that it is fairly obvious that the truth
about "Russia Gate" will be as quickly forgotten as the Bush administrations lying us into war with Iraq.
Dave churbuck March 22, 2019 at 13:10 The corrup people that are and will continue to do the
never ending investigations make a lot of money.
By do the investigations they protect the guilty which are the investigators themselves.
They also insure that the Clinton Cartel will never get caught . Think about that.
Reply
O
Society March 22, 2019 at 11:51 Did you see James Comey let the public down gently and try to quell the riots ahead of time
with the seal of his authenticity?
The USA has become a theater state. Concrete achievements, concrete evidenve, do no matter. All that matters is theatrical
statements, dramatic actions.
O Society March 21, 2019
at 13:07 Truth is Donald Trump is a tool. Like a weedeater or a vacuum, except in reverse. His job is to make a mess like a chaos
snowmachine. Crap all over the Oval Office, the military, and any coherent notion of policy and government as being for good of
the people.
With Russia (and all other simmering wars), Trump does whatever the neoconservatives tell him to do because he has no foreign
policy or ideology of his own. Don't overthink it. There's no 4D chess going on here, just pissing on things, marking his territory.
In fact, Trump has no economic, domestic, or foreign ideology other than "Me." Therefore, any benefit to anyone not named "Me"
which may come from anything he does is coincidental. Collateral damage, so to speak. Inadvertent to the hoisting of the Great
Leader's social status.
Trump is against blacks because he is white. He is against women because he's a man. He's against the regular people because
he's an oligarch. Simple.
DH Fabian March 22, 2019 at 01:01 Agree, and take a look at what Trump did. He reinforced economic sanctions against
Russia, increased US "meddling" in Ukraine, increased US/NATO troops near the Russian border, and we've been subjected to
two years of anti-Russian propaganda. And yes, Trump is about Trump. Period.
Reply
Eddie March 24, 2019 at 12:05 Yes O'S, as I've
noted a number of times before, the 'Occam's razor' POV here (which I and some others subscribed to) is that Trump basically
ran for office as a PR event, to help his always shady/chronically financially troubled scam empire by getting name recognition
to help fool potential investors. His stated political views were by and large entirely opportunistic and irrelevant --
- for instance, he supposedly used to be a liberal Democratic supporter who reportedly supported abortion rights and advocated
for Hillary Clinton. Trump was more stunned than elated when he won on election night (you could almost see him thinking
'Oh crap, NOW I might actually have to do some WORK, and it'll be in the public eye, where I can't con people as easily
as I do investors'), and his wife reportedly cried, but not tears of joy. To impute any serious political policies to the
man is to vastly exaggerate his interest in politics. He never previously held any elected office, which tells us a lot.
Reply
Gary March 21, 2019 at 08:11 It is clear the author
& responders do not understand geo-politics. As US imperialism continues its hegemonic actions, like the expansion of NATO,
it is clear the Russians need to foil this aggression. How do they do it short of nuclear war? They need to disrupt bourgeois
democracy in order to maintain & spread real democracy, i.e., socialist democracy. It doesn't matter that the October Revolution
was destroyed which Putin said recently is the worst thing that happened in the 20th century. There is still a desire to reestablish
socialism. In addition the US doesn't want that nor will it tolerate a powerful capitalist Russia. Writers at Consortium don't
seem to understand this facet of geo-politics. Why? Because writers & readers here are of the bourgeoisie & are not Marxists
even though they seem to be defending Russia & speak about preventing a Cold War II.
O Society March 20, 2019 at 14:42 There's a clear pattern in Donald Trump's life, as well as the life of his father, and his
father before that.
They'll steal and lie and scam and defraud the public, and get away with it.
We all know that's how the American Fairytale ends: He shat all over the place and someone else cleaned it up. Again.
Eddie March 24, 2019 at 15:22 As per your link to the article by Nomi Prins, and other similar articles going back to the
80's, Trump is easily the most financially corrupt POTUS we've seen in our generation (I was born in '49), possibly the worst
ever, at least on a personal-business basis (things like the Teapot Dome scandal were more 'political-financial' corrupt, a
somewhat different category, though in the end it's obviously all CORRUPTION*). It's sad that the US has gotten to this point
politically -- - to have someone so ill-suited and corrupt as our POTUS -- - but maybe as some critics have said Trump IS an
appropriate symbol of the crass country we've become..? If that's true or not, maybe he'll serve as a 'bottoming-out' signal
to enough of the US electorate to examine our overall culture and start a correction to more humanistic policies.
* Side note: Zephyr Teachout (quoted in the link) wrote an excellent book "Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's
Snuff Box to Citizens United", which is a very readable, informative book on that timely subject.
O Society March 19, 2019 at 23:55 You can't believe
the president. You can't believe anything anyone says about the president either.
Whomever had the bright idea to make sure no one believes anything coming out of Washington DC for the foreseeable future
Tom
March 20, 2019 at 04:02 "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is
false"
CIA Director William Casey
Tom March 19, 2019 at 16:18 The very fact that the servers were never
inspected by the FBI but a private company that has a history of being anti Russia completely ruined the investigation and chain
of evidence that breached their own laws and never sought any interview with Ambassador Craig Murray who said he knows who leaked
the evidence says it all.
Craig Murray is banned from the USA.
Why?
Anarcissie March 19, 2019 at 15:00 I was quite interested in the early reports of supposed foreign influences and hacks of
the 2016 election, because to some extent computer security has been part of my métier. I soon realized that very little actual
evidence was being presented in comparison with the wild stories being circulated. So I don't think it's surprising that Mueller
appears to be coming up with nothing substantial (unless there's a big surprise awaiting us all). Mueller did not call a number
of the obvious witnesses (as noted above) because he knew they could not offer anything.
The House investigation is motivated by two things: (1) Democrats promised that if they got control of the House they would
investigate and maybe impeach Trump; (2) CYA procedures. The main effort of the Democratic Party leadership is keeping the Left
down; Russiagate was supposed to distract people from concerns like climate change, health care, education costs, and so on; the
Democratic leadership's donor class wants this sort of thing to be stopped or diverted. Hence the constant focus on Trump and
the conspiracy fables associated by them with him. They have now made a number of gaffes, not just Russiagate, which have to be
covered up and put out of mind if possible.
Those who went along with all this, especially those who indulged in McCarthyism, should be reminded of it frequently.
Lisa March 19, 2019 at 14:13 Concerning the first charge, Russian intelligence hacking the DNC computers, there is one more
witness whom Mueller never contacted, although he sent a message to Mueller and volunteered to be interviewed:
Kim Dotcom / Twitter 8. Aug. 2018
"I certainly know that Wikileaks didn't get it from Russia. I know who was the Wikileaks DNC source. I was involved. The Mueller
indictment of 12 Russians will never be tested in Court, it's a scam, initiated by Hillary Clinton. Mueller is a political hitman
tasked to end Trump."
It seems that both sides are steering the discussion to another dimension, being frustrated in advance of the coming Mueller
report. The Democrats are starting new investigations on other issues on Trump, not pushing the impeachment project further, the
other side is worried that the Mueller report will leave the question open, undecided, so that everyone can stick to their original
suspicions, and the country is left in turmoil.
Reply
DH Fabian March 19, 2019 at 21:56 It was reported
some time ago that the DNC servers hadn't been hacked at all. It was determined that someone who had direct access to the computers
had simply downloaded a huge number of files onto ordinary thumb drives, and these were passed along, ultimately to Wikileaks.
Reply
Norumbega March 20, 2019 at 18:21 I hadn't been aware
of Kim Dotcom's 2018 Tweet, but he is one of several potential witnesses to the matter in whom Mueller has shown zero interest
in interviewing.
I discuss this matter in a long post under last week's VIPS memo. In combination this witness evidence further underscores
that what Mueller is doing cannot by any stretch be considered an honest investigation:
Gregory Kruse March 19, 2019 at 13:34 Paranoiac hyperbole,
is it?
Reply
Jeff Harrison March 19, 2019 at 13:32 Yes, it's pretty
clear that the Democrats want to do to the Republicans what the Republicans did to the Democrats under Clinton and Obama. Hobble
the president that they don't want to consider legitimate. The Democrats have a couple of problems. One is that when there was
no there there in Clinton's case special persecutor Starr was able to get salacious bits on Clinton and essentially trap him into
a formal form of perjury because Clinton didn't want to admit that he had had sex with "that woman". Trump doesn't give a sh*t.
God and the gang know who he's been sleeping with and he doesn't care so the prudish, hypocritical sanctimony of the evangelicals
won't get him. The other problem is essentially that impeachment isn't really the vehicle to remove presidents you don't like.
That's what elections are for. You can't impeach him for something he did five years ago.
It really is too bad that he didn't depose Christopher Steele. Christopher Steele gives new meaning to the line out of the
Charlie Daniels hit where Uneasy Rider says, "he may look dumb, but that's just a disguise. He's a mastermind in the ways of espionage".
So, not only aren't today's Democrats very competent, they can't hire competent help, either.
It's not clear to me what the country does when neither political party is competent.
O Society March 19, 2019 at 13:19 Donald Trump is nothing more than an aristocrat. He got his family millions from his dad,
Fred, whose own mother, Elizabeth, started him in real estate. It's a family of rich grifters.
Yet the Democratic party doesn't go after all the Trump's financial fraud and scams. It's all Spy vs. Spy Russia baloney instead.
Why?
O Society March 19, 2019 at 17:21 Oh, I think we all know Trump is as crooked as a stick in water. There's mountains of
corruption in his family, at least a century's worth of fraud and scams to hold up in the sunlight.
The so called "meritocracy" – aka aristocracy, oligarchy, elite, plutocrats, etc – don't want to turn over rocks looking
for Trumps financial corruption because they're all hiding fraud and scams of their own.
Meritocracy itself is a fraud. These aren't our best and brightest and most worthy running things, they're celebrities and
vampires, just like Trump is.
Are you ready to expose how the selfish bastards rig the game to keep the rest of us from getting any of their so called
"merit?"
The first rule of Rich Club is you don't talk about Rich Club!
Eric32 March 19, 2019 at 13:18 The US is a bizarrely corrupt dysfunctional country.
The two countries that (past and present) interfere the most in US politics and elections are Israel and Britain. The corrupt
FBI didn't include them in its politicized "investigation".
Due to Hillary's incompetent attempts to hide her emails from examination via FOIA requests by using her own insecure servers,
Russia and all other countries with competent computer intelligence capabilities likely have all her emails dealing with State
Dept. classified and unclassified info. They also likely have her emails dealing with the corrupt Clinton "charity" foundation
dealings.
Despite the above, the evidence indicates Wikileaks got the DNC emails showing corrupt activities, not from Russia or any other
country, but from a DNC onsite data transfer to a USB thumb drive, which was later physically transferred to wiki (involving Craig
Murray) . Seth Rich, a DNC employee whose subsequent murder remains unsolved, has been all but named by Assange as the DNC source.
Big Russian money flowed to Bill Clinton for speeches. Big Russian money flowed to the obviously corrupt Clinton foundation
as "donations".
Bill Clinton said: "I left the White House [2001] $16 million in debt". A Forbes magazine analysis of Clinton tax returns had
them pulling in $240 million over the ensuing 15 years.
What do the Clintons have to offer in books and speeches that would pull in that kind of money?
And yet, all the legal and press attention goes to supposed Trump corruption.
So far at least, nobody has been able to point to any any dirt on Trump that could have been used as blackmail leverage, which
is somewhat amazing for an operator who was involved in New York real estate, casinos and hotels.
Glennn March 19, 2019 at 14:14 Russiagate has been a smashing success. It has turned the bulk of the liberal Democratic
voting bloc into Russiaphobic cold warriors who don't seem overly concerned with the almost certain dire consequences of such
insanity. They seem eager to see their freedoms set aside so the rebranded Democratic Neocons can protect them from boogeymen.
It's never been easier in all of human history to inform oneself, yet we find ourselves surrounded by astonishing ignorance
as sites like this see their traffic from search reduced by tricks done by the corporate providers of the search engines. I
foolishly thought that Trump would cause a leftward movement in the population, and to a limited degree it has. I'm just shocked
at how many of my friends and family are totally sucked in by Russiagate and surrounding manipulations. I see no sign that
they learned anything from the 2016 debacle.
Skip Scott March 20, 2019 at 08:58 Yes, there would be at least as much "meat" examining the Clintons' finances as there
is in examining Trump's.
By your wording I'm not sure if you realize that you are talking about two different sets of emails. Hillary's emails for
while she was SoS have no doubt been obtained by the Russians and the Chinese, and any country with an interest in monitoring
US foreign policy that has hacking capability. That she got away with that without being prosecuted is astounding. The DNC
emails could also have been hacked, but all evidence supports a leak being the source for Wikileaks. As Putin said, why would
they bother to try to influence the election, when US foreign policy never changes no matter who is president. If the DNC and
Podesta were hacked by foreign powers, it was likely just done for information.
(I just re-read your comment more carefully and see that you are likely aware that we're talking about separate sets of
emails.)
hetro March 19, 2019 at 12:48 Also not investigated is the role of the Clinton forces, including Obama, in perpetuating the
myth of collusion as cover action for a) a failed election b) problems with The Clinton Foundation. Further on the not emphasized
includes the ICA of January 2017 relying on Crowdstrike, a dubious intelligence service to begin with in the employ of Hillary
Clinton. The earmarks of a fantastic propaganda scheme, involving supposedly reliable agencies of the US government, are clear
and demonstrable under the noses of those who still clamor there must be something legitimate about Mueller and his investigation
fiasco. If we needed further indications of corruption in high places, following the Democratic Party's lead in fixing the 2016
presidential nomination for Clinton, it came speedily along thereafter, with an apparent, "Oh, gee, those nasty Russians are responsible!"
response from a heavily brainwashed public. It would seem we need an official investigation of the investigation to join the enquiries
of Mr. Lawrence, William Binney, et al.
As to Robert Reich, he was "paranoiacally hyperbolic" back in 2016 and has only added to the TDS hysteria.
DW Bartoo March 19, 2019 at 12:25 Of course, the Mueller investigation was never intended to definitively answer any serious
questions, including why the FBI never insisted upon taking charge of the DNC computers allowing, instead, the allegations of
a private firm to stand as "evidence".
As you say, the harm done by the "Russia did it!" claim is immense and will have increasingly dire consequences as time goes
on.
The point and purpose of the Mueller spectacle is to allow evidence-free speculation to entrance the political system, not
just to excuse Hillary and the financial class Democrats of any responsibility for their loss in the election of 2016, but also
to shift attention away from the dismal failure of perpetual warfare and neoliberal austerity, in the service of military empire
and global capitalist extraction, even as the capacity of the planet to support human existence is daily diminished.
As long as the many can be kept distracted, the existential issues of nuclear war and environmental collapse may be avoided
by the political class.
Even such ideas as genuine health care or a more sane, humane, and sustainable economic system can be kept from ever becoming
something that people ought think and talk about.
If all problems may be attributed to Trump and Russia, then getting back to the Clinton-Bush-Obama daze of "business as usual"
will drone on most happily and a new Cold War may be heated up as the next thrilling adventure.
Of course, the US Empire is waning, its capacity to dominate gone, it will behave rather badly. However, if sufficient
fervor may be stirred, the populace may yet embrace an end-times crusade and rally round the flag, once more, to deal with foul
and evil Russia, with China thrown in, just for good measure.
exiled off mainstreet March 19, 2019 at 11:53
This is certainly an accurate view of the problem. He mentions Robert Reich, who along with the rest of the 'mainstream" Democrats
jumped the shark long ago on this issue, which has destroyed the legitimacy of the democratic party. Reich lost any claim on rationality
by following the conventional wisdom. Meanwhile, Trump's defense against the false charges bolstered the neocon element in the
Republican party. I don't see how this ends well.
this is much worse that WDM case. It poisoned relations with Russia at least for a
generation. People who planned and executed Russiagate color revolution, of which Mueller witch
hunt was an integral part are criminals. All of them.
But Russiagate told us a lot about British and Israeli influence on the Us presidential
elections, as well as CIA and FBI machinations.
Robert Mueller has come up empty handed, exposing two years of relentless Russiagate
propaganda and the media that sold it.
The short version? Mueller is done. His report
unambiguously states there was no collusion or obstruction. He was allowed to follow every lead
unfettered in an investigation of breathtaking depth.
It cannot be clearer. The report summary
states, "The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone
associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 US
Presidential Election the report does not recommend any further indictments, nor did the
Special Counsel obtain any sealed indictments that have yet to be made public."
Robert Mueller did not charge any Americans with collusion, coordination, or criminal
conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. The special counsel also considered whether
members of the Trump campaign "coordinated," a much lower standard defined as an "agreement,
tacit or express," with Russian election interference activities. They did not.
Everything -- everything -- else we have been told since the summer of 2016 falls,
depending on your conscience and view of humanity, into the realm of lies, falsehoods,
propaganda, exaggerations, political manipulation, stupid reporting, fake news, bad judgment,
simple bull, or, in the best light, hasty conclusions.
As with Dorothy's ruby slippers, the proof of no collusion has always been with us. There
was a guilty plea from Michael Flynn, Trump's national security advisor, on one count of
perjury unrelated to Russiagate. Flynn lied about a legal meeting with the Russian ambassador.
Rick Gates, deputy campaign manager, pled guilty to conspiracy and false statements unrelated
to Russiagate. George Papadopoulos, a ZZZ-level adviser, pled guilty to making false statements
about legal contact with the Russians. Michael Cohen ,
Trump's lawyer, pled guilty to lying to Congress about a legal Moscow real estate project. Paul
Manafort , very briefly Trump's campaign chair, pled guilty to conspiracy charges unrelated
to Russiagate and that for the most part occurred before he even joined the campaign. Roger
Stone, who never officially worked for Trump, awaits a trial that will happen long after
Mueller turns off the last lights in his office.
Mueller did indict some Russian citizens for hacking, indictments that in no way tied them
to anything Trump and which will never see trial. Joseph Mifsud, the Russian professor who
supposedly told Papadopoulos Moscow had "thousands of Hillary's emails," was never charged
.
Carter Page, subject of FISA
surveillance and a key
actor in the Steele dossier, was also never charged. After hours of testimony about
that infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting to discuss Hillary's email and other meeting around
the Moscow hotel, no one was indicted for perjury.
The short version of Russiagate? There was no Russiagate.
What Will Happen Next is already happening. Democrats are throwing up smoke demanding that
the full Mueller report be made public. Even before AG Barr released the summary, Speaker
Pelosi
announced that whatever he decided to release wouldn't be enough. One Dem on CNN warned
they would need the FBI agents' actual handwritten field notes.
Adam Schiff said , "Congress is going to
need the underlying evidence because some of that evidence may go to the compromise of the
president or people around him that poses a real threat to our national security." Schiff
believes his committee is likely to discover things missed by Mueller, whose report indicates
his team interviewed about 500 witnesses, obtained more than 2,800 subpoenas and warrants,
executed 500 search warrants, obtained 230 orders for communications records, and made 13
requests to foreign governments for evidence.
Mueller may still be called to testify in front of Congress, as nothing will ever be enough
for the #Resistance cosplayers now in charge. Overnight, the findings, made by Mueller the
folk hero , the
dogged Javert, the Marine on his last patrol, suddenly weren't worth puppy poo unless we could
all look over his shoulder and line-by-line second guess him. MSNBC host Joy Reid, for her
part, has already
accused Mueller of covering up the crime of the century .
The New York Times
headline "As Mueller Report Lands, Prosecutorial Focus Moves to New York" says the rest --
we're movin' on! Whatever impeachment/indictment fantasies diehard Dems have left are being
transferred from Mueller to the Southern District of New York. The SDNY's powers, we are
reminded with the tenacity of a bored child in the back seat, are outside of Trump's control,
the Wakanda of justice.
The new holy land is called Obstruction of Justice, though pressing a case against Trump
in a process that ultimately exonerated him will be a tough sell. In a sentence likely to fuel
discussion for months, the attorney general quotes Mueller, "While this report does not
conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."
It sounds dramatic, but in fact it means that, while taking no position on whether
obstruction took place, Mueller concluded that he did not find enough evidence to prosecute. In
the report, he specifically turns over to the attorney general any decision to pursue
obstruction further. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, meanwhile, have already
determined
that the evidence does not support prosecution of the president for obstruction of justice.
Mueller also specifically noted that obstruction of justice requires proof of intent, and
since he found that Trump, et al, did not conspire with Russia, there can be no intent to
obstruct an investigation Trump knew could not lead to anything. The case is thus closed
judicially (Mueller having essentially telegraphed the defense strategy), though Democrats are
likely to quixotically keep pursuing it.
What's left is corruption. Politico has already published a
list of 25 "new" things to investigate about Trump, trying to restock the warehouse of broken
impeachment dreams (secret: it's filled with sealed indictments no one will ever see). The
pivot will be from treason to corruption: see the Cohen hearings as Exhibit A. Campaign finance
minutiae , real estate assessment questions, tax cheating from the 1980s, a failed Buffalo
Bills purchase years ago how much credibility will any of that have now with a public realizing
it has been bamboozled on Russia?
At some point, even the congresswoman with the most Twitter followers is going to have to
admit there is no there there. By digging the hole they are standing in even deeper, Dems will
only make it more obvious to everyone except Samantha Bee's interns that they have nothing.
Expect to hear "this is not the end, it's only the end of the beginning" more often, even if it
sounds more needy than encouraging, like a desperate ex checking in to see if you want to meet
for coffee.
Someone at the DNC might also ask how this unabashed desire to see blood drawn from
someone surnamed Trump will play out with potential 2020 purple voters. It is entirely possible
that the electorate is weary and would like to see somebody actually address immigration,
health care, and economic inequality
now that we've settled the Russian question.
That is what is and likely will happen. What should happen is a reckoning.
Even as the story fell apart over time, a large number of Americans and nearly all of the
mainstream media still believed that the president of the United States was a Russian
intelligence asset -- in Clinton's own words, " Putin's
puppet ." How did that happen?
A mass media that bought lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and
then promised "never again!" did it again. The New York Times , WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, et al,
reported falsehoods to drive a partisan narrative. They gleefully created a serial killer's
emptywheel -like bulletin board
covered in blurry photos connected by strands of yarn.
Another generation of journalists soiled themselves. They elevated mongerers like Seth
Abramson, Malcolm Nance, and Lawrence Tribe, who vomited nonsense all over Twitter every afternoon
before appearing before millions on CNN. They institutionalized unsourced gossip as their ledes
-- how often were we told that the walls were closing in?
That it was Mueller time? How often was the public put on red alert that
Trump/Sessions/Rosenstein/Whitaker/Barr was going to fire the special prosecutor? The mass
media featured only stories that furthered the collusion tall tale and silenced those skeptical
of the prevailing narrative, the same way they failed before the Iraq war.
The short version: there were no WMDs in Iraq. That was a lie and the media promoted it
shamelessly while silencing skeptical voices. Now Mueller has indicted zero Americans for
working with Russia to influence the election. Russiagate was a lie and the media promoted it
shamelessly while silencing skeptical voices.
The same goes for the
politicians , alongside Hayden
,
Brennan , Clapper, and
Comey , who told Americans that the president they elected was a spy working against the
United States. None of that was accidental. It was a narrative they desperately wanted to be
true so they could profit
politically regardless of what it did to the nation. And today the whitewashing is already
ongoing (watch out for tweets containing the word "regardless").
Someone should contact the ghost of Consortium News's Robert Parry , one of the earliest and most
consistent skeptics of Russiagate, and tell him he was right all along. That might be the most
justice we see out of all this.
This article is over a year old, but it really explains what this with hunt was about -- to deflect real interference in the US
election as well as exonerate Hillary fiasco. The way Russian were selected is a typical "projected" Anti-Semitism -- persecution on
the base on national origin without any solid fact, but with plenty of prejudices due to Russia Soviet past. What a gang of scamsters
the US neoliberal elite became !
Russiagate Revisited
35 The
anti-Russian hysteria in Washington has slipped beyond self-parody. We now have front-row seats in a theatre of the absurd, watching
the media furor explode after Robert Mueller's 'indictments' of 13 Russians and three Russian companies for interfering in the 2016
presidential elections.
Mueller's actions deserve the scare quotes because they are not really indictments at all. The accused parties will never be extradited
or brought to trial. Nor is it clear that their actions rise to the level of crimes. The supposed indictments are merely dramatic
accusations, a giant publicity stunt.
Even if they were real indictments, they would not be convictions. American journalists seem to have forgotten that distinction.
In contemporary American jurisprudence, prosecutors routinely get rubber stamps from grand juries. A grand jury, the adage goes,
will indict a ham sandwich. For a g-man on a white horse like Mueller, universally lionised in the mainstream media, a grand jury
would probably indict a peanut butter sandwich.
One of the most bizarre aspects of Russiagate is the magical transformation of intelligence agency heads into paragons of truth-telling
– a trick performed not by reactionary apologists for domestic spying, as one would expect, but by people who consider themselves
liberals. There is something genuinely absurd about a former director of the FBI – which along with the CIA and NSA has long been
one of the gravest threats to democracy in America – solemnly warning of the threat to democracy posed by Russian meddling in the
election.
And what was the nature of that alleged meddling? The pseudo-indictments are clear: the meddlers had nothing to do with the Russian
government and nothing to do with the Trump campaign – except that they sometimes 'communicated with unwitting individuals' associated
with it. And the Russians' activities had no impact on the outcome of the election. Mueller's assignment was to investigate whether
the Russian government colluded with the Trump campaign to promote his victory over Hillary Clinton. None of the current charges
has anything to do with this. (Nor does Mueller's recent indictment of Alex van der Zwaan, an attorney and associate of Trump's crony
Paul Manafort.) The pseudo-indictments merely add to the billowing clouds of innuendo that have characterised the Russiagate narrative
from the beginning.
According to Mueller's accusations, the meddlers began their operations long before the campaign began and certainly before anyone
thought Trump had a snowball's chance in hell; they posed as Muslims, black activists, white Southerners, among other social types,
all posting slogans and invective on social media. After the election, they staged pro-Trump and anti-Trump rallies. Somehow the
media have made this mishmash fit the Russiagate narrative, assuming it reveals a coherent Kremlin plan to elect Trump.
So what is the point of these sham indictments? It is fair to speculate that there is more going on here than a simple search
for truth. Early on in the 37-page document that was
released to such fanfare, the FBI makes a revealing assertion, claiming that the Russians aimed 'to sow discord in the US political
system' – as if vigorous debate were not an appropriate state of affairs for a democratic polity; as if the normal expression
of democracy is bland conformity to policies fashioned by elites. By explicitly linking the Russians with support for the Sanders
and Trump campaigns, Mueller's pseudo-indictments identify dissent from the Washington consensus with foreign subversion. They reinforce
the reigning orthodoxy and tighten the boundaries of permissible public discourse.
The consequences are potentially catastrophic. By focusing on the manufactured menace of Russiagate, the Democratic Party leadership
can continue to ignore its own failures as well as the actual menace posed by Trump. And by fostering the fantasy of a vast Russian
plot against America, the mainstream media can shut down reasonable foreign policy debate and promote a dangerous, unnecessary confrontation
with a rival power. The final act in Washington's theatre of the absurd has yet to be written, but the denouement looks dark.
Which is all the more reason
Americans now deserve a full accounting of the missteps of former FBI Director James Comey and
his team -- in part so that this never happens again.
That includes the following:
What "evidence" did the FBI have in totality?
What efforts did the bureau take to verify it?
Did it corroborate anything before launching its probe?
What role did political players play?
How aware was the FBI that it was being gulled into a dirty-trick operation, and if so,
how did it justify proceeding?
How intrusive were the FBI methods?
And who was harmed?
If Mr. Mueller has done his job properly, his report will address some of this. His team
would have had to look into the sources of the allegations as part of determining the
documents' (lack of) veracity. A Mueller report that doesn't mention the dossier and its
political provenance, or questionable news stories used to justify surveillance warrants, for
instance, is a report that is playing politics.
The fuller accounting will come only through total disclosure of FBI and Justice Department
probe documents. Mr. Trump promised that disclosure in September but has yet to follow
through.
Strassel concludes that "transparency is now a necessity. "
The Mueller report is only half the story. With the special-counsel probe at an end, it's
time to go back the beginning - to the documents that explain its origin. Only then will
Americans have the full story of the Russia-collusion narrative.
Finally, after the President nearly single handedly fought those bastards off, we see the
"courage" of the press...LOL. I'd like to add one more name to that group; the Judas Goat
Sessions.
Ever since the OJ Simpson trial 'justice' in America has been a bad political joke. You
expect justice? Get ready for major disappointment. True justice won't come out of a court
room in America where they routinely make things up as they go, lie, cheat and steal,
blackmail and browbeat, permit prosecutorial abuses not seen since Stalin's show trials of
the 1930s and after literally years of bs arrive at the predetermined verdict.
Leonid Bershidsky is very superficial and decided to put rose glasses. In reality color revolution against Trump was a
very dangerous event. It is the next stop after Patriot Act in sliding toward totalitarism in the USA. It really demonstrates
that existence of super-powerful and well financed intelligence agencies is incompatible with the democracy even in limited
form that existed int he USA. They necessarily emerged as kingmakers, the new Praetorian Guard. The level of control by
intelligence agencies of major MSM proved to be stggeringly effective. They all sing in unison that same song: Russia,
Russia, Russia.
Another sad fact is the level of influence British government and British intelligence agencies exhibited in the USA.
Steele dossier was an unpresended level of interference in the US elections. Yet another the power of pro-Israel lobby.
Russiagate might be dead but neo-McCarthyism is alive and flourishing... It proves very easy to poison relations between two
countries for at least a generation using the power of neoliberal MSM and intelligence agencies who control them.
Another intere4sting observation is that FBI in this story played the role of Gestapo or STASI -- political police. That's
totalitarism. May be this inverted totalistism, but still totolistrism. Empires can's allow to be democratic.
One doesn't need the full text of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference into the 2016
U.S. presidential election to know that Russiagate, perhaps the most powerful anti-Donald Trump narrative of the
last three years, is dead. But it wasn't completely pointless: We can learn important things about both Russia and
the U.S. from it.
People who pushed the conspiracy theory are already busy telling their audiences that Trump
still isn't out of legal trouble. None of the legalistic niggling, however, will change the basic fact: A
thorough, hard-hitting two-year investigation by a team that can't be accused of being Trump sympathizers has
found no proof of a conspiracy that has dominated U.S. airwaves since before Trump got elected. After this, any
further political use of Russiagate can, and will, be deflected with an eye-roll.
The millions of words written about the conspiracy that wasn't will interfere with a meaningful post-mortem. I
find it unnecessary to recall, as my one-time Moscow Times colleague
Matt
Taibbi did
, the lurid details of the dot-connecting orgy; I haven't kept links to the hundreds of tweets in
which I was accused of being a shill for Russian President Vladimir Putin when I consistently doubted the
narrative. It's important now to be clear-eyed, no matter if you bought the conspiracy theory or not.
One thing that's important to realize is that regional expertise matters. For example, it was
obvious
to people with some understanding of Moscow's inner workings that looking into the famous Trump Tower
meeting on June 9, 2016, wasn't going to yield evidence of Trump-Putin collusion because, at the Russian end, the
people involved weren't credible as Kremlin emissaries.
That these signs were largely ignored is evidence that the level of Russia expertise in the U.S. media and
intelligence community is lower than it should be. Investing in raising it, both through educational programs and
through making more knowledgeable voices heard, should prevent embarrassing mistakes in the future.
... ... ...
On the other hand, it distracted many Americans from the real causes of Hillary Clinton's defeat and Trump's
victory. Those causes, at the forefront of media attention for a short while after the election, were about the
Democrats' failure to engage certain poor and middle class voters. Russiagate, however, made Putin's evil trickery
the issue. It worked in the short term, but failed in the longer-run – also in both countries.
... ... ...
And in the U.S., the Democrats have clearly shot themselves in the foot. Instead of wasting their time on Russiagate...
"... The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections. ..."
"... At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this. ..."
"... I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy. ..."
"... It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further. ..."
"... They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. ..."
"... Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal. ..."
"... The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue; ..."
"... Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law. ..."
"... It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.) ..."
There were no major disagreements between Mueller and his managers at the U.S. Department of
Justice (DOJ).
The Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 election were exposed and charged -- but no
American was charged with any effort to conspire with Moscow and hijack the election.
the "Steele dossier" that was the main FISA evidence was paid for with funds
from Hillary Clinton
's campaign and the Democratic Party;
Christopher Steele, the dossier's author, had told a senior DOJ official he was desperate to
defeat Trump;
most of the dossier was not verified before it was used as evidence of alleged Trump-Russia
collusion; and
agents collected statements from key defendants such as Papadopoulos and Carter Page during
interactions with an FBI informant that strongly suggested their innocence.
Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal court. And each and
every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.
An upcoming DOJ inspector general's report should trigger the beginning of that
accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying
all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials. " The Hill
------------
Pilgrims, the seditious conspiracy to depose the elected president of the United States for
conspiracy to commit treason with the Government of the Russian Federation has been
defeated.
The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously
used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make
an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to
overturn the results of elections.
At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary
Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever,
clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the
even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British
intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose
staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this.
The leftist press is already discounting the results of Mueller's investigation while
gloating over how long the Democratic held House of Representatives can continue to search
through Trump's life trying to find criminality.
AG Barr should stand Mueller up next to him at a press conference to make clear the results
of his report and to answer questions about it. After that the prosecutions should begin.
pl
I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee –
Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled
against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this
conspiracy.
It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a
strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' –
notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which
case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further.
The argument that declassification of relevant documentation would harm the intelligence
relationship between the U.S. and U.K. has clearly been made with great emphasis from this
side.
In fact, it is pure bollocks. A serious investigation on your side, which could lead to
the kind of clean-out which should have happened when the scale of the corruption of
intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq became clear, might pave the way for us
to reconstruct reasonably functional intelligence services.
Doing this on both sides of the Atlantic might pave the way for a reconstruction of an
intelligence relationship which was actually beneficial to both countries, as in recent years
it patently has not been.
Whether there is a realistic prospect of people on your side opening the cans of worms on
ours, as well as your own, of course remains a moot point.
I'm glad the Steele affair has been examined at the American end -
"They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with
Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US
political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and
spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York.
"
What about the UK end? We're fussing over some little local difficulties in the UK at the
moment and at our end the questions still remain - Who in the UK authorised it and how high did it go?
The problem with criminal prosecution is one must cite a Brit or US law which was violated.
The only ones in US law that I am aware of stipulate that the plotting must be by means of
violence, "by force". All this appears to me to be only the propagation of rumors.
I think it might be more the investigation of the propagation of rumours. Think back to that election campaign, and to the period before the inauguration.
Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an
odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers
nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it
turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal.
With respect it is not propagating rumours to ask how that happened. As for my own
interest in the affair, it is not propagating rumours to ask how a senior UK ex-Intelligence
Officer comes to be mixed up in it all. I suppose I started to look on it as rather more than a prank or a few cogs slipping when
that senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer got whisked away to a safe house. We're a penny
pinching lot over here and we don't run to that sort of thing for nothing.
An investigation could certainly be predicated on the reasonable suspicion that Steele, et
al, conspired to defraud the United States, in this case a purposeful and knowing smear of a
candidate for office; also, another potential violation could be lying to the FBI, T 18 USC
1001.
The problem, as I see it, is sorting out the malignant from the merely incompetent. As I've
argued many times, the dossier should have been dismissed from the outset as a pile of
garbage, empty of actionable content, because the ultimate sources could not be vetted: the
information could not be said to be either credible or reliable. The information was acted on
by screening it behind the reliabilty and credibility, so called, of Steele. So it would be
necessary to show that Steele knew that the information, point by point, was false. This
could be difficult. Steele's first line of defense would be that he threw everything that he
heard from anyone at all into the mix in the expectation that the "professionals" would
figure it out.
Yes, they were all partisan, Steele, his sources, his bosses, the so called
professionals, and their partisanship would be easy to prove; and yes, almost assuredly their
partisanship contributed, perhaps even explained, their defective judgement as to how to
handle the scurrilous information, especially on the part of the so called professionals, but
proving they actually knew the materials to be false would be difficult.
They couldn't know
that it was false because they had no ability to run down the sources. The professionals
would defend themselves by saying they had no ability to vet the sources but the information
represented such a serious security threat that they had no alternative but to try to vet the
information by launching the investigation against the targets. This puts the cart before the
horse, represents an astonishing lack of judgement, especially considering the "exalted"
positions in the Intel Community the people exercising the bad judgement occupied, but there
it is - "we thought we were doing the right thing."
Perhaps this defense could be overcome by
demonstrating that people at such high and important heights of government could not possible
be so stupid... maybe.
And of course we have the orchestrated leaks to various media, the orchestrated unmaskings,
all of which kept the media frenzy fired up. All in all, it was the greatest political dirty
trick ever attempted in American Politics, and did devastating damage to both domestic
tranquility and national security. Trump survived, but the damage done is incalculable.
So It pains me greatly to think that the reckoning will likely have to be political rather
than criminal because the malice that can be demonstrated is so admixed and even overshadowed
by incompetence and judgement flaws; and even a political reckoning given the state of the
country is so uncertain.
I hope that I am wrong and that some kind of prosecution can be fashioned because of the
sheer enormity of violence that was done to our electoral system, surpassing by far the
chickenshit case Mueller brought against the Russian troll farm; but I fear that I am right.
It hurts to think that so much damage can be caused by scheming little political weasels and
that they all may well walk away scot free; and even be lionized by their political confreres
as having tried to do the right thing. This is the state of American politics today!!!
I see that some of the midgets on horseback are saying that they will bring Mueller before
congress to explain himself. Their knight in shining armor has failed to return with the holy
grail. A couple even suggested that perhaps Mueller has been influenced by the Russians or
somehow intimated by Trump.
The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue;
and that
+ all the crazy Marxism (social and economic), bad immigration policy and Green New Deal is
going to doom the Democrats in 2020. They look like they are jumping off a final sake fueled
banzai charge. Maybe they think the best defense is a good offense re; the prosecutions that
should happen. What is the chance that Mueller will pass *all* he has learned to help get the
criminal cases under way?
On 13 July 2018, when announcing the indictment of 12 Russian military officers by the
Mueller group for "conspiring to interfere" in the 2016 presidential election, Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein admitted that no "interference" actually happened. In this
video of his announcement, starting at 5 minutes, 52 seconds into it and ending at the 6
minute, 5 second mark, he says--
"There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime.
There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election
result."
Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results
of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly
pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law.
However, I am concerned that the new attorney general, William Barr, will not do so based
on his past associations and work. I hope I am wrong about that, but I am not optimistic.
It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly
unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a
weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection"
operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such
obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.)
I'm wrestling with the idea that 'twas ever thus and now with the internet its workings
are revealed to a "lay" audience with no connection to the dark arts of the spy business. But
I am curious, with the good Colonel's indulgence, if the new tools of the trade have made
things which should be secret not possible to be kept secret?
Amen to the prosecutions. If there is seen to be no accountability for this fraud then we are
seriously damaging what's left of democracy. Who, in their right mind, is going to publicly
support and assist a political candidate who is not "Swamp approved" if they face the threat
of thereby triggering their own, and their family's destruction by the judicial system?
I suggest that even a pardon is not enough for those entrapped in this mess. There needs
to be restitution.
To put that another way, in my opinion, "birther" allegations could be passed off as
political tactics. Nobody got hurt. It is just good luck that Russiagate hasn't resulted in
suicide or worse - so far.
I certainly agree that consequences must be brought to bear: lying politicians without a
shred of evidence, nor did they offer any for their lies; press for their utter and complete
malfeasance and corruption without a shred of evidence, the doj/fbi corrupted and coup
plotting officials,and finally the shame to all who shrieked about "evil" putin, russia the
aggressor, etc. It has set our discourse back decades, forced any critics of this insanity
into the shadows, and completely killed any attempt at normal diplomacy between nations.
I noted one astute writer as equating this russiagate insanity to the lies surrounding wmd
and the destruction of iraq. Close. The damage from this criminality is incalculable!
Will the shrillest of all in the press lose their jobs? Nah, not a chance. Prob get raise
or promotion.Will the brennans, clintons, clappers, et al do the perp walk. Nah, not a
chance. High paid lawyers will tie the courts up for years if not decades.
And america has the institutional memory of a gnat. And of course, the question is as to
high up did this criminality go? I personally do not believe it is a question-it is obvious
to me. The major question for me is how high up the prosecution, if any, will go.
Problem is...who's going to do the prosecuting?
The DOJ - protector of the swamp - has become thoroughly corrupted as an arm of the
Democrat-media party.
Should (can) Trump appoint a special prosecutor as far as possible from the DOJ?
The president might use this and any Republican-led prosecutions as leverage to work out
deals that will allow him to achieve his agenda. I think he'll need to given how the
Democrats intend to use their house majority to launch investigations and hearings to find
something, anything to howl about and impede his agenda.
Still need to see the full report. I hope it is releasable. Otherwise the conspiracy theories
or leaks will never let up. The article cited is a partisan opinion piece, not a news report.
It accepts the fallback stance that yes, crimes were committed but collusion by Trump was not
among them. This actually seems possible if only in light of the chaotic condition of the
campaign.
That said, I would not be surprised to find collusion discounted. Not that the Russians
didn't interfere. That would be entirely in character. But I don't know any reason for
supposing that they would have a better understanding of American political dynamics than the
Americans who make good livings being the best in that arena. The Russians seem to have been
doing the same things as numerous other players. They shouldn't have been in that game, but
there is no strong reason for according them Superman status. Their strongest feature seems
to have been sheer quantity. Outrage over their actions often seems to flow from a poor grasp
of the real nature of normal political process.
"The Russians seem to have been doing the same things..."
Multiple members of the FBI and DOJ seem to have been interfering in the 2016 Presidential
election. How many other federal and state elections did they interfere with?
Can you cite a single piece of hard evidence, not simply allegation, that proves the Russians
interfered in the 2016 election? If so, please cite it, since I know of none. Thank you.
"... Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president ..."
"... The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of amounts to an attempted soft coup. ..."
"... It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. ..."
"... As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry. Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch ..."
"... I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way. ..."
"... Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller to prove. ..."
"... It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the "national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon. ..."
"... It is time to build cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony. Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it. The truth will work better. ..."
Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy
that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump
president. They did this fully aware that Trump was a repulsive, narcissistic ass clown who
bragged about "grabbing women by the pussy" and jabbered about building "a big, beautiful
wall" and making the Mexican government pay for it. They did this fully aware of the fact
that Donald Trump had zero experience in any political office whatsoever, was a loudmouth
bigot, and was possibly out of his gourd on amphetamines half the time. The American people
did not care. They were so disgusted with being conned by arrogant, two-faced, establishment
stooges like the Clintons, the Bushes, and Barack Obama that they chose to put Donald Trump
in office, because, fuck it, what did they have to lose?
The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by
inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the
American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives,
getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote
this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to
conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every
component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence
agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to
remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of
amounts to an attempted soft coup.
It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was
nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. The Clintons once
again, both Bill and Hillary, have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug in the White
House to the status of some kind of martyr. What a country America it is. One thing should be
clear however. Any politician or media pundit that towed the pro-Clintonista line should be
barred from public office or the media forever.
As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary,
they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry.
Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch. There is one difference between Typhoid
Mary, and Bill and Hillary: Typhoid Mary didn't realize what she was doing, the Clintons did!
sorry to double post, but it just occurred to me that they pulled a classic DC move: if you
have something humiliating or horrible to admit, do it on a friday night.
i have to wonder if the entire western media is cynically praying for a (coincidentally
distracting) school shooting or terrorist attack within the next two days.
I have close friends that have been on the MSNBC/Maddow Kool-Ade for years. Constantly
declaring Mueller was on the verge of closing in on Trump and associates for treason with the
Russians. On Friday night after dinner at our home, the TV was tuned to MSNBC so they could
watch their spiritual leader Rachel Maddow....what a pitiful sight (both Maddow and friends).
No one was going to jail or be impeached for conspiring with Putin.....how on how could that
be true. Putin personally stole the election from Clinton and THEY are just going to let him
walk was the declaration a few feet from my chair. Normally, I would recommend grieve
counseling, but they are still my friends ... now they can go back to blaming Bernie for
Clinton's loss. Maybe I will recommend grieve counseling!
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Mar 23, 2019 2:27:18 PM |
link
@dltravers: Apart from the "goyim" you may be right.. But if you want to claim with that
Trumps opponents where under the pressure of the Zionists, you got it all wrong man.. ;) No
presidents been more under the Zionist thumb than DJT.
That ofc doesnt make Hillarys Saudi and Muslim brotherhood connections better.. ;)
Anyway, cheers to the end of this BS! And lets hope that Trump has now payed off his debts
with Adelson now that he secured Bibis reelection. But dont hold your breath.. ;)
"very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this
moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life".
I wish so, but that's not how the exceptional nation of US of A works, as demonstrated by
the Iraq WMD fiasco case. In fact, very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit
(about Saddam's WMD" BS) is alive and well, spreading more BS. What is even more depressing
is that the huge chunk of this exceptional nation cannot have enough of the BS and is
chanting "give me more, give me more...".
The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion.
However some good things have come out of the investigation. It cost taxpayers 2 million
but recouped over 25 million from those convicted of fraud and tax evasion.
And its not over, Mueller has sent 5 to 7 referrals or evidence/witnesses to SDNY, EDNY, DC,
EDVA, plus the National Security and Criminal Divisions. These from information turned up
crimes unrelated to his Russia probe and allegedly concerning Trump or his family business, a
cadre of his advisers and associates. They are being conducted by officials from Los Angeles
to Brooklyn.
The bad news is it exposed how wide spread and corrupt the US has become...in private and
political circles.
The other bad news is most of the Trump lovers and Trump haters are too stupid to drop
their partisan and personal blinders and recognize that ....ITS THE CORRUPTION STUPID.
b you have repeatedly made the case that this whole thing was kicked off by the Steele
dossier. That is factually incorrect. The first investigation was already running before the
dossier ever materialized. That investigation spawned the special prosecutors investigation
when Trump fired Comey and then went on TV and said it was because of the Russia
investigation. The Russia investigation was originally kicked off by Papadopoulos drinking
with the the Australian ambassador and bragging about what the campaign was doing with
Russia. Remember the original evidence was presented to the leadership of both the House and
the Senate when they were both controlled by the Republican party and every one that was
briefed came out on camera and said the Justice dept was doing the right thing in pursuing
this.
I think the Democrats should lose Hillary down a deep hole and not let her near any of the
coming campaign events. But this came about because of the actions of the people around
Trump. Not because Hillary controls the US government from some secret bunker some where.
One could argue Russiagate was on the contrary quite a success. The Elites behind the scheme
never believed it would end up with Trump's impeachment. What they did accomplish though is a
deflection via "Fake News" from the Dem's election failures & shenanigans and refocus the
attention towards the DNC's emerging pedophilia scandals (Weiner, the Podesta's, Alefantis,
etc) & suspicious deaths (Seth Rich, etc) towards a dead-end with the added corollary of
preventing US/Ru rapprochement for more then half an administration..
Blooming Barricade , Mar 23, 2019 3:10:02 PM |
link
The deeply tragic thing about this for the media, the neocons, and the liberals is that they
brought it upon themselves by moving the goalposts continuously. If, after Hillary lost, they
had stuck to the "Russia hacked WikiLeaks" lie, then they probably have sufficient proof from
their perspective and the perspective of most of the public that Russia helped Trump win. In
this case it would be remembered by the Democrats like the stolen election of 2000 (albeit
the fact that it was a lie this time). They had multiple opportunities to jump off this
train. Even the ridiculous DNI report could have been their final play: "Russia helped
Trump." Instead of going with 2000 they went with 2001, aka 9-11, with the same neocon
fearmongers playing the pipe organ of lies. As soon as they accepted the Steele Dossier,
moving the focus to "collusion" they discredited themselves forever. Many of the lead
proponents were discredited Iraq war hawks. Except this time it was actually worse because
the whole media bought into it. This leaves an interesting conundrum: there were at least
some pro-Afghanistan anti-Iraq warmongers who rejected the Bush premise in the media, so they
took over the airwaves for about two years before the real swamp creatures returned. This
time, it will be harder to issue a mea culpa. They made this appear like 9-11, well, this
time the truthers have won, and they are doomed.
Societies collapse when their systems (institutions) become compromised. When they are no
longer capable of meeting the needs of the population, or of adapting to a changing world.
Societal systems become compromised when their decision making structures, which are
designed to ensure that decisions are taken in the best interest of the society as a whole,
are captured by people who have no legitimacy to make the decisions, and who make decisions
for the benefit of themselves, at the expense of society as a whole.
Russia-gate is a flagrant example of how the law enforcement and intelligence institutions
have been captured. Their top officials, no longer loyal to their country or their
institution, but rather to an international elite (including the likes of Soros, the
Clintons, and far beyond) have used these institutions in an attempt to delegitimize a
constitutionally elected president and to over turn an election. This is no less than treason
of the highest order.
Indeed, the actions much of the Washington establishment, as well as a number
international actors, since Trump was elected seems suspiciously like one of the 'Color
Revolutions' that are visited upon any country who's citizens did not 'vote right' the first
time. Over-throw the vote, one way or another, until the result that is wanted is achieved.
None of these 'Color Revolutions' has resulted in anything good for the country involved.
Rather they have resulted in the destruction of each country's institutions, and eventually
societal collapse.
In the U.S. the capturing of systems' decision making structures is not limited to
Russia-Gate and the overturning of the electoral system. Their are other prime examples:
- The capture of the Air Transport Safety System by Boeing that has resulted in the recent
737 Max crashes, and likely the destruction of the reputation of the U.S. aviation industry,
in an industry where reputation is everything.
- The capture of the Financial Regulatory System, by Wall Street, who in 1998 rewrote the
rules in their own favor, against the best interests of the population as a whole. The result
was the 2008 financial crisis and the inability of the U.S. economy to effectively recover
from that crisis.
- This capture is also seen in international diplomatic systems, where the U.S. is
systematically by-passing or subverting international law and international institutions,
(the U.N. I.C.J., I.N.F. treaty) etc., and in doing so is destroying these institutions and
the ability to maintain peace.
The result of system (institution) capture is difficult to see at first. But, in time, the
damage adds up, the ability of the systems to meet the needs of the population disappears,
and societal decline sets in.
It looks today like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of
many indicators.
Your comment on the BBC is on the mild side. I listen to it when I drive in in the morning
and also get annoyed sometimes. When it is reporting on the Westminster bubble it is
factually accurate as far as I can judge. Apart from that, and particularly in the case of
the BBC news, we're in information control territory.
But accept that and the BBC turns into quite a valuable resource. It's well staffed, has
good contacts, and picks up what the politicians want us to think with great accuracy.
In that respect it's better than the newspapers and better also than the American media.
Those news outlets have several masters of which the political elite is only one. The BBC has
just the one master, the political elite, and is as sensitive as a stethoscope to the
shifting currents within that political elite.
So I wouldn't despise the BBC entirely. It tells us how the politicians want us to think.
In telling us that it sometimes gives us a bearing on what the politicians et al are doing
and what they intend to do.
The never-Trumpers will never let their dreams die. Of course, they never oppose Trump on
substantive issues like attempting a coup in Venezuela, withdrawing from the INF treaty,
supporting the nazis in Ukraine, supporting Al Qaeda forces in Syria, etc. But somehow
they're totally against him and ready to haul out the latest stupid thing he said as their
daily fodder for conversation...
renfro @ 10 said;"The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion."
Uh no, just doing their job of distracting the public, while ignoring the real issues
the
American workers care about. You know, the things DJT promised the workers, but has never
delivered.(better health care for all, ending the useless wars overseas, an
infrastructure
plan to increase good paying jobs), to name just a few.
The corporate Dems( which is the lions share of them), are bought and paid for to
distract, and they've done it well.
The Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas, and most who have come before, are of the same
ilk.
Bend over workers and lube up, for more of the same in 2020...
I profoundly disagree with the notion that Russiagate had anything to do with Hillary's
collusion with the DNC. Gosh, that is naive at best.
1) Hillary didn't need to collude against Sanders - the additional money that she got from
doing so was small change compared the to overall amount she raised for her campaign.
2) Sanders was a long-time friend of the Clintons. He boasted that he's known Hillary
for over 25 years.
3) Sanders was a sheepdog meant to keep progressives in the Democratic Party. He was
never a real candidate. He refused to attack Hillary on character issues and remained loyal
even after Hillary-DNC collusion was revealed.
When Sanders had a chance to total disgrace Hillary, he refused to do so. Hillary
repeatedly said that she had NEVER changed for vote for money but Warren had proven that
she had: Hillary changed her vote on the Bankruptcy Bill for money from the credit card
industry.
4) Hillary didn't try to bury her collusion with the DNC (as might be expected), instead
she used it to alienate progressive voters by bring Debra Wasserman-Shultz into her
campaign.
5) Hillary also alienated or ignored other important constituencies: she wouldn't
support an increase in the minimum wage but accepted $750,000 from Goldman Sachs for a
speech; she took the black vote for granted and all-but berated a Black Lives Matters
activist; and she called whites "deplorables".
Hillary threw the race to her OTHER long-time friend in the race: Trump. The
Deep-State wanted a nationalist and that's just what they got.
6) Hillary and the DNC has shown NO REMORSE whatsoever about colluding with Sanders and
Sanders has shown no desire whatsoever to hold them accountable.
IMO Russiagate (Russian influence on Trump) and accusations of "Russian meddling" in the
election are part of the same McCarthyist psyop to direct hate at Russia and stamp out any
dissent. Trump probably knowingly, played into the Deep State's psyop by:
> hiring Manafort;
> calling on Russia to release Hillary's emails;
> talking about Putin in a admiring way.
And it accomplished much more than hating on Russia:
> served as excuse for Trump to do Deep State bidding;
> distracted from the real meddling in the 2016 election;
> served as a device for settling scores:
- Assange isolated
(Wikileaks was termed an "agent of a foreign power");
- Michael Flynn forced to resign
(because he spoke to the Russian ambassador).
hopehely , Mar 23, 2019 3:49:15 PM |
link The US owes Russia an official apology. And also Russia should get its stolen
buildings and the consulate back. And maybe to get paid some compensation for the injustice
and for damages suffered. Without that, the Russiagate is not really over.
If memory serves me correctly, the initial accusations of collusion between DJT's
presidential campaign and the Kremlin came from Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company hired
by the Democratic National Committee to oversee the security of its computers and databases.
This was done to deflect attention away from Hillary Clinton's illegal use of a personal
server at home to conduct government business during her time as US State Secretary (2009 -
2013), business which among other things included plotting with the US embassy in Libya (and
the then US ambassador Chris Stevens) to overthrow Muammar Gaddhafi's government in 2011, and
conspiring also to overthrow the elected government in Honduras in 2010.
The business of Christopher Steele's dossier (part or even most of which could have been
written by Sergei Skripal, depending on who you read) and George Papadopoulos' conversation
with the half-wit Australian "diplomat" Alexander Downer in London were brought in to bolster
the Russiagate claims and make them look genuine.
As B says, Crowdstrike does indeed have a Ukrainian nationalist agenda: its founder and
head Dmitri Alperovich is a Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council (the folks who fund
Bellingcat's crapaganda) and which itself receives donations from Ukrainian oligarch Viktor
Pinchuk. Crowdstrike has some association with one of the Chalupa sisters (Alexandra or
Andrea - I can't be bothered dredging through DuckDuckGo to check which - but one of them was
employed by the DNC) who donated money to the Maidan campaign that overthrew Viktor
Yanukovych's government in Kiev in February 2014.
thanks b... i would like russiagate to be finished, but i tend to see it much like kadath
@2.. the link @2 is worth the read as a reminder of how far the usa has sunk in being a
nation of passive neocons... emptywheel can't say no to this as witnessed by her article
from today.. ) as a consequence, i agree with @14 dh-mtl's conclusion - "It looks today
like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of many indicators."
the irony for those of us who don't live in the usa, is we are going to have watch this
sad state of affairs continue to unravel, as the usa and the west continue to unravel in
tandem.. the msm as corporate mouthpiece is not going to be tell us anything of relevance..
instead it will be continued madcow, or maddow bullshit 24-7... amd as kadath notes @2 - if
any of them are to step up as a truth teller - they will be marginalized or silenced... so
long as the mainstream swallow what they are fed in the msm, the direction of the titanic is
still on track...
@19 hopehely... you can forget about anything like that happening..
What Difference Does it Make?
They don't really need Russia-gate anymore. It bought them time. As we speak nuclear bombers
make runs near Russian borders every day and Russian consulates get attacked with heavy
weaponry in the EU and no Russian outlet is even making a reference,while Israel is ready to
move heavy artillery in to Golan targeting Russia bases in Syria and China raking all their
deals for civilian projects in the Med.
Russia got stuffed in the corner getting all the punches.
What a horrible witch hunt, but the msm will keep on denying and keep creating new hoaxes
about Trump, Russia.
Heck the media even deny there was no collussion, they keep spinning it in different ways!
Thanks for citing Caitlin Johnstone's wonderful epitaph, b--Russiavape indeed!
During the fiasco, the Outlaw US Empire provided excellent proof to the world that it does
everything it accused Russia of doing and more, while Russia's cred has greatly risen.
Meanwhile, there're numerous other crimes Trump, his associates, Clinton, her
associates--like Pelosi--ought to be impeached, removed from office, arrested, then tried in
court, which is diametrically opposed to the current--false--narrative.
Scotch Bingeington , Mar 23, 2019 4:47:39 PM |
link
The people who steered us into two years of Russiavape insanity are the very last people
anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world.
Yes, absolutely. And not just regarding the world's future, but even if you happen to be
in the same building with one of them and he/she bursts into your already smoke-filled room
yelling that the house is on fire.
Btw, whatever authority has ever ruled that "ex-MI6 dude" Steele (who doesn't remind me of
steel at all, but rather of a certain nondescript entity named Anthony Blair) is in fact
merely 'EX'? He himself? The organisation? The Queen perhaps?
Expose them at every opportunity, they should not get away with this like nothing
happend:
If you think a single Russiagate conspiracist is going to be held accountable for media
malpractice, you clearly haven't been awake the past 2 decades. No one will pay for being
wrong. This profession is as corrupt & rotten as the kleptocracy it serves
defeatism isn't the answer -- should remind & mock these hacks every opportunity.
Just need to be aware of the beast we're up against.
The establishment plays on peoples fears and so we all sink together as we all cling to
our "lesser evils", tribal allegiances, and try to avoid the embarrassment of being
wrong.
Although everyone is aware of the corruption and insider dealing, no one seems to want to
acknowledge the extent, or to think critically so as to reveal any more than we already
know.
It's almost as though corruption (the King's nudity) is a national treasure and revealing
it would be a national security breach in the exceptional nation.
And so to the Deep State cabal continues to rule unimpeded.
The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by
inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the
American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives,
getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote
this story on a daily basis for nearly three years
Posted by: Ken | Mar 23, 2019 2:09:31 PM | 4
You people don't get it do you?
'The Plan' was to get rid of Turkey-Russia-Israel (and a few others) with one fell
swoop....
Russia gate was both a diversion from the real collusions (Russian Mafia , China and Israel)
and a clever ruse to allow Trump to back off from his campaign promise to improve relations
with Russia. US policy toward Russia is no different under Trump than it was during Obamas
administration. Exactly what the Russia Gaters wanted and Trump delivered.
That Mueller could find nothing more than some tax/money laundering/perjury charges in
which the culprits in the end get pardoned is hardly surprising given his history. Want
something covered up? Put Mueller on it.
To show how afraid Trump was of Mueller he appointed his long term friend Barr as AJ and
pretended he didn't know how close they were when it came out. There is no lie people wont
believe. Lol
Meanwhile Trumps Russian Mafia connections stay under the radar in MSM, Trump continues as
Bibi's sock puppet, the fake trade war with China continues as Ivanka is rolling in China
trademarks .
The Rothschild puppet that bailed out Trumps casinos as Commerce Secretary overseeing
negotiations that will open the doors for more US and EU (they willy piggy back on the deal
like hyenas) jobs to go to China (this time in financial/services) and stronger IPR
protections that will facilitate this transfer, and will provide companies more profits in
which to buyback stocks but wont bring manufacturing jobs back.
The collusion story has been hit badly and it will likely lose its momentum, but I wonder how
far reaching this loss of momentum is. There are many variants. The 'unwitting accomplice' is
an oxymoron which isn't finished yet. The Russians hacking the election: not over. The
Russians sowing discord and division. Not over. Credibility of the Russiagate champions
overall? Not clear. Some could take a serious hit. Brennan and other insiders who made it
onto cable tv?
It is possible that the whole groupthink about Russiagate changes drastically
and that 'the other claims' also lose their credibility but it's far from certain. After
years of building up tension Russia's policies are also changing. I think they have shown
restraint but their paranoia and aggressiveness is also increasing and some claims will
become true after all.
"Russiagate" has always been a meaningless political fraud.
When folks like Hillary Clinton sign on to something and give it a great deal of weight,
you really do know you are talking about an empty bag of tricks. She is a psychopathic liar,
one with a great deal of blood on her hands.
My problem with this official result is that it may tend to give Trump a boost, new
credibility.
The trouble with Trump has never been Russia - something only blind ideologues and people
with the minds of children believe - it is that he is genuinely ignorant and genuinely
arrogant and loud-mouthed - an extremely dangerous combination.
And in trying to defend himself, this genuine coward has completely surrendered American
foreign policy to its most dangerous enemies, the Neocons.
Blaming Russiagate on Hillary is very easy for those who hate her or hope that Trump will
deliver on his faux populist fake-agenda.
No one wants to contemplate the possibility that Hillary and Trump, and the duopoly they
lead, fixed the election and planned Russiagate in advance.
It seems a bridge too far, even for the smart skeptics at MoA.
So funny.
Trump has proven himself to be a neocon. He broke his campaign promise to investigate
Hillary within DAYS of being elected. He has brought allies of his supposed enemies into his
Administration.
Yet every one turns from the possibility that the election was fixed. LOL.
The horrible possibility that our "democracy" is managed is too horrible to contemplate.
Lets just blame it all on Hillary.
Those who have been holding their breath for two years can finally exhale. I guess the fever
of hysteria will have to be attended a while longer. A malady of this kind does not easily
die out overnight. Those who have been taken in, and duped for so long, can not so easily
recover. The weight of so much cognitive dissonance presses down on them like a boulder. The
dust of the stampeded herd behind Russiagate is enough paralyze the will of those who have
succumbed.
As Joseph Conrad once wrote, "The ways of human progress are inscrutable."
Russiagate is a pendulum, it reached the dead point, it would hange in the air for a moment,
then it would start swinging right backwards at full speed crashign everything in the way!
It would be revealed, it was Russia who paid Muller to start that hysteria and stole money
from American tax-payers and make America an international laughing stock. "Putin benefited
from it", highly likely!
Muller's investigation is paid for with Manafort's seized cash and property and Manafort
has made Yanukovich king of Ukraine, so Manafort is Putin's agent, so Muller is working of
Putin's money, so it was Putin's collusion everything that Muller is doing! Highly
likely.
There is no "Liberal Media". Those whom claim to be Liberal and yet support the Warmonger
Democratic Party (Republican lite) are frauds. Liberalism does not condone war and it most
certainly does not support wars of aggression - especially those wars waged against
defenseless nations. Neither can liberalism support trade sanctions or the subjugation of
Palestinians in the Apartheid State of ISreal.
We must be very careful with the words we choose, in order to paint the correct
conjuncture and not to throw the bathtub with the baby inside.
It's one thing to say Bernie Sanders is not a revolutionary; it's another completely
different thing to say he was in cahoots with the Clintons.
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary. Not only he chose to do so, but he only didn't win
because the DNC threw all its weight against him.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist. He's an imperialist who believes the
spoils of the empire should be also used to build a Scandinavian-style Welfare State for the
American people only. A cynic would tell you this would make him a Nazi without the race
theme, but you have to keep in mind societies move in a dialectical patern, not a linear one:
if you preach for "democratic socialism", you're bringing the whole package, not only the
bits you want.
I believe the rise of Bernie Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it
exists. Americans are more aware of their own contradictions (more enlightened) now than
before he disputed those faithful primaries of 2016. And the most important ingredient for
that, in my opinion, was the fact he was crushed by both parties; that the "establishment"
acted in unison not to let him get near the WH. That was a didactic moment for the American
people (or a signficant part of it).
But I agree Russiagate went well beyond just covering the Clintons' dirt in the DNC.
It may have be born like that, but, if that was the case, the elites quickly realized it
had other, ampler practical uses. The main one, in my opinion, was to drive a wedge between
Trump's Clash of Civilizations's doctrine -- which perceives China as the main long term
enemy, and Russia as a natural ally of the West -- and the public opinon. The thing is most
of the American elite is far too dependent on China's productive chain; Russia is not, and
can be balkanized.
There is a funny video compilation of the TV talking heads predicting the end of Trump, new
bombshells, impeachment, etc., over the last two years.
Unfortunately, the same sort of compilation could be made of sane people predicting "this new
information means the end of Russiagate" over the same time period.
The truth is that the truth doesn't matter, only the propaganda, and it has not stopped, only
spun onto new hysteria.
As others have said, hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been
wrong all along. They have too much emotional investment in the grand conspiracy theory to
simply let it go. Rather, they will forever point to what they believe are genuine bits of
evidence and curse Mueller for not following the leads. And the Dems in the House of
Representatives will waste more time and resources on pointless investigations in an effort
to keep the public sufficiently distracted from more important matters, such as the endless
wars and coups that they support. A pox on all their houses, both Democrats and
Republicans.
"...hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been wrong all along."
Wrong about what? There seems to be "narrative" operative here that there are only two
positions on this matter: the "right" one and the "wrong" one and nothing else.
Ben's and other comments might make this a little bit superfluous but it's short.
A case of divide and conquer against the population
This time it was a fabricated scandal.
Continued control over "facts" and narratives, the opportunity for efficient misdirection
and distraction, stealing and wasting other people's time and effort, spurious disagreements,
wearing down relations.
The illusion of choice, (false) opposition, blinded "oversight", and mythical claims
concerning a civilian government (in the case of the US: "of, for, and by" or something like
that).
Who knew or knows is irrelevant as long as the show goes on. There's nothing to prove
anything significant about who if anyone may or may not be behind the curtain and thus on
towards the next big or small scandal we go because people will be dissatisfied and hungry
and ready to bite as hard as possible on some other bait for or against something.
Maybe "Russiagate" was impeccably engineered or maybe it organically outcompeted other
distractions on offer that would ultimately also waste enormous amounts of time and
effort.
Management by crisis
The scandals, crises, "Science says" games and rubbish, outrage narratives, and any other
manipulations attempt and perhaps succeed at controlling the US and the world through
spam.
Jonathan @39: Of course it was fixed. That's what the Electoral College is for.
Well, you can say the same think about money-as-speech , gerrymandering, voter
suppression, etc. Despite all these, Americans believe that their democracy works.
I contend that what we witnessed in 2016 was a SHOW. Like American wrestling. It was
(mostly) fake. The proper term for this is kayfabe .
My advice to the yanks mourning Russiagate: move to the UK. The sick Brits will keep the
Russia hating cult alive even after they spend a decade puking over Brexit.
Jackrabbit @18
So, you don't think HRC qualifies as a nationalist? She can't fake populist, but she can do
nationalist.
I also think she is much too ambitious to have intentionally thrown the election. It was her
turn dammit! Take a look at her behavior as First Lady if you think she's the kind of
personality that is content to wield power from behind the scenes.
They didn't fall for the Steele dossier. I recall that emptywheel had discredited the dossier
during the election as it was known to have been rejected by major media outlets leading up
to the election. I think they merely fell behind the others as the outgoing administration,
the Democrats, the CIA, and the media chose to use the dossier to 'blackmail' Trump.
The most important fruit of russiagate, from the view of the establishment of the hegemon, is
that America has now taken a giant step towards full bore censorship.
We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby
inside.
Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the
bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary.
Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?
Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told
Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's
typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's
that?
The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him
and Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.
Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax
returns. Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the
press asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of
returns). Bernie refused.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie
Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things
for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.
What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate,
meaningless astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like
open borders. These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the
Democrats and another 4 years for Trump.
Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character
issues and to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other
examples: Bernie refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's
well known work to squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer
Flowers), and didn't talk about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make")
and her glee at the overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").
And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find
that even a little bit strange?
We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby
inside.
Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the
bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary.
Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?
Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told
Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's
typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's that?
The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him and
Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.
Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax returns.
Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the press
asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of
returns) . Bernie refused.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie
Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things
for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.
What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate, meaningless
astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like open borders.
These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the Democrats and
another 4 years for Trump.
Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character issues and
to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other examples: Bernie
refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's well known work to
squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer Flowers), and didn't talk
about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make") and her glee at the
overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").
And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find that
even a little bit strange?
mourning dove @57: Exactly! It's the Electoral College that decides elections, not
voters.
Do you think Hillary didn't know that? She refused to campaign in the three mid-western
states that would've won her the electoral college. Each of the states were won by Trump by a
thin margin.
Gosh and Blimey!
Comment #56 in a thread about an utterly corrupt political system and no-one has mentioned
the pro-"Israel" Lobby?
Words fail me. So I'll use someone else's...
From Xymphora March 21, 2019.
"Truth or Trope?" (Sailer):
"Of the top 50 political donors to either party at the federal level in 2018, 52 percent
were Jewish and 48 percent were gentile. Individuals who identify as Jewish are usually
estimated to make up perhaps 2.2 percent of the population.
Of the $675 million given by the top 50 donors, 66 percent of the money came from Jews and 34
percent from gentiles.
Of the $297 million that GOP candidates and conservative causes received from the top 50
donors, 56 percent was from Jewish individuals.
Of the $361 million Democratic politicians and liberal causes received, 76 percent came from
Jewish givers.
So it turns out that Rep. Omar and Gov. LePage appear to have been correct, at least about
the biggest 2018 donors. But you can also see why Pelosi wanted Omar to just shut up about
it: 76 percent is a lot."
Next up another false flag operation. The thing is, it would have be non-trivial and
involving the harming of people to jolt the narrative back to that favoring the deep state.
And taking off the proverbial media table, that Mueller found no collusion. Yes, election in
2016 no collusion, but Putin was behind the latest horrific false flag, "oh look, Trump is
not confronting Putin"...
Not even getting into the "treason", "putin's c*ckholster", "what's the time on Moscow,
troll!" crap we've been subjected to for 3 years, please enjoy this mashup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjUvfZj-Fm0.
I've said before that she's a terrible strategist and she ran a terrible campaign and she's
terribly out of touch. I think she expected a cake walk and was relying on Trump being so
distasteful to voters that they'd have no other option.
I think Trump legitimately won the election and I don't believe for a second that she won the
popular vote. There were so many problems with the election but since they were on the losing
side, nobody cares. In 2012 I didn't know anyone else who was voting for Jill Stein, way too
many people were still in love with Obama. She got .4% of the vote. In 2016 most of the
people I knew were voting for Jill Stein, she drew a large crowd from DemExit, but they say
she got .4% of the vote. Total bullshit. There was also ballot stuffing and lots of other
problems, but it still wasn't enough.
I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her
elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and
the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way.
Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough
to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has
helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller
to prove.
It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that
Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the
"national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify
the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon.
It is time to build
cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony.
Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it.
The truth will work better.
"... RussiaGate was never a sustainable narrative. It was ludicrous from the beginning. And now that it has ended with a whimper there are a lot of angry, confused and scared people out there. ..."
"... And now his report is in. There are no new indictments. And by doing so he is saving his reputation for the future. And that is your biggest tell that Hillary's blackmail is now worthless. ..."
"... They don't fear her anymore because RussiaGate outed her as the architect. Anything else she has is irrelevant in the face of trying to oust a sitting president from power. ..."
"... The Deep State and The Davos Crowd stand revealed and reviled. If they don't do something dramatic then the anger from the rest of the country will also be palpable come election time. Justice is not done simply by saying, "No evidence of collusion." ..."
"... It's clear that RussiaGate is a failure of monumental proportions. Heads will have to roll. But who will be willing to fall on their sword at this point? Comey? No. McCabe? No. ..."
"... If there is no collusion, if RussiaGate is a scam, then all roads lead back to Hillary as the sacrificial lamb. ..."
"... If there is any hope of salvaging the center of this country for the Democrats, the ones that voted against Hillary in 2016, then there is no reason anymore not to indict Hillary as the architect of RussiaGate. ..."
"... And hope that is enough bread and circuses to distract from the real storm ahead of us. ..."
"... Hillary is the epitome of evil. ..."
"... I don't think Hillary is enough. I want McCabe, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Loretta Lynch, Obama, Lois Lerner, Blasey Ford, Brennan, Clapper, Abedin, Weiner, Cheryl Mills, Susan Rice, Strzok, Page, Sally Yates, all of the phony FISA cohort brought to justice. ..."
"... Her DNC cabal cooked in less than 24 hours from the election defeat a conspiracy of Russian meddling and now, when more information became available, HCR is involved in two separate cases of foreign collusion, The Steele dossier, with Russo-Anglo meddling and another a Ukrainian one, which is now under investigation and the purpose was getting their help for becoming elected. ..."
"... Without a doubt the Russian collusion is the most serious one, because it deliberately sabotaged diplomatic relations with Russia and lead into to a new cold war era. This also raised substantially risks for a direct confrontation with catastrophic consequences. The damage from these treacherous acts is huge and the felony bears pretty much all hallmarks of treason. Se deliberately undermined her own nation´s interests and rather risked even a war simply, because she is a psychopath, who refused to concede the defeat in due elections and instead wanted to hide real reasons for her loss to any cost for everybody else, "because it was her turn to get elected". ..."
"... HIS NAME WAS SETH RICH ..."
"... It is clear that from the beginning, fraudulent FISA warrants, that it was a case of Obama's administration digging dirt on Trump believing that when Hillary wins there will be nobody to hold them responsible ..."
"... When Hillary lost there was only one way out for them to justify that kind of abuse, to find something, anything on Trump so they can say that they were right. Worse than Watergate by orders of magnitude, involving FBI, DOJ and WH itself. ..."
During most of the RussiaGate investigation against Donald Trump I kept saying that all
roads lead to Hillary Clinton.
Anyone with three working brain cells knew this, including
'Miss' Maddow, whose tears of disappointment are particularly delicious.
Robert Mueller's investigation was designed from the beginning to create something out of
nothing. It did this admirably.
It was so effective it paralyzed the country for more than two years, just like Europe has
been held hostage by Brexit. And all of this because, in the end, the elites I call The Davos
Crowd refused to accept that the people no longer believed their lies about the benefits of
their neoliberal, globalist agenda.
Hillary Clinton's ascension to the Presidency was to be their apotheosis along with the
Brexit vote. These were meant to lay to rest, once and for all time, the vaguely libertarian
notion that people should rule themselves and not be ruled by philosopher kings in some distant
land.
Hillary's failure was enormous. And the RussiaGate gambit to destroy Trump served a laundry
list of purposes to cover it:
Undermine his legitimacy before he even takes office.
Accuse him of what Hillary actually did: collude with Russians and Ukrainians to effect
the outcome of the election
Paralyze Trump on his foreign policy desires to scale back the Empire
Give aid and comfort to hurting progressives and radicalize them further undermining our
political system
Polarize the electorate over the false choice of Trump's guilt.
Paralyze the Dept. of Justice and Congress so that they would not uncover the massive
corruption in the intelligence agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.
Isolate Trump and take away every ally or potential ally he could have by turning them
against him through prosecutor overreach.
Hillary should have been thrown to the wolves after she failed. When you fail the people she
failed and cost them the money she cost them, you lose more than just your funding. What this
tells you is that Hillary has so much dirt on everyone involved, once this thing started
everyone went along with it lest she burn them down as well.
Burnin' Down da House
Hillary is the epitome of envy. Envy is the destructive sin of coveting someone else's life
so much they are obsessed with destroying it. It's the sin of Cain. She envies what Trump has,
the Presidency. And she was willing to tear it down to keep him from having it no matter how
much damage it would do. She's worse than the Joker from The Dark Knight.
Because while the Joker is unfathomable to someone with a conscience there's little stopping
us from excising him from the community completely., even though Batman refuses.
Hillary hates us for who we are and what we won't give her. And that animus drove her to
blackmail the world while putting on the face of its savior.
And that's what makes what comes next so obvious to me. RussiaGate was never a sustainable
narrative. It was ludicrous from the beginning. And now that it has ended with a whimper there
are a lot of angry, confused and scared people out there.
Mueller thought all he had to do was lean on corrupt people and threaten them with
everything. They would turn on Trump. He would resign in disgrace from the public outcry. It
didn't work. In the end Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and Roger Stone all held their ground or
perjured themselves into the whole thing falling apart.
Andrew Weissman's resignation last month was your tell there was nothing. Mueller would
pursue this to the limit of his personal reputation and no further. Just like so many other
politicians.
Vote Your Pocketbook
With respect to Brexit I've been convinced that it would come down to reputations. Would the
British MP's vote against their own personal best interests to do the bidding of the EU? Would
Theresa May eventually realize her historical reputation would be destroyed if she caves to
Brussels and betrays Brexit in the end? Always bet on the fecklessness of politicians. They
will always act selfishly when put to the test. While leading RussiaGate, Mueller was always
headed here if he couldn't get someone to betray Trump.
And now his report is in. There are no new indictments. And by doing so he is saving his
reputation for the future. And that is your biggest tell that Hillary's blackmail is now
worthless.
They don't fear her anymore because RussiaGate outed her as the architect. Anything else she
has is irrelevant in the face of trying to oust a sitting president from power. The
progressives that were convinced of Trump's treason are bereft; their false hope stripped away
like standing in front of a sandblaster. They will be raw, angry and looking for blood after
they get over their denial.
Everyone else who was blackmailed into going along with this lunacy will begin cutting deals
to save their skins. The outrage over this will not end. Trump will be President when he stands
for re-election.
The Wolves Beckon
The Democrats do not have a chance against him as of right now. When he was caving on
everything back in December it looked like he was done. That there was enough meat on the
RussiaGate bones to make Nancy Pelosi brave. Then she backed off on impeachment talk.
Oops....
... ... ...
The Deep State and The Davos Crowd stand revealed and reviled. If they don't do something
dramatic then the anger from the rest of the country will also be palpable come election time.
Justice is not done simply by saying, "No evidence of collusion."
It's clear that RussiaGate is
a failure of monumental proportions. Heads will have to roll. But who will be willing to fall
on their sword at this point? Comey? No. McCabe? No. There is only one answer. And Obama's
people are still in place to protect him. I said last fall that " Hillary would
indict herself. " And I meant it. Eventually her blackmail and drive to burn it all down
led to this moment.
The circumstances are different than I expected back then, Trump didn't win the mid-terms.
But the end result was always the same. If there is no collusion, if RussiaGate is a scam, then
all roads lead back to Hillary as the sacrificial lamb.
Because the bigger project, the erection of a transnational superstate, is bigger than any
one person. Hillary is expendable. Lies are expensive to maintain. The truth is cheap to
defend. Think of the billions in opportunity costs associated with this. Once the costs rise
above the benefits, change happens fast. If there is any hope of salvaging the center of this
country for the Democrats, the ones that voted against Hillary in 2016, then there is no reason
anymore not to indict Hillary as the architect of RussiaGate.
We all know it's the truth. So, the cheapest way out of this mess for them is to give the
MAGApedes what they want, Hillary.
And hope that is enough bread and circuses to distract from the real storm ahead of us.
I don't think Hillary is enough. I want McCabe, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Loretta Lynch,
Obama, Lois Lerner, Blasey Ford, Brennan, Clapper, Abedin, Weiner, Cheryl Mills, Susan Rice,
Strzok, Page, Sally Yates, all of the phony FISA cohort brought to justice. Think of the
taxpayer money wasted on this ridiculous Mueller investigation! The Roger Stone arrest was an
outrage. Who tipped off CNN? Who ordered it? What was with the attack dogs and machine guns?
And now we have Nadler trying to destroy anyone and everyone who ever did business with
Trump. All those 80 people who got letters from him asking for documents will now be
bankrupted by legal fees.
According to Scott Adams, one recipient is refusing to
cooperate -- he's saying "I can't afford for me and family to be destroyed." He put the request
for documents in a drawer. He has no money for lawyers.
This insanity and abuse of power has
got to stop. Meanwhile, nothing gets done in Congress. We're all looking at censorship,
tilted search engines, de-monetization, being beat up on campus for trying to express an
opinion, being accosted in a restaurant (or, VP Pence, from the stage ("Hamilton"), getting
sucker-punched for wearing a MAGA hat, having elections stolen through myriad Dem cheating
methods, and NOTHING is being done.
Her DNC cabal cooked in less than 24 hours from the election defeat a conspiracy of Russian
meddling and now, when more information became available, HCR is involved in two separate
cases of foreign collusion, The Steele dossier, with Russo-Anglo meddling and another a
Ukrainian one, which is now under investigation and the purpose was getting their help for
becoming elected.
Without a doubt the Russian collusion is the most serious one, because it deliberately
sabotaged diplomatic relations with Russia and lead into to a new cold war era. This also
raised substantially risks for a direct confrontation with catastrophic consequences. The
damage from these treacherous acts is huge and the felony bears pretty much all hallmarks of
treason. Se deliberately undermined her own nation´s interests and rather risked even a
war simply, because she is a psychopath, who refused to concede the defeat in due elections
and instead wanted to hide real reasons for her loss to any cost for everybody else, "because
it was her turn to get elected".
It is clear that from the beginning, fraudulent FISA warrants, that it was a case of
Obama's administration digging dirt on Trump believing that when Hillary wins there will be
nobody to hold them responsible.
When Hillary lost there was only one way out for them to
justify that kind of abuse, to find something, anything on Trump so they can say that they
were right. Worse than Watergate by orders of magnitude, involving FBI, DOJ and WH itself.
"... Sites that use Disqus that allow shadow banning or steal and sell your information are just plain evil. ..."
"... The marketing of Russiagate™ was no act of "stupidity". News outlets didn't erroneously "swallow" anything. They acted as agents of the Globalist American Establishment/Deep State which was attempting to shake an interloper (Trump) off its back or, at the very least, to completely tie his hands in policy-making terms. Too bad that same Deep State has created a "Cadillac of (P)residential prerogative over the years which Trump has been driving right over their little blood-stained hands....as an added benefit, this new brand of hyper-partisan "Yellow Journalism" sold papers...to some ..."
"... How many fake headlines were created? How many panels of propaganda spreading "experts" were assembled? How many drooling sycophant hosts made this their everyday routine to stir the 'divide the nation' pot as they swore to God and the American People that the President was an asset of a foreign provocateur subverting the Republic? ..."
One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates. In other words,
the Media's ability to simply ignore criticism enabled them to go off into their own Russiagate universe. Places that still allow
competing narratives and diverse opinions, like ZeroHedge, are the main places I read anymore. If a link leads to WaPo or NYT,
I bail instantly.
Sites that use Disqus that allow shadow banning or steal and sell your information are just plain evil.
Won't even go there.
Bananaamerican , 4 hours ago (Edited)
One thing I massively disagree with Taibbi on: "news outlets once again 'swallowed' a massive disinformation campaign, only
this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included"
The marketing of Russiagate™ was no act of "stupidity". News outlets didn't erroneously "swallow" anything.
They acted as agents of the Globalist American Establishment/Deep State which was attempting to shake an interloper (Trump) off
its back or, at the very least, to completely tie his hands in policy-making terms. Too bad that same Deep State has created a
"Cadillac of (P)residential prerogative over the years which Trump has been driving right over their little blood-stained hands....as
an added benefit, this new brand of hyper-partisan "Yellow Journalism" sold papers...to some
4 hours ago
(Edited)
Spot on. There was no misunderstanding. Everyone in The Swamp and MSM knew and accepted their assigned roles. That's why their
was nary a retraction. Retractions played no part in their goals.
Nael, 1 hour ago
Agreed. They were totally complicit. How many fake headlines were created? How many panels of propaganda spreading "experts" were
assembled? How many drooling sycophant hosts made this their everyday routine to stir the 'divide the nation' pot as they swore
to God and the American People that the President was an asset of a foreign provocateur subverting the Republic?
All of this reminds me of the first combat scene in 'Full Metal Jacket'. Joker is being
helicoptered into the battle at Hue, and the door gunner is just firing his M-60 nonstop, yelling 'Get some! Come on! Get
some!', as people below are running and getting shot. Joker says, 'Aren't you afraid that you might be killing innocent
women......or children?'. The door gunner says,
If they run, they're VC.
If they stand still, they're WELL TRAINED VC!'.
No matter the result, what is found or is not, to the left, Trump will always be waiting for
his next check written in Cyrillic and denominated in rubles.
"... At Netanyahu's behest, Flynn and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly took the lead in the lobbying to derail the U.N. resolution, which Flynn discussed in a phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (in which the Russian diplomat rebuffed Flynn's appeal to block the resolution). ..."
"... In this case, what Flynn and Kushner were doing was going directly against US foreign policy, because Obama wanted the resolution to pass; He just didn't want to vote for it because that would cross the Israel lobby in the United States. The US finally ended up abstaining on the resolution and it passed 14-0. ..."
"... But before that happened, Flynn went to the Russians and to Egypt, both members of the Security Council, and tried to get the resolution delayed. But all of Israel's machinations to derail this resolution failed and that is what Mueller was investigating, the intervention and disruption of American foreign policy by private citizens who had no official role. ..."
"... While I think Bibi is an idiot, I also think the Logan Act is overinvoked, overstated, probably of dubious legal value and also of dubious constitutional value. ..."
"... In short, especially because Trump had been elected, though not yet inaugurated, I think he is not at all guilty of a Logan Act violation. This is nothing close to Spiro Agnew calling Anna Chenault from the airplane in August 1968. ..."
"... Probably true, although evidence of extreme collusion with Israel eliminates any case against Russia, with whom we have far more reasons for amity. Bringing out the Israel collusion greatly improves public understanding of political corruption. Perhaps it will awaken some to the Agnew-Chennault betrayal of the people of the US. ..."
"... It's ironic that Russia-gate is turning out to be Israel's effort to distract attention from its complete control over the Democratic party in 2016. From Israeli billionaires behind the scenes to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz at the helm. ..."
"... "Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an enemy state." So that is how it works, the White House says it is an enemy state and therefore it is. The so called declaration is the hammer used for trying to make contact with Russia a criminal offense. We are not at war with Russia although we see our leaders doing their best to provoke Russia into one. ..."
"... The Israel connection disclosed by the malpracticer hack Mueller in the recent Flynn-flam just made Trump bullet-proof (so to speak). ..."
"... So Mueller caught Kushner and Flynn red-handed, sabotaging the Obama administration? What of it? He can't use that evidence, because it would inculpate the Zionist neocons that are orchestrating his farcical, Stalinist witchhunt. And Mueller, being an efficient terminator bot, knows that his target is Russia, not Israel. ..."
"... So Mueller will just have to continue swamp-fishing for potential perjurers ahem witnesses, for the upcoming show trials (to further inflame public opinion against Russia and Russia sympathizers). And continue he will, because (as we all know from Schwarzenegger's flicks), the only way to stop the terminator is to terminate him/it first. ..."
"... Trump and Kushner have nothing to worry about, even if a smoking gun is found that proves their collusion with Israel. That's because the entire political and media establishment will simply ignore the Israeli connection. ..."
"... Journalists and politicians will even continue to present Mike Flynn's contacts as evidence of collusion with Russia. They'll keep on repeating that "Flynn lied about his phone call to the Russian ambassador". But there will be no mention of the fact that the purpose of this contact was to support Israel and not any alleged Russian interference. ..."
"... I think you have it right Brendan. The MSM, Intelligence Community, and Mueller would never go down any path that popularized undue Israeli influence on US foreign policy. "Nothing to see here folks, move along." ..."
"... The Nice Zionists responsible for the thefts and murders for the past 69 years along with the "Jewish Community" in the rest of the world will resolve the matter so as to be fair to both parties. This is mind-boggling fantasy. ..."
"... FFS, Netanyahu aired a political commercial in Florida for Romney saying vote for this guy (against Obama)! I mean, it doesn't get any more overtly manipulative than that. Period. End of story. ..."
"... God, I hate to go all "Israel controls the media" but there it is. Not even a discussion. Just a fact. ..."
"... I also have to point out that he "fist pumped" Hillary Clinton at Mohammed Ali's eulogy. If he's as astute as he purports to be, he has to know that Hillary would have invaded Syria and killed a few hundred thousand more Syrians for the simple act of defiantly preserving their country. By almost any read of Ali's history, he would have been adamantly ("killing brown people") against that. But there was Silverstein using the platform to promote, arguably, perpetual war. ..."
"... Yeah I found a couple of Silverstein's statements to be closer to neocon propaganda than reality: "Because this is Israel and because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel lobby . . ." "Instead of going directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible relations, they went to Trump instead." My impression was that the whole "terrible relationship between Obama and Netanyahu" was manufactured by the Israel lobby to bully Obama. However these are small blips within an otherwise solid critique of the Israel lobby's influence. ..."
The Israel-gate Side of Russia-gate December 23, 2017
While unproven claims of Russian meddling in U.S. politics have whipped Official Washington
into a frenzy, much less attention has been paid to real evidence of Israeli interference in
U.S. politics, as Dennis J Bernstein describes.
In investigating Russia's alleged meddling in U.S. politics, special prosecutor Robert
Mueller uncovered evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressured the Trump
transition team to undermine President Obama's plans to permit the United Nations to censure
Israel over its illegal settlement building on the Palestinian West Bank, a discovery
referenced in the plea deal with President Trump's first National Security Adviser Michael
Flynn.
At Netanyahu's behest, Flynn and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly took
the lead in the lobbying to derail the U.N. resolution, which Flynn discussed in a phone call
with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (in which the Russian diplomat rebuffed Flynn's appeal
to block the resolution).
I spoke on Dec, 18 with independent journalist and blogger Richard Silverstein, who writes
on national security and other issues for a number of blogs at Tikun Olam .
Dennis Bernstein: A part of Michael Flynn's plea had to do with some actions he took before
coming to power regarding Israel and the United Nations. Please explain.
Richard Silverstein:
The Obama administration was negotiating in the [UN] Security Council
just before he left office about a resolution that would condemn Israeli settlements.
Obviously, the Israeli government did not want this resolution to be passed. Instead of going
directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible relations, they went to
Trump instead. They approached Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner became involved in this. While
they were in the transition and before having any official capacity, they negotiated with
various members of the Security Council to try to quash the settlement resolution.
One of the issues here which is little known is the Logan Act, which was passed at the
foundation of our republic and was designed to prevent private citizens from usurping the
foreign policy prerogatives of the executive. It criminalized any private citizen who attempted
to negotiate with an enemy country over any foreign policy issue.
In this case, what Flynn and Kushner were doing was going directly against US foreign
policy, because Obama wanted the resolution to pass; He just didn't want to vote for it because
that would cross the Israel lobby in the United States. The US finally ended up abstaining on
the resolution and it passed 14-0.
But before that happened, Flynn went to the Russians and to Egypt, both members of the
Security Council, and tried to get the resolution delayed. But all of Israel's machinations to
derail this resolution failed and that is what Mueller was investigating, the intervention and
disruption of American foreign policy by private citizens who had no official role.
This speaks to the power of the Israel lobby and of Israel itself to disrupt our foreign
policy. Very few people have ever been charged with committing an illegal act by advocating on
behalf of Israel. That is one of the reasons why this is such an important development. Until
now, the lobby has really ruled supreme on the issue of Israel and Palestine in US foreign
policy. Now it is possible that a private citizen will actually be made to pay a price for
that.
This is an important development because the lobby till now has run roughshod over our
foreign policy in this area and this may act as a restraining order against blatant disruption
of US foreign policy by people like this.
Bernstein: So this information is a part of Michael Flynn's plea. Anyone studying this would
learn something about Michael Flynn and it would be part of the prosecution's
investigation.
Silverstein:
That's absolutely right. One thing to note here is that it is reporters who
have raised the issue of the Logan Act, not Mueller or Flynn's people or anyone in the Trump
administration. But I do think that Logan is a very important part of this plea deal, even if
it is not mentioned explicitly.
Bernstein: If the special prosecutor had smoking-gun information that the Trump
administration colluded with Russia, in the way they colluded with Israel before coming to
power, this would be a huge revelation. But it is definitely collusion when it comes to
Israel.
Silverstein: Absolutely. If this were Russia, it would be on the front page of every major
newspaper in the United States and the leading story on the TV news. Because this is Israel and
because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel lobby and they have so much influence
on US policy concerning Israel, it has managed to stay on the back burner. Only two or three
media outlets besides mine have raised this issue of Logan and collusion. Kushner and Flynn may
be the first American citizens charged under the Logan Act for interfering on behalf of Israel
in our foreign policy. This is a huge issue and it has hardly been raised at all.
Bernstein: As you know, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has made a career out of investigating the
Russia-gate charges. She says that she has read all this material carefully, so she must have
read about Flynn and Israel, but I haven't heard her on this issue at all.
Silverstein:
Even progressive journalists, who you'd think would be going after this with a
vengeance, are frightened off by the fact the lobby really bites back. So, aside from outlets
like the Intercept and the Electronic Intifada, there is a lot of hesitation about going after
the Israel lobby. People are afraid because they know that there is a high price to be paid. It
goes from being purely journalism to being a personal and political vendetta when they get you
in their sights. In fact, one of the reasons I feel my blog is so important is that what I do
is challenge Israeli policy and Israeli intervention in places where it doesn't belong.
Bernstein: Jared Kushner is the point man for the Trump administration on Israel. He has
talked about having a "vision for peace." Do you think it is a problem that this is someone
with a long, close relationship with the prime minister of Israel and, in fact, runs a
foundation that invests in the building of illegal Israeli settlements? Might this be
problematic?
Silverstein:
It is quite nefarious, actually. When Jared Kushner was a teenager, Netanyahu
used to stay at the Kushner family home when he visited the United States. This relationship
with one of the most extreme right political figures in Israel goes back decades. And it is not
just Kushner himself, but all the administration personnel dealing with these so-called peace
negotiations, including Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, the ambassador. These are all
orthodox Jews who tend to have very nationalist views when it comes to Israel. They all support
settlements financially through foundations. These are not honest brokers.
We could talk at length about the history of US personnel who have been negotiators for
Middle East peace. All of them have been favorable to Israel and answerable to the Israel
lobby, including Dennis Ross and Makovsky, who served in the last administration. These people
are dyed-in-the-wool ultra-nationalist supporters of [Israeli] settlements. They have no
business playing any role in negotiating a peace deal.
My prediction all along has been that these peace negotiations will come to naught, even
though they seem to have bought the cooperation of Saudi Arabia, which is something new in the
process. The Palestinians can never accept a deal that has been negotiated by Kushner and
company because it will be far too favorable to Israel and it will totally neglect the
interests of the Palestinians.
Bernstein: It has been revealed that Kushner supports the building of settlements in the
West Bank. Most people don't understand the politics of what is going on there, but it appears
to be part of an ethnic cleansing.
Silverstein:
The settlements have always been a violation of international law, ever since
Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967. The Geneva Conventions direct an occupying power to
withdraw from territory that was not its own. In 1967 Israel invaded Arab states and conquered
the West Bank and Gaza but this has never been recognized or accepted by any nation until
now.
The fact that Kushner and his family are intimately involved in supporting
settlements–as are David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt–is completely outrageous. No
member of any previous US administration would have been allowed to participate with these
kinds of financial investments in support of settlements. Of course, Trump doesn't understand
the concept of conflict of interest because he is heavily involved in such conflicts himself.
But no party in the Middle East except Israel is going to consider the US an honest broker and
acceptable as a mediator.
When they announce this deal next January, no one in the Arab World is going to accept it,
with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia because they have other fish to fry in terms of
Iran. The next three years are going to be interesting, supposing Trump lasts out his term. My
prediction is that the peace plan will fail and that it will lead to greater violence in the
Middle East. It will not simply lead to a vacuum, it will lead to a deterioration in conditions
there.
Bernstein: The Trump transition team was actually approached directly by the Israeli
government to try to intercede at the United Nations.
Silverstein:
I'm assuming it was Netanyahu who went directly to Kushner and Trump. Now, we
haven't yet found out that Trump directly knew about this but it is very hard to believe
that Trump didn't endorse this. Now that we know that Mueller has access to all of the emails
of the transition team, there is little doubt that they have been able to find their smoking
gun. Flynn's plea meant that they basically had him dead to rights. It remains to be seen what
will happen with Kushner but I would think that this would play some role in either the
prosecution of Kushner or some plea deal.
Bernstein: The other big story, of course, is the decision by the Trump administration to
move the US embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. Was there any pre-election collusion in that
regard and what are the implications?
Silverstein:
Well, it's a terrible decision which goes against forty to fifty years of US
foreign policy. It also breaches all international understanding. All of our allies in the
European Union and elsewhere are aghast at this development. There is now a campaign in the
United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the announcement, which we will
veto, but the next step will be to go to the General Assembly, where such a resolution will
pass easily.
The question is how much anger, violence and disruption this is going to cause around the
world, especially in the Arab and Muslim world. This is a slow-burning fuse. It is not going to
explode right now. The issue of Jerusalem is so vital that this is not something that is simply
going to go away. This is going to be a festering sore in the Muslim world and among
Palestinians. We have already seen attacks on Israeli soldiers and citizens and there will be
many more.
As to collusion in all of this, since Trump always said during the campaign that this was
what he was going to do, it might be difficult to treat this in the same way as the UN
resolution. The UN resolution was never on anybody's radar and nobody knew the role that Trump
was playing behind the scenes with that–as opposed to Trump saying right from the get-go
that Jerusalem was going to be recognized as the capital of Jerusalem.
By doing that, they have completely abrogated any Palestinian interest in Jerusalem. This is
a catastrophic decision that really excludes the United States from being an honest broker here
and shows our true colors in terms of how pro-Israel we are.
As most regular readers of CN already know, some dynamite books on the inordinate amount
of influence pro-Israel zealots have on Washington:
1.) 'The Host and the Parasite' by Greg Felton
2.) 'Power of Israel in the United States' by James Petras
3.) 'They Dare to Speak Out' by Paul Findley
4.) 'The Israel Lobby' by Mearsheimer and Walt
5.) 'Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of U.S. Power' by James Petras
I suggest that anyone relatively knew to this neglected topic peruse a few of the
aforementioned titles. An inevitable backlash by the citizens of the United States is
eventually forthcoming against the Zionist Power Configuration. It's crucial that this
impending backlash remain democratic, non-violent, eschews anti-Semitism, and travels in a
progressive in direction.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 5:47 pm
Which one would you suggest? I already read "The Israel Lobby."
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:38 pm
Findley and Mearsheimer are certainly worthwhile. I will look for Petras.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:38 pm
If you haven't already read them, the end/footnotes in "The Israel Lobby" are more
illuminating.
That influence is also shown, of course, by the fact that Obama waited until the midnight
hours of his tenure and after the 2016 election to even start working on this resolution.
While I think Bibi is an idiot, I also think the Logan Act is overinvoked, overstated,
probably of dubious legal value and also of dubious constitutional value.
In short, especially because Trump had been elected, though not yet inaugurated, I think
he is not at all guilty of a Logan Act violation. This is nothing close to Spiro Agnew
calling Anna Chenault from the airplane in August 1968.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:41 pm
Probably true, although evidence of extreme collusion with Israel eliminates any case
against Russia, with whom we have far more reasons for amity. Bringing out the Israel
collusion greatly improves public understanding of political corruption. Perhaps it will
awaken some to the Agnew-Chennault betrayal of the people of the US.
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:32 am
It's ironic that Russia-gate is turning out to be Israel's effort to distract attention
from its complete control over the Democratic party in 2016. From Israeli billionaires behind
the scenes to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz at the helm.
The leaked emails showed the corruption
plainly, and based on the ACTUAL evidence (recorded download time), most likely came from a
highly disgruntled insider. The picture was starting to spill into public view. I'd estimate
the real huge worry was that if this stuff came out, it could bring out other Israeli
secrets, like their involvement in 9/11. That would mean actual jail time. Might be hard to
buy your way out of that no matter how much money you have.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 10:48 pm
The Logan act states that anyone who negotiates with an enemy of the US, and Israel is not
defined as an enemy.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 6:59 pm
The Logan act would not apply here, although I wish it would. I don't think anyone has
been convicted based on this act, and they were part of a transition team not to mention the
Logan act clearly states a private citizen who attempts to negotiate with an enemy state, and
that certainly doesn't apply to Israel. In this administration their bias is so blatant that
they can install Kushner as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestine peace process while his
family has a close relationship with Netanyahu, and he runs a foundation that invests in the
building of illegal settlements which goes against the Geneva conventions. Hopefully Trump's
blatant siding with Israel will receive a lot of backlash as did his plan to make Jerusalem
the capital of Israel.
I also found that so called progressive internet sites don't cover this the way they
should.
Al Pinto , December 24, 2017 at 9:16 am
@Annie
"The Logan act would not apply here, although I wish it would."
You and me both .
From the point of starting to read this article, it has been in my mind that the Logan act
would not apply here. After reading most of the comments, it became clear that not many
people viewed this as such. Yes, Joe Tedesky did as well
The UN is the "clearing house" for international politics, where countries freely contact
each other's for getting support for their cause behind the scene. The support sought after
could be voting for or against the resolution on hand. At times, as Israel did, countries
reach out to perceived enemies as well, if they could not secure sufficient support for their
cause. This is the normal activity of the UN diplomacy.
Knowing that the outgoing administration would not support its cause, Israel reached out
to the incoming administration to delay the vote on the UN resolution. I fail to see anything
wrong with Israel's action even in this case; Israel is not an enemy state to the US. As
such, there has been no violation of any acts by the incoming administration, even if they
tried to secure veto vote for Israel. I do not like it, but no action by Mueller in this case
is correct.
People, just like the article in itself, implying that the Logan Act applies in this case
are just plain wrong. Not just wrong, but their anti-Israel bias is in plain view.
Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an
enemy state. Even then, Russia contacting the incoming administration is not a violation of
the Logan Act. That is just normal diplomacy in the background between countries. What would
be a violation is that the contacted official acted on the behalf of Russia and tried to
influence the outgoing administration's decision. That is what the Mueller investigation
tries to prove hopelessly
"Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an
enemy state." So that is how it works, the White House says it is an enemy state and
therefore it is. The so called declaration is the hammer used for trying to make contact with
Russia a criminal offense. We are not at war with Russia although we see our leaders doing
their best to provoke Russia into one.
Annie , December 24, 2017 at 1:55 pm
Thanks for your reply. When I read the article and it referenced the Logan Act, which I am
familiar with in that I've read about it before, I was surprised that Bernstein and
Silverstein even brought it up because it so obviously does not apply in this case, since
Israel is not considered an enemy state. Many have even referenced it as flimsy when it comes
to convictions against those in Trump's transition team who had contacts with Russia. No one
has ever been convicted under the Logan Act.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:41 pm
The Logan Act either should apply equally, or not apply at all. This "Russia-gate" hype
seems to apply it selectively.
mrtmbrnmn , December 23, 2017 at 7:36 pm
You guys are blinded by the light. The Israel connection disclosed by the malpracticer
hack Mueller in the recent Flynn-flam just made Trump bullet-proof (so to speak).
There is no doubt that Trump is Bibi's and the Saudi's ventriloquist dummy and Jared has
been an Israel agent of influence since he was 12.
But half the Dementedcrat Sore Loser Brigade will withdraw from the field of battle (not
to mention most of the GOP living dead too) if publically and noisily tying Israel to Trump's
tail becomes the only route to his removal. Which it would have to be, as there is no there
there regarding the yearlong trumped-up PutinPutinPutin waterboarding of Trump.
Immediately (if not sooner) the mighty (pro-Israel) Donor Bank of Singer (Paul), Saban
(Haim), Sachs (Goldman) & Adelson (Sheldon), would change their passwords and leave these
politicians/beggars with empty begging bowls. End of $ordid $tory.
alley cat , December 23, 2017 at 7:45 pm
So Mueller caught Kushner and Flynn red-handed, sabotaging the Obama administration? What
of it? He can't use that evidence, because it would inculpate the Zionist neocons that are
orchestrating his farcical, Stalinist witchhunt. And Mueller, being an efficient terminator
bot, knows that his target is Russia, not Israel.
Mueller can use that evidence of sabotage and/or obstruction of justice to try to coerce
false confessions from Kushner and Flynn. But what are the chances of that, barring short
stayovers for them at some CIA black site?
So Mueller will just have to continue swamp-fishing for potential perjurers ahem
witnesses, for the upcoming show trials (to further inflame public opinion against Russia and
Russia sympathizers). And continue he will, because (as we all know from Schwarzenegger's
flicks), the only way to stop the terminator is to terminate him/it first.
Leslie F. , December 23, 2017 at 8:28 pm
He used it, along with other info, to turn flip Flynn and possibly can use it the same way
again Kusher. Not all evidence has end up in court to be useful.
JWalters , December 23, 2017 at 8:40 pm
This is an extremely important story, excellently reported. All the main "facts" Americans
think they know about Israel are, amazingly, flat-out lies.
1. Israel was NOT victimized by powerful Arab armies. Israel overpowered and victimized a
defenseless, civilian Arab population. Military analysts knew the Arab armies were in poor
shape and would not be able to resist the zionist army.
2. Muslim "citizens" of Israel do NOT have all the same rights as Jews.
3. Israelis are NOT under threat from the indigineous Palestinians, but Palestinians are
under constant threats of theft and death from the Israelis.
4. Israel does NOT share America's most fundamental values, which rest on the principle of
equal human rights for all.
Maintaining such a blanket of major lies for decades requires immense power. And this
power would have to be exercised "under the radar" to be effective. That requires even more
power. Both Congress and the press have to be controlled. How much power does it take to turn
"Progressive Rachel" into "Tel Aviv Rachel"? To turn "It Takes a Village" Hillary into
"Slaughter a Village" Hillary? It takes immense power AND ruthlessness.
War profiteers have exactly this combination of immense war profits and the ruthlessness
to victimize millions of people. "War Profiteers and the Roots of the War on Terror" http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com
Vast war profits easily afford to buy the mainstream media. And controlling campaign
contributions for members of Congress is amazingly cheap in the big picture. Such a squalid
sale of souls.
And when simple bribery is not enough, they ruin a person's life through blackmail or
false character assassination. And if those don't work they use death threats, including to
family members, and finally murder. Their ruthlessness is unrestrained. John Perkins has
described these tactics in "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man".
For readers who haven't seen it, here is an excellent riff on the absurdly overwhelming
evidence for Israel's influence compared to that of Russia, at a highly professional news and
analysis website run by Jewish anti-Zionists. "Let's talk about Russian influence" http://mondoweiss.net/2016/08/about-russian-influence/
mike k , December 23, 2017 at 8:44 pm
Hitler and Mussolini, Trump and Netanyahoo – matches made in Hell. These characters
are so obviously, blatantly evil that it is deeply disturbing that people fail to see that,
and instead go to great lengths to find some complicated flaws in these monsters.
mike k , December 23, 2017 at 8:49 pm
Keep it simple folks. No need for complex analyses. Just remember that these characters as
simply as evil as it gets, and proceed from there. These asinine shows that portray mobsters
as complex human beings are dangerously deluding. If you want to be victimized by these
types, this kind of overthinking is just the way to go.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 9:00 pm
There is a modern theory of fiction that insists upon the portrayal of inconsistency in
characters, both among the good guys and the bad guys. It is useful to show how those who do
wrongs have made specific kinds of errors that make them abnormal, and that those who do
right are not perfect but nonetheless did the right thing. Instead it is used by commercial
writers to argue that the good are really bad, and the bad are really good, which is of
course the philosophy of oligarchy-controlled mass publishers.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:54 pm
A very important article by Dennis Bernstein, and it is very appropriate that non-zionist
Jews are active against the extreme zionist corruption of our federal government. I am sure
that they are reviled by the zionists for interfering with the false denunciations of racism
against the opponents of zionism. Indeed critics face a very nearly totalitarian power of
zionism, which in league with MIC/WallSt opportunism has displaced democracy altogether in
the US.
backwardsevolution , December 23, 2017 at 9:18 pm
A nice little set-up by the Obama administration. Perhaps it was entrapment? Who set it
up? Flynn and Kushner should have known better to fall for it. So at the end of his
Presidency, Obama suddenly gets balls and wants to slap down Israel? Yeah, right.
Nice to have leverage over people, though, isn't it? If you're lucky and play your cards
right, you might even be lucky enough to land an impeachment.
Of course, I'm just being cynical. No one would want to overturn democracy, would
they?
Certainly people like Comey, Brenner, Clinton, Clapper, Mueller, Rosenstein wouldn't want
that, would they?
Joe Tedesky , December 23, 2017 at 10:33 pm
I just can't see any special prosecutor investigating Israel-Gate. Between what the
Zionist donors donate to these creepy politicians, too what goods they have on these same
mischievous politicians, I just can't see any investigation into Israel's collusion with the
Trump Administration going anywhere. Netanyahu isn't Putin, and Russia isn't Israel. Plus,
Israel is considered a U.S. ally, while Russia is being marked as a Washington rival. Sorry,
this news regarding Israel isn't going to be ranted on about for the next 18 months, like the
MSM has done with Russia, because our dear old Israel is the only democracy in the Middle
East, or so they tell us. So, don't get your hopes up.
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:33 am
It's true the Israelis have America's politicians by the ears and the balls. But as this
story gets better known, politicians will start getting questions at their town meetings.
Increasingly the politicians will gag on what Israel is force-feeding them, until finally
they reach a critical mass of vomit in Congress.
Joe Tedesky , December 24, 2017 at 11:12 am
I hope you are right JWalters. Although relying on a Zionist controlled MSM doesn't give
hope for the news getting out properly. Again I hope you are right JWalters. Joe
Actually, Netanyahu was so desperate to have the resolution pulled and not voted on that
he reached out to any country that might help him after the foreign minister of New Zealand,
one of its co-sponsors refused to pull the plug after a testy phone exchange with the Israeli
PM ending up threatening an Israeli boycott oturnef the KIwis.
He then turned to his buddy, Vladimir Putin, who owed him a favor for having Israel's UN
delegate absent himself for the UNGA vote on sanctioning Russia after its annexation of
Crimea.
Putin then called Russia's UN Ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, since deceased, and asked him to
get the other UNSC ambassadors to postpone the vote until Trump took over the White House but
the other ambassadors weren't buying it. Given Russia's historic public position regarding
the settlements, Churkin had no choice to vote Yes with the others.
This story was reported in detail in the Israeli press but blacked out in the US which,
due to Zionist influence on the media, does not want the American public to know about the
close ties between Putin and Netanyahu which has led to the Israeli PM making five state
visits there in the last year and a half.
Had Clinton won the White House we can assume that there would have been no US veto. That
Netanyahu apparently knew in advance that the US planned to veto the resolution was, I
suspect, leaked to the Israelis by US delegate Samantha Power, who was clearly unhappy at
having to abstain.
Abe , December 24, 2017 at 12:39 am
The Israeli Prime Minister made five state visits to Russia in the last year and a half to
make sure the Russians don't accidentally on purpose blast Israeli warplanes from the sky
over Syria (like they oughtta). Putin tries not to snicker when Netanyahu bloviates ad
nauseum about the purported "threat" posed by Iran.
He thinks Putin is a RATS ASS like the yankee government
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:34 am
"This story was reported in detail in the Israeli press but blacked out in the
US"
We've just had a whole cluster of big stories involving Israel that have all been
essentially blacked out in the US press. e.g. "Dionne and Shields ignore the Adelson in the room" http://mondoweiss.net/2017/12/jerusalem-israels-capital
This is not due to chance. There is no doubt that the US mainstream media is wholly
controlled by the Israelis.
alley cat , December 24, 2017 at 4:49 am
"He [Netanyahu] then turned to his buddy, Vladimir Putin "
Jeff, that characterization of Putin and Netanyahu's relationship makes no sense, since
the Russians have consistently opposed Zionism and Putin has been no exception, having
spoiled Zionist plans for the destruction of Syria.
"Had Clinton won the White House we can assume that there would have been no US
veto."
Not sure where you're going with that, since the US vote was up to Obama, who wanted to
get some payback for all of Bibi's efforts to sabotage Obama's treaty with Iran.
For the record, Zionism has had no more rabid supporter than the Dragon Lady. If we're
going to make assumptions, we could start by assuming that if she had won the White House
we'd all be dead by now, thanks to her obsession (at the instigation of her Zionist/neocon
sponsors) with declaring no-fly zones in Syria.
Brendan , December 24, 2017 at 6:18 am
Trump and Kushner have nothing to worry about, even if a smoking gun is found that proves
their collusion with Israel. That's because the entire political and media establishment will
simply ignore the Israeli connection.
Journalists and politicians will even continue to present Mike Flynn's contacts as
evidence of collusion with Russia. They'll keep on repeating that "Flynn lied about his phone
call to the Russian ambassador". But there will be no mention of the fact that the purpose of
this contact was to support Israel and not any alleged Russian interference.
Skip Scott , December 24, 2017 at 7:59 am
I think you have it right Brendan. The MSM, Intelligence Community, and Mueller would
never go down any path that popularized undue Israeli influence on US foreign policy.
"Nothing to see here folks, move along."
The zionist will stop at nothing to control the middle east with American taxpayers
money/military equiptment its a win win for the zionist they control America lock stock and
barrel a pity though it is a great country to be led by a jewish entity.
What will Israel-Palestine look like twenty years from now? Will it remain an apartheid
regime, a regime without any Palestinians, or something different. The Trump decision, which
the world rejects, brings the issue of "final" settlement to the fore. In a way we can go
back to the thirties and the British Mandate. Jewish were fleeing Europe, many coming to
Palestine. The British, on behalf of the Zionists, were delaying declaring Palestine a state
with control of its own affairs. Seeing the mass immigration and chafing at British foot
dragging, the Arabs rebelled, What happened then was that the British, responding to numerous
pressures notably war with Germany, acted by granting independence and granting Palestine
control of its borders.
With American pressure and the mass exodus of Jews from Europe, Jews defied the British
resulting in Jewish resistance. What followed then was a UN plan to divide the land with a
Jerusalem an international city administered by the UN. The Arabs rebelled and lost much of
what the UN plan provided and Jerusalem as an international city was scrapped.
Will there be a second serious attempt to settle the issue of the land and the status of
Jerusalem? Will there be a serious move toward a single state? How will the matter of
Jerusalem be resolved. The two state solution has always been a fantasy and acquiescence of
Palestinians to engage in this charade exposes their leaders to charges of posturing for
perks. Imagined options could go on and on but will there be serious options placed before
the world community or will the boots on the ground Israeli policies continue?
As I have commented before, it will most probably be the Jewish community in Israel and
the world that shapes the future and if the matter is to be resolved that is fair to both
parties, it will be they that starts the ball rolling.
Zachary Smith , December 24, 2017 at 1:34 pm
As I have commented before, it will most probably be the Jewish community in Israel and
the world that shapes the future and if the matter is to be resolved that is fair to both
parties, it will be they that starts the ball rolling.
The Nice Zionists responsible for the thefts and murders for the past 69 years along with
the "Jewish Community" in the rest of the world will resolve the matter so as to be fair to
both parties. This is mind-boggling fantasy.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 5:56 pm
Truly mind-boggling. Ahistorical, and as you say, fantasy.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 5:48 pm
FFS, Netanyahu aired a political commercial in Florida for Romney saying vote for this guy
(against Obama)! I mean, it doesn't get any more overtly manipulative than that. Period. End
of story.
$50K of Facebook ads about puppies pales in comparison to that blatant, prima facia,
public manipulation. God, I hate to go all "Israel controls the media" but there it is. Not even a discussion. Just a fact.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:11 pm
Just for the record, Richard Silverstein blocked me on Twitter because I pointed out that
he slammed someone who was suggesting that the Assad government was fighting for its
(Syria's) life by fighting terrorists. Actually, more specifically, because of that he read
my "Free Palestine" bio on Twitter and called me a Hamas supporter (no Hamas mentioned) and a
"moron" for some seeming contradiction.
I also have to point out that he "fist pumped" Hillary Clinton at Mohammed Ali's eulogy.
If he's as astute as he purports to be, he has to know that Hillary would have invaded Syria
and killed a few hundred thousand more Syrians for the simple act of defiantly preserving
their country. By almost any read of Ali's history, he would have been adamantly ("killing
brown people") against that. But there was Silverstein using the platform to promote,
arguably, perpetual war.
Silverstein is probably not a good (ie. consistent) arbiter of Israeli impact on US
politics. Just sayin'.
This may be a tad ot but it relates to the alleged hacking of the DNC, the role debbie
wasserman schultz plays in the spy ring (awan bros) in house of rep servers: I have long
suspected that mossad has their fingers in this entire mess. FWIW
Good site, BTW.
Zachary Smith , December 24, 2017 at 7:35 pm
I can't recall why I removed the Tikun Olam site from my bookmarks – it happened
quite a while back. Generally I do that when I feel the blogger crossed some kind of personal
red line. Something Mr. Silverstein wrote put him over that line with me.
In the course of a search I found that at the neocon NYT. Mr. Silverstein claims several
things I find unbelievable, and from that alone I wonder about his ultimate motives. I may be
excessively touchy about this, but that's how it is.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 8:51 pm
Yeah Zachary, "wondering about ultimate motives" is probably a good way to put it/his
views. He's obviously conflicted, if not deferential in some aspects of Israeli policy. He
really was a hero of mine, but now I just don't get whether what he says is masking something
or a true belief. He says some good stuff, but, but, but .
P. Michael Garber , December 24, 2017 at 11:54 pm
Yeah I found a couple of Silverstein's statements to be closer to neocon propaganda than
reality: "Because this is Israel and because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel
lobby . . ." "Instead of going directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible
relations, they went to Trump instead." My impression was that the whole "terrible relationship between Obama and Netanyahu" was
manufactured by the Israel lobby to bully Obama. However these are small blips within an otherwise solid critique of the Israel lobby's
influence.
All of this reminds me of the first combat scene in 'Full Metal Jacket'. Joker is being
helicoptered into the battle at Hue, and the door gunner is just firing his M-60 nonstop, yelling 'Get some! Come on! Get
some!', as people below are running and getting shot. Joker says, 'Aren't you afraid that you might be killing innocent
women......or children?'. The door gunner says,
If they run, they're VC.
If they stand still, they're WELL TRAINED VC!'.
No matter the result, what is found or is not, to the left, Trump will always be waiting for
his next check written in Cyrillic and denominated in rubles.
This is the most grandiose False flag propaganda operation known to the mankind. McCarthyism while more vicious was just a blip
of the screen in comparison this this tide of disinformation and insinuations. Iraq WDM resulted in more casualties but was much
more short term. Damage for the USA from this false flag operation might even exceed the damage for Iraq WDM fiasco.
British government and intelligence serves were active participants and in this sense "Skripals poisoning" looks
like a perverted form of "witness protection:" program. A false flag operation on the top of a false flag operation
("Russiagate").
What is amazing is how unapt were the major players.
Notable quotes:
"... Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media. ..."
"... A few weeks after that hearing, Steele gave testimony in a British lawsuit filed by one of the Russian companies mentioned in his reports. In a written submission , Steele said his information was "raw" and "needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified." He also wrote that (at least as pertained to the memo in that case) he had not written his report "with the intention that it be republished to the world at large." ..."
"... That itself was a curious statement, given that Steele reportedly spoke with multiple reporters in the fall of 2016, but this was his legal position. This story about Steele's British court statements did not make it into the news much in the United States, apart from a few bits in conservative outlets like The Washington Times. ..."
"... The Steele report was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of news stories to come, yet no journalist was ever able to confirm its most salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail, the bribe from Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc. In metaphorical terms, we were unable to independently produce Steele's results in the lab. Failure to reckon with this corrupted the narrative from the start. ..."
"... "Just called," Page said to McCabe. "Apparently the DAG [Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates] now wants to be there, and WH wants DOJ to host. So we are setting that up now. ... We will very much need to get Cohen's view before we meet with her. Better, have him weigh in with her before the meeting. We need to speak with one voice, if that is in fact the case." ..."
"... Someday I hope that Hillary has to be rolled up to testify about the Benghazi business. Grab the guns and the gold (and the oil). Ukraine gold: check. Libyan gold and weapons: check. ..."
The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it...
Note to readers: in light of news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigation is complete, I'm releasing this chapter
of Hate Inc. early, with a few new details added up top. Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller
is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.
As has long been rumored
, the former FBI chief's independent probe will result in multiple indictments and convictions, but no "
presidency-wrecking
" conspiracy charges, or anything that would meet the layman's definition of "collusion" with Russia.
With the caveat that even this news might somehow turn out to be botched, the key detail in the many stories about the end of
the Mueller investigation was best expressed
by the New York Times :
A senior Justice Department official said that Mr. Mueller would not recommend new indictments.
The Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn
of the Trump presidency in Mueller. Nobody even pretended it was supposed to be a fact-finding mission, instead of an act of faith.
The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with
votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members
singing "
All I Want for Christmas is You " to him featuring the rhymey line: "Mueller please come through, because the only option is
a coup."
The Times story today tried to preserve Santa Mueller's reputation, noting Trump's Attorney General William Barr's reaction was
an "endorsement" of the fineness of Mueller's work:
In an apparent endorsement of an investigation that Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked as a "witch hunt," Mr. Barr said Justice
Department officials never had to intervene to keep Mr. Mueller from taking an inappropriate or unwarranted step.
Mueller, in other words, never stepped out of the bounds of his job description. But could the same be said for the news media?
For those anxious to keep the dream alive, the Times published its usual graphic of Trump-Russia "contacts," inviting readers
to keep making connections. But in a
separate piece by Peter
Baker , the paper noted the Mueller news had dire consequences for the press:
It will be a reckoning for President Trump, to be sure, but also for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for Congress,
for Democrats, for Republicans, for the news media and, yes, for the system as a whole
This is a damning page one admission by the Times. Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its other story, and despite the astonishing,
emotion-laden editorial the paper also ran suggesting "
We don't need to read the Mueller
report " because we know Trump is guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for a hard question: "Have
journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?"
The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like themselves made a galactic
error by betting heavily on a
new, politicized approach , trying to be true to "history's judgment" on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse,
in a brutal irony everyone should have
seen coming , the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.
Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps
thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in
a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a "witch hunt."
Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller's final report might leave audiences "
disappointed
," as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.
Openly using such language
has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you'd have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not
match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without
pants.
There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn't prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The
Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters ! There's an ongoing grand jury investigation,
and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and
Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse.
For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped
every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. Now, even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something "so
compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan" against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their political trouble to prosecute.
The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That's a hell of a long way from what
this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn't so.
The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who'd helped
him win the election.
The betrayal narrative was not reported at first as metaphor. It was not "Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as well be
a spy for them." It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing – crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told
reporters, Trump "
will die in jail ."
In the early months of this scandal, the New York Times said Trump's campaign had "repeated contacts" with Russian intelligence;
the Wall Street Journal told us our spy agencies
were withholding intelligence
from the new President out of fear he was compromised; news leaked out our spy chiefs had even told other countries like Israel
not to share their intel with us, because the Russians might have "leverages of pressure" on Trump.
CNN told us Trump officials had been in "constant contact" with "Russians known to U.S. intelligence," and the former director
of the CIA, who'd helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller's probe, said the President was guilty of "high crimes
and misdemeanors," committing acts "
nothing short of treasonous ."
Hillary Clinton insisted Russians "could not have known how to weaponize" political ads unless they'd been "guided" by Americans.
Asked if she meant Trump, she said, "
It's pretty hard not to ." Harry Reid similarly said he had "no doubt" that the Trump campaign was "
in on the
deal " to help Russians with the leak.
None of this has been walked back. To be clear, if Trump were being blackmailed by Russian agencies like the FSB or the GRU, if
he had any kind of relationship with Russian intelligence, that would soar over the "overwhelming and bipartisan" standard, and Nancy
Pelosi would be damning torpedoes for impeachment right now.
There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn't. If he isn't, news outlets once
again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent
past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC's Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a "
reckoning for the media ."
Of course, there won't be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in
pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can't confirm.
#Russiagate debuted as a media phenomenon in mid-summer, 2016. The roots of the actual story, i.e. when the multi-national investigation
began, go back much further, to the previous year at least. Oddly, that origin tale has not been nailed down yet, and blue-state
audiences don't seem terribly interested in it, either.
By June and July of 2016, bits of the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, which
had been funded by the Democratic National Committee through the law firm Perkins Coie (which in turn hired the opposition research
firm Fusion GPS), were already in the ether.
The Steele report occupies the same role in #Russiagate the tales spun by Ahmed Chalabi occupied in the WMD screwup. Once again,
a narrative became turbo-charged when Officials With Motives pulled the press corps by its nose to a swamp of unconfirmable private
assertions.
Some early stories, like a July 4, 2016 piece by Franklin Foer in Slate called "
Putin's Puppet ," outlined future Steele themes in "circumstantial" form. But the actual dossier, while it influenced a number
of pre-election Trump-Russia news stories (notably
one by Michael Isiskoff of Yahoo! that would be
used in a FISA warrant application ), didn't make it into print for a while.
Though it was shopped to
at least nine news organizations during the summer and fall of 2016, no one bit, for the good reason that news organizations
couldn't verify its "revelations."
The Steele claims were explosive if true. The ex-spy reported Trump aide Carter Page had been offered fees on a big new slice
of the oil giant Rosneft if he could help get sanctions against Russia lifted. He also said Trump lawyer Michael Cohen went to Prague
for "secret discussions with Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers."
Most famously, he wrote the Kremlin had kompromat of Trump "deriling" [sic] a bed once used by Barack and Michelle Obama by "employing
a number of prostitutes to perform a 'golden showers' (urination) show."
The piece didn't have pee, Prague, or Page in it, but it did say Russian intelligence had material that could "blackmail" Trump.
It was technically kosher to print because Corn wasn't publishing the allegations themselves, merely that the FBI had taken possession
of them.
A bigger pretext was needed to get the other details out. This took place just after the election, when four intelligence officials
presented copies of the dossier to both President-Elect Trump and outgoing President Obama.
From his own
memos , we know FBI Director James Comey, ostensibly evincing concern for Trump's welfare, told the new President he was just
warning him about what was out there, as possible blackmail material:
I wasn't saying [the Steele report] was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports
were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give
them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were keeping it very close-hold [sic].
Comey's generous warning to Trump about not providing a "news hook," along with a promise to keep it all "close-held," took place
on January 6, 2017. Within four days, basically the entire Washington news media somehow knew all about this top-secret meeting and
had the very hook they needed to go public. Nobody in the mainstream press thought this was weird or warranted comment.
Even Donald Trump was probably smart enough to catch the hint when, of all outlets, it was CNN that first broke the story of "Classified
documents presented last week to Trump"
on January 10 .
At the same time, Buzzfeed
made
the historic decision to publish the entire Steele dossier, bringing years of pee into our lives. This move birthed the Russiagate
phenomenon as a never-ending, minute-to-minute factor in American news coverage.
Comey was right. We couldn't have reported this story without a "hook." Therefore the reports surrounding Steele technically weren't
about the allegations themselves, but rather the journey of those allegations, from one set of official hands to another. Handing
the report to Trump created a perfect pretext.
This trick has been used before, both in Washington and on Wall Street, to publicize unconfirmed private research. A short seller
might hire a consulting firm to prepare a report on a company he or she has bet against. When the report is completed, the investor
then tries to get the SEC or the FBI to take possession. If they do, news leaks the company is "under investigation," the stock dives,
and everyone wins.
This same trick is found in politics. A similar trajectory
drove negative headlines in the scandal surrounding New Jersey's Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who was said to be under investigation
by the FBI for underage sex crimes (although some
were skeptical
). The initial story didn't hold up, but led to other investigations.
Same with the so-called "
Arkansas project ," in which millions of Republican-friendly private research dollars produced enough noise about the Whitewater
scandal to create years of headlines about the Clintons. Swiftboating was another example. Private oppo isn't inherently bad. In
fact it has led to some incredible scoops, including Enron. But reporters usually know to be skeptical of private info, and figure
the motives of its patrons into the story.
The sequence of events in that second week of January, 2017 will now need to be heavily re-examined. We now know,
from his own testimony , that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had some kind of role in helping CNN do
its report, presumably by confirming part of the story, perhaps through an intermediary or two (there is some controversy over whom
exactly was contacted, and when).
Why would real security officials help litigate this grave matter through the media? Why were the world's most powerful investigative
agencies acting like they were trying to move a stock, pushing an private, unverified report that even Buzzfeed could see had factual
issues? It
made no sense at the time , and makes less now.
In January of 2017, Steele's pile of allegations became public, read by millions. "It is not just unconfirmed," Buzzfeed
admitted
. "It includes some clear errors."
Buzzfeed's decision exploded traditional journalistic standards against knowingly publishing material whose veracity you doubt.
Although a few media ethicists wondered
at it , this seemed not to bother the rank-and-file in the business. Buzzfeed chief Ben Smith is still
proud of
his decision today. I think this was because many reporters believed the report was true.
When I read the report, I was in shock. I thought it read like fourth-rate suspense fiction (I should know: I write fourth-rate
suspense fiction). Moreover it seemed edited both for public consumption and to please Steele's DNC patrons.
Steele wrote of Russians having a file of "compromising information" on Hillary Clinton, only this file supposedly lacked "details/evidence
of unorthodox or embarrassing behavior" or "embarrassing conduct."
We were meant to believe the Russians, across decades of dirt-digging, had an empty kompromat file on Hillary Clinton, to say
nothing of human tabloid headline Bill Clinton? This point was made more than once in the reports, as if being emphasized for the
reading public.
There were other curious lines, including the bit about Russians having "moles" in the DNC, plus some linguistic details that
made me wonder at the nationality of the report author.
Still, who knew? It could be true. But even the most cursory review showed the report had issues and would need a lot of confirming.
This made it more amazing that the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, held hearings on March 20,
2017 that blithely read out Steele report details as if they were fact. From Schiff's opening statement:
According to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. Intelligence,
Russian sources tell him that Page has also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin (SEH-CHIN), CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft
Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company.
I was stunned watching this. It's generally understood that members of congress, like reporters, make an effort to vet at least
their prepared remarks before making them public.
But here was Schiff, telling the world Trump aide Carter Page had been offered huge fees on a 19% stake in Rosneft – a company
with a $63 billion market capitalization – in a secret meeting
with a Russian oligarch who was also said to be "a KGB agent and close friend of Putin's."
(Schiff meant "FSB agent." The inability of #Russiagaters to remember Russia is not the Soviet Union became increasingly maddening
over time. Donna Brazile still hasn't deleted her tweet about how "
The Communists are now dictating the
terms of the debate ." )
Schiff's speech raised questions. Do we no longer have to worry about getting accusations right if the subject is tied to Russiagate?
What if Page hadn't done any of these things? To date, he hasn't been charged with anything. Shouldn't a member of Congress worry
about this?
A few weeks after that hearing, Steele gave testimony in a British lawsuit filed by one of the Russian companies mentioned in
his reports. In a
written submission , Steele said his information was "raw" and "needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified." He
also wrote that (at least as pertained to the memo in that case) he had not written his report "with the intention that it be republished
to the world at large."
That itself was a curious statement, given that Steele reportedly spoke with multiple reporters in the fall of 2016, but this
was his legal position. This story about Steele's British court statements did not make it into the news much in the United States,
apart from a few bits in conservative outlets like The Washington Times.
I contacted Schiff's office to ask if the congressman if he knew about Steele's admission that his report needed verifying, and
if that changed his view of it at all. The response (emphasis mine):
The dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and which was leaked publicly several months
ago contains information that may be pertinent to our investigation. This is true regardless of whether it was ever intended for
public dissemination. Accordingly, the Committee hopes to speak with Mr. Steele in order to help substantiate or refute each of
the allegations contained in the dossier.
Schiff had not spoken to Steele before the hearing, and read out the allegations knowing they were unsubstantiated.
The Steele report was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of news stories to come, yet
no journalist was ever able to confirm its most salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail, the bribe from
Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc. In metaphorical terms, we were unable to independently produce Steele's results in the
lab. Failure to reckon with this corrupted the narrative from the start.
For years, every hint the dossier might be true became a banner headline, while every time doubt was cast on Steele's revelations,
the press was quiet. Washington Post reporter Greg Miller went to Prague and led a team looking for evidence Cohen had been there.
Post reporters, Miller said, "literally spent weeks and months trying to run down" the Cohen story.
"We sent reporters through every hotel in Prague, through all over the place, just to try to figure out if he was ever there,"
he said, "and came away empty."
This was heads-I-win, tails-you-lose reporting. One assumes if Miller found Cohen's name in a hotel ledger, it would have been
on page 1 of the Post. The converse didn't get a mention in Miller's own paper. He only told the story during a discussion
aired by C-SPAN about a new book he'd published. Only The Daily Caller and a few conservative blogs picked it up.
It was the same when Bob Woodward said, "I did not find [espionage or collusion] Of course I looked for it, looked for it hard."
The celebrated Watergate muckraker – who once said he'd
succumbed to "groupthink"
in the WMD episode and added, "I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder" – didn't push very hard here, either. News that
he'd tried and failed to find collusion didn't get into his own paper. It only came out when Woodward was promoting his book Fear
in a discussion with conservative host Hugh Hewitt.
When Michael Cohen testified before congress and denied under oath ever being in Prague, it was the same. Few commercial news
outlets bothered to take note of the implications this had for their previous reports. Would a man clinging to a plea deal lie to
congress on national television about this issue?
Perhaps worst of all was the episode involving Yahoo! reporter Michael Isikoff. He had already been part of one strange tale:
the FBI double-dipping when it sought a FISA warrant to conduct secret surveillance of Carter Page, the would-be mastermind who was
supposed to have brokered a deal with oligarch Sechin.
In its FISA application, the FBI included both the unconfirmed Steele report and Isikoff's September 23, 2016 Yahoo! story, "
U.S. Intel Officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin ." The Isikoff story, which claimed Page had met with "high
ranking sanctioned officials" in Russia, had relied upon Steele as an unnamed source.
This was similar to a laundering technique used in the WMD episode called "stove-piping," i.e. officials using the press to "confirm"
information the officials themselves fed the reporter.
But there was virtually no non-conservative press about this problem apart from a Washington Post story pooh-poohing the issue.
(Every news story that casts any doubt on the collusion issue seems to meet with an instantaneous "fact check" in the Post .) The
Post insisted the FISA issue wasn't serious among other things because Steele was not the "foundation" of Isikoff's piece.
Isikoff was perhaps the reporter most familiar with Steele. He and Corn of Mother Jones , who also dealt with the ex-spy, wrote
a bestselling book that relied upon theories from Steele, Russian Roulette , including a rumination on the "pee" episode. Yet Isikoff
in late 2018 suddenly said he believed the Steele report would turn out to be "
mostly
false ."
Once again, this only came out via a podcast, John Ziegler's "Free Speech Broadcasting" show. Here's a transcript of the relevant
section:
Isikoff: When you actually get into the details of the Steele dossier, the specific allegations, you know, we have not seen
the evidence to support them. And in fact there is good grounds to think some of the more sensational allegations will never be
proven, and are likely false.
Ziegler: That's...
Isikoff: I think it's a mixed record at best at this point, things could change, Mueller may yet produce evidence that changes
this calculation. But based on the public record at this point I have to say that most of the specific allegations have not been
borne out.
Ziegler: That's interesting to hear you say that, Michael because as I'm sure you know, your book was kind of used to validate
the pee tape, for lack of a better term.
Isikoff: Yeah. I think we had some evidence in there of an event that may have inspired the pee tape and that was the visit
that Trump made with a number of characters who later showed up in Moscow, specifically Emin Agalarov and Rob Goldstone to this
raunchy Las Vegas nightclub where one of the regular acts was a skit called "Hot For Teacher" in which dancers posing as college
Co-Ed's urinated – or simulated urinating on their professor. Which struck me as an odd coincidence at best. I think, you know,
it is not implausible that event may have inspired...
Ziegler: An urban legend?
Isikoff: ...allegations that appeared in the Steele dossier.
Isikoff delivered this story with a laughing tone. He seamlessly transitioned to what he then called the "real" point, i.e. "the
irony is Steele may be right, but it wasn't the Kremlin that had sexual kompromat on Donald Trump, it was the National Enquirer.
"
Recapping: the reporter who introduced Steele to the world (his September 23, 2016 story was the first to reference him as a source),
who wrote a book that even he concedes was seen as "validating" the pee tape story, suddenly backtracks and says the whole thing
may have been based on a Las Vegas strip act, but it doesn't matter because Stormy Daniels, etc.
Another story of this type involved a court case in which Webzilla and parent company XBT sued Steele and Buzzfeed over the mention
their firm in one of the memos. It came out in court testimony that Steele had culled information about XBT/Webzilla from a
2009 post on CNN's "iReports"
page .
Asked if he understood these posts came from random users and not CNN journalists who'd been fact-checked, Steele replied, "
I do not ."
This comical detail was similar to news that the second British Mi6 dossier released just before the Iraq invasion had been
plagiarized in part from a thirteen year-old student thesis from California State University, not even by intelligence people,
but by mid-level functionaries in Tony Blair's press office.
There were so many profiles of Steele as an "
astoundingly
diligent " spymaster straight
out of LeCarre : he was routinely
described like a LeCarre-ian grinder like the legendary George Smiley, a man in the shadows whose bookish intensity was belied
by his "average," "neutral," "quiet," demeanor, being "more low-key than Smiley." One would think it might have rated a mention that
our "Smiley" was cutting and pasting text like a community college freshman. But the story barely made news.
This has been a consistent pattern throughout #Russiagate. Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or weeks later: news emerges
the story is shakier than first believed. Step three (in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the
same publication.
That's been rare. More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development,
leaving the "retraction" process to conservative outlets that don't reach the original audiences.
This is a major structural flaw of the
new fully-divided media
landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither
"side" feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly.
This has been the main difference between Russiagate and the WMD affair. Despite David Remnick's post-invasion protestations that
"nobody got [WMD] completely right," the Iraq war was launched against the objections of the 6 million or more people who did get
it right, and protested on the streets
. There was open skepticism of Bush claims dotting the press landscape from the start, with people like
Jack Shafer tearing apart every Judith Miller story
in print. Most reporters are Democrats and the people hawking the WMD story were mostly Republicans, so there was political space
for protest.
Russiagate happened in an opposite context. If the story fell apart it would benefit Donald Trump politically, a fact that made
a number of reporters queasy about coming forward. #Russiagate became synonymous with #Resistance, which made public skepticism a
complicated proposition.
Early in the scandal, I appeared on To The Point, a California-based public radio show hosted by Warren Olney, with Corn of Mother
Jones. I knew David a little and had been friendly with him. He once hosted a book event for me in Washington. In the program, however,
the subject of getting facts right came up and Corn said this was not a time for reporters to be picking nits:
So Democrats getting overeager, overenthusiastic, stating things that may not be [unintelligible] true ? Well, tell me a political
issue where that doesn't happen. I think that's looking at the wrong end of the telescope.
I wrote him later and suggested that since we're in the press, and not really about anything except avoiding "things that may
not be true," maybe we had different responsibilities than "Democrats"? He wrote back:
Feel free to police the Trump opposition. But on the list of shit that needs to be covered these days, that's just not high
on my personal list.
Other reporters spoke of an internal struggle. When the Mueller indictment of the Internet Research Agency was met with exultation
in the media, New Yorker writer Adrian Chen, who broke the original IRA story, was
hesitant to come forward with some mild qualms about the way the story was being reported:
"Either I could stay silent and allow the conversation to be dominated by those pumping up the Russian threat," he said, "or I
could risk giving fodder to Trump and his allies."
"What I meant to write is, I wasn't skeptical," he said.
Years ago, in the midst of the WMD affair, Times public editor Daniel Okrent noted the paper's standard had moved from "Don't
get it first, get it right" to "Get it first and get it right." From there,
Okrent wrote , "the next devolution was an obvious one."
We're at that next devolution: first and wrong. The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once "reputable" outlets
are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident.
Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia "bombshells" being walked back, I started to keep a list. It's well
above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you'd
expect them in both directions , but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way.
In some cases the stories are only partly wrong, as in the case of the famed "
17 intelligence agencies said Russia was behind the hacking " story (it was actually four: the Director of National Intelligence
"hand-picking" a team from the FBI, CIA, and NSA).
In other cases the stories were blunt false starts, resulting in ugly sets of matching headlines:
" Trump
Campaign Aides had repeated contacts with Russian Intelligence ," published by the Times on Valentine's Day, 2017, was an important,
narrative-driving "bombshell" that looked dicey from the start. The piece didn't say whether the contact was witting or unwitting,
whether the discussions were about business or politics, or what the contacts supposedly were at all.
Normally a reporter would want to know what the deal is before he or she runs a story accusing people of having dealings with
foreign spies. "Witting" or "Unwitting" ought to be a huge distinction, for instance. It soon after came out that people like former
CIA chief John Brennan don't think this is the case. "Frequently, people who are on a treasonous path do not know they're on a treasonous
path,"
he said, speaking of Trump's circle.
This seemed a dangerous argument, the kind of thing that led to trouble in the McCarthy years. But let's say the contacts were
serious. From a reporting point of view, you'd still need to know exactly what the nature of such contacts were before you run that
story, because the headline implication is grave. Moreover you'd need to know it well enough to report it, i.e. it's not enough to
be told a convincing story off-the-record, you need to be able to share with readers enough so that they can characterize the news
themselves.
Not to the Times, which ran the article without the specifics. Months later, Comey blew up this "contacts" story in public, saying,
" in the
main, it was not true ."
As was the case with the "17 agencies" error, which only got fixed when Clapper testified in congress and was forced to make the
correction under oath, the "repeated contacts" story was only disputed when Comey testified in congress, this time
before the
Senate Intelligence Committee . How many other errors of this type are waiting to be disclosed?
Even the mistakes caught were astounding. On December 1, 2017, ABC reporter Brian Ross claimed Trump "as a candidate" instructed
Michael Flynn to contact Russia. The news caused the Dow to plummet 350 points. The story was retracted almost immediately and
Ross was suspended .
Bloomberg reported Mueller subpoenaed Trump's Deutsche Bank accounts; the subpoenas turned out to be of
other
individuals' records. Fortune said C-SPAN
was hacked after Russia Today programming briefly interrupted coverage of a Maxine Waters floor address. The New York Times
also ran the story, and it's
still up, despite C-SPAN insisting its own "internal routing error" likely caused the feed to appear in place of its own broadcast.
CNN has its own separate sub-list of wrecks. Three of the network's journalists
resigned after a story purporting to tie Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund was retracted. Four more
CNN reporters (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus) were bylined in a story that claimed Comey was expected
to refute Trump's claims he was told he wasn't the target of an investigation. Comey blew that one up, too.
In another CNN scoop gone awry, "
Email pointed Trump campaign to WikiLeaks documents ," the network's reporters were off by ten days in a "bombshell" that supposedly
proved the Trump campaign had foreknowledge of Wikileaks dumps. "It's, uh, perhaps not as significant as what we know now," offered
CNN's Manu Raju in a painful on-air retraction .
The worst stories were the ones never corrected. A particularly bad example is "
After Florida School Shooting,
Russian 'Bot' Army Pounced ," from the New York Times on Feb 18, 2018. The piece claimed Russians were trying to divide Americans
on social media after a mass shooting using Twitter hashtags like #guncontrolnow, #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting.
The Times ran this quote high up:
"This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this," said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge,
a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. "The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically."
About a year after this story came out, Times reporters Scott Shane and Ann Blinder
reported that the same outfit,
New Knowledge , and in particular that same Jonathon Morgan, had participated in a cockamamie scheme to fake Russian troll activity
in an Alabama Senate race. The idea was to try to convince voters Russia preferred the Republican.
The Times quoted a New Knowledge internal report about the idiotic Alabama scheme:
We orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media
by a Russian botnet
The Parkland story was iffy enough when it came out, as Twitter
disputed
it, and another of the main sources for the initial report, former intelligence official Clint Watts, subsequently
said he was "not convinced" on the whole "bot thing."
But when one of your top sources turns out to have faked exactly the kind of activity described in your article, you should at
least take the quote out, or put an update online. No luck: the story remains up on the Times site, without disclaimers.
Russiagate institutionalized one of the worst ethical loopholes in journalism, which used to be limited mainly to local crime
reporting. It's always been a problem that we publish mugshots and names of people merely arrested but not yet found guilty. Those
stories live forever online and even the acquitted end up permanently unable to get jobs, smeared as thieves, wife-beaters, drunk
drivers, etc.
With Russiagate the national press abandoned any pretense that there's a difference between indictment and conviction. The most
disturbing story involved Maria Butina. Here authorities and the press shared responsibility. Thanks to an indictment that initially
said the Russian traded
sex for favors, the Times and other outlets flooded the news cycle with breathless stories about a redheaded slut-temptress come
to undermine democracy, a "real-life Red Sparrow," as ABC put it.
But a judge threw out the sex charge after "five minutes" when it turned out to be based on a
single joke text to a friend who had taken Butina's car for inspection.
It's pretty hard to undo public perception you're a prostitute once it's been in a headline, and, worse, the headlines are still
out there. You can still find stories like "
Maria Butina, Suspected
Secret Agent, Used Sex in Covert Plan " online in the New York Times.
Here a reporter might protest: how would I know? Prosecutors said she traded sex for money. Why shouldn't I believe them?
How about because, authorities have been lying their faces off to reporters since before electricity! It doesn't take much investigation
to realize the main institutional sources in the Russiagate mess – the security services, mainly – have extensive records of deceiving
the media.
As noted before, from World War I-era tales of striking union workers being German agents to the "missile gap" that wasn't (the
"gap" was leaked to the press before the Soviets had even one operational ICBM) to the Gulf of Tonkin mess to all the smears of people
like Martin Luther King, it's a wonder newspapers listen to whispers from government sources at all.
In the Reagan years National Security Adviser John Poindexter spread false stories about Libyan terrorist plots to The Wall Street
Journal and other papers. In the Bush years, Dick Cheney et al were selling manure by the truckload about various connections between
Iraq and al-Qaeda, infamously including a story that bomber Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague.
The New York Times
ran a story that Atta was in Prague in late October of 2001, even giving a date of the meeting with Iraqis, April 8, or "just
five months before the terrorist attacks." The Prague story was another example of a tale that seemed shaky because American officials
were putting the sourcing first on foreign intelligence, then on reporters themselves. Cheney cited the Prague report in subsequent
TV appearances, one of many instances of feeding reporters tidbits and then selling reports as independent confirmation.
It wasn't until three years later, in 2004, that Times reporter James Risen definitively killed the Atta-in-Prague canard (why
is it always Prague?) in a story entitled "
No evidence of meeting with Iraqi ." By then, of course, it was too late. The Times also
held a major dissenting piece by Risen about the WMD case, "C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports," until days
after war started. This is what happens when you start thumbing the scale.
This failure to demand specifics has been epidemic in Russiagate, even when good reporters have been involved. One of the biggest
"revelations" of this era involved a story that was broken first by a terrible reporter (the Guardian's Luke Harding) and followed
up by a good one (Jane Mayer of the New Yorker ). The key detail involved the elusive origin story of Russiagate.
Mayer's piece, the March 12, 2018 "
Christopher
Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier " in the New Yorker , impacted the public mainly by seeming to bolster the credentials
of the dossier author. But it contained an explosive nugget far down. Mayer reported Robert Hannigan, then-head of the GCHQ (the
British analog to the NSA) intercepted a "stream of illicit communications" between "Trump's team and Moscow" at some point prior
to August 2016. Hannigan flew to the U.S. and briefed CIA director John Brennan about these communications. Brennan later testified
this inspired the original FBI investigation.
When I read that, a million questions came to mind, but first: what did "illicit" mean?
If something "illicit" had been captured by GCHQ, and this led to the FBI investigation (one of several conflicting public explanations
for the start of the FBI probe, incidentally), this would go a long way toward clearing up the nature of the collusion charge. If
they had something, why couldn't they tell us what it was? Why didn't we deserve to know?
I asked the Guardian: "Was any attempt made to find out what those communications were? How was the existence of these communications
confirmed? Did anyone from the Guardian see or hear these intercepts, or transcripts?"
Their one-sentence reply:
The Guardian has strict and rigorous procedures when dealing with source material.
That's the kind of answer you'd expect from a transnational bank, or the army, not a newspaper.
I asked Mayer the same questions. She was more forthright, noting that, of course, the story had originally been broken
by Harding , whose
own report said "the precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public."
She added that "afterwards I independently confirmed aspects of [Harding's piece] with several well-informed sources," and "spent
months on the Steele story [and] traveled to the UK twice for it." But, she wrote, "the Russiagate story, like all reporting on sensitive
national security issues, is difficult."
I can only infer she couldn't find out what "illicit" meant despite proper effort. The detail was published anyway. It may not
have seemed like a big deal, but I think it was.
To be clear, I don't necessarily disbelieve the idea that there were "illicit" contacts between Trump and Russians in early 2015
or before. But if there were such contacts, I can't think of any legitimate reason why their nature should be withheld from the public.
If authorities can share reasons for concern with foreign countries like Israel, why should American voters not be so entitled?
Moreover the idea that we need to keep things secret to protect sources and methods and "tradecraft" (half the press corps became
expert in goofy spy language over the last few years, using terms like "SIGINT" like they've known them their whole lives), why are
we
leaking news of our ability to hear Russian officials cheerin g Trump's win?
Failure to ask follow-up questions happened constantly with this story. One of the first reports that went sideways involved a
similar dynamic: the contention that some leaked DNC emails were forgeries.
MSNBC's "Intelligence commentator" Malcolm Nance, perhaps the most enthusiastic source of questionable #Russiagate news this side
of Twitter conspiracist Louise Mensch,
tweeted on October 11, 2016: " #PodestaEmails
are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries &
#blackpropaganda not even professionally done."
As noted in The Intercept and elsewhere, this was re-reported by the likes of
David Frum (a key member of the club that has now contributed to both the WMD and Russiagate panics) and MSNBC host
Joy Reid . The reports didn't stop until roughly October of 2016, among other things because the Clinton campaign kept suggesting
to reporters the emails were fake. This could have been stopped sooner if examples of a forgery had been demanded from the Clinton
campaign earlier.
Another painful practice that became common was failing to confront your own sources when news dispositive to what they've told
you pops up. The omnipresent Clapper told Chuck Todd on March 5, 2017, without equivocation, that there had been no FISA application
involving Trump or his campaign. " I can deny it ," he
said.
It soon after came out this wasn't true. The FBI had a FISA warrant on Carter Page. This was not a small misstatement by Clapper,
because his appearance came a day after Trump claimed in a tweet he'd had his "
wires tapped ." Trump was widely ridiculed for this claim, perhaps appropriately so, but in addition to the Page news, it later
came out there had been a FISA warrant of Paul Manafort as well, during which time Trump may have been the subject of "
incidental " surveillance.
Whether or not this was meaningful, or whether these warrants were justified, are separate questions. The important thing is,
Clapper either lied to Todd, or else he somehow didn't know the FBI had obtained these warrants. The latter seems absurd and unlikely.
Either way, Todd ought to been peeved and demanded an explanation. Instead, he had
Clapper back on again within months and gave him the usual softball routine, never confronting him about the issue.
Reporters repeatedly got burned and didn't squawk about it. Where are the outraged stories about all the scads of anonymous "people
familiar with the matter" who put reporters in awkward spots in the last years? Why isn't McClatchy demanding the heads of whatever
"four people with knowledge" convinced them to
double down on the Cohen-in-Prague story ?
Why isn't every reporter who used "New Knowledge" as a source about salacious
Russian troll stories
out for their heads (or the heads of the congressional sources who passed this stuff on), after reports they faked Russian trolling?
How is it possible NBC and other outlets continued to use
New Knowledge as a source in stories identifying antiwar Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian-backed candidate?
How do the Guardian's editors not already have Harding's head in a vice for hanging them out to dry on the most
dubious un-retracted story in modern history – the tale that the most watched human on earth, Julian Assange, had somehow been
visited in the Ecuadorian embassy by Paul Manafort without leaving any record? I'd be dragging Harding's "well placed source" into
the office and beating him with a hose until he handed them something that would pass for corroborating evidence.
The lack of blowback over episodes in which reporters were put in public compromised situations speaks to the overly cozy relationships
outlets had with official sources. Too often, it felt like a team effort, where reporters seemed to think it was their duty to take
the weight if sources pushed them to overreach. They had absolutely no sense of institutional self-esteem about this.
Being on any team is a bad look for the press, but the press being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump or no Trump. Why bother
having a press corps at all if you're going to go that route?
This posture all been couched as anti-Trump solidarity, but really, did former CIA chief John Brennan – the same Brennan who should
himself have faced charges for
lying to congress about hacking the computers of Senate staff – need the press to
whine on his behalf when Trump yanked his security clearance? Did we need the press to hum Aretha Franklin tunes, as ABC did,
and chide Trump for lacking
R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the CIA? We don't have better things to do than that "work"?
This catalogue of factual errors and slavish stenography will stand out when future analysts look back at why the "MSM" became
a joke during this period, but they were only a symptom of a larger problem. The bigger issue was a radical change in approach.
A lot of #Russiagate coverage became straight-up conspiracy theory, what Baker politely called "connecting the dots ." This was
allowed because the press committed to a collusion narrative from the start, giving everyone cover to indulge in behaviors that would
never be permitted in normal times.
Such was the case with Jonathan
Chait's #Russiagate opus , "PRUMP TUTIN: Will Trump be Meeting With his Counterpart – or his Handler?" The story was also pitched
as "What if Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987," which recalls the joke from The Wire: "
Yo, Herc, what if your mother and father never met ?" What
if isn't a good place to be in this business.
This cover story (!) in New York magazine was released in advance of a planned "face-to-face" summit between Trump and Putin,
and posited Trump had been under Russian control for decades. Chait noted Trump visited the Soviet Union in 1987 and came back "fired
up with political ambition." He offered the possibility that this was a coincidence, but added:
Indeed, it seems slightly insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump and Russia dates back
this far. But it can't be dismissed completely.
I searched the Chait article up and down for reporting that would justify the suggestion Trump had been a Russian agent dating
back to the late eighties, when, not that it matters, Russia was a different country called the Soviet Union.
Only two facts in the piece could conceivably have been used to support the thesis: Trump met with a visiting Soviet official
in 1986, and visited the Soviet Union in 1987. That's it. That's your cover story.
Worse, Chait's theory was first espoused in Lyndon Larouche's "
Elephants and Donkeys " newsletter
in 1987, under a headline, "Do Russians have a Trump card?" This is barrel-scraping writ large.
It's a mania. Putin is literally in our underpants. Maybe, if we're lucky, New York might someday admit
its report claiming Russians set up an anti-masturbation hotline to trap and blackmail random Americans is suspicious, not just
because it seems absurd on its face, but because its source is the same "New Knowledge" group that admitted to faking Russian influence
operations in Alabama.
This ultimately will be the endgame of the Russia charade. They will almost certainly never find anything like the wild charges
and Manchurian Candidate theories elucidated in the Steele report. But the years of panic over the events of 2016 will lead to radical
changes in everything from press regulation to foreign policy, just as the WMD canard led to torture, warrantless surveillance, rendition,
drone assassination, secret budgets and open-ended, undeclared wars from Somalia to Niger to Syria. The screw-ups will be forgotten,
but accelerated vigilance will remain.
It's hard to know what policy changes are appropriate because the reporting on everything involving the Russian threat in the
last two to three years has been so unreliable.
I didn't really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now. I was told early on that this piece
of the story seemed "solid," but even that assertion has remained un-bolstered since then, still based on an "
assessment " by the intelligence services that
always had issues, including the use of things like RT's "anti-American" coverage of fracking as part of its case. The government
didn't even examine the DNC's server, the kind of detail that used to make reporters nervous.
We won't know how much of any of this to take seriously until the press gets out of bed with the security services and looks at
this whole series of events all over again with fresh eyes, as journalists, not political actors. That means being open to asking
what went wrong with this story, in addition to focusing so much energy on Trump and Russia.
The WMD mess had massive real-world negative impact, leading to over a hundred thousand deaths and trillions in lost taxpayer
dollars. Unless Russiagate leads to a nuclear conflict, we're unlikely to ever see that level of consequence.
Still, Russiagate has led to unprecedented cooperation between the government and Internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and
Google, all of which are censoring pages on the left, right, and in between in the name of preventing the "sowing of discord." The
story also had a profound impact on the situation in places like Syria, where Russian and American troops have sat across the Euphrates
River from one another, two amped-up nuclear powers at a crossroads.
As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations
this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it's led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We've become sides-choosers,
obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.
We had the sense to eventually look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped that episode with any
audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don't turn things
around, this story will destroy it
Taibbi is spot on, and in depth with this writing. The main stream media sold Americans on the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Almost 2 decades later, we have spent 6 trillion dollars, 8 millions lives have been lost, and millions of refugees have flooded
out of those countries, causing instability in Europe and beyond. For the past 2 years, 24/7, we have not been able to escape
the claims of Russiagate. He does not mention how the very same media gave Trump 24/7 coverage long before he was elected, and
in fact this free publicity, is probably why Trump is in the White House today. Without the constant press coverage of his campaign,
coverage that was not provided to other candidates, he would most likely not have found his way to the White House. Taibbi does
not go on to tell us what the motivation of the press is, or what he thinks can be done. News shows in the US have become little
more than entertainment. Many of us no longer rely on main stream press for any real news. The mass media has become irrelevant
at it's best, and dangerous, at it's worst. The driving force behind the so called news today, is the advertising dollars, and
the politics of the owners of the networks. How can we have a "free press" when just a few individuals own all the major news
outlets? We are not going to get the real news on tv of from the big newspapers, as long as the power is in the hands of a few
rich and powerful individuals, who decide what is news.
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread" - Alexander Pope
The rash or inexperienced will attempt things that wiser people are more cautious of.
Finally the libs will agree that guns do have their place in society. These crazy zealots may just blow their own brains out
or just find the nearest cliff. Ace Hardware is loading up on rope.
hmmm....just imagine if - sleyers money contribution fo impeach trump was turned into a movie where a "sponsor" drew up a hit
list of batshit crazy MSM "personalities" to include late night "comfuckedupedians"
Even if you were stupid enough to believe Trump was getting dirt on Hillary from the Russians, what is wrong with that? Is
there a law against that? Why is it OK for Obama and the FBI to get away with wiretapping Trump during the election? Why is it
OK for NSA to wiretap All Americans and store all their conversations and internet traffic on hard drives?
Steele, Orbis, Pablo Miller, Salisbury, Porton Down, golden-shower dossier supposedly written by a native Russian speaker with
an intelligence background....it all makes me wonder what happened to Skripal.
"Skripalgate" is suppressed by UK law. All russians are evil in the UK. The fact that (as with tony Bliar and yellowcake Iraq)
any sitting government can prosecute another country without a trial, witnesses or evidence - as in the Skripals and within the
FUKUS cabal that bombed syria because of - "chlorine barrel bomb attacks on civilians" who later showed up unscathed in Den Haag.
UK governments cannot be held to account for their actions domestically or overseas.
Both parties have been playing up the threat from Russia for decades. The Military Industrial Complex was built on creating
fear about the possibility of war with Russian. The military industrial complex owns Congress, so of course Congress is going
to play up this threat. " The reason why media is working so hard to create the impression that Russia is actively conspiring
against is because conflict with the former Soviet Union is good for business." We can expect this to continue in one form or
another. If Americans were not afraid of Russia, we would not support a defense budget that is equal to all other countries in
the world combined.
Right. The depth of your analysis is impressive. You seem to have an unlimited knowledge of world and national affairs too.
Other than some stalking tendencies, why do you post on ZH? You don't really seem to have any interest in the content, or the
discussion.
I dont want to type up everything that led me to believe this. But the racism, his empathy towards certain muslims groups and
how he treated the war, the prisoner release, the sailors broadcasted on tv about drifting into territorial waters, I mean it
was so obvious how he felt about America.
Pile on his efforts to interfere in the election and eavesdrop, unmasking with Hillary getting and receiving emails from her
home brew server not to mention her foundation pulling in 145 million from Russia.
The CIA is sickening to what has developed over the last 20 years
Blind: If so, it just means it will not be reported on in the MainStream Media(MSM) and soon forgotten.
The same people who own the private central bank and currency, also own the MSM, and they control the narrative on ALL TOPICS.
And control of narrative mean control of what people think.
Control of money and mind means TOTAL control of a country.
Nothing will change until control of minds is returned to the people, then issuance of currency can be returned to the government.
Alex Jones' of Infowars got it right when he said "There's a war on for your mind!" ... even though he became a turncoat himself,
soon after.
Hillary lost a freaking election. After almost 3 freaking years of coup d'état the left deserves mocking humiliation. Mock
them ruthlessly. Never, ever let them forget the horrible thing that they did.
Never stop making fun of them and reminding them how stupid and crazy they acted during this humiliating period of US history.
Never let them forget what they did to the nation or what they cost us all. Never let Democrats forget how much time and energy
they wasted, how very, very wrong they were.
Every politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this moronic load of Russia! Russia!
Russia! has utterly discredited themselves for life. They executed and failed to accomplish a coup d'état. These are the very
last people anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world or an ice cream truck.
Refuse them, laugh at them, ignore them. They earned it and deserve nothing but the greatest disdain.
Without Russia, ASSAD would be long gone and IRAN would have been bombed to oblivion, and Greater Israhell would have been
fulfilled and ruling over the MidEast.
There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn't.
Of course there isn't. But this doesn't mean that a prosecutor like Mueller can prove this beyond any reasonable doubt. In
fact it is quite likely that he cannot. The only charge that should be fairly easy to establish is obstruction of justice.
Without knowing what is in the report, Taibbi really jumps the gun here. Especially given the comparison to WMDs.
I knew there were no WMDs in Iraq before the invasion because I followed, and chose to believe, a credible diplomat like Hans
Blix over the dog and pony show that Colin Powell put on. But WMDs are very tangible you either find the hardware or you do not.
Yet, what Putin and Trump discuss without a single other American in the room nobody knows but the Kremlin and Trump.
"It has been people, individuals who have banded together, ordinary people who simply saw what needed to be done and came
together and supported those ideals who have made the difference.
They've marched, they've bled and yes, some of them died. This is hard. Every good thing is. We have done this before. We
can do this again ."
Hardly the call for violent civil war at which it has been portrayed.
The most coiffed, manicured, made up sacks of **** ever to glorify the airwaves tell US what THEY think and get paid handsome
salaries for their effort to overthrow the American system. Freedom of Speech? That'll be gone in a heartbeat if THEY get power.
We have an obligation to not just protect it but a greater one to preserve it.
"I didn't really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now." - exce
The State Department paused its investigation of the Secretary's emails so as not to interfere with the Mueller investigation.
Here we see Taibbi writes an exhaustive condemnation of the Western press while leaving out the very crux of the story, the very
source of the stolen DNC emails was Clapper and Brennan pretending to be Guccifer 2.0.
Pitiful attempt at redemption there Matt. Seriously, go **** your self.
"After reading several articles, it seemed clear that key difficulties for Russians communicating in English include: definite
and indefinite articles, the use of presuppositions and correct usage of say/tell and said/told. Throughout 2017, I
constructed a corpus of Guccifer 2.0's communications
and analyzed the frequency of different types of mistakes. The
results of this work
corroborate Professor Connolly's assessment.
Overall, it appears Guccifer 2.0 could communicate in English quite well but chose to use inconsistently broken English at
times in order to give the impression that it wasn't his primary language. The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken,
did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.
To date, Connolly's language study has not drawn any significant objections or criticism."
Here's the goddam thing IMO. There is this thing called freedom of the press, it's constitutionally protected, no different
than the right to bear arms.
But just because I have the right to carry an M+A 9mm around, that doesn't mean I can point it at the guy who cut me off in
traffic. In that case, I go to jail.
For almost three years now, I've been hearing "bombshell" after unsourced "bombshell" from CNN/MSNBC/WaPo/NPR/NYT et. al. Here's
how it usually goes:
"NPR has been unable to independently confirm, but other major news organizations are reporting that . . ."
"CNN is working to confirm a bombshell report from the Washington Post . . ."
"The New York Times, echoing other major news outlets, is reporting that . . ."
And now let's turn to our panel of experts to "unpack" this latest revelation . . .
These people have criminally abused their rights, and those rights need to be taken away.
Otschelnik,
If Rachel Maddow, Chris Mathews, Judy Woodruff, Chuck Todd, Anderson Cooper, Brian Stelter, Chris Hayes, Mika Brzezinski,
Don Lemon, Alysin Camerota, Lawrence O'Donnell had the slightest inkling of professional integrity, and human conscience -
they'd commit seppuku on national live TeeVee to restore their honor.
A rope leash, 3 hours ago
In his effort to cleanse himself of the slimy residue of his profession, Tiabbi has written a fine piece here, a nice
little documentation of press collusion with government spooks and political operatives.
If a little honest reporting will offer some redemption to damned journalists, his name was Seth Rich.
hooligan2009, 3 hours ago
don't forget that Obama was PERSONALLY and DIRECTLY involved in all aspects of Russiagate.
read between these lines
On Oct. 14, 2016, Page again wrote to McCabe, this time concerning a meeting with the White House.
"Just called," Page said to McCabe. "Apparently the DAG [Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates] now wants to be there,
and WH wants DOJ to host. So we are setting that up now. ... We will very much need to get Cohen's view before we meet with
her. Better, have him weigh in with her before the meeting. We need to speak with one voice, if that is in fact the case."
newworldorder, 3 hours ago
The simple truth here is that most Americans no longer have any critical thinking skills, - all media realized this a long
time ago, and catered to their audience.
The Benjamin Franklin famous quote in answer to the question of "what kind of government have you given us?" rings very hollow
after 240+ years. The "Republic" exists in name only, because its people have not protected it, after the passing of the WW2
generation.
Unrestricted, open borders invasion disguised as alleged migration, and the legalization of an eventual 100+ million new
"migrant" voters will be the final nail on the coffin of the US Republic by 2030.
Mob rule will finally destroy the greatest Republic ever conceived by the mind of men.
Mike Rotsch, 3 hours ago (Edited)
If "open borders" is your measuring stick on Americans' critical-thinking skills, then where does that place Europeans?
They actually have them officially.
Paracelsus, 3 hours ago
Someday I hope that Hillary has to be rolled up to testify about the Benghazi business. Grab the guns and the gold (and
the oil). Ukraine gold: check. Libyan gold and weapons: check.
Ghaddafi actually warned the west that after him would come a deluge of illegals (okay refugees: young males, black, often
Islamic, with little respect for women or experience with western society).
While I have reservations about Trump and his policies, the MSM owe him a huge mea culpa.
So Brennan conspired with MI6 and Clinton wing of Dems to bring down Trump. Trump was falsely
accused of colliding with Russia while he openly collided with Israel. Of course colliding with
Israel is not a crime in the USA as political establishment assumes that the interests of both
countries are identical. This is pretty far from being true. Israel plays its own and sometime
harmful for the USA game in the Middle East. And Israel agents of influence like Kushner, Pompeo,
Haley and Bolton really infiltrated the Trump administration, unlike mythical Russian.
Now the question is: was Brennan acted in the interests of MI6 only, or only of Mossad?
Brennan's pipe dream was all but obliterated on Friday when Mueller submitted his
report to the Justice Department. Officials at the agency said that no more
indictments will be submitted in the 22-month old investigation. There are also no
indictments that have been issued under seal. The last indictment in the investigation was
handed down on Jan. 24 against Trump confidant Roger
Stone .
Of the three dozen indictments or guilty pleas obtained in the investigation, none have
involved charges of conspiracy between Trump associates and Russian government officials.
It does remain unclear whether Mueller recommended Trump for impeachment proceedings, or
whether he found non-criminal evidence of links between Trumpworld and the Kremlin. Attorney
General William Barr said in a letter Friday afternoon that he will likely provide a summary of
the investigation to the Houe and Senate Judiciary Committees as soon as this weekend.
Brennan was actually right about Kushner and Ivanka. But after that he continued to beat dead Russia horse. Trump
collition is with KSA and Isreal is much more plausable then with Russia. And even in case of Russia it was probably with Russian
mafia, which is actually ethnically is a Jewish and Georgian mafia,
Notable quotes:
"... "If anybody from the Trump family is going to be indicted, it would be in the final act of Mueller's investigation because Bob Mueller and I think his team knows that if he were to do something, indicting a Trump family member, or if he were to go forward with an indictment on a criminal conspiracy involving U.S. persons that would basically be the death knell of the special counsel's office," ..."
Former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan predicted just two short weeks ago
that President Trump's family members or associates would be indicted in the special counsel's
probe.
During an appearance on MSNBC on March 5, Brennan predicted that Mueller would issue
indictments related to a "criminal conspiracy" involving Trump or his associates' activities
during the 2016 election. The forecast proved far off the mark on Friday after Robert Mueller
ended his investigation without issuing new indictments.
"If anybody from the Trump family is going to be indicted, it would be in the final act of
Mueller's investigation because Bob Mueller and I think his team knows that if he were to do
something, indicting a Trump family member, or if he were to go forward with an indictment on a
criminal conspiracy involving U.S. persons that would basically be the death knell of the
special counsel's office,"
During an appearance on MSNBC on March 5, Brennan predicted that Mueller would issue
indictments related to a "criminal conspiracy" involving Trump or his associates'
activities during the 2016 election.
That last hope of the Russiagate dead-enders is now
gone :
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III submitted a long-awaited report to Attorney General
William P. Barr on Friday, marking the end of his investigation into Russian interference
in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by President Trump.
...
A senior Justice Department official said the special counsel has not recommended any
further indictments -- a revelation that buoyed Trump's supporters, even as other
Trump-related investigations continue in other parts of the Justice Department.
...
None of the Americans charged by Mueller are accused of conspiring with Russia to
interfere in the election -- the central question of Mueller's work. Instead, they
pleaded guilty to various crimes, including lying to the FBI.
The investigation ended without charges for a number of key figures who had long been
under Mueller's scrutiny ...
Conclusions from the Mueller report will be released by the Justice Department over the
next days.
That the Russiagaters were wrong for falling for the bullshit peddled in the Steele
dossier and the "Russian hacking" lies of the snakeoil salesmen Clapper and Brennan was
obvious long ago. In June 2017 we pointed to a long Washington Post piece on
alleged Russian election hacking and remarked :
Reading that piece it becomes clear (but is never said) that the sole source for that
August 2016 Brennan claim of "Russian hacking" is the
absurd Steele dossier some ex-MI6 dude created for too much money as opposition
research against Trump. The only other "evidence" for "Russian hacking" is the
Crowdstrike report on the DNC "hack". Crowdstrike has a Ukrainian nationalist agenda, was
hired by the DNC, had to retract other "Russian hacking" claims and no one else was
allowed to take a look at the DNC servers. Said differently: The whole "Russian hacking"
claims are solely based on "evidence" of two fake reports.
The Steele dossier was fake opposition research peddled by the Clinton campaign, John
McCain and a bunch of anti-Trump national security types. The still unproven claim of
"Russian hacking" was designed to divert from the fact that Clinton and the DNC colluded to
cheat Bernie Sanders out of the nomination. The stupid claim that commercial click-bait
from a company in Leningrad was a "Russian influence campaign" was designed to explain
Clinton's election loss to the other worst-candidate-ever. The "Russiagate" investigation
was designed to prevent Trump from finding better relations with Russia as he had promised
during his campaign.
All were somewhat successful because some media and some bloggers were happy to sell
such nonsense without putting it into the big picture.
It is high time to start a deep investigation into Brennan, Clapper, Comey and the
Clinton campaign and to uncover the conspiracy that led to the Steele dossier, the FBI
investigation following from it and all the other bullshit that evolved from that
investigation.
As for Marcy Wheeler, Rachel Maddow and other dimwits who peddled the Russiagate
nonsense I agree with the advice Catlin Johnstone
gives :
Every politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed
this moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life.
...
The people who steered us into two years of Russiavape insanity are the very last people
anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our
world.
Posted by b at 01:12 PM |
Comments
(61) Among my friends who hate Trump their is a deep desire to grasp anything that
would destroy him. The media played the phony collusion story relentlessly and the goyim
ate it up. People who had some intellect parked it to get Trump, others who did not
understand how the system works believed the story.
Clearly this was operation crossfire hurricane. Trump was the hurricane blowing in and
the phony collusion story was the crossfire with the top DOJ officials pushing the story to
the hilt. By going on the attack they sucked out all of the oxygen out of the room.
I believe they feared any investigation against their coverup of the real collusion
between Russian oligarchs and the Clinton foundation. The "lock her up" chant frightened
them. Basically the best defense is a good offense.
The empire cannot police itself, it can only protect itself and its primary backers.
I wish I could agree with your assessment of how these Russiagate fools have discredited
themselves for life, but as we've seen with the Iraq war the political/media elite are
never punished for their crimes and failures. Only those that oppose the crimes are ever
punished, Phil Donahue never got his show back after he was fired for opposing the Media's
drive for the Iraq war, Assange is still imprisoned without trial, Manning is back in jail
for contempt of court which will probably be a reoccurring weapon to be used against her
for the rest of her life.
Conversely, those individuals that committed the supreme crime against the world are
stronger than ever; John Bolton is back in power as if the Iraq war disaster never
happened, Elliott Abrams has been forgiven by the Congress he lied to and is back in power
planning another dirty war against Venezuela, relations with Russia are now wrecked for at
LEAST another 10 years (maybe 20 years or more). Brennan, Clapper, Comey and the Clinton
gang will never be punished and will instead be lionized for the rest of their lives since
all of the media elite is complicit in their crimes. Rachel Madcow, Chris Matthews, Brian
Williams and the rest of the MSNBC/CNN crowed will continue to be "Guided by the beauty of
our weapons" for the glory of their sponsors. The Alternative media that brought many of
these crimes to light is now being strangled by a censorship imposed by the very criminals
they exposed. All of the vested Political/Economic interests in the current status quo will
quash the needed reforms and the world community will suffer - things will get worst,
things can only get worse from here.
and yet they will keep going and "fail upward" as is the usual progression of beltway and
manhattan types. it certainly worked for abrams and bolton over their long careers as
incompetent serial killers. even bush II has been slowly rehabilitated by the very
"resistance" who loathed him after the 9/11 honeymoon was over.
i had on the bbc's US nightly news thing last night...they were coming on air just as
this was "breaking news". they stated outright that they had no idea what was in it (at
that point even trump didn't) yet filled the next 30 minutes with "we don't know what's in
it but it's in and we assume BOOM". that's literally all they had and they said it over and
over in 40 different ways. because there's nothing else going on in the world right now i
suppose.
one of the bits was prepared by a field "reporter" who within 5 or 6 sentences of his
stock footage fluff said "derpa derp when the russians hacked the DNC and handed it over
to wikileaks diddly derp". they stated this as fact and once again exemplified the
worst part of arguing with stupid assholes: even when you've proven them 100% objectively,
empirically wrong ...they just don't care. for them reality is a matter of consensus
and as long as enough other idiots exist to keep the story going it's "true".
Now that Robert Mueller has closed his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016
election without bringing any new indictments, some Twitter users have lashed out at former at
political analyst and former CIA director for his recent prediction that Mueller would be
bringing additional charges before finishing his probe.
Brennan
appeared on MSNBC earlier this month, where he predicted that the special counsel's office
would soon be bringing indictments to add to the list of 34
individuals already charged by Mueller's team.
In that interview, Brennan also opined that he expected that any indictment of anyone close
to President Trump, including his family or extended family, would be named at the conclusion
of the investigation.
"Bob Mueller and his team knows if he were to do something -- indicting a Trump family
member or if he were to go forward with indictment on criminal conspiracy involving U.S.
persons -- that would basically be the death of the special counsel's office, because I don't
believe Donald Trump would allow Bob Mueller to continue in the aftermath of those types of
actions," Brennan explained at the time.
Yet Mueller closed his investigation without bringing any further indictments and without
any charges being brought against anyone within Trump's closest circle. The president's
supporters and others took this opportunity to pounce on Brennan via Twitter.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been openly critical of the Russia investigation, was
among the first to call out Brennan's indictment prediction.
"You can't blame MSNBC viewers for being confused," tweeted Greenwald in the wake of news
that Mueller had submitted his report. "They largely kept dissenters from their Trump/Russia
spy tale off the air for 2 years. As recently as 2 weeks ago, they had @JohnBrennan strongly
suggesting Mueller would indict Trump family members on collusion as his last act"
He later added, "The worst part of this video is how Brennan said Mueller would indict Trump
Family members for conspiring with Russia before March 15 or after, because he was too noble to
do it on the Ides of March. Will MSNBC or Brennan apologize? Will there be consequences for any
of this? LOL"
Conservative political pundit Charlie Kirk listed Brenna on a list of other frequent targets
-- Hillary Clinton, President Barack Obama, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, among others
-- of people who should be investigated, though it was not clear which laws Kirk believes any
of these individuals might have broken.
Actor Dean Cain likened Brennan's indictment prediction to Vermont Governor Howard Dean's
infamous "Dean Scream" that helped to tank Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.
Conservative political consultant Frank Luntz used the incorrect Brennan prediction to
criticize media outlets for what he saw as a failure to acknowledge errors on their part.
The Robert Mueller
investigation which monopolized political discourse for two years
has
finally concluded
,
and his anxiously awaited report has been submitted to Attorney
General William Barr. The results are in and the debate is over: those advancing the conspiracy
theory that the Kremlin has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government were wrong, and
those of us voicing skepticism of this were right.
The contents of the report are still secret, but CNN's Justice Department reporter Laura Jarrett
has told us all we need to know,
tweeting
,
"Special Counsel Mueller is not recommending ANY further indictments am told."
On top
of that, William Barr
said
in a letter
to congressional leaders that there has been no obstruction of Mueller's
investigation by Justice Department officials.
So that's it, then.
A completely unhindered investigation has failed to
convict a single American of any kind of conspiracy with the Russian government, and no further
indictments are coming. The political/media class which sold rank-and-file Americans on the lie
that the Mueller investigation was going to bring down this presidency were liars and frauds, and
none of the goalpost-moving that I am sure is already beginning to happen will change that.
It has been obvious from the very beginning that the Maddow Muppets were being sold a
lie.
In 2017 I wrote an article titled "
How
We Can Be Certain That Mueller Won't Prove Trump-Russia Collusion
", saying that Mueller would
continue finding evidence of corruption "since corruption is to DC insiders as water is to fish",
but he will not find evidence of collusion. If you care to take a scroll through the angry comments
on that article, just on Medium alone, you will see a frozen snapshot of what the expectations were
from mainstream liberals at the time.
They had swallowed the Russiagate narrative hook,
line and sinker, and they believed that the Mueller investigation was going to vindicate them. It
did not.
I've been saying Russiagate is bullshit from the beginning, and
I've been called a Trump
shill, a Kremlin propagandist, a Nazi and a troll every day for saying so by credulous mass
media-consuming dupes who drank the Kool Aid
. And I've only taken a fraction of the flack
more high profile Russiagate skeptics like Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey have been getting for
expressing doubt in the Gospel According to Maddow.
The insane, maniacal McCarthyite
feeding frenzy that these people were plunged into by nonstop mass media propaganda drowned out the
important voices who tried to argue that public energy was being sucked into Russia hysteria
and used to manufacture support for
dangerous
cold war escalations
with a nuclear superpower.
Just think what we could have done with that energy over the last two years. Think how much
public support could have been poured into the sweeping progressive reforms called for by the
Sanders movement, for example, instead of constant demands for more sanctions and nuclear posturing
against Russia. Think how much more attention could have been drawn to Trump's actual horrific
policies like his facilitation of Saudi butchery in Yemen or his regime change agendas in Iran and
Venezuela, his support for ecocide and military expansionism and the barbarism of Jair Bolsonaro
and Benjamin Netanyahu. Think how much more energy could have gone into beating back the
Republicans in the midterms, reclaiming far more House seats and taking the Senate as well,
gathering momentum for a presidential candidacy that truly threatens Trump instead of 9,000 primary
candidates who will probably be selected by superdelegates after the first ballot when there's too
many of them to establish a clear majority
under
the new rules.
We must never let them forget what they did or what they cost us all. We must never let
mainstream Democrats forget how crazy they got, how much time and energy they wasted, how very,
very wrong they were and how very, very right we were.
Never stop reminding them of this.
Never stop mocking them for it.
Never
stop mocking their idiotic Rachel Maddow worship. Never stop mocking the Robert Mueller prayer
candles. Never stop making fun of the way they blamed all their problems on Susan Sarandon. Never
stop reminding them of those stupid pink vagina hats. Never stop mocking them for elevating Louise
Mensch and Eric Garland. Never stop mocking them for creating the fucking Krassenstein brothers.
Every politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed
this moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life.
Going
forward, authority and credibility rests solely with those who kept clear eyes and clear heads
during the mass media propaganda blitzkrieg, not with those who were stupid enough to believe what
they were told about the behaviors of a noncompliant government in a post-Iraq invasion world.
The people who steered us into two years of Russiavape insanity are the very last people
anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world.
I think Russiagate is a deliberate Jewish ploy to distract Trump
supporters, and others, from the fact that Trump is very deeply
involved in Israelgate. It's a sophisticated strategy designed to
demonize Russia and favor Israel at the same time. The fact that
America will bear the burden is lost on the Dumbfuck, if the
narcissict is capable of caring in the first place. Obama was a
brilliant *** handler compared to this man.
I believe that Trump and all the neocons along with Sheldon
Adelson and Netenyahu pulled this BIG costly Shenanigan off to
divert attention away from what Trump was doing for Israel.
And lets be clear.....both Democrats and Republicans are failing
America.
The fringe lunatics on both sides have hijacked the
umbrella party. The Zionist cretins/MIC whores on the Right and
SJW Snowflakes/ War Party on the Left are both owned by the
bankster/corporate ruling classes. They are the same turd on
foreign policy.
Its time to balkanize and butcher both parties.
The Deep State needs contrived divisions and dichotomies to
split Americans. People should see past these pathetic attempts to
divide the population.
Even Caitlin misses what's going on here. I'm kinda disappointed,
but hey no one gets everything right and she does have to earn a
buck wherever she can. I get that
The new McCarthyism has been
embraced far and wide in Murika, by both parties, all the MSM. But
that's just a ruse for the home team, to recreate the USSR
bogeyman for political purposes and to feed the MIC. It's worked,
polls show Murikan sheep are more a feared of the Russian bogeyman
than they have been since the cold war
Russia isn't encroaching on America's borders, PNAC is
encroaching on theirs.
That said, the Mueller effort is more than what you think, it's
like a bird dog and it flushed many a bird of prey for shotgun
totin' prosecutors, if they be inclined to fire. And that is how
the game works in the world of dirty sum bitches and misc
psychopaths.
Like the big ***** guy in the movie Platoon said, 'the rich
always **** over the poor, that's the way it's always been.'
Recent events can be explained rather accurately if one knows
history. Which most people don't apparently.
This is just a
re-run of cold war psyops. Except this time, the USSA will meet
the fate of the USSR in its own way.
The Jewish Marxists that ran away from Russia and infested
America, are now drowning in their lies, and gotta vent
somewhere! They are behind the MSM, and cozy dalliance between
the Deep State and useful idiot Leftards.
Glancing at various Twatter feeds over the years...and I couldn't
help but notice that the number of ****-for-brains Americans who
fell for the Russiagate psyop was simply staggering.
I guess its
these gullible morons that the powers-that-be relied on in the
vaunted dumbassocracy, to get away with distracting away from
their own crimes. But alas, the day of judgement always arrives,
and the ******** implodes. It depends on how many of them awaken
in the process, to render this reckoning as either a bang or a
whimper.
"... No one says Trump is a saint. But the deep state wanted to cover its tracks. Dems and deep state hated that their preferred candidate didn't win. They ended up achieving their goal of delegitimizing 2016 and distracting the country for 2 years. ..."
"... They tried to delegitimize the 2016 Election but failed to do so. ..."
The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away: not one single American was charged,
indicted or convicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election - not even a low-level volunteer. The number is zero.
Compare what cable hosts (let's leave them unnamed) & Democratic operatives spent two years claiming this would lead to - the
imprisonment of Don, Jr., Jared, even Trump on conspiracy-with-Russia charges - to what it actually produced. A huge media reckoning
is owed.
Don't even try to pretend the point of the Mueller investigation from the start wasn't to obtain prosecutions of Americans guilty
of conspiring with Russia to influence the outcome of the election or that Putin controlled Trump through blackmail. Nobody will
believe your denials.
Are we now ready to rid ourselves of the thrilling espionage fantasy that Trump is controlled by Putin and the Kremlin using blackmail?
There's no way Robert Mueller would have gone 18 months without telling anyone about this if it were true, right? How could that
be justified?
Perhaps now we can focus on the actually consequential actions the Trump administration is taking and finally move past the deranged
conspiracy theories that have drowned US discourse for 2+ years. A side benefit will be not ratcheting up tension between 2 nuclear-armed
powers.
Giving up these exciting conspiracy theories about international blackmail & convening panels to decipher all the genius hidden
maneuvers of Mueller will be bad for cable ratings, book sales & the Patreon accounts of online charlatans. But it'll be very healthy
in all other ways.
The desperate attempts to salvage something from this debacle by the Mueller dead-enders are just sad. Yes, the public hasn't
read the Mueller report. But we *know* he ended his investigation without indicting a single American for conspiring with Russia
to influence the election
Trump, Jr. testified for hours and hours before Congress, including about the Trump Tower meeting. If he lied there, or to Mueller,
why didn't Mueller indict him for perjury, lying to Congress or obstruction? Same questions for Kushner. Stop embarrassing yourselves.
If Mueller found evidence that Putin controls Trump & forces him to act against US interests & in favor of Russia - not just with
a pee-pee tape but with financial blackmail - what could possibly justify keeping that a secret through the end of the investigation?
It's ludicrous.
US discourse has been drowned for 2+ years with conspiratorial, unhinged, but highly inflammatory and unhinged idiocy - playing
games with two nuclear-armed powers because of anger over the 2016 election. It's time to stop. Mueller ended his work. We see the
public indictments.
So many in the media devoted endless airtime & print & pixels misleading people to believe Mueller was coming to arrest & prosecute
Trump, Jr, Kushner & so many others for conspiring with Russia over the election & obstruction. None of that happened. You can't
pretend it away.
They was never the point. No one says Trump is a saint. But the deep state wanted to cover its tracks. Dems and deep state hated
that their preferred candidate didn't win. They ended up achieving their goal of delegitimizing 2016 and distracting the country
for 2 years.
"... The White House didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. But in another stand-off with House Democrats, Cipollone on Thursday rejected a request renewed last week from Cummings and two other committee chairmen for information on Trump's communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... Cummings said the committee obtained a document that "appears" to show that McFarland conducted official business on her personal email account. He said the document was related to efforts by McFarland and other White House officials to transfer sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia "in coordination with Tom Barrack, a personal friend of President Trump and the chairman of President Trump's inaugural committee." ..."
"... Regarding Trump's communications with Putin, Cummings, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel say they are examining the substance of in-person meetings and phone calls, the effects on foreign policy, and whether anyone has sought to conceal those communications. ..."
"... The Constitution gives the executive branch exclusive power to conduct foreign relations, Cipollone said. "Congress cannot require the president to disclose confidential communications with foreign leaders." ..."
A key House Democrat is renewing demands that the White House turn over documents about the use of private texts or emails by
Jared Kushner, saying Kushner's lawyer acknowledged that the senior aide used the non-secure WhatsApp application to communicate
with foreign leaders.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said in a letter sent Thursday to White House Counsel
Pat Cipollone that the administration has failed to produce documents tied to Kushner and other officials despite requests from the
committee since 2017. Cummings also sought a briefing on how the official messages are being preserved.
... ... ...
The White House didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. But in another stand-off with House Democrats, Cipollone on
Thursday rejected a request renewed last week from Cummings and two other committee chairmen for information on Trump's communications
with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
WhatsApp
Cummings, to underscore his concern about whether unsecured White House communications have included classified information, said
in his letter that Lowell acknowledged during the December meeting that Kushner had used WhatsApp to communicate with foreign leaders.
Kushner is a senior White House adviser and the son-in-law of President
Donald Trump , overseeing the administration's Middle
East policies among other issues. Cummings said he and then-Oversight Chairman
Trey Gowdy , a Republican who has since retired from Congress,
met with Lowell in December.
Cummings's letter said Lowell said that Kushner has been in compliance with the law, and that he takes "screenshots" of communications
on his private WhatsApp account and forwards them to his official White House email account or to the National Security Council.
Cummings wrote that when asked whether Kushner ever used WhatsApp to discuss classified information, Lowell replied, "That's above
my pay grade."
The focus on Kushner and others follows the earlier investigations by the Justice Department and Republican-controlled congressional
committees of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server when she served as secretary of state during the Obama administration.
'Alternative Means'
In Thursday's letter, Cummings said the White House's refusal to turn over documents is "obstructing the committee's investigation
into allegations of violations of federal records laws" and potential breaches of national security. He demanded that the White House
say by March 28 whether it intends to comply voluntarily with the renewed requests.
"If you continue to withhold these documents from the committee, we will be forced to consider alternative means to obtain compliance,"
Cummings said.
... ... ....
K.T. McFarland
Cummings also wrote that his committee has obtained new information about other White House officials that raises additional security
and federal records concerns about the use of private email and messaging applications.
His letter said others may have been involved in the practice while they worked at the White House, including former deputy national
security adviser K.T. McFarland and former chief strategist
Steve Bannon.
Cummings said the committee obtained a document that "appears" to show that McFarland conducted official business on her personal
email account. He said the document was related to efforts by McFarland and other White House officials to transfer sensitive U.S.
nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia "in coordination with Tom Barrack, a personal friend of President Trump and the chairman of President
Trump's inaugural committee."
The chairman said another document appeared to show that Bannon received documents "pitching the plan from Mr. Barrack through
his personal email account," at a time Bannon was at the White House and working on broader Middle East policy.
Regarding Trump's communications with Putin, Cummings, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and Foreign Affairs Chairman
Eliot Engel say they are examining the substance of in-person meetings and phone calls, the effects on foreign policy, and whether
anyone has sought to conceal those communications.
In a written response Thursday, Cipollone wrote, "While we respectfully seek to accommodate appropriate oversight requests, we
are unaware of any precedent supporting such sweeping requests."
The Constitution gives the executive branch exclusive power to conduct foreign relations, Cipollone said. "Congress cannot require
the president to disclose confidential communications with foreign leaders."
In a joint statement on Thursday night, Cummings, Engel and Schiff said that the Obama administration had "produced records describing
the president and secretary of state's calls with foreign leaders." The congressmen added that "President Trump's decision to break
with this precedent raises the question of what he has to hide."
( Updates with statement from Cummings, Schiff and Engel, in final paragraph.
"... Former CIA Chief-turned-Twitter-troll John Brennan warned the President on Wednesday that Special Counsel Mueller will soon put Trump's political and financial future in jeopardy. ..."
Former CIA Chief-turned-Twitter-troll John Brennan warned the President on Wednesday that Special Counsel Mueller will
soon put Trump's political and financial future in jeopardy.
The President fired off an incendiary tweet directed towards Kellyanne Conway's cruel,
Trump-hating "husband from hell," George Conway on Wednesday.
"George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY
jealous of his wife's success & angry that I, with her help, didn't give him the job he so
desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband
from hell!"
In response to Trump's tweets to George Conway, John Brennan, one of the architects of Russiagate, accused President Trump of
throwing temper tantrums because he is panicking over Mueller's impending report.
What does John Brennan know about Mueller's report? Brennan is admitting Mueller's report will complicate Trump's life and
cripple him financially and politically in the future.
BRENNAN:
Hmmm your bizarre tweets and recent temper tantrums reveal your panic over the likelihood the Special Counsel will soon
further complicate your life, putting your political & financial future in jeopardy. Fortunately, Lady Justice does not do
NDAs.
"... George Galloway and Steve Topple of the Canary posted this video on the ongoing transatlantic attack campaign against the left wing, including Ilhan Omar, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Yellow Vests under the canard that they are anti-Semitic. This has now reached the level of the transnational RussiaGate hysteria to the point where it is obviously a coordinated smear by global corporate and political Establishment and ruling class people to muzzle the voice of a rising generation which is anti-capitalist and anti-war. ..."
George Galloway and Steve Topple of the Canary posted this video on the ongoing transatlantic attack campaign against the
left wing, including Ilhan Omar, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Yellow Vests under the canard that they are anti-Semitic. This has now
reached the level of the transnational RussiaGate hysteria to the point where it is obviously a coordinated smear by global corporate
and political Establishment and ruling class people to muzzle the voice of a rising generation which is anti-capitalist and anti-war.
@4 Adam Curtis is always great, I personally preferred The Trap and his short film on Nixon, but Hypernormalisation is arguably
the most powerful and illustrative film of our times. It would be perfect if it weren't for the Russia segment.
anti-semitism... regarding the 2 links on corbyn - both very good btw and worth checking out if you are interested. i find
it disturbing how this topic can be pushed to the forefront 24/7, or ad nauseam... for me, the only purpose it seems to serve
is to inadvertently turn people completely off everything to do with israel.. obviously the initial purpose here is to smear corbyn
in the hopes that the mud sticks.. either way, the fact it is in the news constantly is a clear heads up the media is not neutral,
or unbiased in it's selection of the topics put before people on a regular basis..
Speaking of anti-semitism, what do Dershowitz, Netanyahoo, Adelson and Trump all have in common?
https://journal-neo.org/2019/03/10/the-netanyahu-problem/
Here's the thing (if any of the stated things in the article are true): Bibi's up for re-election on the 9th, and not looking
too well, it seems. Elijah Magnier has sounded alarm bells, too:
https://ejmagnier.com/2019/03/07/syria-preparing-its-missiles-for-the-next-battle-with-israel/
Things might be getting quite interesting in the next weeks. Oh, we can add Corbyn
with the anti-semitism accusations against him and the Brexit mess into the mix, too, with the big vote on May's deal on Tuesday.
It's small wonder why there is so much talk of anti-semitism these days, given the stellar cast of characters involved.
The anti-semistism charges against Corbyn only seem potentially damaging because they occur in the echo chamber of a media system
unanimously organised against him and the anti-imperialism that he supports.
There are signs-one of which is the desperation
of the media in making ever more extreme charges- that the campaign has had very little effect. Labour Party membership is increasing
steadily, the largest political party in Europe gets larger every week, making the party financially independent (it relies much
less now than it ever has in the past on Union financing) and organisationally stronger, as thousands of energetic, intelligent
youthful people volunteer to work for it.
Part of the antisemitism campaign has consisted of MPs going out on a limb and, with maximum publicity, resigning from the
party, thus saving the members the messy job of expelling them or refusing to select them for re-election. At the same time local
party organisations, long strongholds of municipal and regional bosses and Blairite politics, are being re-captured by the membership.
Both Scotland and Wales, for example, are now led by anti-imperialist socialists. Two years ago they were centres of anti-Corbyn
organising.
These things are important because this is a demonstration of the way that a media system, by consistently promoting the interests
of the 'elites' loses its credibility. Most of those who read and contribute to this site were once regular and comnplacent consumers
of the MSM. We used if not to accept uncritically then at least to take as probably true the 'news' on public broadcasters and
quality broadsheets. Now we realise that they are utterly unreliable retailers of propaganda.
The good news is that this is becoming a majority attitude- we are on the way to a situation, already achieved in France I
suspect, in which nothing from the state is taken on trust. And people are making up their own minds after comparing information,
thru places such as this one, with each other.
To get back to Corbyn, I find it hard to believe that he will not only win the next general election but in doing so lead a
new sort of party, backed by a powerful and massive popular movement, full of committed, if often mild reforming, socialists into
Parliament.
If that happens it will only be fair if the Israeli government be asked to take a bow for 'going over the top' to such an extent
that it is going to be difficult to convince anyone that Corbyn is other than spotlessly clear, politically and highly principled.
Jeremy Corbyn is a dead man walking. His failure to stand by his allies (from Ken LIvingstone to the more recent Chris Williamson)
within the Labour Party as they have been successfully picked off, victims of anti-semetic smear campaigns, has seriously undermined
his leadership and increasingly isolated him within his own party. Corbyn's policy of accommodation and appeasement is obviously
failing and has only emboldened his attackers. From his failure to geld the Blairites within his party by expelling its most vocal
zionist mouthpieces (the odious Margaret Hodge and Joan Ryan being prime examples) to Labour's adoption of IHRA's redefinition
of anti-semetism to include anti-zionism, Corbyn's appeasement policy has been an unmitigated disaster, leaving him effectively
neutered in the face of this unremitting onslaught as his poll numbers continue to drop. Even George Galloway, a staunch Corbyn
supporter, is despairing of this state of affairs.
We should not idealize nether Israelis not Palestinians. the latter were pushed by Israeli policies to more fundamentalist Islam.
Changes of anti-Semitism is nor the favorite tool of Israeli lobby to smear critics of Israeli polices.
Notable quotes:
"... The flood of exaggerated claims of antisemitism make it harder to deal with any real instances of antisemitism. The credibility of well-founded allegations is undermined by the less credible ones and real perpetrators are more likely not to be held to account. Crying wolf is dangerous when there are real wolves around the corner. This was the reality that Chris Williamson was drawing attention to. ..."
"... Right now, the establishment -- represented by Richard Dearlove, a former head of the MI6 -- is maliciously trying to frame Corbyn's main adviser, Seumas Milne, as a Kremlin asset. ..."
"... Jewish is about race, religion and place of origin, Zionism is about economics and unabashed wealth: the two concepts are polar opposites. Very few non wealthy Jews are zionist. ..."
"... The gods of finance don't really care about a few dead self-identifying Jews. Once it happens there will be no more pretence of niceness or democratic nonsense and the Orwellian police-state crackdown can proceed in earnest but now with almost everyone's blessing. Expect the very same thing everywhere across Europe and the Anglosphere. ..."
"... Anti-Semitism has re-established itself on the left partly by way of an ideology of anti-colonialism. Believing Western colonial power to be the worst evil in history – a progressive orthodoxy that has been inculcated in Western education systems for decades – sections of the left relativise the Holocaust, treating it as only one among many crimes against humanity. At the same time, they see Israel as the worst embodiment of colonialism – hence the demand that, alone among the world's states, it must demonstrate its "right to exist". ..."
"... Antisemitism in the UK used to mean hostility to the pushiness, greed and mad manners of successful Jews like Philip Green, but it has now been redefined to mean someone who thinks the Palestinians should not be used as target practice. ..."
"... Antisemitism here is a middle and upper class thing. There are so few Jews in some parts of the UK that many people have never met a Jew. I was over 30 before I ever knew anyone who was Jewish. ..."
"... Where is the sanctimonious Catholic Church to anathemize the major war criminal Tony Blair the Pious? ..."
"... British Labor MP Tam Dalyell has charged that Prime Minister Tony Blair was "being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers" ..."
"... The comment echoed remarks by U.S. Republican Patrick Buchanan, who was accused of anti-Semitism when in an article last March, he described a predominantely Jewish group of advisers to President Bush as "a cabal of polemicists and public officials [who] seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests." ..."
"... You're confusing the issue. The issue is this: it's not anti-Semitic to be anti-Zionist. All the rest is squid ink. ..."
"... McCarthyism is the extension of the European dark age inquisition. Nowadays the American glosses over McCarthyism with the terms democracy, neo-liberal order, and human rights. Any idealism other than the American's must be denied, even in the accused own defence. The American presents the accused as an enemy so dangerous, their ideas so corrupting, that they must be silenced from the outset. Their only chance of rehabilitation is prostration before their accusers and utter repentance. ..."
"... Antisemitism in the UK used to mean hostility to the pushiness, greed and mad manners but it has now been redefined to mean someone who thinks the Palestinians should not be used as target practice. ..."
"... On Twitter, Corbyn wrote: "The UN says Israel's killings of demonstrators in Gaza – including children, paramedics and journalists – may constitute 'war crimes or crimes against humanity'". ..."
"... The UN report, published earlier this week, said: "The Israeli security forces killed and maimed Palestinian demonstrators who did not pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to others when they were shot, nor were they directly participating in hostilities," adding that the protests had been "civilian in nature". ..."
"... "A quite incredible story out of England has not received much media coverage in the United States. It concerns how the Israeli Embassy in London connived with government officials to "take down" parliamentarians and government ministers who were considered to be critical of the Jewish State. It was also learned that the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising private groups promoting Israeli interests, including associations of Members of Parliament (MPs)." ..."
"McCarthyism" is a word thrown around a lot nowadays, and in the process its true meaning -- and horror -- has been increasingly
obscured.
McCarthyism is not just the hounding of someone because their views are unpopular. It is the creation by the powerful of a perfect,
self-rationalising system of incrimination -- denying the victim a voice, even in their own defence. It presents the accused as an
enemy so dangerous, their ideas so corrupting, that they must be silenced from the outset. Their only chance of rehabilitation is
prostration before their accusers and utter repentance.
McCarthyism, in other words, is the modern political parallel of the witch hunt.
In an earlier era, the guilt of women accused of witchcraft was tested through the ducking stool. If a woman drowned, she was
innocent; if she survived, she was guilty and burnt at the stake. A foolproof system that created an endless supply of the wicked,
justifying the status and salaries of the men charged with hunting down ever more of these diabolical women.
And that is the Medieval equivalent of where the British Labour party has arrived, with the suspension of MP Chris Williamson
for anti-semitism.
Revenge of the Blairites
Williamson, it should be noted, is widely seen as a key ally of Jeremy Corbyn, a democratic socialist who was propelled unexpectedly
into the Labour leadership nearly four years ago by its members. His elevation infuriated most of the party's MPs, who hanker for
the return of the New Labour era under Tony Blair, when the party firmly occupied the political centre.
Corbyn's success has also outraged vocal supporters of Israel both in the Labour party -- some 80 MPs are stalwart members of
Labour Friends of Israel -- and in the UK media. Corbyn is the first British party leader in sight of power to prefer the Palestinians'
right to justice over Israel's continuing oppression of the Palestinians.
For these reasons, the Blairite MPs have been trying to oust Corbyn any way they can. First through a failed re-run of the leadership
contest and then by assisting the corporate media -- which is equally opposed to Corbyn -- in smearing him variously as a shambles,
a misogynist, a sympathiser with terrorists, a Russian asset, and finally as an "enabler" of anti-semitism.
This last accusation has proved the most fruitful after the Israel lobby began to expand the definition of anti-semitism to include
not just hatred of Jews but also criticism of Israel. Labour was eventually forced to accept a redefinition,
formulated by the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that conflates anti-Zionism -- opposition to Israel's violent creation on the Palestinians' homeland
-- with anti-semitism.
Guilt by association
Once the mud stuck through repetition, a vocal group of Labour MPs began denouncing the party for being "institutionally anti-semitic",
"endemically anti-semitic" and a "cesspit of anti-semitism". The slurs continued relentlessly, even as statistics proved the accusation
to be groundless. The figures
show
that anti-semitism exists only in the margins of the party, as racism does in all walks of life.
Meanwhile, the smears overshadowed the very provable fact that anti-semitism and other forms of racism are rearing their head
dangerously on the political right.
But the witchfinders were never interested in the political reality. They wanted a never-ending war -- a policy of "zero tolerance"
-- to root out an evil in their midst, a supposed "hard left" given succour by Corbyn and his acolytes.
This is the context for understanding Williamson's "crime".
Despite the best efforts of our modern witchfinder generals to prove otherwise, Williamson has not been shown to have expressed
hatred towards Jews, or even to have made a comment that could be interpreted as anti-semitic.
One of the most experienced of the witchfinders, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, indulged familiar McCarthyite tactics
this week in trying to prove Williamson's anti-semitism by association. The MP was what Freedland
termed a
"Jew baiter" because he has associated with people whom the witchfinders decree to be anti-semites.
'Too apologetic'
Shortly before he found himself formally shunned by media commentators and his own parliamentary party, Williamson twice confirmed
his guilt to the inquisitors.
First, he dared to challenge the authority of the witchfinders. He suggested that some of those being hounded out of Labour may
not in fact be witches. Or more specifically, in the context of constant claims of a Labour "anti-semitism crisis", he
argued that the party had been "too apologetic" in dealing
with the bad-faith efforts of those seeking to damage a Corbyn-led party.
In other words, Williamson suggested that Labour ought to be more proactively promoting the abundant evidence that it was indeed
dealing with what he called the "scourge of anti-semitism", and thereby demonstrate to the British public that Labour wasn't "institutionally
anti-semitic". Labour members, he was pointing out, ought not to have to keep quiet as they were being endlessly slandered as anti-semites.
As Jewish Voice for Labour, a Jewish group supportive of Corbyn,
noted :
The flood of exaggerated claims of antisemitism make it harder to deal with any real instances of antisemitism. The credibility
of well-founded allegations is undermined by the less credible ones and real perpetrators are more likely not to be held to account.
Crying wolf is dangerous when there are real wolves around the corner. This was the reality that Chris Williamson was drawing
attention to.
As with all inquisitions, however, the witchfinders were not interested in what Williamson actually said, but in the threat he
posed to the narrative they have created to destroy their enemy, Corbynism, and reassert their own power.
So his words were ripped from their context and presented as proof that he did indeed support witches.
He was denounced for saying what he had not: that Labour should not apologise for its anti-semitism. In this dishonest reformulation
of Williamson's statement, the witchfinders claimed to show that he had supported anti-semitism, that he consorted with witches.
No screening for documentary
Second, Williamson compounded his crime by publicly helping just such a readymade witch: a black Jewish woman named Jackie Walker.
He had booked a room in the British parliament building -- the seat of our supposed democracy -- so that audiences could see a
new documentary on an earlier Labour witch hunt. More than two years ago the party suspended Walker over anti-semitism claims.
The screening was to inform Labour party members of the facts of her case in the run-up to a hearing in which, given the current
atmosphere, it is likely she will be expelled. The screening was sponsored by Jewish Voice for Labour, which has also warned repeatedly
that anti-semitism is being used malevolently to silence criticism of Israel and weaken Corbyn.
Walker was seen as a pivotal figure by those opposed to Corbyn. She was a co-founder of Momentum, the grassroots organisation
established to support Corbyn after his election to the leadership and deal with the inevitable fallout from the Blairite wing of
MPs.
Momentum expected a rough ride from this dominant faction, and they were not disappointed. The Blairites still held on to the
party machinery and they had an ally in Tom Watson, who became Corbyn's deputy.
Walker was one of the
early victims
of the confected claims of an Labour "anti-semitism crisis". But she was not ready to roll over and accept her status as witch. She
fought back.
From lynching to witch hunt
First, she produced a one-woman show about her treatment at the hands of the Labour party bureaucracy -- framed in the context
of decades of racist treatment of black people in the west -- called The Lynching
.
And then her story was turned into a documentary film, fittingly called
Witch Hunt . It sets out very clearly the machinations of the Blairite
wing of MPs, and Labour's closely allied Israel lobby, in defaming Walker as part of their efforts to regain power over the party.
For people so ostensibly concerned about racism towards Jews, these witchfinders show little self-awareness about how obvious
their own racism is in relation to some of the "witches" they have hunted down.
But that racism can only be understood if people have the chance to hear from Walker and other victims of the anti-semitism smears.
Which is precisely why Williamson, who was trying to organise the screening of Witch Hunt, had to be dealt with too.
Party in disrepute
Walker is not the only prominent black anti-racism activist targeted. Marc Wadsworth, another longtime ally of Corbyn's, and founder
of the Anti-Racist Alliance, was "outed" last year in another confected anti-semitism scandal. The allegations of anti-semitism were
impossible to stand up publicly, so finally he was
booted out on a catch-all
claim that he had brought the party "into disrepute".
Jews who criticise Israel and support Corbyn's solidarity with Palestinians have been picked off by the witchfinders too, cheered
on by media commentators who claim this is being done in the service of a "zero tolerance" policy towards racism. As well as Walker,
the targets have included
Tony Greenstein, Moshe Machover, Martin Odoni, Glyn Secker and Cyril Chilson.
But as the battle in Labour has intensified to redefine anti-Zionism as anti-semitism, the deeper issues at stake have come to
the fore. Jon Lansman, another founder of Momentum, recently
stated : "I don't want any Jewish
member in the party to be leaving. We are absolutely committed to making Labour a safe space."
But there are a set of very obvious problems with that position, and they have gone entirely unexamined by those promoting the
"institutional anti-semitism" and "zero tolerance" narratives.
Lobby's covert actions exposed
First, it is impossible to be a home to all Jews in Labour, when the party's Jewish members are themselves deeply split over key
issues like whether Corbyn is a force for good and whether meaningful criticism of Israel should be allowed.
A fanatically pro-Israel organisation like the Jewish Labour Movement will never tolerate a Corbyn-led Labour party reaching power
and supporting the Palestinian cause. To pretend otherwise is simple naivety or deception.
That fact was demonstrably proven two years ago in the Al Jazeera undercover documentary The Lobby into covert
efforts
by Israel and its UK lobbyists to undermine Corbyn from within his own party through groups like the JLM and MPs in Labour Friends
of Israel. It was telling that the party machine, along with the corporate media, did its best to keep the documentary out of public
view.
The MPs loudest about "institutional anti-semitism" in Labour were among those abandoning the party to join the Independent Group
this month, preferring to ally with renegade Conservative MPs in an apparent attempt to frustrate a Corbyn-led party winning power.
Institutional racism on Palestinians
Further, if a proportion of Jewish Labour party members have such a heavy personal investment in Israel that they refuse to countenance
any meaningful curbs on Israel's abuses of Palestinians -- and that has been underscored repeatedly by public comments from the JLM
and Labour Friends of Israel -- then keeping them inside the party will require cracking down on all but the flimsiest criticism
of Israel. It will tie the party's hands on supporting Palestinian rights.
In the name of protecting the "Israel right or wrong" crowd from what they consider to be anti-semitic abuse, Labour will have
to provide institutional support for Israel's racism towards Palestinians.
In doing so, it will in fact simply be returning to the status quo in the party before Corbyn, when Labour
turned a blind eye
over many decades to the Palestinians' dispossession by European Zionists who created an
ugly anachronistic state where rights accrue based on one's ethnicity and religion rather than citizenship.
Those in Labour who reject Britain's continuing complicity in such crimes -- ones the UK set in motion with the Balfour Declaration
-- will find, as a result, that it is they who have no home in Labour. That includes significant numbers of anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinians,
Muslims and Palestinian solidarity activists.
Safe space for whom?
If the creation of a "safe space" for Jews in the Labour party is code, as it appears to be, for a safe space for hardline Zionist
Jews, it will inevitably require that the party become a hostile environment for those engaged in other anti-racism battles.
Stripped bare, what Lansman and the witchfinders are saying is that Zionist Jewish sensitivities in the party are the only ones
that count, that anything and everything must be done to indulge them, even if it means abusing non-Zionist Jewish members, black
members, Palestinian and Muslim members, and those expressing solidarity with Palestinians.
This is precisely the political black hole into which simplistic, kneejerk identity politics inevitably gets sucked.
Right now, the establishment -- represented by Richard Dearlove, a former head of the MI6 -- is maliciously
trying
to frame Corbyn's main adviser, Seumas Milne, as a Kremlin asset.
While the witchfinders claim to have unearthed a "pattern of behaviour" in Williamson's efforts to expose their smears, in fact
the real pattern of behaviour is there for all to see: a concerted McCarthyite campaign to destroy Corbyn before he can reach No
10.
Corbyn's allies are being picked off one by one, from grassroots activists like Walker and Wadsworth to higher-placed supporters
like Williamson and Milne. Soon Corbyn will stand alone, exposed before the inquisition that has been prepared for him.
Then Labour can be restored to the Blairites, the members silenced until they leave and any hope of offering a political alternative
to the establishment safely shelved. Ordinary people will again be made passive spectators as the rich carry on playing with their
lives and their futures as though Britain was simply a rigged game of Monopoly.
If parliamentary politics returns to business as usual for the wealthy, taking to the streets looks increasingly like the only
option. Maybe it's time to dust off a Yellow Vest.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair"
(Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
LONDON – Many of the key players in the escalating British campaign to boycott Israel are Jewish or Israeli, the Jewish
Chronicle revealed in an investigation published Thursday.
According to the investigation, the Jewish academics justify their stance as part of the struggle for Palestinian rights
and ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories.
The report stated that a high proportion of the academics were deeply involved in UCU, the University and College Union,
which last month sparked an international outcry by voting to facilitate a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
Anti-boycott figures suggest that the campaign has been fuelled by a well-organized mix of far-left activists and Islamic
organizations, the JC reported. In reality, the main proponents are a loosely knit collection of academics and trade unionists
linked to groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Jews for the Boycotting of Israeli Goods, and Bricup, the British
Committee for Universities of Palestine
Working class British do not have their own intellectuals. The Jewish intelligentsia's humanist and realist wings are at war.
Gilad Atzmon is being described without qualification as an Anti Semite in popular British newspapers, which never mention
that he is Jewish.
It used to be that Atzmon being a Jew would protect him from accusations of antisemitism, and he would have be described as
"self hating". Unfortunately the main intellectuals of the pro Palestinian movement are are humanist Jewish intellectuals, often
of Israeli origin and the simple minded white gentiles of the Labour Party foolishly think that they are protected. The brilliant
public relations and political experts working for the realist Israel-supporting Jews always lead with their Sunday punch and
go nuclear with a moralising onslaught on white gentiles to get them to altruistically punish anyone Israel does not like. And
it always works. Yet humanist Jews bleating about the Palestinians can always convince the more intellectual humanitarian white
gentiles into supporting the Palestinians. So it will be never ending.
Britain is done. The laws passed show any idea or statement that criticizes Jews and Israel is antisemitic. Atzmon was foolish
to believe that he had some protection from attacks because he was Jewish. They made an example out of him for the rest of those
who do not fall in line with the belief that all true knowledge comes from the Jews and Israel.
The only chance that Britain has is the fact that the crazy Muslim hoards may actually turn on the Magic Jews and start to
murder them. The Jews may have overplayed their hand with immigration just like in France. The Brits have been pummel into cuckolds
as their world is being destroyed by both the Jews and the Muslims.
It works because the majority Israeli-bought politicians let it work. It works because we the public let the politicians get away
with it.
I'm beginning to think that the only way to expose and end this false equivalency [criticism of Israel = anti-semitism) is
for the 80% [yes!] of Europeans who support Palestine against Israel to show up in droves to their respective parliaments and
insist on being imprisoned according to the law.
It's curious that the Labour Party – in both its Blair and Corbyn manifestations – actively encourages the ethnic displacement
of white Britons from their ancient motherland, with their policy of massive uncontrolled immigration, but weeps great big sobs
and tears about the ethnic displacement of one group of foreigners by another group of foreigners.
Corbyn promised, in the party's manifesto, to back the Brexit referendum result. Now, at the worst possible time, he has reneged
on that promise. He had one thing going for him – his reputation as "principled". There is no move more fatal to that reputation
than what he has just done.
Thankfully, Theresa May has a sense of duty and, I think, will outmanoeuvre him in the end. But
as innumerable denizens of this board will ask themselves: so what if Corbyn stands against British democracy, national sovereignty,
any form of border control? So what if he promotes avowed anti-British racists to his shadow cabinet? At least he probably dislikes
Jews
Ah, yes but it is "unfair to conclude the last bit" – even while the rest is straightforward matter of record "he has Jewish
supporters". Great, but those Jews, who remain Jeremy Corbyn supporters, after his great stab in the back over Brexit, are his
collaborators in his attempt to fatally wound Britain as a nation. That tells me all I need to know about their politics. May
they reflect on their grim dishonesty.
If parliamentary politics returns to business as usual for the wealthy, taking to the streets looks increasingly like the
only option. Maybe it's time to dust off a Yellow Vest.
I've been thinking the same. The political systems in the UK and the US are so putrid that street demonstrations seem the only
way forward.
Issue by issue they can be Brexit or Anti-War, and the minority elites are obliged to use their security forces (with all the
risks that that involves).
One should not merge or confuse, by any means rationally imaginable, -- "Economic Zionism (EZ)", a system of economics that claims
it enjoys exclusive right to establish and enforce its monopoly rule over all persons and things, -- -with --
-- "racial bias", a system that claims it enjoys exclusive right to establish and enforce its Jews-Only rule over all persons
and things.
Jewish is about race, religion and place of origin, Zionism is about economics and unabashed wealth: the two concepts are
polar opposites. Very few non wealthy Jews are zionist.
Zionism has long exploited the myth that wealth established by EZ only comes to a Jewish tribal member who is faithful to the
needs and wants of Zionism. This propaganda has a long history being the key that has opened the door to make many Zionist projects
successful.
the fact that the crazy Muslim hoards may actually turn on the Magic Jews and start to murder them
Of course, it is what is desired and very likely the real reason that they are there in the first place. The gods of finance
don't really care about a few dead self-identifying Jews. Once it happens there will be no more pretence of niceness or democratic
nonsense and the Orwellian police-state crackdown can proceed in earnest but now with almost everyone's blessing. Expect the very
same thing everywhere across Europe and the Anglosphere.
When you fail, or refuse, to understand the root source of the growth of a poisonous thing, you aint ever got no hope better than
a soothing fart in Hell to make a correction.
Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was a Judaizing heresy rising from the specifics of Anglophone rebellion against Christendom, which
'reformation' itself began from Saxon Martin Luther's theorizing how to feel as 'saved' just by being who he was as Jews felt
by being Jews – salvation by faith ONLY became Luther's Christian version of salvation by Jewish blood ONLY. Then Luther cemented
even more the Judaizing of the movement by declaring that the Pharisaic definition of Scripture was the defintion of the Old Testament.
A Judaizing heresy will always produce culture that is pro-Jewish and anti-Christendom and anti-peoples most closely seen as
still reflecting Christendom.
Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was the Protestant precursor of the French Revolution. It swept away all that had been in place before,
so thoroughly that it was the final piece of remaking, at points inverting, the national character that had existed before the
16th century.
The best moniker for that new English culture is WASP, though that initial letter seems to make no sense until the US was on
the scene. However, UK WASP Elites were quite busy during the 18th century explaining how the Irish were subhuman, and by the
dawn of the 19th century political cartoons of the Irish as simian were common – before such images were ever used for blacks
in the USA. That WASP culture then began a rather systematic war to exterminate all cultures native to the British Isles that
were not in step with WASP culture.
All cultures produced by, shaped by, finalized by Judiaizing heresy will not merely evolve so that they become staunchly pro-Jewish,
but that necessarily occurs as they also wage at least culture war to exterminate non-Judaizing white Christian cultures . WASP
culture is defined by WASPs using whatever force required (including forcing huge populations into indentured servitude and rather
large segments into chattel slavery) to batter all non-WASP whites into accepting the overlordship of all thins WASP.
WASP culture immediately signaled that it favored Jews over all non-WASP peoples native to the British Isles – Oliver Cromwell,
a truly quintessential WASP invited Jews back into England legally and granted special rights and privileges that the vast
majority of British Isles natives did not have.
The above pattern was far from a one time thing. It is a major factor even throughout the 19th century: the world's all time
largest and richest empire saw Jewish wealth explode and Jews able to flex their political and cultural power openly, while perhaps
a slim majority of the white natives of the British Isles languished barely on or below the poverty line. It was a world in which
even Charles Dickens had to bow to Jewish demands to rewrite Oliver Twist so that Fagin not only was not identified as a Jews,
open preying on the poorest whites, but that he remove all markers that Fagin was indeed almost certainly a Jew.
The Jewish problem cannot be separated from the WASP problem. You cannot have WASP culture that is not philoSemitic. And WASP
Elites always act to ally with Jews (and by the Victorian era, the
other' Semites: Arabs and Mohammedans) while acting to harm the best interests of the vast majority of white Gentiles.
John Gray on Corbyn's anti-Semitism as a strange subset of his anti-Britishness:
Anti-Semitism has re-established itself on the left partly by way of an ideology of anti-colonialism. Believing Western
colonial power to be the worst evil in history – a progressive orthodoxy that has been inculcated in Western education systems
for decades – sections of the left relativise the Holocaust, treating it as only one among many crimes against humanity. At the
same time, they see Israel as the worst embodiment of colonialism – hence the demand that, alone among the world's states, it
must demonstrate its "right to exist".
Claims that anti-Semitism is being "weaponised" in an attempt to undermine Corbyn are the opposite of the truth. More than
a personal failure, Corbyn's complicity in anti-Semitism is a symptom of the morbid politics he embodies.
Corbyn needs to unleash the huge Labour Party membership on the Blairite traitors in its ranks, especially the MPs. Driven out
into the wilderness they will die off and Labour can consolidate itself against its non-external critics.
Antisemitism in the UK used to mean hostility to the pushiness, greed and mad manners of successful Jews like Philip Green,
but it has now been redefined to mean someone who thinks the Palestinians should not be used as target practice.
Antisemitism here is a middle and upper class thing. There are so few Jews in some parts of the UK that many people have
never met a Jew. I was over 30 before I ever knew anyone who was Jewish.
The middle class and upper class British antisemites see Jews as unpleasant and underhand rivals, but for a working class man
like Chris Williamson, who would probably not have known any Jews when he was growing up in Derby, Jews would have been just another
religious group. I've known many people who have met him. He has no interest in religion. His main concerns are veganism and animal
welfare. His holidays are cycling tours around the nearby national park. He is really just a 1970s hippy in a suit. To tar someone
like that with the old antisemitism canard will backfire. The intelligent British person knows Williamson is not the antisemite
type.
Interestingly, Sir John Chilcot believed as late as 2016 that about 150,000 Iraqis were killed during the invasion and subsequent
instability. The figure was in fact well over one million. This much was known years earlier. Chilcott, covering for his friend
Tony Blair did not read the mounting evidence – or more likely, just ignored it.
The 2006 Lancet survey calculated fatalities at well over 650,000 just three years into the conflict and the 2007 ORB survey
that actually surveyed fifteen of the eighteen governorates within Iraq found that number was somewhere between 1,033,000
and a staggering 1,220,588 . Since then, the violence created by the vacuum has continued and many more civilians have
died. The numbers above do not include deaths after 13 years of sanctions imposed by the UN.
Many members of the general public in Britain might mistakenly think that the bombing has stopped in Iraq and Syria – but
they would be wrong. In fact, in the last four years, Britain has spent over £300 million on weapons fired from its air forces,
including drones. The cost does not include personnel, wages, equipment, maintenance, fuel, air bases, etc.
Analysis of data conducted by human rights group Reprieve in 2014 concluded that of 41 men targeted by coalition drone strikes
a further 1,147 innocent civilians were killed simply for being in the way.
Where is the sanctimonious Catholic Church to anathemize the major war criminal Tony Blair the Pious?
Mr Blair made a career out of attacking the enemies of Israel, sending his country into more wars than any prime minister
ever before in history as the UK joined the US in fighting the perceived enemies of Israel both militarily and politically,
advantaging the Zionist cause.
The award is presented by the Dan David Foundation, based at Tel Aviv University
British Labor MP Tam Dalyell has charged that Prime Minister Tony Blair was "being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish
advisers"
The comment echoed remarks by U.S. Republican Patrick Buchanan, who was accused of anti-Semitism when in an article
last March, he described a predominantely Jewish group of advisers to President Bush as "a cabal of polemicists and public
officials [who] seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests."
Who cares about Israel in this case? He supports another Brexit referendum, supports open borders with the 3rd world, and
is probably a full fledged communist (a Jewish, anti white ideology).
The Jews and the muslims can squabble over petty details, I'm more worried about what will benefit European nations.
His election would be disastrous for the white, European race. Of course, I do fully expect for a hard shift against Israel
as Muslims grow their populations in Europe.
@anon
declare immigration <=fraudulent unwind/ deportation
declare <feminism<= unworkable restore/ patriarchy
Why should the Jews be permitted to declare anything; no one appointed them king?
Instead, what is needed is for the people to hold a referendum that declares race homogenizing immigration to be a technique
capable of use by proponents of Economic Zionism(EZ) to impose divide and conquer strategies on race resolved populations
in order to generate racial unrest and conflict . When divided; the people cannot organize, to throw the rascals out!
EZ monitors and destroys cooperative working together because sooner or later such groups organize with common objects which
involve finding ways to resist nasty outcomes fostered by economic zionism).
I believe the civil rights movement in America was fostered in great measure by privately instituted racial unrest and conflict
objectives.
I've been 'watching' Britain the last few years thru the BBC and other outlets and am slightly amazed at how much they are controlled
by the Jooz and American NEOCONS. Their foreign policy is almost completely Neo coon . They've kept to the Iran
deal, but under the slightest pressure from big Joo they will fold. The charade of the poising last year of two Russian
expats, just as Russia was hosting the World Cup was disgustingly transparent. MI6 is a joo run intelligence service. It's
amazing how Britain has turned into a multi cult whore and slut of the KIKE! It started with Disraeli! They should have been 'pogromed'
out back then!
Israel is not a global outlier for humanitarian issues, so people assume Corbyn's obsession with it has something
to do with it being lived in by Jews.
They're only sort of right. In fact, it is because it is a well-organised country of more Western people than those they're
in conflict with. In other words, Corbyn dislikes Israel, and Jews to some degree, as an extension of his oikophobia.
His oikophobia is best show in his grim betrayal over Brexit. This last part is unforgivable.
McCarthyism is the extension of the European dark age inquisition. Nowadays the American glosses over McCarthyism with the
terms democracy, neo-liberal order, and human rights. Any idealism other than the American's must be denied, even in the accused
own defence. The American presents the accused as an enemy so dangerous, their ideas so corrupting, that they must be silenced
from the outset. Their only chance of rehabilitation is prostration before their accusers and utter repentance.
@Ned
LudlamHuge membership of aging Trots LARPing as the youth and only being less than half of what the Green party
got in votes at the last election
The Conservatives ran their last campaign with a clear Brexit position and honesty over no tax cuts and no big government spending
increases because we're bankrupt. I don't think there's ever been such a truthful but unexciting campaign by a political party.
I don't think any party will make that mistake again. Corbyn instead ran on a lie over Brexit and infinite gibs for everyone.
It is sad that the latter softened his loss considerably.
Couldn't agree more. The "Left's" core value in the US and UK is white genocide. It really doesn't matter what Corbyn thinks
about the Jew-occupied territories in Palestine as long as he's assisting the Jewish occupation in the UK.
Yeah, Too bad about Corbin. He's a good bloke. Trump should give him a green card and make him Secretary Of Labor. Do we still
have a Secretary Of Labor?
Here's some data on the last Labour MP -- an Ian Austin -- who quit because of 'anti-semitism.' His recorded foreign trips over
the last three years make fascinating reading.
Will the Supreme Court Finally Protect the Right Not to Work on the Sabbath?
The Supreme Court may be on the verge of correcting a constitutional injustice that has affected the lives and careers of thousands
of religiously observant employees for almost half a century. It can do so in a case that the justices have obviously been taking
very seriously during their recent private conferences.
The case involves an Orlando, Florida, training instructor, Darrell Patterson, who sued his former employer, Walgreen Co.,
for religious discrimination. Patterson is a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which prohibits work on the Sabbath.
Walgreen scheduled Patterson for a Saturday shift, and fired him when he refused the assignment. The case made it to the Eleventh
Circuit federal appeals court, which ruled for Walgreen. The court held that forcing Walgreen to guarantee that Patterson would
never have to work on Saturdays posed an undue hardship on the corporation. Patterson and his church, backed by several other
religious groups, have asked the Supreme Court to hear his case, and the court will soon decide whether to do so.
The second sentences is completely perverse. "McCarthyism" was created by "the powerful," but it was the communists and
their fellow travelers in high places seeking to avoid detection and accountability by incriminating McCarthy, a self-rationalizing
smear that worked out very well for them.
True enough, it was the communists (or rather Jewish activists) and their fellow travelers in high places who created the "McCarthyism"
meme.
It was constructed as a psychological shield against future interference in their subversion – the same as the "Anti-Semitism"
and "Conspiracy Theory" memes.
For example, the MSM have trained the US public to regard anyone who questions the government account of 9/11 as a sort of
far out nutcase looking for UFOs. If you don't believe it, read the factual impossibilities of the government 9/11 account in
the literature of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth https://www.ae911truth.org/
and try presenting some of the evidence in a friendly way (e.g. that the towers didn't collapse due to fire) in a middle class
social setting – and see what happens.
"Taken together, these four volumes constitute an extraordinary commentary on a basic weakness in the Soviet system. The Soviets
are heavily dependent on Western technology and innovation not only in their civilian industries, but also in their military programs.
An inevitable conclusion from the evidence in this book is that we have totally ignored a policy that would enable us to neutralize
Soviet global ambitions while simultaneously reducing the defense budget and the tax load on American citizens." . . .
" His book tells at least part of the story of the Soviet Union's reliance on Western technology, including the infamous Kama
River truck plant, which was built by the Pullman-Swindell company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a subsidiary of M. W. Kellogg
Co. Prof. Pipes remarks that the bulk of the Soviet merchant marine, the largest in the world, was built in foreign shipyards.
He even tells the story (related in greater detail in this book) of the Bryant Chucking Grinder Company of Springfield, Vermont,
which sold the Soviet Union the ball-bearing machines that alone made possible the targeting mechanism of Soviet MIRV'ed ballistic
missiles. "
"The communists (high-ups in the FDR and Truman administrations who were, secretly working for Stalin, e.g. Alger Hiss,
Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Bernard Currie) . . . "
It wasn't just the US government 'supporting' the S.U.?
@anarchyst
But McCarthy's lawyer was Ray Cohen, the queer jew. Ray Cohen was also Trump's mentor. And Ray Cohen was also a close friend of
Roger Stone, who is also a fairy of some flavor or another. Stone was recently crudely raided by the FBI, for lying about Trump's
non-connections to jewish mafia in Russia, which Trump clearly has.
I have no idea what this all means, except that satanists like Crowley were also into weird forms of bisexuality.
@Tyrion
2 Please ponder on the following before accusing others in the lack of humanness.
Antisemitism in the UK used to mean hostility to the pushiness, greed and mad manners but it has now been redefined
to mean someone who thinks the Palestinians should not be used as target practice.
@Tyrion
2 John Gray is a genuine intellectual and, as far as I know, of solid working class origins. However he was associated with
the Conservative party rather than Labour and very greatly influenced by his friendship with Isaiah Berlin. Gray is good example
of how white gentile intellectuals not of the left attack the hapless Labour white gentiles by drawing a bien pensant parallel
between racial anti Semitism, the Holocaust and antiZionism.
Racist attitudes have existed in sections of the British left throughout much of its history. What is unprecedented is that
anti-Semitism is now an integral part of a new style of politics promoted by the leader of the Labour Party. [ ]
Claims that anti-Semitism is being "weaponised" in an attempt to undermine Corbyn are the opposite of the truth. More than
a personal failure, Corbyn's complicity in anti-Semitism is a symptom of the morbid politics he embodies. But is the British
conscience now so lax and coarse that voters are ready to propel into power a party led, and in its current form largely created,
by a shifty figure whose most genuine quality is a deep-seated affinity with the politics of conspiracy and hate?
A few years ago the contest for the Labour party came down to a choice e between the Milibrands: two sons of a Trotskyite theoretician
and his wife that had hastened to Britain during WW2, because they were Jewish people.
The Miliband days are over. So was the brothers' epic battle worth it? Despite their flaws, David and Ed Miliband are two
of the most talented Labour politicians of their generation. Theirs is both a political and a personal tragedy
'The relationship between these two siblings irrevocably changed the day Ed decided he wanted to be leader of the Labour
party, too.' Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
The leaders of disinvestment and antiZionism are the humanist wing of the Jewish intelligentsia. The Israel Lobby essay of
Mearshiemer and Walt that latter became best selling screed was was commissioned by London Review of Books's Mary-Kay Wilmers.
"I'm unambiguously hostile to Israel because it's a mendacious state". Wilmers is Jewish, and has used 25 million of family trust
money for the LRB. The intellectual, financial and organisational resources behind antZionism are are almost completely supplied
by humanistic Jewish intellectuals.
Not convinced? How about brilliant biologist Steven Rose (once Britain's youngest full professor and chair of department. )
a founder member of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science in the 1960s, and more recently they have been
instrumental in calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions for as long as Israel continues its occupation of the
Palestinian Territories, on the grounds of Israeli academics' close relationship with the IDF. An open letter[6] initiated
by Steven and Hilary Rose, and also signed by 123 other academics was published in The Guardian on 6 April 2002.[7] In 2004
Hilary Rose and he were the founding members of the British Committee for Universities of Palestine.[5][8]
Gray is not alone in failing to mention anything about the identity of the most formidable antiZionists.
Jonathon Cook, just another example of his people trying to monopolize all political positions (hint: he has been a dual citizen,
Israeli and Brit for some years, so that means ).
I found this site, according to the search engine's blurb, it was his. Not now.
I do not think that he is now connected to it, but the contents are very strange. Worth looking, esp. if interested in the
pathologies of 'the religion of peace'.
He is surely the least worth reading of commentators here, I can see that Mr. Unz prints 'Cook' articles for the commenary
on Brit politics, but surely there must be an actual British person who is actually living there writing good commentary, instead
of a former crypto-Jew now living in Israel (but still making big efforts to stay as crypto as possible)?
Corbyn shaming and humiliating the Brit sellout elite that genuflects to the Jews.
Corbyn calls for UK to condemn Israel's targeting of Palestinians
March 2, 2019 at 1:37 pm | Published in: Europe & Russia, Israel, Middle East, News, Palestine, UK
Head of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn has called for the UK government to condemn Israel's killing of Palestinians
as well as to freeze arms sales to the occupation state.
His remarks came in the wake of a UN report which found that Israel might have committed war crimes against Palestinians.
On Twitter, Corbyn wrote: "The UN says Israel's killings of demonstrators in Gaza – including children, paramedics and
journalists – may constitute 'war crimes or crimes against humanity'".
"The UK government must unequivocally condemn the killings and freeze arms sales to Israel."
The UN report, published earlier this week, said: "The Israeli security forces killed and maimed Palestinian demonstrators
who did not pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to others when they were shot, nor were they directly participating
in hostilities," adding that the protests had been "civilian in nature".
@Tyrion
2 The member of the House of Lords (Baron) Glasman is the 100% Jewish son of a businessman who had his own manufacturing company.
Though he talks a lot of sense, I really don't see Maurice Glasman being the mastermind of the the Labour Party's "Blue" school
of strategic thought (see here
) is an indication that the indigenous British working class are producing their own thinkers. Did it really need a Jewish academic
to say that Labour were in a 'weird space where we thought that a real assault on the wage levels of English workers was a positive
good'?
Even if they thought it, white gentiles in the Labour Party did not dare articulate the obvious truth that mass immigration
under Labour was 'an unofficial wages policy'. There is a lack of confidence in their own thought processes among everyone but
Jews, and not just in the Labour Party.
John Gray's book Black Mass had the thesis of a link between the Bible's 1,000-year reign of the saints, Christian millenarianism
, Nazism's a 1000-year Reich Auschwitz and the Enlightenment which Gray sees as explaining the invasion of Iraq but when he actual
identified the people responsible for influencing Bush, he was, as Damian Thompson noted in a review, too nervous to mention that
they, and others (pre 9/11 Wolfowitz had been like 'a parrot' about toppling Saddam ), wanting an invasion of Iraq were mostly
Jewish. Some people say Rumsfeld (a gentile with what Jews think is a very Jewish sounding name) was the prime mover in that perhaps
forgetting his support of Saddam's Iraq complete with its open nuclear construction project during the Reagan Presidency. Rumsfeld
was greatly influenced by the Albert Wohlsetter
, who became the guru of Richard Perle who dated Wohlsetter's daughter when they met at Hollywood High School (Ron Unz was born
in Hollywood).
Holliwood is exceptionally Jewish, because it is basically Jews who make films that people will pay to see,. They understand
human nature and how to work with it, and thus Jews have a greater power to influence or force of moral suasion than other people.
As a result the great debates in the West come down to arguments between Jews as with the vendetta between
Bernard Brodie and Wohlsetter
(who without any official position, invented the Missile Gap for JFK and the Window Of Opportunity for Reagan).
@Tyrion
2Israel is not a global outlier for humanitarian issues.
You lie so effortlessly, so carefree, with such nonchalance, such blithe. How do you do it?
The Jew "humanitarian" obsession with getting Iran has let to this.
Over 80,000 kids under the age of five have died of starvation in Yemen, UN chief says
"Children did not start the war in Yemen, but they are paying the highest price. Some 360,000 children are suffering from
severe acute malnutrition, fighting for their lives every day. And one credible report put the number of children under 5 who
have died of starvation at more than 80,000," Guterres told a donor conference in the Swiss city of Geneva on Tuesday.
The merit for having introduced into the Ukrainian Constitution the engagement to enter officially into NATO goes to Parliamentary
President Andriy Parubiy. Co-founder in 1991 of the Ukrainian National-Socialist Party, on the model of Adolf Hitler's
National-Socialist Party; head of the neo-Nazi paramilitary formations which were used in 2014 during the putsch of Place Maïdan
under US/NATO command, and in the massacre of Odessa ; head of the Ukraine National Security and Defense Council, which,
with the Azov Battalion and other neo-Nazi units, attacked Ukrainian civilians of Russian nationality in the Eastern part of
the country and used his squadrons for acts of ferocious abuse, the plunder of political headquarters and other auto-da-fés
in a truly Nazi style.
Ukraine is already linked to NATO, of which it is a partner: for example, the Azov Battalion, whose Nazi character is represented
by the emblem copied from that of the SS unit Das Reich, has been transformed into a special operations regiment, equipped
with armoured vehicles and trained by US instructors from the 173rd Airborne Division, transferred to Ukraine from Vicence,
and seconded by other NATO members.
Not a peep from Britsh purists of holo-biz persuasion. LFI chair Joan Ryan, in particular, is not "disturbed' at all by the
NATO cooperation with Ukrainian neo-Nazi. The Friends of Israel in the UK accept cordially the "good" neo-Nazis that have been
accepted by the Jewish State itself:
@Sean
On the other hand, why do the pro-Palestinian intellectuals in the diaspora always lose out? Why are they incapable of ever showing
influence in any serious way in the Jewish community? Why is it not a widely known reality that most diaspora have views on Israel
similar to the broad opinion in their host countries or even more radical inline with their socio-political stance elsewhere?
Perhaps they don't get much support from the others because they don't want to give it. If even the likes of Rachel Riley and
Stephen Fry are on the anti-Corbyn witchhunt, what is the attitude of the average Jew?
For god's sake, Riley is barely Jewish, (to the point that practically nobody knew she considered herself Jewish until now)
never lived a second in Israel and yet is so emotionally attached to it that she waged a full spectrum media campaign (complete
with the typical selfie of her looking sad after online 'assault') in service of silencing any dissent on Israel.
As Atzmon himself has noted, the entry of large numbers of Jews in the pro-Palestinian movement shifted it's agenda to one
less and less accommodating to Palestinian interests and less demanding of Israel. See MondoWeiss.
Please explain, brainwashed American. Childhood brainwashing is remarkably effective.
These people are right and they know it. If you can't afford to got to hospital and get deeper in debt because you can't afford
the interest payments, just borrow for a flight to Cuba and stay there. You will get the hospital care and not sink deeper into
debt.
Or are you about to start screaming about the most vicious, evil Communist of all time, Jesus of Nazareth, who said, "Sell
all you have and give to the poor"?
Or do you know some objective specifics that the rest of us should know about?
Sometimes soon the FUK, the Former United Kingdom, will have to get used to the fact, that they are not an Empire anymore.
The Lobby has helped the Tories in Britain a lot recently in painting Corbyn as an anti-Semite. Making sure that Corbyn
never becomes prime minister is a big issue for them.
The payback for the Israeli help given is, of course, banning Hizbullah.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
the UK has really gone insane! did they ban bds and anyone opposed to zionism too? only a matter of time
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
The UK's been in gross violation of International Law for decades on end, the latest determination by the WCJ on the Chomoro
Islanders is its latest defeat and proof of its terrorizing policies. Then we have the subject of support for terrorists in
Syria and terrorism in Venezuela. Some brave, enterprising folk ought to plant a passel of Hezbollah flags on the grounds of
the minister's house, then report him for his crime of being in possession of banned material. And yet another reason for Scots
to vote for independence and the end of Union, as I'm certain Scots don't want to be associated with a terror state like Britain.
The UK government has been supporting the terrorists of all stripes including White Helmets and Al Qaeda -- as was ordered
by their masters in Tel Aviv and the Friends of Israel in the UK. The traitorous fools still believe in the chosenites' omnipotence.
But what happens when this anti-Semitic nonsense creates the White Christian Radicals who want to avenge the murder of the Christ
that was done by the Hebrews. Are they ready for that?
Jewish is about race, religion and place of origin,
Modern Jews are not a religion, not a race, and have no place of origin. They are a gang forever imprisoned in an inherited
totalitarian culture by childhood brainwashing to hate all non-Jews. The first thing they are taught is that the non-Jews have
always hated the Jews and wanted to kill them, when the reverse is true.
Most Jews are atheists. It is on record that David Ben-Gurion was an atheist, but still he was a Jew. So Judaism is not a religion.
As for place of origin, it is about how far the proselytizing rabbis reached in the cosmopolitan world of the Macedonian and
Roman empires, where travel was safe and the whole world shared Greek as its lingua franca.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass land and sea to make one proselyte, and when he is made,
ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. [Matt. 23:15, original in Greek!]
The mark of modern Jews is that hypocrisy, pretending they are the victims, that everyone wants to kill them. It goes back
at least as far as the Book of Esther, a fictitious story about how the Persians wanted to kill all the Jews for a trivial reason.
Jew-hating is an incurable disease. Under certain democratic conditions it may not flourish well. Under certain conditions
the germ may even appear to die, but it never does die even in most ideal climate. [Leon Uris, Exodus ]
"Angry arguments broke out in the West Virginia statehouse on Friday after the state Republican Party allegedly set up an anti-Muslim
display in the rotunda linking the 9/11 terror attacks to a freshman congresswoman from Minnesota.
The display featured a picture of the World Trade Center in New York City as a fireball exploded from the one of the Twin Towers,
set above a picture of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Muslim. "'Never forget' – you said. . ." read a caption on the
first picture. "I am the proof – you have forgotten," read the caption under the picture of Omar, who is wearing a hijab.
One staff member was physically injured during the morning's confrontations, and another official resigned after being accused
of making anti-Muslim comments. Several Democrats objected to the display, and reportedly got into an argument with the House's
sergeant at arms, Anne Lieberman, after she allegedly made an anti-Muslim remark.
Del. Mike Angelucci, D-Marion, charged Lieberman had said "all Muslims are terrorists." "I am furious, and I don't want to
see her representing the people of this great state in the House again," Angelucci said of Lieberman, who became the state's first
female sergeant at arms last year. Speaking to West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Lieberman denied she'd made the comment. By
the end of the day she had submitted her resignation "effective immediately," officials said
It's amazing how Britain has turned into a multi cult whore and slut of the KIKE! It started with Disraeli!
I haven't read his books. I might be a little pedantic here. But I have read his biography by a French Jew, André Maurois,
a famous author. Disraeli was a Christian. Jewish childhood. But never knew that till he went to school and found that he and
another pupil were treated differently when the time came for the class on religion. Great puzzle for him and Sarah to work out.
And instead of bar-mitzvah, which he had probably never heard of, he went to baptism.
@Tyrion
2 LOL. Israel lives parasitically off of stolen land and it's fifth column in the West preventing even remotely balanced policy
towards it. It really is amazing how you fail to see how transparent your bullshit is.
Soon Corbyn will stand alone, exposed before the inquisition that has been prepared for him.
No. He will have support from Ireland and Scotland. The Brits, artificial famines, and exporting cheap labour and slaves abroad:
An artificial famine
"A Celtic cross stands high above the waters at the western end of Canada's Grosse Isle. The Cross bears inscription in Gaelic,
French and English, carved on ebony panels."
" Children of the Gael died in their thousands on this island having fled from the laws of the foreign tyrants and an
artificial famine in the years 1847-48.
God's loyal blessing upon them. Let this monument be a token to their name and honour from the Gaels of America. God save Ireland."
"That is the translation from the Gaelic inscription. The bitterness of the accusatory Gaelic inscription is absent from the
English dedication. [ ] The French dedication is similarly lacking in bitterness."
Edward Laxton, The Famine Ships, The Irish Exodus to America . An Owl Book, Henry Holt and Company, New York.
@Anonymous
These are very valid points, but the fact is, the powers that be are terrified of his election for a reason. The sad fact is,
political hope these days lies with the Left, since the cuck right is beyond useless, and there is currently little hope for a
legitimate opposition Right movement. It would be thoroughly demonized in the US and subject to arrest in toilets like Britain
or France. AOC is a very stupid girl, but people like her and Corbyn deserve some consideration, unfortunately.
Israel conspires against the Mother of Parliaments
"A quite incredible story out of England has not received much media coverage in the United States. It concerns how the
Israeli Embassy in London connived with government officials to "take down" parliamentarians and government ministers who were
considered to be critical of the Jewish State. It was also learned that the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising
private groups promoting Israeli interests, including associations of Members of Parliament (MPs)."
It's absolutely amazing how even the very concept of Jewry (let alone their actual existence) can sow such enormous discord all
up and down the political spectrum, with such myriad permutations and combinations thereof.
At the end of the day, there has to be a kind of benign neglect towards the Jews, BUT ONLY after each and every last single
one of them has moved to Israel, by force if necessary. None of them should be allowed to live ever again in any other nation-state,
nor have any controlling interests in anything outside of Israel. Otherwise the rest of us will be back at each other's throats
again in no time.
If they're all in one spot, attending to their own interests, then fine, so be it. They can do whatever they want to and with
their immediate moslem neighbors, as long as the rest of the world doesn't feel obliged to assist, resist, or even care very much.
At that point it should all be left up to them. Truly, a pox on all their houses.
In a much-cited October 2003 essay in The New York Review of Books, Judt called to dismantle the state and to replace it
with "a single, integrated, bi-national state" between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – a recipe for national suicide
for the sovereign Jewish entity. This categorical rejection of Zionism put him in a class with other contemporary Jewish intellectuals
of the Diaspora such as Jacqueline Rose, Michael Neumann and Joel Kovel,
I suppose they are not taken seriously by people with their hands on the levers of power and governments, because they are
asking too much. Diaspora intellectuals represent the intelligentsia's view, which is that ethnic domination of a nations-state
as with the Jewish state of Israel is incompatible with humanist principles.
Lots of politicians get elected by sounding as if they are humanists, but then they are responsible for a state and they start
to obey the dictates of realism. Withdrawing from the occupied territories is now quite clearly something Israel has no intention
of ever doing, although it would not require the evacuation of more than 48,000 people (9000 families) according to this
The information in the above link was quite surprising to me, and it seems that expulsion of the West Bank Arabs is, for the
foreseeable future, a long way from of being the best solution for Israel.
Nevertheless as Ehud Barak said "Every attempt [by the State of Israel] to keep hold of this area [the West Bank and Gaza]
as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote,
then it is a binational state, and if they don't vote it is an apartheid state." I think the Palestinians position is stronger
than Israel and its Lobby want anyone to know, so they are making maximum efforts to stifle debate. But the Palestinians are holding
out for much more that just a state, partly because of Western internationalists.
@Sean
Your post reminds me of my Great Aunt, who was prone to saying things like "your birthday is the 2nd of July and mine is in September,
that's amazing, because 2 + 7 (July) = 9 (September)" as if this was meaningful.
The reductio ad adsurdum of this where you try to include Rumsfeld in a special peri-Jew category on account of the sound of
his name
@Tyrion
2 The Jewish State is indeed an outlier considering its hypocrisy, including holo-biz profiteering schema based on the alleged
"superior morality" and "eternal victimhood" and other Anne Frank specialties:
@Sean
The progressives are Janus-faced. In that on one they believe in the perfect, but on the other hand they let it be the enemy of
the good, thus they end up rejecting realistic achievement and instead exult in bringing it low. They, and their allies, seem
to be mostly riffs on Year Zero cults. No wonder they get all loved up for Islamist fanaticism.
Idolators, perfectionists and slavish decandents, all at once. Naturally, they're strongest among the coddled and well-to-do.
Let's all sit around and worship the golden calf to absolute excess, while we fade away or starve. There can be no middle ground
between perfection or complete embrace of the other.
@Che
Guava Why do you call Cook a crypto-Jew? His claim to Israeli citizenship is based only on his marriage to an Israeli citizen
and she is a Christian Palestinian.
@james
charles Another individual whom, like Corbyn, claimed to be for British sovereignty all of his political career in order to
signal his patriotism but then, when push came to shove, he campaigned for Remain.
Worse, when given a second chance and the backing of a public vote to go for Brexit, again like Corbyn, Duncan doubled down
and ended up dismissing the vote as a mere "working class tantrum".
With his "soak the poor", "open borders", "let them eat cultural enrichment" attitude, he is the Marie Antoinette of British
politics.
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services?
Notable quotes:
"... Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? ..."
"... "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." ..."
"... Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. ..."
"... The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. ..."
"... As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career". ..."
"... Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance. ..."
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? The following extracts are from
an article at the excellent Medialens
And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...
I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services: While it might be difficult to identify precisely
the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as "intelligence", "security", "Whitehall" or "Home Office" sources)
on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.
As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:
"Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."
Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished
journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.
And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct
Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.
In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret
state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed
forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.
As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of
the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood
at the end of their career".
Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent
is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.
A brief history
Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a
cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest
Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.
Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf
of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance.
The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the
Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided
by sending them a list of "crypto-communists". Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it "ran" dozens of Fleet Street journalists
and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.
According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism
served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour
of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.
And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret
service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.
In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives'
Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.
And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.
David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media
and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: "We have somebody
in every office in Fleet Street"
Leaker King
And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing
companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming "embarrassing publications".
Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, "was a longstanding agent of ours" who "made it clear
he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction".
Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet
Street journalists. Wright comments: "No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot". King was also closely
involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.
Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according
to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.
David Walker, the Mirror's foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security
scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament.
Maxwell and Mossad
According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners' strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the
1970s MI5's F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.
In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6
were equally as strong.
Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that
he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks
were fascinating.
For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: "Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse
during the Cold War."
The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster
Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked
to lunch by the head of MI6. "It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted
to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms
of first-hand knowledge."
And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph
and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to
handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.
Lawson strongly denied the allegations.
Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan
McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from "dodgy security
services". She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland
Human Rights Commission: "We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not
being used." (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)
Growing power of secret state
Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.
But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official
Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into
the heart of Blair's ruling clique so these links are even more significant.
Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.
According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by
the Rockingham cell within the MoD.
A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant
attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.
Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.
Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: "Saddam Hussein
has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of
the United Nations inspectors." The source of these "revelations" was said to be "intelligence picked up from within Iraq". Early
in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies
about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group,
the Iraqi National Congress.
Sexed up – and missed out
During the controversy that erupted following the end of the "war" and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the
ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government
(in collusion with the intelligence services) had "sexed up" a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.
The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that
drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition?
But those facts will be forever secret.
Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was
ignored by the inquiry.
Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of
WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US
President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress
and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.
Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a "calculated set-up" devised to foster the
propaganda case for war. "In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published
stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime." And he concluded: "The information fog is thicker
than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures,
especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor."
Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence
services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.
~
Richard Keeble's publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John
Libbey 1997) and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is also the editor of Ethical Space: The International
Journal of Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media Network.
"... General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children. ..."
"... Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War". ..."
"... The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war. ..."
"... the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces. ..."
"... The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening ..."
"... In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing. ..."
"... The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. ..."
"... Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet. ..."
"... But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day. ..."
The American Public has gotten exactly what it deserved. They have been dumbed-down in our poor-by-intention school systems. The
moronic nonsense that passes for news in this country gets more sensational with each passing day. Over on Fox, they are making
the claim that ISIS fighters are bringing Ebola over the Mexican Border, which prompted a reply by the Mexican Embassy that won't
be reported on Fox.
We continue to hear and it was even reported in this very fine article by Ms. Benjamin that the American
People now support this new war. Really? I'm sorry, but I haven't seen that support anywhere but on the news and I just don't
believe it any more.
There is also the little problem of infiltration into key media slots by paid CIA Assets (Scarborough and brainless Mika are
two of these double dippers). Others are intermarried. Right-wing Neocon War Criminal Dan Senor is married to "respected" newsperson
Campbell Brown who is now involved in privatizing our school system. Victoria Nuland, the slimey State Department Official who
was overheard appointing the members of the future Ukrainian Government prior to the Maidan Coup is married to another Neo-Con--Larry
Kagan. Even sweet little Andrea Mitchell is actually Mrs. Alan Greenspan.
General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC.
MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market.
Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being
CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli
Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women
and Children.
Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is
connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option
discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to
a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior
put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War".
Yesterday there was a coordinated action by all of the networks, which was clearly designed to support the idea that the generals
want Obama to act and he just won't. The not-so-subtle message was that the generals were right and that the President's "inaction"
was somehow out of line-since, after all, the generals have recommended more war. It was as if these people don't remember that
the President, sleazy War Criminal that he is, is still the Commander in Chief.
The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our
various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that
they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war.
Finally, this Sunday every NFL Game will begin with some Patriotic "Honor America" Display, which will include a missing man
flyover, flags and fireworks, plenty of uniforms, wounded Vets and soon-to-be-wounded Vets. A giant American Flag will, once again,
cover the fields and hundreds of stupid young kids will rush down to their "Military Career Center" right after the game. These
are the ones that I pity most.
Let's be frank: powerful interests want war and subsequent puppet regimes in the half dozen nations that the neo-cons have been
eyeing (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan). These interests surely include industries like banking, arms and oil-all of
whom make a killing on any war, and would stand to do well with friendly governments who could finance more arms purchases and
will never nationalize the oil.
So, the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come
back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact
that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark
forces.
IanB52, 10 October 2014 6:57pm
The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening. When I'm down at the gym they always have CNN on (I can
only imagine what FOX is like) which is a pretty much dyed in the wool yellow jingoist station at this point. With all the segments
they dedicate to ISIS, a new war, the "imminent" terrorist threat, they seem to favor talking heads who support a full ground
war and I have never, not once, heard anyone even speak about the mere possibility of peace. Not ever.
In media universe there
is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing.
I'd imagine that these media companies have a lot stock in and a cozy relationship with the defense contractors.
Damiano Iocovozzi, 10 October 2014 7:04pm
The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. The media doesn't report on anything but
relies on repeating manufactured crises, creating manufactured consent & discussing manufactured solutions. Follow the oil, the
pipelines & the money. Both R's & D's are left & right cheeks of the same buttock. Thanks to Citizens United & even Hobby Lobby,
a compliant Supreme Court, also owned by United States of Corporations, it's a done deal.
Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer
have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department
to your favorite media outlet.
Let me give you one clear example. A year ago Barack Obama came very close to bombing Syria to
kingdom come, the justification used was "Assad gassed his own people", referring to a sarin gas attack near Damascus. Well, it
turns out that Assad did not initiate that attack, discovered by research from many sources including the prestigious MIT, it
was a false flag attack planned by Turkey and carried out by some of Obama's own "moderate rebels".
But all that research from
MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written
still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and
distorts and misrepresents the news every day.
In yet another stunning blow to the so-called "Steele Dossier" assembled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the former chief
of the (MI6) said the hastily cobbled-together report by his former employee is "overrated" and its salacious claims against Donald
Trump unlikely to be verified, as the
Daily Wire
's Ashe Schow reports.
Following an appearance at the Jamestown Foundation's
12th annual terrorism conference in Washington
D.C., Sir John Scarlett - who headed the British Secret Intelligence Service from 2004 to 2009, fielded a question from journalist
Nicholas Ballasy, who asked Scarlett what he thought of the dossier and if he believed what was written in it.
"Well, no," said Scarlett, adding "I looked at it and I thought these are commercial intelligence reports; I don't know about
the sources -- they might be right, they might be wrong and they'll probably be overrated and they've been overrated. "
When asked if the dossier could ever be verified, Steele's former boss said "No."
Ballasy then asked Scarlett if he was surprised that Steele would produce the dossier using unverified information, to which the
former MI6 head replied:
"Well, they were commercial intelligence reports and they were visibly that so there's a question of why they were there and where
they came from and who commissioned them and so on," adding" So, I've tended to see them in that context and never quite of political
significance for obvious reasons and actually if you think about it, people have talked about them in a really big way a year or
so ago and they haven't really made that much of a difference. "
"As I said, I suspect, all I can say, is they are overrated. "
When asked about what Steele was like to work with, Scarlett replied: " I'm not going to comment ," before walking away. We're
guessing he's probably tired of MI6 having been mentioned in the same breath as Steele for the last several years.
"... In these shorts, Hitler is depicted as waging a mind-control campaign over the German people based on the manipulation of emotions such as anger, love, fear, sympathy, pride, and hate, while also occasionally employing force, regimentation, depravation, and false rewards. ..."
"... Demonizing the enemy, according to Disney historian Leonard Maltin, "relieves aggression." ..."
Aug 23, 2011 | Truthout
At the onset of World War II, Walt Disney was not alone in his belief that film should play a dominant role in the teaching process
or, as he claimed, in "molding opinion."7
He was, however, at the forefront of a movement to recognize a "new aspect of the use of films in war": training industrial workers
and soldiers.8
Some historians try to account for Disney's participation in generating military propaganda by claiming that the studios were "taken
over by the military as part of the war effort"9
on December 8, 1941. But Richard Shale has meticulously documented Disney's much earlier attempts to court contracts with the aircraft
industry, the U.S. Council of National Defense, and Canadian military supporters.10
Indeed, despite a "popular (and frequently quoted) misconception" that the relationship between Disney Studios and the U.S. military
was "unexpected or unsolicited," Shale observes an explicit shift in Disney's focus from "entertainment values to teaching values"
that occurred before Disney acquired his first U.S. military contracts in December 1941.11
For instance, in 1940 Disney approached the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation with the idea of generating a training film on flush
riveting. And in the spring of 1941, with Canada already engaged in war, Disney convinced the commissioner of the National Film Board
of Canada, John Grierson, that animated films were better positioned as teaching tools than documentary films because of their "capacity
for simplifying the presentation of pedagogical problems."12
Grierson then bought the Canadian rights to Four Methods of Flush Riveting and commissioned Disney to produce an instructional
film that taught soldiers how to use an antitank rifle and four short films that encouraged Canadians to purchase war savings certificates.
Then, in the fall of 1941, Walt Disney toured South America at the bequest of the U.S. Office of Inter-American affairs, which
was attempting to establish good relations and "hemispheric unity as explicated in Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy."13
With material collected on the trip, Disney proceeded to generate two feature films, Saludos Amigos (1943) and The Three
Caballeros (1945), both intended to celebrate Latin American culture while accentuating its similarities with North American
culture (and downplaying or ignoring issues like national politics and poverty).14
Born out of U.S. fear of a Nazi alliance with countries like Argentina, the films aimed to "enhance the Latin American image in the
United States," while also "enhanc[ing] America's appreciation of Latin American Everymen."15
Yet, in making The Three Caballeros palatable to white Middle America and American imperialism less threatening to southerners,
Disney more often than not caricatures Latin American culture as a voluptuous, exotic female who is fleeing the attentions of a libidinous,
but comically ineffectual Donald Duck.16
There is little doubt that a relationship between Disney Studios and the U.S. government had been fully cemented by 1943, when 94
percent of the footage produced by Disney was under government contract.17
From 1941 to 1945, the Disney Studios produced dozens of short educational films, with their subjects ranging from aircraft and
warship identification to dental hygiene to the household conservation of cooking oil for the making of military weapons. The studio
also produced a number of anti-Nazi short films, including Der Fuehrer's Face (1943), Education for Death: The Making
of the Nazi (1943), and Reason and Emotion (1943), two of which were nominated for Academy Awards. In these shorts,
Hitler is depicted as waging a mind-control campaign over the German people based on the manipulation of emotions such as anger,
love, fear, sympathy, pride, and hate, while also occasionally employing force, regimentation, depravation, and false rewards.
Of course, the success of the films' efforts to expose Nazi propaganda overwhelmingly relies on the use of comic devices, caricatures,
and stereotypes to make Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito seem irrational and absurd.
Demonizing the enemy, according to Disney historian Leonard Maltin, "relieves aggression."18
This claim, suggesting that the films function to disperse rather than focus emotional energy, clearly sidesteps the multiple ways
in which the films, much like the propaganda they critique, attempt to shape their audience's emotional responses, such as when Donald
Duck, clad in starred-and-striped pajamas, croons to the Statue of Liberty, "Oh, boy, am I glad to be a citizen of the United States
of America!" Most significant about the techniques used by these Disney shorts is how they embody animation's capacity to draw clear,
simple lines and present a selective representation of an otherwise complex reality. Through the use of comedy and comedic violence,
in particular, Disney films are often released from the expectation that they might be attempting to do more than entertain.
Viewers wooed by animation's unique capacity to create novel images through exaggeration, distortion, and aesthetic style are
easily absorbed into an imaginary world that quite deliberately focuses their eyes on a constructed reality to the exclusion of other
possibilities. The value of the anti-Nazi short films for today's audiences lies in their obvious attempt to win the hearts and minds
of American viewers through clever visual and ideological manipulation, while ironically issuing repeated warnings to viewers not
to allow emotion to short-circuit their critical faculties. A historical perspective on the subject matter sets in relief how Disney's
critique of propaganda using the medium of animation inevitably ventures into the realm of propaganda itself.
During the war, a significant number of the studio's resources were devoted to making another feature-length propaganda film,
Victory through Air Power (1943). The film, based in part on a book written by Major Alexander P. De Seversky, advocates
the development of airplane and weapons technology as the means to win the war against the Axis powers. We are told the airplane
will not only "revolutionize warfare" but is "the only weapon of war to develop such usefulness during peacetime." Dramatic music
punctuates scenes that explore new models of airplanes with increased bombing potential. The United States as the "arsenal of democracy"
is represented as a giant heart comprising factories that pump "war supplies" through "the arteries of our transport lines over distances
that actually girdle the globe." This organic, humanizing image of "the great industrial heart of America" contrasts with the mechanical
image of a spoked wheel used to represent the Nazi war industries, which are also vividly portrayed in dark reds and blacks suggestive
of a hellish inferno. Japan is represented as a deadly, black octopus extending its "greedy tentacles" over its "stolen empire."
We are told of the necessity for U.S. long-range bombers to strike at "the heart and vitals of the beast." With the lethal combination
of the "superior" American "science of aviation" and "science of demolition," the "enemy lies hopelessly exposed to systematic destruction."
At the same time, the film announces that "scientific bombing" will enable a "minimum investment in human lives," an oddly ambiguous
use of language suggestive of two possible meanings in the context in which it appears: the assertion that aerial bombing of enemy
territories requires a "minimum investment" of American soldiers and, what is both more sinister and perhaps in need of such coded
language, the claim that bombing the enemy entails such "total destruction" that no human lives requiring "investment" will be left
in its wake. Indeed, the film's climax consists of a montage of exploding bombs among Japanese cities and factories, which begin
curiously unpopulated and end utterly annihilated. At the pinnacle of the climactic violence, the screen resolves into an image of
a bald eagle descending upon and crushing the land-ridden octopus, which then dissolves into a dark cloud of smoke rising above Japan
as "America the Beautiful" plays in the background.
Walt Disney believed that Victory through Air Power convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to support to long-range
bombing.19
For a contemporary viewer who has the benefit of hindsight, the unquestioned propaganda offered by Victory through Air Power
leaves one with the eerie feeling that the perspective being shaped by the film would not only fail to question the use of technology
such as the atomic bomb but even wholeheartedly celebrate it as the quickest and most effective way to win the war. Indeed, it is
precisely the film's unflinching support of the development of bigger and better bombing technology, from small hand-dropped bombs
to ten-ton delayed-action bombs and armor-piercing bomb rockets, that might seem most disturbing given the devastating effects of
the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the postwar escalation of arms development during the Cold War and the ongoing
expansion of the military-industrial complex in the United States.20
But Walt Disney did not just support the development of larger weapons; he was a firm supporter of what might be called the atomic
age and made the classic 1956 propaganda film Our Friend the Atom, which was also produced as a book and appeared as an
atomic submarine ride in the Tomorrowland section of Disney's Magic Kingdom. In this instance, as Mark Langer points out, Our
Friend the Atom was designed to "counter opposition to the military use of atomic weaponry."21
The Magic Kingdom became an outpost for leading young people and adults to believe that an "Atomic reactor . . . is like a big furnace.
An atomic chain reaction is likened to what happens when a stray ping-pong ball is thrown at a mass of mousetraps with ping-pong
balls set on each one."22
Disney played a formidable role in convincing every school child that atomic energy was central not merely to winning the Cold War
but also to preparing them for a future that would be dominated by the United States and its use of new energy sources, which incidentally
could be instrumental in elevating the United States to the position of the world's preeminent military power. Mouse power easily
and readily made the shift to celebrating atomic power and militarism while enlarging Disney's role as a major purveyor of propaganda.
The Disney films discussed above alert us to the fact that Disney animators honed their skills and gained widespread popular appeal
in the 1940s by first producing propaganda films for the U.S. government. This often neglected reality underlying Disney's origins
as a cultural entertainment icon should make us all the more careful to heed Janet Wasko's warning that Disney encodes preferred
readings of both its animated films and its own brand image to such an extent that "one of the most amazing aspects of the Disney
phenomenon is the consistently uniform understanding of the essence of 'Disney.'"23
Attuned to Disney's willingness to assume an overt pedagogical role during World War II, several critics of a more recent Disney
film, Aladdin (1992), noted that the timing of the film's production and release coincided with U.S. military efforts in
the Persian Gulf war. According to Christiane Staninger, Aladdin is "a propaganda movie for Western imperialism" that "shows
the supposed unworkability of Middle Eastern traditions and the need for American intervention."24
Dianne Sachko Macleod takes this critique a step further, suggesting a link between Disney's "revival of British and French colonial
stereotypes of Arab traders, fanatics, and beauties" and the "storehouse of racial and cultural images" used by the Pentagon to justify
the war.25
Macleod notes that regardless of the filmmakers' intentions, the film had the general effect of "privileging the American myths of
freedom and innocence at a time of nationalist fervor."26
Other connections between the film and the first Iraq war are not especially subtle: in addition to locating Aladdin in the fictional
city of "Agrabah," it makes the villainous Grand Vizier Jafar look like a combination of Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini,
while the two young heroes, Aladdin and Jasmine, not only look American-Disney animators made it publicly known that Aladdin
was modeled after Tom Cruise27-but also, as Brenda Ayres suggests, display their heroism by "contesting (and changing) Arabian law
and Islamic religious tradition."28
While it is impossible to discern the actual motives of the Disney animators, it is equally impossible to ignore the cultural context
in which the American public viewed Aladdin. At the time of the film's release, the dominant media were aggressively promoting similar
images of liberation from barbaric traditions in order to justify the United States' "right to intervene in Middle Eastern politics."29
Disney's Conservative Path
Despite the well-documented history of collaboration between the Walt Disney Company and U.S. military and state institutions,
Disney has more recently claimed to have no interest in politics. How Disney's decision in May 2004 to block its Miramax division
from distributing Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 might qualify as a nonpolitical gesture is uncertain. At the time, a senior
executive stated that "it's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle."30
Not only were a number of Disney's top executives known to be campaign contributors to the George W. Bush administration,31
but then CEO Michael Eisner was reported to have said that any criticism of the Bush administration might "endanger tax breaks Disney
receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor."32
Miramax arranged privately to buy Moore's film and distribute it independently, and in 2005, the founders of Miramax, Harvey and
Bob Weinstein, did not renew their contracts with Disney.33
As suggested above, the company's alleged desire to remain outside politics contradicts the reality of Disney's historical pattern
of intervening in political matters. It is hardly surprising, then, that in the wake of the unprecedented success of Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 documentary, Disney/ABC decided to produce its own account of the events leading up to the terrorist attacks
on September 11, 2001. A $40 million miniseries titled The Path to 9/11, originally touted as a docudrama "based on the
9/11 Commission Report" and later as the "official true story," constituted a blatant political move on the part of Disney/ABC.34
In addition, Scholastic, Inc., the educational distribution partner for Disney/ABC, sent one hundred thousand letters to high school
teachers across the United States encouraging them to use The Path to 9/11 in the classroom curriculum and directing them
to online study guides.35
The miniseries was billed by its self-labeled conservative writer Cyrus Nowrasteh as an "objective telling of the events of 9/11"36
but faced severe criticism for its partisan depiction of events and actors. The Path to 9/11, directed by evangelical Christian
filmmaker David Cunningham,37
depicted members of the Bill Clinton administration as totally incompetent, having repeatedly ignored opportunities to capture Osama
bin Laden and overlooked warnings of an incipient attack before September 11, 2001. When prescreened to a select number of film reviewers
before it aired on television, the miniseries was received with skepticism and outrage, not merely from Democrats and Clinton supporters.
Robert Cressey, a top counterterrorism official to both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, argued that a scene depicting
the Clinton administration's refusal to pursue bin Laden was "something straight out of Disney and fantasyland. It's factually wrong.
And that's shameful."38
Nearly one hundred thousand readers of the online journal Think Progress sent protest letters to Robert Iger, president
and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, stating that the film inaccurately "places primary responsibility for the attacks of 9/11 on
the Clinton administration while whitewashing the failures of the Bush administration."39
According to Tom Shales, writing for the Washington Post, the miniseries qualified as an "assault on truth."40
Shales added, "Blunderingly, ABC executives cast doubt on their own film's veracity when they made advance copies available to such
political conservatives as Rush Limbaugh but not to Democrats who reportedly requested the same treatment. . . . Democrats have a
right to be suspicious of any product of the conservative-minded Walt Disney Co."41
A group of academic historians led by Arthur M. Schlesinger sent a letter to ABC calling for the network to "halt the show's broadcast
and prevent misinforming Americans about their history."42
The film presents a number of clichéd stereotypes of "big government" and bureaucratic incompetence, depicting paper-pushing officials
as woefully indecisive at crucial moments, primarily because they are too self-interested to put their necks on the line. Clinton,
for example, is represented as not wanting to issue orders for military action against al-Qaeda because he's too worried about the
effect such decisions might have on the polls, that is, when he is not caught up in dealing with the fallout from the Monica Lewinsky
scandal. In one scene, General Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance, which waits for U.S. approval to go after
bin Laden, asks in a scornful tone, "Are there any men left in Washington?" Individuals working on the ground who buck procedure
and orders from their superiors are, by contrast, willing to "take the heat." So, apparently, is George W. Bush, whose decisiveness
in giving a strike-down order to the military after the 9/11 attacks really functions as the climax of the whole miniseries. One
could imagine Bush political supporters cheering as this scene unfolded: finally, they could rest assured that there was a real man
in Washington. Meanwhile, several FBI and U.S. customs agents recognize the nature of the "new kind of war" being waged against America,
and their appeals to racial profiling and domestic spying appear justified in the film. For example, in a brief dialogue, one FBI
agent states, "Americans have the right to be protected from domestic spying," and the central protagonist of the film, FBI counterterrorism
agent John O'Neil (portrayed by Harvey Keitel), replies, "Do they have the right to be killed by terrorists?" Heroic individuals
such as O'Neil are willing to bypass "red tape" and stand in stark contrast to (1) politicians who are too worried about public opinion
not to bow to the pressures of "political correctness," (2) uncooperative CIA officials who jealously guard intelligence when they
are not mindlessly adhering to obsolete federal legislation that protects individuals' rights, and (3) various utterly casual security
officials and workers who would rather appease suspicious-looking members of the public than be confronted with a situation that
might embroil them in conflict. And that is not all. The film contrasts the coolness of John O'Neil's astute judgments with the irrationality
of emotionally overwrought women, such as the ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine (Patricia Heaton), and the fanatic zeal of the
terrorists. In fact, many of the characters who represent terrorists such as Mohamed Atta (Martin Brody) and Ramzi Yousef (Nabil
Elouahabi) share the same intense stare, bristly mustache, and swarthy skin exhibited by Hitler in Disney's World War II propaganda
films. While it might be possible for a viewer to overlook insipid dialogue, fallacious logic, melodrama, and weak narrative structure,
it is virtually impossible to ignore the film's use of racist and sexist stereotypes to lend legitimacy to all the standard bogeys
of extreme right-wing ideology. And, most importantly, there remains the film's utterly deceptive self-presentation as a historically
accurate depiction of events. Even lead actor Harvey Keitel told a CNN interviewer prior to the airing of the miniseries,
I had questions about certain events-material I was given in The Path to 9/11 that I did raise questions about. .
. . Not all the facts were correct. . . . You cannot cross the line from a conflation of events to a distortion of the event.
No. Where we have distorted something, we made a mistake, and that should be corrected. It can be corrected, by the people getting
involved in the story that they are going to see.43
In response to the controversy surrounding The Path to 9/11, Scholastic, Inc., announced that its online study guide
did not meet the company's "high standards for dealing with controversial issues" and would be replaced with new materials that would
focus more on media literacy and critical thinking.44
ABC also responded to protests by broadcasting disclaimers about the miniseries's "fictionalized" representation while airing a minimally
reedited version on September 10 and 11, 2006. But ABC's rather inexplicable decision to air the broadcast without commercials-entailing
a loss of $40 million45-fostered
an illusion of the film's closer proximity to real life, if not also conveying the impression that it was a public service announcement.
Most significantly, the broadcast that aired on the second night was framed by a strategic interruption-George W. Bush's Address
to the Nation-prompting one journalist to note the "thematic synchronicity," as the president's speech called for ongoing support
for the war on terror.46
It is difficult to deny the political synergy suggested by the combination of the rightwing The Path to 9/11 and
Bush's speech-synergy being a profitdriven marketing strategy by no means unfamiliar to a megacorporation like Disney47-as
Bush appealed to Americans to recognize the ongoing threat of terrorism and the necessity of preemptive action as the only way to
safeguard "advancing freedom and democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism."48
When placed in the context of the film, Bush's success could be measured in terms of how the post9/11 decisions made by his government
succeeded where Clinton's administration apparently had failed. Furthermore, the timely juxtaposition allowed the film to gain a
greater veneer of authenticity from the speech's presentation of topical and really existing political concerns, while the film in
turn provided credible images and points of reference for listeners trying to engage the highly rhetorical, often self-referential
use of language characteristic of Bush's speech. Additionally, the blurring of fact and fiction embodied by the film lent to the
speech the mythic or symbolic power generated by extended narrative, and the grandeur of the presidential address added authority
to the film.
As a context for Bush's speech, The Path to 9/11 made an effort to point out some of the problems in law enforcement
and governance that preceded the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but the nature of the critique-although presented as objective and all
encompassing-never rises above criticizing particular individuals for their character failings. The film was cleverer, however, in
the way it indicated the supposed gaps in the system and advocated taking a hard line, but offered no concrete alternatives. In doing
so, the film left it to Bush to emerge as the ultimate hero, opening up a space for a timely description of the measures instituted
since 9/11:
We've created the Department of Homeland Security. We have torn down the wall that kept law enforcement and intelligence from
sharing information. We've tightened security at our airports and seaports and borders, and we've created new programs to monitor
enemy bank records and phone calls. Thanks to the hard work of our law enforcement and intelligence professionals, we have broken
up terrorist cells in our midst and saved American lives.49
If The Path to 9/11 presented a single narrative perspective (the "path" taken) as the infallible "truth," then Bush's
speech, with a similar kind of religious confidence, also took for granted that only one predetermined course could secure the nation
from the terrorist threat. At no point did the film or Bush's speech suggest that the situation was complex enough to necessitate
the consideration of several possible paths; indeed, both narratives closed off the possibility of questioning the effectiveness
of the security measures endorsed and instituted. Difficult questions-such as the extent to which freedom should be limited in order
to be secured or the kinds of sacrifices entailed by "national security"-were simply ignored in favor of the message that Americans
must do whatever it takes to defeat the "enemy." It is hard to believe that the gross trivializations of the complex issues surrounding
terrorism and the war in Iraq in The Path to 9/11 and Bush's address could almost escape public protest only five years
after the horrifying events of September 11, 2001.
One notable exception to the general complaisance with which the public received The Path to 9/11 involved a group of
students at Ithaca College who protested the college's acceptance of a private donation from Robert Iger on the grounds that The Path to 9/11, touted as a docudrama, was actually an egregious display of media bias. Students argued that "accepting Disney
money would send the wrong message about the importance of objectivity to the school's journalism and communications students."50
Although a Disney spokesperson responded to the student protesters by calling them "people who can't distinguish between fact and
fiction," Ithaca College president Peggy R. Williams lent credence to the students' concerns by reassuring them that Iger's donation
"does not buy Disney any influence on campus. . . . Our curriculum decisions are our own."51
Although certainly admitting no wrongdoing, Disney has uncharacteristically and tellingly opted not to sell The Path to 9/11 on DVD-defying
the expectations of both those who assumed the company would try to recover the costs of making the miniseries and vociferous right-wing
groups who continue to support the film's representation of the events leading to 9/11.52
The National Security-Family: Meet The Incredibles
As films like Aladdin and The Path to 9/11 suggest, the Walt Disney Company has an impressive ability to revise more
or less familiar stories, updating the issues to make them resonate in people's lives at the current moment. It is how Disney offers
audiences not simply escape but also a mode of relating to the real conditions of their existence that makes Disney films such a
long-lived and potent force in U.S. and global popular culture. As Louis Marin suggests regarding the powerful cultural role of Disney
theme parks, Disney represents both "what is estranged and what is familiar: comfort, welfare, consumption, scientific and technological
progress, superpower, and morality." Importantly, Marin adds, "These are values obtained by violence and exploitation; [in Disney
culture] they are projected under the auspices of law and order."53
Marin's framework is especially useful for understanding a film such as The Incredibles as mediating the "imaginary relationship
that the dominant groups of American society maintain with their real conditions of existence, with the real history of the United
States, and with the space outside of its border."54
In a post-9/11 world, Academy Award winner The Incredibles brings home the need not only to reclaim "superpower" identity
as a quintessential American quality but also to recognize that American soil is not immune to the threat of violent attacks. In
response to the forces threatening America-internally, the weakening of superhero resolve in the face of excessive bureaucracy, public
cynicism, and unthinking adherence to the law; externally, enemies whose infantile resentment at being "not super" results in a genocidal
campaign against everything "super," even to the extent of terrorizing an innocent public-the PG-rated film sanctions violence as
a means to establish a new brand of "law and order." Although hearkening back to the nuclear family as the source of America's security
and strength, the film diverges from past narratives in its emphasis on a natural order in which authority and power belong in the
hands of the few strong leaders left in America, while the rest of us must duly recognize our inevitable "mediocrity." This overall
message is especially disturbing in light of the events following 9/11, when the United States witnessed a growing authoritarianism
throughout the larger culture.55
Some consequences of the American response to the tragic terrorist attacks have been a general tolerance for the use of preemptive
violence and coercion, control of the media, the rise of repressive state power, an expanding militarization, and a thriving surveillance
and security industry that is now even welcomed in public schools. And these are only some of the known consequences: many of the
effects of the Bush administration's policies are still coming to light. In 2009, President Barack Obama ordered the release of top-secret
Bush administration memos that sanctioned the CIA's use of torture on terror suspects. A year previous, New York Times reporter
David Barstow wrote an exposé of "independent" military analysts who appeared on television networks to inform the public with their
expert and objective impressions of the war in Iraq (many were retired army generals and had direct ties to corporations that were
courting government military contracts). It turned out the Pentagon was coaching the military analysts behind the scenes to put a
favorable spin on the Bush administration's "wartime performance," with the apparent collusion of U.S. media networks, including
ABC, which failed to check for, or simply ignored, evident conflicts of interest.56
In addition to calling into question the journalistic integrity of the media, the scandal made it seem as if the Bush administration's
public relations machine was taking its cues from corporations such as Disney by not only launching a marketing campaign carefully
tailored to uphold its public image but also secretly controlling access to information and limiting public discourse, all in order
to sell a sense of security to the American people.
An emphasis on controlling public speech and public spaces-not to mention autocratic rule, secrecy, and the appeal to security-is
nothing new to Disney, whose theme parks, according to Steven Watts, "blur the line between fantasy and reality by immersing visitors
in a totally controlled environment."57
Disneyland is a useful space, apparently, to undertake surveillance, and Walt Disney offered the FBI "complete access" to Disneyland
facilities in the 1950s for "use in connection with official matters and for recreational purposes."58
Indeed, the development of a cordial relationship between Walt Disney and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is now better understood not
only in relation to Walt Disney's fervent anticommunism but also in light of revelations that he may have served as "a secret informer
for the Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation."59
Certainly, as Watts indicates, it is known that Disney was appointed a special FBI agent in part because of his desire to root out
so-called communist agitators from the film industry.60
More recently, Eric Smoodin notes that the Disney corporation remains "interested in constructing surveillance as entertainment,"
as suggested by the marketing of products such as a Mickey Mouse doll with glow-in-the-dark eyes that illuminate sleeping children
for the benefit of parental scrutiny.61
The Incredibles, with its complex appeal to several levels of audience, received overwhelming praise from film critics,
who admired not only its retromodern aesthetic and detailed animation but also its "stinging wit."62
However, most reviewers who observed an "edge of intellectual indignation"63
focused on the first thirty minutes of the film in which the main character, Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson), is forced
to conceal his superhero identity as a consequence of public disaffection and a string of lawsuits (he is sued after rescuing a suicidal
man named Sansweet who claimed Mr. Incredible had "ruined [his] death"). With "average citizens" now proclaiming they want "average
heroes," Mr. Incredible; his superhero wife, Elastigirl/Helen (Holly Hunter); and their children become the middle-of-the-road Parr
family, trying to maintain a normal suburban lifestyle by suppressing their superpowers in what one reviewer suggests is a "suspicious
society that's decidedly below-Parr."64
As suggested by a Boston Globe film review, Bob Parr's cubicle office job as a claims adjuster at Insuricare is designed
to evoke identification with the "middle-age blues felt by audience members."65
But many reviewers, in choosing to highlight the film's critique of suburban conformity and corporate greed, misread or overlook
the film's central message, which does not elicit identification on the part of a mere newspaper journalist or academician: in fact,
normal people who wrongly identify with superheroes and devalue their worth are society's worst threat. The film's villain, Buddy
aka Syndrome (Jason Lee), begins as Mr. Incredible's "number one fan" but then transgresses the boundary between admiration and emulation.
Conflict arises when Buddy asserts that his rocket boot technology enables him "to be super" without being born with superpowers.
When rejected by Mr. Incredible, who prefers to "work alone," Buddy turns the pathological injury into villainy with an ideological
goal: to provide the technology "so that everyone can be superheroes. . . . And when everyone's super, no one will be." The connections
between Buddy and the dominant media's portrayal of international terrorists are multiple: his fixation on demolishing a superpower,
his development of hightech weaponry, his narcissistic rage, his ideological purpose, and, what resonates most clearly, his plan
to gain power over a fearful public by launching a plane at Manhattan. At one point, Buddy even tells Mr. Incredible, "Now you respect
me, because I'm a threat. . . . It turns out there's a lot of people, whole countries, who want respect. And they will pay through
the nose to get it." Given the film's resounding judgment of Buddy/Syndrome-he is shredded by a jet turbine while attempting to kidnap
the Parr baby-it is difficult to understand how the film's message could be interpreted, as one reviewer suggests, as empowering
viewers to recognize the "secret identities we all keep tucked away in our hearts."66
Even if one were to extend an allegorical reading of The Incredibles to argue that all Americans are super, it would not
be possible to elide the film's clear validation of a social hierarchy along primordial lines.
Throughout the film, the plight of the super family is closely linked to their superiority. The Incredibles' son Dash
(Spencer Fox), frustrated by not being able to demonstrate his speed in school sports competi-tions, acts out in his fourth-grade
class by playing pranks on his teacher. Dash wins his father's admiration, but the thought of a graduation ceremony for fourth-graders
leads Mr. Incredible to burst out, "It's psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely
exceptional . . . " Later in the film, Elastigirl reassures daughter Violet (Sarah Vowell), "Your identity is your most valuable
possession. . . . Doubt is a luxury we can't afford anymore. You have more power than you realize. Don't think. Don't worry. If the
time comes, you'll know what to do. It's in your blood." As A. O. Scott astutely recognizes in a New York Times review,
the movie argues, "Some people have powers that others do not, and to deny them the right to exercise those powers, or the privileges
that accompany them, is misguided, cruel and socially destructive."67
Being "super" in such a framework does not mean being smart or being virtuous; it simply means possessing innate power. The highly
advanced modern society produces mediocrity because its ethics (a belief in social justice and equality) counter the effects of natural
selection by nullifying Darwinian fitness as the condition for survival.
If the film indeed offers up "the philosophy of Ayn Rand"-who opposed collectivism, altruism, and the welfare state in favor of
egoistic individualism-then it turns to violence as the means to achieve supremacy.68
At no point during The Incredibles' "eardrum-bashing, metal-crunching action sludge" and its self-referential mockery of
"monologuing" does the film suggest that reasoning, discussion, or any other form of peaceful resolution might be pursued instead
of violence. More in keeping, however, with Disney conventions than Rand's philosophy is the film's conflation of the pursuit of
individualism with the protection of the nuclear family. One reviewer cleverly summarizes the film's main theme as "the family that
slays together stays together."69
In this way, the white, nuclear, middle-class family becomes the ethical referent for a bombproof collectivity: only a muscular protection
of one's own will ensure stability, identity, and agency, not to mention consumerism, heterosexuality, clearly defined gender roles,
parenthood, and class chivalry. The result is that the film brings "individuals and their families to the centers of national life,
offering the audience an image of itself and of the nation as a knowable community, a wider public world beyond the routines of a
narrow existence."70
But the American nation drawn by the film is imaged as one that neither shies away from use of force nor requires any justification
for its display of blatant chauvinism when confronted by others.
The Incredibles further contrasts the banality of suburban life with the glamour and excitement of "hero work." The elaborate
security compounds of Syndrome's island and the home of fashion designer Edna Mode (Brad Bird) are suped up with the latest high-tech
gadgetry, the exhilarating navigation of which bears a close resemblance to video game playing, particularly in the medium of computer-generated
animation. And even if the filmmakers' intended to parody gated homes à la Hollywood Hills in their representation of Edna Mode's
mansion, the cumulative message makes security and surveillance systems seem not only unthreatening but also quite normal-at least
as familiar as, say, the presence of gates and cameras at Walt Disney World. In fact, Syndrome's island has a developed monorail
system, which implies a double reference both to the James Bond movie Dr. No (1962) and to Disney World itself. Referentiality seems
to come full circle as The Incredibles' island imitates Bond films that likely drew on the model of Disney theme parks in
portraying the villain's lair. For instance, Bond's antagonist in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) "inhabits a politically
autonomous island that features an amusement park funhouse,"71
an allusion that betrays cultural anxiety about a rigidly controlled theme park environment governed by an autocrat who deliberately
toys with defenseless people's perceptions and plays upon their fears. The Bond films were tapping into a darker side of the Disney-designed
spaces, also noted by M. Keith Booker, who writes, "The fictional utopias portrayed in the [Disney] parks have a definite dystopian
side, as anyone who has ever been bothered by the efficiency with which the parks are able to control and manipulate the vast populations
who visit them has noticed."72
Yet, the lush tropical island in The Incredibles works less to expose the dark side of a totally regulated world than to
associate it with exotic thrills and gamelike suspense as the superheroes infiltrate Syndrome's compound-a brilliant advertisement
for a family adventure at Walt Disney World, if there ever was one. More disturbing is the recognition that as dominant culture in
the United States accepts the expansion of a security-military-surveillance-intelligence complex, negotiating such altered environments
can be reduced to slapstick comedy (when, for instance, Elastigirl finds herself stretched between two security doors and must fight
against a number of armed guards). Not rendered entirely harmless, the island environment also represents the ideal locale for the
Incredible children to rise to the challenge of a real danger-their mother tells them that unlike "the bad guys" on "Saturday morning
cartoons . . . these guys will kill you"-and to engage the enemy in a display of family loyalty and heroic exceptionalism.
Because "calls to action litter the film," critics such as David Hastings Dunn have suggested that The Incredibles is
"an allegorical tale justifying U.S. foreign policy under George W. Bush."73
Indeed, the only imaginable way the "slightly fascist" Incredibles could be labeled a "family-friendly film,"74
as one critic claims, is if one assumes the "super" refrain throughout the film is an oblique reference to American superiority and
supremacy, such that viewers are included as part of one big national family, a family that has recently demonstrated its mettle
on the world stage by waging wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, Mr. Incredible repeatedly argues for an ethic of intervention
and pushes aside anyone who poses an obstacle to action. Those individuals who wish to prevent superheroes from acting are fundamentally
weak: people who claim their right to noninterference, politicians who cravenly seek public approval, lawyers who succumb to financial
pressures, teachers who suppress any challenges to their authority, and employers who expect blind obedience to corporate policy.
Interventionism is legitimated when Bob/Mr. Incredible helps an elderly woman with her insurance claim, only to face his irate boss,
who indicates that Bob's loyalties must be redirected to one specific purpose: "Help our people! Starting with our stockholders."
While the diminutive Mr. Huph (Wallace Shawn) launches into a speech about the necessity for the "little cogs" in the company machine
to "mesh together," Mr. Incredible is prevented from saving a man in the street who is being mugged. The film deserves credit for
extending a clichéd critique of office work as crushing of individual creativity to a representation of greed and corruption plaguing
private corporations charged with providing public services. Unfortunately, the only solution to the social ills of exploitation
and dehumanization proffered by the film is to put one's faith in the individuals who have the power to subjugate a clear and unambiguous
enemy, in other words, a militaristic version of the old adage "Father knows best." Before we join the throngs of enthusiastic reviewers
who laud the film for its exposure of corporate abuses of power, it should be understood that the film is as much invested in showing
how postindustrial capitalism-and liberal democracy even more so-elevates the weak manipulators above the authentic strongmen. Instead
of presenting a viable solution to the ravages of neoliberal economics on social democracy, The Incredibles offers only
one reactionary alternative devised in the realm of fantasy: superheroes will save us as long as we recognize our natural inferiority
and give them our unqualified vote of confidence. The huge, hard-bodied Mr. Incredible is ready to rescue America from the city slicker,
ladies' man softness of the postwar era. (Admittedly, this superhero for a "postfeminist" generation has an exceedingly competent
female sidekick/wife, but one who tellingly possesses the complementary superhero power of extreme malleability).
When considered alongside the blockbuster success of The Incredibles and its overarching message in 2004, it probably
should not surprise us that George W. Bush was reelected the same year-in part because his public relations team managed to convince
voters that, in an insecure world rife with terrorist threats, they should depend on his uncompromising judgments of good and evil,
his impervious cowboylike manner, and his "strong, stable personality." What makes The Incredibles appear to be superheroes
is the same quality that apparently made George W. Bush seem presidential: the ability to act free from the paralyzing effects of
thoughtful consideration. This orientation toward decisive action in the film becomes an end in itself since, as Jeremy Heilman points
out, "There are no scenes in which characters learn to use their power responsibly (except for those that extol conformity), and
no moments in which loss of life is felt."75
According to George Soros, the events of 9/11 renewed a "distorted view" of American supremacy that "postulates that because we
are stronger than others, we must know better and we must have right on our side."76
If American patriotism reached a fever pitch in the aftermath of 9/11, then The Incredibles clearly tapped into a desire
to assert U.S. preeminence on the world stage. Indeed, all the superheroes are American, and the only non-American with any power
is a villainous French mime named Bomb Voyage. The overall message of the film, as Hastings Dunn points out, is a perennial neoconservative
theme: "America's failure to spread its values can lead to 'blowback' from former clients and protégés."77
The only response offered by the film to a society supposedly weakened by a misguided egalitarianism and the post–Cold War softening
of American resolve is to minimize in-stitutional and legal controls while letting unrestrained power achieve its deserved place
of domination. For "supers" to dictate the common good once again, The Incredibles concludes, "it's up to the politicians."
It is difficult to imagine a more resounding dismissal of democratic processes than this final assertion, suggesting less the need
for political accountability and public participation than the need for emboldened leaders whose decisive action should be divorced
from the values and constraints imposed by the mediocre masses.
Disney and the Rhetoric of Innocence
The bizarre way in which The Incredibles marries two dangerous social ideals-a Darwinist notion of survival of the fittest
and a retrograde identity politics based on biological superiority-can verge on acceptability when it is packaged as a Disney animated
film that carries the overarching association with childhood innocence. Audiences are meant to appreciate the fact that if in a fit
of rage Mr. Incredible destroys a car, or another human being for that matter, then it is simply a natural expression of his innate
"super" identity and not something that requires moral assessment. Or, worse yet, it is something that can only be considered as
intrinsically good. By appealing to the view that "might is right," the film fails to open up the possibility that values and ethics
are constituted by various social mechanisms and material relations of power. Instead, the tautological rationale suggests that being
"right" is simply entailed by being "super," such that the imperative to conquer the enemy who threatens one's way of life remains
not only above question but also without any negative consequences (after all, the enemy is not "super" like us). The presumption
of innate American benevolence is implied by a reading of The Incredibles as a national allegory. At stake in this concept
of America as a superpower is the belief that its leaders and the entire populace are incorruptible and therefore exemplify absolute
goodness.78
As we have seen in previous chapters, this notion of a benign, incorruptible nature is nothing new to Disney, whose cultural productions
rely on innocence as a rhetorical tool to legitimate dominant relations of power. The Incredibles slightly modifies the
concept of childhood innocence by linking it to a citizenry in need of a blameless and absolute paternalistic authority to safeguard
its interests. The appeal to innocence often enables animated Disney films to fly below a critical radar. The Incredibles
probably does so, despite its authoritarian overtones, because of the historical and cultural context in which it was received. After
the tragic events of 9/11, Americans sought an opportunity to envision themselves as proactive agents of history rather than its
passive victims and as part of a community with strong leadership that could instill hope for security and redemption in a world
that seemed hostile to such desires.
However, when politics is cloaked in the guise of innocence, more is at stake than a simple affirmation of desire. At stake is
the way in which Disney films garner the cultural power to influence how people think not simply through their particular mode of
representation but also through shaping the knowledge and subjectivities of their viewers in order to valorize some identities while
disabling others. Film watching involves more than entertainment; it is an experience that reproduces the basic conditions of learning.
To understand Disney films, we need to understand how Disney culture influences public understandings of history, national coherence,
and popular values in ways that often conceal injustice, dissent, and the possibility of democratic renewal. While the retro style
and clever allusiveness of The Incredibles appeal to what is aesthetically pleasing about America's past, there is no acknowledgment
of an underlying totalitarian ethos driving, for instance, U.S. military and imperial expansion during the Cold War. Although weakling
institutions and individuals hinder all things "super," Mr. Incredible, as an exemplary cultural icon, enables the reconstruction
of American history purged of its seamy side, not least of all through an appeal to nostalgia, stylized consumption, and a reinvigorated
patriotism. Moreover, The Incredibles' comic representation of 1950s suburban mediocrity does little to challenge the prevailing
discourses of patriarchy, class, and sexism. In fact, the film pays tribute to the consumerism, patriarchy, and family values associated
with 1950s sitcoms by suggesting that the failing of such a family orientation lies not in its oppressive control but in how settling
into a mundane reality and accepting the onset of complacency sap its inherent magisterial vitality. Taking what it considers best
from that era, the film revitalizes conservative ideology for a new generation of video-gaming kids, sexing up the suburban doldrums
with designer superhero garb and high-tech stunts that substitute spectacle for critical engagement.
The Incredibles and The Path to 9/11 are films produced at a particular historical moment that share the theme
of defending U.S. hegemony and values against the insidious forces of a weak-willed political correctness at home and envious terrorists
determined to destroy the American way of life abroad. One interesting outcome of the comparison can be seen in the way the different
film genres elicited much different responses from the public despite their thematic similarities. The Path to 9/11's claim
to portray historical events objectively in the form of a documentary-style ABC miniseries drew some public resistance, whereas the
animated Disney film whose very representation defies objectivity drew virtually none. But the messages of The Incredibles
are no less persuasive for being more fantastic.
Clearly, The Incredibles' inscription of biological supremacy represents not only an assertion of dominant family values
but an ideological justification for genderand race-based conceptions of U.S. global imperialism and national identity. The Path
to 9/11 is less clever in concealing its affirmation of racist and sexist attitudes and its legitimation of violence, but The Incredibles is far more dangerous in that it has been viewed in a generally unfiltered manner by millions of children
and adults worldwide. Recognizing the conservative influence of Disney films-a conservatism that manifests with unprecedented boldness
in The Incredibles-should not entail avoiding them, suppressing them, or complacently accepting their cultural ascendancy.
It should involve making explicit how and what we learn from the very political messages being taught by Disney films, rather than
accepting them at face value or dismissing their existence altogether.
Consuming culture even as a form of entertainment is fundamentally a pedagogical experience, and the more educators, parents,
students, and other cultural workers become active in their attempts to decode the complex representations being offered by Disney,
the more rich and rewarding our experiences with popular culture will become. For this reason, a nuanced criticism of Disney films
would not assume that they inherently disempower the audience but would instead view such cultural encounters as opportunities that
can empower children and adults by creating the conditions that give people control over the production and types of knowledge and
values arising from their experiences as cultural consumers. Being resisted here is the attitude that turns Disney's native utopianism
into an excuse to adopt a stance that willfully overlooks the risks incurred by allowing a multinational corporation to escape any
critical scrutiny as it reproduces dominant forms of identity, authorizes particular forms of history, and validates "hierarchies
of value as universally valid, ecumenical, and effectively consensual."79
Nothing could be more dystopian in its consequences than the abdication of our responsibility to be critical and thoughtful of the
ways the U.S. media represents America to itself and others. Disney should not be allowed to dictate, limit, and monopolize the only
current and future possibilities imaginable for an increasingly global culture that must be able to imagine a better life-a life
built upon the precepts of compassion and justice rather than American-centered images of power, nostalgia, insularity, and world
domination.
"... It appears the FBI, CIA, and NSA have great difficulty in differentiating between Russians and Democrats posing as Russians. ..."
"... Maybe the VIPS should look into the murder of Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who had the security clearance required to access the DNC servers, and who was murdered in the same week as the emails were taken. In particular, they should ask why the police were told to stand down and close the murder case without further investigation. ..."
"... What a brilliant article, so logical, methodical & a forensic, scientific breakdown of the phony Russiagate project? And there's no doubt, this was a co-ordinated, determined Intelligence project to reverse the results of the 2016 Election by initiating a soft coup or Regime change op on a elected Leader, a very American Coup, something the American Intelligence Agencies specialise in, everywhere else, on a Global scale, too get Trump impeached & removed from the Whitehouse? ..."
"... Right. Since its purpose is to destroy Trump politically, the investigation should go on as long as Trump is in office. Alternatively, if at this point Trump has completely sold out, that would be another reason to stop the investigation. ..."
"... Nancy Pelosi's announcement two days ago that the Democrats will not seek impeachment for Trump suggests the emptiness of the Mueller investigation on the specific "collusion" issue. ..."
"... We know and Assange has confirmed Seth Rich, assassinated in D.C. for his deed, downloaded the emails and most likely passed them on to former British ambassador Craig Murray in a D.C. park for transport to Wikileaks. ..."
"... This so-called "Russiagate" narrative is an illustration of our "freedom of the press" failure in the US due to groupthink and self censorship. He who pays the piper is apt to call the tune. ..."
"... Barr, Sessions, every congressmen all the corporate MSM war profiteer mouth pieces. They all know that "Russia hacked the DNC" and "Russia meddled" is fabricated garbage. They don't care, because their chosen war beast corporate candidate couldn't beat Donald goofball Trump. So it has to be shown that the war beast only lost because of nefarious reasons. Because they're gonna run another war beast cut from the same cloth as Hillary in 2020. ..."
"... Mar 4, 2019 Tom Fitton: President Trump a 'Crime Victim' by Illegal Deep State DOJ & FBI Abuses: https://youtu.be/ixWMorWAC7c ..."
"... Trump is a willing player in this game. The anti-Russian Crusade was, quite simply, a stunningly reckless, short-sighted effort to overturn the 2016 election, removing Trump to install Hillary Clinton in office. ..."
"... Much ado about nothing. All the talk and chatter and media airplay about "Russian meddling" in the 2016 election only tells me that these liars think the American public is that stupid. ..."
"... Andrew Thomas I'm afraid that huge amounts of our History post 1947 is organized and propagandized disinformation. There is an incredible page that John Simpkin has organized over the years that specifically addresses individuals, click on a name and read about them. https://spartacus-educational.com/USAdisinformation.htm ..."
"... It's pretty astonishing that Mueller was more interested in Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi as credible sources about Wikileaks and the DNC release than Craig Murray! ..."
"... Yes, he has done his job. And his job was to bring his royal Orangeness to heel, and to make sure that detente and co-operation with Russia remained impossible. The forever war continues. Mission Accomplished. ..."
I could not suffer through reading the whole article. This is mainly because I have
watched the news daily about Mueller's Investigation and I sincerely believe that Mueller is
Champion of the Democrats who are trying to depose President Donald Trump at any cost.
For what Mueller found any decent lawyer with a Degree and a few years of experience could
have found what Mueller found for far far less money. Mueller only found common crimes AND NO
COLLUSION BETWEEN PRESIDENT TRUMP AND PUTIN!
The Mueller Investigation should be given to an honest broker to review, and Mueller
should be paid only what it would cost to produce the commonplace crimes Mueller, The
Democrats, and CNN has tried to convince the people that indeed Trump COLLUDED with RUSSIA.
Mueller is, a BIG NOTHING BURGER and THE DEMOCRATS AND CNN ARE MUELLER'S SINGING CANARYS!
Mueller should be jailed.
Bogdan Miller , March 15, 2019 at 11:04 am
This article explains why the Mueller Report is already highly suspect. For another thing,
we know that since before 2016, Democrats have been studying Russian Internet and hacking
tactics, and posing as Russian Bots/Trolls on Facebook and other media outlets, all in an
effort to harm President Trump.
It appears the FBI, CIA, and NSA have great difficulty in differentiating between Russians
and Democrats posing as Russians.
B.J.M. Former Intelligence Analyst and Humint Collector
vinnieoh , March 15, 2019 at 8:17 am
Moving on: the US House yesterday voted UNANIMOUSLY (remember that word, so foreign these
days to US governance?) to "urge" the new AG to release the complete Mueller report.
A
non-binding resolution, but you would think that the Democrats can't see the diesel
locomotive bearing down on their clown car, about to smash it to pieces. The new AG in turn
says he will summarize the report and that is what we will see, not the entire report. And
taxation without representation takes a new twist.
... ... ...
Raymond Comeau , March 15, 2019 at 12:38 pm
What else would you expect from two Political Parties who are really branches of the ONE
Party which Represents DEEP STATE".
DWS , March 15, 2019 at 5:58 am
Maybe the VIPS should look into the murder of Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who had the
security clearance required to access the DNC servers, and who was murdered in the same week
as the emails were taken. In particular, they should ask why the police were told to stand
down and close the murder case without further investigation.
Raymond Comeau , March 15, 2019 at 12:47 pm
EXACTLY! But, Deep State will not allow that. And, it would ruin the USA' plan to continue
to invade more sovereign countries and steal their resources such as oil and Minerals. The
people of the USA must be Ostriches or are so terrified that they accept anything their
Criminal Governments tell them.
Eventually, the chickens will come home to roost and perhaps the USA voters will ROAST
when the crimes of the USA sink the whole country. It is time for a few Brave Men and Women
to find their backbones and throw out the warmongers and their leading Oligarchs!
KiwiAntz , March 14, 2019 at 6:44 pm
What a brilliant article, so logical, methodical & a forensic, scientific breakdown of
the phony Russiagate project? And there's no doubt, this was a co-ordinated, determined
Intelligence project to reverse the results of the 2016 Election by initiating a soft coup or
Regime change op on a elected Leader, a very American Coup, something the American
Intelligence Agencies specialise in, everywhere else, on a Global scale, too get Trump
impeached & removed from the Whitehouse?
If you can't get him out via a Election, try
& try again, like Maduro in Venezuela, to forcibly remove the targeted person by setting
him up with fake, false accusations & fabricated evidence? How very predictable & how
very American of Mueller & the Democratic Party. Absolute American Corruption, corrupts
absolutely?
Brian Murphy , March 15, 2019 at 10:33 am
Right. Since its purpose is to destroy Trump politically, the investigation should go on
as long as Trump is in office. Alternatively, if at this point Trump has completely sold out, that would be another
reason to stop the investigation.
If the investigation wraps up and finds nothing, that means Trump has already completely
sold out. If the investigation continues, it means someone important still thinks Trump retains some
vestige of his balls.
DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:19 pm
By last June or July the Mueller investigation has resulted in roughly 150 indictments
for perjury/financial crimes, and there was a handful of convictions to date. The report did
not support the Clinton wing's anti-Russian allegations about the 2016 election, and was
largely brushed aside by media. Mueller was then reportedly sent back in to "find something."
presumably to support the anti-Russian claims.
mike k , March 14, 2019 at 12:57 pm
From the beginning of the Russia did it story, right after Trump's electoral victory, it
was apparent that this was a fraud. The democratic party however has locked onto this
preposterous story, and they will go to their graves denying this was a scam to deny their
presidential defeat, and somehow reverse the result of Trump's election. My sincere hope is
that this blatant lie will be an albatross around the party's neck, that will carry them down
into oblivion. They have betrayed those of us who supported them for so many years. They are
in many ways now worse than the republican scum they seek to replace.
DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:26 pm
Trump is almost certain to be re-elected in 2020, and we'll go through this all over
again.
The very fact that the FBI never had access to the servers and took the word of a private
company that had a history of being anti-Russian is enough to throw the entire ruse out.
LJ , March 14, 2019 at 2:39 pm
Agreed!!!! and don't forget the FBI/Comey gave Hillary and her Campaign a head's up before
they moved to seize the evidence. . So too, Comey said he stopped the Investigation , thereby
rendering judgement of innocence, even though by his own words 'gross negligence' had a
occurred (which is normally considered grounds for prosecution). In doing so he exceeded the
FBI's investigative mandate. He rationalized that decision was appropriate because of the
appearance of impropriety that resulted from Attorney General Lynch having a private meeting
on a plane on a runway with Bill and Hillary . Where was the logic in that. Who called the
meeting? All were Lawyers who had served as President, Senator, Attorney General and knew
that the meeting was absolutely inappropriate. . Comey should be prosecuted if they want to
prosecute anyone else because of this CRAP. PS Trump is an idiot. Uhinfortunately he is just
a symptom of the disease at this point. Look at the cover of Rolling Stone magazine , carry a
barf bag.
Jane Christ , March 14, 2019 at 6:51 pm
Exactly. This throws doubt on the ability of the FBI to work independently. They are
working for those who want to cover -up the Hillary mess . She evidently has sufficient funds
to pay them off. I am disgusted with the level of corruption.
hetro , March 14, 2019 at 10:50 am
Nancy Pelosi's announcement two days ago that the Democrats will not seek impeachment for
Trump suggests the emptiness of the Mueller investigation on the specific "collusion" issue.
If there were something hot and lingering and about to emerge, this decision is highly
unlikely, especially with the reasoning she gave at "so as not to divide the American
people." Dividing the people hasn't been of much concern throughout this bogus witch hunt on
Trump, which has added to his incompetence in leavening a growing hysteria and confusion in
this country. If there is something, anything at all, in the Mueller report to support the
collusion theory, Pelosi would I'm sure gleefully trot it out to get a lesser candidate like
Pence as opposition for 2020.
We know and Assange has confirmed Seth Rich, assassinated in D.C. for his deed, downloaded
the emails and most likely passed them on to former British ambassador Craig Murray in a D.C.
park for transport to Wikileaks.
We must also honor Shawn Lucas assassinated for serving DNC with a litigation notice
exposing the DNC conspiracy against Sanders.
hetro , March 14, 2019 at 3:18 pm
Where has Assange confirmed this? Assange's long-standing position is NOT to reveal his
sources. I believe he has continued to honor this position.
Skip Scott , March 15, 2019 at 7:15 am
It has merely been insinuated by the offering of a reward for info on Seth's murder. In
one breath he says wikileaks will never divulge a source, and in the next he offers a $20k
reward saying that sources take tremendous risk. Doesn't take much of a logical leap to
connect A to B.
DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:30 pm
Are you aware that Democrats split apart their 0wn voting base in the 1990s, middle class
vs. poor? The Obama years merely confirmed that this split is permanent. This is particularly
relevant for Democrats, as their voting base had long consisted of the poor and middle class,
for the common good. Ignoring this deep split hasn't made it go away.
hetro , March 14, 2019 at 3:24 pm
Even more important is how the Democrats have sold out to an Establishment view favoring
neocon theory, since at least Bill Clinton. Pelosi's recent behavior with Ilhan Omar confirms
this and the split you're talking about. My point is it is distinctly odd that Pelosi is
discouraging impeachment on "dividing the Party" (already divided, of course, as you say),
whereas the Russia-gate fantasy was so hot not that long ago. Again it points to a cynical
opportunism and manipulation of the electorate. Both parties are a sad excuse to represent
ordinary people's interests.
Skip Scott , March 15, 2019 at 7:21 am
She said "dividing the country", not the party. I think she may have concerns over Trump's
heavily armed base. That said, the statement may have been a ruse. There are plenty of
Republicans that would cross the line in favor of impeachment with the right "conclusions" by
Mueller. Pelosi may be setting up for a "bombshell" conclusion by Mueller. One must never
forget that we are watching theater, and that Trump was a "mistake" to be controlled or
eliminated.
Mueller should be ashamed that he has made President Trump his main concern!! If all this
investigation would stop he could save America millions!!! He needs to quit this witch-hunt
and worry about things that really need to be handled!!! If the democrats and Trump haters
would stop pushing senseless lies hopefully this would stop ? It's so disgusting that his
democrat friend was never really investigated ? stop the witch-hunt and move forward!!!!
torture this , March 14, 2019 at 7:29 am
According to this letter, mistakes might have been made on Rachel Maddow's show. I can't
wait to read how she responds. I'd watch her show, myself except that it has the same effect
on me as ipecac.
Zhu , March 14, 2019 at 3:37 am
People will cling to "Putin made Trump President!!!" much as many cling "Obama's a Kenyan
Muslim! Not a real American!!!". Both nut theories are emotionally satisfying, no matter what
the historical facts are. Many Americans just can't admit their mistakes and blaming a
scapegoat is a way out.
O Society , March 14, 2019 at 2:03 am
Thank you VIPS for organizing this legit dissent consisting of experts in the field of
intelligence and computer forensics.
This so-called "Russiagate" narrative is an illustration of our "freedom of the press"
failure in the US due to groupthink and self censorship. He who pays the piper is apt to call
the tune.
It is astounding how little skepticism and scientifically-informed reasoning goes on in
our media. These folks show themselves to be native advertising rather than authentic
journalists at every turn.
DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:33 pm
But it has been Democrats and the media that market to middle class Dems, who persist in
trying to sell the Russian Tale. They excel at ignoring the evidence that utterly contradicts
their claims.
Oh, we're well beyond your "Blame the middle class Dems" stage.
The WINNING!!! team sports bullshit drowns the entire country now the latrine's sprung a
leak. People pretend to live in bubbles made of blue or red quite like the Three Little Pigs,
isn't it? Except instead of a house made of bricks saving the day for the littlepiggies, what
we've got here is a purple puddle of piss.
Everyone's more than glad to project all our problems on "THEM" though, aren't we?
Meanwhile, the White House smells like a urinal not washed since the 1950s and simpletons
still get their rocks off arguing about whether Mickey Mouse can beat up Ronald McDonald.
T'would be comic except what's so tragic is the desperate need Americans have to believe,
oh just believe! in something. Never mind the sound of the jackhammer on your skull dear,
there's an app for that or is it a pill?
I don't know, don't ask me, I'm busy watching TV. Have a cheeto.
Very good analysis clearly stated, especially adding the FAT timestamps to the
transmission speeds.
Minor corrections: "The emails were copied from the network" should be "from the much
faster local network" because this is to Contradict the notion that they were copied over the
internet network, which most readers will equate with "network." Also "reportedin" should be
"reported in."
Michael , March 13, 2019 at 6:25 pm
It is likely that New Knowledge was actually "the Russians", possibly working in concert
with Crowdstrike. Once an intelligence agency gets away with something like pretending to be
Russian hackers and bots, they tend to re-use their model; it is too tempting to discard an
effective model after a one-off accomplishment. New Knowledge was caught interfering/
determining the outcome in the Alabama Senate race on the side of Democrat Doug Jones, and
claimed they were merely trying to mimic Russian methods to see if they worked (they did; not
sure of their punishment?). Occam's razor would suggest that New Knowledge would be competent
to mimic/ pretend to be "Russians" after the fact of wikileaks' publication of emails. New
Knowledge has employees from the NSA and State department sympathetic to/ working with(?)
Hillary, and were the "outside" agency hired to evaluate and report on the "Russian" hacking
of the DNC emails/ servers.
DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 5:48 pm
Mueller released report last summer, which resulted in (the last I checked) roughly 150
indictments, a handful of convictions to date, all for perjury/financial (not political)
crimes. This wasn't kept secret. It simply wasn't what Democrats wanted to hear, so although
it was mentioned in some lib media (which overwhelmingly supported neoliberal Hillary
Clinton), it was essentially swept under the carpet.
Billy , March 13, 2019 at 11:11 pm
Barr, Sessions, every congressmen all the corporate MSM war profiteer mouth pieces. They
all know that "Russia hacked the DNC" and "Russia meddled" is fabricated garbage. They don't
care, because their chosen war beast corporate candidate couldn't beat Donald goofball Trump.
So it has to be shown that the war beast only lost because of nefarious reasons. Because
they're gonna run another war beast cut from the same cloth as Hillary in 2020.
Realist , March 14, 2019 at 3:22 am
You betcha. Moreover, who but the Russians do these idiots have left to blame? Everybody
else is now off limits due to political correctness. Sigh Those Catholics, Jews, "ethnics"
and sundry "deviants" used to be such reliable scapegoats, to say nothing of the
"undeveloped" world. As Clapper "authoritatively" says, only this vile lineage still carries
the genes for the most extremes of human perfidy. Squirrels in your attic? It must be the
damned Russkies! The bastards impudently tried to copy our democracy, economic system and
free press and only besmirched those institutions, ruining all of Hillary's glorious plans
for a worldwide benevolent dictatorship. All this might be humorous if it weren't so
funny.
And those Chinese better not get to thinking they are somehow our equals just because all
their trillions invested in U.S. Treasury bonds have paid for all our wars of choice and MIC
boondoggles since before the turn of the century. Unless they start delivering Trump some
"free stuff" the big man is gonna cut off their water. No more affordable manufactured goods
for the American public! So there!
As to the article: impeccable research and analysis by the VIPS crew yet again. They've
proven to me that, to a near certainty, the Easter Bunny is not likely to exist. Mueller
won't read it. Clapper will still prance around a free man, as will Brennan. The Democrats
won't care, that is until November of 2020. And Hillary will continue to skate, unhindered in
larding up the Clinton Foundation to purposes one can only imagine.
Joe Tedesky , March 14, 2019 at 10:02 pm
Realist,
I have posted this article 'the Russia they Lost' before and from time to time but
once again it seems appropriate to add this link to expound upon for what you've been saying.
It's an article written by a Russian who in they're youth growing up in the USSR dreamed of
living the American lifestyle if Russia were to ever ditch communism. But . Starting with
Kosovo this Russian's youthful dream turned nightmarishly ugly and, as time went by with more
and yet even more USA aggression this Russian author loss his admiration and desire for all
things American to be proudly envied. This is a story where USA hard power destroyed any hope
of American soft power for world unity. But hey that unity business was never part of the
plan anyway.
right you are, joe. if america was smart rather than arrogant, it would have cooperated
with china and russia to see the belt and road initiative succeed by perhaps building a
bridge or tunnel from siberia to alaska, and by building its own fleet of icebreakers to open
up its part of the northwest passage. but no, it only wants to sabotage what others propose.
that's not being a leader, it's being a dick.
i'm gonna have to go on the disabled list here until the sudden neurological problem with
my right hand clears up–it's like paralysed. too difficult to do this one-handed using
hunt and peck. at least the problem was not in the old bean, according to the scans. carry
on, sir.
Brian James , March 13, 2019 at 5:04 pm
Mar 4, 2019 Tom Fitton: President Trump a 'Crime Victim' by Illegal Deep State DOJ &
FBI Abuses: https://youtu.be/ixWMorWAC7c
DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 5:55 pm
Trump is a willing player in this game. The anti-Russian Crusade was, quite simply, a stunningly reckless,
short-sighted effort to overturn the 2016 election, removing Trump to install Hillary Clinton in office. Trump and the
Republicans continue to win by default, as Democrats only drive more voters away.
Thank you Ray McGovern and the Other 17 VIPS C0-Signers of your National Security Essay
for Truth. Along with Craig Murray and Seymour Hirsch, former Sam Adams Award winners for
"shining light into dark places", you are national resources for objectivity in critical
survival information matters for our country. It is more than a pity that our mainstream
media are so beholden to their corporate task masters that they cannot depart from the
company line for fear of losing their livelihoods, and in the process we risk losing life on
the planet because of unconstrained nuclear war on the part of the two main adversaries
facing off in an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. Let me speak plainly. THEY SHOULD BE
TALKING TO YOU AND NOT THE VESTED INTERESTS' MOUTHPIECES. Thank you for your continued
leadership!
Roger Ailes founder of FOX news died, "falling down stairs" within a week of FOX news
exposing to the world that the assassinated Seth Rich downloaded the DNC emails.
DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 6:03 pm
Google the Mueller investigation report from last June or July. When it was released, the
public response was like a deflated balloon. It did not support the "Russian collusion"
allegations -- the only thing Democrats still had left to sell. The report resulted in
roughly 150 indictments for perjury/financial crimes (not political), and a handful of
convictions to date -- none of which had anything to do with the election results.
Hank , March 13, 2019 at 6:19 pm
Much ado about nothing. All the talk and chatter and media airplay about "Russian
meddling" in the 2016 election only tells me that these liars think the American public is
that stupid. They are probably right, but the REAL reason that Hillary lost is because there
ARE enough informed people now in this nation who are quite aware of the Clinton's sordid
history where scandals seem to follow every where they go, but indictments and/or
investigations don't. There IS an internet nowadays with lots of FACTUAL DOCUMENTED
information. That's a lot more than I can say about the mainstream corporate-controlled
media!
I know this won't ever happen, but an HONEST investigation into the Democratic Party and
their actions during the 2016 election would make ANY collusion with ANY nation look like a
mole hill next to a mountain! One of the problems with living in this nation is if you are
truly informed and make an effort 24/7 to be that way by doing your own research, you
more-than-likely can be considered an "island in a sea of ignorance".
We know that the FBI never had access to the servers and a private company was allowed to
handle the evidence. Wasnt it a crime scene? The evidence was tampered with And we will never
know what was on the servers.
Mark McCarty , March 13, 2019 at 4:10 pm
As a complement to this excellent analysis, I would like to make 2 further points:
The Mueller indictment of Russian Intelligence for hacking the DNC and transferring their
booty to Wikileaks is absurd on its face for this reason: Assange announced on June 12th the
impending release of Hillary-related emails. Yet the indictment claims that Guccifer 2.0 did
not succeed in transferring the DNC emails to Wikileaks until the time period of July 14-18th
– after which they were released online on July 22nd. Are we to suppose that Assange, a
publisher of impeccable integrity, publicly announced the publication of emails he had not
yet seen, and which he was obtaining from a source of murky provenance? And are we further to
suppose that Wikileaks could have processed 20K emails and 20K attachments to insure their
genuineness in a period of only several days? As you will recall, Wikileaks subsequently took
a number of weeks to process the Podesta emails they released in October.
And another peculiarity merits attention. Assange did not state on June 12th that he was
releasing DNC emails – and yet Crowdstrike and the Guccifer 2.0 personna evidently knew
that this was in store. A likely resolution of this conundrum is that US intelligence had
been monitoring all communications to Wikileaks, and had informed the DNC that their hacked
emails had been offered to Wikileaks. A further reasonable prospect is that US intelligence
subsequently unmasked the leaker to the DNC; as Assange has strongly hinted, this likely was
Seth Rich. This could explain Rich's subsequent murder, as Rich would have been in a position
to unmask the Guccifer 2.0 hoax and the entire Russian hacking narrative.
Curious that Assange has Not explicitly stated that the leaker was Seth Rich, if it was,
as this would take pressure from himself and incriminate the DNC in the murder of Rich.
Perhaps he doesn't know, and has the honor not to take the opportunity, or perhaps he knows
that it was not Rich.
View the Dutch TV interview with Asssange and there is another interview available on
youtube in which Assange DOES subtly confirmed it was Seth Rich.
Assange posted a $10,000 reward for Seth Rich's murders capture.
Abby , March 13, 2019 at 10:11 pm
Another mistaken issue with the "Russia hacked the DNC computers on Trump's command" is
that he never asked Russia to do that. His words were, "Russia if you 'find' Hillary's
missing emails let us know." He said that after she advised congress that she wouldn't be
turning in all of the emails they asked for because she deleted 30,000 of them and said that
they were personal.
But if Mueller or the FBI wants to look at all of them they can find them at the NYC FBI
office because they are on Weiner's laptop. Why? Because Hillary's aid Huma Abedin, Weiner's
wife sent them to it. Just another security risk that Hillary had because of her private
email server. This is why Comey had to tell congress that more of them had been found 11 days
before the election. If Comey hadn't done that then the FBI would have.
But did Comey or McCabe look at her emails there to see if any of them were classified? No
they did not do that. And today we find out that Lisa Page told congress that it was Obama's
decision not to charge Hillary for being grossly negligent on using her private email server.
This has been known by congress for many months and now we know that the fix was always in
for her to get off.
robert e williamson jr , March 13, 2019 at 3:26 pm
I want to thank you folks at VIPS. Like I have been saying for years now the relationship
between CIA, NSA and DOJ is an incestuous one at best. A perverse corrupted bond to control
the masses. A large group of religious fanatics who want things "ONE WAY". They are the
facilitators for the rogue government known as the "DEEP STATE"!
Just ask billy barr.
More truth is a very good thing. I believe DOJ is supporting the intelligence community
because of blackmail. They can't come clean because they all risk doing lots of time if a new
judicial mechanism replaces them. We are in big trouble here.
Apparently the rule of law is not!
You folks that keep claiming we live in the post truth era! Get off me. Demand the truth
and nothing else. Best be getting ready for the fight of your lives. The truth is you have to
look yourself in the mirror every morning, deny that truth. The claim you are living in the
post truth era is an admission your life is a lie. Now grab a hold of yourself pick a
dogdamned side and stand for something,.
Thank You VIPS!
Joe Tedesky , March 13, 2019 at 2:58 pm
Hats off to the VIP's who have investigated this Russian hacking that wasn't a hacking for
without them what would we news junkies have otherwise to lift open the hood of Mueller's
never ending Russia-gate investigation. Although the one thing this Russia-gate nonsense has
accomplished is it has destroyed with our freedom of speech when it comes to how we citizens
gather our news. Much like everything else that has been done during these post 9/11 years of
continual wars our civil rights have been marginalized down to zero or, a bit above if that's
even still an argument to be made for the sake of numbers.
Watching the Manafort sentencing is quite interesting for the fact that Manafort didn't
conclude in as much as he played fast and loose with his income. In fact maybe Manafort's
case should have been prosecuted by the State Department or, how about the IRS? Also wouldn't
it be worth investigating other Geopolitical Rain Makers like Manafort for similar crimes of
financial wrongdoing? I mean is it possible Manafort is or was the only one of his type to do
such dishonest things? In any case Manafort wasn't charged with concluding with any Russians
in regard to the 2016 presidential election and, with that we all fall down.
I guess the best thing (not) that came out of this Russia-gate silliness is Rachel
Maddow's tv ratings zoomed upwards. But I hate to tell you that the only ones buying what Ms
Maddow is selling are the died in the wool Hillary supporters along with the chicken-hawks
who rally to the MIC lobby for more war. It's all a game and yet there are many of us who
just don't wish to play it but still we must because no one will listen to the sanity that
gets ignored keep up the good work VIP's some of us are listening.
Andrew Thomas , March 13, 2019 at 12:42 pm
The article did not mention something called to my attention for the first time by one of
the outstanding members of your commentariat just a couple of days ago- that Ambassador
Murray stayed publicly, over two years ago, that he had been given the thumb drive by a
go-between in D.C. and had somehow gotten it to Wikileaks. And, that he has NEVER BEEN
INTERVIEWED by Mueller &Company. I was blown away by this, and found the original
articles just by googling Murray. The excuse given is that Murray "lacks credibility ", or
some such, because of his prior relationship with Assange and/or Wikileaks. This is so
ludicrous I can't even get my head around it. And now, you have given me a new detail-the
meeting with Pompeo, and the complete lack of follow-up thereafter. Here all this time I
thought I was the most cynical SOB who existed, and now I feel as naive as when I was 13 and
believed what Dean Rusk was saying like it was holy writ. I am in your debt.
Bob Van Noy , March 13, 2019 at 2:33 pm
Andrew Thomas I'm afraid that huge amounts of our History post 1947 is organized and
propagandized disinformation. There is an incredible page that John Simpkin has organized
over the years that specifically addresses individuals, click on a name and read about
them. https://spartacus-educational.com/USAdisinformation.htm
Mark McCarty , March 13, 2019 at 4:18 pm
A small correction: the Daily Mail article regarding Murray claimed that Murray was given
a thumbdrive which he subsequently carried back to Wikileaks. On his blog, Murray
subsequently disputed this part of the story, indicating that, while he had met with a leaker
or confederate of a leaker in Washington DC, the Podesta emails were already in possession of
Wikileaks at the time. Murray refused to clarify the reason for his meeting with this source,
but he is adamant in maintaining that the DNC and Podesta emails were leaked, not hacked.
And it is indeed ludicrous that Mueller, given the mandate to investigate the alleged
Russian hacking of the DNC and Podesta, has never attempted to question either Assange or
Murray. That in itself is enough for us to conclude that the Mueller investigation is a
complete sham.
Ian Brown , March 13, 2019 at 4:43 pm
It's pretty astonishing that Mueller was more interested in Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi
as credible sources about Wikileaks and the DNC release than Craig Murray!
LJ , March 13, 2019 at 12:29 pm
A guy comes in with a pedigree like that, """ former FBI head """ to examine and validate
if possible an FBI sting manufactured off a phony FISA indictment based on the Steele Report,
It immediately reminded me of the 9-11 Commission with Thomas Kean, former Board member of
the National Endowment for Democracy, being appointed by GW Bush the Simple to head an
investigation that he had previously said he did not want to authorize( and of course bi
partisan yes man Lee Hamilton as #2, lest we forget) . Really this should be seen as another
low point in our Democracy. Uncle Sam is the Limbo Man, How low can you go?
After Bill and
Hillary and Monica and Paula Jones and Blue Dresses well, Golden Showers in a Moscow luxury
hotel, I guess that make it just salacious enough.
Mueller looks just like what he is. He
has that same phony self important air as Comey . In 2 years this will be forgotten.. I do
not think this hurts Trumps chances at re-election as much as the Democrats are hurting
themselves. This has already gone on way too long.
Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic
charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and
Russians.
Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass
media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by
Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump, which was
the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein, Brennan, Podesta and Mueller's crusade on behalf
of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. It will be fascinating to
witness how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent
edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face?
So sickening to see the manner in which many DNC sycophants obsequiously genuflect to
their godlike Mueller. A damn prosecutor who was likely in bed with the Winter Hill Gang.
Jack , March 13, 2019 at 12:21 pm
You have failed. An investigation is just that, a finding of the facts. What would Mueller
have to extricate himself from? If nothing is found, he has still done his job. You are a
divisive idiot.
Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 1:13 pm
Yes, he has done his job. And his job was to bring his royal Orangeness to heel, and to
make sure that detente and co-operation with Russia remained impossible. The forever war
continues. Mission Accomplished.
@Jack,
Keep running cover for an out of control prosecutor, who, if he had any integrity, would have
hit the bully pulpit mos ago declaring there's nothing of substance to one of the most
potentially dangerous accusations in world history: the Kremlin hacking the election. Last I
checked it puts two nuclear nation-states on the brink of potential war. And you call me
divisive? Mueller's now a willing accomplice to this entire McCarthyite smear and
disinformation campaign. It's all so pathetic that folks such as yourself try and mislead and
feed half-truths to the people.
Drew, you might enjoy this discussion Robert Scheer has with Stephen Cohen and Katrina
vanden Heuvel.
Realist , March 15, 2019 at 3:38 am
Moreover, as the Saker pointed out in his most recent column in the Unz Review, the entire
Deep State conspiracy, in an ad hoc alliance with the embarrassed and embarrassing Democrats,
have made an absolute sham of due process in their blatant witch hunt to bag the president.
This reached an apex when his personal lawyer, Mr. Cohen, was trotted out before congress to
violate Trump's confidentiality in every mortifying way he could even vaguely reconstruct.
The man was expected to say anything to mitigate the anticipated tortures to come in the
course of this modern day inquisition by our latter day Torquemada. To his credit though,
even with his ass in a sling, he could simply not confabulate the smoking gun evidence for
the alleged Russian collusion that this whole farce was built around.
Mueller stood with Bush as he lied the world into war based on lies and illegally spied on
America and tortured some folks.
George Collins , March 13, 2019 at 2:02 pm
QED: as to the nexus with the Winter Hill gang wasn't there litigation involving the
Boston FBI, condonation of murder by the FBI and damages awarded to or on behalf of convicted
parties that the FBI had reason to know were innocent? The malfeasance reportedly occurred
during Mueller time. Further on the sanctified diligence of Mr. Mueller can be gleaned from
the reports of Coleen Rowley, former FBI attorney stationed in Milwaukee??? when the DC FBI
office was ignoring warnings sent about 9/11. See also Sibel Edmonds who knew to much and was
court order muzzled about FBI mis/malfeasance in the aftermath of 9/11.
I'd say it's game, set, match VIPS and a pox on Clapper and the
complicit intelligence folk complicit in the nuclear loaded Russia-gate fibs.
Kiers , March 13, 2019 at 11:47 am
How can we expect the DNC to "hand it " to Trumpf, when, behind the scenes, THEY ARE ONE
PARTY. They are throwing faux-scary pillow bombs at each other because they are both
complicit in a long chain of corruptions. Business as usual for the "principled" two party
system! Democracy! Through the gauze of corporate media! You must be joking!
Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 11:28 am
"We believe that there are enough people of integrity in the Department of Justice to
prevent the outright manufacture or distortion of "evidence," particularly if they become
aware that experienced scientists have completed independent forensic study that yield very
different conclusions."
I wish I shared this belief. However, as with Nancy Pelosi's recent statement regarding
pursuing impeachment, I smell a rat. I believe with the help of what the late Robert Parry
called "the Mighty Wurlitzer", Mueller is going to use coerced false testimony and fabricated
forensics to drop a bombshell the size of 911. I think Nancy's statement was just a feint
before throwing the knockout punch.
If reason ruled the day, we should have nothing to worry about. But considering all the
perfidy that the so-called "Intelligence" Agencies and their MSM lackeys get away with daily,
I think we are in for more theater; and I think VIPS will receive a cold shoulder outside of
venues like CN.
I pray to God I'm wrong.
Sam F , March 13, 2019 at 7:32 pm
My extensive experience with DOJ and the federal judiciary establishes that at least 98%
of them are dedicated career liars, engaged in organized crime to serve political gangs, and
make only a fanatical pretense of patriotism or legality. They are loyal to money alone,
deeply cynical and opposed to the US Constitution and laws, with no credibility at all beyond
any real evidence.
Eric32 , March 14, 2019 at 4:24 pm
As near I can see, Federal Govt. careers at the higher levels depend on having dirt on
other players, and helping, not hurting, the money/power schemes of the players above
you.
The Clintons (through their foundation) apparently have a lot of corruption dirt on CIA,
FBI etc. top players, some of whom somehow became multi-millionaires during their civil
service careers.
Trump, who was only running for President as a name brand marketing ploy with little
desire to actually win, apparently came into the Presidency with no dirt arsenal and little
idea of where to go from there.
Bob Van Noy , March 13, 2019 at 11:09 am
I remember reading with dismay how Russians were propagandized by the Soviet Press
Management only to find out later the depth of disbelief within the Russian population
itself. We now know what that feels like. The good part of this disastrous scenario for
America is that for careful readers, disinformation becomes revelatory. For instance, if one
reads an editorial that refers to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or continually refers to
Russian interference in the last Presidential election, then one can immediately dismiss the
article and question the motivation for the presentation. Of course the problem is how to
establish truth in reporting
Jeff Harrison , March 13, 2019 at 10:41 am
Thank you, VIPs. Hopefully, you don't expect this to make a difference. The US has moved
into a post truth, post reality existence best characterized by Karl Rove's declaration:
"we're an empire now, when we act, we create our own reality." What Mr. Rove in his arrogance
fails to appreciate is that it is his reality but not anyone else's. Thus Pompous can claim
that Guaido is the democratic leader in Venezuela even though he's never been elected .
Thank you. The next time one of my friends or family give me that glazed over stare and
utters anymore of the "but, RUSSIA" nonsense I will refer them directly to this article. Your
collective work and ethical stand on this matter is deeply appreciated by anyone who values
the truth.
Russiagate stands with past government propaganda operations that were simply made up out
of thin air: i.e. Kuwaiti incubator babies, WMD's, Gaddafi's viagra fueled rape camps, Assad
can't sleep at night unless he's gassing his own people, to the latest, "Maduro can't sleep
at night unless he's starving his own people."
The complete and utter amorality of the deep state remains on display for all to see with
"Russiagate," which is as fact-free a propaganda campaign as any of those just mentioned.
Marc , March 13, 2019 at 10:13 am
I am a computer naif, so I am prepared to accept the VIPS analysis about FAT and transfer
rates. However, the presentation here leaves me with several questions. First, do I
understand correctly that the FAT rounding to even numbers is introduced by the thumb drive?
And if so, does the FAT analysis show only that the DNC data passed through a thumb drive?
That is, does the analysis distinguish whether the DNC data were directly transferred to a
thumb drive, or whether the data were hacked and then transferred to a thumb drive, eg, to
give a copy to Wikileaks? Second, although the transatlantic transfer rate is too slow to fit
some time stamps, is it possible that the data were hacked onto a local computer that was
under the control of some faraway agent?
Jeff Harrison , March 13, 2019 at 11:12 am
Not quite. FAT is the crappy storage system developed by Microsoft (and not used by UNIX).
The metadata associated with any file gets rewritten when it gets moved. If that movement is
to a storage device that uses FAT, the timestamp on the file will end in an even number. If
it were moved to a unix server (and most of the major servers run Unix) it would be in the
UFS (unix file system) and it would be the actual time from the system clock. Every storage
device has a utility that tells it where to write the data and what to write. Since it's
writing to a storage device using FAT, it'll round the numbers. To get to your real question,
yes, you could hack and then transfer the data to a thumb drive but if you did that the dates
wouldn't line up.
Skip Scott , March 14, 2019 at 8:05 am
Jeff-
Which dates wouldn't line up? Is there a history of metadata available, or just metadata
for the most recent move?
David G , March 13, 2019 at 12:22 pm
Marc asks: "[D]oes the analysis distinguish whether the DNC data were directly transferred
to a thumb drive, or whether the data were hacked and then transferred to a thumb drive, eg,
to give a copy to Wikileaks?"
I asked that question in comments under a previous CN piece; other people have asked that
question elsewhere.
To my knowledge, it hasn't been addressed directly by the VIPS, and I think they should do
so. (If they already have, someone please enlighten me.)
Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 1:07 pm
I am no computer wiz, but Binney has repeatedly made the point that the NSA scoops up
everything. If there had been a hack, they'd know it, and they wouldn't only have had
"moderate" confidence in the Jan. assessment. I believe that although farfetched, an argument
could be made that a Russian spy got into the DNC, loaded a thumb drive, and gave it to Craig
Murray.
David G , March 13, 2019 at 3:31 pm
Respectfully, that's a separate point, which may or may not raise issues of its own.
But I think the question Marc posed stands.
Skip Scott , March 14, 2019 at 7:59 am
Hi David-
I don't see how it's separate. If the NSA scoops up everything, they'd have solid evidence
of the hack, and wouldn't have only had "moderate" confidence, which Bill Binney says is
equivalent to them saying "we don't have squat". They wouldn't even have needed Mueller at
all, except to possibly build a "parallel case" due to classification issues. Also, the FBI
not demanding direct access to the DNC server tells you something is fishy. They could easily
have gotten a warrant to examine the server, but chose not to. They also purposely refuse to
get testimony from Craig Murray and Julian Assange, which rings alarm bells on its own.
As for the technical aspect of Marc's question, I agree that I'd like to see Bill Binney
directly answer it.
The final Mueller report should be graded "incomplete," says VIPS, whose forensic work proves the speciousness of the story that
DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The Attorney General
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings
Executive Summary
Media reports are predicting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is about to give you the findings of his probe into any
links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.
If Mueller gives you his "completed" report anytime soon, it should be graded "incomplete."
Major deficiencies include depending on a DNC-hired cybersecurity company for forensics and failure to consult with those who
have done original forensic work, including us and the independent forensic investigators with whom we have examined the data. We
stand ready to help.
We veteran intelligence professionals (VIPS) have done enough detailed forensic work to prove the speciousness of the prevailing
story that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking. Given the paucity of evidence to support that story,
we believe Mueller may choose to finesse this key issue and leave everyone hanging. That would help sustain the widespread belief
that Trump owes his victory to President Vladimir Putin, and strengthen the hand of those who pay little heed to the unpredictable
consequences of an increase in tensions with nuclear-armed Russia.
There is an overabundance of "assessments" but a lack of hard evidence to support that prevailing narrative. We believe that there
are enough people of integrity in the Department of Justice to prevent the outright manufacture or distortion of "evidence," particularly
if they become aware that experienced scientists have completed independent forensic study that yield very different conclusions.
We know only too well -- and did our best to expose -- how our former colleagues in the intelligence community manufactured fraudulent
"evidence" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
We have scrutinized publicly available physical data -- the "trail" that every cyber operation leaves behind. And we have had
support from highly experienced independent forensic investigators who, like us, have no axes to grind. We can prove that the conventional-wisdom
story about Russian-hacking-DNC-emails-for-WikiLeaks is false. Drawing largely on the unique expertise of two VIPS scientists who
worked for a combined total of 70 years at the National Security Agency and became Technical Directors there, we have regularly published
our findings. But we have been deprived of a hearing in mainstream media -- an experience painfully reminiscent of what we had to
endure when we exposed the corruption of intelligence before the attack on Iraq 16 years ago.
This time, with the principles of physics and forensic science to rely on, we are able to adduce solid evidence exposing mistakes
and distortions in the dominant story. We offer you below -- as a kind of aide-memoire -- a discussion of some of the key
factors related to what has become known as "Russia-gate." And we include our most recent findings drawn from forensic work on data
associated with WikiLeaks' publication of the DNC emails.
We do not claim our conclusions are "irrefutable and undeniable," a la Colin Powell at the UN before the Iraq war. Our judgments,
however, are based on the scientific method -- not "assessments." We decided to put this memorandum together in hopes of ensuring
that you hear that directly from us.
If the Mueller team remains reluctant to review our work -- or even to interview willing witnesses with direct knowledge, like
WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, we fear that many of those yearning earnestly for the truth on Russia-gate
will come to the corrosive conclusion that the Mueller investigation was a sham.
In sum, we are concerned that, at this point, an incomplete Mueller report will fall far short of the commitment made by then
Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "to ensure a full and thorough investigation," when he appointed Mueller in May 2017. Again,
we are at your disposal.
Discussion
The centerpiece accusation of Kremlin "interference" in the 2016 presidential election was the charge that Russia hacked Democratic
National Committee emails and gave them to WikiLeaks to embarrass Secretary Hillary Clinton and help Mr. Trump win. The weeks following
the election witnessed multiple leak-based media allegations to that effect. These culminated on January 6, 2017 in an evidence-light,
rump report misleadingly labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)." Prepared by "handpicked analysts" from only three of
the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI, and NSA), the assessment expressed "high confidence" in the Russia-hacking-to-WikiLeaks
story, but lacked so much as a hint that the authors had sought access to independent forensics to support their "assessment."
The media immediately awarded the ICA the status of Holy Writ, choosing to overlook an assortment of banal, full-disclosure-type
caveats included in the assessment itself -- such as:
" When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as 'we assess' or 'we judge,' they are conveying an analytic assessment
or judgment. Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on
collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment
is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong."
To their credit, however, the authors of the ICA did make a highly germane point in introductory remarks on "cyber incident attribution."
They noted: "The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber
operation -- malicious or not -- leaves a trail." [Emphasis added.]
Forensics
The imperative is to get on that "trail" -- and quickly, before red herrings can be swept across it. The best way to establish
attribution is to apply the methodology and processes of forensic science. Intrusions into computers leave behind discernible physical
data that can be examined scientifically by forensic experts. Risk to "sources and methods" is normally not a problem.
Direct access to the actual computers is the first requirement -- the more so when an intrusion is termed "an act of war" and
blamed on a nuclear-armed foreign government (the words used by the late Sen. John McCain and other senior officials). In testimony
to the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017, former FBI Director James Comey admitted that he did not insist on physical access
to the DNC computers even though, as he conceded, "best practices" dictate direct access.
In June 2017, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr asked Comey whether he ever had "access to the actual hardware
that was hacked." Comey answered, "In the case of the DNC we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic
information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. " Sen. Burr followed up: "But no content? Isn't content
an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?" Comey: "It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks
is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016."
The "private party/high-class entity" to which Comey refers is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm of checkered reputation and multiple
conflicts of interest, including very close ties to a number of key anti-Russian organizations. Comey indicated that the DNC hired
CrowdStrike in the spring of 2016.
Given the stakes involved in the Russia-gate investigation – including a possible impeachment battle and greatly increased tension
between Russia and the U.S. -- it is difficult to understand why Comey did not move quickly to seize the computer hardware so the
FBI could perform an independent examination of what quickly became the major predicate for investigating election interference by
Russia. Fortunately, enough data remain on the forensic "trail" to arrive at evidence-anchored conclusions. The work we have done
shows the prevailing narrative to be false. We have been suggesting this for over two years. Recent forensic work significantly strengthens
that conclusion.
We Do Forensics
Recent forensic examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25 and 26 May 2016. (On June 12, Julian
Assange announced he had them; WikiLeaks published them on July 22.) We recently discovered that the files reveal a FAT (File Allocation
Table) system property. This shows that the data had been transferred to an external storage device, such as a thumb drive,
before WikiLeaks posted them.
FAT is a simple file system named for its method of organization, the File Allocation Table. It is used for storage only and is
not related to internet transfers like hacking. Were WikiLeaks to have received the DNC files via a hack, the last modified times
on the files would be a random mixture of odd-and even-ending numbers.
Why is that important? The evidence lies in the "last modified" time stamps on the Wikileaks files. When a file is stored under
the FAT file system the software rounds the time to the nearest even-numbered second. Every single one of the time stamps in the
DNC files on WikiLeaks' site ends in an even number.
We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on the Wikileaks site. All 500 files end in an even number -- 2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If
those files had been hacked over the Internet, there would be an equal probability of the time stamp ending in an odd number. The
random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power. Thus, these data show that the DNC emails posted by
WikiLeaks went through a storage device, like a thumb drive, and were physically moved before Wikileaks posted the emails on the
World Wide Web.
This finding alone is enough to raise reasonable doubts, for example, about Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers
for hacking the DNC emails given to WikiLeaks. A defense attorney could easily use the forensics to argue that someone copied the
DNC files to a storage device like a USB thumb drive and got them physically to WikiLeaks -- not electronically via a hack.
Role of NSA
For more than two years, we strongly suspected that the DNC emails were copied/leaked in that way, not hacked. And we said so.
We remain intrigued by the apparent failure of NSA's dragnet, collect-it-all approach -- including "cast-iron" coverage of WikiLeaks
-- to provide forensic evidence (as opposed to "assessments") as to how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks and who sent them. Well before
the telling evidence drawn from the use of FAT, other technical evidence led us to conclude that the DNC emails were not hacked over
the network, but rather physically moved over, say, the Atlantic Ocean.
Is it possible that NSA has not yet been asked to produce the collected packets of DNC email data claimed to have been hacked
by Russia? Surely, this should be done before Mueller competes his investigation. NSA has taps on all the transoceanic cables leaving
the U.S. and would almost certainly have such packets if they exist. (The detailed slides released by Edward Snowden actually show
the routes that trace the packets.)
The forensics we examined shed no direct light on who may have been behind the leak. The only thing we know for sure is that the
person had to have direct access to the DNC computers or servers in order to copy the emails. The apparent lack of evidence from
the most likely source, NSA, regarding a hack may help explain the FBI's curious preference for forensic data from CrowdStrike. No
less puzzling is why Comey would choose to call CrowdStrike a "high-class entity."
Comey was one of the intelligence chiefs briefing President Obama on January 5, 2017 on the "Intelligence Community Assessment,"
which was then briefed to President-elect Trump and published the following day. That Obama found a key part of the ICA narrative
less than persuasive became clear at his last press conference (January 18), when he told the media, "The conclusions of the intelligence
community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to how 'the DNC emails that were leaked' got to WikiLeaks.
Is Guccifer 2.0 a Fraud?
There is further compelling technical evidence that undermines the claim that the DNC emails were downloaded over the internet
as a result of a spearphishing attack. William Binney, one of VIPS' two former Technical Directors at NSA, along with other former
intelligence community experts, examined files posted by Guccifer 2.0 and discovered that those files could not have been downloaded
over the internet. It is a simple matter of mathematics and physics.
There was a flurry of activity after Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016: "We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which
are pending publication." On June 14, DNC contractor CrowdStrike announced that malware was found on the DNC server and claimed there
was evidence it was injected by Russians. On June 15, the Guccifer 2.0 persona emerged on the public stage, affirmed the DNC statement,
claimed to be responsible for hacking the DNC, claimed to be a WikiLeaks source, and posted a document that forensics show
was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."
Our suspicions about the Guccifer 2.0 persona grew when G-2 claimed responsibility for a "hack" of the DNC on July 5, 2016, which
released DNC data that was rather bland compared to what WikiLeaks published 17 days later (showing how the DNC had tipped the primary
scales against Sen. Bernie Sanders). As VIPS
reported in a wrap-up
Memorandum for the President on July 24, 2017 (titled "Intel Vets Challenge 'Russia Hack' Evidence)," forensic examination of the
July 5, 2016 cyber intrusion into the DNC showed it NOT to be a hack by the Russians or by anyone else, but rather a copy onto an
external storage device. It seemed a good guess that the July 5 intrusion was a contrivance to preemptively taint anything WikiLeaks
might later publish from the DNC, by "showing" it came from a "Russian hack." WikiLeaks published the DNC emails on July 22, three
days before the Democratic convention.
As we prepared our July 24 memo for the President, we chose to begin by taking Guccifer 2.0 at face value; i. e., that the documents
he posted on July 5, 2016 were obtained via a hack over the Internet. Binney conducted a forensic examination of the metadata contained
in the posted documents and compared that metadata with the known capacity of Internet connection speeds at the time in the U.S.
This analysis showed a transfer rate as high as 49.1 megabytes per second, which is much faster than was possible from a remote online
Internet connection. The 49.1 megabytes speed coincided, though, with the rate that copying onto a thumb drive could accommodate.
Binney, assisted by colleagues with relevant technical expertise, then extended the examination and ran various forensic tests
from the U.S. to the Netherlands, Albania, Belgrade and the UK. The fastest Internet rate obtained -- from a data center in New Jersey
to a data center in the UK -- was 12 megabytes per second, which is less than a fourth of the capacity typical of a copy onto a thumb
drive.
The findings from the examination of the Guccifer 2.0 data and the WikiLeaks data does not indicate who copied the information
to an external storage device (probably a thumb drive). But our examination does disprove that G.2 hacked into the DNC on July 5,
2016. Forensic evidence for the Guccifer 2.0 data adds to other evidence that the DNC emails were not taken by an internet spearphishing
attack. The data breach was local. The emails were copied from the network.
Presidential Interest
After VIPS' July 24, 2017 Memorandum for the President, Binney, one of its principal authors, was invited to share his insights
with Mike Pompeo, CIA Director at the time. When Binney arrived in Pompeo's office at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017 for an
hour-long discussion, the director made no secret of the reason for the invitation: "You are here because the President told me that
if I really wanted to know about Russian hacking I needed to talk with you."
Binney warned Pompeo -- to stares of incredulity -- that his people should stop lying about the Russian hacking. Binney then started
to explain the VIPS findings that had caught President Trump's attention. Pompeo asked Binney if he would talk to the FBI and NSA.
Binney agreed, but has not been contacted by those agencies. With that, Pompeo had done what the President asked. There was no follow-up.
Confronting James Clapper on Forensics
We, the hoi polloi, do not often get a chance to talk to people like Pompeo -- and still less to the former intelligence
chiefs who are the leading purveyors of the prevailing Russia-gate narrative. An exception came on November 13, when former National
Intelligence Director James Clapper came to the Carnegie Endowment in Washington to hawk his memoir. Answering a question during
the Q&A about Russian "hacking" and NSA, Clapper said:
" Well, I have talked with NSA a lot And in my mind, I spent a lot of time in the SIGINT business, the forensic evidence
was overwhelming about what the Russians had done. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever." [Emphasis added]
Clapper added: " as a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our
country they reached and the different mechanisms that, by which they reached them, to me it stretches credulity to think they didn't
have a profound impact on election on the outcome of the election."
(A transcript of the interesting Q&A can be found
here and a commentary
on Clapper's performance at Carnegie, as well as on his longstanding lack of credibility, is
here .)
Normally soft-spoken Ron Wyden, Democratic senator from Oregon, lost his patience with Clapper last week when he learned that
Clapper is still denying that he lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee about the extent of NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens.
In an unusual outburst, Wyden said: "James Clapper needs to stop making excuses for lying to the American people about mass surveillance.
To be clear: I sent him the question in advance. I asked him to correct the record afterward. He chose to let the lie stand."
The materials brought out by Edward Snowden in June 2013 showed Clapper to have lied under oath to the committee on March 12,
2013; he was, nevertheless, allowed to stay on as Director of National Intelligence for three and half more years. Clapper fancies
himself an expert on Russia, telling Meet the Press on May 28, 2017 that Russia's history shows that Russians are "typically,
almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever."
Clapper ought to be asked about the "forensics" he said were "overwhelming about what the Russians had done." And that, too, before
Mueller completes his investigation.
For the steering group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity:
William Binney , former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA's Signals
Intelligence Automation Research Center (ret.)
Richard H. Black , Senator of Virginia, 13th District; Colonel US Army (ret.); Former Chief, Criminal Law Division,
Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon (associate VIPS)
Bogdan Dzakovic , former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Philip Girald i, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Mike Gravel , former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the
Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator
James George Jatras , former U.S. diplomat and former foreign policy adviser to Senate leadership (Associate VIPS)
Larry C. Johnson , former CIA and State Department Counter Terrorism officer
John Kiriakou , former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Karen Kwiatkowski , former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture
of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
Edward Loomis , Cryptologic Computer Scientist, former Technical Director at NSA (ret.)
David MacMichael , Ph.D., former senior estimates officer, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern , former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray , former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & CIA
political analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce , MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Peter Van Buren , US Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Sarah G. Wilton , CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe , former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Ann Wright , retired U.S. Army reserve colonel and former U.S. diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq
War
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is made up of former intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers
and congressional staffers. The organization, founded in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington's justifications for launching
a war against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and national security policy based on genuine national interests rather than contrived
threats promoted for largely political reasons. An archive of
VIPS memoranda is available at Consortiumnews.com.
"... Bill Preistap was the supervisor for Strzok and Lisa Page who also worked for John Carlin in the Department of Justice National Security Division under Sally Yates. Then Strozk and Page continued their CIA operation as they were appointed to Mueller's Special Council Investigation. ..."
"... Gina Haspel worked directly for the instigator of the Crossfire Hurricane operation – John Brennan. It would have been impossible for Haspel not to have known about the British spying from London since it was reported in UK newspaper on a weekly basis. She certainly was controlling Stefan Halper , Josef Mifsud , Stephan Roh , Alexander Downer, Andrew Wood, John McCain, Mark Warner, Adam Schiff and the other conspirators. ..."
"... Keep in mind Haspel was Michael Gaeta's handler. Gaeta handled the frame-up of George Papadopoulos. ..."
When we saw these tweets from George Papadopoulos, we thought we could help him out with some
answers. If you can get them to George, please do.
Has congress figured out why Peter Strzok's former boss, Bill Priestap, was in London (of
all places) the days before Alexander Downer was sent to spy on me and lie about our meeting?
If not, time to get a move on it.
Britain is in a political crisis. To push Brexit hard, declassifying the spy role of the
David Cameron government on Trump and his team is paramount. Congress can not overlook the
vital importance of London as the center of the coup attempt.
Bill Priestap was the Director of the FBI national security division and would have gone to
the London CIA "office" for a meeting. There he would have met with Stefan Halper and Gina
Haspel who was, at the time, head of the London CIA office and would have been in charge of the
connections with Robert Hannigan (British GCHQ) and John Brennan who planned and executed the
wiretapping of Trump Team at Trump Towers. Haspel's communications, when released, will reveal
the full scope of the CIA led international attack on the 2016 presidential
election.
Gina Haspel would have known about the coup. If she has not reported all of
this to the President Trump, she is complicit in the coup attempt and is guilty of HIGH
TREASON.
Keep in mind, Peter Strzok was a CIA Regional Director who John Brennan appointed as the
head of Crossfire Hurricane, the CIA counter-intelligence operation to "take out" candidate
Trump – later it became the Mueller Witch Hunt after 13 different iterations
spanning:
the CIA (John Brennan),
FBI (James Comey, Andrew McCabe, James Baker, etc.),
DoJ (Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, Andrew Weisseman),
State Department (Victoria Nuland, Jonathon Winer, Hilary Clinton, John Kerry),
ODNS (James Clapper),
NSA (Admiral Mike Rogers)
and the White House senior staff (directly to Obama, Biden, Jarret, Rice, Powers, etc.).
Bill Preistap was the supervisor for Strzok and Lisa Page who also worked for
John Carlin in the Department of Justice National Security Division under Sally Yates. Then
Strozk and Page continued their CIA operation as they were appointed to Mueller's Special
Council Investigation.
Gina Haspel worked directly for the instigator of the Crossfire Hurricane operation –
John Brennan. It would have been impossible for Haspel not to have known about the British
spying from London since it was reported in UK newspaper on a weekly basis. She certainly was
controlling Stefan Halper
, Josef
Mifsud ,
Stephan Roh , Alexander Downer, Andrew Wood, John McCain, Mark Warner, Adam Schiff and the
other conspirators.
All of these facts are well known and reported in open source documents. As the 53
testimonies of the House Intelligence Committee are released, we will see the house of cards
all fall down and Gina Haspel will go with it.
What the Strzok-Page 'insurance policy' text was actually about - The Washington Post
With the release of testimony from those two employees -- attorney Lisa Page and agent Peter
Strzok -- the "insurance policy" argument for the illegitimacy of the Russia investigation
gained new energy. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted a Fox News story about Page's testimony.
"This deserves more attention!" he wrote . "FBI Mistress, Lisa Page,
confirmed to House Judiciary, there was an anti-Trump Insurance Policy and it's the fake
Russian investigation! She admits there was almost no evidence on collusion, yet they continued
with WITCH HUNT!"
Trump tweeted Paul's message to
his followers, adding, "I agree with Rand Paul. This is a total disgrace and should NEVER
happen to another President!"
Blooming Barricade , Mar 14, 2019 5:36:22 PM |
link
Pierre Omidyar opens up new Integrity Initiative
Omidyar's Democracy Fund has also helped to finance the "News Integrity Initiative," a
name that evokes the U.K.'s notorious Integrity Initiative. The latter group claimed to be an
independent charity battling foreign disinformation until it was exposed by hackers as a
propaganda mill run by military officers and covertly funded by the British Foreign Office to
cultivate public opinion in support of heightened conflict with Russia. Leaked communications
revealed how the Integrity Initiative mobilized clusters of journalists, self-styled
disinformation experts, academics and political figures throughout the West to advocate for a
long-term war footing against the Russian menace.
For its part, the News Integrity Initiative is a murky $14 million operation intended to
"combat media manipulation" through a network of "journalists, technologists, academic
institutions, non-profits, and other organizations." The set-up is eerily evocative of the
influence clusters developed by the British Integrity Initiative. Few specifics are provided,
however, on what the group actually does.
A hint about the agenda of the News Integrity Initiative lies in a grant of $1 million it
made to an outlet called Internews in 2017. The bulk of Internews' money -- some 80 percent
of it -- comes from the U.S. government. It has also received backing from liberal financier
George Soros and USAID, which provided the group with seed money for a Russian-language
television network, helped drive the pro-NATO color revolution in the Republic of Georgia,
and published footage of Russian casualties in Chechnya to erode Russian public support for
the war.
In countries that are considered official and semi-official enemies of the United States,
Internews has organized de facto boot camps for opposition journalists. "In the Middle East,"
says Internews founder David Hoffman, "training sessions often begin with discussion of
whether Internews is really U.S. propaganda or the CIA." However Hoffman answers the
question, it is abundantly clear that his outlet has advanced Washington's priorities abroad
behind the guise of independent journalism.
In November 2017, the News Integrity Initiative hosted a workshop alongside Internews and
the Omidyar-backed First Draft News in Kiev, Ukraine, according to the initiative's managing
director, Molly de Aguiar. Kiev is today a nexus for intelligence-connected media crusaders
and a launch pad for projects ostensibly aimed at countering Russia's "information warfare."
But, what exactly the News Integrity Initiative was doing there was left unsaid.
While Omidyar ploughs his fortune into organizations that claim to be countering
"disinformation," especially of the Russian variety, he has established a culture factory to
publicize the supposed feats of the journalists often hyped up by the cartel of media
transparency groups and fact-checking sites he funds.
Crime is a legal definition. This means that to commit big crime you make it legal. Or, you
can try to enhance your commercial business or money making organization by getting conduct
made into a crime that is competition to your activity, like is found in copyright law, and is
done by state governments that make gambling illegal but have state-run lotteries in which the
odds of winning are so remote they make the negative percentage in Las Vegas casino games look
like a paragon of virtue. This also means that the concept of a crime is created by a
government, even though it is commonly thought to be bad behavior (or a failure to act), as
described by social relations, culture, religion, and human biology (with murder opposed by the
instinctive act of self defense). Conduct that is said to be bad enough is defined as a crime
and involves the government using force directly against the actor at least in the form
initially of an arrest, possible imprisonment, or later if an order from a criminal court case
is not followed.
The ongoing jabbering in the mass media -- starting in November 2016 when Donald Trump
was elected president -- declared that all sorts of conduct was illegal, as a civil or criminal
case, or should be the subject of charges for impeachment. A lot of that talk can be described
as horse manure, but it has had a real effect on the public, which effect has been and is the
intent. It reached a fever pitch last week when Judge T.S. Ellis III, an American hero, in
a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, sentenced Paul Manafort in one of his two
criminal cases to 47 months in prison, which was noticeably below the "sentencing guidelines
range" of 235 to 293 months--
Television talkers expressed shock and dismay that Manafort received such a "low" sentence
below the guidelines and they look forward with glee to his second sentencing on 13 March,
beginning at 9:30 a.m., eastern time, in federal court in Washington DC, with Judge Amy Berman
Jackson presiding. Her rulings can be described as statistically matching to a degree those
requested by government prosecutors in cases brought by "special counsel" Robert Mueller, who
was tasked to investigate "interference" in the 2016 presidential election by the Russian
government, with attention to "collusion" by the Trump campaign, but mysteriously not involving
possible collusion with Russia by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Just as important as the definition of a crime are the rules of procedure and evidence that
govern a criminal justice system from start to finish, such as: detaining and arresting a
person, questioning a suspect, confinement or release before a trial (if any), pretrial court
hearings, a trial itself by a jury or otherwise, any appeal of a trial's verdict, ordering a
sentence of punishment or a consequence to the finding of guilt, suspending a sentence through
probation, operating a prison, the power of a president or governor to pardon a person's
conviction or commute the sentence, and so forth.
This brings us to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, a deceptive name if there ever was
one. They are part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 (CCCA), disguised inside
House Joint Resolution 648, "A joint resolution making continuing appropriations for the fiscal
year 1985, and for other purposes", which became Public Law 98-473 and which president Ronald
Reagan signed on 12 October 1984. That legislation shifted the existing federal criminal law so
extensively that it can accurately be described as a radical change. Whether becoming a law in
1984 was a coincidence or an arrogant expression by implementing some of the meaning in George
Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-four" (published in 1949) is not known.
The so-called guidelines came from the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, introduced by Senator
Edward Kennedy (Dem. Massachusetts), and they became part of the Comprehensive Crime Control
Act of 1984, which in turn was Title 2 of the continuing appropriations bill, Public Law
98-473. In the legislation, Congress created the United States Sentencing Commission, and it
would write the new sentencing rules, and federal judges would have to sentence someone within
the "guideline range" set by the commission. This smaller "guideline range" was within the
regular "range of punishment" set by Congress as a possible minimum to maximum sentence for
each particular crime Congress defined. Before the CCCA, if a defendant was found guilty, the
federal judge had the power and discretion to sentence the person to anything within the
regular range of punishment established by Congress, and order probation if allowed in that
instance. But the sentencing guidelines took that discretion away from the federal judge,
and required the sentence to be within the guideline range. The self-righteous language that
supposedly allowed a judge to "depart" from the guideline range in a certain way was laughable
as a practical matter.
When the sentencing guidelines became law, the sentencing commission magically was said to
become part of the judicial branch of government, where it resides today [1].
When the sentencing guidelines kicked in and became operational, a court challenge followed.
The case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, as United States v. Mistretta, 488 U.S. 361 (1989),
and even though at that time "liberals" such as Judges William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and
John Paul Stevens were on the court, the decision was 8 to 1 that the guidelines were
constitutional, with the lone dissenter being none other than Antonin Scalia [2]. Sometimes
Judge Scalia would pull back covering language about an issue and shine a light on what was
really going on. He did so at the start of his dissent--
"While the products of the Sentencing Commission's labors have been given the modest name
'Guidelines,' see 28 U.S.C. 994(a)(1) (1982 ed., Supp. IV); United States Sentencing
Commission Guidelines Manual (June 15, 1988), they have the force and effect of laws,
prescribing the sentences criminal defendants are to receive. A judge who disregards them
will be reversed, 18 U.S.C. 3742 (1982 ed., Supp. IV). I dissent from today's decision
because I can find no place within our constitutional system for an agency created by
Congress to exercise no governmental power other than the making of laws."
As some sort of smiling rationale is always given for a new law or governmental action, the
sentencing guidelines were promoted as providing certainty and fairness in sentencing and
avoiding unwarranted disparities among defendants with similar records found guilty of similar
offenses. Never mind that the differences between individual human beings, their backgrounds,
and behavior are basically unlimited and disparate in reality. The existence of reality was not
part of the new game, and "disparity" was claimed to be a bad thing. Asserted to be just as bad
was the difference between federal judges and the sentences they imposed. Surprisingly, one of
the original members of the sentencing commission, Paul Robinson, objected to what was created
as a final product, and Judge Scalia quoted him--
" ' Under the guidelines, the judge could give the same sentence for abusive sexual
contact that puts the child in fear as for unlawfully entering or remaining in the United
States. Similarly, the guidelines permit equivalent sentences for the following pairs of
offenses: drug trafficking and a violation of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act;
arson with a destructive device and failure to surrender a cancelled naturalization
certificate; operation of a common carrier under the influence of drugs that causes injury
and alteration of one motor vehicle identification number; illegal trafficking in explosives
and trespass; interference with a flight attendant and unlawful conduct relating to
contraband cigarettes; aggravated assault and smuggling $11,000 worth of fish.' Dissenting
View of Commissioner Paul H. Robinson on the Promulgation of the Sentencing Guidelines by the
United States Sentencing Commission 6-7 (May 1, 1987) (citations omitted)".
The point was and is that laws are to be made by Congress, and not from scratch by
delegating the power to a type of commission, which Judge Scalia called "a sort of
junior-varsity Congress". This context also raises thoughts about the separation of powers in
the structure of the federal government.
Sentencing in federal court became a process of assigning a certain number of points to
certain factors, and adding them up and subtracting some to reach a numerical score, and after
that looking at a grid and finding the pigeon hole telling you, and the handcuffed judge, what
the sentence within the new, smaller range of punishment could be. If you think that such a
process is surreal, it is. The sentencing scheme with its new commission became a sprawling
monster, not only in its text and procedures, but also in its expenditure of time and money and
court litigation, which continues to this day. Here is the current version of the sentencing
guidelines manual, in excess of 500 pages, which you can read if your stomach can stand
it--
After the guidelines became effective in 1987 and the Mistretta opinion was handed down in
1989, the problems generated by the new system became more and more obvious and acute. Despite
dissatisfaction expressed in the legal community, Congress did nothing, and it took 15 years
until 2004 for another case with some substance to be accepted by the Supreme Court for review,
called United States vs. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005). It produced an unusual decision
consisting of two separate majority opinions, with each one made up of a different group of
five judges, and several dissenting opinions [3].
One opinion ruled that two sections of the Sentencing Reform Act that made the guidelines
mandatory had to be severed and excised from that law because a conflict existed between facts
that might be found by a jury through a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial, and
what could be done under the mandatory aspects of the sentencing guidelines. Invalidating the
two sections made the guidelines effectively advisory , but the "[federal] district courts,
while not bound to apply the Guidelines, must consult those Guidelines and take them into
account when sentencing", and the "courts of appeals review sentencing decisions for
unreasonableness" (see pages 246-267, pdf pages 448-469). The supreme court did not have the
intestinal fortitude to strike down the entire sentencing guidelines regime, and instead wrote
around the problems, split hairs, and kept the system mostly in place, requiring the trial
judge to still consider the "numerous factors that guide sentencing", and a court of appeals
can review the judge's sentence and decide whether it is "unreasonable".
Judge Stephen Breyer is the author of that particular majority opinion in the Booker case
that kept the guidelines mostly in place; Supreme Court Judge John Paul Stevens wrote the other
majority opinion. One of the original members of the U.S. Sentencing Commission from 1985-1989
was a judge on the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals named Stephen Breyer, who was on that
court from 1980-1994. He was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by president Bill Clinton and
took his seat on 3 August 1994.
The world is indeed small, for in the Booker case before the supreme court in 2004, two
lawyers involved in writing the brief (the written argument) for the Justice Department to
support the guidelines were Christopher Wray, now the FBI Director, and Michael Drebeen, who
has been in the Solicitor General's office in the Justice Department and who has been working
at least part time since 2017 for -- you guessed it -- special counsel Robert Mueller [4]. In
this New York Times newspaper story from 6 June 2017 about Christopher Wray being nominated to
be FBI Director, at the beginning of the story is a photograph from February 2004 of three men
standing together -- James Comey (the Deputy Attorney General), Robert Mueller (FBI Director),
and Christopher Wray (Chief of the Criminal Division in the Justice Department) [5]. To
slightly modify the immortal words of comedian George Carlin, "It's a small club, and you're
not in it".
The growing mutation of the sentencing system continues, with endless quibbling among
lawyers in court, judges, and the sentencing commission through litigation over detailed
bureaucratic parts of the guidelines attempting to identify and pull under control every
conceivable variation of a person, the person's conduct, and different factors that might be
considered in a sentence, and assign a number to it, ultimately producing your guideline and
criminal history levels. The sentencing commission has published a selected annotation of 85
supreme court cases from the Mistretta decision in 1989 to one from 2018, with a brief
discussion of each opinion [6].
You can now see and understand the real reason for the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the
carefully crafted system of assigning numbers to points and designing strict categories to
include and control every possible factor about ordering a sentence for a crime.
This system removes the sentencing power and discretion from the courts and judges in the
judicial branch and gives them to the prosecuting attorneys in the executive branch, through
the Department of Justice and the offices of U.S. Attorneys. It has been and is a clever and
diabolical transfer to the prosecuting authority of one of the most important functions in a
criminal justice system: the sentencing punishment or consequence given to a defendant.
I, the federal prosecutor, will decide what your sentence will be by the offenses I decide
to charge you with. All I have to do is get a guilty verdict from a jury trial or from a trial
to the judge if you agree to have a judge alone hear and decide the trial. Or obtain a guilty
plea from you to a charge and on terms that I agree to, whether that guilty plea results from
your objective decision about your conduct, or whether you are coerced into pleading guilty by
the sheer number of charges with possible sentences I have filed against you, or you plead
guilty because you have run out of money and cannot afford a trial, or I threaten to charge
your wife or family members also if you do not plead guilty to what I agree you can plead to.
The judge is so constrained and limited by the sentencing guideline scheme that I am not
worried at all about the sentence you will get; I have no downside risk there.
The presentence investigation report (PSI) about Paul Manafort from the federal probation
office was filed on 6 March and is not publicly available, as is standard practice. Manafort's
sentencing hearing on 13 March is taking on the aura of a spectacle, boosted by the
government's allegation that he violated the terms of his plea agreement, and after the
courageous departure downward from the sentencing guidelines by Judge T.S. Ellis III last week.
Whether Judge Ellis's sentence may be the subject of review by appeal is another dense
issue.
Meanwhile, in the pending case of Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.), a status report by the lawyers
was filed on 12 March. It requested that his sentencing hearing be rescheduled--
Politicians, the press, and candidates announcing a year before the presidential primaries
begin are blathering on clownlike about who has verbally offended whom, which newly invented
group should have new "rights", whether someone is cis-gender, whether the president had sexual
contact with a floozy pornographic movie performer and whether a legal payment to her to keep
it confidential violated campaign finance laws (it did not), and on and on.
All the while, they are blithely unaware that playing out right in front of their faces is a
radical transformation of federal criminal law, consolidating the ultimate governmental power
in the branch that executes the police power, while federal judges with a lifetime appointment
and all office facilities and perks paid for by taxpayers, dither and refuse to honestly
describe and resist what has been happening. All federal judges except for two. One, Antonin
Scalia, left this world in 2016, but was the only one on the supreme court standing against the
slick usurpation of the democratic process and sentencing discretion. The other one, T.S. Ellis
III, is still with us, and he not only understands what the sentencing guidelines really are,
but he also assessed a sentence as it used to be done, without the double meaning of 1984.
[2] The official version of a Supreme Court opinion is in a book called the United States
Reports. The Supreme Court has a digital version of its opinions in the pdf computer format
going back only to volume 509, and the Mistretta opinion is in volume 488. Other internet
websites have reproduced the opinion.
[3] The supreme court opinion is in a bound volume on the court's website, but I do not have
the software at hand to pull it out as a separate document. The full volume of 1,259 pages in
the pdf computer format is 3.9 megabytes in size and can be viewed or downloaded. The Booker
opinion is on pdf pages 422 to 536, and on book pages 220 to 334.
Thank you Robert for the education. Most people, even educated ones don't grasp the scale,
scope and intricacies of our governmental apparatus. I know the more I learn, the more I
become convinced we have a leviathan that is manipulated, twisted, overly complex and one
that is working only for the ruling elites. We have to cut this behemoth down to size. And
follow Taleb's maxims of "Skin in the Game" and "Anti-fragile" meaning simplicity.
"The point was and is that laws are to be made by Congress, and not from
scratch by delegating the power to a type of commission, which Judge
Scalia called 'a sort of junior-varsity Congress' ". Such as the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau.
Looks like Orr was one of the central figures of the conspiracy against Trump in Justice Department. And it was Orr wife
who probably had written parts of the dossier at the request of CIA Brennan and other conspirators in CIA (who were acting via
controlled by them counterintelligence division at FBI)
Notable quotes:
"... Christopher Steele, a "former" MI-6 officer, had been a paid FBI informant for several years. ..."
"... Bruce Ohr met with Glenn Simpson in August 2016, which totally contradicts Simpson's previous sworn testimony that he did not meet with Ohr until after the 2016 election. ..."
"... Ohr informed FBI and senior DOJ officials, who signed off on the FISA application in October 2016 to spy on Carter Page, that the "dossier" had a tainted political history. ..."
"... What is truly remarkable about Ohr's testimony is that his explanation for repeated meetings and contacts with Christopher Steele do not make sense. I am referring specifically to Ohr's claim that Steele wanted him, Ohr, to pass info to the FBI. ..."
"... This guy is a senior DOJ official. He is a former prosecutor. He knows that the minute he accepts anything from Steele and then passes it on to the FBI that he, Ohr, became a fact witness. He is part of the chain of custody. More importantly, Ohr, knowing that Steele is on the FBI payroll, should have refused to accept any information and direct Steele to talk to his Agent/handler. Period. ..."
"... One other important sidetone--there has been a longstanding agreement among the 5 Eyes (i.e., US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to NOT recruit as assets each other's spies. ..."
"... In light of all of this one can only conclude that Bruce Ohr is lying about the real reason for meeting with Steele or that he is a complete moron. There is no other possible explanation or excuse. I do not think that Ohr is a moron. He does not strike me as a man of limited intelligence. I think he is lying. I believe that the reason Steele approached Ohr was to provide some insulation to the FBI, which was engaged in an act of sedition. The FBI was interfering in the 2016 election and working to destroy Donald Trump. ..."
"... As more transcripts and documents come into the sunlight, we will get a clearer picture of the corruption at both the FBI and the DOJ. The FISA applications to spy on a US citizen, Carter Page, are without foundation. I am sure that William Barr appreciates this point and will press for action against those who willingly engaged in such despicable actions. ..."
Sorry to have been out of pocket (I've fled the wintry north for a new home in Florida). I
am back, so to speak, and ready to write a bit. Last week's release by Congressman Collins of
the interview transcript of Bruce Ohr, who appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last
year is quite damning of the FBI and the DOJ. If our system of justice is truly blind and
committed to fairness, there is little doubt that former FBI and DOJ officials--Comey, McCabe,
Yates and Rosenstein--will be facing serious legal jeopardy. They have lied.
The biggest "revelations" from Ohr are as follows:
Christopher Steele, a "former" MI-6 officer, had been a paid FBI informant for several years.
Bruce Ohr met with Glenn Simpson in August 2016, which totally contradicts Simpson's previous
sworn testimony that he did not meet with Ohr until after the 2016 election.
Ohr informed FBI
and senior DOJ officials, who signed off on the FISA application in October 2016 to spy on
Carter Page, that the "dossier" had a tainted political history.
I put "revelations" in quotations because we already knew most of this--specifically
Steele's status as a paid informant and the failure of the FBI and DOJ to verify the accuracy
of the so-called dossier. The new meat on the bone is Ohr's claim that he met with Simpson in
August 2016. Simpson swore under oath that no such meeting took place. That's a substantive lie
and, if the Flynn case is a guide, Mr. Simpson will be looking at prison.
What is truly remarkable about Ohr's testimony is that his explanation for repeated meetings
and contacts with Christopher Steele do not make sense. I am referring specifically to Ohr's
claim that Steele wanted him, Ohr, to pass info to the FBI. Think about this for a moment--Ohr
knows that Steele is a paid FBI informant. That means Steele has an FBI agent who is his
conduit into the FBI. That Agent handles interviews and writes up reports. Why in the hell
would Steele approach Ohr and not his FBI handler? Because Steele did not want to create a
record, i.e., a 302, that would have been generated if he had followed protocol and gone thru
normal channels.
And Ohr? This guy is a senior DOJ official. He is a former prosecutor. He knows that the
minute he accepts anything from Steele and then passes it on to the FBI that he, Ohr, became a
fact witness. He is part of the chain of custody. More importantly, Ohr, knowing that Steele is
on the FBI payroll, should have refused to accept any information and direct Steele to talk to
his Agent/handler. Period.
One other important sidetone--there has been a longstanding agreement among the 5 Eyes
(i.e., US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to NOT recruit as assets each other's spies.
Christopher Steele's employ with the FBI violates this policy.
In light of all of this one can only conclude that Bruce Ohr is lying about the real reason
for meeting with Steele or that he is a complete moron. There is no other possible explanation
or excuse. I do not think that Ohr is a moron. He does not strike me as a man of limited
intelligence. I think he is lying. I believe that the reason Steele approached Ohr was to
provide some insulation to the FBI, which was engaged in an act of sedition. The FBI was
interfering in the 2016 election and working to destroy Donald Trump.
As more transcripts and documents come into the sunlight, we will get a clearer picture of
the corruption at both the FBI and the DOJ. The FISA applications to spy on a US citizen,
Carter Page, are without foundation. I am sure that William Barr appreciates this point and
will press for action against those who willingly engaged in such despicable actions.
"... Bruce Ohr testified that Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS provided to federal officials information we know to be false regarding Cleta Mitchell, a Republican campaign finance attorney, and the NRA. Giving false statements to federal officials is a crime under 18 U.S.C. 1001. pic.twitter.com/vm0tc4ft5R ..."
"... "Rod Rosenstein won't tell us when he first learned that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS," said Gaetz, in August, 2018. "So I want to know from Bruce Ohr, when did he tell his colleagues at the Department of Justice that in violation of law that required him to disclose his wife's occupation his sources of income. He did not do that. So when did all of the other people at the Department of Justice find this out because Rod Rosenstein, I've asked him twice in open hearing and he will not give an answer. I think there's a real smoking gun there." ..."
"... in Ohr's testimony he says he told the FBI about his wife's role at Fusion GPS but only divulged his role to one person at the DOJ: Rosenstein. ..."
"... It also appears he failed to tell lawmakers about the information he delivered to the FBI. ..."
"... Ohr added: "My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or whatever that she had provided to Fusion GPS But I don't believe her information is reflected in the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of information heading into Fusion GPS." ..."
"... In the testimony Ohr also revealed that Steele had told him details about his work with Deripaska saying Deripaska's attorney Paul Hauser "had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with" Deripaska. Ohr said Manafort "had stolen a large amount of money from" the Russian Oligarch and that Hauser was "trying to gather information that would show that." ..."
Department of Justice senior official
Bruce Ohr's
testimony contradicts testimony given by other senior government officials and key witnesses who testified before Congress regarding
the FBI's investigation into President Trump's 2016 campaign and alleged collusion with the Russian government, according to the
full transcripts released Friday.
Ohr's 268-page testimony, released by Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, reveals inconsistency
and contradiction in testimony given by Glenn Simpson, founder of embattled research firm
Fusion
GPS and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is set to leave his post sometime this month.
It also reveals that many questions are still left unanswered.
The Contradictions and The Revelations
Glenn Simpson suggests in his testimony to the Senate that he never spoke to anyone at the FBI about Christopher Steele,
the former British spy he hired to investigate the Trump campaign during the election. However, Ohr suggest otherwise telling
former Rep.Trey Gowdy under questioning "As I recall, and this is after checking with my notes, Mr. Simpson and I spoke in
August of 2016. I met with him, and he provided some information on possible intermediaries between the Russian government
and the Trump campaign."
In another instance, Simpson's testimony also contradicts notes taken by Ohr after a meeting they had in December, 2016.
Unverified allegations were decimated among the media that the Trump campaign had a
computer server that was linked to a Russian bank in Moscow: Alpha Bank. Simpson suggested to the Senate that he knew very
little about the Trump -Alpha Bank server story and couldn't provide information. But Bruce Ohr's own handwritten notes state
that when he met with Simpson in December 2016, Simpson was concerned over the Alpha Bank story in the New York Times. "The
New York Times story on Oct. 31 downplaying the connection between
Alfa servers and the Trump campaign was incorrect.
There was communication and it wasn't spam," stated Ohr's notes. This suggests that Simpson was well aware of the story, which
was believed by congressional investigators to have started from his research firm.
Ohr testified to lawmakers that Simpson provided information to federal officials that was false regarding Cleta Mitchell,
a well-known Republican campaign finance lawyer, and information regarding the National Rifle Association. Sean Davis, with
the Federalist pointed this out in a tweet today. Read one of those
stories here.
Bruce Ohr testified that Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS provided to federal officials information we know to be false regarding
Cleta Mitchell, a Republican campaign finance attorney, and the NRA. Giving false statements to federal officials is a crime
under 18 U.S.C. 1001. pic.twitter.com/vm0tc4ft5R
4. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would not answer questions to lawmakers during testimony about when he learned that
Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, was working for Fusion GPS. Just check this out from Rep. Matt Gaetz's
interview with Judge Jeanine on Fox News .
"Rod Rosenstein won't tell us when he first learned that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS," said Gaetz, in August,
2018. "So I want to know from Bruce Ohr, when did he tell his colleagues at the Department of Justice that in violation of
law that required him to disclose his wife's occupation his sources of income. He did not do that. So when did all of the other
people at the Department of Justice find this out because Rod Rosenstein, I've asked him twice in open hearing and he will
not give an answer. I think there's a real smoking gun there."
However, in Ohr's testimony he says he told the FBI about his wife's role at Fusion GPS but only divulged his role to one
person at the DOJ: Rosenstein.At the time, Rosenstein was overseeing the Trump-Russia probe, and had taken the information from Ohr and gave it to the
FBI. Just read The Hill's John Solomon
full story here for the full background on Ohr's testimony. I highlighted an important date below: remember Rosenstein wouldn't
answer lawmakers questions as to when he knew about Nellie Ohr. It also appears he failed to tell lawmakers about the information
he delivered to the FBI.
Ohr stated in his testimony: "What I had said, I think, to Mr. Rosenstein in October of 2017 was that my wife was working for
Fusion GPS The dossier, as I understand it, is the collection of reports that Chris Steele has prepared for Fusion GPS."
Ohr added: "My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or whatever that she had provided
to Fusion GPS But I don't believe her information is reflected in the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of
information heading into Fusion GPS."
5. Ohr also told lawmakers in his testimony that the former British spy, Christopher Steele was being paid by the FBI at the
same time he was getting paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. However, there was another player paying Steele and
it was a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska, a tycoon connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin, had well known
animus toward his former friend Paul Manafort.
Rep. Mark Meadows asked Ohr during testimony "Did Chris Steele get paid by the Department of Justice?
Ohr's response: "My understanding is that for a time he was a source for the FBI, a paid source.
In the testimony Ohr also revealed that Steele had told him details about his work with Deripaska saying Deripaska's attorney
Paul Hauser "had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with" Deripaska.
Ohr said Manafort "had stolen a large amount of money from" the Russian Oligarch and that Hauser was "trying to gather information
that would show that."
On the NYT story, you have to love how transparent the propaganda is, and yet they (Bolton, Pompeo, Rubio) don't care whatsoever.
Oh, and not one critical word about people throwing Molotov cocktails. Like that's a perfectly normal, non-violent means of protest.
I'm 72 and I don't watch any main stream news. All they do is "spin" the whatever the
"party line" of the so called "right" or "left". Oh yes, US Government, keep your bloody
hands off of South America.
I❤You Jimmy. You tell us the truth. And the truth is so hard to come by. So on
behalf of the rest of us...THANK YOU! Hugs and many many kisses on your cheeck. I send you my
love and respect.
No accident I spend most of my time on YouTube, at least I know where they are coming from
at the moment. I got pushed out of Common Dreams, Truth Out and Truth Dig by Hillary bots
during the 2016 primary. You couldn't have a conversation there anymore. It was all Bernie
hate all the time and everyday. I sought news and conversation here on YouTube then.
I am neither a Millienal nor am I Russian but I am a critical thinker who doesn't fall for
the CIA narrative of MSM. Keep doing what your doing Jimmy.
I'm 72 and I don't watch any main stream news. All they do is "spin" the whatever the
"party line" of the so called "right" or "left". Oh yes, US Government, keep your bloody
hands off of South America.
I❤You Jimmy. You tell us the truth. And the truth is so hard to come by. So on
behalf of the rest of us...THANK YOU! Hugs and many many kisses on your cheeck. I send you my
love and respect.
Why won't Twitter and Facebook ban Liars like Jake Tapper for telling lies about
Healthcare and other issues in the United States? He is nothing more than a
propagandist.
No accident I spend most of my time on YouTube, at least I know where they are coming from
at the moment. I got pushed out of Common Dreams, Truth Out and Truth Dig by Hillary bots
during the 2016 primary. You couldn't have a conversation there anymore. It was all Bernie
hate all the time and everyday. I sought news and conversation here on YouTube then. Plus
when I need to recharge I can find kitten and puppy videos.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may be privately owned, but they are the public square. So
this stuff is a violation of the first amendment. We need the ACLU to take this to the
Supreme Court (I can't stand him, but Alex Jones is an ideal test case). With respect to
funding, we should always expect the worst (even progressive media like TYT, just look at how
they have treated Tulsi - TYT is obviously compromised by some pro-establishment funding
source).
Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of Edward W. Said's pioneering
book, Orientalism , as well as fifteen years since the Palestinian-American
intellectual's passing. To bid farewell to such an important scholar shortly after the 2003
U.S. invasion of Iraq, which Said fiercely criticized until his dying breath before succumbing
to leukemia, made an already tremendous loss that much more impactful. His seminal text forever
reoriented political discourse by painstakingly examining the overlooked cultural imperialism
of colonial history in the West's construction of the so-called Orient. Said meticulously
interrogated the Other-ing of the non-Western world in the humanities, arts, and anthropology
down to its minutiae. As a result, the West was forced to confront not just its economic and
political plunder but the long-established cultural biases filtering the lens through which it
viewed the East which shaped its dominion over it.
His writings proved to be so influential that they laid the foundations for what is now
known as post-colonial theory. This became an ironic category as the author himself would
strongly reject any implication that the subjugation of developing countries is a thing of the
past. How apropos that the Mandatory Palestine-born writer's death came in the midst of the
early stages of the 'War on Terror' that made clear Western imperialism is very much alive.
Despite its history of ethnic cleansing, slavery, and war, the United States had distinguished
itself from Britain and France in that it had never established its own major colonies within
the Middle East, Asia or North Africa in the heart of the Orient. According to Said, it was now
undergoing this venture as the world's sole remaining superpower following the end of the Cold
War with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Today's political atmosphere makes the Bush era seem like eons ago. Thanks to the shameful
rehabilitation of neoconservatism by centrist extremists, Americans fail to understand how
Trumpism emerged from the pandora's box of destructiveness of Bush policies that destabilized
the Middle East and only increased international terrorism. Since then, another American enemy
has been manufactured in the form of the Russian Federation and its President, Vladimir Putin,
who drew the ire of the West after a resurgent Moscow under his leadership began to contain
U.S. hegemony. This reached a crescendo during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election with the
dubious accusations of election interference made by the same intelligence agencies that sold
the pack of lies that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. The establishment has even
likened the alleged intrusion by Moscow to 9/11.
If a comparison between the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans and the still
unproven allegations of Russian meddling seems outrageous, it is precisely such an analogy that
has been made by Russiagate's own biggest proponents, from neoconservative
columnist Max Boot to Hillary
Clinton herself . Truthfully, it is the climate of hysteria and dumbing down of discourse
to such rigid dichotomies following both events where a real similarity can be drawn. The 'with
us or against us' chasm that followed 9/11 has reemerged in the 'either/or' post-election
polarity of the Trump era whereby all debate within the Overton window is pigeonholed into a
'pro vs. anti-Trump' or 'pro vs. anti-Russia' false dilemma. It is even perpetrated by some on the
far left , e.g. if one critiques corporate media or Russiagate, they are grouped as
'pro-Trump' or 'pro-Putin' no matter their political orientation. This dangerous atmosphere is
feeding an unprecedented wave of censorship of dissenting voices across the spectrum.
In his final years, not only did Edward Said condemn the Bush administration but highlighted
how corporate media was using bigoted tropes in its representations of Arabs and Muslims to
justify U.S. foreign policy. Even though it has gone mostly undetected, the neo-McCarthyist
frenzy following the election has produced a similar travesty of caricatures depicting Russia
and Vladimir Putin. One such egregious example was a July 2018 article in the
Wall Street Journal entitled "Russia's Turn to Its Asian Past" featuring an illustration
portraying Vladimir Putin as Genghis Khan. The racist image and headline suggested that Russia
is somehow inherently autocratic because of its past occupation under the Mongol Empire during
its conquest of Eastern Europe and the Kievan Rus state in the 13th century. In a conceptual
revival of the Eurocentric trope of Asiatic or Oriental despotism, the hint is that past
race-mixing is where Russia inherited this tyrannical trait. When the cover story appeared,
there was virtually no outcry due to the post-election delirium and everyday fear-mongering
about Russia that is now commonplace in the media.
The overlooked casual racism used to demonize Russia in the new Cold War's propaganda
doesn't stop there. One of the main architects of Russiagate, former Director of National
Intelligence James R. Clapper, in an
interview with NBC's Meet the Press on the reported meddling stated :
"And just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically
driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were
concerned."
Clapper, whose Office of the DNI published the Intelligence Community Assessment
(ICA) "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections", has been widely
praised and cited by corporate media as a trustworthy source despite his previous history of
making intentionally false statements at a public hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee
denying that the National Security Agency (NSA) was unconstitutionally spying on U.S.
citizens.
The disclosures of NSA activities by whistleblower Edward Snowden that shocked the world
should have discredited Clapper's status as a reliable figure, but not for mainstream media
which has continuously colluded with the deep state during the entire Russia investigation. In
fact, the scandal has been an opportunity to rehabilitate figures like the ex-spymaster
complicit in past U.S. crimes from surveillance to torture. Shortly after the interview with
NBC, Clapper repeated his prejudiced sentiments against Russians
in a speech at the National Press Club in Australia:
"But as far as our being intimate allies, trusting buds with the Russians that is just not
going to happen. It is in their genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed, to the United
States and to Western democracies."
The post-election mass Trump derangement has not only enabled wild accusations of treason to
be made without sufficient evidence to support them, but such uninhibited xenophobic remarks to
go without notice or disapproval.
In fact, liberals have seemingly abandoned their supposed progressive credence across the
board while suffering from their anti-Russia neurological disorder. In an exemplar of yellow
journalism, outlets like NBC News published sensational articles
alleging that because of the perceived ingratiation between Trump and Putin, there was an
increase in Russian 'birth tourism' in the United States. More commonly known by the pejorative
'anchor babies', birth tourism is the false claim that many immigrants travel to countries for
the purpose of having children in order to obtain citizenship. While there may be individual
cases, the idea that it is an epidemic is a complete myth -- the vast majority of
immigration is motivated by labor demands and changes in political or socio-economic factors in
their native countries, whether it is from the global south or Eastern Europe. Trump has been
rightfully criticized for promoting this falsehood regarding undocumented immigrants and his
executive orders targeting birthright citizenship, but it appears liberals are willing to
unfairly apply this same fallacy toward Russians for political reasons.
This connected continents of Europe and Asia have 70% of the world population, so it is the
center of the world. But the United States is not a local power, it's thousands of miles away
from it. Therefore, the US NEEDS conflicts in Europe and Asia to maintain its influence in
the world stage and its status of "safe haven for capita", as it found out in WW2 that can be
very profitable.
Peace and integration in Europe and Asia is the last thing the US wants. This is why it'd
try its hardest to stir up tension in Europe, Asia and MiddleEast. The Russians were naive to
believe it was about Communism.
World dominance has been very profitable for the capital class, whether the cost for world
dominance worth it for the working class, is open for debate, as citizens of the dominate
nation enjoy nice benefits too.
China's Pearl River delta is the site of the most dramatic urbanization in human history.
The area is home to nearly 70 million people. It contributes an eighth of China's GDP, with
an economy worth $1.5 trillion - roughly the same as Australia and Spain, and nearly as big
as Russia and South Korea.
Now the Chinese government has outlined its plans to unite what it calls the Greater Bay
Area into a giant megalopolis, and transform it into a high-tech centre that could rival
California's Silicon Valley and Japan's Tokyo Bay.
China's Pearl River delta is the site of the most dramatic urbanization in human history.
The area is home to nearly 70 million people. It contributes an eighth of China's GDP, with an
economy worth $1.5 trillion - roughly the same as Australia and Spain, and nearly as big as
Russia and South Korea.
Now the Chinese government has outlined its plans to unite what it calls the Greater Bay
Area into a giant megalopolis, and transform it into a high-tech centre that could rival
California's Silicon Valley and Japan's Tokyo Bay.
His greatest accomplishment may well be that he has caused Washington's Swamp Dwellers to rise from the ooze and expose themselves
for all the world to see. That's weakened them immeasurably, perhaps fatally. To be sure, that's no small thing, and the next
Trump to come along is now on full alert as to who & what to bring with him.
You nailed it. Even if they do eventually succeed in foiling Trump, things will never be the same again. The whole world is watching
the circus in Washington, and so Washington's brand ('democracy') is now shot. 2016 was indeed an annus mirabilis! " things will
never be the same again. The whole world is watching the circus in Washington.."
It looks and sounds like dementia – as if a sick person behaving inappropriately, showing unprovoked aggression (like some
Alzheimer patients), using silly or senseless phrasing, and having the unreasonable demands and uncontrolled fits of rage like
a spoiled child. The marasmic McCain, marasmic Pelosi, and hysterical Max Boot, the openly lying Clapper and the hate-filled profiteer
Brennan.
As I have written here and elsewhere, President Swamp Drainer needs to get control of the DoJ. He got rid of Comey, which was
good, but got Rosenstein and Mueller in response. Meanwhile Jeff Sessions is twiddling his thumbs re the Russia witch hunt. Perhaps
his recusal was appropriate, but he's not doing anything whatsoever regarding Swamp Draining. So it feels like he's a disingenuous
old guard GOPer, who wants to obstruct any real progress, while dragging his feet with do-nothingness obscured behind a facade
of law enforcement community boosterism. By this tactic the GOP attempts to stall until 2020, when it can then point at Trump's
failures (failures they have enabled by their stalling, wink wink) and then campaign to take "their" party back. In short, Sessions
may just be an anti-Trump "mole" planted in the single most important position with regard to swamp draining, in order to ***prevent***
any swamp draining.
Let me be clear: in the last 24 years the DC political class has gone almost entirely criminal, with the last 13 years dedicated
to serial war crimes. In this sort of situation the DoJ, AG, and FBI head, becomes corrupted, and turns away from the rule of
law to become a shield for the DC criminal despotism.
So watch closely what happens next. Just today rumors have come out -- though I've been speaking of this for several weeks
now -- that there is talk in the White House about ***recess appointments*** . We have reached the crucial moment, and I for one
am surprised that, as important as this is, it has not been prominent in public discussion until now. The "August" was scheduled
to begin at the end of business tomorrow, July 28th. Because of the health care business, McConnell has postponed it for two weeks,
so let's call it for close of business Friday, August 11th. That's fifteen days from now.
When Congress goes home fifteen days from now, this country and the world may very well change forever. Go to Wikipedia and
look up "recess appointment". Here's what you will find:
" a recess appointment is an appointment by the President of a federal official while the U.S. Senate is in recess.
Recess appointments are authorized by Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which states:
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting
Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session .
If Trump is the fighter I think he is, then this is what he has been waiting for, ever so patiently these last six months.
Notice that the Congress cannot countermand recess appointments. Recess appointments end by expiration, and then only at the end
of the following Congressional session. Other than impeachment, Congress cannot stop Trump from doing this .
So Trump dumps Sessions, purges the anti-Trump prosecutors from previous administrations, and appoints a new FBI head and dozens
of fire-breathing swamp-draining prosecutors who immediately start doling out orange jumpsuits. He could -- not saying that he
would execute this "nuclear option" -- but he could lock up virtually the entire Congress on war crimes charges; Neocons for conspiracy
to commit war crimes; Cheney, Addington, Yoo, and Bybee to the Hague for torture; Hillary and Obama for Libya.
Control of the DoJ is the key.
The next two weeks will show whether Trump is the real deal, or just another schlub.
Trump actually proved to be very convenient President to CIA., Probably as convenient as Obama... Both completely outsourced
foreign policy to neocons and CIA )in this sense the appointment of Pompeo is worst joke Trump could play with the remnants of
US democracy_ .
Notable quotes:
"... "The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street." ..."
"... "It's agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world's worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads." ..."
"... Greenwald asserts the the CIA preferred Clinton because, like the clandestine agency, she supported regime change in Syria. In contrast, Trump dismissed America's practice of nation-building and declined to tow the line on ousting foreign leaders, instead advocating working with Russia to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups. ..."
"... "So, Trump's agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted," Greenwald argued. "Clinton's was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they've been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him." ..."
"... But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They're barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. ..."
"... He also points out the left's hypocrisy in condemning Flynn for lying when James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration, perpetuated lies without ever being held accountable. ..."
And on the heels of
Dennis Kucinich's warnings , The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, who opposes Trump for a variety of reasons, warns that siding with
the evidently powerful Deep State in the hopes of undermining Trump is dangerous.
As TheAntiMedia's Carey Wedler notes ,
Greenwald asserted in
an interview with Democracy Now, published on Thursday, that this boils down to a fight between the Deep State and the Trump administration.
Though Greenwald has argued the leaks were "wholly justified" in spite of the fact they violated criminal law, he also questioned
the motives behind them.
"It's very possible - I'd say likely - that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble," he wrote. "Whatever else is true,
this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries
in the Trump White House."
"The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies:
the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the
Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement
of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street."
As Greenwald explained during his interview:
"It's agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate
disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the
world's worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads."
Greenwald believes this division is a result of the Deep State's disapproval of Trump's foreign policy and the fact that the intelligence
community overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Trump because of her hawkish views. Greenwald
noted that Mike Morell,
acting CIA chief under Obama, and Michael Hayden, who ran both the CIA and NSA under George W. Bush, openly spoke out against Trump
during the presidential campaign.
Greenwald asserts the the CIA preferred Clinton because, like the clandestine agency, she supported regime change in Syria.
In contrast, Trump dismissed America's practice of nation-building and declined to tow the line on ousting foreign leaders, instead
advocating working with Russia to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups.
"So, Trump's agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted," Greenwald argued. "Clinton's was
exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they've been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout
the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him."
"[In] the closing months of the Obama administration, they put together a deal with Russia to create peace in Syria. A few
days later, a military strike in Syria killed a hundred Syrian soldiers and that ended the agreement. What happened is inside
the intelligence and the Pentagon there was a deliberate effort to sabotage an agreement the White House made."
Greenwald, who opposes Trump for a variety of reasons, warns that siding with the evidently powerful Deep State in the hopes of
undermining Trump is dangerous. "Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated
and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving," he said, likely alluding to a recent court ruling that nullified Trump's travel
ban.
He continued:
"But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They're barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to
urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity."
He argues that mentality is "a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it," highlighting that members
of both prevailing political parties are praising the Deep State's audacity in leaking details of Flynn's conversations.
As he wrote in his article, " it's hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people - from both parties,
across the ideological spectrum - who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era
leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn."
He also points out the left's hypocrisy in condemning Flynn for lying when James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence
during the Obama administration, perpetuated lies without ever being held accountable.
Now they do not even pretend that Justice exists in the USA: only kangaroo courts
Why they are sill waving a dead chicken ? Because they are crooks and can't prosecute Trump for his real misdeeds. Or investigate
influence of MI6 and Israeli lobby on the USA elections. Crooks. all of them.
Notable quotes:
"... This is not a standard beltway tit for tat investigation. Even before Trump took office, the tools of government were used against him. What is more interesting is that the inquisitors have unchecked authority. There is no limit imposed on the inquisitors either in scope or frankly legality. ..."
"... The Republican Party has consistently undermined him. It is the American electorate that will not turn on him. Do you blame them!.? They are slowly realizing that a war has been waging against them. Their way of life, the American way of life, is being dismantled. Years and years of compromise and lofty adherence to reasonable principles by the American electorate have done not a damn thing to abate the onslaught against them. ..."
"... Your timing as well as details are off. Iran-Contra was in the 80s. Laundering money from arms sales to Iran to fund the Contras in violation of the Boland amendement is far different than the Affaire de coeur Russia, which is now turning into an investigation of every financial deal Trump ever did. ..."
"... "The tradition" is using investigative powers to politicaly attack ones opponents when you are in power. ..."
"House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, who would eventually lead any impeachment proceedings, on Sunday
signaled a significant escalation into congressional inquiries into the President.
The New York Democrat plans on Monday to request documents from 60 people and entities close to Trump, including from the Department
of Justice, the White House and the Trump Organization. The document trawl will be used "to present the case to the American people
about obstruction of justice, about corruption and abuse of power, " Nadler said on ABC News' "This Week" on Sunday.
Nadler stuck to the House Democratic position that impeachment "is a long way down the road," apparently in order to avoid
Republican arguments that the decision has already been made to try to oust Trump. The document requests are not taking place
under the auspices of an official impeachment investigation."
Nadler could not be more clear. He and the other kangaroos in the Democrat herd (flock?) will search through every aspect of Trump's
life for the purpose of finding something that will cause a revulsion against Trump among the American people. If they can find that,
their allies among the press and TeeVee agitprop apparatchiks will make judgments evident as to whether or not a bill of impeachment
would result in a conviction in the senate. This method is reminiscent of the attempt to impeach President Andrew Johnson. Remember
him? The Radical Republicans hated this Southern War Democrat simply because he was Southern without regard for his well demonstrated
hatred for the planter class in the greater South as opposed to his east Tennessee anti-slavery home. So, pilgrims, American tradition
is to be reversed. The Democrats will seek for confirmation bias of Trump's "crimes" because of their "progressive" hatred of his
perhaps cynical leadership of a popular revolution against them and the idiot college kids. pl
IMO, Trump could blow the kangaroos off the range by declassifying it all and allowing the American people to see the details
of the attempted coup. And the collusion among the kangaroos. But he chooses to not do that. Very puzzling.
Clearly it can't be because of Mueller and the potential charge of obstruction of justice, as the kangaroos are running hard
towards getting him and his family in any case. So what's behind his strategy of just tweeting witch hunt, which he's been doing
for 2 years, and not doing what could blow this all up which is his prerogative as POTUS?
This is the politics necessary to continue to govern a largely unified country as if it were deeply divided:
https://www.nytimes.com/201...
The minorities that both of our parties represent have had their way for forty years, the majority is fed up by not being represented
and increasingly absurd distractions are required to maintain this status quo.
This has been standard beltway politics since at least the Iran-Contra and Whitewater investigations. It hit hot and heavy once
the Republicans regained control of the Congress in 2014 and hit Obama/Clinton with the Benghazi hearings. I think the political
purpose behind all these investigations, including the current crop of investigations into Trump can best be summed up in this
quote concerning the Benghazi hearings. "In September 2015, Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy famously said Clinton's
"numbers are dropping" because "we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee." I doubt Nadler will ever pursue
an impeachment. His goal is to tear at Trump until the 2020 elections. Anyways, I can't think of anything Trump could have done
or will do that would persuade the Republican party to turn on him. Nothing. You're right. Whoever wins that election will be
subject to the same scrutiny.
This is not a standard beltway tit for tat investigation. Even before Trump took office, the tools of government were used
against him. What is more interesting is that the inquisitors have unchecked authority. There is no limit imposed on the inquisitors
either in scope or frankly legality.
The Republican Party has consistently undermined him. It is the American electorate that will not turn on him. Do you blame
them!.? They are slowly realizing that a war has been waging against them. Their way of life, the American way of life, is being
dismantled. Years and years of compromise and lofty adherence to reasonable principles by the American electorate have done not
a damn thing to abate the onslaught against them.
2020 elections will be won by a Democrat. Trump won by razor thin margins, and those margins will be erased as a malignant
crop of woke young voters will come of age. Frankly I am curious if his health can hold up for another campaign.
Your timing as well as details are off. Iran-Contra was in the 80s. Laundering money from arms sales to Iran to fund the Contras
in violation of the Boland amendement is far different than the Affaire de coeur Russia, which is now turning into an investigation
of every financial deal Trump ever did.
The Republicans didn't control the House until the mid-90s and lost it in 2007. The invasion and occupation of Iraq played
a big part in losing the House then.
The Congressional investigation of Iran-Contra was also referred to as a witch hunt by Republicans. So that usage of the term
was around since the 80s. Reagan's Tower Commission was a different animal altogether. We'll probably never see something as introspective
as that again.
I mentioned both Iran-Contra and Whitewater to point out the longstanding tradition of politically tinged Congressional investigations.
The Whitewater Congressional investigations went into overdrive up after the Republicans won the House in 1994. The Republican
controlled both the House and Senate in 2014. That's when the Benghazi hearings really ramped up. The ramp up of Congressional
investigations with the Democratic winning of the House last year is just following in that tradition.
Selling weapons to Iran was a crime. "The tradition" is using investigative powers to politicaly attack ones opponents when
you are in power. Kind of like using the executive branch of government to hinder opponents activities, such as preventing
IRS non-profit status, or spying on them like the NSA has been doing. All done by the Obama administration. Then there is the
conduct of the FBI. I haven't seen Trump do any of those things with executive branch powers.
TTG hit the nail on the head. Since Clinton and Whitewater, investigations have been the method to hit back at the Presidency
you don't support. The only thing I would add is the Iran-Contra investigation was much more relevant than Whitewater, the Clinton's
Christmas card list, or Benghazi; officials were actually convicted from the Iran-Contra investigation. The sad fact is that some
investigations that are BS successfully work to rile up the investigator's supporters, example Benghazi. I would only add that
Trump's past history provides a lot of fuel for the investigatory fire.
for the first time in weeks (months?) i don't see anything about mueller or russia on the
featured articles at the guardian. are they implicitly going to admit it was all bullshit,
without ever acknowledging it? (by "they" i mean the msm).
Unfortunately the article does not mention the term McCarthyism, which is fully applicable. Also the role of CNN of the
voice of Clinton wing of Democratic Party presuppose the attitudes the Caitlin is complaining about. This is a party MSM
masquerading as impendent new outlet. This are neoliberal presstitutes and warmongers, for the lack of stronger worlds.
Also correlation with RT policies does undermine the US foreign policy. We need only decide whether this is a good or bad
thing and whether the US imperial policies are good for American people, or only for large transnational corporations. I
think Tucker Carlson also undermines the US foreign policy and as such you can find a correlation between his positions and
RT position. Now what ?
Money quote: "the possibility of
an American opposing US warmongering and the political establishment which drives it without
being ordered to by a rubles-dispensing FSB officer was a completely alien idea to them."
Yes, they actually care only in the "politically correct" reason for suppression. So the only new moment is blatant
hypocrisy. But that's how all societies work and in this sense there is nothing special in the fact that dissident voices
are suppressed. In middle ages heretics were burned at the stake.
The situation is interesting because neoliberalism is definitely on the decline and as such represent now (unlike
say 10 year ago) and rich target of attack and as the USA support it neoliberal empire such attacks usually attack the US
foreign policy. The real question is what alternative the particular outlet proposes -- the return to the New Deal
Capitalism in some form or shape, or new socialist experiment is some form of shape.
Notable quotes:
"... CNN knew that Facebook was going to be suspending the pages of her company Maffick Media before she did, suggesting a creepy degree of coordination between the two massive outlets to silence an alternative media platform. ..."
"... the US government has found a legal loophole to suppress speech, in this case speech that is critical of destructive US government policies around the world. ..."
"... Thirdly, and in my opinion weirdest of all, the article goes to great lengths to make the fact that a dissident media outlet supports the same foreign policy positions as Russia look like something strange and nefarious, instead of the normal and obvious thing that it is. ..."
"... the possibility of an American opposing US warmongering and the political establishment which drives it without being ordered to by a rubles-dispensing FSB officer was a completely alien idea to them. ..."
"... Nimmo said the tone of Maffick's pages is 'broadly anti-US and anti-corporate. That's strikingly similar to RT's output. Maffick may technically be independent, but their tone certainly matches the broader Kremlin family.' ..."
"... This is a truly obnoxious mind virus we're seeing the imperial narrative controllers pushing more and more aggressively into mainstream consciousness today : that anyone who opposes the beltway consensus on western interventionism is not simply an individual with a conscience who is thinking critically for themselves, but is actually "boosting the Kremlin narrative" ..."
"... Don't even subscribe to an anti-establishment subreddit. Those things are all Russian. Listen to Big Brother instead. Big Brother will protect you from their filthy Russian lies. ..."
"... "If CNN would like to hire me to present facts against destructive US wars and corporate ownership of our political system, I'll gladly accept," Khalek told me when asked for comment ..."
"... Russian media influence is not their actual target. Their actual target is leftist, antiwar and anti-establishment voices. That's what they're really trying to eliminate. ..."
"... It doesn't take any amount of sympathy for Russia to see that the unipolar empire is toxic for humanity, and most westerners who oppose that toxicity have no particular feelings about Russia any more than they have about Turkey or the Philippines ..."
In an extremely weird article titled " Russia is backing a viral video company aimed at American
millennials ", CNN reports that Facebook has suspended popular dissident media outlet "In
The Now" and its allied pages for failing to publicly "disclose" its financial ties to a
subsidiary of RT.
According to CNN, such disclosures are not and have never been an actual part of Facebook's
official policy, but Facebook has made the exceptional precondition of public disclosure of
financial ties in order for In The Now to return to its platform.
I say the article is extremely weird for a number of reasons.
Firstly , according to In The Now CEO Anissa Naouai, CNN knew that Facebook was going to be
suspending the pages of her company Maffick Media before she did, suggesting a creepy degree of
coordination between the two massive outlets to silence an alternative media platform.
Secondly, the article reports that CNN found out about Maffick's financial ties thanks to a
tip-off from the German Marshall Fund, a narrative control firm which receives funding from the
US government. In The Now 's Rania Khalek has described this tactic as
"a case where the US government has found a legal loophole to suppress speech, in this case
speech that is critical of destructive US government policies around the world."
Thirdly, and in my opinion weirdest of all, the article goes to great lengths to make the
fact that a dissident media outlet supports the same foreign policy positions as Russia look
like something strange and nefarious, instead of the normal and obvious thing that it is.
The article repeatedly mentions the fact that all the people working for In The Now "claim"
to be editorially independent as opposed to being told what to report by Kremlin officials, a
notion which Khalek says was met with
extreme skepticism when she was interviewed for the piece by CNN. As though the possibility of
an American opposing US warmongering and the political establishment which drives it without
being ordered to by a rubles-dispensing FSB officer was a completely alien idea to them.
Check out the following excerpt, for example of this bizarre attitude:
"Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow for information defense at the Atlantic Council's Digital
Forensic Research Lab, told CNN that while Russian state-backed outlets claim to be
editorially independent, 'they routinely boost Kremlin narratives, especially those which
portray the West negatively.'
"Nimmo said the tone of Maffick's pages is 'broadly anti-US and anti-corporate. That's
strikingly similar to RT's output. Maffick may technically be independent, but their tone
certainly matches the broader Kremlin family.' "
This is a truly obnoxious mind virus we're seeing the imperial narrative controllers pushing
more and more aggressively into mainstream consciousness today : that anyone who opposes the
beltway consensus on western interventionism is not simply an individual with a conscience who
is thinking critically for themselves, but is actually "boosting the Kremlin narrative". If you
say it in an assertive and authoritative tone like Mr Nimmo does, it can sound like a perfectly
reasonable position if you don't think about it too hard. If you really look at it directly,
though, what these manipulators are actually saying is "Russia opposes western interventionism,
therefore anyone who opposes western interventionism is basically Russian."
Which is of course a total non-argument. You don't get to just say "Russia bad" for two
years to get everyone riled up into a state of xenophobic hysteria and then say "That's
Russian!" at anything you don't like. That's not a thing. More to the point, though, there is
no causal relationship between the fact that Russia opposes western interventionism and the
fact that many westerners do.
As we
discussed recently , there will necessarily be inadvertent agreement between Russia and
westerners who oppose western interventionism, because Russia, like so many other sovereign
nations, opposes western interventionism. If you discover that an American who opposes US
warmongering and establishment politics is saying the same things as RT, that doesn't mean
you've discovered a shocking conspiracy between western dissidents and the Russian government,
it means people who oppose the same things oppose the same things.
We're seeing this absurd gibberish spouted over and over again by the mainstream media now.
The other day the delightful pro-Sanders subreddit WayOfTheBern was
smeared as a Russian operation by the Washington Times, not because the Washington Times
had any evidence anywhere supporting that claim, but because the subreddit's members are
hostile to Democratic presidential hopefuls other than Sanders, and because its posts
"consistently support positions that would be amenable to the Kremlin." All this means is that
the subreddit is full of people who support Bernie Sanders and oppose US government
malfeasance, yet an entire article was published in a mainstream outlet treating this as
something dangerous and suspicious.
If you really listen to what the CNNs and Ben Nimmos and Washington Timeses are actually
trying to tell you, what they're saying is that it's not okay for anyone to oppose any part of
the unipolar world order or the establishment which runs it . Never ever, under any
circumstances. Don't work for a media outlet that's funded by the Russian government even
though no mainstream outlets will ever platform you. Don't even subscribe to an
anti-establishment subreddit. Those things are all Russian. Listen to Big Brother instead. Big
Brother will protect you from their filthy Russian lies.
"If CNN would like to hire me to present facts against destructive US wars and corporate
ownership of our political system, I'll gladly accept," Khalek told me when asked for
comment.
"But the corporate media doesn't allow antiwar voices a platform. In The Now does. I've
worked for dozens of different outlets, from Vice to Al Jazeera to RT, and my message has
always been the same: leftist, antiwar and pro justice and equality. People should be asking
why US mainstream media outlets that claim to be free and independent refuse to air critical
and adversarial voices like mine."
Why indeed? Actually, if CNN is so worried about Russian media influence in America, all
they'd have to do is put on a few shows featuring leftist, antiwar and pro-justice voices and
that would be the end of it. They could easily out-spend RT by a massive margin, buy up all the
talent like Khalek, Lee Camp and Chris Hedges, put on a sleek, high-budget show and steal RT
America's audience, killing it dead and drawing all anti-establishment energy to their
material.
But they don't. They don't, and they never will. Because Russian media influence is not
their actual target. Their actual target is leftist, antiwar and anti-establishment voices.
That's what they're really trying to eliminate.
So yes, Moscow will of course elevate some western voices who oppose the power establishment
that is trying to undermine and subvert Russia. Those voices will not require any instruction
to speak out against that establishment, since that's what they'd be doing anyway and they're
just grateful to finally have a platform upon which to speak. And it is good that they're
getting a platform to speak. If western power structures have a problem with it, they should
stop universally refusing to platform anyone who opposes the status quo that is destroying
nations abroad and squeezing the life out of citizens at home.
It doesn't take any amount of sympathy for Russia to see that the unipolar empire is toxic
for humanity, and most westerners who oppose that toxicity have no particular feelings about
Russia any more than they have about Turkey or the Philippines. Sometimes Russia will come in
and give them a platform in the void that has been left by the mainstream outlets which are
doing everything they can to silence them. So what? The alternative is all dissident voices
being silenced. The fact that Russia prevents a few of them from being silenced is not the
problem. The problem is that they are being silenced at all.
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"... Halper is reportedly a longtime CIA and FBI informant, and has been involved in US politics at the highest levels for decades, becoming George H.W. Bush's National Director for Policy Development during his presidential campaign. After Bush lost to Reagan, Halper worked as Reagan's Deputy Assistant Secretary of State - where he served under three different Secretaries . ..."
"... He then became a senior advisor to the Department of Defense and DOJ between 1984 and 2001. Halper's former father-in-law was Ray Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA . He also allegedly spied on the Carter administration - collecting information on foreign policy (an account disputed by Ray Cline). ..."
A top FBI official admitted to Congressional investigators last year
that the agency had contacts within the Trump campaign as part of operation "Crossfire
Hurricane," which sounds a lot like FBI "informant" Stefan Halper - a former Oxford University
professor who was
paid over $1 million by the Obama Department of Defense between 2012 and 2018, with nearly
half of it surrounding the 2016 US election.
According to portions of transcripts published on Tuesday by the
Epoch Times of a Aug. 31, 2018 deposition by Trisha Anderson, the FBI relied on sources who
"already had campaign contacts" in order to surveil the Trump team.
"To my knowledge, the FBI did not place anybody within a campaign but, rather, relied upon
its network of sources, some of whom already had campaign contacts, including the source that
has been discussed in the media at some length beyond Christopher Steele ," said Anderson - who
was the #2 attorney at the FBI's Office of General Counsel, and had extensive involvement with
the Trump counterintelligence investigation.
Halper is reportedly a longtime CIA and FBI informant, and has been involved in US politics
at the highest levels for decades, becoming George H.W. Bush's National Director for Policy
Development during his presidential campaign. After Bush lost to Reagan, Halper worked as
Reagan's Deputy Assistant Secretary of State - where he served under three different Secretaries
.
He then became a senior advisor to the Department of Defense and
DOJ between 1984 and 2001. Halper's former father-in-law was Ray Cline, former Deputy Director
of the CIA . He also allegedly spied on the Carter administration - collecting information
on foreign policy (an account disputed by Ray Cline).
Halper's involvement in surveilling the Trump campaign was exposed by the Daily Caller 's
Chuck Ross, who reported that the 74-year-old spook was enlisted by the FBI to befriend and spy
on three members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 US election .
Halper received a DoD contract from the Obama administration for $411,575 - made in two payments, and had a
start date of September 26, 2016 - three days after a September 23
Yahoo! News article by Michael Isikoff about Trump aide Carter Page, which used information
fed to Isikoff by "pissgate" dossier creator Christopher Steele . The FBI would use the Yahoo!
article along with the unverified "pissgate" dossier as
supporting evidence in an FISA warrant application for Page. Halper approached Page during
an election-themed conference at Cambridge on July 11, 2016, six weeks after the September 26
DoD award start date. The two would stay in contact for the next 14 months, frequently meeting
and exchanging emails .
He said that he first encountered the informant during a conference in mid-July of 2016
and that they stayed in touch. The two later met several times in the Washington area. Mr.
Page said their interactions were benign. -
New York Times
And as the Daily Caller reports, Halper used a decades-old association with Paul Manafort to
break the ice with Page.
In September 2016, the FBI would send Halper to further probe Trump aide George Papadopoulos
on an allegation he made that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. According to Papadopoulos
in an interview with Dan Bongino, Halper angrily accused him of working with Russia before
storming out of a meeting.
Halper essentially began interrogating Papadopoulos, saying that it's "obviously in your
interest to be working with the Russians" and to "hack emails." " You're complicit with
Russia in this, isn't that right George " Halper told him. Halper also inquired about
Hillary's hacked emails, insinuating that Papadopoulos possessed them. Papadopoulos denied
knowing anything about this and asked to be left alone. -
Bongino.com
All of these blatant crimes done by the Democrat cheerleading swamp creatures NEVER get
investigated and I am starting to wonder what the hell Trump is doing. Is he stupid or is all
of this just a charade and they are all on the same team. How could this creep Rod Rosenstein
have been left at his position until this time? It makes no sense to me. Sure all of these
rodents have control files on each other but come on how scared are they? It's ridiculous. If
Trump soon gets impeached I'll hold him responsible himself for not doing anything.
They are all on the same team. Trump was never your saviour. He was designed to be a
distraction so the 0.01% that own both parties can rape you some more.
Correct. It's all a big lie and show for the uninformed masses. God help these liars when
all the Qanon followers wake up to this truth. All this 'tremendous winning' bs will
boomerang back big time.
The above Halper story has been circulating for about a year now, so this isn`t
actually big news. As for the FBI and the CIA subverting just about every political campaign
or social movement in existence: Well, duh. The deep state and its satanic minions will
remain in control as long as such "intelligence" and State Security agencies (the FBI is
essentially nothing but a US version of the SS) are allowed to exist.
Alex Acosta works out an illegal deal for Epstein = Trump gives Acosta a cabinet position
= Trump is a protector of Pedo protectors = Trump doesn't give 2 shits about Pedos
When CIA does not want that FBI does not prosecute somebody they usually have their way.
Robert Mueller is not only about Trump, he is also about scrubbing all the crimes committed by Clintons and Obama. That's
a lot of crimes.
Notable quotes:
"... I think ultimately, the coverup of Clinton's emails was not to protect Clinton but to protect Obama, as he had communicated with her on the server ..."
The FBI's top lawyer, General Counsel James Baker, initially thought that Hillary Clinton should face criminal charges for transmitting
classified information over her insecure, private email server, according to transcripts from a 2018 closed-door Congressional testimony
reviewed by
The Hill 's John Solomon.
While being questioned by Rep. John Radcliffe (R-TX), Baker was clear that he thought Clinton should face criminal charges.
"I have reason to believe that you originally believed it was appropriate to charge Hillary Clinton with regard to violations
of law - various laws, with regard to mishandling of classified information. Is that accurate?" asked Ratcliffe, a former federal
prosecutor.
After a brief pause to consult with his attorney, Baker responded: "Yes."
Baker later explained how he arrived at his conclusion, and how he was "persuaded" to change his mind.
"So, I had that belief initially after reviewing, you know, a large binder of her emails that had classified information in them,"
said Baker. "And I discussed it internally with a number of different folks, and eventually became persuaded that charging her was
not appropriate because we could not establish beyond a reasonable doubt that - we, the government, could not establish beyond a
reasonable doubt that - she had the intent necessary to violate (the law). "
Baker says he was persuaded to change his mind "pretty late in the process, because we were arguing about it, I think, up until
the end. "
Recall that in December, 2017 we learned that James Comey's original exoneration letter was drafted in a way that would have required
criminal charges - changing Clinton's conduct from the legally significant "gross negligence" to "extremely careless" - which is
not a legal term of art. This language - along with
several other incriminating components was altered by former FBI counterintelligence agent and attorney, Peter Strzok.
Baker made clear that he did not like the activity Clinton had engaged in: "My original belief after - well, after having conducted
the investigation and towards the end of it, then sitting down and reading a binder of her materials - I thought that it was alarming,
appalling, whatever words I said, and argued with others about why they thought she shouldn't be charged. "
His boss, Comey, announced on July 5, 2016, that he would not recommend criminal charges. He did so without consulting the
Department of Justice, a decision the department's inspector general (IG)
later concluded was misguided
and likely usurped the power of the attorney general to make prosecutorial decisions. Comey has said, in retrospect, he accepts
that finding but took the actions he did because he thought "they were in the country's best interest." -
The Hill
Baker noted that had he been more convinced that there was evidence that Clinton intended to violate the law, "I would have argued
that vociferously with him [Comey] and maybe changed his view."
Comey made this announcement before election day 2016. We knew this excuse was obstruction of justice.
They wanted to see if the public would stand for it, which they did. Most democrats are fine with a seditious, treasonous felon
being president.
A lot of Republicans are cool with it too, so long as they get their brand in there for Federal Pork.
Navy62802 28 minutes ago
I think ultimately, the coverup of Clinton's emails was not to protect Clinton but to protect Obama, as he had
communicated with her on the server (even using an alias email, himself) even though he claimed to have learned of the
server when everyone else did ... an obvious lie. So in order to avoid being a co-conspirator with someone violating the
Espionage Act, Baker was "persuaded" not to charge Clinton.
In the last few weeks, we have witnessed two pillars of the Russiagate narrative continue to
disintegrate and erode. First, we heard
that a bipartisan inquiry by the Senate Intelligence Committee admitted that they have yet to
find evidence indicating that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia in the run-up to the
2016 US Presidential election. Secondly, new light was shed on the process by which the DNC
Emails published by WikiLeaks may have been sourced, thanks to two reports:
one authored by former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney and former CIA analyst Larry
Johnson, with the other work penned by Disobedient Media's
Adam Carter.
Of course, this does not entail that the establishment-backed media will stop promoting the
neo-McCarthyist insanity that has held legacy press audiences captive for the last two and a
half years.
No Evidence For Trump-Russia Collusion
A recent report from NBC related an
admission from both Democratic and Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
indicating that they have discovered no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion to date. NBC's report reads in part:
"The Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the 2016 election has uncovered no
direct evidence of the Trump campaign conspiring with Russia, Democrats and Republicans on
the committee told NBC News. But different parties' investigators in the probe, which is
winding down, disagree over the implications of a pattern of contacts between Trump
associates and Russians."
Let's review that again: the only thing the Democrats and Republicans disagree on is the
significance of an alleged "Pattern of contacts between Trump associates and Russians."
Note: the "pattern" here does not specify that the "Russians" in question were associated in
any sense with the Russian government. One should not have to stress the significance of
differentiating between a nationality versus affiliation with the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the
characterization of "Trump associates" is entirely vague.
To conclude from such sentiments that anyone who so much as has "contacts" with "Russians"
(again, not the same thing as contacts with proxies or employees of the Russian state) must be
working at the behest of Putin would represent an intense strain of xenophobia, if not outright
racism.
Independent journalist and comedian Jimmy Dore also commented on NBC's report,
saying: "For two and a half years, [Rachel Maddow] has been an out-of-her-mind conspiracy
theorist. She said that Russia is going to freeze you when it gets cold... These people are the
biggest conspiracy liars in the world."
One does not have to rely on the statements of the Senate Intelligence Committee to
understand that no shred of evidence of Trump-Russia collusion has yet been shown to the
public. Last month, The Nation's Aaron Mate wrote:
"Not a single Trump official has been accused of colluding with the Russian government or
even of committing any crimes during the 2016 campaign. As The New York Times recently noted,
"no public evidence has emerged showing that [Trump's] campaign conspired with Russia."
In the wake of the latest news regarding such lack of evidence, Mate wrote via Twitter :
The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald also
chimed in on NBC's report, writing via Twitter: "When even NBC, [Ken Dilanian] and Democrats
(excuse the redundancy) are admitting this so clearly in the first paragraph of their article,
it's time for people to start facing some facts about what they've been telling people."
Of course, many have long pointed to evidence countering the Trump-Russia collusion
narrative, expecting such contrary evidence to become the "
death of Russiagate. " Unfortunately for the sake of truth and sanity, it seems that this
writer's opinion on the immortality
of Russiagate is going to continue to prove true, as long as the saga serves the
establishment's need for deflection from real election interference and other pressing domestic
issues.
"Standing on the shoulders of this methodical evidence, it seems at this point that no
amount of contrary evidence, exposure or implosion will ultimately kill the undead Russiagate
monster. If that were possible, the Thing would have been put irrevocably into the ground
over a year ago. Or six months ago. Or a few weeks ago."
Russian Hacking Narrative Implodes
The Russian hacking aspect of the scandal was also severely discredited in recent days, in
the wake of two new
reports . One article was authored by
Disobedient Media's Adam Carter, with a separate piece published by
Bill Binney and Larry Johnson . Binney is a former NSA Technical Director; Johnson an
ex-CIA analyst. Both are active members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).
The two articles discussed revelations arising from studies of the DNC Emails released by
WikiLeaks in 2016. We remind our readers that, while Adam Carter, Disobedient Media, The
Forensicator, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, Stephen McIntyre, and others have
regularly reported regarding documents published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona, the latest pieces
focus instead on the DNC Emails as published days before the DNC convention.
Though this writer will not attempt to present every aspect or technical detail contained in
the
articles, we will endeavor to make our readers aware of the essential points which
Carter , Binney, and Johnson have raised.
Carter's work suggests that the DNC Emails were originally accessed via a USB thumb drive or
similar device, concluding: "The evidence strongly suggests that the first three batches of DNC
emails were transferred via a USB storage device at some stage between acquisition and then
subsequently being published by WikiLeaks."
As noted by Carter, such a scenario aligns with allegations made by former UK Ambassador
Craig Murray, who claimed that he was the
recipient of the files via an intermediary rather than the original source. Carter adds:
"However, transfer speeds observed for the batches with last-modified dates matching the dates
of acquisition indicate that they were transferred at approximately 3 megabits/second, a lot
slower than we would expect if it were a local or LAN transfer, so the transfer we're looking
at likely involved a remote transfer at some point between acquisition and delivery ."
Carter continued: "... It seems likely that the original emails were copied soon after
acquisition... The (hypothetical) existence of an intermediary doesn't tell us anything about
the individual (or individuals) who originally acquired the emails. Thus, this scenario does
not necessarily rule out the possibility of an insider acquiring the emails. If we
contemplate the intermediate use of cloud storage, this could have been used as a method to
decouple the acquisition of the emails from delivery to another party that subsequently
delivered them to Wikileaks."
The article by
Binney and Johnson also discusses the relevance of indications that the DNC emails
published by WikiLeaks were likely accessed via a storage device, rather than leaked. They
state in part:
"An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files do not support the claim that the emails were
obtained via spearphishing. Instead, the evidence clearly shows that the emails posted on the
Wikileaks site were copied onto an electronic media, such as a CD-ROM or thumb-drive before
they were posted at Wikileaks... We believe that Special Counsel Robert Mueller faces major
embarrassment if he decides to pursue the indictment he filed--which accuses 12 Russian GRU
military personnel and an entity identified as, Guccifer 2.0, for the DNC hack -- because the
available forensic evidence indicates the emails were copied onto a storage device."
Binney and Johnson conclude: "Taken together, these disparate data points combine to paint
a picture that exonerates alleged Russian hackers and implicates persons within our law
enforcement and IC taking part in a campaign of misinformation, deceit and incompetence. It
is not a pretty picture."
The Real Cost Of Russiagate
Though Russiagate may be summed up as a never-ending theatrical performance designed to hold
attention rather than prove itself, that ineffability does not mean that the saga has had no
tangible effects in the real world. Regardless of what one makes of the legitimacy of
Russiagate or any one of its sub-narratives, we can all agree that it has wreaked havoc
directly and indirectly on many fronts.
Journalist and award-winning author Patrick Lawrence wrote a ground-breaking article with
The Nation in August of 2017, covering a
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) memorandum to President Trump. The memo, and Lawrence's article,
indicated that the Guccifer 2.0 persona had published documents that were likely accessed
locally, rather than hacked remotely.
The repercussions for Lawrence - professional, financial, personal - continued for many
months. In an interview, Lawrence told Disobedient Media: "My working principle from the
first is that disagreements and other such matters internal to a publication - any
publication - shouldn't be aired outside the newsroom door. When I was trained, you'd be
summarily fired if you went public with such a stunt. I thought this at the time my article
came out, and on that same principle, I won't comment now." Lawrence concluded: "I should add
I have no reason to retract a single syllable of what I wrote."
A hit-piece authored last year by
Duncan Campbell saw the
doxxing of Disobedient Media's Adam Carter, putting his livelihood in jeopardy and
conflating anonymity with wrongdoing, among other things. Campbell's text received much
criticism from
this outlet and others for its disastrously inaccurate depiction of the opinion of Bill Binney and other VIPS members.
NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake was also quoted in the piece , comparing CIA
veteran and VIPS co-founder Ray McGovern with George W. Bush's politicization of intelligence
in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
Most readers do not require the reminder that McGovern and other members of VIPS were
strongly opposed to the faulty intelligence used by the Bush administration as a pretext for
the 2003 war in Iraq. This history makes Drake's comparison particularly odious and is
additionally damaging because like McGovern, Drake is a respected member of VIPS. Disobedient
Media reached out to Drake for comment on this point and others, to which we received no reply
by the time of publication.
McGovern spoke with Disobedient Media, saying:
" I knew Tom Drake to be a straight shooter, an impression strengthened by our teamwork in
Moscow presenting Ed Snowden with the Sam Adams integrity award that Tom himself had won two
years before. I normally cut Tom some slack, in view of all he has been through. But when he
belatedly took issue with the key VIPS memo of July 24, 2017 on "Russian hacking," and made
claims unsupported by evidence (claims strongly challenged by his fellow NSA "alumni" in
VIPS), I, as chair of that memo, had to call him out of order. He reacted poorly and seems
now to be in for further embarrassment."
Disobedient Media also spoke with Bill Binney, who told this author:
"Tom has been a friend of mine for about 20 years. During that time he has demonstrated
sound analytic judgment on technical issues with the exception of one. That is the issue of
Russiagate and association with the Trump campaign and administration. In this case, I
believe he has allowed himself to be diverted by the rather large hoard of emotionally
motivated who are intent on associating the Russians with Trump to form the basis for
impeachment. They have and continue to convict Trump based on statements made by large
numbers of people - as if that were proof of anything. So, on this issue, a good chunk of the
US population have lost their objectivity and instead of demanding proof based on observable
facts (available to be inspected) they accept assertions generated by emotion. The true test
will be in a court of law where all these assertions would be treated as hearsay and
inadmissible as none are first-hand observers."
Disobedient Media has been separately smeared by entities like
Media Bias Fact Check , whose report appraising this outlet laughably alleged that we have
been a "defender" of the Guccifer 2.0 persona. While such an absurd statement would carry no
weight with even the most cursory of Disobedient Media's readers, it is nonetheless noteworthy
in that it specifically uses a false neo-McCarthyist narrative to attempt to assassinate the
credibility of this outlet.
When asked about the real-world implications of Russiagate thus far, Ray McGovern - who, as
we remind our readers, is a former CIA analyst with decades of experience during the cold
war period - expressed deep concern, saying:
"I worry about what conclusions President Putin may draw from attempts to demonize him and
to make Russia a pariah. Inflammatory rhetoric can be prelude to war. Worse still, the
temperament and hubris of President Trump's advisers are a far cry from the sage, sober
advice Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, for example, gave President Kennedy during the Cuban
missile crisis in 1962. Shattered, at this point, is any residual hope Putin may have
harbored that Trump would be able to improve ties with Russia. Trump is not his own man.
Putin, thus, must prepare for the worst. This is the most serious damage from the Russia-gate
narrative so far."
Patrick Lawrence also appraised the damage done by Russiagate in a piece published via
Consortium News,
writing: "Numerous sets of sanctions against Russia, individual Russians, and Russian entities
have been imposed on the basis of this great conjuring of assumption and presumption."
As described by McGovern and Lawrence, the tensions raised between two major nuclear powers
is perhaps the most important real-world result of over two years of neo-McCarthyist fervor in
the US. However, the smearing of members of the independent press and the worsening division
amongst VIPS members comprise additional serious damage stemming from a
scandal-that-never-was.
In terms of the larger political picture, Russiagate has been endlessly hyped to
deflect from public outrage that rightfully erupted in response to
overt election interference by the Democratic Party in the 2016 primary season. It has been
used in an attempt to mask the failure of the Democrats and specifically Hillary Clinton as a
Presidential candidate.
As long as the legacy press continues to use Russiagate to
gaslight the public from focusing on ongoing domestic election interference, it remains
imperative to point out that Russiagate, to date, has no basis whatsoever in fact. For that
reason, Disobedient Media will continue to report on the subject as it develops.
... they have yet to find evidence indicating that the Trump campaign coordinated with
Russia in the run-up to the 2016 US Presidential election.
He was very careful in saying that they did not find direct evidence. Knowing very well
that it would be reported like this as the public does not know what this legal technical
term means.
And that is exactly what is needed right now to give Mueller the space he needs.
Beautifully played.
Don't you find it suspicious that Russiagate is abruptly winding down. Mueller waits until
a week later to issue his non-report when nobody is paying attention. Russiagate is
disappearing and the only reason big enough for that is WAR. They want "unity" between the
parties so we can all be good patriots and start Iraq V2.0 or WWIII. The last time the
parties buried the hatchet like this was before invading Iraq after 911 attacks.
The only collusion was between the FBI and a foreign national to create a phony dossier of
bald faced lies in an attempt to take down the POTUS and invalidate a free and fair
election.
Somehow, the Leftist media does not think that is newsworthy.
These narratives, like the build up to the Iraq war, have a foreign policy context to
them, for which unsuspecting Americans know nothing about
This war on Russia accelerated under Obama's watch.
How many RUSSIAGATERS know about Obama/Nuland/McCain regime change in Ukraine that put
neonazis on RUSSIAS border?
How many Russiagaters know that Obama ordered the Ukies to blow up flight MH-17 with 298
people onboard in a false flag attack to justify FRAUDULENT sanctions on Russia?
How many Russiagaters know that it is dual Israeli Democrats pushing this narrative most?
Schumer, SCHIFF, CARDIN, who was responsible for the fraudulent Magnistsky Act, along with
fraud Bill Browder, a CIA asset who owes hundreds of millions to the Russian government in
back taxes ? There are more dual Israelis involved from Congress too.
Lastly, how many Russiagaters know anything about foreign policy?
What a convenient narrative to throw out in blaming Russia for Clinton's loss, but which
serves the deep state well that has Russia on it's target list for regime change and
balkanizing by a bunch of dual Israeli psychopaths & two whack Christian Zionist
extremists (Pompeo, Pence)
It always comes down to ISRAEL, doesn't it? Russia did the unthinkable in interfering in
Greater Israhell! Stopping the US, Saudi Israhelli war on Syria.
Most Russiagaters can't find Russia on a map
I do wonder how many Americans really buy this ********
100 million did not vote in 2016 and my guess is that most Americans don't give one hoot
about Russia at all. Busy just trying to survive.
A couple of years ago, CNN did a poll asking Americans how they see Russia, and most DID
NOT care nor think about Russia. The reporter who helped with the poll laughed when asked why
CNN continued to go on and on about Russia knowing people didn't care.
Just laughed. Coming from the same crowd at CNN that called viewers dumbshits and were
laughing about that too .I can't recall verbatim what they said but maybe someone here can
recall better than I.
Russiagate is a neocunt war narrative. Russiagate is a smokescreen for Israhelli influence
in our government
Russiagate is a cover-up for many crimes committed by Democrats and the DNC, including but
not limited to primary rigging and election fraud and URANIUM ONE in which Mueller himself
was involved .
more important than having a foreign policy context, is their
"Totalitarianism for Dummies" aspect
How many RUSSIAGATERS know about Obama/Nuland/McCain regime change
how many russiagaters don't think there's anything hypocritical about Obama not returning
the Peace Prize to the Nobels.
it is dual Israeli Democrats pushing this narrative most? Schumer, SCHIFF, CARDIN,
won't they be surprised when a new Israeli Government expects their support for some
pro-Russian, anti-US controversy about foreign policy, trade, military, etc. legislation or
action?
can't find Russia on a map
hyperbole
I seem to agree with you on most of the important things, except for your ending.
a smokescreen for Israhelli influence in our government
I think God named the Jews His Chosen People, but He never mentions what they were chosen
for or chosen to do. The point being that if you believe in God, then Jews' self-promoting,
self-aggrandizing chosenness is irrefutable evidence of the Existence Of God.
Not the God of Forgiveness like Christ. But the God of the Cities of the Plain.
I wonder if Christians can ever accept the fact that the God that Christ became was first
God the Creator, who gave mankind its choice between good and evil?
This world has indeed come to a fork in the road. If what is common knowledge to one set
of people is "discovery" to another set, then they are not even living in the same universe.
There are two roads here onwards. Either we eliminate the purveyors of false narratives or we
are turning the population into ignorant masses again.
Rosenstein Mueller are unconstitutional Brief from Miller in regards to Mueller being duly
appointed..........
"
1
STATEMENT OF JURISDICTION
The district court had subject-matter jurisdiction to enforce a subpoenaissued by the
Special Counsel to Appellant to appear before the grand jury on June29, 2018. After denying
the motion to quash the subpoena on July 31, 2018, thecourt issued a contempt order on August
10, 2018, but stayed the order pendingappeal. Appellant filed his notice of appeal on August
13, 2018. This Court has jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. 1291 to review the final order.
STATEMENT OF THE ISSUES
1. Whether Congress, under the Appointments Clause of Article II, § 2, of
the U.S. Constitution, "established by law" the appointment of a private attorney toserve
as a special counsel as an "Officer of the United States."
2. Whether Special Counse
l Robert S. Mueller III (the "Special Counsel")was unconstitutionally appointed because he
is a "principal officer" under the
Appointments Clause of Article II, and thus was required to be
--
but was not
--
appointed by the President with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.
3. Whether Congress "by Law vest[ed] the Appointment" of the SpecialCounsel as an
"inferior Officer []" in "Head of the [Justice] Department[ ]," andthus, under the "Excepting
Clause," was unconstitutionally appointed because he
2
was required to be
--
but was not
--
appointed by Attorney General Jeff Sessionsrather than by Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein.""
The War Party (AKA Democrats) do not regard inflaming tensions with a nuclear power abroad
if the result is to deliver political power into their own hands at home.
They are defective psychopaths, dangerous people who should be tried for treason and
incarcerated for life as a merciful alternative to hanging in the gallows which they so
richly deserve.
With the majority of the left and quite a few Republicans (who for all intents and
purposes are Democrats with an "R" next to their name) Russiagate has become just like the
man-made global warming scam. They continue to believe it like a religion, regardless of
mounting facts to the contrary, because it serves a purpose for them.
Suddenly, the Democrats want to support Trump, the man they insisted was a dangerous
foreign agent, in leading us to war with Venezuela. Demotards are truly insane fucked up
little moppets with **** for brains!!!
The media in most countries report the news in a neutral manner. Since the Judaists bought
the media, they turned media into weapons of terror, by:
a. Fake news -- outright lies (eg. calling alien invaders "migrants").
b. Manufacturing scandals that THEY make up eg. blackface.
c. Harassing and abusing patriots and others and calling them racists, getting them fired from
jobs, etc.
None of these are legitimate jobs of the media. The New York Times and most Zionists
controlled media in this country are therefore criminal enterprises and terrorist organizations
and these criminals belong in prison.
The ability of those in power to manipulate
the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an
inverted totalitarianism
which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered
by the interests of the common man.
In neoliberal MSM there is positive feedback loop for "Trump is a Russian agent" stories. So the meme feeds on itself.
Notable quotes:
"... And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence agencies. ..."
"... the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it's in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience. ..."
"... Trump is clearly not a Russian asset, he's a facilitator of America's permanent unelected government just like his predecessors, and indeed as far as actual policies and administration behavior goes he's not that much different from Barack Obama and George W Bush. Hell, for all his demagogic anti-immigrant speech Trump hasn't even caught up to Obama's peak ICE deportation years ..."
"... Used to be that the U.S. mass media only killed people indirectly, by facilitating establishment war agendas in repeating government agency propaganda as objective fact and promulgating narratives that manufacture support for a status quo which won't even give Americans health insurance or safe drinking water ..."
"... Now they're skipping the middle man and killing them directly by psychologically brutalizing them so aggressively that it ruins their health, all to ensure that Democrats support war and adore the U.S. intelligence community . ..."
"... The social engineers responsible for controlling the populace of the greatest military power on the planet are watching France closely, and understand deeply what is at stake should they fail to control the narrative and herd ordinary Americans into supporting U.S. government institutions. ..."
"... The ability of those in power to manipulate the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an inverted totalitarianism which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered by the interests of the common man. ..."
The always excellent Moon of Alabama blog has just
published a sarcasm-laden piece documenting the many, many aggressive maneuvers that this administration has made against the
interests of Russia, from pushing for more NATO funding to undermining Russia's natural gas interests to bombing Syria to sanctioning
Russian oligarchs to dangerous military posturing.
<picture deleted>
And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working
to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand
for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence
agencies.
If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, there would be a lot less "Putin's puppet" talk and a lot more "Hey,
maybe we should avoid senseless escalations which could end all life on earth" talk among news media consumers. But there isn't,
because the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it's in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives
are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience.
Like His Predecessors
Trump is clearly not a Russian asset, he's a facilitator of America's permanent unelected government just like his predecessors,
and indeed as far as actual policies and administration behavior goes he's
not that much different
from Barack Obama and George W Bush. Hell, for all his demagogic anti-immigrant speech Trump
hasn't even caught up to Obama's peak ICE deportation years.
If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, people would be no more worried about this administration than they
were about the previous ones, because when it comes to his administration's actual behavior, he's just as reliable an upholder of
the establishment-friendly status quo as his predecessors.
Used to be that the U.S. mass media only killed people indirectly, by facilitating establishment war agendas in repeating
government agency propaganda as objective fact and promulgating narratives that manufacture support for a status quo which won't
even give Americans health insurance or safe drinking water.
They do this for a reason, of course. The Yellow Vests protests in France have continued unabated for their
ninth consecutive week , a decentralized populist uprising resulting from ordinary French citizens losing trust in their institutions
and the official narratives which uphold them.
The social engineers responsible for controlling the populace of the greatest military power on the planet are watching France
closely, and understand deeply what is at stake should they fail to control the narrative and herd ordinary Americans into supporting
U.S. government institutions. Right now they've got Republicans cheering on the White House and Democrats cheering on the U.S.
intelligence community, but that could all change should something happen which causes them to lose control over the thoughts that
Americans think about their rulers.
Propaganda is the single most-overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of human society. The ability of those in power to manipulate
the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an
inverted totalitarianism
which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered
by the interests of the common man.
The only thing that will lead to real change is the people losing trust in corrupt institutions and
rising like lions against them. That gets increasingly likely as those
institutions lose control of the narrative, and with trust in the mass media at an all-time low, populist uprisings restoring power
to the people in France, and media corporations
acting increasingly weird and insecure , that looks more and more likely by the day.
"... Baker said McCabe was cool, calm and collected throughout the discussions, telling lawmakers: "At this point in time, Andy was unbelievably focused and unbelievably confident and squared away. I don't know how to describe it other than I was extremely proud to be around him at that point in time because I thought he was doing an excellent job at maintaining focus and dealing with a very uncertain and difficult situation. So I think he was in a good state of mind at this point in time." ..."
"... According to McCabe, Rosenstein "raised the issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort," adding that Rosenstein was "definitely very concerned about the president, about his capacity and about his intent at that point in time." ..."
Two Trump Cabinet officials were "ready to support" a DOJ scheme to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump , according
to
Bloomberg and
Fox News , citing closed-door testimony from the FBI's former top lawyer, James Baker - who said that the claim came from Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
The testimony was delivered last fall to the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. Fox News has confirmed portions of the
transcript. It provides additional insight into discussions that have returned to the spotlight in Washington as fired FBI Deputy
Director Andrew McCabe revisits the matter during interviews promoting his forthcoming book. -
Fox News
While Baker did not identify the two Cabinet officials, he says that McCabe and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page approached him to
relay their conversations with Rosenstein, including their discussions of the 25th Amendment scheme. "I was being told by some combination
of Andy McCabe and Lisa Page, that, in a conversation with the Deputy Attorney General, he had stated that he -- this was what was
related to me -- that he had at least two members of the president's Cabinet who were ready to support, I guess you would call it,
an action under the 25th Amendment," Baker told the Congressional committees.
The 25th Amendment allows for the removal of a sitting president from office through various mechanisms - including the majority
of a president's Cabinet agreeing that the commander-in-chief is incapable of performing his duties.
Rosenstein - who is slated to leave the Justice Department in the near future, has denied the claims. Baker said McCabe was cool,
calm and collected throughout the discussions, telling lawmakers: "At this point in time, Andy was unbelievably focused and unbelievably
confident and squared away. I don't know how to describe it other than I was extremely proud to be around him at that point in time
because I thought he was doing an excellent job at maintaining focus and dealing with a very uncertain and difficult situation. So
I think he was in a good state of mind at this point in time."
McCabe, meanwhile
told "60 Minutes" in an interview set to air Sunday night that Rosenstein was concerned about Trump's "capacity."
According to McCabe, Rosenstein "raised the issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet
officials might support such an effort," adding that Rosenstein was "definitely very concerned about the president, about his capacity
and about his intent at that point in time."
"Rosenstein was actually openly talking about whether there was a majority of the cabinet who would vote to remove the president?"
asks CBS News anchor Scott Pelly, to which McCabe replied: " That's correct. Counting votes or possible votes. "
The New York Times
first reported
last year that McCabe alleged in memos that Rosenstein had talked about using the 25th Amendment to oust Trump -- or wearing a
wire to surreptitiously monitor the president -- in the hectic days in May 2017 after Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director.
At the time, Rosenstein disputed the reporting. -
WaPo
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called the 25th Amendment scheme a "
bureaucratic coup " led by enemies of President Trump. On Sunday morning, Graham said he would subpoena McCabe and Rosenstein
"if that's what it takes" to get to the bottom of the 25th Amendment claim.
On Thursday, the DOJ issued a statement claiming that Rosenstein rejects McCabe's version of events "as inaccurate and factually
incorrect," and also denied that Rosenstein ever approved wearing a "wire" to record Trump.
"The deputy attorney general never authorized any recording that Mr. McCabe references," reads the DOJ statement. "As the deputy
attorney general previously has stated, based on his personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment,
nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment."
McCabe, meanwhile, walked back some of his "60 Minutes" statements . On Friday a spokeswoman for the former Deputy Director said:
"Certain statements made by Mr. McCabe, in interviews associated with the release of his book, have been taken out of context and
misrepresented," adding "To clarify, at no time did Mr. McCabe participate in any extended discussions about the use of the 25th
Amendment, nor is he aware of any such discussions."
Baker acknowledged during his testimony that he was not directly involved in the May 2017 discussions, rather, McCabe and Page
approached him contemporaneously following a meeting with Rosenstein in the days following former FBI Director James Comey's firing.
"I had the impression that the deputy attorney general had already discussed this with two members in the president's Cabinet
and that they were onboard with this concept already," said Baker.
Question: "Do you know what direction that went? Was it Mr. Rosenstein seeking out members of the Cabinet looking to pursue
this 25th Amendment approach or was it the other way around?"
Baker: "What I recall being said was that the Deputy Attorney General had two members of the Cabinet. So he – how they came
to be had, I don't know, but "
Question: "So he had two members, almost like he was taking the initiative and getting the members?"
Baker: "That would be speculation on my part." -
Via Fox News
Baker also suggested that "Lisa and Andy" did not know the names of the Cabinet officials who were on board with the 25th Amendment
scheme.
Baker testified in October that the alleged discussions took place during an uncertain and anxious time at the FBI and DOJ
after Comey's termination, and that the mood was "pretty dark":
Question: "Did people tell you that the DAG (Deputy Attorney General) was upset?"
Baker: "Yes."
Question: "Did they tell you that he was making jokes?"
Baker: "No."
Question: "Did they tell you that..."
Baker: " This was not a joking sort of time. This was pretty dark. " -
Via Fox News
"Our choice now seems to be between a "new war" and a new world. As always, the forces of reaction and wealth are telling us
we have no choice but war, and no right or power to decide. They are calling for a secret investigation, a secret conviction,
a secret method of execution, and a totally secret war abroad.
"The American people as a whole are the only ones in the world who have the right to decide on a national response to this
tragedy, and it must be one that takes into account the rights of all the other peoples and nations of the world."
Wouldn't surprise me one bit if Kristol and Boot work for the CIA and MI6. They tend to lead
with placed stories, either before or after events, helping to persuade those who have yet to
make up their minds or those looking to have someone else do their thinking for them.
With the ongoing internet reformation we are experiencing, its a lot easier for the masses
to see the bigger picture, the parties involved and the corrupt characters playing the puppet
strings for the media.
Glad to see these shysters exposed for what they are propagandists.
"... In interviews to boost his forthcoming book, fired former FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe confirms that Obama holdovers repeatedly discussed removing President Donald Trump under the pretext of the 25th Amendment, and that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein more than once seriously offered to "wear a wire" in meetings with the President. After Trump fired James Comey as FBI Director in May 2017, McCabe, Comey's deputy director, launched a phony "obstruction of justice" investigation, and said that he began to accumulate files of memos on that and the "Russia Collusion" investigation, to try to ensure that the investigations would continue if he were fired as well. ..."
In interviews to boost his forthcoming book, fired former FBI
Acting Director Andrew McCabe confirms that Obama holdovers repeatedly discussed removing
President Donald Trump under the pretext of the 25th Amendment, and that Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein more than once seriously offered to "wear a wire" in meetings with the
President. After Trump fired James Comey as FBI Director in May 2017, McCabe, Comey's deputy
director, launched a phony "obstruction of justice" investigation, and said that he began to
accumulate files of memos on that and the "Russia Collusion" investigation, to try to ensure
that the investigations would continue if he were fired as well.
Now, after its own two years of investigation and 200 interviews, Chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee Richard Burr (R-NC) has said, "There is no factual evidence of collusion
between the Trump campaign and Russia." Ranking Member Mark Warner (D-VA) said he disagrees
with the way Burr characterized the evidence, but declined to give his own assessment.
Veteran criminal attorney John Dowd, a member of Trump's legal team from June 2017 to March
2018, said,
"I know exactly what he [Mueller] has. I know exactly what every witness said, what every
document said. I know exactly what he asked. And I know what the conclusion or the result
is."
What will be the result of the probe?
"It's been a terrible waste of time.... This is one of the greatest frauds the country has
ever seen. I'm just shocked that Bob Mueller didn't call it that way and say, 'I'm being
used.' I would've done that.
"I'd have gone to [then Attorney General] Sessions and Rosenstein and said, 'Look. This is
nonsense. We are being used by a cabal in the FBI to get even.' "
Asked about Mueller's final report, he responded, "I will be shocked if anything regarding
the President is made public, other than, 'We're done.' "
At the same time, former NSA Technical Director William Binney has published new evidence
which shows that the DNC documents posted by WikiLeaks in July 2016, were probably not hacked
over the internet, by Russians or anyone else -- rather, the only available forensic evidence
indicates that they were downloaded from within the DNC's network. His evidence is summarized
in an article he co-authored with former CIA analyst Larry Johnson on Col. Pat Lang's "Sic
Semper Tyrannis" blog yesterday.
"... This is the behavior of a media class that is interested in selling narratives, not reporting truth. And yet the mass media talking heads are all telling us today that we must continue to trust them. ..."
"... More accountability in media than in politics, Chuck? Really? Accountability to whom? Your advertisers? Your plutocratic owners? Certainly not to the people whose minds you are paid exorbitant sums to influence; there are no public elections for the leadership of the mass media. ..."
"... CNN, for the record, has been guilty of an arguably even more embarrassing Russiagate flub than Buzzfeed 's when they wrongly reported that Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks' DNC email archives prior to their 2016 publication, an error that was hilariously due to to the simple misreading of an email date by multiple people ..."
"... The mass media, including pro-Trump mass media like Fox News, absolutely deserves to be distrusted. It has earned that distrust. It had earned that distrust already with its constant promotion of imperialist wars and an oligarch-friendly status quo, and it has earned it even more with its frenzied promotion of a narrative engineered to manufacture consent for a preexisting agenda to shove Russia off the world stage. ..."
"... The mainstream media absolutely is the enemy of the people; just because Trump says it doesn't mean it's not true. The only reason people don't rise up and use the power of their numbers to force the much-needed changes that need to happen in our world is because they are being propagandized to accept the status quo day in and day out by the mass media's endless cultural engineering project . ..."
"... They are the reason why wars go unopposed, why third parties never gain traction, why people consent to money hemorrhaging upward to the wealthiest of the wealthy while everyone else struggles to survive. The sooner people wake up from the perverse narrative matrix of the plutocratic media, the better. ..."
Following what the Washington Post
has described as "the highest-profile misstep yet for a news organization during a period
of heightened and intense scrutiny of the press," mass media representatives are now flailing
desperately for an argument as to why people should continue to place their trust in mainstream
news outlets.
On Thursday Buzzfeed News delivered
the latest "bombshell" Russiagate report to fizzle within 24 hours of its publication, a
pattern that is now so consistent that I've personally made a practice of declining to comment
on such stories until a day or two after their release. "BOOM!" tweets were issued by
#Resistance pundits on Twitter, "If true this means X, Y and Z" bloviations were made on mass
media punditry panels, and for about 20 hours Russiagaters everywhere were riding the high of
their lives, giddy with the news that President Trump had committed an impeachable felony by
ordering Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a proposed Trump office tower in Moscow, a
proposal which died within weeks
and the Kremlin never touched .
There was reason enough already for any reasonable person to refrain from frenzied
celebration, including the fact that the story's two authors, Jason Leopold and Anthony
Cormier, were giving the press two very different accounts of
the information they'd based it on, with Cormier telling CNN that he had not personally seen
the evidence underlying his report and Leopold telling MSNBC that he had. Both Leopold and
Cormier, for the record, have already previously suffered a
Russiagate faceplant with the clickbait viral story that Russia had financed the 2016
election, burying the fact that it was a Russian election .
Then the entire story came crashing down when Mueller's office took the extremely rare step
of issuing an
unequivocal statement that the Buzzfeed story was wrong , writing simply, "BuzzFeed's
description of specific statements to the special counsel's office, and characterization of
documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen's congressional
testimony are not accurate."
According to journalist and economic analyst Doug Henwood, the print New York Times covered
the Buzzfeed report on its front page when the story broke, but the report on Mueller's
correction the next day was shoved back to page 11 .
This appalling journalistic malpractice makes it very funny that NYT's Wajahat Ali had the gall
to tweet , "Unlike the Trump
administration, journalists are fact checking and willing to correct the record if the Buzzfeed
story is found inaccurate. Not really the actions of a deep state and enemy of the people,
right?"
This is the behavior of a media class that is interested in selling narratives, not
reporting truth. And yet the mass media talking heads are all telling us today that we must
continue to trust them.
"Those trying to tar all media today aren't interested in improving journalism but
protecting themselves," tweeted NBC's Chuck Todd.
"There's a lot more accountability in media these days than in our politics. We know we
live in a glass house, we hope the folks we cover are as self aware."
More accountability in media than in politics, Chuck? Really? Accountability to whom? Your
advertisers? Your plutocratic owners? Certainly not to the people whose minds you are paid
exorbitant sums to influence; there are no public elections for the leadership of the mass
media.
"Mueller didn't do the media any favors tonight, and he did do the president one,"
griped
the odious Chris Cuomo on CNN. "Because as you saw with Rudy Giuliani and as I'm sure
you'll see with the president himself, this allows them to say 'You can't believe it! You can't
believe what you read, you can't believe what you hear! You can only believe us. Even the
Special Counsel says that the media doesn't get it right.'"
"The larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story is that the
news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they're
willing to lie to do it, and I don't think that's true" said Jeffrey Toobin on a CNN panel , adding "I
just think this is a bad day for us."
"It does reinforce bad stereotypes about the news media," said Brian Stelter on the same CNN
panel.
"I am desperate as a media reporter to always say to the audience, judge folks
individually and judge brands individually. Don't fall for what these politicians out there
want you to do. They want you to think we're all crooked. We're not. But Buzzfeed now, now
the onus is on Buzzfeed. "
CNN, for the record, has been guilty of an arguably
even more embarrassing Russiagate flub than Buzzfeed 's when they wrongly reported that
Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks' DNC email archives prior to their 2016
publication, an error that was hilariously due to to the simple misreading of an email date by
multiple people.
The mass media, including pro-Trump mass media like Fox News, absolutely deserves to be
distrusted. It has earned that distrust. It had earned that distrust already with its constant
promotion of imperialist wars and an oligarch-friendly status quo, and it has earned it even
more with its frenzied promotion of a narrative engineered to manufacture consent for a
preexisting agenda to shove Russia off the world stage.
The mainstream media absolutely is the enemy of the people; just because Trump says it
doesn't mean it's not true. The only reason people don't rise up and use the power of their
numbers to force the much-needed changes that need to happen in our world is because they are
being propagandized to accept the status quo day in and day out by the mass media's endless
cultural engineering project .
They are the reason why wars go unopposed, why third parties
never gain traction, why people consent to money hemorrhaging upward to the wealthiest of the
wealthy while everyone else struggles to survive. The sooner people wake up from the perverse
narrative matrix of the plutocratic media, the better.
Looks like all of them were Brennan men. CIA used FBI counterintelligence and counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal.
Notable quotes:
"... We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in the coffin of the Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn's insights are incredible not only because they return us to the earliest reporting on the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members of Mueller's investigation. ..."
"... If you factor in the dreadful reporting to discredit Joseph Mifsud and leaks, it is pretty clear something rather strange happened to George Papadopoulos during the campaign while he was shuttling around Europe and the Middle East. He was working with people who have intelligence links at the London Centre of International Law Practice ..."
"... A recent article in The Telegraph also alludes to MI5, MI6, and CIA using counter-terrorism assets which would tie into the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), and its sister organizations, doing counter-terrorism work for the Australian, UK and US governments. They quote anonymous officials who believe that their intelligence agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal." ..."
"... Continuing, Blackburn pinpointed the significance of defining counter-terrorism as the starting point of the investigation, saying: "It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to make Papadopoulos' activities look like they were something else. ..."
"... It's more likely that the CIA played the FBI with the help of close allies who were suspicious and frightened of a Trump presidency." ..."
"... Zainab Ahmad , a member of Mueller's legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed out by Blackburn , Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event in 2017 ..."
"... "Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism conference in New York with the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged Russian spy, had been working within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ..."
"... I don't think it's a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various elements that popped up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller's team was at Global Center before Mueller was appointed as special counsel is also troubling ..."
"... Days ago, The Hill reported on Congressional testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic and linked to the Clintons ..."
"... Last year, Blackburn noted the connection between Mifsud and Arvinder Sambei , writing: "LCILP director and FBI counsel, works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud's London Academy. Sambei then brought Mifsud over to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US State too." ..."
"... Disobedient Media previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share 'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016. This writer noted that " The Guardian reported Hannigan's announcement that he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017. ..."
"... Jane Mayer, in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the New Yorker, also noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing "deemed so sensitive it was handled at director-level" is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner." ..."
"... There are more and more articles saying that the FBI, CIA, M14 15,16 yada yada, were overly concerned about Trump. Their sin...caring too much for the USA. They attempted a coup de'etat for "our" own good...we... being "we the people". To quote Abe Lincoln "You will find that all the arguments in favour of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, -- not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." Lincoln did not mince words ..."
In April last year, Disobedient Media broke coverage of the British involvement in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, asking
why
All Russiagate Roads Lead To London , via the quasi-scholar Joseph Mifsud and others.
The issue was also raised by WikiLeaks's Julian Assange , just days before
the Ecuadorian government silenced him last March. Assange's Twitter thread cited research by
Chris Blackburn , who spoke with
Disobedient Media on multiple occasions covering Joseph Mifsud's ties to British intelligence figures and organizations, as well
as his links to
Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, the FBI, CIA and the private cyber-security firm Crowdstrike.
We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in the coffin of the
Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn's insights are incredible not only because they return us to the earliest reporting on
the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members
of Mueller's investigation. What we are left with is an indication of collusion between factions of the US and UK intelligence
community in fabricating evidence of Trump-Russia collusion: a scandal that would have rocked the legacy press to its core, if Western
establishment-backed media had a spine.
In
Disobedient Media's previous coverage of Blackburn's work, he described his experience in intelligence:
"I've been involved in numerous investigations that involve counter-intelligence techniques in the past. I used to work for
the
9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism , one of the biggest tort actions in American history. I helped build a profile
of Osama bin Laden's financial and political network, which was slightly different to the one that had been built by the
CIA's Alec Station , a dedicated task force which was focused on Osama bin
Laden and Al-Qaeda. Alec Station designed its profile to hunt Osama bin Laden and disrupt his network. I thought it was flawed.
It had failed to take into account Osama's historical links to Pakistan's main political parties or that he was the figurehead
for a couple of organizations, not just Al-Qaeda."
"I also ran a few conferences for US intelligence leaders during the Bush administration. After the 9/11 Commission published
its report into the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon it created a public outreach program. The US National Intelligence
Conference and Exposition (
Intelcon ) was one of the avenues it used. I was responsible for creating the 'View from Abroad' track. We had guidance from
former Senator Slade Gorton and Jamie Gorelick, who both sat on the 9/11 Commission. We got leaders such as Sir John Chilcot and
Baroness Pauline Neville Jones to come and help share their experiences on how the US would be able to heal the rifts after 9/11."
"The US intelligence community was suffering from severe turf wars and firewalls, which were hampering counter-terrorism efforts.
They were concentrating on undermining each other rather than tackling terrorism. I had mainly concentrated on the Middle East,
but in 2003 I switched my focus to terrorism in South Asia."
Counter Terrorism, Not Counter Intelligence, Sparked Probe
In an article published by The Telegraph last November, the paper acknowledged
the following:
"It forces the spotlight on whether the UK played a role in the FBI's investigation launched before the 2016 presidential election
into Trump campaign ties to the Kremlin... Mr. Trump's allies and former advisers are raising questions about the UK's role in
the start of the probe, given many of the key figures and meetings were located in Britain... One former top White House adviser
to Mr. Trump made similar insinuations, telling this newspaper: "You know the Brits are up to their neck." The source added on
the Page wiretap application: "I think that stuff is going to implicate MI5 and MI6 in a bunch of activities they don't want to
be implicated in, along with FBI, counter-terrorism and the CIA. " [Emphasis Added]
The article cites George Papadopoulos, who asked why the "British intelligence
apparatus was weaponized against Trump and his advisers." Papadopoulos has also addressed the issue at length via Twitter. In response
to the Telegraph's coverage of the issue, Chris Blackburn wrote via Twitter
:
"The Telegraph story on Trump Russia acknowledges that activities involving counter-terrorism are at the heart of the scandal...not
counter-intelligence. If the [London Centre for International Law Practice] was British state, not private, some Commonwealth
countries are going to be seriously pissed off."
Blackburn spoke with Disobedient Media, saying:
" If you factor in the dreadful reporting to discredit Joseph Mifsud and leaks, it is pretty clear something rather strange
happened to George Papadopoulos during the campaign while he was shuttling around Europe and the Middle East. He was working with
people who have intelligence links at the London Centre of International Law Practice.
A recent article in The Telegraph also alludes to MI5, MI6, and CIA
using counter-terrorism assets which would tie into the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), and its sister organizations,
doing counter-terrorism work for the Australian, UK and US governments. They quote anonymous officials who believe that their
intelligence agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal." [Emphasis Added]
Blackburn discussed this differentiation with Disobedient Media:
"Counter-terrorism is obviously involved in more kinetic, violent political actions-concerning mass casualty events, bombings,
assassinations, poisonings, and hacking. But, the lines are blurring between them. Counter-intelligence cases have been known
to stretch for decades- often relying on nothing more than paranoia and suspicion to fuel investigations. Counter-terrorism is
also a broader discipline as it involves tactical elements like hostage rescue, crime scene investigations, and explosive specialists.
Counter-Terrorism is a collaborative effort with counter-terrorism officers working closely with local and regional police forces
and civic organizations. There is also a wider academic field around countering violent, and radical ideology which promotes terrorism
and insurgencies. Cybersecurity has become the third major discipline in intelligence. The London Center of International Law
Practice, the mysterious intelligence company that
employed
both Papadopoulos and Mifsud , had also been working in that area."
Continuing, Blackburn pinpointed the significance of defining counter-terrorism as the starting point of the investigation,
saying: "It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to make Papadopoulos' activities look
like they were something else.
As counter-terrorism and counterintelligence are close in tactics and methods, it would seem that they were used because they
share the same skill sets - covert evidence gathering and deception. It's basically sleight of hand. A piece of theatre would be
more precise. However, we don't know if the FBI knew it was real or make-believe. It's more likely that the CIA played the FBI
with the help of close allies who were suspicious and frightened of a Trump presidency."
Mueller's Team And Joseph Mifsud
Zainab Ahmad , a
member of Mueller's legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed
out by Blackburn , Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event
in 2017. In recent days, Blackburn wrote via Twitter :
"Zainab Ahmad is a major player in the Russiagate scandal at the DOJ. Does she work for SC Mueller? She was at a GCCS event
in May 2017. Arvinder Sambei, a co-director of the [London Centre of International Law Practice], worked with Joseph Mifsud, [George
Papadopoulos] and [Simona Mangiante]. She's a GCCS consultant."
Blackburn told this author:
"Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism
conference in New York with the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged
Russian spy, had been working within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia."
Zainab Ahmad (AHMAD). Image via the Combatting Terrorism Center, West Point
"Richard Barrett, the Former Chief of Counter-Terrorism at MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence department traveled with Mifsud
to Saudi Arabia to give a talk on terrorism in 2017. Ex-CIA officers, US Defense, and US Treasury officials were also there. The
London Centre of International Law Practice's relationship to the Global Center had been established in 2014. The Global Center
on Cooperative Security made Martin Polaine and Arvinder Sambei consultants, they then became directors at the London Centre of
International Law Practice."
"The Global Center on Cooperative Security's first major UK conference was at Joseph Mifsud's London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD).
Mifsud then followed Arvinder Sambei and Nagi Idris over to the London Centre of International Law Practice. Sources have told
me that Mifsud was moonlighting as a specialist on counter-terrorism and Islamism while working at LAD which explains why he went
to work in counter-terrorism after LAD folded."
"I don't think it's a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various elements that popped
up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller's team was at Global Center before Mueller was appointed as
special counsel is also troubling."
Days ago, The Hill reported on Congressional
testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic
and linked to the Clintons. Critically, The Hill
writes:
"Those he briefed included Andrew Weissmann, then the head of DOJ's fraud section; Bruce Swartz, longtime head of DOJ's international
operations, and Zainab Ahmad , an accomplished terrorism prosecutor who, at the time, was assigned to work with Lynch as a senior
counselor. Ahmad and Weissmann would go on to work for Mueller, the special prosecutor overseeing the Russia probe." [Emphasis
Added]
This point is essential, as it not only describes Ahmad's role in Mueller's team but places her at a crucial pre-investigation
meeting.
Last year, Blackburn noted the connection
between Mifsud and Arvinder Sambei , writing: "LCILP director and FBI counsel,
works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud's London Academy.
Sambei then brought Mifsud over to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US
State too."
Sambei has been described elsewhere as a "Former
practising barrister, Senior Crown Prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service of England & Wales, and Legal Adviser at the Permanent
Joint Headquarters (PJHQ), Ministry of Defence." [British spelling has been retained]
Arvinder Sambei. Image via the Public International Law Advisory Group
That Sambei has been so thoroughly linked to organizations where Mifsud was a central figure is yet another cause of suspicion
regarding allegations that Joseph Mifsud was a shadowy, unknown Russian agent until the summer of 2016 . She is also a direct link
between Robert Mueller and Mifsud.
Blackburn wrote via Twitter : "Arvinder Sambei helped to organize LCILP's
counter-terrorism and corruption events. She used her contacts in the US to bring in Middle Eastern government officials that were
seen to be vulnerable to graft. Lisa Osofsky, former FBI Deputy General Counsel, was working with her." Below, Arvinder is pictured
at a London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP) event.
Arvinder Sambei, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter
As Chris Blackburn told this author:
" Mifsud and Papadopoulos's co-director Arvinder Sambei was also the former FBI British counsel working 9/11 cases for Robert
Mueller. She also runs a consultancy which deals with Special Investigative Measure (SIMs) which is just a posh description for
covert espionage and evidence gathering. She has worked for major intelligence and national law agencies in the past. She wore
two hats as a director of London Centre and a consultant for the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), a counter-terrorism
think tank which is sponsored by the Australia, Canada, UK and US governments. Alexander Downer's former Chief of Staff while
at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade now works for the Global Center. Mifsud was also due to meet with Australian
private intelligence figures in Adelaide in March 2016. So. Australia is certainly a major focus for the investigation." [Emphasis
Added]
Lisa Osofsky, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter
An Embarrassment For John Brennan?
Disobedient Media previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share
'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016. This writer noted that "
The Guardian reported Hannigan's announcement that
he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23
January 2017.
Jane Mayer, in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the
New Yorker, also noted that Hannigan had flown
to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and
Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing "deemed
so sensitive it was handled at director-level" is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers
at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner."
Blackburn told Disobedient Media:
"Former Congressman Trey Gowdy, who has seen most of the information gathered by Congress from the intelligence community concerning
the Russia investigation, said that if President Trump were to declassify files and present the truth to the American public,
it would " embarrass John Brennan ." I think that
is pretty concrete for me, but it's not definitive. I know the polarization and spin in Washington has become perverse, but that
statement is pretty specific for me. If Brennan is involved, it is most probably through Papadopoulos who sparked off the 'official'
investigation at the FBI. He also made sure the Steele dossier was spread through the US government."
Blackburn added: "Chris Steele was also working on FIFA projects, and a source has told me that he was working to investigate
the Russian and Qatari World Cup bids. The London Centre of International Law Practice has been working with Majed Garoub, the former
Saudi legal representative of FIFA, the world governing body for soccer. He's also been working against the Qatari bid. Steele likes
to get paid twice for his investigations."
"Mifsud has also been associated with Prince Turki the former Saudi intelligence chief, Mifsud and the London Academy of Diplomacy
used to train Saudi diplomats and intelligence figures while Turki was the Saudi Ambassador to London. Turki is a close friend
of Bill Clinton and John Brennan. Nawaf Obaid was also courting Mifsud and tried to get him a cushy job working with CNN's Freedom
Project at Link Campus in Rome. He also knows John Brennan. Intelligence agencies like to give out professional gifts like this
plum academic position for completing missions. In the US, it is widely known that intelligence agencies gift the children of
assets to get them into prestigious Ivy League schools."
At minimum, we can surmise that Mifsud was not a Russian agent, but was an asset of Western intelligence agencies. We are left
with the impression that the Mifsud saga served as a ploy, whether he participated knowingly or not. It seems reasonable to conclude
that the gambit was initially developed with participation of John Brennan and UK intelligence. Following this, Mueller inherited
and developed the Mifsud narrative thread into the collusion soap opera we know today.
Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal to subvert
a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power.
What ********. Britain was part of the group pulling of 911 along with the American and Jewish establishment. Blackburn was
the inside guy, posing as an outsider, to deflect attention from the real perpetrators. These people always have agents on both
sides of every issue in the same way they fund two "opposing" political parties and fund two "opposing" sides in the media.
Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal
to subvert a US Presidency , and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power .
It's called TREASON .
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies , giving them aid and
comfort within the United States or elsewhere , is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than
five years
SteeleGate---his mate Skripal, boss Pablo Miller----novichok---Porton Down---anything to blame Russia in the end. After 30
dys of shutdown personnel of CIA, FBI and DOJ can be changed legally: draining of the swamp and DECLAS can begin with proper Military
Tribunals in place. This according to Q who shared all of this, so it was not a conspiracy theory that the Q team exposed, but
just MSM and Deep State in their last panic mode. Justice will now be able to follow: maybe rel end of endless wars too!
There are more and more articles saying that the FBI, CIA, M14 15,16 yada yada, were overly concerned about Trump. Their sin...caring
too much for the USA. They attempted a coup de'etat for "our" own good...we... being "we the people". To quote Abe Lincoln "You will find that all the arguments in favour of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, -- not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." Lincoln did not mince words
So now we have an international conspiracy of care. Not one power grubber in the group. A syndicate of misunderstood do gooders.
But not having the consent of the people, but rather trying to undo, and foil the consent of the people.
This part of the Declaration applies
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
-- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish
it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal
to subvert a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power..."
Why do you not call it a coup d'etat? That is what it is, nothing less. If it were about something Trump did you would use
the harshest possible language. Why not tell the truth here. Let the American people know what happened.
"... You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. ..."
"... Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means. ..."
"... Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI, and within the entire Democrat Party. ..."
"... Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western world. ..."
"... Stephen Cohen discusses how rational viewpoints are banned from the mainstream media, and how several features of US life today resemble some of the worst features of the Soviet system. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/12/stephen-cohen-on-war-with-russia-and-soviet-style-censorship-in-the-us/ ..."
"... The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly 4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course. ..."
"... Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically justified by its diabolical policies. ..."
"... Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their Government Lackeys. ..."
"... It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it to be so ..."
"... If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation, propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. ..."
"... See also this primer on Mueller's MO. ..."
"... The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to increase military spending; and more, more, more war. ..."
"... Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished. a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians. ..."
"... At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already brainwashed population? ..."
"... The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. ..."
"... Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others, the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry. ..."
For more than two years U.S. politicians, the media and some bloggers hyped a conspiracy theory. They claimed that Russia had
somehow colluded with the Trump campaign to get him elected.
An obviously fake 'Dirty Dossier' about Trump, commissioned by the Clinton campaign, was presented as evidence. Regular business
contacts between Trump flunkies and people in Ukraine or Russia were claimed to be proof for nefarious deals. A Russian
click-bait company was accused of manipulating the U.S. electorate by posting puppy pictures and crazy memes on social media.
Huge investigations were launched. Every rumor or irrelevant detail coming from them was declared to be - finally - the evidence
that would put Trump into the slammer. Every month the walls were closing in on Trump.
Finally the conspiracy theory has run out of steam. Russiagate
is finished :
After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016
election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats
and Republicans on the committee.
...
Democrats and other Trump opponents have long believed that special counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional investigators would
unearth new and more explosive evidence of Trump campaign coordination with Russians. Mueller may yet do so, although Justice
Department and Congressional sources say they believe that he, too, is close to wrapping up his investigation.
Nothing, zero, nada was found to support the conspiracy theory. The Trump campaign did not collude with Russia. A few flunkies
were indicted for unrelated tax issues and for lying to the investigators about some minor details. But nothing at all supports the
dramatic claims of collusion made since the beginning of the affair.
In a recent statement House leader Nancy Pelosi was reduced
to accuse Trump campaign officials of doing their job:
"The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to
influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people. ...
No one called her out for spouting such nonsense.
Russiagate created a lot of damage.
The alleged Russian influence campaign that never happened was used to
install censorship on social media. It was used
to undermine the election of progressive Democrats. The weapon salesmen used it to push for more NATO aggression against Russia.
Maria Butina, an innocent Russian woman interested in good relation with the United States, was
held in solitary confinement
(recommended) until she signed a paper which claims that she was involved in a conspiracy.
In a just world the people who for more then two years hyped the conspiracy theory and caused so much damage would be pushed out
of their public positions. Unfortunately that is not going to happen. They will jump onto the next conspiracy train continue from
there.
Posted by b on February 12, 2019 at 01:38 PM |
Permalink
Comments next
page " Legally, Maria Butina was suborned into signing a false declaration. If there were the rule of law, such party or
parties that suborned her would be in gaol. Considering Mueller's involvement with Lockerbie, I am not holding my breath. FWIW the
Swiss company that made the timers allegedly involved in Lockerbie have some
comments of its own .
I will be really glad when this 'get Russia' craziness is over, but I suspect even if the Mueller investigation has nothing,
all the same creeps will be pulling out the stops to generate something... Skripal, Integrity Initiative, and etc. etc. stuff
like this just doesn't go away overnight or with the end of this 'investigation'... folks are looking for red meat i tell ya!
as for Maria Butina - i look forward to reading the article.. that was a travesty of justice but the machine moves on, mowing
down anyone in it's way... she was on the receiving end of all the paranoia that i have come to associate with the western msm
at this point...
Hillary's loss is actually best explained as her throwing the election to Trump . The Deep State wanted a nationalist
to win as that would best help meet the challenge from Russia and China - a challenge that they had been slow to recognize.
= ... to smear Wikileaks as a Russian agent
The DNC leak is best explained as a CIA false flag.
= ... to remove and smear Michael Flynn
Trump said that he fired Flynn for lying to VP Pence but Flynn's conversations with the Russian Ambassador after Obama threw
them out for "meddling" in the US election was an embarrassment to the Administration as Putin's Putin's decision not to respond
was portrayed as favoritism toward the Trump Administration.
You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in
the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. This is typical behavior for conspiracy
theorists.
I hope that Russiagate is indeed "finished", but I think it needs to be draped with garlic-clove necklaces, shot up with silver
bullets, sprinkled with holy water, and a wooden stake driven through its black heart just to make sure.
I don't dispute the logical argument B. presents, but it may be too dispassionately rational. I know that the Russiagate
proponents and enthralled supporters of the concept are too invested psychologically in this surrealistic fantasy to let go, even
if the official outcome reluctantly admits that there's no "there" there.
The Democratic Party, one of the major partners mounting the Russophobic psy-op, has already resolved to turn Democratic committee
chairmen loose to dog the Trump administration with hearings aggressively flogging any and all matters that discredit and undermine
Trump-- his business connections, social liaisons, etc.
They may hope to find the Holy Grail: the elusive "bombshell" that "demands" impeachment, i.e., some crime or illicit conduct
so heinous that the public will stand for another farcical impeachment proceeding. But I reckon that the Dems prefer the "soft"
impeachment of harassing Trump with hostile hearings in hopes of destroying his 2020 electability with the death of a thousand
innuendoes and guilt-by-association.
Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt
to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate
the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means.
Put more succinctly, I fear that Russiagate won't be finished until Rachel Maddow says it's finished. ;)
Once a hypothesis is fixed in people's minds, whether true or not, it's hard to get them to let go of it. And let's not forget
how many times the narrative changed (and this is true in the Skripal case as well), with all past facts vanishing to accommodate
a new narrative.
So I, like others, expect the fake scandal to continue while many, many other real crimes (the US attempted
coup in Venezuela and the genocidal war in Yemen, for instance) continue unabated.
Putin solicits public input for essential national
policy goals . If ever there was a template to follow for an actual MAGAgenda, Putin's Russia provides one. While US politicos
argue over what is essentially Bantha Pudu, Russians are hard at work improving their nation which includes restructuring their
economy.
Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI,
and within the entire Democrat Party.
I very much doubt it it is over. Trump is corrupt and has links to corrupt Russians. Collusion, maybe not, but several
stinking individuals are in the frame for, guess what - ...bring it on... The fact that Hilary was arguably even worse (a point
made ad-nauseum on here) is frankly irrelevant. The vilification of Trump will not affect the warmongers efforts. He is a useful
idiot
for a take on the alternative reality some are living in
emptywheel has an article up on the nbc link b provides and the article on butina is discussed in the comments section...
as i said - they are looking for red meat and will not be happy until they get some... they are completely zonkers...
Blooming Barricade , Feb 12, 2019 2:55:18 PM |
link
Now that this racket has been admitted as such, I expect all of the media outlets that devoted banner headlines, hundreds of thousands
of hours of cable TV time, thousands of trees, and free speech online to immediately fire all of their journalists and appoint
Glenn Greenwald as the publisher of the New York Times, Michael Tracey at the Post, Aaron Matte at the Guardian, and Max Blumenthal
at the Daily Beast.
Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this
to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity
Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western
world.
The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly
4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most
of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course.
Then of course Russia has to be surrounded by NATO should they try and take over Europe by surging through the Fulda gap./s
Then of course there are the professional pundits who have built careers on anti Russian propaganda, Rachel Maddow for instance
who earns 30,000$ per day to spew anti Russian nonsense.
Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically
justified by its diabolical policies.
I'm sorry b is so down on Conspiracy Theories, since they reveal quite real staged homicidal false flag operations of US power.
Feeding into the stigmatizing of the truth about reality is not in the interests of the earth's people.
somehow I see this "revelation: tied to Barr's approaching tenure. I think they (FBI/DOJ) didn't want his involvement in their
noodle soup of an investigation and the best way to accomplish that was to end it themselves. I also suspect that a deal has been
made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone.
So we will see no investigation of Hillary, her 650,000
emails or the many crimes they detailed (according to NYPD investigation of Weiner's laptop) and the US will continue to be at
war all day, every day. Team Swamp rules.
Meanwhile, MSM is prepping its readers for the possibility that the Mueller report will never be released to us proles. If that's
the case, I'm sure nobody will try to use innuendo to suggest it actually contains explosive revelations after all...
Harry, its vitally important as the US desperately wants to keep Europe under its thumb and to stop this European army which
means Europe lead by Paris and Berlin becomes a world power. Trump's attempts to make nice with Russia is to keep it out of the
EU bloc.
Well, the liberal conspiracy car crash ensured downmarket Mussolini a second term, it appears...Hard Brexit Tories also look likely
to win thanks to centrist sabatoge of the left. You reap what you sow, corporate presstitutes!
Sane people have predicted the end of Russiagate almost as many times as insane people have predicted that the "smoking gun that
will get rid of Trump" has been found. And yet the Mighty Wurlitzer grinds on, while social media is more and more censored.
I expect it all to continue until the 2020 election circus winds up into full-throated mode, and no one talks about anything but
the next puppet to be appointed. Oops, I mean "elected".
You also need to behead the corpse, stuff the mouth with a lemon and then place the head down in the coffin with the body in
supine (facing up) position. Weight the coffin with stones and wild roses and toss it into a fast-flowing river.
Russiagate won't be finished until a wall is built around Capitol Hill and all its inhabitants and worker bees declared insane
by a properly functioning court of law.
I also suspect that a deal has been made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone. So we will see no
investigation of Hillary ...
Underlying your perspective is the assumption that USA is a democracy where a populist "outsider" could be elected President,
Yet you also believe that Hillary and the Deep State have the power to manipulate government and the intelligence agencies and
propose a "conspiracy theory" based on that power.
Isn't it more likely that Trump made it clear (behind closed doors, of course) that he was amenable to the goals of the Deep
State and that the bogus investigation was merely done to: 1) cover their own election meddling; 2) eliminate threats like Flynn
and Assange/Wikileaks; 3) anti-Russian propaganda?
Dowd, Trump's former lawyer on Russiagate stated there may not even be a report. If this is the case then the Zionist rulers have
gotten to Mueller who no doubt figured out that the election collusion breadcrumbs don't lead to Putin, they lead to Netanyahu
and Zionist billionaire friends! So Mueller may have to come up with a nothing burger to hide the truth.
B is the only alternative media blogger I've followed for a significant amount of time without becoming disenfranchised. Not because
he has no blind spot - his is just one I can deal with... optimism.
I will believe Russiagate is finished when expelled Russian staff gets back, when the US returns the seized Russian properties,
when the consulate is Seattle reopens and when USA issues formal apology to Russia.
Posted by: hopehely | Feb 12, 2019 5:14:49 PM |
link
Nobody has ever advanced the tiniest shred of credible evidence that 'Russia' or its government at any level was in any way implicated
either in Wikileaks' acquisition of the DNC and Podesta emails or in any form of interference with the Presidential election.
This has been going on for three years and not once has anything like evidence surfaced.
On the other hand there has been an abundance of evidence that those alleging Russian involvement consistently refused to listen
to explore the facts.
Incredibly, the DNC computers were never examined by the FBI or any other agency resembling an official police agency. Instead
the notorious Crowdstrike professionally russophobic and caught red handed faking data for the Ukrainians against Russia were
commissioned to produce a 'report.'
Nobody with any sense would have credited anything about Russiagate after that happened.
Thgen there was the proof, from VIPS and Bill Binney (?) that the computers were not hacked at all but that the information
was taken by thumbdrive. A theory which not only Wikileaks but several witnesses have offered to prove.
Not one of them has been contacted by the FBI, Mueller or anyone else "investigating."
In reality the charges from the first were ludicrous on their face. There is, as b has proved and every new day's news attests,
not the slightest reason why anyone in the Russian government should have preferred Trump over Clinton. And that is saying something
because they are pretty well indistinguishable. And neither has the morals or brains of an adolescent groundhog.
Russiagate is over, alright, The Nothingburger is empty. But that means nothing in this 'civilisation': it will be recorded
in the history books, still to be written, by historians still in diapers, that "The 2016 Presidential election, which ended in
the controversial defeat of Hillary Clinton, was heavily influenced by Russian agents who hacked ..etc etc"
What will not be remembered is that every single email released was authentic. And that within those troves of correspondence
there was enough evidence of criminality by Clinton and her campaign to fill a prison camp.
Another thing that will not be recalled is that there was once a young enthusiastic man, working for the DNC, who was mugged
one evening after work and killed.
The 'no collusion' result will only spur the 'beginning of the end' baboons to shout even more, they'll never stop until they
die in their beds or the plebs of the Republic made them adore the street lamp posts, you'll see. The former is by far more likely,
the unwashed of American have never had a penchant for foreign affairs except for the few spasms like Vietnam.
There was collusion alright but the only Russians who helped Trump get elected and were in on the collusion are citizens of ISRAEL
FIRST, likewise for the American billionaires who put Trump in the power perch. ISRAEL FIRST.
That's why Trump is on giant billboards in Israel shaking hands with the Yahoo. Trump is higher in the polls in Israel than
in the U.S. If it weren't that the Zionist upper crust need Trump doing their dirty work in America, like trying today get rid
of Rep. Omar Ilhan, then Trump would win the elections in Ziolandia or Ziostan by a landslide cause he's been better for the Joowish
state than all preceding Presidents put together. Mazel tov to them bullshet for the rest of us servile mass in the vassal West
and Palestinians the most shafted class ever. Down with Venezuela and Iran, up with oil and gas. The billionare shysters' and
Trump's payola is getting closer. Onward AZ Empire!
He proved himself so easy to troll during the election. It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all
along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate.
At least Germany has the good sense not to throw taxpayer money at the F-35.
German F-35 decision sacrifices NATO capability for Franco-German industrial cooperation I don't know what they have
in mind with a proposed airplane purchase. If they need fighters, buy or lease Sweden's Gripen. If attack airplanes are what they're
after, go to Boeing and get some brand new F-15X models. If the prickly French are agreeable to build a 6th generation aircraft,
that would be worth a try.
Regarding Rachel Maddow, I recently had an encounter with a relative who told me 1) I visited too many oddball sites and 2)
he considered Rachel M. to be the most reliable news person in existence. I think we're talking "true believer" here. :)
It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate
they could manipulate.
Considering how those "intelligence agencies" are hard pressed to find their own tails, even if you allow them to use both
hands, it would surprise me.
That Trump would turn out to be a tub of jello in more than just a physical way has been a surprise to an awful lot of us.
Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting
peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their
Government Lackeys.
It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made
that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do
it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it
to be so
Allowed the bipartisan support for the clamp down on alt media with censorship by social media (Deep State Tools) and funded
by the Ministry of Truth set up by Obama in his last days in office to under the false pretense of protecting us from foreign
governments interference in elections (except Israel of course) . Similar agencies have been set up or planned to be in other
countries followig the US example such as UK, France, Russia, etc.
Did anyone really expect Mr "Cover It Up " Mueller to find anything? Mueller is Deep State all the way and Trump is as well,
not withstanding the "Fake Wrestling " drama that they are bitter enemies. All the surveillance done over the past 2-3 decades
would have so much dirt on the Trumpet they could silence him forever . Trump knew that going in and I sometimes wonder if he
was pressured to run as a condition to avoid prosecution. Pretty sure every President since Carter has been "Kompromat"
If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO
Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation,
propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.
Russians and likely at the behest of the Russian state interfered and it was fair payback for Yeltsin's election. It is time to
move on but not in feigned ignorance of what was done. Was it "outcome" affecting, possibly, but not clearly and if the US electoral
college and electoral system generally is so decrepit that a second level power in the world can influence then its the US's fault.
It's not like the 2000 election wasn't a warning shot about the rottenness of system and a system that doesn't understand a
warning shot deserves pretty much what it gets. But there's enough non-hype evidence of acts and intent to say yes, the Russians
tried and may have succeeded. They certainly are acting guilty enough. but still close the book move and move on to Trump's 'real'
crimes which were done without a Russian assist.
I seem to recall former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray saying that it was not a hack and that he had been handed
a thumb drive in a field near American University by a disgruntled Democrat whistleblower. Further, I seem to recall William Binney,
former NSA Technical Leader for intelligence, conducting an experiment to show that internet speeds at the time would not allow
the information to be hacked - they knew the size of the files and the period over which they were downloaded. Plus, Seth Rich.
So why does anyone even believe it was a hack, @32 THN?
Just another comment re Mueller. There is a great documentary by (Dutch, not Israeli---different person) Gideon Levy, Lockerbie
Revisited. The narration is in Dutch, but the interviews are in English, and there is a small segment of a German broadcast. The
documentary ends abruptly where one set of FBI personnel contradict statements by another set of FBI personnel. See also
this primer on Mueller's MO.
reply to Les 42
"It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they
could manipulate."
Not the intelligence agencies, the Military IMO. They knew HC for what she was; horrifically corrupt and,again IMO,they know
she is insane.
They saw and I think still see Trump as someone they could work with, remember Rogers (Navy) of the NSA going to him immediately
once he was elected? That was the Military protecting him as best they could.
They IMO have kept him alive and as long as he doesn't send any troops into "real" wars, they will keep on keeping him alive.
This doesn't mean Trump hasn't gone over to the Dark Side, just that no military action will take place that the military command
doesn't fully support.
Again, I could be wrong, he could be backed by fiends from Patagonia for all I really know:)
The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the
democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to
increase military spending; and more, more, more war.
Boy, I hope Jackrabbit sees this. Everyone knows I believe Trump is the anointed chosen of the Zionist 1%. There was no Russia
collusion; it was Zionist collusion with a Russian twist...
Oh yeah! Forgot to mention the latest. Trump is asking Kim to provide a list of his nuclear scientists! Before Kim acts on this
request, he should call up the Iranian government for advise 'cause they have lots of experience and can warn Kim of what will
happen to each of those scientists. They'll be put on a kill-list and will be extrajudicially wacked as in executed. Can you believe
the chutzpah? Trump must think Kim is really stupid to fall for that one!
Aye! The thought of six more years of Zionist pandering Trump. Barf-inducing prospect is too tame.
The view from the hermitage is, we are in the age of distractions. Russiagate will be replaced with one of a litany of distractions,
purely designed to keep us off target. The target being, corruption, vote rigging, illegal wars, war crimes, overthrowing sovereign
governments, and political assasinations, both at home and abroad. Those so distracted, will focus on sillyness; not the genuine
danger afoot around the planet. Get used to it; it's become the new normal.
@76Hw
I have yet to read anything more delusional, nay, utterly preposterous. Methinks you over-project too much. Even Trump would have
a belly-ache laugh reading that sheeple spiel. You're the type that sees the giant billboard of Zionist Trump and Yahoo shaking
hands and drones on and on that our lying eyes deceive us and it's really Trump playing 4-D chess. I suppose when he tried to
pressure Omar Ilhan into resigning her seat in Congress yesterday, that too was reverse psychology?
Trump instagramed the billboard pic, he tweeted it, he probably pasted it on his wall; maybe with your kind of wacky, Trump
infatuation, you should too!
Russiagate is finished because Mueller discovered an embarrassing fact: The collusion was and always will be with Israel. Here's
Trump professing his endless love for Zionism:
Trump Resign
Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished.
a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the
lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians.
Most designs of armed nation states provide the designers with information feedback and the designers use that information
to appoint more obedient politicians and generals to run things, and to improve the design to better serve the designers. The
armed rule making structure is designed to give the designers complete control over those targeted to be the governed. Why so
stupid the governed? ; always they allow themselves to be manipulated like sheep.
When 10 angry folks approach you with two pieces of ropes: one to throw over the tree branch under which your horse will be
supporting you while they tie the noose around your neck and the other shorter piece of rope to tie your hands behind ..your back
you need at that point to make your words count , if five of the people are black and five are white. all you need do is
say how smart the blacks are, and how stupid the whites are, as the two groups fight each other you manage your escape. democrat
vs republican= divide to conquer. gun, no gun = divide to conquer, HRC vs DJT = divide to conquer, abortion, no abortion = divide
to conquer, Trump is a Russian planted in a high level USA position of power = divide to conquer, They were all in on it together,,
Muller was in the white house to keep the media supplied with XXX, to keep the law enforcement agencies in the loop, and to advise
trump so things would not get out of hand ( its called Manipulation and the adherents to the economic system called Zionism
For the record, Zionism is not related to race, religion or intelligence. Zionism is a system of economics that take's no captives,
its adherents must own everything, must destroy and decimate all actual or imaginary competition, for Zionist are the owners and
masters of everything? Zionism is about power, absolute power, monopoly ownership and using governments everywhere to abuse the
governed. Zionism has many adherents, whites, blacks, browns, Christians, Jews, Islamist, Indians, you name it among each class
of person and walk of life can be found persons who subscribe to the idea that they, and only they, should own everything, and
when those of us, that are content to be the governed let them, before the kill and murder us, they usually end up owning everything.
1. why the Joint non nuclear agreement with Iran and the other nuclear power nations, that prevented Iran from developing nuclear
weapons, was trashed? Someone needs to be able to say Iran is developing ..., at the right time.
2. Why Netanyohu made public a video that claimed Iran was developing nuclear stuff in violation of the Iran non nuclear agreement,
and everybody laughed,
3. Why the nuclear non proliferation agreement with Russia, that terminated the costly useless arms race a decade ago, has
been recently terminated, to reestablish the nuclear arms race, no apparent reason was given the implication might be Russia could
be a target, but
4. why it might make sense to give nukes to Saudi Arabia or some other rogue nation, and
5. why no one is allowed to have nuclear weapons except the Zionist owned and controlled nation states.
Statement: Zionism is an economic system that requires the elimination of all competition of whatever kind. It is a winner
get's all, takes no prisoners, targets all who would threaten or be a challenge or a threat; does not matter if the threat is
in in oil and gas, technology or weapons as soon as a possibility exist, the principles of Zionism would require that it be taken
out, decimated, and destroyed and made where never again it could even remotely be a threat to the Empire, that Zionism demands..
Hypothesis: A claim that another is developing nuclear weapon capabilities is sufficient to take that other out?
I am glad that most commenters understand that Russiagate will not go away. But the majority appear to miss the real reason. Russiagate
is not an accusation, it is the state of mind.
At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on
decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already
brainwashed population?
The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away
from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. Of course, the most ironic in the affair is that it is the so called
US "intellectuals", academics and other assorted cretins who are the most fervent proponents. If you were wondering how Russia
can make such amazing defensive weapons that US can only deny exist and wet dream of having, there is your answer. It is the state
of mind. The whole of US establishment are legends in their on lunch time and totally delusional about the reality surrounding
them - both Russiagate and MAGA cretins, no report can help the Russiagate nation.
Finally, I am thinking of that crazy and ugly professor bitch from the British Cambridge University who gives her lectures
naked to protest something or other. I am so lucky that I do not have to go to a Western university ever again. What a catastrophic
decline! No Brexit can help the Skripal nation.
Russiagate is finished, but is DJT also among the rubble?
Hardly any money for the border wall and still lingering in the ME?
If Hoarsewhisperer proves to be correct above re: DJT, he will really have to knock our socks off before election 2020. To
do this he will have to unequivocally and unceremoniously withdraw from the MENA and Afghanistan and possibly declare a National
Emergency for more money for the wall.
The problem is, when he does this, he will look impulsively dangerous and this may harm his mystique to the lemmings who need
a president to be more "presidential."
My money is on status quo all the way to 2020 and the rethugz hoping the Dems will eat their own in an orgy of warring identities.
The collusion story may be faltering, but the blame for Russia poisoning the Skripals lives on. The other night on The News Hour,
"Judy" led off the program with this: "It has been almost a year since Kremlin intelligence officers attempted to kill a Russian
defector in the British city of Salisbury by poisoning him with a nerve agent. That attack, and the subsequent death of a British
woman, scared away tourists and shoppers, but authorities and residents are working to get the town's economy back on track. Special
correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports."
Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others,
the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry
of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry.
Here is one recent example. You know the measles outbreak in the US Pacific Northwest. Yup, the Russians. How do we know.
A government funded research grant. The study found that 899 tweets caused people to doubt vaccines. Looks like money is
to be had even by academics for the right results.
"... Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the parameters of the debate." ..."
"... "When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media." ..."
"... "And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though they haven't been convicted of anything." ..."
"... "That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said – I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that." ..."
"... Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.. ..."
Cohen has largely been banished from mainstream media.
"I had been arguing for years -- very much against the American political media grain --
that a new US/Russian Cold War was unfolding -- driven primarily by politics in Washington, not
Moscow," Cohen writes in War with Russia. "For this perspective, I had been largely
excluded from influential print, broadcast and cable outlets where I had been previously
welcomed."
On the stage at Busboys and Poets with Cohen was Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of
The Nation magazine, and Robert Borosage, co-founder of the Campaign for America's
Future.
Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship
imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union.
"Until some period of time before Trump, on the question of what America's policy toward
Putin's Kremlin should be, there was a reasonable facsimile of a debate on those venues that
had these discussions," Cohen said. "Are we allowed to mention the former Charlie Rose for
example? On the long interview form, Charlie would have on a person who would argue for a very
hard policy toward Putin. And then somebody like myself who thought it wasn't a good idea."
"Occasionally that got on CNN too. MSNBC not so much. And you could get an op-ed piece
published, with effort, in the New York Times or Washington Post ."
"Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times six or
seven years ago. But then it stopped. And to me, that's the fundamental difference between this
Cold War and the preceding Cold War."
"I will tell you off the record – no, I'm not going to do it," Cohen said. "Two
exceedingly imminent Americans, who most op-ed pages would die to get a piece by, just to say
they were on the page, submitted such articles to the New York Times , and they were
rejected the same day. They didn't even debate it. They didn't even come back and say –
could you tone it down? They just didn't want it."
"Now is that censorship? In Italy, where each political party has its own newspaper, you
would say – okay fair enough. I will go to a newspaper that wants me. But here, we are
used to these newspapers."
"Remember how it works. I was in TV for 18 years being paid by CBS. So, I know how these
things work. TV doesn't generate its own news anymore. Their actual reporting has been
de-budgeted. They do video versions of what is in the newspapers."
"Look at the cable talk shows. You see it in the New York Times and Washington
Post in the morning, you turn on the TV at night and there is the video version. That's
just the way the news business works now."
"The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate
these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in
these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have
been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the
parameters of the debate."
"If you are not, then you struggle to create your own alternative media. It's new in my
lifetime. I know these imminent Americans I mentioned were shocked when they were just told no.
It's a lockdown. And it is a form of censorship."
"When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident
voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes
they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media."
"Dissidents created what is known as samizdat – that's typescript that you circulate
by hand. Gorbachev, before he came to power, did read some samizdat. But it's no match for
newspapers published with five, six, seven million copies a day. Or the three television
networks which were the only television networks Soviet citizens had access to."
"And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some
other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like
keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though
they haven't been convicted of anything."
"That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said
– I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are
doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that."
Cohen appears periodically on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News. And that rankled one person
in the audience at Busboys and Poets, who said he worried that Cohen's perspective on Russia
can be "appropriated by the right."
"Trump can take that and run on a nationalistic platform – to hell with NATO, to
hell with fighting these endless wars, to do what he did in 2016 and get the votes of people
who are very concerned about the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia," the
man said.
Cohen says that on a personal level, he likes Tucker Carlson "and I don't find him to be a
racist or a nationalist."
"Nationalism is on the rise around the world everywhere," Cohen said. "There are
different kinds of nationalism. We always called it patriotism in this country, but we have
always been a nationalistic country."
"Fox has about three to four million viewers at that hour," Cohen said. "If I am not
permitted to give my take on American/Russian relations on any other mass media, and by the
way, possibly talk directly to Trump, who seems to like his show, and say – Trump is
making a mistake, he should do this or do that instead -- I don't get many opportunities
– and I can't see why I shouldn't do it."
"I get three and a half to four minutes," Cohen said. "I don't see it as consistent with my
mission, if that's the right word, to say no. These articles I write for The Nation ,
which ended up in my book, are posted on some of the most God awful websites in the world. I
had to look them up to find out how bad they really are. But what can I do about it?"
What "pretzelattack" does not understand is for whom Luke Harding actually works. Intelligence agencies
control The Guardian and shape forums in the direction they consider beneficial.
Notable quotes:
"... As far as upholding our Community Standards is concerned, The Guardian has decided to stand by the article and thus The Guardian views comments such as yours as misrepresentation. ..."
When you take issue with Editorial decisions of the Guardian, the Moderation team is the
wrong place to address it. You would have better luck following the procedures outlined on
https://www.theguardian.com/info/complaints-and-corrections.
As far as upholding our Community Standards is concerned, The Guardian has decided
to stand by the article and thus The Guardian views comments such as yours as
misrepresentation.
There is also the matter that most of your removed comments are Off Topic for the
discussions on which you post them, which breaches point 8 of our Community Standards.
8. Keep it relevant. We know that some conversations can be wide-ranging, but if you
post something which is unrelated to the original topic ("off-topic") then it may be
removed, in order to keep the thread on track. This also applies to queries or comments
about moderation, which should not be posted as comments.
Premoderation is usually only a temporary measure. Post consistently in line with the
community standards you agreed to abide by when creating your account and the sanction will
be lifted and full commenting privileges restored to your account. Post consistently
against the spirit of the community standards and you risk a permanent ban.
Best wishes
Meg,
Community Moderator
Links: The Guardian's Community Standards & FAQs
This was about the blatant bullshit, by Luke Harding, about Assange and manning meeting at
the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
"The guardian stands by the story" by censoring critical comments, while never bothering
to try to defend the actual reporting.
Of course, that would be difficult since there is no evidence that Manafort somehow
whisked himself (maybe a dr. who tardis) in and out of one of the most heavily surveilled
sites in the world.
"... Maté explains why he thinks this narrative ultimately aligns with the longstanding interests of U.S. establishment power. He calls it a "privilege protection racket" that thrives on distraction and misdirection, turning the public away from a real critique of the rise of Trumpism that would otherwise implicate the neoliberal policies of democrats and conservatives alike, foreign policy think tanks, and the media. ..."
Aaron is gong to break down "Russiagate," taking a sober look at the media frenzy of
"bombshell" stories asserting a Russian conspiracy behind the 2016 election.
Maté explains why he thinks this narrative ultimately aligns with the
longstanding interests of U.S. establishment power. He calls it a "privilege protection racket"
that thrives on distraction and misdirection, turning the public away from a real critique of
the rise of Trumpism that would otherwise implicate the neoliberal policies of democrats and
conservatives alike, foreign policy think tanks, and the media.
And in a prior NBC News article Tuesday morning, Dilanian
spelled out :
After two years and 200 interviews , the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the
end of its investigation into the 2016 election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a
conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia , according to both Democrats and
Republicans on the committee.
MSNBC anchor Hallie Jackson and her guest panelists' faces looked visibly confused and
uncomfortable as they learned the Senate report is going in the opposite direction of
everything MSNBC and other mainstream outlets have been breathlessly reporting on a near 24/7
basis.
More importantly, if this is a precursor of what the Mueller report concludes in a few
weeks/months, the TV station that built its current reputation on the premise of Russian
collusion, may have no option but to go on indefinite hiatus.
Watch the segment below, with host Hallie Jackson appearing to grow exasperated by the
2:20 mark : "If and when the president, as he may inevitably do, points to these
conclusions and says look, the Senate intelligence committee found I am not guilty of
conspiracy... he would be correct in saying that? "
Dilanian noted that while the Republican chair of the committee made what he characterized
as "partisan" comments the week prior, it turned out be unanimous fact. "What I found," he
said, "is that Democrats don't dispute that characterization ."
But perhaps sensing how "contrary" to the network's own hysterical 'Russiagate' coverage his
reporting was, he tried to soften the blow, saying, "But, again, no direct proof of a
conspiracy. As one democratic aide said to me, 'we never thought we were going to find a
Democrat between Trump and Vladimir Putin saying let's collude, but the question is how do we
interpret all these various contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.'"
Hallie Jackson followed with further probing: "Not to put too fine a point on it, but I want
to make sure I'm understanding this..." and asked "If and when the president, as he may
inevitably do, points to these conclusions and says look, the Senate intelligence committee
found I'm not guilty of conspiracy... he would be correct in saying that? "
Her face looking rather incredulous at this point, Dilanian responded by invoking the
Mueller investigation, reassuring her his inquiry is not complete and likely could uncover more
information. But then the bottom line: "That said, Trump will claim vindication through this,
and he'll be partially right," he said. But Dilanian also noted the Senate intel committee has
access to classified material, which means "if there was an intercept between officers
suggesting they were conspiring with the Trump campaign, [the committee] would see that. And
that has not emerged."
"So that evidence does not exist, and Trump will claim vindication," he repeated.
Yet after all this, during the full segment Vice News guest panelist Shawna Thomas actually
invoked impeachment in what appeared a desperate attempt to grasp for anything . "There's two
things I question about [the report]," she began.
"Number one, if and when the report finally comes out from the Senate intelligence
committee, is there anything in there that will cause, especially some of these new House Dems,
to start to clamor, even if there isn't 'conspiracy' or 'collusion', for impeachment?" said
Thomas.
But then she tried to deflate the whole thing, upsetting as it was for purveyors of the
collusion narrative: "The other thing is, based on what Ken is saying, it's all stuff we knew
already," she said.
Right... cause in MSNBC's Russiagate-land "the walls are closing in" on Trump, constantly.
Except the network just woke up to the reality that it's not the case.
We only wonder what Rachel Maddow will be left with after this.
Go to a large library and cross-reference James Jesus Angleton, Kim Philby, Miles Copeland and Nicholas Elliott in the "spy" books.
Soon you will begin to see that MI6 was there at the OSS and later CIA inceptions.
At the hidden deep levels, both these agencies serve the GLOBALIST' enterprise, and have since the start.
Then you will understand Steele and the "five eyes" involvement in the Russia hoax.
March 19, 2017 The CIA's 60-Year History of Fake News How the Deep State Corrupted Many
American Writers
Whitney's new book, "Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers," explores how
the CIA influenced acclaimed writers and publications during the Cold War to produce subtly
anti-communist material. During the interview, Scheer and Whitney discuss these manipulations
and how the CIA controlled major news agencies and respected literary publications (such as
the Paris Review).
JANUARY 18, 2017 CIA Publishes About 13 Million Pages of Declassified Files Online
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) published nearly 13 million pages of declassified
files on its official website for the first time in its history. The declassified files were
previously publicly available only at the National Archives in Maryland.
Intelligence agencies like CIA is a threat to "normal" societies as they tend to acquire
power with time and tail start wagging the dog. Mechanism of control are usually subverted and
considerable part of their activities is dome without informing "supervisory" structures.
In the USA sometimes CIA monitor Congress communications and tries to coerce them like was the case when the torture program was revealed. In other words intelligence agencies are the core
neofascist structures in modern society and as such represent a distinct danger.
Notable quotes:
"... Organizations like the CIA are obviously fallible and have made many mistakes and failed to anticipate world events. But they are also very powerful, having great financial backing, and do the bidding of their masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc. They are the action arm of these financial elites, and are, as Douglass Valentine has written, organized criminals. ..."
"... The corporate mass media take their orders, orders that need not be direct, but sometimes are, because these media are structured to do the bidding of the same elites that formed the CIA and own the media. And while their ostensible raison d'ȇtre is to provide intelligence to the nation's civilian leaders, this is essentially a cover story for their real work that is propaganda, killing, and conducting coups d'états at home and abroad. ..."
"... Because they have deep pockets, they can afford to buy all sorts of people, people who pimp for the elites. Some of these people do work that is usually done by honest academics and independent intellectuals, a dying breed, once called free-floating intellectuals. These pimps analyze political, economic, technological, and cultural trends. They come from different fields: history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, linguistics, etc. They populate the think tanks and universities. They are often intelligent but live in bad faith, knowing they are working for those who are doing the devil's work. But they collect their pay and go their way straight to the bank, the devil's bank. They often belong to the Council of Foreign Relations or the Heritage Foundation. They are esteemed and esteem themselves. But they are pimps. ..."
"... Infecting minds with such symbols and stories must be done directly and indirectly, as well as short-term and long-term. Long term propaganda is like a slowly leaking water pipe that you are vaguely aware of but that rots the metal from within until the pipe can no longer resist the pressure. Drip drop, drip drop, drip drop -- and the inattentive recipients of the propaganda gradually lose their mettle to resist and don't know it, and then when an event bursts into the news -- e.g. the attacks of September 11, 2001 or Russia-gate -- they have been so softened that their assent is automatically given. They know without hesitation who the devil is and that he must be fought. ..."
"... The purpose of the long-term propaganda is to create certain predispositions and weaknesses that can be exploited when needed. Certain events can be the triggers to induce the victims to react to suggestions. When the time is ripe, all that is needed is a slight suggestion, like a touch on the shoulder, and the hypnotized one acts in a trance. ..."
"... Very entertaining. Now tell us how all this works. And what the CIA gets out of it. I mean they surely don't do it for nothing do they? Does the CIA Director get rich for working for 'masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc'? Or is everyone under a giant Satanic Cult in the sky and the CIA is their headquarters on earth? ..."
...The Nazis had a name for their propaganda and mind-control operations:
weltanschauungskrieg -- "world view warfare." As good students, they had learned many
tricks of the trade from their American teachers, including Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward
Bernays, who had honed his propagandistic skills for the United States during World War I and
had subsequently started the public relations industry in New York City, an industry whose
raison d'etre from the start was to serve the interests of the elites in manipulating the
public mind.
In 1941, U.S. Intelligence translated weltanschauungskrieg as "psychological
warfare," a phrase that fails to grasp the full dimensions of the growing power and penetration
of U.S. propaganda, then and now. Of course, the American propaganda apparatus was just then
getting started on an enterprise that has become the epitome of successful world view warfare
programs, a colossal beast whose tentacles have spread to every corner of the globe and whose
fabrications have nestled deep within the psyches of many hundreds of millions of Americans and
people around the world. And true to form in this circle game of friends helping friends, this
propaganda program was ably assisted after WW II by all the Nazis secreted into the U.S.
("Operation Paperclip") by Allen Dulles and his henchmen in the OSS and then the CIA to make
sure the U.S. had operatives to carry on the Nazi legacy (see David Talbot's The Devil's
Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA, and The Rise of America's Secret Government , an
extraordinary book that will make your skin crawl with disgust).
This went along quite smoothly until some people started to question the Warren Commission's
JFK assassination story. The CIA then went on the offensive in 1967 and put out the word to all
its people in the agency and throughout the media and academia to use the phrase "conspiracy
theory" to ridicule these skeptics, which they have done up until the present day. This secret
document -- CIA Dispatch
1035-960 -- was a propaganda success for many decades, marginalizing those researchers and
writers who were uncovering the truth about not just President Kennedy's murder by the national
security state, but those of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. Today, the tide
is turning on this score, as recently more and more Americans are fed up with the lies and are
demanding that the truth be told. Even the
Washington Post is noting this, and it is a wave of opposition that will only grow.
The CIA Exposed -- Partially
But back in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, some covert propaganda programs run by the CIA
were "exposed." First, the Agency's sponsorship of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, through
which it used magazines, prominent writers, academics, et al. to spread propaganda during the
Cold War, was uncovered. This was an era when Americans read serious literary books, writers
and intellectuals had a certain cachet, and popular culture had not yet stupefied Americans.
The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary
and intellectual elites. Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999 book,
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters , and Joel Whitney
followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers, with
particular emphasis on the complicity of the CIA and the famous literary journal The Paris
Review.
Then in 1975 the Church Committee hearings resulted in the exposure of abuses by the CIA,
NSA, FBI, etc. In 1977 Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire -- "The CIA and the
Media" -- naming names of journalists and publications ( TheNew York Times, CBS
, etc.) that worked with and for the CIA in propagandizing the American people and the rest of
the world. (Conveniently, this article can be read on the CIA's website since presumably the
agency has come clean, or, if you are the suspicious type, or maybe a conspiracy theorist, it
is covering its deeper tracks with a "limited hangout," defined by former CIA agent Victor
Marchetti, who went rogue, as "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the
clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely
on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting -- sometimes even
volunteering -- some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts
in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never
thinks to pursue the matter further.")
Confess and Move On
By the late 1970s, it seemed as if the CIA had been caught in flagrante delicto and
disgraced, had confessed its sins, done penance, and resolved to go and sin no more. Seeming,
however, is the nature of the CIA's game. Organized criminals learn to adapt to the changing
times, and that is exactly what the intelligence operatives did. Since the major revelations of
the late sixties and seventies -- MKUltra, engineered coups all around the world,
assassinations of foreign leaders, spying on Americans, etc. -- no major program of propaganda
has been exposed in the mainstream media. Revealing books about certain CIA programs have been
written -- e.g. Douglas Valentine's important The Phoenix Program being one -- and
dissenting writers, journalists, researchers, and whistleblowers (Robert Parry, Gary Webb,
Julian Assange, James W. Douglass, David Ray Griffin, Edward Snowden, et al.) have connected
the U.S. intelligence services to dirty deeds and specific actions, such as the American
engineered coup d'état in Ukraine in 2013-14, electronic spying, and the attacks of
September 11, 2001.
But the propaganda has for the most part continued unabated at a powerful and esoteric
cultural level, while illegal and criminal actions are carried out throughout the world in the
most blatant manner imaginable, as if to say fuck you openly while insidiously infecting the
general population through the mass electronic screen culture that has relegated intellectual
and literary culture to a tiny minority.
Planning Ahead
Let me explain what I think has been happening.
Organizations like the CIA are obviously fallible and have made many mistakes and failed
to anticipate world events. But they are also very powerful, having great financial backing,
and do the bidding of their masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc. They are the action arm
of these financial elites, and are, as Douglass Valentine has written, organized
criminals. They have their own military, are joined to all the armed forces, and are
deeply involved in the drug trade. They control the politicians. They operate their own
propaganda network in conjunction with the private mercenaries they hire for their operations.
The corporate mass media take their orders, orders that need not be direct, but sometimes
are, because these media are structured to do the bidding of the same elites that formed the
CIA and own the media. And while their ostensible raison d'ȇtre is to provide intelligence
to the nation's civilian leaders, this is essentially a cover story for their real work that is
propaganda, killing, and conducting coups d'états at home and abroad.
Because they have deep pockets, they can afford to buy all sorts of people, people who
pimp for the elites. Some of these people do work that is usually done by honest academics and
independent intellectuals, a dying breed, once called free-floating intellectuals. These pimps
analyze political, economic, technological, and cultural trends. They come from different
fields: history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, cultural studies,
linguistics, etc. They populate the think tanks and universities. They are often intelligent
but live in bad faith, knowing they are working for those who are doing the devil's work. But
they collect their pay and go their way straight to the bank, the devil's bank. They often
belong to the Council of Foreign Relations or the Heritage Foundation. They are esteemed and
esteem themselves. But they are pimps.
... ... ...
Methods of Propaganda
Infecting minds with such symbols and stories must be done directly and indirectly, as
well as short-term and long-term. Long term propaganda is like a slowly leaking water pipe that
you are vaguely aware of but that rots the metal from within until the pipe can no longer
resist the pressure. Drip drop, drip drop, drip drop -- and the inattentive recipients of the
propaganda gradually lose their mettle to resist and don't know it, and then when an event
bursts into the news -- e.g. the attacks of September 11, 2001 or Russia-gate -- they have been
so softened that their assent is automatically given. They know without hesitation who the
devil is and that he must be fought.
The purpose of the long-term propaganda is to create certain predispositions and
weaknesses that can be exploited when needed. Certain events can be the triggers to induce the
victims to react to suggestions. When the time is ripe, all that is needed is a slight
suggestion, like a touch on the shoulder, and the hypnotized one acts in a trance. The gun
goes off, and the entranced one can't remember why (see: Sirhan Sirhan). This is the goal of
mass hypnotization through long-term propaganda: confusion, memory loss, and automatic reaction
to suggestion.
Intelligence Pimps and Liquid Screen Culture
When the CIA's dirty tricks were made public in the 1970s, it is not hard to imagine that
the intellectual pimps who do their long-range thinking were asked to go back to the drawing
board and paint a picture of the coming decades and how business as usual could be conducted
without further embarrassment. By that time it had become clear that intellectual or high
culture was being swallowed by mass culture and the future belonged to electronic screen
culture and images, not words. What has come to be called "postmodernity" ensued, or what the
sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls "liquid modernity" and Guy Debord "the society of the
spectacle." Such developments, rooted in what Frederic Jameson has termed "the cultural logic
of late capitalism," have resulted in the fragmentation of social and personal life into
pointillistic moving pictures whose dots form incoherent images that sow mass confusion and do
not cohere.
... ... ...
Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/
But they are also very powerful, having great financial backing, and do the bidding of
their masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc. They are the action arm of these
financial elites, and are, as Douglass Valentine has written, organized criminals. They
have their own military, are joined to all the armed forces, and are deeply involved in the
drug trade. They control the politicians. They operate their own propaganda network in
conjunction with the private mercenaries they hire for their operations. The corporate mass
media take their orders, orders that need not be direct, but sometimes are, because these
media are structured to do the bidding of the same elites that formed the CIA and own the
media. And while their ostensible raison d'ȇtre is to provide intelligence to the
nation's civilian leaders, this is essentially a cover story for their real work that is
propaganda, killing, and conducting coups d'états at home and abroad.
Very entertaining. Now tell us how all this works. And what the CIA gets out of it. I
mean they surely don't do it for nothing do they? Does the CIA Director get rich for working
for 'masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc'? Or is everyone under a giant Satanic Cult
in the sky and the CIA is their headquarters on earth?
Under "The CIA Exposed" could have mentioned Philip Agee's "Inside the Company" as he was the
Edward Snowden of his day.
Interestingly, CIA agent Miles Copeland, Jr., the father of the drummer of the British
band "The Police", said the book was "as complete an account of spy work as is likely to be
published anywhere" and that it is "an authentic account of how an ordinary American or
British 'case officer' operates
" Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who had honed his propagandistic skills for
the United States during World War I and had subsequently started the public relations
industry in New York City, an industry whose raison d'etre from the start was to serve the
interests of the elites in manipulating the public mind.
In 1941, U.S. Intelligence translated weltanschauungskrieg as "psychological warfare," a
phrase that fails to grasp the full dimensions of the growing power and penetration of U.S.
propaganda, then and now."
The Yank propaganda machine always was an alliance between WASP Elites and Jews. Always.
The Yank WASPs knew that Brit and British Commonwealth WASPs had done the same thing: make
alliance to rule the world, which featured – not a bug but a feature – new ways
to use psy ops to pervert the vast majority of white Christians they ruled.
Until that is understood, which means accepting that WASP culture itself is a problem as
big as Jews and Jewish culture, all that is done in opposition to all that is horrendously
wrong today is wasted time and energy.
@DESERT
FOX The CIA is a British creation, just like Israel's Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General
Intelligence Presidency.
The CIA is a pure WASP Elite creation. It always has served the interests of the WASP
Elite, in the UK and the rest of the Anglosphere as well the US. And the CIA always has
served the interests of Jews and Israel, because that makes perfect sense for WASP culture,
which was formed fully, completed, by the Judaizing heresy Anglo-Saxon Puritanism.
Judaizing heresy guarantees pro-Jewish politics and culture.
Sean, Who else, is here first with the CIA line, "CIA works for the president!" CIA
shoehorned that into the Pike Committee report right after Don Gregg visited the committees
and gave them an ultimatum: back off or it's martial law.
Then Sean mouths a bit of bureaucratic bafflegab about feasibility.
The feasibility of CIA crime is a product of CIA impunity. So next Sean feeds you more CIA
boilerplate by trying to pathologize anyone who's aware of CIA impunity through formal legal
pretexts in municipal law. John Bolton, Trump's CIA ventriloquist, had one prime directive as
unauthorized UN ambassador: remove any reference to impunity from the Summit Outcome
Document. To that end he submitted 600+ NeoSoviet amendments to paralyze the drafting
process.
That's how touchy CIA is about its impunity. CIA is the state, with illegal absolute
sovereignty because they can kill you or torture you and get away with it.
If you're John Kennedy, if you're Robert Kennedy, if you're Dag Hammarskjöld, if
you're Judge Robert Vance. No matter who you are.
"... "Am I crazy?" -Bari Weiis Well Bari Weiis you're either crazy or you're a yet another worthless establishment shill whose job is spread deliberate misinformation about the most genuine anti-war candidate running at a time when the entire MSM, MIC, and the neoliberal rightwing establishment (including AIPAC) is deliberately smearing her to immediately kill her campaign. And you didn't come across as crazy so... ..."
This woman had NO CLUE what she was talking about. She thought she was on a show that would just tow the party line and let
her get away with wrong statements. She's just repeating what critics say with no idea of the truth. What a fool. As a woman,
THIS IS WHY I WON'T JUST VOTE FOR ANY WOMAN. We are just as capable of being stupid as anyone else.
Bari: "I think Tulsi Gabbard is an Assad toadie." Joe: "What do you mean by toadie?" Bari: "Oh, I don't know what that means."
Joe: "Okay, I looked it up, and it's like a sycophant." Bari: "Then Tulsi is like an Assad sycophant." Joe: "So what do you mean
by that?" Bari: "I'm not sure what sycophant means either." Joe: "I looked up the definition, it's like a suck-up." Bari: "All
right, Tulsi is an Assad suck-up." Joe: "Could you explain that further?" Bari: "I don't know what suck means." Joe: "It's what
you're doing right now."
"Am I crazy?" -Bari Weiis Well Bari Weiis you're either crazy or you're a yet another worthless establishment shill whose job
is spread deliberate misinformation about the most genuine anti-war candidate running at a time when the entire MSM, MIC, and
the neoliberal rightwing establishment (including AIPAC) is deliberately smearing her to immediately kill her campaign. And you
didn't come across as crazy so...
I will be very surprised if neocons would not frame her Putin toady as well. This is how this
system works. It eliminates undesirable to the neoliberals candidates with 100% efficiency.
They
serve as local STASI and some former STASI official might well envy neocons efficiency of
silencing opponents (with much less blood and overt repression, by pure magic of neocon
propaganda ).
Notable quotes:
"... She has "monstrous ideas, she's an Assad toady," Weiss tells Rogan. ..."
"... Rogan then reads the definition: "Toadies. The definition of toadies: A person who flatters or defers to others for self-serving reasons." "A sycophant. So I did use it right!" Weiss exclaims. "So she's an Assad sycophant? Is that what you're saying?" "Yeah, that's, proven -- known -- about her." ..."
"... When Rogan asks what Gabbard has said that qualifies her as a sycophant, Weiss replies: "I don't remember the details." ..."
"... Gabbard, who announced her presidential campaign on January 11, has drawn incredible amounts of ire from mainstream Democrats tripping over themselves for war with Syria because in January 2017, Gabbard met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and denounced the opposition rebels in the country's civil war as "terrorists." ..."
"... She has also expressed skepticism about accusations that Assad's government has used chemical weapons during the conflict and spoken out against cruise missile attacks by the US and its allies against the country. ..."
Monday to discuss current events, but
things got embarrassing when she went in on Gabbard, a progressive Democrat whose foreign
policy positions have turned more than a few heads.
Neocon NY Times columnist Bari Weiss smeared Tulsi Gabbard (who bravely opposed regime
change and US support for Salafi-jihadist contras) as an "Assad toady," then couldn't
spell/define toady or offer any evidence to prove her smear. Embarrassingly funny pic.twitter.com/m0MLaHFPiX
When Rogan asks for clarification, she says, "I think that I used that word correctly." She
then asks someone off camera to look up what toady means. "Like toeing the line," Rogan says,
"is that what it means?" "No, I think it's like, uh " and Weiss drones off without an answer.
She then attempts to spell it, and can't even do that. "T-O-A-D-I-E. I think it means what I
think it means "
Rogan then reads the definition: "Toadies. The definition of toadies: A person who flatters
or defers to others for self-serving reasons." "A sycophant. So I did use it right!" Weiss
exclaims. "So she's an Assad sycophant? Is that what you're saying?" "Yeah, that's, proven --
known -- about her."
When Rogan asks what Gabbard has said that qualifies her as a sycophant,
Weiss replies: "I don't remember the details."
"We probably should say that before we say that about her -- we should probably read it,
rather, right now, just so we know what she said," Rogan notes. "I think she's, like, the
motherlode of bad ideas," Weiss then says. "I'm pretty positive about that, especially on
Assad. But maybe I'm wrong. I don't think I'm wrong." It seems to us here at Sputnik that such
claims should be made with a bit more confidence than this. So let's set the record
straight.
Gabbard, who announced her presidential campaign on January 11, has drawn incredible amounts
of ire from mainstream Democrats tripping over themselves for war with Syria because in January
2017, Gabbard met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and denounced the opposition rebels in
the country's civil war as "terrorists."
She has also expressed skepticism about accusations that Assad's
government has used chemical weapons during the conflict and spoken out against cruise missile
attacks by the US and its allies against the country.
"Initially I hadn't planned on meeting him," Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran, told CNN's Jake
Tapper following the meeting. "When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so, because I
felt it's important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their
suffering, then we've got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a
possibility that we could achieve peace. And that's exactly what we talked about."
"I have seen this cost of war firsthand, which is why I fight so hard for peace," Gabbard
said. "And that's the reality of the situation that we're facing here. It's why I have urged
and continue to urge [US President Donald] Trump to meet with people like Kim Jong Un in North
Korea, because we understand what's at stake here. The only alternative to having these kinds
of conversations is more war."
Moreover, in a March 2016 speech before Congress, Gabbard called Assad
"a brutal dictator," noting that her opposition to what she called a "war bill" was over the
legal ramifications that she feared would lead to the overthrow of Assad, which she opposes on
anti-interventionist grounds.
"[T]oppling ruthless dictators in the Middle East creates even more human suffering and
strengthens our enemy, groups like ISIS and other terrorist organizations, in those countries,"
Gabbard
said at the time.
Gabbard has been thoroughly demonized for her pro-peace views by global liberal media, as
Trump has been for his moves to end the war in Syria and avoid another on the Korean Peninsula.
For example, The Daily Beast's
article announcing her candidacy called Gabbard "Assad's Favorite Democrat" in its
headline; a Haaretz
headline from last week say she had "Tea With Assad," and the Washington Post has
called her "Assad's Mouthpiece in Washington." The UK Independent
called her a "defender of dictators."
It's not clear what Weiss had in mind when she called Gabbard a "sycophant" and a "toady,"
since the congresswoman's rhetoric about Assad has consisted of skepticism and opposition to
intervention, and she hasn't hesitated to call the Syrian president a "brutal dictator." What
Gabbard's treatment has demonstrated is that a Democrat who steps out of line from the party's
pro-regime change agenda in Syria and who condemns Muslim extremists associated with Daesh and
al-Qaeda should be prepared to suffer for it in the mainstream media.
I love Tulsi; her ad was great. She's the only dem I would vote for at this point. Kamala is an evil hypocrite. And Tulsi's
right, love is the most powerful force in the planet.
Wake up folks -Tulsi would not have run if Bernie was going run. Bernie will endorse her early on and she will have a much
tougher fight than he did, because while Sanders caught the corporate establishment sleeping in 2016, they are now frightened
and see Gabbard coming. They will use every dirty trick at their disposal to keep her from catching fire -and that begins with
dividing progressives like us. Tulsi is not perfect because no one is perfect. But she is young, bright and fucking fearless compared
to other politicians about putting the long term good of the American people above the moneyed interests who think they own our
media and our government. This is why the establishment despises her more than even Sanders. 2020 will reveal weather or not we
can retake ownership of our media and our government. That fight will require all of us - so Kyle get on the bus!
Tulsi is an amazing candidate in her own right, but IMO she would be a perfect VP pick for Bernie. She has the amazing foreign
policy cred and would really shore up Bernie's weakest areas.
Tulsa Gabbard's ad doesn't mention the people who die in the countries we invade. That's 600k people in Iraq for example. A
significant omission me thinks.
The Aloha Spirit Law is a big deal in Hawaii. Government officials are required to approach dignitaries from other countries
or states with the spirit of aloha. "Aloha" means mutual regard and affection and extends warmth in caring with no obligation
in return. Aloha is the essence of relationships in which each person is important to every other person for collective existence.
I think that's what we want in a President or a diplomat.
She's great and unique as she doesnt fall back to identity politics and sjwism as much as the standard left politicians. I
hope she doesnt bend her ethics when the sjws come for her. I'm putting my trust in her. I hope she wins. And if she isn't in
the race, i wont be voting.
The question I would love her to address specifically is will her campaign focus on decreasing military spending like Bernie
Sanders? She has a military background and the US loves war. This ad is good but it is tip toing around the MIC ( military industrial
complex) She can be non interventionist but not decrease military spending is what worries me
This is why we need Gabbard on the debate stage. She will push the Overton window on revealing to the public what our military
is actually doing overseas. She's also a staunch progressive. Bernie/Tulsi 2020. Their weakness match well with each other, and
Tulsi was one of the first to jump ship on the sinking DNC ship when Hillary got caught cheating being the DNC. Keep small donations
going into your favorite progressive candidates to hear their voice. It doesn't work any other way folks.
Intervention isn't only an issue about morality. As Dwight Eisenhower put it (even though he himself was far from an anti imperialist),
you can't have an endless stream of money dedicated to military endeavors AND a sufficient investment in domestic public priorities.
This easily explains why we have increasingly decrepit infrastructure, increasingly worse performing education, increasingly worse
performing health care, absurdly insufficient regulation between government and business (although the pay to play system certainly
is the top reason) and a generally decaying public atmosphere. Beyond the fact that getting involved everywhere creates humanitarian
crises, countless dead people, hopelessly destroyed countries, and so much more, even if other countries haven't in return bombed
our shores from sea to sea, even if generally speaking those who consider not only the US but Americans the "enemies" haven't
overwhelmed with non stop attacks, this non stop and ever growing appetite for more money for more war priorities has created
the very decline we see in our country today. Until there is a change in priorities in general, these problems in the US will
only continue to get worse.
Man, Tulsi made me tear up. She's my girl. This message reminds me more of the message of Jesus than many of the fundamentalists.
She's not even Christian, yet represents Christ very well. I love this woman.
Prepare for BAE, Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other weapons corporations and their bum lickers to launch a viscous
smear campaign against her suggesting she's somehow a Neo Nazi communist anti Semitic islamophobic islamist.
Tulsi 2020 she's saying some of the same things Trump said in his 2016 campaign. Unfortunately, he didn't deliver. Per the
corporate Democrates, making America better is a bad thing.
Tulsi can actually beat Trump...if she gets the nomination. The wars are the elephant in the room, and whoever is willing to
take that on full force, can win.
Muller investigation is at least 50% about the masking cracks in neoliberal facade with
Russia interference smoke screen (and, especially Hillary fiasco as War Party candidate) , as it
is about deposing of Trump. It also puts pressure of Trump to behave as War Party expect him,
or...
Looks like the "United War Party" (which encompass most Republicans and Democrats) felt the
threat to the money flows and acted accordingly. Add to this interest of Deep State (especially
CIA) are completely opposite to the end of foreign wars that Trump professed.
Notable quotes:
"... What causes otherwise intelligent people to put their faith in conspiracy theories? A common explanation on the Right is that these conspiracies are cynically concocted to overthrow the Trump presidency. Another explanation points to declining standards of journalism, i.e., reporters being too incompetent to refute groundless claims. Both reasons have merit yet both fail to explain the peculiar estrangement from reality that a belief in baseless conspiracies represents. ..."
"... When the luminescence of France began to fade and the revolutionary army began to falter, the Jacobins felt there could only be one explanation: conspiracy. Only a deep-seated plot could be preventing France the Savior from vanquishing retrograde monarchs. From the beginning, the virtuous Jacobins saw themselves as fighting a conspiracy against the rights of humanity. Hence the Reign of Terror, with the guillotine deployed against priests and nobles who were seen as forming the core opposition to a better world. ..."
"... Idealism and conspiracy theories are, it seems, opposite sides of the same coin. When the dream fails to materialize, its validity is not questioned; instead the search to find those who connived against it begins. ..."
"... Fukuyama's Hegelianism was both warmed over and unmoored from reality. And yet the foreign policy establishment swooned over him. The Bush 43 administration fell so hard for him that they tried to give history a little push by invading Iraq. ..."
"... Or consider the globalist dreaming of the elites that Samuel P. Huntington labeled "Davos men." In the Davos dream, culture, history, and religion are archaic relics of a world fading away. National borders are disappearing, and a new global order is emerging, led by secular multilateral institutions staffed by an all-knowing "cosmopolitan" elite ..."
"... With cultures clashing, nationalism on the march, and religious wars raging, the Davos men continue to worship their dream from the safety of their Gulfstream jets. ..."
"... And to the Davos men, only a conspiracy can explain the election of Donald Trump. How else could such a regressive development have occurred when history is cascading toward open borders, democracy, and international institutions? How could an American president question the value of NATO and other alliances whose glorious mission is to midwife the end of history by democratizing everything from Lisbon to the Urals? ..."
"... But Trump and Putin will not be permitted to conspire against the dream. Their conspiracy must be destroyed, even at the risk of nuclear war. Special counsels must be created, eavesdropping must be expanded, foreign spies must be employed, and jackbooted agents must break down every door linked to this insidious conspiracy. The ruling elites are prepared to tear up the Constitution itself to save humanity from this diabolical cabal. ..."
"... The resilience of the Russia conspiracy in the minds of our establishment should remind us that the primary obstacle to a sensible foreign policy is our ideologized culture, in which the Western outlook of common sense has been eroded by a Romantic utopian idealism. When people within reach of massive military power are this estranged from reality, the situation can only be described as frightening. ..."
"... With you on "Davos Man" (Love that expression!) and the Trump conspiracy idiocy, though! Two thumbs up! ..."
"... You are making this much too complicated. The cultural stuff had some importance, but much more fundamentally Trump threatened the money/power game of the War Party. They have just about won anyway, because Trump is stupid. So, maybe they will just let Russia-gate fade out. ..."
"... Neolibs and neocons are . Dreamers. GIGO. Whoever wrote the headline and lede made sense, the author might want to match that. The text as is is a useful exhibit for: "to see the world how they wish it to be rather than how it is." Jacobins at Davos? Idealists with lots of loot? ..."
"... At one time, any occurrence that the establishment of the day didn't like was automatically blamed on Jews. No evidence necessary. Because Jews. If you questioned the conspiracy theory, you were instantly accused of being in league with "them". Today's establishment does the same, except they substitute "Russia" for "Jews". Anything they don't like is automatically blamed on Russia. No evidence necessary. Because Russia. Question the conspiracy theory and get accused of being a "Russian troll". ..."
"... If only HRC and her friends were in the White House all these current conspiracies and Mueller investigation wouldn't be an issue. Be the eighth wonder of the world, if Trump survives the deep state. ..."
"... Unfortunately, this article overreaches. I agree that Russiagate is an excuse that liberals embrace to excuse the disastrous failures of Clinton and the Democratic Party, but you don't need to connect this with some grand theorizing about the history of conspiracy theories. People simply don't want to admit their side did anything wrong. ..."
"... And as SteveK9 points out, it's really about how the mainstream War Party wants to keep Trump in line. Trump is a loose cannon. They want a steady reliable warmonger. ..."
"... Call me a child, then, but wisdom often comes from the mouth of babes. There is no evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Read The phoney indictment of the Internet Research Institute. It admits it was a commercial enterprise. It was nothing but a commercial click bait operation. Similarly, the DNC was not hacked, the data was downloaded to a USB, probably by a disaffected Sanders supporter, possibly Seth Rich. Also, Germany, Macedonia, the Netherlands have investigated alleged Russian interference in their elections, and found none. ..."
The Intercept 's Glenn Greenwald recently compiled a list of the
top 10 "most embarrassing media failures on the Trump-Russia story." All of them exhibit a
common theme: Russian conspiracies are undermining American interests everywhere. Greenwald's
piece was followed by a bizarre New York Timesstory from
January 16 with the headline: "Trump and Putin: Five Meetings Infused With Mystery." The story
implied something sinister in undisclosed conversations between the two leaders while offering
no evidence whatsoever.
What causes otherwise intelligent people to put their faith in conspiracy theories? A
common explanation on the Right is that these conspiracies are cynically concocted to overthrow
the Trump presidency. Another explanation points to declining standards of journalism, i.e.,
reporters being too incompetent to refute groundless claims. Both reasons have merit yet both
fail to explain the peculiar estrangement from reality that a belief in baseless conspiracies
represents.
In the early stages of the French Revolution, the Jacobins imagined that the beacon of a
democratic France would shine across the world and tyrannical kings would topple before its
luminescence. The Jacobin imagination was polluted by utopian idealism, the ideology that
causes people to see the world how they wish it to be rather than how it is.
When the luminescence of France began to fade and the revolutionary army began to
falter, the Jacobins felt there could only be one explanation: conspiracy. Only a deep-seated
plot could be preventing France the Savior from vanquishing retrograde monarchs. From the
beginning, the virtuous Jacobins saw themselves as fighting a conspiracy against the rights of
humanity. Hence the Reign of Terror, with the guillotine deployed against priests and nobles
who were seen as forming the core opposition to a better world.
Idealism and conspiracy theories are, it seems, opposite sides of the same coin. When
the dream fails to materialize, its validity is not questioned; instead the search to find
those who connived against it begins.
Like the Jacobins, the foreign policy establishment in the United States has for decades
hitched its wagons to idealistic dreaming. The Romantic ideas of Hegel and Rousseau permeate
their thinking. Consider the establishment's obsequious reaction to Francis Fukuyama's "
end of
history " thesis. Fukuyama presented himself as the all-seeing gnostic who had divined the
direction of all human history. One does not need the acumen of an Aristotle to know
that this was far from an original thesis. Fukuyama's Hegelianism was both warmed over and
unmoored from reality. And yet the foreign policy establishment swooned over him. The Bush 43
administration fell so hard for him that they tried to give history a little push by invading
Iraq.
Or consider the globalist dreaming of the elites that Samuel P. Huntington labeled
"Davos men." In the Davos dream, culture, history, and religion are archaic relics of a world
fading away. National borders are disappearing, and a new global order is emerging, led by
secular multilateral institutions staffed by an all-knowing "cosmopolitan" elite .
The reality of a borderless world is global migration that threatens to extinguish much of
Western civilization in a generation or two. With cultures clashing, nationalism on the
march, and religious wars raging, the Davos men continue to worship their dream from the safety
of their Gulfstream jets.
And to the Davos men, only a conspiracy can explain the election of Donald Trump. How
else could such a regressive development have occurred when history is cascading toward open
borders, democracy, and international institutions? How could an American president question
the value of NATO and other alliances whose glorious mission is to midwife the end of history
by democratizing everything from Lisbon to the Urals?
For those in a dream world, the only possible explanation for Trump is a conspiracy. His
presidency was hatched by Vladimir Putin, the world leader with the strongest reasons for
slowing the progressive march of history. Trump won the election because Putin has the powers
of a Rasputin. He can thwart history by crossing his eyes, pulling secret levers, and deploying
hackers.
But Trump and Putin will not be permitted to conspire against the dream. Their
conspiracy must be destroyed, even at the risk of nuclear war. Special counsels must be
created, eavesdropping must be expanded, foreign spies must be employed, and jackbooted agents
must break down every door linked to this insidious conspiracy. The ruling elites are prepared
to tear up the Constitution itself to save humanity from this diabolical cabal.
The resilience of the Russia conspiracy in the minds of our establishment should remind
us that the primary obstacle to a sensible foreign policy is our ideologized culture, in which
the Western outlook of common sense has been eroded by a Romantic utopian idealism. When people
within reach of massive military power are this estranged from reality, the situation can only
be described as frightening.
William S. Smith is research fellow at and managing director of the Center for the
Study of Statesmanship at The Catholic University of America.
"In the early stages of the French Revolution, the Jacobins imagined that the beacon of a
democratic France would shine across the world and tyrannical kings would topple before its
luminescence. The Jacobin imagination was polluted by utopian idealism, the ideology that
causes people to see the world how they wish it to be rather than how it is."
And yet, idealism or not, republican ideals DID spread around the world and WERE taken up
to oppose, undercut, reign in or overthrow monarchies from Latin America through the Middle
East, and from Europe (e.g., the bourgeois members of the Duma singing "La Marseillaise"
after the abdication of the Tsar) to Asia and Africa.
"When the luminescence of France began to fade and the revolutionary army began to falter,
the Jacobins felt there could only be one explanation: conspiracy. Only a deep-seated plot
could be preventing France the Savior from vanquishing retrograde monarchs. From the
beginning, the virtuous Jacobins saw themselves as fighting a conspiracy against the rights
of humanity. Hence the Reign of Terror, with the guillotine deployed against priests and
nobles who were seen as forming the core opposition to a better world."
I don't doubt the pernicious influence of conspiracy theories, I really don't – I'm
a Trotskyist, for Heaven's sake! – but the author might also acknowledge the reality of
the threats that the Jacobins faced. The armies of the united crowned heads of Europe that
had been sent against France, for instance. That the church and aristocracy WERE parts of the
old order (official estates, remember?), some of whose members WERE actually fighting to
restore the old regime and then drown, as they always drowned past peasant and popular
rebellions, in blood.
With you on "Davos Man" (Love that expression!) and the Trump conspiracy idiocy,
though! Two thumbs up!
You are making this much too complicated. The cultural stuff had some importance, but
much more fundamentally Trump threatened the money/power game of the War Party. They have
just about won anyway, because Trump is stupid. So, maybe they will just let Russia-gate fade
out.
Neolibs and neocons are . Dreamers. GIGO. Whoever wrote the headline and lede made sense,
the author might want to match that. The text as is is a useful exhibit for: "to see the
world how they wish it to be rather than how it is." Jacobins at Davos? Idealists with lots
of loot?
At one time, any occurrence that the establishment of the day didn't like was
automatically blamed on Jews. No evidence necessary. Because Jews. If you questioned the
conspiracy theory, you were instantly accused of being in league with "them". Today's
establishment does the same, except they substitute "Russia" for "Jews". Anything they don't
like is automatically blamed on Russia. No evidence necessary. Because Russia. Question the
conspiracy theory and get accused of being a "Russian troll".
Are we supposed to take this seriously? Your entire "argument" against the so-called Russia
Conspiracy is itself nothing more than a conspiracy theory: an overwrought, paranoid, absurd
conspiracy theory involving The Establishment, Davos Elites, Neo Liberals, et al.
There isn't enough publicly-disclosed evidence to support the claim that Russian
interference tilted the 2016 election decisively in Trump's favor or that Trump has conspired
with or been compromised by Russia. But only a child would believe that Russia didn't
actively interfere in the election, or that various Trump associates didn't have
inappropriate contacts and dealings with Russian entities, which they then lied about and
continue to lie about.
If only HRC and her friends were in the White House all these current conspiracies and
Mueller investigation wouldn't be an issue. Be the eighth wonder of the world, if Trump
survives the deep state.
CLW produces an argument from ignorance. "Just because we have no publicly available evidence
to prove that Trump is in fact Mickey Mouse just means we need to look harder! In the
meantime, we can safely assume that Trump has round black ears and a tail.".
In the meantime, I suggest you learn about the burden of proof – the burden of proof
is on those asserting the existence of a conspiracy (and you in particular are mighty short
on details!) and not on those debunking it.
Unfortunately, this article overreaches. I agree that Russiagate is an excuse that
liberals embrace to excuse the disastrous failures of Clinton and the Democratic Party, but
you don't need to connect this with some grand theorizing about the history of conspiracy
theories. People simply don't want to admit their side did anything wrong.
And as SteveK9 points out, it's really about how the mainstream War Party wants to
keep Trump in line. Trump is a loose cannon. They want a steady reliable warmonger.
CLW says "But only a child would believe that Russia didn't actively interfere in the
election, or that various Trump associates didn't have inappropriate contacts and dealings
with Russian entities, which they then lied about and continue to lie about." It took a child
to point out that the emperor had no clothes on, while the adults pretended that a falsehood
was tru. Perhaps more children are needed today to point out the truth and ignore blatant
propaganda.
Call me a child, then, but wisdom often comes from the mouth of babes. There is no
evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Read The phoney indictment of the
Internet Research Institute. It admits it was a commercial enterprise. It was nothing but a
commercial click bait operation. Similarly, the DNC was not hacked, the data was downloaded
to a USB, probably by a disaffected Sanders supporter, possibly Seth Rich. Also, Germany,
Macedonia, the Netherlands have investigated alleged Russian interference in their elections,
and found none.
Re: "The possibility that MAGA was, in fact, a sly misdirection to co-opt the fervour of re-ignited passions in a disenfranchised
segment of the America people - to re-capture the kind of patriotic commitment and ardor that drove the war effort in two world
wars - into a renewed Imperial adventure was obviated, in my view, by Trump's loud and overt criticism of past Imperial adventures
such as the Iraq war and Obama's inaction regarding ISIS (the accusation that Obama "created" ISIS was a bombshell, in my opinion).
Trump engaged in a bare, pointed, often crass and bordering on contemptuous criticism of his predecessors' foreign policy.
The irreverent tone was unprecedented in recent campaign history and was so plain and completely at odds with Hilary's stated
positions that it essentially committed him (in my eyes anyway) to following through, or to make all efforts to follow through.
If not, he would set one of the worst examples of a duplicitous politician, perhaps ever. The same applies to other bold campaign
positions, such as the border wall, for example.
But when viewed in the context of a deep state "policy change," such a clear and utter denunciation and discrediting of the
former policy would be necessary to shift the National mindset and would not necessarily preclude Trump from engaging in further
Imperial adventures, as long as they were different from the discredited policy."
Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who came up through intelligence positions
in Iraq and Afghanistan, says that the George W. Bush administration's Iraq war was a tremendous blunder that helped to create
the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS.
"It was a huge error," Flynn said about the Iraq war in a detailed interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel published Sunday.
"As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him," Flynn went on to say. "The same is true for Moammar
Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state. The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History
will not be and should not be kind with that decision."
When told by Der Spiegel reporters Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark that the Islamic State would not "be where it is now without
the fall of Baghdad," Flynn, without reservations, said: "Yes, absolutely."
Flynn, who served in the U.S. Army for more than 30 years, also said that the American military response following 9/11 was
not well thought-out at all and based on significant misunderstandings.
Interesting, very interesting. As noted in the Flynn sentencing memo last night there were some curiously framed explanations
of events surrounding his FBI inquisition.
Now Judge Emmet Sullivan wants expanded information, and wishes to see the actual notes (FD-302) that were mentioned by Flynn;
and Judge Sullivan is directing the special counsel to provide all documents created by the FBI surrounding the Flynn interview:
from the comments:
Curt says:
December 12, 2018 at 9:56 pm
This could be big news! Judge Emmet Sullivan was the same judge that had prosecutors investigated for criminal actions they took
in the Sen. Ted Stevens FALSE prosecution. Some on Mueller's team, including Weinstein, were held in contempt. One prosecutor
committed suicide. Others threatened with disbarment and some were suspended. "A federal judge dismissed the ethics conviction
of former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska on Tuesday after taking the extraordinary step of naming a special prosecutor to investigate
whether the government lawyers who ran the Stevens case (2008) should themselves be prosecuted for criminal wrongdoing. Mueller
was also involved in that horrible attempt by prosecutors to frame Sen. Ted Stevens. Judge Sullivan has absolutely no use for
this group of prosecutors. He smells a rat here and is asking for all investigative materials, including 302s. This judge will
not hesitate to take action against these crooked prosecutors if he finds evidence of ANY wrong doing.
On April 7, 2009, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia unleashed his fury
before a packed courtroom. For 14 minutes, he scolded. He chastised. He fumed. "In nearly 25 years on the bench," he said, "I've
never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case.
. . .
For months Judge Sullivan had warned U.S. prosecutors about their repeated failure to turn over evidence. Then, after the jury
convicted Stevens, the Justice Department discovered previously unrevealed evidence. Meanwhile, a prosecution witness and an agent
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came forward alleging prosecutorial misconduct. Finally, newly appointed U.S. Attorney
General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had had enough and recommended that the seven-count conviction against the former
Alaska senator be dismissed.
On April 7, Judge Sullivan did just that. But he was far from done.
In an extraordinarily rare move, he ordered an inquiry into the prosecutors' handling of the case. Judge Sullivan insisted
that the misconduct allegations were "too serious and too numerous" to be left to an internal Justice Department investigation.
He appointed Washington lawyer Henry F. Schuelke III of Janis, Schuelke & Wechsler to investigate whether members of the trial
team should be prosecuted for criminal contempt.
12-13-18 Following the allegations, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan yesterday ordered that both the Mueller investigation and
the Flynn team turn over all documents [the "302s"] relating to the fateful interview, including all contemporaneous notes, before
3pm Friday.
From comments: "Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document
breaks down once you focus on individual claims. " What?!?
Notable quotes:
"... FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn't believe a key claim contained in the "Steele Dossier ..."
"... The Post 's Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats, reports the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross. ..."
"... Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document breaks down once you focus on individual claims. ..."
"... Steele, using Kremlin sources, claimed in his dossier that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin officials for the purpose of discussing "deniable cash payments" made in secret so as to cover up "Moscow's secret liaison with the TRUMP team." ..."
FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn't believe a key claim contained in the
"Steele Dossier," the document the Obama FBI relied on to obtain a surveillance warrant on a member of the Trump campaign.
The Post 's Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump
attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats,
reports the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross.
"We've talked to sources at the FBI and the CIA and elsewhere -- they don't believe that ever happened," said Miller during the
October event which aired Saturday on C-SPAN.
We literally spent weeks and months trying to run down... there's an assertion in there that Michael Cohen went to Prague to
settle payments that were needed at the end of the campaign. We sent reporters to every hotel in Prague, to all over the place
trying to - just to try to figure out if he was ever there, and came away empty . -Greg Miller
Ross notes that WaPo somehow failed to report this information, nor did Miller include this tidbit of narrative-killing information
in his recent book, "The Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion of American Democracy."
Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document breaks down
once you focus on individual claims.
Steele, using Kremlin sources, claimed in his dossier that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August 2016 to meet
with Kremlin officials for the purpose of discussing "deniable cash payments" made in secret so as to cover up "Moscow's secret liaison
with the TRUMP team."
Cohen's alleged Prague visit captured attention largely because the former Trump fixer has vehemently denied it, and also
because it would seem to be one of the easier claims in Steele's 35-page report to validate or invalidate.
Debate over the salacious document was reignited when
McClatchy reported April 15 that
special counsel Robert Mueller had evidence Cohen visited Prague. No other news outlets have verified the reporting, and Cohen
denied it at the time.
Cohen last denied the dossier's allegations in late June, a period of time when he was gearing up to cooperate with prosecutors
against President Donald Trump . Cohen served as a cooperating witness for prosecutors in both New York and the special counsel's
office. - Daily Caller
Cohen's attorney and longtime Clinton pal Lanny Davis vehemently denied on August 22, one day after Cohen pleaded guilty in his
New York case - that Cohen had never been to Prague, telling Bloomberg " Thirteen references to Mr. Cohen are false in the dossier,
but he has never been to Prague in his life ."
Trump never ceases to crack me up. While his (terrible) current lawyer, declares on TV that there was collusion but it just
didn't last long, Trump calls his former lawyer/fixer at "Rat".
This is just too funny, I mean this is the President of the United States calling his former personal lawyer a "Rat" which
of course is a common mob term for a witness testifying against you.
monkeyshine
Of course it never happened, just like Manafort didn't make 3 trips to London to meet Julian Assange. These fictions were just
used as a pretext for diving into the backgrounds of Trump's political supporters and find crimes to charge them with.
The Cohen raid was particularly egregious, a likely violation of attorney-client privilege. Not suprisingly the American Bar Association
is silent.
brewing_it
So here is a WaPo reporter saying they sent reporters to every hotel in Prague to find out if Cohen had been there, they spent
weeks and weeks researching, interviewing, and nothing. What they are not saying is that they also spent shitloads of Bezo's money
exploring all the other fake dossier claims.
And nothing.....all you hillarytards have been completely scammed by, your pulses sent aflutter with clickbait and page views
and thats it. So sorry you losers.
Demologos
Yeah, like rubles are worth anything outside of Russia. Gold on the other hand ...
But seriously, you two should get a room. If you can't see the conspiracy in the Strzok/Page texts, the setup of Papadapoulous
by the Brits, the phony FISA warrant using the FBI informant, the setup of General Flynn, and the seedy cast of characters in
the DOJ breaking laws right and left, you should be checked for brain wave activity. You probably think the Russians paid for
all of the above too. Go suck a bag of Russian dicks.
Why, it is apparently the following, which is surely a red hot smoking gun. That is,
one that condemns the FBI, not Trump; and shows that the NYT , which once courageously
published the Pentagon Papers and had earned the above sobriquet for its journalistic
stateliness, sense of responsibility and possession of high virtue, has degenerated into a War
Party shill – not to say the journalistic equivalent of a comfort woman:
Mr. Trump had caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents when he called on
Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent,
Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising
President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party
softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit
Russia.
Well, for crying out loud!
Any journalist worth his salt would know that Trump's July 2016 shout-out to the Russians
was a campaign joke. At best, it was merely an attempt to cleverly state in one more way the
running GOP theme about Hillary's missing 30,000 emails. How many times before that had Sean
Hannity delivered his riff about Hillary's alleged hammer-smashing of 13 devices and
acid-washing with BleachBit of the missing emails?
BuzzFeed Throws Hail Mary: Publishes New Trump Tower Moscow Docs
After last week's embarrassing debacle in which special counsel Robert Mueller issued a rare statement
calling bullshit on BuzzFeed over their Trump Tower Moscow report that Trump ordered his attorney Michael Cohen to lie about
the timeline, the beleaguered news outlet has taken a
second bite at the
apple with a new report (oddly written by a completely different journalist) refuting comments by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani
that "no plans were ever made" for the project.
Not so fast Rudy ...
In their new report, BuzzFeed claims that the Trump Tower Moscow idea was "led by Trump's then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his
associate Felix Sater" despite
writing in November that Sater both thought of and spearheaded the idea , turning to Cohen to "get it off the ground" while overpromising
that he could seal the deal through his Russian connections that never panned out.
Sater, a brash real estate promoter who pleaded guilty to racketeering in 1998 and became a
longtime
asset to US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, had worked with the Trump Organization on deals in the past and said
he came up with the idea. Cohen, Sater recalled, said, "Great idea." -
BuzzFeed
Today's "gotcha," however is that the project had progressed much further than Giuliani claimed on Monday when he told the New
Yorker "no plans were ever made. There were no drafts. Nothing in the file."
Not true , writes BuzzFeed' s Azeen Ghorayshi.
The president and his representatives have dismissed the project as little more than a notion -- a rough plan led by Trump's
then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his associate Felix Sater, of which Trump and his family said they were only loosely aware as
the election campaign gathered pace.
On Monday, his lawyer,
Rudy Giuliani ,
said "the proposal was in the earliest stage," and he went on to tell the
New Yorker that "no plans were ever made. There were no drafts. Nothing in the file."
However, hundreds of pages of business documents, emails, text messages, and architectural plans, obtained by BuzzFeed News
over a year of reporting, tell a very different story. Trump Tower Moscow was a richly imagined vision of upscale splendor on
the banks of the Moscow River. -
BuzzFeed
Trump Tower Moscow hasn't exactly been a secret, admits BuzzFeed , noting that Donald Trump tweeted about it following the 2013
Miss Universe pageant, and writing in his book The Art of the Deal that he had been trying to expand his business empire into Russia
for over 30 years.
Over the last week, Giuliani admitted to the New York Times that the Trump Tower Moscow discussions were "going on from the day
I announced to the day I won," Giuliani quoted Trump as saying. He then
walked back those comments , claiming in a statement: "My recent statements about discussions during the 2016 campaign between
Michael Cohen and then-candidate Donald Trump about a potential Trump Moscow 'project' were hypothetical and not based on conversations
I had with the President."
In other words, Giuliani is a walking gaffe machine - which we already knew.
That said, the Trump Tower moscow project appears to have been much more developed than anyone in the Trump camp has acknowledged.
According to a finalized letter of intent signed by Donald Trump on Oct. 28, 2015, the tower would have "approximately 250
first class, luxury residential condominiums."
It would be located in Moscow City, a former industrial complex outside of the city center that has since been converted into
an ambitious commercial district clustered with several of the tallest skyscrapers in Europe.
Its hotel portion would feature "approximately 15 floors" and contain "not fewer than 150 hotel rooms," the letter of intent
stated. The building would feature a luxury spa and fitness center, a commercial component "consistent with the overall luxury
level of the Property," and an office space "consistent with Class A luxury office properties," as well as "luxury" parking. -
BuzzFeed
Also in the plan was "The Spa By Ivanka Trump," as well as a $50 million penthouse suite that they would give to Russian President
Vladimir Putin. "My idea was to give a $50 million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units," Sater
told BuzzFeed in November. "All the oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin."
Show Trump the money
The Trump Organization stood to make $4 million on an up-front payment for the deal; 25% of which would be paid upon execution
of the licensing agreement, another quarter when they finalized a location, and the other half a week before the project's groundbreaking
- or two years after the execution of the licensing agreement, whichever came first.
From there on out, Trump's company would also get a cut of all the condominium sales at the tower, the agreement stated. From
the total selling price of each unit, his company would get 5% for sales up to $100 million, 4% for the next bracket up to $250
million, 3% for anything between that and $500 million, 2% for anything up to $1 billion, and thereafter, a solid cut of 1%. For
commercial and office spaces, it would get a 3% cut of all the rent. It'd get another 3% of sales on food and beverages, spa and
fitness center use, and conference fees.
The deal also stipulated how much Trump's management company would get paid for running operations at Trump Tower Moscow over
25 years. For the first five years, it would get 3% of all revenue generated by operating the hotel per month. Over the next two
decades, it'd receive a flat 4%. In addition, the management company would also receive a monthly "incentive fee" -- an additional
20% of the gross operating profit for the hotel -- subject to annual negotiations. -
BuzzFeed
At the end of the day, Trump Tower Moscow has never happened - and Trump himself has turned out to be the worst "Putin Puppet"
ever after slapping heavy sanctions on Moscow and selling Ukraine weapons that the Obama administration wouldn't.
"Let's make this happen and build a Trump Moscow," wrote Sater to Cohen in October of 2015. "And possibly fix relations between
the countries by showing everyone that commerce & business are much better and more practical than politics. Help world peace and
make a lot of money, I would say that's a great lifetime goal for us to go after."
STOP THE ******* PRESSES..........BOMB SHELL......BOMB SHELL REPORT...THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN....ORANGE HAIR PRESIDENT SOON
TO BE WARING ORANGE JUMPSUIT....
Dateline Moscow 2013........
The crime:
American Developer explores possibilities of building a hotel in Moscow.
The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just
because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.
zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building
in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.
And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in
return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe
actually took place between the bribor and bribee.
I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.
Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born.
And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the
pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.
The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.
ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter
that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.
Pure, 100% commie bulls-.
These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down
one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.
We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!
And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then
find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed,
they move in for the kill - literally.
The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The
real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual
behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".
Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government,
we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are
surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back
against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.
Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your
pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.
The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just
because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.
zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building
in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.
And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in
return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe
actually took place between the bribor and bribee.
I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.
Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born.
And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the
pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.
The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.
ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter
that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.
Pure, 100% commie bulls-.
These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down
one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.
We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!
And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then
find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed,
they move in for the kill - literally.
The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The
real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual
behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".
Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government,
we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are
surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back
against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.
Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your
pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.
The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just
because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.
zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building
in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.
And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in
return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe
actually took place between the bribor and bribee.
I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.
Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born.
And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the
pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.
The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.
ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter
that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.
Pure, 100% commie bulls-.
These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down
one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.
We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!
And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then
find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed,
they move in for the kill - literally.
The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The
real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual
behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".
Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government,
we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are
surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back
against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.
Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your
pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.
The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just
because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.
zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building
in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.
And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in
return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe
actually took place between the bribor and bribee.
I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.
Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born.
And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the
pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.
The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.
ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter
that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.
Pure, 100% commie bulls-.
These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down
one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.
We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!
And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then
find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed,
they move in for the kill - literally.
The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The
real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual
behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".
Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government,
we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are
surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back
against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.
Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your
pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.
Justin Case
Keep shoveling that Russia this, that, manure narrative for general consumption. What sanctions? Umm, I'll get back to you
after we extradite the Huawei CEO and extort billions from the corporation for doing business with our (Israel's) adversary.
You voted for this? He talks out of both sides of his mouth. Why do people vote to have someone rule over them?
Among few good things that Trump have done to the USA is that he destoryed credibility of
neoliberal MSM. They all are now firmly belong to the "fake news" catagory.
Notable quotes:
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
So the corporate media have gone and done it again. As they have, repeatedly, for the last
two and half years, they shook the earth with
a "bombshell" story proving beyond any reasonable doubt that Donald Trump colluded with the
Russians to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton, or at least committed an impeachable
felony in connection with something to do with the Russians, or Ukrainians, or other Slavic
persons which story turned out to be inaccurate, or not entirely accurate, or a bunch of
horseshit.
This time it was BuzzFeed's Jason Leopold, " a
reporter with a checkered past " (i.e., a history of inventing
his sources ) who broke the "bombshell" Russiagate story that turned out to be a bunch of
horseshit. Leopold, and his colleague Anthony Cormier, reported that Trump had directed his
attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about plans to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow,
thus suborning perjury and obstructing justice. Their sources for this "bombshell" story were
allegedly "two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the
matter."
Approximately twenty-four hours later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office (i.e., the
office "involved in an investigation of the matter") stated that the BuzzFeed story was "not
accurate," which is a legal term meaning "a bunch of horseshit."
BuzzFeed is standing by its story , and is working to determine what, exactly, Mueller's
office meant by "not accurate." Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's Editor-in-Chief, has called on Mueller
"to make clear what he's disputing."
Liberals and other Trump-obsessives have joined in the effort to interpret the Special
Counsel's office's cryptic utterance. French hermeneuticists have been reportedly called in to
deconstruct the meaning of "accurate." Professional Twitter
semioticians are explaining that "not accurate" doesn't mean "wrong," but, rather, refers
to something that is "accurate," but which the user of the word doesn't want to disclose
publicly, or that legal terms don't mean what they mean or something more or less along those
lines.
But Greenwald's list is just a small sample of the Russiagate stories that have turned out
to be horseshit. For the record, here are several more:
"Seventeen intelligence agencies"
confirm Russia interfered in the U.S. elections (
New York Times ) Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum (
The Guardian ) Russia interfered in the German elections ( Reuters )
Russia hacked the French elections ( Politico and numerous other
outlets ) Michael Cohen conspired with the Russians in Prague ( BuzzFeed
)
I am using the terms "horseshit" and "a bunch of horseshit" (as opposed to terms like
"failures" and "errors"), not just to be gratuitously vulgar, but, also, to try to make a
point. One is not supposed to use these terms in connection with "serious," "respected" news
outlets. Which is why journalists like Greenwald and Aaron Maté (who have extensively
reported on the corporate media's ongoing production and dissemination of horseshit) do not use
such terms in the course of their reporting, and instead use less inflammatory terms like
"false," "inaccurate," "mistake," and "error." Principled journalists like Greenwald and
Maté are constrained by (a) their journalistic ethics, (b) their integrity, and (c)
their belief in the idea of a "free and independent press," which is one of the pillars of
Western democracy.
Being neither a respected journalist nor a believer in the existence of an "independent
press," I am under no such constraints. Because I'm not trying to get or keep a job, or
maintain a "respectable" reputation, I'm free to call a spade a spade and a bunch of horseshit
a bunch of horseshit. I am also free to describe "journalists" like Leopold,
Luke Harding ,
Craig Timberg ,
Franklin Foer , and many of their corporate media colleagues (not to mention
TV clowns like Rachel Maddow ) as the liars and rank propagandists they are. I don't need
to pretend their fabricated stories are simply the result of "shoddy journalism," or
"over-reliance on official sources," or any other type of "error" or "failure." These people
know exactly what they are doing, and are being extremely well paid to do it. They went to
school to learn how to do it. Then they butt-sucked and back-stabbed their way up the ladder of
establishment power to be able to do it.
Yes, of course, there are still principled journalists working for the corporate media, but
they are doing so by walking a very fine line. No one has to tell them where it is. Every
professional journalist knows precisely where it is, and what it is there for. Though they are
permitted to walk right up to it, occasionally (to keep them from feeling like abject whores),
one step over it and they will be cast into the Outer Darkness of the Blogosphere and
excommunicated from the Church of Respectable Journalism. If you don't believe me, just ask
Seymour Hersh, or John Pilger, or any other journalistic heretic.
If Russiagate serves no other useful purpose, it is at least exposing the corporate media as
the propaganda factories that they are. Given the amount of obviously fabricated horseshit they
have disseminated during the last two years, you'd have to be a total moron or a diehard
neoliberal cultist not to recognize the function they perform within the global capitalist
ruling establishment (which is essentially no different than the function the establishment
media perform in any other society, namely, to disseminate, maintain, and reify the official
narrative of its ruling classes).
Sadly, there's no shortage of morons and cultists. I don't blame the morons, because well,
they're morons. The cultists are another species entirely. These are people who, no matter how
often the corporate media feed them another "explosive," "bombshell" Russiagate story that
turns out to be a bunch of horseshit, will defend the concept of the "independent media" like
head-shaven, bug-eyed Manson followers. Confront them with facts contradicting their beliefs
and they close their eyes and start chanting and humming and repetitiously babbling banishing
spells. The notion that the Western corporate media may serve the interests of the ruling
establishment (just like the media in every other society serve that society's ruling classes)
is unimaginable and tantamount to heresy.
This fetishization of "the independent press" is a phenomenon unique to Western capitalism.
Basically, it's a childish fairy tale, like believing that Santa Claus is an actual person or
that voting in elections in a corporate oligarchy has anything to do with actual democracy.
Think about it dispassionately for a minute. Why would any ruling establishment permit a
genuinely "independent" press to disseminate ideas and information willy-nilly throughout
society? If it did, it wouldn't last very long.
Most people understand this intuitively, which is why the corporate media relentlessly
repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent press," over, and over, and over again.
Seriously, switch on NPR, or have a look at The Guardian or the Washington Post, or any of the
other corporate media repeatedly reminding you how "independent," "free" and "democratic" they
are. It's essentially Neuro-linguistic programming.
So let's not be shocked when the corporate media continue to bombard us with "bombshell"
stories about Trump and Russia that turn out to be horseshit. Personally, I welcome these
stories. The more corporate media horseshit the better! Who knows, if they dish out enough
blatant horseshit, more people might lose their "trust in the media," and begin to investigate
matters themselves. I know, that makes me a Nazi, right? Or at least a Russian propagandist? I
mean, encouraging folks to distrust the corporate media? Isn't there some kind of law against
that? Or have they not quite gotten around to that yet?
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play
Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
The Associated Press (AP) reports the latest bad news for the press: " Just 6 Percent of
People Say They Trust the Media ."
Carole Feldman and Emily Swanson began: Trust in the news media is being eroded by
perceptions of inaccuracy and bias, fueled in part by Americans' skepticism about what they
read on social media. Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the
media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public's view of
other institutions.
Most people understand this intuitively, which is why the corporate media relentlessly
repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent press,"
People inversely brag about their short comings.
Militarized police states brag about their freedom.
A well heeled synchophant brags about his independence.
Dudes with small dicks -- big belt buckle and big hat.
I used to listen to the BBC and NPR until the corporo-globalist bias became unbearable. I
laughed at incidents such as Marketplace mocking the public's concern about GMO's. But it
went off the rails in 2016. They may have backed off from Trump Derangement Syndrome a bit
since then, but I've noticed that they have to call themselves "credible." Maybe if they say
that enough times we'll believe it, eh?
The Greenwald link is pretty important and I bookmarked it. These fake news outlets do
everything in their power to scrub these mistakes from the Google machine once they happen.
They remove stories, videos -- everything, in the hopes of shoving it all down the memory
hole. And since other fake news outlets don't hold them accountable, they get away with it.
This is why it's important to take screen shots of fake news and download videos if possible,
to create a record that's permanent and useful when you need it.
More than 6% of the population are technically, and this is the technical term, retarded
-- they are mentally disabled.
I know it's obvious our media is propaganda, but I don't think it's quite so obvious such
that adults watching Sesame Street who fully enjoy it (nothing wrong with that!) are aware of
it.
I would like to think it's true, but I think the Associated Press article is not true,
after all, can you identify their funding sources?
This fetishization of "the independent press" is a phenomenon unique to Western
capitalism. Basically, it's a childish fairy tale, like believing that Santa Claus is an
actual person or that voting in elections in a corporate oligarchy has anything to do with
actual democracy.
Great article. Articles on this theme should be published daily. The fetish must be
destroyed.
There is at least one other person who calls corporate media what it is, and it ain't
"mainstream."
"Sparkie" ain't gonna be happy about it either."Sparky" chewed me out good for correcting
the incomparable and always superb Linh Dinh for using the disgusting and inaccurate term,
"mainstream" when referring to coprophilic media. Oh, and speaking of "horseshit" one wag
suggested we call it main steam media, for accuracy as well as for giggles and that's
fine by me.
the corporate media relentlessly repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent
press," over, and over, and over again. Seriously, switch on NPR, or have a look at The
Guardian or the Washington Post, or any of the other corporate media repeatedly reminding
you how "independent," "free" and "democratic" they are. It's essentially Neuro-linguistic
programming.
It's blatantly obvious that the same can be said about the self-legitimizing term,
"mainstream," too, so bless you sir, and to (bleep) with the Sparkies of the world.
Confront them with facts contradicting their beliefs and they close their eyes and start
chanting and humming and repetitiously babbling banishing spells.
Not only is Hopkins correct, but what he says about corporate media is not new. The Civil
Rights movement presented by the media was false. The media promotion of the US re-engaging
in Europe in the post WW1 period so we could defend dear ole England and sacred democracy.
The media preparing us for our need to fight WW1 so we could end all wars was false. The
media stirring us to go into Cuba and end the awfully evil Spanish Empire so we could start
the process of ending all empires
N o doubt it is a pleasure for you because C.J. Hopkins managed to scribble 1500
words about fake news without even once mentioning the CIA.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public
believes is false."
-- CIA Director, William Casey
Of course, our resident Bumpkin of Unz would have you believe that the CIA is a
corporation.
"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
-- former CIA Director William Colby
So you see Sheete, the term "corporate media" is entirely inaccurate -- a red herring, a
misleading label, a pig in a poke -- because it entirely excludes, avoids, overlooks, and
completely dismisses the role of our intelligence agencies in creating fake news ,
a.k.a. disinformation and propaganda.
The notion that the Western corporate media may serve the interests of the ruling
establishment (just like the media in every other society serve that society's ruling
classes) is unimaginable and tantamount to heresy.
This comes close to the term "regime media," which I like as a replacement for the
clunky-but-common terms "Mainstream Media" or MSM. "
Hopkins uses "corporate media," which appears fifteen times here including in the
title.
Several commenters have noted the problems with the term "mainstream media":
While better than "mainstream media," I'm not sure "corporate media" is sufficient.
"Corporate media," as a term, may wrongly convey the notion that the 'media' in question
complaisantly both [1] broadcasts the ruling ideology (interventionist capitalist
liberal democracy and multicultacracy) and [2] 'megaphones' (Steve Sailer's useful term)
against enemies thereto, coordinating our regular Two-Minute Hates.
That characterization misses an important point, to wit:
The 'media' (in the sense of the "MSM") as we know it today, is itself consciously
part of the ruling apparatus . Not complaisantly, but actively; not lackeys on the
side, but right at the regime's core. A useful distinction. Hence "regime media."
Jun. 14, 2012 These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America
That's consolidated from *50* companies back in 1983. But the fact that a few companies
own everything demonstrates "the illusion of choice," Frugal Dad says.
Tom Charles Huston testified before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee,
on the 43-page plan he presented to the President Nixon and others on ways to collect
information about anti-war and "radical" groups, including burglary, electronic
surveillance, and opening of mail.
Lippmann-Dewey debate, which is known to academics but not the general public in the
United States, the home country of both authors. Obviously, John Dewey is famous as one
of the most important American philosophers, and for his international influence in the
field of education. By contrast, Walter Lippmann has been somewhat forgotten, though he
was a major journalist in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a widely familiar author at the
time, and wrote some cynical things about American democracy. The story America tells
itself politically is that since we're a democracy in which the citizens rule themselves,
there is a paramount need for an excellent public education so that the citizens can vote
wisely. We ourselves are the leaders. But of course it doesn't work that way in practice.
We actually have a surplus of ignorant and uninformed people who pay no attention to the
nuances of policy, and who vote based on the workings of demagoguery and short-sighted
self-interest. Any number of foolish decisions have been made by the American public.
This leads Lippmann to take the somewhat cynical line that America is destined to be
ruled by technocrats. We need experts to run things; the people are too clueless to rule
themselves. We'll pretend we have a democracy, but we actually don't. Now, Dewey reads
this, and he is temperamentally more optimistic, and he thinks: 'This is a really
stimulating book, but Lippmann is wrong. He is setting the bar too high for the people.
People were never supposed to be educated in depth about every issue, which is an
impossible demand. Even Lippmann doesn't have the time to master every issue, and he
covers politics for a living. Instead, Dewey says, political issues generate their own
publics in each case. I might care deeply about seven political issues. I might care
about national health insurance, but I don't care about gay marriage, or vice versa. So I
get involved in one debate and not the other. I take the trouble of becoming informed
about issues that interest me.
@Hail
Hail says: "The 'media' (in the sense of the "MSM") as we know it today, is itself
consciously part of the ruling apparatus. Not complaisantly, but actively; not lackeys on
the side, but right at the regime's core ":
Exactly. The MSM is the government [CIA/NSA/ etc. etc.] grinning right at you as
it continually lies , albeit behind a very thin veil of supposed integrity/respectability
that the general public still refuses to see through.
By way of illustration of this "outrageous" assertion of mine, here is part of a video
analysis of the original 5 channel US MSM "live" coverage of the morning of Sept. 11 2001,
which clearly demonstrates that on that morning, all 5 US networks broadcast entirely fake
"live" footage [ i.e. C.G.I. prefabricated imagery] for about 102 minutes :
So you see Sheete, the term "corporate media" is entirely inaccurate
I never claimed it was perfect. I do claim that the term, "mainstream," in this context
is entirely inaccurate and misleading. And you should be nice, as you admonished me,
regarding the author of this article. As for your complaint that he didn't mention the CIA,
may I remind you that he wrote, as you noticed, an article, not an encyclopedia.
Anyway, you have yet to establish that the CIA and our corporate masters are entirely
separate entities. Even a Dumb Sheete such as myself would find it somewhat, if not
entirely, incredible if they were.
But of course too everyone knows by now that Jews, Israel and Mossad did 9/11 all by
their lonesomes, and the CIA and the Air Force had nothing to do with it.
Ahem, you forgot to mention big, coprophilic, media. Please try to practice the
inclusiveness that you preach.
one step over [the line] and they will be cast into the Outer Darkness of the
Blogosphere and excommunicated from the Church of Respectable Journalism. If you don't
believe me, just ask Seymour Hersh, or John Pilger, or any other journalistic
heretic.
To this list I might also add CBS' Sharyl Attkisson, and Larry Conners of KMOV-TV, who
had the big brass balls to question the $85 million the Obamas spent on vacations.
NR kicked Derb to the curb, but that gutter's littered with Internet flotsam who
presumed integrity.
@Sean
Sean says: "Lippmann-Dewey debate, which is known to academics but not the general
public in the United States, the home country of both authors. "
Debate summary: 2 know-it-alls debating about how "best" to run everybody else's lives
[and with straight faces, I've no doubt].
Two sides of the same [pro-statist] coin, in other words. Oh, and one minor issue one
"thinks" that a ruling technocracy is "the answer".
Sean says: "Obviously, John Dewey is famous as one of the most important American
philosophers, and for his international influence in the field of education."
You mean: Dewey was important in the field of "public education" , otherwise known as
brainwashing.
"... Only the minor Russian RT channel provides, up-to-a-point, some alternative views, defending the American, British and French people's sovereignty, but they can't do much. Paradoxically, RT does not broadcast in Russian and its English-language broadcasts can't be seen in Russia. The rest of the Russian media doesn't differ much from the Western variety. ..."
"... And not only for politics. They want to draw and implement their agenda on all topics disregarding our views. ..."
There is not a single newspaper in the US that supports the views of the US President.
Nobody defended him when he was
accused , brazenly, in-your-face, of being a Russian agent. Nobody supported him when he
called to bring the troops home from Syria. Nobody came to his aid when he mulled parting with
NATO. There are tens of millions of men and women who voted for him, but he has only his
Twitter account at his disposal.
The media
accuses Trump of paying too little attention to Israel's needs. Israel needs US troops in
Syria and in Germany, US jets in Spain and Qatar, US ships in Italy and the Gulf. Israel needs
the US to lead NATO to contain Russia. If Israel needs it, the US should provide,
says Daniel Shapiro, the ex-ambassador. Not a single American newspaper, not a single US
statesman cared to reply that President Trump had been elected by the American people to do
what is needed for them, not for Israel.
The US is not an exception. Millions of French people support the GJ, but not a single
newspaper, not a single TV channel gives them a platform. They are called anti-Semites for they
are revolted by Danny Cohn-Bendit and Bernard-Henri Levi, who are Jewish. They are also called
homophobes because they want to ban same-sex "marriage". They are being attacked by the
bankers' storm-troopers, the Antifa, and no media defends them.
Millions of Brits support Jeremy Corbyn, but all the mainstream media is against him, even
the state-supported BBC, even the Labour Guardian. Corbyn is accused of anti-Semitism, for
Corbyn speaks for the workers and against the bankers. Nobody defends him and there is no
mainstream media to speak for him.
Only the minor Russian RT channel provides, up-to-a-point, some alternative views, defending
the American, British and French people's sovereignty, but they can't do much. Paradoxically,
RT does not broadcast in Russian and its English-language broadcasts can't be seen in Russia.
The rest of the Russian media doesn't differ much from the Western variety.
The mainstream media from Tokyo to Paris to Los Angeles speaks in one voice. All other
opinions had been pushed out of mainstream discussion. It is good that we have the internet and
sites like Unz Review
that allow us to express our views. The problem is with delivery. How can we deliver to the
public? The real mainstream media has so many more views and viewers! For them, hundreds of
thousands or even millions of views are not unusual.
We need our social networks to deliver the ideas and exchange opinions, to inform readers of
our publications, to convince and rally. In over-populated, nuclearized world, with family and
neighbourhood ties torn, there is no substitute for these networks. And Facebook and Twitter
could help us. Google could help us.
Alas, they betrayed us, too. The social networks
And not only for politics. They want to draw and implement their agenda on all topics
disregarding our views.
BuzzFeed's credibility has been seemingly dented by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's recent
dismissal of one of its 'Russiagate' stories. However, it is not the first time its stories on
Russia raised flags or were proven false. The New York-based news outlet has been holding
nothing back over the recent years as it diligently pressed the so-called 'Russiagate'
narrative about a supposed collusion between the US President Donald Trump and Moscow. Its
recent exploits, which claimed Trump told his ex-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress to
cover up some of his dealings with Russia, however, apparently led it a bit too far, as it
earned a rebuke from the office
of Robert Muller – the man in charge of the investigation into the very same alleged
collusion, among other aspects of perceived Russia's meddling into the 2016 elections.
'After this I don't even know if I can trust Buzzfeed's cat listicles anymore'
https://t.co/b4vyIKJAUL
The news sparked a wave of criticism on
the social media, with many people saying that the news outlet's credibility is now
discredited.
But was it that flawless before?
Buzzfeed was the first to publish the infamous Steele dossier – a report by an MI6
spy-turned-private investigator – which contained unverified allegations that Russia held
information on Trump which it was using to blackmail the US president. It also alleged
sustained and close working contacts between Trump aides and Kremlin representatives.
None of these allegations, which were used by the FBI as a reason for obtaining a spy
warrant against Trump adviser Carter Page, have been proven as of now. Instead, it was
revealed that the report
was based on information fed through people close to Hillary Clinton – Trump's rival at
the 2016 presidential elections.
Meanwhile, some of the reporters, who worked with the dossier, admitted that the
document's claims are "likely false." Christopher Steele himself also revealed
that one of his goals in compiling the report was to provide Clinton with a legal basis to
challenge the 2016 election results.
The publication of the dossier has brought a string of defamation lawsuits not only against
Steele but against BuzzFeed as well. The news media outlet was sued by the owners of a Russian
Alfa Bank and a Russian tech
expert Aleksey Gubarev who
were all mentioned in the infamous dossier. At the same time, Trump's personal lawyer also
filed a
defamation lawsuit against the company for pushing the Steele report.
However, Buzzfeed apparently does hope to get away with it. In case of Gubarev, a US court
already ruled in favor of the
news outlet in December 2018, citing a "fair report privilege." The businessman earlier
scolded the publication as "one of the most reckless and irresponsible moments in modern
journalism."
Steele was the source of another controversial episode in the history of BuzzFeed's attempts
to propagate the 'Russiagate' narrative. In March 2018, it claimed that the FBI was covering
the true causes of the death of a Russian media tycoon in Washington in 2015.
Citing a "secret report " by Steele, it claimed the man was allegedly killed by
associates of a Russian oligarch, who happens to be close to the Kremlin, the news outlet said.
A sheer coincidence, apparently. It also did not bother to give any plausible explanation as to
why the FBI, which did not hesitate to point a finger at Moscow in the past, would hide such
information at all.
Anyway, the whole story was debunked just days later
when the Metropolitan Police said the death of the tycoon was an accident. This fact did not
get much attention in the West, though. Neither did it cool BuzzFeed's ardor in stirring up
anti-Russian hysteria.
Buzzfeed was once notorious for
traffic-generating "listicles" , but has since become an impressive outlet for deep
investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the
news this week thanks to its "bombshell" story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story
that, like so many others of its kind,
blew up in its face , this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller's office took the
extremely rare step to
label its key claims "inaccurate."
But in homage to BuzzFeed's past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures
in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by
the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news,
the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger
they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets
(particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most
embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is
so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end
with (dis)honorable mention status.
Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave
threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media
outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would
expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories.
That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media
clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors"
went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the
same agenda and script:
10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)
On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that
C-SPAN "confirmed" it had been hacked. The whole story was false :
9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity
Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)
On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian hackers penetrated the U.S.
electricity grid through a utility in Vermont," causing predictable outrage and panic, along
with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor's
notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S.
electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was
false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:
8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares
Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost
Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)
On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post
published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian
infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing "more than 200 websites" of being
"routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of
at least 15 million Americans." It added: "stories planted or promoted by the disinformation
campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times."
Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that
reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge
Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig,
and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul
Institute. – as "Russian propaganda outlets," producing one of the longest Editor's Note
in memory appended to the top of the article (but
not until two weeks later , long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the
media ecosystem):
7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a
Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)
On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the
Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story
and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network.
6. Russia Attacked
U.S. "Diplomats" (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave
Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)
On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC
spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia
was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic
or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea
what to make of it.
But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered
any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective
psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the "strange sounds"
the U.S. "diplomats" reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean
male cricket during mating season.
5. Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to
Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)
4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three
Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)
On November 27, 2018, the Guardian
published a major "bombshell" that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed
to sneak inside one of the world's most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,
and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators
exploded.
Seven weeks later,
no other media outlet has confirmed this ; no video or photographic evidence has emerged;
the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into
hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian
official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:
3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its
Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew
in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)
On July 27, 2018, CNN
published a blockbuster story : that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that
President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two
problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that
"contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment" (in fact, Davis
was one of CNN's key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous
other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however,
to this date has refused to do either:
2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and
Witness Interviews Proving Trump Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)
1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to
the WikiLeaks Email Archive (CNN/MSNBC)
The morning of December 9, 2017, launched
one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so
grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a
major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and
Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public.
Within an hour, MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to
have "independently confirmed" this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have
been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked
emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC
videos
here ).
There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally
and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks
archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before.
Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and
MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian
message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole
world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all
got the date of the email wrong.
To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong
in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete
silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their "multiple,
independent sources" got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating
– and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources
who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.
Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the
internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just
what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing
is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he
awkwardly struggles to pretend that it's not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously
is:
Dishonorable Mention:
ABC News' Brian Ross is fired for
reporting Trump told Flynn to make contact with Russians when he was still a candidate;
in fact, Trump did that after he won.
The New York Times c laimed Manafort provided
polling data to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a person "close to the Kremlin"; in fact, he
provided them to Ukrainians, not Russians.
Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC, claimed they had evidence that Russia hacked
Ukrainian artillery apps;
they then retracted it .
Bloomberg and the WSJ reported Mueller subpoenaed Deustche Bank for Trump's financial
records; the NYT said
that never happened .
Rachel Maddow devoted 20 minutes at the start of her show to very melodramatically
claiming a highly sophisticated party tried to trick her by sending her a fake Top Secret
document modeled after the one published by the Intercept, and said it could only have come
from the U.S. Government (or the Intercept) since the person obtained the document before it
was published by us and thus must have had special access to it; in fact,
Maddow and NBC completely misread the metadata on the document ; the fake sent to Maddow
was created after we published the document, and was sent to her by a random member of the
public who took the document from the Intercept's site and doctored it to see if she'd fall
for an obvious scam. Maddow's entire timeline, on which her whole melodramatic conspiracy
theory rested, was fictitious.
The U.S. media and Democrats spent six months claiming that all "17 intelligence
agencies" agreed Russia was behind the hacks; the NYT finally
retracted that in June, 2017: "The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies --
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not
approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community."
AP claimed on February 2, 2018, that the Free Beacon commissioned the Steele Dossier;
they thereafter acknowledged that was false and
noted, instead: "Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was
initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until
after Democratic groups had begun funding it."
Widespread government and media claims that accused Russian agent Maria Butina offered
"sex for favors" were
totally false (and scurrilous).
After a Russian regional jet crashed on February 11, 2018, shortly after it took off from
Moscow, killing all 71 people aboard, Harvard Law Professor and frequent MSNBC contributor
Laurence Tribe
strongly implied Putin purposely caused the plane to go down in order to murder Sergei
Millian, a person vaguely linked to George Papadopoulos and Jared Kushner; in fact, Millian
was not on the plane nor, to date, has anyone claimed they had any evidence that Putin
ordered his own country's civilian passenger jet brought down.
Special mention:
As I've said many times, the U.S. media has become quite adept at expressing extreme
indignation when people criticize them; when politicians conclude that it is advantageous to
turn the U.S. media into their main adversary; and when people turn to "fake news" sites.
If, however, they were willing to devote just a small fraction of that energy to examining
their own conduct, perhaps they would develop the tools necessary to combat those problems
instead of just denouncing their critics and angrily demanding that politicians and news
consumers accord them the respect to which they believe they are entitled.
The problem is not Russia; the problem is the crisis of neoliberalism in the USA. And related legitimization of neoliberal
elite, which now Deep State is trying ot patch with anti-Russian hysteria
Notable quotes:
"... That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the "secrecy of presidential private meetings has been the rule, not the exception." He continues, "There's nothing unusual about withholding information from the bureaucracy about the president's private meetings with foreign leaders . Sometimes they would dictate a memo afterward, sometimes not." Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US "bureaucracy," sometimes met privately with Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev's translator was present. ..."
Baseless Russiagate allegations continue to risk war with Russia.
Anti-Trump Frenzy Threatens to End Superpower Diplomacy | The Nation
The New Year has brought a torrent of ever-more-frenzied allegations that President Donald Trump has long had a conspiratorial relationship
-- why mince words and call it "collusion"? -- with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.
Why the frenzy now? Perhaps because Russiagate promoters in high places are concerned that special counsel Robert Mueller will
not produce the hoped-for "bombshell" to end Trump's presidency. Certainly,
New York Times columnist
David Leonhardt seems worried, demanding, "The president must go," his drop line exhorting, "What are we waiting for?" (In some
countries, articles like his, and there are very many, would be read as calling for a coup.) Perhaps to incite Democrats who have
now taken control of House investigative committees. Perhaps simply because Russiagate has become a political-media cult that no
facts, or any lack of evidence, can dissuade or diminish.
And there is no new credible evidence, preposterous claims notwithstanding. One of The New York Times '
own recent "bombshells,"
published on January 12, reported, for example, that in spring 2017, FBI officials "began investigating whether [President Trump]
had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests." None of the three reporters bothered to point out that those "agents
and officials" almost certainly included ones later reprimanded and retired by the FBI itself for their political biases. (As usual,
the Times buried its self-protective disclaimer deep in the story: "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly
in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.")
Whatever the explanation, the heightened frenzy is unmistakable, leading the "news" almost daily in the synergistic print and
cable media outlets that have zealously promoted Russiagate for more than two years, in particular the Times , The Washington
Post , MSNBC, CNN, and their kindred outlets. They have plenty of eager enablers, including the once-distinguished Strobe Talbott,
President Bill Clinton's top adviser on Russia and until recently president of the Brookings Institution.
According to Talbott
, "We already know that the Kremlin helped put Trump into the White House and played him for a sucker . Trump has been colluding
with a hostile Russia throughout his presidency." In fact, we do not "know" any of this. These remain merely widely disseminated
suspicions and allegations.
In this cult-like commentary, the "threat" of "a hostile Russia" must be inflated along with charges against Trump. (In truth,
Russia represents no threat to the United States that Washington itself did not provoke since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.)
For its own threat inflation, the Times featured not an expert with any plausible credentials but Lisa Page, the former FBI
lawyer with no known Russia expertise, and who was one of those reprimanded by the agency for anti-Trump political bias. Nonetheless,
the Times quotes Page
at length : "In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western
alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability to spread our democratic ideals."
Perhaps we should have guessed that the democracy-promotion genes of J. Edgar Hoover were still alive and breeding in the FBI, though
for the Times , in its exploitation of the hapless and legally endangered Page, it seems not to matter.
Which brings us, or rather Russiagate zealots, to the heightened "threat" represented by "Putin's Russia." If true, we would expect
the US president to negotiate with the Kremlin leader, including at summit meetings, as every president since Dwight Eisenhower has
done. But, we are told, we cannot trust Trump to do so, because,
according to The Washington Post , he has repeatedly met with Putin alone, with only translators present, and concealed
the records of their private talks, sure signs of "treasonous" behavior, as the Russiagate media first insisted following the Trump-Putin
summit in Helsinki in July 2018.
It's hard to know whether this is historical ignorance or Russiagate malice, though it is probably both. In any event, the truth
is very different. In preparing US-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) summits since the 1950s, aides on both sides have arranged "private
time" for their bosses for two essential reasons: so they can develop sufficient personal rapport to sustain any policy partnership
they decide on; and so they can alert one another to constraints on their policy powers at home, to foes of such détente policies
often centered in their respective intelligence agencies. (The KGB ran operations against Nikita Khrushchev's détente policies with
Eisenhower, and, as is well established, US intelligence agencies have run operations against Trump's proclaimed goal of "cooperation
with Russia.")
That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the "secrecy
of presidential private meetings has been the rule, not the exception." He continues, "There's nothing unusual about withholding
information from the bureaucracy about the president's private meetings with foreign leaders . Sometimes they would dictate a memo
afterward, sometimes not." Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US "bureaucracy," sometimes met privately with Kremlin
leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev's translator was present.
Nor should we forget the national-security benefits that have come from private meetings between US and Kremlin leaders. In October
1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met alone with their translators and an American official who took
notes -- the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished. The result,
in 1987, was the first and still only treaty abolishing an entire category of such weapons, the exceedingly dangerous intermediate-range
ones. (This is the historic treaty Trump has said he may abrogate.)
And yet, congressional zealots are now threatening to subpoena the American translator who was present during Trump's meetings
with Putin. If this recklessness prevails, it will be the end of the nuclear-superpower summit diplomacy that has helped to keep
America and the world safe from catastrophic war for nearly 70 years -- and as a new, more perilous nuclear arms race between the
two countries is unfolding. It will amply confirm a thesis set out in my book
War with Russia? -- that anti-Trump
Russiagate allegations have become the gravest threat to our security.
The following correction and clarification were made to the original version of this article on January 17: Reagan and Gorbachev
met privately with translators during their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, not February, and Reagan was also accompanied
by an American official who took notes. And it would be more precise to say that the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed
in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished.
Stephen F. Cohen is professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and NYU and author of the new book
War with Russia? From Putin and
Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate . This commentary is based on the most recent of his weekly discussions of the new US-Russian
Cold War with the host of the John Batchelor radio show. (The podcast is
here . Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at
TheNation.com . )
"... Buzzfeed's CEO should do the honorable thing and commit hari kari like the Japanese do when losing face, then the company should close up shop. ..."
"... Sedition is a crime and it is clear that the multiple seditious acts of II and IfS toward many countries and with their band of controlled journalists was a deliberate and planned activity. ..."
"... I don't expect any prosecutions but there is a chance of promotional impediments applying to some of those named. At least for the next month. Every named employee of II and IfS is an enemy of democracy and its people ..."
It should be pointed out that the Integrity Initiative recently claimed on Twitter that some of the documents leaked in batch
#4 were not theirs and had been misrepresented as part of the organisation.
It doesn't really matter, though: all that we know, anti-socialist shills writing propaganda on behalf of II (Nimmo, Cohen,
Reid-Ross) have confirmed their own roles, and the Twitter account was proven to have pushed out slanderous material on Jeremy
Corbyn.
Note that "misrepresented" could have referred to the inclusion of the Corbyn slide show document which was presented at but
created by the II.
This organisation and all of those part of it should be treated as enemies of the people, as they have attacked, disingenuously
and using smears,
-Yellow Vests
– Jill Stein
-Jeremy Corbyn
-George Galloway
-Seuams Milne
-German Left Party
-French Left Party
-French Communist Party
-Greek Communist Party
-Podemos
-Norwegian Red Party
-Norwegian Socialist Left Party
-Swedish Left Party
-Swedish Greens
-International Anti-NATO Groups
-Greyzone Project
-Julian Assange
-MintPressNews
Via
-Infiltrating Corbyn and Sanders campaigns
-Inserting propaganda anonymously into local media including the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, The Times, the Guardian, and more
-Using social media to orchestrate hate and dismissal campaigns against those mentioned above
-Hosting events for collaboration between members
-Building online "clusters" to deploy and shape discourse in the media and elsewhere
By repeating or openly collaborating with:
-Ben Nimmo
-Oz Katergi
-Anne Applebaum
-Peter Pomerantsev
-Bellingcat
-Atlantic Council
-Carole Cadwalladr
-David Aaronovitch
-Center For A Stateless Society
-PropOrNot
-Alexander Reid-Ross
-Nick Cohen
-Michael Weiss
-Jamie Fly
-Jamie Kirchick
Directed by:
-Tory Government
-NATO
-Facebook
-German Multinationals
Sedition is a crime and it is clear that the multiple seditious acts of II and IfS toward
many countries and with their band of controlled journalists was a deliberate and planned activity.
I don't expect any prosecutions but there is a chance of promotional impediments applying to some of those named. At least
for the next month. Every named employee of II and IfS is an enemy of democracy and its people.
"... Buzzfeed's CEO should do the honorable thing and commit hari kari like the Japanese do when losing face, then the company should close up shop. ..."
January
08, 2018Joel Whitney is a co-founder of the magazine Guernica, a magazine of global
arts and politics, and has written for many publications, including the New York Times and Wall
Street Journal. His book Finks: How the C.I.A.
Tricked the World's Best Writers describes how the CIA contributed funds to numerous
respected magazines during the Cold War, including the Paris Review, to subtly promote
anti-communist views. In their conversation, Whitney tells Robert Scheer about the ties the
CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom had with literary magazines. He talks about the CIA's
attempt during the Cold War to have at least one agent in every major news organization in
order to get stories killed if they were too critical or get them to run if they were favorable
to the agency. And they discuss the overstatement of the immediate risks and dangers of
communist regimes during the Cold War, which, initially, led many people to support the Vietnam
War.
James Jesus
Angleton was part of this post-OSS group that understood how important spying and
covert ops had been in World War II. And from there, he makes all kinds of terrible mistakes.
He and his group believed essentially that they needed to do better propaganda than the Soviets
did, and one of the ways that they thought they could do it better was to do it subtly and, you
could say, secretly.
So, when this
program is threatened with exposure in '64, '65, '66 and '67 through various sources like
Ramparts and The New York Times, this privilege of secrecy that they enjoyed was not something
that they were willing to give up. So you have something that is described as relatively
benign, this funding of culture through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a funding of student
movements through the National Student Association, the funding of labor unions that would be
less communist-influenced than the communist-dominated ones that they presumed were out there.
These were seen as benign answers. They were reactions to Soviet penetration. So, secrecy is a
key to making them work.
So, even if you want to make the argument that, for instance, the Congress for Cultural Freedom
never censored its magazines–which I think has been severely disproved; they did censor.
Even if you wanted to say that they published all sorts of great writers–which clearly
they did; that was part of the subtlety of it and part of the brilliance of it, and part of the
soft-power charm of it. Even if you wanted to say all that, when the secrecy is exposed by
honest accounting in the media, the fourth estate, the adversarial media of American bragging
around the world, they are so attached to their secrecy, and so upset, the CIA group led by
people like Angleton, that they commit something that is about as anti-American as anything in
our system. Which is: more secrecy, more media penetration to the point of penetrating, first,
the anti-Vietnam War press; second, the student, the college student newspapers and press; the
alternative, so-called, press. Which essentially is a license to do what they did later. So,
where Ramparts was penetrated, leads to Operation Chaos, presumably; that leads to Operation
Mockingbird in the seventies.
By the time we have Carl Bernstein reporting on Operation Mockingbird, and John Crewdson
reporting on its international equivalent in the New York Times–Bernstein in Rolling
Stone–you essentially see the CIA trying to have at least one agent at every major news
and media organization it can do in the world.
And Crewdson reporting in the Times at the end of 1977 essentially says that they had one agent
or contract agent at a newspaper in every world capital on Earth. They could get stories killed
or get stories to run that portrayed the CIA's views in a favorable way, or kill them if they
did not.
"... Recall that, leaked documents passed to the Sunday Mail reveal Integrity Initiative is funded with £2million of Foreign Office cash and run by military intelligence specialists. Politicians and academics have reacted with fury to news a covert Government-funded unit had been attacking the official opposition in Parliament. ..."
The UK government and other Western governments and the US in recent years have had increasing
difficulties persuading enough of their populations as to the legitimacy of the foreign
policies that they have been pursuing.
And at the same time, Western countries have been going through a period of political crisis
and economic crisis.
Piers Robinson, Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of
Sheffield, further explains:
I think a lot of this drive is as much about trying to shore up shaky official narratives and
trying to shore up political systems in a situation of political crisis, as it is actually
about countering Russian propaganda.
I would suspect that that's a little bit of an excuse here to really what's going on of
problems much closer to home. This is not just to do to UK, this is Europe-wide. And there are also indications from the
documents that they are intending to start to have some kind of impact within the United
States. So, it's a very wide-ranging network that seems to be established.
The reason why it needs to be covert, of course, is that if a media organization, or if a
journalist is to let on that he, or she, is involved in a program, which quite clearly is
pushing a particular agenda, then the credibility of that journalist will be damaged.
And this is really what is very deceptive about the Integrity Initiative . It's about
co-opting journalists and academics into, essentially, a campaign, which appears to be a
propaganda campaign, in order to manipulate opinions.
And the only way that can really work effectively, is if readers and viewers don't know that
what they're reading is something which has emerged from a particular political agenda.
Recall that, leaked documents passed to the Sunday Mail reveal Integrity
Initiative is funded with £2million of Foreign Office cash and run by military
intelligence specialists. Politicians and academics have reacted with fury to news a covert
Government-funded unit had been attacking the official opposition in Parliament.
So, it's not accidental that the organized and systematic propaganda campaign against labour
party has actually started under Corbyn's leadership. And that the campaign contains a lot of
personal attacks against the leader of the Labour party. That's because, of course, Jeremy
Corbyn is driving the party out of the neoliberal machine that has been dominating the UK
politics for decades.
But it seems that the agents of the neoliberal establishment are really desperate as they see
that the new narratives are not particularly successful.
It would not be exaggerating to suggest that the attacks against Leftist leaders like Jeremy
Corbyn and Bernie Sanders essentially bring the opposite effect. That's because especially the
younger generations have turned their back to the mainstream media.
And they understand that the more the media attack Corbyn and Sanders, the stronger the
indication that these leaders are not part of the neoliberal establishment that ruined their
lives becomes.
The
Washington Post's Greg Miller reported Sunday that President Donald Trump's confiscation
of the translator's notes from a one-on-one conversation with Russian President Vladimir
Putin in 2017 was "unusual." This is incorrect. It was unprecedented. There is nothing like
it in the annals of presidential history.
Not really. Other U.S. leaders held long private meetings with their counterparts without
notes being taken.
When Richard Nixon met Leonid Brezhnev he did not even bring his own interpreter:
Nixon would meet Brezhnev alone, the only other person in attendance being Viktor
Sukhodrev, the Soviet interpreter. "Our first meeting in the Oval Office was private, except
for Viktor Sukhodrev, who, as in 1972, acted as translator." Nixon on Brezhnev's 1973 visit.
RN, p.878 . Therefore, the only "notes" that would exist would be those of the Soviet
interpreter. Not sure he would have time to make notes and translate and, even if he did so,
whether those notes would be housed in any US archive.
Nixon's White House office was bugged. There are probably tape recordings of the talks.
There might also be recordings of the Trump-Putin talks.
Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev began their second day of talks with a private meeting that had
been scheduled to last 15 minutes but ran for nearly 70 minutes, with only interpreters
present . They met in a small room in the Soviet Mission , with the Soviet leader seated in a
small armchair and Mr. Reagan on a sofa.
In the afternoon, they meet alone for a little over 20 minutes and then again for 90
minutes. All told, the two leaders have spent 4 hours and 51 minutes alone , except for
interpreters, over the two days here.
That the FBI agents involved in the decision were avid haters of Russia and of Trump has
surely nothing to do with it. That the opening of a counter-intelligence investigation gave
them the legal ability under Obama's EO12333 to use NSA signal intelligence against Trump is
surely irrelevant.
What the FBI people really were concerned about is Trump's public record of favoring Russia
at each and every corner.
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to counter
its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the headlines below.
With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of Russian influence over
him is surely justified.
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He
is reluctant to counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just
consider the headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense
suspicions of Russian influence over him is surely justified.
When one adds up all those actions one can only find that Trump cares more about Russia,
than about the U.S. and its NATO allies. Only with Trump being under Putin's influence,
knowingly or unwittingly, could he end up doing Russia so many favors.
The
Washington Post's Greg Miller reported Sunday that President Donald Trump's confiscation
of the translator's notes from a one-on-one conversation with Russian President Vladimir
Putin in 2017 was "unusual." This is incorrect. It was unprecedented. There is nothing like
it in the annals of presidential history.
Not really. Other U.S. leaders held long private meetings with their counterparts without
notes being taken.
When Richard Nixon met Leonid Brezhnev he did not even bring his own interpreter:
Nixon would meet Brezhnev alone, the only other person in attendance being Viktor
Sukhodrev, the Soviet interpreter. "Our first meeting in the Oval Office was private, except
for Viktor Sukhodrev, who, as in 1972, acted as translator." Nixon on Brezhnev's 1973 visit.
RN, p.878 . Therefore, the only "notes" that would exist would be those of the Soviet
interpreter. Not sure he would have time to make notes and translate and, even if he did so,
whether those notes would be housed in any US archive.
Nixon's White House office was bugged. There are probably tape recordings of the talks.
There might also be recordings of the Trump-Putin talks.
Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev began their second day of talks with a private meeting that had
been scheduled to last 15 minutes but ran for nearly 70 minutes, with only interpreters
present . They met in a small room in the Soviet Mission , with the Soviet leader seated in a
small armchair and Mr. Reagan on a sofa.
In the afternoon, they meet alone for a little over 20 minutes and then again for 90
minutes. All told, the two leaders have spent 4 hours and 51 minutes alone , except for
interpreters, over the two days here.
That the FBI agents involved in the decision were avid haters of Russia and of Trump has
surely nothing to do with it. That the opening of a counter-intelligence investigation gave
them the legal ability under Obama's EO12333 to use NSA signal intelligence against Trump is
surely irrelevant.
What the FBI people really were concerned about is Trump's public record of favoring Russia
at each and every corner.
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to counter
its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the headlines below.
With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of Russian influence over
him is surely justified.
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He
is reluctant to counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just
consider the headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense
suspicions of Russian influence over him is surely justified.
When one adds up all those actions one can only find that Trump cares more about Russia,
than about the U.S. and its NATO allies. Only with Trump being under Putin's influence,
knowingly or unwittingly, could he end up doing Russia so many favors.
I challenge anyone to name a modern war prosecuted by the US government and its allies that
did not involve at its root the direct fabrication of blatant lies on enormous levels, both
as a casus belli and also to manipulate public opinion in favor of hostilities.
The clandestine activity represented by these *provocations* isn't even good spycraft. The
Skripal case and the latest use of chlorine gas in Syria are risible, clumsy, amateur
attempts to wangle the empire into war that the callowest rube could see through. And yet,
it's working its magic on the media. The politicians, suborned by the war machine, give
unanimous bipartisan assent.
@Giuseppe
Saddam's WMD, Gulf of Tonkin, etc., etc. And now a ridiculous false flag attack in Syria. Did
it take place at all? But the narrative is all. The press in the USA is more effectively
controlled and conformist than in Germany in the late 1930s and nobody goes around beating up
journalists or sending them to a KZ. The Syrian Gov't is winning the civil war, things are
going well but what Assad really needs is to have the crap bombed out of his military by
Uncle Sam. What transparent bullshit.
The press in the USA is more effectively controlled and conformist than in Germany in
the late 1930s
Who controlled the press there and then?
What can be said about the control and conformity of the Soviet, British and American
press of the time?
and nobody goes around beating up journalists or sending them to a KZ.
That's probably because the usual thugs don't need to do that any longer since they
control virtually everything.
A couple of anecdotes to illustrate my point.:
2 of the reasons we don't hear much about mobsters these days are that the press and
judiciary are owned by them and if you do get something published, you run the risk of
getting snuffed. They probably don't stop at mere blinding anymore.
Victor Riesel was an American newspaper journalist and columnist who specialized in
news related to labor unions. In 1956 a mobster threw sulfuric acid in his face on a
public street in Chicago causing his permanent blindness.
"Treason is a strong word, but not too strong to characterize the situation in which the
Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to
the American people as any invading army could be." This indictment launched a
nine-part series of articles entitled "Treason of the Senate."
-David Graham Phillips, Cosmopolitan magazine, February 1906
In 1911 Phillips was shot multiple t imes by Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, a
Harvard-educated scion of a prominent Maryland family ,at Gramercy Park in New York
City.
Still, you authors need to start digging deeper. Trump and his Allies are putting on an
amazing show / act to distract their ( and Humanities going back generations) hidden
enemies.
The Bad Guys have for millennia weoponized information, convincing the public, reporters,
and journalists that the rabbit hole ends here, that they don't need to dig any deeper, to
just accept this slightly deeper layer of the onion. That warm and fuzzy feeling from
scratching just a little deeper into to information matrix, isn't enough anymore. You guys
have the intelligence, experience, and ability just do it please!
Suppose that ... CIA-MI6 were trying to ensure the election of Trump, not Hillary. As
I described in previous comments , Trump's election followed a logical progression that,
in sum, indicate manipulation on his behalf. Hal Duell @21 mentions some of the psyop
reality-making: White Helmets, MH-17, Skripal, etc. Karlof1 @30 notes the absolute hubris of
the Empire's "we make our own reality".
Lets say Integrity Initiative, working with CIA and MI6, wanted to use the 2016 election
to cast aspersion on the Russians. A populist running against Hillary was the logical choice.
The narrative: only with Russian help could a challenger hope to win against Hillary.
"Russian meddling" and Wikileaks as Russian agent are major "wins" for the establishment.
Integrity Initiative was formed soon after Kissinger's Op-Ed in August 2014 and before Trump
began his run for President.
"... The current round of bullshit is not about justifying the investigation, it is about concealing MI6 taking a leading role in the attempted coup. ..."
A Russian American was put on sanctions list based on Forbes list of Russian billionaires.
This guy founded a high tech industrial laser company employing over a thousand American
workers. Forbes realized they f'ed this guy over and took him off their Russian billionaire
list. But too late--he remains sanctioned.
In my experience, just about everyone here, including hordes of supposedly educated people
who really should know better, believe it. They really do. However, most of them don't
care--it's merely something to snark about or score points in a political conversation with,
not anything they perceive as an actual threat to their way of life.
It's nothing more than the undying legacy of anti-communism and racism thrown in for good
measure. It echoes the German Nazis and their treatment of Slavs (slaves, unter menchen). We
need only look at how the US viewed the Japanese (and the Germans) during WWII, with
Roosevelt calling for their extermination (I'll find the source).
And of course, there's US slavery and extermination of the original inhabitants that also
feeds into the psychosis.
London was said to be very subdued the day news came through that Sweden's Charles the twelfth
had been crushed at Poltava in 1709 . North Western European economic interests have clashed
with Russian across many centuries. Had Charles been successful in the Ukraine a new level of English and Swedish alliance was
in the offing .
I just read about Trump's AG candidate, commenting on the 'Russian interference' in US
elections ....and i'm struck that these are not stupid people....they are either totally
IGNORANT of the facts and analysis .....or they are good ol boys, ready to tow the deep state
lie, so they too can feed at the trough. It saddens me in either case ....what hope can one
entertain when such cretins and low lifes are the supposed LEADERS of the democratic west. I
hold no hopes.
Proof by absurdity. Trump and Deep State work together. MAGA is a policy choice as much as it is a
campaign slogan. Everyone wants to rail against the anti-Trump forces. Oh it feels so good. That Trump has
proven to be a faux populist like Obama is ignored. WTF? Welcome to the rabbit hole.
I didn't live through the entire Anti-Communist Crusade, but was certainly cognitively aware
of it from JFK's inauguration in 1961 until the USSR's dissolution. I very closely studied
the events that led to an emergent Russian Federation and the device meant to corral the
"Near-Abroad"--The Commonwealth of Independent States. Admittedly, I was somewhat horrified
by Yeltsin's attack on Russia's Duma's White House in 1993 and eagerly read Kargalitsky's
account as it was the only one written by a Parliamentarian in English and published in 1994.
It was possible to discern the outright looting of Russia and former Soviet nations, but the
depth of evil involved wasn't made clear until some publications in the late 1990s
documenting the Rape of Russia; all of which made clear what the underlying intent of the
Anti-Communist Crusade entailed, and that that Crusade wouldn't end until Russia was
absolutely broken and enslaved by NATO/Outlaw US Empire. As many have opined, the Cold
War/Anti-Communist Crusade never ended; rather, it just entered a new phase/chapter, and
that's what we're living through today. But as b portrays, the level of hysterics paraded via
BigLie Media go far beyond anything from the previous chapter and probably outweigh those
employed during Red Scares I and II combined.
It seems fairly plain to see that delusional madness and anger have combined as the
motivating factors, but why/what sparked them and when? IMO, when was during Carter's
presidency with the why/what being several seemingly disparate but connected happenings:
Church Committee Hearings; Stagflation; Iranian Islamic Revolution; OPEC actions; losing grip
on Latin America; informal end to War on Poverty, and institution of Neoliberalism and
Zerosumism; changing of Coldwarrior Guard to Israel First Coldwarrior Guard. The culmination
was CIA gaining control of Executive with DCI GHW Bush becoming Veep to senile, dementia
addled POTUS Reagan.
Interconnected with the above is the prepping of the World Trade Center buildings for
demolition during Clinton's 2nd term, the operative question being: Would the False Flag be
perpetrated by Gore/Liberman, or was Bush/Cheney deemed to do the deed by Deep State actors;
or does this aspect even matter--Liberman was as much of a Neocon as Cheney, all 4 are Israel
Firsters, and Gore was already a War Criminal due to his participation in Clinton's numerous
illegalities. Sure, the Bush/Cheney cabal was more radical; but given what we observed during
Clinton/Gore, Deep State support was quite abundant. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was
finished and Kosovo created, Afghanistan was already targeted and Joint Vision 2010
--the blueprint for the Outlaw US Empire's Full Spectrum Dominance Policy--was published in
1996. Interestingly, at no time known to me has the Policy articulated by the authors of
Joint Vision 2010 or its update Joint Vision 2020 been announced by any POTUS
or senior member of the Duopoly as THE #1 policy goal of the Outlaw US Empire despite both
papers being available to the public. (If he were still alive, IF Stone would have written
about both umpteen numbers of times; while true to form, BigLie media remains 100% mute.)
Despite all the preparations and Trillions of dollars spent and looted, The failure to
implement the Yinon Plan seems to be directed at Russia, although it was indigenous Iraqis
who are responsible for the plan's defeat.
So, is the lying vitriol we're subjected to the result of Russian actions or the inability
to attain the #1 policy goal due to mistakes made at all levels--Deep State and Federal
Government? Recall that Russia/Putin didn't start to actively parry Outlaw Empire moves until
2008, well after the Yinon Plan's defeat by Iraqis.
Blooming Barricade , Jan 15, 2019 5:02:35 PM |
link
This inane narrative has gone too far. It's actually threatening chances for human survival
with its nationalism, poor focus, and banality:
--
"The key focus of the so-called "left" in the world's most polluting country, run by an
ecocidal vandal who deserves to be in the running for most destructive rulers of all time, is
whether or not that vandal is taking orders from the Russian Federation.
Let me repeat that: in the most wasteful society in human history, the forces designated
to oppose the rape of the planet and corporate slavery are concerned with treason and
betrayal of the "nation."
MSNBC: "The worst case scenario that we`ve all been talking about, which is the
possibility that the president had somehow been co-opted and was in the pocket of the
Russians."
THIS is the "worst case scenario" according to the "social justice" network of the
American "left?"
If we were to step back and look at this terrible situation honestly, we could only
conclude that American liberals, and the Democratic Party, are right-wing nationalist forces
concerned with geopolitical gambits and preservation of military alliances.
This isn't the politics of 2019, or 1999. It's the politics of 1819 - but even then, it's
the right wing politics of 1819, as there was already a left dedicated to popular solidarity
and social ownership existing, clandestinely, in the shadows of European cities.
It's worth analyzing how a "Seattle" would play out if it were to occur in the context of
today's US political discourse: the protestors would be seen as nationalist anti-Semites
doing the bidding of Putin, and perhaps Xi Jinping. The leaking of the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment would be condemned instantly as "information warfare." A focus on environmental
issues would be viewed in the context of "energy geopolitics." Indymedia would be shut down
by the authorities as a vehicle for "sowing discord" in Europe against NATO and
liberalism."
@14 karlof1... good post.. i don't know the answer to your questions, but it seems like a bit
of both but mostly the later... i am unaware of this joint vision 2010 paper..
As b points out, and Erelis @6, among others confirms, Kaplan's article in Slate is
worthless. Discredited by everything that has happened over the past two years.
The question is whether it matters. Who reads Slate? Are those who follow Kaplan anything
more than partisans, far beyond the reach of logical argument, committed to the Zionist
project and US hegemony, who read him for comfort and laughs rather than critically.
Kaplan, after twenty odd years of consistently being wrong and consistently impelling the
United States into foreign disasters, costly in lives and treasure, is a busted flush
politically. The only people his ravings effect are the true believers who are simply looking
for someone to articulate their idiotic prejudices.
This, after all is a man whose wife, an Obama/ Clinton favourite, parodying Marie Antionette,
midwifed the Bandera Reich in Kiev.
There is little point in arguing with him, just feed him ever more rope and he will hang
himself, his spouse, his country(s) and the Ukraine and its allies too.
Given the part we know about how self serving, corrupt and incompetent our IC is I fear it is
the tip of the iceberg. So many decades they have learned they can do as they will with
impunity. If I am not mistaken they are partly self financing through likely illegal and
unethical activities. They have gone rogue. Currently the dems think it's fitting however
they will also feel the bite. How will we ever gain control of our country.
Which are more salient--domestically: The attacks on Russia or those against Trump? Lots of
Trumpian, GOP and Corporate Democrat policy ploys go against the majority of the polity and
the National Interest. Unfortunately, the bloc known as the Resistance includes a 5th Column
consisting of most Corporate Democrats, who are essentially Republicans wearing donkey heads.
BigLie Media wants to promote the GOP & Corporate Democrat policy ploys, so the
anti-Russian news assault serves to cover-up popular domestic issues, like
this one regarding taxation and related income disparity . (Amazing that 60
Minutes provided Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez airtime to outline her proposals--airtime that
was meant to cut her down to size but backfired.)
As I outlined earlier, what I see as the struggle is for control of the Federal
Government--CIA/Deep State vs the American People--with the Anti-Communist Crusade used as
cover to diminish rights while enriching actors controlling government, which is exactly what
we see now. Yes, Trump's a player, but with few friends and little coaching. Arguably, his
only asset is the position he occupies.
"... Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract. ..."
"... While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent. ..."
Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who
appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal. Leventhal has been a staffer at the State
Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation,
misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative
memo, he is listed as a current team member:
Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with
"counter-propaganda," the State Department's Global Engagement Center
has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My
old job at the State Department was as chief propagandist," confessed former Global
Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it
and they have to do it to their own population and I don't necessarily think it's that
awful."
Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's
international network, the Global Engagement Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying
smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal
appeared in an
outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he
would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world.
Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would
marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation.
His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and destroy the
messenger.
Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's
international network, the Global Engagement Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying
smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal
appeared in an
outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he
would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world.
Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would
marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation.
His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and destroy the
messenger.
Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000
British pounds) for a 50% contract.
While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own
Linkedin page
lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation Advisor" to the State Department. If that were
true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.
Mueller investigation is a continuation of JFK assassination by other means.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Now, as the 'Russian influence' narrative is dying down, the anti-Trump - anti-Russian campaign is moving to new grounds. ..."
"... Initiating a counter-intelligence investigation, for which there was no basis, gave the FBI, and later the Mueller investigation, unfettered access to NSA 'signals intelligence' that could then possibly be used to incriminate Trump or his associates. ..."
"... It was the Obama administration which had given the FBI access to this tool : ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Trump is no populist. A populist can't be elected by the money-based US political system. Trump's election was almost certainly arranged ..."
"... Then why did Trump nominate Gina Haspel as head of the CIA? She is the acolyte of Trump nemesis Brennan. Why does Trump choose people like Nikki Halley, Pompeo, Bolton? ..."
"... "I very much dislike most of Trump's domestic and foreign policy. But he was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign the media and the intelligence services have since run against him undermines the will of the people." ..."
"... the assassination of JFK opened the floodgates of blatant depravity perpetrated by those whose greed and lust for power will ultimately destroy us. ..."
"... There are trends: A growing US citizen realization that their political system prior to Trump was nearly completely corrupt; the Clintons are more broadly understood as the pathological criminals that they are; the Podesta emails with their sick connotations remain 'in the air' - See Ben Swann's work, for example. The Clinton Foundation is far more broadly understood as a massive criminal enterprise. ..."
"... "Pompeo met on October 24 [at Trump's request] with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower who co-authored an analysis published by a group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community's official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year's theft of data from DNC computers. Binney and the other former officials argue that the DNC data was "leaked," not hacked, "by a person with physical access" to the DNC's computer system." ..."
"... In short the last two years have been about trying to defeat Trump but the attackers are looking more and more wounded, and Trump, well, he's hanging in there. General Kelly and others have described Trump's work ethic as exhausting. ..."
"... Trump has been put under intense investigation by Deep State hacks who are determined to see him impeached. And all they have come up with is that he is a compulsive pussy-grabber (no shit, hey?). ..."
"... Well, if he has then he has hidden them extraordinarily well, because Mueller with all his resources hasn't found any. Indeed, Mueller's investigation is so well-resourced that the only conclusion I can reach is that Trump has no such skeletons. ..."
"... "Simply put, the Russia NIA is not an "IC-coordinated" assessment -- the vehicle for such coordination, the NIC, was not directly involved in its production, and no NIO was assigned as the responsible official overseeing its production. Likewise, the Russia NIA cannot be said to be the product of careful coordination between the CIA, NSA and FBI -- while analysts from all three agencies were involved in its production, they were operating as part of a separate, secretive task force operating under the close supervision of the Director of the CIA, and not as an integral part of their home agency or department." ..."
"... Escalation towards war with Russia was a matter of public record in late pre-election 2016, thanks to Clinton News Network ... now ask yourselves where is that general in the press conference nowadays? ..."
"... For a thorough update on the Integrity Initiative and its offshoots, check out the latest from legal investigator Barbara Boyd. ..."
"... To defeat the "Deep State" in the U.S., it is essential to understand the role of British Intelligence. While it is essential to know the role of Hillary Clinton, Obama, Comey, DOJ/FBI operatives, et.al., it is even more important to understand the geopolitical assumptions behind Russiagate. And for that, one must turn to the British. ..."
"... The aim of the counterintelligence operation and of the Russiagate hoax was not to build a prosecution case against President Trump. It was to put the United States in constitutional limbo by creating a parallel and competing center of constitutional legitimacy. ..."
"... Very difficult to judge: what is the result of infighting in the US vs. any agreed-on never mind coherent foreign policy? That the question is even asked - all over the world now - spells stage one collapse. ..."
"... Trump's nationalist credentials are further belied by such things as: adding TPP provisions to the new North American trade agreement; attacking Syria based on false flags; arming Ukraine; pulling out of the INF treaty and engaging in an unnecessary and costly arms race; actively seeking to overthrow the governments of Iran and Venezuela; etc. ..."
"... My own theory about 2016 is that everybody miscalculated. Trump was (IMO) running as an ego-building publicity stunt. Hillary (and her Deep State sponsors) had actively helped Trump get the nomination with hundreds of millions of dollars of free publicity which also enhanced the bottom lines of Big Media. His multiple flaws were airbrushed away. ..."
Despite the loss of major narratives, the war of the deep state against U.S. President Trump continues unabated. The main of tool
in this war are allegations of relations between Trump and anything Russia. The war runs along several parallel paths.
The narrative war in the media is most visible one. When any of the fake stories about Trump and Russia gets debunked and disposed,
new ones are created or others intensified.
In parallel to these propaganda efforts the deep state created an investigation that Trump has no way to escape from. Enabled
by one of the Obama administrations last acts the investigation is using signal intelligence to entrap and flip the people surrounding
Trump (see section three below). The big price will be Trump himself. Here we take a look at what transpired during the last weeks.
One major anti-Trump narrative was that 'Russian influence' helped to put him into office. This was based on the alleged nefarious
influence a Russian clickbait company, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Peterburg, had on the U.S. electorate. That explanation
never made sense. Little of the IRA activities had to do with the election. It used sockpuppets on Facebook and Twitter to attract
people to websites filled with puppy pictures or similar nonsense. The IRA would then sell advertisement and promotions on these
sites.
This
was obvious for anyone following the factual content of the news instead of the 'opinions' a whole bunch of anti-Trump 'experts'
and the media formed around them.
That the Mueller investigation finally indicted several of the IRA's officers over minor financial transactions was seen as a
confirmation of the political aspects of the IRA activities. But nearly all the reporting left out that Mueller
confirmed the commercial intent behind the IRA and its activities. There is nothing political in the accusations. Indeed point
95 of the Mueller
indictment
of the IRA says:
Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the accounts to receive money from real U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions
and advertisements on the ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages. Defendants and their co-conspirators typically charged certain
U.S. merchants and U.S. social media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content on their popular false
U.S. persona accounts , including Being Patriotic, Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist.
Part of the false narrative of a political influence campaign was the claim that the $100,000 the IRA spent for advertisement
to promote its clickbait webpages through Facebook ads somehow moved people to vote for Trump. But 56% of the IRA ads ran after the
election, 25% of all its ads were never seen by anyone. How a few $10,000 for ads only few saw moved an election that was fought
with several billions spent by each candidate's campaign was left unexplained.
[T]he common understanding is that Russia's interference efforts included sophisticated targeting of specific voting groups on
Facebook, which could have made the difference in states that Trump narrowly won on his way to an electoral-vote victory.
That understanding about Russia's sophisticated targeting, though, is not supported by the evidence -- if it's not flat-out
wrong.
...
Most of the ads purchased by the Russians didn't specify a geographic target smaller than the United States on the whole, according
to a Post review of the ads released by the House Intelligence Committee. Those that did target specific states heavily targeted
those that weren't really considered targets of the 2016 election, such as Missouri and Maryland. And of those ads that did target
specific states, most happened well before or well after the final weeks of the campaign.
All the claims that some Russian sockpuppets influenced the 2016 elections were and are nonsense. The IRA sockpuppets never had
any political intent.
Likewise the allegations that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC and Clinton crony Podesta's email are mere assertions for which
no hard evidence was ever provided. The only known fact is that the emails and papers were real, and that there content revealed
the shoddiness of Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and her campaign.
Now, as the 'Russian influence' narrative is dying down, the anti-Trump - anti-Russian campaign is moving to new grounds. Last week
the New York Times claimed that Paul Manafort, who for some time ran the Trump election campaign, gave public and internal
polling data to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska:
Manafort Accused
of Sharing Trump Polling Data With Russian Associate . A day after that sensational claim made a large splash throughout U.S.
media the New York Times recanted:
CORRECTION: PAUL MANAFORT asked KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK to pass TRUMP polling to the Ukrainian oligarchs SERHIY LYOVOCHKIN & RINAT
AKHMETOV, & not to OLEG DERIPASKA, as originally reported. We have corrected the story & I deleted a tweet repeating the error.
Duh. Manafort gave polling data to his Ukrainian fixer Konstantin Kilimnik with the request to pass it along to Ukrainian oligarchs
for who he had worked before joining the Trump campaign. Kilimnik had long
worked for the International Republican Institute office in Moscow. The IRI is a CIA offshot under Republican Party tutelage
that is used to influence politics abroad. Its long time head was the deceased hawkish Senator John McCain. While he worked with
Kilimnik in the Ukraine, Manafort concentrated on moving the Ukraine towards the European Union and away from Russia. His and Kilimnik
efforts were always opposed to Russian interests. But the NYT and others falsely
try to pass them off as the opposite
with the sole purpose of feeding the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign.
Another anti-Trump/anti-Russian propaganda effort is a new sensational NYT piece on obvious misbehavior in the upper rows
of the FBI :
In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the
president's behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests
, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.
The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions
constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for
Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence.
The NYT lets it seem as if the decision to launch a counter-intelligence investigation related to Trump was as based
on some reasonable suspicion the FBI had. It was not. This was an act of revenge by the upper anti-Trump echelons in the FBI with
which they attempted to undermine Trump's presidency. Note what the claimed suspicion was based on:
Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference
in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign
trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention
platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.
Other factors fueled the F.B.I.'s concerns, according to the people familiar with the inquiry. Christopher Steele, a former
British spy who worked as an F.B.I. informant, had compiled memos in mid-2016 containing unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials
tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail and bribe him.
Trump made a joke during the election campaign asking Russia to release the 30,000 emails Hillary Clinton had deleted from her
illegal private email server. There is no requirement, as far as I know, for any candidate to criticize this or that country. How
can not following the non existing requirement to criticize Russia be suspicious? The Republican Party did not soften its convention
platform on Ukraine. It rejected an amendment that would have further sharpened it. Overall the Republican platform was
more hawkish than the Democratic one. The
Steele dossier was of course from A to Z
made up nonsense paid for
by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
It is non sensible to claim that these were reasonable suspicions sufficient to open a counter-intelligence investigation. The
hasty FBI move to launch a counter-intelligence operation obviously had a different motive and aim.
Strzok and Page sent other text messages that raise the possibility they were discussing opening up a counterintelligence investigation
against Trump before Comey's firing.
"And we need to open the case we've been waiting on now while Andy is acting ," Strzok wrote to Page on the day of Comey's
ouster.
Andy is Andrew McCabe, who served as deputy FBI director.
Page gave some indication in her congressional testimony in July 2018 that the text message was a reference to an investigation
separate from the obstruction probe that has already been reported.
Normally the FBI needs to clear such counter-intelligence investigations with the Justice Department. In this case it
did not do so at all :
In the case of the investigation into Trump, the FBI's decision to open a file on the president so quickly after Comey's firing
in May 2017 was a source of concern for some officials at the Justice Department because the FBI acted without first consulting
leadership at the department . But those worries were allayed when, days later, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was appointed
to oversee the Russia probe ...
After Comey was fired, the FBI made a very hasty move, without reasonable suspicion and without informing the Justice Department,
to launch a counter-intelligence operation involving the sitting president and his administration. What was the real purpose of this
move?
Initiating a counter-intelligence investigation, for which there was no basis, gave the FBI, and later the Mueller investigation,
unfettered access to NSA 'signals intelligence' that could then possibly be used to incriminate Trump or his associates.
On his way out the door, we all were wallowing in our winter of discontent, Obama signed an executive order...
...
The order revised the rules around intelligence sharing among our intel community. Specifically, it made the firehose of raw intelligence
collected by the NSA directly accessible to the FBI and CIA. Instead of having to ask for intel and getting what they filtered
down the FBI and CIA could directly access the unfiltered "SigInt" or signals intelligence. Intercepted phone calls, emails, raw
intel from human sources. Everything our vast intelligence vacuum hoovers up, available directly... but only for counterintel
and foreign intel purposes .
The NSA can sit on virtually every communication into and out of the U.S. that takes place over networks. Obama made it possible
for the FBI to directly access everything they had on Trump, et al. Obama supercharged the FBI's ability to investigate Trump.
The Obama administration
enacted the changed executive order EO 12333 in early January 2017, shortly before Trump took over:
Previously, the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or
the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The N.S.A.'s analysts passed on only information
they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information.
Now, other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by
the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for "minimizing" privacy intrusions.
...
[T]he 12333 sharing procedures allow analysts, including those at the F.B.I., to search the raw data using an American's identifying
information only for the purpose of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence investigations , not for ordinary criminal cases.
And they may do so only if one of several other conditions are met, such as a finding that the American is an agent of a foreign
power.
However, under the rules, if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to
the Justice Department.
At that time Peter Lee, aka Chinahand,
already had the suspicion
that Obama was behind the FBI campaign against Trump.
With the changes in EO 12333 Obama gave the FBI the ability to launch a world wide snooping operation against the incoming Trump
administration under the guise of a 'counter-intelligence' operation. The hasty FBI move after Comey was fired activated this instrument.
The Mueller investigation has since used it extensively. 'Crimes' revealed through the snooping operation are turned over to the
Justice Department.
The NYT claim that the counter-intelligence investigation was initiated because of reasonable suspicion of Russian influence
over Trump is nonsense. It was initiated to get access to a set of tools that would allow unlimited access to communication of Trump
and anyone related to him. It was Obama who on his way out of the door gave the FBI these capabilities.
There are signs that the unlimited access the FBI and Mueller investigation have to signal intelligence is used to create prosecutions
via ' parallel construction ':
An active counterintel investigation means the Trump Administration's crimes were only as secure as the weakest link in their
weakest moment. We got hints of this early. Our intelligence folks picked up "signals intelligence" or SigInt from Russians talking
to Russians.
Those "signals" aren't the kind of evidence that finds its way into a courtroom. In fact, it's important that it doesn't. It would
burn sources and methods. It lays out the crimes and the players though... and then prosecutors find ways to make triable cases
other ways .
The public sees cases for specific charges carrying significant prison time without ever knowing that the NSA and prosecutors
knew so much more than they ever revealed. Now, apply those principles to the cases we've seen Mueller bring forward so far.
Mike Flynn: pleaded out to a minor charge, rolled over in full and then produced five rounds of documents. Likely: Flynn was
confronted with the intel they had on him and knew he was cooked. They knew the crimes. They heard and saw everything. There'd
be no escape.
By flipping and pleading out Flynn, all of that secret intel stays secret. Our intelligence efforts are protected. And Flynn
goes down. And he cooks a bunch of other gooses. He's savvy enough to know that once they have the intel, all that's left to do
is make the case.
...
The 'crime' that di Flynn in was misremembering a phone call he had with the Russian ambassador. Similar happened with Rick Gates,
Paul Manafort's righthand man and a member of Trump's transition team. Then it happened to Paul Manafort himself and to George Papadopoulos.
The Mueller investigation, thanks to the snooping Obama and the FBI enabled, knows the content of every phonecall, chat and email
any member of the Trump administration made and make to someone abroad (and likely also within the U.S.). It invites people as witnesses
and asks them about the content of a specific calls they made. If they misremember or lie - bang - Mueller has the transcript ready.
A crime has been created and an indictment for lying to the FBI will follow. This is what happened to Flynn and the others the Mueller
investigation entrapped and convicted.
Because of the counter-intelligence investigation the anti-Trump gang in the FBI hastened to initiate, the investigators got hands
on signal intelligence - phone calls, chats and emails - that allowed them to indict minor people for petty crimes and to flip them
to talk to the investigation.
The aim, in the end, was and is to build a prosecution case against President Trump for whatever minor and petty half-backed illegal
doing there may be.
To make such a prosecution and an indictment publicly palpable the media is assigned with launching story after story about nefarious
relations between Trump and anything Russia.
As we have seen above with the IRA story, the retracted NYT 's Manafort bang, and the NYT's false claims about
the motive of the FBI's counter-intelligence investigation, none of these stories hold up to diligent scrutiny. Today's Washington
Post adds another example of no-beef stories that insinuate mystic 'Russian influence' over Trump:
President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin
, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to
discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.
The rest of the story largely refutes the claim made in its headline and very first sentence:
Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
...
Trump generally has allowed aides to listen to his phone conversations with Putin ..
...
In an email, Tillerson said that he " was present for the entirety of the two presidents' official bilateral meeting in Hamburg,"...
After Trump had a first White House meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Washington, lots of leaks about the talk
appeared in the DC media. Trump was accused of giving information about an ISIS plot to the Russians that was allegedly secret.
It was not . Since then Trump clamped down on the number of participants, briefings and readouts for such talks. That is simply
a necessary and laudable behavior. Now the media try to construct that into 'Trump is concealing details' about talks with Russia
even when the U.S. Secretary of State and others are present in these.
Ever since Trump won the Republican primaries, the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration and the U.S. and British intelligence
services prepared to prevent a successful Trump presidency. The Steele dossier, created by 'former' British intelligence agents and
paid for by the Clinton campaign, was the basis for an FBI investigation that was seen
as
an insurance against a Trump win. Any possible Russia relations Trump might have came under scrutiny. This prevented him from
fulfilling his campaign promise of coming to better relations with Russia.
Shortly before Obama left the office he created the tool the FBI needed to put its investigation on steroids. When Trump fired
Comey for his handling of the Clinton email affair, the FBI put that tool into action. With unfettered access to signal intelligence
the Mueller investigation was able to entrap a number of Trump related people and to flip them to its side. It will use any information
they give up to find some angle under which Trump can be prosecuted and eventually impeached. Even if nothing comes off this investigations,
the media reports and slander all this created may well be enough to prevent an election of Trump for a second term.
I very much dislike most of Trump's domestic and foreign policy. But he was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign
the media and the intelligence services have since run against him undermines the will of the people. Unfortunately I see no way
that Trump could escape from the hold it has gained over him. Exposing it as much as possible might well be his best defense.
It is information that is put out there that is never cross checked by the American people. They are too busy, too involved
with other things or too stupid to find out the true facts. It is hard to predict what will occur next year. I
feel it all depends who wins the primary on the Democrat side.
[Trump] ... was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign the media and the intelligence services have since
run against him undermines the will of the people.
There is a major flaw in reasoning here. Trump is no populist. A populist can't be elected by the money-based US political system.
Trump's election was almost certainly arranged:
The anti-Russia campaign began in earnest in 2014 (well before the 2016 election);
Trump's pre-election relationship to the Clinton's is highly suspect: they were likely to be much closer than we have
been led to believe;
An FBI informant worked for Trump for over 10 years - during the time that Mueller was FBI director;
Trump was the ONLY populist on the Republican side (out of 19 contenders!);
Sanders was a 'sheepdog'
and Hillary ran a terrible campaign in which she made obvious mistakes that a seasoned campaigner like herself would never
make;
British involvement in the election (Fusion GPS, Cambridge Analytica, a Brit 'spy' in the Sanders campaign, etc.) suggests
CIA-MI6 working together;
Trump Administration policies are consistent those of Clinton-Bush-Obama:
> Obamacare was not repealed "on day one" - it has been strengthened by not defending coverage for prior conditions;
> Trump put TPP provisions into his new North American trade deal;
> Trump continues ME meddling;
> Trump continues militarism and tax cutting;
> Etc.
The only major "difference" that I can think of are Trump's Wall and China tariffs. But these are consistent with the 'Deep
State' goals.
Surveys show that the "will of the people" is very different than the neoliberal, neoconservative policies that the establishment
fosters upon us.
MAGA is a POLICY CHOICE as much as it is a campaign slogan. It is designed to meet the challenge posed by Russia and China
and 'turn the page' on the deceit and duplicity of the Obama Administration just as Obama's "Change You Can Believe In" was designed
to turn the page on the the militarism of the Bush Administration. These BI-PARTISAN page-turnings ensure that there is no accountability
and provides each new Administration with a new sly story line that the public readily swallows. Each new Presidential charade
entertains and misdirects as the interests of the Empire are advanced with a refreshed box of tricks and dishonest narratives.
...war of the deep state against U.S. President Trump continues unabated.
Then why did Trump nominate Gina Haspel as head of the CIA? She is the acolyte of Trump nemesis Brennan. Why does Trump choose
people like Nikki Halley, Pompeo, Bolton?
The war of the Deep State is a psyop to crush dissent as the butt-hurt Deep State continues to pursue their dream of global
hegemony. Anyone that believes that Trump is no part of that psyop is delusional.
Wow, man. Thanks to you and all the regulars here who contribute to gathering relevant info from all kinds of sources. I hate
to repeat myself, but I feel that a little praise every 3 or 6 months is not too much spamming. This is what serious journalism
looks like.
Zachary Smith @2: ... I just don't buy into the "insurance" theory.
And I don't buy the theory that Hillary is hell bent on war. The Clinton's are very rational and calculating and no President has the freedom that your theory suggests. IMO what the Deep State has done under their man Trump is very similar to what the Deep State would have done if they had selected
Clinton instead. The fact is, a populist nationalist is what was deemed necessary to meet the challenge from Russia and China. And that is what
we got (surprise!).
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Furthermore, focusing on personality and Party is just what they want
"Watch what they do, not what they say" has a corollary: pay attention to the polices, not the politicians.
"I very much dislike most of Trump's domestic and foreign policy. But he was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign
the media and the intelligence services have since run against him undermines the will of the people."
This pretty well sums it up for me. Being old enough to remember FDR and the brief rise of the middle class in the 40's, 50's
and 60's (and having benefited from that attempt at leveling the playing field), I am more than saddened at the downward spiral
of our nation. Politics have obviously never been clean and fair, but the assassination of JFK opened the floodgates of blatant
depravity perpetrated by those whose greed and lust for power will ultimately destroy us.
Of course b you have nothing here to offer except your opinion. Your views regarding the relentlessness of the US criminal justice
system are on target, just ask the underclasses about that. Once in view, you are never let be and in the US everyone can be found
guilty of something.
Rather nice to see the pampered son of inherited tax-free wealth on the receiving end for once, in my opinion.
Trump is a crook. Russian collusion is his smokescreen. His crimes have already been demonstrated through what little we already
know and there is still much we don't know and probably never will know.
This essay reads something like a veiled mea culpa from you.
You were wrong about Trump from the get go. Why not just admit it and move along? Why remain steadfastly in thrall to any shred
of rightwing, authoritarianism of the elite masquerading as populism?
Whatever Trump gets from the criminal justice system, Congress or the voters appears to be well-deserved. He has brought this
on himself and really there is no one else to blame even as he never will accept responsibility. He is stupid at best, dishonest
at best, a useful idiot at best.
Trump saved his ass financially after a series of disastrous business bankruptcies by accepting what appears by all indications
to be laundered money from literally hundreds of anonymous shell companies investing in his condos since at least 2008.
He has run roughshod over the emoluments clause quite openly.
I do believe, knowing what we know now, he will probably avoid indictment and escape impeachment, maybe only through resignation/pardon
but more likely the old fashioned way: defeat at the polls in 2020.
In many ways Trump has done some good by reinvigorating the US left (such as it is) and bringing at least enough cohesion in
the ranks of a badly splintered populace mainly among white females and white college educated voters who now reject the GOP,
or at least the GOP of Trump.
Whether this will lead to badly needed fixes for the heinous wealth inequality (started with Reagan) is doubtful but at least
the conversation is now underway (started with Bernie) which is the first step.
Tax increases, social security stabilisation, re-funneling wasted MIC billions to domestic programs for the poor, etc.
It is a start. Will it become a solution or a revolution in time?
That is up to the people who are still under the yoke of neoliberalism and global capital flight.
re:
Mike Flynn: pleaded out to a minor charge, rolled over in full and then produced five rounds of documents. Likely: Flynn was confronted
with the intel they had on him and knew he was cooked. They knew the crimes. They heard and saw everything. There'd be no escape.
By flipping and pleading out Flynn, all of that secret intel stays secret. Our intelligence efforts are protected. And Flynn goes
down. And he cooks a bunch of other gooses. He's savvy enough to know that once they have the intel, all that's left to do is
make the case.//
So the situation is worse than I thought. The clear inference is that (1) Flynn (and others) really did commit some major crimes,
and then (2) got off easy by admitting to a memory lapse (3) while cooking a bunch of other gooses.
Flynn does the easy (2) and gets away with (1) and (3), both very serious. This is justice?
As you may recall, the woman threatened conflict on cyberattacks.
"As president, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyberattacks just like any other attack," the Democratic
presidential nominee said. "We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses."
Regarding the Deep State and Trump, Syria is in the process of winning against the neocons. And Iran has not yet been attacked.
Hillary has a record, and for the most part hasn't even tried to run away from it.
thanks b... the topic is so very tiring.. i am sick of hearing about it.. if the usa fell off a cliff and never came back again
- i would be fine with that.. thank you regardless, for taking it apart and trying ti dispel the bullshite.. it is so thick, it
defies logic.. i agree with @1 jose garcia, and @4 radiator...
trump is a crook... so what? most of the business class in the west are at this point! politics and crookery go hand in hand...
i would be surprised if it was any different at this point in time.. how about the intel agencies? you want to sleep with them?
lol..
There's either something wrong with this assumption, or something we're not being told...
The Mueller investigation, thanks to the snooping Obama and the FBI enabled, knows the content of every phonecall, chat
and email any member of the Trump administration made and make to someone abroad (and likely also within the U.S.). It invites
people as witnesses and asks them about the content of a specific calls they made. If they misremember or lie - bang - Mueller
has the transcript ready. A crime has been created and an indiction for lying to the FBI will follow. This is what happened to
Flynn and the others the Mueller investigation entrapped and convicted.
Option 1. Something wrong?
If you're being cross-examined in a court or pseudo-legal forum about things you may or may not remember, you have the right to
decline to answer a question, or to preface any and every answer with the phrase "If I remember correctly blah blah blah..."
Option 2. Something we're not being told?
If the interrogators were able to ambush Flynn, then it's probably because they didn't acquaint him with all of his rights, or
he didn't have a lawyer with him.
Trump's not stupid. He won't blunder into a situation bereft of any semblance of legal Human Rights protections designed to
ambush him. And if he can't have a lawyer with him when the questions start, then he can probably refuse to attend without breaking
any law.
@donkeytale There has been close to three years of serious investigative intent to lay a glove on Trump (HRC's team, the FBI and
Mueller) and there is only the merest scratch of a womaniser (which with three marriages doesn't come as a surprise). What is
quite remarkable, despite all the investigative effort, is how clean Trump has managed to keep himself despite building a fortune
in one of the toughest cities in the world, building himself up through the eras of the five families, junk bonds and ponzi schemes
and soviet union mobsters, not to mention the corruption of the poltical classes and regulatory abuses and unionised labor.
For the world's he moves in, the only explanation that gives him enough protection is that for a long time Trump has been a
protected FBI asset for one of the field offices, possibly now senior service figures. And it's this deep relationship with well
connected parts of the FBI or other secret services that has given him the ability to steer past the various attempts by the deep
state. Why, for instance, do we have such a lot of leakage of the inner workings of the anti-Trump FBI? Some part of the deep
state has become disgusted at the spying (eg on congress), the blackmailing, the warmongering, and deep corruption of the anti-constitutionalists,
and Trump is their vengence. You just have to decide which side you are on...
I read that as Testing - perhaps a trial/demonstration as a professional troll for somebody or other. How else to interpret "only the merest scratch of a womaniser" or "how clean Trump has managed to keep himself". Maybe I'm
surprised not to also see praise for the clever Government Shutdown.
meanwhile..trump and his appointees attack legitimacy of Venezuela govt.
Trump is in bad odor at home while seeking to attack other govts.
' Washington has explicitly expressed its support for a potential coup against the elected Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro,
by offering its backing to the opposition and stating outright it was time for a "new government."
"The Maduro regime is illegitimate and the United States will continue ... to work diligently to restore a real democracy"
to Venezuela, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters on his trip to the Middle East on Saturday, adding that Washington
would attempt to make the Latin American nations "come together to deliver that."' https://www.rt.com/news/448673-us-venezuela-time-new-government/
One thing the US deep state and their muller proxy would have on Trump, and most if not all of Trump's team, is collusion with
Israel (can this convert into charges of treason as threats). A weapon that is good for threats against and turning those around
Trump, and possibly used in as a last resort to remove Trump.
Adding to my post @ 18
Pat Lang has a post up "What is wrong with Trump?" "But, how does one explain his lack of action on the border? Does someone or
some thing in Russia, Israel, the UK, his former business associates, have something really juicy on Trump, something that he
fears to unleash through decisive action? pl"
Collusion with Israel is something neither side - team Trump and the deep state - would wish to bring into the open, but this
may be the only thing they have on Trump.
"On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike
Rogers traveled to New York and met with President-Elect Donald Trump.
On Friday November 18th The Washington Post reported
on a recommendation in "October" that [NSA Director
Admiral Mike Rogers] Mike Rogers be removed from his
NSA position:
The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's
intelligence community have recommended to President
Obama that the director of the National Security
Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.
In a move apparently unprecedented for a military
officer, Rogers, without notifying superiors, traveled
to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump
Tower.
Occam's Razor. NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers
didn't want to participate in the spying scheme [on
Trump]
(Clapper, Brennan, Etc.), which was the baseline for
President Obama's post presidency efforts to undermine
Donald Trump and keep Trump from digging into
[who knows what crimes]"
After the visit by Rogers, Trump vacated Trump Towers. There is considerable irony in the Mueller 'probe' and the continuing avalanche of MSM lies and evasions and spin etc pertaining
to Trump.
There are trends: A growing US citizen realization that their political system prior to Trump was nearly completely corrupt;
the Clintons are more broadly understood as the pathological criminals that they are; the Podesta emails with their sick connotations
remain 'in the air' - See Ben Swann's work, for example. The Clinton Foundation is far more broadly understood as a massive criminal
enterprise.
Serious criminality at the highest levels of the FBI is now far more obvious to far more people
MSM as evil propaganda is more widely understood.
It is understood widely that the DNC material to Wikileaks was not 'hacked' (Binney)
From the theintercept.com :
"Pompeo met on October 24 [at Trump's request] with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower
who co-authored an analysis published by a group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community's
official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year's theft of data from DNC computers. Binney and the other former
officials argue that the DNC data was "leaked," not hacked, "by a person with physical access" to the DNC's computer system."
In short the last two years have been about trying to defeat Trump but the attackers are looking more and more wounded, and
Trump, well, he's hanging in there. General Kelly and others have described Trump's work ethic as exhausting.
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) paid $100,000 for Facebook ads and then charged its customers for the clickbait service (between
25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content). So even if the IRA didn't manage to make a profit, the net cost for them must have been much lower than $100,000. Does anyone
know how much revenue it made from that operation? Facebook must know but they've kept quiet about it. Same with Mueller.
Thank you, b. I am so glad I did not vote for Obama a second time around. A very rotten duopoly has taken over the US government,
all based on the premise that money is speech and money runs government, the people be damned. Hence the shutdown being orchestrated
by money, with Trump in the crosshairs.
I also very much adhere to your final paragraph's sentences. Let no one be in any doubt - what is underway is no less than
traitorous activity, a clear violation of the US Constitution, motivated by corrupt individuals whose meanness is beyond dispute.
How it can be redressed at this very late stage beggars the mind; I can only hope it be done as peacefully as possible.
If this is really true, then it's a clear sign of decline: Obama sacrificed a huge chunk of American freedom just for the sake
of personal political revenge. The USA is transitioning from a laissez faire to a highly burocratized, byzantine economy.
Shortly after the USSR's experiment with communism collapsed, I read an article which suggested that if the noise from that fall
was loud, even louder will be the noise when the second shoe (the American experiment with capitalism) falls.
And this is the crux of why I appreciate The Donald. His is the most honest face the US can present to the world at this point
in time. So look at it closely, and marvel at where we have come to.
I am so glad I did not vote for Obama a second time around.
LOL (first time I've ever written this!)
You made the same mistake I did in 2008. The deck was really stacked in that election, though I was too blind to see it at
the time. Smiling & smooth-talking black face issuing zillions of promises, and this was right after the Codpiece Commander. It
took me a whole year to realize I'd been suckered, and by 2012 understood the fix was STILL on. Obama had lost most all of his
glitter by then, so the Power Elites arranged his opposition to be a financial predator/Mormon bishop paired up with the most
awful Libertarian POS I've ever seen. Speaking the honest truth here, I'd prefer to have Sarah Palin as POTUS to Paul Ryan. What
a combo! That's why I offered anybody I met 10:1 odds on Obama winning. Hillary thought she had had seen a winning pattern from
all that, and arranged to have as her opponent a fellow named Donald Trump.
@15 Zachary Smith "How else to interpret 'only the merest scratch of a womaniser' or 'how clean Trump has managed to keep himself'."
Zachary Smith, I have been posting here for a number of years, and on this I have to agree with the newcomer Tess Ting
Trump has been put under intense investigation by Deep State hacks who are determined to see him impeached.
And all they have come up with is that he is a compulsive pussy-grabber (no shit, hey?).
To my mind Trump is a very offensive human being, but that isn't an impeachable character trait.
I had assumed that he would have skeletons in his cupboard that would be grounds for impeachment.
Well, if he has then he has hidden them extraordinarily well, because Mueller with all his resources hasn't found any.
Indeed, Mueller's investigation is so well-resourced that the only conclusion I can reach is that Trump has no such skeletons.
As I say, that is extraordinary.
But - apparently - also true.
Blooming Barricade , Jan 13, 2019 9:21:09 PM |
link
Astonishing how out in the open the military coup plotting against Venezuela is right now, it was consisted an outrage to overthrow
Allende and that was even before direct proof of US involvement, now the anti-war and left wing consciousness of the public and
the intellectual class has been so corroded that nobody care and many even see an attempted coup as a god thing. The ideological
counter revolution in full swing.
@ Yeah, Right who wrote:
"
Indeed, Mueller's investigation is so well-resourced that the only conclusion I can reach is that Trump has no such skeletons.
"
I would just bring your attention to the possibility that bringing Trump down brings them down as well. Your assertion that
Trump doesn't have any skeletons in the closet is laughable.
Also consider that most of what is known comes from compromised sources and much of the house of cards we live is built on
sketchy assumptions.
Cui Bono for Trump?
I am beginning to understand how Trump fits the elite plan and instead of your "grab them by the pussy" thought change it to
"they have him by the balls". They played his ego to get him to run the race and then, gee, he won.
I now see Trump as the last great hope of the elite to carve out as big a chunk as they can of the new world....and try and
hold onto it. The ongoing proxy conflicts will keep the musical chair game playing for a bit more but then something is going
to stop the music.
A shrink told me once that after fire came music. What comes after music?
How did I know that you would be first up after b's exhaustive story on the IC's corruption and utterly obvious attempt to
take Trump down to cry, "Fiction."
Here is a reply to all your points:
- yes, the Russia-bad narrative was picking up steam before Trump's election. The MSM and TPTB incorrectly surmised that there
would be enough anti-Russia fervor among the masses that pinning the accusation on Trump would stick. It did not. It is evidence
of THEIR stupidity.
- you must have never heard of keeping your enemies close. The Clintons are powerbrokers. Trump used them. Maybe he did like them
at one point, but clearly shat on his relationship with them and since the election they have truly been trashed and unable to
recover any good fortune or power. The Dems made a mistake will backing HRC. They weren't acting under Deep State orders once
again, Occam's Razor dictates that stupidity is the culprit here.
- How does FBI informant in campaign neccessarily implicate Trump in conspiracy and not confirm IC's weasely attempts to dig up
dirt?
- Look at prior Repub primaries? Notice anything? Populists don't float in the Yacht Club Party, do they? Trump was an anomoly
indicitive of the times (again, Occam's Razor).
- Again, it is absolutely absurd and suspicious that you can not admit that the Dems are a party of retards and that they consistently
step over quarters to pick up pennies.
- Your opinion that Trump's policies do not differ from the Dems needs qualifying. I don't agree that his domestic policies align
and verdict is still out on his FP. We know he is not a True-Believer, which is good.
- British involvement again suggests that the IC is compromised and globalized yielding national sovereignty to centralized planning.
Trump deserves that ire and proves that there is a contest afoot.
If Trump's corporate bankruptcies are so well-known, and picked over several times by different media sources (even Snopes
has covered them), surely any other behaviour or incident that might call Trump's character or ethics into question must have
been uncovered by Robert Mueller by now?
I can't imagine the scale of exploding heads among the media talking heads and the establishment of the two parties, IF, Trump
gets re-elected. DC would be in serious melt down. After 4 years of continuous assault the voters may actually repudiate the corporate
media and the DC elites in the 2020 elections.
In any case with the Democrat candidates starting to announce we are essentially into the next presidential campaign. I don't
think it is smart to under-estimate Trump's electoral chances.
"Normally the FBI needs to clear such counter-intelligence investigations with the Justice Department. In this case it did
not do so at all:"This sounds like the same "kangaroo court" MO Scott Ritter detailed a few years ago:
"Simply put, the Russia NIA is not an "IC-coordinated" assessment -- the vehicle for such coordination, the NIC, was not directly
involved in its production, and no NIO was assigned as the responsible official overseeing its production. Likewise, the Russia
NIA cannot be said to be the product of careful coordination between the CIA, NSA and FBI -- while analysts from all three agencies
were involved in its production, they were operating as part of a separate, secretive task force operating under the close supervision
of the Director of the CIA, and not as an integral part of their home agency or department."
Why does it have to be either-or?; it could have been for insurance AND warmongering narrative/dog whistling.
Escalation towards war with Russia was a matter of public record in late pre-election 2016, thanks to Clinton News Network
... now ask yourselves where is that general in the press conference nowadays?
NemesisCalling @31: Here is a reply to all your points
Well, you haven't replied to all my points, nor have you addressed the the thrust of my remarks. But I'll answer the issues
that you raised so my view is clear to everyone.
= - yes, the Russia-bad narrative was picking up steam before Trump's election. The MSM and TPTB incorrectly surmised that there
would be enough anti-Russia fervor among the masses that pinning the accusation on Trump would stick. It did not. It is evidence
of THEIR stupidity. Wrong. Firstly, I was referring to the anti-Russia imperative in official circles NOT to the propaganda effort. That imperative
intensified greatly after Russia blocked USA-proxy takeover of Syria (2013), and Crimea and Donbas (2014). In fact,
Kissinger
wrote a WSJ Op-Ed in Aug 2014 that issued a cryptic call for MAGA.
"picking up steam before Trump's election" needs some unpacking. The anti-Russia fervor among the masses has been
entirely concocted, and mostly AFTER 2014.
Nothing has stuck to Trump because there's no substance to the allegations.
= - you must have never heard of keeping your enemies close. The Clintons are powerbrokers. Trump used them. Maybe he did like
them at one point, but clearly shat on his relationship with them and since the election they have truly been trashed and unable
to recover any good fortune or power. The Dems made a mistake will backing HRC. They weren't acting under Deep State orders once
again, Occam's Razor dictates that stupidity is the culprit here. What does Occam's Razor have to say about the remarkable continuity of US foreign and domestic policy for the last 30 years?
Trump and the Clintons were known to be close. Even their daughter's were/are close.
Are you unaware of the CIA connections of Clinton, Bush, and Obama? Should we assume that Trump is free of any such connection?
= - How does FBI informant in campaign neccessarily implicate Trump in conspiracy and not confirm IC's weasely attempts to dig
up dirt? The FBI informant (Felix Sater) worked for Trump from about 2001 to 2013. This was essentially the same period in which Mueller
was FBI Director. Mueller and Comey are close and are connected to the Clinton's.
The informant wasn't investigating Trump or digging up dirt on him, he was informing on the Russian mob, and probably using
employment by Trump to get closer to the mob. FBI/counter intel might have also used info provided to turn some of the Russians
into US intel assets.
= - Look at prior Repub primaries? Notice anything? Populists don't float in the Yacht Club Party, do they? Trump was an anomoly
indicitive of the times (again, Occam's Razor). Have you heard of the Tea Party? Have you heard of Obama using the IRS against the Tea Party? Seems that a Republican populist
would get a lot of votes against the hated Hillary who championed Obama's "legacy".
- Again, it is absolutely absurd and suspicious that you can not admit that the Dems are a party of retards and that they
consistently step over quarters to pick up pennies. You can't admit that the Dem's have failed the left so consistently that it is unlikely to be due to their mental capacity
or an accident of circumstance.
= - Your opinion that Trump's policies do not differ from the Dems needs qualifying. I don't agree that his domestic policies
align and verdict is still out on his FP. We know he is not a True-Believer, which is good. I didn't say that they don't differ from the Dems, I said that Trump policies are consistent with policies of previous Administrations
and that Hillary likely would've ruled in much the same way.
= - British involvement again suggests that the IC is compromised and globalized yielding national sovereignty to centralized
planning. Trump deserves that ire and proves that there is a contest afoot The US IC is undoubtedly primary and universally acknowledged to be the lead in the US-Brit Intel relationship.
The only 'contest' I can discern is how best to fool the people.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
You seem to believe that a populist outsider can be elected President. And, you also believe that a US President can be both
all powerful (Obama) or constrained by Deep State whim (Trump).
You also seem to believe that Trump's rhetoric is gospel-truth and means what you think it does. Surprise! "Negotiation with
Russia" doesn't mean peace. Troop 'pull out' doesn't mean it'll happen any time soon (and possibly never). Anti-TPP doesn't mean
he won't implement TPP provisions in other trade agreements. Etc.
PS The establishment doesn't benefit DESPITE our populist President's, they benefit BECAUSE we are willing to believe that
our populist President's work for US.
Jr, it was a fruitless endeavor, to be sure, but I gave it a shot.
For the record, I never counted Trump as savior, although he could very well be if he continues on getting caught with his
dick in his hand as the empire around him crumbles. He's not a true believer, but he can at the very least be a useful idiot for
the real anti-imperialists in the world.
It is of note that Oleg Deripaska is not a stranger to the world of politics and politicians. Before his fortunes changed dramatically,
Oleg Deripaska was well-known for entertaining world politicians on his luxury yacht moored off Kassiopi in the northwest corner
of the Greek Island of Corfu.
The Rothschilds have an estate outside Kassiopi. Among the many high-powered friends and guests
of Deripaska was UK Tory politician, George Osborne, who visited him on his yacht at Kassiopi while still British Chancellor of
the Exchequer. Osborne and EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, a powerful force in Tony Blair's government, were both guests at a
function held aboard the yacht in 2008. Baron Mandelson's position in the EU, at the time, led to accusations of a conflict of
interest.
Among other movers and shakers, John McCain was also a friend of Oleg Deripaska, but that friendship may have soured
after the virtual collapse of the Russian billionaire companies. McCain was more a fairweather friend than a stalwart ally through
thick and thin. The reason I mention these tidbits is because the corporate media fails to join all the pieces that show just
how corrupt Western politicians have become.
For a thorough update on the Integrity Initiative and its offshoots, check out the latest from legal investigator Barbara Boyd.
To defeat the "Deep State" in the U.S., it is essential to understand the role of British Intelligence. While it is essential
to know the role of Hillary Clinton, Obama, Comey, DOJ/FBI operatives, et.al., it is even more important to understand the geopolitical
assumptions behind Russiagate. And for that, one must turn to the British.
It would help to get a handle on the precise nature and format of these FBI "under oath" fishing expeditions if the FBI released
transcripts of a few of the recent hi-profile Q & A sessions. If suspects are being convicted for misdemeanors of dubious relevance
to the stated aim of the Mueller Crusade then transcripts would allow inconsistencies to be counted and evaluated. It would also
be interesting to discover whether the FBI uses a seductive approach to questioning, or a confrontational approach, given the
petty nature of the 'crimes' exposed to date.
The aim of the counterintelligence operation and of the
Russiagate hoax was not to build a prosecution
case against President Trump. It was to put the United States in constitutional limbo by creating a parallel and competing center
of constitutional legitimacy.
The Obama Administration would live on in the structure of this "investigation", without ever having
to relinquish power to Trump. The investigation would form the center of "The Resistance", with the ability to question the legitimacy
of the Trump Administration.
I didn't say that they don't differ from the Dems, I said that Trump policies are consistent with policies of previous Administrations
and that Hillary likely would've ruled in much the same way.
This is very true but only in the same sort of overgeneralised sense with you populate your latest CT. That is, sweep any of
the plainly ridiculous assumptions in your theory under the widest possible rug available to conspiratards.
At least you aint exactly drinking the Orange Kool-Aid like so many of the posters on this thread. That's a big positive in
my book. As for them, it's more a reflection of the love for rightwing authoritarianism than for Trump himself. What they really
wish for is a crafier, shrewder Amerikkkan version of Putin, but they accept Trump because his bumbling is the existential proof
of US decline in relative power, as if such proof was necessary.
And if you overlook all Trump's achievements (such as they are):
1. Obamacare/Medicaid expansion repeal and subsequent degradation of the enrollment and funding processes by executive degree
when appeal failed thanks only to McCain's "in yo office sucka" thumbs down vote.
2. Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations (basically same thing)
3. SCOTUS and federal bench selections
The US system is meant to create a uniparty environment whereby opposing views are compromised into a "third way" legislative
process.
I grok this system is broken and completely controlled by the wealthiest (show me a political system anywhere that you prefer
that is not controlled by the wealthiest) but the funding mechanisms need changing before there will ever be significant change
to governing processes.
Trump through his ignorance, corruption and loose lips has tilted the playing field left. Hilliary through her elitism, arrogance,
corruption and lack of retail political skills gets a big assist in the same tilting.
Those who believe (if any truly do) that Trump represents anything more than the end of Reaganist conservatism are "wishin'
and hopin'" as Dusty Springfield would say.
I do applaud those who are willing to show in the comments that they suffer from the real "Trump Derangement Syndrome," such
as your good buddy James. They're all crooks, in his opinion.
So what is it Jim? Do you excuse Trump only or do you excuse them all? LMAO
Putin January 2017 - "You know, there is a category of people who leave without saying goodbye, out of respect for the situation
that has evolved, so as not to upset anything. And then there are people who keep saying goodbye but don't leave. I believe the
outgoing administration belongs to the second category.
What are we seeing in the United States? We are seeing the continuation of an acute internal political struggle despite the
fact that the presidential election is over and it ended in Mr Trump's convincing victory. Nevertheless, in my opinion, several
goals are being set in this struggle. Maybe there are more, but some of them are perfectly obvious."
The first is to undermine the legitimacy of the US president-elect. By the way, in this regard, I would like to point out that
whether deliberately or not, these people are causing enormous damage to US interests. Simply enormous. The impression is that,
after a practice run in Kiev, they are now ready to organise a Maidan in Washington to prevent Trump from taking office."
Posted by: pretzelattack , Jan 14, 2019 10:05:43 AM |
link
sure, no doubt trump has been involved in financial improprieties; this in no way means he colluded with Russia to fix the election,
or that russia on its own hacked the election, or any of the other false narratives the ic is trying to cram down our throats
with the connivance of the msm and (mostly, but there are some republicans pushing it, too) the "centrist" dems.
And the clintons have their own skeletons, but they seem to be judgement proof with the aid of comey et al.
The only real difference between Trump and the Clintons at end of the day is they are smart lawyers who obviously better understand
how to navigate the treacherous legal waters surrounding them.
They also know what the definition of "is, is" and how to carefully craft their words in public, while Trump is all loose cannon
all the time ahd his legal representation appears to follow his lead, IE Giuliani and Cohen.
Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Jan 14, 2019 9:45:39 AM | 45:
We are seeing the continuation of an acute internal political struggle despite the fact that the presidential election is
over and it ended in Mr Trump's convincing victory.
Not really. What we are seeing is Deep State controlled media force-feeding the public a toxic concoction: the narrative of a
political struggle that centers on anti-Russia hysteria.
Maybe you missed Romney's Op-Ed in which he praised Trump's pro-establishment policies while attacking his Russia-friendly
'pull out' from Syria. That's the best example of the two-faced establishment bullsh*t.
Welcome to the rabbit hole.
Robert Snefjella , Jan 14, 2019 10:57:29 AM |
link
What is loosely called 'globalism', consisting of various trends and ideologies and practices: the EU and the aborted for now
'North American Union' and satellites, and cell phones able to instantly transmit images from the other side of the planet, and
so on, has also importantly aimed at and advocated for and implemented various means by which national sovereignty was eroded.
And this erosion meant a reduction of the ability of a country's people to wield an effective national politics, let alone
something vaguely democratic, or to implement policies which were at odds with the various globalist institutions and imperatives
and programs. So we've seen on numerous occasions, for example, the IMF impose its globalist economic 'recipe' on a nation's economic
policies.
And even the destruction of Libya in 2011 was primarily or importantly directed at preventing Libya from implementing a national
financial strategy intended to give African countries an alternative to the depredations of global financial 'business as usual'.
But over the last two years the movement to restore or renovate national sovereignty has made something of a comeback.
So for example, Macron as recently as roughly two years ago was being lauded as a great new leader of the globalist project,
and both he and Merkel have gone on record decrying the very concept of national sovereignty.
But now Macron and Merkel are largely reviled, especially Macron, by their people, and 'populist' enthusiasm strengthens. You
can see the same trend in virtually every European country.
And in the United States, the tens of millions of 'deplorables' backing Trump are doing so partly, perhaps mostly, because
he champions the restoration of national sovereignty and has questioned dominant globalist institutions.
Now for those who are committed to the view that Trump doesn't really mean it, that he isn't really an American nationalist,
and so on, well, fine, believe what you like. But in the end, Trump's base of support is nationalistic, and that is as I noted
above a very general trend that is quickly manifesting.
Re. the USA, when the handmaidens of power, aka politicians, the servant class in an oligarchic corporatist 'state,' are alarmingly
seen to fight to the death in public it is crystal clear that control (which may take the shape of relatively informal and obscure
networks ) is lost, .. > the 'fight' will only serve to weaken all parties.
Trump is loathed because he upset the apple cart and revealed weakness and fissures in the system. (+ possibly because he is
an upstart, from the wrong side of whatever, has bad hair, is dumb, a thief, more )
He ran as an anti-establishment maverick:
"Drain the Swamp!"
"Lock her up!"
"Build the Wall!"
- and was elected only for that reason. It was disconcertingly easy to do, which is also terrifying to the PTB. Plus, election/voter
fraud did not perform as expected - help !! The MSM promoted him with mega 24/24 coverage - help !!
As the no. 1 disruptive foe is merely an elderly scummy biz type, an intruder, some other entity like malignant agressive Russia
had to be associated with him. (Yes, is was Obama-Clinton who started the highjinks + the following Mueller investig.; see b at
top - also, bashing Russia gradually took wing as it recovered under Putin, the Ukraine plots did not work out, etc. *Crimea!*
the last straw! ..)
If Obama had announced that 2K USA personnel were to be withdrawn from Syria because the good folks want their wonderful husbands
and wives, great ppl, our folks, home soon, they have dutifully served, etc. the MSM and anyone who bothered to digest that news
would have clapped and sent off pixel sparkles and sweet tweets.
Very difficult to judge: what is the result of infighting in the US vs. any agreed-on never mind coherent foreign policy? That
the question is even asked - all over the world now - spells stage one collapse.
Now for those who are committed to the view that Trump doesn't really mean it, that he isn't really an American nationalist,
and so on, well, fine, believe what you like. But in the end, Trump's base of support is nationalistic ..."
Did Obama really mean it when he touted "Change You Can Believe In"? No. His rhetoric was meant to turn the page
from the Bush Administration excesses and convince the world that USA was not the threat that they perceived us to be. In fact,
he was given a Nobel Prize for essentially not being Bush. But it was all psyop. Obama refused to hold CIA accountable for rendition
and torture, refused to stop NSA pervasive spying, conducted covert wars and regime change ops, bragged of his drone targeting
skills, made Bush tax cuts permanent, bailed out bankers, etc.
Does Trump really mean his nationalism? Only to the extent that a nationalist was needed to meet the challenge from Russia
and China. People don't fight for globalist principals.
US is still a member of NATO, still involved in the Middle East, still has hundreds of bases around the world.
Trump's nationalist credentials are further belied by such things as: adding TPP provisions to the new North American trade
agreement; attacking Syria based on false flags; arming Ukraine; pulling out of the INF treaty and engaging in an unnecessary
and costly arms race; actively seeking to overthrow the governments of Iran and Venezuela; etc.
Is there a requirement for an open trial on these sort of things. I'm not sure about the US, but normally gag orders are all
that's required to keep something quiet. All the people around Trump could be taken down in this way with charges that would stick.
Apparently the only one they cannot take down in this way is the president (Another post up now at SST on the legalities of investigating
the president). As far as I know, the president can only be taken down by impeachment so I guess they wouldn't try to use collusion
with Israel for that unless they could keep what they were impeaching him for secret.
And in the United States, the tens of millions of 'deplorables' backing Trump are doing so partly, perhaps mostly, because
he champions the restoration of national sovereignty and has questioned dominant globalist institutions.
Yes, "Amerikkka First" represents nationalism for sure. Many, maybe most Amerikkkans have always been nationalistic and detest
globalist structures because they view them as limiting Amerikkka's rightful global sovereignty. This is a fine distinction
I believe gets lost in commentary such as yours. Trump isn't looking to retreat from Amerikkkan Exceptionalism at all, it his
raison d etre for the tariffs and increases in military spending.
The movement which elected Trump represents the nostalgic view of a lost Amerikkkan dominance over the globe, which of course
they blame on those hated Democratic and Republican establishment globalists, Bushes, Clintons and Obama.
You see all that and then assume that the Hillary-Trump contest was genuine?
Why not assume that the Deep State's candidate won in every election since Carter and work from there.
That first is a difficult one to answer, for I quite agree with you on the second part. Rigged elections from Carter on to
the present day matches my own thoughts as well. In 2000 "they" had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get their man in
office, but GWB did indeed move into the White House.
My own theory about 2016 is that everybody miscalculated. Trump was (IMO) running as an ego-building publicity stunt. Hillary
(and her Deep State sponsors) had actively helped Trump get the nomination with hundreds of millions of dollars of free publicity
which also enhanced the bottom lines of Big Media. His multiple flaws were airbrushed away. Hillary ran a horrible campaign because
she is an arrogant and "entitled" woman. The incompetence of that campaign simply didn't uncover the extent to which she was hated
by so many people. (myself included, but I didn't vote for the torture-loving Trump, either)
The biggest mistake of all was not having any plan in place to use the touch-screen voting systems (think "Diebold") to
nail down her victory. Again an opinion, but I think that was judged to be a little too risky plus the fact it was obviously
totally unnecessary. Hillary didn't have a "loss" speech prepared, and Trump didn't have a "victory" one.
This is why I call Trump an "accidental" President. I'll admit the Deep State has reacted pretty well since 2016, but they're
still playing catchup. Israel - to name just one - remains in shell shock.
Further to American's general support for Trump's declared intention of reduction of troops in Syria and Afghanistan, the Daily
Caller on the 9th of January 2019 cited 56 % in support, 20 % not sure, and 27 % opposing. This is after MSM and general national
political outrage and 'deep concern' over Trump's decision.
Note that US involvement in Syria has been justified by the most lurid of lies and disinfo continually poured for years into
American's psyches. For Tulsi Gabbard to have a direct conversation with Assad (the designated 'butcher of Damascus', the 'horrid
monstrous dictator' accused over and over of attacking his own people, often with chemical weapons from barrel bombs, and especially
targeting children and hospitals: the man can have no soul, no heart! We must help the Syrians in their struggle against this
animal!) was an outrage!
So not only do most Americans want American troops out of Syria, it would seem that there is some growing immunity among the
people of the United States to their diet of diseased propaganda.
The populist hero must be portrayed as an "outsider" that takes on the establishment. Obama was positioned in much the same way.
Trump is no "outsider". He is very establishment. Even before running for President, he had access that ordinary people never
get.
Trump only won because of a bizarre technicality of the American electoral system.
You are directing our attention to what the establishment wants us to see. It ignores Hillary's spectacular failure: snubbing
of Sanders progressives; Cold shoulder to black voters; insult to white voters ("deplorables"); choosing not to campaign in crucial
states; the wierdness of Bill Clinton being discovered meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch (Bill Clinton is one of
the most recognizable people in America - why why why would be meeting with the Attorney General on an airport tarmac?), etc.
If the race were easy, Trump woundn't be a populist hero, would he? And Hillary's winning the popular vote is a nice consolation
prize to the Clinton's. Plus, it nicely sets up the fake Deep State vs. Trump conflict.
While Trump is a member of the elite establishment that practically owns the country he has always been a pariah for one main
reason. He does not honor the unspoken code of never exposing inside information about other elite members. He is a big mouth.
Given that, the establishment and their propaganda arm of the media have been out to get him even before he was elected. His presidency
has largely been an inside struggle. However, Trump is clever and crafty. During his tenure he has been give access to tremendous
amounts of information about his political enemies and he continues to bait, insult and fire them, pushing them deeper and deeper
into insanity.
He will fight fire with fire. If they attempt to impeach him he will tit for tat release information incriminating
his enemies. I view this as a positive direction for the US in the long run. ALL of these people need to be banished to "Elba".
Maybe they will fight to the death of both sides. One can dream.
All links are going to Brennan and CIA. Rosenstein was just a tool, necessary to appoint the Special Prosecutor. And launching
the prove was the meaning of "insurance" that Strock mentioned to his mistress. Both Strzok and McCabe have their liasons
(read bosses) at CIA, so in essence they were "CIA infiltration group" within the FBI. And it is also important to understand that Obama was just a CIA snowperson.
There is Stalin's NKVD chief Beria shadow over CIA and FBI now. He famously said "Show me the man and I'll find you the
crime."
Notable quotes:
"... The Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross has made a brilliant observation, noting Peter Strzok - then the FBI's deputy chief of counterintelligence, admitted to his FBI lawyer mistress, Lisa Page, that there was no merit to the investigation. ..."
"... Interestingly, another series of Strzok-Page texts refers to "coordinating investigation" after Strzok apparently met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who both recommended Comey's firing, then authorized the special counsel probe ..."
"... As Ross notes in The Daily Caller , there were other text messages that between Strzok and Page which raise suspicion over whether the FBI was working on a "gotcha" against Trump. ..."
As FBI Ramped Up "Witch Hunt" When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion
Investigation A Joke
A Friday report in the New York Times revealing that the FBI supercharged its Trump-Russia
collusion investigation after President Trump fired FBI director James Comey appears to have
backfired - especially when one reviews internal FBI communications from the time period in
question.
The Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross has made a brilliant observation, noting Peter Strzok - then
the FBI's deputy chief of counterintelligence, admitted to his FBI lawyer mistress, Lisa Page,
that there was no merit to the investigation.
Nine days after Comey was fired and the DOJ "sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was
knowingly working for Russia," Strzok texted Page on May 18, 2017: "You and I both know the
odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely I'd be there no question. I hesitate in part
because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there. "
It is unclear from The Times report what information was used as a predicate to open the
investigation. The article suggests that the FBI had long considered the move and that
Comey's firing and Trump's subsequent comments marked a tipping point.
...
A source close to Strzok told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Jan. 26, 2018, shortly
after the text was released, that the message reflected Strzok's concern that the FBI would
not find evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia . - Daily Caller
The Times' explanation for the FBI's rationale that Trump may have been a Russian asset
consists of Trump's call for Moscow to release Hillary Clinton's emails an election debate, and
allegations contained within the unverified Steele Dossier. The Times was also quick to note
that Trump may have "unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence," to temper the accusation
that he was an agent of a foreign power. In short, weak sauce.
It's no wonder Strzok was hesitant to join Mueller's team.
Interestingly, another series of Strzok-Page texts refers to "coordinating investigation"
after Strzok apparently met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who both recommended
Comey's firing, then authorized the special counsel probe.
As Ross notes in The Daily Caller , there were other text messages that between Strzok and
Page which raise suspicion over whether the FBI was working on a "gotcha" against Trump.
" And we need to open the case we've been waiting on now while Andy is acting ," Strzok
texted Page the day Comey was fired, referring to then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe.
Meanwhile, Page - who served as McCabe's deputy, provided some additional color on the text
messages during her July 2018 congressional testimony, suggesting that the "case we've been
waiting on" text referred to an investigation separate of the obstruction probe we already knew
about.
"Well, other than obstruction, what could it have been?" one lawmaker asked Page in her
interview, details of which were published by The Epoch Times on Friday.
" I can't answer that, sir. I'm sorry ," she replied.
"If I was able to explain in more depth why the Director firing precipitated this text, I
would," she continued while declining to say if the text message referred to an obstruction
of justice investigation or something more. - Daily Caller
That said, Page admitted that Comey's firing prompted the text exchange.
"So the firing of Jim Comey was the precipitating event as opposed to the occupant of the
Director's office?" asked one lawmaker.
"Yes, that's correct," replied Page.
Meanwhile, The Times went to great lengths to imply that the FBI was justified in their
ratcheted-up collusion investigation - failing to mention who started the probe, who led it,
and more importantly - waiting until the 9th paragraph to mention the fact that it turned up
nothing .
"No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took
direction from Russian government officials. An F.B.I. spokeswoman and a spokesman for the
special counsel's office both declined to comment."
VideoEng_NC
"It is unclear from The Times report what information was used as a predicate to open the investigation."
Should be pretty simple with one question. "Was it Hillary who was the responsible party to open an investigation on Trump?".
About as direct as it gets & we already know the answer.
adampeart
TDS sufferers hate Trump so bad that they have become (at 70%) pro-warmonger. Pathetic. I guess that I shouldn't be
surprised. They were fine with Black Jesus starting wars, overthrowing governments and bombing brown people for 8 years.
Teeter
McCabe initiated the investigation. Nobody likes McCabe, so he is likely to be the one guy that gets thrown under the bus.
Of course what he knows may protect him to some extent... they won't want a trial.
Duc888
Sedition? Treason?
Yippie21
7 Days in May.... except for current version we use the DOJ and FBI! Interesting times.
He essentially became a Republican Obama, save Nobel Peace Price. If Obama was/is a CIA-democrat, this guy is a
Deep State controlled republican. In any case he betrayed his voters in a way that resembles Obama betrayal. One has a
fake slogan "change we can believe in" that other equally fake "Make [middle] America Great Again" (which means restoration
of well-being of middle class and working class in my book, not the continuation of Obama foreign wars, and tax cuts for for
corporations and super rich.
And that means that he lost a considerable part of his electorate: the anti-war republicans
and former Sanders supporters. He might do good and not to try to run in 2020. He definitely is no economic nationalist.
Compare his policies with Tucker Carlson Jan 2, 2019
speech to see the difference. He is
"national neoliberal" which rejects parts of neoliberal globalization based on treaties and
prefer to bully nations to compliance that favor the US interests instead of treaties.
And his "fight" with the Deep State resemble so closely to complete and unconditional
surrender, that you might have difficulties to distinguish between the two.
Most of his appointees would make Hillary proud. That that extends beyond rabid neocons like Haley, Mattis, Bolton and
Pompeo.
Notable quotes:
"... The Washington Post is without a doubt the most pro-establishment among all large mainstream publications, not only do they defend the narratives of the Deep State but actively attacks anyone who challenges them. ..."
"... Jeff Bezos owner of the Washington Post is also a contractor with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board all part of doing everything he can to cozy up and ingratiate himself to the establishment on which his empire is built. ..."
"... It's really sad that people in the public believe this stuff. It's insane and ridiculous. We're living in an Insane Asylum and the ones who should be there for the safety of themselves and others are walking around giving orders to Media and USG, fomenting war and making a mockery of laws and "normal behaviors. ..."
"... They flooded the news with the old Helsinki/Putin stuff to hide the real news. Lisa Page's testimony revealed that John Carlin, Mueller's former chief of staff was running the Russia investigation from the DOJ end, showing another conflict of Mueller's. Now Mueller is covering for two best friends, Comey and Carlin and he has to frame Trump to save them. ..."
"... The testimony also showed FBI David Bowditch was heavily involved, and Bowditch is now 2nd in command at the FBI and blocking the public release of witness testimony, and one reason for it is it reveals his involvement. ..."
"... It is also now revealed that John Brennan CIA had the dossier before the FBI, and the dossier was likely written by Nellie Ohr, who belonged to a CIA group, and then the dossier was laundered by Steele to look like foreign intelligence to get the Crossfire Hurricane investigation started on Trump. You would think it would be big news that Russians may have had nothing to do with the dossier but the media doesn't see it that way ..."
Washington
Post stating that he "has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details" of his
discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin - telling Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in a
phone interview that he would be willing to release the details of a private conversation in
Helsinki last summer.
"I would. I don't care," Trump told Pirro, adding: "I'm not keeping anything under wraps. I
couldn't care less."
"I mean, it's so ridiculous, these people making up," Trump said of the WaPo report.
The president referred to his roughly two-hour dialogue with Putin in Helsinki -- at which
only the leaders and their translators were present -- as "a great conversation" that
included discussions about "securing Israel and lots of other things."
"I had a conversation like every president does," Trump said Saturday. "You sit with the
president of various countries. I do it with all countries." -
Politico
In July an attempt by House Democrats to subpoena Trump's Helsinki interpreter was quashed
by Republicans.
"The Washington Post is almost as bad, or probably as bad, as the New York Times," Trump
said.
When Pirro asked Trump about a Friday night New York Times report that the FBI had opened an
inquiry into whether he was working for Putin, Pirro asked Trump "Are you now or have you ever
worked for Russia, Mr. President?"
"I think it's the most insulting thing I've ever been asked," Trump responded. "I think it's
the most insulting article I've ever had written."
Trump went on an
epic tweetstorm Saturday following the Times article, defending his 2017 firing of former
FBI Director James Comey, and tweeting that he has been "FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush
or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President. At the same time, & as I have often
said, getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. I fully expect that someday
we will have good relations with Russia again!"
rumcho
Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for Washington Post, five years later he gets a government contract with the CIA for $600
million. Are you connecting the dots? You do the numbers. This is how fascism works. Bezos is a crony capitalist joker.
is Trump waiting for Mueller to lay down his cards? Head him off at the pass and arrest Obama, Rice, Jarrett, Lynch, Comey,
Rosenstein and McCabe all on day 1
best defense is a good offense. Make the narrative about Dem sedition not impending House impeachment hearings.
You are President, start acting like it. Make them fear you.
your re-election depends on Mike Obama not being your opponent.
Let it Go
WaPo, again?
The Washington Post is without a doubt the most pro-establishment among all large mainstream publications, not only do
they defend the narratives of the Deep State but actively attacks anyone who challenges them.
Jeff Bezos owner of the Washington Post is also a contractor with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board all
part of doing everything he can to cozy up and ingratiate himself to the establishment on which his empire is built. The
article below delves into how WaPo is behind many of the big stories that manipulate America and moves the needle of public
opinion in huge ways.
It's really sad that people in the public believe this stuff. It's insane and ridiculous. We're living in an Insane Asylum
and the ones who should be there for the safety of themselves and others are walking around giving orders to Media and USG,
fomenting war and making a mockery of laws and "normal behaviors.
shadow54
They flooded the news with the old Helsinki/Putin stuff to hide the real news. Lisa Page's testimony revealed that
John Carlin, Mueller's former chief of staff was running the Russia investigation from the DOJ end, showing another conflict
of Mueller's. Now Mueller is covering for two best friends, Comey and Carlin and he has to frame Trump to save them.
The testimony also showed FBI David Bowditch was heavily involved, and Bowditch is now 2nd in command at the FBI and
blocking the public release of witness testimony, and one reason for it is it reveals his involvement.
It is also now revealed that John Brennan CIA had the dossier before the FBI, and the dossier was likely written by
Nellie Ohr, who belonged to a CIA group, and then the dossier was laundered by Steele to look like foreign intelligence to
get the Crossfire Hurricane investigation started on Trump. You would think it would be big news that Russians may have had
nothing to do with the dossier but the media doesn't see it that way.
Then there is the news that Fusion GPS worked with the Democracy Integrity Project and Knew Knowledge to run a fake Russian
bots campaign against Roy Moore. The Democracy Integrity Project was started by Feinstein's aide and with New Knowledge wrote
a report on Russian bots for the Senate Intelligence Committee. So the Senate Intelligence Committee hired creators of fake
Russian bots to write a report on Russian bots.
"... On Friday November 18th The Washington Post reported on a recommendation in "October" that [NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers] Mike Rogers be removed from his NSA position: The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed. ..."
"... After the visit by Rogers, Trump vacated Trump Towers. ..."
"On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York and met
with President-Elect Donald Trump.
On Friday November 18th The Washington Post reported on a recommendation in "October"
that [NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers] Mike Rogers be removed from his NSA position: The
heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to President
Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be
removed.
In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers, without notifying
superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower.
Occam's Razor. NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers didn't want to participate in the spying
scheme [on Trump]
(Clapper, Brennan, Etc.), which was the baseline for President Obama's post presidency
efforts to undermine Donald Trump and keep Trump from digging into [who knows what
crimes]"
After the visit by Rogers, Trump vacated Trump Towers.
There is considerable irony in the Mueller 'probe' and the continuing avalanche of MSM
lies and evasions and spin etc pertaining to Trump.
There are trends: A growing US citizen realization that their political system prior to
Trump was nearly completely corrupt; the Clintons are more broadly understood as the
pathological criminals that they are; the Podesta emails with their sick connotations remain
'in the air' - See Ben Swann's work, for example. The Clinton Foundation is far more broadly
understood as a massive criminal enterprise.
Serious criminality at the highest levels of the FBI is now far more obvious to far more
people
MSM as evil propaganda is more widely understood.
It is understood widely that the DNC material to Wikileaks was not 'hacked' (Binney)
From the theintercept.com :
"Pompeo met on October 24 [at Trump's request] with William Binney, a former National
Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower who co-authored an analysis published by a
group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community's
official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year's theft of data from DNC
computers. Binney and the other former officials argue that the DNC data was "leaked," not
hacked, "by a person with physical access" to the DNC's computer system."
In short the last two years have been about trying to defeat Trump but the attackers are
looking more and more wounded, and Trump, well, he's hanging in there. General Kelly and
others have described Trump's work ethic as exhausting.
On Smerconish's show today, Bob Baer, spy extraordinaire, (read his books) asserted that the
various bits and pieces of circumstantial "evidence" about Trump's contacts with and attitude
toward Russia, as well as those of his flunkies and relatives amount to a "good enough" case
for Trump being a Russian agent of influence.
That is how a HUMINT spook judges such things. It
is a matter of probabilities, not hard evidence.
Assets of an alien government are not always
witting (understanding) of their status from the POV of the foreign government, but that does
not necessarily make other than agents. Sometimes they think they are merely cooperating in a
good and normal way when, in fact, the relationship is much deeper. Jane Fonda in North Vietnam
would be an example.
It seems injudicious, to say the least, for a former CIA guy to float the notion in public
that there is a good enough case, whatever that means, to think the President of the US was
an Russian Agent of Influence based on "bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence." I would
say probably intemperate as well. Using it in the current climate, it ammounts to a slur.
And what exactly are we to make of the spook expression "Agent of Influence?" I would say
that unless one knows a good deal about the proclivites of the very person who is using the
expression and what is going on in his mind, one shouldn't want to make very much of it at
all. The expression comprehends pretty much of everything and anything, for good, for bad,
for indifferent; for behavior that nobody in the whole wide world would find worrisome except
someone in the CIA or the CI Branches of today's FBI. Such concerns come when Agencies have
been politicized.
It's dangerous enough that these people find an internal use for the term. I would speculate
that some such cover set them off on Carter Page and ensuing FISA debacle.
Bought and owned. One can guess that there is much compromising financial and probably other
information on the Clinton Foundation in the missing emails that Russia (and likely every
other intelligence agency on the planet), and from elsewhere, has, given her lack of
comprehension of the basics of security or that classification is not only for the little
people.
In Bob Baer's 1st book He said that he was able to confirm that it was Israel that attacked
the USS Liberty. As a CIA officer he was trying, without success ,to recruit a local
government radio operator.(probably Egyptian) He said that soon after the attack the
prospective recruit came to him and volunteered to cooperate.Surprised at this sudden change
of heart Baer asked what had happened?.He said that he had listened to the entire attack of
the USS Liberty and the communication between the Israeli planes and their command station.
.The recruit said that he now believed that the US and Israel could not be allies because the
US would never permit an ally to get away with attacking a US vessel and murdering American
sailors.
As a student officer at Ft. Holabird I read the transcripts generated by NSA of the chatter
between the Israeli planes and their command. There is not doubt whatever that the attack was
deliberate and sustained for hours. I have written aout this many times. Look in the archive.
https://turcopolier.typepad...
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) paid $100,000 for Facebook ads and then charged its
customers for the clickbait service (between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional
content). So even if the IRA didn't manage to make a profit, the net cost for them must have
been much lower than $100,000.
Does anyone know how much revenue it made from that operation? Facebook must know but
they've kept quiet about it. Same with Mueller.
"... CIA is boosting the volume of its anti-Russian vilification because more and more CIA assets are getting flushed out. Stephan Halper is an obvious spook. Page is the corniest traitor since Lee Harvey Oswald ..."
"... Strzok has clearly got a dotted-line report to his real boss in CIA ..."
"... Publius Tacitus is incorrect, though, in making a distinction between the Obama administration and the intelligence community. Obama is a third-generation CIA spook he's a CIA spokesmodel, not a head of state (see Andrew Krieg's Presidential Puppetry.) ..."
"... To add to the list of things that the Russians had on Hillary . IIRC, she was Sec of State at the time the US election-meddling-and-color-revolution brigade tried to rig the Russian elections against Putin. ..."
"... Putin does not seem to be the sort to let emotion be more important than policy, but I've always wondered that to the small extent the Russians did take a pop at Hillary's campaign, if it didn't bring a bit of a smile to Putin's face to know he was just giving back the hits he'd already taken from her. ..."
CIA is boosting the volume of its anti-Russian vilification because more and more CIA
assets are getting flushed out. Stephan Halper is an obvious spook. Page is the corniest
traitor since Lee Harvey Oswald .
Publius Tacitus is incorrect, though, in making a distinction between the Obama
administration and the intelligence community. Obama is a third-generation CIA spook he's a
CIA spokesmodel, not a head of state (see Andrew Krieg's Presidential Puppetry.)
Excerpt : "A Pew Research analysis on Monday found that more than a third of the
US' largest newspapers and more than a fifth of its largest digital outlets experienced
layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018."
To add to the list of things that the Russians had on Hillary . IIRC, she was Sec of
State at the time the US election-meddling-and-color-revolution brigade tried to rig the
Russian elections against Putin.
Putin does not seem to be the sort to let emotion be more important than policy, but
I've always wondered that to the small extent the Russians did take a pop at Hillary's
campaign, if it didn't bring a bit of a smile to Putin's face to know he was just giving back
the hits he'd already taken from her.
Hillary of course was incompetent in having America interfere in Russian elections. That
campaign never had a chance as Putin is a lot more popular in Russia than Hillary is in
America. So, she took a pot shot at a rival world leader knowing (or at least some smart
people did) that it would have no effect and that Putin would win that election anyways. And
of course Hillary the Arrrogant could never imagine that another player in the game would get
to take a turn, and that others might interfere in her election, and she knew she'd run and
she knew she'd rig the Dem party to get the nod, in the same way the NED and the Soros NGO's
tried to interfere in Russia.
I share your sentiments [in a slightly different vernacular]; of course they, the usurping
'rulers' are neither a class nor in any way 'elite,' but who/what ever they are [jews,
oligarchs, 'simply' psychopaths or 'true' spawn of Satan], they do seem to be 'in control.'
Proof of that is the coordinated criminal actions of 'the West.'
Find "CIA is the government and the government is CIA" above; it's the obvious place to
expect a ccc = covert criminal cabal to establish itself. Add to that the truly weird concept
of having spies a) out of all control and b) with apparently unlimited power. We 'shall know
them by their deeds' which is almost unrelievedly a 'bad look.' Odd is that the 1st mention
of any conspiracy that I heard of was that of 'jewish banksters ruling the world.' We since
know that such was pilloried by the CIA, but it seems to me to be a case of the tar-baby: The
more they [CIA, jews] howl/deny, the guiltier they prove themselves to be. rgds
I would say that what is affecting the western establishment elites at this juncture is not
mere dementia but the madness which arises from acts of pure, hellish evil. These people are
the Gadarine swine of the contemporary era; a good portion of them appear to be Satanic
perverts and pedophiles, if we are to judge from recent revelations. I am not being
hyperbolic when I write that Antichrist's reign has been postponed. They had imagined it
would be installed by November of 2016 and this is driving them to despair. They hate Trump
because his election blocked their lord and master's ascent and they hate Putin because he
represents the great restraining power.
@yurivkuHe's of course is a bone in DC's throat, but his level of intelligence and real power seem
to be extremely low.
Yes, he's a golden chandelier stuck in the belly of the Beast. I think he's quite smart,
in his own way, but can only do so much on his own. He also has some bad ideas and makes
enemies when it isn't necessary but he's still the only hope for change at the centre of the
American empire.
@skrik
Be that as it may, Romper Stomper took place 30 years after the Vietnam War began. The
reverberations of the war were felt in Australia long afterwards.
@peterAUS
That's an armchair rugby referee for you, encouraging a Civil War in a country he's probably
never set foot. What do you believe would change its policy towards Oz.
If you remember when Reagan broke the air-traffic control union strikes and 30,000 of them
immigrated to Oz in 1981, what would happen would be that many qualified Americans would come
to Australia and take Australian jobs.
That's how such unrest would affect you.
At any rate, the US would still have the same grip on popular culture (If not financial
markets) and Vegemite would not suddenly replace McDonald's everywhere.
Also, though the Asians seem to slowly taking over your economy anyhow, if the US military
was busy suppressing a civil war and Asian countries might get aggressive towards you
militarily.
@peterAUS
The Asians might get more aggressive if the US military suddenly found itself preoccupied
with a Civil War.
Asia is taking over your country economically anyhow but they might get a bit anti-social
if suddenly the US were to lose all capacity to maintain its presence in your hemisphere.
Aw, don't go all wussy -- you're acting like a wounded suitor. I suppose it was my
rejection of your
I'd need to trust you and then we'd have a long chat somewhere in open public place
Similr to which you you offered Backstay
Have a quiet chat somewhere in a park, for example. Just two of us. Two
Try this google ; that the sort
of place you had in mind? It's also reputedly a secret entrance to an ASIO bunker but I
suppose you know that; I call attempted entrapment.
"As a matter of fact, the composition of the governments is predetermined, and their
actions are controlled by great financial consortiums."
J. V. Stalin, Questions & Answers to American Trade Unionists: Stalin's Interview
With the First American Trade Union Delegation to Soviet Russia
Pravda September 15, 1927 ___________(h/t, J.S.)
think he's quite smart, in his own way, but can only do so much on his own
But I think he's stupid, ignorant, spineless (as well as most of POTUSes), the only
difference is -- he's not completely belongs to DC. Probably it's better than if Clinton was
on his place, but who knows, Trump can make any stupid thing
G'day, q.possibly and glad you responded. Yeah sure, Stalin is 'close;' it's why some
suggest oligarchs, but it demonstrably falls a bit short. My ccc = covert criminal cabal,
each word of the highest significance; let's examine each one:
[COED:] covert = not openly acknowledged or displayed -- this is 100% true, since
they operate from 'behind a curtain' of deliberate secrecy. Not declaring who they are is a
lie of omission, then see after cabal below. Before moving on, let's consult Cicero:
mendaci neque quum vera dicit, creditor
= A liar is not to be believed, even when speaking the truth. That's never a 'good look,'
and leads to the next:
criminal -- self-evident, then:
[COED:] cabal = a secret political clique or faction. Øarchaic a secret
intrigue .
ORIGIN
C16 (denoting the Kabbalah): from French cabale, from medieval Latin cabala (see
Kabbalah).
Finally [COED:] Kabbalah (also Kabbala, Cabbala, Cabala, or Qabalah = the ancient
Jewish tradition of mystical interpretation of the Bible .
I allow myself to propose an exactly apposite example of the latter: 'Xxx promised it to
us!' -- Where Xxx comes directly from some "mystical interpretation of the Bible." 'Nuff
said?
More? IF it were only "great financial consortiums" THEN one would need to explain the
criminality, since I'm pretty sure oligarchs *could* work legally. Then, the 'normal'
consortiums' business is to 'make money' [and cheating and/or theft may be sort of 'normal'],
but the ccc goes *far* past that into [mass-]murdering for spoil, quite/most often for oil
and/or *soil* . The latter is within Nuremberg class = supreme international criminality.
That may complete the loop and explain why covert in the 1st place.
I wrote above that I would 'revisit' lies; here's a partial quote:
But it remained for the yyy, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood,
Feel free to 'guess' at the yyy, then I assert QED rgds
Or who are the guys, in Ukrainian Armed Forces, presently engaged against Donbass?
Besides those in "volunteer battalions", which tend to be nationalistic with distinct Nazi
overtones, people in the regular Armed Forces are there for the money. There are very few
paying jobs in today's Ukraine, so men enlist and hope for the best.
the ratio hate/don't care shall shift, hard and fast. Not in Russian favor, I
suspect.
That could've been the case in 2014. Today I very much doubt it. Even the Right Sector
people are fed up with the current power in Kiev, and even the dumbest nationalists are
beginning to realize what a deep hole the country is in. Normal people all over the
South-East are hoping and praying for the Russians to come. The problem is the Russians
aren't coming.
The moniker "journalist" should immediately by banished by replacement of "reporter", as in
report the facts and observations, not interpretations or personal opinions.
@Eagle
Eye " In your view what else was Hubbard brilliant about?"
Well for example his bizarre sounding concepts regarding the sources of mankind, and the
history of this insane planet, which are repeatedly ridiculed and labeled as absurd by the
PTB, who of course have their own turf to defend, and their own concepts which they do not
want to be brought into question.
@EugeneGur
Well can't say I disagree with the comment.
Or, better, can't provide any concrete evidence to the contrary, especially re the second
paragraph.
The thing is, nationalism is a peculiar feeling.
So, while this
Normal people all over the South-East are hoping and praying for the Russians to
come.
could be true, the rest of Ukraine could get into quite the opposite.
But, as you say
The problem is the Russians aren't coming.
so it's all academic.
Now, speaking of
people are fed up with the current power .
one could feel, probably, the same in Donbass.
Things aren't great there either.
In any case the conflict is there, frozen for the moment (not for the people along the
front line) and can erupt, again, when the US Deep State wants it.
@Michael
Kenny If one wants a clear example of the Russophobic or Putinophobic hysteria infecting
the West, one need go no further than this demented fellow. And to that he adds a conspiracy
theory about the gangsters ruling over it all.
@seeing-thru
You got it 100% Right my friend. That's the best reality-connected assessment of the Donald's
performance that I've read. I'm going to swipe it for reuse elsewhere. Thank you, and may the
force be with you.
@Jeff
Davis Glad you liked it. Yeah, go ahead use it any which way. BTW, my fear is that the
Donald may not be able to succeed because of the massive line-up of forces against him. The
whole lunatic asylum is out of their cages, snarling and clawing and planning all sorts of
stuff to bring him down. Let us wish him success.
So standing up for American citizens is considered a "mentally insane" thing?
You are utterly and completely out of your mind, virtually from another planet, another
reality. A textbook example of insanity. The fact that you don't recognize it, simply
confirms the fact.
The Deep state is not, repeat not , the American people.
Regarding the Intel community: There are the guys in the trenches. these are honorable
guys. Then there is the leadership. The current leadership is on notice to behave itself, on
account of the new "Sheriff" in town. The corrupt politicized leadership from the
Clinton/Bush/Obama regimes however, now out of power, are attempting to overthrow the
legitimately elected president of the United States. In so doing, they are pursuing
treason-lite.
Clapper, Brennan, and Hayden are already full-on war criminals: Iraq & torture. Now,
in their attempt to destroy the Trump presidency, they are adding betrayal of democracy and
betrayal of the Constitution of the United States to their criminal resume. These are evil
men who think it is their job to run the United States from behind a malleable (gutless?)
figurehead who does what they tell him to do.
As I said in my original post, it is fascinating to observe people like you, utterly
dominated -- brain-raped really -- by a neocon/neoliberal narrative that has reduced them to
robotic -- even willing -- slaves of the 1%. Good for you. Enjoy. The others, who prefer
self-mastery to self-enslavement, will benefit from your choice of enslavement.
That is what all of this boils down to; Trump treating Americans like s*hit in front of
the whole world, while praising Russia and Russians.
The IC war criminals/traitors should not be equated with or allowed to hide anonymous
behind the majority population of decent Americans. Which is what simpletons like you enable
and then fall for.
I fully understood all the concerns for what the Left is doing to people and to the
society.
Trump praises Israel and says that, "Securing Israel's safety is our most important
task" not a peep comes from the Trump-supporters?!
Some Trump supporters do object. Others however grasp the political reality of Jewish
political influence in the US. Politically incompetent simpletons like yourself think Trump
should commit political suicide by taking on the Jews.
The Jews/Israel will be dealt with -- or not -- later, when Trump has secured his
presidency. And then, the rebalancing of the US-Israeli relationship will not be grounded in
hostility to the Jews, but will be more along the lines of America First.
Never ever did I expect, that it would be the Trump-supporters surfacing as the fifth
column, giving the "finishing touch" to the destruction of American citizens.
The above is pure paranoid, "the sky is falling", TDS whackadoodle.
The Liberals seem to have woken up,
The country is in the throes of a cultural war between the bubble-wrapped snowflakes and
"real" people. Thankfully, the "real" people will win, precisely because they have the
advantage of being reality-connected. The snowflakes will benefit as well -- you will benefit
-- by the resulting opportunity to reconnect with reality.
Good luck, best wishes, Trump is rapidly changing the world for the better.
And let me add: The Soviet Union is a quarter century gone, and with it Soviet Communism.
Putin is the preeminent statesman of our times. Go to YouTube and listen to what he says. He
and Trump, aligned, are a force for good in the world. Peace with Russia is coming, and with
it a new era of peace and prosperity in the world.
Which leaves me to echo your closing comment:
Are you ever going to be able to comprehend this?
(Answer: Probably not for another six years, if ever.)
@peterAUS
Australia's problem is going to be an Asian economic overclass you Australians always obsess
about country's located halfway around the world first the UK now the US.
you're worried about blacks in the US in the ghetto's wealth inequality while Chinese
business elite reduce you to paupers IN Australia and eventually you go the way of the black
aborigines.
But you cannot see that because you're focused on US cultural colonization or things you
have seen in Hollywood films.
Point is that in the sixties you were still obsessed with the British Empire though you
are a bit of a lost colony now you are obsessed with the United States, another waning
Empire.
Pretty soon the Chinese will have you sleeping in your cars and you will still be focused
on the state of blacks in the US ghetto and inequality in America.
But see, the US won't be the problem in Australia. China will.
You compare yourself to the United States because it is a similar former British colony
and white settler nation but it is Asia that will stomp you.
She is most likely onto something important. My solution is that most people are
double-minded because it suits us to lazily allow our leaders to control us while we
(somewhat) hypocritically condemn them for faults and errors which profit us.
St Paul, Shakespeare and Montaigne all complained of their own double-mindedness.
I hope that a column of mine on this topic will appear soon in The U.R.
most people are double-minded because it suits us to lazily allow our leaders to control
us while we (somewhat) hypocritically condemn them for faults and errors which profit us
..
I guess you are onto something here.
It could go a bit deeper, though, as:
. most people are double-minded because it suits us to allow our betters to lead us
while we (somewhat) hypocritically condemn them for their and our faults and errors which
profit us.
But you cannot see that because you're focused on US cultural colonization or things you
have seen in Hollywood films You compare yourself to the United States because it is a
similar former British colony and white settler nation
If I may intercede, no, and that twice.
1. peterAUS, if my interpretation is correct, sees the world through 'military blinkers,'
is assumed not to notice China et al. except as one 'enemy' among many, and probably thinks
that ~100 F35s, xxx new warships, yyy new submarines and zzz new 'armoured cars,' costing the
Aus-taxpayer nose-bleeding squillions will 'save his/their bacon.' As such, peterAUS cannot
be addressed as any valid representative of 'the great Aus-unwashed.'
2. That great Aus-unwashed, hoovering up the trash err, sorry for the US-speak; hoovering
up the horrendous rubbish 'presented' to them via their '1984-style telescreens' err,
one-finger flat-screen distraction devices [when not actual television sets], is largely
unconscious of any 'real world.'
Since the CIA-sponsored coup of 1975, the country has been 'going to the dogs' at an
increasing rate. The sheople glory under their 'Lucky Country' delusion, not even knowing its
full import: Lucky not to be even partly aware. Yeah sure, the corrupt&venal MSM+PFBCs [=
publicly financed broadcasters] try to revive 'the yellow peril' scare, but that's just
standard 'Bernays haze' scare mongering, to keep the proles from thinking: Der, they [as
peterAUS] didn't think. rgds
PS The great Aus-unwashed, as any 'Western' citizen, has zero choice; so-called 'Western
democracy' allows for as good as zero 'citizen input.' The 'choice' of Trump should be put
down to an aberration -- some 'clever-clogs' manipulators -- *not* Russians -- pulled off a
coup. But as they used to say: "Better red than dead;" better Trump than HRC.
Do we have a democracy? Or even representative government? So what happened to our jobs
off-shored. Who approved that? Who approved 100 million legal immigrants in the last 50
years?
Why does anyone accept our stilted self-image, especially Diana?
On the point about the "world's greatest prison population" note that some one-third of
the federal prison population consists of illegal alien criminals and the large U.S. black
criminal underclass commits crimes at a higher rate than everyone else, so there are more
blacks in our prisons. Oh, the horror.
If other nations enjoyed large illegal immigrant populations and a large black criminal
underclass we would see similar inflated prison populations.
Spare us the silliness on this score as well as the "regular massacres of school children"
garbage. No doubt you'll enlighten us with your anti-gun views on American gun nuts at a
later time. I wait with bated breath.
Still, you almost got a lock on insightful commentary these days.
This is a very good blog, column, whatever, because it illuminates with the light of
reason the mass madness of the Washington crowd, and probably much of the American
population. See the New Yorker article in the current issue about the utility of caregivers
lying to and/or deceiving demented patients to keep them content. That is what is happening
now in the USA and your failure to understand my explanation for it, in my essay on
double-mindedness, which I sent you last summer, I mind very much. You could lead the way out
of the mess if you would re-read that essay and try to understand it.
I am a very ordinary guy and I understand it. Please try again. The world needs this.
"... Their fundamental problem is, Aspen Institute is CIA. Their first and only instinct is to use people like toilet paper. They don't want popular support. They want agents in complete control. ..."
@Cagey
Beast Aspen Institute does make attempts at outreach, but they invariably cock it up by
eliciting, recruiting, or suborning every single person they bring in. The shitheads even
tried to do it to me. You would think they'd have a dossier saying I hate those cobags.
Their fundamental problem is, Aspen Institute is CIA. Their first and only instinct is
to use people like toilet paper. They don't want popular support. They want agents in
complete control.
Yes, the Aspen Institute is the CIA and the CIA is the Aspen Institute. Or, to be more
precise, the CIA is the armed wing of Washington's permanently governing technocratic party,
in the same way the KGB was the armed wing of the Soviet Communist Party.
Poor Julian Assange is likely going to be in their hands not too long from now. The
citizen of one Five Eyes country will be arrested by another and then sent off to the
imperial metropole, to be kicked around like a political football. The rest of us
Anglosphericals are expected to cheer or remain silent. Either is acceptable.
there is nothing at all mindless or demented about them
Me: Oh yes there is; by *them* I don't mean "Zuckerberg, others" but the actual
rulers of 'the West,' then see this:
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of
thistles?
Consider also:
Aspen Institute is CIA
and [perhaps most critically] this:
may depend on support for Trump from Israel and the Pentagon!
Now, I term the actual rulers of 'the West' the ccc = covert criminal cabal. Of course
they are in hiding -- acting from 'behind the curtain,' as some have it -- it has to be that
*dishonest* way -- for them. Among their most notable 'fruits' are the JFK murder, USS
Liberty outrage, inside-job 9/11 psyop and the utterly wicked destruction of Libya/Gaddafi,
just 4 of many. The extended list is looong, and note that the 1st 3 in my list demonstrate
the ccc 'murdering their own' -- except that to the ccc, anybody not actually in the ccc
itself is not 'their own' but only exploitable/disposable objects. Of course the ccc causes
lies to be promulgated, hence the Lügenpresse . Neoliberalism/austerity must also
come from the ccc, causing misery wherever it's forced upon us, we the people. One of the
spivs in suits who 'sold' neoliberalism to the Aus people called it 'economic rationalism'
and jeered: 'What would you rather -- irrational economics?' Another ccc modus
operandi item is coercion as demonstrated by the downstream effects of Downer's "Get a
briefing!" -- which shows us that the CIA et al. is a 'command conduit' if not a command
originator. What I'm trying to illustrate here is that the ccc does not merely operate like a
mafia, it *is* a mafia, and one of the author's "may depend on" items suggests a name for
this mafia, namely: Khazar. That's our miserable world, deliberately made that way by that
mafia; if that's not 'mindless and demented' what is? rgds
@MK-DELTABURKE
The Aspen Institute is CIA, but the CIA is an organization created and controlled by the
globalist conspirators at the Council on Foreign Relations, mostly the Rockefellers and other
banksters.
"... By Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast , author of Going Posta l and publisher of The eXile, and Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah , Goliath , The Fifty One Day War , and The Management of Savagery , which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Killing Gaza and Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie . Originally published at the Greyzone Project ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US. ..."
The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing
foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US.
A bombshell
domestic spy scandal has been unfolding in Britain, after hacked internal communications exposed a covert UK state military-intelligence
psychological warfare operation targeting its own citizens and political figures in allied NATO countries under the cover of fighting
"Russian disinformation."
The leaked documents revealed a secret network of spies, prominent journalists and think-tanks colluding under the umbrella of
a group called "Integrity Initiative" to shape domestic opinion -- and to smear political opponents of the right-wing Tory government,
including the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
Until now, this Integrity Initiative domestic spy scandal has been ignored in the American media, perhaps because it has mostly
involved British names. But it is clear that the influence operation has already been activated in the US. Hacked documents reveal
that the Integrity Initiative is cultivating powerful allies inside the State Department, top DC think tanks, the FBI and the DHS,
where it has gained access to
Katharine Gorka and her
husband, the
fascist-linked cable news pundit
Sebastian Gorka .
The Integrity Initiative has spelled out plans to expand its network across the US, meddling in American politics and recruiting
"a new generation of Russia watchers" behind the false guise of a non-partisan charity. Moreover, the group has hired one of the
most notorious American "perception management" specialists, John Rendon, to train its clusters of pundits and cultivate relationships
with the media.
Back in the UK, Member of Parliament Chris Williamson has clamored for an investigation into the Integrity Initiative's abuse
of public money.
In a
recent editorial , Williamson drew a direct parallel between the group's collaboration with journalists and surreptitious payments
the CIA made to reporters during the Cold War.
"These tactics resemble those deployed by the CIA in Operation Mockingbird that was launched at the height of the cold war in
the early 1950s. Its aims included using the mainstream news media as a propaganda tool," Williamson wrote.
"They manipulated the news agenda by recruiting leading journalists to write stories with the express purpose of influencing public
opinion in a particular way," the Labour parliamentarian continued. "Now it seems the British Establishment have dusted off the CIA's
old playbook and is intent on giving it another outing on this side of the Atlantic."
Unmasking a British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine
The existence of the Integrity Initiative was virtually unknown until this November, when the email servers of a previously obscure
British think tank called the Institute for Statecraft were hacked, prompting allegations of Russian intrusion. When the group's
internal documents appeared at a website hosted by Anonymous Europe, the public learned of a covert propaganda network seed-funded
to the tune of over $2 million dollars by the Tory-controlled UK Foreign Office, and run largely by military-intelligence officers.
Through a series of cash inducements, off the record briefings and all-day conferences, the Integrity Initiative has sought to
organize journalists across the West into an international echo chamber hyping up the supposed threat of Russian disinformation --
and to defame politicians and journalists critical of this new Cold War campaign.
A bid for
funding submitted by the Integrity Initiative in 2017 to the British Ministry of Defense promised to deliver a "tougher stance
on Russia" by arranging for "more information published in the media on the threat of Russian active measures."
The Integrity Initiative has also worked through its fronts in the media to smear political figures perceived as a threat to its
militaristic agenda. Its targets have included a Spanish Department of Homeland Security appointee, Pedro Banos, whose nomination
was scuttled thanks a media blitz it secretly orchestrated; Jeremy Corbyn, whom the outfit and its
media cutouts
painted as a useful idiot of Russia; and a Scottish member of parliament, Neil Findlay, whom one of its closest media allies
accused of adopting "Kremlin messaging" for daring to protest the official visit of the far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy
Parubiy -- the founder of two neo-Nazi parties and author of a white nationalist memoir,
"View From The Right."
These smear campaigns and many more surreptitiously orchestrated by the Integrity Initiative offer a disturbing preview of the
reactionary politics it plans to inject into an already toxic American political environment.
Lessons from "The Man Who Sold the War"
A newly released Integrity Initiative document reveals that the outfit plans an aggressive expansion across the US.
The Integrity Initiative claims to have already established a "simple office" in Washington DC, though it does not say where.
It also boasts of partnerships with top DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, CNA, and
close relationships with US officials.
A major hub of Integrity Initiative influence is the State Department's Global Engagement Center, a
de facto US government propaganda operation that was established by President Barack Obama to battle online ISIS recruitment,
but which was rapidly repurposed to counter Russian disinformation following the election of Trump.
He is John Rendon, best known as "The Man Who Sold
The War" -- several wars, in fact, but most notoriously the Iraq invasion. Rendon was the self-described "information warrior"
who planted fake news in the major US-UK media about non-existent WMD threats. With deep ties to the CIA and other military-intelligence
agencies, his PR firm was paid $100 million to organize and sell Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. In 2002, the New York Times
exposed a Pentagon program using Rendon to plant "disinformation" -- including "false stories" and "the blackest of black PR"
-- in media outlets around the world, in order to shape public opinion and sell the Iraq invasion.
John Rendon (left) with Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass, US Africa Command Chief of Staff (photo by US Africom Public Affairs)
Journalist James Bamford outlined a catalogue
of disinformation feats Rendon performed for the Pentagon, such as identifying "the biases of specific journalists and potentially
obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships." Bamford also
found proposals and programs Rendon was involved in that aimed to "'coerce' foreign journalists and plant false information overseas
[and] find ways to 'punish' those who convey the 'wrong message.'"
These tactics seem particularly relevant to his work with the Integrity Initiative, especially considering the internal documents
that reveal further Rendon-style plans to produce reports and studies to be
"fed anonymously into local media." (Among
the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left Spanish daily.)
Keeping Up with the Gorkas
Internal documents also refer to interactions between Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly and top Trump officials like
Katharine Gorka , a vehemently anti-Muslim Department of Homeland Security official, as well as her husband, Sebastian, who earned
right-wing fame during his brief tenure in Trump's White House.
The latter Gorka is an
open supporter of the Hungarian Vitezi Rend, a proto-fascist order that collaborated with Nazi Germany during its occupation
of Hungary. Following Trump's election victory in 2016, Gorka appeared for televised interviews in a black Vitezi Rend uniform.
Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb, with his wife, Katharine, on Election Night
Gorka was among the first figures listed on an itinerary for Donnelly to Washington this September 18 to 22. The itinerary indicates
that the two had breakfast before Donnelly delivered a presentation on "Mapping Russian Influence Activities" at the federally funded
military research center, CNA .
According to the itinerary, Donnelly was granted access to Pentagon officials like
Mara Karlin
, an up-and-coming neoconservative cadre
, and John McCain Institute executive director
Kurt Volker
, another neoconservative operative who also serves as the US Special Representative for Ukraine. Numerous meetings with staffers
inside the State Department's Office of Global Engagement were also detailed.
A Foreign Agent in the State Department?
Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal.
Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation,
misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is listed as a current team
member:
Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with "counter-propaganda," the State Department's
Global Engagement Center
has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My old job at the State Department was
as chief propagandist," confessed former
Global Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their
own population and I don't necessarily think it's that awful."
Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's international network, the Global Engagement
Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal
appeared in an outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian
disinformation smugly explaining how he would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world.
Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem
smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation. His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message
and destroy the messenger.
Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract.
While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own
Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation
Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.
As a cut-out of the British Foreign Office and Defense Ministry, the Integrity Initiative's work with current and former US officials
and members of the media raises certain legal questions. For one, there is no indication that the group has registered under the
Justice Department's Foreign Agent Registration Act, as most foreign agents of influence are required to do.
Grants from the Neocons' Favorite Foundation
An Integrity Initiative memo states that the right-wing Smith Richardson Foundation has also committed to ponying up funding for
its US network as soon as the group receives 501 c-3 non-profit status. The foundation has already provided it with about $56,000
for covert propaganda activities across Europe.
The Smith Richardson Foundation has old ties to the US intelligence community and controversial cold war influence operations.
According to reporter
Russ Bellant , the foundation was secretly bankrolling radical right-wing "indoctrination campaigns for the American public on
cold war and foreign policy issues" -- programs that got the attention of Senator William Fulbright, who warned then-President Kennedy
of their dangers. At one of these indoctrination seminars, a Smith Richardson Foundation director "told attendees that 'it is within
the capacity of the people in this room to literally turn the State of Georgia into a civil war college,' in order to overcome their
opponents."
Smith Richardson has funded a who's who of the neoconservative movement, from hyper-militaristic think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War. "To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level
in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement,"
wrote journalist
Kelley Vlahos.
Besides Smith Richardson, the Integrity Initiative has stated its intention to apply for grants from the State Department "to
expand the Integrity Initiative activities both within and outside of the USA." This is yet another indicator that the US government
is paying for propaganda targeting its own citizens.
The "Main Event" in Seattle
An Integrity Initiative internal
document argues that because
"DC is well served by existing US institutions, such as those with which the Institute [for Statecraft] already collaborates," the
organization should "concentrate on extending the work of the Integrity Initiative into major cities and key State capitals [sic]
across the USA."
This December 10, the Integrity Initiative organized what it called its "main event" in the US. It was a conference on disinformation
held in Seattle, Washington
under the auspices
of a data firm called Adventium Labs. Together with the Technical Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, the Integrity
Initiative listed Adventium Labs as one of its "first partners outside DC."
Adventium is Minneapolis-based research and development firm that has reaped contracts from the US military, including a
recent $5.4 million cyber-security grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Inside a modest-sized hotel conference room, the Adventium/Integrity event
began with a speech by the Integrity Initiative's Simon Bracey-Lane. Two
years prior, Bracey-Lane appeared on the American political scene as a field worker for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential primary
run, earning media write-ups as the
"Brit for Bernie." Now, the young operator was back in the US as the advance man for a military-intelligence cut-out that specialized
in smearing left-wing political figures like Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader widely regarded as the British version of Sanders.
Bracey-Lane opened his address by explaining that Integrity Initiative director Chris Donnelly had been unable to appear at the
event, possibly because he was bogged down in the scandal back home. He proceeded to read remarks prepared by Donnelly that offered
a window into the frighteningly militaristic mindset the Integrity Initiative aims to impose on the public through their media and
political allies.
According to Donnelly's comments, the West was no longer in a "peace time, rules based environment." From the halls of government
to corporate boardrooms to even the UK's National Health System, "the conclusion is that we have to look for people who suit a wartime
environment rather than peacetime."
During Q&A, Bracey-Lane remarked that "we have to change the definition of war to encompass everything that war now encompasses,"
referring vaguely to various forms of "hybrid warfare."
"There is a great deal to be done in communicating that to young people," he continued. "When we mean being at war we don't mean
sending our boys off to fight. It's right here in our homes."
The emphasis on restructuring society along martial lines mirrored the disturbing thinking also on display in
notes of a private meeting
between Donnelly and Gen. Richard Barrons in 2016. During that chat, the two officers decided that the British military should
be removed from democratic supervision and be able to operate as "an independent body outside politics."
While Bracey-Lane's presentation perfectly captured the military mindset of the Integrity Initiative, the speakers that followed
him offered a diverse array of perspectives on the concept of disinformation, some more nuanced than others. But one talk stood out
from the rest -- not because of its quality, but because of its complete lack thereof.
Reanimating the "Red-Brown" Grifter
Alexander Reid Ross (left) and Emmi Bevensee at the Integrity Initiative's "main event" in Seattle
The presentation was delivered by Alexander Reid Ross, a half-baked political researcher who peddles computer-generated spiderweb
relationship charts to prove the existence of a vast hidden network of "red-brown" alliances and "syncretic media" conspiracies controlled
by puppeteers in Moscow.
Ross is a lecturer on geography at Portland State University with no scholarly or journalistic credentials on Russia. His students
have given him dismal marks at Rate My
Professors, complaining about his "terrible monotone lectures" and his penchant for "insert[ing] his own ideologies into our class."
But with a book, "Against the Fascist Creep," distributed by the well-known anarchist publishing house, AK Press, the middling academic
has tried to make his name as a maverick analyst.
Before the Integrity Initiative was exposed as a military-intelligence front operation, Ross was among a small coterie of pundits
and self-styled disinformation experts that followed the
group's Twitter account. The Integrity Initiative even retweeted his smear of War Nerd podcast co-host John Dolan.
In a series of articles for the Southern Poverty Law Center last year, Ross attempted to bring his warmed-over Cold War theories
to the broader public. He wound up trashing everyone from the co-author of this piece, Max Blumenthal, to Nation magazine publisher
Katrina Vanden Heuvel to Harvard University professor of international relations Stephen Walt as hidden shadow-fascists secretly
controlled by the Kremlin.
The articles ultimately
generated an embarrassing scandal and a series of public
retractions by the editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Richard Cohen. And then, like some Dr. Frankenstein for
discredited and buried journalism careers, the British Ministry of Defense-backed Integrity Initiative moved in to reanimate Ross
as a sought-after public intellectual.
Before the Integrity Initiative-organized crowd, Ross offered a rambling recitation of his theory of a syncretic fascist alliance
puppeteered by Russians: "The alt right takes from both this 'red-brown,' it's called, or like left-right syncretic highly international
national of nationalisms, and from the United States' own paleoconservative movement, and it's sort of percolated down through college
organizing, um, and anti-interventionism meets anti-imperialism. Right?"
In a strange twist, Ross appeared on stage at the Integrity Initiative's Seattle event alongside
Emmi Bevensee , a contributor to the left-libertarian
Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank, whose tagline, "a left market anarchist think-tank" expresses its core aim of uniting
far-left anarchists with free-market right-libertarians.
Bevensee , a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona
and self-described "Borderlands anarcho into tech and crypto," concluded her presentation by asserting a linkage between the alternative
news site, Zero Hedge, and the "physical militarized presence in the borderlands" of anti-immigrant vigilantes. Like Bevensee, Ross
has written for C4SS in the past.
The irony of contributors to an anarchist group called the "Center for a Stateless Society" auditioning before The State – the
most jackbooted element of it, in fact – for more opportunities to attack anti-war politicians and journalists, can hardly be overstated.
But closer examination of the history of C4SS veers from irony into something much darker and more unsettling.
Pedophile Co-Founder, White Nationalist Associates
C4SS was co-founded in 2006 by a confessed
child rapist and libertarian activist, Brad Spangler, who set the group up to promote "Market anarchism" to
"replace Marxism on the
left."
When Spangler's child rape confessions emerged in 2015, the Center for Stateless Society founder was
finally drummed out by his colleagues.
There's more: Spangler's understudy and
deputy in the C4SS, Kevin
Carson -- currently listed as the group's "Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory"
-- turned out to be a longtime friend and defender
of white nationalist Keith Preston. Preston's name is prominently plastered on the back of Kevin Carson's book, hailing the C4SS
man as "the Proudhon of our
time" -- a loaded compliment, given Proudhon's unhinged
anti-Semitism . Carson
only disowned Preston in 2009,
shortly before Preston helped white nationalist leader Richard Spencer launch his alt-right webzine, Alternative Right.
The C4SS group currently participates in the annual Koch-backed International
Students For Liberty conference in Washington DC,
LibertyCon, a who's
who of libertarian think-tank hacks and Republican Party semi-celebrities like Steve Forbes, FCC chairman Ajit Pai, and Alan Dershowitz.
In 2013, C4SS's Kevin Carson tweeted out his dream fantasy that four Jewish leftists -- Mark Ames, Yasha Levine, Corey Robin,
and Mark Potok -- would die in a plane crash while struggling over a single parachute. Potok was an executive editor at the Southern
Poverty Law Center, which last year retracted every one of the crank articles that Alexander Reid Ross published with them and
formally apologized for having run them.
For some reason, the super-sleuth Ross conveniently failed to investigate the libertarian group, C4SS, that he has chosen to partner
with and publish in. That ability to shamelessly smear and denounce leftists over the most crudely manufactured links to the far-right
-- while cozying up to groups as sleazy as C4SS and authoritarian as the Integrity Initiative -- is the sort of adaptive trait that
MI6 spies and the Rendon Group would find useful in a covert domestic influence operation.
Ross did not respond to our request for comment on his involvement with the Integrity Initiative and C4SS.
Disinformation for Democracy
As it spans out across the US, the Integrity Initiative has
stated
its desire to "build a younger generation of Russia watchers." Toward this goal, it is supplementing its coterie of elite journalists,
think tank hacks, spooks and State Department info-warriors with certifiable cranks like Ross.
Less than 24 hours after Ross's appearance at the Integrity Initiative event in Seattle, he
sent a menacing email to the co-author
of this article, Ames, announcing his intention to recycle an old and discredited smear against him and publish it in the Daily Beast
-- a publication that appears to enjoy a
special relationship
with Integrity Initiative personnel.
Despite the threat of investigation in the UK, the Integrity Initiative's "network of networks" appears to be escalating its covert,
government-funded influence operation, trashing the political left and assailing anyone that gets in its way -- all in the name of
fighting foreign disinformation.
"We have to win this one," Integrity Initiative founder Col. Chris Donnelly
said , "because if we don't, democracy will be undermined."
making up lies to get paid. james angleton was paranoid (not that it seemed to make him more effective in counterintelligence)–these
people are just con artists, paid to be con artists.
i'm just waiting for "we have to undermine democracy in order to save it".
Agreed. Not only are they paid to make things up, but they have an ingenious scheme for paying themselves from narcotics and
arms dealing.
The most amazing feat of confidence artistry (apart from maybe the TARP bailout (c.f.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
) is their remarkable ability to convince the population they are needed and working on our behalf instead of being in jail
where they belong.
I submitted a long comment on this about an hour ago, which seems to have been eaten by the system. I won't repost it now,
but I'll do so later if it doesn't surface.
This is something that has repeatedly happened to me too recently – it often takes 2 or more hours for most of my recent posting
to surface on the site. It rarely disappears altogether, so I would assume your post will eventually arrive.
Same here on the delays. Keep a copy.
But anyway, very glad you posted this piece. Whatever we make of Patreon, it's one way to support Mark Ames' work.
Sir Alan Duncan, responding on behalf of the Government to Emily Thornberry's urgent question (Dec 12) on recent allegations
that the Foreign Office funded a company which carried out a smear campaign against the official Opposition.
What a frightful fellow that Alan Duncan is eh? Talks like a Mafia lawyer and he's supposed to be a national leader. He reminds
that other MP, the POS who interrogated David Kelly on TV, they both use the same style. Is it a qualification for legislator?
Just a minor note to start off. That image of "Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb". I think that Vitezi Rend actually refers
to the medal he wears on the left. The jacket itself more resembles the patrol jacket that British officers wore in the 19th century.
Moving on! Notice how the same players keep on coming up again and again in all these stories of skulduggery? John Rendon, the
Atlantic Council, Ajit Pai and Alan Dershowitz – the same scum-bags with a few new wannabe players. As an example.
The penchant that Brad Spangler, C4SS co-founder, has for under-age girls is disgusting of course but you have to put it into
the context of the people that you are talking about. If Spengler was more rich or more powerful, you might see his name on a
manifest for the "Lolita Express" but his activities would not be splashed about in an article like this one. That sort of activity
is given a level of protection if you are in the right group. And it is a good thing that that British General Richard Barrons
is retired as his comments are deserving of being cashiered.
Funny how a group that claims to be about protecting democracy wants to push it aside and install propaganda on a "1984" level
in the pursuit of their aims. I cannot decide if their target of Russia is a means or an end. If it is a means, that means using
the boogy-man of Russia to radically restructure western society to their tastes. If it is an end, well, it is true that Russia
has about $75 trillion in resources, mostly in Siberia and the east, so if it was broken up eventually, that would be a bonanza
of wealth appropriation.
I was thinking about the activities of this group and how they go about their activities, especially the smearing of anybody that
talks truth to power. I wonder if anybody here made the connection with this story and the PropOrNot website that came out of
nowhere about two years ago and that had the stamp of approval of the Washington Post. I would not be surprised if it turns out
to be that PropOrNot was a trial balloon in the United States for the Integrity Initiative to establish what it was capable of.
Just a thought.
He looks like an extra from Star Wars – one of those nazi guys working the bridge of the Death Star. The "look and feel" of
a lot of pre-war fascism strikes us as silly in retrospect, though it really wasn't at the time.
That tailored black jacket Sebastian wears looks like something Winston Churchill would have changed out of before that last
cavalry charge at Omdurman. It seems intentionally designed to mimic 19th century great power imperial army officer garb. Nostalgia
for the good times, apparently. Goes with his fascist priorities.
Let us not get carried away with the exuberance of discovering skulduggery among fascist elements of the media and politics.
This does not mean that the conspiracy means Russia is thereby a Goodie Twoshoes. It also does not mean that Russia is any less
a pain in the ass than it has heretorfore be characterized.
It does mean that there is less reason (any?) than ever to put much faith in FoxNews (already a mere propaganda machine) or
other orgs. I am uncomfortable hearing CNA is caught up in this as they are a pseudo government thinktank with some Pentagon influence.
If true, the story should be used to clear out some journalists and analyst riffraff. However, this story is surely not going
to restore, much less create, any integrity among the Beltway Punditry.
The article and related matters may also shed more light on the abrupt resignation of
Robert Hannigan from the leadership of GCHQ in January 2017 a few days after Trump's inauguration. Given previous revelations
about GCHQ and NSA spying on each other's citizens, what else is next in the UK and in the US and elsewhere?
After reading about that Carson character and others I am ready for a shower to try to wash off the disgust.
Yves Smith: Thanks for this. I am wondering about two stories that have been flapping around here for a few days: That odd
New Knowledge company that produced the report about Russian influence on the elections as well as the story about the case before
the Supreme Court of the US in which a company is invoking claims of sovereign immunity.
I have a feeling that New Knowledge definitely fits into the framework outlined by Ames above. A contractor that appears out
of nowhere with a "distinguished" board of concerned semi-liberals (at the trough)?
But what do I know? Some guy named Volodya showed up at my house and bought my vote in 2016 for two bottles of pickled mushrooms
Perfideus Albion is not just a neat saying, but a truth that the Irish, French and
Germans (etc.) have known forever, the people don't deserve it, but the
jumped up Tories do in spades.
Thank you for highlighting this article! It names names and connects some dots, including some connections reaching into the
U.S. It also describes propaganda mechanisms that have been around forever but have become pervasive today. A few protruding tips
of a massive iceberg, in my view. I'm sure *this* "bombshell" story will get the massive coverage it deserves in the MSM -- not!
That was interesting. Well argued all the way through I thought, but they could take a closer look at the unwinding of Yugoslavia;
what Serbia and Syria have in common is having been targeted by outside state powers for dissolution, responses did vary.
Thank you diptherio for posting the C4SS response. Such responses are helpful in evaluating issues like this, and we should
always be open to the other side when they take the time to reply. However, I can't agree that the response was "well argued."
The author does make some valid points, but mainly she resorts to ad hominem attacks on Ames (based on some juvenile antics at
eXile that are often used to smear him), or on both authors because they may have agreed with "Assadists" like Ambassador Peter
Ford or "9/11 Truthers" like Piers Robinson, whose claims about Syria or the White Helmets are, of course, Kremlin propaganda.
Which brings up why Blumenthal would have changed his position on Syria; it was not because of his gradual understanding of what
was really happening there. Rather, while he had once grasp the truth of the "revolution," he made the mistake of going to a Kremlin
gala and the Rooskies (and RT) got to him. Now he is just another propagandist. Nowhere that I can see does the author discuss
the major claims made in Ames and Blumenthal's article, or the evidence cited (except to say that if it was in RT or Sputnik,
we can ignore it anyway as propaganda). Nor does she address the actual defamation made by Alexander Ross-Reid through the SPLC
that pissed off Blumenthal in the first place. There are other problems (don't get me started on the "red-brown" smear), but that's
enough.
Having said all that, I do think that in their criticism of C4SS, Ames and Blumenthal perhaps did some unnecessary punching
down. They could have made clearer the distinction between organizations like the Integrity Initiative, that are pretty clearly
intelligence operatives or cut-outs, versus groups like C4SS that function more like "useful idiots" because of their ideological
position (e.g. equating U.S. and Russian imperialism in this case in their "anarchist" appeal). The latter are in no way as evil
as the former, in my mind.
You are clearly much more engaged with the related debates than I. I read the piece as a response to the punching down you
mention in your last paragraph and felt like I got a respectable read on someone still developing their arguments. I'm not informed
enough to argue with much of it, but having read Diana Johnstone's "Fools Crusade", the Syria/Serbia bit stuck in my craw.
I had thought about commenting on the ad hominems directed at Ames, but didn't want to get into the whole identity argument
embedded in much of the language of the post. While I disagree with many of her positions and attitudes on the state actions she
criticizes without, in my opinion, adequate grounding, I judged it a mostly good faith effort trying to find solid footing in
a world increasingly thick with distorted narratives.
It's hard to argue now, from anywhere with out power, without being someone's "useful idiot": trust has decayed to the point
where language impedes communication in the political sphere.
It's funny you should mention Johnstone's book. I normally would not use the derogatory term "useful idiot" for the very reason
you imply; most such people are acting in good faith. I admit that her comments on Syria irritated me. But the reason I sometimes
overreact to that sort of narrative is because of my own experiences as a useful idiot, starting with Yugoslavia. I fell for the
liberal "humanitarian" argument hook, line, and sinker in the 1990s, even though I considered myself a knowledgeable progressive
at the time. It wouldn't be the last time I was duped, but I'd like to think I'm a little wiser today.
I appreciate your comment. We definitely need to distinguish empire propagandists from the beliefs of people honestly trying
to find their way.
I thought the later part of Ames' piece was unnecessary. It's kind of the same sort of guilt-by-attending-same-conference thing
that I find annoying about the Russophobes.
Keep focused on government malfeasance, not basement brown-shirts.
Oh well, there would be a lot to argue here. In one side it is nice to see that the "Initiative" is being exposed although
it doesn't appear yet to trigger any significant response from supposedly democratic institutions like, let's say the english
parliament (at ransom by brexit).
Just to demonstrate how this article is well focused and pointed I wanted to comment on this bit:
(Among the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left
Spanish daily .)
YES! iIt is so true that the former "center-left" –if you wish– daily that years ago was a must read but has been degraded
to levels that I wouldn't have imagined, in a case that makes the Guardian as the "guardian of reporting-as-it should-be". One
has to bear in mind that the current most important shareholder of Grupo Prisa (owner of El Pais) is an english hedge fund Amber
Capital whose CEO,
Joseph
Oughorlian is chairman at Grupo Prisa and probably responsible for the Russia!Russia!Russia! campaign observed in this medium
that surprised me so much. You don't find nothing similar in Spain even in rigth and rigth of the rigth news outlets.
I believe this UK-based shareholder is clearly associated with the peculiar Russia!Russia!Russia! stance of the supposedly
centre-left daily.
For those of us from way back way back, these kooks relate to offshoots of the Watergate scandal, the original one, where people
working on those burglaries of psychiatrist's offices and Democratic headquarters got their start organizing small gangs of crooks
to infiltrate what was then a porous but trustable system of government – on they went to propose surveillance and collection
of data that was at first publicly laughed about but on they went. On they went. Technology with all its pluses has these minuses
we at first were able to counter (Church hearings) but the rats have scurried into all the back alleys and secretive pathways
that need a thorough cleanup. It can be done, but it needs to be done periodically. Hopefully this is finally the year when that
will happen.
Thank you, Yves. I believe these folk don't end up in a good place, but meanwhile they are wreaking havoc. The place to start,
after the brooms and mops, is to get money OUT of politics and restore a verifiable voting system that happens methodically and
is trustworthy. The citizenry will be behind this. We the people don't care how long it takes to vote or to find out who won.
We don't! Haste makes waste in more ways than we know.
Let's do this. And please, judges, do your duty or go to jail yourselves.
It's obvious that neither Ames or Blumenthal read the actual documents they're quoting from. Which is a shame considering the
relevant one involving the CIA's Operation Mockingbird comparison was only seven pages long. The CIA were merely imitating British
intelligence during the war and it is clearly stated as such when one of the replies involving General Sir Richard Barrons states
that they've done this before during the 1930s. The US didn't possess a foreign intelligence agency at the time and I'd fervently
argue that we still don't to this day.
but I've already commented about British Security Coordination in the aftermath of PropOrNot though and I'm reluctant to beat
a dead horse.
Ah, the smell (or should we say stench) of domestic propaganda in the morning, ironically by some of the same individuals who
brought us Iraq WMDs. While First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and other civil rights must be protected, it seems to
me that a careful balance can be drawn under new legislation that insulates us from such government-sponsored propaganda. We should
be able to rely on our government's representations. Instead, as with a former president who openly acknowledged, "My job is to
catapult the propaganda," the reverse, together with a related loss of trust, unfortunately seems to be increasingly the case.
Stop lying! What part of "of the People, by the People, for the People," is difficult to understand?
"... Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior. ..."
"... That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there's no evidence that it did. ..."
"... So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether. ..."
"... Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. ..."
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump tweeted the following:
"Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made
many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the
rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a
glorious end!"
The tweet was warmly received and celebrated by Trump's supporters, despite the fact that it
says essentially nothing since "eventually" could mean anything.
Indeed, it's
looking increasingly possible that nothing will come of the president's stated agenda to
withdraw troops from Syria other than a bunch of words which allow his anti-interventionist
base to feel nice feelings inside. Yet everyone laps it up, on both ends of the political
aisle, just like they always do:
Trump supporters are acting like he's a swamp-draining, war-ending peacenik...
...his enemies are acting like he's feeding a bunch of Kurds on conveyor belts into
Turkish meat grinders to be made into sausages for Vladimir Putin's breakfast, when in
reality nothing has changed and may not change at all.
How are such wildly different pictures being painted about the same non-event? By the fact
that both sides of the Trump-Syria debate have thus far been reacting solely to narrative.
This has consistently been the story throughout Trump's presidency: a heavy emphasis on
words and narratives and a disinterest in facts and actions. A rude tweet can dominate
headlines for days, while the actual behaviors of this administration can go almost completely
ignored. Trump continues to more or less advance the same warmongering Orwellian globalist
policies and agendas as his predecessors along more or less the same trajectory, but frantic
mass media narratives are churned out every day painting him as some unprecedented deviation
from the norm. Trump himself, seemingly aware that he's interacting entirely with perceptions
and narratives instead of facts and reality, routinely makes things up whole cloth and often
claims he's "never said" things he most certainly has said. And why not? Facts don't matter in
this media environment, only narrative does.
Look at Russiagate. An
excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at
Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the
infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing
but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who
helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's
said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive
behavior.
That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every
breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and
it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way
is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant
analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available
evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as
well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and
there's no evidence that it did.
So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated
election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually
been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet
Union. With the nuclear brinkmanship this administration has been playing with its only nuclear
rival on the planet, it would be so incredibly easy for Trump's opposition to attack him on his
insanely hawkish escalation of a conflict which could easily end all life on earth if any
little thing goes wrong, but they don't. Because this is all about narrative and not facts,
Democrats have been paced into supporting even more sanctioning, proxy conflicts and nuclear
posturing while loudly objecting to any sign of communication between the two nuclear
superpowers, while Republicans are happy to see Trump increase tensions with Moscow because it
combats the collusion narrative. Now both parties are supporting an anti-Russia agenda which
existed in secretive US government agencies
long before the 2016 election .
And this to me is the most significant thing about Trump's presidency. Not any of the things
people tell me I'm supposed to care about, but the fact that the age of Trump has been
highlighting in a very clear way how we're all being manipulated by manufactured narratives all
the time.
Humanity
lives in a world of mental narrative . We have a deeply conditioned societal habit of
heaping a massive overlay of mental labels and stories on top of the raw data we take in
through our senses, and those labels and stories tend to consume far more interest and
attention than the actual data itself. We use labels and stories for a reason: without them it
would be impossible to share abstract ideas and information with each other about what's going
on in our world. But those labels and stories get imbued with an intense amount of belief and
identification; we form tight, rigid belief structures about our world, our society, and our
very selves that can generate a lot of fear, hatred and suffering. Which is why it feels so
nice to go out into nature and relax in an environment that isn't shaped by human mental
narrative.
This problem is exponentially exacerbated by the fact that these stories and labels are
wildly subjective and very easily manipulated. Powerful people have learned that they can
control the way everyone else thinks, acts and votes by controlling the stories they tell
themselves about what's going on in the world using mass media control and financial political
influence, allowing ostensible democracies to be conducted in a way which serves power far more
efficiently than any dictatorship.
See how both A and B herd the public away from opposing the dangerous pro-establishment
agendas being advanced by this administration? The dominant narratives could not possibly be
more different from what's actually going on, and the only reason they're the dominant
narratives is because an alliance
of plutocrats and secretive government agencies exerts an immense amount of influence over
the stories that are told by the political/media class.
The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of
smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn.
It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics
are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only
potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that
it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether.
Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share
information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the
establishment propaganda machine is
acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the
internet are getting more and more severe. It is possible that this is what it looks like when
a thinking species evolves into a sane and healthy relationship with thought. Perhaps the
cracks that are appearing all over official narratives today are like the first cracks
appearing in an eggshell as a bird begins to hatch into the world.
"... Neither Rob nor I have a sound theory of what really happened in Salisbury. There are many possible explanations, but none
for which there is sufficient evidence. What we do know is that the British government lied and lies about the case from A to Z. ..."
"... This wasn't an accident blamed on Putin but a planned semi-assassination in which at least one of the victims was unaware of
the plan designed from the beginning to be used in the rolling anti-Putin regime change operation. ..."
Stuff To Read: Integrity Initiative, Skripal, Kaspersky ...
The is no original piece ready to post today, but here are some interesting links:
The Russian anti-virus company Kaspersky was contacted by someone who it found to be related to the U.S. National Security
Agency. Kaspersky immediately told the NSA about the contact. Following that tip the FBI arrested Harold T. Martin, a NSA contractor
who had collected the NSA entire arsenal of digital weapon at is home. Despite that very helpful tip by Kaspersky the U.S. government
continues to harass the company and to claim that it was working as an agent of the Russian government. Exclusive:
How a Russian firm helped catch an alleged NSA data thief , Kim Zettler, Politico
There are several new stories about the Integrity Initiative though still none in any mainstream media.
Over several months Rob Slane at The Blogmire did a detailed analysis of the Skripal case and the often contradictory
information that officials and media have published. Rob has the advantage of living in Salisbury, where the Skripals were allegedly
poisoned. Today he published the summation of his
series about the case:
Last but not least a 20 minute video by Prolekult about the (geo-)politics of Brexit and the Skripal mess in Britain.
Interestingly Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn seems to be pushing the 'blame Russia' racket just as much as the Conservatives. (Disclaimer
- I do not endorse the views of the authors.):
History
is Marching | Part five: The Fall of the British Empire (vid)
Comments I posted this comment at Off Guardian. There are a couple of points that may be of interest:
The essential feature of this "Integrity Initiative" is that it is purportedly a charity or an NGO. Like Atlantic Council,
or Bellingcat, it is funded by government(s) but it has, as this video demonstrates, the capacity to distance itself from government,
Deniability.
Deniability is the central feature of all British regime change operations since 1945. The UK takes (took?) the UN Charter
and Nuremberg seriously. Not in the sense that it follows the rules but in so far as it tries not to get caught waging aggressive
wars and interfering in sovereign states by carrying out regime change operations.
Britain has become very good not just at keeping its secret operations secret and deniable. But, through its controls over
the media, stopping leaks by ensuring that whistle blowers are not heard.
What this case indicates is that people like Donnelly, contemptible careerists playing games with humanity's very existence,
have prevailed over the more cautious and sensible Civil Servants in the Foreign Office, who used to keep a lid on the irrepressible
folly of psychopaths like Christopher Nigel, and have been given license not only to kill but to do so without reference to 'M'
and Whitehall.
In this case, thanks to the weakness and demoralised state of the current government what has happened is that Donnelly has
improved on the rolling regime change operation against Russia, (consisting of taking advantage of opportunities to castigate
the Kremlin and blaming Putin for everything that goes wrong, every Russian expatriate's death, every botched poison gas gambit
by the White Helmets (another one of these NGOs run by 'retired MI types),).. improved on it to the extent that, now, rather than
waiting to comment on, and build frames around such events as Litvinenko's death, they are constructing them out of whole cloth.
The key word here is bricolage, as used by Levi Strauss to describe one of the characteristic reactions of traditional societies
to the irruption of western imperialism.
Donnelly, his acolytes and his dupes in the media are taking whatever they find lying around in the world and twisting it together
to form apparent events. The White Helmets, for example, attempt a chlorine gas attack on Syrian forces. It fails but rather than
deny that it ever happened British Intelligence convinces the media that, in fact the attack was not by the Jihadists but upon
them. The media dutifully takes its cues, from the clusters and, almost before you know it, the US is bombing Damascus on the
ground that Assad is carrying out poison gas attacks.
The MH17 affair is another instance: an airliner gets shot down, whether deliberately or not doesn't matter, and Russia is
blamed. All manner of phony 'evidence' is publicised. The real evidence such as Air Traffic Control records is suppressed. Sanctions
are imposed. Russia further isolated etc. Then we had the DNC emails, again, a leak probably by a decent person disgruntled by
the utter cynicism and criminality of the DNC's tactics in the primary elections. Twisted into something resembling a Russian
conspiracy against Clinton. Not one that anyone with enough brain to tie his shoelaces would credit but just enough to set the
media lynch mobs, led by their clusters, into operation.
All of which leads inexorably to Salisbury and the Skripals.
And here perhaps there is more than bricolage: rather than picking up what providence has delivered and making a passably plausible
story of it, here, one suspects, the matter was put together in advance. This wasn't an accident blamed on Putin but a planned
semi-assassination in which at least one of the victims was unaware of the plan designed from the beginning to be used in the
rolling anti-Putin regime change operation..
Which, and this is something that the old FO mandarins knew would happen if policy were left in the hands of Donnelly and Co,
(straight out of schoolboy comics like Magnet or Hotspur), has proved to be exactly what Russia needed: a series of kicks at the
Kremlin which drove it into the arms of Beijing and forced it to form an iron alliance which will lead not to regime change in
Moscow but to the destruction of the Atlantic empire.
Just would like to point out a small, interesting parallel between these Integrity Initiative documents and some of the mainstream
academic literature in the US about democracy, namely the use of the phrase "malign influence" to describe the influence of Russia
(and China). If one reads the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy (which names the NED as a partner or some such)
or the latest Freedom House report, one will find the academic version of the language used by mainstream journalism, warning
of the threat that Russia and China pose to the Western liberal democratic way of life.
I would call them a country run fully by intel agencies. I made a game today. Google research results are personalized. I asked several friends to search Google for „Integrity Iniative".
All the screenshots showed the same. One sputnik-Link, one to Nachdenkseiten, the rest international. Not one single main stream
medium was mentioned. Since November! There has been even a debate in the British parliament. If this is no top-down organized
consulting machine what is such a machine then?
@26 Ross Stanford. I had been posting on Craig Murray's website for nearly 10 years since I read his book Murder in Samarkand,
and very nearly turned up at the House of Commons as a witness - but he asked can anyone record this - which I did. I have never
actually met him. bevin posted for maybe a couple of years a couple of years ago. bevin wrote about The French political situation,
before it kicked off.
He is a very clever man, and to delete someone so intelligent who was almost literally predicting what was
likely to happen with yellow vests etc, seems a little bit both arrogant and immature in my my view. However all of us regardless
of our political views accept the Craig Murray is a Man of Great Integrity and Courage, even though on a lot of political issues
I disagree with him. Surely thats O.K. disagreeing about politics?
@30 The basic line seems to be that the West is vulnerable to Russian attacks because we have a free press. So why did it take
the free press such a long time to come up with a response? James Ball does admit that a secretive organization using government funding to slander Jeremy Corbyn might not have been a
great idea.
Posted this over at Mark Chapman's The New Kremlin Stooge blog:
The latest news from Salisbury: first, the park bench and the dining table walked the Path of Fire, then the guinea pigs
and a cat followed, a house may soon do so as well, and the latest perhaps to join the queue
Several comments attached to that post are of "wish we had Novichok in our shopping centre" or "they planned this all along"
type. It seems that Salisbury shopping centre as it is has not been doing well because of high rents previously imposed by Wiltshire
Council and it desperately needs a makeover. Call me cynical but maybe Wiltshire Council is using the poisoning incident to bring
forward its redevelopment plans for the Salisbury shopping centre that will all but kill off local businesses.
Blooming Barricade , Jan 9, 2019 6:17:08 PM |
link
@3
The irony is that, with a genuinely free press, RT would cease to have any appeal. The corporate media is hopelessly biased against
Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, as well as pro-war, opposed to anarchism, openly pro-capitalism, and fails to report on issues
like fracking, oligarchic trade deals Palestinian struggles, police state brutality against left, and almost every other topic
the public would want to know about.
Projects like PropOrNot and the Intgerity Initiative exist solely to prevent the public from
knowing about those things by locking down the information sphere against independent media (today they claimed that "neoliberalism"
and "neoconservatism" aren't real concepts but Russian-invented insults against the rules-based liberal world order.
George Galloway weighs in
on the chaos engulfing the Empire in Washington, London and Paris. The Neoliberal ship is foundering while the uplifting of people-based
policies of Russia and China keep them on track to reach their aims. Soon, if Trump keeps the government shutdown, those idled
federal workers just might be seen in the streets. George has a penchant for connecting things, and had this to say about Macron:
"The very conditions Macron strove so very hard to bring about in Damascus and that France DID help bring about in Kiev are
now rocking the very foundations of the French Republic."
The false flag of Austerity--Neoliberalism preying on its own as was predicted at its beginnings is what we're witnessing,
while the actors that created the situation cling with bloody hands to the ship of state unwilling to surrender the wheel to those
who might salvage the situation. Metaphorically, Rome burns while Nero and his Senators fiddle.
The Guardian has produced an article about Integrity Initiative. It was so poorly written that they had to close the comment section
after 138 comments. People do know a lot more than the Guardian thinks.
the guardian never keeps comment sections open long if too many posters start disagreeing with their preferred line. their other
tactic is simply never to open comments on posts where they think this is likely to happen. and of course they haven't even acknowledged
the luke harding travesty, as they continue to beg for donations to support their fearless independent journalism.
I thought James Ball made a gallant effort to exonerate Western media considering he probably had a team of editors breathing
down his neck. It's the lack of transparency that seems to upset him most. Perhaps his next article will be an in depth look at
how Integrity Initiative got government funding.
Hacking syndicate Anonymous has just released its fourth tranche of documents hacked from
the internal servers of the Institute for Statecraft and its subsidiary, the Integrity
Initiative. Several explosive files raise serious questions about the shadowy British state and
NATO-funded 'think tank' and its connections with the Skripal affair.
The files were
released just after 2:30pm GMT on January 4 -- I've barely scratched the surface of the
content, but what I've seen so far contains a panoply of bombshell revelations -- to say the
least, the organization(s) now have serious questions to answer about what role they played in
the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in March, and its aftermath both nationally and
internationally.
Sinister Timeline
One file
apparently dating to "early 2015" -- "Russian Federation Sanctions" -- written by the
Institute's Victor Madeira outlines "potential levers" to achieve Russian "behaviour change",
"peace with Ukraine", "return [of] Crimea", "regime change" or "other?". The suggested "levers"
span almost every conceivable area, including "civil society", "sports", "finance" and
"technology".
In the section marked "intelligence", Madeira suggests simultaneously expelling "every RF
[Russian Federation] intelligence officer and air/defense/naval attache from as many countries
as possible". In parentheses, it references 'Operation Foot' , the expulsion of over
1000 Soviet officials from the UK in September 1971, the largest expulsion of intelligence
officials by any government in history.
The section on sports also suggests "advocating the view [Russia] is unworthy of hosting
[sporting] events" -- and the section marked "information" recommends the sanctioning of
'Russian' media "in West for not complying with regulators' standards".
2015 File
Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions
In April that year, Institute for Statecraft chief Chris Donnelly was
promoted to Honorary Colonel of SGMI (Specialist Group Military Intelligence), and
in
October he met with General Sir Richard Barrons. Notes from the meeting don't make clear
who said what, but one despaired that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a
response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and
take it out of the political space."
"We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. We did this in the
1930s. My conclusion is it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something
dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside
government. We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the
national capabilities [and/or] capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of
resources to do it? We need this debate now. There is not a moment to be lost," they said.
Operation IRIS Begins
On 4 March 2018, former Russian military officer and double agent for MI6 Sergei Skripal and
his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, England.
Within days, the Institute had submitted a proposal to the Foreign & Commonwealth
Office, "to study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news
spread and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.
The bid was accepted, and the Initiative's 'Operation Iris' was launched. Under its
auspices, the Institute employed 'global investigative solutions' firm Harod Associates to
analyze social media activity related to Skripal the world over.
It also conducted media monitoring of its own, with Institute 'research fellow' Simon
Bracey-Lane
producing regular 'roundups' of media coverage overseas, based on insights submitted by
individuals connected to the Initiative living in several countries. One submission, from an
unnamed source in Moldova, says they "cannot firmly say" whether the country's media had its
"own point of view" on the issue, or whether news organizations had taken "an obvious
pro-Russian or pro-Western position", strongly suggesting these were key questions for the
Initiative.
Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal
Incident
Moreover though, there are clear indications the Institute sought to shape the news
narrative on the attack -- and indeed the UK government's response.
One file dated March 11 appears to be a briefing document on the affair to date, with key
messages bolded throughout.
It opens by setting out "The Narrative" of the incident -- namely "Russia has carried out
yet another brutal attack, this time with a deadly nerve agent, on someone living in
Britain".
"Use of the nerve agent posed a threat to innocent British subjects, affecting 21 people and
seriously affecting a police officer. This is not the first time such an attack has been
carried out in the UK 14 deaths are believed to be attributable to the Kremlin Russia has
poisoned its enemies abroad on other occasions, most notably then-candidate for the Presidency
of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, in 2004. Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been
poisoned twice; and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was also poisoned and later shot dead.
Since Putin has been running Russia, the Kremlin has a history of poisoning its opponents in a
gruesome way," the "narrative" reads.
The file goes on to declare the British response has been "far too weak it's essential the
government makes a much stronger response this time" -- and then lists "possible, realistic,
first actions", including banning RT and Sputnik from operating in the UK, boycotting the 2018
World Cup, withdrawing the UK ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador to
the UK, and refusing/revoking visas to leading Russians within Vladimir Putin's "circle", and
their families.
Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative
It's not clear who the document was distributed to -- but it may have been given to
journalists within the Initiative's UK 'cluster', if not others. This may explain why the
Institute's "narrative", and its various recommended "responses" utterly dominated mainstream
media reporting of the affair for months afterwards, despite the glaring lack of evidence of
Russian state involvement in the attack.
It's extremely curious so many of the briefing document's recommendations almost exactly --
if not exactly -- echo several of the suggested "levers" outlined in the 2015 document. It's
also somewhat troubling the "Global Operation Foot" spoken of in that file duly came to pass on
March 28 2018, with over 20 countries expelling over 100 Russian diplomats.
Likewise, it's striking Victor Madeira, the Institute staffer who made the recommendations
in 2015, made many media appearances discussing the poisoning following the incident
routinely documented by the Institute. Security consultant Dan Kaszeta also wrote a number
of articles for the Integrity Initiative website about chemical weapons following the attack --
including a July 14 article, How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the
Skripal attack? --receiving 40
pence per word .
Invoice submitted to
Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections
The Institute's bizarrely intimate connections with the incident don't end there. Another document
apparently dating to July 2018 contains the contact details of Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6
recruiter, handler and -- unbelievably -- neighbor in Salisbury. Anonymous claims the document
is an invitee list for a meeting the Institute convened between a number of individuals and
Syria's highly controversial White Helmets group, but this is yet to be verified.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the latest document dump raises yet further questions
about how and why it was BBC Diplomatic and Defense Editor Mark Urban -- who was in the same
tank regiment as Miller after leaving University -- came to meet with Skripal in the year
before his poisoning. When I attended the
launch of his book on the affair in October -- The Skripal Files -- he was evasive
on whether he played a role in connecting him with Skripal, and denied Miller was Skripal's
recruiter.
The latest trove also raises yet further questions about the activities of the Institute for
Statecraft and Integrity Initiative. In light of these revelations, reading the record of
Donnelly's meeting with General Barrons takes on an acutely chilling quality. It may be that
purely serendipitously the pair got their "catastrophe", their "something dreadful", which
"[woke] people up" and made the government "realise the problem" posed by Russia -- or it could
be they one way or another played a facilitative role of some kind.
After months of refusing to answer the vast number of questions I and thousands of others
have submitted to the paired organizations, it's high time for them to break cover, and be
honest with the public.
Images removed. Please brose the original to view them.
Notable quotes:
"... "Russian disinformation." ..."
"... "network of networks" ..."
"... It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence. ..."
"... "study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" ..."
"... "global investigative solutions" ..."
"... What role did # IntegrityInitiative play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow.... ..."
"... "pro-Russia troll accounts" ..."
"... "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case." ..."
"... Another document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative" ..."
"... These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK." ..."
"... "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" ..."
"... "threat Russia poses." ..."
"... This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning ..."
"... One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot. ..."
"... "the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history." ..."
"... "Makes you think " ..."
"... The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute. ..."
"... It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended # IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair. ..."
"... £2,276.80 in July 2018 during the # Skripal # Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & # PortonDown @ RTUKproducer 160 1:24 PM - Jan 4, 2019 ..."
"... It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were drawn up years in advance. ..."
The Integrity Initiative, a UK-funded group exposed in leaked files as psyop network, played a key role in monitoring and molding
media narratives after the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal, newly-dumped documents reveal. Created by the NATO-affiliated,
UK-funded Institute for Statecraft in 2015, the Integrity Initiative was
unmasked in November after hackers
released documents detailing a web of politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics involved in purportedly
fighting "Russian disinformation."
The secretive, government-bankrolled "network of networks" has found itself under scrutiny for
smearing UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
as a Kremlin stooge – ostensibly as part of its noble crusade against anti-Russian disinformation. Now, new
leaks show that the organization played a central role in shaping media narratives after Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia
were mysteriously poisoned in Salisbury last March.
It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented
following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence.
Operation Iris
Days after the Skripals were poisoned, the Institute solicited its services to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, offering to
"study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being
perceived" in a number of countries.
After receiving the government's blessing, the Integrity Initiative (II)
launched
'Operation Iris,' enlisting "global investigative solutions" firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity
related to Skripal.
What role did # IntegrityInitiative
play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers
from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow....
However, Harod's confidential
report
did more than just parse social media reactions to the Skripal affair: It compiled a list of alleged "pro-Russia troll accounts"
accused of "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case."
Among those who found themselves listed as nefarious thought-criminals were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a gentleman
from Kent who goes by Ian56 on Twitter.
Neocon Fascist, al-Qaeda Supporting Treasonous Scumbag @ Benimmo
is having a laugh with £2m of Taxpayers money. Nimmo should be IN JAIL for Fraud & Treason
"The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and Petrovas GRU agents"
- has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French yellow jackets. I kid you not.
Another
document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative"
of the Skripal incident, which blames Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally, as well as containing a number of recommended
actions.
These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to
Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the
UK."
Other suggestions included propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim
brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" and getting members of parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses."
It's not clear who the document was drawn up for, but it may have been provided to II-affiliated journalists in the UK and other
countries.
This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning
– which the UK and its allies unanimously blamed on Moscow.
Ahead of its time?
One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a
document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including
mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot.
Coincidentally, more than 100 Russian diplomats were expelled from 20 Western countries in an apparently show of solidarity with
the UK following the Skripal attack. At the time, UK Prime Minister Theresa May welcomed what she said was "the largest collective
expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history."
Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents, written long before the Salisbury events, also call for the arrest of RT and
Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding: "Makes you think "
The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made
all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the
alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler
and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute.
It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended
# IntegrityInitiative meetings. There
is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair.
It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity
Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were
drawn up years in advance.
"... If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another. ..."
"... The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.' ..."
"... There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech. ..."
"... I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. ..."
"... Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome. ..."
After contemplating the likely intelligence and propaganda efforts of HMG over the last 15 years or so I am puzzled as to motivation.
Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little to do with the welfare
of Britain. Why? I suppose that the same question can be asked for the US and I have.
In re "Our man in Havana" I think there
are many issues raised in the work that apply directly to the trade of espionage.
The question why? is a very interesting but also very dispiriting one, but also one which it is quite hard to get one's head
round. I hope to have something more coherent to say about it.
Among many reasons, however, there has been a kind of intellectual disintegration.
If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.'
It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating
one ham-fisted cover-up after another.
The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador
Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in
Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.'
Subsequently, of course, he set about colluding in the process. And, sixteen years later, Dearlove is still at it, with 'Russiagate'
-- and the product being actually accepted much more uncritically by the MSM than it was then.
And that is one of the problems -- nobody any longer pays any penalty for failure, or indeed feels any sense of shame about
it..
There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying
Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with
Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech.
As the Colonel eloquently asks:
"I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem
to have little todo with the welfare of Britain. Why?"
I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating
their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened
in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world
(with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.
Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May,
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though
there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome.
(I don't include the Maurice Cowling-ites in this fandango because they strike me as more Little Englanders. Though Peterhouse
is of course, shamefully, the HQ of the Henry Jackson Society).
"... The British Private Eye finds a relation between the Integrity Initiative and the Rendon Group which drove the propaganda for the Iraq invasion. ..."
Forgot to link this: The
Briefing note
on the Integrity Initiative by Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Jake Mason and Piers Robinson is the most complete analysis of the
Integrity Initiative papers.
The British Private Eye finds a relation
between the Integrity Initiative and the Rendon Group which drove the propaganda for the Iraq invasion.
I'll have to say more on the issue. For some fun, check the attachment to this tweet. (Klarenberg writes for Sputnik.)
"Jornos for hire" are now mainstream. Much like escort services.
Again, it's pure projection. These vermin are literally incapable of looking at anything except in terms of how it can
be used as a weapon (or how it can be destroyed), so they automatically attribute that fundamentalist way of looking at things to everyone
else, and especially to the "enemy". So by definition anything Putin and the Russians do is some kind of "weaponization".
Notable quotes:
"... Yes! All true! But I weaponised Vladimir Putin to make media profits, newspapers (Guardian!), radio (BBC), internet (Bellingcat). Evidently only the Brits understand me. The US does the same in a different style. ..."
"... Here is what Americans really think about the anti-Russia hysteria coming from Washington: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/08/americans-on-russia-will-of-people.html Washington has completely lost touch with what Main Street America really believes. ..."
"... And besides humor I am sure Putin is also weaponizing calendars, at least in Japan. Maybe in exchange for keeping the Kuril islands: Putin calendar sales surpassing those of Japanese stars in Japan What I am wondering is, if the socalled "Western Elite" maybe actually believe what they are saying and are not aware that it is a self-created illusion they are chaught in. Otherwise I can not understand why they are again and again surprised if Russia is not behaving they way they expected. ..."
"... Yes, these are projections, and they tell us the final world war, a war of aggression by the US against China and Russia, will be a total war beyond our imaginations. (Unless real leftists and real lovers of peace can stop it.) ..."
"... I think this insane epidemic illustrates the degree to which the Western propaganda system has completely decoupled the population from reality. ..."
"... The underlying problem: Russia has weaponized telling the truth. ..."
"... Yes, I'd agree that's part of its purpose -- to prevent the unification of Eurasia, which as I wrote last week's proceeding apace. They're trying to wall off Japan too, so I wonder if Japanese media's as flush with the same garbage as BigLie Media. ..."
"... Although likely covered by weaponizing incompetence and stupidity, Putin has certainly weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's appalling lack of a professional diplomatic corp--just look at who he gets Trump to nominate to key diplomatic positions. ..."
"... Hey guys, guys, you are not getting the point man. There is something really creepy about this Russia place, like Midas. Everything they touch turns to weapons. ..."
"... But since the fall of Communism in Russia, I have lost all belief in anything like a new Cold War. After all, when I was in parochial school, we prayed for the conversion of Russia. Now, that has been accomplished. Russia's government is more Christian than Western governments ..."
"... Truth weaponized. Five eyes pulling out all stops in its propaganda campaign to defeat it. ..."
Several of the pieces listed in it are products of the recently uncovered
British government
financed disinformation campaign , or of similar efforts by other governments. But these are only a part of the general anti-Russian
reflex that is ingrained in our 'western' culture. Nothing else can explain the craziness of these 'weaponizing' claims.
The updated list with some 65 issues, ideas and things that Russia allegedly 'weaponizes' will hopefully help to convince people
that most of what is said or written about Russia is likewise blatant nonsense.
Yes! All true! But I weaponised Vladimir Putin to make media profits, newspapers (Guardian!), radio (BBC), internet (Bellingcat).
Evidently only the Brits understand me. The US does the same in a different style.
And besides humor I am sure Putin is also weaponizing calendars, at least in Japan. Maybe in exchange for keeping the Kuril
islands:
Putin calendar sales surpassing those of Japanese stars in Japan What I am wondering is, if the socalled "Western Elite"
maybe actually believe what they are saying and are not aware that it is a self-created illusion they are chaught in. Otherwise
I can not understand why they are again and again surprised if Russia is not behaving they way they expected.
Yes, these are projections, and they tell us the final world war, a war of aggression by the US against China and Russia,
will be a total war beyond our imaginations. (Unless real leftists and real lovers of peace can stop it.)
I think this insane epidemic illustrates the degree to which the Western propaganda system has completely decoupled the
population from reality. Now whether it's believed or not is neither here nor there as it's built upon decades of anti-communism
and the inherent racism of the Anglo-Saxon Empire that has demonized the Russians as essentially backward peasants who cannot
be trusted. Worse still, the Russkies have ginormous weapons!
I agree that both 'sides' in a phony cold war 2.0 weaponize just about anything of a controversial nature or event in civilization.
Both sides are advancing agenda that are leading humanity in the same direction even as they create a false adversarial paradigm.
This has been termed non linear psychological warfare under which such a confusing array of created realities leaves the greater
public unable to define what is real or a fabrication. It takes at least two or more to create the illusions and the 'other' can
simply be created/funded as controlled opposition and then even this can be published to further create more confusion within
the confusion. Carl Rove told us this. He just didn't tell us that the 'Empire' also includes Russia, China and any number of
other corporate national jurisdictions.
More seriously, this is not "stupidity" of the political class, as some pundits would have you believe. It is a well thought-out
retrenchment plan of attempting to institute a new "iron curtain" to separate Europe from Asia after the demise of unipolarity.
Yes, I'd agree that's part of its purpose -- to prevent the unification of Eurasia, which as I wrote last week's proceeding
apace. They're trying to wall off Japan too, so I wonder if Japanese media's as flush with the same garbage as BigLie Media.
Russia's weaponized Arctic
Ocean or perhaps Russia's weaponized the lack of proper marine maintenance. Russia's also weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's
lack of naval or other Arctic Ocean land-based infrastructure -- there's zip to support any off-shore drilling from Alaska's coastline.
IOW, Russia's weaponizing a plethora of Outlaw US Empire weaknesses.
And what the Sputnik article refers to as the heavy US icebreaker Polar Star is more roughly one half the size of the
nuclear powered Russian icebreaker 50 Years of Victory, 50 лет Победы . I suspect the Russians would call the Polar
Star a light icebreaker. Sputnik probably probably being polite.
Way back in the 1950s the Pentagon (specifically the Air Force) was all atwitter over unsubstantiated reports (again leaked by
the Air Force) that the Soviets (read: the Russians) were building a nuclear powered strategic bomber that would have unlimited
range and flight time. Well now. You know what that means? We gotta have one too! So guess what. The Air Force dutifully volunteered
to save the US and Western civilization from being bombed back to the stone age and godless communism all at the same time by
building a nuclear powered bomber of our own. To make a long story short the effort failed miserably. The project managed to last
into the Kennedy administration but was cancelled in favor of developing submarine launched ICBMs. While the nuclear bomber program
died it's spirit lived on. During the Carter administration the then chief of Air Force intelligence (yes I know there's no such
thing) became convinced that the russkies were building ground-based and orbiting death ray machines to use against US satellites
and ICBMs. Thus was born "Star Wars." Of course this fit in perfectly with the Reagan administration's defense views even though
the engineering and science simply didn't exist then of now. Well as the french say the "more things change the more they remain
the same"
Some people get weaponized on business trips to Moscow. This video shows how they do it...
https://youtu.be/8cs4tKdiiI4 Posted by: dh | Dec 17, 2018 10:36:48
AM | 15
Move over Russia make room for the Chinese weapon program.. its much more dangerous than the Russian disinformation program,
unlike Russia, the Chinese circumvent the USA Senate, the President, and the SCOUS and go directly to the poor, innocent governed
humans, lending them money, creating for them jobs and developing infra structure to make life easier; such will be the end of
us all. WE MUST REMEMBER Aake news and made up fictions are produced by the six entities that own 92 of the media. Without the
Internet and other public infra structure, the media could not smear you with its dirty tricks. Someone please pass the soap.
"weaponizing terrorism "? because until Putin all "terrorists" sat around talking and sipping tea like the goddamn mclaughlin
group? then again, given the outsize influence of objectively insane think tanks in DC, maybe they were onto something.
funny how this can also be seen as what psychology types call "projection". in a culture like the west's (especially the states)
where the economies are built on warfare and financial voodoo, everything is either "weaponized" or collateralized. look at anything
on that list and it's something from which someone "atlantic" has tried or will try to make money. of course, many things start
out weaponized and are then collateralized
. weaponized taxes? weaponized corporate welfare?
hey, if a bunch of white/israeli suburbanite music executives in LA can control rap, it should be pretty easy. side note: rap
is officially banned in iran. some say it's been deemed "satanic". Years ago when i was grooving to das efx or public enemy i'd
have disagreed but now that the big names are drake, minaj and meek mill...only malevolent supernatural evil can explain that.
I'm shocked to learn that "Russia is weaponizing its Coast Guard",
https://warisboring.com/russia-is-weaponizing-its-coast-guard/
The author seems quite angry the Russians are using their "Coast Guard" of all things, to defend their coast. He thinks they should
have used their Navy instead!
"The use of the Russian Federation Navy to close the strait would have been more likely to escalate because it would have
been a military-on-military clash. In contrast, using the Russian coast guard made it a law enforcement issue rather than a
military-sanctioned act of war. Russia is adept at using legal channels to pursue violations of justice. It now appears willing
to use its coast guard for this purpose.
Onshore, the situation in eastern Ukraine has been stuck in a rut. Perhaps the escalation in the Sea of Azov was seen by
the Russians as a means to break the impasse, using the flimsy legal cover provided by the coast guard. No similar terrestrial
options exist, as the Russians have exhausted their plausible deniability for operations by police, volunteers and undercover
"little green men."
While Russian seizure of the Azov coast was anticipated, it was not expected to use its coast guard. Utilizing the Russian
coast guard in this way opens a new range of options for Moscow, in the Sea of Azov and beyond."
Although likely covered by weaponizing incompetence and stupidity, Putin has certainly weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's appalling
lack of a professional diplomatic corp--just look at who he gets Trump to nominate to key diplomatic positions. Indeed, perhaps
this ought to be enlarged to include weaponizing mediocrity as portrayed by Trump's entire Cabinet. We can also see the great
strides Putin's made in making the Outlaw US Empire appear as the Ogre it is by weaponizing Anglo-American Exceptionalism. It
seems, given the above list and its additions via comments, that the Outlaw US Empire is most exceptional at being incapable of
weaponizing anything aside from its #1 go-to--The BigLie.
Strategic Message Code One , Dec 17, 2018 3:04:33 PM |
link
Hey guys, guys, you are not getting the point man. There is something really creepy about this Russia place, like Midas. Everything
they touch turns to weapons. I seen it here as well, every Russia thing is trouble of some kind, like there is nothing else
that comes from there. I seen Russian people and they ok, but now I'm frightened to get close to them in case I turn into a weapon.
Aan here too guys, Russia touches the west an the west as consequence are all buying weapons an using them everywhere, they cant
do nothing cause Russia makes them weaponators too. Oh my, we are doomed man and waponized press freakin me out aaaaaaahhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A quote from the report mentioned in (50): "Although the NDS generally reflects the right priorities and objectives, it
is not supported by adequate investments. It is beyond the scope of this Commission's work to identify the exact dollar amount
required to fully fund the military's needs, but the available means are clearly insufficient to fulfill the strategy's ends.
This is true despite the two-year funding increase for FY2018 and FY2019 provided by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018."
What would be particularly interesting is also to see how the money flow is helping the (we all know it) struggling news organizations.
I believe many of these quasi-journalists are going hat in hand to various agencies that have some of that propaganda money. Most
of them would need to work for weeks getting paid a measly amount, but doing a couple of these anti-Russia pieces gets them paid
well. I certainly think the Guardian has such an arrangement with MI5/6.
The recipe is using the wonderwords like Putin, Russia,
'weaponizing', hackers, cyber, fake news...
I believe the Saker was pointing out a few days ago that the Border Guards were often more like spetsnaz than what we in the
west think of as a border patrol. The Russian Coast Guard has probably maintained the tradition.
I see culture's already been deemed weaponized, but
here's Putin's actual plan he laid out in his speech to a meeting of the Presidential Council for Culture and Art in St Petersburg
two days ago. Introductory remarks:
"... global competition in creating best conditions for self-fulfilment and revealing the potential of each individual is
growing, and the world's leading powers including Russia, rightly see it as a key to the future. Of course, a significant role
here will belong to establishing a vibrant, rich cultural space, which will be interesting and attractive not only for the
citizens of our country but also for the whole world."
Meanwhile within the Outlaw US Empire, Boy Scouts of America is about to
file for bankruptcy thanks
to the many sexual abuse lawsuits it now faces. This leads me to declare yet another Russian accomplishment: Putin has weaponized
Machiavellian divide and rule by enticing the Outlaw US Empire's Deep State -- years prior to his birth! -- to promote and escalate
what's known as the Culture Wars used to ensure a continuing inability to achieve solidarity by the USA's polity.
Anaya, I take it you took a look-see at its staff and there's a lot of them! Yeah, that's what prompted my own feelings about
it. The report has apparently been published but I've not yet seen it.
The '150 million' influenced by those scheming Russkies, has been floating for awhie. I first saw it used in a Euro-based setup,
funded by NATO I think. I'll try and dig it out as I remember writing something about.
This kind of "Weaponization" is far less expensive than say an F35 or a 13bn Ford class Aircraft carrier, but the more of them
you build the safer you will be from the "Weaponization" of coloring books. Nuke crayons now! The state of the US and its
military in my view is that they can't win a war against anyone, all they can do is blow up the world with nukes - the only question
is will they deny the world to everyone if they can't own it.
It's a shame we can't massively disseminate our weaponization of ridicule contained in b's article and our commentary. I wonder
how many comedians are making good money ridiculing the entire weaponization meme, and not just in English.
What I'd like to see at all US government pressers is for uncontrollable laughter to break out amongst the press when the spokesperson
begins speaking and continue until it leaves the podium, followed by the press exiting the room.
In case you haven't yet heard, Heather Nauert replaces Nutty Nikki as US ambassador to the UN so 'tis there that Matt Lee and
his fellow journos must trek (it's gonna be a long way to NYC) to get their regular dose of laughter.
Here in my exceptional country it is customary at the end of each year to declare a "word of the year", some from past years were
truthiness, Y2K and hashtag.
but it didn't go after the current Russian govt. It pointed out how the US imitates the Soviets in weaponizing psychiatry by
declaring dissidents crazy. You have to be insane to disagree with TPTB.
I'm sure the comedian replacing Nauert will be just as distracting and of similar character.
Did you happen to read Caitlin Johnstone's
Twenty-One Thoughts On The Persecution Of Julian Assange , particularly #s 8-10 as they relate to her essay about narratives?
All our rather witty ridicule is almost totally wasted on us--we don't need to hear it; it's those people Caitlin refers to in
her 8-10 that require the deep pin-prick of ridicule to snap them from their torpor and return them to reality and to rational
thinking.
The biggest weapon in the West arsenal is private finance. Private finance is the jackboot that keep nations/governments/individuals
in line. Private finance has been the primary weapon of control for centuries. China/Russia are trying to weaponize alternative
finance......and succeeding......which is why the world is all in a tither.
I think it has to do with what one has studied. I have four university degrees: B.A. in Classics from Princeton, A.B. in Classics
from Oxford, Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard, and a J.D. from Yale. I spent a lot of time in the U.S. military: four
years in the active duty U.S. Air Force, plus something like 15 years in the reserves, largely of the U.S. Navy. For as long as
the original Cold War lasted and Communism ruled Russia, I was a true believer in the Cold War. It now looks to me as if I was
misguided at the time, but that is what I believed, whether despite or because of my education, I don't know which.
But since the fall of Communism in Russia, I have lost all belief in anything like a new Cold War. After all, when I was
in parochial school, we prayed for the conversion of Russia. Now, that has been accomplished. Russia's government is more Christian
than Western governments. I think someone with a classical education like the one I got is more capable of thinking for himself.
I don't think my education disabled me from thinking critically and independently.
BB 93 Truth weaponized. Five eyes pulling out all stops in its propaganda campaign to defeat it.
Hoarsewhisperer 95 He may well be, but with the passing of several years and his actions in that time appear to be ardent
zionist. The swamp to him are those that frittered away US unilateral power and those that did not sufficiently support Israel.
What Trump views as the swamp is not what most of us view as the swamp. Kissinger was not forced upon Trump, rather his thinking
is in line with that of Kissinger.
"... To get an idea of how Gladio 2.0 is now investing each corner of our lives, including art and education, I saw recently on the flyer of a sculpture exhibition in a 5-eyes country that two artists, one born in 1901 and one in 1914 were "famous Cold War artists". Of course, there was nothing political in their work, the first died in 1966 and the other in 2003... ..."
To get an idea of how Gladio 2.0 is now investing each corner of our lives, including art
and education, I saw recently on the flyer of a sculpture exhibition in a 5-eyes country that
two artists, one born in 1901 and one in 1914 were "famous Cold War artists". Of course,
there was nothing political in their work, the first died in 1966 and the other in
2003...
In EU universities you now see all sorts of "labs" popping out, with EU funding from the
"digital" budget. They are trying to recruit people with a very odd profile: ambitious, ONG
oriented, IT familiar. The reason why these labs insist on the ONG type activities is
dubious. An example of US/EU sponsored project involving refugees in Greece, neurosciences
and mobile phones (check Harvard/Data&Society: Refugee Connectivity)
News that the BBC is trying to tie the Gilets Jaunes movement to the Kremlin reaches the
Russian Foreign Ministry. Betting that Lavrov, Zakharova and company are all having a laugh
as well.
Just when you think British news media couldn't fall any deeper into their rabbit hole ...
down, down farther they go into the abyss ... aaarrgghhh ...
"... Some of the people at the Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are banal presstitutes ready to oblige the top clients (management) for a modest pay, whereas others are real criminals whose ideas and orders have been endangering the western civilization -- and humankind at large. ..."
"... People are building their careers on this garbage! ..."
The Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are run by people.
These people display a stunning level of immorality by lying and war-mongering.
Some of the people at the Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are banal
presstitutes ready to oblige the top clients (management) for a modest pay, whereas others are real criminals whose ideas and
orders have been endangering the western civilization -- and humankind at large.
It would be proper to publish a roster of the presstitutes and their idiotic managers working at the Oxford University's Computational
Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project
About half an hour ago I opened News.Google.Com these are some of their major headlines:
Russians sought to recruit 'assets' through social media, Senate told - CNN . one hour
ago
Russua favored Trump, targeted African-Americans with election meddling, reports say -
NBC News . one hour ago
New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the operation's
scale and sweep - The Washington Post . today
Senate report finds millions of social media posts by Russians aimed at helping Trump,
GOP - USA TODAY . 2 hours ago
Silicon Valley may have done 'bare minimum' to help Russia investigation, Senate Intel
Committee told - CNN . one hour ago
I opened the one from the Washington Post:
Headline: "New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the
operation's scale and sweep"
Subtext: "The report, a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the
first to analyze the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate
Intelligence Committee."
The headline is meant to give the impression that the report was prepared at *The Behest*
of the Senate. If you read the article it would have you believe that it *was* written at the
behest of the Senate but does not say that specifically.
Well? Was it? I have tried to track it down and could use some assistance.
Buried in a CBS NEWS version of the article is this sentence: "The Committee welcomed the
research effort without endorsing either report's findings."
USA TODAY says it *was* "Senate Reports". The lead paragraph is this: "WASHINGTON –
The Senate released Monday a pair of reports that found Russia engaged in an all-out social
media campaign on Donald Trump's behalf during the 2016 election and continued to support him
after he took office."
"People are building their careers on this garbage!"
Josh said at #60
"What would be particularly interesting is also to see how the money flow is helping the
(we all know it) struggling news organizations. I believe many of these
quasi-journalists are going hat in hand to various agencies that have some of that
propaganda money. Most of them would need to work for weeks getting paid a measly amount,
but doing a couple of these anti-Russia pieces gets them paid well. I certainly think
the Guardian has such an arrangement with MI5/6. The recipe is using the wonderwords like Putin, Russia, 'weaponizing', hackers, cyber,
fake news..."
Hackers who leaked documents from the Integrity Initiative, a shadowy outfit funded by the
UK government, claim they show its connections to the March 2018 alleged poisoning attack in
Salisbury and proposed actions against Russia. The Integrity Initiative (II) was set up in 2015
by the equally shadowy "Institute for Statecraft," according to the documents
published online in
November by hackers calling themselves a part of the Anonymous collective. While Anonymous
has denied the group was behind the leak, the Institute confirmed the authenticity of the first
batch of documents.
The hackers
posted a fresh batch of documents purportedly from the Initiative and the Institute on
Friday, hinting that both outfits had connections with Western media coverage of the March 2018
alleged poisoning of former Russian spy Sergey Skripal, and the actions against Russia taken
subsequently by the UK government and its allies.
One of the documents is the
confidential report by Harod Associates, a company hired by the Initiative to conduct
"mainstream & social media analysis" of the Skripal scandal coverage. The entire
undertaking was dubbed "Operation Iris."
Among those who found themselves named "Russian trolls" and Kremlin agents in the
report were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa and a gentleman from Kent who goes by
Ian56 on Twitter.
Wanna see something funny? 🤣
"The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and
Petrovas GRU agents" - has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French
yellow jackets. I kid you not. https://t.co/I3X4ypylAP
Another
document , dated March 11, 2018, contains a "Narrative" of the Skripal incident,
blaming Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally and containing a number of recommended
actions, such as boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2
gas pipeline from Russia to Germany and block Russian access to SWIFT international banking
system, but also to "ban RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK."
Other suggestions include propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicise what has been
happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion" (sic) and getting
members of Parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses."
The document dump also contains the April
14, 2018 email from Andy Pryce, whom the hackers describe as "chief propaganda man" at the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, containing the official government narrative of the Skripal
affair and the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria. Pryce ends the email by recommending
"good sources of further information" on alleged Russian propaganda, including the
Atlantic Council's DFR Lab, Bellingcat and Stopfake.
Documents obtained and published by the hackers also show connections between Skripal's
recruiter and neighbor Pablo Miller, the Institute for Statecraft, and the so-called rescue
group White Helmets, created in militant-held areas of Syria by a former British official in
2013.
It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended
#IntegrityInitiative
meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II
initiated the affair. https://t.co/Xv29Uk9z3e
There are also several invoices from Dan Kaszeta of the Institute for Statecraft, for
articles he wrote as supposedly a chemical weapons expert advancing the Institute's narrative
on both the Skripals and Syria.
The most intriguing, however, is
a document from 2015 , in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a
series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of
1971's Operation Foot. One of the actions by the UK, US and several other NATO countries in the
wake of claims that Russia used a nerve agent against Skripal was a mass expulsion of Russian
diplomats.
Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents written long before the Salisbury events
call for arrests of RT and Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding, "Makes you think
"
Previously published documents have revealed the Initiative and the Institute as being
involved in widespread
propaganda operations targeting not only foreign countries and media outlets – as one
might expect from someone doing the bidding of the Foreign Office – but also domestic political
figures , such as Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
"... Neoliberal media has always embraced boundary transgression, always embraced invasiveness, always embraced adventurism, always embraced war. ..."
"... Fox is a racist bully. MSNBC is poison, & CNN is a joke. If nothing else, Trump is right about one thing. The American media is the enemy of the people. ..."
"... That an entire generation of Democrats paying attention to politics for the first time is being instilled with formerly right-wing Cold Warrior values of jingoism, über-pat riotism, reverence for security state agencies and prosecutors, a reckless use of the "traitor" accusation to smear one's enemies, and a belief that neoconservatives embody moral rectitude and foreign policy expertise has long been obvious and deeply disturbing. ..."
"... Years ago, whilst this reactionary putsch was still in it's infancy, my mom would listen to the "news" on the local CBS affiliate, and many times I heard her gasp and say, referring to the "reporters" jabbering, "My God, they're a bunch of dopes!" The dopes are ascendant; stupid, scared, violent-minded, and very well-paid. ..."
"... We, The People, Are Fed Up With Neo-Cons and Neo-Libs! ..."
"... Democratic Party leadership has basically always been neoconservative supporters of the national security state, but there has been some resistance within the rank and file. ..."
"... But the democrats will help republicans squeeze the peons with excessive education costs, unaffordable health care premiums and copays, expensive housing,.... ..."
"... We've known for a long time that NBC & MSNBC "have become ground zero for these political pathologies of militarism and servitude to security state agencies." ..."
"... The US military presence in the Middle East has nothing to do with national security (i.e protecting American citizens from military attack by foreign nations, or even with disrupting the activities and funding of terrorist groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda, groups we financed and armed as part of the overthrow Assad strategy). ..."
"... It has everything to do with controlling the region's oil flow and propping up regimes like Saudi Arabia who agree to invest the majority of their oil money in Wall Street banks. This is called petrodollar recycling, a strategy devised in the 1970s. Here is a foundational document discussing the plan, from 1974: https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974LONDON16506_b.html ..."
"... Real News vs "fake news" is almost impossible to find and dissect. Even looking for real reporting beyond echoing is hard to find. The real problems are ignored or misstated to the extent real solutions are impossible. Not just security and endless wars but every aspect of civil existence, education, healthcare, you name it. We exist in an echo-chamber where real knowledge and understanding have been all but banished. ..."
"... Gotta hand it to the neocons, soon after the Vietnam debacle (I served 3 tours there), and Watergate, they quickly licked their wounds and devised a new playbook that, over time, would become a 'Project for the New American Century'. First things first, get rid of the draft. Go professional, and then only a very minuscule percentage of Americans have skin in the game, meaning their own sons and daughters at risk, while the rest of America can focus on the more important things, like watching the Housewives of New Jersey, New York, Beverly Hills, etc. etc., or sports, or the newest fashions, or the current fad diets, or the newest Trump tweet, bla bla bla. ..."
"... Next, and this is genius because it incorporates that great American pastime, greed, spread all of that endless supply of taxpayer money around to each and every State, County, and municipality in the form of jobs tied to the military industrial complex. ..."
"... And finally, silence and denigrate any meaningful opposition. As Kierkegaard stated, "Once you label me you negate me." Hence the long, ongoing labeling of opposition with terms like traitor, anti-American, unpatriotic, (insert name or country here) sympathizer. The sad part of all of this, too many Americans are gullible enough to swallow this crap, hook, line and sinker, as long as they get their daily ration of manna. ..."
"... What's the central reason MSNBC is so pro-war? Because the shareholders in its parent corporation, Comcas, have a deep vested interest in militarism, arms sales, and the capture of natural resources around the word ..."
"... Maddow long ago described herself as a "national security liberal." ..."
"... Still, that a network insider has blown the whistle on how all this works, and how MSNBC and NBC have become ground zero for these political pathologies of militarism and servitude to security state agencies, while not surprising, is nonetheless momentous given how detailed and emphatic he is in his condemnations. ..."
"... . . if they mean by the word partisan that it is New Yorkers and Washingtonians against the rest of the country then they are right. ..."
"... This essay is critical for every American to read. No exaggeration. NBC/MSNBC has become the proverbial spear tip in the march toward nuclear war with Russia. ..."
"... Perhaps, but I would suggest that Iran has become the most desired target for a war, and due in no small part to the aggressive advocacy for such a war by Israel and Saudi Arabia, and their subservient boot-licking, ass kissing American politicians. ..."
"... Project Mockingbird was publicly revealed years ago, but pretty much totally ignored by the audiences who lap contentedly from the MSM koolaid bowl. ..."
"... It's ironic that these politicians who have gorged themselves on literally millions of dollars in campaign funding from Big Pharma, Defense Contractors, Energy, Big Banking, and even insider stock trading now feel compelled to warn us of graft and corruption they all fostered. These politicians get elected as nobodies, sell their votes, retire as millionaires, then have the nerve to tell us how corrupted our government has become as they check out to become Lobbyist' ..."
"... I am so glad to see this man speak out. For the longest time, war and the military budget has been a third rail in politics ..."
"... State Department has become another branch of the MIC, not a diplomatic corps. And I am not saying this is all because of Trump. Probably started when we "won" the Cold War. ..."
Veteran NBC/MSNBC Journalist Blasts the Network for Being Captive to the National Security State and Reflexively Pro-War to Stop
Trump
A VETERAN national security journalist with NBC News and MSNBC blasted the networks in
a Monday
email for becoming captive and subservient to the national security state, reflexively pro-war in the name of stopping President
Donald Trump, and now the prime propaganda instrument of the War Machine's promotion of militarism and imperialism.
As a result of NBC/MSNBC's all-consuming militarism, he said, "the national security establishment not only hasn't missed a beat
but indeed has gained dangerous strength" and "is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism."
The NBC/MSNBC reporter, William Arkin, is a longtime prominent war and military reporter, perhaps best known for his
groundbreaking,
three-part Washington Post series in 2010, co-reported with two-time Pulitzer winner Dana Priest, on how sprawling, unaccountable,
and omnipotent the national security state has become in the post-9/11 era. When that three-part investigative series, titled "Top
Secret America," was published, I hailed it as one of the most
important pieces of reporting of the war on terror, because while "we chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the
Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and
parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization."
Arkin has worked with NBC and MSNBC over the years and continuously since 2016. But yesterday, he announced that he was leaving
the network in a long, emphatic email denouncing the networks for their superficial and reactionary coverage of national security,
for becoming fixated on trivial Trump outbursts of the day to chase profit and ratings, and -- most incriminating of all -- for becoming
the central propaganda arm of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI in the name of #Resistance, thus inculcating an entire new generation
of liberals, paying attention to politics for the first time in the Trump era, to "lionize" those agencies and their policies of
imperialism and militarism.
That MSNBC and NBC have become Security State Central has been obvious for quite some time. The network
consists of little more than former CIA, NSA, and Pentagon officials as news "analysts"; ex-Bush-Cheney national security and
communications officials as hosts and commentators; and the most extremists pro-war neocons constantly bashing Trump (and critics
of Democrats generally) from the right, using the Cheney-Rove playbook on which they built their careers to accuse Democratic Party
critics and enemies of being insufficiently patriotic,
traitors for America's official enemies , and abandoning America's hegemonic role in the world.
Some of the most beloved and frequently featured MSNBC commentators are the most bloodthirsty pro-war militarists from the war
on terror: David Frum, Jennifer Rubin, Ralph Peters, and Bill Kristol (who was just giddily and affectionately celebrated with a
playful nickname bestowed on him: "Lil Bill"). In early 2018,
NBC hired former
CIA chief John Brennan to serve as a "senior national security and intelligence analyst," where
the rendition and torture advocate joined -- as
Politico's Jack Shafer noted -- a long litany of former security state officials at the network, including "Chuck Rosenberg,
former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller
III; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush."
As Shafer noted, filling your news and analyst slots with former security state officials as MSNBC and NBC have done is tantamount
to becoming state TV, since "their first loyalty -- and this is no slam -- is to the agency from which they hail." As he put it:
"Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate
the current peculiarities."
All of this led Arkin to publish a remarkable denunciation of NBC and MSNBC in the form of an email he sent to various outlets,
including The Intercept. Its key passages are scathing and unflinching in their depiction of those networks as pro-war propaganda
outlets that exist to do little more than amplify and serve the security state agencies most devoted to opposing Trump, including
their mindless opposition to Trump's attempts (with whatever motives) to roll back some of the excesses of imperialism, aggression,
and U.S. involvement in endless war, as well as to sacrifice all journalistic standards and skepticism about generals and the U.S
war machine if doing so advances their monomaniacal mission of denouncing Trump. As Arkin wrote (emphasis added):
My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued
at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested
in the Trump circus.
To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security, the national security
leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested . Despite being at "war," no great wartime leaders or visionaries
are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. And though there might
be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus' and Wes Clarks', or the so-called warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster,
we've had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently have done little of consequence. And
yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as "analysts". We do so ignoring the empirical
truth of what they have wrought: There is not one county in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed
the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous.
Windrem again convinced me to return to NBC to join the new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign.
I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary
Clinton's hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other
upstarts creeping up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly
lost in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow
storm. And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable.
No wars won but the ball is kept in play.
I'd argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn't missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous
strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I'd also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has
become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against
Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results).
I accept that there's a lot to report here, but I'm more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step
back and think why so little changes with regard to America's wars.
In our day-to-day whirlwind and hostage status as prisoners of Donald Trump, I think – like everyone else does – that we miss
so much. People who don't understand the medium, or the pressures, loudly opine that it's corporate control or even worse, that
it's partisan. Sometimes I quip in response to friends on the outside (and to government sources) that if they mean by the word
partisan that it is New Yorkers and Washingtonians against the rest of the country then they are right.
For me I realized how out of step I was when I looked at Trump's various bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations
with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why we are fighting in Africa, even in his
attacks on the intelligence community and the FBI. Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I'm alarmed at
how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really?
We shouldn't get out Syria? We shouldn't go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we
should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the
Cold War? And don't even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?
That an entire generation of Democrats paying attention to politics for the first time is being instilled with formerly right-wing
Cold Warrior values of jingoism, über-patriotism, reverence for security state agencies and prosecutors, a
reckless use of the "traitor" accusation to smear one's enemies, and a belief that neoconservatives embody moral rectitude and
foreign policy expertise has long been obvious and deeply disturbing. These toxins will endure far beyond Trump, particularly given
the
now full-scale unity between the Democratic establishment and neocons .
photosymbiosis1 hour ago
Just remembered something about Arkin. This book: Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the
9/11 World January 25, 2005 by William M. Arkin
https://books.google.com/books/about/Code_Names.html?id=KXLfAAAAMAAJ
In particular there was this one exercise called Vigilant Guardian, run by NORAD, simulating terrorist attacks by hijackers which,
curiously enough, happened to be in operation on the very day the Saudi hijackers were actually conducting such attacks:
NORAD's next Vigilant Guardian exercise, in 2001, will actually be several days underway on 9/11 (see (6:30 a.m.) September
11, 2001). It will include a number of scenarios based around plane hijackings, with the fictitious hijackers targeting New
York in at least one of those scenarios (see September 6, 2001, September 9, 2001, September 10, 2001, and (9:40 a.m.) September
11, 2001). [9/11 COMMISSION, 2004; VANITY FAIR, 8/1/2006]
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=vigilant_guardian
However, what's interesting from Arkin's book, as I recall, is that this operation name was then reused in Afghanistan (a very
rare practice, apparently, to reuse an operation name, but perhaps if you wanted to hide the original program, etc...), in 2003
or so - here's a NYT article about Vigilant Guardian in Afghanistan:
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/magazine/where-the-enemy-is-everywhere-and-nowhere.html
It's just one of many stories that makes one wonder exactly how much pre-warning the Bush Administration had about the 9/11 attacks,
and whether there was a deliberate decision to allow the hijackers to seize control of the planes without any interference. It
did save the Bush presidency, it did open the door to the Iraq invasion, and the Saudi intelligence services were involved with
helping the hijackers. All very suspicious, really. Point being, Arkin's book is one of the few sources that lay out all those
covert/overt program names, and is a real treasure for anyone interested in the history of that era.
bobhope1: 2 hours ago
This has been clearly obvious for several years. Goebbels would be proud.
Dysnomia 3 hours ago
If there were some kind of political realignment (similar to the realignment that took place in the 60s and 70s where racist
white Democrats became racist white Republicans) where neoconservatives and warmongers become Democrats, and the Republican Party
becomes the party of, surely not peace, but at least moderation in foreign military intervention, that might not be too bad, or
at least not too much worse than the earlier post-9/11 status quo.
But I'm afraid this shift in discourse heralds something worse than that. So-called "liberal" media's embrace of neoconservatism
and imperialism is likely to have the effect of narrowing the Overton window on issues of war and peace, making genuine anti-war
positions even more unthinkable and beyond the pale. There will increasingly be no place for public anti-war discourse.
The single greatest threat to human freedom in the world today is the U.S. national security state. Inculcating public reverence
for the state is perhaps the most dangerous thing that a media organization could do.
open_hearted_jade 2 hours ago
Neoliberal media has always embraced boundary transgression, always embraced invasiveness, always embraced adventurism,
always embraced war.
Fox is a racist bully. MSNBC is poison, & CNN is a joke. If nothing else, Trump is right about one thing. The American
media is the enemy of the people.
Lawrence_Hill 4 hours ago ( Edited )
Do we remember way back in the 80's/Reagan admin war involvement in the El Salvador civil war when NBC anchor Tom Brokaw openly
questioned the US's support for death squad leader D' Auboissan's terror regime on the air? Shocking! A Walter Cronkite-Vietnam
War moment Brokaw supposed, maybe?
I remember that in all the hullabaloo that followed one of our ruling class commented that Brokaw was being $5 million a year
not to say such subversive things. Lesson learned, Brokaw nor any other gainfully employed MSM tool has made the same mistake
again, and now Brokaw has emeritus status in the NBC "News" hierarchy.
That comment opened my eyes for the first time to the reality of American MSM...
Michael_Wilk 4 hours ago
That an entire generation of Democrats paying attention to politics for the first time is being instilled with formerly
right-wing Cold Warrior values of jingoism, über-pat riotism, reverence for security state agencies and prosecutors, a reckless
use of the "traitor" accusation to smear one's enemies, and a belief that neoconservatives embody moral rectitude and foreign
policy expertise has long been obvious and deeply disturbing.
I have to take issue with your use of the word 'formerly' in describing Cold War values. They are still very much right-wing.
They never stopped being right-wing, nor did the current and former government and security state apparatchiks polluting the airwaves
with their lies.
TimN 5 hours ago
The neo-con and neo-lib argument against this unfortunate reveal of things present, and things to come: "But Trump! Trump!"
I didn't think I'd see things unravel so quickly, but Goddamn. Years ago, whilst this reactionary putsch was still in it's
infancy, my mom would listen to the "news" on the local CBS affiliate, and many times I heard her gasp and say, referring to the
"reporters" jabbering, "My God, they're a bunch of dopes!" The dopes are ascendant; stupid, scared, violent-minded, and very well-paid.
haugeneder 6 hours ago
Great piece. America is on the precipice and there are few who care -- very few. Time for an great economic depression -- not
recession -- to shift the ground or open it to swallow us whole.
Tlaloc 7 hours ago
Interesting that we might be seeing a shift on both parties, the republicans finally embracing their libertarian side (long
being a part of the republican party) and the neocons trying to find a new home on the democratic party. I wonder where the progressive
side of the DNC will go, they might be the ones pushed out of any national party :(
Art 6 hours ago
[...] the progressive side of the DNC [...] might be the ones pushed out of any national party
Fuck that! They're headed for permanent electoral failure on every occasion they put forward neocons on any ballot.
We, The People, Are Fed Up With Neo-Cons and Neo-Libs!
Dysnomia 3 hours ago
Unfortunately, I think it's more likely that we'll see a shift only on the Democratic side. Democratic Party leadership
has basically always been neoconservative supporters of the national security state, but there has been some resistance within
the rank and file. The narrowing of the Overton window we're seeing will make such resistance increasingly beyond the pale.
But I don't think the Republican Party, in terms of leadership or rank and file, will become more "libertarian" (in the American
sense of that word) or less pro-war. I think there's likely to be greater consensus among the political class in favor of U.S.
imperialism generally, and Trump, to the extent he occasionally makes moves in the opposite direction, is a convenient foil to
bring that about.
johnanderson 7 hours ago ( Edited )
There is no "means test" for the empire military spending supports energy supplies supports international banking supports
global corporatism but the democrats will help republicans squeeze the peons with excessive education costs, unaffordable health
care premiums and copays, expensive housing, and social security cutbacks because they are playing the same elite economic game
against the majority true the democratic leadership has a better stance on abortion and a generally more rainbow-flavored social
agenda. Because they want this stuff for their own social class however economic policy will be at our expense ... just watch
Pelosi and Company
open_hearted_jade 2 hours ago
But the democrats will help republicans squeeze the peons with excessive education costs, unaffordable health care premiums
and copays, expensive housing,....
Those costs rise for one reason...
Mona 7 hours ago
...And here's Joe Biden: ""Paul Ryan was correct when he did the tax code, what was the first thing we have to go after, Social
Security and Medicare. Now we need to do something about Social Security and Medicare. It's the only way to find room to pay for
it." Biden is after means testing and other "adjustments" slashing SS, as endorsed by his pal. Paul Ryan. (This is called Republican
Lite.)
Thanks for publishing this story, Glenn, and putting your perspective on it. We've known for a long time that NBC & MSNBC
"have become ground zero for these political pathologies of militarism and servitude to security state agencies." Before
Comcast purchased them, General Electric owned these networks for many years. The public's interests are the last thing on their
minds when they do "news reporting."
Have you watched when MSNBC's "prime time" talk shows are doing live sports-like camera angles, moves, and shots in their studio,
trying to make it look all-the-more sensational on your TV screen? I mean, they're doing these intricate camera shots, rapid switching
between cameras, zooming, panning, trying to make it look like a high-production-value shoot, and it looks like they've hired
some live sports producers and technical directors to make this pathetic illusion on the air. All this shit for talking heads.
Rotf-lmao.
What's next? Slow-motion HDTV instant replays of Rachel Maddow, utilizing zoomed-in camera shots of her mouth, when she's spraying
spittle into her guests' faces? That's what happens when she launches into her infamous hissy fits.
The round table MSNBC uses in their cheap studio is only 4 feet in diameter. In other words, they're shooting these live action
shots of people talking around an itty-bitty little table, and they're doing all this intricate camera work with approximately
8 cameras to make it look 'sensational', action-packed, and thrilling. Instead, it's extremely ugly, stupid, idiotic, disgusting,
and ridiculous. It's not sensational. It's a disgusting cocktail of vomit, puss, and diarrhea.
I need reliable sources of news and weather so I can live my life sustainably with dignity while I maintain my values. My pride
and dignity are invaluable to me. All these a-holes are doing for me is raising my blood pressure and pissing me off. That's why
I read The Intercept. I'd like to have the option to just sit back and watch TI's reporting on a news channel someday SOON, if
possible.
Again, what's our msm network news alternatives, besides Fox news, and why are they so pathetic? CBS news: Les Moonves in particular
has cheered the Trump phenomenon, telling investors in 2016 that the Trump campaign "may not be good for America, but it's damn
good for CBS." -- https://theintercept.com/2017/02/24/cbs-fcc-trump/
-- Moonves got fired and lost his pension -- The longtime chairman-CEO was forced out Sept. 9, 2018 amid a cascade of sexual assault
and misconduct allegations. "The CBS board of directors has denied former chairman-CEO Leslie Moonves any of the $120 million
severance he was due under his employment contract after conducting a five-month internal probe of his conduct and the corporate
culture at CBS Corp." --
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-ent-les-moonves-denied-severance-20181217-story.html ABC news: Who owns
ABC? Walt Disney bought ABC 22 years ago. Exactly, we're in Disneyland.
photosymbiosis 8 hours ago ( Edited )
Some basic facts:
The US military presence in the Middle East has nothing to do with national security (i.e protecting American citizens
from military attack by foreign nations, or even with disrupting the activities and funding of terrorist groups like ISIS or Al
Qaeda, groups we financed and armed as part of the overthrow Assad strategy).
It has everything to do with controlling the region's oil flow and propping up regimes like Saudi Arabia who agree to invest
the majority of their oil money in Wall Street banks. This is called petrodollar recycling, a strategy devised in the 1970s. Here
is a foundational document discussing the plan, from 1974:
https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974LONDON16506_b.html
"CENTRAL THESIS, BASED ON BELIEF THAT THERE IS NO EARLY PROSPECT OF BREAKING OIL CARTEL, IS THAT WE SHOULD SEEK EARLY DIALOGUE
WITH PRODUCERS TO WORK OUT ARRANGEMENTS WITH ALL OR SOME OF THEM TO (A) INDEX PRICE OF OIL AND (B) BRING THEM INTO RECYCLING MECHANISM
IN ORDER TO SHARE THE RISK. SECOND PAPER LARGELY DUPLICATES FIRST, THOUGH IT DOES ADD SOME STRESS ON LONGER RANGE PROBLEM OF MASSIVE
SURPLUS OF OPEC COUNTRIES, ESTIMATED AT $400 BILLION BY 1980, FOR WHICH NO SOLUTION IS PROPOSED OTHER THAN NEW INTERNATIONAL RECYCLING
AGENCY PROPOSED IN BOTH PAPERS."
One key point is that the proponents of this scheme in the United States, be they Democrats or Republicans, have zero interest
in replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar and battery storage. That would sour the whole deal; nobody would buy Saudi oil.
Of course the Russkies, the stated enemy, don't want to see Europe go 100% renewable either, any more than the Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump
Administrations did. The Russia-US conflict is mostly over who gets to sell gas to Europe, and neither dealer wants the addict
to kick the habit, right?
This is a very consistent policy, year-to-year.
Now, why can't the corporate media honestly discuss this? Because they are the corporate establishment's propaganda monkeys,
little more, regardless of whether they work at MSNBC or at FOX.
Oh, and this is why #Resist Trump is so nonsensical, when those supporting that them want to install a Joe Biden or Kamela
Harris, who would continue right on with this status quo, i.e. blocking the development of renewable energy and continuing the
idiotic military entanglements in the Middle East.
Fred_Cowan 8 hours ago
Real News vs "fake news" is almost impossible to find and dissect. Even looking for real reporting beyond echoing is hard
to find. The real problems are ignored or misstated to the extent real solutions are impossible. Not just security and endless
wars but every aspect of civil existence, education, healthcare, you name it. We exist in an echo-chamber where real knowledge
and understanding have been all but banished.
Mona 8 hours ago
@Tom Collins & Art
"Yeah one wonders if [Snowden's] cover would have been blown so decisively had he done it anonymously through Wikileaks"
No need to wonder! Snowden made clear -- explicitly stated-- he wanted Greenwald and Poitras, and not Wikileaks. He deeply
desired journalists to exercise judgment over what should be released to the public and did not want a data dump.
Further, he insisted on outing himself , and did so several days after the first document was published. At his behest,
Poitras videotaped a 20-minute video of him taking responsibility, which was then posted at The Guardian. He did this, among other
reasons, to spare his co-workers from suspicion and investigation.
Mona 1 hour ago
Citizen 4 won the Oscar for best documentary in 2013 or '14. It's all Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, and other real players.
DC_Reade 8 hours ago
If the only way someone can manage to frame any of these issues is as "Fox vs. MSNBC" or "Trump Corruption vs. Washington Establishment
Defenders of Democracy", they've assented to a two-valued action-reaction Pavlovian conditioned response loop.
No way should that be confused with a process of independent thought.
Unsurprisingly, I don't read one mention in the above post to any of the specifics of the content in Glenn Greenwald's remarks,
or to any of the observations made by Arkin in his email resignation.
You're too busy fitting everyone with Team Jerseys tailored to your preconceived ideas.
Mona 6 hours ago
"This article does not inform."
Oh, it does lots of informing, you just don't like what it informs us of, to wit, the first paragraph:
A VETERAN national security journalist with NBC News and MSNBC blasted the networks in a Monday email for becoming captive
and subservient to the national security state, reflexively pro-war in the name of stopping President Donald Trump, and now
the prime propaganda instrument of the War Machine's promotion of militarism and imperialism . As a result of NBC/MSNBC's all-consuming
militarism, he said, "the national security establishment not only hasn't missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength"
and "is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism."
Any substantive response, Milton?
MiltonWiltmellow 6 hours ago ( Edited )
Any substantive response, Milton?
As always, Mr. Greenwald's description is hyperbolic and bordering on unhinged. As DC_Reade suggested, I read Arkin's
email. You should too. It seemed more like a Montaigne Essaiy or a reflective note for posterity than a thundering repudiation
of MSNBC.
Mr. Greenwald turns it into a typical Greenwald crie du guerre™ against the evil Deep State (a term which he appears to have
mercifully discarded. Too Foxy I suppose.) Here's his problem. Crying "wolf" only works for awhile. Eventually it becomes part
of the information flood drowning everyone. Any bit of flotsam is as good as another.
Tom_Collins 5 hours ago
What's your point again? Do you even know?
DC_Reade 4 hours ago ( Edited )
Excerpts from Arkin's email:
"Seeking refuge in its political horse race roots, NBC (and others) meanwhile report the story of war as one of Rumsfeld vs.
the Generals, as Wolfowitz vs. Shinseki, as the CIA vs. Cheney, as the bad torturers vs. the more refined, about numbers of troops
and number of deaths, and even then Obama vs. the Congress, poor Obama who couldn't close Guantanamo or reduce nuclear weapons
or stand up to Putin because it was just so difficult. We have contributed to turning the world of national security into this
sort of political story. I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders.
I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum
reporting..."
"...I argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years, doing the daily blah, blah, blah in Secaucus,
but also poking at the conventional wisdom of everyone from Matthews to Hockenberry. And yet I feel like I've failed to convey
this larger truth about the hopelessness of our way of doing things, especially disheartened to watch NBC and much of the rest
of the news media somehow become a defender of Washington and the system..."
"...For me I realized how out of step I was when I looked at Trump's various bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations
with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why we are fighting in Africa, even in his
attacks on the intelligence community and the FBI. Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I'm alarmed at
how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really?
We shouldn't get out Syria? We shouldn't go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we
should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the
Cold War? And don't even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?..."
Yes, William Arkin does go on to be gracious and complimentary of some of his (former) colleagues at NBC. Arkin mantains his
professional composure. His critique of the focus and practices of NBC/MSNBC News is tempered and reasoned. But the critique is
scathing, nonetheless.
Tom_Collins 4 hours ago ( Edited )
You are missing Milton's point altogether. Like "Craig Summers", MW expects that his word alone is enough to dismiss the editorial/investigative/analytical
work put in by Greenwald, Arkin or anyone else on the topics considered most important by the U.S. State Department.
When MW or CS weigh in on these things to dismiss or diminish these stories/opinions/facts with the wave of a hand or incorrect
reading (and absolutely nothing of substance), we are supposed to defer to them respectfully and re-consider the respect we have
developed for the professionalism, dedication and personal/career risks taken on by the people who bring us these stories that
are inconvenient to the establishment government and media actors.
Mona 3 hours ago
"As DC_Reade suggested, I read Arkin's email. "
Cool, Milton, and what are your substantive comments on this part:
My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued
at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested
in the Trump circus. To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security,
the national security leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested. Despite being at "war," no great
wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any
conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus' and Wes Clarks', or the so-called
warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster, we've had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently
have done little of consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as "analysts".
We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one county in the Middle East that is safer today
than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous. Windrem again convinced me to return
to NBC to join the new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign. I thought that the mission was
to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton's hawkishness.
It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other upstarts creeping
up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost
in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm.
And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable. No
wars won but the ball is kept in play. I'd argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn't missed
a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I'd
also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional
wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure
and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there's a lot to report here, but I'm more worried about how
much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America's wars. In
our day-to-day whirlwind and hostage status as prisoners of Donald Trump, I think – like everyone else does – that we miss
so much. People who don't understand the medium, or the pressures, loudly opine that it's corporate control or even worse,
that it's partisan. Sometimes I quip in response to friends on the outside (and to government sources) that if they mean by
the word partisan that it is New Yorkers and Washingtonians against the rest of the country then they are right. For me I realized
how out of step I was when I looked at Trump's various bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations with Russia, to
denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why we are fighting in Africa, even in his attacks on
the intelligence community and the FBI. Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I'm alarmed at how quick
NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We
shouldn't get out Syria? We shouldn't go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we
should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for
the Cold War? And don't even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?
OftenWrongSeldomInDoubt 9 hours ago
This is SO validating to read! Surely no other ruler in history with a cute butt and polite voice ordered killings in 56 countries
in one year. I want someone to discuss this without accusing me of being pro-Rump. I guess, the Rachel Maddows of the world cannot
criticize Hillary/Obama for expanding every awful thing for which the good people of the world hated Bush.
There are two giant problems in the world today-
1. the scale of people who lost their homes and countries because of the good guy's wars and
2. climate change which the good guy's 27,600 odd bombs of 2016 might or might not have exacerbated. After all, each bomb costs
upward of $10,000,000. Who is measuring the greenhouse gases released by them?
The media needs to be equally adversarial to 'liberal' governments as they are to 'conservative' ones, so that majority parties
cannot take credit for granting me bathroom and bedroom permissions that are surely my personal domain! The media must shed light
on whether it is bad to tell 'aliens' not to cross a border or it is bad to win a Nobel Peace prize before raining bombs on brown
people in other countries, never separating children from families, when blowing up ten civilians for every 'target' we extra-judicially
decided to label as militant.
So thank you for this article!!
bluecurl3 9 hours ago
Gotta hand it to the neocons, soon after the Vietnam debacle (I served 3 tours there), and Watergate, they quickly licked
their wounds and devised a new playbook that, over time, would become a 'Project for the New American Century'. First things first,
get rid of the draft. Go professional, and then only a very minuscule percentage of Americans have skin in the game, meaning their
own sons and daughters at risk, while the rest of America can focus on the more important things, like watching the Housewives
of New Jersey, New York, Beverly Hills, etc. etc., or sports, or the newest fashions, or the current fad diets, or the newest
Trump tweet, bla bla bla.
Next, and this is genius because it incorporates that great American pastime, greed, spread all of that endless supply
of taxpayer money around to each and every State, County, and municipality in the form of jobs tied to the military industrial
complex. Now, lots of Americans have skin in the game, as long as the lobbyists, politicians, government and the military
can provide a pipeline of endless wars and conflicts. Of course, in order to provide and maintain the patina of morality and righteousness,
a subservient and corporate controlled media is vital.
And finally, silence and denigrate any meaningful opposition. As Kierkegaard stated, "Once you label me you negate me."
Hence the long, ongoing labeling of opposition with terms like traitor, anti-American, unpatriotic, (insert name or country here)
sympathizer. The sad part of all of this, too many Americans are gullible enough to swallow this crap, hook, line and sinker,
as long as they get their daily ration of manna.
Xavi 8 hours ago
Orwellian times.
firstpersoninfinite 9 hours ago
No, it's not rocket science. Otherwise you couldn't have proven Greenwald's point with your own views about "supporting" the
security state so easily. You missed the entire point of the article, which is that the neocons and the neoliberals support the
same cast of nefarious personalities that got us into the Middle East, over and over again. Why is NBC/MSNBC normalizing right-wing
radicalism? Because they've joined hands with neocons and neoliberals to support the military/industrial complex. Your argument
is akin to someone claiming that their Communion wafer is more holy than anyone else's because it has the Pope's imprint on it.
firstpersoninfinite 8 hours ago
Neocons, like Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol's father, were leftists in the 1930's. It's not a difficult term to come to terms
with, historically. I don't wonder why anyone questions what Trump is doing. I never said such a thing.
What Trump has done during his first two years in office has not been questioned by the mainstream press at all. Only the imbecile
tweets and the gaffes are of any interest to the citizens of such a redoubtable empire as our own. A friend of mine who fights
anti-wolf and anti-bear laws in Montana, laws sent down by the Trump administration, says that these are the same laws they fought
during 8 years of Obama. The mainstream of both parties are the two sides of the same coin. So I agree with the "role reversal."
Dysnomia 2 hours ago
I think the problem is not that supporting the "deep state" is becoming a convenient excuse to oppose Trump, but that opposing
Trump is becoming a convenient excuse to support the deep state.
DC_Reade 10 hours ago
Bravo, William Arkin. I only wish that you could have found some way for you to resign on the air in the middle of a broadcast.
(I've been wishing such a scenario for decades. Preferably featuring one or more news anchors.)
Incredible that the USA has spent trillions of dollars in a game of whack-a-mole that's been extended over the entire globe
with no time limitations, occasionally interspersed with declarations of surprise that the nation faces more emergent terror threats
than ever. We spend more money on the military and warfare than we spent during the Cold War. And all that was required to trigger
this spiral into perpetual militarism was a single special operation carried out 17 years ago by a small team of not-particularly-elite
commandos who hijacked four airliners, thereby obtaining the one-time ability to repurpose three of them into cruise missiles.
By now, it should be no surprise that other large nations have taken notice of the American assumption of entitlement to police
the world and begun their own rearmament campaigns. Also worth noting that the focus on the Terror Threat has served as the rationale
for massive investment in a level of surveillance technology that's unknown in human history. As for the norms and values that
international law was supposedly intended to provide for governments everywhere, all of that went out the window in 2003, with
the unprovoked invasion of Iraq by the Benevolent Hegemon Hyperpower. American scolding of other nations for their armed territorial
incursions and imperial designs has rung awfully hollow, ever since.
The emphasis on massive military escalation to deal with terrorism outbreaks is reminiscent of the War on Drugs- which, it
should be noted, also remains largely in effect, notwithstanding occasional feints toward de-escalation. And we all know what
the War on Drugs did in terms of empowering the criminal elite that it was supposed to eliminate.
What's that all about? The leaders of this country- and for that matter, the supposed leaders of the rest of the world- aren't
leading. To me, almost all of them look like they're running from something: they're running from fossil fuels addiction and its
toxic blowback, looming climate catastrophe, natural resource depletion, maldistribution of wealth and neglect of the commons.
photosymbiosis 11 hours ago
What's the central reason MSNBC is so pro-war? Because the shareholders in its parent corporation, Comcas, have a deep
vested interest in militarism, arms sales, and the capture of natural resources around the word:
Comcast, a large cable operator, completed its purchase of a majority stake in NBCUniversal from General Electric in January
2011. The cable giant bought the rest of NBCUniversal in February 2013. NBCUniversal is the parent company of MSNBC, as well
as NBC, Bravo, USA and other channels.
State Street Corporation 13,394,660,471 Vanguard Group, Inc. (The) 6,210,096,924
Capital World Investors 5,098,130,465
Blackrock Inc. 5,084,573,828
Bank of America Corporation 2,826,426,091
ExxonMobil major holders, $US:
Vanguard Group, Inc. (The) 26,661,034,588
Blackrock Inc. 21,669,998,686
State Street Corporation 16,964,902,104
Northern Trust Corporation 4,566,789,988
Bank Of New York Mellon Corporation 4,420,622,076
It pretty obvious once you look at the value of an outfit like Blackrock's investments in media, arms, and oil - they don't
want any stories told on MSNBC that would threaten the profit margins of Exxon, Lockheed or Comcast.
The only real solution is government enforcement of anti-trust legisation which would require the likes of Comcast, TimeWarner(CNN)
and NewsCorp(FOX) to divest their media holdings, creating dozens of independently owned outfits not beholden to some corporate
master who won't let them discuss important topics like, say NAFTA....
Benito_Mussolini 10 hours ago
The only real solution is government enforcement of anti-trust legislation
Hopefully, MSNBC will be smart enough to provide a friendly platform for ex-government officials. It means a great deal to
government officials to know their influence, public visibility (and associated appearance fees) will continue into their retirement.
I don't watch MSNBC, so I don't know if they have implemented this strategy, but the pictures in the article seem encouraging.
johnnyred 11 hours ago
War is touted exclusively by those who've never experienced it. Get rid of the generals, put in some infantry casualties, those
who've lost a limb or two.
Then we can have some informed comment.
Somewherearoundtikrit 11 hours ago
Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, "In these critical times..." their "editorial independence" is in sincere need of your donation.
They're just 80K away from their million dollar goal! Pardon me while I retch. Julian Assange is still being robbed of his freedom.
In these critical times indeed. Thank you Glenn.
Tom_Collins 11 hours ago
The Guardian can get its funding from the organizations for whom they carry water. Not a damn cent from me. After they caved
in on the Snowden files, I was done with them for good.
Yeah one wonders if his cover would have been blown so decisively had he done it anonymously through Wikileaks, but I think
they were onto him anyway. Ultimately the information got out, and media orgs like The Guardian were exposed for their fealty
to the national security state(s).
Cryptome wouldn't have censored the releases, as WikiLeaks has. Still WikiLeaks continues to be one of the world's premier
journalistic outlets.
MyInnocuousUsernameWasBanned 9 hours ago
Was anyone else surprised by how long it took them to get to a million? I've seen Kickstarters for video games that got to
a million faster. The slow pace of the fundraising seemed like a rebuke. I was hoping they'd never hit a million.
And I say all of that as someone who has recurring donations set up for about a dozen podcasts and blogs. The nonprofit/fundraiser
model is the way to go, but I also think that publicly owned media outlets, or privately owned but public-interest-minded news
organizations, while editorially independent, can't be totally contemptuous of their reader/donors.
I would never donate to the Guardian for a million reasons, but to pick just one: they have played the lead role in smearing
Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as dangerous radicals and anti-Semites.
And I would never donate to The Intercept, for instance, because of the crucial role it has played in promoting Russiagate
and amplifying voices like Mattathias Schwartz's. (I'll never stop reminding people that Schwartz non-jokingly advocated here
for what would essentially be a coup -- Obama "putting a hold on the transfer of power" -- after the most recent presidential
election. The Intercept published that. Amazing.) And the face of the Intercept, arguably, is no longer Greenwald but Mehdi Hasan,
who publishes rank propaganda smearing peace activists as "Bashar al-Assad Apologists" who revere human rights abusers as "heroes."
(Again: the Intercept published that. Amazing.)
My favorite line from that Arkin email is the one about the tension between worship of "officialdom" and respect for "public
yearnings." To political elites and reporters (including the experts at the Intercept who spent a week running PR for Nancy Pelosi's
speaker bid, and who constantly write off the 2016 election as a consequence either of sinister foreign interference or of the
squalid bigotry, stupidity and ugliness of non-coastal Americans), officialdom always wins, and "public yearnings" are just the
bleatings of deplorables.
If Glenn's excellent reporting was removed from this site, The Intercept would be as deserving of Arkin's critique as NBC and
the Guardian are.
tigertiger 8 hours ago
They didn't hit their million, which they wanted before the end of the year, but they're still begging. Not for lack of trying,
that 'give us money!' pop up has to be about the loudest, most intrusive of it's kind I've ever seen.
And yes, TI is only marginally less repulsive (thanks to Glenn, Lee Fang, and Jon Schwartz). It amazes me that an outlet owned
by a bajillionaire constantly begs for money. I guess they think it makes them more 'populist' or something- 'look, the peons
are sacrificing their pennies to help us!'.
TravisTea 11 hours ago
As an American author (and journalist) once wrote:
"Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and
keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries, and keep them
from grabbing slices of his . And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for the
'universal brotherhood of man' -- with his mouth."
-- Mark Twain, Man's Place in the Animal World (1896)
P.S. As always, thank you very much, Mr. Greenwald (and thank you, Mr. Arkin).
Carlaly 11 hours ago
Just vindicates what you have been saying all along. Although I expect the denialists will dismiss Arkin as some anti-American,
anti-troop stooge of Putin.
Mona 11 hours ago
"The cable network's key anchor, Rachel Maddow, once wrote a book on the evils of endless wars without congressional authorization,
but now routinely depicts anyone who wants to end those illegal wars as reckless weaklings and traitors."
She's just coming home. Liberals have long been dominated by hawks (after all, Vietnam was a Democrats' war, albeit Nixon/Kissinger
took the war crimes up to 11.)
Maddow long ago described herself as a "national security liberal."
Which leads to yet another element of Ms. Maddow's portfolio: the daughter of an Air Force captain who served stateside during
the Vietnam War, she is an admitted defense-policy wonk. "I'm a national security liberal, which I tell people because it's
meant to sound absurd," she said. "I'm all about counterterrorism. I'm all about the G.I. Bill."
Madcow would like nothing more than to see open war with Russia.
brer_rabbit 11 hours ago ( Edited )
maddcow . . my laugh of the day.
Tom_Collins 11 hours ago
It's a common refrain in far-right reaches of the Internet. I almost felt bad for saying it, but that's what she's become on
the topic of Russia.
brer_rabbit 11 hours ago
Yes, whenever is see her, or Anderson Cooper, or any of these guys for that matter (which is rare . . usually for a few minutes
to catch a glimpse of the latest environmental disaster, mass shooting, or whatever) my first thought always goes to question
the kind of upbringing that could have produced such vapid people, who enthusiastically shame themselves on a daily basis for
money. What must they think of their audience?
open_hearted_jade 11 hours ago
Maddow is less respected by an awakening public -- therefore she must be a conservative right winger. Didn't you learn anything
after 1945?
Tom_Collins 11 hours ago
You've made made totally missing the point into a trolling form of art. Bravo.
endlesswar 11 hours ago
Attacking an extreme right wing president from the right, while lauding unrepentant war criminals like Bush and McCain. Just
about sums up what it means to be a liberal in this day and age.
PatrickShaw 6 hours ago
MSNBC and their national security contributors do not speak for liberals. They never invite liberal voices on who are anti-war/pro
diplomacy.
xochtl 12 hours ago
Still, that a network insider has blown the whistle on how all this works, and how MSNBC and NBC have become ground zero
for these political pathologies of militarism and servitude to security state agencies, while not surprising, is nonetheless
momentous given how detailed and emphatic he is in his condemnations.
perfect summary
brer_rabbit 12 hours ago ( Edited )
. . if they mean by the word partisan that it is New Yorkers and Washingtonians against the rest of the country then they
are right.
bingo
clawhammerjake 13 hours ago
War is a business decision.
Steeeve 13 hours ago ( Edited )
I've been consistently surprised that anyone is still watching these things. Personally, I've already divested from special-interest
funded media outlets and the DNC for that matter. It's always interesting when I run across someone parrotting their viewpoints
though.
TheManj 13 hours ago ( Edited )
The greatest scam of the millennium, after cruptocurrency, was the use of Trump Derangement Syndrome to pervert "progressives"
into acolytes of the security establishment.
pedinska2 13 hours ago
Actually, TDS wasn't used in the original perversion so much as it was used as the cement to keep it firmly in place.
I lay blame for much of the greatest scam of the millenium on Obama with his drone policies, expansion of our involvement
in the ME, retention of the same Smartest Guys in the Room who tanked our economy and wholesale conversion of liberals into acceptance
of further erosion of our Constitutional rights with his warm embrace of the same criminals running the security state when torture
became de rigueur. He was just so darn pretty and eloquent they had no choice but to believe all the lies dripping from those
sexy lips. And have you seen Michelle's arms???!? /s
Benito_Mussolini 13 hours ago
To herd people, it's more effective to use both the carrot (Obama) and the stick (TDS). The fact that progressives needed to
be herded is a testament to their numbers and success.
Erelis 13 hours ago
This essay is critical for every American to read. No exaggeration. NBC/MSNBC has become the proverbial spear tip in the
march toward nuclear war with Russia. Every day, step by step, brick by brick, they are laying the foundation for the justification
of war--in fact, for needing and demanding war, almost any war, but more particularly with Russia. Let's remember that when Bush
ordered the invasion of Iraq, 72% of Americans supported it to according to Gallup. That didn't happen overnight with some big
propaganda event.
bluecurl3 4 hours ago
Perhaps, but I would suggest that Iran has become the most desired target for a war, and due in no small part to the aggressive
advocacy for such a war by Israel and Saudi Arabia, and their subservient boot-licking, ass kissing American politicians.
I'm all for pulling our troops out of Syria, but mark my word, Bibi and his zionist war-hawks will seize the opportunity to bomb
the hell out of Syria, and use it as a pretext to launch attacks against Iran.
Mike5000 13 hours ago
Maddow is not really pro-war or anti-war. She is just pro whatever Clinton and Pelosi happen to be pushing this week. It's
a shame. She's a good presenter but hopelessly biased.
PresumptuousInsect 13 hours ago
I think she is more enthralled to the people who are paying her.
Erelis 13 hours ago
Maddows rhetoric and reporting is pro-war regardless of her motivations. She uses the language of aggression and conspiracy
and accusation in describing the Russians and other Americans such as Jill Stein. She without exception imputes malevolent motives
on "the enemy" which is Russia leading to a truly a bizarre clip telling Americans in somber and concerned tones that Russia and
N. Korea share a border. The conspiracy has been exposed.
Bill_Owen 10 hours ago
What is it, exactly, about Hillary Clinton that enthralls Rachel Maddow so much that she now pretty much spends her days building
a case (in-the-sky) for war on Russia? Seems pathological somehow.
MyInnocuousUsernameWasBanned 9 hours ago
Look at how her ratings and salary have been affected by her transformation. She's gone from "cable news anchor" to "superstar."
The Russiagate scam has also given dozens of mediocrities like Seth Abramson a chance to be noticed and to feel important. Even
the writers on the Intercept's "intelligence" beat have been doing some sort of Tom Clancy cosplay for the last two years. It's
profitable and fun to be one of these people, as long as you don't have a nagging sense of shame.
William 13 hours ago
Indeed, none of this is new. I read Norman Solomon's and Martin Lee's UNRELIABLE SOURCES: A GUIDE TO DETECTING BIAS IN NEWS
MEDIA back when I was in college in the late 80s and they cite General Electric's ownership of NBC (before there was an "MSNBC")
uncritically:
General Electric's Influence on NBC GE is by no means a hands off owner of NBC. Lee and Solomon in their book Unreliable Sources
have detailed how GE insisted on the removal of references to itself in an NBC programme on substandard products. They also point
out that NBC journalists have not been particularly keen to expose GE's environmental record and that TV commercials by a group
called INFACT, urging a boycott of GE products, were banned by NBC as well as other television stations. NBC did however briefly
report GE's indictment for cheating the Department of Defense which was reported more extensively in other media outlets. (Lee
and Solomon 1990, pp. 77-81) Former NBC News Chief, Lawrence Grossman, claims that the head of GE, Jack Welch made it clear to
him that he worked for GE and told him not to use terms such as 'Black Monday' to describe the stock market crash in 1987 because
it depressed share prices such as GE's (Cited in Naureckas 1995). Todd Putnam, editor of National Boycott News, tells of how he
was approached by the NBC's Today Show to do an interview about consumer boycotts. Their biggest boycott at the time was against
General Electric and its nuclear defense contracts but the show wouldn't let him talk about that and was reluctant to have him
mention boycotts against any large corporation preferring him to talk about "a boycott that was 'small,' 'local' and 'sexy'."
(1991) Mark Gunther writing in American Journalism Review claims that references to General Electric's use of the bolts in an
NBC Today Show on defective bolts in planes, bridges and nuclear plants, were edited out and only mentioned in a follow-up segment
after criticism of the omission (1995, p. 40). In 1990 NBC Nightly News ran 14 minutes of coverage over three days of a breast
cancer detection machine produced by GE, without mentioning that it was made by NBC's owners. The other two major television networks
didn't bother to cover it at all. (FAIR 1991) Helen Caldicott who had been featured on the Today Show previously found that when
she wrote her book If You Love This Planet, which used GE as a case study of an environmentally damaging company, her scheduled
appearance was mysteriously cancelled (Anon. 1992). In 1987, one year after GE took over NBC, NBC broadcast a special documentary
promoting nuclear power using France as a model. The promotion for the programme proclaimed that "French townspeople welcome each
new reactor with open arms". The documentary won a Westinghouse sponsored prize for science journalism. (Westinghouse Electric
Company also builds nuclear power stations.) Shortly after the documentary was screened, when there were a couple of accidents
at French power stations and there was significant opposition to nuclear power amongst the French population (polls showed about
one third opposed it), NBC did not report the story although some US newspapers did. (Lee and Solomon 1990, p. 78) Karl Grossman
documents in Extra! (1993) how the programme What Happened? broadcast on NBC in 1993 gave a one sided account of the Three Mile
Island nuclear accident and its aftermath. It showed local resident Debbie Baker saying that she was not as afraid of the nuclear
plant as she used to be. However, according to Grossman, Baker, whose son was born with Down's syndrome 9 months after the accident
and who has received $1.1 million in a settlement arising from the accident, was shocked at how the programme had been edited
to imply her acceptance of the plant. She said she was still extremely uncomfortable with the plant and that what she had said
was she felt safer since her groups set up a network of radiation monitors around the plant. Neither Baker's settlement nor the
200 or so others "made to families who have suffered injury, birth defects and death because of the 1979 accident" were mentioned.
Instead a nuclear power industry expert was featured who said the plant's back-up safety systems worked successfully. When EXTRA!
pointed out that no scientists critical of nuclear power appeared in the program, Jaffe [executive producer of the show] responded,
'That is correct. Maybe there is some misunderstanding. That show is not a journalistic show but an entertainment show to look
into and to find out the reason and cause of various accidents and incidents.' (Grossman 1993, p. 6) NBC has not been alone in
putting a positive spin on the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. On the tenth anniversary of the accident, the New York Times
ran an anniversary article opposite the editorial page headlined "Three Mile Island: The Good News" which argued that the accident
had been good for the nuclear power industry prompting better management and emergency planning. The paper did not report the
fact that 2000 residents living near the plant had filed claims for cancer and other health problems they blamed on the accident,
nor the 280 personal-injury settlements paid out to such claimants, nor the unusual clusters of leukemia, birth defects and hypothyroidism
around the plant. (Lee and Solomon 1990, p. 210) This was not the first time Times reporting had fitted with General Electric's
views. In 1986 the Times reported on the use of humans as subjects in tritium absorption experiments. Tritium is routinely handled
by nuclear power plant workers. An early edition of the paper said: "The tritium study was financed by the Atomic Energy Commission
and conducted by the General Electric Company at Richland, which abuts the Hanford [nuclear weapons] reservation." In the late
edition the sentence ended after Commission and no longer named General Electric. (Tenenbaum 1990)
Tom_Collins 11 hours ago
Sure, but the question then becomes: Why didn't the corporate networks and newspapers with whom NBC competed point these things
out?
Art 11 hours ago
That's what my father always said about media - that it was self-correcting. But he was wrong. They're all influenced by the
same thing, namely the ultra-rich and their money.
Tom_Collins 11 hours ago
But wouldn't another network stand to gain more clout from the ultra-rich, corporations, and their money from NBC's losing
viewers/ratings due to exposure for their corrupt unwillingness to report negatively on their parent corporation's actions?
Art 11 hours ago
They share a huge fraction of investors, that's the problem.
Midwest 14 hours ago
Nothing has changed except that there is an outsider independent president. NBC was just as bad 20 years ago.
TheManj 13 hours ago
Project Mockingbird was publicly revealed years ago, but pretty much totally ignored by the audiences who lap contentedly
from the MSM koolaid bowl.
Phil 14 hours ago
William Arkin is right on point with his email to MSNBC, especially when he says:
"And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as "analysts". We do so ignoring
the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one county in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18
years ago. "
In that same vein I have problems with MSNBC et al also covering the farewell speeches of outgoing Senators and Representatives
which are full of warnings as to how the current system is "broken" [Paul Ryan, ClaireMcCaskill, Orrin Hatch, Jeff Flake, among
many] and not calling them out.
It's ironic that these politicians who have gorged themselves on literally millions of dollars in campaign funding from
Big Pharma, Defense Contractors, Energy, Big Banking, and even insider stock trading now feel compelled to warn us of graft and
corruption they all fostered. These politicians get elected as nobodies, sell their votes, retire as millionaires, then have the
nerve to tell us how corrupted our government has become as they check out to become Lobbyist's.
Orrin Hatch was a Senator for 42 years but last week he woke up one morning to find the Senate needs fixing? Paul Ryan was
Speaker of the House and fiercely defended Trump but now as he leaves he's suddenly discovers that things aren't right in Washington?
And what about all those who are still in office now – where are their warnings and concern? The answer is it's difficult to talk
while you're in office stuffing your mouths at the trough.
Sadly, MSNBC and the media carry these farewell speeches with no comment except that they are all great public servants and
their viewers soak it all up because to do otherwise would be unpatriotic. And the march of the lemmings to the voting booths
continues.
PresumptuousInsect 14 hours ago
I am so glad to see this man speak out. For the longest time, war and the military budget has been a third rail in politics,
and "support the troops!"--however hypocritical that slogan might be--has been a rallying cry as well as an accusation of treason/unAmericanism/communism,
etc., for those who have had doubts. But finally we are starting to see signs of dissatisfaction with the status quo among the
political class, and even antiwar bullet points listed on some platforms. There are even calls for diplomacy, a word that seemed
to have been deleted from all U.S. dictionaries. I hope that Arkin's outcry serves to move this agitation forward.
shenebraskan 14 hours ago
Dunno if you noticed (I did because I watch State Department briefings), but when Brett McGurk resigned as Syria envoy, in
a similar huff to McMaster, he bemoaned the loss of his colleagues at State and Pentagon. State Department has become another
branch of the MIC, not a diplomatic corps. And I am not saying this is all because of Trump. Probably started when we "won" the
Cold War.
"... Mr. Dubelier has depicted Mr. Mueller as a rogue prosecutor willfully ignoring Justice Department guidelines. ..."
"... He has accused Mr. Mueller of creating a "make-believe crime" against his Russian client, Concord Management and Consulting, which is accused of funding a troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election. ..."
"... " Mr. Dubelier is exactly right on Mr. Mueller 's motives and tactics," said Sidney Powell, whose book "License to Lie" exposes years of Justice Department scandals. "His lieutenant Weissmann is the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct and has no regard for the facts or the law. He will make up whatever he wants to win, and the entire like-minded team views as an accomplishment everyone whose life they destroy in pursuit of their objective." ..."
"... The Washington defense attorney seemed to catch the Mueller team off guard by immediately demanding disclosure of evidence. Disclosure, Mr. Dubelier argues, is a sacred legal right in America, even for the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, Concord 's chief with close ties to Russian leader Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... Mr. Dubelier argues that people are free to create fake accounts. It's done all the time, he says. "When it comes to political speech, one is free to pretend to be whomever he or she wants to be and to say whatever he or she wants to say," he said at an Oct. 15 hearing. ..."
"... "That's why in this case this special counsel made up a crime to fit the facts that they have," Mr. Dubelier said. "And that's the fundamental danger with the entire special counsel concept: that they operate outside the parameters of the Department of Justice in a way that is absolutely inconsistent with the consistent behavior of the Department of Justice in these cases for the past 30 years." ..."
"... But he wasn't done. There is an ongoing battle over Concord 's access to "sensitive" evidence that Mr. Mueller won't let its officers see because they are Russians with ties to Mr. Putin. Mr. Dubelier has expressed exasperation. "This equates to the burden of preparing for trial without any ability to discuss the evidence with the client who is to be put on trial," he said. "This has never happened before in reported case law because the notion is too ludicrous to contemplate." ..."
"... On another matter, Mr. Dubelier is accusing the Mueller team of skullduggery. Judge Friedrich last summer approved the prosecutor's request for a "firewall counsel" to review evidence for its national security implications. ..."
"... In another pre-trial argument, Mr. Dubelier is the first defense attorney to ask this question: Why isn't British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who was paid by Democrats to obtain anti- Trump information from the Kremlin to influence 2016 voting, being investigated by the Justice Department for election interference just like the Russians? ..."
"... Mr. Steele didn't register under the Justice Department 's Foreign Agent Registration Act, under which Mr. Mueller has brought charges against a number of defendants, including the Concord team. Judge Friedrich rejected Mr. Dubelier 's argument of "selective prosecution." ..."
A former federal prosecutor has emerged as special counsel
Robert
Mueller
's most persistent courtroom critic.
It's not Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney and now President
Trump
's
ubiquitous defender, or any of cable TV's prosecutors-turned-pundits.
He is
Eric
A. Dubelier
, a litigator for the Reed Smith law firm who knows international law and the D.C. playing
field. He served eight years prosecuting cases as a
Justice
Department
assistant U.S. attorney in Washington. He refers to his former employer as "the real
Justice
Department
," implying that
Mr.
Mueller
's team is something less.
His biting remarks have come in months of court filings and oral arguments.
Mr.
Dubelier
has depicted
Mr.
Mueller
as a rogue prosecutor willfully ignoring
Justice
Department
guidelines.
He has accused
Mr.
Mueller
of creating a "make-believe crime" against his Russian client, Concord Management and
Consulting, which is accused of funding a troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election.
So far, the federal judge presiding over the case has sided with
Mr.
Mueller
.
Mr. Dubelier
charges that the Mueller team violated the confidentially of
Concord
's
counter evidence while hiding documents
Concord needs
for its defense. The prosecutor wants to "whisper secrets to the judge,"
Mr.
Dubelier
says, as
Mr.
Mueller
is calculating the "short-term political value of a conviction" and not worrying about an
appeals court defeat years later.
An example: In a Dec. 20 motion,
Mr.
Dubelier
resurrected a botched case spearheaded by
Mr.
Mueller
's top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann.
Mr. Weissmann headed the
Justice
Department
's Enron task force nearly two decades ago. He won a conviction against the accounting firm
Arthur Andersen for shredding the defunct energy firm's financial documents.
Years later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction. The 2005 decision effectively said
that Andersen, by then out of business and its 28,000 employees gone, hadn't committed a crime.
"Mr.
Dubelier
is exactly right on
Mr.
Mueller
's motives and tactics," said Sidney Powell, whose book "License to Lie" exposes years of
Justice
Department
scandals. "His lieutenant Weissmann is the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct and has no
regard for the facts or the law. He will make up whatever he wants to win, and the entire like-minded team
views as an accomplishment everyone whose life they destroy in pursuit of their objective."
'Made up a crime to fit the facts'
Concord Management and Consulting is an unlikely client. Legal observers opined that when
Mr.
Mueller
brought charges against various Russians who hacked computers and trolled the 2016 election, no
defendant would travel the nearly 5,000 miles to show up for trial.
No defendant has personally arrived. But
Concord
did
appear quickly after the February indictment. Of 28 Russian individuals and firms charged with election
interference by
Mr.
Mueller
, only
Concord
has
appeared in U.S. District Court, in this instance in the person of the aggressive
Mr.
Dubelier
.
The Washington defense attorney seemed to catch the Mueller team off guard by immediately demanding
disclosure of evidence. Disclosure,
Mr.
Dubelier
argues, is a sacred legal right in America, even for the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin,
Concord
's
chief with close ties to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Concord
is accused of an elaborate conspiracy with another Russian operation, the Internet Research
Agency. The indictment accuses
Concord
of
providing the troll farm $1.2 million monthly to defraud the U.S. The two firms set up fake personas and
false Twitter accounts, Facebook ads and other social media posts mostly to disparage Hillary Clinton and
support
Donald
Trump
.
In a separate case,
Mr.
Mueller
brought charges in July against 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic
computers, stealing emails and funneling them to three websites for distribution.
Mr. Dubelier
argues that people are free to create fake accounts. It's done all the time, he says.
"When it comes to political speech, one is free to pretend to be whomever he or she wants to be and to say
whatever he or she wants to say," he said at an Oct. 15 hearing.
"That's why in this case this special counsel made up a crime to fit the facts that they have,"
Mr.
Dubelier
said. "And that's the fundamental danger with the entire special counsel concept: that they
operate outside the parameters of the
Department
of Justice
in a way that is absolutely inconsistent with the consistent behavior of the
Department
of Justice
in these cases for the past 30 years."
Mr. Dubelier
lost that argument with U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, who rejected his bid to
dismiss the case.
But he wasn't done. There is an ongoing battle over
Concord
's
access to "sensitive" evidence that
Mr.
Mueller
won't let its officers see because they are Russians with ties to Mr. Putin.
Mr. Dubelier
has expressed exasperation.
"This equates to the burden of preparing for trial without any ability to discuss the evidence with the
client who is to be put on trial," he said. "This has never happened before in reported case law because the
notion is too ludicrous to contemplate."
What
Mr.
Mueller
has turned over is often irrelevant to mounting a defense, such as promotion emails for airlines
and personal naked selfie photographs,
Mr.
Dubelier
said in a December filing.
The special counsel is keeping most relevant information between himself and Judge Friedrich, excluding
Mr.
Dubelier
.
Why no probe of dossier writer?
Mr. Mueller
won the argument over "sensitive" material. He now wants to hold closed sessions with the
judge over classified information -- again, without
Mr.
Dubelier
.
Mr. Dubelier
responded in a Dec. 27 filing: "The Special Counsel has made up a crime that has never been
prosecuted before in the history of the United States, and now seeks to make up secret procedures for
communicating ex parte [meaning no defense counsel present] to the court which have never been employed in
any reported criminal case not involving classified discovery."
The defense attorney admitted his motion is "likely fruitless" because Judge Friedrich previously has ruled
against
Concord
.
Many documents are in Russian, a culturally different language than English.
One Russian word,
Mr.
Dubelier
says, "can be translated into the English words 'chief,' 'boss' or 'chef' -- a distinction that
is critically important since international media often refers to Mr. Prigozhin as 'Putin's chef.'"
On another matter,
Mr.
Dubelier
is accusing the Mueller team of skullduggery.
Judge Friedrich last summer approved the prosecutor's request for a "firewall counsel" to review evidence
for its national security implications.
Mr. Dubelier
said he submitted evidence to the firewall lawyer only to see it fall into the hands of
Mr.
Mueller
's team, who began using it to further investigate
Concord
.
"Surely a remarkable coincidence,"
Mr.
Dubelier
said.
In another pre-trial argument,
Mr.
Dubelier
is the first defense attorney to ask this question: Why isn't British ex-spy Christopher
Steele, who was paid by Democrats to obtain anti-
Trump
information
from the Kremlin to influence 2016 voting, being investigated by the
Justice
Department
for election interference just like the Russians?
Mr. Steele didn't register under the
Justice
Department
's Foreign Agent Registration Act, under which
Mr.
Mueller
has brought charges against a number of defendants, including the
Concord
team.
Judge Friedrich rejected
Mr.
Dubelier
's argument of "selective prosecution."
Mr. Mueller
's counter-motion boils down to this: Mr. Prigozhin is a criminal fugitive who blatantly
interfered in the U.S. election and is not entitled to sensitive national security information he would
share with the Kremlin intelligence.
In a new battleground, the Mueller team wants to show the judge top secret material to persuade her to keep
it from the defense.
"Disclosure of such information could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security," the
Mueller filing stated.
Judge Friedrich ruled in June that Mr. Prigozhin is prohibited from viewing non-classified sensitive
information that details how the government obtained evidence.
The Mueller team argued: "Discovery in this case contains sensitive information about investigative
techniques and cooperating witnesses that goes well beyond the information that will be disclosed at trial
Information within this case's discovery identifies sources, methods, and techniques used to identify the
foreign actors behind these interference operations the government has particularized concerns about
discovery in this case being disclosed to Russian intelligence services."
Mr. Mueller
says that as long as Mr. Prigozhin, whom the U.S. sanctioned and then indicted for election
interference, remains in Russia, he isn't entitled to see sensitive evidence.
Russophobia is the standard deflection trick, designed to cement cracks in neoliberal society facade. And deep distrust of common
people toward neoliberal elite. With neoliberal elite completely immersed in its own groupthink, which reaches the level "Let them eat
cakes".
Notable quotes:
"... We have seen this play out in the US in the continuing obsession, fronted by Troll-Finder General Robert Mueller, over alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. And the same obsession has emerged in the UK, too, with politicians and pundits claiming that a shadowy network of Russian influence tipped the EU referendum in favour of Leave. ..."
"... It is never quite clear how the 'Russians' or 'Putin' did all this, beyond Facebook ads and decidedly dubious talk of so-called dark money. But then clarity is not the point for this stripe of Russia-maniac. He or she simply wants to believe that Trump or Brexit were not what they were. Not expressions of popular will. Not manifestations of popular discontent. Not democratic exercises. ..."
While Russia-mania is widespread among today's political and cultural elites, it is not uniform.
For an older, right-wing section of the Western political and media class, otherwise known as the Cold War Re-Enactment Society,
Russia looms large principally as a military, quasi-imperial threat. Jim Mattis, the former US marine and general, and now US defence
secretary, said Russia was responsible
for 'the biggest attack [on the world order] since World War Two'. Whether this is true or not is beside the point. What matters
is that Russia appears as a military aggressor. What matters is that Russia's actions in Ukraine – which were arguably a defensive
reaction to NATO and the EU's expansion into Russia's traditional ally – are grasped as an act of territorial aggrandisement. What
matters is that Russia's military operations in Syria – which, again, were arguably a pragmatic intervention to stabilise the West-stoked
chaos – are rendered as an expression of imperial aggression. What matters is that Russian state involvement in the poisoning of
the Skripals in Salisbury – which, given its failure, proved Russian incompetence – is presented as 'part of a pattern of Russian
aggression against Europe and its near neighbours, from the western Balkans to the Middle East', to
quote Theresa May.
And it matters because, if Russia is dressed up as the West's old Cold War adversary, just with a new McMafia logo, then the crumbling,
illegitimate and increasingly pointless postwar institutions through which Western elites have long ordered the world, suddenly look
just that little bit more solid, legitimate and purposeful. And none more so than NATO.
This is why NATO has this year been accompanying its statements
warning Russia to 'stop its reckless pattern of
behaviour' with some of the
largest military exercises since the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly three decades ago. Including one in November in Norway, involving
50,000 troops, 10,000 vehicles, 250 aircraft and 60 warships.
Then there is the newer form of Russia-mania. This has emerged from within the political and cultural elite that came to power
after the Cold War, ploughing an uninspiring third way between the seeming extremes of the 20th century's great ideologies. Broadly
social democratic in sentiment, and elitist and aloof in practice, this band of merry technocrats and their middle-class supporters
have found in 'Russia' a way to avoid having to face up to what the populist revolt reveals – that the majority of Western citizens
share neither their worldview nor their wealth. Instead, they use 'Russia' to displace the people as the source of discontent and
political revolt.
We have seen this play out in the US in the continuing obsession, fronted by Troll-Finder General Robert Mueller, over alleged
Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. And the same obsession has emerged in the UK, too, with politicians and pundits
claiming that a shadowy network of Russian influence tipped the EU referendum in favour of Leave.
It is never quite clear how the 'Russians' or 'Putin' did all this, beyond Facebook ads and decidedly dubious talk of so-called
dark money. But then clarity is not the point for this stripe of Russia-maniac. He or she simply wants to believe that
Trump or
Brexit were not what they were. Not expressions of popular
will. Not manifestations of popular discontent. Not democratic exercises.
No, they were the result, as one Tory MP
put it , of 'the covert and overt forms of malign influence used by Moscow'.
Or, in
the words of an Observer columnist, 'a campaign that purported to be for the "left behind" was organised and funded by men with
links across the global network of far-right American demagogues and kleptomaniac dictators such as Putin'.
Such has been the determination to blame 'Russia' or 'Putin' for the political class's struggles, that in August Tom Watson, Labour's
conspiracy-theory-peddling deputy leader,
called for a public inquiry into an alleged Russian Brexit plot. '[Voters] need to know whether that referendum was stolen or
not', he said.
Such a call ought to be mocked. After all, it is absurd to think 'Russia', 'Putin' and the trolls are the power behind every populist
throne. But the claims aren't mocked – they're taken as calls to action. Think of anything viewed as a threat to our quaking political
and cultural elites in the West, and you can bet your bottom ruble that some state agency or columnist is busy identifying Putin
or one of his legion of bots and trolls as the source. The
gilet jaunes protests
in France?
Check . Climate change?
Check . Italy's Five Star Movement?
Check
.
And all this from a nation with a GDP
equivalent to Spain, an ageing, declining population, and a failing infrastructure. The reality of Russia is not that of a global
threat, but of a struggling state. Russia is weak. Yet in the minds of those clinging desperately to the status quo, 'Russia' has
never been more powerful.
The USA is treating Russia the same way it treated the USSR and run all kind of subversive operations against it.
Notable quotes:
"... This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 1440 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page , which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Read about why we're doing this fundraiser, what we've accomplished in the last year and our current goal, more original reporting . ..."
"... By John Helmer , the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears ..."
"... In June 1933, he bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction, for $825,000 ..."
"... It [USA] has always been fighting on foreign soil since it was formed by violence against a lawful sovereign. ..."
"... This Vast Southern Empire ..."
"... A mentor in shamelessness: the man who taught Trump the power of publicity Roy Cohn, the lawyer who embraced infamy during the McCarthy hearings and Rosenberg trial, influenced Donald Trump to turn the tabloids into a soapbox ..."
"... Angels in America ..."
"... For the life of me, I still cannot figure out why people are in an absolute panic over Russian "agents" buying $100,000.00, or whatever, worth of advertising promoting either or both sides of the election when U.S.citizens and Political Parties spent over $1.6 billion. ..."
"... Are American citizens really so stupid as to fall for the amazingly, brilliantly conceived and placed $100K worth of Russian advertising, so clever that it superseded $1.6 billion worth of U.S. citizen ads? ..."
"... Or (to misquote Shakespeare/Macbeth) is it a tale told by propagandists, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? ..."
Yves here. An important bit of history that can't be repeated too often: when the Clinton
Administration decided to move NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries, violating a
understanding made as part of the peaceful dissolution, George Kennan said it would prove to be
the worst geopolitical mistake the US ever made.
By John Helmer , the
longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist
to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also
been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United
States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy
Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with
Bears
Joseph Alsop and George Kennan started the kind of Russia-hating in Washington which, today,
President Vladimir Putin, like the businessmen around him, think of as a novelty that cannot
last for long.
Alsop was a fake news fabricator, and such a narcissist as to give the bow-ties he wore a
bad name. Kennan was a psychopath who alternated bouts of aggression to prove himself with
bouts of depression over his cowardice. For them, Russia was a suitable target. The Washington
Post was the newspaper which gave their lunacy public asylum. This, according to a fresh
history by a university professor from California, started in 1947, long before the arrival in
Washington of the anti-communist phobia known after the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Russia-hating was an American upper-class phenomenon, cultivated in the offices, cocktail
parties, clubs, and mansions of the deep state, as it emerged out of World War II. It needed a
new enemy to thrive; it fastened on Russia (aka the Soviet Union) as the enemy.
McCarthyism was an American lower-class phenomenon. It focused on the loyalty or disloyalty
of the upper-class deep-staters. That wasn't the same thing as Russia-hating; Wall Street
bankers, Boston lawyers, homosexuals, Jews, communists, were all the enemy. As the Senator from
Wisconsin characterized it himself in 1952, "McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves
rolled." He implied – without a middle-class tie; certainly not an upper-class
bow-tie.
Russia was not an enemy which united the two American lunacies, for they hated each other
much more than they hated the Russians. The Soviet Politburo understood this better then than
the Kremlin does now.
Gregg Herken's The Georgetown
Set , is so named because it records the activities of Alsop, Kennan and several other
State Department, Central Intelligence Agency and White House officials who lived as neighbours
in the Georgetown district of the capital city, together with Katharine (Kay) and Philip
Graham, proprietor managers of the Washington Post. The district – once a chartered city
of Maryland and river port, which was absorbed into the federal District of Columbia in 1871 --
was expensive, relatively speaking then; more so now. The richest of the set, including Alsop,
had town houses in Georgetown, and rural retreats in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and
Connecticut.
They were a set because because, as Herken said succinctly to an interviewer , "they got
together every Sunday for supper and, basically, they ran the country from those meetings." As
the book elaborates, they thought they were running the world. With a longer time lapse in
which to view the evidence, they were also losing it.
Newspapers exposed in the book for collaborating in all the deceits, failures and war crimes
of the history have reacted by calling
Herken's effort a "provincial corner". The New Yorker opined that the Russia-hating
and Russia war-making which Herken retells are dead and gone. "The guests at the Sunday
soirées no doubt felt that they were in the cockpit of history. But the United States is
a democracy, not a Wasp Ascendancy There was once an atmosphere of willingness that made a
system of bribes and information exchanges seem, to the people involved, simply a way of
working together for a common cause in a climate of public opinion that, unfortunately,
required secrecy. No one got rich from the arrangement. People just lost track of what was
inside their bubble and what was outside, as people tend to do. Vietnam was the reality check.
'I've Seen the Best of It' was the title Alsop gave to his memoirs. Things hadn't been the same
since, he felt. He was right about that, and we should be thankful." In the New York media
business these days it's possible to publish a selfie of pulling your own leg.
The Washington Post has deflected the indictment against itself by describing Herken's work
as "a very strange book (A) a rehash of the history of the Cold War as experienced in certain
Washington circles and (B) an almost obsessive recapitulation of the life and journalism of
Joseph Alsop." Alsop is dismissed as unworthy of a history at all because he was "utterly
repellent: arrogant, patronizing, imperious, uninterested in anyone except himself."
That's the truth about Alsop. The truth about the Washington Post is buried in this line by
the Post's books editor about the hand that fed him: "it must be very hard for people who did
not live through the '50s and '60s to understand how obsessed the American people were with the
threat from Moscow." That line appeared in
print on November 7, 2014. It was already history, that's to say, a misjudgement. How
monumentally mistaken is obvious now.
In covering the period from 1946 to 1975, Herken's research does repeat much of the history
of the Cold War which has been told elsewhere. It starts on February 22, 1946, the date of the
"Long Telegram", No. 511 -- Kennan's despatch from the US Embassy in Moscow to the State
Department, setting out his strategy of so-called containment and much more besides. Read it in
the declassified original
. Most of the war-fighting and other war crimes which the telegram set in motion under Kennan's
1948 rubrics, "organized political warfare" and "preventive direct action", are reported in
Herken's book; so too are Kennan's frequent funks, failures of conviction, reversals of
judgement, and pleas for help.
The book ends on December 30, 1974, the date of Alsop's last column. Alsop concluded with
the line: "I have never known the American people to be really badly wrong, if only they were
correctly and fully informed."
Herken shows how self-deluded and professionally delusional that was -- not because of
Alsop's character but because of his sources. Herken documents that they ran upwards from
foot-soldiers (also lubricious sailors) to presidents and cabinet secretaries. Herken doesn't
think the same of Kennan, who gets to walk off stage, aged 101, sounding more sceptical of
overthrowing Saddam Hussein than he ever was in his prime and in power to direct schemes of
what we call state terrorism today.
Left to right: Kennan died in 2005, aged 101; Alsop died in 1989 aged 78; Frank Wisner
died in 1965 aged 56. The deeper Herken gets into the private papers, the more he refers to his
subjects by their diminutives and nicknames – Joe, Oppie, Beetle, Dickie, the Crocodile,
Wig, Jack, Wiz, Soozle, Vangie, et al.
What is fresh about the sources is that Herken has had access to the private notes, letters
and diaries of the Alsop family; the Kennan diaries and letters; and the private papers of
Frank Wisner, the first director of covert operations against Russia. Wisner went mad and
killed himself, as did Graham. There's no doubt about the suicide outcome of their madness.
In the case of the mad ex-Defence Secretary James Forrestal his fatal jump from the window
of the Navy hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, in May 1949 might have been a homicidal push.
Herken concludes that Forrestal's death was "the first senior-ranking American casualty of the
Cold War." Herken thinks of their madness as anomalies. The history shows they were
normalities.
Missing from this history is any reference to official documents, now declassified; press
reporting of the time; or interviews with veterans of the same events but on other sides
– Russian and Soviet; British; German; French; Polish; Vietnamese; Chinese. This isn't so
much a fatal flaw in Herken's (right) book as the reason why his history is repeating itself
today. Call this a variation on Karl's Marx's apothegm that history starts as tragedy and
repeats itself as farce. Herken's blindness to this is as revealing as the Washington Post's
madness, not yet as suicidal as its former proprietor's, today.
So mesmerized is Herken by the moneyed backgrounds of his subjects and sources, and by the
amount of black cash from the US Government they spent on operations, he forgets to report what
they did to fill their own pockets. The claim by the New Yorker that "no one got rich from the
arrangement" – Alsop's fake news fabrications – is false, but Herken touches only
in passing on how they made (or kept) their money. Alsop's column, for example, was sold to 200
newspapers, and at one time claimed a readership of 25 million. His family inheritance is
recorded, but not its annual revenue value. Alsop's payola included silk shirts from Alfred
Kohlberg, a textile importer from China who backed Chiang Kai-shek against Mao Tse-tung, as did
Alsop. Alsop's patrons included Convair (General Dynamics), the company building the US Air
Force Atlas missile for procurement of which Alsop reported fictions about Soviet missile
strength.
In the US power which Alsop, Kennan and Wisner believed without hesitation, Herken is not
less a believer. "Anything could be achieved", Herken quotes a New York Times reporter quoting
Wisner. When the US force multiple changed, however, and US allies or agents were outgunned,
outspent, outnumbered, or outwitted, they were unable to acknowledge miscalculation,
attributing defeat instead to the superior force or guile of their adversaries, especially the
Russians.
This is madness, and there is good reason for recognizing the symptoms again. In 1958, when
Herken says Wisner's paranoid manias were becoming obvious to his friends and colleagues,
"Frank put forward a theory that the careless comment which had gotten George Kennan kicked out
of the Soviet Union was evidence the Soviets had succeeded in an area where the CIA's own
scientists had failed: mind control. Some agency hands alleged that Wisner attributed his own
increasingly bizarre behaviour to the Kremlin's sly manipulation."
From Washington in 1958, fast forward to Washington in 2017; for mind control and sly
manipulation, read Russian hacking and cyber warfare. From Wisner's and Kennan's balloon drops
of leaflets and broadcasts by Radio Free Europe, fast forward to Russia Today Television and
Russian infiltrations of Twitter, Google, the Democratic National Committee, and the Trump
organization.
It stands to reason (ahem!) that if you think what the US Government and its journalists
were doing then was mad, you are might conclude that what they is doing now is just as mad
– and not very different. When the incumbent president and his Secretary of State
publicly call for IQ tests on each other, all reason has failed. "The nation," as Alsop had
written, "had simply taken leave of all sense of proportion." That was in March 1954.
If you fast forward to now, there's one difference. Today the lunatic Russia warfighters
don't retire. They also don't fade away. Today's sleek successors to mad Wisner and mad Graham
sleep easily in their beds a-nights. For what they've done and do, they wouldn't dream of
taking shotguns to their heads.
Herken retells the story of the campaign Alsop waged against McCarthyism at the State
Department, against McCarthy himself, and the vulnerability Alsop himself presented until the
Boston lawyer Joseph Welch put an end to McCarthy on June 9, 1954 : "Have you no sense of decency,
sir, at long last?" Welch famously said. "Have you left no sense of decency?" The recurring
history reveals why, even if there are plenty of people to say the same thing today to the
Washington Post, New York Times, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the madness will continue
repeating itself.
Wisner's son married the stepmother of Nicolas Sarkozy. This facilitated the Sarkozy
family's links with Wall Street (Guillaume at Credit Suisse and Carlyle and Nicolas'
stepdaughter Judith Martin (daughter of France's Bruce Forsyth and Cecilia Albeniz) at Morgan
Stanley, the latter at Canary Wharf).
A year ago, before his elimination in the Republicain primary, Sarko met executives from
Goldman Sachs to discuss a move from London to Paris due to Brexit. Sarko promised bespoke
personal and corporate tax arrangements in return for a relocation and fanfare. Sarko was
keen on the fanfare and planned to exploit that, thinking it would be a PR coup soon between
his election and the August shut down.
Kay Graham was the daughter of a former partner at Lazard Freres. Her father bought the
WaPo after his retirement. The family and its plaything rag formed part of Operation
Mockingbird.
Also worth mentioning that he purchased the WaPo in 1933. Per wikipedia, " In June
1933, he bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction, for $825,000 ".
Pre-sages Bezos buying the WaPo on the cheap too. Can't say I would have thought of Bezos
as being a Russia scare-monger. I guess it's the flip-side of regime change. If you're in the
regime preservation business, perhaps that means regime changing your enemies. In which case,
never let a good crisis go to waste. And if a crisis isn't available well if a newspaper
can't figure out how to manufacture a crisis out of the available pool of evil-doers, then
really why even have a newspaper?
Bezos to Russia, "It's nothing personal, it's just business". Bezos to Trump, "It's
personal."
Seems like that is the under the radar amount of supposed funding for Fronts.
Slowly it dawned on me, or I simply put two and two together realizing I was working for a
CIA/MI6 Front. Explained why mediocrities, liars & thieves had secure jobs.
American Airlines is most probably the inheritor of Air America's freight operations,
station agents, & to pilots a great system for overt & covert operations gets 685
million a year.
IN-Q-TEL the CIA retirement benefits fund for agents gets 685 million as well.
I don't remember where I read the figures. See what you find out?
When I worked the independent movie scene in NYC all the budgets were 100 thousand
dollars.
Now how you know, or the commentators know what they are saying here, I don't know. We are
aware that the US power structure found it convenient to blame, or imply the blame for all
that was stupid and violent in politics in the US on the Russians who as a secretive
organization by habit made the picture plausible.
If oligarchs money fleeing Russia came to America and was a source of Industrial Service
Banking it would be a victory. As it is the working classes in the US and Russia end up with
the same leaders only different.
As it is the game is the same with it being real estate and art.
If there is one thing about Russians, they lust to possess beauty.
Otherwise from my experience they are difficult to do business with and you get more respect
when you up front don't trust them so they can act like Russians.
I pitched to the Atlantic "Statehood for Russia" when the Cold War supposedly ended.
With the propaganda going into what Americans look at and voter system hacking it is evident
they want to be a state.
Outstanding article and excellent commentary points and to elaborate just on several facts
stated: ("Wisner went mad and killed himself, as did Graham.") -- this might have been the
case, but most curiously, both Wisner and Graham were first treated at Chestnut Lodge
Sanitarium in Rockville, MD at the CIA's MK ULTRA wing, then they both would return home and
commit suicide?! This was also the facility where the CIA would send a research nutritionist
(do not know whether they connived her, or it was against her will, etc., but she did not
work for the Agency) who was researching an Amazonian plant with unique properties, and after
her treatment, she never mentioned said plant or research ever again?!.
Also, this is where Richard Helms, then CIA director, had his famous auto accident right
before giving testimony before the Church Committee (when he perjured himself and later was
officially censured by Congress). Helms claimed he was seeing a psychoanalyst (basis for a
simpleton movie from Hollywood called "The President's Analyst" -- probably involved Harry
Weinstein) -- but it was because Helms was shredding all the MK ULTRA files kept there prior
to appearing before the Church Committee.
And Joe Alsop was cousin to several CIA dudes, Kermit Roosevelt and Archibald Roosevelt,
whereupon he received his "tips" or misinformation.
And the Colonel explains Sarkozy's familial background quite nicely, but to further add it
was Wisner and John Negroponte, working through the Franco-American Foundation, who were
supposed to be behind the concocted false scandals against Sarkozy's presidential opponent
which allowed Sarkozy to win the election the first time. (The second time, Sarkozy was
behind that NYC airport "incident" which blow up in his face, resulting in a Hollande
victory.)
There are further Wall Street links in the Sarkozy family. Olivier, half-brother of
Nicolas, was at CS First Boston and worked briefly with our company on an engagement some
years ago. His colleagues remarked on his pedigree and ability to open doors where others
couldn't.
So the USA had no hand in arming Japan and encouraging them to attack Russia, successfully
in 1904? Who stirred up Japan, forcing them with battleships to trade, actually firing on
Japan. USA has always had war plans for the invasion of every country on Earth, since the Civil
War, if not before.
It has always been fighting on foreign soil since it was formed by violence against a
lawful sovereign. Except for 20 years!!!
WWII was a result of rearmament of Germany, by USA and its banker allies. They wanted USSR
in ashes. In the end they had to rescue Germany, failing in that and losing half of Europe.
That must be smart!
It [USA] has always been fighting on foreign soil since it was formed by violence
against a lawful sovereign.
The monarchy of George III? Lawful sovereign? Who elected George III? Nobody. Who elected
the members of Parliament? Nobody in America, and only adult males who could meet stringent
properly requirements in Britain. Britain in 1775/1776 was definitely not a lawful sovereign
over any territory in the North American continent.
Don't forget Woody Wilson sending the troops to Vladivostok after WW1. Communism was
always regarded as an existential threat by the then WASPy, now not so WASPy elites.
And re Kennan, the recent Ken Burns Vietnam documentary shows him casting doubts on the
Vietnam intervention at a Congressional hearing. Kennan said the policy was like the elephant
being terrified of the mouse. So his Russia obsession does seem to have been more about power
rivalry than ideological apostasy.
If this is true, why did the US send 17.5 M tons of material to the USSR, through
Lend Lease ,
during WW2?
Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food
were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For
comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from
January 1942 to May 1945.
One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company's
River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and
services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.
Wasn't Henry Ford supposed to be a Na*i?
While repayment of the interest-free loans was required after the end of the war under
the act, in practice the U.S. did not expect to be repaid by the USSR after the war. The
U.S. received $2M in reverse Lend-Lease from the USSR. This was mostly in the form of
landing, servicing, and refueling of transport aircraft; some industrial machinery and rare
minerals were sent to the U.S. The U.S. asked for $1.3B at the cessation of hostilities to
settle the debt, but was only offered $170M by the USSR. The dispute remained unresolved
until 1972, when the U.S. accepted an offer from the USSR to repay $722M linked to grain
shipments from the U.S., with the remainder being written off.
So $722M in 1972 dollars for $11B in 1947 dollars?
If this is true, why did the US send 17.5 M tons of material to the USSR, through Lend
Lease, during WW2?
They suspended their death wish because without the USSR they could very well have lost to
the Nazis. Short of a successful invasion of Britain, the availability to the Nazis of a
small portion of the tank and aerial forces that were getting chewed up in the Soviet Union
would have led to the easy conquest of North Africa and the loss of the Suez canal. That
would have been hard for the Allies to recover from. Once the war was won it was time to
shift back into playing the innocent party responding to Soviet aggression.
The U.S. also sent $20 million in food aid to the Soviets during the famine of 1921-1922.
The U.S. attitude towards Russia / Soviet Union is complex and contradictory. Members of the
U.S. establishment mostly opposed the Soviets, but future President Herbert Hoover's role in
the famine relief project shows that there were exceptions.
By the 1930s, the behavior of Stalin justified opposition to the Soviets, although I think
that for a long time, many (perhaps most) of the Americans who opposed them did so for the
wrong reasons.
Hoover's role in famine relief was about more than food distribution. By 1911-1912 or so
he was director of the Russo-Asiatic Corporation and had extensive oil, mining, and timber
interests in Russia, all of which made him very, very wealthy. These interests were
relinquished prior to the Revolution, which Hoover vehemently opposed. According to Sayers
and Kahn in The Great Conspiracy Against Russia, "He was to remain one of the world's
bitterest foes of the Soviet Government for the rest of his life. It is a fact, whatever his
personal motive may have been, that American food sustained the White Russians and fed the
storm troops of the most reactionary regimes in Europe which were engaged in suppressing the
upsurge of democracy after the First World War. Thus American relief became a weapon against
the peoples' movements in Europe."
This is Disaster Capitalism 100 years ago.
The quote is footnoted. The footnote reads: "Herbert Hoover's activities as Food Relief
Administrator were directed toward giving aid to the White Russians and withholding all
supplies to the Soviets. Hundreds of thousands starved in Soviet territory. When, finally,
Hoover bowed to public pressure and sent some food to the Soviets he continued according to a
statement by a Near East Relief official in the New York World in April, 1922 -- to
'interfere with the collection of funds for famine-stricken Russia.' In February, 1992, when
Hoover was Secretary of Commerce, the New York Globe made this editorial comment:
'Bureaucrats centered throughout the Department of Justice, the Department of State and the
Department of Commerce for purposes of publicity are carrying on a private war with the
Bolshevist Government Washington propaganda has grown to menacing proportions Messrs. Hughes
and Hoover and Dougherty will do well to clean their houses before public irritation reaches
too high a point. The American people will not long endure a presumptuous bureaucracy which
for its own wretched purposes is willing to let millions of innocent people die."
In 1919, when the American Relief Administration first offered to help Russia, it's very
plausible that they only wanted to help the regions under White control. But the Soviets
refused foreign assistance at that time. In 1921, when the famine was worse, the Whites
didn't control much outside of portions of Siberia. I think the worst areas of famine were in
eastern Ukraine and the nearby parts of Russia. I don't think the Whites controlled any of
that territory any longer, but I could be wrong. I think that Hoover's aid helped a lot of
people in Soviet areas. And yes, he was anti-communist.
Also there was considerable sympathy towards Germany among the Latin American elites.
Several countries, such as Paraguay and Argentina, would likely have jumped aboard the Axis
bandwagon if it began to look like they'd come out on top.
The percentage of battle deaths incurred by the Germans on the Eastern front was at a
minimum 70%, and by some counts over 90%. If Operation Barbarosa had not been launched in
1941 and a truce had held on that front it is unlikely that the Anglo-American alliance could
have sustained a a landing on continental Europe in the west. This would have especially been
the case if the Germans, instead of putting their chips on Barbarosa, had been able to
successfully shut off British use of the Suez Canal, and thus deprive them of ready access to
the resources from India and especially the oil from Iran. Given British naval dominance of
the Mediterranean, however, this would have been difficult unless they were able to negotiate
passage to the Levant by land through Turkey and the Balkans.
Agreed. Instead of peddling diagnoses he would do well to stick with the attacking the
crudity of Kennan's view of world affairs. Kennan saw the Soviets as akin to "windup toys"
that were somehow driven to expand. In this he completely failed to account for the fact that
the Soviets were potentially autarchic, while the capitalist West was governed by
accumulation imperatives that pushed for market expansion. He doesn't bother himself with the
problem but jumps right into rationalizing base construction and an arms race. That Kennan is
seen as a kind of geostrategic genius speaks volumes regarding the self-deluded mindlessness
of US foreign policy.
This article sounds more like an angry emotional outburst from Helmer. It wouldn't
surprise me if he's one of the people taking a lot of crap in all this Russian propaganda
hysteria.
Yes, I know about his depression. But the claim that he was a psychopath? That stretches
believability. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy were examples of
psychopaths. I don't think that George Kennan was like them.
Russia-phobia is actually 100 years old. Strangely, I haven't seen any commemoration of
the centenary of 1917 Revolution. Nobody can deny that it was a world-changing event.
The Bolshevik Revolution, that overtook the Kerensky Revolution shocked the world to the
core, particularly the Church. It quickly alienated even syndicalists and anarchists, because
it developed into a strong centralized state, not the bottom up movement that Lenin found
when he entered Petrograd.
The last 4 years of Nato intervention in the Baltics, Poland and
the Ukraine have shown that the world has never recovered from that shock. British opposition
to Russia goes even deeper, back to the Great Game and the Crimean War. Without Churchill
vehemently opposing Russia in general and Stalin in particular would there even be a Nato?
History is more about continuity than discontinuity.
I'm glad you mentioned Churchill. Since the first Directors of the OSS and the CIA were
complete Anglophiles and modeled their collection techniques on Britian's SIS (MI-6) (until,
of course, those famous British spies were uncovered), it is not surprising that our first
after the war "enemies" were the same as Churchill's enemies
I have a sneaking suspicion that the troubles of the world have such a basic foundation
that if they are ever solved, people will look back, marveling at the simplicity of the
answers.
Humans have always faced the dilemma of how to organize society. The main sticking points
being how to control personal ambition in ones own group and how to get the work done that
needs doing- including protecting oneself form ones neighbors who are dealing with the same
issues.
Capitalism, and the west in general, seem to turn personal ambition loose. It takes a
persons personal confrontation and experience with the universe and makes that the primary
motivator for organization. It serves to reward the aggressive while insulating failure as a
personal shortcoming, not a flaw in the system. The Catholic religion, which underpins such a
system by giving it a spiritual legitimacy. The individual can have a personal relationship
with the creator of the universe- with the moderating teaching of caring for the poor to curb
excessive personal ambition or too close a connection. That hasn't worked out so well as the
poor are with us still and the argument is given that the poor will be with us forever. The
Divine right of Kings and all that.
Godless Communists challenged all that and the results still haven't worked themselves
out.
Endless wars seem to be an excuse to justify recurring cycles of hate. Love your God, and
spite your enemies.
The promise of Socialism is that the tools of science and reason can be used to relieve
human suffering and provide for a meaningful life. That vision remains unborn because those
sentiments are always snuffed out as quickly as they take hold.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the troubles of the world have such a basic foundation
that if they are ever solved, people will look back, marveling at the simplicity of the
answers.
I have the exact same suspicion. We might, in fact, understand the basic foundation and
already have the solutions but, to use your words, they are always snuffed out as quickly as
they take hold -- which is itself its own intractable problem.
Interesting observation about McCarthyism as a feature of the lower classes. Particularly
about what the hate and fear was directed against: bankers, lawyers, Jews, homosexuals,
communists One of the big actors in that great national drama was a fella named Roy Cohn, who
kind of fell into almost all of those categories (except maybe "communist", though with Cohn,
who was also a mob lawyer and buddy of J. Edgar Hoover, who knows?).
And for Trump haters, or those who are trying to "understand" the guy, there's even a
great big Cohn Connection, which is fun to read about here: " A mentor in shamelessness:
the man who taught Trump the power of publicity
Roy Cohn, the lawyer who embraced infamy during the McCarthy hearings and Rosenberg trial,
influenced Donald Trump to turn the tabloids into a soapbox " ,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/20/roy-cohn-donald-trump-joseph-mccarthy-rosenberg-trial
Interesting observation about McCarthyism as a feature of the lower classes.
I noted that too. It gives credence to Matt Stoller's observation that the elites / 1%ers
are not monolithic but are fractions that can and do fight each other.
Tangentially, I saw the Angels in America in London, which includes a vivid
portrait of Roy Cohn. On his deathbed, watched over by Ethel Rosenberg, Cohn dekes Rosenberg
into singing him off to his last sleep out of pity A touching moment until Cohn sits up and
yells "Fooled ya!" (paraphrasing).
America was born of conquest. The North American continent is/was vast in scale and
resources. The vision was never to live in such a place as more to conquer it and extract its
resources. That mentality is still prominent as the resource base has not been depleted yet
and energies are directed to further exploitation- fracking and the opening of the arctic
regions. Even now, an argument can be made that American corporations are more concerned
about exploiting their customers for profit, than the health of the citizenry. That is the
motivational force behind our governing elite, not some attachment to the land and its people
and the desire to make the world a better place.
American Exceptionalism is based on conquest and the right for individuals to exploit
those resources to their own end. By that standard it continues to be a success. Communism,
in principle, was an ideology opposed to that vision. Under no circumstances can such an
ideology be allowed to exist, so was set for extermination by force and disinformation. Once
that process takes hold, you live in a world devoid of reality. It is fantasy.
Naked greed cannot be justified for long without some form of damage taking place in the
human psyche. Reflection is not prevalent in the American creed. The rise of American
Corporations to the detriment of the nations citizens is a confirmation of that fact. For how
can a nation be "Great" if its citizens are driven into poverty?
You become a Nation of crazy people.
Greed and misuse of Power lead to crazy. Instead of trying to talk sense to crazy people,
sanity lies in the opposite direction. Less greed and an articulation of the proper use of
power. Implementation is another matter.
Thanks for the reading suggestions, and I especially second the the mention of Douglass's
JFK and the Unspeakable. TTBOMK although it's nearly ten years old it's the best analysis out
there of the John Kennedy assassination.
Saying "Russia (aka the Soviet Union)" (as Helmer does) is akin to saying "California (aka
The United States". It is a false statement.
The Soviet Union (1917-1991) was a materialist anti-christian, anti religious totalitarian
State. Godlessness was the ruling precept of Soviet society.
In 1923, Lenin created the first Soviet Concentration Camp, at the "re-purposed", Russian
Orthodox Solovetsky Monastery. Solovetsky was used as the prototype for the Gulag network of
camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solovki_prison_camp
IMO, today, the USA is the World Epicenter of materialism, internationalism, greed and
godlessness.
Conversely, Russia (2017) is a Nationalist, Orthodox Christian Democracy. No wonder our
materialistic rulers are so "hysterically", (The APA says, "conversion disorder". Casual
psychiatric diagnosis of opponents is a breeze now!), fearful of Russia, and the Biblical,
little David, with his sling and stone (Putin).
There is a vast body of scholarly work on the origins of the Cold War from many different
perspectives, into which context this analysis is trivial and downright loopy. The Georgetown
Set got us into it? It was "mad" to oppose the Soviet Union and now Russia? Oh, please.
Western opposition to Russian communism pre-dates Joe Alsop and his bowties by decades.
The revolutionary regime that weakened the WWI alliance and prolonged that bloody war by
making a separate peace with Germany wasn't going to be well-liked by its former allies in
the first place. The same regime preached the violent overthrow of democratically-elected
western governments, who reacted as one might expect, including the (poorly-considered)
intervention of 1918-1920.
Stalin then gave the world many, many reasons not to trust Russia – brutal
repression on a hitherto unheard of scale, mass murder, disastrous economic policies leading
to mass famine, show trials and active promotion of Soviet-style take-overs elsewhere. Even
before WWII and the start of the Cold War there was plenty not to like. During the war,
Western governments bowed to geopolitical reality and allied with the USSR, despite Stalin's
cynical deal with Hitler to divide Poland just before, but Poland provides one of the best
samplings of why opposing the USSR/Russia after geopolitical realities changed at the end of
the war was not only understandable but a very good idea. Shortly after Russia took over in
eastern Poland the NKVD rounded up and brutally murdered 22,000 military officers, police
officers, public officials and assorted intellectuals, i.e. anyone who could think
independently and oppose Russian rule, and threw the bodies into pits dug in the Katyn
Forest. The Soviets denied this for decades, blaming it on the Nazi's, but finally fessed up
in 1990 during perestroika, now best understood as a brief twinkling of light in Russia's
dark history. Reports had leaked out of the massacre and other Soviet atrocities during the
war, which played a large role in mobilizing another major force in U.S. politics that was
deeply skeptical of the USSR after the war – ethnic Eastern Europeans.
The West and Russia did do deals at Yalta and Tehran on spheres of influence, but there
was ambiguity as to what that meant and words were thrown in about national
self-determination and free elections. After the war the West (mostly) promoted democratic
government, at least in Europe, while the Soviets laughed at the joke and imposed their
brutal regimes anywhere they could. Stalin's last living legacy is the horror show in North
Korea, where he installed a Soviet agent as head of the regime, now a dynasty. Kennan's Long
Cable/Article X, which is still well worth reading, dealt with the causes of Soviet
expansionism as part of Russia's long, troubled history and urged containment as an
alternative to more active opposition ("roll-back"), which largely worked in Europe. As the
counterpoint to containment, when Sec State Dean Acheson omitted Korea from the U.S.
"defensive perimeter" in his January 1950 speech, the North invaded the South with Soviet
support five months later. It was after that experience that containment went global.
With the exception of Kennan, the people mentioned may have had influence but were not the
real policy makers. Truman, George Marshall and Dean Acheson were the primary architects of
U.S postwar policy. Only Acheson lived in Georgetown, and he thought Alsop was a "pest."
Acheson took on Kennan as his staff chief because he had deep expertise on Russia and largely
made sense. The off-hand comments in the article about Kennan being a psychopath and coward
were made with no support and are at odds with his reputation as a pragmatist and
traditionalist in foreign policy. He was recently most well known for his quaint view that
the U.S. should declare wars as required by the Constitution before getting into them. Alsop
was a commentator not a policy maker and was regarded as somewhat of a fringe character, not
least because he was gay in the 1950s. As for the rest of the U.S. elite at the time, far
more of them had been sympathetic to Russia in their youths than rabid anti-communists. The
typical Cold Warrior was made that way not by bowtie-wearing but by sober, mature observation
of what the Soviet regime was all about.
So let's do fast-forward to the present day. No one with an objective understanding of
Russian history is at all surprised that a regime headed by one of their former secret
policemen is tampering with elections, fomenting political divisions and trying to disrupt
the western alliance. All the evidence supports those conclusions and more comes out every
day. Facebook, Google, the scope is astounding. In Helmer's piece we see the birth of a new
phenomenon, on the same intellectual level as climate-change denial. It's electing-tampering
denial.
I think if NC-ers wanted to read official propaganda, they could just subscribe to NYT.
The only thing that your comment demonstrates is that you've no idea what "objective
understanding of Russian history" could possibly be.
Was that an argument? The problem Russian apologists have is that periodically, after
years or decades of denial, the truth finally comes out from a Russian source, usually when
it's convenient to blame their predecessor. Khrushchev finally admitted Stalin's "mistakes",
like anyone really needed confirmation that his regime had murdered millions. Gorbachev
finally had the guts to admit the NKVD liquidated the Polish elite, which everyone else
(except the "useful idiots") had known for a long time, etc. That was the context of the Cold
War and the original posting. U.S. containment policy responded to real actions and constant
lying by the USSR as it imposed totalitarian regimes throughout Eastern Europe and elsewhere,
not some goofy chatter at Georgetown cocktail parties. Every one of those countries, as soon
as they had freedom to choose, bolted for the West and NATO.
As for election-tampering denial, sure looks like it's real. This was a new twist –
deny something simply because it's been reported in the NYT (Russian sources, and Donald
Trump, being so much more credible). But some other historical truth-telling pertains here.
If you want to understand what Vladimir Putin and his fellow secret policemen did in East
Germany, despite decades of denial, you can now go to the Stasi archives. It's a museum that
documents 44 years of soul-crushing repression, cynical manipulation of neighbor against
neighbor and systematic subversion of anyone or any group that might speak up against the
state. It's not hard at all to believe that someone who came of age with that background
would take advantage of such an easy way to undermine their U.S. adversaries. In fact, it's
hard to believe they wouldn't.
Well said. Thank you. My comment was much shorter, but said many of the same things. It
was censored. Much shorter version: Asserting that George Kennan was a lunatic is lunacy.
For the life of me, I still cannot figure out why people are in an absolute panic over
Russian "agents" buying $100,000.00, or whatever, worth of advertising promoting either or
both sides of the election when U.S.citizens and Political Parties spent over $1.6
billion.
Are American citizens really so stupid as to fall for the amazingly, brilliantly conceived
and placed $100K worth of Russian advertising, so clever that it superseded $1.6 billion
worth of U.S. citizen ads?
Or (to misquote Shakespeare/Macbeth) is it a tale told by propagandists, full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing?
"After the war the West (mostly) promoted democratic government, at least in Europe, "
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
I am surprised no one else responded to this screed. I agree that the Soviet Union had a
horrific human rights record, but that little snippet I quote above is like a relic from the
silliest days of Cold War propaganda. As for Russian meddling, the evidence is that probably
something happened, in my opinion, but if people were serious they would keep some sense of
proportion. I read the NYT articles and melodramatic language is doing an awful lot of work
with regards to the Facebook claims.
If I accepted everything I have read at face value our
democracy was so fragile literally anyone willing to hire some hackers and spend a minuscule
amount of money could have destroyed it. Heck, if I and a few friends were willing to
mortgage our homes and cash in our retirement funds we could fund its destruction
ourselves.
Richard Spence, professor of history at the University of Idaho, has just published "Wall
Street and the Russian Revolution: 1905 – 1925." This is a fascinating book that I
would think at least some of the above commenters would be interested in. Spence has updated
Anthony Sutton's earlier work with new/more archival research and access to new/more recently
declassified documents.
I haven't finished it as it came in the mail yesterday, but it does have a few interesting
comments about George Kennan not the above George Kennan but his distant cousin who in 1891
published a book entitled "Siberia and the Exile System." So it seems that Russia-hating ran
in the family. The cousin Kennan claimed to have assisted in the distribution of a ton and a
half of literature to Russian POWs in Japan during the Russo-Japanese War. This, according to
Kennan, was financed by Jacob Schiff and caused many of the POWs to become liberals and
revolutionaries opposed to the Tsar.
Fleshing out the role of capitalist/financial interests in the Revolution is certainly
important. These were the deep state actors of 100 years ago. The names of the people and the
interests they represent may have changed, but the chicanery hasn't.
" the Clinton administration decided to move NATO into former Warsaw Pact nations,
violating a understanding made as part of the peaceful dissolution". The "peaceful
dissolution" of the Soviet "union", I presume?
NATO was formed in 1948 in response to the Soviet refusal to withdraw from the Eastern
European nations it continued to control with puppet governments and Soviet troops after
WWll. The Soviets responded by forming the Warsaw Pact -- consisting of those very same
nations: (East) Germany, Poland, Czechoslavakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. The
only time Warsaw Pact troops were used militarily was against its own members -- Hungary in
1956, and Czechoslavakia in 1968.
The collapse of the USSR started in 1989, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and
culminated in 1991 with the failed coup by hardliners against Gorbachev in August of 1991,
though the official end did not come until the formal dissolution on December 26, 1991.
In the following years, all of the Warsaw Pact nations, plus the illegally annexed and
occupied Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, having regained their sovereignty,
all made a point of joining NATO -- to make sure that the Russian bear did not return to do
even more damage.
What "understanding" was violated? It is a popular myth that the Russians were "promised"
that NATO would not expand to the east. Who made this promise to who, and under what
authority? Did the nations of Eastern Europe, after half a century of Russian control,
voluntarily cede the power to determine their future alliances to the Clinton Administration?
The premise is absurd on its face. In any case, how do you keep a "promise" to a political
entity- the USSR- which no longer exists?
Russian interference in Ukraine, and the forced annexation of Crimea (reminiscent of
Stalin's annexation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1940), has validated the pragmatism
of its former vassal states in joining NATO. Russia is not being threatened by its neighbor's
membership in NATO; to them, Russia is the threat.
You should ask Jim Baker, who had confirmed that an agreement regarding NATO was made. In
addition to many other people present at the time Why try at revisionist history now ?
And FIY, Estonia, Latvia, and Litva were a part of the czarist Russia for more than 300 yrs.
Soviet Union gave up the territories in the terrible peace it had to sign with Germany before
the end of WWI. After the next war, which it won, it simply took back the areas – kinda
like the French took back Alsace-Lorraine, after victory over German in WWI.
Knowing history is really a good thing
More Russians troops are buried in the soil of the Crimea than the US lost in Europe
during WWI &WWII as well. The West or it's proxies have been after it for nearly as long
as The Great Game has been in play. But that's what Russia gets for helping Lincoln by
keeping France and Britain from actively coming in on the side of the Confederates. Never
help an ingrate.
That's two misreadings of history. There was no agreement not to expand NATO, which is
confirmed by both Jim Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev, the other guy there at the table. The only
agreement made was that NATO would not put nuclear weapons or non-German troops in the former
GDR. That agreement has been kept.
The Baltic states had all declared their independence from Russia before the Russian peace
with Germany, so they weren't anyone's to give. If they were ever "transferred" to Germany
they didn't stay German for long – in fact a couple of them defeated German armies in
battle towards the end of WWI. They were all independent by 1920, part of the wave of
national self-determination after WWI that saw the liberation of lots of smaller countries
that had been dominated by one of the defunct empires. Lithuania, of course, hadn't always
been so small – at one point it was the largest country in Europe and included parts of
what became Russia. Comparisons with Alsace are absurd on several levels.
"... That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases. ..."
"... For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity. ..."
"... American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. ..."
"... In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public. ..."
"... The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. ..."
"... The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing. ..."
"... I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection. ..."
"... The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions. ..."
"... Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. ..."
"... The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the "security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure evil (TPTB contend). ..."
"... Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be dealt with. ..."
"... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
"... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
"... Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists one. ..."
"... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
"... The US is progressing toward a fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin. The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of "aggression." And so on ..."
"... The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys." ..."
"... Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest). ..."
"... Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and paranoia. ..."
"... Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and the United States. ..."
"... One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs. Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion of secure employment. Hugh Stretton, Economics: A New Introduction ..."
"... The anti-russian think tanks, msm, bellingcat etc push this too much, making them look stupid. ..."
"... Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the other forces at play." ..."
The U.S. mainstream media are going nuts. They now make up and report stories based on the
uncritical acceptance of an algorithm they do not want to understand and which is known to
produce fake results.
SAN FRANCISCO -- One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week,
Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up
the gun control debate.
The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the
hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on
Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland,
Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel
Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
In other words - the "Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia" were following
the current news just as cable news networks do. When a new sensational event happened they
immediately jumped onto it. But the NYT authors go to length to claim that there is some
nefarious Russian scheme behind this that uses automated accounts to spread divisive
issues.
Those claims are based on this propaganda project:
Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall
Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds
of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian
influence campaign.
The "Alliance for Securing Democracy" is
run by military lobbyists, CIA
minions and neo-conservative propagandists. Its
claimed task is:
... to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy
in the United States and Europe.
There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin ever made or makes such efforts.
The ASD "Hamilton 68" website shows graphics with rankings of "top items"
and "trending items" allegedly used by Russian bots or influence agents. There is nothing
complicate behind it. It simply tracks the tweets of 600 Twitter users and aggregates the
hashtags they use. It does not say which Twitter accounts its algorithms follows. It
claims
that the 600 were selected by one of three criteria: 1. People who often tweet news that also
appears on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik News, two general news sites
sponsored by the Russian government; 2. People who "openly profess to be pro-Russian"; 3.
accounts that "appear to use automation" to boost the same themes that people in group 1 and
2 tweet about.
Nowhere does the group say how many of the 600 accounts it claims to track belong to which
group. Are their 10 assumed bots or 590 in the surveyed 600 accounts? And how please does one
"openly profess" to be pro-Russian? We don't know and the ASD won't say.
On December 25 2017 the "Russian influence" agents or bots who - according to NYT - want
to sow divisiveness and subvert democracy,
wished everyone
a #MerryChristmas.
The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is
unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters,
Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all
of these accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably
nefarious:
Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President
Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl,
#standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started
kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.
The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag , ...
The Daily Beast reported earlier that the last claim is
definitely false :
Twitter's internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not
Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo . There are no preliminary
indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is
either predominantly Russian.
The same is presumably true for the other hashtags.
The Dutch IT expert and blogger Marcel van den Berg was wondering how Dutch
keywords and hashtags showed up on the Hamilton 68 "Russian bots" dashboard. He found (
Dutch ,
English auto translation) that the dashboard is a total fraud:
In recent weeks, I have been keeping a close eye on Hamilton 68. Every time a Dutch hashtag
was shown on the website, I made a screenshot. Then I noted what was playing at that moment
and I watched the Tweets with this hashtag. Again I could not find any Tweet that seemed to
be from a Russian troll.
In all cases, the hash tags that Hamilton 68 reported were trending topics in the
Netherlands . In all cases there was much to do around the subject of the hashtag in the
Netherlands. Many people were angry or shared their opinion on the subject on Twitter. And
even if there were a few tweets with Russian connections between them, the effect is zero.
Because they do not stand out among the many other, authentic Tweets.
Van den Berg lists a dozen examples he analyzed in depth.
The anti-Russian Bellingcat group around couch blogger Eliot Higgins is sponsored
by the NATO propaganda shop Atlantic Council . It sniffs through open source stuff
to blame Russia or Syria wherever possible. Bellingcat was recently a victim of the
"Russian bots" - or rather of the ASD website. On February 10 the hashtag #bellingcat trended
to rank 2 of the
dashboard.
Bellingcat was thus, according to the Hamilton 68 claims, under assault by hordes
of nefarious Russian government sponsored bots.
The Bellingcat folks looked into the issue and found
that only six people on Twitter, none
of them an automated account , had used the #bellingcat hashtag in the last 48 hours. Some of
the six may have opinions that may be "pro-Russian", but as Higgins himself
says :
[I]n my opinion, it's extremely unlikely the people listed are Russian agents
The pro-NATO propaganda shop Bellingcat thus debunked the pro-NATO propaganda
shop Alliance for Securing Democracy.
The fraudsters who created the Hamilton 68 crap seem to have filled their database with
rather normal people from all over the world who's opinions they personally dislike. Those
then are the "Russian bots" who spread "Russian influence" and divisiveness.
Moreover - what is the value of its information when six normal people out of millions of
active Twitter users can push a hashtag with a handful of tweets to the top of the
dashboard?
But the U.S. media writes long gushing stories about the dashboard and how it somehow
shows automated Russian propaganda. They go to length to explain that this shows "Russian
influence" and a "Russian" attempt to sow "divisiveness" into people's minds.
This is nuts.
Last August, when the Hamilton 68 project was first released, the Nation was the
only site critical of it. It
predicted :
The import of GMF's project is clear: Reporting on anything that might put the US in a bad
light is now tantamount to spreading Russian propaganda.
It is now even worse than that. The top ranking of the #merrychristmas hashtag shows that
the algorithm does not even care about good or bad news. The tracked twitter accounts are
normal people.
The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged "Russian influence"
into U.S. media. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false
"Russian bots" and "divisiveness" narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy
contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, - CNN, Wired, the New York Times -
are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package
the venom and spread it to the public.
How long will it take until people die from it?
Posted by b on February 20, 2018 at 03:15 PM |
Permalink
Comments next page " It's all too reminiscent of Duck Soup:
"to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the
United States and Europe."
That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in
proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the
clearest cases.
For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't
believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even
during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity.
Gee, what could go wrong formulating policy founded upon a series of Big Lies? Kim Dotcom says he has
important info the FBI refuses to hear. At the Munich
Security Conference , neocon Nicholas Burns, former US Ambassador to NATO, details my
assertion's factual basis that current policy is being formed on a series of Big Lies: "Will
NATO strengthen itself to contain Russian power in Eastern Europe giving what Russian
[sic] has done illegally in Crimea, in the Donbass, and in Georgia ?" [Bolded text are
the Big Lies.]
Clearly, this entire psyop was premeditated and its design was hastily done
contemporaneously with Russia's Syria intervention. NSA/CIA/FBI knew of HRC's security
breeches and rightly assumed their contents would find their way into the election, so the
general plan was ready to go prior to WikiLeaks publications. b has uncovered much, and I
hope he's planning to publish a book about the entire affair.
Ken @ 4: There doesn't necessarily need to be One Major Reason for going to war. There may be
several reasons all feeding and reinforcing one another and creating a psychological climate
in which Going To War is seen as the only solution and is inevitable. The reasons are not
just economic and political but cultural and historical.
In some countries allied with the US, the politicians in power are the ideological
descendants of those who collaborated with Nazi Germany - so in a sense they are committed to
"correcting" what they see as wrong. In the case of current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe, he is the grandson of a former prime minister who once served in General Tojo's World
War II cabinet.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/12/26/national/formed-in-childhood-roots-of-abes-conservatism-go-deep/#.WoyZCG9uaUk
That's why pinning down the reason for wanting a war against Russia is so difficult.
Since the FBI never inspected the DNC's computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from
an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical
officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council,
a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary
Clinton ally.
Thus, Putin-basher Clinton hired Putin-basher Alperovitch to investigate an alleged
electronic heist, and to absolutely no one's surprise, his company concluded that guilty
party was Vladimir Putin. Amazing! Since then, a small army of internet critics has chipped
away at CrowdStrike for praising the hackers as among the best in the business yet
declaring in the same breath that they gave themselves away by uploading a document in the
name of "Felix Edmundovich," i.e. Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret
police.
As noted cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr observed with regard to Russia's two main
intelligence agencies: "Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add
Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world
while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor."
muddy waters.. paid for propaganda.... look at all the russian bots, lol... cold war 2 / mccarthyism 2 is in effect... the historic parallels are marked. thank you
neo cons! it's working... the ordinary person in the usa can't be this stupid can they?
when does ww3 kick in? is that really what these idiots want? or is it just to prolong the
huge defense budget?
This is about conditioning voters in Europe and the United States for a long war with Russia
and China. In other words, a return to the 1950s. It is not working and becoming increasingly
hysterical because societies are not nearly as cohesive as they once were, and the mainstream
political parties, while better funded and more top-down organized, are basically hollow. The
collapse is coming. Four years or ten, take your pick.
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."
Most Americans probably don't. Just the chosen few with the deepest fall-out shelters. The
idea is to keep piling the pressure on to countries like Iran and Russia in the hope that
their populations will rise up and demand the freedoms that we enjoy in the West....things
like uncensored wardrobe malfunctions and transgender washrooms.
let's imagine that we have the pyramid of evilness, by which we measure bestiality of one
regime and its constituency. my firm belief is that us would be on the top of that pyramid.
Only dilemma would be between Zionist entity and the US.
"How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?" was the question Wilhelm
Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree,
February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar
Republic's democratic constitution.
Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933
and Reich was trying to grapple with the fact that the German people had apparently chosen
the authoritarian politics promoted by National Socialism against their own political
interests.
Ever since, the question of fascism, or rather the question of why might people
vote for their own oppression, has never ceased to haunt political philosophy.2 With Trump
openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral
success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become
a pressing one.
An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime.
Remember the "USS MAINE"! Media have long agitated for War in US History. Nothing sells newspapers
like a good ole war! Demonizing is a way to achieve it. What is sure is that this is a one way street.
Once over the cliff, there is no turning back.
How do you tell people that, at the flick of your magic switch, Putin is in fact
a swell guy and wonderful human being? Once love is gone who goes back
to the filthy, abhorrent and estranged spouse?
Surely the US establishment is playing with fire thinking they will successfully
ride out any conflict and come out on top secure in their newly reestablished
hegemony on the smoldering ruins of Humanity.
Make no mistake, we are all on the road to hell. Better enjoy todays peace as
tomorrow word will be filled with the sweet music of cemeteries.
@15 "An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime."
I'm not so sure. I think there are many Americans who deeply distrust their government.
But of course they don't want to appear unpatriotic. There are also many who are apathetic
and many simply don't know how to change things.
It's horrible I know to quote a Nazi, but Goring had this right:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm
want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his
farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in
England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all,
it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or
a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter
through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare
wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always
be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country
to danger. It works the same way in any country.
American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources"
to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. The
skills required to repeat the text verbatim serve them well in both cases. Skepticism is only
reserved to anyone who tries to introduce logic or facts into the equation--such as when Jill
Stein was interviewed on MSNBC recently. How dare Ms. Stein try to bring FACTS into the
discussion!
In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the
proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no
circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public.
Thanks Jen. It still makes no sense. As a veteran of the Vietnam fiasco, I was pretty much
government oriented until McNamara outed the whole thing whining about haw sorry he was.
59,000 dead and he's sorry. They were able to hide the Gulf of Tonkin BS until then. After
that I researched the reasons for each war/conflict the USA started and could find no logical
reasons except hunger for power. But the little sandbox wars won't destroy the world like a
major war/conflict with Russia and it goes nuclear. Almost every politician, and major news
organizations are pushing for a war/conflict with Russia. This is insanity as no one will win
a war like this and I am sure they know that,,, but they keep the war drums beating anyhow.
It simply doesn't make sense. But Thanks again.
Same for dh, #14. Things are soooo stupid, your joking may be closer to the truth than you
know. :-)
Thank you for the post. I will save it and use it liberally, with proper attributions.
When one challenges the tribe on places like Twitter, it is hard to tell who is a real idiot
and who is a bot. How do you know? Maybe that the bots go away fairly quickly and the idiots
hang around to argue ad infinitum.
The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how
poor their deceptions are. The public perception that "russia did it!!" continues to rise. I
wonder what the public acceptance level needs to be for them to execute a MAJOR false flag
event. They seem to think they are still on target, and its just a short matter or time...
They are going to do this when the perception management is complete... We really do not need another one of their disasters
The bully pushes and pushes until stopped by the first serious push back. The dynamic of the
west and the neocon/Zionists at the core is essentially that of the bully. Nations like
Venezuela and the Philippines have started to push back, and I hope and feel fairly confident
that they will both survive the rage of the US. In some part, they have begun to show the
actual powerlessness of the bully.
But the really killer nations - Russia and China - are holding their water as they
strengthen their force. I believe that one very serious push back from either of them in the
right circumstances will stop the bully. And yet, as they bide their time, we see a curious
phenomenon wherein the US is destroying itself from the inside.
It's as if all of the forces that exist to control the country - the lockstep media, the
fully rigged markets, the hysterical military, the bought legislature and the crooked courts
- are all acting far more strongly than should be necessary. The entire system is
over-reacting, over-reaching, over-boiling. And in the course of this, the US is actually
shedding power, and at an amazing rate. But not from the action of Russia but from its
non-action, the empty space that that allows the bully's dynamic to over-reach, all the way
to complete failure.
Is it possible that deep in the security states of Russia and China there's even a study
and a model for this? Is the collapse of the US actually being gamed by Russia and China -
and through the totally counter-intuitive action of non-action?
Hey b,
Just wanted to let you know that Joe Lauria mentioned your blog and the article you wrote on
the indictment of the 13 Russians. He was on Loud and Clear (Sputnik Radio, Washington DC)
today and brought you up at the start of the program.
Glad to see you get some recognition for all the great work you've been doing :)
Ken @ 24: The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in
critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own
emotions or other people's emotions.
Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions
and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion"
(1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the
mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. https://archive.org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda
Bernays' books influenced Nazi and Soviet propaganda and Bernays himself was hired by the
US government to justify in the public mind the 1954 US invasion of Guatemala.
You may be aware that Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation which owns the Wall Street
Journal, FOX News and 20th Century Fox studios, is also on the Board of Directors of Genie
Energy which owns a subsidiary firm that was granted a licence by an Israeli court to explore
and drill for oil and natural gas in Syria's (and Israeli-occupied) Golan Heights.
The national media speaks as one -with one consistent melody day after day. Who is the
conductor?
When will one representative of the mainstream media sing solo? There must be a Ray
McGovern somewhere among the flock.
Many of my thoughts as well.
The U.S.'s greatest fault is its tacit misunderstanding of just what russia is in fact.
They utterly fail to understand the Russian character; forged over 800 years culminating with
the defeat of Nazi Germany, absorbing horrific losses; the U.S. fails to understand the
effect upon the then Soviets, become todays Russians.
Even the god's have abandoned the west...
I watched bbc news this am in the hope that I would get to see the most awful creature at the
2018 olympics cry her croc tears (long story - a speed skater who cuts off the opposition but
has been found out so now when she swoops in front of the others they either skate over her
leading to tearful whines from perp about having been 'pushed', or gets disqualified for
barging. Last night she got disqualified so as part of my study on whether types like this
believe their own bullshit I thought I'd tune in but didn't get that far into the beebs
lies)
The bulk of the bulletin was devoted to a 'lets hate Russia' session which featured a
quisling who works for the russian arm of BBC (prolly just like cold war days staffed
exclusively by MI6/SIS types). This chap, using almost unintelligible english, claimed he had
proof at least 50 Russian Mercenaries (question - why are amerikan guns for hire called
contractors [remember the Fallujah massacre of 100,000 civilians because amerikan contractors
were stupid] yet Russian contractors are called mercenaries by the media?) had been killed in
Syria last week. The bloke had evidence of one contractor's death not 50 - the proof was a
letter from the Russian government to the guy's mother telling her he didn't qualify for any
honours because he wasn't in the Russian military.
The quisling (likely a Ukranian I would say) went on to rabbit about the bloke having also
fought in Donbass under contract - to which the 'interviewer (don't ya love it when media
'interview' their own journos - a sure sign that a snippet of toxic nonsense is being
delivered) led about how the deceitful Russians had claimed the only Russians fighting in
Donbass were contractors - yeah well this bloke was a contractor surely that proves the
Russians were telling the truth.
It's not what these propagandists say; they adopt a tone and the audience is meant to hate
based on that even when the facts as stated conflict with the media outlet's point of view.
Remember the childhood trick of saying "bad dog" ter yer mutt in loving tones - the dog comes
to ya tail wagging & licks yer hand. This is that.
The next item was more Syria lies - white helmets footage (altho the beeb is now mostly
giving them an alternative name to dodge the facts about white helmets) of bandaged children
with flour tipped on their heads.
The evil Syrians and Russians are bombarding Gouta - nary a word about the continuous
artillery barrage Gouta has subjected the citizens of Damascus to for the past 4 years, or
that the Syrians have repeatedly offered truces and safe passage for civilians. Any injured
children need to ask their parents why they weren't allowed to take advantage of the frequent
offers of transport out. Maybe the parents are worried 'the resistance' will do its usual and
blow up the busloads of children after luring them over with candy.
Anyway I switched off after that so never did learn if little miss cheat had a cry.
Thank you for reporting on this. The people behind the so-called Alliance for Securing
Democracy need to be exposed for the warmongering frauds that they are. Regardless of what
one thinks of him, Trump was correct when he said that NATO is obsolete.
The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the
"security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media
Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the
world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure
evil (TPTB contend).
So the whole scenario makes perfect sense from that standpoint.
re Felix E. Dzerzhinsky: Ukrainian fascists have a particular hatred of Felix because he was
both a Bolshevik and a Pole.
I hate to do this but I just posted this elsewhere, at Off Guardian, where the Guardian is
back into its highest gears promoting war.
"The wardrums are beating in a way not heard since 1914-there is no reason for war except the
best reason of all: an imperial ruling class sees its grip slipping and will chance
everything rather than endure the humiliation of adjusting to reality.
"China is in the position that the US was in 1914-it can prevent the war or wait until the
combatants are too exhausted to defend their paltry gains.
Given the realities of nuclear warfare-which seem not to have sunk in among the Americans,
perhaps because they mistake a bubble for a bomb shelter- the wise option is to prevent war
by publicly warning against it. In the hope that brought face to face with reality the masses
will besiege their governments, as we can easily do, and prevent war.'
Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and
allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be
dealt with.
The horrible thing with the US attitude is that you do a white thing, you're attacking them
and if you do a black thing, you're attacking them too. This attitude is building hostility
against Russia. It's like programming a pet to be afraid of something. The western people are
being programmed into hating Russia, dehumanizing her people, cutting every tie with Russia
and transforming any information from Russia into life threatening propaganda. A war for our
hearts is running. The US population is being coerced into believing that war against Russia
is a vital necessity.
It will be a war of choice from the US "elites". Clinton announced it and the population
had chosen Trump for that reason.
You're wondering why they're doing it. I suppose that their narrative is losing its grip on
the western populations. They're also conscious of it. If they lose it, they'll have to face
very angry mobs and face the void of their lives. Everything they did was either useless or
poisonous. It means to be in a very bad spot. They're are therefore under an existential
threat.
Russia proved time and again that it's possible to get out of their narrative. Remember their
situation when Eltsin was reelected with the western help.
The Chicago boys were telling the
Russian authorities how to run the economy and they made out of the word democrat a synonym
of thief. They were in the narrative and the result was a disaster. Then, they woke up and
started to clean the house. I remember the "hero" of democracy whose name was "Khodorovsky
(?)". In the west he was a freedom fighter and in Russia he stole something like Rosneft.
This guy and others of the same sort were described in the west as heroes, pionniers and so
on. They were put back into submission to the law. The western silence about their stealings,
lies and cheating is still deafening me.
It was the first Russian crime. The second one was
to survive the first batch of sanctions against them (I forgot the reason of the sanctions).
They not only survived they thrived. It was against the western leading economic ideology. A
third crime was to push back Saakachvili and his troops with success.
The fourth was to put
back into order the Tchechen. Russia was back into the world politics and history. They were
not following the script written for them in Washington and Brussels. They were having a
political system putting limits to the big companies. And, worst of it, it works.
Everybody in the west who can read and listen would have noticed that they are making it.
More, with RT and Sputnik giving info outside the allowed ones or asking annoying questions
(western journalists lost that habit with their new formation in the schools of journalism -
remember the revolution in their education was criticised and I missed why - very curious to
discover why), they were exposing weaknesses of the western narrative. On the other side
their narrative became so poor and so limited that any regular reader would feel bored
reading the same things time and again and being asked to pay for it at a time his salary was
decreased in the name of competitivity. The threat to their narrative was ready. They had to
fight it.
It's becoming a crime to think outside their marks. It's becoming a crime to read outside
their marks. I don't even talk about any act outside their marks. Now, it's going to be a
crime of treason to them in war time.
I do feel sadness because many will die from their fear of losing their grip on our minds. I
do feel sadness because they have lost and are in denial about it. I do feel sadness because
those death aren't necessary. I do feel sadness because those people can't face the
consequences of their actions. They don't have the necessary spine. Their lives were useless
and even toxic. They could start repairing or mitigating their damages but it would need a
very different worldview, a complete conversion to another meaning of life outside the
immediate and maximal profit.
You have aptly described the most dangerous country on this planet.
That country must not be appeased, at any cost, because it would surely end us forever...
Conclusion regarding IP address data:
What we're seeing in this IP data is a wide range of countries and hosting providers. 15% of
the IP addresses are Tor exit nodes. These exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be
anonymous online, including malicious actors.
Overall Conclusion:
The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like
Russia. But they don't appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used
by a wide range of other malicious actors, especially the 15% of IP addresses that are Tor
exit nodes.
The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be Ukrainian. It has no apparent
relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any
website.
Partisan @15: "With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the
continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question
has again become a pressing one."
The above is entirely backwards. The bottom 2/3rds is frustrated by the LACK of democracy
in the US and that's a major reason many voted against the (in fact anti-democratic) elite's
desired candidate, Hillary.
70% of the voting age public was dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with both candidates,
and 40% of Americans didn't vote, so that means whichever of Clinton/Trump won, she/he would
win with approval of only 10% of the electorate. That's the best example possible of our
anti-democratic reality (it's not a worry or a threat, it's already here).
In the case of both Europe and the US, many people are generally very dissatisfied with
the anti-democratic response by the elite to 'the will of the people' that there be much less
immigration into countries with high unemployment and 'race to the bottom' labor conditions.
That's nearly the entire basis of what the corporate media calls 'the move right'... When in
fact restricting immigration is a pro-labor and therefore 'left' policy ... Except in the
confused and deliberately stupid political discourse the elite media pushes so hard.
Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft
(actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the
months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I
am not alone after all.
That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own
opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism
of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's
what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught
in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all
those think tanks and media.
One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but
I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments
are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality. One wonders what
they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a
fearless anti-Putin crusader?
Well, it is not...if you are believer in "democracy". Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be
modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or
the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists
one.
One way or other result is the same, it is: Barbarism.
When "trending on Twitter" became a news item in and of itself, I began to despair for the
future of reporting, political discourse and ultimately, democracy in America. Twitter and FB
are at best a source of information for news reporting, but not a source of news in
themselves.
We made ourselves vulnerable to any and every sort of pernicious manipulation and in the
end, we just about deserve everything we get.
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the
same time over the means of mental production. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the
ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.
It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of
new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is
primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all
the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia.
They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his
drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the
looting .........connect the dots.
Media and its politicians have lost it completely,
and if you criticize them, well then of course you are a... "russian bot". Unfortunately 90% of westerners buy this western
MSM influence propaganda campaign, WW3
with Russia will come easy.
At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very
highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress
and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.
It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power
and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?
I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor
primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think
they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum,
however bloody and expensive.
Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.
Chris Hedges has an article on the similar situation in Germany almost 100 years ago.
"In 1923 the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin gave a report at the Communist
International about the emergence of a political movement called fascism. ...." https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-we-fight-fascism/
Partisan @54: The facts contradict the statement in the quote that Trump was "openly
campaigning for less democracy." He wasn't. He in fact campaigned in part as a populist who
would oust (or at least repeatedly ridicule) an anti-democratic elite. If you've overlooked
that and believe more or less the opposite, you can't understand the 2016 election or the
elite's virulently anti-democratic reaction to it.
Earlier I wrote about the following relationship: Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter -
Henry Jackson Society (UK) .
With Bush and the Iraq War, Dutch PM Balkenende and FM de Hoop Scheffer were seen as the
poodle of the White House. In recent years PM Mark Rutte [of MH-17 crash fame] can be
considered its puppy. Perhaps a parrot would suit better.
I noticed a former journalist Hubert Smeets hs partnered with some people to found a
"knowledge center" Window on Russia [Raam op Rusland]. Laughable, funded by the Dutch Foreign
Ministry and a Dutch-Russia cultural exchange Fund. Preposturous in its simplicity and harm
for honest reporting.
US media has gone bonkers. The original claim was Russian meddling and Russian
interference in the election. Then, a sort of bridging meme showed up (see also b
above), undermining democracy or subverting it. This in turn then morphed into
promoting divisive issues which is new (circa 2018, not before?)
Imho. US pols make it their business to create divisive issues, diviusses
(neologism), to the point of inventing rubbish ones. Part of the US public embraces that sh*t
as well, > tribalism and religious economics in lieu of policy politics. So such actions
should be viewed as gloriously democratic, ;) - ok easy to make fun.
The emphasis on 'divisive' is curious, it signals that some managers are calling for
'union' - 'cohesion' - 'group soldering' facing the outside enemy, threat.
Russia has really become the all-purpose épouvantail scarecrow, specter of
doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled -> massive
social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.
Heh, or the whole storm is just fluff that distracts, occupies the pixels, airwaves, a
jamboree of knee-jerk reactions irrelevant to the present World Situation, with practically
no important body - faction of the PTB, Trump, the MIC, lame outsiders like the EU, etc.
having any clue.
The accusation is a lot like accusing somebody of despoiling an outhouse by crapping in
it, along with everyone else, but the outhouse in question had a sign on its door that read
"No Russians!" and the 13 Russians just ignored it and crapped in it anyway.
The reason the Outhouse of American Democracy is posted "No Russians!" is because Russia
is the enemy. There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy, and treating it
as such is incredibly foolish and dangerous, but that's beside the point. Painting Russia as
the enemy serves a psychological need rather than a rational one: Americans desperately need
some entity onto which they can project their own faults.
The US is progressing toward a
fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin.
The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the
Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the
planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of
"aggression." And so on
@Noirette 70
Yes, claiming that Russians are promoting polical division is silly -- the divisions were
already there. gizmodo
, Jun 12, 2014: It's Been 150 Years Since the U.S. Was This Politically Polarized
Nevertheless, now in WIRED
magazine: Their [Agency] goal was to enflame "political intensity through supporting radical
groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation, and oppositional social
movements."
Bernie Sanders said he on Wednesday, "felt compelled to address Russian interference
during the US election. Sunday.... he was not aware and believes Russian bot promoting
him and went as far to said WikiLeaks published Hillary's email stolen by the
Russia....."
Can you really trust that lying basted? I'm probably one of the few MoA refused to
believe and trust Bernie Sanders and the fuckup Democrats .
Excellent article summarizing much of what B has posted and more.
"Finally, and as long was we are on the topic, here is what a real troll farm looks like.
[Picture of NSA] Yet this vast suite of offices in Fort Meade, Maryland, where 20,000 SIGINT
spies and technicians work for the NSA, is only the tip of the iceberg.
The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion
defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth.
An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual
budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated,
highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys."
Great article. Great comments. I LOVE MoA! And it's great to see b getting recognition.
james wrote: "There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy"
You know the following; I think you're just too decent a human being to understand how
psychopaths operate. Russia is a huge area with enormous natural resources as well as a
large, educated populace. Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand
Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which
boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling
off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest).
Ziggy also noted that once Russia was incorporated, China is the next, and largely last
target.
Jen: NICE JOB putting together a big picture, from Bernays' control of the masses all the
way to Genie Energy. Add in Oded Yinon and PNAC and the "foreign policy blunders" that led to
the present situation in MENA look like a carefully-constructed, long-game being played "by
the book."
Fairleft. Any leftist/socialist movement which is not global is doomed to failure. This
has always been true, but with "offshoring" of manufacturing jobs and the internet
untethering many "white collar" jobs from any given geological location(s), workers must see
ourselves as a global entity rather than national or regional players - because that is
certainly how the 0.01% see us (and themselves).
"Workers of the world UNITE" is more true today than a century and a half ago.
nations that do not have to face costs arising from environmental, health or safety
legislation will almost always prevail in the world market over those that have some concern
for the environment and the workers.
That is the main issue I have with globalization.
Competing on wages is one thing; that can be a great impetus to become more efficient and
productive, but if we do nothing to force other countries to clean up their act, they will
have no impetus to do so and we will continue to lose jobs to the international competition,
no matter how efficiently we work.
Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a
large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and
paranoia.
"....borderless globalization has been a catastrophe for most of the underdeveloped world's
businesses and workers."
it is always annoying when I see the 'globalization" argument is used whether from the
right or left. The globalization has started by the moment when us humans begin to roaming on this
planet. there are millions of examples yet somehow globalization is of recent phenomenon.
Lapis Lazuli mineral used in making blue color and paint is found on clay pottery in
Mesopotamia's ancient city of Ur. That city is also place where many legend originated which
were taken by major religion and can be found in their holy books. See even the myth are globalizied from very early on.
Most of the people do not even know what it is, not those who are writing about it.
Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend
or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by
national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping
or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted
chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and
the United States.
One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs.
Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich
countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion
of secure employment.
the observable and demonstrable attempts are clearly futile, and have been pretty
much reduced to spasms and tantrums, largely devoid of cognizance, not to mention legality,
but certainly dangerous nonetheless.
no sir ree bob, we get our multipolar world or we scavenge a dead landscape of Alamogordo glass .
Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering
to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the
differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the
other forces at play."
Cybersecurity "experts" in the United States have long alleged that "Russian bots" were used
to meddle in the 2016 elections.
But, as it turns out, the authors of a Senate report on "Russian election meddling" actually
ran the false flag meddling operation themselves.
A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia
of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its
authors , New Knowledge , quickly became a household name. Described by the New
York Timesas a
group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the U.S.
military and the intelligence agencies.
Morgan and Fox have both struck gold in the " Russiagate " scheme, which sprung into being
after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan,
for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that
purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. And also
worth mentioning, that dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for
Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by
NATO (North AtTreaty Tready Organization) and
USAID (United States Agency for International Development).
It is worth noting that the 600 " Russia-linked " Twitter accounts monitored by the
dashboard is not disclosed to the public either, making it impossible to verify these claims.
This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry
journalists, however. Yet on December 19, a New York Times
story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created the fake army of Russian bots, as well
as several fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in
Alabama's 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake
Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several
Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to
support a write-in candidate instead . In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had
" orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore
campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet ." – RT
This scandal is being perpetrated by the
United States media and has so far deceived millions, if not more. The botnet claim made a
splash on social media and was further amplified by
Mother Jones , which based its story on "expert opinion" from Morgan's dubious creation,
Hamilton 68.
Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Tim es
piece, had known about the meddling for months because he spoke at an event where the
organizers boasted about it!
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement
Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar.
Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican
votes, "enrage " Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a " false flag " to hurt Moore. He
dubbed it " Project Birmingham ." -RT
There really was meddling in American democracy by " Russian bots. " Except those bots
weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly
responsible for creating and amplifying the " Russiagate " hysteria over the past two years in
a
textbook case of psychological projection ,
brainwashing, and
Nazi-style propaganda campaigns.
"... At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like. ..."
"... I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum, however bloody and expensive. ..."
"... Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud. ..."
At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very
highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress
and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.
It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power
and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?
I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor
primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think
they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum,
however bloody and expensive.
Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.
"... Britain must surely be in the running for many reasons: among others, the sheer disaster that is Theresa May's government (and the various clowns and thuggish goons that constitute her Cabinet), the Brexit mess, the Skripal poisoning circus, Britain's own collapse in controlling the propaganda narrative on Syria and the revelations about Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, and their ties to the British military establishment. ..."
If Syria wins the award for Country of the Year 2018, I'd hate to see who gets the Wooden
Spoon for 2018. There must be quite a few serious contenders for that prize!
Britain must surely be in the running for many reasons: among others, the sheer
disaster that is Theresa May's government (and the various clowns and thuggish goons that
constitute her Cabinet), the Brexit mess, the Skripal poisoning circus, Britain's own
collapse in controlling the propaganda narrative on Syria and the revelations about Integrity
Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, and their ties to the British military
establishment.
"... Ever since US Crude Oil peaked its production in 1970, the US has known that at some point the oil majors would have their profitability damaged, "assets" downgraded, and borrowing capacity destroyed. At this point their shares would become worthless and they would become bankrupt. The contagion from this would spread to transport businesses, plastics manufacture, herbicides and pesticide production and a total collapse of Industrial Civilisation. ..."
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with
Russia."
Ever since US Crude Oil peaked its production in 1970, the US has known that at some
point the oil majors would have their profitability damaged, "assets" downgraded, and
borrowing capacity destroyed. At this point their shares would become worthless and they
would become bankrupt. The contagion from this would spread to transport businesses, plastics
manufacture, herbicides and pesticide production and a total collapse of Industrial
Civilisation.
In anticipation of increasing Crude Oil imports, Nixon stopped the convertibility of
Dollars into Gold, thus making the Dollar entirely fiat, allowing them to print as much of
the currency as they needed.
They also began a system of obscuring oil production data, involving the DoE's EIA and the
OECD's IEA, by inventing an ever-increasing category of Undiscovered Oilfields in their
predictions, and combining Crude Oil and Condensate (from gas fields) into one category (C+C)
as if they were the same thing. As well the support of the ethanol-from-corn industry began,
even though it was uneconomic. The Global Warming problem had to be debunked, despite its
sound scientific basis. Energy-intensive manufacturing work was off-shored to cheap
labour+energy countries, and Just-in-Time delivery systems were honed.
In 2004 the price of Crude Oil rose from $28 /barrel up to $143 /b in mid-2008. This
demonstrated that there is a limit to how much business can pay for oil (around $100 /b).
Fracking became marginally economic at these prices, but the frackers never made a profit as
over-production meant prices fell to about $60 /b. The Government encourages this destructive
industry despite the fact it doesn't make any money, because the alternative is the end of
Industrial Civilisation.
Eventually though, there must come a time when there is not enough oil to power all the
cars and trucks, bulldozers, farm tractors, airplanes and ships, as well as manufacture all
the wind turbines and solar panels and electric vehicles, as well as the upgraded
transmission grid. At that point, the game will be up, and it will be time for WW3. So we
need to line up some really big enemies, and develop lots of reasons to hate them.
Thus you see the demonisation of Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela for reasons that don't
make sense from a normal perspective.
It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of
new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is
primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all
the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia.
They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his
drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the
looting .........connect the dots.
"The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Demorats Experts
masquerading as progressive Republicans and Democrats"............FIFY
It's all they have left after being rendered politically irrelevant and statistically
insignificant in November 2016 by the deplorables. ROFLMAO.........this civil war needs to
die in federal government so we do not waste money in mass deportations to an established
island nation surrounded by 1000 nautical miles of water.
"Election tampering via false identity" sounds like the right kind of language for
a federal law -- but I'm betting there is something already out there (at state/fed level),
and am not wild about yet more laws (which [[[they]]] get to ignore anyway).
a text book case of "projection" by demorats -their own crimes of sedition and treason
projected onto trump via the russians.
one can only hope that Mueller has found the proof that DemoRats were responsible for
attempts to rig the presidential elections - aided and abetted by criminal journalists also
guilty of sedition and treason.
As if it ******* matters at this point. Get real. We are watching a display of raw power
right now. Well connected individuals are calling the shots right now, well outside of the
legal system. If you haven't realized that over the past 2 years, you haven't been paying
attention. Furthermore, no amount of factual proof is going to result in the actual criminals
being held to account. The thing that is most difficult for Americans to grasp is that they
do not control their own government and have not for many decades. They do not have an equal
system of justice. Instead, the US is ruled by a secret oligarchy which exists above the US
legal code. This is the harsh reality we are watching be revealed right now.
We're watching an attempted display of raw power...that hasn't been going as
planned. If it had, Trump would either be gone or automagically transformed into the next
iteration of BushBama. We are fly in the ointment...buzz buzz
No prosecution... our DOJ does not prosecute anything political... no matter how serious
the felony. Just ask the ***-maggots Hillary, Brennan, Comey, Clapper and Lynch.
Wow! What does Sherlock Holmes Mueller think of this? This story makes Mueller out to be
the biggest fraud of all time and his attorneys tantamount to the Keystone Cops. Where are
they on all this?
US media has gone bonkers. The original claim was Russian meddling and Russian
interference in the election. Then, a sort of bridging meme showed up (see also b
above), undermining democracy or subverting it. This in turn then morphed into
promoting divisive issues which is new (circa 2018, not before?)
Imho. US pols make it their business to create divisive issues, diviusses
(neologism), to the point of inventing rubbish ones. Part of the US public embraces that sh*t
as well, > tribalism and religious economics in lieu of policy politics. So such actions
should be viewed as gloriously democratic, ;) - ok easy to make fun.
The emphasis on 'divisive' is curious, it signals that some managers are calling for
'union' - 'cohesion' - 'group soldering' facing the outside enemy, threat.
Russia has really become the all-purpose épouvantail scarecrow, specter of
doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled -> massive
social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.
Heh, or the whole storm is just fluff that distracts, occupies the pixels, airwaves, a
jamboree of knee-jerk reactions irrelevant to the present World Situation, with practically
no important body - faction of the PTB, Trump, the MIC, lame outsiders like the EU, etc.
having any clue.
At the inception of this entire RussiaGate spectacle I suggested that it was a political
distraction to take the attention away from the rejection by the people of neoliberalism which
has been embraced by the establishments of both political parties.
And that the result of the investigation would be indictments for perjury in the covering up
of illicit business deals and money laundering. But that 'collusion to sway the election' was
without substance, if not a joke.
Everything that has been revealed to date tends to support that.
One thing that Aaron overlooks is the evidence compiled by William Binney and associates
that strongly suggests the DNC hack was no hack at all, but a leak by an insider who was
appalled by the lies and double dealing at the DNC.
In general, RussiaGate is a farcical distraction from other issues as they say in the video.
And this highlights the utterly Machiavellian streak in the corporate Democrats and the Liberal
establishment under the Clintons and their ilk who care more about money and power than the
basic principles that historically sustained their party. I have lost all respect for them.
But unfortunately this does open the door for those who use this to approve of the
Republican establishment, which is 'at least honest' about being substantially corrupt servants
to Big Money who care nothing about democracy, the Constitution, or the public. The best of
them are leaving or have already left, and their party is ruined beyond repair.
This all underscores the paucity of the Red v. Blue, monopoly of two parties, 'lesser of two
evils' model of political thought which has come to dominate the discussion in the US.
We are heavily propagandized by the owners of the corporate media and influencers of the
narrative, and a professional class that has sold its soul for economic advantage and access to
money and power.
Is this shadow of Integrity Initiative in the USA ? This false flag open the possibility that other similar events like
DNC (with very questionable investigation by Crowdstrike, which was a perfect venue to implement a false flag; cybersecurity area is
the perfect environment for planting false flags), MH17 (might be an incident but later it definitely was played as a false flag), Skripals
(Was Skripals poisoning a false flag decided to hide the fact that Sergey Skripal was involved in writing Steele dossier?) and Litvinenko
(probably connected with lack of safety measures in the process of smuggling of Plutonium by Litvinenko himself, but later played a
a false flag). All of those now should be re-assessed from the their potential of being yet another flag flag operation
against Russia. While Browder was a MI6 operation from the very beginning (and that explains
why he abdicated the US citizenship more convincingly that the desire to avoid taxes) .
Notable quotes:
"... Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior. ..."
"... Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign). ..."
"... By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling." ..."
"... The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true). ..."
For over two years now, the concepts of "Russian collusion" and "Russian election meddling" have been shoved down our throats
by the mainstream media (MSM) under the guise of legitimate concern that the Kremlin may have installed a puppet president in Donald
Trump.
Having no evidence of collusion aside from a largely unverified opposition-research dossier fabricated by a former British spy,
the focus shifted from "collusion" to "meddling" and "influence." In other words, maybe Trump didn't actually collude with Putin,
but the Kremlin used Russian tricks to influence the election in Trump's favor. To some, this looked like nothing more than an establishment
scheme to cast a permanent spectre of doubt over the legitimacy of President Donald J. Trump.
Election meddling "Russian bots" and "troll farms" became the central focus - as claims were levied of social media operations
conducted by Kremlin-linked organizations which sought to influence and divide certain segments of America.
And while scant evidence of a Russian influence operation exists outside of a handful of indictments connected to a St. Petersburg
"Troll farm" (which a liberal journalist
cast serious doubt ov er), the MSM - with all of their proselytizing over the "threat to democracy" that election meddling poses,
has largely decided to ignore actual evidence of "Russian bots" created by Democrat IT experts, used against a GOP candidate in the
Alabama special election, and amplified through the Russian bot-detecting "Hamilton 68" dashboard developed by the same IT experts.
Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation
against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed
to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior.
As Russian state-owned RT puts
it - and who could blame them for being a bit pissed over the whole thing, "it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy
by "Russian bots." Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible
for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection. "
A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout
by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.
Described by the
New York Times
as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies.
Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agenc y. His partner,
Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company
in 2018 alone.
...
On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as
fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names,
and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded
voters to support a write-in candidate instead.
In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea
that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."
It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones, which based its story
on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious creation, Hamilton 68. -
RT
Moore ended up losing the Alabama special election by a slim margin of just
In other words: In November 2017 – when Moore and his Democratic opponent were in a bitter fight to win over voters – Morgan
openly promoted the theory that Russian bots were supporting Moore's campaign . A year later – after being caught red-handed orchestrating
a self-described "false flag" operation – Morgan now says that his team never thought that the bots were Russian and have no idea
what their purpose was . Did he think no one would notice? -
RT
Disinformation warrior @ jonathonmorgan attempts to control
damage by lying. He now claims the "false flag operation" never took place and the botnet he promoted as Russian-linked (based
on phony Hamilton68 Russian troll tracker he developed) wasn't Russian https://www.
newknowledge.com/blog/about-ala bama
Even more strange is that Scott Shane - the journalist who wrote the New York Times piece exposing the Alabama "Russian bot" scheme,
knew about it for months after speaking at an event where the organizers bragged about the false flag on Moore .
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey
Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to
suppress Republican votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hrt Moore. He dubbed it "Project
Birmingham." - RT
Shane told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, though hid behind a nondisclosure agreement at the request of American
Engagement Technologies (AET). He instead chose to spin the New Knowledge "false flag" operation on Moore as "limited Russian tactics"
which were part of an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 - and which had no effect on the election.
New Knowledge suggested that the false flag operation was simply a "research project," which Morgan suggested was designed "to
better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation."
While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard
to give his "false flag" more credibility – misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was fake.
New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which
announced last week that five
accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
- RT
They knew exactly what they were doing
While Morgan and New Knowledge sought to frame the "Project Birmingham" as a simple research project, a leaked copy of the operation's
after-action report reveals that they knew exactly what they were doing .
"We targeted 650,000 like AL voters, with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification
and targeted advertising," reads the report published by entrepreneur and executive coach Jeff Giesea.
The rhetorical question remains, why did the MSM drop this election meddling story like a hot rock after the initial headlines
faded away?
criminal election meddling, but then who the **** is going to click on some morons tactic and switch votes?
anyone basing any funding, whether it is number of facebook hits or attempted mind games by egotistical cuck soyboys needs a serious
psychological examination. fake news is fake BECAUSE IT ISNT REAL AND DOES NOT MATTER TO ANYONE but those living in the excited misery
of their tiny bubble world safe spaces. SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CON AND IS NOT IMPORTANT OR RELEVANT TO ANYONE.
far more serious is destroying ballots, writing in ballots without consent, bussing voters around to vote multiple times in different
districts, registering dead voters and imperosnating the corpses, withholding votes until deadlines pass - making them invalid.
Herdee , 10 minutes ago
NATO on behalf of the Washington politicians uses the same bullsh*t propaganda for continual war.
Mugabe , 20 minutes ago
Yup "PROJECTION"...
Yippie21 , 21 minutes ago
None of this even touches on the 501c3 or whatever that was set up , concerned Alabama voters or somesuch, and was funneled
a **** load of money to be found to be in violation of the law AFTER the election and then it all just disappeared. Nothing to
see here folks, Democrat won, let's move on. There was a LOT of " tests " for the smart-set in that election and it all worked.
We saw a bunch of it used in 2018, especially in Texas with Beto and down-ballot races. Democrats cleaned up like crazy in Texas,
especially in Houston.
2020 is going to be a hot mess. And the press is in on it, and even if illegal or unseemly things are done, as long as Democrats
win, all good... let's move on. Crazy.
LetThemEatRand , 21 minutes ago
The fact that MSM is not covering this story -- which is so big it truly raises major questions about the entire Russiagate
conspiracy including why Mueller was appointed in the first place -- is proof that they have no interest in journalism or the
truth and that they are 100% agenda driven liars. Not that we needed more proof, but there it is anyway.
Oldguy05 , 19 minutes ago
Dimz corruption is a nogo. Now if it were conservatives.......
CosineCosineCosine , 23 minutes ago
I'm not a huge fan, but Jimmy Dore has a cathartic and entertaining 30 minutes on this farce. Well worth the watch:
Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election
(not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign).
By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we
are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were,
actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling."
The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all
on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people
who have a vested interest in convincing us its true).
dead hobo , 30 minutes ago
I've been watching Scandal on Netflix. Still only in season 2. Amazing how nothing changes.They nailed it and memorialized
it. The MSM are useful idiots who are happy to make money publicizing what will sell the best.
chunga , 30 minutes ago
The media is biased and sucks, yup.
The reason the reds lost the house is because they went along with this nonsense and did nothing about it, like frightened
baby chipmunks.
JRobby , 33 minutes ago
Only when "the opposition" does it is it illegal. Total totalitarian state wannabe stuff.
divingengineer , 22 minutes ago
Amazing how people can contort reality to justify their own righteous cause, but decry their opposition for the EXACT same
thing. See trump visit to troops signing hats as most recent proof. If DJT takes a piss and sprinkles the seat, it's a crime.
DarkPurpleHaze , 33 minutes ago
They're afraid to expose themselves...unlike Kevin Spacey. Trump or Whitaker will expose this with one signature. It's
coming.
divingengineer , 20 minutes ago
Spacey has totally lost it. See his latest video, it will be a powerful piece of evidence for an insanity plea.
CosineCosineCosine , 10 minutes ago
Disagree strongly. I think it was excellent - perhaps you misunderstood the point? 6 minutes Diana Davidson look at it clarifies
"... Craig Murray today publishes accounts from the "Integrity Initiative" showing that journalists in Scotland are receiving retainers of 2500 a month Sterling, plus expenses and payment for actual articles published. ..."
"... We can be actually confident not just that the journalists in the MSM are on the payroll but that the invoices and accounts for their bribes are carefully preserved. ..."
"... What we are witnessing is the complete incompetence of those running the Empire. While malicious, indeed deadly, they simply cannot keep up with the critics of imperialism. Their power rests entirely on their ability to use force, both physical and financial. ..."
Craig Murray today publishes accounts from the "Integrity Initiative" showing that
journalists in Scotland are receiving retainers of 2500 a month Sterling, plus expenses and
payment for actual articles published.
And if this is going on in Scotland we can be quite sure that it is actually happening in
North America and Europe, generally, and, of course, in the less prosperous parts of the
world where standards of integrity are just as low as they are hereabouts.
We can be actually confident not just that the journalists in the MSM are on the
payroll but that the invoices and accounts for their bribes are carefully preserved.
Murray's blog is almost always worth following, just as 'b's is. Yesterday more news about
the Skripal case emerged: it seems that the British government was prepared well in advance
for the sudden attack on Skripal.
What we are witnessing is the complete incompetence of those running the Empire. While
malicious, indeed deadly, they simply cannot keep up with the critics of imperialism. Their
power rests entirely on their ability to use force, both physical and financial. Their
attempts to use social medias to their advantage are lame and ineffective. It seems clear to
me that they will soon be reduced to using their power not just to hobble but to cripple
critics- net neutrality is already finished.
Craig Murray is right that "As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier."
Collapse of neoliberal ideology and rise of tentions in neoliberal sociarties resulted in unprecedented increase of covert and false
flag operations by British intelligence services, especially against Russia, which had been chosen as a convenient scapegoat.
With Steele dossier and Skripal affair as two most well known.
New Lady Macbeth (Theresa May) Russophobia is so extreme that her cabinet derailed the election of a Russian to head
Interpol.
Looks like neoliberalism cannot be defeated by and faction of the existing elite. Only when shepp oil end mant people will
have a chance. The US , GB and EU are part of the wider hegemonic neoliberal system. In fact rejection of neoliberal
globalization probably will lead to "national neoliberals" regime which would be a flavor of neo-fascism, no more no less.
Notable quotes:
"... The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. ..."
"... I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign. ..."
"... It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia. ..."
"... the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it. ..."
"... By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building . It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London. ..."
"... Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence. ..."
"... I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills. ..."
"... I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information. ..."
"... one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day ..."
"... As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier. ..."
"... You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy". ..."
The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. Look up Eldred Pottinger, who for 180 years appears
in scores of British history books – right up to and including William Dalrymple's Return of the King – as a British officer who
chanced to be passing Herat on holiday when it came under siege from a partly Russian-officered Persian army, and helped to organise
the defences. In researching
Sikunder Burnes, I discovered and published from the British Library incontrovertible and detailed documentary evidence that
Pottinger's entire journey was under the direct instructions of, and reporting to, British spymaster Alexander Burnes. The first
historian to publish the untrue "holiday" cover story, Sir John Kaye, knew both Burnes and Pottinger and undoubtedly knew he was
publishing lying propaganda. Every other British historian of the First Afghan War (except me and latterly
Farrukh Husain) has just followed Kaye's official propaganda.
Some things don't change. I was irresistibly reminded of Eldred Pottinger just passing Herat on holiday, when I learnt how
highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane
just happened to be on holiday in the
United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Recent university graduate Simon Bracey-Lane took it even further. Originally from Wimbledon in London, he was inspired to
rejoin the Labour party in September when Corbyn was elected leader. But by that point, he was already in the US on holiday. So
he joined the Sanders campaign, and never left.
"I had two weeks left and some money left, so I thought, Fuck it, I'll make some calls for Bernie Sanders," he explains. "I just
sort of knew Des Moines was the place, so I just turned up at their HQ, started making phone calls, and then became a fully fledged
field organiser."
It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane
is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely
unbalanced panel of British
military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia.
Nor would it seem likely that Bracey-Lane would be involved with the Integrity Initiative. Even the mainstream media has been
forced to give a few paragraphs to the outrageous Integrity Initiative, under which the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft
has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against
Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of
influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus
exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and
others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it.
The mainstream media have
tracked down
the HQ of the "Institute for Statecraft" to a derelict mill near Auchtermuchty. It is owned by one of the company directors, Daniel
Lafayeedney, formerly of D Squadron 23rd SAS Regiment and later of Military Intelligence (and incidentally born the rather more prosaic
Daniel Edney).
By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location
of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of
the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building.
It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London.
Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing
for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence.
Having been told where the Institute for Statecraft skulk, I tipped off journalist Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio to go and physically
check it out. Kit did so and was
aggressively
ejected by that well-known Corbyn and Sanders supporter, Simon Bracey-Lane. It does seem somewhat strange that our left wing
hero is deeply embedded in an organisation that
launches troll attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.
I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation
war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I
am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills.
I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the
Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter
for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information.
But one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the
British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that
we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity
Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media,
it would be the biggest story of the day.
As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier.
You can
bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy".
As both Scottish Independence and Jeremy Corbyn are viewed as
real threats by the British Establishment, you can anticipate every possible kind of dirty trick in the next couple of years, with
increasing frequency and audacity
"... In his just published book, War With Russia? ..."
"... To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition." ..."
"... Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared. ..."
"... The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned. ..."
Throughout the long Cold War Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University was a
voice of reason. He refused to allow his patriotism to blind him to Washington's contribution to the conflict and to criticize only
the Soviet contribution. Cohen's interest was not to blame the enemy but to work toward a mutual understanding that would remove
the threat of nuclear war. Although a Democrat and left-leaning, Cohen would have been at home in the Reagan administration, as Reagan's
first priority was to end the Cold War. I know this because I was part of the effort. Pat Buchanan will tell you the same thing.
In 1974 a notorious cold warrior, Albert Wohlstetter, absurdly accused the CIA of underestimating the Soviet threat. As the CIA
had every incentive for reasons of budget and power to overestimate the Soviet threat, and today the "Russian threat," Wohlstetter's
accusation made no sense on its face. However he succeeded in stirring up enough concern that CIA director George H.W. Bush, later
Vice President and President, agreed to a Team B to investigate the CIA's assessment, headed by the Russiaphobic Harvard professor
Richard Pipes. Team B concluded that the Soviets thought they could win a nuclear war and were building the forces with which to
attack the US.
The report was mainly nonsense, and it must have have troubled Stephen Cohen to experience the setback to negotiations that Team
B caused.
Today Cohen is stressed that it is the United States that thinks it can win a nuclear war. Washington speaks openly of using "low
yield" nuclear weapons, and intentionally forecloses any peace negotiations with Russia with a propaganda campaign against Russia
of demonization, vilification, and transparent lies, while installing missile bases on Russia's borders and while talking of incorporating
former parts of Russia into NATO. In his just published book, War With Russia? , which I highly recommend, Cohen makes a
convincing case that Washington is asking for war.
I agree with Cohen that if Russia is a threat it is only because the US is threatening Russia. The stupidity of the policy toward
Russia is creating a Russian threat. Putin keeps emphasizing this. To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring
us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless
repetition."
Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the
Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of
cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared.
The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media
and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media
to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful
use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo
Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned.
The demonization of Russia is also aided and abetted by the Democrats' hatred of Trump and anger from Hillary's loss of the presidential
election to the "Trump deplorables." The Democrats purport to believe that Trump was installed by Putin's interference in the presidential
election. This false belief is emotionally important to Democrats, and they can't let go of it.
Although Cohen as a professor at Princeton and NYU never lacked research opportunities, in the US Russian studies, strategic studies,
and the like are funded by the military/security complex whose agenda Cohen's scholarship does not serve. At the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, where I held an independently financed chair for a dozen years, most of my colleagues were dependent on
grants from the military/security complex. At the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where I was a Senior Fellow for three
decades, the anti-Soviet stance of the Institution reflected the agenda of those who funded the institution.
I am not saying that my colleagues were whores on a payroll. I am saying that the people who got the appointments were people
who were inclined to see the Soviet Union the way the military/security complex thought it should be seen.
As Stephen Cohen is aware, in the original Cold War there was some balance as all explanations were not controlled. There were
independent scholars who could point out that the Soviets, decimated by World War 2, had an interest in peace, and that accommodation
could be achieved, thus avoiding the possibility of nuclear war.
Stephen Cohen must have been in the younger ranks of those sensible people, as he and President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet
Union, Jack Matloff, seem to be the remaining voices of expert reason on the American scene.
If you care to understand the dire threat under which you live, a threat that only a few people, such as Stephen Cohen, are trying
to lift, read his book.
If you want to understand the dire threat that a bought-and-paid-for American media poses to your existence, read Cohen's accounts
of their despicable lies. America has a media that is synonymous with lies.
If you want to understand how corrupt American universities are as organizations on the take for money, organizations to whom
truth is inconsequential, read Cohen's book.
If you want to understand why you could be dead before Global Warming can get you, read Cohen's book.
"... Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation program !!! ..."
"... the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global elites? ..."
"... Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they are fighting the commies. ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth. ..."
"... He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI). ..."
"... This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine. ..."
"... That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia" ..."
"... In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested Military measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea: ..."
"... Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia? ..."
"... Yes, Putin really believes his own propaganda ..."
"... Putin's paranoia is driving his foreign adventures ..."
"... Russian information warfare - airbrushing reality ..."
"... Distract, deceive, destroy: Putin at war in Syria ..."
"... Russian penetration in Germany ..."
"... Russian conspiracy theory and foreign policy ..."
"... The most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the Initiative commissioned such research (pdf) and paid for it. ..."
"... Here is an interesting look at how little the Russia-linked entities spent on advertising on Google during the 2016 election: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/12/google-russia-and-4700-in-advertising.html Slowly but surely, the Russian meddling narrative is falling apart. ..."
"... McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow vest protesters. ..."
"... Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would have responded with force. ..."
"... It looks like one of the decision was to get closer to France (after getting very close friends in Homs and Aleppo?) See the list of people in the French II cluster dumped yesterday by Anonymous: half the names work at the fr Min of F Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_House_Treaties and http://www.gmfus.org/publications/frances-defense-partnerships-and-dilemmas-brexit ..."
"... This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state. ..."
"... it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy. ..."
"... It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes fascism. ..."
"... Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art. ..."
"... Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller? ..."
"... Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. " Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11, with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians. ..."
"... Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM ..."
"... The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism (Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque (less defensible) reasons and missions. ..."
"... right after 2016 US elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation. Seems that veil has been dispensed with ..."
"... Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking, setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry. That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise of free markets and democracy. ..."
"... 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation Designed To Create A New Enemy ..."
Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation
program !!! How many billions is that guna save us all ! not to mention lives saved.
Wrong JR. It seems quite the obvious that the big boy in the west, the US, would seem to be
the one spearheading the whole globalist agenda.
But this is a retarded proposition.
The US is nothing more than a Golem. It has been reduced to somnambulism and hijacked,
utilized for the ends of these Non-National elites. Sure, like many posters here, it feels good
to blame the US for everything. But the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its
hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but
ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global
elites?
Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power
brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of
Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they
are fighting the commies.
Muntadhar al-Zaidi was arrested and tortured for it...
"They broke my teeth, my nose, my leg, they electrocuted me, lashed me, they would beat me,
they even broke a table or a chair over my back. I don't know, they had my eyes covered,"
al-Zaidi recalled. "This was one thing I never experienced before. Torture by the
authorities, by the rule of law."
I wish it had been a hand grenade.
The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading
anti-Russian propaganda and with influencing the public, military and governments of a number
of countries. What follows is an incomplete analysis of the third batch of the Initiative's
papers which was
dumped yesterday.
Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot
Integrity Initiative . The
Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".
Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government
Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state donors.
Among the documents
lifted by some anonymous person from the servers of the Institute we find several papers
about Donnelly as well as some memos written by him. They show a russophobe mind with a lack of
realistic strategic thought.
There is also
a file (pdf) with a copy of his passport:
From his
curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army
Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA
Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office
(FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth.
He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries
General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises
the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's
Stabilisation Unit which
is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the
Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI).
During his time as military intelligence analyst in the 1980s Donnelly wrote several books
and papers about the Soviet Union and its military.
Our problem is that, for the last 70 years or so, we in the UK and Europe have been living in
a safe, secure rules-based system which has allowed us to enjoy a holiday from history.
... ... ...
Unfortunately, this state of affairs is now being challenged. A new paradigm of conflict
is replacing the 19th & 20th Century paradigm.
... ... ...
In this new paradigm, the clear distinction which most people have been able to draw
between war and peace, their expectation of stability and a degree of predictability in life,
are being replaced by a volatile unpredictability, a permanent state of instability in which
war and peace become ever more difficult to disentangle . The "classic" understanding of
conflict being between two distinct players or groups of players is giving way to a world of
Darwinian competition where all the players – nation states, sub-state actors, big
corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and so on – are constantly striving with each
other in a "war of all against all". The Western rules-based system, which most westerners
take for granted and have come to believe is "normal", is under attack from countries and
organisations which wish to replace our system with theirs. This is not a crisis which faces
us; it is a strategic challenge, and from several directions simultaneously.
In reality the "Western rules-based system", fully implemented after the demise of the
Soviet Union, is a concept under which 'the west' arbitrarily makes up rules and threatens to
kill anyone who does not follow them. Witness the wars against Serbia, the war on Iraq, the
destruction of Libya, the western led coup in Ukraine and the war by Jihadi proxies against the
people of Syria and Iraq. None of these actions were legal under international law. Demanding a
return to strict adherence to the rule of international law, as Russia,
China and others now do, it is not an attempt to replace "our system with theirs". It is a
return to the normal state of global diplomacy. It is certainly not a "Darwinian
competition".
In October 2016 Donnelly had a Private
Discussion with Gen Sir Richard Barrons (pdf), marked as personal and confidential. Barrons
is a former commander of the British Joint Forces Command. The nonsensical top line is: "The UK
defence model is failing. UK is at real risk."
Some interesting nuggets again reveal a paranoid mindset. The talk also includes some
realistic truthiness about the British military posture Barrons and others created:
There has been a progressive, systemic demobilisation of NATO militarily capability and a run
down of all its members' defences
...
We are seeing new / reinvented ways of warfare – hybrid , plus the reassertion of hard
power in warfare
...
Aircraft Carriers can be useful for lots of things, but not for war v China or Russia, so we
should equip them accordingly. ...
The West no longer has a military edge on Russia. ...
Our Nuclear programme drains resources from conventional forces and hollows them out. ...
The UK Brigade in Germany is no good as a deterrent against Russia. ...
Our battalion in Estonia are hostages, not a deterrent. ...
The general laments the lack of influence the military has on the British government and its
people. He argues for more government financed think tank research that can be fed back into
the government:
So, if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a
way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political
space. We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. NB We did this in
the 1930s
My conclusion is that it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something
dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside
government .
...
We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the national
capabilities / capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of resources to
do it? We need this debate NOW. There is not a moment to be lost.
This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper
into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken
from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine.
That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative
bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the
public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance
indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for
the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia"
.
Asking for government finance to influence the government to take a "tougher stand towards
Russia" seems a bit circular. But this is consistent with the operation of other Anglo-American
think tanks and policy initiatives in which one part of the government, usually the hawkish
one, secretly uses NGO's and think-tanks to lobby other parts of the government to support
their specific hobbyhorse and budget.
Here is how it is done. The 'experts' of the 'charity' Institute for Statecraft and
Integrity Initiative
testified
in the British parliament. While they were effectively paid by the government they lobbied
parliament under the cover of their NGO. This circularity also allows to use international
intermediates. Members of the Spanish cluster
(pdf) of the Initiative
testified in the British Parliament about the Catalan referendum and related allegations
against Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. (It is likely that this testimony led to the change
in the position of the Ecuadorian government towards Assange.)
Unfortunately, or luckily, such lobbying operations are mostly run by people who are
incompetent in the specific field they are lobbying for. Chris Donnelly, despite a life long
experience in military intelligence, has obviously zero competence as a military strategist or
planner.
In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested
Military
measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea:
If I were in charge I would get the following implemented asp
Set up a cordon sanitaire across the Crimean Isthmus and on the coast N. of Crimea with
troops and mines
Mine Sevastopol harbour/bay. Can be done easily using a car ferry if they have no
minelayers. Doesn't need a lot of mines to be effective. They could easily buy some
mines.
Get their air force into the air and activate all their air defences. If they can't fly
the Migs on the airfield in Crimea those should be destroyed as a gesture that they are
serious. Going "live" electronically will worry the Russians as the Ukrainians have the
same electronic kit. If the Russians jam it they jam their own kit as well.
Ukraine used to have some seriously important weapons, such as a big microwave
anti-satellite weapon. If they still have this, they should use it.
The government needs a Strategic communication campaign-so far everything is coming
from Moscow. They need to articulate a long-term vision that will inspire the people,
however hard that is to do. Without it, what have people to fight for?
They should ask the west now to start supplying Oil and gas. There is plenty available
due to the mild winter.
I am trying to get this message across
Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the
frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures"
would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally
stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's
pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia?
Such half-assed thinking is typical for the Institute and its creation of propaganda. One of
its employees/contractors is Hugh Benedict Nimmo who the Initiative paid to produce
anti-Russian propaganda that was then disseminated through various western publications.
According to the (still very incomplete) Initiative files Ben Nimmo
received a monthly consultancy fee of £2.500 between December 2015 and March 2016. In
August 2016 he sent an invoice
(pdf) of £5,000 for his "August work on Integrity Initiative". A
Production Timetable (pdf) for March to June 2016 lists the following Nimmo outputs and
activities:
17 March Atlantic Council: Yes, Putin really believes his own propaganda , Ben
Nimmo
21 March Newsweek: Putin's paranoia is driving his foreign adventures , Ben
Nimmo
22 March, UK House of Commons: Russian information warfare - airbrushing
reality , Jonathan Eyal and Ben Nimmo
Mid May: Atlantic Council: Distract, deceive, destroy: Putin at war in Syria .
Ben Nimmo et al (Major study)
Early May timeframe: Russian penetration in Germany , Harold Elletson, Ben
Nimmo et al - 10,000 words
June timeframe: Atlantic Council, major report on Russian conspiracy theory and
foreign policy , Ben Nimmo (potential launch events in London and / or
Washington)
End-June: Mapping Russia's whole influence machine , Ben Nimmo - 10,000
words
One wonders how often Ben Nimmo double billed his various sponsors for these copy-paste
fantasy pamphlets.
In late 2017 Ben Nimmo and Guardian 'journalist' Carole Cadwalladr disseminated
allegations that Russia used Facebook ads to influence the Brexit decision. Cadwalladr even
received a price for her work. Unfortunately the price was not revoked when Facebook revealed
that "Russia linked" accounts had spend a total of 97 cents on Brexit ads. It is unexplained
how that was enough to achieve their alleged aim.
Cadwalladr is listed
as a speaker (pdf) at a "skill sharing" conference the Institute organized for November 1-2
under the headline: "Tackling Tools of Malign Influence - Supporting 21st Century
Journalism".
This year Ben Nimmo became notorious for claiming that
several real persons with individual opinions were "Russian trolls". As we
noted :
Nimmo, and several other dimwits quoted in the piece, came to the conclusion that Ian56 is
a Kremlin paid troll, not a real person. Next to Ian56 Nimmo 'identified' other 'Russian
troll' accounts:
One particularly influential retweeter (judging by the number of accounts which then
retweeted it) was @ValLisitsa, which posts in English and Russian. Last year, this account
joined the troll-factory #StopMorganLie campaign.
Had Nimmo, a former NATO spokesperson, had some decent education he would have
know that @ValLisitsa, aka Valentina Lisitsa , is a famous
American- Ukrainian pianist. Yes, she sometimes tweets in Russian language to her many fans
in Russia and the Ukraine. Is that now a crime? The videos of her world wide
performances on Youtube have more than 170 million views. It is absurd to claim that she is a
'Russian troll' and to insinuate that she is taking Kremlin money to push 'Russian troll'
opinions.
The
Institute for Statecraft Expert Team (pdf) list several people with military intelligence
backgrounds as well as many 'journalists'. One of them is:
Mark Galeotti
Specialist in Russian strategic thinking; the application of Russian disinformation and
hybrid warfare; the use of organised crime as a weapon of hybrid warfare. Educational and
mentoring skills, including in a US and E European environment, and the corporate world.
Russian linguist
Galeotti is the infamous inventor of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' and of the propaganda about
Russia's alleged 'hybrid' warfare. In February 2013 the Russian General Valery Gerasimov, then
Russia's chief of the General Staff, published a paper that analysed the way the 'west' is
waging a new type of war by mixing propaganda, proxy armies and military force into one unified
operation.
Galeotti claimed that Gerasimov's analysis of 'western' operations was a new Russian
doctrine of 'hybrid war'. He invented the term 'Gerasimov doctrine' which then took off in the
propaganda realm. In February 2016 the U.S. Army Military Review
published a longer analysis of Gerasimov's paper that debunked the nonsense (pdf). It
concluded:
Gerasimov's article is not proposing a new Russian way of warfare or a hybrid war, as has
been stated in the West.
But anti-Russian propagandist
repeated Galeotti's nonsense over and over. Only in March 2018, five years after Galeotti
invented the 'Germasimov doctrine' and two years after he was thoroughly debunked, he finally
recanted
:
Everywhere, you'll find scholars, pundits, and policymakers talking about the threat the
"Gerasimov doctrine" -- named after Russia's chief of the general staff -- poses to the West.
It's a new way of war, "an expanded theory of modern warfare," or even "a vision of total
warfare."
There's one small problem. It doesn't exist. And the longer we pretend it does, the longer
we misunderstand the -- real, but different -- challenge Russia poses.
I feel I can say that because, to my immense chagrin, I created this term, which has since
acquired a destructive life of its own, lumbering clumsily into the world to spread fear and
loathing in its wake.
The Institute for Statecraft's "Specialist in Russian strategic thinking", an expert of
disinformation and hybrid warfare, created a non-existing Russian doctrine out of hot air and
used it to press for anti-Russian measures. Like Ben Nimmo he is an aptly example of the
quality of the Institute's experts and work.
One of the newly released documents headlined CND Gen list 2
(pdf) (CND= Chris Nigel Donnelly) includes the names and email addresses of a number of
military, government and think tank people. The anonymous releaser of the documents claims that
the list is "of employees who attended a closed-door meeting with the white helmets". (No
document has been published yet that confirms this.) One name on the list is of special
interest:
Pablo Miller was the handler and friend of Sergej Skripal, the British double agent who was
"novichoked" in Salisbury. When Miller's name was mentioned in the press the British government
issued a D-Notice to suppress its further publishing,
Pablo Miller, a British MI6 agent, had
recruited Sergej Skripal. The former MI6 agent in Moscow, Christopher Steele, was also
involved in the case. Skripal was caught by the Russian security services and went to jail.
Pablo Miller, the MI6 recruiter, was also the handler of Sergej Skripal after he was released
by Russia in a spy swap. He reportedly also lives in Salisbury. Both Christopher Steele and
Pablo Miller work for Orbis Business Intelligence which created the "Dirty Dossier" about
Donald Trump.
At the very beginning of the Skripal affair, before there was any talk of 'Novichok', we
asked
if Skripal was involved in creating the
now debunked "Dirty Dossier" and if that was a reason for certain British insiders to move
him out of the way:
Here are some question:
Did Skripal help Steele to make up the "dossier" about Trump?
Were Skripal's old connections used to contact other people in Russia to ask about
Trump dirt?
Did Skripal threaten to talk about this?
If there is a connection between the dossier and Skripal, which seems very likely to me,
then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him. Lots
of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and
running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very
dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia
looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness.
The
most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth
reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the
Initiative commissioned
such research (pdf) and paid for it.
After two years the Muller investigation found zero
evidence for the 'collusion' between Russia and the Trump campaign that the fake Steele
dossier suggested. The whole collusion claim is a creation by 'former' British intelligence
operatives who likely acted on request of U.S. intelligence leaders Clapper and Brennan. How
deep was the Russia specialist Chris Donnelly and his Institute for Statecraft involved in this
endeavor?
Checking through all the released Initiative papers and lists one gets the impression of a
secret military intelligence operation, disguised as a public NGO. Financed by millions of
government money the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative work under a charity
label to create and disseminate disinformation to the global public and back into the
government and military itself.
The paranoia about Russia, which does way less harm than the 'western' "rules based system"
constantly creates, is illogical and not based on factual analysis. It creates Russia as an
"enemy" when it is none. It hypes a "threat" out of hot air. The only people who profit from
this are the propagandists and the companies and people who back them.
The Initiatives motto "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation" is a truly Orwellian
construct. By disseminating propaganda and using it to influence the public, parliament, the
military and governments, the Institute actively undermines the democratic process that depends
on the free availability of truthful information.
It should be shut down immediately.
---
Note: There have already been attempts to delete the released files from the Internet. A
complete archive of all Integrity Initiative files published so far is here . Should
the public links cease to work, you can contact the author of this blog for access to private
backups.
Aside from the fact that the government itself funds this organization, the creepiest thing
about it is that the "non-governmental individuals" that help fund it are the same people
that run the think tanks: a bunch of Rhodesians.
"Such half-assed thinking...Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of
Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in
Crimea. Those "gestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear
power which were legally stationed in Crimea."
It sure seems like this half-assed thinking isn't just the domain of a fringe element, but
is increasingly mainstream among the elites. Doesn't bode well.
Thank you B. It is truly amazing to watch the UK elites unravel as they have become truly
unhinged by their own connivances. It is a bad joke at the commoner's expense that they
propagandize and demonize in the name of the 'Western rules based system' even as they are
busy shooting themselves in both feet by committing Brexit. Although there are legitimate
grievances with the EU, it is clear that Brexit is a Tory power play that is all politics and
zero governance. Alas, Perfidious Albion has succumbed to Mad Cow disease.
What remains mysterious (not really) is why --if these initiatives are truly meant to save
and strengthen democracy-- they aren't proudly proclaimed and advertised, in the open,
transparent, for everyone one to see and judge, like an adult democracy that they claim to
stand for might want to debate and form an opinion on.
The fact that it isn't, is testimony to the nefarious anti-democratic, authoritarian and
totalitarian streak that runs in between every two lines that they put on paper.
McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal
practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been
MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being
sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow
vest protesters.
Every time one scratches the surface of such smears, it seems there is a connection to
US/British MIC, Ukraine, or Israel - essentially, those who benefit (financially or
otherwise) from greater tensions with Russia.
At what point does neocon doubling-down on failed foreign policy become more than just
picking our pockets and warping our minds? At what point do they start killing our kids in
another unnecessary war?
Cold War has been over for nearly 30 years. It's time enough for Western countries to send
into real retirement every single cold-warrior, their time is over, their mindset is quaint
and useless, if not downright dangerous and counter-productive.
Thank you 'b'
I'll just say -- - there is safety in numbers ! Already valuable information, important to
the public good and democracy has been spread wide enough to be certain, this gene won't go
back in the bottle ! D notice or no ! And by doing that, has made the fearless journalists
and investigators lives all the safer ! Safety in numbers, spread this wide everyone?
Thanks for the continued exposition of this story b.....may it go viral
I want to comment on some of the wording you quote Donnelly as writing
" .....is giving way to a world of Darwinian competition where all the players
– nation states, sub-state actors, big corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and
so on – are constantly striving with each other in a "war of all against all".
"
This is Donnelly's characterization of a world in which finance is a public utility
instead of the private jackboot that it currently is. This is the delusion these people have
been led to believe.
So instead of his "war of all against all" that some might call human cooperation on the
basis of merit we have a mythical God of Mammon religion that continues to instantiate the
private finance led world of the West with it parasitic elite and fawning acolytes.
Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the
UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would
have responded with force.
Thankfully it wasn't done but the fact this was even discussed by senior figures confirms
that there was at least a sizable minority pushing for it. 30 years after the fall of the
Soviet Union, the Western elite have truly abandoned all sense of reality and embraced a
consequence free view of the use of force. After Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya they haven't
learned a thing! I'm becoming more and more certain that a peaceful transition to the
multipolar world is impossible and that it will only happen after the US or one of its'
vassal states blunder into a proxy war and get utterly and comprehensively defeated, forcing
a radical world realignment, but with nuts like John Bolton and the neocons in the Whitehouse
it could easily lead to a nuclear war
This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the
British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and
Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state.
exiled off mainstreet , Dec 15, 2018 2:22:39 PM |
link
As an aside this happens to be "Bill of Rights Day", the anniversary of the passage of the
Bill of Rights as amendments to the yankee constitution. This reveals again how far from the
rule of law the yankee imperium, now the key element of the British Empire they supposedly
seceded from, has strayed, since it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was
engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy.
It has also ensured that the victorious candidate has been neutered and faithfully follows
the world control line put forward by the five eyes spy-masters making up the empire in its
present iteration. This also shows what a farce the regime, based on the rule of law, now
presents.
It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's
kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it
is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic
and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes
fascism.
The "Western-based rules system" described in this article reminds me of a game called
"Calvin Ball" which appeared in the former comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes." In the strip
Calvin a wildly imaginative adolescent boy who plays a free-form of football with his
imaginary pet toy tiger (Hobbes). Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to
suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art.
b, I downloaded the zip file, and had also downloaded all the PDF's from pdf-archive
yesterday. There are more files in the zip, but the following were on pdf-archive and are NOT
in the zip:
integrity-france.pdf (this is a dud, looks like html, prob. response from a failed
attempt to put a file up on pdf-archive)
Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly
linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller?
Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either
generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. "
Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11,
with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians.
Emmanuel Goldstein , Dec 15, 2018 4:21:51 PM |
link
The transcript of his conversation with the general shows very starkly that we would last
about two minutes in a nuclear exchange, but about half a day in a conventional one. No
reserves, no equipment stockpiles, a navy consisting of two fat targets, neither of which has
any aircraft and some destroyers which have propulsion problems, a smallish air force and
very small numbers of troops. The tripwire force in Estonia is wholly sacrificial. In fact he
lays bare the whole fallacy of biting the bear. With the armed forces in the state he
describes, and with the recruitment and retention problems, wouldn't it be better, as one
defense minister said, 'to go away and shut up'...
Thanks b and especially the link to Valentina Lisitsa who I had tinkling in the background as
I read your grand expose. These people are seditious morons, parasites infesting the state
apparatus. Shut these fools down. Nice touch publishing the passport image. I can just
imagine the frenzied aftermath of Kit's visit to the basement. Big thanks to anonymous and
Craig Murray too. Their IT personel are probably visiting Devil's Island or Diego Garcia as
we read.
Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to
spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate
government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM
The British and US connections to loot and evade Russian riches and funds are exposed, as
well as the origin of sanctions, supposed "alt-media" "truth-seakers" like Meduza...or
supposed "pro-Russian" US intelligence operatives married to Russian women....
Amongst the many issues he usually passes over trying to make himself the fool, while at
the same time trying to convince us of the oustanding intellectual capacities, honesty and
classy stance of him and his "comittee"...
For that travel, to end bluntly and in such public view siding with the nazis of the "Azov
Regiment" and other criminals of war, there was no need of so many saddlebags, so as
pretending that the people who supported Trump as if there was no tomorrow, were enlightened
people who only wanted to rescue "America" for the "Americans", as if there would not be a
sign of blatant exceptionalism in appropriating of the term "Americans" for themselves in
such a huge continent....
In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of
chicken with Russia.
The FP pre-Soviet collapse consisted of one MO: GET THE COMMIES!
Since then, Neocons and Neolibs which are frontmen for this Non-National Globalized Elite,
have hijacked our country's military and have steered it to a Global agenda where dominance
in the ME means either superiority for these EURO elites or Vassal-hood.
The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse
which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism
(Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats
where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque
(less defensible) reasons and missions.
The average American could care less about the ME and the US would be 1000x better-off
reverting to an isolationist stance.
But this will not happen so long as Nationalism in the US and UK is repeatedly put-down.
It seems as though there is going to be another Brexit vote. Does anyone doubt that
miraculously the people by then will have second-guessed their will to Brexit and so will
vote against it given another crack at a vote?
Import IT workers and staff science faculties from abroad w dual citizens while kkr
buys wafer labs that outsource to mainland for manufacturing
Cry boo hoo hoo to wake up with indigenous capacity decades behind world players like
Russia, China, India, etc who operate on fractional budgets...
But this drama also exposes ashura/emigods intra necine warfare: right after 2016 US
elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation.
Seems that veil has been dispensed with , but it invites other questions, insofar as UK
is Her Majesty's Service, so are we to read this with Prince Harry or Philip's culture, or a
"consent by silence") in mind? Defending crown or EU "Saturnus Sattelitus"?
Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking,
setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right
about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry.
That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise
of free markets and democracy.
Good to see Trump finally give it a face... 'you need freedom and security now pay up
bitches'
In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of
chicken with Russia.... Globalist Agenda
I think the opposite is true.
The US-led Empire and their globalist sycophants seek to weaken Europe so that it can not
act independently in its own best interests. They will do what ever they can to ensure that
the vassals never join with Russia/China and the SCO.
Russian scare-mongering and immigration have been effective in furthering this agenda.
Also note: what USA has termed "new Europe" - eastern European states like Poland and Ukraine
- are solidly pro-American.
"... MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given. They later put Michael Steele onto the project; he was a guy with credible Russian contacts. Basically, the scam worked like this: ..."
"... They funneled an MI6 intelligence file to Michael Steele (governments routinely keep such files on influential foreigners and what they are up to) so he could use his contacts to launder the information and make it appear that it came from sources within Russia; they then funneled the report back to elements of the FBI so they could use it to justify to the FISA court a spying campaign on Trump ..."
"... the Obama regime purposely mishandled information in regards to the spying program (ex: Michael Steele leaked his document to various news sources before the election and later lied to congress about it), ensuring it would leak to the press; the Obama regime illegally unmasked elements of Trump's personal contacts so they could clandestinely leak suggested targets off the record to the right people ..."
"... They lost the election anyway, so they then planted dirt and negative press to make the document look legit – lies about Manafort meeting Assange (Guardian is funded by the British government to police the left), WaPo lies claiming a vast Russian conspiracy just as Trump came into office (it was an effort to delegitimize him and create calls for Hillary to take his place), leaking bank records, the special counsel .and leaking information on Trump policies to the media using a secret security clearance credentials program enacted by Obama. ..."
"... The government takes CCTV footage of you at a grocery store; in the background there is an attractive woman. The woman then goes missing. The government illegally reads your emails and finds that you like sexual jokes. The government then interviews a friend of yours who claims that you once made a risque rape joke back in college. They also plant a mole in your workplace who befriends you and reports back all of your politically incorrect humor. Then the cops find the woman's body and the government claims that you killed her because you were in the area at the time and you make bad jokes, which has been confirmed by multiple credible people. You look guilty, don't you? The government 1) took information out of context 2) laundered circumstantial evidence through a credible witness when they originally obtained it elsewhere using nefarious sources. That's what they did to Trump, but much much much worse. ..."
"... And don't forget the Skripals' affair and the relationships (via M16) between Mr. Steele and Mr. Skripal: https://thedeepstate.com/steele-skripal/ ..."
"You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections."
MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of
John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given. They later put Michael
Steele onto the project; he was a guy with credible Russian contacts. Basically, the scam
worked like this:
They funneled an MI6 intelligence file to Michael Steele (governments routinely keep such
files on influential foreigners and what they are up to) so he could use his contacts to
launder the information and make it appear that it came from sources within Russia; they then
funneled the report back to elements of the FBI so they could use it to justify to the FISA
court a spying campaign on Trump (the FBI illegally withheld the source of the document);
they found nothing proving any Russian connection but they kept the spy program going; they
tried justifying the spy program with a fake story involving a reliable asset that once
passed information from Jimmy Carter's campaign to George H.W. Bush in an effort to help
Reagan win the 1980 election; they later paid the asset nearly a quarter million dollars for
his efforts using a fake "India-China" grant despite the grant running to 2018, the asset
attempted to get a job in the Trump administration so he could act as a mole ; the Obama
regime purposely mishandled information in regards to the spying program (ex: Michael Steele
leaked his document to various news sources before the election and later lied to congress
about it), ensuring it would leak to the press; the Obama regime illegally unmasked elements
of Trump's personal contacts so they could clandestinely leak suggested targets off the
record to the right people
They lost the election anyway, so they then planted dirt and negative press to make the
document look legit – lies about Manafort meeting Assange (Guardian is funded by the
British government to police the left), WaPo lies claiming a vast Russian conspiracy just as
Trump came into office (it was an effort to delegitimize him and create calls for Hillary to
take his place), leaking bank records, the special counsel .and leaking information on Trump
policies to the media using a secret security clearance credentials program enacted by Obama.
They also ran interference through CIA guys like Mark Warner in an effort to cover up the
mole they planted; they falsely asserted this was a national security issue when the man's
identity was well-known to the press and he was never an undercover spy like Jarret was, at
least not in recent history.
To put this all into perspective, imagine the following scenario:
The government takes CCTV footage of you at a grocery store; in the background there is an
attractive woman. The woman then goes missing. The government illegally reads your emails and
finds that you like sexual jokes. The government then interviews a friend of yours who claims
that you once made a risque rape joke back in college. They also plant a mole in your
workplace who befriends you and reports back all of your politically incorrect humor. Then
the cops find the woman's body and the government claims that you killed her because you were
in the area at the time and you make bad jokes, which has been confirmed by multiple credible
people. You look guilty, don't you? The government 1) took information out of context 2)
laundered circumstantial evidence through a credible witness when they originally obtained it
elsewhere using nefarious sources. That's what they did to Trump, but much much much
worse.
"... Having said that, still worrying that the CIA devotes time to finding out what Maureen Dowd might write! ..."
"... It is true that Mazzetti's emails with the CIA do not shock or surprise in the slightest. But that's the point. With some noble journalistic exceptions (at the NYT and elsewhere), these emails reflect the standard full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the establishment media outlets that claim to act as "watchdogs" over them." ..."
"... A few years ago the New York Times reported that there had been a successful coup in Venezuela - toppling Chavez. The story turned out to be inaccurate. The NY Times finally revealed their source - US State Dept... who were using NYT to give critical mass and support to their dream end to a thorn in their side. ..."
"... The New York Times-all the news the CIA decided is fit to print. ..."
Great column. The NYT does do some good things, such as give us Paul Krugman three times a
week, some important reporting and articulate editorial opposition to the republican
nightmare, but they are much, much too close to the government, as evidenced by their asking
for permission to print news the White House disapproves of.
They are also devoted to denying their readers an accurate picture of American foreign
policy. I frequently comment on threads there and my contributions nearly always get posted,
except when I use the word empire. I have never succeeded in getting that word onto their
website , nor have I seen it make it into anyone else's comment. It is like the famous
episode of Fawlty Towers. "Don't mention the empire.'' Stories and commentaries sometimes
describe specific aspects of US policy in negative terms, but connecting the dots is
obviously forbidden.
Bill Keller is like a character from The Wire. The perfect example of the kind of
authority-revering careerist that butt-kisses his way to the top in institutions.
most of the story seems to come down to the usual kind of thing we see from Judicial
Watch - manufactured outrage over almost nothing
I think part of the outrage here is the extent to which it's almost hard to muster the
energy because it's become so much the norm for the NYTimes to be in bed with whoever is in
power in Washington at any given time. It's the sort of thing that should be "they did
what!!!!?" but instead it's "yeah, well, Judith Miller, Wen Ho Lee, etcetc ... >long
drawn-out sigh<." So, perhaps there is some manufacturing of outrage, but not unreasonably
so if you take a step back and look at what's going on.
Having said that, still worrying that the CIA devotes time to finding out what Maureen
Dowd might write!
"This cynicism – oh, don't be naive: this is done all the time – is precisely
what enables such destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.
It is true that Mazzetti's emails with the CIA do not shock or surprise in the slightest.
But that's the point. With some noble journalistic exceptions (at the NYT and elsewhere),
these emails reflect the standard full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger –
between our the government and the establishment media outlets that claim to act as
"watchdogs" over them."
Once a corrupt practice is sufficiently perceived as commonplace, then it is transformed
in people's minds from something objectionable into something acceptable. Indeed, many
people believe it demonstrates their worldly sophistication to express indifference toward
bad behavior by powerful actors on the ground that it is so prevalent. This cynicism
– oh, don't be naive: this is done all the time – is precisely what enables
such destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.
This is extremely important, and manifestly true. One runs into such people all the
time.
I haven't read any comments yet, but it would not surprise me to find some of them already
here.
Even worse, I've done it myself on occasion, most recently just the other day on a Cif
thread. Though I will say this; this kind of bullshit is not so much "transformed in people's
minds from something objectionable into something acceptable ", as grudgingly
transformed into something unstoppable , but still toxic and objectionable.
That's mighty thin gruel as an alibi, but the reality for a lot of ordinary working people
is they get fucking tired of it, and yes, they do get discouraged, then cynical and hardened
to it all.
That, of course, is part of the plan.
I'm unaware of a "source" being a person who requests documents from the reporter for doing
damage control on behalf of the boss. (Not that I'd worry about Dowd either.) How exactly is
this secret national intel? I'm glad this came out. We are being manipulated by the govt.
through its minions in the media. The entire incident, from the glorious movie to this
revelation is a fraud.
I found this interesting example of media manipulation at nakedcapitalsim.org:
"Pro-marijuana group endorses Obama The Hill. This purported group, which claims 10,000
members, appears to be just one guy with a PO Box and a press list. But don't count on your
average reporter digging deeper than the news release.":
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/links-82812.html#717LX1oL7dfPsb7I.99
The breadth and depth of propagandizing of citizens is astounding. I wonder what it's like
to have so little integrity. What kind of person so readily sells out their fellow citizen
with lies? It's scary because people read these things and they have no idea they are lies.
People are making decisions based on manufactured "facts". It's very difficult to find actual
information and I can tell you from personal experience, Obama supporters cling desperately
to "authorities" like the NYTimes to maintain their belief in the goodness of dear
leader.
This weird big-brother relationship goes both ways.
A few years ago the New York Times reported that there had been a successful coup in
Venezuela - toppling Chavez. The story turned out to be inaccurate.
The NY Times finally revealed their source - US State Dept... who were using NYT to give
critical mass and support to their dream end to a thorn in their side.
Nice investigative journalism. A couple of years ago the NYTmade a big deal of publicly
firing a low level writer for making up articles from his NY apt when he was supposed to be
in the field. He was hardly the worst of the bunch.
Great article and thankfully I do not trust big newspapers in the USA especially the New York
Times since it has being caught lying about Weapons of Mass Destructions in Iraq to justify
the Iraq War. Judith Millar was the liar then.
Read CounterPunch and smaller publications for the truth.
The NYT is all about selling ads on a Sunday. It really is a corrupt rag.
"this didn't come from me and please delete after you read." -- Mazzetti
This could serve as the epitaph for our times. This (Shock and Awe, drones, the Apache
Massacre, Guantanamo, killing children, etc.) didn't come from US (even though it did)
because ...our crimes can be deleted through that magical "we're too big and bad to fail"
button.
See, nothing to worry about.
(Except future historians who will not be blindfolded and gagged and who will
therefore have some choice things to say about the journalists who were fully complicit
in the crimes of this lawless era.)
They are not only presstitutes, they are degenerative presstitutes...
Notable quotes:
"... I love how the NYT mentions how no public evidence has emerged, to skirt around the fact that if there were internal evidence (from some gov agency or private citizen) it would've leaked by now. There is no such thing as evidence which hasn't been leaked in an alleged scandal of this size. ..."
"... Further, the corporate news media gave Trump something like $2 billion dollars worth of advertising in free airtime. That's a much larger impact -- around 20 times Clinton's campaign costs IIRC -- than any alleged hacked e-mails (though the e-mails were leaked not hacked, and that played a role. As well as the FBI's investigation into Clinton's illegal email server which was public fact at the time) or social media interference. ..."
"... Banks, defense contractors and oil companies decide who the President is and what their Cabinet will look like (see Obama's leaked CitiBank memo "recommending" executives to his 2009 Cabinet). Russians and the American people do not. ..."
"... John Pilger's essay: Hold the Front Page, the Reporters are Missing appropriately describes this BigLie media item b dissected, while also observing, "Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years," prior to providing Why this is so. ..."
"... but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. ..."
"... The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo. [My emphasis] ..."
"... on journalism and it being usurped by social media behemoths google, facebook, twitter and etc - i found this cbc radio) interview last night worth recommending.. ..."
"... That New York Times piece was amazing. Belief anything the US Gov't/anti-Russian lobby and other nut cases tell you, unquestioningly. Investigative journalism at its best! ..."
"... Accept the most stupid evidence with blinking an eye. Even if one believes the collusion argument, try to be a bit critical. And always believe that a GRU hacker will put Felix Dzerzinnsky's name in their program. For heaven's sake he was Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, not the GRU which was military intelligence. ..."
"After the security briefing and everyone cleared out, McCabe shut the door to
Priebus's office. This is very weird, thought Priebus, who was standing by his
desk.
"You know this story in The New York Times?" Priebus knew it all too well.
McCabe was referring to a recent Times story of February 14 that stated, "Phone records
and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump's 2016
presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with
senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the elections, according to four
current and former American officials."
The story was one of the first bombs to go off about alleged Trump-Russian
connections after Flynn's resignation.
"It's total bullshit," McCabe said. "It's not true, and we want you to know
that. It's grossly overstated."
Oh my God, thought Priebus.
"Andrew," he said to the FBI deputy, "I'm getting killed."
The story about Russia and election meddling seemed to be running 24/7 on
cable news, driving Trump bananas and therefore driving Priebus bananas.
"This is crazy," Trump had told Priebus. "We've got to stop it. We need to
end the story."
McCabe had just walked in with a big gift, a Valentine's Day present. I'm
going to be the hero of this entire West Wing, Priebus thought.
"Can you help me?" Priebus asked. "Could this knockdown of the story be
made public?"
"Call me in a couple of hours," McCabe said. "I will ask around and I'll let
you know. I'll see what I can do."
Priebus practically ran to report to Trump the good news that the FBI would
soon be shooting down the Times story
Two hours passed and no call from McCabe. Priebus called him."I'm sorry, I can't," McCabe
said.
"There's nothing I can do about it. I tried, but if we start issuing comments on individual
stories, we'll be doing statements
every three days." The FBI could not become a clearinghouse for the accuracy of news stories.
If the FBI tried to debunk certain stories, a failure to comment could be seen as a
confirmation.
"Andrew, you're the one that came to my office to tell me this is a BS story,
and now you're telling me there's nothing you can do?"
McCabe said that was his position.
"This is insanity," Priebus said. "What am I supposed to do? Just suffer, bleed out?"
"Give me a couple more hours."
Nothing happened. No call from the FBI. Priebus tried to explain to Trump,
who was waiting for a recanting. It was another reason for Trump to distrust and
hate the FBI, a pernicious tease that left them dangling.
About a week later on February 24 CNN reported an exclusive: "FBI Refused
White House Request to Knock Down Recent Trump-Russia Story." Priebus
was cast as trying to manipulate the FBI for political purposes.
The White House tried and failed to correct the story and show that McCabe
had initiated the matter.
Four months later on June 8, Comey testified under oath publicly that the
original New York Times story on the Trump campaign aides' contacts with
senior Russian intelligence officials "in the main was not true."
The Mueller Hoax is unraveling.
Posted by: Sid2 | Sep 20, 2018 3:03:44 PM | 3
The Mueller Hoax is unraveling, and concommittently the NYT is digging in; ergo ,
the NYT is also unravelling! The NYT will permanently damage its reputation with its own
readers.
I love how the NYT mentions how no public evidence has emerged, to skirt around the
fact that if there were internal evidence (from some gov agency or private citizen) it
would've leaked by now. There is no such thing as evidence which hasn't been leaked in
an alleged scandal of this size.
Further, the corporate news media gave Trump something like $2 billion dollars worth of
advertising in free airtime. That's a much larger impact -- around 20 times Clinton's
campaign costs IIRC -- than any alleged hacked e-mails (though the e-mails were leaked
not hacked, and that played a role. As well as the FBI's investigation into Clinton's illegal
email server which was public fact at the time) or social media interference.
Banks, defense contractors and oil companies decide who the President is and what their
Cabinet will look like (see Obama's leaked CitiBank memo "recommending" executives to his
2009 Cabinet). Russians and the American people do not.
John Pilger's essay: Hold
the Front Page, the Reporters are Missing appropriately describes this BigLie media
item b dissected, while also observing, "Although journalism was always a loose extension of
establishment power, something has changed in recent years," prior to providing Why this is
so.
Want to highlight this additional bit from Pilger:
"Journalism students should study this [New book from Media Lens Propaganda Blitz ]
to understand that the source of "fake news" is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox news,
or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal
journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects
it, and colludes with it.
The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has
failed to rehabilitate, is its echo. [My emphasis]
IMO, the bolded text well describes BigLie Media. I wonder what George Seldes would say
differently from Pilger if he were alive. Unfortunately, Pilger failed to include MoA as a
source in his short list of sites having journalistic integrity.
on journalism and it being usurped by social media behemoths google, facebook, twitter and
etc - i found
this cbc radio) interview last night worth recommending..
That New York Times piece was amazing. Belief anything the US Gov't/anti-Russian lobby and
other nut cases tell you, unquestioningly. Investigative journalism at its best!
Accept the most stupid evidence with blinking an eye. Even if one believes the collusion
argument, try to be a bit critical. And always believe that a GRU hacker will put Felix
Dzerzinnsky's name in their program. For heaven's sake he was Cheka, the forerunner of the
KGB, not the GRU which was military intelligence.
"... One thing that has puzzled me about Trump methods is his constant tweeting of witch hunt with respect to Mueller but his unwillingness to actually disclose what Brennan, Clapper, Comey, et al actually did by declassifying all the documents and communications among them. In your opinion what is he trying to accomplish with his method here? ..."
I believe you are spot on in your analysis of the Trump methods. No doubt based on your
personal observations up close of similar sole proprietor business hustlers. I think one
problem that Trump methods face is that he needs people around him who can make things happen
despite the byzantine ways of the vast federal bureaucracy who have their own agenda.
One thing that has puzzled me about Trump methods is his constant tweeting of witch
hunt with respect to Mueller but his unwillingness to actually disclose what Brennan,
Clapper, Comey, et al actually did by declassifying all the documents and communications
among them. In your opinion what is he trying to accomplish with his method here?
"... Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out? ..."
And there are other friends in unlikely
places. Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly
against a Trump threat
to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate. The real problem is that
the documents apparently don't expose anything done by the Russians.
Rather, they seem to appear to reveal
a plot by the British intelligence and security services
working in collusion with then CIA Director
John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment
favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?
So how about it? Teenagers who get in
trouble often have to ditch their bad friends to turn their lives around. There is still a chance for the
United States if we keep our distance from the bad friends we have been nurturing all around the world,
friends who have been convincing us to make poor choices. Get rid of the ties the bind to the Saudis,
Israelis, Ukrainians, Poles, and yes, even the British. Deal fairly with all nations and treat everyone the
same, but bear in mind that there are only two relationships that really matter – Russia and China. Make a
serious effort to avoid a war by learning how to get along with those two nations and America might actually
survive to celebrate a tricentennial in 2076.
You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections. Why, if the
beneficiary was anyone other than a Democrat, much less one named Clinton, someone might
actually appoint a Special Counsel to look into it, not to mention the misdeeds of the
various agencies and departments who aided and abetted it.
"You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections."
MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of
John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given. They later put Michael
Steele onto the project; he was a guy with credible Russian contacts. Basically, the scam
worked like this:
They funneled an MI6 intelligence file to Michael Steele (governments routinely keep such
files on influential foreigners and what they are up to) so he could use his contacts to
launder the information and make it appear that it came from sources within Russia; they then
funneled the report back to elements of the FBI so they could use it to justify to the FISA
court a spying campaign on Trump (the FBI illegally withheld the source of the document);
they found nothing proving any Russian connection but they kept the spy program going; they
tried justifying the spy program with a fake story involving a reliable asset that once
passed information from Jimmy Carter's campaign to George H.W. Bush in an effort to help
Reagan win the 1980 election; they later paid the asset nearly a quarter million dollars for
his efforts using a fake "India-China" grant despite the grant running to 2018, the asset
attempted to get a job in the Trump administration so he could act as a mole ; the Obama
regime purposely mishandled information in regards to the spying program (ex: Michael Steele
leaked his document to various news sources before the election and later lied to congress
about it), ensuring it would leak to the press; the Obama regime illegally unmasked elements
of Trump's personal contacts so they could clandestinely leak suggested targets off the
record to the right people
They lost the election anyway, so they then planted dirt and negative press to make the
document look legit – lies about Manafort meeting Assange (Guardian is funded by the
British government to police the left), WaPo lies claiming a vast Russian conspiracy just as
Trump came into office (it was an effort to delegitimize him and create calls for Hillary to
take his place), leaking bank records, the special counsel .and leaking information on Trump
policies to the media using a secret security clearance credentials program enacted by Obama.
They also ran interference through CIA guys like Mark Warner in an effort to cover up the
mole they planted; they falsely asserted this was a national security issue when the man's
identity was well-known to the press and he was never an undercover spy like Jarret was, at
least not in recent history.
To put this all into perspective, imagine the following scenario:
The government takes cctv footage of you at a grocery store; in the background there is an
attractive woman. The woman then goes missing. The government illegally reads your emails and
finds that you like sexual jokes. The government then interviews a friend of yours who claims
that you once made a risque rape joke back in college. They also plant a mole in your
workplace who befriends you and reports back all of your politically incorrect humor. Then
the cops find the woman's body and the government claims that you killed her because you were
in the area at the time and you make bad jokes, which has been confirmed by multiple credible
people. You look guilty, don't you? The government 1) took information out of context 2)
laundered circumstantial evidence through a credible witness when they originally obtained it
elsewhere using nefarious sources. That's what they did to Trump, but much much much
worse.
a plot by the British intelligence and security services to subvert the course of the 2016
election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that
one work out?
Deep State and Establishment stooge Donald Trump.
There is still a chance for the United States if we
"... As for the self-licking ice cream cone that "mainstream media" have become, and how they overlook little peccadilloes like feeding at the government PR trough and helping Cheney and Bush attack Iraq, well – now, now – let's not be nasty. Here's how Jill Abramson, The New York Times Washington Bureau Chief from 2000 to 2003, while the Times acted as drum major for the war, lets Bob Woodward off the hook for his own abysmal investigative performance. ..."
"... Are we to believe that the Abramsons, Woodwards, et al. of the media elite simply missed the WMD deception? ..."
Dishonest (not "mistaken") intelligence greased the skids for the
widespread killing and maiming in the Middle East that began with the Cheney/Bush "Shock and
Awe" attack on Iraq. The media reveled in the unconscionable (but lucrative) buzzword
"shock-and-awe" for the initial attack. In retrospect, the real shock lies in the awesome
complicity of virtually all "mainstream media" in the leading false predicate for this war of
aggression – weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Only one major media group, Knight Ridder, avoided the presstitution, so to speak. It
faced into the headwinds blowing from the "acceptable" narrative, did the investigative
spadework, and found patriotic insiders who told them the truth. Karen Kwiatkowski, who had a
front-row seat at the Pentagon, was one key source for the intrepid Knight Ridder
journalists. Karen tells us that her actual role is accurately portrayed by the professional
actress in the Rob Reiner's film Shock and Awe .
Other members of the Sam Adams Associates were involved as well, but we will leave it to
them to share on Saturday evening how they helped Knight Ridder accurately depict the prewar
administration/intelligence/media fraud.
Intelligence Fraud
More recently, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper added a coda to
pre-Iraq-War intelligence performance. Clapper was put in charge of imagery analysis before
the Iraq war and was able to conceal the fact that there were were no weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq. In his memoir, Clapper writes that Vice President Cheney "was pushing"
for imagery analysis "to find (emphasis in original) the WMD sites."
For the record, none were found because there were none, although Clapper –
"eager to help" – gave it the old college try. Clapper proceeds, in a matter-of-fact
way, to blame not only pressure from the Cheney/Bush administration, but also "the
intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn't
really there."
Regarding those Clapper-produced "artist renderings" of "mobile production facilities for
biological agents"? Those trucks "were in fact used to pasteurize and transport milk,"
Clapper admits nonchalantly. When challenged on all
this while promoting his memoir at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, Clapper gave not the
slightest hint that it occurred to him his performance was somewhat lacking.
Media: Consequential Malfeasance
As for the self-licking ice cream cone that "mainstream media" have become, and how
they overlook little peccadilloes like feeding at the government PR trough and helping Cheney
and Bush attack Iraq, well – now, now – let's not be nasty. Here's how Jill
Abramson, The New York Times Washington Bureau Chief from 2000 to 2003, while the
Times acted as drum major for the war, lets Bob Woodward off the hook for his own abysmal
investigative performance.
Reviewing Woodward's recent book on the Trump White House, Abramson praises his "dogged
investigative reporting," noting that he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, and adds: "His work has
been factually unassailable." Then she (or perhaps an editor) adds in parenthesis: "(His
judgment is certainly not perfect, and he has been self-critical about his belief, based on
reporting before the Iraq War, that there were weapons of mass destruction.)"
Are we to believe that the Abramsons, Woodwards, et al. of the media elite simply
missed the WMD deception? (Hundreds of insiders knew of it, and some were willing to
share the truth with Knight Ridder and some other reporters.) Or did the media moguls simply
hunker down and let themselves be co-opted into helping Cheney/Bush start a major war? The
latter seems much more likely: and transparent attempts to cover up for one another, still,
is particularly sad – and consequential. Having suffered no consequences (for example,
in 2003 Abramson was promoted to Managing Editor of the NYT ), the "mainstream media"
appear just as likely to do a redux on Iran.
This is why there will be a premium on honest insider patriots, like Karen Kwiatkowski, to
rise to the occasion and try to prevent the next war. Bring along your insider friends on
Saturday; they need to know about Karen and about Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in
Intelligence.
Please do come and join us in congratulating Karen Kwiatkowski and the other SAAII members
who also helped Knight Ridder get the story right. (Those others shall remain unnamed until
Saturday.) And let insiders know this: they are not likely to hear about all this
otherwise.
Date : Saturday, December 8, 2018
Time : 6:30 PM Showing of film, "Shock and Awe" – 8:00 PM Presentation 17th
annual Sam Adams Award – Ceremony will include remarks by Larry Wilkerson, 7th SAAII
awardee (in 2009)
Place : The Festival Center, 1640 Columbia Road, NW, Washington, DC 20009
FREE : But RSVP, if you can, to give us an idea of how many to expect; email:
[email protected]
ALL WELCOME : Lots of space in main conference room
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as
Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily
Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). William
Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world
military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems
still used by NSA. Reprinted with permission from Consortium News .
Essentially Mueller witch hunt repeat the trick invented by Bolsheviks leadership during
Stalin Great Terror: the accusation of a person of being a foreign agent is a 'slam dank" move
that allows all kind to nasty things to be performed to convict the person no matter whether he
is guilty of not.
Consolidation of power using Foreign Counter Intelligence as a tool is a classic and a very
dirty trick.
Notable quotes:
"... It would be of great value to know what the underlying predicate crime(s) are that are sustaining Mueller's scorched earth approach to what looks to be 'all things Trump,' whether the crimes relate to counter intelligence jurisdiction (treason, espionage), illicit overseas business transactions relating to sanctions violations or something of that sort, or election law violations, the smoke of which got the whole Mueller jihad underway ..."
"... This would not be unusual in a Foreign Counter Intelligence case which are almost by definition open ended; it would be very unusual, in fact prohibited, in a criminal case where a factual predicate needs to be articulated that constitutes reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. ..."
"... It seems Mueller has been riding the FCI horse whither he pleases to round up interviews, compare them, and then take the chicken shit route of charging 1001 violations to leverage his way forward. If that seems to smell bad, it is because it does. ..."
"... IMO, Trump is not helping himself or the American people get to the objective truth by declassifying all the documents and communications. Unless all the documents are released unredacted, all we have are theories and speculation. And Trump will be on the losing end of that as the news media and their Deep State collaborators have all the means to drive the narrative and attempt to convict in the court of public opinion through constant innuendo. ..."
"... In the mean time the Mueller investigation itself creates the crimes as pretty much most Trump associates have been indicted for perjury. Even Manafort was prosecuted for money laundering that took place over a decade ago ..."
"... Trump has stated that he doesn't want to declassify as the American people shouldn't know how corrupt their government is. This seems to contradict his Drain the Swamp rhetoric. ..."
"... Mueller may have created more crimes than existed before his inquiry. ..."
It would be of great value to know what the underlying predicate crime(s) are that are
sustaining Mueller's scorched earth approach to what looks to be 'all things Trump,' whether
the crimes relate to counter intelligence jurisdiction (treason, espionage), illicit overseas
business transactions relating to sanctions violations or something of that sort, or election
law violations, the smoke of which got the whole Mueller jihad underway .
It certainly does give every appearance, at least from the outside perspective, of an
investigation looking for a crime.
This would not be unusual in a Foreign Counter Intelligence case which are almost by
definition open ended; it would be very unusual, in fact prohibited, in a criminal case where
a factual predicate needs to be articulated that constitutes reasonable suspicion that a
crime has been committed.
It seems Mueller has been riding the FCI horse whither he pleases to round up
interviews, compare them, and then take the chicken shit route of charging 1001 violations to
leverage his way forward. If that seems to smell bad, it is because it does.
Precisely the same approach could have been taken vis a vis the Uranium mattter or any of
the Clinton Foundation speaker forays into foreign lands and almost certainly a boatload of
1001 violations would have come into port.
IMO, Trump is not helping himself or the American people get to the objective truth by
declassifying all the documents and communications. Unless all the documents are released
unredacted, all we have are theories and speculation. And Trump will be on the losing end of
that as the news media and their Deep State collaborators have all the means to drive the
narrative and attempt to convict in the court of public opinion through constant
innuendo.
In the mean time the Mueller investigation itself creates the crimes as pretty much
most Trump associates have been indicted for perjury. Even Manafort was prosecuted for money
laundering that took place over a decade ago .
There have been no claims from Mueller that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to
steal the 2016 election.
Trump has stated that he doesn't want to declassify as the American people shouldn't
know how corrupt their government is. This seems to contradict his Drain the Swamp
rhetoric. With the Democrats gonna run the House come January. I think Trump will come
under increased pressure from all sides. I don't believe the Mueller investigation will ever
wind down until Trump is defeated either via impeachment or loss of the next presidential
election.
Skripal events probably helped to advance this line of investigation. So in a way UK intelligence services put their own
stooge on the line of fire.
Notable quotes:
"... Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering ..."
"... The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively. ..."
"... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did. ..."
"... The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials. ..."
"... The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up. ..."
"... Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition. ..."
"... Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets. ..."
"... If you like this story, share it with a friend! ..."
Kremlin
critic Bill Browder may have given the order for his employee Sergei Magnitsky to be poisoned
with a rare toxin in a Russian prison cell, along with other suspects in a tax-evasion probe
against him, prosecutors have said. British financier Browder was once a well-connected
investor in post-Soviet Russia, but he became a fugitive from the law in the country after
being accused of financial crimes. In the West, however, he is best known as the employer of
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant who died in police custody while being investigated in
connection to the Browder case. Magnitsky's death became an international scandal, with Browder
accusing Russian officials of killing him.
Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with
Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new
criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his
extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money
laundering.
The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom
died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay
Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November
2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial
detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008
and September 2008, respectively.
Korobeinikov died after falling off a high-rise building, while the others had health
complications. The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a
rare water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being
poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths, while Korobeinikov had traces of it in his liver,
according to a post mortem. An investigation into four possible murders has been
opened.
Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within
months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely
that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony
against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told
journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia
didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but
several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did.
The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of
Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the
latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his
cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false
statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle
taxpayers' money involving Russian officials.
The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after
obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for
Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up.
Last year, Browder was sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison for tax evasion.
The trial was held in absentia and Moscow failed to have him extradited to serve the term. The
prosecutors said that they will renew attempts to get custody of Browder as part of the new
criminal case, using a UN convention on fighting transnational crime to have him arrested.
Browder is a US-born British financier, whose change of citizenship had the benefit of
allowing him to avoid paying tax on foreign earnings. However, he claimed the switch was
prompted by his family being persecuted in the US during the McCarthyism witch hunt, while the
UK seemed like the land of law and order.
He made a fortune in Russia during the country's chaotic transition to a market economy,
having invested before there was a stock exchange in Moscow. His Hermitage Capital Management
fund was a leading foreign investment entity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning
millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail
Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal
wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too
numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
The transformation of his public image from a financial shark into a human rights crusader
started when Browder himself entered the spotlight of Russian law enforcement. In 2007, the
foundation he ran was targeted by a probe into possible large-scale embezzlement of Russian
taxpayers' money. Magnitsky, who worked for Browder and had knowledge of his firms' finances,
was arrested and held in pre-trial detention until his death in November 2009. The British
businessman insisted that the entire case was fabricated and that Magnitsky had been
assassinated for exposing a criminal scheme involving several Russian tax officials.
The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of
Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for
his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by
Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin
as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic
competition.
Browder's new-found status as a rights advocate and self-proclaimed worst enemy of Putin
helps him deflect Russia's attempts to prosecute him. On several occasions, Russia filed
international arrest warrants against him with Interpol, which even led to his brief detention
in Spain last May.
Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part
of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian
government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was
apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its
architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to
US lawmakers and media outlets.
"... Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. ..."
"... Indeed, a national security policy that sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once again. ..."
"... George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address , counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification." ..."
"... Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country. ..."
"... Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime. ..."
"... Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick it in their face). ..."
"... America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics. ..."
President Donald Trump's
recent statement on the Jamal Khashoggi killing by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince might well be considered a metaphor for his foreign
policy. Several commentators have suggested that the text appears to be something that Trump wrote himself without any adult supervision,
similar to the poorly expressed random arguments presented in his tweeting only longer. That might be the case, but it would not
be wise to dismiss the document as merely frivolous or misguided as it does in reality express the kind of thinking that has produced
a foreign policy that seems to drift randomly to no real end, a kind of leaderless creative destruction of the United States as a
world power.
Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of Britain in the mid nineteenth century, famously said that "Nations have no permanent friends
or allies, they only have permanent interests."The United States currently has neither real friends nor any clearly defined interests.
It is, however, infested with parasites that have convinced an at-drift America that their causes are identical to the interests
of the United States. Leading the charge to reduce the U.S. to "bitch" status, as Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard
has artfully put it , are Israel and Saudi
Arabia, but there are many other countries, alliances and advocacy groups that have learned how to subvert and direct the "leader
of the free world."
Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the
three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. It is difficult to find a part of the world where an actual
American interest is being served by Washington's foreign and global security policies. Indeed, a national security policy that
sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet
Union in 1991, thinkable once again. The fact that no one is the media or in political circles is even talking about that terrible
danger suggests that war has again become mainstreamed, tacitly benefiting from bipartisan acceptance of it as a viable foreign policy
tool by the media, in the U.S. Congress and also in the White House.
The part of the world where American meddling coupled with ignorance has produced the worst result is inevitably the Middle East...
... ... ...
All of the White House's actions have one thing in common and that is that they do not benefit Americans in any way unless one
works for a weapons manufacturer, and that is not even taking into consideration the dead soldiers and civilians and the massive
debt that has been incurred to intervene all over the world. One might also add that most of America's interventions are built on
deliberate lies by the government and its associated media, intended to increase tension and create a casus belli where
none exists.
So what is to be done as it often seems that the best thing Trump has going for him is that he is not Hillary Clinton? First of
all, a comprehensive rethink of what the real interests of the United States are in the world arena is past due. America is less
safe now than it was in 2001 as it continues to make enemies with its blundering everywhere it goes. There are now
four times as many designated terrorists as there were in 2001, active in 70 countries. One would quite plausibly soon arrive
at George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address
, counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington
might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment
of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary
common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former
into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."
George Washington or any of the other Founders would be appalled to see an America with 800 military bases overseas, allegedly
for self-defense. The transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the military industrial complex and related entities like Wall Street
has been catastrophic. The United States does not need to protect Israel and Saudi Arabia, two countries that are armed to the teeth
and well able to defend themselves. Nor does it have to be in Syria and Afghanistan. And
If the United States were to withdraw its military from the Middle East and the rest of Asia tomorrow, it would be to nearly everyone's
benefit. If the armed forces were to be subsequently reduced to a level sufficient to defend the United States it would put money
back in the pockets of Americans and end the continuous fearmongering through surfacing of "threats" by career militarists justifying
the bloated budgets.
... ... ...
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational
foundation that seeks a more interests [email protected]
.
but even small steps in the right direction could initiate a gradual process of turning the United States into a more normal
country in its relationships with the rest of the world rather than a universal predator and bully.
Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute
the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country.
To expect mutations -- no matter how slow or fast in a
trait that appears deeply embedded in our DNA is to be naive. Add to that the intractable stranglehold Zionists and organized
world Jewry has on our nuts and decision making. A more congruent convergence of histories and DNAs would be hard to come by among
other nations. Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone
of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime.
Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give
him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick
it in their face).
Hey, how about a Rand Paul-Tulsi Gabbard fusion ticket in 2024, not a bad idea, IMHO.
Going back to the Administration you can see the slimy Zionist hands of Steven Miller on all of those foreign policy statements.
Trump is allowing this because he has to protect his flanks from Zionists, Christian or otherwise. He might be just giving Miller
just enough rope to jettison him (wishful thinking on my part). Or he doesn't care or is unaware of the texts, a possibility.
1. Because that defies human nature. See all of history if you disagree.
2. America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples
who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics.
The beginning of USA foreign policy for me is the 1820 or 1830 Monroe Declaration: south America is our backyard, keep out.
Few people know that at the time European countries considered war on the USA because of this beginning of world domination.
When I told this to a USA correspondent the reply was 'but this declaration still is taught here in glowing terms'.
What we saw then was the case until Obama, USA foreign policy was for internal political reasons.
As Hollings stated in 2004 'Bush promising AIPAC the war on Iraq, that is politics'.
No empire ever, as far as I know, ever was in the comfortable position to be able to let foreign policy to be decided (almost)
completely by internal politics.
This changed during the Obama reign, the two war standard had to be lowered to one and a half.
All of a sudden the USA had to develop a foreign policy, a policy that had to take into consideration the world outside the USA.
Not the whole USA understands this, the die hards of Deep State in the lead.
What a half war accomplishes we see, my opinion, in Syria, a half war does not bring victory on an enemy who wages a whole
war.
Assad is still there, Russia has airforce and naval bases in Syria.
Normally, as any history book explains, foreign policy of a country is decided on in secret by a few people.
British preparations for both WWI and WWII included detailed technical talks with both the USA and France, not even all cabinet
members knew about it.
One of Trump's difficulties is that Deep State does not at all has the intention of letting the president decide on foreign policy,
at the time of FDR he did what he liked, though, if one reads for example Baruch's memoirs, in close cooperation with the Deep
State that then existed.
The question 'why do we not leave the rest of the world alone', hardly ever asked.
The USA is nearly autarcic, foreign trade, from memory, some five percent of national income, a very luxurious position.
But of course, leaving the rest of the world alone, huge internal consequences, as Hinckley explains with an example, politically
impossible to stop the development of a bomber judged to be superfluous.
Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990
Good luck. A fight over resources with the biggest consumer of resources, the People That Kill People and all their little buddies
in the Alphabet Soup of Law Enforcement and Intelligence Depravity..
That could get a fella hurt. Ask Jack and Bob Kennedy.
"The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Russia is now worse than it was towards the end of the Cold War". Classic American
cold warrior mentality. The present-day Russian Federation is assimilated to the former Soviet Union.
Tragically for America, and the West in general, President Trump is unrecognizable from
candidate Trump :
'This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over
our government. The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals,
massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry Their financial resources are virtually
unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched, and most importantly, the depths of their
immorality is absolutely unlimited.'
"... The Telegraph adds that the UK's dispute with the Trump administration is so politically sensitive that staff within the British Embassy in D.C. have been barred from discussing it with journalists. Theresa May has also "been kept at arms-length and is understood to have not raised the issue directly with the US president ." ..."
"... In September , we reported that the British government "expressed grave concerns" over the material in question after President Trump issued an order to the DOJ to release a wide swath of materials, "immediately" and "without redaction." ..."
"... Trump walked that order back days later after the UK begged him not to release them. ..."
"... MI6 agents have a reputation for writing fiction. Ian Fleming comes to mind. Its is interesting to reflect on the similarities of fiction and so called intelligence. ..."
"... Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA's Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself. ..."
"... To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ ..."
"... The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial of two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump associates. ..."
"... GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping surveillance on Trump associates. ..."
"... The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. ..."
"... The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised. ..."
"... Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner. ..."
"... After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency could officially justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian lawyer at the meeting Natalia Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into the United States or the UK, federal sources said. ..."
"... By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole to wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones and emails of U.S. citizens inside the United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil at Fort Meade. ..."
"... The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the evidence is considered "poisoned fruit. ..."
"... Add: GCHQ (UK NSA) was in agreement with HilBarry Inc to block the US 2016 election for U.K. candidate Hillary aka Clinton 'Rhodes scholar' Brit colonial agent. Study who 'Rhodes' was. CIA and MI6 are UK siblings. Note nickname for CIA is "Langley" = 'The English' in French L'Anglai. Trump Tower - Russkie atty Natalia met with Simpson GPS Fusion to debrief before & after meeting. Natalia was granted US entry by Mueller Spec Counsel teamster Preet Baharara (conflict in that Preet is compromised witness and also SC "investigator"). Russkie Ahkmedishin met with Obama WH in prep for meeting (see Jan 2016 WH log). The 'translator' at meeting was Obama WH translator. ..."
"... The evidence for false Trump Russkie bank connections is a phony server set up by CIA agent McMullen that robo scammed Russian Alfa Bank to robo talk to the phony server the CIA named with miss-spell Trump OrGAINization. See godaddy domain registration. Hillary slandered Trump with this scam on Twitter Oct 31, 2016 - her witchy day. ..."
"... Obama used the intelligence agencies to spy on all political opponents, not just the Trump campaign and eventually the administration. NSA databases were being queried by Democrat contractors with content feed to Obama's National Security staff where communications were "unmasked" by Rice and others. Rodgers shut down the scheme. So much Marxist criminality and fraud left unpunished. ..."
"... George Papadopoulos was not the reason the FBI opened their 2016 Counterintelligence Investigation into the Trump Campaign. John Brennan was the reason. ..."
"... Brennan was the man pushing the entire Russian Narrative that consumed Washington D.C. – and ultimately led to the Mueller Investigation. He did this based on little or no evidence. The Electronic Communication should prove interesting. John Brennan's Role in the FBI's Trump-Russia Investigation ..."
"... In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with then-CIA Head John Brennan regarding alleged communications between the Trump Campaign and Moscow. ..."
"... The Trump Team was being surveiled the entire time by Breanan via the GCHQ. The CIA are Analysts. That's it. They had to involve the FBI to begin the Surveillance & Criminal Investigation into the Counter Intelligence Operation. Thus, Criminal at Large Breanan's trip up to Capital Hill to meet with Harry Reid to brief him on Steele. Brennan the "Puppet Master" has been quarter backing the entire Deep State Intelligence Psychological Operation & Parallel Construction Surveillance from the very start. ..."
"... They've been reverse engineering their lies ever since they lost the election to cover their tracks and use the excuse of "Plausible Deniability" as the Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous Seditious Psychopaths at the CIA always claim. ..."
"... Why get a FISA warrant for Cater Paige after he left the Trump Team? Because folks, the FISA Warrant is RETROACTIVE. ..."
The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent
President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling
investigation, according to
The Telegraph , stating that any disclosure would "undermine intelligence gathering if he
releases pages of an FBI application to wiretap one of his former campaign advisers."
Trump's allies, however, are fighting back - demanding transparency and suggesting that the
UK wouldn't want the documents withheld unless it had something to hide.
The Telegraph has talked to more than a dozen UK and US officials, including in American
intelligence, who have revealed details about the row.
British spy chiefs have "genuine concern" about sources being exposed if classified parts
of the wiretap request were made public, according to figures familiar with discussions.
" It boils down to the exposure of people ", said one US intelligence official, adding: "
We don't want to reveal sources and methods ." US intelligence shares the concerns of the
UK.
Another said Britain feared setting a dangerous "precedent" which could make people less
likely to share information, knowing that it could one day become public. -
The Telegraph
The Telegraph adds that the UK's dispute with the Trump administration is so politically
sensitive that staff within the British Embassy in D.C. have been barred from discussing it
with journalists. Theresa May has also "been kept at arms-length and is understood to have not
raised the issue directly with the US president ."
In September , we reported that the British government "expressed grave concerns" over the
material in question after President Trump issued an order to the DOJ to release a wide swath
of materials, "immediately" and "without redaction."
Mr Trump wants to declassify 21 pages from one of the applications. He announced the move
in September, then backtracked, then this month said he was "very seriously" considering it
again. Both Britain and Australia are understood to be opposing the move.
The New
York Times reported at the time that the UK's concern was over material which " includes
direct references to conversations between American law enforcement officials and Christopher
Steele ," the former MI6 agent who compiled the infamous "Steele Dossier." The UK's objection,
according to former US and British officials, was over revealing Steele's identity in an
official document, "regardless of whether he had been named in press reports."
We noted in September, however, that Steele's name was contained within the Nunes Memo
- the House Intelligence Committee's majority opinion in the Trump-Russia case.
Steele also had
extensive contacts with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie , who - along with
Steele - was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the anti-Trump campaign. Trump
called for the declassification of FBI notes of interviews with Ohr, which would ostensibly
reveal more about his relationship with Steele. Ohr was demoted twice within the Department of
Justice for
lying about his contacts with Fusion GPS.
Perhaps the Brits are also concerned since much of the espionage performed on the Trump
campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016 . Recall that Trump aid George Papadopoulos
was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor
that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would
drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who Strzok flew to London to
meet with).
Also recall that CIA/FBI "informant" (spy) Stefan Halper met with both Carter Page
and Papadopoulos in
London.
Halper, a veteran of four Republican administrations, reached out to Trump aide George
Papadopoulos in September 2016 with an offer to fly to London to write an academic paper on
energy exploration in the Mediterranean Sea.
Papadopoulos accepted a flight to London and a $3,000 honorarium. He claims that during a
meeting in London, Halper asked him whether he knew anything about Russian hacking of
Democrats' emails.
Papadopoulos had other contacts on British soil that he now believes were part of a
government-sanctioned surveillance operation. - Daily Caller
In total, Halper received
over $1 million from the Obama Pentagon for "research," over $400,000 of which was granted
before and during the 2016 election season.
Papadopoulos, who was sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying about his conversations with
a shadowy Maltese professor and self-professed member of the
Clinton Foundation , has publicly claimed he was targeted by UK spies, and told The
Telegraph that he demands transparency. Trump's allies in Washington, meanwhile, have suggested
that the facts laid out before us mean that the ongoing Russia investigation was invalid from
the start .
In short, it's understandable that the UK would prefer to hide their involvement in the
"witch hunt" of Donald Trump since much of the counterintelligence investigation was conducted
on UK soil. And if the Brits had knowledge of the operation, it will bolster claims that they
meddled in the 2016 US election by assisting what appears to have been a
set-up from the start .
Steele's ham-handed dossier is a mere embarrassment, as virtually none of the claims
asserted by the former MI6 agent have been proven true.
Steele, a former MI6 agent, is the author of the infamous and unverified anti-Trump
dossier. He worked as a confidential human source for the FBI for years before the
relationship was severed just before the election because of Steele's unauthorized contacts
with the press.
He shared results of his investigation into Trump's links to Russia with the FBI beginning
in early July 2016.
The FBI relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier to fill out applications for four
FISA warrants against Page. Page has denied the dossier's claims, which include that he was
the Trump campaign's back channel to the Kremlin. - Daily Caller
That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse
focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK
soil, is curious.
Trump talks the talk but so far no walking of the walk. Not falling for it anymore, Tyler. No Swamp Draining from Pres. Cheeto anymore than we got Hope or Change from Superfly
When fraud is coming to light, the cockroaches scramble. The so-called intelligence
agencies have run amuck for way too long and leave a trail of lies, murder and deception.
That is the reason Obama and Clinton went to New Zealand and Australia. They have access
to the Five Eyes network in New Zealand and Australia without their requests being recorded
whereas if they had asked in the US their requests and all documents given to them would have
been recorded. . They are both traitors to not only the sitting President and the US people
but also to the United States.
That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their
excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which
occurred on UK soil, is curious.
MI6 agents have a reputation for writing fiction. Ian Fleming comes to mind. Its is
interesting to reflect on the similarities of fiction and so called intelligence.
I think we all know now that the UK not Russia was the dirtbags working for Obama/HRC to
trap Trump. Release the declass Trump and let's start cleaning up the swamp. Let the SHTF those Brits
have never been friends to freedom.
If they released audio-video evidence of public officials indulging in cannibalistic
pedophilia at their state desks, they would still get off the hook.
Their MSM fiends oops I meant friends would scramble to the rescue and create another AV
to counter the actual one, and their idiot Democrat audiences would fall for it.
No matter what is exposed on 5 December the perps will get off the hook.
Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA's Brennan, to run
domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself.
To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced
the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ.
The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial of
two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump
associates.
GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA's
headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping
surveillance on Trump associates.
The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier
compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr.,
Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear
compromised.
Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump
Jr., and Kushner.
After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency could officially
justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian
lawyer at the meeting Natalia Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk
and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into the United States or the UK,
federal sources said.
By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole to
wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones
and emails of U.S. citizens inside the United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal
for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil at Fort
Meade.
The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel
Robert Mueller's probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the
evidence is considered "poisoned fruit."
Add: GCHQ (UK NSA) was in agreement with HilBarry Inc to block the US 2016 election for U.K.
candidate Hillary aka Clinton 'Rhodes scholar' Brit colonial agent. Study who 'Rhodes'
was. CIA and MI6 are UK siblings. Note nickname for CIA is "Langley" = 'The English' in French
L'Anglai. Trump Tower - Russkie atty Natalia met with Simpson GPS Fusion to debrief before &
after meeting. Natalia was granted US entry by Mueller Spec Counsel teamster Preet Baharara
(conflict in that Preet is compromised witness and also SC "investigator"). Russkie
Ahkmedishin met with Obama WH in prep for meeting (see Jan 2016 WH log). The 'translator' at
meeting was Obama WH translator.
GPS Fusion wrote the Dossier with UK spy Steele and was paid by Hillary/DNC.
The evidence for false Trump Russkie bank connections is a phony server set up by CIA
agent McMullen that robo scammed Russian Alfa Bank to robo talk to the phony server the CIA
named with miss-spell Trump OrGAINization. See godaddy domain registration. Hillary slandered
Trump with this scam on Twitter Oct 31, 2016 - her witchy day.
Obama used the intelligence agencies to spy on all political opponents, not just the Trump
campaign and eventually the administration. NSA databases were being queried by Democrat
contractors with content feed to Obama's National Security staff where communications were
"unmasked" by Rice and others. Rodgers shut down the scheme. So much Marxist criminality and
fraud left unpunished.
George Papadopoulos was not the reason the FBI opened their 2016 Counterintelligence
Investigation into the Trump Campaign. John Brennan was the reason.
Brennan was the man pushing the entire Russian Narrative that consumed Washington D.C.
– and ultimately led to the Mueller Investigation. He did this based on little or no
evidence. The Electronic Communication should prove interesting. John Brennan's Role in the FBI's Trump-Russia Investigation
April 9, 2018 by Jeff Carlson, CFA
In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of Britain's Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with then-CIA Head John Brennan
regarding alleged communications between the Trump Campaign and Moscow.
That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA
chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director
level", face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. The meeting between Hannigan and Brennan appears somewhat unusual.
The US and the UK are two of the so-called Five Eyes -- along with Canada, Australia and
New Zealand -- that share a broad range of intelligence through a formalized alliance.
The GCHQ is responsible for Britain's Signals Intelligence. The NSA is responsible for the United States' Signals Intelligence. Hannigan's U.S. counterpart was not CIA Director Brennan. Hannigan's U.S. counterpart was NSA Director Mike Rogers. Luke Harding of the Guardian originally reported the meeting in an April 13, 2017 article
on Britain's spy agencies early role in the Trump-Russia investigation:
GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious "interactions" between figures
connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents. This intelligence was passed to the
US as part of a routine exchange of information
Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further
information on contacts between Trump's inner circle and Russians.
See above about phony robot "suspicious communications" set up by CIA McMullen to smear
Trump with Trump Tower falsely named server and data created in robo call response with
Russian Alfa bank.
Russian "communications" was e-data of the Russkie Bank and the non-Trump server named
"Trump OrGAINization". It was just two robo-computers pinging back and forth.
The Trump Team was being surveiled the entire time by Breanan via the GCHQ. The CIA are
Analysts. That's it. They had to involve the FBI to begin the Surveillance & Criminal
Investigation into the Counter Intelligence Operation. Thus, Criminal at Large Breanan's trip
up to Capital Hill to meet with Harry Reid to brief him on Steele. Brennan the "Puppet
Master" has been quarter backing the entire Deep State Intelligence Psychological Operation
& Parallel Construction Surveillance from the very start.
They've been reverse engineering their lies ever since they lost the election to cover
their tracks and use the excuse of "Plausible Deniability" as the Pure Evil War Criminal
Treasonous Seditious Psychopaths at the CIA always claim.
Feb 13th, Don Bongino Podcast.
"I'll include an article from NPR. NPR, not a by any stretch a right Wing outlet. Ok? But
it's actually a decent piece. Now, it describes the three hop rule. It's from 2013, but it describes it very shortly
& ce scintillating in about 400 words. And it's done well so I'll include it in todays
show notes.
Remember, It's now the "Two Hop Rule" but you just have to know what a "Hop" is to
understand how dangerous this is.
Here's how they explain it.
It says, "testimony before Congress on Wednesday, remember this is written in 2013 Joe.
Showed how easy it is for Americans, with no connection to Terrorism to unwittingly have
their calling patterns analyzed by the Government." This is really wacko stuff. It hinges on
what is known as a "Hop."
Or chain analysis. When the NSA identifies a suspect, it can look not just at his phone
records Joe, but also the records of everyone he calls, everyone who calls those people and
everyone who calls those people." Chain Migration.
You ain't kidding! Right!? Chain spying!
It goes on...though....this is good.
"If the average person Joe, called 40 unique people. "Three Hop Analysts" would allow the
Government to mine the records....this is a staggering number...of 2.5 Million Americans when
investigating one suspected terrorist."
"Holy Moly!" Holly Moly is right.
Why get a FISA warrant for Cater Paige after he left the Trump Team? Because folks, the
FISA Warrant is RETROACTIVE.
All the the emails he sent in the past to Trump Team members, combine that with "Two Hops"
you basically have everybody in the known universe that could of ever contacted the Trump
Team.
Paige sends an email, whatever to Kushner. I don't know who he sends emails to. He
probably didn't. But you get the point. Then you go to another "Hop." Kushner, who'd he send
an email to? Now you got the while Trump Team.
That's the whole point. That's why I constantly say to you that they were trying to put a
legal face on this thing after they realized the election was coming up and they could
lose.
They were like. Man, we've been spying on these people the whole time. We already got most
of their emails and their communications. How do we legally do it now?
Oh, we get a FISA Warrant, we use couple of "Hops" and we're Golden."
"... Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region ..."
"... The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies." ..."
The hacking collective known as "Anonymous" published a
trove of documents on November 5 which it claims exposes a UK-based psyop to create a " large-scale information secret service
" in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" - which has been blamed for everything from
Brexit to US President Trump winning the 2016 US election.
The primary objective of the " Integrity Initiative " - established
in 2015 by the Institute for Statecraft - is "to provide a coordinated
Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare."
And while the notion of Russian disinformation has become the West's favorite new bogeyman to excuse things such as Hillary Clinton's
historic loss to Donald Trump, we note that "Anonymous" was called out by WikiLeaks in October 2016 as an FBI cutout, while the report
on the Integrity Initiative that Anonymous exposed comes from Russian state-owned network
RT - so it's anyone's guess whose 400lb
hackers are at work here.
Operating on a budget
of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists,
military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference
in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.
The UK establishment appears to be conducting the very activities of which it and its allies have long-accused the Kremlin,
with little or no corroborating evidence. The program also aims to "change attitudes in Russia itself" as well as influencing
Russian speakers in the EU and North America, one of the leaked
documents states. -
RT
The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway,
Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its
sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region .
The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts
embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government
agencies."
The initiative has received £168,000 in funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy and £250,000 from the
US State Department , the
documents allege.
Some of its purported members include British MPs and high-profile " independent" journalists with a penchant for anti-Russian
sentiment in their collective online oeuvre, as showcased by a brief glance at their Twitter feeds. -
RT
Noted examples of "inedependent" anti-Russia journalists:
Spanish "Op"
In one example of the group's activities, a "Moncloa Campaign" was successfully conducted by the group's Spanish cluster to block
the appointment of Colonel Pedro Banos as the director of Spain's Department of Homeland Security. It took just seven-and-a-half
hours to accomplish, brags the group in the
documents .
"The [Spanish] government is preparing to appoint Colonel Banos, known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin positions in the Syrian
and Ukrainian conflicts, as Director of the Department of Homeland Security, a key body located at the Moncloa," begins Nacho Torreblanca
in a seven-part tweetstorm describing what happened.
Others joined in. Among them – according to the leaks – academic Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, who wrote that "Mr. Banos is to
geopolitics as a homeopath is to medicine." Appointing such a figure would be "a shame." -
RT
The operation was reported in Spanish media, while Banos was labeled "pro-Putin" by UK MP Bob Seely.
In short, expect anything counter to predominant "open-border" narratives to be the Kremlin's fault - and not a natural populist
reflex to the destruction of borders, language and culture.
"... It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" ..."
"... "The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016." ..."
"... "Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..." ..."
"... this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war ..."
"... Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK. ..."
"... The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth ..."
"... British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me ..."
"... It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations ..."
"... A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants? ..."
"... I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins. ..."
"... The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval. ..."
"... Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda ..."
"... This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap. ..."
"... Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification ..."
"... It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling ..."
"... As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love? ..."
"... They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites. ..."
"... The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation. ..."
"... Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power. ..."
"... Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government. ..."
British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear CampaignsSteveg , Nov 24,
2018 11:43:44 AM |
link
In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream.
We have already seen
many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who
does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign
against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but
seems to be part of a different project.
The ' Integrity
Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military
personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via
social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.
On June 7 it took the the Spanish cluster only a few hours to derail the appointment of
Perto Banos as the Director of the National Security Department in Spain. The cluster
determined that he had a too positive view of Russia and launched a coordinated social media
smear
campaign (pdf) against him.
The Initiative and its operations were unveiled when someone liberated some of its
documents, including its budget applications to the British Foreign Office, and
posted them under the 'Anonymous' label at cyberguerrilla.org .
The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in
cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of
politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed
by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North
America.
It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" and
promises that:
Cluster members will be sent to educational sessions abroad to improve the technical
competence of the cluster to deal with disinformation and strengthen bonds in the cluster
community. [...] (Events with DFR Digital Sherlocks, Bellingcat, EuVsDisinfo, Buzzfeed,
Irex, Detector Media, Stopfake, LT MOD Stratcom – add more names and propose cluster
participants as you desire).
The Initiatives Orwellian slogan is 'Defending Democracy Against Disinformation'. It
covers European countries, the UK, the U.S. and Canada and seems to want to expand to the
Middle East.
On its About page
it claims: "We are not a government body but we do work with government departments and
agencies who share our aims." The now published budget plans show that more than 95% of the
Initiative's funding is coming directly from the British government, NATO and the U.S. State
Department. All the 'contact persons' for creating 'clusters' in foreign countries are
British embassy officers. It amounts to a foreign influence campaign by the British
government that hides behind a 'civil society' NGO.
The organisation is led by one Chris N. Donnelly who
receives (pdf) £8,100 per month for creating the smear campaign network.
To counter Russian disinformation and malign influence in Europe by: expanding the
knowledge base; harnessing existing expertise, and; establishing a network of networks of
experts, opinion formers and policy makers, to educate national audiences in the threat and
to help build national capacities to counter it .
The Initiative has a black and white view that is based on a "we are the good ones"
illusion. When "we" 'educate the public' it is legitimate work. When others do similar, it
its disinformation. That is of course not the reality. The Initiative's existence itself,
created to secretly manipulate the public, is proof that such a view is wrong.
If its work were as legit as it wants to be seen, why would the Foreign Office run it from
behind the curtain as an NGO? The Initiative is not the only such operation. It's
applications seek funding from a larger "Russian Language Strategic Communication Programme"
run by the Foreign Office.
The 2017/18 budget application sought FCO funding of £480,635. It received
£102,000 in co-funding from NATO and the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense. The 2018/19
budget application shows a
planned spending (pdf) of £1,961,000.00. The co-sponsors this year are again NATO
and the Lithuanian MoD, but
also include (pdf) the U.S. State Department with £250,000 and Facebook with
£100,000. The budget lays out a strong cooperation with the local military of each
country. It notes that NATO is also generous in financing the local clusters.
One of the liberated papers of the Initiative is a talking points memo labeled
Top 3 Deliverable for FCO (pdf):
Developing and proving the cluster concept and methodology, setting up clusters in a
range of countries with different circumstances
Making people (in Government, think tanks, military, journalists) see the big
picture, making people acknowledge that we are under concerted, deliberate hybrid attack
by Russia
Increasing the speed of response, mobilising the network to activism in pursuit of
the "golden minute"
Under top 1, setting up clusters, a subitem reads:
- Connects media with academia with policy makers with practitioners in a country to impact
on policy and society: ( Jelena Milic silencing pro-kremlin voices on Serbian TV )
Defending Democracy by silencing certain voices on public TV seems to be a
self-contradicting concept.
Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:
We engage only very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal
contacts, specifically to ensure that they do not come to see our work as a problem, and to
try to influence them gently, as befits an independent NGO operation like ours, viz;
- Germany, via the Zentrum Liberale Moderne to the Chancellor's Office and MOD
- Netherlands, via the HCSS to the MOD
- Poland and Romania, at desk level into their MFAs via their NATO Reps
- Spain, via special advisers, into the MOD and PM's office (NB this may change very soon
with the new Government)
- Norway, via personal contacts into the MOD
- HQ NATO, via the Policy Planning Unit into the Sec Gen's office.
We have latent contacts into other governments which we will activate as needs be as the
clusters develop.
A look at the 'clusters' set up in U.S. and UK shows some prominent names.
Members of the Atlantic Council, which has a contract to
censor Facebook posts , appear on several cluster lists. The UK core cluster also
includes some prominent names like tax fraudster William Browder , the daft Atlantic Council
shill Ben Nimmo and the neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. One person
of interest is Andrew Wood who
handed the Steele 'dirty dossier' to Senator John McCain to smear Donald Trump over
alleged relations with Russia. A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah
Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times, Neil Buckley from the FT and Jonathan Marcus
of the BBC.
A ' Cluster
Roundup ' (pdf) from July 2018 details its activities in at least 35 countries. Another
file reveals (pdf) the local
partnering institutions and individuals involved in the programs.
The Initiatives Guide
to Countering Russian Information (pdf) is a rather funny read. It lists the downing of
flight MH 17 by a Ukranian BUK missile, the fake chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun and the
Skripal Affair as examples for "Russian disinformation". But at least two of these events,
Khan Sheikun via the UK run White Helmets and the Skripal affair, are evidently products of
British intelligence disinformation operations.
The probably most interesting papers of the whole stash is the 'Project Plan' laid out at
pages 7-40 of the
2018 budget application v2 (pdf). Under 'Sustainability' it notes:
The programme is proposed to run until at least March 2019, to ensure that the clusters
established in each country have sufficient time to take root, find funding, and
demonstrate their effectiveness. FCO funding for Phase 2 will enable the activities to be
expanded in scale, reach and scope. As clusters have established themselves, they have
begun to access local sources of funding. But this is a slow process and harder in some
countries than others. HQ NATO PDD [Public Diplomacy Division] has proved a reliable source
of funding for national clusters. The ATA [Atlantic Treaty Association] promises to be the
same, giving access to other pots of money within NATO and member nations. Funding from
institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal
disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been
resolved and funding should now flow.
The programme has begun to create a critical mass of individuals from a cross society
(think tanks, academia, politics, the media, government and the military) whose work is
proving to be mutually reinforcing . Creating the network of networks has given each
national group local coherence, credibility and reach, as well as good international
access. Together, these conditions, plus the growing awareness within governments of the
need for this work, should guarantee the continuity of the work under various auspices and
in various forms.
The
third part of the budget application (pdf) list the various activities, their output and
outcome. The budget plan includes a section that describes 'Risks' to the initiative. These
include hacking of the Initiatives IT as well as:
Adverse publicity generated by Russia or by supporters of Russia in target countries, or by
political and interest groups affected by the work of the programme, aimed at discrediting
the programme or its participants, or to create political embarrassment.
We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.
Posted by b on November 24, 2018 at 11:24 AM |
Permalink
"The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to
prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election
meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil
throughout 2016."
"Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that
Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In
Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling
custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele
dossier..."
For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.
this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and
propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex
corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the
voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war.. i guess the idea is to get the
ordinary people to think in terms of hating another country based on lies and that this would
be a good thing... it is very sad what uk / usa leadership in the past century has come down
to here.... i can only hope that info releases like this will hasten it's demise...
Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of
illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a
financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same
laws as the rest of the UK.
The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to
me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth
@6 ingrian... things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of Russia after the fall of
the Soviet Union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit Russia
fully, as they'd intended...
Let the Doxx wars begin! Sure, Anonymous is not Russian but it will surely now be targeted
and smeared as such which would show that it has hit a nerve. British hypocrisy publicly
called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me.
I think we've all noticed the euro-asslantic press (and friends) on behalf of, willingly
and in cooperation with the British intelligence et al 'calling out' numerous Russians as
G(R)U/spies/whatever for a while now yet providing less than a shred of credible
evidence.
It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The
interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint
does not bode well for such relations.
Meanwhile in Brussels they are having their cake and eating it, i.e. bemoaning Europe's
'weak response' to Russian propaganda:
"A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of
the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you
have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants?
Yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be
black at all; it's just the pot making up things. "These Russian criminals are using
propaganda to show (truths) like the fact the DNC and Clinton campaigns colluded to prevent
Sanders from being nominated, so we need to establish a clandestine propaganda network to
establish that the Russians are running propaganda!"
"In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream."
I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit
and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been
launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins.
The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's
explicit approval.
Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed
by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to
have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are
not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own
party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda
BUT...the author assures us that the "deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding
should now flow" Huh?? In other words, the fix is in. Mueller will pardon Trump on collusion charges but the
propaganda campaign against Russia will continue...with the full support of both parties. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it...
This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been
about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had
plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap.
A lot of
sour grapes with this so-called 'integrity initiative', IMO. BP was behind a lot of this, I
would also think. When Assad pulled the plug on the pipeline through the Levant in 2009, the
Brits hacked up a fur ball. It's gone downhill for them ever since. Couldn't happen to a
nicer lot. If you can't invade or beat them with proxies, you can at least call them names.
If Trump was taking dirty money or engaged in criminal activity with Russians then he
was doing it with Felix Sater, who was under the control of the FBI... And who was in
charge of the FBI during all of the time that Sater was a signed up FBI snitch? You got it
-- Robert Mueller (2001 thru 2013) ...
It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6
meddling, including:
Steele dossier: To create suspicion in government, media, and later the public
Leaking of DNC emails to Wikileaks (but calling it a "hack"):
To help with election of Trump and link Wikileaks (as agent) to Russian election
meddling
Cambridge Analytica: To provide necessary reasoning for Trump's (certain) win of the electoral college.
Note: We later found that dozens of firms had undue access to Facebook data. Why did the
campaign turn to a British firm instead of an American firm? Well, it had to be a British
firm if MI6 was running the (supposed) Facebook targeting for CIA.
As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The
election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was
the best candidate for the job.
The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love?
"things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of russia after the fall of the soviet
union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit russia fully, as
they'd intended..."
They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent
Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course
the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass
psychological pathology among the elites.
The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist
"order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US
and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation.
Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it
all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is
Strength." The three pillars of political power.
Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his
pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always
been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so
called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK
government...and in this context, new empowerished sovereign governemts into the EU should
consider the possibility expelling these traitors as spies of the UK....
Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:
Germany: Harold Elletson ,Klaus NaumannWolf-Ruediger Bengs, Ex Amb Killian, Gebhardt v Moltke, Roland
Freudenstein, Hubertus Hoffmann, Bertil Wenger, Beate Wedekind, Klaus Wittmann, Florian
Schmidt, Norris v Schirach
Sweden, Norway, Finland: Martin Kragh , Jardar Ostbo, Chris Prebensen, Kate Hansen Bundt, Tor Bukkvoll, Henning-Andre
Sogaard, Kristen Ven Bruusgard, Henrik O Breitenbauch, Niels Poulsen, Jeppe Plenge, Claus
Mathiesen, Katri Pynnoniemi, Ian Robertson, Pauli Jarvenpaa, Andras Racz
Netherlands: Dr Sijbren de Jong, Ida Eklund-Lindwall, Yevhen Fedchenko, Rianne Siebenga, Jerry Sullivan,
Hunter B Treseder, Chris Quick
Spain: Nico de Pedro, Ricardo Blanco Tarno, Eduardo Serra Rexach, Dionisio Urteaga Todo, Dimitri
Barua, Fernando Valenzuela Marzo, Marta Garcia, Abraham Sanz, Fernando Maura, Jose Ignacio
Sanchez Amor, Jesus Ramon-Laca Clausen, Frances Ghiles, Carmen Claudin, Nika Prislan, Luis
Simon, Charles Powell, Mira Milosevich, Daniel Iriarte, Anna Bosch, Mira Milosevich-Juaristi,
Tito, Frances Ghiles, Borja Lasheras, Jordi Bacaria, Alvaro Imbernon-Sainz, Nacho Samor
US, Canada:
Mary Ellen Connell, Anders Aslund, Elizabeth Braw, Paul Goble, David Ziegler
Evelyn Farkas, Glen Howard, Stephen Blank, Ian Brzezinski, Thomas Mahnken, John Nevado,
Robert Nurick, Jeff McCausland
Todd Leventhal
UK: Chris Donnelly
Amalyah Hart William Browder John Ardis
Roderick Collins, Patrick Mileham Deborah Haynes
Dan Lafayeedney Chris Hernon Mungo Melvin
Rob Dover Julian Moore Agnes Josa David Aaronovitch Stephen Dalziel Raheem Shapi Ben
Nimmo
Robert Hall Alexander Hoare Steve Jermy Dominic Kennedy
Victor Madeira Ed Lucas Dr David Ryall
Graham Geale Steve Tatham Natalie Nougayrede Alan Riley [email protected]Anne Applebaum Neil Logan Brown James Wilson
Primavera Quantrill
Bruce Jones David Clark Charles Dick
Ahmed Dassu Sir Adam Thompson Lorna Fitzsimons Neil Buckley Richard Titley Euan Grant
Alastair Aitken Yusuf Desai Bobo Lo Duncan Allen Chris Bell
Peter Mason John Lough Catherine Crozier
Robin Ashcroft Johanna Moehring Vadim Kleiner David Fields Alistair Wood Ben Robinson Drew
Foxall Alex Finnen
Orsyia Lutsevych Charlie Hatton Vladimir Ashurkov
Giles Harris Ben Bradshaw
Chris Scheurweghs James Nixey
Charlie Hornick Baiba Braze J Lindley-French
Craig Oliphant Paul Kitching Nick Childs Celia Szusterman
James Sherr Alan Parfitt Alzbeta Chmelarova Keir Giles
Andy Pryce Zach Harkenrider
Kadri Liik Arron Rahaman David Nicholas Igor Sutyagin Rob Sandford Maya Parmar Andrew Wood
Richard Slack Ellie Scarnell
Nick Smith Asta Skaigiryte Ian Bond Joanna Szostek Gintaras Stonys Nina Jancowicz
Nick Washer Ian Williams Joe Green Carl Miller Adrian Bradshaw
Clement Daudy Jeremy Blackham Gabriel Daudy Andrew Lucy Stafford Diane Allen Alexandros
Papaioannou
Paddy Nicoll
In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream.
We have already seen
many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who does
not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign against
Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but seems to be
part of a different project.
The ' Integrity
Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal,
academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to
take action when the British center perceives a need.
"... When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also. ..."
"... Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. ..."
"... This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts. ..."
One of the documents lists a series of propaganda weapons to be used against Russia. One is
use of the church as a weapon. That has already been started in Ukraine with Poroshenko
buying off regligious leader to split Ukraine Orthodoxy from Russian Orthodoxy. It also
explicitly states that the Skripal incident is a 'Dirty Trick' against Russia.
The British political system is on the verge of collapse. BREXIT has finally demonstrated
that the Government/ Opposition parties are clearly aligned against the interests of the
people. The EU is nothing more than an arm of the Globalist agenda of world domination.
The US has shown its true colours - sanctioning every country that stands for independent
sovereignty is not a good foreign policy, and is destined to turn the tide of public opinion
firmly against global hegemony, endless wars, and wealth inequity.
The old Empire is in its death throes. A new paradigm awaits which will exclude all those
who have exploited the many, in order to sit at the top of the pyramid. They cannot escape
Karma.
The Western world needs to come to terms with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its
aftermath. Today, Russia is led by Putin and he obviously has objectives as any national
leader has.
Western "leaders" need to decide whether Putin:
Is trying to create Soviet Union 2.0, to have a 2nd attempt at ruling the world thru
communism and to do this by holding the world to ransom over oil/gas supplies. OR
Is wanting Russia to become a member of the family of nations and of a multi-polar world to improve the lives of
Russian people, but is being blocked at every twist and turn by manufactured events like Russia-gate and the Skripal affair
and now this latest revelation of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns being coordinated and run out of London.
Both of the above cannot be true because there are too many contradictions. Which is it??
Yes because imagine that that we lived in 1940 without any means to inform ourselves and
that media was still in control over the information that reaches us. We would already be in
a fullblown war with Russia because of it but now with the Internet and information going
around freely only a whimpy 10% of we the people stand behind their desperately wanted war.
Imagine that, an informed sheople.
Can't have that, they cannot do their usual stuff anymore.... good riddance.
"250,000 from the US State
Department , the documents allege."....... Interesting.
"During the third
Democratic debate on Saturday night, Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like
project" to break encrypted terrorist communications. The project would "bring the government and the tech communities together" to find a way
to give law enforcement access to encrypted messages, she said. It's something that some
politicians and intelligence officials have wanted for awhile,"........
***wasn't the Manhatten project a secret venture?????? Hummmmm"
Hillary Clinton has all of our encryption keys, including the FBI's . "Encryption keys" is
a general reference to several encryption functions hijacked by Hillary and her surrogate
ENTRUST. They include hash functions (used to indicate whether the contents have been altered
in transit), PKI public/private key infrastructure, SSL (secure socket layer), TLS (transport
layer security), the Dual_EC_DRBG
NSA algorithm and certificate authorities.
The convoluted structure managed by the "Federal Common Policy" group has ceded to
companies like ENTRUST INC the ability to sublicense their authority to third parties who in
turn manage entire other networks in a Gordian knot of relationships clearly designed to fool
the public to hide their devilish criminality. All roads lead back to Hillary and the Rose
Law Firm."- patriots4truth
When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with
plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also.
FBI/Anonymous can use this story to support a narrative that social media bots posting
memes is a problem for everybody, and it's not a partisan issue. The idea is that fake news
and unrestricted social media are inherently dangerous, and both the West and Russia are
exploiting that, so governments need to agree to restrict the ability to use those platforms
for political speech, especially without using True Names.
Oilygawkies in the UK and USSA seem to be letting their spooks have a good-humored (rating
here on the absurd transparency of these ops) contest to see who can come up with the most
surreal propaganda psy-ops.
But they probably also serve as LHO distractions from something genuinely sleazy.
Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. Anything that is
remotely like Nationalism is the true enemy of these Globalist/Internationalists, which is
what the Top-Ape Bolshevik promoted: see Vladimir Lenin and his quotes on how he believed
fully in "internationalism" for a world without borders. Ironic how they Love the butchers of
the Soviet Union but hate Russia. It is ALL ABOUT IDEOLOGY to these people and "the means
justify the ends".
Basically, if one acquires factual information from an internet source, which leads to
overturning the propaganda to which we're all subjected, then it MUST have come from Putin.
This is the direction they're headed. Anyone speaking out against the official story is
obviously a Russian spy.
Better to call it the Anti-Integrity Initiative. UK cretins up to their usual dirty tricks - let them choke on their poison. The judgement of history will eventually catch up with them.
A good 'ole economic collapse will give western countries a chance to purge their crazy
leaders before they involve us all in a thermonuclear war. Short everything with your entire
accounts.
This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have
such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the
WEST? This is nuts.
Isn't it just as likely someone in the WEST planted this cache, intending Anonymous to
find it?
Any propaganda coming from the UK or US is strictly zionist. EVERYTHING they put out is to
the benefit of Israel and the "lobby". Russia isn't perfect, but if they're an enemy of the
latter, then they should NOT be considered a foe to all thinking and conscientious
people.
Yesterday, the BBC had a thing on Thai workers in Israel, and how they keep dying of
accidents, their general level of slavery etc. Very odd to have a negative Israel story, so I
wonder who upset whom, and what the ongoing status will be.
Thai labourers in Israel tell of harrowing conditions
A year-long BBC investigation has discovered widespread abuse of Thai nationals living
and working in Israel - under a scheme organized by the two governments.
Many are subjected to unsafe working practices and squalid, unsanitary living
conditions. Some are overworked, others underpaid and there are dozens of unexplained
deaths.
England and the U.S. don't like their very poor and rotten social conditions put out for
the public to see. Both countries have severely deteriorating problems on their streets
because of bankrupt governments printing money for foreign wars.
More of the same fraudulent duality while alleged so called but not money etc continues to
flow (everything is criminal) and the cesspool of a hierarchy pretends it's business as
usual.
This isn't about maintaining balance in a lie this is about disclosing the truth and
agendas (Agenda 21 now Agenda 2030 = The New Age Religion is Never Going To Be Saturnism).
The layers of the hierarchy are a lie so unless the alleged so called leaders of those layers
are publicly providing testimony and confession then everything that is being spoon fed to
the pablum puking public through all sources is a lie.
Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity
Initiative consists of "clusters" of (((local politicians, journalists, military personnel,
scientists and academics))).
The (((team))) is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian
interference in European affairs, while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes,
the documents claim.
So the USA Congress operates under CIA surveillance... Due to CIA access to Saudi money the situation is probably much
worse then described as CIA tried to protect both its level of influence and shadow revenue streams.
Notable quotes:
"... The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch, is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing. ..."
"... I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community Inspector General 2014 ..."
"... The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly," wrote Grassley in a statement. ..."
"... According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with "bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper." ..."
"... Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications ..."
"... CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director ..."
"... During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance," said Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016. ..."
CIA intercepted Congressional emails about whistleblowers in 2014
The Inspector General expressed concern about "potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality" and "chilling effect"
Newly-declassified documents show the CIA intercepted sensitive Congressional communications about intelligence community whistleblowers.
The intercepts occurred under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The new disclosures
are contained in two letters of "Congressional notification" originally written to key members of Congress in March 2014, but kept
secret until now.
In the letters, then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough tells four key members of Congress that during
"routing counterintelligence monitoring of Government computer systems," the CIA collected emails between Congressional staff and
the CIA's head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough states that he's concerned "about the potential compromise to
whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent 'chilling effect' that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might
have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing."
The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch,
is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence
agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing.
"Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower complaints," McCullough states in his letters to lead Democrats
and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees at the time: Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Saxby Chambliss
(R-Georgia); and Representatives Michael Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland). McCullough adds that the type
of monitoring that occurred was "lawful and justified for [counterintelligence] purposes" but
"I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive
Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community
Inspector General 2014
The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The
fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers
raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly,"
wrote Grassley in a statement.
According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with
"bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper."
Grassley adds that he repeated his request to declassify the letters under the Trump administration, but that Trump intelligence
officials failed to respond. The documents were finally declassified this week after Grassley appealed to the new Intelligence Community
Inspector General Michael Atkinson.
History of alleged surveillance abuses
Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the
possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications. A Congressional staffer involved at the time says Clapper's
response seemed to imply that if Congressional communications were "incidentally" collected by the CIA, the material would not be
saved or reported up to CIA management.
"In the event of a protected disclosure by a whistleblower somehow comes to the attention of personnel responsible for monitoring
user activity," Clapper wrote to Grassley and Wyden on July 25, 2014, "there is no intention for such disclosure to be reported
to agency leadership under an insider threat program."
However, the newly-declassified letters indicate the opposite happened in reality with the whistleblower-related emails:
"CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually
shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy
Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director."
Clapper has previously come under fire for his 2013 testimony to Congress in which he denied that the national Security Agency
(NSA) collects data on millions of Americans. Weeks later, Clapper's statement was proven false by material leaked by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden.
"During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance,"
said
Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016.
"Top officials, officials who reported to Director Clapper, repeatedly misled the American people and even lied to them."
Clapper has repeatedly denied lying, and said that any incorrect information he provided was due to misunderstandings or mistakes.
Clapper and Brennan have also acknowledged taking part in the controversial practice of "unmasking" the protected names of U.S.
citizens - including people connected to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump - whose communications were "incidentally" captured
in US counterintelligence operations. Unmaskings within the US intelligence community are supposed to be extremely rare and only
allowed under carefully justified circumstances. This is to protect the privacy rights of American citizens. But it's been revealed
that Obama officials requested unmaskings on a near daily basis during the election year of 2016.
Clapper and Brennan have said their activities were lawful and not politically motivated. Both men have become vocal critics of
President Trump.
Can you imagine what kind of place the US would have been under Clinton?!!!!!!
All the illegality, spying, conniving, dirty tricks, arcancides, selling us out to the highest bidder and full on attack against
our Constitution would be in full swing!
When intel entities can operate unimpeded and un-monitored, it spells disaster for everyone and everything outside that parameter.
Their operations go unnoticed until some stray piece of information exposes them. There are many facilities that need to be purged
and audited, but since this activity goes on all over the world, there is little to stop it. Even countries that pledge allegiance
and cooperation are blindsiding their allies with bugs, taps, blackmails, and other crimes. Nobody trusts nobody, and that's a
horrid fact to contend with in an 'advanced' civilization.
Forget the political parties. When the intelligence agencies spy on everyone, they know all about politicians of both parties
before they ever win office, and make sure they have enough over them to control them. They were asleep at the switch when Trump
won, because no one, including them, believed he would ever win. Hillary was their candidate, the State Department is known overseas
as "the political arm of the CIA". They were furious when she lost, hence the circus ever since.
From its founding by the Knights of Malta the JFK&MLK-assassinating, with Mossad 9/11-committing CIA has been the Vatican's
US Fifth Column action branch, as are the FBI and NSA: with an institutional hiring preference for Roman Catholic "altared boy"
closet-queen psychopaths "because they're practiced at keeping secrets."
Think perverts Strzok, Brennan, and McCabe "licked it off the wall?"
I agree with you 100%. Problem is, tons of secret technology and information have been passed out to the private sector. And
the private sector is not bound to the FOIA requests, therefore neutralizing the obligation for government to disclose classified
material. They sidestepped their own policies to cooperate with corrupt MIC contractors, and recuse themselves from disclosing
incriminating evidence.
Everyone knows that spying runs in the fam. 44th potus Mom and Gma BOTH. An apple doesn't fall from the tree. If ppl only knew
the true depth of the evil and corruption we would be in the hospital with a heart attack. Gilded age is here and has been, since
our democracy was hijacked (McCain called it an intervention) back in 1963. Unfortunately it started WAY back before then when
(((they))) stole everything with the installation of the Fed.
The FBI and CIA have long since slipped the controls of Congress and the Constitution. President Trump should sign an executive
order after the mid terms and stand down at least the FBI and subject the CIA to a senate investigation.
America needs new agencies that are accountable to the peoples elected representatives.
A determined care has been used to cultivate in D.C., a system that swiftly decapitates the whistleblowers. Resulting in an
increasingly subservient cadre of civil servants who STHU and play ostrich, or drool at what scraps are about to roll off the
master's table as the slide themselves into a better position, taking advantage to sell vice, weapons, and slaves.
What the hell does the CIA have to do with ANYTHING in the United States? Aren't they limited to OUTSIDE the U.S.? So why would
they be involved in domestic communications for anything? These clowns need to be indicted for TREASON!
"... There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress. ..."
"... Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary. ..."
"... "Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it." ..."
"... "While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the £4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women ..."
"... The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it. ..."
"... While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE. ..."
"... Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony." ..."
"... In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage] ..."
"... The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945 ..."
"... I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism ..."
"... What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to! ..."
"... Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned. ..."
"... Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded! ..."
"... Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire" ..."
"... While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned. ..."
"... As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood. ..."
This is one of the most sensible editorials on the Russia issue I've seen, and it is true, insofar as it goes. There is something
very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies.
There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to
testify before congress.
That said, I wouldn't dismiss the effect of the Russian involvement, or the relevance of the charges against Trump and his
people. Bear in mind that the Party of McCarthy has been all about spying on its opponents from the days of HUAC. Nixon's break-in
at the Watergate Hotel didn't singlehandedly decide the election ... but who would believe that was the only underhanded tactic
he used? Republicans believe that if you're not cheating, you're not trying -- holding out for any ethical standard makes you
inherently disloyal and unworthy of support. Something like Kavanaugh's involvement in the hacking of Democrats in 2003 (
http://www.foxnews.com/poli... ) should be no surprise; neither should the "Guccifer" hack that put the Democrats' data in
the hands of Wikileaks. (Their subsequent attempts to demand Wikileaks not publish such a newsworthy leak, of course, is the sort
of thing that undermines their position with me!)
Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary.
But if you go back in your house after the Republicans were minding it, don't be surprised if together with the missing couch
change you notice some missing silverware, your kitchen tap has been sawed off, and the laptop is short half its RAM. By the time
you've catalogued everything missing, the stolen brass part from the gas main downstairs might have blown you to smithereens.
"Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie,
the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it."
There are many reasons the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule. Each one of them is bound up with the lies required to enforce
its rule. The greater its unfitness, "the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it.
"While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise
is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just
want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the £4 billion annual license fee."
- BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women
The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it.
While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies
to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in
the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE.
Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of
colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources
and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony."
In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another
'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite
an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage]
The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945. It is time radical critiques of
its values, power and methods should call it by its right name.
I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months.
The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war.
We are in an age of new mccarthyism
What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction
they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told
to!
just because it was a convenient act for them to do what they wanted in conquering iraq is not reason that idiots like that are
capable of planning and concealing the numerous co-conspirators to arrange something like 9..11. imperialism can always count
on blowback to have occasion for further crimes. there is the slim chance that they knew what was being planned and that they
let it happen - except that none of those folks is evil enough for that. not even dick cheney. what i love about all conspiracy
theories of the american kind is that they never nam or show an actual conspirator conspiring. look at one of the truly great
failed conspiracy, that of the 20th july 1944 in germany that was meant to kill hitler and how many people were arrested in no
time at all and executed..
A "conspiracy" is just any two or more people getting together to discuss something affecting one or more other people without
them being party to the discussion. Like a surprise birthday party, for instance. Obviously the "official" version of the 9/11
events is also a "conspiracy theory" that 19 mostly Saudi Arabians led by a guy hiding in a cave in Afghanistan conspired to carry
out co-ordinated attacks that just happened to coincide with most of the USAF being conveniently off in Alaska and northern Canada
on an exercise that day, and another "coinciding exercise" simulating a multiple hijacking being carried out in the northeast
US thereby confusing the Air Traffic Controllers as to whether the hijackings were "real world or exercise", significantly delaying
the response, among other things.
Do you really believe that WTC 7, a steel frame building which was not adjacent to WTC 1 & 2, and was NOT hit by any airplanes,
coincidentally collapsed due to low temperature paper and furniture office fires? Something that has never happened before or
since? Or that such low temperature fires would cause the massive heavily reinforced concrete central core/elevator shaft to collapse
first, pulling the rest of the building inward onto it in classic controlled demolition technique?
It is getting more difficult to find the videos showing that now as Google, as with WSWS articles, is pushing them off the
front pages of results, while Snopes has put out a some very misleading reports that set up false "straw man" claims and then
"disprove" them. Even the "disproofs" are false.
For instance, a Snopes report on the WTC 7 collapse states: "relied heavily on discredited claims, none of which were new,
including:
Jet fuel cannot melt steel beams (This claim is misleading, as steel beams do to not need to melt completely to be compromised
structurally).
A sprinkler system would have prevented temperatures from rising high enough to cause to cause structural damage. (This claim
ignores the fact that a crash from a 767 jet would likely destroy such a system.)
The structural system would have been protected by fireproofing material (similarly, such a system would have been damaged
in a 767 crash). "
Jet fuel, which is Kerosene, burns at around 575º in open air, which was the case in WTC buildings 1 & 2. Most of it was vaporized
by the impact with the buildings and burned of within minutes. At any rate, 575º is far below the point at which structural steel
specifically designed to withstand high temperature fires like that used in the World Trade Centre buildings is weakened.
All of which is irrelevant, as are the other "points" made by Snopes, because Building 7 was not hit by an airplane and there
was no jet fuel involved. Something conveniently "overlooked" by Snopes and other similar misleading "disproofs". Not to mention
that the Intelligence establishment is busy putting out false trails constantly which use, for instance, obviously faked photos
or videos of the three WTC buildings collapsing to discredit the real videos and photos by setting up "straw men" they can then
"disprove" and point to as "evidence" that people who don't believe the official version are "creating fake news".
Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called
it as soon as the buildings imploded!
"The perpetrators and their conspiracy is not a theory since it has been proved."
By "proved" I assume you are referring to "proofs" such as the fantastical claim that Mohammed Atta's passport was allegedly
and fortuitously "found" when it supposedly survived the 600 mph impact of the 767 he was supposedly piloting with a huge steel
and concrete building, survived the huge fireball it was supposedly in the middle of unscorched, and conveniently fluttered to
the ground intact to land at the feet of an FBI agent who immediately realized it must have belonged to one of the hijackers!
Even Hans Christian Andersen couldn't invent Fairy Tales like that.
the best that conspiracy theorist can do is, invariably, to call proven facts "just another theory " which only proves that they
are actually aware that they are full of hot air! zarembas father as a structural engineer unless a fantasy is certainly better
off among the dead than among the living and perpetrating his ignorance of steel and weight and fire onto the world!
Just because all the details aren't known as to who conspired and why there's enough holes in the "official conspiracy theory"
of 19 hijackers to conclude that this could not have been pulled off without some conspiring on the American side. Certainly the
the neocons benefited greatly from these attacks. So motive is there for sure.
Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most
effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party
Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party
are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form
a "Political Revolution against Empire"
While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is
concerned.
There is nothing to win in global nuke war, all know it while the outcome would be surely the current global oligarchy loosing
grip on population destroying the system that works for them so well giving chance to what they dread socialist revolution they
would have been much weaker to counter.
Regional conflicts are just positioning of oligarchy for management of global oligarchic country club while strict class morality
is maintained.
What I do not we are conditions for war (split of global ruling elites) while what I see is broad propaganda of war as a excuse
to clamp down on fake enemy in order to control respective populations while there is factual unity among world oligarchy.
As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch
of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood.
She died abandoned by those on the left who embraced the war for their political aspirations, she was murdered for her true
internationalism i.e. No war fought between working people of one country and working people of another country.
Kalen, it's only effective to use the correct and understandable term 'Empire' in exposing, warning, and motivating average Americans
--- since very few even know what words like; oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism, authoritarianism, corporate-state, or Wolin's 'inverted
totalitarianism' mean --- let alone could ever serve as rallying cries for the coming essential Second American Revolution against
EMPIRE.
As Pat would have shouted if Tom had taken the Paine to edit his call, "Give me Liberty over EMPIRE, or Give me Death!"
"Sweet Carolyn" OH OH OH --- Yes, only a very small percentage of Americans understand that our former country, the U.S. of America,
is categorically, provably, and absolutely a new form of Empire, and is inexorably the first in world history an; 'effectively-disguised',
'truly-global', 'dual-party Vichy', and 'capitalist-fueled' EMPIRE --- an EMPIRE, really just an EMPIRE!
Just do an honest survey, "Sweet Carolyn", yourself, and if you're not a "Sweet Liarlyn", you will have to admit that essentially
ZERO of the first 1000 people you ask, will say --- "Oh ya, Carolyn, of course I know that this whole effin 'system' that others
less informed may still be so stupid that they think they live in a real country, when I (enter their name) do solemnly swear
is just an effin EMPIRE, which is so well disguised, that these few idiots who don't understand that they are just citizen/'subjects'
of this monsterous EMPIRE."
Do the survey, "Sweet Carolyn" and if you don't lie to yourself --- which maybe you do, because HELL, your job is to lie to
others (so it's quite likely that you'll lie about anything) --- you'll find that exactly zero average Americans have the effin
slightest idea in the world that their great 'country' is actually an effin EMPIRE.
HELL, Carolyn, almost half the Americans repeatedly yell, "We're number ONE", "We're number ONE", that their brains would rather
rattle themselves to death than even let logic, history, knowledge, or anything into their addled and propaganda filled heads!
Excellent article, and it did a particularly good job of tying together the foreign policy and domestic policy stratagems of a
major faction of the U.S. ruling class. I, for one, do not doubt that the Russians conduct some sort of cyber warfare against
the U.S.; but that must be understood by considering the fact that every major governmental, political, military, and business
organization on the face of the Earth must now operate in this manner. A friend of mine's son, who was in the Army, pointed out
that the big players, by a wide margin, in spying on and to some degree interfering in the U.S. domestic scene are China and Israel.
Kevin Barrett has written and said on various radio shows that much of what is attributed to the "Russians" are actually the actions
of Russian/Israeli dual citizens, many of whom move freely between the U.S., Russia, and Israel. And, of course, the U.S. runs
major spy and manipulation operations in more countries than any other nation of Earth, and U.S. based corporations are busy both
inside the U.S. and in foreign places in similar activities.
It is clearly a desire of significant sectors, of the Capitalist rulers of the U.S., to repress dissent and political activities
that oppose their agendas. It took them a few years to realize that their old methods using TV, hate radio, magazines, direct
mail, and newspapers were losing their effectiveness. They have been increasing their attacks on leftist websites, hacking into
websites, closing websites using phonied-up "national security" justifications, employing numerous trolls, and establishing and
funding more far right websites, such as Breitbart and Infowars. These efforts are most effective when they are not overpowering
and heavy handed.
The classic book on this was the 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"
by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann. Rob Williams has updated the concept for the internet age in
<http:
www.vermontindependent.org ="" the-post-truth-world-reviving-the-propaganda-model-of-news-for-our-digital-age=""/>.
The strategy
is nothing new, the methods are merely updated and use the latest technologies.
I guess the lesson to be learned here is that rigging elections through byzantine electoral laws and billion dollar corporate
slush funds is a thing of the past. All you need now is 13 amateur IT goomba's with a marketing scheme and twitter accounts. Well, sure is a fragile "World's Sole Superpower" we got here. Go Team?
"... There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out in my book The Myth of Homeland Security ..."
"... "The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance. ..."
"... One thing that did ..."
"... US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point. ..."
"... My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection." ..."
"... All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault 7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. ..."
"... the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET -- Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ] ..."
"... It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being prepared for cyberwar. ..."
"... it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools. ..."
"... My observation is that the NSA and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese? ..."
"... The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are much smaller operations? ..."
"... That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other processors have similar backdoors. ..."
"... There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at all. ..."
"... So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order to justify its actions and defend its budget. ..."
"... What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes. ..."
"... Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of same. ..."
Bob Moore asks me to comment on an article about propaganda and security/intelligence. [
article ] This is going to be a mixture of opinion and references to facts; I'll try to be
clear which is which.
Yesterday several NATO countries ran a concerted propaganda campaign against Russia. The
context for it was a NATO summit in which the U.S. presses for an intensified cyberwar
against NATO's preferred enemy.
On the same day another coordinated campaign targeted China. It is aimed against China's
development of computer chip manufacturing further up the value chain. Related to this is
U.S. pressure on Taiwan, a leading chip manufacturer, to cut its ties with its big
motherland.
It is true that the US periodically makes a big push regarding "messaging" about hacking.
Whether or not it constitutes a "propaganda campaign" depends on how we choose to interpret
things and the labels we attach to them -- "propaganda campaign" has a lot of negative
connotations and one person's "outreach effort" is an other's "propaganda." An
ultra-nationalist or an authoritarian submissive who takes the government's word for anything
would call it "outreach."
There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that
China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking
to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out
in my book The Myth of Homeland Security (2004) [
wc ] claims such as that the Chinese had "40,000 highly trained hackers" are flat-out
absurd and ignore the reality of hacking; that's four army corps. Hackers don't engage in
"human wave" attacks.
"The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was
presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm
perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the
industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance.
One thing that did happen in 2010 around the same time as the nonexistent
cyberwar was China and Russia proposed trilateral talks with the US to attempt to define
appropriate limits on state-sponsored hacking. The US flatly rejected the proposal, but there
was virtually no coverage of that in the US media at the time. The UN also called for a
cyberwar treaty framework, and the effort was killed by the US. [ wired ] What's
fascinating and incomprehensible to me is that, whenever the US feels that its ability to claim
pre-emptive cyberwar is challenged, it responds with a wave of claims about Chinese (or Russian
or North Korean) cyberwar aggression.
John Negroponte, former director of US intelligence, said intelligence agencies in the
major powers would be the first to "express reservations" about such an accord.
US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to
war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in
advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the
superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to
try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point.
My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other
nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and
Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder
reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of
its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a
war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has
not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US
distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US
power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis
is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection."
The anti-Russian campaign is about alleged Russian spying, hacking and influence
operations. Britain and the Netherland took the lead. Britain accused Russia's military
intelligence service (GRU) of spying attempts against the Organisation for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague and Switzerland, of spying attempts against the British
Foreign Office, of influence campaigns related to European and the U.S. elections, and of
hacking the international doping agency WADA. British media willingly
helped to exaggerate the claims: [ ]
The Netherland [sic] for its part released
a flurry
of information about the alleged spying attempts against the OPCW in The Hague. It claims
that four GRU agents traveled to The Hague on official Russian diplomatic passports to sniff
out the WiFi network of the OPCW. (WiFi networks are notoriously easy to hack. If the OPCW is
indeed using such it should not be trusted with any security relevant issues.) The Russian
officials were allegedly very secretive, even cleaning out their own hotel trash, while they,
at the same, time carried laptops with private data and even taxi receipts showing their
travel from a GRU headquarter in Moscow to the airport. Like in the Skripal/Novichok saga the
Russian spies are, at the same time, portrayed as supervillains and hapless amateurs. Real
spies are neither.
There's a lot there, and I think the interpretation is a bit over-wrought, but it's mostly
accurate. The US and the UK (and other NATO allies, as necessary) clearly coordinate when it
comes to talking points. Claims of Chinese cyberwar in the US press will be followed by claims
in the UK and Australian press, as well. My suspicion is that this is not the US Government and
UK Government coordinating a story -- it's the intelligence agencies doing it. My
opinion is that the intelligence services are fairly close to a "deep state" -- the
CIA and NSA are completely out of control and the CIA has gone far toward building its own
military, while the NSA has implemented completely unrestricted surveillance worldwide.
All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault
7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking
the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. While the attribution
that "Fancy Bear is the GRU" has been made and is probably fairly solid, the attribution of NSA
malware and CIA malware is rock solid; the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET --
Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on
Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully
said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA
wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ]
It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US
has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being
prepared for cyberwar. I tend to be extremely skeptical of US claims because: bomber gap,
missile gap, gulf of Tonkin, Iraq WMD, Afghanistan, Libya and every other aggressive attack by
the US which was blamed on its target. The reason I assume the US is the most aggressive actor
in cyberspace is because the US has done a terrible job of protecting its tool-sets and
operational security: it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the
NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools.
Meanwhile, where are the leaks of Russian and Chinese tools? They have been few and far
between, if there have been any at all. Does this mean that the Russians and Chinese have
amazingly superior tradecraft, if not tools? I don't know. My observation is that the NSA
and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing
to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA
and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese?
The article does not have great depth to its understanding of the situation, I'm afraid. So
it comes off as a bit heavy on the recent news while ignoring the long-term trends. For
example:
The allegations of Chinese supply chain attacks are of course just as hypocritical as the
allegations against Russia. The very first know case of computer related supply chain
manipulation goes
back to 1982 :
A CIA operation to sabotage Soviet industry by duping Moscow into stealing booby-trapped
software was spectacularly successful when it triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas
pipeline, it emerged yesterday.
I wrote a piece about the "Farewell Dossier" in 2004. [ mjr
] Re-reading it, it comes off as skeptical but waffly. I think that it's self-promotion by the
CIA and exaggerates considerably ("look how clever we are!") at a time when the CIA was
suffering an attention and credibility deficit after its shitshow performance under George
Tenet. But the first known cases of computer related supply chain manipulation go back to the
70s and 80s -- the NSA even compromised Crypto AG's Hagelin M-209 system (a mechanical
ciphering machine) in order to read global communications encrypted with that product. You can
imagine Crypto AG's surprise when the Iranian secret police arrested one of their sales reps
for selling backdoor'd crypto -- the NSA had never told them about the backdoor, naturally. The
CIA was also on record for producing Xerox machines destined for the USSR, which had recorders
built into them So, while the article is portraying the historical sweep of NSA dirty tricks,
they're only looking at the recent ones. Remember: the NSA also weakened the elliptic curve
crypto library in RSA's Bsafe implementation, paying RSADSI $13 million to accept their tweaked
code.
Why haven't we been hearing about the Chinese and Russians doing that sort of thing? There
are four options:
The Russians and Chinese are doing it, they're just so darned good nobody has
caught them until just recently.
The Russians and Chinese simply resort to using existing tools developed by the
hacking/cybercrime community and rely on great operational security rather than fancy
tools.
The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts
the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence
agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is
around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are
much smaller operations?
Something else.
That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's
not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel
management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other
processors have similar backdoors.
Was the Intel IME a "backdoor" or just "a bad idea"? Well, that's tricky. Let me put my
tinfoil hat on: making a backdoor look like a sloppily developed product feature would be the
competent way to write a backdoor. Making it as sneaky as the backdoor in the Via is
unnecessary -- incompetence is eminently believable.
&
(kaspersky)
I believe all of these stories (including the Supermicro) are the tip of a great big, ugly
iceberg. The intelligence community has long known that software-only solutions are too
mutable, and are easy to decompile and figure out. They have wanted to be in the BIOS of
systems -- on the motherboard -- for a long time. If you go back to 2014, we have disclosures
about the NSA malware that hides in hard drive BIOS: [
vice ] [
vice ] That appears to have been in progress around 2000/2001.
Of note, the group recovered two modules belonging to EquationDrug and GrayFish that were
used to reprogram hard drives to give the attackers persistent control over a target machine.
These modules can target practically every hard drive manufacturer and brand on the market,
including Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba, Corsair, Hitachi and more. Such attacks
have traditionally been difficult to pull off, given the risk in modifying hard drive
software, which may explain why Kaspersky could only identify a handful of very specific
targets against which the attack was used, where the risk was worth the reward.
But
Equation Group's malware platforms have other tricks, too. GrayFish, for example, also has
the ability to install itself into computer's boot record -- software that loads even
before the operating system itself -- and stores all of its data inside a portion of
the operating system called the registry, where configuration data is normally stored.
EquationDrug was designed for use on older Windows operating systems, and "some of the
plugins were designed originally for use on Windows 95/98/ME" -- versions of Windows so old
that they offer a good indication of the Equation Group's age.
This is not a very good example of how to establish a "malware gap" since it just makes the
NSA look like they are incapable of keeping a secret. If you want an idea how bad it is,
Kaspersky labs' analysis of the NSA's toolchain is a good example of how to do attribution
correctly. Unfortunately for the US agenda, that solid attribution points toward Fort Meade in
Maryland. [kaspersky]
Let me be clear: I think we are fucked every which way from the start. With backdoors in the
BIOS, backdoors on the CPU, and wireless cellular-spectrum backdoors, there are probably
backdoors in the GPUs and the physical network controllers, as well. Maybe the backdoors in the
GPU come from the GRU and maybe the backdoors in the hard drives come from NSA, but who cares?
The upshot is that all of our systems are so heinously compromised that they can only be
considered marginally reliable. It is, literally, not your computer: it's theirs. They'll let
you use it so long as your information is interesting to them.
Do I believe the Chinese are capable of doing such a thing? Of course. Is the GRU? Probably.
Mossad? Sure. NSA? Well-documented attribution points toward NSA. Your computer is a free-fire
zone. It has been since the mid 1990s, when the NSA was told "no" on the Clipper chip and
decided to come up with its own Plan B, C, D, and E. Then, the CIA came up with theirs. Etc.
There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at
all.
From my 2012 RSA conference lecture "Cyberwar, you're doing it wrong."
The problem is that playing in this space is the purview of governments. Nobody in the
cybercrime or hacking world need tools like these. The intelligence operatives have huge
budgets, compared to a typical company's security budget, and it's unreasonable to expect any
business to invest such a level of effort on defending itself. So what should companies do?
They should do exactly what they are doing: expect the government to deal with it; that's what
governments are for. The problem with that strategy is that their government isn't on their
side, either! It's Hobbes' playground.
In case you think I am engaging in hyperbole, I assure you I am not. If you want another
example of the lengths (and willingness to bypass the law) "they" are willing to go, consider
'stingrays' that are in operation in every major US city and outside of every interesting hotel
and high tech park. Those devices are not passive -- they actively inject themselves into the
call set-up between your phone and your carrier -- your data goes through the stingray, or it
doesn't go at all. If there are multiple stingrays, then your latency goes through the roof.
"They" don't care. Are the stingrays NSA, FBI, CIA, Mossad, GRU, or PLA? Probably a bit of all
of the above depending on where and when.
Whenever the US gets caught with its pants down around its ankles, it blames the Chinese or
the Russians because they have done a good job of building the idea that the most serious
hackers on the planet at the Chinese. I don't believe that we're seeing complex propaganda
campaigns that are tied to specific incidents -- I think we see ongoing organic
propaganda campaigns that all serve the same end: protect the agencies, protect their budgets,
justify their existence, and downplay their incompetence.
So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been
consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order
to justify its actions and defend its budget.
The government also engages in propaganda, and is influenced by the intelligence
community's propaganda as well. And the propaganda campaigns work because everyone
involved assumes, "well, given what the NSA has been able to do, I should assume the Chinese
can do likewise." That's a perfectly reasonable assumption and I think it's probably true that
the Chinese have capabilities. The situation is what Chuck Spinney calls "A self-licking ice
cream cone" -- it's a justifying structure that makes participation in endless aggression seem
like a sensible thing to do. And, when there's inevitably a disaster, it's going to be like a
cyber-9/11 and will serve as a justification for even more unrestrained aggression.
Want to see what it looks like? A thousand thanks to Commentariat member [redacted] for this
link. If you don't like video, there's an article here. [ toms ]
Is this an NSA backdoor, or normal incompetence? Is Intel Management Engine an NSA-inspired
backdoor, or did some system engineers at Intel think that was a good idea? There are other
scary indications of embedded compromise: the CIA's Vault7 archive included code that appeared
to be intended to embed in the firmware of "smart" flatscreen TVs. That would make every LG
flat panel in every hotel room, a listening device just waiting to be turned on.
We know the Chinese didn't do that particular bug but why wouldn't they do
something similar, in something else? China is the world's oldest mature culture -- they
literally wrote the book on strategy -- Americans acting as though it's a great
surprise to learn that the Chinese are not stupid, it's just the parochialism of a 250 year-old
culture looking at a 3,000 year-old culture and saying "wow, you guys haven't been asleep at
the switch after all!"
What little I've been able to find out the new
Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive
retribution against (perceived) foes.
Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of
same.
Pierce R. Butler@#1: What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that
it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes.
Yes. Since 2001, as far as most of us can tell, federal cybersecurity spend has been 80%
offense, 20% defense. And a lot of the offensive spend has been aimed at We, The
People.
Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think
that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese
hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick
style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead
old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running
troll farms on social media). I mean, I've seen interviews with retired US intelligence
people since the 90s complain that since the late 1980s, the intelligence agencies have
been crippled by management in love with hi-tech "SIGINT" solutions to problems that never
deliver and neglecting old-fashioned "HUMINT" intelligence-gathering.
The thing is, Kevin Mitnick got away with a lot of what he did because people didn't
take security seriously then, and still don't. On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember
reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of the researchers who helped in the analysis of
the Morris worm
that took down a significant chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a
year or so afterwards and some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it
still hadn't patched the holes that had let the worm infect them in the first
place.
Cat Mara@#3: Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think
that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese
hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick
style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead
old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running
troll farms on social media).
I think that's right, to a high degree. What if Edward Snowden was an agent provocateur
instead of a well-meaning naive kid? A tremendous amount of damage could be done, as well
as stealing the US' expensive toys. The Russians have been very good at doing exactly that
sort of operation, since WWII. The Chinese are, if anything, more subtle than the
Russians.
The Chinese attitude, as expressed to me by someone who might be a credible source is,
"why are you picking a fight with us? We don't care, you're too far away for us to threaten
you, we both have loads of our own fish to fry. To them, the US is young, hyperactive, and
stupid.
The FBI is not competent, at all, against old-school humint intelligence-gathering.
Compared to the US' cyber-toys, the old ways are probably more efficient and cost
effective. China's intelligence community is also much more team-oriented than the CIA/NSA;
they're actually a disciplined operation under the strategic control of policy-makers.
That, by the way, is why Russians and Chinese stare in amazement when Americans ask things
like "Do you think Putin knew about this?" What a stupid question! It's an autocracy; they
don't have intelligence operatives just going an deciding "it's a nice day to go to England
with some Novichok." The entire American attitude toward espionage lacks maturity.
On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of
the researchers who helped in the analysis of the Morris worm that took down a significant
chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a year or so afterwards and
some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it still hadn't patched the
holes that had let the worm infect them in the first place.
That as an exciting time. We were downstream from University of Maryland, which got hit
pretty badly. Pete Cottrel and Chris Torek from UMD were also in on Bostic's dissection. We
were doing uucp over TCP for our email (that changed pretty soon after the worm) and our
uucp queue blew up. I cured the worm with a reboot into single-user mode and a quick 'rm
-f' in the uucp queue.
Thanks. I appreciate your measured analysis and the making explicit of the bottom line:
" agencies, protect their budgets, justify their existence, and downplay their
incompetence."
"... Their testimony was usually highly emotional and impassioned, leaving an impression very similar to that conveyed last night by Dr. Ford. ..."
"... The "Recovered" (or "False") Memory Syndrome movement emerged in the midst of the steadily radicalizing Feminist Movement in the United States, probably at the very apogee of its extreme evolution, and was a movement in which Freudian therapy was central and Freudian therapists came to play the leading role. ..."
"... It was only after they had been subjected to extensive pseudo-scientific Freudian "therapy," in which sex always lay prominently at the center, that virtually all of these women came forward with these stories. ..."
"... nd, in this dispute the American ultra-Feminists chose to believe and preach the worst, most salacious, and most vicious possible interpretation of Dr. Freud's highly speculative, evidence-less, and – as subsequent study has overwhelmingly shown – completely contrived diagnoses. ..."
"... Beginning with a conviction that cocaine could provide a substantial therapeutic base for solving psychological problems, Freud seems himself to have become for a period a regular consumer of that drug, but subsequently altered the focus of his therapy to hypnosis. After realizing certain limitations to this approach, he shifted again, turning to the so-called "Talking Cure" rooted in provoking word associations, which provided the basis for the classic Freudian method of popular imagination – with the patient reclining on a couch and the good Dr. seated behind with his notebook and pen in hand. This is the method he retained for the rest of his life. ..."
"... The primary fault which has been cited for Freud's methods generally, but which has been particularly critiqued in both hypnosis and the "Talking Cure" as a reason for their invalidation, is the claim that both – at least inadvertently – incorporate the high probability of suggestion from the therapist. ..."
"... Analysis thus follows a circular course, the analyst's theoretical surmise being first subtly communicated to the patient, then confirmed by the patient's casting of his (or, more often her) own ideas within the framework which had been suggested by the analyst. In the end, nothing new is actually discovered. The patient merely replicates the expressed Freudian doctrine. ..."
"... Those women patients, and a few men, became their victims, but in turn became the perpetrators in the savaging of numerous men's lives, as these men were subjected to the most vicious accusations imaginable. Most of these accusations were, in retrospect, clearly fantasies in a ruthless mid-20th century male-witch hunt. ..."
"... Into this popular intellectual desert walks Dr. Ford, both whose personal history and her strange physical mannerisms in testimony before the Senate clearly indicate she has unfortunately suffered some form of serious psychological disturbance. ..."
"... Seemingly alienated from her own parents and most immediate family members, she has made her home as far away from the Washington, DC area ..."
"... In 2012 she underwent some sort of psychological counseling with her husband, though the details as far as I know have not emerged. But, it hardly seems likely coincidental that her first documentable expressions of antipathy to Judge Kavanaugh occurred in that year, when it was announced that Judge Kavanaugh was considered the likely Supreme Court appointee should Mit Romney win the Presidential election. Her expressions of antipathy to him have only grown from there. ..."
"... Use of weapons and tactics, of which the defender is unprepared for, is a good offense. ..."
"... Are Republicans et al. unable to understand basic military strategy? Do we lack the ability to conceive of new tactics and weapons to use against Democrats and Globalists? ..."
"... I realize that it is unacceptable to attack this poor helpless victim so the "it can't be corroborated" card has to be played. However, who else notices how carefully manicured these charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual proof she is a liar and this whole thing is staged. ..."
"... She always takes everybody on some emotional ride right up to the point where she could be exposed but never with enough information so somebody could come out of the woodwork and prove she is a liar. ..."
"... We also have the infamous letter where we are repeatedly reminded she mailed it BEFORE Kavanaugh was picked. Of course, we only have Feinstein's word for that since nobody saw it until after this crap started. The delay was used to push up the story with new revelation about Mike Judge in a grocery store that shied away from her – again with no specific date so Judge could prove she is a liar. ..."
"... We also have all of our own recollections of high school insecurities and male-female interactions. What freshman or sophomore girl didn't get all giddy at the thought of the older guys hitting on her so she could tell all her friends about her older boyfriend ..."
"... Outside doors enter public areas kitchen sunroom living rooms not bedrooms. An outside door into a master bedroom with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment ..."
"... Your post is very perceptive and just might be how it all went down. With the complications of couples' counseling over her demand for the bizarre double main entry doors. (lulz) Though I would think any family that built an illegal in-law apartment into their Palo Alto house and deployed it, would be ratted out by their neighbors. ..."
We still have to wait to see whether Judge Kavanaugh's appointment will go through, so the most important practical consequence
of this shameful exercise in character assassination is as yet unknown. I'm pretty sure he'll eventually be appointed.
But, I think some critical theoretical aspects of the context in which this battle was waged were definitively clarified in
the course of this shameful and hugely destructive effort by the Democrat leadership to destroy Judge Kavanaugh's reputation in
pursuit of narrow political advantage. On balance, although Judge Kavanaugh and his family were the ones who had to pay the price
for this bitter learning experience, all of us should be the long-term beneficiaries of this contest's central but often hidden
issues being brought to light and subjected to rational analysis. I want to show what I think these hidden issues are.
What this sordid affair was all about was the zombie-like return-from-the-dead of a phenomenon exposed and pretty much completely
invalidated more than thirty years ago, which never should have been permitted to raise its ugly head before an assembly of rational,
educated Americans: the "Recovered Memory" (aka "False Memory") Syndrome movement of the 1980s, in which numerous troubled, frequently
mentally off-balance, women (and a few men) came forward to declare that they had been the victims of incestual sexual abuse –
most often actual sexual intercourse – at the hands of mature male family members; usually fathers but sometimes uncles, grandfathers,
or others.
Their testimony was usually highly emotional and impassioned, leaving an impression very similar to that conveyed last
night by Dr. Ford. Many hearers were completely convinced that these events had occurred. I recall having a discussion in
the 1990s with two American women who swore up and down that they believed fully 25% of American women had been forced into sexual
intercourse with their fathers. I was dumbfounded that they could believe such a thing. But, vast numbers of American women did
believe this at that time, and many – perhaps most – may never have looked sufficiently into the follow-up to these testimonials
to realize that the vast majority of such bizarre claims had subsequently been definitively proven invalid.
The "Recovered" (or "False") Memory Syndrome movement emerged in the midst of the steadily radicalizing Feminist Movement
in the United States, probably at the very apogee of its extreme evolution, and was a movement in which Freudian therapy was central
and Freudian therapists came to play the leading role.
It was only after they had been subjected to extensive pseudo-scientific Freudian "therapy," in which sex always lay prominently
at the center, that virtually all of these women came forward with these stories. A major controversy, which arose within
the ranks of the Freudians themselves over what was the correct understanding of the Master's teachings, lay at the core of the
whole affair. A nd, in this dispute the American ultra-Feminists chose to believe and preach the worst, most salacious, and
most vicious possible interpretation of Dr. Freud's highly speculative, evidence-less, and – as subsequent study has overwhelmingly
shown – completely contrived diagnoses.
It's now known that Dr. Freud's journey to the theoretical positions which had become orthodoxy among his followers by the
mid-20th century had followed a strange, little known, possibly deliberately self-obscured, and clearly unorthodox course.
Beginning with a conviction that cocaine could provide a substantial therapeutic base for solving psychological problems, Freud
seems himself to have become for a period a regular consumer of that drug, but subsequently altered the focus of his therapy to
hypnosis. After realizing certain limitations to this approach, he shifted again, turning to the so-called "Talking Cure" rooted
in provoking word associations, which provided the basis for the classic Freudian method of popular imagination – with the patient
reclining on a couch and the good Dr. seated behind with his notebook and pen in hand. This is the method he retained for the
rest of his life.
The primary fault which has been cited for Freud's methods generally, but which has been particularly critiqued in both
hypnosis and the "Talking Cure" as a reason for their invalidation, is the claim that both – at least inadvertently – incorporate
the high probability of suggestion from the therapist. In this view, patient testimony moves subtly, and probably without
the patient's awareness, from whatever his or her own understanding might originally have been to the interpretation implicitly
propounded by the analyst. Analysis thus follows a circular course, the analyst's theoretical surmise being first subtly communicated
to the patient, then confirmed by the patient's casting of his (or, more often her) own ideas within the framework which had been
suggested by the analyst. In the end, nothing new is actually discovered. The patient merely replicates the expressed Freudian
doctrine.
The particular doctrine at hand was undergoing a critical reworking at this very time, and this important reconsideration of
the Master's meaning almost certainly constituted a major, likely the predominating, factor which facilitated the emergence of
the Recovered Memory Syndrome movement. Freudian orthodoxy at that time included as an important – seemingly its key – component
the conviction of a child's (even an infant's) sexuality, as expressed through the hypothesized Oedipus Complex for males, and
the corresponding Electra Complex for females. In these complexes, Freud speculated that sexually-based neuroses derived from
the child's (or infant's) fear of imagined enmity and possible physical threat from the same-sex parent, because of the younger
individual's sexual longing for the opposite-sex parent.
This Freudian idea, entirely new to European, American, and probably most other cultures, that children, even infants, were
the possessors of an already well-developed sexuality had been severely challenged by Christian and some other traditional authorities,
and had been met with repugnance from many individuals in Western society. But, the doctrine, as it then stood, was subject to
a further major questioning in the mid-1980s from Freudian historical researcher Jeffrey Masson, who postulated, after examining
a collection of Freud's personal writings long kept from popular examination, that the Child Sexual Imagination thesis itself
was a pusillanimous and ethically-unjustified retreat from an even more sinister thesis the Master had originally held, but which
he had subsequently abandoned because of the controversy and damage to his own career its expression would likely cause. This
was the belief, based on many of his earlier interviews of mostly women patients, that it wasn't their imaginations which lay
behind their neuroses. They had told him that they had actually been either raped or molested as infants or young girls by their
fathers. This was the secret horror hidden away in those long-suppressed writings, now brought into the light of day by Prof.
Masson.
Masson's research conclusions were initially widely welcomed within the psychoanalytical fraternity/sorority and shortly melded
with the already raging desire of many ultra-Feminist extremists to place the blame for whatever problems and dissatisfactions
women in America were encountering in their lives upon the patriarchal society by which they claimed to be oppressed. The problem
was men. Countless fathers were raping their daughters. Wow! What an incentive to revolutionary Feminist insurrection! You couldn't
find a much better justification for their man-hate than that. Bring on the Feminist Revolution! Men are not only a menace, they
are no longer even necessary for procreation, so let's get rid of them entirely. This is the sort of extreme plan some radical
Feminists advocated. Many psychoanalysts became their professional facilitators, providing the illusion of medical validation
to the stories the analysts themselves had largely engendered. Those women patients, and a few men, became their victims,
but in turn became the perpetrators in the savaging of numerous men's lives, as these men were subjected to the most vicious accusations
imaginable. Most of these accusations were, in retrospect, clearly fantasies in a ruthless mid-20th century male-witch hunt.
This radical ideology is built upon the conviction that Dr. Freud, in at least this one of his several historical phases of
interpretative psychological analysis, was really on to something. But, subsequent evaluation has largely shown that not to be
the case. The same critique which had been delivered against the Child Sexual Imagination version of Freud's "Talking Cure" analytical
method was equally relevant to this newly discovered Father Molestation thesis: all such notions had been subtly communicated
to the patient by the analyst in the course of the interview. Had thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of European
and American women really been raped or molested by their fathers? Freud offered no corroborating evidence of any kind, and I
think it's the consensus of most competent contemporary psychoanalysts to reject this idea. Those few who retain a belief in it
betray, I think, an ideological commitment to Radical Feminism, for whose proponents such a view offers an ever tempting platform
to justify their monstrous plans for the future of a human race in which males are subjected to the status of slaves or are entirely
eliminated.
But, the judicious conclusions of science often – perhaps usually – fail to promptly percolate down to the comprehension of
common humanity on the street, and within the consequent vacuum of understanding scheming politicians can frequently find opportunity
to manipulate, obfuscate, and distort facts in order to facilitate their own devious and often highly destructive schemes. Such,
I fear, is the situation which has surrounded Dr. Ford. The average American of either sex has absolutely no familiarity with
the history, character, or ultimate fate of the Recovered Memory Syndrome movement, and may well fail to realize that the phenomenon
has been nearly entirely disproved.
Into this popular intellectual desert walks Dr. Ford, both whose personal history and her strange physical mannerisms in
testimony before the Senate clearly indicate she has unfortunately suffered some form of serious psychological disturbance.
Seemingly alienated from her own parents and most immediate family members, she has made her home as far away from the
Washington, DC area where she was born as possible within the territorial limits of the continental United States. The focus
of her professional research and practice in the field of psychology has lain in therapeutic treatment to overcome mental and
emotional trauma, a problem she has acknowledged has been her own disturbing preoccupation for many decades. In 2012 she underwent
some sort of psychological counseling with her husband, though the details as far as I know have not emerged. But, it hardly seems
likely coincidental that her first documentable expressions of antipathy to Judge Kavanaugh occurred in that year, when it was
announced that Judge Kavanaugh was considered the likely Supreme Court appointee should Mit Romney win the Presidential election.
Her expressions of antipathy to him have only grown from there.
Dr. Ford is clearly an unfortunate victim of something or someone, but I don't believe it was Judge Kavanaugh. Almost certainly
she has been influenced in her denunciations against him by both that long-term preoccupation with her own sense of psychological
injury, whatever may have been its cause, and her professional familiarization with contemporary currents of psychological theory,
however fallacious, likely mediated by the ministrations of that unnamed counselor in 2012. Subsequently, she has clearly been
exploited mercilessly by the scheming Democratic Party officials who have viciously plotted to turn her plight to their own cynical
advantage. As in so many cases during the 1980s Recovered Memory movement, she has almost certainly been transformed by both the
scientifically unproven doctrines and the conscienceless practitioners of Freudian mysticism from being merely an innocent victim
into an active victimizer – doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the pain inherent in her own tragic situation and aggressively
projecting it upon helpless others, in this case Judge Kavanaugh and his entire family. She is not a heroine.
A recovered memory from more than five decades ago. Violet Elizabeth, a irritating younger child who tended to tag along,
often wore expensive Kate Greenaway dresses. Her family was new money.
William was no misogynist, though. He liked and respected Joan, who was his friend. The second William book is online.
Rules-of-thumb
-- -- -- -- -- -- -
1. A good offense is the best defense.
2. An ambush backed up by overwhelming force is a good offense.
3. Use of weapons and tactics, of which the defender is unprepared for, is a good offense.
Are Republicans et al. unable to understand basic military strategy? Do we lack the ability to conceive of new tactics
and weapons to use against Democrats and Globalists?
I realize that it is unacceptable to attack this poor helpless victim so the "it can't be corroborated" card has to be played.
However, who else notices how carefully manicured these charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual
proof she is a liar and this whole thing is staged.
She always takes everybody on some emotional ride right up to the point where she could be exposed but never with enough
information so somebody could come out of the woodwork and prove she is a liar.
We also have the infamous letter where we are repeatedly reminded she mailed it BEFORE Kavanaugh was picked. Of course, we
only have Feinstein's word for that since nobody saw it until after this crap started. The delay was used to push up the story
with new revelation about Mike Judge in a grocery store that shied away from her – again with no specific date so Judge could
prove she is a liar. This all reeks of testimony gone over and coached by a team of lawyers.
We also have all of our own recollections of high school insecurities and male-female interactions. What freshman or sophomore
girl didn't get all giddy at the thought of the older guys hitting on her so she could tell all her friends about her older
boyfriend
and possibility of going to the prom as a lower classman? All he had to do (assuming he wasn't repulsive physically and he was
a bit of a jock) was make the usual play of pretending to be interested and he likely would have been at least getting to first
base at the party.
From her pictures she was no Pamela Anderson and would likely have been flattered. The idea that you rape someone
without trying to get the milk handed to you on a silver platter is ridiculous.
This is another female driven hysteria based on lies like the child molestation and satanic cult hysterias of years past. Those
were all driven by crazy or politically motivated women who whipped up the rest of the ignorant females.
Outside doors enter public areas kitchen sunroom living rooms not bedrooms. An outside door into a master bedroom
with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment
Your post is very perceptive and just might be how it all went down. With the complications of couples' counseling over her
demand for the bizarre double main entry doors. (lulz) Though I would think any family that built an illegal in-law apartment
into their Palo Alto house and deployed it, would be ratted out by their neighbors.
An interesting hypothesis. CIA definitly became a powerful political force in the USA -- a rogue political force which starting from JFK assasination tries to control who is elected to important offices. But in truth Cavanaugh is a pro-CIA candidate so to speak. So why CIA would try to derail him.
Notable quotes:
"... I think I've figured out why they had to go to couples counseling about an outside door and why she came up with claim that she needed an outside bedroom door because she'd been assaulted 37 years ago. The Palo Alto building codes for single family homes were created to make sure single family homes remained single family and weren't chopped up into apartments. ..."
"... An outside door into a master bedroom with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment ..."
"... So she wants the door. Husband says waste of money and trouble. Contractor says call me when you're ready. So they go to counseling Husband explains why the door's unreasonable. Therapist asks wife why she " really deep down" needs the door. Wife makes up the story about attempted rape 35 years ago flashbacks If only there were 2 doors in that imaginary bedroom she could have escaped. ..."
"... Kacanaugh was nominated. CIA searched for sex problems in his working life. Found nothing Searched law school and college found nothing. In desperation searched high school found nothing. Searched CIA personnel records which go back to grade school and found one of their own employees was about Kavanaugh's age and attended a high school near his and the students socialized. ..."
"... She's 3rd generation CIA. grandfather assistant director. Father CIA contractor who managed CIA unofficial band accounts. And she runs a CIA recruitment office. ..."
I think I've figured out why they had to go to couples counseling about an outside door and why she came up with claim
that she needed an outside bedroom door because she'd been assaulted 37 years ago. The Palo Alto building codes for single family
homes were created to make sure single family homes remained single family and weren't chopped up into apartments.
Outside doors enter public areas kitchen sunroom living rooms not bedrooms. An outside door into a master bedroom with
attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment
There's a unit It's a stove 2 ft counter space and sink. The stoves electric and plugs into an ordinary household electricity.
It's backed against the bathroom wall. Break through the wall, connect the pipes running water for the sink. Add an outside door
and it's a small apartment.
Assume they didn't want to make it an apartment just a master bedroom. Usually the contractor pulls the permits routinely.
But an outside bedroom door is complicated. The permits will cost more. It might require an exemption and a hearing They night
need a lawyer. And they might not get the permit.
So she wants the door. Husband says waste of money and trouble. Contractor says call me when you're ready. So they go to
counseling Husband explains why the door's unreasonable. Therapist asks wife why she " really deep down" needs the door. Wife
makes up the story about attempted rape 35 years ago flashbacks If only there were 2 doors in that imaginary bedroom she could
have escaped.
Kacanaugh was nominated. CIA searched for sex problems in his working life. Found nothing Searched law school and college
found nothing. In desperation searched high school found nothing. Searched CIA personnel records which go back to grade school
and found one of their own employees was about Kavanaugh's age and attended a high school near his and the students socialized.
She's 3rd generation CIA. grandfather assistant director. Father CIA contractor who managed CIA unofficial band accounts.
And she runs a CIA recruitment office.
"... But strangely most of us are much readier to concede the corrupting influence of the relatively small power of individuals than we are the rottenness of vastly more powerful institutions and structures. We blame the school teacher or the politician for abusing his or her power, while showing a reluctance to do the same about either the education or political systems in which they have to operate. ..."
"... It is relatively easy to understand that your line manager is abusing his power, because he has so little of it. His power is visible to you because it relates only to you and the small group of people around you ..."
"... It is a little harder, but not too difficult, to identify the abusive policies of your firm – the low pay, cuts in overtime, attacks on union representation ..."
"... It is more difficult to see the corrupt power of large institutions, aside occasionally from the corruption of senior figures within those institutions, such as a Robert Maxwell or a Richard Nixon ..."
"... But it is all but impossible to appreciate the corrupt nature of the entire system. And the reason is right there in those aphorisms: absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption. If that were not the case, we wouldn't be dealing with serious power – as should be obvious, if we pause to think about it ..."
"... The current neoliberal elite who effectively rule the planet have reached as close to absolute power as any elite in human history. And because they have near-absolute power, they have a near-absolute control of the official narratives about our societies and our "enemies", those who stand in their way to global domination ..."
"... What is clear, however, is that the British intelligence services have been feeding the British corporate media a self-serving, drip-drip narrative from the outset – and that the media have shown precisely no interest at any point in testing any part of this narrative or even questioning it. They have been entirely passive, which means that we their readers have been entirely passive too ..."
"... Journalists typically have a passive relationship to power, in stark contrast to their image as tenacious watchdog. But more fundamental than control over narrative is the ideology that guides these narratives. Ideology ensures the power-system is invisible not only to us, those who are abused and exploited by it, but also to those who benefit from it. ..."
"... It is precisely because power resides in structures and ideology, rather than individuals, that it is so hard to see. And the power-structures themselves are made yet more difficult to identify because the narratives created about our societies are designed to conceal those structures and ideology – where real power resides – by focusing instead on individuals ..."
"... Before neoliberalism there were other systems of rule. There was, for example, feudalism that appropriated a communal resource – land – exclusively for an aristocracy. It exploited the masses by forcing them to toil on the land for a pittance to generate the wealth that supported castles, a clergy, manor houses, art collections and armies. For several centuries the power of this tiny elite went largely unquestioned ..."
"... Neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, plutocratic rule by corporations – whatever you wish to call it – has allowed a tiny elite to stash away more wealth and accrue more power than any feudal monarch could ever have dreamt of. And because of the global reach of this elite, its corruption is more endemic, more complete, more destructive than any ever known to mankind ..."
"... A foreign policy elite can destroy the world several times over with nuclear weapons. A globalised corporate elite is filling the oceans with the debris from our consumption, and chopping down the forest-lungs of our planet for palm-oil plantations so we can satisfy our craving for biscuits and cake. And our media and intelligence services are jointly crafting a narrative of bogeymen and James Bond villains – both in Hollywood movies, and in our news programmes – to make us fearful and pliable ..."
"... The system – whether feudalism, capitalism, neoliberalism – emerges out of the real-world circumstances of those seeking power most ruthlessly. In a time when the key resource was land, a class emerged justifying why it should have exclusive rights to control that land and the labour needed to make it productive. When industrial processes developed, a class emerged demanding that it had proprietary rights to those processes and to the labour needed to make them productive. ..."
"... In these situations, we need to draw on something like Darwin's evolutionary "survival of the fittest" principle. Those few who are most hungry for power, those with least empathy, will rise to the top of the pyramid, finding themselves best-placed to exploit the people below. They will rationalise this exploitation as a divine right, or as evidence of their inherently superior skills, or as proof of the efficiency of the market. ..."
"... And below them, like the layers of ball bearings, will be those who can help them maintain and expand their power: those who have the skills, education and socialisation to increase profits and sell brands. ..."
"... None of this should surprise us either. Because power – not just the people in the system, but the system itself – will use whatever tools it has to protect itself. It is easier to deride critics as unhinged, especially when you control the media, the politicians and the education system, than it is to provide a counter-argument. ..."
"... so neoliberalism is driven not by ethics but the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of the planet. ..."
"... The only truth we can know is that the western power-elite is determined to finish the task of making its power fully global, expanding it from near-absolute to absolute. It cares nothing for you or your grand-children. It is a cold-calculating system, not a friend or neighbour. It lives for the instant gratification of wealth accumulation, not concern about the planet's fate tomorrow. ..."
I rarely tell readers what to believe. Rather I try to indicate why it might be wise to
distrust, at least without very good evidence, what those in power tell us we should
believe.
We have well-known sayings about power: "Knowledge is power", and "Power tends to corrupt,
while absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." These aphorisms resonate because they say
something true about how we experience the world. People who have power – even very
limited power they hold on licence from someone else – tend to abuse it, sometimes subtly
and unconsciously, and sometimes overtly and wilfully.
If we are reasonably self-aware, we can sense the tendency in ourselves to exploit to our
advantage whatever power we enjoy, whether it is in our dealings with a spouse, our children, a
friend, an employee, or just by the general use of our status to get ahead.
This isn't usually done maliciously or even consciously. By definition, the hardest thing to
recognise are our own psychological, emotional and mental blind spots – and the biggest,
at least for those born with class, gender or race privileges, is realising that these too are
forms of power.
Nonetheless, they are all minor forms of power compared to the power wielded collectively by
the structures that dominate our societies: the financial sector, the corporations, the media,
the political class, and the security services.
But strangely most of us are much readier to concede the corrupting influence of the
relatively small power of individuals than we are the rottenness of vastly more powerful
institutions and structures. We blame the school teacher or the politician for abusing his or
her power, while showing a reluctance to do the same about either the education or political
systems in which they have to operate.
Similarly, we are happier identifying the excessive personal power of a Rupert Murdoch than
we are the immense power of the corporate empire behind him and on which his personal wealth
and success depend.
And beyond this, we struggle most of all to detect the structural and ideological framework
underpinning or cohering all these discrete examples of power.
Narrative control
It is relatively easy to understand that your line manager is abusing his power, because he
has so little of it. His power is visible to you because it relates only to you and the small
group of people around you.
It is a little harder, but not too difficult, to identify the abusive policies of your firm
– the low pay, cuts in overtime, attacks on union representation.
It is more difficult to see the corrupt power of large institutions, aside occasionally from
the corruption of senior figures within those institutions, such as a Robert Maxwell or a
Richard Nixon.
But it is all but impossible to appreciate the corrupt nature of the entire system. And the
reason is right there in those aphorisms: absolute power depends on absolute control over
knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption. If that were not the case, we
wouldn't be dealing with serious power – as should be obvious, if we pause to think about
it.
Real power in our societies derives from that which is necessarily hard to see –
structures, ideology and narratives – not individuals. Any Murdoch or Trump can be
felled, though being loyal acolytes of the power-system they rarely are, should they threaten
the necessary maintenance of power by these interconnected institutions, these structures.
The current neoliberal elite who effectively rule the planet have reached as close to
absolute power as any elite in human history. And because they have near-absolute power, they
have a near-absolute control of the official narratives about our societies and our "enemies",
those who stand in their way to global domination.
No questions about Skripals
One needs only to look at the narrative about the two men, caught on CCTV cameras, who have
recently been accused by our political and media class of using a chemical agent to try to
murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia back in March.
I don't claim to know whether Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov work for the Russian
security services, or whether they were dispatched by Vladimir Putin on a mission to Salisbury
to kill the Skripals.
What is clear, however, is that the British intelligence services have been feeding the
British corporate media a self-serving, drip-drip narrative from the outset – and that
the media have shown precisely no interest at any point in testing any part of this narrative
or even questioning it. They have been entirely passive, which means that we their readers have
been entirely passive too.
That there are questions about the narrative to be raised is obvious if you turn away from
the compliant corporate media and seek out the views of an independent-minded, one-time insider
such as Craig Murray.
A former British ambassador, Murray is asking questions
that may prove to be pertinent or not. At this stage, when all we have to rely on is what the
intelligence services are selectively providing, these kinds of doubts should be driving the
inquiries of any serious journalist covering the story. But as is so often the case, not only
are these questions not being raised or investigated, but anyone like Murray who thinks
critically – who assumes that the powerful will seek to promote their interests and avoid
accountability – is instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or in Putin's
pocket.
That is no meaningful kind of critique. Many of the questions that have been raised –
like why there are so many gaps in the CCTV record of the movements of both the Skripals and
the two assumed assassins – could be answered if there was an interest in doing so. The
evasion and the smears simply suggest that power intends to remain unaccountable, that it is
keeping itself concealed, that the narrative is more important than the truth.
And that is reason enough to move from questioning the narrative to distrusting it.
Ripples on a lake
Journalists typically have a passive relationship to power, in stark contrast to their image
as tenacious watchdog. But more fundamental than control over narrative is the ideology that
guides these narratives. Ideology ensures the power-system is invisible not only to us, those
who are abused and exploited by it, but also to those who benefit from it.
It is precisely because power resides in structures and ideology, rather than individuals,
that it is so hard to see. And the power-structures themselves are made yet more difficult to
identify because the narratives created about our societies are designed to conceal those
structures and ideology – where real power resides – by focusing instead on
individuals.
That is why our newspapers and TV shows are full of stories about personalities –
celebrities, royalty, criminals, politicians. They are made visible so we fail to notice the
ideological structures we live inside, which are supposed to remain invisible.
News and entertainment are the ripples on a lake, not the lake itself. But the ripples could
not exist without the lake that forms and shapes them.
Up against the screen
If this sounds like hyperbole, let's stand back from our particular ideological system
– neoliberalism – and consider earlier ideological systems in the hope that they
offer some perspective. At the moment, we are like someone standing right up against an IMAX
screen, so close that we cannot see that there is a screen or even guess that there is a
complete picture. All we see are moving colours and pixels. Maybe we can briefly infer a mouth,
the wheel of a vehicle, a gun.
Before neoliberalism there were other systems of rule. There was, for example, feudalism
that appropriated a communal resource – land – exclusively for an aristocracy. It
exploited the masses by forcing them to toil on the land for a pittance to generate the wealth
that supported castles, a clergy, manor houses, art collections and armies. For several
centuries the power of this tiny elite went largely unquestioned.
But then a class of entrepreneurs emerged, challenging the landed artistocracy with a new
means of industrialised production. They built factories and took advantage of scales of
economy that slightly widened the circle of privilege, creating a middle class. That elite, and
the middle-class that enjoyed crumbs from their master's table, lived off the exploitation of
children in work houses and the labour of a new urban poor in slum housing.
These eras were systematically corrupt, enabling the elites of those times to extend and
entrench their power. Each elite produced justifications to placate the masses who were being
exploited, to brainwash them into believing the system existed as part of a natural order or
even for their benefit. The aristocracy relied on a divine right of kings, the capitalist class
on the guiding hand of the free market and bogus claims of equality of opportunity.
In another hundred years, if we still exist as a species, our system will look no less
corrupt – probably more so – than its predecessors.
Neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, plutocratic rule by corporations – whatever you
wish to call it – has allowed a tiny elite to stash away more wealth and accrue more
power than any feudal monarch could ever have dreamt of. And because of the global reach of
this elite, its corruption is more endemic, more complete, more destructive than any ever known
to mankind.
A foreign policy elite can destroy the world several times over with nuclear weapons. A
globalised corporate elite is filling the oceans with the debris from our consumption, and
chopping down the forest-lungs of our planet for palm-oil plantations so we can satisfy our
craving for biscuits and cake. And our media and intelligence services are jointly crafting a
narrative of bogeymen and James Bond villains – both in Hollywood movies, and in our news
programmes – to make us fearful and pliable.
Assumptions of inevitability
Most of us abuse our own small-power thoughtlessly, even self-righteously. We tell ourselves
that we gave the kids a "good spanking" because they were naughty, rather than because we
established with them early on a power relationship that confusingly taught them that the use
of force and coercion came with a parental stamp of approval.
Those in greater power, from minions in the media to executives of major corporations, are
no different. They are as incapable of questioning the ideology and the narrative – how
inevitable and "right" our neoliberal system is – as the rest of us. But they play a
vital part in maintaining and entrenching that system nonetheless.
David Cromwell and David Edwards of Media Lens have provided two analogies – in the
context of the media – that help explain how it is possible for individuals and groups to
assist and enforce systems of power without having any conscious intention to do so, and
without being aware that they are contributing to something harmful. Without, in short, being
aware that they are conspiring in the system.
When a shoal of fish instantly changes direction, it looks for all the world as though the
movement was synchronised by some guiding hand. Journalists – all trained and selected
for obedience by media all seeking to maximise profits within state-capitalist society
– tend to respond to events in the same way.
Place a square wooden framework on a flat surface and pour into it a stream of ball
bearings, marbles, or other round objects. Some of the balls may bounce out, but many will
form a layer within the wooden framework; others will then find a place atop this first
layer. In this way, the flow of ball bearings steadily builds new layers that inevitably
produce a pyramid-style shape. This experiment is used to demonstrate how near-perfect
crystalline structures such as snowflakes arise in nature without conscious design.
The system – whether feudalism, capitalism, neoliberalism – emerges out of the
real-world circumstances of those seeking power most ruthlessly. In a time when the key
resource was land, a class emerged justifying why it should have exclusive rights to control
that land and the labour needed to make it productive. When industrial processes developed, a
class emerged demanding that it had proprietary rights to those processes and to the labour
needed to make them productive.
Our place in the pyramid
In these situations, we need to draw on something like Darwin's evolutionary "survival of
the fittest" principle. Those few who are most hungry for power, those with least empathy, will
rise to the top of the pyramid, finding themselves best-placed to exploit the people below.
They will rationalise this exploitation as a divine right, or as evidence of their inherently
superior skills, or as proof of the efficiency of the market.
And below them, like the layers of ball bearings, will be those who can help them maintain
and expand their power: those who have the skills, education and socialisation to increase
profits and sell brands.
All of this should be obvious, even non-controversial. It fits what we experience of our
small-power lives. Does bigger power operate differently? After all, if those at the top of the
power-pyramid were not hungry for power, even psychopathic in its pursuit, if they were caring
and humane, worried primarily about the wellbeing of their workforce and the planet, they would
be social workers and environmental activists, not CEOs of media empires and arms
manufacturers.
And yet, base your political thinking on what should be truisms, articulate a worldview that
distrusts those with the most power because they are the most capable of – and committed
to – misusing it, and you will be derided. You will be called a conspiracy theorist,
dismissed as deluded. You will be accused of wearing a tinfoil hat, of sour grapes, of being
anti-American, a social warrior, paranoid, an Israel-hater or anti-semitic, pro-Putin,
pro-Assad, a Marxist.
None of this should surprise us either. Because power – not just the people in the
system, but the system itself – will use whatever tools it has to protect itself. It is
easier to deride critics as unhinged, especially when you control the media, the politicians
and the education system, than it is to provide a counter-argument.
In fact, it is vital to prevent any argument or real debate from taking place. Because the
moment we think about the arguments, weigh them, use our critical faculties, there is a real
danger that the scales will fall from our eyes. There is a real threat that we will move back
from the screen, and see the whole picture.
Can we see the complete picture of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury; or the US election
that led to Trump being declared president; or the revolution in Ukraine; or the causes and
trajectory of fighting in Syria, and before it Libya and Iraq; or the campaign to discredit
Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party; or the true implications of the banking crisis a
decade ago?
Profit, not ethics
Just as a feudal elite was driven not by ethics but by the pursuit of power and wealth
through the control of land; just as early capitalists were driven not by ethics but by the
pursuit of power and wealth through the control of mechanisation; so neoliberalism is driven
not by ethics but the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of the planet.
The only truth we can know is that the western power-elite is determined to finish the task
of making its power fully global, expanding it from near-absolute to absolute. It cares nothing
for you or your grand-children. It is a cold-calculating system, not a friend or neighbour. It
lives for the instant gratification of wealth accumulation, not concern about the planet's fate
tomorrow.
And because of that it is structurally bound to undermine or discredit anyone, any group,
any state that stands in the way of achieving its absolute dominion.
If that is not the thought we hold uppermost in our minds as we listen to a politician, read
a newspaper, watch a film or TV show, absorb an ad, or engage on social media, then we are
sleepwalking into a future the most powerful, the most ruthless, the least caring have designed
for us.
Step back, and take a look at the whole screen. And decide whether this is really the future
you wish for your grand-children.
"... If Trump backs the British looneys in the UN security council in a day or two we can all be sure he is now a puppet on a British string and that point will be seen by USA voters. ..."
"... Any leader that lets a foreign nation, Britain, try to destroy his family, presidential campaign and now presidency by assembling and publishing a dirt dossier without response is a coward. If Trump wont stand up to Hillary Clinton, Theresa May, or any of the dossier conspirators, then he is useless. The USA voters see that no matter what the spin but the swing voters more than any other actually discriminate and make judgements based on actions ..."
"... They are in a quandary and only Trump can cement their support by going after the perpetrators NOW and telling the EU loonies like Britain and France to F off with their belligerent war mongering. I wouldn't count on it. ..."
More notions on USA election so excuse a repeat post all. I figure an enormous number of
voters reeled in horror at the prospect of a Hillary Clinton president and voted for Trump.
Will that horror revert to more democrat support now?
Are those swing voters now uncertain if the $hillary will stage a come back. Nothing
absolute has been stated and the demoncrats go through the motions of 'thinking about'
another stooge like creepy Joe Biden. The USA is not liberated from the 'Clinton option'
yet.
More to the point though is that repeatedly implied and sometimes stated 'certainty' that
the DOJ/FBI under its new Trumpian management has a thousand grand jury indictments pending
to be actioned in October or something. The Trumpers are certain that their hero is about to
slay the many headed dragon and they have been anticipating that move for some time. Sure
there appears to be sufficient evidence to draw and quarter a couple of seriously stupid
clowns.
Given Trumps kneeling to the British Skripal poisoning 'hate russia' hoax I suspect there
is no chance he will go after Christopher Steele or any of the senior demoncrat conspirers no
matter how much he would love to sucker punch Theresa May and her nasty colleagues. If
Trump backs the British looneys in the UN security council in a day or two we can all be sure
he is now a puppet on a British string and that point will be seen by USA voters.
Any leader that lets a foreign nation, Britain, try to destroy his family,
presidential campaign and now presidency by assembling and publishing a dirt dossier without
response is a coward. If Trump wont stand up to Hillary Clinton, Theresa May, or any of the
dossier conspirators, then he is useless. The USA voters see that no matter what the spin but
the swing voters more than any other actually discriminate and make judgements based on
actions .
They are in a quandary and only Trump can cement their support by going after the
perpetrators NOW and telling the EU loonies like Britain and France to F off with their
belligerent war mongering. I wouldn't count on it.
'Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a
wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established
money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
'What exactly might an "insurance policy" against Donald Trump look like?'
All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it
possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden
interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.
Notable quotes:
"... A great deal of evidence, I think, suggests that practically all those involved in 'Russiagate' were caught totally unprepared by Trump's victory, that they then went rushing around like headless chickens, and that part of this process involved a decision being taken to publish the dossier, without consulting British intelligence. If people like Younger were not consulted, then it would seem to me unlikely that Steele was. ..."
"... And I have immense difficulty seeing how any competent media lawyer would not have recommended, at the minimum, the redaction of the names of Aleksej Gubarev and his company from the final December 2016 memorandum. This would have made legal action unlikely, without greatly diminishing the effect of the claims. ..."
"... But if this was so, and if what they thought was accurate information was actually disinformation, the likely conduit would not have been through Steele, but from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts. ..."
"... It it is I think material that intelligence agencies commonly include a great variety of people, ranging from very able analysts and operators to complete dolts. So, the CIA has employed both Philip Giraldi and John Brennan, MI6 both Alastair Crooke and also Christopher Steele and Alex Younger. ..."
"... It is however somewhat revealing that one now finds Giraldi and Crooke appearing on a Russian site, 'Strategic Culture Foundation', while Brennan and Younger are treated as authoritative figures by the MSM. ..."
"... My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate measures to cover their backsides. ..."
"... There are many aspects to this story that don't make any sense to me if one looks at it from a rational perspective. One of course being concerns about libel litigation and the related legal discovery that you note. The second being no real contingency planning in the event Hillary loses the election. Admittedly they must have bought the media line and Nate Silver's forecast of a greater than 75% probability of a Hillary win. ..."
"... The purported "arms length" relationships don't make any sense. There's Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson playing a central role. They hire Nellie Ohr, a possible CIA asset and the wife of Bruce Ohr, the 4th highest ranking official at the DOJ. ..."
"... Glenn Simpson also hires Christopher Steele who he knows from previous "spook" associations. Steele had numerous and continuous communications including telephone, Skype, email and personal meetings with Bruce and Nellie Ohr during all this. ..."
"... Then there is Mifsud and Halper. Apparently both are CIA and FBI assets. ..."
"... You have Brennan ginning up concerns giving super secret and individual briefings to the Gang of 8 in Congress. There's Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the minority leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee texting and calling Adam Waldman, Deripaska's US attorney about setting up clandestine meetings with Steele. ..."
"... Not to be left behind there's Sen. McCain doing the same. His top aide even travels to London to meet Steele. And then there's Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page busily spending every waking moment texting each other about every twist and turn in all the political games being played. Of course there's Admiral Rogers investigating unusual searches by FBI officials and contractors on the NSA database. And he briefs President-elect Trump at Trump Tower which prompts the entire transition team to move to Trump's golf course in NJ. ..."
"... In fact the IG report on the Clinton "investigation" states that many at the FBI were accepting "gifts" from various media personalities for a quid pro quo ..."
"... There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele. Of course he knew nothing but signed the FISA application on Carter Page. ..."
"... At this point I don't buy that Christopher Steele dug up real intelligence from his contacts at the highest levels of the Russian government, which caught Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Lynch's pants on fire, who then launched a formal investigation of Russia collusion with Trump. Many things just don't pass the smell test. Now of course I have no qualifications nor experience in spookdom. ..."
"... I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time. ..."
"... I ask because, if one tries to look at it in a non-partisan way, the Western IC seemed to be a failure when it came to predicting Russian reactions in the Donbass, the Crimea, and it seems in Syria. I link this to various comments from Colonel Lang indicating that true experts were replaced over the years by less experienced and knowledgeable people. Does being "highly politicised" mean that they're not up to much when it comes to minding the shop? ..."
"... I thought I detected a protest against the politicisation of the US in the world some years ago. And we must not forget that Gen Flynn (DIA) and Adm Rogers (NSA) acted strongly against this. Flynn was the first casualty of the Trump/Russia hysteria and the Clapper claque tried to fire Rogers. ..."
"... I was born in the Depression and have seen vitriolic politics but never have seen such a massive opposition by the media, the pundits and the establishment of both parties. Over 500 print publications endorsed Hillary. Only some 20 endorsed Trump. Yet he confounds the pundits by winning the election. Clearly many voters are at odds with the political media class. ..."
"... I think there is an ideological background to this, on which the piece by Alastair Crooke – himself former MI6 – to which Patrick Armstrong links, and the piece by James George Jatras to which Crooke links, are both to the point. The 'end of history' crowd thought they were inhabiting a realised utopia, and cannot cope with the fact that their dream is collapsing. ..."
"... In relation to the millenarian undercurrents on which Crooke focuses, however, it is also worth noting that a traditional conservative suspicion has been that millenarianism is naturally linked to antinomianism: the belief that the moral law is not binding on the elect. ..."
"... It is obviously possible that Ohr did not report up the chain of command, and if so, he and his wife become pivotal figures in the conspiracy. Alternatively, it could be that Rosenstein is lying – in which case, we have large questions about who else is implicated, and specifically whether the termination of Steele by the FBI was anything more than a ruse. ..."
"... 'Yet, Simpson allegedly acknowledged that most of the information Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher Steele developed did not come from sources inside Moscow. "Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.," Ohr scribbled in his notes.' ..."
"... And it confirms my strong suspicion that the dossier is actually a composite product, much of it assembled at Fusion, which could indeed contain material from a range of people from the former Soviet space, who could living in the United States, Britain, or elsewhere – Ukraine and the Baltics being obvious possibilities. ..."
"... So Sergei Skripal and Sergei Millian, neither of whom fit the description by Simpson, have been mentioned as possible sources, and there is also the very curiously ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin. ..."
"... All these people, obviously, could simply have fabricated material or retailed gossip, and Steele himself was involved in fabricating material on an industrial scale to cover up what actually happened to Alexander Litvinenko. ..."
"... All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele. ..."
"... Apparently that organisation is doing rather well in sustaining the claiming that 'fair report privilege' could circumvent any requirement to prove truth – and a key question now is whether documents which the DOJ is being forced to produce will establish that the dossier was being used by officials in ways that would trigger the privilege as of 10 January 2017. ..."
"... That said, what Ohr reports Simpson as telling him raises fundamental questions about how anyone could have relied upon the dossier for anything – and should push people back to actually asking hard questions about its origins. ..."
"... To add: Steele was on the FBI's payroll, in addition to being on Fusion GPS's payroll. And on the payroll of Her Majesty's Government. After he got caught leaking to the media he was apparently "fired" by the FBI. But he was continuing to communicate and brief through Bruce Ohr at the DOJ. ..."
"... I think the circle of Glenn Simpson. Chris Steele, Bruce & Nellie Ohr, Adam Waldman. Peter Strzok, and Sen. Mark Warner will be very interesting to pursue. ..."
"... The other circle that should be investigated is the Brennan, Clapper, Lynch, Comey, Yates, Susan Rice. ..."
"... No investigation can exclude the active participation of key people from the media complex including people like Comey's good friend Benjamin Wittes. ..."
"... In its original version, the 'Statement of Principles' explained, among other things, that the Society: 'Believes that only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that any international organization which admits undemocratic states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.' ..."
"... Ironically, it was shortly after the publication of the dossier that Anatol Lieven published in the 'National Interest' an article entitled 'Is America Becoming a Third World Country?' (See https://nationalinterest.or... .) ..."
"... Also in June, Sergei Karaganov published a piece in 'Russia in Global Affairs', of which he is publisher, entitled 'Ideology of Eastward Turn.' ..."
"... I do not think Karaganov's article is simply a reflection of changes in Russian attitudes. The changes, it seems to me, are global. ..."
"... I do think that we in the West really blew it. In 1990, we could have said, in all humility, that our way of life (IMO the key word is pluralism) had proven more survivable. So we should welcome the others into the tent. Instead, we were right and that was that. ..."
"... Just as you're asking about the origins of the dossier I wonder if it was orchestrated or something that evolved organically? If it was orchestrated, then who was the mastermind? Did Brennan, Clapper and Come sit down and hatch it or was Simpson the brains? What is astounding is the scale. So many people involved. Were they all motivated by ideology or by the need to protect their racket? ..."
"... It seems there are many sub-plots. There's the Deripaska, Steele, Waldman, Mueller, Sen. Warner angle. Then there's the Simpson, Steele, Ohr, Strzok, Page, McCabe angle. There's also the Simpson, Steele, media reporters angle. Then there's the whole Mifsud, Halper, Carter Page, Papadopolous, Downer bit. There's the Comey, Rosenstein, Yates, Strzok FISA application piece. Then there's all the stuff happening in the UK including Hannigan's resignation as soon as Trump is elected. Of course the whole Mueller appointment and the obstruction of justice thread to tie Trump's hand. There are so many elements. Who initiated and coordinated? Was each element separate? ..."
"... Together, these methods are likely to have produced a mass of information. It is important to remember, for example, that at the time of his mysterious death on 23 March 2013 Boris Berezovsky was negotiating to return to Russia, and that his head of security, Sergei Sokolov did return, with a 'cache' of documents. ..."
"... The purpose was to demonstrate that Alexei Navalny was the instrument of a 'régime change' plot in which William Browder was acting as an agent of MI6. ..."
"... An important role in the Apelbaum piece is played by the private security company Hakluyt. A quick look at the entries on Wikipedia and Powerbase will make clear that, if there is a British 'deep state', this is likely to be at its core. ..."
"... It is against this background that on has to see a specific claim which Apelbaum makes, for which I do not think any evidence is produced, about two figures whose role in 'Russiagate' is clearly central. So Luke Harding is described as 'A Guardian reporter and a Hakluyt and Orbis contractor' (note word.) Meanwhile, Edward Baumgartner is described as 'Co-founder of Edward Austin. Contractor at Orbis and Hakluyt.' ..."
"... That Harding is corrupt, as also Sir Robert Owen's 'Inquiry' into the death of the late Alexander Litvinenko, I can prove. When Owen's report was published in January 2016, a preliminary response by me was posted here on SST, which among other things listed some of the evidence establishing that the interviews supposedly recorded with Litvinenko by Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt immediately before his death were blatant forgeries. ..."
"... In relation to that part of the evidence discussed in my January 2016 post which exposes the fumbling attempts by Steele and his colleagues to cover up the truth about when and how Litvinenko travelled into central London on the day he was supposedly killed, most of this had been among a mass of material submitted by me to the Inquiry Team, which I have e-mails to prove was read. ..."
"... Further study of Owen's report has confirmed my suspicion that a strong 'prima facie case' of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice exists against very many of those involved in it. ..."
"... At the same time, materials produced on the Russian side have confirmed my suspicion that the reason why Steele and others have been able to get away with their cover-up is that the Russian intelligence services are no more enthusiastic than their British counterparts about having anything like the whole truth about how Litvinenko lived and died made public. ..."
"... Additionally, the text itself displays an odd parallelism with his assertion regarding the Steele Dossier- that is, the likelihood of multiple authors, of diverse origins. ..."
"... My curiosity about who Apelbaum might be is reinforced by the fact that the intimations he gives about his background in his responses to comments, while not incompatible with what he has said in the past, do not sit so easily with it. ..."
"... So, questions naturally arise about Apelbaum's intelligence career, in particular, who he is likely to have been employed by, and associated with, in the past, and whether he is still involved with any of those agencies which have employed him. ..."
"... 'Also, there is a large Hakluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US that regularly services political and federal agencies and has the power to summon Nazgûls the likes of John Brennan. So Steele is not the new kid on the block, he has been doing this type of work long before 2016. This is also why he has such a cozy relationship with the brass at the DOJ and state.' ..."
"... This is that he, the Ukrainian nationalist former KGB person Yuri Shvets, the convicted Italian disinformation peddler Mario Scaramella, and quite possibly the sometime key FBI expert on Mogilevich, Robert 'Bobby' Levinson, were involved in trying to suggest that Mogilevich was an instrument of a plot by Putin to equip Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb.' ..."
"... In his prepared statement, Lugovoi claimed that his supposed victim used to say that everyone in Britain were ''retards', to use the translation submitted in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, or 'idiots', to use that by RT. And according to this version, the British believed in everything that 'we' – that is, the Berezovky group – said was happening in Russia. ..."
"... Whether or not Litvinenko expressed this cynical contempt, the credulity with which the claims of the 'information operations' people around Berezovsky have been accepted – well illustrated by Owen's report and perhaps most ludicrous in Harding's journalism – makes clear it is justified. ..."
"... Perhaps then, cartoons about Trump as a puppet, with the strings pulled by another puppet representing Manafort, whose strings are in turn pulled by Putin, should be replaced by ones in which Mueller is seen as a puppet manipulated by the ghost of Boris Berezovsky. ..."
"... But that is the irony. The relationship with Berezovsky blew up in the faces of all concerned, when in the wake of the successsful corruption of the investigation into the death of Litvinenko by him and his 'information operations' people, he attempted to recoup his fortunes by suing Roman Abramovich, and got taken to pieces by Lord Sumption. ..."
"... The 'Vesti Nedeli' piece uses what Elizaveta Berezovskaya says in support of the claim that Berezovsky was murdered by British 'special forces', because he was planning to return to Russia, and he 'knew too much about them.' ..."
"... One of the things I've never understood about the Trump Dossier story is the lack of any forensic analysis of its content and style anywhere in the media, even the alt media. Who was supposed to have actually written it? Steele? The style does not match someone of his background and education, and the formatting and syntax were atrocious. The font actually varied from "report" to "report." It certainly did not give me the impression of being the product of a high-end, Belgravia consultancy. ..."
"... I wonder whether it was produced by an American of one sort or another and then "laundered" by being accorded association with the UK firm. Given that Steele just happened to be hired by the USG to help in the anti-FIFA skulduggery, he and his firm seem very much to be a concern that does dirty little jobs that need discretely to be done, though in this case, the discretion was undermined. ..."
"... Most of the memos were issued before October and Fusion/Simpson authorized Steele to release information to the FBI starting in July. The question is why the memos were released after the election when a release before the election would have been enough to sink Trump. Instead the FBI and presumably those paying Fusion on Hillarys behalf sat on it, and Comey comes out days before the election ..."
"... Kind of looks like they all wanted Trump in office and the disclosure was to give Trump the excuse needed to back track on his promises to improve relations with Russia and blame that on pressure from the Deep State and Russia Gate. ..."
"... Looking at Trumps history with Sater (FBI/CIA asset) and his political aspirations that began following his Moscow visit in 1987 it seems likely Trump has been a Deep State asset for 30 years and fed intelligence to CIA/FBI on Russian oligarchs and mafia . Indeed he may well have duped Russians into believing he was working for them when in fact it was the CIA/FBI who had the best Kompromat with US RICO laws that could have beggared him ..."
"... One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.) ..."
"... I suspect the decision to publish the dossier was political. It was required to enable Clapper, Brennan, and others to opine on national media and create further media hysteria prior to the vote as well as to justify the counter-intelligence investigations underway. They were throwing the kitchen sink to sink Trump's electoral chances. I don't think a lot of thought was given about the legal ramifications. ..."
"... This seems to be a pattern. Leak information. Then use the leaked story to justify actions like apply for a FISA warrant or fan the media flames. ..."
"... I find it incredulous that former leaders of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained paid access to powerful media platforms and they have used it to launch vicious attacks on a POTUS. ..."
"... I find it amazing that McCabe and Peter Strzok are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media platforms. ..."
"... If the GOP retains the House and Jim Jordan becomes speaker, then there may be a possibility that Sessions, Rosenstein and Wray may be fired and another special counsel appointed who will then convene a grand jury. ..."
My strong impression is that nobody on the British side vetted the dossier for publication. A striking feature of the early news
coverage is that there appeared to be total confusion, with some of the reporting suggesting that the sources quoted wanted to hang
him out to dry, others that they wanted to defend him.
An interesting aspect is that not only were anonymous sources linked to MI6 quoted on both sides of the argument -- which could
have been explained by disagreements within the organisation: in different stories, not however far apart in date, its head, Sir
Alex Younger, was portrayed as holding radically different views.
When CNN publicised the existence of the dossier on 10 January 2017, the same day that it was published by 'BuzzFeed', it suggested
that the author was British. The following day, the WSJ named Steele.
On 13 January, Martin Robinson, UK Chief Reporter for 'Mail Online', published a report whose headlines seem worth quoting in
full:
'I introduced him to my wife as James Bond': Former spy Chris Steele's friends describe a "show-off" 007 figure but MI6 bosses
brand him "an idiot" for an "appalling lack of judgement" over the Trump "dirty dossier": Intelligence expert Nigel West says friend
is like Ian Fleming's famous character; He said: "He's James Bond. I actually introduced him to my wife as James Bond'; Mr West says
Steele dislikes Putin and Kremlin for ignoring rules of espionage; Angry spy source calls him 'idiot' and blasts decision to take
on the Trump work; Current MI6 boss Sir Alex Younger is said to be livid about reputation damage.'
On 15 January, however, Kim Sengupta, Defence Editor of the 'Independent', produced a report headlined: 'Head of MI6 used information
from Trump dossier in first public speech; Warnings on cyberattacks show ex-spy's work is respected.'
A great deal of evidence, I think, suggests that practically all those involved in 'Russiagate' were caught totally unprepared
by Trump's victory, that they then went rushing around like headless chickens, and that part of this process involved a decision
being taken to publish the dossier, without consulting British intelligence. If people like Younger were not consulted, then it would
seem to me unlikely that Steele was.
This leads me on to another puzzle about the dossier to which I have been having a difficulty finding a solution. Long years
ago I was reasonably familiar with libel law in relation to journalism. Anyone who 'served indentures', as very many of us did in
those days, had to study it. Later, I got involved in a protracted libel suit -- successfully, I hasten to add -- in relation to
a programme I made, and had the sobering experience of having a top-class libel barrister requiring me to justify every assertion
I had made.
In the jargon then, a crucial question when an article, or programme, was being 'vetted' before publication was whether it represented
a 'fair business risk.' This involved both the technical legal issues, and also judgements as to whether people were likely to sue,
and how if they did the case would be likely to pan out.
On the face of things, one would not have expected that people at 'BuzzFeed' would have gone ahead and make the dossier public,
without having it 'vetted' by competent lawyers. And I have difficulty seeing how, if they did, the advice could have been to publish
what they published.
I have some difficulty seeing how the advice could have been to include the memorandum with the claims about the Alfa Group oligarchs,
unless either these could be seriously defended or it was assumed that contesting them effectively would involve revealing more 'dirty
linen' than these wanted to see aired in public.
And I have immense difficulty seeing how any competent media lawyer would not have recommended, at the minimum, the redaction
of the names of Aleksej Gubarev and his company from the final December 2016 memorandum. This would have made legal action unlikely,
without greatly diminishing the effect of the claims.
Trying to make sense of why such an obvious precaution was not taken, I find myself wondering whether, in fact, the reason may
have been that the people responsible for the dossier may have actually believed this part of it at least.
If that is so, however, the most plausible explanation I can see is that while other claims in the dossier may well be total fabrication,
either by the people at Fusion and Steele or by some of their questionable contacts, this information at least did come from what
Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr et al thought were reliable Russian government sources.
But if this was so, and if what they thought was accurate information was actually disinformation, the likely conduit would
not have been through Steele, but from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts.
I think that the cases involving Karim Baratov and Dmitri Dokuchaev and his colleagues may be much more complex than is apparent
from what looks to me like patent disinformation put out both on the Western and Russian sides.
It it is I think material that intelligence agencies commonly include a great variety of people, ranging from very able analysts
and operators to complete dolts. So, the CIA has employed both Philip Giraldi and John Brennan, MI6 both Alastair Crooke and also
Christopher Steele and Alex Younger.
It is however somewhat revealing that one now finds Giraldi and Crooke appearing on a Russian site, 'Strategic Culture Foundation',
while Brennan and Younger are treated as authoritative figures by the MSM.
If you want to get a clear picture of quite how low-grade the latter figure is, incidentally, it is worth looking at the speech
to which Kim Sengupta refers.
A favourite line of mine comes in Younger's discussion of the -- actually largely mythical -- notion of 'hybrid warfare': 'In
this arena, our opponents are often states whose very survival owes to the strength of their security capabilities; the work is complex
and risky, often with the full weight of the State seeking to root us out.'
Leaving aside the fact that this is borderline illiterate, what it amazing is Younger's apparent blindness to clearly unintended
implications of what he writes. If indeed, the 'very survival' of the Russian state 'owes to the strength of [its] security capabilities',
the conclusions, seen from a Russian point of view, would seem rather obvious: vote Putin, and give medals to Patrushev and Bortnikov.
My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American
intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended
consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate
measures to cover their backsides.
There are many aspects to this story that don't make any sense to me if one looks at it from a rational perspective. One
of course being concerns about libel litigation and the related legal discovery that you note. The second being no real contingency
planning in the event Hillary loses the election. Admittedly they must have bought the media line and Nate Silver's forecast of
a greater than 75% probability of a Hillary win.
The purported "arms length" relationships don't make any sense. There's Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson playing a central
role. They hire Nellie Ohr, a possible CIA asset and the wife of Bruce Ohr, the 4th highest ranking official at the DOJ.
Glenn Simpson also hires Christopher Steele who he knows from previous "spook" associations. Steele had numerous and continuous
communications including telephone, Skype, email and personal meetings with Bruce and Nellie Ohr during all this. They even
have discussions about Deripaska and about his visa application to visit the US. Bruce is a conduit to Strzok at FBI. Glenn Simpson
also is part of these discussions with Steele and the Ohrs.
Simpson also arranges for Steele to brief "reporters" like David Corn and others at the NY Times, WaPo, WSJ, Politico and others.
Then there is Mifsud and Halper. Apparently both are CIA and FBI assets. They are communicating with Carter Page and
Papadopolous, who in turn is drinking and yapping with Aussie ambassador Downer.
You have Brennan ginning up concerns giving super secret and individual briefings to the Gang of 8 in Congress. There's
Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the minority leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee texting and calling Adam Waldman, Deripaska's
US attorney about setting up clandestine meetings with Steele. There's Sen. Harry Reid passing on the Steele "dossier" to
Comey.
Not to be left behind there's Sen. McCain doing the same. His top aide even travels to London to meet Steele. And then
there's Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page busily spending every waking moment texting each other about every twist and turn in
all the political games being played. Of course there's Admiral Rogers investigating unusual searches by FBI officials and contractors
on the NSA database. And he briefs President-elect Trump at Trump Tower which prompts the entire transition team to move to Trump's
golf course in NJ.
Oh, there is also Nellie Ohr setting up ham radio to avoid detection in her communications with Steele. Then we have everyone
leaking and spinning to their "cohorts" in the premier media like the NY Times, CNN and WaPo.
Comey even has his buddy a professor and ostensibly his legal counsel on the payroll of the FBI as a contractor with access
to all the sensitive databases leaking to the media.
Andy McCabe has his legal counsel Lisa Page spin stories around his wife's huge campaign contributions from Clinton consigliere
McAuliffe.
In fact the IG report on the Clinton "investigation" states that many at the FBI were accepting "gifts" from various media
personalities for a quid pro quo.
As if all this was not enough there's AG Loretta Lynch, meeting with Bill Clinton on a tarmac ostensibly to discuss their grandkids.
Not to forget there were these "unmaskings" of surveillance information by Susan Rice, Samantha Power.
There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele.
Of course he knew nothing but signed the FISA application on Carter Page. Then there are the FISC judges who never believed
their mandate required them to verify the evidence before issuing sweeping surveillance warrants. Now all this is what I as an
old farmer and winemaker have read. Those more in tune would easily add to these convoluted machinations.
I don't know how to make sense of all this. All I see is the extent of effort to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and
after he won from governing. The most obvious observation is that the leadership in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies
are so busy politicking spinning and leaking they have neither the time or the inclination let alone competence to do their real
job for which they get paid a handsome wage and sterling benefits.
At this point I don't buy that Christopher Steele dug up real intelligence from his contacts at the highest levels of the
Russian government, which caught Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Lynch's pants on fire, who then launched a formal investigation of
Russia collusion with Trump. Many things just don't pass the smell test. Now of course I have no qualifications nor experience
in spookdom.
If you have any speculative theories that connects some of the dots it would be my great pleasure to read.
I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised
not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time.
Confident that their horse is going to win the race and that the media will cover it all up and nobody will ever hear anything
about anything. Now that the unexpected happened, they're just spinning and denying faster hoping the Dems win in Nov and stop
all the investigations. And, they're getting nervous wondering who's going to sell out whom next. Up and down, around and around.
Gerbils -- there really isn't anything very consistent, planned or thought-out.
"I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised
not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time."
I believe your summary of what's happening is more accurate than Alastair Crooke's as set out in the article linked to.
But bright or not, what are these people in the IC doing being "highly politicised"? Does that not render them considerably
less efficient?
I ask because, if one tries to look at it in a non-partisan way, the Western IC seemed to be a failure when it came to
predicting Russian reactions in the Donbass, the Crimea, and it seems in Syria. I link this to various comments from Colonel Lang
indicating that true experts were replaced over the years by less experienced and knowledgeable people. Does being "highly politicised"
mean that they're not up to much when it comes to minding the shop?
I thought I detected a protest against the politicisation of the US in the world some years ago. And we must not forget
that Gen Flynn (DIA) and Adm Rogers (NSA) acted strongly against this. Flynn was the first casualty of the Trump/Russia hysteria
and the Clapper claque tried to fire Rogers.
Usually the incumbent party loses the mid-term election. The Democrats lost big in Obama's first mid-term. The Republicans
won the House and gained six senators. While the punditry claims a Blue Wave and Nate Silver is giving the Dems the odds. I'm
not so sure. I think the GOP will increase their majority in the Senate putting any conviction of Trump out of question.
I was born in the Depression and have seen vitriolic politics but never have seen such a massive opposition by the media,
the pundits and the establishment of both parties. Over 500 print publications endorsed Hillary. Only some 20 endorsed Trump.
Yet he confounds the pundits by winning the election. Clearly many voters are at odds with the political media class.
Yeah. My bet is that the Repubs hold onto both. 1) the economy is getting better 2) what do the Dems have to offer other than
this crazy Trump/Russia thing?
Economy will slow down sharply in 2019 but there should be enough momentum to help with the mid-terms. Trump needs to stop
with the endless sanction stuff. The House does look like a close one.
At a very general level, a 'speculative theory' which I have been mulling over for some time was rather well set out in a commentary
in 'The Hill' on 9 August by Sharyl Attkisson, which opens:
'Let's begin in the realm of the fanciful.
'Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that
a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established
money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
'What exactly might an "insurance policy" against Donald Trump look like?'
And Attkisson goes on to outline precisely the developments that appear to have happened.
I think there is an ideological background to this, on which the piece by Alastair Crooke – himself former MI6 – to which
Patrick Armstrong links, and the piece by James George Jatras to which Crooke links, are both to the point. The 'end of history'
crowd thought they were inhabiting a realised utopia, and cannot cope with the fact that their dream is collapsing.
In relation to the millenarian undercurrents on which Crooke focuses, however, it is also worth noting that a traditional
conservative suspicion has been that millenarianism is naturally linked to antinomianism: the belief that the moral law is not
binding on the elect. And in turn, according to a familiar skeptical view, antinomianism can easily end up in in straightforward
rascality.
On the rascality – to which Attkisson is pointing – I am working on how parts of the picture can be fleshed out. A few preliminary
points raised by your remarks.
As you note, 'There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok
for Steele.' So, we know that Ohr and Steele were conspiring together to ensure that the latter could continue to be intimately
involved in the Mueller investigation, despite the FBI termination,
It is obviously possible that Ohr did not report up the chain of command, and if so, he and his wife become pivotal figures
in the conspiracy. Alternatively, it could be that Rosenstein is lying – in which case, we have large questions about who else
is implicated, and specifically whether the termination of Steele by the FBI was anything more than a ruse.
If, as seems to me likely, although not certain, the second possibility is closer to the truth than the former, then before
Ohr testifies on 28 August before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees he will have to consider whether he is prepared
to 'take the rap' for his superiors, or 'sing sweetly.'
The fact that in a report in 'The Hill', I think on the same day as the Attkisson piece, John Solomon was quoting from Ohr's
handwritten notes of a meeting with Glenn Simpson in December 2016 makes me wonder whether he may not already have made a decision.
A key paragraph from the report:
'Yet, Simpson allegedly acknowledged that most of the information Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher
Steele developed did not come from sources inside Moscow. "Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes
from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.," Ohr scribbled in his notes.'
There is I think a need for caution here. There is no guarantee that Simpson was telling the literal truth to Ohr, or indeed
the latter reproducing with absolute accuracy with he was told (handwritten notes can be disposed of easily, but they can also
be rewritten.)
One is I think on firmer ground in relation to what it suggests was not the case – that there is any substance whatsoever in
the ludicrous story of someone running a private security company in London sending out hired employees who then gain access to
top Kremlin insiders, with these, of course, telling them precisely what they actually think.
And it confirms my strong suspicion that the dossier is actually a composite product, much of it assembled at Fusion, which
could indeed contain material from a range of people from the former Soviet space, who could living in the United States, Britain,
or elsewhere – Ukraine and the Baltics being obvious possibilities.
So Sergei Skripal and Sergei Millian, neither of whom fit the description by Simpson, have been mentioned as possible sources,
and there is also the very curiously ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin.
All these people, obviously, could simply have fabricated material or retailed gossip, and Steele himself was involved
in fabricating material on an industrial scale to cover up what actually happened to Alexander Litvinenko.
That said, I continue to think it possible that both the second and final memoranda may incorporate some 'glitter', as well
as 'chickenfeed' fed from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts, to hark back to George Smiley says to the Minister,
quite possibly included in the hope that the BS involved would be reproduced in contexts where it could provoke legal action.
All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making
it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie
Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.
It could then be that Steele has been, in effect, hoist with his own petard, in that he is having to sustain the fiction that
he had some kind of grounds for making the claims about Aleksej Gubarev and XBT. How far this matters, at least in relation to
the action bought against 'BuzzFeed' in Florida, remains moot at the moment.
Apparently that organisation is doing rather well in sustaining the claiming that 'fair report privilege' could circumvent
any requirement to prove truth – and a key question now is whether documents which the DOJ is being forced to produce will establish
that the dossier was being used by officials in ways that would trigger the privilege as of 10 January 2017.
That said, what Ohr reports Simpson as telling him raises fundamental questions about how anyone could have relied upon
the dossier for anything – and should push people back to actually asking hard questions about its origins.
Mr Habakkuk, you mention "ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin" - I am not sure if you meant Akhmetov.
I am surprised and curious about you mentioning him - if you meant Akhmetov - because that is one name among all the oligarchs
which has so far not been prominent. Thank you for your posts, these posts and the SST comments could and should serve as help
to the congressional investigations and hearings.
To add: Steele was on the FBI's payroll, in addition to being on Fusion GPS's payroll. And on the payroll of Her Majesty's
Government. After he got caught leaking to the media he was apparently "fired" by the FBI. But he was continuing to communicate
and brief through Bruce Ohr at the DOJ.
I think the circle of Glenn Simpson. Chris Steele, Bruce & Nellie Ohr, Adam Waldman. Peter Strzok, and Sen. Mark Warner
will be very interesting to pursue.
The other circle that should be investigated is the Brennan, Clapper, Lynch, Comey, Yates, Susan Rice.
No investigation can exclude the active participation of key people from the media complex including people like Comey's
good friend Benjamin Wittes.
Younger isn't the brightest bulb in the box, is he?
"If you doubt the link between legitimacy and effective counter-terrorism, then – albeit negatively – the unfolding tragedy
in Syria will, I fear, provide proof. I believe the Russian conduct in Syria, allied with that of Assad's discredited regime,
will, if they do not change course, provide a tragic example of the perils of forfeiting legitimacy. In defining as a terrorist
anyone who opposes a brutal government, they alienate precisely that group that has to be on side if the extremists are to
be defeated. Meanwhile, in Aleppo, Russia and the Syrian regime seek to make a desert and call it peace. The human tragedy
is heart-breaking"
Those were indeed some of the most inane comments in an inane piece.
But then, if you read an interview given to Jay Elwes of 'Prospect' magazine in May last year by Younger's predecessor Sir
Richard Dearlove, who looks to have been a significant background presence in what has been going on, you will find that, although
he is much more coherent than than his successor, it is almost as inane.
As it happens, Dearlove was one of the signatories of the 'Statement of Principles' of something called the 'Henry Jackson
Society.'
This was founded in 2005, in Cambridge, by a group in whom acolytes of an historian called Maurice Cowling were prominent –
Dearlove is himself a graduate in history from that university.
In its original version, the 'Statement of Principles' explained, among other things, that the Society: 'Believes that
only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that any international organization which admits undemocratic
states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.'
Ironically, it was shortly after the publication of the dossier that Anatol Lieven published in the 'National Interest'
an article entitled 'Is America Becoming a Third World Country?' (See
https://nationalinterest.or...
.)
Among other things, he harked back to the way that, in 1648, a century and a half of bloody ideological strife in Europe had
been ended with a recognition that the legitimacy of different state forms had to be accepted, if a kind of 'war of all against
all' was to be avoided.
And Lieven went on to reflect on the way that, at what was then widely seen as the end of the Cold War, the abandonment of
universalisitic pretensions by Russia and China was interpreted as justifying an embrace of these by the the West.
This, he went on to argue, had actually had the paradoxical effect of relegitimising 'régimes' which do not conform to Western
'democratic' models, concluding by noting what appears to our new, quasi-Soviet, preference for not letting experience interfere
with ideological dogma:
'Finally – even after the catastrophes of Iraq and Libya – there is almost no awareness among US policymakers of the fact that
US attempts to change the regimes of other countries are likely to be seen not only by the elites of those countries but also
by their populations as leading to – and intended to lead to – the destruction of the state itself, leading to disaster for its
society and population. When the Communist regime in the USSR collapsed (though only in part under Western pressure), it took
the Soviet state with it. The Russian state came close to following suit in the years that followed, Russia was reduced to impotence
on the world stage, and large parts of the Russian and other populations suffered economic and social disaster. Remembering their
own past experiences with state collapse, warlordism, famine and foreign invasion, Chinese people looked at this awful spectacle
and huddled closer to the Chinese state – one that they may dislike in many ways, but which they certainly trust more than anything
America has to offer – especially given the apparent decay of democracy throughout the West.'
I read with interest your piece back in June entitled 'Putin Once Dreamed the American Dream', reprinting Charles Heberle's
account of the 'Transforming Subjects Into Citizens' project, and the attitude of some people close to Putin to it.
One of the things which struck me was that the question why the American Revolution succeeded, and so many others failed, which
was concerning the intellectuals to whom Heberle talked, is one of the central questions of modern political thought, from Tocqueville
on.
(Indeed, the question of the preconditions for what might be called 'constitutional' government, has been central to 'republican'
thought, ever since it was revived by Italian thinkers, including prominently Machiavelli, when the 'Renaissance' made them reactivate
and rework debates from ancient Rome and Greece.)
However, to hark back to the anxieties expressed by Lieven, nothing in the analysis of the great French thinker necessary guarantees
that the success of 'Democracy in America' is stable and permanent, or indeed that the relatively civilised order of the post-war
'Pax Americana' is necessarily durable in Western Europe.
Also in June, Sergei Karaganov published a piece in 'Russia in Global Affairs', of which he is publisher, entitled 'Ideology
of Eastward Turn.' A paragraph that struck me:
'Russian society should by no means abdicate from its mostly European culture. But it should certainly stop being afraid,
let alone feel ashamed, of its Asianism. It should be remembered that from the standpoint of prevailing social mentality and
society's attitude to the authorities Russia, just as China and many other Asian states, are offspring of Chengiss Khan's Empire.
This is no reason for throwing up hands in despair or for beginning to despise one's own people, contrary to what many members
of intelligencia sometimes do. It should be accepted as a fact of life and used as a strength. The more so, since amid the
harsh competitive environment of the modern world the authoritarian type of government – in the context of a market economy
and equitable military potentials – is certainly far more effective than modern democracy. This is what our Western partners
find so worrisome. Of course, we should bear in mind that authoritarianism – just like democracy – may lead to stagnation and
degradation. Russia is certainly confronted with such a risk.'
Unlike you, I cannot claim serious expertise on Russia. But, as a reasonably alert generalist television current affairs producer,
I took note of the indications which were emerging in the course of 1987 that the Gorbachev 'new thinking' was underpinned by
a realisation that Soviet institutions and ideas had become fundamentally dysfunctional, to which you have referred repeatedly
over the years.
And, after long tedious months trying interest the powers that were in British broadcasting in what was happening, I ended
up producing a couple of programmes for BBC Radio in February/March 1989 in which we interviewed some of the leading 'new thinkers',
among them Karaganov's then immediate superior at the Institute of Europe, Vitaly Zhurkin.
At the Institute for the USA and Canada, by contrast, we did not interview its head, Georgiy Arbatov, but his deputy, Andrei
Kokoshin, and one of the latter's mentors on military matters and collaborators General-Mayor Valentin Larionov, who I later realised
had earlier been one of the foremost Soviet nuclear strategists. (At the Institute for World Economy and International Relations,
we interviewed Arbatov's son, Alexei.)
Talking to these people we got a sense, although it had to be fleshed out later, of the scale of the disillusion with Soviet
models, and indeed – which began to frighten me not long after – of the way many of them were romanticising the West.
What Karaganov now writes is I think a hardly very surprising reaction to the way that the Western powers responded to the
'new thinking.' Moreover, it seems to me that the disillusionment involved is in no sense particular Russian, but rather global.
If one regards 'democracy' as though it were quoted on the stock exchange, before 1914 there were very many buyers, including
among the Russian élite. By 1931, in very many places, including large sections of the 'intelligentsia' in Western countries,
it was a sellers' market, to put it mildly.
After 1945, a kind of long 'bull market' in 'democracy' started: for very good reasons.
The – largely but very far from entirely – peaceful retreat and collapse of Soviet power was to a very significant extent the
product of this. The subsequent behaviour of Western élites has generated a vicious 'bear market', a fact they appear unable to
understand.
I do not think Karaganov's article is simply a reflection of changes in Russian attitudes. The changes, it seems to me,
are global.
I do think that we in the West really blew it. In 1990, we could have said, in all humility, that our way of life (IMO
the key word is pluralism) had proven more survivable. So we should welcome the others into the tent. Instead, we were right and
that was that.
PS, in light of the Henry Jackson society and all Younger's references to "values" this one rather stands out "A vital lesson
I take from the Chilcot Report is the danger of group think."
Yeah. Group think, the very opposite of what I mean by pluralism.
Sharyl Atkinson describes well the conspiracy. When one steps back and look at all the machinations we know now, it seems incredible.
Just as you're asking about the origins of the dossier I wonder if it was orchestrated or something that evolved organically?
If it was orchestrated, then who was the mastermind? Did Brennan, Clapper and Come sit down and hatch it or was Simpson the brains?
What is astounding is the scale. So many people involved. Were they all motivated by ideology or by the need to protect their
racket?
It seems there are many sub-plots. There's the Deripaska, Steele, Waldman, Mueller, Sen. Warner angle. Then there's the
Simpson, Steele, Ohr, Strzok, Page, McCabe angle. There's also the Simpson, Steele, media reporters angle. Then there's the whole
Mifsud, Halper, Carter Page, Papadopolous, Downer bit. There's the Comey, Rosenstein, Yates, Strzok FISA application piece. Then
there's all the stuff happening in the UK including Hannigan's resignation as soon as Trump is elected. Of course the whole Mueller
appointment and the obstruction of justice thread to tie Trump's hand. There are so many elements. Who initiated and coordinated?
Was each element separate?
There's no doubt a political thriller movie could be made.
I guess the comedy part is that there actually exist people with medically functioning brains, who are somehow able to contort
such a worldview...Aleppo as peaceful 'desert' indeed...who knew that having bearded fanatics in charge is somehow 'better'...[and
not 'heart-breaking']...
Some here may find blogpost from March of this year interesting as it speaks to the production of the Steele dossier. I have
not seen it mentioned here before and a site search produced no results.
https://apelbaum.wordpress....
Some sections seem to have gotten David Cay Johnston's hackles up.
I had seen Yaacov Apelbaum's piece referred to by Clarice Feldman in a post on the 'American Thinker' site a few days back,
but not looked at it properly.
It is indeed fascinating, and clearly repays a closer study than I have so far had time to give it. I was however relieved
to find that what Apelbaum writes 'meshes' quite well with my own views of the likely authorship of the dossier.
A question I have is whether the monumental amount of labour involved in producing it can really be the work of a single IT
person – however wide-ranging his abilities and interests. My suspicion is that there may be input from Russian intelligence.
This is not said in order to discredit Apelbaum's work. In matters where I have had occasion critically to examine claims from
official Russian sources, I have found several unsurprising, but recurring, patterns. Sometimes, the information provided can
be shown to be essentially accurate, and it is reasonably clear how it has been obtained.
At other times, claims are made which information from other sources suggests either are, or may well be, true, but the 'sources
and methods' involved are deliberately obscured, making evaluation more difficult.
And then, there are many occasions when what one gets is quite patently a mixture of accurate information and disinformation.
Analysing these can be very productive, if one can both sift out the accurate information, and attempt to see what the disinformation
is designed to obscure.
One thing of which I am absolutely certain is that the networks which are outlined by Apelbaum are precisely those which Russian
intelligence will have spent a great deal of time and ingenuity penetrating.
This will have been attempted by 'SIGINT' and surveillance methods, and also through infiltrating agents and turning people.
(There are often grounds to suspect that some of those most vociferously denouncing Putin are colluding with Russian intelligence.)
Together, these methods are likely to have produced a mass of information. It is important to remember, for example, that
at the time of his mysterious death on 23 March 2013 Boris Berezovsky was negotiating to return to Russia, and that his head of
security, Sergei Sokolov did return, with a 'cache' of documents.
Some of these were used back in April 2016 in a 'Vesti Nedeli' edition presented by Dmitry Kiselyov, who manages Russia's informational
programming resources, and an accompanying documentary on the 'Pervyi Kanal' station.
The purpose was to demonstrate that Alexei Navalny was the instrument of a 'régime change' plot in which William Browder was
acting as an agent of MI6.
There is a good discussion of this, which highlights some of the problems with the documents, by Gilbert Doctorow, and Sokolov
appears to have been involved in some murky activities since.
But whatever the credibility or lack of it of the material, its appearance illustrates a general pattern, where the political
disintegration of the London-based opposition to Putin has meant that more and more people involved in it have been supplying
information to the Russians.
If, as I strongly suspect, there is fire beneath the smoke in those Russian television programmes, and if a great part of a
series of projects of a related kind orchestrated in conjunction by elements in American and British intelligence were actually
large run from this side, this will be creating headaches for people in Washington, as well as London.
An important role in the Apelbaum piece is played by the private security company Hakluyt. A quick look at the entries
on Wikipedia and Powerbase will make clear that, if there is a British 'deep state', this is likely to be at its core.
It is against this background that on has to see a specific claim which Apelbaum makes, for which I do not think any evidence
is produced, about two figures whose role in 'Russiagate' is clearly central. So Luke Harding is described as 'A Guardian reporter
and a Hakluyt and Orbis contractor' (note word.) Meanwhile, Edward Baumgartner is described as 'Co-founder of Edward Austin. Contractor
at Orbis and Hakluyt.'
That Harding is corrupt, as also Sir Robert Owen's 'Inquiry' into the death of the late Alexander Litvinenko, I can prove.
When Owen's report was published in January 2016, a preliminary response by me was posted here on SST, which among other things
listed some of the evidence establishing that the interviews supposedly recorded with Litvinenko by Detective Inspector Brent
Hyatt immediately before his death were blatant forgeries.
If this is the case, then questions are raised about how much of the apparently compelling forensic evidence is forged – and
close examination suggests that key parts of it are.
In relation to that part of the evidence discussed in my January 2016 post which exposes the fumbling attempts by Steele
and his colleagues to cover up the truth about when and how Litvinenko travelled into central London on the day he was supposedly
killed, most of this had been among a mass of material submitted by me to the Inquiry Team, which I have e-mails to prove was
read.
Likewise, also in January 2016, I sent the key relevant evidence on this crucial matter to Harding and senior figures at the
'Guardian', and have reason to believe it was read.
Further study of Owen's report has confirmed my suspicion that a strong 'prima facie case' of conspiracy to pervert the
course of justice exists against very many of those involved in it.
At the same time, materials produced on the Russian side have confirmed my suspicion that the reason why Steele and others
have been able to get away with their cover-up is that the Russian intelligence services are no more enthusiastic than their British
counterparts about having anything like the whole truth about how Litvinenko lived and died made public.
Given the central role which Steele has now assumed in what looks like one of the biggest political scandals in American history,
and the fact that in his book 'Collusion' Harding was again coming out in support of him, it would be of the greatest possible
interest if indeed the latter had combined being a senior 'Guardian' correspondent with being paid by both Orbis and – even more
important – Hakluyt.
And, particularly given the peculiar ambiguities of the role both of Fusion GPS and Baumgartner in the 'Trump Tower' meeting,
it would be of great interest if the latter could be tied not only to Fusion, but to Orbis and – again even more important – Hakluyt.
This in turn might be relevant in trying to make sense of whether the fact that he and Simpson appear to have been working
against Trump and Browder at the same time was or was not part of an elaborate ploy to give credibility to 'information operations'
against the former.
There are accordingly two possibilities. It may be that, while much else in the Apelbaum material can be shown to be accurate,
such accurate information is being used to give credibility to disinformation.
Alternatively, he is being used as a conduit for accurate and really explosive information about the British end of 'Russiagate',
which he is unlikely to have unearthed all by himself, and the actual sources of which are – for very understandable reasons –
being obscured.
Thank you for your reply. You have given me much to think about and I am very grateful that you took the time to respond in
such a comprehensive manner, and that you have provided me and others here with some really compelling information and notions.
In particular, the issue of sources and methods you note seems spot on. The author(s)'s information gathering methodologies
and expertise are certainly not those of the laiety. In fact in the comments below his post YA mentions intelligence work.
Additionally, the text itself displays an odd parallelism with his assertion regarding the Steele Dossier- that is, the
likelihood of multiple authors, of diverse origins.
One thing that did catch my eye was a response he made to David Cay Johnston's pissy request for a retraction about Jacoby
involvement. YA included a quote in Latin from Cicero's accusations against Cataline. Here is the English: What is there that
you did last night, what the night before -- where is it that you were -- who was there that you summoned to meet you -- what
design was there which was adopted by you, with which you think that any one of us is unacquainted?
While this sort of riposte isn't exactly hyper-erudite, it ain't chopped liver either. What I mean to say is that exceptional
cyber skills, algorithm coding (I'm guessing crawlers) are not commonly coupled with that sort of classical formation. His recourse
to various biblical quotes suggests an unusual level of education as well. And no way is he younger than 38 or so.
At any rate, thank you for the article and your kind and informative reply.
Thanks. I have now read both a good few of Apelbaum's earlier posts, and also the comments on his discussion of the dossier.
Given the importance of his analysis of that document closer study is clearly needed of all this material, but I have some preliminary
reactions.
My curiosity about who Apelbaum might be is reinforced by the fact that the intimations he gives about his background in
his responses to comments, while not incompatible with what he has said in the past, do not sit so easily with it.
In a July 2010 post, he explained that: 'In my previous life, I was a civil engineer. I worked for a large power marine construction
company doing structural design and field engineering.' According to the account he gave then, he subsequently shifted to software
development.
What he now tells us is that: 'As far as how I first started, I do have an intelligence background and have been developing
OSINT/cyber/intelligence platforms for many years.'
That makes sense in terms of the analysis, which – whatever other inputs there may or may not have been – looks to me like
the work of someone who has a serious background in these kinds of methodology, and moreover, is clearly not any kind of 'Fachidiot.'
So, questions naturally arise about Apelbaum's intelligence career, in particular, who he is likely to have been employed
by, and associated with, in the past, and whether he is still involved with any of those agencies which have employed him.
Even if he is not, questions would obviously rise about present connections arising from past work. This is in addition to
the possibility that the logic of events may have provoked him to collaborate with those who might earlier have been his adversaries.
Reading Apelbaum's work, I am reminded of another interesting intervention in an embittered argument relating to the Middle
East and the post-Soviet space, from what turned out to be an unexpected source.
In the period following the 'false flag' sarin attack at Ghouta on 21 August 2013 an incisive demolition of the conventional
wisdom was provided in the 'crowdsourced' investigation masterminded by one 'sasa wawa' on a site entitled 'Who Attacked Ghouta?'
And then, in December 2016, an Israeli high technology entrepreneur called Saar Wilf, a former employee of Unit 8200, that
country's equivalent of the NSA or GCHQ, who had subsequently made a great deal of money when he and his partner sold their company
to Paypal, co-founded a site called 'Rootclaim.'
The site, it was explained, was dedicated to applying Bayesian statistics to 'current affairs' problems. This is a methodology,
whose modern form owes much to work done at Bletchley Park in the war, which is invaluable in 'SIGINT' analysis and also combating
online fraud.
At the outset, 'Rootclaim' posted a recycled version of some of the key material from the 'Who Attacked Ghouta?' investigation.
So, it seems likely, if not absolutely certain, that Saar Wilf and 'sasa wawa' are one and the same.
Following the Salisbury incident on 4 March, a blogger using the name 'sushi' produced a series of eleven posts under the title
'A Curious Incident' on the 'Vineyard of the Saker' blog.
Again, there are some very clear resemblances to 'sasa wawa' and Saar Wilf, which made me wonder whether the same person may
be reappearing under yet another 'moniker.'
While the 'flavour' of Apelbaum seems to be different, the combination of what looks like serious technical expertise in IT
techniques relating to intelligence with broad general intellectual interests looks to me similar.
I was amused by the combination of his quotation of the words from John 8:32 etched into the wall of the original CIA headquarters
– 'And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' – and the following remarks:
'The June 2016 start date of Steele's contract with Fusion GPS is the start of the "billable" activity, not the beginning of
the research. Steele and Simpson/Jacoby have been collaborating on Trump/Russia going back to 2009.
'Also, there is a large Hakluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US that regularly services political and
federal agencies and has the power to summon Nazgûls the likes of John Brennan. So Steele is not the new kid on the block, he
has been doing this type of work long before 2016. This is also why he has such a cozy relationship with the brass at the DOJ
and state.'
As it happens, I think that many of the collaborations involved may have started significantly earlier than this. In his response
to David Cay Johnston, Apelbaum links to an April 2007' WSJ' article by Simpon and Jacoby which, among other things, deals with
Semyon Mogilevich.
This is behind a paywall, but, fortunately, the fact that Ukrainian nationalists have had an obvious interest in treating it
as a source of reliable information has meant that it is easily accessible.
It should I think be clear from my January 2016 post why I find this particularly interesting, in that it has to be interpreted
in the context of a crucial 'key' to the mystery of the death of Alexander Litvinenko.
This is that he, the Ukrainian nationalist former KGB person Yuri Shvets, the convicted Italian disinformation peddler
Mario Scaramella, and quite possibly the sometime key FBI expert on Mogilevich, Robert 'Bobby' Levinson, were involved in trying
to suggest that Mogilevich was an instrument of a plot by Putin to equip Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb.'
So, I then come back to the question of whether this notion of a 'large Haluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the
US', playing the role of Sauron with Brennan, perhaps, as the 'Witch-king of Angmar', does or does not have substance.
If it does, there would be very good reasons for a variety of people, with a range of different attitudes to events in the
post-Soviet space and the Middle East, to think that they had an interest in collaborating with Russian intelligence against a
common enemy.
If it does not, then there is a real possibility that Apelbaum may be involved in using accurate intelligence to disseminate
inaccurate. (It seems to me that he is much too intelligent to be a plausible candidate for the role of 'useful idiot.')
One further point that may, or may not, be relevant. Many of the most influential American and British Jews, for reasons which
I find somewhat hard to understand, seem to have decided that the heirs of the architects of the Lvov pogrom are nice and cuddly.
So, for example, Chrystia Freeland, the unrepentant granddaughter of the notorious Nazi collaborator Michael Chomiak, has been
able to end up as Canadian Foreign Minister because made a successful journalistic career on the London 'Financial Times', a paper
with a strong Jewish presence.
That the editorial staff of such a paper thought it appropriate to have someone like Freeland as their Moscow correspondent
gives you a good insight into how moronic British élites have become. This may well be relevant, in trying to evaluate claims
about Hakluyt and other matters.
In relation to Apelbaum, it may be quite beside the point that other Jews from a Russian/East European background, both in
Russia, Israel, and the United States, have very different views on Ukraine, Russia, and the dangers posed – not least to Israel
– by jihadists. It is however a fact which needs to be born in mind, when one comes across people whose views cut across conventional
dividing lines in the United States and Britain.
Beside the point in relation to Apelbaum, I am confident, but also needing to be kept in mind, is the possibility that elements
in the United States 'intelligence community', seeing the 'writing on the wall', may think it appropriate to shift from trying
to pass the buck by blaming the Russians to doing so by blaming the Brits.
It seems apparent that Putin's reordering of the Russian economy after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, Republic
Bank's difficulites and the death of Edmund Safra left a bitter taste in the mouths of many who had hoped to exercise rentier
rights over the Russian economy and resources. Why so much US resources and energy have been committed to recovering a contested
deed is a real conundrum.
I was unaware of Freeland's grandfather and his lamentable CV. Thank you. It's funny that you mentioned both the Ghouta post
and the Vineyard of the Saker. I recall reading those and thinking- this is not like common fare on the intertubes.
Your last points about failings in the quality of elite decision-making is extremely important. This dynamic of the dumb (US,
UK, EU) at the wheel is, for me, the most frightening feature of the current state of play. In the worst moments I fear we are
all on a bus driven by a drunk monkey, careening through the Andes. It's going to hurt all the way to the bottom.
Again, I am very grateful for your replies and all the great information and thought.
I think the question of why large elements in both American and British élites got so heavily invested, in essence, in supporting
the oligarchs who refused Putin's terms in what turned into a kind of 'bare knuckles' struggle they were always likely to lose
is a very interesting one.
It has long seemed to me that, even if one looked at matters from the most self-interested and cynical point of view, this
represented a quite spectacular error of judgement. And, viewing the way in which 'international relations' are rearranging themselves,
I am reasonably confident that this was one matter on which I got things right.
A central reason for this, I have come to think, is that Berezovsky and the 'information operations' people round him – Litvinenko
is important, but the pivotal figure, the 'mastermind', if you will, was clearly Alex Goldfarb, and Yuri Shvets and Yuri Felshtinsky
both played and still play important supporting roles – were telling people in the West what these wanted to hear.
It is a truth if not quite 'universally acknowledged', at least widely recognised by those who have acquired some 'worldly
wisdom', that intellectually arrogant people, with limited experience of the world and a narrow education, can commonly be 'led
by the nose' by figures who have more of the relevant kinds of intelligence and experience, and few scruples.
This rather basic fact is central to understanding the press conference on 31 May 2007 where the figure whom the Berezovsky
group and Christopher Steele had framed in relation to the death of Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, responded to the Crown Prosecution
Service request for his extradition.
In his prepared statement, Lugovoi claimed that his supposed victim used to say that everyone in Britain were ''retards',
to use the translation submitted in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, or 'idiots', to use that by RT. And according to this version,
the British believed in everything that 'we' – that is, the Berezovky group – said was happening in Russia.
Whether or not Litvinenko expressed this cynical contempt, the credulity with which the claims of the 'information operations'
people around Berezovsky have been accepted – well illustrated by Owen's report and perhaps most ludicrous in Harding's journalism
– makes clear it is justified.
What moreover became very evident, when Glenn Simpson testified to the House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees,
was that he was once again recycling the Berezovsky's group's version of Putin 'sistema' as the 'return of Karla.'
Given what has been emerging on the ways in which Fusion GPS and Steele were both integrated into networks involving top-level
people in the FBI, DOJ, State Department and CIA, it seems clear that the 'retards'/'idiots' label is as applicable to people
on your side as to people on ours.
Perhaps then, cartoons about Trump as a puppet, with the strings pulled by another puppet representing Manafort, whose
strings are in turn pulled by Putin, should be replaced by ones in which Mueller is seen as a puppet manipulated by the ghost
of Boris Berezovsky.
But that is the irony. The relationship with Berezovsky blew up in the faces of all concerned, when in the wake of the
successsful corruption of the investigation into the death of Litvinenko by him and his 'information operations' people, he attempted
to recoup his fortunes by suing Roman Abramovich, and got taken to pieces by Lord Sumption.
As to what happened next, a recent item on 'Russian Insider', providing a link to and transcript of a more recent piece presented
by Dmitry Kiselyov on 'Vesti Nedeli is a good illustration of where accurate information and disinformation can be mixed in material
from Russian sources.
The piece, which appeared in July, discusses, and quotes from, an interview given the previous month to Dmitry Gordon, who
runs a Ukrainian nationalist site, by Berezovsky's daughter Elizaveta. Among other things, this deals with Berezovsky's death.
(See
https://gordonua.com/public...
. A little manipulation will get you a reasonably serviceable English translation, although
it becomes comic because Berezovsky is referred to as 'pope'.)
The 'Vesti Nedeli' piece uses what Elizaveta Berezovskaya says in support of the claim that Berezovsky was murdered by
British 'special forces', because he was planning to return to Russia, and he 'knew too much about them.'
As it happens, this is a patently tendentious reading of what she says. However, interesting features of the actual text of
the interview are 1. that it does provide what to my mind is compelling evidence that her father was murdered, and 2. while she
clearly suggests that this was covered up by the British, she is not suggesting that they were responsible – but also not making
Putin 'prime suspect.'
Whether the suggestion by his daughter that her father might have been murdered by people who knew that by so doing they might
get control of assets he might otherwise recoup has any merit I cannot say: I doubt it but cannot simply rule the possibility
out.
What remains the case is that at that point there were very many people, including but in no way limited to elements in Western
intelligence agencies, who had strong interests in avoiding a return by Berezovsky to Russia.
And the same people had the strongest possible interest in avoiding his being treated at the Inquest into Litvinenko's death
by a competent barrister representing the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation in the way he had been treated by
Lord Sumption.
Ironically, it may have been partly because Lugovoi had made a dramatic announcement that he was withdrawing from the proceedings
less than a fortnight before Berezovsky's death that before this happened a lot of people were staring at an absolutely worst-case
scenario.
Time and again, in Owen's report, one finds matters where he recycles patent disinformation, which a well-briefed barrister
acting for the ICRF could have easily ripped to shreds. At the same time, in this situation, the Russians could most probably
have made a reasonable fist of coping with the multiple contradictions in claims made on their own side.
And, crucially, their patent weak suit – the need to obscure the actual role of Russian intelligence in the smuggling of the
polonium into London, which had nothing to do with any murder plot – could have been reasonably well 'covered.'
Precisely because of these facts, the one scenario which can very easily be completely ruled out is that which is basic to
the 'information operations' now coming out of London and Washington. In this, Berezovsky's death is portrayed as a key element
in a systematic attempt by the Putin 'sistema' to eradicate the supposedly heroic opposition, much of it located in London.
That sustaining this fable is critical to defending the credibility of Steele, and therefore of the whole 'Russiagate' narrative,
is quite evident from the 'From Russia With Blood' materials published by 'BuzzFeed' in July last year.
This, however, leads on to a paradox, which is highlighted by a piece posted by James George Jatras on the 'Strategic Culture
Foundation' site on 18 August, entitled 'Have You Committed Your Three Felonies Today?'
Among the points Jatras – who I think is an Orthodox Christian – makes is that the logic of contesting the 'Russiagate' narrative
has had some strange consequences. Among these, there is one on which the actual history of the activities of Berezovsky and his
'information operations' people bears directly:
'Flipping the "Russians did it" narrative: Among the President's defenders, on say Fox News, no less than among his detractors,
Russia is the enemy who (altogether now!) "interfered in our elections" in order to "undermine our democracy." Mitt Romney was
right! The only argument is over who was the intended beneficiary of Muscovite mendacity, Trump or Hillary – that's the variable.
The constant is that Putin is Hitler and only a traitor would want to get along with him. All sides agree that the Christopher
Steele dossier is full of "Russian dirt" – though there's literally zero actual evidence of Kremlin involvement but a lot pointing
to Britain's MI6 and GCHQ.'
For reasons I have already discussed, I think what while Jatras is substantially right, 'zero evidence' is only partially correct:
It seems to me that disinformation supplied by elements in Russian intelligence could quite possibly have found its way into the
second and final memoranda.
That said, Jatras has pointed to a fundamental feature of the current situation, which involves multiple ironies.
The total destruction of Steele's credibility could easily be achieved by anyone who was interested in looking at the evidence
about the life and death of the late Alexander Litvinenko seriously. However, because a central tactic of most of those who are
attacking the 'Russiagate' narrative has generally been 'Flipping the "Russians did it" narrative', they are like people who ought
to be able to see Steele's 'Achilles' heel', but in practice, often end up attacking him where his armour is, without being, not
at its weakest.
Meanwhile, as I have already stressed, the ability of the Russian authorities to undermine the 'narrative' produced by the
'information operations' people around Berezovsky, of whom the most important are Alex Goldfarb and Yuri Shvets, is compromised
by their fear of having to 'own up to' their actual role in the smuggling of the polonium into London in October-November 2007.
The person who had a strong interest in blowing this structure of illusion to pieces was actually Lugovoi. But it seems to
me at least possible that there has been a kind of disguised covert conspiracy by elements in Western and Russian intelligence
to ensure there was no risk of him doing so.
One of the things I've never understood about the Trump Dossier story is the lack of any forensic analysis of its content
and style anywhere in the media, even the alt media. Who was supposed to have actually written it? Steele? The style does not
match someone of his background and education, and the formatting and syntax were atrocious. The font actually varied from "report"
to "report." It certainly did not give me the impression of being the product of a high-end, Belgravia consultancy.
I wonder whether it was produced by an American of one sort or another and then "laundered" by being accorded association
with the UK firm. Given that Steele just happened to be hired by the USG to help in the anti-FIFA skulduggery, he and his firm
seem very much to be a concern that does dirty little jobs that need discretely to be done, though in this case, the discretion
was undermined.
Most of the memos were issued before October and Fusion/Simpson authorized Steele to release information to the FBI starting
in July. The question is why the memos were released after the election when a release before the election would have been enough
to sink Trump. Instead the FBI and presumably those paying Fusion on Hillarys behalf sat on it, and Comey comes out days before
the election
Saying he was reopening the HC email investigation.
Kind of looks like they all wanted Trump in office and the disclosure was to give Trump the excuse needed to back track
on his promises to improve relations with Russia and blame that on pressure from the Deep State and Russia Gate.
Looking at Trumps history with Sater (FBI/CIA asset) and his political aspirations that began following his Moscow visit
in 1987 it seems likely Trump has been a Deep State asset for 30 years and fed intelligence to CIA/FBI on Russian oligarchs and
mafia . Indeed he may well have duped Russians into believing he was working for them when in fact it was the CIA/FBI who had
the best Kompromat with US RICO laws that could have beggared him
One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers
murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.)
Now can we imagine that not everyone in a senior position at the FBI knows about that report? I can't. Literally everyone from
the supervisor of the Special Agent or computer forensic investigator who examined Rich's computer right up to the Director HAD
to know that report exists - and covered it up.
That right there is obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Literally everyone at the FBI who can't PROVE he didn't know about
that report will be going to jail. The entire top administration of the FBI is going to go down.
And how many people at the Department of Justice are aware of that report? Did Rosenstein know? Who else in the Obama administration
knew?
That would be motivation for a lot of desperate maneuvering. Add to that who was really behind the Steele Dossier and even
more people are likely to end up in jail.
You haven't heard that yet? It's the infamous audio tape that Hersh was caught on discussing it. He's since obfuscated what
he said, but the tape stands on its own, and he has never said that anything he said on the tape wasn't true, despite that a lot
of Democrats and Trump-bashers claim he has.
I have told you several times and I will tell you again probably hopelessly that Hersh PERSONALLY has told me that the "tape"
was made without his permission or knowledge when he was aimlessly speculating on possibilities.
I am unaware of your explicitly telling me that he personally told you that the tape was "aimless speculation." My apologies
if I missed that response.
Of course the tape was made without his permission. We all know that. It's irrelevant to what he said on the tape.
What I'm saying is that despite what he may have told you, nothing on that tape sounds like "aimless speculation".
When you consider that he has four good reasons for dissembling about the tape, I view it as far more likely that everything
he said was true.
1) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his FBI contact. Not good for his line of work.
2) If what he said is true, compromising that contact may well make all his other contacts wary about talking to him in the
future - a bad deal for a journalist who relies on his contacts.
3) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his ability to get his "long form journalism" article published - a problem
he already has had in the past.
4) If what he said is true, he's accusing the FBI of sitting on that report for two years, which might well make him a target
of retaliation in some way.
If you believe that everything he said on the tape is untrue and that is what he explicitly told you, fine. I'm waiting for
his "long form journalism" report to explain it. So far everything he has said publicly about it has not contradicted what he
said on the tape, but merely waved his hands about it.
Sy Hersh talks a lot both loudly and profanely. He never intended to tell Buttowski that there was more than a possibility
that the FBI held more than a rumor that this might be true. He talked to Buttowski because a mutual friend of him and me asked
him to do so for no good reason. Please go talk to all the other people you pester and not on SST. You are an argumentative nuisance.
I have no stake in the debate about Rich, DNC, wikileaks. But I do notice some loose ends. Hersh may well have engaged in speculation, but it is interesting speculation:
quote: 55. During his conversation with Butowsky, Mr. Hersh claimed that he had received information from an "FBI report." Mr. Hersh
had not seen the report himself, but explained: "I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. And I know
this person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He's a very high level guy."
56. According to Mr. Hersh, his source told him that the FBI report states that, shortly after Seth Rich's murder, the D.C.
police obtained a warrant to search his home. When they arrived at the home, the D.C. police found Seth Rich's computer, but were
unable to access it.The computer was then provided to the D.C. police Cyber Unit, who also were unable to access the computer.
At that point, the D.C. police contacted the Cyber Unit at the FBI's Washington D.C. field office. Again, according to the supposed
FBI report, the Washington D.C. field office was able to get into the computer and found that in "late spring early summer [2016],
[Seth Rich][made] contact with Wikileaks." "They found what he had done. He had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some
juicy emails from the DNC." Mr. Hersh told Butowsky that Seth Rich "offered a sample [to WikiLeaks][,] an extensive sample, you
know I'm sure dozens, of emails, and said I want money." . . . "I hear gossip," Hersh tells NPR on Monday. "[Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it."
. . . The clip is definitely worth listening to in its entirety if you haven't already. Hersh is heard telling Butowsky that he had
a high-level insider read him an FBI file confirming that Seth Rich was known to have been in contact with WikiLeaks prior to
his death, which is not even a tiny bit remotely the same as having "heard rumors". Hersh's statements in the audio recording
and his statement to NPR cannot both be true. endquote https://medium.com/@caityjo...
You may very well be right. There may be a large element of 'amateur night out' about this.
But then I come back to the question of who decided that the dossier be published, and who, if anyone, was consulted before
the decision was made. For the reasons I gave, I am reasonably confident that those on this side who had been in one way or another
complicit in its production and covert dissemination were taken aback by the publication.
It is not clear to me whether anything significant can be inferred from the publicly available evidence about whether those
on your side who had been complicit were involved in the decision to publish without taking even elementary precautions, or whether
the 'Buzzfeed' people just had a rush of blood to the head.
I suspect the decision to publish the dossier was political. It was required to enable Clapper, Brennan, and others to
opine on national media and create further media hysteria prior to the vote as well as to justify the counter-intelligence investigations
underway. They were throwing the kitchen sink to sink Trump's electoral chances. I don't think a lot of thought was given about
the legal ramifications.
This seems to be a pattern. Leak information. Then use the leaked story to justify actions like apply for a FISA warrant
or fan the media flames.
And now they are turning on one another. Hayden just slammed Clapper for making too much of losing the security clearance the
he abuse for political reasons.
Looks like both Clapper and Haydon made the same comment about Brennan. they said "his rhetoric was becoming a problem. Ah,
the USAF intel rats are swimming for the shore. Lets see how many others (not all USAF) decide to try to save themselves.
I find it incredulous that former leaders of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained paid access to powerful
media platforms and they have used it to launch vicious attacks on a POTUS.
I find it amazing that McCabe and Peter Strzok are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media platforms.
IMO, everyone on the list that Sarah Sanders noted, should not just lose their clearance but should be testifying to a grand
jury.
Not really incredulous. Just expected behavior from swamp creatures whose self-assumed importance and "rights" (that the rest
of us peasants don't have) are coming under threat.
It seems to me absolutely appalling, and I am also appalled that people on this side appear to have been playing a central
role in all this.
One question. It seems to me that if what seems likely to be true does prove true, a range of these people must have committed
very serious offences indeed.
However, I am too ignorant to know what precisely those offences might be. If you, or anyone else, had a clear understanding,
I would be interested.
"It seems to me absolutely appalling, and I am also appalled that people on this side appear to have been playing a central
role in all this."
That says it all. We got the more discreditable side of the affair outsourced to us. Ugh. Is that all we're fit for now in
the UK? White helmets and Khan Sheikhoun and Steele, all the scrubby stuff? Is that what the famous "Special Relationship" now
consists of? We get to do the scrubby stuff because it's what we're fit for and we can be relied upon to keep it quiet?
Because at least on the American side there are people concerned about the political/PR involvement of parts of their own Intelligence
Community, and seeking to have it looked into. Here - am I right? - it's dead silence.
I've been permitted to say before on SST that I don't think the Americans are going to resolve this affair satisfactorily until
more light is cast on the UK side. But I also think that, for our own sakes, we should be looking at what exactly our IC does,
and in particular, how much UK political involvement there was in what is now clear was a direct PR attack on an American President.
I'm not a lawyer and have no experience with the federal criminal statutes. Having said that I suspect that the following could
be considered crimes:
intentionally misleading FISC
perjury
leaking classified information
launching investigations on the basis of known false information
surveillance of US citizens on the basis of false information
conspiracy to subvert the constitution
sedition/treason
There may also be certain professional agreements with the government that may have been violated. The only way any of these
people will face a grand jury is if Donald Trump chooses to take action. Left to the natural devices of the law enforcement institutions
nothing will happen and they will sweep everything under the rug. The intensity of Trump's tweets and the accusations therein
are rising. If the GOP retains the House and Jim Jordan becomes speaker, then there may be a possibility that Sessions, Rosenstein
and Wray may be fired and another special counsel appointed who will then convene a grand jury.
Considering what has been uncovered by Congressional investigators and the DOJ IG, I am truly surprised that Sessions has resisted
the appointment of a special counsel. But of course that could go the way of the Owens inquiry in your country.
"... There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though, "Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear that the Russians were coming. ..."
"... That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989, followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America. ..."
"... With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula). ..."
"... Before long, it became clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself. ..."
"... That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on. ..."
"... The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded, fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria. ..."
"... Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts in the UK and other allied nations. ..."
"... How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims! ..."
"... They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel ..."
"... Cold War revivalists can therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth. ..."
"... Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American "democracy" can plausibly allege. ..."
"... Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons, liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State – that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east. ..."
"... The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one that emerged after World War II. ..."
"... However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism, suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a demonstrably aggressive "free world." ..."
"... That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they" are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that ensued. ..."
"... The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved." ..."
"... Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free. ..."
"... From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies. ..."
"... Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified. But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a vote for catastrophe. ..."
"... For now, though, the hard and very relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm, Russia. ..."
"... It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been. ..."
"... If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for America and its allies but for Russia too. ..."
There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though,
"Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear
that the Russians were coming.
That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989,
followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed
that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was
triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America.
With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of
others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was
comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing
Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula).
It turned out, though, that American triumphalism was only a phase. Before long, it became
clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War
anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself.
However, in the final days of Bush 41 and then at the dawn of the Clinton era, nobody knew
that. Nobody gave America's propaganda system the credit it deserved.
Also, nobody quite realized how devastating Russia's regression to capitalism would be, and
nobody quite grasped the savagery of the kleptocrats who had taken charge of what remained of
the Russian state.
For more than a decade, the situation in that late great superpower was too dire to sustain
the old fears and animosities. Capitalism had made Russia wretched again.
That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin,
Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard
to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on.
But anti-Communism (without Communism) and its close cousin, Russophobia, could not remain
in remission forever. The need for them was too great.
In the Age of Obama, the Global War on Terror, with or without that ludicrous Bush 43-era
name, wasn't cutting it anymore. It was, and still is, good for keeping America's perpetual war
regime going and for undoing civil liberties, but there had never been much glory in it, only
endless misery for all. Also it was getting old and increasingly easy to see through.
The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded,
fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed
far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria.
This was not the only factor behind the Obama administration's "pivot towards Asia," its
largely failed attempt to take China down a notch or two, but it was an important part of the
story.
However, by the time Obama and his team decided to pivot, China had become too important to
the United States economically to make a good Cold War enemy. Worse still, it had for too long
been an object of pity and contempt, not fear.
When the Soviet Union was an enemy, China was an enemy too, most glaringly during the Korean
War. It remained an enemy even after the Sino-Soviet split became too obvious to deny. However,
unlike post-1917 Russia, it had never quite become an historical foe.
Moreover, as Russia began to recover from the Yeltsin era, the Russian political class, and
many of the oligarchs behind them, sensing the popular mood, decided that the time was ripe "to
make Russia great again." Putin is not so much a cause as he is a symptom – and symbol
– of this aspiration.
And so, there it was: the longed for new Cold War would be much like the one that seemed
over a quarter century ago.
***
As everyone who has seen, heard or read anything about the 2016 election "knows," Russian
intelligence services (= Putin) meddled. Everyone also "knows" that, with midterm elections
looming, they are at it again.
This, according to the mainstream consensus view, is a bona fide casus belli , a
justification for war. To be sure, what they want is a war that remains cold; ending life on
earth, as we know it, is not on their agenda.
But inasmuch as cold wars can easily turn hot, this hardly mitigates the recklessness of
their machinations. Humankind was extraordinarily lucky last time; there is no guarantee that
all that luck will hold.
Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is
still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional
wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting
the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts
in the UK and other allied nations.
Time was when anyone with any sense understood that these intelligence services, the
American ones especially, are second to none in meddling in the affairs of other nations, and
that the American national security state – essentially our political police -- is
comprised, by design, of liars and deceivers.
How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News
demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who
are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims!
Try as they might, the manufacturers and guardians of conventional wisdom have so far been
unable to concoct a plausible story in which Russian meddling affected the outcome of the 2016
election in any serious way. The idea that the Russians defeated Hillary, not Hillary herself,
is, to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Bentham, "nonsense on stilts." Leading Democrats and their
media flacks don't seem to mind that either.
They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared
to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and
gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia,
the Gulf monarchies, and Israel.
Nevertheless, it probably is true that the Russians meddled. Cold War revivalists can
therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with
which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth.
Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet
republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse
American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American
"democracy" can plausibly allege.
Moreover, it should go without saying that the democracy they purport to care so much about
has almost nothing to do with "the rule of the demos." It doesn't even have much to do with
free and fair competitive elections – unless "free and fair" means that anything goes, so
long as the principals and perpetrators are homegrown or citizens of favored nations.
Self-righteous posturing aside, Putin's real sin in the eyes of the American power elite is
that, in his own small way, he has been defying America's "right" to run the world as it sees
fit.
When Clinton was president, Serbia did that, and lived to regret it. Cuba has been suffering
for nearly six decades for the same reason, and now Venezuela is paying its dues. The empire is
merciless towards nations that rebel.
With Soviet support and then with sheer determination and grit, Cuba has been able to
withstand the onslaught to some extent from Day One. Venezuela may not be so lucky –
especially now that Republicans and Democrats feel threatened by the growing number of
"democratic socialists" in their midst. Already, the propaganda system is targeting Venezuelan
"socialism," blaming it for that country's woes, and warning that if our newly minted,
homegrown socialists prevail, a similar fate will be in store for us.
This is ludicrous, of course – American hostility and the vagaries of the global oil
market deserve the lion's share of the blame. But the on-going propaganda blitz could
nevertheless pave the way for horrors ahead, should Trump decide to start a war America could
actually win.
Inconsequential Russian meddling is a big deal on the "liberal" cable networks, on NPR, and
in the "quality" press. Democrats and a few Republicans love to bleat on about it. But it is
Ukraine that made Russia our "adversary" and its president Public Enemy Number One.
Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons,
liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State
– that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's
Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the
Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently
anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian
speaking Ukrainians in the east.
But never mind: Putin – that is, the Russia government – violated international
law by sending troops briefly into beleaguered Russian-speaking parts of the country. That they
were generally welcomed by the people living there is of no importance.
Worst of all, Russia annexed Crimea – a territory integral to the Russian empire since
the eighteenth century. Since long before the Russian Revolution, Crimea has been home to a
huge naval base vital to Russia's strategic defense.
The story line back in the day was that anything that could be described as Russian
aggression outside the Soviet Union's agreed upon sphere of influence had to do with spreading
Communism. In fact, the Soviets did everything they could to keep Communist and other
insurgencies from upending the status quo. The mainstream narrative was wrong.
Now Communism is gone and nothing has taken its place. Even so, the idea that Russia has
designs on its neighbors for ideological reasons is hard to shake – in part because it is
actively promoted by propagandists who have suddenly and uncharacteristically become defenders
of international law.
Meanwhile, of course, the hypocrisies keep piling on. It is practically a tenet of the
American civil religion that international law applies to others, not to the United States.
This is why, when it suits some perceived purpose, America flaunts its violations
shamelessly.
Thus nothing the Russians did or are ever likely to do comes close to the shenanigans Bill
Clinton displayed – successfully, for the most part – in his efforts to tear Kosovo
away from Serbia. Clinton even went so far as to bomb Belgrade; Putin never bombed Kiev.
The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic
systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist
centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one
that emerged after World War II.
However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War
revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism,
suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had
little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with
maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a
demonstrably aggressive "free world."
George W. Bush claimed that 9/11 happened because "they hate our freedom." "They" would be
radical Islamists of the kind stirred into action in Afghanistan by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his
co-thinkers in the Carter administration. Their objective was to undermine the Soviet Union by
getting it bogged down in a quagmire like the one that did so much harm to the United States in
Vietnam.
That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they"
are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America
and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that
ensued.
The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago
never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's
Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved."
However, the American public is not as naïve as it used to be, and it is impossible to
say, at this point, how well this new story line will work.
Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But
this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply
cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free.
It is hard to believe, but there are people who are actually buying this but, with a lot of
corporate media assistance, there are. No matter how clear it is that they are not worth being
taken seriously, Cold War mythologies just won't die.
However, it is worth pondering why today's Russia would do what it is alleged to have done;
and why, as is also alleged, it is still doing it.
From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward
off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at
blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails
in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and
abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies.
However, in view of prevailing power relations, these are interests it cannot do much to
advance. Acting as if this were not the case only puts Russia in a bad light -- not for
meddling, but for meddling stupidly.
No doubt, for reasons both fair and foul, Putin wanted Hillary to lose the election two
years ago. So, but for one little problem, would anyone whose head is screwed on right. That
problem's name is Donald Trump.
Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified.
But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be
even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a
vote for catastrophe.
Putin's enemy was Trump's enemy, and it is axiomatic that "the enemy of my enemy is my
friend" -- except sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, my enemy's enemy is an enemy far worse.
For reasons that remain obscure, Putin and Trump seem to have a "thing" going on between
them. Some day perhaps we will know what that is all about. For now, though, the hard and very
relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm,
Russia.
It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as
hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been.
If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have
realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be
of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for
America and its allies but for Russia too.
Therefore, if there really was Russian meddling, as there probably was, Putin should be
ashamed – not so much for the DNC reasons laid out 24/7 on MSNBC and CNN, but for
overestimating Trump's abilities and for underestimating the extent to which what started out
as a maneuver of Hillary Clinton's, concocted to excuse her incompetence, would take a
perilously "viral" turn, becoming a major threat to peace in a political culture that never
quite got beyond the lunacy of the First Cold War.
"... The myth of BBC being some standard for news reporting died with the advent of the availability of international and independent news in Western countries ..."
"... Ironic when the BBC has been ceaselessly pushing fake news for at least 15 years, with disastrous results. (Iraq; Libya; what caused the deficit and who should be forced to pay it down; Russia/Syria false flags; Corbyn A/S.) ..."
"... I find it impossible to watch BBC News, primarily because most of the editorial staff and senior correspondents seem to be working for MI5/6 and are more interested in disseminating Geo-political propaganda than upholding their journalistic responsibilities as defined in the BBC charter. ..."
"... The book is obviously part of a propaganda campaign. It seems hugely fortuitous that Mark Urban should have had "hours" of interviews with Skripal before the poisoning incident. ..."
"... Isn't it much more likely that the Urban "interviews" would have happened after the event? But Urban can't say that because that would lead to demands from other journalists or news bodies to have access to Skripal. ..."
"... I'm open to alternative hypotheses but right now I think the most likely explanation for Urban's pre-poisoning contact with Sergei Skripal is that, at the time, it was assumed the Orbis dossier would be a key component of the successful takedown of Trump and Urban was putting together a mutually flattering account by interviewing the main players. ..."
"... With regard to your tongue-in-cheek point. Urban could have interviewed Skripal anytime after Trump was gone, unless he believed Skripal might be unavailable (for some reason). The fact he interviewed Skripal before does indicate foresight. If Urban really did interview Skripal before the event then he would be wiser to pull the book and burn every copy in existence (as well as all his notes). ..."
"... Urban pretends to research a book exposing Russia and part of his research is to interview Skripal. His objective is to find dirt on Putin in order to swing the war in Syria in favour of USUKIS bombing Assad to smithereens, bayonets bums etc. ..."
"... Interestingly Mark Urbans' book on Sergei Skripal was available to purchase on Amazon in July. I added it to my Amazon wishlist on 28/7/18. I've just looked at my wishlist and was rather surprised to find it is no longer available. It has been pulled. ..."
"... Can't help thinking that the answer to all this lies in Estonia. Sergei went to Estonia in June 2016, Pablo was in Estonia, the Estonians passed on sigint about Trump-Russian collusion in the summer of 2016. A Guardian article of 13 April 2017 said: ..."
"... No doubt in my mind that the Skripal affair is a planned operation carried out by US/UK intelligence. What has actually taken place is still to be determined, but the propaganda operation itself is clear. ..."
"... I know about Ireland, and I agree, it was NOT a nerve agent. That said, I don't believe anyone was 'attacked', including the Skripals. ..."
"... All foreign correspondents of major newspapers too work with MI6. Nobody who is close to them has any kind of doubt about this. ..."
"... I despise everyone who says that free markets are the solution for the problems of the third world. What they mean is mass starvation and an enormous population cull. There are international "foundations" that pay academics and politicians large amounts of money to spout this obscene line. One of them is called the John Templeton Foundation. They have had their fangs in to British universities for a long time. ..."
"... When the Tories talk about 'free markets', they are talking about markets free from democracy. ..."
BBC is skanky state propaganda. The myth of BBC being some standard for news reporting died with the advent of the availability
of international and independent news in Western countries. The main thing that BBC used to have which propped up the illusion
of it being a respectable news source is that there was no competition or alternative to compare its narratives against. Since
that time is over, so is BBC's masquerading as an impartial or accurate news source.
Agree, Dave. That's what's informing the push to rubbish dissenting sites as fake news and eventually have them removed.
Ironic when the BBC has been ceaselessly pushing fake news for at least 15 years, with disastrous results. (Iraq; Libya;
what caused the deficit and who should be forced to pay it down; Russia/Syria false flags; Corbyn A/S.)
Well I was convinced of fake BBC news during 9/11 and not for the reasons of building 7 coming down too early but the fact
that the female journalist was facing a camera standing in front of a glass window and there was no reflection of her or the camera
person from the glass. Not even a faint shadow.
That's when I knew the BBC were employing vampires and have been ever since.
Green Screen technology I discovered later. All the On the spot reporters are at it apparently. Or repeating Reuters or PA.
I find it impossible to watch BBC News, primarily because most of the editorial staff and senior correspondents seem to
be working for MI5/6 and are more interested in disseminating Geo-political propaganda than upholding their journalistic responsibilities
as defined in the BBC charter. People should not only boycott the BBC but refuse to pay the license fee on the grounds that
it's a compulsory political subscription.
Dear Mark,
In a BBC article on 4 July 2018, you wrote: "I have not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do
now that the book is nearing completion."
Could you please explain that comment? I do not see why your acknowledgement of your meetings with Sergei Skripal should be
delayed until your book is nearing completion.
If you felt that it was right to reveal those meetings in July, then why was it not right to do so in March, soon after the
poisoning occurred? What difference would it have made if you had done so four months earlier?
I cannot think of any negative consequences of an earlier acknowledgement of the meetings. In fact, disclosures of any possible
conflict of interest are generally considered to be desirable in journalism, regardless of whether the conflict of interest is
real.
The book is obviously part of a propaganda campaign. It seems hugely fortuitous that Mark Urban should have had "hours"
of interviews with Skripal before the poisoning incident.
Isn't it much more likely that the Urban "interviews" would have happened after the event? But Urban can't say that because
that would lead to demands from other journalists or news bodies to have access to Skripal.
And that can't happen because either Skripal would be asked about what happened on the day of the poisoning, or can't be guaranteed
to stick to the script, or is no longer alive. And that leads to a suspicion that whatever Skripal is supposed to have said in
his interviews with Urban has really just been made up by the British security services.
I'm open to alternative hypotheses but right now I think the most likely explanation for Urban's pre-poisoning contact
with Sergei Skripal is that, at the time, it was assumed the Orbis dossier would be a key component of the successful takedown
of Trump and Urban was putting together a mutually flattering account by interviewing the main players.
Tongue in cheek, it'd be worth asking Urban if his decision to cover the Skripal poisoning in his new book was made before
or after the Skripals were actually poisoned.
The consensus seems to be that it was an anti-Russia book, but that doesn't conflict with what you say (there is overlap, your
view is just more specific). But, I just find it hard to believe that Urban and the conspirators would waste their time "counting
their chickens ". Not least because such a book would form a handy list of traitors (together with confessions) if Trump were
to prevail and it fell into the right hands. This is "101 – How to Organise a Revolution" (secrecy / don't put anything in writing);
surely British security services know that?
With regard to your tongue-in-cheek point. Urban could have interviewed Skripal anytime after Trump was gone, unless he
believed Skripal might be unavailable (for some reason). The fact he interviewed Skripal before does indicate foresight. If Urban
really did interview Skripal before the event then he would be wiser to pull the book and burn every copy in existence (as well
as all his notes).
Regardless, it looks like the master of the universe are losing their ability to create reality.
Last month, Mark Urban was promoting the reports that the Russian assassins had been identified from CCTV footage:
"There are now subjects of interest in the police Salisbury investigation. ( ) analytic and cyber techniques are now being
exploited against the Salisbury suspects by people with a wealth of experience in complex investigations." https://twitter.com/MarkUrban01/status/1020366761848385536
The BBC relies on it's interpretation of the Act because it is held for the purposes of 'journalism, art or literature.' but
this relies on a usually unrelated precedent and the opinions of a number of Judges which contradict this view. I'm in the process
of challenging this with ICO but don't expect anything will change until another supreme court ruling:
I can see the value in asking writers, journalists and artists to pose exactly the same questions as Eccles' original letter
but I'm not convinced about Craig's email.
A quick google shows me that a man named Mark Urban has written a book on the Skripals. Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping
the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?
It wouldn't surprise me if Urban cares far more about his writing career than his job at the BBC. I'm sure most journalists
would rather be authors. He's written a number of books on war and military intelligence. If his sources have nothing to do with
the BBC then why should he answer to an on line mob?
" Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?"
No, entirely unlikely. a chance to plug his forthcoming book and his Skripal contacts to a massive worldwide televion audience
was eschewed.
The book is now about the Skripal attack. Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened
yet. The book will just be a rehash of the "noble defector – Putin revenge" line and none of the questions I asked about the genesis
of his involvement will be answered in it.
"Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened yet." Or it was prescience ie that
it was part of the planning for the incident?
@BBC, Summer 2017, in an executive office:
"Hey Mark, why don't you go down to have a chat with this guy in Salisbury. I have a hunch that a story might be going to happen
involving him, you know, as an ex-Soviet spy. Spend time with him, get to know him, be able to write in depth about him. Say it's
for a book ."
Urban is never one-sided in his BBC reports on the Middle East. I would rather have him as Foreign Secretary than a bumbling
idiot like Hubris Johnson or a Tory racketeer Hunt, because however clunky the formula of BBC balance Urban is at least pretending
to be governed by normal rules. After Thatcher went anyone with half a brain left the Conservative party, leaving dolts like Johnson
and nasties like May and Cameron to pick up the pieces after Blair and Brown.
There's money to be made from Russian billionaires and tory shit will follow the money like flies on d**t**d.
Urban pretends to research a book exposing Russia and part of his research is to interview Skripal. His objective is to
find dirt on Putin in order to swing the war in Syria in favour of USUKIS bombing Assad to smithereens, bayonets bums etc.
Tory shit Hubris Johnson finds this political research floating around the Foreign Office and decides to twist it into Russia
murders Skripal by Novichok. Unfortunately Johnson is already known to be a liar and gravy-trainer Tory and nobody believes him
at all. Mrs May , realising that Johnson, Fox, Rees-Mogg and Hunt are completely bonkers, does Chequers her own way.
Interestingly Mark Urbans' book on Sergei Skripal was available to purchase on Amazon in July. I added it to my Amazon
wishlist on 28/7/18. I've just looked at my wishlist and was rather surprised to find it is no longer available. It has been pulled.
From memory the books description said that Mark had interviewed Skripal 'extensively' during 2017 and also mentioned the 'new'
spying war now happening between Britain and Russia.
Salisbury poisoning: Skripals 'were under Russian surveillance'
Mark Urban Diplomatic and defence editor, Newsnight
4 July 2018
'My meetings with Sergei Skripal
I met Sergei on a few occasions last summer and found him to be a private character who did not, even under the circumstances
then prevailing, wish to draw attention to himself.
He agreed to see me as a writer of history books rather than as a news journalist, since I was researching one on the post-Cold
War espionage battle between Russia and the West.
Information gained in these interviews was fed into my Newsnight coverage during the early days after the poisoning. I have
not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do now that the book is nearing completion.
As a man, Sergei is proud of his achievements, both before and after joining his country's intelligence service.
He has a deadpan wit and is remarkably stoical given the reverses he's suffered in his life; from his imprisonment following
conviction in 2006 on charges of spying for Britain, to the loss of his wife Liudmila to cancer in 2012, and the untimely death
of his son Alexander (or Sasha) last summer.'
Laughable given that the whole world and virtually all heads of State were under US surveillance by the NSA – at least until
Edward Snowden made all his revelations.
I have pasted and copied your Email regarding the above with a few slight alterations, it will be interesting to see the response
I receive if any being just a concerned citizen of the U.
Is this not a matter for the Police? (Even if you're not too sure if they'd do anything about it) These would be files that
are to do with an attempted murder case. And definitely not Journalism if the story is fabricated.
It feels as if you are moving in the right direction in linking Sergei to Steele. I'm intrigued by the very early media references
to Sergei wanting to return home to see his elderly mother for perhaps the last time. He had apparently written to Putin making
his request but again according to newspapers hadn't received a reply.
I would suggest Julia was bringing the answer via her own secret services contacts, her boyfriend and his mother, apparently
Senior in the Russian Intelligence Agency. Perhaps a sentimental man Sergei was aware his mother couldn't travel so the plea to
Putin was his best bet.
Such a request must have disturbed MI6 if Sergei had anything at all to do with the Steele dossier because inevitably if he
returned to Russia he'd be debriefed by his old colleagues. But how can you rely on a mercenary double agent? If he decided he
might want to stay in Russia with his family that might well have been attractive, away from the lonely existence in a Salisbury
cul de sac with only spies for company. But the Steele dossier has great potential to turn sour on the British.
It's author was a Senior spy and Head of the Russian Desk for some years. It is – perhaps you'd agree? – inconceivable that
he didn't require permission to prepare it, especially as much of it was based on his experience as a spy in Russia. Yet it's
equally inconceivable that the Agency bosses didn't know the identity of the commissioners or the use to which it would be put
in the US election – to boost Clinton's bid. If she'd won everything would have been fine but as it is any discussion of foreign
interference in that election would have to include MI6 leading the list (they probably didn't tell any politician?) To have Sergei
supporting and highlighting that embarrassment would be problematic for US-UK relations. Of course Sergei may have had other nuggets
to expose as well as Steele.
Soon after Julia's arrival the pair fell ill. They both survived but are now locked away, presumably for life and never able
to explain their side of the story.
It was a bodged job with a poor cover story from the start and could only be carried because of D Notices and media complicity.
Is his mother still alive? Would he still like to see her before she dies? Would Russia allow it? Would MI6 allow it? I think
that's 3 yeses and a resounding No.
Following the deaths of 55 Palestinians on the Gaza 'border' and the wounding of thousands, in this video, Urban asks the questions
but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against Hamas.
Gaza deaths: Who's to blame? – BBC Newsnight
Published on 15 May 2018
Subscribe 256K
Fresh protests against Israel are expected in the Palestinian territories, a day after Israeli troops killed 58 people in the
Gaza Strip.
David Keyes is the spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mark Urban asked him whether it was appropriate
for the US to open their embassy on the 70th anniversary of Israel's creation, a day that is hugely controversial for the Palestinian
people.
Mr Keyes' pronounced American accent was heard. The Occupation was not mentioned. A Palestinian voice was not heard.
This is another of his videos. On the same subject and on the opening of the Israeli Embassy in Jerusalem. This time, Jonathan
Conricus spoke for the IDF.
"Urban asks the questions but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against
Hamas."
Yes indeed : Urban asked the questions and allowed the interviewee to answer. Perhaps you would have preferred him to interrupt
the interviewee continually 'a la Today programme, or to have shouted at him similarly to the way I understand some people shout
at customers inside or outside supermarkets?
This may or may not be relevant regarding Russia, chemical weapons and BBC/MSM bovine effluent:
"US Poised to Hit Syria Harder: The Russian Defense Ministry issued a statement on Aug. 25 stating that the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham
militants had brought eight containers of chlorine to Idlib in order to stage a false-flag attack with the help of UK intelligence
agencies. A group of Tahrir al-Sham fighters trained to handle chemical warfare agents by the UK private military company Olive
arrived in the suburbs of the city of Jisr ash-Shugur, Idlib, 20 km. from the Turkish border."
Can't help thinking that the answer to all this lies in Estonia. Sergei went to Estonia in June 2016, Pablo was in Estonia,
the Estonians passed on sigint about Trump-Russian collusion in the summer of 2016. A Guardian article of 13 April 2017 said:
"Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's
inner circle and Russians, sources said. The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included
Germany, Estonia and Poland."
Perhaps not the Dossier, as such, but some material on collusion?
No doubt in my mind that the Skripal affair is a planned operation carried out by US/UK intelligence. What has actually
taken place is still to be determined, but the propaganda operation itself is clear.
Catch my last post Doodlebug, sadly MI6 diabolical elements can be traced back to Ireland in the 70's early 80's assassinations
theRealTerror (theRealElvis) understands.
Often it's been open. There was the BBC monitoring station at Caversham Park. The BBC's Foreign Broadcast Information Service
split the world into two parts with the CIA.
All foreign correspondents of major newspapers too work with MI6. Nobody who is close to them has any kind of doubt about
this.
Theresa May says a no deal Brexit "wouldn't be the end of the world".
This is not a negotiating strategy. This is not a pantomime where one giant on the stage can wink to his supporters (using
the British media) without his opponent (EU27) noticing.
The subconscious doesn't work well with negation. Whatever you do, please DON'T imagine an elephant at this time.
I would love to know what the preparations are at Trinity College, Cambridge, for food shortages. They own the port of
Felixstowe, which handles more than 40% of Britain's containerised trade. They also own a 50% stake in a portfolio of Tesco
stores. Soon food distribution will be what everyone is talking about. I am never going to stop making the point that the god
of the Tory party is Thomas Malthus.
" As a Prime Minister who believes both in free markets and in nations and businesses acting in line with well-established
rules and principles of conduct, I want to demonstrate to young Africans that their brightest future lies in a free and thriving
private sector. "
I despise everyone who says that free markets are the solution for the problems of the third world. What they mean is mass
starvation and an enormous population cull. There are international "foundations" that pay academics and politicians large amounts
of money to spout this obscene line. One of them is called the John Templeton Foundation. They have had their fangs in to British
universities for a long time.
They are keen on Prince Philip, the guy who said he wanted to come back as a virus so he could kill a large part of the population.
Never trust anyone who has received a Templeton scholarship or prize or who has anything to do with these people or with the message
that free markets and the private sector are the key to "development"
When the Tories talk about 'free markets', they are talking about markets free from democracy.
May's rhetoric is laughable .basically all her speeches read : 'the sky is green, the snow is black etc etc' -- totally detached
from reality and a spent political force, as their recent membership numbers showed, with more revenues from legacies left in
wills than from actual living members.
I agree with the Skripal relatives that Sergei is dead. He hasn't been seen or heard of and would have called his mother. Mind
boggling deception at all levels and I struggle to believe any of it.
Sergei Skripal could be in US custody, either in the US itself or in a US facility somewhere.
If he is dead, then the rehospitalisation of Charlie Rowley may be to assist with the narrative. "Once you've had a drop of
Novvy Chockk, you may recover but you can fall down ill at any time, and here's an Expert with a serious voice to confirm it."
I follow this blog closely, particularly in relation to the Skripal case, but this is my first comment. I just watched Sky
News piece on 'super recognisers' and couldn't help but wonder why, in an age of powerful facial recognition technology, the police
and security services seem to have drawn such a blank. The surveillance state in the UK is known to be one of the most advanced
in the world but when it comes to this highly important geopolitical crisis our technological infrastructure seems to be redundant
to the point where 'human eyes' are deemed to be more accurate than the most powerful supercomputers available. Psychologically,
all humans have an inherent facial recognition ability from a very young age, but the idea that some police officers have this
ability developed to such an extent that they supercede computer recognition is, i feel, laughable. To me this announcement through
the ever subservient Sky News reeks of desperation on the part of the ;official story'. Are we about to be shown suspects who,
although facial recognition technology fails to identify them, a 'super recogniser' can testify that it actually is person A or
person B and we are all supposed to accept that? Seems either a damning indictment of the judicial process, or a damning indictment
of the £££££'s of taxpayers money that is spent on places like GCHQ etc whose technology is now apparently no better than a highly
perceptive human brain. Give me a break !
People do die Trowbridge. I know you haven't, but you have the motivation of outliving your persecutors. With Muckin about
with Isis gone and covert operations isn't social work Kissinger looking as though he's on daily blood transfusions, you have
rejected Trump for some reason. But Trump has undone much of John McCain's worst mischief in one year. If McCain was an example
of a politician, we don't need politicians.
Give me an example, other than the Coopers. of a healthy couple one day that is found dying the next day like the Skripals.
And while i tried on another site to be generous about McCain. he got Navy Secretary John Lehman, Jr. to scare the Soviets
for prevailing in the Vietnam War so much about what NATO was up to in the fallout from shooting Swedish PM Olof Palme that Moscow
gave up the competition for fear that it would blow up the world, helping bring on the crappy one we have.
McCain was a continuing Cold Warrior who we don't need since we still have Trump who is just trying to do it another way.
"... OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD - Operation Mockingbird was (IS) a secret campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media. Begun in the 1950s, it was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, and was later led by Frank Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA. The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA's views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA. In addition to earlier exposés of CIA activities in foreign affairs, in 1966 Ramparts magazine published an article revealing that the National Student Association was funded by the CIA. The United States Congress investigated, and published its report in 1976. Other accounts were also published. The media operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis's 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. ..."
"... the secret societies, the banks, the oil families and other super rich powerful groups of people all call the shots in secret, doesn't matter who the "elected" president is, they are going to do what they want to do, unless, people know the truth... ..."
"... It wouldn't surprise me if this also applied on Swedish media. For decades our journalism was very neutral showing two sides of the story, but nowdays, last 7-8 years, things have changed. Swedish media has to a high degree become incredible one-sided in the writing of world politics... I started to notice the change some 7-8 years ago. Of course I find expectations like the municipal Television station SVT that still seems two-sided, but most written press in Sweden have become rotten, very rotten. ..."
"... The US's MIC has to find other ways to make money. This MIC could spend money on developing outer space programs, go the depths of the oceans, and study the fauna and flora on the earth. This nonsense of creating and making enemies on earth has to stop. The world is too small for this NONSENSE. ..."
"... Who has built the first concentration camp? It was the British Empire during the war against the Boers. The British put women, children and old people in these camps to make the Boers surrender. ..."
German journalist and editor Udo Ulfkotte says he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, adding
that noncompliance ran the risk of being fired. Ulfkotte made the revelations during interviews with RT and Russia Insider.
OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD - Operation Mockingbird was (IS) a secret campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
to influence media. Begun in the 1950s, it was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, and was later led by Frank
Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA. The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help
present the CIA's views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also
worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA. In addition
to earlier exposés of CIA activities in foreign affairs, in 1966 Ramparts magazine published an article revealing that the National
Student Association was funded by the CIA. The United States Congress investigated, and published its report in 1976. Other accounts
were also published. The media operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis's 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine
Graham and her Washington Post Empire.
the secret societies, the banks, the oil families and other super rich powerful groups of people all call the shots in secret,
doesn't matter who the "elected" president is, they are going to do what they want to do, unless, people know the truth...
Being of German decent my sympathies are with the people of Germany. Not to say that the Russian people haven't had a bad deal, of
course they have under the Bolshevik Jews who nearly destroyed Russia for the sake of Zionist ideology.
The people of Germany
deserve better than this. They need to overthrow American control of their government and their media and replace it with pro
German people who will serve the interests of Germany, not that of the vicious prostitute Washington and their pimps. Not that
of the corrupt child molesting swine in Belgium who control the E.U.
They need to do something about it now and decisively take
back control of their own country. Germany must stop being a puppet controlled by the worst criminal element in the world....
the CIA. Freedom for Germany!
The EU pawns are ruled by the US lords! and The EU has Imposed the sanctions on Russia and thanks to that destroys the European
economies because it is good for the US economy!
The US has weaken the EU companies so the Americans have weak competitors in
Europe and on the agreement between the European Union and the United States the American companies and economy will gain but
European companies and farms will lost and many Europeans will lost their jobs for the sake of US welfare!
The US manufacturers
will earning and developing but the Europeans will go bankrupt and lost their jobs!
It wouldn't surprise me if this also applied on Swedish media. For decades our journalism was very neutral showing two sides
of the story, but nowdays, last 7-8 years, things have changed. Swedish media has to a high degree become incredible one-sided
in the writing of world politics... I started to notice the change some 7-8 years ago. Of course I find expectations like the
municipal
Television station SVT that still seems two-sided, but most written press in Sweden have become rotten, very rotten.
Good for you, coming clean about Germany's role in all this. Germany pretending to be innocent since WW2 but they're just as
involved as any of the other usual suspects. And when I say Germany, I don't mean ordinary citizens but the intelligence media
and political establishment.
I wouldn't mind if America was controlling the world if they had any moral integrity. The country was born through the genocide
of the natives and the re population of the country with slaves. Covertly funding and supporting dictators tyrants and terrorists
since the end of the second world war as part of their foreign policy. Training illiterate Afghan farmers in terrorist tactics
to fight the Russians in a proxy war encouraging Jihad to get more Muslims to fight the Russians creating what we call today modern
radical extremism. Funny how it became immoral when American blood was shed. Funny how all of Saddam's transgressions were ignored
while he was at war with Iran and how stopping the war with Iran suddenly made these actions unacceptable to America(how did Saddam
gain power again?).
The really astounding thing to me is how the American public seem to have this idea of being the bastion of freedom and democracy.
But then Again everyone in my country seems to be similarly ignorant about our own foreign policy and atrocities committed in
the name of Empire.
We killed more than Hitler did and were a lot worse. Just most of our victims were brown or black so don't seem to matter.
You are only really evil if you commit Genocide against white European Jews. Non whites don't seem to matter.
Brave man. Corporate news is what we get in the western world. I did not know Europe did not have a free press also. Russia
has government news, which is more free than our military industrial complex and corporate news. The big military industries want
wars and endless wars. Our government is a puppet on their strings. I would rather have a government in control rather than a
government under the control of military industries which creates endless wars to feed this military corporate monster.
This is
a small planet. We are all inter connected. This nonsense of creating and making enemies on this little planet has to stop. We
have to learn to get all along.
The US's MIC has to find other ways to make money. This MIC could spend money on developing outer
space programs, go the depths of the oceans, and study the fauna and flora on the earth. This nonsense of creating and making
enemies on earth has to stop. The world is too small for this NONSENSE.
Herr Ulfkotte is a man of courage, but when he says that the BND was formed by the CIA, he doesn't mention that the CIA has
roots in the Gehlen Spy network of the 3rd Reich after WW2.
Who has built the first concentration camp? It was the British Empire during the war against the Boers. The British put women,
children and old people in these camps to make the Boers surrender.
The same is true for the Americans in WW2 in regard to German
and Japanese civilians. (Just two examples of many!) These f*** Anglo-Saxons killed millions of people just for the heck of it
-- in Dresden, Hiroshima, many smaller places all around the world... -- and they keep doing it in several Arabian countries these
days. Of course, other empires, like the Russian, or the German, did evil deeds in their history but they took the responsibility.
I hope that the Anglo-Saxons once will have their own 'Nuremberg'.
"... My guess is that this book is just too dangerous to allow it to become part of the debate on "fake news" and "Russiagate." Of course now the CIA doesn't even have to exclusively – "own"- journalists as fronts when ex-CIA heads are being hired outright by MSM as pundits. I just wish someone with access would post an English language PDF version online. It would be a real contribution to free thought and free speech to do so. ..."
"... Western elites realize what they could have, what they could do and what they could get away with, but only if they reinvent the political system Hitler created. If they defeat every enemy abroad who might stop them, next they'll do to their own people what the Nazis did to those they didn't want alive ..."
"... Journos have long been pliant enablers for Intel agencies. It's strange how Dr. Ulfkotte's revelations have been taken as some signifier of further Western moral decay/decadence. ..."
"... The real story here, which the media pretends not to notice, is that if Intelligence services and corporations did not finance newspapers they would cease to exist. The old business model whereby newspapers covered their costs by selling advertising and paid circulation is finished. Under that model there were, to an extent, incentives for the publisher to preserve a modicum of credibility in order to keep readership, as well as reasons to publish sensational stories to beat competition. ..."
"... The days that Ulfkotte recalled were times when it took lots of money and careful preparation to put spooks into the newsroom, nowadays the papers are only too happy to publish the CIA's PR and very grateful if the government pays their journalists' salaries. ..."
"... To understand how journalism is bought, go analyze the output of the Uk's Daily Telegraph. They literally sell space to lobbyists and for several years outraged BTL comment would tear the articles to shreds. The whole UK Press prostitutes itself whenever there is a US war on i.e. all the time. It really is about time the CIA were unmasked – they do not serve our interests, they serve only their own . ..."
The rather obvious suppression of the English version of what was a "best seller" in Germany suggests that the Western system
of thought manipulation and consent manufacture sees itself as weaker and more vulnerable than one might at first imagine.
We can see from a year+ of "Russiagate" that Western media is a clown-show, much of so called "alternative media" included.
My guess is that this book is just too dangerous to allow it to become part of the debate on "fake news" and "Russiagate."
Of course now the CIA doesn't even have to exclusively – "own"- journalists as fronts when ex-CIA heads are being hired outright
by MSM as pundits. I just wish someone with access would post an English language PDF version online. It would be a real contribution
to free thought and free speech to do so.
Just like "200 years together" by Solzhenitsyn which was never officially published in English despite Andrei having authored
many works which were big sellers. Just an example of other private business and corporations are often fully responsible
for pro-establishment censorship.
The treatment of the book aroused suspicion because of its content – ie supine news outlets forever dancing to the tune of western
military imperatives.
Ongoing support for illegal wars tell us that the MSM has hardly been at the forefront of informing readers why war criminals
like Hilary and Obama keep getting away with it. In fact Obama, just like Kissinger was awarded a peace prize – so obviously something
has gone very wrong somewhere.
It may be, although it seems unlikely that the mis-handling of an important theme like this is simply due to oversight by the
publisher (as Matt claims) but neither is it beyond the realms of possibility that somebody has had a word with someone in the
publishing world, perhaps because they are not overly keen on the fact Udo Ulfkotte has deviated from the media's mono-narrative
about why it is necessary for the US to destabilise countries and kill so many of their citizens.
Lets face it – it would be harder for the pattern to be maintained if the MSM was not so afraid of telling the truth, or at
least be more willing to hold to account politicians as the consequences of their disastrous policies unfold for all to see.
Maybe you want to have a go at answering the obvious question begged by such self evident truths – why are the MSM usually
lying?
Somebody said banning books is the modern form of book burning, and like Heinrich Heine said two centuries ago, "Where they burn
books, in the end, they start burning people."
Western elites realize what they could have, what they could do and what they could get away with, but only if they reinvent
the political system Hitler created. If they defeat every enemy abroad who might stop them, next they'll do to their own people
what the Nazis did to those they didn't want alive. If enough water sources are lost to fracking, and enough food sources
lost through poisoned seas and forest fires, many people will go to their camps as refuge but few will survive them. This ecological
destruction is for future population reduction.
In the US they use newspeak to say what the Nazis described with more honesty. Their master race became the indispensable nation,
their world domination became full spectrum dominance, and Totalerkrieg became the global war on terror. There will be others.
Farzad Basoft anyone ? Journos have long been pliant enablers for Intel agencies. It's strange how Dr. Ulfkotte's revelations
have been taken as some signifier of further Western moral decay/decadence.
Maybe I am taking what you wrote out of context but I don't find it strange at all .It is just that someone, Udo, on the inside
has become a whistle blower , and confirmed what most suspected .The establishment can't have that.
As the economy growth has this so-called invisible hand, journalism also has an 'invisible pen'. One of the questions that
need an answer: how come feminists are so anti-Putin and anti-Russia? Easy to connect to dots?
The real story here, which the media pretends not to notice, is that if Intelligence services and corporations did not finance
newspapers they would cease to exist. The old business model whereby newspapers covered their costs by selling advertising and
paid circulation is finished. Under that model there were, to an extent, incentives for the publisher to preserve a modicum of
credibility in order to keep readership, as well as reasons to publish sensational stories to beat competition.
Those days
are gone: none of the newspapers make financial profits, they now exist because they have patrons. They always did, of course,
but now they have nothing else- the advertisers have left and circulation is diminishing rapidly.
The days that Ulfkotte recalled were times when it took lots of money and careful preparation to put spooks into the newsroom,
nowadays the papers are only too happy to publish the CIA's PR and very grateful if the government pays their journalists' salaries.
As to competition that is restricted to publishers competing to demonstrate their loyalty to the government and their ingenuity
in candy coating its propaganda.
Anyone doubt that Luke Harding will be in the running for a Pulitzer? Or perhaps even the Nobel Prize for Literature?
For what it's worth, I skimmed through this very long link by Matt, and could find no mention of poison gas -- certainly no denunciation
-- just horrific conventional arms : Der Spiegel 1984:
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13508659.html
Also for what it's worth, the German publisher's blurb which I got Google to translate above, says there is much more to the
book than old Soddem: the author names names and points to organizations.
Now, without any evidence, based only on my faulty memory and highly biased interpretation of events strung together on a timeline,
here is my conspiracy story about a very nice country called Iraq and a very nasty Iraqi called Saddam who came to a very nasty
end at the hands of his much more nasty friends, who first gave him a boost and then put in the boot.
1914 Great Britain invades Iraq and BP takes over the Iraqi oilfields.
1968 Iraqi govt member under Yaya wants to nationalize the oil. CIA coup replaces Yaya with Saddam as a safe pair of hands.
1970 Saddam the dirty dog does the dirty on the friends who put him in power; he nationalizes Iraqi oil. And nationalizes Iraqi
banks. From now on Saddam is a dead man walking. Like Mossadeq in Iran whom the US-UK replaced with the Shah
1978 But in Iran the Shah is replaced by the Islamic Socialist Republic -- who again nationalize Iranian oil. Saddam's
friends now face a dilemma: kill him first, or kill the Ayatollah's first? They decide to first go for the Ayatollahs -- with
Saddam's help.
1980 Saddam invades Iran with help from US and Germany -- including, strangely enough, generous supplies of poison gas.
1984-1989 Saddam's invasion of Iran flops. Reports about use of poison gas by Saddam begin to emerge, first in German newspapers
then even debated US govt.
1990 Saddam thinks he has restored credit with the US & Germany by using their weapons against Iran, and now has the green
light to invade another country. Finds out his mistake in the Gulf War. He is once again, a dead man walking. So is his country.
2001 Saddam is accused of harbouring Islamic terrorists who knocked down 3 skyscrapers by flying 2 passenger planes into
them. The idea of Secular Baathist Saddam in league with religious fanatics is ridiculous, but what the heck it's a story.
2003 Saddam hanged for, inter alia, use of chemical weapons; likewise his minister whom the MSM have a field day comically
calling "Chemical" Ali.
2017 Who's next? The Ayatollahs, of course. And anyone else who dares to nationalize "our" oil. Or "our" banks.
That is more than plausible. Unfortunately. Hard not to sympathize with the Iraqis and feel shame for what has been done in the
name of the US and UK. Rotten to the core, and sanctimonious to boot.
To understand how journalism is bought, go analyze the output of the Uk's Daily Telegraph. They literally sell space to lobbyists
and for several years outraged BTL comment would tear the articles to shreds. The whole UK Press prostitutes itself whenever
there is a US war on i.e. all the time. It really is about time the CIA were unmasked – they do not serve our interests, they
serve only their own .
The Guardian sells space to lobbyists too. Not ad space – article space. It's literally hiring itself out to whomever wants to
buy the right to publish an article under its name.
Well one things stands out in bold and that is the fear that such a revelation is associated with. 'Broad spectrum dominance'
of a central intelligent agency is a reversal of the wholeness of being expressing through all its parts.
Fake intelligence
is basically made up to serve a believed goal. The terrorism of fear generates the goal of a self-protection that sells true relationship
to 'save itself'.
This goes deep into what we take to be our mind. The mind that thinks it is in control by controlling what it thinks.
If I can observe this in myself at will, is it any surprise I can see it in our world?
What is the fear that most deeply motivates or drives the human agenda?
I do not ask this of our superficial thinking, but of a core self-honesty that cannot be 'killed' but only covered over with a
thinking-complex.
And is it insane or unreal to be moved by love?
We are creatures of choice and beneath all masking, we are also the creator of choice.
But the true creative is not framed into a choosing between, but feeling one call as the movement of it.
When the 'intelligence' of a masking narrative no longer serves, be the willingness for what you no longer claim to have, and
open to being moved from within.
I am so tired of the simmering fury that lives inside me. This bubbling cauldron brim full of egregious truths, images and accounts
accumulated over nearly 40 years of looking behind the headlines. I disagree that the usurpation of journalists and media organisations
is in any way a recent phenomena. It certainly predates my emergent mind. And even the most lauded of anti-establishment hacks
and film makers self-censored to some degree. True, the blatant in your face propaganda and thought control agenda has accelerated,
but it was always there. I do not believe Chomsky, Oliver Stone, Pilger and their like could have done much more than they have,
that is to guide us in a direction counter to the official narrative. And to insinuate they are gatekeepers, when our heads never
stretch above the parapet, is really just a reflection of our own frustration that despite their work the only change remains
for the worse.
Yet I fear worse is to come. Our safe bitching in glorious anonymity has been all that we have had as solace to the angst that
pervades us, the other 1%. But the the thumbscrew is tightening. We may be as little as months away from any dissent being entirely
removed from the internet by AI algorithms. I have already been receiving warnings on several sites anyone here would call legitimate
that have had their security certificates removed and the statement that the site may contain malicious code etc. How prepared
are we for blackout?
A foundation should be set up in remembrance of Udo and sponsored by all true journalists and truth seekers. Maybe some day there
will be a Udo Ulfkotte award to the bravest journalist of the year .Wouldn't that be something .Udo's work would not have been
in vain . That would throw a monkey wrench into orgs like the Guardian and their ilk .Just dreaming out loud maybe , but with
good intentions.
Thank you Alun for the link to the German edition, which I have managed to download (naughty me!) I think the suggestion of retranslating
important sections and dressing these in some commentary for (presumably legitimate) publication on e.g. Off-G would be a good
idea. I'm quite fluent in German and would be glad to help.
Mods: do you see any legal pitfalls?
That depends on who holds the rights to the English language version and the original and whether they would want to take issue.
If it's Ulfkotte's family they may be happy to see his work get some sort of airing in English. If it's his publishers we can
imagine they will see things differently – as indeed would whoever it is that seems to want the book buried.
I heard it is blocked in many western countries, as the site is well known for its disregard for copyright. Fortunately not the
case where I am (NZ). If you're technically inclined, a VPN or anonymising application may help, although a VPN that 'exits' in
a western area won't get you any further ahead.
One hopes. I also hold out hope for F. William Engdahl's "Geheimakte NGOs." Here's a Dissident Voice article in which Engdahl
discusses the role of NGOs in aiding and abetting the US regime change program:
Yes, it has also been interesting to note that in 2015 the Guardian published a review of Richard Sakwa's book 'Frontline Ukraine'
in which the author was critical of both NATO and the EU, in fomenting this crisis. The 2014 'coup' which was carried out in February
2014 was, according to the independent geopolitical publication, Strator, 'the most blatant in history.' The appraisal which was
carried out by Guardian journalist Jonathon Steele was generally favourably disposed to Sakwa's record of events; however, Mr
Steele now rarely publishes anything in the Guardian. Read into this what you like.
As to Sakwa's latest book,'' Russia Against the Rest'', – nothing, not a peep, it doesn't exist, it never existed, it never
will exist. It would appear to be the case that the Guardian is now fully integrated into the military/surveillance/media-propaganda
apparatus. The liberal gatekeeper as to what is and what isn't acceptable. Its function is pure to serve the interests of the
powerful, in much the same way as the church did in the middle ages. The media doesn't just serve the interests power it is also
part of the same structure of dominance, albeit the liberal wing of the ruling coalition.
During the British war against the Boers in South Africa, at the turn of the 19/20 century, the then Manchester Guardian took
a brave and critical stand against the UK government. This lead to its offices in Manchester being attacked by jingoistic mobs,
as was the home of the then editor C.P.Scott, whose family needed police protection. In those days 'Facts were Sacred', unlike
the present where opposing views are increasingly ignored or suppressed.
Having just watched the documentary film tribute to I.F. Stone, "All Governments Lie", I was struck by the fact that no-one mentioned
Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone journalist (who outed General McChrystal, but whose Mercedes went mysteriously out of control,
hit a tree and exploded, throwing the engine 200 yards clear of the wreck ). Here was a film about control and self-censorship,
yet no-one even breathed the acronyms C.I.A. or FBI. Matt Taibbi referred to a silent coup, but none dared to mention the assassinations
of JFK, MLK and RFK. These doyens of Truth included the thoroughly dodgy Noam Chomsky. Finally, the Spartacus website suggests
that the saintly I.F. Stone was in the pay of the CIA. Other terms unspoken were CIA Operation Mockingbird or Operation Northwoods.
There was a clip of 9/11, but zero attempt to join up all the dots.
RIP Udo Ulfkotte. CIA long ago developed a dart to induce all the signs of a heart attack, so one is naturally somewhat suspicious.
Lies and assassinations are two sides of the same coin.
The only thing harder to find than Udo Ulfkotte's book is a Guardian review of it.
I daresay any mention of this book, BTL, would immediately be moderated (i.e censored) followed by a yellow or red card for
the cheeky commentator.
The level of pretence on this forum has now reached epic proportions, and seems to cuts both ways, ie. commentators pretending
that there are not several subjects which are virtually impossible to discuss in any depth (such as media censorship), and moderators
pretending that 'community standards' is not simply a crude device to control conversational discourse, especially when a commentators
point of view stray beyond narrow, Guardian approved borders.
Books, such as 'Bought Journalists' (which expose the corruption at the heart of western media) are especially inconvenient
for the risible 'fake news' agenda currently being rammed down the readerships throat – some of these people at the Guardian have
either absolutely no insight, or no shame.
Ulfkotte and Ganser in their ways are both telling a similar story – NATO, i.e an arm of the US military industrial complex
are mass murderers and sufficiently intimidating to have most western journalists singing from the same hymn sheet.
Since the Guardian follows the party line it is only possible to send coded or cryptic messages (BTL) should commentators wish
to deviate from the approved narrative.
For example, I was 'pre-moderated' for having doubts about the veracity of the so called 'Parsons Green tube bomb', especially
the nature of the injuries inflicted on a young model who looked like she was suffering from toothache.
https://www.thenational.ae/image/policy:1.628812:1505494262/wo16-web-parsons-green.JPG?f=16×9&w=1024&$p$f$w=e135eda
Been there, done that. What ordinarily happens if the submission is proper and cannot be censored on the basis of impropriety
or foulmouthedness or any other good reason, but exposes a Guardian sacred cow in an embarrassing light, is that it is said to
be off topic. Now this is really unaccountable, and truly subjective.
The community in community standards is "them" and has close ties to the 1%, if I hazard a guess.
"... Anyone who claims there are no conspiracies, that there are no behind-the-scenes efforts by powerful people to suppress information that would expose their efforts at global domination, is full of crap. ..."
"... How many CIA-paid journalists do you have on staff at the Washington Post? ..."
"... The author who was a deputy editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine and worked there for 17 years turns whistleblower and spills the beans on the corruption of German media by US lobby agencies which have CIA backing. ..."
"... The news is always given a pro American slant and journalists can look forward to rewards for their efforts. Should they not collude then their career is over. Corrupted German journalists are named and shamed. The EU is also revealed to be equally corrupt . ..."
"... German journalists assigned to EU reporting have to sign a document stating that they will never write anything negative about the EU. The level of manipulation by the EU is also frightening. ..."
"... This situation reeks of Stasi or Asian plutocratic realms. We want our freedom back! What are you people (including colluding Amazon) trying to cover up? Shame on you! ..."
"... The collussion of corporate media and Western intelligence is a taboo subject one must surmise. It suggests that our power structure realizes it has a rather fragile hold on the popular mind when the CIA morphs into the former KGB to simply suppress and disappear unacceptable reporting. ..."
"... I would suggest that the absolute silence by MSM about this book and its censorship validates the authors contentions that much of MSM reporting is right out of the Western intelligence agencies and has nothing whatsoever to do with reality on the ground. ..."
No, I haven't read the book, because it is priced completely out of my reach. I am giving
it five stars anyway because of what I've read *about* it, as I've followed its author's saga
-- the blackout by German media of the original German edition Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought
Journalists) for a couple of years now, raids by German police on the author's house, his
noting how he feared for his life, and his finally being found dead on January 13 of this
year "from a heart attack" (he was only 56, and because it is possible to kill someone in
ways that look like a heart attack, some people believe he was murdered).
The fate of a whistleblower against one of the world's most powerful organizations in a
controlled society being passed off as a democracy?
Two things are abundantly clear:
(1) The English translation of this book has been
"privished." There are a couple of good recent discussions of what it means to "privish" a
book, but Amazon will not allow me to link to them. So let's just say: the purpose of
"privishing" is make a book with an unwanted message disappear without a trace by limiting
information about it, destroying its marketability by printing too few copies, and refusing
reprint rights, so that the copies available are too expensive for readers of ordinary means
(which is nearly all of us).
(2) Anyone who claims there are no conspiracies, that there are
no behind-the-scenes efforts by powerful people to suppress information that would expose
their efforts at global domination, is full of crap.
XXX, September 30, 2017 Format: Paperback
Sell this book so we can buy it!
Amazon, you are a tool of the State. This book is available in English at a market
competitive price. Why do you refuse to make it available to your customers?
How many
CIA-paid journalists do you have on staff at the Washington Post? To the reviewer who asked
how much money the author will see from the exhorbotant price of the book, he won't see any
because he is dead.
He died of hearth issues shortly after the publication of the book. He
did have a history of heart ailments so I am not implying a sinister act. You can find an
good interview with him on YouTube if they haven't removed it.
XXX, November 11, 2017 Format: Paperback
Dynamite
Have read this book in German but as far as I know it is no longer available in bookshops
in Germany either. The author who was a deputy editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine and
worked there for 17 years turns whistleblower and spills the beans on the corruption of
German media by US lobby agencies which have CIA backing.
The news is always given a pro
American slant and journalists can look forward to rewards for their efforts. Should they not
collude then their career is over. Corrupted German journalists are named and shamed. The EU
is also revealed to be equally corrupt .
German journalists assigned to EU reporting have to
sign a document stating that they will never write anything negative about the EU. The level
of manipulation by the EU is also frightening. The author himself was part of the set up and
even received a prestigious reward for his pro America efforts but eventually became
disgusted by the system and his collusion in it.
I pre ordered the book last year in English
on Amazon as my son wanted to read it but I kept receiving emails from Amazon changing
publication dates and eventually they informed me that they were unable to access the book.
There is no doubt that the book is dynamite and has been suppressed because of this.
XXX, July 31, 2017 Format: Hardcover
Tyranny in America Writ Large In A Super-Large Price
Somebody has set the price of this book -- available in English though it is -- so high as
to make it unavailable. I wonder, if some rich or extremely extravagant person were to bye
this book at the $1300 price it's offered at, would the author ever see a dime of that?
This
situation reeks of Stasi or Asian plutocratic realms. We want our freedom back! What are you
people (including colluding Amazon) trying to cover up? Shame on you!
XXX, August 16, 2017 Format: Paperback
Second book I've wanted that's been banned
Second book I've wanted that's been banned by Amazon. Shame on you, Mr. Bezos.
Unfortunately for you, more people are waking up to this. The cracks are starting to
show.
The suppression of the English language version of this book is censorship of the most
Orwellian kind.
I have been awaiting the English version of this book for several years now, watching with
interest while the publishing date was delayed multiple times. As a best seller in Germany
one had to wonder why it would take years to translate the book to English unless there were
forces working against publication. Well, low and behold it is finally set to publish in May
2017 when it again doesn't and finally disappears from sight. The obvious suppression of this
book is censorship of the press and of course speaks volumes about Western "freedom of the
press" as a fantasy.
The collussion of corporate media and Western intelligence is a taboo
subject one must surmise. It suggests that our power structure realizes it has a rather
fragile hold on the popular mind when the CIA morphs into the former KGB to simply suppress
and disappear unacceptable reporting.
I would suggest that the absolute silence by MSM about
this book and its censorship validates the authors contentions that much of MSM reporting is
right out of the Western intelligence agencies and has nothing whatsoever to do with reality
on the ground.
Somewhere in the great beyond Orwell is smiling and thinking "I told you
so."
"... The letter by Mister or Ms Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas Friedman. That is, someone on the NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite obvious calculated aims. It is a masterpiece of treacherous deception. ..."
"... This anonymous enemy of amorality claims to approve of all the most extreme right-wing measures of the Trump administration as "bright spots": deregulation, tax reform, a more robust military, "and more" – cleverly omitting mention of Trump's immigration policy which could unduly shock the New York Times' liberal readers. The late Senator John McCain, the model of bipartisan bellicosity, is cited as the example to follow. ..."
"... The "resistance" proclaimed is solely against the facets of Trump's foreign policy which White House insiders are said to be working diligently to undermine: peaceful relations with Russian and North Korea. ..."
"... Trump's desire to avoid war is transformed into "a preference for autocrats and dictators". (Trump gets no credit for his warlike rhetoric against Iran and close relations with Netanyahu, even though they must please Anonymous.) ..."
"... The purpose of this is stunningly obvious. The New York Times has already done yeoman service in rounding up liberal Democrats and left-leaning independents in the anti-Trump lynch mob. But now the ploy is to rally conservative Republicans to the same cause of overthrowing the elected President. The letter amounts to an endorsement of future President Pence. ..."
"... This is the Iago ploy. Shakespeare's villain destroyed Othello by causing him to distrust those closest to him, his wife and closest associates. Like Trump in Washington, Othello, the "Moor" of Venice, was an outsider, that much easier to deceive and betray. ..."
"... The New York Times is playing Iago, whispering that Putin in the Kremlin is surrounded by secret "informants", and that Trump in the White House is surrounded by people systematically undermining his presidency. Putin is not likely to be impressed, but the trick might work with Trump, who is truly the target of open and covert enemies and whose position is much more insecure. There is certainly some undermining going on. ..."
"... Was the New York Times oped written by the paper's own writers or by the CIA? It hardly matters since they are so closely entwined. ..."
"... The military-industrial-congressional-deep state-media complex is holding its breath to breathe that great sigh of relief. The intruder is gone. Hurrah! Now we can go right on teaching the public to hate and fear the Russian enemy, so that arms contracts continue to blossom and NATO builds up its aggressive forces around Russia in hopes that this may frighten the Russians into dumping Putin in favor of a new Boris Yeltsin, ready to let the United States pursue the Clintonian plan of breaking up the Russian Federation into pieces, like the former Yugoslavia, in order to take them over one by one, with all their great natural resources. ..."
"... When dialogue is impossible, all that is left is force and violence. That is what is being promoted by the most influential media in the United States. ..."
The New York Times continues to outdo itself in the production of fake news. There is no
more reliable source of fake news than the intelligence services, which regularly provide their
pet outlets (NYT and WaPo) with sensational stories that are as unverifiable as their sources
are anonymous. A prize example was the August 24 report that US intelligence agencies don't
know anything about Russia's plans to mess up our November elections because "informants close
to Putin and in the Kremlin" aren't saying anything. Not knowing anything about something for
which there is no evidence is a rare scoop.
A story like that is not designed to "inform the public" since there is no information in
it. It has other purposes: to keep the "Russia is undermining our democracy" story on front
pages, with the extra twist in this case of trying to make Putin distrustful of his entourage.
The Russian president is supposed to wonder, who are those informants in my entourage?
But that was nothing compared to the whopper produced by the "newpaper of record" on
September 5. (By the way, the "record" is stuck in the same groove: Trump bad, Putin bad
– bad bad bad.) This was the sensational oped headlined "I am Part of the Resistance
Inside the Trump Administration", signed by nobody.
The letter by Mister or Ms Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas
Friedman. That is, someone on the NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite
obvious calculated aims. It is a masterpiece of treacherous deception.
The fictional author presents itself as a right-wing conservative shocked by Trump's
"amorality" – a category that outside the Washington swamp might include betraying the
trust of one's superior.
This anonymous enemy of amorality claims to approve of all the most extreme right-wing
measures of the Trump administration as "bright spots": deregulation, tax reform, a more robust
military, "and more" – cleverly omitting mention of Trump's immigration policy which
could unduly shock the New York Times' liberal readers. The late Senator John McCain, the model
of bipartisan bellicosity, is cited as the example to follow.
The "resistance" proclaimed is solely against the facets of Trump's foreign policy which
White House insiders are said to be working diligently to undermine: peaceful relations with
Russian and North Korea.
Trump's desire to avoid war is transformed into "a preference for autocrats and
dictators". (Trump gets no credit for his warlike rhetoric against Iran and close relations
with Netanyahu, even though they must please Anonymous.)
The purpose of this is stunningly obvious. The New York Times has already done yeoman
service in rounding up liberal Democrats and left-leaning independents in the anti-Trump lynch
mob. But now the ploy is to rally conservative Republicans to the same cause of overthrowing
the elected President. The letter amounts to an endorsement of future President Pence.
Just get rid of Trump and you'll have a nice, neat, ultra-right-wing Republican as
President.
The Democrats may not like Pence, but they are so demented by hatred of Trump that they are
visibly ready to accept the Devil himself to get rid of the sinister clown who dared defeat
Hillary Clinton. Down with democracy; the votes of deplorables shouldn't count.
That is treacherous enough, but even more despicable is the insidious design to destabilize
the presidency by sowing distrust. Speaking of Trump, Mr and/or Ms Anonymous declare: "The
dilemma – which he does not fully grasp – is that many of the senior officials in
his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and
his worst inclinations" (meaning peace with Russia).
This is the Iago ploy. Shakespeare's villain destroyed Othello by causing him to
distrust those closest to him, his wife and closest associates. Like Trump in Washington,
Othello, the "Moor" of Venice, was an outsider, that much easier to deceive and
betray.
The New York Times is playing Iago, whispering that Putin in the Kremlin is surrounded
by secret "informants", and that Trump in the White House is surrounded by people
systematically undermining his presidency. Putin is not likely to be impressed, but the trick
might work with Trump, who is truly the target of open and covert enemies and whose position is
much more insecure. There is certainly some undermining going on.
Was the New York Times oped written by the paper's own writers or by the CIA? It hardly
matters since they are so closely entwined.
No trick is too low for those who consider Trump an intolerable intruder on THEIR power
territory. The New York Times "news" that Trump is surrounded by traitors is taken up by other
media who indirectly confirm the story by speculating on "who is it?" The Boston Globe (among
others) eagerly rushed in, asking:
"So who's the author of the op-ed? It's a question that has many people poking through the
text, looking for clues. Meanwhile, the denials have come thick and fast. Here's a brief look
at some of the highest-level officials in the administration who might have a motive to write
the letter."
Isn't it obvious that all this is designed to make Trump distrust everyone around him? Isn't
that a way to drive him toward that "crazy" where they say he already is, and which is fallback
grounds for impeachment when the Mueller investigation fails to come up with nothing more
serious than the fact that Russian intelligent agents are intelligent agents?
The White House insider (or insiders, or whatever) use terms like "erratic behavior" and
"instability" to contribute to the "Trump is insane" narrative. Insanity is the alternative
pretext to the Mueller wild goose chase for divesting Trump of the powers of the presidency. If
Trump responds by accusing the traitors of being traitors, that will be final proof of his
mental instability. The oped claims to provide evidence that Trump is being betrayed, but if he
says so, that will be taken as a sign of mental derangement. To save our exemplary democracy
from itself, the elected president must be thrown out.
The military-industrial-congressional-deep state-media complex is holding its breath to
breathe that great sigh of relief. The intruder is gone. Hurrah! Now we can go right on
teaching the public to hate and fear the Russian enemy, so that arms contracts continue to
blossom and NATO builds up its aggressive forces around Russia in hopes that this may frighten
the Russians into dumping Putin in favor of a new Boris Yeltsin, ready to let the United States
pursue the Clintonian plan of breaking up the Russian Federation into pieces, like the former
Yugoslavia, in order to take them over one by one, with all their great natural
resources.
And when this fails, as it has been failing, and will continue to fail, the United States
has all those brand new first strike nuclear weapons being stationed in European NATO
countries, aimed at the Kremlin. And the Russian military are not just sitting there with their
own nuclear weapons, waiting to be wiped out. When nobody, not even the President of the United
States, has the right to meet and talk with Russian leaders, there is only one remaining form
of exchange. When dialogue is impossible, all that is left is force and violence. That is
what is being promoted by the most influential media in the United States.
Sara h
Huckabee Sanders has a tiny request: Please stop asking her about that pesky little
New York Times op-ed written by an anonymous White House official.
... ... ...
On Thursday, Sanders tweeted a message addressed to all the people "asking for the identity
of the anonymous coward" (basically, everyone).
The media's wild obsession with the identity of the anonymous coward is recklessly
tarnishing the reputation of thousands of great Americans who
proudly serve our country and work for President Trump. Stop. If you want to know who this
gutless loser is, call the opinion desk of the failing NYT at 212-556-1234, and ask them.
They are the only ones complicit in this deceitful act.
We stand united together and fully support our President Donald J.Trump.
"... Trump is being promoted by the MSM as the leader of the deplorables – an orange straw man. I support him to the degree that he is confounding the deep state elites and social engineering. ..."
Here is my take on the priorities of the deep state and its public face – the
MSM:
stopping the deplorable rebellion
cutting off the head of the rebellion – perceived as Trump
reinstating the Cold War in an effort to derail Rusisa's recovery and international
leadership role
bitch slapping China
The rest involves turning unsustainable debt into establishment of a feudal world
comprised of elites living on Mount Olympus, legions of vassals and a vast sea of cerebrally
castrated peasants to serve as a reservoir for any imaginable exploitation.
Upon further reflection, Trump is being promoted by the MSM as the leader of the
deplorables – an orange straw man. I support him to the degree that he is confounding
the deep state elites and social engineering.
"... The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter: ..."
"... For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird. ..."
"... Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner. ..."
"... However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II ..."
"... And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections." ..."
"... We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance." ..."
"... "Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows ..."
William Blum shares with us his correspondence with
Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum's replies, he comes
across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset.
When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee,
which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the
Washington Post was a CIA asset. Watching the Washington Post's takedown of President Richard
Nixon with the orchestrated Watergate story, that became obvious. President Nixon had made too
many overtures to the Soviets and too many arms limitations agreements, and he opened to China.
Watching President Nixon's peace initiatives water down the threat level from the Soviet Union
and Maoist China, the military/security complex saw a threat to its budget and power and
decided that Nixon had to go. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy had resulted in
far too much skepticism about the Warren Commission Report, so the CIA decided to use the
Washington Post to get rid of Nixon. To keep the clueless American left hating Nixon, the CIA
used its assets in the leftwing to keep Nixon blamed for the Vietnam war, a war that Nixon
inherited and did not want.
The CIA knew that Nixon's problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his
conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical "Domino Theory." I have always
wondered if the CIA concocted the "Domino Theory," as it so well served them. Unable to get rid
of the war "with honor," Nixon was driven to brutal methods to force the North Vietnamese to
accept a situation that he could depart without defeat and soiling America's "honor" and losing
his conservative support base. The North Vietnamese wouldn't bend, but the US Congress did, and
so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon's war
management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA.
Here is Blum's exchange with Birnbaum. It is possible that Birnbaum is neither stupid nor a
CIA asset, but just a person wanting to hold on to a job. The last thing he can afford to do is
to disabuse readers of the "Russian Threat" when Bezos' Amazon and Washington Post properties
are dependent on the CIA's annual subsidy of $600 million disquised as a "contract."
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-20/cia-washington-post-and-russia-what-youre-not-being-told
The Anti-Empire Report # 159 Willian Blum
The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post
foreign policy reporter: July 18, 2018
Dear Mr. Birnbaum,
You write Trump "made no mention of Russia's adventures in Ukraine". Well, neither he nor Putin
nor you made any mention of America's adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the
overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure.
Therefore ?
If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in
Mexico? William Blum
Dear Mr. Blum,
Thanks for your note. "America's adventures in the Ukraine": what are you talking about? Last
time I checked, it was Ukrainians in the streets of Kiev who caused Yanukovych to turn tail and
run. Whether or not that was a good thing, we can leave aside, but it wasn't the Americans who
did it.
It is, however, Russian special forces who fanned out across Crimea in February and March 2014,
according to Putin, and Russians who came down from Moscow who stoked conflict in eastern
Ukraine in the months after, according to their own accounts. Best, Michael Birnbaum
To MB,
I can scarcely believe your reply. Do you read nothing but the Post? Do you not know of high
State Dept official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine in Maidan Square to
encourage the protesters? She spoke of 5 billion (sic) dollars given to aid the protesters who
were soon to overthrow the govt. She and the US Amb. spoke openly of who to choose as the next
president. And he's the one who became president. This is all on tape. I guess you never watch
Russia Today (RT). God forbid! I read the Post every day. You should watch RT once in a
while. William Blum
To WB,
I was the Moscow bureau chief of the newspaper; I reported extensively in Ukraine in the months
and years following the protests. My observations are not based on reading. RT is not a
credible news outlet, but I certainly do read far beyond our own pages, and of course I talk to
the actual actors on the ground myself – that's my job.
And: yes, of course Nuland was in the Maidan – but encouraging the protests, as she
clearly did, is not the same as sparking them or directing them, nor is playing favorites with
potential successors, as she clearly did, the same as being directly responsible for
overthrowing the government. I'm not saying the United States wasn't involved in trying to
shape events. So were Russia and the European Union. But Ukrainians were in the driver's seat
the whole way through. I know the guy who posted the first Facebook call to protest Yanukovych
in November 2013; he's not an American agent. RT, meanwhile, reports fabrications and terrible
falsehoods all the time. By all means consume a healthy and varied media diet – don't
stop at the US mainstream media. But ask yourself how often RT reports critically on the
Russian government, and consider how that lacuna shapes the rest of their reporting. You will
find plenty of reporting in the Washington Post that is critical of the US government and US
foreign policy in general, and decisions in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government in specific.
Our aim is to be fair, without picking sides. Best, Michael Birnbaum
======================= end of exchange =======================
Right, the United States doesn't play indispensable roles in changes of foreign governments;
never has, never will; even when they offer billions of dollars; even when they pick the new
president, which, apparently, is not the same as picking sides. It should be noticed that Mr
Birnbaum offers not a single example to back up his extremist claim that RT "reports
fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time." "All the time", no less! That should make
it easy to give some examples.
For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And,
yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem –
Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full
century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is
there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast?
Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that
when they do it can seem rather weird.
To the casual observer, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
indictments of July 14 of Russian intelligence agents (GRU) reinforced the argument that the
Soviet government interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Regard these indictments in
proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed
objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and
conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So
we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at
determining the winner.
The Russians did it (cont.)
Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I'm
looking for evidence – real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something
logical and rational – to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from
influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK.
But I do not find such evidence.
Each day brings headlines like these:
"U.S. to add economic sanctions on Russia: Attack with nerve agent on former spy in England
forces White House to act"
"Is Russia exploiting new Facebook goal?"
"Experts: Trump team lacks urgency on Russian threat"
These are all from the same day, August 9, which led me to thinking of doing this article,
but similar stories can be found any day in the Post and in major newspapers anywhere in
America. None of the articles begins to explain how Russia did these things, or even WHY.
Motivation appears to have become a lost pursuit in the American mass media. The one thing
sometimes mentioned, which I think may have some credibility, is Russia's preference of Trump
over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this doesn't begin to explain how Russia could pull off any
of the electoral magic it's accused of, which would be feasible only if the United States were
a backward, Third World, Banana Republic.
There's the Facebook ads, as well as all the other ads The people who are influenced by this
story – have they read many of the actual ads? Many are pro-Clinton or anti-Trump; many
are both; many are neither. It's one big mess, the only rational explanation of this which I've
read is that they come from money-making websites, "click-bait" sites as they're known, which
earn money simply by attracting visitors.
As to the nerve agents, it makes more sense if the UK or the CIA did it to make the Russians
look bad, because the anti-Russian scandal which followed was totally predictable. Why would
Russia choose the time of the World Cup in Moscow – of which all of Russia was immensely
proud – to bring such notoriety down upon their head? But that would have been an ideal
time for their enemies to want to embarrass them.
However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day
believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact
that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at
all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is
alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II.
But we're the Good Guys, ain't we?
For a defender of US foreign policy there's very little that causes extreme heartburn more
than someone implying a "moral equivalence" between American behavior and that of Russia. That
was the case during Cold War I and it's the same now in Cold War II. It just drives them up the
wall.
After the United States passed a law last year requiring TV station RT (Russia Today) to
register as a "foreign agent", the Russians passed their own law allowing authorities to
require foreign media to register as a "foreign agent". Senator John McCain denounced the new
Russian law, saying there is "no equivalence" between RT and networks such as Voice of America,
CNN and the BBC, whose journalists "seek the truth, debunk lies, and hold governments
accountable." By contrast, he said, "RT's propagandists debunk the truth, spread lies, and seek
to undermine democratic governments in order to further Vladimir Putin's agenda."
And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights
and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S.
government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that
Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski,
"apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would
interfere in the other's elections."
"Is this moral equivalence fair?" Malinowski asked and answered: "In short, no. Russia's
interference in the United States' 2016 election could not have been more different from what
the United States does to promote democracy in other countries."
How do you satirize such officials and such high-school beliefs?
We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED),
which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft
the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today
was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's
wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of
political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance."
"Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and
government-overthrows. The authors continue: "This narrative is churned out by propaganda
outlets such as RT and Sputnik [radio station]. it is deployed by isolationists who propound a
U.S. retreat from global leadership."
"Isolationists" is what [neo]conservatives call critics of US foreign policy whose arguments they
can't easily dismiss, so they imply that such people just don't want the US to be involved in
anything abroad.
And "global leadership" is what they call being first in election-interferences and
government-overthrows.
"... The anti-Russian mania in U.S. politics gives social media companies a welcome excuse to clamp down on promotional schemes for sites like Liberty Front Press by claiming that these are disinformation campaigns run by the U.S. enemy of the day . ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Well this surely shows that Facebook/Twitter is run through the help of US/Western intelligence ..."
"... Sorry, but, if you let any opinion on Facebook or Twitter sway your politics, you're an idiot. ..."
"... fireEye, google, yahoo, facebook and so many other tech companies are all in a few miles radius of one another in San Jose area of California ..."
"... In the battles over ideas, printing presses were often targeted for destruction so ideas could be restricted -- what's happening with Twitter and Facebook is merely an updated version of such repression. ..."
"... Blogs today represent yesterday's broadsheets, and by using social media, they can increase their exposure to a wider audience. Thus, social media represents a point-of-control for those trying to shape/frame discourse/content. They may be private companies, but they interact with public discourse and ought to be subjected to Free Speech controls like the USA's 1st Amendment. ..."
"... Very many hi-tech companies in the US are working with the CIA. Such as Oracle that has an office on the east coast of the US that keeps a very low profile inside the company. ..."
"... Robert Bridge provides us with a timely written article dealing with the issue at hand: "And if US intel is in bed with Hollywood you can be damn sure they're spending time in the MSM whorehouse as well." ..."
"... IMHO, it would be foolish to presume that the CIA would simply discontinue and to walk away from (as it claims!) a program like Operation Mockingbird. Government agencies have famously infiltrated the Quakers (ferchrissakes!). Facebook was funded and developed by a CIA front shop. Zuckerburg is a dopey kid and a frontispiece. ..."
"... The danger of course is when people start to conclude that any media site permitted by FB or SM is Sanctioned by the Propaganda department of the Ministry of Truth and ignored. ..."
"... Trump would be hailed a savior if he were to morph into President Taft and Bust the Trusts like BigLie Media, its allied telecoms and social media corps. ..."
"... As to a lack authenticity, what about the tweets from outside Egypt pushing and reporting on the "Arab Spring" protests there. We have other examples of "inauthentic" social messaging on other agendas pushed like Syria. What about "A Gay Girl in Damascus?" ..."
"... who still uses facebook? The only people i know who still are active users are senior citizens. ..."
The creation of digital content led to the re-establishment of claqueurs :
By 1830 the claque had become an institution. The manager of a theatre or opera house was
able to send an order for any number of claqueurs. These were usually under a chef de claque
(leader of applause), who judged where the efforts of the claqueurs were needed and to
initiate the demonstration of approval. This could take several forms. There would be
commissaires ("officers/commissioner") who learned the piece by heart and called the
attention of their neighbors to its good points between the acts. Rieurs (laughers) laughed
loudly at the jokes. Pleureurs (criers), generally women, feigned tears, by holding their
handkerchiefs to their eyes. Chatouilleurs (ticklers) kept the audience in a good humor,
while bisseurs (encore-ers) simply clapped and cried "Bis! Bis!" to request encores.
An alternative is to create artificial social media personas who then promote ones content.
That is what the Internet Research Agency , the Russian "troll factory" from St.
Petersburg, did. The fake personas it established on Facebook promoted IRA created
clickbait content like puppy picture pages that was then marketed
to sell advertisements .
The profit orientated social media giants do not like such third party promotions. They
prefer that people pay THEM to promote their content. Selling advertisements is Facebook's
business. Promotional accounts on its own platform are competition.
Yesterday Facebook announced that it deleted a
number of user accounts for "inauthentic behavior":
We've removed 652 Pages, groups and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior that
originated in Iran and targeted people across multiple internet services in the Middle East,
Latin America, UK and US. FireEye, a cybersecurity firm, gave us a tip in July about "Liberty
Front Press," a network of Facebook Pages as well as accounts on other online services.
...
We are able to link this network to Iranian state media through publicly available website
registration information, as well as the use of related IP addresses and Facebook Pages
sharing the same admins. For example, one part of the network, "Quest 4 Truth," claims to be
an independent Iranian media organization, but is in fact linked to Press TV, an
English-language news network affiliated with Iranian state media.
FireEye has identified a suspected influence operation that appears to originate from Iran
aimed at audiences in the U.S., U.K., Latin America, and the Middle East. This operation is
leveraging a network of inauthentic news sites and clusters of associated accounts across
multiple social media platforms to promote political narratives in line with Iranian
interests. These narratives include anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes, as
well as support for specific U.S. policies favorable to Iran, such as the U.S.-Iran nuclear
deal (JCPOA) .
...
Based on an investigation by FireEye Intelligence's Information Operations analysis team, we
assess with moderate confidence that this activity originates from Iranian actors.
The evidence FireEye presents is quite thin. The purpose of its inquest and report is
obviously self-promotion.
Moon of Alabama is also promoting anti-Saudi , anti-Israeli
, and pro-Palestinian themes. It
supports the JCPOA deal. This is, according to FireEye, "in line with Iranian interests".
It may well be. But does that make Moon of Alabama a "suspected influence operation"?
Is it an "inauthentic news site"?
Is the @MoonofATwitter
account showing "coordinated inauthentic behavior" when it promotes the pieces presented on
this site? We, by the way, assess with high confidence that that this activity originates from
a German actor. Is that a reason to shut it down?
Here is another high confidence tip for FireEye. There is proof, and even an admission of
guilt, that a hostile government financed broadcasting organization is creating inauthentic
Facebook accounts to disseminate disinformation. These narratives include
anti-Russian, anti-Syrian, and pro-Saudi views, as well as support for specific U.S. policies
favorable to Israel, such as its financing of the
anti-Iranian headscarf campaign .
This year the U.S. government run Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) will spend more than
$23 million for its Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB). OCB administers Radio and Television
(TV) Martí programs directed at the Cuban public. In its 2019 budget
request to Congress (pdf) the BBG admits that it creates inauthentic Facebook
accounts to increase the distribution of its dreck:
In FY 2018, OCB is establishing on island digital teams to create non-branded local Facebook
accounts to disseminate information . Native pages increase the chances of appearing on Cuban
Facebook users newsfeeds. The same strategy will be replicated on other preferred social
media networks.
How is this different from what the PressTV may have done? When will Facebook shut those
inauthentic BBG accounts down?
At the Defense One Summit last November [2016], former GEC director Michael Lumpkin [GEC,
Pentagon propaganda department] described how the Center was using the data it received as
a Facebook advertiser to maximize the effectiveness of its own targeted appeals.
"Using Facebook ads, I can go within Facebook, I can go grab an audience, I can pick
Country X, I need age group 13 to 34, I need people who have liked -- whether it's Abu Bakr
Al Baghdadi or any other set -- I can shoot and hit them directly with messaging," Lumpkin
said. He emphasized that with the right data, effective message targeting could be done for
"pennies a click."
Ironically, when I created a FB page hangout for my foreign students to disseminate topical
educational materials that were freely available as PDF links, or free 'loss-leader' lessons
from for-profits, or Khan Academy free lesson links ... in other words, organizing a
docent-guided free education feed for terribly poor 3W students ...
FB informed me that this
was an 'illegal' business activity, lol. They shut it down with *zero* warning. One moment it
was a beautiful colorful uplifting education resource, the next it was burnt to ashes. 404.
ATM, on an Anony FB page I launched to reconnect with my students, after a couple
ill-advised comments to their thread posts, discussing what's *really* going on in the world,
FB has blocked any posts that I might want to make. They just never show up when I hit enter.
Like training a bad puppy, lol. All FB lets me do is 'like' or emoji or 'wave' to my
students, so it's a semaphore that I still exist, even in FB lockup.
But I think I'll stop. It's bread-crumbing them to FBs candy-cane house and the boiling
cauldron that awaits. Frog in a Pot!
"...we assess with moderate confidence that this activity originates from Iranian actors."
Jeez, can't they at least produce a "highly likely" for us? On the intelligence community's confidence scale, "moderate" has to be just above
"wishful" and "doubtful"
One of the tricks of corporate propaganda:
Often, when exposed to capitalist propaganda, a socialist gets the impression that he can
have the best of both worlds! - the perceived benefits of capitalism as he keeps his beloved
social benefits.
It isn't until some time after the bmobing has stopped, that he realizes that he has lost
ALL his former social benefits and what he has thereafter is hard capitalism and no
money.
Well this surely shows that Facebook/Twitter is run through the help of US/Western
intelligence.
Only way is to fight back or you will eventually have fines and end up in jail for
thoughtcrimes.
This site and us here commenting is of course already targeted by these scums, besides,
sites like this will certainly be shut down sooner or later.
Remember Facebook also attacked Venezuela recently, "Why Did Facebook Purge TeleSUR English?"
TeleSUR English is a rare voice of dissent to US foreign policy. Is that why Facebook
deleted its page?
b.. thanks... your first paragraph giving context to how the public was swayed going back
close to 200 years ago was very interesting..
The usa gov't has something to sell and something to buy.. fireEye, google, yahoo,
facebook and so many other tech companies are all in a few miles radius of one another in
San Jose area of California.. If Russia was to bomb somewhere in the usa - that would be one good
place to start!
They are all selling to the usa gov't at this point... the usa devotes so
much to propaganda and these corps all try to peddle the needed tools to keep the
fearmongering going, when they're not snooping of course! hey - they can do both - snoop and
sell!!
Long ago before the Hydrocarbon Epoch, the Broadsheet was your typical newscast assembled by
the local printer who was often reporter and editor, and even in small towns there was
competition, with readers of news gathering in coffee shops to discuss their contents. The
vociferousness of many publications was extreme, but as Jefferson observed in the 1790s,
easily disproved hyperbole was far more desirable than censorship -- people were deemed capable
of determining a publication's veracity for themselves and thus their success or failure
would be determined by the marketplace of ideas.
In the battles over ideas, printing presses were often targeted for destruction so ideas
could be restricted -- what's happening with Twitter and Facebook is merely an updated version
of such repression. With the advent of the personal computer and internet, ease of publishing
exploded, which presented elites determined to control the overall discourse with a huge
problem they are still grappling with. One of the aims of the Independent Media Center on its
founding in 1999 was to turn every activist into a reporter and every computer into a
printing press with contents published collectively at regional Media Centers. Unfortunately,
after a promising first several years, the nascent movement failed and remains in dormancy,
being mostly replaced by personal blogs.
Blogs today represent yesterday's broadsheets, and by using social media, they can
increase their exposure to a wider audience. Thus, social media represents a point-of-control
for those trying to shape/frame discourse/content. They may be private companies, but they
interact with public discourse and ought to be subjected to Free Speech controls like the
USA's 1st Amendment.
Very many hi-tech companies in the US are working with the CIA. Such as Oracle that has an
office on the east coast of the US that keeps a very low profile inside the company. In fact
the first contract that launched the company was a contract with the CIA to implement the IBM
SQL standard. I shouldn't have to explain to anyone here why the CIA would use a relational
database (have to keep all those subversive secret ops in order). Similar connection to CIA
for Google, Facebook, Symantec, etc.
If you are using US software (very likely) then assume CIA and NSA back-doors. Some
solutions are to use Linux and VPNs, and Yandex for cloud storage. Get away from US
software.
Robert Bridge provides us with a timely written article dealing with the issue at hand:
"And if US intel is in bed with Hollywood you can be damn sure they're spending time in the
MSM whorehouse as well."
Sorry, should have included this in 17. As many know, Caitlin Johnstone, a Truth Seeker par
excellence, has also been censored, but prior to that
wrote this essay on the subject at hand, which is all about manufacturing consent as she
sees it:
"This is a setup. Hit the soft target so your oligarch-friendly censorship doesn't look
like what it is, then once you've manufactured consent, go on to shut down the rest of
dissenting media bit by bit."
This is a US government ordered setup supported by the evidence she presents in her intro,
but not by Trump!
IMHO, it would be foolish to presume that the CIA would simply discontinue and to walk away
from (as it claims!) a program like Operation Mockingbird.
Government agencies have famously infiltrated the Quakers (ferchrissakes!). Facebook was funded and developed by a CIA front shop. Zuckerburg is a dopey kid and a
frontispiece.
The danger of course is when people start to conclude that any media site permitted by FB or
SM is Sanctioned by the Propaganda department of the Ministry of Truth and ignored. Then
these few truthful media sites that are unbanned will need to beg these social media giants
to ban them so as to restablish credibility. FB and SM will then need to ban a few controlled
MSM sites so people will believe they are credible and read the propaganda
I guess we are not there yet, or are we? I do not use FB or other SM for news or anything else, although I do occasionally click on
links to them from a web page, but I guess a lot of people do. Maybe that will change.
The battle over Net Neutrality is related to this. Recently,
Verizon blackmailed a California fire department engaged in fighting the state's largest
ever wildfire by throttling its data feed thus threatening public safety for a Few Dollars
More.
Trump would be hailed a savior if he were to morph into President Taft and Bust the Trusts
like BigLie Media, its allied telecoms and social media corps.
Claqueurs. One of the earliest versions of the annoying "laugh track" used in television.
Like Ben 10, I learned something new today.
As to a lack authenticity, what about the tweets from outside Egypt pushing and reporting
on the "Arab Spring" protests there. We have other examples of "inauthentic" social messaging
on other agendas pushed like Syria. What about "A Gay Girl in Damascus?"
As usual, thanks for pointing out the hypocrisy of US govt/media.
"... Most important was " Brennan's ringleader role in the so-far unsuccessful attempts to derail Trump , both before and after the 2016 election. As far as we can tell it was Brennan who concocted and launched the conspiracy to insinuate that Trump is connected with alleged Russian influence. Brennan bet that Hillary Clinton would win the election. He lost his bet and is now out in the cold. He fears that his role, especially his conspiring with British security services and with the Steele dossier, will come to light. ..."
"... [R]unning against the deep state provides Trump a rhetorical crutch. It's a built-in excuse for failing to deliver on his 2016 campaign promises. Sitting presidents usually have to run as incumbents. Trump can try to run for re-election as an outsider. And is there a better poster boy for the alleged deep state than Brennan? ..."
"... The idiots who express solidarity with Brennan by offering up their security clearances confirm, simply by doing so, that there IS a deep state cabal that is opposed to Trump. Attacking Brennan and them will help Trump to get reelected. ..."
"... By colluding against me, the fake media proved once and for all, that they are in cahoots with the Democrats and have declared themselves to be my true political opposition ..."
"... Trump is excellent in playing his domestic opponents. Brennan made a huge mistake in publicly opposing him. He is now standing in the limelight and people will only dig further into his role in the "Russian collusion" campaign. Yesterday Brennan authored a New York Times ..."
"... Director Brennan's recent statements purport to know as fact that the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power. If Director Brennan's statement is based on intelligence he received while still leading the CIA, why didn't he include it in the Intelligence Community Assessment released in 2017? If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach. If he has some other personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion, it should be disclosed to the Special Counsel, not The New York Times . ..."
"... It is doubtful that Trump will let go of the issue. Brennan is a too juicy target to stop shooting at it. Currently Brennan is still too valuable as an enemy for Trump to destroy him. But once that is over Brennan's day of judgment will come. Here are high hopes that Brennan will finally have to pay for at least one of his many crimes. ..."
"... If the Democrats jump to defend Brennan, they will have fallen into another Trump Trap. They are assuredly tone-deaf and stupid enough to take the bait. ..."
"... You are a Trump supporter because you supposedly believe Trump is an insurgent fighting the deep state for a democratic world order, or some such, perhaps more discreetly phrased. But this is nonsense ..."
"... Trump, whatever maybe said against him, is a legitimately, constitutionally elected president. The people like Brennan working against him were not elected. I didn't vote for Trump. I voted for Jill Stein. But, if there is a civil war, I will have to fight for Trump's side. The oath that I swore as a naval officer was to the Constitution. ..."
"... he's a nasty neocon that is of course protected by liberal MSM ..."
"... Unfortunately, there is no limit on the numbers of despicable, warmongering, money-grubbing, craven, destructive, maniacal creatures in government. Brennan is one such specimen. Brennan belongs in prison for subverting the Constitution. ..."
"... Look, Brennan has now had enough time, with his 'hit-team' to clear much of his record and trail of criminality, and he believes that he has enough backing to go after Trump. The key is obviously the Uranium1 scam, which Mueller and Sessions appear to be stalling on big-time. And then there's the Imran Awan / Debbie Washerwoman Shultz bonanza about to break big-time - and you're trying to tell me that Brennan being charged or sued would be 'quite extreme, and an evil precedent'? ..."
"... Just my 2 cents worth. Trump's a stooge, and nearly 100% of what he does is solely and only to bully someone whom Trump perceives has having stood up to him (Trump). It's not so much about Trump taking on BigSpy, Inc, in any meaningful or substantive way. It's about Trump being a big-assed bully and throwing his considerable weight around... without accomplishing much other than smacking down Brennan - deservedly but with no real ongoing lasting useful effect. ..."
"... Democrats are not collectively smart enough or politically astute enough to run away from Brennan. What fools they are! ..."
"... Why did Trump nominated Gina Haspel as CIA Director? Her nomination was supported by former CIA directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Michael Morell, former Director of the NSA and CIA Michael Hayden, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. ..."
"... Haspel was CIA chief of station in London in 2016, when the plot against Trump was hatched. She must have known what Steele et al. were up to. ..."
"... Trumps connections with the Russian Mafia were certainly reason for concern. Too bad the DeepState Media downplayed this angle and some other angles , perhaps that would have prevented Trump from winning. ..."
"... Post Brennan the Trump administration is not only expanding the use of drones, it is also obscuring the facts about how many drones are being used, how many people are being killed by them, and where. His CIA Director Gina Haspel is certainly just as evil as Brennan and even better versed in water boarding. ..."
"... And we should not forget Brennan's role in the coup in Ukraine....does CIA still have an office on the 4th floor of SBU building in Kiev? ..."
"... If the intelligence agencies are so hostile to him, then why nominate Haspel? How does Haspel who, is connected to torture, help MAGA? How is Trump "draining the swamp" when he nominates a swamp creature (the 'choice' of the Deep State) for CIA Director? ..."
"... When "populist" Presidents (both Obama and Trump) serve the establishment instead of the people then we are, simply, being played. In fact, the American political system is organized to prevent a real popul ..."
U.S President Trump
revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan.
Good. It is probably the best things Trump has ever done. Brennan is one of the most
despicable former U.S. officials alive. He should rot in hell instead of making money off his
former status.
Besides that there is
no sound reason why anyone who does not work for the government, directly or indirectly,
should have a clearance and thereby access to state secrets. ACLU and others are
wrong in this. Revoking or keeping a security clearance has nothing to do with free speech
or first amendment rights.
Abu Jihad Brennan was the CIA's station chief in Saudi Arabia when the Khobar Towers were
bombed. Al-Qaeda did it , but
Brennan was helpful in blaming the attack on Hizbullah and Iran. He was deputy executive
director of the CIA on 9/11. That 9/11 happened was an intelligence failure or, as some have
it, an incident arranged by the deep state. Brennan was CIA chief of staff while the agency
concocted false stories about Iraqi WMD. He was within the command line that ran the CIA
torture program. It was Brennan who conspired with the Gulf dictators to hire Jihadis to
destroy Libya and to attempt the same in Syria. In short - the man was always ruthless,
incompetent and dishonest.
When Obama became president he wanted to make Brennan Director of the CIA. The Democrats in
Congress were opposed to that. Obama then made him his high priest of
targeted killings . After Obama's reelection, Brennan finally became director. He ordered
the CIA to spy on the Congress committee investigating CIA torture. He lied to Congress under
oath when he denied that it had happened. When it was proven that the CIA did what it did, he
had to apologize.
At that time a Washington Post editorial headlined
Obama should fire John Brennan . Today the Post
calls the revocation of a security clearance of a former official, who -it had opined-
should have long been fired, a "political vendetta against a career intelligence officer".
Hypocrites.
Most important was " Brennan's
ringleader role in the so-far unsuccessful attempts to derail Trump , both before and after
the 2016 election. As far as we can tell it was Brennan who concocted and launched the
conspiracy to insinuate that Trump is connected with alleged Russian influence. Brennan bet
that Hillary Clinton would win the election. He lost his bet and is now out in the cold. He
fears that his role, especially his conspiring with British security services and with the
Steele dossier, will come to light.
Since Trump became president Brennan publicly opposed him. That was a huge mistake. He is no
match for Trump. Be revoking Brennan's clearance Trump is now elevating him to 'hero' of the so
called 'resistance' against him which he connects to the deep state.
This is the Trump playbook :
[R]unning against the deep state provides Trump a rhetorical crutch. It's a built-in excuse
for failing to deliver on his 2016 campaign promises. Sitting presidents usually have to run
as incumbents. Trump can try to run for re-election as an outsider. And is there a better
poster boy for the alleged deep state than Brennan?
The idiots who express solidarity with Brennan by
offering up their security clearances confirm, simply by doing so, that there IS a deep
state cabal that is opposed to Trump. Attacking Brennan and them will help Trump to get
reelected.
Trump uses the same playbook when he attacks the "fake news media" for opposing him. He is
right in that nearly all U.S. and international editors favored Hillery Clinton over Trump.
This week 200 U.S. papers united to write editorials against Trump's attacks against the
"freedom of the press". They fell
for his trick :
Most journalists agree that there's a great need for Trump rebuttals. I've written my share.
But this [Boston] Globe -sponsored coordinated editorial response is sure to
backfire: It will provide Trump with circumstantial evidence of the existence of a national
press cabal that has been convened solely to oppose him. When the editorials roll off the
press on Thursday, all singing from the same script, Trump will reap enough fresh material to
whale on the media for at least a month. His forthcoming speeches almost write themselves:
By colluding against me, the fake media proved once and for all, that they are in cahoots
with the Democrats and have declared themselves to be my true political opposition ...
Trump is excellent in playing his domestic opponents. Brennan made a huge mistake in
publicly opposing him. He is now standing in the limelight and people will only dig further
into his role in the "Russian collusion" campaign. Yesterday Brennan authored a New York
Times Op Ed headlined
President Trump's Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash. It does not provide any evidence for
the "hogwash" claim. Brennan can not show that there was a Trump campaign collusion with Russia
or anyone else.
Richard Burr, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, gave a somewhat salty and
fitting
response :
"Director Brennan's recent statements purport to know as fact that the Trump campaign
colluded with a foreign power. If Director Brennan's statement is based on intelligence he
received while still leading the CIA, why didn't he include it in the Intelligence Community
Assessment released in 2017? If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since
leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach. If he has some other personal
knowledge of or evidence of collusion, it should be disclosed to the Special Counsel, not The New York Times .
"If, however, Director Brennan's statement is purely political and based on conjecture,
the president has full authority to revoke his security clearance as head of the Executive
Branch."
In short: "Nut up or shut up."
It is doubtful that Trump will let go of the issue. Brennan is a too juicy target to stop
shooting at it. Currently Brennan is still too valuable as an enemy for Trump to destroy him.
But once that is over Brennan's day of judgment will come. Here are high hopes that Brennan
will finally have to pay for at least one of his many crimes.
If the Democrats jump to defend Brennan, they will have fallen into another Trump Trap. They
are assuredly tone-deaf and stupid enough to take the bait.
That said, there is no deep state, there is just the state. There are factions in the
ruling class, but arbitrarily deciding one is evil is just working for the other. You are a
Trump supporter because you supposedly believe Trump is an insurgent fighting the deep state
for a democratic world order, or some such, perhaps more discreetly phrased. But this is
nonsense. The idea that people hate John Brennan so much they'll vote for Trumpery in the
midterm and 2020 because Trump is kicking the ass of their enemy...did you actually read what
you wrote here?
As far as the free speech rights of Brennan are concerned, the question is whether any
contacts with other security officials, and any other research for article, books and
speeches can be deemed as pursuing information he is not cleared for. That he could be
criminally charged or sued. This would be quite extreme, and an evil precedent when such
repressive tactics are used even within the upper ranks. What they do to each other, they'll
do to us, faster, harder and more often.
Good. It is one of the best things Trump has ever done. Brennan is one of the most
despicable former U.S. officials alive. He should rot in hell.
but, but, Nancy Pelosi said in a twit:
Revoking the security clearance of an honorable patriot is a stunning abuse of power &
a pathetic attempt to silence critics.
Whom am I to believe? (um, trick question) Thank you for the brief summary of this horrible person's career lowlites. Now I can just
point people to this piece when they ask me how can I speak against such an 'honorable
patriot'. Jeesh, these times we live.
Trump, whatever maybe said against him, is a legitimately, constitutionally elected
president. The people like Brennan working against him were not elected.
I didn't vote for Trump. I voted for Jill Stein. But, if there is a civil war, I will have
to fight for Trump's side. The oath that I swore as a naval officer was to the
Constitution.
"Brennan is one of the most despicable former U.S. officials alive.
He should rot in hell." Neither of those are reasons to remove someone's security clearance. The reasons are
documented. Try to stay on topic.
I think this is the right move and it may indeed turn out to be a political win. But before
giving Trump all the credit, it should be noted that Senator Rand Paul, a man who has
consistently been critical of US foreign policy, publicly proposed the idea of canceling
Brennan's security clearance last month.
Unfortunately, there is no limit on the numbers of despicable, warmongering, money-grubbing,
craven, destructive, maniacal creatures in government. Brennan is one such specimen. Brennan belongs in prison for subverting the Constitution.
"That said, there is no deep state, there is just the state. There are factions in the
ruling class, but arbitrarily deciding one is evil is just working for the other. You are a
Trump supporter because you supposedly believe Trump is an insurgent fighting the deep state
for a democratic world order, or some such, perhaps more discreetly phrased. "
What a strange opening gambit? There obviously is a deep state - who do you think Trump
has been battling with if it is not 'hangers on' to political power and influence, the MIC,
the Corporations, Wall St, the Fed and the Bankers (spelt with a 'W')?
Look, Brennan has now had enough time, with his 'hit-team' to clear much of his record and
trail of criminality, and he believes that he has enough backing to go after Trump. The key
is obviously the Uranium1 scam, which Mueller and Sessions appear to be stalling on big-time.
And then there's the Imran Awan / Debbie Washerwoman Shultz bonanza about to break big-time -
and you're trying to tell me that Brennan being charged or sued would be 'quite extreme, and
an evil precedent'?
Jeez, what are they feeding the trolls with these days...
Brennan is disgusting scum. May he rot.
I would prefer for all who are Ex-BigSpy,Inc to have their security clearances revoked as
soon as they become "ex." Sadly, that's apparently not how it's done. I fully disagree with a
policy of letting these "ex" types keep their security clearance as "a matter of courtesy."
Perhaps this whole kerfuffle will lead to a review of this practice and a change but not
holding my breath.
Although I kinda personally "like" it that Trump revoked Brennan's clearance, I am also
troubled by it. I don't think Trump followed proper channels, and the way it was done -- and
for the reasons stated -- are questionable. IMO, it has at least a bit of a stink of
Dictatorship about it.
Ergo, I'm not all "down" with what Trump did. Yeah, yeah, he fired a shot across the bow
of BigSpy, Inc. In some ways, that's a good thing. But as usual, Trump does this in such a
stupidly dumb and ham-handed way that it pretty much negates the potential "good" this might
do.
Just my 2 cents worth. Trump's a stooge, and nearly 100% of what he does is solely and
only to bully someone whom Trump perceives has having stood up to him (Trump). It's not so
much about Trump taking on BigSpy, Inc, in any meaningful or substantive way. It's about
Trump being a big-assed bully and throwing his considerable weight around... without
accomplishing much other than smacking down Brennan - deservedly but with no real ongoing
lasting useful effect.
Democrats are not collectively smart enough or politically astute enough to run away from
Brennan. What fools they are!
They abandoned their "working persons" base a long time ago. That, and Obama embraced
(rescued) the Republican Party after it was nearly torn asunder by Dubya Bush. Recall that
Republican affiliation was at an historic low. They needed a boot on their throats and
instead they got a hand up. A seat at the table, and often, the head of the table.
Completely revived, they (the R Party) now have carte blanche to destroy public
institutions at will.
Why did Trump nominated Gina Haspel as CIA Director? Her nomination was supported by former CIA directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and
Michael Morell, former Director of the NSA and CIA Michael Hayden, and former Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper. Draining the swamp? If Trump had taken on Brennan sooner, Haspel's nomination and confirmation might've been
moot.
Trumps connections with the Russian Mafia were certainly reason for concern. Too bad the
DeepState Media downplayed this angle and some other angles , perhaps that would have
prevented Trump from winning.
Post Brennan the Trump administration is not only expanding the use of drones, it is also
obscuring the facts about how many drones are being used, how many people are being killed by
them, and where. His CIA Director Gina Haspel is certainly just as evil as Brennan and even
better versed in water boarding.
Anyways, big whoop that Brennan lost his security clearance . I doubt he needs Food Stamps
now.
Personally I hope this gets right out of control. Drone strikes and cruse missile style !
Freandly rebels, white helmets the whole deal. bring it on and pass the popcorn !!! Dirty
scum.
lysias @27: Trump was meant to win? Obviously not by the intelligence agencies...
If the intelligence agencies are so hostile to him, then why nominate Haspel? How does Haspel who, is connected to torture, help MAGA? How is Trump "draining the swamp"
when he nominates a swamp creature (the 'choice' of the Deep State) for CIA Director?
When "populist" Presidents (both Obama and Trump) serve the establishment instead of the
people then we are, simply, being played. In fact, the American political system is organized
to prevent a real popul
As far as I am concerned, every CIA director, living or dead, is/was guilty of heinous crimes
and deserves to rot in hell. Yet it is just plain nonsense to believe that Donald Trump can
outsmart them...
"a deep state asset." How do you know that? It could be just as well that Trump is
fighting this group by outsmarting them with the long game, a la Putin. (i.e. mixed signals
and not acting too brashly in undoing the cabal)
"a faux populist." Even if he was a faux populist, which he might exhibit shades
of, how does this make him a bad president at this current juncture in US history? Would you
accept that a good president could not be a populist? IMO, he appears to be scrambling the
cohesive unity and appearance of America's FP and putting the pressure on the seams of NATO
and the UN so that they may eventually tear. Whatever your opinion of the UN, one can not
argue against its ineffectual weight in ongoing atrocity (Syria, Yemen), but one COULD argue
that it has been an agent of or has at least been coopted by the NWO.
I believe you are proceeding from these two points in your thinking that need to be
reevaluated.
In your prior post @13, you equate selecting Gina Haspel as director of the CIA as further
proof of Trump's assured malfeasance. Have you considered that:
1) she may be ineffectual and so on Trump's leash at the CIA
2) in her prior years under the shadow of Brennan, her promotions might have been
politically-motivated and so it is understandable that a globalist like Brennan would vote in
lockstep their approval of Haspel because "GIRL POWER!" .
3) it might not be as simple as that to say that just because one is brought up in Brennan's
CIA and then ascends to its heights that she will do globalist/Brennan bidding as a
sleeper-agent in her position.
I agree with everything expressed here about Brennan but while Trump is getting rid of one
war criminal, he's bedding another; oligarch friend Erik Prince aka Blackwater ceo, aka exCIA
operative who he wants to put in charge in Afghanistan. Trump could care less of your noble
reasons for hating Brennan. Trump is no genius who gives a damn about human rights
violations. Trump only cares about number one; HIMSELF.
So what's the difference between Brennan and Prince? Only the size of their bank account.
When Trump does something right as in Brennan's case you can always thank his big fat ego;
self-promotion or self-preservation; SELF being the operative word. To compensate for that
accidental right move he'll make a collosal dumb move as in North Korea vs Iran as in Brennan
vs Erik Prince. I rest my case.
The enemy of my enemy is also an enemy in this case. It pains me to agree with Trump on any
issue. Brennan is a thug. His physiognomy gives him away at a glance. To say he is no match
for Trump is not correct. He is no match for the power of the presidency. Trump can't handle
this power, either, which is why he is going down for laundering money for Russians and for
colluding with them to win the election, which is not to say the Russians rigged the
election. Nor is not to say the Russians are enemies, as Obama and the CIA have struggled to
establish. This is to say that Trump is impulsive, ignorant, solipsistic, and corrupt to the
bone.
I have heard rumour that while he was CIA Station Chief in Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s,
John Brennan converted to Wahhabi Islam. Is anyone able to say if this is true?
The only sources of information on this rumour are a former FBI counter-terrorism agent
John Guandolo and a retired CIA senior official Brad Johnson (who has admitted that he has
never heard Brennan say the shahada - the profession of faith, that the only God is Allah and
Muhammad is his prophet - but knows people in the CIA who apparently have heard Brennan say
the shahada in front of Saudi and US government officials).
Brennan is one of the most despicable former U.S. officials alive.
Indeed. It's possible that the misdeeds listed in the article have not begun to measure
the man's wickedness.
I think it's a good time to mention The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the
Global Drug Trade by Alfred McCoy. (I am not posting a link as the URL is too long.) As
the title says, the book is about how deeply the CIA is involved in the global drug
trade.
What are the chances that former CIA Director Brennan is/was one of the gangsters causing
the current opioid and heroin epidemic in the U.S.?
Why would he have a security clearance if he was no longer a member of the government?
None of them should
I cannot understand the logic of it all,
Hillary Clinton for example - she has one I believe.
Rather bizarre isn't it?
Just asking.
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @
nytimes , @ NBCNews , @ ABC , @ CBS , @ CNN
) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People! ~ Donald Trump
On Thursday, Mr. Trump expressed his distaste for journalists in more populist terms, saying,
"much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles in particular, speaks
not for the people, but for the special interests."
"The public doesn't believe you people anymore," Mr. Trump added. "Now, maybe I had something
to do with that. I don't know. But they don't believe you."
President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and ongoing fabrications of
the mass media. Never before has a President so forcefully identified the lies of the leading
print and TV outlets. The NY Times , Washington Post , the Financial
Times, NBC, CNN, ABC and CBS have been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the
larger public. They have lost legitimacy and trust. Where progressives have failed, a war
monger billionaire has accomplished, speaking a truth to serve many injustices.
"... I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media. ..."
I posted this one to my facebook page three or four days ago. It's brilliant. I have a few comments. First, I disagree with the
analysis given by the fellow from the Duran in the introduction, something along the lines of "even Anderson Cooper was smirking
because Cohen was demolishing Boot so badly".
If you pay attention to the questions and statements, you find that Cooper is equally as unhinged as Boot is, first hammering
on the point that nobody knows what was discussed in the meeting, then after Cohen rattles off a list, Cooper shifts to the "you're
believing Vladimir Putin on this" tactic, a nail that Cohen wisely smashes with a hammering statement, "I don't want to shock
you, but I believe Vladimir Putin on several things."
Cooper continues to insist that the content of the meeting is unknown and unconfirmed, regardless of what Putin and Trump say.
The sheer hubris of journalists today is unprecedented and outrageous.
I do admit that Cooper shuts up after being schooled by Cohen a second and third time and after Boot makes the mistake of calling
Cohen an apologist for Putin and Russia. This leads me to a second point.
I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists,
especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news"
and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media.
\This would accomplish two important things, both necessary, in my opinion. First, it would put the front line journalists
into their correct place, telling them that they are really nothing but mouthpieces, and we know that the real decisions on content
are not made by them.
What a blow to their narcisstic self-esteem that would be!
Second, it would give the American people more information on how their consent is engineered, how the media has owners
who have an agenda, and that agenda is not related to improving the lives of the American people, or even keeping them informed
with accurate information.
For several years, a family of foreign nationals (and not only Wassermannn-Schultz) has
been surfing the congressional computers while having no security clearance.
Both Debbie and Hillary should be in federal prison already. Clinton used to be fond of
droning Assange for divulging the criminal and illegal activities of the state. What Debbie
and Hillary did has been much more dangerous to the US national security.
"... Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in case of future "meddling," and John McCain , still desperate to take the rest of the world with him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the "disgraceful" display of two heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon has invested a lot of time and money in positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable hole . Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash , motherfucker. ..."
"... The Intelligence Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and crickets. ..."
The Helsinki hysteria shone a spotlight on the utter impotence of the establishment media
and their Deep State controllers to make their delusions reality. Never before has there been
such a gaping chasm visible between the media's "truth" and the facts on the ground. Pundits
compared the summit to Pearl Harbor and
9/11 , with some even reaching for the brass ring of the Holocaust by likening it to
Kristallnacht , while
polls revealed the American people reallydidn't care .
Worse, it laid bare the collusion between the media and their Deep State handlers –
the central dissemination point for the headlines, down to the same phrases, that led to every
outlet claiming Trump had "thrown the Intelligence Community under the bus" by refusing to
embrace the Russia-hacked-our-democracy narrative during his press conference with Putin.
Leaving aside the sudden ubiquity of "Intelligence Community" in our national discourse –
as if this network of spies and murderous thugs is Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood – no one
seriously believes every pundit came up with "throws under the bus" as the proper way of
describing that press conference.
The same central control was apparent in the unanimous condemnations of Putin – that
he murders
journalists , breaks
international agreements , uses bannedchemical
weapons ,
kills women and children
in Syria , and, of course,
meddles in elections . For every single establishment pundit to exhibit such a breathtaking
lack of insight into their own government's misdeeds is highly unlikely. Many of these same
talking heads remarked in horror on Sinclair Broadcasting's Orwellian "prepared statement"
issuing forth from the mouths of hundreds of stations' anchors at once. Et tu, Anderson
Cooper?
The media frenzy was geared toward sparking a popular revolt, with tensions already running
high from the previous media frenzy about family separation at the border (though only one
MSNBC segment seemed to recall that they should still care about that, and belatedly included
some footage of kids
behind a fence wrapped in Mylar blankets). Rachel Maddow , armed with the crocodile tears that
served her so well during the family-separation fracas, exhorted her faithful cultists to
do something.
Meanwhile, national-security neanderthal John Brennan all but called for a coup, condemning the
president for the unspeakable "high crimes and misdemeanors" of seeking to improve relations
with the world's second-largest nuclear power. He called on Pompeo and Bolton, the two biggest
warmongers in a Trump administration bristling with warmongers, to resign in protest. This
would have been a grand slam for world peace, but alas, it was not to be. Even those two
realize what a has-been Brennan is.
Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring
the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in
her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in
case of future "meddling," and John McCain , still desperate to take the rest of the world with
him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the "disgraceful" display of two
heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon
has invested a lot of time and money in
positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice
with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the
American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable
hole . Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash , motherfucker.
Trump's grip on his long-elusive spine was only temporary, and he held another press
conference upon returning home to reiterate his trust in the intelligence agencies that have
made no secret of their utter loathing for him since day one. When the lights went out at the
climactic moment, it became clear for anyone who still hadn't gotten the message who was
running the show here (and Trump, to his credit, actually joked about it). The Intelligence
Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the
media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and crickets.
On to the Playmates .
Sacha Baron Cohen 's latest series, "Who is America," targeted Ted Koppel for one segment.
Koppel cut the interview short after smelling a rat and expressed his
high-minded concern that Cohen's antics would hurt Americans' trust in reporters. But after
a week of the entire media establishment screaming that the sky is falling while the heavens
remain firmly in place, Cohen is clearly the least of their problems. At least he's funny.
*
Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. She covers
politics, sociology, and other anthropological/cultural phenomena. Helen has a BA in Journalism
from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University.
Find more of her work at http://www.helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski .
"... After the Creation of the "CIA" Unelected, Unconstitutional CIA Intelligence Agency Interfered In Foreign Presidential Elections At Least 81 Times In 54 Years. The US was found to have interfered in foreign elections at least 81 times in 31 countries between 1946 and 2000 – not counting Libya, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, The US-backed military coups or regime change efforts, Proxy-Wars. Just saying ..."
"... Tucker Carlson has been analyzing policies/ideas on a deeper level this year. He is painting US a big picture for us to see. It's quite refreshing to see Fox News actually allow objective truth be aired on on occasion. ..."
"... The Intelligence Agencies are the Praetorian Guard in the United States. ..."
"... Party politics is a means of control. When you come to realize that we all have a tendency to agree that the major issues have no party loyalty, and we're all on the same side, you can look past minor differences and move forward to working for the greater good... ..."
"... I just saw another Tucker Carlson news clip that Tony Podesta is offered immunity to testify against Paul Manafort? WTF? Why aren't Podestas charged?! ..."
"... Neocons, military industrial complex and liberal leftists have penetrated deeply into the government intelligence communities, wall street banking, both houses of Us congress, mainstream media as well as Hollywood people, even in an academia. This country is deep sh*t. I am surprised liberal leftists have not crucified Tucker Carlson yet for speaking out. ..."
"... Russiagate is DemoKKKrat horse cookies. Putin is correct. DemoKKKrats are bad losers. $1.2 billion gone, servers gone! ..."
Guys Did you know: After the Creation of the "CIA" Unelected, Unconstitutional CIA
Intelligence Agency Interfered In Foreign Presidential Elections At Least 81 Times In 54
Years. The US was found to have interfered in foreign elections at least 81 times in 31
countries between 1946 and 2000 – not counting Libya, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, The
US-backed military coups or regime change efforts, Proxy-Wars. Just saying.
¯\_(^)_/¯
Tucker Carlson is a special character. 95% of time i disagree with Tucker but 5% of time
he's just exceptionally good. In April his 8 minute monologue was epic. I love Jimmy Dore's
passion... specially when he pronounes "they're lying!!!" Jimmy clearly hates liars ;-) We
love you Jimmy for your integrity and intelligence.
Weapons of mass destruction, 9/11, Bin Laden, Lybia, Gulf of Tonkin, Opium fields in
Afghanistan, Operation Mockingbird, Operation Paperclip..... A few reasons not to trust your
CIA and FBI. I am sure you guys can name some more.
Tucker Carlson has been analyzing policies/ideas on a deeper level this year. He is
painting US a big picture for us to see. It's quite refreshing to see Fox News actually allow
objective truth be aired on on occasion.
Pulling off the partisan blinders is the first step toward enlightenment... Party politics
is a means of control. When you come to realize that we all have a tendency to agree that the
major issues have no party loyalty, and we're all on the same side, you can look past minor
differences and move forward to working for the greater good...
THE CIA HAS BEEN OVERTHROWING GOVERMENTS FOR DECADES,and you wonder why Trump doesn't
trust them? It's because he doesn't want war. He ain't no saint but at least we have an anti
war President.
Morning Joe's panel said today that the Democrats need to run on this Russia conspiracy
theory, and nothing else, in order to win the midterms. If they bring up free college or
medicare for all it will "weaken their message and confuse the voters". Once again the
corporate neoliberal warmonger Democrats and their rich TV puppets are setting us up for
failure, no voter gives a damn about Russia, MSNBC wants our progressive candidates to lose
instead of reform their corrupt party!
I think what has happened to the Liberals, is that for decades and decades they were the
most progressive, tolerant party. They really did want to do more for the people and tried to
introduce things that the right would instantly point to and call "socialist!!" Corporations
started to look at these liberals as representatives they could pay off but without suspect,
unlike Republicans, who were widely known to accept money from Corporations, Big Pharma and
huge construction companies (Haliburton anyone?).
Over time, Liberals saw the benefits of
being chummy with these same big $$ companies and voted on bills, etc in the ways that would
make these corps very happy and more profitable. No one wanted to believe that Liberals were
doing the same thing as Republicans but now we know they are. It's not a secret anymore. Most
politicians aren't in it to make their country, their state or their cities better; they're
in it to make their bank accounts unbelievably huge and that's it. They're greedy people with
no integrity, pretending to serve the people.
I'm a righty, and I'm so surprised to see a liberal agree with Tucker in all the things I
care about! Imagine what we could accomplish if we put aside our differences for a time and
work on what we agree on! No more immoral wars for Israel! TRY BUSH, CHENEY, AND ALL NEOCONS
THAT LED US TO WAR WITH IRAQ FOR TREASON!!
You are so right. Thank you for bringout the truth. Neocons, military industrial complex
and liberal leftists have penetrated deeply into the government intelligence communities,
wall street banking, both houses of Us congress, mainstream media as well as Hollywood people,
even in an academia. This country is deep sh*t. I am surprised liberal leftists have not
crucified Tucker Carlson yet for speaking out.
Russiagate is DemoKKKrat horse cookies. Putin is correct. DemoKKKrats are bad losers. $1.2
billion gone, servers gone! DmoKKKrats cannot even prove climate change
"... By creating an extremely anti-communist state, the elite will never have to worry about losing control over society because their wealth and power remains safe and sound. ..."
It is an evolution of conspiracy theory, not requiring any kind of convoluted logic or
story telling that used to be required for conspiracy theory to stick. Fake News allows for
simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without
examination.
Here's an ad about COCs (PDF) from
1942. They're used for tanning leather, in soaps and perfumes, as insect repellents, for
dying cloth, as antiseptics, and for many, many other commercial and industrial
purposes.
Damn those Syrian butchers for dropping perfume on civilians!
Fake News is the 21st century version of Conspiracy Theory.
It is an evolution of conspiracy theory, not requiring any kind of convoluted logic or
story telling that used to be required for conspiracy theory to stick. Fake News allows
for simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without
examination.
@The Voice In the
Wilderness In the dim reaches of pre-history, when Walter Cronkite was reporting, a
real journalist wouldn't report that someone launched a chemical weapons attack unless the
journalist had at least two credible, independent sources providing solid evidence that the
story was true. Newspaper editors and television producers knew their reputations were on the
line and that their competitors would make sure the egg on their face stuck if they reported
something blatantly wrong.
Nowadays, there are no competitors, because journalists and news outlets are mostly
hanging out together in one big cheery cartel, every member of which will defend every other
member to protect the reputation of the whole. The goal is not to outdo competitors and gain
more eyeballs or a greater distribution or greater authority over public opinion. The goal is
to defend the status quo by any means necessary, while somehow maintaining the credibility of
the press.
But no, they shouldn't have published a story that Assad had launched a chemical weapons
attack unless they had a significant amount of solid evidence that it was true.
I have a hard time understanding how people can even begin to credit this crap, given how
close it is to what they told us about Saddam Hussein. But it's actually even worse, because
at least Hussein did, at one time, use chemical weapons on the Kurds. I mean, at least he did
it once, even if he didn't have weapons of mass destruction ready to aim at Israel, or the
Saudis, or the U.S.
#7
It was big news. But failure to report it as false with just as much (or more) attention
and timing was journalistic malpractice. They should have been outraged to have been
conned into spreading false propaganda. IF they were legitimate journalists.
@Cant Stop the
Macedonian Signal
I don't know that anyone waits for confirmation anymore. And the two sources could
be the CIA and VOA or one of their tame journalists.
Credibility is in the eye of the beholder. After they all jumped on Saddam's WMD one can
hardly compare them with Cronkite.
I do remember web blogs asking to please wait for the UN inspectors report. When that
report did come out, anyone with integrity, even if not a professional journalist, would have
highlighted that report and retracted the original and not figuratively bury it on page
56.
But we are substantially together on this. They reported is as fact not as an
unsubstantiated claim.
Chomsky's Five News Filters: A little dated but a good starting point.
The first filter is Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation of the Mass Media. Mainstream
media is essentially owned by corporations and the government, because those are the very
agents who fund them. Any favourable studies, studies or information that the government or
corporations want the public to know (or don't want them to know) either ends up being aired
or buried as a result.
The second filter is Advertising License to do Business. Mass media isn't interested in
attracting viewers to educate them, but rather to sell them on something. They're more
interested in engaging an audience with higher buying power than actually making a difference
through education and information. Chomsky provides an excellent example, explaining: "CBS proudly tells its shareholders that while it "continuously seeks to maximize audience
delivery," it has developed a new "sales tool" with which it approaches advertisers: "Client
Audience Profile, or CAP, will help advertisers optimize the effectiveness of their network
television schedules by evaluating audience segments in proportion to usage levels of
advertisers' products and services." In short, the mass media are interested in attracting
audiences with buying power, not audiences per se."
The third filter is Sourcing Mass-Media News. Whatever is aired on mass media needs to be
100% credible, meaning it's viewers need to completely trust what's being aired, without the
need of them using their critical thinking skills. Since the majority of the public trusts
the government and mass corporations, AKA the propaganda machines, most of the "news worthy"
content comes from them. Plus, whatever's aired needs to be approved by corporations or the
government and/or mass media must avoid airing anything that would offend their contributors
and funders.
The fourth filter is Flak and the Enforcers. "Flak" refers to negative responses to a
media statement or program aired on the network. Perhaps the most influential producers of
flak are corporations and the government. Corporations have created large scale organizations
whose sole purpose is to produce flak. The government is also a large producer of flak, as it
constantly corrects or threatens the media based on their interests.
The final filter is Anticommunism as a Control Mechanism. Everything at home seems to be a
lesser evil if there's something on the news that seems much worse (fake terrorist attacks,
false enemies, and/or "radical" states). Anything that sounds too left can also be dismissed
if it sounds too much like "communism." By creating an extremely anti-communist state, the
elite will never have to worry about losing control over society because their wealth and
power remains safe and sound.
@fakenews
namely big, opinion-policing non-profits and their lobbyists and followers, ranging from
religious denominations, to AIPAC and the NRA, to the ADL and SPLC.
Looks like MIC is a cancel of the society for which there is no cure....
While this jeremiad raises several valid point the key to understanding the situation should
be understanding of the split of the Us elite into two camp with Democratic party (representing
interests of Wall Street) and large part of intelligence communality fighting to neoliberal
status quo and Pentagon, some part of old money, part of trade unions (especially rank and file
members) and a pert of Republican Party (representing interests of the military) realizing that
neoliberalism came to the natural end and it is time for change which includes downsizing of the
American empire.
This bitter internal struggle in which neoliberals so far have an upper hand over Trump
administration and forced him into retreat.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump is a traitor because he wants peace with Russia. ..."
"... The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans, as well as the rest of the world, desperately need to notice the extremely hostile reaction to peace on the part of the US Democratic Party, many members of the Republican Party, including the despicable US Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the Western Presstitute Media, a collection of people on the CIA payroll according to the German newspaper editor, Udo Ulfkotte, and the CIA itself. ..."
"... Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of the corrupt filth that rules over us are all in the pay of the military/security complex. Just go and investigate the donations to their re-election campaigns. The 1,000 billion dollar budget of the military/security complex, amplified by the CIA's front corporations and narcotics business, provides enormous sums with which to purchase the senators and representatives that the insouciant American voters think that they elect. ..."
"... Therefore, the American public gets not representation, but lies that justify war and conflict. The military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned the American people to no effect, is in desperate need of an enemy. In obedience to the military/security complex, the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have made Russia that enemy. If Trump and Putin do not understand this, they will easily be made irrelevant. ..."
"... They both can be assassinated, and that is what the statements from Pelosi, Schumer, McCain, Lindsey Graham, et. al., repeated endlessly in the propaganda ministry that is the Western press, encourages. ..."
"... The Supply-Side Revolution ..."
"... When the combination of tax cuts with defense budget cuts came up for a vote, the legendary senator Strom Thurmond, a 48-year member of the US Senate from South Carolina, tapped me on the shoulder. He said: "son, never set your senator up against the military/security complex. He will not be re-elected, and you will be out of a job." I replied that we were just establishing for the record that under no conditions would the Democrats, who wanted more government, vote for a tax rate reduction even if there was a case that it would cure stagflation. He replied: "son, the military/security complex doesn't care." ..."
"... Later as a member of a secret presidential committee, I saw how the CIA attempted to prevent President Reagan from ending the Cold War. ..."
"... Today, right now, at this moment, we are faced with a massive effort of the military/security complex, the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, and the presstitute media to discredit the elected President of the United States and to overthrow him in order that the utterly corrupt elite that rule American can continue to hold on to power and to protect the massive budget of the military/security complex that, along with the Israel Lobby, funds the elections of those who rule us. ..."
"... There is no institution in America, government or private, that can be trusted. Any government or person who trusts America or any Western country is stupid beyond belief. ..."
"... The entire Russiagate hoax is an orchestration by the military/security complex, led by John Brennen, Comey, and Rosenstein. The purpose is to discredit President trump for two reasons. One is to prevent any normalization of relations with Russia. The other is to remove Trump's agenda as an alternative to the agenda of the Democratic Party. ..."
"... President Trump is almost powerless. Putin, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans should recognize this before it is too late for them. President Trump cannot fire and arrest for high treason Mueller and Rosenstein. ..."
"... Reckless and irresponsible comments about treason from former CIA director Brennan, and other ranking public figures, echo similar inflammatory rhetoric from far-right-wing rabble rouser Gen. Edwin Walker, and other members of the John Birch Society, in the days before Pres. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. ..."
"... What's going on in the United States of America beats the band what happened under Joe McCarthy. The witch hunt against a sitting President by 95 percent of the media, major government institutions such as the criminal CIA, FBI, DOJ and the rest of the crooked Intel community plus the rascals in the US Congress can only happen in a totalitarian society, which the US is. ..."
"... The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many subordinate political Mafiosi should be put behind bars instead of running from one TV station to the next and lay the ground for a possibly Trump assassination. ..."
"... As Mr. Rogers correctly states, President Trump is almost powerless. These US fools even try to breed discord between the so-called nationalists and the globalists in Russia for which Medvedev stays. He once served US interests more than Russian ones when he was Prime Minister and got flattered by the ineffable Bill Clinton. ..."
"... So what do we see now ? Putin aiding Trump in steering the USA away from trying to control the whole world, an effort that is destroying the USA, but Deep State does not mind. In this way Russia indeed meddles in USA politics. Trump now invited Putin to come to Washington, the MH17 statement is withheld, the hysteria at CNN is such that MH17 is not even mentioned. In stead: Trump must be mentally deranged. ..."
"... Gore Vidal said there's only one party in America, it's the Money Party and it has two branches. It is even more true today than when he said it. There is no Left or Right anymore, only the question, is it good for Israel? And the American people be damned. ..."
"... Trump is completely powerless to do anything about these two. And this has gone on for a year and a half. ..."
"... It's clear though that Trump believes he has forced his opponents to play a bad hand in their outlandish craze the past week. It's why he doubled down and invited Putin to Washington near the 2018 election time. He perceives this as a chance to re-enact the 2016 election and coast to victory. The establishment is insane, and if he brings their insanity out it plays to his favor. ..."
The US Democratic Party is determined to take the world to thermo-nuclear war rather than to
admit that Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election fair and square. The Democratic Party
was totally corrupted by the Clinton Regime, and now it is totally insane. Leaders of the
Democratic Party, such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, my former co-author in the New York
Times, have responded in a non-Democratic way to the first step President Trump has taken to
reduce the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia that the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama
regimes created between the two superpowers.
Yes, Russia is a superpower. Russian weapons are so superior to the junk produced by the
waste-filled US military/security complex that lives high off the hog on the insouciant
American taxpayer that it is questionable if the US is even a second class military power. If
the insane neoconservatives, such as Max Boot, William Kristol, and the rest of the neocon scum
get their way, the US, the UK, and Europe will be a radioactive ruin for thousands of
years.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (CA), Minority Leader of the US House of
Representatives, declared that out of fear of some undefined retribution from Putin, a dossier
on Trump perhaps, the President of the United States sold out the American people to Russia
because he wants to make peace: "It begs the question, what does Vladimir Putin, what do the
Russians have on Donald Trump -- personally, politically and financially that he should behave
in such a manner?" The "such a manner" Pelosi is speaking about is making peace instead of
war.
To be clear, the Democratic Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives has accused
Donald Trump of high treason against the United States. There is no outcry against this
blatantly false accusation, totally devoid of evidence. The presstitute media instead of
protesting this attempt at a coup against the President of the United States, trumpet the
accusation as self-evident truth. Trump is a traitor because he wants peace with
Russia.
Here is Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (NY) repeating Pelosi's false accusation: "Millions
of Americans will continue to wonder if the only possible explanation for this dangerous
behavior is the possibility that President Putin holds damaging information over President
Trump." If you don't believe that this is orchestrated between Pelosi and Schumer, you are
stupid beyond belief.
Here is disgraced Obama CIA director John Brennan, a leader of the fake Russiagate campaign
against President Trump in order to prevent Trump from making peace with Russia and, thus, by
making the world safer, threatening the massive, unjustified budget of the military/security
complex: "Donald Trump's press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the
threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were
Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are
you???"
NOTICE THAT NOT ONE WESTERN MEDIA SOURCE IS CELEBRATING AND THANKING TRUMP AND PUTIN FOR
EASING THE ARTIFICIALLY CREATED TENSIONS THAT WERE LEADING TO NUCLEAR WAR. HOW CAN THIS BE? HOW
CAN IT BE THAT THE WESTERN MEDIA IS SO OPPOSED TO PEACE? WHAT IS THE EXPLANATION?
The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans, as well as the rest of
the world, desperately need to notice the extremely hostile reaction to peace on the part of
the US Democratic Party, many members of the Republican Party, including the despicable US
Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the Western Presstitute Media, a
collection of people on the CIA payroll according to the German newspaper editor, Udo Ulfkotte,
and the CIA itself.
Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of the corrupt
filth that rules over us are all in the pay of the military/security complex. Just go and
investigate the donations to their re-election campaigns. The 1,000 billion dollar budget of
the military/security complex, amplified by the CIA's front corporations and narcotics
business, provides enormous sums with which to purchase the senators and representatives that
the insouciant American voters think that they elect.
Do you know how large 1,000 billion is? You would have to live for thousands of years and do
nothing for 24/7 except count to reach that figure. It is a sum that nurtures the recipients,
and the recipients regard it as worth protecting.
Therefore, the American public gets not representation, but lies that justify war and
conflict. The military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned the American
people to no effect, is in desperate need of an enemy. In obedience to the military/security
complex, the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have made Russia that enemy. If Trump
and Putin do not understand this, they will easily be made irrelevant.
They both can be assassinated, and that is what the statements from Pelosi, Schumer,
McCain, Lindsey Graham, et. al., repeated endlessly in the propaganda ministry that is the
Western press, encourages. Trump can be assassinated or overthrown in a political coup for
selling out America to Russia, as members of both political parties claim and as the media
trumpets endlessly. Putin can be easily assassinated by the CIA operatives that the Russian
government stupidly permits to operate throughout Russia in NGOs and Western/US owned media and
among the Atlanticist Integrationists, Washington's Firth Column inside Russia serving
Washington's purposes. These Russian traitors serve in Putin's own government!
ORDER IT NOW
Americans are so unaware that they have no idea of the risk that President Trump is taking
by challenging the US military security complex. For example, during the last half of the 1970s
I was a member of the US Senate staff. I was working together with a staffer of the US
Republican Senator from California, S. I. Hayakawa, to advance understanding of a supply-side
economic policy cure to the stagflation that threatened the US budget's ability to meet its
obligations. Republican Senators Hatch, Roth, and Hayakawa were trying to introduce a
supply-side economic policy as a cure for the stagflation that was threatening the US economy
with failure. The Democrats, who later in the Senate led the way to a supply-side policy, were,
at this time, opposed (see Paul Craig Roberts, The Supply-Side Revolution , Harvard
University Press, 1984). The Democrats claimed that the policy would worsen the budget deficit,
the only time in those days Democrats cared about the budget deficit. The Democrats said that
they would support the tax rate reductions if the Republicans would support offsetting cuts in
the budget to support a balanced budget. This was a ploy to put Republicans on the spot for
taking away some groups' handouts in order "to cut tax rates for the rich."
The supply-side policy did not require budget cuts, but in order to demonstrate the
Democrats lack of sincerety, Hayakawa's aid and I had our senators introduce a series of budget
cuts together with tax cuts that, on a static revenue basis (not counting tax revenue feedbacks
from the incentives of the lower tax rates) kept the budget even, and the Democrats voted
against them every time.
When the combination of tax cuts with defense budget cuts came up for a vote, the
legendary senator Strom Thurmond, a 48-year member of the US Senate from South Carolina, tapped
me on the shoulder. He said: "son, never set your senator up against the military/security
complex. He will not be re-elected, and you will be out of a job." I replied that we were just
establishing for the record that under no conditions would the Democrats, who wanted more
government, vote for a tax rate reduction even if there was a case that it would cure
stagflation. He replied: "son, the military/security complex doesn't care."
My emergence from The Matrix began with Thurmond's pat on my shoulder. It grew with my time
at the Wall Street Journal when I learned that some truthful things simply could not be said.
In the Treasury I experienced how those outside interests opposed to a president's policy
marshall their forces and the media that they own to block it. Later as a member of a
secret presidential committee, I saw how the CIA attempted to prevent President Reagan from
ending the Cold War.
Today, right now, at this moment, we are faced with a massive effort of the
military/security complex, the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, and the presstitute
media to discredit the elected President of the United States and to overthrow him in order
that the utterly corrupt elite that rule American can continue to hold on to power and to
protect the massive budget of the military/security complex that, along with the Israel Lobby,
funds the elections of those who rule us. Trump, like Reagan, was an exception, and it is
the exceptions that accumulate the ire of the corrupt leftwing, bought off with money, and the
ire of the media, concentrated into small tight ownership groups indebted to those who
permitted the illegal concentration of a once independent and diverse American media that once
served, on occasion, as a watchdog over government. The rightwing, wrapped in the flag,
dismisses all truth as "anti-American."
If Putin, Lavrov, the Russian government, the traitorous Russian Fifth Column -- the
Atlanticist Integrationists -- the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans think that any
peace or consideration can come out of America, they are insane. Their delusions are setting
themselves up for destruction. There is no institution in America, government or private,
that can be trusted. Any government or person who trusts America or any Western country is
stupid beyond belief.
The entire Russiagate hoax is an orchestration by the military/security complex, led by
John Brennen, Comey, and Rosenstein. The purpose is to discredit President trump for two
reasons. One is to prevent any normalization of relations with Russia. The other is to remove
Trump's agenda as an alternative to the agenda of the Democratic Party.
President Trump is almost powerless. Putin, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North
Koreans should recognize this before it is too late for them. President Trump cannot fire and
arrest for high treason Mueller and Rosenstein. And Trump cannot indict Hillary for her
numerous unquestionable crimes in plain view of everyone, or Comey or Brennan, who declares
Trump "to be wholly in the pocket of Putin," for trying to overthrow the elected president of
the United States. Trump cannot have the Secret Service question the likes of Pelosi and
Schumer and McCain and Lindsey Graham for false accusations that encourage assassination of the
President of the United States.
Trump cannot even trust the Secret Service, which accumulated evidence suggests was
complicit in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.
If Putin and Lavrov, so anxious to be friends of Washington, let their guards down, they are
history.
As I said above, Russiagate is an orchestratration to prevent peace between the US and
Russia. Leading military/security complex experts, including the person who provided the CIA's
daily briefing of the President of the United States for many years, and the person who devised
the spy program for the National Security Agency, have proven conclusively that Russiagate is a
hoax designed for the purpose of preventing President Trump from normalizing relations between
the US and Russia, which has the power to destroy the entirety of the Western World at
will.
If Putin doesn't listen to him, Russia is in the trash can of history.
Keep in mind that no media informs you better than my website. If my website goes down, you
will be left in darkness. No valid information comes from the US government or the Western
presstitutes. If you sit in front of the TV screen watching the Western media, you are
brainwashed beyond all hope. Not even I can rescue you. Nor God himself.
Americans, and indeed the Russians themselves, are incapable of realizing it, but there is a
chance that Trump will be overthrown and a Western assault will be launched against the handful
of countries that insist on sovereignty.
I doubt that few of the Americans who elected Trump will be taken in by the anti-Trump
propagana, but they are not organized and have no armed power. The police, militarized by
George W. Bush and Obama, will be set against them. The rebellions will be local and suppressed
by every violation of the US Constitution by the private powers that rule Washington, as always
has been the case with rebellions in America.
In the West, which the Russians are so anxious to join, all freedoms are dead -- freedom of
assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom of privacy,
freedom from arbitrary search, freedom from arbitrary arrest, along with the Constitutional
protections of due process and habeas corpus. Today there are no countries less free than the
United States of America.
Why do the Russian Atlanticist Integrationists want to join an unfree Western world? Are
they that brainwashed by Western Propaganda?
If Putin listens to these deluded fools, Putin will destroy Russia.
There is something wrong with Russian perception of Washington. Apparently the Russian
elite, with the exception of Shoigu and a few others are incapable of comprehending the
neoconservative drive for US world hegemony and the neoconservative determination to destroy
Russia as a constraint on US unilateralism. The Russian government somehow, despite all
evidence to the contrary, believes that Washington's hegemony is negotiable. (Republished from
PaulCraigRoberts.org by permission of author or representative)
is big question even if Trump wants peace at all. Trump has shown his real face on the very
beginning when he said that they are going to talk about "his friend" Xi, making Putin very
uncomfortable and throwing some worms in Russia~China relationship in front of cameras for
all to see
Trump came to the meeting in hope to impress Putin with his cowboy arrogance, He now says
that he'll be Putin's worst enemy ( if he don't bow to him I guess : ). all Trump cares about
is his ego, nothing else too sweat mouthed sleazy person
Reckless and irresponsible comments about treason from former CIA director Brennan, and
other ranking public figures, echo similar inflammatory rhetoric from far-right-wing rabble
rouser Gen. Edwin Walker, and other members of the John Birch Society, in the days before
Pres. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
What's going on in the United States of America beats the band what happened under Joe
McCarthy. The witch hunt against a sitting President by 95 percent of the media, major
government institutions such as the criminal CIA, FBI, DOJ and the rest of the crooked Intel
community plus the rascals in the US Congress can only happen in a totalitarian society,
which the US is.
The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many subordinate
political Mafiosi should be put behind bars instead of running from one TV station to the
next and lay the ground for a possibly Trump assassination. Trump is portrayed by these
crooks as a "traitor." In the US, traitors usefully deserve death. If these political Mafiosi
don't bring down Trump "legally," they will hire a kind of Lee Harvey Oswald who "shot"
JFK.
As Mr. Rogers correctly states, President Trump is almost powerless. These US fools
even try to breed discord between the so-called nationalists and the globalists in Russia for
which Medvedev stays. He once served US interests more than Russian ones when he was Prime
Minister and got flattered by the ineffable Bill Clinton.
Let's wait and see what happens in the upcoming mid-term elections. If the Dems win both
Houses of Congress, Trump is done. The obstructionists will have the upper hand. If they
can't remove him from office "legally," there will be a hitman out there somewhere.
President smugly making peace with the Russian nation that was supposed to be the evil enemy
in a 3rd and final brother war to devastate the white race beyond recovery.
Little upstart in the Democrat party making left wing politics less palatable to the
masses with her heavy handed socialist rhetoric. All while preaching BDS and anti-Israel
sentiment too, representing Frankenstein's CultMarx monster turning on it's creator.
And fewer and fewer people on all sides buying what the American Pravda is selling with
each passing day. The resulting hysteria is both par for the course and downright
delectable.
" Apparently the Russian elite, with the exception of Shoigu and a few others are incapable
of comprehending the neoconservative drive for US world hegemony and the neoconservative
determination to destroy Russia as a constraint on US unilateralism. " My idea is that many
in Russia understand quite well, this is why they demonstrate Russia's military capabilities
frequently. Why does Putin support Assad and Syria ? Not because he likes these countries,
but because he understands that if these countries also get the USA yoke the position of
Russia and China deteriorate.
Putin is careful not to give USA public opinion more 'reason' to fear Russia. Already a
few years ago something fell into the E part of the Mediterranean. It was asserted that
Russia had intercepted a USA missile fired from Spain to Syria. USA and Israel declared that
an excercise had been held. Putin said nothing.
Despite all that NATO does at Russia's borders Putin does not let himself be provoked.
MH17, I suppose Putin knows quite well what happened, Russia has radar and satelites, yet
Putin never gave the Russian view.
So what do we see now ? Putin aiding Trump in steering the USA away from trying to
control the whole world, an effort that is destroying the USA, but Deep State does not mind.
In this way Russia indeed meddles in USA politics. Trump now invited Putin to come to
Washington, the MH17 statement is withheld, the hysteria at CNN is such that MH17 is not even
mentioned. In stead: Trump must be mentally deranged.
Good to see PCR accepting comments again. It's not just the Dumbocruds, it's the Rupuglicunts
too. Follow the money, it's coming from the same sources. Gore Vidal said there's only
one party in America, it's the Money Party and it has two branches. It is even more true
today than when he said it. There is no Left or Right anymore, only the question, is it good
for Israel? And the American people be damned.
Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace with Russia? The Democrats say he is
The Democrats -- and their wholly-owned MSM -- will call Trump any name that'll stick. It
means little. Even if Trump got everything he wanted on immigration, that particular
toothpaste is already out of the tube and unless we send back some of the millions of
illegal third-world squatters we've no hope of recovering the United States of America.
If you want to talk treason, you need look no further than the Hart-Celler Act of 1965,
whereby the plan was laid to replace the population of this nation with third-world refuse,
which guaranteed cheap labor for GOP capitalists and endless political support for Democrat
traitors.
As the saying goes "timing is everything." I have to admit I was incredulous that you were
somehow able to link to a functioning version of the Nekrosov film. I've been trying to get
my hands on that documentary for the last few years, but to no avail. I finally managed to
read a comment on another blog that recommended that people who were interested in viewing
the film could do so by reaching out to the producer to request a personalized link, after
which you had to request a password from another individual affiliated with the film.
I managed to do all of that a few weeks ago and was able to watch the video on Vimeo for
the full 2 hours. It was riveting, to say the least. After viewing it again, I thought about
making it available to others. Due to the pressures by Browder and his lawyers, however,
Nekrosov was prevented from making his film available to a wider audience. He got around this
limitation by making it available for private viewing only. And to prevent a private viewer
from uploading it onto the internet he cleverly placed a watermark on each film, indicating
the owner of each copy of the video by displaying a number on the screen. I was surprised to
see the version you linked to indeed has this watermark shown on the screen. Somehow, this
did not deter the individual tied to that number from uploading it and being the one
identified as doing so. That said, I'm glad the film is more widely available as it should be
viewed by as many people as possible so that they can realize what a despicable liar Browder
really is and how the passage of The Magnitsky Act was a travesty of justice which must be
reversed.
"Do you know how large 1,000 billion is? You would have to live for thousands of years and do
nothing for 24/7 except count to reach that figure. It is a sum that nurtures the recipients,
and the recipients regard it as worth protecting."
Tens of thousands of years. At one count per second, 31,687 years and a few months.
"In the West, which the Russians are so anxious to join, all freedoms are dead --
freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom
of privacy, freedom from arbitrary search, freedom from arbitrary arrest, along with the
Constitutional protections of due process and habeas corpus."
True. That is the Anglo-Zionist Empire. That is what the WASP Empire delivers, and
it does so to destroy more conservative national and local cultures so their peoples are
tossed into the melting pot and reduced into a goop easy to rule.
Oliver Cromwell taking Jewish money, allying with Jews so he would have the funds to wage
permanent war against the vast, vast majority of non-WASP whites within his reach: that is
the definition of WASP culture; that picture tells you what it always will do.
make something serious about Obama and Hillary destroying whole African country of Libya
killing Colonel Gaddafi on the street, which is greatest war crime in the 21st century so far
or, Bill Clinton bombing Bosnian Serbs '95 opening the door to jihadis to continue behead
people in the middle of the Europe or, Bill Clinton and Nato bombing Serbia '99 to give
"Kosovo" independence killing many civilian and destroying infrastructure on purpose or
Madeline Albright confessing killing half of million Iraqi kids on the camera or, Bush and or
Bushes or those such Bill Browder are just small dirty fish who in comparison is almost not
worth filming I appreciate the effort but get seriously real if you are about to get truth to
people
"The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many
subordinate political Mafiosi "
What is going on in the US is systematic. Assange, an investigative journalist who became
the light of truth worldwide, is under a grave danger from US' and UK' Intelligence
Communities of the non-intelligent opportunists and real traitors: https://www.rt.com/news/433783-wikileaks-assange-ecuador-uk/
Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton, who was criminally negligent with regard to the most important
classified information, has been protected by the politicking Brennan, Clapper, and Mueller:
" it was over 30,000 emails , emails that were sent through to Hillary Clinton through
the unauthorized server and unsecured server and every email she sent out.
There were highly classified -- beyond classified -- top secret-type stuff that had
gone through that server. an instruction embedded, compartmentalized data embedded in the
email server telling the server to send a copy of every email that came to Hillary Clinton
through that unauthorized server and every email that she sent out through that server, to
send it to this foreign entity that is not Russia."
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/congressional-record-transcript-on-chinagate.html
The Awan Affair, the most serious ever violation of national cybersecurity, has
demonstrated the spectacular incompetence of the CIA and FBI, which had allowed a family of
Pakistani nationals to surf congressional computers of various committees, including
Intelligence Committee, for years. None of the scoundrels had a security clearance! Their
ardent protector, Wasserman-Schultz (who threatened the DC Marschall) belongs to the
untouchables, unlike Assange:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/awan-congressional-scandal-in-spotlight-as-president-suggests-data-could-be-part-of-court-case_2500703.html
Trump and Putin made a mistake. I do not understand how it could have happened. They should
have issued communiqué that they have agreed to work toward peace and relieve tensions
and suppress conflicts around the world. (I do not have a time for now to write more.)
(sorry)
If Rosenstein & Mueller had done what they did with the publication of the indictments a
few days before the summit -- and were North Koreans -- they'd be in front of a firing squad
within 24 hours. Trump is completely powerless to do anything about these two. And this
has gone on for a year and a half. This is not a strength of democracy.
The US today is like Venezuela was shortly after Maduro was elected (by a narrow margin)
-- after Chavez's death -- and before violence eventually broke out. The losing opposition
refused to accept the result and tensions simmered for a long time.
Or after Morsi was elected in Egypt and before the military coup. The victory was narrow,
the opposition refused the to accept the result and tensions simmered for a long time.
Or maybe like Bush vs Gore. Bush was kinda saved by 9/11 which completely changed the
atmosphere.
Who knows what will happen. It's clear though that Trump believes he has forced his
opponents to play a bad hand in their outlandish craze the past week. It's why he doubled
down and invited Putin to Washington near the 2018 election time. He perceives this as a
chance to re-enact the 2016 election and coast to victory. The establishment is insane, and
if he brings their insanity out it plays to his favor.
The reception of the Trump- Putin meeting is breathtaking. I have in my 61 years never
witnessed such a hate and slander in the MSM. I have after this begun to actually dismiss
that Americans are sensible people! They have completely forgotten the cost of the Civil War.
We in Europe have not forgotten the cost of war and are not going there again. Ever.
The US has become a lunatic asylum with nuclear weapons, never mind Kim Jong Un, look a
squirrel! But the US is a threat to humanity, included it's protegé Israel, the new
Apartheid state.
"Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace with Russia?"
Wait; what?
From badmouthing Russia to appointing Russophobes to high office, to imposing sanctions,
to illegally seizing Russian diplomatic property, to committing war crimes in Syria, to a
provocative military buildup in Europe, to arming the illegitimate Ukrainian "government,"
etc., presidential poseur Orange Clown has spent 99% of his "presidency" so far antagonizing
Russia; apparently trying to provoke some kind of Russian military response.
If it was anyone else other than Vladimir Putin calling the shots in Russia, WW3 probably
would've happened already. Yet PCR claims Orange Clown wants peace with Russia?
Note to PCR: It is Vladimir Putin who wants peace, not presidential poseur Orange Clown.
If Orange Clown has had some kind of spiritual epiphany/change of heart, he's going to have
to show good faith by taking some kind of unambiguous action; posturing won't suffice.
There is a lot of truth in what you say, but it does not account for the fight we are
currently witnessing. Two factions in the Money Party are at war with each other. Neither one
is willing to level with the public as to its true aims and motives -- they are fighting
viciously but under the bed sheets, which is why the spectacle looks so unhinged and
silly.
It appears that he is trying to save the US from financial collapse. Hence, he is a traitor
to MIC, particularly to the obscenely greedy Pentagon contractors. The US presidents and
Congress always pandered to MIC first and foremost. He broke (or at least tried to break) the
pattern.
Don't blame all Americans. Forty-eight percent of us voted for Trump; it is very likely
that more than half of the rest voted for Hellary only with great reluctance, owing largely
to the unprecedented campaign of vilification directed at Trump. The point is: a very large
majority of people in this country are nowhere near as insane as the media and elites are --
in fact, we're still nowhere near insane enough for their taste!
"... For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder, in this particular case. Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia and never paid any taxes neither in Russia or the United States and yet the money escaped the country. They were transferred to the United States. They sent [a] huge amount of money, $400,000,000, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Well that's their personal case. ..."
"... we have solid reason to believe that some [US] intelligence officers accompanied and guided these transactions. So we have an interest in questioning them. ..."
"... Browder is notoriously the man behind the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which exploited Congressional willingness to demonize Russia and has done so much to poison relations between Washington and Moscow. ..."
"... Browder, a media favorite who self-promotes as "Putin's enemy #1," portrays himself as a selfless human rights advocate, but is he? He has used his fortune to threaten lawsuits for anyone who challenges his version of events, effectively silencing many critics. He claims that his accountant Sergei Magnitsky was a crusading "lawyer" who discovered a $230 million tax-fraud scheme that involved the Browder business interest Hermitage Capital but was, in fact, engineered by corrupt Russian police officers who arrested Magnitsky and enabled his death in a Russian jail. ..."
"... William Browder is again in the news recently in connection with testimony related to Russiagate. On December 16th Senator Diane Feinstein of the Senate Judiciary Committee released the transcript of the testimony provided by Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS. According to James Carden, Browder was mentioned 50 times, but the repeated citations apparently did not merit inclusion in media coverage of the story by the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico. ..."
Vladimir Putin made a bombshell claim during Monday's joint press conference with President
Trump in Helsinki, Finland, when the Russian President said some $400 million )should be $400K) in illegally
earned profits was funneled to the Clinton campaign by associates of American-born British
financier Bill Browder - at one time the largest foreign portfolio investors in Russia. The
scheme involved members of the U.S. intelligence community, said Putin, who he said
"accompanied and guided these transactions."
Browder made billions in Russia during the 90's. In December, a Moscow court sentenced
Browder in absentia to nine years in prison for tax fraud, while he was also found guilty of
tax evasion in a separate 2013 case. Putin accused Browder's associates of illegally earning
over than $1.5 billion without paying Russian taxes, before sending $400 million to Clinton.
After offering to allow special counsel Robert Mueller's team to come to Russia for their
investigation - as long as there was a reciprocal arrangement for Russian intelligence to
investigate in the U.S., Putin said this:
For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder, in this particular case. Business associates of
Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia and never paid any taxes neither in
Russia or the United States and yet the money escaped the country. They were transferred to
the United States. They sent [a] huge amount of money, $400,000,000, as a contribution to the
campaign of Hillary Clinton. Well that's their personal case.
It might have been legal, the contribution itself but the way the money was earned was
illegal. So we have solid reason to believe that some [US] intelligence officers accompanied
and guided these transactions. So we have an interest in questioning them.
Israel Shamir, a keen observer of the
American-Russian relationship, and celebrated American journalist Robert
Parryboth think
that one man deserves much of the credit for the new Cold War and that man is William Browder,
a hedge fund operator who made his fortune in the corrupt 1990s world of Russian commodities
trading.
Browder is also symptomatic of why the United States government is so poorly informed about
international developments as he is the source of much of the Congressional "expert testimony"
contributing to the current impasse. He has somehow emerged as a trusted source in spite of the
fact that he has self-interest in cultivating a certain outcome. Also ignored is his
renunciation of American citizenship in 1998, reportedly to avoid taxes. He is now a British
citizen.
Browder is notoriously the man behind the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which exploited Congressional
willingness to demonize Russia and has done so much to poison relations between Washington and
Moscow. The Act sanctioned individual Russian officials, which Moscow has rightly seen as
unwarranted interference in the operation of its judicial system.
Browder, a media favorite who self-promotes as "Putin's enemy #1," portrays himself as a
selfless human rights advocate, but is he? He has used his fortune to threaten lawsuits for
anyone who challenges his version of events, effectively silencing many critics. He claims that
his accountant Sergei Magnitsky was a crusading "lawyer" who discovered a $230 million
tax-fraud scheme that involved the Browder business interest Hermitage Capital but was, in
fact, engineered by corrupt Russian police officers who arrested Magnitsky and enabled his
death in a Russian jail.
Many have been skeptical of the Browder narrative, suspecting that the fraud was in fact
concocted by Browder and his accountant Magnitsky. A Russian court recently
supported that alternative narrative, ruling in late December that Browder had deliberately
bankrupted his company and engaged in tax evasion. He was sentenced to nine years prison in
absentia.
William Browder is again in the news recently in connection with testimony related to
Russiagate. On December 16th Senator Diane Feinstein of the Senate Judiciary Committee released
the transcript of the testimony provided by Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS.
According to James Carden, Browder was mentioned 50 times, but the repeated citations
apparently did not merit inclusion in media coverage of the story by the New York Times,
Washington Post and Politico.
Fusion GPS, which was involved in the research producing the Steele Dossier used to
discredit Donald Trump, was also retained to provide investigative services relating to a
lawsuit in New York City involving a Russian company called Prevezon. As information provided
by Browder was the basis of the lawsuit, his company and business practices while in Russia
became part of the investigation. Simmons maintained that Browder proved to be somewhat evasive
and his accounts of his activities were inconsistent. He claimed never to visit the United
States and not own property or do business there, all of which were untrue, to include his
ownership through a shell company of a $10 million house in Aspen Colorado. He repeatedly
ran away , literally, from attempts to subpoena him so he would have to testify under
oath.
Per Simmons, in Russia, Browder used shell companies locally and also worldwide to avoid
taxes and conceal ownership, suggesting that he was likely one of many corrupt businessmen
operating in what was a wild west business environment.
My question is, "Why was such a man granted credibility and allowed a free run to poison the
vitally important US-Russia relationship?" The answer might be follow the money. Israel Shamir
reports
that Browder was a major contributor to Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, who was the major
force behind the Magnitsky Act.
So Mueller was a CIA mole in FBI fromthe very beginning. Interesting...
Notable quotes:
"... You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife's family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a "lone nut", as well as the mayor who hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out of the investigation into JFK's murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding. ..."
"... Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections. ..."
"... Mueller, who had been appointed Assistant U.S. Prosecutor under GHW Bush, became FBI Director under George W. Bush just in time not to see the CIA fingerprints on 9/11, which should not be surprising considering whom he didn't see when he investigated BCCI. ..."
"... Additionally, Mueller oversaw the anthrax letter case, never investigating Battelle Memorial Corporation, which had a building within a mile of the mailbox where the letters had been mailed. (Battelle Memorial's corporate motto is "It Can Be Done".) Instead, he centered FBI investigations on scientists in government labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had neither the expertise nor the equipment to make the weaponized military grade anthrax found in the letters. One scientist sued and won millions. The other allegedly "committed suicide". Battelle is noteworthy because it handles the US military's anthrax program. Mueller had no interest that two of the targets who received anthrax letters were at the time the most vociferous opponents of the Bush Administration's Patriot Act. ..."
"... Perhaps his greatest accomplishment aiding the Deep State as FBI Director was his shutting down of Operation Green Quest, the FBI's investigation into the funding behind 9/11 and the terrorist network behind it. Names began popping up like Grover Norquist, the Muslim Brotherhood, old Nazis and the royal family of Luxembourg. Nothing to see here. Move along. ..."
"... @detroitmechworks ..."
"... Only thing missing for me was the tie in to Pappy Bush and the rest of the family. Mueller the consigliere of the CIA. Oh man how fucked are we? ..."
"... Great history of how corrupt Mueller has always been and how he has covered up for so many crimes. I'm just stunned by the number of people who have decided that Mueller's history and the history of the CIA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies wasn't that bad after all just because they are going after Trump. This selective amnesia is simply amazing, isn't it? ..."
"... Clinton's role in helping the CIA to smuggle drugs into Arkansas is never talked about either. Or if it is it's called "a right wing attempt to bring them down." ..."
"... that explains why centrist and liberal media have a disturbing tendency to rehabilitate some of the most vile, reactionary forces on the American right simply because they say vaguely negative things about Donald Trump -- a phenomenon we call "Trumpwashing." ..."
"... Just like Mueller, Brennan is one more war criminal whose actions seem to have been forgotten. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
"... The seas were calm and the skies were clear." ..."
"... "The reason why the ship went down is because of the massive storm that came out of nowhere." ..."
"... It would appear at first glance this is basically an effort at espionage only ..."
"... as it appears they don't ..."
"... I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
In the 1950s, when the science fiction genre started making itself felt in movies, there was always the pivotal scene where the
protagonist discovers the dark secret but no one will believe him: a flying saucer hidden under the sand in a field, truckloads of
pod people to replace real people, or that the friendly aliens' book "To Serve Man" wasn't a guide to helping humans, but a cookbook.
It's that moment of sudden realization that no one will believe the hero because it sounds too crazy to believe.
Granted, to the uninitiated, coming to a realization so shocking and threatening to your current mental construction of the world
can appear like paranoia. It becomes a question of the discoverer's knowledge and senses over what everyone else believes. Everyone
else seems to be allowing him or herself to be absorbed into the great growing evil.
Today many of us, certainly readers here at Caucus99, are finding ourselves in similar positions. Our political structure is a
lie, the people who are supposed to represent us and our interests don't, our law enforcement protects the property of the rich,
not our lives, and often are in cahoots with the criminals from whom we are supposed to be protected. I am sure that many of our
old friends and acquaintances have been alienated from some of us here when we began talking about Hillary's track record during
the Presidential campaign, for example. In our current pasteboard world, if you are a Republican or Democrat you must assume that
your designated political party, maybe with a couple of exceptions, are there to look after you.
And there that crazy friend goes, yelling about cookbooks.
I suppose my introduction to the corruption of those in power, at thirteen, was the assassination of JFK. Not actually the assassination,
but the murder of Oswald two days later, in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. I had slept overnight at a friend's and
we came back from shooting basketballs to watch the transfer of Oswald to another facility. That was the moment that I realized all
wasn't what it seemed. But, like most kids my age, the Beatles came along in a month or so and I was swept into the world of rock
and roll, which kept me occupied until I began noticing girls. Until 1968. I was still noticing girls and rock and roll, but I was
also noticing the number of progressives being gunned down by "lone nuts". And I was noticing Vietnam.
I'm not sharing this to explain to you how I became (that loathsome term) a "conspiracy theorist". I just want to explain to you
that the democracy of the United States, and all the characters running across the stage in Washington, D.C., are the cookbook.
I wrote an essay here back in April of 2017 explaining how the Russiagate scandal had been designed to give Hillary Clinton a
casus belli for her future war against Russia, and that what we were seeing since she lost has been a recycling of it to get Trump
in line with the goals of the Deep State. So far nothing much has happened that has moved me from that belief. Now that the Deep
State seems to have persuaded our Dear Leader that he can go on being himself as long as he understands the actual hierarchy and
doesn't get in the way the Deep State, everything seems to be back on track. At least until Donald's next tweet.
But in order to understand the depth of criminality in our system one has to understand how things are done. After World War II
a lot of social awareness began putting pressure on the old system that had driven the world into the Great Depression. FDR had demonstrated
that the government could look out for the poor, could give them jobs when there were no other jobs to be had. The GI Bill sent millions
of vets to college and helped to create the middle class we used to have. Unions had real power in negotiating wages and terms of
service. Government could create a system to help the elderly. The African Americans, coming back home from fighting a war against
fascism, refused go to the coloreds only water fountains. In short, the United States were in for some growing pains.
What happened? As I mentioned above there was a rash of murders of progressive political candidates and leaders in the sixties.
But in order for the forces behind a return to the old rules to keep a lid on any revolutions there had to be something better than
shooting every progressive who raised his head above the lectern. Thus the wave of recruitment of agents and assets in the late sixties
by the CIA, FBI and other agencies. Although I didn't know it directly at the time, arriving on campus in 1968 it was evident that
there was a "presence" of people looking over the shoulders of student activists.
Which brings me to another great revelation. It's not just politicians and political parties that are serving the Deep State.
Any agency that can be corrupted by power will be, eventually.
Which brings us to the courts.
There are certain things that must be preserved for a ruling class to remain legitimate in the eyes of the public. Some people
don't think much beyond the flag. But there are other things. The media is better than ever at keeping uncomfortable truths from
the majority of Americans. But what happens where the criminality of the Deep State collides with our judicial system?
Let me introduce you to the man of the hour in Washington, Robert Swann Mueller III. Robert was born into the upper crust in our
American class system. At one point in his education in private schools John Kerry was a classmate. (Kerry was also a fellow Bonesman
with the Bushes.) Mueller met his eventual bride, Ann Cabell Standish, at one of the dances they attended. They married in 1966,
three years after John Kennedy's assassination. If you have read much about the JFK assassination you would recognize her middle
name. Her grandfather, Charles Cabell, had been second in command at the CIA when John Kennedy was elected President. In the aftermath
of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired three men from leadership positions at the CIA: Director Allen Dulles, Cabell and Richard
Bissell. Charles Cabell was Ann's grandfather. Her grand uncle, Earle Cabell, was the mayor of Dallas at the time of Kennedy's murder
there. Recently declassified JFK documents revealed that Mayor Cabell was also an asset of the CIA at the time. Small world.
You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife's
family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a "lone nut", as well as the mayor who
hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out
of the investigation into JFK's murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding.
Soon thereafter Mueller decided to go to Vietnam because, he said, a classmate had died there and patriotism and so forth. He
became an officer and eventually ended up as an aide-de-camp for the 3rd Marine Division's commanding general, General William K.
Jones. Something else was going on in Vietnam. The CIA had installed its Phoenix Program. I cannot do justice to the Phoenix Program
and won't considering Doug Valentine's work on it is available for everyone, but the Phoenix Program was the CIA's attempt to totally
control the Vietnamese population. Besides massacres of villages, the program assassinated suspected leaders and spies for the Vietcong,
coerced others into being their agents, and kept up files on all the relevant Vietnamese down to the village level. Like in later
wars, the CIA incorporated torture, murder and psychological techniques in order to control their targets. As an aide-de-camp to
a commanding Marine general, there is no way that Mueller didn't know about the Phoenix Program. He probably saw daily briefings.
When he came back to the US he studied law and quickly became a federal prosecutor.
One of the things to mark his career was to deny a pardon to Patty Hearst for her part in the whole Symbionese Liberation Army's
"terror" campaign. What did the SLA have to do with anything? A short history: Donald DeFreeze, a small-time criminal in Los Angeles
agreed to become an informant for the LAPD in order to stay out of jail. After awhile he got tired of ratting out others and asked
to get out of the program. Instead, DeFreeze was incarcerated at the Vacaville Medical Facility for criminally insane prisoners in
the California penal system. There DeFreeze met Colston Westbrook who gave classes for the "Black Cultural Association", an experimental
behavior modification unit inside the prison. Who was Westbrook? He was a CIA agent, trained in psychological warfare and part of
the Phoenix Program. DeFreeze was modified by Westbrook and company for two years. Soon thereafter, he was transferred to Soledad
Prison, from which he "escaped" and became the infamous "Cinque". Then came the Symbionese Liberation Army, a caricature of a black
militant group filled with mostly white people with military backgrounds. The murder of Marcus Foster, a progressive black leader
in the San Francisco East Bay, was done by white men in blackface, according to eyewitnesses. The SLA claimed credit for it. The
SLA kidnapped Hearst, subjected her to torture, rape, sensory deprivation and mind control tactics, just like the CIA did in the
Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Then came the bank robberies.
I bring up the Patty Hearst case because, in 2000, decades after her prison sentence had been commuted, Mueller still opposed
her pardon. Guess what he didn't notice when he rejected her pardon? This has been his pattern throughout his career. We'll return
to Patty Hearst shortly.
Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA. He
prosecuted what was known in the San Francisco Bay Area as the "drug tug" case which had connections to an island in Panama. It was
a drug smuggling case and had tentacles into things like bank frauds in Northern California. He prosecuted Manuel Noriega's drug-smuggling
without noticing Oliver North's drug-smuggling, arms running and money laundering through Panama as a part of Iran-contra.
Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections.
For example, he prosecuted Pan Am 103. Initially, and then later confirmed by an insurance investigator's report, the bomb that
brought down the airliner was believed to be placed onboard by baggage handlers working at the Frankfurt Airport. They were given
the bomb by a terrorist cell who in turn got it from one Monzer al-Kassar, who was a very large heroin dealer, estimated at supplying
twenty percent of the US's heroin at the time. A big operator. And, in fact, one of the passengers on the plane was a drug mule for
al-Kassar. Al-Kassar also happened to be a part of the Iran-contra operation, supplying weapons for North's Enterprise. The operation
was, according to the early reports, carried out by a cell of Palestinian terrorists based in Frankfurt, the Palestinian Liberation
Front-General Command, who got the bomb from al-Kassar and put the bomb on that airline.
Mueller, put in charge of the case, pursued an entirely different direction, accusing two Libyans of bombing the plane. At the
time Libya and Khadafy were getting blamed for a lot of terrorist activity, but the case against the two was so weak as to hardly
be circumstantial.
There were other questions arising from Pan Am 103. A top official in the FBI, Oliver "Buck" Revell, rushed onto the tarmac in
London to pull his son and daughter-in-law off of Pan Am 103 before it went on to explode over Lockerbie, Scotland. Also changing
flight plans were South African President Pik Botha and his negotiating team. Apparently, someone that Revell and Pik Botha knew
gave them the warning.
There was one group that didn't get warned. That was the McKee Team, an assembled group of US intelligence agents tasked to investigate
American hostages in Beruit. They allegedly discovered a link between the hostage takers, drug traffickers and the CIA. They were
returning to the US, against orders, presumably to spill the beans. This was essentially a clean-up operation, tying up loose strings
of the Iran-contra operation. So was Noriega's prosecution.
That's why Mueller got the case. He knew where to look and where not to look.
He also prosecuted ancillary Iran-contra cases. He prosecuted John Gotti for dealing cocaine in the New York City area. The cocaine
he sold was part of the the Iran-contra (CIA) plan where Southern Air Transport flew weapons to Latin America for the contras (whom
Congress had voted against aiding) and bringing back cocaine from Latin America on its return flights, to include Mena, Arkansas.
One of the CIA's pilots, Barry Seal, bragged that he had a "get-out-of-jail" letter written for him by then-Governor Bill Clinton.
At the time, Asa Hutchinson was the federal prosecutor for that corner of Arkansas. He also didn't notice all that cocaine. Hutchson
later served as George W. Bush's first "drug czar" before going into politics. How coincidental.
Mueller, who had been appointed Assistant U.S. Prosecutor under GHW Bush, became FBI Director under George W. Bush just in
time not to see the CIA fingerprints on 9/11, which should not be surprising considering whom he didn't see when he investigated
BCCI. As head of our country's biggest law enforcement agency Mueller did not pursue the House of Saud's part in 9/11 even though
fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and a number of them could be traced to Saudi intelligence, and the money
chain could be traced to Saudis living in the US, some of whom flew out of the US while all other US flights were grounded. He did
not investigate Mohammed Atta's time in Frankfort, Germany, where he was employed by a front company for the BND, West Germany's
equivalent to the CIA. Nor did Mueller investigate Huffman Aviation where Mo Atta and another hijacker matriculated in flying planes
into buildings. Huffman is interesting because while Mo was studying in Huffman's Venice, Florida aviation school a Huffman plane
was busted in Orlando with 43 pounds of heroin. Curiously, the pilot walked away from the DEA without being charged and no one was
prosecuted at Huffman.
Ask Colleen Rowley about Mueller's leadership in the 9/11 investigation.
Additionally, Mueller oversaw the anthrax letter case, never investigating Battelle Memorial Corporation, which had a building
within a mile of the mailbox where the letters had been mailed. (Battelle Memorial's corporate motto is "It Can Be Done".) Instead,
he centered FBI investigations on scientists in government labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had neither the expertise nor the
equipment to make the weaponized military grade anthrax found in the letters. One scientist sued and won millions. The other allegedly
"committed suicide". Battelle is noteworthy because it handles the US military's anthrax program. Mueller had no interest that two
of the targets who received anthrax letters were at the time the most vociferous opponents of the Bush Administration's Patriot Act.
Perhaps his greatest accomplishment aiding the Deep State as FBI Director was his shutting down of Operation Green Quest,
the FBI's investigation into the funding behind 9/11 and the terrorist network behind it. Names began popping up like Grover Norquist,
the Muslim Brotherhood, old Nazis and the royal family of Luxembourg. Nothing to see here. Move along.
A closer examination of Robert Mueller would probably find a lot more of these cases and I encourage others to continue the search.
For example, it's been alleged that Mueller sent innocent men to jail for crimes committed by Whitey Bulger for the benefit of someone
or something within the government and that this allowed Bulger to continue his criminal activities for years.
***
It's been seventy years since the CIA was created, fifty years since JFK was most likely murdered by them. In order to avoid any
consequences for their crimes more and more institutions have had to be infiltrated and corrupted by them. Many of the heroes of
the Left have turned out to be purveyors of "modified limited hangouts" which served the Deep State. Ramsey Clark, who was given
the mantle of "good guy" by the media of the Left, was active as LBJ's Attorney General in blocking Jim Garrison's investigation
into the JFK assassination and was named by Doug Valentine in his THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME as a major proponent of the CIA's OPERATION
CHAOS and the FBI's COINTELPRO. While the media spent a good deal of time talking about how great they were in releasing the Pentagon
Papers to the public, the hero who exposed the military, Daniel Ellsberg, turns out to have been CIA, operating with CIA black ops
in Vietnam. And while the Pentagon Papers exposed our military's great errors in Vietnam the CIA was generally spared. Again. Bob
Woodward, our hero of Watergate, had been a courier for the Office of Naval Intelligence only a few years earlier. Thus, the CIA
and Deep State, which had soured on Nixon, orchestrated that President's departure.
I raise this because Robert Mueller's current task is the investigation of our sitting President. No matter how much you dislike
Trump you can't help but notice that the "evidence" against him conspiring with Putin and Russia is thin gruel. And while Trump,
like most politicians who ascend to the big seat, has a lot of questionable, even indictable business connections around him, the
great dangers of a Putin-Trump conspiracy trumpeted by the media have been fading because, apparently, there was never a there there.
Thus, as Mueller oversees this case, he will find people surrounding Trump who have lied to FBI agents, who have perhaps not registered
as foreign agents, and other crimes that routinely happen out of the public spotlight and aren't prosecuted. What was obvious to
me from the start, that this was a psyop that involved U.S. intelligence, Ukrainian intelligence, Clinton and the DNC, will not be
obvious to Mueller. Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a
means of pressure on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it.
When one begins examining high-profile court cases in post-1963 America one sees a cast of people who keep popping up. Prosecutors,
judges, defense attorneys, coroners, witnesses, reporters, authors. This ensemble keeps reappearing in these show trials. We may
not know what Mueller will find, but we know what he won't find.
There was a review at Truthdig back in 2016 of Jeffrey Toobin's book on Patty Hearst, AMERICAN HEIRESS (Toobin himself worked
as an associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh during the investigation Iran–Contra affair and Oliver North's criminal
trial). In part it reads: "Toobin features the characters who populated the edges of Hearst's story. Robert Shapiro, who would later
work with [F. Lee] Bailey on the O.J. Simpson case, makes a cameo appearance. Lance Ito, the judge in that case, briefly shared a
shooting range with a machine-gun toting SLA member. Reverend Jim Jones offered to help with the food distribution effort; that enterprise
also employed Sara Jane Moore, who served 32 years for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford during his 1975 visit to San
Francisco. Congressman Leo Ryan, who represented Randy and Catherine Hearst's district, endorsed the commutation of Patty's sentence.
"Off to Guyana," he wrote Patty in 1978. "See you when I return. Hang in there." Jim Jones' henchmen shot and killed Ryan before
he could board his flight home. Robert Mueller, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco before taking over as FBI director, strenuously
opposed Hearst's pardon, claiming that her attitude, born of wealth and social position, "has always been that she is a person above
the law.""
When Mueller wrote that line he must have laughed out loud.
That isn't connecting the dots. Its painting a bloody Mona Lisa.
I had no idea how dirty this man was. He is the CIA version of Zelig or Forest Gump. He makes Bill Clinton look like an amateur.
Beginning with the double CIA family ties and proceeding through whitewashing 911, this man is so central to our rotten government
that its a wonder someone hasn't done what you just did a lot sooner.
My hat is off to you. Someone should post this article on our blog.
The one that keeps jumping to mind is the mid 80's game "Paranoia" which was a cartoonish comedy about the drugged citizens
of a complex where the state oversaw everything, and the people were obsessed with celebrities and junk food and oh my goooooodd...
Thanks for pointing to it. I got laughs just reading the wikipedia page.
It sounds like Kafka meets that Russian guy who was simultaneously head of the secret police and leader of the resistance.
LOL.
The one that keeps jumping to mind is the mid 80's game "Paranoia" which was a cartoonish comedy about the drugged citizens
of a complex where the state oversaw everything, and the people were obsessed with celebrities and junk food and oh my goooooodd...
@arendt even
considering they were working from licenses half the time. They ended up essentially creating the universe bibles for Ghostbusters
and the Star Wars EU prior to the reboots.
Unfortunately, that didn't translate into respect. However, I still to this day am amazed at the complexity of thought that
went into many of the rules and the ability they had to match mechanics to maintaining the play feel.
Paranoia in particular was hilarious. Kafka and Three Stooges, and even a little Joseph Heller. Later editions even managed
to work in criticisms of late stage capitalism by having players ALWAYS broke and any unexpected expenses needing to be made up
through crime... which was illegal, to avoid budget shortfalls... which was also illegal...
Bob, thank you. As detailed and extensive as it is, your essay is concise by making it clear exactly what's so wrong with Mueller:
Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA...
Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections...
Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a means of pressure
on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it...
For me, the anthrax case is the most important. Biological weapons are no joke. I believe we learned, from whistle-blowing
scientists, not from the FBI investigation, that the CIA had one of the many illegal biological weapons programs being run with
our tax dollars leading up to the anthrax attack. So whether Battelle was one of the CIA's contractors or yet another cut out,
the investigation by Mueller simply stated those entities, all of them, were eliminated from the investigation.
The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the "suspect" and
the "objective enemy". The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it. He is
never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tendencies"
like a carrier of disease. Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler behaves like a man who persistently insults another man
until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defense.
p423-4
"From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian
replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime ...While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable
of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality, the totalitarian possible crime is based on the logical anticipation
of objective developments.
The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain
category of the population.
"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the
less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out
to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)
"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the
less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn
out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)
The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the "suspect"
and the "objective enemy". The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it.
He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tendencies"
like a carrier of disease. Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler behaves like a man who persistently insults another
man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defense.
p423-4
"From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian
replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime ...While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable
of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality, the totalitarian possible crime is based on the logical anticipation
of objective developments.
The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a
certain category of the population.
"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are,
the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn
out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)
Great history of how corrupt Mueller has always been and how he has covered up for so many crimes. I'm just stunned by
the number of people who have decided that Mueller's history and the history of the CIA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies
wasn't that bad after all just because they are going after Trump. This selective amnesia is simply amazing, isn't it?
Clinton's role in helping the CIA to smuggle drugs into Arkansas is never talked about either. Or if it is it's called
"a right wing attempt to bring them down."
I almost skipped reading this one, assumed at first from the headline it was going to be about the Russia "investigation" which
I've been steadfast in not paying any attention to.
But wow, this is so much better than I'd expected, a fascinating tapestry. A lot to absorb. At this point I'm just feeling
overwhelmed at how little "we the people" in this country have any say in, or even any knowledge about, what is going on.
Thank you for this excellent history and synthesis.
from those who believe the fairy tale of Russia Gate. John
Brennan has also become a darling of the left. Greenwald wrote about him after Obama appointed him to his cabinet.
Joe posted this
linkthat explains why centrist and liberal media have a disturbing tendency to rehabilitate some of the most vile, reactionary
forces on the American right simply because they say vaguely negative things about Donald Trump -- a phenomenon we call "Trumpwashing."
Just like Mueller, Brennan is one more war criminal whose actions seem to have been forgotten.
conclude from this, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the Mueller investigation of "Russiagate" won't get anywhere near the
Oval Office.
Mostly becuz "Deep State" itself is up to its eyebrows in the affair. And also becuz Trump has very little to do with it. I'm
sure they'd Love to bury Hillary in this, but it looks like that won't happen either. A shame.
I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies
for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in
February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers
for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the
firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order
to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence
services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign
actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations,"
according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were
unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social
media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed
on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe
that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
@snoopydawg@snoopydawg
What the hell? Do these people even know they're on this list, or part of this evidence? Or, are they not even real people, or
are they maybe even govt employees needed to play a role? There's that cookbook again, maybe. Yikes!
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly
recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies
for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they
did.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted
in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to
lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment
accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social
media in order to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence
services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign
actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations,"
according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say
were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social
media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency
placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people
still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
It's obvious that the whole damn Russia Gate conspiracy was just made up. It started when Wikileaks said that they were going
to release the emails between Hillary and Podesta that showed how they rigged the primary against Bernie. The reason why they
did it was to keep people from talking about the contents of the emails. And it worked. The media didn't focus on their contents,
but only on how Wikileaks obtained them.
Another reason for the Russian propaganda crap is so people will give their permission for the upcoming war against Russia
that had already been planned for over two years before the election. And they will. I've seen so many comments that says what
Russia (Putin) did and is still doing was an act of war. Today on ToP one person said that "we need to assassinate Putin." Was
that person HRd for promoting violence which is against the site rules? Nope. Those that believe Russia actually did interfere
with the election also think that the republicans are also Putin's puppets and that is why they won't go against Trump. The front
pagers have been pushing lies about Russia's actions it should be obvious to anyone with a working brain. I'll see a definitive
statement like " The seas were calm and the skies were clear." But they will rewrite their statement to "The reason
why the ship went down is because of the massive storm that came out of nowhere." Hopefully you get my drift on how they're
blatantly lying in their statements.
Hillary's BFF, Nuland and McCain were the ones that worked the hardest on overthrowing the Ukraine government. The USA wanted
to put its own puppet government on Russia's border. Plus the USA and NATO have been installing troops into countries that surround
Russia's borders.
The original reason why the Mueller investigation was created was to find evidence that Trump colluded with Putin to win the
election. None of the Mueller indictments have anything to do with that charge. This is why he was taken off guard when the Russian
lawyers showed up to defend their clients. Hope that you read the entire article.
#13#13
What the hell? Do these people even know they're on this list, or part of this evidence? Or, are they not even real people,
or are they maybe even govt employees needed to play a role? There's that cookbook again, maybe. Yikes!
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were
unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
This also proves my point above how information is selectively posted over there. Just certain parts of the articles are posted,
but the parts of the articles that show the information in a different light are left out. This is from a comment..
It would appear at first glance this is basically an effort at espionage only , but I'm not much more sure than
you are.
If they don't have a US presence ( as it appears they don't ), I can't understand why they even care that Mueller
has charged them. As you point out, they won't be extradited, so none of this really matters. They could have their lawyers
just play a DVD of them confessing followed by giving Mueller the double birds all around and it wouldn't make any difference,
so the only logical answer for this is to try and pry state secrets out legally via the courts instead of through hacking and
spying.
Oops. From the article ..
I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against
the charges.
I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies
for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they
did.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted
in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to
lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment
accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social
media in order to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence
services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign
actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations,"
according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say
were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social
media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency
placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people
still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
off the hook. @snoopydawg
Especially Mueller. Finding the 13 Russians guilty that is. Mueller can then claim, "See! The Russians did it," which gives Hillbots
a warm fuzzy and reason to scold BernieBros with a "told ya so!!" AND, no reason to investigate further. Investigation over. Case
closed! Everyone gets what they want. Alas... Their lawyer showed up.
I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies
for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they
did.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted
in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to
lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment
accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social
media in order to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence
services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign
actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations,"
according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say
were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social
media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency
placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people
still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
As Powerline notes, Mueller probably didn't see that coming - and the indictment itself was perhaps nothing more than a PR
stunt to bolster the Russian interference narrative.
I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against
the charges. Rather, the Mueller prosecutors seem to have obtained the indictment to serve a public relations purpose, laying
out the case for interference as understood by the government and lending a veneer of respectability to the Mueller Switch
Project.
One of the Russian corporate defendants nevertheless hired counsel to contest the charges. In April two Washington-area
attorneys -- Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly of the Reed Smith firm -- filed appearances in court on behalf of Concord Management
and Consulting. Josh Gerstein covered that turn of events for Politico here. -Powerline Blog
@snoopydawg
Especially since it's supposed to contain all these names of stooges, duped into participating in US politics by the Kremlin.
It's ridiculous.
As Powerline notes, Mueller probably didn't see that coming - and the indictment itself was perhaps nothing more than
a PR stunt to bolster the Russian interference narrative.
I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against
the charges. Rather, the Mueller prosecutors seem to have obtained the indictment to serve a public relations purpose, laying
out the case for interference as understood by the government and lending a veneer of respectability to the Mueller Switch
Project.
One of the Russian corporate defendants nevertheless hired counsel to contest the charges. In April two Washington-area
attorneys -- Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly of the Reed Smith firm -- filed appearances in court on behalf of Concord Management
and Consulting. Josh Gerstein covered that turn of events for Politico here. -Powerline Blog
I have read here in a long time. While I linked ot our Twitter account last night, I did not have time to read it before I
posted it. I am going to link this again because I think it is such an important essay for others to read.
"... The Donald likes to complain about fake news when these implicate him, but on the other hand he creates and acts on fake news himself: see the Russian sanctions, Skripal case, the two Syrian attacks based on fake news created by the White Helmets, paid by the State Department. ..."
As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is
this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?
The Donald likes to complain about fake news when these implicate him, but on the
other hand he creates and acts on fake news himself: see the Russian sanctions, Skripal case,
the two Syrian attacks based on fake news created by the White Helmets, paid by the State
Department.
Looks like another Steele dossier and it has Brennan fingertips all over. Looks like another
exercise in creation of a parallel reality. The content of the document implies that malware was
installed in GRU computers and those computers were monitored 24/7 by CIA. The documents
describes both GNU officers and DNC employees as unsophisticated idiots. DNC employees who who
should undergo some basic security training were easily deceived by fishing emails from a foreign
country. And a good practice is to disable hotlinks in emails.
I always suspected that Guccifer 2.0 was a false flag operation to hide the leak of DNC
documents. If this is true this was really sophisticated false flag.
BTW GRU is military intelligence unit, so to hack into civil computers is kind of out of
their main sphere of activities. They also should be aware about NSA capabilities of intercepting
the traffic.
I especially like the following tidbit: "On or about June 1,2016, the Conspirators attempted
to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the computer program CCleaner." This
is how third rate hackers (wannabes) behave.
First of all the investigation of DNC was botched by hiring a private, connected to
Democratic Party security company (Crowdstrike), so no data from it are acceptable in court. FBI
did not have any access to the data.
Which means that Mueller is a patsy of more powerful forces
How about speed of download that proved to be excessive for Internet connection? Nothing is
said about Dmitri
Alperovitch role is all this investigation, which completely discredit all that results? See for example diuscusstion at
Why
Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear And, again, the question is: Was Guccifer 2.0 in itself a USA false flag operation ?
Looks like Mueller is acting as an operative of Democratic Party. Could not dig up enough
dirt on Trump, so he now saddled his beloved horse, trying to provoke Russia to respond.
And this John Le Carre style details about individuals supposedly involved. Probably were
provided by CIA ;-)
4. By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators also hacked into the computer networks of
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ("DCCC") and the Democratic National Committee
("DNC"). The Conspirators covertly monitored the computers of dozens of DCCC and DNC employees,
implanted hundreds of files containing malicious computer code ("malware"), and stole emails
and other documents from the DCCC and DNC.
5. By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators began to plan the release of materials
stolen from the Clinton Campaign, DCCC, and DNC.
6. Beginning in or around June 2016, the Conspirators staged and released tens of thousands
of the stolen emails and documents. They did so using fictitious online personas, including
"DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0."
7. The Conspirators also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release additional stolen
documents through a website maintained by an organization ("Organization Iй), that had
previously posted documents stolen from U.S. persons, entities, and the U.S. government The
Conspirators continued their U.S. election-interference operations through in or around
November 2016.
8. To hide their connections to Russia and the Russian government, the Conspirators used
false identities and made false statements about their identities. To further avoid detection,
the Conspirators used a network of computers located across the world, including in the United
States, and paid for this infrastructure using cryptocurrency.
... ... ...
13. Defendant ALEKSEY VIKTOROVICH LUKASHEV
(Лукашсв
Алексей
Викторович) was a Senior Lieutenant
in the Russian military assigned to ANTONOV's department within Unit 26165. LUKASHEV used
various online personas, including "Den Katenberg" and "Yuliana Martynova." In on around 2016,
LUKASHEV sent spcarphisliing emails to members of the Clinton Campaign and affiliated
individuals, including the chairman of the Clinton Campaign.
14. Defendant SERGEY ALEKSANDROVICH MORGACHEV
(Моргачев
Сергей
Александрович)
was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Russian military assigned to Unit 26165. MORGACHEV oversaw a
department within Unit 26165 dedicated to developing and managing malware, including a hacking
tool used by the GRU known as "X-Agent." During the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks,
MORGACHEV supervised the co-conspirators who developed and monitored the X-Agent malware
implanted on those computers.
15. Defendant NIKOLAY YURYEVICH KOZACHEK (Козачек
Николай
Юрьевич) was a Lieutenant Captain in the Russian
military assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. KOZACHEK used a variety of
monikers, including "kazak" and "blablablal234565 " KOZACHEK developed, customized, and
monitored X-Agent malware used to hack the DCCC and DNC networks beginning in or around April
2016.
16. Defendant PAVEL VYACHESLAVOVICH YERSHOV (Ершов
Павел
Вячеславович) was a
Russian military officer assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. In or around
2016, YERSHOV assisted KOZACHEK and other co-conspirators in testing and customizing X-Agent
malware before actual deployment and use.
17. Defendant ARTEM ANDREYEVICH MALYSHEV (Малышев
Арт е м
Андреевич) was a Second Lieutenant in the
Russian military assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. MALYSIIEV used a variety
of monikers, including "djangomagicdev" and "realblatr." In or around 2016, MALYSHEV monitored
X-Agent malware implanted on the DCCC and DNC networks.
18. Defendant ALEKSANDR VLADIMIROVICH OSADCHUK
(Осадчук
Александр В
ладимирович) was a Colonel in
the Russian military and the commanding officer of Unit 74455. Unit 74455 was located at 22
Kirova Street, Khimki, Moscow, a building referred to within the GRU as the 'Tower." Unit 74455
assisted in the release of stolen documents through the DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas, the
promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media
accounts operated by the GRU.
19. Defendant ALEKSEY ALEKSANDROVICH POTEMKIN
(Потемкин
Алексей
Александрович)
was an officer in the Russian military assigned to Unit 74455. POTEMKIN was a supervisor in a
department within Unit 7445f responsible for the administration of computer infrastructure used
in cyber operations. Infrastructure and social media accounts administered by POTEMKIN'S
department were used, among other things, to assist in the release of stolen documents through
the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2 0 personas.
21, ANTONOV, BADIN, YKRMAKOV, LUKASHEV, and their co-conspiratore targeted victims using a
technique known as spearphishing to steal victims' passwords or otherwise gain access to their
computers. Beginning by at least March 2016, the Conspirators targeted over 300 individuals
affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, DCCC, and DNC.
a. For example, on or about March 19, 2016, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators created and
sent a spearphishing email to the chairman of the Clinton Campaign. LUKASHEV used the account
"John356gh" at an online service that abbreviated lengthy website addresses (referred to as a
"URL-shortcning service"). LIJKASHEV used the account to mask a link contained in the
spearphishing email, which directed the recipient to a GRU-created website. LUKASHEV altered
the a security notification from Google (a technique known as "spoofing"), instructing the user
to change his password by clicking the embedded link. Those instructions wore followed. On or
about March 21, 2016, LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and their co-conspirators stole the contents of the
chairman's email account, which consisted of over 50,000 emails.
Starting on or about March 19, 2016, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators sent spearphishing
emails to the personal accounts of other individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign,
including its campaign manager and a senior foreign policy advisor. On or about March 25, 2016,
LUKASHEV used the same john356gh account to mask additional links included in spearphishing
emails sent to numerous individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, including Victims 1
and 2. LUKASliEV sent these emails from the Russia-based email account [email protected] that he spoofed to appear to be from
Google. On or about March 28,2016, YERMAKOV researched the names of Victims 1 and 2 and their
association with Clinton on various social media sites. Through their spearphishing operations,
LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and their co-conspirators successfully stole email credentials and
thousands of emails from numerous individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign. Many of
these stolen emails. Including those from Victims 1 and 2, were later released by the
Conspirators through DCLeaks.
On or about April 6, 2016, the Conspirators created an email account in the name (with a
one-letter deviation from the actual spelling) of a known member of the Clinton Campaign. The
Conspirators then used that account to send spearphishing emails to the work accounts of more
than thirty different Clinton Campaign employees. In the spearphishipg emails, LUKASHEV and his
co-conspirators embedded a link purporting to direct the recipient to a document titled
"hillary-clinton-favorable-rating.xlsx " In fact, this link directed the recipients' computers
to a GRU-crcatcd website.
22. The Conspirators spearphished individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign
throughout the summer of 2016. For example, on or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators
attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a
third-
party provider and used by Clinton's personal office. At or around the same time, they also
targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.
Hacking into the DCCC Network
23. Beginning in or around March 2016, the Conspirators, in addition to their spearphishing
efforts, researched the DCCC and DNC computer networks to identify technical specifications and
vulnerabilities.
For example, beginning on or about March 15,2016, YERMAKOV ran a technical query for the
DNC's internet protocol configurations to identify connected devices.
On or about the same day, YERMAKOV searched for opcn-source information about the DNC
network, the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton.
On or about April 7. 2016. YKRMAKOV ran я technical query for the DNC's internet
protocol configurations to identify connected devices.
24. By in or around April 2016, within days of YERMAKOV's searches regarding the DCCC, the
Conspirators hacked into the DCCC computer network. Once they gained access, they installed and
managed different types of malware to explore the DCCC network and steal data.
a. On or about April 12,2016. the Conspirators used the stolen credentials of a I )CCC On or
about April 12,2016, the Conspirators used the stolen credentials of a DCCC Employee ('"DCCC
Employee 1") to access the DCCC network. DCCC Employee 1 had received a spearphishing email
from the Conspirators on or about April 6,2016, and entered her password after clicking on the
link.
b. Between in or around April 2016 and June 2016, the Conspirators installed multiple
versions of their X-Agent malware on at least ten DCCC computers, which allowed them to monitor
individual employees' computer activity, steal passwords, and maintain access to the DCCC
network.
c. X-Agent malware implanted on the DCCC network transmitted information from the victims'
computers to a GRU-leased server located in Arizona. The Conspirators referred to this server
as their "AMS" panel. KOZACHEK, MALYSHEV, and their со-conspirators logged into the
AMS panel to use X-Agent's keylog and screenshot functions in the course of monitoring and
surveilling activity on the DCCC computers. 'Ibe keylog function allowed the Conspirators to
capture keystrokes entered by DCCC employees. The screenshot function allowed the Conspirators
to take pictures of the DCCC employees' computer screens.
d. For example, on or about April 14, 2016, the Conspirators repeatedly activated X-Agent's
keylog and screensiot functions to surveil DCCC Employee 1's computer activity over the course
of eight hours. During that time, the Conspirators captured DCCC Employee 1 's communications
with co-workers and the passwords she entered while working on fundraising and voter outreach
projects. Similarly, on or about April 22, 2016, the Conspirators activated X-Agcnt's keylog
and screenshot functions to capture the discussions of another DCCC Employee ("DCCC Employee
2") about the DCCC's finances, as well as her individual banking information and other personal
topics.
25. On or about April 19, 2016, KOZAC1IEK, YERSIIOV, and their co-conspirators remotely
configured an overseas computer to relay communications between X-Agent malware and the AMS
panel and then tested X-Agent's ability to connect to this computer. The Conspirators referred
to this computer as a "middle server." The middle server acted as a proxy to obscure the
connection between malware at the DCCC and the Conspirators' AMS panel. On or about April 20,
2016, the Conspirators directed X-Agent malware on the DCCC computers to connect to this middle
server and receive directions from the Conspirators.
Hacking into the DNC Network
26. On or about April 18, 2016, the Conspirators hacked into the DNC's computers through
their access to the DCCC network. The Conspirators then installed and managed different types
of malware (as they did in the DCCC network) to explore the DNC network and steal documents, a.
On or about April 18, 2016, the Conspirators activated X-Agent's keylog and screenshot
functions to steal credentials of a DCCC employee who was authorized
to access the DNC network. The Conspirators hacked into the DNC network from the DCCC network
using stolen credentials. By in or around June 2016, they gained access to approximately
thirty-three DNC computers.
In or around April 2016, the Conspirators installed X Agent malware on tho DNC network,
including the same versions installed on the DCCC network.
MALYSHEV and his co-conspifators monitored the X-Agent malware from the AMS panel and captured
data from the victim computers. The AMS panel collected thousands of keylog and screenshot
results from the DCCC and DNC computers, such as a screenshot and keystroke capture of DCCC
Employee 2 viewing the DCCC's online banking information.
Theft of DCCC and DNC Documents
27. The Conspirators searched for and identified computers within the DCCC and DNC networks
that stored information related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, for example, on or
about April 15, 2016, the Conspirators searched one hacked DCCC computer for terms that
included "hillary," "cruz," and "trump." The Conspirators also copied select DCCC folders,
including "Benghazi Investigations." The Conspirators targeted computers containing information
such as opposition research and field operation plans for the 2016 elections.
28. To enable them to steal a large number of documents at once without detection, the
Conspirators used a publicly available tool to gather and compress multiple documents on the
DCCC and DNC networks. The Conspirators then used other GRU malware, known as "X-Tunncl," to
move the stolen documents cutside the DCCC and DNC networks through encrypted channels.
a. For example, on or about April 22, 2016, the Conspirators compressed gigabytes of data
from DNC computers, including opposition research. The Conspirators later moved the compressed
DNC data using X-Tunnel to a GRU-leased computer located in Illinois.
b. On or about April 28, 2016, the Conspirators connected to and tested the same computer
located in Illinois. Later that day, the Conspirators used X-Tunnel to connect to that computer
to steal additional documents from the DCCC network.
29. Between on or about May 25, 2016 and June 1, 2016, the Conspirators hacked the DNC
Microsoft Exchange Server and stole thousands of emails from the work accounts of DNC
employees. During that time, YERMAKOV researched PowerShell commands related to accessing and
managing the Microsoft Exchange Server.
30. On or about May 30, 2016, MALYSHEV accessed the AMS panel in order to upgrade custom AMS
software on die server. That day, the AMS panel received updates from approximately thirteen
different X-Agent malware implants on DCCC and DNC computers.
31. During the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks, the Conspirators covered their tracks
by Intentionally deleting logs and computer flies. For example, on or about May 13, 2016, the
Conspirators cleared the event logs from a DNC computer. On or about June 20, 2016, the
Conspirators deleted logs from the AMS panel that documented their activities on the panel,
including the login history. Efforts to Remain on the X'CC and PNC Networks
32. Despite the Conspirators' efforts to hide their activity, beginning in or around May
2016, both the DCCC and DNC became aware that they had been hacked and hired a security company
("Company 1") to identify the extent of the intrusions. By in or around June 2016, Company 1
took steps to exclude intruders from the networks. Despite these efforts, a Linux-based version
of X-Agent, programmed to communicate with the GRU-registercd domain linuxkml.net, remained on
the DNC network until in or around October 2016.
33. In response to Company Ts efforts, the Conspirators took countermeasures to maintain
access to the DCCC and DNC networks.
a. Oil 01 about May 31, 2016, YERMAKOV searched for opcn-sourcc information about Company 1
and its reporting on X-Agent and X-Tunnel. On or about June 1,2016, the Conspirators attempted
to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the computer program CCleaner.
b. On or about June 14, 2016, the Conspirators registered the domain actblues.com,
which mimicked the domain of a political fundraising platform that included a
DCCC donations page. Shortly thereafter, the Conspirators used stolen DCCC
credentials to modify the DCCC website and redirect visitors to the actblucs.com
On or about June 14, 2016, the Conspirators registered the domain actblues.com,
which mimicked the domain of a political fundraising platform that included a
DCCC donations page. Shortly thereafter, the Conspirators used stolen DCCC
credentials to modify the DCCC website and redirect visitors to the actblucs.com
domain.
On or about June 20, 2016, after Company 1 had disabled X-Agent on the DCCC
network, the Conspirators spent ever seven hours unsuccessfully trying to connect
to X-Agent. The Conspirators also tried to access the DCCC network using
previously stolen credentials.
34. In or around September 2016, the Conspirators also successfully gained access to DNC
computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service. These computers contained test
applications related to the DNC's analytics. After conducting reconnaissance, the
Conspirators
gathered data by creating backups, or "snapshots," of the DNC's eloud-based systems using
the
cloud provider's own technology. The Conspirators then moved the snapshots to cloud-based
accounts they had registered with the same service, thereby stealing the data from the DNC.
Stolen Documents Released through DCLcaks
35. More than a month before the release of any documents, the Conspirators constructed the
online persona DCLeaks to release and publicize stolen election-related documents. On or about
April 19, 2016, after attempting to register the domain clcctionleaks.com, the Conspirators
registered the domain dcleaks.com through a service that anonymizcd the registrant. The funds
used to pay for the dcleaks.com domain originated from an online cryptocutrrecy service that
the Conspirators also used to fund the lease of a virtual private server registered with the
operational email account [email protected]. The dirbinsaabol email account was also used
to register the john356gh URL-shortening account used by LUKASHEV to spearphish the Clinton
Campaign chairman and other campaign-related individuals.
36. On or about June 8,2016, the Conspirators launched the public website dcleaks.com, which
they used to release stolen emails. Before it shut down in or around March 2017, the site
received over one million page views. The Conspirators falsely claimed on the site that DCLeaks
was started by a group of "American hacktivists," when in fact it was started by the
Conspirators.
37. Starting in or around June 2016 and continuing through the 2016 U.S. presidential
election, the Conspirators used DCLeaks to release emails stolen from individuals affiliated
with the Clinton Campaign. The Conspirators also released documents they had stolen in other
spearphishing operations, including those they had conducted in 2015 that collected emails from
individuals affiliated with the Republican Party.
38. On or about June 8,2016, and at approximately the same time that the dcleaks.com website
was launched, the Conspirators created a DCLeaks Facebook page using a preexisting social media
account under the fictitious name "Alice Donovan." In addition to the DCLeaks Facebook page,
the Conspirators used other social media accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. persons such
as "Jason Scott" and "Richard Gingrey" to promote the DCLeaks website. The Conspirators
accessed these accounts from computers managed by POTEMKFN and his co-conspirators.
39. On or about June 8, 2016, the Conspirators created the Twitter account @dcleaks_. The
Conspirators operated the @dclcaks_ Twitter account from the same computer used for other
efforts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. For example, the Conspirators
used the same computer to operate the Twitter account @BaltimorcIsWhr, through which they
encouraged U.S. audiences to "[j]oin our flash mob" opposing Clinton and to post images with
the hashtag #BlacksAgainstHillary.
Stolen Documents Released through Guccifer 2.0
40. On or about June 14, 2016, the DNC -- through Company 1 -- publicly announced that it
had been hacked by Russian government actors. In response, the Conspirators created the online
persona Guccifer 2.0 and falsely claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker to undermine the
allegations of Russian responsibility for the intrusion.
41. On or about June 15,2016, the Conspirators logged into a Moscow-based server used and
managed by Unit 74455 and, between 4:19 PM and 4:56 PM Moscow Standard Time, searched for
certain words and phrases, including:
Search terms
"some hundred sheets"
"some hundreds of sheets"
dcleaks
illuminati
широко
известный
перевод [widely known translation]
"worldwide known"
"think twice about"
"company's competence"
42. Later that day, at 7:02 PM Moscow Standard Time, the online persona Guccifer 2.0
published its first post on a blog site created through WordPress. Titled "DNC's servers hacked
by a lone hacker," the post used numerous English words and phrases that the Conspirators had
searched for earlier that day (bolded below):
Worldwide known cyber security company [Company 1] announced that the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by
"sophisticated" hacker groups.
I'm very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) [...]
Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking
into DNC's network. [...]
Some hundred sheets! This's a serious case, isn't it? [...]
I guess [Company 1] customers should think twice about company's competence.
F[***J the Illuminati and their conspiracies! МШШ F[***]
[Company 1] !!!!!!!!
43. Between in or around June 2016 and October 2016, the Conspirators used Guccifer 2.0 to
release documents through WordPrcss that they had stolen from the DCCC and DNC. The
Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also shared stolen documents with certain
individuals.
a. On or about August 15,2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, received a request
for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress. The Conspirators responded using
the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate's
opponent. On or about August 22,2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, transferred
approximately 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DCCC to a then-registered state lobbyist
and online source of political news. The stolen data included donor records and personal
identifying information for more than 2,000 Democratic donors.
On or about August 22, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent a reporter
stolen documents pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement. The reporter responded by
discussing when to release the documents and offering to write an article about their
release.
44. The Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also communicated with U.S. persons about the
release of stolen documents. On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer
2.0, wrote to a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential
campaign of Donald J. TVump, "thank u for writing back... do u find anyt[h]ing interesting in
the docs i posted?" On or about August 17, 2016, the Conspirators added, "please tell me if i
can help u anyhow ... it would be a great pleasure to me." On or about September 9,2016, the
Conspirators, again posing as Guccifer 2.0, referred to a stolen DCCC document posted online
and asked the person, "what do u think of the info on the tunout model for the democrats entire
presidential campaign." The person responded, "[p]retty standard."
45. The Conspirators conducted operations as Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks using overlapping
computer infrastructure and financing.
a. For example, between on or about March 14, 2016 and April 28. 2016, the Conspirators used
the same pool of bitcoin funds to purchase a virtual private network ("VPN") account and to
lease a server in Malaysia. In or around June 2016, the Conspirators used the Malaysian server
to host the dcleaks.com website.
On or about July 6, 2016, the Conspirators used the VPN to log into the @Guccifcr_2 Twitter
account. The Conspirators opened that VPN account from
the same server that was also used to register malicious domains for the hacking of the DCCC
and DNC networks.
On or about June 27, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, contacted a U.S.
reporter with an offer to provide stolen emails from "Hillary Clinton's staff." The
Conspirators then sent the reporter the password to access a nonpublic, password-protected
portion of dc.eaks.com containing emails stolen from Victim 1 bу LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and
thier co-conspirators in or around March 2016.
46. On or about January 12,2017, the Conspirators published a statement on the Guccifer 2.0
WordPrcss blog, falsely claiming that the intrusions and release of stolen documents had
"totally no relation to the Russian government"
Use of Organization 1
47. In order to expand their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the
Conspirators transferred many of the documents they stole from the DNC and the chairman of the
Clinton Campaign to Organization 1. The Conspirators posing as Guccifer 2.0, discussed the
release of the stolen documents and the timing of those releases with Organization 1 to
heighten their impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
a. On or about Juno 22, 2016, Organization 1 sent a private message to Guccifer 2.0 to
"[s]end any new material [stolen from the DNC] here for us to review and it will have a much
higher impact than what you are doing." On or about July 6, 2016, Organization 1 added, "if you
have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the
DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters
behind her after." The Conspirators responded, "ok... i see." Organization I explained, "we
think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary ... so conflict between bernie and
hillary is interesting "
b After failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents starting in late June 2016, on or
about July 14, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent Organization 1 an email
with an attachment titled "wk dnc linkl.txt.gpg." The Conspirators explained to Organization 1
that the encrypted file contained Instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC
documents. On or about July 18, 2016, Organization 1 confirmed it had "the 1Gb or so archive"
and would make a release of the stolen documents "this week."
48. On or about July 22, 2016, Organization 1 released over 20,000 emails and other
documents stolen from the DNC network by the Conspirators. This release occurred approximately
three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention. Organization 1 did not
disclose Guccifer 2.0's role in providing them. The latest-in-time email released through
Organization 1 was dated on or about May 25,2016, approximately the same day the Conspirators
hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server.
49. On or about October 7, 2016, Organization 1 released the first set of emails from the
chairman of the Clinton Campaign that had been stolen by LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators.
Between on or about October 7, 2016 and November 7, 2016, Organization 1 released approximately
thirty-three tranches of documents mat had been stolen from the chairman of the Clinton
Campaign. In total, over 50,000 stolen documents were released.
"... The fact of the matter is, if Russia wanted to do, cause lot of difficulty to the American election they could have. Instead, they went and talked privately to us. So when the government says Russia intercepted stuff that was very important to us, I'm being very fuzzy about it, it wasn't about the election. They told us that there were certain people in America doing things that were very deleterious to the War on Terrorism for personal and financial gain, and they could have blown it publicly but they went internally to us." ..."
"... I haven't listened to that particular interview yet, but can say the the HRC emails with Sid Blumenthal show the reason we got in bed with Sarkozy (and Britain) to destroy Libya was: ..."
"... To steal the nationalized oil ..."
"... To steal the hundreds of tons of gold and silver. ..."
"... To prevent Libya from developing a pan-African gold dinar and development bank to complete with the Federal Reserve petrodollar and the IMF. ..."
"... I can also say that Hersh documented that Ambassador Stevens was an arms dealer, smuggling Libyan military weapons into Syria to finish the "regime change" operation still ongoing there. Also, HRC knew her "rebels" were hunting down and murdering any black Libyans they could find even before Gaddafi was anally bayonet raped. ..."
Hello There! I'm curious to know if any readers have comments about a recent Sy Hersh
interview. In response to a question about Russian interference in the last US presidential
election Hersh replied:
"I have been reporting something, I've been watching something since 2011 in Libya, when we
had a secretary of state that later ran for president, and I will tell you: Some stories take
a long time. And I don't know quite how to package it. I don't know how much to say about it.
I assure you that there's no known intelligence that Russia impacted, cut into the DNC,
Podesta e-mails. That did not happen. I can say that.
I can also say Russia learned other things about what was going on in Libya with us and
instead of blowing -- [. . . lots cut out here before returning to the topic . . . ]
The fact of the matter is, if Russia wanted to do, cause lot of difficulty to the
American election they could have. Instead, they went and talked privately to us. So when the
government says Russia intercepted stuff that was very important to us, I'm being very fuzzy
about it, it wasn't about the election. They told us that there were certain people in
America doing things that were very deleterious to the War on Terrorism for personal and
financial gain, and they could have blown it publicly but they went internally to
us."
I haven't listened to that particular interview yet, but can say the the HRC emails with Sid
Blumenthal show the reason we got in bed with Sarkozy (and Britain) to destroy Libya was:
To steal the nationalized oil
To steal the hundreds of tons of gold and silver.
To prevent Libya from developing a pan-African gold dinar and development bank to complete
with the Federal Reserve petrodollar and the IMF.
I can also say that Hersh documented that Ambassador Stevens was an arms dealer, smuggling
Libyan military weapons into Syria to finish the "regime change" operation still ongoing there.
Also, HRC knew her "rebels" were hunting down and murdering any black Libyans they could find
even before Gaddafi was anally bayonet raped.
If I come up with more after listening, I'll post again.
Looks like Brennan abused his power as a head of CIA and should be held accountable for that.
Notable quotes:
"... Did the U.S. "Intelligence Community" judge that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election? ..."
"... it is not that ..."
"... even that is misleading ..."
"... the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express it ..."
"... The second thing to remember is that reports of the intelligence agencies reflect the views of the heads of the agencies and are not necessarily a consensus of their analysts' views. The heads of both the CIA and FBI are political appointments, while the NSA chief is a military officer; his agency is a collector of intelligence rather than an analyst of its import, except in the fields of cryptography and communications security. ..."
"... Among the assertions are that a persona calling itself "Guccifer 2.0" is an instrument of the GRU, and that it hacked the emails on the Democratic National Committee's computer and conveyed them to Wikileaks. What the report does not explain is that it is easy for a hacker or foreign intelligence service to leave a false trail. In fact, a program developed by CIA with NSA assistance to do just that has been leaked and published. ..."
"... Retired senior NSA technical experts have examined the "Guccifer 2.0" data on the web and have concluded that "Guccifer 2.0's" data did not involve a hack across the web but was locally downloaded. Further, the data had been tampered with and manipulated, leading to the conclusion that "Guccifer 2.0" is a total fabrication. ..."
"... "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries." ..."
"... DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying ..."
"... Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically motivated, report as proof of "Russian interference" in the U.S. election without even the pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with common dangers is vital to both countries. ..."
Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence
Posted on by JackDid the U.S. "Intelligence Community" judge that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential
election?
Most commentators seem to think so. Every news report I have read of the planned meeting of
Presidents Trump and Putin in July refers to "Russian interference" as a fact and asks whether
the matter will be discussed. Reports that President Putin denied involvement in the election
are scoffed at, usually with a claim that the U.S. "intelligence community" proved Russian
interference. In fact, the U.S. "intelligence community" has not done so. The intelligence
community as a whole has not been tasked to make a judgment and some key members of that
community did not participate in the report that is routinely cited as "proof" of "Russian
interference."
I spent the 35 years of my government service with a "top secret" clearance. When I reached
the rank of ambassador and also worked as Special Assistant to the President for National
Security, I also had clearances for "codeword" material. At that time, intelligence reports to
the president relating to Soviet and European affairs were routed through me for comment. I
developed at that time a "feel" for the strengths and weaknesses of the various American
intelligence agencies. It is with that background that I read the January 6. 2017 report of three
intelligence agencies: the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
This report is labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment," but in fact it is not
that . A report of the intelligence community in my day would include the input of all the
relevant intelligence agencies and would reveal whether all agreed with the conclusions.
Individual agencies did not hesitate to "take a footnote" or explain their position if they
disagreed with a particular assessment. A report would not claim to be that of the
"intelligence community" if any relevant agency was omitted.
The report states that it represents the findings of three intelligence agencies: CIA, FBI,
and NSA, but even that is misleading in that it implies that there was a consensus of
relevant analysts in these three agencies. In fact, the report was prepared by a group of
analysts from the three agencies pre-selected by their directors, with the selection process
generally overseen by James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Clapper told
the Senate in testimony May 8, 2017, that it was prepared by "two dozen or so analysts --
hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies." If you can hand-pick the
analysts, you can hand-pick the conclusions. The analysts selected would have understood what
Director Clapper wanted since he made no secret of his views. Why would they endanger their
careers by not delivering?
What should have struck any congressperson or reporter was that the procedure Clapper
followed was the same as that used in 2003 to produce the report falsely claiming that Saddam
Hussein had retained stocks of weapons of mass destruction. That should be worrisome enough to
inspire questions, but that is not the only anomaly.
The DNI has under his aegis a National Intelligence Council whose officers can call any
intelligence agency with relevant expertise to draft community assessments. It was created by
Congress after 9/11 specifically to correct some of the flaws in intelligence collection
revealed by 9/11. Director Clapper chose not to call on the NIC, which is curious since its
duty is "to act as a bridge between the intelligence and policy communities."
During my time in government, a judgment regarding national security would include reports
from, as a minimum, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Bureau of
Intelligence and Research (INR) of the State Department. The FBI was rarely, if ever, included
unless the principal question concerned law enforcement within the United States. NSA might
have provided some of the intelligence used by the other agencies but normally did not express
an opinion regarding the substance of reports.
What did I notice when I read the January report? There was no mention of INR or DIA! The
exclusion of DIA might be understandable since its mandate deals primarily with military
forces, except that the report attributes some of the Russian activity to the GRU, Russian
military intelligence. DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, is the U.S. intelligence organ
most expert on the GRU. Did it concur with this attribution? The report doesn't say.
The omission of INR is more glaring since a report on foreign political activity could not
have been that of the U.S. intelligence community without its participation. After all, when it
comes to assessments of foreign intentions and foreign political activity, the State
Department's intelligence service is by far the most knowledgeable and competent. In my day, it
reported accurately on Gorbachev's reforms when the CIA leaders were advising that Gorbachev
had the same aims as his predecessors.
This is where due diligence comes in. The first question responsible journalists and
politicians should have asked is "Why is INR not represented? Does it have a different opinion?
If so, what is that opinion? Most likely the official answer would have been that this is
"classified information." But why should it be classified? If some agency heads come to a
conclusion and choose (or are directed) to announce it publicly, doesn't the public deserve to
know that one of the key agencies has a different opinion?
The second question should have been directed at the CIA, NSA, and FBI: did all their
analysts agree with these conclusions or were they divided in their conclusions? What was the
reason behind hand-picking analysts and departing from the customary practice of enlisting
analysts already in place and already responsible for following the issues involved?
As I was recently informed by a senior official, the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express
it . So the January report was not one of the "intelligence community," but rather of
three intelligence agencies, two of which have no responsibility or necessarily any competence
to judge foreign intentions. The job of the FBI is to enforce federal law. The job of NSA is to
intercept the communications of others and to protect ours. It is not staffed to assess the
content of what is intercepted; that task is assumed by others, particularly the CIA, the DIA
(if it is military) or the State Department's INR (if it is political).
The second thing to remember is that reports of the intelligence agencies reflect the views
of the heads of the agencies and are not necessarily a consensus of their analysts' views. The
heads of both the CIA and FBI are political appointments, while the NSA chief is a military
officer; his agency is a collector of intelligence rather than an analyst of its import, except
in the fields of cryptography and communications security.
One striking thing about the press coverage and Congressional discussion of the January
report, and of subsequent statements by CIA, FBI, and NSA heads is that questions were never
posed regarding the position of the State Department's INR, or whether the analysts in the
agencies cited were in total agreement with the conclusions.
Let's put these questions aside for the moment and look at the report itself. On the first
page of text, the following statement leapt to my attention:
We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of
the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the
intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political
processes or US public opinion.
Now, how can one judge whether activity "interfered" with an election without assessing its
impact? After all, if the activity had no impact on the outcome of the election, it could not
be properly termed interference. This disclaimer, however, has not prevented journalists and
politicians from citing the report as proof that "Russia interfered" in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election.
As for particulars, the report is full of assertion, innuendo, and description of
"capabilities" but largely devoid of any evidence to substantiate its assertions. This is
"explained" by claiming that much of the evidence is classified and cannot be disclosed without
revealing sources and methods. The assertions are made with "high confidence" or occasionally,
"moderate confidence." Having read many intelligence reports I can tell you that if there is
irrefutable evidence of something it will be stated as a fact. The use of the term "high
confidence" is what most normal people would call "our best guess." "Moderate confidence" means
"some of our analysts think this might be true."
Among the assertions are that a persona calling itself "Guccifer 2.0" is an instrument of
the GRU, and that it hacked the emails on the Democratic National Committee's computer and
conveyed them to Wikileaks. What the report does not explain is that it is easy for a hacker or
foreign intelligence service to leave a false trail. In fact, a program developed by CIA with
NSA assistance to do just that has been leaked and published.
Retired senior NSA technical experts have examined the "Guccifer 2.0" data on the web and
have concluded that "Guccifer 2.0's" data did not involve a hack across the web but was locally
downloaded. Further, the data had been tampered with and manipulated, leading to the conclusion
that "Guccifer 2.0" is a total fabrication.
The report's assertions regarding the supply of the DNC emails to Wikileaks are dubious, but
its final statement in this regard is important: "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not
contain any evident forgeries." In other words, what was disclosed was the truth! So,
Russians are accused of "degrading our democracy" by revealing that the DNC was trying to fix
the nomination of a particular candidate rather than allowing the primaries and state caucuses
to run their course. I had always thought that transparency is consistent with democratic
values. Apparently those who think that the truth can degrade democracy have a rather bizarre
-- to put it mildly–concept of democracy.
Most people, hearing that it is a "fact" that "Russia" interfered in our election must think
that Russian government agents hacked into vote counting machines and switched votes to favor a
particular candidate. This, indeed, would be scary, and would justify the most painful
sanctions. But this is the one thing that the "intelligence" report of January 6, 2017, states
did not happen. Here is what it said: " DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] assesses
that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote
tallying ."
This is an important statement by an agency that is empowered to assess the impact of
foreign activity on the United States. Why was it not consulted regarding other aspects of the
study? Or -- was it in fact consulted and refused to endorse the findings? Another obvious
question any responsible journalist or competent politician should have asked.
Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically
motivated, report as proof of "Russian interference" in the U.S. election without even the
pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block
any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with
common dangers is vital to both countries.
This is only part of the story of how, without good reason, U.S.-Russian relations have
become dangerously confrontational. God willin and the crick don't rise, I'll be musing about
other aspects soon.
Thanks to Ray McGovern and Bill Binney for their research assistance.
Jack F. Matlock, Jr.
Booneville, Tennessee
June 29, 2018
The current anti-Russian hysteria is the attempt to unite the society which become hostile to neoliberal elite.
Notable quotes:
"... A casual glance at facts and history makes it instantly clear that the United States has no "moral authority" of any kind whatsoever, and is arguably the hub of the most pernicious and dangerous force ever assembled in human history. But the establishment Russia narrative really is that cartoonishly ridiculous: you really do have to believe that the US government is 100 percent pure good and the Russian government is 100 percent pure evil to prevent the whole narrative from falling to pieces. ..."
"... In reality, Russia is nothing other than a rival power structure that the US-centralized empire wants to either collapse or absorb, but they can't just come right out and tell the public that they're dangerously escalating tensions with a nuclear superpower because westerners live in an invisible empire ruled by insatiably greedy plutocrats, so they make up nonsense about Putin being some kind of omnipotent supervillain who has infiltrated the highest levels of US government and is trying to take over the world. ..."
"... All this new cold war hysteria and nuclear brinkmanship has basically been America acting like a bitchy high school drama queen because Russia is saying mean things about it behind its back? How does a guy named "Mad Dog" get to be such a thin-skinned little snowflake? ..."
"... As we've been discussing a lot recently, control of the narrative is absolutely essential for rulers to maintain their rule. When you hear establishment policy makers babbling about "Russian propaganda" and Putin's attempts to "undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals," all that they are saying is that the plutocrats who rule America need to be able to control the way Americans think and vote, and that the Russian government is making it a bit harder for them to do that. ..."
"... It seems to be that every criticism leveled at Russia, and China even, is a simple reflection of what the USA is doing. Deflection. Classic 'pot calling the kettle black' stuff. ..."
"... You're paying more respect to it than it deserves by giving it a clinical diagnosis, implying "projection" as a psychological defense. Let's call it by its simple name: dirty rotten lying, propaganda, trickery. It's not like the assholes don't know they are lying – of course they do! And they know we know it, too, and don't care. ..."
At a graduation ceremony for the US Naval War College (barf), US Secretary of Defense James Mattis
asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aims to diminish the appeal
of the western democratic model and attempts to undermine America's moral authority," and that "his actions are designed not to challenge
our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals."
A casual glance at facts and history makes it instantly clear that the United States has no "moral authority" of any kind whatsoever,
and is arguably the hub of the most pernicious and dangerous force ever assembled in human history. But the establishment Russia
narrative really is that cartoonishly ridiculous: you really do have to believe that the US government is 100 percent pure good and
the Russian government is 100 percent pure evil to prevent the whole narrative from falling to pieces. If you accept the idea that
the exchange is anything close to 50/50, with Russia giving back more or less what it's getting and simply protecting its own interests
from the interests of geopolitical rivals, it no longer makes any sense to view Putin as a leader who poses a unique threat to the
world. If you accept the idea that the west is actually being far more aggressive and antagonistic toward Russia than Russia is being
toward the west, it gets even more laughable.
In order to believe that the US has anything resembling "moral authority" you have to shove your head so far into the sand you
get lava burns, but that really is what is needed to keep western anti-Russia hysteria going. None of the things the Russian government
has been accused of doing (let alone the very legitimate questions about whether or not they even did all of them) merit anything
but an indifferent shrug when compared with the unforgivable evils that America's unelected power establishment has been inflicting
upon the world, so they need to weave a narrative about "moral authority" in order to give those accusations meaning and relevance.
And, since the notion of America having moral authority is contradicted by all facts in evidence, that narrative is necessarily woven
of threads of fantasy and denial.
Establishment anti-Russia hysteria is all narrative, no substance. It's sustained by the talking heads of plutocrat-owned western
media making the same unanimous assertions over and over again in authoritative, confident-sounding tones of voice without presenting
any evidence or engaging with the reality of what Russia or its rivals are actually doing. The only reason American liberals believe
that Putin is a dangerous boogieman who has taken over their government, but don't believe for example that America is ruled by a
baby-eating pedophile cabal, is because the Jake Tappers and Rachel Maddows have told them to believe one conspiracy theory and not
the other. They could have employed the exact same strategy with any other wholly unsubstantiated conspiracy narrative and had just
as much success.
In reality, Russia is nothing other than a rival power structure that the US-centralized empire wants to either collapse or
absorb, but they can't just come right out and tell the public that they're dangerously escalating tensions with a nuclear superpower
because westerners live in an invisible empire ruled by insatiably greedy plutocrats, so they make up nonsense about Putin being
some kind of omnipotent supervillain who has infiltrated the highest levels of US government and is trying to take over the world.
Of equal interest to the Defense Secretary's "moral authority" gibberish is his claim that Putin's actions "are designed not to
challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals."
I mean, like what? So Russia isn't challenging America militarily and isn't taking any actions to attempt to, but it's trying
to, what, hurt America's feelings? All this new cold war hysteria and nuclear brinkmanship has basically been America acting
like a bitchy high school drama queen because Russia is saying mean things about it behind its back? How does a guy named "Mad Dog"
get to be such a thin-skinned little snowflake?
I'm just playing. Actually, when Mattis says that the Russian government is trying to "undercut and compromise our belief in our
ideals," he is saying that Moscow is interrupting the lies that Americans are being told about their government by the plutocrat-owned
media. As we've
been
discussing a lot recently, control of the narrative is absolutely essential for rulers to maintain their rule. When you hear
establishment policy makers babbling about "Russian propaganda" and Putin's attempts to "undercut and compromise our belief in our
ideals," all that they are saying is that the plutocrats who rule America need to be able to control the way Americans think and
vote, and that the Russian government is making it a bit harder for them to do that.
More and more, the threads of the establishment narrative are ceasing to be unconsciously absorbed and are being increasingly
consciously examined instead. This development has ultimately nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with our species
moving
out of its old relationship with mental narrative as it approaches evolve-or-die time in our challenging new world. I am greatly
encouraged by what I am seeing.
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Harry S Nydick / June 17, 2018
This is so right on that it is scary. The only problem, while more are questioning, is the fact that the majority of Americans
actually believe the bullshit that people like Mattis says. And, with a nickname like Mad Dog, it's a wonder that he hasn't been
put down yet.
Even today I had to deal with a typical American – 'swallow-it-hook-line-and-sinker' – idiot.
"The stock market is honest and above board.' 'All immigrants don't belong here.' 'It's fine if the government violates your
civil rights' 'Oh and immigrants don't have any.'
I could go on, but I learned long ago to say my piece and move on. For some people, there is no changing their minds, nor even
opening them up to considering the truth. There are the descendants of those who were protested against in the 1960s. The 'My
country right or wrong' people. Most likely they never had the balls, as children, to speak back to their parents, when those
adults were in the wrong. I always wondered whether intellectual blindness is a learned trait. I'm pretty sure that it must be.
William / June 17, 2018
Much or most of what you write about the American narrative is true. However, you weave it into a narrative that ignores central
historical facts and themes. Examples; Russia's behavior in Poland after WW2, the Hungarian revolution, the Check invasion and
oppression, the take over of Manchuria in the last weeks of WW2.
Stalin killing 20-40 million of his own people, Chechnya, the
Korean war, the Berlin wall. Not to mention recent assassinations of its own citizens. Yes, America has done cruel and horrific
things in many countries, but it pales to what the Russians have done throughout the ages. It would be akin to comparing what
the Nazis did to what the French underground did in response. Both killed, both did things that were horrific, but the French
did it in response and not nearly in the same magnitude. Historical contrast is very important when viewing these issues. It is
very easy to criticize one's own country but balance is called for. Was Russia justified in taking Crimea, perhaps, but then was
Hitler justified in taking the Sudetenland?
JRGJRG / June 17, 2018
What Lee Yates just did there is a beautiful example of Advantageous Comparison defense in Bandera's Moral Disengagement Theory.
Yes, the US is morally bankrupt, but so what? The Soviets or Hitler or somebody else was worse. Sorry, that is bullshit.
What did the US overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran have to do with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? Nothing. And he brings
up Russian Crimea, which voted 95% to rejoin Russia, an example of democracy in action.
william / June 17, 2018
The so what is this: when dealing with monsters one has to stoop as low to defend against it. What happened in Iran was Brittain's
provocation. They approached Eisenhower once previously and he refused to intervene. It was only after they convinced him that
it was a Russian plot to take over the oil fields that he relented. So yes it was wrong and even monstrous but put in the historical
perspective at the time, it made sense. At that time, France was in danger of collapsing and with it the rest of Europe. I am
of Middle Eastern ethnicity so I too am sensitive to Western colonialization of the region. However, things are not always as
simple as we would like them to be.
I really enjoy when people lower themselves to using vulgarities because they disagree with a point of view-most flattering and
intelligent.
JRGJRG / June 17, 2018
Just more evasive moral disengagement. So the Dulles boys finally duped Ike into giving the green light to the overthrow of democratically
elected Mossadegh installing a bloodthirsty tyrant that ended up destabilizing the Middle East for the next 50years and running,
based on the pretext of Russia hysteria.
Was it true the Russians were really going to take over the oilfields? I never heard
that story before. I doubt it very much. History teaches a different lesson. Mossadegh had the temerity to want to share oil profits
with the Iranian people who owned it. Thats too much democracy for any country.
Just like Truman was tricked into Korea. Or Johnson was duped into Vietnam.
And so how do you explain why the CIA overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala beginning a reign of terror with genocude lasting 50 years
against unarmed peasant villages? East Timor? Chile? Brazil and Argentina? Greece? Angola?
This is just more Advantageous Comparison to justify moral bankruptcy. Sorry, sometimes things are as simple as they look.
No I respectfully disagree. If these seem like difficult moral choices to you, I pity you.
JRGJRG / June 17, 2018
Although I must apologize for not recognizing your rank as a cut above the usual G-7 troll with your knowledge of the advanced
techniques of argument for moral disengagement, defending your country against the indefensible. Tough job that calls for an expert.
You must be one of those G-12 trolls called to fill in for overtime duty on fathers day. I'm sorry your wife and kids are going
to be missing you today. You can make it up to them tomorrow.
William / June 18, 2018
Funny thing, I agree that the overthrow was wrong, and horrible. I also think it was wrong and perhaps criminal when we invaded
both Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of my relatives were killed by tyrants in the Middle East and much of what has happened there
is ugly. But again, I do not stoop to personal disparagement. It has no place in honest debate. Same tactic used by the deplorable
. Trump and McCarthy for that matter, and of course, now you. As for Mossadegh, he was truly a statesman. England owned the oil
fields and he went to the UN to mediate the purchase of the oil fields at market value. The English refused and tried to convince
Eisenhower that it was a Russian plot. He tried again and finally Eisenhower relented, wrongly I might add. But do remember, that
Eisenhower also stopped the English and French when they wanted to invade Egypt to take over the Suez.
Lee Yates / June 17, 2018
Thank You, JRGJRG. I did not know that I knew that much philosophy. What I said was more in light of current events circa the
1990s. Our "bankers" went to Russia and "helped" them get capitalism. Well they got it, and now their gangsters/bankers are just
as wealthy and sophisticated as ours, or more so. Politically, I cannot really blame Putin for holding a grudge about our meddling
in Russia and general promotion of Boris Yeltsin. Still I doubt that he would make it easy for us to install another Yeltsin or
buy all of Russia's resources either, so why would we make it easy for him to meddle in our country, or do what we do overseas?
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
This is what you're doing, even if you don't recognize it. If you understand this you will begin to understand the errors of your
own ways. This is how totalitarianship develops. Read and learn.
Take off the blinders and fully explain how the U.S. genocide of native Americans – and the ongoing horrific treatment of them
– pales in comparison to anything except, possibly, the unnecessary dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan.
Sorry, but your
dissertation of an excuse just doesn't cut the mustard – or maybe your mother never told you that two wrongs don't make a right.
Or in the case of the U.S., dozens of never ending wrongs. Unless you really open your eyes and mind and understand the truth,
you will never come off as anything more than an apologist for the top 1/10th of the top 1%.
Harry S Nydick / June 17, 2018
This was a reply to William, but comes off looking as an original comment and criticism of Caity, with whom I am in complete agreement
on todays article.
jrgjrg / June 18, 2018
Not just the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, but remember that Gen. LeMay firebombed every city in Japan before the bombs
were dropped, causing at least another half million deaths. Robert MacNamara said in an interview that if the US had lost the
Second World War they both would have been tried as war criminals, and it would be right. See:
Always impressed by Caitlin driving a bulldozer through lying narratives. We need more Caitlin's; we need an antiwar mass movement
of Caitlin's. But the antiwar movement is very weak and it is divided against itself.
In the 1990's there was a coming together of the Chronicles paleoconservatives and the CounterPunch progressives against the
US/NATO attack on Yugoslavia. But today Thomas Fleming and Chronicles have retreated and those controlling CounterPunch have explicitly
rejected an alliance with the 'right' against the US march to war.
I wish I could share the Caitlin enthusiasm for the future but I am depressed and fearful for the future. The US public is
asleep. The US is gearing up for war in Europe and Asia. Starting with Clinton each president has murdered about a million souls.
They are gearing up for a bigger war in the MENA and even Eastern Europe with Iran as the major target and will likely claim another
million+.
From Jungian psychology I learned that unless the opposites come close together change (a birth out of the tyranny of the status
quo) will not happen. The elites in control of the US use the fake dialectic of the major two parties to keep us apart. Those
in charge of each pole of the fake dialectic derive power from defending it against the 'other' and see alliance with the 'other'
as a diminution of their power (a good example is those in control of CounterPunch arguing against antiwar alliance with the 'right';
that they are captured by their power drive is plain to see).
Liberals (neolibs) and many progressives have walked straight into a trap set by the CIA that engineered a Cold War v2. They
knew the neocons would come along. The CIA, Wall Street, military, NSA are marching to war. They thirst for their holy war. They
are the supremacist 'exceptional and indispensable' while the rest of the world is unexceptional and dispensable.
If the left and right do not come together in an antiwar alliance then how can the warmongering trajectory of the US change?
geoffreyskoll / June 17, 2018
It's just like you, Caitlin, to bring up such quibbles as genocide, slavery, torture, and a few others too minor to even mention.
We're talking IDEALS here. You know like complete global domination, slavish catering to the most exploitive class in human history–the
stuff that makes America great!
Lee Yates / June 17, 2018
I agree that the U.S. is Imperialist and has been for a long time. However, it is false that Russia opposes the US kleptocracy
or represents anything other than the same bankster/gangsters that run the West. They came into the fold after the end of the
Soviet Union, and there they remain, probably not too happy about it, but neither are we right. The elites from all over launder
money, hide wealth enjoy power and luxury beyond our imagination. A small spat between them is death sentence for the rest of
us, but they will make up and enjoy their stolen wealth again.
The moral authority that the West or USA enjoys is a hollow thing,
much like Christianity at the height of the Church's power. But the words are still there maybe some day a true believer will
come along and do something about them.
Forgive me, I could not get beyond the 'undermine America's moral authority'. I take it, Mattis means the 'moral authority' to
starve the Yemenis to death and deny them medicine while they are dying . aided by our French Poodle and a mad woman from the
Isles! Or maybe the 'moral authority' of Albright when she said killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children 'was worth it'.
Or maybe it was 'moral authority' of Clinton, giggling over the sadist murder of Kaddafi. Some how, as an American I don't feel
'moral authority' , all I feel is the pain of inhumanity.
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
No, no, no, you're still not getting it. Let me explain it to you. It means the authority of the autocrats to determine what's
moral for you. They themselves are above morality, like Nietzsche taught, remember? Authoritarianism.
Now do you understand?
elkojohn / June 17, 2018
As was hinted at by the FBI-IG report, neither political party in the criminal U.S. government is complying with law (domestic
nor international). The U.S. government system is an organized crime syndicate of liars, thieves and murders. The ruling class
and the inside players of the secret government consider the common folk to be deplorable, trailer-park trash.
That's the mind-set of the "holier-than-thou" professionals working inside the U.S. government. Whatever trust, loyalty and
respect citizens had for this government has been completely squandered – and voters (not Putin) gave the FU finger to the status
quo by electing Trump.
The treasonous, seditious, murdering 2-party dictatorship has absolutely NO ONE to blame but themselves. The time has come
to eliminate and defund the secret espionage agencies that run our government, – and which have morphed into crime syndicates.
Ditto the two political parties. Until we see all the top level law-breakers in jail (i.e., Clinton, Bush, Obama), until we witness
2/3's of the House and the Senate being purged and replaced, until we witness the complete dismantling of the FED, until we witness
ALL military bases around the world being closed and our troops brought home, until we witness the M-I-C's budget cut down to
1/4th and used ONLY for national protection, until we witness a purge of the CIA/FBI cartel, until we witness manufacturing being
restored to this country, until we witness the USA cutting all special interest lobbying (in particular, Israel and Saudi Arabia),
until we witness the break-up of the death grip that Wall St. and the banking monopoly has on our economy, until we witness the
full restoration of the "rule of law" in our government, – until then, it will be the absolute, open, in-your-face, tyrannical,
24/7, lawlessness of the U.S. government that destroys this nation.
So I disagree with James Mattis, that the U.S. holds the moral high ground.
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
You're paying more respect to it than it deserves by giving it a clinical diagnosis, implying "projection" as a psychological
defense. Let's call it by its simple name: dirty rotten lying, propaganda, trickery. They're playing the "I'm rubber and you're
glue" game. It's not like the assholes don't know they are lying – of course they do! And they know we know it, too, and don't
care.
WillD / June 17, 2018
Mattis didn't realise how well he described Trump. When you look at what Trump's regime has done since taking office last year,
it 'trumps' [pun intended] Putin's efforts, such as they are, by a mile. Putin could never hope to achieve so much in such a short
time, if that's what he wanted to do.
It seems to be that every criticism leveled at Russia, and China even, is a simple reflection of what the USA is doing.
Deflection. Classic 'pot calling the kettle black' stuff.
All one has to do is change a few names in the narrative – replace Putin with Trump, Russia / China with USA. That's it. Easy.
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
You're paying more respect to it than it deserves by giving it a clinical diagnosis, implying "projection" as a psychological
defense. Let's call it by its simple name: dirty rotten lying, propaganda, trickery. It's not like the assholes don't know they
are lying – of course they do! And they know we know it, too, and don't care.
WillD / June 17, 2018
No, you misunderstood what I was saying. I'm not saying he/they use it as a defense, but that they don't realize how close it
is to what it (the USA) is doing.
Believe me, I have no respect for Mattis & that mob, nor Putin for that matter. None of them deserve respect.
I agree with you on the dirty rotten lying, too. They do know they are lying, but don't know how close to the truth it is when
applied to them.
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
No worries. We are in the "post-truth era." That sounds crazy, I know. The plutocrats are discussing this exact topic this year
at the Bilderberg Conference.
"... There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of history, resentment over losses (Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and contempt towards anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional hatreds have been added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays, stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push. Most Europeans turn out on reflection to be quite gullible and stupid. ..."
"... There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is also a minority view in the German world, mostly based on their business realism that is neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement between EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and EU-Russia economic ties are such an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility will go on. ..."
"... After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases, nations that were literally saved from extermination were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in Czech Republic 20 years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again. ..."
The U.S. has warned both Russia and Germany against pursuing a planned gas pipeline that would
run between the two countries, threatening to impose sanctions and claiming the project would
threaten the security of its European allies.
Construction has recently begun for the Nord Stream 2 project, a planned pipeline that would
extend from Russia along an existing pipeline through the Baltic Sea into northeastern Germany.
Once finished, Nord Stream 2 would reportedly double the amount of gas that Russia could
provide Europe. State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Sandra Oudkirk told reporters in
Berlin Thursday that the project could bolster Russia's "malign influence" in the region and
that Washington was "exerting as much persuasive power" as it could to stop it, according to
the Associated Press.
Europe in diplomatic push to ease Russia sanctions | Financial Times
https://www.ft.com/content/9b9bbd3c-44a5-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fdApr 20, 2018 - A Europe-wide
diplomatic push is under way to persuade the Trump administration to ease US sanctions
targeting Russia, as fears mount that ...
We are talking apples and oranges. EU wants cheap, reliable energy from Russia and to export
to Russia as much as possible without interference from US. That is pure business. But the
dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia, some because they are fed by the
security-military-academic spending, some because they 'studied' and were politically formed
in US or UK. Some because that's just the way they are.
There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of
history, resentment over losses (Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about
perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and contempt towards
anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional
hatreds have been added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays,
stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push. Most Europeans turn out on
reflection to be quite gullible and stupid.
There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is
also a minority view in the German world, mostly based on their business realism that is
neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement between
EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and
EU-Russia economic ties are such an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility
will go on.
After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional
anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases, nations that were literally saved from extermination
were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in Czech Republic 20
years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again.
My advise to Russia would be to mind its
own business and not try to sacrifice for the others or to help them. It has always backfired
because the cultural milieu in Europe is naturally resentful of Russia and the east in
general. Business doesn't change that.
The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream mediaIn short: because they are rapidly losing the propaganda monopoly by system failure
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find a source to inform me about the exact origin
(who and when) of the term 'fake news'. Generally, the term became mainstream during the last
years, and especially after some shocking events for the Western neoliberal establishment, like
Trump's presidency and Brexit.
Very briefly, it appears that the term was suspiciously invented by the neoliberal apparatus
to discredit people who supported such events, through social media and other Internet
platforms completely independent from the mainstream media control. Of course, one can easily
discredit this perception as 'conspiracy theory' or even 'fake news', as well.
While it's true that there has been a lot of hyperbole, misinformation and hard propaganda
circulated inside the cyberspace, it seems that the 'fake news' term was expanded somehow to
include even opinions and positions outside the dominant neoliberal orthodoxy expressed by the
political center in the West.
What's perhaps most interesting in the whole story, is that the term 'fake news' eventually
backfired against the establishment, as it was immediately adopted by the political 'extremes'
outside the neoliberal center, to include the misinformation and the smearing campaigns by the
mainstream media against those who didn't comply with the neoliberal narratives. Mainstream
media propaganda is what brought us numerous wars and plenty of disaster in previous decades,
after all.
numerous wars and plenty of disaster in previous decades, after all.
Now, a
relatively new technology with its origins in the beginning of the previous decade,
seems that it spreads a sort of panic among the mainstream media, often described as
'information apocalypse'.
What is new is the democratisation of
advanced IT, the fact that anyone with a computer can now engage in the weaponisation of
information. 2016 was the year we woke up to the power of fake news, with internet
conspiracy theories and lies used to bolster the case for both Brexit and Donald Trump. We
may, however, look back on it as a kind of phoney war, when photoshopping and video
manipulation were still easily detectable. That window is closing fast. A program developed
at Stanford University allows users to convincingly put words into politicians' mouths.
Celebrities can be inserted into porn videos. Quite soon it will be all but impossible for
ordinary people to tell what's real and what's not. What will the effects of this be? When a public figure claims the racist or sexist audio of
them is simply fake, will we believe them? How will political campaigns work when millions
of voters have the power to engage in dirty tricks? What about health messages on the
dangers of diesel or the safety of vaccines? Will vested interests or conspiracy theorists
attempt to manipulate them? Unable to trust what they see or hear, will people retreat into
lives of non-engagement, ceding the public sphere to the already powerful or the
unscrupulous? The potential for an "information apocalypse" is beginning to be taken seriously. The
problem is we have no idea what a world in which all words and images are suspect will look
like, so it's hard to come up with solutions. Perhaps not very much will change –
perhaps we will develop a sixth sense for bullshit and propaganda, in the same way that it
has become easy to distinguish sales calls from genuine inquiries, and scam emails with
fake bank logos from the real thing. But there's no guarantee we'll be able to defend
ourselves from the onslaught, and society could start to change in unpredictable ways as a
result.
The perspective described here is indeed frightening. Yet, what's really impressive in this
article and in other similar articles by the big media on the Internet, is that there is a type
of information elitism, implying that there is a media priesthood, which has the copyright of
Truth. You can tell that by the fact that the article completely ignores the possibility that
this technology could be used by the mainstream media too, to manipulate the public.
Inside this increasingly artificial reality, is there really anyone today who holds the keys of
the 'ultimate' truth? I don't think so.
So, this bizarre panic around the mainstream media about this new, and indeed frightening
technology, is not coming from their concern that you will be heavily misinformed. It's coming
from the fact that they want the monopoly to misinform you. Because they know that after
decades of lies and propaganda being upgraded to a literally scientific level, their
credibility today has reached a record low.
Celebrities can be inserted into porn videos by anyone. I don't like it. I don't think is
right.
Personalities should be protected and perhaps we need a new legislation code to achieve
that.
But what about the mainstream media pundits who will use this frightening technology to grab
the consent of the masses for another devastating war with millions of dead?
"... the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block " Siberian candidate " Trump. ..."
"... The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The Washington Post , Dearlove told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers" opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin." ..."
"... Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down. When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst). ..."
"... Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaid advisor . ..."
"... Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom every Russian is a Boris Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that Lokhova convincingly argues are absurd. ..."
"... As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, argued that the Iraqi military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too. ..."
"... Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult" hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... describes Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort. ..."
"... But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK. ..."
"... Stefan Halper then infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign. Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other. ..."
"... The rightwing Federalist website speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating it." Clovis believes that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue after inauguration. ..."
"... Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a "nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency with violating US election laws. ..."
"... As The Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2 article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election Day. ..."
"... Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not his government. ..."
"... Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker ..."
"... But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press." ..."
"... It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice. ..."
"... "Russiagate" continues to attract mounting blowback at Clinton, Obama and the Dems. Might well be they who end up charged with lawbreaking, though I'd be surprised if anyone in authority is ever really punished. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-02/fbi-spying-trump-started-london-earlier-thought-new-texts-implicate-obama-white ..."
"... I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb, Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged "puppet." ..."
"... The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what really happened. ..."
"... I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump did. ..."
"... Long-time CIA asset named as FBI's spy on Trump campaign By Bill Van Auken https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/21/poli-m21.html ..."
"... What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was "in the lead". ..."
"... Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House. Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal ideology for the most part. ..."
"... The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White House. ..."
"... It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its existence based on foreign enemies. ..."
"... So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab. ..."
As the role of a well-connected group of British and U.S. intelligence agents begins to
emerge, new suspicions are growing about what hand they may have had in weaving the Russia-gate
story, as Daniel Lazare explains.
Special to Consortium News
With the news that a Cambridge academic-cum-spy
named Stefan Halper infiltrated the Trump campaign, the role of the intelligence agencies in
shaping the great Russiagate saga is at last coming into focus.
It's looking more and more massive. The intelligence agencies initiated reports that Donald
Trump was colluding with Russia, they nurtured them and helped them grow, and then they spread
the word to the press and key government officials. Reportedly, they even tried to use these
reports to force Trump to step down prior to his inauguration. Although the corporate press
accuses Trump of conspiring with Russia to stop Hillary Clinton, the reverse now seems to be
the case: the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block "
Siberian
candidate " Trump.
The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business
partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The
Washington Post , Dearlove
told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers"
opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years
earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US
authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in
communication with the Kremlin."
Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down.
When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make
him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable
scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for
his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director
Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top
Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese
academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA
Director (and now NBC News analyst).
In-Bred
A few things stand out about this august group. One is its in-bred quality. After helping to
run an annual confab known as the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, Dearlove and Halper are now
partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are
connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also
connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke
and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another
MI6 vet. Alexander Downer
served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is
linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped
found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an
unpaid
advisor .
Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about
this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom
every Russian is a Boris
Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike
Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian
scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that
Lokhova convincingly
argues are absurd.
Halper: Infiltrated Trump campaign
In December 2016, Halper and Dearlove both resigned from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar
because they suspected that a company footing some of the costs was tied up with Russian
intelligence – suspicions that Christopher Andrew, former chairman of the Cambridge
history department and the seminar's founder, regards as " absurd " as well.
As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known,
Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of
Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass
destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency,
argued that the Iraqi
military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in
fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too.
Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence
against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend
the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses
fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult"
hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly
misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and
spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine.
The result is a diplo-espionage gang that is very bad at the facts but very good at public
manipulation – and which therefore decided to use its skill set out to create a public
furor over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
It Started Late 2015
The effort began in late 2015 when GCHQ, along with intelligence agencies in Poland,
Estonia, and Germany, began monitoring
what they said were " suspicious 'interactions' between figures connected to Trump and
known or suspected Russian agents."
Since Trump was surging ahead in the polls and scaring the pants off the foreign-policy
establishment by calling for a rapprochement with Moscow, the agencies figured that Russia was
somehow behind it. The pace accelerated in March 2016 when a 30-year-old policy consultant
named George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser. Traveling in
Italy a week later, he ran into Mifsud, the London-based Maltese academic, who reportedly set
about cultivating him after learning of his position with Trump. Mifsud claimed
to have "substantial connections with Russian government officials," according to prosecutors.
Over breakfast at a London hotel, he told Papadopoulos that he had just returned from Moscow
where he had learned that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands
of emails."
This was the remark that supposedly triggered an FBI investigation. The New York
Timesdescribes
Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at
meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr.
Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort.
But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later
tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking
British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security
agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in
such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK.
After Papadopoulos caused a minor political ruckus by
telling a reporter that Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize for criticizing
Trump's anti-Muslim pronouncements, a friend in the Israeli embassy put him in touch with a
friend in the Australian embassy, who introduced him to Downer, her boss. Over drinks, Downer
advised him to be more diplomatic. After Papadopoulos then passed along Misfud's tip about
Clinton's emails, Downer informed his government, which, in late July, informed the FBI.
Was Papadopoulos Set Up?
Suspicions are unavoidable but evidence is lacking. Other pieces were meanwhile clicking
into place. In late May or early June 2016, Fusion GPS, a private Washington intelligence firm
employed by the Democratic National Committee, hired Steele to look into the Russian angle.
On June 20, he turned in the first of eighteen memos that would eventually comprise
the
Steele dossier , in this instance a three-page document asserting that Putin "has been
cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years" and that Russian intelligence
possessed "kompromat" in the form of a video of prostitutes performing a "golden showers" show
for his benefit at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. A week or two later, Steele
briefed the FBI on his findings. Around the same time, Robert Hannigan flew to Washington
to brief CIA Director John Brennan about additional material that had come GCHQ's way, material
so sensitive that it could only be handled at "director level."
One player was filling Papadopoulos's head with tales of Russian dirty tricks, another was
telling the FBI, while a third was collecting more information and passing it on to the bureau
as well.
Page: Took Russia's side.
On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on
U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in which he complained that " Washington and other western
capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such
as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed "
unease " that someone representing the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's
side in a growing neo-Cold War.
Stefan Halper then
infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks
before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter
re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign.
Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other.
On July 11, Page showed up at a Cambridge symposium at which Halper and Dearlove both spoke.
In early September, Halper sent Papadopoulos an email offering $3,000 and a paid trip to London
to write a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean, his specialty.
"George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?" Halper asked when he got there,
but Papadopoulos said he knew nothing. Halper also sought out Sam Clovis, Trump's national
campaign co-chairman, with whom he chatted about China for an hour or so over coffee in
Washington.
The rightwing Federalist website
speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that
"Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating
it." Clovis believes
that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in
the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue
warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought
a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue
after inauguration.
Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty
rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does
his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite
countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the
sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a
"nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said
it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others
on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for
corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency
with violating US election laws.
But the corruption charges have nothing to do with Russian collusion and nothing in the
indictment against IRA indicates that either the Kremlin or the Trump campaign were involved.
Indeed, the activities that got IRA in trouble in the first place are so unimpressive –
just $46,000 worth of Facebook
ads that it purchased prior to election day, some pro-Trump, some anti, and some with
no particular slant
at all – that Mueller probably wouldn't even have bothered if he hadn't been under
intense pressure to come up with anything at all.
The same goes for the army of bots that Russia supposedly deployed on Twitter. As The
Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2
article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a
six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one
billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election
Day.
The Steele dossier is also underwhelming. It declares on one page that the Kremlin sought to
cultivate Trump by throwing "various lucrative real estate development business deals" his way
but says on another that Trump's efforts to drum up business were unavailing and that he thus
"had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather
than business success."
Why would Trump turn down business offers when he couldn't generate any on his own? The idea
that Putin would spot a U.S. reality-TV star somewhere around 2011 and conclude that he was
destined for the Oval Office five years later is ludicrous. The fact that the Democratic
National Committee funded the dossier via its law firm Perkins Coie renders it less credible
still, as does the fact that the world has heard nothing more about the alleged video despite
the ongoing deterioration in US-Russian relations. What's the point of making a blackmail tape
if you don't use it?
Steele: Paid for political research, not intelligence.
Even Steele is backing off. In a legal paper filed in response to a libel suit last May, he
said the document "did not represent (and did not purport to represent) verified facts, but
were raw intelligence which had identified a range of allegations that warranted investigation
given their potential national security implications." The fact is that the "dossier" was
opposition research, not an intelligence report. It was neither vetted by Steele nor anyone in
an intelligence agency. Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig
up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at
taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not
his government.
Using it Anyway
Nonetheless, the spooks have made the most of such pseudo-evidence. Dearlove and Wood both
advised Steele to take his "findings" to the FBI, while, after the election, Wood pulled
Sen. John McCain aside at a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to let him know that
the Russians might be blackmailing the president-elect. McCain dispatched long-time aide David
J. Kramer to the UK to discuss the dossier with Steele directly.
Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker found a former national-security
official who
says he spoke with him at the time and that Kramer's goal was to have McCain confront Trump
with the dossier in the hope that he would resign on the spot. When that didn't happen, Clapper
and Brennan arranged for FBI Director James Comey to confront Trump instead. Comey later
testified that he didn't want Trump to think he was creating "a J. Edgar Hoover-type
situation – I didn't want him thinking I was briefing him on this to sort of hang it over
him in some way."
But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry
observed a few
days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on
government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure
hate to see end up in the press."
Since then, the Democrats have touted the dossier at every opportunity, TheNew
Yorker
continues to defend it , while Times columnist Michelle Goldberg cites it as well,
saying it's a
"rather obvious possibility that Trump is being blackmailed." CNN, for its part, suggested not
long ago that the dossier may actually be Russian
disinformation designed to throw everyone off base, Republicans and Democrats alike.
It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the
intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the
public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that
they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this
out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice.
Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing
Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a
wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique , and his articles about
the Middle East, terrorism, Eastern Europe, and other topics appear regularly on such websites
as Jacobin and The American Conservative.
Mueller is trying to omit the normal burden of legal liability, "wilful intent" in his
charges against the St Petersburg, social media operation. In a horrifically complex area
such as tax, campaign contributions or lobbying, a foreign entity can be found guilty of
breaking a law that they cannot reasonably have been expected to have knowledge of.
But the omission or inclusion of "wilful intent" is applied on a selective basis depending on
the advantage to the deep state.
From a practical standpoint, omission of "wilful intent" makes it easier for Mueller to get a
guilty verdict (in adsentia assuming this is legally valid in America). Once the "guilt" of
the St Petersburg staff is established, any communication between an American and them
becomes "collusion".
I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's
persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the
White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been
motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten
into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never
recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb,
Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would
have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged
"puppet."
The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his
candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were
always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of
jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to
beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat
themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and
other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what
really happened.
backwardsevolution , June 3, 2018 at 2:50 pm
Realist – good post. I think what you say is true. Trump got too caught up in the
birther crap, and Obama retaliated. But I think that Trump had been thinking about the
presidency long before Obama came along. He sees the country differently than Obama and
Clinton do. Trump would never have built up China to the point where all American technology
has been given away for free, with millions of jobs lost and a huge trade deficit, and he
would have probably left Russia alone, not ransacked it.
I saw Obama as a somewhat reluctant globalist and Hillary as an eager globalist. They are
both insiders. Trump is not. He's interested in what is best for the U.S., whereas the
Clinton's and the Bush's were interested in what their corporate masters wanted. The
multinationals have been selling the U.S. out, Trump is trying to put a stop to this, and it
is going to be a fight to the death. Trump is playing hardball with China (who ARE U.S.
multinationals), and it is working. Beginning July 1, 2018, China has agreed to reduce its
tariffs:
"Import tariffs for apparel, footwear and headgear, kitchen supplies and fitness products
will be more than halved to an average of 7.1 percent from 15.9 percent, with those on
washing machines and refrigerators slashed to just 8 percent, from 20.5 percent.
Tariffs will also be cut on processed foods such as aquaculture and fishing products and
mineral water, from 15.2 percent to 6.9 percent.
Cosmetics, such as skin and hair products, and some medical and health products, will also
benefit from a tariff cut to 2.9 percent from 8.4 percent.
In particular, tariffs on drugs ranging from penicillin, cephalosporin to insulin will be
slashed to zero from 6 percent before.
In the meantime, temporary tariff rates on 210 imported products from most favored nations
will be scrapped as they are no longer favorable compared with new rates."
Trade with China has been all one way. At least Trump is leveling the playing field. He at
least is trying to bring back jobs, something the "insiders" could care less about.
I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've
underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always
the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the
chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons
and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their
favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump
did.
Abe , June 2, 2018 at 2:20 am
"Pentagon documents indicate that the Department of Defense's shadowy intelligence arm,
the Office of Net Assessment, paid Halper $282,000 in 2016 and $129,000 in 2017. According to
reports, Halper sought to secure Papadopoulos's collaboration by offering him $3,000 and an
all-expenses-paid trip to London, ostensibly to produce a research paper on energy issues in
the eastern Mediterranean.
"The choice of Halper for this spying operation has ominous implications. His deep ties to
the US intelligence apparatus date back decades. His father-in-law was Ray Cline, who headed
the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence at the height of the Cold War. Halper served as an aide
to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Alexander Haig in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
"In 1980, as the director of policy coordination for Ronald Reagan's presidential
campaign, Halper oversaw an operation in which CIA officials gave the campaign confidential
information on the Carter administration and its foreign policy. This intelligence was in
turn utilized to further back-channel negotiations between Reagan's campaign manager and
subsequent CIA director William Casey and representatives of Iran to delay the release of the
American embassy hostages until after the election, in order to prevent Carter from scoring a
foreign policy victory on the eve of the November vote.
"Halper subsequently held posts as deputy assistant secretary of state for
political-military affairs and senior adviser to the Pentagon and Justice Department. More
recently, Halper has collaborated with Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, the British
intelligence service, in directing the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSi), a security think
tank that lists the US and UK governments as its principal clients.
"Before the 2016 election, Halper had expressed his view – shared by predominant
layers within the intelligence agencies – that Clinton's election would prove 'less
disruptive' than Trump's.
"The revelations of the role played by Halper point to an intervention in the 2016
elections by the US intelligence agencies that far eclipsed anything one could even imagine
the Kremlin attempting."
Sorry for not commenting on other posts as of yet. But I think I have a different
perspective. Russia Gate is not about Hillary Clinton or Putin but it is about Donald Trump.
Specifically an effort to get rid of him by the intelligence agencies and the MSM. The fact
is the MSM created Trump and were chiefly responsible for his election. Trump is their
brainchild starlet used to fleece all the republican campaigns like a huckster fleeces an
audience. It all ties to key Supreme Court rulings eliminating campaign finance regulations
which ushered in the age of dark money.
When billionaires can donate unlimited amounts of money anonymously to the candidate of
their choosing what ends up is a field of fourteen wannabes in a primary race each backed by
their own investor(s). The only way these candidates can win is to convince us to vote. The
only way they can do that is to spend on advertising.
What the MSM dreamed of in a purely capitalistic way was a way to drain the wallets of
every single one of the republican Super PACs. The mission was fraught with potential
checkmates. Foe example, there could be an early leader who snatched up the needed delegates
for the nomination early on which would have stopped the flow of advertising cash flowing to
the MSM. Such possibilities worried the MSM and caused great angst since this might just be
the biggest haul they ever took in during a primary season. How would they prevent a
premature end of the money river. Like financial vampire bats, ticks and leeches they needed
a way to keep the money flowing from the veins of the republican Super PACs until they were
sucked dry.
What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like
a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the
term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause
all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was
"in the lead".
It was a pure stroke of genius and it worked so well that Carl Rove is looking for a job
and Donald Trump is sitting in the White House.
Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one
little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House.
Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a
democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal
ideology for the most part.
What to do? Trump was now the Commander in Chief and was spouting nonsense that the
establishment recoiled at such as Trumps plans to form economic ties with Russia rather than
continue to wage a cold war spanning 65 years which the MIC used year after year to spook us
all and guarantee their billions annual increase in funding. Trump directly attacked defense
projects and called for de-funding major initiatives like F35 etc.
The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin
horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every
year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the
hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and
entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of
governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White
House.
What to do? There was clearly a need to eliminate this bad guy since his avowed policies
were in direct opposition to the game plan that had successfully compromised the former
administration. They felt powerless to dissuade the Administration to continue the course and
form strategies to eliminate Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya, Ukraine and other vulnerable
targets swaying toward China and Russia. They faced a new threat with the Trump
Administration which seemed hell bent to discontinue the wars in these regions robbing them
of many dollars.
It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very
threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the
hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its
existence based on foreign enemies.
So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and
the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It
had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in
the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they
committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the
White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab.
In the interim, they also forgot on purpose to tell anyone about the election campaign
finance fraud that they were the chief beneficiaries of. They also of course forgot to tell
anyone what the fight was about for the Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Twenty seven
million dollars in dark money was donated by dark money donors enabled by the Supreme Court's
decisions to eliminate campaign finance regulations which enabled these donors to buy out
Congress and elect and confirm a Supreme Court Justice who would uphold the laws which
eliminate all the election rules and campaign finance regulations dating back to the Tillman
Act of 1907 which was an attempt to eliminate corporate contributions in political campaigns
with associated meager fines as penalties. The law was weak then and has now been
eliminated.
In an era of dark money in politics protected by revisionist judges laying at the top of
our federal judicial branch posing as strict constructionists while being funded by the
corporatocracy that viciously fights over control of the highest court by a panicked
republican party that seeks to tie up their domination in our Congress by any means including
the abdication of the Constitutional authority granted to the citizens of the nation we now
face a new internal enemy.
That enemy is not some foreign nation but our own government which conspires to represent
the wealthy and the powerful and which exalts them and which enacts laws to defend their
control of our nation. Here is a quote:
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they
create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral
code that glorifies it.
Frederic Bastiat – (1801-1850) in Economic Sophisms
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:32 am
Different journalist covering much the same ground:
"Russiagate" is strictly a contrivance of the Deep State, American & British Spookery,
and the corporate media propagandists. It clearly needs to be genuinely investigated (unlike
the mockery being orchestrated by Herr Mueller from the Ministry of Truth), re-christened
"Intellgate" (after the real perpetrators of crime), pursued until all the guilty traitors
(including Mueller) who really tried to steal our democratic election are tried, convicted
and incarcerated (including probably hundreds complicit from the media) and given its own
lengthy chapter in all the history books about "The Election They Tried to Steal and Blame on
Russia: How America Nearly Lost its Constitution." If not done, America will lose its
constitution, or rather the incipient process will become totally irreversible.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 6:25 am
Your timing of events is confused.
The deep state didn't try and steal the election because they were overly complacent that
their woman would win. Remember, they didn't try to use the dodgy, Steele dossier before the
election.
What the deep state has done is reactively try to overcome the election outcome by launching
an investigation into Trump. The egregious element of the investigation is giving it the
title "investigation into collusion" when they in all probability knew that collusion was
unlikely to have taken place. To achieve their aim (removing Trump) they included the line
"and matters arising" in the brief to give them an open ended remit which allowed them to
investigate Trump's business dealings of a Russian / Ukrainian nature (which may venture
uncomfortably close to Semion Mogilevich).
If as you state (and I concur) there was no Russian collusion, then barring fabrication of
evidence by Mueller (and there is little evidence of that to date) you have nothing to worry
about on the collusion front. Remember, to date, Mueller has stuck (almost exclusively) to
meat and potatoes charges like tax evasion and money laundering. If however the investigation
leads to credible evidence that Trump broke substantive laws in the past for financial gain,
then it is not reasonable to cry foul.
Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:02 am
The Deep State assisted the DNC in knocking out Sanders. THAT was ground zero. Everything
since then has been to cover this up and to discredit Trump (using him as the distraction).
Consider that the Deep State never bothered to investigate the DNC servers/data; reason being
is that they'd (Deep State) be implicated.
Skip Scott , June 1, 2018 at 7:29 am
Very true Seer. That is the real genesis of RussiaGate. It was a diversion tactic to keep
people from looking at the DNC's behavior during the primaries. They are the reason Trump is
president, not the evil Ruskies.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:13 am
We all seem agreed that the Russia collusion is an exercise in distraction. I can't say I
know enough to comment with authority on whether the DNC would require assistance from the
deep state to trash Bernie. From an outsider perspective it looked more like an application
of massively disproportionate spending and standard, back room dirty tricks.
There is a saying; don't attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.
In this case, try replacing incompetence with MONEY.
dikcheney , June 2, 2018 at 5:09 pm
Totally agree with you Skip and the Mueller performance is there to keep up the
intimidation and distraction by regularly finding turds to throw at Trump. Mueller doesnt
need to find anything, he just needs to create vague intimations of 'guilty Trump' and
suspicious associates so that no one will look at the DNC or the Clinton corruption or the
smashing of the Sanders campaign.
Their actual agenda is to smother analysis and clear thinking. Thankfully there is the
forensicator piecing the jigsaw as well as consortium news.
robjira , June 1, 2018 at 11:55 am
Spot on, Seer.
michael , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm
Those servers probably had a lot more pay-to-play secrets from the Clinton Foundation and
ring-kissing from foreign big donors than what was released by Wikileaks, which mostly was
just screwing over Bernie, which the judge ruled was Hillary's prerogative. Some email chains
were probably construed as National Security and were discreetly not leaked.
The 30,000 emails Hillary had bit bleached from her private servers are likely in the hands
of Russians and every other major country, all biding their time for leverage. This was the
carrot the British (who undoubtedly have copies as well) dangled over idiot Popodopolous.
Uncle Bob , June 1, 2018 at 10:33 pm
Seth Rich
anon , June 1, 2018 at 7:42 am
Realist is likely referring to events before the election which involved people with
secret agency connections, such as the opposition research (Steele dossier and Skripal
affair).
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:32 am
Realist responded but is being "moderated" as per usual.
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:31 am
Hillary herself was a prime force in cooking up the smear against Trump for being "Putin's
puppet." This even before the Democratic convention. Then she used it big time during the
debates. It wasn't something merely reactive after she lost. Certainly she and her
collaborators inside the deep state and the intelligence agencies never imagined that she
would lose and have to distract from what she and her people did by projecting the blame onto
Trump. That part was reactive. The rest of the conspiracy was totally proactive on her part
and that of the DNC, even during the primaries.
Don't forget, the intel agencies led by Clapper, Brennan and Comey were all working for
Obama at the time and were totally acquiescent in spying on the Trump campaign and
"unmasking" the identities and actions of his would-be administration, including individuals
like General Flynn. The cooked up Steele dossier was paid for by money from the Clinton
campaign and used as a pretext for the intel agencies to spy on the Trump campaign. There is
no issue on timing. The establishment was fully behind Clinton by hook or crook from the
moment Trump had the delegates to win the GOP nomination. (OBTW, I am not a Trump supporter
or even a Republican, so I KNOW that I "have nothing to worry about on the collusion front."
I'm a registered Dem, though not a Hillary supporter.)
Moreover, if you think that Mueller (and the other intel chiefs) have been on the
impartial up-and-up, why did the FBI never seize and examine the DNC servers? Why simply
accept the interpretation of events given by the private cybersecurity firm (Crowdstrike)
that the Clinton campaign hired to very likely mastermind a cover-up? That is exceptional
(nay, unheard of!) "professional courtesy." Why has Mueller to this day not deposed Julian
Assange or former British Ambassador Craig Murray, both of whom admit to knowing precisely
who provided the leaked (not hacked) Podesta and DNC emails to Wikileaks? Why has Mueller not
pursued the potential role of the late Seth Rich in the leaking of said emails? Why has
Mueller not pursued the robust theory, based on actual evidence, proposed by VIPS, and
supported by computer experts like Bill Binney and John McAfee, that the emails were not, as
the Dems and the intel agencies would have you believe on NO EVIDENCE, hacked (by the
"Russians" or anyone else) but were downloaded to a flash drive directly from the DNC
servers? Why has Mueller not deposed Binney or Ray McGovern who claim to have evidence to
bear on this and have discussed it freely in the media (to the miniscule extent that the
corporate media will give them an audience)? Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a
kangaroo court he is running? Is the media really independent and impartial or are they part
of a cover-up, perpetrating numerous sins of both commission and omission in their highly
flawed reportage?
I don't see clarity in what has been thus far been propounded by Mueller or any of Trump's
other accusers, but I don't think I am the one who is confused here, Vivian. If you want to
meet a thoroughly confused individual on what transpired leading up to this moment in
American political history, just go read Hillary's book. Absolutely everyone under the sun
shares in the blame but her for the fact that she does not presently reside in the White
House.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 1:48 pm
You have presented your case with a great deal more detail and clarity than the original
post that prompted my reply. You are also a great deal more knowledgeable than I on the
details. I think we are 98% in agreement and I wouldn't like to say who's correct on the
remaining 2%.
For clarity, I didn't follow the debates and wouldn't do so now if they were repeated. Much
heat very little light.
The "pretext" that the intel agencies claim launched their actions against Trump was not the
Steele dossier, at least that is what the intel agencies say. Either way your assertion that
it was the dossier that set things off is just that, an assertion. I think this is a minor
point.
On the DNC servers and the FBI we are 100% singing from the same hymn book and it all sticks.
Mueller's apparent disinterest in the question of hack or USB drive does rather taint his
investigation and thanks for pointing this out, I hadn't thought of that angle. I still think
Mueller will stick to tax and money laundering and stay well clear of "collusion", so yes he
may be running a kangaroo court investigation but the charges will be real world.
The MSM as a whole are a sick joke which is why we collectively find ourselves at CN, Craig
Murray's blog, etc. I wouldn't like to attribute "collaboration" to any individual in the
media. It was the reference to hundreds of journalists being sent to jail in your original
post that set me off in the first place. When considering the "culpability" of any individual
journalist you can have any position on a spectrum from; fully cognisant collaborator with a
deep state conspiracy, to; a bit dim and running with the "sexy" story 'cause it's the
biggest thing ever, the bosses can't get enough of it and the overtime is great. If American
journalists are anything like their UK counterparts, 99% will fall into the latter
category.
Don't have any issue with your final point. Hillary on stage and on camera was phoney as
rocking horse s**te and everyone outside her extremely highly remunerated team could see
it.
Sorry for any inconvenience, but your second post makes your points a hell of a lot clearer
than the original.
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:26 pm
My purpose for the first post in this thread was to direct readers to the article in Unz
by Mike Whitney, not to compress a full-blown amateur expose' by myself into a three-sentence
paragraph. You would have found much more in the way of facts, analysis and opinion in his
article to which my terse comments did not even serve as an abstract.
Quoting his last paragraph may give you the flavor of this piece, which is definitely not
a one-off by him or other actual journalists who have delved into the issues:
"Let's see if I got this right: Brennan gets his buddies in the UK to feed fake
information on Russia to members of the Trump campaign, after which the FBI uses the
suspicious communications about Russia as a pretext to unmask, wiretap, issue FISA warrants,
and infiltrate the campaign, after which the incriminating evidence that was collected in the
process of entrapping Trump campaign assistants is compiled in a legal case that is used to
remove Trump from office. Is that how it's supposed to work?
It certainly looks like it. But don't expect to read about it in the Times."
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm
Vivian – 90% of all major media is owned by six corporations. There most definitely
was and IS collusion between some of them to bring down the outsider, Trump.
As far as individual journalists go, yeah, they're trying to pay their mortgage, I get it,
and they're going to spin what their boss bloody well tells them to spin. But there is
evidence coming out that "some" journalists did accept money from either Fusion GPS, Perkins
Coie (sp) or Christopher Steele to leak information, which they did.
Bill Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that enabled these six media
conglomerates to dominate the news. Of course they're political. They need to be split up,
like yesterday, into a thousand pieces (ditto for the banks). They have purposely and with
intent been feeding lies to the American people. Yes, some SHOULD go to jail.
As Peter Strzok of the FBI said re Trump colluding with Russia, "There was never any
there, there." The collusion has come from the intelligence agencies, in cahoots with Hillary
Clinton, perhaps even as high as Obama, to prevent Trump being elected. When that failed,
they set out to get him impeached on whatever they could find. Of course Mueller is going to
stick with tax and money laundering because he already KNOWS there was never any collusion
with Russia.
This is the Swamp versus the People.
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 1:52 pm
Realist – another excellent post. "Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a kangaroo
court he is running?" As you rightly point out, Mueller IS being very selective in what he
examines and doesn't examine. He's not after the whole truth, just a particular kind of
truth, one that gets him a very specific result – to take down or severely cripple the
President.
Evidence continues to trickle out. Former and active members of the FBI are now even
begging to testify as they are disgusted with what is being purposely omitted from this
so-called "impartial" investigation. This whole affair is "kangaroo" all the way.
I'm not so much a fan of Trump as I am a fan of the truth. I don't like to see him –
anyone – being railroaded. That bothers me more than anything. But he's right about
what he calls "the Swamp". If these people are not uncovered and brought to justice, then the
country is truly lost.
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:38 pm
Precisely. Destroy the man on false pretenses and you destroy our entire system, whether
you like him and his questionable policies or not.
Some people would say it's already gone, but we do what we can to get it back or hold onto
to what's left of it. Besides, all the transparent lies and skullduggery in the service of
politics rather than principles are just making our entire system look as corrupt as
hell.
michael , June 1, 2018 at 5:00 pm
When Mueller arrested slimy Manafort for crimes committed in the Ukraine and gave a pass
to the Podesta Brothers who worked closely with Manafort, it was clear that Russiagate was a
partisan operation.
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 6:17 pm
Michael – good point!
KiwiAntz , June 1, 2018 at 1:00 am
Its becoming abundantly clear now, that the whole Russiagate charade was had nothibg to do
with Russia & is about a elaborate smokescreen & shellgame coverup designed to divert
attention away from, firstly the Democratic Party's woeful defeat & its lousy Candidate
choice in the corrupt Hillary Clinton? & also the DNC's sabotaging of Bernie Saunders
campaign run! But the most henious & treacherous parts was Obama's, weaponising the
intelligence agencies to spy (Halper) on the imaginary Mancharian Candidate Trump & to
set him up as a Russia stooge? Obama & Hillary Clinton are complicent in this disgraceful
& illegal activity to get dirt on Trump withe goal of ensuring Clinton's election win?
This is bigger than Watergate & more scandalous? But despite the cheating & stacking
of the card deck, she still lost out to the Donald? And this isn't just illegal its
treasonous & willful actions deserving of a lengthy jail incarceration? HRC & her
crooked Clinton foundation's funding of the fraudulent & discredited "Steele Dosier" was
also used to implement Trump & Russia in a made up, pile of fictitious gargage that was
pure offal? Obama & HRC along with their FBI & CIA spys need to be rounded up,
convicted & thrown in jail? Perhaps if Trump could just shut his damn mouuth for once
& get off twitter long enough to be able too get some Justice Dept officials looking into
this, without being distracted by this Russiagate shellgame fakery, then perhaps the real
criminal's like Halpert, Obama,HRC & these corrupt spooks & spies can be rounded up
& held to account for this treasonous behaviour?
Sean Ahern , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 pm
Attention should be paid also to the role of so called progressive media outlets such as
Mother Jones which served as an outlets for the disinformation campaign described in Lazare's
article.
Here from David Corn's Mother Jones 2016 article:
"And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian
counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with
memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian
government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump -- and that the FBI requested more
information from him."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump/
Not only was Corn and Mother Jones selected by the spooks as an outlet, but these so
called progressives lauded their 'expose' as a great investigative coup on their part and it
paved the way for Corn's elevation on MSNBC for a while as a 'pundit.'
Paul G. , May 31, 2018 at 8:46 pm
In that vein did the spooks influence Rachel Maddow or is her $30,000. a day salary
adequate to totally compromise her microscopic journalistic integrity.
dikcheney , June 3, 2018 at 6:57 am
Passing around references to Mother Jones is like passing round used toilet paper for
another try. MJ is BS it is entirely controlled fake press.
Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:23 pm
Stefan Halper was being paid by the Clinton's foundation during the time he was spying on
the Trump campaign. This is further evidence that Hillary Clinton's hands are all over
getting Russia Gate started. Then there's the role that Obama's justice department played in
setting up the spying on people who were working with the Trump campaign. This is worse than
Watergate, IMO.
Rumors are that a few ex FBI agents are going to testify to congress in Comey's role in
covering up Hillary's crimes when she used her private email server to send classified
information to people who did not have clearance to read it. Sydney Bluementhol was working
for Hillary's foundation and sending her classified information that he stole from the
NSA.
Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills were concerned about Obama knowing that Hillary wasn't using
her government email account after he told the press that he only found out about it at the
same time they did. He had been sending and receiving emails from her Clintonone email
address during her whole tenure as SOS.
Obama was also aware of her using her foundation for pay to play which she was told by
both congress and Obama to keep far away from her duties. Why did she use her private email
server? So that Chelsea could know where Hillary was doing business so she could send Bill
there to give his speeches to the same organizations, foreign governments and people who had
just donated to their foundation.
Has any previous Secretary of State in history used their position to enrich their spouses
or their foundations? I think not.
The secrets of how the FBI covered for Hillary are coming out. Whether she is charged for
her crimes is a different matter.
F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 7:48 pm
If Hillary paid a political operative using Clinton Foundation funds – those are tax
exempt charitable contributions – she would be guilty of tax fraud, charity fraud and
campaign finance violations. Hillary may be evil, but she's not stupid. The U.S.Government
paid Halper, which might be "waste, fraud and abuse", but it doesn't implicate Hillary at
all. Not that she's innocent, mind you
Rob , June 1, 2018 at 2:14 am
I need some references to take any of your multitude of claims seriously. With all due
respect, this sound like something taken from info wars and stylized in smartened up a little
bit.
the idea that Stefan Halper was some sort a of mastermind spy behind the so called
"Russiagate" fiasco
seems very implausible considering what he seems to have spent doing for the past 40
years
going back to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980 and his efforts then.
i think he must have had a fairly peripheral role as to whatever or not was going on
behind the scenes from 2016 election campaign, and the campaign to first stop Trump getting
elected, and secondly, when that failed, to bring down his Presidency.
of course, the moment his name was revealed in recent days, would have shocked or
surprised those of in the general
public, but not certainly amongst those in Government aka FBI/CIA/Military-industrial
circles.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 4:36 pm
chris m – Halper is probably one of those people who hide behind their professor (or
other legitimate) jobs, but are there at the ready to serve the Deep State. "I understand.
You want me to set up some dupes in order to make it look like there was or could be actual
Russian meddling. Gotcha." All you've got to do is make it "look like" something nefarious
was going on. This facilitates a "reason" to have a phony investigation, and of course they
make it as open-ended an investigation as possible, hoping to get the target on something,
anything.
Well, they've no doubt looked long and hard for almost two years now, but zip. However, in
their zeal to get rid of their opponent, who they did not think would win the election, they
left themselves open, left a trail of crimes. Whoops!
This is the Swamp that Trump talked about during the election. He's probably not squeaky
clean either, but he pales in comparison to what these guys have done. They have tried to
take down a duly-elected President.
F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 5:09 pm
His role may have been peripheral, but I seem to recall that the Office of Net Assessments
paid him roughly a million bucks to play it. That office, run from the Pentagon, is about as
deep into the world of "black ops" spookdom as you can get. Hardly "peripheral", I'd say.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:13 pm
F. G. Sanford – yes, a million bucks implies something more than just a peripheral
involvement, more like something essential to the plot, like the actual setting up of the
plot. Risk of exposure costs money.
ranney , May 31, 2018 at 6:17 pm
Chris, I think the Halper inclusion in this complex tale is simply an example of how these
things work in the ultra paranoid style of spy agencies. As Lazare explains, every one knew
every one else – at least at the start of this, and it just kind of built from there,
and Halper may have been the spark – but the spark landed on a highly combustible pile
of paranoia that caught on fire right away. This is how our and the UK agencies function.
There is an interesting companion piece to this story today at Common Dreams by Robert Kohler
titled The American Way of War. It describes basically the same sort of mind set and action
as this story. I'd link it for you if I knew how, but I'm not very adept at the computer.
(Maybe another reader knows how?)
We (that is the American people who are paying the salaries of these brain blocked, stiff
necked idiots) need to start getting vocal and visible about the destructive path our
politicians, banks and generals have rigidly put us on. Does any average working stiff still
believe that all this hate, death and destruction is to "protect" us?
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:07 pm
ranney – when you are on the page that you want to link to, take your cursor (the
little arrow on your screen) to the top of the page to the address bar (for instance, the
address for this article is:
"https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/31/spooks-spooking ")
Once your cursor is over the address bar, right click on your mouse. A little menu will
come up. Then position your cursor down to the word "copy" and then left click on your mouse.
This will copy the link.
Then proceed back to the blog (like Consortium) where you want to provide the link in your
post. You might say, "Here is the link for the article I just described above." Then at this
point you would right click on your mouse again, position your cursor over the word "paste",
and then left click on your mouse. Voila, your link magically appears.
If you don't have a mouse and are using a laptop pad, then someone else will have to help
you. That's above my pay grade. Good luck, ranney.
irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:13 pm
If you are using a Mac, either laptop w/touch screen or with a mouse, the copy/paste
function
works similarly. Use either the mouse (no need to 'right click, left click') or the touch
screen
to highlight the address bar once you have the cursor flashing away on the left side of
it.
You may need to scroll right to highlight the whole address. Then go up to Edit (there's
also
a keyboard command you can use, but I don't) in your tool bar at the top of your screen.
Click on 'copy'. Now your address is in memory. Then do the same as described above to
get back to where you want to paste it. Put your cursor where you want it to be 'pasted'.
Go back to 'edit' and click 'paste'. Voila !
This is a very handy function and can be used to copy text, web addresses, whatever you
want.
Explore it a little bit. (Students definitely overuse the 'paste and match style' option,
which allows
a person to 'paste' text into for example an essay and 'match the style' so it looks
seamless, although
unless carefully edited it usually doesn't read seamlessly !)
Remember that whatever is in 'copy' will remain there until you 'copy' something else. (Or
your
computer crashes . . . )
ranney , June 1, 2018 at 3:39 pm
Irina and Backwards Evolution – Thanks guys for the computer advice! I'll try it,
but I think I need someone at my shoulder the first time I try it.
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 8:53 pm
ranney – you're welcome! Snag one of your kids or a friend, and then do it together.
Sometimes I see people posting things like: "Testing. I'm trying to provide a link, bear with
me." Throw caution to the wind, ranney. I don't worry about embarrassing myself anymore. I do
it every day and the world still goes on.
I heard a good bit of advice once, something I remind my kids: when you're young, you
think everybody is watching you and so you're afraid to step out of line. When you're
middle-aged, you think everybody is watching you, but you don't care. When you're older, you
realize nobody is really watching you because they're more concerned about themselves.
Good luck, ranney.
irina , June 2, 2018 at 10:00 pm
I find it helpful to write down the steps (on an old fashioned piece of paper, with old
fashioned ink)
when learning to use a new computer tool, because while I think I'll remember, it doesn't
usually
'stick' until after using it for quite a while. And yes, definitely recruit a member of the
younger set
or someone familiar with computers. My daughter showed me many years ago how to 'cut &
paste'
and to her credit she was very gracious about it. Remember that you need a place to 'paste'
what-
ever you copied -- either a comment board like this, or a document you are working on, or
(this is
handy) an email where you want to send someone a link to something. Lots of other
possibilities too!
mike , June 1, 2018 at 7:43 pm
No one is presenting Halper as a mastermind spy. He was a tool of the deep state nothing
more.
It seems a mistake to frame the "Russiagate" nonsense as a "Democrat vs Republican"
affair, except at the most surface level of understanding in terms of our political
realities. If one considers that the Bush family has been effectively the Republican Party's
face of the CIA/deep state nexus for decades, as the Clinton/Obama's have been the Democratic
Party's face for decades now, what comes into focus is Trump as a sort of unknown, unexpected
wild card not appropriately tethered to the control structure. Simply noting that the U.S.
and Russia need not be enemies is alone enough to require an operation to get Trump into
line.
This hardly means this is some sort of "partisan" issue as the involvement of McCain and
others demonstrates.
One of the true "you can't make this stuff up" ironies of the Bush/Clinton CIA/deep state
nexus history is worth remembering if one still maintains any illusions about how the CIA
vets potential presidents since they killed JFK. During Iran/Contra we had Bush, the former
CIA director now vice president, running a drugs for arms operation out the White House
through Ollie North, WHILE then unknown Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was busy squashing
Arkansas State Police investigations into said narcotics trafficking. Clinton obviously
proved his bona fides to the CIA/deep state with such service and was appropriately rewarded
as an asset who could function as a reliable president. Here in one operation we had two
future presidents in Bush and Clinton both engaged in THE SAME CIA drug running operation.
You truly can't make this stuff up.
Russiagate seems to be in the end all about keeping deep state policy moving in the "right
direction" and "hating Russia" is the only entree on the menu at this time for the whole
cadre of CIA/deep state, MIC, neocons, Zionists, and all their minions in the MSM. The Obama
White House would have gladly supported Vlad the Impaler as the Republican candidate that
beat Hillary if Vlad were to have the appropriate foaming at the mouth "hate-Russia" vibe
going on.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:18 pm
Gary – great post.
irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm
Roger that. I would really like to see an inquiry re-opened into the
teenage boys who died 'on the train tracks' in Arkansas during the
early years of the Clinton-Bush trafficking. Many questions are still
unanswered. Speculation is that they saw something they weren't
supposed to see.
Mark Thomason , May 31, 2018 at 1:12 pm
This all grows out of the failure to clean up the mess revealed by the Iraq fiasco.
Instead, those who did that remained, got away with it, and are doing more of the same.
Babyl-on , May 31, 2018 at 12:46 pm
So, here is my question – Who, ultimately does the
permanent/bureaucratic/deep/Imperial* state finally answer to? Who's interests are they
serving? How do they know what those interests are?
It could be, and increasingly it looks as if, the answer is – no one in particular
– but the Saud family, the Zionist cabal of billionaires, the German industrialist
dynasties, the Japanese oligarchy and never forget the arms dealers, all of them once part of
the Empire now fighting for themselves so we end up with the high level apparatchiks not
knowing what to do or who to follow so they lie outright to Congress and go on TV and babble
more lies for money.
It's a great contradiction that the greatest armed force ever assembled with cutting edge
robotics and AI yet at the same time so weak and pathetic it can not exercise hegemony over
the Middle East as it seems to desire more than anything. Being defeated by forces with less
than 20% of the US spend.
Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:36 pm
You're right. They answer to no one because they are not just working in this country, but
they think that the whole world is theirs.
To these people there are no borders. They meet at places like the G20, Davos and wherever
the Bilderberg group decides to meet every year. No leader of any country gets to be one
unless they are acceptable to the Deep State. The council of foreign relations is one of the
groups that run the world. How we take them down is a good question.
Abe , May 31, 2018 at 12:43 pm
Following the pattern of mainstream media, Daniel Lazare assiduously avoids mentioning
Israel and pro-Israel Lobby interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the
Israel-gate reality underlying all the Russia-gate fictions.
For example, George Papadopoulos is directly connected to the pro-Israel Lobby, right wing
Israeli political interests, and Israeli government efforts to control regional energy
resources.
Lazare mentions that Papadapoulos had "a friend in the Israeli embassy".
But Lazare conspicuously neglects to mention numerous Israeli and pro-Israel Lobby players
interested in "filling Papadopoulos's head" with "tales of Russian dirty tricks".
Papadopoulos' LinkedIn page lists his association with the right wing Hudson Institute.
The Washington, D.C.-based think tank part of pro-Israel Lobby web of militaristic security
policy institutes that promote Israel-centric U.S. foreign policy.
The Hudson Institute confirmed that Papadopoulos was an intern who left the pro-Israel
neoconservative think tank in 2014.
In 2014, Papadopoulos authored op-ed pieces in Israeli publications.
In an op-ed published in Arutz Sheva, media organ of the right wing Religionist Zionist
movement embraced by the Israeli "settler" movement, Papadopoulos argued that the U.S. should
focus on its "stalwart allies" Israel, Greece, and Cyprus to "contain the newly emergent
Russian fleet".
In another op-ed published in Ha'aretz, Papadopoulos contended that Israel should exploit
its natural gas resources in partnership with Cyprus and Greece rather than Turkey.
In November 2015, Papadapalous participated in a conference in Tel Aviv, discussing the
export of natural gas from Israel with a panel of current and past Israeli government
officials including Ron Adam, a representative of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
and Eran Lerman, a former Israeli Deputy National Security Adviser.
Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of
the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon
and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and
on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region.
Israeli plans to develop energy resources and expand territorial holdings in the Syrian
Golan are threatened by the Russian military presence in Syria. Russian diplomatic efforts,
and the Russian military intervention that began in September 2015 after an official request
by the Syrian government, have interfered with the Israeli-Saudi-U.S. Axis "dirty war" in
Syria.
Israeli activities and Israel-gate realities are predictably ignored by the mainstream
media, which continues to salivate at every moldy scrap of Russia-gate fiction.
Lazare need no be so circumspect, unless he has somehow been spooked.
"Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of
the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon
and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and
on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region."
And water. Rating energy and water, what's at the top for Israel. Israel would probably
say both but Israel shielded by the US will take what it wants. That is already true with the
Palestinians.. The last figure I heard is that the Palestinians are allocated one fifth per
capita what is allocated to Israel's
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:59 am
A large swamp is actually an ancient and highly organized ecosystem. Only humans could
create a lawless madness like Washington DC.
irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:24 pm
Yes that is a good description of a swamp. BUT, if it loses what sustains it --
water, in the case of a 'real' swamp and money in the case of this swamp --
it changes character very quickly and becomes first a bog, then a meadow.
I am definitely ready for more meadowland ! But the only way to create it
is to voluntarily redirect federal taxes into escrow accounts which stipulate
that the funds are to be used for (fill in the blank) Public Services at the
Local and Regional levels. Much more efficient than filtering them through
the federal bureaucracy !
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:21 pm
But how would one avoid prosecution for nonpayment of taxes?
That seems a very quiet way to be rendered ineffective as a resister.
irina , June 1, 2018 at 2:30 am
The thing is, you don't 'nonpay' them. The way it used to work, through the
Con$cience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account, was that you filed
your taxes as usual. (This does require having less withholding than you owe).
BUT instead of paying what is due to the IRS, you send it to the Escrow Account.
You attach a letter to your tax return, explaining where the money is and why it
is there. That is, you want it to be spent on _________________(fill in the blank)
worthy public social service. Then you send your return to the IRS.
When I used to do this, I stated that I wanted my tax dollars to be spent to develop
public health clinics at neighborhood schools. Said clinics would be staffed by nurse
practitioners, would be open 24-7 and nurses would be equipped with vans to make
House Calls. Security would be provided.
So you're not 'nonpaying' your taxes, you are (attempting) to redirect them.
Eventually,
after several rounds of letters back and forth, the IRS would seize the monies from the
escrow account, which would only release them to the IRS upon being told to by the
tax re-director. Unfortunately, not enough people participated to make it a going
concern.
But the potential is still there, and the template has been made and used. It's very
scale-
able, from local to international. And it would not take that many 're-directors' to shift
the
focus of tax liability from the collector to the payor. Because ultimately we are liable
for
how our funds are used !
Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:19 pm
this was done a lot during the Vietnam conflict, especially by Quakers. the first thing,
if you are a wage earner, is to re-file a W2 with maximum withholdings-that has two effects:
1) it means you owe all your taxes in April. 2) it means the feds are deprived of the hidden
tax in which they use or invest your withholding throughout the year before it's actually
due(and un-owed taxes if you over over-withhold). Pretty sure that if a large number of
people deprive the government of that hidden tax by under-withholding, they will begin to
take notice.
Abe , May 31, 2018 at 11:54 am
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence agency of the government
and armed forces of the United Kingdom.
In 2013, GCHQ received considerable media attention when the former National Security
Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency was in the process of collecting
all online and telephone data in the UK. Snowden's revelations began a spate of ongoing
disclosures of global surveillance and manipulation.
For example, NSA files from the Snowden archive published by Glenn Greenwald reveal
details about GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) unit, which uses "dirty
trick" tactics to covertly manipulate and control online communities.
In 2017, officials from the UK and Israel made an unprecedented confirmation of the close
relationship between the GCHQ and Israeli intelligence services.
Robert Hannigan, outgoing Director-General of the GCHQ, revealed for the first time that
his organization has a "strong partnership with our Israeli counterparts in signals
intelligence." He claimed the relationship "is protecting people from terrorism not only in
the UK and Israel but in many other countries."
Mark Regev, Israeli ambassador to the UK, commented on the close relationship between
British and Israeli intelligence agencies. During remarks at a Conservative Friends of Israel
reception, Regev opined: "I have no doubt the cooperation between our two democracies is
saving British lives."
Hannigan added that GCHQ was "building on an excellent cyber relationship with a range of
Israeli bodies and the remarkable cyber industry in Be'er Sheva."
The IDF's most important signal intelligence–gathering installation is the Urim
SIGINT Base, a part of Unit 8200, located in the Negev desert approximately 30 km from Be'er
Sheva.
Snowden revealed how Unit 8200 receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens, as part of
a secret agreement with the U.S. National Security Agency.
After his departure from GCHQ, Hannigan joined BlueteamGlobal, a cybersecurity services
firm, later re-named BlueVoyant.
BlueVoyant's board of directors includes Nadav Zafrir, former Commander of the Israel
Defense Forces' Unit 8200. The senior leadership team at BlueVoyant includes Ron Feler,
formerly Deputy Commander of the IDF's Unit 8200, and Gad Goldstein, who served as a division
head in the Israel Security Agency, Shin Bet, in the rank equivalent to Major General.
In addition to their purported cybersecurity activities, Israeli. American, and British
private companies have enormous access and potential to promote government and military
deception operations.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 12:23 pm
Thanks Abe. Sounds like a manual for slave owners and con men. What a tangled wed the rich
bastards weave. The simple truth is their sworn enemy.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:19 pm
Interesting that a foreign power would be given all US communications data, which implies
that the US has seized it all without a warrant and revealed it all in violation of the
Constitution. If extensive, this use of information power amounts to information warfare
against the US by its own secret agencies in collusion with a foreign power, an act of
treason.
Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:18 am
This has been going on for a LONG time, it's nothing new. I seem to recall 60 Minutes
covering it way back in the 70s(?). UK was allowed to do the snooping in the US (and, likely,
vice versa) and then providing info to the US. This way the US govt could claim that it
didn't spy/snoop on its citizens. Without a doubt Israel has been extensively intercepting
communications in the US..
Secrecy kills.
Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:23 am
Yes, but the act of allowing unregulated foreign agencies unwarranted access to US
telecoms is federal crime, and it is treason when it goes so far as to allow them full
access, and even direct US bulk traffic to their spy agencies. If this is so, these people
should be prosecuted for treason.
F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 11:36 am
To listen to the media coverage of these events, it is tempting to believe that two
entirely different planets are being discussed. Fox comes out and says Mueller was "owned" by
Trump. Then, CNN comes out and says Trump was "owned" by Clapper. Clapper claims the evidence
is "staggering", while video clips of his testimony reveal irrefutable perjury. Some of
President Trump's policies are understandably abhorrent to Democrats, while Clinton's email
server and charity frauds are indisputably violations of Federal statutes. Democrats are
attempting to claim that a "spy" in the Trump campaign was perfectly reasonable to protect
"national security", but evidence seems to indicate that the spy was placed BEFORE there was
a legitimate national security concern. Some analysts note that, while Mueller's team appears
to be Democratic partisan hacks, their native "skill set" is actually expertise in money
laundering investigations. They claim that although Mr. Trump may not be compromised by the
Russian government, he is involved with nefarious Russian organized crime figures. It
follows, according to them, that given time, Mueller will reveal these illicit connections,
and prosecution will become inevitable.
Let's assume, for argument, that both sides are right. That means that our entire
government is irretrievably corrupt. Republicans claim that it could " go all the way to
Obama". Democrats, of course, play the "moral high ground" card, insinuating that the current
administration is so base and immoral that somehow, the "ends justify the means". No matter
how you slice it, the Clinton campaign has a lot more liability on its hands. The problem is,
if prosecutions begin, people will "talk" to save their own skins. The puppet masters can't
really afford that.
"All the way to Obama", you say? I think it could go higher than that. Personally, I think
it could go all the way to Dick Cheney, and the 'powers that be' are in no mood to let that
happen.
Vivian O'Blivion , May 31, 2018 at 12:19 pm
The issue as I see it is that from the start everyone was calling the Mueller probe an
investigation into collusion and not really grasping the catch all nature of his brief.
It's the "any matters arising " that is the real kicker. So any dodgy dealing / possible
criminal activity in the past is fair game. And this is exactly what in happening with
Manafort.
Morally you can apply the Nucky Johnson defence and state that everyone knew Trump was a
crook when they voted for him, but legally this has no value.
There is an unpleasant whiff of deep state interference with the will of the people
(electoral college). Perhaps if most bodies hadn't written Trump's chances off in such an off
hand manner, proper due diligence of his background would have uncovered any liabilities
before the election.
If there is actionable dirt, can't say I am overly sympathetic to Trump. Big prizes sometimes
come with big risks.
David G , May 31, 2018 at 5:14 pm
My own feeling from the start has been that Mueller was never going to track down any
"collusion" or "meddling" (at least not to any significant degree) because the whole,
sprawling Russia-gate narrative – to the extent one can be discerned – is
obviously phony.
But at the same time, there's no way the completely lawless, unethical Trump, along with
his scummy associates, would be able to escape that kind of scrutiny without criminal conduct
being exposed.
So far, on both scores, that still seems to me to be a likely outcome, and for my part I'm
fine with it.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 5:29 am
My thoughts exactly. Collusion was never a viable proposition because the Russians aren't
that stupid. Regardless of any personal opinion regarding the intelligence and mental
stability of Donald Snr., the people he surrounds himself with are weapons grade stupid. I
don't see the Russians touching the Trump campaign with a proverbial barge pole.
Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:26 pm
it just happens that Trump appears to have been involved (wittingly or not), with the
laundering a whole lot of Russian money and so many of his friends seem to be connected with
wealthy Russian oligarchs as well plus they are so stupid, they keep appearing to (and
probably are) obstructing justice. The Cohen thing doesn't get much attention here, but it's
significant that they have all this stuff on a guy who is clearly Trump's bagman.
Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:15 pm
There is also quite an indication that the entire Mueller investigation is a complete
smoke screen to be used as cannon fodder in the mainstream media.
On the one hand, Mueller and his hacks have found nothing of import to link Trump to
anything close to collusion with members of the Russian government. And I am by no means a
Trump supporter by any stretch of the imagination, except as a foil to Clinton. However, even
my minimalist expectations for Trump have not worked out either.
In addition. the Mueller investigation has been spending what appears to be a majority of
its time on ancillary matters that were not within the supposed scope and mandate of this
investigation. Further, a number of indictments have come down against people involved with
such ancillary matters.
The result is that if Mueller is going beyond the scope of his investigatory mandate, this
may come in as a technicality that will allow indicted persons to escape prosecution on
appeal.
Such a mandate, I would think, is the same thing as a police warrant, which can find only
admissible evidence covered by the warrant. Anything else found to be criminally liable must
be found to be as a result of a completely different investigation that has nothing to do
with the original warrant.
In other words, it appears that the Mueller investigation was allowed to commence under a
Republican controlled Congress for the very reason that its intent is simply to go in circles
long enough for Republicans to get their agendas through, which does not appear to be working
all too well as a result of their high levels of internecine party conflicts.
This entire affair is coming to show just how dysfunctional, corrupt, and incompetent the
entirety of the US federal government has become. And to the chagrin of all sincere
activists, no amount of organized protesting and political action will ever rid the country
of this grotesque political quagmire that now engulfs the entirety of our political
infrastructure.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:48 pm
Very true that the US federal government is now "dysfunctional, corrupt, and
incompetent."
What are your thoughts on forms of action to rid us this political quagmire?
(other than ineffective "organized protesting and political action")
Have you considered new forms of public debate and public information?
Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:34 am
All of this is blackmail to hold Trump's feet to the fire of the Israel firsters (such
actions pull in all the dark swampy things). By creating the Russia blackmail story they've
effectively redirected away from themselves. The moment Trump balks the Deep State will reel
in some more, airing innuendos to overwhelm Trump. Better believe that Trump has been fully
"briefed" on all of this. John Bolton was able to push out a former OPCW head with threats
(knew where his, the OPCW head's children were). And now John Bolton is sitting right next to
Trump (whispering in his ear that he knows ways in which to oust Trump).
What actual "ideas" were in Trump's head going in to all of this (POTUS run) is hard to
say. But, anything that can be considered a threat to the Deep State has been effectively
nullified now.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:22 am
Possible, but Manafort already tried to get his charges thrown out as being the outcome of
investigations beyond the remit He failed.
Brendan , May 31, 2018 at 10:26 am
There's no doubt at all that Joseph Mifsud was closely connected with western
intelligence, and with MI6 in particular. His contacts with Russia are insignificant compared
with his long career working amongst the elite of western officials.
Lee Smith of RealClearInvestigations lists some of the places where Mifsud worked, including
two universities:
"he taught at Link Campus University in Rome, ( ) whose lecturers and professors include
senior Western diplomats and intelligence officials from a number of NATO countries,
especially Italy and the United Kingdom.
Mifsud also taught at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and the London Academy of
Diplomacy, which trained diplomats and government officials, some of them sponsored by the
UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Council, or by their own governments."
Two former colleagues of Mifsud's, Roh and Pastor, recently interviewed him for a book
they have written. Those authors could very well be biased, but one of them makes a valid
point, similar to one that Daniel Lazare makes above:
"Given the affiliations of Link's faculty and staff, as well as Mifsud's pedigree, Roh thinks
it's impossible that the man he hired as a business development consultant is a Russian
agent."
Politically, Mifsud identifies with the Clintons more than anyone else, and claims to
belong to the Clinton Foundation, which has often been accused of being just a way of
funneling money into Hillary Clinton's campaign.
As Lee Smith says, if Mifsud really is a Russian spy, "Western intelligence services are
looking at one of the largest and most embarrassing breaches in a generation. But none of the
governments or intelligence agencies potentially compromised is acting like there's anything
wrong."
From all that we know about Joseph Mifsud, it's safe to say that he was never a Russian
spy. If not, then what was he doing when he was allegedly feeding stories to George
Papadopoulos about Russians having 'dirt' on Clinton?
I read somewhere that Mifsud had disappeared. Was that true? If so, is he back, or still
missing?
Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 6:21 pm
Here are some excerpts that will answer your question from an article by Lee Smith at
Realclearinvestigations, "The Maltese Phantom of Russiagate".
A new book by former colleagues of Mifsud's – Stephan Roh, a 50-year-old
Swiss-German lawyer, and Thierry Pastor, a 35-year-old French political analyst –
reports that he is alive and well. Their account includes a recent interview with him.
Their self-published book, "The Faking of Russia-gate: The Papadopoulos Case, an
Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with Mifsud in which he denies saying
anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they write, stated "vehemently that he
never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos." Mifsud asked rhetorically: "From where
should I have this [information]?"
Mifsud's account seems to be supported by Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat who
alerted authorities about Papadopoulos. As reported in the Daily Caller, Downer said
Papadopoulos never mentioned emails; he spoke, instead, about the Russians possessing
material that could be damaging to Clinton. This new detail raises the possibility that
Mifsud, Papadopoulos' alleged source for the information, never said anything about
Clinton-related emails either.
In interviews with RealClearInvestigations, Roh and Pastor said Mifsud is anything but a
Russian spy. Rather, he is more likely a Western intelligence asset.
According to the two authors, it was a former Italian intelligence official, Vincenzo
Scotti, a colleague of Mifsud's and onetime interior minister, who told the professor to go
into hiding. "I don't know who was hiding him," said Roh, "but I'm sure it was organized by
someone. And I am sure it will be difficult to get to the bottom of it."
Toby McCrossin , June 1, 2018 at 1:54 am
" The Papadopoulos Case, an Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with
Mifsud in which he denies saying anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they
write, stated "vehemently that he never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos.""
Thank you for providing that explosive piece of information. If true, and I suspect it is,
that's one more nail in the Russiagate narrative. Who, then, is making the claim that Misfud
mentioned emails? The only source for the statement I can find is "court documents".
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:20 am
The election scams serve only to distract from the Israel-gate scandal and the oligarchy
destruction of our former democracy. Mr. Lazare neglects to tell us about that. All of
Hillary's top ten campaign bribers were zionists, and Trump let Goldman-Sachs take over the
economy. KSA and big business also bribed heavily.
We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for
democracy is lost.
We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and
foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious preference.
Otherwise the United States is lost, and our lives have no historical meaning beyond
slavery to oligarchy.
Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 9:51 am
You are right Sam. Israel does work the fence under the guise of the Breaking News.
Joe
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm
My response was that Israel massacres at the fence, ignored by the zionist US mass
media.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:48 am
The extreme wealth and privileges of oligarchy depend on the poverty and slavery of
others. Inequality of income is the root cause of most of our ills. Try to imagine what a
world of economic equals would be like. No striving for more and more wealth at the expense
of others. No wars. What would there be to fight over – everyone would be content with
what they already had.
If you automatically think such a world would be impossible, try to state why. You might
discover that the only obstacle to such a world is the greedy bastards who are sitting on top
of everybody, and will do anything to maintain their advantages.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:52 am
How do the oligarchs ensure your slavery? With the little green tickets they have hoarded
that the rest of us need just to eat and have a roof over our heads. The people sleeping in
the streets tell us the penalty for not being good slaves.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 12:50 pm
Very true, Mike. Those who say that equality or fairness of income implies breaking the
productivity incentive system are wrong. No matter how much or how little wage incentive we
offer for making an effort in work, we need not have great disparities of income. Those who
can work should have work, and we should all make an effort to do well in our work, but none
of us need the fanciest cars or grand monuments to live in, just to do our best.
Getting rid of oligarchy, and getting money out of mass media and elections, would be the
greatest achievement of our times.
Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 5:30 pm
An old socialist friend of my dad's generation who claimed to have read the biography of
Andrew Carnegie had told me over a few beers that Carnegie said, "that at a time when he was
paying his workers $5 a week he 'could' have been paying them $50 a day, but then he could
not figure out what kind of life they would lead with all that money". Think about it mike,
if his workers would have had that kind of money it would not be long before Carnegie's
workers became his competition and opened up next door to him the worst case scenario would
be his former workers would sell their steel at a cheaper price, kind of, well no exactly
like what Rockefeller did with oil, or as Carnegie did with steel innovation. How's that
saying go, keep them down on the farm . well. Remember Carnegie was a low level stooge for
the railroads at one time, and rose to the top .mike. Great point to make mike, because there
could be more to go around. Joe
Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:16 pm
"We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for
democracy is lost.
We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and
foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious
preference."
Good luck with that!!!
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:19 pm
Well, you are welcome to make suggestions on how to save the republic.
john wilson , May 31, 2018 at 9:10 am
The depths of the deep state has no limits, but as a UK citizen, I fail to see why the
American "spooks" need any help from we Brits when it comes state criminal activity. Sure, we
are masters at underhand dirty tricks, but the US has a basket full of tricks that 'Trump'
(lol) anything we've got. It was the Russians wot done mantra has been going on for many
decades and is ever good for another turn around the political mulberry tree of corruption
and underhand dealings. Whether the Democrats or the Republicans win its all the same to the
deep state as they are in control whoever is in the White House. Trump was an outsider and
there for election colour and the "ho ho ho" look what a great democracy we are, anyone can
be president. He is in fact the very essence of the 'wild card' and when he actually won
there was total confusion, panic, disbelief and probably terror in the caves and dungeons of
the deep state.
Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:33 am
I'm sure the result was so unexpected that the shadowy fixers, the IT mavens who could
have "adjusted" the numbers, were totally caught off guard and unable to do "cleanly." Not
that they didn't try to re-jigger the results in the four state recounts that were ordered,
but it was simply too late to effectively cheat at that point, as there were already massive
overvotes detected in key urban precincts. Such a thing will never happen again, I am
sure.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:36 am
It appears that UK has long had a supply of anti-Russia fearmongers, presumably backed by
its anti-socialist oligarchy as in the US. Perhaps the US oligarchy is the dumbest salesman,
who believes that all customers are even dumber, so that UK can sell Russophobia here thirty
years after the USSR.
Bob Van Noy , May 31, 2018 at 8:49 am
"But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry
observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information
about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press."
Perfect.
Recently, while trying to justify my arguement that a new investigation into the RFK Killing
was necessary, I was asked why I thought that, and my response was "Modus operandi," exactly
what Robert Parry learned by experience, and that is the fundamental similarity to all of the
institutionalized crime that takes place by the IC. Once one realizes the literary approach
to disinformation that was fundamental to Alan Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, even Ian
Fleming, one can easily see the Themes being applied. I suppose that the very feature of
believability offered by propaganda, once recognized, becomes its undoing. That could be our
current reality; the old Lines simply are beginning to appear to be ridiculous
Thank you Daniel Lazar.
Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:39 am
The recognition of themes of propaganda as literary themes and modus operandi is helping
to discredit propaganda. The similarities of the CW false-flag operations (Iraq, Syria, and
UK), and the fake assassinations (Skripal and Babchenko) by the anti-Russia crowd help reveal
and persuade on the falsehood of the Iraq WMD, Syria CW, and MH-17 propaganda ops. Just as
the similarities of the JFK/MLK/RFK assassinations persuade us that commonalities exist long
before we see evidence.
Bob Van Noy , June 1, 2018 at 1:11 pm
Many thanks Sam F for recognizing that. As we begin to achieve a resolution of the 60's
Kllings, we can begin to see the general and specific themes utilized to direct the programs
of Assassination. The other aspect is that real investigation Never followed; and that took
Real Power.
In a truly insightful book by author Sally Denton entitled "The Profiteers" she puts
together a very cogent theory that it isn't the Mafia, it's the Syndicate, which means (for
me at least) real, criminal power with somewhat divergent interests ok with one another, to
the extent that they can maintain their Own Turf. I think that's a profound insight
Too, in a similar vain, the Grand Deceptions of American Foreign Policy, "scenarios" are
simply and only that, not a Real possible solution. Always resulting in failure
Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 9:23 pm
Yes, it is difficult to determine the structure of a subculture of gangsterism in power,
which can have many specialized factions in loose cooperation, agreeing on some general
policy points, like benefits for the rich, hatred of socialism, institutionalized bribery of
politicians and judges, militarized policing, destruction of welfare and social security,
deregulation of everything, essentially the neocon/neolib line of the DemReps. The party line
of oligarchy in any form.
Indeed the foreign policy of such gangsters is designed to "fail" because destruction of
cultures, waste, and fragmentation most efficiently exploits the bribery structure available,
and serves the anti-socialist oligarchy. Failure of the declared foreign policy is success,
because that is only propaganda to cover the corruption.
You know, not only Gay Trowdy but even Dracula Napolitano think people like Lazare ,
McGovern, etc. are overblown on this issue.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 1:47 pm
SocraticGadfly – Trey Gowdy hasn't even seen the documents yet, so he's hardly in a
position to say anything. The House Intelligence Committee, under Chairman Nunes, are being
stymied by the FBI and the Department of Justice who are refusing to hand over documents.
Refusing! Refusing to disclose documents to the very people who, by law, have oversight.
Nunes is threatening to hit them with Contempt of Congress.
Let's see the documents. Then Trey Gowdy can open his mouth.
What I take from this head spinning article is the paragraph about Carter Page.
"On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in
which he complained that "Washington and other western capitals have impeded potential
progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality,
corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed "unease" that someone representing
the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's side in a growing neo-Cold War
Mr. Page hit the nail on the head. There is no greater sin to entrenched power than to
spell out what is going on with Russia. It helps us understand why terms like dupe and
naïve were stuck on Carter Page's back.. Truth to power is not always good for your
health.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:07 am
The tyrant accuses of disloyalty, all who question the reality of his foreign
monsters.
And so do his monster-fighting agencies, whose budgets depend upon the fiction.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 am
Daniel Lazare – good report. "It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth
degree." This wasn't a case of paranoia. This was a blatant attempt to bring down a rival
opponent and, failing that, the President of the United States. This was intentional and
required collusion between top officials of the government. They fabricated the phony Steele
dossier (paid for by the Clinton campaign), exonerated Hillary Clinton, and then went to town
on bringing down Trump.
"Was George Popodopolous set up?" Of course he was. Set up a patsy in order to give you
reason to carry out a phony investigation.
"If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged
themselves to notice." They're not befogged; they're following orders (the major television
and newspaper outfits). Without their 24/7 spin and lies, Russiagate would never have been
kept alive.
These guys got the biggest surprise of their life when Hillary Clinton lost the election.
None of this would have come out had she won. During the campaign, as Trump gained in the
polls, she was heard to say, "If they ever find out what we've done, we'll all hang."
I hope they see jail time for what they've done.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:38 am
Apparently what has come out so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Some are saying this
could lead all the way up to Obama. I hope not, but they have certainly done all they can to
ruin the Trump Presidency.
JohnM , May 31, 2018 at 9:58 am
I'm adjusting my tinfoil hat right now. I'm wondering if Skripal had something to do with
the Steel dossier. The iceberg may be even bigger than thought.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:18 am
It is known that Skripal's close friend living nearby was an employee of Steele's firm
Orbis.
Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 2:58 pm
Exactly, his name is Pablo Miller and he is the MI6 agent who initially recruited Sergei
Skripal. Miller worked for Orbis, Steele's company and listed that in his resume on LinkedIn
but later deleted it. But once it's on the internet it can always be found and it was and it
was published.
robjira , May 31, 2018 at 2:13 pm
John, both Moon Of Alabama and OffGuardian have had excellent coverage of the Skripal
affair. Informed opinions wonder if Sergei Skripal was one of Steele's "Russian sources," and
that he may have been poisoned for the purpose of either a) bolstering the whole "Russia =
evil" narrative, or b) a warning not to ask for more than what he may have conceivably
received for any contribution he may or may not have made to the "dossiere."
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:20 am
Interesting details in this article, but we have known this whole Russiagate affair was a
scam from the get go. It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over
Hillary. The chagrined dems came together and concocted their sore loser alibi – the
Russians did it. They scooped up a lot of pre-election dirt, rolled it into a ball and
directed it at Trump. It is a testament to the media's determination to stick with their
story, that in spite of not a single scrap of real evidence after over a year of digging by a
huge team of democratic hit men and women, this ridiculous story still has supporters.
David G , May 31, 2018 at 10:31 am
"It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over Hillary."
Not so.
Daniel Lazare's first link in the above piece is to Paul Krugman's July 22, 2016 NY Times
op-ed, "Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate". (Note how that headline doesn't even bother to
employ a question mark.)
I appreciate that that Krugman column gets pride of place here since I distinctly remember
reading it in my copy of the Times that day, months before the election, and my immediate
reaction to it: nonplussed that such a risible thesis was being aired so prominently, along
with a deep realization that this was only the first shot in what would be a co-ordinated
media disinformation campaign, à la Saddam's WMDs.
Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 3:37 pm
Actually, I think the intelligence agencies' (CIA/FBI/DNI) plan started shortly after
Trump gave the names of Page and Papadopoulos to the Washington Post (CIA annex) in a meeting
on March 21, 2016 outlining his foreign policy team.
Carter Page (Naval Academy distinguished graduate and Naval intelligence officer) in 2013
worked as an "under-cover employee" of the FBI in a case that convicted Evgeny Buryakov and
it was reported that he was still an UCE in March of 2016. The FBI never charged or even
hinted that Page was anything but innocent and patriotic. However, in October 2016 the FBI
told the FISA Court that he was a spy to support spying on him. Remember the FISA Court
allows spying on him AND the persons he is in contact, which means almost everyone on the
Trump transition team/administration.
Here is an excerpt from an article by WSJ's Kimberley Strassel:
In "late spring" of 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed White House "National
Security Council Principals" that the FBI had counterintelligence concerns about the Trump
campaign. Carter Page was announced as a campaign adviser on March 21, and Paul Manafort
joined the campaign March 29. The briefing likely referenced both men, since both had
previously been on the radar of law enforcement. But here's what matters: With this briefing,
Mr. Comey officially notified senior political operators on Team Obama that the bureau had
eyes on Donald Trump and Russia. Imagine what might be done in these partisan times with such
explosive information.
And what do you know? Sometime in April, the law firm Perkins Coie (on behalf the Clinton
campaign) hired Fusion GPS, and Fusion turned its attention to Trump-Russia connections.
David G , May 31, 2018 at 4:56 pm
Most interesting, Chet Roman. Thanks.
My understanding is that Trump more or less pulled Page's name out of a hat to show the
WashPost that he had a "foreign policy team", and thus that his campaign wasn't just a hollow
sham, but that at that point he really had had no significant contact at all with Page
– maybe hadn't even met him. It was just a name from his new political world that
sprang to "mind" (or the Trumpian equivalent).
Of course, the Trump campaign *was* just a sham, by conventional Beltway standards: a
ramshackle road show with no actual "foreign policy team", or any other policy team.
So maybe that random piece of B.S. from Trump has caused him a heap of trouble. This is
part of why – no matter how bogus "Russia-gate" is – I just can't bring myself to
feel sorry for old Cheeto Dust.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 6:56 am
Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal had some good advice:
"Mr. Trump has an even quicker way to bring the hostility to an end.
He can – and should – declassify everything possible, letting Congress and the
public see the truth.
That would put an end to the daily spin and conspiracy theories. It would puncture
Democratic arguments that the administration is seeking to gain this information only for
itself, to "undermine" an investigation.
And it would end the Justice Department's campaign of secrecy, which has done such harm to
its reputation with the public and with Congress."
What do you bet he does?
RickD , May 31, 2018 at 6:44 am
I have serious doubts about the article's veracity. There seems to be a thread running
through it indicating an attempt to whitewash any Russian efforts to get Trump elected. To
dismiss all the evidence of such efforts, and , despite this author's words, there is enough
such evidence, seems more than a bit partisan.
What evidence? I've seen none so far. A lot of claims that there is such evidence but no
one seems to ever say what it is.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:06 am
RickD – thanks for the good laugh before bedtime. I'm with Mr. Merrell and I
actually want to see some evidence. Maybe it was Professor Halper in the kitchen with the
paring knife.
Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:21 am
Unfortunately, what this guy says is what most Americans still seem to believe. When I ask
people what is the actual hard evidence for "Russiagate" (because I don't know of any that
has been corroborated), I get a response that there have been massive examples of Russian
hacks, Russian posts, tweets and internet adverts–all meant to sabotage Hillary's
candidacy, and very effective, mind you. Putin has been an evil genius worthy of a comic book
villain (to date myself, a regular Lex Luthor). Sez who, ask I? Sez the trustworthy American
media that would never lie to the public, sez they. You know, professional paragons of virtue
like Rachel Maddow and her merry band.
Nobody seems aware of the recent findings about Halpern, none seem to have a realistic
handle on the miniscule scope of the Russian "offenses" against American democracy. Rachel,
the NY Times and WaPo have seen to that with their sins of both commission and omission. Even
the Republican party is doing a half-hearted job of defending its own power base with
rigorous and openly disseminated fact checking. It's like even many of the committee chairs
with long seniority are reluctant to buck the conventional narrative peddled by the media.
Many have chosen to retire rather than fight the media and the Deep State. What's a better
interpretation of events? Or is one to believe that the silent voices, curious retirements
and political heat generated by the Dems, the prosecutors and the media are all independent
variables with no connections? These old pols recognise a good demonizing when they see it,
especially when directed at them.
Personally, I think that not only the GOPers should be fighting like the devil to expose
the truth (which should benefit them in this circumstance) but so should the media and all
the watchdog agencies (ngo's) out there because our democracy WAS hijacked, but it was NOT by
the Russians. Worse than that, it was done by internal domestic enemies of the people who
must be outed and punished to save the constitution and the republic, if it is not too late.
All the misinformation by influential insiders and the purported purveyors of truth
accompanied by the deliberate silence by those who should be chirping like birds suggests it
may well be far too late.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:53 pm
Realist – a most excellent post! Some poll result I read about the other day
mentioned that well over half of the American public do NOT believe what they are being told
by the media. That was good to hear. But you are right, there are still way too many who
never question anything. If I ever get in trouble, I wouldn't want those types on my jury.
They'd be wide awake during the prosecution's case and fast asleep during my defense.
This is the Swamp at work on both sides of the aisle. Most of the Republicans are hanging
Trump out to dry. They've probably got too much dirt they want to keep hidden themselves, so
retirement looks like a good idea. Get out of Dodge while the going is good, before the real
fighting begins! The Democrats are battling for all they're worth, and I've got to hand it to
them – they're dirty little fighters.
Yes, democracy has been hijacked. Hard to say how long this has been going on –
maybe forever. If there is anything good about Trump's presidency, it's that the Deep State
is being laid out and delivered up on a silver platter for all to see.
There has never been a better chance to take back the country than this. If this
opportunity passes, it will never come again. They will make sure of it.
The greatest thing that Trump could do for the country would be to declassify all
documents. Jeff Sessions is either part of the Deep State or he's been scared off. He's not
going to act. Rosenstein is up to his eyeballs in this mess and he's not going to act. In
fact, he's preventing Nunes from getting documents. It is up to Trump to act. I just hope
he's not being surrounded by a bunch of bad apple lawyers who are giving him bad advice. He
needs to go above the Department of Justice and declassify ALL documents. If he did that, a
lot of these people would probably die of a heart attack within a minute.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:11 am
You sure came out of the woodwork quickly to express your "serious doubts" RickD.
Skip Scott , May 31, 2018 at 8:07 am
Please provide "such evidence". I've yet to see any. The entire prosecution of RussiaGate
has been one big Gish Gallop.
strgr-tgther , May 31, 2018 at 9:39 pm
RickD – Thank you for pointing that out! You were the only one!!! It is a very
strange article leaving Putin and the Russians evidence out and also not a single word about
Stromy Daniels witch is also very strange. I know Hillary would never have approved of any of
this and they don't say that either.
John , June 1, 2018 at 2:26 am
What does Stormy Daniels have to do with RussiaGate?
You know that someone who committed the ultimate war crime by lying us into war to destroy
Libya and re-institute slavery there, and who laughed after watching video of a man that
Nelson Mandela called "The Greatest Living Champion of Human Rights on the Planet" be
sodomized to death with a knife, is somehow too "moral" to do such a thing? Really?
It amazes me how utterly cultish those who support the Red Queen have shown themselves to
be – without apparently realizing that they are obviously on par with the followers of
Jim Jones!
strgr-tgther , June 1, 2018 at 12:17 pm
That is like saying what does income tax have to do with Al Capone. Who went to Alctraz
because he did not pay income tax not for being a gangster. So we know Trump has sexual
relations with Stormy Daniels, then afterward PAID her not to talk about it. So he paid Story
Daniels for sex! That is Prostitution! Same thing. And that is inpeachable, using womens
bodies as objects. If we don't prosecute Trump here then from now on all a John needs to say
to the police is that he was not paying for sex but paying to keep quiet about it. And
Cogress can get Trump for prostitution and disgracing the office of President. Without Russia
investigations we would never have found out about this important fact, so that is what it
has to do with Russia Gate.
"... That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say. ..."
"... The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack. ..."
"... "No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.] ..."
"... "Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since . ..."
"... "More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi." ..."
"... The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ] ..."
"... Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies. MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers. ..."
"... The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. ..."
"... I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed out" propaganda. One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not. No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply." ..."
"... There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths. ..."
"... Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked" to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another ..."
"... (FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and printed. ..."
"... Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden. ..."
"... Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their "investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again. ..."
"... Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's activities are a complete sham. ..."
"... Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely cause of the Russiagate scams. ..."
"... Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." ..."
"... For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic conspiracy. ..."
"... Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB drive, it is not a known. ..."
"... There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings. ..."
"... Don't forget this Twitter post by Wikileaks on October 30, 2016: Podesta: "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36082#efmAGSAH- ..."
"... Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face? ..."
"... If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars. ..."
"... My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody? ..."
If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked
into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand
close scrutiny . It
could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to
investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with
WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity -- including two "alumni" who were former
National Security Agency technical directors -- have long since concluded that Julian Assange
did not acquire what he called the "emails related to Hillary Clinton" via a "hack" by the
Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access
to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage
device -- probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained
this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.
On January 18, 2017 President Obama admitted
that the "conclusions" of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian hacking got to
WikiLeaks were "inconclusive." Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA "Intelligence Community Assessment of
Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections" of January 6, 2017, which tried to
blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained
no direct evidence of Russian involvement. That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of
that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian
intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to
WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.
Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA "assessment" became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff
(D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off the
blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump. It simply could not have been that
Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself. No, it had
to have been the Russians.
Five days into the Trump presidency, I had a chance to
challenge Schiff personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks.
Schiff still "can't share the evidence" with me or with anyone else, because it does not
exist.
WikiLeaks
It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that
Assange announced the pending publication of "emails related to Hillary Clinton," throwing the
Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias in favor of
Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders. When the emails
were published on July 22, just three days before the convention began, the campaign decided to
create what I call a Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the
emails by blaming Russia for their release.
Clinton's PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later admitted that she golf-carted around to various
media outlets at the convention with instructions "to get the press to focus on something even
we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails
from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton." The
diversion worked like a charm. Mainstream media kept shouting "The Russians did it," and gave
little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer'
Fox, Bernie didn't say nothin'.
Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work fabricating "forensic
facts" to "prove" the Russians did it. Here's how it played out:
June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish "emails related to
Hillary Clinton."
June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple
conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there
is evidence it was injected by Russians.
June 15, 2016: "Guccifer 2.0" affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the
"hack;" claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was
synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."
The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a
pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish
and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack.
Enter Independent Investigators
A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for
reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the "handpicked analysts"
who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do. The independent investigators found
verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5,
2016 showing that the "hack" that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or
anyone else.
Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for
example) by an insider -- the same process used by the DNC insider/leaker before June 12, 2016
for an altogether different purpose. (Once the metadata was found and the "fluid dynamics"
principle of physics applied, this was not difficult to
disprove the validity of the claim that Russia was responsible.)
One of these independent investigators publishing under the name of The Forensicator on May
31
published new evidence that
the Guccifer 2.0 persona uploaded a document from the West Coast of the United States, and not
from Russia.
In our July 24, 2017 Memorandum to President Donald Trump we stated ,
"We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI."
Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be
related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made aware of in this
general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish a trove of original CIA
documents that WikiLeaks labeled 'Vault 7.' WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or
former CIA contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the
information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.
"No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which
disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's
Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital
Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned
President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.]
Marbled
"Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it
race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described
and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part
3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too
delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has
never been mentioned since .
"The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, it seems, 'did not get the memo' in time. Her March
31
article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: 'WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA
cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations.'
"The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use
'obfuscation,' and that Marble source code includes a "de-obfuscator" to reverse CIA text
obfuscation.
"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post
report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by
WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution
double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian,
Korean, Arabic and Farsi."
A few weeks later William Binney, a former NSA technical, and I commented on
Vault 7 Marble, and were able to get a shortened op-ed version
published in The Baltimore Sun
The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was
neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his
associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a
non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24
Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like
it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we
know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and
with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [
President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017
VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together
at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary
straightforwardness. ]
We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin.
In his interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager
– to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7
disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's
technology enables hacking to be 'masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can
understand the origin' [of the hack] And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or
any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack.
"'Hackers may be anywhere,' he said. 'There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States
who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a
scenario? I can.'
New attention has been drawn to these issues after I discussed them in a widely published
16-minute
interview last Friday.
In view of the highly politicized environment surrounding these issues, I believe I must
append here the same notice that VIPS felt compelled to add to our key Memorandum of July 24,
2017:
"Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in
the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we
add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political
agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our
former intelligence colleagues.
"We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say
and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." The fact we find it
is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Savior in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer before serving as
a CIA analyst for 27 years. His duties included preparing, and briefing one-on-one, the
President's Daily Brief.
ThomasGilroy , June 9, 2018 at 9:44 am
"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post
report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by
WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic
attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in
Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi."
Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of
choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies.
MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to
blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the
supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US
allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not
capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of
the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during
the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis
could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth
Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted
by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers.
The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the
CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. It must be the Gulf of Tonkin all
over again. While Crowdstrike might have a "dubious professional record and multiple
conflicts of interest", their results were also confirmed by several other cyber-security
firms (Wikipedia):
cybersecurity experts and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant,
SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and the editor for Ars Technica, have rejected the claims of
"Guccifer 2.0" and have determined, on the basis of substantial evidence, that the
cyberattacks were committed by two Russian state-sponsored groups (Cozy Bear and Fancy
Bear).
Then there was Papadopoulas who coincidentally was given the information that Russia had
"dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Obviously, they were illegally
obtained (unless this was another CIA false flag operation). This was before the release of
the emails by WikiLeaks. This was followed by the Trump Tower meeting with Russians with
connections to the Russian government and the release of the emails by WikiLeaks shortly
thereafter. Additionally, Russia had the motive to defeat HRC and elect Trump. Yesterday,
Trump pushed for the reinstatement of Russia at the G-7 summit. What a shock! All known
evidence and motive points the finger directly at Russia.
Calling everything a false flag operation is really the easy way out, but ultimately, it
lets the responsible culprits off of the hook.
anon , June 9, 2018 at 11:28 am
I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed
out" propaganda.
One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not.
No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin
supply."
CitizenOne , June 8, 2018 at 11:40 pm
There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence
agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false
flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false
flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible
to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths.
In pre computer technology days there were also many false flags which were set up to
create real world scenarios which suited the geopolitical agenda. Even today, there are many
examples of tactical false flag operations either organized and orchestrated or utilized by
the intelligence agencies to create the narrative which supports geopolitical objectives.
Examples:
The US loaded munitions in broad daylight visible to German spies onto the passenger ship
Lusitania despite German warnings that they would torpedo any vessels suspected of carrying
munitions. The Lusitania then proceeded to loiter unaccompanied by escorts in an area off the
Ireland coast treading over the same waters until it was spotted by a German U-Boat and was
torpedoed. This was not exactly a false flag since the German U-Boat pulled the trigger but
it was required to gain public support for the entrance of the US into WWI. It worked.
There is evidence that the US was deliberately caught "off guard" in the Pearl Harbor
Attack. Numerous coded communication intercepts were made but somehow the advanced warning
radar on the island of Hawaii was mysteriously turned off in the hours before and during the
Japanese attack which guaranteed that the attack would be successful and also guaranteed that
our population would instantly sign on to the war against Japan. It worked.
There is evidence that the US deliberately ignored the intelligence reports that UBL was
planning to conduct an attack on the US using planes as bombs. The terrorists who carried out
the attacks on the twin towers were "allowed" to conduct them. The result was the war in Iraq
which was sold based on a pack of lies about WMDs and which we used to go to war with
Iraq.
The Tonkin Gulf incident which historians doubt actually happened or believe if it did was
greatly exaggerated by intelligence and military sources was used to justify the war in
Vietnam.
The Spanish American War was ginned up by William Randolph Hearst and his yellow
journalism empire to justify attacking Cuba, Panama and the Philippines. The facts revealed
by forensic analysis of the exploded USS Maine have shown that the cataclysm was caused by a
boiler explosion not an enemy mine. At the time this was also widely believed to not be
caused by a Spanish mine in the harbor but the news sold the story of Spanish treachery and
war was waged.
In each case of physical false flags created on purpose, or allowed to happen or just made
up by fictions based on useful information that could be manipulated and distorted the US was
led to war. Some of these wars were just wars and others were wars of choice but in every
case a false flag was needed to bring the nation into a state where we believed we were under
attack and under the circumstances flocked to war. I will not be the judge of history or
justice here since each of these events had both negative and positive consequences for our
nation. What I will state is that it is obvious that the willingness to allow or create or
just capitalize on the events which have led to war are an essential ingredient. Without a
publicly perceived and publicly supported cause for war there can be no widespread support
for war. I can also say our leaders have always known this.
Enter the age of technology and the computer age with the electronic contraptions which
enable global communication and commerce.
Is it such a stretch to imagine that the governments desire to shape world events based on
military actions would result in a plan to use these modern technologies to once again create
in our minds a cyber scenario in which we are once again as a result of the "cyber" false
flag prepared for us to go to war? Would it be too much of a stretch to imagine that the
government would use the new electronic frontier just as it used the old physical world
events to justify military action?
Again, I will not go on to condemn any action by our military but will focus on how did we
get there and how did we arrive at a place where a majority favored war.
Whether created by physical or cyberspace methods we can conclude that such false flags
will happen for better or worse in any medium available.
susan sunflower , June 8, 2018 at 7:52 pm
I'd like "evidence" and I'd also like "context" since apparently international electoral
"highjinks" and monkey-wrenching and rat-f*cking have a long tradition and history (before
anyone draws a weapon, kills a candidate or sicc's death squads on the citizenry.
The DNC e-mail publication "theft" I suspect represents very small small potatoes for so
many reasons As Dixon at Black Agenda Report put it . Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism
writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked"
to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another
(FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund
marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy
targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is
able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and
printed.
Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as
source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal
State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden.
Skip Scott , June 8, 2018 at 1:07 pm
I can't think of any single piece of evidence that our MSM is under the very strict
control of our so-called intelligence agencies than how fast and completely the Vault 7
releases got flushed down the memory hole. "Nothing to see here folks, move along."
I don't think anyone can predict whether or not Sanders would have won as a 3rd party
candidate. He ran a remarkable campaign, but when he caved to the Clinton machine he lost a
lot of supporters, including me. If he had stood up at the convention and talked of the DNC
skullduggery exposed by Wikileaks, and said "either I run as a democrat, or I run as a Green,
but I'm running", he would have at least gotten 15 pct to make the TV debates, and who knows
what could have happened after that. 40 pct of registered voters didn't vote. That alone
tells you it is possible he might have won.
Instead he expected us to follow him like he was the f'ing Pied Piper to elect another
Wall St. loving warmonger. That's why he gets no "pass" from me. He (and the Queen of Chaos)
gave us Trump. BTW, Obama doesn't get a "pass" either.
willow , June 8, 2018 at 9:24 pm
It's all about the money. A big motive for the DNC to conjure up Russia-gate was to keep
donors from abandoning any future
Good Ship Hillary or other Blue Dog Democrat campaigns: "Our brand/platform wasn't flawed. It
was the Rooskies."
Vivian O'Blivion , June 8, 2018 at 8:22 am
An earlier time line.
March 14th. Popadopoulos has first encounter with Mifsud.
April 26th. Mifsud tells Popadopoulos that Russians have "dirt" on Clinton, including "thousands of e-mails".
May 4th. Trump last man standing in Republican primary.
May 10th. Popadopoulos gets drunk with London based Australian diplomat and talks about "dirt" but not specifically
e-mails.
June 9th. Don. Jr meets in Trump tower with Russians promising "dirt" but not specifically in form of e-mails.
It all comes down to who Mifsud is, who he is working for and why he has been "off grid" to journalists (but not presumably
Intelligence services) for > 6 months.
Specific points.
On March 14th Popadopoulos knew he was transferring from team Carson to team Trump but this was not announced to the
(presumably underwhelmed) world 'till March 21st. Whoever put Mifsud onto Popadopoulos was very quick on their feet.
The Australian diplomat broke chain of command by reporting the drunken conversation to the State Department as opposed to his
domestic Intelligence service. If Mifsud was a western asset, Australian Intelligence would likely be aware of his status.
If Mifsud was a Russian asset why would demonstrably genuine Russians be trying to dish up the dirt on Clinton in June?
There are missing pieces to this jigsaw puzzle but it's starting to look like a deep state operation to dirty Trump in the
unlikely event that he went on to win.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:28 pm
Ms. Clinton was personally trying to tar Trump with allusions to "Russia" and being
"Putin's puppet" long before he won the presidency, in fact, quite conspicuously during the
two conventions and most pointedly during the debates. She was willing to use that ruse long
before her defeat at the ballot box. It was the straw that she clung to and was willing to
use as a pretext for overturning the election after the unthinkable happened. But, you are
right, smearing Trump through association with Russia was part of her long game going back to
the early primaries, especially since her forces (both in politics and in the media) were
trying mightily to get him the nomination under the assumption that he would be the easiest
(more like the only) Republican candidate that she could defeat come November.
Wcb , June 8, 2018 at 5:25 pm
Steven Halper?
Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:33 am
I might add to this informative article that the reason why Julian Assange has been
ostracized and isolated from any public appearance, denied a cell phone, internet and
visitors is that he tells the truth, and TPTB don't want him to say yet again that the emails
were leaked from the DNC. I've heard him say it several times. H. Clinton was so shocked and
angry that she didn't become president as she so confidently expected that her, almost
knee-jerk, reaction was to find a reason that was outside of herself on which to blame her
defeat. It's always surprised me that no one talks about what was in those emails which
covered her plans for Iran and Russia (disgusting).
Trump is a sociopath, but the Russians had nothing to do with him becoming elected. I was
please to read here that he or perhaps just Pompeo? met with Binney. That's a good thing,
though Pompeo, too, is unstable and war hungry to follow Israel into bombing yet another
innocent sovereign country. Thank, Mr. McGovern for another excellent coverage of this
story.
MLS , June 7, 2018 at 9:59 pm
"no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team"
Do tell, Ray: How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's investigation –
with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks – has and has not
done?
strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:14 am
MLS: Thank you! No one stands up for what is right any more. We have 17 Intelligency
agencies that say are election was stolen. And just last week the Republicans Paul Ryan,
Mitch McConnel and Trey Gowdy (who I detest) said the FBI and CIA and NSA were just doing
there jobs the way ALL AMERICANS woudl want them to. And even Adam Schiff, do you think he
will tell any reporter what evidence he does have? #1 It is probably classified and #2 he is
probably saving it for the inpeachment. We did not find out about the Nixon missing 18
minutes until the end anyways. All of these articles sound like the writer just copied Sean
Hannity and wrote everything down he said, and yesterday he told all suspects in the Mueller
investigation to Smash and Bleach there mobile devices, witch is OBSTRUCTION of justice and
witness TAMPERING. A great American there!
Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:48 am
strgr-tgther:
Sean Hannity??? Ha, ha, ha.
As Mr. McGoven wrote .."any resemblance between what we say and what presidents,
politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental."
John , June 8, 2018 at 5:48 am
Sorry I had to come back and point out the ultimate irony of ANYONE who supports the
Butcher of Libya complaining about having an election stolen from them (after the blatant
rigging of the primary that caused her to take the nomination away from the ONE PERSON who
was polling ahead of Trump beyond the margin of error of the polls.)
It is people like you who gave us Trump. The Pied Piper Candidate promoted by the DNC
machine (as the emails that were LEAKED, not "hacked", as the metadata proves conclusively,
show.)
incontinent reader , June 8, 2018 at 7:14 am
What is this baloney? Seventeen Intelligence agencies DID NOT conclude what you are
alleging, And in fact, Brennan and his cabal avoided using a National intelligence Estimate,
which would have shot down his cherry-picked 'assessment' before it got off the ground
– and it would have been published for all to read.
The NSA has everything on everybody, yet has never released anything remotely indicating
Russian collusion. Do you think the NSA Director, who, as you may recall, did not give a
strong endorsement to the Brennan-Comey assessment, would have held back from the Congress
such information, if it had existed, when he was questioned? Furthermore, former technical
directors of the NSA, Binney, Wiebe and Loomis- the very best of the best- have proven
through forensics that the Wikileaks disclosures were not obtained by hacking the DNC
computers, but by a leak, most likely to a thumb drive on the East Coast of the U.S. How many
times does it have to be laid out for you before you are willing and able to absorb the
facts?
As for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, (and Trey Gowdy, who was quite skilled on the
Benghazi and the Clinton private email server investigations- investigations during which
Schiff ran interference for Clinton- but has seemed unwilling to digest the Strozk, Page,
McCabe, et al emails and demand a Bureau housecleaning), who cares what they think or say,
what matters is the evidence.
I suggest you familiarize yourself with the facts- and start by rereading Ray's articles,
and the piece by Joe diGenova posted on Ray's website.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:12 pm
The guy's got Schiff for brains. Everyone who cares about the truth has known since before
Mueller started his charade that the "17 intelligence agency" claim was entirely a ruse,
bald-faced confected propaganda to anger the public to support the coup attempted by Ms.
Clinton and her zombie followers. People are NOT going to support the Democratic party now or
in the future when its tactics include subverting our public institutions, including the
electoral process under the constitution–whether you like the results or not! If the
Democratic party is to be saved, those honest people still in it should endeavor to drain the
septic tank that has become their party before we can all drain the swamp that is the federal
government and its ex-officio manipulators (otherwise known as the "deep state") in
Washington.
Farmer Pete , June 8, 2018 at 7:30 am
"We have 17 Intelligency agencies that say are election was stolen."
You opened up with a talking point that is factually incorrect. The team of hand-picked
spooks that slapped the "high confidence" report together came from 3 agencies. I know, 17
sounds like a lot and very convincing to us peasants. Regardless, it's important to practice
a few ounces of skepticism when it comes to institutions with a long rap sheet of crime and
deception. Taking their word for it as a substitute for actual observable evidence is naive
to say the least. The rest of your hollow argument is filled with "probably(s)". If I were
you, I'd turn off my TV and stop looking for scapegoats for an epically horrible presidential
campaign and candidate.
strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:50 pm
/horrible presidential campaign and candidate/ Say you. But we all went to sleep
comfortable the night before the election where 97% of all poles said Clinton was going to be
are next President. And that did not happen! So Robert Mueller is going to find out EXACTLY
why. Stay tuned!!!
irina , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm
Not 'all'. I knew she was toast after reading that she had cancelled her election night
fireworks
celebration, early on the morning of Election Day. She must have known it also, too.
And she was toast in my mind after seeing the ridiculous scene of her virtual image
'breaking the glass ceiling' during the Democratic Convention. So expensively stupid.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:50 pm
Mueller is simply orchestrating a dramatic charade to distract you from the obvious reason
why she lost: Trump garnered more electoral votes, even after the popular votes were counted
and recounted. Any evidence of ballot box stuffing in the key states pointed to the
Democrats, so they gave that up. She and her supporters like you have never stopped trying to
hoodwink the public either before or after the election. Too many voters were on to you,
that's why she lost.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:57 pm
Indeed, stop the nonsense which can't be changed short of a coup d'etat, and start
focusing on opposing the bad policy which this administration has been pursuing. I don't see
the Dems doing that even in their incipient campaigns leading up to the November elections.
Fact is, they are not inclined to change the policies, which are the same ones that got them
"shellacked" at the ballot box in 2016. (I think Obama must own lots of stock in the shellack
trade.)
Curious , June 8, 2018 at 6:27 pm
Ignorance of th facts keep showing up in your posts for some unknown reason. Sentence two:
"we have 17 intelligency (sic) agencies that say ". this statement was debunked a long time
ago.
Have you learned nothing yet regarding the hand-picked people out of three agencies after all
this time? Given that set of lies it makes your post impossible to read.
I would suggest a review of what really happened before you perpetuate more myths and this
will benefit all.
Also, a good reading of the Snowden Docs and vault 7 should scare you out of your shell since
our "intelligeny" community can pretend to be Chinese, Russian, Iranian just for starters,
and the blame game can start after hours instead of the needed weeks and/or months to
determine the veracity of a hack and/or leak.
It's past trying to win you over with the actual 'time lines' and truths. Mr McGovern has
re-emphasized in this article the very things you should be reading.
Start with Mr Binney and his technical evaluation of the forensics in the DNC docs and build
out from there This is just a suggestion.
What never ceases to amaze me in your posts is the 'issue' that many of the docs were
bought and paid for by the Clinton team, and yet amnesia has taken over those aspects as
well. Shouldn't you start with the Clintons paying for this dirt before it was ever
attributed to Trump?
Daniel , June 8, 2018 at 6:38 pm
Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on
their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their
"investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry
picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again.
More than 1/2 of their report was about RT, and even though that was all easily viewable
public record, they got huge claims wrong. Basically, the best they had was that RT covered
Occupy Wall Street and the NO DAPL and BLM protests, and horror of horrors, aired third party
debates! In a democracy! How dare they?
Why didn't FBI subpoena DNC's servers so they could run their own forensics on them? Why
did they just accept the claims of a private company founded by an Atlantic Council board
member? Did you know that CrowdStrike had to backpedal on the exact same claim they made
about the DNC server when Ukraine showed they were completely wrong regarding Ukie
artillery?
Joe Lauria , June 8, 2018 at 2:12 am
Until he went incommunicado Assange stated on several occasions that he was never
questioned by Muellers team. Craig Murray has said the same. And Kim Dotcom has written to
Mueller offering evidence about the source and he says they have never replied to him.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm
Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to
divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the
truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's
activities are a complete sham.
MLS wrote, "How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's
investigation – with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks
– has and has not done?"
Robert Mueller is NOT a Special Prosecutor appointed by the Congress. He is a special
counsel appointed by the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, and is part of the
Department of Justice.
I know no one who dislikes Trumps wants to hear it. But all Mueller's authority and power
to act is derived from Donald J. Trump's executive authority because he won the 2016
presidential election. Mueller is down the chain of command in the Executive Department.
That's why this is all nonsense. What we basically have is Trump investigating himself.
The framers of the Constitution never intended this. They intended Congress to investigate
the Executive and that's why they gave Congress the power to remove him or her via
impeachment.
As long as we continue with this folly of expecting the Justice Department to somehow
investigate and prosecute a president we end up with two terrible possibilities. Either a
corrupt president will exercise his legitimate authority to end the investigation like Nixon
did -or- we have a Deep State beyond the reach of the elected president that can effectively
investigate and prosecute a corrupt president, but also then has other powers with no
democratic control.
The solution to this dilemma? An empowered Congress elected by the People operating as the
Constitution intended.
As to the rest of your post? It is an example of the "will to believe." Me? I'll not act
as if there is evidence of Russian interference until I'm shown evidence, not act as if it
must be true, because I want to believe that, until it's fully proven that it didn't
happen.
F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 8:22 pm
There must be some Trump-Russia ties.
Or so claim those CIA spies-
McCabe wants a deal, or else he won't squeal,
He'll dissemble when he testifies!
No one knows what's on Huma's computer.
There's no jury and no prosecutor.
Poor Adam Schiff hopes McCabe takes the fifth,
Special council might someday recruit her!
Assange is still embassy bound.
Mueller's case hasn't quite come unwound.
Wayne Madsen implies that there might be some ties,
To Israelis they haven't yet found!
Halper and Mifsud are players.
John Brennan used cutouts in layers.
If the scheme falls apart and the bureau is smart,
They'll go after them all as betrayers!
They needed historical fiction.
A dossier with salacious depiction!
Some urinous whores could get down on all fours,
They'd accomplish some bed sheet emiction!
Pablo Miller and Skripal were cited.
Sidney Blumenthal might have been slighted.
Christopher Steele offered Sidney a deal,
But the dossier's not copyrighted!
That story about Novichok,
Smells a lot like a very large crock.
But they can't be deposed or the story disclosed,
The Skripals have toxic brain block!
Papadopolis shot off his yap.
He told Downer, that affable chap-
There was dirt to report on the Clinton cohort,
Mifsud hooked him with that honey trap!
She was blond and a bombshell to boot.
Papadopolis thought she was cute.
She worked for Mifsud, a mysterious dude,
Now poor Paps is in grave disrepute!
But the trick was to tie it to Russians.
The Clinton team had some discussions.
Their big email scandal was easy to handle,
They'd blame Vlad for the bad repercussions!
There must have been Russian collusion.
That explained all the vote count confusion.
Guccifer Two made the Trump team come through,
If he won, it was just an illusion!
Lisa Page and Pete Strzok were disgusted
They schemed and they plotted and lusted.
If bald-headed Clapper appealed to Jake Tapper,
Brennan's Tweets might get Donald Trump busted!
There had to be cyber subversion.
It would serve as the perfect perversion.
They would claim it was missed if it didn't exist,
It's a logically perfect diversion!
F.G., you've done it again, and I might add, topped even yourself! Thanks.
KiwiAntz , June 7, 2018 at 7:30 pm
What a joke, America, the most dishonest Country on Earth, has meddled, murdered &
committed coups to overturn other Govts & interfered & continues to do so in just
about every Country on Earth by using Trade sanctions, arming Terrorists & illegal
invasions, has the barefaced cheek to puff out its chest & hypocritcally blame Russia for
something that it does on a daily basis?? And the point with Mueller's investigation is not
to find any Russian collusion evidence, who needs evidence when you can just make it up? The
point is provide the US with a list of unfounded lies & excuses, FIRSTLY to slander &
demonise RUSSIA for something they clearly didn't do! SECONDLY, was to provide a excuse for
the Democrats dismal election loss result to the DONALD & his Trump Party which just
happens to contain some Republicans? THIRDLY, to conduct a soft Coup by trying to get Trump
impeached on "TRUMPED UP CHARGES OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION"? And FOURTLY to divert attention away
from scrutiny & cover up Obama & Hillary Clinton's illegal, money grubbing activities
& her treasonous behaviour with her private email server?? After two years of Russiagate
nonsense with NOTHING to show for it, I think it's about time America owes Russia a public
apology & compensation for its blatant lying & slander of a innocent Country for a
crime they never committed?
Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 7:11 pm
Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely
cause of the Russiagate scams.
I am sure that they manipulate the digital voting machines directly and indirectly. True
elections are now impossible.
Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any
resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely
coincidental."
Antiwar7 , June 7, 2018 at 6:23 pm
Expecting the evil people running the show to respond to reason is futile, of course. All
of these reports are really addressed to the peanut gallery, where true power lies, if only
they could realize it.
Thanks, Ray and VIPS, for keeping up the good fight.
mike k , June 7, 2018 at 5:55 pm
For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which
pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering
a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic
conspiracy.
And BTW people have become shy about using the word conspiracy, for fear it will
automatically brand one as a hoaxer. On the contrary, conspiracies are extremely common, the
higher one climbs in the power hierarchy. Like monopolies, conspiracies are central to the
way the oligarchs do business.
John , June 8, 2018 at 5:42 am
Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in
knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is
involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB
drive, it is not a known.
There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that
the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth
Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being
done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated
reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings.
" whether or not"?!! Wow. That's an imperialistic statement.
Drew Hunkins , June 7, 2018 at 5:50 pm
Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic
charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and
Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the
mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by
Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was
the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable
DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his
crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they
even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face?
So sickening to see the manner in which many DNC sycophants obsequiously genuflect to
their godlike Mueller. A damn prosecutor who was arguably in bed with the Winter Hill
Gang!
jose , June 7, 2018 at 5:13 pm
If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They
know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The
Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars.
Jeff , June 7, 2018 at 4:35 pm
Thanx, Ray. The sad news is that everybody now believes that Russia tried to "meddle" in
our election and, since it's a belief, neither facts nor reality will dislodge it. Your
disclaimer should also probably carry the warning – never believe a word a government
official says especially if they are in the CIA, NSA, or FBI unless they provide proof. If
they tell you that it's classified, that they can't divulge it, or anything of that sort, you
know they are lying.
john wilson , June 7, 2018 at 4:09 pm
I suspect the real reason no evidence has been produced is because there isn't any. I know
this is stating the obvious, but if you think about it, as long as the non extent evidence is
supposedly being "investigated" the story remains alive. They know they aren't going to find
anything even remotely plausible that would stand up to any kind of scrutiny, but as long as
they are looking, it has the appearance that there might be something.
Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 4:08 pm
I first want to thank Ray and the VIPS for their continuing to follow through on this
Russia-Gate story. And it is a story.
My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After
all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart
Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not
be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for
justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved
in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody?
Now we have Sean Hannity making a strong case against the Clinton's and the FBI's careful
handling of their crimes. What seems out of place, since this should be big news, is that CNN
nor MSNBC seems to be covering this story in the same way Hannity is. I mean isn't this news,
meant to be reported as news? Why avoid reporting on Hillary in such a manner? This must be
that 'fake news' they all talk about boy am I smart.
In the end I have decided to be merely an observer, because there are no good guys or gals
in our nation's capital worth believing. In the end even Hannity's version of what took place
leads back to a guilty Russia. So, the way I see it, the swamp is being drained only to make
more room for more, and new swamp creatures to emerge. Talk about spinning our wheels. When
will good people arrive to finally once and for all drain this freaking swamp, once and for
all?
Realist , June 7, 2018 at 5:25 pm
Ha, ha! Don't you enjoy the magic show being put on by the insiders desperately trying to
hang onto their power even after being voted out of office? Their attempt to distract your
attention from reality whilst feeding you their false illusions is worthy of Penn &
Teller, or David Copperfield (the magician). Who ya gonna believe? Them or your lying
eyes?
Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 10:00 pm
Realist, You can bet they will investigate everything but what needs investigated, as our
Politico class devolves into survivalist in fighting, the mechanism of war goes
uninterrupted. Joe
F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 5:34 pm
Joe, speaking of draining the swamp, check out my comment under Ray's June 1 article about
Freddy Fleitz!
Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 6:59 pm
That is just what I was reminded of; here is an antiseptic but less emphatic last
line:
"Swamp draining progresses apace.
It's being accomplished with grace:
They're taking great pains to clean out the drains,"
New swamp creatures will need all that space!
Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 11:00 am
We must realize that to them, "the Swamp" refers to those in office who still abide by New
Deal policy. Despite the thoroughly discredited neoliberal economic policy, the radical right
are driving the world in the libertarian direction of privatization, austerity, private bank
control of money creation, dismantling the nation-state, contempt for the Constitution,
etc.
"... The reports delivered during the four-hour meeting provided a devastating exposure of the connection between propaganda and censorship by the media and the warmongering of governments in Britain, the United States and across the world. ..."
"... Professor Piers Robinson (Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism) spoke on the rebranding of government propaganda as "public relations." Drawing on his research into the Iraq war, he cited material from the Chilcot Inquiry into the war confirming the systematic manipulation and exaggeration of "intelligence" on Iraq's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction. This included discussions between the US and British governments over how the 9/11 terror attacks could be used for regime change operations, under the slogan of the "war on terror", which Robinson described as a propaganda slogan for mobilising support for military operations. ..."
"... Stuart gave a presentation on his examination of film recorded by BBC personnel at Atareb Hospital in Aleppo on August 26, 2013 purporting to show the aftermath of a napalm-style bombing by Syrian government forces. The footage was broadcast the same evening that parliament delivered a shock vote against a military attack on Syria. He showed that much of it was staged. Not only did this potentially include the use of military casualty trauma simulations, but BBC personnel were travelling in vehicles displaying ISIS flags and alongside senior members of the western-funded White Helmets. ..."
"... It was impossible to have a functioning democracy without a functioning fourth estate, he said. This had been the gold standard but was no longer the case. Henningsen noted widespread popular opposition to war in the US that successive presidential candidates had sought to manipulate, only to betray once in power -- from George W. Bush to Barack Obama and Donald Trump. ..."
"... The mainstream media have enormous assets and resources but claim democracy is threatened by "fake news", when they are the purveyors of fake news and the real threat to democracy. ..."
"Government propaganda and the war on terror from 9/11 to Syria"
Media on Trial held a successful event in Leeds on Sunday, in the face of sustained efforts
to prevent the meeting taking place.
The group was formed by Frome Stop War, based in Somerset. Working with academics,
investigative journalists and other interested parties and individuals, and drawing on the
illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, Media on Trial seeks to "cultivate public scepticism when faced
with establishment and corporate media's partisan reporting at times of conflict". It held
well-attended meetings in Frome and London last year. Its success in exposing the ongoing
regime-change operations in Syria, and government/media propaganda to this end, has made its
members the subject of an organised media smear campaign, culminating in efforts to silence it
altogether.
" Government propaganda and the war on terror from 9/11 to Syria" was booked at
Leeds City Museum. But in an assault on free speech, Labour-run Leeds City Council in West
Yorkshire cancelled the event .
Sheila
Coombes speaking at Media on Trial
Sheila Coombes (Frome Stop War) has reported that the ban, made on May 3 -- World Press
Freedom Day -- came after a series of attacks on several of the
featured speakers by the Huffington Post , Guardian and Times
newspapers as "Assad Apologists".
Among those targeted were Professor Piers Robinson
(University of Sheffield), Professor Tim Hayward (University of Edinburgh) -- both of the
Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM) -- and investigative journalist Vanessa
Beeley.
Having travelled to Leeds to check out the venue, Coombes was told that Leeds City Council
had cancelled the event, suggesting that "security issues" were involved. She was informed that
it was a blanket ban and that no other council-run venue would host it.
Less than an hour after she had been informed, the Yorkshire Post ran an online
article welcoming the ban, followed by a similar report in the Huffington Post . The
speed of publication suggests that these media outlets were aware of the ban before Coombes
herself had been informed.
Piers Robinson speaking at the Media on Trial event
Coombes reports that she was in contact with police regarding security arrangements for the
event and that she had been informed by the police officer in charge that he had advised Leeds
City Council there was "no intelligence to assess a threat". A second alternative private venue
was also cancelled.
Media on Trial was forced to keep details of the third venue secret until shortly before it
was due to open and restrict entrance to those who had already purchased tickets. The panel was
eventually able to go ahead on Sunday at the Baab-ul-llm Islamic education centre, one of the
few venues prepared to stand in defiance of this campaign of censorship. Approximately 200
people attended.
The reports delivered during the four-hour meeting provided a devastating exposure of
the connection between propaganda and censorship by the media and the warmongering of
governments in Britain, the United States and across the world.
Professor Piers Robinson (Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism) spoke on
the rebranding of government propaganda as "public relations." Drawing on his research into the
Iraq war, he cited material from the Chilcot Inquiry into the war confirming the systematic
manipulation and exaggeration of "intelligence" on Iraq's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction.
This included discussions between the US and British governments over how the 9/11 terror
attacks could be used for regime change operations, under the slogan of the "war on terror",
which Robinson described as a propaganda slogan for mobilising support for military
operations.
Robert Stuart is an independent researcher whose presentation on the "irregularities" in the
BBC Panorama documentary, "Saving Syria's Children," encouraged film producer and
writer Victor Lewis-Smith to tear up his BBC contract in disgust.
Robert Stuart speaking at
the Media on Trial event
Stuart gave a presentation on his examination of film recorded by BBC personnel at
Atareb Hospital in Aleppo on August 26, 2013 purporting to show the aftermath of a napalm-style
bombing by Syrian government forces. The footage was broadcast the same evening that parliament
delivered a shock vote against a military attack on Syria. He showed that much of it was
staged. Not only did this potentially include the use of military casualty trauma simulations,
but BBC personnel were travelling in vehicles displaying ISIS flags and alongside senior
members of the western-funded White Helmets.
Professor Tim Hayward (Environmental Political Theory) questioned the morality of the media
presenting information that was untrue and its implications for democracy and society. He
questioned the media's complicity in glorifying jihadi figures, despite this being in
contravention of the British governments' own anti-terror laws. He drew attention to broadcasts
on Channel 4 that provided flattering accounts of British women signing up for jihad. The media
were guilty of inverting the truth and placing a "lockdown" on information that breached the
rudiments of journalistic integrity.
American journalist and broadcaster Patrick Henningsen (21st Century Wire), drew attention
to the unprecedented conditions in which the meeting was being held, "in secret, in a
tent".
It was impossible to have a functioning democracy without a functioning fourth estate, he
said. This had been the gold standard but was no longer the case. Henningsen noted widespread
popular opposition to war in the US that successive presidential candidates had sought to
manipulate, only to betray once in power -- from George W. Bush to Barack Obama and Donald
Trump.
The mainstream media have enormous assets and resources but claim democracy is threatened by
"fake news", when they are the purveyors of fake news and the real threat to democracy.
Peter Ford is a former UK ambassador to Syria (2003–2006) and now Director of the
British Syrian Society. He noted that the government had been forced to convene the Leveson
Inquiry into the media after the phone-hacking scandal involving Murdoch's News of the
World . But those actions were trivial in comparison with the real charge sheet that
needed to be presented against the media: that of "war mongering and aiding and abetting war
mongering".
Vanessa Beeley is an international investigative journalist and photographer who had
reported from inside Syria (including East Aleppo), Egypt and Palestine. She played an
important role in exposing Syria's White Helmets as an arm of western propaganda and regime
change operations.
She delivered a moving account of the situation within Syria and the capital Damascus. In
addition to detailing the role of the White Helmets and other institutions financed and backed
by western governments, Beeley noted that, especially following the Second World War, pro-war
propaganda was deemed a threat to peace. The Nuremberg Trials in 1946 characterised propaganda
to facilitate war as a serious crime against humanity; one of the gravest that could be
committed. Today, those who advocate peace and the defence of international law are smeared and
silenced, while those who promote war are being lauded in the media.
In the short time available for questions, contributions were made, including the
possibility of practical action against war-mongering.
Julie Hyland, speaking for the World Socialist Web Site , was greeted warmly by the
audience for raising that the high point of the international campaign of smears and censorship
is the attack on Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is in grave danger of eviction from
the Ecuadorian Embassy and extradition to the United States.
Henningson replied that the embassy had determined to cut Assange's internet access and
personal communications while Syria was being targeted for military strikes. "I don't
underestimate the influence of Julian Assange at those critical times. His own website was
taken offline as the air strike by the US, Britain and France were happening, along with
several other web sites". He added, "Julian Assange is being silenced because they don't want
someone like him to have a platform".
Video of the Media on Trial Leeds event can be viewed here
"... In the case of the fabricated Russia Gate narrative the results of the Trump election and widespread public distrust of the election process was turned into a new cold war with Russia which benefited major defense contractors and resulted in sanctions against Russia and huge windfalls for the Military Industrial Complex as the US ponied up to fund our national defense industry. ..."
"... We should by now be educated that major failures of our economy and political processes precipitated by government deregulation or corrupted elections will be used by the main stream media to create fictional enemies of our nation to turn public anger into a public movement to blame a target of opportunity which will benefit the wealth and power structures which is based on fiction and contrived plots to benefit the very powerful and wealthy organizations such as big banks and the military. ..."
"... The root cause of this is that they (the MSM) own the microphone. They have the ability to lie without rebuttal because they own that single megaphone to tell lies. They have the ability to create fictions and fantasies which go unchallenged because they own the megaphone. ..."
"... From our history: The creation of the Tea Party was a watershed moment where the big banks turned their bailout by the US government into a political movement which was manufactured by the press as a new and never heard about new political party (The Tea Party) into a political movement aimed to grant the big banks and wealthy Americans tax breaks which resulted in a 3.5 trillion bailout we are now on the hook for. ..."
"... How many news corporations supported the lies about WMDs and Iraq's secret stockpiles of Uranium and chemical weapons? The NY Times and the Washington Post were among the most fervent supporters of those lies and they have never acknowledged their errors. ..."
"... So it is with the Trump administration and the media's aim to turn our attention away from the real reasons our election system is corrupted by dark money by creating fake facts to convince us that Russia is a war monger which stole the election and must be countered by more massive military spending and a renewal of the old Cold War. ..."
"... The NY Times got it wrong in Iraq. They got it wrong in Ukraine. They got it wrong in the last election. They got it wrong on savings and loan deregulation under Reagan. They got it wrong on banking deregulation under Clinton. They got it wrong with Russia Gate. They have gotten it wrong so many times that the statement "they got it wrong" is a testament of their ability to fool us all. ..."
"... Yes, I continually read that the government was "in error", they "didn't understand", or "their models were incorrect". Yeah, sure, whatever you say. ..."
"... It's all just one big "Fleece the Sheep" game, except they can't let the sheep know they're being fleeced. Errors and omissions are all part of the game, and the media act to call the sheep to the starting line. ..."
"... Dan if Robert Blum had had his way the CIA would have been privately funded by secret donations. CIA got caught laundering money in the middle to late 60″s and as always CIA makes investigations go away. A recount of the episode can be found in Jane Mayers book Dark Money. The CIA wrote the book on laundering money. Then the ICIJ and the Paradise Papers expose how large the off shore industry is. ..."
"... I was convinced that Russiagate was a complete fabrication after reading the following penned by Caitling Johnstone:" this administration has already killed Russians in Syria, greatly escalated nuclear tensions with Russia, allowed the sale of arms to Ukraine, established a permanent military presence in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, forced RT and Sputnik to register as foreign agents, expanded NATO with the addition of Montenegro, assigned Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine, shut down a Russian consulate in San Francisco and expelled Russian diplomats " ..."
"... Trump is a thug and a money laundering crook, not a machievelian plotter. His total ignorance of world politics is dangerously leading us to armagedden. ..."
The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which
was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain
more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy.
In the case of the fabricated Russia Gate narrative the results of the Trump election and widespread public distrust of the election
process was turned into a new cold war with Russia which benefited major defense contractors and resulted in sanctions against Russia
and huge windfalls for the Military Industrial Complex as the US ponied up to fund our national defense industry.
We should by now be educated that major failures of our economy and political processes precipitated by government deregulation
or corrupted elections will be used by the main stream media to create fictional enemies of our nation to turn public anger into
a public movement to blame a target of opportunity which will benefit the wealth and power structures which is based on fiction and
contrived plots to benefit the very powerful and wealthy organizations such as big banks and the military.
Trump won because the media cleaned up big time by playing the Super PACs for suckers just as deregulation of the big banks enabled
them to clean up by merging savings banks with investment banks which moved all the savings banks deposits into risky investments.
There is a clear and present danger born out and evidenced by former economic collapses that the media and the big financial institutions
will create public relations campaigns based on the mantra of deregulation to swindle Americans even further. They have a proven
ability to use their power to persuade Americans that some other reason is responsible for the latest swindle.
The root cause of this is that they (the MSM) own the microphone. They have the ability to lie without rebuttal because they own
that single megaphone to tell lies. They have the ability to create fictions and fantasies which go unchallenged because they own
the megaphone.
From our history: The creation of the Tea Party was a watershed moment where the big banks turned their bailout by the US government
into a political movement which was manufactured by the press as a new and never heard about new political party (The Tea Party)
into a political movement aimed to grant the big banks and wealthy Americans tax breaks which resulted in a 3.5 trillion bailout
we are now on the hook for.
How many media/news organizations signed onto the Tea Party after the implosion of the banking industry and beat the drums to
grant tax breaks for billionaires? All of them.
How many of the media corporations beat the drums to blame Russia for the election results which resulted in sanctions against
Russia and a new Cold War with Russia which resulted in windfall profits for the defense industry? All of them.
How many news corporations supported the lies about WMDs and Iraq's secret stockpiles of Uranium and chemical weapons? The NY
Times and the Washington Post were among the most fervent supporters of those lies and they have never acknowledged their errors.
The facts are clear in all of these major failures of our free press to get it right. In every case the media have conspired to
fool most of the people into believing the lies of the government and the financial sectors published by main stream press as facts
which are giant falsehoods.
The result of this collaboration between the press and the wealth in our nation has been to deceive us and to lead us down paths
that twist our understanding to a new understanding that benefits the wealthy in times of prosperity and in times of crisis.
So it is with the Trump administration and the media's aim to turn our attention away from the real reasons our election system
is corrupted by dark money by creating fake facts to convince us that Russia is a war monger which stole the election and must be
countered by more massive military spending and a renewal of the old Cold War.
The NY Times got it wrong in Iraq. They got it wrong in Ukraine. They got it wrong in the last election. They got it wrong on
savings and loan deregulation under Reagan. They got it wrong on banking deregulation under Clinton. They got it wrong with Russia
Gate. They have gotten it wrong so many times that the statement "they got it wrong" is a testament of their ability to fool us all.
CitizenOne – "'They got it wrong' is a testament of their ability to fool us."
Yes, I continually read that the government was "in error", they "didn't understand", or "their models were incorrect". Yeah,
sure, whatever you say. They can't come out and inform us that they lied from the get-go because that would prove intent to deceive,
so they cover up their tracks by saying they made an "error" whenever things fall apart, as they knew they would.
It's all just one big "Fleece the Sheep" game, except they can't let the sheep know they're being fleeced. Errors and omissions
are all part of the game, and the media act to call the sheep to the starting line.
Dave P. , May 20, 2018 at 11:49 pm
Citizen One – Excellent post. Very informed comments indeed.
Skip Scott , May 21, 2018 at 7:15 am
Citizen One-
Great post. It reminded me of a joke I saw the other day:
"A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there
is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier and says, "look out
for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."
munchma quchi , May 19, 2018 at 11:51 pm
re: "Without offering a shred of evidence, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a
formal assessment on Jan. 6, 2017, that "Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election [in
order] to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential
presidency." The "assessment" contains this disclaimer: " [You (the author) did not include a disclaimer. please remedy this.]
F. G. Sanford , May 20, 2018 at 9:39 am
Ms. Quchi,
I think the disclaimer said that intelligence assessments are based on sources, methods and interpretations and rely on raw data.
It's raw, so it has to be properly marinated until it's fit for consumption. Addenda to the disclaimer indicate that the Intelligence
Community will not accept outrageous conspiracy theories, noting specifically that, "They hate us for our freedom, and those weapons
of mass destruction must be here somewhere." It's the standard "release from liability" which accompanies all official narratives.
Kinda like eating tuna fish: It's pretty good once you get past the smell.
Chet Roman , May 20, 2018 at 11:35 am
Page 13 of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017
explains: "High confidence does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong. Judgments
are not intended to imply that we have proof that show something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information,
which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents."
robert e williamson jr , May 19, 2018 at 7:35 pm
Dan I really can not disagree with much you have to say here. Except there are a few things about this whole affair that bug
the hell out of me. For instance the fact that the village idiot from new york spent over $400 million in cash the last 9 years
before he ran for president.
Your effort here sounds quite a lot like whining about having nothing to report. Calm down these things take time. If Russia
isn't to blame fine but Mueller is not talking and seems to be conducting himself very professionally.
Dan if Robert Blum had had his way the CIA would have been privately funded by secret donations. CIA got caught laundering
money in the middle to late 60″s and as always CIA makes investigations go away. A recount of the episode can be found in Jane
Mayers book Dark Money. The CIA wrote the book on laundering money. Then the ICIJ and the Paradise Papers expose how large the
off shore industry is.
Trump like doing business with Russians during a time when Russian oligarchs were hiding the money they pulled from the Soviet
coffers. I think it has gotten him in trouble.
Also interesting is the accounts of what has happen with the Inslaw / PROMIS case and Bill Hamilton. Was this software and
early version of what CIA and NSA use to monitor the world now?
One last thing in your last paragraph here you claim the Dimocraps have gone off the deep end with the Russian Connection thing.
Dan the dimocraps went off the deep end with their undying allegiance to Israel. And they do little damned else.
When this is finished if CIA allows the release of the Dogdamned files maybe we will learn what happened. Chill my brotha !
kntlt , May 20, 2018 at 6:14 pm
Listen to this man.
drC , May 19, 2018 at 7:27 pm
"The press, the intelligence community, and the Democrats" have committed FAR MORE than a mere "crime against journalism".
For kryssakes, this isn't a debating society at Yale! They have provoked international tensions, suspicions and distrust that
have pushed the world far closer to the brink of a third world war, damaging national economies across the globe & negatively
impacting the lives of millions.
jose , May 19, 2018 at 6:30 pm
I was convinced that Russiagate was a complete fabrication after reading the following penned by Caitling Johnstone:" this
administration has already killed Russians in Syria, greatly escalated nuclear tensions with Russia, allowed the sale of arms
to Ukraine, established a permanent military presence in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, forced RT and Sputnik
to register as foreign agents, expanded NATO with the addition of Montenegro, assigned Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative
to Ukraine, shut down a Russian consulate in San Francisco and expelled Russian diplomats "
Since the US national media have been
aware of the lack of solid evidence against Russia allege meddling case, they now want to pretend it has not been their fault.
Their sheer dishonesty underscores their deviant reporting.
ranney , May 19, 2018 at 5:54 pm
Joe, Abe, Andrew, Sam, Mike,
You are all correct in blaming the MSM for ignoring Israel in all this and whitewashing the main cause of our problems in the
middle east. I agree that Russia has not been interfering in our politics any more than virtually all the other countries in the
world who have embassys here and things they want to "lobby" for. I believe spying is universal and the US does it more than most,
but everyone does it including Russia (and UK, France Germany Israel, Ukraine and on and on for everyone on the map).
What I find increasingly strange is the fact that the MSM and just about everyone else is ignoring the fact that Trump did indeed
have business with Russia. He was trying to get permission and financial backing for a Trump tower to be built in Moscow. and
he had been trying for a while before he even thought of running for president. THAT is what his now indicted lawyer was doing
initially, along with others in Trump's employ. That is why there is indeed evidence of contact with Russians during the pre-
campaign and during the campaign as well. Trump didn't want to lose this lucrative deal which, also involves money laundering
and other illegal, and/or shady dealings.
I can't figure out why Muller hasn't subpoenaed or somehow got hold of Trump's tax returns. I'm pretty sure he'd find all the
crimes we need to impeach him.
Trump is a thug and a money laundering crook, not a machievelian plotter. His total ignorance of
world politics is dangerously leading us to armagedden. And I can't help but wonder why Muller is slow walking this whole investigation.
I'm pretty sure he can see what I can see. Trump is a crooked, money launderer, ultra con man with his Trump towers and other
ploys, and too dumb and ignorant of history and science to understand how dangerous the game he plays is to the world when he
has the power of the presidency. But Muller knows that! So what else is really going on that explains why he has moved at snails
pace to stop the damage?
Does anyone have a good guess at that? I'd really like to read it.
Was Rosenstein-Comey-Mueller gambit so called "insurance" about which Strzok told Lisa Page ? It looks more and more
likely that it was. So Trump was declared illegitimate president by intelligence community even before he was elected. And
actions against him were actins typically done during color revolutions by the State Department and CIA. Role of FBI
in "regime change" efforts was to implement directives from those agencies. It is doubtful that FBI acted as an independent
player.
Notable quotes:
"... The regulations require that such an appointment recite the facts justifying the conclusion that a federal crime was committed, and specify the crime. However, the initial appointment of Robert Mueller did neither, referring instead to a national security investigation that a special counsel has no authority to pursue. Although Rosenstein apparently tried to correct his mistake in a new appointment memo, he has thus far refused to disclose, even to a federal judge, a complete copy of it. ..."
"Stopping Robert Mueller to protect us all" [Mark Penn (!), The
Hill ]. "Rather than a fair, limited and impartial investigation, the Mueller investigation
became a partisan, open-ended inquisition that, by its precedent, is a threat to all those who
ever want to participate in a national campaign or an administration again. Its prosecutions
have all been principally to pressure witnesses with unrelated charges and threats to family,
or just for a public relations effect, like the indictment of Russian internet trolls.
Unfortunately, just like the Doomsday Machine in 'Dr. Strangelove; that was supposed to save
the world but instead destroys it, the Mueller investigation comes with no 'off' switch: You
can't fire Mueller. He needs to be defeated, like Ken Starr, the independent counsel who
investigated President Clinton. Finding the 'off' switch will not be easy. Step one here is for
the Justice Department inspector general report to knock Comey out of the witness box. Next,
the full origins of the investigation and its lack of any real intelligence needs to come out
in the open." ( Penn was a
chief strategist and pollster for the 2008 Clinton campaign .)
"End Robert Mueller's investigation: Michael Mukasey" [
USA Today ]. "Recall that the investigation was begun to learn whether the Trump campaign
had gotten help unlawfully from Russia . Because Attorney General Jeff Sessions had worked on
the Trump campaign, he recused himself from the matter, and so the deputy -- Rod Rosenstein --
took the decision to appoint a special counsel. The regulations require that such an
appointment recite the facts justifying the conclusion that a federal crime was committed, and
specify the crime. However, the initial appointment of Robert Mueller did neither, referring
instead to a national security investigation that a special counsel has no authority to pursue.
Although Rosenstein apparently tried to correct his mistake in a new appointment memo, he has
thus far refused to disclose, even to a federal judge, a complete copy of it.
In other investigations supposedly implicating a president -- Watergate and Whitewater
come to mind -- we were told what the crime was and what facts justified the investigation. Not
here . Nor have any of the charges filed in the Mueller investigation disclosed the Trump
campaign's criminal acceptance or solicitation of help from the Russians." I missed that detail
about the lettre
de cachet aspect of the appointment memo
"The FBI Informant Who Wasn't Spying" [Editorial Board,
Wall Street Journal ]. "Could a Trump FBI task agents to look into the foreign ties of
advisers to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2020?"
"Hayden: The Intel Community and Presidents -- Facts vs. Vision" [
RealClearPolitics ]. Hayden on Presidential transitions and the intelligence community:
"HAYDEN : We knew that if it were to be a President Trump this [transition] would be a big
speed bump because these attributes I described over here, I think the creator gave him an
extra measure. He is inherently instinctive, spontaneous, not very reflective, prone to
action, has an almost preternatural view of his own preternatural confidence in his own a
priori narrative of how things work. So we well, this one's gonna be tough. To your point, it
is a national tragedy and a perfect storm that the first time we had to do that with the new
president, we knew it's always tough but it was gonna be especially tough with this one,
through no one's fault, it was on an issue as you described. An issue that other
Americans, not the intel guys, other Americans were using to challenge his legitimacy of
President of the United States ."
"... Could it be that Mueller is there for some other reason? we know there are special interests that the democrats represent and since the US federal system doesn't really lend itself to any sort of coalition govt of any form, that the investigation is cover for the those interests being represented in some fashion the form doesn't allow for. ..."
"... Presumably the op would have allowed HRC to undertake just the sort of actions against Russia that, after Trump's election, have been undertaken in any case. The difference being that there is at least some reason to bet that HRC along with Obama knew something of the operation, and that in conjunction with UK/Ukrainian interests was planning her early foreign policy directives. The election of Trump on this reading was accidental to the op as originally designed. Is this right? ..."
Could it be that Mueller is there for some other reason? we know there are special interests
that the democrats represent and since the US federal system doesn't really lend itself to any
sort of coalition govt of any form, that the investigation is cover for the those interests
being represented in some fashion the form doesn't allow for.
That's what I'm thinking. It is apparent the "The Mueller Investigation" is - firstly - a
major distraction. It is also apparent that it doesn't make any headway, lead to any
conclusions or indictments of any big fish.
Re: Mueller. If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was
undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you
never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA
coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump.
Presumably the op would have allowed HRC
to undertake just the sort of actions against Russia that, after Trump's election, have been
undertaken in any case. The difference being that there is at least some reason to bet that
HRC along with Obama knew something of the operation, and that in conjunction with
UK/Ukrainian interests was planning her early foreign policy directives. The election of
Trump on this reading was accidental to the op as originally designed. Is this right?
The other possibility being that the operation was demanded by Trump winning the Republican
primary, as a kind of insurance policy. He being the only candidate who could not be
predictably counted on to follow the anti-Putin hard liners in the Military-intelligence
community, something needed to be done to ensure that, on the off chance that he won, the
anti-Russian measures already being planned for would not be affected.
So it is perhaps
unlikely that this op would have been necessary had, say, Jeb Bush or Rubio won the primary.
What made it necessary was the unknown quantity that Trump represented. This would mean,
again, that the op was not so much partisan (Dem v Rep) as it was about ensuring continuity
of military-intelligence decisions in face of relatively unknown entity. Had Bush won the R
nomination, there would have been no op because the Bush family like the Clintons are down
for whatever.
There is no question that Trump of over his head and folded early on, adopting the deep state
foreign policy in even more militant incarnation the under Obama.
All those moves about "Russiagate" now is an empty sound or a cat fight of the faction of the
US elite for contracts and sinecures in government.
Notable quotes:
"... Since being inaugurated, orange clown has reversed himself on the pre-election intimations and campaign promises that apparently got him elected. Instead of improving relations with Russia, he's made everything worse; he never misses a chance to provoke Russia. Instead of pulling out of Afghanistan, he's escalating that pointless war. He's increased the illegal, immoral and unconstitutional U.S. military occupation of Syria. He's escalating the genocidal war against Yemen. He's arming the corrupt puppet government in Kiev. He's already slaughtered more people with drone strikes than Obama did in eight years. He's surrounded himself with bloodthirsty psychopaths. He's trying to overthrow the Maduro government in Venezuela. He puts Israel first and America second (or lower) on the list. He wants more military spending. He seems to want a bigger, more powerful more and aggressive NATO, not the reverse. Rather than investigate 9/11, he studiously avoids the topic. Etc., etc., etc. ..."
"... From a "deep state" perspective, what is there to dislike about orange clown? How can the "deep state" have any kind of serious problem with someone who's making Obama look like Mister Rogers? ..."
"... Has the "deep state" deployed a "lone nut" against him? Apparently not. Is he being impeached? No. Is there even a hint of political opposition to his reckless, imperial "foreign policy"? No. Have any of his appointees been blocked? No. Has there been any kind of significant legal action against him challenging his blatantly unconstitutional military adventurism for example? As far as I know, no. ..."
"... Not where I live in the Northwest. I have spoken to people who are convinced Trump is "beyond guilty" of collusion. These people are either CNN watchers or work in IT. Everyday I go to the gym people are either watching CNN or MSNBC on their screen. ..."
"... How do you "manipulate" a reasonable person into flirting with planetary extinction? How can someone who actually cares about America be manipulated into risking war with Russia for no good reason? Such a person is not morally or mentally fit for the job of president in the first place. ..."
"... So in essence Trump's whole campaign platform was reversed by "deep state" "manipulation" but rather than surround himself with reasonable people, appeal to his supporters, investigate or threaten to investigate 9/11, or even resign (rather than become a mass-murderer), he decides to stay on because he enjoys killing people with drones and he loves the vacations, etc.? ..."
"... The more likely case is that orange clown's a con man whose whole campaign was a calculated bait and switch fraud from the beginning. And all this "out to get Trump" nonsense depicting Trump as hapless "victim" of the deep state is pure political theater. ..."
"... Michael Caputo now says he was approached by a SECOND recruiter, someone other than Halper. ..."
"... Yes, Halper was involved in getting President Carter's debate briefing book to the Reagan/ BUSH campaign ahead of the debate. He's been in there, connected, for years and years, a call-boy the players, the powers-that-be have at their disposal. ..."
"... Democrats and Republicans serve the same master, no difference, neither have real any real power. The Wall St bankers,, The Lobby, MIC, International Corporations call the shots. All the politicians are dirty, and deep state has plenty of blackmail info on ALL of them if they step out of line. They're only puppets for you to get angry at, and vote out to ease your anger. But nothing changes with elections because the ones with power are unelected, and never move. See Jim Traficant or JFK for what happens when one dares to tell the truth, or challenge the establishment. ..."
"... If Trump really wanted to change things, if he was the real deal, he would have Sessions start a new 9/11 investigation, and start imprisoning and executing the perps and traitors, all the way from Tel Aviv back home to Wall St. All of them. ..."
"... In fairness, his life expectancy after such an announcement would be about 6 minutes. Getting the public to realize the truth about 9/11 is the best chance I can see for real political change in the U.S., but hoping that anyone in Washington will lead the charge seems quite futile. A group of lawyers representing victims' families recently filed a petition for a new investigation – the media of course were not interested. It really comes down to spreading the word on the grassroots level. ..."
"... Halper was not a recruiter. He was there to collect information for the FBI, the very definition of a spy. ..."
"... The Democrats truly hate the whole concept of democracy. They've tried as best they can to ban democracy from their party. And now they've instituted both illegal campaign tactics before the election and a coup after the election to try to keep the power in the Democratic Party and the money flowing to them. ..."
"... Did Imram Awan leak the documents exposing that the DNC was colluding with the Clintons and rigging the primaries and convention in her favor? After all, that's where this all began. ..."
"... That was when Hillary came up with the idea to try to blame the Russians for the leaks and thus lead the world close to nuclear war for her own personal ambition. ..."
So, help me out here – the only reason the NYT is even reporting on this is because
Congress was closing in on this turd's identity, right?
"F.B.I. agents sent an informant to talk to two campaign advisers only after they
received evidence that the pair had suspicious contacts linked to Russia during the
campaign.
"Suspicious contacts" = Russians who talked to Trump's employees.
So the FISA surveillance, the national-security letters, the FBI informants and 18
months of relentless probing-harassment have all been justified on the basis of allegations
about Russia hacking that may or may not have happened at all??
The one silver lining to all of this is that the GOP can to absolutely DRAG the Democrats
about this in the next election. If the GOP is smart, they will not listen to a goddamn word
coming out of the mouths of the Democrats or their (((Big Media))) mouthpieces during the
2020 election. They will not respond to a single point they have to make, except to call them
hopelessly corrupt authoritarians who are unfit to govern until they come clean about their
malfeasance and cut the rot from their ranks, and then spout their other talking points and
drop the mic.
"According to people familiar with (General Michael) Flynn's visit to the intelligence
seminar, the source was alarmed by the general's apparent closeness with a Russian woman
who was also in attendance. The concern was strong enough that it prompted another person
to pass on a warning to the American authorities that Mr. Flynn could be compromised by
Russian intelligence, according to two people familiar with the matter."
*Facepalm*
These fucks are beyond parody now. We're literally ruled by corrupt morons, stooges, and
degenerates.
"The cockblocking/penis-envy concern was enough for Stasi agents to follow up "
I would be shocked if both political party's didn't have a myriad of spies in each other's
campaigns dating back to Lincoln! Grow up people, there's a ton of money here.
Rod Rosenstein is a traitorous weasel POS who never should've been appointed. Christopher
Wray worked as a deputy to James Comey and is highly likely dirty and another deep state
puppet. Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, McConnell, Pompeo, John Kelly, Kirstjen Nielsen, Gina Haspel,
John Bolton, Nikki Haley, all are deep state puppets. Why does Trump keep appointing more
deep state puppets to take over from the other deep state puppets?
I cannot for the life of me understand why Jeff Sessions continues to stick up for
Rosenstein the weasel. My only explanation is that this whole thing is a coup set up by Deep
State and Mike Pence from the get go so Pence can be president, and Sessions is in on the
coup to keep his job.
I did not know it was Rosenstein's memo that prompted Trump to fire James Comey. Trump
needs to bring that out in the open and let everyone know Rosenstein set him up. This POS
weasel needs to go to jail. As long as he's still in the DOJ no real investigation of deep
state will ever take place. We've got the fox guarding the hen house.
It notes that all the corporate media knows it was Halper, but they obey the Deep State
and refuse to report this, pretending that evil Republicans are trying to out an innocent FBI
spy. Even today, their coverage is "alleged" informant. For some reason, NBC News was the
only "mainstream" team to ignore this absurd BS and report his name as part of the biggest
news story of the decade. Note that Halper is not a Democratic Party mole, but a Bush family
mole.
Doesn't Mueller have the self-respect to end his witch hunt and crawl back under a
rock?
A very strong move by President Trump. It is a fact that the FBI sent an informant, Mr.
Halper, to gather information on the Trump campaign. The FBI can plead it was to gather info
on alarming Russians, but the informant my gather other info just as easily. If the FBI can
send one, Halper, they can just as easily send another, or more unknown informants. This
RussiaGate nonsense has always been a matter to be tried in the court of public opinion, by
innuendo. Therefore President Trump's investigation can use the "have you stopped beating
your wife?" method. Every time the FBI says no to a question it looks like they are lying to
cover something bigger. Informants have Control Officers, who write reports to superiors, the
reports make reference to code words, places and dates. Reports generate memos and orders.
Everything becomes fuel for innuendo and the only out the FBI will have is "We honestly
thought .but no, we found nothing".
A point well made in qualification of the merits of the article. Surely the author knows
on reflection that no political party or campaign is going to forgo the chance of getting
inside information on what their opponents are up to, including crimes – and
spying.
Since Trump could do some shuffling so as to appoint an Attorney-General who wouldn't
recuse himself or get rid of Rosenstein by appointing him a judge, or ambassador just for
example maybe it is best to assume that the President doesn't feel immediately threatened and
is reasonably confident that he can find and time his countermeasures satisfactorily. It is
hardly beyond belief that there are Trump moles in Mueller's army who are assuring him that
his instinct is right: apparent witch hunting persecution by Mueller is actually a harmless
distraction and so good for him until the time is right to blow it up.
Considered in its entirety, this Trump/Russia business is indeed turning into the political
crime (& shame) of the century. Were someone who had died in the 50′s to suddenly
resurrect, they would suffer the equivalent of a psychotic episode or a bad LSD trip.
Its mind boggling to anyone even vaguely conscious .
Mr Trump needs to clean house: politiclly difficult, yes, but Trump needs to visit a Lehman
Bros' moment on the DOJ, CIA & FBI.
No doubt the above toxic agencies will (again) spew forth the magic word:
"Russia-Russia-Russia" to render all opposition impotent.
One may, of course, truly wonder whether a majority of citizens will awake & notice the
stench of rotting democracy & having noticed, draw the correct conclusions and –
finally – act .
Trump has surrounded himself with lifer Deep Staters who no doubt tell him that
investigations and prosecutions will do grave harm to national security and, at the same
time, would appear to be his own politically motivated witch hunt, the kind one sees only in
third-world basket case countries, and that would reflect more poorly on him than on the
actual cabal attempting to overthrow him and overturn his election.
But the actual collusion has become so obvious that he has to pull the trigger, because
nobody else is going to. Sessions should have been all over this a year ago, but he too is a
long-serving government employee, which suggests he is also of the swamp. As for Congress, a
few brave souls, e.g. Nunes, have tried and have been exposed to withering fire from all
sides.
The purpose of the informant/spy was to "dirty" Page and Papadopoulos; to make them plausible
suspects so that full use of the NSA database could be used on the Trump team both pre- and
post-election and as far back in the past as they wanted to go. The warrants used on Page and
Papadopoulos were counterintelligence warrants that allow using NSA resources on anyone "two
hops" (two people) away from Page and Papadopoulos. "Two-hops" would easily include everyone
near Trump even if Page and Papadopoulos had only minimal contact with the campaign. This is
the heart of the crime. Page and Papadopoulos were used as place-holders to gather
information on everyone near Trump. The informer was used to set those two up.
Trump posting something on Twitter isn't "fighting back"–it's venting steam. As the
article correctly states, letting the DOJ investigate itself is a joke. So Trump needed a
Special Counsel of his own, and he needed him right after his inauguration. It may be that
Trump likes a dose of Russia Scare to push overpriced American weapons and LNG to clueless
Europeans. It may be that he's found out (or at least his people have) that he needs
Deep-State sleaze for his anti-Iran campaign. It may be that Trump well knows he's vulnerable
on nepotism, old NY Mob ties, and oh yeah some sexual peccadilloes, so he better play along
and color within the lines. Or it may simply be that Trump is a moron without the attention
span for anything beyond venting on Twitter.
It doesn't really matter now, the ship has sailed, he's gone too far in with "Putin-Assad
baby killers" to return to sanity now.
"After 18 months of withering attacks and accusations, Donald Trump has decided to get up off
the canvas and fight back."
If "they" are really out to "get" orange clown, why don't "they" go after him for his
impeachable war crimes in Syria, for example? Why don't "they" at least bring a lawsuit
against him for his illegal, immoral and unconstitutional occupation of Syria?
Generally speaking, when one party ostensibly dislikes another party, and apparently seeks
to "get" that party, isn't there usually some kind of plausible, identifiable reason for the
enmity?
Since being inaugurated, orange clown has reversed himself on the pre-election intimations
and campaign promises that apparently got him elected. Instead of improving relations with
Russia, he's made everything worse; he never misses a chance to provoke Russia. Instead of
pulling out of Afghanistan, he's escalating that pointless war. He's increased the illegal,
immoral and unconstitutional U.S. military occupation of Syria. He's escalating the genocidal
war against Yemen. He's arming the corrupt puppet government in Kiev. He's already
slaughtered more people with drone strikes than Obama did in eight years. He's surrounded
himself with bloodthirsty psychopaths. He's trying to overthrow the Maduro government in
Venezuela. He puts Israel first and America second (or lower) on the list. He wants more
military spending. He seems to want a bigger, more powerful more and aggressive NATO, not the
reverse. Rather than investigate 9/11, he studiously avoids the topic. Etc., etc., etc.
From a "deep state" perspective, what is there to dislike about orange clown? How can the
"deep state" have any kind of serious problem with someone who's making Obama look like
Mister Rogers?
"In any event, Trump has decided to throw caution to the wind and go for broke. He's
decided that the only way he's going to get his enemies off his back is by flushing them out
into the open and subjecting their activities to public scrutiny."
Has the "deep state" deployed a "lone nut" against him? Apparently not. Is he being
impeached? No. Is there even a hint of political opposition to his reckless, imperial
"foreign policy"? No. Have any of his appointees been blocked? No. Has there been any kind of
significant legal action against him challenging his blatantly unconstitutional military
adventurism for example? As far as I know, no.
3D chess, 4D chess or what is it up to now, 14D chess? Trumpistas have too much faith in
their man. Trump is a businessman not a politician. He's in over his head. Just look at how
easily he was goaded into canning James Comey that set off this whole sorry affair.
One may, of course, truly wonder whether a majority of citizens will awake & notice
the stench of rotting democracy & having noticed, draw the correct conclusions and
– finally – act.
Not where I live in the Northwest. I have spoken to people who are convinced Trump is "beyond guilty" of collusion.
These people are either CNN watchers or work in IT. Everyday I go to the gym people are either watching CNN or MSNBC on their
screen. Most Americans are brain dead sheeple.
"Has the "deep state" deployed a 'lone nut' against him? Apparently not. Is he being
impeached? No. Is there even a hint of political opposition to his reckless, imperial
'foreign policy'? No. Have any of his appointees been blocked? No. Has there been any kind of
significant legal action against him challenging his blatantly unconstitutional military
adventurism for example? As far as I know, no.
So how is anybody actually '[on] his back'?"
Answer: the Deep State obviously is on his back, It is has successfully manipulated him
into a foreign policy that he did not want. He wanted an America First policy, but because of
political blackmail and dishonest allegations about collusion with Russia, Trump has felt
compelled to do what Zionists want in the Middle East. At home, massive legal immigration
continues, there will be no mass deportations, and the border wall will not be built. The
Democrats will be firmly entrenched after Trump is gone from the scene.
"the Deep State obviously is on his back, It is has successfully manipulated him into a
foreign policy that he did not want. "
Or so goes the Trump apologists' claim. But that's pure unfounded speculation.
How do you "manipulate" a reasonable person into flirting with planetary extinction? How
can someone who actually cares about America be manipulated into risking war with Russia for
no good reason? Such a person is not morally or mentally fit for the job of president in the
first place.
So in essence Trump's whole campaign platform was reversed by "deep state" "manipulation"
but rather than surround himself with reasonable people, appeal to his supporters,
investigate or threaten to investigate 9/11, or even resign (rather than become a
mass-murderer), he decides to stay on because he enjoys killing people with drones and he
loves the vacations, etc.?
I think not. The more likely case is that orange clown's a con man whose whole
campaign was a calculated bait and switch fraud from the beginning. And all this "out to get
Trump" nonsense depicting Trump as hapless "victim" of the deep state is pure political
theater.
"In an earlier version of this article I stated that the FBI planted a spy INSIDE the Trump
campaign. This is not correct, which is why I asked editor Ron Unz to remove the article. The
informant was not part of the Campaign but sought information from members of the Campaign."
Hyper-technical hair splitting that is ultimately false. The point of Halper's approaches
were to recruit people in the campaign to provide information. Those recruits would have been
spies. Michael Caputo now says he was approached by a SECOND recruiter, someone other than Halper.
Trump is head of the Executive Branch. The DoJ and FBI are part of the executive branch and
subordinate to Trump. He can send 30-40 US Marshals to FBI headquarters, and to DoJ
headquarters, and have them extract by force the necessary documents, and no one can say
"boo!"
I wish he would.
The downside of course is that everyone in the media and in Congress would scream
"tyrant!" So Trump currently is leaving them alone to continue digging their own grave with
the Mueller/Russia witchunt, as the country moves towards the midterm elections.
Yes, Halper was involved in getting President Carter's debate briefing book to the Reagan/
BUSH campaign ahead of the debate. He's been in there, connected, for years and years,
a call-boy the players, the powers-that-be have at their disposal.
Stefan Halper is one of the creepy-crawly things that have been living under the rock
Donald Trump kicked over.
As Steve Sailer points out, Halper is the son-in-law of CIA man Ray. S. Cline, who was
instrumental in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Democrats and Republicans serve the same master, no difference, neither have real any real
power. The Wall St bankers,, The Lobby, MIC, International Corporations call the shots. All
the politicians are dirty, and deep state has plenty of blackmail info on ALL of them if they
step out of line. They're only puppets for you to get angry at, and vote out to ease your
anger. But nothing changes with elections because the ones with power are unelected, and
never move. See Jim Traficant or JFK for what happens when one dares to tell the truth, or
challenge the establishment.
9/11 and silence from both sides with regard to a real investigation into the biggest
"terrorist" attack in US History, and the murder of 3000 Americans, this tells you who is in
power, the people that pulled it off. Neither party supports a real investigation into this
attack, they both work for the same people. The fact that the MSM still lies about it means
they are also controlled by the goons. The FBI, CIA lies about it, and Muellers coverup of
the crime tells you all of the "Intelligence" and "Law" enforcement agencies are also
controlled by the same cabal.
Until they start telling the truth about 9/11, you can bet the same goons are still in
charge, no matter who the president is, no matter which Democrat or Republican you elect, the
shadow government, deep state are still calling the shots. If you do vote, vote 3rd party.
The whole election system is rigged to keep out most anyone who might dare to challenge the
establishment, thats why we only get lowlifes like Mitt Romney or the Cintons running for
office year after year, out of millions of people the same dirtbags just won't go away.
Everything else is just noise, distractions from this reality. If Trump really wanted to
change things, if he was the real deal, he would have Sessions start a new 9/11
investigation, and start imprisoning and executing the perps and traitors, all the way from
Tel Aviv back home to Wall St. All of them.
If Trump really wanted to change things, if he was the real deal, he would have Sessions
start a new 9/11 investigation, and start imprisoning and executing the perps and traitors,
all the way from Tel Aviv back home to Wall St. All of them.
In fairness, his life expectancy after such an announcement would be about 6 minutes. Getting the public to realize the truth about 9/11 is the best chance I can see for real
political change in the U.S., but hoping that anyone in Washington will lead the charge seems
quite futile. A group of lawyers representing victims' families recently filed a
petition for a new investigation – the media of course were not interested. It
really comes down to spreading the word on the grassroots level.
Hyper-technical hair splitting that is ultimately false. The point of Halper's
approaches were to recruit people in the campaign to provide information. Those recruits
would have been spies. Michael Caputo now says he was approached by a SECOND recruiter,
someone other than Halper.
Halper was not a recruiter. He was there to collect information for the FBI, the very
definition of a spy.
Hatunggal Muda Siregar, a spokesman for MNC, said the theme park and the Trump
properties are separate projects within the Lido development. The agreement with the
Chinese company to build the theme park does not include any financing for the project, he
said.
Mr. Trump's business dealings in Indonesia prompted scrutiny even before his
inauguration, and he pledged not to embark on any new deals while in office. But the Trump
Organization held onto the projects in Indonesia, saying the contracts with Mr. Hary were
signed in 2015 and were binding.
Yet another nothing burger. This an old deal made before he even ran for president. The
Chinese loan does not extend to building of the Trump properties.
As the article repeatedly pointed out:
There isn't any evidence that the agreement with the construction company was intended
to sway the Trump administration on any matters.
If there's no evidence, why report it at all? To give more ammo to people who are always
for looking for any reason to disparage Trump, and only bother to read headlines.
"It's worth noting, that the current Russia investigation is based on the dubious claim that
Russia hacked DNC computers."
Imran Awan is not Russian, he's a Paki. And he didn't need to hack the DNC, Debbie
Wasserman Schultz let him in and gave him the password. There, huge mystery solved.
"Anyone who refers to Trump as 'orange clown' is obviously partisan to the point of not
worth listening to."
You may be right about that; now that I think about it, it does seem too generous.
How about "teflon-don-the-con-man"; or, "the ignorant orange savage in the White House"?
Of course there's always the Biblical description to fall back on: "the beast from the earth"
(i.e. the second beast of Rev 13); will that work?
Meanwhile, at the same time we also learn that there is evidence that there really was
collusion between the Trump campaign and foreign powers that wanted to see it elected in
return for favorable policies. But, the problem that the Deep State has is that the foreign
powers were not the cartoon-pinup-all-purpose villan of the Russians. No, it was Israel and
Saudi Arabia.
The point of all of this is that the United States is supposed to be a democracy which
means that the government does what the people want it to do. The one thing that we are
seeing is that nobody in Washington wants that. The Democrats truly hate the whole concept of
democracy. They've tried as best they can to ban democracy from their party. And now they've
instituted both illegal campaign tactics before the election and a coup after the election to
try to keep the power in the Democratic Party and the money flowing to them.
But, it turns out Trump was off cutting deals with Israel and Saudi Arabia that now seem
to have the USA headed straight into a disasterous war that was the last thing that voters
wanted. The voters keep electing candidates who claim to be against these wars. The problem
is that they whole bunch of them are a lot of liars, and the one and only thing they are
truly against is democracy and letting the people have a say.
America desperately needs a Democracy Movement. One that cleans the temples of DC of all
of the corrupt liars that currently rule us in both fake parties.
"He's decided that the only way he's going to get his enemies off his back is by flushing
them out into the open and subjecting their activities to public scrutiny. It's a risky
strategy "
It's the only strategy he can pursue. If he doesn't take the fight out into the open,
where his enemies are vulnerable, they will bury him.
Did Imram Awan leak the documents exposing that the DNC was colluding with the Clintons and
rigging the primaries and convention in her favor? After all, that's where this all began.
It was a bit before the conventions when those emails leaked. Hillary certainly knew that
they could be the death of her lifelong quest to see how much she could steal as President.
If the Bernie voters were upset that the whole fake primary and caucus process had been
rigged all along and refused to support Hillary, then she was done as a Presidential
contender.
That was when Hillary came up with the idea to try to blame the Russians for the leaks and
thus lead the world close to nuclear war for her own personal ambition.
You know it's funny, all those 'conservatives' screaming that Edward Snowden is a traitor,
that we should trust the US government to spy on us in secret because national security
demands it, etc. Because only bad people have something to hide, right?
And now we begin to see exactly what it means when the central government can essentially
spy on anyone for any reason not so wonderful after all, is it?
There is an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal
is a conservative who's been arrested. I guess a civil libertarian is a national security hawk that's been spied on.
I see your point, bread and circus for the people. I'm more worried about is Israel attacking
Lebanon, tbh, dragging the entire ME in to the conflict ending up with trump/bibi and Erdogan
stumbling us into a ww and/or financial breakdown.
America desperately needs a Democracy Movement. One that cleans the temples of DC of all
of the corrupt liars that currently rule us in both fake parties
Yes indeed we do. The Dems are using the corruption theme, but of course they are
hypocrites also and don't live up to ethical standards either.
Still, maybe an election platform based on ITS THE CORRUPTION STUPID ..will open the eyes of
some of our more mentally challenged voters.
Hate always works – Tump pretended he was going to drain the hateful deep state swamp to
save his little people -- -so I guess the Dems can pretend they are going to kill the corrupt
to save the little people.
Democrats Roll Out Anti-Corruption Message for 2018
1 day ago – Instead, Democrats are returning to an anti-corruption message that A
decade later, Trump seized on a similar theme, directing voter ire at
Mueller is the only admirable man in this mess. Trump's problem is he is for once up against
an honest man, someone he cant threaten or bribe or bully.
Trump, as we say in the south, is white trash he is way out of his class with Mueller.
Mueller's investigation isn't going to 'wrap up' soon -- and Trump is still in peril
Anyone paying attention over the last year knows Mueller will not yield to political
pressure. His investigators haven't leaked; they have ignored vicious personal attacks; they
haven't veered in the slightest from prosecutorial professionalism.
So to "wrap it up," Trump would have to make a move, but will he?
The president and his lawyers are strategizing about whether he will agree to be
interviewed by Mueller, either voluntarily or under subpoena. If he were to refuse, as the
current swing of the pendulum suggests, and then try to end the probe, he would only seem
more guilty and undermine his support even among Republicans. If his refusal were to lead, as
expected, to a court battle, we would expect the Supreme Court to settle the issue. Any move
by Trump to preempt it would again only undermine his credibility.
In addition, the president and his circle are well aware of how fast the midterm election
is approaching and what effect an attempt to fire Mueller could have on the outcome. They
want to avoid any action that would help the Democrats flip the House. Such a shift would
change every calculation, not least because a Democratic majority could move to impeach the
president early next year.
Of course, Trump may calculate that he could get away with firing Mueller now, if he moved
quickly and the Republican leadership rallied to his side. But it is equally possible that
Congress would respond with legislation to reinstate Mueller. Again, the field of battle
would shift to the courts.
Most importantly, even a successful ouster of Mueller would not derail the investigation
at this point. Too much evidence has been gathered, and too many prosecutors, who have surely
considered and planned for the contingency, stand ready to carry on. Should Trump try to
shutter the entire special counsel's office, a much graver and politically and legally
riskier act than firing Mueller or Rosenstein, other divisions in the Department of Justice,
in particular the Southern District of New York, would also be ready to take up the
charge.
The strength of all that evidence, the careful work done thus far, and the indictments
already filed are the special counsel's protection against "witch hunt" tweets and
protestations that the investigation is already over with nothing to show for it.
In the course of the past year, we've learned not to underestimate what Mueller knows and
what bombshell he may have prepared. It may involve the Russians and the campaign, it may
involve obstruction of justice, but there are other relevant threads as well: the true motive
behind the Seychelles meeting between Trump associate Erik Prince and the head of a Russian
wealth fund, the hacking of Democratic Party emails and its links to Trump political advisor
Roger Stone, the recent sale of Russia's state owned oil company to Qatar.
Last week we discovered that Mueller was way ahead of us on the huge payments made to
Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen for access to the president. We don't yet know what
he's found out from cooperating witnesses, including Michael Flynn and Rick Gates, that might
point directly at the president. And there is still the possibility that Paul Manafort or
Cohen could decide to cooperate with the investigation.
None of these threads signals Trump's removal from office. A conviction in the Senate, no
matter what happens in the midterm, would require a good number of Republicans to turn
against the president, which seems remote absent a smoking gun that proves grave criminal
conduct. But it is more than plausible that the probe and associated investigations will
result in additional indictments of Trump associates -- including Jared Kushner and Donald
Trump Jr. -- and will leave Trump seriously wounded, an untenable candidate in 2020. Once he
leaves office, his legal exposure, both civil and criminal, would skyrocket.
The "wrap it up" crowd is indulging in wishful thinking. The first anniversary of the
Mueller investigation is unlikely to be the last.
Harry Litman teaches constitutional law at UC San Diego. He is a former U.S. attorney
and deputy assistant attorney general.
"... A McClatchy journalist investigated further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was disinformation. ..."
"... Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma. ..."
"... The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny. Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation. ..."
"... Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them, anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them. ..."
"... No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of Russian responsibility) have been shattered. ..."
"... Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation. ..."
"... The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote." ..."
"... Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?" ..."
"... Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth. ..."
"... 1984, anyone? ..."
"... The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and other sites is just so stupid its painful. ..."
"... Presumably the Skripals touch the cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW can't even get the amounts of the chemical right. ..."
"... Biggest problem with the world today is lazy insouciant citizens. ..."
"... One very important point Lavrov made was the anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction of humanity; ..."
"... while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter envisioned. ..."
"... Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation. ..."
"... Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™. ..."
"... Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar. ..."
"... And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™ apparatus. ..."
"... Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls' school. ..."
"... In the Guardian I only read the comments, never the article. Here, I read both. That is the difference between propaganda and good reporting. ..."
The Grauniad is slipping deeper into the disinformation business:
Revealed: UK's push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance is the headline of a page one piece
which reveals exactly nothing. There is no secret lifted and no one was discomforted by a
questioning journalist.
Like other such pieces it uses disinformation to accuse Russia of spreading such.
The main 'revelation' is stenographed from a British government official. Some quotes from
the usual anti-Russian propagandists were added. Dubious or false 'western' government claims
are held up as truth. That Russia does not endorse them is proof for Russian mischievousness
and its 'disinformation'.
The opener:
The UK will use a series of international summits this year to call for a comprehensive
strategy to combat Russian disinformation and urge a rethink over traditional diplomatic
dialogue with Moscow, following the Kremlin's aggressive campaign of denials over the use of
chemical weapons in the UK and Syria.
...
"The foreign secretary regards Russia's response to Douma and Salisbury as a turning point
and thinks there is international support to do more," a Whitehall official said. "The areas
the UK are most likely to pursue are countering Russian disinformation and finding a
mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons."
There is a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons. It is the
Chemical Weapon Convention and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
It was the British government which at first
rejected the use of these instruments during the Skripal incident:
Early involvement of the OPCW, as demanded by Russia, was resisted by the British
government. Only on March 14, ten days after the incident happened and two days after Prime
Minister Theresa may had made accusations against Russia, did the British government invite
the OPCW. Only on March 19, 15 days after the incident happen did the OPCW technical team
arrive and took blood samples.
Now back to the Guardian disinformation:
In making its case to foreign ministries, the UK is arguing that Russian denials over
Salisbury and Douma reveal a state uninterested in cooperating to reach a common
understanding of the truth , but instead using both episodes to try systematically to divide
western electorates and sow doubt.
A 'common understanding of the truth' is an interesting term. What is the truth? Whatever
the British government claims? It accused Russia of the Skripal incident a mere eight days
after it happened. Now, two month later, it admits that it
does not know who poisoned the Skripals:
Police and intelligence agencies have failed so far to identify the individual or
individuals who carried out the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the UK's national security
adviser has disclosed.
Do the Brits know where the alleged Novichok poison came from? Unless they produced it
themselves they likely have no idea. The Czech Republic just admitted that it
made small doses of a Novichok nerve agent for testing purposes. Others did too.
Back to the Guardian :
British politicians are not alone in claiming Russia's record of mendacity is not a personal
trait of Putin's, but a government-wide strategy that makes traditional diplomacy
ineffective.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, famously came off one lengthy phone call with Putin
– she had more than 40 in a year – to say he lived in a different world.
No, Merkel never said that. An Obama administration flunky planted that
in the New York Times :
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking
with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call
said. "In another world," she said.
When that claim was made in March 2014 we were immediately suspicious
of it:
This does not sound like typically Merkel but rather strange for her. I doubt that she said
that the way the "people briefed on the call" told it to the Times stenographer. It is rather
an attempt to discredit Merkel and to make it more difficult for her to find a solution with
Russia outside of U.S. control.
A day later the German government
denied (ger) that Merkel ever said such (my translation):
The chancellery is unhappy about the report in the New York Times. Merkel by no means meant
to express that Putin behaved irrational. In fact she told Obama that Putin has a different
perspective about the Crimea [than Obama has].
A McClatchy journalist investigated
further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was
disinformation.
That disinformation, spread by the Obama administration but immediately exposed as false, is
now held up as proof by Patrick Wintour, the Diplomatic editor of the Guardian , that
Russia uses disinformation and that Putin is a naughty man.
The British Defense Minister Gavin Williamson
wants journalists to enter the UK reserve forces to help with the creation of
propaganda:
He said army recruitment should be about "looking to different people who maybe think, as a
journalist: 'What are my skills in terms of how are they relevant to the armed forces?'
Patrick Wintour seems to be a qualified candidate.
Or maybe he should join the NATO for Information Warfare the Atlantic Council wants to
create to further disinform about those damned Russkies:
What we need now is a cross-border defense alliance against disinformation -- call it
Communications NATO. Such an alliance is, in fact, nearly as important as its military
counterpart.
Like the Guardian piece above writer of the NATO propaganda lobby Atlantic Council
makes claims of Russian disinformation that do not hold up to the slightest test:
By pinning the Novichok nerve agent on Sweden or the Czech Republic, or blaming the UK for
the nerve gas attack in Syria, the Kremlin sows confusion among our populations and makes us
lose trust in our institutions.
Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that
several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in
Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma.
The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny.
Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation.
The bigger aim behind all these activities, demanding a myriad of new organizations to
propagandize against Russia, is to introduce a strict control over information within 'western'
societies.
Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed
with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy'
disinformation.
That scheme will be used against anyone who deviates from the ordered norm. You dislike that
pipeline in your backyard? You must be falling for
Russian trolls or maybe you yourself are an agent of a foreign power. Social Security? The
Russians like that. It is a disinformation thing. You better forget about it.
Excellent article, in an ongoing run of great journalism.
I am curious - have you read this? https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/
It purports to be a book by an American military man intimately familiar with the covert ops
portion of the US government. The internal Kafka-esque dynamics described certainly feel
true.
One of the reasons newspapers are getting worse is the economics. They aren't really viable
anymore. Their future is as some form of government sanctioned oligopoly. Two national papers
-- a "left" and a "right" -- and then a handful of regional papers. All spouting the same
neoliberal, neoconservative chicanery.
Genuine journalist Matt Taibbi warned of this sort of branding of disparate views as enemy a
month ago. He was also correct. Evil and insidious. The enemy of a free society.
Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning
of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as
they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA
will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them,
anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them.
I agree that it's difficult to see how the drive to renew the Cold War is going to be
stopped. I presume that, with the exception of certain NeoCon circles, there isn't a desire
for Hot War. Certainly not in the British sources you quote. Britain wouldn't want Hot War
with Russia. It's all a question of going to the limit for internal consumption. Do a 1984,
in order to keep the population in-line.
thanks b... i can't understand how any intelligent thinking person would read the guardian,
let alone something like the huff post, and etc. etc... why? the propaganda money that pays
for the white helmets, certainly goes to these outlets as well..
the uk have gone completely nuts! i guess it comes with reading the guardian, although, in
fairness, all british media seems very skewed - sky news, bbc, and etc. etc.
it does appear as though Patrick Wintour is on Gavin Williamson's propaganda
bandwagon/payroll already... in reading the comments and articles at craig murrays site, i
have become more familiar with just how crazy things are in the uk.. his latest article
freedom no
more sums it up well... throw the uk msm in the trash can... it is for all intensive
purposes, done..
Meanwhile, OPCW chief Uzumcu seems to have been pranked again, this time by his own staff
(this is how I interpret it):
He claimed that the amount of Novichok found was about 100 g and therefore more than
research laboratories would produce, i.e. this was weaponized Novichok.
Q: What is our reaction to the Guardian article on a "comprehensive strategy" to "deepen
the alliance against Russia" to be pursued by the UK Government at international forums?
A: Judging by the publication, the main current challenge for Whitehall is to preserve
the anti-Russian coalition that the Conservatives tried to build after the Salisbury
incident. This task is challenging indeed. The "fusion doctrine" promoted by the national
security apparatus has led to the Western bloc taking hasty decisions that, as life has
shown, were not based on any facts.
No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the
US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political
justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of
Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was
built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of
Russian responsibility) have been shattered.
Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian
logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to
see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting
countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation.
Hmmm... My reply to c1ue went sideways it seems. Yes, The late Mr. Prouty's book's the real
deal and the website hosting his very rare book is a rare gem itself. Click the JFK at page
top left to be transported to that sites archive of writings about his murder. The very important essay by
Prouty's there too.
The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is
his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote."
This one detail tells us so much about how propaganda works, and about how it can be
defeated. Successful propaganda both depends upon and seeks to accelerate the erasure of
historical memory. This is because its truths are always changing to suit the immediate needs
of the state. None of its truths can be understood historically. b makes the connection
between the documented but forgotten past "truth" of Merkel's quote and its present
reincarnation in the Guardian, and this is really all he *needs* to do. What b points out is
something quite simple; yet the ability to do this very simple thing is becoming increasingly
rare and its exercise increasingly difficult to achieve. It is for me the virtue that makes
b's analysis uniquely indispensable.
Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime,
"whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to
understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted
contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does
this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?"
Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no
essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth.
The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and
other sites is just so stupid its painful. This implies that the Skripals both closed the
door together and then went off on their day spreading the stuff everywhere, yet no one else
was contaminated (apart from the fantasy policeman).
Presumably the Skripals touch the
cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected
as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance
of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the
chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW
can't even get the amounts of the chemical right.
The problem is,,, most know it's all BS but find it 'easier' to believe or at most ignore, as
then there is no responsibility to 'do something'. Biggest problem with the world today is
lazy insouciant citizens. (Yes,,, I'm a PCR reader) :))
Did you catch the Lavrov interview I linked to on previous Yemen thread? As you might
imagine, the verbiage used is quite similar. One very important point Lavrov made was the
anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction
of humanity; and that while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the
rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of
forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter
envisioned.
"I cannot sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it is right to ban
a meeting with very distinguished speakers, because it is questioning the government and
establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead."
Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed
with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy'
disinformation. _______________________________________
Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and
including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™.
This isn't a new insight, but it's worth repeating. It struck me anew while I was
listening to a couple of UK "journalists" hectoring OPCW Representative Shulgin, and
directing scurrilous and provocative innuendo disguised as "questions" to Mr. Shulgin and the
Syrian witnesses testifying during his presentation.
It flashed upon me that there is no longer a reasonable expectation that the Perpetual Big
Liars must eventually abandon, much less confess, their heinous mendacity. Just as B points
out, there are no countervailing facts, evidence, rebuttals, theories, or explanations
that can't be countered with further iterations of Big Lies, however offensively incredible
and absurd.
Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or
technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech
Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought
off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar.
And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy
arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have
been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly
independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™
apparatus.
Even as the Big Liars reach a point of diminishing returns, they respond with more of the
same. I wish I were more confident that this reprehensible practice will eventually fail due
to the excess of malignant hubris; I'm not holding my breath.
Is Putin capitulating? Pro US Alexei Kudrin could join new government to negotiate "end of
sanctions" with the West.
Former finance minister Alexei Kudrin will be brought back to "mend fences with the West"
in order to revive Russia's economy. Kudrin has repeatedly said that unless Russia makes her
political system more democratic and ends its confrontation with Europe and the United
States, she will not be able to achieve economic growth. Russia's fifth-columnists were
exalted: "If Kudrin joined the administration or government, it would indicate that they have
agreed on a certain agenda of change, including in foreign policy, because without change in
foreign policy, reforms are simply impossible in Russia," said Yevgeny Gontmakher . . . who
works with a civil society organization set up by Mr. Kudrin. "It would be a powerful
message, because Kudrin is the only one in the top echelons with whom they will talk in the
west and towards whom there is a certain trust."
Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington
Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill
Clinton in charge of a girls' school.
It would mark Putin's de facto collapse as a leader. We
shall know very soon. Either way, if anyone wondered what the approach to Russia would be
from Bolton and Pompeo, we now know: they will play very hard ball with Putin, regardless of
what he does (or doesn't do), and with carefree readiness to risk an eventual snap.
Certainly looks like @ 18 is a fine example of what b is presenting.
A good way to extract one's self from the propaganda is to refuse using whatever meme the
disinformation uses, e.g. that Sergei Skripal was a double agent -- that is not a known, only
a convenient suggestion.
Military intelligence is far better described as military
information needed for some project or mission. Not surreptitious cloak and dagger spying.
This is not to say Sergei Scripal was a British spy for which he was convicted, stripped of
rank and career and exiled through a spy swap. To continue using Sergei Scripal was a double
agent only repeats and verifies the disinformation meme and all the framing that goes with
it. Find some alternative to what MSM produces that does not embed truthiness to their
efforts.
I realize it's from one of the biggest propaganda organs in the world... take this New
York Times report of the OPCW's retraction with a 100 grams -- 100mg? -- of salt:
Kudrin is a neoliberal and as such is an
enemy of humanity and will never again be allowed to hold a position of power within Russia's
government. Let him emigrate to the West like his fellow parasites and teach junk economics
at some likeminded university.
"... Inside the Tent gatekeepers have relentlessly attacked those brave individuals who have questioned the official narratives, but its these individuals- smeared as 'crackpots' and 'conspiracy theorists' who the public are turning to for their analysis. ..."
"... After the lies told about Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya people no longer tamely accept what the NeoCon Establishment tells us. ..."
"... We're at an 'Emperor's New Clothes' moment in British politics where more and more people have found the courage to say out loud 'The Emperor has no clothes!'. ..."
"... The elite have been lying to us and they know that we know they've been lying. The question is: what are we going to do about it?" ..."
"Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased
coverage, the British haven't bought it. Literally or metaphorically. Inside the Tent
gatekeepers have relentlessly attacked those brave individuals who have questioned the official
narratives, but its these individuals- smeared as 'crackpots' and 'conspiracy theorists' who
the public are turning to for their analysis.
Compare the number of retweets the former UK
Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray gets when he publishes on the Skripal case, with those
who try and denigrate him. My own Twitter following has increased by several thousands since
early March.
Citizen Halo got a big boost in followers after she was smeared by The Times.
After the lies told about Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya people no longer tamely accept what the NeoCon Establishment tells us.
We're at an 'Emperor's New Clothes' moment in British politics
where more and more people have found the courage to say out loud 'The Emperor has no
clothes!'.
The elite have been lying to us and they know that we know they've been lying. The
question is: what are we going to do about it?"
"... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies. ..."
"... the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies. ..."
"... The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule. ..."
"... But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils. ..."
In a three-part series published last week,
the World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and military operatives into the Democratic
Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant seats and those with Republican
incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant swing to the Democrats.
... ... ...
The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA,
NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus.
This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts"
for the television networks .
In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while essentially ignoring Trump's attacks
on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs
like Medicaid and food stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the
military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice.
This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the
intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen
candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation
with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.
The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its
operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that
score. A chorus of media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire editorial board
of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip
up support on alleged "human rights" grounds for an expansion of the US war in Syria.
The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers
to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic
Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining
the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.
The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence
operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience
invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given
preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.
The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration
has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened
its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.
The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of
American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose
interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class
is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.
Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right policies. But it is impossible to carry
out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx
of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that
the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the
corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.
"... For decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office – the Information Research Department (IRD) – carried out propaganda campaigns using the international media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years before Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western destabilization and "regime change." IRD and its associates at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets, tabloids, wire services, and magazines, particularly "The Daily Telegraph," "The Times," "Financial Times," Reuters, "The Guardian," and "The Economist," ran media smear campaigns against a number of leaders considered to be leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow travelers). ..."
"... After the Cold War, this same propaganda operation took aim at Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Somalia's Mohamad Farrah Aidid, and Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Today, it is Assad's, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's, and Catalonian independence leader Carles Puigdemont's turn to be in the Anglo-American state propaganda gunsights. Even Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, long a darling of the Western media and such propaganda moguls as George Soros, is now being targeted for Western visa bans and sanctions over the situation with Muslim Rohingya insurgents in Rakhine State. ..."
"... Through IRD-MI-6-Central Intelligence Agency joint propaganda operations, many British journalists received payments, knowingly or unknowingly, from the CIA via a front in London called Forum World Features (FWF), owned by John Hay Whitney, publisher of the "New York Herald Tribune" and a former US ambassador to London. ..."
When it comes to creating bogus news stories and advancing false narratives, the British
intelligence services have few peers. In fact, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) has led
the way for its American "cousins" and Britain's Commonwealth partners – from Canada and
Australia to India and Malaysia – in the dark art of spreading falsehoods as truths.
Recently, the world has witnessed such MI-6 subterfuge in news stories alleging that Russia
carried out a novichok nerve agent attack against a Russian émigré and his
daughter in Salisbury, England. This propaganda barrage was quickly followed by yet another
– the latest in a series of similar fabrications – alleging the Syrian government
attacked civilians in Douma, outside of Damascus, with chemical weapons.
It should come as no surprise that American news networks rely on British correspondents
stationed in northern Syria and Beirut as their primary sources. MI-6 has historically relied
on non-official cover (NOC) agents masquerading primarily as journalists, but also humanitarian
aid workers, Church of England clerics, international bankers, and hotel managers, to carry out
propaganda tasks. These NOCs are situated in positions where they can promulgate British
government disinformation to unsuspecting actual journalists and diplomats.
For decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office – the Information
Research Department (IRD) – carried out propaganda campaigns using the international
media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years before Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Iraq's Saddam
Hussein, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western
destabilization and "regime change." IRD and its associates at the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets,
tabloids, wire services, and magazines, particularly "The Daily Telegraph," "The Times,"
"Financial Times," Reuters, "The Guardian," and "The Economist," ran media smear campaigns
against a number of leaders considered to be leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow
travelers).
These leaders included Indonesia's President Sukarno, North Korean leader (and grandfather
of Pyongyang's present leader) Kim Il-Sung, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cyprus's Archbishop
Makarios, Cuba's Fidel Castro, Chile's Salvador Allende, British Guiana's Cheddi Jagan,
Grenada's Maurice Bishop, Jamaica's Michael Manley, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, Guinea's Sekou
Toure, Burkina Faso's Thomas Sankara, Australia's Gough Whitlam, New Zealand's David Lange,
Cambodia's Norodom Sihanouk, Malta's Dom Mintoff, Vanuatu's Father Walter Lini, and Ghana's
Kwame Nkrumah.
After the Cold War, this same propaganda operation took aim at Serbian President Slobodan
Milosevic, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Somalia's Mohamad Farrah
Aidid, and Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Today, it is Assad's, Hungarian Prime Minister
Viktor Orban's, and Catalonian independence leader Carles Puigdemont's turn to be in the
Anglo-American state propaganda gunsights. Even Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, long a darling
of the Western media and such propaganda moguls as George Soros, is now being targeted for
Western visa bans and sanctions over the situation with Muslim Rohingya insurgents in Rakhine
State.
Through IRD-MI-6-Central Intelligence Agency joint propaganda operations, many British
journalists received payments, knowingly or unknowingly, from the CIA via a front in London
called Forum World Features (FWF), owned by John Hay Whitney, publisher of the "New York Herald
Tribune" and a former US ambassador to London.
It is not a stretch to believe that similar and
even more formal relationships exist today between US and British intelligence and so-called
British "journalists" reporting from such war zones as Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan,
and the Gaza Strip, as well as from much-ballyhooed nerve agent attack locations as Salisbury,
England.
No sooner had recent news reports started to emerge from Douma about a Syrian chlorine gas
and sarin agent attack that killed between 40 to 70 civilians, British reporters in the Middle
East and London began echoing verbatim statements from the Syrian "White Helmets" and the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
In actuality, the White Helmets – claimed by Western media to be civilian defense
first-responders but are Islamist activists connected to jihadist radical groups funded by
Saudi Arabia – are believed to have staged the chemical attack in Douma by entering the
municipality's hospital and dowsing patients with buckets of water, video cameras at the ready.
The White Helmets distributed their videos to the global news media, with the BBC and Rupert
Murdoch's Sky News providing a British imprimatur to the propaganda campaign asserting that
Assad carried out another "barrel bomb" chemical attack against "his own people." And, as
always, the MI-6 financed Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad news front claimed
to be operated by a Syrian expatriate and British national named Rami Abdel Rahman from his
clothing shop in Coventry, England, began providing second-sourcing for the White Helmet's
chemical attack claims.
With President Trump bringing more and more neo-conservatives, discredited from their
massive anti-Iraq propaganda operations during the Bush-Cheney era, into his own
administration, the world is witnessing the prolongation of the "Trump Doctrine."
The Trump Doctrine can best be explained as follows: A nation will be subject to a US
military attack depending on whether Trump is facing a severe political or sex scandal at
home.
Such was the case in April 2017, when Trump ordered a cruise missile attack on the joint
Syrian-Russian airbase at Shayrat, Syria. Trump was still reeling from the resignation of his
National Security Adviser, Lt. General Michael Flynn, in February over the mixing of his
private consulting business with his official White House duties. Trump needed a diversion and
the false accusation that Assad used sarin gas on the village of Khan Sheikoun on April 4,
2017, provided the necessary pabulum for the war-hungry media.
The most recent cruise missile attack was to divert the public's attention away from Trump's
personal attorney being raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a sex scandal involving
Trump and a porn actress, and a "tell-all" book by Trump's fired FBI director, James Comey.
Although these two scandals provided opportunities for the neo-cons to test Trump with false
flag operations in Syria, they were not the first time such actions had been carried out. In
2013, the Syrian government was blamed for a similar chemical attack on civilians in Ghouta.
That year, Syrian rebels, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, admitted to the
Associated Press reporter on the ground in Syria that they had been given banned chemical
weapons by Saudi Arabia, but that the weapons canisters exploded after improper handling by the
rebels. Immediately, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Syrian rebel organizations
operating out of Turkey claimed that Assad had used chemical-laden barrel bombs on "his own
people." However, Turkish, American, and Lebanese sources confirmed that it was the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) that had badly bungled a false flag sarin nerve agent
attack on Ghouta.
Few Western media outlets were concerned about a March 19, 2013, sarin nerve agent by the
Bashair al-Nasr Brigade rebel group linked to the US- and British-backed Free Syrian Army. The
rebels used a "Bashair-3" unguided projectile, containing the deadly sarin agent, on civilians
in Khan al-Assal, outside Aleppo. At least 27 civilians were killed, and scores of others
injured in the attack. The Syrian Kurds also reported the use of chemical weapons on them
during the same time frame by Syrian rebel groups backed by the United States, Turkey, and
Saudi Arabia. The usual propaganda operations – Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,
Doctors Without Borders, the BBC, CNN, and Sky News – were all silent about these
attacks.
In 2013, April 2017, and April 2018, the Western media echo chamber blared out all the same
talking points: "Assad killing his own people," "Syrian weapons of mass destruction," and the
"mass murder of women and children." Western news networks featured videos of dead women and
children, while paid propagandists, known as "contributors" to corporate news networks –
all having links to the military-intelligence complex – demanded action be taken against
Assad.
Trump, now being advised by the notorious neocon war hawk John Bolton, the new National
Security Adviser, began referring to Assad as an "animal" and a "monster." Bolton, along with
Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby, helped craft similar
language against Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was
not coincidental that Trump – at the urging of Bolton and other neocons – gave a
full pardon to Libby on the very same day he ordered the cruise missile attack on Damascus and
other targets in Syria. Libby was convicted in 2005 of perjury and illegally disclosing
national security information.
The world is being asked to take, at face value, the word of patented liars like Trump,
Bolton, and other neocons who are now busy joining the Trump administration at breakneck speed.
The corporate media unabashedly acts as though it never lied about the reasons given by the
United States and Britain for going to war in Iraq and Libya. Why should anyone believe them
now?
Wayne
MADSEN Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. A member of the Society
of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club
"... I wanted to investigate whether the growing volume of criticism toward Russia, sometimes by people who could hardly claim to be knowledgeable about the country, concealed a political agenda. ..."
"... I discovered evidence of Russophobia shared by different circles within the American political class and promoted through programs and conferences at various think tanks, congressional testimonies, activities of NGOs, and the media. Russophobia is not merely a critique of Russia, but a critique beyond any sense of proportion, waged with the purpose of undermining the nation's political reputation. ..."
"... To these individuals, Russophobia is merely a means to pressure the Kremlin into submitting to the United States in the execution of its grand plans to control the world's most precious resources and geostrategic sites. In the meantime, Russia has grown increasingly resentful, and the war in the Caucasus in August 2008 has demonstrated that Russia is prepared to act unilaterally to stop what it views as US unilateralism in the former Soviet region. ..."
"... Anti-American attitudes are strongly present in Russian media and cultural products, as a response to the US policies of nuclear, energy, and military supremacy in the world. Extreme hegemonic policies tend to provoke an extreme response, and Russian nationalist movements and often commentators react harshly to what they view as unilateral encroachment on Russia's political system and foreign policy interests. Russia's reactions to these policies by the United States are highly negative and frequently inadequate, but hardly more extreme than the American hegemonic and imperial discourse. ..."
"... The central objective of the Lobby has been to preserve and strengthen America's power in the post-Cold War world through imperial or hegemonic policies. The Lobby has viewed Russia with its formidable nuclear power, energy reserves, and important geostrategic location as a major obstacle in achieving this objective. Even during the 1990s, when Russia looked more like a failing state3 than one capable of projecting power, some members of the American political class were worried about the future revival of the Eurasian giant as a revisionist power. In their percep- tion, it was essential to keep Russia in a state of military and economic weakness-not so much out of emotional hatred for the Russian people and their culture, but to preserve American security and promote its val- ues across the world. To many within the Lobby, Russophobia became a useful device for exerting pressures on Russia and controlling its policies. Although to some the idea of undermining and, possibly, dismembering Russia was personal, to others it was a necessity of power dictated by the realities of international politics. ..."
"... According to this dominant vision, there was simply no place in this "New American Century" for power competitors, and America was destined eventually to assume control over potentially threatening military capabilities and energy reserves of others. As the two founders of the Project for the New' American Century (PNAC), William Kristol and Robert Kagan, asserted when referring to the large military forces of Russia and China, "American statesmen today ought to recognize that their charge is not to await the arrival of the next great threat, but rather to shape the international environment to prevent such a threat from arising in the first place."4 ..."
"... Russia was either to agree to assist the United States in preserving its world-power status or be forced to agree. It had to either follow the U.S. interpretation of world affairs and develop a political and economic system sufficiently open to American influences or live as a pariah state, smeared by accusations of pernicious behavior, and in constant fear for its survival in the America-centered world. As far as the U.S. hegemonic elites were concerned, no other choice was available. ..."
"... This hegemonic mood was largely consistent with mainstream ideas within the American establishment immediately following the end of the Cold War. For example, 1989 saw the unification of Germany and the further meltdown of the Soviet Union, which some characterized as "the best period of U.S. foreign policy ever."5 President Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski envisioned the upcoming victory of the West by celebrating the Soviet Union's "grand failure."6 ..."
"... Charles Krauthammer, went as far as to proclaim the arrival of the United States' "unipolar moment," a period in which only one super- power, the United States, would stand above the rest of the world in its military, economic, and ideological capacity ..."
"... The mid-1990s saw the emergence of post-Soviet Russophobia. The Lobby's ideology was not principally new, as it still contained the three central myths of Sovietophobia left over from the Cold War era: Russia is inherently imperialist, autocratic, and anti-Western. This ideology now had to be modified to the new conditions and promoted politically, which required a tightening of the Lobby's unity, winning new allies within the establishment, and gaining public support.15 ..."
"... During the period of 2003-2008, Vice President Richard Dick Cheney formed a cohesive and bipartisan group of Russia critics, who pushed for a more confrontational approach with the Kremlin. ..."
"... Cheney could not tolerate opposition to what he saw as a critical step in establishing worldwide US hegemony. He was also harboring the idea of controlling Russia's energy reserves.91 ..."
"... In Russia, however, the Cold War story has been mainly about sovereignty and independence, rather than Western-style liberalism. To many Russians it is a story of freedom from colonization by the West and of preserving important attributes of sovereign statehood. ..."
"... In a world where neocolonialism and cultural imperialism are potent forces, the idea of freedom as independence continues to have strong international appeal and remains a powerful alternative to the notion of liberal democracy. ..."
"... The West's unwillingness to recognize the importance of this legitimizing myth in the role of communist ideology has served as a key reason for the Cold War.5 Like their Western counterparts, the Soviets were debating over methods but not the larger assumptions that defined their struggle. ..."
"... Yet another analyst wrote "at the Cold War's end, the United States was given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, the largest nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, his- toric or economic quarrel between us, once communist ideology was interred. We blew it. We moved NATO onto Russia's front porch, ignored her valid interests and concerns, and, with our 'indispensable-nation' arrogance, treated her as a defeated power, as France treated Weimar Germany after Versailles."114 ..."
It was during the spring of 2006 that I began this project. I wanted
to investigate whether the growing volume of criticism toward Russia, sometimes
by people who could hardly claim to be knowledgeable about the country, concealed
a political agenda.
As I researched the subject, I discovered evidence of Russophobia shared
by different circles within the American political class and promoted through
programs and conferences at various think tanks, congressional testimonies,
activities of NGOs, and the media. Russophobia is not merely a critique of Russia,
but a critique beyond any sense of proportion, waged with the purpose of undermining
the nation's political reputation.
... ... ....
Although a critical analysis of Russia and its political system is entirely
legitimate, the issue is the balance of such analysis. Russia's role in the
world is growing, yet many U.S. politicians feel that Russia doesn't matter
in the global arena. Preoccupied with international issues, such as Iraq and
Afghanistan, they find it difficult to accept that they now have to nego- tiate
and coordinate their international policies with a nation that only yesterday
seemed so weak, introspective, and dependent on the West. To these individuals,
Russophobia is merely a means to pressure the Kremlin into submitting to the
United States in the execution of its grand plans to control the world's most
precious resources and geostrategic sites. In the meantime, Russia has grown
increasingly resentful, and the war in the Caucasus in August 2008 has demonstrated
that Russia is prepared to act unilaterally to stop what it views as US unilateralism
in the former Soviet region.
And some in Moscow are tempted to provoke a much greater confrontation with
Western states. The attitude of ignorance and self-righteousness toward Russia
tells us volumes about the United States' lack of preparation for the twenty-first
century's central challenges that include political instability, weapons proliferation,
and energy insecurity. Despite the dislike of Russia by a considerable number
of American elites, this attitude is far from universally shared. Many Americans
understand that Russia has gone a long way from communism and that the overwhelming
support for Putin's policies at home cannot be adequately explained by high
oil prices and the Kremlin's manipulation of the public-despite the frequent
assertions of Russophobic observers.
Balanced analysts are also aware that many Russian problems are typical difficulties
that nations encounter with state-building, and should not be presented as indicative
of Russia's "inherent drive" to autocracy or empire. As the United States and
Russia move further to the twenty-first century, it will be increasingly important
to redefine the relationship between the two nations in a mutually enriching
way.
Political and cultural phobias are, of course, not limited to those of an
anti-Russian nature. For instance, Russia has its share of America-phobia --
a phenomenon that I have partly researched in my book Whose World Order (Notre
Dame, 2004) and in several articles. Anti-American attitudes are strongly
present in Russian media and cultural products, as a response to the US policies
of nuclear, energy, and military supremacy in the world. Extreme hegemonic policies
tend to provoke an extreme response, and Russian nationalist movements and often
commentators react harshly to what they view as unilateral encroachment on Russia's
political system and foreign policy interests. Russia's reactions to these policies
by the United States are highly negative and frequently inadequate, but hardly
more extreme than the American hegemonic and imperial discourse.
The Anti-Russian Lobby
When the facile optimism was disappointed, Western euphoria faded, and
Russophobia returned ... The new Russophobia was expressed not by the
governments, but in the statements of out-of-office politicians, the
publications of academic experts, the sensational writings of jour-
nalists, and the products of the entertainment industry. (Rodric Braithwaite,
Across the Moscow River, 2002)1
....
Russophobia is not a myth, not an invention of the Red-Brovvns, but
a real phenomenon of political thought in the main political think tanks
in the West . .. [T]he Yeltsin-Kozyrev's pro-U.S. "giveaway game" was
approved across the ocean. There is reason to say that the period in
ques- tion left the West with the illusion that Russia's role was to
serve Washington's interests and that it would remain such in the future.
(Sergei Mikoyati, International Affairs /October 2006j)2
This chapter formulates a theory of Russophobia and the anti-Russian lobby's
influence on the U.S. Russia policy. 1 discuss the Lobby's objec- tives, its
tactics to achieve them, the history of its formation and rise to prominence,
and the conditions that preserved its influence in the after- math of 9/11.1
argue that Russophobia has been important to American hegemonic elites in pressuring
Russia for economic and political conces- sions in the post-Cold War era.
1. Goals and Means
Objectives
The central objective of the Lobby has been to preserve and strengthen
America's power in the post-Cold War world through imperial or hegemonic policies.
The Lobby has viewed Russia with its formidable nuclear power, energy reserves,
and important geostrategic location as a major obstacle in achieving this objective.
Even during the 1990s, when Russia looked more like a failing state3 than one
capable of projecting power, some members of the American political class were
worried about the future revival of the Eurasian giant as a revisionist power.
In their percep- tion, it was essential to keep Russia in a state of military
and economic weakness-not so much out of emotional hatred for the Russian people
and their culture, but to preserve American security and promote its val- ues
across the world. To many within the Lobby, Russophobia became a useful device
for exerting pressures on Russia and controlling its policies. Although to some
the idea of undermining and, possibly, dismembering Russia was personal, to
others it was a necessity of power dictated by the realities of international
politics.
According to this dominant vision, there was simply no place in this
"New American Century" for power competitors, and America was destined eventually
to assume control over potentially threatening military capabilities and energy
reserves of others. As the two founders of the Project for the New' American
Century (PNAC), William Kristol and Robert Kagan, asserted when referring to
the large military forces of Russia and China, "American statesmen today ought
to recognize that their charge is not to await the arrival of the next great
threat, but rather to shape the international environment to prevent such a
threat from arising in the first place."4
Russia was either to agree to assist the United States in preserving
its world-power status or be forced to agree. It had to either follow the U.S.
interpretation of world affairs and develop a political and economic system
sufficiently open to American influences or live as a pariah state, smeared
by accusations of pernicious behavior, and in constant fear for its survival
in the America-centered world. As far as the U.S. hegemonic elites were concerned,
no other choice was available.
This hegemonic mood was largely consistent with mainstream ideas within
the American establishment immediately following the end of the Cold War. For
example, 1989 saw the unification of Germany and the further meltdown of the
Soviet Union, which some characterized as "the best period of U.S. foreign policy
ever."5 President Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
envisioned the upcoming victory of the West by celebrating the Soviet Union's
"grand failure."6
In his view, the Soviet "totalitarian" state was incapable of reform. Communism's
decline was therefore irreversible and inevitable. It would have made the system's
"practice and its dogma largely irrelevant to the human conditions," and communism
would be remembered as the twentieth century's "political and intellectual aberration."7
Other com- mentators argued the case for a global spread of Western values.
In 1990 Francis Fukuyama first formulated his triumphalist "end of history"
thesis, arguing a global ascendancy of the Western-style market democracy.®
... ... ...
Marc Plattner declared the emergence of a "world with one dominant principle
of legitimacy, democracy."9 When the Soviet system had indeed disintegrated,
the leading establishment journal Foreign Affairs pronounced that "the Soviet
system collapsed because of what it was, or more exactly, because of what it
was not. The West 'won' because of what the democracies were-because they were
free, prosperous and successful, because they did justice, or convincingly tried
to do so."10 Still others, such as Charles Krauthammer, went as far as to
proclaim the arrival of the United States' "unipolar moment," a period in which
only one super- power, the United States, would stand above the rest of the
world in its military, economic, and ideological capacity.11
In this context of U.S. triumphalism, at least some Russophobes expected
Russia to follow the American agenda. Still, they were worried that Russia may
still have surprises to offer and would recover as an enemy.12
Soon after the Soviet disintegration, Russia indeed surprised many, although
not quite in the sense of presenting a power challenge to the United States.
Rather, the surprise was the unexpectedly high degree of corruption, social
and economic decay, and the rapid disappointment of pro-Western reforms inside
Russia. By late 1992, the domestic economic situation was much worsened, as
the failure of Western-style shock ther- apy reform put most of the population
on the verge of poverty. Russia was preoccupied not with the projection of power
but with survival, as poverty, crime, and corruption degraded it from the status
of the indus- trialized country it once was. In the meantime, the economy was
largely controlled by and divided among former high-ranking party and state
officials and their associates. The so-called oligarchs, or a group of extremely
wealthy individuals, played the role of the new post-Soviet nomenklatura; they
influenced many key decisions of the state and suc- cessfully blocked the development
of small- and medium-sized business in the country.13 Under these conditions,
the Russophobes warned that the conditions in Russia may soon be ripe for the
rise of an anti-Western nationalist regime and that Russia was not fit for any
partnership with the United States.14
The mid-1990s saw the emergence of post-Soviet Russophobia. The Lobby's
ideology was not principally new, as it still contained the three central myths
of Sovietophobia left over from the Cold War era: Russia is inherently imperialist,
autocratic, and anti-Western. This ideology now had to be modified to the new
conditions and promoted politically, which required a tightening of the Lobby's
unity, winning new allies within the establishment, and gaining public support.15
... ... ...
The impact of structural and institutional factors is further reinforced
by policy factors, such as the divide within the policy community and the lack
of presidential leadership. Not infrequently, politicians tend to defend their
personal and corporate interests, and lobbying makes a difference in the absence
of firm policy commitments.
Experts recognize that the community of Russia watchers is split and that
the split, which goes all the way to the White House, has been responsible for
the absence of a coherent policy toward the country. During the period of
2003-2008, Vice President Richard Dick Cheney formed a cohesive and bipartisan
group of Russia critics, who pushed for a more confrontational approach with
the Kremlin. The brain behind the invasion of Iraq, Cheney could not
tolerate opposition to what he saw as a critical step in establishing worldwide
US hegemony. He was also harboring the idea of controlling Russia's energy reserves.91
Since November 2004, when the administration launched a review of its policy
on Russia,92 Cheney became a critically important voice in whom the Lobby found
its advocate. Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and, until November 2004,
Colin Powell opposed the vice president's approach, arguing for a softer and
more accommodating style in relations with Moscow.
President Bush generally sided with Rice and Powell, but he proved unable
to form a consistent Russia policy. Because of America's involvement in the
Middle East, Bush failed to provide the leadership committed to devising mutually
acceptable rules in relations with Russia that could have prevented the deterioration
in their relationship. Since the end of 2003, he also became doubtful about
the direction of Russia's domestic transformation.93 As a result, the promising
post-9/11 cooperation never materialized. The new cold war and the American
Sense of History
It's time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the
United States. (Bret Stephens, "Russia: The Enemy," The Wall Street Journal,
November 28, 2006)
If today's reality of Russian politics continues ... then there is the real
risk that Russia's leadership will be seen, externally and internally, as illegitimate.
(John Edwards and Jack Kemp, "We Need to Be Tough with Russia," International
Herald Tribune, July 12, 2006)
On Iran, Kosovo, U.S. missile defense, Iraq, the Caucasus and Caspian basin,
Ukraine-the list goes on-Russia puts itself in conflict with the U.S. and its
allies . . . here are worse models than the united Western stand that won the
Cold War the first time around.
("Putin Institutionalized," The Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2007) In
order to derail the U.S.-Russia partnership, the Lobby has sought to revive
the image of Russias as an enemy of the United States. The Russophobic groups
have exploited important differences between the two countries' historical self-perceptions,
presenting those differences as incompatible.
1. Contested History
Two versions of history
The story of the Cold War as told from the U.S. perspective is about American
ideas of Western-style democracy as rescued from the Soviet threat of totalitarian
communism. Although scholars and politicians disagreed over the methods of responding
to the Soviet threat, they rarely questioned their underlying assumptions about
history and freedom.' It therefore should not come as surprise that many in
the United States have interpreted the end of the Cold War as a victory of the
Western freedom narrative. Celebrating the Soviet Union's "grand failure"-as
Zbigniew Brzezinski put it2-the American discourse assumed that from now on
there would be little resistance to freedom's worldwide progression. When Francis
Fukuyama offered his bold summary of these optimistic feelings and asserted
in a famous passage that "what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the
Cold War... but the end of history as such,"3 he meant to convey the disappearance
of an alternative to the familiar idea of free- dom, or "the universalization
of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."4
In Russia, however, the Cold War story has been mainly about sovereignty
and independence, rather than Western-style liberalism. To many Russians it
is a story of freedom from colonization by the West and of preserving important
attributes of sovereign statehood.
In a world where neocolonialism and cultural imperialism are potent forces,
the idea of freedom as independence continues to have strong international appeal
and remains a powerful alternative to the notion of liberal democracy.
Russians formulated the narrative of independence centuries ago, as they successfully
withstood external invasions from Napoleon to Hitler. The defeat of the Nazi
regime was important to the Soviets because it legitimized their claims to continue
with the tradition of freedom as independence.
The West's unwillingness to recognize the importance of this legitimizing
myth in the role of communist ideology has served as a key reason for the Cold
War.5 Like their Western counterparts, the Soviets were debating over methods
but not the larger assumptions that defined their struggle.
This helps to understand why Russians could never agree with the Western
interpretation of the end of the Cold War. What they find missing from the U.S.
narrative is the tribute to Russia's ability to defend its freedom from expansionist
ambitions of larger powers. The Cold War too is viewed by many Russians as a
necessarily defensive response to the West's policies, and it is important that
even while occupying Eastern Europe, the Soviets never celebrated the occupation,
emphasizing instead the war vic- tory.6 The Russians officially admitted "moral
responsibility" and apolo- gized for the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.7
They may be prepared to fully recognize the postwar occupation of Eastern Europe,
but only in the context of the two sides' responsibility for the Cold War. Russians
also find it offensive that Western VE Day celebrations ignore the crucial contribution
of Soviet troops, even though none of the Allies, as one historian put it, "paid
dearer than the Soviet Union for the victory. Forty Private Ivans fell in battle
to every Private Ryan."8 Victory over Nazi Germany constitutes, as another Russian
wrote, "the only undisputable foundation of the national myth."9
If the two sides are to build foundations for a future partnership, the two
historical narratives must be bridged. First, it is important to recognize the
difficulty of negotiating a common meaning of freedom and accept that the idea
of freedom may vary greatly across nations. The urge for freedom may be universal,
but its social content is a specific product of national his- tories and local
circumstances. For instance, the American vision of democracy initially downplayed
the role of elections and emphasized selection by merit or meritocracy. Under
the influence of the Great Depression, the notion of democracy incorporated
a strong egalitarian and poverty-fighting component, and it was not until the
Cold War- and not without its influence-that democracy has become associated
with elections and pluralistic institutions.10 Second, it is essential to acknowledge
the two nations' mutual respon- sibility for the misunderstanding that has resulted
in the Cold War. A historically sensitive account will recognize that both sides
were thinking in terms of expanding a territorial space to protect their visions
of security. While the Soviets wanted to create a buffer zone to prevent a future
attack from Germany, the Americans believed in reconstructing the European continent
in accordance with their ideas of security and democracy. A mutual mistrust
of the two countries' leaders exacerbated the situation, making it ever more
difficult to prevent a full-fledged political confronta- tion. Western leaders
had reason to be suspicious of Stalin, who, in his turn, was driven by the perception
of the West's greed and by betrayals from the dubious Treaty of Versailles to
the appeasement of Hitler in Munich. Arrangements for the post-World War II
world made by Britain, the USSR, and the United States proved insufficient to
address these deep-seated suspicions.
In addition, most Eastern European states created as a result of the Versailles
Treaty were neither free nor democratic and collaborated with Nazi Germany in
its racist and expansionist policies. The European post-World War 1 security
system was not working properly, and it was only a matter of time before it
would have to be transformed.
Third, if an agreeable historical account is to emerge, it would have to
accept that the end of the Cold War was a product of mutually beneficial a second
Cold War, "it also does not want the reversal of the U.S. geopolitical gains
that it made in the decade or so after the end of the Cold War."112 Another
expert asked, "What possible explanation is there for the fact that today-at
a moment when both the U.S. and Russia face the common enemy of Islamist terrorism-hard-liners
within the Bush administration, and especially in the office of Vice President
Dick Cheney, are arguing for a new tough line against Moscow along the lines
of a scaled-down Cold War?"113
Yet another analyst wrote "at the Cold War's end, the United States was
given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, the largest
nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost
perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, his- toric or economic quarrel
between us, once communist ideology was interred. We blew it. We moved NATO
onto Russia's front porch, ignored her valid interests and concerns, and, with
our 'indispensable-nation' arrogance, treated her as a defeated power, as France
treated Weimar Germany after Versailles."114
The furor is all about the "illegitimate" victories of Brexit and Trump's campaign. Does the average user care if s/he is micro-targetted
by political advertisements based on what they already believe?
No, because they already believe they're right, so what's wrong with a little confirmation bias? Most of us spend significant
amounts of energy seeking out sources of information confirming what we already believe; micro-targetting just makes our lives
that little bit less effortful.
The "60 Minutes" broadcast on Sunday night, devoted to rehashing allegations of sexual
impropriety and bullying against Donald Trump, marked a new level of degradation for the US
political system. For nearly half an hour, an audience of 23 million people tuned in to a
discussion of a brief sexual encounter between Trump and adult film star Stormy Daniels
(Stephanie Clifford) in 2006.
Trump was then a near-bankrupt real estate and casino mogul, best known for reinventing
himself as a television personality. By her account, the proffer of a possible guest appearance
on Celebrity Apprentice was the only attraction the 60-year-old Trump had for Daniels,
then 27. Trump made promises, but as usual did not deliver.
Earlier in the week, the same interviewer, Anderson Cooper, appearing on CNN instead of CBS,
held an hour-long discussion with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy magazine
centerfold, who described a year-long relationship with Trump, also in 2006, the year after his
marriage to Melania Knauss.
White House officials flatly denied both accounts, but Trump himself has been conspicuously
and unusually silent, even on Twitter. His lawyers filed papers with a Los Angeles court, in
advance of the "60 Minutes" broadcast, claiming that Daniels was in violation of a
confidentiality agreement and could be liable for damages of up to $20 million.
Last Tuesday, a New York state judge turned down a motion by lawyers acting for Trump and
refused to dismiss the lawsuit for defamation brought against him by Summer Zervos, a former
contestant on another Trump "reality" show, The Apprentice . One of nearly a dozen
women who made public charges of sexual harassment against Trump during the final weeks of the
2016 campaign, Zervos alone has sued Trump over his repeated public claims that the women were
all liars.
There is little doubt that the accounts by Zervos, McDougal and Daniels are substantially
true. Trump has already demonstrated this by attempting to suppress their stories, either
through legal action or by purchasing their silence, directly or indirectly. A Trump ally,
David Pecker, owner of the National Enquirer tabloid, bought the rights to McDougal's
account of her relationship with Trump in 2016 for $150,000, in order not to publish it.
Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, admitted last month that he had paid $130,000 to
Daniels in October 2016, only weeks before the election, to guarantee her silence.
The bullying tactics of Cohen and other Trump allies add credibility to the claim by
Daniels, during her "60 Minutes" interview, that a thug, presumably sent by Cohen, had
threatened her with violence in 2011, when she first sought to sell her story about Trump to
the media. Daniels offered no evidence to back her claim, but her attorney Michael Avenatti
dropped broad hints that Daniels would be able to corroborate much of her account.
Cohen may himself face some legal jeopardy due to his public declaration that he paid
Daniels out of his own funds. Given the proximity of the payment to the election, this could
well be construed as a cash contribution to the Trump campaign far beyond the $3,500 legal
limit for an individual.
The Zervos suit, however, may present the most immediate legal threat, since the next step,
after New York Supreme Court Justice Jennifer G. Schecter rejected Trump's claim that he has
presidential immunity, is to take discovery. In other words, Trump and his closest aides could
be required to give sworn depositions about his actions in relation to Zervos and many of the
other women.
Justice Schecter cited the precedent of the Paula Jones case against President Bill Clinton,
in which the US Supreme Court held that a US president had no immunity from lawsuits over his
private actions. While cloaked in democratic rhetoric at the time ("No one is above the law"),
that decision actually gave a green light to an anti-democratic conspiracy by ultra-right
forces who used the Jones lawsuit to trap Clinton into lying about his relationship with Monica
Lewinsky.
Unlike the 1998-1999 conflict over impeachment, there is no issue of democratic rights
involved in the sexual allegations against Trump. Some of the same legal tactics (using sworn
depositions to set a perjury trap), are being employed as weapons in an increasingly bitter
conflict within the US ruling elite, in which both factions are equally reactionary.
Trump is a representative of the underworld of real estate, casino gambling and reality
television, elevated to the presidency because he had the good fortune to run against a deeply
unpopular and reactionary shill for Wall Street and the military-intelligence agencies, Hillary
Clinton. Under conditions of mounting discontent among working people with the Democratic
Party, after eight years of the Obama administration, Trump was able to eke out a narrow
victory in the Electoral College.
The Democratic "opposition" to Trump is focused not on his vicious attacks on immigrants,
his promotion of racist and neo-fascist elements, his deregulation of business and passage of
the biggest tax cut for the wealthy in decades, or his increasingly violent and unhinged
foreign policy pronouncements. The Democrats have sought to attack Trump from the right,
particularly on the question of US-Russian relations, making use of the investigation into
alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections, headed by former FBI Director Robert
Mueller.
Trump has sought to mollify his critics within the US national security establishment with
measures such as a more aggressive US intervention in Syria, the elevation of Gina Haspel, the
CIA's chief torturer, to head the agency, and, most recently, the expulsion of dozens of
Russian diplomats as part a NATO-wide campaign aimed at whipping up a war fever against
Moscow.
As Trump has made concessions on foreign policy, his opponents have shifted their ground,
attacking his behavior towards women. They have sought to link these exposures with the broader
#MeToo campaign, which is aimed at creating a witch-hunt atmosphere in Hollywood, the US
political system, and more generally throughout American society, in which gender issues are
brought forward to conceal and suppress more fundamental class questions.
In both the Russia investigation and now the allegations of sexual misconduct, the Democrats
have sought to hide their real political agenda, which is just as reactionary and dangerous as
that of Trump and the Republicans. While Trump is pushing towards war with North Korea or Iran,
and behind them China, the Democrats and their allies in the national security apparatus seek
to maintain the focus on Russia that was developed during the second term of the Obama
administration, particularly in Syria, Ukraine and Eastern Europe as a whole, posing the danger
of a war between the world's two main nuclear powers.
Beyond the immediate foreign policy issues, the whipping up of sexual scandals is invariably
a hallmark of reactionary politics. Such methods appeal to social backwardness, Puritanical
prejudices or prurient interest. They contribute nothing to the political education of working
people and youth, who must come to understand the fundamental class forces underlying all
political phenomena. The political basis for a struggle against Trump is not in designating him
as a sexual predator, but in understanding his class role as a front man for the American
financial oligarchy, which treats the entire working class, including the female half, as
objects of exploitation.
What is interesting is a strong Brennan connections with UK and his possiblke role in Steel dossier creation and propogation. Which actually were typical for
many members of Trump administration. He also has connections with Saudi intelligence services
Notable quotes:
"... So Morell is by his own words clearly an idiot, which explains a lot about what is wrong with CIA and is probably why he is now a consultant with CBS News instead of serving as Agency Director under the beneficent gaze of President Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... Back in 2013 John Brennan, then Obama's counter-terrorism advisor, had a difficult time with the Senate Intelligence Committee explaining some things that he did when he was still working at CIA. ..."
"... He claimed that he had only "raised serious questions" in his own mind on the interrogation issue after reading the 525 page summary of the 6,000 page report prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee which detailed the failure of the Agency program. Brennan's reaction, however, suggested at a minimum that he had read only the rebuttal material produced by CIA that had deliberately inflated the value of the intelligence produced. ..."
"... Surprisingly the subject of rendition, which Brennan must surely have been involved with while at CIA, hardly surfaced though two other interesting snippets emerged from the questioning. ..."
"... Brennan was not questioned at all about the conflict of interest or ethical issues raised by the revolving door that he benefited from when he left CIA as Deputy Executive Director in 2005 and joined a British-owned company called The Analysis Corporation (TAC) where he was named CEO. ..."
"... At the Center of the Storm ..."
"... Brennan certainly knew how to feather his nest and reward his friends, but the area that is still murky relates to what exactly he was up to in 2016 when he was CIA Director and also quite possibly working hard to help Hillary get elected. He was still at it well after Trump got elected and assumed office. In May 2017, his testimony before Congress was headlined in a Washington Post ..."
"... The precise money quote by Brennan that the two articles chiefly rely on is "I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind whether or not Russia was able to gain the co-operation of those individuals." ..."
"... The testimony inevitably raises some questions about just what Brennan was actually up to. First of all, the CIA is not supposed to keep tabs on American citizens and tracking the activities of known associates of a presidential candidate should have sent warning bells off, yet Brennan clearly persisted in following the trail. ..."
"... it is clear that Brennan then used that information to request an FBI investigation into a possible Russian operation directed against potential key advisers if Trump were to somehow get nominated and elected, which admittedly was a longshot at the time. That is how Russiagate began. ..."
"... So, Mr. Brennan, for all his bluster and scarcely concealed anger, has a lot of baggage, to include his possible role in coordinating with other elements in the national security agencies as well as with overseas parties to get their candidate Hillary Clinton elected. ..."
Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan, a Barack Obama friend and
protégé as well as a current paid contributor for NBC and MSNBC, has
blasted President Donald Trump for congratulating President Vladimir Putin over his victory
in recent Russian national elections. He said that the U.S. President is "afraid of the
president of Russia" and that the Kremlin "may have something on him personally. The fact that
he has had this fawning attitude toward Mr. Putin continues to say to me that he does have
something to fear and something very serious to fear."
It is an indication of how low we have sunk as a nation that a possible war criminal like
Brennan can feel free to use his former official status as a bully pulpit to claim that someone
is a foreign spy without any real pushback or objection from the talking heads and billionaire
manipulators that unfortunately run our country. If Trump is actually being blackmailed, as
Brennan implies, what evidence is there for that? One might reasonably conclude that Brennan
and his associates are actually angry because Trump has had the temerity to try to improve
relations with Russia.
It is ironic that when President Trump does something right he gets assailed by the same
crowd that piles on when he does something stupid, leading to the conclusion that unless The
Donald is attacking another country, when he is lauded as becoming truly presidential, he
cannot ever win with the inside the Beltway Establishment crowd. Brennan and a supporting cast
of dissimulating former intelligence chiefs opposed Trump from the git-go and were perfectly
willing to make things up to support Hillary and the status quo that she represented. It was,
of course, a status quo that greatly and personally benefited that ex-government crowd which by
now might well be described as the proverbial Deep State.
The claim that Trump is a Russian agent is not a new one since it is an easy mark to allege
something that you don't have to prove. During the campaign, one was frequently confronted on
the television by the humorless stare of the malignant Michael Morell, former acting CIA
Director, who wrote in a mind numbing August 2016
op-ed how he was proud to support Hillary Clinton because of her "commitment to our
nation's security: her belief that America is an exceptional nation that must lead in the world
for the country to remain secure and prosperous; her understanding that diplomacy can be
effective only if the country is perceived as willing and able to use force if necessary; and
her capacity to make the most difficult decision of all: whether to put young American women
and men in harm's way." Per Morell, she was a "proponent of a more aggressive approach [in
Syria], one that might have prevented the Islamic State from gaining a foothold "
But Morell saved his finest vitriol for Donald Trump, observing how Vladimir Putin, a wily
ex-career intelligence officer "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to
exploit them" obtained the services of one fairly obscure American businessman named Trump
without even physically meeting him. Morell, given his broad experience as an analyst and desk
jockey, notes, "In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr.
Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." An "unwitting agent" is a contradiction
in terms, but one wouldn't expect Morell to know that. Nor would John Brennan, who was also an
analyst and desk jockey before he was elevated by an equally witless President Barack
Obama.
So Morell is by his own words clearly an idiot, which explains a lot about what is wrong
with CIA and is probably why he is now a consultant with CBS News instead of serving as Agency
Director under the beneficent gaze of President Hillary Clinton.
Well, Trump's fractured foreign policy aside, I have some real problems with folks like
Michael Morell and John Brennan throwing stones. Both can be reasonably described as war
criminals due to what they did during the war on terror and also as major subverters of the
Constitution of the United States that has emerged as part of the saga of the 2016 election,
the outcome of which, ironically, is being blamed on the Russians.
Back in 2013 John Brennan, then Obama's counter-terrorism advisor, had a difficult time
with the Senate Intelligence Committee explaining some things that he did when he was still
working at CIA. He was predictably
attacked by some senators concerned over the expanding drone program, which he supervised;
over CIA torture; for the kill lists that he helped manage; and regarding the pervasive
government secrecy, which he surely condoned to cover up the questionable nature of the
assassination lists and the drones. Not at all surprisingly, he was forced to defend the
policies of the administration that he was then serving in, claiming that the United States is
"at war with al-Qaeda." But he did cite his basic disagreement with the former CIA
interrogation policies and expressed his surprise at learning that enhanced interrogation,
which he refused to label torture because he is "no lawyer," had not provided any unique or
actionable information. He claimed that he had only "raised serious questions" in his own
mind on the interrogation issue after reading the 525 page summary of the 6,000 page report
prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee which detailed the failure of the Agency program.
Brennan's reaction, however, suggested at a minimum that he had read only the rebuttal material
produced by CIA that had deliberately inflated the value of the intelligence produced.
Surprisingly the subject of rendition, which Brennan must surely have been involved with
while at CIA, hardly surfaced though two other interesting
snippets emerged from the questioning. One was his confirmation that the government
has its own secret list of innocent civilians killed by drones while at the same time
contradicting himself by maintaining that the program does not actually exist and that if even
if it did exist such fatalities do not occur. And more directly relevant to Brennan himself,
Senator John D. Rockefeller provided an insight into the classified sections of the Senate
report on CIA torture, mentioning that the enhanced interrogation program was both "managed
incompetently" and "corrupted by personnel with pecuniary conflicts of interest." One would
certainly like to learn more about the presumed contractors who profited corruptly from
waterboarding and one would like to know if they were in any way punished, an interesting
sidebar as Brennan has a number of times spoken about the need for accountability.
Brennan was not questioned at all about the conflict of interest or ethical issues
raised by the revolving door
that he benefited from when he left CIA as Deputy Executive Director in 2005 and joined a
British-owned company called The Analysis Corporation (TAC) where he was named CEO. He
made almost certainly some millions of dollars when the Agency and other federal agencies
awarded TAC contracts to develop biometrics and set up systems to manage the government's
various watch lists before rejoining the government with a full bank account to help him along
his way. Brennan also reportedly knew how to return a favor, giving his former boss at CIA
George Tenet a compensated advisory position in his company and also hosting in 2007 a book
signing for Tenet's At the Center of the Storm . The by-invitation-only event included
six hundred current and former intelligence officers, some of whom waited for hours to have
Tenet sign copies of the book, which were provided by TAC.
Brennan certainly knew how to feather his nest and reward his friends, but the area that
is still murky relates to what exactly he was up to in 2016 when he was CIA Director and also
quite possibly working hard to help Hillary get elected. He was still at it well after Trump
got elected and assumed office. In May 2017, his testimony before Congress was headlined in a
Washington Post front page featured article as
Brennan's explosive testimony just made it harder for the GOP to protect Trump . The
article stated that Brennan during the 2016 campaign "reviewed intelligence that showed
'contacts and interaction' between Russian actors and people associated with the Trump
campaign." Politico was also in on the chase in an article entitled
Brennan: Russia may have successfully recruited Trump campaign aides .
The precise money quote by Brennan that the two
articles chiefly rely on is "I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that
revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the
Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such
individuals. It raised questions in my mind whether or not Russia was able to gain the
co-operation of those individuals."
The testimony inevitably raises some questions about just what Brennan was actually up
to. First of all, the CIA is not supposed to keep tabs on American citizens and tracking the
activities of known associates of a presidential candidate should have sent warning bells off,
yet Brennan clearly persisted in following the trail. What Brennan did not describe,
because it was "classified," was how he came upon the information in the first place. We know
from Politico and other sources that it came from foreign intelligence services,
including the British, Dutch and Estonians, and there has to be a strong suspicion that the
forwarding of at least some of that information might have been sought or possibly inspired by
Brennan unofficially in the first place. But whatever the provenance of the intelligence,
it is clear that Brennan then used that information to request an FBI investigation into a
possible Russian operation directed against potential key advisers if Trump were to somehow get
nominated and elected, which admittedly was a longshot at the time. That is how Russiagate
began.
So, Mr. Brennan, for all his bluster and scarcely concealed anger, has a lot of baggage,
to include his possible role in coordinating with other elements in the national security
agencies as well as with overseas parties to get their candidate Hillary Clinton elected.
Brennan should be thoroughly investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, to include
subpoenaing all records at CIA relating to the Trump inquiries before requiring testimony under
oath of Brennan himself with possible legal consequences if he is caught lying
Manipulating democracy -- brainwashing the public for a large fee
Cambridge Analytica, the data harvesting firm that worked for the Trump campaign, is in the
midst of a scandal that should make everyone who cares about a clean political process demand
major investigations of anyone who has procured the services of the company, major prosecutions
of those who have violated laws across multiple nations and a wholesale revitalisation of
electoral laws to prevent politicians from ever again procuring the services of unethical
companies like Cambridge Analytica.
Days ago, whistleblower Christopher Wylie went public about his time
working for Cambridge Analytica and specifically about how the firm illegally obtained the
public and private data, including the private messages of 50 million Facebook users. He also
exposed how Cambridge Analytica used this data to run highly scientific social manipulation
campaigns in order to effectively brainwash the public in various countries to support a
certain political candidate or faction.
Cambridge Analytica's dubious methods were used to meddle in the US election after the Trump
campaign paid Cambridge Analytica substantial sums of money for their services. The firm also
meddled in the last two Kenyan Presidential elections, elections in Nigeria, elections in Czech
Republic, elections in Argentina, elections in India, the Brexit campaign, UK Premier Theresa
May's recently election and now stands accused of working with the disgraced former
Pakistani Premier Nawaz Sharif in an attempt to reverse his judicial ban on holding public
office, while helping his PML-N party win the forthcoming general election.
Beyond the scandalous use of personal data from Facebook users and the illegal access to
people's private messages, Cambridge Analytica has now been exposed as a company that, by the
hidden-camera admission of its CEO Alexander Nix, engages in nefarious, illegal and outrageous
activities across the globe.
The UK Broadcaster Channel 4 just released a video of Cambridge Analytica's CEO and Managing
DIrector Mark Turnbull in a conversation with an undercover reporter posing as a Sri Lankan
businessman interested in meddling in domestic elections. During the conversation Nix boasted
of Cambridge Analytica's history of using entrapment, bribery and intimidation against the
political opponents of its wealthy clients. Furthermore, Nix boasted about his firm's ability
to procure Ukrainian prostitutes as a means to entrap adversaries while also procuring the
services of "Israeli spies" as part of dirty smear operations.
The activities that Nix boasted of using in the past and then offered to a prospective
client are illegal in virtually every country in the world. But for Nix and his world of
ultra-rich clients, acting as though one is above the law is the rule rather than the
exception. Thus far, Cambridge Analaytica has been able to escape justice throughout the world
both for its election meddling, data harvesting, data theft and attempts to slander politicians
through calculated bribery and entrapment schemes.
One person who refused to be tempted by Cambridge Analytica was Julian Assange. Alexander
Nix personally wrote to Julian Assange asking for direct access to information possessed by
Wikileaks and Assange refused. This is a clear example of journalistic ethics and personal
integrity on the part of Assange. Justice must be done
Cambridge Analytica stands accused of doing everything and more that the Russian
state was accused of doing in respect of meddling in the 2016 US Presidential election. While
meetings and conversations that Trump campaign officials, including Steve Bannon had with
Cambridge Analyatica big wigs were not recorded, any information as to what was said during
these exchanges should be thoroughly investigated by law enforcement and eventually made public
for the sake of restoring transparency to politics.
Just as the Hillary Clinton campaign openly conspired to deprive Bernie Sanders of the
Democratic Party's nomination, so too did Donald Trump's campaign pay Cambridge Analytica to
conspire against the American voters using a calculated psychological manipulation campaign
that was made possible through the use of unethically obtained and stolen data.
While Facebook claims it was itself misled and consequently victimised by Cambridge
Analytica and has subsequently banned the firm from its platform, many, including Edward
Snowden have alleged that Facebook knew full well what Cambridge Analytica was doing with the
data retrieved from its Facebook apps. Already, the markets have reacted to the news and the
verdict is not favourble in terms of the public perception of Facebook as an ethical company.
Facebook's share prices are down over 7% on the S&P 500. This represents the biggest tumble
in the price of Facebook share prices since 2014. Moreover, the plunge has knocked Facebook out
of the coveted big five companies atop the S&P 500. Furthermore, Alex Stamos, Facebook's
security director has announced that he will soon leave the company.
The Trump myth and Russia myth exposed
Donald Trump has frequently boasted of his expert campaigning skills as being the reason he
won an election that few thought he could have ever won. While Trump was a far more charismatic
and exciting platform speaker than his rival Hillary Clinton, it seems that for the Trump
campaign, Trump ultimately needed to rely on the expensive and nefarious services of Cambridge
Analytica in order to manipulate the minds of American voters and ultimately trick them into
voting for him. It is impossible to say whether Trump would have still won his election without
Cambridge Analaytica's services, but the fact they were used, should immediately raise the
issue of Trump's suitability for office.
Ultimately, the Trump campaign did conspire to meddle in the election, only it was
not with Russia or Russians with whom the campaign conspired, it was with the British firm
Cambridge Analytica. Thus one sees that both the narrative about Trump the electoral "genius"
and the narrative about Trump the Kremlin puppet are both false. The entire time, the issue of
Trump campaign election meddling was one between a group of American millionaires and
billionaires and a sleaze infested British firm.
Worse than Watergate
In 1972, US President Richard Nixon conspired to cover-up a beak-in at the offices of his
political opponents at the Watergate Complex. The scandal ultimately led to Nixon's resignation
in 1974. What the Trump campaign did with Cambridge Analytica is far more scandalous than the
Watergate break-in and cover-up. Where Nixon's cronies broke into offices to steal information
from the Democratic party, Trump's paid cyber-thugs at Cambridge Analytica broke in to the
private data of 50 million people, the vast majority of whom were US citizens.
Richard Nixon, like Donald Trump, was ultimately driven by a love of power throughout his
life. Just as Trump considered running for President for decades, so too did Nixon try to run
in 1960 and lost to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, while he also failed to become governor of
California in 1962 election. By 1968 he finally got into the White House at the height of the
Vietnam War. When time came for his re-election, Nixon's team weren't going to take any chances
and hence the Watergate break-in was orchestrated to dig up dirt on Nixon's opponent. As it
turned out Nixon won the 1972 by a comfortable margin, meaning that the Watergate break-in was
probably largely in vain.
Likewise, Trump may well have won in 2016 even without Cambridge Analytica, but in his quest
for power, Trump has resorted to dealing with a company whose practices have done far more
damage to the American people than the Watergate break-in.
New laws are needed
While existing laws will likely be sufficient to bring the fiends at Cambridge Analytica to
justice, while also determining the role that Trump campaign officials, up to and including
Trump played in the scandal, new laws must be enshrined across the globe in order to put the
likes of Cambridge Analytica out of business for good.
The following proposals must be debated widely and ideally implemented at the soonest
possible date:
-- A total ban on all forms of data mining/harvesting for political purposes.
-- A total ban on the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence in any political
campaign or for any political purpose.
-- A mandatory seizing of the assets of any company involved in data mining/harvesting for
political purposes, after which point such a company would be forcibly shut down
permanently.
-- A mandatory seizing of the assets of any company involved in the use of artificial
intelligence or algorithms in the course of a public political campaign.
-- A total ban on the use of internet based platforms, including social media by political
candidates and their direct associates for anything that could reasonably be classified as a
misinformation and/or manipulation scheme.
-- A total ban on politicians using third party data firms or advertising firms during
elections. All such advertising and analysis must be devised by advisers employed directly by
or volunteering for an individual candidate or his or her party political organisation.
-- A total ban on any individual working for a political campaign, who derives at least half
of his or her income from employment, ownership and/or shares in a company whose primary
purpose is to deliver news and analysis.
-- A total ban on anyone paid by a political candidate to promote his or her election from
an ownership or major share holding role in any company whose primary purpose is to deliver
news and analysis until 2 years after the said election.
If all of these laws were implemented along with thorough campaign finance reform
initiatives, only then can anything remotely resembling fair elections take place.
The elites eat their own
While many of the media outlets who have helped to publish the revelations of whistleblower
Christopher Wylie continue to defame Russia without any evidence about Russian linkage to the
2016 US election (or any other western vote for that matter), these outlets are nevertheless
exposing the true meddling scandal surrounding the Trump campaign which has the effect of
destroying the Russia narrative.
In this sense, a divided elite are turning against themselves. While the billionaire
property tycoon Donald Trump can hardly be described as anything but a privileged figure who
moved in elite public circles for most of his life, his personal style, rhetoric and attitude
towards fellow elites has served to alienate Trump from many. Thus, there is a desire on the
part of the mainstream media to expose a scandal surrounding Trump in a manner that would be
unthinkable in respect of exposing a cause less popular among western elites, for example the
brutal treatment of Palestine by the Zionist regime.
In this sense, Trump's own unwillingness or lack of desire to endear himself to fellow
elites and instead present himself as a 'man of the people', might be his penultimate undoing.
His rich former friends are now his rich present day enemies and many ordinary voters will be
completely aghast at his involvement with Cambridge Analytica, just as many Republicans who
voted for Nixon, became converts to the anti-Nixon movement once the misdeeds and dishonesty of
Richard Nixon were made public. Many might well leave the 'Trump train' and get on board the
'political ethics express'.
Conclusion
This scandal ultimately has nothing to do with one's opinion on Trump or his policies, let
alone any of the other politicians who have hired Cambridge Analytica. The issue is that a
company engaged in the most nefarious, dangerous, sleazy and wicked behaviour in the world, is
profiting from their destruction of political institutions that ought to be based on open
policy debates rather than public manipulation, brainwashing and artificial intelligence.
The issue is also one of privacy. 50 million people have been exploited by an unethical
company and what's more is that the money from the Trump campaign helped to empower this
unethical company. This is therefore as unfair to non-voters as it is to voters. Cambridge
Analytica must be shut down and all companies like it must restrict the scope of their
operations or else face the same consequence.
For the greater part of a decade the US, the UK and the EU have been carrying out a
campaign to undermine and overthrow the Russian government and in particular to oust President
Putin. Fundamental issues are at stake including the real possibility of a nuclear war. "
Why do the Western regimes now feel Russia is a greater threat then in the past? Do they
believe Russia is more vulnerable to Western threats or attacks? Why do the Western military
leaders seek to undermine Russia's defenses? Do the US economic elites believe it is possible
to provoke an economic crisis and the demise of President Putin's government? What is the
strategic goal of Western policymakers? Why has the UK regime taken the lead in the
anti-Russian crusade via the fake toxin accusations at this time?
Notable quotes:
"... For the greater part of a decade the US, the UK and the EU have been carrying out a campaign to undermine and overthrow the Russian government and in particular to oust President Putin. Fundamental issues are at stake including the real possibility of a nuclear war. ..."
"... First and foremost, during the 1990's the US degraded Russia, reducing it to a vassal state, and imposing itself as a unipolar state. ..."
"... Secondly, Western elites pillaged the Russian economy, seizing and laundering hundreds of billions of dollars. ..."
"... Thirdly, the US seized and took control of the Russian electoral process, and secured the fraudulent "election" of Yeltsin. ..."
"... With the collapse of the Yeltsin regime and the election of President Putin, Russia regained its sovereignty, its economy recovered, its armed forces and scientific institutes were rebuilt and strengthened. Poverty was sharply reduced and Western backed gangster capitalists were constrained, jailed or fled mostly to the UK and the US. ..."
"... As the entire US unipolar fantasy dissolved it provoked deep resentment, animosity and a systematic counter-attack. The US's costly and failed war on terror became a dress rehearsal for the economic and ideological war against the Kremlin ..Russia's historical recovery and defeat of Western rollback intensified the ideological and economic war. ..."
"... Russia is not a threat to the West: it is recovering its sovereignty in order to further a multi-polar world. President Putin is not an "aggressor" but he refuses to allow Russia to return to vassalage. ..."
"... The Western regimes recognize that Russia is a threat to their global dominance; they know that Russia is no threat to invade the EU, North America or their vassals. ..."
"... Western regimes believe they can topple Russia via economic warfare including sanctions. In fact Russia has become more self-reliant and has diversified its trading partners, especially China, and even includes Saudi Arabia and other Western allies. ..."
For the greater part of a decade the US, the UK and the EU have been carrying out a
campaign to undermine and overthrow the Russian government and in particular to oust President
Putin. Fundamental issues are at stake including the real possibility of a nuclear
war.
The most recent western propaganda campaign and one of the most virulent is the charge
launched by the UK regime of Prime Minister Theresa May . The Brits have claimed that Russian
secret agents conspired to poison a former Russian double-agent and his daughter in England ,
threatening the sovereignty and safety of the British people. No evidence has ever been
presented. Instead the UK expelled Russian diplomats and demands harsher sanctions, to increase
tensions. The UK and its US and EU patrons are moving toward a break in relations and a
military build-up.
A number of fundamental questions arise regarding the origins and growing intensity of this
anti-Russian animus.
Why do the Western regimes now feel Russia is a greater threat then in the past? Do they
believe Russia is more vulnerable to Western threats or attacks? Why do the Western military
leaders seek to undermine Russia's defenses? Do the US economic elites believe it is possible
to provoke an economic crisis and the demise of President Putin's government? What is the
strategic goal of Western policymakers? Why has the UK regime taken the lead in the
anti-Russian crusade via the fake toxin accusations at this time?
This paper is directed at providing key elements to address these questions.
The Historical Context for Western Aggression
Several fundamental historical factors dating back to the 1990's account for the current
surge in Western hostility to Russia.
First and foremost, during the 1990's the US degraded Russia, reducing it to a vassal
state, and imposing itself as a unipolar state.Secondly, Western elites pillaged
the Russian economy, seizing and laundering hundreds of billions of dollars. Wall Street
and City of London banks and overseas tax havens were the main beneficiaries Thirdly, the
US seized and took control of the Russian electoral process, and secured the fraudulent
"election" of Yeltsin. Fourthly, the West degraded Russia's military and scientific
institutions and advanced their armed forces to Russia's borders. Fifthly, the West insured
that Russia was unable to support its allies and independent governments throughout Europe,
Asia, Africa and Latin America. Russia was unable to aid its allies in the Ukraine, Cuba,
North Korea, Libya etc.
With the collapse of the Yeltsin regime and the election of President Putin, Russia
regained its sovereignty, its economy recovered, its armed forces and scientific institutes
were rebuilt and strengthened. Poverty was sharply reduced and Western backed gangster
capitalists were constrained, jailed or fled mostly to the UK and the US.
Russia's historic recovery under President Putin and its gradual international influence
shattered US pretense to rule over unipolar world. Russia's recovery and control of its
economic resources lessened US dominance, especially of its oil and gas fields.
As Russia consolidated its sovereignty and advanced economically, socially, politically and
militarily, the West increased its hostility in an effort to roll-back Russia to the Dark Ages
of the 1990's. The US launched numerous coups and military intervention and fraudulent
elections to surround and isolate Russia . The Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Russian
allies in Central Asia were targeted. NATO military bases proliferated.
Russia's economy was targeted : sanctions were directed at its imports and exports.
President Putin was subject to a virulent Western media propaganda campaign. US NGO's funded
opposition parties and politicians.
As the entire US unipolar fantasy dissolved it provoked deep resentment, animosity and a
systematic counter-attack. The US's costly and failed war on terror became a dress rehearsal
for the economic and ideological war against the Kremlin ..Russia's historical recovery and
defeat of Western rollback intensified the ideological and economic war.
The UK poison plot was concocted to heighten economic tensions and prepare the western
public for heightened military confrontations.
Russia is not a threat to the West: it is recovering its sovereignty in order to further
a multi-polar world. President Putin is not an "aggressor" but he refuses to allow Russia to
return to vassalage.
President Putin is immensely popular in Russia and hated by the US precisely because he is
the opposition of Yeltsin -- he has created a flourishing economy; he resists sanctions and
defends Russia's borders and allies.
Conclusion
In a summary response to the opening questions.
The Western regimes recognize that
Russia is a threat to their global dominance; they know that Russia is no threat to invade the
EU, North America or their vassals.Western regimes believe they can topple Russia via
economic warfare including sanctions. In fact Russia has become more self-reliant and has
diversified its trading partners, especially China, and even includes Saudi Arabia and other
Western allies.
The Western propaganda campaign has failed to turn Russian voters against Putin. In the
March 19, 2018 Presidential election voter participation increased to 67% . .Vladimir Putin
secured a record 77% majority. President Putin is politically stronger than ever.
Russia's display of advanced nuclear and other advanced weaponry has had a major deterrent
effect especially among US military leaders, making it clear that Russia is not vulnerable to
attack.
The UK has attempted to unify and gain importance with the EU and the US via the launch of
its anti-Russia toxic conspiracy. Prime Minister May has failed. Brexit will force the UK to
break with the EU.
President Trump will not replace the EU as a substitute trading partner. While the EU and
Washington may back the UK crusade against Russia they will pursue their own trade agenda;
which do not include the UK.
In a word, the UK, the EU and the US are ganging-up on Russia, for diverse historic and
contemporary reasons. The UK exploitation of the anti-Russian conspiracy is a temporary ploy to
join the gang but will not change its inevitable global decline and the break-up of the UK.
Russia will remain a global power. It will continue under the leadership of President Putin.
The Western powers will divide and bugger their neighbors -- and decide it is their better
judgment to accept and work within a multi-polar world.
*
Prof. James Petras is a Research Associate of the CRG.
The idea the Russians " "had the strategic purpose of sowing political discord in the
United States" which in reality in the result of deep crisis on neoliberalism, which started
in 2008 is a typical scapegoating. The essence of neo-McCarthyism if you wish.
"... But the indictments themselves suggest that Mueller's narrative is wrong. The objective
was not to influence the election, but make money by getting viewers to "click on"
advertisements. Check it out: ..."
"... It's worth noting, that if Mueller really wanted to get to the bottom of the Russia-gate
allegations, he would interview the people who have first-hand knowledge what actually happened.
He would question Julian Assange (WikiLeaks) and Craig Murray, both of whom have stated publicly
that they know who stole the Podesta emails. ..."
"... Mueller hasn't done that, nor has he contacted the VIPs (Ray McGovern, William Binney,
Skip Folden, etc) who did extensive forensic investigation of the "hacking" allegations and
proved that the emails were not hacked but leaked. Mueller has not pursued that line of inquiry
either. ..."
"... The above statement helps to prove my point that the indictments are not a vehicle for
criminal prosecution, but part of a politically-motivated information campaign to damage Trump
and vilify Russia. No one seriously believes that Mueller would ever try to prosecute this case
based on the spurious and looney claims of a criminal conspiracy. The whole idea is laughable.
..."
"... We found it interesting that Rob Goldman, who is the Vice President of Facebook Ads,
tweeted this revealing disclaimer on Monday which Trump posted on Twitter: ..."
"... Bottom line: The indictments were very good news for Donald Trump, but very bad news for
Robert Mueller who appears to have run into a brick wall. But has he? Has Mueller abandoned the
attacks on Trump or is there something else going on just below the surface? ..."
"... I can only guess at the answer, but it looks to me like Trump may have made a deal to
support the attacks on Russia provided he is acquitted on charges of collusion. That's what he's
wanted from the beginning, so, maybe he won this round? Here's one of his recent tweets that
helps to support my theory: ..."
"... What's wrong with that? If Trump's enemies want to provide him with a
Get-Outta-Jail-Free card, then why shouldn't he snatch it up and put this whole goofy probe
behind him? That's what most people would do. ..."
"... The problem is that Trump's biggest supporters want him to continue struggle against
"The Swamp". They want him to fight for their interests and expose the crooked goings-on behind
the Russiagate scandal. They want him to lift up the rock that conceals the activities of the
National Security State so everyone can see the maggots squirming below. That's what they want, a
modern-day Samson who shakes the temple's pillars and brings the whole crooked system crashing
down around him. ..."
"... These same people are hopeful that the Nunes memo and the Grassley-Graham "criminal
referral" are just the tip of the iceberg that will inevitably lead to the bigger fish involved
in this deep-state conspiracy, namely former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper, Former FBI Director James Comey, and very likely, Barack
Hussein Obama himself. What role did these men play in spying on the Trump campaign? Were they
actively trying to sabotage the elections by giving Hillary an edge? Should a second Special
Counsel be appointed to investigate whether crimes were committed in their targeting of the Trump
team? ..."
"... There is no crime called "collusion". So Trump cannot be "acquitted", let alone be
charged with something that is not a crime. Apparently the deep state and media's repetition of
"collusion" has duped not just the public, but this author with thinking it is some kind of
crime. ..."
"... Trump needs the swamp to produce politicized intel for his campaigns against Iran and
Venezuela (plus a dozen other countries which don't threaten the US). He needs the hated MSM (not
much more than the swamp's media branch) to sell the Iran war to his voters, who are supposed to
pay for it. He needs his shady relatives to stay OUT of prison, where several of them seem to
belong (of course, papa Kushner has already spent time inside). So appeasement it is. ..."
"... Sorry, but on the whole Trump voters are too dumb to pose much of an obstacle. They like
the campaigns against Iran because of religion, and against Venezuela because of "socialism".
They didn't raise a peep when it became clear that THEIR money would all go to the Armies of
Mordor. That this is "Saddam-WMD-9/11″ all over again just hasn't registered with them, and
never will. Just like Trump winning his primary running against outside money, and immediately
afterwards selling out for Adelson's shekels–it exceeds the deplorables' attention span, so
it never happened. Keep harping on immigrants and it's all good; razzle-dazzle them, as it was
called in the Chicago movie. ..."
"... So on the whole, yes, already since his inauguration it has been clear that The Donald
is mostly playing along, as long as he'll be allowed to stay president ..."
"... So Trump is not opposed to demonizing Russia, he's just opposed to demonizing Donald
John Trump. That's where he draws the line. ..."
"... Well guys, if there's anyone here who still abides by the '5-D chess' theory, I think
it's time to face facts: Trump has thrown us all under the bust to save himself. Expect a war in
Syria, or Ukraine, or maybe both. ..."
"... The indictments have no legal merit, they are a form of domestic propaganda and
disinformation. The real target is the American people. ..."
"... That's pretty much what this banana republic's government is all about. One way or
another, everything they do is designed to ultimately squeeze something out of us dumb 'Merkin
proles and peasants ..."
"... I was expecting more of a profile in courage under the tutelage of someone smarter than
Trump; instead we are seeing another profile in venality and stupidity. ..."
"... US has too many laws that are ambiguous beyond belief, almost anything can be declared a
'crime'. Plus you have limited disclosure due to national security ('methods and sources
subterfuge always works). Volunteering for a political show trial doesn't work. ..."
"... Pentagon vs neoliberal CIA for upper hand at the White House with Bibi (via AIPAC)
solidly on the side of Pence, probably not if, but much more likely when, Trump is taken down.
..."
"... The RussiaGate affairs and collusion charge are the obvious "Banksters United" coup run
with a stunning degree of incompetence. Russia must be demonized because of her mineral
resources, which are still not available for free, and because of her "wrong" behavior in Syria.
Bansksters need this war. Arm producers and dealers need this war. Only the apparent danger of
suicide by nuclear answer stops the banksters and other war profiteers from an immediate attack
against Russian Federation. ..."
"... The FBI and the CIA are the hired gangster organizations for the banksters. If the FBI
and the CIA cared about national security, the US would not suffer the infamy of Awan affair,
CrowdStrike "conclusions," and the US support for Daesh/ISIS/Al Qaida in the Middle East, as well
as the US support for neo-Nazis in Ukraine. The US taxpayers have been financing both ISIS and
neo-Nazis because banksters decided so. ..."
Notable quotes:
"... But the indictments themselves suggest that Mueller's narrative is wrong. The objective was not to influence the election, but make money by getting viewers to "click on" advertisements. Check it out: ..."
"... It's worth noting, that if Mueller really wanted to get to the bottom of the Russia-gate allegations, he would interview the people who have first-hand knowledge what actually happened. He would question Julian Assange (WikiLeaks) and Craig Murray, both of whom have stated publicly that they know who stole the Podesta emails. ..."
"... Mueller hasn't done that, nor has he contacted the VIPs (Ray McGovern, William Binney, Skip Folden, etc) who did extensive forensic investigation of the "hacking" allegations and proved that the emails were not hacked but leaked. Mueller has not pursued that line of inquiry either. ..."
"... The indictment states that the organization that employed the trolls "had the strategic purpose of sowing political discord in the United States." This seems to be a recurrent theme that has popped up frequently in the media as well. The implication is that the Russians are the source of the widening divisions in the US that are actually the result of growing public angst over the lopsided distribution of wealth that naturally emerges in late-stage capitalism. ..."
"... The above statement helps to prove my point that the indictments are not a vehicle for criminal prosecution, but part of a politically-motivated information campaign to damage Trump and vilify Russia. No one seriously believes that Mueller would ever try to prosecute this case based on the spurious and looney claims of a criminal conspiracy. The whole idea is laughable. ..."
"... We found it interesting that Rob Goldman, who is the Vice President of Facebook Ads, tweeted this revealing disclaimer on Monday which Trump posted on Twitter: ..."
"... Bottom line: The indictments were very good news for Donald Trump, but very bad news for Robert Mueller who appears to have run into a brick wall. But has he? Has Mueller abandoned the attacks on Trump or is there something else going on just below the surface? ..."
"... I can only guess at the answer, but it looks to me like Trump may have made a deal to support the attacks on Russia provided he is acquitted on charges of collusion. That's what he's wanted from the beginning, so, maybe he won this round? Here's one of his recent tweets that helps to support my theory: ..."
"... Hmmm? So Trump now Trump is okay with blaming Russia as long as he's not included too? Is that what he's saying? ..."
"... Okay, so now Trump is turning the tables and saying, 'Yeah, maybe Russia has been 'sowing discord', but the Democrats are the ones you should be blaming not me.'So Trump is not opposed to demonizing Russia, he's just opposed to demonizing Donald John Trump. That's where he draws the line. ..."
"... The problem is that Trump's biggest supporters want him to continue struggle against "The Swamp". They want him to fight for their interests and expose the crooked goings-on behind the Russiagate scandal. They want him to lift up the rock that conceals the activities of the National Security State so everyone can see the maggots squirming below. That's what they want, a modern-day Samson who shakes the temple's pillars and brings the whole crooked system crashing down around him. ..."
"... These same people are hopeful that the Nunes memo and the Grassley-Graham "criminal referral" are just the tip of the iceberg that will inevitably lead to the bigger fish involved in this deep-state conspiracy, namely former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Former FBI Director James Comey, and very likely, Barack Hussein Obama himself. What role did these men play in spying on the Trump campaign? Were they actively trying to sabotage the elections by giving Hillary an edge? Should a second Special Counsel be appointed to investigate whether crimes were committed in their targeting of the Trump team? ..."
"... Trump's backers hope that he is principled and pugnacious enough to go nose-to-nose with these Intel agency serpents and give them the bloody whooping they so richly deserve. Unfortunately, I don't see any evidence that that's what he has in mind ..."
"... Goldman, an executive at Zucc's Book, displayed evidence at a House Committee hearing of Russian bots trolling the US by portraying Sanders as 'sexy' and Trump as a hero. These memes were generally amusing but largely ineffectual. The idea of election meddling by Russia to elect Trump has largely been debunked, and both the Left and the Right now see it as a distraction to the real issue: Deep State malfeasance. ..."
"... Trump has to realize that he would be neutered by the continuance of the Mueller witchhunt, so I think that if it is a deal, it is tactical for the present. ..."
"... in my view, the Democrats overplayed their hand by calling this clickbait scam the "equivalent of Pearl Harbor" and make pushback more likely. ..."
"... Whitney can't bring himself to say Mueller has been, for decades, 'historically, criminally corrupt with longtime habit of maintaining a DoJ cover for CIA.' As well, why does Mike exclude mentioning Seymour Hersh and Kim Dotcom concerning the proposed fact Seth Rich leaked the DNC mails? He sticks with a weak 'we really don't know' line of bs. ..."
"... Grassley wants the DoJ personalities to fall on their swords while Feinstein is besides herself, going crazy, as the investigation into President Skunk implodes around the Steele Dossier. It's like an exclusive 'serial-killers only' swingers' club where everybody is tired of the limited opportunity at couplings, yet their sex addiction requires everyone screwing everyone out of habit and everyone hates everyone's guts. At some point, the entire crew will resort to some new mass murder, like allowing war in Korea, to get it all back on track ..."
"... There is no crime called "collusion". So Trump cannot be "acquitted", let alone be charged with something that is not a crime. Apparently the deep state and media's repetition of "collusion" has duped not just the public, but this author with thinking it is some kind of crime. ..."
"... Trump needs the swamp to produce politicized intel for his campaigns against Iran and Venezuela (plus a dozen other countries which don't threaten the US). He needs the hated MSM (not much more than the swamp's media branch) to sell the Iran war to his voters, who are supposed to pay for it. He needs his shady relatives to stay OUT of prison, where several of them seem to belong (of course, papa Kushner has already spent time inside). So appeasement it is. ..."
"... Sorry, but on the whole Trump voters are too dumb to pose much of an obstacle. They like the campaigns against Iran because of religion, and against Venezuela because of "socialism". They didn't raise a peep when it became clear that THEIR money would all go to the Armies of Mordor. That this is "Saddam-WMD-9/11″ all over again just hasn't registered with them, and never will. Just like Trump winning his primary running against outside money, and immediately afterwards selling out for Adelson's shekels–it exceeds the deplorables' attention span, so it never happened. Keep harping on immigrants and it's all good; razzle-dazzle them, as it was called in the Chicago movie. ..."
"... So on the whole, yes, already since his inauguration it has been clear that The Donald is mostly playing along, as long as he'll be allowed to stay president ..."
"... So Trump is not opposed to demonizing Russia, he's just opposed to demonizing Donald John Trump. That's where he draws the line. ..."
"... Well guys, if there's anyone here who still abides by the '5-D chess' theory, I think it's time to face facts: Trump has thrown us all under the bust to save himself. Expect a war in Syria, or Ukraine, or maybe both. ..."
"... The indictments have no legal merit, they are a form of domestic propaganda and disinformation. The real target is the American people. ..."
"... That's pretty much what this banana republic's government is all about. One way or another, everything they do is designed to ultimately squeeze something out of us dumb 'Merkin proles and peasants ..."
"... I was expecting more of a profile in courage under the tutelage of someone smarter than Trump; instead we are seeing another profile in venality and stupidity. ..."
"... US has too many laws that are ambiguous beyond belief, almost anything can be declared a 'crime'. Plus you have limited disclosure due to national security ('methods and sources subterfuge always works). Volunteering for a political show trial doesn't work. ..."
"... Pentagon vs neoliberal CIA for upper hand at the White House with Bibi (via AIPAC) solidly on the side of Pence, probably not if, but much more likely when, Trump is taken down. ..."
"... The RussiaGate affairs and collusion charge are the obvious "Banksters United" coup run with a stunning degree of incompetence. Russia must be demonized because of her mineral resources, which are still not available for free, and because of her "wrong" behavior in Syria. Bansksters need this war. Arm producers and dealers need this war. Only the apparent danger of suicide by nuclear answer stops the banksters and other war profiteers from an immediate attack against Russian Federation. ..."
"... The FBI and the CIA are the hired gangster organizations for the banksters. If the FBI and the CIA cared about national security, the US would not suffer the infamy of Awan affair, CrowdStrike "conclusions," and the US support for Daesh/ISIS/Al Qaida in the Middle East, as well as the US support for neo-Nazis in Ukraine. The US taxpayers have been financing both ISIS and neo-Nazis because banksters decided so. ..."
Here's your legal koan for the day: When is an indictment not an indictment?
Answer– When there is no intention of initiating a criminal case against the accused.
In the case of the 13 Russian trolls who have just been indicted by Special Counsel Robert
Mueller, there is neither the intention nor the ability to prosecute a case against them. (They
are all foreign nationals who will not face extradition.)
But, if that's the case, than why would Mueller waste time and money compiling a 37-page
document alleging all-manner of nefarious conduct when he knew for certain that the alleged
perpetrators would never be prosecuted? Why?
Isn't is because the indictments are not really a vehicle for criminal prosecution, but a
vehicle for political grandstanding? Isn't that the real purpose of the indictments, to add
another layer of dirt to the mountain of unreliable, uncorroborated, unproven allegations of
Russian meddling. Mueller is not acting in his capacity as Special Counsel, he is acting in his
role of deep state hatchet-man whose job is to gather scalps by any means necessary.
Keep in mind, the subjects of the indictment will never be apprehended, never hire an
attorney, never be in a position to defend themselves or refute the charges, and never have
their case presented before and judge or a jury. They will be denied due process of law and the
presumption of innocence. Mueller's ominous-sounding claims, which were the centerpiece of his
obscene media extravaganza, made sure of that. In most people's minds, the trolls are guilty of
foreign espionage and that's all there is to it. Case closed.
But the indictments themselves suggest that Mueller's narrative is wrong. The objective
was not to influence the election, but make money by getting viewers to "click on"
advertisements. Check it out:
"Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the accounts to receive money from real
U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions and advertisements on the
ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages. Defendants and their co-conspirators typically
charged certain U.S. merchants and U.S. social media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per
post for promotional content on their popular false U.S. persona accounts, including Being
Patriotic, Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist."
That sounds like a money-making scheme to me not an attempt to subvert US democracy. So why
is Mueller in such a lather? Isn't this all just an attempt to divert attention from the fact
that the Nunes' investigation has produced proof that senior-level officials at the FBI and DOJ
were "improperly obtaining" FISA warrants to spy on members of the Trump Campaign? Isn't that
what's really going on?
If we can agree that the indictments were not intended to bring the "accused" to justice,
then don't we also have to agree that there must have been an ulterior motive for issuing them?
And what might that ulterior motive be? What are the real objectives of the investigation, to
cast a shadow on an election that did not produce the results that powerful members of the
entrenched bureaucracy wanted, to make it look like Donald Trump did not beat Hillary Clinton
fair and square, and to further demonize a geopolitical rival that has blocked Washington's
imperial ambitions in Syria and Ukraine? Which of these is the real driving force behind
Russiagate or is it 'all of the above?'
Nothing will come of the indictments because the indictments were not designed reveal the
truth or bring the accused to justice. They were written to shape public perceptions and to
persuade the American people that Trump cheated in the elections and that Russia poses a
serious threat to US national security. The indictments have no legal merit, they are a form of
domestic propaganda and disinformation. The real target is the American people.
It's worth noting, that if Mueller really wanted to get to the bottom of the Russia-gate
allegations, he would interview the people who have first-hand knowledge what actually
happened. He would question Julian Assange (WikiLeaks) and Craig Murray, both of whom have
stated publicly that they know who stole the Podesta emails.
Mueller hasn't done that, nor has he contacted the VIPs (Ray McGovern, William Binney,
Skip Folden, etc) who did extensive forensic investigation of the "hacking" allegations and
proved that the emails were not hacked but leaked. Mueller has not pursued that line of inquiry
either. Nor has he interviewed California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who met with
Assange personally and who has suggested that Assange may reveal the name (of the DNC "leaker")
under the right conditions. Instead of questioning witnesses, Mueller has spent a great deal of
time probing the online activities Russian trolls who were engaged in a money-making scheme
that was in no way connected to the Russian government, in no way connected to the Trump
campaign, and in no way supportive of the claims of hacking or collusion. None of this reflects
well on Mueller who, by any stretch, appears to be either woefully incompetent or irredeemably
biased.
The indictment states that the organization that employed the trolls "had the strategic
purpose of sowing political discord in the United States." This seems to be a recurrent theme
that has popped up frequently in the media as well. The implication is that the Russians are
the source of the widening divisions in the US that are actually the result of growing public
angst over the lopsided distribution of wealth that naturally emerges in late-stage
capitalism. Moscow has become the convenient scapegoat for the accelerated parasitism that
has seen 95% of the nation's wealth go to a sliver of people at the top of the foodchain, the 1
percent. (But that's another story altogether.) Here's a brief clip from the
portentous-sounding indictment:
"The general conspiracy statute creates an offense "[i]f two or more persons conspire
either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or
any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose .
The intent required for a conspiracy to defraud the government is that the defendant
possessed the intent (a) to defraud, (b) to make false statements or representations to the
government or its agencies in order to obtain property of the government, or that the
defendant performed acts or made statements that he/she knew to be false, fraudulent or
deceitful to a government agency, which disrupted the functions of the agency or of the
government. It is sufficient for the government to prove that the defendant knew the
statements were false or fraudulent when made."
The above statement helps to prove my point that the indictments are not a vehicle for
criminal prosecution, but part of a politically-motivated information campaign to damage Trump
and vilify Russia. No one seriously believes that Mueller would ever try to prosecute this case
based on the spurious and looney claims of a criminal conspiracy. The whole idea is
laughable.
There are a couple interesting twists and turns regarding the indictments that could be
significant, but, then again, maybe not. We found it interesting that Rob Goldman, who is
the Vice President of Facebook Ads, tweeted this revealing disclaimer on Monday which Trump
posted on Twitter:
"I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the
election was *NOT* the main goal."
Then there are the puzzling comments by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who said on
Friday:
"There's no allegation in this indictment that any American had any knowledge. And the
nature of the scheme was the defendants took extraordinary steps to make it appear that they
were ordinary American political activists, even going so far as to base their activities on
a virtual private network here in the United States so, if anybody traced it back to that
first jump, they appeared to be Americans ."
Do you notice anything unusual about Rosenstein's remarks? There's no mention of Trump at
all, which is a striking omission since all of previous public announcements have been used to
strengthen the case against Trump. Now that's changed. Why? Naturally, Trump picked up on
Rosenstein's omission and blasted this triumphant message on Twitter:
"Deputy A.G. Rod Rosenstein stated at the News Conference: "There is no allegation in the
indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no
allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016
election." Donald Trump
So, what's going on here? Mueller and Rosenstein are smart guys. They must have known that
Trump would use the dates and the absence of anything remotely suggesting collusion as
vindication. Was that the purpose, to let Trump off the hook while the broader propaganda
campaign on Russia continues?
This is the great mystery surrounding the indictments, far from helping to establish
Trump's culpability, they appear to imply his innocence. Why would Mueller and his allies
want to do that? Are the Intel agencies and the FBI looking for a way to end this political
cage-match before a second Special Counsel is appointed and he starts digging up embarrassing
information about the involvement of other agencies (and perhaps, the White House) in the
Russiagate fiasco?
Just think about it for a minute: There is nothing in the indictments that suggests that
Trump or anyone in his campaign was involved with the Russian trolls. There is nothing in the
indictments that suggests Trump was acting as a Russian agent. And there's nothing in the
indictments that suggests the Russian government helped Trump win the election. Also, the
timeline of events seems to favor Trump as does Rosenstein's claim that the online activity
did not have "any effect on the outcome of the election."
Bottom line: The indictments were very good news for Donald Trump, but very bad news for
Robert Mueller who appears to have run into a brick wall. But has he? Has Mueller abandoned the
attacks on Trump or is there something else going on just below the surface?
I can only guess at the answer, but it looks to me like Trump may have made a deal to
support the attacks on Russia provided he is acquitted on charges of collusion. That's what
he's wanted from the beginning, so, maybe he won this round? Here's one of his recent tweets
that helps to support my theory:
"I never said Russia did not meddle in the election, I said "it may be Russia, or China or
another country or group, or it may be a 400 pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his
computer." The Russian "hoax" was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia – it never
did!" Donald Trump
Hmmm? So Trump now Trump is okay with blaming Russia as long as he's not included too?
Is that what he's saying? Here's more in the same vein:
"If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S.
then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have
succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart
America!" Donald Trump
Okay, so now Trump is turning the tables and saying, 'Yeah, maybe Russia has been
'sowing discord', but the Democrats are the ones you should be blaming not me.'So Trump is not
opposed to demonizing Russia, he's just opposed to demonizing Donald John Trump. That's where
he draws the line.
What's wrong with that? If Trump's enemies want to provide him with a Get-Outta-Jail-Free
card, then why shouldn't he snatch it up and put this whole goofy probe behind him? That's what
most people would do.
The problem is that Trump's biggest supporters want him to continue struggle against
"The Swamp". They want him to fight for their interests and expose the crooked goings-on behind
the Russiagate scandal. They want him to lift up the rock that conceals the activities of the
National Security State so everyone can see the maggots squirming below. That's what they want,
a modern-day Samson who shakes the temple's pillars and brings the whole crooked system
crashing down around him.
These same people are hopeful that the Nunes memo and the Grassley-Graham "criminal
referral" are just the tip of the iceberg that will inevitably lead to the bigger fish involved
in this deep-state conspiracy, namely former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper, Former FBI Director James Comey, and very likely, Barack
Hussein Obama himself. What role did these men play in spying on the Trump campaign? Were they
actively trying to sabotage the elections by giving Hillary an edge? Should a second Special
Counsel be appointed to investigate whether crimes were committed in their targeting of the
Trump team?
All of these questions need to be answered in order to clear the air, hold the guilty
parties accountable and restore confidence in the government. Trump's backers hope that he
is principled and pugnacious enough to go nose-to-nose with these Intel agency serpents and
give them the bloody whooping they so richly deserve. Unfortunately, I don't see any evidence
that that's what he has in mind . We'll see.
Goldman, an executive at Zucc's Book, displayed evidence at a House Committee hearing of
Russian bots trolling the US by portraying Sanders as 'sexy' and Trump as a hero. These memes
were generally amusing but largely ineffectual. The idea of election meddling by Russia to
elect Trump has largely been debunked, and both the Left and the Right now see it as a
distraction to the real issue: Deep State malfeasance.
Those Never Trumpers in the Dems and McCain camps are now left disgraced and humiliated
and their only allies are WaPo, NYT, CNN and a few other fake news outlets. The test for
Trump will be whether he can take a wrecking ball to the FBI and Department of State and to
truly cleanse the bureaucracy of ne'er-do-wells who have constantly been undermining him from
the beginning.
I think the author is correct in his assumptions. One area of hope, though, is that the
allegations are so ridiculous and others have pointed out, for instance, that the Australian
Labor party sent operatives to the US to help defeat Trump, and Trump has to realize that
he would be neutered by the continuance of the Mueller witchhunt, so I think that if it is a
deal, it is tactical for the present.
As the article indicates, Trump would lose a lot of his support if he follows through on
the deal. Also, pro-Trump websites are continuing on with the drumbeat against Mueller, and
in my view, the Democrats overplayed their hand by calling this clickbait scam the
"equivalent of Pearl Harbor" and make pushback more likely.
I think that one thing the indictment has accomplished is to reveal to anybody not paid to
think otherwise that the yankee imperium entered the post-legal era years ago, and that the
legitimacy of the yankee state has totally evaporated.
Isn't is because the indictments are not really a vehicle for criminal prosecution, but
a vehicle for political grandstanding? Isn't that the real purpose of the indictments, to
add another layer of dirt to the mountain of unreliable, uncorroborated, unproven
allegations of Russian meddling. Mueller is not acting in his capacity as Special Counsel,
he is acting in his role of deep state hatchet-man whose job is to gather scalps by any
means necessary [...] It's worth noting, that if Mueller really wanted to get to the bottom
of the Russia-gate allegations, he would interview the people who have first-hand knowledge
what actually happened. He would question Julian Assange (WikiLeaks) and Craig Murray, both
of whom have stated publicly that they know who stole the Podesta emails.[sic][...] None of
this reflects well on Mueller who, by any stretch, appears to be either woefully
incompetent or irredeemably biased
Misdirection here by Mike Whitney. Whitney can't bring himself to say Mueller has
been, for decades, 'historically, criminally corrupt with longtime habit of maintaining a DoJ
cover for CIA.' As well, why does Mike exclude mentioning Seymour Hersh and Kim Dotcom
concerning the proposed fact Seth Rich leaked the DNC mails? He sticks with a weak 'we
really don't know' line of bs.
These same people are hopeful that the Nunes memo and the Grassley-Graham "criminal
referral" are just the tip of the iceberg that will inevitably lead to the bigger fish
involved in this deep-state conspiracy, namely former CIA Director John Brennan, former
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Former FBI Director James Comey, and very
likely, Barack Hussein Obama himself. What role did these men play in spying on the Trump
campaign? Were they actively trying to sabotage the elections by giving Hillary an edge?
Should a second Special Counsel be appointed to investigate whether crimes were committed
in their targeting of the Trump team?
Yeah, well Mike, 'hope springs eternal' is the apropos folk wisdom. Why not look at this
instead:
"Of course, none of this will be brought out by the Congressional intelligence
committees, to collapse the credibility of 'three amigos' Special Counsel Mueller, fired
Director Comey & present FBI boss Wray to help kill the 'Russia collusion' farce;
because all parties are complicit and tainted in the cover-up.Grassley wants the
DoJ personalities to fall on their swords while Feinstein is besides herself, going crazy,
as the investigation into President Skunk implodes around the Steele Dossier. It's like an
exclusive 'serial-killers only' swingers' club where everybody is tired of the limited
opportunity at couplings, yet their sex addiction requires everyone screwing everyone out
of habit and everyone hates everyone's guts. At some point, the entire crew will resort to
some new mass murder, like allowing war in Korea, to get it all back on track"
(See second link, preceding.)
There is no crime called "collusion". So Trump cannot be "acquitted", let alone be
charged with something that is not a crime. Apparently the deep state and media's repetition
of "collusion" has duped not just the public, but this author with thinking it is some kind
of crime.
That's the purpose of endlessly repeating this vague term in pejorative rhetoric, without
ever referencing a criminal statute like the Foreign Agent Registration Act or whatever.
This gigantic diversionary twaddle has worked because the seditionists have still not been
stopped. I'm not real optimistic about it, but there are some positive developments. There is
a big disappointment in the offing with the Inspector General report coming out soon.
Horowitz is a deep state operative who has covered for the Clintons in the past. They have to
do something, so expect a limited hangout or partial whitewash. That way the drug and weapons
ratlines can continue to fund our unconscionable acts across the globe.
Trump needs the swamp to produce politicized intel for his campaigns against Iran and
Venezuela (plus a dozen other countries which don't threaten the US). He needs the hated MSM
(not much more than the swamp's media branch) to sell the Iran war to his voters, who are
supposed to pay for it. He needs his shady relatives to stay OUT of prison, where several of
them seem to belong (of course, papa Kushner has already spent time inside). So appeasement
it is.
Sorry, but on the whole Trump voters are too dumb to pose much of an obstacle. They
like the campaigns against Iran because of religion, and against Venezuela because of
"socialism". They didn't raise a peep when it became clear that THEIR money would all go to
the Armies of Mordor. That this is "Saddam-WMD-9/11″ all over again just hasn't
registered with them, and never will. Just like Trump winning his primary running against
outside money, and immediately afterwards selling out for Adelson's shekels–it exceeds
the deplorables' attention span, so it never happened. Keep harping on immigrants and it's
all good; razzle-dazzle them, as it was called in the Chicago movie.
So on the whole, yes, already since his inauguration it has been clear that The Donald
is mostly playing along, as long as he'll be allowed to stay president . The question
remains if (just like Putin in Syria) he isn't trying to appease something which won't be
appeased–maybe Trump thinks he has a deal, but his enemies, while technically backing
off from the collusion claim, will still squeeze his relatives so hard on their finances and
other shenanigans that something breaks. I say: would serve Trump right for sleeping with the
dogs.
Intriguing if these 13 Russians turned up at US District Court for a chat with a Federal
Prosecutor with the International press in tow. It would be lovely to have Vlad present his
people for investigation and trial. Mueller set these 13 up, again, 'knowing' he would never
have to prove a damned thing and so, there are many embellishments. Mueller 'knows' he'll
never try them, but he also 'knew', as they ALL did, that Hillary was getting in and so these
crimes would never come to light.
Love to have Putin blow up yet another thing these folks thought they 'knew'. I'd
contribute to the GoFundMe for the best lawyers there are..
So Trump is not opposed to demonizing Russia, he's just opposed to demonizing Donald
John Trump. That's where he draws the line.
Bingo. Well guys, if there's anyone here who still abides by the '5-D chess' theory, I
think it's time to face facts: Trump has thrown us all under the bust to save himself. Expect
a war in Syria, or Ukraine, or maybe both.
It's all up to Nunes now. Let's hope he doesn't sell us out, too:
The indictments have no legal merit, they are a form of domestic propaganda and
disinformation. The real target is the American people.
That's pretty much what this banana republic's government is all about. One way or
another, everything they do is designed to ultimately squeeze something out of us dumb
'Merkin proles and peasants , especially us stupid goyim.
The rest is mere detail. Understanding that saves a lot of time and energy.
"The test for Trump will be whether he can take a wrecking ball to the FBI and
Department of State "
He could have done that a year ago. Trump has left more people loyal to Obama in their
jobs than would have thought possible. His advisors are all seemingly pushing their own
agendas and haven't clued him in on the fact that he has Obama's bureaucracy snapping at his
ankles and he needs to go on a firing rampage.
I doubt that he even knows who he can fire outright and who would have to be moved into
another department.
According to the author, this troll farm had 90 employees assigned to the American market
who designed clickbait ads using titles that would attract doofuses wanting to read articles
on their favorite subjects related to the election.
If you surf the net without a good adblocker, you'll see all these clickbait ads with
titles like "Defeat Trump with one weird trick", or "What Trump said to Hillary off stage
will astonish you" in an attempt to get the reader to go to their site and buy something.
That's what these trolls were doing, and it had nothing to do with influencing voters.
Bingo. Well guys, if there's anyone here who still abides by the '5-D chess' theory, I
think it's time to face facts: Trump has thrown us all under the bust to save himself.
Expect a war in Syria, or Ukraine, or maybe both.
It does really look like this is true. I was expecting more of a profile in courage
under the tutelage of someone smarter than Trump; instead we are seeing another profile in
venality and stupidity.
there have been thousands of such people in Balkans, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece,
who set up web pages and made money on advertising, who used the presidential election, as
honey pot. Mueller is such an idiot, that he does not know it. Sorry, he is so clever, to go
only after russian trace. you can start here:
send a couple of the indictees over to stand trial, and hire some lefty-lawyer like
Dershowitz to defend them
That was my initial reaction. But that assumes that a Washington court would not be a show
trial with emphasis on process minutia, e.g. 'identity theft' and some financial violations.
With media in overdrive proving their hyper-patriotism.
US has too many laws that are ambiguous beyond belief, almost anything can be declared
a 'crime'. Plus you have limited disclosure due to national security ('methods and sources
subterfuge always works). Volunteering for a political show trial doesn't work.
We just have to let it go, it is now a 'crime' for foreigners to criticise US politicians
without first registering with Washington. Quite a beacon of freedom for the world.
Indicting foreign election interference trolls sets a precedent for prosecuting domestic
election interference trolls. The domestic election interference trolls spent hundreds of
millions and left very prolific financial and digital footprints. Jim Messina shouldn't be
sleeping easy.
Trump's failure to fire people by the truckload during the first week of his presidency is
a topic worth exploring. Probably we won't know why he failed to do this until after his
presidency sometime, but it is a curious choice given how widespread and intense was the
hatred of him.
We can know why now. Trump was kneecapped from day one in the Oval Office and he's
surrounded by treasonous people who'll either keep him in line or step out of the way of
Trump's political enemies. Pence and his ideologically (theologically, actually) aligned
Christian Zionist generals have it under control:
Meanwhile Trump is the perfect idiot to take the heat and end up holding the bag. The
momentary big, inside fight, is fundamentalist Christian Pentagon vs neoliberal CIA for
upper hand at the White House with Bibi (via AIPAC) solidly on the side of Pence, probably
not if, but much more likely when, Trump is taken down.
That fool actually believed he would be allowed to become President. Well, he was wrong.
He got the title, he gets the heat, but he'll never be allowed to exercise the power.
Trump belongs to the Ruling Class. If he didn't, the rulers never would have selected him
as president. I thought the producers had brought in the Trump character to change the
direction of the play. But no, still the same old Empire first, the rich second, and
everything else later. How much did the Trump family save from the new tax law? That's
another story all together.
Back in the day, when knights were bold, prosecutors for real, laws were understood by
all , they laid their turds beside the road, and walked away contented!
Sheesh anyhow, This Comey, and his side kick Mueller are doing pretty good job of what
they are charged with, (to do that is charged with a task.) of charging Russians, those dirty
Boris's and Natashia's over there in the dark forrest somewhere.
A ticket a tasket, the case is in a basket, (basket case, of course) and Comey and Mueller
are excellent in their roles, playing to a tough crowd, masterful impressions of Lerch and
Herman Munster.
What is the real job? could it be to extend childhood and adelescence (strike that) wrong
thought . dupdada here it is: could it be that the real job is to extend the election process
FOOD FIGHT, indeterminately, thus displacing the expectations normally accruing to a change
of administrations. That is a serious sounding term for adults, not for the kids.
ADMINISTRATION suit wearing mthfrkrs all around, all dry fake talk masking every possible
meaning and to what end?
That boat left the pier now the population is only to be amused, more of the same Food
Fight please!
You have an evolution of pollution of the process of regress into the
abstraction/distraction. Mad Hatter's Tea Party, now the new norm, and it seems to work,
We've grown too cynical for the likes of Columbo, or Perry Mason, etc.
The investigation like the Sword of Damocles may indeed get Pres Trump to further compromise
his agenda as per the campaign. However, those who lost the election have no intention of of
giving an inch. if at all possible, they intend to get rid of Pres Trump because he waylaid
there plans. Unfortunately they are incorrect, it was Pres Trump, it was their agenda and and
a solid opposition to it that defeated them during the election.
Since the attempt to remove him includes the Russia investigation and it various tentacles
I intend to defend the current President as much possible.
Major Sjursen and Dr. Bacivich – ya ya ya I know . . . he's a this and a that . . .
) seem to have reached the same conclusion – once in it's "heck to fight" the
preordained agenda.
The RussiaGate affairs and collusion charge are the obvious "Banksters United" coup
run with a stunning degree of incompetence. Russia must be demonized because of her mineral
resources, which are still not available for free, and because of her "wrong" behavior in
Syria. Bansksters need this war. Arm producers and dealers need this war. Only the apparent
danger of suicide by nuclear answer stops the banksters and other war profiteers from an
immediate attack against Russian Federation.
The moneyed and powerful psychopaths-in-charge are enraged that the wealth of other
nations is still outside their reach becasue of Russian "stubborness." The US/UK banking
section is the main engine behind the supreme crimes of aggression in the Middle East and
Ukraine (the ongoing civil war there had been initiated on the CIA instructions in 2014; see
Brennan "secret" visit to Kiev on the eve of military actions against the civilian
populations of Eastern Ukraine:
https://themoscowtimes.com/news/russian-media-report-cia-director-held-secret-consultations-in-kiev-33897
).
The FBI and the CIA are the hired gangster organizations for the banksters. If the FBI
and the CIA cared about national security, the US would not suffer the infamy of Awan affair,
CrowdStrike "conclusions," and the US support for Daesh/ISIS/Al Qaida in the Middle East, as
well as the US support for neo-Nazis in Ukraine. The US taxpayers have been financing both
ISIS and neo-Nazis because banksters decided so.
Germany invested a lot in the US project for the Middle East (the strategy of the
destruction of societies and states, conceived by Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, but noticeably
less in the British-US project for the " Arab Springs ". Since the Cold War, it has housed
and supported several headquarters for the Muslim Brotherhood, including that of the Syrians
in Aix-la-Chapelle. Germany took a part in the assassination of ex-Prime Minister of Lebanon,
Rafic Hariri. In 2012, it co-wrote the Feltman plan for the total and unconditional
capitulation of Syria. At present, Volker Perthes, director of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und
Politik, the state think-tank, is advisor to Jeffrey Feltman at the UNO. [Jeffrey David
Feltman is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs. Feltman was born
to Jewish parents in the US he speaks Hebrew, English, Arabic, French, and Hungarian.]
For several years, the internal documents of the European External Action Service (EEAS)
are copied and pasted from Volker Perthes' notes for the German government. Volker Perthes
was at Munich with Jeffrey Feltman and their friends, Lakdhar Brahimi, Ramzi Ramzi, Steffan
de Mistura, Generals David Petraeus (the KKR was also represented by Christian Ollig) and
John Allen (Brookings Institution), as well as Nasser al-Hariri, the President of the High
Authority for Negotiations (pro-Saudi Syrian opposition), Raed al-Saleh, director of the
White Helmets (Al-Qaïda)and their Qatari sponsors, including Emir
Thamim."
There were also "three bosses – German BND (Bruno Kahl), British MI6 (Alex Younger)
and the French DGSE (Bernard Emié), who explained in a private room, in front of an
audience chosen for their naïveté, how nervous they were about the Turkish
operation in Syria. The three men pretended to believe that the combatants of the YPG
constitute the safest barrier against Daesh. Yet they were supposed to create the Frontier
Security Force with certain ex-members of Daesh . It's clear that the job of these three
super-spies is to know to whom they owe the truth, and to whom they can lie. Sustaining their
momentum, they hinted that the Syrian Arab Army uses chemical weapons – profiting from
the absence in the room of the US Secretary for Defence, Jim Mattis, who had testified a few
days earlier that proof of this claim is inexistent."
-- Lies, obfuscations, and crimes. The "three bosses" [of national security services] are
in service to Banksters, corporations, and arm dealers and producers. On the public dime, of
course And is not it touching that Jeffrey Feltman [a veritable Israel-firster] designs the
US military support for ISIS/Daesh in Syria?
The Government exists for the rich to control the slaves. The rich choose one of their own
to be President. The patriotic slaves, aka zombie morons left and right, vote for the slave
masters every four years. And argue over their merits. Oh, the Trump has a much nicer touch
with the lash than Obama.
The DNC data was leaked by an insider -- some say by the murdered Seth Rich. The Podesta
emails were hacked. And what that hack revealed was a network of wealthy pedophiles that
included both Podesta brothers, John and Tony, and other D.C. notables like Maeve Luzzatto
and James Alefantis. It's true that the PizzaGate conspiracy theory has been promoted by
Twitter nutcases, but that doesn't mean there isn't truth in it.
Obama CIA Director James Brennan's heavy involvement in the Russia/election conspiracy
theory might be a clue that the D.C. pedophile network might be a CIA blackmail operation,
much as Jeffrey Epstein's private Caribbean island was used as a Mossad honey trap.
"No greater friend of the Zionists than the fundamentalist Christians."
True. And thanks for using the term "Zionist" because not all Jews are Zionists and not
all Zionists are Jews. Most American Jews, while supportive of Israel, are not Zionists. Most
American Jews are a benefit to the communities they call home. Zionism is a globalist cult
that must be unmasked and destroyed.
Years ago when I was working for CNN an Army Major showed up and started working in the
newsroom; I thought to myself, well maybe he's learning things to take back to the Armed
Forces Radio and TV network - NOT, he continued to work in the newsroom for years and was
still there when I left. He worked sans military uniform of course - isn't that right
Art....?
"... I agree that they are a big threat to life on earth. From the amount of ecological damage that our wars create, the number of people who we have killed or misplaced, to their planned war with Russia that could see the end of the human race and animals. That so many people are believing this Russian propaganda crap is beyond belief. These are the same people who used to question what the intelligence agencies were saying, but not any more. ..."
"... All Maxine "Lip Flappin" Waters does nowadays, like Adam Schiff, is ignore their districts in favor of Russiagate and get Trump out. They don't deserve their congressional positions. ..."
"... Ain't no one touching Schumer, and as for our president all he has to do is make another $10B donation to his favorite country and all this will go away. They done sold this country out many times over. ..."
"... The quaint idea that the public should "just trust" the "intelligence" (sic) "community" (sic) is trotted out by the propaganda media whenever anyone dares to question this gang of spies and dirty tricksters. As if these scum are somehow paragons of virtue and truthfulness! And the mass of Americans just swallow this rotten bait, and continue their profound sleep ..."
"... Yes, the secret agencies must be nearly abolished, as completely incompatible with democracy. ..."
"... I am wondering if Trump is going to make it out of this alive. ..."
"... I can see the pure evil in Brennan's eyes. He is dripping with hatred. Not that I like Trump, but our so-called intelligence agencies must be brought to heel if we are to have any hope for the future. People like Brennan need to be prosecuted and go to jail. ..."
"... Skip Scott -- Trump should keep his mouth shut, I know, but I can't blame the guy for speaking out, especially when he's been hounded by the press with something like 90+% negative coverage. He was right about his phones being "tapped", and everyone said he was out of his mind for saying such a thing. The Steele dossier is a phony, made-up dossier purposely invented to spy on Trump and bring in the Special Prosecutor. Everyone who had a hand in this should be behind bars. This has been an attempted coup against a duly-elected President. ..."
"... When the Inspector General's Report comes out, when Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy finally get the information they've been asking for, I think we're going to see people go to jail. They're now looking into Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation. ..."
"... These guys brought down the World Trade Center just to further their geopolitical agenda. Nothing is beyond their treachery. They don't have to assassinate the man, as they did the hapless Skripal's just to smear Russia one more time. They can bring down Airforce One and blame it on the Russians in some kind of grand two-fer, if they so choose (everyone knows those Russians just can't quit their evil ways). ..."
"... These spooks and their collaborators in the Pentagon, the MIC, Capitol Hill and the MSM have as effectively seized all power in this country as the Stalinists did in the Soviet Union. Idiots like Schumer sometimes unwittingly let the cat out of the bag, and he was right in pin-pointing who runs this country and to what extent they will go to destroy you to maintain their stake in ruling the planet ..."
"... Realist, very true, and you have summarized it so well. I am afraid this Skirpal incident in U.K. has been staged as a prelude to attack on Syria by U.S., U.K., Israel, and France, with Germany and other Western Nations cheering from the side. ..."
"... Trump is completely safe & will not be taken out? Why? Because Candidate Trump has completely backtracked from every foreign policy statements he made such as seeking peace with Russia? It's no coincidence that Trump was made to pay a visit to the one of the Deepstate's intelligence agencies at the CIA? ..."
"... I wonder to what extent Trump is whistling past the graveyard. Most women understand the dynamic: When you know you are under threat, pretend not to notice anything untoward ..."
"... "Power also saw fit to remind Trump where the power lies, so to speak. She warned him publicly that it is "not a good idea to piss off John Brennan." Didn't Michael Hastings piss off Brennan? ..."
"... Washington is like a continuing Soap Opera, as the real bad guys battle it out with the other really bad guys. We the people are mere pawns in their hands, to be influenced and duped to no end, as the lies swirl around and around until a citizen is completely buffaloed into submission. ..."
"... While reading this about John Brennan I could not help but think of JFK firing Allen Dulles. Again with the rhyming. ..."
"... "Former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom said that there was a plot among "high-ranking" people throughout government -- "not just the FBI," who coordinated in a plot to help Hillary Clinton avoid indictment. ..."
"... "I think we have ample facts revealed to us during this last year and a half that high-ranking people throughout government, not just the FBI, high-ranking people had a plot to not have Hillary Clinton, you know, indicted," Kallstrom told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo. ..."
"... "I think it goes right to the top. And it involves that whole strategy -- they were gonna win, nobody would have known any of this stuff, and they just unleashed the intelligence community. Look at the unmaskings. We haven't heard anything about that yet. Look at the way they violated the rights of all those American citizens." ..."
"... "Mike Whitney suspects that John Brennan was the mastermind behind Russia-gate." Looking at the pictures of Barack Obama with John Brennen, they seemed to have very cozy relationship. I wonder about Obama's role in this Russia-Gate. There are many unanswered questions about the top-echelons' role in this bizarre drama which may end up in many ominous consequences for the country and for the World. ..."
"... I think the intelligence agencies are the true source of nearly all of the problems..instead of gathering intelligence the IAs are effecting the events about which the intelligence is supposed to be about. Certainty Intelligence agencies can be credited with 9/11 and the war on Iraq. Interconnected between nations, shuffling in open-source form, secret sharing, false flag event production, and media delivered propaganda are activities which define the intelligence agencies. Secret means slave citizens are denied the knowledge that would allow them to understand how corrupt our societies are; so that the leaders of such societies can continue in the office that commands the power. ..."
"... Brilliantly stated, faraday's law. You've raised the all-important point that the intelligence agencies are are not simply gathering intelligence, they are also engaging in covert action, unlawfully, unaccountably, and unscrutinized. For all we know they could be spending their virtually unlimited funds on creating our enemies, thereby creating a need for our military industrial complex, the only entity that benefits from their work. ..."
"... Seems like the two wings of the Anglo-American establishment alliance are working in concert to defeat all who stand in their way and regain dominance over the western world. In Britain, Teresa May and the Tories -- who are losing popularity to the resurgent Labour party and its progressive leader Jeremy Corbyn -- are trying to blame Russia for a nerve agent attack. The blame game over there is evidence-free of course and the lies and weasel-word assertions are being effectively countered by, among others, ex-Ambassador Craig Murray ( https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/ ) in post after post. ..."
"... You present some interesting points, but John Brennan is no "Wild Bill Donovan" or even a William Casey with the backup of the fraternity of OSS which no longer has meetings. It seems to me that Brennan's and his diminishing followers' power lies with the media that has done the dance of "valued sources" and perception manipulation of the masses. Actually, "night of the long knives" occurred in Saudi Arabia when Prince "Bandar Bush" was captured and "interviewed" not by the FBI or the CIA, but most probably by individuals with videos of confessions which summarized the long history of the activities involving operatives conducting activities during the presidential administrations of both political parties but continuously for clans such as the Bush Dynasty and assorted associates within the institutions that are now domestically profiting from the policies of the President. ..."
"... But beyond this crisis is the larger one of how to harness the Deep State to reflect the nation's interests, not those few who run things now. Some say start to rid foreign intelligence of its operational arm which has been at the forefront of regime change and other mischief. ..."
"... Yes, the CIA operations division should be made small because it is abused for the hidden agendas of oligarchy, that the People would never approve. It should be monitored by an agency reporting directly to Congress. ..."
"... The Deep State, through the CIA, pursues a foreign policy that is often at odds with the wishes of the vast majority of the people in this country ..."
"... Brennans screech confirms that Trump is not just smoke and mirrors. He really hit the bureaucracy where it hurts, their pensions -- brilliant move. ..."
"... Trump and Brennan represent equally criminal factions of the ruling class, divided over foreign policy, particularly in the civil war in Syria, and more generally towards Russia. ..."
"... Brennan and the Democrats speak for powerful sections of the military-intelligence apparatus embittered by the failure of US intervention in Syria and Trump's apparent abandonment of the Islamic fundamentalist groups armed by the CIA to fight the Russian and Iranian-backed government of President Bashar al-Assad. They want to push further into the Syrian slaughter, regardless of the risk of open military conflict with Russia, the world's second strongest nuclear power. ..."
"... That "moral turpitude" reference seems to imply that there is some -- yet to be revealed -- scandal held in abeyance, fully capable of delivering a decisive blow. And, the "deep staters" are merely waiting for the right moment to pull this shark-toothed rabbit out of the hat. ..."
"... Former heads of the nation's top intelligence organization do not attack sitting presidents, let alone in such a visceral vituperative and public fashion. This is indication of deep fissures, quite beyond politics as most citizens understand. As the World Socialist Web Site published today: "There is no recent parallel for statements and actions such as those of the past three days. One would have to go back to the period before the American Civil War to find equivalent levels of tension, which in the late 1850s erupted in violence in the halls of Congress before exploding in full-scale military conflict." ..."
"... Trump is a maverick outsider so it's hard to get a handle on what or who he represents, but the Brennan/deep state side of the dispute is very much aligned with the corporate DNC Democratic Party. That they seem, by Brennan's comments, to consider themselves as the representation of "America" as they abandon constitutional and etiquette norms and articulate visceral hatred towards political rivals should serve as fair warning. ..."
"... Kevin Zeese: "He basically is a Senator for Israel. He totally supports the Israeli foreign policy viewpoint, which is a very hawkish, if you were a Republican you would call him a neocon." ..."
"... Thomas Hedges: "Schumer's staunch support for Israel has prompted him for example, to criticize the Obama administration, when in 2016, the United States abstained from a UN Security Council resolution re-affirming something the Council had almost unanimously upheld since 1979. Namely, that Israel's settlement building projects on Palestinian land violated international law." ..."
"... Brennan is history's most hilarious DCI. His grandiose hissy fit suggests that CIA continues the Dulles tradition of infiltrating the civil service with 'focal points -' illegal CIA moles infiltrating US government agencies -- and the IG fumigated one key out in firing McCabe. ..."
"... the MSM and the Left see the "crime" being that McCabe was fired, not that McCabe broke the law. Kind of like when they didn't see a crime in Hillary using her own personal servers, but saw the crime as being that the emails might have been hacked by a foreign government. That they had no evidence of this didn't matter. ..."
"... Brennan sounds like a desperate man. They must be getting closer to him. ..."
"... See how this works? The article is about Brennan. The comment is about Brennan's CIA. But immersive CIA propaganda immediately diverts the topic to CIA's synthetic warring factions, Hillary! Trump! Hillary! Trump! ..."
"... CIA runs your country. You're not going to get anywhere until you stop bickering about their presidential puppet rulers. ..."
"... The mention of John Brennan brings to mind the bizarre death of Rolling Stone's writer, Michael Hastings, who was reported to be working on a story about Brennan just before he had his "accident". ..."
"... Our MS Media is nothing more than Democrat Propaganda, and that situation will doom us to Russian interference. Every election the Russians can do the same as 2016: release the truth about justice not served. ..."
"... Israel has advised, trained and equipped, and ran "dirty war" operations in the Latin American "dirty war" conflicts in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Colombia. In the case of the Salvadoran "bloodbath", the Israelis were present from the beginning. Besides arms sales, they helped train ANSESAL, the secret police who were later to form the framework of the infamous death squads that would kill tens of thousands of mostly civilian activists. ..."
"... USMC activated. Well, I'd put my two-cents on POTUS. Just like we've all seen throughout our lives when the supposed tough guy starts making threats he is really scared Sh**less. Lots of these clowns are just going to disappear during the late night hours of the day never to be heard from again. ..."
"... Guys like Brennan are scared rats in a sinking ship, good riddance! ..."
"... What an amazingly illuminating article. Devin Nunes, who perfectly ok with wire taps as long as the target aren't from his party is somehow a noble individual. While I agree that Brennan should be in prison, it should be for torturing people ..."
Great article. I hope Brennan is running scared, along with Power. It's like the Irish
Mafia.
"Meanwhile, the Washington Post is dutifully playing its part in the deep-state game of
intimidation. The following excerpt from Sunday's lead article conveys the intended message:
"Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI. 'This is open,
all-out war. And guess what? The FBI's going to win,' said one ally, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to be candid. 'You can't fight the FBI. They're going to torch
him.'"
That sounds like something "Six Ways From Sunday" Schumer would say. In fact, I'd bet
money that it is the shyster himself. That guy should be removed from the Senate in leg
irons. He is a menace to society.
Abby , March 19, 2018 at 9:51 pm
I agree that they are a big threat to life on earth. From the amount of ecological
damage that our wars create, the number of people who we have killed or misplaced, to their
planned war with Russia that could see the end of the human race and animals. That so many
people are believing this Russian propaganda crap is beyond belief. These are the same people
who used to question what the intelligence agencies were saying, but not any more.
The fact that most of congress and people in other governments have made up the Russian
propaganda is what needs to be exposed. This is a huge crime against humanity, IMO. This
includes Bernie of all people. They are doing this so they can get their war on with Russia
and escalate the Syrian war.
geeyp , March 20, 2018 at 3:02 am
Agreed. All Maxine "Lip Flappin" Waters does nowadays, like Adam Schiff, is ignore
their districts in favor of Russiagate and get Trump out. They don't deserve their
congressional positions. I wish to add a comment Coleen Rowley's piece. An update: Law
Professor Jonathan Turley says Andrew M. will still get his pension, just have to wait until
he's 57 (now 50). Can you understand this? What will it take to punish these arrogant evil
little punks? And why should we pay their pensions, especially when so many of us get
nothing!
Ain't no one touching Schumer, and as for our president all he has to do is make
another $10B donation to his favorite country and all this will go away. They done sold this
country out many times over.
Brad Owen , March 19, 2018 at 12:16 pm
The draining of the swamp has now begun, and battle is about to be joined. That's the word
from Alex Jones, Roy Potter and that youtube crowd of similar "guerilla journalists", who
fill in for the Deep State-captured and untrustworthy MSM.
The Deep State miscalculated the alignment of forces for the upcoming, somewhat covert,
civil war within the governing apparatus; Trump knows the military has his back, especially
the Marines, and they are part & parcel of the Constitution. The Deep State is a sick
Post-WWII mistake, rogue and criminal, and will be rolled up. There are a lot of jewels
hidden in their unacknowledged black programs of great benefit to the World, if we can
wrestle them away from these weaponizing psychopaths of the Deep State.
jean , March 20, 2018 at 2:53 pm
Unfortunately whistleblowers like Bill Binny and others can't get airtime on in corporate
media but can get a voice on Alex Jones.
William Binney High Ranking NSA Whistle Blower Interview with Alex. Video for Bill Binney
alex jones
? 34:25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW-V-TOJVE8
Jun 14, 2017 -- Uploaded by N Jacobson
William Binney High Ranking NSA Whistle Blower Interview w/ Alex Jones 6-14-17 William
Binney, and ..
Whistleblower Reveals NSA Blackmailing Top Govt Officials -- YouTube
Video for Russ tice alex jones
? 22:27 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZoV52qdaOA
Jun 8, 2014 -- Uploaded by The Alex Jones Channel
NSA whistleblower Russell Tice was a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew
the lid off the
saveourliberty , March 20, 2018 at 8:35 pm
Attacks on Alex Jones might be warranted, but I find those trivial in comparison for how
he has awakened the masses and has given a bully-pit to those that have been silenced by the
MSM. Choose your battles. Jones isn't one I want to silence though we can never let our guard
down to co-option neither.
Andrew , March 20, 2018 at 7:04 am
An open threat to torch the POTUS and there are no consequences for making such threats?
Like Brennan's clear threat? No judicial system to deal with those threats?
mike k , March 19, 2018 at 7:46 am
The quaint idea that the public should "just trust" the "intelligence" (sic)
"community" (sic) is trotted out by the propaganda media whenever anyone dares to question
this gang of spies and dirty tricksters. As if these scum are somehow paragons of virtue and
truthfulness! And the mass of Americans just swallow this rotten bait, and continue their
profound sleep ..
Sam F , March 20, 2018 at 6:32 am
Yes, the secret agencies must be nearly abolished, as completely incompatible with
democracy.
Wolfbay , March 20, 2018 at 6:54 am
There are only 17 secret agencies. No room to cut.
toni , March 21, 2018 at 11:51 am
Why do you think that there all the shows on television and the movies where the good guy
is the cop, or some federal agent?
Skip Scott , March 19, 2018 at 8:06 am
I am wondering if Trump is going to make it out of this alive. I know they don't
want to tip their hand to the public, but if their media circus performance doesn't gain
sufficient traction, it'll probably be time for a "lone nut" assassin. I can see the pure
evil in Brennan's eyes. He is dripping with hatred. Not that I like Trump, but our so-called
intelligence agencies must be brought to heel if we are to have any hope for the future.
People like Brennan need to be prosecuted and go to jail.
backwardsevolution , March 19, 2018 at 8:34 am
Skip Scott -- Trump should keep his mouth shut, I know, but I can't blame the guy for
speaking out, especially when he's been hounded by the press with something like 90+%
negative coverage. He was right about his phones being "tapped", and everyone said he was out
of his mind for saying such a thing. The Steele dossier is a phony, made-up dossier purposely
invented to spy on Trump and bring in the Special Prosecutor. Everyone who had a hand in this
should be behind bars. This has been an attempted coup against a duly-elected
President.
When the Inspector General's Report comes out, when Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy finally
get the information they've been asking for, I think we're going to see people go to jail.
They're now looking into Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation.
Never mind the damage being done re relations between Russia and the U.S. and the possible
nuclear threat. These people truly are insane. I agree with you, these intelligence agencies
really have gone rogue and need to be "brought to heel".
laninya , March 19, 2018 at 11:22 am
The day Trump keeps his mouth shut or stops tweeting is the day he and his revolution will
be over. What do you think is smoking all these malefactors out into the open?
Steve Naidamast , March 19, 2018 at 12:51 pm
backwardsevolution
Former CIA Officer, Kevin Shipp, spoke out in an article I saw the other day that the FBI
is working very methodically on the investigations into the Clinton Foundation. He expects
that when it comes out so many "heads will roll" in the Congress and the Executive branch
that we will have a Constitutional crises portending a collapse of the US government.
Can't wait to see these fireworks :-)
Typingperson , March 19, 2018 at 9:33 pm
Not holding my breath -- but I hope so!
Abby , March 19, 2018 at 9:55 pm
I read this article and I too hope that Shipp is right about this. The Clinton foundation
and everything connected to them is rotten. They robbed Haiti's reconstruction funds and gave
their friends and family members special access to bilking them. Everyone knew that they did
that, yet no one said a word about it.
Dave P. , March 20, 2018 at 1:27 am
Steve, I watched this Youtube video of Kevin Shipp talking to this Group of citizens, last
evening. It is really very informative. The title of the video was: "CIA Officer exposes the
shadow government" dated Feb 19, 2018. This video is really worth watching.
Realist , March 19, 2018 at 3:38 pm
These guys brought down the World Trade Center just to further their geopolitical
agenda. Nothing is beyond their treachery. They don't have to assassinate the man, as they
did the hapless Skripal's just to smear Russia one more time. They can bring down Airforce
One and blame it on the Russians in some kind of grand two-fer, if they so choose (everyone
knows those Russians just can't quit their evil ways).
These spooks and their collaborators in the Pentagon, the MIC, Capitol Hill and the
MSM have as effectively seized all power in this country as the Stalinists did in the Soviet
Union. Idiots like Schumer sometimes unwittingly let the cat out of the bag, and he was right
in pin-pointing who runs this country and to what extent they will go to destroy you to
maintain their stake in ruling the planet .
All this has been clear for a long time now, yet nothing is ever done about it, probably
because the task is too immense, these devils are too numerous and too deeply entrenched.
Everything they say or do before the public is simply stagecraft and dramatics, and that
includes all the gibbering that emanates from Congress each day, dispensed to you in a direct
feed by the propaganda organs of the mass media which now includes most of the internet. You
want to hear the truth? Go read a novel, maybe the publishing monolith will occasionally let
slip an accurate description of our world couched in metaphor, a glitch in the Matrix, if you
will.
Dave P. , March 20, 2018 at 3:16 pm
Realist, very true, and you have summarized it so well. I am afraid this Skirpal
incident in U.K. has been staged as a prelude to attack on Syria by U.S., U.K., Israel, and
France, with Germany and other Western Nations cheering from the side.
Most likely, a false flag event will staged in Syria very soon to justify it. And there
will be some sort of action in Ukraine too. U.S., U.K., and France are deep in debt. China is
rising economically, and I am afraid that these Western Imperial Nations will not let go
their complete dominance over the planet without a fight.
Events may take a very sad and violent turn in no time.
Skip Scott , March 21, 2018 at 8:47 am
Realist.
That is a very scary scenario you propose about Air Force One, and quite conceivable. The
way things are heating up, I suspect something in that order of magnitude very soon.
KiwiAntz , March 20, 2018 at 12:02 am
Trump is completely safe & will not be taken out? Why? Because Candidate Trump has
completely backtracked from every foreign policy statements he made such as seeking peace
with Russia? It's no coincidence that Trump was made to pay a visit to the one of the
Deepstate's intelligence agencies at the CIA?
Trump would have been taken into a office & shown a continuous looped, Zapruder film
of JFK getting his head blasted apart, as a warning of what happened to the last President
who tried to destroy their power & influences? Remember Chuck Schumer's threat in 2017,
warning Trump that the Intelligence Agencies have a number of ways, to take you down, if you
rock the boat? Trump was shown what to expect if he doesn't toe the line & do what he's
told by his real masters? Confirmation of Trump's obedience to the Deepstate agenda is that
as he's now singing from the same song sheet that the Deepstate is singing from, completely
backtracking most of his his election promises, making America great again, not by diplomacy
but by endless war mongering & foreign interventions with no end in sight?
geeyp , March 20, 2018 at 12:51 am
We have known for sometime that the CIA and Google (not to mention WaPo and Jeff's garage
sale site) are tight. Julian Assange's "When Google Met Wikileaks" is a go to for this. And
you know that Eric Schmidt and Hillary Clinton are close connivers.
Litchfield , March 20, 2018 at 9:17 am
I wonder to what extent Trump is whistling past the graveyard. Most women understand
the dynamic: When you know you are under threat, pretend not to notice anything untoward
. . . So as not to trigger something really bad happening. If the picture changed
dramatically -- say, with indictments of co-conspirators in the DNC shenanigans or the FBI
collusion, or the Russiagate farce -- Trump might do some kind fo about-face. The big
question, though, is his real relationship to and heartfelt convictions regarding
Netanyahu/Israel.
Gregory Herr , March 20, 2018 at 6:45 pm
"Power also saw fit to remind Trump where the power lies, so to speak. She warned him
publicly that it is "not a good idea to piss off John Brennan." Didn't Michael Hastings piss
off Brennan?
Washington is like a continuing Soap Opera, as the real bad guys battle it out with
the other really bad guys. We the people are mere pawns in their hands, to be influenced and
duped to no end, as the lies swirl around and around until a citizen is completely buffaloed
into submission.
While reading this about John Brennan I could not help but think of JFK firing Allen
Dulles. Again with the rhyming.
backwardsevolution , March 19, 2018 at 9:07 am
Two short interviews with James Kallstrom at this site:
"Former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom said that there was a plot among
"high-ranking" people throughout government -- "not just the FBI," who coordinated in a plot
to help Hillary Clinton avoid indictment.
"I think we have ample facts revealed to us during this last year and a half that
high-ranking people throughout government, not just the FBI, high-ranking people had a plot
to not have Hillary Clinton, you know, indicted," Kallstrom told Fox News' Maria
Bartiromo.
"I think it goes right to the top. And it involves that whole strategy -- they were
gonna win, nobody would have known any of this stuff, and they just unleashed the
intelligence community. Look at the unmaskings. We haven't heard anything about that yet.
Look at the way they violated the rights of all those American citizens."
Yes, very interesting interview with Kallstrom -- on mainstream media, which is important.
Seems too many people understand what's really transpired for Trump -- or anyone -- to be in
mortal danger. We'll see.
Brennan's tweet suggests he knows the walls are closing in on him.
I agree. If you're very strong, you don't bother making public threats against powerful
people. You just break their backs without comment. Brennan comes across like he's been
backed into a corner where he has no weapons and from which he knows there is no escape.
It is what I already sussed out, Paul. In reading Whitney's piece, it reminded me that
over the last eight years the State Department in their press gatherings continuously mocked
any RT reporters and disrespected them. You could easily surmise from this that they had a
hand in these propaganda smears and lies.
Dave P. , March 20, 2018 at 1:53 am
"Mike Whitney suspects that John Brennan was the mastermind behind Russia-gate."
Looking at the pictures of Barack Obama with John Brennen, they seemed to have very cozy
relationship. I wonder about Obama's role in this Russia-Gate. There are many unanswered
questions about the top-echelons' role in this bizarre drama which may end up in many ominous
consequences for the country and for the World.
Dave P(et.al.) it's getting more involved every day. It is interesting that the interview
was on Fox as it indicates prominent Republicans may be leaning towards a more thorough
investigation. However, if the investigation includes an inquiry into Cambridge Analytica
they are likely to find that most of the fake news on Facebook that was influential in
throwing the election to Trump was the result of Breitbart strategy with no Russian
connection. Some Republicans may be willing to do this, but if it were conclusive I doubt
whether either the Democrats or the Trump administration would come out on top; there are
very few innocents that didn't add to the stench of the swamp. BTW: thanks for that valuable
link B.E.!
How will it end, or will it go on without end?
This feasting on blood that these demons depend
Will these diabolical devils ever be arraigned and indicted
And will we ever see the land of the free tried and convicted?
[more info at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2017/04/is-this-land-of-free.html
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
-- -- --
"It has become embarrassing to be an American. Our country has had four war criminal
presidents in succession. Clinton twice launched military attacks on Serbia, ordering NATO to
bomb the former Yugoslavia twice, both in 1995 and in 1999, so that gives Bill two war
crimes. George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and attacked provinces of Pakistan and
Yemen from the air. That comes to four war crimes for Bush. Obama used NATO to destroy Libya
and sent mercenaries to destroy Syria, thereby committing two war crimes. Trump attacked
Syria with US forces, thereby becoming a war criminal early in his regime."
Paul Craig Roberts, Information Clearing House, April 15/16, 2017.
Yes, this "H.W., Kuwait" is the war crime that started the era of ruthless war-making in
which we are now trapped. It is the era of the kicked-down Vietnam Syndrome, where we are
free once again to enrich our mercenary corporations as we project our military force
'exceptionally' to 'creatively destroy' in our noble quest to guide the world to do things
our way. Some may recall how, back then, the pundit and Congressional classes deployed
propaganda that was the prototype for what we have since become accustomed to. "We are doing
this for peace, so all you dissenters shut up." Nobody then would acknowledge that we had
covertly -- and treacherously -- aided and abetted both Iran and Iraq during their 8-year war
that immediately preceded our war. (Hush, hush, wink, wink, said the media.) Thus, we had no
moral or legal standing to pronounce any country guilty of 'aggression', as we did Saddam's
country, who we had also green-lighted into settling his border dispute with force. That
alone was enough to reveal our collective disregard for Muslim life. The rules of engagement
that allowed water treatment plants to be bombed only confirmed our disregard. Warnings of
unintended (or intended?) consequences then, as later, went unheeded, such as the certainty
of blow back when one betrays so many peoples of the world who thought we had 'principles'.
Is it any wonder there was blow back, such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? (By the
way, Rep. Dick Gephardt, criticized in this article, eventually led a valiant but futile
effort to derail the war momentum in the House.) Peace.
Paul Craig Roberts is a bit off. Each of the war crimes he mentions were waging wars of
aggression. But there were a multitude of lesser war crimes committed in each of those wars.
And his count is off. Bush's wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen did not cease
being wars of aggression in 2008 simply because 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue acquired new tenants
that year. Obama gets credit for the continuation of those four wars in addition to the wars
first launched while he was in office. And Trump likewise must be given credit for his
continuations of wars of aggression launched by his predecessors.
Michael Kenny , March 19, 2018 at 11:01 am
For over 50 years, I have applied the rule that I never take the word of anyone who has
ever been connected with the CIA.
Skip Scott , March 20, 2018 at 8:21 am
Bullshit. I've seen your posts going back months, and you are a typical MSM propaganda
apologist. If you know anything about "Operation Mockingbird", then you know that all of your
past comments are "connected with the CIA".
Realist , March 20, 2018 at 11:17 pm
I'm telling ya, the guy seems like the amazing schizoid man these days.
faraday's law , March 19, 2018 at 11:05 am
I think the intelligence agencies are the true source of nearly all of the
problems..instead of gathering intelligence the IAs are effecting the events about which the
intelligence is supposed to be about. Certainty Intelligence agencies can be credited with
9/11 and the war on Iraq. Interconnected between nations, shuffling in open-source form,
secret sharing, false flag event production, and media delivered propaganda are activities
which define the intelligence agencies. Secret means slave citizens are denied the knowledge
that would allow them to understand how corrupt our societies are; so that the leaders of
such societies can continue in the office that commands the power.
Linda Wood , March 20, 2018 at 6:24 pm
Brilliantly stated, faraday's law. You've raised the all-important point that the
intelligence agencies are are not simply gathering intelligence, they are also engaging in
covert action, unlawfully, unaccountably, and unscrutinized. For all we know they could be
spending their virtually unlimited funds on creating our enemies, thereby creating a need for
our military industrial complex, the only entity that benefits from their work.
Dr. Ip , March 19, 2018 at 11:17 am
Seems like the two wings of the Anglo-American establishment alliance are working in
concert to defeat all who stand in their way and regain dominance over the western world. In
Britain, Teresa May and the Tories -- who are losing popularity to the resurgent Labour party
and its progressive leader Jeremy Corbyn -- are trying to blame Russia for a nerve agent
attack. The blame game over there is evidence-free of course and the lies and weasel-word
assertions are being effectively countered by, among others, ex-Ambassador Craig Murray (
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
) in post after post.
Over here, where the establishment Democrats and their cabal of friendly old Republicans
(think: Mitt Romney) have lost their hold on direct power, they are trying to assert it
through their long-time henchmen in the intelligence services. Ever since Wild Bill Donovan
and the Dulles brothers, the intelligence services have been looking after their own survival
and proliferation (and the profits of their masters) while, as a side-benefit, the United
States got some security.
This clash of the services with Trump is only the latest in a series of clashes which
Presidents have mostly lost (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, even Obama backed
down after he became President) unless they were card-carrying members of the clan like Bush
the First. So, you can expect Trump to lose as well unless he has the armed forces behind him
and can purge the services of his enemies. We actually might have a night of the long knives
coming. The question is of course if Caesar can survive the knifings!
Not that this Caesar is an Augustus or Marcus Aurelius
You present some interesting points, but John Brennan is no "Wild Bill Donovan" or
even a William Casey with the backup of the fraternity of OSS which no longer has meetings.
It seems to me that Brennan's and his diminishing followers' power lies with the media that
has done the dance of "valued sources" and perception manipulation of the masses. Actually,
"night of the long knives" occurred in Saudi Arabia when Prince "Bandar Bush" was captured
and "interviewed" not by the FBI or the CIA, but most probably by individuals with videos of
confessions which summarized the long history of the activities involving operatives
conducting activities during the presidential administrations of both political parties but
continuously for clans such as the Bush Dynasty and assorted associates within the
institutions that are now domestically profiting from the policies of the President.
Yes, Pres. Trump and his advisers (such as Peter Thiel and even possibly Erik Prince and
individuals of varied backgrounds possibly to even include Rabbis, Cardinals and other wise
men not members of the Brookings Institution or the CFR) knew the obstacles and the nature of
the enemies that would unit against a Populist Movement. In addition to advisers aware of the
cyber world and the underworld of intelligence/counter-intelligence operations, advisers
aware of the functioning of institutions and how institutions change their "culture" were
absolutely necessary when the "resistance" was sending the message non-stop that Pres. Trump
was only a temporary resident of the White House, and he would follow the path of Nixon, but
in short order! Well, it seems that even the FBI is cleaning house internally and even
Brennan's supporters within the old intelligence community leadership are giving their
endorsement to the President's choice for CIA Dir. and she has a loyal following among the
rank and file members of that institution.
Yes, ministers of Egypt wanted to present documents on the Muslim Brotherhood and it's
relationship with the Obama Adm.; and Prince Salman will probably bring gifts during his
State Visit. Pres. Trump and his team will decide the time and date to unwrap the evidence
that will shatter the camera lens and stop the presses! No knives or guns, please!
"Moral turpitude is a legal concept in the United States and some other countries that
refers to "an act or behavior that gravely violates the sentiment or accepted standard of the
community".[1] This term appears in U.S. immigration law beginning in the 19th
century.[2]"
I guess the "community" Brennan was referring to was the Deep State. Not willingly but
perhaps fortuitously Trump finds himself on the battlefield playing David and Goliath is
there wearing a stone proof helmet. Obama liked to go after leakers, so long as the were
underling leakers. If Trump is successful, which is to be hoped for but unlikely, how will
the New York Times and Washington Post fill their editorial pages?
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, which is a paraphrase but apt.
But beyond this crisis is the larger one of how to harness the Deep State to reflect
the nation's interests, not those few who run things now. Some say start to rid foreign
intelligence of its operational arm which has been at the forefront of regime change and
other mischief.
Sam F , March 19, 2018 at 1:00 pm
Yes, the CIA operations division should be made small because it is abused for the
hidden agendas of oligarchy, that the People would never approve. It should be monitored by
an agency reporting directly to Congress.
Joe Wallace , March 19, 2018 at 3:32 pm
Herman and Sam F:
"But beyond this crisis is the larger one of how to harness the Deep State to reflect the
nation's interests, not those few who run things now. Some say start to rid foreign
intelligence of its operational arm which has been at the forefront of regime change and
other mischief."
"Yes, the CIA operations division should be made small because it is abused for the hidden
agendas of oligarchy, that the People would never approve. It should be monitored by an
agency reporting directly to Congress."
Not until Citizens United v FEC is overturned will we have a foreign policy that reflects
the nation's interests, administered by elected officials who actually represent the will of
the electorate. The Deep State, through the CIA, pursues a foreign policy that is often
at odds with the wishes of the vast majority of the people in this country .
Sam F , March 20, 2018 at 6:55 am
Yes, but the judiciary that decided Citizens United are corruption leaders installed by
corrupt politicians installed by the dictatorship of the rich. Until the rich are overthrown
there will be no democracy in the US.
I believe the system has become corrupted. The same people who parrot the words "rule of
law" are according to numerous reports working hand in glove with terrorists. They even pass
"laws" against terrorism, while at the same time consorting with terrorists. I guess "our
hypocrite leaders" are above the law? The latest horrific terrorist bombing in Manchester
raises questions about the spy agency "MI5."
[read more at link below] http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2017/06/has-system-become-corrupted.html
mike k , March 19, 2018 at 12:13 pm
Our problem is how to shock the American public into awareness of who their real enemies
are: the Oligarchs, Deep State, Zionazis, MSM, MIC. What kind of major disclosure could start
the ball rolling? What kind of outrage would be too much for the zombified public to brush
off and continue sleeping? What the hell would it take to knock the middle class out of it's
putrid comfort zone?
Linda Wood , March 20, 2018 at 7:04 pm
zendeviant, I think it will come to a national refusal to fund illegal activity on the
part of our federal government. I don't think it will come to violence, which would
accomplish less than nothing. Instead, I think the American people will take legal action to
stop the hemorrhage of black funding.
Skip Scott , March 21, 2018 at 10:22 am
Linda-
Funding is not the issue. They just print the money and give it out. Our tax dollars are
just demanded to make sure we are in submission. The Pentagon isn't even audited, and at this
point would be impossible to audit. Legal action requires an uncompromised judiciary. Haven't
seen that in my lifetime. It will take real "boots on the ground" from the people to get any
real change. TPTB will only budge when their backs are against the wall.
Sam F , March 20, 2018 at 7:54 am
Fair question, Mike, although perhaps annoying at times to very well-meaning people.
Middle class comfort is indeed the security of a corrupt government, and so affluence
destroys democracy.
As you know, I have advocated a College of Policy Debate constituted to protect all points
of view, and to conduct moderated text-only debate among university experts of several
disciplines, of the status and possibilities of each world region, and the policy options.
Debate summaries commented by all sides are to be made available for public study and
comment.
The debates would require a higher standard of argument in foreign and domestic policy on
all sides, and would have much reduced the group-think that led to our endless mad wars since
WWII. Extreme and naïve politicians would be easier to expose, and media commentators
would have a starting point and a standard for media investigation and analysis.
While most politicians will ignore and attack careful analysis, and "the common man avoids
the truth [because] it is dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn't pay" (Mencken),
the CPD can bring the knowledge of society into public debate, educate the electorate,
discourage propaganda, and expose the wrongs of society and the corruption of government that
desperately need reform.
If such a rational mechanism fails to awaken the public and cause reform, then we are
doomed to overthrow of the dictatorship of the rich, requiring far greater degradation to
motivate the people, and greater violence than any previous revolution due to the advance of
technology. I fear that both will in fact occur, after a long era of US corruption.
Deniz , March 19, 2018 at 12:36 pm
Brennans screech confirms that Trump is not just smoke and mirrors. He really hit the
bureaucracy where it hurts, their pensions -- brilliant move.
orwell , March 19, 2018 at 1:15 pm
It's nice to see that everybody here agrees about this situation. Really refreshing, and
no pro-CIA/FBI TROLLS !!!!!!
I remember that Larry Johnson described this threat in detail more than a year ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMkR_5Sesgg
It was on RT but he made a lot of sense. Appears to have been vindicated.
backwardsevolution , March 19, 2018 at 4:39 pm
Herry Smith -- thanks for posting that interview. Larry Johnson was excellent, articulate,
and he's going to be proven right.
Gregory Kruse , March 19, 2018 at 2:05 pm
"Shortly before his re-election in 2012, Obama reportedly was braced at a small dinner
party by wealthy donors who wanted to know whatever happened to the 'progressive Obama.' The
President did not take kindly to the criticism, rose from the table, and said, 'Don't you
remember what happened to Dr. King?'"
Dr. Ip , March 19, 2018 at 3:06 pm
" Trump and Brennan represent equally criminal factions of the ruling class, divided
over foreign policy, particularly in the civil war in Syria, and more generally towards
Russia.
Brennan and the Democrats speak for powerful sections of the military-intelligence
apparatus embittered by the failure of US intervention in Syria and Trump's apparent
abandonment of the Islamic fundamentalist groups armed by the CIA to fight the Russian and
Iranian-backed government of President Bashar al-Assad. They want to push further into the
Syrian slaughter, regardless of the risk of open military conflict with Russia, the world's
second strongest nuclear power. "
It is imperative to bring about a cleansing of the FBI and DOJ, removing high-ranking
officials who place politics and personal agendas ahead of enforcing the law fairly and
without bias. Will that mean a "war" with the deep state? Or are there enough people within
the FBI and DOJ who WANT to remove the stains from their agencies? If so, we may see more
corruption exposed in the coming days.
A cleansing of the CIA or NSA is probably not feasible, even though it is sorely needed. If
the president tried, he would probably be regime-changed.
Bob Van Noy , March 19, 2018 at 3:39 pm
Craig Murray has been totally reliable on Russiagate from the beginning. There is an
excellent synopsis of his web reporting with commentary at Unz for those interested.
http://www.unz.com/article/russian-to-judgement/
JWalters , March 19, 2018 at 10:24 pm
Excellent link. Thanks very much. His theory that the murder of the ex-Russian spy in
England was an Israeli false flag operation seems to me the most plausible theory, for the
reasons he states. And it fits so well into the overall picture.
KiwiAntz , March 19, 2018 at 4:03 pm
What a Banana Republic America has become? Russia has just had it's election & we have
had all the usual negative comments by Western Leaders regarding Putin & Russia's
supposed lack of a democratic process in voting?
Russians, at least, voted for a well known individual in Putin with a proven track record,
so they know exactly what they can look forward to, secure in that knowledge of certainty?
Russia has no Deepstate puppeteer's pulling the strings behind the scenes!
Contrast that with America? The whole Political system is corrupt & dominated by
Corporate money paying off its Leaders? The sick joke is America claims it's a Democracy
which it isn't? It's a Fascist Oligarchy ruled by a unelected Deepstate, & it doesn't
matter what Party or Leader you voted for, the Deepstate, shadow Govt never just marches on
& rules?
It also raises the issue, is there any point in American's actually getting out &
voting every 4 yrs, they may as well just stay home & have a beer instead, as this
electoral process is a complete & utter farce! America's Deepstate Govt doesn't need or
care for your vote? Your vote doesn't matter in the overall scheme of things? And that, by
definition, is what America has become, a Banana Republic!
Typingperson , March 20, 2018 at 12:47 am
True. And sad.
Michael Wilk , March 19, 2018 at 4:06 pm
Speaking for myself, I'd love nothing more than to see that degenerate orange-painted
child take the intel agencies and their scum-willing leaders down several pegs, just to
remind them who is supposed to be working for whom. Alas, the Great Orange Dope hasn't the
brains to do anything but screw things up. But give the boy credit for trying, bless his
toupée-glue-crusted head.
backwardsevolution , March 19, 2018 at 5:04 pm
Dumb like a fox: to be smart or cunning, but pretend you don't know what you're doing.
President Trump is letting them hang themselves. As someone said above, he is smoking them
out. It is working beautifully too. Who, besides Trump, could have or would have put up with
what he's had to contend with? It took a tough, hard-shelled individual who wouldn't cow,
someone who would hang in there long enough while the others (the Inspector General,
intelligence committees) could do their work.
I grant you that President Trump's brain is not like Slick Willy's or polished smooth like
the last Narcissist in Chief, but he's right about a lot of things: you can't have a country
without borders; you can't have a country without making your own steel and a healthy
manufacturing base; and you can't have a country run by the intelligence agencies.
I'm putting my money on Trump.
Michael Wilk , March 19, 2018 at 5:50 pm
That might be true if this country respected the borders of other nations or if it
actually brought back steel-making and a healthy manufacturing base. But Caligula Drumpf
never intended to bring any of that back, nor will he even try. Oh, he'll make a few token
statements bragging about his exaggerated actions having actually achieved success, but
that's all it will be is empty boasting. Let's face it: Drumpf supporters were had.
backwardsevolution , March 19, 2018 at 6:11 pm
Too early to call. It took years to ship all of the jobs overseas (thanks, Slick Willy!),
and it will take years to bring them back. Did you think Trump was magical, that he could
bring the jobs back in one year with the wave of a wand or something? I mean, he's been a tad
busy fighting the intelligence community, hasn't he?
If given the chance, he will secure the borders, decrease immigration, institute a
merit-based immigration system, bring some jobs back (a lot are being automated). The
globalists are losing, but it takes time.
The Swamp will take time to drain as well, but it's proceeding along quite nicely.
But Drumpf won't even try to bring the jobs back. This is not a matter of how quickly he
can do something he's never going to do, but about his will to actually follow through on his
campaign promises. There's simply no reason to believe Drumpf will bother. Why would he? He's
got no stake in bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.
Bart Hansen , March 19, 2018 at 5:28 pm
That "six ways from Sunday" saying may keep Schumer in line; but for Trump, what could
they possibly have against him that would in the least embarrass or bother his voters,
himself or his family? Day after day he crosses a variety of moral red lines.
F. G. Sanford , March 19, 2018 at 6:22 pm
That "moral turpitude" reference seems to imply that there is some -- yet to be
revealed -- scandal held in abeyance, fully capable of delivering a decisive blow. And, the
"deep staters" are merely waiting for the right moment to pull this shark-toothed rabbit out
of the hat. I can't help but wonder what you suspect they'll try next, Ray but this
whole thing reminds me of an old friend's advice given to me during a dark and desolate
period of my own life: "If they had something really good, they'd have used it by now."
jaycee , March 19, 2018 at 7:23 pm
A word of caution -- the intensely partisan fighting may induce a certain fascination as a
spectator, like eye-witnessing the aftermath of a vehicle accident, but what is happening is
without precedent, at least in modern history. Former heads of the nation's top
intelligence organization do not attack sitting presidents, let alone in such a visceral
vituperative and public fashion. This is indication of deep fissures, quite beyond politics
as most citizens understand. As the World Socialist Web Site published today: "There is no
recent parallel for statements and actions such as those of the past three days. One would
have to go back to the period before the American Civil War to find equivalent levels of
tension, which in the late 1850s erupted in violence in the halls of Congress before
exploding in full-scale military conflict."
Trump is a maverick outsider so it's hard to get a handle on what or who he
represents, but the Brennan/deep state side of the dispute is very much aligned with the
corporate DNC Democratic Party. That they seem, by Brennan's comments, to consider themselves
as the representation of "America" as they abandon constitutional and etiquette norms and
articulate visceral hatred towards political rivals should serve as fair warning.
backwardsevolution , March 19, 2018 at 8:25 pm
jaycee -- great post. I agree with what you've said: what is happening IS without
precedent, Brennan/deep state ARE aligned with the Democrats, and they believe only THEY
represent the true "America".
Dangerous game by very dangerous people who are systematically destroying the Constitution
in their quest to retain power.
Over and over I've heard people who know Trump well say that he listens to them, but then
makes up his own mind. They say he wants to stay true to what he promised to the American
people, that that is actually important to him. Of course he's willing to compromise some,
but he wants the basics of what he promised.
If the Swamp takes him out, the lid is going to come off.
Kevin Zeese: "He basically is a Senator for Israel. He totally supports the Israeli
foreign policy viewpoint, which is a very hawkish, if you were a Republican you would call
him a neocon."
Ariel Gold: "He has come out in strong opposition to the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions
movement and was very supportive of New York Governor Cuomo's order to ban BDS in New York
state, and Schumer made a direct statement in support of that."
Thomas Hedges: "Schumer's staunch support for Israel has prompted him for example, to
criticize the Obama administration, when in 2016, the United States abstained from a UN
Security Council resolution re-affirming something the Council had almost unanimously upheld
since 1979. Namely, that Israel's settlement building projects on Palestinian land violated
international law."
Ben Norton: "Schumer criticized the Obama administration for abstaining on this very basic
resolution, which every other country voted for. So the US was still a pariah, because the US
didn't vote for it, it just abstained on it. But to Schumer that was not enough, he wanted it
to be completely vetoed, because anything that Israel does is sacrosanct, and anyone who
criticizes it, in Schumer's eyes, is not someone he wants to ally with politically, so he'd
rather affectively ally with Trump."
Thomas Hedges: "The most recent showing of that allegiance was [ ] when Schumer supported
Trump's decision to launch an air strike on an Air Force base in Syria, something Israel also
strongly supported. [ ] But perhaps Schumer's greatest show of allegiance to Israel, was his
decision to oppose the Iran nuclear deal, without which experts have warned, would put the
United States and Iran on a collision course."
Ben Norton: "Under President Obama, Schumer was one of the most prominent Democrats to
oppose the Iran nuclear deal, and he was of course fearmongering about Iran, which to him is
the devil incarnate, and he actually made factually false statements about the nuclear
agreement, and claimed that it would allow Iran in 10 years to produce nuclear weapons
etc."
Thomas Hedges: "Leading up to his decision, Schumer reassured Zionists that he was
consulting the most credentialed men in Washington, including Henry Kissinger, an opponent of
the deal, and the man who orchestrated the violent coup in Chile that toppled its
democratically elected leader, as well as the architect of the very bloody Vietnam war."
Chuck Schumer: I spent some time with Dr. Kissinger, I'm spending time with
excellence.
Ariel Gold: So it threatened to pull us into another war, and we're back in that threat
again with Trump winning the election we hear a lot about undoing the Iran nuclear deal, and
it's one of the things that Israel has been saying they would like to see come out of the
Trump administration.
Thomas Hedges: Schumer's willingness to oppose the deal early on, which created an opening
for other undecided Democrats to do the same, is a strong display of support for Israel.
JWalters , March 19, 2018 at 10:32 pm
Spot on about Chuck Schumer. The following link, from a Jewish-run, anti-Zionist website,
proves that Schumer lies to Americans for the benefit of Israel. He puts Israel's interests
above those of the US. He is an Israeli mole in the US government. "Schumer says he
opposed the Iran deal because of 'threat to Israel'"http://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/schumer-opposed-because/
Opus Doi , March 19, 2018 at 7:40 pm
America will triumph over you. Wo wo wo. Wo wo wo. Doo doo-doo doo doo! ?
Brennan is history's most hilarious DCI. His grandiose hissy fit suggests that CIA
continues the Dulles tradition of infiltrating the civil service with 'focal points -'
illegal CIA moles infiltrating US government agencies -- and the IG fumigated one key out in
firing McCabe.
backwardsevolution , March 19, 2018 at 8:35 pm
Opus Doi -- and the MSM and the Left see the "crime" being that McCabe was fired, not
that McCabe broke the law. Kind of like when they didn't see a crime in Hillary using her own
personal servers, but saw the crime as being that the emails might have been hacked by a
foreign government. That they had no evidence of this didn't matter.
Brennan sounds like a desperate man. They must be getting closer to him.
Opus Doi , March 20, 2018 at 7:56 am
See how this works? The article is about Brennan. The comment is about Brennan's CIA.
But immersive CIA propaganda immediately diverts the topic to CIA's synthetic warring
factions, Hillary! Trump! Hillary! Trump!
People need to come to grips with the fact that the past four presidents -- the ones you
hate and the ones you like -- were all drawn from CIA nomenklatura. DCI Bush; Bill Clinton,
recruited by Cord Meyer at Oxford; spy brat and hopeless Arubusto 'wildcatter' GW Bush; and
Obama, son of spooks, grandson of spooks, greased into Harvard by Alwaleed bin-Talal's
bagman, invisible student at Columbia, honored guest of the future acting president of
Pakistan before his career even started. Before CIA took over directly they thwarted (Truman,
Eisenhower's disarmament plan, Carter's human rights initiative,) purged (Nixon, Carter,)
shot at (Ford,) and shot (Kennedy, Reagan) their presidential figureheads.
CIA runs your country. You're not going to get anywhere until you stop bickering about
their presidential puppet rulers.
Kenneth Rapoza , March 19, 2018 at 8:46 pm
Who makes the laws? He who makes the laws can break the laws. I would bet my life that
Brenna, Hillary and all the "deep state" actors do not see one second in jail nor pay a
nickel in fines.
backwardsevolution , March 19, 2018 at 10:22 pm
Comey and McCabe were fired for breaking the law. Lots of laws have been broken. The only
thing separating the U.S. and a Third World country is the Rule of Law. Start breaking laws
and looking the other way on corruption and you've got a Banana Republic. Jail time coming up
for some of them.
E. Leete , March 20, 2018 at 1:29 pm
"Give me control over a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws." -- Meyer A
Rothschild
Whoever controls the creation and destruction of money, as well as credit regulation (this
is the deep state; the massive financial matrix including the MIC -- all run by wealthpower
giants with their insatiable desires for power to control nothing less than the entire
planet) controls the government including the spook/spy agencies (this is the shadow
government).
the two are intimately connected, of course, and function thru unbridled unconstitutional
powers of secrecy -- empowered by the state secrets privilege
nothing changes until we once and for all time do away with the bankers having the power
to issue our money as debt
because, again, it all starts with private control of money creation -- the most enormous
farce in all of history and it rules yet today
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large
centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson." -- Franklin Delano
Roosevelt
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no
allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people." -- Theodore Roosevelt
"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some
of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid
of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized,
so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not
speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." -- Woodrow Wilson
The mention of John Brennan brings to mind the bizarre death of Rolling Stone's
writer, Michael Hastings, who was reported to be working on a story about Brennan just before
he had his "accident".
Imagine if a Trump tweet alleged that a man who was found guilty by the FBI was really
innocent. Imagine if Trump tweeted that a man was really guilty despite no evidence found
after almost 2 years of investigation.
What would be the response to either tweet be from the MS Media? Our MS Media is
nothing more than Democrat Propaganda, and that situation will doom us to Russian
interference. Every election the Russians can do the same as 2016: release the truth about
justice not served.
Skip Scott , March 20, 2018 at 1:00 pm
Michael-
I'm no fan of Trump, but Hillary had absolutely no intention to "address the needs of the
people". They are all globalizing warmongers who know how to say what needs to be said to get
elected, and then do whatever their paymasters tell them. Hillary's speeches to her banker
buddies unearthed via Podesta's email account show that she felt it necessary to have
"private views" separate from her "public views". How much plainer could it be than that!
j. D. D. , March 20, 2018 at 7:59 am
"Does one collect a full pension in jail?" Brilliant, provocative and persuasive, in the
way that any follower of Ray McGovern has come to expect.
Abe , March 21, 2018 at 11:38 am
As the Russia-gate fictions erode and Israel-gate emerges, the Hasbara troll army is
scraping the bottom of the propaganda barrel.
Here we have "j. D. D." and the shrill refrain of "BobS"
Comrade "BobS" and fellow Hasbara troll "will" are positively obsessed about Reagan era
"dirty wars" Central and South America. That's understandable.
Israel has advised, trained and equipped, and ran "dirty war" operations in the Latin
American "dirty war" conflicts in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Colombia.
In the case of the Salvadoran "bloodbath", the Israelis were present from the beginning.
Besides arms sales, they helped train ANSESAL, the secret police who were later to form the
framework of the infamous death squads that would kill tens of thousands of mostly civilian
activists.
McGovern certainly understands what sort of "ally" Israel can be.
So keep on yappin' "BobS". We got you.
IsItAnyWonder , March 20, 2018 at 11:10 am
USMC activated. Well, I'd put my two-cents on POTUS. Just like we've all seen
throughout our lives when the supposed tough guy starts making threats he is really scared
Sh**less. Lots of these clowns are just going to disappear during the late night hours of the
day never to be heard from again.
Our society is sitting on a knifes edge, anything at all happens to Trump and the entire
nation will just burn to the ground with literal blood in the streets. No one needs to pound
their chest and say what tough guy acts they will do since most of the heavy lifting is
already going on with Spec Ops and very soon USMC.
Most of us would not have the skills are knowledge to do what is needed. Foggy Bottom is
about to get a big enema along with the CIA to our benefit. Guys like Brennan are scared
rats in a sinking ship, good riddance!
geeyp , March 20, 2018 at 3:05 pm
Excuse me Mr. Williamson, I think you are precisely right. This indeed is the time to get
it all out. Expose it all. Lay it all out and go for it. These people have it coming to
them.
will , March 20, 2018 at 1:23 pm
What an amazingly illuminating article. Devin Nunes, who perfectly ok with wire taps
as long as the target aren't from his party is somehow a noble individual. While I agree that
Brennan should be in prison, it should be for torturing people ...
Abe , March 21, 2018 at 12:18 pm
As the Russia-gate fictions erode and Israel-gate emerges, the Hasbara propaganda troll
army keeps on sending in the clowns.
Comrade "will" and his fellow Hasbara troll "BobS" recite the same propaganda script,
going on and on about the war in Latin America.
Of course, the trolls never mention the fact that the US government, especially the CIA,
recruited an all-too-eager Israel to "support" the Central and South American military forces
and intelligence units engaged in violent and widespread repression during the Reagan and
Bush era "dirty wars".
Recently declassified 1983 US government documents have obtained by the Washington,
DC-based National Security Archives through the Freedom of Information Act. One such
declassified document is a 1983 memo from the notorious Colonel Oliver North of the Reagan
Administration's National Security Council and reads: "As discussed with you yesterday, I
asked CIA, Defense, and State to suggest practical assistance which the Israelis might offer
in Guatemala and El Salvador."
Another document, this time a 1983 cable from the US Ambassador in Guatemala to Washington
Frederic Chapin shows the money trail. Chapin says that at a time when the US did not want to
be seen directly assisting Guatemala, "we have reason to believe that our good friends the
Israelis are prepared, or already have, offered substantial amounts of military equipment to
the GOG (Government of Guatemala) on credit terms up to 20 years (I pass over the importance
of making huge concessionary loans to Israel so that it can make term loans in our own
backyard)."
The Reagan and Bush era "dirty wars" were bad enough. The Israeli-Saudi-US Axis jumped the
shark with Bush the Lesser and Obama wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Under Trump,
Israel remains only to happy to continue providing "support" for Al Qaeda and ISIS.
So keep on blabbin', Hasbara troll team mates "will" and "BobS". We got you.
Drogon , March 20, 2018 at 6:45 pm
"It is an open secret that the CIA has been leaking like the proverbial sieve over the
last two years or so" And this is supposed to be a bad thing? I'm sorry, but the more leaks
the better IMO.
Drogon, You're right; usually the more leaks the better ..BUT these are "AUTHORIZED" leaks
to co-opted journalists and PR people like Palmieri designed to give some "substance" to
Russia-gate, for example. ray
"... It is an open secret that the CIA has been leaking like the proverbial sieve over the last two years or so to its favorite stenographers at the New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post. ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... On April 6, 2017 I attended a panel discussion on "Russia's interference in our democracy" at the Clinton/Podesta Center for American Progress Fund. In my subsequent write-up I noted that panelist Palmieri had inadvertently dropped tidbits of evidence that I suggested "could get some former officials in deep kimchi -- if a serious investigation of leaking, for example, were to be conducted." ..."
"... Palmieri was asked to comment on "what was actually going on in late summer/early fall [2016]." She answered: "It was a surreal experience so I did appreciate that for the press to absorb the idea that behind the stage that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton was too fantastic for people to, um, for the press to process, to absorb . ..."
"... But she lost. And a month ago, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) threw down the gauntlet, indicating that there could be legal consequences, for example, for officials who misled the FISA court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and associates. ..."
"... John Brennan is widely reported to be Nunes's next target. Does one collect a full pension in jail? ..."
"... Unmasking: Senior national security officials are permitted to ask the National Security Agency to unmask the names of Americans in intercepted communications for national security reasons -- not for domestic political purposes. ..."
"... Brennan's words and attitude are a not-so-subtle reminder of the heavy influence and confidence of the deep state, including the media -- exercised to a fare-thee-well over the past two years. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the Washington Post ..."
"... The Post, incidentally, waited until paragraph 41 of 44 to inform readers that it was the FBI's own Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General of the Department of Justice that found McCabe guilty, and that the charge was against McCabe, not the FBI. A quite different impression was conveyed by the large headline "Trump escalates attacks on FBI" as well as the first 40 paragraphs of Sunday's lead article. ..."
"... "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," Schumer told Maddow. "So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." Did Maddow ask Schumer if he was saying President of the United States should be afraid of the intelligence community? No, she let Schumer's theorem stand. ..."
With former CIA Director John Brennan accusing President Donald Trump of "moral turpitude"
for his "scapegoating" of Andy McCabe, it remains to be seen whether a constitutional crisis
will be averted, writes Ray McGovern.
What prompted former CIA Director John Brennan on Saturday to accuse President Donald Trump
of "moral turpitude" and to predict, with an alliterative flourish, that Trump will end up "as
a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history"? The answer shines through the next sentence
in Brennan's threatening tweet : "You
may scapegoat Andy McCabe [former FBI Deputy Director fired Friday night] but you will not
destroy America America will triumph over you."
It is easy to see why Brennan lost it. The Attorney General fired McCabe, denying him full
retirement benefits, because McCabe "had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and
lacked candor -- including under oath -- on multiple occasions." There but for the grace of God
go I, Brennan must have thought, whose stock in trade has been unauthorized disclosures.
In fact, Brennan can take but small, short-lived consolation in the fact that he succeeded
in leaving with a full government pension. His own unauthorized disclosures and leaks probably
dwarf in number, importance, and sensitivity those of McCabe. And many of those leaks appear to
have been based on sensitive intercepted conversations from which the names of American
citizens were unmasked for political purposes. Not to mention the leaks of faux intelligence
like that contained in the dubious "dossier" cobbled together for the Democrats by British
ex-spy Christopher Steele.
It is an open secret that the CIA has been leaking like the proverbial sieve over the
last two years or so to its favorite stenographers at the New York Times and
Washington Post. (At one point, the obvious whispering reached the point that the
Wall Street Journal saw fit to complain that it was being neglected.) The leaking can
be traced way back -- at least as far as the Clinton campaign's decision to blame the Russians
for the publication of very damning DNC emails by WikiLeaks just three days before the
Democratic National Convention.
This blame game turned out to be a hugely successful effort to divert attention from the
content of the emails, which showed in bas relief the dirty tricks the DNC
played on Bernie Sanders. The media readily fell in line, and all attention was deflected from
the substance of the DNC emails to the question as to why the Russians supposedly
"hacked into the DNC and gave the emails to WikiLeaks."
This media operation worked like a charm, but even Secretary Clinton's PR person, Jennifer
Palmieri, conceded later that at first it strained credulity that the Russians would be doing
what they were being accused of doing.
Magnificent Diversion
On April 6, 2017 I attended a panel discussion on "Russia's interference in our
democracy" at the Clinton/Podesta Center for American Progress Fund. In my subsequent write-up I noted that panelist
Palmieri had inadvertently dropped tidbits of evidence that I suggested "could get some former
officials in deep kimchi -- if a serious investigation of leaking, for example, were to be
conducted." (That time seems to be coming soon.)
Palmieri was asked to comment on "what was actually going on in late summer/early fall
[2016]." She answered: "It was a surreal experience so I did appreciate that for the press to
absorb the idea that behind the stage that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to
defeat Hillary Clinton was too fantastic for people to, um, for the press to process, to absorb
.
"But then we go back to Brooklyn [Clinton headquarters] and heard from the -- mostly our
sources were other intelligence, with the press who work in the intelligence sphere, and that's
where we heard things and that's where we learned about the dossier and the other story lines
that were swirling about; and how to process And along the way the administration started
confirming various pieces of what they were concerned about what Russia was doing. So I do
think that the answer for the Democrats now in both the House and the Senate is to talk about
it more and make it more real."
So the leaking had an early start, and went on steroids during the months following the
Democratic Convention up to the election -- and beyond.
As a Reminder
None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, or other activities directed against the Trump
campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind that it was considered a sure
thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which point illegal and extralegal
activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not prison.
But she lost. And a month ago, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA)
threw down the gauntlet, indicating
that there could be legal consequences, for example, for officials who misled the FISA court in
order to enable surveillance on Trump and associates. His words are likely to have sent
chills down the spine of yet other miscreants. "If they need to be put on trial, we will put
them on trial," he said. "The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we
created."
John Brennan is widely reported to be Nunes's next target. Does one collect a full
pension in jail?
Unmasking: Senior national security officials are permitted to ask the National Security
Agency to unmask the names of Americans in intercepted communications for national security
reasons -- not for domestic political purposes. Congressional committees have questioned
why Obama's UN ambassador Samantha Power (as well as his national security adviser Susan Rice)
made so many unmasking requests. Power is reported to have requested the unmasking of more than
260 Americans, most of them in the final days of the administration, including the names of
Trump associates.
Deep State Intimidation
Back to John Brennan's bizarre tweet Saturday telling the President, "You may scapegoat Andy
McCabe but you will not destroy America America will triumph over you." Unmasking the word
"America," so to speak, one can readily discern the name "Brennan" underneath. Brennan's
words and attitude are a not-so-subtle reminder of the heavy influence and confidence of the
deep state, including the media -- exercised to a fare-thee-well over the past two
years.
Later on Saturday, Samantha Power, with similar equities at stake, put an exclamation point
behind what Brennan had tweeted earlier in the day. Power also saw fit to remind Trump where
the power lies, so to speak. She warned him publicly that it is "not a good idea to piss off
John Brennan."
Meanwhile, the Washington Post is dutifully playing its part in the deep-state
game of intimidation. The following excerpt from Sunday's lead article conveys the intended
message: "Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI. 'This
is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI's going to win,' said one ally, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to be candid. 'You can't fight the FBI. They're going to torch him.'"
[sic]
The Post, incidentally, waited until paragraph 41 of 44 to inform readers that it was
the FBI's own Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General of the Department
of Justice that found McCabe guilty, and that the charge was against McCabe, not the FBI. A
quite different impression was conveyed by the
large headline "Trump escalates attacks on FBI" as well as the first 40 paragraphs of Sunday's
lead article.
Putting Down a Marker
It isn't as though Donald Trump wasn't warned, as are all incoming presidents, of the power
of the Deep State that he needs to play ball with -- or else. Recall that just three days
before President-elect Trump was visited by National Intelligence Director James Clapper, FBI
Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Michael Rogers, Trump was put
on notice by none other than the Minority Leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer. Schumer has been
around and knows the ropes; he is a veteran of 18 years in the House, and is in his 20th year
in the Senate.
On Jan. 3, 2017 Schumer said it all, when he told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, that
President-elect Trump is "being really dumb" by taking on the intelligence community and its
assessments on Russia's cyber activities:
"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday
at getting back at you," Schumer told Maddow. "So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed
businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." Did Maddow ask Schumer if he was saying
President of the United States should be afraid of the intelligence community? No, she let
Schumer's theorem stand.
With gauntlets now thrown down by both sides, we may not have to wait very long to see if
Schumer is correct in his blithe prediction as to how the present constitutional crisis will be
resolved.
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as a CIA analyst under seven Presidents and nine
CIA directors and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).
Western journalists, with a very small exception (real outliers), are experts at presenting
one-sided arguments, whatever the facts and evidence. Look at Meagan Kelly interviews for the inspiration.
They know how to wear down any dissident who does not buy into government talking points
If you spend any time on Twitter, you'll probably be familiar with the latest pathetic attempt to defend and insulate the U.S.
status quo from criticism. It centers around the usage of an infantile and meaningless term, "whataboutism."
Let's begin with one particularly absurd accusation of "whataboutism" promoted by
NPR
last year:
When O'Reilly countered that "Putin is a killer," Trump responded, "There are a lot of killers. You got a lot of killers. What,
you think our country is so innocent?"
This particular brand of changing the subject is called "whataboutism" -- a simple rhetorical tactic heavily used by the Soviet
Union and, later, Russia. And its use in Russia helps illustrate how it could be such a useful tool now, in America. As Russian
political experts told NPR, it's an attractive tactic for populists in particular, allowing them to be vague but appear straight-talking
at the same time.
The idea behind whataboutism is simple: Party A accuses Party B of doing something bad. Party B responds by changing the subject
and pointing out one of Party A's faults -- "Yeah? Well what about that bad thing you did?" (Hence the name.)
It's not exactly a complicated tactic -- any grade-schooler can master the "yeah-well-you-suck-too-so-there" defense. But it
came to be associated with the USSR because of the Soviet Union's heavy reliance upon whataboutism throughout the Cold War and
afterward, as Russia.
This is a really embarrassing take by NPR .
First, the author tries to associate a tactic that's been around since humans first wandered into caves -- deflecting attention
away from yourself by pointing out the flaws in others -- into some uniquely nefarious Russian propaganda tool. Second, that's not
even what Trump did in this example.
In his response to O'Reilly, Trump wasn't using "whataboutism" to deflect away from his own sins. Rather, he offered a rare moment
of self-reflection about the true role played by the U.S. government around the world. This isn't "whataboutism," it's questioning
the hypocrisy and abuse of power of one's own government. It's an attempt to take responsibility for stuff he might actually be able
to change as President. It's the most ethical and honest response to that question in light of the amount of violence the U.S. government
engages in abroad. If our leaders did this more often, we might stop repeatedly jumping from one insane and destructive war to the
next.
Had O'Reilly's question been about the U.S. government's ongoing support of Saudi Arabia's war crimes in Yemen and Trump shifted
the conversation to Russian atrocities, he could then be fairly accused of changing the subject to avoid accountability. In that
case, you could condemn Trump for "whataboutism" because he intentionally deflected attention away from his own government's sins
to the sins of another. This sort of thing is indeed very dangerous, especially when done by someone in a position of power.
But here's the thing. You don't need some catchy, infantile term like "whataboutism" to point out that someone in power's deflecting
attention from their own transgressions. I agree wholeheartedly with Adam Johnson when he states:
He's absolutely right. One should never rely on the lazy use of a cutesy, catchy term like "whataboutism" as a retort to someone
who points out a glaring contradiction. If you do, you're either a propagandist with no counterargument or a fool who mindlessly
adopts the jingoistic cues of others. Responding to someone by saying "that's just whataboutism" isn't an argument, it's an assault
on one's logical faculties. It's attempt to provide people with a way to shut down debate and conversation by simply blurting out
a clever sounding fake-word. Here's an example of how I've seen it used on Twitter.
One U.S. citizen (likely a card carrying member of "the resistance") will regurgitate some standard intel agency line on Syria
or Russia. Another U.S. citizen will then draw attention to the fact that their own government plays an active role in egregious
war crimes in Yemen on behalf of the Saudis. This person will proceed to advocate for skepticism with regard to U.S. government and
intelligence agency war promotion considering how badly the public was deceived in the run up to the Iraq war. For this offense,
they'll be accused of "whataboutism."
The problem with this accusation is that this person isn't switching the subject to bring up another's transgression to deflect
from scrutiny of his or her behavior. In contrast, the person is putting the conversation in its rightful place, which is to question
the behavior of one's own country. When it comes to issues such as nation-state violence, the primary duty of a citizen is not to
obsess all day about the violence perpetrated by foreign governments, but to hold one's own government accountable. This is as true
for an American citizen in American as it is for a Russian citizen in Russia.
NPR explained how the Russian government used "whataboutism" to deflect away from it's own crimes, but Trump actually did the
opposite in his interview with O'Reilly. He wasn't deflecting away from his own country's crimes, he was pointing out that they exist.
That's precisely what you're supposed to do as a citizen.
The problem arises when governments deflect attention away from their own crimes for which they are actually responsible, by pointing
out the crimes of a foreign government. This is indeed propaganda and an evasion of responsibility. Calling out your own government's
hypocrisy in matters of state sanctioned murder abroad is the exact opposite sort of thing.
Noam Chomsky put it better than I ever could. Here's what he said
in
a 2003 interview
:
QUESTION: When you talk about the role of intellectuals, you say that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country.
Could you explain this assertion?
CHOMSKY: One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the anticipated consequences of your own
actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis Khan, but there isn't much that you can do about them. If Soviet intellectuals
chose to devote their energies to crimes of the U.S., which they could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those
who recognized that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country. And it is interesting that no one ever asks for an explanation,
because in the case of official enemies, truisms are indeed truisms. It is when truisms are applied to ourselves that they become
contentious, or even outrageous. But they remain truisms. In fact, the truisms hold far more for us than they did for Soviet dissidents,
for the simple reason that we are in free societies, do not face repression, and can have a substantial influence on government
policy. So if we adopt truisms, that is where we will focus most of our energy and commitment. The explanation is even more obvious
than in the case of official enemies.
Naturally, truisms are hated when applied to oneself. You can see it dramatically in the case of terrorism. In fact one of
the reasons why I am considered "public enemy number one" among a large sector of intellectuals in the U.S. is that I mention
that the U.S. is one of the major terrorist states in the world and this assertion, though plainly true, is unacceptable for many
intellectuals, including left-liberal intellectuals, because if we faced such truths we could do something about the terrorist
acts for which we are responsible, accepting elementary moral responsibilities instead of lauding ourselves for denouncing the
crimes official enemies, about which we can often do very little.
Elementary honesty is often uncomfortable, in personal life as well, and there are people who make great efforts to evade it.
For intellectuals, throughout history, it has often come close to being their vocation. Intellectuals are commonly integrated
into dominant institutions. Their privilege and prestige derives from adapting to the interests of power concentrations, often
taking a critical look but in very limited ways. For example, one may criticize the war in Vietnam as a "mistake" that began with
"benign intentions". But it goes too far to say that the war is not "a mistake" but was "fundamentally wrong and immoral". the
position of about 70 percent of the public by the late 1960s, persisting until today, but of only a margin of intellectuals. The
same is true of terrorism. In acceptable discourse, as can easily be demonstrated, the term is used to refer to terrorist acts
that THEY carry out against US, not those that WE carry out against THEM. That is probably close to a historical universal. And
there are innumerable other examples.
For saying the above, Noam Chomsky would surely be labeled the godfather of "whataboutism" by Twitter's resistance army, but he's
actually advocating the most ethical, logical and courageous path of citizenship. U.S. taxpayers aren't paying for Russia's military
operations, but they are paying for the U.S. government's. The idea that U.S. citizens emphasizing U.S. violence are committing the
thought-crime of "whataboutism" when it comes to foreign policy is absurd. Our primary responsibility as citizens is our own aggressive
and violent foreign policy, not that of other countries.
Naturally, this isn't how neocon/neoliberal and intelligence agency imperialists want you to think. Proponents of the American
empire need the public to ignore the atrocities of the U.S. government and its allies for obvious reasons, while constantly obsessing
over the atrocities of the empire's official enemies. This is the only way to continue to exert force abroad without domestic pushback,
and it's critical in order to keep the imperial gravy train going for those it benefits so significantly. How do you shut down vibrant
foreign policy debate on social media that exposes imperial hypocrisy? Accuse people of "whataboutism."
That's what I see going on. I see the weaponization of a cutesy, catchy term on social media in order to prevent people from
questioning their own government. It's completely logical and ethical for U.S. citizens to push back against those arguing for more
regime change wars by pointing out the evils of our own foreign policy.
In fact, the unethical position is the one espoused by those who claim the U.S. can do no wrong, but when an adversary country
does what we permit ourselves to do, they must be bombed into oblivion. These people know they have no argument, so they run around
condemning those trying to hold their own government accountable of "whataboutism." It's a nonsensical term with no real meaning
or purpose other than to defend imperial talking points.
Accusations of "whataboutism" amount to a cynical, sleazy attempt to stifle debate without actually engaging in argument.
It's also the sort of desperate and childish propaganda tactic you'd expect during late-stage imperial decline.
* * *
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"... For requesting evidence of Russian culpability in the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been denounced by PM Theresa May and even members of his own party. ..."
"... he British government demanded that Russia offer an explanation, but then rejected a Russian request to share a sample of the nerve agent that was used in the poisoning. ..."
"... JEREMY CORBYN: Our response must be both decisive and proportionate, and based on clear evidence. If the government believes that it is still a possibility that Russia negligently lost control of a military grade nerve agent, what action is being taken through the OPCW with our allies? I welcome the fact the police are working with the OPCW, and has the prime minister taken the necessary steps under the Chemical Weapons Convention to make a formal request for evidence from the Russian government under Article 9.2? How has she responded to the Russian government's request for a sample of the agent used in the Salisbury attack to run its own tests? Has high resolution trace analysis been run on a sample of the nerve agent? And has that revealed any evidence as to the location of its production or the identity of its perpetrators? ..."
"... My first reaction having listened to the clip you played by Jeremy Corbyn is that's one very courageous man. It's not clear even his own Labour Party supports what he said. ..."
"... So, I kind of quarrel with your opening sentence that relations are as bad as they've been since the end of the Cold War. I say, no they're worse than they were during the Cold War. I jotted down just a few reasons. Let me just rattle them off and then we'll get to this, any other event you want to talk about. The reason this new Cold War is more dangerous is we already have three fronts that are fraught with hot war. That's where the NATO buildup in the North Baltic and the Black Sea, Ukraine, and Syria. Remember in Syria, it appears to be the case that American proxies have already killed Russian citizens. So, we don't know what's going to come next. ..."
"... Secondly, two of these fronts are directly on Russia's borders, not in Berlin as was the case during the preceding Cold War, right on Russia's borders in the Baltic region and in Ukraine. Thirdly, there has been such demonization of the Kremlin leader, Putin, unlike anything that was the case during the old Cold War with Kremlin communist leaders, and along with it a kind of a Russophobic attack on Russia itself the old Cold War was about communism. This one seems to be about Russia just in general. And then you get this lightning speed of news as with this nerve agent, with people weighing in without any authority or any knowledge, very very quickly, and it's spreading before anybody has a time has time to reflect, and think, an actual expert opinion come to the fore. ..."
"... Theresa May is, perhaps, among the weakest prime ministers in modern history. She's holding on for dear life. Jeremy Corbyn is an extraordinary figure. His party, his Labour Party, which is not very good on Russia related issues either, didn't approve of what he said. But he said the right thing. He said, "There's no evidence. While we search for evidence, we need to continue a robust dialogue with Russia." That's exactly right. ..."
"... And whether he'll prevail or not, I don't know, but it is interesting, isn't it, that unlike in the United States, the leader of the opposition, which is what Corbyn is, and potentially a prime minister, is setting himself against this reckless Cold War behavior on the part of the British government. All I can say is I wish we had such a person in American high politics. ..."
"... The latest in a continuing campaign of fear and violence, staged for a hapless public, designed to lend legitimacy to authoritarianism and fascism foisted upon our domestic population; brought to you by the same Fear Inc. that capitalized on the Charlie Hebdo massacre ..."
"... With such careless rush to judgement, circumventing due process, as has been demonstrated time and again by a class of corrupt and covetous warmongers posing as public officials and their equally corrupt mainstream propaganda machine, literally everything uttered by the likes of Teresa May and her cohort of psychopathic political charlatans must be viewed with incredulity. ..."
For requesting evidence of Russian culpability in the poisoning of former
spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been denounced by PM Theresa May and even members of his
own party. We discuss the case with Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at New York University and Princeton
AARON MATÉ: It's The Real News. I'm Aaron Maté. Ties between Russia and the West are at their lowest point since The Cold War,
and a new spat over a poisoning in Britain has sunk them even lower. The British government is blaming Russia for the poisoning of
former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the British town of Salisbury.
The two remain in critical condition after ingesting what the British government says is a military-grade nerve agent made by
Russia. The British government demanded that Russia offer an explanation, but then rejected a Russian request to share a sample of
the nerve agent that was used in the poisoning. Speaking today in parliament, British Prime Minister Theresa May said Russia's response
so far proves their culpability.
THERESA MAY: There is no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian state was culpable for the attempted murder of
Mr. Skripal and his daughter. And for threatening the lives of other British citizens in Salisbury, including Detective Sergeant
Nick Bailey. This represents an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom. And as I set out on Monday,
it has taken place against the backdrop of a well established pattern of Russian state aggression across Europe and beyond. It
must therefore, be met with a full and robust response, beyond the actions we have already taken since the murder of Mr. Litvinenko
and to counter this pattern of Russian aggression elsewhere.
AARON MATÉ: As part of the measures against Russia, May announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats, the single biggest such
expulsion in three decades. That drew a response from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who pressed May to hand over evidence.
JEREMY CORBYN: Our response must be both decisive and proportionate, and based on clear evidence. If the government believes
that it is still a possibility that Russia negligently lost control of a military grade nerve agent, what action is being taken
through the OPCW with our allies? I welcome the fact the police are working with the OPCW, and has the prime minister taken the
necessary steps under the Chemical Weapons Convention to make a formal request for evidence from the Russian government under
Article 9.2? How has she responded to the Russian government's request for a sample of the agent used in the Salisbury attack
to run its own tests? Has high resolution trace analysis been run on a sample of the nerve agent? And has that revealed any evidence
as to the location of its production or the identity of its perpetrators?
AARON MATÉ: The dispute over the poisoning has gotten so serious, that there has been speculation of NATO invoking Article 5,
which bounds member states to defend others in the event of an attack. So far, Downing Street has tamped down talk of Article 5,
but Theresa May has been summoning support from key allies, including the US
Joining me is professor Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton. Welcome, Professor
Cohen.
You have been warning for a long time that we are in the midst of a new Cold War. What are your thoughts today as you see now
tensions escalating between Britain and Russia, with now Britain ordering the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats following the expulsions
that have happened in the US to Russian diplomats as a result of the Russiagate controversy?
STEPHEN COHEN: My first reaction having listened to the clip you played by Jeremy Corbyn is that's one very courageous man.
It's not clear even his own Labour Party supports what he said. In the essence of what he said is Theresa May has no evidence,
and yet she's prepared to ratchet up already a bad relationship with Russia based on this. They haven't produced any evidence. Let's
put it like that. This alarms me because, I've said this before on your broadcast, but it's almost never said in the mainstream and
it's hard to get an American discussion of it, is that whether we call our relationship with Russia a new cold war or not, it certainly
is. The point is it's so much more dangerous than the preceding Cold War. I could even argue that the situation today is in some
ways more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So, I kind of quarrel with your opening sentence that relations are as bad as they've been since the end of the Cold War. I say,
no they're worse than they were during the Cold War. I jotted down just a few reasons. Let me just rattle them off and then we'll
get to this, any other event you want to talk about. The reason this new Cold War is more dangerous is we already have three fronts
that are fraught with hot war. That's where the NATO buildup in the North Baltic and the Black Sea, Ukraine, and Syria. Remember
in Syria, it appears to be the case that American proxies have already killed Russian citizens. So, we don't know what's going to
come next.
Secondly, two of these fronts are directly on Russia's borders, not in Berlin as was the case during the preceding Cold War, right
on Russia's borders in the Baltic region and in Ukraine. Thirdly, there has been such demonization of the Kremlin leader, Putin,
unlike anything that was the case during the old Cold War with Kremlin communist leaders, and along with it a kind of a Russophobic
attack on Russia itself the old Cold War was about communism. This one seems to be about Russia just in general. And then you get
this lightning speed of news as with this nerve agent, with people weighing in without any authority or any knowledge, very very
quickly, and it's spreading before anybody has a time has time to reflect, and think, an actual expert opinion come to the fore.
AARON MATÉ: One person who has been pillared in the media today is Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader who we heard from before.
And I wanna play more of his speech of his comments today, to the British parliament.
JEREMY CORBYN: And while suspending planned high level contact, does the prime minister agree that it is essential to maintain
a robust dialogue with Russia in the interest of our own and wider international security?
AARON MATÉ: That's Jeremy Corbyn speaking today, calling today for. "a robust dialogue with Russia." So, Professor Cohen, for
saying that, Corbyn was widely mocked, including by members of his own party. I'm wondering if you can comment on that, the import
of that, not just for this specific case, but overall, this attitude towards having dialogue, calling for dialogue with Russia being
somehow worthy of scorn and contempt.
... ... ...
STEPHEN COHEN: But I've heard some of these people saying privately that we need this, but I don't hear them saying it publicly.
Look, I did live in England and get educated there partly many, many years ago, and I followed British politics. So, I don't have
great authority, but two things come to mind. Theresa May is, perhaps, among the weakest prime ministers in modern history. She's
holding on for dear life. Jeremy Corbyn is an extraordinary figure. His party, his Labour Party, which is not very good on Russia
related issues either, didn't approve of what he said. But he said the right thing. He said, "There's no evidence. While we search
for evidence, we need to continue a robust dialogue with Russia." That's exactly right.
And whether he'll prevail or not, I don't know, but it is interesting, isn't it, that unlike in the United States, the leader
of the opposition, which is what Corbyn is, and potentially a prime minister, is setting himself against this reckless Cold War behavior
on the part of the British government. All I can say is I wish we had such a person in American high politics.
AARON MATÉ: Well, that's a good segue to the next part of our discussion where we're gonna talk more about the role right now
of Russiagate in US politics. Professor Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York
University, thank you.
And thank you for joining us on The Real News.
Stephen F. Cohen is professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University.
The latest in a continuing campaign of fear and violence, staged for a hapless public, designed to lend legitimacy to authoritarianism
and fascism foisted upon our domestic population; brought to you by the same Fear Inc. that capitalized on the Charlie Hebdo
massacre (See Youtube | StormCloudsGathering | 02m:43s " Charlie Hebdo Shootings - Censored Video " [
https://youtu.be/yJEvlKKm6og ])
With such careless rush to judgement, circumventing due process, as has been demonstrated time and again by a class
of corrupt and covetous warmongers posing as public officials and their equally corrupt mainstream propaganda machine, literally
everything uttered by the likes of Teresa May and her cohort of psychopathic political charlatans must be viewed with incredulity.
... I know about people who challenged the system and paid or are still paying the price.
Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, just to name a few of the most recognizable
names.
I know dozens of people who have left the US because of disagreements with its foreign
policy. They walk the walk and talk the talk.
Sure they are the minority because most people are conforming cowards or unthinking fools
who can be pulled on a boiled noodle. I have far more esteem for the members of that minority
though than for somebody who figures than spewing forth a couple of thousands words once a
week represents some form of serious resistance.
The French philosopher Alain Soral is quite right when he says that modern "journalists
are either unemployed or prostitutes"
An interesting observation. I will refrain from drawing any conclusions.
"... If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. ..."
"... Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation, assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice. ..."
"... The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD; ..."
"... Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century. ..."
"... The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated." ..."
"... The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies glorifying American spies and assassins ..."
"... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks . ..."
"... This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine. ..."
"... The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. ..."
"... The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments. ..."
In a three-part series published last week, the
World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and
military operatives into the Democratic Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence
candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant
seats and those with Republican incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant
swing to the Democrats.
If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control
of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department
officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. The
presence of so many representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus in the legislature
is a situation without precedent in the history of the United States.
Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry
Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the
activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation,
assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice.
In the wake of the Watergate crisis and the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon,
reporter Seymour Hersh published the first devastating exposure of the CIA domestic spying, in
an investigative report for the New York Times on December 22, 1974. This report
triggered the establishment of the Rockefeller Commission, a White House effort at damage
control, and Senate and House select committees, named after their chairmen, Senator Frank
Church and Representative Otis Pike, which conducted hearings and made serious attempts to
investigate and expose the crimes of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.
The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against
foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in
Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly
subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD;
Operation Mockingbird, in
which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an
effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the
telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century.
The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating
political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA
became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was
widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated."
In that period, it would have been unthinkable either for dozens of "former"
military-intelligence operatives to participate openly in electoral politics, or for them to be
welcomed and even recruited by the two corporate-controlled parties. The Democrats and
Republicans sought to distance themselves, at least for public relations purposes, from the spy
apparatus, while the CIA publicly declared that it would no longer recruit or pay American
journalists to publish material originating in Langley, Virginia. Even in the 1980s, the
Iran-Contra scandal involved the exposure of the illegal operations of the Reagan
administration's CIA director, William Casey.
How times have changed. One of the main functions of the "war on terror," launched in the
wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has been to
rehabilitate the US spy apparatus and give it a public relations makeover as the supposed
protector of the American people against terrorism.
This meant disregarding the well-known connections between Osama bin Laden and other Al
Qaeda leaders and the CIA, which recruited them for the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in
Afghanistan, waged from 1979 to 1989, as well as the still unexplained role of the US
intelligence agencies in facilitating the 9/11 attacks themselves.
The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies,
backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies
glorifying American spies and assassins ( 24 , Homeland , Zero Dark
Thirty , etc.)
The American media has been directly recruited to this effort. Judith Miller of the New
York Times , with her reports on "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, is only the most
notorious of the stable of "plugged-in" intelligence-connected journalists at the
Times , the Washington Post , and the major television networks. More
recently, the Times has installed as its editorial page editor James Bennet, brother
of a Democratic senator and son of the former administrator of the Agency for International
Development, which has been accused of working as a front for the operations of the Central
Intelligence Agency.
The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based
entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either
unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been
accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly
paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks .
In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while
essentially ignoring Trump's attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with
ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs like Medicaid and food
stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the
agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political
voice.
This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and
expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United
States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the
Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate
the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.
The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of
resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the
campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. A chorus of
media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire
editorial board of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part
of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip up support on alleged "human rights" grounds
for an expansion of the US war in Syria.
The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence
operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in
Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are
"former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however,
purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the
Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.
The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not
covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic
primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat
experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on
their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party
officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.
The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand,
the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other
previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a
"friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.
The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an
expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the
extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state
apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working
class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.
Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right
policies. But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects
the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of
military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade
unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary,
working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled
two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.
The US State Department is spending millions of dollars spreading its own disinformation and
propping up NGOs to destroy any individual or organization that does not toe the official US
government line on the US global military empire. Through its "Global Engagement Center" the
State Department establishes in fact -- in the open -- what it accuses the Russian government
of doing without any evidence. Social media companies are colluding with the US government to
make organizations who oppose the US global military empire disappear.
RPI's Daniel McAdams joins the
Corbett Report to discuss the neocon/Washington war on dissent in America:
"... This,,,"Russia appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war." Should be changed to "The Guardian appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war." ..."
"... The Guardian has consistently propagandised for regime changes inspired by Washington NeoCons, those of Libya, Syria, Ukraine and is ramping up their propaganda machine toward North Korea, Venezuela and now Russia itself having promoted destabilisation on its borders in Ukraine. ..."
"... On top of what I said yesterday, if Russian oligarchs do pull all their money out of Britain, the British economy would crash, it being highly dependent on the services sector (constituting 80% of Britain's GDP in 2016 according to Wikipedia) and the financial services industry in particular. So if all those Russian billions swirling through Britain's financial system are "dodgy", that's because the system itself encouraged those inflows. ..."
"... "Poor little Britain" which actually spends on par with Russia in terms of its military budget, despite the fact that a) it's a much smaller country to defend and is surrounded by water, and b) it's part of NATO with the US as its staunch defender so it really doesn't need a standalone military anyway. ..."
"... From what's emerging now, it seems there simply were no assassins wandering round Salisbury. Instead, it appears Mr Skripal for some reason has a house full of nerve gas, or enough of it at least to take out himself, his daughter and a policeman who inspected the premises. ..."
"... There is one key element that proves that the Russians didn't do it: The Russians aren't so clumsy as to poison over a dozen other people at the same time. ..."
"... The whole piece is an emotionally charged rant, bordering on hysteria, based on a transparent tissue of lies, distortions and absolutely stunning hypocrisy; and this coming from the 'liberal' 'left of centre' Guardian! ..."
Mark Rice-Oxley,
Guardian columnist and the first in line to fight in WWIII.
The alleged poisoning of ex-MI6 agent Sergei Skripal has caused the Russophobic MSM to go into overdrive. Nowhere is the desperation
with which the Skripal case has been seized more obvious than the Guardian. Luke Harding is spluttering incoherently about a
weapons lab that might not even exist anymore . Simon Jenkins gamely takes up his position as the only rational person left at
the Guardian, before being heckled in the comments and dismissed as a contrarian by Michael White on twitter. More and more the media
are becoming a home for dangerous, aggressive, confrontational rhetoric that has no place in sensible, adult newspapers.
Oh, Russia! Even before we point fingers over poison and speculate about secret agents and spy swaps and pub food in Salisbury,
one thing has become clear: Russia appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during
the cold war.
Read this. It's from a respected "unbiased", liberal news outlet. It is the worst, most partisan political language I have ever
heard, more heated and emotionally charged than even the most fraught moments of the Cold War. It is dangerous to the whole planet,
and has no place in our media.
If everything he said in the following article were true, if he had nothing but noble intentions and right on his side, this would
still be needlessly polarizing and war-like language.
To make it worse, everything he proceeds to say is a complete lie.
Usually we would entitle these pieces "fact checks", but this goes beyond that. This? This is a reality check.
Its agents pop over for murder and shopping
FALSE: There's no proof any of this ever happened. There has been no trial in the Litvinenko case. The
"public
inquiry" was a farce, with no cross-examination of witnesses, evidence given in secret and anonymous witnesses. All of which
contravene British law regarding a fair trial.
even while its crooks use Britain as a 24/7 laundromat for their ill-gotten billions, stolen from compatriots.
TRUE sort of: Russian billionaires do come to London, Paris, and Switzerland to launder their (stolen) money. Rice-Oxley is too
busy with his 2 minutes of hate to interrogate this issue. The reason oligarchs launder their money here is that WE let them. Oligarchs
have been fleeing Russia for over a decade. Why? Because, in Russia, Putin's government has jailed billionaires for tax evasion and
embezzling, stripped them of illegally acquired assets and demanded they pay their taxes. That's why you have wanted criminals like
Sergei Pugachev doing interviews with Luke Harding, complaining he's down to
his
"last 270 million" .
When was the last time a British billionaire was prosecuted for financial crimes? Mega-Corporations owe
literally billions in tax , and our government lets them
get away with it.
Its digital natives use their skills not for solving Russia's own considerable internal problems but to subvert the prosperous
adversaries that it secretly envies.
FALSE: Russiagate is a farce,
anyone with an open-mind can see that . The reference to Russians envying the west is childish and insulting. The 13, just thirteen,
Russians who were indicted by Mueller have no connection to the Russian government, a
nd allegedly
campaigned for many candidates , and both for and against Trump. They are a PR firm, nothing more.
It bought a World Cup,
FALSE: The World Cup bids are voted on, and after years and years of investigation the US/UK teams have found so little evidence
of corruption in the Russia bid that they simply stopped talking about it. If the FBI had found even the slightest hint of financial
malpractice, would we ever have stopped hearing about it?
Regarding the second "neighbour": Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are not at war. Ukraine has claimed to have been "invaded" by Russia
many times but has never declared war. Why? Because they rely on Russian gas to live, and because they know that if Russia were to
ever REALLY invade, the war would last only just a big longer than the Georgian one. The
"anti-terrorist operation" in Ukraine was started by the coup government in 2014. Since that time over 10,000 people have died.
The vast majority killed by the governments mercenaries and far-right militias many of whom
espouse outright fascism
.
bombed children to save a butcher in the Middle East.
MISLEADING: The statement is trying to paint Russia/Assad as deliberately targeting children, which is clearly untrue. Russia
is operating in Syria in full compliance with international law. Unlike literally everybody else bar Iran. When Russia entered the
conflict, at the invitation of the legitimate Syrian government, Jihadists were winning the war. ISIS had huge swathes of territory,
al-Qaeda affiliates had strongholds in all of Syria's major cities. Syria was on the brink of collapse. Rice-Oxley is unclear whether
or not he thinks this is a good thing.
Today, ISIS is obliterated, Aleppo is free
and the war is almost over. Apparently Syria becoming another Libya is preferable to a secular government winning a war against terrorists
and US-backed mercenaries.
And now it wants to start a new nuclear arms race.
FALSE: America started the arms race when they pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
Putin warned at the time it was a dangerous move . America then moved their
AEGIS "defense
shield" into Eastern Europe . Giving them the possibility of first-strike without retaliation. This is an untennable position
for any country.
Putin warned, at the time, that Russia would have to respond. They have responded. Mr Rice-Oxley should take this up with Bush
and Cheney if he has a problem with it.
And before the whataboutists say, "America does some of that stuff too", that may be true, but just because the US is occasionally
awful it doesn't mean that Russia isn't.
MISLEADING: America doesn't do "some of that stuff". No, America aren't "occasionally awful". They do ALL of that stuff, and have
been the biggest destructive force on the planet for over 70 years. Since Putin came to power America has carried out aggressive
military operations against Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria. They have sanctioned and threatened
and carried out coups against North Korea, Ukraine, Iran, Honduras, Venezuela and Cuba. All that time, the US has also claimed the
right to extradite and torture foreign nationals with impunity. The war crimes of American forces and agencies are beyond measure
and count.
We are so used to American crimes we just don't see them anymore. Imagine Putin, at one his epic four-hour Q&A sessions, off-handedly
admitting to torturing people in illegal prison camps .
Would we ever hear the end of it?
Even if you cede the utterly false claim that Russia has "invaded two neighbours", the scale of destruction just does not compare.
Invert the scale of destruction and casualties of Georgia and Iraq. Imagine Putin's government had killed 500,000 people in Georgia
alone, whilst routinely condemning the US for a week-long war in Iraq that killed less than 600 people. Imagine Russia kidnapped
foreign nationals and tortured them, whilst lambasting America's human rights record.
The double-think employed here is literally insane.
Note to Rice-Oxley and his peers, pointing out your near-delusional hypocrisy is not "whataboutism". It's a standard rhetorical
appeal to fairness. If you believe the world shouldn't be fair, fine, but don't expect other people not to point out your double
standards.
As for poor little Britain, it seems to take this brazen bullying like a whipping boy in the playground who has wet himself.
Boycott the World Cup? That'll teach them!
FALSE: Rice-Oxley is trying to paint a picture of false weakness in order to promote calls for action. Britain has been anything
but cooperative with Russia. British forces operate illegally in
Syria , they arm and train rebels. They refused to let Russian authorities see the evidence in the Litvinenko case, and refused
to let Russian lawyers cross-examine witnesses. Britain's attitude to Russia has been needlessly, provocatively antagonistic for
years.
Russians have complained that the portrayal of their nation in dramas such as McMafia is cartoonish and unhelpful, a lazy smear
casting an entire nation as a ludicrous two-dimensional pantomime villain with a pocketful of poisonous potions .Of course, the
vast majority of Russians are indeed misrepresented by such portrayals, because they are largely innocent in these antics.
TRUE: Russians do complain about this, which is entirely justifiable. The western representation of Russians is ignorant and racist
almost without exception. It is an effort, just like Rice-Oxley's column, to demonize an entire people and whip up hatred of Russia
so that people will support US-UK warmongering.
Most ordinary Russians are in fact also victims of the power system in their country, which requires ideas such as individual
comfort, aspiration, dignity, prosperity and hope to be subjugated to the wanton reflexes of the state
FALSE: Putin's government has decreased poverty by
over 66% in 17 years . They have increased life-expectancy, decreased crime, and increased public health. Pensions, social security
and infrastructure have all been rebuilt. These are not controversial or debated claims. The Guardian published them itself just
a few years ago. That is hardly a state where hope and aspiration are put aside.
Why is Russian power like this: cynical, destructive, zero-sum, determined to bring everything down to a base level where everyone
thinks the worst of each other and behaves accordingly?
MISLEADING FALLACY: This is simply projection. There is no logical basis for this statement. He is simply employing the old rhetorical
trick of asking WHY something exists, as a way of establishing its existence. This allows the (dishonest) author to sell his own
agenda as if it solves a riddle. Before you can explain something, you need to establish an explanandum something which requires
explaining. This is the basic logical process that our dear author is attempting to circumvent. We don't NEED to explain why
Russian power is like this, because he hasn't yet established that it is .
I think there are two reasons. The most powerful political idea in Russia is restoration. A decade of humiliation – economic,
social and geopolitical – that followed its rebirth in 1991 became the defining narrative of the new nation.
MISLEADING LANGUAGE: Describing the absolute destruction caused by the fall of the USSR as "rebirth" is an absurd joke. People
sold their medals, furniture and keepsakes for food, people froze to death in the streets.
At times, even the continued existence of the Russian Federation appeared under threat.
TRUE: This is true. Russia was in danger of Balkanisation. The possibility of dozens of anarchic microstates, many with access
to nuclear weapons, was very real. Most rational people would consider this a bad thing. The achievement of Putin's government in
pulling Russia back from the brink should be applauded. Especially when compared with our Western governments who can barely even
maintain the functional social security states created by their predecessors. Compare the NHS now with the NHS in 2000, compare Russia's
health service now to 17 years ago. Who do you think is really in trouble?
The second reason is that the parlous internal state of Russia – absurdist justice, a threadbare social safety net, a pyramid
society in which a very few get very rich and the rest languish – creates moral ambivalence.
PROJECTION: he actually makes this statement without even a hint of irony. The Tory government has killed people by slashing their
benefits, and homeless people froze to death during the recent blizzards. The overall trend of British social structure has been
down, for decades.
Poverty is increasing all the time ,
food banks are opening and people are increasingly desperate. We are trending down. 20%, one in five British people,
now live in poverty .
In that same time, as stated above, Russia's poverty has gone down and down. 13% of Russians live in poverty, almost half the
UK rate. In 2014, before we sanctioned Russia, it was only 10%. Even the briefest research would show this. Columnists like Rice-Oxley
go out of their way to avoid inconvenient facts.
What is to be done? I wouldn't respond with empty threats, Boris Johnson. No one cares.
Here we come to the centre of the shrubbery maze, up until now the column was just build up. Establishing a "problem" so he can
pitch us a "solution".
There are only two weaknesses in this bully's defences. The first is his money. Britain needs to do something about the dodgy
Russian billions swilling through its financial system. Make it really hard for Kremlin-connected money to buy football clubs
or businesses or establish dodgy limited partnerships; stop oligarchs from raising capital on the London stock exchange. Don't
bother with sanctions. Just say: "No thanks, we don't want your business."
FALSE: This shows not even the most basic understanding of the way money works. Money being made in Russia and spent in London
is bad fo Russia. Sending billionaires back to Russia would inject money INTO the Russian economy. Either Rice-Oxley is actually
a moron, or he is being deliberately dishonest.
What he REALLY means is that we should put pressure on the oligarchs, not to the hurt the Russian economy, but in the hopes the
oligarchs will turn on Putin and remove him by undemocratic means.
He is pushing for backdoor regime change. And if you think I'm reading too much into this, then here
The second is public opinion. The imminent presidential election is a foregone conclusion, but the mood in Russia can turn
suddenly, as we saw in 1991, 1993 and 2011-2012.
Notice how quickly he dismisses the democratic will of the Russian people. Poor, stupid, "envious" Russians aren't equipped to
make their own decisions. We need to step in. "Public opinion" turning means a colour revolution. It means US backed regime change
in a nuclear armed super-power. Backed by the cyberwarriors paid to spread Western propaganda online.
Maybe it's time to try some new digital hearts-and-minds operation. In the internet age, Russians have already shown how public
opinion can be manipulated. Perhaps our own secret digital marvels can embark on the kind of information counter-offensive to
win over the many millions of Russians who share our values. Perhaps they already are.
The hypocrisy is mind-blowing, when I read this paragraph I was dumb-founded. Speechless. For months we've been hearing about
how terrible Russia is for allegedly interfering in the American election. Damaging democracy with reporting true news out of context
and some well placed memes.
Our response? Our defense of our "values"? Use the armies of online propagandists our governments employ –
their existence
was reported in the
Guardian – in order to undermine, or undo the democratic will of the Russian people. Rice-Oxley is positing this with a straight
face.
Russia is such a destabilising threat to "our democratic values", such a moral vacuum, that we must use subterfuge to undermine
their elections and remove their popular head of state.
Rice-Oxley wants to push and prod and provoke and antagonise a nuclear armed power that, at worst, is guilty of nothing but playing
our game by our rules and winning. He wants to build a case for war with Russia, and he's doing it on bedrock of cynical lies.
It's all incredibly dangerous. Hopefully they'll realise that before it's too late. For all our sakes.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Putin's 10 year plan for the future of Russia. Putin is a builder, like Peter the Great. He
is a seeker after excellence, like Catherine the Great. If his 10 year plan can achieve the half of what he set out in his recent
speech, the name Putin will go down in history with the same sobriquet.
The most important part of Putin's March 1st speech:
And on the village level, because that's where most of the real work of the world is done, a snippet BTL from Auslander who
lives in the Crimea: "the first implications of anti corruption efforts are obvious in our little village. We'll see how it pans
out but everyone can, and should, assist in this task. The proof will be in the pudding when The West starts screaming about certain
kind, gentle and innocent 'businessmen' who end up counting trees [in Siberia?] for a decade or three."
I wonder how much longer the general readership over there will cotton on to the pro-war and propaganda agenda of the Guardian
and leave it en masse? It's as dishonest as The Sun.
"Poor little Britain", with half the population, a much smaller territory ,and being part of the largest military alliance in
the world, spends only 10 billions less than Russia in "defense". One of those "defense" strategies included in the budget, one
that all those commentators vilifying Russia conveniently ignore, is to blow up weddings, funerals and entire villages with missiles
fired from drones. No trial, no public kill list, no record of people killed, no accountability. That is sanctioned, extra-judicial
murder of suspects and everyone around them. And these progressive commentators, eager to spread prosperity by any mean, seem
to be ok with it.
Update: as I was writing this I noticed that The Guardian has a piece by (of all people!), Simon Jenkins, which, yes, takes
for granted that the assassination attempt was carried out by the Russians, but asks if there is a moral difference between that
and killing suspects with drone strikes. For that, he has been labeled an useful idiot and "an apologist for attempted mass murder
on British soil". Highly amusing if you ask me, but also a terrifying example of how straying if only a little bit from the official
line ("yes, the Russians tried to kill this guy, they are the worst, but maybe we should have a look at ourselves and our (kind
of) inappropriate tendency to murder everyone we want") has to be punished. There are no ifs or buts while at the two minutes
of hate. Now even the pieces that are there to give a semblance of balance have to be torn apart by those liberal, prosperity
loving persons that can´t seem to be able to condemn the murder of children at will. Now it is time to express hatred towards
Goldstein, I mean, of course, Putin and everything Russia.
This,,,"Russia appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war."
Should be changed to "The Guardian appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during
the cold war."
All suffering from PTDS AKA Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The Russophobes over at the Guardian (and the rest of the corporate media) would be well advised to review the trial of Julius
Streicher at the Nuremberg Tribunal.
The Guardian has consistently propagandised for regime changes inspired by Washington NeoCons, those of Libya, Syria, Ukraine
and is ramping up their propaganda machine toward North Korea, Venezuela and now Russia itself having promoted destabilisation
on its borders in Ukraine.
I find it the ultimate paradox that a publication purporting to be 'liberal' acts so enthusiastically
for deadly regime changes from this once Trotskyist but now extreme Right Wing group. There is nothing 'liberal', 'humanitarian',
or moral about promotion of deadly regime changes that have destroyed previously peaceful nations and murdered hundreds of thousands
in the process. Guardian for the geopolitical goals of the self-declared 'exceptional' Empire, the new 'master race' that of the
US.
One final observation on the Skripal case (for now): this stuff is so toxic. We don't know what the stuff is: nevertheless,
we know it is so toxic, can only be made by a state, and needs careful expert handling. We know this because every paper
and TV channel has by now emphasised that this stuff is so toxic, etc. If we missed the "nerve agents and what they do
to you" coverage: we can ascertain for ourselves from the men in the hazmat suits, the this stuff must be so toxic. The
Army have now been deployed: on hand after completing the largest CW exercise ever held, 'Toxic Dagger'; they are now employing
their specialist skills to carry out "Sensitive Site Operations" because this stuff is you get it by now. In another piece of
pure theater: police in hazmat suits were examining the grave of Alexander and Liudmila Skripal because even after a year or more
buried underground, you can't be too careful, because this stuff is A woman from the office next to Zizzi was taken ill (maybe
she had the risotto con pesce) because even after a week, and next door, traces of this stuff can still be
11 (or 16) people were hospitalised from the effects of 'this stuff': the first attending officer, Nick Bailey, is only just
out of ICU and lucky to be alive. The Skripal's are not so lucky: and on "palliative care" according to H de Bretton-Gordon. Yet
the eye-witness calling himself 'Jamie Paine' was close enough to get coughed on; and the unnamed passing doctor and nurse that
attended the Skripals at the scene, clearing their airways, are all fine (despite being hospitalised). Yet PC Bailey nearly died?
Funny that?
When first you practice to deceive: someone in the propaganda department must have noticed this glaring inconsistency. Enter,
stage right, former Met Chief Ian (now Lord) Blair (guess who was leading the Met when Litvinenko was poisoned?): to clarify that
PC Bailey was contaminated when he was the first officer to enter the Skripal's home – not attend them in Salisbury. This allowed
the Torygraph and Fox to speculate that Yulia brought a contaminated present for her father (which she kept in a drawer for a
week, because this stuff is so toxic?). The Torygraph's previous spin: that Skripal was poisoned for his contributions
to the Pissgate dossier were torpedoed by Orbis (Steele's company). Speaking on Radio 4: after pushing the Buzzfeed "14 other
deaths" dodgy dossier; Blair said "So there maybe some clues floating around in here." Yes, clues that you are lying? This is
pure theater: only it is more Morecambe and Wise than Shakespeare.
Check out the report from
C4News (mute the sound).
Two guys plodding around in fluorescent breather suits, another couple with gas masks, but behind them firemen in normal uniform
and no gas masks and the reporter 20 feet in front, in civvies wih no protective gear at all.
Virulent nerve agent threat? Theatre, and not very convincing at that.
Flaxgirl: a bit OT, but not too much as this event does not seem to have too much basis in reality: on the question of fabrication
the UK Home Office held an event this week – Security and Policing 2018 – where the "Live Demo Area" was sponsored by Crisis Cast.
I though you might interested? Are they providing critical incident training: or the critical incidents themselves is a legitimate
question after the events in Salisbury?
I suppose by now we should be used to the nauseating, self-righteous bluster dished out on a daily basis by the Anglo-Zionist
media. The two minutes hate by the flabby 'left' liberals who now have apparently joined forces with the demented US neo-cons
in openly baying for a war against Russia. How, exactly did these people expect Russia to react to the abrogation of the ABM agreement,
marching NATO right up to Russia's doorstep, staging coups in the Ukraine and Georgia, having the US sixth fleet swanning around
in the Black Sea? Of course, Russia reacted as any other self-respecting state would react to such blatant provocations. And this
includes the US during the Cuba crisis and its self-proclaimed right to intervene in its sphere of influence – Latin America –
and for that matter anywhere else on the planet. And it does so A L'outrance.
But I was foregetting, the Anglo-Zionist axis has a divine mission mandated by the deity to reconfigure the world and bring
democracy and freedom to those "Lesser breeds without the Law" (Kipling). Of course, this updated version of 'taking up the white
man's burden' by the 'exceptional people' may involve mass murder, mayhem, destruction and chaos, unfortunately necessary in the
short(ish) run. But these benighted peoples should realise it is for their own good, and if this means starving to death 500,000
Iraqi children through sanctions, well, it was 'worth it' according to the lovely Madeline Albright. This is the language and
methodology of a totalitarian imperialism. As someone has remarked the Anglo-zionist empire is not on the wrong side of history,
it is the wrong side of history.
The arrogance, ignorance and crass venality of these people is manifest to the point of parody.
I agree with Mark Rice-Oxley that Russian oligarchs should pull their money out of Britain and return it to Russia to invest in
businesses there. That would be the ethical thing for them to do, to fulfill their proper tax obligations and stop using Britain
as a tax haven.
I hear that Russia has had another bumper wheat harvest and is now poised to take over from Australia as the major wheat exporter
to Egypt and Indonesia, the world's biggest buyers of wheat. So if Russian oligarchs are wondering where to put their money in,
wheat production, research into improving wheat yields and the conditions wheat is grown in are just a few areas they can invest
in.
Be careful what you wish for, Mr Rice-Oxley – your wish might come true bigger than you realise!
On top of what I said yesterday, if Russian oligarchs do pull all their money out of Britain, the British economy would crash,
it being highly dependent on the services sector (constituting 80% of Britain's GDP in 2016 according to Wikipedia) and the financial
services industry in particular. So if all those Russian billions swirling through Britain's financial system are "dodgy", that's
because the system itself encouraged those inflows.
"Poor little Britain" which actually spends on par with Russia in terms of its military budget, despite the fact that a) it's
a much smaller country to defend and is surrounded by water, and b) it's part of NATO with the US as its staunch defender so it
really doesn't need a standalone military anyway.
"It's them, over there, they are evil. We must stop them. They are coming for us, they will take our children and steal our i
phones !!! Arrgh!!!" "I'll have another strong short black thanks"
Their world is falling apart- in Korea and the Middle East the Empire is on the verge of eviction. All the certitudes of yesteryear
are dissolving. Even the Turks, who, famously, held the line in Korea when the PLA attacked and the US Eighth Army fled south,
are now on the other side. The same Turks who hosted US nuclear armed strategic missiles so openly that the USSR sent missiles
of its own to Cuba.
As to the UK, the economy is contracting and the economic infrastructure is cracking up- living standards are plummeting and the
only recourse of those responsible for the mess-the officers on the bridge- is propaganda. Like the Empire the British Establishment
has been living on the fruits of its own propaganda for so long that, when it is exposed as merely empty bullying, there is nothing
left but to resort to more lies in the hope that they will obscure raw and looming reality.
In The Guardian newsroom the water
is three feet deep and rising inexorably, the ship is sinking and all hands are required to bail or the screens will go black.
There is no time to wait for developments, for investigations to be completed, for evidence- every ounce of strength must be thrown
into the defiance of nature, the shocking nakedness of reality.
There is something very significant about the way that simultaneous attacks of impotent russophobic dementia are eating away
the brains of the rulers on both sides of the Atlantic.
The game, which has been going the same way for about 500 years, is up. The maritime empire is becoming marginal and the force
that it has used, throughout these centuries, no longer overwhelms. The cruisers and carriers no longer work except to intimidate
those not worth frightening.
There is only one thing left for the Empire and its hundreds of thousands of apparatchiki-from cops to pundits, from Professors
to jailers- either they adjust to a new dispensation because the Times are Changing or they blow themselves and the whole planet
up.
From what's emerging now, it seems there simply were no assassins wandering round Salisbury. Instead, it appears Mr Skripal
for some reason has a house full of nerve gas, or enough of it at least to take out himself, his daughter and a policeman who
inspected the premises.
Cleary the Guardian was swallowed up by England's fascist regime controlled by the City of London when it surrendered its hard
drives to the regime for examination and/or destruction in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
The Guardian ownerships also sold their souls -- although the Guardian had already been in decline before they nabbed Glenn
Greenwald. When he left, the Guardian lost ALL presumptive credibility.
Now The Guardian is just an organ of regime propaganda like the BBC (thank GOd for OffGuardian) and here is the island nation
AGAIN asserting its dominance over the whole world, but this time on behalf of his brawnier brother, the EUSE, aka Exceptional
US Empire.
One wonders how much longer the Russians will put up with this now that it is CLEAR that -- for the first time ever -- the
Russians have complete military and nuclear superiority over "The West."
I'll bet Putin won't invade Ukraine, Germany, France, Brussels and England from the North and from the sea in the wintertime.
The Big Problem Is YThat Americans are afraid -- frightened -- but they are NOT afraid or frightened of a particular tbhing
-- it is a generic fright. So they are no longer afraid of nuclear war. Trotsky said A'meria was the strongest nation but also
the most terrified' and nothing has changed except military and nuclear superiority along with economic clout has shifted to Russia
and China. Were Americans afraid of nuclear war -- or say, of an invasion from Saskatchewan or Tamaulipas -- there might be hope.
But somewhere along the time beginning with Clinton, Americans didn't worry their pretty little heads about nuclear war or
American wars on everybody anywhere any longer so long as it didn't disturb their creature comforts and shopping and lattes by
coming to the homeland. The Nuclear Freeze movement was, after all, a direct response to Reagan's "evil empire" military buildup
in the 1980s and then voila he and Gorbachev negotiated away a whole class of nuclear weapoms and Old Bush promised NAto wouldn;t
expand. Hope. Then that sneaky little bastard Clinton started expanding Nato on behalf of the Pentagon / CKIA / NSA / miklitary
/congressional industyrial complex.
Maybe it's time to try some new digital hearts-and-minds operation. In the internet age, Russians have already shown
how public opinion can be manipulated. Perhaps our own secret digital marvels can embark on the kind of information counter-offensive
to win over the many millions of Russians who share our values. Perhaps they already are.
He really is taking Russians for idiots and fools!
There is one key element that proves that the Russians didn't do it: The Russians aren't so clumsy as to poison over a dozen
other people at the same time.
The whole piece is an emotionally charged rant, bordering on hysteria, based on a transparent tissue of lies, distortions
and absolutely stunning hypocrisy; and this coming from the 'liberal' 'left of centre' Guardian!
It's rather scary. The Guardian screaming for a crusade aimed at toppling the Russian system and replacing it with something
else, something closer to 'our values.' The moralizing is shocking and grotesque. I really wish the ground would just open up
and swallow the Guardian whole. We'd be far better off with out it.
"... To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC ..."
"... Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence. ..."
"... In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich. ..."
Re this: " In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC
because the Democratic National Committee did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine
the computers and the network that was allegedly attacked."
To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images"
of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided
these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC .
All three allegedly examined those images and concurred with CrowdStrike's analysis.
Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to
its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence.
In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly
contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor
that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and
even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks
as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth
Rich.
The "assessment" that Putin ordered any of this is pure mind-reading and can be utterly
dismissed absent any of the other evidence Publius points out as necessary.
The same applies to any "estimate" that the Russian government preferred Trump or wished
to denigrate Clinton. Based on what I read in pro-Russian news outlets, Russian officials
took great pains to not pick sides and Putin's comments were similarly very restrained. The
main quote from Putin about Trump that emerged was mistranslated as approval whereas it was
more an observation of Trump's personality. At no time did Putin ever say he favored Trump
over Clinton, even though that was a likely probability given Clinton's "Hitler"
comparison.
As an aside, I also recommend Scott Ritter's trashing of the ICA. Ritter is familiar with
intelligence estimates and their reliability based on his previous service as a UN weapons
inspector in Iraq and in Russia implementing arms control treaties.
The sad but reasonable conclusion from all those Russiagate events is that an influential part of the US elite wants to
balance on the edge of war with Russia to ensure profits and flow of taxpayer money. that part of the elite include top
honchos on the US intelligence community and Pentagon (surprise, surprise)
The other logical conclusion is that intelligence agencies now determine the US foreign policy and control all major political
players (there were widespread suspicions that Clinton, Bush II and Obama were actually closely connected to CIA). Which neatly fits
into hypotheses about the "deep state".
This "can of worms" that the US political scene now represents is very dangerous for the future on mankind indeed.
Notable quotes:
"... Most objective observers would concede that the DNI has been a miserable failure and nothing more than a bureaucratic boondoggle. ..."
"... "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow -- the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities." ..."
"... More telling was the absence of any written document issued from the Office of the DNI that detailed the supposed intel backing up this judgment. Notice the weasel language in this release ..."
"... If there was actual evidence/intelligence, such as an intercepted conversation between Vladimir Putin and a subordinate ordering them to hack the DNC or even a human source report claiming such an activity, then it would have and should have been referenced in the Clapper/Johnson document. It was not because such intel did not exist. ..."
"... "We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election," Clinton said. "I find that deeply disturbing." ..."
"... The basic job of an analyst is to collect as much relevant information as possible on the subject or topic that is their responsibility. There are analysts at the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and State INR that have the job of knowing about Russian cyber activity and capabilities. That is certain. But we are not talking about hundreds of people. ..."
"... Let us move from the hypothetical to the actual. In January of 2017, DNI Jim Clapper release a report entitled, " Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections " (please see here ). In subsequent testimony before the Congress, Clapper claimed that he handpicked two dozen analysts to draft the document . That is not likely. There may have been as many as two dozen analysts who read the final document and commented on it, but there would never be that many involved in in drafting such a document. In any event, only analysts from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI were involved ..."
"... This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies. ..."
"... That is how the process is supposed to work. But the document produced in January 2017 was not a genuine work reflecting the views of the "Intelligence Community." It only represented the supposed thinking (and I use that term generously) of CIA, NSA and FBI analysts. In other words, only three of 16 agencies cleared on the document that presented four conclusions ..."
"... Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow's longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations. ..."
"... We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. ..."
"... We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. ..."
"... We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes. ..."
"... It is genuinely shocking that DNI Jim Clapper, with the acquiescence of the CIA, the FBI and NSA, would produce a document devoid of any solid intelligence. There is a way to publicly release sensitive intelligence without comprising a the original source. But such sourcing is absent in this document. ..."
"... The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged. ..."
"... "The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.'" Yes it was and so remains the lie unchallenged. ..."
"... Conjectural garbage appears first to have been washed through the FBI, headquarters no less, then probably it picked up a Triple A rating at the CIA, and then when the garbage got to Clapper, it was bombs away - we experts all agree. There were leaks, but they weren't sufficient to satisfy Steele so he just delivered the garbage whole to the Media in order to make it a sure thing. The garbage was placed securely out there in the public domain with a Triple A rating because the FBI wouldn't concern itself with garbage, would it? ..."
"... Contrast this trajectory with what the Russian policy establishment did when it concluded that the US had done something in the Ukraine that Russia found significantly actionable: it released the taped evidence of Nuland and our Ambassador finishing off the coup. ..."
"... To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC ..."
"... Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence. ..."
"... In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich. ..."
"... My interpretation is: In 1990 +- Bush 41 sold us the 1st Iraq war using fudged intelligence, then Bush 43 sold us the second Iraq war using fabricated intelligence. And now the Obama Administration tried to sell us fake intelligence in regard to Russia in order to get Clinton elected ..."
"... Mueller has had 18 months and has proceeded to reveal exactly nothing related to either Trump "collusion" with Russia nor Russia as a state actually doing anything remotely described as "meddling." ..."
"... His expected indictment of some Russians for the DNC hack is going to be more of the same in all likelihood. I predict there will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29 or that they had any direct connection with either the alleged DNC hack or Wikileaks or the Russian government. ..."
"... It's a witch hunt, nothing more. People holding their breath for the "slam dunk" are going to pass out soon if they haven't already. ..."
"... Mueller is investigating some aspects. But there is another aspect - the conspiracy inside law enforcement and the IC. That is also being investigated. There are Congressional committees in particular Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley. Then there is the DOJ IG. And today AG Sessions confirms there is a DOJ prosecutor outside Washington investigating. ..."
"... But such evidence (corroborating the Steele dossier) was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified." ..."
"... ... was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process, material that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?" I would say yes and especially yes if the contact for this piece of data was conducted at the highest level within the context of the already tight liaison between the US IC and Mi-6/GCHQ ..."
"... Was it Hitler or Stalin who said "show me the man and I will find his crime?" As I have said before, Trumps greatest vulnerability lies in his previous business life as an entrepreneurial hustler. ..."
"... Re 'baby adoption' meeting between Trump, Jr. and Veselnitskaya, I recall a comment here linking to an article speculating the email initiating the meeting originated in Europe, was set up by the playboy son of a European diplomat, and contained words to trip data-gathering monitors which would have enabled a FISA request to have Trump, Jr. come under surveillance. ..."
"... "We don't have the evidence yet because Mueller hasn't found it yet!" is a classic argument from ignorance, in that is assumes without evidence (there's that pesky word again!) that there is something to be found. ..."
"... The fact is Flynn has pled guilty to perjury. Nothing else like collusion with the Russians. ..."
"... Manafort has been indicted for money laundering, wire fraud, etc for activities well before the election campaign. Sure, it is good that these corrupt individuals should be investigated and prosecuted. However, this corruption is widespread in DC. How come none of these cheering Mueller on to destroy Trump care about all the foreign money flowing to K Street? Why aren't they calling for investigations of the Clinton Foundation or the Podesta brothers where probable cause exist of foreign money and influence? What about Ben Cardin and all those recipients of foreign zionist money and influence? It would be nice if there were wide ranging investigations on all those engaged in foreign influence peddling. But it seems many just want a witch hunt to hobble Trump. It's going to be very difficult to get the Senate to convict him for obstruction of justice or tax evasion or some charge like that. ..."
"... What does "hacking our elections" mean? Does it means breaking into voting systems and changing the outcome by altering votes? Or does it mean information operations to change US voters' minds about for whom they would vote? ..."
"... As for McMasters, I am unimpressed with him. He displays all the symptoms of Russophobia. He has special information? Information can be interpreted many ways depending on one's purpose. pl ..."
"... IMO the perpetrators in the Steel Memo case are and were merely hiding behind claims of sources and methods protection in order to protect themselve. ..."
"... So now we are supposed to believe unquestioningly the word of torturers, perjurers and entrapment artists, all talking about alleged evidence that we are not allowed to see? Did you learn nothing from the "Iraqi WMD" fiasco or the "ZOMG! Assad gassed his own peoples ZOMG!" debacle? Funny how in each of these instances, the intelligence community's lies just happened to coincide with the agenda of empire. ..."
Americans tend to be a trusting lot. When they hear a high level government official, like former Director of National Intelligence
Jim Clapper, state that Russia's Vladimir ordered and monitored a Russian cyber attack on the 2016 Presidential election, those trusting
souls believe him. For experienced intelligence professionals, who know how the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence works,
they detect a troubling omission in Clapper's presentation and, upon examining the so-called "Intelligence Community Assessment,"
discover that document is a deceptive fraud. It lacks actual evidence that Putin and the Russians did what they are accused of doing.
More troubling -- and this is inside baseball -- is the fact that two critical members of the Intelligence Community -- the DIA and
State INR -- were not asked to coordinate/clear on the assessment.
You should not feel stupid if you do not understand or appreciate the last point. That is something only people who actually have
produced a Community Assessment would understand. I need to take you behind the scenes and ensure you understand what is intelligence
and how analysts assess and process that intelligence. Once you understand that then you will be able to see the flaws and inadequacies
in the report released by Jim Clapper in January 2017.
The first thing you need to understand is the meaning of the term, the "Intelligence Community" aka IC. Comedians are not far off
the mark in touting this phrase as the original oxymoron. On paper the IC currently is comprised of 17 agencies/departments:
Air Force Intelligence,
Army Intelligence,
Central Intelligence Agency aka CIA,
Coast Guard Intelligence,
Defense Intelligence Agency aka DIA,
Energy Department aka DOE,
Homeland Security Department,
State Department aka INR,
Treasury Department,
Drug Enforcement Administration aka DEA,
Federal Bureau of Investigation aka FBI,
Marine Corps Intelligence,
National Geospatial Intelligence Agency aka NGIA or NGA,
National Reconnaissance Office aka NRO,
National Security Agency aka NSA,
Navy Intelligence
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
But not all of these are "national security" agencies -- i.e., those that collect raw intelligence, which subsequently is packaged
and distributed to other agencies on a need to know basis. Only six of these agencies take an active role in collecting raw foreign
intelligence. The remainder are consumers of that intelligence product. In other words, the information does not originate with them.
They are like a subscriber to the New York Times. They get the paper everyday and, based upon what they read, decide what is going
on in their particular world. The gatherers of intelligence are:
The CIA collects and disseminates intelligence from human sources, i.e., foreigners who have been recruited to spy for us.
The DIA collects and disseminates intelligence on the activities and composition of foreign militaries and rely primarily
on human sources but also collect documentary material.
The State Department messages between the Secretary of State and the our embassies constitutes the intelligence reviewed and
analyzed by other agencies.
NGIA collects collects, analyzes, and distributes geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) in support of national security. NGA was
known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) until 2003. In other words, maps and photographs.
NRO designs, builds, and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the U.S. federal government, and provides satellite intelligence
to several government agencies, particularly signals intelligence (SIGINT) to the NSA, imagery intelligence (IMINT) to the NGA,
and measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) to the DIA.
NSA analyzes signal intelligence, including phone conversations and emails.
Nine of the other agencies/departments are consumers. They do not collect and package original info. They are the passive recipients.
The analysts in those agencies will base their conclusions on information generated by other agencies, principally the CIA and the
NSA.
The astute among you, I am sure, will insist my list is deficient and will ask, "What about the FBI and DEA?" It is true that
those two organizations produce a type of human intelligence -- i.e., they recruit informants and those informants provide those
agencies with information that the average person understandably would categorize as "intelligence." But there is an important difference
between human intelligence collected by the CIA and the human source intelligence gathered by the FBI or the DEA. The latter two
are law enforcement agencies. No one from the CIA or the NSA has the power to arrest someone. The FBI and the DEA do.
Their authority as law enforcement agents, however, comes with limitations, especially in collecting so-called intelligence. The
FBI and the DEA face egal constraints on what information they can collect and store. The FBI cannot decide on its own that skinheads
represent a threat and then start gathering information identifying skinhead leaders. There has to be an allegation of criminal activity.
When such "human" information is being gathered under the umbrella of law enforcement authorities, it is being handled as potential
evidence that may be used to prosecute someone. This means that such information cannot be shared with anyone else, especially intelligence
agencies like the CIA and the NSA.
The "17th" member of the IC is the Director of National Intelligence aka DNI. This agency was created in the wake of the September
11, 2001 terrorist attacks for the ostensible purpose of coordinating the activities and products of the IC. In theory it is the
organization that is supposed to coordinate what the IC collects and the products the IC produces. Most objective observers would
concede that the DNI has been a miserable failure and nothing more than a bureaucratic boondoggle.
An important, but little understood point, is that these agencies each have a different focus. They are not looking at the same
things. In fact, most are highly specialized and narrowly focused. Take the Coast Guard, for instance. Their intelligence operations
primarily hone in on maritime threats and activities in U.S. territorial waters, such as narcotic interdictions. They are not responsible
for monitoring what the Russians are doing in the Black Sea and they have no significant expertise in the cyber activities of the
Russian Army military intelligence organization aka the GRU.
In looking back at the events of 2016 surrounding the U.S. Presidential campaign, most people will recall that Hillary Clinton,
along with several high level Obama national security officials, pushed the lie that the U.S. Intelligence agreed that Russia had
unleashed a cyber war on the United States. The initial lie came from DNI Jim Clapper and Homeland Security Chief, Jeb Johnson, who
released the following memo to the press on
7 October 2016 :
"The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails
from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on
sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed
efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow
-- the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there.
We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these
activities."
This was a deliberate deceptive message. It implied that the all 16 intelligence agencies agreed with the premise and "evidence
of Russian meddling. Yet not a single bit of proof was offered. More telling was the absence of any written document issued from
the Office of the DNI that detailed the supposed intel backing up this judgment. Notice the weasel language in this release:
"The USIC is confident . . ."
"We believe . . ."
If there was actual evidence/intelligence, such as an intercepted conversation between Vladimir Putin and a subordinate ordering
them to hack the DNC or even a human source report claiming such an activity, then it would have and should have been referenced
in the Clapper/Johnson document. It was not because such intel did not exist.
Hillary Clinton helped perpetuate this myth during the late October debate with Donald Trump, when she declared as fact that:
"We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks,
come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election," Clinton said. "I find that deeply
disturbing."
What is shocking is that there was so little pushback to this nonsense. Hardly anyone asked why would the DEA, Coast Guard, the
Marines or DOE have any technical expertise to make a judgment about Russian hacking of U.S. election systems. And no one of any
importance asked the obvious -- where was the written memo or National Intelligence Estimate laying out what the IC supposedly knew
and believed? There was nothing.
It is natural for the average American citizen to believe that something given the imprimatur of the Intelligence Community must
reflect solid intelligence and real expertise. Expertise is supposed to be the cornerstone of intelligence analysis and the coordination
that occurs within the IC. That means that only those analysts (and the agencies they represent) will be asked to contribute or comment
on a particular intelligence issue. When it comes to the question of whether Russia had launched a full out cyber attack on the Democrats
and the U.S. electoral system, only analysts from agencies with access to the intelligence and the expertise to analyze that intelligence
would be asked to write or contribute to an intelligence memorandum.
Who would that be? The answer is simple -- the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, State INR and the FBI. (One could make the case that there
are some analysts within Homeland Security that might have expertise, but they would not necessarily have access to the classified
information produced by the CIA or the NSA.) The task of figuring out what the Russians were doing and planned to do fell to five
agencies and only three of the five (the CIA, the DIA and NSA) would have had the ability to collect intelligence that could inform
the work of analysts.
Before I can explain to you how an analyst work this issue it is essential for you to understand the type of intelligence that
would be required to "prove" Russian meddling. There are four possible sources -- 1) a human source who had direct access to the
Russians who directed the operation or carried it out; 2) a signal intercept of a conversation or cyber activity that was traced
to Russian operatives; 3) a document that discloses the plan or activity observed; or 4) forensic evidence from the computer network
that allegedly was attacked.
Getting human source intel is primarily the job of CIA. It also is possible that the DIA or the FBI had human sources that could
have contributed relevant intelligence.
Signal intercepts are collected and analyzed by the NSA.
Documentary evidence, which normally is obtained from a human source but can also be picked up by NSA intercepts or even an old-fashioned
theft.
Finally there is the forensic evidence . In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC because
the Democratic National Committee did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine the computers and the network that was allegedly
attacked.
What Do Analysts Do?
Whenever there is a "judgment" or "consensus" claimed on behalf to the IC, it means that one or more analysts have written a document
that details the evidence and presents conclusions based on that evidence. On a daily basis the average analyst confronts a flood
of classified information (normally referred to as "cables" or "messages"). When I was on the job in the 1980s I had to wade through
more than 1200 messages -- i.e., human source reports from the CIA, State Department messages with embassies around the world, NSA
intercepts, DIA reports from their officers based overseas (most in US embassies) and open source press reports. Today, thanks to
the internet, the average analyst must scan through upwards of 3000 messages. It is humanly impossible.
The basic job of an analyst is to collect as much relevant information as possible on the subject or topic that is their responsibility.
There are analysts at the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and State INR that have the job of knowing about Russian cyber activity and capabilities.
That is certain. But we are not talking about hundreds of people.
Let us move from the hypothetical to the actual. In January of 2017, DNI Jim Clapper release a report entitled, "
Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent
US Elections " (please see
here ). In subsequent testimony before the Congress, Clapper claimed that he handpicked
two dozen analysts to draft the document . That is not likely. There may have been as many as two dozen analysts who read the
final document and commented on it, but there would never be that many involved in in drafting such a document. In any event, only
analysts from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI were involved :
This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated
by those three agencies.
Limiting the drafting and clearance on this document to only the CIA, the NSA and the FBI is highly unusual because one of the
key analytical conclusions in the document identifies the Russian military intelligence organization, the GRU, as one of the perpetrators
of the cyber attack. DIA's analysts are experts on the GRU and there also are analysts in State Department's Bureau of INR who should
have been consulted. Instead, they were excluded.
Here is how the process should have worked in producing this document:
One or more analysts are asked to do a preliminary draft. It is customary in such a document for the analyst to cite specific
intelligence, using phrases such as: "According to a reliable source of proven access," when citing a CIA document or "According
to an intercept of a conversation between knowledgeable sources with access," when referencing something collected by the NSA.
The analyst does more than repeat what is claimed in the intel reports, he or she also has the job of explaining what these facts
mean or do not mean.
There always is an analyst leading the effort who has the job of integrating the contributions of the other analysts into
a coherent document. Once the document is completed in draft it is handed over to Branch Chief and then Division Chief for editing.
We do not know who had the lead, but it was either the FBI, the CIA or the NSA.
At the same time the document is being edited at originating agency, it is supposed to be sent to the other clearing agencies,
i.e. those agencies that either provided the intelligence cited in the draft (i.e., CIA, NSA, DIA, or State) or that have expertise
on the subject. As noted previously, it is highly unusual to exclude the DIA and INR.
Once all the relevant agencies clear on the content of the document, it is sent into the bowels of the DNI where it is put
into final form.
That is how the process is supposed to work. But the document produced in January 2017 was not a genuine work reflecting the views
of the "Intelligence Community." It only represented the supposed thinking (and I use that term generously) of CIA, NSA and FBI analysts.
In other words, only three of 16 agencies cleared on the document that presented four conclusions:
Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow's longstanding
desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness,
level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.
Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability
and potential presidency.
We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.
We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future
influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes.
Sounds pretty ominous, but the language used tells a different story. The conclusions are based on assumptions and judgments.
There was nor is any actual evidence from intelligence sources showing that Vladimir Putin ordered up anything or that his government
preferred Trump over Clinton.
How do I know this? If such evidence existed -- either documentary or human source or signal intercept -- it would have been cited
in this document. Not only that. Such evidence would have corroborated the claims presented in the Steele dossier. But such evidence
was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts
of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified."
It is genuinely shocking that DNI Jim Clapper, with the acquiescence of the CIA, the FBI and NSA, would produce a document devoid
of any solid intelligence. There is a way to publicly release sensitive intelligence without comprising a the original source. But
such sourcing is absent in this document.
That simple fact should tell you all you need to know. The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and
persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.
Good summary argument, PT. Thanks. Helpful reminder.
But, makes me feel uncomfortable. Cynical scenario. I'd prefer them to be both drivers and driven, somehow stumbling into the
chronology of events. They didn't hack the DNC, after all. Crowdstrike? Steele? ...
********
But yes, all the 17 agencies Clinton alluded to in her 3rd encounter with Trump was a startling experience:
One other point on which Tacitus and I differ is the quality of the analysts in the "minors." The "bigs" often recruit analysts
from the "minors" so they can't be all that bad. And the analysts in all these agencies receive much the same data feed electronically
every day. There are exceptions to this but it is generally true. I, too, read hundreds of documents every day to keep up with
the knowledge base of the analysts whom I interrogated continuously. "How do you know that?" would have been typical. pl
"The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they
did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.'"
Yes it was and so remains the lie unchallenged.
Conjectural garbage appears first to have been washed through the FBI, headquarters no less, then probably it picked up a Triple
A rating at the CIA, and then when the garbage got to Clapper, it was bombs away - we experts all agree. There were leaks, but
they weren't sufficient to satisfy Steele so he just delivered the garbage whole to the Media in order to make it a sure thing.
The garbage was placed securely out there in the public domain with a Triple A rating because the FBI wouldn't concern itself
with garbage, would it?
Contrast this trajectory with what the Russian policy establishment did when it concluded that the US had done something in the
Ukraine that Russia found significantly actionable: it released the taped evidence of Nuland and our Ambassador finishing off
the coup.
The whole sequence reminds me in some ways of the sub prime mortgage bond fiasco: garbage risk progressively bundled, repackaged,
rebranded and resold by big name institutions that should have known better.
I have only two questions: was it misfeasance, malfeasance, or some ugly combination of the two? And are they going to get away
with it?
Re this: " In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC because the Democratic National Committee
did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine the computers and the network that was allegedly attacked."
To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved
in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC.
All three allegedly examined those images and concurred with CrowdStrike's analysis.
Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified
true images" are themselves tainted evidence.
In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate
to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack
involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another
leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich.
The "assessment" that Putin ordered any of this is pure mind-reading and can be utterly dismissed absent any of the other evidence
Publius points out as necessary.
The same applies to any "estimate" that the Russian government preferred Trump or wished to denigrate Clinton. Based on what
I read in pro-Russian news outlets, Russian officials took great pains to not pick sides and Putin's comments were similarly very
restrained. The main quote from Putin about Trump that emerged was mistranslated as approval whereas it was more an observation
of Trump's personality. At no time did Putin ever say he favored Trump over Clinton, even though that was a likely probability
given Clinton's "Hitler" comparison.
As an aside, I also recommend Scott Ritter's trashing of the ICA. Ritter is familiar with intelligence estimates and their
reliability based on his previous service as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq and in Russia implementing arms control treaties.
This is a wonderful explanation of the intelligence community. And I thank you for the explanation. My interpretation is: In 1990
+- Bush 41 sold us the 1st Iraq war using fudged intelligence, then Bush 43 sold us the second Iraq war using fabricated intelligence.
And now the Obama Administration tried to sell us fake intelligence in regard to Russia in order to get Clinton elected. However
inadequate my summary is it looks like the Democrats are less skilled in propaganda than the Repubs. And what else is the difference?
Mueller has had 18 months and has proceeded to reveal exactly nothing related to either Trump "collusion" with Russia nor Russia
as a state actually doing anything remotely described as "meddling."
His expected indictment of some Russians for the DNC hack is going to be more of the same in all likelihood. I predict there
will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29 or that they had any
direct connection with either the alleged DNC hack or Wikileaks or the Russian government.
It's a witch hunt, nothing more. People holding their breath for the "slam dunk" are going to pass out soon if they haven't
already.
Mueller is investigating some aspects. But there is another aspect - the conspiracy inside law enforcement and the IC. That is also being investigated. There are
Congressional committees in particular Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley. Then there is the DOJ IG. And today AG Sessions confirms
there is a DOJ prosecutor outside Washington investigating.
IMO, the conspiracy is significantly larger in scale and scope than anything the Russians did.
Yes, indeed we'll have to wait and see what facts Mueller reveals. But also what facts these other investigations reveal.
Thank you for setting out the geography and workings of this complex world.
Might I ask how liaison with other Intelligence Communities fits in? Is intelligence information from non-US sources such as
UK intelligence sources subject to the same process of verification and evaluation?
I ask because of the passage in your article -
"But such evidence (corroborating the Steele dossier) was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed
in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under
oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified." "
Does this leave room for the assertion that although the "Dossier" was unverified in the US it was accepted as good information
because it had been verified by UK Intelligence or by persons warranted by the UK? In other words, was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process,
material that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?
" ... was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process, material
that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?" I would say yes and especially
yes if the contact for this piece of data was conducted at the highest level within the context of the already tight liaison
between the US IC and Mi-6/GCHQ. PT may think differently. pl
Was it Hitler or Stalin who said "show me the man and I will find his crime?" As I have said before, Trumps greatest vulnerability
lies in his previous business life as an entrepreneurial hustler. If he is anything like the many like him whom I observed in
my ten business years, then he has cut corners legally somewhere in international business. they pretty much all do that. Kooshy,
a successful businessman confirmed that here a while back. These other guys were all business hustlers including Flynn and their
activities have made them vulnerable to Mueller. IMO you have to ask yourself how much you want to be governed by political hacks
and how much by hustlers. pl
hy this socialist pub would fing it surprising that former public servants seek elected office is a mystery to me. BTW, in
re all the discussion here of the IC, there are many levels in these essentially hierarchical structures and one's knowledge of
them is conditioned by the perspective from which you viewed them. pl
Re 'baby adoption' meeting between Trump, Jr. and Veselnitskaya, I recall a comment here linking to an article speculating the
email initiating the meeting originated in Europe, was set up by the playboy son of a European diplomat, and contained words to
trip data-gathering monitors which would have enabled a FISA request to have Trump, Jr. come under surveillance.
Also, the Seymour Hersh tape certainly seems authentic as far as Seth Rich being implicated in the DNC dump.
You insist (I guess you rely on MSNBC as your fact source) that Manafort, Page, etc. all "have connections to Russia or Assange."
You are using smear and guilt by association. Flynn's so-called connection to Russia was that he accepted an invite to deliver
a speech at an RT sponsored event and was paid. So what? Nothing wrong with that. Just ask Bill Clinton. Or perhaps you are referring
to the fact that Flynn also spoke to the Russian Ambassador to the US after the election in his capacity as designated National
Security Advisor. Zero justification for investigation.
Stone? He left the campaign before there had even been a primary and only had text exchanges with Assange.
Your blind hatred of Trump makes you incapable of thinking logically.
The most sarcastic irony was intended. This is what the real left looks like, its very different from Clintonite Liberals, not that I agree with their ideological
program, though I believe parts have their place.
And to your second comment, yes I agree about the complexity of institutions and how situationally constrained individual experiences
are, if that was the point.
I'll also concede my brief comments generalize very broadly, but it's hard to frame things more specific comments without direct
knowledge, such as the invaluable correspondents here. I try to avoid confirmation bias by reading broadly and try to provide
outside perspectives. My apologies if they're too far outside.
I suppose it would be interesting to see a side by side comparison of how many former IC self affiliated with which party in
choosing to run. I'm just guessing but I'll bet there's more CIA in the D column and more DIA among the Rs.
"We don't have the evidence yet because Mueller hasn't found it yet!" is a classic argument from ignorance, in that is assumes
without evidence (there's that pesky word again!) that there is something to be found.
That said, I have no doubt that Mueller will find *something*, simply because an aggressive and determined prosecutor can always
find *something*, especially if the target is engaged in higher level business or politics. A form unfiled, an irregularity in
an official document, and overly optimistic tax position.
If nothing else works, there's always the good old standby of asking question after question until the target makes a statement
that can be construed as perjury or lying to investigators.
My perspective, after reading that linked article by the WSWS, is that both, the IC and the DoD, are trying to take over the
whole US political spectrum, in fact, militarizing de facto the US political life....
Now, tell me that this is not an
intend by the MIC ( where all the former IC or DoD people finally end when they leave official positions )to take over the
government ( if more was needed after what has happened with Trump´s ) to guarantee their profit rate in a moment where
everything is crimbling....
Btw, have you read the recently released paper, "WorldWide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community" by Daniel R.
Coats ( DNI )? You smell fear from the four corners....do not you?
Those immortal words are attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, Colonel and you are not the first to draw the comparison re Mueller's
investigation. For those who do not know Beria was head of the NKVD under Stalin.
The BBC reported this morning that a police officer who was amongst the earliest responders to the "nerve gas" poisoning of Col.
Skripal is also being treated for symptoms. How was it that many "White Helmets" who were filmed where the sarin gas was dropped
on Khan Sheikhoun last April suffered no symptoms?
That's a good way to present it political hacks vs hustlers. The fact is Flynn has pled guilty to perjury. Nothing else like collusion with the Russians.
And his sentencing is on hold
now as the judge has ordered Mueller to hand over any exculpatory evidence. Clearly something is going on his case for the judge
to do that.
Manafort has been indicted for money laundering, wire fraud, etc for activities well before the election campaign. Sure, it is good that these corrupt individuals should be investigated and prosecuted. However, this corruption is widespread
in DC. How come none of these cheering Mueller on to destroy Trump care about all the foreign money flowing to K Street? Why aren't
they calling for investigations of the Clinton Foundation or the Podesta brothers where probable cause exist of foreign money
and influence? What about Ben Cardin and all those recipients of foreign zionist money and influence? It would be nice if there
were wide ranging investigations on all those engaged in foreign influence peddling. But it seems many just want a witch hunt
to hobble Trump. It's going to be very difficult to get the Senate to convict him for obstruction of justice or tax evasion or
some charge like that.
The select group of several dozen analysts from CIA, NSA and FBI who produced the January 2017 ICA are very likely the same group
of analysts assembled by Brenner in August 2016 to form a task force examining "L'Affaire Russe" at the same time Brennan brought
that closely held report to Obama of Putin's specific instructions on an operation to damage Clinton and help Trump. I've seen
these interagency task forces set up several times to address particular info ops or cyberattack issues. Access to the work of
these task forces was usually heavily restricted. I don't know if this kind of thing has become more prevalent throughout the
IC.
I am also puzzled by the absence of DIA in the mix. When I was still working, there were a few DIA analysts who were acknowledged
throughout the IC as subject matter experts and analytical leaders in this field. On the operational side, there was never great
enthusiasm for things cyber or info ops. There were only a few lonely voices in the darkness. Meanwhile, CIA, FBI and NSA embraced
the field wholeheartedly. Perhaps those DIA analytical experts retired or moved on to CYBERCOM, NSA or CIA's Information Operations
Center.
I predict there will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29
...
Richard, over here the type of software is categorized under Advanced Persistent Threat, and beyond that specifically labeled
the "Sofacy Group". ... I seem to prefer the more neutral description 'Advanced Persistent Threat' by Kaspersky. Yes, they seem
to be suspicious lately in the US. But I am a rather constant consumer, never mind the occasional troubles over the years.
APT: Helps to not get confused by all the respective naming patterns in the economic field over national borders. APT 1 to
29 ...? Strictly, What's the precise history of the 'Bear' label and or the specific, I assume, group of APT? ...
Ever used a datebase checking a file online? Would have made you aware of the multitude of naming patterns.
******
More ad-hoc concerning one item in your argument above. To what extend does a standard back-up system leave relevant forensic
traces? Beyond the respective image in the present? Do you know?
Admittedly, I have no knowledge about matters beyond purely private struggles. But yes, they seemed enough to get a vague glimpse
of categories in the field of attribution. Regarding suspected state actors vs the larger cybercrime scene that is.
Even mentioning those is just further evidence that something really did happen.
I appreciate you are riding our partially shared hobby horse, Fred. ;)
But admittedly this reminds me of something that felt like a debate-shift, I may be no doubt misguided here. Nitwit! In other
words I may well have some type of ideological-knot in the relevant section dealing with memory in my brain as long-term undisciplined
observer of SST.
But back on topic: the argument seemed to be that "important facts" were omitted. In other words vs earlier times were are
now centrally dealing with omission as evidence. No?
General McMaster has seen the evidence and says the fact of Russian meddling can no longer be credibly denied.
That doesn't stop the right-wing extremists from spinning fairy tales.
The right wing (re: Hannity and Limbaugh) have been trying mightily to discredit this investigation by smearing Mueller's reputation,
even though he is a conservative republican.
They are doing this so that if Mueller's report is damning, they can call it a "witch hunt."
I would think that if Trump is innocent, he would cooperate with this investigation fully.
You are insinuating that McMaster is a liar even though he has access to information that you don't.
"omission as evidence. " Incorrect. Among the omissions was the fact that the dossier was paid for by a political campaign
and that the wife of a senior DOJ lawyer's wife was working for Fusion GPS. Then there's the rest of the political motivations
left out.
If you have seen the classified information that would be necessary to back up your conclusions, it should not be discussed in
this forum. As you are well aware sources and methods cannot be made public so I fail to see how you believe this should have
been publically done. Having said that, I pretty much agree with your conclusion except for the indication that the analysts lied.
What does "hacking our elections" mean? Does it means breaking into voting systems and changing the outcome by altering votes?
Or does it mean information operations to change US voters' minds about for whom they would vote?
If the latter you must know
that we (the US) have done this many times in foreign elections, including Russian elections, Israeli elections, Italian elections,
German elections, etc., or perhaps you think that a different criterion should be applied to people who are not American.
As for
McMasters, I am unimpressed with him. He displays all the symptoms of Russophobia. He has special information? Information can
be interpreted many ways depending on one's purpose. pl
PT does not have access to the classified information underlying but your argument that "As you are well aware sources and
methods cannot be made public so I fail to see how you believe this should have been publicly done." doesn't hold water for me
since I have seen sources and methods disclosed by the government of the US many times when it felt that necessary. One example
that I have mentioned before was that of the trial of Jeffrey Sterling (merlin) for which I was an expert witness and adviser
to the federal court for four years.
In that one the CIA and DoJ forced the court to allow them to de-classify the CIA DO's operational
files on the case and read them into the record in open court. I had read all these files when they were classified at the SCI
level. IMO the perpetrators in the Steel Memo case are and were merely hiding behind claims of sources and methods protection
in order to protect themselve. pl
Mueller cleared his ridiculous indictment relating to the Russian troll farm, a requirement that at one time would have been
SOP for any FBI Office or USAtty Office bringing an indictment of this kind.
Not aware of this. Can you help me out?
No doubt vaguely familiar with public lore, in limited ways. As always.
So now we are supposed to believe unquestioningly the word of torturers, perjurers and entrapment artists, all talking about alleged
evidence that we are not allowed to see?
Did you learn nothing from the "Iraqi WMD" fiasco or the "ZOMG! Assad gassed his own peoples ZOMG!" debacle? Funny how in each of these instances, the intelligence community's lies just happened to coincide with the agenda of empire.
Ok, true. I forgot 'Steele'* was used as 'evidence'. Strictly, Pat may have helped me out considering my 'felt' "debate-shift". Indirectly. I do recall, I hesitated to try to clarify
matters for myself.
Depends on what crime the "hack" committed. Fudging on taxes or cutting corners? Big whoop. Laundering $500 mil for a buddy of
Vlad's? Now you got my attention and should have the voters' attention.
This is a political process in the end game. Clinton lied about sex in the oval Office and was tried for it. Why don't we exercise
patience in the process and see if this President should be tried?
I ain't a lawyer but don't prosecutors hold their cards (evidence) close to their chests until the court has a criminal charge
and sets a date for discovery?
Linda,
You betray your ignorance on this subject. You clearly have not understood nor comprehended what I have written. So i will put
it in CAPS for you. Please read slowly.
THIS TYPE OF DOCUMENT, IF IT HAD A SOURCE OR SOURCES BEHIND IT, WOULD REFERENCE THOSE SOURCES. AN ANALYST WOULD NOT WRITE "WE
ASSESS." IF YOU HAVE A RELIABLE HUMAN SOURCE OR A RELIABLE PIECE OF SIGINT THE YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ASSESS. YOU SIMPLY STATE, ACCORDING
TO A KNOWLEDGEABLE AND RELIABLE SOURCE.
GOT IT. And don't come back with nonsense that the sources are so sensitive that they cannot be disclose. News flash genius--the
very fact that Clapper put out this piece of dreck would have exposed the sources if they existed (but they do not). In any event,
there would be reference to sources that provided the evidence that such activity took place at the direction of Putin.
I notice other Intelligence Community Assessments also use the term "we assess" liberally. For example, the 2018 Worldwide
Threat Assessment and the 2012 ICA on Global Water Security use the "we assess" phrase throughout the documents. I hazard to guess
that is why they call these things assessments.
The 2017 ICA on Russian Interference released to the public clearly states: "This report is a declassified version of a highly
classified assessment. This document's conclusions are identical to the highly classified assessment, but this document does not
include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence on key elements of the influence campaign. Given the
redactions, we made minor edits purely for readability and flow."
I would hazard another guess that those minor edits for readability and flow are the reason that specific intelligence reports
and sources, which were left out of the unclassified ICA, are not cited in that ICA.
As far as I know, no one has reliably claimed that election systems, as in vote tallies, were ever breached. No votes were
changed after they were cast. The integrity of our election system and the 2016 election itself was maintained. Having said that,
there is plenty of evidence of Russian meddling as an influence op. I suggest you and others take a gander at the research of
someone going by the handle of @UsHadrons and several others. They are compiling a collection of FaceBook, twitter and other media
postings that emanated from the IRA and other Russian sources. The breadth of these postings is quite wide and supports the assessment
that enhancing the divides that already existed in US society was a primary Russian goal.
I pointed this stuff out to Eric Newhill a while back in one of our conversations. He jokingly noted that he may have assisted
in spreading a few of these memes. I bet a lot of people will recognize some of the stuff in this collection. That's nothing.
Recently we all learned that Michael Moore did a lot more than unwittingly repost a Russian meme. He took part in a NYC protest
march organized and pushed by Russians. This stuff is open source proof of Russian meddling.
TTG
Nice try, but that is bullshit just because recent assessments come out with sloppy language is no excuse. Go back and look at
the assessment was done for iraq to justify the war in 2003. Many sources cited because it was considered something Required to
justify going to war. As we have been told by many in the media that the Russians meddling was worse or as bad as the attack on
Pearl Harbor and 9-11. With something so serious do you want to argue that they would downplay the sourcing?
"... Still worse, Putin and "Putin's Russia" have been so demonized that it is hard to imagine any leading American political figures or editorial commentators responding positively to what is plainly his hope for a new beginning in US-Russian relations. If nothing else, strategic parity always also meant political parity -- recognizing that Soviet Russia, like the United States, had legitimate national interests abroad. The years of American vilifying Putin and Russia are essentially an assertion that neither has any such legitimacy. ..."
Does Putin really believe Washington will "listen now"? He may still have some
"illusions," but we should have none. In recent years, there has been ample evidence that
US policy-makers and, equally important, mainstream media commentators do not bother to
read what Putin says, or at least not more than snatches from click-bait wire-service
reports.
Still worse, Putin and "Putin's Russia" have been so demonized that it is hard to
imagine any leading American political figures or editorial commentators responding
positively to what is plainly his hope for a new beginning in US-Russian relations. If
nothing else, strategic parity always also meant political parity -- recognizing that
Soviet Russia, like the United States, had legitimate national interests abroad. The years
of American vilifying Putin and Russia are essentially an assertion that neither has any
such legitimacy.
And making matters worse, there are the still unproven allegations of "Russiagate"
collusion. Even if President Trump understands, or is made to understand, the new --
possibly historic -- overture represented by Putin's speech, would the "Kremlin puppet"
allegations made daily against him permit him to seize this opportunity? Indeed, do the
promoters of "Russiagate" care?
"... The evidence is damning. And the silence underscores the arrogance. ..."
"... More than seven weeks after a devastating report from the media watch group FAIR, top executives and prime-time anchors at MSNBC still refuse to discuss how the network's obsession with Russia has thrown minimal journalistic standards out the window. ..."
The evidence is damning. And the silence underscores the arrogance.
More than seven weeks after a devastating report from the media watch group FAIR, top executives and prime-time anchors at
MSNBC still refuse to discuss how the network's obsession with Russia has thrown minimal journalistic standards out the window.
"An analysis by FAIR has found that the leading liberal cable network did not run a single segment devoted specifically to
Yemen in the second half of 2017. And in these latter roughly six months of the year, MSNBC ran nearly 5,000 percent more segments
that mentioned Russia than segments that mentioned Yemen."
"Moreover, in all of 2017, MSNBC only aired one broadcast on the U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of
Yemeni civilians. And it never mentioned the impoverished nation's colossal cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million
Yemenis in the
largest outbreak in recorded history ."
"All of this is despite the fact that the U.S. government has played a leading role in the 33-month war that has devastated
Yemen, selling
many billions
of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia, refueling Saudi warplanes as they relentlessly bomb civilian areas and providing
intelligence
and military assistance to the Saudi air force."
Meanwhile, MSNBC's incessant "Russiagate" coverage has put the network at the media forefront of overheated hyperbole about the
Kremlin. And continually piling up the dry tinder of hostility toward Russia boosts the odds of a cataclysmic blowup between the
world's two nuclear superpowers.
In effect, the programming on MSNBC follows a thin blue party line, breathlessly conforming to Democratic leaders' refrains about
Russia as a mortal threat to American democracy and freedom across the globe. But hey -- MSNBC's ratings have climbed upward during
its monochrome reporting, so why worry about whether coverage is neglecting dozens of other crucial stories? Or why worry if the
anti-Russia drumbeat is worsening the risks of a global conflagration?
FAIR's report, written by journalist Ben Norton and published on Jan. 8, certainly merited a serious response from MSNBC and the
anchors most identified by the study, Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes . Yet no response has come from them or network executives. (Full
disclosure: I'm a longtime associate of FAIR.)
In the aftermath of the FAIR study, a petition gathered 22,784 signers and 4,474 individual comments -- asking MSNBC to remedy
its extreme imbalance of news coverage. But the network and its prime-time luminaries Maddow and Hayes refused to respond despite
repeated requests for a reply.
The petition was submitted in late January to Maddow and Hayes via their producers, as well as to MSNBC senior vice president
Errol Cockfield and to the network's senior manager in charge of media relations for "The Rachel Maddow Show" and "All In with Chris
Hayes."
Signers responded to outreach from three organizations -- Just Foreign Policy, RootsAction.org (which I coordinate), and World
Beyond War -- calling for concerned individuals to "urge Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and MSNBC to correct their failure to report
on the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and the direct U.S. military role in causing the catastrophe by signing our petition." (The
petition
is still gathering signers.)
As the cable news network most trusted by Democrats as a liberal beacon, MSNBC plays a special role in fueling rage among progressive-minded
viewers toward Russia's "attack on our democracy" that is somehow deemed more sinister and newsworthy than corporate dominance of
American politicians (including Democrats), racist voter suppression, gerrymandering and many other U.S. electoral defects all put
together.
At the same time, the anti-Russia mania also services the engines of the current militaristic machinery.
It's what happens when nationalism and partisan zeal overcome something that could be called journalism.
"The U.S. media's approach to Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda," the independent journalist Robert Parry
wrote at the end of 2017 , in
the last article published before his death. "Does any sentient human being read the New York Times' or the Washington Post's
coverage of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts?"
Parry added that
"to even suggest that there is another side to the story makes you a 'Putin apologist' or 'Kremlin stooge.' Western journalists
now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia.
Ironically, many 'liberals' who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam
War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S. intelligence community feeds us, even if we're told to accept the assertions
on faith."
Across a U.S. media landscape where depicting Russia as a fully villainous enemy is now routine, MSNBC is a standout. The most
profound dangers from what Rachel Maddow and company are doing is what they least want to talk about -- how the cumulative effects
and momentum of their work are increasing the likelihood that tensions between Washington and Moscow will escalate into a horrendous
military conflict.
Even at the height of the Cold War during the 1960s, when Soviet Communists ruled Russians with zero freedom of speech or press,
most U.S. political and media elites recognized the vital need for détente. They applauded the "
Spirit of Glassboro
" when the top leadership of the United States and Russia met at length. Now, across most of the U.S. media spectrum, no such overtures
to the Kremlin are to be tolerated.
The U.S. government's recently released "
Nuclear Posture Review "
underscores just how unhinged the situation has become.
Consider the assessment from the head of a first-rate research organization in the nuclear weapons field, the Los Alamos Study
Group. Its executive director,
Greg Mello,
said :
"What is most 'missing in action' in this document is civilian leadership. Trump is not supplying that. In part the fault for
this comes from Democrats -- who, allied with the intelligence community and other military-industrial interests, insist that
the U.S. must have an adversarial relationship with Russia. There is no organized senior-level opposition to the new Cold War,
which is intensifying week by week. This document reflects, and is just one of many policies embodying, the new and very dangerous
Cold War."
But -- with everyone's survival at stake
-- none of that seems to matter much to those who call the shots at MSNBC.
*
Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org.
"... It was President Bill Clinton who moved NATO eastwards, abrogating a 1991 agreement with the Russians not to recruit former members of the Warsaw Pact that is at the root of current tensions with Moscow. And, while the U.S. and NATO point to Russia's annexation of the Crimea as a sign of a "revanchist" Moscow, it was NATO that set the precedent of altering borders when it dismembered Serbia to create Kosovo after the 1999 Yugoslav war. ..."
"... And it was President Barack Obama who further chilled relations with the Russians by tacitly backing the 2014 coup in the Ukraine, and whose "Asia pivot" has led to tensions between Washington and Beijing. ..."
"... In speaking at Johns Hopkins, Defense Secretary James Mattis warned , "If you challenge us, it will be your longest and worst day" -- a remark aimed directly at Russia. ..."
"... NATO ally Britain went even further. Chief of the United Kingdom General Staff, Nick Carter, told the Defense and Security Forum that "our generation has become used to wars of choice since the end of the Cold War," but "we may not have a choice about conflict with Russia." He added , "The parallels with 1914 are stark." ..."
"... Certainly the verbiage about Russia and China is alarming. Russia is routinely described as "aggressive," "revisionist," and "expansionist." In a recent attack on China, U.S. Defense Secretary Rex Tillerson described China's trade with Latin America as " imperial ," an ironic choice of words given Washington's more overtly imperial history in the region. ..."
"... While Moscow is certainly capable of destroying the world with its nuclear weapons, Russia today bears little resemblance to 1914 Russia -- or, for that matter, the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The U.S. and its NATO allies currently spend more than 12 times what Russia does on its armaments, and even that vastly underestimates Washington's actual military outlay. A great deal of U.S. spending is not counted as "military," including nuclear weapons, currently being modernized to the tune of $1.5 trillion. ..."
"... The balance between China and the U.S. is more even, but the U.S. still outspends China almost three to one. Fact in Washington's major regional allies -- Japan, Australia, and South Korea -- and that figure is almost four to one. In nuclear weapons, the ratio is vastly greater: 26 to 1 in favor of the U.S. Add NATO and the ratios are 28 to 1. ..."
"... Meanwhile, China has two military goals: to secure its sea-borne energy supplies by building up its navy, and to establish a buffer zone in the East and South China seas to keep potential enemies at arm's length. To that end it has constructed smaller, more agile ships, and missiles capable of keeping U.S. aircraft carriers out of range, a strategy called "area denial." It has also modernized its military, cutting back on land-based forces and investing in air and sea assets. However, it spends less of its GDP on its military than does the U.S.: 1.9 percent as opposed to 3.3 percent as of 2016. ..."
"... But China has been invaded several times, starting with the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856, when Britain forced the Chinese to lift their ban on importing the drug. Japan invaded in 1895 and 1937. If the Chinese are touchy about their coastline, one can hardly blame them. ..."
"... Is this a new Cold War, when the U.S. attempted to surround and isolate the Soviet Union? There are parallels, but the Cold War was an ideological battle between two systems, socialism and capitalism. The fight today is over market access and economic domination. When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned Latin America about China and Russia, it wasn't about "Communist subversion," but trade. ..."
"... For one, the big arms manufacturers -- Lockheed Martian, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics -- have lots of cash to hand out come election time. "Great power competition" will be expensive, with lots of big-ticket items: aircraft carriers, submarines, surface ships, and an expanded air force. ..."
"... And many of the Democrats are ahead of the curve when it comes to demonizing the Russians. The Russian bug-a-boo has allowed the party to shift the blame for Hillary Clinton's loss to Moscow's manipulation of the election, thus avoiding having to examine its own lackluster campaign and unimaginative political program. ..."
"... Piling onto Moscow may have consequences as well. Andrei Kostin, head of one of Russia's largest banks, VTB, told the Financial Times that adding more sanctions against Russia " would be like declaring war ." ..."
The U.S. has never taken its eyes off its big competitors.
It was President Bill Clinton who moved NATO eastwards, abrogating a 1991 agreement with the
Russians not to recruit former members of the Warsaw Pact that is at the root of current
tensions with Moscow. And, while the U.S. and NATO point to Russia's annexation of the Crimea
as a sign of a "revanchist" Moscow, it was NATO that set the precedent of altering borders when
it dismembered Serbia to create Kosovo after the 1999 Yugoslav war.
It was President George W. Bush who designated China a "strategic competitor," and who tried
to lure India into an anti-Chinese alliance by allowing New Delhi to violate the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. Letting India purchase uranium on the international market -- it was
barred from doing so by refusing to sign the NPT -- helped ignite the dangerous nuclear arms
race with Pakistan in South Asia.
And it was President Barack Obama who further chilled relations with the Russians by tacitly
backing the 2014 coup in the Ukraine, and whose "Asia pivot" has led to tensions between
Washington and Beijing.
So is jettisoning "terrorism" as the enemy in favor of "great powers" just old wine, new
bottle? Not quite. For one thing the new emphasis has a decidedly more dangerous edge to
it.
1914 vs. Today
In speaking at Johns Hopkins, Defense Secretary
James Mattis warned , "If you challenge us, it will be your longest and worst day" -- a
remark aimed directly at Russia.
NATO ally Britain went even further. Chief of the United Kingdom General Staff, Nick
Carter, told the Defense and Security Forum that "our generation has become used to wars of
choice since the end of the Cold War," but "we may not have a choice about conflict with
Russia."
He added , "The parallels with 1914 are stark."
Certainly the verbiage about Russia and China is alarming. Russia is routinely described
as "aggressive," "revisionist," and "expansionist." In a recent attack on China, U.S. Defense
Secretary Rex Tillerson described China's trade with Latin America as "
imperial ," an ironic choice of words given Washington's more overtly imperial history in the
region.
But there are differences between now and the run up to the First World War. In 1914, there
were several powerful and evenly matched empires at odds. That is not the case today.
While Moscow is certainly capable of destroying the world with its nuclear weapons,
Russia today bears little resemblance to 1914 Russia -- or, for that matter, the Soviet
Union.
The U.S. and its NATO allies currently spend
more than 12 times what Russia does on its armaments, and even that vastly underestimates
Washington's actual military outlay. A great deal of U.S. spending is not counted as
"military," including nuclear weapons, currently being modernized to the tune of $1.5
trillion.
The balance between China and the U.S. is more even, but the U.S. still outspends China
almost three to one. Fact in Washington's major regional allies -- Japan, Australia, and South
Korea -- and that figure is almost four to one. In nuclear weapons, the ratio is vastly
greater: 26 to 1 in favor of the U.S. Add NATO and the ratios are 28 to 1.
This isn't to say that the military forces of Russia and China are irrelevant. Russia's
intervention in the Syrian civil war helped turn the tide against the anti-Assad coalition put
together by the United States. But its economy is smaller than Italy's, and its "aggression" is
arguably a response to NATO establishing a presence on Moscow's doorstep.
Meanwhile, China has two military goals: to secure its sea-borne energy supplies by
building up its navy, and to establish a buffer zone in the East and South China seas to keep
potential enemies at arm's length. To that end it has constructed smaller, more agile ships,
and missiles capable of keeping U.S. aircraft carriers out of range, a strategy called "area
denial." It has also modernized its military, cutting back on land-based forces and investing
in air and sea assets. However, it spends less of its GDP on its military than does the U.S.:
1.9 percent as
opposed to 3.3 percent as of 2016.
Beijing has been heavy-handed in establishing "area denial," alienating many of its
neighbors -- Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan -- by claiming most of the South
China Sea and building bases in the Paracel and Spratly islands.
But China has been invaded several times, starting with the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856,
when Britain forced the Chinese to lift their ban on importing the drug. Japan invaded in 1895
and 1937. If the Chinese are touchy about their coastline, one can hardly blame them.
China is, however, the United States' major competitor and the second largest economy in the
world. It has replaced the U.S. as Latin America's largest trading partner and successfully
outflanked Washington's attempts to throttle its economic influence. When the U.S. asked its
key allies to boycott China's new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, with
the exception of Japan , they ignored Washington.
However, commercial success is hardly "imperial."
Is this a new Cold War, when the U.S. attempted to surround and isolate the Soviet
Union? There are parallels, but the Cold War was an ideological battle between two systems,
socialism and capitalism. The fight today is over market access and economic domination. When
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned Latin America about China and Russia, it wasn't about
"Communist subversion," but trade.
Behind the Shift
There are other players behind this shift.
For one, the big arms manufacturers -- Lockheed Martian, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems,
Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics -- have lots of cash to hand out come election time.
"Great power competition" will be expensive, with lots of big-ticket items: aircraft carriers,
submarines, surface ships, and an expanded air force.
This is not to say that the U.S. has altered its foreign policy focus because of arms
company lobbies, but they do have a seat at the table. And given that those companies have
spread their operations to all 50 states, local political representatives and governors have a
stake in keeping -- and expanding -- those often high paying jobs.
Nor are the Republicans going to get much opposition on increased defense spending from the
Democrats, many of whom are as hawkish as their colleagues across the aisle. That's true even
though higher defense spending -- coupled with the recent tax cut bill -- will rule out funding
many of the programs the Democrats hold dear. Of course, for the Republicans that dilemma is a
major side benefit: cut taxes, increase defense spending, then dismantle social services,
Social Security, and Medicare in order to service the deficit.
And many of the Democrats are ahead of the curve when it comes to demonizing the
Russians. The Russian bug-a-boo has allowed the party to shift the blame for Hillary Clinton's
loss to Moscow's manipulation of the election, thus avoiding having to examine its own
lackluster campaign and unimaginative political program.
There are other actors pushing this new emphasis as well, including the Bush
administration's neoconservatives who launched the Iraq War. Their new target is Iran, even
though inflating Iran to the level of a "great power" is laughable. Iran's military budget is
$12.3 billion. Saudi Arabia alone spends $63.7 billion on defense, slightly less than Russia,
which has five times the population and eight times the land area. In a clash between Iran and
the U.S. and its local allies, the disparity in military strength would be closer to 60 to 1 .
However, in terms of disasters, even Iraq would pale before a war with Iran.
The most dangerous place in the world right now is the Korean Peninsula, where the Trump
administration appears to be casting around for some kind of military demonstration that will
not ignite a nuclear war. But how would China react to an attack that might put hostile troops
on its southern border?
Piling onto Moscow may have consequences as well. Andrei Kostin, head of one of Russia's
largest banks, VTB, told the Financial Times that adding more sanctions against Russia "
would be like
declaring war ."
"... Therefore, if we must see this in terms of conflict, we see a dramatically less powerful and dramatically poorer but essentially unified Russia facing up to a threat from a West that is far superior militarily and economically but that is divided in itself and slipping further into decline. ..."
"... This does of course lead to the unstable world you say we are faced with. Dangerously unstable. But I do not believe you are admitting to yourself that it is an instability we in the West are causing. ..."
I don't understand the last three paragraphs of your comment so I may be missing
your central point. However, I believe this sentence taken in isolation could do with
qualifying:-
"No doubt there is a lot of noise, but the reality is that economically Russia is a basket
case and the US is rapidly joining them."
The picture one gets of Russia is of a country slowly digging itself out of the
disintegrative corruption of the 90's. Putin's recent remarks indicate how slowly.
President Carter's characterisation of the US as now being an oligarchy shows the US
slowly going the other way. Even including Germany that is the general picture in the
West.
Some recent remarks and examples from DH show the Russian people, or rather a substantial
number of them, soberly and consciously preparing to address the threat from the West. Unless
it's all Russian PR there is a sense of national unity there, at least for many, and that is
reflected by the Russian leadership.
I'm afraid our host is correct when he characterises the current anti-Russian sentiment in
the West as hysterical. That, however, is I believe largely top down. It is a product of PR
from the media and from the Western politicians. Behind it is no deep sense of unity or
national resolve. In fact we see the reverse - most Western countries are deeply divided
within themselves.
The Russians seem also to have escaped the demoralising effects of the more far out social
trends in the US and other Western countries.
Therefore, if we must see this in terms of conflict, we see a dramatically less
powerful and dramatically poorer but essentially unified Russia facing up to a threat from a
West that is far superior militarily and economically but that is divided in itself and
slipping further into decline.
This does of course lead to the unstable world you say we are faced with. Dangerously
unstable. But I do not believe you are admitting to yourself that it is an instability we in
the West are causing.
Yes, I have such friends, too – wouldn't dream of reading NYT 'cuz it's just way too
commie On the other hand, my good, lib'ral friends think anything published in the Times is a
word of mr. god. (Somehow, a subs to NYT makes one a true and honest intellectual, a
confirmation of their smartness and how far they've come along, a status symbol!) Oh, my
I do remember an interview with Bill Keller, not too long after he resigned from NYT (you
know, that little problem w J. Miller and all). It was published in the Salon (back when it
was still worth a read). In it, he very plainly said that the Times supports and follows the
'national security' line (whatever that means). He was not particularly shy about it.
He did not explain (at least, I do not remember) what 'national security' means. The
interview was quite unsettling there was finally proof that NYT has an agenda, a lens through
which it sees the world. It clarified a lot and, wouldn't you know, hard as I try, I've not
been able to find it on Salon's website. Maybe he said too much
Muller was the guy who buried 911 investigation. That's probably why he was hired for Russiagate investigation too.
Notable quotes:
"... retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks a simple, yet monumentally significant question: Why haven't Congressional
Investigators or Special Counsel Robert Mueller addressed the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich - who multiple people have claimed was
Wikileaks' source of emails leaked during the 2016 U.S. presidential election? ..."
"... Mueller has been incredibly thorough in his ongoing investigations -- however he won't even respond to Kim Dotcom, the New
Zealand entrepreneur who clearly knew about the hacked emails long before they were released, claims that Seth Rich obtained them with
a memory stick , and has offered to provide proof to the Special Counsel investigation. ..."
"... In addition to several odd facts surrounding Rich's still unsolved murder - which officials have deemed a "botched robbery,"
forensic technical evidence has emerged which contradicts the Crowdstrike report. The Irvine, CA company partially funded by Google
, was the only entity allowed to analyze the DNC servers in relation to claims of election hacking: ..."
"... Notably, Crowdstrike has been considered by many to be discredited over their revision and retraction of a report over Russian
hacking of Ukrainian military equipment - a report which the government of Ukraine said was fake news. ..."
"... Also notable is that Crowdstrike founder and anti-Putin Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch sits on the Atlantic Council - which
is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Who else is on the Atlantic Council?
Evelyn Farkas - who slipped up during an MSNBC interview with Mika Brzezinski and disclosed that the Obama administration had been spying
on the Trump campaign: ..."
"... "The facts that we know of in the murder of the DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was that he was gunned down blocks from his home on
July 10, 2016. Washington Metro police detectives claim that Mr. Rich was a robbery victim, which is strange since after being shot
twice in the back, he was still wearing a $2,000 gold necklace and watch. He still had his wallet, key and phone. Clearly, he was not
a victim of robbery, " writes Lyons. ..."
"... Another unexplained fact muddying the Rich case is that of a stolen 40 caliber Glock 22 handguns stolen from an FBI agent's
car the same day Rich was murdered. D.C. Metro police said that the theft occurred between 5 and 7 a.m., while the FBI said two weeks
later that the theft had occurred between Midnight and 2 a.m. - fueling speculation that the FBI gun was used in Rich's murder ..."
"... Perhaps the most stunning audio evidence, however, comes from leaked audio of a recorded conversation between Ed Butowsky and
Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who told him of a " purported FBI report establishing that Seth Rich
sent emails to WikiLeaks ." ..."
"... Hersh also told Butowsky that the DNC made up the Russian hacking story as a disinformation campaign – directly pointing a
finger at former CIA director (and now MSNBC/NBC contributor ) John Brennan as the architect. ..."
As rumors swirl that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is
preparing a case against Russians who are alleged to have hacked Democrats during the 2016 election -- a conclusion based solely
on the analysis of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, a Friday op-ed in the
Washington Times by retired
U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks a simple, yet monumentally significant question: Why haven't Congressional Investigators
or Special Counsel Robert Mueller addressed the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich - who multiple people have claimed was Wikileaks'
source of emails leaked during the 2016 U.S. presidential election?
Mueller has been incredibly thorough in his ongoing investigations -- however he won't even respond to Kim Dotcom, the New
Zealand entrepreneur who
clearly knew about the hacked emails long before they were released, claims that Seth Rich obtained them with a
memory
stick , and has offered to provide proof to the Special Counsel investigation.
On May 18, 2017, Dotcom proposed that if Congress includes the Seth Rich investigation in their Russia probe, he would provide
written testimony with evidence that Seth Rich was WikiLeaks' source.
In addition to several odd facts surrounding Rich's still unsolved murder - which officials have deemed a "botched robbery,"
forensic technical evidence has emerged which contradicts the Crowdstrike report. The Irvine, CA company
partially
funded by Google , was the
only
entity allowed to analyze the DNC servers in relation to claims of election hacking:
Notably, Crowdstrike has been considered by many to be discredited over their revision and retraction of a report over Russian
hacking of Ukrainian military equipment - a report which the government of Ukraine said was fake news.
In connection with the emergence in some media reports which stated that the alleged "80% howitzer D-30 Armed Forces of Ukraine
removed through scrapping Russian Ukrainian hackers software gunners," Land Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine informs
that the said information is incorrect .
Ministry of Defence of Ukraine asks journalists to publish only verified information received from the competent official sources.
Spreading false information leads to increased social tension in society and undermines public confidence in the Armed Forces
of Ukraine. –mil.gov.ua (translated) (1.6.2017)
In fact, several respected journalists have cast serious doubt on CrowdStrike's report on the DNC servers:
Pay attention, because Mueller is likely to use the Crowdstrike report to support the rumored upcoming charges against Russian
hackers.
Also notable is that Crowdstrike founder and anti-Putin Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch sits on the Atlantic Council - which
is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and
Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk.
Who else is on the Atlantic Council?
Evelyn Farkas - who slipped up during an MSNBC interview with Mika Brzezinski and disclosed that the Obama administration had
been spying on the Trump campaign:
The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try
to compromise those sources and methods , meaning we would not longer have access to that intelligence. - Evelyn Farkas
Odd facts surrounding the murder of Seth Rich
"The facts that we know of in the murder of the DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was that he was gunned down blocks from his home on
July 10, 2016. Washington Metro police detectives claim that Mr. Rich was a robbery victim, which is strange since after being shot
twice in the back, he was still wearing a $2,000 gold necklace and watch. He still had his wallet, key and phone. Clearly, he was
not a victim of robbery, " writes Lyons.
Another unexplained fact muddying the Rich case is that of a stolen 40 caliber Glock 22 handguns stolen from an FBI agent's
car the same day Rich was murdered. D.C. Metro police said that the theft occurred between 5 and 7 a.m., while the FBI said two weeks
later that the theft had occurred between Midnight and 2 a.m. - fueling speculation that the FBI gun was used in Rich's murder.
Furthermore, two men working with the Rich family - private investigator and former D.C. Police detective Rod Wheeler and family
acquaintance Ed Butowsky, have previously stated that Rich had contacts with WikiLeaks before his death.
"According to Ed Butowsky, an acquaintance of the family, in his discussions with Joel and Mary Rich, they confirmed that their
son transmitted the DNC emails to Wikileaks ," writes Lyons.
While Wheeler initially told TV station Fox5 that proof of Rich's contact with WikiLeaks lies on the murdered IT staffer's laptop,
he later walked
the claim back - though he maintained that there was "some communication between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks."
Wheeler also claimed in recently leaked audio that Seth Rich's
brother, Aaron – a Northrup Grumman employee, blocked him from looking at Seth's computer and stonewalled his investigation.
Wheeler said that brother Aaron Rich tried to block Wheeler from looking at Seth's computer, even though there could be evidence
on it. "He said no, he said I have his computer, meaning him," Wheeler said. "I said, well can I look at it? He said, what are
you looking for? I said anything that could indicate if Seth was having problems with someone. He said no, I already checked it.
Don't worry about it."
Aaron also blocked Wheeler from finding out about who was at a party Seth attended the night of the murder.
"All I want you to do is work on the botched robbery theory and that's it," Aaron told Wheeler -
Big League Politics
Perhaps the most stunning audio evidence, however, comes from leaked audio of a recorded conversation between Ed Butowsky
and Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who told him of a " purported FBI report establishing that Seth
Rich sent emails to WikiLeaks ."
As transcribed and exclusively reported on by journalist Cassandra Fairbanks last year:
What the report says is that some time in late Spring he makes contact with WikiLeaks, that's in his computer," he says. "
Anyway, they found what he had done is that he had submitted a series of documents -- of emails, of juicy emails, from the DNC."
Hersh explains that it was unclear how the negotiations went, but that WikiLeaks did obtain access to a password protected
DropBox where Rich had put the files.
" All I know is that he offered a sample, an extensive sample, I'm sure dozens of emails, and said 'I want money.' Later, WikiLeaks
did get the password, he had a DropBox, a protected DropBox," he said. They got access to the DropBox."
Hersh also states that Rich had concerns about something happening to him, and had
"The word was passed, according to the NSA report, he also shared this DropBox with a couple of friends, so that 'if anything
happens to me it's not going to solve your problems,'" he added. "WikiLeaks got access before he was killed."
Brennan and Russian disinformation
Hersh also told Butowsky that the DNC made up the Russian hacking story as a disinformation campaign – directly pointing a
finger at former CIA director (and now
MSNBC/NBC contributor
) John Brennan as the architect.
I have a narrative of how that whole f*cking thing began. It's a Brennan operation, it was an American disinformation , and
the fu*kin' President, at one point, they even started telling the press – they were backfeeding the Press, the head of the NSA
was going and telling the press, fu*king c*cksucker Rogers, was telling the press that we even know who in the Russian military
intelligence service leaked it.
(full transcription here and extended audio of the Hersh conversation
here )
Hersh denied that he told Butowsky anything before the leaked audio emerged , telling NPR " I hear gossip [Butowsky] took two
and two and made 45 out of it. "
Technical Evidence
As we mentioned last week, Dotcom's assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name
Forensicator , who determined that the DNC files were copied at
22.6 MB/s - a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network - yet a speed
typical of file transfers to a memory stick.
The big hint
Last but not least, let's not forget that Julian Assange heavily implied Seth Rich was a source:
Given that a) the Russian hacking narrative hinges on Crowdstrikes's questionable reporting , and b) a mountain of evidence pointing
to Seth Rich as the source of the leaked emails - it stands to reason that Congressional investigators and Special Counsel Robert
Mueller should at minimum explore these leads.
As retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks: why aren't they?
Something all of us here already know, if Mueller gets away from the delusion of Trump-Russia collusion then it will be his
ass in the frying pan. So he won't go after the Clintons, Obama, Comey or anyone else. Hitlery could show up with a gun in her
hand and tell Mueller she shot Seth and he would ignore it.
And, sadly, there ain't nobody gonna do anything about it unless and until a Special Prosecutor from outside DC is hired. Right
now a snowball in hell has a better chance.
Why don't the Democrats scream about the exploitation of his murder against them like they do with every minor accusation? It's as if they want his death to disappear from the public view...wonder why?
I think it is mostly because they know so much of their world hangs in the secrecy. If they let the Seth Rich story get out,
the Uranium One story gets out. If the Uranium One story gets out, the Awans' stolen cars with diplomatic cover for guns to Syria
in return for heroin to America comes out. If that story comes out, then the ISI Pakistani doctors with fake medical degrees pushing
pharma opiods in America comes out. And finally, Pizzagate, Pedogate, call it what you want, it comes out too. And then all of
these dirty sons of bitches go to jail.
And that's why you aren't hearing any of it. Especially from Mueller. I think he got hoodwinked too. They sold him this job
as a slam dunk to get Trump out of the White House. It really is the shits when the best laid plans of mice go south.
One of Trumps big problems is that as an outsider he did not have people both qualified and loyal to appoint to critical offices
in the deep state. That is why he wound up with a cipher like Sessions, a guy naive and gullible enough to believe the justice
department was filled with honorable and trustworthy people or at least men who played by some set of rules. Having found out
the hard way that he screwed up Trump is groping for a way out, trying to use a knife in a gun fight. The other side is too ruthless
and i suspect they will take him down in the end.
"All I know is that he offered a sample, an extensive sample, I'm sure dozens of emails, and said 'I want money.'
Later, WikiLeaks did get the password, he had a DropBox, a protected DropBox," he said. They got access to the
DropBox."
Why has no one followed the money on this yet? This introduces an interesting angle - did Seth Rich get paid by WikiLeaks?
And if so, can we find evidence of the payoff? How did he afford his expensive watch and necklace?
Report a crime, yet don't allow law enforcement access to evidence to help them solve the case.
Sounds like a case in Illinois. A 1 1/2 year old went missing, yet the parent wouldn't let the authorities search the house.
I don't remember if there was a warrant or what finally happened that the police were allowed to search the home, but they did,
and found the baby, dead, under the sofa.
The other key is Rod Rosenstein's post-indictment presser. At the very end, he gave away the game by admitting there was no
collusion, no Americans were involved, and nothing allegedly done by the Russians affected the election's outcome. BOOM. Stick
a fork in Mueller's ham sandwich indictment.
The one bit of evidence that pushes me over from the possible to probably is the gun, what are the odds of this gun being stolen
from the FBI, not just some random joe, but the FBI themselves. If that was the same gun used in the murder than the odds of it
happening to turn up immediately in a robbery where nothing was stolen in an area where no one commits crimes is so small as to
be near zero. It is vague above, what do ballistics say?
If Trump really wants to drain his swamp then this would be the way in, however if they did murder Seth then they'll murder
Trump's family too so he is neutralized unless they can go in and get everyone involved in one go. Otherwise I'd expect the job
to be handed over to someone ready to die, thinking here a retired general/admiral with no family might be the one to do it.
"... Following Admiral Roger's closing the FSA mega-file to the FBI, it looks as though Christopher Steele's real role was laundering information stateside which had been obtained through continued Inquiries of the NSA mega-file by our Ambassador to the UN. *** Fusion GPS immediately hired FBI manager Bruce Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, and Christopher Steele. Bruce Ohr passed his illegally obtained information to Nellie, she to Steele, who then relayed the material back to Fusion / FBI as coming from his "Russian contacts." ..."
"... And here 44 may have made a mistake in authorizing the spread his Daily Briefing to 30+ agencies and individuals -- again as a work-around of the Roger's information ban. This places 44's fingerprints on the work-around. ..."
"... As it happens, I think the suggestion that Steele's role may have been, in very substantial measure, to give the impression that material from other source was the product of a high-quality 'humint' investigation merits being taken extremely seriously. ..."
"... Carter Page during his period of cooperation with the FBI, almost certainly was handled by Agents assigned to a field office. I wonder what they had to say, assuming they even knew, about HQ opening a CI case targeting their former cooperating witness for FISA coverage. It will be very interesting to see who handled Steele. Strzok? ..."
"... What was the compelling evidence and who furnished it to turn a US Naval Academy graduate, and presumably a Naval Officer with a readily accessible track record in service, into the targeted subject of an espionage investigation. Did he even have any current access to classified information? This is not looking good. ..."
Following Admiral Roger's closing the FSA mega-file to the FBI, it looks as though
Christopher Steele's real role was laundering information stateside which had been obtained
through continued Inquiries of the NSA mega-file by our Ambassador to the UN. *** Fusion GPS
immediately hired FBI manager Bruce Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, and Christopher Steele. Bruce Ohr
passed his illegally obtained information to Nellie, she to Steele, who then relayed the
material back to Fusion / FBI as coming from his "Russian contacts."
And here 44 may have made a mistake in authorizing the spread his Daily Briefing to 30+ agencies and individuals --
again as a work-around of the Roger's information ban. This
places 44's fingerprints on the work-around.
You may recall the incident of the wrong Michael Cohen traveling to Prague to meet with
Russians -- when the future 45's personal lawyer was having a family celebration / baseball
game stateside? The error was generated by the NSA mega-file. Steele's "Russian contacts"
dutifully corroborated Cohen's visit with them in Prague -- how could they not, since they
exist only in Steele's mind. In short, the Steele "Russians contacts" are proved to be
fictions and if fictions then there was no Russian collusion between the Trump Campaign and
Russia.
*** Our UN Ambassador claims she was not generating hundreds of NSA Inquiries per week and
we can believe her. The NSA Inquiries were coming from the FBI via her State Department
"support" in DC.
It really does help if, when you make claims, you link to the source so that others can
evaluate them. In the case of the claims you are making, the source is clearly a post two days ago by
'sundance' on the 'Conservative Treehouse' site entitled 'Tying All The Loose Threads
Together – DOJ, FBI, DoS, White House: "Operation Latitude" '
As it happens, I think the suggestion that Steele's role may have been, in very
substantial measure, to give the impression that material from other source was the product
of a high-quality 'humint' investigation merits being taken extremely seriously.
However, to repeat claims by 'sundance', while not taking the – rather minimal
– amount of trouble required to provide the link which allows others to evaluate them,
simply puts people's backs up and makes them less likely to take what you are suggesting
seriously.
Most unusual, I would say, for an Agent in an upper management position in FBI HQ to open a
counter intelligence case and then for all intents and purposes assign it to himself. Cases
are normally worked and directly supervised in field offices.
Carter Page during his period of cooperation with the FBI, almost certainly was handled by
Agents assigned to a field office. I wonder what they had to say, assuming they even knew,
about HQ opening a CI case targeting their former cooperating witness for FISA coverage.
It will be very interesting to see who handled Steele. Strzok?
What was the compelling evidence and who furnished it to turn a US Naval Academy graduate,
and presumably a Naval Officer with a readily accessible track record in service, into the
targeted subject of an espionage investigation. Did he even have any current access to
classified information?
This is not looking good.
Carter Page FISA warrant does much, much more than surveille Page himself -- it
permits surveillance of most of the Trump campaign.
Notable quotes:
"... The whole Memo discussion above concerns the FBI's data manipulations to cast Carter Page as a spy worthy of an Article 1 warrant by the FISC. As I explained above, once Admiral Rogers closed the FBI's access to the NSA mega-file, the Bureau developed several work-arounds to explain how the FBI had data from the mega-file that they were mining through our Ambassador to the UN. ..."
"... Fusion GPS immediately hired the wife of FBI manager Bruce Ohr, Nellie, and Christopher Steele. Bruce handed material to Nellie, Nellie to Christopher. He repackaged the material claiming it was provided by very personal "Russian contacts" and the FBI then handed that laundered Steele material to the FISC. ..."
"... This laundering operation was exposed with a mistake concerning Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen was actually attending a family celebration and a ball game here in the US when he supposedly met Steele's "Russian contacts" in Prague. Steele's contacts, who exist only in his mind, dutifully confirmed that the meeting took place in Prague. ..."
"... Bill Binney, on Jimmy Dore show, said that FISA warrant enabled "two hop" surveillance. If so, then Carter Page FISA warrant does much, much more than surveille Page himself -- it permits surveillance of most of the Trump campaign. ..."
"... My "dog that didn't bark" question about Carter Page - if Carter Page was such a known danger, why didn't the FBI warn the Trump Campaign against letting him become involved in the campaign? ..."
"... The dog that didn't bark - if the Schiff Memo were so powerful, such a slam dunk, every MSM outlet in the western world would be trumpeting it to the skies and talking about nothing but. They seem to be barely able to acknowledge the existence of the Memo. ..."
"... As it happens, I think the suggestion that Steele's role may have been, in very substantial measure, to give the impression that material from other source was the product of a high-quality 'humint' investigation merits being taken extremely seriously. ..."
"... Schiff's defence sounded so, pardon the pun, shifty and did nothing to really counter the main point Nunes made when he released his memo. ..."
"... Schiff's memo was basically a vendetta against persons. Page and Papadopolis (sp?) are obviously the unpopular kids in the minds of the "mean girl" Democrats because they had links to Trump, the real threat to the popular girl Democrats. ..."
"... Funnily enough the question raised in your excerpt is exactly what I've been thinking since reading a post by TTG about Carter Page being an important FBI informant and state witness to the prosecution of Russian espionage. ..."
"... If the FBI believed Page had become a Russian spy it would have been easy due to their prior relationship with him to interview him and if he lied, to prosecute him for the process crime of perjury. That is such a slam dunk that the fact they didn't do that makes it seem there's something fishy there. ..."
"... And they never verified Steele's allegation that Page met with Sechin and Divyekin which would have been easy to do and now it seems was pure fabrication. Instead the FBI and DOJ lied and misrepresented to FISC to get a surveillance warrant on Page. This seems rather fishy. I speculate they did that to gain incidental collection on members of the Trump campaign. ..."
"... I note that Page hasn't been charged by the DOJ for any crime. ..."
"... Instead of working hard to protect national security, the FBI/CIA/DOJ' senior-idiots (accustomed to comfort and hefty checks) have been politicking and meddling in the electoral process. Meanwhile, the foreign nationals were left free to surf congressional computers – for years! (See Awan affair) and the "natives" like Clinton et al have been making a lot of money by getting huge bribes from Russians and Saudis (see Uranium One, involving Mueller for all other people). ..."
"... Carter Page during his period of cooperation with the FBI, almost certainly was handled by Agents assigned to a field office. I wonder what they had to say, assuming they even knew, about HQ opening a CI case targeting their former cooperating witness for FISA coverage. It will be very interesting to see who handled Steele. Strzok? ..."
"... What was the compelling evidence and who furnished it to turn a US Naval Academy graduate, and presumably a Naval Officer with a readily accessible track record in service, into the targeted subject of an espionage investigation. Did he even have any current access to classified information? This is not looking good. ..."
"... Carter Page is indeed a puzzlement. I don't see any account of him being an FBI informant, but he was a witness in the investigation and trial of the three SVR officers who tried to recruit him in 2013. ..."
"... Obama claimed something to the effect that, it turns out I am pretty good at killing people. This was in reference to the drone program and assume I don't need to footnote. Perhaps he got the notion that his administration was pretty good at intelligence. ..."
Devin
Nunes and his team have saved me the effort of pointing out the problems with the Schiff
rebuttal. I am presenting that in full. Here is the bottomline--we now know that Christopher
Steele was not a "one-time Charlie." He had a longstanding covert relationship as an FBI
intelligence asset. The Democrat memo does nothing to dispute that fact.
It also is clear that DOJ and FBI personnel engaged in unprofessional (and possibly illegal)
conduct with respect to making representations to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
(FISC). Three key points on this front--1: The so-called Steele dossier was proffered as
evidence to the FISC without fully disclosing that Steele was a covert asset being paid for his
work and that Democrat political operatives were also paying him; 2: Senior DOJ officials,
particularly Bruce Our, were totally comprised yet continued to be involved in the process; and
3: The Democrats insist that Carter Page is a bad guy and deserves to be investigated. Yet, no
charges have been filed against him and the allegations leveled in the Steele dossier were
dismissed by former FBI Director Comey as "salacious and unverified."
Anyway, here are the main points from the Democrat memo and the Republican response.
"George Papadopoulos revealed [redacted] that individuals linked to Russia, who took
interest in Papadopoulos as a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, informed him in late
April 2016 that Russia [two lines redacted]. Papadopoulos's disclosure, moreover, occurred
against the backdrop of Russia's aggressive covert campaign to influence our elections, which
the FBI was already monitoring. We would later learn in Papadopoulos's plea that the
information the Russians could assist by anonymously releasing were thousands of Hillary
Clinton emails."
my problem with this is wikileaks released the e mails via a search-able archive on march
16th 2016...
i still don't see how anything papadopolous said is relevant time wise.. what am i missing
here, other then the obvious fact papadopolous looks like a lousy liar.. apparently he got
this from Joseph Mifsud who as it turns out was 'director of the London Academy of Diplomacy'
and etc - according to the nyt here -
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/world/europe/russia-us-election-joseph-mifsud.html
and from the nyt article "Mr. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about
his conversations with the "professor." Mr. Mifsud is referred to in the papers only as "the
professor," based in London, but a Senate aide familiar with emails involving Mr. Mifsud --
lawmakers in both the Senate and the House are investigating Russia's role in the election --
confirmed that he was the person cited."
the whole thing of russia influencing the usa election seems built on via a number of
sketchy characters at best..
at any rate - this is what emptywheel thinks is relevant in an otherwise irrelevant memo
from schiff... i don't get how it is!
The whole Memo discussion above concerns the FBI's data manipulations to cast Carter Page
as a spy worthy of an Article 1 warrant by the FISC. As I explained above, once Admiral
Rogers closed the FBI's access to the NSA mega-file, the Bureau developed several
work-arounds to explain how the FBI had data from the mega-file that they were mining through
our Ambassador to the UN.
Fusion GPS immediately hired the wife of FBI manager Bruce Ohr, Nellie, and Christopher
Steele. Bruce handed material to Nellie, Nellie to Christopher. He repackaged the material
claiming it was provided by very personal "Russian contacts" and the FBI then handed that
laundered Steele material to the FISC.
This laundering operation was exposed with a mistake concerning Trump's lawyer Michael
Cohen. Michael Cohen was actually attending a family celebration and a ball game here in the
US when he supposedly met Steele's "Russian contacts" in Prague. Steele's contacts, who exist
only in his mind, dutifully confirmed that the meeting took place in Prague.
I wish I might be a sock-puppet, but too many of my condo neighbors know otherwise. My
favorite hobby in retirement is writing films for children, in which white hats succeed and
black hats don't.
Bill Binney, on Jimmy Dore show, said that FISA warrant enabled "two hop" surveillance. If
so, then Carter Page FISA warrant does much, much more than surveille Page himself -- it
permits surveillance of most of the Trump campaign.
In some ways, being a sock-puppet and napping, in a bureau drawer (?), between soliloquies
would be rather peaceful. Alas, too many of my condo neighbors know me to be otherwise !
Do check out sites such as The Conservative Treehouse and you will discover that Admiral
Rogers' closing the NSA mega-file to the FBI led to Nellie Ohr's & Christopher Steele's
information laundering operation. Other sites yet will introduce you to FISC Chief Judge
Rosemary Collyer's 99-page rebuke of the FBI for their defalcations.
At a minimum, you won't be surprised when a plethora of FBI / DOJ / State Department
employees are found guilty and sent to prison.
My "dog that didn't bark" question about Carter Page - if Carter Page was such a known
danger, why didn't the FBI warn the Trump Campaign against letting him become involved in the
campaign?
The memo does note that "the FBI also interviewed Page multiple times about his Russian
intelligence contacts." Apparently, these interviews stretch back to 2013. The memo also
lets slip that there was at least one more interview with Page in March 2016, before the
counterintelligence investigation began. We must assume that Page was a truthful
informant since his information was used in a prosecution against Russian spies and Page
himself has never been accused of lying to the FBI .
So . . . here's the question: When Steele brought the FBI his unverified allegations
that Page had met with Sechin and Divyekin, why didn't the FBI call Page in for an
interview rather than subject him to FISA surveillance? Lest you wonder, this is not an
instance of me second-guessing the Bureau with an investigative plan I think would have
been better. It is a requirement of FISA law.
When the FBI and DOJ apply for a FISA warrant, they must convince the court that
surveillance -- a highly intrusive tactic by which the government monitors all of an
American citizen's electronic communications -- is necessary because the
foreign-intelligence information the government seeks "cannot reasonably be obtained by
normal investigative techniques." (See FISA, Section 1804(a)(6)(C) of Title 50, U.S. Code.)
Normal investigative techniques include interviewing the subject. There are, of course,
situations in which such alternative investigative techniques will inevitably fail -- a
mafia don or a jihadist is not likely to sit down with FBI agents and tell them everything
he knows. But Carter Page was not only likely to do so, he had a documented
history of providing information to the FBI .
There's a reason why Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley are focused on the Clinton commissioned
Fusion GPS dossier, Christopher Steele and the FISA Title 1 warrant on Carter Page. It is the
simplest path to the conspiracy at the Obama administration.
My, street sense, and experience as a lawyer tells me that -- "tips, confessions.." from
informants is true Steve. But the bar for going after a drug dealer, or fence, or kiddie porn
type, is supposed -- one assumes -- to be a hell of a lot lower than going after the nominee for
President of a major political party.
Welcome to the criminal defense world. Everyday, hundreds of warrants based on the statements
of criminals, paid informers, bitter ex-girlfriends, lying cops, and even non-existent
"confidential informants" are issued. With all but the most blatant provably false
affidavits, questionable searches are upheld by judges.
At this point I'm just waiting for Mueller's final indictments and the report. The facts
will be there, or they won't.
If they are, try arguing a Motion to Suppress Evidence in the impeachment trial. That'll
get you far . . .
The dog that didn't bark - if the Schiff Memo were so powerful, such a slam dunk, every MSM
outlet in the western world would be trumpeting it to the skies and talking about nothing
but.
They seem to be barely able to acknowledge the existence of the Memo.
It really does help if, when you make claims, you link to the source so that others can
evaluate them. In the case of the claims you are making, the source is clearly a post two days ago by
'sundance' on the 'Conservative Treehouse' site entitled 'Tying All The Loose Threads
Together – DOJ, FBI, DoS, White House: "Operation Latitude" '
As it happens, I think the suggestion that Steele's role may have been, in very
substantial measure, to give the impression that material from other source was the product
of a high-quality 'humint' investigation merits being taken extremely seriously.
However, to repeat claims by 'sundance', while not taking the – rather minimal
– amount of trouble required to provide the link which allows others to evaluate them,
simply puts people's backs up and makes them less likely to take what you are suggesting
seriously.
In the words of Emily Dickinson, I'm nobody. So., I come here to test my reaction when I
read what the Democrats wrote -- though it was hard to get any continuity while reading because
of all the big black lines--I was completely underwhelmed. I hate it when someone claims that
what he/she is going to say will be something that will change my entire Weltanschauung and
it turns out to be a nothing burger, in today's parance.
So thank you for confirming my opinion of the memo and thanks to others who have commented
and who have way more experience and knowledge about how our Swam works (or doesn't
work?).
My first reaction before I even tried to read the memo was correct. My first instinct was
to judge on the basis of personality, which I know is not often logical. I felt that nothing
put out under Schiff's authority could change my mind about the point Nunes made when he put
out his mamo. Schiff's defence sounded so, pardon the pun, shifty and did nothing to really
counter the main point Nunes made when he released his memo.
Schiff's memo was basically a vendetta against persons. Page and Papadopolis (sp?) are
obviously the unpopular kids in the minds of the "mean girl" Democrats because they had links
to Trump, the real threat to the popular girl Democrats. All we have to do is hear their
names and we should automatically decide that if we want to be popular, we should malign them
also so as to malign Trump and gain our entrance into the popular group in the cafeteria.
Funnily enough the question raised in your excerpt is exactly what I've been thinking
since reading a post by TTG about Carter Page being an important FBI informant and state
witness to the prosecution of Russian espionage.
If the FBI believed Page had become a Russian spy it would have been easy due to their
prior relationship with him to interview him and if he lied, to prosecute him for the process
crime of perjury. That is such a slam dunk that the fact they didn't do that makes it seem
there's something fishy there.
And they never verified Steele's allegation that Page met with Sechin and Divyekin which
would have been easy to do and now it seems was pure fabrication. Instead the FBI and DOJ
lied and misrepresented to FISC to get a surveillance warrant on Page. This seems rather
fishy. I speculate they did that to gain incidental collection on members of the Trump
campaign.
I note that Page hasn't been charged by the DOJ for any crime. I agree with you that the
investigation of the "conspiracy" is moving along well despite the roadblocks by the DOJ. Goodlatte who has seen the FISA application has now requested all the DOJ testimony from
FISC. In a recent interview Rep. Ratcliffe who has also seen the FISA application made an
interesting point that since in a FISC proceeding the accused has no ability to challenge the
prosecution's claims, the prosecution has an affirmative obligation under FISA to present all
the evidence, which the DOJ did not do but instead knowingly mislead the court.
It looks like we're heading towards another special counsel to investigate law enforcement
and the IC regarding both the Trump and Clinton counter-intelligence investigations as well
as the IC and media propaganda efforts to build hysteria around the meme of collusion of the
Trump campaign with the Russian government. That investigation could lead all the way into
the Obama White House.
See post No 14: "...the FBI also interviewed Page multiple times about his Russian
intelligence contacts." Apparently, these interviews stretch back to 2013. The memo also lets
slip that there was at least one more interview with Page in March 2016, before the
counterintelligence investigation began. We must assume that Page was a truthful informant
since his information was used in a prosecution against Russian spies and Page himself has
never been accused of lying to the FBI."
The case is not closed – it is closing on the high-placed violators of the US
Constitution --as well as on their lack of professionalism, sheer incompetence and
promiscuous opportunism
Instead of working hard to protect national security, the FBI/CIA/DOJ' senior-idiots
(accustomed to comfort and hefty checks) have been politicking and meddling in the electoral
process. Meanwhile, the foreign nationals were left free to surf congressional computers
– for years! (See Awan affair) and the "natives" like Clinton et al have been making a
lot of money by getting huge bribes from Russians and Saudis (see Uranium One, involving
Mueller for all other people).
There is another big Q: To what extend both the FBI and the CIA have been infiltrated by
Israel-firsters that are loyal to Zion, and how extensive is the damage inflicted by the
"duals" on the US.
Most unusual, I would say, for an Agent in an upper management position in FBI HQ to open a
counter intelligence case and then for all intents and purposes assign it to himself. Cases
are normally worked and directly supervised in field offices.
Carter Page during his period of cooperation with the FBI, almost certainly was handled by
Agents assigned to a field office. I wonder what they had to say, assuming they even knew,
about HQ opening a CI case targeting their former cooperating witness for FISA coverage.
It will be very interesting to see who handled Steele. Strzok?
What was the compelling evidence and who furnished it to turn a US Naval Academy graduate,
and presumably a Naval Officer with a readily accessible track record in service, into the
targeted subject of an espionage investigation. Did he even have any current access to
classified information?
This is not looking good.
Carter Page is indeed a puzzlement. I don't see any account of him being an FBI informant,
but he was a witness in the investigation and trial of the three SVR officers who tried to
recruit him in 2013.
If he was an informant, the FBI would not have had to obtain a FISA
warrant to surveil him in 2014. That also raises doubts about how cooperative he was during
that investigation and the 2015 Russian spy trial.
Obviously he didn't obstruct the
investigation or prosecution or he would have been charged for that long ago. I get the
impression he is a lot more wily than most people give him credit for.
Obama claimed something to the effect that, it turns out I am pretty good at killing people.
This was in reference to the drone program and assume I don't need to footnote.
Perhaps he got the notion that his administration was pretty good at intelligence.
A very interesting interview. It is almost one year old.
When intelligence agencies use the phase "with high confidence" means that they do not have evidence. This is one of
the biggest lie intelligence agencies resort to. They are all professional liars and should be treated as such.
If DNC email offloading was done over Internet (which means it was a hack not an internal leak) NSA should have the direct evidence.
They do not. So this is a progpaganda move by Brennan and Clapper to unleash MSM witch hunt, which is a key part of the color revolution
against Trump.
Another question is who downloaded this information to Wikileaks. Here NSA also should have evidence. And again they do not.
They have already to direct attention from the main issues. Oversight of intelligence agencies is joke. They can lie with impunity.
BTW NSA has all Hillary emails, including deleted.
He also exposes the NSA penchant for "swindles", such as preventing the plugging of holes in software around the world, to preserve
their spying access.
It's almost comical to hear that they lie to each other. No wonder why these retards in the mid-east and every other third
world country gets the better of us.
The Clinton campaign to divert attention to Russia instead of her myriad of crimes that were revealed during the election must
be stopped and the alt media needs to start talking about her and Obama's crimes again and demand justice...control the dialogue
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."
Ever since US Crude Oil peaked its production in 1970, the US has known that at some point
the oil majors would have their profitability damaged, "assets" downgraded, and borrowing
capacity destroyed. At this point their shares would become worthless and they would become
bankrupt. The contagion from this would spread to transport businesses, plastics manufacture,
herbicides and pesticide production and a total collapse of Industrial Civilisation.
In anticipation of increasing Crude Oil imports, Nixon stopped the convertibility of
Dollars into Gold, thus making the Dollar entirely fiat, allowing them to print as much of
the currency as they needed.
They also began a system of obscuring oil production data, involving the DoE's EIA and the
OECD's IEA, by inventing an ever-increasing category of Undiscovered Oilfields in their
predictions, and combining Crude Oil and Condensate (from gas fields) into one category (C+C)
as if they were the same thing. As well the support of the ethanol-from-corn industry began,
even though it was uneconomic. The Global Warming problem had to be debunked, despite its
sound scientific basis. Energy-intensive manufacturing work was off-shored to cheap
labour+energy countries, and Just-in-Time delivery systems were honed.
In 2004 the price of Crude Oil rose from $28 /barrel up to $143 /b in mid-2008. This
demonstrated that there is a limit to how much business can pay for oil (around $100 /b).
Fracking became marginally economic at these prices, but the frackers never made a profit as
over-production meant prices fell to about $60 /b. The Government encourages this destructive
industry despite the fact it doesn't make any money, because the alternative is the end of
Industrial Civilisation.
Eventually though, there must come a time when there is not enough oil to power all the
cars and trucks, bulldozers, farm tractors, airplanes and ships, as well as manufacture all
the wind turbines and solar panels and electric vehicles, as well as the upgraded
transmission grid. At that point, the game will be up, and it will be time for WW3. So we
need to line up some really big enemies, and develop lots of reasons to hate them.
Thus you see the demonisation of Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela for reasons that don't
make sense from a normal perspective.
This is an old method to unite the nation against external enemy. Carnage (with so much oil and gas) needs to be
destroyed. And it's working only partially with the major divisions between Trump and Hillary supporters remaining
open and unaffected by Russiagate witch hunt.
Notable quotes:
"... It is an age-old statecraft technique to seek unity within a state by depicting an external enemy or threat. Russia is the bête noire again, as it was during the Cold War years as part of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... Russophobia -- "blame it all on Russia" -- is a short-term, futile ploy to stave off the day of reckoning when furious and informed Western citizens will demand democratic restitution for their legitimate grievances. ..."
"... The dominant "official" narrative, from the US to Europe, is that "malicious" Russia is "sowing division;""eroding democratic institutions;" and "undermining public trust" in systems of governance, credibility of established political parties, and the news media. ..."
"... A particularly instructive presentation of this trope was given in a recent commentary by Texan Republican Representative Will Hurd. In his piece headlined, "Russia is our adversary" , he claims: "Russia is eroding our democracy by exploiting the nation's divisions. To save it, Americans need to begin working together." ..."
"... He contends: "When the public loses trust in the media, the Russians are winning. When the press is hyper-critical of Congress the Russians are winning. When Congress and the general public disagree the Russians are winning. When there is friction between Congress and the executive branch [the president] resulting in further erosion of trust in our democratic institutions, the Russians are winning." ..."
"... The endless, criminal wars that the US and its European NATO allies have been waging across the planet over the past two decades is one cogent reason why the public has lost faith in grandiose official claims about respecting democracy and international law. ..."
"... The US and European media have shown reprehensible dereliction of duty to inform the public accurately about their governments' warmongering intrigues. Take the example of Syria. When does the average Western citizen ever read in the corporate Western media about how the US and its NATO allies have covertly ransacked that country through weaponizing terrorist proxies? ..."
"... The destabilizing impact on societies from oppressive economic conditions is a far more plausible cause for grievance than outlandish claims made by the political class about alleged "Russian interference". ..."
"... Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV. ..."
Russophobia - "blame it all on Russia" - is a short-term, futile ploy to stave off the day of reckoning when furious
and informed Western citizens will demand democratic restitution for their legitimate grievances
It is an age-old statecraft technique to seek unity within a state by depicting an external
enemy or threat. Russia is the bête noire again, as it was during the Cold War years as
part of the Soviet Union.
But the truth is Western states are challenged by internal problems. Ironically, by denying their own internal democratic challenges, Western authorities are
only hastening their institutional demise.
Russophobia -- "blame it all on Russia" -- is a short-term, futile ploy to stave off the day
of reckoning when furious and informed Western citizens will demand democratic restitution for
their legitimate grievances.
The dominant "official" narrative, from the US to Europe, is that "malicious" Russia is
"sowing division;""eroding democratic institutions;" and "undermining public trust" in systems
of governance, credibility of established political parties, and the news media.
This narrative has shifted up a gear since the election of Donald Trump to the White House
in 2016, with accusations that the Kremlin somehow ran "influence operations" to help get him
into office. This outlandish yarn defies common sense. It is also running out of thread to keep
spinning.
Paradoxically, even though President Trump has rightly rebuffed such dubious claims of
"Russiagate" interference as "fake news", he has at other times undermined himself by
subscribing to the notion that Moscow is projecting a campaign of "subversion against the US
and its European allies." See for example the National Security Strategy he signed off in
December.
Pathetically, it's become indoctrinated belief among the Western political class that
"devious Russians" are out to "collapse" Western democracies by
"weaponizing disinformation" and spreading "fake news" through Russia-based
news outlets like RT and Sputnik.
Totalitarian-like, there seems no room for intelligent dissent among political or media
figures.
British Prime Minister Theresa May has chimed in to
accuse Moscow of "sowing division;" Dutch state intelligence claim Russia
destabilized the US presidential election; the European Union commissioner for security, Sir
Julian King, casually lampoons Russian news media as "Kremlin-orchestrated
disinformation" to destabilize the 28-nation bloc; CIA chief Mike Pompeo recently warned
that Russia is stepping up its efforts to tarnish the Congressional mid-term elections later
this year.
On and on goes the narrative that Western states are essentially victims of a nefarious
Russian assault to bring about collapse.
A particularly instructive presentation of this trope was given in a recent commentary by Texan
Republican Representative Will Hurd. In his piece headlined, "Russia is our adversary"
, he claims: "Russia is eroding our democracy by exploiting the nation's divisions. To save
it, Americans need to begin working together."
Congressman Hurd asserts: "Russia has one simple goal: to erode trust in our democratic
institutions It has weaponized disinformation to achieve this goal for decades in Eastern and
Central Europe; in 2016, Western Europe and America were aggressively targeted as
well."
Lamentably, all these claims above are made with scant, or no, verifiable evidence. It is
simply a Big Lie technique of relentless repetition transforming itself into "fact"
.
It's instructive to follow Congressman Hurd's thought-process a bit further.
He contends: "When the public loses trust in the media, the Russians are winning. When
the press is hyper-critical of Congress the Russians are winning. When Congress and the general
public disagree the Russians are winning. When there is friction between Congress and the
executive branch [the president] resulting in further erosion of trust in our democratic
institutions, the Russians are winning."
As a putative solution, Representative Hurd calls for "a national counter-disinformation
strategy" against Russian "influence operations" , adding, "Americans must
stop contributing to a corrosive political environment".
The latter is a chilling advocacy of uniformity tantamount to a police state whereby any
dissent or criticism is a "thought-crime."
It is, however, such anti-democratic and paranoid thinking by Western politicians -- aided
and abetted by dutiful media -- that is killing democracy from within, not some supposed
foreign enemy.
There is evidently a foreboding sense of demise in authority and legitimacy among Western
states, even if the real cause for the demise is ignored or denied. Systems of governance,
politicians of all stripes, and institutions like the established media and intelligence
services are increasingly held in contempt and distrust by the public.
Whose fault is that loss of political and moral authority? Western governments and
institutions need to take a look in the mirror.
The endless, criminal wars that the US and its European NATO allies have been waging across
the planet over the past two decades is one cogent reason why the public has lost faith in
grandiose official claims about respecting democracy and international law.
The US and European media have shown reprehensible dereliction of duty to inform the public
accurately about their governments' warmongering intrigues. Take the example of Syria. When
does the average Western citizen ever read in the corporate Western media about how the US and
its NATO allies have covertly ransacked that country through weaponizing terrorist proxies?
How then can properly informed citizens be expected to have respect for such criminal
government policies and the complicit news media covering up for their crimes?
Western public disaffection with governments, politicians and media surely stems also from
the grotesque gulf in social inequality and poverty among citizens from slavish adherence to
economic policies that enrich the wealthy while consigning the vast majority to unrelenting
austerity.
The destabilizing impact on societies from oppressive economic conditions is a far more
plausible cause for grievance than outlandish claims made by the political class about alleged
"Russian interference".
Yet the Western media indulge this fantastical "Russiagate" escapism instead of campaigning
on real social problems facing ordinary citizens. No wonder such media are then viewed with
disdain and distrust. Adding insult to injury, these media want the public to believe Russia is
the enemy?
Instead of acknowledging and addressing real threats to citizens: economic insecurity,
eroding education and health services, lost career opportunities for future generations, the
looming dangers of ecological adversity, wars prompted by Western governments trashing
international and diplomacy, and so on -- the Western public is insultingly plied with corny
tales of Russia's "malign influence" and "assault on democracy."
Just think of the disproportionate amount of media attention and public resources wasted on
the Russiagate scandal over the past year. And now gradually emerging is the real scandal that
the American FBI probably colluded with the Obama administration to corrupt the democratic
process against Trump.
Again, is there any wonder the public has sheer contempt and distrust for "authorities" that
have been lying through their teeth and playing them for fools?
The collapsing state of Western democracies has got nothing to do with Russia. The
Russophobia of blaming Russia for the demise of Western institutions is an attempt at
scapegoating for the very real problems facing governments and institutions like the news
media. Those problems are inherent and wholly owned by these governments owing to chronic
anti-democratic functioning, as well as systematic violation of international law in their
pursuit of criminal wars and other subterfuges for regime-change objectives.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several
languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a
scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For
over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and
Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation
and Press TV.
Nunes chances to bring perpetrators to justice are close to zero. The Deep State controls the Washington, DC and can
withstand sporadic attacks.
It is an extremly courageous of Devin Nunes to give this interview.
Notable quotes:
"... Throwing down the gauntlet on alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by the Department of Justice and the FBI, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) stated that there could be legal consequences for officials who may have misled the FISA court. "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said. "The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created." ..."
"... Nunes took this highly unusual, no-holds-barred stance during an interview with Emmy-award winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson , which aired on Sunday. ..."
"... He unapologetically averred that, yes, a criminal trial might well be the outcome. "DOJ and FBI are not above the law," he stated emphatically. "If they are committing abuse before a secret court getting warrants on American citizens, you're darn right that we're going to put them on trial." ..."
"... The stakes are very high. Current and former senior officials -- and not only from DOJ and FBI, but from other agencies like the CIA and NSA, whom documents and testimony show were involved in providing faulty information to justify a FISA warrant to monitor former Trump campaign official Carter Page -- may suddenly find themselves in considerable legal jeopardy. Like, felony territory. ..."
"... On the other hand, the presumptive perps have not run into a chairman like Nunes in four decades, since Congressmen Lucien Nedzi (D-Mich.), Otis Pike (D-NY), and Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) ran tough, explosive hearings on the abuses of a previous generation deep state, including massive domestic spying revealed by quintessential investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in December 1974. (Actually, this is largely why the congressional intelligence oversight committees were later established, and why the FISA law was passed in 1978.) ..."
"... At this point, one is tempted to say plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose ..."
"... One glaring sign of the media's unwillingness to displease corporate masters and Official Washington is the harsh reality that Hersh's most recent explosive investigations, using his large array of government sources to explore front-burner issues, have not been able to find a home in any English-speaking newspaper or journal. ..."
"... On this point, Nunes said, "In the last administration they were unmasking hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of Americans' names. They were unmasking for what I would say, for lack of a better definition, were for political purposes." ..."
"... It is real courageous of Devin Nunes to give this interview. It is not only the accountability to law that is at stake in U.S., but the Whole World is imperiled with what happens in Washington. But as many have written before in comments about this complete moral collapse of the Entire West, I am afraid, it is all going to be swept under the rug. We have to just keep the fingers crossed. ..."
"... I have never seen such media bias against a sitting president in my lifetime, not even against Richard Nixon when they at least practiced decorum and feigned objectivity even if they were secretly cheering on his demise. I will reiterate here that I do not champion the man but rather due process under our constitution, which has been made a travesty from the moment of Clinton's loss at the polls. ..."
"... I completely agree with you Realist. I am not Trump's fan or supporter of his agenda, in fact, in many things quite the opposite of it. However, he raised some very valid points about the the domestic economy and other issues, and about the need to stop interventions in foreign countries, and getting along Russia, and the need to rebuild country's manufacturing system again. He was duly elected by the people, and he should have been given the support to pursue what he promised. But it did not happen. ..."
"... Although it's being done for the wrong reasons, I am nevertheless looking forward to seeing our out-of-control intelligence agencies being put in their place. If I were president and my party controlled both houses of Congress, you'd better believe I'd be looking to dismantle the national surveillance state and reduce the military budget to a "mere" $250 billion annually. ..."
"... The post 9-11 wars of aggression, massive surveillance, torture and other war crimes were sold to the American public as only to be inflicted on foreigners, i.e. "we fight them over there so we don't fight them here." But the blowback has now turned America's schools, malls, workplaces, concerts and churches into war zones and little by little, the disinformation ops, "regime change" know-how and other accoutrements of perpetual war (the fool's errand of gaining full spectrum dominance over the rest of the world) have been turned inward on the American people, including powerful American officials themselves. So it would seem to be a good thing that some politicians like Nunes have finally seen the light exactly as Frank Church did -- only when they themselves began to reap the negative consequences of what they thought would only negatively impact other, lesser people. ..."
"... But there is more to it, as some have pointed out in comments above, there are some intra-party quarrels going on in Washington to take the upper hand. Regarding foreign policy, National Security State and surveillance, and other such issues, both parties are joined at the hip. ..."
"... It is instructive to read the comments on any NYT article on this subject. The comments are clearly written by intelligent, well-educated individuals – who parrot the Deep State's anti-Russian propaganda as if they were the dumbest of the "Better dead than Red!" 50s McCarthyites. ..."
"... The new McCarthyites are actually stupider and more authoritarian than their sad fore-bearers, because they could pierce the Deep States lies with 30 minutes of online research, but they prefer tribalism and ignorance, instead. ..."
"... Trump started going head to head with the intel folks, but has backed down a lot now. Let's hope Nunes et al hang in there and keep the pressure on these despicable criminals who hide behind governmental powers. ..."
"... Somehow I don't think Nunes or his committee is capable of reigning in Frankenstein. His "constitutuents"" are not likely to allow it and although the monster was pieced together from many body parts its instincts for self-preservation are formidable. Nevertheless, I would applaud anyone who makes the effort. ..."
"... Note that after saying the Russians are indicted for interfering in the election, and spending 5 minutes on this, at the 5 minute 20 second mark Rosenstein says there is no evidence that the Russians had any affect [sic] on the election! So what we have is the Deputy Attorney General of the United States announcing an indictment for which he says there is no evidence! ..."
"... In the world of cypher espionage I have no knowledge, but if Russia does hang out in it well then I'm sure the U.S. is already there to do what it must to defend it's cypher security. So that's a wash, but this insane Russia-Gate distraction was originally a way to deflect attention from Hillary & Debbie's putting the screws to Socialist Sanders . then Russia-Gate became a MSM driven coup to oust Trump from his Electoral won presidential office. ..."
"... Impossible to get the whole Gorgon's head, anyway, in such a corrupt system as we have ..."
"... Ray, do you think Trump has made a deal: he'll allow escalations against Russia, and in return the Deep State will leave him alone? If so, does that portend that this will fizzle out? ..."
"... While the shiny ball, smoke and mirrors psychological operation known as "Russiagate" has begun running on fumes before the gas tank finally runs dry, the major revelation of the Clinton WikiLeaks emails describing Saudi/Qatari financing of ISIS drops further down the memory hole. There's nothing like success ..."
House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes has stated that "DOJ and FBI are not above
the law," and could face legal consequences for alleged abuses of the FISA court, reports Ray
McGovern.
Throwing down the gauntlet on alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) by the Department of Justice and the FBI, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes
(R-Calif.) stated that there could be legal consequences for officials who may have misled the
FISA court. "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said. "The reason
Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created."
Attkisson said she had invited both Nunes and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member
Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) but that only Nunes agreed. She asked him about Schiff's charge that
Nunes' goal was "to put the FBI and DOJ on trial." What followed was very atypical bluntness --
candor normally considered quite unacceptable in polite circles of the Washington
Establishment.
Rather than play the diplomat and disavow what Schiff contended was Nunes' goal, Nunes said,
in effect, let the chips fall where they may. He unapologetically averred that, yes, a
criminal trial might well be the outcome. "DOJ and FBI are not above the law," he stated
emphatically. "If they are committing abuse before a secret court getting warrants on American
citizens, you're darn right that we're going to put them on trial."
Die Is Cast
The stakes are very high. Current and former senior officials -- and not only from DOJ
and FBI, but from other agencies like the CIA and NSA, whom documents and testimony show were
involved in providing faulty information to justify a FISA warrant to monitor former Trump
campaign official Carter Page -- may suddenly find themselves in considerable legal jeopardy.
Like, felony territory.
This was not supposed to happen. Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in, remember? Back when the FISA
surveillance warrant of Page was obtained, just weeks before the November 2016 election, there
seemed to be no need to hide tracks, because, even if these extracurricular activities were
discovered, the perps would have looked forward to award certificates rather than legal
problems under a Trump presidency.
Thus, the knives will be coming out. Mostly because the mainstream media will make a major
effort -- together with Schiff-mates in the Democratic Party -- to marginalize Nunes, those who
find themselves in jeopardy can be expected to push back strongly.
If past is precedent, they will be confident that, with their powerful allies within the
FBI/DOJ/CIA "Deep State" they will be able to counter Nunes and show him and the other
congressional investigation committee chairs, where the power lies. The conventional wisdom is
that Nunes and the others have bit off far more than they can chew. And the odds do not favor
folks, including oversight committee chairs, who buck the system.
Staying Power
On the other hand, the presumptive perps have not run into a chairman like Nunes in four
decades, since Congressmen Lucien Nedzi (D-Mich.), Otis Pike (D-NY), and Sen. Frank Church
(D-Idaho) ran tough, explosive hearings on the abuses of a previous generation deep state,
including massive domestic spying revealed by quintessential investigative reporter Seymour
Hersh in December 1974. (Actually, this is largely why the congressional intelligence oversight
committees were later established, and why the FISA law was passed in 1978.)
At this point, one is tempted to say plus ça change, plus c'est la même
chose -- or the more things change, the more they stay the same -- but that would be only
half correct in this context. Yes, scoundrels will always take liberties with the law to spy on
others. But the huge difference today is that mainstream media have no room for those who
uncover government crimes and abuse. And this will be a major impediment to efforts by Nunes
and other committee chairs to inform the public.
One glaring sign of the media's unwillingness to displease corporate masters and
Official Washington is the harsh reality that Hersh's most recent explosive investigations,
using his large array of government sources to explore front-burner issues, have not been able
to find a home in any English-speaking newspaper or journal. In a sense, this provides
what might be called a "confidence-building" factor, giving some assurance to deep-state perps
that they will be able to ride this out, and that congressional committee chairs will once
again learn to know their (subservient) place.
Much will depend on whether top DOJ and FBI officials can bring themselves to reverse course
and give priority to the oath they took to support and defend the Constitution of the United
States against all enemies foreign and domestic. This should not be too much to hope for, but
it will require uncommon courage in facing up honestly to the major misdeeds appear to have
occurred -- and letting the chips fall where they may. Besides, it would be the right thing to
do.
Nunes is projecting calm confidence that once he and Trey Gowdey (R-Tenn.), chair of the
House Oversight Committee, release documentary evidence showing what their investigations have
turned up, it will be hard for DOJ and FBI officials to dissimulate.
In Other News
In the interview with Attkisson, Nunes covered a number of other significant issues:
The
committee is closing down its investigation into possible collusion between Moscow and the
Trump campaign; no evidence of collusion was found. The apparently widespread practice of
"unmasking" the identities of Americans under surveillance. On this point, Nunes said, "In
the last administration they were unmasking hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of Americans'
names. They were unmasking for what I would say, for lack of a better definition, were for
political purposes." Asked about Schiff's criticism that Nunes behaved improperly on what
he called the "midnight run to the White House," Nunes responded that the stories were untrue.
"Well, most of the time I ignore political nonsense in this town," he said. "What I will say is
that all of those stories were totally fake from the beginning."
Not since Watergate has there been so high a degree of political tension here in Washington
but the stakes for our Republic are even higher this time. Assuming abuse of FISA court
procedures is documented and those responsible for playing fast and loose with the required
justification for legal warrants are not held to account, the division of powers enshrined in
the Constitution will be in peril.
A denouement of some kind can be expected in the coming months. Stay tuned.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Savior in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is co-founder of
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Skip Scott , February 19, 2018 at 9:38 am
Thanks Ray for another great article. One can only hope that Nunes is successful. However,
like you say, the MSM is now complicit with the "Deep State", so the fight for justice
becomes much harder. One also has to remember Schumer's "six ways from Sunday" applies
equally to the congress as it does to the president. I hardly ever watch TV news, but
recently I've been subjected to it, and I've seen a deluge of fluff pieces on our so-called
Intelligence Agencies. I would love to see Trump give a speech (instead of a tweet) directly
to the American people letting them know what rascals like Brennan, Clapper, et al have been
up to.
Bob Van Noy , February 19, 2018 at 12:51 pm
This may be the best broadcast tv journalism in many years, read Sharyl Attkisson's story,
"Stonewalled" (I will link the commentary page to that book for thorough readers). And thank
you Nat, Ray McGovern & CN
An excellent and very timely article by Ray McGovern. Lawlessness, greed, complete
subservience to Wall Street Finance and other Powers, insanity, and utter inhumanity prevails
in present day Ruling Establishment in Washington. Obama, "the hope and change" Con Artist
for whose election, being democrats we worked so hard in 2008 turned to be the biggest
perpetrator of this lawlessness and responsible for fanning the flames still further in
starting a new Cold War.
It is real courageous of Devin Nunes to give this interview. It is not only the
accountability to law that is at stake in U.S., but the Whole World is imperiled with what
happens in Washington. But as many have written before in comments about this complete moral
collapse of the Entire West, I am afraid, it is all going to be swept under the rug. We have
to just keep the fingers crossed.
Howard Dean just said yesterday that Nunes and people like him belong in jail. Now can you
believe it, how low these so called liberal democrats have come to? Looking at the pictures
of Adam Schiff, Howard Dean, and others in their company, I literally feel sick in the
stomach. And one asks the essential question: "did not their parents teach them any honesty
or moral principles in young age?".
Abbybwood , February 19, 2018 at 3:54 pm
But what he said is very confusing. First he says that Congress has no way to prosecute the DOJ/FBI for wrong doing then at
the end he says Congress will need to prosecute the DOJ/FBI if necessary. Either Congress has the ability to prosecute the DOJ/FBI and issue indictments and set up
Grand Juries or they don't.
Somebody needs to find out, Constitutionally, what the solution is when the DOJ/FBI at the
highest levels become the criminals. WHO has the power to indict/convict these individuals??
Sam F , February 19, 2018 at 10:36 pm
A special prosecutor (Mueller's position) is appointed by the Pres or AG.
Annie , February 19, 2018 at 3:20 pm
From what I've heard expressed by a few FBI people, you don't come before a court, but a
judge, one person, and they are known to rubber stamp almost everything. So they should be
investigated too.
Realist , February 19, 2018 at 5:02 pm
I have never seen such media bias against a sitting president in my lifetime, not even
against Richard Nixon when they at least practiced decorum and feigned objectivity even if
they were secretly cheering on his demise. I will reiterate here that I do not champion the
man but rather due process under our constitution, which has been made a travesty from the
moment of Clinton's loss at the polls.
Dave P. , February 19, 2018 at 7:56 pm
I completely agree with you Realist. I am not Trump's fan or supporter of his agenda, in
fact, in many things quite the opposite of it. However, he raised some very valid points
about the the domestic economy and other issues, and about the need to stop interventions in
foreign countries, and getting along Russia, and the need to rebuild country's manufacturing
system again. He was duly elected by the people, and he should have been given the support to
pursue what he promised. But it did not happen. We would not know now what he actually wanted
to accomplish.
Sam F , February 19, 2018 at 10:41 pm
Yes, neither party nor the mass media shows concern for the Constitution or for the
people. As the propaganda agency, the mass media are primarily responsible. The
zionist/WallSt/MIC oligarchy have consolidated control over mass media, secret agencies, and
elections, but not without factions.
Although it's being done for the wrong reasons, I am nevertheless looking forward to
seeing our out-of-control intelligence agencies being put in their place. If I were president
and my party controlled both houses of Congress, you'd better believe I'd be looking to
dismantle the national surveillance state and reduce the military budget to a "mere" $250
billion annually.
Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 11:09 am
Michael I hear ya. Yes, there is a civil war of sorts going on in DC, and yes it would be
a wonderful thing to rid our bureaucracy of all the slim that is in it, but taking Jiminy
Cricket's good advice to heart would be so much more fruitful to if you and I would only
sing;
'When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires will come to you"
Now that song will be stuck in my head all day .got any Journey? Joe
Coleen Rowley , February 19, 2018 at 3:27 pm
It's true that people generally do not care when bad practices, policies or violence is
inflicted on others and not on themselves. Of course that's stupid because it's just a matter
of time before "blowback" occurs (as the CIA euphemistically labeled how doing unto others
eventually boomerangs back on perpetrators). Going back to the Church Committee and how that
bit of accountability finally happened, it only got off the ground when Frank Church and
other Senators found THEMSELVES in the crosshairs of FBI Cointelpro; CIA's "CHAOS" and NSA's
"Minaret" surveillance.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/09/25/secret-cold-war-documents-reveal-nsa-spied-on-senators/
(To this day, only 7 of the 1000 or so Americans targeted by the NSA during the Vietnam War
have been discovered but their identities are telling.)
The post 9-11 wars of aggression, massive surveillance, torture and other war crimes were
sold to the American public as only to be inflicted on foreigners, i.e. "we fight them over
there so we don't fight them here." But the blowback has now turned America's schools, malls,
workplaces, concerts and churches into war zones and little by little, the disinformation
ops, "regime change" know-how and other accoutrements of perpetual war (the fool's errand of
gaining full spectrum dominance over the rest of the world) have been turned inward on the
American people, including powerful American officials themselves. So it would seem to be a
good thing that some politicians like Nunes have finally seen the light exactly as Frank
Church did -- only when they themselves began to reap the negative consequences of what they
thought would only negatively impact other, lesser people.
BobS , February 19, 2018 at 4:50 pm
" the blowback has now turned America's schools, malls, workplaces, concerts and churches
into war zones"
"blowback" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, if you're referring specifically to
"post 9-11 wars of aggression, massive surveillance, torture and other war crimes". Whenever
the incidents have had a political agenda attached, it's more often than not been of the
domestic right-wing variety. And of course, all of them have been facilitated by easy
civilian access to hardware that was originally developed by the military (ours and the
Soviets) to efficiently kill/incapacitate large numbers of enemy fighters.
Gregory Herr , February 19, 2018 at 7:30 pm
BobS fails to understand that blowback encapsulates more than "revenge". "Forever war" and
all Colleen mentions that goes with it has had societal impact because violence is glorified
as a "solution" and feelings of suspicion and antagonism become part of the dark
undertow.
Sam F , February 19, 2018 at 10:54 pm
Well said, Colleen. Let us hope that Nunes is not merely acting the part. I wonder whether
the greatest secrets of domestic spying are now so compartmentalized and controlled that only
those most dependent upon their agency could blow the whistle.
Annie , February 19, 2018 at 4:23 pm
This is not to be compared to spying on citizens, which is unacceptable, but they tried to
undermine a presidency, whether you like Trump or not, and at the same time it allowed them
to push their cold war agenda. I remember Clinton's campaign manager coming out right after
the e-mail dump that said the Russians did it. And didn't Obama send a lot of those Russian
ambassadors packing? They should be investigated, as should the FISA court itself. Perhaps if
Trump didn't have this charge of colluding with Russia he might have been able to be more
diplomatic on that score. Now, they made sure he would never be getting along with Russia.
What they have now is a bunch of Russians acting on their own that allegedly interfered in
our elections and created political discord, which is absurd, since the democrats are mainly
responsible for this nonsense, as is the FBI and DOJ. I was a democrat, but no more.
Dave P. , February 19, 2018 at 4:52 pm
Annie, you are right on that. However, Coleen Rowely has also made some very good
observations in her comments. But there is more to it, as some have pointed out in comments
above, there are some intra-party quarrels going on in Washington to take the upper hand.
Regarding foreign policy, National Security State and surveillance, and other such issues,
both parties are joined at the hip.
Gregory Herr , February 19, 2018 at 7:42 pm
I wouldn't completely discount the idea that Nunes' sense of responsibility has been
activated by being a close witness to what is blatant wrongdoing. But then my cynicism is
still tempered by the belief that sometimes people are compelled to do what's right just
because it's what's right. Silly me.
Virginia , February 19, 2018 at 10:34 am
Me, too, Michael, to " dismantle the national surveillance state and reduce the military
budget to a 'mere' $250 billion annually."
Thanks to Ray McGovern for another good article with link to interview. Good to hear they
will finally be closing the Mueller investigation (Nunes was straightforward about that, no
there there) and will likely be investigating the FBI and DOJ.
Applause goes to David Nunes. Keep up the good work.
Abbybwood , February 19, 2018 at 4:03 pm
But I see where Trump asked for nearly one TRILLION dollars for the military and got
it.
Pandas4peace , February 19, 2018 at 10:24 am
Where can we get access to Seymour Hersh's "recent explosive investigations" even if they
are written in German?
"On June 25th 2017 the German newspaper, Welt, published the latest piece by Seymour
Hersh, countering the "mainstream" narrative around the April 4th 2017 Khan Sheikhoun
chemical attack in Syria."
Consortiumnews.com publishes and comments on everything Pulitzer Prize winning Sy Hersh
does. The problem is that he is BANNED from English-language pubs -- simply banned and even
kept off erstwhile "liberal" TV and radio programs. Amy Goodman, for example, has ALWAYS had
Sy on when he had a new story until this one. She would not touch it; these days prefers to
go with the "White Helmets" of this world. O Tempora, O Mores. Sad.
So, in sum, the problem is a very basic one. Sy does not publish until he has nailed down
every significant detail and, since he is so well plugged in with many longtime, trusted
sources to sift through, that takes a while for a bit story -- as all of them are. And when
he is ready to publish, he hears folks whisper "Leper" as he gets close to an editorial
office. It really IS that bad. We owe the op-ed editor at die Welt our thanks.
Btw: The Consortiumnews.com main page has a SEARCH button that I find very handy. Try to
search on Seymour Hersh. Same goes for easily searchable raymcgovern.com, my website.
Ray
David Otness , February 19, 2018 at 5:37 pm
The London Review of Books has been publishing Hersh's work. That's one source.
The ostracizing of Sy Hersh is a major -- if highly depressing -- story in and of itself.
But he is irrepressible. I do not think he is going to silently steal away any time soon.
Ray McGovern
Kim Dixon , February 19, 2018 at 10:32 am
Can anyone imagine the Neocon WashPo, or the NYT (or CBS, or CNN, or ) committing actual
journalism, as this story progresses?
That, and the DNC's commitment to the DNC to the Russia Did It!™ canard, will ensure
that real revelations go nowhere.
It is instructive to read the comments on any NYT article on this subject. The comments
are clearly written by intelligent, well-educated individuals – who parrot the Deep
State's anti-Russian propaganda as if they were the dumbest of the "Better dead than Red!"
50s McCarthyites.
The new McCarthyites are actually stupider and more authoritarian than their sad
fore-bearers, because they could pierce the Deep States lies with 30 minutes of online
research, but they prefer tribalism and ignorance, instead.
Lois Gagnon , February 19, 2018 at 1:01 pm
You got that right! I live in the 5 college area in Massachusetts. Plenty of those types
around here playing activists. They fit your description. I can't stand to be in the same
room with any of them. They may as well be from Mars.
Nancy , February 19, 2018 at 2:47 pm
I agree. The average working person has more common sense than the so-called intelligent,
educated class. I suspect their views reflect the fact that they are very comfortable,
financially, with the status quo, and don't want any real change.
mike k , February 19, 2018 at 10:35 am
Trump started going head to head with the intel folks, but has backed down a lot now.
Let's hope Nunes et al hang in there and keep the pressure on these despicable criminals who
hide behind governmental powers. When you allow people to do whatever they want in secret
with no oversight, you can expect them to abuse their power. The basic question all this
leads to is "who is running this country and making crucial decisions about war and peace, or
fascism and democracy"?
Somehow I don't think Nunes or his committee is capable of reigning in Frankenstein. His
"constitutuents"" are not likely to allow it and although the monster was pieced together
from many body parts its instincts for self-preservation are formidable. Nevertheless, I
would applaud anyone who makes the effort.
Thanks BobH, that's an excellent rant, thanks for passing it along.
Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 10:58 am
The only way any trail that Nunes could even begin to make magically appear to happen
before our weary eyes will happen only, and I say only, will appear because it will be good
for tv ratings. Enforcing Constitutional law, I mean who does that anymore? Why today in our
nation's capital we have congressional people asking the opposite of what Ben Franklin warned
us good citizens about as the swamp critters are saying, 'Constitution how can we lose it'.
You know this Ray that these crooks and crookettes in DC think that the U.S. Constitution is
so passé and so anciently colonial that they hear Jefferson saying, 'ignore this
stupid document, I was drunk with Adams and Franklin when I wrote it. It was all a big
mistake.' Or something like that, but Constitutional law we don't need no stink'n
Constitutional law, now get back to your part time work. (Whip cracking sound)
Hey Ray this whole fiasco does what is most important in this new American century, this
fiasco is entertaining and the ratings are going through the roof so with that what more
could a red blooded good American ask for now pass the tv remote.
Note that after saying the Russians are indicted for interfering in the
election, and spending 5 minutes on this, at the 5 minute 20 second mark Rosenstein says
there is no evidence that the Russians had any affect [sic] on the election! So what
we have is the Deputy Attorney General of the United States announcing an indictment for
which he says there is no evidence!
If we take Roberts' statement at face value, he may have inadvertenly mischaracterized
Rosenstein's statement. According to Roberts, Rosenstein said there is no evidence of an
effect on the election, but it does not follow from that that Rosenstein is saying that there
is no evidence of interference. There may have been "interference" that had no impact. And,
of course, there is the question, just what is meant by "interference" in this context?
I share the frustration many commenters have about the entire "Russiagate" narrative, but
I think it is important to be careful in how we evaluate these statements. It may all be a
"nothinburger," but it is important to describe things carefully and correctly. Otherwise,
one ends up inadvertently setting up a straw man for someone else to knock down.
Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 10:25 pm
I share the stress you do blimblax that you and all who stay on this Russia-Gate pay-ops
suffer, but the way this crooked nail investigation has been going, mostly distorted by the
press coverage, your argument about the interpretation of Rosenstein's words to the general
public will be like splitting hairs with bald people . they just won't get it, and why,
because I'm not sure the vast amount of Americans get it now. They got turned off along time
ago back when the FBI didn't produce Trump performing his much heard about Steele Dossier
acclaimed Water Sports in his Moscow Obama's Presidential Suite sick, yes, but it's the
truth. No pictures, no believe you.
Personally I have never doubted any Russian influence in the way of statements, or essays,
but this contribution of opinion is to be expected from any well thinking country, or nation
if you'd rather of the world. Plus the Russians spending wasn't even close to any real
fraction of what both U.S. Presidential candidate spend on their campaigns, get real.
In the world of cypher espionage I have no knowledge, but if Russia does hang out in it
well then I'm sure the U.S. is already there to do what it must to defend it's cypher
security. So that's a wash, but this insane Russia-Gate distraction was originally a way to
deflect attention from Hillary & Debbie's putting the screws to Socialist Sanders . then
Russia-Gate became a MSM driven coup to oust Trump from his Electoral won presidential
office.
We could argue to how Trump,should be questioned, or even brought up on impeachment
charges, but not for this particular Russia interference into our so well guarded American
democracy. In fact we Americans don't need any Russian help at bringing our American
democracy down, because we Americans already did that with the Patriot Act as among a few
many other things. Joe
Somehow many Democrats are convinced that the FBI/DOJ did nothing wrong with regards to
the FISA warrants. And they're still convinced that Trump colluded with Putin. Nothing will
change their minds, it's hopeless.
Lois Gagnon , February 19, 2018 at 4:17 pm
It is indeed surreal to watch people who classify themselves as the left undermining the
left by supporting the very agencies whose sole purpose from their inception is to destroy
the left.
As David William Pear put it at OpEd News, "I don't think even Orwell has a scene like
this: anti-authoritarian dissidents endorse more authoritarian means to weed out
authoritarians resulting in authoritarians having more control to weed out dissidents."
The Deep State is very, very deep, and we're "Knee Deep in the Big Muddy" (Pete Seeger).
Anybody knows the US Deep State was thoroughly entrenched by Reagan's time. It's overdue not
to let this deep state corruption harden to concrete. I support neither party until there is
a course correction, and Nunes makes valid points in support of a correction. Thanks,
Ray.
BobS , February 19, 2018 at 11:58 am
Thin skinned too, eh Ray?
You're right, of course- Russia analysts at the CIA did stellar work in the 1980s.
Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 12:01 pm
No BobS it's you with your thickhead that doesn't get it. Keep it up BobS, because
eventually you are going to say something funny. Take care. Joe
Will Nunes or any conservative go after the thousands of illegal acts perpetrated by
conservatives??? NO! Nunes, along with every conservative traitor in America (republican or
democrat) needs to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The conservative agenda is
not moral or constitutional.
BobS , February 19, 2018 at 1:09 pm
Considering their disregard for law as well as their worship of authoritarianism
(exercised against the proper targets, of course), I'd say it's more than "self-enrichment"
that drives conservatives, both ancient and modern.
Deniz , February 19, 2018 at 1:58 pm
Perhaps that is an issue, but I am unclear precisely what is wrong in Nunes position that
he is relying on Gowdy, an undeniably sharp, precise, prosecutor, to review the examined
material. Watching both Nunes and Gowdy in sessions, I would have probably, and gladly, made
the same decision. It also make sense politically that they cover for each other, one person
is expendable and takes the heat – Nunes, while the other – Gowdy, an upward star
of the party, who probably ran the whole investigation anyway, keeps his hands clean.
BobS , February 19, 2018 at 2:09 pm
The always partisan "upward star" Trey 'BENGHAZI!!!' Gowdy announced his retirement from
congress last month due to his being "sick of hyper-partisanship".
And let me show you this bridge I'm selling
Deniz , February 19, 2018 at 2:32 pm
In fact, I would greatly enjoy a discussion on weapons transfers from Libya to Erdogan to
Al – Qaeda via Clinton. This is actually one of my favorite topics. So have it.
Deniz , February 19, 2018 at 5:34 pm
So what is your argument, that we should be loyal to our crime family and not theirs?
Or do you think Hillary, "We came, we saw, he died" or Mueller, of nothing to see here on
9/11 notoriety are the sort of people we should be defending.
Impossible to get the whole Gorgon's head, anyway, in such a corrupt system as we have.
Why else are we in such a mess? Both GOP and Democrats have not served the people, so we
should therefore give up trying to address any abuse?
Antiwar7 , February 19, 2018 at 12:35 pm
Ray, do you think Trump has made a deal: he'll allow escalations against Russia, and in
return the Deep State will leave him alone? If so, does that portend that this will fizzle
out?
Gregory Herr , February 19, 2018 at 8:14 pm
So you are privy to the briefings in question. Just because Reagan bloated the military
budget doesn't mean he was being fed false intelligence by McGovern.
On the other hand, it is well publicized that Cheney twisted arms at Langley and Tenet
obliged and Rummy worked the Iraq angle as well. We also had the Downing Street Memo and the
Powell fiasco and Valerie Plame. Ray was right to be indignant.
While the shiny ball, smoke and mirrors psychological operation known as "Russiagate" has
begun running on fumes before the gas tank finally runs dry, the major revelation of the
Clinton WikiLeaks emails describing Saudi/Qatari financing of ISIS drops further down the
memory hole. There's nothing like success
Drew Hunkins , February 19, 2018 at 3:59 pm
Good point Mr. Alatalo. The Saudi-Zio Terror Network gets away with murder, literally and
figuratively and of course the Saudi-Zio Terror Network NEVER, EVER interferes in ANY
elections in the United States, no never.
Thank you Paul E. Merrell, J.D. I have been convinced from the beginning of all of this
that this was the line to Wikileaks. Now if we could only get a real investigation into
Seth's murder.
Stop Bush and Clinton , February 19, 2018 at 7:34 pm
"We found that they broke a vast number of laws, did surveillance of a competitor with a
warrant based on fake evidence, all adding up to treason worse than Watergate. But we think
that no reasonable prosecutor would file charges .."
-- The FBI
Mueller was the person responsible for investigation of 911. That fact alone tells you all as for what we can
expect.
Notable quotes:
"... NO actual physical proof has been presented to the public to substantiate claims that Russia hacked the DNC ..."
"... There is NO proof (only allegations) of collusion between Trump's campaign and the Kremlin ..."
"... Social media efforts by Russian trolls to influence the election were minimal in the extreme, laughably amateurish and completely ineffective ..."
"... Glenn Greenwald has spent the past year documenting in detail the large volume of fake anti-Russian "news" generated by the MSM (see GG at The Intercept) ..."
"... There is NO connection between the Russian government and the 13 private citizens recently indicted for their pathetic and ineffectual activity as part of a troll farm ..."
"... Thanks to the paranoid, xenophobic, Russia-bashing nationalistic propaganda that is being promoted by our military-industrial-intelligence-media complex, the U.S. now believes it is acceptable to launch a first strike nuclear attack in retaliation for breeches of cyber security ..."
"... Trump won't be impeached over Russiagate for the simple reason that Russiagate is nothing but a psyops perpetrated against the American people by the national-security bureaucracy (and their corporate media propagandists) for the purposes of reigniting a second Cold War and maintaining U.S. global hegemony. ..."
"... Thanks to the hysterical McCarthyism now rampant among Democrats - and that is being used to great effect by Washington's bipartisan neocon warmongers - we may just end up in a nuclear war. The good news: it will be a short war and the Democrats will never have to accept responsibility for Clinton's loss. ..."
"... How about that Clinton got the CIA to partner with neo-Nazis in Ukraine to stage a coup, kick out Putin's friend, and install a billionaire capitalist as President? - something the media never mentions. ..."
"... Ultimately, I see the Russia story as getting its legs from the efforts of the dominant Hillary wing of the Democratic party, backed by big media, to continue to assert that Hillary really won the presidency in 2016, and that their wing should continue to have control of the party. ..."
"... That an immensely dangerous war fever is being whipped up in the process is of no importance to them. And, by no means incidentally, they are ignoring all of the real atrocities being committed by the Trump administration against the American people and the earth's environment. ..."
"... It has been thus since the creep moved into the White House. Dreyfuss, perky Rachel Maddow, Colbert, Maher, and many others have been the true "useful idiots". ..."
"... This same media never gave Sanders any media exposure during the primary. ..."
"... I would add that the election manipulations which the Clinton forces engaged in to defeat Sanders during the Democratic primaries dwarfs, by orders of magnitude, anything alleged against the Russians by even the most hawkish backers of the Russia probe. ..."
"... tweet by Peter Van Buren, former US foreign intelligence officer "Just did a quick read of the '13 Russian' indictment. Missing are a) any connections between the 13 and the Russian government and/or Trump campaign; b) any discussion of the impact (if any) their social media efforts had. It describes them buying Facebook ads, but nothing about if it affected votes; c) no connection shown between any of this and DNC, Wikileaks, hacking of emails; d) no discussion of motive; e) assumption that anything anti-Clinton was defacto pro-Bernie and/or pro-Trump. And all indicted persons are Russians, and outside the U.S., so highly unlikely this is going anywhere further legally. ..."
"... BTW, today the media put up that scumbag Podesta as a spokesperson for the Democrats. ..."
"... Seems that the end justifies the means. No matter what is the truth. In the mean-time, they're actually harming the opposition to Trump. I suppose nobody asked Podesta why the DNC never offered their computers for FBI forensics. ..."
"... The MSM never asks the hard questions anymore. It seems all pre-scripted and sanitized for corporate media. ..."
"... It's been a year since Mueller went to work and what's he got? A couple of Republican political operatives being political operatives. Their crime was not reporting to the USG that they were working for Ukraine. Now we're down to social media posts. You're probably one of those people who say, I saw it on the internet so it must be true. If the government is going to be upset about crap they see on social media from foreign parties, they need to start by telling said social media that they can't solicit advertising from foreign entities with political overtones as facebook did of RT. ..."
"... So we are going to limit global free speech by spending $Trillions more on building a nuclear arsenal - total madness - driven by [un] Democratic whining. ..."
"... Apparently, it comes down to trolls who planted various "fake news" stories. Stipulate to all of that; the worst of it. How does THAT begin to stack–up against the murderous coup that the USA OPENLY fomented in the Ukraine a couple of years earlier by bankrolling dozens of Non-governmental organizations whose sole purpose was "regime change"? ..."
"... Maybe come back to me about all of this when the FBI can convincingly prove that the Russian government armed and funded a Neo–nazi para–military group that assaulted and burned–down the North Carolina State House. ..."
"... You mean like Clinton and the CIA did in Ukraine, for economic domination over Russia, don't you? ..."
"... Tell me, as soon as you can, when having skepticism on the Russia/Election Meddling story is finally permitted. I heard tell, we've lately dropped the "Treason" narration. Now the spin du jour is that Trump & Co were all duped by them clever Ruskies. Whatever floats your boat. ..."
"... Stephen Cohen's take on Russiagate makes a lot of sense, to me. I've followed Russia/soviet/US relations very closely since Gorbachev. Open your eyes, Mattis has labeled Russia our mortal enemy, we just upped defense spending to an obscene level that shall keep our schools, hospitals, social services, and infrastructure in their bad state. ..."
NO actual physical proof has been presented to the public to substantiate claims that
Russia hacked the DNC
There is NO proof (only allegations) of collusion between Trump's campaign and the
Kremlin
Social media efforts by Russian trolls to influence the election were minimal in the
extreme, laughably amateurish and completely ineffective
Glenn Greenwald has spent the past year documenting in detail the large volume of fake
anti-Russian "news" generated by the MSM (see GG at The Intercept)
There is NO connection between the Russian government and the 13 private citizens recently
indicted for their pathetic and ineffectual activity as part of a troll farm
Thanks to the paranoid, xenophobic, Russia-bashing nationalistic propaganda that is being
promoted by our military-industrial-intelligence-media complex, the U.S. now believes it is
acceptable to launch a first strike nuclear attack in retaliation for breeches of cyber
security
Read number six again and think about it. The U.S. is ready and willing to launch a
preemptive nuclear attack against any nation it accuses of undermining our cyber security -
no proof necessary. The Democratic establishment, which has spent the past year engaging in
baseless Kremlin-baiting (and very little else), is directly responsible for this
insanity.
Trump won't be impeached over Russiagate for the simple reason that Russiagate is nothing
but a psyops perpetrated against the American people by the national-security bureaucracy
(and their corporate media propagandists) for the purposes of reigniting a second Cold War
and maintaining U.S. global hegemony.
Thanks to the hysterical McCarthyism now rampant among
Democrats - and that is being used to great effect by Washington's bipartisan neocon
warmongers - we may just end up in a nuclear war. The good news: it will be a short war and
the Democrats will never have to accept responsibility for Clinton's loss.
Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:30 pm
Who gives a shit really?
How about that Clinton got the CIA to partner with neo-Nazis in Ukraine to stage a coup,
kick out Putin's friend, and install a billionaire capitalist as President? - something the
media never mentions.
Caleb Melamed says: February 18, 2018 at 9:12 am
As I open the online edition of The Nation this morning, there are two lead stories. One
of them tells how Trump is planning to evict 5 million poor people from public housing. A
very important story.
The second story by Bob Dreyfuss is probably the 10,000th one I've seen about the Russia
probe. The public housing story is obviously much more important and substantial, yet the
Democrats have been focusing almost exclusively on the flimsy Russia probe. Not even the
pressing need to regulate assault rifles has really grabbed their full attention, even in the
wake of the latest dreadful Florida high school massacre. In perusing the news stories this
Sunday morning, the Russia probe continues to hold first place in coverage by a big
margin.
Ultimately, I see the Russia story as getting its legs from the efforts of the dominant
Hillary wing of the Democratic party, backed by big media, to continue to assert that Hillary
really won the presidency in 2016, and that their wing should continue to have control of the
party.
That an immensely dangerous war fever is being whipped up in the process is of no
importance to them. And, by no means incidentally, they are ignoring all of the real
atrocities being committed by the Trump administration against the American people and the
earth's environment.
Clark M Shanahan says: February 18, 2018 at 9:52 am
Amen, Caleb It has been thus since the creep moved into the White House.
Dreyfuss, perky Rachel Maddow, Colbert, Maher, and many others have been the true "useful
idiots".
Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:33 pm
This same media never gave Sanders any media exposure during the primary.
Caleb Melamed says: February 18, 2018 at 9:42 am
I would add that the election manipulations which the Clinton forces engaged in to defeat
Sanders during the Democratic primaries dwarfs, by orders of magnitude, anything alleged
against the Russians by even the most hawkish backers of the Russia probe.
Clark M Shanahan says: February 18, 2018 at 8:24 am
FYI tweet by Peter Van Buren,
former US foreign intelligence officer "Just did a quick read of the '13 Russian' indictment. Missing are a) any connections
between the 13 and the Russian government and/or Trump campaign; b) any discussion of the
impact (if any) their social media efforts had. It describes them buying Facebook ads, but
nothing about if it affected votes; c) no connection shown between any of this and DNC,
Wikileaks, hacking of emails; d) no discussion of motive; e) assumption that anything
anti-Clinton was defacto pro-Bernie and/or pro-Trump. And all indicted persons are Russians,
and outside the U.S., so highly unlikely this is going anywhere further legally.
Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:37 pm
There is nothing illegal or unethical about any individual of government supporting one
candidate over another. BTW, today the media put up that scumbag Podesta as a spokesperson for the Democrats.
Clark M Shanahan says: February 19, 2018 at 9:02 am
Seems that the end justifies the means.
No matter what is the truth.
In the mean-time, they're actually harming the opposition to Trump. I suppose nobody asked Podesta why the DNC never offered
their computers for FBI forensics.
Fred Caruso says: February 19, 2018 at 12:31 pm
The MSM never asks the hard questions anymore. It seems all pre-scripted and sanitized for
corporate media.
Richard Phelps says: February 18, 2018 at 2:52 am
There is one issue that no media is talking about regarding the "memos". Trump is clearly
a "person of interest", if not a suspect in some parts of the investigation. Given Trump's
entanglement how is it not an absolute conflict of interest for Trump being the person who
decides what memos get to be public and what redactions must be made.
Imagine a judge being a suspect in a crime or a major stockholder in a corporate civil
suit. S/he would never be allowed to make any rulings on what evidence the jury gets to see
or anything about the case. Some non-interested 3rd party needs to make those decisions.
Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:38 pm
Quit feeding this beast.
Jeffrey Harrison says: February 16, 2018 at 8:15 pm
The other interesting and fun fact not mentioned anywhere. Three Names won by 3 million
votes. Crafty Ruskis.
Carla Skidmore says: February 16, 2018 at 7:33 pm
This investigation by Mueller is just beginning. In other words, and to use the
vernacular, "We "ain't seen nothing," yet."
Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:40 pm
You are right. This is nothing but bullshit and it may be just the beginning. The
Democrats have an endless supply of donkey-shit.
Jeffrey Harrison says: February 16, 2018 at 6:08 pm
It's interesting that the Russians set this all up to boost Trump and disparage Three
Names before Trump even announced he was running. The basic set up for this was going on in
2014 whereas Trump announced in 2015.
Carla Skidmore says: February 16, 2018 at 7:29 pm
No, not really. Trump was making gestures of interest in the presidency in 2012
Clark M Shanahan says: February 18, 2018 at 10:28 am
Since when have you been so trusting of our FBI & CIA, Carla?
From what we've experienced together from the Gulf of Tonkin onward, I'm a wee-tad taken
aback.
Please read the ex-foreign intelligence officer's twitter posting that I posted above.
Jeffrey Harrison says: February 16, 2018 at 8:30 pm
Pfui. He also made noises about running in the 2012 election. People don't set up
organizations to do stuff just on the off chance that some politician or wannabe is going to
run. These guys ain't got nothin'. It's been a year since Mueller went to work and what's he
got? A couple of Republican political operatives being political operatives. Their crime was
not reporting to the USG that they were working for Ukraine. Now we're down to social media
posts. You're probably one of those people who say, I saw it on the internet so it must be
true. If the government is going to be upset about crap they see on social media from foreign
parties, they need to start by telling said social media that they can't solicit advertising
from foreign entities with political overtones as facebook did of RT.
Fred Caruso says: February 19, 2018 at 3:35 pm
So we are going to limit global free speech by spending $Trillions more on building a
nuclear arsenal - total madness - driven by [un] Democratic whining.
Francis Louis Szot says: February 16, 2018 at 6:05 pm
Apparently, it comes down to trolls who planted
various "fake news" stories. Stipulate to all of that; the worst of it. How does THAT begin to stack–up against the
murderous coup that the USA OPENLY fomented
in the Ukraine a couple of years earlier by bankrolling
dozens of Non-governmental organizations whose
sole purpose was "regime change"?
Maybe come back to me about all of this when the FBI
can convincingly prove that the Russian government
armed and funded a Neo–nazi para–military group
that assaulted and burned–down the North Carolina State House.
Fred Caruso says: February 19, 2018 at 3:37 pm
You mean like Clinton and the CIA did in Ukraine, for economic domination over Russia,
don't you?
Clark M Shanahan says: February 16, 2018 at 3:44 pm
I'm hoping the hush-money passed on to two of Trump's romantic caprices, during the election, gets traction.
Tell me, as soon as you can, when having skepticism on the Russia/Election Meddling story is finally permitted. I heard
tell, we've lately dropped the "Treason" narration. Now the spin du jour is that Trump & Co were all duped by them clever
Ruskies. Whatever floats your boat.
Clark M Shanahan says: February 17, 2018 at 10:13 am
Yes David, I'm still a skeptic.
In fact, I think this move to indict 13 suspects, that have a snowball in Hell's chance of
ever being tried, is simply a dog and pony show to placate the public.
Debrief yourself, read Binney's report and listen to Stephen F Cohen's latest, here on the
Nation.
Clark M Shanahan says: February 17, 2018 at 5:25 pm
Stephen Cohen's take on Russiagate makes a lot of sense, to me. I've followed Russia/soviet/US relations very closely
since Gorbachev.
Open your eyes, Mattis has labeled Russia our mortal enemy, we just upped defense spending to
an obscene level that shall keep our schools, hospitals, social services, and infrastructure
in their bad state.
As if Hill, who stole the primaries actually ran a competent campaign.
This dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia is extremely lucrative for the war
profiteers, the retired generals & intelligence members who prostitute themselves as
media pundits, the members of Congress who get $$$ from the war profiteers, and the corporate
media which thrives on links to the war profiteers as well as on war reporting.
That's why we must all be kept fearful, so we don't demand that annual trillion dollar
military "defense" budgets be slashed and that money instead be spent on social safety net
programs and infrastructure.
That's also why tensions with not only Russia, but Iran, Syria, North Korea, and China
must be maintained, and our endless wars and global empire of military bases continued.
As long as war and militarism are such profitable rackets, it doesn't matter that all life
on earth is threatened. That is the essence of capitalism in a nutshell: profits are more
important than life itself.
Joe Tedesky , February 17, 2018 at 12:55 pm
You got that right, and the sooner the American public wise up to all these lies the
better. If you want this maddening insanity to stop, well then my fellow Americans quit
buying into their lies. Just go ahead and board the damn plane, oh BTW one of the reasons NFL
attendance is down is well think of the new security rules put in place plus who knows the
rules of football anymore (our football is even tainted with screwiness). Sorry for the rant,
but we Americans got to start calling our officials out on this stuff. It's that plain and
simple. Nice post REDPILLED. Joe
Virginia , February 17, 2018 at 1:06 pm
REDPILLED,
I'm just imagining how it must feel, if you're Putin, to be able to rein in your emotions,
to not react no matter how much baited, and to stay above the fray while warmongers, like
dogs, are barking at your feet. That degree of self-composure, resting on a strong necessity
to try to prevent WWIII and nuclear annihilation, well, I'm afraid not many of us will ever
know or feel that exactly, but we can imagine! To do this with grace and dignity, insult
after insult! There are lessons to be learned here.
Joe Tedesky , February 17, 2018 at 1:10 pm
Virginia we Americans better hope patient Putin stays in power. Joe
irina , February 17, 2018 at 3:19 pm
Exactly. I can't imagine who the Creatures of the Deep think would be a
good successor to Putin, but I do think they should be very careful of
what they wish for. Case in point, the Ukraine. What exactly happened
to "Our Man Yats" anyway ? He seems to have (been ?) disappeared. . .
Joe Tedesky , February 17, 2018 at 3:30 pm
There is a bit of a warring nature still left in this old fighter cat, and during these
imaginary moments of destruction I struggle with I see Russian T72 tanks driving down Maiden
Square looking for old Yats and his friends. Not to worry though, I seriously don't want
anyone, anywhere, to have to suffer even one minute of war, but on a bad day, well need I say
more? Joe
ranney , February 17, 2018 at 5:45 pm
I agree Virginia. I am so depressed by Mueller's actions my head swims. I had hoped that
Mueller was actually an honest investigator who believed in the rule of law as everyone said.
Now I can't imagine what game he is playing. Now it seems like all hope has vanished that
anything even vaguely resembling the truth will come out.. Mueller"s indictments of these
poor people seals the deal: Russia is the evil bugbear that must be destroyed and all right
thinking patriots will agree to that when we launch nuclear war.
I keep feeling like we're all in a Kafka exercise or a Harold Pinter play where motives and
truths are hidden behind an impenatrable wall. Even the new Consortium article by McGovern
and Binney seems to hint at much more than they are telling, leaving me to wish they'd just
come out and say what they are worried about given their knowledge and expertise. Instead I'm
left with the sense that there is a coded message in there that I have missed.
So yes, I too worry about how patient Putin can be when we have already in so many ways
performed a dozen or more acts of war on Russia in the past year and he has not reacted
violently.
p.s. Once again Caitlin has provided great links. Click on one of the first about the
government telling us lies. It'll get you a great 4 minute cartoon based on Chomskys book
Manufacturing Consent. It's about propaganda. You'll like it.
Virginia , February 17, 2018 at 8:50 pm
Ranney -- One thing that has lifted my spirit somewhat, I heard a real thinker say that
the Deep State (DS) is losing ground now because its anointed candidate HRC was defeated in
2016. So 2016 marks a positive time of turning and healing. Putin and Xi seem to both be
working for the good of the world. Wonderful if Donald Trump could drain the swamp and get on
board. Either way, those two Leaders together can lead us out of this morass.
There's a state of thought that remains composed no matter what the valley of the shadow
of death. The more I learn -- and sometimes what I learn is vastly darker than I could ever
conceive -- the deeper grows my joy. It's been a puzzle to me that I could read something
truly devastating here on CN and walk away with more joy than I had before reading it (and
believe me, it's not because of the evil news). It's partly because I'm grateful that my eyes
have been opened. There is absolutely nothing I can do without being well informed about it.
I feel I'm learning all this for a reason; a very real big good reason. Don't you? There's a
state of thought that refuses to be fearful no matter what. Adopt that one, Ranney.
Just look at those Olympiads doing the impossible! They start with, "I can."
Dave P. , February 18, 2018 at 4:07 am
Virginia,
Yes. Regarding the barking dogs, I read some where this Putin's answer to a question a few
days ago on that list of 200 sanctioned Russians put out by U.S. Treasury Department. Putin
said: Let the barking dogs bark, but the caravan goes on.
"... And the dossier, a pastiche of falsehoods from gossips in the Kremlin, has been exposed as a smear job paid for by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee ..."
"... The hunters are the prey and Trump will prosecute, sack, or intimidate the deep state. But it is there, can arise quickly and can be very dangerous. Forewarned is forearmed. ..."
...Donald Trump went to war against the entire political class: all factions of both parties, the bureaucracy, the national
media, the lobbyists, Hollywood and Wall Street. He said the whole system was rotten and had failed the nation: hopeless wars
that accomplished nothing except the wastage of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, the extension of Iranian influence
and an immense humanitarian crisis, a flatlined economy, a shrinking workforce, increasing poverty and crime, oceans of debt,
large trade deficits from trade agreements that exported unemployment to the United States and the unmonitored influx of
millions of illiterate peasants from Latin America.
... ... ...
For the first nine months of the new administration, there was the constant confected threat
of impeachment. The phantasmagorical imbecility that Trump had somehow colluded and connived
with the Russian government to rig the election was the excuse of the hapless Clinton and her
Trump-hating echo chamber in the national media for the election result.
The deep state was almost the whole state, and it pitched in to sabotage the administration.
For nearly that long, the Republican leaders sat on their hands waiting to see if he would be
impeached or not. His nominees were a long time in being confirmed. There were leaks of White
House conversations, including with foreign leaders -- outright acts of insubordination
causing Trump, a decisive executive, to fire some fairly high officials, including the malign
director of the FBI, who then informed Congress that he had leaked a self-addressed memo
(probably illegally, as it was technically government property), in order to have a special
prosecutor named to torment the president over the fatuous Russian allegations, although
Comey testified that Trump himself was not a target or suspect and the Russians had not
influenced the outcome of the election. (This was a sober position compared to the wholesale
fabrications of the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark
Warner, that a
thousand Russian agents had swarmed the key battleground states and had delivered
Wisconsin to Trump.)
The president has strengthened the White House staff. The FBI and Justice Department have
been ripped apart in their partisanship and misuse of the dossier on which the collusion
argument and the surveillance of the Trump campaign were based. And the dossier, a pastiche
of falsehoods from gossips in the Kremlin, has been exposed as a smear job paid for by the
Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, and the whole impeachment movement has
collapsed. The hunters are the prey and Trump will prosecute, sack, or intimidate the deep
state. But it is there, can arise quickly and can be very dangerous. Forewarned is
forearmed.
Conrad Black is a writer and former newspaper publisher whose most recent book is
Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full
(PublicAffairs, 2007).
"It's worth noting that intentionally deceiving a federal judge is a felony."
It's also worth noting that sometimes the judge is in on it.
For the Trump Admin surveillance warrants the FISA judge was probably Contreras. So goes
the rumor. He was probably in on it or halfway in on it. All the major players in DC know
each other and trade favors.
And Gen Mike Flynn is in the process of getting his case dismissed. The only thing left to
determine is how much the Federales will have to reimburse him for his lawyers fees, which
are a million plus.
Rudolph Contreras was the FISA Judge who issued a warrant to spy on Carter Page because
of a Yahoo News article and a Phony Probably have already. He needs to go
Recused Judge in Flynn Prosecution Served on FISA Court
Did Judge Contreras OK electronic surveillance of Recused Judge in Flynn
Prosecution Served on FISA Court Did Judge Contreras OK electronic surveillance of
Federal FISA Judge Recuses Himself From Michael Flynn Case
Blows the whole FISA Court to hell in a hand basket and Judge Contreras is getting the
hell out of dodge. This a helluva mess for the FISA Court and it's victims. Rule 5.
Authority of the Judges. (b) Referring Matters to Other Judges.
"... Mainly, unnamed intelligence officials and operatives who are in the CIA or recently retired from such. A number of media outfits are exceptionally active in propagating negative headlines and stories about Trump and his administration. Elements of other intelligence agencies and departments of government are possibly involved. We do not know the names of those operating against Trump, and this is a weakness of the coup hypothesis. ..."
"... Its foundation was laid in 2016 by accusations of Russian interference in the election. The coup began in earnest as soon as the election in November 2016 made Trump the winner. ..."
"... On Jan. 14, 2017, a news report states that the CIA set up a task force in 2016 to investigate possible Russian funding of Trump's campaign. The task force included the FBI, the Treasury, and Justice Departments, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency (NSA). ..."
"... On February 24, 2016, ex-CIA chief Hayden said he'd be "frightened" of a Trump presidency. He said, "I would be incredibly concerned if President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the language that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign." A news report told us "Former CIA director Michael Hayden believes there is a legitimate possibility that the U.S. military would refuse to follow orders given by Donald Trump if the Republican front-runner becomes president and decides to make good on certain campaign pledges." ..."
"... There is ample evidence in the form of sharp public bickering between Trump and these two CIA chiefs, present and the past, that the CIA set up a task force to investigate Trump's campaign as a weapon against Trump and his possible election. The motive behind the investigation was not to ensure a clean campaign free of Russian influence but to work against Trump's election chances. The CIA was dismayed by what appeared to them to be a possible president who was aiming to work with Putin and not against him. ..."
"... The excuse was an allegation that three of Trump's associates had received campaign money from the Kremlin. This allegation came from a Baltic state and it was processed by the CIA and made into something worthy of following up. We read that the task force " was set up after the director of the CIA, John Brennan, received a recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into Trump's campaign coffers, the BBC's Paul Wood reported. The recording was apparently passed to the CIA by the intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States." ..."
"... According to this, John Brennan is the key player in the anti-Trump movement. He wants to see Trump's presidency brought to a quick end or otherwise neutered and made compliant to rule by the CIA. By their control over information and its interpretation, the leaders of the CIA have gained considerable power within the government. They've enhanced this by developing operational forces in the field. ..."
"... As occurred during the propaganda campaign that preceded Bush 2's attack on Iraq and as in the Ukraine case noted above, we again observe murky foreign sources that are given credence and validity by the CIA. The public and media have no viable way of checking on the story of Kremlin money except perhaps through off the record sources. Such stories can't be traced through public hearings without subpoena power and a will to wash a lot of dirty linen in public. They are perfect for propaganda and cover-ups. ..."
"... On January 3, 2016, Charles Schumer said that Trump was "being really dumb" for arguing against the assessments of the intelligence community on Russian hacking. He adds ominously: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you." ..."
"... On January 15, 2017, we read "CIA Director John Brennan on Sunday had a stern parting message for Republican Donald Trump days before he assumes the U.S. presidency, cautioning him against loosening sanctions on Russia and warning him to watch what he says. Brennan rebuked the president-elect for comparing U.S. intelligence practices to Nazi Germany in comments that laid bare the friction between Trump and the intelligence community he has criticized and is on the verge of commanding." ..."
"... In 2016 Trump and the CIA became foes of one another because of vast policy differences. Past and present CIA directors went public against Trump. They instigated a series of reports and leaks to discredit Trump and to link his campaign to Russian meddling in the election. They went after several of his aides, causing Paul Manafort to resign. After the election, they produced new anti-Trump material and managed to get his National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, to resign. This adds up to an attempted coup that has had some success. ..."
A. Mainly, unnamed intelligence officials and operatives who are in the CIA or recently
retired from such. A number of media outfits are exceptionally active in propagating negative
headlines and stories about Trump and his administration. Elements of other intelligence
agencies and departments of government are possibly involved. We do not know the names of those
operating against Trump, and this is a weakness of the coup hypothesis.
Q. When did the coup attempt begin?
A. Its foundation was laid in 2016 by accusations of Russian interference in the
election. The coup began in earnest as soon as the election in November 2016 made Trump the
winner.
Q. What evidence points to the CIA's role in the coup attempt?
A. A news report from September 5, 2016, reports that "U.S. intelligence and law enforcement
agencies are investigating what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United
States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political
institutions, intelligence, and congressional officials said."
On Jan. 14, 2017, a news report states that the CIA set up a task force in 2016 to
investigate possible Russian funding of Trump's campaign. The task force included the FBI, the
Treasury, and Justice Departments, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, and the National Security Agency (NSA).
Q. Why did the CIA set up a task force to investigate Trump's campaign?
A. Why did the CIA not set up a task force to investigate Hillary Clinton's activities
during and after being Secretary of State in response to receipt of mammoth amounts of foreign
money that were laundered through the Clinton Foundation? The reason is that she was the
candidate favored by the CIA leadership and Trump was not.
Early in 2016, Trump was raising very strong doubts in the intelligence community that he'd
govern as they saw fit.
On February 24, 2016, ex-CIA chief Hayden said he'd be "frightened" of a Trump presidency.
He said, "I would be incredibly concerned if President Trump governed in a way that was
consistent with the language that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign." A news report
told us "Former CIA director Michael Hayden believes there is a legitimate possibility that the
U.S. military would refuse to follow orders given by Donald Trump if the Republican
front-runner becomes president and decides to make good on certain campaign pledges."
A month later, Hayden opined that Trump was a larger threat to national stability on
security matters than Hillary Clinton.
On April 11, 2016, we learn that CIA Director "Brennan said on NBC News Sunday that he would
not allow enhanced interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, even if a future president
ordered it." Trump wasted no time responding: "Donald Trump is taking on CIA Director John
Brennan on torture, saying Brennan's pledge not to allow waterboarding is 'ridiculous.'"
On July 13, 2016, Brennan testified that he'd consider quitting rather than obey a
president's order to reinstate waterboarding, something that Trump had suggested. Another
article says that even before that date, "[Brennan] has already expressed his distaste for
Trump."
There is ample evidence in the form of sharp public bickering between Trump and these two
CIA chiefs, present and the past, that the CIA set up a task force to investigate Trump's
campaign as a weapon against Trump and his possible election. The motive behind the
investigation was not to ensure a clean campaign free of Russian influence but to work against
Trump's election chances. The CIA was dismayed by what appeared to them to be a possible
president who was aiming to work with Putin and not against him.
Q. But wasn't the CIA doing the right thing to investigate possible Russian funding of
the Trump campaign?
A. The idea of Russian funding of Trump's campaign was absurd. This investigation had no
reason to be started other than a goal of smearing Trump and preventing a Trump presidency. It
was absurd because foreign money given to American political campaigns is illegal and everyone
knows it. Trump would not jeopardize his campaign for some trivial amount of money nor would
his campaign officials; and a large amount would easily be spotted through the banking system.
It was also absurd because the Kremlin would not operate and does not operate in this way. It
would not risk being found out blatantly violating American law in this way, as that would
greatly diminish its credibility. "Doing the right thing" for the American system was strictly
a plausible and disingenuous device.
Q. If the investigation was absurd, what leads or allegations did the CIA have to set it
up?
A. The excuse was an allegation that three of Trump's associates had received campaign money
from the Kremlin. This allegation came from a Baltic state and it was processed by the CIA and
made into something worthy of following up. We read that the task force " was set up after the
director of the CIA, John Brennan, received a recording of a conversation about money from the
Kremlin going into Trump's campaign coffers, the BBC's Paul Wood reported. The recording was
apparently passed to the CIA by the intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States."
According to this, John Brennan is the key player in the anti-Trump movement. He wants to
see Trump's presidency brought to a quick end or otherwise neutered and made compliant to rule
by the CIA. By their control over information and its interpretation, the leaders of the CIA
have gained considerable power within the government. They've enhanced this by developing
operational forces in the field.
As occurred during the propaganda campaign that preceded Bush 2's attack on Iraq and as in
the Ukraine case noted above, we again observe murky foreign sources that are given credence
and validity by the CIA. The public and media have no viable way of checking on the story of
Kremlin money except perhaps through off the record sources. Such stories can't be traced
through public hearings without subpoena power and a will to wash a lot of dirty linen in
public. They are perfect for propaganda and cover-ups.
John Brennan has the CIA initiate an investigation on a flimsy basis and gets away with it.
We know from his public statements at that time and later that he's thoroughly anti-Trump and
anti-Russia. This is why such an investigation went forward. Brennan had nothing to lose. If he
found some dirt on Trump or his associates, he'd discredit Trump and lose him votes. If he
didn't find anything, the investigation itself would still raise suspicions about Trump and
provide Hillary Clinton and her aides with anti-Trump ammunition. In fact, her campaign did use
the alleged Russian connection against Trump.
Q. What else do we know of Brennan's differences with Trump?
A. On Sept. 11, 2016, Brennan disagreed with Trump publicly: "CIA Director John Brennan
pushed back against Donald Trump's claim that he could read disapproval of President Barack
Obama's policies in the body language of the intelligence officers who gave him a confidential
national security briefing."
On November 30, 2016, we read that Brennan expressed another difference with Trump: "The
director of the CIA has issued a stark warning to President-elect Donald J. Trump. Tearing up
the Iran nuclear deal would be 'the height of folly' and 'disastrous.'"
On January 3, 2016, Charles Schumer said that Trump was "being really dumb" for arguing
against the assessments of the intelligence community on Russian hacking. He adds ominously:
"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at
getting back at you."
On January 15, 2017, we read "CIA Director John Brennan on Sunday had a stern parting
message for Republican Donald Trump days before he assumes the U.S. presidency, cautioning him
against loosening sanctions on Russia and warning him to watch what he says. Brennan rebuked
the president-elect for comparing U.S. intelligence practices to Nazi Germany in comments that
laid bare the friction between Trump and the intelligence community he has criticized and is on
the verge of commanding."
Q. What became of the allegations against the three associates of Trump?
A. The three accused men each strongly denied allegations of being paid by the Kremlin. On
October 15, the FISA court granted a warrant to intercept communications from two Russian
banks. The investigators were looking for evidence that money passed from Russia to the three
Trump associates. No such evidence was found.
On January 19, 2017, the continuing investigation by "American law enforcement and
intelligence agencies" was confirmed, and Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, was
mentioned:
"The counterintelligence investigation centers at least in part on the business dealings
that some of the president-elect's past and present advisers have had with
Russia . Mr. Manafort has done business in Ukraine and Russia. Some of his contacts there
were under surveillance by the National Security Agency for suspected links to Russia's Federal
Security Service, one of the officials said."
Mr. Manafort has done nothing illegal, we learn. He has merely done some business in Ukraine
and Russia. He merely came into contact with people with suspected links to a Russian
intelligence outfit. They weren't even known spies. Mr. Manafort has fallen victim to
suspicion by association two or three times removed even from guilt by association.
The other two being investigated are Carter Page and Roger Stone, and we learn that they too
are innocent of wrongdoing.
"The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the
C.I.A. and the Treasury Department's financial crimes unit. The investigators have
accelerated their efforts in recent weeks but have found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing,
the officials said."
So, we know that a concerted effort has been made to investigate three of Trump's close
aides. We know that the CIA was the instigator and that it used its typical murky and
unverifiable tips to gain credibility. Finally, we know that this inquiry has produced no
evidence of any illegal activities of Trump or his aides.
Q. What other evidence is there of an attempted coup against Trump?
A. On Oct. 7, 2016, there was released the "Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland
Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security". This brief
statement on behalf of U.S. intelligence agencies linked the Russian government to hacking:
"The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the
recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political
organizations." It stated its belief "that only Russia's senior-most officials could have
authorized these activities."
On Nov. 30, 2016, an outfit named PropOrNot with links to the U.S. intelligence community
published a report that named 200 websites as propagators of Russian propaganda: "Russia Is
Manipulating US Public Opinion through Online Propaganda".
On Dec. 9, 2016, it was reported that "The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that
Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency "
Dec. 29, 2016, arrived the FBI-DHS report: "Grizzly Steppe – Russian Malicious Cyber
Activity". This was widely denounced as lacking even persuasive circumstantial evidence, never
mind direct evidence of Russian involvement.
On Jan. 10, 2017, the Golden Showers report was leaked, accusing Trump of having been
compromised by Russian agents and therefore subject to blackmail. This report had been
circulating for weeks in intelligence and media circles. It had supposedly been written between
July and December by former British MI-6 agent, Christopher Steele.
Once again we observe that a spurious anti-Trump report is purported or arranged to have a
foreign origination; but that it is carried to the public by means of the CIA and leaks within
the U.S.
On February 13, 2017, the coup perps drew fresh blood when Michael Flynn resigned, despite
no evidence of wrongdoing. Their success is attributable to their use of wiretapped phone calls
and to leaking these to the media. Since intelligence agents have access to these calls that
the NSA collects, we once again observe that intelligence circles are active in seeking to
undermine Trump. This is consistent with the conclusion that a coup attempt is ongoing.
Q. Could you summarize, please?
A. In 2016 Trump and the CIA became foes of one another because of vast policy differences.
Past and present CIA directors went public against Trump. They instigated a series of reports
and leaks to discredit Trump and to link his campaign to Russian meddling in the election. They
went after several of his aides, causing Paul Manafort to resign. After the election, they
produced new anti-Trump material and managed to get his National Security Advisor, Michael
Flynn, to resign. This adds up to an attempted coup that has had some success.
Q. What happens next?
A. The future is guesswork. We will be surprised at what happens, but here are some guesses.
The coup attempt will not cease. There is nothing presently opposing it unless Trump is
counterattacking behind the scenes, of which there is no evidence. Trump will eventually sense
the coup's efficacy and devise ways to stop it. The anti-Trump media will keep the pot boiling.
They will need new stories to exploit. Anti-Trump elements in the CIA can be expected to come
up with new, dubious and devious revelations aimed at discrediting Trump's handling of foreign
affairs. We can expect former intelligence officials to speak out against Trump at critical
times and to recruit allies who will add what appears to be an even more independent criticism
of Trump. The coup may transform into an effort to control Trump's policies from outside his
administration.
"... How did Simpson know with such confidence what the "Intelligence Community" was "saying", and who were Simpson's and Steele's sources in the "Intelligence Community"? Rooney failed to inquire. Instead, he and Simpson exchanged question and answer regarding the approach Simpson and Steele made to the FBI when they delivered their dossier. In the details of that, Simpson repeated what he had already told the Senate Judiciary Committee. ..."
"... Sources in London are divided on the question of where Steele's sources came from -- CIA, MI6, or elsewhere. What has been clear for the year in which the dossier's contents have been in public circulation is that the sources the dossier referred to as "Russian" were not. For details of the sourcing . The subsequent identification of the Maltese source Joseph Mifsud, and the Greek-American George Papadopoulos, corroborates their lack of direct Russian sources. Instead, the sources identified in the dossier were either Americans, Americans of Russian ethnic origin, or Russians with no direct knowledge repeating hearsay three or four times removed from source. ..."
"... Another reported version of the FIFA contract is that Steele, Burrows and Orbis were hired by the British Football Association to collect materials on FIFA corruption, and provide them to the FBI and other US investigators, and then to the press. The scheme's objective was reportedly to advance the British bidding for the World Cup in 2018 or 2022 by discrediting the rival bids from Russia and Qatar. Click to read . Were MI6 and CIA sources mobilized by Orbis to feed the FBI with evidence the US investigators were unable to turn up, or was Orbis the conduit through which disinformation targeting Russia was fed to make it appear more credible to the FBI, and to the media? ..."
"... US Congressional investigators have so far failed to notice the similarities between the FIFA and the Trump dossier operations. Early this month two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that they have called for a Justice Department and FBI investigation of Steele for providing false information to the FBI. The provision of the US code making lying a federal crime requires the falsehoods occur "within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States." Simpson has testified that when Steele briefed the FBI on the dossier, he did so at meetings in Rome, Italy. ..."
"... With Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there is some evidence that Clinton and Co. actually wanted to run against Donald Trump, and tried to get their allies to manipulate the Republican primary in favor of a Trump victory (hence all the free corporate media coverage of the Donald). The dossier, fabricated or not, seems to have been one of many 'ace in the holes' that the Clinton campaign thought they could use to discredit Trump (including the Access Hollywood tape, etc.) in the general election. If so, this strategy really blew up in their face – they thought they could manipulate the process, so they could ignore the Rust Belt concerns, and that's what handed Trump the presidency. ..."
"... If the Clintonites were to admit this, however, they'd have to step down from party leadership and let the Sanders Democrats take over, and that's what this is really all about now, their effort to prevent that outcome. ..."
"... And I say "fed to him" when I'm in a generous mood, giving him the benefit of the doubt, because usually I am of the opinion that he's either a really crappy CIA agent posing as a journalist or just a garden variety rat f*!@er. A black job political operative, stitching together a few almost-believable "facts" and out-and-out fabrications with squishy words like "collusion" and "ties." ..."
"... The London experts believe the Senate Committee transcript shows Simpson and Steele were hired for the black job of discrediting the target of their research, Trump; did a poor job; failed in 2016; and now are engaged in bitter recriminations against each other to avoid multi-million dollar court penalties. ..."
"... A source at a London firm which is larger and better known than Steele's Orbis says "standard due diligence means getting to the truth. It's confidential to the client, and not leaked. There are also black jobs, white jobs, and red jobs. Black means the client wants you to dig up dirt on the target, and make it look credible for publishing in the press. White means the client wants you to clear him of the wrongdoing which he's being accused of in the media or the marketplace; it's also leaked to the press. A red job is where the client pays the due diligence firm to hire a journalist to find out what he knows and what he's likely to publish, in order to bribe or stop him. The Steele dossier on Trump is an obvious black job. Too obvious." ..."
"... A bigger bombshell, which of course none of them mentioned, is that Simpson, with his client's consent, was secretly briefing Clinton-friendly reporters on information from Steele's memos, and they used it to write stories based on "unnamed sources." He even admitted that he didn't verify the information before feeding it to the media, said he didn't feel he needed to, because it came from a trustworthy source. Where have we heard that before? ..."
"... I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. It's well-established that the State Department often acts as a cover for the CIA, and the agency under Secretary Clinton had a strong anti-Russia faction that's on the record as meddling in Ukraine's presidential election. And how much doubt could there be that both Clintons kept the CIA connections they made while in office? ..."
"... Then there was the whole "Grizzly Steppe" report just before Trump's inauguration, presented as a consensus among "17 intelligence agencies" that the Russians "hacked the election" to help Trump win. ..."
"... I'm not 100-percent convinced that U.S. intelligence was behind the dossier, but it's enough of a possibility that I'm not writing it off as some nutty "conspiracy theory." ..."
"... Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. ..."
"... In fact I am fairly certain that it is the case, although from what I understand the FBI and MI6 were also involved. ..."
According to Simpson, "foreign intelligence services hacking American political operations is not that unusual, actually, and
there's a lot of foreign intelligence services that play in American elections." He mentioned the Chinese and the Indians, not the
Israelis. The Mossad, Simpson did tell the Committee, was his source for his belief that Russian intelligence has been operating
through the Jewish Orthodox Chabad movement, and the Russian Orthodox Church. "The Orthodox church is also an arm of the Russian
State now the Mossad guys used to tell me about how the Russians were laundering money through the Orthodox church in Israel, and
that it was intelligence operations."
There are just two references in the Committee transcript to the CIA. One was a passing remark to imply the Russians cannot "break[ing]
into the CIA, [so instead] you are breaking into, you know, places where, you know, an open society leaves open."
The second was a bombshell. It dropped during questioning by Congressman Thomas Rooney (right), a 3-term Republican representative
from Florida with a career as an army lawyer. Rooney asked Simpson: "Do you or anyone else independently verify or corroborate any
information in the dossier?"
Simpson replied by saying, "Yes. Well, numerous things in the dossier have been verified. You know, I don't have access to the
intelligence or law enforcement information that I see made reference to, but, you know, things like, you know, the Russian Government
has been investigating Hillary Clinton and has a lot of information about her."
Then Simpson contradicted himself, disclosing what he had just denied. "When the original memos came in saying that the Kremlin
was mounting a specific operation to get Donald Trump elected President , that was not what the Intelligence Community was saying.
The Intelligence Community was saying they are just seeking to disrupt our election and our political process, and that this is sort
of kind of just a generally nihilistic, you know, trouble-making operation. And, you know, Chris turned out to be right, it was specifically
designed to elect Donald Trump President."
How did Simpson know with such confidence what the "Intelligence Community" was "saying", and who were Simpson's and Steele's
sources in the "Intelligence Community"? Rooney failed to inquire. Instead, he and Simpson exchanged question and answer regarding
the approach Simpson and Steele made to the FBI when they delivered their dossier. In the details of that, Simpson repeated what
he had already told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Rooney then asked what contact had been made with the CIA or "any other intelligence officials". Simpson claimed he didn't understand
the question at first, then he stumbled.
What Simpson was concealing in the two pauses, reported in the transcript as hyphens, Rooney did not realize. Simpson was implying
that none from Fusion GPS, his consulting company, had been in contact with the CIA, nor him personally. But Simpson left open that
Steele had been in contact with the CIA. Rooney followed with a question about "anyone", but that was so imprecise, Simpson recovered
his confidence to say "No". That was a cover-up -- and the House Intelligence Committee let it drop noiselessly.
Intelligence community sources and colleagues who know Simpson and Steele say Simpson was notorious at the Wall Street Journal
for coming up with conspiracy theories for which the evidence was missing or unreliable. He told the Committee that disbelief on
the part of his editors and management had been one of his reasons for leaving the newspaper. "One of the reasons why I left the
Wall Street Journal was because I wanted to write more stories about Russian influence in Washington, D.C., on both the Democrats
and the Republicans eventually the Journal lost interest in that subject. And I was frustrated that was where I left my journalism
career."
When Simpson was asked "do you -- did you find anything to -- that you verified as false in the dossier, since or during?" Simpson
replied: "I have not seen anything -- ". Note the hypthen, the stenographer's signal that Simpson was pausing.
"[Question]. So everything in that dossier, as far as you're concerned, is true or could be true?"
"MR. SIMPSON: I didn't say that. What I said was it was credible at the time it came in. We were able to corroborate various things
that supported its credibility."
Sources in London are divided on the question of where Steele's sources came from -- CIA, MI6, or elsewhere. What has been
clear for the year in which the dossier's contents have been in public circulation is that the sources the dossier referred to as
"Russian" were not. For details of the
sourcing . The subsequent identification of the Maltese source Joseph Mifsud, and the Greek-American George Papadopoulos, corroborates
their lack of
direct Russian sources. Instead, the sources identified in the dossier were either Americans, Americans of Russian ethnic origin,
or Russians with no direct knowledge repeating hearsay three or four times removed from source.
So were the allegations of the dossier manufactured by a CIA disinformation unit, and fed back to the US through the British agent,
Steele? Or were they a Simpson conspiracy theory of the type that failed to pass veracity testing when Simpson was at the Wall Street
Journal? The House Intelligence Committee failed to inquire.
One independent clue is what financial and other links Simpson and Steele and their consulting firms, Fusion GPS and Orbis Business
Intelligence, have had with US Government agencies other than the FBI, and what US Government contracts they were paid for, before
the Republican and Democratic Party organizations commissioned the anti-Trump job?
The House Committee has subpoenaed business records from Fusion, but Simpson's lawyers say they will refuse to hand them over.
The financial records of Steele's firm are openly accessible through the UK government company registry, Companies House. Click to
read here .
Because the Trump dossier work ran from the second half of 2015 to November 2016, the financial reports of Orbis for the financial
years ending March 31, 2016, and March 31, 2017, are the primary sources. For FY 2016 and FY 2017, open this
link to read.
The papers reveal that Orbis was a small firm with no more than 7 employees. Steele's business partner and co-shareholder, Christopher
Burrows, is another former MI6 spy. They had been hoping for MI6 support of their private business, but it failed to materialize,
says an London intelligence source. "Chris Burrows is another from the same background. They all hope to be Hakluyt [a leading commercial
intelligence operation in London] but didn't get the nod on departure."
They do not report the Orbis income. Instead, for 2016 the company filings indicate £155,171 in cash at the bank, and income of £245,017
owed by clients and contractors. Offsetting that figure, Orbis owed £317,848 -- to whom and for what purposes is not reported. The
unaudited accounts show Orbis's profit jumped from £121,046 in 2015 to £199,223 in 2016, and £441,089 in 2017.
The financial data are complicated by the operation by Steele and Burrows of a second company, Orbis Business Intelligence International,
a subsidiary they created in 2010, a year after the parent company was formed. Follow its affairs
here .
According to British press
reports , Orbis and Steele
were paid £200,000 for the dossier. Simpson told the House Intelligence Committee the sum was much less -- $160,000 (about £114,000).
Simpson's firm, he also testified, was being paid at a rate of about $50,000 per month for a total of about $320,000. If the British
sources are more accurate than Simpson's testimony, Steele's takings from the dossier represented roughly half the profit on the
Orbis balance-sheet.
British sources also report that a US Government agency paid for Orbis to work on evidence and allegations of corruption at the
world soccer federation, Fédération Internationale de Football (FIFA). Indictments in this case were issued by the US Department
of Justice in
May 2015 , and the following
December . What role the two-partner British consultancy played in the complex investigations by teams from the Justice Department,
the FBI and also the Internal Revenue Service is unclear. That Steele, Burrows and Orbis depended on US government sources for their
financial well-being appears to be certain.
Another reported version of the FIFA contract is that Steele, Burrows and Orbis were hired by the British Football Association
to collect materials on FIFA corruption, and provide them to the FBI and other US investigators, and then to the press. The scheme's
objective was reportedly to advance the British bidding for the World Cup in 2018 or 2022 by discrediting the rival bids from Russia
and Qatar. Click to
read . Were MI6 and CIA sources mobilized by Orbis to feed the FBI with evidence the US investigators were unable to turn up,
or was Orbis the conduit through which disinformation targeting Russia was fed to make it appear more credible to the FBI, and to
the media?
US Congressional investigators have so far failed to notice the similarities between the FIFA and the Trump dossier operations.
Early this month two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee
announced that they
have called for a Justice Department and FBI investigation of Steele for providing false information to the FBI. The
provision of the US code making lying a federal crime
requires the falsehoods occur "within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the
United States." Simpson has testified that when Steele briefed the FBI on the dossier, he did so at meetings in Rome, Italy.
Now then, Part I and this
sequel of the Simpson-Steele story having been read and thoroughly mulled over, what can the meaning be?
In the short run, this case was a black job assigned by Republican Party candidates for president, then the Democratic National
Committee, for the purpose of discrediting Trump in favour of Hillary Clinton. It failed on Election Day in 2016; the Democrats are
still trying.
In the long run, the case is a measurement of the life, or the half-life, of truth. Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote once that nowhere
has truth so short a life as in Sicily. On his clock, that was five minutes. He didn't know the United States, or shall we say the
stretch from Washington through New York to the North End of Boston. There, truth has an even shorter life. Scarcely a second.
"The primary reason I generally don't believe in conspiracies is that they can usually be better explained as the result of
sheer incompetence and hubris."
I divide conspiracy notions into two categories: grand mal and petit mal . The former are generally implausible
due to the large number of participants involved and while occassionally attempted, they are typically exposed pretty quickly.
They may still have significant effects – for example, there was a large conspiracy to sell the Iraqi WMD story to the public,
involving top levels of the British and American governments and a good section of the corporate media. That's the grand mal
version.
Petit mal is your typical small criminal conspiracy. The FBI, for example, almost always includes 'conspiracy to commit
mail fraud' on the list of federal charges.
With Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there is some evidence that Clinton and Co. actually wanted to run against Donald
Trump, and tried to get their allies to manipulate the Republican primary in favor of a Trump victory (hence all the free corporate
media coverage of the Donald). The dossier, fabricated or not, seems to have been one of many 'ace in the holes' that the Clinton
campaign thought they could use to discredit Trump (including the Access Hollywood tape, etc.) in the general election. If so,
this strategy really blew up in their face – they thought they could manipulate the process, so they could ignore the Rust Belt
concerns, and that's what handed Trump the presidency.
If the Clintonites were to admit this, however, they'd have to step down from party leadership and let the Sanders Democrats
take over, and that's what this is really all about now, their effort to prevent that outcome.
I pay pretty close attention to this topic and I must say I sometimes wonder if the Russians haven't sold the rope to the American
political elite. I read all 311 pages of Simpson's testimony. I was struck that much of what he was "fed" by Steele confirmed
his "OMG Russia corruption" biases.
And I say "fed to him" when I'm in a generous mood, giving him the benefit of the doubt, because usually I am of the opinion
that he's either a really crappy CIA agent posing as a journalist or just a garden variety rat f*!@er. A black job political operative,
stitching together a few almost-believable "facts" and out-and-out fabrications with squishy words like "collusion" and "ties."
London due diligence firms say the record of Simpson's firm Fusion GPS and Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence operations
in the US has discredited them in the due diligence market. The London experts believe the Senate Committee transcript
shows Simpson and Steele were hired for the black job of discrediting the target of their research, Trump; did a poor job;
failed in 2016; and now are engaged in bitter recriminations against each other to avoid multi-million dollar court penalties.
A source at a London firm which is larger and better known than Steele's Orbis says "standard due diligence means getting
to the truth. It's confidential to the client, and not leaked. There are also black jobs, white jobs, and red jobs. Black means
the client wants you to dig up dirt on the target, and make it look credible for publishing in the press. White means the client
wants you to clear him of the wrongdoing which he's being accused of in the media or the marketplace; it's also leaked to the
press. A red job is where the client pays the due diligence firm to hire a journalist to find out what he knows and what he's
likely to publish, in order to bribe or stop him. The Steele dossier on Trump is an obvious black job. Too obvious."
I read all 311 pages of Simpson's testimony. I was struck that much of what he was "fed" by Steele confirmed his "OMG Russia
corruption" biases.
Same here, but not just about what he was fed by Steele. Simpson claimed to have done some of his own research and said it
was consistent with what he got from Steele.
I'm about three-quarters of the way through the transcript of Simpson's interrogation by the House Intelligence Committee,
and I've read all 312 pages of the Senate Judiciary Committee transcript, which bears little resemblance to what was reported
in the major media – shocking, I know.
Among the "bombshells" the mainstream reported was "proof" that it wasn't the dossier that launched the FBI's investigation
of Trump, and therefore the dossier couldn't have been used as justification for a FISA warrant. A bigger bombshell, which
of course none of them mentioned, is that Simpson, with his client's consent, was secretly briefing Clinton-friendly reporters
on information from Steele's memos, and they used it to write stories based on "unnamed sources." He even admitted that he didn't
verify the information before feeding it to the media, said he didn't feel he needed to, because it came from a trustworthy source.
Where have we heard that before?
Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded
the dossier, so I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing.
It's well-established that the State Department often acts as a cover for the CIA, and the agency under Secretary Clinton had
a strong anti-Russia faction that's on the record as meddling in Ukraine's presidential election. And how much doubt could there
be that both Clintons kept the CIA connections they made while in office?
Then there was the whole "Grizzly Steppe" report just before Trump's inauguration, presented as a consensus among "17 intelligence
agencies" that the Russians "hacked the election" to help Trump win.
I'm not 100-percent convinced that U.S. intelligence was behind the dossier, but it's enough of a possibility that I'm
not writing it off as some nutty "conspiracy theory."
Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded
the dossier, so I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing.
FWIW this NC commenter has never had any problem believing that this may be the case. In fact I am fairly certain that
it is the case, although from what I understand the FBI and MI6 were also involved.
Adding: Heh. I posted this before looking at Rev Kev's link to the Raimondo article, which comes to the same conclusions. Interesting
times!
I believe that Seth Abramson or someone put photographs to the Steele dossier showing people in the places & at the times delineated
in the Steele dossier. From the very first Steele said he would not & could not reveal his sources. It was from the first indicated
that it would be to the FBI & CIA to discover. He said he believed that his sources were credible.
When I was studying Intelligence services the CIA was said to be the private army of the CIA. These days I don't know exactly
who the CIA works for, or answers to. I certainly don't think well of the CIA believing they are wrapped up working for their
Front businesses more than focusing on the mission of spying in the interests of the American people. Of private intelligence
companies I get what I can from IHS Jane's. That the CIA lost 20 assets, human beings, in China for incompetent secret communications
methods would lead professionals to withhold as much of identities as possible.
For awhile there I believe Steele was worried about his own health.
David Corn at Mother Jones was reticent to break the story. So now what I see to look for is what Steele said needed to be
done, & that being what Mueller is doing at the behest of the DOJ.
The US has been at war, albeit Hybrid war since the imposition of sanctions for their violations of international law as regarded
the annexation of Crimea & the attack on the Ukraine. Sanctions are Economic Warfare.
That the US feels the right to engage in warfare of any kind Economic or Hot over violations of International Law leads me
to believe that the UN will fail to prevent the apocalyptic riot. But that as regards Trump becomes neither here nor there, correct?
William Binney, former NSA technical official and whistleblower, comments on the FISA memo, that has apparently just been released.
Obviously, a major development in 'Russia-gate'.
"... The pro-Hillary warmongering media, the ones that pushed for war in Iraq and elsewhere, through big lies and false evidence, are the vanguard of this ugly machine that supports the most terrible Trump administration bills, yet, this machine can't stop accusing him for 'colluding' with Russia that 'interfered' in the 2016 US election. Of course, no evidence presented for such an accusation and no one really can explain what that 'interference' means. ..."
"... They're accusing the President of the United States of being a Russian agent, this has never happened in American history. However much you may loathe Trump, this is a whole new realm of defamation. For a number of years, there's been a steady degradation of American political culture and discourse, generally. There was a time when I hoped or thought that it would be the Democratic Party that would push against that degradation ..."
"... Now, however, though I'm kind of only nominally, a Democrat, it's the Democratic Party that's degrading our political culture and our discourse. So, this is MSNBC, which purports to be not only the network of the Democratic Party, but the network of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, is now actually because this guy was a semi-anchor was asking the question to an American senator, " Do you think that Representative Nunes, because he wants the memo released, has been compromised by the Kremlin? " ..."
"... And by the way, if people will say, " Well, it's a weak capitulation of McCarthyism, " I say no, it's much more than that because McCarthy was obsessed with Communist. That was a much narrower concept than being obsessed with anybody who might be under Russian influence of any kind. The so-called affinity for Russia. Well, I have a profound affinity for Russian culture and for Russian history. I study it all the time. This is something new. And so, when you accuse a Republican or any Congressman of being a Kremlin agent, this has become a commonplace. We are degraded. ..."
"... We are building up our military presence there, so the Russians are counter-building up, though within their territory. That means the chances of hot war are now much greater than they were before. ..."
"... Every time Trump has tried with Putin to reach a cooperative arrangement, for example, on fighting terrorism in Syria, which is a necessary purpose, literally, the New York Times and the others call him treasonous. Whereas, in the old days, the old Cold War, we had a robust discussion. There is none here. We have no alert system that's warning the American people and its representatives how dangerous this is. And as we mentioned before, it's not only Nunes, it's a lot of people who are being called Kremlin agents because they want to digress from the basic narrative. ..."
"... Meanwhile, people in Moscow who formed their political establishment, who surround Putin and the Kremlin, I mean, the big brains who are formed policy tankers, and who have always tended to be kind of pro-American, and very moderate, have simply come to the conclusion that war is coming. ..."
"... The Democrats couldn't had downgrade their party further. This disgusting spectacle would make FDR totally ashamed of what this party has become. Not only they are voting for every pro-plutocracy GOP bill under Trump administration, but they have become champions in bringing back a much worse and unpredictable Cold War that is dangerously escalating tension with Russia. ..."
How Russiagate fiasco destroys Kremlin moderates, accelerating danger for a hot war with Russiaglobinfo freexchange
Corporate Democrats can't stop pushing for war through the Russiagate fiasco.
The party has been completely taken over by the neocon/neoliberal establishment and has nothing to do with the Left. The pro-Hillary
warmongering media, the ones that pushed for war in Iraq and elsewhere, through big lies and false evidence, are the vanguard of
this ugly machine that supports the most terrible Trump administration bills, yet, this machine can't stop accusing him for 'colluding'
with Russia that 'interfered' in the 2016 US election. Of course, no evidence presented for such an accusation and no one really
can explain what that 'interference' means.
But things are probably much worse, because this completely absurd persistence on Russiagate fiasco that feeds an evident anti-Russian
hysteria, destroys all the influence of the Kremlin moderates who struggle to keep open channels between Russia and the United States.
Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at NY University and Princeton University, explained
to Aaron Maté and the RealNews
the terrible consequences:
They're accusing the President of the United States of being a Russian agent, this has never happened in American history. However
much you may loathe Trump, this is a whole new realm of defamation. For a number of years, there's been a steady degradation of American
political culture and discourse, generally. There was a time when I hoped or thought that it would be the Democratic Party that would
push against that degradation.
Now, however, though I'm kind of only nominally, a Democrat, it's the Democratic Party that's degrading our political culture
and our discourse. So, this is MSNBC, which purports to be not only the network of the Democratic Party, but the network of the progressive
wing of the Democratic Party, is now actually because this guy was a semi-anchor was asking the question to an American senator,
" Do you think that Representative Nunes, because he wants the memo released, has been compromised by the Kremlin? "
I think all of us need to focus on what's happened in this country when in the very mainstream, at the highest, most influential
levels of the political establishment, this kind of discourse is no longer considered an exception. It is the norm. We hear it daily
from MSNBC and CNN, from the New York Times and the Washington Post, that people who doubt the narrative of what's loosely called
Russiagate are somehow acting on behalf of or under the spell of the Kremlin, that we aren't Americans any longer. And by the way,
if people will say, " Well, it's a weak capitulation of McCarthyism, " I say no, it's much more than that because McCarthy
was obsessed with Communist. That was a much narrower concept than being obsessed with anybody who might be under Russian influence
of any kind. The so-called affinity for Russia. Well, I have a profound affinity for Russian culture and for Russian history. I study
it all the time. This is something new. And so, when you accuse a Republican or any Congressman of being a Kremlin agent, this has
become a commonplace. We are degraded.
The new Cold War is unfolding not far away from Russia, like the last in Berlin, but on Russia's borders in the Baltic and in
Ukraine. We are building up our military presence there, so the Russians are counter-building up, though within their territory.
That means the chances of hot war are now much greater than they were before. Meanwhile, not only do we not have a discussion of
these real dangers in the United States but anyone who wants to incite a discussion, including the President of the United States,
is called treasonous. Every time Trump has tried with Putin to reach a cooperative arrangement, for example, on fighting terrorism
in Syria, which is a necessary purpose, literally, the New York Times and the others call him treasonous. Whereas, in the old days,
the old Cold War, we had a robust discussion. There is none here. We have no alert system that's warning the American people and
its representatives how dangerous this is. And as we mentioned before, it's not only Nunes, it's a lot of people who are being called
Kremlin agents because they want to digress from the basic narrative.
Meanwhile, people in Moscow who formed their political establishment, who surround Putin and the Kremlin, I mean, the big brains
who are formed policy tankers, and who have always tended to be kind of pro-American, and very moderate, have simply come to the
conclusion that war is coming. They can't think of a single thing to tell the Kremlin to offset hawkish views in the Kremlin. Every
day, there's something new. And these were the people in Moscow who are daytime peacekeeping interlockers. They have been
destroyed by Russiagate. Their influence as Russia is zilch. And the McCarthyites in Russia, they have various terms, now
called the pro-American lobby in Russia 'fifth columnists'. This is the damage that's been done. There's never been anything like
this in my lifetime.
The Democrats couldn't had downgrade their party further. This disgusting spectacle would make FDR totally ashamed of what this party
has become. Not only they are voting for every pro-plutocracy GOP bill under Trump administration, but they have become champions
in bringing back a much worse and unpredictable Cold War that is dangerously escalating tension with Russia.
And, unfortunately,
even the most progressives of the Democrats are adopting the Russiagate bogus, like Bernie Sanders, because they know that if they
don't obey to the narratives, the DNC establishment will crush them politically in no time.
"... The "Newspeak" we experience is straight out of Orwell's 1984. From Wikipedia: Newspeak is the fictional language in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell. It is a controlled language created by the totalitarian state Oceania as a tool to limit freedom of thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality, and peace. Any form of thought alternative to the party's construct is classified as "thoughtcrime". ..."
"... It is truly scary how Orwellian our current situation has become reminding me that there are always two two takeaways from any story or historical record. Those that view it as a cautionary tale and those who use it as an instruction manual. ..."
"... We are also controlled through Doublespeak another Orwellian concept. From Wikipedia: Doublespeak is a language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Some common examples are the branding of liberals by pundits in the media as Fascists in order to eliminate the historical understanding of exactly what that word refers to. Another example is the appearance of the term Alt Right which is used to confuse and obscure the true nature of these groups. A great example of the doublespeak the media exercises in service to the state is the instantaneous adoption of the term Alt Right and nary ever a mention of its former names such as White Supremacist, Neo Nazi, Racist, Hate Group etc. They just rename these movements and hide all the other terms from sight. Another example is scapegoating the same group of people but under a different term. Today the term is Liberal but in the past, the Nazi movement called them Jews, Communists, Intellectuals etc. Whatever the term, the target of these attacks are always the ones that threaten the Power Structure. ..."
"... Joseph Goebbels was in charge of the war propaganda for the Nazis during WWII. He said: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." ..."
The reason we are in the pickle barrel is exactly the reasons stated in the article and by Annie. We are exposed to exactly
what they want to show us and are blinded by other narratives which do not support the group think. It is as if the politicians,
the intelligence community and the media are all involved in a conspiracy. Remember that word means a plan by two or more people.
No tin foil hat required. But anyone suggesting conspiracy is instantly branded a nut hence the universal use of the term conspiracy
nut as a derogatory term to label anyone with a different message that somehow captures the attention of a wider audience. It
is not so much that all Holly Wood stars are liberal socialists. They are a diverse group. However they all have one thing in
common which is they have the public's ear. They are also not on point with the approved messaging and so must be continuously
branded as conspiracy nuts and socialist subversives. We all have seen the 24/7 bashing of these folks. Control is the reason.
The "Newspeak" we experience is straight out of Orwell's 1984. From Wikipedia: Newspeak is the fictional language in the
novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell. It is a controlled language created by the totalitarian state Oceania as
a tool to limit freedom of thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality,
and peace. Any form of thought alternative to the party's construct is classified as "thoughtcrime".
It is truly scary how Orwellian our current situation has become reminding me that there are always two two takeaways from
any story or historical record. Those that view it as a cautionary tale and those who use it as an instruction manual.
I am appalled by how the media at first put Trump in the game in the first place for economic gain (see Les Moonvies article)
and then created another fictional fantasy which serves the goal of permawar and control of the citizenry through fear, confusion
and ignorance. We are all exposed to the Daily Two Minutes of Hate another Orwellian concept. From Wikipedia: The Two Minutes
Hate, from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a daily period in which Party members of the society of Oceania must
watch a film depicting the Party's enemies (notably Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers) and express their hatred for them for
exactly two minutes. The difference is we can find it 24/7 on our technological wonder machines.
Another Orwellian concept is The Ministry of Truth: The Ministry of Truth (in Newspeak, Minitrue) is the ministry of propaganda.
As with the other ministries in the novel, the name Ministry of Truth is a misnomer because in reality it serves the opposite:
it is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events. From Wikipedia: As well as administering truth, the ministry
spreads a new language amongst the populace called Newspeak, in which, for example, "truth" is understood to mean statements like
2 + 2 = 5 when the situation warrants. In keeping with the concept of doublethink, the ministry is thus aptly named in that it
creates/manufactures "truth" in the Newspeak sense of the word. The book describes the doctoring of historical records to show
a government-approved version of events.
We are also controlled through Doublespeak another Orwellian concept. From Wikipedia: Doublespeak is a language that deliberately
obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Some common examples are the branding of liberals by pundits
in the media as Fascists in order to eliminate the historical understanding of exactly what that word refers to. Another example
is the appearance of the term Alt Right which is used to confuse and obscure the true nature of these groups. A great example
of the doublespeak the media exercises in service to the state is the instantaneous adoption of the term Alt Right and nary ever
a mention of its former names such as White Supremacist, Neo Nazi, Racist, Hate Group etc. They just rename these movements and
hide all the other terms from sight. Another example is scapegoating the same group of people but under a different term. Today
the term is Liberal but in the past, the Nazi movement called them Jews, Communists, Intellectuals etc. Whatever the term, the
target of these attacks are always the ones that threaten the Power Structure.
Joseph Goebbels was in charge of the war propaganda for the Nazis during WWII. He said: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep
repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield
the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State
to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is
the greatest enemy of the State."
If these things seem eerily similar to what is going on today then we probably have a power structure which is a grave threat
for peace. Okay, we do have a power structure that is a grave threat to peace but oddly not democracy. Noam Chomsky wrote about
propaganda stating, "it's the essence of democracy" This notion is contrary to the popular belief that indoctrination is inconsistent
with democracy. The point is that in a totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter what people think because you can control what
they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force and when the voice of the people can be
heard, you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to
be called propaganda. Manufacture of consent. Creation of necessary illusions.
The folks who contribute here on this website are few indeed and what lies beyond the haven of the oasis is a vast barren dessert
filled with scorpions, snakes and a whole bunch of lies.
Well said for Annie and the authors.
Democracy may be the ultimate tool of control of the masses.
More wisdom from Goebbels:
Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will
A media system wants ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity.
We are striving not for truth, but effect.
The worst enemy of any propaganda, it is intellectualism.
For the lie to be believable, it should be terrifying.
A lie repeated thousands of times becomes a truth.
Some day the lie will fall under its own weight and the truth will rise.
I like that last one a lot but unfortunately it will not come to pass until things get bad.
Citizen One – You have beautifully & precicely nailed the means ( "how" ) the
USA has gotten in such a mess : Newspeak, Daily Two Minutes of Hate, The Ministry of Truth,
DoubleSpeak and the way and why of how Propaganda actually works. George Orwell was a
seer.
AND now it would be helpful to understand "why" the USA has gotten in such a mess. The
polarity of American politics tells a very long story but in short, polarity means there are
only two ways and when the going gets tough, each way is in the extreme – the right way
or the wrong way, it flips depending on each individual's political persuasion. When the
going gets tough the extremes become the tail that wags the dog.
So my question is : WHY after the seemingly happy years under Obama did the going get so
tough so fast?
My pet theory is that Trump threatened to "drain the swamp" which was understood –
seemingly now quite rightly – that he was going to expose some very significant wrong
doing in very high places. I believe that he was on "NYC/DC" friendly terms with the Clintons
and both parties knew each other for the true devil they were. Thus the big red flag he waved
in her face brought about what is turning in to a multi billion dollar ongoing attempt to
discredit him in the eyes of the people, in the eyes of the World and in the eyes of the
highest courts " America be damned".
And politically this is quite necessary because she is not only an icon of all that is
American,"apple pie and motherhood"; she is to the under 45 age group the great white mother
of democracy via Democrat rule. And the bad part of that iconography is that if she goes down
so does the party. It was also critical for her to win because of all the swamp people who
had chosen to compromise their life's work, thus had to continue in that compromise in the
hope that they would come out clean since they believed that both Trump and the ordinary
American were so naive, thus would be easily played for fools.
So all this crap to destroy Trump is about saving her hide to save the party. Things are
so desperate now because there is nothing yet in place to replace her in the mind's eye of
the Democratic half the voting public. All who might have been in 2nd place were kept
diminished to raise her higher. It now is quite obvious that she has been told to shut up and
lie low, to come out only when she is in safe company – as at the Golden Globes. So the
big picture today as is being painted and hyped to intensify mass hysteria is that Mueller
needs to be protected from Trump where really what is needed are the names and numbers to be
called on for more $$$, more social media propaganda pages and to vote in November 2018.
Why only that? Because Trump is not going to fire Mueller; remember Mueller was a Bush man
and so was Comey. They have a long history of going both ways. Survival is tricky business
– especially in DC. The scapegoats are already cornered; possibly the new "lie" is
already in draft form. Remember – "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,
people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as
the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of
the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress
dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is
the greatest enemy of the State."
It is going to be an interesting next few months!! But we can hope that, from this one of
many previous American political exercises in democracy, the ordinary defenders of those
democratic values (the voters) will learn some significant truths about governance,
transparency and the rule of law. The guys at the top are not gods and are not above the law;
they must not only do right but be seen to do right.
CitizenOne , February 10, 2018 at 7:57 pm
The only thing I can tell you is that the conspirators who concocted Russia Gate have
figured out all the pieces to the puzzle of how to control events via the means I mentioned
and many other means. We are as manipulated as a light switch. One way we are all fired up
about some BS and flip the switch and we are all calm and mellow. Hopefully if you follow the
threads here you will find out a lot of alternative information much of it thoroughly
researched by highly respected and qualified individuals who are in a position to know the
truth.
Mariam , February 10, 2018 at 7:11 pm
I agree with you wholeheartedly. They call themselves "liberals" in fact they are "new
liberals."
Alas, these false ("new) liberals" are very well represented by the Obamas, the Clintons, the
Trudeaus, the Macrons and so on.
If you truly believe in the "left" and call yourself "progressive" you couldn't stand for
useless and pointless wars, period.
Actually an interesting interview. Of course, interviewer is a regulate presstitute, but still answers on provocative (and
predictable) questions based on State Department talking points were pretty interesting and sometimes unexpected.
Margarita Simonyan is the head of RT, Russia's state-run television network. She's also been
referenced 27 times in a U.S. intelligence report that assesses that Russian President Vladimir
Putin, "ordered an influence campaign aimed at the U.S . election."
Simonyan has a simple response to that.
"There's nothing illegal that we did," Simonyan tells 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl.
"There's nothing murky. There's no weird activity that we're involved in. Nothing."
"... What 'StratCom' means in practical terms is propaganda, usually involving the creation of a 'narrative' -- in which the complexities of the world are elided in favour of a simplistic picture of 'good guys' versus 'bad guys.' Commonly it is difficult to know how far the people doing this are deliberately dishonest, how far they have simply succumbed to 'double think' and 'crimestop.' ..."
"... It has become amply apparent that with MI6, and other intelligence and indeed law enforcement agencies, the activity of attempting to understand the world has become inextricably involved with that of trying to shape it by covert action and 'perception management', or 'StratCom.' ..."
"... The structures involved, moreover, are inextricably linked with ostensibly non-governmental institutions, like King's College and the Atlantic Council, and related organisations in a range of countries, as Rid's career strongly suggests. ..."
"... It has also however become amply apparent that these structures create ample opportunities for 'information operations' groups such as those which were associated with the late Boris Berezovsky and the Menatep oligarchs. ..."
My apologies -- it was sloppy of me to use the term.
I was using it interchangeably with 'propaganda.' One reason for this is that I have been
looking at the website of the 'Department of War Studies' at King's College London. This has
a 'Centre for Strategic Communications', which 'aims to be the leading global centre of
expertise on strategic communications.'
An 'Associate Fellow' is my sometime BBC Radio colleague Mark Laity, who, according to his
bio on the site, 'is the Chief Strategic Communications at SHAPE, the first post holder, and
as such he has been a leading figure in developing StratCom within NATO.' In this capacity,
he produces presentations with titles like ' "Bocca della veritas" or "Perception becomes
Reality."
The same ethos penetrates other parts of the War Studies Department -- Eliot Higgins is
involved, as also Thomas Rid, who backed up the claims made by Dmitri Alperovitch of
'CrowdStrike', along with the former GCHQ person Matt Tait. (It appears that Rid, who has now
moved to SAIS at Johns Hopkins, is a German who has earlier worked at IFRI in Paris, RAND,
and in Israel.)
What 'StratCom' means in practical terms is propaganda, usually involving the creation
of a 'narrative' -- in which the complexities of the world are elided in favour of a
simplistic picture of 'good guys' versus 'bad guys.' Commonly it is difficult to know how far
the people doing this are deliberately dishonest, how far they have simply succumbed to
'double think' and 'crimestop.'
It has become amply apparent that with MI6, and other intelligence and indeed law
enforcement agencies, the activity of attempting to understand the world has become
inextricably involved with that of trying to shape it by covert action and 'perception
management', or 'StratCom.'
The structures involved, moreover, are inextricably linked with ostensibly
non-governmental institutions, like King's College and the Atlantic Council, and related
organisations in a range of countries, as Rid's career strongly suggests.
It has also however become amply apparent that these structures create ample opportunities
for 'information operations' groups such as those which were associated with the late Boris
Berezovsky and the Menatep oligarchs.
So in describing what these people got up to I sloppily used 'StratCom', when I should
have said propaganda.
"... Many Americans do not seem to understand what is at stake. What America is confronted with is a coup conspiracy organized by top officials of the Obama Justice Department, FBI, CIA, the Hillary DNC, and the presstitute media to overturn the result of a democratic election and remove the president from office. The basis of the coup is a fake dossier purchased for money that consists of unsupported allegations against Trump and that was used to obtain warrants from the FISA count to spy on Trump and various associates hoping to find something that can be used against Trump. Regardless, the false allegations could be fed to the CIA's media assets and used to create a scandal requiring a special prosecutor to investigate Russiagate. ..."
"... If the highest reaches of the police state agencies can get away with an attempted or successful coup against the president of the United States, then that is the complete end of democracy and all accountability in government. The House, Senate, and judiciary will become as powerless as the Roman senate under the caesars. We will live under a dictatorship ruled by police state agencies. ..."
"... This is not minor stuff. This goes to the heart of whether any form of liberty will exist. We all know that the ability of the people to hold government accountable is not assured by democracy. However, there is no prospect of holding government accountable if it is a police state, a road that the US has been going down for some time. The audacious coup attempt against President Trump is our opportunity to stop the momentum to a police state. ..."
"... When Admiral Rodgers, director of the National Security Agency, discovered that the FBI and DOJ were misusing the spy system for partisan political reasons, he let it be known that he was going to inform the FISA court. This caused the FBI and DOJ to rush to the court in advance and confess to "mistakes" and to promise to tighten up procedures so as not to make mistakes in the future. It is these "mistakes" and corrections that the FISA court document reveals. ..."
"... In other words, the information already exists in the pubic domain that proves that Russiagate was a conspiracy organized for the purpose of bringing down the elected president of the United States ..."
"... A case can be made that it would be just as well if the coup succeeds as it would bring an end to Washington's cover as the government of a great democracy with liberty and justice for all. Most other governments, and one would hope certainly the Russian and Chinese governments, would see the coup as America's final transition into a police state and give up their utopian ideas of reaching accommodation with Washington. The constraints on Washington's ability to bully the world would be greatly strengthened by the universal perception that the government of the United States had devolved into a police state. ..."
The Republicans' delay in releasing the summary of the House Intelligence Committee's Russiagate investigation is giving weight
to the presstitutes' claim that the report is not being released, because it is a hack attempt at a Trump cover-up that is not believable.
Only Republicans are stupid enough to put themselves in such a situation.
Readers ask me why the summary memo is not released if it is real. There must be some reasons besides the stupidity of Republicans.
Yes, that is so. Among the many reasons that might be blocking release are:
1) Republicans are very national security conscious. They don't want to provide precedents for the release of classified information.
2) Many Republican congressional districts host installations of the military/security complex. Upsetting a large employer
and directing campaign financing to a challenger is a big consideration.
3) The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime was a neoconservative regime. One consequence is that Republicans are influenced by
neoconservatives who stress the alleged "Russian threat."
4) The Israel Lobby can unseat any member of the House and Senate. The Israel Lobby is allied with the neoconservatives and
this alliance intends to keep the US militarily active against perceived threats to Israel's hegemony in the Middle East and against
Russia, which supports Syria and Iran, countries perceived as threats by Israel.
5) Many Republicans are themselves invested in false Russiagate allegations against Trump and would like to replace him with
Pence. Other Republicans believe that Trump is undermining Washington's expensively-purchased foreign alliances and, thereby,
undermining US power.
Many Americans do not seem to understand what is at stake. What America is confronted with is a coup conspiracy organized by top
officials of the Obama Justice Department, FBI, CIA, the Hillary DNC, and the presstitute media to overturn the result of a democratic
election and remove the president from office. The basis of the coup is a fake dossier purchased for money that consists of unsupported
allegations against Trump and that was used to obtain warrants from the FISA count to spy on Trump and various associates hoping
to find something that can be used against Trump. Regardless, the false allegations could be fed to the CIA's media assets and used
to create a scandal requiring a special prosecutor to investigate Russiagate.
Once the investigation was under way, the presstitutes kept the scandal alive hoping to convince enough Americans that Trump must
have done something -- "where there is smoke, there is fire" -- that justifies his removal. It worked against Richard Nixon, but
not against Ronald Reagan, and Trump is no Reagan. If the highest reaches of the police state agencies can get away with an attempted
or successful coup against the president of the United States, then that is the complete end of democracy and all accountability
in government. The House, Senate, and judiciary will become as powerless as the Roman senate under the caesars. We will live under
a dictatorship ruled by police state agencies.
Many Americans say they don't need the House Intelligence Report, because they don't believe the Russiagate BS in the first place.
They miss the point. They need the report, because those responsible for this attempt at a coup must be identified, charged, and
prosecuted for their act of high treason.
This is not minor stuff. This goes to the heart of whether any form of liberty will exist. We all know that the ability of the
people to hold government accountable is not assured by democracy. However, there is no prospect of holding government accountable
if it is a police state, a road that the US has been going down for some time. The audacious coup attempt against President Trump
is our opportunity to stop the momentum to a police state.
Despite my recent postings, many people do not understand that the somewhat redacted FISA court document that has been declassified
and released and explained
by myself, William Binney, and former US Attorney Joe di Genova contains admissions by the FBI and DOJ that they improperly spied
and obtained warrants from the court under false pretenses. In other words, we have it on the authority of the FISA court itself
that the FBI and DOJ have admitted to the court their transgressions. When Department of Justice (sic) congressional liaison Stephen
Boyd says the DOJ is "unaware of any wrongdoing," he is lying through his teeth. The DOJ has already confessed its wrongdoing to
the FISA court.
(See
Lendman
on Boyd's claim that releasing the memo would harm national security and ongoing investigations. This is always the claim made when
government has to cover up its crimes. )
When Admiral Rodgers, director of the National Security Agency, discovered that the FBI and DOJ were misusing the spy system for
partisan political reasons, he let it be known that he was going to inform the FISA court. This caused the FBI and DOJ to rush to
the court in advance and confess to "mistakes" and to promise to tighten up procedures so as not to make mistakes in the future.
It is these "mistakes" and corrections that the FISA court document reveals.
In other words, the information already exists in the pubic domain that proves that Russiagate was a conspiracy organized for
the purpose of bringing down the elected president of the United States.
A case can be made that it would be just as well if the coup succeeds as it would bring an end to Washington's cover as the government
of a great democracy with liberty and justice for all. Most other governments, and one would hope certainly the Russian and Chinese
governments, would see the coup as America's final transition into a police state and give up their utopian ideas of reaching accommodation
with Washington. The constraints on Washington's ability to bully the world would be greatly strengthened by the universal perception
that the government of the United States had devolved into a police state.
"Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K., for one morning, without having
done anything wrong, he was arrested."
Thus begins The Trial , Franz Kafka's 1925 work, in which Joseph K., ordinary bank employee,
is arrested at his home by mysterious agents and notified of legal proceedings against him.
He is not informed of the offense or crime of which he would allegedly be guilty – he
is only given to understand that he must have broken some unknown law – and is notified
of a summons to court a certain day, without knowing the exact time or place.
The protagonist is dragged into a completely absurd circle, wavering between inspectors,
bailiffs, lawyers and judges, and not knowing at any time for what or against whom he must
defend himself.
He is finally executed by three distinguished executioners who, with "odious politeness",
plant a butcher's knife in his heart.
"... The FBI used to spy on Russians. This time they spied on us. what this story is about - a brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law with regard to the way she handled classified information with her classified server. Absolutely a crime, absolutely a felony . It's about finding out why - as the Inspector General is doing at the department of justice - why Comey and the senior DOJ officials conducted a fake criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton . Followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, no grand jury, no subpoenas, no search warrant. That's not an investigation, that's a Potemkin village. It's a farce. ..."
"... DiGenova condemned the FBI for working so closely with the controversial Fusion GPS, a political hit squad paid by the DNC and Clinton campaign to create and spread the discredited Steele dossier about President Donald Trump . Without a justifiable law enforcement or national security reason, he says, the FBI "created false facts so that they could get surveillance warrants. Those are all crimes. " He adds, using official FISA-702 "queries" and surveillance was done "to create a false case against a candidate, and then a president. " - Daily Caller ..."
"... This feels like the most significant American political scandal that has taken place in my lifetime, and I was born in the 60's. ..."
"... The entire collection program needs to be shut down, the data deleted and the program replaced by the one William Binney originally created that collected and analyzed only metadata unless a warrant is obtained first. The current program is clearly a violation of our 4th Amendment rights even without NDAA section 702. ..."
"... He forgot to mention Weissman: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-15/fbi-probe-russian-uranium-bri ..."
"... " unauthorized disclosures of raw intelligence on Americans]. This is stunning stuff. " "Stunning" only for the willfully deluded among us. ..."
"... Pretty soon, the MSM is gonna have to do a false flag ..."
"... Is he gonna sit there and let these bastards have another shot at him? ..."
In this highly recommended 30 minute interview with Joe diGenova, the former Special Counsel
who went after both the Teamsters and former NY Governor Elliot Spitzer, paints a very clear
picture of collusion is painted between the Obama administration, the FBI, the Clinton campaign
and opposition research firm Fusion GPS.
The FBI used to spy on Russians. This time they spied on us. what this story is about - a
brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law with regard to the
way she handled classified information with her classified server. Absolutely a crime,
absolutely a felony . It's about finding out why - as the Inspector General is doing at the
department of justice - why Comey and the senior DOJ officials conducted a fake criminal
investigation of Hillary Clinton . Followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break
in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, no grand
jury, no subpoenas, no search warrant. That's not an investigation, that's a Potemkin
village. It's a farce.
And everybody knew it was a farce. The problem was, she didn't win. And because she didn't
wain, the farce became a very serious opera. It wasn't a comic opera anymore, it was a tragic
opera. And she was going to be the focus.
What this is about, this is about a lavabo, a cleansing of FBI and the upper echelons of
the Department of Justice.
We're going to discover that the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, her deputy Sally Yates,
the head of the national security division John Carlin, Bruce Ohr and other senior DOJ
officials, and regrettably, lying attorneys . People who were senior career civil servants
violated the law, perhaps committed crimes, and covered up crimes by a presidential candidate
- but more than that, they tried to frame an incoming president with a false Russian
conspiracy that never existed, and they knew it, and they plotted to ruin him as a candidate
and then destroy him as a president. That's why this is important. That's why connecting the
dots is important.
DiGenova condemned the FBI for working so closely with the controversial Fusion GPS, a
political hit squad paid by the DNC and Clinton campaign to create and spread the discredited
Steele dossier about President Donald Trump . Without a justifiable law enforcement or national
security reason, he says, the FBI "created false facts so that they could get surveillance
warrants. Those are all crimes. " He adds, using official FISA-702 "queries" and surveillance
was done "to create a false case against a candidate, and then a president. " - Daily
Caller
During the interview, DiGenova holds up and references a previously unreported and
heavily redacted 99-page FISA court opinion from April, 2017, which " describes systematic and
on-going violations of the law [by the FBI and their contractors using unauthorized disclosures
of raw intelligence on Americans]. This is stunning stuff."
NSA Admiral Mike Rodgers: An American Hero
diGenova also discusses the immense risks taken by retiring NSA director, Mike Rogers - who
briefed Trump on Nov. 7, 2016 about the Obama administration's surveillance of the Trump team.
The next day, the Presidental transition team was moved out of Trump tower and into the
president-elect's Bedminster, NJ golf course until they could sweep for bugs.
Paul Craig Roberts says he's been too hard on the NSA. I don't think so. The FISA warrant
only allowed the FBI to unmask people in surveillance the NSA is already doing on everybody.
If the dirt is being collected and stored, eventually somebody will find a way to use it.
The
entire collection program needs to be shut down, the data deleted and the program replaced by
the one William Binney originally created that collected and analyzed only metadata unless a
warrant is obtained first. The current program is clearly a violation of our 4th Amendment
rights even without NDAA section 702.
Trump has known all of this all along. The only pre-emptive move that he could make would
be to declare martial law , and have the military move on the traitors. For Chrissake, look
what's at stake here. Is he gonna sit there and let these bastards have another shot at
him?
(Shakes head in puzzlement).
Brilliant summary of the situation. You should listen this interview. False Russiagate was from the beginning a plot to derail and then depose Trump. They created false facts.
Brazen port to exonerate Hillary Clinton and then derail Trump
Notable quotes:
"... It is rare to see a man of integrity and a lawyer who speaks in plain English and speaks about facts and conclusions of law. The problem we face today is far too many lawyers with no integrity in positions of government that protect blatant criminals holding public office who are also lawyers. Lawyers always protect other lawyers, except this wonderful man! ..."
It is rare to see a man of integrity and a lawyer who speaks in plain English and speaks
about facts and conclusions of law. The problem we face today is far too many lawyers with no
integrity in positions of government that protect blatant criminals holding public office who
are also lawyers. Lawyers always protect other lawyers, except this wonderful
man!
Love Joe to bad he can't become the new AG and why isn't this interview on the news at
least Fox, Hannity, Tucker, Laura. And we know CNN, MSNBC, and the rest are all in the bag
for Obummer and Killary. 😎
NY Times Buzzfeed Washington Post CNN ABC CBS NBC are all complicit in perpetrating these
lies Just watch Colbert Jimmy Farrel or Jimmy Kimmel These bad actors pretending to be
entertainers need to hang
Mueller carried the sample of Uranium to the Russians. Mueller was paid off, as was Comey.
So glad President Trump can confiscate all their money. Now to catch Daddy Bush and Jr for
having all those people in New York killed on 9/11! Go Trump!!
There needs to be an arrest of ALL the top MSM owners and chairpeople of all the
affiliates including those who stand in front of the camera pushing false information. Their
license needs to be rescinded and taken away. Bankrupt the news affiliates and sell off their
assets.
This is a truly excellent and clear explanation of how our government was corrupted by
Team Hillary. I reckon she needs to pay the Ultimate price: a thorough investigation into her
crimes: A fair trial... and maybe execution, followed by her being reviled down the centuries
as one of the most evil women in History. Every little girl should be told: Do not be like
this woman!
Bill, don't forget to mention that those same entities also include those working for CNN
and MSNBC who were funded by Clinton donations to push the false media on the country. Can
you say lawsuits?
What a bombshell! Finally some truth about the "Justice system" in the US.
Following on from this should be the whole subsequent story of the DNC-Fusion-Steele dossier in detail, exposing the MSM too
for what it has been worth.
Perhaps then Trump dares to go against the deep state swamp and stop wars instead of following the dictates of CIA, Israel and
Military Industrialists. That would be a real POTUS PLUS result.
""It's troubling. It is shocking," North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows said. "Part of me wishes that I didn't read it because
I don't want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much.""
***
Come on, child! Enough with that spectacle. Get real. Have the basic courage to know and to admit what everybody has known
about your country for ages!... The entire world already knows.
More proof, if any were needed, that the only threat to the people of the USA comes from their own government. The 'external
threat' is a fiction calculated to enslave the US population and enrich the Oligarchy.
Somebody's going to leak this in short order. Let's take a real look at what both Dems and Repubs just expanded, let's look
at the monster they are feeding in broad daylight.
"... Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia's attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition , complete with virulent nationalisms, battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and territory, and even -- though it shocks our 21st-century sensibilities -- the use of military power to obtain geopolitical objectives. ..."
"... Administration officials said Mr. Putin had miscalculated and would pay a cost regardless of what the United States did, pointing to the impact on Russia's currency and markets. "What we see here are distinctly 19th- and 20th-century decisions made by President Putin to address problems," one of the officials said. "What he needs to understand is that in terms of his economy, he lives in the 21st-century world, an interdependent world." ..."
"... The dossier's claim that Putin talked about the "ideals-based international order" also rings false. Putin only ever refers to Western ideals when saying that Western countries' leaders are hypocrites for not adhering to them. ..."
"... The more straightforward explanation is that, knowing that this is opposition research, Steele and his sources provided information that rang true with what the client already believed and would want to hear. This is the first report in the series–in effect, a teaser trailer–and no consultant working on a monthly retainer is going to tell you in the first memo that his services aren't needed. If Steele had indicated that there was no dirt to investigate, the $15,000/mo. (as estimated by Vanity Fair ) contract wouldn't have lasted longer than a month or two. ..."
"... The dossier's use of the phraseology "Trump and his team" and "Trump team" and the like is confusing in reference to the pre-2016 campaign period. Other than his lawyer Michael Cohen, there's nothing I've seen to indicate that the other Trump campaign people mentioned by name in the dossier (Paul Manafort and Carter Page) knew Trump before 2016. By all appearances, the key members of Trump's team before 2016 were his children, and maybe his talent agent. ..."
"... It also seems out of character for Trump to have the foresight and planning that it would take to seek out intelligence on Hillary Clinton several years back. Several years ago, Trump and the Clintons were friends , and the Clintons attended Trump's wedding and Bill and Donald played golf together. ..."
"... Russians are very cautious about what they talk about, even amongst each other. Therefore, with the story about [sexual acts] in the Moscow Ritz Carlton, the idea you have managed to triple source it via an employee at the hotel, a serving FSB [Russian security service] officer, and the security officer at the hotel, who inevitably will be at least a former FSB or GRU [Russian intelligence agency] officer It just doesn't make sense. If such a thing had taken place, it would be a Russian state secret. ..."
"... Seems more likely that it's just a piece of "scuttlebutt" that Steele's sources, pressed to find anything juicy on Trump, saw in the newspaper or in a news search on Google or on Russian search engine Yandex . ..."
"... Whatever the truth of the matter, Page is clearly someone who was very keen to network with powerful Russians in 2016 and was not shy about leveraging his affiliation with the Trump campaign to do it. ..."
"... But at the same time, this would also mean Page was a loose cannon and a huge potential liability to the Trump campaign. Igor Sechin is, and was in July 2016, on the Specially Designated Nationals list of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. This means that it's a crime for any US citizen to do any business with Sechin personally (though not with Rosneft as a corporate entity). ..."
"... Page, by all appearances, is reckless and kind of an idiot . He had to have known that his activities (even if they were limited to just non-treasonous networking with Russians) carried a huge risk of blowback for Trump. He didn't care. Carter Page's willingness to toe the Russian line on foreign policy, publicly and on the record, goes beyond even what the most Russophile Western expats in Moscow say in private conversations. I think it's a perfectly valid question to ask why and how Carter Page came to be affiliated with the Trump campaign, why he visited Russia alone at least twice in 2016, and what contacts he's had with Russian officials (he definitely met with some of them, at least at the New Economic School graduation reception on Jul. 8, at which there were several senior Russian officials present and Carter Page was commencement speaker and an honored foreign guest). ..."
"... And why send him to give a public university commencement speech in which he rails against US foreign policy, ensuring wide media coverage? ..."
"... A meeting with a Trump adviser on the sidelines of such a noisy, high-profile trip–with both the Russian and foreign press speculating in real-time what the hell Page was doing in Moscow–seems like an extremely incautious setting for a meeting to discuss the most scandalous quid pro quo since the secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. ..."
"... To sum up, I have serious doubts that a meeting took place as described. But I also think that Carter Page was–at the very least–trying to leverage his connection to Trump in Russia for personal gain at the very earliest opportunity he got. ..."
"... *This report doesn't have a date. However, the July 19 report is numbered "2016/94" and the July 26 report is numbered "2016/097" so it seems like this is where the report should go. ..."
"... This is the central allegation against the Trump campaign – that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to take actions aimed at defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. The one thing that I'd add (or, rather, remind) is that by late July, the story of allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election was in full swing . Manafort's history in the former Soviet Union was being widely reported . Carter Page, as mentioned above, had traveled to Moscow for unknown purposes a few weeks before, a trip that was covered in the Russian and US media. ..."
"... What I'd like to point out here -- in terms of the timing of the information in this report -- is that the DNC hacked e-mail dumps on WikiLeaks that led to Debbie Wassermann Schultz resigning as head of the DNC happened on July 22, 2016 , and even before the WikiLeaks dumps the DNC had been attributing the hack to Russia. ..."
"... Since this report refers to the WikiLeaks dump of DNC e-mails that happened on July 22, even though it's undated we know that the report must have been made after that, as well as after the Republican National Convention that happened on July 18, as well as after reports had emerged that the Trump team had been behind a change in the Republican Party platform to remove a reference to providing lethal arms to Ukraine. The allegation made here closely tracks what was being reported in the media at the time. ..."
"... FBI director James Comey made a point of saying that US intelligence services were struck by how unusually noisy the Russians had been in their election interference, as if they wanted to be discovered. ..."
"... *The actual date on the report is "26 July 201 5 " (in the British style), but since it refers to events that happened as recently as June 2016, and based on the news reports that said that Steele was hired in June 2016, I assume this is just a typo. ..."
"... This strains credulity. So there's a single Russian emigre who not only knows the internal mood of the Trump team, but also knows what the Russian leadership is thinking (about a matter that, remember, according to the dossier is top-top secret)? And I know what you're thinking – well, if they were in collusion, of course there's such a person. But who is it? You'd think that there couldn't be too many people who fit this description – being a Russian emigre, close to the Trump campaign, and also with top-level Kremlin access. ..."
"... This is described as someone's opinion so it's hard to argue against or fact-check. I will note that the e-mails from John Podesta's Gmail account started being published by WikiLeaks in October 2016, and since the e-mails run only through March 2016, and given that WikiLeaks usually takes time to prepare for a dump, whoever broke into Podesta's Gmail account was likely very active at the time when this report was dated. If you believe that it was the Russians who broke into Podesta's Gmail account, then this intelligence report is precisely wrong. Eleven days after this report, on August 10, Guccifer 2.0 published the personal contact info of 200 prominent Democrats, so if you believe that Guccifer 2.0 was the alter ego of the Russian government, this intelligence report was precisely wrong. ..."
"... This report is dated precisely one week before Sergei Ivanov was dismissed from his post and moved to a less political role as Putin's special envoy for the environment. If you want to be charitable to the dossier, you could say that this report foreshadows Ivanov's dismissal (later reports say that the dismissal was unexpected). But on the other hand, clearly Ivanov's move to his new position was already in the works on Aug. 5 – it was reported that rumors of the move had been circulating since spring. Why hadn't Steele's "well-placed and established" sources heard those rumors? ..."
"... Peskov is widely considered not to be an independent political player in the Kremlin. He is seen as being a sort of assistant to Putin in addition to his role as spokesman, but someone who likes the spotlight, celebrity and glamour a bit too much. ..."
"... About Turkey: Peskov started his career in the Russian diplomatic corps as a Turkey specialist and worked as the third secretary of the Russian embassy in Ankara in the early '90s. He speaks Turkish. So hearing him mentioned in connection with Turkey makes some sense. ..."
"... Russia was reported to have given advance warning to Erdogan, based on intelligence intercepts, that a coup was being planned. Peskov denied these reports. Just a few weeks earlier, Turkish president Erdogan had apologized to Putin for shooting down a Russian fighter jet on the Turkey-Syria border and Medvedev had announced that Russia would begin lifting the sanctions it had imposed on Turkey in connection with the incident. ..."
"... So in early August 2016 it seemed like Russia-Turkey relations had turned a corner and were being handled quite well – as a matter of fact, over the course of 2016, Turkey went from being the US's partner on Syria to being in a de facto alliance with Russia . The turnaround is stunning – in January 2016 , the US and Turkey were conducting joint operations in Syria, and in January 2017 , Turkey and Russia were conducting joint operations in Syria. Whoever was handling Russia's relationship with Turkey, they did a good job by any objective measure – hard to see how this can be considered "botched." ..."
"... Around this time , there was a lot of speculation in the media about whether Trump would drop out of the race. It's remarkable how the "intelligence" in the dossier follows what was being reported in the news at the time. ..."
"... Ivanov was leading the operation to "hack the US election" literally days before he was fired? That doesn't make sense. ..."
"... This ethnic Russian associate of Trump – who is it? Is it Sergei Millian ? He's supposed to be Source D , a "close associate" of Trump, but he might also be the ethnic Russian (even though Millian is technically from Belarus) associate referred to here and elsewhere. ..."
"... Here we have Carter Page telling the maybe-Millian about his collusion with Russian intelligence on the DNC leaks. Do people really go around confessing crimes willy-nilly? According to this dossier, they do. ..."
"... The big Trump campaign news of August 2016, of course, was that on Aug. 17, Steve Bannon replaced Paul Manafort as head of Trump's campaign. This news was absolutely huge. If Steele's source would have said on Aug. 9 that Bannon would be replacing Manafort, or even that a change of campaign management was being discussed, then in retrospect, you would have to admit that this source was well-informed. But if on Aug. 9, this source was talking about "a rethink and a likely change of tactics," s/he either was not very close to the campaign or was holding back on Steele. ..."
"... So this associate was so close to the campaign that he was privy to all of the team's discussions about collusion with the Russians, but he didn't know that Steve Bannon was about to be named as the new campaign head? ..."
"... But my main beef with this paragraph involves the phrase "kick-back payments to MANAFORT as alleged." Manafort wasn't accused of receiving kickbacks (as I'll explain in a moment, that doesn't make any sense) – he was accused of being paid cash by Yanukovich's political party in an off-the-books scheme, and this was widely covered in the press after the story broke in The New York Times on Aug. 14. ..."
"... That's not a kickback. A kickback is when a government or other organization is offering a contract to an outside contractor, typically in a competitive bid situation, and then when the winner is selected the winner kicks back some of the contract proceeds to the person who manipulated the contract selection process. ..."
"... So if there were kickbacks involved in Manafort's work for Yanukovich, it would've been Manafort kicking back money to Yanukovich, not the other way around. ..."
"... However, what Manafort was actually accused of in the press -- receiving money not properly accounted for under Ukrainian law -- is a crime under American law only if he received income that he didn't report to the IRS, or engaged in money laundering, even if an indisputable "documentary trail" emerges. ..."
"... It is difficult to imagine Putin and his inner circle being fearful of political vulnerability and embarrassment in connection with Manafort. As even Julia Ioffe–a journalist opposed to both Trump and Putin–conceded i n a recent article i n The Atlantic , the political consulting work that Manafort did for Yanukovich and others in the former Soviet Union was hardly unusual. ..."
"... Just to point out – there's a certain implication in the dossier's description of Manafort's work for Yanukovich that this work was "exposed" during the 2016 US election campaign. That's not the case. Manafort just wasn't a household name before 2016, so no one cared. He was just another American political consultant who was more than happy to offer his services to unsavory foreign politicians, like Sandra Bullock's character in "Our Brand is Crisis." ..."
"... Manafort's work for Yanukovich was public knowledge in Ukraine as early as 2005, and was reported actively in the Ukrainian press. By 2016 it was part of Manafort's resume. ..."
"... The report on the Alfa Group (yes, Steele spelled it wrong) is actually the only place in the whole dossier where the dossier was ahead of the mainstream news cycle. The report doesn't give any context for why a special report on the relationship between Putin and Alfa was requested. But on Halloween 2016, the story broke that in Spring and Summer 2016, white-hat hackers had been tracking electronic communications between Trump's e-mail server and an Alfa-Bank (part of Alfa Group) computer in Russia, posting their findings on Reddit – so it was in the public domain but you really had to be paying attention (as apparently a few New York Times journalists and probably the FBI were). I doubt that Steele or his sources were following hacker forums on Reddit. ..."
"... So here's what I think happened: by September, Steele's ultimate client was the Democrats. Someone tipped off the Hillary Clinton campaign (and/or the Clinton-aligned group that was paying Fusion GPS / Orbis) about the electronic link to Alfa, and then Orbis (Steele) got a call asking for an intelligence report on Alfa Group's connections to Putin, without saying why. However, since it was on the phone, the Orbis person heard it as "Alpha Group," and their Russian sources didn't correct the error. ..."
"... Vladimir Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg from 1992 to 1996 . In August 1996 Putin moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow to be Deputy Chief of the Presidential Property Management Directorate (Yeltsin was president at the time, of course). He needed a new job because his boss, St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak , lost his re-election bid. ..."
"... Alfa-Bank was a direct competitor to Khodorkovsky's Bank Menatep (a subsidiary of Rosprom) at the time. So there's no way Fridman and Aven used Govorun to deliver cash to Putin when Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. The dates don't line up. There was an 8-month gap after Putin left St. Petersburg and before Govorun started working at Alfa. ..."
"... How could Steele's sources have made this mistake? Because Govorun's Wikipedia page omits his time at Rosprom, and makes it look like Govorun worked at Alfa-Bank from 1993 to 2000. This is why you don't prepare your report based on Wikipedia, kids! ..."
"... Or if Steele was feeling particularly lazy, he could've gone to Trump's Twitter feed, where Trump proudly told his millions of followers that he'd just spent the weekend with Aras Agalarov and that he wanted to do more business with him. Maybe in Steele's world, being "well-placed" to hear intel about Trump's connections with Russian businesspeople means reading Donald Trump's tweets? ..."
"... There's no other word but "fraud" to describe an "intelligence report" that tries to make it look like the connection between Trump and the Agalarov family is some kind of inside information that you'd need "well-placed sources" to obtain. It took some serious balls for Steele to present it that way, since all anyone would have to do is Google the names mentioned in the report and it would be instantly clear that the intelligence was worthless. ..."
"... Hmm. This is the intelligence that Hillary's people were getting less than one month from Election Day. Intelligence that they paid for. Makes you feel sorry for her; I strongly suspect she was being conned with these reports. ..."
"... In December 2016, Rosneft did indeed sell 19.5% of its shares to two investors using a complicated financing structure. Some have pointed to this as an example where the dossier correctly predicted something would happen. However, the sale of 19.5% of Rosneft to an investor was part of Russia's privatization plan for 2016, which the Russian government announced in December 2015 , and the timeline for the privatization (referring to the 19.5% figure) was updated throughout the year . Anyone who was following Russian business news in 2016 knew that Rosneft was planning to sell 19.5% to an investor that year. ..."
"... Sucks to be Michael Cohen! Unless the dossier is true, he should sue for libel. ..."
"... Sechin is a very big deal in Russia, and a total badass that you don't want to mess with. He is an intimidating guy who is as serious as a heart attack. Carter Page is a dumbass. But the account of this conversation makes it sound like Page was running the meeting like a seasoned pro, leaving Sechin hanging, keeping things vague and noncommittal. I, on the other hand, think that Sechin would never bother meeting with a nobody like Carter Page to discuss something as consequential as billion-dollar oil deals and international relations unless Page had made his bona fides abundantly clear. ..."
"... "Unexpectedly." This looks suspiciously like ass-covering as to why Steele's earlier reports dated mere days before Ivanov's dismissal, containing statements attributed directly to Ivanov, made no mention that these were his last days on the job. ..."
"... Most political observers believed at the time that it was Bernie Sanders, not Russia, who pushed Hillary Clinton away from supporting TPP. This is because Bernie Sanders said openly that he was pressuring Hillary to drop support for TPP. Strangely, the only place where the "veterans' pensions ruse" was ever reported was in the Steele dossier, and the media haven't been tipped off to it to this day. Dodged a bullet! Remember, this is after Putin had supposedly directly ordered all Kremlin insiders, all of whom are tried-and-true Putin loyalists, not to talk about these matters even in private. ..."
"... Steele's team has made the bold decision to misspell Paul Manafort's name as MANNAFORT (Mannafort from heaven?) throughout this report. ..."
"... Gubarev sued BuzzFeed and its editor-in-chief for libel and slander and, lacking any basis other than the dossier itself for these allegations, BuzzFeed blacked out the identifying information. ..."
"... This is quite a cinematic portrayal of hacking. The implication seems to be that there were teams of hackers in a room somewhere and they were ordered to "stand down." Is that how hacking works? Especially in this case, where the hacking that resulted in the 2016 DNC and Podesta leaks had taken place several months before this alleged meeting? This also seems to contradict the declassified US intelligence community findings that said that the hacks were done by Russian government hacker teams called "Cozy Bear" and "Fancy Bear" that were working for the GRU, a Russian intelligence agency that isn't mentioned once in the dossier. The Romanian angle apparently refers t o Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be Romanian but was also believed to be a Russian intelligence agency alter ego only pretending to be Romanian. If these were Russian government hackers, why would they be ordered to cross international borders and "lay low" in Bulgaria, a member of NATO? ..."
"... Also, given that Russia allegedly had huge wins in their 2016 election meddling, why would they be so stingy as to demand that Trump pay his share for the hacking? Especially if they were so concerned about covering their tracks? This only would implicate the Trump campaign and create a paper trail leading directly to Trump transition team members in the United States, plus they would be involving themselves in a criminal conspiracy to violate US money laundering laws, RICO and the like. ..."
Joel Whitney is a co-founder of the magazine Guernica, a magazine of
global arts and politics, and has written for many publications, including the New York Times
and Wall Street Journal.
His book Finks: How the C.I.A.
Tricked the World's Best Writers describes how the CIA contributed funds to numerous
respected magazines during the Cold War, including the Paris Review, to subtly promote
anti-communist views. In their conversation, Whitney tells Robert Scheer about the ties the
CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom had with literary magazines.
He talks about the CIA's
attempt during the Cold War to have at least one agent in every major news organization in
order to get stories killed if they were too critical or get them to run if they were favorable
to the agency. And they discuss the overstatement of the immediate risks and dangers of
communist regimes during the Cold War, which, initially, led many people to support the Vietnam
War. globinfo
freexchange
James Jesus
Angleton was part of this post-OSS group that understood how important spying and
covert ops had been in World War II. And from there, he makes all kinds of terrible mistakes.
He and his group believed essentially that they needed to do better propaganda than the Soviets
did, and one of the ways that they thought they could do it better was to do it subtly and, you
could say, secretly.
So, when this program is threatened with exposure in '64, '65, '66 and '67
through various sources like Ramparts and The New York Times, this privilege of secrecy that
they enjoyed was not something that they were willing to give up. So you have something that is
described as relatively benign, this funding of culture through the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, a funding of student movements through the National Student Association, the funding
of labor unions that would be less communist-influenced than the communist-dominated ones that
they presumed were out there. These were seen as benign answers. They were reactions to Soviet
penetration. So, secrecy is a key to making them work.
So, even if you want to make the argument that, for instance, the Congress for Cultural Freedom
never censored its magazines–which I think has been severely disproved; they did censor.
Even if you wanted to say that they published all sorts of great writers–which clearly
they did; that was part of the subtlety of it and part of the brilliance of it, and part of the
soft-power charm of it. Even if you wanted to say all that, when the secrecy is exposed by
honest accounting in the media, the fourth estate, the adversarial media of American bragging
around the world, they are so attached to their secrecy, and so upset, the CIA group led by
people like Angleton, that they commit something that is about as anti-American as anything in
our system. Which is: more secrecy, more media penetration to the point of penetrating, first,
the anti-Vietnam War press; second, the student, the college student newspapers and press; the
alternative, so-called, press. Which essentially is a license to do what they did later. So,
where Ramparts was penetrated, leads to Operation Chaos, presumably; that leads to Operation
Mockingbird in the seventies.
By the time we have Carl Bernstein reporting on Operation Mockingbird, and John Crewdson
reporting on its international equivalent in the New York Times–Bernstein in Rolling
Stone–you essentially see the CIA trying to have at least one agent at every major news
and media organization it can do in the world.
And Crewdson reporting in the Times at the end of 1977 essentially says that they had one agent
or contract agent at a newspaper in every world capital on Earth. They could get stories killed
or get stories to run that portrayed the CIA's views in a favorable way, or kill them if they
did not.
"... Sally Yates essentially said 'all DOJ is subject to oversight, except the National Security Division'. ..."
"... In short, FISA "queries" from any national security department within government are allowed without seeking court approval. ..."
"... We know NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers became aware of an issue with unauthorized FISA-702(17) " About Queries " early in 2016. As a result of a FISA court ruling declassified in May of 2017 we were able to piece a specific timeline together. ..."
"... At the same time Christopher Steele was assembling his dossier information (May-October 2016), the NSA compliance officer was conducting an internal FISA-702 review as initiated by NSA Director Mike Rogers. The NSA compliance officer briefed Admiral Mike Rogers on October 20th 2016. On October 26th 2016, Admiral Rogers informed the FISA Court of numerous unauthorized FISA-702(17) "About Query" violations. Subsequent to that FISC notification Mike Rogers stopped all FISA-702(17) "About Queries" permanently . They are no longer permitted. ..."
"... Mike Rogers discovery becomes the impetus for him to request the 2016 full NSA compliance audit of FISA-702 use. It appears Fusion-GPS was the FBI contracted user identified in the final FISA court opinion/ruling on page 83. ..."
"... What plan came from that April 19th,2016 White House meeting? What plan did Mary Jacoby and Glenn Simpson present to use the information they had assembled? How and who would they feed their information to; and how do they best use that 'valuable' information? This appears to be where Fusion-GPS contracting with Christopher Steele comes in. ..."
"... Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. ..."
"... The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr's duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016. ( link ) ..."
"... DOJ Deputy Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie Ohr had a prior working relationship with Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson. Together they worked on a collaborative CIA Open Source group project surrounding International Organized Crime. ( pdf here ) Page #30 Screen Shot Below . ..."
"... Nellie Ohr is a subject matter expert on Russia, speaks Russian, and also is well versed on CIA operations. Nellie Ohr's skills would include how to build or create counterintelligence frameworks to give the appearance of events that may be entirely fabricated. ..."
"... Knowing the NSA was reviewing FISA "Queries"; and intellectually accepting the resulting information from those queries was likely part of the framework put together by Glenn Simpson and Mary Jacoby; we discover that GPS employee Nellie Ohr applied for a HAM radio license [ May 23rd 2016 ] (screen grab below). ..."
"... Accepting the FBI was utilizing Fusion-GPS as a contractor, there is now an inherent clarity in the relationship between: FBI agent Peter Strzok, Fusion-GPS Glenn Simpson, and 'Russian Dossier' author Christopher Steele. They are all on the same team. ..."
"... The information that Fusion-GPS Glenn Simpson put together from his advanced work on the 'Trump Project', was, in essence, built upon the foundation of the close relationship he already had with the FBI. ..."
"... Simpson, Jacoby and Ohr then passed on their information to Christopher Steele who adds his own ingredients to the mix, turns around, and gives the end product back to the FBI. That end product is laundered intelligence now called "The Trump/Russia Dossier". ..."
"... The FBI turn around and use the "dossier" as the underlying documents and investigative evidence for continued operations against the target of the entire enterprise, candidate Donald Trump. As Peter Strzok would say in August 2016: this is their "insurance policy" per se'. ..."
"... In October 2016, immediately after the DOJ lawyers formatted the FBI information (Steele Dossier etc.) for a valid FISA application, the head of the NSD, Asst. Attorney General John P Carlin, left his job . His exit came as the NSD and Admiral Rogers informed the FISC that frequent unauthorized FISA-702 searches had been conducted. Read Here . ..."
"... Yes, the FBI was working with Christopher Steele through their contractor Fusion-GPS. Yes, the FBI and Clinton Team were, in essence, both paying Christopher Steele for his efforts. The FBI paid Steele via their sub-contractor Fusion-GPS. ..."
"... Lastly, when the DOJ/FBI used the Steele Dossier to make their 2016 surveillance activity legal (the October FISA application), they are essentially using the outcome of a process they created themselves in collaboration with both Fusion GPS and the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... All research indicates the intelligence information the DOJ and FBI collected via their FISA-702 queries, combined with the intelligence Fusion GPS created in their earlier use of contractor access to FISA-702(17) "about queries", was the intelligence data delivered to Christopher Steele for use in creating "The Russian Dossier". ..."
"... Christopher Steele was just laundering intelligence. The Steele "dossier" was then used by the DOJ to gain FISA-702 approvals – which provided retroactive legal cover for the prior campaign surveillance, and also used post-election to create the "Russian Narrative". ..."
"... The ENTIRE SYSTEM of FISA-702 surveillance and data collection was weaponized against a political campaign. The DOJ and FBI used the FISA Court to gain access to Trump data, and simultaneously justify earlier FISA "queries" by their contractor, Fusion GPS. FISA-702 queries were used to gather information on the Trump campaign which later became FBI counterintelligence surveillance on the officials therein. ..."
Following the released transcript of Fusion-GPS Co-Founder Glenn Simpson's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee
by Senator Dianne Feinstein , several media outlets have begun questioning the relationship between the FBI investigators, Glenn
Simpson and dossier author Christopher Steele.
What we have discovered highlights the answer to those relationship questions; and also answers a host of other questions, including:
Did the FBI pay Christopher Steele? Yes, but now how media has stated. Was the FBI connected to the creation of the Steele Dossier?
Yes, but again, not the way the media is currently outlining.
I wish Robert Parry quick and full recovery after his minor stoke. He is a magnificent journalist !
Notable quotes:
"... In the past, America has witnessed "McCarthyism" from the Right and even complaints from the Right about "McCarthyism of the Left." But what we are witnessing now amid the Russia-gate frenzy is what might be called "Establishment McCarthyism, " traditional media/political powers demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives. ..."
"... This extraordinary assault on civil liberties is cloaked in fright-filled stories about "Russian propaganda" and wildly exaggerated tales of the Kremlin's "hordes of Twitter bots," but its underlying goal is to enforce Washington's "groupthinks" by creating a permanent system that shuts down or marginalizes dissident opinions and labels contrary information – no matter how reasonable and well-researched – as "disputed" or "rated false" by mainstream "fact-checking" organizations like PolitiFact. ..."
"... For instance, PolitiFact still rates as "true" Hillary Clinton's false claim that "all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies" agreed that Russia was behind the release of Democratic emails last year. Even the Times and The Associated Press belatedly ran corrections after President Obama's intelligence chiefs admitted that the assessment came from what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called "hand-picked" analysts from only three agencies: CIA, FBI and NSA. ..."
"... And, the larger truth was that these "hand-picked" analysts were sequestered away from other analysts even from their own agencies and produced "stove-piped intelligence," i.e., analysis that escapes the back-and-forth that should occur inside the intelligence community. ..."
"... And this was not a stand-alone story. Previously, the Times has run favorable articles about plans to deploy aggressive algorithms to hunt down and then remove or marginalize information that the Times and other mainstream outlets deem false. ..."
"... Congress has authorized $160 million to combat alleged Russian "propaganda and disinformation," a gilded invitation for "scholars" and "experts" to gear up "studies" that will continue to prove what is supposed to be proved – "Russia bad" – with credulous mainstream reporters eagerly gobbling up the latest "evidence" of Russian perfidy. ..."
"... And, given the risk of thermo-nuclear war with Russia, why aren't liberals and progressives demanding at least a critical examination of what's coming from the U.S. intelligence agencies and the mainstream press? ..."
"... So, as we have moved into this dangerous New Cold War, we are living in what could be called "Establishment McCarthyism," a hysterical but methodical strategy for silencing dissent and making sure that future mainstream groupthinks don't get challenged. ..."
In the past, America has witnessed "McCarthyism" from the Right and even complaints from the Right about "McCarthyism of the
Left." But what we are witnessing now amid the Russia-gate frenzy is what might be called
"Establishment McCarthyism,
" traditional media/political powers demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives.
This extraordinary assault on civil liberties is cloaked in
fright-filled stories about "Russian
propaganda" and wildly
exaggerated tales of the Kremlin's "hordes of Twitter bots," but its underlying goal is to enforce Washington's "groupthinks"
by creating a permanent system that shuts down or marginalizes dissident opinions and labels contrary information – no matter how
reasonable and well-researched – as "disputed" or "rated false" by mainstream "fact-checking" organizations like PolitiFact.
It doesn't seem to matter that the paragons of this new structure – such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and,
indeed, PolitiFact – have a checkered record of getting facts straight.
For instance, PolitiFact still
rates as "true" Hillary Clinton's false claim that "all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies" agreed that Russia was behind the release
of Democratic emails last year. Even the Times and The Associated Press belatedly
ran corrections after
President Obama's intelligence chiefs admitted that the assessment came from what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
called "hand-picked" analysts from only three agencies: CIA, FBI and NSA.
And, the larger truth was that these "hand-picked" analysts were
sequestered away
from other analysts even from their own agencies and produced "stove-piped intelligence," i.e., analysis that escapes the back-and-forth
that should occur inside the intelligence community.
Yet, the Times and other leading newspaper routinely treat these findings as flat fact or the unassailable "consensus" of the
"intelligence community." Contrary information, including WikiLeaks' denials of a Russian role in supplying the emails, and
contrary judgments from former
senior U.S. intelligence officials are ignored.
The Jan. 6 report also tacked on a seven-page addendum smearing the Russian television network, RT, for such offenses as sponsoring
a 2012 debate among U.S. third-party presidential candidates who had been excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates. RT also
was slammed for reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests and the environmental dangers from "fracking."
How the idea of giving Americans access to divergent political opinions and information about valid issues such as income inequality
and environmental dangers constitutes threats to American "democracy" is hard to comprehend.
However, rather than address the Jan. 6 report's admitted uncertainties about Russian "hacking" and the troubling implications
of its attacks on RT, the Times and other U.S. mainstream publications treat the report as some kind of holy scripture that can't
be questioned or challenged.
Silencing RT
For instance, on Tuesday, the Times published a front-page story entitled "
YouTube Gave Russians Outlet
Portal Into U.S ." that essentially cried out for the purging of RT from YouTube. The article began by holding YouTube's vice
president Robert Kynci up to ridicule and opprobrium for his praising "RT for bonding with viewers by providing 'authentic' content
instead of 'agendas or propaganda.'"
The article by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Nicholas Confessore swallowed whole the Jan. 6 report's conclusion that RT is "the Kremlin's
'principal international propaganda outlet' and a key player in Russia's information warfare operations around the world." In other
words, the Times portrayed Kynci as essentially a "useful idiot."
Yet, the article doesn't actually dissect any RT article that could be labeled false or propagandistic. It simply alludes generally
to news items that contained information critical of Hillary Clinton as if any negative reporting on the Democratic presidential
contender – no matter how accurate or how similar to stories appearing in the U.S. press – was somehow proof of "information warfare."
As Daniel Lazare wrote at Consortiumnews.com
on Wednesday, "The web version [of the Times article] links to an RT interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that ran shortly
before the 2016 election. The topic is a September 2014
email obtained by Wikileaks in which Clinton acknowledges that 'the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia are providing clandestine
financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.'"
In other words, the Times cited a documented and newsworthy RT story as its evidence that RT was a propaganda shop threatening
American democracy and deserving ostracism if not removal from YouTube.
A Dangerous Pattern
Not to say that I share every news judgment of RT – or for that matter The New York Times – but there is a grave issue of press
freedom when the Times essentially calls for the shutting down of access to a news organization that may highlight or report on stories
that the Times and other mainstream outlets downplay or ignore.
And this was not a stand-alone story. Previously, the
Times has run favorable
articles about plans to deploy aggressive algorithms to hunt down and then remove or marginalize information that the Times and
other mainstream outlets deem false.
Nor is it just the Times. Last Thanksgiving, The Washington Post ran
a fawning front-page article
about an anonymous group PropOrNot that had created a blacklist of 200 Internet sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other
independent news sources, that were deemed guilty of dispensing "Russian propaganda," which basically amounted to our showing any
skepticism toward the State Department's narratives on the crises in Syria or Ukraine.
So, if any media outlet dares to question the U.S. government's version of events – once that storyline has been embraced by the
big media – the dissidents risk being awarded the media equivalent of a yellow star and having their readership dramatically reduced
by getting downgraded on search engines and punished on social media.
Meanwhile, Congress has
authorized $160 million to combat alleged Russian "propaganda and disinformation," a gilded invitation for "scholars" and "experts"
to gear up "studies" that will continue to prove what is supposed to be proved – "Russia bad" – with credulous mainstream reporters
eagerly gobbling up the latest "evidence" of Russian perfidy.
There is also a more coercive element to what's going on. RT is facing demands from the Justice Department that it register as
a "foreign agent" or face prosecution. Clearly, the point is to chill the journalism done by RT's American reporters, hosts and staff
who now fear being stigmatized as something akin to traitors.
You might wonder: where are the defenders of press freedom and civil liberties? Doesn't anyone in the mainstream media or national
politics recognize the danger to a democracy coming from enforced groupthinks? Is American democracy so fragile that letting Americans
hear "another side of the story" must be prevented?
A Dangerous 'Cure'
I agree that there is a limited problem with jerks who knowingly make up fake stories or who disseminate crazy conspiracy theories
– and no one finds such behavior more offensive than I do. But does no one recall the lies about Iraq's WMD and other U.S. government
falsehoods and deceptions over the years?
Often, it is the few dissenters who alert the American people to the truth, even as the Times, Post, CNN and other big outlets
are serving as the real propaganda agents, accepting what the "important people" say and showing little or no professional skepticism.
And, given the risk of thermo-nuclear war with Russia, why aren't liberals and progressives demanding at least a critical
examination of what's coming from the U.S. intelligence agencies and the mainstream press?
The answer seems to be that many liberals and progressives are so blinded by their fury over Donald Trump's election that they
don't care what lines are crossed to destroy or neutralize him. Plus, for some liberal entities, there's lots of money to be made.
For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union has made its "resistance" to the Trump administration an important part of its
fundraising. So, the ACLU is doing nothing to defend the rights of news organizations and journalists under attack. When I asked
ACLU about the Justice Department's move against RT and other encroachments on press freedom, I was told by ACLU spokesman Thomas
Dresslar: "Thanks for reaching out to us. Unfortunately, I've been informed that we do not have anyone able to speak to you about
this."
Meanwhile, the Times and other traditional "defenders of a free press" are now part of the attack machine against a free press.
While much of this attitude comes from the big media's high-profile leadership of the anti-Trump Resistance and anger at any resistors
to the Resistance, mainstream news outlets have chafed for years over the Internet undermining their privileged role as the gatekeepers
of what Americans get to see and hear.
For a long time, the big media has wanted an excuse to rein in the Internet and break the small news outlets that have challenged
the power – and the profitability – of the Times, Post, CNN, etc. Russia-gate and Trump have become the cover for that restoration
of mainstream authority.
So, as we have moved into this dangerous New Cold War, we are living in what could be called "Establishment McCarthyism,"
a hysterical but methodical strategy for silencing dissent and making sure that future mainstream groupthinks don't get challenged.
"... The central groupthink around Russia-gate is the still unproven claim that Russia hacked Democratic emails in 2016 and publicized them via WikiLeaks, a crucial issue that NSA experts say should be easy to prove if true, reports Dennis J. Bernstein. ..."
"... Binney: We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an article on this in July. First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic world, the NSA would know. Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points on the fiber lines, taking in everything. ..."
"... The other data that came out from Guccifer 2.0, a download from the DNC, has been a charade. It was a download and not a transfer across the Web. The Web won't manage such a high speed. It could not have gotten across the Atlantic at that high speed. You would have to have high capacity lines dedicated to that in order to do it. They have been playing games with us. There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here. ..."
"... Bernstein: Let me come at this from the other side. Has the United States ever tried to hack into and undermine Russian operations in this way? ..."
"... Binney: Oh, sure. We do it as much as anybody else. In the Ukraine, for example, we sponsored regime change. When someone who was pro-Soviet was elected president, we orchestrated a coup to put our man in power. ..."
"... Did the US meddle in the Russian elections that brought Yeltsin to power? ..."
"... I believe they did. We try to leverage our power and influence elections around the world. ..."
"... Binney: Yes, to defend privacy but also to defend the Constitution. Right now, our government is violating the first, fourth and fifth amendments in various ways. Mueller did it, Comey did it, they were all involved in violating the Constitution. ..."
"... Bernstein: There seems to be a new McCarthyite operation around the Russia-gate investigation. It appears that it is an attempt to justify the idea that Clinton lost because the Russians undermined the election. ..."
"... Bernstein: It was initially put out that seventeen intelligence agencies found compelling evidence that the Russians hacked into our election. You're saying it was actually selected individuals from just three agencies. Is there anything to the revelations that FBI agents talked about taking action to prevent Trump from becoming president? ..."
"... Binney: It certainly does seem that it is leaning that way, that is was all a frame-up. It is a sad time in our history, to see the government working against itself internally ..."
"... Bernstein: What concerns do you have regarding the Russia-gate investigation and the McCarthyite tactics that are being employed? ..."
"... Binney: Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with Russia. We should definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars. I am also concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the fundamental principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to start indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly unconstitutional. ..."
The central groupthink around Russia-gate is the still unproven claim that Russia hacked
Democratic emails in 2016 and publicized them via WikiLeaks, a crucial issue that NSA experts
say should be easy to prove if true, reports Dennis J. Bernstein.
A changing-places moment brought about by Russia-gate is that liberals who are usually more
skeptical of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially their evidence-free claims, now question
the patriotism of Americans who insist that the intelligence community supply proof to support
the dangerous claims about Russian 'hacking" of Democratic emails especially when some veteran
U.S. government experts say the data would be easily available if the Russians indeed were
guilty.
One of those experts is William Binney, a former high-level National Security Agency
intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement, blew the whistle on the extraordinary
breadth of NSA surveillance programs. His outspoken criticism of the NSA during the George W.
Bush administration made him the subject of FBI investigations that included a raid on his home
in 2007.
Even before Edward Snowden's NSA whistleblowing, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had
access to telecommunications companies' domestic and international billing records, and that
since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 trillion to 20 trillion communications. Snowden
has said: "I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the
rules."
I spoke to Binney on Dec. 28 about Russia-gate and a host of topics having to do with
spying and America's expanding
national security state.
Dennis Bernstein: I would like you to begin by telling us a little about your background at
the NSA and how you got there.
William Binney: I was in the United States Army from 1965 to 1969. They put me in the
Army Security Agency, an affiliate of the NSA. They liked the work I was doing and they put me
on a priority hire in 1970. I was in the NSA for 32 years, mostly working against the Soviet
Union and the Warsaw Pact. I was solving what were called "wizard puzzles," and the NSA was
sometimes referred to as the "Puzzle Palace." I had to solve code systems and work on cyber
systems and data systems to be able to predict in advance the "intentions and capabilities of
adversaries or potential adversaries."
Bernstein: At a certain point you ran amiss of your supervisors. What did you come to
understand and try to tell people that got you in dutch with your higher-ups?
Binney: By 1998-1999, the "digital issue" was basically solved. This created a
problem for the upper ranks because at the time they were lobbying Congress for $3.8 billion to
continue working on what we had already accomplished. That lobby was started in 1989 for a
separate program called Trailblazer, which failed miserably in 2005-2006. We had to brief
Congress on how we were progressing and my information ran contrary to the efforts downtown to
secure more funding. And so this caused a problem internally.
We learned from some of our staff members in Congress that several of the corporations that
were getting contracts from the NSA were downtown lobbying against our program in Congress.
This is the military industrial complex in action. That lobby was supported by the NSA
management because they just wanted more money to build a bigger empire.
But Dick Cheney, who was behind all of this, wanted it because he grew up under Nixon, who
always wanted to know what his political enemies were thinking and doing. This kind of approach
of bulk acquisition of everything was possible after you removed certain segments of our
software and they used it against the entire digital world. Cheney wanted to know who his
political enemies were and get updates about them at any time.
Bernstein: Your expertise was in the Soviet Union and so you must know a lot about
bugging. Do you believe that Russia hacked and undermined our last election? Can Trump thank
Russia for the result?
Binney: We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an
article on this in July. First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic
world, the NSA would know. Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points
on the fiber lines, taking in everything. Mark Klein exposed some of this at the AT&T
facility in San Francisco.
This is not for foreigners, by the way, this is for targeting US citizens. If they wanted
only foreigners, all they would have to do was look at the transatlantic cables where they
surface on the coast of the United States. But they are not there, they are distributed among
the US population.
Bernstein: So if, in fact, the Russians were tapping into DNC headquarters, the NSA
would absolutely know about it.
Binney: Yes, and they would also have trace routes on where they went specifically,
in Russia or anywhere else. If you remember, about three or four years ago, the Chinese hacked
into somewhere in the United States and our government came out and confirmed that it was the
Chinese who did it, and it came from a specific military facility in Shanghai. The NSA had
these trace route programs embedded by the hundreds across the US and all around the world.
The other data that came out from Guccifer 2.0, a download from the DNC, has been a
charade. It was a download and not a transfer across the Web. The Web won't manage such a high
speed. It could not have gotten across the Atlantic at that high speed. You would have to have
high capacity lines dedicated to that in order to do it. They have been playing games with us.
There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here.
Bernstein: So was this a leak by somebody at Democratic headquarters?
Binney: We don't know that for sure, either. All we know was that it was a local
download. We can likely attribute it to a USB device that was physically passed along.
Bernstein: Let me come at this from the other side. Has the United States ever tried
to hack into and undermine Russian operations in this way?
Binney: Oh, sure. We do it as much as anybody else. In the Ukraine, for example, we
sponsored regime change. When someone who was pro-Soviet was elected president, we orchestrated
a coup to put our man in power.
Then we invited the Ukraine into NATO. One of the agreements we made with the Russians when
the Soviet Union fell apart was that the Ukraine would give them their nuclear weapons to
manage and that we would not move NATO further east toward Russia. I think they made a big
mistake when they asked Ukraine to join NATO. They should have asked Russia to join as well,
making it all-inclusive. If you treat people as adversaries, they are going to act that
way.
Bernstein:Did the US meddle in the Russian elections that brought Yeltsin to
power?
Binney:I believe they did. We try to leverage our power and influence elections
around the world.
Bernstein: What has your group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, been
up to, and what has been the US government's response?
Binney: We have been discussing privacy and security with the European Union and with a
number of European parliaments. Recently the Austrian supreme court ruled that the entire bulk
acquisition system was unconstitutional. Everyone but the conservatives in the Austrian
parliament voted that bill down, making Austria the first country there to do the right
thing.
A slide from material leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden to the Washington Post,
showing what happens when an NSA analyst "tasks" the PRISM system for information about a new
surveillance target.
Bernstein: Is it your goal to defend people's privacy and their right to communicate
privately?
Binney: Yes, to defend privacy but also to defend the Constitution. Right now,
our government is violating the first, fourth and fifth amendments in various ways. Mueller did
it, Comey did it, they were all involved in violating the Constitution.
Back in the 1990's, the idea was to make our analysts effective so that they could see
threats coming before they happened and alert people to take action so that lives would be
saved. What happens now is that people go out and kill someone and then the NSA and the FBI go
on a forensics mission. Intelligence is supposed to tell you in advance when a crime is coming
so that you can do something to avert it. They have lost that perspective.
Bernstein: They now have access to every single one of our electronic conversations,
is that right? The human mind has a hard time imagining how you could contain, move and study
all that information.
Binney: Basically, it is achievable because most of the processing is done by machine
so it doesn't cost human energy.
Bernstein: There seems to be a new McCarthyite operation around the Russia-gate
investigation. It appears that it is an attempt to justify the idea that Clinton lost because
the Russians undermined the election.
Binney: I have seen no evidence at all from anybody, including the intelligence
community. If you look at the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) report, they state on the
first page that "We have high confidence that the Russians did this." But when you get toward
the end of the report, they basically confess that "our judgment does not imply that we have
evidence to back it up."
Bernstein: It was initially put out that seventeen intelligence agencies found
compelling evidence that the Russians hacked into our election. You're saying it was actually
selected individuals from just three agencies. Is there anything to the revelations that FBI
agents talked about taking action to prevent Trump from becoming president?
Binney: It certainly does seem that it is leaning that way, that is was all a
frame-up. It is a sad time in our history, to see the government working against itself
internally.
Bernstein: I take it you are not a big supporter of Trump.
Binney: Well, I voted for him. I couldn't vote for a warmonger like Clinton. She
wanted to see our planes shooting down Russian planes in Syria. She advocated for destabilizing
Libya, for getting rid of Assad in Syria, she was a strong backer of the war in Iraq.
Bernstein: What concerns do you have regarding the Russia-gate investigation and
the McCarthyite tactics that are being employed?
Binney: Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with
Russia. We should definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars.
I am also concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the
fundamental principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to
start indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly
unconstitutional.
"If one argues the document is unverified and never will be, it is critical to learn the
identity of the sources to support that conclusion. If one argues the document is the whole
truth, or largely true, knowing sources is equally critical."
Notable quotes:
"... there is another reason to know Steele's sources, and that is to learn not just the origin of the dossier but its place in the larger Trump-Russia affai ..."
"... Really incredible that it is assumed that everyone will believe any loopy paid-by-Soros "sources" the CIA trots out. ..."
"... I'll not bother with the CIA's repugnant history of overthrowing governments all over the planet. But I do have to ask: when are the Russia-did-it enthusiasts going to stop making fools of themselves? ..."
"... Steele's contacts might just be a bunch of washed-up spies like himself, feeding him garbage ... because he was paying for it. ..."
According to Zerohedge,there is another reason to know Steele's sources, and that is to learn not just the origin of
the dossier but its place in the larger Trump-Russia affair.
As the WashEx adds, there is a belief among some congressional investigators that the
Russians who provided information to Steele were using Steele to disrupt the American
election as much as the Russians who distributed hacked Democratic Party emails. In some
investigators' views, they are the two sides of the Trump-Russia project, both aimed at
sowing chaos and discord in the American political system.
Still, investigators who favor this theory ask a sensible question: " It is likely that
all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming,
Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America – except the Russians who talked to
Christopher Steele? "
On the other hand, the theory is still just a theory, for now and as the Examiner's Byron
York correctly points out, to validate -or refute – it House investigators will seek
Steele's sources – and is why they will try to compel Kramer to talk.
Are we supposed to believe that the CIA doesn't have any Russian spooks on its payroll?
Any Russian "sources" are going to be taken as gold? Really incredible that it is assumed
that everyone will believe any loopy paid-by-Soros "sources" the CIA trots out.
I'll not bother with the CIA's repugnant history of overthrowing governments all over the
planet. But I do have to ask: when are the Russia-did-it enthusiasts going to stop making
fools of themselves?
There is another theory: the 'Kremlin' did not direct any of this. Steele's contacts might
just be a bunch of washed-up spies like himself, feeding him garbage ... because he was
paying for it.
It you need to read a singe article analyzing current anti-Russian hysteria in the USA this in the one you should read. This is
an excellent article Simply great !!! And as of December 2017 it represents the perfect summary of Russiagate, Hillary defeat and, Neo-McCarthyism
campaign launched as a method of hiding the crisis of neoliberalism revealed by Presidential elections. It also suggest that growing
jingoism of both Parties (return to Madeleine Albright's 'indispensable nation' bulling. Both Trump and Albright assume that the
United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena) and loss of the confidence and paranoia of the US
neoliberal elite.
It contain many important observation which in my view perfectly catch the complexity of the current Us political landscape.
Bravo to Jackson Lears !!!
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress ..."
"... Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton's defeat. Then everything changed. ..."
"... A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton's chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s. ..."
"... The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. ..."
"... Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free 'assessment' produced last January by a small number of 'hand-picked' analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. ..."
"... It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role. When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's putative weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the long history of disinformation (a.k.a. 'fake news') as a tactic for advancing one administration or another's political agenda. Once again, the established press is legitimating pronouncements made by the Church Fathers of the national security state. Clapper is among the most vigorous of these. He perjured himself before Congress in 2013, when he denied that the NSA had 'wittingly' spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. ..."
"... In May 2017, he told NBC's Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump's campaign because they are 'almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique'. The current orthodoxy exempts the Church Fathers from standards imposed on ordinary people, and condemns Russians – above all Putin – as uniquely, 'almost genetically' diabolical. ..."
"... It's hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump's election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It's true that Trump's menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. ..."
"... Trump is committed to continuing his predecessors' lavish funding of the already bloated Defence Department, and his Fortress America is a blustering, undisciplined version of Madeleine Albright's 'indispensable nation'. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because it's the greatest country in the world, Albright because it's an exceptional force for global good. ..."
"... Besides Trump's supposed uniqueness, there are two other assumptions behind the furore in Washington: the first is that the Russian hack unquestionably occurred, and the second is that the Russians are our implacable enemies. ..."
"... So far, after months of 'bombshells' that turn out to be duds, there is still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference in the American election. Meanwhile serious doubts have surfaced about the technical basis for the hacking claims. Independent observers have argued it is more likely that the emails were leaked from inside, not hacked from outside. On this front, the most persuasive case was made by a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, former employees of the US intelligence agencies who distinguished themselves in 2003 by debunking Colin Powell's claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, hours after Powell had presented his pseudo-evidence at the UN. ..."
"... The crucial issue here and elsewhere is the exclusion from public discussion of any critical perspectives on the orthodox narrative, even the perspectives of people with professional credentials and a solid track record. ..."
"... Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes – like the stories about Russian interference in the French and German elections – they are not retracted even after they have been discredited. These stories have been thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. ..."
"... The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. ..."
"... More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders's supporters. ..."
"... Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin's interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. ..."
"... Yet the FBI apparently took the Steele dossier seriously enough to include a summary of it in a secret appendix to the Intelligence Community Assessment. Two weeks before the inauguration, James Comey, the director of the FBI, described the dossier to Trump. After Comey's briefing was leaked to the press, the website Buzzfeed published the dossier in full, producing hilarity and hysteria in the Washington establishment. ..."
"... The Steele dossier inhabits a shadowy realm where ideology and intelligence, disinformation and revelation overlap. It is the antechamber to the wider system of epistemological nihilism created by various rival factions in the intelligence community: the 'tree of smoke' that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. ..."
"... Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale rehabilitation of the intelligence community – or at least the part of it that supports the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party's base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about 'treason' like a reconstituted John Birch Society. ..."
"... The Democratic Party has now developed a new outlook on the world, a more ambitious partnership between liberal humanitarian interventionists and neoconservative militarists than existed under the cautious Obama. This may be the most disastrous consequence for the Democratic Party of the new anti-Russian orthodoxy: the loss of the opportunity to formulate a more humane and coherent foreign policy. The obsession with Putin has erased any possibility of complexity from the Democratic world picture, creating a void quickly filled by the monochrome fantasies of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. ..."
"... For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open for business. This view is difficult to challenge when it cloaks itself in humanitarian sentiment. There is horrific suffering in the world; the US has abundant resources to help relieve it; the moral imperative is clear. There are endless forms of international engagement that do not involve military intervention. But it is the path taken by US policy often enough that one may suspect humanitarian rhetoric is nothing more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics – one that defines the national interest as global and virtually limitless. ..."
"... The prospect of impeaching Trump and removing him from office by convicting him of collusion with Russia has created an atmosphere of almost giddy anticipation among leading Democrats, allowing them to forget that the rest of the Republican Party is composed of many politicians far more skilful in Washington's ways than their president will ever be. ..."
"... They are posing an overdue challenge to the long con of neoliberalism, and the technocratic arrogance that led to Clinton's defeat in Rust Belt states. Recognising that the current leadership will not bring about significant change, they are seeking funding from outside the DNC. ..."
"... Democrat leaders have persuaded themselves (and much of their base) that all the republic needs is a restoration of the status quo ante Trump. They remain oblivious to popular impatience with familiar formulas. ..."
"... Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and maintenance of American empire. ..."
"... This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. 'The Democratic Party's claims of fighting for "working families" have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people,' Autopsy announces. ..."
"... Clinton's record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war. ..."
"... If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished. It's a long shot, but there is something happening out there. ..."
American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are
troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership's failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign.
Bernie Sanders's challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump's triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as
usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington.
Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means
of fighting evil in order to secure global progress . Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered
their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a
widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more
capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton's defeat. Then everything changed.
"... The Russia Investigation shifts to Clinton's Political Rivals ..."
"... Let me get this straight: The Democrats think Stein siphoned votes away from Hillary, so Stein must be a "Russian agent". Is that it? ..."
"... The persecution of Jill Stein strips away the facade once and for all exposing Russia-gate as a complete fraud that is being used to exact revenge on the adversaries of Hillary Clinton and her reprobate friends. The New York Times even admits as much. ..."
"... That's what's really really going on, the fatcat honchos behind the scenes are just settling scores for Hillary's lost election. It's payback time for the Clinton Mafia. Here's more baloney from the Times: ..."
"... Give me a break. Does anyone on the Senate Intelligence Committee honestly believe that Jill Stein is a Russian agent? ..."
"... Of course not. They're just harassing her to send a message to anyone who might be thinking about running for president in the future. They're saying, "You'd better watch your step or we'll trump-up charges against you and make your life a living hell. Isn't that the message?You're damn right it is! ..."
"... "This is a witch hunt. It is neo-McCarthyism, plain and simple. The people who are outright calling Stein a Russian agent are making a complete mockery of themselves and of the American political process ..."
"... Dragging Stein into this mess shows Clinton Democrats up for what they really are. It proves that the 'Resist' crowd's crusade is not just about Trump and "collusion" -- it's also about discrediting all dissenting American voices and establishing their own definition of what political opposition is supposed to look like -- and for the Clinton cult, it's not supposed to look like Jill Stein . ..."
"... Anyone who disagrees with the Democrats is a Putin puppet -- and if you've ever been to Moscow, forget it -- don't even bother trying to defend yourself. Off with your head." ("McCarthy-style targeting of Jill Stein proves Democrats have truly lost the plot", RT) ..."
"... "The Socialist Equality Party condemns the targeting of Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate in the 2016 election, by the neo-McCarthyite witch-hunters on the Senate Intelligence Committee . The attack on Stein, spearheaded by the Democratic Party, is an unconstitutional attempt to delegitimize and suppress political opposition to the monopoly of the capitalist two-party system . ..."
"... This is the Orwellian reality of America in 2017, ruled by two right-wing, oligarchic parties that can and will tolerate no political opposition . ..."
"... If you're a liberal and you hate Donald Trump, then you probably see the Russia-gate investigation as your best chance to achieve the Golden Grail of "impeachment". But are you willing to compromise your principles, join forces with the sinister and unscrupulous Clinton cabal, and throw allies like Jill Stein under the bus to achieve your goal? ..."
"... How high a price are you willing to pay to get rid of Trump? That's the question that every liberal in America should be asking themselves. And they'd better answer it fast before it's too late. ..."
"... Mueller is clearly not the upstanding 'protector of American values' he is painted he is a servile political degenerate. A lifetime of betrayal has rendered him ethically autistic. He is blind to the way his own actions condemn him before reasonable minds. Hopefully he will wake up when condemned hiself in an American Court of Law at some future date. ..."
"... According to Edward Aguilar of Project for Nuclear Awareness, cancelling construction of the new submarines, reducing the current number of such subs, and retiring rather than replacing nuclear warheads and a couple hundred ICBMs would save $270 billion. ..."
"... The weapons oligarchy appears to be a racketeering-influenced and corrupt organization. Luckily, the RICO Act provides for heavy criminal penalties for such death-dealing corruption. ..."
Essentially CIA dictates the US foreign policy. The tail is wagging the dog. The current Russophobia hysteria mean
additional billions for CIA and FBI. As simple as that.
The article contain some important observation about self-sustaining nature of the US
militarism. It is able to create new threats and new insurgencies almost at will via CIA activities.
The key problem is that wars are highly profitable for important part of the ruling elite,
especially representing finance and military industrial complex. Also now part of the US
ruling elite now consists of "colonial administrators" which are directly interested in maintaining
and expanding the US empire. This is trap from which nation might not be able to escape.
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S. Davies. ..."
"... Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. ..."
"... No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them. ..."
"... The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book Roots of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing," Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination." ..."
"... Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991. ..."
"... Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. ..."
"... Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any actual military threat to the United States. ..."
"... U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy. ..."
"... The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for war. ..."
"... The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years. ..."
"... Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out. ..."
"... Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq. ..."
"... But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant ..."
"... The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror," would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy objective. ..."
"... This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental scale. ..."
"... China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business." ..."
"... As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash on others. ..."
"... But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike. ..."
"... Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized Crime : How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy. ..."
"... In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to "make the economy scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. ..."
"... The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction. ..."
"... Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most expensive military budge t of any president since World War Two. ..."
"... Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction. ..."
The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington
seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer,
writes Nicolas J.S. Davies.
As the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American officials
ever believed that the United States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he committed
hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment
that had already killed millions of people.
As conversations tape-recorded in the White House reveal, and as other writers have documented,
the reasons for wading into the Big Muddy, as
Pete Seeger satirized it
, and then pushing on regardless, all came down to "credibility": the domestic political credibility
of the politicians involved and America's international credibility as a military power.
Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the
1954 Geneva Accords
and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die
was cast. The CIA's support for the repressive
Diem regime and its successors
ensured an ever-escalating war, as the South rose in rebellion, supported by the North. No U.S. president
could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could
achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited
from them.
The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book
Roots
of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing,"
Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination."
Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived
the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere,
but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of
Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991.
Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized
intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across
every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility
as Johnson and Nixon did. His predictable response has been to escalate ongoing wars in Syria, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and West Africa, and to threaten new ones against North Korea, Iran and
Venezuela.
Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries
across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only
become more entrenched over time, as
President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now,
the lack of any actual military threat to the United States.
Ironically but predictably, the U.S.'s aggressive and illegal war policy has finally provoked
a real military threat to the U.S., albeit one that has emerged only in response to U.S. war plans.
As I explained in a recent article , North Korea's discovery in 2016 of a U.S. plan to assassinate
its president, Kim Jong Un, and launch a Second Korean War has triggered a crash program to develop
long-range ballistic missiles that could give North Korea a viable nuclear deterrent and prevent
a U.S. attack. But the North Koreans will not feel safe from attack until their leaders and ours
are sure that their missiles can deliver a nuclear strike against the U.S. mainland.
The CIA's Pretexts for War
U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs
of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and
around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book,
The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World ,
was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores
and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher
sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role
of the CIA in U.S. policy.
Prouty surprisingly described the role of the CIA as a response by powerful people and interests
to the abolition of the U.S. Department of War and the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947.
Once the role of the U.S. military was redefined as one of defense, in line with the United Nations
Charter's
prohibition against the threat or use of military force in 1945 and similar moves by other military
powers, it would require some kind of crisis or threat to justify using military force in the future,
both legally and politically. The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such
pretexts for war.
The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence
and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating
pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years.
Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National
Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions
to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment,
ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out.
Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis
in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed
VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts
for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq.
CIA in Syria and Africa
But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations
to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty
meant. In late 2011, after destroying Libya and aiding in the torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi,
the CIA and its allies began
flying fighters
and weapons from Libya to Turkey and infiltrating them into Syria. Then, working with Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, Turkey, Croatia and other allies, this operation poured
thousands of tons of weapons across Syria's borders to ignite and fuel a full-scale civil war.
Once these covert operations were under way, they ran wild until they had unleashed a savage Al
Qaeda affiliate in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra, now rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), spawned the even
more savage "Islamic State," triggered
the heaviest
and
probably the deadliest U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam and drawn Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel,
Jordan, Hezbollah, Kurdish militias and almost every state or armed group in the Middle East into
the chaos of Syria's civil war.
Meanwhile, as Al Qaeda and Islamic State have expanded their operations across Africa, the U.N.
has published a report titled
Journey to Extremismin Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment
, based on 500 interviews with African militants. This study has found that the kind of special operations
and training missions the CIA and AFRICOM are conducting and supporting in Africa are in fact the
critical "tipping point" that drives Africans to join militant groups like Al Qaeda, Al-Shabab and
Boko Haram.
The report found that government action, such as the killing or detention of friends or family,
was the "tipping point" that drove 71 percent of African militants interviewed to join armed groups,
and that this was a more important factor than religious ideology.
The conclusions of Journey to Extremism in Africa confirm the findings of other similar
studies. The Center for Civilians in Conflict interviewed 250 civilians who joined armed groups in
Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya for its 2015 study,
The People's Perspectives: Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict . The study
found that the most common motivation for civilians to join armed groups was simply to protect themselves
or their families.
The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and
the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror,"
would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take
on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy
objective.
"The more intimate one becomes with this activity," Prouty wrote, "The more one begins to realize
that such operations are rarely, if ever, initiated from an intent to become involved in pursuit
of some national objective in the first place."
The U.S. justifies the deployment of 6,000 U.S. special forces and military trainers to
53 of the 54 countries in Africa as a response to terrorism. But the U.N.'s Journey to Extremism
in Africa study makes it clear that the U.S. militarization of Africa is in fact the "tipping
point" that is driving Africans across the continent to join armed resistance groups in the first
place.
This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early
60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations
that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed
resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on
a continental scale.
Taking on China
What seems to really be driving the CIA's militarization of U.S. policy in Africa is China's growing
influence on the continent. As Steve Bannon put it in an
interview with the Economist in August, "Let's go screw up One Belt One Road."
China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine
named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every
10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against
the wall, just to show we mean business."
China is too powerful and armed with nuclear weapons. So, in this case, the CIA's job would be
to spread violence and chaos to disrupt Chinese trade and investment, and to make African governments
increasingly dependent on U.S. military aid to fight the militant groups spawned and endlessly regenerated
by U.S.-led "counterterrorism" operations.
Neither Ledeen nor Bannon pretend that such policies are designed to build more prosperous or
viable societies in the Middle East or Africa, let alone to benefit their people. They both know
very well what Richard Barnet already understood 45 years ago, that America's unprecedented investment
in weapons, war and CIA covert operations are only good for one thing: to kill people and destroy
infrastructure, reducing cities to rubble, societies to chaos and the desperate survivors to poverty
and displacement.
As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies
into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the
safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash
on others.
But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely
about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop
the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which
we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike.
Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist,
beginning with his book on
The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled
The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's
analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many
ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy.
The Three Scapegoats
In
Trump's speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he named North Korea, Iran and Venezuela as his
prime targets for destabilization, economic warfare and, ultimately, the overthrow of their governments,
whether by coup d'etat or the mass destruction of their civilian population and infrastructure.
But Trump's choice of scapegoats for America's failures was obviously not based on a rational reassessment
of foreign policy priorities by the new administration. It was only a tired rehashing of the CIA's
unfinished business with two-thirds of Bush's "axis of evil" and Bush White House official
Elliott Abrams'
failed 2002 coup in Caracas, now laced with explicit and illegal threats of aggression.
How Trump and the CIA plan to sacrifice their three scapegoats for America's failures remains
to be seen. This is not 2001, when the world stood silent at the U.S. bombardment and invasion of
Afghanistan after September 11th. It is more like 2003, when the U.S. destruction of Iraq split the
Atlantic alliance and alienated most of the world. It is certainly not 2011, after Obama's global
charm offensive had rebuilt U.S. alliances and provided cover for French President Sarkozy, British
Prime Minister Cameron, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Arab royals to destroy Libya,
once ranked by the U.N. as the
most developed country
in Africa , now mired in intractable chaos.
In 2017, a U.S. attack on any one of Trump's scapegoats would isolate the United States from many
of its allies and undermine its standing in the world in far-reaching ways that might be more permanent
and harder to repair than the invasion and destruction of Iraq.
In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President
Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to
"make the economy
scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. But the
solid victory of Venezuela's
ruling Socialist Party in recent nationwide gubernatorial elections, despite a long and deep
economic crisis, reveals little public support for the CIA's puppets in Venezuela.
The CIA has successfully discredited the Venezuelan government through economic warfare, increasingly
violent right-wing street protests and a global propaganda campaign. But the CIA has stupidly hitched
its wagon to an extreme right-wing, upper-class opposition that has no credibility with most of the
Venezuelan public, who still turn out for the Socialists at the polls. A CIA coup or U.S. military
intervention would meet fierce public resistance and damage U.S. relations all over Latin America.
Boxing In North Korea
A U.S. aerial bombardment or "preemptive strike" on North Korea could quickly escalate into a
war between the U.S. and China, which has reiterated
its commitment to North
Korea's defense if North Korea is attacked. We do not know exactly what was in the
U.S. war plan discovered by North Korea, so neither can we know how North Korea and China could
respond if the U.S. pressed ahead with it.
Most analysts have long concluded that any U.S. attack on North Korea would be met with a North
Korean artillery and missile barrage that would inflict unacceptable civilian casualties on Seoul,
a metropolitan area of 26 million people, three times the population of New York City. Seoul is only
35 miles from the frontier with North Korea, placing it within range of a huge array of North Korean
weapons. What was already a no-win calculus is now compounded by the possibility that North Korea
could respond with nuclear weapons, turning any prospect of a U.S. attack into an even worse nightmare.
U.S. mismanagement of its relations with North Korea should be an object lesson for its relations
with Iran, graphically demonstrating the advantages of diplomacy, talks and agreements over threats
of war. Under the
Agreed Framework
signed in 1994, North Korea stopped work on two much larger nuclear reactors than the small experimental
one operating at Yongbyong since 1986, which only produces 6 kg of plutonium per year, enough for
one nuclear bomb.
The lesson of Bush's Iraq invasion in 2003 after Saddam Hussein had complied with demands that
he destroy Iraq's stockpiles of chemical weapons and shut down a nascent nuclear program was not
lost on North Korea. Not only did the invasion lay waste to large sections of Iraq with hundreds
of thousands of dead but Hussein himself was hunted down and condemned to death by hanging.
Still, after North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006, even its small experimental
reactor was shut down as a result of the
"Six Party Talks" in
2007, all the fuel rods were removed and placed under supervision of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, and the cooling tower of the reactor was demolished in 2008.
But then, as relations deteriorated, North Korea conducted a second nuclear weapon test and again
began reprocessing spent fuel rods to recover plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.
North Korea has now conducted six nuclear weapons tests. The explosions in
the first five tests increased gradually up to 15-25 kilotons, about the yield of the bombs the
U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but estimates for the yield of the 2017 test range
from 110
to 250 kilotons , comparable
to a small hydrogen bomb.
The even greater danger in a new war in Korea is that the U.S. could unleash part of its arsenal
of
4,000 more powerful weapons (100 to 1,200 kilotons), which could kill millions of people and
devastate and poison the region, or even the world, for years to come.
The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks
in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate
defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see
a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction.
China has proposed a
reasonable framework for diplomacy to address the concerns of both sides, but the U.S. insists
on maintaining its propaganda narratives that all the fault lies with North Korea and that it has
some kind of "military solution" to the crisis.
This may be the most dangerous idea we have heard from U.S. policymakers since the end of the
Cold War, but it is the logical culmination of a
systematic normalization of deviant and illegal U.S. war-making that has already cost millions
of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. As historian Gabriel Kolko
wrote in Century of War in 1994, "options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous
and irrational become not merely plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy
that is possible in official circles."
Demonizing Iran
The idea that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program is seriously contested by the IAEA,
which has examined every allegation presented by the CIA and other Western "intelligence" agencies
as well as Israel. Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed many details of this wild
goose chase in his 2011 memoir,
Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times .
When the CIA and its partners reluctantly acknowledged the IAEA's conclusions in a 2007 National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE), ElBaradei issued
a press release confirming that, "the agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons
program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran."
Since 2007, the IAEA has resolved all its outstanding concerns with Iran. It has verified that
dual-use technologies that Iran imported before 2003 were in fact used for other purposes, and it
has exposed the mysterious "laptop documents" that appeared to show Iranian plans for a nuclear weapon
as forgeries. Gareth Porter thoroughly explored all these questions and allegations and the history
of mistrust that fueled them in his 2014 book,
Manufactured
Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare , which I highly recommend.
But, in the parallel Bizarro world of U.S. politics, hopelessly poisoned by the CIA's
endless disinformation campaigns, Hillary Clinton could repeatedly take false credit for disarming
Iran during her presidential campaign, and neither Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump nor any corporate
media interviewer dared to challenge her claims.
"When President Obama took office, Iran was racing toward a nuclear bomb," Clinton fantasized
in a
prominent foreign policy speech on June 2, 2016, claiming that her brutal sanctions policy "brought
Iran to the table."
In fact, as Trita Parsi documented in his 2012 book,
A Single
Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy With Iran , the Iranians were ready, not just
to "come to the table," but to sign a comprehensive agreement based on a U.S. proposal brokered by
Turkey and Brazil in 2010. But, in a classic case of "tail wags dog," the U.S. then rejected its
own proposal because it would have undercut support for tighter sanctions in the U.N. Security Council.
In other words, Clinton's sanctions policy did not "bring Iran to the table", but prevented the U.S.
from coming to the table itself.
As a senior State Department official told Trita Parsi, the real problem with U.S. diplomacy with
Iran when Clinton was at the State Department was that the U.S. would not take "Yes" for an answer.
Trump's ham-fisted decertification of Iran's compliance with the JCPOA is right out of Clinton's
playbook, and it demonstrates that the CIA is still determined to use Iran as a scapegoat for America's
failures in the Middle East.
The spurious claim that Iran is the world's greatest sponsor of terrorism is another CIA canard
reinforced by endless repetition. It is true that Iran supports and supplies weapons to Hezbollah
and Hamas, which are both listed as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. But they are
mainly defensive resistance groups that defend Lebanon and Gaza respectively against invasions and
attacks by Israel.
Shifting attention away from Al Qaeda, Islamic State, the
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and other groups that actually commit terrorist crimes around the
world might just seem like a case of the CIA "taking its eyes off the ball," if it wasn't so transparently
timed to frame Iran with new accusations now that the manufactured crisis of the nuclear scare has
run its course.
What the Future Holds
Barack Obama's most consequential international achievement may have been the triumph of symbolism
over substance behind which he expanded and escalated the so-called "war on terror," with a vast
expansion of covert operations and proxy wars that eventually triggered the
heaviest U.S.
aerial bombardments since Vietnam in Iraq and Syria.
Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and
the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the
most expensive military budget of any president since World War Two.
But Obama's expansion of the "war on terror" under cover of his deceptive global public relations
campaign created many more problems than it solved, and Trump and his advisers are woefully ill-equipped
to solve any of them. Trump's expressed desire to place America first and to resist foreign entanglements
is hopelessly at odds with his aggressive, bullying approach to every foreign policy problem.
If the U.S. could threaten and fight its way to a resolution of any of its international problems,
it would have done so already. That is exactly what it has been trying to do since the 1990s, behind
both the swagger and bluster of Bush and Trump and the deceptive charm of Clinton and Obama: a "good
cop – bad cop" routine that should no longer fool anyone anywhere.
But as Lyndon Johnson found as he waded deeper and deeper into the Big Muddy in Vietnam, lying
to the public about unwinnable wars does not make them any more winnable. It just gets more people
killed and makes it harder and harder to ever tell the public the truth.
In unwinnable wars based on lies, the "credibility" problem only gets more complicated, as new
lies require new scapegoats and convoluted narratives to explain away graveyards filled by old lies.
Obama's cynical global charm offensive bought the "war on terror" another eight years, but that only
allowed the CIA to drag the U.S. into more trouble and spread its chaos to more places around the
world.
Meanwhile, Russian President Putin is winning hearts and minds in capitals around the world by
calling for a recommitment to the
rule of international
law , which
prohibits
the threat or use of military force except in self-defense. Every new U.S. threat or act of aggression
will only make Putin's case more persuasive, not least to important U.S. allies like South Korea,
Germany and other members of the European Union, whose complicity in U.S. aggression has until now
helped to give it a false veneer of political legitimacy.
Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition,
as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor.
France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their
own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and
destruction.
Americans had better hope that we are not so exceptional, and that the world will find a diplomatic
rather than a military "solution" to its American problem. Our chances of survival would improve
a great deal if American officials and politicians would finally start to act like something other
than putty in the hands of the CIA
Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction
of Iraq . He also wrote the chapters on "Obama at War" in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card
on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader .
The fact that he is employed by Guardia tells a lot how low Guardian fall. It's a yellow press (owned by intelligence agencies
if we talk about their coverage of Russia).
Notable quotes:
"... In theory, it would be hard to find two journalists more qualified to debate each side of this important issue. In practice, it was a one-sided thrashing that The Intercept 's Jeremy Scahill accurately described as "brutal". ..."
"... Russiagate only works if you allow it to remain zoomed out, where the individually weak arguments of this giant Gish gallop fallacy form the appearance of a legitimate argument. ..."
"... That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season. Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument. ..."
Have you ever wondered why mainstream media outlets, despite being so fond of dramatic panel
debates on other hot-button issues, never have critics of the Russiagate narrative on to debate
those who advance it? Well, in a recent Real News interview we received an extremely
clear answer to that question, and it was so epic it deserves its own article.
Real News host and producer Aaron Maté has recently emerged as one of the most
articulate critics of the establishment Russia narrative and the Trump-Russia conspiracy
theory, and has published in The Nation some of the
clearest
arguments against both that I've yet seen. Luke Harding is a journalist for The Guardian
where he has been
writing prolifically in promotion of the Russiagate narrative, and is the author of
New
York Times bestseller Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald
Trump Win.
In theory, it would be hard to find two journalists more qualified to debate each side of
this important issue. In practice, it was a one-sided thrashing that The Intercept 's Jeremy
Scahill accurately described as "brutal".
The term Gish gallop
, named after a Young Earth creationist who was notoriously fond of employing it, refers to a
fallacious debate tactic in which a bunch of individually weak arguments are strung together in
rapid-fire succession in order to create the illusion of a solid argument and overwhelm the
opposition's ability to refute them all in the time allotted. Throughout the discussion the
Gish gallop appeared to be the only tool that Luke Harding brought to the table, firing out a
deluge of feeble and unsubstantiated arguments only to be stopped over and over again by
Maté who kept pointing out when Harding was making a false or fallacious claim.
In this part here , for
example, the following exchange takes place while Harding is already against the ropes on the
back of a previous failed argument. I'm going to type this up so you can clearly see what's
happening here:
Harding: Look, I'm a journalist. I'm a storyteller. I'm not a kind of head of the CIA or
the NSA. But what I can tell you is that there have been similar operations in France, most
recently when President Macron was elected ? -
Harding: Yeah. But, if you'll let me finish, there've been attacks on the German parliament ?
-
Maté: Okay, but wait Luke, do you concede that the France hack that you just claimed
didn't happen?
Harding: [pause] What? -- ?that it didn't happen? Sorry?
Maté: Do you concede that the Russian hacking of the French election that you just
claimed actually is not true?
Harding: [pause] Well, I mean that it's not true? I mean, the French report was inconclusive,
but you have to look at this kind of contextually. We've seen attacks on other European
states as well from Russia, they have very kind of advanced cyber capabilities.
Maté: Where else?
Harding: Well, Estonia. Have you heard of Estonia? It's a state in the Baltics which was
crippled by a massive cyber attack in 2008, which certainly all kind of western European and
former eastern European states think was carried out by Moscow. I mean I was in Moscow at the
time, when relations between the two countries were extremely bad. This is a kind of ongoing
thing. Now you might say, quite legitimately, well the US does the same thing, the UK does
the same thing, and I think to a certain extent that is certainly right. I think what was
different last year was the attempt to kind of dump this stuff out into kind of US public
space and try and influence public opinion there. That's unusual. And of course that's a
matter of congressional inquiry and something Mueller is looking at too.
Maté: Right. But again, my problem here is that the examples that are frequently
presented to substantiate claims of this massive Russian hacking operation around the world
prove out to be false. So France as I mentioned; you also mentioned Germany. There was a lot
of worry about Russian hacking of the German elections, but it turned out? -- ?and there's
plenty of articles since then that have acknowledged this? - ? that actually there was no
Russian hack in Germany.
In the above exchange, Maté derailed Harding's Gish gallop, and Harding actually
admonished him for doing so, telling him "let me finish" and attempting to go on listing more
flimsy examples to bolster his case as though he hadn't just begun his Gish gallop with a
completely
false example .
That's really all Harding brought to the debate. A bunch of individually weak arguments, the
fact that he speaks Russian and has lived in Moscow, and the occasional straw man where he tries to imply that
Maté is claiming that Vladimir Putin is an innocent girl scout. Meanwhile Maté
just kept patiently dragging the debate back on track over and over again in the most polite
obliteration of a man that I have ever witnessed.
The entire interview followed this basic script. Harding makes an unfounded claim,
Maté holds him to the fact that it's unfounded, Harding sputters a bit and tries to zoom
things out and point to a bigger-picture analysis of broader trends to distract from the fact
that he'd just made an individual claim that was baseless, then winds up implying that
Maté is only skeptical of the claims because he hasn't lived in Russia as Harding
has.
jeremy scahill 0
@jeremyscahill
This @aaronjmate interview is brutal. He makes mincemeat of Luke Harding, who can't seem to
defend the thesis, much less the title, of his own book: Where's the 'Collusion' -
YouTube
11:03 AM-Dec 25, 2017
Q 131 11597 C? 1,148
The interview ended when Harding once again implied that Maté was only skeptical of
the collusion narrative because he'd never been to Russia and seen what a right-wing oppressive
government it is, after which the following exchange took place:
Maté: I don't think I've countered anything you've said about the state of Vladimir
Putin's Russia. The issue under discussion today has been whether there was collusion, the
topic of your book.
Harding: Yeah, but you're clearly a kind of collusion rejectionist, so I'm not sure what sort
of evidence short of Trump and Putin in a sauna together would convince you. Clearly nothing
would convince you. But anyway it's been a pleasure.
At which point Harding abruptly logged off the video chat, leaving Maté to wrap up
the show and promote Harding's book on his own.
You should definitely watch this debate for yourself , and enjoy
it, because I will be shocked if we ever see another like it. Harding's fate will serve as a
cautionary tale for the establishment hacks who've built their careers advancing the Russiagate
conspiracy theory , and it's highly unlikely that any of them will ever make the mistake of
trying to debate anyone of Maté's caliber again.
The reason Russiagaters speak so often in broad, sweeping terms? - saying there are too many
suspicious things happening for there not to be a there there, that there's too much smoke for
there not to be fire? - ? is because when you zoom in and focus on any individual part of their
conspiracy theory, it falls apart under the slightest amount of critical thinking (or as
Harding calls it, "collusion rejectionism"). Russiagate only works if you allow it to remain
zoomed out, where the individually weak arguments of this giant Gish gallop fallacy form the
appearance of a legitimate argument.
Well, Harding did say he's a storyteller.
* * *
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Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . Our Hidden History4
days ago (edited) That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right
nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence (something like Russia's Richard
Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.
He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is
to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western
intelligence agencies.
That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority -
Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read
my whole book" is just getting to the silly season. Also "well this is the kind of person Putin
is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long
history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around
of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when
it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument.
Few in the US know
about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be
involved in murdering journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not
explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course if someone here discusses he
death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian
were to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.
Essentially CIA dictates the US foreign policy. The tail is wagging the dog. The current Russophobia hysteria mean
additional billions for CIA and FBI. As simple as that.
The article contain some important observation about self-sustaining nature of the US
militarism. It is able to create new threats and new insurgencies almost at will via CIA activities.
The key problem is that wars are highly profitable for important part of the ruling elite,
especially representing finance and military industrial complex. Also now part of the US
ruling elite now consists of "colonial administrators" which are directly interested in maintaining
and expanding the US empire. This is trap from which nation might not be able to escape.
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S. Davies. ..."
"... Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. ..."
"... No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them. ..."
"... The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book Roots of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing," Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination." ..."
"... Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991. ..."
"... Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. ..."
"... Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any actual military threat to the United States. ..."
"... U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy. ..."
"... The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for war. ..."
"... The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years. ..."
"... Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out. ..."
"... Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq. ..."
"... But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant ..."
"... The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror," would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy objective. ..."
"... This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental scale. ..."
"... China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business." ..."
"... As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash on others. ..."
"... But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike. ..."
"... Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized Crime : How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy. ..."
"... In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to "make the economy scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. ..."
"... The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction. ..."
"... Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most expensive military budge t of any president since World War Two. ..."
"... Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction. ..."
The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington
seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer,
writes Nicolas J.S. Davies.
As the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American officials
ever believed that the United States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he committed
hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment
that had already killed millions of people.
As conversations tape-recorded in the White House reveal, and as other writers have documented,
the reasons for wading into the Big Muddy, as
Pete Seeger satirized it
, and then pushing on regardless, all came down to "credibility": the domestic political credibility
of the politicians involved and America's international credibility as a military power.
Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the
1954 Geneva Accords
and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die
was cast. The CIA's support for the repressive
Diem regime and its successors
ensured an ever-escalating war, as the South rose in rebellion, supported by the North. No U.S. president
could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could
achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited
from them.
The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book
Roots
of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing,"
Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination."
Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived
the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere,
but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of
Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991.
Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized
intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across
every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility
as Johnson and Nixon did. His predictable response has been to escalate ongoing wars in Syria, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and West Africa, and to threaten new ones against North Korea, Iran and
Venezuela.
Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries
across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only
become more entrenched over time, as
President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now,
the lack of any actual military threat to the United States.
Ironically but predictably, the U.S.'s aggressive and illegal war policy has finally provoked
a real military threat to the U.S., albeit one that has emerged only in response to U.S. war plans.
As I explained in a recent article , North Korea's discovery in 2016 of a U.S. plan to assassinate
its president, Kim Jong Un, and launch a Second Korean War has triggered a crash program to develop
long-range ballistic missiles that could give North Korea a viable nuclear deterrent and prevent
a U.S. attack. But the North Koreans will not feel safe from attack until their leaders and ours
are sure that their missiles can deliver a nuclear strike against the U.S. mainland.
The CIA's Pretexts for War
U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs
of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and
around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book,
The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World ,
was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores
and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher
sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role
of the CIA in U.S. policy.
Prouty surprisingly described the role of the CIA as a response by powerful people and interests
to the abolition of the U.S. Department of War and the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947.
Once the role of the U.S. military was redefined as one of defense, in line with the United Nations
Charter's
prohibition against the threat or use of military force in 1945 and similar moves by other military
powers, it would require some kind of crisis or threat to justify using military force in the future,
both legally and politically. The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such
pretexts for war.
The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence
and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating
pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years.
Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National
Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions
to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment,
ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out.
Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis
in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed
VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts
for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq.
CIA in Syria and Africa
But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations
to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty
meant. In late 2011, after destroying Libya and aiding in the torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi,
the CIA and its allies began
flying fighters
and weapons from Libya to Turkey and infiltrating them into Syria. Then, working with Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, Turkey, Croatia and other allies, this operation poured
thousands of tons of weapons across Syria's borders to ignite and fuel a full-scale civil war.
Once these covert operations were under way, they ran wild until they had unleashed a savage Al
Qaeda affiliate in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra, now rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), spawned the even
more savage "Islamic State," triggered
the heaviest
and
probably the deadliest U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam and drawn Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel,
Jordan, Hezbollah, Kurdish militias and almost every state or armed group in the Middle East into
the chaos of Syria's civil war.
Meanwhile, as Al Qaeda and Islamic State have expanded their operations across Africa, the U.N.
has published a report titled
Journey to Extremismin Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment
, based on 500 interviews with African militants. This study has found that the kind of special operations
and training missions the CIA and AFRICOM are conducting and supporting in Africa are in fact the
critical "tipping point" that drives Africans to join militant groups like Al Qaeda, Al-Shabab and
Boko Haram.
The report found that government action, such as the killing or detention of friends or family,
was the "tipping point" that drove 71 percent of African militants interviewed to join armed groups,
and that this was a more important factor than religious ideology.
The conclusions of Journey to Extremism in Africa confirm the findings of other similar
studies. The Center for Civilians in Conflict interviewed 250 civilians who joined armed groups in
Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya for its 2015 study,
The People's Perspectives: Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict . The study
found that the most common motivation for civilians to join armed groups was simply to protect themselves
or their families.
The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and
the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror,"
would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take
on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy
objective.
"The more intimate one becomes with this activity," Prouty wrote, "The more one begins to realize
that such operations are rarely, if ever, initiated from an intent to become involved in pursuit
of some national objective in the first place."
The U.S. justifies the deployment of 6,000 U.S. special forces and military trainers to
53 of the 54 countries in Africa as a response to terrorism. But the U.N.'s Journey to Extremism
in Africa study makes it clear that the U.S. militarization of Africa is in fact the "tipping
point" that is driving Africans across the continent to join armed resistance groups in the first
place.
This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early
60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations
that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed
resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on
a continental scale.
Taking on China
What seems to really be driving the CIA's militarization of U.S. policy in Africa is China's growing
influence on the continent. As Steve Bannon put it in an
interview with the Economist in August, "Let's go screw up One Belt One Road."
China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine
named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every
10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against
the wall, just to show we mean business."
China is too powerful and armed with nuclear weapons. So, in this case, the CIA's job would be
to spread violence and chaos to disrupt Chinese trade and investment, and to make African governments
increasingly dependent on U.S. military aid to fight the militant groups spawned and endlessly regenerated
by U.S.-led "counterterrorism" operations.
Neither Ledeen nor Bannon pretend that such policies are designed to build more prosperous or
viable societies in the Middle East or Africa, let alone to benefit their people. They both know
very well what Richard Barnet already understood 45 years ago, that America's unprecedented investment
in weapons, war and CIA covert operations are only good for one thing: to kill people and destroy
infrastructure, reducing cities to rubble, societies to chaos and the desperate survivors to poverty
and displacement.
As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies
into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the
safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash
on others.
But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely
about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop
the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which
we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike.
Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist,
beginning with his book on
The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled
The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's
analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many
ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy.
The Three Scapegoats
In
Trump's speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he named North Korea, Iran and Venezuela as his
prime targets for destabilization, economic warfare and, ultimately, the overthrow of their governments,
whether by coup d'etat or the mass destruction of their civilian population and infrastructure.
But Trump's choice of scapegoats for America's failures was obviously not based on a rational reassessment
of foreign policy priorities by the new administration. It was only a tired rehashing of the CIA's
unfinished business with two-thirds of Bush's "axis of evil" and Bush White House official
Elliott Abrams'
failed 2002 coup in Caracas, now laced with explicit and illegal threats of aggression.
How Trump and the CIA plan to sacrifice their three scapegoats for America's failures remains
to be seen. This is not 2001, when the world stood silent at the U.S. bombardment and invasion of
Afghanistan after September 11th. It is more like 2003, when the U.S. destruction of Iraq split the
Atlantic alliance and alienated most of the world. It is certainly not 2011, after Obama's global
charm offensive had rebuilt U.S. alliances and provided cover for French President Sarkozy, British
Prime Minister Cameron, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Arab royals to destroy Libya,
once ranked by the U.N. as the
most developed country
in Africa , now mired in intractable chaos.
In 2017, a U.S. attack on any one of Trump's scapegoats would isolate the United States from many
of its allies and undermine its standing in the world in far-reaching ways that might be more permanent
and harder to repair than the invasion and destruction of Iraq.
In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President
Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to
"make the economy
scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. But the
solid victory of Venezuela's
ruling Socialist Party in recent nationwide gubernatorial elections, despite a long and deep
economic crisis, reveals little public support for the CIA's puppets in Venezuela.
The CIA has successfully discredited the Venezuelan government through economic warfare, increasingly
violent right-wing street protests and a global propaganda campaign. But the CIA has stupidly hitched
its wagon to an extreme right-wing, upper-class opposition that has no credibility with most of the
Venezuelan public, who still turn out for the Socialists at the polls. A CIA coup or U.S. military
intervention would meet fierce public resistance and damage U.S. relations all over Latin America.
Boxing In North Korea
A U.S. aerial bombardment or "preemptive strike" on North Korea could quickly escalate into a
war between the U.S. and China, which has reiterated
its commitment to North
Korea's defense if North Korea is attacked. We do not know exactly what was in the
U.S. war plan discovered by North Korea, so neither can we know how North Korea and China could
respond if the U.S. pressed ahead with it.
Most analysts have long concluded that any U.S. attack on North Korea would be met with a North
Korean artillery and missile barrage that would inflict unacceptable civilian casualties on Seoul,
a metropolitan area of 26 million people, three times the population of New York City. Seoul is only
35 miles from the frontier with North Korea, placing it within range of a huge array of North Korean
weapons. What was already a no-win calculus is now compounded by the possibility that North Korea
could respond with nuclear weapons, turning any prospect of a U.S. attack into an even worse nightmare.
U.S. mismanagement of its relations with North Korea should be an object lesson for its relations
with Iran, graphically demonstrating the advantages of diplomacy, talks and agreements over threats
of war. Under the
Agreed Framework
signed in 1994, North Korea stopped work on two much larger nuclear reactors than the small experimental
one operating at Yongbyong since 1986, which only produces 6 kg of plutonium per year, enough for
one nuclear bomb.
The lesson of Bush's Iraq invasion in 2003 after Saddam Hussein had complied with demands that
he destroy Iraq's stockpiles of chemical weapons and shut down a nascent nuclear program was not
lost on North Korea. Not only did the invasion lay waste to large sections of Iraq with hundreds
of thousands of dead but Hussein himself was hunted down and condemned to death by hanging.
Still, after North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006, even its small experimental
reactor was shut down as a result of the
"Six Party Talks" in
2007, all the fuel rods were removed and placed under supervision of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, and the cooling tower of the reactor was demolished in 2008.
But then, as relations deteriorated, North Korea conducted a second nuclear weapon test and again
began reprocessing spent fuel rods to recover plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.
North Korea has now conducted six nuclear weapons tests. The explosions in
the first five tests increased gradually up to 15-25 kilotons, about the yield of the bombs the
U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but estimates for the yield of the 2017 test range
from 110
to 250 kilotons , comparable
to a small hydrogen bomb.
The even greater danger in a new war in Korea is that the U.S. could unleash part of its arsenal
of
4,000 more powerful weapons (100 to 1,200 kilotons), which could kill millions of people and
devastate and poison the region, or even the world, for years to come.
The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks
in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate
defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see
a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction.
China has proposed a
reasonable framework for diplomacy to address the concerns of both sides, but the U.S. insists
on maintaining its propaganda narratives that all the fault lies with North Korea and that it has
some kind of "military solution" to the crisis.
This may be the most dangerous idea we have heard from U.S. policymakers since the end of the
Cold War, but it is the logical culmination of a
systematic normalization of deviant and illegal U.S. war-making that has already cost millions
of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. As historian Gabriel Kolko
wrote in Century of War in 1994, "options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous
and irrational become not merely plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy
that is possible in official circles."
Demonizing Iran
The idea that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program is seriously contested by the IAEA,
which has examined every allegation presented by the CIA and other Western "intelligence" agencies
as well as Israel. Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed many details of this wild
goose chase in his 2011 memoir,
Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times .
When the CIA and its partners reluctantly acknowledged the IAEA's conclusions in a 2007 National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE), ElBaradei issued
a press release confirming that, "the agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons
program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran."
Since 2007, the IAEA has resolved all its outstanding concerns with Iran. It has verified that
dual-use technologies that Iran imported before 2003 were in fact used for other purposes, and it
has exposed the mysterious "laptop documents" that appeared to show Iranian plans for a nuclear weapon
as forgeries. Gareth Porter thoroughly explored all these questions and allegations and the history
of mistrust that fueled them in his 2014 book,
Manufactured
Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare , which I highly recommend.
But, in the parallel Bizarro world of U.S. politics, hopelessly poisoned by the CIA's
endless disinformation campaigns, Hillary Clinton could repeatedly take false credit for disarming
Iran during her presidential campaign, and neither Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump nor any corporate
media interviewer dared to challenge her claims.
"When President Obama took office, Iran was racing toward a nuclear bomb," Clinton fantasized
in a
prominent foreign policy speech on June 2, 2016, claiming that her brutal sanctions policy "brought
Iran to the table."
In fact, as Trita Parsi documented in his 2012 book,
A Single
Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy With Iran , the Iranians were ready, not just
to "come to the table," but to sign a comprehensive agreement based on a U.S. proposal brokered by
Turkey and Brazil in 2010. But, in a classic case of "tail wags dog," the U.S. then rejected its
own proposal because it would have undercut support for tighter sanctions in the U.N. Security Council.
In other words, Clinton's sanctions policy did not "bring Iran to the table", but prevented the U.S.
from coming to the table itself.
As a senior State Department official told Trita Parsi, the real problem with U.S. diplomacy with
Iran when Clinton was at the State Department was that the U.S. would not take "Yes" for an answer.
Trump's ham-fisted decertification of Iran's compliance with the JCPOA is right out of Clinton's
playbook, and it demonstrates that the CIA is still determined to use Iran as a scapegoat for America's
failures in the Middle East.
The spurious claim that Iran is the world's greatest sponsor of terrorism is another CIA canard
reinforced by endless repetition. It is true that Iran supports and supplies weapons to Hezbollah
and Hamas, which are both listed as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. But they are
mainly defensive resistance groups that defend Lebanon and Gaza respectively against invasions and
attacks by Israel.
Shifting attention away from Al Qaeda, Islamic State, the
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and other groups that actually commit terrorist crimes around the
world might just seem like a case of the CIA "taking its eyes off the ball," if it wasn't so transparently
timed to frame Iran with new accusations now that the manufactured crisis of the nuclear scare has
run its course.
What the Future Holds
Barack Obama's most consequential international achievement may have been the triumph of symbolism
over substance behind which he expanded and escalated the so-called "war on terror," with a vast
expansion of covert operations and proxy wars that eventually triggered the
heaviest U.S.
aerial bombardments since Vietnam in Iraq and Syria.
Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and
the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the
most expensive military budget of any president since World War Two.
But Obama's expansion of the "war on terror" under cover of his deceptive global public relations
campaign created many more problems than it solved, and Trump and his advisers are woefully ill-equipped
to solve any of them. Trump's expressed desire to place America first and to resist foreign entanglements
is hopelessly at odds with his aggressive, bullying approach to every foreign policy problem.
If the U.S. could threaten and fight its way to a resolution of any of its international problems,
it would have done so already. That is exactly what it has been trying to do since the 1990s, behind
both the swagger and bluster of Bush and Trump and the deceptive charm of Clinton and Obama: a "good
cop – bad cop" routine that should no longer fool anyone anywhere.
But as Lyndon Johnson found as he waded deeper and deeper into the Big Muddy in Vietnam, lying
to the public about unwinnable wars does not make them any more winnable. It just gets more people
killed and makes it harder and harder to ever tell the public the truth.
In unwinnable wars based on lies, the "credibility" problem only gets more complicated, as new
lies require new scapegoats and convoluted narratives to explain away graveyards filled by old lies.
Obama's cynical global charm offensive bought the "war on terror" another eight years, but that only
allowed the CIA to drag the U.S. into more trouble and spread its chaos to more places around the
world.
Meanwhile, Russian President Putin is winning hearts and minds in capitals around the world by
calling for a recommitment to the
rule of international
law , which
prohibits
the threat or use of military force except in self-defense. Every new U.S. threat or act of aggression
will only make Putin's case more persuasive, not least to important U.S. allies like South Korea,
Germany and other members of the European Union, whose complicity in U.S. aggression has until now
helped to give it a false veneer of political legitimacy.
Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition,
as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor.
France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their
own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and
destruction.
Americans had better hope that we are not so exceptional, and that the world will find a diplomatic
rather than a military "solution" to its American problem. Our chances of survival would improve
a great deal if American officials and politicians would finally start to act like something other
than putty in the hands of the CIA
Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction
of Iraq . He also wrote the chapters on "Obama at War" in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card
on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader .
If this is true, then this is definitely a sophisticated false flag operation. Was malware Alperovich people injected specifically
designed to implicate Russians? In other words Crowdstrike=Fancy Bear
Images removed. For full content please thee the original source
One interesting corollary of this analysis is that installing Crowdstrike software is like inviting a wolf to guard your chicken.
If they are so dishonest you take enormous risks. That might be true for some other heavily advertized "intrusion prevention" toolkits.
So those criminals who use mistyped popular addresses or buy Google searches to drive lemmings to their site and then flash the screen
that they detected a virus on your computer a, please call provided number and for a small amount of money your virus will be removed
get a new more sinister life.
"... Disobedient Media outlines the DNC server cover-up evidenced in CrowdStrike malware infusion ..."
"... In the article, they claim to have just been working on eliminating the last of the hackers from the DNC's network during the past weekend (conveniently coinciding with Assange's statement and being an indirect admission that their Falcon software had failed to achieve it's stated capabilities at that time , assuming their statements were accurate) . ..."
"... To date, CrowdStrike has not been able to show how the malware had relayed any emails or accessed any mailboxes. They have also not responded to inquiries specifically asking for details about this. In fact, things have now been discovered that bring some of their malware discoveries into question. ..."
"... there is a reason to think Fancy Bear didn't start some of its activity until CrowdStrike had arrived at the DNC. CrowdStrike, in the indiciators of compromise they reported, identified three pieces of malware relating to Fancy Bear: ..."
"... They found that generally, in a lot of cases, malware developers didn't care to hide the compile times and that while implausible timestamps are used, it's rare that these use dates in the future. It's possible, but unlikely that one sample would have a postdated timestamp to coincide with their visit by mere chance but seems extremely unlikely to happen with two or more samples. Considering the dates of CrowdStrike's activities at the DNC coincide with the compile dates of two out of the three pieces of malware discovered and attributed to APT-28 (the other compiled approximately 2 weeks prior to their visit), the big question is: Did CrowdStrike plant some (or all) of the APT-28 malware? ..."
"... The IP address, according to those articles, was disabled in June 2015, eleven months before the DNC emails were acquired – meaning those IP addresses, in reality, had no involvement in the alleged hacking of the DNC. ..."
"... The fact that two out of three of the Fancy Bear malware samples identified were compiled on dates within the apparent five day period CrowdStrike were apparently at the DNC seems incredibly unlikely to have occurred by mere chance. ..."
"... That all three malware samples were compiled within ten days either side of their visit – makes it clear just how questionable the Fancy Bear malware discoveries were. ..."
Of course the DNC did not want to the FBI to investigate its "hacked servers". The plan was well underway to excuse Hillary's
pathetic election defeat to Trump, and
CrowdStrike would help out by planting evidence to pin on those evil "Russian hackers." Some would call this
entire DNC server hack an
"insurance policy."
"... By illuminating CIA programs and systems of surveillance, control, and assassination utilized against the civilian population of South Vietnam, we are presented with parallels with operations and practices at work today in America's seemingly perpetual war against terror. ..."
"... Through the policies of covert infiltration and manipulations, illegal alliances, and "brute force" interventions that wreak havoc on designated enemy states, destroy progress and infrastructure under the claim of liberation, degrade the standards of living for people in the perceived hostile nations, "...America's ruling elite empowers itself while claiming it has ensured the safety and prestige of the American people. Sometimes it is even able to convince the public that its criminal actions are 'humanitarian' and designed to liberate the people in nations it destroys." ..."
"... Want to know why the DEA is losing the war on drugs, how torture has become policy? Want to know why the government no longer represents your interests? Look no further. ..."
Of the extraordinarily valuable and informative works for which Mr. Valentine is responsible, his latest, CIA As Organized
Crime, may prove to be the best choice as an introduction to the dark realm of America's hidden corruptions and their consequences
at home and around the world. This new volume begins with the unlikely but irrevocable framework by which Mr. Valentine's path
led to unprecedented access to key Agency personnel whose witting participation is summarized by the chapter title: "How William
Colby Gave Me the Keys to the CIA Kingdom."
By illuminating CIA programs and systems of surveillance, control, and assassination utilized against the civilian population
of South Vietnam, we are presented with parallels with operations and practices at work today in America's seemingly perpetual
war against terror.
Through the policies of covert infiltration and manipulations, illegal alliances, and "brute force" interventions that
wreak havoc on designated enemy states, destroy progress and infrastructure under the claim of liberation, degrade the standards
of living for people in the perceived hostile nations, "...America's ruling elite empowers itself while claiming it has ensured
the safety and prestige of the American people. Sometimes it is even able to convince the public that its criminal actions are
'humanitarian' and designed to liberate the people in nations it destroys."
Mr. Valentine has presented us with a major body of work which includes: The Strength of the Wolf; The Strength of the Pack;
The Pheonix Program, to which we may now add The CIA as Organized Crime, and for which we are profoundly indebted.
If you want the inside scoop on the CIA and it's criminal past; this is the book. Additionally, why the Phoenix Program is
pertinent for our own times. This book connects the dots.
If you have been wondering why Homeland Security has fusion centers; why the USA Anti-Patriot Act, NDAA and Rex 84 have been
passed by Congress; you will get your answer here.
A book every intelligent American needs to read and place in a prominent place in their library. Oh, and don't forget after
you read it; spread the word !!! (this book is based upon actual face to face interviews and documents)
Run, don't walk, and get yourself a copy of this book. The author has been warning us for decades about the clear and present
danger that is the CIA I was unaware of Valentine's work for most of those years, perhaps because our media outlets (even the
"anti-establishment" ones like Democracy Now and The Intercept) have been compromised. Valentine's work has been suppressed since
his ground-breaking book on the Phoenix Program.
Not that I didn't know anything about the sordid history. I knew about MK-Ultra, some of the agency's drug running and empire-building
exploits. This work goes much deeper and paints a much bigger picture. The extent of the agency's influence is much greater than
I had imagined.
This is not another history book about dirty tricks. It is not just about our insane foreign policy and empire building. The
cancer of corruption, of outright crime, has metastasized into every agency of the government right here in the US itself. Those
dirty tricks and crimes have become domestic policy- in fusion centers and Homeland Security, in the militarization of local police
and in Congress, from Wall Street to Main Street. Border Patrol, the DEA, Justice and State have all been compromised.
Want to know why the DEA is losing the war on drugs, how torture has become policy? Want to know why the government no
longer represents your interests? Look no further.
The problem is now. We are the new targets.
Read it and weep, but for God's sake, please read it.
A highly informative and comprehensive book, and a scathing, fearless indictment of government corruption.
I cannot overstate it's importance.
I just picked up this book and have not read it yet--but I am writing this to CORRECT THE RECORD regarding very basic information.
There are 446 PAGES (not 286, as listed above). 160 Pages is a big difference--obviously, QUALITY is more important than quantity--but
I do feel the listing needs be corrected.
The "Inside Look" feature is also cutting off the last 9 chapters of the book, which are as follows:
Chapter 16: Major General Bruce Lawlor: From CIA Officer in Vietnam to Homeland Security Honcho
Chapter 17: Homeland Security: The Phoenix Comes Home to Roost
PART IV: MANUFACTURING COMPLICITY: SHAPING THE AMERICAN WORLDVIEW
Chapter 18: Fragging Bob Kerrey: The CIA and the Need for a War Crimes Tribunal
Chapter 19: Top Secret America Shadow Reward System
Chapter 20: How Government Tries to Mess with Your Mind
Chapter 21: Disguising Obama's Dirty War
Chapter 22: Parallels of Conquest, Past and Present
Chapter 23: Propaganda as Terrorism
Chapter 24: The War on Terror as the Greatest Covert Op Ever
This is a devastating and must-read study of the social and political calamity created by the CIA over the last sixty years.
The portrait shows the criminal character of the agency and finally of the government it is said to serve. The portrait is a double
shock because it shows not just a sordid corruption but a malevolent 'dark side' mafia-style corruption of american civilization
and government. That the CIA controls the drug trade is not the least of the stunning revelations of this history.
This was written almost a year ago. Not author demonstrated tremendous insight which was confirmed by subsequent events.
Notable quotes:
"... The decisive shift to 'regime change' at home has been a continual process organized, orchestrated and implemented by elected and appointed officials within the Obama regime and by a multiplicity of political action organizations, which cross traditional ideological boundaries. ..."
"... The outgoing President Obama mobilized the entire leadership of the security state to fabricate 'dodgy dossiers' linking Donald Trump to the Russian President Vladimir Putin, insisting that Trump was a stooge or 'vulnerable to KGB blackmail'. The CIA's phony documents (arriving via a former British intelligence operative-now free lance 'security' contractor) were passed around among the major corporate media who declined to publish the leaked gossip. Months of attempts to get the US media to 'take the bite' on the 'smelly' dossier were unsuccessful. The semi-senile US Senator John McCain ('war-hero' and hysterical Trump opponent) then volunteered to plop the reeking gossip back onto the lap of the CIA Director Brennan and demand the government 'act on these vital revelations'! ..."
"... Under scrutiny by serious researchers, the 'CIA dossier' was proven to be a total fabrication by way of a former 'British official – now – in – hiding !' Undaunted, despite being totally discredited, the CIA leadership continued to attack the President-Elect. Trump likened the CIA's 'dirty pictures hatchet job' to the thuggish behavior of the Nazis and clearly understood how the CIA leadership was involved in a domestic coup d'état. ..."
"... CIA Director John Brennan, architect of numerous 'regime changes' overseas had brought his skills home – against the President-elect. For the first time in US history, a CIA director openly charged a President or President-elect with betraying the country and threatened the incoming Chief Executive. He coldly warned Trump to ' just make sure he understands that the implications and impacts (of Trump's policies) on the United States could be profound " ..."
The norms of US capitalist democracy include the election of presidential candidates through competitive elections, unimpeded
by force and violence by the permanent institutions of the state. Voter manipulation has occurred during the recent elections, as
in the case of the John F. Kennedy victory in 1960 and the George W. Bush victory over 'Al' Gore in 2000. But despite the dubious
electoral outcomes in these cases, the 'defeated' candidate conceded and sought via legislation, judicial rulings, lobbying and peaceful
protests to register their opposition.
These norms are no longer operative. During the election process, and in the run-up to the inauguration of US President-Elect
Donald Trump, fundamental electoral institutions were challenged and coercive institutions were activated to disqualify the elected
president and desperate overt public pronouncements threatened the entire electoral order.
We will proceed by outlining the process that is used to undermine the constitutional order, including the electoral process and
the transition to the inauguration of the elected president.
Regime Change in America
In recent times, elected officials in the US and their state security organizations have often intervened against independent
foreign governments, which challenged Washington 's quest for global domination. This was especially true during the eight years
of President Barack Obama's administration where the violent ousting of presidents and prime ministers through US-engineered coups
were routine – under an unofficial doctrine of 'regime change'.
The violation of constitutional order and electoral norms of other countries has become enshrined in US policy. All US political,
administrative and security structures are involved in this process. The policymakers would insist that there was a clear distinction
between operating within constitutional norms at home and pursuing violent, illegal regime change operations abroad.
Today the distinction between overseas and domestic norms has been obliterated by the state and quasi-official mass media. The
US security apparatus is now active in manipulating the domestic democratic process of electing leaders and transitioning administrations.
The decisive shift to 'regime change' at home has been a continual process organized, orchestrated and implemented by elected
and appointed officials within the Obama regime and by a multiplicity of political action organizations, which cross traditional
ideological boundaries.
Regime change has several components leading to the final solution: First and foremost, the political parties seek to delegitimize
the election process and undermine the President-elect. The mass media play a major role demonizing President-Elect Trump with personal
gossip, decades-old sex scandals and fabricated interviews and incidents.
Alongside the media blitz, leftist and rightist politicians have come together to question the legitimacy of the November 2016
election results. Even after a recount confirmed Trump's victory, a massive propaganda campaign was launched to impeach the president-elect
even before he takes office – by claiming Trump was an 'enemy agent'.
The Democratic Party and the motley collection of right-left anti-Trump militants sought to blackmail members of the Electoral
College to change their vote in violation of their own mandate as state electors. This was unsuccessful, but unprecedented.
Their overt attack on US electoral norms then turned into a bizarre and virulent anti-Russia campaign designed to paint the elected
president (a billionaire New York real estate developer and US celebrity icon) as a 'tool of Moscow .' The mass media and powerful
elements within the CIA, Congress and Obama Administration insisted that Trump's overtures toward peaceful, diplomatic relations
with Russia were acts of treason.
The outgoing President Obama mobilized the entire leadership of the security state to fabricate 'dodgy dossiers' linking Donald
Trump to the Russian President Vladimir Putin, insisting that Trump was a stooge or 'vulnerable to KGB blackmail'. The CIA's phony
documents (arriving via a former British intelligence operative-now free lance 'security' contractor) were passed around among the
major corporate media who declined to publish the leaked gossip. Months of attempts to get the US media to 'take the bite' on the
'smelly' dossier were unsuccessful. The semi-senile US Senator John McCain ('war-hero' and hysterical Trump opponent) then volunteered
to plop the reeking gossip back onto the lap of the CIA Director Brennan and demand the government 'act on these vital revelations'!
Under scrutiny by serious researchers, the 'CIA dossier' was proven to be a total fabrication by way of a former 'British
official – now – in – hiding !' Undaunted, despite being totally discredited, the CIA leadership continued to attack the President-Elect.
Trump likened the CIA's 'dirty pictures hatchet job' to the thuggish behavior of the Nazis and clearly understood how the CIA leadership
was involved in a domestic coup d'état.
CIA Director John Brennan, architect of numerous 'regime changes' overseas had brought his skills home – against the President-elect.
For the first time in US history, a CIA director openly charged a President or President-elect with betraying the country and threatened
the incoming Chief Executive. He coldly warned Trump to ' just make sure he understands that the implications and impacts (of Trump's
policies) on the United States could be profound "
Clearly CIA Director Brennan has not only turned the CIA into a sinister, unaccountable power dictating policy to an elected US
president, by taking on the tone of a Mafia Capo, he threatens the physical security of the incoming leader.
From a Scratch to Gangrene
The worst catastrophe that could fall on the United States would be a conspiracy of leftist and rightist politicos, the corporate
mass media and the 'progressive' websites and pundits providing ideological cover for a CIA-orchestrated 'regime change'.
Whatever the limitations of our electoral norms- and there are many – they are now being degraded and discarded in a march toward
an elite coup, involving elements of the militarist empire and 'in`telligence' hierarchy.
Mass propaganda, a 'red-brown alliance, salacious gossip and accusations of treason ('Trump, the Stooge of Moscow') resemble the
atmosphere leading to the rise of the Nazi state in Germany . A broad 'coalition' has joined hands with a most violent and murderous
organization (the CIA) and imperial political leadership, which views overtures to peace to be high treason because it limits their
drive for world power and a US dominated global political order.
James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York.
http://petras.lahaine.org/
"... The promotion of the alleged Russian election hacking in certain media may have grown from the successful attempts of U.S. intelligence services to limit the publication of the NSA files obtained by Edward Snowden. ..."
"... In May 2013 Edward Snowden fled to Hongkong and handed internal documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) to four journalists, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian and separately to Barton Gellman who worked for the Washington Post . ..."
"... In July 2013 the Guardian was forced by the British government to destroy its copy of the Snowden archive. ..."
"... In August 2013 Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for some $250 million. In 2012 Bezos, the founder, largest share holder and CEO of Amazon, had already a cooperation with the CIA. Together they invested in a Canadian quantum computing company. In March 2013 Amazon signed a $600 million deal to provide computing services for the CIA. ..."
"... The motivation for the Bezos and Omidyar to do this is not clear. Bezos is estimated to own a shameful $90 billion. The Washington Post buy is chump-change for him. Omidyar has a net worth of some $9.3 billion. But the use of billionaires to mask what are in fact intelligence operations is not new. The Ford Foundation has for decades been a CIA front , George Soros' Open Society foundation is one of the premier "regime change" operations, well versed in instigating "color revolutions" ..."
"... It would have been reasonable if the cooperation between those billionaires and the intelligence agencies had stopped after the NSA leaks were secured. But it seems that strong cooperation of the Bezos and Omidyar outlets with the CIA and others continue. ..."
"... The Washington Post , which has a much bigger reach, is the prime outlet for "Russia-gate", the false claims by parts of the U.S. intelligence community and the Clinton campaign, that Russia attempted to influence U.S. elections or even "colluded" with Trump. ..."
"... The revelation that the sole Russiagate "evidence" was the so-called Steele Dossier - i.e. opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign - which was used by the intelligence community to not only begin the public assertions of Trump's perfidy but to then initiate FISA approved surveillance on the Trump campaign, that is truly astonishing. Instructive then that the NY Times, Washington Post, etc have yet to acknowledge these facts to their readers, and instead have effectively doubled down on the story, insisting that the Russiagate allegations are established fact and constitute "objective reality." That suggests this fake news story will continue indefinitely. ..."
"... What we see here is these bastions of establishment thinking in the USA promoting "objective reality" as partisan - i.e. there is a Clinton reality versus a Trump reality, or a Russian reality versus a "Western" reality, facts and documentation be damned. This divorce from objectivity is a symptom of the overall decline of American institutions, an indicate a future hard, rather than soft, landing near the end of the road. ..."
The promotion of the alleged Russian election hacking in certain media may have grown from the successful attempts of U.S. intelligence
services to limit the publication of the NSA files obtained by Edward Snowden.
In May 2013 Edward Snowden fled to Hongkong and handed internal documents
from the National Security Agency (NSA) to four journalists,
Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian and separately to Barton Gellman who worked for the
Washington Post . Some of those documents were published by Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian , others by Barton
Gellman in the Washington Post . Several other international news site published additional material though the mass of
NSA papers that Snowden allegedly acquired never saw public daylight.
In July 2013 the Guardian was
forced by the British government to destroy its copy of the Snowden archive.
In August 2013 Jeff Bezos
bought the Washington Post for some $250 million. In 2012 Bezos, the founder, largest share holder and CEO of Amazon,
had already a cooperation with the CIA. Together they
invested
in a Canadian quantum computing company. In March 2013 Amazon
signed a $600 million
deal to provide computing services for the CIA.
In October 2013 Pierre Omidyar, the owner of Ebay, founded
First Look Media and hired Glenn Greenwald and Laura
Poitras. The total planned investment was said to be $250 million. It took up to February 2014 until the new organization launched
its first site, the Intercept . Only a few NSA stories appeared on it. The Intercept is a rather mediocre site.
Its management is
said to be chaotic . It publishes few stories of interests and one might ask if it ever was meant to be a serious outlet. Omidyar
has worked,
together with the U.S. government, to force regime change onto Ukraine. He had
strong ties with the Obama administration.
Snowden had copies of some
20,000 to 58,000 NSA files . Only 1,182 have been
published . Bezos and Omidyar obviously helped the NSA to keep more than 95% of the Snowden archive away from the public. The
Snowden papers were practically privatized into trusted hands of Silicon Valley billionaires with ties to the various secret services
and the Obama administration.
The motivation for the Bezos and Omidyar to do this is not clear. Bezos is
estimated to own a shameful
$90 billion. The Washington Post buy is chump-change for him. Omidyar has a net worth of some $9.3 billion. But the use
of billionaires to mask what are in fact intelligence operations is not new. The Ford Foundation has for decades been
a CIA front , George Soros' Open Society foundation is
one of the premier "regime change" operations, well versed in instigating "color revolutions".
It would have been reasonable if the cooperation between those billionaires and the intelligence agencies had stopped after the
NSA leaks were secured. But it seems that strong cooperation of the Bezos and Omidyar outlets with the CIA and others continue.
The Interceptburned
a intelligence leaker, Realty Winner, who had trusted its journalists to keep her protected. It
smeared the President of Syria as neo-nazi based on an (intentional?) mistranslation of one of his speeches. It additionally
hired a Syrian supporter of the CIA's "regime change by Jihadis" in Syria. Despite its
pretense of "fearless, adversarial journalism" it hardly deviates from
U.S. policies.
The Washington Post , which has a much bigger reach, is the prime outlet for "Russia-gate", the false claims by parts
of the U.S. intelligence community and the Clinton campaign, that Russia attempted to influence U.S. elections or even "colluded"
with Trump.
Just today it provides two stories and one op-ed that lack any factual evidence for the anti-Russian claims made in them.
In
Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options the writers insinuate that some anonymous writer who
published a few pieces on Counterpunch and elsewhere was part of a Russian operation. They provide zero evidence to back that claim
up. Whatever that writer
wrote (see
list at end) was run of the mill stuff that had little to do with the U.S. election. The piece then dives into various cyber-operations
against Russia that the Obama and Trump administration have discussed.
A
second story in the paper today is based on "a classified GRU report obtained by The Washington Post." It claims that the Russian
military intelligence service GRU started a social media operation one day after the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was illegally
removed from his office in a U.S. regime change
operation . What the story lists as alleged GRU puppet postings reads like normal internet talk of people opposed to the fascist
regime change in Kiev. The Washington Post leaves completely unexplained who handed it an alleged GRU report from 2014,
who classified it and how, if at all, it verified its veracity. To me the piece and the assertions therein have a strong odor of
bovine excrement.
An op-ed in the very same Washington Post has a similar smell. It is written by the intelligence flunkies Michael Morell
and Mike Rogers. Morell had hoped to become CIA boss under a President Hillary Clinton. The op-ed (which includes a serious misunderstanding
of "deterrence") asserts that
Russia never stopped its cyberattacks on the United States :
Russia's information operations tactics since the election are more numerous than can be listed here . But to get a sense of the
breadth of Russian activity, consider the messaging spread by Kremlin-oriented accounts on Twitter, which cybersecurity and disinformation
experts have tracked as part of the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy.
The author link to this page which claims to list Twitter
hashtags that are currently used by Russian influence agents. Apparently the top issue Russia's influence agents currently promote
is "#merrychristmas".
When the authors claim Russian operations are "more numerous than can be listed here" they practically admit that they have not
even one plausible operation they could cite. Its simply obfuscation to justify their call for more political and military measures
against Russia. This again to distract from the real reasons Clinton lost the election and to introduce a new Cold War for the benefit
of weapon producers and U.S. influence in Europe.
If what you allege is true about Greenwald and the Intercept, then why hasn't Snowden spoken out about it yet? Surely he would
have said something about the Intercept and Greenwald keeping important stories buried by now. Yet, as far as I can tell, he has
a good relationship with Greenwald. I find it hard to believe hat a man who literally gave up everything he had in life to leak
important docs would remain silent for so long about a publishing cover up. I don't really like the Intercept and I think your
analysis of its content is accurate, but I do find it hard to believe that the NSA docs were "bought" back by the CIA.
If what you allege is true about Greenwald and the Intercept, then why hasn't Snowden spoken out about it yet?
_____________________________________________________
My understanding is that early on, Snowden placed his trove of documents in the exclusive care of Glenn Greenwald and his associates.
Although Snowden has since become a public figure in his own right, and his opinions on state-security events and issues are solicited,
as far as I know Snowden has no direct responsibility for managing the material he downloaded.
I haven't followed Snowden closely enough to know how familiar he may be with the contents of the reported "20,000 to 58,000
NSA files" turned over to GG/Omidyar. Snowden presumably took pains to acquire items of interest in his cache as he accumulated
classified material, but even if he has extraordinary powers of recall he may not remember precisely what remains unreleased.
FWIW, I was troubled from the first by one of the mainstays of GG's defense, or rationale, when it became clear that he was
the principal, and perhaps sole, executive "curator" of the Snowden material. In order to reassure and placate nervous "patriots"--
and GG calls himself a "patriot"-- he repeatedly emphasized that great care was being taken to vet the leaked information before
releasing it.
GG's role as whistleblower Snowden's enabler and facilitator was generally hailed uncritically by progressive-liberals and
civil-liberties advocates, to a point where public statements that should've raised skeptical doubts and questions were generally
passively accepted by complacent admirers.
Specifically, my crap detectors signaled "red alert" early on, when Greenwald (still affiliated with "The Guardian", IIRC)
took great pains to announce that his team was working closely with the US/UK governments to vet and screen Snowden's material
before releasing any of it; GG repeatedly asserted that he was reviewing the material with the relevant state-security agencies
to ensure that none of the released material would compromise or jeopardize government operatives and/or national security.
WTF? Bad enough that Greenwald was requiring the world to exclusively trust his judgment in deciding what should be released
and what shouldn't. He was also making it clear that he wasn't exactly committed to disclosing "the worst" of the material "though
the heavens fall".
In effect, as GG was telling the world that he could be trusted to manage the leaked information responsibly, he was also telling
the world that it simply had to trust his judgment in this crucial role.
To me, there was clearly a subliminal message for both Western authorities and the public: don't worry, we're conscientious,
patriotic leak-masters. We're not going to irresponsibly disclose anything too radical, or politically/socially destabilizing.
GG and the Omidyar Group have set themselves up as an independent "brand" in the new field of whistleblower/hacker impresario
and leak-broker.
Like only buying NFL-approved merchandise, or fox-approved eggs, the public is being encouraged to only buy (into) Intercept-approved
Snowden Leaks™. It's a going concern, which lends itself much more to the "modified limited hangout" approach than freely tossing
all the biggest eggs out of the basket.
GG found an opportunity to augment his rising career as a self-made investigative journalist and civil-liberties advocate.
Now he's sitting pretty, the celebrity point man for a lucrative modified limited hangout enterprise. What is wrong with this
picture?
@16 I just see no evidence of that aside from fitting the narrative of people who are convinced of a cover up in leaked docs.
Moreover, there is no way Russia would continue to offer Snowden asylum if he was gov agent. I'm sure Russian intelligence did
a very thorough background check on him.
@17 that's simply not true. He regularly tweets, gives online talks and publishes on his own. He has not used either Poitras
or Greenwald as a means of communication for years. And he has never dropped a single hint of being disappointed or frustrated
with how documents and info was published.
It just seems so implausible given the total lack of any sign of Snowden's dissatisfaction.
The revelation that the sole Russiagate "evidence" was the so-called Steele Dossier - i.e. opposition research funded by the
Clinton campaign - which was used by the intelligence community to not only begin the public assertions of Trump's perfidy but
to then initiate FISA approved surveillance on the Trump campaign, that is truly astonishing. Instructive then that the NY Times,
Washington Post, etc have yet to acknowledge these facts to their readers, and instead have effectively doubled down on the story,
insisting that the Russiagate allegations are established fact and constitute "objective reality." That suggests this fake news
story will continue indefinitely.
What we see here is these bastions of establishment thinking in the USA promoting "objective reality" as partisan - i.e.
there is a Clinton reality versus a Trump reality, or a Russian reality versus a "Western" reality, facts and documentation be
damned. This divorce from objectivity is a symptom of the overall decline of American institutions, an indicate a future hard,
rather than soft, landing near the end of the road.
G @ 1 and 18: My understanding is that Edward Snowden has been advised (warned?) by the Russian government or his lawyer in Moscow
not to reveal any more than he has said so far. The asylum Moscow has offered him may be dependent on his keeping discreet. That
may include not saying much about The Intercept, in case his communications are followed by the NSA or any other of the various
US intel agencies which could lead to their tracking his physical movements in Russia and enable any US-connected agent or agency
(including one based in Russia) to trace him, arrest him or kill him, and cover up and frame the seizure or murder in such a way
as to place suspicion or blame on the Russian government or on local criminal elements in Russia.
I believe that Snowden does have a job in Russia and possibly this job does not permit him the time to say any more than what
he currently tweets or says online.
There is nothing in MoA's article to suggest that Glenn Greenwald is deliberately burying stories in The Intercept. B has said
that its management is chaotic which could suggest among other things that Greenwald himself is dissatisfied with its current
operation.
@21 I'm not disputing that moneyed interests might have been leaned on by the CIA to stop publishing sensitive info. What I'm
disputing is the idea that people like Greenwald have deliberately with-held information that is in the public interest. I doubt
that, regardless of the strength of the Intercept as a publication.
@25 What interest would the Russian gov have in helping protect NSA? I assume Russia loves the idea of the US Intel agencies
being embarrassed. Snowden speaks his mind about plenty of domestic and international events in US. I have never seen him act
like he's being censored.
G @ 25: Moscow would have no interest in helping protect the NSA or any other US intel agency. The Russians would have advised
Snowden not to say more than he has said so far, not because they are interested in helping the NSA but because they can only
protect him as long as he is discreet and does not try to say or publish any more that would jeopardise his safety or give Washington
an excuse to pressure Moscow to extradite him back to the US. That would include placing more sanctions on Russia until Snowden
is given up.
There is the possibility also that Snowden trusts (or trusted) Greenwald to know what to do with the NSA documents. Perhaps
that trust was naively placed - we do not know.
b, a big exposition of facts, rich in links to more facts.
This is important material for all to understand.
Snowden is "the squirrel over there!" A distraction turned into a hope.
Compared to Assange, who is being slow-martyred in captivity, Snowden is a boy playing with gadgets.
Why did not Snowden make certain a copy of his theft went to Wikileaks? That would have been insurance.
Since he did not, it all could be just a distraction.
What is known about the Snowden affair is we received proof of what we knew. Not much else. For those who didn't know, they
received news.
And ever since, the shape of things from the Deep State/Shadow Government/IC has been lies and warmongering against American freedoms
and world cooperation among nations.
Fascism is corporate + the police state. The US government is a pure fascist tyranny that also protects the Empire and Global
Hegemony.
We connect the dots and it's always the same picture. It was this way in the 60s,70s,80s,90s, 00s, and this forlorn decade.
Fascism more bold each decade. Billionaires and millionaires have always been in the mix.
"... I accept your point that the Democrats and the Republicans are two sides of the same coin, but it's important to understand that Putin is deeply conservative and very risk averse. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton may be a threat to Russia but she knows the "rules" and is very predictable, while Trump doesn't know the rules and appears to act on a whim ..."
"... However, given the problems that Hillary Clinton had to overcome to get elected, backing her against Trump would be risky. So the highly risk averse Putin would logically stay out of the election entirely and all the claims of Russia hacking the election are fake news. ..."
"... As for the alleged media campaign, my response is "so what!". Western media, including state-owned media, interferes around the world all the time so complaining about Russian state-owned media doing the same is pure hypocrisy and should be ignored. ..."
On your surmise that Putin prefers Trump to Hillary and would thus have incentive to
influence the election, I beg to differ. Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well
it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections.
I accept your point that the Democrats and the Republicans are two sides of the same
coin, but it's important to understand that Putin is deeply conservative and very risk
averse.
Hillary Clinton may be a threat to Russia but she knows the "rules" and is very
predictable, while Trump doesn't know the rules and appears to act on a whim , so if
Putin were to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election, logic would suggest that he
would do so on Hillary Clinton's side. However, given the problems that Hillary Clinton
had to overcome to get elected, backing her against Trump would be risky. So the highly risk
averse Putin would logically stay out of the election entirely and all the claims of Russia
hacking the election are fake news.
As for the alleged media campaign, my response is "so what!". Western media, including
state-owned media, interferes around the world all the time so complaining about Russian
state-owned media doing the same is pure hypocrisy and should be ignored.
Neocons dominate the US foreign policy establishment.
In other words Russiagate might be a pre-emptive move by neocons after Trump elections.
Notable quotes:
"... The dogma does not come from questioning this conclusion. Because Putin, during the campaign, complimented Trump, does not support the conclusion with its insinuation that those who voted for Trump needed to be influenced by anything other than being fed up with the usual in American politics. Same with Brexit. That dissatisfaction continues, and it doesn't need Russian influence to feed it. This is infantile oversimplification to say so. ..."
"... "The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind." ..."
"... But I do believe Putin, and for that matter Xi Jinping of China too, should make efforts to infiltrate the USA election processes. It's an eye for an eye. USA has been exercising its free hands in manipulating elections and stirring up color revolutions all around the world, including the 2012 presidential election in Russia. They should be given a taste of their own medicine. In fact, I believe it is for this reason that the US MSM is playing up this hocus pocus Russian-gate matter, as a preemptive measure to justify imposing electioneering controls in the future. ..."
"... USA may not be vulnerable as yet to this kind of external nuisances, as the masses have not yet reached the stage of being easily stirred. But that time will come. ..."
I have great respect for the reporting on this site regarding Syria and the Middle East. I
regret that for some reason there is this dogmatic approach to the issue of Russian attempts
to influence the US election. Why wouldn't the Russians try to sway the election? Allowing
Hillary to win would have put a dangerous adversary in the White House, one with even more
aggressive neocon tendencies than Obama. Trump has been owned by Russian mobsters since the
the 1990s, and his ties to Russian criminals like Felix Sater are well known.
Putin thought that getting Trump in office would allow the US to go down a more restrained
foreign policy path and lift sanctions against Russia, completely understandable goals. Using
Facebook/Twitter bots and groups like Cambridge Analytica, an effort was made to sway public
opinion toward Trump. That is just politics. And does anyone really doubt there are
incriminating sexual videos of Trump out there? Trump (like Bill Clinton) was buddies with
billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Of course there are videos of Trump that can be used
for blackmail purposes, and of course they would be used to get him on board with the Russian
plan.
The problem is that everything Trump touches dies. He's a fraud and an incompetent idiot.
Always has been. To make matters worse, Trump is controlled by the Zionists through his
Orthodox Jewish daughter and Israeli spy son-in-law. This gave power to the most openly
extreme Zionist elements who will keep pushing for more war in the Middle East. And Trump is
so vile that he's hated by the majority of Americans and doesn't have the political power to
end sanctions against Russia.
Personally, I think this is all for the best. Despite his Zionist handlers, Trump will
unintentionally unwind the American Empire through incompetence and lack of strategy, which
allows Syria and the rest of the world to breathe and rebuild. So Russia may have made a bad
bet on this guy being a useful ally, but his own stupidity will end up working out to the
world's favor in the long run.
there is considerable irony in use of "dogmatic" here: the dogma actually occurs in the
rigid authoritarian propaganda that the Russians Putin specifically interfered with the
election itself, which now smugly blankets any discussion. "The Russians interfered" is now
dogma, when that statement is not factually shown, and should read, "allegedly interfered."
The dogma does not come from questioning this conclusion. Because Putin, during the
campaign, complimented Trump, does not support the conclusion with its insinuation that those
who voted for Trump needed to be influenced by anything other than being fed up with the
usual in American politics. Same with Brexit. That dissatisfaction continues, and it doesn't
need Russian influence to feed it. This is infantile oversimplification to say so.
To suggest "possibly" in any argument does not provide evidence. There is no evidence.
Take a look at b's link to the following for a clear, sane assessment of what's going on. As
with:
"The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir
Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in
the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and
completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the
evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility for
the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical
embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in
the public mind. It is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not
seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in
casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility –
even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling to me; there have been
moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind."
I echo you opinion that this site gives great reports on issues pertaining to Syria and
the ME. Credit to b.
On your surmise that Putin prefers Trump to Hillary and would thus have incentive to
influence the election, I beg to differ. Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it
makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections. Any candidate that WOULD
make a difference would NEVER see the daylight of nomination, especially at the presidential
level. I myself believe all the talk of Russia interfering the 2016 Election is no more than
a witch hunt.
But I do believe Putin, and for that matter Xi Jinping of China too, should make efforts
to infiltrate the USA election processes. It's an eye for an eye. USA has been exercising its
free hands in manipulating elections and stirring up color revolutions all around the world,
including the 2012 presidential election in Russia. They should be given a taste of their own
medicine. In fact, I believe it is for this reason that the US MSM is playing up this hocus
pocus Russian-gate matter, as a preemptive measure to justify imposing electioneering
controls in the future.
USA may not be vulnerable as yet to this kind of external nuisances, as the masses have
not yet reached the stage of being easily stirred. But that time will come.
"... While it's clear that this political cage-match is going to persist for some time to come, we'd like to make two points. First, that there was never sufficient ..."
"... While it's clear that this political cage-match is going to persist for some time to come, we'd like to make two points. First, that there was never sufficient reason to appoint a Special Counsel. The threshold for making such an appointment should have been probable cause, that is, deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should have shown why he thought there was 'reasonable basis to believe that a crime had been committed.' That's what's required under the Fourth Amendment, and that's the standard that should have been met. But Rosenstein ignored that rule because it improved the Special Counsel's chances of netting indictments ..."
"... the loosey-goosy standard Rosenstein has applied is an invitation for an open ended fishing expedition aimed at derailing the political agenda of the elected government. This puts too much power in the hands of unelected agents in the bureaucracy who may be influenced by powerbrokers operating behind the scenes who want to disrupt, obstruct, or paralyze the government. And this, in fact, is exactly what is taking place presently. ..."
"... Naturally, a broad-ranging mandate like Rosenstein's will result in excesses, and it has. Of the four people who have been caught up in Mueller's expansive dragnet, exactly zero have been indicted on charges even remotely connected to the original allegation of "collusion with Russia to sway the presidential election in Trump's favor." Clearly, people's civil liberties are being violated to conduct a political jihad on an unpopular president and his aids. ..."
"... The daily blather in the media does not meet that standard nor does the much ballyhooed Intelligence Community Assessment that was supposed to provide ironclad proof of Russian meddling in the elections. The ICA even offered this sweeping disclaimer at the beginning of the report which admits that the intelligence gathered therein should not in any way be construed to represent solid evidence of anything. ..."
"... Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents ..."
"... The fact is, Mueller is no elder statesman or paragon of virtue. He's a political assassin whose task is to take down Trump at all cost. Unfortunately for Mueller, the credibility of his investigation is beginning to wane as conflicts of interest mount and public confidence dwindles. After 18 months of relentless propaganda and political skullduggery, the Russia-gate fiction is beginning to unravel ..."
"... The skepticism about Mueller probably has less to do with the man, than it does with Washington in general ..."
"... That may be the case among those who have never bothered to look past the mainstream TV news for information about Mueller. Those who have kept up with his career in the swamp have been skeptical (to say the least) about Mueller's appointment because he's so obviously a criminal himself ..."
While it's clear that this political cage-match is going to persist for some time to come, we'd like to make two points. First,
that there was never sufficient
While it's clear that this political cage-match is going to persist for some time to come, we'd like to make two points. First,
that there was never sufficient reason to appoint a Special Counsel. The threshold for making such an appointment should have been
probable cause, that is, deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should have shown why he thought there was 'reasonable basis to believe
that a crime had been committed.' That's what's required under the Fourth Amendment, and that's the standard that should have been
met. But Rosenstein ignored that rule because it improved the Special Counsel's chances of netting indictments
Even so, there's no evidence that a crime has been committed. None. And that's been the main criticism of the investigation from
the get go. It's fine for the New York Times and the Washington Post to reiterate the same tedious, unsubstantiated claims over and
over again ad nauseam. Their right to fabricate news is guaranteed under the First Amendment and they take full advantage of that
privilege. But it's different for professional attorney operating at the highest level of the Justice Department to appoint a Special
Counsel to rummage through all manner of private or privileged documents, transcripts, tax returns, private conversations, intercepted
phone calls and emails -- of the democratically-elected president -- based on nothing more than the spurious and politically-motivated
allegations made in the nation's elite media or by flagrantly-partisan actors operating in the Intelligence Community or law enforcement.
Can you see the problem here? This is not just an attack on Trump (whose immigration, environmental, health care, tax and foreign
policies I personally despise.) It is an attempt to roll back the results of the election by bogging him down in legal proceedings
making it impossible for him to govern. These attacks are not just on Trump, they're on the legitimate authority of the people to
choose their own leaders in democratic elections. That's what's at stake. And that's why there must be a high threshold for launching
an investigation like this.
Consider this: On May 17, 2017, when Rosenstein announced his decision to appoint a Special Counsel he said the following:
"In my capacity as acting attorney general I determined that it is in the public interest for me to exercise my authority and
appoint a special counsel to assume responsibility for this matter. My decision is not a finding that crimes have been committed
or that any prosecution is warranted. I have made no such determination. What I have determined is that based upon the unique
circumstances, the public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree
of independence from the normal chain of command." Rosenstein wrote that his responsibility is to ensure a "full and thorough
investigation of the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 election." As special counsel, Mueller is charged with
investigating "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President
Donald Trump."
That's not good enough. There's no evidence that "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals
associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump" were improper, unethical or illegal. Nor do any such presumed "links and/or
coordination" imply a crime was committed. Rather, the loosey-goosy standard Rosenstein has applied is an invitation for an open
ended fishing expedition aimed at derailing the political agenda of the elected government. This puts too much power in the hands
of unelected agents in the bureaucracy who may be influenced by powerbrokers operating behind the scenes who want to disrupt, obstruct,
or paralyze the government. And this, in fact, is exactly what is taking place presently.
Naturally, a broad-ranging mandate like Rosenstein's will result in excesses, and it has. Of the four people who have been
caught up in Mueller's expansive dragnet, exactly zero have been indicted on charges even remotely connected to the original allegation
of "collusion with Russia to sway the presidential election in Trump's favor." Clearly, people's civil liberties are being violated
to conduct a political jihad on an unpopular president and his aids.
So, how does one establish whether there's a reasonable basis to believe that a crime has been committed?
The daily blather in the media does not meet that standard nor does the much ballyhooed Intelligence Community Assessment that
was supposed to provide ironclad proof of Russian meddling in the elections. The ICA even offered this sweeping disclaimer at the
beginning of the report which admits that the intelligence gathered therein should not in any way be construed to represent solid
evidence of anything.
Here's the from the report:
"Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected
information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents."
... ... ...
The fact is, Mueller is no elder statesman or paragon of virtue. He's a political assassin whose task is to take down Trump at
all cost. Unfortunately for Mueller, the credibility of his investigation is beginning to wane as conflicts of interest mount and
public confidence dwindles. After 18 months of relentless propaganda and political skullduggery, the Russia-gate fiction is beginning
to unravel.
"The skepticism about Mueller probably has less to do with the man, than it does with Washington in general."
That may be the case among those who have never bothered to look past the mainstream TV news for information about Mueller.
Those who have kept up with his career in the swamp have been skeptical (to say the least) about Mueller's appointment because
he's so obviously a criminal himself.
That segment of the general public, as it were, have been opposed to the establishment of the investigation itself from the
first day it was proposed.
"... Needless to say, the Never Trumpers were eminently correct in their worry that Trump would sully, degrade and weaken the Imperial Presidency. That he has done in spades with his endless tweet storms that consist mainly of petty score settling, self-justification, unseemly boasting and shrill partisanship; and on top of that you can pile his impetuous attacks on friend, foe and bystanders (e.g. NFL kneelers) alike. ..."
There was a sinister plot to meddle in the 2016
election, after all. But it was not orchestrated from the Kremlin; it was an entirely homegrown
affair conducted from the inner sanctums---the White House, DOJ, the Hoover Building and
Langley----of the Imperial City.
Likewise, the perpetrators didn't speak Russian or write in the Cyrillic script. In fact,
they were lifetime beltway insiders occupying the highest positions of power in the US
government.
Here are the names and rank of the principal conspirators:
John Brennan, CIA director;
Susan Rice, National Security Advisor;
Samantha Power, UN Ambassador;
James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence;
James Comey, FBI director;
Andrew McCabe, Deputy FBI director;
Sally Yates, deputy Attorney General,
Bruce Ohr, associate deputy AG;
Peter Strzok, deputy assistant director of FBI counterintelligence;
Lisa Page, FBI lawyer;
and countless other lessor and greater poobahs of Washington power, including President
Obama himself.
To a person, the participants in this illicit cabal shared the core trait that made Obama
such a blight on the nation's well-being. To wit, he never held an honest job outside the halls
of government in his entire adult life; and as a careerist agent of the state and practitioner
of its purported goods works, he exuded a sanctimonious disdain for everyday citizens who make
their living along the capitalist highways and by-ways of America.
The above cast of election-meddlers, of course, comes from the same mold. If Wikipedia is
roughly correct, just these 10 named perpetrators have punched in about 300 years of
post-graduate employment---and 260 of those years (87%) were on government payrolls or
government contractor jobs.
As to whether they shared Obama's political class arrogance, Peter Strzok left nothing to
the imagination in his now celebrated texts to his gal-pal, Lisa Page:
"Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support......I LOATHE
congress....And F Trump."
You really didn't need the ALL CAPS to get the gist. In a word, the anti-Trump cabal is
comprised of creatures of the state.
Their now obvious effort to alter the outcome of the 2016 election was nothing less than the
Imperial City's immune system attacking an alien threat, which embodied the very opposite
trait: That is, the Donald had never spent one moment on the state's payroll, had been elected
to no government office and displayed a spirited contempt for the groupthink and verities of
officialdom in the Imperial City.
But it is the vehemence and flagrant transparency of this conspiracy to prevent Trump's
ascension to the Oval Office that reveals the profound threat to capitalism and democracy posed
by the Deep State and its prosperous elites and fellow travelers domiciled in the Imperial
City.
That is to say, Donald Trump was no kind of anti-statist and only a skin-deep populist, at
best. His signature anti-immigrant meme was apparently discovered by accident when in the early
days of the campaign he went off on Mexican thugs, rapists and murderers----only to find that
it resonated strongly among a certain element of the GOP grass roots.
But a harsh line on immigrants, refugees and Muslims would not have incited the Deep State
into an attempted coup d'état; it wouldn't have mobilized so overtly against Ted Cruz,
for example, whose positions on the ballyhooed terrorist/immigrant threat were not much
different.
No, what sent the Imperial City establishment into a fit of apoplexy was exactly two things
that struck at the core of its raison d' etre.
First was Trump's stated intentions to seek rapprochement with Putin's Russia and his
sensible embrace of a non-interventionist "America First" view of Washington's role in the
world. And secondly, and even more importantly, was his very persona.
That is to say, the role of today's president is to function as the suave, reliable
maître d' of the Imperial City and the lead spokesman for Washington's purported good
works at home and abroad. And for that role the slovenly, loud-mouthed, narcissistic,
bombastic, ill-informed and crudely-mannered Donald Trump was utterly unqualified.
Stated differently, welfare statism and warfare statism is the secular religion of the
Imperial City and its collaborators in the mainstream media; and the Oval Office is the bully
pulpit from which its catechisms, bromides and self-justifications are propagandized to the
unwashed masses---the tax-and-debt-slaves of Flyover America who bear the burden of its
continuation.
Needless to say, the Never Trumpers were eminently correct in their worry that Trump would
sully, degrade and weaken the Imperial Presidency. That he has done in spades with his endless
tweet storms that consist mainly of petty score settling, self-justification, unseemly boasting
and shrill partisanship; and on top of that you can pile his impetuous attacks on friend, foe
and bystanders (e.g. NFL kneelers) alike.
Yet that is exactly what has the Deep State and its media collaborators running scared. To
wit, Trump's entire modus operandi is not about governing or a serious policy agenda---and most
certainly not about Making America's Economy Great Again. (MAEGA)
By appointing a passel of Keynesian monetary central planners to the Fed and launching an
orgy of fiscal recklessness via his massive defense spending and tax-cutting initiatives, the
Donald has more than sealed his own doom: There will unavoidably be a massive financial and
economic crisis in the years just ahead and the rulers of the Imperial City will most certainly
heap the blame upon him with malice aforethought.
In the interim, however, what the Donald is actually doing is sharply polarizing the country
and using the Bully Pulpit for the very opposite function assigned to it by Washington's
permanent political class. Namely, to discredit and vilify the ruling elites of government and
the media and thereby undermine the docility and acquiescence of the unwashed masses upon which
the Imperial City's rule and hideous prosperity depend.
It is no wonder, then, that the inner circle of the Obama Administration plotted an
"insurance policy". They saw it coming-----that is, an offensive rogue disrupter who was soft
on Russia, to boot--- and out of that alarm the entire hoax of RussiaGate was born.
As is now well known from the recent dump of 375 Strzok/Gates text messages, there occurred
on August 15, 2016 a meeting in the office of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (who is still
there) to kick off the RussiaGate campaign. As Strzok later wrote to Page, who was also at the
meeting:
" I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office -- that
there's no way he gets elected -- but I'm afraid we can't take that risk......It's like an
insurance policy in the unlikely event that you die before you're 40."
They will try to spin this money quote seven-ways to Sunday, but in the context of
everything else now known there is only one possible meaning: The national security and law
enforcement machinery of Imperial Washington was being activated then and there in behalf of
Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Indeed, the trail of proof is quite clear. At the very time of this August meeting, the FBI
was already being fed the initial elements of the Steele dossier, and the latter had nothing to
do with any kind of national security investigation.
For crying out loud, it was plain old "oppo research" paid for by the Clinton campaign and
the DNC. And the only way that it bore on Russian involvement in the US election was that
virtually all of the salacious material and false narratives about Trump emissaries meeting
with high level Russian officials was disinformation sourced in Moscow, and was completely
untrue.
As former senior FBI official, Andrew McCarthy, neatly summarized the sequence of action
recently:
The Clinton campaign generated the Steele dossier through lawyers who retained Fusion GPS.
Fusion, in turn, hired Steele, a former British intelligence agent who had FBI contacts from
prior collaborative investigations. The dossier was steered into the FBI's hands as it began
to be compiled in the summer of 2016. A Fusion Russia expert, Nellie Ohr, worked with Steele
on Fusion's anti-Trump research. She is the wife of Bruce Ohr, then the deputy associate
attorney general -- the top subordinate of Sally Yates, then Obama's deputy attorney general
(later acting AG). Ohr was a direct pipeline to Yates.....
Based on the publication this week of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and
Lisa Page, the FBI lawyer with whom he was having an extramarital affair, we have learned of
a meeting convened in the office of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe...... right around the
time the Page FISA warrant was obtained......
Bruce Ohr met personally with Steele. And after Trump was elected, according to Fusion
founder Glenn Simpson, he requested and got a meeting with Simpson to, as Simpson told the
House Intelligence Committee, "discuss our findings regarding Russia and the election."
This, of course, was the precise time Democrats began peddling the public narrative of
Trump-Russia collusion. It is the time frame during which Ohr's boss, Yates, was pushing an
absurd Logan Act investigation of Trump transition official Michael Flynn (then slotted to
become Trump's national-security adviser) over Flynn's meetings with the Russian
ambassador.
Here's the thing. There is almost nothing in the Steele dossiers which is true. At the same
time, there is no real alternative evidence based on hard NSA intercepts that show Russian
government agents were behind the only two acts----the leaks of the DNC emails and the Podesta
emails----that were of even minimal import to the outcome of the 2016 presidential
campaign.
As to the veracity of the dossier, the raving anti-Trumper and former CIA interim chief,
Michael Morrell, settled the matter. If you are paying ex-FSA agents for information on the
back streets of Moscow, the more you pay, the more "information" you will get:
Then I asked myself, why did these guys provide this information, what was their
motivation? And I subsequently learned that he paid them. That the intermediaries paid the
sources and the intermediaries got the money from Chris. And that kind of worries me a little
bit because if you're paying somebody, particularly former [Russian Federal Security Service]
officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they're going to call
you up and say, 'Hey, let's have another meeting, I have more information for you,' because
they want to get paid some more,' Morrell said.
Far from being "verified," the dossier is best described as a pack of lies, gossip, innuendo
and irrelevancies. Take, for example, the claim that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen met with
Russian Federation Council foreign affairs head Konstantin Kosachev in Prague during August
2016. That claim is verifiably false as proven by Cohen's own passport.
Likewise, the dossier 's claim that Carter Page was offered a giant bribe by the head of
Rosneft, the Russian state energy company, in return for lifting the sanctions is downright
laughable. That's because Carter Page never had any serious role in the Trump campaign and was
one of hundreds of unpaid informal advisors who hung around the basket hoping for some role in
a future Trump government.
Like the hapless George Papadopoulos, in fact, Page apparently never met Trump, had no
foreign policy credentials and had been drafted onto the campaign's so-called foreign policy
advisory committee out of sheer desperation.
That is, because the mainstream GOP foreign policy establishment had so completely boycotted
the Trump campaign, the latter was forced to fill its advisory committee essentially from the
phone book; and that desperation move in March 2016, in turn, had been undertaken in order to
damp-down the media uproar over the Donald's assertion that he got his foreign policy advise
from watching TV!
The truth of the matter is that Page was a former Merrill Lynch stockbrokers who had plied
his trade in Russia several years earlier. He had gone to Moscow in July 2016 on his own dime
and without any mandate from the Trump campaign; and his "meeting" with Rosneft actually
consisted of drinks with an old buddy from his broker days who had become head of investor
relations at Rosneft.
Nevertheless, it is pretty evident that the Steele dossier's tale about Page's alleged
bribery scheme was the basis for the FISA warrant that resulted in wiretaps on Page and other
officials in Trump Tower during September and October.
And that's your insurance policy at work: The Deep State and its allies in the Obama
administration were desperately looking for dirt with which to crucify the Donald, and thereby
insure that the establishment's anointed candidate would not fail at the polls.
So the question recurs as to why did the conspirators resort to the outlandish and even
cartoonish disinformation contained in the Steele dossier?
The answer to that question cuts to the quick of the entire RussiaGate hoax. To wit, that's
all they had!
Notwithstanding the massive machinery and communications vacuum cleaners operated by the $75
billion US intelligence communities and its vaunted 17 agencies, there are no digital
intercepts proving that Russian state operatives hacked the DNC and Podesta emails. Period.
Yet when it comes to anything that even remotely smacks of "meddling" in the US election
campaign, that's all she wrote.
There is nothing else of moment, and most especially not the alleged phishing expeditions
directed at 20 or so state election boards. Most of these have been discredited, denied by
local officials or were simply the work of everyday hackers looking for voter registration
lists that could be sold.
The patently obvious point here is that in America there is no on-line network of voting
machines on either an intra-state or interstate basis. And that fact renders the whole election
machinery hacking meme null and void. Not even the treacherous Russians are stupid enough to
waste their time trying to hack that which is unhackable.
In that vein, the Facebook ad buying scheme is even more ridiculous. In the context of an
election campaign in which upwards of $7 billion of spending was reported by candidates and
their committees to the FEC, and during which easily double that amount was spent by
independent committees and issue campaigns, the notion that just $44,000 of Facebook ads made
any difference to anything is not worthy of adult thought.
And, yes, out of the ballyhooed $100,000 of Facebook ads, the majority occurred after the
election was over and none of them named candidates, anyway. The ads consisted of issue
messages that reflected all points on the political spectrum from pro-choice to anti-gun
control.
And even this so-called effort at "polarizing" the American electorate was "discovered" only
after Facebook failed to find any "Russian-linked" ads during its first two searches. Instead,
this complete drivel was detected only after the Senate's modern day Joseph McCarthy, Sen. Mark
Warner, who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leading legislator
on Internet regulation, showed up on Mark Zuckerberg's doorstep at Facebook headquarters.
In any event, we can be sure there are no NSA intercepts proving that the Russians hacked
the Dem emails for one simple reason: They would have been leaked long ago by the vast network
of Imperial City operatives plotting to bring the Donald down.
Moreover, the original architect and godfather of NSA's vast spying apparatus, William
Binney, has essentially proved that the DNC emails were leaked by an insider who downloaded
them on a memory stick. By conducting his own experiments, he showed that the known download
speed of one batch of DNC emails could not have occurred over the Internet from a remote
location in Russia or anywhere else on the planet, and actually matched what was possible only
via a local USB-connected thumb drive.
So the real meaning of the Strzok/Gates text messages is straight foreword. There was a
conspiracy to prevent Trump's election, and then after the shocking results of November 8, this
campaign morphed into an intensified effort to discredit the winner.
For instance, Susan Rice got Obama to lower the classification level of the information
obtained from the Trump campaign intercepts and other dirt-gathering actions by the
Intelligence Community (IC)--- so that it could be disseminated more readily to all Washington
intelligence agencies.
In short order, of course, the IC was leaking like a sieve, thereby paving the way for the
post-election hysteria and the implication that any contact with a Russian--even one living in
Brooklyn-- must be collusion. And that included calls to the Russian ambassador by the
president-elect's own national security advisor designate.
Should there by any surprise, therefore, that it turns out the Andrew McCabe bushwhacked
General Flynn on January 24 when he called to say that FBI agents were on the way to the White
House for what Flynn presumed to be more security clearance work with his incipient staff.
No at all. The FBI team was there to interrogate Flynn about the transcripts of his
perfectly appropriate and legal conversations with Ambassador Kislyak about two matters of
state----the UN resolution on Israel and the spiteful new sanctions on certain Russian citizens
that Obama announced on December 28 in a fit of pique over the Dems election loss.
And that insidious team of FBI gotcha cops was led by none other than......Peter Strzok!
But after all the recent leaks---and these text messages are just the tip of the
iceberg-----the die is now cast. Either the Deep State and its minions and collaborators in the
media and the Republican party, too, will soon succeed in putting Mike Pence into the Oval
Office, or the Imperial City is about ready to break-out in vicious partisan warfare like never
before.
Either way, economic and fiscal governance is about ready to collapse entirely, making the
tax bill a kind of last hurrah before they mayhem really begins.
In that context, selling the rip may become one of the most profitable speculations ever
imagined.
Not sure why Stockman went off on a tangent about Trump's innumerate economic strategy -
kinda dilutes from an otherwise informative piece for anyone who hasn't a handle on the
underhand shit that's been hitting the fan in recent months. Its like he has to have a go
about it no matter what the main theme. Like PCR and "insouciance". And then there's the
texting...
Clue yourself in, David.
A very small percentage of the public are actually informed about what is really going
down. Those that visit ZH or your website. Fox is the only pro-Trump mainstream TV news
outlet, and as to the NYT, WP et al? The media disinformation complex keep the rest in the
matrix, and it has been very easy to see in action over the last year or so because it has
been so well co-ordinated (and totally fabricated).
Given the blatant and contemptous avoidance of the truth by the MSM (the current litany of
seditious/treasonous actions being a case in point), it is fair to say that Trump's tweets
provide a very real public service - focussing the (otherwise ignorant) public's attention on
many things the aforementioned cunts (I'll include Google and FaecesBook) divert from like
the plague (and making them look utter slime in the process).
I do respect stockman but here's bullshit-call #1: he says that the deep state doesn't
like the divisiveness he causes: bush certainly did that and Obama' did so at an order of
magnitude higher. I don't believe that the left is more upset by trump than we were by Barry-
we're just not a bunch of sniveling, narcissistic babies like they are.
When the details of the FISA warrant application are revealed, it will be like a
megaton-class munition detonating, and the Deep State will bear the brunt of destruction.
Similar mass deception was in play to start the Iraq war as well. Constant bombardment led
to public consensus and even the liberal New York Times endorsed the war. Whenever we see
mass hysteria about something new, we should just go with the flow and not ask any questions
at all. It is best for retaining sanity in this dumbed down and getting more dumber
world.
Susan Rice and Obama should be indicted for illegally wiretapping Trump Towers for the
express purpose of finding oppo research to help Hellary's late term abortiion of a
campaign
This one is deeper but well laid out. Comey & Mueller Ignored McCabe's Ties to Russian
Crime Figures & His Reported Tampering in Russian FBI Cases, Files
Great read, loved the 'Imperial City's immune system' analogy...
I disagree about the economy though.
It feels strange to me that the architect of the Reagan Revolution is unable to see the
makings of another revolution, the Trump Revolution.
We have had 10-20 years of pent up demand in the economy and instead of electing another
neo-Marxist Alynski acolyte, the American people elected a hard charging anti-establishment
bull in a China shop.
Surely Dave can see the potential.
It kills me when people are surprised by a 12 month, 5000 point run up on Wall Street.
For God's sake the United States was run by a fucking commie for 8 years, what the fuck
did you think was gonna happen?
America is divided and will remain divided. I think it will last at least for the next 50
years, maybe longer. The best way out is to limit the federal government and give each state
more responsibility. States can succeed or fail on their own. People will be free to move
where they want.
Somewhere there is a FISA judge who should be defrocked and exposed as a fraud. No sober
judge would accept such evidence for any purpose, much less authorizing government snooping
on a major party candidate for president.
The CIA holds all the videos from Jeff Epstein's Island (20 documented trips by Bill, 6
documented trips by Hillary), I'm sure Bill doing a 12 year old, Hillary and Huma doing an 8
year old girl together, etc. So what are they willing to do for the CIA? Anything at any
cost, getting caught red handed with a dossier is chump change when you look at the big
picture..they don't care and will do anything...ANYTHING to get rid of Trump.
This is the only reason they are so frantic. There is absolutely no other reason they
would play at this level.
As always, Dave puts it all into prospective for even the brain dead. Ya think Joe and his
gang will be talking about this article on their morning talk show today?? I wonder how
Brezenski's daughter is going to tell daddy that the gig is up and they may want to look into
packing a boogie bag just to play it safe?
David Stockman is a flame of hope in a world of dark machievellian thought!
Why did the alt media and the msm all stop reportinmg that McCabe's wife recieved 700
thousand dollars from Terry McAulife (former Clinton campaign manager times 2!) for a
Virginia State Senate run? Quid pro quo? Oh no, never the up and up DemonRats.
So when I hear that the conversation was held in McCabe's office- I want to puke first
then start building the gallows.
fucken brilliant article!! There is a lot I don't like about trump (some of which stockman
discusses above), but as a retired govt worker, I can tell you that he right about what he is
saying here.
One little tidbit that has been lost in all of this:
If the FBI was willing to use their power to back Hillary and defeat Trump at the national
level, what did they try to do in McCabe's wife's state senate campaign? She is a
pediatrician and she ran for state senate. ??? WTF is that about? She's not only a doctor but
a doctor for children. Those people are usually wired to help people. Yet she was going to
for-go being a doctor for a state senate position. ??? And the DNC forked over $700,000 to
put her on the map.
I'm sure the people meeting daily in Andy's office were not pleased with the voter
resistance to his wife and to Hillary. The FBI needs to be shut down. They have become an
opposition research firm for the DNC. Even if they can't find dirt on candidates using the
NSA database, they are able to tap that database to find out political strategies in real
time on opposition The fish is rotten from the head down to the tail.
No matter what article you read here, and don't get me wrong, I love the insight, but
every fucking article is "it's all over. America is doomed, the petro dollar days are over,
China China China. It's getting a bit old. The charts and graphs about stock market
collapse......it becoming an old record that needs changed. If I say it's going to rain every
fucking day, at some point I will be right. That doesn't make me a genius....it makes me
persistent.
It's a Deep State mess and Sessions is trying his best as he cowers in a corner sucking
his thumb.
If they continue to go after Trump, the FBI is going to be found guilty of violating the
Hatch Act by exonerating Hillary. See burner phones. See writing the conclusion in May when
the investigation supposedly ended with Hillary's interview on July 3rd. The FBI will also be
exposed for sedition as they then carried out the phony Russiagate investigation as their
"insurance policy."
However, they have created an expectation with the left that Trump and his minions will be
brought to "justice." If we thought the Left didn't handle losing the election well, they
will not be pleased at losing Russiagate.
"A looming, aggressive enemy (so portrayed) is needed to sustain the US's parasitic surveillance, "security", and "defense"
ecosystems." Well said. National security parasites are so entrenched (and well fed by MIC) that any change of the US foreign
policy is next to impossible. The only legitimate course is more wars and bombing.
Notable quotes:
"... This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even Joe McCarthy's search for "Communist" connections. It would suggest, for example, that scores of American corporations doing business in Russia today are engaged in criminal enterprise. ..."
"... To suggest that such contacts are in any way criminal is to slur hundreds of reputations and to leave U.S. policy-makers with advisers laden with ideology and no actual expertise. It is also to suggest that any quest for better relations with Russia, or détente, is somehow suspicious, illegitimate, or impossible, as expressed recently by Andrew Weiss in The Wall Street Journal and by The Washington Post , in an editorial . This is one reason why I have, in a previous commentary , argued that Russia-gate and its promoters have become the gravest threat to American national security. ..."
"... Russia-gate began sometime prior to June 2016, not after the presidential election in November, as is often said, as an anti-Trump political project. (Exactly why, how, and by whom remain unclear, and herein lies the real significance of the largely bogus "dossier" and the still murky role of top U.S. intel officials in the creation of that document.) ..."
"... As Greenwald points out, all of the now retracted stories, whether by print media or cable television, were zealous promotions of Russia-gate and virulently anti-Trump. They, too, are examples of Russia-gate without Russia. ..."
"... Tillerson may be the last man standing who represents the possibility of some kind of détente. ..."
"... Unfortunately, and I can't believe I'm going to concede this, but FOX News, regarding this one particular issue: the baloney of Russiagate, is probably the most accurate mainstream source out there right now. Despite everything else they get wrong, FOX News, pertaining to Russiagate, is generally (generally) accurate from the bits and pieces I've seen. ..."
"... I agree. It seems sort of like the Nazi regime with more advanced technology and more complete ability for the gestapo to exercise control or more aptly like the Soviet Union where people actually believe the regime's propaganda. ..."
"... The neocon perpetrators of the Russia-gate hoax will continue putting their own greed (for money and power) ahead of American national security. That's who they are and what they do. They conflate global domination with American national security because it benefits them to do so. Sure, they don't want a hot war with Russia because they are neither psychotic nor suicidal. But they are power-crazed: delusional to the extent they think they can prevent the Russian-American hostility provoked by their own machinations from spinning out of control. ..."
"... Reason #3: A looming, aggressive enemy (so portrayed) is needed to sustain the U.S.'s parasitic surveillance, "security", and "defense" ecosystems. ..."
"... Thanks, Professor Cohen, and I happen to think that this phony Russia hacking fabrication is breaking down, along with many other false narratives of the West. So many things are exposing the lies and there are truly good investigators who are weighing in, so I am hopeful that the neocons will be finally outed as hopelessly behind the times. ..."
Despite a lack of evidence at its core – and the risk of nuclear conflagration as its
by-product – Russia-gate remains the go-to accusation for "getting" the Trump
administration, explains Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen.
The foundational accusation of Russia-gate was, and remains, charges that Russian President
Putin ordered the hacking of Democratic National Committee e-mails and their public
dissemination through WikiLeaks in order to benefit Donald Trump and undermine Hillary Clinton
in the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump and/or his associates colluded with the
Kremlin in this "attack on American democracy."
As no actual evidence for these allegations has been produced after nearly a year and a half
of media and government investigations, we are left with Russia-gate without Russia. (An apt
formulation perhaps first coined in an e-mail exchange by Nation writer James Carden.)
Special counsel Mueller has produced four indictments: against retired Gen. Michael Flynn,
Trump's short-lived national-security adviser, and George Papadopolous, a lowly and
inconsequential Trump "adviser," for lying to the FBI; and against Paul Manafort and his
partner Rick Gates for financial improprieties. None of these charges has anything to do with
improper collusion with Russia, except for the wrongful insinuations against Flynn.
Instead, the several investigations, desperate to find actual evidence of collusion, have
spread to "contacts with Russia" -- political, financial, social, etc. -- on the part of a
growing number of people, often going back many years before anyone imagined Trump as a
presidential candidate. The resulting implication is that these "contacts" were criminal or
potentially so.
This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even Joe
McCarthy's search for "Communist" connections. It would suggest, for example, that scores of
American corporations doing business in Russia today are engaged in criminal enterprise.
More to the point, advisers to U.S. policy-makers and even media commentators on Russia must
have many and various contacts with Russia if they are to understand anything about the
dynamics of Kremlin policy-making. I myself, to take an individual example, was an adviser to
two (unsuccessful) presidential campaigns, which considered my wide-ranging and longstanding
"contacts" with Russia to be an important credential, as did the one sitting president whom I
advised.
To suggest that such contacts are in any way criminal is to slur hundreds of reputations and
to leave U.S. policy-makers with advisers laden with ideology and no actual expertise. It is
also to suggest that any quest for better relations with Russia, or détente, is somehow
suspicious, illegitimate, or impossible, as expressed recently by Andrew Weiss in The
Wall Street Journal and by
The Washington Post , in an editorial . This is one reason why I have, in a
previous commentary , argued that Russia-gate and its promoters have become the gravest
threat to American national security.
Russia-gate began sometime prior to June 2016, not after the presidential election in
November, as is often said, as an anti-Trump political project. (Exactly why, how, and by whom
remain unclear, and herein lies the real significance of the largely bogus "dossier" and the
still murky role of top U.S. intel officials in the creation of that document.)
That said, the mainstream American media have been largely responsible for inflating,
perpetuating, and sustaining the sham Russia-gate as the real political crisis it has become,
arguably the greatest in modern American presidential and thus institutional political history.
The media have done this by increasingly betraying their own professed standards of verified
news reporting and balanced coverage, even resorting to tacit forms of censorship by
systematically excluding dissenting reporting and opinions.
(For inventories of recent examples, see
Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept and Joe Lauria at Consortiumnews . Anyone interested in exposures of such truly "fake news" should
visit these two sites regularly, the latter the product of the inestimable veteran journalist
Robert Parry.)
Still worse, this mainstream malpractice has spread to some alternative-media publications
once prized for their journalistic standards, where expressed disdain for "evidence" and
"proof" in favor of allegations without any actual facts can sometimes be found. Nor are these
practices merely the ordinary occasional mishaps of professional journalism.
As Greenwald points out, all of the now retracted stories, whether by print media or cable
television, were zealous promotions of Russia-gate and virulently anti-Trump. They, too, are
examples of Russia-gate without Russia.
Flynn and the FBI
Leaving aside possible financial improprieties on the part of General Flynn, his persecution
and subsequent prosecution is highly indicative. Flynn pled guilty to having lied to the FBI
about his communications with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, on behalf of the incoming
Trump administration, discussions that unavoidably included some references, however vague, to
sanctions imposed on Russia by President Obama in December 2016, just before leaving
office.
Those sanctions were highly unusual -- last-minute, unprecedented in their seizure of
Russian property in the United States, and including a reckless veiled threat of unspecified
cyber-attacks on Russia. They gave the impression that Obama wanted to make even more difficult
Trump's professed goal of improving relations with Moscow.
Still more, Obama's specified reason was not Russian behavior in Ukraine or Syria, as is
commonly thought, but Russia-gate -- that is, Putin's "attack on American democracy," which
Obama's intel chiefs had evidently persuaded him was an entirely authentic allegation. (Or
which Obama, who regarded Trump's victory over his designated successor, Hillary Clinton, as a
personal rebuff, was eager to believe.)
But Flynn's discussions with the Russian ambassador -- as well as other Trump
representatives' efforts to open "back-channel" communications with Moscow – were
anything but a crime. As I pointed out in
another commentary , there were so many precedents of such overtures on behalf of
presidents-elect, it was considered a normal, even necessary practice, if only to ask Moscow
not to make relations worse before the new president had a chance to review the
relationship.
When Henry Kissinger did this on behalf of President-elect Nixon, his boss instructed him to
keep the communication entirely confidential, not to inform any other members of the incoming
administration. Presumably Flynn was similarly secretive, thereby misinforming Vice President
Pence and finding himself trapped -- or possibly entrapped -- between loyalty to his president
and an FBI agent. Flynn no doubt would have been especially guarded with a representative of
the FBI, knowing as he did the role of Obama's Intel bosses in Russia-gate prior to the
election and which had escalated after Trump's surprise victory.
In any event, to the extent that Flynn encouraged Moscow not to reply in kind immediately to
Obama's highly provocative sanctions, he performed a service to U.S. national security, not a
crime. And, assuming that Flynn was acting on the instructions of his president-elect, so did
Trump. Still more, if Flynn "colluded" in any way,
it was with Israel, not Russia , having been asked by that government to dissuade countries
from voting for an impending anti-Israel U.N. resolution.
Removing Tillerson
Finally, and similarly, there is the ongoing effort by the political-media establishment to
drive Secretary of State Rex Tillerson from office and replace him with a fully neocon,
anti-Russian, anti-détente head of the State Department. Tillerson was an admirable
appointee by Trump -- widely experienced in world affairs, a tested negotiator, a mature and
practical-minded man.
Originally, his role as the CEO of Exxon Mobil who had negotiated and enacted an immensely
profitable and strategically important energy-extraction deal with the Kremlin earned him the
slur of being "Putin's pal." This preposterous allegation has since given way to charges that
he is slowly restructuring, and trimming, the long bloated and mostly inept State Department,
as indeed he should do. Numerous former diplomats closely associated with Hillary Clinton have
raced to influential op-ed pages to denounce Tillerson's undermining of this purportedly
glorious frontline institution of American national security. Many news reports, commentaries,
and editorials have been in the same vein. But who can recall a major diplomatic triumph by the
State Department or a Secretary of State in recent years?
The answer might be the Obama administration's multinational agreement with Iran to curb its
nuclear-weapons potential, but that was due no less to Russia's president and Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, which provided essential guarantees to the sides involved. Forgotten,
meanwhile, are the more than 50 career State Department officials who publicly protested
Obama's rare attempt to cooperate with Moscow in Syria. Call it by what it was: the sabotaging
of a president by his own State Department.
In this spirit, there are a flurry of leaked stories that Tillerson will soon resign or be
ousted. Meanwhile, however, he carries on. The ever-looming menace of Russia-gate compels him
to issue wildly exaggerated indictments of Russian behavior while, at the same time, calling
for a "productive new relationship" with Moscow, in which he clearly believes. (And which, if
left unencumbered, he might achieve.)
Evidently, Tillerson has established a "productive" working relationship with his Russian
counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, the two of them having just announced North Korea's readiness to
engage in negotiations with the United States and other governments involved in the current
crisis.
Tillerson's fate will tell us much about the number-one foreign-policy question confronting
America: cooperation or escalating conflict with the other nuclear superpower, a
détente-like diminishing of the new Cold War or the growing risks that it will become
hot war. Politics and policy should never be over-personalized; larger factors are always
involved. But in these unprecedented times, Tillerson may be the last man standing who
represents the possibility of some kind of détente. Apart, that is, from President Trump
himself, loathe him or not. Or to put the issue differently: Will Russia-gate continue to
gravely endanger American national security?
Stephen F.
Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and
Princeton University and a contributing editor of The Nation , where a version of this
article first appeared.
Abe , December 15, 2017 at 1:49 pm
"Thanks to Flynn's indictment, we now know that the Israeli prime minister was able to
transform the Trump administration into his own personal vehicle for undermining Obama's lone
effort to hold Israel accountable at the UN. A clearer example of a foreign power colluding
with an American political operation against a sitting president has seldom, if ever, been
exposed in such glaring fashion.
"Kushner's deep ties to the Israeli right-wing and ethical breaches
"The day after Kushner was revealed as Flynn's taskmaster, a team of researchers from the
Democratic Super PAC American Bridge found that the presidential son-in-law had failed to
disclose his role as a co-director of his family's Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation
during the years when his family's charity funded the Israeli enterprise of illegal
settlements. The embarrassing omission barely scratched the surface of Kushner's decades long
relationship with Israel's Likud-led government. [ ]
"A Clinton mega-donor defends Kushner's collusion
"So why isn't this angle of the Flynn indictment getting more attention? An easy
explanation could be deduced from the stunning spectacle that unfolded this December 2 at the
Brookings Institution, where the fresh-faced Kushner engaged in a 'keynote conversation' with
Israeli-American oligarch Haim Saban. [ ]
""The spectacle of a top Democratic Party money man defending one of the Trump
administration's most influential figures was clearly intended to establish a patina of
bipartisan normalcy around Kushner's collusion with the Netanyahu government. Saban's effort
to protect the presidential son-in-law was supplemented by an op-ed in the Jewish Daily
Forward headlined, 'Jared Kushner Was Right To 'Collude' With Russia -- Because He Did It For
Israel.'
"While the Israel lobby ran interference for Kushner, the favorite pundits of the liberal
anti-Trump "Resistance" minimized the role of Israel in the Flynn saga. MSNBC's Rachel
Maddow, who has devoted more content this year to Russia than to any other topic, appeared to
entirely avoid the issue of Kushner's collusion with Israel.
"There is simply too much at stake for too many to allow any disruption in the preset
narrative. From the journalist pack that followed the trail of Russiagate down a conspiracy
infested rabbit hole to the Clintonites seeking excuses for their mind-boggling campaign
failures to the Cold Warriors exploiting the panic over Russian meddling to drive an
unprecedented arms build-up, the narrative must go on, regardless of the facts."
Unfortunately, and I can't believe I'm going to concede this, but FOX News, regarding this
one particular issue: the baloney of Russiagate, is probably the most accurate mainstream
source out there right now. Despite everything else they get wrong, FOX News, pertaining to Russiagate, is generally
(generally) accurate from the bits and pieces I've seen.
One quick example -- a few months ago the otherwise execrable Hannity actually had on his
show the great Dennis Kucinich who railed against the deep state for attacking Trump b/c of
his overtures toward peace with Moscow and how the deep state was using Russiagate to do it,
etc. Kucinich was sensational. I doubt Maddow would ever have given him such a platform to
voice the truth like Hannity did on this particular occasion.
Patrick Lucius , December 15, 2017 at 2:27 pm
I may have to take a look at Fox again–I bet you are right. Hannity as an arbiter of
truth–oh my god
Drew Hunkins , December 15, 2017 at 3:35 pm
On this one particular issue, Hannity gets things right.
Rob , December 16, 2017 at 2:00 pm
If Hannity ever reports a story correctly, it's only because it coincides with his deeply
partisan interests. Being truthful is something about which he cares little, if at all.
Skip Scott , December 15, 2017 at 3:05 pm
Yeah Drew-
For years I railed against Fox, but nowadays they seem to be the relatively sensible ones.
Tucker Carlson is exceptionally bright, and I have no idea what got into Hannity. I used to
loathe him to no end. Him giving Dennis Kucinich a chance to speak his mind is something I
never would have imagined.
Drew Hunkins , December 15, 2017 at 3:36 pm
Isn't it something Mr. Scott?
Dave P. , December 15, 2017 at 11:34 pm
Drew and Skip Scott – Yes, I agree with you. I watched Dennis Kucinich too. Hannity
and Carlson have been doing some very good reporting on these issues. It is amazing how the
things have changed. Fox News was "No" for progressives to go to.
Annie , December 15, 2017 at 4:25 pm
Prior to Trump's presidency I would never watch Fox News, but on this issue,, they are a
more accurate source of information then any other broadcasting media. Rachel Maddow does
nothing but rave, as if she had her own personal agenda, and maybe she does, ousting Trump,
and that a woman didn't win the White House. I too saw the interview with Kucinich, and
indeed it was a very good one.
RamboDave , December 15, 2017 at 5:27 pm
Tucker Carlson, on Fox (right before Hannity), has had Glenn Greenwald on several
times.
David G , December 16, 2017 at 9:08 am
That basically maps directly onto the fact that Russia is the one issue Trump is right
on.
Patrick Lucius , December 15, 2017 at 2:20 pm
Great article. Has America gone off the deep end? I just watched the first ten minutes of
an anti-Putin and anti-Russian Frontline on television two nights ago. I have never seen more
blatant or shameless propaganda. Because my mom watches tv all day and I am taking care of
her, I see the same slop, drivel, and gibberish parroted all day long on the major news
outlets. Perhaps I should state that more professionally: I see the same shameless propaganda
parroted daily by the mainstream news media And it occurs to me–these young news
commentators are not part of a conspiracy, willfully lying–they actually believe the
propaganda. We are in trouble. I think as a group we act much more like bees in a hive or
monkeys in a troop than we do as rational beings, and I mean no disrespect to bees or
monkeys.
exiled off mainstreet , December 15, 2017 at 2:56 pm
I agree. It seems sort of like the Nazi regime with more advanced technology and more
complete ability for the gestapo to exercise control or more aptly like the Soviet Union
where people actually believe the regime's propaganda.
Annie , December 15, 2017 at 4:35 pm
Personally I believe that many do know that there is nothing to the Russia-gate story, but
go along to get along, and they are no different then politicians, who bow before the Israeli
Lobby, or NRA, or corporate groups to get reelected, and maintain their standing in their
party. Another way of putting it, is to say they are willing to prostitute themselves. I
can't see myself doing that.
occupy on , December 16, 2017 at 12:36 am
I, too, saw this scurrilous 'documentary' – "Putin's Revenge" – and made a
point of writing down the names of a good number of those commentators moving the narrative
along. All of them are well-known active Zionists or children of American Zionists who've
helped create and ardently protect the State of Israel. I wish I could remember now at least
some of the commentors' names. I didn't see Frontline' "Putin's Revenge" on PBS. It was on a
National Geographic channel that traditionally shows those anthropological 'documentaries'
about "Ancient Alien Visitors," "Gods from Outer Space, etc .pleasant programs to fall to
sleep by. 'Putin's Revenge', however, was grotesque in its downright lies – making me
furiously wide awake until I could google info on those names.
alley cat , December 15, 2017 at 2:36 pm
"Or to put the issue differently: Will Russia-gate continue to gravely endanger
American national security?"
The neocon perpetrators of the Russia-gate hoax will continue putting their own greed (for
money and power) ahead of American national security. That's who they are and what they do.
They conflate global domination with American national security because it benefits them to
do so. Sure, they don't want a hot war with Russia because they are neither psychotic nor
suicidal. But they are power-crazed: delusional to the extent they think they can
prevent the Russian-American hostility provoked by their own machinations from spinning out
of control.
exiled off mainstreet , December 15, 2017 at 2:54 pm
This is a great article by one of the most intelligent and knowledgeable commentators on
Russia remaining active despite the ongoing dangerous propaganda storm. Those responsible for
this storm are threatening our continued existence. Because of this depressing salient fact,
the democratic party, which has been fully on board with this, has totally sacrificed its
legitimacy and degenerated to a clear and present existential danger. Clear thinking people
have to view it as such and take necessary action based upon that fact, which is serious in
its implications, since it is difficult in the extreme to supplant an existing party in a two
party system (which has degenerated into a two faction one party state some time ago) in
light of the media propaganda, intelligence and police control exercised by this odious
system.
Bill , December 15, 2017 at 3:11 pm
Really glad, Mr, Cohen, to see your article in Consortium. Your voice is always a wise
one. Weekly listener.
Very important and accurate information, for the most part, in my view, though I have a
few caveats.
Unfortunately for our perception of the 'goodness' of those in power, I tend to think the
level of knowledge and intention of those who spread Russiagate are more cynical than you
imagine.
When we read certain articles from hardline think-tanks and serious political commentary
from those publications and outlets which sustain the current 'scandal' we see a surprising
awareness of Russia's true intentions and nature. Sober, and reasonable. The problem is that
this commentary is not what is used to persuade any element of the public toward a certain
view on Russia. You instead see it within the establishment essentially talking amongst
themselves.
The problem, as I see it, is that these people are fully aware of the truth, as well as
Russia's intentions. They are just quite simply spinning vast lies to the contrary whenever
they speak to, or in front of, the public. For two main reasons:
Hobbling Trump, for a number of reasons, not least of which amounts to his unwillingness
to pretend he cares about 'spreading Democracy' around the world. More immediate goal.
Trying to put a lid on a rapidly boiling over domestic discontent with the status quo.
Meaning corporate control over the government, pro-corporate, anti-democratic policy, and
endless senseless war.
The remainder of this piece refers to #2.
Russia is an 'enemy' now, more than anything else, because, for whatever it's
self-interested motivations, it is a loud, prominent, powerful voice actively and
methodically criticizing and opposing US imperial hypocrisy, double-standards, and
deception.
We are told they 'sow chaos'. Code for platforming anti-establishment truth-tellers.
We are told they cause us to 'lose trust in our system of government'. Code for them platforming people who help expose, like Bernie Sanders does, how 'our system of government'
has been taken from us by corporations, and making us want it back, for the people.
We are told that Russia is, in however many words, whatever we, ourselves are.
Imperialistic, disregarding of truth and reality, arrogant, entitled, expansionist etc. The
American people are waking up to what the Empire does, and why. The rather desperate idea is
to redirect that knowledge and stick it to Russia. Externalizing an internal threat.
Finally, we are told that Russia is criticizing and grand-standing against the West in
order to tamp down domestic discontent. Which, given the previous entry here, is showing to
be exactly what the US government is doing. To the letter.
Russia is a fake enemy, talked about in a fake way, by fake people in an increasingly fake
democracy. Respectfully, Mr. Cohen, I don't think ideology is the problem. I don't think
those at the helm of US foreign policy have had an ideology in a long, long time. I think
they have, with few exceptions, a 'prime directive': The retention and expansion of
Oligarchic corporate power.
Nowadays, fearmongering over immigrant crime, terrorists, non-state cyber-criminals, or
whatever else conjured to make the extremely safe-from-foreign-threats (To this day no war on
our soil since the Civil War. Itself a domestic threat) American people feel afraid, and thus
controllable and ignorant, is no longer working. Only a big fish like Russia can even hope to
do the job. Plus that big fish is one of the factors 'sowing chaos' by giving a voice to
anti-imperialists in the West to spread the truth of the government we actually live
under.
In short, Russiagate, and it's accompanying digital censorship efforts, are a desperate
attempt to rest control back over the American people and away from honest, rational
truth.
Even shorter, our rulers underestimated the power of the internet.
Kind regards,
Bill
Lois Gagnon , December 15, 2017 at 8:57 pm
Thank you. That is a really truthful post. It really is all about maintaining imperial
hegemony at all costs. Unfortunately, the cost could be the end of life on Earth. These
weasels controlling the machinery of state from the darkness must be exposed as the
treacherous criminals they are.
David G , December 16, 2017 at 9:22 am
Reason #3: A looming, aggressive enemy (so portrayed) is needed to sustain the U.S.'s
parasitic surveillance, "security", and "defense" ecosystems.
Thanks, Professor Cohen, and I happen to think that this phony Russia hacking fabrication
is breaking down, along with many other false narratives of the West. So many things are
exposing the lies and there are truly good investigators who are weighing in, so I am hopeful
that the neocons will be finally outed as hopelessly behind the times.
And Twitter is helping because western media sources will not tell the truth and people
are taking to it to push back. I agree that at this time Fox is more interested in the facts
than MSNBC, and particularly Tucker Carlson. (The sex scandals, now another witch hunt, are
showing what a fouled-up society America has become. It is feminist McCarthyism, sadly, and I
am glad Tavis Smiley is fighting back.)
Yesterday I had a conversation with a loud mouth believer of the "Putin did it" fable and
told him some details, that outright it was a fabrication, and someone nearby in the coffee
shop actually joined to support the pushback with other facts. So, I am hopeful that people
are waking up. And Nikki Haley has just been called by people on Twitter for her lies about
Iran provocation in Yemen. Plus documents on NATO expansion after Gorbachev was assured would
not happen, have just been revealed. I do think people are waking up.
Bill , December 15, 2017 at 3:30 pm
Jessica,
That's what it takes. The political battle of our times. Good on you. I think you're
right. The beginnings of which seem to have motivated Russiagate in the first place. I did a
longer post on this above. Please keep spreading sense. I'll do the same.
Best wishes,
Bill
RnM , December 15, 2017 at 9:25 pm
It's good to be optimistc, but let us not forget the long history (short by Old World
standards) of the oligarchy of doing anything and everything to get what they want.
The present cock-up of Russia-gate (Geez, I hate using that MSM concocted jingo term) points,
not to the oligarchs losing their groove, but to an incompetent but persistent bunch of
Clinton/Obama synchophants. Their days in any kind of power are, thankfully, numbered. But the
snakes are lurking in the bushes, as are the deeper parts of the deep state. It's the long
game that they are in for.
Martin - Swedish citizen , December 15, 2017 at 6:37 pm
Thanks, Jessica,
A hopeful comment! Here, too, I sense at least some more dissent among us citizens with the
prevailing lies.
When the bubble bursts, the boy has cried and everyone "realises" the emperor is naked, I
wonder, will our governments, politicians and media survive? Everyone, practically, is
complicit.
Thanks, Bill, and I think we're at a profound crossroads in world history. I saw an
interview on YouTube with young Americans who did not even know who won the Civil War nor why
it was fought! We all must speak out with conviction and without anger.
Realist , December 15, 2017 at 3:44 pm
My parents always used to use the old argument to keep my thinking on track and avoid
conforming to dangerous groupthink: "if everyone else decided to jump off the cliff, in the
river or out the 10th floor window, would you just follow the crowd?" Professor Cohen is one
of the rare little boys who either learned that lesson well or has always had strong innate
instincts to avoid following the crowd or jumping on self-destructive bandwagons. Most of the
readers of this site seem to have similar predilections and are among the very few Americans
not being led by the Pied Pipers of all-encompassing self-destructive Russophobia. (Is there
some common childhood experience or shared gene in our personal biographies that compel our
rigorous adherence to the principles we all uphold?) As other posters have noted here, those
few media personalities with a seeming immunity to the pathological groupthink now infecting
most of America are indeed a very curious lot, with little else in the way of ideological
conformity, but thank heavens for them for any restoration of mass sanity will surely have to
originate from within their ranks, examples and leadership. I, for one, am pulling for
Professor Cohen to be among those leading this country out of the wilderness of lock-step
madness.
Bob Van Noy , December 15, 2017 at 3:47 pm
We remember an era before 11/22/1963
Joe Tedesky , December 15, 2017 at 4:30 pm
Realist I'm glad you brought up the readers on consortiumnews, and their not falling for
this Russia-Gate nonsense. People posting comments here in support of 'no Russian
interference' have been accused of being Trump supporters, but that was never the case. No,
instead many here just saw through the fog of propaganda, and certainly saw this Russia-Gate
idiocy as it being nothing more than an instigated coup. This defense of Trump could have
been for any newly elected president, but the division between Hillary supporters, and Trump
backers, has been the biggest obstacle to overcome, while attempting to explain your thought.
I truly think that if the shoe had been on the other foot, that the many posters of comments
here on consortiumnews would have been on Hillary's side, if it had been the same kind of
coup that had been put in place. It's time to tell John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey,
and Robert Mueller, to call Hillary and say, 'well at least we tried Madam Secretary', and
then be done with it.
Dave P. , December 16, 2017 at 2:43 pm
Realist and Joe – I always enjoy reading your thoughtful comments. Those of us who
have been reading professor Stephen Cohen's articles for more than four decades now , know
that he is the foremost authority on Russia. Instead of being courted to give his valuable
input into the relations with Russia, he and others like him are being vilified as Putin
apologists. It is the sign of the times we live in now.
As many comments posters here on this site had noted, the Russia-Gate has been
deliberately created to confront Russia at this time rather than later on. Russia is in the
way for final push for World domination – the Neoliberal Globalization.
Nobody, in Washington or elsewhere in the Country seems to ask why and for whom they, The
ruling Powers want to establish this World Empire at any cost – even at the risk of a
nuclear war. This process of building an Empire has changed the country as I had seen it more
than half a century ago.
NeoLiberal Globalization, building this World wide Empire during the last three or four
decades had its real winners and losers. Lot of wealth has been created all over the World
under neoliberal global economy.
The big time winners are top .01% and another about 10% are also in the winners category,
and have accumulated lot of wealth. From all over the World; China, India . . . this top 10%
class send their kids to the best universities in the West for professional education;
Finance, High tech, Sciences, and other professions and they get the jobs all over in Silicon
Valley, and big financial Institutions and other professional fields in U.S. , U.K.,
Australia Canada . . .
The losers are middle class in U.S. – whom Hillary called deplorables –
especially in those once mighty Industrial States in the Midwest, and East. With my marriage
here , I inherited lots of relatives more than forty five years ago, most of them in the
Midwest. As somebody commented a few weeks ago on this site about these middle class people
that their " Way of Life " has been destroyed. It is true. All these people voted for Trump.
With the exception of two, all our relatives in the Midwest and elsewhere on my wife's side
voted for Trump. They are good, hard working people. It is painful to look at those ruined
and abandoned factories in those States and ruined lives of many of those Middle Class
people. Globalization has been disastrous for the middle class people in U.S. It is a race to
the bottom for those people.
Ask those relatives if they have ever read anything about Russia during 2016. Not one of
them have ever read or listened to anything related to Russian media or other Russian source.
They did not even know if anything like RT or Sputnik News ever existed. Most of them don't
even know now. And it is true of the people we associate with here where we live. None of
them have time to read anything let alone Russian Media. I came to know about RT during
events in Ukraine in 2014, and about Sputnik News over a year ago when this Russia- Gate
commotion began. And I had read lot of Russian literature in my young age.
As several articles on this website have pointed out those email leaks were an inside job.
Russia-Gate is just a concocted scheme to bring down Trump. And to destabilize Russia –
a hurdle to Globalization and West's domination.
Skip Scott , December 17, 2017 at 8:39 am
Dave P-
Yours is a very accurate portrayal of the heartland of America. I live in a very rural
area of the southwest, and you describe reality there to a "T". They are much too busy trying
to survive to dig too deeply into world affairs. Thank goodness at least they've got Tucker
Carlson at Fox to contrast the propaganda spewers on the other networks. They know the latte
sippers and their government has abandoned them, but they don't fully understand the PNAC
empire's moves in pursuit of global domination, and many wind up in the military jousting at
windmills.
Realist , December 17, 2017 at 4:46 pm
I totally concur, Dave. I'm 70 and well remember, as a little kid, as a teenager and as a
young man, folks talking about a far-off ideal of world unity, wherein all people on earth
would share in earth's bounty and have the same democratic rights. The UN was supposed to be
one of the first steps in that general direction. However, nobody thought that the eventual
outcome would be what the movement has transmogrified into today: neoliberal globalism in
which a tiny fraction of the top 1% own and control everything, with the rest of us actually
suffering a drastic drop in our standard of living and a blatant diminution of our political
rights.
It's been fifty years since I lived in Chicago, and about 45 since I last lived in the
Midwest, but I was born and raised there and well recognise everything you have said about
the place and the people in your remark to be entirely correct. It's also true for most of
the other regions of this country in which I have lived, but the "Rust Belt" has paid the
price in spades to satiate the neoliberal globalist "free traders." (Remember when THAT
catchphrase was first sold to the working classes by Slick Willie's DLC wing of the
Democratic party? He and Al Gore basically ended up doubling the ranks of "Reagan Democrats"
whether they intended to do so or not. And, Hillary was so delusional as to assume those
people would be on her side!)
Dave P. , December 17, 2017 at 11:36 pm
Yes, Realist. That Slick Willie and Gore did the most damage to the working class than any
other administration in the recent American history. And being progressive democrats, we
worked hard for their election as volunteers registering voters. At that time Rolling Stone
Magazine called them as Saviors after Reagan and Bush era of greed – as they called it.
Clintons sold the Democratic Party to the Wall Street and to Neoliberal Globalization. Tony
Blair did the same in U.K. to the Labor Party.
Then we put faith in Hopey changey Obama and worked for his election. And he turned out to
be big fraud too. After his Libya intervention and then on to Syria, I finally got turned off
from Democratic Party politics. My wife, and I had started with McGovern Campaign in
1972.
Talking about Chicago, I landed at O'Haire fifty two years ago during snowy Winter, with
just a few hundred dollars in my pocket enough for one semester on my way to Graduate School.
You can not do it these days. America was at it's best. Ann Arbor was a Republican town those
days with very friendly people. Compared to Europe, and other cultures, I found Americans the
least prejudiced people, very open to other cultures. The factories In Michigan, Ohio,
Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana . . . were humming. Never on Earth, such a prosperous middle
class on such a scale has ever been created; made of good, hard working people in those small
and big towns. The workers were back bone of the Democratic Party. And every thing looked
optimistic. I, and couple of my friends thought it can not get better than this on Earth.
And all this seems like a past history now. Life is still good but that stability and that
optimism of 1960's is gone. I visited Wisconsin and Michigan last Spring and in Fall again
this year. It is painful to look at those gigantic factories shut down and in ruins. I lived
for a decade in Michigan. As I said in my comments above, the biggest loser in this
NeoLiberal Globalization is American Middle Class.
Piotr Berman , December 15, 2017 at 4:13 pm
Jessica K: The sex scandals, now another witch hunt, are showing what a fouled-up society
America has become.
One could say that there is nothing bad about a witch hunt, provided that it genuinely
goes after evil witches. Perhaps the worst hitch hunt in my memory was directed at preschool
teachers accused of sexual molestation and sometimes satanism. Probably we are not in this
Animal Kingdom story (yet):
Denizens of AK see a hare running very fast and they ask "what happen?" Mr. hare answers
"They are castrating camels!" "But you are a hare, not a camel!" "Try to prove that you are
not a camel!".
Abe , December 15, 2017 at 5:02 pm
"In a dramatic development in the trial in Kiev of several Berkut police officers accused
of shooting civilians in the Maidan demonstrations in February 2014, the defence has produced
two Georgians who confirm that the murders were committed by foreign snipers, at least 50 of
them, operating in teams. The two Georgians, Alexander Revazishvili and Koba Nergadze have
agreed to testify [ ]
"This dramatic and explosive evidence was first brought to light by the Italian journalist
Gian Micalessin on November 16 in an article in the Italian journal Il Giornale and is again
brought to the world's attention by a lawyer with some courage picking up on that report and
speaking with the witnesses himself. These witnesses stated to Gian Micalessin, even more
explosively, that the American Army was directly involved in the murders.
"The clear objective of the Maidan massacre in Kiev on February 20, 2014 was to sow chaos
and reap the fall of the democratically elected, pro-Russian Yanukovych government. People
were slaughtered for no other reason than to destroy a government the NATO powers, especially
the United States and Germany, wanted removed because of its opposition to NATO, the EU, and
their hegemonic drive to open Ukraine and Russia to American and German economic expansion.
In other words, it was about money and the making of money.
"The western media and leaders quickly blamed the Yanukovych government for the killings
during the Maidan demonstrations, but more evidence has become available indicating that the
massacre in Kiev of police and civilians – which led to the escalation of protests,
leading to the overthrow of the Yanukovych government – was the work of snipers working
on orders of government opponents and their NATO controllers using the protests as a cover
for a coup.
"One of the snipers already admitted to this in February 2015, thereby confirming what had
become common knowledge just a few days after the massacre in Kiev and in a secretly recorded
telephone call, the Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet reported to the EU head of Foreign
Policy, Catherine Ashton, in early March 2014, that there was widespread suspicion that
"someone from the new coalition" in the Kiev government may have ordered the sniper murders.
In February 2016, Maidan activist Ivan Bubenchik confessed that in the course of the
massacre, he had shot Ukrainian police officers. Bubenchik confirmed this in a film that
gained wide attention.
'Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, at the University of Ottawa, published a devastating paper on the
Maidan killings setting out in extensive detail the conclusive evidence that it was a false
flag operation and that members of the present Kiev regime, including Poroshenko himself were
involved in the murders, not the government forces. [ ]
"In the November 16 article in the Italian journal Il Giornale, and repeated on Italian TV
Canale 5, journalist Gian Micalessin revealed that 3 Georgians, all trained army snipers, and
with links to Mikheil Saakashvili and Georgian security forces were ordered to travel to Kiev
from Tbilisi during the Maidan events. It is two of these men that are now being called to
testify in Kiev."
The pretext for the western-supported overthrow of Ukrainian President Yanukovych was the
massacre of more than a hundred protestors in Kiev in February 2014, which Yanukovych
allegedly ordered his forces to carry out. Doubts have been expressed about the evidence for
this allegation, but they have been almost entirely ignored by the western media and
politicians.
Ukrainian-Canadian professor Ivan Katchanovski has carried out a detailed study of the
evidence of those events, including videos and radio intercepts made publicly available by
pro-Maidan sources, and eye witness accounts. His findings point to the involvement of
far-right militias in the massacre and a cover-up afterwards:
– The trajectories of many of the shots indicate that they were fired from buildings
that were then occupied by Maidan forces.
– Many warnings were given by announcers on the Maidan stage about snipers firing from
those buildings.
– Several leaders of the then opposition felt secure enough to give speeches on the
Maidan around the time that gunmen in nearby buildings were shooting protestors dead, and
those leaders were not targeted by the gunmen .
– Many of the protesters were shot with an outdated type of firearm that was not used
by professional snipers but was available in Ukraine as a hunting weapon.
– Recordings of all live TV and Internet broadcasts of the massacre by five different
TV channels were either removed from their websites immediately after the massacre or not
made publicly available.
– Official results of ballistic, weapons, and medical examinations and other evidence
collected during the investigations have not been made public, while crucial evidence,
including bullets and weapons, has disappeared.
– No evidence has been given that links the then security forces' weapons to the
killings of the protesters.
– No evidence has been given of orders to shoot unarmed protestors even though the new
government claimed that Yanukovych issued those orders personally.
– So far the only three people have been charged with the massacre, one of whom has
disappeared from house arrest.
Thank you Abe that article could change everything
Martin - Swedish citizen , December 15, 2017 at 6:54 pm
Abe,
Thanks for advocating Dr Katchanovski! I have been reading some of his papers since a year or
two and his work seems very thorough! He uses physical facts like trajectories of bullets to
determine where shots originated.
Another expert in the field who knows Mr Katchanovski fully endorsed his academic work
without any hesitation when I asked him recently. He is being published by publishers with
the highest demands. His work can be found in academia.com or is it .org, login is free of
charge.
His work deserves the attention of real journalists.
Martin - Swedish citizen , December 15, 2017 at 6:57 pm
Oh, sorry, I see u already mentioned academia.edu!
No harm repeating though.
And it is .edu. :)
Litchfield , December 15, 2017 at 9:51 pm
Ditto with the airliner shootdown.
Russia is accused and evidence is destroyed/suppressed.
The pattern is quite clear. Russiagate is merely an extension of the same pattern.
Remember those intelligence tests that consist of presenting a series of numbers, and the
test taker has to figure out what the next number in the pattern is . . .
So, the Russiagate thing is merely the next item that continues the pattern of Maidan, plane
shootdown and cover-up, shootdown of plane in Sinai, etc. etc. etc.
I think the deep state REALLY went apoplectic when Snowden escaped to Russia.
They will have their revenged, at any price, to the USA, to Russia, to the world. These
are madmen.
Joe Tedesky , December 16, 2017 at 12:32 am
It's prove Abe that 'only if you live long enough' applies to learning these newly
uncovered facts regarding the Maiden Square riots. Let's hold out hope that the truth to MH17
comes out soon. Another thing, how can these sanctions against Russia stay in place while
everything known as a narrative to that event comes unraveled.
Marko , December 15, 2017 at 5:31 pm
That's a good article , worth reading in its entirety. Thanks.
occupy on , December 16, 2017 at 1:23 am
Abe, thank you so much for this information. US fingerprints are all over Ukraine's
sickening economic 'reforms', too! Have you read the House Ukraine Freedom Support Act
– passed by both houses in the middle of the night Dec. 2014? I have. Wade through
until nearly the end where it gives President Obama #1. the power to work toward US
corporations exploring and developing Ukraine's natural resources (including fracking) once
'reforms' have been put in place (privatization); #2. the power to ask the World Bank to
extend special loans for US corporations to develop those natural resources; #3. the power to
install 'defensive' missile sites all along Russia's western borders; #4. the power to free
US NGO's in Russia from their previously non-partisan restraints and allow them to work with
anti-Putin political groups.
I urge you to google Dennis Kucinich/Ron Paul/Ukraine Freedom Support Act -2014. You won't
believe how that bill got through the House of Representatives and Senate. And you'll have to
laugh when you hear the word "democracy" in any context with "the USA".
Annie , December 15, 2017 at 6:48 pm
I also see the sexual allegations made against Trump, as another opportunity to oust him
from his presidency. I in no way condone such behavior, but it's disturbing to think the main
motivation driving this is another means of trying to oust him from his presidency. I don't
believe, as these women claim, that they felt "left out", in the recent outings of men who
have misused their positions of power to exploit women sexually.
Litchfield , December 15, 2017 at 9:58 pm
Yep, the Weinstein thing is being trumpeted and amplified to the extent that it synergizes
wtih attempts to oust Trump. It is handy to the deep state. Trump qua political figure is
being tarred with the Weinstein brush. That is the main reason we are seeing such a heavy
dose of stories on male bad behavior. We would not be seeing this if Hillary were in power.
Just a few stories but not full-court press. Because too many of these bad actors are
actually in the Hillary camp. Like, most of Hollywood. The story wouldn't help her,
politically, if she were in power. It only helps politically to drag down Trump. Before the
Weinstein thing came along, we arleady had teh golden showers fairy tale. In fact it would
not surprise me at all if Rose McGowan had some kind of political support and encouragement
to "go public."
this is no way means that I think this kind of thing is OK. But, things are not
straightforward in our world. It is a political as well as a "moral" or lifestyle story. One
of the political targets is Trump. Notice that the heads of studios who knew all about this
behavior and did nothing are not being forced to step down. Let's check out their political
donations . . .
Joe Tedesky , December 16, 2017 at 12:44 am
What if the 'Sexual Predator Purge' stories along with the 'Get Trump Out of Office'
campaign were but two stories colliding into each other? I mean a reporter in our TMZ world
we live in would need paid a handsome sum to continually stay quiet over a Harvey Weinstein
kind of scoop, so eventually these scandals had to come out. And then there's hateable loud
mouth the Donald, who must be stopped by any means. Put the two together, and hey with how
all these big shot perv's are going down, why not corral Trump and force him to resign. It's
even cheaper than impeachment.
So the conniving once again craft together a piece of fiction, mixed in with some reality,
and take the American conscience off into another realm of fantasy. Hate can get anybody
carted off to the guillotine, if the timings right.
Joe Tedesky , December 16, 2017 at 12:55 am
Andrew Bacevich mentions the Weinstein scandal, and then goes on to suggest what the
conversation should be.
Bacevich is fine as far as he goes
But he never quite "turns the corner" himself in taking the story as far as it needs to be
taken and laying out the conclusions that the public needs to grasp.
David G , December 16, 2017 at 9:32 am
Yes! That! Thank you, Litchfield.
Bacevich is knowledgeable and worth reading. But he never, afaik, ventures to look deeply
enough into the imperial heart of darkness – "turn the corner", as you say.
Leslie F. , December 15, 2017 at 7:11 pm
So the investigation isn't really about Russia. It is about corruption, money laundering,
tax evasion, etc. All worthy of investigation. Not to mention the conspiracy to kidnap the
Turkish cleric and collusion with Israel This investigation should not be shut down because
the deep state and the press are in a conspiracy to blame it all on Russia. It is up to you
guys in the press to convince your colleagues to call it what it really is, and expose those
members who continue to misrepresent reality. The press, as a whole, has dropped the ball in
a big way on this, but that is not Mueller's responsibility. The 4th estate is a mess and you
should be trying to figure out how to clean it up without violating the constitution.
Annie , December 15, 2017 at 7:58 pm
This is one of the reasons I no longer support Democracy Now. As Mr. Cohen said, " worse,
this mainstream malpractice has spread to some alternative-media publications once prized for
their journalistic standards, "
God, help us, everyone including mental health professionals have no sense of
professionalism, but they sure know how to make a buck, and try to undo a presidency.
"There are Thousands of Us": Mental Health Professionals Warn of Trump's Increasing
Instability
I read your post, and of course I agree. Some of the allegations are so minor, as he
hugged me and gave me a kiss on my mouth. He touched my breast. I was in the dressing room
when he came in unannounced, and my hair was in curlers, and I was only wearing a robe, but I
was nude underneath. Of course some were more disconcerting then those I mentioned, but all
claim to be traumatized. I have no doubt their agenda is to bring him down and the whole
thing has been orchestrated to do just that. Where is all the concern, and coverage of rape
in this country where the estimates go from 300,000 to over a million women raped each year?
Where are the stories about sexual trafficking of children, or the children who are sexually
abused in their own homes? I've never seen coverage on these issues like what is happening
now. That is another reason I find this whole thing appalling. Not to mention using sexual
harassment as a political tool to bring down a president.
David G , December 16, 2017 at 9:41 am
So many examples of this. There's an alternative newspaper comic I used to like, "Tom the
Dancing Bug" – smart, subversive, and "progressive". But the writer has completely
bought into Scary Putin/Puppet Trump. It's depressing.
"unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous" sums it up nicely. It was also good to have
Professor Cohen's endorsement of this website's courageous initiatives in combatting the
Russia-gate farce.
Bob Van Noy , December 16, 2017 at 11:15 am
I'll happily second that thought BobH. And thanks
Litchfield , December 15, 2017 at 9:29 pm
Thank god Consortium News keeps up the pressure on the Russia-gate scam.
And glad to see Stephen Cohen published here.
Readers of this site need to keep reminding themselve of the basic background on this -- at
least, I do -- in case opportunities comes along to deflate others' credulousness.
One question for Stephen Cohen:
Your wife is the editor of The Nation.
What has The Nation done to stop the madness?
Not enough. What's the story?
In fact, during the campaign and post-election, The Nation shamefully lent itself to the
craziness on the left that sought to devalidate not only the results of the election but
Trump himself qua human being. Nothing has been too far below the belt for Nation editors and
writers to strike. I have had the ongoing impression that The Nation's editorial board really
cannot see below the surface on any of this and have driven a very superficial anti-Trump,
"resist" narrative dangerous in its implications. I think I have seen just one story, by a
Patrick someone, that seriously questioned the russia-gate narrative. The Nation has fallen
right in to the trap of "I hate Trump so much and am so freaked out by his election that I
will make common cause with any one and any forces in our polity that will get rid of him
somehow." The nation seems too scared of facing head on the reality of deep state actors in
the USA. Or is too wedded to its version of reality to see what has become incraseingly clear
to growing numbers of Americans.
As many an intelligent and more knowledgeable than I person has said: There is plenty to
decry about Trump. But worse is the actions taken in the name of ridding the country of him
and his presidency.
Because of this consistent cluelessness I have canceled all gift subscriptions to The Nation.
I'll pay for my own sub, to see where this magazine goes, but others will have to pay their
own way with The Nation if they so choose.
So, please clean up at home and get the act together on what is left of the left.
First.
Thought the acronym PEPs was clever, Progressives Except for Palestine. Now it has morphed
into PEPIRs pronounced Peppers, Progressives Except for Palestine, Iran and Russia. Actually
could be PEPIRS adding Syria. If we added Iraq it could be PIEPIRS or Peepers. Actually, I
have little regard for such people whose aims include killing and maiming for land and
money.
Professor Cohen's credentials are very impressive and his voice and pen are badly needed.
People like him are precious resources for America and the world.
PIEPIRS is incorrect with the I before the E making Pipers. So we have PEPs, Peppers and
Pipers. Please excuse the frivolous comments but it feels good to try to expose their
hypocrisy in any way you can, that is of the Peps, Peppers and Pipers.
Gregory Herr , December 15, 2017 at 9:43 pm
What has really been astonishing to me -- beyond a lack of evidence for all the
"Russia-gate" allegations–is the utterly preposterous nature of the narrative in the
first place. Robert Parry has addressed this, but the voice of Stephen Cohen–with the
perspective of specialized scholarship and experience vis-a-vis Russia–is a welcome
voice indeed.
David G , December 16, 2017 at 9:55 am
The NY Times printed an allegedly explanatory graphic a couple of days ago showing the
Trump/Russia "scandal" as a basically a proliferating root system descending from the central
"collusion" premise, with the roots and rootlets branching down to encompass all the
disjointed facts (and "facts") and allegations that have appeared in the media.
The graphic was unintentionally revealing of the phoniness of the whole business: instead
of showing numerous observations leading to a deeper truth, it accurately depicted
"Russia-gate" as a pre-existing (fact-free) conceit that has chaotically complexified to
accommodate random developments. That's the definition of a weak and useless theory!
Gregory Herr , December 16, 2017 at 4:37 pm
It seems to that as a representative of the incoming Administration's foreign policy team
Flynn was just doing his job speaking with the Russian ambassador about the sudden and
striking maneuvers of Obama during the transition. And in trying to defuse potential fallout
and escalation due to those sanctions he was doing his job well. Was it not perfectly legal
and well within the parameters of his duties to establish some baselines of discussion with
counterparts?
Flynn's expression of thoughts on policy to counterparts were, to my mind, subject to the
approval of the head of the incoming Administration -- namely Trump, and Trump only.
By the time the FBI questioned Flynn, he surely must have had an idea his conversation
with the Ambassador had been under surveillance. What was the "lie"? Was he forgetful of a
detail and just caught in a nitpicking technicality? Or did he deliberately manufacture a
falsehood? When he gets past his legal entanglement, I sure hope he sits down to a candid
interview. I'd like him to demystify me about all this.
I like your phraseology David this nonsense has been chaotically complexified to
accommodate random developments!
David G , December 16, 2017 at 6:46 pm
Thanks, Gregory Herr. In your earlier comment that I replied to, you reference "the
utterly preposterous nature of the narrative". That's not bad phraseology either.
And it also gets to something I've been thinking all along: I'd like to hear a
"Russia-gate" proponent, such as an MSNBC host, actually supply what they consider a
plausible narrative that fits all these breathless Trump/Russia "scoops".
I'm not demanding they prove anything, but just want to hear a story that makes sense.
Because it seems to me that all the little developments they rush toward with their
hummingbird attention spans don't fit together, *even if you concede all the dubious and
debatable "facts"*.
dhinds , December 16, 2017 at 7:28 am
An important interview, for anyone that wants to understand Russia, today.
Damn good Interview (on the part of Putin – He said what was needed to be said.
including "well, this is just more nonsense Have you lost your mind over there, or
something)? He then continued to wrap it up, in a reasonable and and diplomatic manner.
Effectively, the USA continues locked into denial, refusing to accept responsibility for
it's own current state of affairs. (The mass delusion is so thick you could eat it with a
spoon, if it wasn't so putrid).
Warmongering, terrorist and refugee creating Regime Change and mass assassinations (with
neither congressional oversight nor due process), arms and influence peddling profiteering,
the creation of a mass surveillance society and militarized police state that kills
minorities, the homeless and poor with impunity, mass incarceration in private for profit
prisons, increasingly gross inequality and the excessive cost of health care and education;
show the USA to be a society adrift and devoid of fundamental values. (And that's me talking,
not Vladimir Putin)
The Clintons, Bush's and their supporters are to blame and should be held accountable, but
mainly a new course for society must be charted and neither of the two corrupt major
political parties is capable of that at this time.
A new coalition is called for.
James , December 16, 2017 at 10:13 am
Thank you Mr. Cohen for your ever insightful and reasoned commentary on this disturbing
trend.
Clif , December 16, 2017 at 5:04 pm
Yes, thank you Dr. Cohen.
The lack of scrutiny is alarming. I'd like to offer Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan as
possible figures who are working the lines and should be drawn into the light.
rosemerry , December 16, 2017 at 5:53 pm
Professor Cohen is one of the few who really knows about Russia, so of course so any of
the Fawning Corporate Media (to quote Ray McGovern) denigrate his work. Even in GWBush's time
he often explained "the Cold War is over", and Obama's intemperate rush to expel diplomats
and push ahead the Russophobia after Trump's election had no basis in fact and just
encouraged the Hillary-Dems and neocons to continue the unjustified destruction of the one
aspect of Trump's "plan" that would have benefited the USA and peace.
Bill , December 17, 2017 at 12:03 pm
Do you really think that Obama was misled by others? I don't believe it. Obama and Hillary
are the origin of the fabrications. Will anyone hold their feet to the fire?
"It's the state-sponsorship of terrorism, stupid." The largest-scale, ongoing, organized
war criminal operation in the history of the world has murdered millions.
Vox has an article "The Left Shouldn't Make Peace With Neocons -- Even to Defeat Trump",
by Robert Wright. Bill Kristol of American Conservative and many other neocons including
Robert Kagan have dual US-Israel citizenship, and they push the MICC toward war. They'll be
pushing for war with Iran and maybe Russia.
Tim , December 18, 2017 at 10:13 am
Sadly, quite a concise, clear picture of the muddy waters called Russia-gate, Intel's
baby, and the faint possibilities of Tillerson and Lavrov holding fast against sabotage.
Let's hope against all hope.
"... More like he's denying the story peddled by the Democrats in some vain attempt at reducing his legitimacy over smashing Hillary in the elections. ..."
"... What is he going to prison for, again? Colluding with Israel? ..."
"... The most anger in the media against the POTUS seems to be directed against Russia gate. Time and energy is wasted on conjecture, most 'probables will not stand in a court of law. This media hysteria deflects from the destruction of the affordable healthcare act and the tax changes good for the rich against the many. I think the people are being played. ..."
"... In the 1990s and 2000s a large section of the American establishment was effectively bought off by people like Prince Bandar. These are the ones that are determined that the anti-Russian policy then instigated be continued, even at the cost of slandering the current President's son-in-law. The irony is that in the meantime an effective regime change has taken place in Saudi and Bandar's bandits are mostly locked up behind bars. ..."
"... True, and not just hypocrisy either. This has to be seen in the context of a war, cold for now, on Russia - with China, via Iran and NK, next in line. Dangerous times, as a militarily formidable empire in economic decline looks set to take us all out. For the few who think and resist the dominant narrative - and are thereby routinely called out as 'kremlin trolls' - it is dismaying how easily folk are manipulated. ..."
"... Your points are valid but, alas, factual truths are routinely trumped (!) by powerful mythology. Fact is, despite an appalling record since WW2, Washington and its pet institutions - IMF/World Bank/WTO - are still seen as good guys. How? Because (a) all western states have traded foreign policy independence for favoured status in Washington, (b) English as global lingua franca means American soft propaganda is lapped up across the world via its entertainment industry, and (c) all 'our' media are owned by billionaire corps or as with BBC/Graun, subject to government intimidation/market forces. ..."
"... Truth is, DRT is not some horrifically new entity. (Let's not forget how HRC's 'no fly zone' for Syria promised to take us into WW3, nor her demented "we came, we saw, he died - ha ha" response to Gaddafi's sodomisation by knife blade, and more importantly to Libya's descent into hell.) As John Pilger noted, "the obsession with Trump the man – not Trump as symptom and caricature of an enduring system – beckons great danger for all of us". ..."
"... If all Meuller has is Flynn and the Russians during the transition period, he's got nothing. ..."
"... It's alleged that Turkey wanted Flynn to extradite Gullen for his alleged involvement in Turkey's failed coup. Just this weekend, Turkey have issued an arrest warrant for a former CIA officer in relation to the failed coup. So, IF the CIA were behind the failed coup and Flynn knows this - well, a good way to silence him would be to charge him with some serious crimes and then offer to drop them in return for his silence. But, like your theory, it's just speculation. ..."
"... The secret deep state security forces haven't been this diminished since Carter cleared the stables in the 70's - they fought back and stopped his second term ... ..."
"... Seeing how the case against Trump and Flynn is based on 'probable' and not hard proof its 'probable that the anti Trump campaign is directed from within the murky enclaves of the US intelligence community. ..."
"... Hatred against Trump deflects the anger, see the system works the US is still a democracy. Well it isn't, its a sick oligarchy run by the mega rich who own the media, 90% is owned by 5 corporations. Americans are fed the lie that their vast military empire with its 800 overseas bases are to defend US interests. ..."
"... Wow this is like becoming McCarthy Era 2.0. I'm just waiting for the show trials of all these so-called colluders. ..."
"... the interest of (Russian Ambassador) Kislyak in determining the position of the new administration on sanctions is not unheard of in Washington, or necessarily untoward to raise with one of the incoming national security advisers. Ambassadors are supposed to seek changes in policies and often seek to influence officials in the early stages of administrations before policies are established. Flynn's suggestion that the Russians wait as the Trump administration unfolded its new policies is a fairly standard response of an incoming official ..."
"... "The problem is charging Flynn for lying. A technicality. But not charging Hillary for email server. Another technicality. That's all the public will see if no collusion proved, and will ruin credibility of the FBI and the Dems" ..."
"... It's not just collusion is it, what about the rampant, naked nepotism, last seen on this unashamed scale in ancient Rome? ..."
"... So he lobbied for Israel not Russia then? Whoops. How does the author even know where Mueller's probe is heading, and which way Flynn flipped? Flynn worked much longer for the Obama administration than for Trump's. ..."
"... You can easily impeach Trump for bombing Syria's military airfield, which is by UN definition war crime of war aggression, starting war without the Congress approval; and doing so by supporting false flag of AQ, is support of terrorists and so on ..."
"... Oh you can't do it, of course, it was so - so presidential to bomb another country and it is just old habit and no war declaration, if country is too weak to bomb you back. And you love this exiting crazy balance of global nuclear annihilation too much, so you prefer screaming Russia, Russia to keep it hot, for wonderful military contracts. ..."
"... If the US wanted to do itself a massive favour it should shine the spotlight on Robert Mueller, the man now in charge of investigating the President of these United States for "collusion" with Russia and possible "obstruction of justice" himself obstructed a congressional investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks. ..."
"... Dealing with western backed coups on its own doorstep and being the only country actually to be legally fighting in Syria - a war that directly threatens its security - does not amount to global belligerence. ..."
"... Clinton lied under oath ..."
"... The logan act is a dead law no one will be prosecuted for a act that has never been used... plus the president elect can talk to any foreign leader he or she wishes to use and even talk deals even if a current president for 2 months is still in office... ..."
"... Should all countries which try to influence elections be treated as enemies? Where do you set the threshold? If we go by the actual evidence, Russia seems to have bought some Facebook ads and was allegedly involved in exposing HRC's meddling with the Democratic primaries. Compare that to the influence that countries like Israel and the Gulf Arabs exert on American politics and elections. Are you seriously claiming that Russia's influence is bigger or more decisive? ..."
"... The goal of weakening the US is also highly debatable. Accepting for a moment that Russia tried to tip the balance in favor of Trump, would America be stronger if it were engaged more actively in Syria and Ukraine? Is there a specific example where Trump's administration weakened the American position to the advantage of Russia? And how is the sustained anti-Russian information warfare helping anyone but the Chinese? ..."
"... The clues that Kushner has been pulling the strings on Russia are everywhere... He then pushed Flynn hard to try to turn Russia around on an anti-Israel vote by the UN security council. ..."
"... And Russia didn't turn, so hardly a clue that Kushner was pulling strings with any effect. What this clue does suggest however, is that Israel pressured/colluded with the Trump Team to undermine the Obama administrations policy towards a UN resolution on illegal settlements. The elephant in the room is Israels influence on US politics. ..."
"... In relation to the "lying" charge - In December, Flynn (in his role as incoming National Security Advisor) was told to talk to the Russians by Kushner (in his role as incoming special advisor). In these conversations, Flynn told the Russians to be patient regarding sanctions as things may change when Trump becomes President. All of this is totally legal and is what EVERY new adminstration does. Flynn had his phoned tapped by the FBI so they knew he had talked to the Russian about sanctions - they also knew the conversation was totally legal - but when they asked him about it, he said he didn't discuss sanctions. So Flynn is being charged about lying about something that was totally legal for him to do. That's it. ..."
"... All those thinking this is the beginning of the end of Trump are going to be disappointed. Just look at the charges so far. Manafort has been charged with money laundering and not registering as a foreign agent - however, both of those charges pre-date him working for Trump. Flynn has been charged with lying to the FBI about speaking to the Russians - even though him speaking to the Russians in his role as National Security Advisor to the President-elect was not only totally legal, it was the norm. And this took place in December, after the election. ..."
"... So the 2 main players have been charged with things that have nothing to do with the Trump campaign, and lets not forget the point of the investigation is to find out if Trump's campaign colluded with the Russians to win the election. Manafort's charges related to before working for the Trump campaign whilst Flynn's came after Trump won the Presidency, neither of which have anything to do with the election. As much as I wish Trump wasn't President, don't get your hopes up that this is going anywhere ..."
"... Gross hypocrisy on the US governments side. They have, since WW2 interfered with other countries elections, invaded, and killed millions worldwide, and are still doing so. Where were the FBI investigations then? Non existent. US politicians and the military hierarchy are completely immune from any prosecutions when it comes down to overseas illegal interference. ..."
"... America like all governments are narcissistic, they will cheat, steal, kill, if it benefits them. It's called national interest, and it's number one on any leader's job list. Watch fog of war with Robert McNamara, fantastic and terrifying to see how it works. ..."
"... The US has also been meddling in other countries elections for years, and doubtless most Americans neither know or care about that! So it's perhaps it's best to simply term them a 'rival', most people should be able to agree on that ..."
"... Gallup have been polling Americans for the past couple of decades on this. The last time I read about it a couple of years ago 70% of Americans had unfavourable views of Russia, ranging from those who saw them as an enemy (a smaller amount) through to those who saw them as a threat. ..."
Mueller will have to thread very carefully because he is maneuvering on a very politically
charged terrain. And one cannot refrain from comparing the current situation with the many
free passes the democrats were handed over by the FBI, the Department of Justice and the
media which make the US look like a banana republic.
The mind blowing fact that Clinton sat
with the Attorney General on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport "to chit-chat" and not to
discuss the investigation on Clinton's very wife that was being overseen by the same AG,
leaves one flabbergasted.
And the fact that Comey essentially said that Clinton's behaviour,
tantamount in his own words to extreme recklessness, did not warrant prosecution was just
inconceivable.
Don't forget that Trump has nearly 50 M gun-toting followers on Tweeter and
that he would not hesitate to appeal to them were he to feel threatened by what he could
conceive as a judicial Coup d'Etat. The respect for the institutions in the USA has never
been so low.
...a judge would decide if the evidence was sufficient to warrant a trial.
Actually, in the U.S. a grand jury would decide if the evidence was sufficient to warrant
formal charges leading to a trial. There is also the possibility that Mueller has uncovered
both Federal and NY State offenses, so charges could be brought against Kushner at either
level. Mueller has been sharing information from his investigation with the NY Attorney
General's Office. Trump could pardon a federal offense, but has no jurisdiction to pardon
charges brought against Kushner by the State of NY.
I watched RT for 24 months before the US election. They favoured Bernie Saunders strongly
before he lost to Hilary. Then they ran hustings for the smaller US parties, eg Greens, and
the Libertarians , which could definitely be seen as an interference in the US election, but
which as far as I know, was never mentioned in the US. They were anti Hilary but not pro
Trump. And indeed, their strong anti capitalist bias would have made such support unlikely.
What's he lying about? More like he's denying the story peddled by the Democrats in some vain attempt at reducing his
legitimacy over smashing Hillary in the elections.
Obama and Hillary met hundreds of foreign officials. Were they colluding as well?
The most anger in the media against the POTUS seems to be directed against Russia gate.
Time and energy is wasted on conjecture, most 'probables will not stand in a court of law. This media hysteria deflects from the destruction of the affordable healthcare act and the
tax changes good for the rich against the many.
I think the people are being played.
In the 1990s and 2000s a large section of the American establishment was effectively
bought off by people like Prince Bandar. These are the ones that are determined that the
anti-Russian policy then instigated be continued, even at the cost of slandering the current
President's son-in-law. The irony is that in the meantime an effective regime change has
taken place in Saudi and Bandar's bandits are mostly locked up behind bars.
It's all too funny.
True, and not just hypocrisy either. This has to be seen in the context of a war, cold for
now, on Russia - with China, via Iran and NK, next in line. Dangerous times, as a militarily
formidable empire in economic decline looks set to take us all out. For the few who think and
resist the dominant narrative - and are thereby routinely called out as 'kremlin trolls' - it
is dismaying how easily folk are manipulated.
Your points are valid but, alas, factual truths
are routinely trumped (!) by powerful mythology. Fact is, despite an appalling record since
WW2, Washington and its pet institutions - IMF/World Bank/WTO - are still seen as good guys.
How? Because (a) all western states have traded foreign policy independence for favoured
status in Washington, (b) English as global lingua franca means American soft propaganda is
lapped up across the world via its entertainment industry, and (c) all 'our' media are owned
by billionaire corps or as with BBC/Graun, subject to government intimidation/market forces.
Truth is, DRT is not some horrifically new entity. (Let's not forget how HRC's 'no fly
zone' for Syria promised to take us into WW3, nor her demented "we came, we saw, he died - ha
ha" response to Gaddafi's sodomisation by knife blade, and more importantly to Libya's
descent into hell.) As John Pilger noted, "the obsession with Trump the man – not Trump
as symptom and caricature of an enduring system – beckons great danger for all of
us".
I missed Jill Abramson's column about all the meetings the Obama administration held -- quite
openly -- with foreign governments during the transition period between his election and his
first inauguration.
But since she's been demonstrably and laughably wrong about predicting future political
events in the USA (see her entire body of work during the 2016 election campaign), why should
she start making sense now?
It's completely possible, of course, that some as-yet-to-be-revealed piece of evidence
will prove collusion -- before the election and by candidate Trump -- with the
Russians. But the Flynn testimony certainly isn't it. All the heavy breathing and hysteria is
simply a sign of how the media, yet again, always gravitates toward the news it wishes were
true, rather than what really is true. If all Meuller has is Flynn and the Russians during
the transition period, he's got nothing.
Flynn was charged with far more serious crimes which were all dropped and he was left with a
charge that if he spends any time in prison, it will be about 6 months. Now, you could say
for him to agree to that, he must have some juicy info - and he probably does - but what that
juicy info is is just speculation. And if we are speculating, then maybe what he traded it
for was nothing to do with Trump? After all, one of the charges against him was failing to
register as a foreign agent on behalf of Turkey.
It's alleged that Turkey wanted Flynn to
extradite Gullen for his alleged involvement in Turkey's failed coup. Just this weekend,
Turkey have issued an arrest warrant for a former CIA officer in relation to the failed coup.
So, IF the CIA were behind the failed coup and Flynn knows this - well, a good way to silence
him would be to charge him with some serious crimes and then offer to drop them in return for
his silence. But, like your theory, it's just speculation.
Still no evidence of Russian collusion in Trump campaign BEFORE the election...... whatever
happened after being president elect is not impeachable unless it would be after taking
office.
The secret deep state security forces haven't been this diminished since Carter cleared
the stables in the 70's - they fought back and stopped his second term ...
Seeing how the case against Trump and Flynn is based on 'probable' and not hard proof its
'probable that the anti Trump campaign is directed from within the murky enclaves of the US
intelligence community.
Trumps presidency could have the capability of galvanising a powerful resistance against
the 2 party state for 'real change, like affordable healthcare and affordable education for
ALL its people. But no its not happening, Trump is attacked on probables and undisclosed
sources. A year has passed and nothing has been revealed.
Hatred against Trump deflects the anger, see the system works the US is still a
democracy. Well it isn't, its a sick oligarchy run by the mega rich who own the media, 90% is
owned by 5 corporations. Americans are fed the lie that their vast military empire with its
800 overseas bases are to defend US interests.
Well their not, their only function is, is to spend tax dollars that otherwise would be
spent on education, health, infrastructure, things that would 'really' benefit America.
Disagree, well go ahead and accuse me of being a conspiracy nut-job, in the meantime China is
by peaceful means getting the mining rights in Africa, Australia, deals that matter.
The tax legislation for the few against the many is deflected by the anti-Trump hysteria
based on conjecture and not proof.
Crimea was and is Russian.
Your mask is slipping, Vlad .
Your ignorance is showing.
I have no connection to Russia what so ever.
Crimea was legally ceded to Russia over 200 years ago, by the Ottomans to Catherine the
Great.
Russia has never relinquished control.
What the criminal organization the USSR did under Ukrainian expat Khrushchev, is
irrelevant.
And as Putin said , any agreement about respecting Ukraine's territorial integrity was
negated when the USA and the EU fomented and financed a rebellion and revolution.
Australia, Canada, and S. Africa supply the lion's share of gold bullion that London survives
on. And the best uranium in the world. All sorts of other precious commodities as well.
If you're not toeing the line on US foreign policies religiously, the Yanks will drop you.
You are selectively choosing to refer to this one instance, but even here Obama
administration were still in charge - so not very legal, was it.
I am "selectively choosing to refer to this one instance" because that's all Flynn has
been charged with. Oh, and it is totally legal for a member of the incoming administration to
start talks with their foreign counterparts. Here's a quote from an op-ed piece in The Hill
from a law professor at Washington University.
the interest of (Russian Ambassador) Kislyak in determining the position of the new
administration on sanctions is not unheard of in Washington, or necessarily untoward to
raise with one of the incoming national security advisers. Ambassadors are supposed to
seek changes in policies and often seek to influence officials in the early stages of
administrations before policies are established. Flynn's suggestion that the Russians wait
as the Trump administration unfolded its new policies is a fairly standard response of
an incoming official .
"The problem is charging Flynn for lying. A technicality.
But not charging Hillary for email server.
Another technicality.
That's all the public will see if no collusion proved, and will ruin credibility of the FBI
and the Dems"
It's not just collusion is it, what about the rampant, naked nepotism, last seen on this
unashamed scale in ancient Rome?
He then pushed Flynn hard to try to turn Russia around on an anti-Israel vote by the UN
security council.
So he lobbied for Israel not Russia then? Whoops.
How does the author even know where Mueller's probe is heading, and which way Flynn
flipped?
Flynn worked much longer for the Obama administration than for Trump's.
You can easily impeach Trump for bombing Syria's military airfield, which is by UN definition
war crime of war aggression, starting war without the Congress approval; and doing so by
supporting false flag of AQ, is support of terrorists and so on
Oh you can't do it, of course, it was so - so presidential to bomb another country and it
is just old habit and no war declaration, if country is too weak to bomb you back. And you
love this exiting crazy balance of global nuclear annihilation too much, so you prefer
screaming Russia, Russia to keep it hot, for wonderful military contracts.
Oh, and I have to be supporter of Putin's oligarchy with dreams of great tsars of Russia,
if I care about humans survival on this planet and have very bad opinion about suicidal fools
playing this stupid games.
If the US wanted to do itself a massive favour it should shine the spotlight on Robert
Mueller, the man now in charge of investigating the President of these United States for
"collusion" with Russia and possible "obstruction of justice" himself obstructed a
congressional investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Dealing with western backed coups on its own doorstep and being the only country actually to
be legally fighting in Syria - a war that directly threatens its security - does not amount
to global belligerence.
The logan act is a dead law no one will be prosecuted for a act that has never been used...
plus the president elect can talk to any foreign leader he or she wishes to use and even talk
deals even if a current president for 2 months is still in office...
I am not sure any level of scandal will make much difference to Trump or his supporters.
They simply see this as an elitist conspiracy and not amount of evidence of wrongdoing will
have an impact.
So far the level of scandal is below that of Whitewater/Lewinsky, and that was a very low
level indeed. What "evidence of wrongdoing" is there? Nothing, that's why they charged Flynn
with lying to investigators. It's important to keep in mind that the he did nor lie about
actual crimes. Perhaps that's going to change as the investigation proceeds, but so far this
is nothing more than a partisan lawfare fishing expedition.
Because they attempted to covertly influence a general election in order to weaken the
US.
And your evidence for this is what exactly? As for countries trying to influence elections in other countries, I'm all for it
particularly when one of the candidates is murderous, arrogant and stupid.
BTW, in Honduras after supporting a coup against the democratically-elected president
because he sought a referendum on allowing presidents to serve two terms, you'd think the
United States would interfere when his non-democratically-elected replacement used a "packed"
supreme court to change the constitution to allow presidents to serve more than one term to
at least stop him stealing an election as he is now doing/has done. But they didn't and that
hasn't stopped the United States whining that Evo Morales is being undemocratic by trying to
extend the number of terms he can serve.
Because they attempted to covertly influence a general election in order to weaken the
US.
Should all countries which try to influence elections be treated as enemies? Where do you
set the threshold? If we go by the actual evidence, Russia seems to have bought some Facebook
ads and was allegedly involved in exposing HRC's meddling with the Democratic primaries.
Compare that to the influence that countries like Israel and the Gulf Arabs exert on American
politics and elections. Are you seriously claiming that Russia's influence is bigger or more
decisive?
The goal of weakening the US is also highly debatable. Accepting for a moment that Russia
tried to tip the balance in favor of Trump, would America be stronger if it were engaged more
actively in Syria and Ukraine? Is there a specific example where Trump's administration
weakened the American position to the advantage of Russia? And how is the sustained
anti-Russian information warfare helping anyone but the Chinese?
The clues that Kushner has been pulling the strings on Russia are everywhere... He then
pushed Flynn hard to try to turn Russia around on an anti-Israel vote by the UN security
council.
And Russia didn't turn, so hardly a clue that Kushner was pulling strings with any effect.
What this clue does suggest however, is that Israel pressured/colluded with the Trump Team to
undermine the Obama administrations policy towards a UN resolution on illegal settlements.
The elephant in the room is Israels influence on US politics.
Can someone please actually tell us what Flynn/Jared/Trump is supposed to have done.
In relation to the "lying" charge - In December, Flynn (in his role as incoming National
Security Advisor) was told to talk to the Russians by Kushner (in his role as incoming
special advisor). In these conversations, Flynn told the Russians to be patient regarding
sanctions as things may change when Trump becomes President. All of this is totally legal and
is what EVERY new adminstration does. Flynn had his phoned tapped by the FBI so they knew he
had talked to the Russian about sanctions - they also knew the conversation was totally legal
- but when they asked him about it, he said he didn't discuss sanctions. So Flynn is being
charged about lying about something that was totally legal for him to do. That's it.
These days "US influence" seems to consist of bombing Middle Eastern countries back to the
bronze age for reasons that defy easy logic.
Anything that reduces that kind of influence would be welcome.
The Logan Act (18 U.S.C.A. § 953 [1948]) is a single federal statute making it a crime
for a citizen to confer with foreign governments against the interests of the United States.
Specifically, it prohibits citizens from negotiating with other nations on behalf of the
United States without authorization. https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Logan+Act
All those thinking this is the beginning of the end of Trump are going to be disappointed.
Just look at the charges so far. Manafort has been charged with money laundering and not
registering as a foreign agent - however, both of those charges pre-date him working for
Trump. Flynn has been charged with lying to the FBI about speaking to the Russians - even
though him speaking to the Russians in his role as National Security Advisor to the
President-elect was not only totally legal, it was the norm. And this took place in December,
after the election.
So the 2 main players have been charged with things that have nothing to do with the Trump
campaign, and lets not forget the point of the investigation is to find out if Trump's
campaign colluded with the Russians to win the election. Manafort's charges related to before
working for the Trump campaign whilst Flynn's came after Trump won the Presidency, neither of
which have anything to do with the election. As much as I wish Trump wasn't President, don't
get your hopes up that this is going anywhere.
Gross hypocrisy on the US governments side. They have, since WW2 interfered with other
countries elections, invaded, and killed millions worldwide, and are still doing so. Where
were the FBI investigations then? Non existent. US politicians and the military hierarchy are
completely immune from any prosecutions when it comes down to overseas illegal interference.
But now this Russian debacle, and at last they've woken up, because another country had the
temerity to turn the tables on them. And I think if this was Bush or Obama we would never
have heard a thing about it. Everybody hates the Dotard, because he's an obese dick with an
IQ to match.
Nothing will happen to Trump, It's all bollocks. You've all watched too many Spielberg films,
bad guys win, and they win most of the time.
Trump is the real face of America, America like all governments are narcissistic, they will
cheat, steal, kill, if it benefits them. It's called national interest, and it's number one
on any leader's job list. Watch fog of war with Robert McNamara, fantastic and terrifying to
see how it works.
when American presidents were rational, well balanced with progressive views we had....
decent American healthcare? Equality of opportunity? Gun laws that made it safe to
walk the streets?
Say who, what an a where now????????? Since when has the US EVER had any of
the three things that you mentioned???
If ever, then it was a loooooong time before the pilgrim fathers ever landed.
The US has also been meddling in other countries elections for years, and doubtless most
Americans neither know or care about that! So it's perhaps it's best to simply term them a
'rival', most people should be able to agree on that.
That is the bottom line, yes. People view the world through west = good and Russia = bad,
while both make economic and political decisions that serve the interests of their people
respectively. Ultimately, I think people are scared that the West's monopoly on global
influence is slipping, to as you said, a rival.
You are right that calling Russia the US enemy needs justification, but these threads often
deteriorate into arguments of the yes it is/no it isn't variety.
Gallup have been polling Americans for the past couple of decades on this. The last time I
read about it a couple of years ago 70% of Americans had unfavourable views of Russia,
ranging from those who saw them as an enemy (a smaller amount) through to those who saw them
as a threat.
It's certain that their ideals and goals run counter to those generally held in the US in
many ways. But let's not forget that the US' ideals are often, if not generally, divergent
from their interests and US foreign policy since 1945 has been responsible for countless
deaths, perhaps more than Russia's.
The US has also been meddling in other countries elections for years, and doubtless most
Americans neither know or care about that! So it's perhaps it's best to simply term them a
'rival', most people should be able to agree on that.
How the liberals and the Democrats don't give a damm about the USA or the world's political
scene, just some endless 'sore loser' witch hunt.
So much could be achieved by the improving of relations with Russia.
Crimea was and is Russian.
Let Trump have a go as POTUS and then judge him.
He wants to befriend Putin and if done it would help solve Syrian, Nth Korean and other
global problems.
They simply see this as an elitist conspiracy and not amount of evidence of wrongdoing
will have an impact
Whereas if it's a Democrat in the spotlight, these same dipshits see it as an
élitist cover-up and no lack of evidence of wrongdoing will have an impact. If
anything, lack of evidence is evidence of cover-up which is therefore proof of evidence.
These cynical games they play with veracity and human honesty are a very pure form of
evil.
Looks like Browder was connected to MI6. That means that intellignece agances participated in economic rape of Russia That's explains a lot, including his change of citizenship from US to UK. He wanted better
protection.
Notable quotes:
"... The Russian lawyer, Natalie Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump Jr. and other advisers to Donald Trump Sr.'s campaign, represented a company that had run afoul of a U.S. investigation into money-laundering allegedly connected to the Magnitsky case and his death in a Russian prison in 2009. His death sparked a campaign spearheaded by Browder, who used his wealth and clout to lobby the U.S. Congress in 2012 to enact the Magnitsky Act to punish alleged human rights abusers in Russia. The law became what might be called the first shot in the New Cold War. ..."
"... Despite Russian denials – and the "dog ate my homework" quality of Browder's self-serving narrative – the dramatic tale became a cause celebre in the West. The story eventually attracted the attention of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, a known critic of President Vladimir Putin. Nekrasov decided to produce a docu-drama that would present Browder's narrative to a wider public. Nekrasov even said he hoped that he might recruit Browder as the narrator of the tale. ..."
"... Nekrasov discovered that a woman working in Browder's company was the actual whistleblower and that Magnitsky – rather than a crusading lawyer – was an accountant who was implicated in the scheme. ..."
"... Ultimately, Nekrasov completes his extraordinary film – entitled "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes" – and it was set for a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016. However, at the last moment – faced with Browder's legal threats – the parliamentarians pulled the plug. Nekrasov encountered similar resistance in the United States, a situation that, in part, brought Natalie Veselnitskaya into this controversy. ..."
"... That was when she turned to promoter Rob Goldstone to set up a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. To secure the sit-down on June 9, 2016, Goldstone dangled the prospect that Veselnitskaya had some derogatory financial information from the Russian government about Russians supporting the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr. jumped at the possibility and brought senior Trump campaign advisers, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, along. ..."
"... By all accounts, Veselnitskaya had little or nothing to offer about the DNC and turned the conversation instead to the Magnitsky Act and Putin's retaliatory measure to the sanctions, canceling a program in which American parents adopted Russian children. One source told me that Veselnitskaya also wanted to enhance her stature in Russia with the boast that she had taken a meeting at Trump Tower with Trump's son. ..."
"... But another goal of Veselnitskaya's U.S. trip was to participate in an effort to give Americans a chance to see Nekrasov's blacklisted documentary. She traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post. ..."
"... There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Instead a room was rented at the Newseum near Capitol Hill. Browder's lawyers. who had successfully intimidated the European Parliament, also tried to strong arm the Newseum, but its officials responded that they were only renting out a room and that they had allowed other controversial presentations in the past. ..."
"... Their stand wasn't exactly a profile in courage. "We're not going to allow them not to show the film," said Scott Williams, the chief operating officer of the Newseum. "We often have people renting for events that other people would love not to have happen." ..."
"... So, Nekrasov's documentary got a one-time showing with Veselnitskaya reportedly in attendance and with a follow-up discussion moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. However, except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially shielded from the documentary's discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment of the New Cold War. ..."
"... Over the past year, we have seen a growing hysteria about "Russian propaganda" and "fake news" with The New York Times and other major news outlets eagerly awaiting algorithms that can be unleashed on the Internet to eradicate information that groups like Google's First Draft Coalition deem "false." ..."
"... First Draft consists of the Times, the Post, other mainstream outlets, and establishment-approved online news sites, such as Bellingcat with links to the pro-NATO think tank, Atlantic Council. First Draft's job will be to serve as a kind of Ministry of Truth and thus shield the public from information that is deemed propaganda or untrue. ..."
"... From searches that I did on Wednesday, Nekrasov's film was not available on Amazon although a pro-Magnitsky documentary was. I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available. ..."
"... Why are so many people–corporate executives, governments, journalists, politicians–afraid of William Browder? Why isn't Andrei Nekrasov's film available via digital versatile disk, for sale on line? Mr. Parry, why can't you find it? Oh, wait: You did! Heaven forbid we, your readers, should screen it. Since you, too, are helping keep that film a big fat secret at least give us a few clues as to where we can find it. Throw us a bone! Thank you. ..."
"... Hysterical agit-prop troll insists that world trembles in fear of "genuine American hero" William Browder. John McCain in 2012 was too busy trembling to notice that Browder had given up his US citizenship in 1998 in order to better profit from the Russian financial crisis. ..."
"... Abe – and to escape U.S. taxes. ..."
"... Excellent report and analysis. Thanks for timely reminder regarding the Magitsky story and the fascinating background regarding Andrei Nekrasov's film, in particular its metamorphosis and subsequent aggressive suppression. Both of those factors render the film a particular credibility and wish on my part to view it. ..."
"... I am beginning to feel more and more like the citizens of the old USSR, who, were to my recollection and understanding back in the 50's and 60's:. Longing to read and hear facts suppressed by the communist state, dependent upon the Voice of America and underground news sources within the Soviet Union for the truth. RU, Consortium news, et. al. seem somewhat a parallel, and 1984 not so distant. ..."
"... Last night, After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson, i was inspired to watch episode 2 of The Putin Interviews. I felt enlightened. If only the Establishment Media could turn from promoting its agenda of shaping and suppressing the news into accurately reporting it. ..."
"... Media corruption is not so new. Yellow journalism around the turn of the 19th century, took us into a progression of wars. The War to End All Wars didn't. Blame the munitions makers and the Military Industrial Complex if you will, but a corrupt medial, at the very least enabled a progression of wars over the last 120 or so years. ..."
"... Nekrasov, though he's a Putin critic, is a genuine hero in this instance. He ulitimately put his preconceptions aside and took the story where it truly led him. Nekrasov deserves boatloads of praise for his handling of Browder and his final documentary film product. ..."
"... "[Veselnitskaya] traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post." The other day I saw photos of her sitting right behind Amb. McFaul in some past hearing. How did she get a seat on the front row? ..."
"... "The approach taken by Brennan's task force in assessing Russia and its president seems eerily reminiscent of the analytical blinders that hampered the U.S. intelligence community when it came to assessing the objectives and intent of Saddam Hussein and his inner leadership regarding weapons of mass destruction. The Russia NIA notes, 'Many of the key judgments rely on a body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior.' There is no better indication of a tendency toward 'group think' than that statement. ..."
"... "The acknowledged deficit on the part of the U.S. intelligence community of fact-driven insight into the specifics of Russian presidential decision-making, and the nature of Vladimir Putin as an individual in general, likewise seems problematic. The U.S. intelligence community was hard wired into pre-conceived notions about how and what Saddam Hussein would think and decide, and as such remained blind to the fact that he would order the totality of his weapons of mass destruction to be destroyed in the summer of 1991, or that he could be telling the truth when later declaring that Iraq was free of WMD. ..."
"... Magnitsky Act in Canada has been based on made-up `facts` as Globe & Mail reporting proves. Not news, but deepens my concern about Canada following the Cold War without examination. ..."
"... Bill Browder's grandfather was Earl Browder, leader of the CPUSA from the the late 30s to late 40s. His father was also a communist. Bill jr parlayed those connections with the Soviet apparatchiks to gain a foothold in looting Russia of its state assets during the 1990s. No he was not a communist but neither were the leaders of the Soviet Union at the time of its dissolution (in name yes, but in fact not). ..."
"... I've also heard that it was the Jewish commissars who, when the USSR fell apart, rushed off to grab everything they could (with the help of outside Jewish money) and became the Russian oligarchs we hear about today. This is probably what Britton is getting at: "His father has a communist past." You go from running the government to owning it. Anti-Putin because Putin put a stop to them. ..."
"... backwardsevolution: I worked with a Soviet emigre engineer – Jewish – on the same project in an Engineering design and construction company during early 1990's. He immigrated with his family around 1991. In Soviet Union, there being no private financial institutions or lawyers so to speak , many Jews went into science and engineering. A very interesting person, we were close work place friends. His elder brother had stayed behind back in Russia. His brother was in Moscow and involved in this plunder going on there. He used to tell me all these hair raising first hand stories about what was going on in Russia during that time. All the plunder flowed into the Western Countries. ..."
"... I have read all the comments up to yours you have told it like it was in Russia in those years. Browder was the king of the crooks looting Russia. ..."
"... I remember reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine," but I just could not get through the chapter on the USSR falling apart. I started reading it, but I didn't want to finish it (and I didn't) because it just made me angry. The West was too unfair! Russia was asking for help, but instead the West just looted. I'd say that Russia was very lucky to have someone like Putin clean it up. ..."
"... The Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a few months ago " -- Birds of a feather flock together. Mrs. Chrystal Freeland has a very interesting background for which she is very proud of: her granddad was a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator denounced by Jewish investigators: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/02/27/a-nazi-skeleton-in-the-family-closet/ ..."
Exclusive: A documentary debunking the Magnitsky myth, which was an opening salvo in the New Cold War, was largely blocked from
viewing in the West but has now become a factor in Russia-gate, reports Robert Parry.
Near the center of the current furor over Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 is a documentary that
almost no one in the West has been allowed to see, a film that flips the script on the story of the late Sergei Magnitsky and his
employer, hedge-fund operator William Browder.
The Russian lawyer, Natalie Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump Jr. and other advisers to Donald Trump Sr.'s campaign, represented
a company that had run afoul of a U.S. investigation into money-laundering allegedly connected to the Magnitsky case and his death
in a Russian prison in 2009. His death sparked a campaign spearheaded by Browder, who used his wealth and clout to lobby the U.S.
Congress in 2012 to enact the Magnitsky Act to punish alleged human rights abusers in Russia. The law became what might be called
the first shot in the New Cold War.
According to Browder's narrative, companies ostensibly under his control had been hijacked by corrupt Russian officials in furtherance
of a $230 million tax-fraud scheme; he then dispatched his "lawyer" Magnitsky to investigate and – after supposedly uncovering evidence
of the fraud – Magnitsky blew the whistle only to be arrested by the same corrupt officials who then had him locked up in prison
where he died of heart failure from physical abuse.
Despite Russian denials – and the "dog ate my homework" quality of Browder's self-serving narrative – the dramatic tale became
a cause celebre in the West. The story eventually attracted the attention of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, a known critic of
President Vladimir Putin. Nekrasov decided to produce a docu-drama that would present Browder's narrative to a wider public. Nekrasov
even said he hoped that he might recruit Browder as the narrator of the tale.
However, the project took an unexpected
turn when Nekrasov's research kept turning up contradictions to Browder's storyline, which began to look more and more like a
corporate cover story. Nekrasov discovered that a woman working in Browder's company was the actual whistleblower and that Magnitsky
– rather than a crusading lawyer – was an accountant who was implicated in the scheme.
So, the planned docudrama suddenly was transformed into a documentary with a dramatic reversal as Nekrasov struggles with what
he knows will be a dangerous decision to confront Browder with what appear to be deceptions. In the film, you see Browder go from
a friendly collaborator into an angry adversary who tries to bully Nekrasov into backing down.
Blocked Premiere
Ultimately, Nekrasov completes his extraordinary film – entitled "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes" – and it was set for
a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016. However, at the last moment – faced with Browder's legal threats
– the parliamentarians pulled the plug. Nekrasov encountered similar resistance in the United States, a situation that, in part,
brought Natalie Veselnitskaya into this controversy.
Film director Andrei Nekrasov, who produced "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes."
As a lawyer defending Prevezon, a real-estate company registered in Cyprus, on a money-laundering charge, she
was dealing with U.S. prosecutors in New York City and, in that role, became an advocate for lifting the U.S. sanctions, The
Washington Post reported.
That was when she turned to promoter Rob Goldstone to set up a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. To secure the
sit-down on June 9, 2016, Goldstone dangled the prospect that Veselnitskaya had some derogatory financial information from the Russian
government about Russians supporting the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr. jumped at the possibility and brought senior Trump
campaign advisers, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, along.
By all accounts, Veselnitskaya had little or nothing to offer about the DNC and turned the conversation instead to the Magnitsky
Act and Putin's retaliatory measure to the sanctions, canceling a program in which American parents adopted Russian children. One
source told me that Veselnitskaya also wanted to enhance her stature in Russia with the boast that she had taken a meeting at Trump
Tower with Trump's son.
But another goal of Veselnitskaya's U.S. trip was to participate in an effort to give Americans a chance to see Nekrasov's
blacklisted documentary. She traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs
Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post.
There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Instead a room was rented at the
Newseum near Capitol Hill. Browder's lawyers. who had successfully intimidated the European Parliament, also tried to strong arm
the Newseum, but its officials responded that they were only renting out a room and that they had allowed other controversial presentations
in the past.
Their stand wasn't exactly a profile in courage. "We're not going to allow them not to show the film," said Scott Williams,
the chief operating officer of the Newseum. "We often have people renting for events that other people would love not to have happen."
In an article about the controversy in June 2016, The New York Times
added that "A screening at the Newseum is especially controversial because it could attract lawmakers or their aides." Heaven
forbid!
One-Time Showing
So, Nekrasov's documentary got a one-time showing with Veselnitskaya reportedly in attendance and with a follow-up discussion
moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. However, except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially
shielded from the documentary's discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment
of the New Cold War.
Financier William Browder (right) with Magnitsky's widow and son, along with European parliamentarians.
After the Newseum presentation,
a Washington Post editorial branded Nekrasov's documentary Russian "agit-prop" and sought to discredit Nekrasov without addressing
his many documented examples of Browder's misrepresenting both big and small facts in the case. Instead, the Post accused Nekrasov
of using "facts highly selectively" and insinuated that he was merely a pawn in the Kremlin's "campaign to discredit Mr. Browder
and the Magnitsky Act."
The Post also misrepresented the structure of the film by noting that it mixed fictional scenes with real-life interviews and
action, a point that was technically true but willfully misleading because the fictional scenes were from Nekrasov's original idea
for a docu-drama that he shows as part of explaining his evolution from a believer in Browder's self-exculpatory story to a skeptic.
But the Post's deception is something that almost no American would realize because almost no one got to see the film.
The Post concluded smugly: "The film won't grab a wide audience, but it offers yet another example of the Kremlin's increasingly
sophisticated efforts to spread its illiberal values and mind-set abroad. In the European Parliament and on French and German television
networks, showings were put off recently after questions were raised about the accuracy of the film, including by Magnitsky's family.
"We don't worry that Mr. Nekrasov's film was screened here, in an open society. But it is important that such slick spin be fully
exposed for its twisted story and sly deceptions."
The Post's gleeful editorial had the feel of something you
might read in a totalitarian
society where the public only hears about dissent when the Official Organs of the State denounce some almost unknown person for
saying something that almost no one heard.
New Paradigm
The Post's satisfaction that Nekrasov's documentary would not draw a large audience represents what is becoming a new paradigm
in U.S. mainstream journalism, the idea that it is the media's duty to protect the American people from seeing divergent narratives
on sensitive geopolitical issues.
Over the past year, we have seen a growing hysteria about
"Russian propaganda" and "fake
news" with The New York Times and other major news outlets
eagerly awaiting algorithms
that can be unleashed on the Internet to eradicate information that groups like Google's First Draft Coalition deem "false."
First Draft consists of the Times, the Post, other mainstream outlets, and establishment-approved online news sites, such
as Bellingcat with links to the pro-NATO think tank, Atlantic Council. First Draft's job will be to serve as a kind of Ministry of
Truth and thus shield the public from information that is deemed propaganda or untrue.
In the meantime, there is the ad hoc approach that was applied to Nekrasov's documentary. Having missed the Newseum showing, I
was only able to view the film because I was given a special password to an online version.
From searches that I did on Wednesday, Nekrasov's film was not available on Amazon although a pro-Magnitsky documentary was.
I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available.
But the Post's editors were right in their expectation that "The film won't grab a wide audience." Instead, it has become a good
example of how political and legal pressure can effectively black out what we used to call "the other side of the story." The film
now, however, has unexpectedly become a factor in the larger drama of Russia-gate and the drive to remove Donald Trump Sr. from the
White House.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in
print here or as an e-book
(from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
Why are so many people–corporate executives, governments, journalists, politicians–afraid of William Browder? Why isn't
Andrei Nekrasov's film available via digital versatile disk, for sale on line? Mr. Parry, why can't you find it? Oh, wait: You
did! Heaven forbid we, your readers, should screen it. Since you, too, are helping keep that film a big fat secret at least give
us a few clues as to where we can find it. Throw us a bone! Thank you.
Rob Roy , July 13, 2017 at 2:45 pm
Parry isn't keeping the film viewing a secret. He was given a private password and perhaps can get permission to let the readers
here have it. It isn't up to Parry himself but rather to the person(s) who have the rights to the password. I've come across this
problem before.
ToivoS , July 13, 2017 at 4:01 pm
Parry wrote: I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available.
Any link?? I am willing to buy it.
Lisa , July 13, 2017 at 6:28 pm
This may not be of much help, as the film is dubbed in Russian. If you want to look for the Russian versions on the internet,
search for: "????? ?????? ????????? "????? ???????????. ?? ????????"
Hysterical agit-prop troll insists that world trembles in fear of "genuine American hero" William Browder. John McCain
in 2012 was too busy trembling to notice that Browder had given up his US citizenship in 1998 in order to better profit from the
Russian financial crisis.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 5:51 pm
Abe – and to escape U.S. taxes.
incontinent reader , July 13, 2017 at 6:24 pm
Well stated.
Vincent Castigliola , July 13, 2017 at 2:38 pm
Mr. Parry,
Excellent report and analysis. Thanks for timely reminder regarding the Magitsky story and the fascinating background regarding
Andrei Nekrasov's film, in particular its metamorphosis and subsequent aggressive suppression. Both of those factors render the
film a particular credibility and wish on my part to view it.
Is there any chance you can share information regarding a means of accessing the forbidden film?
I am beginning to feel more and more like the citizens of the old USSR, who, were to my recollection and understanding
back in the 50's and 60's:. Longing to read and hear facts suppressed by the communist state, dependent upon the Voice of America
and underground news sources within the Soviet Union for the truth. RU, Consortium news, et. al. seem somewhat a parallel, and
1984 not so distant.
Last night, After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson, i was inspired to watch episode 2 of The Putin Interviews.
I felt enlightened. If only the Establishment Media could turn from promoting its agenda of shaping and suppressing the news into
accurately reporting it.
Media corruption is not so new. Yellow journalism around the turn of the 19th century, took us into a progression of wars.
The War to End All Wars didn't. Blame the munitions makers and the Military Industrial Complex if you will, but a corrupt medial,
at the very least enabled a progression of wars over the last 120 or so years.
Demonizing other countries is bad enough, but wilfully ignoring the potential for a nuclear war to end not only war, but life
as we know it, is appalling.
"After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson "
Am I the only one who thinks that Max Boot should have been institutionalized for some time already? He is not well.
Vincent Castigliola , July 13, 2017 at 9:41 pm
Anna,
Perhaps Max can share a suite with John McCain. Sadly, the illness is widespread and sometimes seems to be in the majority. Neo
con/lib both are adamant in finding enemies and imposing punishment.
Finding splinters, ignoring beams. Changing regimes everywhere. Making the world safe for Democracy. Unless a man they don't
like get elected
Max Boot parents are Russain Jews who seemingly instilled in him a rabid hatred for everything Russian. The same is with Aperovitch,
the CrowdStrike fraudster. The first Soviet (Bolshevik) government was 85% Jewish. Considering what happened to Russia under Bolsheviks,
it seems that Russians are supremely tolerant people.
Anna, Anti-Semitism will get you NOWHERE, and you should be ashamed of yourself for injecting such HATRED into the rational
discussion here.
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 8:03 pm
Dear orwell
re Anna
Its not anti Semitic if its true .and its true he is a Russian Jew and its very obvious he hates Russia–as does the whole Jewish
Zionist crowd in the US.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:02 am
orwell, I wonder why the truth always turns out to be so anti-semitic!?
Taras77 , July 13, 2017 at 11:17 pm
I hope you caught the preceding tucker interview with Ralph Peters, who says he is a retired us army LTC. He came off as completely
deranged and hysterical. The two interviews back to back struck me as neo con desperation and panic. My respect for Tucker
just went up for taking on these two wackos.
Zachary Smith , July 13, 2017 at 2:51 pm
The fact that the film is being suppressed by everybody is significant to me. I don't know a thing about the "facts" of the
Magnitsky case, and a quick look at the results of a Google search suggests this film isn't going to be available to me unless
I shell out some unknown amount of money.
If the producers want the film to be seen, perhaps they ought to release it for download to any interested parties for a nominal
sum. This will mean they won't make any profit, but on the other hand they will be able to spit in the eyes of the censors.
Dan Mason , July 13, 2017 at 6:42 pm
I went searching the net for access to this film and found that I was blocked at every turn. I did find a few links which all
seemed to go to the same destination which claimed to provide access once I registered with their site. I decided to avoid that
route. I don't really have that much interest in the Magnitsky affair, but I do wonder why we are being denied access to information.
Who has this kind of influence, and why are they so fearful. I'm really afraid that we already live in a largely hidden Orwellian
world. Now where did I put that tin foil hat?
The Orwellian World is NOT HIDDEN, it is clearly visible.
Drew Hunkins , July 13, 2017 at 2:53 pm
Nekrasov, though he's a Putin critic, is a genuine hero in this instance. He ulitimately put his preconceptions aside and
took the story where it truly led him. Nekrasov deserves boatloads of praise for his handling of Browder and his final documentary
film product.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 3:30 pm
Drew – good comment. It's very hard to "turn", isn't it? I wonder if many people appreciate what it takes to do this. Easier
to justify, turn a blind eye, but to actually stop, question, think, and then follow where the story leads you takes courage and
strength.
Especially when your bucking an aggressive billionaire.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:49 am
BannanaBoat – that too!
Zim , July 13, 2017 at 3:11 pm
This is interesting:
"In December 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hillary Clinton opposed the Magnitsky Act while serving as secretary
of state. Her opposition coincided with Bill Clinton giving a speech in Moscow for Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank!
for which he was paid $500,000.
"Mr. Clinton also received a substantial payout in 2010 from Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank whose executives
were at risk of being hurt by possible U.S. sanctions tied to a complex and controversial case of alleged corruption in Russia.
Members of Congress wrote to Mrs. Clinton in 2010 seeking to deny visas to people who had been implicated by Russian accountant
Sergei Magnitsky, who was jailed and died in prison after he uncovered evidence of a large tax-refund fraud. William Browder,
a foreign investor in Russia who had hired Mr. Magnitsky, alleged that the accountant had turned up evidence that Renaissance
officials, among others, participated in the fraud."
The State Department opposed the sanctions bill at the time, as did the Russian government. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov pushed Hillary Clinton to oppose the legislation during a meeting in St. Petersburg in June 2012, citing that U.S.-Russia
relations would suffer as a result."
"[Veselnitskaya] traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs
Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post." The other day I saw photos of her sitting right behind Amb. McFaul in some
past hearing. How did she get a seat on the front row?
Now I remember that Post editorial. I was one of only 20 commenters before they shut down comments. It was some heavy pearl
clutching.
afterthought couldn't the film be shown on RT America?
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:11 am
Would that not enable Bowder's employees online to claim that this documentary is Russian state propaganda, which it obviously
is not because it would have been made available for free everywhere already just like RT. I believe that Nekrasov does not like
RT and RT probably still does not like Nekrasov. The point of RT has never been the truth then the alternative point of view,
as they advertised: Audi alteram partem.
Abe , July 13, 2017 at 3:41 pm
"The approach taken by Brennan's task force in assessing Russia and its president seems eerily reminiscent of the analytical
blinders that hampered the U.S. intelligence community when it came to assessing the objectives and intent of Saddam Hussein
and his inner leadership regarding weapons of mass destruction. The Russia NIA notes, 'Many of the key judgments rely on a
body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior.' There is no better
indication of a tendency toward 'group think' than that statement.
Moreover, when one reflects on the fact much of this 'body of reporting' was shoehorned after the fact into an analytical
premise predicated on a single source of foreign-provided intelligence, that statement suddenly loses much of its impact.
"The acknowledged deficit on the part of the U.S. intelligence community of fact-driven insight into the specifics of
Russian presidential decision-making, and the nature of Vladimir Putin as an individual in general, likewise seems problematic.
The U.S. intelligence community was hard wired into pre-conceived notions about how and what Saddam Hussein would think and
decide, and as such remained blind to the fact that he would order the totality of his weapons of mass destruction to be destroyed
in the summer of 1991, or that he could be telling the truth when later declaring that Iraq was free of WMD.
'President Putin has repeatedly and vociferously denied any Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Those
who cite the findings of the Russia NIA as indisputable proof to the contrary, however, dismiss this denial out of hand. And yet
nowhere in the Russia NIA is there any evidence that those who prepared it conducted anything remotely resembling the kind of
'analysis of alternatives' mandated by the ODNI when it comes to analytic standards used to prepare intelligence community assessments
and estimates. Nor is there any evidence that the CIA's vaunted 'Red Cell' was approached to provide counterintuitive assessments
of premises such as 'What if President Putin is telling the truth?'
'Throughout its history, the NIC has dealt with sources of information that far exceeded any sensitivity that might attach
to Brennan's foreign intelligence source. The NIC had two experts that it could have turned to oversee a project like the Russia
NIA!the NIO for Cyber Issues, and the Mission Manager of the Russian and Eurasia Mission Center; logic dictates that both should
have been called upon, given the subject matter overlap between cyber intrusion and Russian intent.
'The excuse that Brennan's source was simply too sensitive to be shared with these individuals, and the analysts assigned to
them, is ludicrous!both the NIO for cyber issues and the CIA's mission manager for Russia and Eurasia are cleared to receive the
most highly classified intelligence and, moreover, are specifically mandated to oversee projects such as an investigation into
Russian meddling in the American electoral process.
'President Trump has come under repeated criticism for his perceived slighting of the U.S. intelligence community in repeatedly
citing the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction intelligence failure when downplaying intelligence reports, including the Russia
NIA, about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Adding insult to injury, the president's most recent comments were made
on foreign soil (Poland), on the eve of his first meeting with President Putin, at the G-20 Conference in Hamburg, Germany, where
the issue of Russian meddling was the first topic on the agenda.
"The politics of the wisdom of the timing and location of such observations aside, the specific content of the president's
statements appear factually sound."
Thanks Abe once again, for providing us with news which will never be printed or aired in our MSM. Brennan may ignore the NIC,
as Congress and the Executive Branch constantly avoid paying attention to the GAO. Why even have these agencies, if our leaders
aren't going to listen them?
Virginia , July 13, 2017 at 6:16 pm
Abe, I'm always amazed at how much you know. Thank you for sharing. If you have your comments in article form or on a site
where they can be shared, I'd really like to know about it. I've tried, but I garble the many points you make when trying to explain
historical events you've told us about.
Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 9:08 am
Thanks Abe. You are a real asset to us here at CN.
John V. Walsh , July 13, 2017 at 3:54 pm
Very good article! The entire Magnitsky saga has become so convoluted and mired in controversy and propaganda that it is very
hard to understand. I remember vaguely the controversy surrounding the showing of the film at the Newseum. it is especially impressive
that Nekrasov changed his opinion as fcts unfolded.
I will now try to get the docudrama and watch it.
If anyone has suggestions on how to do this, please let me know via a response. here.
Thanks.
A 'Magnitsky Act' in Canada was approved by the (appointed) Senate several months ago and is now undergoing fine tuning in
the House of Commons prior to a third and final vote of approval. The proposed law has the unanimous support of the parties in
Parliament.
A column in today's Globe and Mail daily by the newspaper's 'chief political writer' tiptoes around the Magnitsky story, never
once daring to admit that a contrary narrative exists to that of Bill Browder.
Magnitsky Act in Canada has been based on made-up `facts` as Globe & Mail reporting proves. Not news, but deepens my concern
about Canada following the Cold War without examination.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 5:56 pm
Roger Annis – just little lemmings following the leader. Disgusting. I hope you posted a comment at the Globe and Mail, Roger,
with a link to this article.
Britton , July 13, 2017 at 4:05 pm
Browder is a Communist Jew, his father has a Communist past according to his background so I know I can't trust anything he
says. Hes just one of many shady interests undermining Putin I've seen over the years. His book Red Notice is just as shady. Good
reporting Consortium News. Fox News promotes Browder like crazy every chance they get especially Fox Business channel.
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 5:06 pm
"Browder is a Communist " Hedge Fund managers are hardly Communist – that's an oxymoron.
ToivoS , July 13, 2017 at 6:02 pm
Bill Browder's grandfather was Earl Browder, leader of the CPUSA from the the late 30s to late 40s. His father was also
a communist. Bill jr parlayed those connections with the Soviet apparatchiks to gain a foothold in looting Russia of its state
assets during the 1990s. No he was not a communist but neither were the leaders of the Soviet Union at the time of its dissolution
(in name yes, but in fact not).
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 6:34 pm
ToivoS,
thank you for this background information.
My main intention had been to straighten out the blurring of calling a hedge fund manager communist. Nowadays everything gets
blurred by people misrepresenting political concepts. Either the people have been dumbed-down by misinformation or misrepresenting
is done in order to keep neo-liberalism the dominant economical model. On many occasions I had read comments of people seemingly
believing that Nationalsocialism had been some variant of socialism. Even the ideas of Bernie Sanders had been misrepresented
as socialist instead of social democratic ones.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 6:21 pm
Joe Average – Dave P. mentioned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book entitled "Two Hundred Years Together" the other day. I've been
reading a long synopsis of this book. What Britton says appears to be quite true. I don't know about Browder, but from what I've
read the Jews were instrumental in the communist party, in the deaths of so many Russians. It wasn't just the Jews, but they played
a big part. It's no wonder Solzhenitsyn's book has been "lost in translation", at least into English, for so many years.
I've also heard that it was the Jewish commissars who, when the USSR fell apart, rushed off to grab everything they could
(with the help of outside Jewish money) and became the Russian oligarchs we hear about today. This is probably what Britton is
getting at: "His father has a communist past." You go from running the government to owning it. Anti-Putin because Putin put a
stop to them.
Dave P. , July 13, 2017 at 7:37 pm
backwardsevolution: I worked with a Soviet emigre engineer – Jewish – on the same project in an Engineering design and
construction company during early 1990's. He immigrated with his family around 1991. In Soviet Union, there being no private financial
institutions or lawyers so to speak , many Jews went into science and engineering. A very interesting person, we were close work
place friends. His elder brother had stayed behind back in Russia. His brother was in Moscow and involved in this plunder going
on there. He used to tell me all these hair raising first hand stories about what was going on in Russia during that time. All
the plunder flowed into the Western Countries.
In recent history, no country went through this kind of plunder on a scale Russia went through during ten or fifteen years
starting in 1992. Russia was a very badly ravaged country when Putin took over. Means of production, finance, all came to halt,
and society itself had completely broken down. It appears that the West has all the intentions to do it again.
I have read all the comments up to yours you have told it like it was in Russia in those years. Browder was the king of
the crooks looting Russia. Then he got to John McCain with all his lies and bullshit and was responsible for the sanctions
on Russia. All the comments aboutBrowders grandfather andCommunist party are all true but hardly important. Except that it probably
was how Browder was able to get his fingers on the pie in Russia. And he sure did get his fingers in the pie BIG TIME.
I am a Canadian and am aware of Maginsky Act in Canada. Our Minister Chrystal Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a
few months ago both of these two you could say are not fans of Putin, I certainly don't know what they spoke about but other than
lies from Browder there is no reason she should have been talking with him. I have made comments on other forums regarding these
two meeting. Read Browders book and hopefully see the documentary that this article is about. When I read his book I knew instantly
that he was a crook a charloten and a liar. Just the kind of folk John McCain and a lot of other folks in US politics love. You
all have a nice Peacefull day
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:38 am
Joe Average – "I guess that this book puts blame for Communism entirely on the Jewish people and that this gave even further
rise to antisemitism in the Germany of the 1930's."
No, it doesn't put the blame entirely on the Jews; it just spells out that they did play a large part. As one Jewish scholar
said, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was too much of an academic, too intelligent to ever put the blame entirely on one group. But something
like 40 – 60 million died – shot, taken out on boats with rocks around their necks and thrown overboard, starved, gassed in rail
cars, poisoned, worked to death, froze, you name it. Every other human slaughter pales in comparison. Good old man, so civilized
(sarc)!
But someone(s) has been instrumental in keeping this book from being translated into English (or so I've read many places online).
Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" and his other books have been translated, but not this one. (Although I just found one site
that has almost all of the chapters translated, but not all). Several people ordered the book off Amazon, only to find out that
it was in the Russian language. LOL
Solzhenitsyn does say at one point in the book: "Communist rebellions in Germany post-WWI was a big reason for the revival
of anti-Semitism (as there was no serious anti-Semitism in the imperial [Kaiser] Germany of 1870 – 1918)."
Lots of Jewish people made it into the upper levels of the Soviet government, academia, etc. (and lots of them were murdered
too). I might skip reading these types of books until I get older. Too bleak. Hard enough reading about the day-to-day stuff here
without going back in time for more fun!
I remember reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine," but I just could not get through the chapter on the USSR falling apart.
I started reading it, but I didn't want to finish it (and I didn't) because it just made me angry. The West was too unfair! Russia
was asking for help, but instead the West just looted. I'd say that Russia was very lucky to have someone like Putin clean it
up.
Keep smiling, Joe.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:58 am
Dave P. – I told you, you are a wealth of information, a walking encyclopedia. Interesting about your co-worker. Sounds like
it was a free-for-all in Russia. Yes, I totally agree that Putin has done and is doing all he can to bring his country back up.
Very difficult job he is doing, and I hope he is successful at keeping the West out as much as he can, at least until Russia is
strong and sure enough to invite them in on their own terms.
Now go and tell your wife what I said about you being a "walking encyclopedia". She'll probably have a good laugh. (Not that
you're not, but you know what she'll say: "Okay, smartie, now go and do the dishes.")
Chucky LeRoi , July 14, 2017 at 9:56 am
Just some small scale, local color kind of stuff, but living in the USA, west coast specifically, it was quite noticeable in
the mid to late '90's how many Russians with money were suddenly appearing. No apparent skills or 'jobs', but seemingly able to
pay for stuff. Expensive stuff.
A neighbor invited us to her 'place in the mountains', which turned out to be where a lumber company had almost terra-formed
an area and was selling off the results. Her advice: When you go to the lake (i.e., the low area now gathering runoff, paddle
boats rentals, concession stand) you will see a lot of men with huge stomachs and tiny Speedos. They will be very rude, pushy,
confrontational. Ignore them, DO NOT comment on their rudeness or try to deal with their manners. They are Russians, and the amount
of trouble it will stir up – and probable repercussions – are simply not worth it.
Back in town, the anecdotes start piling up quickly. I am talking crowbars through windows (for a perceived insult). A beating
where the victim – who was probably trying something shady – was so pulped the emergency room staff couldn't tell if the implement
used was a 2X4 or a baseball bat. When found he had with $3k in his pocket: robbery was not the motive. More traffic accidents
involving guys with very nice cars and serious attitude problems. I could go on. More and more often somewhere in the relating
of these incidents the phrase " this Russian guy " would come up. It was the increased use of this phrase that was so noticeable.
And now the disclaimer.
Before anybody goes off, I am not anti-Russian, Russo-phobic, what have you. I studied the Russian language in high school
and college (admittedly decades ago). My tax guy is Russian. I love him. My day to day interactions have led me to this pop psychology
observation: the extreme conditions that produced that people and culture produced extremes. When they are of the good, loving
, caring, cultured, helpful sort, you could ask for no better friends. The generosity can be embarrassing. When they are of the
materialistic, evil, self-centered don't f**k with me I am THE BADDEST ASS ON THE PLANET sort, the level of mania and self-importance
is impossible to deal with, just get as far away as possible. It's worked for me.
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 8:10 pm
backwardsevolution,
thanks for the info. I'll add the book to the list of books onto my to-read list. As far as I know a Kibbutz could be described
as a Communist microcosm. The whole idea of Communism itself is based on Marx (a Jew by birth). A while ago I had started reading
"Mein Kampf". I've got to finish the book, in order to see if my assumption is correct. I guess that this book puts blame for
Communism entirely on the Jewish people and that this gave even further rise to antisemitism in the Germany of the 1930's.
The most known Russian Oligarchs that I've heard of are mainly of Jewish origin, but as far as I know they had been too young
to be commissars at the time of the demise of the USSR. At least one aspect I've read of many times is that a lot of them built
their fortunes with the help of quite shady business dealings.
With regard to President Putin I've read that he made a deal with the oligarchs: they should pay their taxes, keep/invest their
money in Russia and keep out of politics. In return he wouldn't dig too deep into their past. Right at the moment everybody in
the West is against President Putin, because he stopped the looting of his country and its citizens and that's something our Western
oligarchs and financial institutions don't like.
On a side note: Several years ago I had started to read several volumes about German history. Back then I didn't notice an
important aspect that should attract my attention a few years later when reading about the rise of John D. Rockefeller. Charlemagne
(Charles the Great) took over power from the Merovingians. Prior to becoming King of the Franks he had been Hausmeier (Mayor of
the Palace) for the Merovingians. Mayor of the Palace was the title of the manager of the household, which seems to be similar
to a procurator and/or accountant (bookkeeper). The similarity of the beginnings of both careers struck me. John D. Rockefeller
started as a bookkeeper. If you look at Bill Gates you'll realize that he was smart enough to buy an operating system for a few
dollars, improved it and sold it to IBM on a large scale. The widely celebrated Steve Jobs was basically the marketing guy, whilst
the real brain behind (the product) Apple had been Steve Wozniak.
Another side note: If we're going down the path of neo-liberalism it will lead us straight back to feudalism – at least if
the economy doesn't blow up (PCR, Michael Hudson, Mike Whitney, Mike Maloney, Jim Rogers, Richard D. Wolff, and many more economists
make excellent points that our present Western economy can't go on forever and is kept alive artificially).
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:50 am
Joe Average – somehow my reply to you ended up above your post. What? How did that happen? You can find it there. Thanks for
the interesting info about John D. Rockefeller, Gates, Jobs and Wozniak. Some are good managers, others good at sales, while others
are the creative inventors.
Yes, Joe, I totally agree that we are headed back to feudalism. I don't think we'll have much choice as the oil is running
out. We'll probably be okay, but our children? I worry about them. They'll notice a big change in their lifetimes. The discovery
and capture of oil pulled forward a large population. As we scale back, we could be in trouble, food-wise. Or at least it looks
that way.
Thanks, Joe.
Miranda Keefe , July 14, 2017 at 5:48 am
Charlemagne did not take over from the Merovingians. The Mayor of the Palace was not an accountant.
During the 7th Century the Mayor of the Place more and more became the actual ruler of the Franks. The office had existed for
over a century and was basically the "prime minister" to the king. By the time Pepin of Herstal, a scion of a powerful Frankish
family, took the position in 680, the king was ceremonial leader doing ritual and the Mayor ruled- like the relationship of the
Emperor and the Shogun in Japan. In 687 Pepin's Austrasia conquered Neustria and Burgundy and he added "Duke of the Franks" to
his titles. The office became hereditary.
When Pepin died in 714 there was some unrest as nobles from various parts of the joint kingdoms attempted to get different
ones of his heirs in the office until his son Charles Martel took the reins in 718. This is the famous Charles Martel who defeated
the Moors at Tours in 732. But that was not his only accomplishment as he basically extended the Frankish kingdom to include Saxony.
Charles not only ruled but when the king died he picked which possible heir would become king. Finally near the end of his reign
he didn't even bother replacing the king and the throne was empty.
When Charles Martel died in 741 he followed Frankish custom and divided his kingdom among his sons. By 747 his younger son,
Pepin the Short, had consolidated his rule and with the support of the Pope, deposed the last Merovingian King and became the
first Carolingian King in 751- the dynasty taking its name from Charles Martel. Thus Pepin reunited the two aspects of the Frankish
ruler, combining the rule of the Mayor with the ceremonial reign of the King into the new Kingship.
Pepin expanded the kingdom beyond the Frankish lands even more and his son, Charlemagne, continued that. Charlemagne was 8
when his father took the title of King. Charlemagne never was the Mayor of the Palace, but grew up as the prince. He became King
of the Franks in 768 ruling with his brother, sole King in 781, and then started becoming King of other countries until he united
it all in 800 as the restored Western Roman Emperor.
When he died in 814 the Empire was divided into three Kingdoms and they never reunited again. The western one evolved into
France. The eastern one evolved in the Holy Roman Empire and eventually Germany. The middle one never solidified but became the
Low Countries, Switzerland, and the Italian states.
The Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a few months ago " -- Birds of a feather flock
together. Mrs. Chrystal Freeland has a very interesting background for which she is very proud of: her granddad was a Ukrainian
Nazi collaborator denounced by Jewish investigators:
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/02/27/a-nazi-skeleton-in-the-family-closet/
Since the inti-Russian tenor of the Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland is in accord with the US ziocons anti-Russian policies
(never mind all this fuss about WWII Jewish mass graves in Ukraine), "Chrysta" is totally approved by the US government.
Joe Average , July 14, 2017 at 11:32 pm
I'll reply to myself in order to send a response to backwardsevolution and Miranda Keefe.
For a change I'll be so bold to ignore gentleman style and reply in the order of the posts – instead of Ladies first.
backwardsevolution,
in my first paragraph I failed to make a clear distinction. I started with the remark that I'm adding the book "Two Hundred
Years Together" to my to-read list and then mentioned that I'm right now reading "Mein Kampf". All remarks after mentioning the
latter book are directed at this one – and not the one of Solzhenitsyn.
Miranda Keefe,
I'm aware that accountant isn't an exact characterization of the concept of a Mayor of the Palace. As a precaution I had added
the phrase "seems to be similar". You're correct with the statement that Charlemagne was descendant Karl Martel. At first I intended
to write that Karolinger (Carolings) took over from Merowinger (Merovingians), because those details are irrelevant to the point
that I wanted to make. It would've been an information overload. My main point was the power of accountants and related fields
such as sales and marketing. Neither John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs actually created their products from scratch.
Many of those who are listed as billionaires haven't been creators / inventors themselves. Completely decoupled from actual
production is banking. Warren Buffet is started as an investment salesman, later stock broker and investor. Oversimplified you
could describe this activity as accounting or sales. It's the same with George Soros and Carl Icahn. Without proper supervision
money managers (or accountants) had and still do screw those who had hired them. One of those victims is former billionaire heiress
Madeleine Schickedanz ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Schickedanz
). Generalized you could also say that BlackRock is your money manager accountant. If you've got some investment (that dates
back before 2008), which promises you a higher interest rate after a term of lets say 20 years, the company with which you have
the contract with may have invested your money with BlackRock. The financial crisis of 2008 has shown that finance (accountants
/ money managers) are taking over. Aren't investment bankers the ones who get paid large bonuses in case of success and don't
face hardly any consequences in case of failure? Well, whatever turn future might take, one thing is for sure: whenever SHTF even
the most colorful printed pieces of paper will not taste very well.
Cal , July 13, 2017 at 10:13 pm
History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks on
History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks . EVER SINCE THE Emperor Constantine established the legal
position of the church in the
Many Bolsheviks fled to Germany , taking with them some loot that enabled them to get established in Germany. Lots of invaluable
art work also.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:54 am
Cal – read about "History's Greatest Heist" on Amazon. Sounds interesting. Was one of the main reasons for the Czar's overthrow
to steal and then flee? It's got to have been on some minds. A lot of people got killed, and they would have had wedding rings,
gold, etc. That doesn't even include the wealth that could be stolen from the Czar. Was the theft just one of those things that
happened through opportunism, or was it one of the main reasons for the overthrow in the first place, get some dough and run with
it?
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 2:22 pm
@ backwards
" Was the theft just one of those things that happened through opportunism, or was it one of the main reasons for the overthrow"'
imo some of both. I am sure when they were selling off Russian valuables to finance their revolution a lot of them set aside
some loot for themselves.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 4:09 pm
Cal – thank you. Good books like this get us closer and closer to the truth. Thank goodness for these people.
Brad Owen , July 14, 2017 at 11:45 am
An autocratic oligarch would probably be a better description. He probably believes like other Synarchist financiers that they
should rightfully rule the World, and see democratic processes as heresy against "The Natural Order for human society", or some
such belief.
Brad Owen , July 14, 2017 at 12:13 pm
Looking up "A short definition of Synarchism (a Post-Napoleonic social phenomenon) by Lyndon LaRouche" would give much insight
into what's going on. People from the intelligence community made sure a copy of a 1940 army intelligence dossier labelled something
like "Synarchism:NAZI/Communist" got into Lyndon's hands. It speaks of the the Synarchist method of attacking a targeted society
from both extreme (Right-Left) ends of the political spectrum. I guess this is dialectics? I suppose the existence of the one
extreme legitimizes the harsh, anti-democratic/anti-human measures taken to exterminate it by the other extreme, actually destroying
the targeted society in the process. America, USSR, and (Sun Yat Sen's old Republic of) China were the targeted societies in the
pre-WWII/WWII yearsfor their "sins" of championing We The People against Oligarchy. FDR knew the Synarchist threat and sided with
Russia and China against Germany and Japan. He knew that, after dealing with the battlefield NAZIs, the "Boardroom" NAZIs would
have to be dealt with Post-War. That all changed with his death.The Synarchists are still at it today, hence all the rabid Russo-phobia,
the Pacific Pivot, and the drive towards war. This is all being foiled with Trump's friendly, cooperative approach towards Russia
and China.
mike k , July 13, 2017 at 4:11 pm
Big Brother at work – always protecting us from upsetting information. How nice of him to insure our comfort. No need for us
to bother with all of this confusing stuff, he can do all that for us. The mainstream media will tell us all we need to know ..
(Virginia – please notice my use of irony.)
Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 4:21 pm
Do you remember mike K when porn was censored, and there were two sides to every issue as compromise was always on the table?
Now porn is accessible on cable TV, and there is only one side to every issue, and that's I'm right about everything and your
not, what compromise with you?
Don't get me wrong, I don't really care how we deal with porn, but I am very concerned to why censorship is showing up whereas
we can't see certain things, for certain reasons we know nothing about. Also, I find it unnerving that we as a society continue
to stay so undivided. Sure, we can't all see the same things the same way, but maybe it's me, and I'm getting older by the minute,
but where is our cooperation to at least try and work with each other?
Always like reading your comments mike K Joe
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 5:09 pm
Joe,
when it comes to the choice of watching porn and bodies torn apart (real war pictures), I prefer the first one, although we
in the West should be confronted with the horrible pictures of what we're assisting/doing.
Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 5:27 pm
This is where the Two Joe's are alike.
mike k , July 13, 2017 at 6:07 pm
I do remember those days Joe. I am 86 now, so a lot has changed since 1931. With the 'greed is good' philosophy in vogue now,
those who seek compromise are seen as suckers for the more single minded to take advantage of. Respect for rules of decency is
just about gone, especially at the top of the wealth pyramid.
Distraction from critical thinking, excellent observation ( please forget the NeoCon Demos they are responsible for half of
the nightmare USA society has become.
ranney , July 13, 2017 at 4:37 pm
Wow Robert, what a fascinating article! And how complicated things become "when first we practice to deceive".
Abe thank you for the link to Ritter's article; that's a really good one too!
John , July 13, 2017 at 4:40 pm
If we get into a shooting war with Russia and the human race somehow survives it Robert Parry' s name will one day appear in
the history books as the person who most thoroughly documented the events leading up to that war. He will be considered to be
a top historian as well as a top journalist.
Abe , July 13, 2017 at 7:01 pm
"Browder, who abjured his American citizenship in 1998 to become a British subject, reveals more about his own selective advocacy
of democratic principles than about the film itself. He might recall that in his former homeland freedom of the press remains
a cherished value."
Abe – "never driven by the money". No, he would never be that type of guy (sarc)!
"It's hard to know what Browder will do next. He rules out any government ambitions, instead saying he can achieve more by
lobbying it.
This summer, he says he met "big Hollywood players" in a bid to turn his book into a major film.
"The most important next step in the campaign is to adapt the book into a Hollywood feature film," he says. "I have been approached
by many film-makers and spent part of the summer in LA meeting with screenwriters, producers and directors to figure out what
the best constellation of players will be on this.
"There are a lot of people looking at it. It's still difficult to say who we will end up choosing. There are many interesting
options, but I'm not going to name any names."
What the ..? I can see it now, George Clooney in the lead role, Mr. White Helmets himself, with his twins in tow.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:56 am
Is it not impressive how money buys out reality in the modern world? This is why one can safely assume that whatever is told
in the MSM is completely opposite to the truth. Would MSM have to push it if it were the truth? You may call this Kiza's Law if
you like (modestly): " The truth is always opposite to what MSM say! " The 0.1% of situations where this is not the case
is the margin of error.
Abe , July 13, 2017 at 7:39 pm
"no figure in this saga has a more tangled family relationship with the Kremlin than the London-based hedge fund manager Bill
Browder [ ]
"there's a reticence in his Jewish narrative. One of his first jobs in London is with the investment operation of the publishing
billionaire Robert Maxwell. As it happens, Maxwell was originally a Czech Jewish Holocaust survivor who fled and became a decorated
British soldier, then helped in 1948 to set up the secret arms supply line to newly independent Israel from communist Czechoslovakia.
He was also rumored to be a longtime Mossad agent. But you learn none of that from Browder's memoir.
"The silence is particularly striking because when Browder launches his own fund, he hires a former Israeli Mossad agent, Ariel,
to set up his security operation, manned mainly by Israelis. Over time, Browder and Ariel become close. How did that connection
come about? Was it through Maxwell? Wherever it started, the origin would add to the story. Why not tell it?
"When Browder sets up his own fund, Hermitage Capital Management -- named for the famed czarist-era St. Petersburg art museum,
though that's not explained either -- his first investor is Beny Steinmetz, the Israeli diamond billionaire. Browder tells how
Steinmetz introduced him to the Lebanese-Brazilian Jewish banking billionaire Edmond Safra, who invests and becomes not just a
partner but also a mentor and friend.
"Safra is also internationally renowned as the dean of Sephardi Jewish philanthropy; the main backer of Israel's Shas party,
the Sephardi Torah Guardians, and of New York's Holocaust memorial museum, and a megadonor to Yeshiva University, Hebrew University,
the Weizmann Institute and much more. Browder must have known all that. Considering the closeness of the two, it's surprising
that none of it gets mentioned.
"It's possible that Browder's reticence about his Jewish connections is simply another instance of the inarticulateness that
seizes so many American Jews when they try to address their Jewishness."
Abe – what a web. Money makes money, doesn't it? It's often what club you belong to and who you know. I remember a millionaire
in my area long ago who went bankrupt. The wealthy simply chipped in, gave him some start-up money, and he was off to the races
again. Simple as that. And I would think that the Jews are an even tighter group who invest with each other, are privy to inside
information, get laws changed in favor of each other, pay people off when one gets in trouble. Browder seems a shifty sort. As
the article says, he leaves a lot out.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 11:37 pm
In 1988, Stanton Wheeler (Yale University – Law School), David L. Weisburd (Hebrew University of Jerusalem; George Mason University
– The Department of Criminology, Law & Society; Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Faculty of Law). Elin Waring (Yale University
– Law School), and Nancy Bode (Government of the State of Minnesota) published a major study on white collar crime in America.
Part of a larger program of research on white-collar crime supported by a grant from the United States Department of Justice's
National Institute of Justice, the study included "the more special forms associated with the abuse of political power [ ] or
abuse of financial power". The study was also published as a Hebrew University of Jerusalem Legal Research Paper
The research team noted that Jews were over-represented relative to their share of the U.S. population:
"With respect to religion, there is one clear finding. Although many in both white collar and common crime categories do not
claim a particular religious faith [ ] It would be a fair summary of our. data to say that, demographically speaking, white collar
offenders are predominantly middle-aged white males with an over-representation of Jews."
In 1991, David L. Weisburd published his study of Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts,
Weisburd found that although Jews comprised only around 2% of the United States population, they contributed at least 9% of lower
category white-collar crimes (bank embezzlement, tax fraud and bank fraud), at least 15% of moderate category white-collar crimes
(mail fraud, false claims, and bribery), and at least 33% of high category white-collar crimes (antitrust and securities fraud).
Weisburg showed greater frequency of Jewish offenders at the top of the hierarchy of white collar crime. In Weisbug's sample of
financial crime in America, Jews were responsible for 23.9%.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:26 am
What I find most interesting is how Putin handles the Jews.
It is obvious that he is the one who saved the country of Russia from the looting of the 90s by the Russian-American Jewish
mafia. This is the most direct explanation for his demonisation in the West, his feat will never be forgiven, not even in history
books (a demon forever). Even to this day, for example in Syria, Putin's main confrontation is not against US then against the
Zionist Jews, whose principal tool is US. Yet, there is not a single anti-Semitic sentence that Putin ever uttered. Also, Putin
let the Jewish oligarchs who plundered Russia keep their money if they accepted the authority of the Russian state, kept employing
Russians and paying Russian taxes. But he openly confronted those who refused (Berezovsky, Khodorovsky etc). Furthermore, Putin
lets Israel bomb Syria under his protection to abandon. Finally, Putin is known in Russia as a great supporter of Jews and Israel,
almost a good friend of Nutty Yahoo.
Therefore, it appears to me that the Putin's principal strategy is to appeal to the honest Jewish majority to restrain the
criminal Jewish minority (including the criminally insane), to divide them instead of confronting them all as a group, which is
what the anti-Semitic Europeans have traditionally been doing. His judo-technique is in using Jewish power to restrain the Jews.
I still do not know if his strategy will succeed in the long run, but it certainly is an interesting new approach (unless I do
not know history enough) to an ancient problem. It is almost funny how so many US people think that the problem with the nefarious
Jewish money power started with US, if they are even aware of it.
Cal , July 16, 2017 at 5:41 am
" His judo-technique is in using Jewish power to restrain the Jews. "
The Jews have no power without their uber Jew money men, most of whom are ardent Zionist.
And because they get some benefits from the lobbying heft of the Zionist control of congress they arent going to go against them.
In this 2015 tirade, Browder declared "Someone has to punch Putin in the nose" and urged "supplying arms to the Ukrainians
and putting troops, NATO troops, in all of the surrounding countries".
The choice of Mozgovaya as interviewer was significant to promote Browder with the Russian Jewish community abroad.
Born in the Soviet Union in 1979, Mozgovaya immigrated to Israel with her family in 1990. She became a correspondent for the
Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth in 2000. Although working most of the time in Hebrew, her reports in Russian appeared in various
publications in Russia.
Mozgovaya covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, including interviews with President Victor Yushenko and his partner-rival
Yulia Timoshenko, as well as the Russian Mafia and Russian oligarchs. During the presidency of Vladimir Putin, Mozgovaya gave
one of the last interviews with the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She interviewed Garry Kasparov, Edward Limonov, Boris
Berezovsky, Chechen exiles such as Ahmed Zakaev, and the widow of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
In 2008, Mozgovaya left Yedioth Ahronoth to become the Washington Bureau Chief for Haaretz newspaper in Washington, D.C.. She
was a frequent lecturer on Israel and Middle Eastern affairs at U.S. think-tanks. In 2013, Mozgovaya started working at the Voice
of America.
HIDE BEHIND , July 13, 2017 at 7:43 pm
Gramps was decended from an old Irish New England Yankee lineage and in my youth he always dragged me along when the town meetings
were held, so my ideas of American DEmocracy stem from that background, one of open participation.
The local newspapers had more social chit chat than political news of international or for that mstter State or Federal shenanigansbut
everu member in that far flung settled communit read them from front to back; ss a child I got to read the funny and sports pages
until Gramps got finidhed reading the "News Section, always the news first yhen the lesser BS when time allowed,this habit instilled
in me the sence of
priority.
Aftrr I had read his dection of paper he would talk with me,even being a yonker, in a serious but opinionated manner, of the Editorial
section which had local commentary letterd to the editor as large as somtimes too pages.
I wonder today at which section of papersf at all, is read by american public, and at how manyadults discuss importsn news worthy
tppics with their children.
At advent of TV we still had trustworthy journalist to finally be seen after years of but reading their columns or listening on
radios,almost tottaly all males but men of honesty and character, and worthy of trust.
They wrre a part of all social stratas, had lived real lives and yes most eere well educated but not the elitist thinking jrrks
who are no more than parrots repeating whatevrr a teleprompter or bias of their employers say to write.
Wrll back to Gramps and hid home spun wisdom: He alwsys ,and shoeed by example at those old and somrtimes boistrous town Halls,
that first you askef a question, thought about the answer, and then questioned the answer.
This made the one being question responsible for the words he spoke.
So those who have doubts by a presumed independent journalist, damn right they should question his motives, which in reality begin
to answer our unspoken questions we can no longer ask those boobs for bombs and political sychophants and their paymasters of
popular media outlets.
As one who likes effeciency in prodution one monitors data to spot trends and sny aberations bring questions so yes I note this
journalist deviation from the norms as well.
I can only question the why, by looking at data from surrounding trends in order to later be able to question his answers.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:07 am
Hide Behind – sounds like you had a smart grandpa, and someone who cared enough about you to talk things over with you (even
though he was opinionated). I try to talk things over with my kids, sometimes too much. They're known on occasion to say, "Okay,
enough. We're full." I wait a few days, and then fill them up some more! Ha.
Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 10:53 pm
Here's a thought; will letting go of Trump Jr's infraction cancel out a guilty verdict of Hillary Clinton's transgressions?
I keep hearing Hillary references while people defend Donald Trump Jr over his meeting with Russian Natalia Veselnitskaya.
My thinking started over how I keep hearing pundits speak to Trump Jr's 'intent'. Didn't Comey find Hillary impossible to prosecute
due to her lack of 'intent'? Actually I always thought that to be prosecuted under espionage charges, the law didn't need to prove
intent, but then again we are talking about Hillary here.
The more I keep hearing Trump defenders make mention of Hillary's deliberate mistakes, and the more I keep hearing Democrates
point to Donald Jr's opportunistic failures, the more similarity I see between the two rivals, and the more I see an agreed upon
truce ending up in a tie. Remember we live in a one party system with two wings.
Am I going down the wrong road here, or could forgiving Trump Jr allow Hillary to get a free get out of jail card?
F. G. Sanford , July 14, 2017 at 12:42 am
I've been saying all along, our government is just a big can of worms, and neither side can expose the other without opening
it. But insiders on both sides are flashing their can openers like it's a game of chicken. My guess is, everybody is gonna get
a free pass. I read somewhere that Preet Bharara had the goods on a whole bunch of bankers, but he sat on it clear up to the election.
Then, he got fired. So much for draining the swamp. If they prosecute Hillary, it looks like a grudge match. If they prosecute
Junior, it looks like revenge. If they prosecute Lynch, it looks like racism. When you deal with a government this corrupt, everybody
looks innocent by comparison. I'm still betting nobody goes to jail, as long as the "deep state" thinks they have Trump under
control.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 1:29 am
It's like we are sitting on the top of a hill looking down at a bunch of little armies attacking each other, or something.
I'm really screwy, I have contemplated to if Petraues dropped a dime on himself for having a extra martial affair, just to
get out of the Benghazi mess. Just thought I'd tell you that for full disclosure.
When it comes to Hillary, does anyone remember how in the beginning of her email investigation she pointed to Colin Powell
setting precedent to use a private computer? That little snitch Hillary is always the one when caught to start pointing the finger
.she would never have lasted in the Mafia, but she's smart enough to know what works best in Washington DC.
I'm just starting to see the magic; get the goods on Trump Jr then make a deal with the new FBI director.
Okay go ahead and laugh, but before you do pass the popcorn, and let's see how this all plays out.
Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see.
Joe
Lisa , July 14, 2017 at 4:22 am
"Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see."
Joe, where does this quote originate? Or is it a paraphrase?
I once had an American lecturer (political science) at the university, and he stressed the idea that we should not believe anything
we read or hear and only half of what we see. This was l-o-o-ng ago, in the 60's.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 10:59 am
The first time I ever heard that line, 'believe nothing of what you see', was a friend of mine said it after we watched Roberto
Clemente throw a third base runner out going towards home plate, as Robert threw the ball without a bounce to the catcher who
was standing up, from the deep right field corner of the field .oh those were the days.
Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 9:12 pm
JT,
Clemente had an unbelievable arm! The consummate baseball player I have family in western PA, an uncle your age in fact who remembers
Clemente well. Roberto also happened to be a great human being.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 9:56 pm
I got loss at Forbes Field. I was seven years old, it was 1957. I got separated from my older cousin, we got in for 50 cents
to sit in the left field bleachers. Like I said I loss my older cousin so I walked, and walked, and just about the time I wanted
my mum the most I saw daylight. I followed the daylight out of the big garage door, and I was standing within a foot of this long
white foul line. All of a sudden this Black guy started yelling at me in somekind of broken English to, 'get off the field, get
out of here'. Then I felt a field ushers hand grab my shoulder, and as I turned I saw my cousin standing on the fan side of the
right field side of the field. The usher picked me up and threw me over to my cousin, with a warning for him to keep his eye on
me. That Black baseball player was a young rookie who was recently just drafted from the then Brooklyn Dodgers .#21 Roberto Clemente.
Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 10:12 pm
You were a charmed boy and now you are a charmed man. Great story life is a Field of Dreams sometimes.
Zachary Smith , July 15, 2017 at 9:00 pm
Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see.
My introduction to this had the wording the other way around:
"Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see."
This was because the workplace was saturated with rumors, and unfortunately there was a practice of management and union representatives
"play-acting" for their audience. So what you "saw" was as likely as not a little theatrical production with no real meaning whatever.
The two fellows shouting at each other might well be laughing about it over a cup of coffee an hour later.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:01 am
Sanford – "But insiders on both sides are flashing their can openers " That's funny writing.
Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 10:20 pm
yessir, love it
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:41 am
Absolutely, one of the best political metaphors ever (unfortunately works in English language only).
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 6:19 pm
BTW, they are flashing at each other not only can openers then also jail cells and grassy knolls these days. But the can openers
would still be most scary.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 2:13 am
Israeli banks have helped launder money for Russian oligarchs, while large-scale fraudulent industries, like binary options,
have been allowed to flourish here.
A May 2009 diplomatic cable by the US ambassador to Israel warned that "many Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin and Jewish
members of organized crime groups have received Israeli citizenship, or at least maintain residences in the country."
The United States estimated at the time that Russian crime groups had "laundered as much as $10 billion through Israeli holdings."
In 2009, then Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged 17 managers and employees of the Conference on Jewish Material
Claims for defrauding Germany 42.5 million dollars by creating thousands of false benefit applications for people who had not
suffered in the Holocaust.
The scam operated by creating phony applications with false birth dates and invented histories of persecution to process compensation
claims. In some cases the recipients were born after World War II and at least one person was not even Jewish.
Among those charged was Semyon Domnitser, a former director of the conference. Many of the applicants were recruited from Brooklyn's
Russian community. All those charged hail from Brooklyn.
When a phony applicant got a check, the scammers were given a cut, Bharara said. The fraud which has been going on for 16 years
was related to the 400 million dollars which Germany pays out each year to Holocaust survivors.
Later, in November 2015, Bharara's office charged three Israeli men in a 23-count indictment that alleged that they ran a extensive
computer hacking and fraud scheme that targeted JPMorgan Chase, The Wall Street Journal, and ten other companies.
According to prosecutors, the Israeli's operation generated "hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profit" and exposed
the personal information of more than 100 million people.
Despite his service as a useful idiot propagating the Magnitsky Myth, Bharara discovered that for Russian Jewish oligarchs,
criminals and scam artists, the motto is "Nikogda ne zabyt'!" Perhaps more recognizable by the German phrase: "Niemals vergessen!"
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 3:00 am
Abe – wow, what a story. I guess it's lucrative to "never forget"! Bandits.
National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS)
NCJRS Abstract
The document referenced below is part of the NCJRS Library collection. To conduct further searches of the collection, visit the
NCJRS Abstracts Database. See the Obtain Documents page for direction on how to access resources online, via mail, through interlibrary
loans, or in a local library.
NCJ Number: NCJ 006180
Title: CRIMINALITY AMONG JEWS – AN OVERVIEW
United States of America
Journal: ISSUES IN CRIMINOLOGY Volume:6 Issue:2 Dated:(SUMMER 1971) Pages:1-39
Date Published: 1971
Page Count: 15
.
Abstract: THE CONCLUSION OF MOST STUDIES IS THAT JEWS HAVE A LOW CRIME RATE. IT IS LOWER THAN THAT OF NON-JEWS TAKEN AS A WHOLE,
LOWER THAN THAT OF OTHER RELIGIOUS GROUPS,
HOWEVER, THE JEWISH CRIME RATE TENDS TO BE HIGHER THAN THAT OF NONJEWS AND OTHER RELIGIOUS GROUPS FOR WHITE-COLLAR OFFENSES,
THAT IS, COMMERCIAL OR COMMERCIALLY RELATED CRIMES, SUCH AS FRAUD, FRAUDULENT BANKRUPTCY, AND EMBEZZLEMENT.
Index Term(s): Behavioral and Social Sciences ; Adult offenders ; Minorities ; Behavioral science research ; Offender classification
Country: United States of America
Language: English
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 4:21 pm
Cal – that does not surprise me at all. Of course they would be where the money is, and once you have money, you get nothing
but the best defense. "I've got time and money on my side. Go ahead and take me to court. I'll string this thing along and it'll
cost you a fortune. So let's deal. I'm good with a fine."
A rap on the knuckles, a fine, and no court case, no discovery of the truth that the people can see. Of course they'd be there.
That IS the only place to be if you want to be a true criminal.
Skip Scott , July 15, 2017 at 1:57 pm
Thanks again Abe, you are a wealth of information. I think you have to allow for anyone to make a mistake, and Bharara has
done a lot of good.
Longtime Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz and his team have directed their grievance at Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior
White House adviser.
Citing a person familiar with Trump's legal team, The Times said Kasowitz has bristled at Kushner's "whispering in the president's
ear" about stories on the Russia investigation without telling Kasowitz and his team.
The Times' source said the attorneys, who were hired as private counsel to Trump in light of the Russia investigation, view Kushner
"as an obstacle and a freelancer" motivated to protect himself over over Trump. The lawyers reportedly told colleagues the work
environment among Trump's inner circle was untenable, The Times said, suggesting Kasowitz could resign
Second
Who thinks Jared works for Trump? I don't.
Jared works for his father Charles Kushner, the former jail bird who hired prostitutes to blackmail his brother in law into not
testifying against him. Jared spent every weekend his father was in prison visiting him.,,they are inseparable.
Third
So what is Jared doing in his WH position to help his father and his failing RE empire?
Trying to get loans from China, Russia, Qatar,Qatar
And why Is Robert Mueller Probing Jared Kushner's Finances?
Because of this no doubt:..seeking a loan for the Kushners from a Russian bank.
The White House and the bank have offered differing accounts of the Kushner-Gorkov sit-down. While the White House said Kushner
met Gorkov and other foreign representatives as a transition official to "help advance the president's foreign policy goals."
Vnesheconombank, also known as VEB, said it was part of talks with business leaders about the bank's development strategy.
It said Kushner was representing Kushner companies, his family real estate empire.
Jared Kushner 'tried and failed to get a $500m loan from Qatar before http://www.independent.co.uk › News › World › Americas › US politics
2 days ago –
Jared Kushner tried and failed to secure a $500m loan from one of Qatar's richest businessmen, before pushing his father-in-law
to toe a hard line with the country, it has been alleged. This intersection between Mr Kushner's real estate dealings and his
father-in-law's
The Kushners are about to lose their shirts..unless one of those foreign country's banks gives them the money.
At Kushners' Flagship Building, Mounting Debt and a Foundered Deal https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/nyregion/kushner-companies-666-fifth-avenue.html
The Fifth Avenue skyscraper was supposed to be the Kushner Companies' flagship in the heart of Manhattan -- a record-setting $1.8
billion souvenir proclaiming that the New Jersey developers Charles Kushner and his son Jared were playing in the big leagues.
And while it has been a visible symbol of their status, it has also it has also been a financial headache almost from the start.
On Wednesday, the Kushners announced that talks had broken off with a Chinese financial conglomerate for a deal worth billions
to redevelop the 41-story tower, at 666 Fifth Avenue, into a flashy 80-story ultraluxury skyscraper comprising a chic retail mall,
a hotel and high-priced condominiums"
Get these cockroaches out of the WH please.,,,Jared and his sister are running around the world trying to get money in exchange
for giving them something from the Trump WH.
The NYC skyline displays 666 in really really really HUGE !!!! numbers. Perhaps the USA government as Cheney announced has
gone to the very very very DARK side.
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 2:16 pm
Yea 666 probably isn't a coincidence .lol
Chris Kinder , July 14, 2017 at 12:15 am
What I think most comments overlook here is the following: the US is the primary imperialist aggressor in the world today,
and Russia, though it is an imperialist competitor, is much weaker and is generally losing ground. Early on, the US promised that
NATO would not be extended into Eastern Europe, but now look at what's happened: not only does the US have NATO allies and and
missiles in Eastern Europe, but it also engineered a coup against a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine, and is now trying to drive
Russia out of Eastern Ukraine, as in Crimea and the Donbass and other areas of Eastern Ukraine, which are basically Russian going
back more than a century. Putin is pretty mild compered to the US' aggressive stance. That's number one.
Number two is that the current anti-Russian hysteria in the US is all about maintaining the same war-mongering stance against
Russia that existed in the cold war, and also about washing clean the Democratic Party leadership's crimes in the last election.
Did the Russians hack the election? Maybe they tried, but the point is that what was exposed–the emails etc–were true information!
They show that the DNC worked to deprive Bernie Sanders of the nomination, and hide crimes of the Clintons'! These exposures,
not any Russian connection to the exposures, are what really lost Hillary the election.
So, what is going on here? The Democrats are trying to hide their many transgressions behind an anti-Russian scare, why? Because
it is working, and because it fits in with US imperialist anti-Russian aims which span the entire post-war period, and continue
today. And because it might help get Trump impeached. I would not mind that result one bit, but the Democrats are no alternative:
that has been shown to be true over and over again.
This is all part of the US attempt to be the dominant imperialist power in the world–something which it has pursued since the
end of the last world war, and something which both Democrats and Republicans–ie, the US ruling class behind them–are committed
to. Revolutionaries say: the main enemy is at home, and that is what I say now. That is no endorsement of Russian imperialism,
but a rejection of all imperialism and the capitalist exploitative system that gives rise to it.
Thanks for your attention -- Chris Kinder
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:58 am
Chris – good post. Thanks.
mike k , July 14, 2017 at 11:35 am
Chris, I think most commenters here are aware of everything you summarized above, but we just don't put all that in each individual
post.
Paranam Kid , July 14, 2017 at 6:40 am
It is ironic that Browder on his website describes himself as running a battle against corporate corruption in Russia, and
there is a quote by Walter Isaacson: "Bill Browder is an amazing moral crusader".
http://www.billbrowder.com/bio
HIDE BEHIND , July 14, 2017 at 10:02 am
One cannot talk of Russian monry laundering in US without exposing the Jewish Israeli and many AIPAC connections.
I studied not so much the Jewish Orthodoxy but mainly the evolution of noth their outlook upon G.. but also how those who do not
believe in a G.. and still keep their cultural cohesiveness
The largest money laundering group in US is
both Jewish and Israeli, and while helping those of their cultural similarities, their ecpertise goes. Very deep in Eastern U.S.
politics and especially strong in all commercial real estate, funding, setting up bribes to permitting officials,contractors and
owners of construvtion firms.
Financials some quite large are within this Jew/Israel connections, as all they who offshore need those proper connections to
do so. take bribes need the funding cleaned and
flow out through very large tax free Jewish Charity Orgd, the largest ones are those of Orthodox.
GOV Christie years ago headed the largest sting operation to try and uproot what at that time he believed was just statewide tax
fraud and laundering operations, many odd cash flows into political party hacks running for evrry gov position electefd or appointed.
Catchng a member of one of the most influential Orthofox familys mrmbers, that member rolled on many many indivifuals of his own
culture.
It was only when Vhristies investigative team began turning up far larger cases of laundering and political donations thst msinly
centered in NY Stste and City, fid he then find out howuch power this grouping had.
Soon darn near every AIPAC aided elected politico from city state and rspecially Congress was warning him to end investigation.
Which he did.
His reward was for his fat ass to be funded for a run towards US Presidency, without any visibly open opposition by that cultural
grouping.
No it is not odd for Jewery to charge goyim usury or to aid in political schemes that advance their groups aims.
One thing to remenber by the Bible thumpers who delay any talks of Israel ; Christian Zionist, is that to be of their culture
one does not have to believe in G.
There are a few excellent books written about early days Jewish immigrant Pre Irish andblre Sicilian mafias.
The Jewish one remainst to this day but are as well orgNized as the untold history of what is known as "The Southern mafia.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:55 pm
Hide Behind – fascinating! I guess if we ever knew half of what goes on behind the scenes, we'd be shocked. We only ever know
things like this exist when people like you enlighten us, or when there's a blockbuster movie about it. Thanks.
Deborah Andrew , July 14, 2017 at 10:03 am
With great respect and appreciation for your writing about the current unsubstantiated conversations/writing about 'Russia-gate'
I would ask if 'the other side of a story' is really what we want or, is it that we want all the facts. Analysis and opinions,
that include the facts, may differ. However, it is the readers who will evaluate the varied analysis and opinions when they include
all the facts known. I raise this question, as it seems to me that we have a binary approach to our thinking and decision making.
Something is either good or bad, this or that. Sides are taken. Labels are added (such as conservative and progressive). Would
we not be wiser and would our decision making not be wiser if it were based on a set of principles? My own preference: the precautionary
principle and the principle of do no harm. I am suggesting that we abandon the phrase and notion of the 'other side of the story'
and replace it with: based on the facts now known, or, based on all the facts revealed to date or, until more facts are revealed
it appears
I would ask if 'the other side of a story' is really what we want or, is it that we want all the facts.
Replying to a question with another question isn't really good form, but given my knowledge level of this case I can see no
alternative.
How do you propose to determine the "facts" when virtually none of the characters involved in the affair appear trustworthy?
Also, there is a lot of evidence (displayed by Mr. Parry) that another set of "characters" we call the Mainstream Media are
extremely biased and one-sided with their coverage of the story.
Again – Where am I going to find those "facts" you speak of?
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:52 am
Spot on.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:02 pm
Deborah Andrew – good comment, but the problem is that we never seem to get "the other side of the story" from the MSM. You
are right in pointing out that "the other side of the story" probably isn't ALL there is (as nothing is completely black and white),
but at least it's something. The only way we can ever get to the truth is to put the facts together and question them, but how
are you going to do that when the facts are kept away from us?
It can be very frustrating, can't it, Deborah? Cheers.
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 8:52 pm
Nice comment.
None of us can know the exact truth of anything we ourselves haven't seen or been involved in. The best we can do is try to
find trusted sources, be objective, analytical and compare different stories and known the backgrounds and possible agendas of
the people involved in a issue or story.
We can use some clues to help us cull thru what we hear and read.
Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation
Note: The first rule and last five (or six, depending on situation) rules are generally not directly within the ability of
the traditional disinfo artist to apply. These rules are generally used more directly by those at the leadership, key players,
or planning level of the criminal conspiracy or conspiracy to cover up.
1. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Regardless of what you know, don't discuss it -- especially if you are a public
figure, news anchor, etc. If it's not reported, it didn't happen, and you never have to deal with the issues.
2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the
topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the 'How dare you!' gambit.
3. Create rumor mongers. Avoid discussing issues by describing all charges, regardless of venue or evidence, as mere rumors
and wild accusations. Other derogatory terms mutually exclusive of truth may work as well. This method which works especially
well with a silent press, because the only way the public can learn of the facts are through such 'arguable rumors'. If you can
associate the material with the Internet, use this fact to certify it a 'wild rumor' from a 'bunch of kids on the Internet' which
can have no basis in fact.
4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent's argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself
look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the
opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy
them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real
issues.
5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though
other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal',
'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and
so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.
6. Hit and Run. In any public forum, make a brief attack of your opponent or the opponent position and then scamper off before
an answer can be fielded, or simply ignore any answer. This works extremely well in Internet and letters-to-the-editor environments
where a steady stream of new identities can be called upon without having to explain criticism, reasoning -- simply make an accusation
or other attack, never discussing issues, and never answering any subsequent response, for that would dignify the opponent's viewpoint.
7. Question motives. Twist or amplify any fact which could be taken to imply that the opponent operates out of a hidden personal
agenda or other bias. This avoids discussing issues and forces the accuser on the defensive.
8. Invoke authority. Claim for yourself or associate yourself with authority and present your argument with enough 'jargon'
and 'minutia' to illustrate you are 'one who knows', and simply say it isn't so without discussing issues or demonstrating concretely
why or citing sources.
9. Play Dumb. No matter what evidence or logical argument is offered, avoid discussing issues except with denials they have
any credibility, make any sense, provide any proof, contain or make a point, have logic, or support a conclusion. Mix well for
maximum effect.
10. Associate opponent charges with old news. A derivative of the straw man -- usually, in any large-scale matter of high visibility,
someone will make charges early on which can be or were already easily dealt with – a kind of investment for the future should
the matter not be so easily contained.) Where it can be foreseen, have your own side raise a straw man issue and have it dealt
with early on as part of the initial contingency plans. Subsequent charges, regardless of validity or new ground uncovered, can
usually then be associated with the original charge and dismissed as simply being a rehash without need to address current issues
-- so much the better where the opponent is or was involved with the original source.
11. Establish and rely upon fall-back positions. Using a minor matter or element of the facts, take the 'high road' and 'confess'
with candor that some innocent mistake, in hindsight, was made -- but that opponents have seized on the opportunity to blow it
all out of proportion and imply greater criminalities which, 'just isn't so.' Others can reinforce this on your behalf, later,
and even publicly 'call for an end to the nonsense' because you have already 'done the right thing.' Done properly, this can garner
sympathy and respect for 'coming clean' and 'owning up' to your mistakes without addressing more serious issues.
12. Enigmas have no solution. Drawing upon the overall umbrella of events surrounding the crime and the multitude of players
and events, paint the entire affair as too complex to solve. This causes those otherwise following the matter to begin to lose
interest more quickly without having to address the actual issues.
13. Alice in Wonderland Logic. Avoid discussion of the issues by reasoning backwards or with an apparent deductive logic which
forbears any actual material fact.
14. Demand complete solutions. Avoid the issues by requiring opponents to solve the crime at hand completely, a ploy which
works best with issues qualifying for rule 10.
15. Fit the facts to alternate conclusions. This requires creative thinking unless the crime was planned with contingency conclusions
in place.
16. Vanish evidence and witnesses. If it does not exist, it is not fact, and you won't have to address the issue.
17. Change the subject. Usually in connection with one of the other ploys listed here, find a way to side-track the discussion
with abrasive or controversial comments in hopes of turning attention to a new, more manageable topic. This works especially well
with companions who can 'argue' with you over the new topic and polarize the discussion arena in order to avoid discussing more
key issues.
18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them
into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat
less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses
the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.'
19. Ignore proof presented, demand impossible proofs. This is perhaps a variant of the 'play dumb' rule. Regardless of what
material may be presented by an opponent in public forums, claim the material irrelevant and demand proof that is impossible for
the opponent to come by (it may exist, but not be at his disposal, or it may be something which is known to be safely destroyed
or withheld, such as a murder weapon.) In order to completely avoid discussing issues, it may be required that you to categorically
deny and be critical of media or books as valid sources, deny that witnesses are acceptable, or even deny that statements made
by government or other authorities have any meaning or relevance.
20. False evidence. Whenever possible, introduce new facts or clues designed and manufactured to conflict with opponent presentations
-- as useful tools to neutralize sensitive issues or impede resolution. This works best when the crime was designed with contingencies
for the purpose, and the facts cannot be easily separated from the fabrications.
21. Call a Grand Jury, Special Prosecutor, or other empowered investigative body. Subvert the (process) to your benefit and
effectively neutralize all sensitive issues without open discussion. Once convened, the evidence and testimony are required to
be secret when properly handled. For instance, if you own the prosecuting attorney, it can insure a Grand Jury hears no useful
evidence and that the evidence is sealed and unavailable to subsequent investigators. Once a favorable verdict is achieved, the
matter can be considered officially closed. Usually, this technique is applied to find the guilty innocent, but it can also be
used to obtain charges when seeking to frame a victim.
22. Manufacture a new truth. Create your own expert(s), group(s), author(s), leader(s) or influence existing ones willing to
forge new ground via scientific, investigative, or social research or testimony which concludes favorably. In this way, if you
must actually address issues, you can do so authoritatively.
23. Create bigger distractions. If the above does not seem to be working to distract from sensitive issues, or to prevent unwanted
media coverage of unstoppable events such as trials, create bigger news stories (or treat them as such) to distract the multitudes.
24. Silence critics. If the above methods do not prevail, consider removing opponents from circulation by some definitive solution
so that the need to address issues is removed entirely. This can be by their death, arrest and detention, blackmail or destruction
of theircharacter by release of blackmail information, or merely by destroying them financially, emotionally, or severely damaging
their health.
25. Vanish. If you are a key holder of secrets or otherwise overly illuminated and you think the heat is getting too hot, to
avoid the issues, vacate the kitchen. .
Note: There are other ways to attack truth, but these listed are the most common, and others are likely derivatives of these.
In the end, you can usually spot the professional disinfo players by one or more of seven (now 8) distinct traits:
Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist
by H. Michael Sweeney
copyright (c) 1997, 2000 All rights reserved
(Revised April 2000 – formerly SEVEN Traits)
1) Avoidance. They never actually discuss issues head-on or provide constructive input, generally avoiding citation of references
or credentials. Rather, they merely imply this, that, and the other. Virtually everything about their presentation implies their
authority and expert knowledge in the matter without any further justification for credibility.
2) Selectivity. They tend to pick and choose opponents carefully, either applying the hit-and-run approach against mere commentators
supportive of opponents, or focusing heavier attacks on key opponents who are known to directly address issues. .
3) Coincidental. They tend to surface suddenly and somewhat coincidentally with a new controversial topic with no clear prior
record of participation in general discussions in the particular public arena involved. They likewise tend to vanish once the
topic is no longer of general concern. They were likely directed or elected to be there for a reason, and vanish with the reason.
4) Teamwork. They tend to operate in self-congratulatory and complementary packs or teams. Of course, this can happen naturally
in any public forum, but there will likely be an ongoing pattern of frequent exchanges of this sort where professionals are involved.
Sometimes one of the players will infiltrate the opponent camp to become a source for straw man or other tactics designed to dilute
opponent presentation strength.
5) Anti-conspiratorial. They almost always have disdain for 'conspiracy theorists' and, usually, for those who in any way believe
JFK was not killed by LHO. Ask yourself why, if they hold such disdain for conspiracy theorists, do they focus on defending a
single topic discussed in a NG focusing on conspiracies? One might think they would either be trying to make fools of everyone
on every topic, or simply ignore the group they hold in such disdain.Or, one might more rightly conclude they have an ulterior
motive for their actions in going out of their way to focus as they do.
6) Artificial Emotions. An odd kind of 'artificial' emotionalism and an unusually thick skin -- an ability to persevere and
persist even in the face of overwhelming criticism and unacceptance. You might have outright rage and indignation one moment,
ho-hum the next, and more anger later -- an emotional yo-yo. With respect to being thick-skinned, no amount of criticism will
deter them from doing their job, and they will generally continue their old disinfo patterns without any adjustments to criticisms
of how obvious it is that they play that game -- where a more rational individual who truly cares what others think might seek
to improve their communications style, substance, and so forth, or simply give up.
7) Inconsistent. There is also a tendency to make mistakes which betray their true self/motives. This may stem from not really
knowing their topic, or it may be somewhat 'freudian', so to speak, in that perhaps they really root for the side of truth deep
within.
8) BONUS TRAIT: Time Constant. Wth respect to News Groups, is the response time factor. There are three ways this can be seen
to work, especially when the government or other empowered player is involved in a cover up operation:
1) ANY NG posting by a targeted proponent for truth can result in an IMMEDIATE response. The government and other empowered players
can afford to pay people to sit there and watch for an opportunity to do some damage. SINCE DISINFO IN A NG ONLY WORKS IF THE
READER SEES IT – FAST RESPONSE IS CALLED FOR, or the visitor may be swayed towards truth.
2) When dealing in more direct ways with a disinformationalist, such as email, DELAY IS CALLED FOR – there will usually be a minimum
of a 48-72 hour delay. This allows a sit-down team discussion on response strategy for best effect, and even enough time to 'get
permission' or instruction from a formal chain of command.
3) In the NG example 1) above, it will often ALSO be seen that bigger guns are drawn and fired after the same 48-72 hours delay
– the team approach in play. This is especially true when the targeted truth seeker or their comments are considered more important
with respect to potential to reveal truth. Thus, a serious truth sayer will be attacked twice for the same sin.
Michael Kenny , July 14, 2017 at 11:22 am
I don't really see Mr Parry's point. The banning of Nekrasov's film isn't proof of the accuracy of its contents and even less
does it prove that anything that runs counter to Nekrasov's argument is false. Nor does proving that a mainstream meida story
is false prove that an internet story saying the opposite is true. "A calls B a liar. B proves that A is a liar. That proves that
B is truthful." Not very logical! What seems to be established is that the lawyer in question represents a Russian-owned company,
a money-laundering prosecution against which was settled last May on the basis of what the company called a "surprise" offer from
prosecutors that was "too good to refuse". This "Russian government attorney" (dixit Goldstone) had information concerning illegal
campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr jumped at it and it makes no difference whether he was tricked
or even whether he actually got anything, his intent was clear. In addition DNC "dirt" did indeed appear on the internet via Wikileaks,
just as "dirt" appeared in the French election. MacronLeaks proves Russiagate and "Juniorgate" confirms MacronLeaks. The question
now is did Trump, as president, intervene to bring about this "too good to refuse" offer? That question cannot just be written
off with the "no evidence" argument.
Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 1:40 pm
God, you are persistent if nothing else. Keep repeating the same lie until it is taken as true, just like the MSM. You say
that Russia-gate, Macron leaks, etc can't be written off with the "no evidence" argument (how is that logical?), and then you
trash a film you haven't even seen because it doesn't fit your narrative. Maybe some evidence is provided in the film, did you
consider that possibility? That fact that Nekrasov started out to make a pro Broder film, and then switched sides, leads me to
believe he found some disturbing evidence. And if you look into Nekrasov you will find that he is no fan of Putin, so one has
to wonder what his motive is if he is lying.
I am wondering if you ever look back at previous posts, because you never reply to a rebuttal. If you did, you would see that
you are almost universally seen by the commenters here as a troll. If you are being paid, I suppose it might not matter much to
you. However, your employer should look for someone with more intelligent arguments. He is wasting his money on you.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 9:27 pm
Propaganda trolls attempt to trash the information space by dismissing, distracting, diverting, denying, deceiving and distorting
the facts.
The trolls aim at confusing rather than convincing the audience.
The tag team troll performance of "Michael Kenny" and "David" is accompanied by loud declarations that they have "logic" on
their side and "evidence" somewhere. Then they shriek that they're being "censored".
Propaganda trolls target the comments section of independent investigative journalism sites like Consortium News, typically
showing up when articles discuss the West's "regime change" wars and deception operations.
Pro-Israel Hasbara propaganda trolls also strive to discredit websites, articles, and videos critical of Israel and Zionism.
Hasbara smear tactics have intensified due to increasing Israeli threats of military aggression, Israeli collusion with the United
States in "regime change" projects from the Middle East to Eastern Europe, and Israeli links to international organized crime
and terrorism in Syria.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 3:04 am
Gee Abe, you are a magician (and I thought that you only quote excellent articles). Short and sharp.
Abe , July 15, 2017 at 4:15 pm
When they have a hard time selling that they're being "censored" (after more than a dozen comments), trolls complain that they're
being "dismissed" and "invalidated" by "hostile voices".
exiled off mainstreet , July 14, 2017 at 1:54 pm
Aaron Kesel, in Activistpost documents the links between Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS, the company engaged by the Clintons
to prepare the defamatory Christopher Steele Dossier against Trump later used by Comey to help gin up the Russian influence conspiracy
theory. In the article, it is true the GPS connection may have involved her lobbying efforts to overturn the Magnitsky law, not
the dossier, but it is also interesting that she is on record as anti-Trump and having associations with Clinton democrats. Though
it may have been part of the beginnings of a conspiracy, the conspiracy may have developed later and the meeting became something
they related back to to bolster this fraudulent dangerous initiative.
mike k , July 14, 2017 at 2:01 pm
I think as you say Skip that most on this blog have seen through Michael Kenny's stuff. Nobody's buying it. He's harmless.
If he's here on his own dime, if we don't feed him, he will get bored and go away. If he's being payed, he may persist, but so
what. Sometimes I check the MSM just to see what the propaganda line is. Kenny is like that; his shallow arguments tell me what
we must counter to wake people up.
Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 5:51 pm
Yeah mike k, I know you're right. I don't know why I let the guy get under my skin. Perhaps it's because he never responds
to a rebuttal.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 3:14 am
Then you would have to waste more time rebutting the (equally empty) rebuttal.
The second thing is that many trolls suffer from DID, that is the Dissociative Identity Disorder, aka sock puppetry. There
is a bit of similarity in argument between David and Michael and HAWKINS, only one of them rebuts quite often.
Another excellent article! I wrote a very detailed
blog post
in which I methodically take apart the latest "revelation" about Donald Trump Jr.'s emails. I talk a lot about the Magnitsky
Act, which is very relevant to this whole story.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 4:43 pm
I always like reading your articles Philippe, you have a real talent. Maybe read what I wrote above, but I'm sensing this Trump
Jr affair will help Hillary more than anything, to give her a reprieve from any further FBI investigations. I mean somehow, I'm
sure by Hillary's standards and desires, that this whole crazy investigation thing has to end. So, would it not seem reasonable
to believe that by allowing Donald Jr to be taken off the hook, that Hillary likewise will enjoy the taste of forgiveness?
Tell me if you think this Donald Trump Jr scandal could lead to this Joe
PS if so this could be a good next article to write there I go telling the band what to play, but seriously if this Russian
conclusion episode goes on much longer, could you not see a grand bargain and a deal being made?
Thanks for the compliment, I'm glad you like the blog. I wasn't under the impression that Clinton was under any particular
danger from the Justice Department, but even if she was, she doesn't have the power to stop this Trump/Russia collusion nonsense
because it's pushed by a lot of people that have nothing to do with her except for the fact that they would have preferred her
to win.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 6:48 pm
Excellent summary and analysis, Philippe. Key observation:
"as even the New York Times admits, there is no evidence that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met Donald Trump Jr., Jared
Kushner and Paul Manafort for 20-30 minutes on 9 June 2016, provided any such information during that meeting. Donald Trump Jr.
said that, although he asked her about it, she didn't give them anything on Clinton, but talked to him about the Magnitsky Act
and Russia's decision to block adoption by American couples in retaliation. Of course, if we just had his word, we'd have no particularly
good reason to believe him. But the fact remains that no documents of the sort described in Goldstone's ridiculous email ever
surfaced during the campaign, which makes what he is saying about how the meeting went down pretty convincing, at least on this
specific point. It should be noted that Donald Trump Jr. has offered to testify under oath about anything related to this meeting.
Moreover, he also said during the interview he gave to Sean Hannity that there was no follow-up to this meeting, which is unlikely
to be a lie since he must know that, given the hysteria about this meeting, it would come out. He may not be the brightest guy
in the world, but surely he or at least the people who advised him before that interview are not that stupid."
Your own necpluribus article was one of the best I've seen summarising the whole controversy, and your exhaustive responses
to the pro-deep state critics was edifying. I am now convinced that your view of Veselnitskaya's role in the affair and the nature
her connections to the dossier drafting company GPS being based on their unrelated work on the magnitsky law is accurate.
"Bill Browder, born into a notable Jewish family in Chicago, is the grandson of Earl Browder, the former leader of the Communist
Party USA,[2] and the son of Eva (Tislowitz) and Felix Browder, a mathematician. He grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and attended
the University of Chicago where he studied economics. He received an MBA from Stanford Business School[3] in 1989 where his classmates
included Gary Kremen and Rich Kelley. In 1998, Browder gave up his US citizenship and became a British citizen.[4] Prior to setting
up Hermitage, Browder worked in the Eastern European practice of the Boston Consulting Group[5] in London and managed the Russian
proprietary investments desk at Salomon Brothers.[6]"
Rake , July 15, 2017 at 9:13 am
Successfully keeping a salient argument from being heard is scary, given the social media and alternative media players who
are all ripe to uncover a bombshell. Sy Hersh needs to convince Nekrasov to get his documentary to WkiLeaks.
"Sy Hersh needs to convince Nekrasov to get his documentary to WkiLeaks."
Agree.
P. Clark , July 15, 2017 at 12:01 pm
When Trump suggested that a Mexican-American judge might be biased because of this ethnicity the media said this was racist.
Yet these same outlets like the New York Times are now routinely questioning Russian-American loyalty because of their ethnicity.
As usual a ridiculous double standard. Basically the assumption is all Russians are bad. We didn't even have this during the cold
war.
Cal , July 15, 2017 at 8:10 pm
Yes indeed P. Clark .that kind or hypocrisy makes my head explode!
MichaelAngeloRaphaelo , July 15, 2017 at 12:17 pm
Enough's Enough
STOP DNC/DEMs
#CryBabyFakeNewsBS
Support Duly ELECTED
@POTUS @realDonaldTrump
#BoycottFakeNewsSponsors
#DrainTheSwamp
#MAGA
Wow, I just learned via this article that in US Nekrasov is labeled as "pro-Kremlin" by WaPo. That's just too funny. He's in
a relationship with a Finnish MEP Heidi Hautala, who is very well known for her anti-Russia mentality. Nekrasov is defenetly anti-Kremlin
if something. He was supposed to make an anti-Kremlin documentary, but the facts turned out to be different than he thought, but
still finished his documentary.
The lengths to which the Neo Conservative War Cabal will go to destroy freedom of speech and access to alternative news sources
underscores that the United States is becoming an Orwellian agitation-propaganda police state equally dedicated to igniting World
War III for Netanyahu, the Central Banks, our Wahhabic Petrodollar Partners, and a pipeline consortium or two. The Old American
Republic is dead.
Roy G Biv , July 15, 2017 at 4:38 pm
Interesting to note that each and everyone of David's comments were bleached from this page. Looks like he was right about
the censorship. Sad.
Duly noted Abe. But you should adhere to the first part of the statement that you somehow forgot to include:
From Editor Robert Parry: At Consortiumnews, we welcome substantive comments about our articles, but comments should avoid
abusive language toward other commenters or our writers, racial or religious slurs (including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia),
and allegations that are unsupported by facts.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 6:06 pm
My favorite was David's claim that he contributed to this zine whilst it was publishing articles not to his liking (/sarc).
I kindly reminded him that people pay much more money to have publishing the way they like it – for example how much Bezos paid
for Washington Post, or Omidyar to establish The Intercept.
Except for such funny component, David's comments were totally substance free and useless. Nothing lost with bleaching.
Roy G Biv , July 16, 2017 at 5:44 am
You're practicing disinformation. He actually said he contributed early on and had problems with the recent course of the CN
trajectory. Censorship is cowardly.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 1:53 pm
Consortium News welcomes substantive comments.
"David" was presenting allegations unsupported by facts and disrupting on-topic discussion.
Violations of CN comment policy are taken down by the moderator. Period. It has nothing to do with "censorship".
Stop practicing disinformation and spin, "Roy G Biv".
David , July 16, 2017 at 3:57 pm
I stopped contributing after the unintellectual dismissal of scientific 911 truthers. And it's easy for you to paint over my
comments as they have been scrubbed. There was plenty of useful substance, it just ran against the tide. Sorry you didn't appreciate
it the contrary viewpoint or have the curiosity to read the backstory.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 5:02 pm
The cowardly claim of "censorship".
The typical troll whine is that their "contrary viewpoint" was "dismissed" merely because it "ran against the tide".
No. Your allegations were unsupported by facts. They still are.
Martyrdom is just another troll tactic.
dub , July 15, 2017 at 9:44 pm
torrent for the film?
Roy G Biv , July 16, 2017 at 5:56 am
Here is the pdf of the legal brief about the Magnitsky film submitted by Senator Grassly to Homeland Security Chief. Interesting
read and casts doubt on the claims made in the film, refutes several claims actually. Skip past Chuck Grassly's first two page
intro to get to the meat of it. If you are serious about a debate on the merits of the case, this is essential reading.
Yes, very interesting read. By all means, examine the brief.
But forget the spin from "Roy G Biv" because the brief actually refutes nothing about Andrei Nekrasov's film.
It simply notes that the Russian government was understandably concerned about "unscrupulous swindler" and "sleazy crook" William
Browder.
After your finished reading the brief, try to remember any time when Congress dared to examine a lobbying campaign undertaken
on behalf of Israeli (which is to say, predominantly Russian Jewish) interests, the circumstances surrounding a pro-Israel lobbying
effort and the potential FARA violations involved. or the background of a Jewish "Russian immigrant".
Note on page 3 of the cover letter the CC to The Honorable Dianne Feinstein, Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on the
Judiciary. Feinstein was born Dianne Emiel Goldman in San Francisco, to Betty (née Rosenburg), a former model, and Leon Goldman,
a surgeon. Feinstein's paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Poland. Her maternal grandparents, the Rosenburg family,
were from Saint Petersburg, Russia. While they were of German-Jewish ancestry, they practiced the Russian Orthodox faith as was
required for Jews residing in Saint Petersburg.
In 1980, Feinstein married Richard C. Blum, an investment banker. In 2003, Feinstein was ranked the fifth-wealthiest senator,
with an estimated net worth of US$26 million. By 2005 her net worth had increased to between US$43 million and US$99 million.
Like the rest of Congress, Feinstein knows the "right way" to vote.
David , July 16, 2017 at 1:50 pm
So you're saying because a Jew Senator was CC'd it invalidates the information? Read the first page again. The Chairman of
the Senate Judiciary Committee is obligated to CC these submissions to the ranking member of the Committee, Jew heritage or not.
Misinformation and disinformation from you Abe, or generously, maybe lazy reading. The italicized unscrupulous swindler and sleazy
crook comments were quoting the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after the Washington screening of Nekrasov's film and demonstrating
Russia's intentions to discredit Browder. You are practiced at the art of deception. Hopefully readers will simply look for themselves.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 2:11 pm
Ah, comrade "David". We see you're back muttering about "disinformation" using your "own name".
My statements about Senator Feinstein are entirely supported by facts. You really should look into that.
Also, please note that quotation marks are not italics.
And please note that the Russian Foreign Minister is legally authorized to present the view of the Russian government.
Browder is pretty effective at discrediting himself. He simply has to open his mouth.
I encourage readers to look for themselves, and not simply take the word of one Browder's sockpuppets.
David , July 16, 2017 at 2:55 pm
It won't last papushka. Every post and pended moderated post was scrubbed yesterday, to the cheers of you and your mean spirited
friends. But truth is truth and should be defended. So to the point, I reread the Judiciary Committee linked document, and the
items you specified are in italics, because the report is quoting Lavrov's comments to a Moscow news paper and "another paper"
as evidence of Russia's efforts to undermine the credibility and standing of Browder. This is hardly obscure. It's plain as day
if you just read it.
David , July 16, 2017 at 2:59 pm
Also Abe, before I get deleted again, I don't question any of you geneological description of Feinstein. I merely pointed out
that she is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and it is normal for the Chairman of the Committee (Republican)
to CC the ranking member. Unless of course it is Devin Nunes, then fairness and tradition goes out the window.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 4:01 pm
It's plain as day, "David" or whatever other name you're trolling under, that you're here to loudly "defend" the "credibility"
and "standing" of William Browder.
Sorry, but you're going to have to "defend" Browder with something other than your usual innuendo, blather about 9-11, and
slurs against RP.
Otherwise it will be recognized for what it is, repeated violation of CN comment policy, and taken down by the moderator again.
Good luck to any troll who wants to "defend" Browder's record.
But you're gonna have to earn your pay with something other than your signature unsupported allegations, 9-11 diversions, and
the "non-Jewish Russian haters gonna hate" propaganda shtick.
David , July 16, 2017 at 5:07 pm
I wish you would stop with the name calling. I am not a troll. I have been trying to make simple rational points. You respond
by calling me names and wholly ignoring and/or misrepresenting and obfuscating easily verifiable facts. I suspect you are the
moderator of this page, and if so am surprised by your consistent negative references to Jews. I'm not Jewish but you're really
over the top. Of course you have many friends here so you get little push back, but I really hope you are not Bob or Sam.
Anonymous , July 16, 2017 at 10:26 am
We can see that it was what can be considered to be a Complex situation, where it was said that someone had Dirt on Hillary
Clinton, but there was No collusion and there was No attempted collusion, but there was Patriotism and Concern for Others during
a Perplexing situation.
This is because of what is Known as Arkancide, and which is associated with some People who say they have Dirt on the Clintons.
The Obvious and Humane thing to do was to arrange to meet the Russian Lawyer, who it was Alleged to have Dirt on Hillary Clinton,
regardless of any possible Alleged Electoral advantage against Hillary Clinton, and until further information, there may have
been some National Security Concerns, because it was Known that Hillary Clinton committed Espionage with Top Secret Information
on her Unauthorized, Clandestine, Secret Email Server, and the Obvious cover up by the Department of Justice and the FBI, and
so it was with this background that this Complex situation had to be dealt with.
This is because there is Greater Protection for a Person who has Dirt or Alleged Dirt on the Clintons, if that Information
is share with other People.
This is because it is a Complete Waste of time to go to the Authorities, because they will Not do anything against Clinton
Crimes, and a former Haitian Government Official was found dead only days before he was to give Testimony regarding the Clinton
Foundation.
We saw this with Seth Rich, where the Police Videos has been withheld, and we have seen the Obstruction in investigating that
Crime.
The message to Leakers is that Seth Rich was taken to hospital and Treated and was on his way to Fully Recovering, but he died
in hospital, and those who were thinking of Leaking Understood the message from that.
There was Also concern for Rob Goldstone, who Alleged that the Russian Lawyer had Dirt on the Clintons.
We Know that is is said Goldstone that he did Not want to hear what was said at the meeting.
This is because Goldstone wanted associates of Candidate Donald Trump to Know that he did Not know what was said at that meeting.
We now Know that the meeting was a set up to Improperly obtain a FISA Warrant, which was Requested in June of 2016, and that
is same the month and the year as the meeting that the Russian Lawyer attended.
There was what was an Unusual granting of a Special Visa so that the Russian Lawyer could attend that set up, which was Improperly
Used to Request a FISA Warrant in order to Improperly Spy on an Opposition Political Candidate in order to Improperly gain an
Electoral advantage in an Undemocratic manner, because if anything wrong was intended by Associates of Candidate Donald Trump,
then there were enough People in that meeting who were the Equivalent of Establishment Democrats and Establishment Republicans,
because we Know that after that meeting, that the husband of the former Florida chair of the Trump campaign obtained a front row
seat to a June 2016 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing for the Russian Lawyer.
There are Americans who consider that the 2 Major Political Party Tyranny has Betrayed the Constitution and the Principles
of Democracy, because they oppose President Donald Trump's Election Integrity Commission, because they think that the Establishment
Republicans and the Establishment Democrats are the Bribed and Corrupted Puppets of the Shadow Regime.
We Know from Senator Sanders, that if Americans want a Political Revolution, then they will need their own Political Party.
There are Americans who think that a Group of Democratic Party Voters and Republican Party Voters who have No association with
the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, and that they may be named The Guardians of American Democracy.
These Guardians of American Democracy would be a numerous Group of People, and they would ask Republican Voters to Vote for
the Democratic Party Representative instead of the Republican who is in Congress and who is seeking Reelection, in exchange for
Democratic Party Voters to Vote for the Republican Party Candidate instead of the Democrat who is in Congress and who is seeking
Reelection, and the same can be done for the Senate, because the American People have to Decide if it is they the Shadow Regime,
or if it is We the People, and the Establishment Republicans and the Establishment Democrats are the Bribed and Corrupt Puppets
of the Shadow Regime, and there would be equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats replaced in this manner, and so it will Not
affect their numbers in the Congress or the Senate.
There could be People who think that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was Unacceptability Biased and Unacceptability Corrupt during
the Democratic Party Primaries, and that if she wants a Democratic Party Candidate to be Elected in her Congressional District,
then she Should announce that she will Not be contesting the next Election, and there could be People who think that Speaker Paul
Ryan was Unacceptability Disloyal by insufficiently endorse the Republican Presidential nominee, and with other matters, and that
if he wants a Republican Party Candidate to be Elected in his Congressional District, then he Should announce that he will Not
be contesting the next Election, and then the Guardians of American Democracy can look at other Dinos and Rinos, including those
in the Senate, because the Constitution says the words: We the People.
There are Many Americans who have Noticed that Criminal Elites escape Justice, and Corruption is the norm in American Politics.
There are those who Supported Senator Sanders who Realize that Senator Sanders would have been Impeached had he become President,
and they Know that they Need President Donald Trump to prepare the Political Landscape so that someone like Senator Sanders could
be President, without a Coup attempt that is being attempted on President Donald Trump, and while these People may not Vote for
the Republicans, they can Refuse to Vote for the Democratic Party, until the conditions are there for a Constitutional Republic
and a Constitutional Democracy, and they want the Illegal Mueller Team to recuse themselves from this pile of Vile and Putrid
McCarthyist Lies Invented by their Shadow Regime Puppet Masters,
There are Many Americans who want Voter Identification and Paper Ballots for Elections, and they have seen how several States
are Opposed to President Donald Trump's Commission on Election Integrity, because they want to Rig their Elections, and this is
Why there are Many Americans who want America to be a Constitutional Republic and a Constitutional Democracy.
MillyBloom54 , July 16, 2017 at 12:31 pm
I just read this article in the Washington Monthly, and wish to read informed comments about this issue. There are suggestions
that organized crime from Russian was heavily involved. This is a complicated mess of money, greed, etc.
Yes, very interesting read. By all means, examine the article, which concludes:
"So, let's please stay focused on why this matters.
"And why was Preet Bharara fired again?"
Israeli banks have helped launder money for Russian oligarchs, while large-scale fraudulent industries have been allowed to
flourish in Israel.
A May 2009 diplomatic cable by the US ambassador to Israel warned that "many Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin and Jewish
members of organized crime groups have received Israeli citizenship, or at least maintain residences in the country."
The United States estimated at the time that Russian crime groups had "laundered as much as $10 billion through Israeli holdings."
In 2009, then Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged 17 managers and employees of the Conference on Jewish Material
Claims for defrauding Germany 42.5 million dollars by creating thousands of false benefit applications for people who had not
suffered in the Holocaust.
The scam operated by creating phony applications with false birth dates and invented histories of persecution to process compensation
claims. In some cases the recipients were born after World War II and at least one person was not even Jewish.
Among those charged was Semyon Domnitser, a former director of the conference. Many of the applicants were recruited from Brooklyn's
Russian community. All those charged hail from Brooklyn.
When a phony applicant got a check, the scammers were given a cut, Bharara said. The fraud which has been going on for 16 years
was related to the 400 million dollars which Germany pays out each year to Holocaust survivors.
Later, in November 2015, Bharara's office charged three Israeli men in a 23-count indictment that alleged that they ran a extensive
computer hacking and fraud scheme that targeted JPMorgan Chase, The Wall Street Journal, and ten other companies.
According to prosecutors, the Israeli's operation generated "hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profit" and exposed
the personal information of more than 100 million people.
Why was Bharara fired?
Any real investigation of Russia-Gate will draw international attention towards Russian Jewish corruption in the FIRE (Finance,
Insurance, and Real Estate) sectors, and lead back to Israel.
Ain't gonna happen.
David , July 16, 2017 at 3:22 pm
Remember Milly that essentially one of the first things Trump did when he came into office was fire Preet, and just days before
the long awaited trial. Then, Jeff Sessions settled the case for 6 million without any testimony on a 230 million dollar case,
days after. Spectacular and brazen, and structured to hide the identities of which properties were bought by which investors.
Hmmmm.
David , July 16, 2017 at 3:33 pm
By the way Milly, great summary article you have linked and one that everyone who is championing the Nekrasov film should read.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 4:37 pm
The "great" article was not written by a journalist. It's an opinion piece written by Martin Longman, a blogger and Democratic
Party political consultant.
From 2012 to 2013, Longman worked for Democracy for America (DFA) a political action committee, headquartered in South Burlington,
Vermont, founded by former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
Since March 2014, political animal Longman has managed the The Washington Monthly website and online magazine.
Although it claims to be "an independent voice", the Washington Monthly is funded by the Ford Foundation, JP Morgan Chase Foundation,
and well-heeled corporate entities http://washingtonmonthly.com/about/
Longman's credentials as a "progressive" alarmist are well established. Since 2005, he has been the publisher of Booman Tribune.
Longman admits that BooMan is related to the 'bogey man' (aka, bogy man, boogeyman), an evil imaginary character who harms children.
Vladimir Putin is the latest bogey man of the Democratic Party and its equally pro-Israel "opposition".
Neither party wants the conversation to involve Jewish Russian organized crime, because that leads to Israel and the pro-Israel
AIPAC lobby that funds both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Guardian in Russia coverage acts as MI6 outlet. Magnitsky probably was MI6 operation, anyway.
Notable quotes:
"... The Observer fabricated a direct quote from the Russian president for their propaganda purposes without any regard to basic journalistic standards. They wanted to blame Putin personally for the suspicions of some Russian investigators, so they just invented an imaginary statement from him so they could conveniently do so. ..."
"... What is really going on here is the classic trope of demonisation propaganda in which the demonised leader is conflated with all officials of their government and with the targeted country itself, so as to simplify and personalise the narrative of the subsequent Two Minutes Hate to be unleashed against them. ..."
"... In the same article, the documents from Russian investigators naming Browder as a suspect in certain crimes are first "seen as" a frame-up (by the sympathetic chorus of completely anonymous observers yellow journalism can always call on when an unsupported claim needs a spurious bolstering) and then outright labelled as such (see quote above) as if this alleged frame-up is a proven fact. Which it isn't. ..."
"... No evidence is required down there in the Guardian/Observer journalistic gutter before unsupported claims against Russian officials can be treated as unquestionable pseudo-facts, just as opponents of Putin can commit no crime for the outlet's hate-befuddled hacks. ..."
The decline of the falsely self-described "quality" media outlet The Guardian/Observer into a deranged fake news site pushing
anti-Russian hate propaganda continues apace. Take a look at
this gem :
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has accused prominent British businessman Bill Browder of being a "serial killer" –
the latest extraordinary attempt by the Kremlin to frame one of its most high-profile public enemies.
But Putin has not been reported anywhere else as making any recent statement about Browder whatever, and the Observer article
makes no further mention of Putin's supposed utterance or the circumstances in which it was supposedly made.
As the rest of the article makes clear, the suspicions against Browder were actually voiced by Russian police investigators and
not by Putin at all.
The Observer fabricated a direct quote from the Russian president for their propaganda purposes without any regard to basic
journalistic standards. They wanted to blame Putin personally for the suspicions of some Russian investigators, so they just invented
an imaginary statement from him so they could conveniently do so.
What is really going on here is the classic trope of demonisation propaganda in which the demonised leader is conflated with
all officials of their government and with the targeted country itself, so as to simplify and personalise the narrative of the subsequent
Two Minutes Hate to be unleashed against them.
When, as in this case, the required substitution of the demonised leader for their country can't be wrung out of the facts even
through the most vigorous twisting, a disreputable fake news site like The Guardian/Observer is free to simply make up new, alternative
facts that better fit their disinformative agenda. Because facts aren't at all sacred when the official propaganda line demands lies.
In the same article, the documents from Russian investigators naming Browder as a suspect in certain crimes are first "seen as"
a frame-up (by the sympathetic chorus of completely anonymous observers yellow journalism can always call on when an unsupported
claim needs a spurious bolstering) and then outright labelled as such (see quote above) as if this alleged frame-up is a proven fact.
Which it isn't.
No evidence is required down there in the Guardian/Observer journalistic gutter before unsupported claims against Russian officials
can be treated as unquestionable pseudo-facts, just as opponents of Putin can commit no crime for the outlet's hate-befuddled hacks.
The above falsifications were brought to the attention of the Observer's so-called Readers Editor – the official at the Guardian/Observer
responsible for "independently" defending the outlet's misdeeds against outraged readers – who did nothing. By now the article has
rolled off the site's front page, rendering any possible future correction nugatory in any case.
Later in the same article Magnitsky is described as having been Browder's "tax lawyer" a standard trope of the Western propaganda
narrative about the case. Magnitsky
was actually an accountant .
A trifecta of fakery in one article! That makes crystal clear what the Guardian meant in
this article , published at precisely the same moment as the disinformation cited above, when it said:
"We know what you are doing," Theresa May said of Russia. It's not enough to know. We need to do something about it.
By "doing something about it" they mean they're going to tell one hostile lie about Russia after another.
From the 'liberal' Guardian/Observer wing of the rightwing bourgeois press, spot the differences with the article in the Mail
on Sunday by Nick Robinson?
This thing seems to have been cobbled together by a guy called Nick Robinson. The same BBC Nick Robinson that hosts the Today
Programme? I dunno, one feels really rather depressed at how low our media has sunk.
I think huge swathes of the media, in the eyes of many people, have never really recovered from the ghastly debacle that was
their dreadful coverage of the reasons for the illegal attack on Iraq.
The journalists want us to forget and move on, but many, many, people still remember. Nothing happened afterwards. There
was no tribunal to examine the media's role in that massive international crime against humanity and things actually got worse
post Iraq, which the attack on Libya and Syria illustrates.
Exactly: in my opinion there should be life sentences banning scribblers who printed lies and bloodthirsty kill, kill, kill
articles from ever working again in the media.
Better still, make them go fight right now in Yemen. Amazing how quickly truth will spread if journalists know they have
a good chance of dying if they print lies and falsehoods ..
At a time when the ruling elite, across virtually the entire western world, is losing it; it being, political legitimacy and
the breakdown of any semblance of a social contract between the ruled and the rulers the Guardian lurches even further to the
political right . amazing, though not really surprising. The Guardian's role appears to be to 'coral' radical and leftist ideas
and opinions and 'groom' the educated middle class into accepting their own subjugation.
The Guardian's writers get so much, so wrong, so often it's staggering and nobody gets the boot, except for the people who
allude to the incompetence at the heart of the Guardian. They fail dismally on Trump, Brexit and Corbyn and yet carry on as if
everything is fine and dandy. Nothing to complain about here, mover along now.
I suppose it's because they are actually media aristocrats living in a world of privilege, and they, as members of the ruling
elite, look after one another regardless of how poorly they actually perform. This is typical of an elite that's on the ropes
and doomed. They choose to retreat from grubby reality into a parallel world where their own dogmas aren't challenged and they
begin to believe their propaganda is real and not an artificial contruct. This is incredibly dangerous for a ruling elite because
society becomes brittle and weaker by the day as the ruling dogmas become hollow and ritualized, but without traction in reality
and real purpose.
The Guardian is a bit like the Tory government, lost and without any real ideas or ideals. The slow strangulation of the CIF
symbolizes the crisis of confidence at the Guardian. A strong and confident ruling class welcomes criticism and is ready to brush
it all off with a smile and a shrug. When they start running scared and pretending there is no dissent or opposition, well, this
is a sign of decadence and profound weakness. They are losing the battle of ideas and the battle of solutions to our problems.
All that really stands between them and a social revolution is a thin veneer of 'authority' and status, and that's really not
enough anymore.
All our problems are pathetically and conviniently blamed on the Russians and their Demon King and his vast army of evil Trolls.
It's like a political version of the Lord of the Rings.
Don't expect the Guardian to cover the biggest military build-up (NATO) on Russia's borders since Hitler's 1941 invasion.
John Pilger has described the "respectable" liberal press (Guardian, NYT etc) as the most effective component of the propaganda
system, precisely BECAUSE it is respectable and trusted. As to why the Guardian is so insistent in demonising Russia, I would
propose that is integrates them further with a Brexit-ridden Tory government. Its Blairite columnists prefer May over Corbyn any
day.
The Guardian is trying to rescue citizens from 'dreadful dangers that we cannot see, or do not understand' – in other words they
play a central role in 'the power of nightmares'
https://www.youtube.com/embed/LlA8KutU2to
So Russians cannot do business in America but Americans must be protected to do business in Russia?
If you look at Ukraine and how US corporations are benefitting from the US-funded coup, you ask what the US did in Russia
in the 1990s and the effect it had on US business and ordinary Russian people. Were the two consistent with a common US template
of economic imperialism?
In particular, you ask what Bill Browder was doing, his links to US spying organisations etc etc. You ask if he supported
the rape of Russian State assets, turned a blind eye to the millions of Russians dying in the 1990s courtesy of catastrophic economic
conditions. If he was killing people to stay alive, he would not have been the only one. More important is whether him making
$100m+ in Russia needed conditions where tens of millions of Russians were starving .and whether he saw that as acceptable collateral
damage ..he made a proactive choice, after all, to go live in Moscow. It is not like he was born there and had no chance to leave
..
I do not know the trurh about Bill Browder, but one thing I do know: very powerful Americans are capable of organising mass
genocide to become rich, so there is no possible basis for painting all American businessmen as philanthropists and all Russians
as murdering savages ..
It's perfectly possible, in fact the norm historically, for people to believe passionately in the existence of invisible threats
to their well-being, which, when examined calmly from another era, resemble a form of mass-hysteria or collective madness. For
example; the religious faith/dogma that Satan, demons and witches were all around us. An invisible, parallel, world, by the side
of our own that really existed and we were 'at war with.' Satan was our adversary, the great trickster and disseminator of 'fake
news' opposed to the 'good news' provided by the Gospels.
What's remarkable, disturbing and frightening is how closely our media resemble a religious cult or the Catholic Church in
the Middle Ages. The journalists have taken on a role that's close to that of a priesthood. They function as a 'filtering' layer
between us and the world around us. They are, supposedly, uniquely qualified to understand the difference between truth and lies,
or what's right and wrong, real news and propaganda. The Guardian actually likes this role. They our the guardians of the truth
in a chaotic world.
This reminds one of the role of the clergy. Their role was to stand between ordinary people and the 'complexities' of the
Bible and separate the Truths it contained from wild and 'fake' interpretations, which could easily become dangerous and undermine
the social order and fundamental power relationships.
The big challenge to the role of the Church happened when the printing press allowed the ordinary people to access the information
themselves and worst still when the texts were translated into the common language and not just Latin. Suddenly people could access
the texts, read and begin to interpret and understand for themselves. It's hard to imagine that people were actually burned alive
in England for smuggling the Bible in English translation a few centuries ago. That's how dangerous the State regarded such a
'crime.'
One can compare the translation of the Bible and the challenge to the authority of the Church and the clergy as 'guardians
of the truth' to what's happeing today with the rise of the Internet and something like Wikileaks, where texts and infromation
are made available uncensored and raw and the role of the traditional 'media church' and the journalist priesthood is challenged.
We're seeing a kind of media counter-reformation. That's why the Guardian turned on Assange so disgracefully and what Wikileaks
represented.
A brilliant historical comparison. They're now on the legal offensive in censoring the internet of course, because in truth
the filter system is wholly vulnerable. Alternative media has been operating freely, yet the majority have continued to rely on
MSM as if it's their only source of (dis)information, utilizing our vast internet age to the pettiness of social media and prank
videos. Marx was right: capitalist society alienates people from their own humanity. We're now aliens, deprived of our original
being and floating in a vacuum of Darwinist competition and barbarism. And we wonder why climate change is happening?
Apparently we are "living in disorientating times" according to Viner, she goes on to say that "championing the public interest
is at the heart of the Guardian's mission".
Really? How is it possible for her to say that when many of the controversial articles which appear in the Guardian are not
open for comment any more. They have adopted now a view that THEIR "opinion" should not be challenged, how is that in the public
interest?
In the Observer on Sunday a piece also appeared smearing RT entitled: "MPs defend fees of up to £1,000 an hour to appear
on 'Kremlin propaganda' channel." However they allowed comments which make interesting reading. Many commenter's saw through their
ruse and although the most vociferous critics of the Graun have been banished, but even the mild mannered ones which remain appear
not the buy into the idea that RT is any different than other media outlets. With many expressing support for the news and op-ed
outlet for giving voice to those who the MSM ignore – including former Guardian writers from time to time.
Why Viner's words are so poisonous is that the Graun under her stewardship has become a agitprop outlet offering no balance.
In the below linked cringe worthy article there is no mention of RT being under attack in the US and having to register itself
and staff as foreign agents. NO DEFENCE OF ATTACKS ON FREEDOM OF THE PRESS by the US state is mentioned.
Surely this issue is at the heart of championing public interest?
For the political/media/business elites (I suppose you could call them 'the Establishment') in the US and UK, the main problem
with RT seems to be that a lot of people are watching it. I wonder how long it will be before access is cut. RT is launching a
French-language channel next month. We are already being warned by the French MSM about how RT makes up fake news to further Putin's
evil propaganda aims (unlike said MSM, we are told). Basically, elites just don't trust the people (this is certainly a constant
in French political life).
It's not just that they don't allow comments on many of their articles, but even on the articles where CiF is enabled, they ban
any accounts that disagree with their narrative. The end result is that Guardianistas get the false impression everyone shares
their view and that they are in the majority. The Guardian moderators are like Scientology leaders who banish any outsiders
for fear of influencing their cult members.
Everyone knows that Russia-gate is a feat of mass hypnosis, mesmerized from DNC financed lies. The Trump collusion myth is
baseless and becoming dangerously hysterical: but conversely, the Clinton collusion scandal is not so easy to allay. Whilst
it may turn out to be the greatest story never told: it looks substantive enough to me. HRC colluded with Russian oligarchy
to the tune of $145m of "donations" into her slush fund. In return, Rosatom gained control of Uranium One.
A curious adjunct to this corruption: HRC opposed the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Given her subsequent rabid Russophobia: you'd
have thought that if the Russians (as it has been spun) arrested a brave whistleblowing tax lawyer and murdered him in prison
– she would have been quite vocal in her condemnation. No, she wanted to make Russia
great again. It's amazing how $145m can focus ones
attention away from ones natural instinct.
[Browder and Magnitsky were as corrupt as each other: the story that the Russians took over Browder's hedge fund and implicated
them both in a $230m tax fraud and corruption scandal is as fantastical as the "Golden Shower" dossier. However, it seems to me
Magnitsky's death was preventable (he died from complications of pancreatitis, for which it seems he was initially refused treatment
) ]
So if we turn the clock back to 2010-2013, it sure looks to me as though we have a Russian collusion scandal: only it's not
one the Guardian will ever want to tell. Will it come out when the FBI 's "secret" informant (William D Cambell) testifies to
Congress sometime this week? Not in the Guardian, because their precious Hillary Clinton is the real scandal here.
This "tactic" – a bold or outrageous claim made in the headline or in the first few sentences of a piece that is proven false
in the very same article – is becoming depressingly common in the legacy media.
In other words, the so-called respectable media knowingly prints outright lies for propaganda and clickbait purposes.
I dropped a line to a friend yesterday saying "only in a parallel universe would a businessman/shady dealer/tax evader such as
Browder be described as an "anti-corruption campaigner."" Those not familiar with the history of Browder's grandfather, after
whom a whole new "deviation" in leftist thinking was named, should look it up.
Some months ago you saw tweets saying Russophobia had hit ridiculous levels. They hadn't seen anything yet. It's scary how easily
people can be brainwashed.
The US are the masters of molesting other nations. It's not even a secret what they've been up to. Look at their budgets or
the size of the intelligence buildings. Most journalists know full well of their programs, including those on social media, which
they even reported on a few years back. The Guardian run stories by the CIA created and US state funded RFE/RL & then tell
us with a straight face that RT is state propaganda which is destroying our democracy.
The madness spreads: today The Canary has/had an article 'proving' that the 'Russians' were responsible for Brexit, Trump, etc
etc.
Then there is the neo-liberal 'President' of the EU charging that the extreme right wing and Russophobic warmongers in the
Polish government are in fact, like the President of the USA, in Putin's pocket..
This outbreak is reaching the dimensions of the sort of mass hysteria that gave us St Vitus' dance. Oh and the 'sonic' terrorism
practised against US diplomats in Havana, in which crickets working for the evil one (who he?) appear to have been responsible
for a breach in diplomatic relations. It couldn't have happened to a nicer empire.
When national security establishment is trying to undermine sitting President this is iether color revolution or coup d'état. In
the USa it looks more like color revolution.
"Now you have this interesting dynamic where the national security establishment is effectively undermining a duly elected president
of the United States. I recognize that Trump is vulnerable, but these types of investigations often become highly politicized."
Notable quotes:
"... The Credico subpoena, after he declined a request for a "voluntary" interview, underscores how the investigation is moving into areas of "guilt by association" and further isolating whistleblowers who defy the powers-that-be through unauthorized release of information to the public, a point made by National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake in an interview. ..."
"... Drake knows well what it means to blow the whistle on government misconduct and get prosecuted for it. A former senior NSA executive, Drake complained about a multi-billion-dollar fraud, waste, and widespread violation of the rights of civilians through secret mass surveillance programs. As a result, the Obama administration indicted Drake in 2010, "as the first whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg charged with espionage," according to the Institute for Public Accuracy. ..."
"... In 2011, the government's case against him, which carried a potential 35 years in prison, collapsed. Drake went free in a plea deal and was awarded the 2011 Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize. ..."
"... In this hyper-inflated, politicized environment, it is extremely difficult to wade through the massive amount of disinformation on all sides. Hacking is something all modern nation-states engage in, including the United States, including Russia. The challenge here is trying to figure out who the players are, whose ox is being gored, and who is doing the goring. ..."
"... From all accounts, Trump was duly elected. Now you have the Mueller investigation and the House investigation. Where is this all leading? The US intelligence agency hasn't done itself any favors. The ICA provides no proof either, in terms of allegations that the Russians "hacked" the election. We do have the evidence disclosed by Reality Winner that maybe there was some interference. But the hyper-politicization is making it extraordinarily difficult. ..."
"... Well, if you consider the content of those emails .Certainly, the Clinton folks got rid of Bernie Sanders. ..."
"... The national security establishment was far more comfortable having Clinton as president. Someone central to my own case, General Michael Hayden, just a couple days ago went apoplectic because of a tweet from Trump taking on the mainstream media. Hayden got over 100,000 likes on his response. Well, Hayden was central to what we did in deep secrecy at the highest levels of government after 9/11, engaging in widespread surveillance and then justifying it as "raw executive authority." ..."
"... Now you have this interesting dynamic where the national security establishment is effectively undermining a duly elected president of the United States. I recognize that Trump is vulnerable, but these types of investigations often become highly politicized. I worry that what is really happening is being sacrificed on the altar of entertainment and the stage of political theater. ..."
"... What is happening to Randy is symptomatic of a larger trend. If you dare speak truth to power, you are going to pay the price. Is Randy that much of a threat, just because he is questioning authority? Are we afraid of the press? Are we afraid of having the uncomfortable conversations, of dealing with the inconvenient truths about ourselves? ..."
"... Yeah, it is definitely a way of describing the concept of fascism without using the word. The present Yankee regime seems to be quite far along that road, and the full-on types seem to be engaged in a coup to eliminate those they fear may not be as much in the fascist deep-state bag. ..."
"... How disgusting to have to live today in the society so accurately described by Orwell in 1984. It was a nice book to read, but not to live in! ..."
"... Truth is he enemy of coercive power. Lies and secrecy are essential in leading the sheeple to their slaughter. ..."
"... Perhaps the one good thing about Trumps election is that its shows democracy is still just about alive and breathing in the US, because as is pointed out in this article, Trump was never expected to win and those who lost are still in a state of shock and disbelief. ..."
"... One things for sure: the Neocons, the deep state, and all the rest of the skunks that infest Washington will make absolutely sure that future elections will go the way as planned, so perhaps we should celebrate Trump, because he may well be the last manifestation of the democracy in the US. ..."
"... In the end, what will bring this monstrously lumbering "Russia-gate" dog and pony show crashing down is that stupid, fake Fusion GPS dossier that was commissioned, paid for, and disseminated by Team Hillary and the DNC. Then, as with the sinking of the Titanic, all of the flotsam and jetsam floating within its radius of destruction will go down with it. What will left to pluck from the lifeboats afterwards is anyone's guess. All thanks to Hillary. ..."
The investigation to somehow blame Russia for Donald Trump's election has now merged with another establishment goal of isolating
and intimidating whistleblowers and other dissidents, as Dennis J Bernstein describes.
The Russia-gate investigation has reached into the ranks of journalism with the House Intelligence Committee's subpoena of Randy
Credico, who produced a series about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for Pacifica Radio and apparently is suspected of having passed
on early word about leaked Democratic emails to Donald Trump's supporter Roger Stone.
The Credico subpoena, after he declined a request for a "voluntary" interview, underscores how the investigation is moving
into areas of "guilt by association" and further isolating whistleblowers who defy the powers-that-be through unauthorized release
of information to the public, a point made by National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake in an interview.
Drake knows well what it means to blow the whistle on government misconduct and get prosecuted for it. A former senior NSA
executive, Drake complained about a multi-billion-dollar fraud, waste, and widespread violation of the rights of civilians through
secret mass surveillance programs. As a result, the Obama administration indicted Drake in 2010, "as the first whistleblower since
Daniel Ellsberg charged with espionage," according to the Institute for Public Accuracy.
In 2011, the government's case against him, which carried a potential 35 years in prison, collapsed. Drake went free in a
plea deal and was awarded the 2011 Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize.
I interviewed Drake about the significance of Credico's subpoena, which Credico believes resulted from his journalism about the
persecution of Julian Assange for releasing information that powerful people would prefer kept hidden from the public. (I had a small
role in Credico's 14-part radio series, Julian Assange: Countdown to Freedom . It was broadcast first as part of his Live
on the Fly Series, over WBAI and later on KPFA and across the country on community radio.)
Credico got his start as a satirist and became a political candidate for mayor of New York City and later governor of New York,
making mainstream politicians deal with issues they would rather not deal with.
I spoke to Thomas Drake by telephone on Nov. 30, 2017.
Dennis Bernstein: How do you look at Russiagate, based on what you know about what has already transpired in terms of the
movement of information? How do you see Credico's role in this?
Thomas Drake: Information is the coin of the realm. It is the currency of power. Anyone who questions authority or is perceived
as mocking authority -- as hanging out with "State enemies" -- had better be careful. But this latest development is quite troubling,
I must say. This is the normalization of everything that has been going on since 9/11. Randy is a sort of 21st century Diogenes who
is confronting authority and pointing out corruption. This subpoena sends a chilling message. It's a double whammy for Randy because,
in the eyes of the US government, he is a media figure hanging out with the wrong media figure [Julian Assange].
Dennis Bernstein: Could you say a little bit about what your work was and what you tried to do with your expose?
Thomas Drake: My experience was quite telling, in terms of how far the government will go to try to destroy someone's life.
The attempt by the government to silence me was extraordinary. They threw everything they had at me, all because I spoke the truth.
I spoke up about abuse of power, I spoke up about the mass surveillance regime. My crime was that I made the choice to go to the
media. And the government was not just coming after me, they were sending a really chilling message to the media: If you print this,
you are also under the gun.
Dennis Bernstein: We have heard the charges again and again, that this was a Russian hack. What was the source? Let's trace
it back as best we can.
Thomas Drake:In this hyper-inflated, politicized environment, it is extremely difficult to wade through the massive
amount of disinformation on all sides. Hacking is something all modern nation-states engage in, including the United States, including
Russia. The challenge here is trying to figure out who the players are, whose ox is being gored, and who is doing the goring.
From all accounts, Trump was duly elected. Now you have the Mueller investigation and the House investigation. Where is this
all leading? The US intelligence agency hasn't done itself any favors. The ICA provides no proof either, in terms of allegations
that the Russians "hacked" the election. We do have the evidence disclosed by Reality Winner that maybe there was some interference.
But the hyper-politicization is making it extraordinarily difficult.
The advantage that intelligence has is that they can hide behind what they are doing. They don't actually have to tell the truth,
they can shade it, they can influence it and shape it. This is where information can be politicized and used as a weapon. Randy has
found himself caught up in these investigations by virtue of being a media figure and hanging out with "the wrong people."
Dennis Bernstein: It looks like the Russiagaters in Congress are trying to corner Randy. All his life he has spoken truth
to power. But what do you think the role of the press should be?
Thomas Drake: The press amplifies just about everything they focus on, especially with today's 24-hour, in-your-face social
media. Even the mainstream media is publishing directly to their webpages. You have to get behind the cacophony of all that noise
and ask, "Why?" What are the intentions here?
I believe there are still enough independent journalists who are looking further and deeper. But clearly there are those who are
hell-bent on making life as difficult as possible for the current president and those who are going to defend him to the hilt. I
was not surprised at all that Trump won. A significant percentage of the American electorate were looking for something different.
Dennis Bernstein : Well, if you consider the content of those emails .Certainly, the Clinton folks got rid of Bernie
Sanders.
Thomas Drake: That would have been an interesting race, to have Bernie vs. Trump. Sanders was appealing, especially to
young audiences. He was raising legitimate issues.
Dennis Bernstein: In Clinton, they had a known quantity who supported the national security state.
Thomas Drake:The national security establishment was far more comfortable having Clinton as president. Someone central
to my own case, General Michael Hayden, just a couple days ago went apoplectic because of a tweet from Trump taking on the mainstream
media. Hayden got over 100,000 likes on his response. Well, Hayden was central to what we did in deep secrecy at the highest levels
of government after 9/11, engaging in widespread surveillance and then justifying it as "raw executive authority."
Now you have this interesting dynamic where the national security establishment is effectively undermining a duly elected
president of the United States. I recognize that Trump is vulnerable, but these types of investigations often become highly politicized.
I worry that what is really happening is being sacrificed on the altar of entertainment and the stage of political theater.
What is happening to Randy is symptomatic of a larger trend. If you dare speak truth to power, you are going to pay the price.
Is Randy that much of a threat, just because he is questioning authority? Are we afraid of the press? Are we afraid of having the
uncomfortable conversations, of dealing with the inconvenient truths about ourselves?
"Raw Executive Authority" means Totalitarianism/Fascism.
exiled off mainstreet , December 7, 2017 at 4:23 pm
Yeah, it is definitely a way of describing the concept of fascism without using the word. The present Yankee regime seems
to be quite far along that road, and the full-on types seem to be engaged in a coup to eliminate those they fear may not be as
much in the fascist deep-state bag.
It is highly encouraging to know that a great many good and decent men and women Americans are 100% supportive of Mr, Randy
Credico as he prepares for his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Remember all those standing right there beside
you, speak what rightly needs to be spoken, and make history Mr. Credico!
jaycee , December 7, 2017 at 3:56 pm
The intensification of panic/hysteria was obviously triggered by the shock election of Trump. Where this is all heading is
on display in Australia, as the government is writing legislation to "criminalise covert and deceptive activities of foreign actors
that fall short of espionage but are intended to interfere with our democratic systems and processes or support the intelligence
activities of a foreign government." The legislation will apparently be accompanied by new requirements of public registration
of those deemed "foreign agents". (see http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12/07/auch-d07.html
).
This will be an attack on free speech, free thought, and political freedoms, justified by an orchestrated hysteria which ridiculously
assumes a "pure" political realm (i.e. the "homeland") under assault by impure foreign agents and their dirty ideas. Yes, that
is a fascist construct and the liberal establishment will see it through, not the alt-right blowhards.
mike k , December 7, 2017 at 5:49 pm
How disgusting to have to live today in the society so accurately described by Orwell in 1984. It was a nice book to read,
but not to live in!
john wilson , December 8, 2017 at 5:48 am
Actually Mike, the book was a prophesy but you aren't seen nothing yet. You me and the rest of the posters here may well find
ourselves going for a visit to room 101 yet.
fudmier , December 7, 2017 at 4:42 pm
Those who govern (527 of them) at the pleasure of the constitution are about to breach the contract that entitles them to govern.
Limiting the scope of information allowed to those who are the governed, silencing the voices of those with concerns and serious
doubts, policing every word uttered by those who are the governed, as well as abusing the constitutional privilege of force and
judicial authority, to deny peaceful protests of the innocents is approaching the final straw.
The governors and their corporate sponsors have imposed on those the governors govern much concern. Exactly the condition that
existed prior to July 4, 1776, which elicited the following:
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the Political bands which connected them
with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the laws of nature and of Nature's
God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to
the separation.
Those who govern (527 of them and the puppet master oligarch behind them) will make certain that there's no support for the
next declaration. There's no respect to the opinions of the mankind, what matters is keeping the current status quo in place and
further advance it by silencing the independent media.
Maybe when the next "Mother of all bubbles" come, there's an opportunity for the mankind to be heard, but it's doubtful. What
has taken place during the last bubble is that the rich has gotten richer and the poor, well, you know the routine.
Truth is he enemy of coercive power. Lies and secrecy are essential in leading the sheeple to their slaughter.
john wilson , December 8, 2017 at 5:44 am
Perhaps the one good thing about Trumps election is that its shows democracy is still just about alive and breathing in
the US, because as is pointed out in this article, Trump was never expected to win and those who lost are still in a state of
shock and disbelief.
Trump's election has also shown us in vivid technicolour, just what is really going on in the deep state. Absolutely none of
this stuff would have come out had Clinton won and anything there was would have been covered up as though under the concrete
foundation of a tower block. However, Trump still has four years left and as a British prime minister once said, "a week is a
long time in politics". Well four more years of Trump is a hell of a lot longer so who knows what might happen in that time.
One things for sure: the Neocons, the deep state, and all the rest of the skunks that infest Washington will make absolutely
sure that future elections will go the way as planned, so perhaps we should celebrate Trump, because he may well be the last manifestation
of the democracy in the US.
Christene Bartels , December 8, 2017 at 9:57 am
In the end, what will bring this monstrously lumbering "Russia-gate" dog and pony show crashing down is that stupid, fake
Fusion GPS dossier that was commissioned, paid for, and disseminated by Team Hillary and the DNC. Then, as with the sinking of
the Titanic, all of the flotsam and jetsam floating within its radius of destruction will go down with it. What will left to pluck
from the lifeboats afterwards is anyone's guess. All thanks to Hillary.
Apparently, Santa isn't the only one making a list and checking it twice this year. He's going to have to share the limelight
with Karma.
This is a simply a brilliant article. Probably the best written on the subject so far. Kudos to Max Blumenthal
Thinks tanks are really ideological tanks -- formidable weapon in propaganda wars that crush everything on its way. And taken
together far right think tanks financed by defense sector or intelligence agencies are really a shadow far right political party with
its own neocon agenda. Actually subverting the will of American people (who elected Trump) for more peaceful relations (aka detente)
with Russia in favor of interest of weapon manufactures and the army of "national security parasites".
At a time when the ruling elite, across virtually the entire western world, is losing it; it being, political legitimacy and
the breakdown of any semblance of a social contract between the ruled and the rulers those think tanks decides to create a fake
narrative and blame Russians. Is not this a classic variant of projection ?
The slow strangulation of the US MSM means the crisis of confidence. A strong and confident ruling class welcomes criticism and
is ready to brush it all off with a smile and a shrug. When they start running scared and pretending there is no dissent or
opposition, well, this is a sign of of degradation of the ruling elite. They are losing the battle of ideas and the battle of
solutions to social problems. All that really stands between them and a social revolution is a thin veneer of 'authority' and
status, as well as intelligence agencies spying on everybody.
Now all those well paid ( and sometimes even talented) war propagandist intend to substitute the real crisis of neoliberalism in
the USA demonstrated during the recent Presidential Elections for the artificial problem of Russian meddling. And they are succeeding
in this unfair and evil substitution. The also manage to "poison the well" -- relation between two nations were now at the
level probably lower then during Cold War (when many Russians were sympathetic to the USA). I think 70% of Democratic voters now
are convinced the Russia was meddling in the USA election and about 30% of Republican voters also think so. For the creators of
'artificial reality" such numbers signify big success. A very big success to be exact.
Notable quotes:
"... In perhaps the most chilling moment of the hearings, and the most overlooked, Clint Watts, a former U.S. Army officer who had branded himself an expert on Russian meddling, appeared before a nearly empty Senate chamber. Watts conjured up a stark landscape of American carnage, with shadowy Russian operatives stage managing the chaos ..."
"... The spectacle perfectly illustrated the madness of Russiagate, with liberal lawmakers springboarding off the fear of Russian meddling to demand that Americans be forbidden from consuming the wrong kinds of media ..."
"... A former U.S. Army officer who spent years in obscurity at a defense industry funded think tank called the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), Watts has become a go-to source for cable news producers and print journalists on the subject of Russian bots, always available with a comment that reinforces the sense that America is under sustained cyborg attack. This September, his employers at FPRI hailed him as "the leading expert on developments related to Russian-backed efforts to not only influence the 2016 presidential election, but also to inflame racial and cultural divisions within the U.S. and across Europe." ..."
"... Watts boasts an impressive-looking bio that is replete with fancy sounding fellowships at national security-oriented outfits, including George Washington University's Center Cyber and Homeland Security. His bio also indicates that he served on an FBI Joint Terror Task Force. ..."
"... Though Watts is best known for his punditry on Russian interference, it's fair to say he is as much an expert on Russian affairs as Harvey Weinstein is a trusted voice on feminism. Indeed, Watts appears to speak no Russian, has no record of reporting or scholarship from inside Russia, and has produced little to no work of any discernible academic value on Russian affairs. ..."
"... Whether or not he has the substance to support his claims of expertise, Watts has proven a talented salesman, catering to popular fears about Russian interference while he plies credulous lawmakers with ease. ..."
"... In the widely publicized testimony, Watts explained to the panel of senators that he first noticed the pernicious presence of Russian social media bots after he co-authored an article in 2014 in Foreign Affairs titled, " The Good and The Bad of Ahrar al Sham ." The article urged the US to arm a group of Syrian Salafi insurgents known for its human rights abuses , sectarianism and off-and-on alliances with Al Qaeda. Watts and his co-authors insisted that Ahrar al-Sham was the best proxy force for wreaking havoc on the Syrian government weakening its allies in Iran and Russia. Right below the headline, Watts and his co-authors celebrated Ahrar al-Sham as "an Al Qaeda linked group worth befriending." ..."
"... Watts rehashed the same argument at FPRI a year later, urging the U.S. government to harness jihadist terror as a weapon against Russia. "The U.S. at a minimum, through covert or semi-covert platforms, should take advantage and amplify these free alternative [jihadist] narratives to provide Russia some payback for recent years' aggression," he wrote. In another paper, Watts asked , "Why shouldn't the U.S. redirect some of the jihadi hatred towards those with the dirtiest hands in the Syrian conflict: Russia and Iran?" Watts did not specify whether the theater of covert warfare should be limited to the Syrian battlefield, or if he sought to encourage jihadists to carry out terrorist acts inside Russia and Iran. ..."
"... Next, Watts introduced his signature theme, claiming that Russia manipulated civil rights protests to exploit divisions in American society. Declaring that "pro-Russian" outlets were spreading "chaos in Black Lives Matter protests" by deploying active measures, Watts did not bother to say what those measures were. ..."
"... Watts then moved to the main course of his testimony, focusing on how Trump employed Russian "active measures" to attack his opponents. Watts told the Senate panel that the Russian-backed news outlets RT and Sputnik had produced a false report on the U.S. airbase in Incirlik, Turkey being "overrun by terrorists." He presented the Russian stories as the anchor for a massive influence operation that featured swarms of Russian bots across social media. And he claimed that then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort invoked the incident to deflect from negative media coverage, suggesting that Trump was coordinating strategy with the Kremlin. In reality, it was Watts who was spreading the fake news. ..."
"... Watts has pushed his bogus narrative of RT and Sputnik's Incirlik coverage in numerous outlets, including Politico . Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen echoed Watts' false account on the Senate floor while arguing for legislation to force RT out of the U.S. market on political grounds. And Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times' media correspondent, reproduced Watts' distorted account in a major feature on RT and Sputnik's "new theory of war." Almost no one, not one major media organization or public figure, has bothered to fact check these false claims, and few have questioned the agenda behind them. ..."
"... The episode began during a Trump rally at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump read out an email purportedly from longtime Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal (the father of this writer), hoping to embarrass Clinton over Benghazi. The text of the email turned out to be part of a column written by the pro-Clinton Newsweek columnist Kurt Eichenwald, not an email by Blumenthal. ..."
"... The source of Trump's falsehood appeared to have been a report by Bill Moran, then a reporter for Sputnik, the news service funded by the Russian government. Having confused Eichenwald's writing for a Blumenthal email, Moran scrubbed his erroneous article within 20 minutes. Somehow, Moran's retracted article had found its way onto the Trump campaign's radar, a not atypical event for a campaign that had relied on material from far-out sites like Infowars to undercut its opponents. ..."
"... In his column at Newsweek, Eichenwald framed Moran's honest mistake as the leading edge of a secret Russian influence operation. With help from pro-Clinton elements, Eichenwald's column went viral, earning him slots on CNN and MSNBC, where he howled about the nefarious Russian-Trump-Wikileaks plot he believed he had just exposed. (Glenn Greenwald was perhaps the only reporter with a national platform to highlight Eichenwald's falsifications .) Moran was fired as a result of the fallout, and would have to spend the next several months fighting to correct the record. ..."
"... When Moran appealed to Eichenwald for a public clarification, Eichenwald staunchly refused. Instead, he offered Moran a job at the New Republic in exchange for his silence and warned him, "If you go public, you'll regret it." (Eichenwald had no role at the New Republic or any clear ability to influence the magazine's hiring decisions.) Moran refused to cooperate, prompting Eichenwald to publish a follow-up piece painting himself as the victim of a Russian "active measures" campaign, and to cast Moran once again as a foreign agent. ..."
"... Representing himself in court, Moran elicited a settlement from Newsweek that forced the magazine to scrub all of Eichenwald's articles about him -- a tacit admission that they were false from top to bottom. This meant that the most consequential claim Watts made before the Senate was also a whopping lie. ..."
"... The day after Watts' deception-laden appearance, he was nevertheless transformed from an obscure national security into a cable news star, with invites from Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow, Meet the Press, and the liberal comedian Samantha Bee, among many others. His testimony received coverage from the gamut of major news outlets, and even earned him a fawning profile from CNN. From out of the blue, Watts had become the star witness of Russiagate, and one of corporate media's favorite pundits. ..."
"... Dr. Strangelove ..."
"... It was not until this summer, however, that the influence operation Watts helped establish reached critical capacity. He had approached one of Washington's most respected think tanks, the German Marshall Fund, and secured support for an initiative called the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The new initiative became responsible for a daily blacklist of subversive, "pro-Russian" media outlets, targeting them with the backing of a who's who of national security honchos, from Bill Kristol to former CIA director and ex-Hillary Clinton surrogate Michael Morrell, along with favorable promotion from some of the country's most respected news organizations. ..."
Nearly a year after the presidential election, the scandal over accusations of Russian political interference in the 2016 election
has gone beyond Donald Trump and reached into the nebulous world of online media. On November 1, Congress held hearings on "Extremist
Content and Russian Disinformation Online." The proceedings saw executives from Facebook, Twitter and Youtube subjected to tongue-lashings
from lawmakers like Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who howled about Russian online trolls "spread[ing] stories about abuse of black
Americans by law enforcement."
In perhaps the most chilling moment of the hearings, and the most overlooked, Clint Watts, a former U.S. Army officer who
had branded himself an expert on Russian meddling,
appeared before a nearly empty Senate chamber.
Watts conjured up a stark landscape of American carnage, with shadowy Russian operatives stage managing the chaos.
"Civil wars don't start with gunshots, they start with words," he proclaimed. "America's war with itself has already begun. We
all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations
and easily transform us into the Divided States of America."
Next, Watts suggested a government-imposed campaign of media censorship: "Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing
on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced: silence the guns and the barrage will
end."
The censorious overtone of Watts' testimony was unmistakable. He demanded that government news inquisitors drive dissident media
off the internet and warned that Americans would spear one another with bayonets if they failed to act. And not one member of Congress
rose to object. In fact, many echoed his call for media suppression in the House and Senate hearings, with Democrats like Sen. Dianne
Feinstein and
Rep. Jackie Speier agreeing the most vehemently. The spectacle perfectly illustrated the madness of Russiagate, with liberal
lawmakers springboarding off the fear of Russian meddling to demand that Americans be forbidden from consuming the wrong kinds of
media -- including content that amplified the message of progressive causes like Black Lives Matter.
Details of exactly what transpired vis a vis Russia and the U.S. in social media in 2016 are still emerging. This year, the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a declassified version of the intelligence community's report on "Assessing
Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections," written by CIA, FBI and NSA, with its central conclusion that Russian
efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow's longstanding desire to undermine
the U.S.-led liberal democratic order."
To be sure, there is ample evidence that Russian-linked trolls have attempted to exploit wedge issues on social media platforms.
But the impact of these schemes on real-world events appears to have been exaggerated. According to
Facebook's data
, 56 percent of Russian-linked ads appeared after the 2016 presidential election, and another 25 percent "were never shown to
anyone." The ads were said to have "reached" over 100 million people, but that assumes that Facebook users did not scroll through
or otherwise ignore them, as they do with most ads. Content emanating from "Russia-linked" sources on YouTube, meanwhile, managed
to rack up hit totals in the hundreds , not
exactly a viral smash.
Facebook posts traced to the infamous Internet Research Agency troll factory in Russia amounted to only 0.0004 percent of total
content that appeared on the social network. (Some of these posts
targeted "animal
lovers with memes of adorable puppies," while another hawked an LGBT-themed "
Buff Bernie coloring book for Berniacs.") According
to its " deliberately
broad" review , Twitter found that only 0.74 percent of its election-related tweets were "Russian-linked." Google, for its part,
documented a grand total of $4,700 of "Russian-linked
ad spending" during the 2016 election cycle. While some have argued that the Russian-linked ads were micro-targeted, and could have
shifted key electoral voting blocs, these ads appeared in a media climate awash in a multi-billion dollar deluge of political ad
spending from both established parties and dark money super PACs.
However, a blitz of feverish corporate media coverage and tension-filled congressional hearings has convinced a whopping
82 percent of Democrats
that "Russian-backed" social media content played a central role in swinging the 2016 election. Russian meddling has even earned
comparisons by lawmakers to Pearl Harbor, to "acts of war," and by Hillary Clinton to the
attacks of 9/11
. And in an inadvertent way, these overblown comparisons were apt.
As during the aftermath of 9/11, the fallout from Russiagate has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry of pundits and self-styled
experts eager to exploit the frenetic atmosphere for publicity and profits. Many of these figures have emerged out of the swamp that
flowed from the war on terror and are gravitating toward the growing Russia fearmongering industrial complex in search of new opportunities.
Few of these characters have become as prominent as Clint Watts.
So who is Watts, and how did he emerge seemingly from nowhere to become the star congressional witness on Russian meddling?
Dubious Expertise, Impressive Salesmanship
A former U.S. Army officer who spent years in obscurity at a defense industry funded think tank called the Foreign Policy
Research Institute (FPRI), Watts has become a go-to source for cable news producers and print journalists on the subject of Russian
bots, always available with a comment that reinforces the sense that America is under sustained cyborg attack. This September, his
employers at FPRI
hailed him as "the leading expert on developments related to Russian-backed efforts to not only influence the 2016 presidential
election, but also to inflame racial and cultural divisions within the U.S. and across Europe."
Watts boasts an impressive-looking bio that is replete with fancy sounding fellowships at national security-oriented outfits,
including George Washington University's Center Cyber and Homeland Security. His bio also indicates that he served on an FBI Joint
Terror Task Force.
Though Watts is best known for his punditry on Russian interference, it's fair to say he is as much an expert on Russian affairs
as Harvey Weinstein is a trusted voice on feminism. Indeed, Watts appears to speak no Russian, has no record of reporting or scholarship
from inside Russia, and has produced little to no work of any discernible academic value on Russian affairs.
Whether or not he has the substance to support his claims of expertise, Watts has proven a talented salesman, catering to
popular fears about Russian interference while he plies credulous lawmakers with ease.
Before Congress, a String of Deceptions
Back on March 30, as the narrative of Russian meddling gathered momentum, Watts made his first appearance before the Senate Select
Intelligence Committee.
Seated at the front of a hearing room packed with reporters, Watts introduced Congress to concepts of Russian meddling that were
novel at the time, but which have become part of Beltway newspeak. His testimony turned out to be a signal moment in Russiagate,
helping transition the narrative of the scandal from Russia-Trump collusion to the wider issue of online influence.
In the widely publicized testimony, Watts explained to the panel of senators that he first noticed the pernicious presence
of Russian social media bots after he co-authored an article in 2014 in Foreign Affairs titled, "
The Good and The Bad
of Ahrar al Sham ." The article urged the US to arm a group of Syrian Salafi insurgents known for its
human rights abuses , sectarianism and
off-and-on alliances
with Al Qaeda. Watts and his co-authors insisted that Ahrar al-Sham was the best proxy force for wreaking havoc on the Syrian
government weakening its allies in Iran and Russia. Right below the headline, Watts and his co-authors celebrated Ahrar al-Sham as
"an Al Qaeda linked group worth befriending."
Watts rehashed the same argument at FPRI a year later,
urging the
U.S. government to harness jihadist terror as a weapon against Russia. "The U.S. at a minimum, through covert or semi-covert platforms,
should take advantage and amplify these free alternative [jihadist] narratives to provide Russia some payback for recent years' aggression,"
he wrote. In another paper, Watts
asked
, "Why shouldn't the U.S. redirect some of the jihadi hatred towards those with the dirtiest hands in the Syrian conflict: Russia
and Iran?" Watts did not specify whether the theater of covert warfare should be limited to the Syrian battlefield, or if he sought
to encourage jihadists to carry out terrorist acts inside Russia and Iran.
The premise of these op-eds should have raised serious concerns about Watts and his colleagues, and even questions about their
sanity. They had marketed themselves as national security experts, yet they were lobbying the US to "befriend" the allies of Al Qaeda,
the group that brought down the Twin Towers. (Ahrar al-Sham was founded by Abu Khalid al-Suri, a Madrid bombing suspect who was
named by Spanish
investigators as Osama bin-Laden's courier.) Anyone cynical enough to put such ideas into public circulation should have expected
a backlash. But when the inevitable wave of criticism came, Watts dismissed it all as a Russian bot attack.
Addressing the Senate panel, Watts said that those who took to social media to mock and criticize his Foreign Affairs article
were, in fact, Russian bots. He provided no evidence to support the claim, and
a look at his single tweet promoting the
article shows that he was criticized only once (by @Navsteva, a Twitter user known for defending the Syrian government against regime
change proponents, not an automated bot). Nevertheless, Watts painted the incident as proof that Russia had revived a Cold War information
warfare strategy of "Active Measures," which was supposedly aimed at "crumbl[ing] democracies from the inside out [by] creating political
divisions."
Next, Watts introduced his signature theme, claiming that Russia manipulated civil rights protests to exploit divisions in
American society. Declaring that "pro-Russian" outlets were spreading "chaos in Black Lives Matter protests" by deploying active
measures, Watts did not bother to say what those measures were. In fact, the only piece of proof he offered (in a Daily Beast
transcript of his testimony) was a
single link
to an RT article that factually documented
a squabble between Black Lives Matter protesters and white supremacists -- an incident that had been widely covered by other outlets,
from the
Houston
Chronicle to the
Washington Post . Watts did not explain how this one report by RT sowed any chaos, or whether it had any effect at all on actual
events.
Watts then moved to the main course of his testimony, focusing on how Trump employed Russian "active measures" to attack his
opponents. Watts told the Senate panel that the Russian-backed news outlets RT and Sputnik had produced a false report on the U.S.
airbase in Incirlik, Turkey being "overrun by terrorists." He presented the Russian stories as the anchor for a massive influence
operation that featured swarms of Russian bots across social media. And he claimed that then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort
invoked the incident to deflect from negative media coverage, suggesting that Trump was coordinating strategy with the Kremlin. In
reality, it was Watts who was spreading the fake news.
In the articles
cited
by Watts during his testimony, neither
RT nor
Sputnik made
any reference to "terrorists" taking over Incirlik Airbase. Rather, these outlets compiled tweets by Turkish activists and sourced
their coverage to a report by Hurriyet, one of Turkey's largest mainstream papers. In fact, the incident was reported by virtually
every major Turkish news organization (
here ,
here ,
here and
here ). What's more,
the events appeared to have taken place approximately as RT and Sputnik reported it, with protesters readying to protect the airbase
from a coup while Turkish police sealed the base's entrances and exits. A look at RT's coverage shows the network even downplayed
the severity of the event,
citing a tweet by a U.S.-based national security analysis group stating, "We are not finding any evidence of a coup or takeover."
This stands entirely at odds with Watts' claim that RT exaggerated the incident to spark chaos.
Watts has pushed his bogus narrative of RT and Sputnik's Incirlik coverage in numerous outlets, including
Politico . Democratic
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen
echoed Watts'
false account on the Senate floor while arguing for legislation to force RT out of the U.S. market on political grounds. And Jim
Rutenberg, the New York Times' media correspondent,
reproduced
Watts' distorted account in a major feature on RT and Sputnik's "new theory of war." Almost no one, not one major media organization
or public figure, has bothered to fact check these false claims, and few have questioned the agenda behind them.
Questions emailed to Watts via his employers at FPRI received no reply.
Another Watts Deception, This Time Discredited in Court
During his Senate testimony, Watts introduced a second, and even more distorted claim of Trump employing Russian "active measures"
to attack his political foes. The details of the story are complex and difficult for a passive audience to absorb, which is probably
why Watts has been able to get away with pushing it for so long.
Watts' testimony was the culmination of a mainstream media deception that forced an aspiring reporter out of his job, drove him
to contemplate suicide, and ultimately prompted him to take matters into his own hands by suing his antagonists.
The episode began during a Trump rally at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump read out an email purportedly
from longtime Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal (the father of this writer), hoping to embarrass Clinton over Benghazi.
The text of the email turned out to be part of a column written by the pro-Clinton Newsweek columnist Kurt Eichenwald, not an email
by Blumenthal.
The source of Trump's falsehood appeared to have been a report by Bill Moran, then a reporter for Sputnik, the news service
funded by the Russian government. Having confused Eichenwald's writing for a Blumenthal email, Moran
scrubbed
his erroneous article within 20 minutes. Somehow, Moran's retracted article had found its way onto the Trump campaign's radar,
a not atypical event for a campaign that had relied on material from far-out sites like Infowars to undercut its opponents.
In his column at Newsweek, Eichenwald framed Moran's honest mistake as the leading edge of a secret Russian influence operation.
With help from pro-Clinton elements, Eichenwald's column went viral, earning him slots on CNN and MSNBC, where he howled about the
nefarious Russian-Trump-Wikileaks plot he believed he had just exposed. (Glenn Greenwald was perhaps the only reporter with a national
platform to
highlight Eichenwald's falsifications .) Moran was fired as a result of the fallout, and would have to spend the next several
months fighting to correct the record.
When Moran appealed to Eichenwald for a public clarification, Eichenwald staunchly refused. Instead, he
offered
Moran a job at the New Republic in exchange for his silence and warned him, "If you go public, you'll regret it." (Eichenwald
had no role at the New Republic or any clear ability to influence the magazine's hiring decisions.) Moran refused to cooperate, prompting
Eichenwald to publish a follow-up piece painting himself as the victim of a Russian "active measures" campaign, and to cast Moran
once again as a foreign agent.
When Watts revived Eichenwald's bogus version of events in his Senate testimony, Moran began to spiral into the depths of depression.
He even entertained thoughts of suicide. But he ultimately decided to fight, filing a lawsuit against Newsweek's parent company for
defamation and libel.
Representing himself in court, Moran elicited a settlement from Newsweek that forced the magazine to scrub all of Eichenwald's
articles about him -- a tacit admission that they were false from top to bottom. This meant that the most consequential claim Watts
made before the Senate was also a whopping lie.
The day after Watts' deception-laden appearance, he was nevertheless transformed from an obscure national security into a
cable news star, with
invites
from Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow, Meet the Press, and the liberal comedian Samantha Bee, among many others. His testimony received
coverage from the gamut of major news outlets, and even earned him a fawning profile from CNN. From out of the blue, Watts had become
the star witness of Russiagate, and one of corporate media's favorite pundits.
FPRI, a Pro-War Think Tank Founded by White Supremacist Eugenicists
Before he emerged in the spotlight of Russiagate, Watts languished at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, earning little name
recognition outside the insular world of national security pundits. Based in Philadelphia, the FPRI has been
described by journalist Mark Ames as "one of the looniest (and spookiest) extreme-right think tanks since the early Cold War
days, promoting 'winnable' nuclear war, maximum confrontation with Russia, and attacking anti-colonialism as dangerously unworkable."
Daniel Pipes, the arch-Islamophobe pundit and former FPRI fellow, offered a
similar characterization
of the think tank, albeit from an alternately opposed angle. "Put most baldly, we have always advocated an activist U.S. foreign
policy," Pipes said in a 1991 address to FPRI. He added that the think tank's staff "is not shy about the use of force; were we members
of Congress in January 1991, all of us would not only have voted with President Bush and Operation Desert Storm, we would have led
the charge."
FPRI was co-founded by Robert Strausz-Hupé, a far-right Austrian emigre, with help from conservative corporations and covert funding
from the CIA From the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, Strausz-Hupé gathered a "Philadelphia School" of Cold War hardliners
to develop a strategy for protracted war against the Soviet Union. His brain trust included FPRI co-founder Stefan Possony, an Austrian
fascist who was a board member of the World Anti-Communist League, the international fascist organization
described by journalists
Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson as a network of "those responsible for death squads, apartheid, torture, and the extermination
of European Jewry." True to his fascist roots, Possony co-authored a racialist tract, "
The Geography of Intellect
," that argued that blacks were biologically inferior and that the people of the global South were "genetically unpromising."
Strausz-Hupé seized on Possony's racialist theories to inveigh against anti-colonial movements led by "populations incapable of rational
thought."
While clamoring for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union -- and acknowledging that their preferred strategy would cause
mass casualties in American cities -- Strausz-Hupé and his band of hawks developed a monomaniacal obsession with Russian propaganda.
By the time of the Cuban missile crisis, they were stricken with paranoia, arguing on the pages of the New York Times that filmmaker
Stanley Kubrick was a Soviet useful idiot whose film, Dr. Strangelove , advanced "the principal Communist objectives to
drive a wedge between the American people and their military leaders."
Ultimately, Strausz-Hupé's fanaticism cost him an ambassadorship, as Sen. William Fulbright scuttled his appointment to serve
in Morocco on the grounds that his "hard line, no compromise" approach to communism could shatter the delicate balance of diplomacy.
Today, he is remembered fondly
on FPRI's website as "an intellectual and intellectual impresario, administrator, statesman, and visionary." His militaristic
legacy continues thanks to the prolific presence -- and bellicose politics -- of Watts.
The Paranoid Style
This year, FPRI dedicated its annual gala to honoring Watts' success in mainstreaming the narrative of Russian online meddling.
Since I first transcribed a Soundcloud recording of Watts' keynote address, the file has been
mysteriously scrubbed
from the internet. It is unclear what prompted the removal, however, it is easy to understand why Watts would not want his comments
examined by a critical listener. His speech offered a window into a paranoid mindset with a tendency for overblown, unverifiable
claims about Russian influence.
While much of the speech was a rehash of Watts' Senate testimony, he spent an unusual amount of time describing the threat he
believed Russian intelligence agents posed to his own security. "If you speak up too much, you'll get knocked down," Watts said,
claiming that think tank fellows who had been too vocal about Russian meddling had seen their laptops "burned up by malware."
"If someone rises up in prominence, they will suddenly be -- whoof! -- swiped down out of nowhere by some crazy disclosure from
their email," Watts added, referring to unspecified Russian retaliatory measures. As usual, he didn't produce concrete evidence or
offer any examples.
"Anybody remember the reporters that were outed after the election? Or maybe they tossed up a question to the Clinton campaign
and they were gone the next day?" he asked his audience. "That's how it goes."
It was unclear which reporters Watts was referring to, or what incident he could have possibly been alluding to. He offered no
details, only innuendo about the state of siege Kremlin actors had supposedly imposed on him and his freedom-fighting colleagues.
He even predicted he'd be "hacked and cyber attacked when this recording comes out."
According to Watts, Russian "active measures" had singlehandedly augmented Republican opinion in support of the Kremlin. "It is
the greatest success in influence operations in the history of the world," Watts confidently proclaimed. He contrasted Russia's success
with his own failures as an American agent of influence working for the U.S. military, a saga in his career that remains largely
unexamined.
Domestic Agent of Influence
"I worked in influence operations in counter-terrorism for 15 years," Watts boasted to his audience at FPRI. "We didn't break
one or two percent [increase in the approval rating of US foreign policy] in fifteen years and we spent billions a year in tax dollars
doing it. I was paid off of those programs. We had almost no success throughout the Middle East."
By Watts' own admission, he had been part of a secret propaganda campaign aimed at manipulating the opinions of Middle Easterners
in favor of the hostile American military operating in their midst. And he failed massively, wasting "billions a year in tax dollars."
Given his penchant for deception, this may have been yet another tall tale aimed at burnishing his image as an internet era James
Bond. But if the story was even partially true, Watts had inadvertently exposed a severe scandal that, in a fairer world, might have
triggered congressional hearings.
Whatever took place, it appears that Watts and his Cold Warrior colleagues are now waging another expensive influence operation,
this time directed against the American public. By deploying deceptions, half-truths and hyperbole with the full consent of Congress
and in collaboration with the mainstream press, they have managed to convince a majority of Americans that Russia is "trying to knock
us down and take us over," as Watts remarked at the FPRI's gala.
In just a matter of months, public consent for an unprecedented array of hostile measures against Russia, from sanctions and
consular raids to arbitrary
crackdowns on Russian-backed news organizations, has been assiduously manufactured.
It was not until this summer, however, that the influence operation Watts helped establish reached critical capacity. He had
approached one of Washington's most respected think tanks, the German Marshall Fund, and secured support for an initiative called
the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The new initiative became responsible for a daily blacklist of subversive, "pro-Russian" media
outlets, targeting them with the backing of a who's who of national security honchos, from Bill Kristol to former CIA director and
ex-Hillary Clinton surrogate Michael Morrell, along with favorable promotion from some of the country's most respected news organizations.
In the next installment of this investigation, we will see how a collection of cranks, counter-terror retreads and online vigilantes
overseen by the German Marshall Fund have waged a search-and-destroy mission against dissident media under the guise of combating
Russian "active measures," and how the mainstream press has enabled their censorious agenda.
The most important part of power elite in neoliberal society might not be financial oligarchy, but intelligence agencies elite.
If you look at the role
of Brennan in "Purple color revolution" against Trump that became clear that heads of the agencies are powerful political players
with resources at hand, that are not available to other politicians.
Notable quotes:
"... Men in positions of great power have been forced to realize that their aspirations and responsibilities have exceeded the horizons of their own experience, knowledge, and capability. Yet, because they are in chargeof this high-technology society, they are compelled to do something. This overpowering necessity to do something -- although our leaders do not know precisely what to do or how to do it -- creates in the power elite an overbearing fear of the people. It is the fear not of you and me as individuals but of the smoldering threat of vast populations and of potential uprisings of the masses. ..."
"... This power elite is not easy to define; but the fact that it exists makes itself known from time to time. Concerning the power elite, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote of the "vastly ambitious individuals who [have] become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery." Fuller noted also, "Always their victories [are] in the name of some powerful sovereign-ruled country. The real power structures [are] always the invisible ones behind the visible sovereign powers." ..."
"... This report, as presented in the novel, avers that war is necessary to sustain society, the nation, and national sovereignty, a view that has existed for millennia. Through the ages, totally uncontrolled warfare -- the only kind of "real" war -- got bigger and "better" as time and technology churned on, finally culminating in World War II with the introduction of atomic bombs. ..."
"... This is why, even before the end of World War II, the newly structured bipolar confrontation between the world of Communism and the West resulted in the employment of enormous intelligence agencies that had the power, invisibly, to wage underground warfare, economic and well as military, anywhere -- including methods of warfare never before imagined. These conflicts had to be tactically designed to remain short of the utilization of the H-bomb by either side. There can never be victories in such wars, but tremendous loss of life could occur, and there is the much-desired consumption and attrition of trillions of dollars', and rubles', worth of war equipment. ..."
"... Since WWII, there has been an epidemic of murders at the highest level in many countries. Without question the most dynamic of these assassinations was the murder of President John F. Kennedy, but JFK was just one of many in a long list that includes bankers, corporate leaders, newsmen, rising political spokesmen, and religious leaders. ..."
"... The ever-present threat of assassination seriously limits the number of men who would normally attempt to strive for positions of leadership, if for no other reason than that they could be singled out for murder at any time. This is not a new tactic, but it is one that has become increasingly utilized in pressure spots around the world. ..."
"... Under totalitarian or highly centralized nondemocratic regimes, the intelligence organization is a political, secret service with police powers. It is designed primarily to provide personal security to those who control the authority of the state against all political opponents, foreign and domestic. These leaders are forced to depend upon these secret elite forces to remain alive and in power. Such an organization operates in deep secrecy and has the responsibility for carrying out espionage, counterespionage, and pseudoterrorism. This methodology is as true of Israel, Chile, or Jordan as it has been of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The second category of intelligence organization is one whose agents are limited to the gathering and reporting of intelligence and who have no police functions or the power to arrest at home or abroad. This type of organization is what the CIA was created to be; however, it does not exist. ..."
"... Over the decades since the CIA was created, it has acquired more sinister functions. All intelligence agencies, in time, tend to develop along similar lines. The CIA today is a far cry hum the agency that was created in 1947 by the National Security Act. As President Harry S. Truman confided to close friends, the greatest mistake of his administration took place when he signed that National Security Act of 1947 into law. It was that act which, among other things it did, created the Central Intelligence Agency.3 ..."
True existence of these multimegaton hydrogen bombs has so drastically changed the Grand Strategy of world powers that, today
and for the future, that strategy is being carried out by the invisible forces of the CIA, what remains of the KGB, and their lesser
counterparts around the world.
Men in positions of great power have been forced to realize that their aspirations and responsibilities have exceeded the
horizons of their own experience, knowledge, and capability. Yet, because they are in chargeof this high-technology society, they
are compelled to do something. This overpowering necessity to do something -- although our leaders do not know precisely what to
do or how to do it -- creates in the power elite an overbearing fear of the people. It is the fear not of you and me as individuals
but of the smoldering threat of vast populations and of potential uprisings of the masses.
This power elite is not easy to define; but the fact that it exists makes itself known from time to time. Concerning the power
elite, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote of the "vastly ambitious individuals who [have] become so effectively powerful because of their
ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery." Fuller noted also, "Always their victories [are] in the
name of some powerful sovereign-ruled country. The real power structures [are] always the invisible ones behind the visible sovereign
powers."
The power elite is not a group from one nation or even of one alliance of nations. It operates throughout the world and no doubt
has done so for many, many centuries.
... ... ...
From this point ot view, warfare, and the preparation tor war, is an absolute necessity for the welfare of the state and for control
of population masses, as has been so ably documented in that remarkable novel by Leonard Lewin Report From Iron Mountain on
the Possibility and Desirability of Peace and attributed by Lewin to "the Special Study Group in 1966," an organization whose
existence was so highly classified that there is no record, to this day, of who the men in the group were or with what sectors of
the government or private life they were connected.
This report, as presented in the novel, avers that war is necessary to sustain society, the nation, and national sovereignty,
a view that has existed for millennia. Through the ages, totally uncontrolled warfare -- the only kind of "real" war -- got bigger
and "better" as time and technology churned on, finally culminating in World War II with the introduction of atomic bombs.
Not long after that great war, the world leaders were faced suddenly with the reality of a great dilemma. At the root of this
dilemma was the new fission-fusion-fission H-bomb. Is it some uncontrollable Manichean device, or is it truly a weapon of war?
... ... ...
Such knowledge is sufficient. The dilemma is now fact. There can no longer be a classic or traditional war, at least not the all-out,
go-for-broke-type warfare there has been down through the ages, a war that leads to a meaningful victory for one side and abject
defeat for the other.
Witness what has been called warfare in Korea, and Vietnam, and the later, more limited experiment with new weaponry called the
Gulf War in Iraq.
... ... ...
This is why, even before the end of World War II, the newly structured bipolar confrontation between the world of Communism
and the West resulted in the employment of enormous intelligence agencies that had the power, invisibly, to wage underground warfare,
economic and well as military, anywhere -- including methods of warfare never before imagined. These conflicts had to be tactically
designed to remain short of the utilization of the H-bomb by either side. There can never be victories in such wars, but tremendous
loss of life could occur, and there is the much-desired consumption and attrition of trillions of dollars', and rubles', worth of
war equipment.
One objective of this book is to discuss these new forces. It will present an insider's view of the CIA story and provide
comparisons with the intelligence organizations -- those invisible forces -- of other countries. To be more realistic with the priorities
of these agencies themselves, more will be said about operational matters than about actual intelligence gathering as a profession.
This subject cannot be explored fully without a discussion of assassination. Since WWII, there has been an epidemic of murders
at the highest level in many countries. Without question the most dynamic of these assassinations was the murder of President John
F. Kennedy, but JFK was just one of many in a long list that includes bankers, corporate leaders, newsmen, rising political spokesmen,
and religious leaders.
The ever-present threat of assassination seriously limits the number of men who would normally attempt to strive for positions
of leadership, if for no other reason than that they could be singled out for murder at any time. This is not a new tactic, but it
is one that has become increasingly utilized in pressure spots around the world.
It is essential to note that there are two principal categories of intelligence organizations and that their functions are determined
generally by the characteristics of the type of government they serve -- not by the citizens of the government, but by its leaders.
Under totalitarian or highly centralized nondemocratic regimes, the intelligence organization is a political, secret service
with police powers. It is designed primarily to provide personal security to those who control the authority of the state against
all political opponents, foreign and domestic. These leaders are forced to depend upon these secret elite forces to remain alive
and in power. Such an organization operates in deep secrecy and has the responsibility for carrying out espionage, counterespionage,
and pseudoterrorism. This methodology is as true of Israel, Chile, or Jordan as it has been of the Soviet Union.
The second category of intelligence organization is one whose agents are limited to the gathering and reporting of intelligence
and who have no police functions or the power to arrest at home or abroad. This type of organization is what the CIA was created
to be; however, it does not exist.
Over the decades since the CIA was created, it has acquired more sinister functions. All intelligence agencies, in time, tend
to develop along similar lines. The CIA today is a far cry hum the agency that was created in 1947 by the National Security Act.
As President Harry S. Truman confided to close friends, the greatest mistake of his administration took place when he signed that
National Security Act of 1947 into law. It was that act which, among other things it did, created the Central Intelligence Agency.3
At some point quantity of duplicity turns into quality. and affect international relations. Economic decline can speed this process
up. The US elite has way too easy life since 1991. And that destroyed the tiny patina of self-restraint that it has during Cold War
with negative (hugely negative) consequences first of all for the US population. Empire building is a costly project even if it supported
by the dominance of neoliberal ideology and technological advances in computers and telecommunication. . The idea of "full spectrum
dominance" was a disaster. But the realization of this came too late and at huge cost for the world and for the US population. Russia
decimated its own elite twice in the last century. In might be the time for the USA to follow the Russia example and do it once in XXI
century. If we thing about Hillary Clinton Jon McCain, Joe Biden, Niki Haley, as member of the US elite it is clear that "something
is rotten in the state of Denmark).
Notable quotes:
"... How Washington's chronic deceit -- especially towards Russia -- has sabotaged U.S. foreign policy. ..."
"... Unfortunately, North Korean leaders have abundant reasons to be wary of such U.S. enticements. Trump's transparent attempt to renege on Washington's commitment to the deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) -- which the United States and other major powers signed in 2015 to curb Tehran's nuclear program -- certainly does not increase Pyongyang's incentive to sign a similar agreement. His decision to decertify Iran's compliance with the JCPOA, even when the United Nations confirms that Tehran is adhering to its obligations, appears more than a little disingenuous. ..."
"... There seems to be no limit to Washington's desire to crowd Russia. NATO has even added the Baltic republics, which had been part of the Soviet Union itself. In early 2008, President George W. Bush unsuccessfully tried to admit Georgia and Ukraine, which would have engineered yet another alliance move eastward. By that time, Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders were beyond furious. ..."
"... The timing of Bush's attempted ploy could scarcely have been worse. It came on the heels of Russia's resentment at another example of U.S. duplicity. In 1999, Moscow had reluctantly accepted a UN mandate to cover NATO's military intervention against Serbia, a long-standing Russian client. The alliance airstrikes and subsequent moves to detach and occupy Serbia's restless province of Kosovo for the ostensible reason of protecting innocent civilians from atrocities was the same "humanitarian" justification that the West would use subsequently in Libya. ..."
"... Nine years after the initial Kosovo intervention, the United States adopted an evasive policy move, showing utter contempt for Russia's wishes and interests in the process. Kosovo wanted to declare its formal independence from Serbia, but it was clear that such a move would face a certain Russian (and probable Chinese) veto in the UN Security Council. Washington and an ad-hoc coalition of European Union countries brazenly bypassed the Council and approved Pristina's independence declaration. It was an extremely controversial move. Not even all EU members were on board with the policy, since some of them (e.g., Spain) had secessionist problems of their own. ..."
"... Russia's leaders protested vehemently and warned that the West's unauthorized action established a dangerous, destabilizing international precedent. Washington rebuffed their complaints, arguing that the Kosovo situation was unique. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns made that point explicitly in a February 2008 State Department briefing. Both the illogic and the hubris of that position were breathtaking. ..."
"... This -- in the context of the long history of US and EU deceit and duplicity in their dealings with Russia is why Russia is supporting Catalan separatism (e.g. RT en Español's constant attacks on Spain and promotion of the separatists). The US and the EU effectively gave Russia permission to do this back in the 1990s. We set a precedent for their actions in Catalonia -- and, more famously, in Ukraine. ..."
"... One could scarcely ask for a better summary of why the Cold War seems, sadly, to be reheating as well as why Democratic attempts to blame it on Russian meddling are a equally sad evasion of their share of bipartisan responsibility for creating this mess. Reinhold Niebuhr's prayer for, "the courage to change the things I can," is painfully appropriate. ..."
"... "No one forced any eastern European country to join NATO and the EU – decisions that indicate these countries feared a Russian revival after the collapse of the USSR. Russia always believed that these countries were in their near abroad or backyard." ..."
"... Putin is a rationally calculating man. He has made his strategic objectives well known. They are economic. He sees Russia as the great linchpin of the pan-Eurasian One Belt/One Road (OB/OR) initiative proposed by China as well as the AIIB. In that construct, Europe and East Asia are Russia's customers and bilateral trading partners. Military conquest would wreck that vision and Putin knows it. ..."
"... He's been remarkably restrained when egged on by Big Mouth Nikki Haley, Mad Dog Mattis or that other Pentagon nutcase Phillip Breedlove (former Supreme Commander of NATO) who have gone out of their way to demonize Russia. Unfortunately, with those Pentagon hacks whispering in Trump's ear, too much war-mongering is never enough. ..."
"... U.S. foreign policy is an unmitigated disaster. The War Machine Hammer wrecks everything that it touches while sending the befuddled taxpayers the bill. ..."
"... When you meet individual Americans, they are frequently so nice and level-headed that you are perplexed trying to imagine where their leaders come from. And while we're on that subject, America does not actually have a foreign policy, as such. Its foreign policy is to bend every other living soul on the planet to the service of America. ..."
How Washington's chronic deceit -- especially towards Russia -- has sabotaged U.S. foreign policy.
For any country, the foundation of successful diplomacy is a reputation for credibility and reliability. Governments are wary
of concluding agreements with a negotiating partner that violates existing commitments and has a record of duplicity. Recent U.S.
administrations have ignored that principle, and their actions have backfired majorly, damaging American foreign policy in the process.
The consequences of previous deceit are most evident in the ongoing effort to achieve a diplomatic solution to the North Korean
nuclear crisis. During his recent trip to East Asia, President Trump
urged
Kim Jong-un's regime to "come to the negotiating table" and "do the right thing" -- relinquish the country's nuclear weapons and
ballistic missile programs. Presumably, that concession would lead to a lifting (or at least an easing) of international economic
sanctions and a more normal relationship between Pyongyang and the international community.
Unfortunately, North Korean leaders have
abundant reasons to be wary of such U.S. enticements. Trump's transparent attempt to renege on Washington's commitment to the
deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) -- which the United States and other major powers signed in
2015 to curb Tehran's nuclear program -- certainly does not increase Pyongyang's incentive to sign a similar agreement. His decision
to decertify Iran's compliance with the JCPOA, even when the United Nations confirms that
Tehran is adhering to its obligations, appears more than a little disingenuous.
North Korea is likely focused on another incident that raises even greater doubts about U.S. credibility. Libyan dictator Muammar
Qaddafi capitulated on the nuclear issue in December of 2003, abandoning his country's nuclear program and reiterating a commitment
to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In exchange, the United States and its allies lifted economic sanctions and welcomed Libya
back into the community of respectable nations. Barely seven years later, though, Washington and its NATO partners double-crossed
Qaddafi, launching airstrikes and cruise missile attacks to assist rebels in their campaign to overthrow the Libyan strongman. North
Korea and other powers took notice of Qaddafi's fate, making the already difficult task of getting a de-nuclearization agreement
with Pyongyang
nearly
impossible.
The Libya intervention sullied America's reputation in another way. Washington and its NATO allies prevailed on the UN Security
Council to pass a resolution endorsing a military intervention to protect innocent civilians. Russia and China refrained from vetoing
that resolution after Washington's assurances that military action would be limited in scope and solely for humanitarian purposes.
Once the assault began, it quickly became evident that the resolution was merely a fig leaf for another U.S.-led regime-change war.
Beijing, and especially Moscow, understandably felt duped. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates
succinctly described Russia's reaction, both short-term and long-term:
The Russians later firmly believed they had been deceived on Libya. They had been persuaded to abstain at the UN on the grounds
that the resolution provided for a humanitarian mission to prevent the slaughter of civilians. Yet as the list of bombing targets
steadily grew, it became obvious that very few targets were off-limits, and that NATO was intent on getting rid of Qaddafi. Convinced
they had been tricked, the Russians would subsequently block any such future resolutions, including against President Bashar al-Assad
in Syria.
The Libya episode was hardly the first time the Russians concluded that U.S. leaders had
cynically
misled them . Moscow asserts that when East Germany unraveled in 1990, both U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and West German
Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher offered verbal assurances that, if Russia accepted a unified Germany within NATO, the alliance
would not expand beyond Germany's eastern border. The official U.S. position that there was nothing in writing affirming such a limitation
is correct -- and the clarity, extent, and duration of any verbal commitment to refrain from enlargement are certainly
matters of
intensecontroversy . But invoking
a "you didn't get it in writing" dodge does not inspire another government's trust.
There seems to be no limit to Washington's desire to crowd Russia. NATO has even added the Baltic republics, which had been
part of the Soviet Union itself. In early 2008, President George W. Bush unsuccessfully
tried to admit Georgia and Ukraine, which
would have engineered yet another alliance move eastward. By that time, Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders were beyond furious.
The timing of Bush's attempted ploy could scarcely have been worse. It came on the heels of Russia's resentment at another
example of U.S. duplicity. In 1999, Moscow had reluctantly accepted a UN mandate to cover NATO's military intervention against Serbia,
a long-standing Russian client. The alliance airstrikes and subsequent moves to detach and occupy Serbia's restless province of Kosovo
for the ostensible reason of protecting innocent civilians from atrocities was the same "humanitarian" justification that the West
would use subsequently in Libya.
Nine years after the initial Kosovo intervention, the United States adopted an evasive policy move, showing utter contempt
for Russia's wishes and interests in the process. Kosovo wanted to declare its formal independence from Serbia, but it was clear
that such a move would face a certain Russian (and probable Chinese) veto in the UN Security Council. Washington and an ad-hoc coalition
of European Union countries brazenly bypassed the Council and approved Pristina's independence declaration. It was an extremely controversial
move. Not even all EU members were on board with the policy, since some of them (e.g., Spain) had secessionist problems of their
own.
Russia's leaders protested vehemently and warned that the West's unauthorized action established a dangerous, destabilizing
international precedent. Washington rebuffed their complaints, arguing that the Kosovo situation was unique. Under Secretary of State
for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns made that point
explicitly in a February 2008 State Department
briefing. Both the illogic and the hubris of that position were breathtaking.
It is painful for any American to admit that the United States has acquired a well-deserved reputation for duplicity in its foreign
policy. But the evidence for that proposition is quite substantial. Indeed, disingenuous U.S. behavior regarding NATO expansion and
the resolution of Kosovo's political status may be the single most important factor for the poisoned bilateral relationship with
Moscow. The U.S. track record of duplicity and betrayal is one reason why prospects for resolving the North Korean nuclear issue
through diplomacy are so bleak.
Actions have consequences, and Washington's reputation for disingenuous behavior has complicated America's own foreign policy
objectives. This is a textbook example of a great power shooting itself in the foot.
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of 10 books,
the contributing editor of 10 books, and the author of more than 700 articles and policy studies on international affairs.
you are dead ON! I have been saying this since IRAQ
fiasco (not one Iraqi onboard on 9/11) we should have invaded egypt and saudi arabia. how the foolish american public(sheep) just
buys the american propaganda is beyond me.. don't blame the Russians one spittle!!
Excellent piece. The US really has destroyed its credibility over the years.
This points Ted Galen Carpenter makes in this piece go a long way toward explaining Russia's destabilizing behavior in recent
years.
One point in particular jumped out at me:
"Kosovo wanted to declare its formal independence from Serbia, but it was clear that such a move would face a certain Russian
(and probable Chinese) veto in the UN Security Council. Washington and an ad-hoc coalition of European Union countries brazenly
bypassed the Council and approved Pristina's independence declaration. It was an extremely controversial move. Not even all EU
members were on board with the policy, since some of them (e.g., Spain) had secessionist problems of their own. Russia's leaders
protested vehemently and warned that the West's unauthorized action established a dangerous, destabilizing international precedent.
Washington rebuffed their complaints, arguing that the Kosovo situation was unique."
This -- in the context of the long history of US and EU deceit and duplicity in their dealings with Russia is why Russia
is supporting Catalan separatism (e.g. RT en Español's constant attacks on Spain and promotion of the separatists). The US and
the EU effectively gave Russia permission to do this back in the 1990s. We set a precedent for their actions in Catalonia -- and,
more famously, in Ukraine.
You have made a reasonable case that the US and Europe have not always been reliable, but the expansion of NATO is not one
of them. No one forced any eastern European country to join NATO and the EU – decisions that indicate these countries feared a
Russian revival after the collapse of the USSR. Russia always believed that these countries were in their near abroad or backyard.
The idea of a "sphere of influence" is a cold war relic which Russia invoked with the Medvedev Doctrine in 2008. This is currently
on display in Ukraine. Russia is aggressively denying Ukraine their sovereignty. Who could possibly blame former Soviet Block
countries for hightailing it to NATO during a lull in Russian aggression?
One could scarcely ask for a better summary of why the Cold War seems, sadly, to be reheating as well as why Democratic attempts
to blame it on Russian meddling are a equally sad evasion of their share of bipartisan responsibility for creating this mess.
Reinhold Niebuhr's prayer for, "the courage to change the things I can," is painfully appropriate.
The whole weakness of the author's argument is a classic American one: very few Americans seem to be able to get their heads around
the fact that the Soviet Union ceased to exist 26 years ago! They are still totally locked into their cold war mentality. He thus
unquestioningly accepts Putin's pre-1789 "sphere of influence" theory in which there are "superior" and "inferior" races, with
only the superior races being entitled to have a sovereign state and the inferior races being forced to submit to being ruled
by foreigners. Mr Carpenter really needs to put his cold war mentality aside and come into the 21st century!
Most seriously
of all, Mr Carpenter offers no solution for improving relations between the US and Russia. Saying that past US actions were wrong,
even if true, says nothing about the present and offers nothing for the future. At best, Mr Carpenter's article is empty moralising.
And the unspoken, but perfectly obvious, subtext, namely that the US should "atone for its sins" by capitulating to Putin,
is morally reprehensible and politically unrealistic. Since, by Mr Carpenter's own account, the problem is caused by US wrongdoing,
isn't it for the US to put things right (for example, by getting Putin out of Ukraine) and not simply make a mess in someone else's
country and then run for home with its tail between its legs? Who gave Americans the right to give away other people's countries?
The one problem with your argument if, you are an american as I am, is that Russia is not acting in our names. If the US government,
supposedly a government of, by, and for the people breaks its word, then you and I are foresworn oathbreakers as well because
the government is (theoretically, at least) acting on OUR authority.
Really?! "Russia always believed that these countries were in their near abroad or backyard."
I think that if you look at a map or a globe, you will find that this is not a belief but a fact. How you could overlook this,
I don't know.
"The idea of a "sphere of influence" is a cold war relic "
If you are going to try and use history to influence opinion, it is best to check your facts. This is a very old concept.What
do you think the Great Game between Imperial Russia and the British Empire in Central Asia was about? For that matter, what we
call the Byzantine Commonwealth was a clearly attempt by the Romaoi to establish a political, cultural, and religious sphere of
influence to support the power of the Empire, much as the United States has been doing over the past several decades.
You could make the case that Iraq too in 2003 is another reason why the Russians and the North Koreans distrust the US.
At this point, it is fairly certain that the Bush Administration knew that Saddam was not building nuclear weapons of mass
destruction, which is what Bush strongly implied in his ramp up to the war.
One other takeaway that the North Koreans mag have from the 2003 Iraq invasion is that the US will lie any way to get what
it wants.
Not saying that Russia or North Korea are perfect. Far from it. But the US needs to take a hard look in the mirror.
Re: craigsummers, "No one forced any eastern European country to join NATO and the EU – decisions that indicate these countries
feared a Russian revival after the collapse of the USSR. Russia always believed that these countries were in their near abroad
or backyard."
Except both here and abroad, the Global Cop Elites in Washington shape the strategy space through propaganda, fear-mongering
and subversion. Moreover, the Eastern European countries are happy to join NATO when it's the American taxpayers who foot a large
percentage of the bill.
Standard U.S. MO: create the threat, inflate the threat, send in the War Machine at massive cost to sustain the threat.
Rather than being broadened, NATO should have been ratcheted back after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the U.S. military
presence in Europe massively reduced. Then normalized relations between Europe and Russia would have been designed and developed
by Europe and Russia. Not the 800 pound Gorilla Global Cop that is good at little more than breaking things. (And perversely,
after flushing TRILLIONS of tax dollars down the toilet, duping Americans to wildly applaud the "Warrior-Heroes" for a job well
done.)
The 2008 war between Georgia and Russia was, per observers at the time, in Russian word and thought directly linked to the Balkan
's precedent.
The subtext here – of nation states, sovereignty, separatism and secessionist movements – is even more relevant with respect
to US-China relationships. Since WW2 and that brief, transient monopoly on nuclear weapons, US foreign policy has eroded the Peace
of Westphalia while attempting to erect an "international order" of convenience on top if it.
Both China and Russia know that nothing will stop the expansionism of US "national interests". In response to the doctrinal
aspirations of the Soviets, the US has committed itself to an ideology that is just a greedy and relentless. In retrospect, it
is hard to tell how many decades ago the Cold War stopped being about opposition to Soviet ideology, and instead became about
"projecting" – in every sense of the word – an equally globalist US ideology.
We are the redcoats now. Now wonder the neocons and neolibs are shouting "Russia!" at every opportunity.
I am amazed how many masochistic conservatives are in USA conservative circles especially in the CATO institute. Mr. T. G. Carpenter,
as is clear from not only this and other articles, is a staunch defender of Yalta and proponent of Yalta 2 after the Cold War
ended. As far as I remember Libya was the hatchet job of the Europeans especially the French and British. B. Obama at first didn't
want to attack Libya but gave in after lobbying by the French, British and the neoliberal/neo-conservative lobby and supporters
of the Arab Spring in the USA. America lost credibility after and only since the conservatives neoliberals and neocons manipulated
USA and the West's foreign politics for thirty plus years. USA is still a democratic country so it is easy to blame everything
on the US. In today's Putin's Russia similar critics of the Russian politics wouldn't be so "easy".
The Central Europe doesn't want Russia's sphere of influence precisely because of centuries of Russian occupation and atrocities
in there especially after WW2, brutal and bloody invasion of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Cuban Crisis, Afghanistan, Chechnya
etc. Now you have infiltration by Russia of the American electoral process and political system and some conservatives still can't
connect the dots and see what is going on. I wonder why the western conservatives and US in particular are such great supporters
of Russia. If Russia should be allowed to keep her sphere of influence after the Cold War then what was the reason to fight the
Cold War in the first place. Wouldn't it be easier to surrender to Russia right after WW2.
One other observation about Russia that should be made but isn't is that the Russia-phobes can't point to an actual motive for
Russian military aggression. There is no "Putin Plan" for conquest and domination by Russia like in Das Kapital or Hitler's
Mein Kampf . What strategic value would Russia see from overrunning Poland and then having to perpetually suppress 35
million resistors? Or retaking the Baltic states that have only minority ethnic Russian populations?
Putin is a rationally calculating man. He has made his strategic objectives well known. They are economic. He sees Russia
as the great linchpin of the pan-Eurasian One Belt/One Road (OB/OR) initiative proposed by China as well as the AIIB. In that
construct, Europe and East Asia are Russia's customers and bilateral trading partners. Military conquest would wreck that vision
and Putin knows it.
In the gangster movies, a mob boss often says that he hates bloodshed because it's bad for business. That's Putin. He's
been remarkably restrained when egged on by Big Mouth Nikki Haley, Mad Dog Mattis or that other Pentagon nutcase Phillip Breedlove
(former Supreme Commander of NATO) who have gone out of their way to demonize Russia. Unfortunately, with those Pentagon hacks
whispering in Trump's ear, too much war-mongering is never enough.
U.S. foreign policy is an unmitigated disaster. The War Machine Hammer wrecks everything that it touches while sending
the befuddled taxpayers the bill.
"And, Mr. Carpenter, when you have time off from your job as Russian apologist, learn the meaning of "verbal." It's not a synonym
for "oral."
I imagine you thought you were being funny; and you were, just not in the way you foresaw. In fact, verbal is a synonym for
oral; to wit, "spoken rather than written; oral. "a verbal agreement". Synonyms: oral, spoken, stated, said, verbalized, expressed."
Of course anyone who attempts to portray the United States as duplicitous and sneaky (those are synonyms!)is immediately branded
a "Russian apologist". As if there are certain countries which automatically have no rights, and can be assumed to be lying every
time they speak. Except they're not, and the verbal agreement that NATO would not advance further east in exchange for Russian
cooperation has been acknowledged by western principals who were present.
As SteveM implies, NATO's reason for being evaporated with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and was dead as a dodo with
the breakup of the Soviet Union. Everything since has been a rationalization for keeping it going, including regular demonizations
of imaginary enemies until they become real enemies. You can't just 'join NATO' because it's the in-crowd, you know. No, there
are actually criteria, one of which is the premise that your acceptance materially enhances the security of the alliance. Pretty
comical imagining Montenegro in that context, isn't it?
When you meet individual Americans, they are frequently so nice and level-headed that you are perplexed trying to imagine
where their leaders come from. And while we're on that subject, America does not actually have a foreign policy, as such. Its
foreign policy is to bend every other living soul on the planet to the service of America.
"... Kovalik's historical excursion takes in the Soviet Union. Clearly, many of the U. S. military interventions described in this valuable book wouldn't have occurred if the Soviet Union still existed. Beyond that, Kovalik says, "the Soviet Union, did wield sizable political and ideological influence in the world for some time, due to the appeal of its socialist message as well as its critical role in winning [World War] II." ..."
"... Ultimately, Kovalik sides with Martin Luther King, who remarked that, 'The US is on the wrong side of the world-wide revolution' – and with Daniel Ellsberg's clarification: 'The US is not on the wrong side; it is the wrong side.'" ..."
Review " A powerful contradiction to the present US narrative of the world . . .
As shown here, fake news is thriving in Washington, DC."-- Oliver Stone , Academy Award winning
director and screenwriter
" The Plot to Scapegoat Russia is a beautifully written, uncommonly coherent,
and very compelling treatise on the issues facing America today... a troubling indictment of
where we've been and where we're headed. Moreover, this book is profoundly important , and
a timely retrospective review of American foreign policy misadventures since the advent of the Cold
War." -- Phillip F. Nelson , author of LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination and
LBJ: From Mastermind to "The Colossus"
" The Plot to Scapegoat Russia underscores how the CIA's infiltration and shaping
of the media, which began in the 1950s, successfully continues today. A very worthwhile account
for anyone who wants to understand how 'reality' is manufactured, while 'real truth' is murdered
and buried." -- Peter Janney , author of Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John
F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace
"At a time when the U.S. military budget is again soaring to enrich the oligarchs, this timely
and thought-provoking book turns Orwellian 'double-think' on its head in a cogent analysis of
what's really behind all the saber-rattling against Russia. In a scholarly but also deeply personal
and fluidly written work , Dan Kovalik pulls no punches in dissecting the history of how America
has justified its own imperialistic aims through the Cold War era and right up to the current anti-Putin
hysteria." -- Dick Russell , New York Times bestselling author of Horsemen of the
Apocalypse: The Men Who Are Destroying Life on Earth and What It Means to Our Children
" The Plot to Scapegoat Russia confronts the timeliest of subjects, the effort to
resuscitate the Cold War by blaming Russian president Vladimir Putin for interfering in the 2016
presidential campaign on behalf of Donald Trump, an effort pursued by CIA and the Democratic Party
working in tandem. Kovalik establishes... that not a scintilla of evidence has emerged to grant credibility
to this self-serving fantasy... [and he] deftly eviscerates the mainstream press . Reading
[this book] will be salutary, illuminating and more than instructive ." -- Joan Mellen
, author of Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber Baron Culture
of Texas
Beating up on Russia; history tells why
By William T. Whitney Jr. .
Lawyer and human rights activist Dan Kovalik has written a valuable book. He looked at a recent
U. S. political development in terms of history and then skewered it. His new book, "The Plot
to Scapegoat Russia," looks at mounting assaults against Russia that increased during the Obama
administration and that spokespersons for the Democratic Party, among others, are promoting.
The CIA, he claims, without going into specifics, is engaged in anti-Russian activities. For
Kovalik, "the CIA is a nefarious, criminal organization which often misleads the American public
and government into wars and misadventures."
Kovalik devotes much of his book to what he regards as precedents for the current dark turn
in U.S. – Russian relations. Toward that end, he surveys the history of U.S. foreign interventions
since World War II. He confirms that the United States government is indeed habituated to aggressive
adventurism abroad. That's something many readers already know, but Kovalik contributes significantly
by establishing that U.S. hostility against Russia ranks as a chapter in that long story.
But what's the motivation for military assaults and destabilizing projects? And, generally,
why all the wars? The author's historical survey provides answers. He finds that the scenarios
he describes are connected. Treating them as a whole, he gives them weight and thus provides an
intellectual weapon for the anti-imperialist cause. Kovalik, putting history to work, moves from
the issue of U.S.-Russian antagonism to the more over-arching problem of threats to human survival.
That's his major contribution.
His highly-recommended book offers facts and analyses so encompassing as to belie its small
size. The writing is clear, evocative, and eminently readable; his narrative is that of a story
– teller. Along the way, as a side benefit, Kovalik recalls the causes and outrage that fired
up activists who were his contemporaries.
He testifies to a new Cold War. Doing so, he argues that the anti-communist rational for the
earlier Cold War was a cover for something else, a pretext. In his words: "the Cold War, at least
from the vantage point of the US, had little to do with fighting 'Communism,' and more to do with
making the world safe for corporate plunder." Once more Russia is an enemy of the United States,
but now it's a capitalist country.
That's mysterious; explanation is in order. Readers, however, may be hungry to know about the
"plot" advertised in the book's title. We recommend patience. History and its recurring patterns
come first for this author. They enable him to account for U. S. – Russian relations that are
contradictory and, most importantly, for the U.S. propensity for war-making. After that he tells
about a plot.
Kovalik describes how, very early, reports of CIA machinations from former agents of the spy
organization expanded his political awareness, as did a trip to Nicaragua. There he gained first-hand
knowledge of CIA atrocities, of deaths and destruction at the hands of the Contras, anti- Sandinista
paramilitaries backed by the CIA His book goes on fully and dramatically to describe murders
and chaos orchestrated by the United States and/or the CIA in El Salvador, Colombia, and in the
South America of Operation Condor. Kovalic discusses the U.S. war in Vietnam, occupation and war
in Korea, nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, nuclear testing and dying in the Marshall Islands, and
the CIA's recruitment of the anti-Soviet Mujahedeen in Afghan¬istan. He recounts U. S. - instigated
coups in Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; and Chile, 1973.
These projects were about keeping "the world safe from the threat of Soviet totalitarianism"
– in other words, anti-communism. But then the USSR disappeared, and the search was on for a new
pretext. The Clinton administration evoked "humanitarian intervention," and continued the intrusions:
in Ruanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo (on behalf of "US mining interests"), Yugoslavia,
and Libya.
In Kovalik's telling, the U. S. government eventually settled upon the notion of "American
exceptionalism," that is to say, "the belief that the US is a uniquely benign actor in the world,
spreading peace and democracy." Thus armed, the U. S. military exported terror to Afghanistan,
Iraq, Somalia, Yemen (via its Saudi Arabian proxy), and Honduras, through a U. S. facilitated
military coup. The book catalogues other episodes, other places. Along the way on his excursion,
Kovalik contrasts U. S. pretensions and brutal deeds with the relatively benign nature of alleged
Russian outrages.
Good relations with Russia, he says, would be "simply bad for business, in particular the business
of war which so profoundly undergirds the US economy As of 2015, the US had at least 800 military
bases in over 70 nations, while Britain, France and Russia had only 30 military bases combined."
And, "under Obama alone, the US had Special Forces deployed in about 138 countries." Further,
"The US's outsized military exists not only to ensure the US's quite unjust share of the world's
riches, but also to ensure that those riches are not shared with the poor huddled masses in this
country."
Kovalik highlights the disaster that overwhelmed Russia as a fledgling capitalist nation: life
expectancy plummeted, the poverty rate was 75 percent, and investments fell by 80 percent. National
pride was in the cellar, the more so after the United States backed away from Secretary of State
Baker's 1991 promise that NATO would never move east, after the United States attacked Russia's
ally Serbia, and after the United States, rejecting Russian priorities, attacked Iraq in 2003
and Libya in 2011.
The author rebuts U. S. claims that Russian democracy has failed and that Putin over-reached
in Ukraine. He praises Putin's attempts to cooperate with the United States in Syria. The United
States has abused peoples the world over, he insists, and suffers from a "severe democracy deficit."
By the time he is discussing current U. S. – Russian relations, readers have been primed never
to expect U.S. imperialism to give Russia a break. The author's instructional course has taken
effect, or should have done so. If readers aren't aware of what the U. S. government has been
up to, the author is not to blame.
Kovalik condemns the Obama administration and particularly Secretary of State Hilary Clinton
for intensifying the U. S. campaign against Russia. He extends his criticism to the Democratic
Party and the media. The theme of anti – Russian scheming by the CIA comes up briefly in the book
in connection with hacking attributed to Russia and with WikiLeaks revelations about the Democratic
Party. Nothing is said about possible interaction between personnel of the Trump campaign and
Russian officials.
Kovalik's historical excursion takes in the Soviet Union. Clearly, many of the U. S. military
interventions described in this valuable book wouldn't have occurred if the Soviet Union still
existed. Beyond that, Kovalik says, "the Soviet Union, did wield sizable political and ideological
influence in the world for some time, due to the appeal of its socialist message as well as its
critical role in winning [World War] II."
Kovalik acknowledges "periods of great repression." He adds, however, that "the Russian Revolution
and the USSR delivered on many of their promises, and against great odds. . In any case, the goals
of the Russian Revolution-equality, worker control of the economy, universal health care and social
security- were laudable ones." And, "One of the reasons that the West continues to dance on the
grave of the Soviet Union, and to emphasize the worst parts of that society and downplay its achievements,
is to make sure that, as the world-wide economy worsens, and as the suffering of work¬ing people
around the world deepens, they don't get any notions in their head to organize some new socialist
revolution with such ideals."
Ultimately, Kovalik sides with Martin Luther King, who remarked that, 'The US is on the wrong
side of the world-wide revolution' – and with Daniel Ellsberg's clarification: 'The US is not
on the wrong side; it is the wrong side.'"
The most important non-fiction work thus far of 2017 is upon us. Finally the book has arrived
that cuts through all the hype, deceit, misinformation and disconcerting groupthink.
Kovalik structures TPTSR by starting at the most logical place -- the history of unilateral
Washington aggression across the globe, from the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran through the Washington
intell agencies' orchestrated coups and proxy wars in Latin America.
This exposition of historical Washington empire building provides a solid foundation when he
ultimately addresses why the predatory military-industrial-media-complex is incessantly fomenting
this dangerous contemporary Russophobic campaign. The book nails it by presenting in a crystal
clear manner the two exact reasons why the demonization of Moscow never seems to subside: 1.)
The corporate and Washington military empire builders are deeply threatened by the potential loss
of certain markets and a sovereign Russia that desires a say over the diplomatic and military
maneuvers on its borders, especially its Western region. 2.) Most importantly, the MIC/national-security
state absolutely MUST HAVE a villain (real or imagined, it doesn't matter) in order to justify
the trillion dollar budget and careerism that seeps into every pore of the U.S. politico-economic
system. This Pentagon system of pseudo economic Keynesianism could potentially lead to nuclear
war. The giant house of cards could doom us all.
This book is an amazing contribution. A veritable primer on U.S. foreign policy, this book
is part memoir, part history, and part analysis of current events. Kovalik makes a compelling
case that U.S. policies--not Russia--are the biggest danger to world peace and human rights. The
book traces Kovalik's own awakening and transformation from his conservative religious-minded
youth to one of our most trenchant critics of U.S. foreign policy writing today. And he does it
in his own inimitable, witty, readable, and humane style.
Russiagate witch hunt is destroying CIA franchise in Facebook and Twitter, which were used
by many Russians and Eastern Europeans in general.
One telling sign of the national security state is "demonizing enemies of the state" including
using neo-McCarthyism methods, typically for Russiagate.
In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence
for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists largely
gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established fact, but since
the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence services, it
probably is not that interesting any more).
Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian people,
as the new Undermensch. If these people and US MSM recognized the reality that they are now
a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States
Notable quotes:
"... Buried in the story's "jump" is the acknowledgement that Milner's "companies sold those holdings several years ago." But such is the anti-Russia madness gripping the Establishment of Washington and New York that any contact with any Russian constitutes a scandal worthy of front-page coverage. On Monday, The Washington Post published a page-one article entitled, "9 in Trump's orbit had contacts with Russians." ..."
"... The anti-Russian madness has reached such extremes that even when you say something that's obviously true – but that RT, the Russian television network, also reported – you are attacked for spreading "Russian propaganda." ..."
"... We saw that when former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile disclosed in her new book that she considered the possibility of replacing Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket after Clinton's public fainting spell and worries about her health. ..."
"... In other words, the go-to excuse for everything these days is to blame the Russians and smear anyone who says anything – no matter how true – if it also was reported on RT. ..."
"... The CIA has an entire bureaucracy dedicated to propaganda and disinformation, with some of those efforts farmed out to newer entities such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). NATO has a special command in Latvia that undertakes "strategic communications." ..."
"... Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world to harass people who criticize the Zionist project. Indeed, since the 1980s, Israel has pioneered many of the tactics of computer spying and sabotage that were adopted and expanded by America's National Security Agency, explaining why the Obama administration teamed up with Israel in a scheme to plant malicious code into Iranian centrifuges to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. ..."
"... And, if you're really concerned about foreign interference in U.S. elections and policies, there's the remarkable influence of Israel and its perceived ability to effect the defeat of almost any politician who deviates from what the Israeli government wants, going back at least to the 1980s when Sen. Chuck Percy and Rep. Paul Findley were among the political casualties after pursuing contacts with the Palestinians. ..."
"... The answer seems to be the widespread hatred for President Trump combined with vested interests in favor of whipping up the New Cold War. That is a goal valued by both the Military-Industrial Complex, which sees trillions of dollars in strategic weapons systems in the future, and the neoconservatives, who view Russia as a threat to their "regime change" agendas for Syria and Iran. ..."
"... After all, if Russia and its independent-minded President Putin can be beaten back and beaten down, then a big obstacle to the neocon/Israeli goal of expanding the Mideast wars will be removed. ..."
"... Right now, the neocons are openly lusting for a "regime change" in Moscow despite the obvious risks that such turmoil in a nuclear-armed country might create, including the possibility that Putin would be succeeded not by some compliant Western client like the late Boris Yeltsin but by an extreme nationalist who might consider launching a nuclear strike to protect the honor of Mother Russia. ..."
"... The likely outcome from the anti-Russian show trials on Capitol Hill is that technology giants will bow to the bipartisan demand for new algorithms and other methods for stigmatizing, marginalizing and eliminating information that challenges the mainstream storylines in the cause of fighting "Russian propaganda." ..."
"... America's Stolen Narrative, ..."
"... witch hunt by congressional Democrats, working with the intelligence agencies and leading media outlets, to legitimize censorship and attack free speech on the Internet. ..."
"... The aim of this campaign is to claim that social conflict within the United States arises not from the scale of social inequality in America, greater than in any other country in the developed world, but rather from the actions of "outside agitators" working in the service of the Kremlin. ..."
"... The McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s sought to suppress left-wing thought and label all forms of dissent as illegitimate and treasonous. Those who led them worked to purge left-wing opinion from Hollywood, the trade unions and the universities. ..."
"... Likewise, the new McCarthyism is aimed at creating a political climate in which left-wing organizations and figures are demonized as agents of the Kremlin who are essentially engaged in treasonous activity deserving of criminal prosecution. ..."
"... Danny there was a time not to long ago, I would have said of how we are 'moving towards' to us becoming a police state, well instead replace that prediction of 'moving towards' to the stark reality to be described as 'that now we are', and there you will have it that we have finally arrived to becoming a full blown 'police state'. ..."
"... Thanks to Mr. Parry for this very fair and complete review of the latest attempts to generate a fake foreign enemy. The tyrant over a democracy must generate fake foreign enemies to pose falsely as a protector, so as to demand domestic power and accuse his opponents of disloyalty, as Aristotle and Plato warned thousands of years ago. ..."
"... The insanity of the entire "Russian hacking" narrative has been revealed over and over, including this past weekend when +/-100 Clinton loyalists published a screed on Medium saying Donna Brazile had been taken in by Russian propaganda. ..."
"... I have come to expect just about anything when it comes to Russia-Gate, but I was taken aback by the Hillary bots' accusation that videos of Hillary stumbling and others showing her apparently having a fit of some kind and also needing to be helped up the steps to someone's house -- which were taken by Americans and shown by Americans and seen by millions of shocked Americans -- were driven by Russia-Gate. ..."
"... Now, since the extremist xenophobic idea that contact with *any* Russians is a scandal has taken hold in the United States, people are probably not too eager to mention these contacts in these atmosphere of extreme xenophobic anti-Russian hatred in today's United States. Furthermore, people who have contact with large numbers of people probably really have difficulties remembering and listing these all. ..."
"... Their contacts are with Russian business and maybe the Russian mob, not the Russian state. There is really not question that Trump and his cronies are crooks, but they are crooks in the US and in all the other countries where they do business, not just Russia. I'm sure Mueller will be able to tie Trump directly to some of the sleeze. But there is no evidence that the Russian government is involved in any of it. "Russia-gate" implies Russian government involvement, not just random Russians. There is no evidence of that and moreover the logic is against. ..."
"... Mr. Cash . I think George Papadopoulis, Trump's young Aide, was an inside mole for neocon pro-Israel interests. Those interests needed to knock the unreliable President Trump out of the way to get the "system" back where it belonged – in their pocket. Papadopoulis, on his own, was rummaging around making Trump/Russian connections that finally ended with the the William (Richard?) Browder (well-known Washington DC neocon)/Natalia Veselnitskaya/Donald Trump, Jr. fiasco. The Trumps knew nothing of those negotiations, and young Trump left when he realized Natalia was only interested in Americans being allowed to adopt Russian children again and had no dirt on Hillary. ..."
"... It was never my impression that Cold War liberals opposed McCarthy or the anti-Communist witch hunt. Where they didn't gleefully join in, they watched quietly from the sidelines while the American left was eviscerated, jailed, driven from public life. Then the liberals stepped in when it was clear things were going a little too far and just as the steam had run out of McCarthy's slander machine. ..."
"... At that point figures like Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy found the path clear for their brand of political stagecraft. They were imperialists to a man, something they proved abundantly when given the chance. Liberals supplanted the left in U.S. life- in the unions, the teaching profession, publishing and every other field where criticism of the Cold War and the enduring prevalence of worker solidarity across international lines threatened the new order. ..."
"... The book concludes that by equating dissent with disloyalty, promoting guilt by association, and personally commanding loyalty programs, ""Truman and his advisors employed all the political and programmatic techniques that in later years were to become associated with the broad phenomenon of McCarthyism."" ..."
"... Formed by Google in June 2015 with Eliot Higgins of the Atlantic Council's Bellingcat as a founding member, the "First Draft" coalition includes all the usual mainstream media "partners" in "regime change" war propaganda: the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, the UK Guardian and Telegraph, BBC News, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab and Kiev-based Stopfake. ..."
"... In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists largely gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established fact, but since the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence services, it probably is not that interesting any more) ..."
"... Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian people, anyone who is "Russian linked" by ever having logged in to social networks from Russia or using Cyrillic letters. If these people and their media at least recognized the reality that they are now a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States ..."
"... The interview of Roger Waters on RT is one of the best I have seen in a long while. I wish some other artists get the courage to raise their voices. The link to the Roger Waters interview is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7jcvfbLoIA This Roger Waters interview is worth watching. ..."
"... It would seem that everyone on the US telivision , newspaper and internet news has mastered the art of hand over mouth , gasp and looking horrified every time Russia is mentioned. It looks to me that the US is in the middle of another of it´s mid life crises. Panic reigns supreme every where. If it was not so sad it would be funny. i was born in the 1940s and remember the McCarthy witch hunts and the daily shower of people jumping out of windows as a result of it. ..."
"... In The Fifties (1993), American journalist and historian David Halberstam addressed the noxious effect of McCarthyism: "McCarthy's carnival like four year spree of accusation charges, and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness and boozing ended his career in shame." (page 53) ..."
"... Halberstam specifically discussed how readily the so-called "free" press acquiesced to McCarthy's masquerading: "The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better. They were delighted to be a part of his traveling road show, chronicling each charge and then moving on to the next town, instead of bothering to stay behind and follow up. They had little interest in reporting how careless McCarthy was or how little it all meant to him." (page 55) ..."
"... Why have they not investigated James Comey? Why has the MSM instead created a Russian Boogeyman? Why was he invited to testify about the Russian connection but never cross examined about his own influence? Why is the clearest reason for election meddling by James Comey not even spoken of by the MSM? This is because the MSM does not want to cover events as they happened but wants to recreate a alternate reality suitable to themselves which serves their interests and convinces us that the MSM has no part at all in downplaying the involvement of themselves in the election but wants to create a foreign enemy to blame. ..."
Special Report: Many American liberals who once denounced McCarthyism as evil are now learning
to love the ugly tactic when it can be used to advance the Russia-gate "scandal" and silence dissent,
reports Robert Parry.
The New York Times has finally detected some modern-day McCarthyism, but not in the anti-Russia
hysteria that the newspaper has fueled for several years amid the smearing of American skeptics as
"useful idiots" and the like. No, the Times editors
are accusing a Long Island Republican of McCarthyism for linking his Democratic rival to "New
York City special interest groups." As the Times laments, "It's the old guilt by association."
Yet, the Times sees no McCarthyism in the frenzy of Russia-bashing and guilt by association for
any American who can be linked even indirectly to any Russian who might have some ill-defined links
to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On Monday, in the same edition that expressed editorial outrage over that Long Island political
ad's McCarthyism, the Times ran two front-page articles under the headline: "A Complex Paper Trail:
Blurring Kremlin's Ties to Key U.S. Businesses."
Buried in the story's "jump" is the acknowledgement that Milner's "companies sold those holdings
several years ago." But such is the anti-Russia madness gripping the Establishment of Washington
and New York that any contact with any Russian constitutes a scandal worthy of front-page coverage.
On Monday, The Washington Post published
a page-one article entitled, "9 in Trump's orbit had contacts with Russians."
The anti-Russian madness has reached such extremes that even when you say something that's obviously
true – but that RT, the Russian television network, also reported – you are attacked for spreading
"Russian propaganda."
We saw that when former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile disclosed in her
new book that she considered the possibility of replacing Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket
after Clinton's public fainting spell and worries about her health.
Though there was a video of Clinton's collapse on Sept. 11, 2016, followed by her departure from
the campaign trail to fight pneumonia – not to mention her earlier scare with blood clots – the
response from a group of 100 Clinton supporters was to question Brazile's patriotism: "It is
particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda,
spread by both the Russians and our opponents about our candidate's health."
In other words, the go-to excuse for everything these days is to blame the Russians and smear
anyone who says anything – no matter how true – if it also was reported on RT.
Pressing the Tech Companies
Just as Sen. Joe McCarthy liked to haul suspected "communists" and "fellow-travelers" before his
committee in the 1950s, the New McCarthyism has its own witch-hunt hearings, such as last week's
Senate grilling of executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google for supposedly allowing Russians
to have input into the Internet's social networks. Executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google hauled
before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism on Oct. 31, 2017.Trying to appease Congress and fend off threats of government regulation, the rich tech companies
displayed their eagerness to eradicate any Russian taint.
Twitter's general counsel Sean J. Edgett
told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism that Twitter adopted an "expansive
approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account."
Edgett said the criteria included "whether the account was created in Russia, whether the user
registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email address, whether the user's
display name contains Cyrillic characters, whether the user frequently Tweets in Russian, and whether
the user has logged in from any Russian IP address, even a single time. We considered an account
to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria."
The trouble with Twitter's methodology was that none of those criteria would connect an account
to the Russian government, let alone Russian intelligence or some Kremlin-controlled "troll farm."
But the criteria could capture individual Russians with no link to the Kremlin as well as people
who weren't Russian at all, including, say, American or European visitors to Russia who logged onto
Twitter through a Moscow hotel.
Also left unsaid is that Russians are not the only national group that uses the Cyrillic alphabet.
It is considered a standard script for writing in Belarus, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbo-Croatia and
Ukraine. So, for instance, a Ukrainian using the Cyrillic alphabet could end up falling into the
category of "Russian-linked" even if he or she hated Putin.
Twitter's attorney also said the company conducted a separate analysis from information provided
by unidentified "third party sources" who pointed toward accounts supposedly controlled by the St.
Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), totaling 2,752 accounts. The IRA is typically described
in the U.S. press as a "troll farm" which employs tech-savvy employees who combat news and opinions
that are hostile to Russia and the Russian government. But exactly how those specific accounts were
traced back to this organization was not made clear.
And, to put that number in some perspective, Twitter claims 330 million active monthly users,
which makes the 2,752 accounts less than 0.001 percent of the total.
The Trouble with 'Trolling'
While the Russia-gate investigation has sought to portray the IRA effort as exotic and somehow
unique to Russia, the strategy is followed by any number of governments, political movements and
corporations – sometimes using enthusiastic volunteers but often employing professionals skilled
at challenging critical information or at least muddying the waters.
Those of us who operate on the Internet are familiar with harassment from "trolls" who may use
access to "comment" sections to inject propaganda and disinformation to sow confusion, to cause disruption,
or to discredit the site by promoting ugly opinions and nutty conspiracy theories.
As annoying as this "trolling" is, it's just a modern version of more traditional strategies used
by powerful entities for generations – hiring public-relations specialists, lobbyists, lawyers and
supposedly impartial "activists" to burnish images, fend off negative news and intimidate nosy investigators.
In this competition, modern Russia is both a late-comer and a piker.
The U.S. government fields legions of publicists, propagandists, paid journalists,
psy-ops specialists , contractors and non-governmental organizations to promote Washington's
positions and undermine rivals through information warfare.
The CIA has an entire bureaucracy dedicated to propaganda and disinformation, with some of
those
efforts farmed out to newer entities such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or paid
for by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). NATO has a special command in Latvia
that undertakes
"strategic communications."
Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world
to harass people who criticize the Zionist project. Indeed, since the 1980s, Israel has pioneered
many of the tactics of computer spying and sabotage that were adopted and expanded by America's National
Security Agency, explaining why the Obama administration teamed up with Israel in a scheme to plant
malicious code into Iranian centrifuges to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.
It's also ironic that the U.S. government touted social media as a great benefit in advancing
so-called "color revolutions" aimed at "regime change" in troublesome countries. For instance, when
the "green revolution" was underway in Iran in 2009 after the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
the Obama administration asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance so the street protesters
could continue using the platform to organize against Ahmadinejad and to distribute their side of
the story to the outside world.
During the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, Facebook, Twitter and Skype won praise as a means of
organizing mass demonstrations to destabilize governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. Back then,
the U.S. government denounced any attempts to throttle these social media platforms and the free
flow of information that they permitted as proof of dictatorship.
Social media also was a favorite of the U.S. government in Ukraine in 2013-14 when the Maidan
protests exploited these platforms to help destabilize and ultimately overthrow the elected government
of Ukraine, the key event that launched the New Cold War with Russia.
Swinging the Social Media Club
The truth is that, in those instances, the U.S. governments and its agencies were eagerly exploiting
the platforms to advance Washington's geopolitical agenda by disseminating American propaganda and
deploying U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations, which
taught
activists how to use social media to advance "regime change" scenarios.
A White Helmets volunteer pointing to the aftermath of a military attack.
While these uprisings were sold to Western audiences as genuine outpourings of public anger –
and there surely was some of that – the protests also benefited from U.S. funding and expertise.
In particular, NED and USAID provided money, equipment and training for anti-government operatives
challenging regimes in U.S. disfavor.
One of the most successful of these propaganda operations occurred in Syria where anti-government
rebels operating in areas controlled by Al Qaeda and its fellow Islamic militants used social media
to get their messaging to Western mainstream journalists who couldn't enter those sectors without
fear of beheading.
Since the rebels' goal of overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad meshed with the objectives of
the U.S. government and its allies in Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Western journalists
uncritically accepted the words and images provided by Al Qaeda's collaborators.
The success of this propaganda was so extraordinary that the White Helmets, a "civil defense"
group that worked in Al Qaeda territory, became the go-to source for dramatic video and even was
awarded the short-documentary
Oscar for an info-mercial produced for Netflix – despite evidence that the White Helmets were
staging some of the scenes for propaganda purposes.
Indeed, one argument for believing that Putin and the Kremlin might have "meddled" in last year's
U.S. election is that they could have felt it was time to give the United States a taste of its own
medicine.
After all, the United States intervened in the 1996 Russian election to ensure the continued rule
of the corrupt and pliable Boris Yeltsin. And there were the U.S.-backed street protests in Moscow
against the 2011 and 2012 elections in which Putin strengthened his political mandate. Those
protests earned the "color" designation the "snow revolution."
However, whatever Russia may or may not have done before last year's U.S. election, the Russia-gate
investigations have always sought to exaggerate the impact of that alleged "meddling" and molded
the narrative to whatever weak evidence was available.
The original storyline was that Putin authorized the "hacking" of Democratic emails as part of
a "disinformation" operation to undermine Hillary Clinton's candidacy and to help elect Donald Trump
– although
no hard evidence has been presented to establish that Putin gave such an order or that Russia
"hacked" the emails. WikiLeaks has repeatedly denied getting the emails from Russia, which also denies
any meddling.
Further, the emails were not "disinformation"; they were both real and, in many cases, newsworthy.
The DNC emails provided evidence that the DNC unethically tilted the playing field in favor of Clinton
and against Sen. Bernie Sanders, a point that Brazile also discovered in reviewing staffing and financing
relationships that Clinton had with the DNC under the prior chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The purloined emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta revealed the contents of Clinton's
paid speeches to Wall Street (information that she was trying to hide from voters) and pay-to-play
features of the Clinton Foundation.
A Manchurian Candidate?
Still, the original narrative was that Putin wanted his Manchurian Candidate (Trump) in the White
House and took the extraordinary risk of infuriating the odds-on favorite (Clinton) by releasing
the emails even though they appeared unlikely to prevent Clinton's victory. So, there was always
that logical gap in the Russia-gate theory.
Since then, however, the U.S. mainstream narrative has shifted, in part, because the evidence
of Russian election "meddling" was so shaky. Under intense congressional pressure to find something,
Facebook reported
$100,000 in allegedly "Russian-linked" ads purchased in 2015-17, but noted that only 44 percent
were bought before the election. So, not only was the "Russian-linked" pebble tiny – compared to
Facebook's annual revenue of $27 billion – but more than half of the pebble was tossed into this
very large lake after Clinton had already lost.
So, the storyline was transformed into some vague Russian scheme to exacerbate social tensions
in the United States by taking different sides of hot-button issues, such as police brutality against
blacks. The New York Times reported that one of these "Russian-linked" pages
featured photos of cute puppies , which the Times speculated must have had some evil purpose
although it was hard to fathom. (Oh, those devious Russians!).
The estimate of how many Americans may have seen one of these "Russian-linked" ads also keeps
growing, now up to as many as 126 million or about one-third of the U.S. population. Of course, the
way the Internet works – with any item possibly going viral – you might as well say the ads could
have reached billions of people.
Whenever I write an article or send out a Tweet, I too could be reaching 126 million or even billions
of people, but the reality is that I'd be lucky if the number were in the thousands. But amid the
Russia-gate frenzy, no exaggeration is too outlandish or too extreme.
Another odd element of Russia-gate is that the intensity of this investigation is disproportionate
to the lack of interest shown toward far better documented cases of actual foreign-government interference
in American elections and policymaking.
For instance, the major U.S. media long ignored the extremely well-documented case of Richard
Nixon colluding with South Vietnamese officials to sabotage President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam
War peace talks to gain an advantage for Nixon in the 1968 election. That important chapter of history
only gained
The
New York Times' seal of approval earlier this year after the Times had dismissed the earlier
volumes of evidence as "rumors."
In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan's team – especially his campaign director William Casey in
collaboration with Israel and Iran – appeared to have gone behind President Jimmy Carter's back
to undercut Carter's negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran and essentially
doom Carter's reelection hopes.
There were a couple of dozen witnesses to that scheme who spoke with me and other investigative
journalists – as well as documentary evidence showing that President Reagan did authorize secret
arms shipments to Iran via Israel shortly after the hostages were freed during Reagan's inauguration
on Jan. 20, 1981.
However, since Vice President (later President) George H.W. Bush, who was implicated in the scheme,
was well-liked on both sides of the aisle and because Reagan had become a Republican icon, the October
Surprise case of 1980 was pooh-poohed by the major media and dismissed by a congressional investigation
in the early 1990s. Despite the extraordinary number of witnesses and supporting documents, Wikipedia
listed the scandal as a "conspiracy theory."
Israeli Influence
And, if you're really concerned about foreign interference in U.S. elections and policies,
there's the remarkable influence of Israel and its perceived ability to effect the defeat of almost
any politician who deviates from what the Israeli government wants, going back at least to the 1980s
when
Sen.
Chuck Percy and Rep. Paul Findley were among the political casualties after pursuing contacts
with the Palestinians.
If anyone doubts how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to pull the strings
of U.S. politicians, just watch one of his record-tying three addresses to joint sessions of Congress
and count how often
Republicans and Democrats jump to their feet in enthusiastic applause. (The only other foreign
leader to get the joint-session honor three times was Great Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill.)
So, what makes Russia-gate different from the other cases? Did Putin conspire with Trump to extend
a bloody war as Nixon did with the South Vietnamese leaders? Did Putin lengthen the captivity of
U.S. hostages to give Trump a political edge? Did Putin manipulate U.S. policy in the Middle East
to entice President George W. Bush to invade Iraq and set the region ablaze, as Israel's Netanyahu
did? Is Putin even now pushing for wider Mideast wars, as Netanyahu is?
Indeed, one point that's never addressed in any serious way is why is the U.S. so angry with Russia
while these other cases, in which U.S. interests were clearly damaged and American democracy compromised,
were treated largely as non-stories.
Why is Russia-gate a big deal while the other cases weren't? Why are opposite rules in play now
– with Democrats, many Republicans and the major news media flogging fragile "links," needling what
little evidence there is, and assuming the worst rather than insisting that only perfect evidence
and perfect witnesses be accepted as in the earlier cases?
The answer seems to be the widespread hatred for President Trump combined with vested interests
in favor of whipping up the New Cold War. That is a goal valued by both the Military-Industrial Complex,
which sees trillions of dollars in strategic weapons systems in the future, and the neoconservatives,
who view Russia as a threat to their "regime change" agendas for Syria and Iran.
After all, if Russia and its independent-minded President Putin can be beaten back and beaten
down, then a big obstacle to the neocon/Israeli goal of expanding the Mideast wars will be removed.
Right now, the neocons are openly lusting for a
"regime change" in Moscow despite the obvious risks that such turmoil in a nuclear-armed country
might create, including the possibility that Putin would be succeeded not by some compliant Western
client like the late Boris Yeltsin but by an extreme nationalist who might consider launching a nuclear
strike to protect the honor of Mother Russia.
The Democrats, the liberals and even many progressives justify their collusion with the neocons
by the need to remove Trump by any means necessary and "stop fascism." But their contempt for Trump
and their exaggeration of the "Hitler" threat that this incompetent buffoon supposedly poses have
blinded them to
the extraordinary risks attendant to their course of action and how they are playing into the
hands of the war-hungry neocons.
A Smokescreen for Repression
There also seems to be little or no concern that the Establishment is using Russia-gate as a smokescreen
for
clamping down on independent media sites on the Internet. Traditional supporters of civil liberties
have looked the other way as the rights of people associated with the Trump campaign have been trampled
and journalists who simply question the State Department's narratives on, say, Syria and Ukraine
are denounced as "Moscow stooges" and "useful idiots."
The likely outcome from the anti-Russian show trials on Capitol Hill is that technology giants
will bow to the bipartisan demand for new algorithms and other methods for stigmatizing, marginalizing
and eliminating information that challenges the mainstream storylines in the cause of fighting "Russian
propaganda."
The warning from powerful senators was crystal clear. "I don't think you get it," Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, D-California,
warned social media executives last week. "You bear this responsibility. You created these platforms,
and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it. Or we will."
As this authoritarian if not totalitarian future looms and as the dangers of nuclear annihilation
from an intentional or unintentional nuclear war with Russia grow, many people who should know better
are caught up in the Russia-gate frenzy.
I used to think that liberals and progressives opposed McCarthyism because they regarded it as
a grave threat to freedom of thought and to genuine democracy, but now it appears that they have
learned to love McCarthyism except, of course, when it rears its ugly head in some Long Island political
ad criticizing New York City.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative,
either in
print here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
Joe Tedesky , November 6, 2017 at 3:12 pm
I watched the C-Span 'Russian/2016 Election Investigation Hearings' in horror, as each congressperson
grilled the Hi-Tech executives in a way to suggest that our First Amendment Rights are now on
life support, and our Congress is ready to pull the plug at any moment. I thought, of how this
wasn't the America I was brought up to believe in. So as I have reached the age in life where
nothing should surprise me, I realize now how fragile our Rights are, in this warring nation that
calls itself America.
When it comes to Israel I have two names, Jonathan Pollard & the USS Liberty, and with that,
that is enough said.
Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:33 pm
This week's congressional hearings on "extremist content" on the Internet mark a new stage
in the McCarthyite witch hunt by congressional Democrats, working with the intelligence agencies
and leading media outlets, to legitimize censorship and attack free speech on the Internet.
One after another, congressmen and senators goaded representatives of Google, Twitter and Facebook
to admit that their platforms were used to sow "social divisions" and "extremist" political opinions.
The aim of this campaign is to claim that social conflict within the United States arises
not from the scale of social inequality in America, greater than in any other country in the developed
world, but rather from the actions of "outside agitators" working in the service of the Kremlin.
The hearings revolved around claims that Russia sought to "weaponize" the Internet by harnessing
social anger within the United States. "Russia," said Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, promoted
"discord in the US by inflaming passions on a range of divisive issues." It sought to "mobilize
real Americans to sign online petitions and join rallies and protests."
The McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s sought to suppress left-wing thought and label
all forms of dissent as illegitimate and treasonous. Those who led them worked to purge left-wing
opinion from Hollywood, the trade unions and the universities.
Likewise, the new McCarthyism is aimed at creating a political climate in which left-wing
organizations and figures are demonized as agents of the Kremlin who are essentially engaged in
treasonous activity deserving of criminal prosecution.
Watching this Orwellian tragedy play out in our American society, where our Congress is insisting
that disclaimers and restrictions be placed upon suspicious adbuys and editorial essays, is counterintuitive
to what we Americans were brought up to belief. Why, all my life teachers, and adults, would warn
us students of reading the news to not to believe everything we read as pure fact, but to research
a subject before coming to a conclusion toward your accepting an opinion to wit. And with these
warnings of avoiding us being suckered into a wrong belief, we were told that this was the price
we were required to pay for having a free press society. This freedom of speech was, and has always
been the bedrock of our hopes and wishes for our belief in the American Dream.
Danny there was a time not to long ago, I would have said of how we are 'moving towards'
to us becoming a police state, well instead replace that prediction of 'moving towards' to the
stark reality to be described as 'that now we are', and there you will have it that we have finally
arrived to becoming a full blown 'police state'. Little by little, and especially since 911
one by one our civil liberties were taken away. Here again our freedom of speech is being destroyed,
and with this America is now where Germany had been in the mid-thirties. America's own guilty
conscience is rapidly doing some physiological projections onto their imaginary villain Russia.
All I keep hearing is my dear sweet mother lecturing me on how one lie always leads to another
lie until the truth will finally jump up and bite you in the ass, and think to myself of how wise
my mother had been with her young girl Southside philosophy. May you Rest In Peace Mum.
Martin , November 7, 2017 at 3:21 pm
Yankees chicks are coming home to roost. So many peoples rights and lives had to be extinguished
for Americans to have the illusion of pursuing their happiness, well, what goes around comes around.
Gregory Herr , November 7, 2017 at 8:39 pm
Gee wiz Adam Schiff you make it sound as if signing petitions and rallying to causes and civil
protests are unamerican or something. And Russians on the internet are harnessing social anger!
Pathetic. These jerks who would have us believe they are interested in "saving" democracy or stopping
fascism have sure got it backward.
Geoffrey de Galles , November 8, 2017 at 12:33 pm
Joe, Allow me please, respectfully, to add Mordecai Vanunu -- Israel's own Daniel Ellsberg
-- to your two names.
Erik G , November 6, 2017 at 3:55 pm
Thanks to Mr. Parry for this very fair and complete review of the latest attempts to generate
a fake foreign enemy. The tyrant over a democracy must generate fake foreign enemies to pose falsely
as a protector, so as to demand domestic power and accuse his opponents of disloyalty, as Aristotle
and Plato warned thousands of years ago.
It is especially significant that the zionists are the sole beneficiaries of this scam as well
as the primary sponsors of the DNC, hoping to attack Russia and Iran to support Israeli land thefts
in the Mideast. It is well established that zionists control US mass media, which never examine
the central issue of our times, the corruption of democracy by the zionist/MIC/WallSt influence
upon the US government and mass media. Russia-gate is in fact a coverup for Israel-gate.
Why did we ever believe that the democrat party was a defender of free speech? These bought
and paid for tools of the economic elites are only interested in serving their masters with slavish
devotion. Selfishness and immorality are their stock in trade; betraying the public their real
intention.
Cratylus , November 6, 2017 at 4:11 pm
Great essay.
But one disagreement. I may agree with Trump on very, very few things, among them getting rid
of the horrible TPP, one cornerstone of Hillary's pivot; meeting with Putin in Hamburg; the Lavrov-Tillerson
arranged cease-fire in SE Syria; the termination of the CIA's support for anti-Assad jihadis in
Syria; a second meeting with Putin at the ASEAN conference this week; and in general the idea
of "getting along with Russia" (a biggie) which Russia-gate is slowing to a crawl as designed
by the neocons.
But Trump as an "incompetent buffoon" is a stretch albeit de rigueur on the pages of the NYT,
the programs of NPR and in all "respectable" precincts. Trump won the presidency for god's sake
– something that eluded the 17 other GOP primary candidates, some of them considered very"smart"
and Bernie and Jill, and in the past, Ralph Nader and Ron Paul – and the supposedly "very smart"
Hillary for which we should be eternally grateful. "Incompetent" hardly seems accurate. The respectable
commentariat has continually underestimated Trump. We should heed Putin who marveled at Trump's
seemingly impossible victory.
Bill Cash , November 6, 2017 at 4:13 pm
How do you explain all the connections between Trump acolytes and Russia and their lying about
it. I think they've all lied about their contacts. Why would they do that?I lived through the
real McCarthyism and, so far, this isn't close to what happened then.
Bill , November 6, 2017 at 4:40 pm
Probably because they are corruptly involved. Thing is, the higher priority is to avoid another
decades-long cold war risking nuclear war. Do you remember how many close calls we had in the
last one?
I'm more suspicious of Trump than most here, but even I think we need some priorities. Far
more extensive corruption of a similar variety keeps occurring and no one cares, as Mr. Parry
points out here yet again.
As for McCarthyism, whatever the current severity, the result is unfolding as a new campaign
against dissenting voices on the internet. That's supremely not-okay with me.
Gregory Herr , November 7, 2017 at 8:46 pm
Right. Just because we don't yet have another fulll-fledged HUAC happening doesn't mean severe
perils aren't attached to this new McCarthyism. Censorship of dissent is supremely not-okay with
me as well.
That class of people lie as a matter of course; it's standard procedure. If you exacerbate
it by adding on the anti-Russia hysteria that was spewed out by the Democrats before the ink was
dry on the ballots, what possible reason would they have for being truthful?
The insanity of the entire "Russian hacking" narrative has been revealed over and over,
including this past weekend when +/-100 Clinton loyalists published a screed on Medium saying
Donna Brazile had been taken in by Russian propaganda.
Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 7:10 pm
I have come to expect just about anything when it comes to Russia-Gate, but I was taken
aback by the Hillary bots' accusation that videos of Hillary stumbling and others showing her
apparently having a fit of some kind and also needing to be helped up the steps to someone's house
-- which were taken by Americans and shown by Americans and seen by millions of shocked Americans
-- were driven by Russia-Gate.
Obviously, Brazile, like millions of voters, saw these films and made appropriate inferences:
that Hillary's basic health and stamina were a question mark. Of course, Hillary also offered
Americans nothing in her campaign rhetoric. She came across as the mother-in-law from hell.
Was it also a Russia-Gate initiative when Hillary hid from her supporters on election night
and let Podesta face the screaming sobbing supporters? Too much spiked vodka or something? Our
political stage in the USA is a madhouse.
Adrian Engler , November 6, 2017 at 6:20 pm
These people probably have "connections" with a relatively large number of people, and only
very small fraction of the people they have contact with are probably Russians. Now, since
the extremist xenophobic idea that contact with *any* Russians is a scandal has taken hold in
the United States, people are probably not too eager to mention these contacts in these atmosphere
of extreme xenophobic anti-Russian hatred in today's United States. Furthermore, people who have
contact with large numbers of people probably really have difficulties remembering and listing
these all.
Today's political atmosphere in the United States probably has a lot in common with the Soviet
Union. There, people got in trouble if they had contacts with people from Western, capitalist
countries – and if they were asked and did not mention these contacts in order to avoid problems,
they could get in trouble even more.
I think it is absolutely clear that no one who takes part in this hateful anti-Russian campaign
can pretend to be liberal or progressive. The kind of society these xenophobes who detest pluralism
and accuse everyone who has opinions outside the mainstream of being a foreign agent is absolutely
abhorrent, in my view.
Leslie F , November 6, 2017 at 6:40 pm
Their contacts are with Russian business and maybe the Russian mob, not the Russian state.
There is really not question that Trump and his cronies are crooks, but they are crooks in the
US and in all the other countries where they do business, not just Russia. I'm sure Mueller will
be able to tie Trump directly to some of the sleeze. But there is no evidence that the Russian
government is involved in any of it. "Russia-gate" implies Russian government involvement, not
just random Russians. There is no evidence of that and moreover the logic is against.
occupy on , November 7, 2017 at 12:47 am
Mr. Cash . I think George Papadopoulis, Trump's young Aide, was an inside mole for neocon
pro-Israel interests. Those interests needed to knock the unreliable President Trump out of the
way to get the "system" back where it belonged – in their pocket. Papadopoulis, on his own, was
rummaging around making Trump/Russian connections that finally ended with the the William (Richard?)
Browder (well-known Washington DC neocon)/Natalia Veselnitskaya/Donald Trump, Jr. fiasco. The
Trumps knew nothing of those negotiations, and young Trump left when he realized Natalia was only
interested in Americans being allowed to adopt Russian children again and had no dirt on Hillary.
In the meantime, Trump Jr. was connected with an evil Russian (Natalia), William Browder was
able to link the neocon-hated Trump Sr with neocon-hated, evil Russians (who currently have a
warrant out for Browder's arrest on a 15 [or 50?] million dollar tax evasion charge), and neocons
have a good chance of claiming victory out of chaos (as is their style and was their intent for
the Middle East [not Washington DC!] in the neocon Project For a New American Century – 1998).
Clinton may have lost power in Washington DC, but Clinton-supporting neocons may not have – thanks
to George Papadopoulis. We shall see. Something tells me the best is yet to come out of the Mueller
Investigations.
Roy G Biv , November 7, 2017 at 2:03 pm
You are seeing it clearly Bill. This site was once a go-to-source for investigative journalism.
Now it is a place for opinion screeds, mostly with head buried in the sand about the blatant Russian
manipulation of the 2016 election. The dominant gang of posters here squash any dissent and dissenting
comments usually get deleted within a day. I don't understand why and how it came to be so, but
the hysterical labeling of Comey/Mueller investigations as McCarthyism by Parry has ruined his
sterling reputation for me.
Stygg , November 7, 2017 at 2:24 pm
If this "Russian manipulation" was as blatant as everyone keeps telling me, how come it's all
based on ridiculous BS instead of evidence? Where's the beef?
anon , November 7, 2017 at 3:22 pm
Unable to substantiate anything you say nor argue against anything said here, you disgrace
yourself. Do you think anyone is fooled by your repeated lie that you are a disaffected former
supporter of this site? And you made the "Stygg" reply above.
Tom Hall , November 6, 2017 at 4:46 pm
It was never my impression that Cold War liberals opposed McCarthy or the anti-Communist
witch hunt. Where they didn't gleefully join in, they watched quietly from the sidelines while
the American left was eviscerated, jailed, driven from public life. Then the liberals stepped
in when it was clear things were going a little too far and just as the steam had run out of McCarthy's
slander machine.
At that point figures like Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy found the
path clear for their brand of political stagecraft. They were imperialists to a man, something
they proved abundantly when given the chance. Liberals supplanted the left in U.S. life- in the
unions, the teaching profession, publishing and every other field where criticism of the Cold
War and the enduring prevalence of worker solidarity across international lines threatened the
new order.
So it's no surprise that liberalism is the rallying point for a new wave of repression. The
dangerous buffoon currently occupying the White House stands as a perfect foil to the phony indignation
of the liberal leadership- Schumer, Pelosi et al.. The jerk was made to order, and they mean to
dump him as their ideological forebears unloaded old Tail Gunner Joe. In fact, Trump is so odious,
the Democrats, their media colleagues and major elements of the national security state believe
that bringing down the bozo can be made to look like a triumph of democracy. Of course, by then
dissent will have been stamped out far more efficiently than Trump and his half-assed cohorts
could have achieved. And it will be done in the name of restoring sanity, honoring the constitution,
and protecting everyone from the Russians. I was born in the fifties, and it looks like I'm going
to die in the fifties.
Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:37 pm
Truman started it. And he used it very well.
THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE AND ORIGINS OF ""McCARTHYISM
By Richard M. Freeland
This book argues that Truman used anti-Communist scare tactics to force Congress to implement
his plans for multilateral free trade and specifically to pass the Marshall Plan. This is a sound
emphasis, but other elements of postwar anti-Communist campaigns are neglected, especially anti-labor
legislation; and Freeland attributes to Truman a ""go-soft"" attitude toward the Soviets, which
is certainly not proven by the fact that he restrained the ultras Forrestal, Kennan, and Byrnes
-- indeed, some of Freeland's own citations confirm Truman's violent anti-Soviet spirit.
The book concludes that by equating dissent with disloyalty, promoting guilt by association,
and personally commanding loyalty programs, ""Truman and his advisors employed all the political
and programmatic techniques that in later years were to become associated with the broad phenomenon
of McCarthyism."" Freeland's revisionism is confined and conservative: he deems the Soviets
most responsible for the Cold War and implies that ""subversion"" was in fact a menace.
You are one of the very few critical journalists today willing to print objective measures
of the truth, while the MSM spins out of control under the guise of "protecting America" (and
their vital sources), while at the same time actually undermining the very principles of a working
democracy they sanctimoniously pretend to defend. It makes me nostalgic for the McCarthy era,
when we could safely satirize the Army-McCarthy Hearings (unless you were a witness!). I offer
the following as a retrospective of a lost era.:
Top-Ten Criteria for being a Putin Stooge, and a Chance at Winning A One Way Lottery Ticket:to
the Gala Gitmo Hotel:
:
(1) Reading Consortium News, Truth Dig, The Real News Network, RT and Al Jeziera
(2) Drinking Starbucks and vodka at the Russian Tea Room with Russian tourists (with an embedded
FSS agent) in NYC.
(3) Meeting suspicious tour guides in Red Square who accept dollars for their historical jokes.
(4) Claiming to catch a cell phone photo of the Putin limousine passing through the Kremlin Tower
gate.
(4) Starting a joint venture with a Russian trading partner who sells grain to feed Putin's stable
of stallions. .
(5) Catching the flu while being sneezed upon in Niagara Falls by a Russian violinist.
(6) Finding the hidden jewels in the Twelfth Chair were nothing but cut glass.
(7) Reading War and Peace on the Brighton Beach ferry.
(8) Playing the iPod version of Rachmaninoff's "Vespers" through ear buds while attending mass
in Dallas, TX..
(9) Water skiing on the Potomac flying a pennant saying "Wasn't Boris Good Enough?"
(10) Having audibly chuckled even once at items (1) – (9). Thanks Bob, Please don't let up!
Lisa , November 6, 2017 at 7:47 pm
Howard,
I chuckled loudly more than once – but luckily, no one heard me! No witnesses! So you are acquainted
with the masterpiece "12 chairs"? Very suspicious.
David G , November 6, 2017 at 8:42 pm
I've heard that's Mel Brooks favorite among his own movies.
David G , November 6, 2017 at 8:48 pm
I always find it exasperating when I have to remind the waiter at the diner to bring Russian
dressing along with the reuben sandwich, but these days I wonder if my loyalty is being tested.
Dave P. , November 6, 2017 at 10:27 pm
David G –
They will change the name of dressing very soon. Remember 2003 when French refused to endorse
the invasion of Iraq. I think they unofficially changed the name of "French Fries" to "Freedom
Fries".
It is just the start. The whole History is being rewritten – in compliance with Zionist Ideology.
Those evil Russkies will be shown as they are!
Clearly, since I've published one book by a Russian, one by a now-deceased US ex-pat living
in Russia, and have our catalog made available in Russia via our international distributor, I
am a traitor to the US. If you add in my staunch resistance to the whole Russiagate narrative
AND the fact I post links to stories in RT America, I'm doomed.
I wish I could think I'm being wholly sarcastic.
Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:38 pm
You are not alone. Many of us live outside the open air prison and feel the same way
Abe , November 6, 2017 at 5:29 pm
Robert Parry has described "the New McCarthyism" having "its own witch-hunt hearings". In fact
"last week's Senate grilling of executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google" was merely an exercise
in political theatre because all three entities already belong to the "First Draft" coalition:
Formed by Google in June 2015 with Eliot Higgins of the Atlantic Council's Bellingcat as
a founding member, the "First Draft" coalition includes all the usual mainstream media "partners"
in "regime change" war propaganda: the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, the UK Guardian and
Telegraph, BBC News, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab and Kiev-based Stopfake.
In a remarkable post-truth declaration, the "First Draft" coalition insists that members will
"work together to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the verification process".
In the "post-truth" regime of US and NATO hybrid warfare, the deliberate distortion of truth
and facts is called "verification".
The Washington Post / PropOrNot imbroglio, and "First Draft" coalition "partner" organizations'
zeal to "verify" US intelligence-backed fake news claims about Russian hacking of the US presidential
election, reveal the "post-truth" mission of this new Google-backed hybrid war propaganda alliance.
Hysterical demonization of Russia escalated dramatically after Russia thwarted the Israeli-Saudi-US
plan to dismember the Syrian state.
With the rollback of ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorist proxy forces in Syria, and the failure of
Kurdish separatist efforts in Iraq, Israel plans to launch military attacks against southern Lebanon
and Syria.
South Front has presented a cogent and fairly detailed analysis of Israel's upcoming war in
southern Lebanon.
Conspicuously absent from the South Front analysis is any discussion of the Israeli planned
assault on Syria, or possible responses to the conflict from the United States or Russia.
Israeli propaganda preparations for attack are already in high gear. Unfortunately, sober heads
are in perilously short supply in Israel and the U.S., so the prognosis can hardly be optimistic.
"Scenarios for the Third Lebanon War
Over time, IDF's military effectiveness had declined. [ ] In the Second Lebanon War of 2006
due to the overwhelming numerical superiority in men and equipment the IDF managed to occupy key
strong points but failed to inflict a decisive defeat on Hezbollah. The frequency of attacks in
Israeli territory was not reduced; the units of the IDF became bogged down in the fighting in
the settlements and suffered significant losses. There now exists considerable political pressure
to reassert IDF's lost military dominance and, despite the complexity and unpredictability of
the situation we may assume the future conflict will feature only two sides, IDF and Hezbollah.
Based on the bellicose statements of the leadership of the Jewish state, the fighting will be
initiated by Israel.
"The operation will begin with a massive evacuation of residents from the settlements in the
north and centre of Israel. Since Hezbollah has agents within the IDF, it will not be possible
to keep secret the concentration of troops on the border and a mass evacuation of civilians. Hezbollah
units will will be ordered to occupy a prepared defensive position and simultaneously open fire
on places were IDF units are concentrated. The civilian population of southern Lebanon will most
likely be evacuated. IDF will launch massive bombing causing great damage to the social infrastructure
and some damage to Hezbollah's military infrastructure, but without destroying the carefully protected
and camouflaged rocket launchers and launch sites.
"Hezbollah control and communications systems have elements of redundancy. Consequently, regardless
of the use of specialized precision-guided munitions, the command posts and electronic warfare
systems will not be paralysed, maintaining communications including through the use of fibre-optic
communications means. IDF discovered that the movement has such equipment during the 2006 war.
Smaller units will operate independently, working with open communication channels, using the
pre-defined call signs and codes.
"Israeli troops will then cross the border of Lebanon, despite the presence of the UN peacekeeping
mission in southern Lebanon, beginning a ground operation with the involvement of a greater number
of units than in the 2006 war. The IDF troops will occupy commanding heights and begin to prepare
for assaults on settlements and actions in the tunnels. The Israelis do not score a quick victory
as they suffer heavy losses in built-up areas. The need to secure occupied territory with patrols
and checkpoints will cause further losses.
"The fact that Israel itself started the war and caused damage to the civilian infrastructure,
allows the leadership of the movement to use its missile arsenal on Israeli cities. While Israel's
missile defence systems can successfully intercept the launched missiles, there are not enough
of them to blunt the bombardment. The civilian evacuation paralyzes life in the country. As soon
IDF's Iron Dome and other medium-range systems are spent on short-range Hezbollah rockets, the
bombardment of Israel with long-range missiles may commence. Hezbollah's Iranian solid-fuel rockets
do not require much time to prepare for launch and may target the entire territory of Israel,
causing further losses.
"It is difficult to assess the duration of actions of this war. One thing that seems certain
is that Israel shouldn't count on its rapid conclusion, similar to last September's exercises.
Hezbollah units are stronger and more capable than during the 2006 war, despite the fact that
they are fighting in Syria and suffered losses there.
"Conclusions
"The combination of large-scale exercises and bellicose rhetoric is intended to muster Israeli
public support for the aggression against Hezbollah by convincing the public the victory would
be swift and bloodless. Instead of restraint based on a sober assessment of relative capabilities,
Israeli leaders appear to be in a state of blood lust. In contrast, the Hezbollah has thus far
demonstrated restraint and diplomacy.
"Underestimating the adversary is always the first step towards a defeat. Such mistakes are
paid for with soldiers' blood and commanders' careers. The latest IDF exercises suggest Israeli
leaders underestimate the opponent and, more importantly, consider them to be quite dumb. In reality,
Hezbollah units will not cross the border. There is no need to provoke the already too nervous
neighbor and to suffer losses solely to plant a flag and photograph it for their leader. For Hezbollah,
it is easier and safer when the Israeli soldiers come to them. According to the IDF soldiers who
served in Gaza and southern Lebanon, it is easier to operate on the plains of Gaza than the mountainous
terrain of southern Lebanon. This is a problem for armoured vehicles fighting for control of heights,
tunnels, and settlements, where they are exposed to anti-armor weapons.
"While the Israeli establishment is in a state of patriotic frenzy, it would be a good time
for them to turn to the wisdom of their ancestors. After all, as the old Jewish proverb says:
'War is a big swamp, easy to go into but hard to get out'."
Yes, the latest "big fish" outed yesterday as an agent of the Kremlin was the U.S. Secretary
of Commerce (Wilbur Ross) who was discovered to hold stock in a shipping company that does business
with a Russian petrochemical company (Sibur) whose owners include Vladimir Putin's son-in-law
(Kirill Shamalov). Obviously the orders flow directly from Putin to Shamalov to Sibur to the shipping
company to Ross to Trump, all to the detriment of American citizens.
From RT (another tainted source!): "US Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. has a stake in
a shipping firm that receives millions of dollars a year in revenue from a company whose key owners
include Russian President Vladimir Putin's son-in-law and a Russian tycoon sanctioned by the U.S.
Treasury Department as a member of Putin's inner circle," says the International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the main publisher of the Paradise Papers. After the report
was published, some US lawmakers accused Ross of misleading Congress during his confirmation hearings."
Don't go mistaking the "International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for "Consortium
News." These guys are dedicated witch hunters, searching for anyone with six degrees of separation
to Vladimir Putin and his grand plan to thwart the United States and effect regime change within
its borders.
In a clear attempt to weasel out of his traitorous transgression, Ross stated "In a separate
interview with CNBC, that Sibur [which is NOT the company he owned stock in] was not subject to
US sanctions." 'A company not under sanction is just like any other company, period. It was a
normal commercial relationship and one that I had nothing to do with the creation of, and do not
know the shareholders who were apparently sanctioned at some later point in time,' he said." Since
when can we start allowing excuses like that? Not knowing that someone holds stock in a company
that does business with a company in which you own stock may at some later point in time become
sanctioned by the all-wise and all-good American federal government?
I can't wait till they make the first Ben Stiller comedy based on this fiasco twenty years
from now. It will be hilarious slap-stick, maybe titled "Can You Believe these Mother Fockers?"
President Chelea Clinton of our great and noble idiocracy will throw out the first witch on opening
day of the movie.
Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:27 pm
Let's be honest. Most Americans think McCarthy is a retail store. No education. And they think
Russia is the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Trump is in Japan to start war with N. Korea to hide the
blemishes or the canker on his ass. America is rapidly collapsing.
Adrian Engler , November 6, 2017 at 6:34 pm
In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence
for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists
largely gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established
fact, but since the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence
services, it probably is not that interesting any more).
Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian
people, anyone who is "Russian linked" by ever having logged in to social networks from Russia
or using Cyrillic letters. If these people and their media at least recognized the reality that
they are now a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States
But when people daily spew hate against anything and anyone "Russia linked" and still don't
recognize that they have gone over to the far right and even claim they are liberal or progressive,
this is completely absurd.
McCarthyism, as terrible as it was, at least originally was motivated by hatred against a certain
political ideology that also had its bad sides. But today's Russiagate peddlers clearly are motivated
by hatred against a certain ethnicity, a certain country, and a certain language. I don't think
there is any way to avoid the conclusion that with their hatred against anyone who is "Russia
linked", they have become right-wing extremists.
Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 6:46 pm
"Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world
to harass people who criticize the Zionist project."
Yes, very well organized.
In fact virtually every synagogue is a center for organizing people to harass others who are exercising
their First Amendment rights to diseminate information about Israel's occupation of Palestine.
The link below is to a protest and really, personal attack, against a Unitarian minister in Marblehead,
Mass., for daring to screen the film ""The Occupation of the American Mind, Israel's Public Relations
War in the United States." In other words, for daring to provide an dissenting opinion and, simply,
to tell the truth. Ironic is that the protesters' comment actually reinforce the basic message
of the film.
No other views on Israel will be allowed to enter the public for a good airing and discussion
and debate. The truth about the illegal Israeli occupation will be shouted down, and those who
try to provide information to the public on this subject will be vilified as "anti-semites." Kudos
to this minister for screening the film.
The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States (2016)
examines pro-Israel Hasbara propaganda efforts within the U.S.
This important documentary, narrated by Roger waters, exposes how the Israeli government, the
U.S. government, and the pro-Israel Lobby join forces to shape American media coverage in Israel's
favor.
Documentary producer Sut Jhally is professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts,
and a leading scholar on advertising, public relations, and political propaganda. He is also the
founder and Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation, a documentary film company that
looks at issues related to U.S. media and public attitudes.
Jhally is the producer and director of dozens of documentaries about U.S. politics and media
culture, including Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli–Palestinian
Conflict.
The Occupation of the American Mind provides a sweeping analysis of Israel's decades-long battle
for the hearts, minds, and tax dollars of the American people – a battle that has only intensified
over the past few years in the face of widening international condemnation of Israel's increasingly
right-wing policies.
Dave P. , November 7, 2017 at 2:45 am
Abe –
The interview of Roger Waters on RT is one of the best I have seen in a long while. I wish
some other artists get the courage to raise their voices. The link to the Roger Waters interview
is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7jcvfbLoIA
This Roger Waters interview is worth watching.
It would seem that everyone on the US telivision , newspaper and internet news has mastered
the art of hand over mouth , gasp and looking horrified every time Russia is mentioned. It looks
to me that the US is in the middle of another of it´s mid life crises. Panic reigns supreme every
where. If it was not so sad it would be funny. i was born in the 1940s and remember the McCarthy
witch hunts and the daily shower of people jumping out of windows as a result of it.
As a Canadian I could not get over, even though I was just a teenager back then, just how a
people in a supposedly advanced country could be so collectively paniced. I think back then it
was just a scam to get rid of unions and any kind of collective action against the owners of the
country, and this time around I think it is just a continuation of that scam, to frighten people
into subservience to the police state. I heard a women on TV today commenting on the Texas masscre,
she said " The devil never sleeps", well in the USA the 1/10 of 1% never sleeps when it comes
to more control, more pwoer and more wealth, in fact I think they are after the very last shekle
still left in the pockets of the bottom 99.9 % of the population. Those evil Russians are just
a ploy in the scam.
Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 6:58 pm
"The Democrats, the liberals and even many progressives justify their collusion with the neocons
by the need to remove Trump by any means necessary and "stop fascism." But their contempt for
Trump and their exaggeration of the "Hitler" threat that this incompetent buffoon supposedly poses
have blinded them to the extraordinary risks attendant to their course of action and how they
are playing into the hands of the war-hungry neocons."
And they are driving more and more actual and potential Dem Party members away in droves, further
weakening the party and depriving it of its most intelligent members. Any non-senile person knows
that this is all BS and these people are not only turning their backs on the Dem Party but I think
many of them are being driven to the right by their disgust with this circus and the exposure
of the party's critical weaknesses and derangement.
Paolo , November 6, 2017 at 6:59 pm
You correctly write that "the United States intervened in the 1996 Russian election to ensure
the continued rule of the corrupt and pliable Boris Yeltsin". The irony is that a few years later
Yeltsin chose Putin as his successor, and presumably the 'mericans gave him a hand to win his
first term.
How extremely sad it is to see the USA going totally nuts.
Abe , November 6, 2017 at 9:00 pm
In The Fifties (1993), American journalist and historian David Halberstam addressed
the noxious effect of McCarthyism: "McCarthy's carnival like four year spree of accusation charges,
and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after
his own recklessness, carelessness and boozing ended his career in shame." (page 53)
Halberstam specifically discussed how readily the so-called "free" press acquiesced to
McCarthy's masquerading: "The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the
Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better. They were delighted to be a part
of his traveling road show, chronicling each charge and then moving on to the next town, instead
of bothering to stay behind and follow up. They had little interest in reporting how careless
McCarthy was or how little it all meant to him." (page 55)
Abe , November 6, 2017 at 9:15 pm
On March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow and a news team at CBS produced a half-hour See It Now special
titled "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy".
Murrow interspersed his own comments and clarifications into a damaging series of film clips
from McCarthy's speeches. He ended the broadcast with a warning:
"As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves–as
indeed we are–the defenders of freedom, what's left of it, but we cannot defend freedom abroad
by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and
dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies, and whose fault
is that? Not really his. He didn't create the situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather
successfully. Cassius was right: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.'"
CBS reported that of the 12,000 phone calls received within 24 hours of the broadcast, positive
responses to the program outnumbered negative 15 to 1. McCarthy's favorable rating in the Gallup
Poll dropped and was never to rise again.
Gary , November 6, 2017 at 11:34 pm
Sad to see so many hypocrites here espousing freedom from McCarthyism while they continue to
vote for capitalist candidates year in year out. Think about the fact that in 2010 when Citizens
United managed to get the Supreme Court to certify corporations as people the fear among many
was that this would open US company subsidiaries to be infiltrated by foreign money. I guess it
is happening in spades with collusion between Russian money & Trump's organization along with
Facebook, Twitter & many others. How Mr. Parry can maintain that this parallels the 1950s anti-communist
crusade is quite ingenuous. When libertarians, the likes of Bannon, Mercer, Trump et al, with
their "destruction of the administrative state" credo are compared to the US communists of the
50s we know progressives have become about as disoriented as can be.
geeyp , November 7, 2017 at 3:30 am
I guess these "Paradise Papers" were released just yesterday, i.e., Sunday the 5th. Somehow
I didn't get to it.
john wilson , November 7, 2017 at 6:01 am
So it looks like Hillary will be crossing Putin off her Xmas card list this year! I sometimes
wonder if all we posters on here and other similar sites are on a list somewhere and when the
day of reckoning comes, the list will be produced and we will have to account for our treasonous
behaviour? Of course, one man's treason is another man's truth. I suppose in the end it boils
down to the power thing. If you have a perceived enemy you can claim the need for an army. If
you have an army you have power and with that power you can dispose of anyone who disagrees with
you simply by calling them the enemy.
Lisa , November 7, 2017 at 9:38 am
John, your post made me wonder whether I would be on a list of traitors. I've written three
posts, starting yesterday, and tried to explain something about the background of Yuri Milner,
mentioned in the article. After "your comment has been posted, thank you" nothing has appeared
on this thread.
Well, once more: Milner is known to me as a well-educated physicist from Moscow State University,
and the co-founder and financier of The Breakthrough Prize, handing out yearly awards to promising
scientists, with a much larger sum than the humble Nobel Prize. The awarding ceremony is held
in December in Silicon Valley.
john wilson , November 7, 2017 at 12:34 pm
Hi Lisa, I have just looked up Milner on Wiki and he appears to be into everything including
investment in internet companies. He is the co-founder of the "break through prize" that you mention
and seems to have backed face book and twitter in their start up. I don't see why you posts haven't
appeared as anyone can look Milner up on Wiki and elsewhere in great detail. You don't say where
you have tried to post, but I would have thought on this site you would have no trouble whatever.
If you have watched the last episode of 'cross talk' on RT you will see that anyone who as ever
mentioned Russia in a public place is regarded as some kind of traitor. I guess you and me are
due for rendition anytime now!! LOL
Lisa , November 7, 2017 at 1:49 pm
Hi John,
Naturally I had been trying to post on this site. First I tried three times in the comment space
below all other posts, and they never went through. Only when I posted a reply to someone else's
comment, my reply appeared. Maybe some technical problem on the site.
My motive was to show that Milner is doing worthwhile things with his millions, even if he
is an "evil Russian oligarch". The mentioned prize has its own website: breakthroughprize.org.
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) is a board member.
The prize is certainly a "Putin conspiracy", as it has links to Russia. (sarc)
Zachary Smith , November 7, 2017 at 8:05 pm
Maybe some technical problem on the site.
Possibly that's the case. Disappearing-forever posts happen to me from time to time. For at
least a while afterwards I cut/paste what I'm about to attempt to "post" to a WORD file before
hitting the "post comment" button.
In any event, avoid links whenever possible. By cut/pasting the exact title of the piece you're
using as a reference, others can quickly locate it themselves without a link.
K , November 7, 2017 at 9:44 am
I'm a lifelong Democrat. I was a Bernie supporter. But logic dictates my thinking. The Russia
nonsense is cover for Hillary's loss and a convenient hammer with which to attack Trump. Not biting.
Bill Maher is fixated on this. The Rob Reiner crowd is an embarrassment. The whole thing is embarrassing.
The media is inept. Very bizarre times.
Excellent article which should shed light on the misunderstandings manifested to manipulate
and censor Americans. Personally, it's ludicrous to imply that Russia was the primary reason I
could not vote for Hillary. My interest in Twitter peaked when Sidney Blumenthal's name popped
up selling arms in Libya. He was on The Clinton Foundation's Payroll for $120K, while the Obama
Administration specifically told HRC Sidney Blumenthal was not to work for the State Department.
Further research showed Chris Stevens had no knowledge of Sidney Blumenthal selling arms in
Libya. Hillary NEVER even gave Chris Stevens, a candidate with an outstanding background for diplomatic
relations in the Middle East, her email. Chris Stevens possessed a Law Degree in International
Trade, and had previously worked for Senator Lugar (R). Senator Lugar had warned HRC not to co-mingle
State Department business with The Clinton Foundation.
To add salt to the wound Hillary choose to put a third rate security firm in Libya, changing
firms a couple of short weeks before the bombing. I think she anticipated the bombing, remarking
"What difference does it make? " at the congressional hearings.
If you remember Guccifer (that hacker) he said he'd hacked both Hillary and Sidney Blumenthal.
He also said he found Sidney Blumenthal's account more interesting.
That's just one reason why I started surfing the internet. Sidney Blumenthal was a name that
hung in the cobwebs of my memory, and I wanted to know what this scum-job of a journalist was
doing!
Then there was Clinton Cash, BoysonTheTracks, Clinton Chronicles, the outrageous audacity of
the Democrats Superdelegates voting before a single primary ballot had been cast, MSM bias to
Hillary, Kathy Shelton's video "I thought you should know." and maybe around September 2016, wondering
what dirty things Hillary had done with Russia since 1993?
So I guess it's true. In the end after witnessing what has transpired since the election I
would not vote for Hillary because she'd rather risk WWIII, than have the TRUTH come out why she
lost.
After living in Europe much of the last three years we've recently returned to the U.S. I must
say that life here feels very much like I'm living within a strange Absurdist theatre play of
some sort (not that Europe is vastly better). Truth, meaning, rationality, mean absolutely nothing
at this juncture here in the United States. Reality has been turned on its head. The only difference
between our political parties runs along identity politics lines: "do you prefer your drone strikes,
illegal invasions, regime change black-ops, economic warfare and massive government spying 'with'
or 'without' gender specific bathrooms?" MSM refer to this situation as "democracy" while of course
any thinking person knows we are actually living within a totalitarian nightmare. Theatre of the
Absurd as a way of life. I must admit it feels pretty creepy being home again.
I wish it wasn't asking too much, but I suspect it is. If the NYT was reporting it, I'd feel
better about our chances. But the Deep State controls the narrative, and thus controls Pompeo,
Trump's order notwithstanding. I hope I'm wrong.
Dave P. , November 7, 2017 at 4:17 pm
Yes Joe. It is rather painful to watch as you said this Orwellian Tragedy playing out in the
Country which has just about become a police state. For those of us who grew up admiring the Western
Civilization starting with the Greeks and Romans, and then for its institutions enshrining Individual
Rights; and its scientific, literary, and cultural achievements, it is as if it still happening
in some dream, though it has been coming for some time now – more than two decades now at least.
The System was not perfect but I think that it was good as it could get. The system had been in
decline for four decades or so now.
From Robert Parry's article:
"The warning from powerful senators was crystal clear. "I don't think you get it," Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, D-California, warned social media executives last week. "You bear this responsibility.
You created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones who do
something about it. Or we will."
Diane Feinstein's multi-billionaire husband was implicated in those Loan and Savings scandals
of Reagan and G.H.W. Bush Era and in many other financial scandals later on but Law did not touch
him. He has a dual residency in Israel. These are very corrupt people.
Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Perle, Nulad-Kagan clan, Kristol, Gaffney . . . the list goes
on; add Netanyahu to it. In the Hollywood Harvey Weinstein, Rob Reiner. and the rest . . . In
Finance and wall Street characters like Sandy Weiss and the gang. The Media and TV is directly
or indirectly owned and controlled by "The Chosen People". So, where would you put the blame for
all what is going on in this country, and all this chaos, death, and destruction going on in ME
and many countries in Africa.
Any body who points out their role in it or utters a word of criticism of Israel is immediately
called an anti-semite. Just to tell my own connections, my wife youngest sister is married to
person who is Jewish (non-practicing). In all the relatives we have, they are closest to us for
more than thirty five years now. They are those transgender common restroom liberals, but we have
many common views and interests. In life, I have never differentiated people based on their ethnic
or racial backgrounds; you look at the principles they stand for.
As I see it, this era of Russia-Gate and witch hunt is hundred times worse than McCarthy era.
It seems irreversible. There is no one in the political establishment or elsewhere in Media or
academia left for regeneration of the "Body Politic". In fact, what we are witnessing here is
much worse than it was in the Soviet Union. It is complete degeneration of political leadership
in this country. It extends to Media and other institutions as well. People in Soviet Union did
not believe the lies they were told by the government there. And there arose writers like Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn in Soviet Union. What is left here now except are these few websites?
Maedhros , November 7, 2017 at 4:27 pm
If there is evidence, you should be able to provide some so that readers can analyze and discuss
it. Exactly what evidence has been provided that the Russian government manipulated the 2016 election?
CitizenOne , November 7, 2017 at 10:42 pm
Robert Parry You Nailed It!!!
I need to do a little research to see how far back you used the term "New McCarthyism" to describe
the next cold war with Russia. It was about the same time the first allegations of a Trump-Russia
conspiracy was floated by the MSM. I do not pretend to know how much airtime they spent covering
their coverup for all that the MSM did to profit from SuperPacs. They have webed a weave that
conspires to conceive to the tunes of billions of dollars spent to reprieve their intent to deceive
us and distract us away from their investment in Donald Trump which was the real influence in
the public spaces to gain mega profits from extorting the SuperPacs into spending their dollars
to defeat the trumped up candidate they created and boosted. One has to look no further than the
Main Stream Press (MSM) to find the guilty party with motive and opportunity to cash in on a candidacy
which if not for the money motive would not pass any test of journalistic integrity but would
make money for the Media.
The Russian Boogeyman was created shortly after the election and is an obvious attempt to shield
and defend the actions of the MSM which was the real fake news covered in the nightly news leading
up to the election which sought to get money rather than present the facts.
This is an example of how much power and influence the MSM has on us all to be able to upend
a National election and turn around and blame some foreign Devil for the results of an election.
The Russians had little to do with Trumps election. The MSM had everything to do with it. They
cast blame on the Russians and in so doing create a new Cold War which suits the power establishment
and suitably diverts all of our attention away from their machinations to influence the last presidential
election.
Win Win. More Nuclear Weapons and more money for the MIC and more money for all of the corporations
who would profit from a new Cold War.
Profit in times of deceit make more money from those who cheat.
CitizenOne , November 7, 2017 at 11:25 pm
Things not talked about:
1. James Comey and his very real influence on the election has never entered the media space
for an instant. It has gone down the collective memory hole. That silence has been deafening because
he was the person who against DOJ advice reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the
Servergate investigation after it had been closed by the FBI just days before the election.
The silence of the media on the influence on the election by the reopening of James Comey's
Servergate investigation and how the mass media press coverage implicating Hillary Clinton (again)
in supposed crimes (which never resulted in an indictment) influenced the National Election in
ways that have never been examined by the MSM is a nail in the coffin of media impartiality.
Why have they not investigated James Comey? Why has the MSM instead created a Russian Boogeyman?
Why was he invited to testify about the Russian connection but never cross examined about his
own influence? Why is the clearest reason for election meddling by James Comey not even spoken
of by the MSM? This is because the MSM does not want to cover events as they happened but wants
to recreate a alternate reality suitable to themselves which serves their interests and convinces
us that the MSM has no part at all in downplaying the involvement of themselves in the election
but wants to create a foreign enemy to blame.
It serves many interests. The MSM lies to all of us for the benefit of the MIC. It serves to
support White House which will deliver maximum investments in the Defense Industry. It does this
by creating a foreign enemy which they create for us to fear and be afraid of.
It is obvious to everyone with a clear eyed history of how the last election went down and
how the MSM and the government later played upon our fears to grab more cash have cashed in under
the present administration.
It is up to us to elect leaders who will reject this manipulation by the media and who will
not be cowed by the establishment. We have the power enshrined in our Constitution to elect leaders
who will pave the path forward to a better future.
Those future leaders will have to do battle with a media infrastructure that serves the power
structure and conspires to deceive us all.
Clear critical thinking must accompany free speech, however, and irrationality seems to have
beset Americans, too stuck in the mud of identity politics. Can they get out? I have hopes that
a push is coming from the new multipolar world Xi and Putin are advocating, as well as others
(but not the George Soros NWO variety). The big bully American government, actually ruled by oligarchy,
has not been serving its regular folks well, so things are falling apart. Seems like the sex scandals,
political scandals especially of the Democrat brand, money scandals are unraveling to expose underlying
societal sickness in the Disunited States of America.
It is interesting that this purge shakeup in Saudi Arabia is happening in 2017, one hundred
years since the shakeup in Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution. So shake-ups are happening everywhere.
I think a pattern is emerging of major changes in world events. Just yesterday I read that because
"Russia-gate" isn't working well, senators are looking to start a "China-gate", for evidence of
Trump collusion with Chinese oligarchs. Ludicrous. As Seer once said, "The Empire in panic mode".
Patricia, thanks for the info on Sid Blumenthal, HRC and the selling of arms from Libya to
ME jihadists, which seems to exonerate Chris Stevens from those dirty deeds and lays blame squarely
at Blumenthal's and Clinton's doorstep; changes my thinking. And thanks to Robert Parry for continuing
to push back at the participation of MSM and government players in the Orwellian masquerade being
pulled on the sheeple.
Truther , November 8, 2017 at 12:54 pm
Just the facts for those of you who have minds still open. suggest you bookmark it quickly
as the moderator will delete it within the hour.
These tactics do not just suppress information. They enforce conformity at much
deeper level.
Notable quotes:
"... I am using the Orwellian verb "unperson" playfully, but I'm also trying to be precise. What's happening isn't censorship, technically, at least not in the majority of cases. While there are examples of classic censorship (e.g., in the UK, France, and Germany), apart from so-called "terrorist content," most governments aren't formally banning expressions of anti-corporatist dissent. This isn't Czechoslovakia, after all. This is global capitalism, where the repression of dissent is a little more subtle. The point of Google unpersoning CounterPunch (and probably many other publications) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like Hedges is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to readers. The goal is to delegitmize them, and thus decrease traffic to their websites and articles, and ultimately drive them out of business, if possible. ..."
"... Another objective of this non-censorship censorship is discouraging writers like myself from contributing to publications like CounterPunch, Truthdig, Alternet, Global Research, and any other publications the corporatocracy deems "illegitimate." Google unpersoning a writer like Hedges is a message to other non-ball-playing writers. The message is, "this could happen to you." This message is meant for other journalists, primarily, but it's also aimed at writers like myself who are making a living (to whatever degree) writing and selling what we think of as "literature." ..."
"... These tactics do not just suppress information. They enforce conformity at much deeper level. ..."
"... Chomsky explains how this system operates in What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream . It isn't a question of censorship the system operates on rewards and punishments, financial and emotional coercion, and subtler forms of intimidation. Making examples of non-cooperators is a particularly effective tactic. Ask any one of the countless women whose careers have been destroyed by Harvey Weinstein, or anyone who's been to graduate school, or worked at a major corporation. ..."
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
On November 30, 2016, presumably right at the stroke of midnight, Google Inc. unpersoned
CounterPunch. They didn't send out a press release or anything. They just quietly removed it
from the Google News aggregator. Not very many people noticed. This happened just as the "fake
news" hysteria was being unleashed by the corporate media, right around the time The Washington
Post ran
this neo-McCarthyite smear piece vicariously accusing CounterPunch, and a number of other
publications, of being "peddlers of Russian propaganda." As I'm sure you'll recall, that
astounding piece of "journalism" (which The Post was promptly forced to disavow with an absurd
disclaimer but has refused to retract) was based on the claims of an anonymous website
apparently staffed by a couple of teenagers and a formerly rabidly anti-Communist, now rabidly
anti-Putin think tank. Little did most people know at the time that these were just the opening
salvos in what has turned out to be an all-out crackdown on any and all forms of vocal
opposition to the global corporate ruling classes and their attempts to quash the ongoing
nationalist backlash against their neoliberal agenda.
Almost a year later, things are much clearer. If you haven't been following this story
closely, and you care at all about freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and that kind of
stuff, you may want to take an hour or two and catch up a bit on what's been happening. I
offered a few examples of some of the measures governments and corporations have been taking to
stifle expressions of dissent in my latest
piece in CounterPunch , and there are many more detailed articles online, like this one by Andre
Damon from July, and this follow-up he published last
week (which reports that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges has also
been unpersoned). Or, if you're the type of soul who only believes what corporations tell you,
and who automatically dismisses anything published by a Trotskyist website, here's
one from last December in The Guardian, and an
op-ed in The New York Times , both of which at least report what Google, Twitter, and
Facebook are up to. Or you could read this
piece by Robert Parry , who also has "legitimate" (i.e., corporate) credentials, and who
hasn't been unpersoned just yet, although I'm sure they'll get around to him eventually.
I am using the Orwellian verb "unperson" playfully, but I'm also trying to be precise.
What's happening isn't censorship, technically, at least not in the majority of cases. While
there are examples of classic censorship (e.g., in the UK, France, and Germany), apart from
so-called "terrorist content," most governments aren't formally banning expressions of
anti-corporatist dissent. This isn't Czechoslovakia, after all. This is global capitalism,
where the repression of dissent is a little more subtle. The point of Google unpersoning
CounterPunch (and probably many other publications) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like
Hedges is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to
readers. The goal is to delegitmize them, and thus decrease traffic to their websites and
articles, and ultimately drive them out of business, if possible.
Another objective of this non-censorship censorship is discouraging writers like myself
from contributing to publications like CounterPunch, Truthdig, Alternet, Global Research, and
any other publications the corporatocracy deems "illegitimate." Google unpersoning a writer
like Hedges is a message to other non-ball-playing writers. The message is, "this could happen
to you." This message is meant for other journalists, primarily, but it's also aimed at writers
like myself who are making a living (to whatever degree) writing and selling what we think of
as "literature."
Yes, as you've probably guessed by now, in addition to writing political satire, I am, as
rogue journalist Caitlin Johnstone so aptly put it once, an "elitist wanker." I've spent the
majority of my adult life writing stage plays and working in the theater, and it doesn't get
any more elitist than that. My plays are published by "establishment" publishers, have won a
few awards, and have been produced internationally. I recently published my "debut novel"
(which is what you call it if you're an elitist wanker) and am currently trying to promote and
sell it. I mention this, not to blow my little horn, but to the set the stage to try to
illustrate how these post-Orwellian intimidation tactics (i.e., unpersoning people from the
Internet) work. These tactics do not just suppress information. They enforce conformity at much
deeper level.
The depressing fact of the matter is, in our brave new Internet-dominated world,
corporations like Google, Twitter, and Facebook (not to mention Amazon), are, for elitist
wankers like me, in the immortal words of Colonel Kurz, "either friends or they are truly
enemies to be feared." If you are in the elitist wanker business, regardless of whether you're
Jonathan Franzen, Garth Risk Hallberg, Margaret Atwood, or some "mid-list" or "emerging"
author, there is no getting around these corporations. So it's kind of foolish, professionally
speaking, to write a bunch of essays that will piss them off, and then publish these essays in
CounterPunch. Literary agents advise against this. Other elitist literary wankers, once they
discover what you've been doing, will avoid you like the bubonic plague. Although it's
perfectly fine to write books and movies about fictional evil corporations, writing about how
real corporations are using their power to mold societies into self-policing virtual prisons of
politically-correct, authoritarian consumers is well, it's something that is just not done in
professional elitist wanker circles.
Normally, all this goes without saying, as these days most elitist wankers are trained how
to write, and read, and think, in MFA conformity factories, where they screen out any unstable
weirdos with unhealthy interests in political matters. This is to avoid embarrassing episodes
like Harold
Pinter's Nobel Prize lecture (which, if you haven't read it, you probably should), and is
why so much of contemporary literature is so well-behaved and instantly forgettable. This
institutionalized screening system is also why the majority of journalists employed by
mainstream media outlets understand, without having to be told, what they are, and are not,
allowed to report. Chomsky explains how this system operates in What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream . It isn't a
question of censorship the system operates on rewards and punishments, financial and emotional
coercion, and subtler forms of intimidation. Making examples of non-cooperators is a
particularly effective tactic. Ask any one of the countless women whose careers have been
destroyed by Harvey Weinstein, or anyone who's been to graduate school, or worked at a major
corporation.
Or let me provide you with a personal example.
A couple weeks ago, I googled myself (which we elitist wankers are wont to do), and noticed
that two of my published books had disappeared from the "Knowledge Panel" that appears in the
upper right of the search results. I also noticed that the people "People Also Search For" in
the panel had changed. For years, consistently, the people you saw there had been a variety of
other elitist literary wankers and leftist types. Suddenly, they were all rather right-wing
types, people like Ilana Mercer and John Derbyshire, and other VDARE writers. So that was a
little disconcerting.
I set out to contact the Google Search specialists to inquire about this mysterious
development, and was directed to a series of unhelpful web pages directing me to other
unhelpful pages with little boxes where you can write and submit a complaint to Google, which
they will completely ignore. Being an elitist literary wanker, I also wrote to Google Books,
and exchanged a number of cordial emails with an entity (let's call her Ms. O'Brien) who
explained that, for "a variety of reasons," the "visibility" of my books (which had been
consistently visible for many years) was subject to change from day to day, and that,
regrettably, she couldn't assist me further, and that sending her additional cordial emails was
probably a pointless waste of time. Ms. O'Brien was also pleased to report that my books had
been restored to "visibility," which, of course, when I checked, they hadn't.
"Whatever," I told myself, "this is silly. It's probably just some IT thing, maybe Google
Books updating its records, or something." However, I was still perplexed by the "People Also
Search For" switcheroo, because it's kind of misleading to link my writing to that of a bunch
of serious right-wingers. Imagine, if you were a dystopian sci-fi fan, and you googled me to
check out my book and see what else I had written, and so on, and my Google "Knowledge Panel"
popped up and displayed all these far-right VDARE folks. Unless you're a far-right VDARE type
yourself, that might be a little bit of a turn-off.
At that point, I wondered if I was getting paranoid. Because Google Search runs on
algorithms, right? And my political satire and commentary is published, not only in
CounterPunch, but also in The Unz Review, where these far-right-wing types are also published.
Moreover, my pieces are often reposted by what appear to be "Russia-linked" websites, and
everyone knows that the Russians are all a bunch of white supremacists, right? On top of which,
it's not like I'm Stephen King here. I am hardly famous enough to warrant the attention of any
post-Orwellian corporate conspiracy to stigmatize anti-establishment dissent by manipulating
how authors are displayed on Google (i.e., subtly linking them to white supremacists,
anti-Semites, and others of that ilk).
So, okay, I reasoned, what probably happened was over the course of twenty-four hours, for
no logical reason whatsoever, all the folks who had been googling me (along with other leftist
and literary figures) suddenly stopped googling me, all at once, while, more or less at the
exact same time, hundreds of right-wingers started googling me (along with those white
supremacist types they had, theoretically, already been googling). That kind of makes sense
when you think about it, right? I mean, Google couldn't be doing this intentionally. It must
have been some sort of algorithm that detected this sudden, seismic shift in the demographic of
people googling me.
Or, I don't know, does that possibly sound like a desperate attempt to rationalize the
malicious behavior of an unaccountable, more or less god-like, global corporation that wields
the power of life and death over my book sales and profile on the Internet (a more or less
god-like global corporation that could do a lot of additional damage to my sales and reputation
with complete impunity once the piece you're reading is published)? Or am I simply getting
paranoid, and, in fact, I've developed a secret white supremacist fan base without my
knowledge? Only Google knows for sure.
Such are the conundrums elitist literary wankers have to face these days that is, those of
us wankers who haven't learned to keep our fucking mouths shut yet. Probably the safest course
of action, regardless of whether I'm being paranoid or Google does have me on some kind of
list, is to lay off the anti-corporatist essays, and definitely stop contributing to
CounterPunch, not to mention The Unz Review, and probably also give up the whole dystopian
satire novel thing, and ensure that my second novel conforms to the "normal" elitist wanker
rules (which every literary wanker knows, but which, technically, do not exist). Who knows, if
I play my cards right, maybe I can even sell the rights to Miramax, or okay, some other
corporation.
Once that happens, I assume that Google will want to restore me to normal personhood, and
return my books to visibility, and I will ride off into the Hollywood sunset with the Clintons,
Clooneys, and Pichais, and maybe even Barack Obama himself, if he isn't off jet skiing with
Richard Branson, or having dinner with Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, who just happen to live right
down the street, or hawking the TPP on television. By that time, CounterPunch and all those
other "illegitimate" publications will have been forced onto the dark web anyway, so I won't be
giving up all that much. I know, that sounds pretty cold and cynical, but my liberal friends
will understand I just hope all my new white supremacist fans will find it in their hearts to
forgive me.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Thank you for mustering the courage and then taking the time to spell out these outrages in a
straightforward, unemotional way. I've appreciated the humor that centers your other essays,
but there's not a damned thing funny about this.
But why are things as they are? With billions aplenty, our rulers must be driven by their
libido dominandi. We're left to wonder only whether they get off more on ostracizing the
Hopkinses, on buying the politicians, or on herding the sheep from bathrooms to statues to
flags.
"All along Trump has been the candidate of the military. The other two power centers of
the
power triangle , the corporate and the executive government (CIA), had gone for Clinton.
The Pentagon's proxy defeated the CIA proxy. (Last months' fight over Raqqa was similar - with
a similar outcome.)"
Notable quotes:
"... All along Trump has been the candidate of the military. The other two power centers of the power triangle , the corporate and the executive government (CIA), had gone for Clinton. The Pentagon's proxy defeated the CIA proxy. (Last months' fight over Raqqa was similar - with a similar outcome.) ..."
"... Former U.S. Army Captain and now CIA director Mike Pompeo was educated at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is part of the Junta circle, installed to control the competition. ..."
"... Is the U.S. military really qualified to teach anyone how to respect human rights? Did it learn that from committing mass atrocities in about each campaign it ever fought? ..."
"... The deep-seated problems plaguing the USA do have solutions, but they are not those being forwarded by the very radical conservatives now in charge of Congress and many statehouses. And the junta members share their mindsets. So, I see the domestic situation continuing to spiral further out-of-control with no sign anywhere of a countervailing power arising with the potential to steer the ship-of-state away from the massive reef it's rapidly heading for ..."
"... Ah, Masha Gessen, literally cancer. Who elevated her? I find it interesting that she does the "translating" for the CIA-scripted FX show "The Americans", a show which has probably more effectively demonized Russians for the cud-chewing crowd than the sum total of Cold War propaganda since the 50s AND the daily Russian hate columns in Wapo et al that trickle down to the Buzzfeed crowd. ..."
"... Military junta or not b, make no mistake, the real power behind the throne are a cabal of billionaires who buy their way by co-opting the politicians who make the laws. Democracy is indeed dead here in the U$A. It's now a full-blown Oligarchy. ..."
"... I agree with this division of power and would add that Trump is also the candidate of the police. I see the media though as more being in the CIA/corporate camps. I think the military backing is necessary as you mention to take the CIA down a few notches. So far I'd say the result in Syria is promising. ..."
"... This tribal civil war is also spilling over into places like Las Vegas, which clearly is run by the Jewish Mafia. There still is no plausible motive given for the shooting incident, but we know that the owners of MGM would never willingly have allowed this to happen on their own property. So it clearly was a hit, and with Area 51 down the road and all the MIC contractors in Vegas, it is highly unlikely that they were not involved or at least aware of the operation. ..."
"... The ground work, or state-of-affairs that lead to what one might call a soft military coup in the US (see b) = within what, at one extreme could be called Ayn-Randian rabid individualism, and at the other a sort of neo-liberal capitalism which is nevertheless highly 'socialist' in the sense re-distributive from the center of power (if only to create a slave/subservient class and prevent uprisings), there is NO public space for 'solidarity' within (besides familial, or close, etc.) ..."
"... historically, dying empires invest in the double prong, military conquest + internal control (can be vicious) ..."
"... I don't think it is all that clear. Corps or better conglomerates of power like 'the media', the 'silicons', banking and finance, Energy, electronics, Big Pharma, etc. are politcally inclined (say!) to some form of corporate fascism, > bought pols from all-sides of any-aisle. Their ties to the military / milit. type power at home are not very strong, they may collaborate on occasion. Some of these 'industries' fear domination that goes beyond soft power and they loathe sanctions - think about who/what/how is doing lucrative deals and has continuing biz success in Iraq, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, etc. - NOT US cos./corps. ..."
"... First, if the only two choices were the Executive CIA and the Military "Junta" with Trump why would we continue the farce of elections? And if the elections were pre-determined and the ruling Junta took over in a coup, then how and why is the CIA out of power? ..."
"... The "farce of elections" is accurate because Trump is not doing what he claimed he would do, not unusual actually. It was Trump who sprang the "junta" on us. And who claimed that the CIA would be out of power? ..."
"... I used to think it was a counter-coup also. But sheep-dog Sanders and Trump's having supported Hillary in 2008 among other things caused me to conclude that it all bullshit. I now believe that the hyper-partisanship is just a show. The political system in the US is designed to prevent any real populist from gaining power. We are being played. Trump is the Republican Obama. ..."
"... The excuse for this was that while US hands were tied (because public wouldn't support further adventurism after Iraq) close allies could push forward. But the new Cold War has changed the calculus. ..."
"... The US isn't giving up on Empire. It's just a different type of Empire for a different type of environment. When Trump talks about "draining the swamp" I think he merely refers to foreign influence. ..."
"... Trump has one ally and that is the 65million voters who put him into office. He surrendered his top people. Saker says it was lack of character. I think when they point the gun at you, your family, your closest friends in your life, you acquiesce. They even took from him Keith Schiller, his personal security man for years. Kelly forced him out of the WH. ..."
"... On the bright side, members of Congress are at least nominally elected. Four star Generals, not so much. It's still a felony carrying a prison term of 5 to 10 years per incident to lie to Congress. The military have no precedent to recommend them either as a source of information or in their decision making ability. They are way out of their depth when it comes to administering a nation. ..."
"... Moon of Alabama always writes interesting and insightful critiques of the Deep State, the military, and the imperialist/war party, but falls flat on his face in his naive faith in the supposed anti-establishment, populist, and America First Nationalist proclivities of Donald Trump, and his arch-reactionary Svengali Steve Bannon. There is indeed at least one major split in the ranks of the ruling class, but to present Trump and Bannon as either valiant figures struggling for the national good, or noble isolated men surrounded by vipers and traitors is absurd. ..."
"... Now, in its late imperial decline, the U.S. has become unable to continue to exercise hegemony, the way it became accustomed to in the first 70+ years in the Post-WW 2 period. The number one Client/Ally/Master, Israel and their deeply embedded 5th Column in the U.S., the Zionists with their associated Pro-Zionist factions within the War Party, now nearly directly and openly controls U.S. foreign policy and military actions in the regions that the Likudnik faction in Israel cares about (i.e. the Levant, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa). ..."
"... Hollowed out economically and industrially the U.S. Empire is clearly on the way out. The various factions fighting for control of policy seem to be oblivious to this basic fact. ..."
In an advertising campaign in 2008 the U.S. Air Force declared itself to be "Above
All". The slogan and symbol of the campaign
was similar to the
German "Deutschland Über Alles" campaign of 1933. It was a sign of things to come.
On Thursday Masha Gessen watched the press briefing of White House Chief of Staff General
John Kelly and
concluded :
The press briefing could serve as a preview of what a military coup in this country would
look like, for it was in the logic of such a coup that Kelly advanced his four arguments .
Those who criticize the President don't know what they're talking about because they
haven't served in the military . ...
The President did the right thing because he did exactly what his generals told him to
do . ...
Communication between the President and a military widow is no one's business but
theirs. ...
Citizens are ranked based on their proximity to dying for their country. ...
Gessen is late. The coup happened months ago. A military junta is in strong control of White
House polices. It is now widening its claim to power.
All along Trump has been the candidate of the military. The other two power centers of
the
power triangle , the corporate and the executive government (CIA), had gone for Clinton.
The Pentagon's proxy defeated the CIA proxy. (Last months' fight over Raqqa was similar - with
a similar outcome.)
The military will demand its due beyond the three generals now in Trump's cabinet.
With the help of the media the generals in the White House defeated their civilian
adversary. In August the Trump ship dropped its ideological
pilot . Steve Bannon went from board. Bannon's militarist enemy, National Security Advisor
General McMaster, had won. I
stated :
Trump's success as the "Not-Hillary"
candidate was based on an anti-establishment insurgency. Representatives of that
insurgency, Flynn, Bannon and the MAGA voters, drove him through his first months in office.
An intense media campaign was launched to counter them and the military took control of the
White House. The anti-establishment insurgents were fired. Trump is now reduced to public
figure head of a stratocracy - a military junta which nominally follows the rule of law.
The military took full control of White House processes and policies:
Everything of importance now passes through
the Junta's hands ... To control Trump the Junta filters his information input
and eliminates any potentially alternative view ... The Junta members dictate their policies
to Trump by only proposing certain alternatives to him. The one that is most preferable to
them, will be presented as the only desirable one. "There are no alternatives," Trump will be
told again and again.
With the power center captured the Junta starts to implement its ideology and to suppress
any and all criticism against itself.
On Thursday the 19th Kelly
criticized Congresswoman Frederica Wilson of South Florida for hearing in (invited) on a
phone-call Trump had with some dead soldiers wife:
Kelly then continued his criticism of Wilson, mentioning the 2015 dedication of the Miramar
FBI building, saying she focused in her speech that she "got the money" for the building.
The video of the Congresswoman's speech (above link) proves that Kelly's claim was a
fabrication. But one is no longer allowed to point such out. The Junta, by definition, does not
lie. When the next day journalists asked the White House Press Secretary about Kelly's
unjustified attack she
responded:
MS. SANDERS: If you want to go after General Kelly, that's up to you. But I think that that
-- if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that's
something highly inappropriate
It is now "highly inappropriate" to even question the Junta that rules the empire.
... ... ...
If the soldiers do not work "for any other reason than that they love this country" why do
they ask to be paid? Why is the public asked to finance 200 military
golf courses ? Because the soldiers "love the country"? Only a few 10,000 of the 2,000,000
strong U.S. military will ever see an active front-line.
And imagine the "wonderful joy" Kelly "got in his heart" when he
commanded the illegal torture camp of Guantanamo Bay:
Presiding over a population of detainees not charged or convicted of crimes, over whom he had
maximum custodial control, Kelly treated them with brutality. His response to the detainees'
peaceful hunger strike in 2013 was punitive force-feeding, solitary confinement, and rubber
bullets. Furthermore, he sabotaged efforts by the Obama administration to resettle detainees,
consistently undermining the will of his commander in chief.
Former U.S. Army Captain and now CIA director Mike Pompeo was educated at the United States
Military Academy at West Point. He is part of the Junta circle, installed to control the
competition. Pompeo also wants to again feel the "wonderful joy". On Friday he
promised that the CIA would become a "much more vicious agency". Instead of merely
waterboarding 'terrorists' and drone-bombing brown families, Pompeo's more vicious CIA will
rape the 'terrorist's' kids and nuke whole villages. Pompeo's remark was made at a
get-together of the Junta and neo-conservative warmongers.
On October 19 Defense Secretary General Mattis was asked in Congress about the recent
incident in Niger during which, among others, several U.S. soldiers were killed. Mattis
set
(vid 5:29pm) a curious new metric for deploying U.S. troops:
Any time we commit out troops anywhere it is based on a simple first question and that is -
is the well-being of the American people sufficiently enhanced by putting our troops there ,
by putting our troops in a position to die?
In his October 20 press briefing General Kelly also tried to
explain why U.S. soldiers are in Niger:
So why were they there ? They're there working with partners, local -- all across Africa --
in this case, Niger -- working with partners, teaching them how to be better soldiers;
teaching them how to respect human rights ...
Is the U.S. military really qualified to teach anyone how to respect human rights? Did it
learn that from committing mass atrocities in about
each campaign it ever fought?
One of the soldiers who were killed in Niger while "teaching how to respect human rights"
was
a 39 year old "chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist" with "more than a
dozen awards and decorations". The U.S. military sent a highly qualified WMD specialist on a "routine patrol" in Niger to
teach local soldiers "to respect human rights" due to which presumably "the well-being of the
American people" would be "sufficiently enhanced"? Will anyone really buy that bridge?
But who would dare to ask more about this? It is" highly inappropriate " to doubt whatever
the military says. Soon that will change into "verboten". Any doubt, any question will be
declared "fake news" and a sign of devious foreign influence. Whoever spreads such will be
blocked from communicating.
The military is now indeed "Above All". That air force slogan was a remake of a 1933
"Über Alles" campaign in Germany. One wonders what other historic similarities will
develop from it.
Posted by b on October 21, 2017 at 03:58 PM | Permalink
The military junta rely on the US dollar as reserve currency for their lurks and perks. The
more they take power, the faster this will slip away. So called allies will move towards
China/Russia and other currencies.
Dangerous times but the downfall of the US is gaining momentum.
@1 While I understand the temptation to link Trump to Neo-con policies, I think it over
simplifies the issue.
Thierry Meyssan has a recent article in which he questions how seriously we should take
the US's anti-Iran policy. In it he states "We have to keep in mind that Donald Trump is not
a professional politician, but a real estate promoter, and that he acts like one. He gained
his professional success by spreading panic with his outrageous statements and observing the
reactions he had created amongst his competitors and his partners."
That statement is a great summary of one of the key precepts of what I called
'asymmetrical leadership' - which I think characterizes Trumps leadership style (an
application of asymmetrical warfare techniques to the political arena). This does not mean
that the Junta has not taken over control. I would agree with b on this. However, the forms
by which that control get expressed will still run through Trump and will still reflect his
'asymmetric' style.
It does take someone on the other side of the world to give perspective. I don't think it is
as much a military junta as things are falling apart. The generals are attempting to keep
their corrupt war profits flowing. The media moguls still hate Donald Trump; only as an
oligarch hates another. Donald Trump is firing up his base. Expect, the whole of the
alt-right propaganda is false. It relies on the hatred of others. All he will do is speed up
the splintering. If your home is foreclosed, flooded, polluted, burned down or blown apart;
reality is slapping you in the face.
One of your most important posts, b. At first I thought it strange that you would quote Masha
Gessen, an infamous anti-Putin journalist and Khodorkovsky fan, but then it didn't seem so
strange. Gessen is a Zionist, therefore she is aligned with the CIA/Wall Street faction,
which as you perceptively say lost out with Trump and Raqqa. I say Wall Street as opposed to
corporate because, as I have pointed out before, non-financial corporates - and that includes
most of the Dow Jones or FTSE - have fuck all say on anything except how they are going to
meet next quarterly's earnings estimates. And the CIA is very close to Wall Street.
What interests me is how this relates to Iran, on which both factions appear to be in
agreement, but there must be nuances. The Saker published an article where,in my opinion, he
failed to give enough weight to how circumstances around Iran have changed over the last
decade. I see little green men in large green aircraft weaving their way down the Caspian
Sea, not to mention invisible Chinese hardware in the sense of how did it get there, and a
Europe which is in disarray with their tongues hanging out for deals with Iran. The success
of the anti-Trump MSM narrative combined with fears of potentially millions of Iranian
refugees would surely indicate this is the worst possible time to attack Iran. So how can
they conjure a war out of this?
On a far more insidious note, one has to wonder what an radiological 'expert' was doing in
Niger - thanks b for that important piece of info.
When that info is combined with:
1) US Special ops in Mali from 2006
2) US operation Oasis Enabler (2009) looking to infiltrate and control Elite Malian army
units
3) March 2012 Coup brought to power American trained Capt. Amadou Sanogo
4) French Operation Serval, at the request of the 'interim government' fights to control
northern Malian territory and URANIUM mines along the Mali - Niger border (they said they
fought ISIS but what they actually fought was a Tuareg separatist movement)
together with the presence of ISIS (the US trained, evacuated from Syria version?) in the
area... Ominous is hardly strong enough to describe the feeling...
I start my comment by referencing these since the operational doctrine of the Outlaw US
Empire is to keep any such challenges to its perceived dominance--and quest for total
dominance--subdued to the point of insignificance. As you can clearly read, Xi, China, Putin,
Russia, and their allies aren't going to allow any junta to stop their integration and
development plans preparing their nations and region for the future--plans and thinking
woefully absent from any sector of the Outlaw US Empire excepting perhaps weapon development.
The just completed Valdai Conference provides an excellent insight to the drama, the comments
and visions are as important as they're powerful, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/55882
I could pile more of the same for barflies to digest, but I don't think that's required.
There's a very longstanding joke about the joining together of these two words--military
intelligence--and for good reason, particularly within the Outlaw US Empire. I don't think
anyone within the governmental establishment has any idea of what to do about the
Eurasian/Muiltipolar Challenge other than trying to break it--no ideas of how to compete or
join it so as to also profit from it. The reason for this as I see it is ideological--Zero
Sumism and Randian junk economics is so deeply ingrained they've polluted minds to the point
where their blinded and unable to think outside the box they've caged themselves within:
Hoisted by their own petard as the saying goes. They just can't accept Win/Win as something
viable--sharing is for sissies and commies. Problem is that well over half of humanity sees
Win/Win as eminently viable and far more welcome than the demonstrably failed Zero Sum Game
promoted by Randian political-economists and enforced through the barrel a gun.
The deep-seated problems plaguing the USA do have solutions, but they are not those being
forwarded by the very radical conservatives now in charge of Congress and many statehouses.
And the junta members share their mindsets. So, I see the domestic situation continuing to
spiral further out-of-control with no sign anywhere of a countervailing power arising with
the potential to steer the ship-of-state away from the massive reef it's rapidly heading for.
There might be a surprise in store from the junta, however--it might just take on a bit of
the massive corruption plaguing the USA by attacking the Clinton Foundation and its related
sewage. Although, that just solves one part of a huge host of problems.
funny thing that just accord to me that i had not thought of for nearly ten years, one of the
initial "benefits" of the state of Israel, was the cutting off of Africa from asia, and its
pretty glaring that a project to connect Asia Africa and Europe does not include the logical
land route as well.
At least in the times of Caesar and Augustus, military junta who seized power could claim to
be effective and victorious military, able to crush significant enemy armies. The current top
military in the US were at best kiddies the last time the US actually managed to defeat a
truly powerful enemy, back in 1945. (though this criticism can apply to all major powers)
Ah, Masha Gessen, literally cancer. Who elevated her? I find it interesting that she does the
"translating" for the CIA-scripted FX show "The Americans", a show which has probably more
effectively demonized Russians for the cud-chewing crowd than the sum total of Cold War
propaganda since the 50s AND the daily Russian hate columns in Wapo et al that trickle down
to the Buzzfeed crowd.
We need to start calling the CIA traitors, actual traitors. Masha Gessen is CIA, CIA
ghostwrites for most MSM. Traitors all. But even without the constant hagiographies, would
people start to get it? "Americans", I mean?
Here's a bit of what Hamid Karzai at the Valdai Club had to say about what the junta
accomplished in Afghanistan:
"Today, I am one of the greatest critics of the US policy in Afghanistan. Not because I am
anti-Western, I am a very Western person. My education is Western, my ideas are Western. I am
very democratic in my inner instincts. And I love their culture. But I am against the US
policy because it is not succeeding. It is causing us immense trouble and the rise of
extremism and radicalism and terrorism. I am against the US policy because on their watch,
under their total control of the Afghan air space, the Afghan intelligence and the Afghan
military, of all that they have, that super power, there is Daesh in Afghanistan. How come
Daesh emerged in Afghanistan 14–15 years after the US presence in Afghanistan with that
mass of resources and money and expenditure? Why is the world not as cooperative with America
in Afghanistan today as it was before? How come Russia now has doubts about the intentions of
the US in Afghanistan or the result of its work in Afghanistan? How come China does not view
it the same way? How come Iran has immense difficulty with the way things are conducted in
Afghanistan?
"Therefore, as an Afghan in the middle of this great game, I propose to our ally, the
United States, the following: we will all succeed if you tell us that you have failed. We
would understand. Russia would understand, China would understand. Iran, Pakistan, everybody
would understand. India would understand. We have our Indian friends there. We see all signs
of failure there, but if you do not tell us you failed, what is this, a game?"
I doubt the junta will do any better than its performed in Afghanistan because it only
knows how to play the game Karzai describes. Link is same as one above.
We can now add the Air Force being 'Above All' to the supremacist 'exceptional and
indispensable' lunatic attitude in the US that is definitely psychologically the same as
another people that thought they were 'Uber Alles'.
You stated: The insurgency that brought Trump to the top was defeated by a
counter-insurgency campaign waged by the U.S. military. (Historically its first successful
one).
I differ. JFK was taken out by a combined US Naval Intel and CIA plot. The beneficiary was
the MIC. Eleven days later, LBJ reversed the executive order by JFK to end the US involvement
in Nam. For 11 more years the Military got what it wanted--war.
LBJ got what he wanted--the Presidency. The Cuban-Americans got what they wanted--revenge for failure at Bay of Pigs by
Kennedy. The Mafia got what they wanted--revenge for Bobby Kennedy.
One other thing about the counter-insurgency. It was not so much Military. They waited while
the IC ran the leaks and counter-insurgency. Then,Trump fell into the Military's arms. He had
been cut off from his base and key supporters and had to empower them by obedience to their
plans. Foreign policy is what they wanted. He can still have all the domestic policy he can
get, which is basically nothing much. A SC justice, some EOs, and all the Twitter-shit he can
muster.
American democracy is indeed dead. The US Military's only real victory after WWII. After
Vietnam, the generals said: "Freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly and the right
to trial by jury and all that crap has got to go! And they got rid of it all! The Junta is in
control. And the only positive aspect is that we have a rolling Fukushima disaster in Trump,
who could implode and then explode in a nuclear Holocaust any second from all the humiliation
and investigations crushing in on him--if the Junta did not keep tight control over all the
information coming in to him. So you better leave them in place or... BAM! That's the
blackmail. But it only works as long as Trump has sole authority to launch our nuclear
arsenal. If someone else with a 2nd launch key were required to agree, the Junta would no
longer be needed to "protect" us Mafia-style.
Military junta or not b, make no mistake, the real power behind the throne are a cabal of
billionaires who buy their way by co-opting the politicians who make the laws. Democracy is indeed dead here in the U$A. It's now a full-blown Oligarchy.
Re Bill Wedin at 18, you wrote "the blackmail only works as long as Trump has sole authority
to launch our nuclear arsenal."
Authority to launch also includes predelegation to some of the highest ranking military,
in the event of a perceived nuclear attack, in which the National Command Authority is
disrupted and unable to give launch orders. However, this leaves open the question as to
whether the President could be bypassed in the process.
Trident sub commanders also have the necessary launch codes on board to initiate a nuclear
strike. Yes, the codes are under lock and key, but the key is on board.
The current US militarism also reflects on the kneeling during the national anthem, which is
also an ode to the flag in a war setting -- "by the rockets red glare" etc. President Trump
has said the protests (against police killing blacks) are unpatriotic and disrespectful of
military veterans. Trump has initiated a petition: "The President has asked for a list of
supporters who stand for the National Anthem. Add your name below to show your patriotism and
support."
Randolph Bourne (see #8) had some thoughts on this.
. . . We reverence not our country but the flag. We may criticize ever so severely our
country, but we are disrespectful to the flag at our peril. It is the flag and the uniform
that make men's heart beat high and fill them with noble emotions, not the thought of and
pious hopes for America as a free and enlightened nation. It cannot be said that the object
of emotion is the same, because the flag is the symbol of the nation, so that in
reverencing the American flag we are reverencing the nation. For the flag is not a symbol
of the country as a cultural group, following certain ideals of life, but solely a symbol
of the political State, inseparable from its prestige and expansion.
""All along Trump has been the candidate of the military. The other two power centers of the
power triangle, the corporate and the executive government (CIA), had gone for Clinton. The
Pentagon proxy won over the CIA proxy. (Last months' fight over Raqqa was similar - with the
same outcome.)""
I agree with this division of power and would add that Trump is also the candidate of the
police. I see the media though as more being in the CIA/corporate camps. I think the military backing is necessary as you mention to take the CIA down a few
notches. So far I'd say the result in Syria is promising.
I think this CIA/corporate power has to be dealt with first to give progressive/socialist
ideas much of a chance. It's a fine line but the military is supposed to protect against
enemies foreign and domestic.
The corporate part of course has huge power over Congress.
a 39 year old "chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist"
This is Niger - Remember back in 2002/2003 :
The Italian letter and Yellow Cake. These days we have Areva mining uranium in Niger
Hence the French military offering both security and protecting the "assets" of French
Establishment. Those soldiers were not ambushed but were conducting a raid and something went
wrong!
If there was a coup Masha would be singing praises free n the rooftop because the waragenda
she is paid to shill for would be back on. The fact that the lying bitch is gnashing her teeth would suggest that the NeoCon agenda,
especially for war against Russia, has been derailed. Fuck you Masha. You suck.
This is great news! I hope the military junta smashes the CIA into little tiny pieces.
Why? Because the US military is in its most easily defeatable state ever - they haven't won a
war in generations, their generals are armchair soldiers most who have never seen combat, and
they have a fondness for massively overpriced technological pieces of MIC enriching garbage
for weapons. The CIA owns the media, and without an effective propaganda arm, the military
will only ever face another Vietnam.
On the topic of losing generals I'm reminded of Harry Truman. A couple of Truman quotes:
"It's the fellows who go to West Point and are trained to think they're gods in uniform that
I plan to take apart". . ."I didn't fire him [General MacArthur] because he was a dumb son of
a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to
three quarters of them would be in jail."
> It's worse now. Most generals got where they are by sucking up, not performing.
> Donald Trump is no Harry Truman, for sure.
Remember CNN? That fake MSM outlet that never tells the truth? Well, they have been skewering Kelly since he ran his mouth about that Florida
congresswoman. So have the other outlets. Huckabee-Sanders is now something of a national
joke after her comments. Kelly's shit doesn't hold up and he's been called out
repeatedly. "It is now "highly inappropriate" to even question the Junta that rules over the
empire." Bullshit.
Look in the Twitter archives and you will find a counter-tweet for almost anything Trump
says, including one criticizing four-star general Colin Powell...
"The slogan and symbol of the campaign was similar to the German "Deutschland Über
Alles" campaign of 1933."
This is once again typical anti-German propaganda that was used to get both WWI and WWII
started, and is now being used against Putin and Russia as well as nationalists across Europe
and the Anglo world. In 1933 France still had control of the Saar and the Rhineland, Germany
was saddled with monumental war debts, and Hitler was clearly not running a campaign on the
slogan "Germany should rule the world", which is what the Anglo-Zionist narrative would have
us believe. The meaning "Über Alles" was clearly "Germany First". That means look out
for the German people first. The Weimar government clearly wasn't doing this. Call it
Hitler's "MAGA".
The real truth is that it is this same US military industrial complex who worked for
Roosevelt, Churchill, and their Zionist masters to get the second world war started, and who
now are desperate for a third. They are sadistic, murdering globalists. Hitler was a
nationalist. He never planned to rule the world the same way the Zionists already do, as is
evidenced by the never ending strife in the Middle East, and their ongoing tribal civil war
which is also being waged within the US government.
This tribal civil war is also spilling over into places like Las Vegas, which clearly is
run by the Jewish Mafia. There still is no plausible motive given for the shooting incident,
but we know that the owners of MGM would never willingly have allowed this to happen on their
own property. So it clearly was a hit, and with Area 51 down the road and all the MIC
contractors in Vegas, it is highly unlikely that they were not involved or at least aware of
the operation.
Here is a LV company where for $3500 you can fly around the desert in a Helicopter
shooting up targets with a SAW-249.
The original meaning of "Deutschland über alles" came about in the early 1800's when
there was no united Germany: it meant that there should be a united Germany above all the
minor German states, duchies and principalities that existed at the time.
For those who want to avoid being datamined by nhs, the original link about "Why Donald Trump
is the perfect tool in the hands of neocons right now" is here: https://failedevolution.blogspot.com/
"One of the soldiers who were killed in Niger while "teaching how to respect human rights"
was a 39 year old "chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist" with "more than
a dozen awards and decorations".
The U.S. military sent a highly qualified WMD specialist on a "routine patrol" in Niger to
teach local soldiers "to respect human rights" due to which presumably "the well-being of the
American people" would be "sufficiently enhanced"?" It's all about the uranium in Agades, then?
Trump is either very gullible and ignorant (most likely) or he is diabolically clever.
Everything he does - every action, every appointment, every utterance - could not be better
formulated to undermine the Zioamerican empire. Which is kind of what he promised to do.
The brazen arrogance of these jerks like Kelly is stupefying. Infuriatingly shameless.
The guy has never done an honest day's work IN HIS LIFE, has had his snout in the public
trough continuously and has materially contributed to the ruination of his country. STFU you
stupid twat. He is also a scumbag that no doubt had a lot to do with his son's demise -
imagine being this a-hole's son?
These clowns call themselves "General" and we are supposed to think that puts them in the
same class as a Wellington or a Caesar or Napoleon? They were all first class bastards,
ruthless, but fine Generals. Tough, bold, audacious leaders of men and brilliant strategists,
who took risks, including with their own lives. Hell, the Prussian officer training system
turned out Quartermasters that were better field Generals than these American frauds.
As I have said in another thread, the US has none of the martial virtues. Not as a people,
not as military institutions, not as individual soldiers or sailors (their airmen are
obviously cowards or psychopaths so not necessary even to consider in this context). Virtues
such as steadfastness in adversity, discipline when under fire, self-sacrifice for comrades
and the cause. Not saying anything about the morality of any particular cause here, just what
makes a professional army. To compare the US military with Rome's Legions, say, is laughable.
The biggest difference between these American whackers is that in real armies individuals are
expected to be able to contend with a worthy adversary. To take risks. To fight when it is
HARD to fight. Even Rome's patricians understood that every now and then they had to expose
themselves to danger if they were to have any honour, as Crassus, richest of them all, found
out very dramatically when he met his end at the head of the Syrian Legions. (Defeated by the
Iranians! - they've seen 'em all come and go). Windbags like Kelly wouldn't know what honour
is.
The US has NEVER fought an adversary on anything like equal terms. They preen themselves
about WW2. I call BS. They waited until the Soviets had broken the back of the most fearsome
war machine in history, the Wehrmacht and then faced teenagers and old men in France. On the
occasions when they did face professional German troops they had their whiney arses kicked.
As for the Pacific war, they stood off island after island and rained a stupendous amount of
naval shells and bombs on the Japanese garrisons to the point where they were insane with the
cacophany and pure physical terror to turn your bowels to water, before setting foot on them,
while the aerial destruction of Japanese cities is one of the great atrocities in history,
disgraceful and completely without honour. I suspect a disproportionate number of US military
casualties are due to being run over by a forklift, training accidents, friendly fire,
syphilis or fragging of their own.
The qualities the US military (they don't deserve the epithet "army") exemplifies are
cowardice, incompetence, viciousness and wanton destructiveness. No wonder, as the corruption
(plenty of fiscal as well as moral) starts at the top with the Kellys and drips down like a
putrid slime from there.
He and his ilk are just a bunch of murderous bags of human excrement. No decent person can
have anything but contempt for them.
It is little surprise if a junta has taken over. Many Democrats would support a military
junta over Trump. Now we are hearing similar calls from Republicans.
One of the latest is this opinion piece by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post
from October 12, 2017:
Republicans, it's time to panic The Washington Examiner has a short
summary:
Michael Gerson, who's also a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote in an op-ed Friday
that "the security of our country -- and potentially the lives of millions of people abroad
-- depends on Trump being someone else entirely."
"The time for whispered criticisms and quiet snickering is over. The time for panic and
decision is upon us. The thin line of sane, responsible advisers at the White House -- such
as Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson -- could break at any moment," Gerson wrote. "The American government now has a
dangerous fragility at its very center. Its welfare is as thin as an eggshell -- perhaps as
thin as Donald Trump's skin."
The op-ed comes amid Trump's feud with Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who warned that the
president's reckless threats could lead to "World War III."
"I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it's a situation of trying
to contain him," Corker told the New York Times.
At this point in history to be US president is to be a criminal.
An "autonomous" US president has not existed at least since JFK, perhaps not since
Lincoln. Kelley, like his boss, routinely "clowns" the media, and however unctuous Kelley's remarks
are, they fit into that mode.
Our generals are weak men. If they weren't, they wouldn't need a Trump, or a whatever to
run for office and win that office.
They can't run and win any better than they can conduct warfare as a rational means to a
rational end; and as the post eloquently points out, again: they are experts at rape, murder,
war crimes, mayhem and destruction. The ubiquitous propaganda to hide that is all they have
that saves them from the penal colony where they belong.
Their project to rule the world would be as successful as any "they destroyed it in order
to save it" attempts.
MG's fragmented consciousness permit her to be rational at times, and irresponsible at
others.
re: Presiding over a population of detainees not charged or convicted of crimes, over whom
he had maximum custodial control, Kelly treated them with brutality. . .
The US needed go show progress in the "war on terror" and one way was to accumulate some
prisoners of the "war." CIA operatives were sent to the tribal areas of Afghanistan &
Pakistan with cash to entice "bounty hunters." It was easy, because every tribal chief had
enemies, which he would capture and present for a big payoff. So the Guantanamo (Gitmo)
prison was set up in Cuba and soon accumulated 7-800 "detainees" who were bullied and
tortured.
None of them were tried because there was no evidence they had done anything wrong.
The Supreme Court ruled that they should have a judicial process but (except a few cases) it
was never done. Most of the prisoners detainees were released, including a
13 yo boy and a 92 yo man, and about 200 remained. I guess it's less now.
Meanwhile the
Washington politicians were able to crow about all those dangerous people in Gitmo, and
prattle about the "recidivism" danger if and when they would be released. What were they
supposed to do, forgive and forget all the terrible treatment they had received?? So yes,
Kelly is scum, but that's not unusual for a general.
The ground work, or state-of-affairs that lead to what one might call a soft military coup in
the US (see b) = within what, at one extreme could be called Ayn-Randian rabid individualism,
and at the other a sort of neo-liberal capitalism which is nevertheless highly 'socialist' in
the sense re-distributive from the center of power (if only to create a slave/subservient
class and prevent uprisings), there is NO public space for 'solidarity' within (besides
familial, or close, etc.)
Therefore, the belonging or 'solidarity' is activated only facing an outside enemy who is
personalised as e.g. communist, ugly dictator, intends to attack the US, poisons babies, etc.
That gives the military an edge.. Then natch, historically, dying empires invest in the
double prong, military conquest + internal control (can be vicious), ain't flash news.
.... I don't think it is all that clear. Corps or better conglomerates of power like 'the
media', the 'silicons', banking and finance, Energy, electronics, Big Pharma, etc. are
politcally inclined (say!) to some form of corporate fascism, > bought pols from all-sides
of any-aisle. Their ties to the military / milit. type power at home are not very strong,
they may collaborate on occasion. Some of these 'industries' fear domination that goes beyond
soft power and they loathe sanctions - think about who/what/how is doing lucrative deals and
has continuing biz success in Iraq, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, etc. - NOT US cos./corps.
To me this looks more like total disorganisation than anything else.
First, if the only two choices were the Executive CIA and the Military "Junta" with Trump
why would we continue the farce of elections? And if the elections were pre-determined and
the ruling Junta took over in a coup, then how and why is the CIA out of power?
Secondly, same question will be here for you when a) the military and Trump get booted
with impeachment, or b) when the next election comes.
Van Morrison once penned "politics, superstition and religion go hand in hand." It never
fails, those out of power go from being logical, critical thinkers to becoming outlandish
bores who exaggerate things and fabricate what they see. It's called delusion.
@J 49 The "farce of elections" is accurate because Trump is not doing what he claimed he would do,
not unusual actually. It was Trump who sprang the "junta" on us. And who claimed that the CIA
would be out of power?
Kelly: So why were they there? They're there working with partners, local -- all across
Africa -- in this case, Niger -- working with partners, teaching them how to be better
soldiers; teaching them how to respect human rights
These guys didn't die teaching, nor in combat in Niger, they were (according to news
reports) trying to track down an accomplice of one Abu Adnan al-Sahraoui. In other words they
were doing police work in a foreign country, an absolutely ridiculous task which they were
not trained or able to do and which put their lives needlessly in danger. This criticism
applies to the whole "war on terror" which has proven to be a tragic farce (if there can be
such a thing).
I used to think it was a counter-coup also. But sheep-dog Sanders and Trump's having
supported Hillary in 2008 among other things caused me to conclude that it all
bullshit. I now believe that the hyper-partisanship is just a show. The political system in the
US is designed to prevent any real populist from gaining power. We are being played. Trump is the Republican Obama.
I really think that this is the case in this instance. Trump is bellicose and erratic. In
the realm of foreign policy and military, it yielded one positive change: his obsession with
ISIS led to huge decrease of fighting between "moderate opposition" in Syria with "SAA and
allies", allowing the latter to effectively reduce the territory controlled by ISIS,
similarly, Obama's efforts to sideline "sectarian forces trained by Iran" from fighting with
ISIS were apparently abandoned with similar effect. But otherwise, no "reset" with Russia,
clown show concerning the nuclear program of North Korea, berating allies who spend
insufficiently to fight threats that they do not have, increasing domestic military budget
(again, to fight threats that we do not have) and so on. Formation of the new axis of evil,
North Korea, Iran and Venezuela is a notable novelty.
Trump was so contradictory is his campaign statements that it is almost amazing that ANY
positive element can be discerned. At the time, I paid attention to his praises of John
Bolton, a proud walrus-American who communicates using bellowing, in other words, resembles a
walrus both in the way he looks, but also in the way he speaks.
Needless to say, Dotard in Chief can exercise power only through underlings that may try
to make sense of what he says. In some cases, like reforming American healthcare according to
his promises, this is flatly impossible. So generals are seemingly in the same position, and
of course, when in doubt, they do what they would do anyway.
Not that I am any more or less in the loop than any of these fine commenters, but what pops
into my mind when reading of the ambush of the four special forces servicemen is the crash of
the helicopter that took out so many of the seal team six who supposedly took out Osama.
Maybe they knew too much would be my guess. Why else would they put such a knowledgable
specialist out on the perimeter? Makes no sense. Offing your own is part and parcel in the
military. Heroes of convenience.
What seems to have been lost in the discussion is what exactly the "counter-coup" is all
about.
1. During the Obama years, "successes" like Lybia and Ukraine were matched by "failures"
like the lost proxy war for Syria and pushing Russia into the arms of China. The new 'Cold
War' makes US nationalism more important as 'hot' conflicts become more likely.
2. Obama/Clinton-led civilian authority was abusing power to promote an "Empire-first"
vision of governance, Obama/Clinton:
>> replaced/retired many military officers;
>> placed US resources/forces in a support role ("leading from behind")
;
>> grew a 'radical center' (aka "Third Way") that sought to undermine traditional
nationalist/patriotism via immigration and divisive 'wedge issues'.
The excuse for this was that while US hands were tied (because public wouldn't support
further adventurism after Iraq) close allies could push forward. But the new Cold War has
changed the calculus.
The US isn't giving up on Empire. It's just a different type of Empire for a different
type of environment. When Trump talks about "draining the swamp" I think he merely refers to
foreign influence.
So Trump pivots US policy based on Obama's record (as Obama did off Bush's record), and
the next President will pivot off Trump's record, but the direction is always the same.
Trump has one ally and that is the 65million voters who put him into office.
He surrendered his top people.
Saker says it was lack of character.
I think when they point the gun at you, your family, your closest friends in your life, you
acquiesce. They even took from him Keith Schiller, his personal security man for years. Kelly forced
him out of the WH.
Trump is powerless except when he functions as Leader of the rallies. As President, even
with the cabal running the Oval Office, they all are limited by the Shadow Government, Deep
State, IC, Khazarian Matrix. No President is a free man empowered to act.
He now is focused on what is possible. Perhaps that will be a tax cut and a few more SC
justices and a few score of judges for the fed district courts. Those don't interfere with
Financial Power and MIC and the Hegemony of Empire.
There is one hope. Putin + Xi.
And we know the limits they face.
Inside the Tyranny of American government, there is no hope. During the Trump time Putin
and Xi have to make the most of the Swamp creating their own problems. It is that moment of
opportunity, though it looks bleak.
One thing for certain, the US military does not want a direct war. It wants more of these
terror conflicts. Africa will become huge over the next few years. Graham is already selling
it big. Trillions of dollars is what is the goal.
SE Asia and Africa are the new big "markets" for MIC. ISIS/AQ are the product. War is the
service industry being sold as the "solution".
The Long War of anti-terror is the scam Smedley Butler told us about in the thirties.
-- Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not
what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It
is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over
here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns
6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the
flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the
bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and
the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has
its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men"
to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels
me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of
this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned
ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my
time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In
short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the
members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service.
My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups.
This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I
helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues
in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of
Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long.
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in
1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic
for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went
its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket.
Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could
do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
On the bright side, members of Congress are at least nominally elected. Four star Generals,
not so much. It's still a felony carrying a prison term of 5 to 10 years per incident to lie
to Congress.
The military have no precedent to recommend them either as a source of information or in
their decision making ability. They are way out of their depth when it comes to administering
a nation.
In none of their unwarranted invasions (all the result of bad information and poor judgment)
of other nations have they been successful the day after the bombs stopped falling.
IDIOTS!!! you forget the fact that if clinton won you would first be glowing GREEN and now
dead. On Oct 16th 2016 Putin said "if hillary wins its WW3" on you tube. guess what we are
alive and have to deal with that taxevader trump. we will survive!
The time has long passed since one can ignore JFK's failed insistence on the inspections
of the illegal Israeli nuclear weapons program at Dimona, and then his sudden death.
Factoring Israel into the equation greatly simplifies understanding the make-up of the Warren
Commission, LBJ's about turn on the relation to the illegal nuclear weapons program and his
reaction to the attack on the Liberty, and the evolution of US politics more generally.
One would be more pressed to argue why one thinks it is not a primary cause.
We voted for change and as usual, we got more of the same. All I can say is thank God it's
not Hillary in the White House. At least Trump's not spoiling for a war with Russia.
Democracy has been dead in America for a long time. I'd rather Kelly run the country than
Hillary Clinton. She would have us all annihilated in a war with Russia and China
It's going to be hard to fight a junta. The military is at least halfway competent, something
that can't be said for either the administration or congress. Look at this latest flap - on
the one side you have Wilson the rodeo clown, on the other you have Trump, who can't resist
the urge to pop off on twitter.
Then you have Kelly, who at least comes off like an adult.
Before people start pointing to all the nefarious things the military is doing, let me just
say I'm talking about perception.
Good post sans the Africa bit. They are having a tough time explaining the Niger debacle
to people. I don't think African conflicts have the same glamorous draw as MENA conflicts.
Once the economy goes to shit, it will be an even tougher sell.
Trump is walking a narrow line. He has not brought us into a war with either Russia or
NoKo...yet. This deserves some praise. The media blitz against Trump has always had a twofold
reasoning behind it: it puts pressure on his ego to acquiesce and, two, if he doesn't, the
public has been inoculated against feeling too bad when a lone-gunmen puts a bullet in his
brain. I guess if you believe that, as I do, it explains why even a bumbling policy is a
positive aspect of a Trump presidency, instead of the true-believer approach from Hillary and
her ilk. There really is no other choice. It's either war or watch the empire crumble. The
true believers might have chosen the former, but President Trump, I believe, has sabotaged
that possibility. So take all the Trump-bashers in here with a grain or salt. They are asking
for the stars, but watching the empire's police implode suits me just fine.
"But the white supremacists...KKK!" What a fucking joke.
Moon of Alabama always writes interesting and insightful critiques of the Deep State, the
military, and the imperialist/war party, but falls flat on his face in his naive faith in the
supposed anti-establishment, populist, and America First Nationalist proclivities of Donald
Trump, and his arch-reactionary Svengali Steve Bannon. There is indeed at least one major
split in the ranks of the ruling class, but to present Trump and Bannon as either valiant
figures struggling for the national good, or noble isolated men surrounded by vipers and
traitors is absurd.
Now, in its late imperial decline, the U.S. has become unable to continue to exercise
hegemony, the way it became accustomed to in the first 70+ years in the Post-WW 2 period. The
number one Client/Ally/Master, Israel and their deeply embedded 5th Column in the U.S., the
Zionists with their associated Pro-Zionist factions within the War Party, now nearly directly
and openly controls U.S. foreign policy and military actions in the regions that the Likudnik
faction in Israel cares about (i.e. the Levant, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa).
Hollowed out economically and industrially the U.S. Empire is clearly on the way out. The
various factions fighting for control of policy seem to be oblivious to this basic fact. The
actual situation is similar to that the U.S. participated in during period from the late
1800s - WW 2; the declining hegemon accustomed to calling the shots in international affairs
(then the British Empire, now the U.S.), ends up overextended and committed in far too many
areas, with declining resources and domestic solidarity to dedicate to the tasks; the rising
hegemon (then the U.S. now China) is still focused on issues of internal and external
economic development and the exercise of regional power. China is already either equal in
power to the U.S. or more powerful and will only continue to grow in power as the U.S.
continues to decline. The Israelis/Zionists fully realize that the U.S. would not survive
another disastrous war (like the air war they want the U.S. to wage against Iran, the U.S.
does not have the capability to conduct a land war against Iran) intact. They are willing to
try to force the issue to achieve one more step in their plan to establish "Eretz Israel"
whose territory would extend from the Nile to the Euphrates and from the Sinai to Turkey.
Their plans are just as crazy as those of the NeoCons and the NeoLiberals and their endless
disastrous wars; and Trump/Bannon are their agents in the U.S.
"... The answer to the question in the title of this article is that Russiagate was created by CIA director John Brennan.The CIA started what is called Russiagate in order to prevent Trump from being able to normalize relations with Russia. The CIA and the military/security complex need an enemy in order to justify their huge budgets and unaccountable power. Russia has been assigned that role. The Democrats joined in as a way of attacking Trump. They hoped to have him tarnished as cooperating with Russia to steal the presidential election from Hillary and to have him impeached. I don't think the Democrats have considered the consequence of further worsening the relations between the US and Russia. ..."
"... Russia bashing became more intense when Washington's coup in Ukraine failed to deliver Crimea. Washington had intended for the new Ukrainian regime to evict the Russians from their naval base on the Black Sea. This goal was frustrated when Crimea voted to rejoin Russia. ..."
"... The neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony requires the principal goal of US foreign policy to be to prevent the rise of other countries that can serve as a restraint on US unilateralism. This is the main basis for the hostility of US foreign policy toward Russia, and of course there also is the material interests of the military/security complex. ..."
"... Washington is fully aware that there was no Russian interference in the presidential election or in the state elections. The military/security complex, the neoconservatives, and the Democratic Party are merely using the accusations to serve their own agendas. ..."
The answer to the question in the title of this article is that Russiagate was created
by CIA director John Brennan.The CIA started what is called Russiagate in order to prevent
Trump from being able to normalize relations with Russia. The CIA and the military/security
complex need an enemy in order to justify their huge budgets and unaccountable power. Russia
has been assigned that role. The Democrats joined in as a way of attacking Trump. They hoped to
have him tarnished as cooperating with Russia to steal the presidential election from Hillary
and to have him impeached. I don't think the Democrats have considered the consequence of
further worsening the relations between the US and Russia.
Public Russia bashing pre-dates Trump. It has been going on privately in neoconservative
circles for years, but appeared publicly during the Obama regime when Russia blocked
Washington's plans to invade Syria and to bomb Iran.
Russia bashing became more intense when Washington's coup in Ukraine failed to deliver
Crimea. Washington had intended for the new Ukrainian regime to evict the Russians from their
naval base on the Black Sea. This goal was frustrated when Crimea voted to rejoin
Russia.
The neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony requires the principal goal of US
foreign policy to be to prevent the rise of other countries that can serve as a restraint on US
unilateralism. This is the main basis for the hostility of US foreign policy toward Russia, and
of course there also is the material interests of the military/security complex.
Russia bashing is much larger than merely Russiagate. The danger lies in Washington
convincing Russia that Washington is planning a surprise attack on Russia. With US and NATO
bases on Russia's borders, efforts to arm Ukraine and to include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO
provide more evidence that Washington is surrounding Russia for attack. There is nothing more
reckless and irresponsible than convincing a nuclear power that you are going to attack.
Washington is fully aware that there was no Russian interference in the presidential
election or in the state elections. The military/security complex, the neoconservatives, and
the Democratic Party are merely using the accusations to serve their own agendas.
These selfish agendas are a dire threat to life on earth.
"... Thus, you have the current hysteria over Russia's supposed "aggression" in Ukraine when the crisis was actually provoked by the West, including by U.S. neocons who helped create today's humanitarian crisis in eastern Ukraine that they now cynically blame on Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... But these were largely ad hoc efforts. A more comprehensive "public diplomacy" operation took shape beginning in 1982 when Raymond, a 30-year veteran of CIA clandestine services, was transferred to the NSC. ..."
"... A slight, soft-spoken New Yorker who reminded some of a character from a John le Carré spy novel, Raymond was an intelligence officer who "easily fades into the woodwork," according to one acquaintance. But Raymond would become the sparkplug for this high-powered propaganda network, according to a draft chapter of the Iran-Contra report. ..."
"... But things were about to change. In a Jan. 13, 1983, memo, NSC Advisor Clark foresaw the need for non-governmental money to advance this cause. "We will develop a scenario for obtaining private funding," Clark wrote. (Just five days later, President Reagan personally welcomed media magnate Rupert Murdoch into the Oval Office for a private meeting, according to records on file at the Reagan library.) ..."
"... As administration officials reached out to wealthy supporters, lines against domestic propaganda soon were crossed as the operation took aim not only at foreign audiences but at U.S. public opinion, the press and congressional Democrats who opposed funding the Nicaraguan Contras. ..."
"... At the time, the Contras were earning a gruesome reputation as human rights violators and terrorists. To change this negative perception of the Contras as well as of the U.S.-backed regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, the Reagan administration created a full-blown, clandestine propaganda network. ..."
"... Rupert Murdoch's media empire is bigger than ever, but his neocon messaging barely stands out as distinctive, given how the neocons also have gained control of the editorial and foreign-reporting sections of the Washington Post, the New York Times and virtually every other major news outlet. For instance, the demonizing of Russian President Putin is now so total that no honest person could look at those articles and see anything approaching objective or evenhanded journalism. Yet, no one loses a job over this lack of professionalism. ..."
"... Reagan actually has two sides as he was portrayed on SNL, the nice grandfatherly side, and the mafia boss warmonger side. He managed to use the media to display his nice side. ..."
"... Studies estimate that between 100K and 150K Nam vets have committed suicide since the war. There are many reasons why but I suspect a goodly number did so when they couldn't handle the knowledge of how they had been used. I'm careful about who in my "peers" I enlighten. ..."
"... It's painful to watch any western MSM. It's all through our sports and entertainment programming to the point of madness. The wreckage caused by our "leaders" across the earth's face, in our name, IS evil. ..."
"... Studies estimate that between 100K and 150K Nam vets have committed suicide since the war. There are many reasons why but I suspect a goodly number did so when they couldn't handle the knowledge of how they had been used. I'm careful about who in my "peers" I enlighten. ..."
Special Report: In the 1980s, the Reagan administration pioneered "perception management" to
get the American people to "kick the Vietnam Syndrome" and accept more U.S. interventionism,
but that propaganda structure continues to this day getting the public to buy into endless war,
writes Robert Parry.
To understand how the American people find themselves trapped in today's Orwellian dystopia
of endless warfare against an ever-shifting collection of "evil" enemies, you have to think
back to the Vietnam War and the shock to the ruling elite caused by an unprecedented popular
uprising against that war.
While on the surface Official Washington pretended that the mass protests didn't change
policy, a panicky reality existed behind the scenes, a recognition that a major investment in
domestic propaganda would be needed to ensure that future imperial adventures would have the
public's eager support or at least its confused acquiescence.
President Ronald Reagan meeting with media magnate Rupert Murdoch in the Oval Office on Jan.
18, 1983, with Charles Wick, director of the U.S. Information Agency, in the background. (Photo
credit: Reagan presidential library)
This commitment to what the insiders called "perception management" began in earnest with
the Reagan administration in the 1980s but it would come to be the accepted practice of all
subsequent administrations, including the present one of President Barack Obama.
In that sense, propaganda in pursuit of foreign policy goals would trump the democratic
ideal of an informed electorate. The point would be not to honestly inform the American people
about events around the world but to manage their perceptions by ramping up fear in some cases
and defusing outrage in others depending on the U.S. government's needs.
Thus, you have the current
hysteria over Russia's supposed "aggression" in Ukraine when the crisis was actually
provoked by the West, including by U.S. neocons who helped create today's humanitarian crisis
in eastern Ukraine that they now cynically blame on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Yet, many of these same U.S. foreign policy operatives outraged over Russia's limited
intervention to protect ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are demanding
that President Obama launch an air war against the Syrian military as a "humanitarian"
intervention there.
In other words, if the Russians act to shield ethnic Russians on their border who are being
bombarded by a coup regime in Kiev that was installed with U.S. support, the Russians are the
villains blamed for the thousands of civilian deaths, even though the vast majority of the
casualties have been inflicted by
the Kiev regime from indiscriminate bombing and from dispatching neo-Nazi militias to do
the street fighting.
In Ukraine, the exigent circumstances don't matter, including the violent overthrow of the
constitutionally elected president last February. It's all about white hats for the current
Kiev regime and black hats for the ethnic Russians and especially for Putin.
But an entirely different set of standards has applied to Syria where a U.S.-backed
rebellion, which included violent Sunni jihadists from the start, wore the white hats and the
relatively secular Syrian government, which has responded with excessive violence of its own,
wears the black hats. But a problem to that neat dichotomy arose when one of the major Sunni
rebel forces, the Islamic State, started seizing Iraqi territory and beheading Westerners.
Faced with those grisly scenes, President Obama authorized bombing the Islamic State forces
in both Iraq and Syria, but neocons and other U.S. hardliners have been hectoring Obama to go
after their preferred target, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, despite the risk that
destroying the Syrian military could open the gates of Damascus to the Islamic State or
al-Qaeda's Nusra Front.
Lost on the Dark Side
You might think that the American public would begin to rebel against these messy entangling
alliances with the 1984 -like demonizing of one new "enemy" after another. Not only
have these endless wars drained trillions of dollars from the U.S. taxpayers, they have led to
the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops and to the tarnishing of America's image from the
attendant evils of war, including a lengthy detour into the "dark side" of torture,
assassinations and "collateral" killings of children and other innocents.
But that is where the history of "perception management" comes in, the need to keep the
American people compliant and confused. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration was determined
to "kick the Vietnam Syndrome," the revulsion that many Americans felt for warfare after all
those years in the blood-soaked jungles of Vietnam and all the lies that clumsily justified the
war.
So, the challenge for the U.S. government became: how to present the actions of "enemies"
always in the darkest light while bathing the behavior of the U.S. "side" in a rosy glow. You
also had to stage this propaganda theater in an ostensibly "free country" with a supposedly
"independent press."
From documents declassified or leaked over the past several decades, including an
unpublished draft chapter of the congressional Iran-Contra investigation, we now know a
great deal about how this remarkable project was undertaken and who the key players were.
Perhaps not surprisingly much of the initiative came from the Central Intelligence Agency,
which housed the expertise for manipulating target populations through propaganda and
disinformation. The only difference this time would be that the American people would be the
target population.
For this project, Ronald Reagan's CIA Director William J. Casey sent his top propaganda
specialist Walter Raymond Jr. to the National Security Council staff to manage the inter-agency
task forces that would brainstorm and coordinate this "public diplomacy" strategy.
Many of the old intelligence operatives, including Casey and Raymond, are now dead, but
other influential Washington figures who were deeply involved by these strategies remain, such
as neocon stalwart Robert Kagan, whose first major job in Washington was as chief of Reagan's
State Department Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America.
Now a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist at the Washington Post, Kagan
remains an expert in presenting foreign policy initiatives within the "good guy/bad guy" frames
that he learned in the 1980s. He is also the husband of Assistant Secretary of State for
European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who oversaw the overthrow of Ukraine's elected President
Viktor Yanukovych last February amid a very effective U.S. propaganda strategy.
During the Reagan years, Kagan worked closely on propaganda schemes with Elliott Abrams,
then the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America. After getting convicted and then
pardoned in the Iran-Contra scandal, Abrams reemerged on President George W. Bush's National
Security Council handling Middle East issues, including the Iraq War, and later "global
democracy strategy." Abrams is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
These and other neocons were among the most diligent students learning the art of
"perception management" from the likes of Raymond and Casey, but those propaganda skills have
spread much more widely as "public diplomacy" and "information warfare" have now become an
integral part of every U.S. foreign policy initiative.
A Propaganda Bureaucracy
Declassified documents now reveal how extensive Reagan's propaganda project became with
inter-agency task forces assigned to develop "themes" that would push American "hot buttons."
Scores of documents came out during the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987 and hundreds more are now
available at the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California.
What the documents reveal is that at the start of the Reagan administration, CIA Director
Casey faced a daunting challenge in trying to rally public opinion behind aggressive U.S.
interventions, especially in Central America. Bitter memories of the Vietnam War were still
fresh and many Americans were horrified at the brutality of right-wing regimes in Guatemala and
El Salvador, where Salvadoran soldiers raped and murdered four American churchwomen in December
1980.
The new leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua also was not viewed with much alarm.
After all, Nicaragua was an impoverished country of only about three million people who had
just cast off the brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.
So, Reagan's initial strategy of bolstering the Salvadoran and Guatemalan armies required
defusing the negative publicity about them and somehow rallying the American people into
supporting a covert CIA intervention inside Nicaragua via a counterrevolutionary force known as
the Contras led by Somoza's ex-National Guard officers.
Reagan's task was made tougher by the fact that the Cold War's anti-communist arguments had
so recently been discredited in Vietnam. As deputy assistant secretary to the Air Force, J.
Michael Kelly, put it, "the most critical special operations mission we have is to persuade the
American people that the communists are out to get us."
At the same time, the White House worked to weed out American reporters who uncovered facts
that undercut the desired public images. As part of that effort, the administration attacked
New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner for disclosing the Salvadoran regime's massacre of
about 800 men, women and children in the village of El Mozote in northeast El Salvador in
December 1981. Accuracy in Media and conservative news organizations, such as The Wall Street
Journal's editorial page, joined in pummeling Bonner, who was soon ousted from his job.
But these were largely ad hoc efforts. A more comprehensive "public diplomacy" operation
took shape beginning in 1982 when Raymond, a 30-year veteran of CIA clandestine services, was
transferred to the NSC.
A slight, soft-spoken New Yorker who reminded some of a character from a John le
Carré spy novel, Raymond was an intelligence officer who "easily fades into the
woodwork," according to one acquaintance. But Raymond would become the sparkplug for this
high-powered propaganda network, according to a draft chapter of the Iran-Contra report.
Though the draft chapter didn't use Raymond's name in its opening pages, apparently because
some of the information came from classified depositions, Raymond's name was used later in the
chapter and the earlier citations matched Raymond's known role. According to the draft report,
the CIA officer who was recruited for the NSC job had served as Director of the Covert Action
Staff at the CIA from 1978 to 1982 and was a "specialist in propaganda and disinformation."
"The CIA official [Raymond] discussed the transfer with [CIA Director] Casey and NSC Advisor
William Clark that he be assigned to the NSC as [Donald] Gregg's successor [as coordinator of
intelligence operations in June 1982] and received approval for his involvement in setting up
the public diplomacy program along with his intelligence responsibilities," the chapter
said.
"In the early part of 1983, documents obtained by the Select [Iran-Contra] Committees
indicate that the Director of the Intelligence Staff of the NSC [Raymond] successfully
recommended the establishment of an inter-governmental network to promote and manage a public
diplomacy plan designed to create support for Reagan Administration policies at home and
abroad."
During his Iran-Contra deposition, Raymond explained the need for this propaganda structure,
saying: "We were not configured effectively to deal with the war of ideas."
One reason for this shortcoming was that federal law forbade taxpayers' money from being
spent on domestic propaganda or grassroots lobbying to pressure congressional representatives.
Of course, every president and his team had vast resources to make their case in public, but by
tradition and law, they were restricted to speeches, testimony and one-on-one persuasion of
lawmakers.
But things were about to change. In a Jan. 13, 1983, memo, NSC Advisor Clark foresaw the
need for non-governmental money to advance this cause. "We will develop a scenario for
obtaining private funding," Clark wrote. (Just five days later, President Reagan personally
welcomed media magnate Rupert Murdoch into the Oval Office for a private meeting, according to
records on file at the Reagan library.)
As administration officials reached out to wealthy supporters, lines against domestic
propaganda soon were crossed as the operation took aim not only at foreign audiences but at
U.S. public opinion, the press and congressional Democrats who opposed funding the Nicaraguan
Contras.
At the time, the Contras were earning a gruesome reputation as human rights violators and
terrorists. To change this negative perception of the Contras as well as of the U.S.-backed
regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, the Reagan administration created a full-blown,
clandestine propaganda network.
In January 1983, President Reagan took the first formal step to create this unprecedented
peacetime propaganda bureaucracy by signing National Security Decision Directive 77, entitled
"Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security." Reagan deemed it "necessary to
strengthen the organization, planning and coordination of the various aspects of public
diplomacy of the United States Government."
Reagan ordered the creation of a special planning group within the National Security Council
to direct these "public diplomacy" campaigns. The planning group would be headed by the CIA's
Walter Raymond Jr. and one of its principal arms would be a new Office of Public Diplomacy for
Latin America, housed at the State Department but under the control of the NSC.
CIA Taint
Worried about the legal prohibition barring the CIA from engaging in domestic propaganda,
Raymond formally resigned from the CIA in April 1983, so, he said, "there would be no question
whatsoever of any contamination of this." But Raymond continued to act toward the U.S. public
much like a CIA officer would in directing a propaganda operation in a hostile foreign
country.
Raymond fretted, too, about the legality of Casey's ongoing involvement. Raymond confided in
one memo that it was important "to get [Casey] out of the loop," but Casey never backed off and
Raymond continued to send progress reports to his old boss well into 1986. It was "the kind of
thing which [Casey] had a broad catholic interest in," Raymond shrugged during his Iran-Contra
deposition. He then offered the excuse that Casey undertook this apparently illegal
interference in domestic politics "not so much in his CIA hat, but in his adviser to the
president hat."
As a result of Reagan's decision directive, "an elaborate system of inter-agency committees
was eventually formed and charged with the task of working closely with private groups and
individuals involved in fundraising, lobbying campaigns and propagandistic activities aimed at
influencing public opinion and governmental action," the draft Iran-Contra chapter said. "This
effort resulted in the creation of the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the
Caribbean in the Department of State (S/LPD), headed by Otto Reich," a right-wing Cuban exile
from Miami.
Though Secretary of State George Shultz wanted the office under his control, President
Reagan insisted that Reich "report directly to the NSC," where Raymond oversaw the operations
as a special assistant to the President and the NSC's director of international communications,
the chapter said.
"Reich relied heavily on Raymond to secure personnel transfers from other government
agencies to beef up the limited resources made available to S/LPD by the Department of State,"
the chapter said. "Personnel made available to the new office included intelligence specialists
from the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army. On one occasion, five intelligence experts from the
Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, were assigned to work
with Reich's fast-growing operation."
A "public diplomacy strategy paper," dated May 5, 1983, summed up the administration's
problem. "As far as our Central American policy is concerned, the press perceives that: the USG
[U.S. government] is placing too much emphasis on a military solution, as well as being allied
with inept, right-wing governments and groups. The focus on Nicaragua [is] on the alleged
U.S.-backed 'covert' war against the Sandinistas. Moreover, the opposition is widely perceived
as being led by former Somozistas."
The administration's difficulty with most of these press perceptions was that they were
correct. But the strategy paper recommended ways to influence various groups of Americans to
"correct" the impressions anyway, removing what another planning document called "perceptional
obstacles."
"Themes will obviously have to be tailored to the target audience," the strategy paper
said.
Casey's Hand
As the Reagan administration struggled to manage public perceptions, CIA Director Casey kept
his personal hand in the effort. On one muggy day in August 1983, Casey convened a meeting of
Reagan administration officials and five leading ad executives at the Old Executive Office
Building next to the White House to come up with ideas for selling Reagan's Central American
policies to the American people.
Earlier that day, a national security aide had warmed the P.R. men to their task with dire
predictions that leftist governments would send waves of refugees into the United States and
cynically flood America with drugs. The P.R. executives jotted down some thoughts over lunch
and then pitched their ideas to the CIA director in the afternoon as he sat hunched behind a
desk taking notes.
"Casey was kind of spearheading a recommendation" for better public relations for Reagan's
Central America policies, recalled William I. Greener Jr., one of the ad men. Two top proposals
arising from the meeting were for a high-powered communications operation inside the White
House and private money for an outreach program to build support for U.S. intervention.
The results from the discussions were summed up in an Aug. 9, 1983, memo written by Raymond
who described Casey's participation in the meeting to brainstorm how "to sell a 'new product'
Central America by generating interest across-the-spectrum."
In the memo to then-U.S. Information Agency director Charles Wick, Raymond also noted that
"via Murdock [sic] may be able to draw down added funds" to support pro-Reagan initiatives.
Raymond's reference to Rupert Murdoch possibly drawing down "added funds" suggests that the
right-wing media mogul had been recruited to be part of the covert propaganda operation. During
this period, Wick arranged at least two face-to-face meetings between Murdoch and Reagan.
In line with the clandestine nature of the operation, Raymond also suggested routing the
"funding via Freedom House or some other structure that has credibility in the political
center." (Freedom House would later emerge as a principal beneficiary of funding from the
National Endowment for Democracy, which was also created under the umbrella of Raymond's
operation.)
As the Reagan administration pushed the envelope on domestic propaganda, Raymond continued
to worry about Casey's involvement. In an Aug. 29, 1983, memo, Raymond recounted a call from
Casey pushing his P.R. ideas. Alarmed at a CIA director participating so brazenly in domestic
propaganda, Raymond wrote that "I philosophized a bit with Bill Casey (in an effort to get him
out of the loop)" but with little success.
Meanwhile, Reich's Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America (S/LPD) proved extremely
effective in selecting "hot buttons" that would anger Americans about the Sandinistas. He also
browbeat news correspondents who produced stories that conflicted with the administration's
"themes." Reich's basic M.O. was to dispatch his propaganda teams to lobby news executives to
remove or punish out-of-step reporters with a disturbing degree of success. Reich once bragged
that his office "did not give the critics of the policy any quarter in the debate."
Another part of the office's job was to plant "white propaganda" in the news media through
op-eds secretly financed by the government. In one memo, Jonathan Miller, a senior public
diplomacy official, informed White House aide Patrick Buchanan about success placing an
anti-Sandinista piece in The Wall Street Journal's friendly pages. "Officially, this office had
no role in its preparation," Miller wrote.
Other times, the administration put out "black propaganda," outright falsehoods. In 1983,
one such theme was designed to anger American Jews by portraying the Sandinistas as
anti-Semitic because much of Nicaragua's small Jewish community fled after the revolution in
1979.
However, the U.S. embassy in Managua investigated the charges and "found no verifiable
ground on which to accuse the GRN [the Sandinista government] of anti-Semitism," according to a
July 28, 1983, cable. But the administration kept the cable secret and pushed the "hot button"
anyway.
Black Hats/White Hats
Repeatedly, Raymond lectured his subordinates on the chief goal of the operation: "in the
specific case of Nica[ragua], concentrate on gluing black hats on the Sandinistas and white
hats on UNO [the Contras' United Nicaraguan Opposition]." So Reagan's speechwriters dutifully
penned descriptions of Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as a "totalitarian dungeon" and the Contras
as the "moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers."
As one NSC official told me, the campaign was modeled after CIA covert operations abroad
where a political goal is more important than the truth. "They were trying to manipulate [U.S.]
public opinion using the tools of Walt Raymond's trade craft which he learned from his career
in the CIA covert operation shop," the official admitted.
Another administration official gave a similar description to The Miami Herald's Alfonso
Chardy. "If you look at it as a whole, the Office of Public Diplomacy was carrying out a huge
psychological operation, the kind the military conduct to influence the population in denied or
enemy territory," that official explained. [For more details, see Parry's Lost
History .]
Another important figure in the pro-Contra propaganda was NSC staffer Oliver North, who
spent a great deal of his time on the Nicaraguan public diplomacy operation even though he is
better known for arranging secret arms shipments to the Contras and to Iran's radical Islamic
government, leading to the Iran-Contra scandal.
The draft Iran-Contra chapter depicted a Byzantine network of contract and private
operatives who handled details of the domestic propaganda while concealing the hand of the
White House and the CIA "Richard R. Miller, former head of public affairs at AID, and Francis
D. Gomez, former public affairs specialist at the State Department and USIA, were hired by
S/LPD through sole-source, no-bid contracts to carry out a variety of activities on behalf of
the Reagan administration policies in Central America," the chapter said.
"Supported by the State Department and White House, Miller and Gomez became the outside
managers of [North operative] Spitz Channel's fundraising and lobbying activities. They also
served as the managers of Central American political figures, defectors, Nicaraguan opposition
leaders and Sandinista atrocity victims who were made available to the press, the Congress and
private groups, to tell the story of the Contra cause."
Miller and Gomez facilitated transfers of money to Swiss and offshore banks at North's
direction, as they "became the key link between the State Department and the Reagan White House
with the private groups and individuals engaged in a myriad of endeavors aimed at influencing
the Congress, the media and public opinion," the chapter said.
The Iran-Contra draft chapter also cited a March 10, 1985, memo from North describing his
assistance to CIA Director Casey in timing disclosures of pro-Contra news "aimed at securing
Congressional approval for renewed support to the Nicaraguan Resistance Forces."
The chapter added: "Casey's involvement in the public diplomacy effort apparently continued
throughout the period under investigation by the Committees," including a 1985 role in
pressuring Congress to renew Contra aid and a 1986 hand in further shielding the Office of
Public Diplomacy for Latin America from the oversight of Secretary Shultz.
A Raymond-authored memo to Casey in August 1986 described the shift of the S/LPD office
where Robert Kagan had replaced Reich to the control of the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs,
which was headed by Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who had tapped Kagan for the
public diplomacy job.
Even after the Iran-Contra scandal unraveled in 1986-87 and Casey died of brain cancer on
May 6, 1987, the Republicans fought to keep secret the remarkable story of the public diplomacy
apparatus. As part of a deal to get three moderate Republican senators to join Democrats in
signing the Iran-Contra majority report, Democratic leaders agreed to drop the draft chapter
detailing the CIA's domestic propaganda role (although a few references were included in the
executive summary). But other Republicans, including Rep. Dick Cheney, still issued a minority
report defending broad presidential powers in foreign affairs.
Thus, the American people were spared the chapter's troubling conclusion: that a secret
propaganda apparatus had existed, run by "one of the CIA's most senior specialists, sent to the
NSC by Bill Casey, to create and coordinate an inter-agency public-diplomacy mechanism [which]
did what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might do. [It] attempted to manipulate the
media, the Congress and public opinion to support the Reagan administration's policies."
Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome
The ultimate success of Reagan's propaganda strategy was affirmed during the tenure of his
successor, George H.W. Bush, when Bush ordered a 100-hour ground war on Feb. 23, 1991, to oust
Iraqi troops from Kuwait, which had been invaded the previous August.
Though Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had long been signaling a readiness to withdraw and
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had negotiated a withdrawal arrangement that even had the
blessings of top U.S. commanders in the field President Bush insisted on pressing ahead with
the ground attack.
Bush's chief reason was that he and his Defense Secretary Dick Cheney saw the assault
against Iraq's already decimated forces as an easy victory, one that would demonstrate
America's new military capacity for high-tech warfare and would cap the process begun a decade
earlier to erase the Vietnam Syndrome from the minds of average Americans.
Those strategic aspects of Bush's grand plan for a "new world order" began to emerge after
the U.S.-led coalition started pummeling Iraq with air strikes in mid-January 1991. The
bombings inflicted severe damage on Iraq's military and civilian infrastructure and slaughtered
a large number of non-combatants, including the incineration of some 400 women and children in
a Baghdad bomb shelter on Feb. 13. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's " Recalling the Slaughter of Innocents
."]
The air war's damage was so severe that some world leaders looked for a way to end the
carnage and arrange Iraq's departure from Kuwait. Even senior U.S. military field commanders,
such as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, looked favorably on proposals for sparing lives.
But Bush was fixated on a ground war. Though secret from the American people at that time,
Bush had long determined that a peaceful Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait would not be allowed.
Indeed, Bush was privately fearful that the Iraqis might capitulate before the United States
could attack.
At the time, conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak were among the few
outsiders who described Bush's obsession with exorcising the Vietnam Syndrome. On Feb. 25,
1991, they wrote that the Gorbachev initiative brokering Iraq's surrender of Kuwait "stirred
fears" among Bush's advisers that the Vietnam Syndrome might survive the Gulf War.
"There was considerable relief, therefore, when the President made clear he was having
nothing to do with the deal that would enable Saddam Hussein to bring his troops out of Kuwait
with flags flying," Evans and Novak wrote. "Fear of a peace deal at the Bush White House had
less to do with oil, Israel or Iraqi expansionism than with the bitter legacy of a lost war.
'This is the chance to get rid of the Vietnam Syndrome,' one senior aide told us."
In the 1999 book, Shadow , author Bob Woodward confirmed that Bush was adamant
about fighting a war, even as the White House pretended it would be satisfied with an
unconditional Iraqi withdrawal. "We have to have a war," Bush told his inner circle of
Secretary of State James Baker, national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Gen. Colin
Powell, according to Woodward.
"Scowcroft was aware that this understanding could never be stated publicly or be permitted
to leak out. An American president who declared the necessity of war would probably be thrown
out of office. Americans were peacemakers, not warmongers," Woodward wrote.
The Ground War
However, the "fear of a peace deal" resurfaced in the wake of the U.S.-led bombing campaign.
Soviet diplomats met with Iraqi leaders who let it be known that they were prepared to withdraw
their troops from Kuwait unconditionally.
Learning of Gorbachev's proposed settlement, Schwarzkopf also saw little reason for U.S.
soldiers to die if the Iraqis were prepared to withdraw and leave their heavy weapons behind.
There was also the prospect of chemical warfare that the Iraqis might use against advancing
American troops. Schwarzkopf saw the possibility of heavy U.S. casualties.
But Gorbachev's plan was running into trouble with President Bush and his political
subordinates who wanted a ground war to crown the U.S. victory. Schwarzkopf reached out to Gen.
Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to make the case for peace with the
President.
On Feb. 21, 1991, the two generals hammered out a cease-fire proposal for presentation to
the NSC. The peace deal would give Iraqi forces one week to march out of Kuwait while leaving
their armor and heavy equipment behind. Schwarzkopf thought he had Powell's commitment to pitch
the plan at the White House.
But Powell found himself caught in the middle. He wanted to please Bush while still
representing the concerns of the field commanders. When Powell arrived at the White House late
on the evening of Feb. 21, he found Bush angry about the Soviet peace initiative. Still,
according to Woodward's Shadow , Powell reiterated that he and Schwarzkopf "would
rather see the Iraqis walk out than be driven out."
In My American Journey , Powell expressed sympathy for Bush's predicament. "The
President's problem was how to say no to Gorbachev without appearing to throw away a chance for
peace," Powell wrote. "I could hear the President's growing distress in his voice. 'I don't
want to take this deal,' he said. 'But I don't want to stiff Gorbachev, not after he's come
this far with us. We've got to find a way out'."
Powell sought Bush's attention. "I raised a finger," Powell wrote. "The President turned to
me. 'Got something, Colin?'," Bush asked. But Powell did not outline Schwarzkopf's one-week
cease-fire plan. Instead, Powell offered a different idea intended to make the ground offensive
inevitable.
"We don't stiff Gorbachev," Powell explained. "Let's put a deadline on Gorby's proposal. We
say, great idea, as long as they're completely on their way out by, say, noon Saturday," Feb.
23, less than two days away.
Powell understood that the two-day deadline would not give the Iraqis enough time to act,
especially with their command-and-control systems severely damaged by the air war. The plan was
a public-relations strategy to guarantee that the White House got its ground war. "If, as I
suspect, they don't move, then the flogging begins," Powell told a gratified president.
The next day, at 10:30 a.m., a Friday, Bush announced his ultimatum. There would be a
Saturday noon deadline for the Iraqi withdrawal, as Powell had recommended. Schwarzkopf and his
field commanders in Saudi Arabia watched Bush on television and immediately grasped its
meaning.
"We all knew by then which it would be," Schwarzkopf wrote. "We were marching toward a
Sunday morning attack."
When the Iraqis predictably missed the deadline, American and allied forces launched the
ground offensive at 0400 on Feb. 24, Persian Gulf time.
Though Iraqi forces were soon in full retreat, the allies pursued and slaughtered tens of
thousands of Iraqi soldiers in the 100-hour war. U.S. casualties were light, 147 killed in
combat and another 236 killed in accidents or from other causes. "Small losses as military
statistics go," wrote Powell, "but a tragedy for each family."
On Feb. 28, the day the war ended, Bush celebrated the victory. "By God, we've kicked the
Vietnam Syndrome once and for all," the President exulted, speaking to a group at the White
House. [For more details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy &
Privilege .]
So as not to put a damper on the post-war happy feelings, the U.S. news media decided not to
show many of the grisliest photos, such as charred Iraqi soldiers ghoulishly still seated in
their burned-out trucks where they had been incinerated while trying to flee. By that point,
U.S. journalists knew it wasn't smart for their careers to present a reality that didn't make
the war look good.
Enduring Legacy
Though Reagan's creation of a domestic propaganda bureaucracy began more than three decades
ago and Bush's vanquishing of the Vietnam Syndrome was more than two decades ago the legacy of
those actions continue to reverberate today in how the perceptions of the American people are
now routinely managed. That was true during last decade's Iraq War and this decade's conflicts
in Libya, Syria and Ukraine as well as the economic sanctions against Iran and Russia.
Gershman and his NED played important behind-the-scenes roles in instigating the Ukraine
crisis by financing activists, journalists and other operatives who supported the coup against
elected President Yanukovych. The NED-backed Freedom House also beat the propaganda drums. [See
Consortiumnews.com's " A Shadow Foreign
Policy. "]
Two other Reagan-era veterans, Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan, have both provided important
intellectual support for continuing U.S. interventionism around the world. Earlier this year,
Kagan's article for The New Republic, entitled " Superpowers
Don't Get to Retire ," touched such a raw nerve with President Obama that he hosted Kagan
at a White House lunch and crafted the presidential commencement speech at West Point to
deflect some of Kagan's criticism of Obama's hesitancy to use military force.
A New York Times article about Kagan's influence over Obama
reported that Kagan's wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, apparently had a
hand in crafting the attack on her ostensible boss, President Obama.
According to the Times article, the husband-and-wife team share both a common world view and
professional ambitions, Nuland editing Kagan's articles and Kagan "not permitted to use any
official information he overhears or picks up around the house" a suggestion that Kagan's
thinking at least may be informed by foreign policy secrets passed on by his wife.
Though Nuland wouldn't comment specifically on Kagan's attack on President Obama, she
indicated that she holds similar views. "But suffice to say," Nuland said, "that nothing goes
out of the house that I don't think is worthy of his talents. Let's put it that way."
Misguided Media
In the three decades since Reagan's propaganda machine was launched, the American press
corps also has fallen more and more into line with an aggressive U.S. government's foreign
policy strategies. Those of us in the mainstream media who resisted the propaganda pressures
mostly saw our careers suffer while those who played along moved steadily up the ranks into
positions of more money and more status.
Even after the Iraq War debacle when nearly the entire mainstream media went with the
pro-invasion flow, there was almost no accountability for that historic journalistic failure.
Indeed, the neocon influence at major newspapers, such as the Washington Post and the New York
Times, only has solidified since.
Today's coverage of the Syrian civil war or the Ukraine crisis is so firmly in line with the
State Department's propaganda "themes" that it would put smiles on the faces of William Casey
and Walter Raymond if they were around today to see how seamlessly the "perception management"
now works. There's no need any more to send out "public diplomacy" teams to bully editors and
news executives. Everyone is already onboard.
Rupert Murdoch's media empire is bigger than ever, but his neocon messaging barely stands
out as distinctive, given how the neocons also have gained control of the editorial and
foreign-reporting sections of the Washington Post, the New York Times and virtually every other
major news outlet. For instance, the demonizing of Russian President Putin is now so total that
no honest person could look at those articles and see anything approaching objective or
evenhanded journalism. Yet, no one loses a job over this lack of professionalism.
The Reagan administration's dreams of harnessing private foundations and non-governmental
organizations have also come true. The Orwellian circle has been completed with many American
"anti-war" groups advocating for "humanitarian" wars in Syria and other countries targeted by
U.S. propaganda. [See Consortiumnews.com's " Selling 'Peace
Groups' on US-Led Wars. "]
Much as Reagan's "public diplomacy" apparatus once sent around "defectors" to lambaste
Nicaragua's Sandinistas by citing hyped-up human rights violations now the work is done by NGOs
with barely perceptible threads back to the U.S. government. Just as Freedom House had
"credibility" in the 1980s because of its earlier reputation as a human rights group, now other
groups carrying the "human rights" tag, such as Human Rights Watch, are in the forefront of
urging U.S. military interventions based on murky or propagandistic claims. [See
Consortiumnews.com's " The Collapsing
Syria-Sarin Case. "]
At this advanced stage of America's quiet surrender to "perception management," it is even
hard to envision how one could retrace the many steps that would lead back to the concept of a
democratic Republic based on an informed electorate. Many on the American Right remain
entranced by the old propaganda theme about the "liberal media" and still embrace Reagan as
their beloved icon. Meanwhile, many liberals can't break away from their own wistful trust in
the New York Times and their empty hope that the media really is "liberal."
To confront the hard truth is not easy. Indeed, in this case, it can cause despair because
there are so few voices to trust and they are easily drowned out by floods of disinformation
that can come from any angle right, left or center. Yet, for the American democratic Republic
to reset its goal toward an informed electorate, there is no option other than to build
institutions that are determinedly committed to the truth.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen
Narrative, either in print here or
as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ). You also can order Robert Parry's trilogy on the Bush Family and its
connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America's
Stolen Narrative . For details on this offer, click here .
LIANE CASTEN , December 28, 2014 at 1:21 pm
Terrific analysis. Am working on my own book on Vietnam (under contract.) Would love to
use this piece liberally–of course with serious attribution. Do I have your
permission?. Liane
W. R. Knight , December 28, 2014 at 1:51 pm
Bear in mind that during WWII, Reagan was nothing more than an itinerant movie actor who
played war heros but never participated in the war itself. The movies he played in weren't
much more than unabashed propaganda.
It is obscene that we allow the most vociferous warmongers to avoid any personal risk in
the wars they promote; and it is depressing to see the public persuaded by the propaganda to
sacrifice their money and children for the benefit of the warmongers.
Man on the street , December 29, 2014 at 2:49 pm
Reagan actually has two sides as he was portrayed on SNL, the nice grandfatherly side, and
the mafia boss warmonger side. He managed to use the media to display his nice side.
Carroll Price , December 31, 2014 at 11:49 am
It takes both. All really successful presidents have a nice grandfatherly side and a mafia
boss side that's displayed to the public as the need arises. Why? Because the American people
admire the mafia war monger trait as much, if not more, than the grandfatherly trait. FDR and
Reagan were both successful presidents because they had great skill in displaying whichever
side fitted occasion, while Jimmy Carter, who was not blessed with a mafia/war monger side
was a complete failure.
Joe Tedesky , December 28, 2014 at 2:07 pm
When ever this subject comes up, of how the right wing in American politics controls the
narrative, I think of the 'Powell Memo'. In 1971 Lewis Powell wrote a secretive memo
descripting how the conservatives must take hold of the American media. Powell would become a
Supreme Court justice. If you Google his 'Powell Memo' you will read how Justice Powell laid
out a very specific plan on how to do this. Powell wrote this before becoming a sitting
Supreme Court Justice. His instructions were so good that many believe this document he
wrote, was his stairway to heaven.
I cannot help but reflect on how the Warren Report was a great way for the Dark State to
see how well they could pull the wool over America's eyes. Even though many did not buy the
official one gunman claim, what else was there to counter this official report. So, it's
business as usual, and for the average US citizen there isn't much else left to do.
I value this site. Although, there are way to many Americans not getting the news this
site has to offer. Instead our society strolls along catching the sound bites, and listening
to agenda driven pundits to become the most ill informed populace in human history.
Everythings Jake , December 28, 2014 at 3:54 pm
Another stellar moment of "integrity" in Colin Powell's long and ignominious career.
JWalters , December 28, 2014 at 5:43 pm
" given how the neocons also have gained control of the editorial and foreign-reporting
sections of the Washington Post, the New York Times and virtually every other major news
outlet."
And how do the neocons, working from niches out of the limelight, have the power to do all
this? In a political system dominated by money, from where comes their money? Who coordinates
their game plan? Who has an interest in promoting needless wars? http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com
Mark , December 29, 2014 at 8:35 am
A tour de force outstanding work; essential reading, imo. It draws together in detail the
mind-management of aggressive imperial adventures from Vietnam, through Central America and
Iraq up to Ukraine and Syria today. Thank you Robert Parry.
Perhaps, as a further signal of the 'same ole same ole', you might even have thrown in
somewhere the epithet 'jihadi contras' to describe extremist militias used (recruited,
funded, trained, armed and directed) by the US (and allies) in the Syrian nightmare (and
Libyan); where the secular and tolerant Assad government is – painfully for perception
managers – still supported by the vast majority of Syrians, however topsy-turvy the
mainextreme narrative is.
Thomas Seifert , December 29, 2014 at 9:12 am
A question from Germany: We observe a very similar process over here – the
mainstream media closest following (and inciting!) the official NATO-propaganda in the case
of Ukraine. This happens even stubbornly against the bitter protests from greater parts of
their own readers.
But: HOW does this happen? What are precisely the mechanisms to unite the media and the
journalists behind a special doctrine? On other themes there is still a pluralism of opinions
– but in the case of "national interests"/foreign policy there is a kind of frightening
standardization. Why this difference?
And why this against an obvious resistance from large
parts of their readers and from experts (e.g. the last three German chancellors –
Schmidt, Kohl and Schroeder – have admonished the NATO for better considering the
Russian security interests). I don't want to believe in simple conspiracy theories
onno , December 29, 2014 at 9:23 am
Another great article by Consortiumnews proving the manipulation of people by the Western
Media. It's amazing and scary to realize that people's minds are influenced by government
propaganda. It reminds me of the German occupation during WW II and the lies broadcasted by
US financed Radio Free Europe during the Cold War and apparently still happening in
Azerbaijan.
This is psychological warfare at its best and used at the hands of the White House and
Washington's Congress. What a shame for a so-called democratic nation, when are the American
people waking up?
John , December 29, 2014 at 12:57 pm
Excellent piece indeed. The collusion of mass media and officials installed by the same
economic powers completes the totalitarian mechanism which has displaced democracy.
Suggest clarifying use of the name Raymond, at first apparently Raymond Bonner also called
Bonner, then a (different?) Raymond with the CIA referred to only by surname(?) as Raymond,
then a Walter Raymond jr.
Studies estimate that between
100K and 150K Nam vets have committed suicide since the war. There are many reasons why but I
suspect a goodly number did so when they couldn't handle the knowledge of how they had been
used. I'm careful about who in my "peers" I enlighten.
Paul , December 29, 2014 at 3:39 pm
The positive side of democracy in America is exemplified precisely by journalism such as
this. How sad that it is almost completely overshadowed by the cynical imperial 'democracy'
that Parry's essay describes.
Your description of how the first Iraq War was pursued despite easily available options to
avoid the carnage are hair-raising and infuriating. Almost as infuriating as the internal
propaganda efforts of the U.S. government. I hope this essay is widely read.
To me, the positive side of democracy in America is exemplified precisely by journalism
such as this. How sad that it is almost completely overshadowed by the cynical imperial
'democracy' that Parry's essay describes.
Barbc , December 29, 2014 at 7:32 pm
This past year I have learned from a number of Vietnam veterans that Reagan is not as well
liked as has had been implied.
A most of the dislike is how he did not follow throw with bringing home the POWs left behind
in Vietnam.
Steve Pahs , December 29, 2014 at 10:47 pm
Mr. Parry,
I follow your writing and have passed it along at times to the misinformed in my life. I
appreciate such as your MH17 work early on when Putin and Russia were immediately blamed.
I am a Nam grunt vet from 66′-67′ who is the not so proud recipient of the Purple
Heart. My physical wounds affect me to this day as I approach the age of 68. My mental wounds
are not from my combat experience so much as they are from the eventual feeling of being used
and betrayed. Adversity does not build character, it reveals it. I'm good with mine. The
mental wounds evolved over time as I educated myself about how such an awful thing as that
war could happen and engulf me in it at 19.
Three months in a military hospital makes one
think about what had just transpired. It was the start of a journey that will continue till
my last breath. I've crossed that threshold where most of my family and friends are looking
through a keyhole offered up by our "leaders" while I am in the room dealing with the evil.
Even those who understand what I present will sometimes tell me that "you are right, but it's
too late in my life to accept it". That was said by a former Marine pilot.
It's painful to watch any western MSM. It's all through our sports and entertainment
programming to the point of madness. The wreckage caused by our "leaders" across the earth's
face, in our name, IS evil. I stopped taking the local paper a couple of years ago after they
no longer would print my letters and columns. Twenty years ago it all made me quite angry.
It's sadness I feel now for those who refuse to "see". Many vets don't know the source of
their anger and the VA gladly numbs them with drugs. Not I.
Studies estimate that between
100K and 150K Nam vets have committed suicide since the war. There are many reasons why but I
suspect a goodly number did so when they couldn't handle the knowledge of how they had been
used. I'm careful about who in my "peers" I enlighten.
Mark Twain (SLC) said some profound things. One of my favorites is "It is easier to fool
people than to convince them that they have been fooled". Always follow the money.
Thanks for what you do. It does make a difference.
Steve Pahs
MarkinPNW , December 30, 2014 at 1:43 am
This "Perception Management" is nothing knew. The argument has been made persuasively that
the attack on Pearl Harbor actually resulted from a deliberate and successful campaign by FDR
to change or "manage" the mass opinions or "Perceptions" of the US electorate from strongly
pro-peace and anti-war (what could be called a "Great War syndrome" from the stupid and
useless devastation of WW1) to all out pro-war for US involvement in WW2, by provoking the
Japanese and refusing all peace negotiations with the Japanese who desperately were trying to
avoid war.
In reference to "Orwellian Dystopia", Orwell's novels "Animal Farm" and "1984" were based
in large part on Orwell's experience in the Spanish Civil War and WW2, respectively.
Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg , December 30, 2014 at 12:01 pm
Until the U.S. gets its butt seriously whipped again, as in Vietnam, the ever escalating
strategy of tension against all countries who exhibit less than total and unconditional
obedience to Washington will continue. Victoria Nuland is nothing more than a modern version
of Cecil Rhodes; the ever probing tentacle of a voracious empire. In fact, It's really the
same one.
hp , December 30, 2014 at 3:52 pm
The ripened fruit of the pervert Freud's pervert nephew Edward Bernays.
(how the usurping usurers roll)
Jacob , December 31, 2014 at 11:51 pm
"In the 1980s, the Reagan administration pioneered 'perception management' to get the
American people to 'kick the Vietnam Syndrome' and accept more U.S. interventionism, . .
."
The management of public perception within the U.S. regarding its imperialistic/colonial
ambitions goes back much further than the 1980s. The Committee on Public Information, also
known as "the Creel Commission," was the likely model Reagan wanted to imitate. The purpose
of the CPI was to convince the American public, which was mostly anti-war, to support
America's entry into the European war, also known as WWI. The CPI was in official operation
from 1917 to 1919 during the Woodrow Wilson administration. But the paradigm for the use of
mass propaganda to alter public perceptions is the Congregatio de propaganda fide (The Office
for the Propagation of the Faith), a 1622 Vatican invention to undermine the spread of
Protestantism by managing public perceptions on religious and spiritual matters.
"... Now, despite what the Russian propagandists will tell you, this recent outbreak of fascistic behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with these people's frustration with neoliberalism or the supranational Corporatocracy that has been expanding its global empire with total impunity for twenty-five years. And it definitely has nothing at all to do with supranational political unions, or the supersession of national sovereignty by corporate-concocted "free trade" agreements, or the relentless privatization of everything, or the fear that a lot of people have that their cultures are being gradually erased and replaced with a globalized, corporate-friendly, multicultural, market-based culture, which is merely a simulation of culture, and which contains no actual cultural values (because exchange value is its only operative value), but which sells the empty signifiers of their eviscerated cultural values back to them so they can wear their "identities" like designer brands as they hunch together in silence at Starbucks posting pictures of themselves on Facebook. ..."
"... No, this discontent with the political establishment, corporate elites, and the mainstream media has nothing to do with any of that. It's not like global Capitalism, following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. (its last external ideological adversary), has been restructuring the entire planet in accordance with its geopolitical interests, or doing away with national sovereignty, and other nationalistic concepts that no longer serve a useful purpose in a world where a single ideological system (one backed by the most fearsome military in history) reigns completely unopposed. If that were the case, well, it might behoove us to question whether this outbreak of Nazism, racism, and other forms of "hate," was somehow connected to that historical development and maybe even try to articulate some sort of leftist analysis of that. ..."
"... a world where a single ideology rules the planet unopposed from without ..."
"... Brexit is about Britons who want their country back, a movement indeed getting stronger and stronger in EU member states, but ignored by the ruling 'elites'. ..."
"... A lot of these so called "revolutions" are fomented by the elite only to be subverted and perverted by them in the end. They've had a lot of practice co-opting revolutions and independence movements. ..."
"... "Independence" is now so fashionable (as was Communism among the "elite" back in the '30s), that they are even teaching and fostering independence to kids in kindergarten here in the US. That strikes me as most amusing. Imagine "learning" independence in state run brainwashing factories. ..."
Well all right, let's review what happened, or at least the official version of what
happened. Not Hillary Clinton's version of what happened, which Jeffrey St. Clair so
incisively skewered , but the Corporatocracy's version of what happened, which overlaps
with but is even more ridiculous than Clinton's ridiculous version. To do that, we need to
harken back to the peaceful Summer of 2016, (a/k/a the
"Summer of Fear" ), when the United States of America was still a shiny city upon a hill
whose beacon light guided freedom-loving people, the Nazis were still just a bunch of ass
clowns meeting in each other's mother's garages, and Russia was, well Russia was Russia.
Back then, as I'm sure you'll recall, Western democracy, was still primarily being menaced
by the lone
wolf terrorists, for absolutely no conceivable reason, apart from the terrorists' fanatical
desire to brutally murder all non-believers. The global Russo-Nazi Axis had not yet reared its
ugly head. President Obama, who, during his tenure, had single-handedly restored America to the
peaceful, prosperous, progressive paradise it had been before George W. Bush screwed it up, was
on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon slow
jamming home the TPP . The Wall Street banks had risen from the ashes of the 2008 financial
crisis, and were buying back all the foreclosed homes of the people they had fleeced with
subprime mortgages. American workers were enjoying the freedom and flexibility of the new gig
economy. Electioneering in the United States was underway, but it was early days. It was
already clear that Donald Trump was literally
the Second Coming of Hitler , but no one was terribly worried about him yet. The Republican
Party was in a shambles. Neither Trump nor any of the other contenders had any chance of
winning in November. Nor did Sanders, who had been defeated, fair and square, in the Democratic
primaries, mostly because of
his racist statements and crazy, quasi-Communist ideas. Basically, everything was hunky
dory. Yes, it was going to be terribly sad to have to bid farewell to Obama, who had bailed out
all those bankrupt Americans the Wall Street banks had taken to the cleaners, ended all of Bush
and Cheney's wars, closed down Guantanamo, and just generally served as a multicultural messiah
figure to affluent consumers throughout the free world, but Hope-and-Change was going to
continue. The talking heads were all in agreement Hillary Clinton was going to be President,
and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Little did we know at the time that an epidemic of Russo-Nazism had been festering just
beneath the surface of freedom-loving Western societies like some neo-fascist sebaceous cyst.
Apparently, millions of theretofore more or less normal citizens throughout the West had been
infected with a virulent strain of Russo-Nazi-engineered virus, because they simultaneously
began exhibiting the hallmark symptoms of what we now know as White Supremacist Behavioral
Disorder, or Fascist Oppositional Disorder (the folks who update the DSM are still arguing over
the official name). It started with the Brexit referendum, spread to America with the election
of Trump, and there have been a rash of outbreaks in Europe, like
the one we're currently experiencing in Germany . These fascistic symptoms have mostly
manifest as people refusing to vote as instructed, and expressing oppressive views on the
Internet, but there have also been more serious crimes, including several assaults and murders
perpetrated by white supremacists (which, of course, never happened when Obama was President,
because the Nazis hadn't been "emboldened" yet).
Now, despite what the Russian propagandists will tell you, this recent outbreak of
fascistic behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with these people's frustration with
neoliberalism or the supranational Corporatocracy that has been expanding its global empire
with total impunity for twenty-five years. And it definitely has nothing at all to do with
supranational political unions, or the supersession of national sovereignty by
corporate-concocted "free trade" agreements, or the relentless privatization of everything, or
the fear that a lot of people have that their cultures are being gradually erased and replaced
with a globalized, corporate-friendly, multicultural, market-based culture, which is merely a
simulation of culture, and which contains no actual cultural values (because exchange value is
its only operative value), but which sells the empty signifiers of their eviscerated cultural
values back to them so they can wear their "identities" like designer brands as they hunch
together in silence at Starbucks posting pictures of themselves on Facebook.
No, this discontent with the political establishment, corporate elites, and the
mainstream media has nothing to do with any of that. It's not like global Capitalism, following
the collapse of the U.S.S.R. (its last external ideological adversary), has been restructuring
the entire planet in accordance with its geopolitical interests, or doing away with national
sovereignty, and other nationalistic concepts that no longer serve a useful purpose in a world
where a single ideological system (one backed by the most fearsome military in history) reigns
completely unopposed. If that were the case, well, it might behoove us to question whether this
outbreak of Nazism, racism, and other forms of "hate," was somehow connected to that historical
development and maybe even try to articulate some sort of leftist analysis of that.
This hypothetical leftist analysis might want to focus on how Capitalism is fundamentally
opposed to Despotism, and is essentially a value-decoding machine which renders everything and
everyone it touches essentially valueless interchangeable commodities whose worth is determined
by market forces, rather than by societies and cultures, or religions, or other despotic
systems (wherein values are established and enforced arbitrarily, by the despot, the church, or
the ruling party, or by a group of people who share an affinity and decide they want to live a
certain way). This is where it would get sort of tricky, because it (i.e., this hypothetical
analysis) would have to delve into the history of Capitalism, and how it evolved out of
medieval Despotism, and how it has been decoding despotic values for something like five
hundred years. This historical delving (which would probably be too long for people to read on
their phones) would demonstrate how Capitalism has been an essentially progressive force in
terms of getting us out of Despotism (which, for most folks, wasn't very much fun) by fomenting
bourgeois revolutions and imposing some semblance of democracy on societies. It would follow
Capitalism's inexorable advance all the way up to the Twentieth Century, in which its final
external ideological adversary, fake Communism, suddenly imploded, delivering us to the world
we now live in a world where a single ideology rules the planet unopposed from without
, and where any opposition to that global ideology can only be internal, or insurgent, in
nature (e.g, terrorism, extremism, and so on). Being a hypothetical leftist analysis,
it would, at this point, need to stress that, despite the fact that Capitalism helped deliver
us from Despotism, and improved the state of society generally (compared to most societies that
preceded it), we nonetheless would like to transcend it, or evolve out of it toward some type
of society where people, and everything else, including the biosphere we live in, are not
interchangeable, valueless commodities exchanged by members of a global corporatocracy who have
no essential values, or beliefs, or principles, other than the worship of money. After having
covered all that, we might want to offer more a nuanced view of the current neo-nationalist
reaction to the Corporatocracy's ongoing efforts to restructure and privatize the rest of the
planet. Not that we would support this reaction, or in any way refrain from calling
neo-nationalism what it is (i.e., reactionary, despotic, and doomed), but this nuanced view
we'd hypothetically offer, by analyzing the larger sociopolitical and historical forces at
play, might help us to see the way forward more clearly, and who knows, maybe eventually
propose some kind of credible leftist alternative to the "global neoliberalism vs.
neo-nationalism" double bind we appear to be hopelessly stuck in at the moment.
Luckily, we don't have to do that (i.e., articulate such a leftist analysis of any such
larger historical forces). Because there is no corporatocracy not really. That's just a fake
word the Russians made up and are spreading around on the Internet to distract us while the
Nazis take over. No, the logical explanation for Trump, Brexit, and anything else that
threatens the expansion of global Capitalism, and the freedom, democracy, and prosperity it
offers, is that millions of people across the world, all at once, for no apparent reason, woke
up one day full-blown fascists and started looking around for repulsive demagogues to swear
fanatical allegiance to. Yes, that makes a lot more sense than all that complicated stuff about
history and hegemonic ideological systems, which is probably just Russian propaganda anyway, in
which case there is absolutely no reason to read any boring year-old pieces, like this one in TheEuropeanFinancialReview , or this report by
Corporate Watch , from way back in the year 2000, about the rise of global corporate
power.
So, apologies for wasting your time with all that pseudo-Marxian gobbledygook. Let's just
pretend this never happened, and get back to more important matters, like statistically proving
that Donald Trump got elected President because of racism, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia,
or some other type of behavioral disorder, and pulling down Confederate statues, or kneeling
during the National Anthem, or whatever happens to be trending this week. Oh, yeah, and
debating punching Nazis, or people wearing MAGA hats. We definitely need to sort all that out
before we can move ahead with helping the Corporatocracy remove Trump from office, or at least
ensure he remains surrounded by their loyal generals, CEOs, and Goldman Sachs guys until the
next election. Whatever we do, let's not get distracted by that stuff I just distracted you
with. I know, it's tempting, but, given what's at stake, we need to maintain our laser focus on
issues related to identity politics, or else well, you know, the Nazis win.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Yesterday evening on RT a USA lady, as usual forgot the name, spoke about the USA. In a
matter of fact tone she said things like 'they (Deep State) have got him (Trump) in the
box'.
They, Deep State again, are now wondering if they will continue to try to control the
world, or if they should stop the attempt, and retreat into the USA.
Also as matter of fact she said 'the CIA has always been the instrument of Deep State, from
Kenndy to Nine Eleven'.
Another statement was 'no president ever was in control'.
How USA citizens continue to believe they live in a democracy, I cannot understand.
Yesterday the intentions of the new Dutch government were made public, alas most Dutch
also dot not see that the Netherlands since 2005 no longer is a democracy, just a province of
Brussels.
Brexit is about Britons who want their country back, a movement indeed getting
stronger and stronger in EU member states, but ignored by the ruling 'elites'.
No doubt many do want their country back, but what concerns me is that all of a sudden we
have the concept of "independence" plastered all over the place. Such concepts don't get
promoted unless the ruling elites see ways to turn those sentiments to their favor.
A lot of these so called "revolutions" are fomented by the elite only to be subverted
and perverted by them in the end. They've had a lot of practice co-opting revolutions and
independence movements. (And everything else.)
"Independence" is now so fashionable (as was Communism among the "elite" back in the '30s),
that they are even teaching and fostering independence to kids in kindergarten here in the
US. That strikes me as most amusing. Imagine "learning" independence in state run
brainwashing factories.
"Now, despite what the Russian propagandists will tell you, this recent outbreak of
fascistic behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with these people's frustration with
neoliberalism or the supranational Corporatocracy that has been expanding its global empire
with total impunity for twenty-five years. And it definitely has nothing at all to do with
supranational political unions, or the supersession of national sovereignty by
corporate-concocted "free trade" agreements, or the relentless privatization of everything,
or the fear that a lot of people have that their cultures are being gradually erased and
replaced with a globalized, corporate-friendly, multicultural, market-based culture, which
is merely a simulation of culture, and which contains no actual cultural values (because
exchange value is its only operative value), but which sells the empty signifiers of their
eviscerated cultural values back to them so they can wear their "identities" like designer
brands as they hunch together in silence at Starbucks posting pictures of themselves on
Facebook."
Very impressed with this article, never really paid attention to CJ's articles but that is
now changing!
Chris Hedges, who is doubtless a courageous journalist and an intelligent commentator, suggests
that if we are to discuss the anti-Russia campaign realistically, as baseless in fact, and as
contrived for an effect and to further/protect some particular interests, we can hardly avoid the
question: Who or what interest is served by the anti-Russia campaign?
An interesting observation "The Democratic Party doesn't actually function as a political
party. It's about perpetual mass mobilization and a hyperventilating public relations arm, all paid
for by corporate donors. The base of the party has no real say in the leadership or the policies of
the party, as Bernie Sanders and his followers found out."
The other relevant observation is that there is no American left. It was destroyed as a
political movement. The USA is a right wing country.
Notable quotes:
"... This obsession with Russia is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working men and women and poor people of color. ..."
"... It is the result of the slashing of basic government services, including, of course, welfare, that Clinton gutted; deregulation, a decaying infrastructure, including public schools, and the de facto tax boycott by corporations. It is the result of the transformation of the country into an oligarchy. The nativist revolt on the right, and the aborted insurgency within the Democratic Party, makes sense when you see what they have done to the country. ..."
"... The Democratic Party, in particular, is driving this whole Russia witch-hunt. It cannot face its complicity in the destruction of our civil liberties -- and remember, Barack Obama's assault on civil liberties was worse than those carried out by George W. Bush -- and the destruction of our economy and our democratic institutions. ..."
"... Politicians like the Clintons, Pelosi and Schumer are creations of Wall Street. That is why they are so virulent about pushing back against the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. ..."
"... The Democratic Party doesn't actually function as a political party. It's about perpetual mass mobilization and a hyperventilating public relations arm, all paid for by corporate donors. The base of the party has no real say in the leadership or the policies of the party, as Bernie Sanders and his followers found out. They are props in the sterile political theater. ..."
"... These party elites, consumed by greed, myopia and a deep cynicism, have a death grip on the political process. They're not going to let it go, even if it all implodes. ..."
"... The whole exercise was farcical. The White House would leak some bogus story to Judy Miller or Michael Gordon, and then go on the talk shows to say, 'as the Times reported .' It gave these lies the veneer of independence and reputable journalism. This was a massive institutional failing, and one the paper has never faced. ..."
"... The media's anti-Russia narrative has been embraced by large portions of what presents itself as the "left." ..."
"... Well, don't get me started on the American left. First of all, there is no American left -- not a left that has any kind of seriousness, that understands political or revolutionary theories, that's steeped in economic study, that understands how systems of power work, especially corporate and imperial power. The left is caught up in the same kind of cults of personality that plague the rest of society. It focuses on Trump, as if Trump is the central problem. Trump is a product, a symptom of a failed system and dysfunctional democracy, not the disease. ..."
"... For good measure, they purged the liberal class -- look at what they did to Henry Wallace -- so that Cold War "liberals" equated capitalism with democracy, and imperialism with freedom and liberty. I lived in Switzerland and France. There are still residues of a militant left in Europe, which gives Europeans something to build upon. But here we almost have to begin from scratch. ..."
"... The corporate elites we have to overthrow already hold power. And unless we build a broad, popular resistance movement, which takes a lot of patient organizing among working men and women, we are going to be steadily ground down. ..."
"... The corporate state has made it very hard to make a living if you hold fast to this radical critique. You will never get tenure. You probably won't get academic appointments. You won't win prizes. You won't get grants. ..."
"... The elite schools, and I have taught as a visiting professor at a few of them, such as Princeton and Columbia, replicate the structure and goals of corporations. If you want to even get through a doctoral committee, much less a tenure committee, you must play it really, really safe. You must not challenge the corporate-friendly stance that permeates the institution and is imposed through corporate donations and the dictates of wealthy alumni. Half of the members of most of these trustee boards should be in prison! ..."
"... Speculation in the 17th century in Britain was a crime. Speculators were hanged. And today they run the economy and the country. They have used the capturing of wealth to destroy the intellectual, cultural and artistic life in the country and snuff out our democracy. There is a word for these people: traitors. ..."
But the whole idea that the Russians swung the election to Trump is absurd. It's really premised
on the unproven claim that Russia gave the Podesta emails to WikiLeaks, and the release of these
emails turned tens, or hundreds of thousands, of Clinton supporters towards Trump. This doesn't make
any sense. Either that, or, according to the director of national intelligence, RT America, where
I have a show, got everyone to vote for the Green Party.
This obsession with Russia is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic
Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their
policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working men and women and poor people of
color. It is the result of disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA that abolished good-paying union
jobs and shipped them to places like Mexico, where workers without benefits are paid $3.00 an hour.
It is the result of the explosion of a system of mass incarceration, begun by Bill Clinton with the
1994 omnibus crime bill, and the tripling and quadrupling of prison sentences. It is the result of
the slashing of basic government services, including, of course, welfare, that Clinton gutted; deregulation,
a decaying infrastructure, including public schools, and the de facto tax boycott by corporations.
It is the result of the transformation of the country into an oligarchy. The nativist revolt on the
right, and the aborted insurgency within the Democratic Party, makes sense when you see what they
have done to the country.
Police forces have been turned into quasi-military entities that terrorize marginal communities,
where people have been stripped of all of their rights and can be shot with impunity; in fact over
three are killed a day. The state shoots and locks up poor people of color as a form of social control.
They are quite willing to employ the same form of social control on any other segment of the population
that becomes restive.
The Democratic Party, in particular, is driving this whole Russia witch-hunt. It cannot face
its complicity in the destruction of our civil liberties -- and remember, Barack Obama's assault
on civil liberties was worse than those carried out by George W. Bush -- and the destruction of our
economy and our democratic institutions.
Politicians like the Clintons, Pelosi and Schumer are creations of Wall Street. That is why
they are so virulent about pushing back against the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. Without
Wall Street money, they would not hold political power. The Democratic Party doesn't actually function
as a political party. It's about perpetual mass mobilization and a hyperventilating public relations
arm, all paid for by corporate donors. The base of the party has no real say in the leadership or
the policies of the party, as Bernie Sanders and his followers found out. They are props in the sterile
political theater.
These party elites, consumed by greed, myopia and a deep cynicism, have a death grip on the political
process. They're not going to let it go, even if it all implodes.
... ... ...
DN: Let's come back to this question of the Russian hacking news story. You raised the ability
to generate a story, which has absolutely no factual foundation, nothing but assertions by various
intelligence agencies, presented as an assessment that is beyond question. What is your evaluation
of this?
CH: The commercial broadcast networks, and that includes CNN and MSNBC, are not in the business
of journalism. They hardly do any. Their celebrity correspondents are courtiers to the elite. They
speculate about and amplify court gossip, which is all the accusations about Russia, and they repeat
what they are told to repeat. They sacrifice journalism and truth for ratings and profit. These cable
news shows are one of many revenue streams in a corporate structure. They compete against other revenue
streams. The head of CNN, Jeff Zucker, who helped create the fictional persona of Donald Trump on
"Celebrity Apprentice," has turned politics on CNN into a 24-hour reality show. All nuance, ambiguity,
meaning and depth, along with verifiable fact, are sacrificed for salacious entertainment. Lying,
racism, bigotry and conspiracy theories are given platforms and considered newsworthy, often espoused
by people whose sole quality is that they are unhinged. It is news as burlesque.
I was on the investigative team at the New York Times during the lead-up to the Iraq
War. I was based in Paris and covered Al Qaeda in Europe and the Middle East. Lewis Scooter Libby,
Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and maybe somebody in an intelligence agency, would confirm whatever story
the administration was attempting to pitch. Journalistic rules at the Times say you can't
go with a one-source story. But if you have three or four supposedly independent sources confirming
the same narrative, then you can go with it, which is how they did it. The paper did not break any
rules taught at Columbia journalism school, but everything they wrote was a lie.
The whole exercise was farcical. The White House would leak some bogus story to Judy Miller or
Michael Gordon, and then go on the talk shows to say, 'as the Times reported .' It gave these lies
the veneer of independence and reputable journalism. This was a massive institutional failing, and
one the paper has never faced.
DN: The CIA pitches the story, and then the Times gets the verification from those who
pitch it to them.
CH: It's not always pitched. And not much of this came from the CIA The CIA wasn't buying the
"weapons of mass destruction" hysteria.
DN: It goes the other way too?
CH: Sure. Because if you're trying to have access to a senior official, you'll constantly be putting
in requests, and those officials will decide when they want to see you. And when they want to see
you, it's usually because they have something to sell you.
DN: The media's anti-Russia narrative has been embraced by large portions of what presents itself
as the "left."
CH: Well, don't get me started on the American left. First of all, there is no American left --
not a left that has any kind of seriousness, that understands political or revolutionary theories,
that's steeped in economic study, that understands how systems of power work, especially corporate
and imperial power. The left is caught up in the same kind of cults of personality that plague the
rest of society. It focuses on Trump, as if Trump is the central problem. Trump is a product, a symptom
of a failed system and dysfunctional democracy, not the disease.
If you attempt to debate most of those on the supposedly left, they reduce discussion to this
cartoonish vision of politics.
The serious left in this country was decimated. It started with the suppression of radical movements
under Woodrow Wilson, then the "Red Scares" in the 1920s, when they virtually destroyed our labor
movement and our radical press, and then all of the purges in the 1950s. For good measure, they purged
the liberal class -- look at what they did to Henry Wallace -- so that Cold War "liberals" equated
capitalism with democracy, and imperialism with freedom and liberty. I lived in Switzerland and France.
There are still residues of a militant left in Europe, which gives Europeans something to build upon.
But here we almost have to begin from scratch.
I've battled continuously with Antifa and the Black Bloc. I think they're kind of poster children
for what I would consider phenomenal political immaturity. Resistance is not a form of personal catharsis.
We are not fighting the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The corporate elites we have to overthrow already
hold power. And unless we build a broad, popular resistance movement, which takes a lot of patient
organizing among working men and women, we are going to be steadily ground down.
So Trump's not the problem. But just that sentence alone is going to kill most discussions with
people who consider themselves part of the left.
The corporate state has made it very hard to make a living if you hold fast to this radical critique.
You will never get tenure. You probably won't get academic appointments. You won't win prizes. You
won't get grants. The New York Times , if they review your book, will turn it over to a
dutiful mandarin like George Packer to trash it -- as he did with my last book. The elite schools,
and I have taught as a visiting professor at a few of them, such as Princeton and Columbia, replicate
the structure and goals of corporations. If you want to even get through a doctoral committee, much
less a tenure committee, you must play it really, really safe. You must not challenge the corporate-friendly
stance that permeates the institution and is imposed through corporate donations and the dictates
of wealthy alumni. Half of the members of most of these trustee boards should be in prison!
Speculation in the 17th century in Britain was a crime. Speculators were hanged. And today they
run the economy and the country. They have used the capturing of wealth to destroy the intellectual,
cultural and artistic life in the country and snuff out our democracy. There is a word for these
people: traitors.
US Congress allowed to drag itself into this propaganda swamp by politized Intelligence community, which became a major political
player, that can dictate Congress what to do and what not to do. Now it is not that easy to get out of this "intelligence swamp"
Notable quotes:
"... The 2017 ICA on Russia was conceived in an atmosphere of despair and denial, birthed by Democrats and Republicans alike who were stunned by Trump's surprise electoral victory in November 2016. To say that this issue was a political event would be a gross understatement; the 2017 Russian ICA will go down in history as one of the most politicized intelligence documents ever, regardless of the degree of accuracy eventually afforded its contents. The very fact that the document is given the sobriquet "Intelligence Community" is itself a political act, designed to impart a degree of scrutiny and community consensus that simply did not exist when it came to the production of that document, or the classified reports that it was derived from. ..."
"... This was a report prepared by handpicked analysts ..."
"... iven the firestorm of political intrigue and controversy initiated by the publication of this document, the notion of a "general consensus" regarding the level of trust imparted to it by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee does not engender confidence. ..."
"... It was this document that spawned the issue of "collusion." While Sens. Burr and Warner can state that "collusion" is still an open issue, the fact of the matter is that, in this regard, Trump and his campaign advisors have already been found guilty in the court of public opinion, especially among those members of the public and the media who were vehemently opposed to his candidacy and ultimate victory. ..."
"... One need only review the comments of the various Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee, their counterparts serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as the various experts and pundits in the media, to underscore the degree to which prejudice has "worked its evil" when it comes to the issue of collusion and the Trump campaign in this regard. ..."
"... purchase of advertisements on various social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, by the Russians or their proxies. With regard to these advertisements, Senator Burr painted a dire picture. "It seems," he declared, "that the overall theme of the Russian involvement in the US elections was to create chaos at every level." ..."
"... No one wants to be told that they have been victims of a con; this is especially true when dealing with the sacred trust imparted to the American citizenry by the Constitution of the United States regarding the free and fair election of those who will represent us in higher office. American politics, for better or worse, is about the personal connection a given candidate has with the voter, a gut feeling that this person shares common values and beliefs. ..."
"... the percentage of Americans that participate in national elections is low. Those that do tend to be people who care enough about one or more issues to actually get out and vote. To categorize these dedicated citizens as brain-dead dupes who are susceptible to social media-based click advertisements is an insult to American democracy. ..."
"... There is a world of difference between Russian intelligence services allegedly hacking politically sensitive emails and selectively releasing them for the sole purpose of undermining a given Presidential candidate's electoral prospects, and mimicking social media-based advertisements addressing issues that are already at play in an election. The Russians didn't invent the ongoing debate in the United States over gun control (i.e., the "Second Amendment" issue), race relations (the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri) or immigration ("The Wall"). ..."
"... These were, and remain, core issues that are at the heart of the American domestic political discourse, regardless of where one stands. You either know the issues, or you don't; it is an insult to the American voter to suggest that they are so malleable that $100,000 of targeted social media-based advertisements can swing their vote, even if 10 million of them viewed it. ..."
The 'briefing' is just another exercise in preferred narrative boosting.
The co-chairmen of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held a press briefing Thursday on the status of their ongoing investigation
into Russian meddling in the American electoral process. Content-wise, the press briefing and the question and answer session were
an exercise in information futility -- they provided little substance and nothing new. The investigation was still ongoing, the senators
explained, and there was still work to be done.
Nine months into the Committee's work, the best Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), could offer was that there
was "general consensus" among committee members and their staff that they trust the findings of the Intelligence Community Assessment
(ICA) of January 2017, which gave high confidence to the charge that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. The issue
of possible collusion between Russia and members of the campaign of Donald Trump, however, "is still open."
Frankly speaking, this isn't good enough.
The 2017 ICA on Russia was conceived in an atmosphere of despair and denial, birthed by Democrats and Republicans alike who
were stunned by Trump's surprise electoral victory in November 2016. To say that this issue was a political event would be a gross
understatement; the 2017 Russian ICA will go down in history as one of the most politicized intelligence documents ever, regardless
of the degree of accuracy eventually afforded its contents. The very fact that the document is given the sobriquet "Intelligence
Community" is itself a political act, designed to impart a degree of scrutiny and community consensus that simply did not exist when
it came to the production of that document, or the classified reports that it was derived from.
This was a report prepared by handpicked analysts from three of the Intelligence Community's sixteen agencies (the
CIA, NSA, and FBI) who operated outside of the National Intelligence Council (the venue for the production of Intelligence Community
products such as the Russian ICA), and void of the direction and supervision of a dedicated National Intelligence Officer. Overcoming
this deficient family tree represents a high hurdle, even before the issue of the credibility of the sources and methods used to
underpin the ICA's findings are discussed. Given the firestorm of political intrigue and controversy initiated by the publication
of this document, the notion of a "general consensus" regarding the level of trust imparted to it by the Senate Select Intelligence
Committee does not engender confidence.
It was this document that spawned the issue of "collusion." While Sens. Burr and Warner can state that "collusion" is still
an open issue, the fact of the matter is that, in this regard, Trump and his campaign advisors have already been found guilty in
the court of public opinion, especially among those members of the public and the media who were vehemently opposed to his candidacy
and ultimate victory. Insofar as the committee's investigation serves as a legitimate search for truth, it does so as a post-conviction
appeal. However, as the distinguished Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna noted in his opinion in Berger v. United States
(1921):
The remedy by appeal is inadequate. It comes after the trial, and, if prejudice exist, it has worked its evil and a judgment
of it in a reviewing tribunal is precarious. It goes there fortified by presumptions, and nothing can be more elusive of estimate
or decision than a disposition of a mind in which there is a personal ingredient.
One need only review the comments of the various Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee, their counterparts serving
on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as the various experts and pundits in the media, to underscore the
degree to which prejudice has "worked its evil" when it comes to the issue of collusion and the Trump campaign in this regard.
The two senators proceeded to touch on a new angle recently introduced into their investigation, that of the purchase of advertisements
on various social media platforms, including
Facebook and Twitter, by the
Russians or their proxies. With regard to these advertisements, Senator Burr painted a dire picture. "It seems," he declared, "that
the overall theme of the Russian involvement in the US elections was to create chaos at every level."
No one wants to be told that they have been victims of a con; this is especially true when dealing with the sacred trust imparted
to the American citizenry by the Constitution of the United States regarding the free and fair election of those who will represent
us in higher office. American politics, for better or worse, is about the personal connection a given candidate has with the voter,
a gut feeling that this person shares common values and beliefs.
Nevertheless, the percentage of Americans that participate in national elections is low. Those that do tend to be people who
care enough about one or more issues to actually get out and vote. To categorize these dedicated citizens as brain-dead dupes who
are susceptible to social media-based click advertisements is an insult to American democracy.
There is a world of difference between Russian intelligence services allegedly hacking politically sensitive emails and selectively
releasing them for the sole purpose of undermining a given Presidential candidate's electoral prospects, and mimicking social media-based
advertisements addressing issues that are already at play in an election. The Russians didn't invent the ongoing debate in the United
States over gun control (i.e., the "Second Amendment" issue), race relations (the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri)
or immigration ("The Wall").
These were, and remain, core issues that are at the heart of the American domestic political discourse, regardless of where
one stands. You either know the issues, or you don't; it is an insult to the American voter to suggest that they are so malleable
that $100,000 of targeted social media-based advertisements can swing their vote, even if 10 million of them viewed it.
The take away from the press briefing given by Senator's Burr and Warner was two-fold: One, the Russians meddled, and two, we
don't know if Trump colluded with the Russians. The fact that America is nine months into this investigation with little more to
show now than what could have been said at the start is, in and of itself, an American political tragedy. The Trump administration
has been hobbled by the inertia of this and other investigations derived from the question of Russian meddling. That this process
may yet vindicate President Trump isn't justification for the process itself; in such a case the delay will have hurt more than the
truth. As William Penn, the founder of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, so eloquently noted:
Delays have been more injurious than direct Injustice. They too often starve those they dare not deny. The very Winner is made
a Loser, because he pays twice for his own; like those who purchase Estates Mortgaged before to the full value.
Our law says that to delay Justice is Injustice. Not to have a Right, and not to come of it, differs little. Refuse or Dispatch
is the Duty of a Good Officer.
Senators Burr and Warner, together with their fellow members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and their respective
staffs, would do well to heed those words.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control
treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of "Deal
of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West's Road to War" (Clarity Press, 2017).
This is particular dirty campaign to implicate Trump and delegitimize his victory is a part of
color revolution against Trump.
The other noble purpose is to find a scapegoat for the
current problems, especially in Democratic Party, and to preserve Clinton neoliberals rule over
the party for a few more futile years.
Notable quotes:
"... Congress is investigating 3,000 suspicious ads which were run on Facebook. These were claimed to have been bought by "Russia" to influence the U.S. presidential election in favor of Trump. ..."
"... The mini-ads were bought to promote click-bait pages and sites. These pages and sites were created and then promoted to sell further advertisement. The media though, has still not understood the issue. ..."
"... A few thousand users will come and look at a page. Some will 'like' the puppy pictures or the rant against LGBT and further spread the page. Some will click the promoted Google ads. Money then flows into the pockets of the page creator. One can automatize, rinse and repeat this scheme forever. Each such page is a small effort for a small revenue. But the scheme is highly scale-able and parts of it can be automatized. ..."
"... This is, in essence, the same business model traditional media publishers use. One creates "news" and controversies to attract readers. The attention of the readers is then sold to advertisers. The business is no longer a limited to a few rich oligarchic. One no longer needs reporters or a printing press to join in. Anyone can now take part in it. ..."
"... We learned after the election that some youths in Macedonia created whole "news"-websites filled with highly attractive but fake partisan stories. They were not interested in the veracity or political direction of their content. Their only interest was to attract viewers. They made thousands of dollars by selling advertisements on their sites: ..."
"... The teen said his monthly revenue was in the four figures, a considerable sum in a country where the average monthly pay is 360 euros ($383). As he navigated his site's statistics, he dropped nuggets of journalism advice. ..."
"... After the mystery of "Russian" $3 ads for "adorable puppies" pages on Facebook has been solved, Congress and the New York Times will have to move on. There next subject is probably the "Russian influence campaign" on Youtube. ..."
"... Russian Car Crash Compilations have for years attracted millions of viewers. The "Russians" want to increase road rage on U.S. highways. This again will - according to expert Clinton Watts - "amplify divisive political issues across the political spectrum". ..."
"... "Russian interference" in Western faux democracies is just more Fake News that distracts from the real issues. And all those real issues come down to this: the need to reign in the oligarchs. This is very easy to do via progressive taxation (with no loopholes). ..."
"... The two words that the establishment fears most: Progressive Taxation . ..."
"... Great article. I especially like the tactful way that modern clickbait farming is obliquely tied to the MSM business model. Facebook and Google have a lot to answer for. ..."
"... Russia gate, since it is unnecessarily mentally exhausting and intellectually futile, it is namely pure provocation and as such it should be ignored and not proliferated even in its criticism making a fakes news a real news by sole fact of mentioning it on the respectable independent sites. ..."
"... The whole digital media and ad business that have built the Google and Facebook media juggernauts is all a giant scam. Smart advertisers like P&G are recognizing it for what it is and will slowly pullback. It is only a matter of time before others catch on and these companies will bleed ad revenues. ..."
Congress is investigating 3,000 suspicious ads which were run on Facebook. These were
claimed to have been bought by "Russia" to influence the U.S. presidential election in favor of
Trump.
It now turns out that these Facebook ads had nothing to do with the election. The mini-ads
were bought to promote click-bait pages and sites. These pages and sites were created and then
promoted to sell further advertisement. The media though, has still not understood the
issue.
Providing new evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Facebook disclosed on
Wednesday that it had identified more than $100,000 worth of divisive ads on hot-button
issues purchased by a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin.
...
The disclosure adds to the evidence of the broad scope of the Russian influence campaign,
which American intelligence agencies concluded was designed to damage Hillary Clinton and
boost Donald J. Trump during the election.
Like any Congress investigation the current one concerned with Facebook ads is leaking like
a sieve. What oozes out makes little sense.
If "Russia" aimed to make Congress and U.S. media a laughing stock it surely achieved
that.
Today the NYT says that the ads
were posted "in disguise" by "the Russians" to promote variously themed Facebook pages:
There was "Defend the 2nd," a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with
firearms and tough rhetoric. There was a rainbow-hued page for gay rights activists, "LGBT
United." There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies
that spread across the site with the help of paid ads
No one has explained how these pages are supposed to be connected to a Russian "influence"
campaign. It is unexplained how these are supposed to connected to the 2016 election. That is
simply asserted because Facebook said, for unknown reasons, that these ads may have come from
some Russian agency. How Facebook has determined that is not known.
With each detail that leaks from the "Russian ads" investigation the propaganda framework of
"election manipulation" falls further apart:
Late Monday, Facebook said in a post that about 10 million people had seen the ads in
question. About 44 percent of the ads were seen before the 2016 election and the rest after,
the company said
The original story propagandized that "Russia" intended to influence the election in favor
of Trump. But why then was the majority of the ads in questions run later after November 9? And
how would an animal-lovers page with adorable puppy pictures help to achieve Trumps election
victory?
Roughly 25% of the ads were never shown to anyone. That's because advertising auctions are
designed so that ads reach people based on relevance, and certain ads may not reach anyone as
a result.
...
For 50% of the ads, less than $3 was spent; for 99% of the ads, less than $1,000 was spent.
Of the 3,000 ads Facebook originally claimed were "Russian" only 2,200 were ever viewed.
Most of the advertisements were mini-ads which, for the price of a coffee, promoted private
pages related to hobbies and a wide spectrum of controversial issues. The majority of the ads
ran after the election.
All that "adds to the evidence of the broad scope of the Russian influence campaign ...
designed to damage Hillary Clinton and boost Donald J. Trump during the election"?
No.
But the NYT still finds "experts" who believe in the "Russian influence" nonsense and find
the most stupid reasons to justify their claims:
Clinton Watts, a former F.B.I. agent now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in
Philadelphia, said Russia had been entrepreneurial in trying to develop diverse channels of
influence. Some, like the dogs page, may have been created without a specific goal and held
in reserve for future use.
Puppy pictures for "future use"? Nonsense. Lunacy! The pages described and the ads leading to them are typical click-bait, not a political
influence op.
The for-profit scheme runs as follows: One builds pages with "hot" stuff that attracts lots of viewers. One creates ad-space on
these pages and fills it with Google ads. One promotes the spiked pages by buying $3 Facebook
mini-ads for them.
A few thousand users will come and look at a page. Some will 'like' the puppy pictures or
the rant against LGBT and further spread the page. Some will click the promoted Google ads.
Money then flows into the pockets of the page creator. One can automatize, rinse and repeat this scheme forever. Each such page is a small effort
for a small revenue. But the scheme is highly scale-able and parts of it can be
automatized.
This is, in essence, the same business model traditional media publishers use. One creates
"news" and controversies to attract readers. The attention of the readers is then sold to
advertisers. The business is no longer a limited to a few rich oligarchic. One no longer needs
reporters or a printing press to join in. Anyone can now take part in it.
We learned after
the election that some youths in Macedonia created whole "news"-websites filled with highly
attractive but fake partisan stories. They were not interested in the veracity or political
direction of their content. Their only interest was to attract viewers. They made thousands of
dollars by selling advertisements on their sites:
The teen said his monthly revenue was in the four figures, a considerable sum in a country
where the average monthly pay is 360 euros ($383). As he navigated his site's statistics, he
dropped nuggets of journalism advice.
"You have to write what people want to see, not what you want to show," he said, scrolling
through The Political Insider's stories as a large banner read "ARREST HILLARY NOW."
The 3,000 Facebook ads Congress is investigating are part of a similar scheme. The mini-ads
promoted pages with hot button issues and click-bait puppy pictures. These pages were
themselves created to generate ad-clicks and revenue. As Facebook claims that "Russia" is
behind them, we will likely find some Russian teens who simply repeated the scheme their
Macedonian friends were running on.
With its "Russian influence" scare campaign the NYT follows the same business model. It is
producing fake news which attracts viewers and readers who's attention is then sold to
advertisers. Facebook is also profiting from this. Its current piecemeal release of vague
information keeps its name in the news.
After the mystery of "Russian" $3 ads for "adorable puppies" pages on Facebook has been
solved, Congress and the New York Times will have to move on. There next subject is probably
the "Russian influence campaign" on Youtube.
Russian Car Crash
Compilations have for years attracted millions of viewers. The "Russians" want to increase
road rage on U.S. highways. This again will - according to expert Clinton Watts - "amplify
divisive political issues across the political spectrum".
The car crash compilations, like the puppy pages, are another sign that Russia is waging war
against the people of the United States!
You don't believe that? You should. Trust your experienced politician!
This gets more chilling daily : now we learn Russia targeted Americans on Facebook by
"demographics, geography, gender & interests," across websites & devices, reached
millions, kept going after Nov. An attack on all Americans, not just HRC campaign washingtonpost.com/business/econo
It indeed gets more chilling. It's fall. It also generates ad revenue.
Posted by b on October 3, 2017 at 02:09 PM |
Permalink
"Russian interference" in Western faux democracies is just more Fake News that distracts from
the real issues. And all those real issues come down to this: the need to reign in the
oligarchs.
This is very easy to do via progressive taxation (with no loopholes).
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
The two words that the establishment fears most: Progressive Taxation .
You're presenting a very good concept/meme to understand: Fake news is click bait for
gain.
The same can be said for any sensationalism or shocking event - like the Kurdish
referendum, like the Catalonia referendum, like the Vegas shooting - or like confrontational
or dogmatic comments in threads about those events.
Everywhere we turn someone is trying to game us for some kind of gain. What matters is to
step back from the front lines where our sense is accosted and offended, to step back from
the automatic reflex, and to remember that someone triggered that reflex, deliberately, for
their gain, not ours.
We have to reside in reason and equanimity, because the moment we indulge in our righteous
anger or our strong convictions, the odds are extremely good that someone is playing us.
It's a wicked world, but in fact we live in an age when we can see its meta
characteristics like never before.
Jesus Christ, every friggin day we hear about Russians and then the next the lies falls
apart, STILL the stupid dumb liberal media keep coming up with new conspiracies spread them
as fact, and then try justify them even when they get debunked!
These people are indeed lunatic.
What we see is the biggest psyop., propaganda disinformation campaig ever in the western
media, far more powerful than "nuclear Iraq" of 2003.
Still, and this should be a warning, majority of people in EU/US believe this
nonsense.
I lol'd. But seriously the next step is a false flag implicating Russia. They're getting
nowhere assassinating Russian diplomats and shooting down Russian aircraft, both military and
civilian. Even overthrowing governments who are Russia-friendly hasn't seem to provoke a
response.
But I consider the domestic Russia buzz to be performance art, and I imagine it's become
even grating to some of its participants. How could it not be, unless everyone is heavily
medicated(a lot certainly are)? Anyway it's by design that the western media and the
political classes they serve need a script, they're incapable of discussing actual issues.
Independence has been made quaint.
The line between politics and product marketing has gone.
But no matter if "the Russians" influenced the US election or not - after all that is what
most countries do to each other - the FBI is correct that to be able to target audiences
according to demographics and individual traits is a powerful tool.
The newspapers had a clear agenda. An editorial in The New York Times, headlined In the
Terror by Radio, was used to censure the relatively new medium of radio, which was becoming
a serious competitor in providing news and advertising. "Radio is new but it has adult
responsibilities. It has not mastered itself or the material it uses," said the editorial
leader comment on November 1 1938. In an excellent piece in Slate magazine in 2013,
Jefferson Pooley (associate professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College) and
Michael J Socolow (associate professor of communication and journalism at the University of
Maine) looked at the continuing popularity of the myth of mass panic and they took to task
NPR's Radiolab programme about the incident and the Radiolab assertion that "The United
States experienced a kind of mass hysteria that we've never seen before." Pooley and
Socolow wrote: "How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America's newspapers.
... AND IT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO COPY ORSON WELLES . . . In February 1949, Leonardo Paez and
Eduardo Alcaraz produced a Spanish-language version of Welles's 1938 script for Radio Quito
in Ecuador. The broadcast set off panic. Quito police and fire brigades rushed out of town
to fight the supposed alien invasion force. After it was revealed that the broadcast was
fiction, the panic transformed into a riot. The riot resulted in at least seven deaths,
including those of Paez's girlfriend and nephew. The offices Radio Quito, and El Comercio,
a local newspaper that had participated in the hoax by publishing false reports of
unidentified flying objects in the days preceding the broadcast, were both burned to the
ground.
Jackrabbit 2
No - the two words the Capital system fears the most are SURPLUS VALUE , the control of the
'profit principle' for social not private ends .
Jesus Christ, every friggin day we hear about Russians and then the next the lies falls
apart, STILL the stupid dumb liberal media keep coming up with new conspiracies spread them
as fact, and then try justify them even when they get debunked!
These people are indeed lunatic.
somebody | Oct 3, 2017 3:11:44 PM | 9 The American panic was a myth, the Equadorian panic in 1949 not so much. I listened to this
Radiolab podcast about same ... the details of how they pulled it off in a one-radio station
country pre-internet are interesting and valuable (they widely advertised a very popular music
program which was then "interrupted" by the hoax to ensure near-universal audience (including
the police and other authorities). Very very fews were "in on the joke" and it wasn't a
joke.
whole page on WooW:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91622-war-of-the-worlds/
Great article.
I especially like the tactful way that modern clickbait farming is obliquely tied to the MSM
business model.
Facebook and Google have a lot to answer for.
"Lankford shocked the world this week by revealing that "Russian Internet trolls" were
stoking the NFL kneeling debate. ... Conservative outlets like Breitbart and Newsmax and
Fox played up the "Russians stoked the kneeling controversy" angle because it was in their
interest to suggest that domestic support for kneeling protests is less than what it
appears....
The Post reported that Lankford's office had cited one of "Boston Antifa's"
tweets. But the example offered read suspiciously like a young net-savvy American goofing
on antifa stereotypes "More gender inclusivity with NFL fans and gluten free options at
stadiums We're liking the new NFL #NewNFL #TakeAKnee #TakeTheKnee." ...
The group was most
likely a pair of yahoos from Oregon named Alexis Esteb and Brandon Krebs. "
Pity Rolling Stone got caught up in that fake college rape allegation, they have actually
done some solid reporting. Every MSM outlet has had multiple fake stories, so should RS be
shunned for life for one bad story?
It is time that sane part of independent media understood that there is no more need to
rationally respond to psychotic delusions of Deep State puppets in Russia gate, since it is
unnecessarily mentally exhausting and intellectually futile, it is namely pure provocation
and as such it should be ignored and not proliferated even in its criticism making a fakes
news a real news by sole fact of mentioning it on the respectable independent sites.
There are only two effective responses to provocation namely silence or violence, anything
else plays the book of provocateurs.
Now they're seriously undermining their claims of intentionality ... as well as their wildly
inflated claims effect on outcome or even effective "undermining" ... again, compared to
Citizens United and the long-count of 2000 ... negligible....
And still insisting that Hillary Clinton is Russia's Darth Vader against whom unlimited
resources are marshalled because she must be stopped ... even though she damn near won... and
the reasons she lost seems unrelated to such vagaries as the DNC e-mails or facebook
campaigns (unless you believe she had a god-given right to each and every vote)
Why do you think this is important enough to make the effort to write another blog entry B?
Everyone who wants to know that this is all fantasy knows by now.
'Congress is investigating 3,000 suspicious ads which were run on Facebook. These were
claimed to have been bought by "Russia" to influence the U.S. presidential election in favor
of Trump.
This is the same US congress that regularly marches off to Israel to receive orders
This isn't about the "truth" (or lies) wrt Russian involvement, it's about the
increasingly rapid failure of the Government/Establishment's narrative ...
Increasingly they can't even keep their accusations "alive" for more than a few days ...
and some of their accusations (like the one here, that some "Russian" sites were created and
not used, but to be held for use at some future date) become fairly ridiculous ... and the
"remedy" to "Russians" creating clickbait sites for some future nefarious use, I think can
only be banning all Russians from creating sites ... or maybe using facebook altogether ...
all with no evidence of evil-doers actually doing evil...
It's rather like Jared Kushner's now THIRD previously undisclosed private e-mail account
... fool me once versus how disorganized/dumb/arrogant/crooked is this guy?
Sorry to be off topic but yesterday the Saker of the Vineyard published a couple of articles
about Catalonia. The first was a diatribe, a nasty hatchet job on the Catalan people which
included the following referring to the Catalan people:
"The Problems they have because with their corruption, inefficiency, mismanagement,
inability and sometimes the simplest stupidity, are always the fault of others (read
Spaniards here) which gives them "carte blanche" to keep going on with it."
"... They (the independistas) are NATIONAL SOCIALIST (aka NAZI) in their Ideology"
Then Saker published an article by Peter Koenig that was reasonable and what we have come
to expect. Then he forbade all comments on either of the two articles. My comment was banned,
which simply said in my opinion from working for fourteen years in Spain that the Catalans
were extremely efficient in comparison with their Madrid counterparts.
I must admit that I became a fan of watching those Russian car crashes that were captured by
the cams many russian drivers keep on their dash boards. Some of these were very funny. I was
not aware that made me a victim of Putin propaganda. In any case, they are not that
interesting anymore once they were commercialized. That was about 10 years ago.
The whole digital media and ad business that have built the Google and Facebook media
juggernauts is all a giant scam. Smart advertisers like P&G are recognizing it for what
it is and will slowly pullback. It is only a matter of time before others catch on and these
companies will bleed ad revenues.
OT - more from comedy central - daily USA press briefing from today...
"QUESTION: On Iran, would you and the State Department say, as Secretary Mattis said
today, that staying in the JCPOA would be in the U.S. national interest?
MS NAUERT: Yeah.
QUESTION: Is this a position you share?
MS NAUERT: So I'm certainly familiar with what Secretary Mattis said on Capitol Hill
today. Secretary Mattis, of course, one of many people who is providing expertise and counsel
to the President on the issue of Iran and the JCPOA. The President is getting lots of
information on that. We have about 12 days or so, I think, to make our determination for the
next JCPOA guideline.
The administration looks at JCPOA as – the fault in the JCPOA as not looking at the
totality of Iran's bad behavior. Secretary Tillerson talked about that at length at the UN
General Assembly. So did the President as well. We know that Iran is responsible for terror
attacks. We know that Iran arms the Houthi rebels in Yemen, which leads to a more miserable
failed state, awful situation in Yemen, for example. We know what they're doing in Syria.
Where you find the Iranian Government, you can often find terrible things happening in the
world. This administration is very clear about highlighting that and will look at Iran in
sort of its totality of all of its bad behaviors, not just the nuclear deal.
I don't want to get ahead of the discussions that are ongoing with this – within the
administration, as it pertains to Iran. The President has said he's made he's decision, and
so I don't want to speak on behalf of the President, and he'll just have to make that
determination when he's ready to do so."
"... But what it does demonstrate is that an incredibly reckless, anything-goes climate prevails when it comes to claims about Russia. Media outlets will publish literally any official assertion as Truth without the slightest regard for evidentiary standards. ..."
"... Seeing Putin lurking behind and masterminding every western problem is now religious dogma – it explains otherwise-confounding developments, provides certainty to a complex world, and alleviates numerous factions of responsibility – so media outlets and their journalists are lavishly rewarded any time they publish accusatory stories about Russia (especially ones involving the U.S. election), even if they end up being debunked. ..."
"... A highly touted story yesterday from the New York Times – claiming that Russians used Twitter more widely known than before to manipulate U.S. politics – demonstrates this recklessness. The story is based on the claims of a new group formed just two months ago by a union of neocons and Democratic national security officials, led by long-time liars and propagandists such as Bill Kristol, former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, and Bush Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff. I reported on the founding of this group, calling itself the Alliance for Securing Democracy, when it was unveiled (this is not to be confused with the latest new Russia group unveiled last week by Rob Reiner and David Frum and featuring a different former national security state official (former DNI James Clapper) – calling itself InvestigateRussia.org – featuring a video declaring that the U.S. is now "at war with Russia"). ..."
"... The Kristol/Morell/Chertoff group on which the Times based its article has a very simple tactic: they secretly decide which Twitter accounts are "Russia bots," meaning accounts that disseminate an "anti-American message" and are controlled by the Kremlin. They refuse to tell anyone which Twitter accounts they decided are Kremlin-loyal, nor will they identify their methodology for creating their lists or determining what constitutes "anti-Americanism." ..."
"... That's how the Russia narrative is constantly "reported," and it's the reason so many of the biggest stories have embarrassingly collapsed. It's because the Russia story of 2017 – not unlike the Iraq discourse of 2002 – is now driven by religious-like faith rather than rational faculties. ..."
"... No questioning of official claims is allowed. The evidentiary threshold which an assertion must overcome before being accepted is so low as to be non-existent. ..."
"... Regardless of your views on Russia, Trump and the rest, nobody can possibly regard this climate as healthy. ..."
Last Friday, most major media outlets touted a major story about Russian attempts to hack into
U.S. voting systems, based exclusively on claims made by the Department of Homeland Security. "Russians
attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states in the run-up to last year's presidential election,
officials said Friday," began the USA Today story, similar to how most other outlets presented this
extraordinary claim.
This official story was explosive for obvious reasons, and predictably triggered instant decrees
– that of course went viral – declaring that the legitimacy of the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential
election is now in doubt.
Virginia's Democratic Congressman Don Beyer, referring to the 21 targeted states, announced that
this shows "Russia tried to hack their election":
MSNBC's Paul Revere for all matters relating to the Kremlin take-over, Rachel Maddow, was indignant
that this wasn't told to us earlier and that we still aren't getting all the details. "What we have
now figured out," Maddow gravely intoned as she showed the multi-colored maps she made, is that "Homeland
Security knew at least by June that 21 states had been targeted by Russian hackers during the election.
. .targeting their election infrastructure."
They were one small step away from demanding that the election results be nullified, indulging
the sentiment expressed by #Resistance icon Carl Reiner the other day: "Is there anything more exciting
that [sic] the possibility of Trump's election being invalidated & Hillary rightfully installed as
our President?"
So what was wrong with this story? Just one small thing: it was false. The story began to fall
apart yesterday when Associated Press reported that Wisconsin – one of the states included in the
original report that, for obvious reasons, caused the most excitement – did not, in fact, have its
election systems targeted by Russian hackers:
The spokesman for Homeland Security then tried to walk back that reversal, insisting that there
was still evidence that some computer networks had been targeted, but could not say that they had
anything to do with elections or voting. And, as AP noted: "Wisconsin's chief elections administrator,
Michael Haas, had repeatedly said that Homeland Security assured the state it had not been targeted."
Then the story collapsed completely last night. The Secretary of State for another one of the
named states, California, issued a scathing statement repudiating the claimed report:
Sometimes stories end up debunked. There's nothing particularly shocking about that. If this were
an isolated incident, one could chalk it up to basic human error that has no broader meaning.
But this is no isolated incident. Quite the contrary: this has happened over and over and over
again. Inflammatory claims about Russia get mindlessly hyped by media outlets, almost always based
on nothing more than evidence-free claims from government officials, only to collapse under the slightest
scrutiny, because they are entirely lacking in evidence.
The examples of such debacles when it comes to claims about Russia are too numerous to comprehensively
chronicle. I wrote about this phenomenon many times and listed many of the examples, the last time
in June when 3 CNN journalists "resigned" over a completely false story linking Trump adviser Anthony
Scaramucci to investigations into a Russian investment fund which the network was forced to retract:
Remember that time the Washington Post claimed that Russia had hacked the U.S. electricity grid,
causing politicians to denounce Putin for trying to deny heat to Americans in winter, only to have
to issue multiple retractions because none of that ever happened? Or the time that the Post had to
publish a massive editor's note after its reporters made claims about Russian infiltration of the
internet and spreading of "Fake News" based on an anonymous group's McCarthyite blacklist that counted
sites like the Drudge Report and various left-wing outlets as Kremlin agents?
Or that time when Slate claimed that Trump had created a secret server with a Russian bank, all
based on evidence that every other media outlet which looked at it were too embarrassed to get near?
Or the time the Guardian was forced to retract its report by Ben Jacobs – which went viral – that
casually asserted that WikiLeaks has a long relationship with the Kremlin? Or the time that Fortune
retracted suggestions that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN's network? And then there's the
huge market that was created – led by leading Democrats – that blindly ingested every conspiratorial,
unhinged claim about Russia churned out by an army of crazed conspiracists such as Louise Mensch
and Claude "TrueFactsStated" Taylor?
And now we have the Russia-hacked-the-voting-systems-of-21-states to add to this trash heap. Each
time the stories go viral; each time they further shape the narrative; each time those who spread
them say little to nothing when it is debunked.
None of this means that every Russia claim is false, nor does it disprove the accusation that
Putin ordered the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta's email inboxes (a claim for which, just by
the way, still no evidence has been presented by the U.S. government). Perhaps there were some states
that were targeted, even though the key claims of this story, that attracted the most attention,
have now been repudiated.
But what it does demonstrate is that an incredibly reckless, anything-goes climate prevails
when it comes to claims about Russia. Media outlets will publish literally any official assertion
as Truth without the slightest regard for evidentiary standards.
Seeing Putin lurking behind and masterminding every western problem is now religious dogma
– it explains otherwise-confounding developments, provides certainty to a complex world, and alleviates
numerous factions of responsibility – so media outlets and their journalists are lavishly rewarded
any time they publish accusatory stories about Russia (especially ones involving the U.S. election),
even if they end up being debunked.
A highly touted story yesterday from the New York Times – claiming that Russians used Twitter
more widely known than before to manipulate U.S. politics – demonstrates this recklessness. The story
is based on the claims of a new group formed just two months ago by a union of neocons and Democratic
national security officials, led by long-time liars and propagandists such as Bill Kristol, former
acting CIA chief Mike Morell, and Bush Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff. I reported on the
founding of this group, calling itself the Alliance for Securing Democracy, when it was unveiled
(this is not to be confused with the latest new Russia group unveiled last week by Rob Reiner and
David Frum and featuring a different former national security state official (former DNI James Clapper)
– calling itself InvestigateRussia.org – featuring a video declaring that the U.S. is now "at war
with Russia").
The Kristol/Morell/Chertoff group on which the Times based its article has a very simple tactic:
they secretly decide which Twitter accounts are "Russia bots," meaning accounts that disseminate
an "anti-American message" and are controlled by the Kremlin. They refuse to tell anyone which Twitter
accounts they decided are Kremlin-loyal, nor will they identify their methodology for creating their
lists or determining what constitutes "anti-Americanism."
They do it all in secret, and you're just supposed to trust them: Bill Kristol, Mike Chertoff
and their national security state friends. And the New York Times is apparently fine with this demand,
as evidenced by its uncritical acceptance yesterday of the claims of this group – a group formed
by the nation's least trustworthy sources.
But no matter. It's a claim about nefarious Russian control. So it's instantly vested with credibility
and authority, published by leading news outlets, and then blindly accepted as fact in most elite
circles. From now on, it will simply be Fact – based on the New York Times article – that the Kremlin
aggressively and effectively weaponized Twitter to manipulate public opinion and sow divisions during
the election, even though the evidence for this new story is the secret, unverifiable assertions
of a group filled with the most craven neocons and national security state liars.
That's how the Russia narrative is constantly "reported," and it's the reason so many of the
biggest stories have embarrassingly collapsed. It's because the Russia story of 2017 – not unlike
the Iraq discourse of 2002 – is now driven by religious-like faith rather than rational faculties.
No questioning of official claims is allowed. The evidentiary threshold which an assertion must
overcome before being accepted is so low as to be non-existent. And the penalty for desiring to see
evidence for official claims, or questioning the validity and persuasiveness of the evidence that
is proffered, are accusations that impugn one's patriotism and loyalty (simply wanting to see evidence
for official claims about Russia is proof, in many quarters, that one is a Kremlin agent or at least
adores Putin – just as wanting to see evidence in 2002, or questioning the evidence presented for
claims about Saddam, was viewed as proof that one harbored sympathy for the Iraqi dictator).
Regardless of your views on Russia, Trump and the rest, nobody can possibly regard this climate
as healthy. Just look at how many major, incredibly inflammatory stories, from major media outlets,
have collapsed. Is it not clear that there is something very wrong with how we are discussing and
reporting on relations between these two nuclear-armed powers?
I think the key to collapse of Soviet society and its satellites was the victory of
neoliberal ideology over communism. It was pure luck for neoliberalism was that its triumphal
march over the globe coincide with deep crisis of both communist ideology and the Soviet elite
(nomenklatura) in the USSR. Hapless, mediocre Gorbachov, a third rate politician who became the
leader of the USSR is a telling example here. Propaganda, especially "big troika" (BBC,
Deutsche Welle and
Voice of America), also played a very important role in this. Especially in Baltic countries and
Ukraine.
Domestic fake new industry always has huge advantage over foreign one in the USA and other
Western countries, because of general cultural dominance of the West.
The loss of effectiveness of neoliberal propaganda now is the same as the reason for loss of
effectiveness of communist propaganda since 60th. In the first case it was the crisis of
communist ideology, in the second is the crisis of neoliberal ideology. Everybody now understands
that the neoliberal promises were fake, and "bait and switch" manuver that enriched the tiny
percentage of population (top 1% and even more 0.01%).
When the society experience the crisis of ideology it became inoculated toward official
propaganda -- it simply loses its bite.
Notable quotes:
"... As the The Economist notes, a 2015 survey of the top 94 cable channels in America by the research firm Nielsen found that RT did not even make it into the rankings, capturing only 0.04 percent of viewers, according to the Broadcast Audience Research Board. ..."
"... RT has claimed dominance on YouTube, an assertion that apparently caught the attention of the U.S. intelligence community, which noted that RT videos get 1 million views a day, far surpassing other outlets. ..."
"... Or as media-effects theorists explain the communication process, the intentions of the producer (Soviet Union) and the conventions of the content (communist propaganda) were interwoven in a strategy aimed at influencing the receiver (the American audience). But the majority of Americans, with the exception of a few hard-core ideologues, interpreted the content of the message as pitiful Soviet propaganda, assuming they even paid attention to it. ..."
"... There is no doubt that Moscow, which regarded President Harry Truman as its leading American political nemesis, was hoping that Progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace would win the 1948 election -- and had tailored its propaganda effort in accordance with that goal. That pro-Wallace campaign took place at a time when the American Communist Party still maintained some influence in the United States, where many Americans still sympathized with the former World War II ally and a large number of Soviet spies were operating in the country. But then Wallace's Progressives ended up winning 2.5 percent of the vote, less than Strom Thurmond's Southern segregationist ticket. ..."
"... Yet we are supposed to believe that by employing RT, Sputnik, Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch of hackers, the Russians could help their American candidate "steal" the 2016 presidential election. Is there any evidence that those white blue-collar workers and rural voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan -- the people who provided Trump with his margin of victory -- were even exposed to the reports distributed by RT and Sputnik, or by the memes constructed by Russian trolls or their posts on Facebook? ("Hey, did you watch RT last night?") ..."
"... Yet the assertion that a "silver bullet shot from a media gun" in the form of Russian propaganda was able "to penetrate a hapless audience" in the United States has been gaining more adherents in Washington and elsewhere. This conspiracy seems to correlate the intent of the Russian government and the content of their messages with the voting behavior of Americans. ..."
"... In a strange irony, those who are promoting this fallacious assertion may -- unlike their Russian scapegoat -- actually succeed in penetrating a hapless American audience. ..."
The Russians can dish it out, but don't expect Americans to swallow everything.
During the Cold War, it became an article of faith among Western policymakers and
journalists: One of the most effective ways to discredit the leaders of Communist countries
would be to provide their citizens with information from the West. It was a view that was
shared by Soviet Bloc regimes who were worried that listening to the Voice of America (VOA) or
watching Western television shows would induce their people to take political action against
the rulers.
So it was not surprising that government officials in East Germany, anxious that many TV
stations from West Germany could be viewed by their citizens, employed numerous means!such as
jamming the airwaves and even damaging TV antennas that were pointing west!in order to prevent
the so-called "subversive" western broadcasts from reaching audiences over the wall.
After the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, communication researchers studying public attitudes
in former East German areas assumed that they would discover that those who had access to West
German television!and were therefore exposed to the West's political freedom and economic
prosperity!were more politically energized and willing to challenge the communist regime than
those who couldn't watch Western television.
But as Evgeny Morozov recalled in his Net Delusion: The
Dark Side of Internet Freedom , a study conducted between 1966 and 1990 about incipient
protests in the so-called "Valley of the Clueless"!an area in East Germany where the government
successfully blocked Western television signals!raised questions about this conventional
wisdom.
As it turns out, having access to West German television actually made life in East Germany
more endurable. Far from radicalizing its citizens, it seemed to have made them more
politically compliant. As one East German dissident quoted by Morozov lamented, "The whole
people could leave the country and move to the West as a man at 8pm, via television."
Meanwhile, East German citizens who did not have access to Western German television were
actually more critical of their regime, and more politically restless.
The study concluded that "in an ironic twist for Marxism, capitalist television seems to
have performed the same narcotizing function in communist East Germany that Karl Marx had
attributed to religious beliefs in capitalist society when he condemned religion as the 'opium
of the people.'"
Morozov refers to the results of these and other studies to raise an interesting idea:
Western politicians and pundits have predicted that the rise of the Internet, which provides
free access to information to residents of the global village, would galvanize citizens in
Russia and other countries to challenge their authoritarian regimes. In reality, Morozov
contends that exposure to the Internet may have distracted Russian users from their political
problems. The young men who should be leading the revolution are instead staying at home and
watching online pornography. Trotsky, as we know, didn't tweet.
Yet the assumption that the content of the message is a "silver bullet shot from a media gun
to penetrate a hapless audience," as communication theorists James Arthur Anderson and Timothy
P. Meyer put it, remains popular among politicians and pundits today, despite ample evidence to
the contrary.
Hence the common assertion that a presidential candidate who has raised a lots of money and
can spend it on buying a lots of television commercials, has a clear advantage over rivals who
cannot afford to dominate the media environment. But the loser in the 2016 presidential race
spent about $141.7 million on ads, compared with $58.8 million for winner's campaign, according
to NBC News . Candidate Trump also spent a fraction of what his Republican rivals had
during the Republican primaries that he won.
Communication researchers like Anderson and Meyers are not suggesting that media messages
don't have any effect on target audiences, but that it is quite difficult to sell ice to
Eskimos. To put it in simple terms, media audiences are not hapless and passive. Although you
can flood them with messages that are in line with your views and interests, audiences actively
participate in the communication process. They will construct their own meaning from the
content they consume, and in some cases they might actually disregard your message.
Imagine a multi-billionaire who decides to produce thousands of commercials celebrating the
legacy of ISIS, runs them on primetime American television, and floods social media with
messages praising the murderous terrorist group. If that happened, would Americans be rallying
behind the flag of ISIS? One can imagine that the response from audiences would range from
anger to dismissal to laughter.
In 2013 Al Jazeera Media Network
purchased Current
TV , which was once partially owned by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and launched
an American news channel. Critics expressed concerns that the network, which is owned by the
government of Qatar and has been critical of U.S. policies in the Middle East, would try to
manipulate American audiences with their anti-Washington message.
Three years later, after hiring many star journalists and producing mostly straight news
shows, Al Jazeera America CEO Al Anstey announced that the network would cease
operations. Anstey cited the "economic landscape" which was another way of saying that its
ratings were distressingly low. The relatively small number of viewers who watched Al
Jazeera America 's programs considered them not anti-American but just, well, boring.
You don't have to be a marketing genius to figure out that in the age of the 24/7 media
environment, foreign networks face prohibitive competition from American cable news networks
like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, social media, not to mention Netflix and yes, those online porno
sites. Thus the chances that a foreign news organization would be able to attract large
American audiences, and have any serious impact on their political views, remain very low.
That, indeed, has been the experience of not only the defunct Al Jazeera America ,
but also of other foreign news outlets that have tried to imitate the Qatar-based network by
launching operations targeting American audiences. These networks have included CGTN (China
Global Television Network), the English-language news channel run by Chinese state broadcaster
China Central
Television ; PressTV, a 24-hour English language news and documentary network affiliated
with Islamic Republic of Iran
Broadcasting ; or RT (formerly Russia Today), a Russian international television network funded by the
Russian
government that operates cable and satellitetelevision channels directed to
audiences outside of Russia.
After all, unless you are getting to paid to watch CTGN, PressTV, or RT -- or you are a news
junkie with a lot of time on your hands -- why in the world would you be spending even one hour of
the day watching these foreign networks?
Yet if you have been following the coverage and public debate over the alleged Russian
interference in the 2016 presidential election, you get the impression that RT and another
Russian media outlet, Sputnik (a news agency and radio broadcast service established by the
Russian
government-controlled news agency Rossiya Segodnya ), were central players
in a conspiracy between the Trump presidential campaign and the Kremlin to deny the presidency
to Hillary Clinton.
In fact, more than half of the much-cited January report on the Russian electoral
interference released by U.S. intelligence agencies was devoted to warning of RT's growing
influence in the United States and across the world, referring to the "rapid expansion" of the
network's operations and budget to about $300 million a year, and citing the supposedly
impressive audience numbers listed on the RT website.
According to America's spooks, the coordinated activities of RT and the online-media
properties and social-media accounts that made up "Russia's state-run propaganda machine" have
been employed by the Russian government to "undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic
order."
And in a long cover story in TheNew York Times Magazine this month, with the
headline, "
RT, Sputnik and Russia's New Theory of War, " Jim Rutenberg suggested that the Kremlin has
"built one of the most powerful information weapons of the 21st century" and that it "may be
impossible to stop."
But as the British Economist magazine reported early this year, while RT claims to
reach 550 million people worldwide, with America and Britain supposedly being its most
successful markets, its "audience" of 550 million refers to "the number of people who can
access its channel, not those who actually watch it."
As the The Economist notes, a 2015 survey of the top 94 cable channels in America by
the research firm Nielsen found that RT did not even make it into the rankings, capturing only
0.04 percent of viewers, according to the Broadcast Audience Research Board.
The Times' s Rutenberg argues that the RT's ratings "are almost beside the point." RT
might not have amassed an audience that remotely rivals CNN's in conventional terms, "but in
the new, 'democratized' media landscape, it doesn't need to" since "the network has come to
form the hub of a new kind of state media operation: one that travels through the same diffuse
online channels, chasing the same viral hits and memes, as the rest of the
Twitter-and-Facebook-age media."
Traveling "through the same diffuse online channels" and "chasing the same viral hits and
memes" sounds quite impressive. Indeed, RT has claimed dominance on YouTube, an assertion that
apparently caught the attention of the U.S. intelligence community, which noted that RT videos
get 1 million views a day, far surpassing other outlets.
But as The Economist points out, when it comes to Twitter and Facebook, RT's reach is
narrower than that of other news networks. Its claim of YouTube success is mostly down to the
network's practice of buying the rights to sensational footage -- for instance, Japan's 2011
tsunami -- and repackaging it with the company logo. It's not clear, however, how the
dissemination of a footage of a natural disaster or of a dog playing the piano helps efforts to
"undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order."
It is obvious that the Russian leaders have been investing a lot of resources in RT,
Sputnik, and other media outlets, and that they employ them as propaganda tools aimed at
promoting their government's viewpoints and interests around the world. From that perspective,
these Russian media executives are heirs to the communist officials who had been in charge of
the propaganda empire of the Soviet Union and its satellites during much of the 20th
Century.
The worldwide communist propaganda machine did prove to be quite effective during the Great
Depression and World War II, when it succeeded in tapping into the economic and social
anxieties and anti-Nazi sentiments in the West and helped strengthen the power of the communist
parties in Europe and, to some extent, in the United States.
But in the same way that Western German television programs failed to politically energize
East Germans during the Cold War, much of the Soviet propaganda distributed by the Soviet Union
at that time had very little impact on the American public and its political attitudes, as
symbolized by the shrinking membership of the American Communist Party.
Or as media-effects theorists explain the communication process, the intentions of the
producer (Soviet Union) and the conventions of the content (communist propaganda) were
interwoven in a strategy aimed at influencing the receiver (the American audience). But the
majority of Americans, with the exception of a few hard-core ideologues, interpreted the
content of the message as pitiful Soviet propaganda, assuming they even paid attention to
it.
Soviet propaganda may have scored limited success during the Cold War when it came to
members of the large communist parties in France, Italy, and Japan, as well as exploited
anti-American sentiments in some third-world countries. In these cases, the intentions of the
producer and the convention of the message seemed to be in line with the interpretations of the
receivers.
There is no doubt that Moscow, which regarded President Harry Truman as its leading American
political nemesis, was hoping that Progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace would win
the 1948 election -- and had tailored its propaganda effort in accordance with that goal. That
pro-Wallace campaign took place at a time when the American Communist Party still maintained
some influence in the United States, where many Americans still sympathized with the former
World War II ally and a large number of Soviet spies were operating in the country. But then
Wallace's Progressives ended up winning 2.5 percent of the vote, less than Strom Thurmond's
Southern segregationist ticket.
Yet we are supposed to believe that by employing RT, Sputnik, Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch
of hackers, the Russians could help their American candidate "steal" the 2016 presidential
election. Is there any evidence that those white blue-collar workers and rural voters in
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan -- the people who provided Trump with his margin of victory -- were
even exposed to the reports distributed by RT and Sputnik, or by the memes constructed by
Russian trolls or their posts on Facebook? ("Hey, did you watch RT last night?")
Yet the assertion that a "silver bullet shot from a media gun" in the form of Russian
propaganda was able "to penetrate a hapless audience" in the United States has been gaining
more adherents in Washington and elsewhere. This conspiracy seems to correlate the intent of
the Russian government and the content of their messages with the voting behavior of
Americans.
In a strange irony, those who are promoting this fallacious assertion may -- unlike their
Russian scapegoat -- actually succeed in penetrating a hapless American audience.
Leon Hadar is a writer and author of the books Quagmire: America in the Middle East and
Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East. His articles have appeared in the New York Times,
The Washington Post, Washington Times, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy,
and the National Interest.
For an example of the success of propaganda, look at Breitbart. The messages online during
the 2016 election were pervasive and insidious. I think this post underestimates the threat
by focusing on traditional media instead of social interaction.
RT covered Assange during the election better than other outlets.
It's easy to see everything from a personal perspective and forget that we are very
diverse. We don't live in an ABC, CBS, and NBC world anymore, with information controlled.
Changes in thought and belief happen online now, in many, many different venues.
A government that has confidence in its own support doesn't need to fight foreign
information. In the '30s and '40s the US government encouraged shortwave listening, and
manufacturers made money by adding SW bands to their radios. We were going through a
depression and then a war, but our government was CONFIDENT enough to encourage us to
understand the world.
Since 1950 the government has been narrowing the focus of external input because it knows
that it no longer has the natural consent of the governed. TV and the Web are intentional
forms of jamming, filling our eyes and ears with internally produced nonsense to crowd out
the external info.
The ones you have to worry about are those much closer to home – "inside the tent".
Friends in the UK, Canada, and Europe are appalled at the distorting effect Israeli
propaganda has on American news sources, and how unaware of it typical Americans seem to
be.
Indeed, it is odd and more than a little worrying that all the concern about "foreign
meddling" has so far failed to engage with Israel, which is hands down the best funded, most
sophisticated and successful foreign meddler.
The FBI annually reports that Israel spies on us at the same level as Russia and China.
But we have yet to fully register that Israeli spying includes systematic efforts to
influence American elections and policies, efforts that dwarf those of Putin's Russia both in
scale and impact.
I think that the corporate masters of propaganda media and politics in these United States,
have, in the words of Edward G. Robinson's Rico in Little Caesar, "gotten to where you can
dish it out, but you can't take it anymore."
It's counterfactual to conflate Soviet propaganda with the perspective of Russians today,
unless Communism never really was the real point. In fact, it's our own leaders in media and
politics who now increasingly issue dogmatic and insulting derogatory language, sounding more
and more like late Soviet propagandists themselves.
So what? What's wrong with people being exposed to a broad array of points of view, trying
to better understand the world and constantly challenging, refining, and reshaping their
worldview in the process?
You're coming perilously close to suggesting that Americans who are critical of their
government are dupes of hostile foreign powers ! an unfair, unhelpful, and undemocratic
assertion.
The problem with Russian trolls is that people don't know they are Russian trolls. They think
they are their fellow Americans and neighbors on Facebook. The influence of foreign
propaganda on Americans is not due to transparent media like Al Jazeera. It's due to
propaganda disguised as your neighbor's opinion.
this conversation cant be taken serious without a serious discussion on Israel, who by the
way provides the perfect case and point of how effective foreign propaganda can be. They work
through our media, school systems and even our churches. Just look at what happened to McGraw
Hill for daring to show before and after maps of the Palestine over the years.
"... Adam Hochschild, the founding editor of Mother Jones (and author of some great books including King Leopold's Ghost), responded publicly to the threats coming out of the Senate in the early Reagan years. In a New York Times op-ed published in late 1981, "Dis-(Mis-?)Information", Hochschild wrote about a Republican Senate mailer sent out to 290 radio stations that accused Mother Jones of being Kremlin disinformation dupes. ..."
"... "In it, the writer Arnaud de Borchgrave accuses Mother Jones, the Village Voice, the Soho News, the Progressive magazine of serving as disseminators of K.G.B. 'disinformation' – the planting of false or misleading items in news media. "Mr. de Borchgrave provided no specific examples of facts or articles. But, then, the trouble with the K.G.B. is that you don't know what disinformation it is feeding you because you don't know who its myriad agents are. So the only safe thing is to distrust any author or magazine too critical of the United States. Because anyone who is against, say, the MX or the B-1 bomber could be working for the Russians." ..."
"... The communist/leftist imagery is there for a reason. In case you haven't noticed, Clinton supporters have waged a crude PR campaign to blame their candidate's loss on leftists, whom they equate with neo-Nazis and Trump. I've been smeared as "alt-left" by a Vanity Fair columnist, who equated me with Breitbart and other far-right journalists, for the crime of not sufficiently supporting Hillary Clinton. The larger goal of this crude PR effort is to equate opposition to Hillary Clinton with treason and Nazism. Which was exactly the goal of Reagan's "Kremlin disinformation" hysteria - the whole point was to smear critics of Reagan and his right-wing politics as pro-Kremlin traitors, whether they knew it or not. ..."
"... Even the words and the terminology are plagiarized from the Reagan Right witch-hunting campaign - "Kremlin active measures"; "Kremlin disinformation"; "Kremlin dupes" - terms introduced by right-wing novelists and intelligence hucksters, and repeated ad nauseam until they transformed into something plausible, giving quasi-academic cover to some very old-fashioned state repression, harassment, surveillance . . . and a lot of ruined lives. That's what happened last time, and if history is any guide, it's how this one will end up too. ..."
"... The Reagan Era kicked off with a lot of dark fear-mongering about the Kremlin using disinformation and active measures to destroy our way of life. Everything that the conservative Establishment loathed about 1970s - defeat in Vietnam, Church Committee hearings gutting the CIA and FBI, the cult of Woodward & Bernstein & Hersh, peace marchers, minority rights radicals - was an "active measures" treason conspiracy. ..."
"... The image at the top of this article comes from a lead article in Columbia University's student newspaper, the Spectator, published a few weeks after Reagan took office, on SST committee's assault on Mother Jones. The headline read: The New McCarthyism / Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been and the the full-page article begins, If you subscribe to Mother Jones, give money to the American Civil Liberties Union, or support the Institute for Policy Studies, Senator Jeremiah Denton's new Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism may be interested in you. ..."
"... It describes how in the 1970s Americans finally got rid of HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Committee, the Red Scare witch-hunting Congressional committees - only to have them revived one election cycle later in the Reagan Revolution. ..."
"... Sexual immorality -- it's a common theme in all the Russia panics of the past 100 years-whether the sexually liberated Emma Goldmans of the Red Scare, the homosexual-panic of the McCarthy witch-hunts, the hippie orgies of Denton's nightmares, or Trump's supposed golden shower fetish with immoral Russian prostitutes in our current panic. . . . ..."
"... To fight the Kremlin disinformation demons, Denton set up the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism (SST), with two other young Republican senators-Orrin Hatch, who's still haunting Capitol Hill today; and John East of North Carolina, a Jesse Helms protege who later did his country a great service by committing suicide in his North Carolina garage, before the end of his first term in office in 1986. ..."
"... Sen. East's staffers leaned Nazi-ward, like their boss. One Sen. East staffer was Samuel Francis - now famous as the godfather of the alt-Right, but who in 1981 was known as the guru behind the Senate's "Russia disinformation" witch hunt. Funny how that works - today's #Resistance takes its core idea, that America is under the control of hostile Kremlin disinformation sorcerers - is culturally appropriated from the alt-Right's guru. ..."
"... Another staffer for Sen. East was John Rees, one of the most loathsome professional snitches of the post-McCarthy era, who collected files on suspected leftists, labor activists and liberal donors. I'll have to save John Rees for another post - he really belongs in a category by himself, proof of Schopenhauer's maxim that this world is run by demons. ..."
"... These were the people who first cooked up the "disinformation" panic. You can't separate the Sam Francises, Orrin Hatches, John Easts et al from today's panic-mongering over disinformation - you can only try to make sense of why, what is it about our culture's ruling factions that brings them together on this sort of xenophobic witch-hunt, even when they see themselves as so diametrically opposed on so many other issues. ..."
"... The subversion scare and moral panic were crucial in resetting the culture for the Reagan counter-revolution. Those who opposed Reagan's plans, domestically and overseas, would be labeled "dupes" of Kremlin "active measures" and "disinformation" conspiracies, acting on behalf of Moscow whether they knew it or not. The panic incubated in Denton's subcommittee investigations provided political cover for vast new powers given to the CIA, FBI, NSA and other spy and police agencies to spy on Americans. Fighting Russian "active measures" grew over the years into a massive surveillance program against Americans, particularly anyone involved in opposing Reagan's dirty wars in Central America, anyone opposing nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants, and anyone involved in providing sanctuary to refugees from south of the border. The "active measures" panic even led to FBI secret investigations into liberal members of Congress, some of whom wound up in a secret "FBI terrorist photo album". ..."
"... 'Russia is a bigger threat to America than Islamic State.' is almost certainly true. If one insists, as the US has done, on standing at the border of the bears lair and poking it with a very short stick, then there may well be consequences. On the other hand, Islamic State is no threat to the US in any way, shape or form. ..."
"... The Cold War is over, so now the US can reveal its truly feral nature. ..."
"... American slogan Violence R Us. Not judging, just being honest. We were no more interested in the common good of the Vietnamese back then, any more than we are interested in the common good of the Syrians today. ..."
"... It's always 'Russia this, Russia that', how we're going to bring democracy to some other part of the world, how some country's leader is a dictator. These are excuses we can do reverse Robin Hood wherever we can and enrich the 1%. ..."
"... It's my duty to point out that the glaring similarities in this brand of cold war Russophobia with that of pre-WW2 anti-Comintern material coming out of Nazi Germany (or even the anti-Semitic material from the early 1900s) are no coincidence. ..."
"... Among the Nazi intelligence officers and scientists we spirited away before the Russians could get their hands on them [ Operation Paperclip ] were a few sly operators who immediately started filling our elected leaders' ears with stories of Reds under the bed. One of these reps was Senator Joe McCarthy and the rest, as they say ..."
"... American-produced historical documentaries tell it like we were united as a country in support of Stalin against Hitler. This reluctance is usually credited to not wanting to get into another bloodbath like WW1 but let's be straight- about half the country (proto-deplorables?) wanted nothing to do with helping the commies beat the Nazis and actually thought the Germans weren't the bad guys. Anti-communism, big brother to anti-unionism and first cousin to anti-Semitism, was all the rage before we helped Uncle Joe beat Hitler, making it all the easier to revive after the war was over and it looked like the only threat to US world domination was a war-weakened Soviet Union. ..."
"... A few years ago, with the advent of internet freeness, I'd added MJ ..."
"... It is sensible but really too polite to say that NATO expanded because "that is what bureaucracies do and it became a way for U.S. presidents to show their 'toughness.'" To expand a bureaucracy by subversion of Ukraine and false reports of Russian aggression, to show toughness by aggression rather than defense, requires the mad power grasping of tyrants in the military, the intel agencies, the NSC, the administration, Congress. and the mass media. ..."
"... They are joined in a tyranny of inventing foreign monsters, to pose falsely as protectors, and to accuse their moral superiors of disloyalty, as Aristotle warned. This is the domestic political power grab of tyrants, a far greater danger. ..."
"... Apart from NATO and a few other treaties, the US would have no constitutional power to wage foreign wars, just to repel invasions and suppress insurrections, and that is the way it should be. Any treaty becomes part of the Supreme Law of the land, and must be rigorously restricted to defense, with provisions for international resolution of conflicts. NATO has been nothing but an excuse for warmongering since 1989. ..."
"... I think this is much closer to the mark than the association of the anti-russia fearmongering with sincere xenophobia. Russia is the go-to foreign enemy because there is such a huge and convenient stockpile of propaganda material lying around in stockpiles, but left unused because of the tragic and abrupt end of Cold War 1.0. And Russia is a great target because it is distant, and has a weird alphabet. Anyone who knows enough about Russia to contradict the disinformation (like by mentioning that they are not commies, but US-style authoritarian oligarchs) is suspicious ipso facto ..."
"... Both parties being pro wall street deficit and war hawks differing in perhaps degree .with the Demos supporting a more generous portion of calf's foot jelly being distributed to peasants of more varied hue as they also support privatization, more subtle tax cuts and deregulation for the rich, R2P wars, and globalization's race to the bottom. People seem to inhabit their own Plato's Cave each opposing their own particular artfully projected phantom menace. ..."
"... Brilliant, as Ames usually is. Especially the point that this is a manifestation of consistent anti-left sentiment within the establishment whether R or D. The confounding of Putin's Russia with some imagined communist threat always amazes me. D's got to keep up the hippie-punching at all times though! ..."
"... The Russophobia is stuck on an endless loop. I wish they'd at least come up with new lies or some fresh enemy for us all to fear. ..."
"... Without defending Trump, it is wrong of the Dems to push this stuff when Ukrainians helped Clinton's campaign and Clinton approved Uranium One getting 20% of US uranium when they gave $100 million to the Foundation. ..."
By Mark Ames, founding editor of the Moscow satirical paper The eXile and co-host of the Radio
War Nerd podcast with Gary Brecher (aka John Dolan). Subscribe here. Originally published at
The eXiled
Mother Jones recently announced it's "redoubling our Russia reporting"-in the words of editor
Clara Jeffery. Ain't that rich. What passes for "Russia reporting" at Mother Jones is mostly just
glorified InfoWars paranoia for progressive marks - a cataract of xenophobic conspiracy theories
about inscrutable Russian barbarians hellbent on subverting our way of life, spreading chaos, destroying
freedom & democracy & tolerance wherever they once flourished. . . . because they hate us, because
we're free.
Western reporting on Russia has always been garbage, But the so-called "Russia reporting" of the
last year has taken the usual malpractice to unimagined depths - whether it's from Mother Jones or
MSNBC, or the Washington Post or Resistance hero Louise Mensch.
But of all the liberal media, Mother Jones should be most ashamed for fueling the moral panic
about Russian "disinformation". It wasn't too long ago that the Reagan Right attacked Mother Jones
for spreading "Kremlin disinformation" and subverting America. There were threats and leaks to the
media about a possible Senate investigation into Mother Jones serving as a Kremlin disinformation
dupe, a threat that hung over the magazine throughout the early Reagan years. A new Senate Subcommittee
on Security and Terrorism (SST for short) was set up in 1981 to investigate Kremlin "disinformation"
and "active measures" in America, and the American "dupes" who helped Moscow subvert our way of life.
That subcommittee was created to harass and repress leftist anti-imperial dissent in America, using
"terrorism" as the main threat, and "disinformation" as terrorism's fellow traveller. The way the
the SST committee put it, "terrorism" and "Kremlin disinformation" were one and the same, a meta-conspiracy
run out of Moscow to weaken America.
And Mother Jones was one of the first American media outlets in the SST committee's sites.
Adam Hochschild, the founding editor of Mother Jones (and author of some great books including
King Leopold's Ghost), responded publicly to the threats coming out of the Senate in the early Reagan
years. In a New York Times op-ed published in late 1981, "Dis-(Mis-?)Information", Hochschild wrote
about a Republican Senate mailer sent out to 290 radio stations that accused Mother Jones of being
Kremlin disinformation dupes. The mailer, on Senate letterhead, featured a tape recording of an interview
between the chairman of the SST subcommittee, Sen. Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, and a committee witness-
a "disinformation expert" named Arnaud de Borchgrave, author of a bestselling spy novel called "The
Spike" - about a fictional Kremlin plot to subvert the West with disinformation, and thereby rule
the world.
Here's how Hochschild described the Republican Senate mailer in his NYTimes piece:
"In it, the writer Arnaud de Borchgrave accuses Mother Jones, the Village Voice, the Soho News,
the Progressive magazine of serving as disseminators of K.G.B. 'disinformation' – the planting of
false or misleading items in news media. "Mr. de Borchgrave provided no specific examples of facts or articles. But, then, the trouble
with the K.G.B. is that you don't know what disinformation it is feeding you because you don't know
who its myriad agents are. So the only safe thing is to distrust any author or magazine too critical
of the United States. Because anyone who is against, say, the MX or the B-1 bomber could be working
for the Russians."
Here, the Mother Jones founder describes the menacing logic of pursuing the "Kremlin disinformation"
conspiracy: any American critical of US military power, police power, corporate power, overseas power
. . . anyone critical of anything that powerful Americans do, is a Kremlin disinformation dupe whether
they know it or not. That leaves only the appointed accusers to decide who is and who isn't a Kremlin
agent.
Hochschild called this panic over Kremlin disinformation another "Red Scare", warning,
"[T]o accuse critical American journalists of serving as its unwitting dupes makes as little sense
as Russians accusing rebellious Poles of being unwitting agents of American imperialism. When Mr.
de Borchgrave accuses skeptical journalists of being unwitting purveyors of disinformation, the accusation
is more slippery, less easy to definitively disprove, and less subject to libel law than if he were
to accuse them of being conscious Communist agents.
" Although if you believe the K.G.B. is successfully infiltrating America's news media, then anything
must seem possible."
It's a damn shame today's editorial staff at Mother Jones aren't aware of their own magazine's
history.
Then again, who am I fooling? Mother Jones wouldn't care if you shoved their faces in their own
recent history - they're way too donor-deep invested in pushing this "active measures" conspiracy.
Trump has been a goldmine of donor cash for anyone willing to carry the #Resistance water.
PutinTrump was a project set up last fall by tech plutocrat Rob Glaser, CEO and founder of RealNetworks,
to scare voters into believing that voting for Trump is treason. God knows I can't stand Trump or
his politics, but of all the inane campaign ideas to run on - this?
One would've thought that the smart people would learn their lesson from the election, that running
against a Kremlin conspiracy theory is a loser. But instead, they seem to think the problem is they
didn't fear-monger enough, so they're "redoubling" on the Russophobia. Donor money is driving this
- donor cash is quite literally driving Mother Jones' editorial focus. And it really is this crude.
Take for example a PutinTrump section titled "Russian Expansion" - the scary Red imagery and language
are lifted straight out of the Reagan Cold War playbook from the early-mid 80s, when, it so happens,
Mother Jones was targeted as a Kremlin dupe. Featuring a lot of shadowy red-colored alien soldiers
over an outline of Crimea, Mother Jones' donor-partner promotes a classic Cold War propaganda line
about Russian/Soviet expansionism-a lie that has been the basis for so many wars launched to "stop"
this alleged "expansionism" in the past, wars that Mother Jones is supposed to oppose. Here's what
MJ's partner writes now:
RUSSIAN EXPANSION
Through unknowing manipulation, or by direct support, Trump will become an accessory to the continual
expansionism committed by Putin. Might does not equal right-and it never has for Americans-but Putin's Russia plays by different
rules. Or maybe no rules at all.
The communist/leftist imagery is there for a reason. In case you haven't noticed, Clinton
supporters have waged a crude PR campaign to blame their candidate's loss on leftists, whom they equate with
neo-Nazis and Trump. I've been smeared as "alt-left" by a Vanity Fair columnist, who equated me with Breitbart and other far-right journalists, for the crime of not sufficiently supporting Hillary Clinton.
The larger goal of this crude PR effort is to equate opposition to Hillary Clinton with treason and
Nazism. Which was exactly the goal of Reagan's "Kremlin disinformation" hysteria - the whole point
was to smear critics of Reagan and his right-wing politics as pro-Kremlin traitors, whether they
knew it or not.
* * *
What's kind of shocking to me as someone who was alive in the Reagan scare is how unoriginal this
current one is. Even the words and the terminology are plagiarized from the Reagan Right witch-hunting
campaign - "Kremlin active measures"; "Kremlin disinformation"; "Kremlin dupes" - terms introduced
by right-wing novelists and intelligence hucksters, and repeated ad nauseam until they transformed
into something plausible, giving quasi-academic cover to some very old-fashioned state repression,
harassment, surveillance . . . and a lot of ruined lives. That's what happened last time, and if
history is any guide, it's how this one will end up too.
Today we're supposed to remember how cheerful and optimistic the Reagan Era was. But that's now
how I remember it, it's not how it looked to Mother Jones at the time - and it's not how it looks
when you go back through the original source material again and relive it. The Reagan Era kicked
off with a lot of dark fear-mongering about the Kremlin using disinformation and active measures
to destroy our way of life. Everything that the conservative Establishment loathed about 1970s -
defeat in Vietnam, Church Committee hearings gutting the CIA and FBI, the cult of Woodward & Bernstein
& Hersh, peace marchers, minority rights radicals - was an "active measures" treason conspiracy.
As soon as the new Republican majority in the Senate took power in 1981, they set up a new subcommittee
to investigate Kremlin disinformation dupes, called the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism.
Staffers leaked to the media they intended to investigate Mother Jones. Panic spread across the progressive
media world, and suddenly all those cool Ivy League kids who invested everything in becoming the
next Woodward-Bernsteins - the cultural heroes at the time - got scared. The image at the top of
this article comes from a lead article in Columbia University's student newspaper, the Spectator,
published a few weeks after Reagan took office, on SST committee's assault on Mother Jones. The headline
read: The New McCarthyism / Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been and the the full-page article begins, If you subscribe to Mother Jones, give money to the American Civil Liberties Union, or support
the Institute for Policy Studies, Senator Jeremiah Denton's new Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism
may be interested in you.
It describes how in the 1970s Americans finally got rid of HUAC and the Senate Internal Security
Committee, the Red Scare witch-hunting Congressional committees - only to have them revived one election
cycle later in the Reagan Revolution.
By the end of Reagan's first year in office, there was still no formal investigation into Mother
Jones, but the harassment was there and it wasn't subtle at all - such as the Republican Senate mailer
accusing the magazine of being KGB disinformation dupes. At the end of 1981, MJ editor/founder Adam
Hochschild announced he was stepping aside, and in his final note to readers and the public, he wrote:
To Senator Jeremiah Denton, chair of the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism: If your committee
investigates Mother Jones, a plan hinted at some months ago, I demand to be subpoenaed. I would not
want to miss telling off today's new McCarthyites.
So here we are a few decades later, and Mother Jones' editor Clara Jeffery is denouncing WikiLeaks
- yesterday's journalism stars, today's traitors - as "Russia['s] willing dupes and propagandists"
while Mother Jones magazine turned itself into a mouthpiece for America's spies peddling the same
warmed-over conspiracy theories that once targeted Mother Jones.
* * *
Jeremiah Denton - the New Right senator from Alabama who led the SST committee investigation into
Kremlin "disinformation" and its dupes like Mother Jones - believed that America was being weakened
from within and had only a few years left at most to turn it around. As Denton saw it, the two most
dangerous threats to America's survival were a) hippie sex, and b) Kremlin disinformation. The two
were inseparable in his mind, linked to the larger "global terrorism" plot masterminded by Moscow.
To fight hippie sex and teen promiscuity, the freshman senator introduced a "Chastity Bill" funding
federal programs that promoted the joys of chastity to Americans armies of bored, teen suburban long-hairs.
A lot of clever people laughed at that, because at the time the belief in linear historical progress
was strong, and this represented something so atavistic that it was like a curiosity more than anything
- Pauly Shore's "Alabama Man" unfrozen after 10,000 years and unleashed on the halls of Congress.
Less funny were Denton's calls for death penalty for adulterers, and laws he pushed restricting
women's right to abortion.
Jeremiah Denton was once a big name in this country. Americans have since forgotten Denton, because
John McCain pretty much stole his act. But back in the 70s and early 80s, Denton was America's most
famous Vietnam War hero/POW. Like McCain, Denton was a Navy pilot shot down over Vietnam and taken
prisoner. Denton spent 1965-1973 in North Vietnamese POW camps-two years longer than McCain-and he
was America's most famous POW. His most famous moment was when his North Vietnamese captors hauled
him before the cameras to acknowledge his crimes, and instead Denton famously blinked out a Morse
code message: "T-O-R-T-U-R-E".
In the 1973 POW exchange deal between Hanoi and Nixon, "Operation Homecoming," it was Denton who
was the first American POW to come off the plane and speak to the American tv crews (McCain was on
the same flight, but not nearly as prominent as Denton). I keep referring back to McCain here because
not only were they both famous Navy pilot POWs, but they both wind up becoming the most pathologically
obsessive Russophobes in the Senate. Just a few days ago, McCain said that Russia is a bigger threat
to America than Islamic State. Something real bad must've happened in those Hanoi Hiltons, worse
than anything they told us about, because those guys really, really hate Russians - and they reallywant
the rest of us to hate Russians too.
Everything they loathed about America, everything that was wrong with America, had to be the fault
of a hostile alien culture. There was no other explanation for what happened in the 1970s. The America
that Denton came home to in 1973 was under some kind of hostile power, an alien-controlled replica
of the America he last saw in 1965. Popular morality had been turned on its head: Hollywood blockbusters
with bare naked bodies and gutter language! Children against their parents! Homosexuals on waterskis!
Sex and treason! Patriots were the enemy, while America-haters were heroes! Denton re-appeared like
some reactionary Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep in the safe feather-bed world of J Edgar Hoover's
America - only to wake up eight years later on Bernadine Dohrn's futon, soaked in Bill Ayers' bodily
fluids. For Denton, the post-60s cultural shock came on all at once - as sudden and as jarring as,
well, the shock so many Blue State Americans experienced when Donald Trump won the election last
November.
Sex, immorality & military defeat-these were inseparable in Denton's mind, and in a lot of reactionaries'
minds. Attributing all of America's social convulsions of the previous 15 years to immorality and
a Kremlin disinformation plot was a neat way of avoiding the complex and painful realities - then,
as now.
"No nation can survive long unless it can encourage its young to withhold indulgence in their
sexual appetites until marriage." - Jeremiah Denton
What hit Denton hardest was all the hippie sex and the pop culture glorification of hippie sex.
It's hard to convey just how deeply all that smug hippie sex wounded tens of millions of Americans.
It's a hate wound that's still raw, still burns to the touch. A wound that fueled so much reactionary
political fire over the past 50 years, and it doesn't look like it'll burn out any time soon.
Back in 1980, Denton blamed all that pop culture sex on Russian active measures, and he did his
best to not just outlaw it, but to demonize sex as something along the lines of treason.
Just as so many people today cannot accept the idea that Trump_vs_deep_state is Made In America-so Denton
and his Reagan Right constituents believed there had to be some alien force to explain why Americans
had changed so drastically, seeming to adopt values that were the antithesis of Middle America's
values in 1965. It had to be the fault of an alien voodoo beam! It had to be a Russian plot!
And so, therefore, it was a Russian plot.
A 1981 Time magazine profile of the freshman Senator begins, Denton believes that America is being destroyed by sexual immorality and Soviet-sponsored political
'disinformation'-and that both are being promoted by dupes, or worse, in the media. By the mid-1980s,
he warns, "we will have less national security than we had proportionately when George Washington's
troops were walking around barefoot at Valley Forge."
Sexual immorality -- it's a common theme in all the Russia panics of the past 100 years-whether the
sexually liberated Emma Goldmans of the Red Scare, the homosexual-panic of the McCarthy witch-hunts,
the hippie orgies of Denton's nightmares, or Trump's supposed golden shower fetish with immoral Russian
prostitutes in our current panic. . . .
To fight the Kremlin disinformation demons, Denton set up the Senate Subcommittee on Security
and Terrorism (SST), with two other young Republican senators-Orrin Hatch, who's still haunting Capitol
Hill today; and John East of North Carolina, a Jesse Helms protege who later did his country a great
service by committing suicide in his North Carolina garage, before the end of his first term in office
in 1986.
Sen. East's staffers leaned Nazi-ward, like their boss. One Sen. East staffer was Samuel Francis
- now famous as the godfather of the alt-Right, but who in 1981 was known as the guru behind the
Senate's "Russia disinformation" witch hunt. Funny how that works - today's #Resistance takes its
core idea, that America is under the control of hostile Kremlin disinformation sorcerers - is culturally
appropriated from the alt-Right's guru.
Another staffer for Sen. East was John Rees, one of the most loathsome professional snitches of
the post-McCarthy era, who collected files on suspected leftists, labor activists and liberal donors.
I'll have to save John Rees for another post - he really belongs in a category by himself, proof
of Schopenhauer's maxim that this world is run by demons.
These were the people who first cooked up the "disinformation" panic. You can't separate the Sam
Francises, Orrin Hatches, John Easts et al from today's panic-mongering over disinformation - you
can only try to make sense of why, what is it about our culture's ruling factions that brings them
together on this sort of xenophobic witch-hunt, even when they see themselves as so diametrically
opposed on so many other issues. I don't think this is something as simple as hypocrisy - it's actually
quite consistent: Establishment faction wakes up to a world it doesn't recognize and loathes and
feels threatened by, and blames it not on themselves or anything domestic, but rather on the most
plausible alien conspiracy they can reach for: Russian barbarians. Anti-Russian xenophobia is burned
into the Establishment culture's DNA; it's a xenophobia that both dominant factions, liberal or conservative,
view as an acceptable xenophobia. When poorer "white working class" Americans feel threatened and
panic, their xenophobia tends to be aimed at other ethnics - Latinos and Muslims these days - a xenophobia
that the Establishment views as completely immoral and unacceptable, completely beyond the pale.
The thought never occurs to them that perhaps all forms of xenophobia are bad, all bring with them
a lot of violence and danger, it just depends on who's threatened and who's doing the threatening
The subversion scare and moral panic were crucial in resetting the culture for the Reagan counter-revolution.
Those who opposed Reagan's plans, domestically and overseas, would be labeled "dupes" of Kremlin
"active measures" and "disinformation" conspiracies, acting on behalf of Moscow whether they knew
it or not. The panic incubated in Denton's subcommittee investigations provided political cover for
vast new powers given to the CIA, FBI, NSA and other spy and police agencies to spy on Americans.
Fighting Russian "active measures" grew over the years into a massive surveillance program against
Americans, particularly anyone involved in opposing Reagan's dirty wars in Central America, anyone
opposing nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants, and anyone involved in providing sanctuary to
refugees from south of the border. The "active measures" panic even led to FBI secret investigations
into liberal members of Congress, some of whom wound up in a secret "FBI terrorist photo album".
I'll get to that "FBI Terrorist Photo Album" story later. There's a lot of recent "Kremlin disinformation"
history to recover, since it seems every last memory cell has been zapped out of existence.
After Reagan's inauguration (the most expensive, lavish inauguration ball in White House history),
Senator Denton sent a chill through the liberal and independent media world with all the talk coming
out of his committee about targeting activists, civil rights lawyers and journalists. Denton tried
to come off as reasonable some of the times; other times, he came right out and said it: "disinformation"
is terrorism: When I speak of a threat, I do not just mean that an organization is, or is about to be, engaged
in violent criminal activity. I believe many share the view that support groups that produce propaganda,
disinformation or legal assistance may be even more dangerous than those who actually throw the bombs.
Congratulations Mother Jones, you've come a long way, baby! Next post, I'll recover some of the early committee hearings, and the rightwing hucksters, creeps
and spooks who fed Denton's committee.
I think that John McCain may well be correct, if for the wrong reasons. 'Russia is a bigger
threat to America than Islamic State.' is almost certainly true. If one insists, as the US has
done, on standing at the border of the bears lair and poking it with a very short stick, then
there may well be consequences. On the other hand, Islamic State is no threat to the US in any
way, shape or form.
This is now, that was then. There is no comparison. The Cold War is over, so now the US
can reveal its truly feral nature. It seems both parties are struggling to bring back the
1960s with Cold War 2.0. We need to pull out of the Middle East, and invade Vietnam, again ;-(
And yes, probably even back then, Mother Jones was controlled opposition. They just don't bother
hiding it anymore.
@Disturbed Voter – Dontcha know. We just signed deals with Viet Nam that will bring "billions
of dollars" to the U.S. Trump said so last week after meeting with the Vietnamese Prime Minister,
so it must be true. They're safe for now. :-)
American slogan Violence R Us. Not judging, just being honest. We were no more interested
in the common good of the Vietnamese back then, any more than we are interested in the common
good of the Syrians today.
Our nation worries about other countries' problems but we never care about ours! It's always
'Russia this, Russia that', how we're going to bring democracy to some other part of the world,
how some country's leader is a dictator. These are excuses we can do reverse Robin Hood wherever
we can and enrich the 1%.
Magazines (tabloids) and (fake)news organization are cheer leaders to this effort because they
cash in on the chant du jour.
Thank you so much for exposing in such great detail the hypocrisy regarding MJ s recent
neo-Red Scare leanings. If only the editorial staff at dear MJ would educate themselves
not only about their own organization's history, but history in general, they might avoid looking
like complete fools and enemies to their own institution's founding principles when we collectively
reminisce on this bizarre era at some point in the future.
It's my duty to point out that the glaring similarities in this brand of cold war Russophobia
with that of pre-WW2 anti-Comintern material coming out of Nazi Germany (or even the anti-Semitic
material from the early 1900s) are no coincidence.
Among the Nazi intelligence officers and scientists we spirited away before the Russians could
get their hands on them [
Operation Paperclip
] were a few sly operators who immediately started filling our elected leaders' ears with
stories of Reds under the bed. One of these reps was Senator Joe McCarthy and the rest, as they
say
American-produced historical documentaries tell it like we were united as a country in support
of Stalin against Hitler. This reluctance is usually credited to not wanting to get into another
bloodbath like WW1 but let's be straight- about half the country (proto-deplorables?) wanted nothing
to do with helping the commies beat the Nazis and actually thought the Germans weren't the bad
guys. Anti-communism, big brother to anti-unionism and first cousin to anti-Semitism, was all
the rage before we helped Uncle Joe beat Hitler, making it all the easier to revive after the
war was over and it looked like the only threat to US world domination was a war-weakened Soviet
Union.
As a kid in the 80s I remember MJ being singled out as a leftist commie rag by Reaganites
of the day. Through college this was about all I knew about the magazine– as an epithet for what
hippie commie liberals read before trying to ruin our country. Despite it leaning to my political
inclinations, I never paid it any attention.
A few years ago, with the advent of internet freeness, I'd added MJ to my news stream.
Once Sanders- then later Trump- started looking like an actual threat to the Clinton campaign,
their headlines started turning snippy and trite toward her opposition. I turned them off my feed
last year, so the only exposure to their drivel is thanks to the links here at NC . Now
with the advent of twitter, their staff have taken the extra step of proving how twisted their
personal Russophobian views really are. Between just Corn and Jeffery, there's enough material
to make any McCarthyite proud.*
[* – I was going to close with ' and make Adam Hochschild roll in his grave' but then I googled
him and discovered that he's still alive. Wonder what he thinks about this current turn at the
magazine he co-founded?]
Reposting a comment that IMV, snapshots the reality of Russophobia far better than Ames (it
was in response to a Ray McGovern article on Trump's visit to NATO HQ) :
"Ray has written well to the general audience, bridging the information gap for those heavily
propagandized. He has properly shown the expansion of NATO as an act of calculated betrayal, a
policy of aggression in the face of zero threat.
It is sensible but really too polite to say that NATO expanded because "that is what bureaucracies
do and it became a way for U.S. presidents to show their 'toughness.'" To expand a bureaucracy
by subversion of Ukraine and false reports of Russian aggression, to show toughness by aggression
rather than defense, requires the mad power grasping of tyrants in the military, the intel agencies,
the NSC, the administration, Congress. and the mass media.
They are joined in a tyranny of inventing foreign monsters, to pose falsely as protectors,
and to accuse their moral superiors of disloyalty, as Aristotle warned. This is the domestic political
power grab of tyrants, a far greater danger.
Tyranny is a subculture, a groupthink of bullies who tyrannize each other and compete for the
most radical propositions of nonexistent foreign threats. They fully well know that they are lying
to the people of the United States to serve a personal and factional agenda that involves the
murder of millions of innocents, the diversion of a very large fraction of their own and other
nations' budgets from essential needs, and they have not an ounce of humanity or moral restraint
among them. Those who waver are cast aside, and the worst of the bullies rise to the top. This
is why the nation's founders opposed a standing military, and they were right.
Apart from NATO and a few other treaties, the US would have no constitutional power to
wage foreign wars, just to repel invasions and suppress insurrections, and that is the way it
should be. Any treaty becomes part of the Supreme Law of the land, and must be rigorously restricted
to defense, with provisions for international resolution of conflicts. NATO has been nothing but
an excuse for warmongering since 1989.
Let us hope that Trump pulls the plug on NATO interventionism, accidentally or otherwise. The
Dem leaders have now joined the Reps in their love of bribes for genocide, but at the least the
Reps still don't like paying for it. Perhaps the last duopoly imitation of civilization."
I think this is much closer to the mark than the association of the anti-russia fearmongering
with sincere xenophobia. Russia is the go-to foreign enemy because there is such a huge and convenient
stockpile of propaganda material lying around in stockpiles, but left unused because of the tragic
and abrupt end of Cold War 1.0. And Russia is a great target because it is distant, and has a
weird alphabet. Anyone who knows enough about Russia to contradict the disinformation (like by
mentioning that they are not commies, but US-style authoritarian oligarchs) is suspicious
ipso facto .
Having lived in Kansas for 60 some years which is the poster-child for trickle-down necromancy
and a land heavily infused with rural, German-Catholic sensibilities, I can vouch for the deeply
felt attitudes towards sex as a primary issue. "Family Values" being the code word for the whole
sex and reproductive moral prism.
Like Cuba with its 50s autos, the conservatives have never given up their 60s conception of
the Democrats as the party of free love, peace-nicks (soft on commies hard on guns) and tax and
spend bleeding hearts coddling dependent malingerers.
The GOP here campaigns against a democrat party that no longer exists (if it ever did). They
seem oblivious to the fact that the democrats have become the moderate republicans of yore.
Both parties being pro wall street deficit and war hawks differing in perhaps degree .with
the Demos supporting a more generous portion of calf's foot jelly being distributed to peasants
of more varied hue as they also support privatization, more subtle tax cuts and deregulation for
the rich, R2P wars, and globalization's race to the bottom. People seem to inhabit their own Plato's
Cave each opposing their own particular artfully projected phantom menace.
Brilliant, as Ames usually is. Especially the point that this is a manifestation of consistent
anti-left sentiment within the establishment whether R or D. The confounding of Putin's Russia
with some imagined communist threat always amazes me. D's got to keep up the hippie-punching at
all times though!
This is a great piece. The Russophobia is stuck on an endless loop. I wish they'd at least
come up with new lies or some fresh enemy for us all to fear. Tell me about why South African
dupes are causing all the problems in society, tell me that the people of the Maldives each own
a nuclear capable artillery piece and are burning American flags.
Thanks for this post down memory lane. I assumed MJ was liberal. And Jane Fonda was a conservative.
And by 1981 I was completely confused about where the media stood on any given issue. And now
finally the mask is coming off and we can see (Phillip K. Dick style) that left is right and right
is left. And we are all fascists. Will the real Atilla please stand up? #Resistance is a little
over the top and so is putintrump. But what looks like actual progress is the fact that Bernie
was not completely destroyed by the state paranoia. There has to be a certain bed-rock decency
that can rise above this eternal crap. Just a note of interest on the young Orrin Hatch being
on the SST as a freshman senator. Orrin was the subject of local rumors that claimed he had been
put in the senate by the mafia (some mormon-mafia connection in las vegas) and the fact that they
did use entrapment with a hooker to disgrace his opponent was mafia-enough to make the story convincing.
The story died out fast. But we should all remember that the mafia was involved in its own anti-commie
terrorist tactics for decades.
file under Too Weird: 15 minutes after I posted the above I got a call from Orrin Hatch's robo-computer
inviting me to a local discussion call me paranoid.
@Susan the other – It's not paranoia if someone really is out to get you. Or, to get all of
us. Or, demonstrates that they have the ability to do so at will.
Only 16% of people surveyed are very worried about climate change.
Corporate news is consumed with covering the Trump/Russia affair, but whatever the truth of
all this turns out to be, it pales in significance to the real existential threat that is upon
us. Largely due to a lack of coverage by corporate television news, there is a dangerous lack
of public awareness of it.
land of the free and home of the brave you have to be brave to live in this free-for-all.
Just want to pass on this killer quote from Discover Magazine: "It is sometimes argued that the
illusion of free will arises from the fact that we can't adequately judge all possible moves with
the result that our choices are based on imperfect or impoverished information." what a nightmare
world.
"It is sometimes argued that the illusion of free will arises from the fact that we can't adequately
judge all possible moves with the result that our choices are based on imperfect or impoverished
information."
Accepting that premise does not rule out the possibility of free will, it only suggests that
our free will is likely mired in a blind stumbling, darkness of unknowing.
Hallelujah.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to
hear.
George Orwell. Every one has that 'right', right or wrong! But it is your right & duty to develop 'critical' thinking to DISCERN the difference
Without defending Trump, it is wrong of the Dems to push this stuff when Ukrainians helped
Clinton's campaign and Clinton approved Uranium One getting 20% of US uranium when they gave $100
million to the Foundation. The book "Shattered" says her campaign did internal polling which found
Uranium One was the most damaging line to use against Clinton so she decided to get her retaliation
in first and use the Russia charge at every opportunity. And on election night when they realised
they had been defeated they decided to blame Russia again. What has Trump done for Russia so far?
He's kept up sanctions and bombed their client state Syria. Whereas Clinton had a pattern of arms
sales to Foundation donors. Prefer Clinton? Fine, but not over this.
"... The New York Times is prepping the American people for what could become World War III. The daily message is that you must learn to hate Russia and its President Vladimir Putin so much that, first, you should support vast new spending on America's Military-Industrial Complex and, second, you'll be ginned up for nuclear war if it comes to that. ..."
"... At this stage, the Times doesn't even try for a cosmetic appearance of objective journalism. Look at how the Times has twisted the history of the Ukraine crisis, treating it simply as a case of "Russian aggression" or a "Russian invasion." The Times routinely ignores what actually happened in Ukraine in late 2013 and early 2014 when the U.S. government aided and abetted a violent coup that overthrew Ukraine's elected President Viktor Yanukovych after he had been demonized in the Western media. ..."
"... The Times and much of the U.S. mainstream media refuses even to acknowledge that there is another side to the Ukraine story. Anyone who mentions this reality is deemed a "Kremlin stooge" in much the same way that people who questioned the mainstream certainty about Iraq's WMD in 2002-03 were called "Saddam apologists." ..."
"... Many liberals came to view the dubious claims of Russian "meddling" in the 2016 election as the golden ticket to remove Trump from the White House. So, amid that frenzy, all standards of proof were jettisoned to make Russia-gate the new Watergate. ..."
"... For one, even if the U.S. government were to succeed in destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia sufficiently to force out President Putin, the neocon dream of another malleable Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin is far less likely than the emergence of an extreme Russian nationalist who might be ready to push the nuclear button rather than accept further humiliation of Mother Russia. ..."
"... The truth is that the world has much less to fear from the calculating Vladimir Putin than from the guy who might follow a deposed Vladimir Putin amid economic desperation and political chaos in Russia. But the possibility of nuclear Armageddon doesn't seem to bother the neocon/liberal-interventionist New York Times. Nor apparently does the principle of fair and honest journalism. ..."
"... America's Stolen Narrative, ..."
"... The Trans-Atlantic Empire of banking cartels rest upon enmity with the only other Great Powers in the World: Russia and China, while keeping USA thoroughly within their orbit, relying on our Great Power as the engine that powers this Western Bankers' Empire (the steering room lies in City-of-London, who has LONG maneuvered, via their Wall Street assets, to bring us into Empire). Should peaceful, cooperative and productive relations break out between USA, Russia, and China, this would undermine everything the Western Empire has worked to build. ..."
"... THIS is why the phony Russiagate issue is flogged to get rid of Trump (who seeks cooperation with Russia and China), AND keeping Russia as "The Enemy", keeping the MIC, Intel community, various police-state ops, in high demand for "National Security" reasons (also positioned to foil any democratic uprisings, should they see past the progs daily curtain and see their plight). ..."
"... The funny thing about living through the 'fake news' era, is that now everyone thinks that their news source is the correct news source. Many believe that outside of the individual everyone else reads or listens too 'fake news'. It's like all of a sudden no one has credibility, yet everyone may have it, depending on what news source you subscribe to. I mean there's almost no way of knowing what the truth is, because everyone is claiming that they are getting their news from reputable news outlets, but some or many aren't, and who are the reputable news sources, if you don't mind my asking you this just for the record? ..."
"... To learn how to deal with this 'fake news', I would suggest you start studying the JFK assassination, or any other ill defined tragic event, and then you might learn how to decipher the 'fake news' matrix of confusion to learn what you so desire to learn. I chose this route, because when was the last time the Establishment brokered the truth in regard to a happening such as the JFK assassination? Upon learning of what a few well written books has to say, you will then need to rely on your own brain to at least give you enough satisfaction to allow you to believe that you pretty well got it right, and there go you. In other words, the truth is out there, hiding in plain sight, and if you are persistent enough you just might find it. Good luck. ..."
The NYT's Yellow Journalism on Russia September 15, 2017
Exclusive: The New York Times' descent into yellow journalism over Russia recalls the
sensationalism of Hearst and Pulitzer leading to the Spanish-American War, but the risks to
humanity are much greater now, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Reading The New York Times these days is like getting a daily dose of the "Two Minutes Hate"
as envisioned in George Orwell's 1984, except applied to America's new/old enemy
Russia. Even routine international behavior, such as Russia using fictitious names for
potential adversaries during a military drill, is transformed into something weird and
evil.
In the snide and alarmist style that the Times now always applies to Russia, reporter Andrew
Higgins wrote
– referring to a fictitious war-game "enemy" – "The country does not exist, so it
has neither an army nor any real citizens, though it has acquired a feisty following of
would-be patriots online. Starting on Thursday, however, the fictional state, Veishnoriya, a
distillation of the Kremlin's darkest fears about the West, becomes the target of the combined
military might of Russia and its ally Belarus."
This snarky front-page story in Thursday's print editions also played into the Times' larger
narrative about Russia as a disseminator of "fake news." You see the Russkies are even
inventing "fictional" enemies to bully. Hah-hah-hah -- The article was entitled, "Russia's War
Games With Fake Enemies Cause Real Alarm."
Of course, the U.S. and its allies also conduct war games against fictitious enemies, but
you wouldn't know that from reading the Times. For instance,
U.S. war games in 2015 substituted five made-up states – Ariana, Atropia, Donovia,
Gorgas and Limaria – for nations near the Caucasus mountains along the borders of Russia
and Iran.
In earlier war games, the U.S. used both fictitious names and colors in place of actual
countries. For instance, in 1981, the Reagan administration conducted "Ocean Venture" with that
war-game scenario focused on a group of islands called "Amber and the Amberdines," obvious
stand-ins for Grenada and the Grenadines, with "Orange" used to represent Cuba.
In those cases, the maneuvers by the powerful U.S. military were clearly intended to
intimidate far weaker countries. Yet, the U.S. mainstream media did not treat those war
rehearsals for what they were, implicit aggression, but rather mocked protests from the obvious
targets as paranoia since we all know the U.S. would never violate international law and invade
some weak country -- (As it turned out, Ocean Venture '81 was a dress rehearsal for the actual
U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983.)
Yet, as far as the Times and its many imitators in the major media are concerned, there's
one standard for "us" and another for Russia and other countries that "we" don't like.
Yellow Journalism
But the Times' behavior over the past several years suggests something even more sinister
than biased reporting. The "newspaper of record" has slid into yellow journalism, the practice
of two earlier New York newspapers – William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and
Joseph Pulitzer's New York World – that in the 1890s manipulated facts about the crisis
in Cuba to push the United States into war with Spain, a conflict that many historians say
marked the beginning of America's global empire.
Except in today's instance, The New York Times is prepping the American people for what
could become World War III. The daily message is that you must learn to hate Russia and its
President Vladimir Putin so much that, first, you should support vast new spending on America's
Military-Industrial Complex and, second, you'll be ginned up for nuclear war if it comes to
that.
At this stage, the Times doesn't even try for a cosmetic appearance of objective journalism.
Look at how the Times has twisted the history of the Ukraine crisis, treating it simply as a
case of "Russian aggression" or a "Russian invasion." The Times routinely ignores what actually
happened in Ukraine in late 2013 and early 2014 when the U.S. government aided and abetted a
violent coup that overthrew Ukraine's elected President Viktor Yanukovych after he had been
demonized in the Western media.
Even as neo-Nazi and ultranationalist protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at police,
Yanukovych signaled a willingness to compromise and ordered his police to avoid worsening
violence. But compromise wasn't good enough for U.S. neocons – such as Assistant
Secretary of State Victoria Nuland; Sen. John McCain; and National Endowment for Democracy
President Carl Gershman. They had invested too much in moving Ukraine away from Russia.
Nuland put the U.S. spending at $5 billion and was caught discussing with
U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who should be in the new government and how to "glue" or
"midwife this thing"; McCain appeared on stage urging on far-right militants; and Gershman
was
overseeing scores of NED projects inside Ukraine, which he had deemed the "biggest prize"
and an important step in achieving an even bigger regime change in Russia, or as he put it:
"Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian
imperialism that Putin represents. Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the
near abroad but within Russia itself."
The Putsch
So, on Feb. 20, 2014, instead of
seeking peace , a sniper firing from a building controlled by anti-Yanukovych forces killed
both police and protesters, touching off a day of carnage. Immediately, the Western media
blamed Yanukovych. Sen. John McCain appearing with Ukrainian rightists of the Svoboda party at a pre-coup rally
in Kiev.
Shaken by the violence, Yanukovych again tried to pacify matters by reaching a compromise
--
guaranteed by France, Germany and Poland -- to relinquish some of his powers and move up an
election so he could be voted out of office peacefully. He also pulled back the police.
At that juncture, the neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists spearheaded a violent putsch on Feb.
22, 2014, forcing Yanukovych and other officials to flee for their lives. Ignoring the
agreement guaranteed by the three European nations, Nuland and the U.S. State Department
quickly deemed the coup regime "legitimate."
However, ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, which represented Yanukovych's
electoral base, resisted the coup and turned to Russia for protection. Contrary to the Times'
narrative, there was no "Russian invasion" of Crimea because Russian troops were already there
as part of an agreement for its Sevastopol naval base. That's why you've never seen photos of
Russian troops crashing across Ukraine's borders in tanks or splashing ashore in Crimea with an
amphibious landing or descending by parachute. They were already inside Crimea.
The Crimean autonomous government also voted to undertake a referendum on whether to leave
the failed Ukrainian state and to rejoin Russia, which had governed Crimea since the Eighteenth
Century. In that referendum, Crimean citizens voted by some 96 percent to exit Ukraine and seek
reunion with Russia, a democratic and voluntary process that the Times always calls
"annexation."
The Times and much of the U.S. mainstream media refuses even to acknowledge that there
is another side to the Ukraine story. Anyone who mentions this reality is deemed a "Kremlin
stooge" in much the same way that people who questioned the mainstream certainty about Iraq's
WMD in 2002-03 were called "Saddam apologists."
But what is particularly remarkable about the endless Russia-bashing is that – because
it started under President Obama – it sucked in many American liberals and even some
progressives. That process grew even worse when the contempt for Russia merged with the Left's
revulsion over Donald Trump's election.
Many liberals came to view the dubious claims of Russian "meddling" in the 2016 election
as the golden ticket to remove Trump from the White House. So, amid that frenzy, all standards
of proof were jettisoned to make Russia-gate the new Watergate.
The Times, The Washington Post and pretty much the entire U.S. news media joined the
"resistance" to Trump's presidency and embraced the neocon "regime change" goal for Putin's
Russia. Very few people care about the enormous risks that this "strategy" entails.
For one, even if the U.S. government were to succeed in destabilizing nuclear-armed
Russia sufficiently to force out President Putin, the neocon dream of another malleable Boris
Yeltsin in the Kremlin is far less likely than the emergence of an extreme Russian nationalist
who might be ready to push the nuclear button rather than accept further humiliation of Mother
Russia.
The truth is that the world has much less to fear from the calculating Vladimir Putin
than from the guy who might follow a deposed Vladimir Putin amid economic desperation and
political chaos in Russia. But the possibility of nuclear Armageddon doesn't seem to bother the
neocon/liberal-interventionist New York Times. Nor apparently does the principle of fair and
honest journalism.
The Times and rest of the mainstream media are just having too much fun hating Russia and
Putin to worry about the possible extermination of life on planet Earth.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen
Narrative, either in print here or
as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
jo6pac , September 15, 2017 at 4:51 pm
Amerikas way of bring the big D to your nation. Death
Bingo -- In a surely related story, the mainstream press is equally relentless in AVOIDING
telling Americans the facts about Israel, and especially about its control over the American
press. "Israel lobby is never a story (for media that is in bed with the lobby)" http://mondoweiss.net/2017/09/israel-lobby-never/
Virtually everything average Americans have been told about Israel has been, amazingly, an
absolute lie. Israel was NOT victimized by powerful Arab armies. Israel
overpowered and victimized a defenseless, civilian Arab population. Military analysts knew
the Arab armies were in poor shape and would be unable to resist the zionist army. Muslim
"citizens" of Israel do NOT have all the same rights as Jews. Israelis are
NOT under threat from the indigineous Palestinians, but Palestinians are under
constant threats of theft and death from the Israelis. Israel does NOT share
America's most fundamental values, which rest on the principle of equal human rights for
all.
How has this gigantic package of outright lies has been foisted upon the American public
for so long? And how long can it continue? It turns out they did not foresee the internet,
and the facts are leaking out everywhere. So it appears they're desperately coercing facebook
and google to rig their rankings, trying to hide the facts. But one day soon there will be a
'snap' in the collective mind, and everybody will know that everybody knows.
JWalters
I can tell you are angry. I too was angry when I figured it out.
Long before I figured it out, I was a soldier. Our unit was prepared for an exercise and we
were all sleeping at the regiment compound, the buses would arrive at zero-dark thirty. I was
reading a book about the ME(this was shortly after 9-11). A friend, came up and asked what I
was reading. I told him I was reading about the Balfour paper and how that had a significant
effect on the ME. He began explaining to me how the zionist movement had used the idea that
no one lived on that land, to force the people from that land, out of that land.
I quickly responded that Israel had defended that land against 5 Arab armies and managed to
hold on to that land. I informed him he was mistaken.
He agreed to disagree, and walked away.
This happened way back in 2002 if only I could pick his mind now. How did he know about this,
way back before the internet was in any shape to wake people up?
There is hope still that guys who are young as i was, will say "Fuck You I defend this line
and no further."
Without their compliance, there can be no wars.
CommonTater your story parallels mine -- I was in the military, went to Vietnam to 'defend
our nation against communism', felt horror at the Zionist stories of how Palestinians
rocketed them, was told by senior officer about what Zionism is really about and I, like you,
disbelieved him. That was in 1974 -- -- Now, with all the troubles in the world I won't read the
MSP but look towards the alternative news sources. They make more sense. But as I try to
educate others on what I have learned I am as disappointed as my senior officer must have
been back them. Articles such as this one reproduced by ICH are gems: I save and print them
in a compendium detailing ongoing war crimes.
Thanks Mr. Parry,
You are a voice in the hurricane of hatred and lies propagated by the richest people on the
planet.
Eventually some moron who believes this new York Times garbage will actually unleash the bomb
and we will all be smoke.
That has always been the result of such successful propaganda. And it is very successful. It
has almost occluded any truth for the vast majority of westerners .
Michael Fish
Agreed. I wish this clear and comprehensive article could be stapled on every American
voter's door (wanted to say forehead but violence is bad). Many would toss it in the trash.
Many would not agree even with full comprehension because of their own horrid beliefs. But
maybe a few would read it and have an epiphany. It's very hard work to find an avenue to
change the minds of millions of people who've been inculcated by nationalist propaganda since
birth. Since 4 years old seeing the wonderful National Anthem and jets fly over the stadium
of their favorite sports team. Since required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in
school.
I refused to stand for or recite the Pledge when I was seven or eight years old. I was
sent to detention. My awesome mom though intervened and afterwards I could remain seated
while most or all other kids stood up to do the ritual. I refuse to stand up and place
hand-on-heart and remove cap during any sporting contests when the Anthem is played. I've
been threatened with physical violence by many strangers around me.
Thanks Mr. Parry, your voice is appreciated, your articles and logic are top-notch. Very
valuable stuff, available for the curious, the skeptical. Well, until Google monopolizes
search algorithms and calls this a Russian fake news site, perhaps or Congress the same
My hat is off to you sir, I have not been to any sporting events since I woke up, but I
imagine it would be very difficult to remain seated and hatted during the opening affirmation
of nationalism. My waking up coincides with a drastic drop in sports viewing. I used to be an
NFL fan, rooted for the Niners (started watching NFL in the late eighties), the last full
season I followed was the 2013-14 season.
It was the Ukraine coup that woke me up. It started when watching videos on youtube of guys
stomping on riot cops, using a fire hose on them like a reverse water cannon. Then I realized
these guys were the peaceful protesters being talked about on t.v. It was like a thread
hanging in front of me, I began pulling and pulling until the veil in front of my eyes came
apart. It was during this time I discovered consortiumnews.com.
Mr Common Tater–just appreciating reading that someone else "woke up". That is the
way it has felt to me. For me it was Oct 2002 and Bush's speech that was clearly heading us
to war in Iraq. The "election" (appointment) of Bush in 2000 though was the first alarm clock
that I started to hear. Most recent wake up is connected to Mr Parry's relentless (I hope)
and necessary debunking of the myth of Russian nastiness and corresponding myth of US
rectitude. Been watching The Untold History of the United States and have been dealing with
the real bedrock truth that my government invented and invents enemies as a tactic in a
game–ie. it's a bunch of boys thinking foreign relationship building is first and
foremost a game. It has been hard to wash away all this greasy insidious smut from my
life.
It sucks to wake up, in a way. Once one gets past the denial, Tom Clancy novel type movies
lose some of it's fun, although still entertaining. One secretly knows the audience in the
cinema is just eating it all up and loving it. The American hero yells "yippie kayay mother
f -- -r" as he defeats the post-Soviet Russian villain in Russia blowing up buildings, and
destroying s–t as he saves the world for democracy. The Russian authorities amount to
some guy in Soviet peaked hat, and long coat, begging for a bribe.
Oliver Stone's series is really good, it turns history on his head and shakes all the pennies
out his pockets. Another good reporter is John Pilger, he has a long list of docs he has done
over several decades.
I have been watching that same series, about 3 episodes in. The most mind blowing part to
think about is how the establishment consipired to block the nomination of the progressive
Henry Wallace as a repeat VP for Roosevelt, leading instead to Harry Truman's nomination as
VP, and then you know the rest of the story.
Funny how history repeated itself with the nomination of Clinton instead of Sanders. Btw,
after Sanders mistakenly jumped on the Russia bashing bandwagon he was one of the few who
voted against the recent sanctions being imposed against Russia, Iran, and North Korea. So
yeah, I'd feel alot better with a Sanders president at this point.
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:21 pm
Apart from the obvious Exceptionalist and Zionazi imperative to destroy Russia and China
in order that God's Kingdom of 'Full Spectrum Dominance' be established across His world by
his various 'Chosen People', the USA always needs an enemy. Now, more than ever, as the
country crumbles into disrepair and unprecedented inequality, poverty and elite arrogance,
the proles must be led to blame their plight on some Evil foreign daemon.
Only this time its
no Saddam or Gaddaffi or Assad that can be easily bombed back to that Stone Age that all the
non-Chosen must inhabit. This time the bullying thugs will get a, thermo-nuclear, bloody nose
if they do not back off. Regretably, their egos refuse to withdraw, even in the interest of
self-survival.
Paranam Kid , September 16, 2017 at 6:13 am
" It has almost occluded any truth for the vast majority of westerners."
You are so right about that, I notice it every day on other forums on which I discuss current
affairs with others: the US views are the accepted ones, and I get a lot of stick for stating
different views. It is actually frightening to see how few people can think for
themselves.
mike k , September 15, 2017 at 5:47 pm
The American people are being systematically lied to, and they don't have a clue that it
is happening. There is no awake and intelligent public to prevent what is unfolding. The
worst kind of criminals are in charge of our government, media, and military. The sleeping
masses are making their way down the dark mountain to the hellish outcome that awaits
them.
"These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur
of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it
seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and
kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future I should do foolishly. The beauty
of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain."
Robinson Jeffers
HopeLB , September 15, 2017 at 10:36 pm
Great, Dark and Accurate poem -- Thank You -- Think I'll send it to Rachel Maddow, Wapo and
the NYTimes.Might do them some good. Wouldn't that be lovely.
Patrick Lucius , September 16, 2017 at 12:42 am
Which poem is that? Not Shine, perishing Republic, is it?
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas -- GAS -- Quick, boys -- -- An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. --
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
******************************
And this, from Bob Dylan's "Jokerman" .
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?
******************************
I love life and am by nature a cockeyed optimist, but I find myself intermittently gloomy,
my optimism overwhelmed by cynicism, when I see the abundance of moronic belligerence so
passionately snarled out in the comments sections across the internet. Clearly, humans are
cursed with an addiction to violence For my part, I am old and will die soon and have no
children, plus I live in a quiet backwater far away from the nuclear blast zone. Humanity
seems on course for a major "culling". Insane and sad.
I'd like to see more investigative reporting on the NYT's and other major media outlets'
links to the CIA and other Deep State info-war bureaus. What the Times is doing now is
reminiscent of the Michael Gordon-Judith Miller propaganda in the run up to the invasion of
Iraq. Operation Mockingbird, uncovered during the mid-70s Church Hearings, is an ongoing
effort, it would seem. Revealing hard links to CIA information ops would be a great service
to humanity.
SteveK9 , September 15, 2017 at 7:22 pm
After 'Michael Gordon-Judith Miller' I stopped reading the Times.
Beard681 , September 18, 2017 at 11:52 am
I am amazed at how many conspiracy types there are who want to see some sort of oligarch,
capitalist, zionist or deep state cabal behind it all. (That is a REALLY optimistic view of
the human propensity for violent conflict.) It is just a bunch of corporate shills pushing
for war (hopefully cold) because war sells newspapers.
Robert Parry has gotten this exactly right -- I'm a regular NYTimes subscriber /-have been
for years -- and I have NEVER read anything about Russia that has not been written by
professional Russia-haters like Higgins. Frankly, I don't get it. What accounts for this
weird and dangerous bias?
mike k , September 15, 2017 at 6:03 pm
Have you looked into who owns the NYT?
Paranam Kid , September 16, 2017 at 6:32 am
Why do you keep reading the NYT? Not only the Russia stories are heavily biased, but all
their stories are. Most op-ed's about Israel/Palestine are written by zealous
pro-Israel/pro-Zionists, against very few pro-Palestine people.
Brad Owen , September 16, 2017 at 8:07 am
The Trans-Atlantic Empire of banking cartels rest upon enmity with the only other Great
Powers in the World: Russia and China, while keeping USA thoroughly within their orbit,
relying on our Great Power as the engine that powers this Western Bankers' Empire (the
steering room lies in City-of-London, who has LONG maneuvered, via their Wall Street assets,
to bring us into Empire). Should peaceful, cooperative and productive relations break out
between USA, Russia, and China, this would undermine everything the Western Empire has worked
to build.
THIS is why the phony Russiagate issue is flogged to get rid of Trump (who seeks
cooperation with Russia and China), AND keeping Russia as "The Enemy", keeping the MIC, Intel
community, various police-state ops, in high demand for "National Security" reasons (also
positioned to foil any democratic uprisings, should they see past the progs daily curtain and
see their plight).
Brad Owen , September 16, 2017 at 8:08 am
Progs=propaganda stupid iPad.
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:30 pm
Here in Aust-failure I read the papers for many years until they became TOO repulsive,
particularly the Murdoch hate and fear-mongering rags. I also, and still do, masochistically
listen to the Government ABC and SBS. In all those years I really cannot recall any articles
or programs that reported on Russia or China in a positive manner, save when Yeltsin, a true
hero to all our fakestream media, was in charge. That sort of uniformity of opinion, over
generations, is almost admirable. And the necessity to ALWAYS follow the Imperial US ('Our
great and powerful friend') line leads to some deficiencies in the quality of the personnel
employed, as I one again reflected upon the other day when one hackette referred to (The
Evil, of course)Kim Jong-un as 'President Un', several times.
Jeff Davis , September 18, 2017 at 12:31 pm
"What accounts for this weird and dangerous bias?"
Several points:
The Russian -- formerly Commie -- -- boogieman is a profit center for the military, their
industrial suppliers, and the political class. That's the major factor. But also, the Zionist
project requires a bulked up US military "tasked" with "full spectrum" military dominance
--
the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the American jackboot on the world's throat forever -- to insure the
eternal protection of Israel. Largely unseen in this Israeli/Zionist factor is the
thousand-year-old blood feud between the Jews and Russians. They are ancient enemies since
the founding of Czarist Russia. No amount of time or modernity can diminish the passion of
that animus. (I suspect that the Zionist aim to "destroy" Russia will eventually backfire and
lead instead to the destruction of Israel, but really, we shouldn't talk about that.)
mike k , September 15, 2017 at 6:26 pm
The richest man in the world has the controlling interest in the NYT. Draw your own
conclusions.
Mexico, ground zero for the world fascist movement in the 20s and 30s (going by name
Synarchy Internationale still does) throuout Ibero-America, centered in PAN. The
Spanish-speaking World had to contend with Franco, and Salazar being in power so long in the
respective "Mother Countries" of the Iberian Peninsula. This was the main trail for the
ratlines to travel.
I saw a dead coyote on the side of the road the other day. I know you know what that means
to me, Mike. Omens are a lost art in these modern times, and I have no expertise in these
matters, but it struck my attention hard. It was on the right side of the road: trouble for
Trump coming from The Right? They are more potent than the ineffective Left, so this might be
the way Trump is pulled down.
Sfomarco , September 16, 2017 at 3:37 pm
Carlos Slim (f/k/a Salim)
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:31 pm
Yes, but who bankrolls Slim?
Stiv , September 15, 2017 at 6:51 pm
I wouldn't even need to read this to know what's going to be said. After the last article
from Parry, which was very good and interesting .plowing new ground for him he's back to
rehashing the same old shit. Not that it's necessarily wrong, only been said about a hundred
times. Yawn
D.H. Fabian , September 16, 2017 at 2:46 am
After months of so many people pointing out how and why the "Russia stole the election"
claim is false, it came roaring back (in liberal media) in recent days. It demands a
response.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 7:26 am
No one is required to read anything on CN.
Virginia , September 16, 2017 at 1:58 pm
RP brought lots of new things into play in his article and showed how they mesh together
and support one another "against Trump." I almost skipped it because so familiar with the
topic, but RP brought new light to the subject, in my humble opinion.
I do not need to read or watch established "news" media to know what's going to be said.
After the last b.s. story from the usual talking heads which was low brow and insulting to
the intelligence of the audience, they are back at it again same ol'shit by the same talking
heads. It is most definitely wrong, and it needs to be countered as much as possible not
yawning.
Gregory Herr , September 16, 2017 at 8:18 pm
That's what struck me just how absurdly insulting will the Times get?
And I think the point that trying to destabilize the Russian Federation may very well
bring about a more militant hardline Russia is important to stress.
anon , September 17, 2017 at 9:02 am
"Stiv" is a troll who makes this junk comment every time. Better to ignore him.
Colin , September 18, 2017 at 11:54 am
Were you planning to contribute anything useful to the discussion?
SteveK9 , September 15, 2017 at 7:19 pm
I always wonder what motivation the accusers believe you have when they call you a 'Putin
stooge'. Why would you be one? Are you getting paid? Of course not, so this is just a
judgment on your part. They could call you a fool, but accuse you of 'carrying water for the
Kremlin' as I heard that execrable creature, Adam Schiff say to Tucker Carlson? That just
makes no sense. Of course, none of it is rational.
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:38 pm
They're insane. A crumbling Empire which was supposed to rule the world forever, 'Under
God' through Full Spectrum Dominance, but which, in fact, is disintegrating under its own
moral, intellectual and spiritual rottenness, is bound to produce hate-crazed zealots looking
for foreign scape-goats. Add the rage of the Clintonbots whose propaganda had told then for
months that the She-Devil would crush the carnival-huckster, and her vicious post-defeat
campaign to drive for war with Russia (what a truly Evil creature she is)and you get this
hysteria. Interestingly, 'hysteria' is the word used to describe Bibi Nutty-yahoo, the USA's
de facto 'capo di tutti capi', in Sochi recently when Putin refused to follow orders.
David Grace , September 15, 2017 at 7:30 pm
I have another theory I'd like to get reviewed. These are corporate wars, and not aimed at the stability of nations. It is claimed that in 1991, at the fall of the Soviet Union, the oligarchs were created by
the massive purchasing of the assets of the collapsing nation. The CIA was said to have put
together a 'bond issue' worth some $480 Billion, and it was used to buy farms, factories,
mineral rights and other formerly common holdings of the USSR. This 'bond issue' was never
repaid to the US taxpayers, and the deeds are in the hands of various oligarchs. Not all of
the oligarchs are tied to the CIA, as there were other wells of purchasers of the country,
but the ties to Trump are actually ties to dirty CIA or other organized crime entities.
The NY Times may be trying to capture certain assets for certain clients, and their
editorial policy reflects this.
David Grace . what have we here, a thinking man? I like your premise, and I haven't even
watched the link you supplied. That being said, I'll sign off and investigate that link.
D.H. Fabian , September 16, 2017 at 2:39 am
Conspiracy theories upon conspiracy theories, ensuring that the public will never be able
to root out the facts. People still argue about the Kennedy assassination 54 years later.
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:39 pm
There is no rational 'argument' about what really happened to JFK.
Zhu Bajie , September 17, 2017 at 7:12 pm
Most conspiracy theories are fantasy fiction. If you have real evidence, based on
verifiable facts, then it's not a theory any more. But most of the conspiracy theories
popular in the USA just serve popular vanity. We never have to accept our mistakes, our
crimes against humanity, etc. It's always THEIR fault.
We Americans over all are like small children, always making excuses.
mark , September 16, 2017 at 5:23 pm
Some of the material on the Black Eagle Trust are suspect. It gives figures for stolen
Japanese war loot, for example, that are simply ludicrous. Figures of so many thousand tons
of gold, for example, when the references should probably be to OUNCES of gold.
One sniper in Ukraine overthrew the democratic government. Previously one sniper in Dallas
overthrew another democratic government. Are there any other examples?
Is our infatuation with democracy just a propaganda thing – to fool citizens into
supposing they have value beyond their labour?
AshenLight , September 15, 2017 at 10:13 pm
> Is our infatuation with democracy just a propaganda thing – to fool citizens
into supposing they have value beyond their labour?
It's about control -- those who know they are slaves will resist and fight, but those who
mistakenly believe they are free will not (and if you give them even just a little comfort,
they'll tenaciously defend their own enslavement). It turns out this "inverted
totalitarianism" thing works a lot better than the old-fashioned kind.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 7:19 am
Indeed. Gurdjieff told the tale of a farmer whose sheep were always wandering off due to
his being unable to afford fences to keep them in. Then he had an idea, and called them all
together. He told some of them they were eagles, and others lions etc. They were now so proud
of their new identities that it never occurred to them anymore to escape from their master's
small domain.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 7:23 am
MLK is another example, as is Robert Kennedy.
Anna , September 16, 2017 at 12:53 pm
The American patriots are coming out: "CIA Agent Whistleblower Risks All To Expose The
Shadow Government" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHbrOg092G
That would be the end of the Lobby, mega oilmen and the FedReserve criminals
mark , September 16, 2017 at 5:30 pm
Yes, snipers on rooftops in Deraa, southern Syria, in 2011. These mysterious figures fired
into crowds, deliberately targeting women and young children to inflame the crowd. At the
same time the same snipers killed 7 police officers. Unarmed police had been sent in to deal
with unrest without bloodshed. These police officers were armed only with batons.
This is a standard page from the CIA playbook. The mysterious snipers in Maidan Square in
2014 are believed to have been Yugoslavian mercenaries hired by the CIA
We all have some kind of a bias but fortunately most of us here know the difference
between bias and propaganda. Bias based on facts and our own values is often constructive but
the N.Y. Times(like most msm) has descended into disseminating insidious propaganda.
Unfortunately the search for truth requires a bit more research and time than most people are
willing to invest. Thankfully, Robert Parry continues his quest but the dragons are not easy
to slay. My own quest for truth once led to a philosophical essay. The cartoon at the
bottom(SH Chambers) sums it up. https://crivellistreetchronicle.blogspot.com/2016/07/truth-elusive-concept.html
Mike, thanks so much, I'll look forward to reading it(so far, I don't see it
Moderation?)
Virginia , September 16, 2017 at 2:20 pm
If we have a bias towards honesty, that helps. It keeps one's mind more open and provides
a willingness to entertain various points of view. It's not naivete, however, but thoughtful
consideration coupled with awareness and that protects one from being easily manipulated. But
then, oppositely, there's a human tendency to want to be popular which inclines one towards
groupthink. But why that so entrenches itself, making people impervious to truth, is a
conundrum -- Maybe if the "why" can be answered, the "how" will become apparent -- how to reach
individuals with the truth as so oft told, though hard on the ears, at CN.
Jacob Leyva , September 15, 2017 at 10:12 pm
So what do you think of the Russia-Facebook dealings? When will we get an article on
that?
The Russian /Iranian vs the Ashkenazi has been going on for many, many years ..The USA is
to a large extent controlled by the Ashkenazi / Zionist agenda which literally owns most of
the MSM outlets .Agendas must be announced through propaganda to sway the sleeping public
toward conformity .The only baffling question that remains is why do Americans allow Zionist
to control such a large part of their great republic ?
Art , September 16, 2017 at 1:43 am
Robert, you come from intelligence. Why don't you look at Russia-gate from all possible
angles?
I suggest the following. Putin is an American spy. Russia-gate is created to make him a
winner, a hero.
And the specious confrontation is a good cover for Putin.
This is in a nutshell.
I can obviously say mu-uch more.
D.H. Fabian , September 16, 2017 at 2:33 am
Throughout 2017, we've seen a surge of efforts by both parties -- via the media that serve
them -- to build support for a final nuclear war. The focus jumps from rattling war sabers at
China (via Korea, at the moment) to rattling them at Russia, two nuclear-armed world powers.
This has been working to bring Russia and China together, resolving their years of conflict
in view of a potential world threat -- the US. Whatever their delusions, and regardless of
their ideology, our political leaders are setting the stage for the deaths of millions of us,
and the utter destruction of the US.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 6:59 am
Our political leaders have betrayed us.
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:42 pm
Thermo-nuclear war would cause human extinction, not just billions of casualties.
Jim Glover , September 16, 2017 at 3:15 am
It is the same now with North Korea and China. So what would happen if those nations were
destabilized by Sanctions or worse Russia, China Iran and more would support Kim. How to make
peace?
Dennis Rodman has the guts to suggest call and talk with Kim or "Try it you might like it
better than total mutual destruction". Think Love and Peace it can't hurt like all the war,
hate and fear the media keeps pushing for advertising profits. War and Fear is the biggest
racket on the planet. What can I do? Fighting a losing battle but it is fun tryin' to
win.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 6:57 am
We may be losing now, but who knows? It ain't over till it's over. Hang in there.
Great article- again . I used to live in the US, I used to live in Alaska, I used to live
in Crimea, Ukraine but now I live in Crimea, Russia and Smolensk, Ru. I watched this all go
down but it took awhile to see the entire picture. I seldom get any more emails from the
states – even my brother doesn't get it. They think I'm now a " commie" , I guess. I
see it as the last big gasp of hot, dangerous air from an Empire -- Exposed. Unfortunately,
its not over yet and maybe we/you will have more bad times ahead. Crimea this summer is doing
well with much work going on – from the badly needed new infrastructure to the new
bridge, the people are much better off than in Ukraine. They made the right choice in
returning to Mother Russia even though it was a no-brainer for them. The world is lucky to
have free writers like, Parry, Roberts, Vltchek, Pepe', the Saker and the intelligent
commenters are as important as the writers in spreading the Pravda. Spacibo Mr. Parry
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 6:54 am
Thanks for sharing with us GMC. And good luck to you.
ranney , September 16, 2017 at 4:22 am
YES -- -- -- -- -- Yes to all that you wrote Robert -- Thank you again for writing clearly and saying
what obviously needs to be said, but no one else will. We've been down this road before -i.e.
the media pulling us into wars of Empire – first the Spanish- American one, then a
bunch of others working up to Viet Nam, and then Iraq. Each one gets worse and now we're
reaching for a nuclear one. Keep writing; your voice gives some of us hope that just maybe
others will join in and stop the media from their constant "messages of hate" and the urging
of the public to a suicidal conflagration.
Joe Tedesky , September 16, 2017 at 8:55 am
The funny thing about living through the 'fake news' era, is that now everyone thinks that
their news source is the correct news source. Many believe that outside of the individual
everyone else reads or listens too 'fake news'. It's like all of a sudden no one has
credibility, yet everyone may have it, depending on what news source you subscribe to. I mean
there's almost no way of knowing what the truth is, because everyone is claiming that they
are getting their news from reputable news outlets, but some or many aren't, and who are the
reputable news sources, if you don't mind my asking you this just for the record?
Come to think of it, the 'fake news' theme is brilliant considering that now we have no
bench mark for what the truth is, and by not having that bench mark for the truth we all go
our separate ways believing what we believe, because certainly my news source is the only
truthful one, and your news source is beyond questionable of how the news should be
reported.
People read headlines, but hardly do they ever read the article. Many hear news sound
bites, but never do they do the research required, in order to verify the stories accuracy.
Hear say works even more to rain in the clouds of mass deception. Then there are those who
sort of buy whatever it is the established news outlets are selling based on their belief
that it doesn't much matter anyway, because 'the establishment' lies to us all the time as a
rule, so what's the big deal to keep up on the news, because it's all obviously one big lie
isn't it? So not only do we have irresponsible news journalist, we also have a very large
number of a monopolized unqualified news gatherers who must accept what the various news
agencies report, regardless of what the truth may be. It's better the Establishment keep it
this way, because then the Establishment has better control over the 'mob grabbing the
pitchforks and sickles' and crying out justice for somebody's head. It's kind of like job
security for the Establishment, but in their case it's more like a 'keeping your elitist
head' security, if you know what I mean.
To learn how to deal with this 'fake news', I would suggest you start studying the JFK
assassination, or any other ill defined tragic event, and then you might learn how to
decipher the 'fake news' matrix of confusion to learn what you so desire to learn. I chose
this route, because when was the last time the Establishment brokered the truth in regard to
a happening such as the JFK assassination? Upon learning of what a few well written books has
to say, you will then need to rely on your own brain to at least give you enough satisfaction
to allow you to believe that you pretty well got it right, and there go you. In other words,
the truth is out there, hiding in plain sight, and if you are persistent enough you just
might find it. Good luck.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 11:29 am
The truth has never been that easy to find Joe. Actually all the beyond obvious propaganda
on the MSM might wake some people up to do the searching necessary to get closer to what is
really happening in their world. Maybe the liars have finally overplayed their hand? Or are
we the people really that dumb? (I am scared to hear the answer to that one -- )
Joe Tedesky , September 16, 2017 at 12:04 pm
I could be a wise guy, and say to you 'or so you say' in reply to your kind comment, but
then that would make me a troll.
All I'm saying mike is that in this era of 'fake news' we are all running about on
different levels, and never shall the two of us meet. That is unless you and I get our news
from the same source, but what are the odds of all of us getting the same news? It's
impossible, and I'm not quite that sure that that would be what we want either. Still without
an objective, and honest large media to set the correct narrative we end up in this place,
where you might find yourself doing a spread sheet study to come to some conclusion of what
is true, and what isn't.
Case in point, read about Russia-Gate here on consortiumnews, and then go listen to Rachel
Maddow report on the same thing. Two different sets of stories. Just try and reconcile what
you read on sites like this one concerning Ukraine, then go watch MSNBC or CNN. Never a
match. So you mike read consortiumnews, and your in laws read the NYT and watch CNN, and
there you go, a controversy arises between you and the in laws and with that life goes on,
but where is the correct news to be found to settle the score?
Once upon a time the established news agencies such as CNN, and the NYT, were the hallmark
of the news, and sites such as this one were the ones on the edge, now I'm convinced this
conviction has reversed itself.
Thanks mike for the reply. Joe
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 9:07 am
Wouldn't it be hilarious mike, if the dumbed down people attacked the Bastille under false
pretense? Especially if the lie had been concocted by the blinded by their own hubris sitting
powers to be. Talk about poetic justice, and well placed irony. Priceless --
Virginia , September 16, 2017 at 2:38 pm
Joe, Apparently people take the easy way out. And that's just it -- "the way out."
Extinction -- Maybe they haven't learned there's something worth learning about and living for.
I'm gonna concentrate on that. Open eyes that they might see
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 8:08 am
You are right Virginia, it is probably 'a way out', and God bless them for it. My late
Mother was like that, but I'll tell you why. When my Mother was growing up in a family of
eleven children, her father would rent out their street level basement to the voting polls. A
block away my uncle who was quite older than my Mother owned a corner saloon. Now on Election
Day my Mother said how the men in suits would pull up in their big expensive cars, and they
would descend upon my uncles corner bar. Soon after one by one drunks would come out of the
tavern wearing Republican buttons then they would go into grandpap's basement voting booth,
and vote. Not long after my Mom said, the same drunks would come pouring out of my uncles
tavern and this time they were wearing Democratic buttons, and they would go vote once or as
many times as it would take to thank the big guys in the suits for the free drinks. My Mom
said this went on all day. She said a lot dead people voted whether they knew it or not, and
that's the truth. She would follow up by saying, 'yeah a lot of politicians won on the drunk
vote'.
So Virginia some can't take the decept and lying, and with that they give up. I myself
don't feel this way, but then there are the times I can't help but think of how my dear sweet
Mother probably did have it right for the sake of living your life in the most upright and
honest way. Sadly, there is no virtue in politics, or so it seems.
Oh yeah, that uncle who owned the corner saloon, he did go into politics holding nominee
appointed positions, until he got wise and got a honest job, as he would jokingly say.
For the record my Mother did vote, but she was the lady standing in line who looked
reluctant and pissed off to be there, but never the less my Mum was a voter. Oh, the
candidate my Mother loved the most was JFK. John F Kennedy's was the only presidential
picture my Mother ever hung in our humble home.
My message here, was only meant to give some cover, and an explanation for those who shy
away from politics, and not an excuse to stay uninvolved. For even my non political Mum did
at least in the end break down, and do the right thing. We should all at least try, and keep
up on the events of our time, and vote with the best intentions we can muster up.
Okay, I'm sorry for the length of my reply, but you are always worth taking time for me to
give a reasonable answer to. I also hope I'm entertaining with these stories I seem to tell
from time to time. Take care Virginia. Joe
Tannenhouser , September 17, 2017 at 7:28 pm
Humans are approximately 90% water, give or take depending on evaporation (Age). Water
always takes the path of least resistance. Oh I wish and hope for the day when most realize
they are much more than 'just' water:)
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:47 pm
The fakestream media lies incessantly, and has for generations. Chomsky and Herman's
'Manufacturing Consent' outlines the propaganda role of the 'mass media', and is twenty-five
years old, in which period things have gotten MUCH worse (just look at the fate of the UK
'Guardian' for an example). Yet the fakestream presstitutes STILL have the unmitigated gall
to call others 'fake' and demand that we believe their unbelievable narratives. That's real
chutzpah.
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 8:26 am
You know Mulga you are correct, many generations have listened to many, many, lies upon
their way to the voting booths. It goes without saying, how the aristocrats when they find it
necessary, as they often do find it necessary, they lie to their flock for a whole host of
reasons. Why we could pick anytime in history, and find out where lies have paved the way to
a leaders greater conquest, or a leaders said greater conquest if not met with defeat, but
never the less the public was used to propel some leaders wishes onward and upward whether
for the good or the bad.
But here we are Mulga, you and the rest of us here, straddling on the fence over what
might be right to what possibly could be wrong. Without a responsible press you and us Mulga
need to learn from each other. Like when comment posters leave links, that's always been
something good for me to follow through on.
We live in a unique time, but a time not that unique, as much as it is our time. Our
great, great, grandparents were straddling the same fence, and I'm guessing they too relied
on each other to navigate there way through the twisting maze of politics, and basically what
they all wanted, was a little peace on earth. So Mulga I also guess that you and we the
people are just carrying on a tradition that us common folk have been assigned too
continue.
Like reading your comments Mulga, good to see you here. Joe
Zhu Bajie , September 17, 2017 at 7:44 pm
Fake news has always been common. Critical thinking has never been popular because Occam's
Razor might slice your favorite story to shreds. Personally, I give full credence to few
things in life, but suspect many more, to some degree. I trust my own experiences more than
what I read in the media and try to reject conventional wisdom as much as possible.
Herman , September 16, 2017 at 9:39 am
Observing Putin's behavior, you have to be impressed with his continue willingness to
extend the olive branch and to seek a reasonable settlement of differences. His language
always leaves open the possibility of détente with the understanding that Russia is
not going to lay down to be run over. On the contrary, the language of Obama and Trump, and
their representatives is consistently take it or leave and engaging in school yard insults of
Russia, Putin, Lavrov and others. We have consistently played the bully in the school yard
encouraging others to join in the bullying. We talk about the corrosive discourse at home,
but observe the discourse in foreign affairs. Trump and his associates are guilty, but slick
talking Obama and his subordinates was often worse. .As has so often been said, we have only
two arrows in our foreign affairs quiver, war and sanctions. We lack the imagination and will
to actually engage in civil discussions with those on our enemies' list.
Parry is of course correct in his opinion of the New York Times but it doesn't stop there,
only that the New York Times undeservedly is the "newspaper of record." His citing of Orwell
is on the mark. Just turn your TV on for the news and see for yourself.
Dave P. , September 16, 2017 at 8:27 pm
Very well said, Herman. Very true.
Patricia Victour , September 16, 2017 at 9:54 am
I don't subscribe to the NYT for this reason, and it is galling to me that our local rag,
"The Santa Fe New Mexican," while featuring excellent local coverage for the most part, gets
all it's "national" news from the likes of the NYT, WaPo, and AP. These stories, much of it
"fake news" in my opinion, are offered as gospel by the "New Mexican", with no journalistic
effort to print opposing views. People I know seem so proud of themselves that they subscribe
to "The Times," and I don't even dare try to point out to them that they are being duped and
propagandized into believing the most outrageous (and dangerous) crap.
To add another dimension, these sources are so jealous of their position as the ultimate
word on what Americans are to believe, and also so worried about their waning influence, that
now RT and Sputnik, both Russia-sponsored news outlets, may be forced to register as "foreign
agents" in the U.S. I am not familiar with Sputnik, but I have been watching RT on TV for
several years and find it to be an excellent source of national and foreign news. Stories I
see first on RT are usually confirmed soon after by other reliable sources, such as this
excellent site – Consortiumnews. At no point did I feel I was being coerced by Russia
during the 2016 election – I needed no confirmation that both Trump and Clinton were
probably the worst candidates ever to run for President.
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 9:31 am
You know what I find interesting is how a reporter such as Robert Parry will pinpoint his
details to a critique of say the NYT, but when or if a NYTer is to write a likewise article
of the Alternative Internet Press the NYTer will just simply critique their internet rival as
a 'conspiracy theorist' or as now as in 2017 they refer to them as 'fake news artist'. I mean
no rebuttal back referencing certain details such as what Parry mentioned, but just
rhetorical words written over tabloid written headlines finalized under the heading of 'fake
news'. This must be being taught in journalism school these days, because it's popular in the
MSM.
Just like you have never heard or read from the MSM a detailed answered rebuttal to the
pointed questions of say the '911 Truthers' or a 'JFK Assassination Researcher' a valid bona
fide answer. No, but you do hear the masters and mistresses of the corporate media world call
writers such as Parry, Roberts, and St Clair, 'fake newscasters', 'Putin Puppets', and or a
whole host of other nasty names, as they feel fit to write, but never a honest too goodness
rebuttal. Then they talk about Trump not sounding or acting presidential hmm the nerve of
these wordsmiths.
BTW, I don't care much for Trump, and I even care less for our MSM. Just wanted to get
that straight.
Nice comment Patricia. Joe
hatedbyu , September 16, 2017 at 10:57 am
let's not forget about the nytimes grossly negligent reporting on syria and libya. judith
miller? russian doping scandal. lying about the holdomor . man i could do this all day ..
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 10:12 am
You mean the on air hours of punditry explaining away their professions mistakes, or the
honest rebuttal? It's at those particular times and occurrences of ignored self reflection
our honorable (not) MSM falls back on Orwell's 1984. Like it never happened. The dog didn't
eat no home work, because there never was a dog, nor was there any homework .stupid us. Life
goes on uninterrupted and non commercial time can be filled with an update on Bill Cosby's
past alleged sexual predator attacks, and this is our professional news casting doing its
best to entertain us, not inform us god forbid, but entertain us the ignorant masses of their
workless society.
One day hatedbyu the ignorant masses may just show the corporate infotainment duchess and
dudes that they 'the people' ain't so ignorant, and things must change. Well at least that's
the dream, but it's still a work in progress, and then there's the historical seesaw.
I think it's the power of empire to expand, just like a balloon, until it reaches it's
bursting point. But just what that bursting point is, is without a doubt the most disputable
of arguments to be made. I am coming to the belief we are, as always, continually getting to
that point, and we may of course be very close to igniting that spark in the not so far off
future. I would prefer the spark to be completely financial, and dealt with accordingly, but
I'm a dreamer purest and a conspiracy theorist, so that means when the crap starts going
down, I'll be the old man on the hill lighting up a big fat doobie cue soundtrack 'Fool On
the Hill'.
Sorry just had to get carried away, but it's Sunday morning hatedbyu and I'm home alone
and nobody's trying to break in .. Good comment hatedbyu. Joe
A Compilation Not seen in Corporate Media: See Link Below:
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
US Wars and Hostile Actions: A List
By David Swanson
Stephen J. Thank you for introducing me to David Swanson. Great link.
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 11:29 am
Im with you on that Bob, Stephen J providing the Swanson link should be a must read, to
keep things fair and balanced. I also do wonder if Swanson's message isn't getting out there,
and we all don't already know it? I'm a glass half full kind of guy, but what do we really
know about each other, other than what the corporate media instills on us? I wish cable news
would air a program made up of Swanson, Pilger, and Parry, for that at least could put some
well needed balance finality back, if it ever was there in the first place, back into the
public narrative .but there go I.
Good to see you Bob. Joe
Hank , September 16, 2017 at 11:32 am
The deep state sticks with what works: controlling the media keeps the masses ignorant and
malleable. "Remember the Maine"
Germans are bayoneting Belgium babies and "remember the Lusitania" , some evidence shows
higher ups knew the Japanese fleet was 400 miles from Hawaii, recall "Tonkin Gulf" episode,
Iran Contra , invasion of Granada, Panama, and of course 911 and war on terror, patriot act,
weapons of mass destruction, and Russia hacking the election. The masses "believe" these to
be true and react and respond accordingly.
"
"Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that
matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, IT IS THE LEADERS of the country who
determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is
a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice
or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy.
All you have to do is TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING ATTACKED, and denounce the peacemakers for
lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY COUNTRY."
–Goering at the Nuremberg Trials
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 12:53 pm
Thanks Hank. Same ole same ole, eh? When will we ever learn?
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 11:32 am
"Trump might well go down in history of the President who screwed-up a historical
opportunity to really change our entire planet for the better and who, instead, by his abject
lack of courage and honor, his total lack of political and diplomatic education and by his
groveling subservience to the "swamp" he had promised to drain ended up being as pathetically
clueless as Obama was." (The Saker)
My sentiments exactly.
Voytenko , September 16, 2017 at 11:49 am
What a glaring lie this article is, its' author being either "useful idiot" played by
Kremlin, or maybe not so much of an idiot. What are you talking about here in comments, those
who applaud this article, this bunch of lies? You live in Ukraine, you know anything about
that so-called "putch"? How dare you to insult the whole nation – Ukrainian nation?
Shame on you, people. You don't know (author of the article including) anything about Russia,
Ukraine and that bloody Putin, but you have problems with the US and its' politics. US are
your business, Ukraine definitely not. Find some other examples of NYT and USA malfeasance,
some you know something about. Stop insulting other nations.
anon , September 17, 2017 at 9:53 am
You are not from Ukraine, and you care not for Ukraine, or you would seek unity not
dominance of East over West Ukraine. Tell us about your life in Ukraine, and show us the
evidence of "that bloody Putin."
Abe , September 16, 2017 at 1:31 pm
Yellow journalism now employs "open source and social media investigation" scams foisted
by Eliot Higgins and the Bellingcat disinformation site.
Bellingcat is allied with the New York Times and the Washington Post, the two principal
mainstream media organs for "regime change" propaganda, via the First Draft Coalition
"partner network".
In a triumph of Orwellian Newspeak, this Google-sponsored "post-Truth" Propaganda 3.0
coalition declares that member organizations will "work together to tackle common issues,
including ways to streamline the verification process".
The New York Times routinely hacks up Bellingcat "reports" and pretends they're
"verification"
Malachy Browne, "Senior Story Producer" at the New York Times, cited Bellingcat to
embellish the media "story" about the Khan Shaykhun chemical incident in Idlib Syria.
Before joining the Times, Browne was an editor at "social news and marketing agency"
Storyful and at Reported. ly, the "social reporting" arm of Pierre Omidyar's First Look
Media.
Browne generously "supplemented" his "reporting" on the Khan Shaykun incident with "videos
gathered by the journalist Eliot Higgins and the social media news agency Storyful".
Browne encouraged Times readers to participate in the Bellingcat-style "verification"
charade: "Find a computer, get on Google Earth and match what you see in the video to the
streets and buildings"
Browne of Storyful and Higgins of Bellingcat are founding members of the Google-funded
"First Draft" coalition.
Browne demonstrates how the NYT and other "First Draft" coalition media outlets use video
to "strengthen" their "storytelling".
In 2016, the NYT video department hired Browne and Andrew Glazer. a senior producer on the
team that launched VICE News, to help "enhance" the "reporting" at the Times.
Browne represents the Times' effort to package its dubious "reporting" using the Storyful
marketing strategy of "building trust, loyalty, and revenue with insight and emotionally
driven content" wedded with Bellingcat style "digital forensics" scams.
In other words, we should expect the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, UK Guardian,
and all the other "First Draft" coalition media "partners" to barrage us more Bellingcat /
Atlantic Council-style Facebook and YouTube video mashups, crazy fun with Google Earth, and
Twitter campaigns.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 1:47 pm
Thanks Abe. Sounds like these guys all read 1984, and decided it was just the thing for
2017 Amerika.
Obviously Browne is proud of the "investigation" even though merely shared a "story" fed
to him by Higgins' Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council .
Abe , September 16, 2017 at 1:58 pm
Higgins and Bellingcat receives direct funding from the Open Society Foundations (OSF)
founded by business magnate George Soros, and from Google's Digital News Initiatives
(DNI).
Google's 2017 DNI Fund Annual Report describes Higgins as "a world–leading expert in
news verification".
In their zeal to propagate the story of Higgins as a courageous former "unemployed man"
now busy independently "Codifying social conflict data", Google neglects to mention Higgins'
role as a "research fellow" for the NATO-funded Atlantic Council "regime change" think
tank.
Despite their claims of "independent journalism", Eliot Higgins and the team of
disinformation operatives at Bellingcat depend on the Atlantic Council to promote their
"online investigations".
The Atlantic Council donors list includes:
– US government and military entities: US State Department, US Air Force, US Army,
US Marines.
– The NATO military alliance
– Large corporations and major military contractors: Chevron, Google, Lockheed
Martin, Raytheon, BP, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Northrup Grumman, SAIC, ConocoPhillips,
and Dow Chemical
– Foreign governments: United Arab Emirates (UAE; which gives the think tank at
least $1 million), Kingdom of Bahrain, City of London, Ministry of Defense of Finland,
Embassy of Latvia, Estonian Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Defense of Georgia
– Other think tanks and think tankers: Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS), Nicolas Veron of Bruegel (formerly at PIIE), Anne-Marie Slaughter (head of
New America Foundation), Michele Flournoy (head of Center for a New American Security),
Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings Institution.
Higgins is a Research Associate of the Department of War Studies at King's College, and
was principal co-author of the Atlantic Council "reports" on Ukraine and Syria.
Damon Wilson, Executive Vice President of Programs and Strategy at the Atlantic Council, a
co-author with Higgins of the report, effusively praised Higgins' effort to bolster
anti-Russian propaganda:
Wilson stated, "We make this case using only open source, all unclassified material. And
none of it provided by government sources. And it's thanks to works, the work that's been
pioneered by human rights defenders and our partner Eliot Higgins, uh, we've been able to use
social media forensics and geolocation to back this up." (see Atlantic Council video
presentation minutes 35:10-36:30)
However, the Atlantic Council claim that "none" of Higgins' material was provided by
government sources is an obvious lie.
Higgins' primary "pieces of evidence" are a video depicting a Buk missile launcher and a
set of geolocation coordinates that were supplied by the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine)
and the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior via the Facebook page of senior-level Ukrainian
government official Arsen Avakov, the Minister of Internal Affairs.
Higgins and the Atlantic Council are working in support of the Pentagon and Western
intelligence's "hybrid war" against Russia.
The laudatory bio of Higgins on the Kings College website specifically acknowledges his
service to the Atlantic Council:
"an award winning investigative journalist and publishes the work of an international
alliance of fellow investigators using freely available online information. He has helped
inaugurate open-source and social media investigations by trawling through vast amounts of
data uploaded constantly on to the web and social media sites. His inquiries have revealed
extraordinary findings, including linking the Buk used to down flight MH17 to Russia,
uncovering details about the August 21st 2013 Sarin attacks in Damascus, and evidencing the
involvement of the Russian military in the Ukrainian conflict. Recently he has worked with
the Atlantic Council on the report "Hiding in Plain Sight", which used open source
information to detail Russia's military involvement in the crisis in Ukraine."
While it honors Higgins' enthusiastic "trawling", King's College curiously neglects to
mention that Higgins' "findings" on the Syian sarin attacks were thoroughly debunked.
King's College also curiously neglects to mention the fact that Higgins, now listed as a
Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's "Future Europe Initiative", was principal co-author
of the April 2016 Atlantic Council "report" on Syria.
The report's other key author was John E. Herbst, United States Ambassador to Ukraine from
September 2003 to May 2006 (the period that became known as the Orange Revolution) and
Director of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.
Other report authors include Frederic C. Hof, who served as Special Adviser on Syrian
political transition to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012. Hof was previously the
Special Coordinator for Regional Affairs in the US Department of State's Office of the
Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, where he advised Special Envoy George Mitchel. Hof had
been a Resident Senior Fellow in the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle
East since November 2012, and assumed the position as Director in May 2016.
There is no daylight between the "online investigations" of Higgins and Bellingcat and the
"regime change" efforts of the NATO-backed Atlantic Council.
Thanks to the Atlantic Council, Soros, and Google, it's a pretty well-funded gig for fake
"citizen investigative journalist" Higgins.
Dave P. , September 17, 2017 at 12:26 am
Abe – Thanks for all the invaluable information you have been providing.
jaycee , September 16, 2017 at 1:52 pm
The meme of an aggressive assertive Russia, based on what happened in Crimea, is a
deliberate lie expressed with the utmost contempt towards principled diplomacy. The average
consumer of mainstream news is also being shamelessly and contemptuously manipulated.
First, the people of Crimea did not want to be part of Ukraine after the USSR dissolved,
and had previously expressed their opinion through referenda. The events of 2014 were part of
an obvious pattern of previously expressed opinion.
Second, around the time of the so-called Orange Revolution, NATO analysts forecast what
would probably happen should Ukraine embrace European "security architecture" (i.e. NATO),
and concluded that Russia would take steps to protect their naval facilities in Crimea. Yet,
in 2014, NATO officials would disingenuously express their utmost shock and surprise at the
event.
Third, Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power in Ukraine in 2005 through the NED-financed
Orange Revolution, consistently described his intention to join Ukraine with European
institutions, including its "security architecture" (NATO), although acknowledging that the
Ukrainian citizenry would have to be manipulated into accepting such a controversial and
adversarial position. He would downplay presumed Russian reaction to potential removal from
Crimea despite the obviousness and predictability of a serious crisis (see Sept 23, 2008
"Conversation with Viktor Yushchenko" Council On Foreign Relations). Yushchenko polled at
5.45% when he lost the Presidency in 2010, running on a platform of European integration.
Fourth, Russian officials at the highest level told their American counterparts in 2009
that any attempt to integrate Ukraine into NATO, and a corresponding threat to the Crimean
naval facilities, would result in moves similar to what would later happen in 2014. Yet the
United States, after instigating and legitimizing the Ukraine coup, would react to the
Crimean referendum as an aggressive act which represented an unexpected security crisis
requiring a reluctant but firm response of militarizing the entire region, and portraying the
Russian state to the public as a dangerous and aggressive rogue power.
The deliberate omission of relevant contextual background by politicians, military
officials, and the mainstream media demonstrates that none of these institutions can be
trusted, and it is they who represent the greatest threat to international security. Putin
has been relentlessly demonized, but it can be argued that his swift and essentially
bloodless moves in Crimea in 2014 avoided what could have been a major international crisis
on the level of the Berlin blockade in 1961. It appears, in hindsight, that such a crisis is
exactly what the NATO alliance desired all along.
Sam F , September 17, 2017 at 9:58 am
Well said.
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 12:02 pm
Nicely put jaycee. What you wrote took me back to a time of some eight months before
Maiden Square, when my niece decided to live in Kiev. A bit of a ways away from Pittsburgh,
so I started researching Ukraine. I also discovered RT & Moonofalabama, and sites like
that.
What you wrote jaycee, in my humble opinion should be said in our MSM news. If for no
other reason but to give an alternative fair and balance to say the likes of Rachel Maddow,
or Joy Ann Reed. The way the MSM picks and chooses, and skims across important events in
Ukraine, like Odessa, are criminal if ever the Press is to be judged for crimes of war. To
the crys of a destroyed empire's vanquished population would then your small essay be heard
jaycee, and yet that's the world we live in, but at least you said it.
Thanks jaycee (that's the first time I wrote your name and the j didn't go capital what
does that mean? Who cares.)
Joe
rosemerry , September 16, 2017 at 2:04 pm
Of course the NYT liars would not bother to watch Oliver Stone's interviews with Pres.
Putin, but during them he explained at length about his cooperation during the years after
Ukraine elected a pro-Western president, managing to carry out mutual agreements and
policies, but after the new pro- Russian president was elected, the USA did not accept him
and overthrew him, which preceded the antics of Nuland et al in 2014 and the rest which
followed.
MaDarby , September 16, 2017 at 2:05 pm
It appears to me that the elites decided long ago that the best solution to overpopulation
is just to let climate change take care of three or four billion people while the Saud family
and the Cargill family live on in their sheltered paradises with every convenience AI can
provide.
It is clear these mega-rich families DO NOT CARE about society, about mass human extension
or even about nature itself. They are the pinnacle of human evolution. Psycho-pathological
loss of empathy might have been a bad evolutionary experiment.
This is derangement on a human specie scale, no leader no one in power has been willing to
do anything but exploit every opportunity to make money and increase global domination, the
great powers knew this day was coming when they made their decisions to hide it 50 years ago.
The consequences are acceptable to the decision makers.
A mass extension of organic life is taking place before our eyes, nothing can stop it,
THEY DO NOT CARE.
They sure as hell don't care if millions don't believe the Russia crap they just move
ahead as the Imperial power, might makes right. In the end it is a religious project, the
biblical slaughter of the innocents to appease a vengeful god and rid the world of evil.
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 12:19 pm
What you bring up MaDarby takes me towards the direction of wondering what all those other
Departments, other than State & Defense, of the Presidential Cabinet are up too? If our
news were done and somehow properly organized, in such away as to educate us peons, then
whatever the time allowed would be to broadcast and print out what each Federal Agency is up
to. Now I know a citizen can seek out this information, but why can't there be a suitable
mass media representation to reach us clunkheads like me, not you?
What should be exposed is the corporate ownership of the very agencies that were put in
place to protect the 'Commons' has been corrupted to the point of no return. This dilemma
will take a huge public referendum short of a mob revolution to change this atmosphere of
complacency. The public will get blamed, but the real blame should be put on the massive
leadership programs which were bolted down on to their citizens masses knowledge of said
events, and there in lies the total crime of deception.
MaDarby your concern for nature is where a smart person should put their number one
priority concern, no arguing there, but just a lifting word of approval of how you put it.
Joe
Donald Patterson , September 16, 2017 at 2:45 pm
Consortium has been a clear voice on the lunacy of the Russia-Gate scandal. But to paint
Yanukovych former President of the Ukraine as an injured party considering his history in
government with what appears to be large scale corruption is part of the story as well. A
treason trial started in May. More info needed on what looks like a complicated story. This
would be a good piece of investigative journalism as well.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 9:03 pm
Can you imagine what a huge can of worms would be revealed if there was a thorough
investigation on every congressperson and public official in Washington DC? It would make
Yanukovych look like a saint. And in addition, let's investigate the 10,000 richest people in
the US, including all their offshore fortunes gained by illegal means. Wouldn't it make sense
to do that? Isn't there enough evidence of probable criminal activity to open these
investigations? Where is our ethical sense when it comes to our own dirty laundry? I guess
it's easier to speculate about other's crimes than look into our own, eh?
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 12:40 pm
The focus I get isn't so much focused on Yanukovych, even Putin wasn't all that crazy
about his style of leadership, but my focus on a viable democratically created government
doesn't necessarily start with an armed public coup. Yes, leading up to the violence,
peaceful protesters took to the streets, but as we both know this is always the case until
the baton twirling thugs come to finally ramp up the protest to a marathon of violent clashes
and whatever else gets heads busted, until we have a full fledged revolution on our hands
pass out the cookies. I mean by by-passing the voting polls, even to somehow ad hoc a
temporary government in some manner of government overthrow were done peacefully, well then
maybe I could get on board with this new Ukrainian government, but even the NYT finds it
impossible to cover up everything.
And what about the people of Donbass? Shouldn't they have a say in this new government
realignment? Ukraine has, and has always had a East meets West kind of problem. That area has
been ruled over for centuries by each other, and one another, to a point of who's who and
what's what is hard to figure out. Donbass, should in my regard be separate from the Now Kiev
government. (Be kind with your critique of me for I am just an average American telling you
what I see from here)
It's like everything else, where we should let the people of the region sit down with each
other and work it out, we instead blame it on Putin, or whoever else Putin appears to be, and
there you have it MIC spending up the ying-yang, for the lack of a better portrayal, but
still a portrayal of what ills our modern geopolitical society.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 2:49 pm
"The best thing which could happen to this country and its people would be the collapse of
this Empire. The support, even tacit and passive, of this Empire by people like yourself only
delays this outcome and allows this abomination to to bring even more misery and pain upon
millions of innocent people, including millions of your fellow Americans. This Empire now
also threatens my country, Russia, with war and possibly nuclear war and that, in turn, means
that this Empire threatens the survival of the human species. Whether the US Empire is the
most evil one in history is debatable, but the fact that it is by far the most dangerous one
is not. Is that not a good enough reason for you to say "enough is enough"? What would it
take for you to switch sides and join the rest of mankind in what is a struggle for the
survival of our species? Or will it take a nuclear winter to open your eyes to the true
nature of the Empire you apparently are still supporting against all evidence?" (the
Saker)
Please go to the entire article on today's Saker Blog.
Voytenko , September 16, 2017 at 3:48 pm
Sick edition consortiumnews, sick readers. Elites, Deep State, Evil Empire USA Dove Putin
with olive branch Guys, why don't you watch, say for a week, Russian TV, if you have somebody
around who can translate from Russian. If you want to hear real nazi racist alt-whatever
crap, Russian TV is the place. But you'll enjoy it, most probably. Thankfully, you guys, are
obviously, minority, with all your pseudo intellectual delusions, discussions and ideas.
"Useful idiots" – that's what Lenin said about the likes of you.
Abe , September 16, 2017 at 7:00 pm
There is no reason to assume that the trollish rants of "Voytenko" are from some outraged
flag-waving "patriot" in Kiev. There are plenty of other "useful idiots" ready, willing and
able to make mischief.
For example, about a million Jews emigrated to Israel ("made Aliyah") from the post-Soviet
states during the 1990s. Some 266,300 were Ukrainian Jews. A large number of Ukrainian Jews
also emigrated to the United States during this period. For example, out of an estimated 400
thousand Russian-speaking Jews in Metro New York, the largest number (thirty-six percent)
hail from Ukraine. Needless to say, many among them are not so well disposed toward the
nations of Russia or Ukraine, and quite capable of all manner of mischief.
A particularly "useful idiot" making mischief the days is Sergey Brin of Google. Brin's
parents were graduates of Moscow State University who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979
when their son was five years old.
Google, the company that runs the most visited website in the world, the company that owns
YouTube, is very snugly in bed with the US military-industrial-surveillance complex.
In fact, Google was seed funded by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA). The company now enjoys lavish "partnerships" with military
contractors like SAIC, Northrop Grumman and Blackbird.
Google's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and
make it universally accessible and useful".
In a 2004 letter prior to their initial public offering, Google founders Larry Page and
Sergey Brin explained their "Don't be evil" culture required objectivity and an absence of
bias: "We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and
research, not only to the information people pay for you to see."
The corporate giant appears to have replaced the original motto altogether. A carefully
reworded version appears in the Google Code of Conduct: "You can make money without doing
evil".
This new gospel allows Google and its "partners" to make money promoting propaganda and
engaging in surveillance, and somehow manage to not "be evil". That's "post-truth" logic for
you.
Indeed, a very cozy cross-promotion is happening between Google and Bellingcat.
In November 2014, Google Ideas and Google For Media, partnered the George Soros-funded
Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to host an "Investigathon" in New
York City. Google Ideas promoted Higgins' "War and Pieces: Social Media Investigations" song
and dance via their YouTube page.
Higgins constantly insists that Bellingcat "findings" are "reaffirmed" by accessing
imagery in Google Earth.
Google Earth, originally called EarthViewer 3D, was created by Keyhole, Inc, a Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded company acquired by Google in 2004. Google Earth uses
satellite images provided by the company Digital Globe, a supplier of the US Department of
Defense (DoD) with deep connections to both the military and intelligence communities.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is both a combat support agency under
the United States Department of Defense, and an intelligence agency of the United States
Intelligence Community. Robert T. Cardillo, director of the NGA, lavishly praised Digital
Globe as "a true mission partner in every sense of the word". Examination of the Board of
Directors of Digital Globe reveals intimate connections to DoD and CIA
Google has quite the history of malicious behavior. In what became known as the "Wi-Spy"
scandal, it was revealed that Google had been collecting hundreds of gigabytes of payload
data, including personal and sensitive information. First names, email addresses, physical
addresses, and a conversation between two married individuals planning an extra-marital
affair were all cited by the FCC. In a 2012 settlement, the Federal Trade Commission
announced that Google will pay $22.5 million for overriding privacy settings in Apple's
Safari browser. Though it was the largest civil penalty the Federal Trade Commission had ever
imposed for violating one of its orders, the penalty as little more than symbolic for a
company that had $2.8 billion in earnings the previous quarter.
Google is a joint venture partner with the CIA In 2009, Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel
invested "under $10 million each" into Recorded Future shortly after the company was founded.
The company developed technology that strips information from web pages, blogs, and Twitter
accounts.
In addition to funding Bellingcat and joint ventures with the CIA, Brin's Google is
heavily invested in Crowdstrike, an American cybersecurity technology firm based in Irvine,
California.
Crowdstrike is the main "source" of the "Russians hacked the DNC" story.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, is a Senior
Fellow at the Atlantic Council "regime change" think tank.
Alperovitz said that Crowdstrike has "high confidence" it was "Russian hackers".
"But we don't have hard evidence," Alperovitch admitted in a June 16, 2016 Washington Post
interview.
Allegations of Russian perfidy are routinely issued by private companies with lucrative US
Department of Defense (DoD) contracts. The companies claiming to protect the nation against
"threats" have the ability to manufacture "threats".
The US and UK possess elite cyber capabilities for both cyberspace espionage and offensive
operations.
Both the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the British Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) are intelligence agencies with a long history of supporting military
operations. US military cyber operations are the responsibility of US Cyber Command, whose
commander is also the head of the NSA.
US offensive cyber operations have emphasized political coercion and opinion shaping,
shifting public perception in NATO countries as well as globally in ways favorable to the US,
and to create a sense of unease and distrust among perceived adversaries such as Russia and
China.
The Snowden revelations made it clear that US offensive cyber capabilities can and have
been directed both domestically and internationally. The notion that US and NATO cyber
operations are purely defensive is a myth.
Recent US domestic cyber operations have been used for coercive effect, creating
uncertainty and concern within the American government and population.
The perception that a foreign attacker may have infiltrated US networks, is monitoring
communications, and perhaps considering even more damaging actions, can have a disorienting
effect.
In the world of US "hybrid warfare" against Russia, offensive cyber operations work in
tandem with NATO propaganda efforts, perhaps best exemplified by the "online investigation"
antics of the Atlantic Council's Eliot Higgins and his Bellingcat disinformation site.
I live in Russia and see those shows that you speak of. The Nazi rants are from the
Ukraine folks invited on the show – you want to see Ukraine shows like the ones in RU.
– well, you won't see any Russians invited to talk -- -- NONE --
Gregory Herr , September 17, 2017 at 10:33 am
Your posts are so blatantly contrived it's almost funny. Do you write for sitcoms as
well?
mrtmbrnmn , September 16, 2017 at 4:48 pm
Is this a great country, or wot???
Stupid starts at the very top and there is no bottom to it .
The Washington Post has its own ironically self-describing slogan. Perhaps that of the NYT
these days should be, in the same vein, "The Sleep of Reason begets monsters". And who will
soon then be able to whistle in the darkness full of these things?
mike k , September 17, 2017 at 8:03 am
When looking for monsters, the WaPo should start by looking at themselves.
The chaos in Ukraine was engineered by Victoria Nuland at Hillary's request. Good that she
is not president. The Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same people, same DNA, same
religion Orthodoxy., Slavic, languages very close to each other, Cyrillic alphabet and a long
common history .
Russian_angel , September 17, 2017 at 9:43 pm
Thank you for the truth about Russia, it hurts the Russians to read about themselves in
the American newspapers a lie.
Florin , September 18, 2017 at 2:15 am
Gershman, Nuland, Pyland, Feltman . essentially ths four biggest US (quasi) diplomats,
like Volodymyr Groysman, Petro Poroshenko and perhaps 'our guy' Yats – are Jewish.
Add to this the role of Israeli 'ex' military, some hundreds, which means Mossad, and of
Jewish oligarchs in Ukraine – and consider that Jews are less than 1% of the
population.
The point is if we were free to speak plainly, the Ukraine coup looks to be one in which
American and Ukrainian Jews acted in concert to benefit Jewish power. There is more to be said on this, but this glimpse will suffice because, of course, one is
not free to speak plainly even where plain speaking is, on the face of it, encouraged.
Jamie , September 18, 2017 at 12:03 pm
Where was fake Antifa when Obama armed Nazi's in the Ukraine?
By ignoring the fascism of one political party, Antifa is actually pro-fascist. This fits
in well with their Hitler-like disdain for freedom of press, speech and assembly. And their
absolute love of violence, we also saw in the 1930s among Nazi groups
All signs of sophisticated false flag operation, which probably involved putting malware into DNC servers and then
detecting and analyzing them
Notable quotes:
"... 6 May 2016 when CrowdStrike first detected what it assessed to be a Russian presence inside the DNC server. Follow me here. One week after realizing there had been a penetration, the DNC learns, courtesy of the computer security firm it hired, that the Russians are doing it. Okay. Does CrowdStrike shut down the penetration. Nope. The hacking apparently continues unabated. ..."
"... The Smoking Gun ..."
"... I introduce Seth Rich at this point because he represents an alternative hypothesis. Rich, who reportedly was a Bernie Sanders supporter, was in a position at the DNC that gave him access to the emails in question and the opportunity to download the emails and take them from the DNC headquarters. Worth noting that Julian Assange offered $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Rich's killer or killers. 8. 22 July 2016. Wikileaks published the DNC emails starting on 22 July 2016. Bill Binney, a former senior official at NSA, insists that if such a hack and electronic transfer over the internet had occurred then the NSA has in it possession the intelligence data to prove that such activity had occurred. ..."
"... Notwithstanding the claim by CrowdStrike not a single piece of evidence has been provided to the public to support the conclusion that the emails were hacked and physically transferred to a server under the control of a Russian intelligence operative. ..."
"... Please do not try to post a comment stating that the "Intelligence Community" concluded as well that Russia was responsible. That claim is totally without one shred of actual forensic evidence. Also, Julian Assange insists that the emails did not come from a Russian source. ..."
"... Wikileaks, the protector of the accountability of the top, has announced a reward for finding the murderers of Seth Rich. In comparison, the DNC has not offered any reward to help the investigation of the murder of the DNC staffer, but the DNC found a well-connected lawyer to protect Imran Awan who is guilty (along with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) in the greatest breach of national cybersecurity: http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/29/wasserman-schultz-seemingly-planned-to-pay-suspect-even-while-he-lived-in-pakistan/ ..."
"... I'm afraid you're behind the times. Wheeler is no longer relevant now that Sy Hersh has revealed an FBI report that explicitly says Rich was in contact with Wikileaks offering to sell them DNC documents. ..."
"... It's unfortunate for the Rich family, but now that the connection is pretty much confirmed, they're going to have to allow the truth to come out ..."
"... Mr. Dmitri Alperovitch, of Jewish descent (and an emigre from Russia), has been an "expert" at the Atlantic Council, the same organization that cherishes and provides for Mr. Eliot Higgins. These two gentlemen - and the directorate of Atlantic Council - are exhibit one of opportunism and intellectual dishonesty (though it is hard to think about Mr. Higgins in terms of "intellect"). ..."
"... Alperovitch is not just an incompetent "expert" in cybersecurity - he is a willing liar and war-mongering, for money. ..."
"... One could of course start earlier. What is the exact timeline of the larger cyberwar post 9/11, or at least the bits and pieces that surfaced for the nitwits among us, like: Stuxnet? ..."
"... Scott Ritter's article referenced in PT's post is terrific, covering a ton of issues related to CrowdStrike and the DNC hack. You need to read it, not just PT's timeline. In case you missed the link in PT's post: ..."
"... His article echoes and reinforces what Carr and others have said about the difficulty of attribution of infosec breaches. Namely that the basic problem of both intelligence and infosec operations is that there is too much obfuscation, manipulation, and misdirection involved to be sure of who or what is going on. ..."
"... The Seth Rich connection is pretty much a done deal, now that Sy Hersh has been caught on tape stating that he knows of an FBI report based on a forensic analysis of Rich's laptop that shows Rich was in direct contact with Wikileaks with an attempt to sell them DNC documents and that Wikileaks had access to Rich's DropBox account. Despite Hersh's subsequent denials - which everyone knows are his usual impatient deflections prior to putting out a sourced and organized article - it's pretty clear that Rich was at least one of the sources of the Wikileaks email dump and that there is zero connection to Russia. ..."
"... None of this proves that Russian intelligence - or Russians of some stripe - or for that matter hackers from literally anywhere - couldn't or didn't ALSO do a hack of the DNC. But it does prove that the iron-clad attribution of the source of Wikileaks email release to Russia is at best flawed, and at worst a deliberate cover up of a leak. ..."
Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom that Russia hacked into the DNC computers, downloaded emails and a passed the stolen missives
to Julian Assange's crew at Wikileaks, a careful examination of the timeline of events from 2016 shows that this story is simply
not plausible.
Let me take you through the known facts:
1. 29 April 2016 , when the DNC became aware its servers had been penetrated (https://medium.com/homefront-rising/dumbstruck-how-crowdstrike-conned-america-on-the-hack-of-the-dnc-ecfa522ff44f).
Note. They apparently did not know who was doing it. 2, 6 May 2016 when CrowdStrike first detected what it assessed to be a Russian
presence inside the DNC server. Follow me here. One week after realizing there had been a penetration, the DNC learns, courtesy of
the computer security firm it hired, that the Russians are doing it. Okay. Does CrowdStrike shut down the penetration. Nope. The
hacking apparently continues unabated. 3. 25 May 2016. The messages published on Wikileaks from the DNC show that 26 May 2016
was the last date that emails were sent and received at the DNC. There are no emails in the public domain after that date. In other
words, if the DNC emails were taken via a hacking operation, we can conclude from the fact that the last messages posted to Wikileaks
show a date time group of 25 May 2016. Wikileaks has not reported nor posted any emails from the DNC after the 25th of May. I think
it is reasonable to assume that was the day the dirty deed was done. 4. 12 June 2016, CrowdStrike purged the DNC server of all malware.
Are you kidding me? 45 days after the DNC discovers that its serve has been penetrated the decision to purge the DNC server is finally
made. What in the hell were they waiting for? But this also tells us that 18 days after the last email "taken" from the DNC, no additional
emails were taken by this nasty malware. Here is what does not make sense to me. If the DNC emails were truly hacked and the malware
was still in place on 11 June 2016 (it was not purged until the 12th) then why are there no emails from the DNC after 26 May 2016?
an excellent analysis of Guccifer's role : Almost immediately after the one-two punch of the Washington Post article/CrowdStrike
technical report went public, however, something totally unexpected happened -- someone came forward and took full responsibility
for the DNC cyber attack. Moreover, this entity -- operating under the persona Guccifer 2.0 (ostensibly named after the original
Guccifer , a Romanian hacker who stole the emails of a number of high-profile celebrities and who was arrested in 2014 and sentenced
to 4 ½ years of prison in May 2016) -- did something no state actor has ever done before, publishing documents stolen from the DNC
server as proof of his claims.
Hi. This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee.
With that simple email, sent to the on-line news magazine,
The Smoking
Gun , Guccifer 2.0 stole the limelight away from Alperovitch. Over the course of the next few days, through a series of
emails, online posts and
interviews
, Guccifer 2.0 openly mocked CrowdStrike and its Russian attribution. Guccifer 2.0 released a number of documents, including a massive
200-plus-missive containing opposition research on Donald Trump.
Guccifer 2.0 also directly contradicted the efforts on the part of the DNC to minimize the extent of the hacking,
releasing the very donor lists
the DNC specifically stated had not been stolen. More chilling, Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be in possession of "about 100 Gb of data"
which had been passed on to the online publisher, Wikileaks, who "will publish them soon." 7. Seth Rich died on 10 July 2016.
I introduce Seth Rich at this point because he represents an alternative hypothesis. Rich, who reportedly was a Bernie Sanders supporter,
was in a position at the DNC that gave him access to the emails in question and the opportunity to download the emails and take them
from the DNC headquarters. Worth noting that Julian Assange offered
$20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Rich's killer or killers. 8. 22 July 2016. Wikileaks published the DNC emails
starting on 22 July 2016. Bill Binney, a former senior official at NSA, insists that if such a hack and electronic transfer over
the internet had occurred then the NSA has in it possession the intelligence data to prove that such activity had occurred.Notwithstanding the claim by CrowdStrike not a single piece of evidence has been provided to the public to support the conclusion
that the emails were hacked and physically transferred to a server under the control of a Russian intelligence operative.Please do not try to post a comment stating that the "Intelligence Community" concluded as well that Russia was responsible.
That claim is totally without one shred of actual forensic evidence. Also, Julian Assange insists that the emails did not come from
a Russian source.
Wikileaks, the protector of the accountability of the top, has announced a reward for finding the murderers of Seth Rich.
In comparison, the DNC has not offered any reward to help the investigation of the murder of the DNC staffer, but the DNC found
a well-connected lawyer to protect Imran Awan who is guilty (along with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) in the greatest breach of national
cybersecurity:
http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/29/wasserman-schultz-seemingly-planned-to-pay-suspect-even-while-he-lived-in-pakistan/
Seth Rich's family have pleaded, and continue to plead, that the conspiracy theorists leave the death of their son alone and have
said that those who continue to flog this nonsense around the internet are only serving to increase their pain. I suggest respectfully
that some here may wish to consider their feelings. (Also, this stuff is nuts, you know.)
"We also know that many people are angry at our government and want to see justice done in some way, somehow. We are asking
you to please consider our feelings and words. There are people who are using our beloved Seth's memory and legacy for their own
political goals, and they are using your outrage to perpetuate our nightmare."
"Wheeler, a former Metropolitan Police Department officer, was a key figure in a series of debunked stories claiming that Rich
had been in contact with Wikileaks before his death. Fox News, which reported the story online and on television, retracted it
in June."
I'm afraid you're behind the times. Wheeler is no longer relevant now that Sy Hersh has revealed an FBI report that explicitly
says Rich was in contact with Wikileaks offering to sell them DNC documents.
It's unfortunate for the Rich family, but now that the connection is pretty much confirmed, they're going to have to allow
the truth to come out.
Mr. Dmitri Alperovitch, of Jewish descent (and an emigre from Russia), has been an "expert" at the Atlantic Council, the same
organization that cherishes and provides for Mr. Eliot Higgins. These two gentlemen - and the directorate of Atlantic Council
- are exhibit one of opportunism and intellectual dishonesty (though it is hard to think about Mr. Higgins in terms of "intellect").
Take note how Alperovitch coded the names of the supposed hackers: "Russian intelligence services hacked the Democratic National
Committee's computer network and accessed opposition research on Donald Trump, according to the Atlantic Council's Dmitri Alperovitch.
Two Russian groups ! codenamed FancyBear and CozyBear ! have been identified as spearheading the DNC breach." Alperovitch
is not just an incompetent "expert" in cybersecurity - he is a willing liar and war-mongering, for money.
The DNC hacking story has never been about national security; Alperovitch (and his handlers) have no loyalty to the US.
PT, I make a short exception. Actually decided to stop babbling for a while. But: Just finished something successfully.
And since I usually need distraction by something far more interesting then matters at hand. I was close to your line of thought
yesters.
But really: Shouldn't the timeline start in 2015, since that's supposedly the time someone got into the DNC's system?
One could of course start earlier. What is the exact timeline of the larger cyberwar post 9/11, or at least the bits and
pieces that surfaced for the nitwits among us, like: Stuxnet?
But nevermind. Don't forget developments and recent events around Eugene or Jewgeni Walentinowitsch Kasperski?
The Russia thing certainly seems to have gone quiet.
Bannon's chum says the issue with pursuing the Clinton email thing is that you would end up having to indict almost all of
the last administration, including Obama, unseemly certainly. Still there might be a fall guy, maybe Comey, and obviously it serves
Trump's purposes to keep this a live issue through the good work of Grassley and the occasional tweet.
Would be amusing if Trump pardoned Obama. Still think Brennan should pay a price though, can't really be allowed to get away
with it
Scott Ritter's article referenced in PT's post is terrific, covering a ton of issues related to CrowdStrike and the DNC hack.
You need to read it, not just PT's timeline. In case you missed the link in PT's post:
Also, the article Carr references is very important for understanding the limits of malware analysis and "attribution". Written
by Michael Tanji, whose credentials appear impressive: "spent nearly 20 years in the US intelligence community. Trained in both
SIGINT and HUMINT disciplines he has worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National
Reconnaissance Office. At various points in his career he served as an expert in information warfare, computer network operations,
computer forensics, and indications and warning. A veteran of the US Army, Michael has served in both strategic and tactical assignments
in the Pacific Theater, the Balkans, and the Middle East."
His article echoes and reinforces what Carr and others have said about the difficulty of attribution of infosec breaches.
Namely that the basic problem of both intelligence and infosec operations is that there is too much obfuscation, manipulation,
and misdirection involved to be sure of who or what is going on.
The Seth Rich connection is pretty much a done deal, now that Sy Hersh has been caught on tape stating that he knows of
an FBI report based on a forensic analysis of Rich's laptop that shows Rich was in direct contact with Wikileaks with an attempt
to sell them DNC documents and that Wikileaks had access to Rich's DropBox account. Despite Hersh's subsequent denials - which
everyone knows are his usual impatient deflections prior to putting out a sourced and organized article - it's pretty clear that
Rich was at least one of the sources of the Wikileaks email dump and that there is zero connection to Russia.
None of this proves that Russian intelligence - or Russians of some stripe - or for that matter hackers from literally
anywhere - couldn't or didn't ALSO do a hack of the DNC. But it does prove that the iron-clad attribution of the source of Wikileaks
email release to Russia is at best flawed, and at worst a deliberate cover up of a leak.
And Russiagate depends primarily on BOTH alleged "facts" being true: 1) that Russia hacked the DNC, and 2) that Russia was
the source of Wikileaks release. And if the latter is not true, then one has to question why Russia hacked the DNC in the first
place, other than for "normal" espionage operations. "Influencing the election" then becomes a far less plausible theory.
The general takeaway from an infosec point of view is that attribution by means of target identification, tools used, and "indicators
of compromise" is a fatally flawed means of identifying, and thus being able to counter, the adversaries encountered in today's
Internet world, as Tanji proves. Only HUMINT offers a way around this, just as it is really the only valid option in countering
terrorism.
Fear is "a powerful thing" and such zeitgeist pervades America to an extent that people fear independent thought for concern
that they will be deterred from upward employment mobility. In short, we suffer the enforcement of an institutional hindance to
Free Speech.
Call it what it is – TERRORISM.
"Terror"
1. Intense, overpowering fear.
2. One that instills intense fear.
3. The ability to instill intense fear.
4. Violence committed or threatened by a group, especially against civilians , in the pursuit of political goals.
There are probably two factors here: The first is the real anger of Arab population against aggression by the USA and European states
(mainly GB and Frnace). That what produces radicalized Muslims who can commit terrorist attacks.
The second factor is the desire of intelligence agencies to exploit those attacks for thier own purposes. For example,
it is quite possible, that they are standing idle to the most stupid of them and disrupt others, more dangerous.
Notable quotes:
"... How many Muslims are needed to drive one suicide car? Five, of course. What's the best, most lethal vehicle for the purpose?
The compact Audi A3, naturally. ..."
"... From 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, Paris' Bataclan Concert Hall, Berlin's Christmas Market to Barcelona, etc., Muslim mass murderers
seem expert at leaving behind their identity papers. ..."
"... Classic examples of this type of "lost and found id" were Oswald's lost wallet and James Earl Ray's dropped bundle of documents
(ML King) ..."
"... Arab folks are brimming with anger that is now being met by the anger of the natives. ..."
"... I think the author misses the role of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, who appear to be the main financiers of the work performed
by the above American Israel Empire. ..."
"... Perhaps the term Petrodollar Empire would be more accurate? As a bonus, it also complies better to the rules of political correctness.
..."
"... I am always deeply skeptical of these false flag claims. We bomb and kill arabs daily, yet create magnificent conspiracy theories
to explain how it is someone else blowing crap up in vengeance. ..."
"... Why would Israel need to frame Muslim bombers when so many are so willing to do the job themselves and avenge their dead? Israel
certainly pulls our strings to conduct the bombardment and they control American politics – why would they need to fabricate murders
of random faceless Spaniards? How does that keep American taxpayers footing the bill for Zionism? ..."
"... It's really pretty simple isn't it? Before we decided to throw in with England and help genocide the Palestinians we had few
problems with arabs. Now we've expanded our mission to include Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, etc and our blowback is serious. The arabs
are doing what I'd do if a foreign power bombed my family. I could not care less what happens to Israelis or arabs. We need to either
nuke the entire Arab world or leave it the hell alone – none of them are worth a single American life. ..."
How many Muslims are needed to drive one suicide car? Five, of course. What's the best, most lethal vehicle for the purpose?
The compact Audi A3, naturally. What's the best time to stage such an attack? 1:15AM, grasshopper, when there are almost nobody
on the Paseo Maritimo. Finally, what should you wear for such a momentous and self-defining occasion? Fake suicide vests, stupid,
because they serve no purpose besides giving cops an excuse to perforate you immediately.
... .. ...
Astonishingly moronic, the five Muslims in Cambrils made all the worst choices possible, but the rest of their "terrorist cell"
weren't any smarter, it is said.
Eight hours earlier, a van had killed 14 people and injured 130+ more in Barcelona, and the purported driver of that van, 22-year-old
Younes Aboyaaqoub, had rented the vehicle with his own credit card. Very stupid. He also left his IDs in a second van, meant as a
get-away car.
From 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, Paris' Bataclan Concert Hall, Berlin's Christmas Market to Barcelona, etc., Muslim mass murderers
seem expert at leaving behind their identity papers. Otherwise, the official narrative can't be broadcast immediately. Wait
a week or a month for a proper investigation, and the public won't have any idea what you're talking about, fixated as they are on
a Kardashian pumped up buttocks or Messi goal.
List of Passport / ID documents found at terrorism attack scenes – at least 8, including those Linh Dinh mentions above
(1) – 11 Sep 2001 passport found in NYC towers rubble tho aeroplane had 'turned to vapour'
(2) – 7 Jul 2005 London bomboings – ID of '4th bomber' allegedly 'found by UK police'
(3) – 7 Jan 2015 Charlie Hebdo, passport in car in front of Paris Jewish deli where Mossad meets
(4) – 13 Nov 2015 Bataclan Paris passport flew from body 'after killer exploded his suicide vest'
(5) – 14 Jul 2016 Nice France lorry attack 'passport found'
(6) – 19 Dec 2016 Berlin Christmas market lorry attack 'ID found', after 24 hours of searching lorry cab
(7) – 22 May 2017 Manchester UK 'suicide bomber leaves ID' at scene amidst another 'terror on 22nd'
(8) – 17 Aug 2017 Barcelona deadly terror attack by white van, 'Spanish passport found in van'
Also related & of interest
'Mossad did the Barcelona attack' – Israel heavily involved with Barcelona police – from Aangirfan on her site
@Brabantian List of Passport / ID documents
found at terrorism attack scenes - at least 8, including those Linh Dinh mentions above
(1) - 11 Sep 2001 passport found in NYC towers rubble tho aeroplane had 'turned to vapour'
(2) - 7 Jul 2005 London bomboings - ID of '4th bomber' allegedly 'found by UK police'
(3) - 7 Jan 2015 Charlie Hebdo, passport in car in front of Paris Jewish deli where Mossad meets
(4) - 13 Nov 2015 Bataclan Paris passport flew from body 'after killer exploded his suicide vest'
(5) - 14 Jul 2016 Nice France lorry attack 'passport found'
(6) - 19 Dec 2016 Berlin Christmas market lorry attack 'ID found', after 24 hours of searching lorry cab
(7) - 22 May 2017 Manchester UK 'suicide bomber leaves ID' at scene amidst another 'terror on 22nd'
(8) - 17 Aug 2017 Barcelona deadly terror attack by white van, 'Spanish passport found in van'
Also related & of interest
'Mossad did the Barcelona attack' - Israel heavily involved with Barcelona police - from Aangirfan on her site
http://aanirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/mossad-did-barcelona-attack.html
http://aanirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/barcelona-false-flag-part-3.html
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Lost_and_Found_ID
Classic examples of this type of "lost and found id" were Oswald's lost wallet and James Earl Ray's dropped bundle of documents
(ML King)
Dinh, you are a fool. The Spanish police until the last two decades were always a bit trigger happy. And then you forget the
Guardia Civil. They were the people in charge of keeping Franco's Spain quiet, and it was quiet like the grave. The really funny
part is the Arab folks are brimming with anger that is now being met by the anger of the natives. Read the Blood of Spain,
and see the complicated relationship between Franco's Moros and how they ravaged parts of Spain during the Civil War. The really
ironic part is these "radicalized" kids are simply fodder for the papers back home, and an excuse to begin the round ups and mass
deportations.
Fascism is now returning to Europe because of the liberal insanity of open borders and mass immigration.
Nice read, indeed. Regarding the main idea of the article, that the:
" .. American Israel Empire is working nonstop to deform the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and, frankly, the rest of the
world."
I think the author misses the role of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, who appear to be the main financiers of the work
performed by the above American Israel Empire.
Perhaps the term Petrodollar Empire would be more accurate? As a bonus, it also complies better to the rules of political
correctness.
Which seems more likely prima facie , Muslim terrorism or that the whole thing was faked? The whole premise of this
article seems to be that it's simply ludicrous that a Muslim would ever do something like ram a car into a crowd of people.
It's like in the great movie by Kurosawa, Yojimbo, one guy playing both sides one against the other. Except Sanjuro was a good
guy trying to kill a bunch of thugs and bring peace to the town, while our globo-masters prefer to see innocent people being murdered
and the world in chaos.
Linh, the Orlando video seems obviously fake. For those who look for those things, there are plenty of give-aways. But what's
your point with the Barcelona video? I don't speak Spanish or Catalan, as the case may be, but he seems to be fairly dispassionate
and therefore not bullshitting. I do hope there was a point you were making. There is enough in what you say, so that your linguistic
showing off is a pointless irritation. I would like to make my point with a pointless Hindi quip, but my phone doesn't support
the script.
What Merkel has done in Germany is incredible. She took in a million, a million and a half refugees, and there has been no
major problem. It has been a great success, a miracle."
Yeah....good luck with that! By the time this all sorts out historically Merkel will rate lower than ol Schickelgruber.
Mutti.....Europes greatest "Crazy Cat Lady"!
"and there has been no major problem"
Except for a few stabbings, shootings and bombings as well as general malaise and waste of taxpayer's money, but what is that
compared to the glory of diversity?
Well, I guess Germany had too few kebab shops
"By the time this all sorts out historically Merkel will rate lower than ol Schickelgruber."
The problem of politics and especially democracy is that politicians act for short term gains, but their decisions affect everybody
else in the long term. By the time the Scheiße hits the fan Merkel and her friends will be happily retired in Switzerland or Monaco.
You'd have to be blind and stupid not have noticed this convenient habit of Muslim terrorists. I wonder why the IRA/ Baader
Meinhof/Brigata Rossi or the westher,men didn't have the same habit?
You'd have to be blind and stupid not have noticed this convenient habit of pseudo moslem terrorists. I wonder why the IRA/
Baader Meinhof/Brigata Rossi or the Weathermen didn't have the same habit?
I fixed that for you, mate. The frequency of this seemingly ritual habit is amazing I agree. It is certainly one for the Coincidence
Theorists out there.
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
I am here reminded of Jerry Seinfeld's wise observation that "Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason."
I would advise Ron Unz to take this saying to heart and to spike the execrable Linh Dinh from these pages, and his butt-buddy
Revusky, too.
I am here reminded of Jerry Seinfeld's wise observation that "Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason."
Seinfeld would have been wiser if he had said that it's always less travelled for a reason. That reason is invariably
along the lines of it being less convenient, more arduous, and more challenging. It often takes you to uncomfortable places, and
you have to leave your beloved baggage behind.
Most people naturally choose to walk the broad level path that's been thoughtfully laid out for them. It doesn't go anywhere at
all, except maybe in a giant circle, so that it doesn't matter where they start or where they stop, but they get to keep and even
accumulate baggage along the way and that's what travelling is all about, isn't it?
@utu Looks like Linh Dinh was turned
by Revusky. Everything must be a hoax. This is their starting position: It is a hoax until proven otherwise.
And Revusky comes up with his cheap schtick about the "emotional register." As if he ever seen true reactions of real people
who lost relatives? All his life like all the hoax mongering youtube yahoos he was exposed to movies with the overacted emotional
displays by actors and this formed the baseline for the youtube yahoos and Revusky. So when he sees more measure reactions of
real people he thinks it must be bad acting. Yes, if you haven't noticed, the real life is full of bad acting, you fool.
More interesting would be to read about how is the bromance evolving? Actually real life is usually quite authentic which is
the 'real' part and since several big "terror"events have had some inexplicable aspects to them suggesting the involvement of
trickery it would be wise to suspect that of other events too. If you've been mugged while walking in the street a couple of times
it would be completely rational and indeed prudent if you crossed the street to avoid a stranger, or clutched a hidden weapon
as a stranger approached. This is natural and the survival instinct at work.
As to the emotional register, most people have not studied acting yet they can spot poor acting on TV or in a movie very quickly
because they have experienced human behaviour their entire lives. When the behaviour or physical action doesn't match the dialogue
or situation it appears very odd to us. Some people are more observant than others, this is why professional actors like to study
the traits and quirks of people.
Linh Dinh has written some really excellent articles as many commenters have approved and stated as much but if you don't like
them why bother reading or commenting? Jonathan Revusky too has written some very worthwhile articles in my opinion but he doesn't
seem to take criticism well and has made a few enemies here but again, if you don't like them why not spend your time reading
the work of other people?
i agree that the passports left behind all the time are a little bit weird. when some shit goes down, among friends, we jokingly
ask if they found the passports yet? but it could also be that they want to leave them behind, as a martyr signature or something
maybe. like now they recruited irma for their cause..saying god is on their side.
but then again..i am susceptible to consider weird shit. like the boston bombings for example. I saw a very strange video of a
simulation of a bombing attack which looked very real, like tv footage, but maybe that's the point of a good simulation.
we live in weird times. information flow is corrupted and not to be trusted. stanislaw lem wrote about it 40years ago and I always
think about it reading news.
The American Israel Empire, the Anglo Zionist Conspiracy, the Jew Bolshevik plot
How do the Jews have time for all that and make so much money, run their dentistry, legal, media, entertainment empires and
lust after blond shiksa cheerleaders as well?
Maybe it's from those gefilte fish they eat, or from the chopped liver they do even better than this sample produced by Linh Dinh.
Millions of us have been aware of the "Empire" for years now Linh. We just don't have access to the media expression as you
do. We tend to be quiet about it until we sense a person or group is open to this Truth. Most people think inside the box because
it's safe, comforting, and lacks unpleasant reactions. We who want the Truth value your articles, because we really do believe
that "The Truth will set you free."
Francisco, a typical teacher of philosophy and never a real philosopher. Most of this "refugees" are permanent immigrants,
that's why this "refugee crisis" is just a way to accelerate the capitulation of Europe. Real refugees came back to their countries
when they have opportunity. In the end the most effective way to stop middle east conflicts must be done via exposition of real
(((criminals))), the direct responsible for all this shit. Only the truth can solve any problem and (((problem))).
Teacher of history's philosophy, what most of this "philosophers" are. Real philosophers learn/or invent and teach real or
valid philosophical methods of thinking/analytical-critical thinking and of course subsequent action/application.
The author is claiming it's all fake because the participants were inept and stupid. They possibly were being monitored and
followed all along. That doesn't make it a staged fake event. "Kosher Nostra"? What's that supposed to mean? Jews are scapegoated
for what Muslims do and have been doing for close to fourteen hundred years? It took the Spanish hundreds of years of struggle
to free themselves from Muslim overlordship and now they're just supposed to wash their brains of any historical memory? Those
third worlders written about so lovingly add nothing to Spain besides just some food joints. The author doesn't live there anyway
so why is he telling them how to live?"Drugged and inflamed" is not necessarily true of all of America. The author is probably
an alcoholic and needs to stop hanging around craphole taverns with all those dysfunctional boozers.
Conspiracy theories like those expressed in this article and in many of the comments are for those either lacking the good
sense to appreciate that the world is complex or the intellectual patience to sort through that complexity.
In the absence of these qualities, conspiracy nuts come up with unified theories that "explain everything" (e.g., the Jews
control the world).
Actually moving out of the basement of their mom's house, or even losing their virginity, might help, but most of these sweaty
little pamphleteers are lost causes whose lives rarely extend beyond a circle of like-minded friends and the insular concerns
expressed in their over-heated and under-read blogs.
@DFH Which seems more likely prima
facie , Muslim terrorism or that the whole thing was faked?
The whole premise of this article seems to be that it's simply ludicrous that a Muslim would ever do something like ram
a car into a crowd of people.
Which seems more likely prima facie, Muslim terrorism or that the whole thing was faked?
The whole premise of this article seems to be that it's simply ludicrous that a Muslim would ever do something like ram a car
into a crowd of people.
I am always deeply skeptical of these false flag claims. We bomb and kill arabs daily, yet create magnificent conspiracy
theories to explain how it is someone else blowing crap up in vengeance.
Why would Israel need to frame Muslim bombers when so many are so willing to do the job themselves and avenge their dead?
Israel certainly pulls our strings to conduct the bombardment and they control American politics – why would they need to fabricate
murders of random faceless Spaniards? How does that keep American taxpayers footing the bill for Zionism?
It's really pretty simple isn't it? Before we decided to throw in with England and help genocide the Palestinians we had
few problems with arabs. Now we've expanded our mission to include Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, etc and our blowback is serious.
The arabs are doing what I'd do if a foreign power bombed my family. I could not care less what happens to Israelis or arabs.
We need to either nuke the entire Arab world or leave it the hell alone – none of them are worth a single American life.
How stupid must you be to not see that the American Israel Empire has rigged every aspect of your reality?
...The pattern of human nature that they use is called the Stockholm syndrome.
It has been documented that a group of people can be turned against themselves when they are captured and terrorized, and in
the process, they are propagandized to believe that the terrorizers themselves are the true victims. The terrorists tell the those
they captured, that they are doing this because they themselves are the real victims.
The syndrome is that the captured group begin to sympathize with their terrorists. They take to heart that the terrorists are
indeed victims, and that they should be supported. .
@ChuckOrloski "... none of them are worth
an American life."
Stan d Mute,
The dangerous thing about your rather common conclusion (above) is the stinky fact that, for the sake of creating Greater Israel,
Neoconservatives are in your "Amen Corner" and also would green light the "nuking" of Iran.
Thank you.
Neoconservatives are in your "Amen Corner" and also would green light the "nuking" of Iran.
Don't paint me with your misrepresentation. I wrote " nuke the entire Arab world " Your Iran reply is a strawman.
Few neocons would endorse my suggestion to either obliterate the Middle East (drill for oil through the glass) or abandon their
first loyalty of Zionism and all resulting meddling and murdering in the region.
Cry me a river. No sympathy from me. This article is completely one sided. What kind of investigative reporting is this when
the author didn't even interview the police and review the evidence, but simply hurl out accusations through hearsay from the
average guys on the street.
The real question is who controlled Imram Awan and who planted him into Congress (as a mole). The level of criminal negligence
demonstrated during his hiring is atypical for the
USA government. And especially for government IT. Which is staffed by very security conscious people, as a rule. So he
definitely should have a "sponsor" among intelligence agencies to accomplish such a feat and suppress all the "flash
lights" that lighted during evaluation of his candidacy. I think that "I want this guy" request from Debbie Wasserman
was not enough. She is no Hillary Clinton ;-) But to which country this intelligence agency belong is an open question,
but most probably this was a USA intelligence agency. I doubt that Mossad would use Pakistani as their agent.
Notable quotes:
"... To be sure, the tale is a strange one with plenty of unsavory links. Thirty-seven year old Awan, his wife, sister-in-law and two brothers Abid and Jamal worked as IT administrators, full and part-time, for between 30 and 80 congressmen , all Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. They did not have security clearances and it is not even certain that they were in any way checked out before being hired. Nor were their claimed skills at IT administration confirmed as their work pattern reportedly turned out to consist more of absences than time spent in the House offices. One congressional IT staffer described them as "ghost employees." ..."
"... At one point, Imran brought into the House as a colleague one Rao Abbas, someone to whom he owed money, best distinguished by his being recently fired by McDonald's . Abbas lived in the basement of a house owned by Imran's wife as a rental property. He may have had no qualifications at all to perform IT but the congressmen in question did not seem to notice. Abbas wound up working, on the rare occasions that he went into the building, in the office of Congressman Patrick Murphy, who was at the time a member of the House Intelligence Committee as well as for Florida Congressman Theo Deutch. He was paid $250,000. ..."
"... To cover for all the non-working but on the payroll employees, Imran also hired a high school friend Haseeb Rana, who actually did know something about computers. Rana reportedly did "all the work" and kept wanting to quit for that reason. It was also against House rules for an IT administrator to fill in for someone else, as Rana routinely did, since each such employee had be personally registered by the congressman. ..."
"... The Awans and their two friends were all taken on as salaried employees of the House of Representatives at senior civil service level paygrades of ca. $165,000 annually, which normally is what is paid to highly experienced senior managers or chiefs of staff. Imran's younger brother Jamal was only twenty years old when he was hired at that level in 2014. ..."
"... It is not known if the Awans, who were working for several Intelligence Committee members simultaneously, would have been involved or had access to the computers able to pull up classified material being used by those staffers, but Buzzfeed, in its initial reporting on the investigation of the Awans family, repeated the concerns of a Congressman that the suspects might have "had access to the House of Representatives' entire computer network." Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that that was not the case. In office environments, the IT administrators routinely ask for passwords if they are checking out the system. WikiLeaks emails confirm that Imran certainly had passwords relating to Congressman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as well as to others on her staff. ..."
"... As of February 2016, the Awans came under suspicion for having set up an operation involving double billing as well as the theft and reselling of government owned computer equipment. It was also believed that they had somehow obtained entry to much of the House of Representatives' computer network as well as to other information in the individual offices' separate computer systems that they were in theory not allowed to access. The Capitol Hill Police began an investigation and quietly alerted the congressmen involved that there might be a problem. Most stopped employing the Awan family members and associates, but Wasserman-Schultz kept Imran on the payroll until the day after he was actually arrested. ..."
"... Initially Wasserman-Schultz refused to cooperate with the police, refusing to provide her passwords and not permitting them to open her computers, but Fox News reports that she has recently apparently allowed the authorities to do a scan. ..."
"... Dr. Ali A. Al-Attar fled the United States after the indictment to avoid arrest and imprisonment and is now considered a fugitive from justice. Late in 2012 he was observed in Beirut Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official. Al-Attar is of interest in this case because he appears to have been a friend of Imran Awan and also loaned him $100,000, which was never repaid. The FBI is currently looking into any possible international espionage specifically involving the two men as Awan and his associates clearly had access to classified information while working in the House of Representatives that would have been of interest to any number of foreign governments. ..."
"... [An earlier version of this article appeared on The American Conservative on August 3 rd ] ..."
There has been surprisingly little media follow-up on the story about the July 25 th Dulles Airport arrest of House
of Representatives' employed Pakistani-American IT specialist Imran Awan, who was detained for bank fraud while he was allegedly
fleeing to Pakistan. The mainstream media somewhat predictably produced
minimal press coverage before the story died. The speed at which the news vanished has prompted some observers,
including Breitbart, to sound the alarm over a suspected cover-up of possible exposure of classified information or even espionage
that just might be part of the story that we are now calling Russiagate.
To be sure, the tale is a strange one with plenty of unsavory links. Thirty-seven year old Awan, his wife, sister-in-law and
two brothers Abid and Jamal worked as IT administrators, full and part-time, for between
30 and 80 congressmen , all Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
They did not have security clearances and it is not even certain that they were in any way checked out before being hired. Nor were
their claimed skills at IT administration confirmed as their work pattern reportedly turned out to consist more of absences than
time spent in the House offices. One congressional IT staffer described them as "ghost employees."
At one point, Imran brought into the House
as a colleague one Rao Abbas, someone to whom he owed money, best distinguished by his being
recently fired
by McDonald's . Abbas lived in the basement of a house owned by Imran's wife as a rental property. He may have had no qualifications
at all to perform IT but the congressmen in question did not seem to notice. Abbas wound up working, on the rare occasions that he
went into the building, in the office of Congressman Patrick Murphy, who was at the time a member of the House Intelligence Committee
as well as for Florida Congressman Theo Deutch. He was paid $250,000.
To cover for all the non-working but on the payroll employees,
Imran also
hired a high school friend Haseeb Rana, who actually did know something about computers. Rana reportedly did "all the work" and
kept wanting to quit for that reason. It was also against House rules for an IT administrator to fill in for someone else, as Rana
routinely did, since each such employee had be personally registered by the congressman.
The Awans and their two friends were all taken on as salaried employees of the House of Representatives at senior civil service
level paygrades of ca. $165,000 annually, which normally is what is paid to highly experienced senior managers or chiefs of staff.
Imran's younger brother Jamal was only twenty years old when he was hired at that level in 2014.
The process of granting security clearances to Congressional staff is not exactly transparent, but it is not unlike the procedures
for other government agencies. The office seeking the clearance for a staff member must put in a request, some kind of investigation
follows, and the applicant must then sign a non-disclosure agreement before the authorization is granted. Sometimes Congress pushes
the process by demanding that its staff have access above and beyond the normal "need to know." In March 2016, for example, eight
Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee requested
that their staffs be given access to top secret sensitive compartmented information.
It is not known if the Awans, who were working for several Intelligence Committee members simultaneously, would have been
involved or had access to the computers able to pull up classified material being used by those staffers, but Buzzfeed, in its initial
reporting on the investigation of the Awans family,
repeated the concerns of a Congressman that the suspects might have "had access to the House of Representatives' entire computer
network." Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that that was not the case. In office environments, the IT administrators routinely
ask for passwords if they are checking out the system. WikiLeaks emails confirm that Imran certainly had passwords relating to Congressman
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as well as to others on her staff.
Congress paid the Awans
more than $4 million between 2004 and 2016 at their $165,000 salary level, a sum that some sources suggest to be
three or four times higher than the norm for government contractor IT specialists performing similar work at the same level of
alleged competency. Four of the Awans were among the
500 highest paid of the 15,000 congressional staffers. The considerable and consistent level of overpayment has not been explained
by the congressmen involved. In spite of all that income being generated, Imran Awan declared bankruptcy in 2010 claiming losses
of $1 million on a car business that he owned in Falls Church Virginia that ran up debts and borrowed money that it failed to repay.
The business was named
Cars International A, abbreviated on its business cards as CIA
The Awans family also was noted for its brushes with the law and internal discord, though it is doubtful if the congressional
employers were aware of their outside-of-the-office behavior. The brothers were on the receiving end of a number of traffic citations,
including DUI, and were constantly scheming to generate income, including what must have been a
hilarious phone conversation to their credit union in
which Imran pretended to be his own wife in order to wire money to Pakistan. They were on bad terms with their father and step-mother,
including forging a document to cheat their step-mother of an insurance payment and even holding her "captive" so she could not see
their dying father. Their father even changed his last name to dissociate himself from them.
As of February 2016, the Awans
came under suspicion for having set up an operation involving double billing as well as the theft and reselling of government
owned computer equipment. It was also believed that they had somehow obtained entry to much of the House of Representatives' computer
network as well as to other information in the individual offices' separate computer systems that they were in theory not allowed
to access. The Capitol Hill Police began an investigation and quietly alerted the congressmen involved that there might be a problem.
Most stopped employing the Awan family members and associates, but Wasserman-Schultz kept Imran on the payroll until the day after
he was actually arrested.
Some of those defending the Awans, to include Wasserman-Schultz and the family lawyer, have insisted that he and his family were
the victims of
"an anti-Muslim, right-wing smear job," though there is no actual evidence to suggest that is the case. They also claim that
the bank fraud that led to the arrest, in which Imran obtained a home equity loan for $165,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit
Union based on a house that he owned and claimed to live in in Lorton Virginia, was largely a misunderstanding It has been described
as something "extremely minor" by his lawyer
Chris Gowen , a
high priced Washington attorney who has worked for the Clintons personally, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative.
It turned out that Imran and his wife no longer lived in the house which had been turned into a rental property, a clear case
of bank fraud. The Awans had
tenants in the house, an ex-Marine and his Naval officer wife, who were very suspicious about a large quantity of what appeared
to be government sourced computer equipment and supplies, all material that had been left behind by the owners. They contacted the
FBI, which discovered hard drives that appeared to have been deliberately destroyed.
The FBI is certainly interested in the theft of government computers but it is also looking into the possibility that the Awans
were using their ability to access and possibly exploit sensitive information stored in the House of Representatives' computer network
as well as through Wasserman-Schultz's iPad, which Imran had access to and was connected to the Democratic National Committee server.
It is believed that Imran sent stolen government files
to a remote personal server . It may have been located in his former residence in Lorton Virginia, where the smashed equipment
was found, or as far away as Pakistan. As Imran Awan is a dual-national, born in Pakistan, the possibility of espionage also had
to be considered. By some accounts the Awan family traveled back to Pakistan frequently, where Imran was treated royally by local
officialdom, suggesting that he may have been doing favors for the not very friendly government in Islamabad.
Considering the possible criminal activity that Imran and his family might have been engaged in and which was still under investigation,
the Capitol Police and FBI determined that he should be stopped in his attempt to flee to Pakistan. The charge that Awan was actually
arrested on at the airport, bank fraud, was an easy way to hold him as it was well documented. It allows the other more serious investigations
to continue, so the argument that Imran Awan is only being held over a minor matter is not necessarily correct.
Awans had wired the credit union money and some cash of his own to Pakistan, as part of a $283,000 transfer that was made in January.
His wife Hina Alvi also left the U.S. two months later.
She was searched by Customs officers and it was determined that she had on her $12,400 in cash. She also had with her their three
children, and numerous boxes containing household goods and clothing. It was clear that she did not intend to come back but there
has been no explanation
why she was even allowed to leave since carrying more than $10,000 out of the country without reporting it is a felony.
As Imran Awan
reportedly had access to Wasserman-Schultz's iPad, he presumably also was able to see the incriminating Hillary Clinton emails.
He used a laptop in her office as well that was, according to investigators, concealed in an "unused crevice" in the Rayburn House
Office Building. It is currently being examined by police but Wasserman-Schultz tried strenuously to recover it before it could be
looked at. She pressured the
Chief of the Capitol Police Matthew Verderosa to return it, threatening him by saying "you should expect that there will be consequences."
Initially Wasserman-Schultz refused to cooperate with the police, refusing to provide her passwords and not permitting them to
open her computers, but Fox News reports that she has recently apparently allowed the authorities to do a scan.
There is another odd connection of Imran Awan that goes back to the neocon circle around Paul Wolfowitz during the Iraq War. In
late 2002 and early 2003, Wolfowitz regularly
met secretly with
a group of Iraqi expatriates who resided in the Washington area and were opponents of the Saddam Hussein regime. The Iraqis had not
been in their country of birth for many years but they claimed to have regular contact with well-informed family members and political
allies. The Iraqi advisers provided Wolfowitz with a now-familiar refrain, i.e. that the Iraqi people would rise up to support invading
Americans and overthrow the hated Saddam. They would greet their liberators with bouquets of flowers and shouts of joy.
The Iraqis were headed by one Dr. Ali A. al-Attar, born in Baghdad to Iranian parents in 1963, a 1989
graduate of the American University of
Beirut Faculty of Medicine. He subsequently emigrated to the United States and set up a practice in internal medicine in Greenbelt
Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C. Al-Attar eventually expanded his business to include nine practices that he wholly or partly
owned in Virginia and Maryland but he eventually lost his license due to "questionable billing practices" as well as "unprofessional
conduct" due to having sex with patients
Al-Attar was
investigated by the FBI and eventually
indicted for large scale health care fraud in 2008-9, which included charging insurance companies more than $2.3 million for
services their patients did not actually receive with many of the false claims using names of diplomats and employees enrolled in
a group plan at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. In one case, the doctors claimed an embassy employee visited three of their clinics
every 26 days between May 2007 and August 2008 to have the same testing done each time. The insurance company paid the doctors $55,000
for more than 400 nonexistent procedures for the one patient alone.
Dr. Ali A. Al-Attar fled the United States after the indictment to avoid arrest and imprisonment and is now considered a fugitive
from justice. Late in 2012 he was observed in Beirut Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official. Al-Attar is of interest in this
case because he appears to have been a friend of Imran Awan and
also loaned him $100,000, which was never repaid. The FBI is currently looking into any possible international espionage specifically
involving the two men as Awan and his associates clearly had access to classified information while working in the House of Representatives
that would have been of interest to any number of foreign governments.
The Imran Awan case is certainly of considerable interest not only for what the investigation eventually turns up but also for
what it reveals about how things actually work in congress and in the government more generally speaking. I don't know which of the
allegations about what might have taken place are true, but there is certainly a lot to consider. Whether the case is investigated
and prosecuted without fear or favor will depend on the Department of Justice and FBI, but I for one was appalled to learn that the
official who quite likely will
oversee the investigation of the Awans is one Steven Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia, the brother
of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. If that should actually occur, it would be a huge conflict of interest and it has to be wondered if
Wasserman would have the integrity to recuse himself.
There are many questions regarding the Awan case. One might reasonably ask how foreign-born IT specialists are selected and vetted
prior to being significantly overpaid and allowed to work on computers in congressional offices. And the ability of those same individuals
to keep working even after the relevant congressmen have been warned that their employee was under investigation has to be explained
beyond Wasserman-Schultz's
comment that Awan had not committed any crime, which may have been true but one would expect congressmen to err on the side of
caution over an issue that could easily have national security ramifications. And how does a recently bankrupt and unemployed Imran
Awan wind up with a high-priced lawyer to defend him who is associated with the Clintons? Would that kind of lawyer even take a relatively
minor bank fraud case if that were all that is involved? Finally, there are the lingering concerns about the unfortunately well-established
Russiagate narrative. Did the Russians really hack into the DNC or were there other possibilities, to include some kind of inside
job, a "leak," carried out by someone working for the government or DNC for reasons that have yet to be determined, possibly even
someone actually employed by DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz? There are certainly many issues that the public needs to know more
about and so far, there are not enough answers.
[An earlier version
of this article appeared on The American Conservative on August 3 rd ]
Foreign-born people should be barred for life from holding any kind of security clearance. I mean in the highly unlikely
event I were to become a Chinese citizen (and be 40 years younger), would the Chinese be so stupid as to give me a clearance
and allow me to work in a key government office?
Obviously not but forget"obviously" when we're talking about the U.S.A.
The Department of Justice needs to do its job looking at the Clintons, the DNC, Wasserman-Schultz, Donna Brazile and others.
The stench of corruption is appalling, and the Russia thing looks more like a fraudulent story to keep the pressure off, particularly
since the phony dossier which started it was compiled at the behest of a political consultancy which usually works for the same
crowd. I think it is about time that Mueller's fishing expedition be closed down and the necessary draining of the swamp be commenced.
@Cloak And Dagger
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the law is only meant for we ordinary citizens and not for the elite. Those of us
who are silently hoping for the indictment of Debbie and Hillary are sure to be sorely disappointed.
There is no justice anymore in these United States whose domestic and foreign policies are controlled by the deep state. Some
days can be so bleak... Actually, the whole Awan-US Congress case is about the High Treason. No security clearances. The open
access to the classified documents of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (oh the irony!) and the House Committee
on Foreign Affairs.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/04/exclusive-house-intelligence-it-staffers-fired-in-computer-security-probe/
There are should be arrests made of those congresspeople who allowed the greatest breach in the national cybersecurity by inviting
and financing the non-qualified personnel (fraudulent hiring).
An important question is, who pays Chris Gowen, a very expensive and well-connected lawyer, for the defense of the documented
fraudster and possible spy.
That Steven Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia, the brother of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz oversees the investigation
is a scandal of gigantic proportions.
Those making the presstituting peeps about Russiangate should be from now on pummelled with the facts of the Tale of the Brothers
Awan.
This is a staggering story. What a load of incompetence and coverup. This government is a total sieve. Of course those people
were spying. Even if they didn't want to spy, for whatever reason, the Pakistani government could surely find ways to 'convince'
them to do so. Most of these politicians appear to be so clueless that it's difficult to comprehend. It's just a carnival of taxpayer
ripoff in DC.
@Dana Thompson Somebody
should write a movie script based on this. It would be better than American Hustle - call it Pakistani Hustle, maybe. The pitch
would start with, "It's the Sopranos meet the Simpsons."
I for one was appalled to learn that the official who quite likely will oversee the investigation of the Awans is one Steven
Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia, the brother of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
Yup. And guess what? As Assistant DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder
13 months on and still no leads!
When the hell are Trump and Sessions going to get serious about going after these freaks?
What if the Awan brothers are "cutouts" for another intelligence agency? What if Seth Rich leaked the emails, and they exposed
Hillary Clinton to prosecution? What if the "deep state" panicked because it could no longer control the narrative? What if Comey
dragged his feet on a slam-dunk investigation because the "deep state" was sure Clinton would win, and it could all be buried?
What if they hadn't had time to consider "Plan B" in time to head off investigation of Clinton Foundation fraud? What if they
never expected that Anthony Wiener's sexting would get his computer seized by the NYPD? What if the whole story extends back to
the Mueller, Wolfowitz, Clarke and Tenet cabal, and all of their think-tank gurus? What if somebody realizes that the planning
stages had to predate the Bush-Cheney administration? What if Russia-gate and Clinton-gate are playing out as two hands in a game
of strip poker? What if one side refuses to fold? What if Hillary threatens to file a sworn affidavit? What if Mueller is the
historical analogue of John J. McCloy, the anonymous "deep state" Chairman of the Board? What if this is just a plot in the latest
episode of war pornography? What if it's called, "Debbie Does Dulles", and its stars include "Many Talented Celebrities"? What
are the chances that somebody important goes to jail? I'm guessing the odds are pretty long. I'm betting Hillary has the goods
on all of them, and she'll file that affidavit if she has to.
Killing freedom of speech in America, one google search at a time:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/08/08/google-committed-suppression-free-speech/
"According to reports, Google works hand in hand with the NSA and CIA to expand unconstitutional spying on everyone everywhere
and to suppress independent and dissenting thought and expression. For example, on July 31, the World Socialist Web Site reported
that "Between April and June, Google completed a major revision of its search engine that sharply curtails public access to Internet
web sites that operate independently of the corporate and state-controlled media. Since the implementation of the changes,
many left wing, anti-war and progressive web sites have experienced a sharp fall in traffic generated by Google searches."
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/31/goog-j31.html
@Seamus Padraig "As
Assistant DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder 13 months on and still no
leads!"
Amazing. How come that the name "Wasserman" has become spread over the major ongoing DC scandals: The leak of the DNC emails
(the pseudo-Russiangate), the greatest breach in the national cybersecurity (Awan affair), and finally, the death of Seth Rich,
a DNC employee who went into contact with Wikileaks re the DNC machinations. Looks like American "democracy on the march," Clinton
style.
the greatest breach in the national cybersecurity (Awan affair)
and the Trump Justice Dept. seems to have zero interest in it
I suspect this and other reasons- like the serial leaks from the highest levels of the intelligence agencies are why Trump
is becoming openly exasperated with Sessions
I suspect that Sessions knows that too much exposure of back-room dealings of the deepstate (with perhaps the Senate), would
be potentially inconvenient.
when Lindsey Graham! came to Jeff Sessions defense, I sort of knew then that Jeff Sessions is a deepstate asset
@F. G. Sanford What
if the Awan brothers are "cutouts" for another intelligence agency? What if Seth Rich leaked the emails, and they exposed Hillary
Clinton to prosecution? What if the "deep state" panicked because it could no longer control the narrative? What if Comey dragged
his feet on a slam-dunk investigation because the "deep state" was sure Clinton would win, and it could all be buried? What if
they hadn't had time to consider "Plan B" in time to head off investigation of Clinton Foundation fraud? What if they never expected
that Anthony Wiener's sexting would get his computer seized by the NYPD? What if the whole story extends back to the Mueller,
Wolfowitz, Clarke and Tenet cabal, and all of their think-tank gurus? What if somebody realizes that the planning stages had to
predate the Bush-Cheney administration? What if Russia-gate and Clinton-gate are playing out as two hands in a game of strip poker?
What if one side refuses to fold? What if Hillary threatens to file a sworn affidavit? What if Mueller is the historical analogue
of John J. McCloy, the anonymous "deep state" Chairman of the Board? What if this is just a plot in the latest episode of war
pornography? What if it's called, "Debbie Does Dulles", and its stars include "Many Talented Celebrities"? What are the chances
that somebody important goes to jail? I'm guessing the odds are pretty long. I'm betting Hillary has the goods on all of them,
and she'll file that affidavit if she has to. I'm sorry F.G., but what if all the various narratives, which are being supplied
to the Seth Rich murder end up only being a way of hiding the truth within plain sight, so as to make it hard to distinguish between
the real, and the phony, narratives which have been put in place, as to only confuse us truth seekers? This is how 'conspiracy
theories' are made to become conspiracy theories.
It's possible the Wasserman-Schultz – Awan scandal was raised subsequently by a caller to C Span, but as the above schedule
of C Span Washington Journal programming displays, if the American people wanted to in-depth information about the Awans, they'd
do better to tune in to RT, where Dr. Phil Giraldi explained the case and labeled it "the scandal of the century"
@annamaria "As Assistant
DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder 13 months on and still no leads!"
Amazing. How come that the name "Wasserman" has become spread over the major ongoing DC scandals: The leak of the DNC emails
(the pseudo-Russiangate), the greatest breach in the national cybersecurity (Awan affair), and finally, the death of Seth Rich,
a DNC employee who went into contact with Wikileaks re the DNC machinations. Looks like American "democracy on the march," Clinton
style.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/05/debbie-wasserman-schultzs-brother-steven-wasserman-accused-burying-seth-rich-case/
"The Seth Rich Case: Nucleus of An American Coup Attempt:" http://www.phillip-butler.com/seth-rich-case/ Where is Mr. Wasserman's
boss, the U.S. Attorney for D.C.? Oh, right, it's an Obama holdover. Why hasn't President Trump put his own person in this critical
job? (Apparently he has nominated someone but as usual the Senate is in no hurry to approve him. Nothing would stop DOJ from firing
the current guy and placing the Trump nominee in an acting position, just as Obama did with the incumbent.)
This story would be hilarious if it weren't so serious. The quintessential example of foreigners from corrupt societies learning
quickly how to work our system. We have to give the Awans credit for milking liberal banks' and Democrats' foreigner- and Muslim-worship
(combined with sheer stupidity) to refrain from asking any questions.
@Ace Foreign-born
people should be barred for life from holding any kind of security clearance. I mean in the highly unlikely event I were
to become a Chinese citizen (and be 40 years younger), would the Chinese be so stupid as to give me a clearance and allow
me to work in a key government office?
Obviously not but forget"obviously" when we're talking about the U.S.A.
Foreign-born people should be barred for life from holding any kind of security clearance.
Several years ago, I was denied employment in an aerospace company because I was considered a security risk for having relatives
abroad. This was done in spite of the fact that I was already working for the same company in another division. In the end, I
had the last laugh, because a week later a company employee, a native born white American, was arrested for passing out secret
information.
@annamaria "As Assistant
DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder 13 months on and still no leads!"
Amazing. How come that the name "Wasserman" has become spread over the major ongoing DC scandals: The leak of the DNC emails
(the pseudo-Russiangate), the greatest breach in the national cybersecurity (Awan affair), and finally, the death of Seth Rich,
a DNC employee who went into contact with Wikileaks re the DNC machinations. Looks like American "democracy on the march," Clinton
style.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/05/debbie-wasserman-schultzs-brother-steven-wasserman-accused-burying-seth-rich-case/
"The Seth Rich Case: Nucleus of An American Coup Attempt:" http://www.phillip-butler.com/seth-rich-case/ Maybe it should be called
Wassergate.
@EdwardM Where is
Mr. Wasserman's boss, the U.S. Attorney for D.C.? Oh, right, it's an Obama holdover. Why hasn't President Trump put his own person
in this critical job? (Apparently he has nominated someone but as usual the Senate is in no hurry to approve him. Nothing would
stop DOJ from firing the current guy and placing the Trump nominee in an acting position, just as Obama did with the incumbent.)
This story would be hilarious if it weren't so serious. The quintessential example of foreigners from corrupt societies learning
quickly how to work our system. We have to give the Awans credit for milking liberal banks' and Democrats' foreigner- and Muslim-worship
(combined with sheer stupidity) to refrain from asking any questions. There is no Muslim-worship among the ziocons at DNC, who
got caught in the Awan affair. The Muslim card is a desperate argument for the currently unstoppable process of investigation.
Whether Mr. Wasserman or his boss or Clintons' lawyer defending Awan for the undisclosed amount of money, the train is moving
and the word Treason is in the air.
The most serious detail of the Awan affair is the violation of the protocol re classified information: The Awan family had no
security clearance, there was no documentation of the confirmation of the previous employment and no records for their relevant
education/training. Just to reiterate: the family (with a history of fraud and suspicious connections) has an open access to the
classified documents of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/04/exclusive-house-intelligence-it-staffers-fired-in-computer-security-probe/
Wasserman-Schultz has been directly involved in the greatest breach of the national cybersecurity. She tried to impede the investigation
and she kept the fraudsters on the US-taxpayers-paid payroll up to the day of the arrest of the main culprit. She did that despite
being warned by the police. She should be stripped already of her security clearance and arrested for the breach that was done
on her watch and with her active help.
Foreign-born people should be barred for life from holding any kind of security clearance.
Several years ago, I was denied employment in an aerospace company because I was considered a security risk for having relatives
abroad. This was done in spite of the fact that I was already working for the same company in another division. In the end, I
had the last laugh, because a week later a company employee, a native born white American, was arrested for passing out secret
information. It's all about minimizing risk. My respect for Sikhs would make me inclined to grant security clearances to them
liberally. My overall position, however, is that we have let in far too many foreigners than sane persons would and are stupidly
phlegmatic about leaving illegals here to "make a life for themselves" or "make a contribution" (at the expense of native born
Americans).
You were entitled to the last laugh indeed. We do not lack for native born white Americans. In fact, they are the source of
our fundamental problems.
n no explanation why she was even allowed to leave since carrying more than $10,000 out of the country without reporting it
is a felony.
Not a felony, but a mere civil infraction. Not reporting carrying more than $10k across the border can be either a criminal charge
with fines up to $500k and jail time, or a civil violation which often results in all unreported assets being seized and forfeit
and possibly with a civil penalty of up to the amount forfeit, or even both criminal and civil. The fact that she was allowed
to go on her way with her cash shows an unusual deference to the lady.
@Seamus Padraig His
boss, no doubt, is also an Obama flunkee. That's entirely possible given Trump's bewildering indifference to personnel matters.
He appears to have been hamstrung at the outset, eschewing both philosophical leadership and staffing up with loyalists. His
director of personnel is a bad joke but Trump simply doesn't see it or care. He made a point of saying how he hires good people
and lets them run but competent isn't the same thing as loyal or otherwise appropriate
@Cloak And Dagger
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the law is only meant for we ordinary citizens and not for the elite. Those of us
who are silently hoping for the indictment of Debbie and Hillary are sure to be sorely disappointed.
There is no justice anymore in these United States whose domestic and foreign policies are controlled by the deep state. Some
days can be so bleak... I agreed but it sure would be nice if Sessions would get her and her brother.
@anonymous This is
a staggering story. What a load of incompetence and coverup. This government is a total sieve. Of course those people were spying.
Even if they didn't want to spy, for whatever reason, the Pakistani government could surely find ways to 'convince' them to do
so. Most of these politicians appear to be so clueless that it's difficult to comprehend. It's just a carnival of taxpayer ripoff
in DC. It could possibly be a case of intensional incompetence. There are a huge number of people IN Congress that are totally
committed to destruction from within. The Trojan Horse has been within the gates for a surprising number of years. Trevor Loudon
has an interesting video on Amazon titled The Enemies (inclde the "s") Within. If accurate, it IS intensional incompetence. It
may be on Youtube as well.
La (w)hore Pakistan is most likely in bed with her pimp du jour, China and using the Pakis working for the US Congress to secure
data to be passed on to their handlers at ISI who in turn, pass it on to Beijing. And let's not forget the Saudis
@Sowhat I agreed but
it sure would be nice if Sessions would get her...and her brother. I just saw this posted. Don't know if it is completely true
but it fits with other information. Devastating.
@Joe Tedesky I'm sorry
F.G., but what if all the various narratives, which are being supplied to the Seth Rich murder end up only being a way of hiding
the truth within plain sight, so as to make it hard to distinguish between the real, and the phony, narratives which have been
put in place, as to only confuse us truth seekers? This is how 'conspiracy theories' are made to become conspiracy theories. F.G.
said "What if the Awan brothers are "cutouts" for another intelligence agency?" But of course. They're perfect patsies, just like
in our most famous "conspiracy theory" dubbed case.
Were the Awan brothers really gathering intelligence for Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence)? And was the ISI on
secret contract with the CIA?
I for one was appalled to learn that the official who quite likely will oversee the investigation of the Awans is one Steven
Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia, the brother of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
Yup. And guess what? As Assistant DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder ...
13 months on and still no leads!
When the hell are Trump and Sessions going to get serious about going after these freaks?
As Assistant DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder 13 months on and
still no leads!
In a recent broadcast, Michael Savage suddenly savaged what he called "fake news from the right" such as the Seth Rich murder,
Pizzagate (which he misrepresented as relating to hookers), etc. The presentation seemed curiously disengaged.
My guess is that Savage and his family were physically threatened.
@Sam Shama What evidence
prompts your scepticism about the Hezbollah connection? Al-Attar is a known Hezbollah operative with a connection to Awan. Pakistan
is next door to Iran which finances Hezbollah. You want all that to be airbrushed away?
What evidence prompts your scepticism about the Hezbollah connection?
Read what was written: LACK of evidence -- in the face of the logic of antipathies -- prompts the skepticism.
Pakistan is next door to Iran which finances Hezbollah. You want all that to be airbrushed away?
Israel shares borders with Lebanon, which is home to Hezbollah; it was at Israel's instigation that Hezbollah came into being.
Does that constitute "evidence" that Israel supports Hezbollah and is also/likewise complicit in Wassergate (h/t Chris
@ #35)?
Or do you prefer that Israel's involvement be airbrushed away ?
@Pachyderm Pachyderma
La (w)hore Pakistan is most likely in bed with her pimp du jour, China and using the Pakis working for the US Congress to secure
data to be passed on to their handlers at ISI who in turn, pass it on to Beijing. And let's not forget the Saudis... I think you
are absolutely right that the Pakis passed on information to China and any other country willing to pay for it.
Ray McGovern raise important fact: DNC hide evidence from FBI outsourcing everything to CrowdStrike. This is the most unexplainable
fact in the whole story. One hypotheses that Ray advanced here that there was so many hacks into DNC that they wanted to hide.
Another important point is CIA role in elections, and specifically
John O. Brennan behaviour. Brennan's 25 years with the CIA
included work as a Near East and South Asia analyst and as station chief in Saudi Arabia.
McGovern thing that Brennon actually controlled Obama. And in his opinion Brennan was the main leaker of Trump surveillance information.
Notable quotes:
"... Do really think the Deep State cares about the environment. Trump is our only chance to damage Deep State. McGovern is wrong... DNC were from Seth Rich, inside DNC. Murdered for it. McGovern is wrong... i could go on and on but suffice it to say his confidence is way to high. He is wrong. ..."
I really like Ray... I watch and listen , he seems to use logic, reason and facts in his assessments.. I'm surprised CIA and the
deep state allow him to operate ... stay safe Ray...
McGovern, you idiot. To try to put Trump on Hillary's level is complete stupidity. The war with Russia or nothing was avoided
with a Trump victory. Remember the NATO build up on the Russian border preparing for a Hillary win? Plus, if Hillary won, justice
and law in the USA would be over with forever. The Germans dont know sht about the USA to say their little cute phrase. Trump
is a very calm mannered man and his hands on the nuke button is an issue only to those who watch the fake MSM. And no the NSA
has not released anything either. Wrong on that point too.
The German expression of USA having a choice between cholera and plague is ignorant. McGovern is wrong ....everyone knew HRC
was a criminal. McGovern is wrong... Jill Stein in not trustworthy. A vote for Jill Stein was a vote away from Trump. If Jill
Stein or HRC were elected their would be no environment left to save. Do really think the Deep State cares about the environment.
Trump is our only chance to damage Deep State. McGovern is wrong... DNC were from Seth Rich, inside DNC. Murdered for it. McGovern
is wrong... i could go on and on but suffice it to say his confidence is way to high. He is wrong.
Another month or so and the DHS may offer a color-coding system to help the sheeple understand various levels of confidence.
Green - Moderate Confidence Blue - High Confidence Yellow - Very High Confidence Orange - Extremely High Confidence Red - Based
on Actual Fact
The last category may be one of the signs of the apocalypse.
"... In recent times, elected officials in the US and their state security organizations have often intervened against independent foreign governments, which challenged Washington 's quest for global domination. This was especially true during the eight years of President Barack Obama's administration where the violent ousting of presidents and prime ministers through US-engineered coups were routine – under an unofficial doctrine of 'regime change'. ..."
"... The violation of constitutional order and electoral norms of other countries has become enshrined in US policy. All US political, administrative and security structures are involved in this process. The policymakers would insist that there was a clear distinction between operating within constitutional norms at home and pursuing violent, illegal regime change operations abroad. ..."
"... The decisive shift to 'regime change' at home has been a continual process organized, orchestrated and implemented by elected and appointed officials within the Obama regime and by a multiplicity of political action organizations, which cross traditional ideological boundaries. ..."
"... Regime change has several components leading to the final solution: First and foremost, the political parties seek to delegitimize the election process and undermine the President-elect. The mass media play a major role demonizing President-Elect Trump with personal gossip, decades-old sex scandals and fabricated interviews and incidents. ..."
"... Their overt attack on US electoral norms then turned into a bizarre and virulent anti-Russia campaign designed to paint the elected president (a billionaire New York real estate developer and US celebrity icon) as a 'tool of Moscow .' The mass media and powerful elements within the CIA, Congress and Obama Administration insisted that Trump's overtures toward peaceful, diplomatic relations with Russia were acts of treason. ..."
"... The outgoing President Obama mobilized the entire leadership of the security state to fabricate 'dodgy dossiers' linking Donald Trump to the Russian President Vladimir Putin, insisting that Trump was a stooge or 'vulnerable to KGB blackmail'. The CIA's phony documents (arriving via a former British intelligence operative-now free lance 'security' contractor) were passed around among the major corporate media who declined to publish the leaked gossip. Months of attempts to get the US media to 'take the bite' on the 'smelly' dossier were unsuccessful. The semi-senile US Senator John McCain ('war-hero' and hysterical Trump opponent) then volunteered to plop the reeking gossip back onto the lap of the CIA Director Brennan and demand the government 'act on these vital revelations'! ..."
"... Under scrutiny by serious researchers, the 'CIA dossier' was proven to be a total fabrication by way of a former 'British official – now – in – hiding !' Undaunted, despite being totally discredited, the CIA leadership continued to attack the President-Elect. Trump likened the CIA's 'dirty pictures hatchet job' to the thuggish behavior of the Nazis and clearly understood how the CIA leadership was involved in a domestic coup d'état. ..."
"... CIA Director John Brennan, architect of numerous 'regime changes' overseas had brought his skills home – against the President-elect. For the first time in US history, a CIA director openly charged a President or President-elect with betraying the country and threatened the incoming Chief Executive. He coldly warned Trump to ' just make sure he understands that the implications and impacts (of Trump's policies) on the United States could be profound " ..."
"... Mass propaganda, a 'red-brown alliance, salacious gossip and accusations of treason ('Trump, the Stooge of Moscow') resemble the atmosphere leading to the rise of the Nazi state in Germany . A broad 'coalition' has joined hands with a most violent and murderous organization (the CIA) and imperial political leadership, which views overtures to peace to be high treason because it limits their drive for world power and a US dominated global political order. ..."
The norms of US capitalist democracy include the election of presidential candidates through competitive
elections, unimpeded by force and violence by the permanent institutions of the state. Voter manipulation
has occurred during the recent elections, as in the case of the John F. Kennedy victory in 1960 and
the George W. Bush victory over 'Al' Gore in 2000. But despite the dubious electoral outcomes in
these cases, the 'defeated' candidate conceded and sought via legislation, judicial rulings, lobbying
and peaceful protests to register their opposition.
These norms are no longer operative. During the election process, and in the run-up to the inauguration
of US President-Elect Donald Trump, fundamental electoral institutions were challenged and coercive
institutions were activated to disqualify the elected president and desperate overt public pronouncements
threatened the entire electoral order.
We will proceed by outlining the process that is used to undermine the constitutional order, including
the electoral process and the transition to the inauguration of the elected president.
Regime Change in America
In recent times, elected officials in the US and their state security organizations have often
intervened against independent foreign governments, which challenged Washington 's quest for global
domination. This was especially true during the eight years of President Barack Obama's administration
where the violent ousting of presidents and prime ministers through US-engineered coups were routine
– under an unofficial doctrine of 'regime change'.
The violation of constitutional order and electoral norms of other countries has become enshrined
in US policy. All US political, administrative and security structures are involved in this process.
The policymakers would insist that there was a clear distinction between operating within constitutional
norms at home and pursuing violent, illegal regime change operations abroad.
Today the distinction between overseas and domestic norms has been obliterated by the state and
quasi-official mass media. The US security apparatus is now active in manipulating the domestic democratic
process of electing leaders and transitioning administrations.
The decisive shift to 'regime change' at home has been a continual process organized, orchestrated
and implemented by elected and appointed officials within the Obama regime and by a multiplicity
of political action organizations, which cross traditional ideological boundaries.
Regime change has several components leading to the final solution: First and foremost, the
political parties seek to delegitimize the election process and undermine the President-elect. The
mass media play a major role demonizing President-Elect Trump with personal gossip, decades-old sex
scandals and fabricated interviews and incidents.
Alongside the media blitz, leftist and rightist politicians have come together to question the
legitimacy of the November 2016 election results. Even after a recount confirmed Trump's victory,
a massive propaganda campaign was launched to impeach the president-elect even before he takes office
– by claiming Trump was an 'enemy agent'.
The Democratic Party and the motley collection of right-left anti-Trump militants sought to blackmail
members of the Electoral College to change their vote in violation of their own mandate as state
electors. This was unsuccessful, but unprecedented.
Their overt attack on US electoral norms then turned into a bizarre and virulent anti-Russia
campaign designed to paint the elected president (a billionaire New York real estate developer and
US celebrity icon) as a 'tool of Moscow .' The mass media and powerful elements within the CIA, Congress
and Obama Administration insisted that Trump's overtures toward peaceful, diplomatic relations with
Russia were acts of treason.
The outgoing President Obama mobilized the entire leadership of the security state to fabricate
'dodgy dossiers' linking Donald Trump to the Russian President Vladimir Putin, insisting that Trump
was a stooge or 'vulnerable to KGB blackmail'. The CIA's phony documents (arriving via a former British
intelligence operative-now free lance 'security' contractor) were passed around among the major corporate
media who declined to publish the leaked gossip. Months of attempts to get the US media to 'take
the bite' on the 'smelly' dossier were unsuccessful. The semi-senile US Senator John McCain ('war-hero'
and hysterical Trump opponent) then volunteered to plop the reeking gossip back onto the lap of the
CIA Director Brennan and demand the government 'act on these vital revelations'!
Under scrutiny by serious researchers, the 'CIA dossier' was proven to be a total fabrication
by way of a former 'British official – now – in – hiding !' Undaunted, despite being totally discredited,
the CIA leadership continued to attack the President-Elect. Trump likened the CIA's 'dirty pictures
hatchet job' to the thuggish behavior of the Nazis and clearly understood how the CIA leadership
was involved in a domestic coup d'état.
CIA Director John Brennan, architect of numerous 'regime changes' overseas had brought his
skills home – against the President-elect. For the first time in US history, a CIA director openly
charged a President or President-elect with betraying the country and threatened the incoming Chief
Executive. He coldly warned Trump to ' just make sure he understands that the implications and impacts
(of Trump's policies) on the United States could be profound "
Clearly CIA Director Brennan has not only turned the CIA into a sinister, unaccountable power
dictating policy to an elected US president, by taking on the tone of a Mafia Capo, he threatens
the physical security of the incoming leader.
From a Scratch to Gangrene
The worst catastrophe that could fall on the United States would be a conspiracy of leftist and
rightist politicos, the corporate mass media and the 'progressive' websites and pundits providing
ideological cover for a CIA-orchestrated 'regime change'.
Whatever the limitations of our electoral norms- and there are many – they are now being degraded
and discarded in a march toward an elite coup, involving elements of the militarist empire and 'in`telligence'
hierarchy.
Mass propaganda, a 'red-brown alliance, salacious gossip and accusations of treason ('Trump,
the Stooge of Moscow') resemble the atmosphere leading to the rise of the Nazi state in Germany .
A broad 'coalition' has joined hands with a most violent and murderous organization (the CIA) and
imperial political leadership, which views overtures to peace to be high treason because it limits
their drive for world power and a US dominated global political order.
James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New
York. http://petras.lahaine.org/
max Book is just anothe "Yascha about Russia" type, that Masha Gessen represents so vividly.
The problem with him is that time of neocon prominance is solidly in the past and now unpleasant
question about the cost from the US people of their reckless foreign policies get into some
newspapers and managines. They cost the USA tremedous anount of money (as in trillions) and those
money consititute a large portion of the national debt. Critiques so far were very weak and
partially suppressed voices, but defeat of neocon warmonger Hillary signify some break with
the past.
Notable quotes:
"... National Interest ..."
"... Carlson's record suggests that he has been in the camp skeptical of U.S. foreign-policy intervention for some time now and, indeed, that it predates Donald Trump's rise to power. (Carlson has commented publicly that he was humiliated by his own public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) According to Carlson, "This is not about Trump. This is not about Trump. It's the one thing in American life that has nothing to do with Trump. My views on this are totally unrelated to my views on Donald Trump. This has been going since September 11, 2001. And it's a debate that we've never really had. And we need to have it." He adds, "I don't think the public has ever been for the ideas that undergird our policies." ..."
"... National Interest ..."
"... But the fight also seems to have a personal edge. Carlson says, "Max Boot is not impressive. . . . Max is a totally mediocre person." Carlson added that he felt guilty about not having, in his assessment, a superior guest to Boot on the show to defend hawkishness. "I wish I had had someone clear-thinking and smart on to represent their views. And there are a lot of them. I would love to have that debate," Carlson told me, periodically emphasizing that he is raring to go on this subject. ..."
"... New York Observer ..."
"... National Interest ..."
"... Weekly Standard ..."
"... Weekly Standard ..."
"... Though he eschews labels, Carlson sounds like a foreign-policy realist on steroids: "You can debate what's in [the United States'] interest. That's a subjective category. But what you can't debate is that ought to be the basic question, the first, second and third question. Does it represent our interest? . . . I don't think that enters into the calculations of a lot of the people who make these decisions." Carlson's interests extend beyond foreign policy, and he says "there's a massive realignment going on ideologically that everybody is missing. It's dramatic. And everyone is missing it. . . . Nobody is paying attention to it, " ..."
This week's primetime knife fights with Max Boot and Ralph Peters are emblematic of the
battle for the soul of the American Right.
To be sure, Carlson rejects the term
"neoconservatism,"
and implicitly, its corollary on the Democratic side, liberal internationalism. In 2016, "the reigning
Republican foreign-policy view, you can call it neoconservatism, or interventionism, or whatever you
want to call it" was rejected, he explained in a wide-ranging interview with the National Interest
Friday.
"But I don't like the term 'neoconservatism,'" he says, "because I don't even know what it means.
I think it describes the people rather than their ideas, which is what I'm interested in. And to
be perfectly honest . . . I have a lot of friends who have been described as neocons, people I really
love, sincerely. And they are offended by it. So I don't use it," Carlson said.
But Carlson's recent segments on foreign policy conducted with Lt. Col.
Ralph Peters and the prominent neoconservative journalist and author
Max Boot were acrimonious even by Carlsonian standards. In a discussion on Syria, Russia and
Iran, a visibly upset Boot accused Carlson of being "immoral" and taking foreign-policy positions
to curry favor with the White House, keep up his
ratings , and by proxy, benefit financially. Boot says that Carlson "basically parrots whatever
the pro-Trump line is that Fox viewers want to see. If Trump came out strongly against Putin tomorrow,
I imagine Tucker would echo this as faithfully as the pro-Russia arguments he echoes today." But
is this assessment fair?
Carlson's record suggests that he has been in the camp skeptical of U.S. foreign-policy intervention
for some time now and, indeed, that it predates Donald Trump's rise to power. (Carlson has commented
publicly that he was humiliated by his own public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) According
to Carlson, "This is not about Trump. This is not about Trump. It's the one thing in American life
that has nothing to do with Trump. My views on this are totally unrelated to my views on Donald Trump.
This has been going since September 11, 2001. And it's a debate that we've never really had. And
we need to have it." He adds, "I don't think the public has ever been for the ideas that undergird
our policies."
Even if Carlson doesn't want to use the label neocon to describe some of those ideas, Boot is
not so bashful. In 2005, Boot wrote an essay called
"Neocons May Get
the Last Laugh." Carlson "has become a Trump acolyte in pursuit of ratings," says Boot, also
interviewed by the National Interest . "I bet if it were President Clinton accused of colluding
with the Russians, Tucker would be outraged and calling for impeachment if not execution. But since
it's Trump, then it's all a big joke to him," Boot says. Carlson vociferously dissents from such
assessments: "This is what dumb people do. They can't assess the merits of an argument. . . . I'm
not talking about Syria, and Russia, and Iran because of ratings. That's absurd. I can't imagine
those were anywhere near the most highly-rated segments that night. That's not why I wanted to do
it."
But Carlson insists, "I have been saying the same thing for fifteen years. Now I have a T.V. show
that people watch, so my views are better known. But it shouldn't be a surprise. I supported Trump
to the extent he articulated beliefs that I agree with. . . . And I don't support Trump to the extent
that his actions deviate from those beliefs," Carlson said. Boot on Fox said that Carlson is "too
smart" for this kind of argument. But Carlson has bucked the Trump line, notably on Trump's April
7 strikes in Syria. "When the Trump administration threw a bunch of cruise missiles into Syria for
no obvious reason, on the basis of a pretext that I
question . . . I questioned [the decision] immediately. On T.V. I was on the air when that happened.
I think, maybe seven minutes into my show. . . . I thought this was reckless."
But the fight also seems to have a personal edge. Carlson says, "Max Boot is not impressive. .
. . Max is a totally mediocre person." Carlson added that he felt guilty about not having, in his
assessment, a superior guest to Boot on the show to defend hawkishness. "I wish I had had someone
clear-thinking and smart on to represent their views. And there are a lot of them. I would love to
have that debate," Carlson told me, periodically emphasizing that he is raring to go on this subject.
Boot objects to what he sees as a cavalier attitude on the part of Carlson and others toward allegations
of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and also toward the deaths of citizens of other countries.
"You are laughing about the fact that Russia is interfering in our election process. That to me is
immoral," Boot told Carlson on his show. "This is the level of dumbness and McCarthyism in Washington
right now," says Carlson. "I think it has the virtue of making Max Boot feel like a good person.
Like he's on God's team, or something like that. But how does that serve the interest of the country?
It doesn't." Carlson says that Donald Trump, Jr.'s emails aren't nearly as important as who is going
to lead Syria, which he says Boot and others have no plan for successfully occupying. Boot, by contrast,
sees the U.S. administration as dangerously flirting with working with Russia, Iran and Syrian president
Bashar al-Assad. "For whatever reason, Trump is pro-Putin, no one knows why, and he's taken a good
chunk of the GOP along with him," Boot says.
On Fox last Wednesday, Boot reminded Carlson that he originally supported the 2003 Iraq decision.
"You supported the invasion of Iraq," Boot said, before repeating, "You supported the invasion of
Iraq." Carlson conceded that, but it seems the invasion was a bona fide turning point. It's most
important to parse whether Carlson has a long record of anti-interventionism, or if he's merely
sniffing the throne of the president (who, dubiously, may have opposed the 2003 invasion). "I
think it's a total nightmare and disaster, and I'm ashamed that I went against my own instincts in
supporting it," Carlson told the New York Observer in early 2004. "It's something I'll never
do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who's smarter than I am, and I shouldn't have
done that. . . . I'm enraged by it, actually." Carlson told the National Interest that he's
felt this way since seeing Iraq for himself in December 2003.
The evidence points heavily toward a sincere conversion on Carlson's part, or preexisting conviction
that was briefly overcome by the beat of the war drums. Carlson did work for the Weekly Standard
, perhaps the most prominent neoconservative magazine, in the 1990s and early 2000s. Carlson today
speaks respectfully of William Kristol, its founding editor, but has concluded that he is all wet.
On foreign policy, the people Carlson speaks most warmly about are genuine hard left-wingers: Glenn
Greenwald, a vociferous critic of both economic neoliberalism and neoconservatism; the anti-establishment
journalist Michael Tracey; Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation ; and her husband,
Stephen Cohen, the Russia expert and critic of U.S. foreign policy.
"The only people in American public life who are raising these questions are on the traditional
left: not lifestyle liberals, not the Williamsburg (Brooklyn) group, not liberals in D.C., not Nancy
Pelosi." He calls the expertise of establishment sources on matters like Syria "more shallow than
I even imagined." On his MSNBC show, which was canceled for poor ratings, he cavorted with noninterventionist
stalwarts such as
Ron Paul , the 2008 and 2012 antiwar GOP candidate, and Patrick J. Buchanan. "No one is smarter
than Pat Buchanan," he said
last year of the man whose ideas many say laid the groundwork for Trump's political success.
Carlson has risen to the pinnacle of cable news, succeeding Bill O'Reilly. It wasn't always clear
an antiwar take would vault someone to such prominence. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Mitt Romney could
be president (Boot has advised the latter two). But here he is, and it's likely no coincidence that
Carlson got a show after Trump's election, starting at the 7 p.m. slot, before swiftly moving to
the 9 p.m. slot to replace Trump antagonist Megyn Kelly, and just as quickly replacing O'Reilly at
the top slot, 8 p.m. Boot, on the other hand, declared in 2016 that the Republican Party was
dead , before it went on to hold Congress and most state houses, and of course take the presidency.
He's still at the Council on Foreign Relations and writes for the New York Times (this seems
to clearly annoy Carlson: "It tells you everything about the low standards of the American foreign-policy
establishment").
Boot wrote in 2003 in the Weekly Standard that the fall of Saddam Hussein's government
"may turn out to be one of those hinge moments in history" comparable to "events like the storming
of the Bastille or the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which everything is different." He continued,
"If the occupation goes well (admittedly a big if ), it may mark the moment when the powerful
antibiotic known as democracy was introduced into the diseased environment of the Middle East, and
began to transform the region for the better."
Though he eschews labels, Carlson sounds like a foreign-policy realist on steroids: "You can debate
what's in [the United States'] interest. That's a subjective category. But what you can't debate
is that ought to be the basic question, the first, second and third question. Does it represent our
interest? . . . I don't think that enters into the calculations of a lot of the people who make these
decisions." Carlson's interests extend beyond foreign policy, and he says "there's a massive realignment
going on ideologically that everybody is missing. It's dramatic. And everyone is missing it. . .
. Nobody is paying attention to it, "
Carlson seems intent on pressing the issue. The previous night, in his debate with Peters, the
retired lieutenant colonel said that Carlson sounded like Charles Lindbergh, who opposed U.S. intervention
against Nazi Germany before 1941. "This particular strain of Republican foreign policy has almost
no constituency. Nobody agrees with it. I mean there's not actually a large group of people outside
of New York, Washington or L.A. who think any of this is a good idea," Carlson says. "All I am is
an asker of obvious questions. And that's enough to reveal these people have no idea what they're
talking about. None."
Curt Mills is a foreign-affairs reporter at the National Interest . Follow him on Twitter:
@CurtMills .
"... "Have you ever met or talked to any Russian official or relative of any Russian banker, or any Russian or even read Gogol, now or in the past?" ..."
"... Progressives joined the FBI/CIA's 'Russian Bear' conspiracy: " Russia intervened and decided the Presidential election" – no matter that millions of workers and rural Americans had voted against Hillary Clinton, Wall Street's candidate and no matter that no evidence of direct interference was ever presented. Progressives could not accept that 'their constituents', the masses, had rejected Madame Clinton and preferred 'the Donald'. They attacked a shifty-eyed caricature of the repeatedly elected Russian President Putin as a subterfuge for attacking the disobedient 'white trash' electorate of 'Deploralandia'. ..."
"... Progressive demagogues embraced the coifed and manicured former 'Director Comey' of the FBI, and the Mr. Potato-headed Capo of the CIA and their forty thugs in making accusations without finger or footprints. ..."
"... Then Progressives turned increasingly Orwellian: Ignoring Obama's actual expulsion of over 2 million immigrant workers, they condemned Trump for promising to eventually expel 5 million more! ..."
"... Progressives, under Obama, supported seven brutal illegal wars and pressed for more, but complained when Trump continued the same wars and proposed adding a few new ones. At the same time, progressives out-militarized Trump by accusing him of being 'weak' on Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. They chided him for his lack support for Israel's suppression of the Palestinians. They lauded Trump's embrace of the Saudi war against Yemen as a stepping-stone for an assault against Iran, even as millions of destitute Yemenis were exposed to cholera. The Progressives had finally embraced a biological weapon of mass destruction, when US-supplied missiles destroyed the water systems of Yemen! ..."
"... Thank you for putting your finger on the main problem right there in the first paragraph. There were exceptions of course. I supported Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic Primary that gave us the first black etc. But I never voted for Obama. Throughout the Cheney Admin I pleaded with progressives to bolt the party. ..."
"... This is an excellent summary of the evolution of "progressives" into modern militarist fascists who tolerate identity politics diversity. There is little to add to Mr. Petras' commentary. ..."
"... Barak Obama is America's biggest con man who accomplished nothing "progressive" during eight years at the top, and didn't even try. (Obamacare is an insurance industry idea supported by most Republicans, which is why it recently survived.) Anyone who still likes Obama should read about his actions since he left office. Obama quickly signed a $65 million "book deal", which can only be a kickback since there is no way the publisher can sell enough books about his meaningless presidency to justify that sum. Obama doesn't get royalties based on sales, but gets the money up front for a book he has yet to write, and will have someone do that for him. (Book deals and speaking fees are legal forms of bribery in the USA.) ..."
"... Then Obama embarked on 100 days of ultra expensive foreign vacations with taxpayers covering the Secret Service protection costs. He didn't appear at charity fundraisers, didn't campaign for Democrats, and didn't help build homes for the poor like Jimmy Carter. He returns from vacation this week and his first speech will be at a Wall Street firm that will pay him $400,000, then he travels to Europe for more paid speeches. ..."
"... They chose power over principles. Nobel War Prize winner Obomber was a particularly egregious chameleon, hiding his sociopathy through two elections before unleashing his racist warmongering in full flower throughout his second term. ..."
"... Like a huge collective 'Monica Lewinsky' robot, the Progressives in the Democratic Party bent over and swallowed Clinton's vicious 1999 savaging of the venerable Glass Steagall Act ..."
Over the past quarter century progressive writers, activists and academics have followed a trajectory
from left to right – with each presidential campaign seeming to move them further to the right. Beginning
in the 1990's progressives mobilized millions in opposition to wars, voicing demands for the transformation
of the US's corporate for-profit medical system into a national 'Medicare For All' public
program. They condemned the notorious Wall Street swindlers and denounced police state legislation
and violence. But in the end, they always voted for Democratic Party Presidential candidates who
pursued the exact opposite agenda.
Over time this political contrast between program and practice led to the transformation of the
Progressives. And what we see today are US progressives embracing and promoting the politics of the
far right.
To understand this transformation we will begin by identifying who and what the progressives are
and describe their historical role. We will then proceed to identify their trajectory over the recent
decades.
We will outline the contours of recent Presidential campaigns where Progressives were deeply
involved.
We will focus on the dynamics of political regression: From resistance to submission, from
retreat to surrender.
We will conclude by discussing the end result: The Progressives' large-scale, long-term embrace
of far-right ideology and practice.
Progressives by Name and Posture
Progressives purport to embrace 'progress', the growth of the economy, the enrichment of society
and freedom from arbitrary government. Central to the Progressive agenda was the end of elite corruption
and good governance, based on democratic procedures.
Progressives prided themselves as appealing to 'reason, diplomacy and conciliation', not brute
force and wars. They upheld the sovereignty of other nations and eschewed militarism and armed intervention.
Progressives proposed a vision of their fellow citizens pursuing incremental evolution toward
the 'good society', free from the foreign entanglements, which had entrapped the people in unjust
wars.
Progressives in Historical Perspective
In the early part of the 20th century, progressives favored political equality while opposing
extra-parliamentary social transformations. They supported gender equality and environmental preservation
while failing to give prominence to the struggles of workers and African Americans.
They denounced militarism 'in general' but supported a series of 'wars to end all wars'
. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson embodied the dual policies of promoting peace at home
and bloody imperial wars overseas. By the middle of the 20th century, different strands emerged
under the progressive umbrella. Progressives split between traditional good government advocates
and modernists who backed socio-economic reforms, civil liberties and rights.
Progressives supported legislation to regulate monopolies, encouraged collective bargaining and
defended the Bill of Rights.
Progressives opposed wars and militarism in theory until their government went to war.
Lacking an effective third political party, progressives came to see themselves as the 'left
wing' of the Democratic Party, allies of labor and civil rights movements and defenders of civil
liberties.
Progressives joined civil rights leaders in marches, but mostly relied on legal and
electoral means to advance African American rights.
Progressives played a pivotal role in fighting McCarthyism, though ultimately it was the Secretary
of the Army and the military high command that brought Senator McCarthy to his knees.
Progressives provided legal defense when the social movements disrupted the House UnAmerican Activities
Committee.
They popularized the legislative arguments that eventually outlawed segregation, but it was courageous
Afro-American leaders heading mass movements that won the struggle for integration and civil rights.
In many ways the Progressives complemented the mass struggles, but their limits were defined by
the constraints of their membership in the Democratic Party.
The alliance between Progressives and social movements peaked in the late sixties to mid-1970's
when the Progressives followed the lead of dynamic and advancing social movements and community organizers
especially in opposition to the wars in Indochina and the military draft.
The Retreat of the Progressives
By the late 1970's the Progressives had cut their anchor to the social movements, as the anti-war,
civil rights and labor movements lost their impetus (and direction).
The numbers of progressives within the left wing of the Democratic Party increased through recruitment
from earlier social movements. Paradoxically, while their 'numbers' were up, their caliber had declined,
as they sought to 'fit in' with the pro-business, pro-war agenda of their President's party.
Without the pressure of the 'populist street' the 'Progressives-turned-Democrats' adapted
to the corporate culture in the Party. The Progressives signed off on a fatal compromise: The corporate
elite secured the electoral party while the Progressives were allowed to write enlightened manifestos
about the candidates and their programs . . . which were quickly dismissed once the Democrats took
office. Yet the ability to influence the 'electoral rhetoric' was seen by the Progressives as a sufficient
justification for remaining inside the Democratic Party.
Moreover the Progressives argued that by strengthening their presence in the Democratic Party,
(their self-proclaimed 'boring from within' strategy), they would capture the party membership,
neutralize the pro-corporation, militarist elements that nominated the president and peacefully transform
the party into a 'vehicle for progressive changes'.
Upon their successful 'deep penetration' the Progressives, now cut off from the increasingly disorganized
mass social movements, coopted and bought out many prominent black, labor and civil liberty activists
and leaders, while collaborating with what they dubbed the more malleable 'centrist' Democrats.
These mythical creatures were really pro-corporate Democrats who condescended to occasionally converse
with the Progressives while working for the Wall Street and Pentagon elite.
The Retreat of the Progressives: The Clinton Decade
Progressives adapted the 'crab strategy': Moving side-ways and then backwards but never forward.
Progressives mounted candidates in the Presidential primaries, which were predictably defeated
by the corporate Party apparatus, and then submitted immediately to the outcome. The election of
President 'Bill' Clinton launched a period of unrestrained financial plunder, major wars of aggression
in Europe (Yugoslavia) and the Middle East (Iraq), a military intervention in Somalia and secured
Israel's victory over any remnant of a secular Palestinian leadership as well as its destruction
of Lebanon!
Like a huge collective 'Monica Lewinsky' robot, the Progressives in the Democratic Party bent
over and swallowed Clinton's vicious 1999 savaging of the venerable Glass Steagall Act, thereby opening
the floodgates for massive speculation on Wall Street through the previously regulated banking sector.
When President Clinton gutted welfare programs, forcing single mothers to take minimum-wage jobs
without provision for safe childcare, millions of poor white and minority women were forced to abandon
their children to dangerous makeshift arrangements in order to retain any residual public support
and access to minimal health care. Progressives looked the other way.
Progressives followed Clinton's deep throated thrust toward the far right, as he outsourced manufacturing
jobs to Mexico (NAFTA) and re-appointed Federal Reserve's free market, Ayn Rand-fanatic, Alan Greenspan.
Progressives repeatedly kneeled before President Clinton marking their submission to the Democrats'
'hard right' policies.
The election of Republican President G. W. Bush (2001-2009) permitted Progressive's to temporarily
trot out and burnish their anti-war, anti-Wall Street credentials. Out in the street, they protested
Bush's savage invasion of Iraq (but not the destruction of Afghanistan). They protested the media
reports of torture in Abu Ghraib under Bush, but not the massive bombing and starvation of millions
of Iraqis that had occurred under Clinton. Progressives protested the expulsion of immigrants from
Mexico and Central America, but were silent over the brutal uprooting of refugees resulting from
US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the systematic destruction of their nations' infrastructure.
Progressives embraced Israel's bombing, jailing and torture of Palestinians by voting unanimously
in favor of increasing the annual $3 billion dollar military handouts to the brutal Jewish State.
They supported Israel's bombing and slaughter in Lebanon.
Progressives were in retreat, but retained a muffled voice and inconsequential vote in favor of
peace, justice and civil liberties. They kept a certain distance from the worst of the police state
decrees by the Republican Administration.
Progressives and Obama: From Retreat to Surrender
While Progressives maintained their tepid commitment to civil liberties, and their highly 'leveraged'
hopes for peace in the Middle East, they jumped uncritically into the highly choreographed Democratic
Party campaign for Barack Obama, 'Wall Street's First Black President'.
Progressives had given up their quest to 'realign' the Democratic Party 'from within':
they turned from serious tourism to permanent residency. Progressives provided the foot soldiers
for the election and re-election of the warmongering 'Peace Candidate' Obama. After the election,
Progressives rushed to join the lower echelons of his Administration. Black and white politicos joined
hands in their heroic struggle to erase the last vestiges of the Progressives' historical legacy.
Obama increased the number of Bush-era imperial wars to attacking seven weak nations under American's
'First Black' President's bombardment, while the Progressives ensured that the streets were quiet
and empty.
When Obama provided trillions of dollars of public money to rescue Wall Street and the bankers,
while sacrificing two million poor and middle class mortgage holders, the Progressives only criticized
the bankers who received the bailout, but not Obama's Presidential decision to protect and reward
the mega-swindlers.
Under the Obama regime social inequalities within the United States grew at an unprecedented rate.
The Police State Patriot Act was massively extended to give President Obama the power to order the
assassination of US citizens abroad without judicial process. The Progressives did not resign when
Obama's 'kill orders' extended to the 'mistaken' murder of his target's children and other family
member, as well as unidentified bystanders. The icon carriers still paraded their banner of the
'first black American President' when tens of thousands of black Libyans and immigrant workers
were slaughtered in his regime-change war against President Gadhafi.
Obama surpassed the record of all previous Republican office holders in terms of the massive numbers
of immigrant workers arrested and expelled – 2 million. Progressives applauded the Latino protestors
while supporting the policies of their 'first black President'.
Progressive accepted that multiple wars, Wall Street bailouts and the extended police state were
now the price they would pay to remain part of the "Democratic coalition' (sic).
The deeper the Progressives swilled at the Democratic Party trough, the more they embraced the
Obama's free market agenda and the more they ignored the increasing impoverishment, exploitation
and medical industry-led opioid addiction of American workers that was shortening their lives. Under
Obama, the Progressives totally abandoned the historic American working class, accepting their degradation
into what Madam Hillary Clinton curtly dismissed as the 'deplorables'.
With the Obama Presidency, the Progressive retreat turned into a rout, surrendering with one flaccid
caveat: the Democratic Party 'Socialist' Bernie Sanders, who had voted 90% of the time with the Corporate
Party, had revived a bastardized military-welfare state agenda.
Sander's Progressive demagogy shouted and rasped on the campaign trail, beguiling the young electorate.
The 'Bernie' eventually 'sheep-dogged' his supporters into the pro-war Democratic Party corral.
Sanders revived an illusion of the pre-1990 progressive agenda, promising resistance while demanding
voter submission to Wall Street warlord Hillary Clinton. After Sanders' round up of the motley progressive
herd, he staked them tightly to the far-right Wall Street war mongering Hillary Clinton. The Progressives
not only embraced Madame Secretary Clinton's nuclear option and virulent anti-working class agenda,
they embellished it by focusing on Republican billionaire Trump's demagogic, nationalist, working
class rhetoric which was designed to agitate 'the deplorables'. They even turned on the working
class voters, dismissing them as 'irredeemable' racists and illiterates or 'white trash' when
they turned to support Trump in massive numbers in the 'fly-over' states of the central US.
Progressives, allied with the police state, the mass media and the war machine worked to defeat
and impeach Trump. Progressives surrendered completely to the Democratic Party and started to advocate
its far right agenda. Hysterical McCarthyism against anyone who questioned the Democrats' promotion
of war with Russia, mass media lies and manipulation of street protest against Republican elected
officials became the centerpieces of the Progressive agenda. The working class and farmers had disappeared
from their bastardized 'identity-centered' ideology.
Guilt by association spread throughout Progressive politics. Progressives embraced J. Edgar Hoover's
FBI tactics: "Have you ever met or talked to any Russian official or relative of any Russian
banker, or any Russian or even read Gogol, now or in the past?" For progressives, 'Russia-gate'
defined the real focus of contemporary political struggle in this huge, complex, nuclear-armed superpower.
Progressives joined the FBI/CIA's 'Russian Bear' conspiracy: "Russia intervened and decided
the Presidential election" – no matter that millions of workers and rural Americans had voted
against Hillary Clinton, Wall Street's candidate and no matter that no evidence of direct interference
was ever presented. Progressives could not accept that 'their constituents', the masses, had rejected
Madame Clinton and preferred 'the Donald'. They attacked a shifty-eyed caricature of the repeatedly
elected Russian President Putin as a subterfuge for attacking the disobedient 'white trash' electorate
of 'Deploralandia'.
Progressive demagogues embraced the coifed and manicured former 'Director Comey' of the FBI,
and the Mr. Potato-headed Capo of the CIA and their forty thugs in making accusations without finger
or footprints.
The Progressives' far right - turn earned them hours and space on the mass media as long
as they breathlessly savaged and insulted President Trump and his family members. When they managed
to provoke him into a blind rage . . . they added the newly invented charge of 'psychologically
unfit to lead' – presenting cheap psychobabble as grounds for impeachment. Finally! American
Progressives were on their way to achieving their first and only political transformation: a Presidential
coup d'état on behalf of the Far Right!
Progressives loudly condemned Trump's overtures for peace with Russia, denouncing it as appeasement
and betrayal!
In return, President Trump began to 'out-militarize' the Progressives by escalating US involvement
in the Middle East and South China Sea. They swooned with joy when Trump ordered a missile strike
against the Syrian government as Damascus engaged in a life and death struggle against mercenary
terrorists. They dubbed the petulant release of Patriot missiles 'Presidential'.
Then Progressives turned increasingly Orwellian: Ignoring Obama's actual expulsion of over
2 million immigrant workers, they condemned Trump for promising to eventually expel 5 million
more!
Progressives, under Obama, supported seven brutal illegal wars and pressed for more, but complained
when Trump continued the same wars and proposed adding a few new ones. At the same time, progressives
out-militarized Trump by accusing him of being 'weak' on Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. They
chided him for his lack support for Israel's suppression of the Palestinians. They lauded Trump's
embrace of the Saudi war against Yemen as a stepping-stone for an assault against Iran, even as millions
of destitute Yemenis were exposed to cholera. The Progressives had finally embraced a biological
weapon of mass destruction, when US-supplied missiles destroyed the water systems of Yemen!
Conclusion
Progressives turned full circle from supporting welfare to embracing Wall Street; from preaching
peaceful co-existence to demanding a dozen wars; from recognizing the humanity and rights of undocumented
immigrants to their expulsion under their 'First Black' President; from thoughtful mass media critics
to servile media megaphones; from defenders of civil liberties to boosters for the police state;
from staunch opponents of J. Edgar Hoover and his 'dirty tricks' to camp followers for the 'intelligence
community' in its deep state campaign to overturn a national election.
Progressives moved from fighting and resisting the Right to submitting and retreating; from retreating
to surrendering and finally embracing the far right.
Doing all that and more within the Democratic Party, Progressives retain and deepen their ties
with the mass media, the security apparatus and the military machine, while occasionally digging
up some Bernie Sanders-type demagogue to arouse an army of voters away from effective resistance
to mindless collaboration.
But in the end, they always voted for Democratic Party Presidential candidates who pursued
the exact opposite agenda.
Thank you for putting your finger on the main problem right there in the first paragraph.
There were exceptions of course. I supported Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic Primary that gave
us the first black etc. But I never voted for Obama. Throughout the Cheney Admin I pleaded with
progressives to bolt the party.
This piece accurately traces the path from Progressive to Maoist. It's a pity the Republican
Party is also a piece of shit. I think it was Sara Palin who said "We have two parties. Pick one."
This should be our collective epitaph.
This is an excellent summary of the evolution of "progressives" into modern militarist
fascists who tolerate identity politics diversity. There is little to add to Mr. Petras' commentary.
"Progressives loudly condemned Trump's overtures for peace with Russia, denouncing it as
appeasement and betrayal!"
Perhaps the spirit of Senator Joseph McCarthy is joyously gloating as progressives (and democrats)
take their place as his heirs and successors and the 21st century incarnation of the House UnAmerican
Activities Committee.
The great Jimmy Dore is a big thorn for the Democrats. From my blog:
Apr 29, 2017 – Obama is Scum!
Barak Obama is America's biggest con man who accomplished nothing "progressive" during
eight years at the top, and didn't even try. (Obamacare is an insurance industry idea supported
by most Republicans, which is why it recently survived.) Anyone who still likes Obama should read
about his actions since he left office. Obama quickly signed a $65 million "book deal", which
can only be a kickback since there is no way the publisher can sell enough books about his meaningless
presidency to justify that sum. Obama doesn't get royalties based on sales, but gets the money
up front for a book he has yet to write, and will have someone do that for him. (Book deals and
speaking fees are legal forms of bribery in the USA.)
Then Obama embarked on 100 days of ultra expensive foreign vacations with taxpayers covering
the Secret Service protection costs. He didn't appear at charity fundraisers, didn't campaign
for Democrats, and didn't help build homes for the poor like Jimmy Carter. He returns from vacation
this week and his first speech will be at a Wall Street firm that will pay him $400,000, then
he travels to Europe for more paid speeches.
Obama gets over $200,000 a year in retirement, just got a $65 million deal, so doesn't need
more money. Why would a multi-millionaire ex-president fly around the globe collecting huge speaking
fees from world corporations just after his political party was devastated in elections because
Americans think the Democratic party represents Wall Street? The great Jimmy Dore expressed his
outrage at Obama and the corrupt Democratic party in this great video.
Left in the good old days meant socialist, socialist meant that governments had the duty of
redistributing income from rich to poor. Alas in Europe, after 'socialists' became pro EU and
pro globalisation, they in fact became neoliberal. Both in France and the Netherlands 'socialist'
parties virtually disappeared.
So what nowadays is left, does anyone know ?
Then the word 'progressive'. The word suggests improvement, but what is improvement, improvement
for whom ? There are those who see the possibility for euthanasia as an improvement, there are
thos who see euthanasia as a great sin.
Discussions about left and progressive are meaningless without properly defining the concepts.
They chose power over principles. Nobel War Prize winner Obomber was a particularly egregious
chameleon, hiding his sociopathy through two elections before unleashing his racist warmongering
in full flower throughout his second term. But, hey, the brother now has five mansions, collects
half a mill per speech to the Chosen People on Wall Street, and parties for months at a time at
exclusive resorts for billionaires only.
Obviously, he's got the world by the tail and you don't. Hope he comes to the same end as Gaddaffi
and Ceaușescu. Maybe the survivors of nuclear Armageddon can hold a double necktie party with
Killary as the second honored guest that day.
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson embodied the dual policies of promoting peace at home
and bloody imperial wars overseas.
You left out the other Roosevelt.
Like a huge collective 'Monica Lewinsky' robot, the Progressives in the Democratic Party
bent over and swallowed Clinton's vicious 1999 savaging of the venerable Glass Steagall Act
Hilarious!
Ignoring Obama's actual expulsion of over 2 million immigrant workers, they condemned Trump
for promising to eventually expel 5 million more!
so it's not just conservative conspiracy theory stuff as some might argue.
Still, the overall point of this essay isn't affected all that much. Open borders is still
a "right wing" (in the sense this author uses the term) policy–pro-Wall Street, pro-Big Business.
So Obama was still doing the bidding of the donor class in their quest for cheap labor.
I've seen pro-immigration types try to use the Obama-deportation thing to argue that we don't
need more hardcore policies. After all, even the progressive Democrat Obama was on the ball when
it came to policing our borders, right?! Who needed Trump?
@Carlton Meyer If Jimmy keeps up these attacks on Wall Street, the Banksters, and rent-seekers
he is going to get run out of the Progressive movement for dog-whistling virulent Anti-Semitism.
Look at how the media screams at Trump every time he mentions Wall Street and the banks.
Mr. Petra has penned an excellent and very astute piece. Allow me a little satire on our progressive
friends, entitled "The path to hell is paved with good intentions".
The early socialist/progressive travellers were well-intentioned but naïve in their understanding
of human nature and fanatical about their agenda. To move the human herd forward, they had no
compulsions about resorting to harsher and harsher prodding and whipping. They felt entitled to
employ these means because, so they were convinced, man has to be pushed to move forward and they,
the "progressives", were the best qualified to lead the herd. Scoundrels, psychopaths, moral defectives,
and sundry other rascals then joined in the whipping game, some out of the sheer joy of wielding
the whip, others to better line their pockets.
So the "progressive" journey degenerates into a forced march. The march becomes the progress,
becoming both the means and the end at the same time. Look at the so-called "progressive" today
and you will see the fanatic and the whip-wielder, steadfast about the correctness of his beliefs.
Tell him/her/it that you are a man or a woman and he retorts "No, you are free to choose, you
are genderless". What if you decline such freedom? "Well, then you are a bigot, we will thrash
you out of your bigotry", replies the progressive. "May I, dear Sir/Madam/Whatever, keep my hard-earned
money in my pocket for my and my family's use" you ask. "No, you first have to pay for our peace-making
wars, then pay for the upkeep of refugees, besides which you owe a lot of back taxes that are
necessary to run this wonderful Big Government of ours that is leading you towards greener and
greener pastures", shouts back the progressive.
Fed up, disgusted, and a little scared, you desperately seek a way out of this progress. "No
way", scream the march leaders. "We will be forever in your ears, sometimes whispering, sometimes
screaming; we will take over your brain to improve your mind; we will saturate you with images
on the box 24/7 and employ all sorts of imagery to make you progress. And if it all fails, we
will simply pack you and others like you in a basket of deplorables and forget about you at election
time."
Knowing who is "progressive" and know who is "far-right" is like knowing who is "fascist" and
who is not. For obvious historical reasons, the Russian like to throw the "fascist" slogan against
anyone who is a non-Russian nationalist. However, I accept the eminent historian Carroll Quigley's
definition of fascism as the incorporation of society and the state onto single entity on a permanent
war footing. The state controls everything in a radically authoritarian social structure. As Quigley
states, the Soviet Union was the most complete embodiment of fascism in WWII. In WWII Germany,
on the other hand, industry retained its independence and in WWII Italy fascism was no more than
an empty slogan.
Same for "progressives". Everyone wants to be "progressive", right? Who wants to be "anti-progressive"?
However, at the end of the day, "progressive" through verbal slights of hand has been nothing
more than a euphemism for "socialist" or, in the extreme, "communist" the verbal slight-of-hand
because we don't tend to use the latter terms in American political discourse.
"Progressives" morphing into a new "far-right" in America is no more mysterious than the Soviet
Union morphing from Leninism to Stalinism or, the Jewish (Trotskyite) globalists fleeing Stalinist
nationalism and then morphing into, first, "Scoop" Jackson Democrats and then into Bushite Republicans.
As you might notice, the real issue is the authoritarian vs. the non-authoritarian state. In
this context, an authoritarian government and social order (as in communism and neoconservatism)
are practical pre-requisites necessity to force humanity to transition to their New World Order.
Again, the defining characteristic of fascism is the unitary state enforced via an authoritarian
political and social structure. Ideological rigor is enforced via the police powers of the state
along with judicial activism and political correctness. Ring a bell?
In the ongoing contest between Trump and the remnants of the American "progressive" movement,
who are the populists and who the authoritarians? Who are the democrats and who are the fascists?
I would say that who lands where in this dichotomy is obvious.
@Alfa158 Is Jimmy Dore really a "Progressive?" (and what does that mean, anyway?) Isn't Jimmy's
show hosted by the Young Turks Network, which is unabashedly Libertarian?
Anyway, what's so great about "the Progressive movement?" Seems to me, they're just pathetic
sheepdogs for the war-crazed Dems. Jimmy should be supporting the #UNRIG movement ("Beyond Trump
& Sanders") for ALL Americans:
On 1 May 2017 Cynthia McKinney, Ellen Brown, and Robert Steele launched
Petras, for some reason, low balls the number of people ejected from assets when the mafia
came to seize real estate in the name of the ruling class and their expensive wars, morality,
the Constitution or whatever shit they could make up to fuck huge numbers of people over. Undoubtedly
just like 9/11, the whole thing was planned in advance. Political whores are clearly useless when
the system is at such extremes.
Banks like Capital One specialize in getting a signature and "giving" a car loan to someone
they know won't be able to pay, but is simply being used, shaken down and repossessed for corporate
gain. " No one held a gun to their head! " Get ready, the police state will in fact put a gun
to your head.
Depending on the time period in question, which might be the case here, more than 20 million
people were put out of homes and/or bankrupted with more to come. Clearly a bipartisan effort
featuring widespread criminal conduct across the country – an attack on the population to sustain
militarism.
If I may add:
"and you also have to dearly pay for you being white male heterosexual for oppressing all colored,
all the women and all the sexually different through the history".
"And if it all fails, we will simply pack you and others like you in a basket of deplorables
and forget about you at election time. If we see that you still don't get with the program we
will reeducate you. Should you resist that in any way we'll incarcerate you. And, no, normal legal
procedure does not work with racists/bigots/haters/whatever we don't like".
"Progressives loudly condemned Trump's overtures for peace with Russia, denouncing it as appeasement
and betrayal!"
Perhaps the spirit of Senator Joseph McCarthy is joyously gloating as progressives (and democrats)
take their place as his heirs and successors and the 21st century incarnation of the House UnAmerican
Activities Committee.
take their place as his heirs and successors and the 21st century incarnation of the House
UnAmerican Activities Committee
which itself was a progressive invention. There was no "right wing" anywhere in sight when
it was estsblished in 1938.
"... Cohen's appearance on Carlson's show last night demonstrated again at what a blistering pace public opinion in the West about Putin and Russia is shifting, for the better. ..."
"... Cohen is always good, but last night he nailed it, calling the media's coverage of Hamburg 'pornography'. ..."
"... It was just a year ago, pre-Trump, that professor Cohen was banned from all the networks, from any major media outlet, and being relentlessly pilloried by the neocon media for being a naive fool for defending Putin and Russia. ..."
"... "The first thing you notice is just how much the press is rooting for this meeting between our president and the Russian President to fail. It's a kind of pornography. Just as there's no love in pornography, there's no American national interest in this bashing of Trump and Putin. ..."
"... Carlson tried to draw Cohen out about who exactly in Washington is so against Assad, and why, and Cohen deflected, demurring - 'I don't know - I'm not an expert'. Of course he knows, as does Carlson - it is an unholy alliance of Israel, Saudi Arabia and their neocon friends in Washington and the media who are pushing this criminal policy, who support ISIS, deliberately. But they can't say so, because, ... well, because. Ask Rupert Murdoch. ..."
Cohen's appearance on Carlson's show last night demonstrated again at what a blistering pace public opinion in the West about
Putin and Russia is shifting, for the better.
Cohen is always good, but last night he nailed it, calling the media's coverage of Hamburg 'pornography'.
Ahh, the power of the apt phrase.
It was just a year ago, pre-Trump, that professor Cohen was banned from all the networks, from any major media outlet, and
being relentlessly pilloried by the neocon media for being a naive fool for defending Putin and Russia.
Last night he was the featured guest on the most watched news show in the country, being cheered on by the host, who has him on
as a regular. And Cohen isn't remotely a conservative. He is a contributing editor at the arch-liberal Nation magazine, of which
his wife is the editor. It doesn't really get pinker than that.
Some choice quotes here, but the whole thing is worth a listen:
"The first thing you notice is just how much the press is rooting for this meeting between our president and the Russian
President to fail. It's a kind of pornography. Just as there's no love in pornography, there's no American national interest in
this bashing of Trump and Putin.
As a historian let me tell you the headline I would write instead:
"What we witnessed today in Hamburg was a potentially historic new detente. an anti-cold-war partnership begun by Trump and
Putin but meanwhile attempts to sabotage it escalate." I've seen a lot of summits between American and Russian presidents, ...
and I think what we saw today was potentially the most fateful meeting ... since the Cold War.
The reason is, is that the relationship with Russia is so dangerous and we have a president who might have been crippled or
cowed by these Russiagate attacks ... yet he was not. He was politically courageous. It went well. They got important things done.
I think maybe today we witnessed president Trump emerging as an American statesman."
Cohen goes on to say that the US should ally with Assad, Iran, and Russia to crush ISIS, with Carlson bobbing his head up and
down in emphatic agreement.
Carlson tried to draw Cohen out about who exactly in Washington is so against Assad, and why, and Cohen deflected, demurring
- 'I don't know - I'm not an expert'. Of course he knows, as does Carlson - it is an unholy alliance of Israel, Saudi Arabia and
their neocon friends in Washington and the media who are pushing this criminal policy, who support ISIS, deliberately. But they can't
say so, because, ... well, because. Ask Rupert Murdoch.
Things are getting better in the US media, but we aren't quite able to call a spade a spade in the land of the free and the home
of the brave.
Political hacks picked up be Clinton stooges in intelligence agencies and guided by Clapper produced what was required on them...
Notable quotes:
"... Stefan Molyneux opens the below video with the song lyrics, "When the walls come crumbling down", as the political analyst comprehensively explains the bullsh**t lie Hillary Clinton and her mainstream media cronies feed the world so as to sabotage Trump's presidency, at the risk of war with Russia. ..."
"... It is a must watch, must share video which puts yet another US Deeep State lie to bed ..."
"... As a reminder as to how stupid the "17 Intelligence Agencies" Russian hacking narrative The FBI did not even get access to the DNC servers. It relied upon data provided by private security firm CrowdStrike, who had to walk back their audit conclusions on the hacks. ..."
"... Because we are certain that the Coast Guard Intelligence Agency, Marine Corps Intelligence Agency, and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are authorities when it comes to US election hacking, and thus should be trusted when they sign off to being "highly confident" of Russian election meddling. ..."
Yesterday
The Duran reported that the New York Times was finally forced to admit that the "17 US intelligence agencies" narrative is completely
made up fake news.
The "17 Intelligence Agencies" Russian hacking narrative was the core foundation for which the entire Trump-Russia collusion/cooperation/connection
was built upon.
Stefan Molyneux opens the below video with the song lyrics, "When the walls come crumbling down", as the political analyst
comprehensively explains the bullsh**t lie Hillary Clinton and her mainstream media cronies feed the world so as to sabotage Trump's
presidency, at the risk of war with Russia.
It is a must watch, must share video which puts yet another US Deeep State lie to bed
As a reminder as to
how stupid the "17 Intelligence Agencies" Russian hacking narrative The FBI did not even get access to the DNC servers. It relied
upon data provided by private security firm CrowdStrike,
who had to walk back their audit
conclusions on the hacks.
Below is a complete list of the 16 intelligence agencies in the US Intelligence Community, headed by the Director of National
Intelligence (DNI), whose statutory leadership is exercised through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), who
under the Obama White House was James R. Clapper making 17 total agencies.
Why the list?
Because we are certain that the Coast Guard Intelligence Agency, Marine Corps Intelligence Agency, and National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency are authorities when it comes to US election hacking, and thus should be trusted when they sign off to being "highly confident"
of Russian election meddling.
"... "They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history – led by some very bad and conflicted people!" ..."
"... If Donald Trump had any kind of presidential strategy and propensity to take command, he would have had all the intercepts of Russian chatter gathered up weeks ago. He would then have had them declassified and made public, even as he launched a criminal prosecution against Obama's hit squad-John Brennan, Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett for illegally unmasking and leaking classified information. ..."
"... Such a course of action would have crushed the Russian interference hysteria in the bud. At bottom, the latter was a rearguard invention of the Deep State and Democratic partisans. They became literally shocked and desperate for a scapegoat early last fall by the prospect that the unthinkable was happening. ..."
"... That became more than evident-and more than pathetic, too-when earlier this morning he tweeted out an attack on his own Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein. At least Nixon fired Elliot Richardson (his Attorney General) and Bill Ruckelshaus (Deputy AG): ..."
"... Mueller is a card-carrying apparatchik of the Deep State, who was there at the founding of today's surveillance monster as Director of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11. Since the whole $75 billion apparatus that eventually emerged was based on a vastly exaggerated threat of global Islamic terrorism that doesn't exist, Russia had to be demonized into order to keep the game going-a transition that Mueller fully subscribed to. ..."
"... To wit, Mueller's #1 hire was the despicable Andrew Weissmann. The latter had led the fraud section of the department's Criminal Division, served as general counsel to the F.B.I. when Mueller was its director, and, more importantly, was the driving force behind the Enron task force the most egregious exercise in prosecutorial abuse and thuggery since the Palmer raids of 1919. ..."
"... Exactly four years ago in June 2013, no one was seriously demonizing Putin or Russia. In fact, the slicksters of CNN were still snickering about Mitt Romney's silly claim during the 2012 election campaign that Russia was the greatest security threat facing America. ..."
"... But then came the Syrian jihadist false flag chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the US intelligence community's flagrant lie that it had proof the villain was Bashar Assad. To the contrary, it subsequently became evident that the primitive rockets that had carried the deadly sarin gas, which killed upwards of 1500 innocent civilians, could not have been fired from regime-held territory; the rockets examined by UN investigators had a range of only a few kilometers, not the 15-20 kilometers from the nearest Syrian base. ..."
"... Needless to say, in the eyes of the neocon War Party, this constructive act of international statesmanship by Putin was the unforgivable sin. It thwarted the next target on their regime change agenda-removal of the Assad government in Syria as a step toward an ultimate attack on its ally, the Shiite regime of Iran. ..."
"... So it did not take long for the Deep State to retaliate. While Putin was basking in the glory of the 2014 winter Olympics at Sochi, the entire apparatus of Imperial Washington – the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department and a long string of Washington funded NGOs - was on the ground in Kiev midwifing the putsch that overthrew Ukraine's constitutionally elected President and Russian ally. ..."
"... Indeed, given the Stalin-era animosity between the Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimean regions of the confected state of Ukraine and the virulent anti-Russian populations elsewhere – including descendants of the Nazi collaborators with Hitler during WWII -- there could have been no other outcome. And that was especially the case after Washington designated "Yats", a neo-Nazi sympathizer named Arseniy Yatseniuk, as the guy to takeover the Ukrainian government at the time of the Kiev uprising. ..."
"... There is nothing like a demonized enemy to keep the $700 billion national security budget flowing and the hideous Warfare State opulence of the Imperial City intact. So why not throw in an allegedly "stolen" US election to garnish the case? ..."
"... In a word, the Little Putsch in Kiev is now begetting a Great Big Coup in the Imperial City. This is a history-shattering development, but don't tell the boys and girls and robo-machines on Wall Street. ..."
"They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice
on the phony story. Nice You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history – led by some very bad and
conflicted people!"
The Donald has never spoken truer words but also has never sunken lower into abject victimhood. Indeed, what is he waiting for
--
handcuffs and a perp walk?
Just to be clear, "he" doesn't need to be the passive object of a "WITCH HUNT" by "they".
If Donald Trump had any kind of presidential strategy and propensity to take command, he would have had all the intercepts
of Russian chatter gathered up weeks ago. He would then have had them declassified and made public, even as he launched a criminal
prosecution against Obama's hit squad-John Brennan, Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett for illegally unmasking and leaking classified
information.
Such a course of action would have crushed the Russian interference hysteria in the bud. At bottom, the latter was a rearguard
invention of the Deep State and Democratic partisans. They became literally shocked and desperate for a scapegoat early last fall
by the prospect that the unthinkable was happening.
Namely, the election by the unwashed masses of an outsider and insurrectionist who could not be counted upon to serve as a "trusty"
for the status quo; and whose naïve but correct instinct to seek a rapprochement with Russia was a mortal threat to the very modus
operandi of the Imperial City.
Moreover, from the very beginning, the Russian interference narrative was rooted in nothing more than standard cyber noise from
Moscow that pales compared to what comes out of Langley (CIA) and Ft. Meade (NSA). And we do mean irrelevant noise.
After all, it didn't take a Kremlinologist from the old Soviet days to figure out that Putin did not favor Clinton, who had likened
him to Hitler. And that he welcomed Trump, who had correctly said NATO was obsolete, that he didn't want to give lethal aid to the
Ukrainians, and had expressed a desire to make a deal with Putin on Syria and numerous other areas of unnecessary confrontation.
So let's start with two obvious points. Namely, that there is no "there, there" and that the president not only has the power
to declassify secret documents at will but in this instance could do so without compromising intelligence community (IC) "sources
and methods" in the slightest.
The latter is the case because after Snowden's revelations in June 2013, the whole world was put on notice and most especially
Washington's adversaries–that it collects in raw form every single electronic digit that passes through the worldwide web and related
communications grids. It boils down to universal and omniscient SIGINT (signals intelligence), and acknowledgment of that fact by
publishing the Russia-Trump intercepts would provide new knowledge to exactly no one.
Nor would it jeopardize the lives of any American spy or agent (HUMINT); it would just document the unconstitutional interference
in the election process that had been committed by the US intelligence agencies and political operatives in the Obama White House.
Yes, we can hear the boxes on the CNN screen harrumphing and spinning noisily that declassifying the "evidence" would amount to
obstruction of justice! That is to say, since Trump's "crime" is axiomatic (i.e. his occupancy of the Oval Office), anything that
gets in the way of his conviction and removal therefrom amounts to "obstruction".
Given that he is up against a Deep State/Dem/Neocon/ mainstream media prosecution, the Donald has no chance of survival short
of an aggressive offensive of the type described above.
But that's not happening because the man is clueless about what he is doing in the White House and is being advised by a cacophonous
coterie of amateurs and nincompoops. So he has no action plan except to impulsively reach for his Twitter account.
That became more than evident-and more than pathetic, too-when earlier this morning he tweeted out an attack on his own Deputy
Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein. At least Nixon fired Elliot Richardson (his Attorney General) and Bill Ruckelshaus (Deputy AG):
"I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt"
So alone with his Twitter account, clueless advisors and pulsating rage, the Donald is instead laying the groundwork for his own
demise. Were this not the White House, it would normally be the point at which they send in the men in white coats with a straight
jacket.
Indeed, that's essentially what Donald's ostensible GOP allies on the Hill are actually doing. RussiaGate is self-evidently a
witch-hunt like few others in American political history. Yet as the mainstream cameras and microphones were thrust at one Congressional
Republican after another yesterday afternoon following Donald's outburst quoted above, there was nary an echo of the agreement.
Even Senator John Thune, an ostensible Swamp-hating conservative, had nothing but praise for Special Counsel Robert Mueller while
affecting an earnest confidence that he would fairly and thoroughly get to the bottom of the matter.
No he won't!
Mueller is a card-carrying apparatchik of the Deep State, who was there at the founding of today's surveillance monster as Director
of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11. Since the whole $75 billion apparatus that eventually emerged was based on a vastly exaggerated
threat of global Islamic terrorism that doesn't exist, Russia had to be demonized into order to keep the game going-a transition
that Mueller fully subscribed to.
So he will "find" extensive Russian interference in the 2016 election and bring the hammer down on the Donald for seeking to prevent
it from coming to light. The clock is now ticking and his investigatory team is being loaded up with prosecutorial killers who have
proven records of thuggery when it comes to finding crimes that make for the fame and fortune of the prosecutors-even if the crime
itself never happened.
To wit, Mueller's #1 hire was the despicable Andrew Weissmann. The latter had led the fraud section of the department's Criminal
Division, served as general counsel to the F.B.I. when Mueller was its director, and, more importantly, was the driving force behind
the Enron task force the most egregious exercise in prosecutorial abuse and thuggery since the Palmer raids of 1919.
Meanwhile, as we said the other day, the GOP elders especially could also not be clearer about what is coming down the pike.
They are not defending Trump with even a modicum of the vigor and resolve that we recall from the early days of Tricky Dick's
ordeal, and, of course, he didn't survive anyway. Instead, it's as if Ryan, McConnell, et al. have offered to hold his coat, while
the Donald pummels himself with a 140-character Twitter Knife that is visible to the entire world.
So there should be no doubt. A Great Big Coup is on the way. But here's the irony of the matter.
Exactly four years ago in June 2013, no one was seriously demonizing Putin or Russia. In fact, the slicksters of CNN were still
snickering about Mitt Romney's silly claim during the 2012 election campaign that Russia was the greatest security threat facing
America.
But then came the Syrian jihadist false flag chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the US intelligence
community's flagrant lie that it had proof the villain was Bashar Assad. To the contrary, it subsequently became evident that the primitive rockets that had carried the deadly sarin gas, which killed
upwards of 1500 innocent civilians, could not have been fired from regime-held territory; the rockets examined by UN investigators
had a range of only a few kilometers, not the 15-20 kilometers from the nearest Syrian base.
In any event, President Obama choose to ignore his own red line and called off the bombers. That, in turn, paved the way for Vladimir
Putin to step into the breach and persuade Assad to give up all of his chemical weapons commitment he fully complied with over the
course of the next year.
Needless to say, in the eyes of the neocon War Party, this constructive act of international statesmanship by Putin was the unforgivable
sin. It thwarted the next target on their regime change agenda-removal of the Assad government in Syria as a step toward an ultimate
attack on its ally, the Shiite regime of Iran.
So it did not take long for the Deep State to retaliate. While Putin was basking in the glory of the 2014 winter Olympics at Sochi,
the entire apparatus of Imperial Washington – the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department and a long string
of Washington funded NGOs - was on the ground in Kiev midwifing the putsch that overthrew Ukraine's constitutionally elected President
and Russian ally.
From there, the Ukrainian civil war and partition of Crimea inexorably followed, as did the escalating campaign against Russia
and its leader.
Indeed, given the Stalin-era animosity between the Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimean regions of the confected state of Ukraine
and the virulent anti-Russian populations elsewhere – including descendants of the Nazi collaborators with Hitler during WWII --
there could have been no other outcome. And that was especially the case after Washington designated "Yats", a neo-Nazi sympathizer
named Arseniy Yatseniuk, as the guy to takeover the Ukrainian government at the time of the Kiev uprising.
So as it turned out, the War Party could not have planned a more fortuitous outcome -- especially after Russia moved to protect
its legitimate interests in its own backyard resulting from the Washington-instigated civil war in Ukraine, including protecting
its 200-year old Naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. The War Party simply characterized these actions falsely as acts of aggression
by a potential sacker of the peace and territorial integrity of its European neighbors.
There is nothing like a demonized enemy to keep the $700 billion national security budget flowing and the hideous Warfare State
opulence of the Imperial City intact. So why not throw in an allegedly "stolen" US election to garnish the case?
In a word, the Little Putsch in Kiev is now begetting a Great Big Coup in the Imperial City. This is a history-shattering development, but don't tell the boys and girls and robo-machines on Wall Street.
Pathetically, they still think its game on.
David Alan Stockman is an author, former businessman and U.S. politician who served as a Republican U.S. Representative from
the state of Michigan and as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information
Clearing House.
"... Donald Trump is not the target of an FBI investigation. Donald Trump has never been the target of an FBI investigation. The FBI is not investigating Trump for collusion, improper relations with a foreign government, treason or any of the other ridiculous things he's been falsely accused of in the fake media. In fact, the FBI is not investigating him at all. ..."
"... So, there was no counter-intelligence case on Trump? There was no investigation of collusion with Russia? But how can that be, after all, Trump has been hectored and harassed by the media from Day 1? His appointments have been blocked, his political agenda has been derailed, and the results of the 2016 elections have been effectively repealed due to the relentless attacks of the media, political elites and high-ranking leaders in the Intelligence Community. Now Comey admits that Trump is not guilty of anything, he's not even a suspect. ..."
"... Trump repeatedly asked Comey to announce that he wasn't under investigation. According to Comey, Trump "emphasized the problems this was causing him" and (Trump) said "We need to get that fact out." But Comey repeatedly refused to publicly acknowledge the truth. Why? ..."
"... It's true, he admitted it himself. Following his first meeting with Trump on January 6, he started recording contents of his private conversations with the president-elect on a secure FBI laptop in his car outside Trump Tower. He didn't even wait until he got back to the office, he did it in the goddamn parking lot. That's what you call "eager". In his testimony he admitted that he kept notes of his private meetings with Trump "from that point forward." ..."
"... Does that sound like the normal activities of dedicated public servant acting in behalf of the elected government or does it sound like someone who's on an assignment to dig up as much dirt as possible on the target of a political smear campaign. ..."
"... Comey is a man with zero integrity. Did you know that? ..."
"... In short, the memo Comey that approved gave a thumbs-up on waterboarding, wall slams, and other forms of torture – all violations of domestic and international law. Then, there's warrantless wiretapping. ."("Let's Check James Comey's Bush Years Record Before He Becomes FBI Director", ACLU) ..."
"... Repeat: "He approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration (including) torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention." How does that square with the media's portrayal of Comey as a man of unshakable integrity and honor? ..."
"... In my mind, Comey tipped his hand when he said that he leaked the memo of his private conversation with Trump to the media in order to precipitate the appointment of a special prosecutor. Think about that for a minute. Here's what he said: ..."
"... because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel ..."
"... Listen to Comey. The man is openly admitting that leaking the memo was all part of a very clearly-defined political strategy to force the appointment of a special prosecutor. That was the political objective from the get go. He doesn't even try to hide it. He wasn't trying to protect himself from 'mean old' Trump. That's baloney! He was laying the groundwork for a massive and expansive investigation into anything and anyone even remotely connected to the Trump team, a gigantic fishing expedition aimed at taking down Trump and his closest allies. That's what Comey's been up to. Only his plan didn't work, did it, because the 'leaked memo' didn't lead to the appointment of the special prosecutor. Instead, someone had to whisper in Trump's ear that he should fire Comey and, ah ha, that's all it took. ..."
"... In other words, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenberg had to step in and give Comey his pink slip before the media could cry "obstruction", creating the perfect opportunity to appoint "hired gun" Robert Mueller as special counsel. Now that the dominoes are in motion, Comey can trundle off to some comfy job at one of the many rightwing Washington think tanks while Mueller gathers together his team of superstar prosecutors to launch their first broadsides on the White House. ..."
"... Clearly, Trump was not trying to impede the investigation. But even if he was, it is a particularly murky area of the law and difficult to prove. ..."
"... lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition . He can be reached at [email protected] . ..."
"... Excellent article. The politicized charge 'obstruction of justice' is nebulous, arcane and insufferably highfalutin, which makes the entire investigation a very appealing opportunity to launch a politically correct witch hunt. Watch the MSM cheer it on. ..."
"... But the endgame is not exclusively about Russia. Ancillary targets include Russia's teetering allies, Syria and Iran. Cui Bono? ..."
"... Good takes all, Mike, and they're the truth. But I'd fire Rosenburg for his betrayals, then fire Mueller for his political selections, all Democrats, most with contributor or employment connections to the Clintons, the Foundation, or the Global Initiative. Those would be a firings for cause and I would fire all their allies, too. Immediately, I'd demand a Grand Jury hearing and have appointed another Special Prosecutor. Nixon wasn't impeached over the Saturday Night Massacre, he was impeached because they had the goods on him. ..."
"... The endless investigations can be terminated by the President on whim. The Congress can then impeach and hold a trial. They would all look like fools because there's nothing there, only their desire to do Trump in. Trump should fire, fire, fire wherever the politics lead in whatever agency. A lot of this is Clinton-driven, too. Jeff Sessions also needs to get on board, carry the frustrated Clinton investigations to a Grand Jury, flip it all back on them and indict Comey, Rosenberg and all their little buddies down below that leaked. Anyone who leaks, lies or obstructs goes to jail. ..."
"... It may sound strange, but I do not believe this entire escapade is about Donald Trump or Russia. It is about our Neocon overlords asserting their unconstitutional primacy over the sovereign will of the American People. ..."
"... If the American people had their way, all our "Neocon overlords" would be in federal prison or Guantanamo Bay, and all their assets seized to pay down the heinous 20 trillion debt their lies have created. ..."
"... Presumably Comey was deeply involved in Obama's illegal spying. ..."
"... Learned thus far; the deep state has more power than the Senate, the HOUSE and all members of the voting public.. Its not about Trump, its about you voters.. you people out their in vote land did not vote for the person the deep state elected.. therefore your elected persons must go.. somehow, he must go.. and believe me the DEEPSTATE has pledged to make it so.. ..."
"... Mueller was not appointed via the congressional "special prosecutor" statute (which was allowed to lapse.) He was appointed by the Justice Departement which means that Trump appointed the man whose job is to destroy him. Why would Trump agree to that when he can simply fire Rosenstein and instal someone who'll get rid of Mueller. Sure, the Washington Post will moan and groan, but who cares. ..."
"... A little discouraged. Don' t think the swamp is drainable. Trump agenda will never be enacted under these circumstances. Maybe Trump should fire Rosenstein and Mueller and then resign, loudly proclaiming truth about swamp. Don't like Pence but maybe few things can get done. Trump underestimated deep state. They ARE in charge. What will the people do ? Become more apathetic? ..."
"... Alternatively, Trump could go out swinging. Fire Rosenstein and Mueller and rally base and see what happens. Can't go on as is. The death by a thousand cuts. ..."
"... In light of Mueller's early actions corroborating his status as an establishment thug and lackey, Trump should fire him, and should fire Rosenstein, particularly since he has the power to do so, and Comey's testimony admits that the leak was intended to get somebody, probably his longtime associate Mueller, in as special prosecutor. As the article shows, the whole thing has been an effort by the power structure to continue its nihilistic war policies. Trump's other proven faults are not the issue. Our survival and the restoration of the rule of law are what is at stake. ..."
"... The problem is that this leads back to the same questions of why Russia is Washington's sworn enemy anyway. Furthermore, what is Trump's motivation in pushing for a detente with Russia, potentially jeopardizing first his candidacy, and now his presidency, with a generally unpopular among the electorate position? ..."
"... I tend to agree with some of the comments above, that this has to do with the Neocons, their hold on power and their plans for Middle Eastern conquest. Russia stands in the way of a lot of their plans. Still, Trump's stance on Russia, and who or what else is behind that, to me is the great mystery in all this. And, to be clear, I don't believe in any kind of ridiculous collusion or blackmail scenario. ..."
"... Trump needs to stage a false flag assasination attempt. Blame it on operatives within the FBI and the upper echelons of congress. Invite bikers for Trump and other patriots to washington, putting them on the payroll and arming them while stating "Due to the assasination attempt I can no longer trust the secret service or Washington establishment for protection." He then needs to have this army occupy both Capitol hill, the CIA and the FBI. etc etc. Its time for Trump to flex his inner Yeltsin. ..."
"... Uh, because he is a tool of the criminal elite who really run the show, which is one reason he was rewarded with a directorship at HSBC in an earlier time. He made beaucoup bucks there they made beaucoup bucks laundering hundreds of billions of drug cartel money. Apple tree. ..."
"... I don't care much for Trump, finding many of his specific domestic policies noxious; but I do have a dog in the fight when the Deep State tries to overturn the election of the Chief Magistrate of the nation because he might upset their applecart. He already fucked with their so-called "trade" deals by deep sixing the TPP, and then he is talking about speaking respectfully with Russia, implicitly rejecting the unipolarity of American Hegemony. What further proof did the Deep State require to set a soft coup into motion? ..."
"... Comey's having previously taken a job as general counsel of Bridgewater, including a reported and unmerited $3+ million severance on leaving, was sufficient reason for Trump to fire him on day one. Comey's due diligence had to have made him aware of–and therefore he apparently wanted to be in on–Dalio's deranged, Stalinesque corporate culture of backstabbing absolutely everyone under the guise of openness. ..."
"... Were Trump to take hysterical pieces like this post seriously it would likely precipitate him into war with Russia. Fortunately that won't be necessary, because Trump can order the FBI to do or stop doing things; the pres has that constitutional authority as Dershowitz has said repeatedly from the begining, so there is no case against Trump for obstruction. Dershowitz has also said anything (jaywalking) is in theory an "impeachable offense" , because impeachment is completely political. ..."
"... JULY 10 = ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF SETH RICH MURDER How about something big on July 10? The date shouldn't be wasted. Over 66,000 people have signed the petition to make this point. There are only 3 days left, but it could still make the 100K mark. ..."
"The Democrats are not fighting Trump over his assault on health care, his attacks on immigrants,
his militaristic bullying around the world, or even his status as a minority president who can
claim no mandate after losing the popular vote. Instead, they have chosen to attack Trump, the
most right-wing president in US history, from the right, denouncing him as insufficiently committed
to a military confrontation with Russia."
- Patrick Martin, "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming", World Socialist Web Site
Donald Trump is not the target of an FBI investigation. Donald Trump has never been the target of an FBI investigation. The FBI is not investigating Trump for collusion, improper relations with a foreign government,
treason or any of the other ridiculous things he's been falsely accused of in the fake media. In
fact, the FBI is not investigating him at all.
Last week, former FBI Director James Comey admitted publicly what he has known all along: that
Trump was not a suspect in the Russia hacking probe and never has been. Here's the story from Politico:
"Comey assured Trump he wasn't under investigation during their first meeting. He said he discussed
with FBI leadership before his meeting with the president-elect whether to disclose that he wasn't
personally under investigation. "That was true; we did not have an open counter-intelligence case
on him," Comey said." (Politico)
So, there was no counter-intelligence case on Trump? There was no investigation of collusion with
Russia? But how can that be, after all, Trump has been hectored and harassed by the media from Day 1?
His appointments have been blocked, his political agenda has been derailed, and the results of the
2016 elections have been effectively repealed due to the relentless attacks of the media, political
elites and high-ranking leaders in the Intelligence Community. Now Comey admits that Trump is not
guilty of anything, he's not even a suspect.
What's going on here? Why didn't Comey clear the air earlier so the American people would know
that their president wasn't in bed with a foreign power? Why did he allow this farce to continue
when he knew there was no substance to the claims? Did he enjoy seeing Trump twisting in the wind
or was there some more sinister "political" motive behind his omission?
Trump repeatedly asked Comey to announce that he wasn't under investigation. According to Comey,
Trump "emphasized the problems this was causing him" and (Trump) said "We need to get that fact out."
But Comey repeatedly refused to publicly acknowledge the truth. Why?
Comey never answered that question to Trump, but he did explain his reasoning to the Senate Intelligence
Committee last week. He said he didn't want to announce that Trump was not part of the Bureau's Russia
probe because "it would create a duty to correct, should that change."
A "duty to correct"? Are you kidding me? What kind of bullshit answer is that? How many hours
of legal brainstorming did it take to come up with that lame-ass excuse?
Let's state the obvious: Comey wanted to maintain the cloud of suspicion that was hanging over
Trump because it helped to feed the perception that Trump was a traitor who collaborated with Russia
to win the election. By remaining silent, Comey helped to fuel the public hysteria and reinforce
the belief that Trump was guilty of criminal wrongdoing. That is why Comey never spoke out before,
it's because his silence was already achieving the result he sought which was to inflict as much
damage as possible on Trump and his administration.
Did you know that Comey was spying on Trump from Day 1?
It's true, he admitted it himself. Following his first meeting with Trump on January 6, he started
recording contents of his private conversations with the president-elect on a secure FBI laptop in
his car outside Trump Tower. He didn't even wait until he got back to the office, he did it in the
goddamn parking lot. That's what you call "eager". In his testimony he admitted that he kept notes
of his private meetings with Trump "from that point forward."
Does that sound like the normal activities of dedicated public servant acting in behalf of the
elected government or does it sound like someone who's on an assignment to dig up as much dirt as
possible on the target of a political smear campaign.
Isn't that what Comey was really up to?
Comey is a man with zero integrity. Did you know that?
"There's one very big problem with describing Comey as some sort of civil libertarian: some
facts suggest otherwise. While Comey deserves credit for stopping an illegal spying program in
dramatic fashion, he also approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration
during his time as deputy attorney general. Those included torture, warrantless wiretapping, and
indefinite detention.
On 30 December 2004, a memo addressed to James Comey was issued that superseded the infamous
memo that defined torture as pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical
injury, such as organ failure". The memo to Comey seemed to renounce torture but did nothing of
the sort. The key sentence in the opinion is tucked away in footnote 8. It concludes that the
new Comey memo did not change the authorizations of interrogation tactics in any earlier memos.
In short, the memo Comey that approved gave a thumbs-up on waterboarding, wall slams, and other
forms of torture – all violations of domestic and international law. Then, there's warrantless
wiretapping. ."("Let's Check James Comey's Bush Years Record Before He Becomes FBI Director",
ACLU)
Repeat: "He approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration (including)
torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention." How does that square with the media's portrayal of Comey as a man of unshakable integrity and
honor?
It doesn't square at all, does it? The media is obviously lying. Now ask yourself this: Can a man who rubber-stamped waterboarding be trusted? No, he can't be trusted because he's already proved himself to be inherently immoral.
Would a man like Comey agree to use his position and authority to try to "undo" the damage he
did prior to the election when he announced the FBI was reopening its investigation of Hillary Clinton?
In other words, was Comey being blackmailed to gather illicit material on Trump?
I think it's very likely, although entirely unprovable. Even so, Comey has been way too eager
to frame Trump for things for which he is not guilty. Why has he been so eager? Was he really just
protecting himself as he says or was he gathering information to build a legal case against Trump?
In my mind, Comey tipped his hand when he said that he leaked the memo of his private conversation
with Trump to the media in order to precipitate the appointment of a special prosecutor. Think about
that for a minute. Here's what he said:
"My judgment was I needed to get that out into the public square. So I asked a friend of mine
to share the content of the memo with a reporter. I didn't do it myself for a variety of reasons,
but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel
, so I asked a close friend of mine to do it."
Listen to Comey. The man is openly admitting that leaking the memo was all part of a very clearly-defined
political strategy to force the appointment of a special prosecutor. That was the political objective
from the get go. He doesn't even try to hide it. He wasn't trying to protect himself from 'mean old'
Trump. That's baloney! He was laying the groundwork for a massive and expansive investigation into
anything and anyone even remotely connected to the Trump team, a gigantic fishing expedition aimed
at taking down Trump and his closest allies. That's what Comey's been up to. Only his plan didn't
work, did it, because the 'leaked memo' didn't lead to the appointment of the special prosecutor.
Instead, someone had to whisper in Trump's ear that he should fire Comey and, ah ha, that's all it
took.
In other words, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenberg had to step in and give Comey his pink
slip before the media could cry "obstruction", creating the perfect opportunity to appoint "hired
gun" Robert Mueller as special counsel. Now that the dominoes are in motion, Comey can trundle off
to some comfy job at one of the many rightwing Washington think tanks while Mueller gathers together
his team of superstar prosecutors to launch their first broadsides on the White House.
Whoever wrote this script deserves an Oscar. This is really first-rate political theater.
Now it's up to Mueller to prove that Trump tried to obstruct the investigation by asking Comey
to go easy on former national security advisor General Michael Flynn. (According to Comey, Trump
said, "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy.
I hope you can let this go.") It might sound like obstruction, but there are real problems with this
type of prosecution particularly the fact that Trump denies the allegations. Also, Comey has acknowledged
that Trump expressed his support for the overall goals of the investigation when he said, "that if
there were some 'satellite' associates of his who did something wrong, it would be good to find that
out."
Clearly, Trump was not trying to impede the investigation. But even if he was, it is a particularly
murky area of the law and difficult to prove. Here's a short clip from an article by Professor Jonathan
Turley at George Washington University who helps to clarify the point:
"The desire for some indictable or impeachable offense by President Trump has distorted the
legal analysis to an alarming degree. Analysts seem far too thrilled by the possibility of a crime
by Trump. The legal fact is that Comey's testimony does not establish a prima facie - or even
a strong - case for obstruction.
It is certainly true that if Trump made these comments, his conduct is wildly inappropriate.
However, talking like Tony Soprano does not make you Tony Soprano .
The crime of obstruction of justice has not been defined as broadly as suggested by commentators The
mere fact that Trump asked to speak to Comey alone would not implicate the president in obstruction.
.
It would be a highly dangerous interpretation to allow obstruction charges at this stage. If
prosecutors can charge people at the investigation stage of cases, a wide array of comments or
conduct could be criminalized. It is quite common to have such issues arise early in criminal
cases. Courts have limited the crime precisely to avoid this type of open-ended crime where prosecutors
could threaten potential witnesses with charges unless they cooperated.
We do not indict or impeach people for being boorish or clueless or simply being Donald Trump."
("James Comey's testimony doesn't make the case for impeachment or obstruction against Donald
Trump", USA Today)
The fact that the obstruction charge won't stick is not going to stop Mueller from rummaging around
and making Trump's life a living Hell. Heck no. He's going to dig through his old phone records,
bank accounts, tax returns, shaky land deals, ex girl friends, whatever it takes. His prosecutorial
tentacles will extend into every nook and cranny of Trump's private life and affairs until he latches
onto some particularly sordid incident or transaction he can use he can use to disgrace, discredit,
and demonize Trump to the point that impeachment proceedings seem like a welcome relief. It should
be obvious by now, that the deep state elites who launched this coup are not going to be satisfied
until Trump is forced from office and the results of the 2016 presidential election are wiped out.
But, why? Why is Trump so hated by these people?
Trump is not being attacked because of his reactionary political agenda, but because he's been
deemed insufficiently hostile to Washington's sworn enemy, Russia. It's all about Russia. Trump wanted
to "normalize" relations with Moscow which pitted him against the powerful US foreign policy establishment.
Now Trump has to be taught a lesson. He must be crushed, humiliated and exiled. And that's probably
the way this will end.
Let me get this straight: Comey leaks a memo to the NY Times saying that Trump pressured him
to go easy on Flynn. He hoped that the leak would result in an "obstruction" charge against Trump.
But it doesn't work.
So, Rod Rosenstein–who has convenently replaced Sessions– talks Trump into firing Comey. Why?
Because Rosenstein is working for the other team and he needs Trump to do something stupid
that REALLY looks like obstruction, so he fires the head of the FBI. (Again, according to Salon,
firing Comey was Rosenstein's idea)
A week later, Rosenstein –without consulting Trump– appoints deep state handyman and political
assassin, Bob Mueller. So, in effect, Rosenstein appointed a special prosecutor to address the
appearence of obstruction that he created when he told Trump to fire Comey.
How's that for symetry!
Then on Tuesday, Rosenstein was asked what he would do if the president ordered him to fire
Mueller. Rosenstein said, "I'm not going to follow any orders unless I believe those are lawful
and appropriate orders." He added later: "As long as I'm in this position, he's not going to be
fired without good cause," which he said he would have to put in writing.
Oh man, this thing has "set up" written all over it. The whole thing stinks to high heaven
[ ] Comey's defenders were left sputtering that the fired FBI director had repeatedly affirmed
the 'fact' of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and that Comey had called Trump
a liar. The President's response was to hint again that he had recordings of his conversations
with Comey, to which the ex-director cockily declared 'Lordy I hope there are tapes'. This of
course, is a bluff by Comey and his derp state/Trump hating media backers, since Comey's entire
argument for obstruction of justice rests on his feelings/interpretations of a conversation alone
with the President, rather than any actual evidence of obstructing actions by Administration officials.
The only thing known for sure as of this posting is that the U.S. Secret Service says it does
not have recordings of the private Trump-Comey conversation. Meaning the President may have used
a personal recording device to protect himself from Comey's subsequent write up and self-serving
leaked recollections of their conversation. For more on the crookedness of Comey, read this summary
by Mike Whitney at Unz Review. [ ]
Excellent article. The politicized charge 'obstruction of justice' is nebulous, arcane and
insufferably highfalutin, which makes the entire investigation a very appealing opportunity to
launch a politically correct witch hunt. Watch the MSM cheer it on.
Meanwhile, the broad and well-earned suspicions surrounding the Clintons and their money-laundering
foundation will be moved aside and slowly forgotten, as planned.
Trump's enemies will use this open-ended 'investigation' to cloud and sully every action the
President makes. It is a legalistic act of war using the courts as cover. Disgraceful.
But the endgame is not exclusively about Russia. Ancillary targets include Russia's teetering allies, Syria and Iran. Cui Bono?
Seen from Europe the hearings by the USA Senate seem a comedy, if it was not serious. In my
view the effort is to prevent talks with Russia, in order to get a normal relation with that country.
At all costs Russia must remain the dangerous enemy of the USA. Why ?
I suppose on the on hand the desire for USA world domination, on the other hand the fear, that
existed in the USA since the 1917 Lenin coup, that Europe's trade relations with the east would
become more important than across the Atlantic.
Antony C. Sutton, ´Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution', 1974 New Rochelle, N.Y.
Good takes all, Mike, and they're the truth. But I'd fire Rosenburg for his
betrayals, then fire Mueller for his political selections, all Democrats, most with contributor
or employment connections to the Clintons, the Foundation, or the Global Initiative. Those would
be a firings for cause and I would fire all their allies, too. Immediately, I'd demand a Grand
Jury hearing and have appointed another Special Prosecutor. Nixon wasn't impeached over the Saturday
Night Massacre, he was impeached because they had the goods on him.
The endless investigations
can be terminated by the President on whim. The Congress can then impeach and hold a trial. They
would all look like fools because there's nothing there, only their desire to do Trump in. Trump
should fire, fire, fire wherever the politics lead in whatever agency. A lot of this is Clinton-driven,
too. Jeff Sessions also needs to get on board, carry the frustrated Clinton investigations to
a Grand Jury, flip it all back on them and indict Comey, Rosenberg and all their little buddies
down below that leaked. Anyone who leaks, lies or obstructs goes to jail.
This IS manageable, Jeff Sessions needs to man up here, or another AG needs to be in his place.
Thank you for a fine article. It may sound strange, but I do not believe this entire escapade is about Donald Trump or Russia.
It is about our Neocon overlords asserting their unconstitutional primacy over the sovereign
will of the American People.
If the American people had their way, all our "Neocon overlords" would be in federal prison
or Guantanamo Bay, and all their assets seized to pay down the heinous 20 trillion debt their
lies have created.
Rather than be held to ACCOUNT for the gigantic mess they have made, the stupid wars they "lied
us into", and the trillions they have pilfered from the taxpayer in the process They put on this
" Comey (dog) and Mueller (pony) show to deflect from their stupendous failures and horrendous
criminality.
On day ONE of his Presidency, Donald Trump should have called in "the Marines", and started
seizing assets (up ,down, left and right) to recoup the losses our nation has endured.
The American people should be witnessing a Nuremberg like trial, today, where all our treasonous,
defrauding "elites" are admonished, shamed, and sentenced before the entire world.
@Mike Whitney Yes the role of Rosenstein and his background needs exploring. Firing Comey
was the right thing to do I think, he and they would have worked something anyway.
Frank Qattrone and Martha Stewart could tell you that you can do nothing wrong but they can
still put you in prison. Trump needs to be careful and get some good advice, I think so far he
hasn't taken this seriously enough. Seems clear Mueller has a conflict and that a special counsel
was appointed on false pretext.
Learned thus far; the deep state has more power than the Senate, the HOUSE and all members
of the voting public.. Its not about Trump, its about you voters.. you people out their in vote land did not vote
for the person the deep state elected.. therefore your elected persons must go.. somehow, he must
go.. and believe me the DEEPSTATE has pledged to make it so..
Why should Trump hire his own executioner?
Would you? Would you try to help the people who are trying to frame you for nothing?
Comey already admitted that there wasn't even an investigation.
Why wasn't there an investigation?
Because they have nothing on Trump. Nothing. That's why Comey "the waterboarder" agreed to frame
him on the obstruction charge. Because they have Nothing.
Mueller was not appointed via the congressional "special prosecutor" statute (which was allowed
to lapse.) He was appointed by the Justice Departement which means that Trump appointed the man
whose job is to destroy him. Why would Trump agree to that when he can simply fire Rosenstein
and instal someone who'll get rid of Mueller. Sure, the Washington Post will moan and groan, but who cares.
If Congress thinks there is enough evidence here to prosecute Trump, LET THEM APPOINT THEIR
OWN SPECIAL PROSECUTOR.
A little discouraged.
Don' t think the swamp is drainable.
Trump agenda will never be enacted under these circumstances.
Maybe Trump should fire Rosenstein and Mueller and then resign, loudly proclaiming truth about
swamp.
Don't like Pence but maybe few things can get done.
Trump underestimated deep state.
They ARE in charge.
What will the people do ?
Become more apathetic?
Alternatively, Trump could go out swinging.
Fire Rosenstein and Mueller and rally base and see what happens.
Can't go on as is.
The death by a thousand cuts.
In light of Mueller's early actions corroborating his status as an establishment thug and lackey,
Trump should fire him, and should fire Rosenstein, particularly since he has the power to do so,
and Comey's testimony admits that the leak was intended to get somebody, probably his longtime
associate Mueller, in as special prosecutor. As the article shows, the whole thing has been an
effort by the power structure to continue its nihilistic war policies. Trump's other proven faults
are not the issue. Our survival and the restoration of the rule of law are what is at stake.
I emigrated to Canada 10 years ago, fortunately being a dual citizen. One of the major reasons
I did so was the Martha Stewart case mentioned by a commenter above. I didn't think much of Martha
Stewart personally, but if she could be prosecuted despite the fifth amendment for a statement
made not under oath exclusively on the say-so of a government agent, then there was no longer
due process in the yankee imperium.
The fact the courts had allowed this "law" to go unchallenged
was proof that the rule of law no longer obtained. That was a key factor in my deliberations about
what to do. I also find it discouraging that counterpunch apparently did not see fit to publish
this Whitney article, probably because it is too much on point and they don't want to fully break
with the traditional left, which has destroyed itself by being taken over by fascists like the
Clintons and Tony Blair. The yankee imperium needs a figure like Corbyn to put things right again,
not a sell-out like Sanders.
Republicans in Congress surely don't like Trump.
However, they better start getting on board with him.
They are tied together, whether they like it or not.
what i find so weird, is the almost immediate flip-flop of so-called progressives/dem'rats
yelling full-throatedly for violence against -not just all things t-rumpian- ALL those who fail
ANY trivial PC litmus test they have their about-face on -essentially- renouncing nonviolence,
adopting Empire's motto of 'might makes right', and going full berserker against the rest of the
99% is too sudden and severe to be anything but an astroturf wannabe purple revolution with hillary's
puppet masters pulling the strings
IF they were actually calling for jihad against EMPIRE, instead of their fellow pathetic nekkid
apes, i could get behind that but their petulant excuses for why they should be given free reign
to 'punch a nazi' (ie ANYONE who disagrees with me), the disgusting shilling for hillary/dem'rats/Empire
is maddening
.
don't give a shit about t-rump; but they hound him out of office, i will consider that a direct
assault on my small-dee democracy, that a duly elected official is run off by hijacking the mechanisms
of state to pursue the agenda of the 1% is not right, though done numerous times
.
i think they might find that 100+ million PISSED-OFF, nothing-to-lose unemployed may consider
that the straw that broke the camel's back, and soros and his cabal of deep state slime won't
like the pushback when bubba gets out of the recliner
.
come the revolution idiot dem'rats appear to be itching for, just WHICH SIDE do stupid libtards
think the police, natl guard, military, etc are going to come down on ? ? ?
(hint: NOT the libtard side )
"Instead, someone had to whisper in Trump's ear that he should fire Comey and, ah ha, that's
all it took. In other words, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosen berg had to step
in"
The problem is that this leads back to the same questions of why Russia is Washington's sworn
enemy anyway. Furthermore, what is Trump's motivation in pushing for a detente with Russia, potentially
jeopardizing first his candidacy, and now his presidency, with a generally unpopular among the
electorate position?
I tend to agree with some of the comments above, that this has to do with the Neocons, their
hold on power and their plans for Middle Eastern conquest. Russia stands in the way of a lot of
their plans. Still, Trump's stance on Russia, and who or what else is behind that, to me is the
great mystery in all this. And, to be clear, I don't believe in any kind of ridiculous collusion
or blackmail scenario.
We here in Ft. Meade are having a good laugh. One of our assets, a shyster named Rosenstein
(that's Scottish, isn't it?) gives Trumpenstein a little pinprick in the back (not even a stab)
and the silly old jooie tool folds like a cheap lawn chair. No wall, no tax cuts, no ending the
jooie wars for the izzies, no mass deportations, no curbing the jooie central bank .just tacky
soap opera histrionics for the few interested in the doings in wash dc.
Trump needs to stage a false flag assasination attempt.
Blame it on operatives within the FBI and the upper echelons of congress.
Invite bikers for Trump and other patriots to washington, putting them on the payroll and arming
them while stating "Due to the assasination attempt I can no longer trust the secret service or
Washington establishment for protection."
He then needs to have this army occupy both Capitol hill, the CIA and the FBI.
etc etc.
Its time for Trump to flex his inner Yeltsin.
Uh, because he is a tool of the criminal elite who really run the show, which is one reason
he was rewarded with a directorship at HSBC in an earlier time. He made beaucoup bucks there
they made beaucoup bucks laundering hundreds of billions of drug cartel money. Apple tree.
@Mike Whitney Put Rosenstein under oath and ask him about any communications and agreements
and meetings he may have had with Comey or Mueller before he appointed a special prosecutor.
Do the same thing with Comey and Mueller in regard to Rosenstein. Trump's attorney should do these interrogations.
I feel that, despite the exhaustive process, this one has to be played- all 19 holes. Everyone
is going to demand a good stiff one at the nineteenth. Given his resume, Rosenstein was a good
choice by Trump. Sessions may regret his recusal but, Rosenstein may feel that his Frosted Flakes
breakfast will carry the day. One should not prejudice him. Trump may have snagged a few and ended
up in a sand trap but, he's still below par and we're only on the forth fairway. I did some digging
and found that Rod's from Philly. Just thought I would throw that in.
You can't judge a book by it's cover. The guy will be a good caddy.
@Mike Whitney Thank you, Mr. Whitney. This comment and comment #12 delineate the mechanics
of the set-up with laser-like precision.
We are in your debt for articulating the hinge points of this assault on the Constitutional
order. I don't care much for Trump, finding many of his specific domestic policies noxious; but
I do have a dog in the fight when the Deep State tries to overturn the election of the Chief Magistrate
of the nation because he might upset their applecart. He already fucked with their so-called "trade"
deals by deep sixing the TPP, and then he is talking about speaking respectfully with Russia,
implicitly rejecting the unipolarity of American Hegemony. What further proof did the Deep State
require to set a soft coup into motion?
Comey's having previously taken a job as general counsel of Bridgewater, including a reported
and unmerited $3+ million severance on leaving, was sufficient reason for Trump to fire him on
day one. Comey's due diligence had to have made him aware of–and therefore he apparently wanted
to be in on–Dalio's deranged, Stalinesque corporate culture of backstabbing absolutely everyone
under the guise of openness.
Dalio may be very rich, but he's an evil man who we may assume saw in Comey a kindred spirit.
Having a Ray Dalio protege leading the FBI suggests agents supported him, if that's actually the
case, out of fear and not allegiance.
Were Trump to take hysterical pieces like this post seriously it would likely precipitate him
into war with Russia. Fortunately that won't be necessary, because Trump can order the FBI to
do or stop doing things; the pres has that constitutional authority as Dershowitz has said repeatedly
from the begining, so there is no case against Trump for obstruction. Dershowitz has also said
anything (jaywalking) is in theory an "impeachable offense" , because impeachment is completely
political.
They want Trump to quit and are predicting impeachment in an attempt to get him to just go,
but even if Trump got fed up and wanted to quit, he couldn't now, because without the protection
of office, his fortune (at least) would be destroyed. As for the Russia innuendo, it is always
open to Trump to humiliate Russia with a military initiative (in Syria for example), which would
prove he has nothing to hide. As a major conflict with Russian proxies beckoned, the country would
look askance at scarce domestic intelligence resources being used for an old tax or sexual harassment
line of investigation against the sitting president. Knowing what kind of a man he is, who can
doubt that Trump wouldn't hesitate to kill Russians if that is what it took to turn the heat on
his opponents..
If the American people had their way, all our "Neocon overlords" would be in federal prison
or Guantanamo Bay, and all their assets seized to pay down the heinous 20 trillion debt their
lies have created.
@Mark Green "Ancillary targets" are American citizens. (Syria and Iran are much clearer direct
targets.)
Trump has done some great things. Recognition of Fake News and the Deep State threatened a
much bigger awakening. So Trump had to be diminished. Sure, he's a mixed bag, but his defeat of
Killary was a blessing. His direct communication (Twitter) and exposure of the MSM was brilliant.
As you say, 'obstruction of justice' is nebulous. Going on the defensive is a loser's game. There must be a counter-attack. What have we
got? Please, if you have something better, something simpler to put in meme and slogan, let's
have it, but I see Who Killed Seth Rich as a powerful offensive. You don't even have to solve
it. Just get the case broadcast. Do you know that only this week, Seth Rich's neighbor has come
out as a witness? (NOT a witness of the shooting, but of the immediate aftermath, police, etc.
Seth may have been totally beat down before he was shot.)
JULY 10 = ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF SETH RICH MURDER How about something big on July 10? The date shouldn't be wasted. Over 66,000 people have signed
the petition to make this point. There are only 3 days left, but it could still make the 100K
mark.
"..carry the frustrated Clinton investigations to a Grand Jury, flip it all
back on them and indict Comey, Rosenberg and all their little buddies down below that leaked "
YES, SO TRUE!! Big mistake to let Clinton off the hook. And what was her involvement in the
murder of Seth Rich? Investigate the DNC, Lynch, Comey, Clinton – all of them.
That's a good idea. Should be public. He needs to be fired any way. The person or persons who
recommended Rosenstein need to be fired also. Putting him under is an excellent idea. Trump needs
to hear it or read it. IMO, Rosenstein doesn't have a resumè that him suspect.
"... A few days before his firing, Mr. Comey reportedly had asked for still more resources to hunt the Russian bear. Pundit piranhas swarmed to charge Mr. Trump with trying to thwart the investigation into how the Russians supposedly "interfered" to help him win the election. ..."
"... Truth is, President Trump had ample reason to be fed up with Mr. Comey, in part for his lack of enthusiasm to investigate actual, provable crimes related to "Russia-gate" -- like leaking information from highly sensitive intercepted communications to precipitate the demise of Trump aide Michael Flynn ..."
"... we suspect Mr. Comey already knows who was responsible.) ..."
"... In contrast, Mr. Comey evinced strong determination to chase after ties between Russia and the Trump campaign until the cows came home. In the meantime, the investigation (already underway for 10 months) would itself cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump's presidency and put the kibosh on plans to forge a more workable relationship with Russia -- a win-win for the establishment and the FBI/CIA/NSA "Deep State"; a lose-lose for the president. ..."
"... So far, it has been all smoke and mirrors with no chargeable offenses and not a scintilla of convincing evidence of Russian "meddling" in the election. The oft-cited, but evidence-free, CIA/FBI/NSA report of Jan. 6, crafted by "hand-picked" analysts, according to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper , is of a piece with the "high-confidence," but fraudulent, National Intelligence Estimate 15 years ago about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ..."
"... On March 31, 2017, WikiLeaks released original CIA documents - ignored by mainstream media - showing that the agency had created a program allowing it to break into computers and servers and make it look like others did it by leaving telltale signs like Cyrillic markings, ..."
"... It is altogether possible that the hacking attributed to Russia was actually one of several "active measures" undertaken by a cabal consisting of the CIA, FBI, NSA and Mr. Clapper - the same agencies responsible for the lame, evidence-free memorandum of Jan. 6. ..."
"... Mr. Comey displayed considerable discomfort on March 20, explaining to the House Intelligence Committee why the FBI did not insist on getting physical access to the Democratic National Committee computers in order to do its own proper forensics, but chose to rely on the those done by DNC contractor Crowdstrike. Could this be explained by Mr. Comey's fear that FBI technicians not fully briefed on CIA/NSA/FBI Deep State programs might uncover a lot more than he wanted? Did this play a role in Mr. Trump's firing of Mr. Comey? ..."
"... President Trump has entered into a high-stakes gamble in confronting the Deep State and its media allies over the evidence-free accusations of his colluding with Russia. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, publicly warned him of the risk earlier this year. "You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," ..."
Donald Trump
said he had fired FBI
Director James
Comey over "this Russia thing, with Trump and Russia." The president labeled it a "made-up story" and, by all appearances, he
is mostly correct.
A few days before his firing, Mr. Comey reportedly had asked for still more resources to hunt the Russian bear. Pundit piranhas
swarmed to charge Mr. Trump with trying to thwart the investigation into how the Russians supposedly "interfered" to help him win
the election.
But can that commentary bear close scrutiny, or is it the "
phony narrative "
Senate
Republican Whip John Cornyn of Texas claims it to be? Mr. Cornyn has quipped that, if impeding the investigation was Mr. Trump's
aim, "This strikes me as a lousy way to do it. All it does is heighten the attention given to the issue."
Truth is, President Trump had ample reason to be fed up with Mr. Comey, in part for his lack of enthusiasm to investigate
actual, provable crimes related to "Russia-gate" -- like leaking information from highly sensitive intercepted communications to
precipitate the demise of Trump aide
Michael
Flynn . Mr. Flynn was caught "red-handed," so to speak, talking with Russia's ambassador last December. (In our experience,
finding the culprit for that leak should not be very difficult; we suspect Mr. Comey already knows who was responsible.)
In contrast, Mr. Comey evinced strong determination to chase after ties between Russia and the Trump campaign until the cows
came home. In the meantime, the investigation (already
underway for 10 months)
would itself cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump's presidency and put the kibosh on plans to forge a more workable relationship
with Russia -- a win-win for the establishment and the FBI/CIA/NSA "Deep State"; a lose-lose for the president.
So far, it has been all smoke and mirrors with no chargeable offenses and not a scintilla of convincing evidence of Russian
"meddling" in the election. The oft-cited, but evidence-free, CIA/FBI/NSA report of Jan. 6, crafted by "hand-picked" analysts, according
to then-Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper , is of a piece with the "high-confidence," but fraudulent, National Intelligence Estimate 15 years ago about weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq.
But what about "Russia hacking," the centerpiece of accusations of Kremlin "interference" to help Mr.Trump?
On March 31, 2017,
WikiLeaks released original CIA documents - ignored by mainstream media - showing that the agency had created a program allowing
it to break into computers and servers and make it look like others did it by leaving telltale signs like Cyrillic markings,
for example. The capabilities shown in what WikiLeaks calls the "Vault 7"
trove of CIA documents required the creation of hundreds of millions of lines of source code. At $25 per line of code, that amounts
to about $2.5 billion for each 100 million code lines. But the Deep State has that kind of money and would probably consider the
expenditure a good return on investment for "proving" the Russians hacked.
It is altogether possible that the hacking attributed to Russia was actually one of several "active measures" undertaken by
a cabal consisting of the CIA, FBI, NSA and Mr. Clapper - the same agencies responsible for the lame, evidence-free memorandum of
Jan. 6.
Mr. Comey displayed considerable discomfort on March 20, explaining to the House Intelligence Committee why the FBI did not
insist on getting physical access to the Democratic National Committee computers in order to do its own proper forensics, but chose
to rely on the those done by DNC contractor Crowdstrike. Could this be explained by Mr. Comey's fear that FBI technicians not fully
briefed on CIA/NSA/FBI Deep State programs might uncover a lot more than he wanted? Did this play a role in Mr. Trump's firing of
Mr. Comey?
President Trump has entered into a high-stakes gamble in confronting the Deep State and its media allies over the evidence-free
accusations of his colluding with Russia. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, publicly warned him of the
risk earlier this year. "You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," Mr.
Schumer told MSNBC's
Rachel
Maddow on Jan. 3.
If Mr. Trump continues to "take on" the Deep State, he will be fighting uphill, whether he's in the right or not. It is far from
certain he will prevail.
Ray McGovern ([email protected]) was a CIA analyst for 27 years; he briefed the president's daily brief one-on-one to
President Reagan's most senior national security officials from 1981-85. William Binney ([email protected]) worked for
NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created
many of the collection systems still used by NSA.
The public owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to both Mr. McGovern and Mr. Binney, who are substantial individuals with sterling
reputations, for putting themselves forward and informing the public of the crimes that are taking place in DC behind closed doors.
The fact that paid shills and trolls would make the effort to post content free criticisms of this article only serves to underline
the article's importance to a thoughtful reader. The people who sponsor these posters obviously have complete contempt for the
public. However, each day, thanks to articles like this and the idiotic attempts to criticize them, more and more people are becoming
aware of the fraud that is DC.
"... Ray suggests that Brennan and also Comey may been at the center of a "Deep State" combined CIA-NSA-FBI cabal working to discredit the Trump candidacy and delegitimize his presidency. Brennan in particular was uniquely well placed to fabricate the Russian hacker narrative that has been fully embraced by Congress and the media even though no actual evidence supporting that claim has yet been produced. As WikiLeaks has now revealed that the CIA had the technical ability to hack into sites surreptitiously while leaving behind footprints that would attribute the hack to someone else, including the Russians, it does not take much imagination to consider that the alleged trail to Moscow might have been fabricated. If that is so, this false intelligence has in turn proven to be of immense value to those seeking to present "proof" that the Russian government handed the presidency to Donald Trump. ..."
"... Robert Parry asked in an article on May 10 th whether we are seeing is "Watergate redux or 'Deep State' coup?" and then followed up with a second Piece "The 'Soft Coup' of Russia-gate" on the 13 th . In other words, is this all a cover-up of wrongdoing by the White House akin to President Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox and the resignations of both the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General or is it something quite different, an undermining of an elected president who has not actually committed any "high crimes and misdemeanors" to force his removal from office. ..."
"... Parry sees the three key players in the scheme as John Brennan of CIA, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and James Comey of the FBI. Comey's role in the "coup" was key as it consisted of using his office to undercut both Hillary Clinton and Trump, neither of whom was seen as a truly suitable candidate by the Deep State. He speculates that a broken election might well have resulted in a vote in the House of Representatives to elect the new president, a process that might have produced a Colin Powell presidency as Powell actually received three votes in the Electoral College and therefore was an acceptable candidate under the rules governing the electoral process. ..."
"... Yes, the scheme is bizarre, but Parry carefully documents how Russiagate has developed and how the national security and intelligence organs have been key players as it moved along, often working by leaking classified information. ..."
"... anyone even vaguely connected with Trump who also had contact with Russia or Russians has been regarded as a potential traitor. Carter Page, for example, who was investigated under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant, was under suspicion because he made a speech in Moscow which was mildly critical of the west's interaction with Russia after the fall of communism. ..."
"... Parry's point is that there is a growing Washington consensus that consists of traditional liberals and progressives as well as Democratic globalist interventionists and neoconservatives who believe that Donald Trump must be removed from office no matter what it takes. ..."
"... The interventionists and neocons in particular already control most of the foreign policy mechanisms but they continue to see Trump as a possible impediment to their plans for aggressive action against a host of enemies, most particularly Russia. ..."
"... Ray has been strongly critical of the current foreign policy, most particularly of the expansion of various wars, claims of Damascus's use of chemical weapons, and the cruise missile attack on Syria. Robert in his latest article describes Trump as narcissistic and politically incompetent. But their legitimate concerns are that we are moving in a direction that is far more dangerous than Trump. A soft coup engineered by the national security and intelligence agencies would be far more dangerous to our democracy than anything Donald Trump can do. ..."
"... Brennan is a particularly unsavory character. There has been some baying-at-the-moon speculation that he is a Moslem convert! ..."
"... The coup, if successful, would probably mean the end of what would traditionally be considered to be a republican form of government in the US and its replacement by a deep state dictatorship. ..."
"... The USA is not different from other western countries, such as GB, France, Austria, Italy, Greece, Netherlands. In each of these countries the battle is going on between the establishment, and those who want to rid themselves of this establishment. ..."
"... The battle is between trying to dominate the world, neoliberalism, destruction of nation states, power of money, on the one hand, and nationalism, more or less certain jobs, rejection of wars, power of governments, on the other hand. ..."
"... What is amazing is that Mr Giraldi still believes the USA is a democracy. Maybe if one compares it with China. Anyway, "a soft coup" has already happened in you history -- Kennedy's assassination by the deep state- and life just went on in the "greatest democracy" in the earth. ..."
"... Perhaps this is the indication of where Trump and DOJ are going: Monday during the 10 p.m. ET news broadcast on Fox's Washington, D.C. affiliate WTTG, correspondent Marina Marraco said an investigation by former D.C. homicide detective Rod Wheeler found that the now-deceased Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had been emailing with WikiLeaks. ..."
"... Despite the TV image, it is rare for a CEO to outright sack one of his top executives. The story of dinners where Comey made his pitch to stay rings true to what I have seen in real life. Trump probably asked Comey if he wouldn't be happier returning to private business where he made a boatload more money, and Comey, drunk on the power of high public office just wouldn't pull the trigger for him. ..."
"... Having just noticed the latest by-line in Antiwar.com, I am forced to raise the question we should all be asking ourselves "Was it Russia or was it .. Seth Rich ? " ..."
"... If there was indeed a "soft coup" in our country, did it not occur at the DNC convention when our back room oligarchs decided to "putsch" Bernie Sanders out of the race, and gift the nomination to Hillary ? ..."
"... Was it not Bernie Sanders who was igniting the young progressive liberal base by the tens of millions ? Was it not Bernie who was gaining enormous momentum as the race for the nomination went on ? Was it not Bernie's "message" that began to ring true for so many voters across the country ? ..."
"... The homicide detective hired by the family , also pointed out, after doing some rudimentary due diligence, that word had come down through the DC mayor's office to stymie its own detectives in the murder investigation of Mr. Rich. Strange thing, especially when we are dealing with a homicide .No, Mr Giraldi ? If the Seth Rich murder was a "botched robbery" as is claimed, why won't the DC police release Seth's laptop computer to his family ? ..."
"... I would be very interested in your take on the latest impeachable "scandal", that Trump revealed unrevealable top secrets to Lavrov and Kislyak during their recent White House meeting. Among other things, how would the Washington Post know the specifics of the Trump-Lavrov conversation? Is the White House bugged? And if an intelligence source was somehow really compromised, is advertising that fact in the Washington Post (presumably on the front page) really the wisest course? ..."
"... "A soft coup engineered by the national security and intelligence agencies would be far more dangerous to our democracy than anything Donald Trump can do." Until further notice, that is absolutely correct. It needs to be recalled – ad nauseam – that Russia-gate, or whatever rubbish its called, is a LIE. There is NO, repeat NO evidence of ANY wrong-doing by Trump re the Russians. The MSM & various elements of the "establishment" should suicide NOW from pure SHAME. ..."
"... Trump was right in firing Comey. An open ended investigation that hasn't yielded a scintilla of evidence of collusion with Russia after one year is not acceptable. Such an investigation would not have been tolerated if the target was a Marxist mulatto by the name of Barack Hussein Obama. Blacks would have rioted in response while the media cheered them on. ..."
"... If there's a Constitutional crisis then it's that the deep state apparatus in the form of the various alphabet soup intelligence agencies have the power to plot a coup against a duly elected president. They need to be stripped of much of their power and reformed but it's probably already too late for that. ..."
"... I thought since Trump went from advocating a humble, non-interventionist foreign policy to loud and proud neo-conservative (in less than 100 days) that that would buy him protection from deep state machinations and endear him to the corrupt Washington, D.C. establishment. ..."
"... The only thing I can think of is that even though Trump's picking up where Dubya and Obama left off on foreign policy, the deep state knows that Trump can be totally unpredictable and change on a dime. So he could go off the establishment reservation at a moment's notice which makes them apoplectic. Hence, their attempts to get him out of the way and install someone more pliant and predictable like Tom Pence. ..."
"... Deepstate has been sustaining and expanding its conspiracies for 100 years. (There is always a 'deep state' of some kind, but the current well-organized structure was created by Wilson.) A conspiracy AGAINST Deepstate is hard to sustain because Deepstate owns and monitors all public communications. ..."
"... While the collusion story is an obvious canard there is another level to this "Russian thing" which may prove to be extremely damaging to Trump. And that is Trump's participation in a money-laundering operation with the Russo-jewish mafia going back decades. ..."
"... The money-laundering angle is already all over the Web (ex. google: Bayrock Trump) and, one must assume, in the hands of various intelligence agencies. .This may be the basis for Trump's increasingly frantic attempts to shut down the "Russian thing" investigation.(Comey firing??) ..."
"... I don't think, however, the notion of the "establishment" is a problem in itself. Our country has always had powerful elites, so have many other countries. The problem which presents itself today is our elites seem determined to perpetuate endless wars that cost obscene amounts of money, and do not seem to produce positive results in any of the places the wars are being fought. ..."
"... The short answer is yes! March 31, 2017 The Surveillance State Behind Russia-Gate. Although many details are still hazy because of secrecy – and further befogged by politics – it appears House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was informed last week about invasive electronic surveillance of senior U.S. government officials and, in turn, passed that information onto President Trump. ..."
"... The people pushing the big lie about Trump and Russia are legion. And they are not stupid. They are evil. They are the same people who are preparing a preemptive nuclear attack against Russia and China. They are the globalists who would institute a universal Feudalism from which there would be no escape. I have no further use for Trump. But his enemies remain enemies of the people. ..."
And what if there really is a conspiracy against Donald Trump being orchestrated within the various
national security agencies that are part of the United States government? The president has been
complaining for months about damaging leaks emanating from the intelligence community and the failure
of Congress to pay any attention to the illegal dissemination of classified information. It is quite
possible that Trump has become aware that there is actually something going on and that something
just might be a conspiracy to delegitimize and somehow remove him from office.
President Trump has also been insisting that the "Russian thing" is a made-up story, a view that
I happen to agree with. I recently produced
my own analysis of the possibility that there is in progress a soft, or stealth or silent coup,
call it what you will, underway directed against the president and that, if it exists, it is being
directed by former senior officials from the Obama White House. Indeed, it is quite plausible to
suggest that it was orchestrated within the Obama White House itself before the government changed
hands at the inauguration on January 20 th . In line with that thinking, some observers
are now suggesting that Comey might well have been party to the conspiracy and his dismissal would
have been perfectly justified based on his demonstrated interference in both the electoral process
and in his broadening of the acceptable role of his own Bureau, which Trump has described as "showboating."
Two well-informed observers of the situation have recently joined in the discussion, Robert Parry
of Consortiumnews and former CIA senior analyst Ray McGovern of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity. McGovern has noted, as have I, that there is one individual who has been curiously absent
from the list of former officials who have been called in to testify before the Senate Intelligence
Committee. That is ex-CIA Director John Brennan, who many have long considered an extreme Obama/Hillary
Clinton loyalist long rumored to be at the center of the information damaging to Team Trump sent
to Washington by friendly intelligence services, including the British.
Ray
suggests that
Brennan and also Comey may been at the center of a "Deep State" combined CIA-NSA-FBI
cabal working to discredit the Trump candidacy and delegitimize his presidency. Brennan in particular
was uniquely well placed to fabricate the Russian hacker narrative that has been fully embraced by
Congress and the media even though no actual evidence supporting that claim has yet been produced.
As WikiLeaks has now revealed that the CIA had the technical ability to hack into sites surreptitiously
while leaving behind footprints that would attribute the hack to someone else, including the Russians,
it does not take much imagination to consider that the alleged trail to Moscow might have been fabricated.
If that is so, this false intelligence has in turn proven to be of immense value to those seeking
to present "proof" that the Russian government handed the presidency to Donald Trump.
Robert Parry asked in an article on May 10 th whether we are seeing is
"Watergate redux or 'Deep State' coup?"
and then followed up with a second Piece
"The
'Soft Coup' of Russia-gate" on the 13 th . In other words, is this all a cover-up
of wrongdoing by the White House akin to President Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate independent
special prosecutor Archibald Cox and the resignations of both the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney
General or is it something quite different, an undermining of an elected president who has not actually
committed any "high crimes and misdemeanors" to force his removal from office.
Like Parry, I
am reluctant to embrace conspiracy theories, in my case largely because I believe a conspiracy is
awfully hard to sustain. The federal government leaks like a sieve and if more than two conspirators
ever meet in the CIA basement it would seem to me their discussion would become public knowledge
within forty-eight hours, but perhaps what we are seeing here is less a formal arrangement than a
group of individuals who are loosely connected while driven by a common objective.
Parry sees the three key players in the scheme as John Brennan of CIA, Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper and James Comey of the FBI. Comey's role in the "coup" was key as it consisted
of using his office to undercut both Hillary Clinton and Trump, neither of whom was seen as a truly
suitable candidate by the Deep State. He speculates that a broken election might well have resulted
in a vote in the House of Representatives to elect the new president, a process that might have produced
a Colin Powell presidency as Powell actually received three votes in the Electoral College and therefore
was an acceptable candidate under the rules governing the electoral process.
Yes, the scheme is bizarre, but Parry carefully documents how Russiagate has developed and how
the national security and intelligence organs have been key players as it moved along, often working
by leaking classified information. And President Barack Obama was likely the initiator, notably so
when he de facto authorized the wide distribution of raw intelligence on Trump and the Russians through
executive order. Parry notes, as would I, that to date no actual evidence has been presented to support
allegations that Russia sought to influence the U.S. election and/or that Trump associates were somehow coopted by Moscow's intelligence services as part of the process. Nevertheless,
anyone even vaguely
connected with Trump who also had contact with Russia or Russians has been regarded as a potential
traitor. Carter Page, for example, who was investigated under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act warrant, was under suspicion because he made a speech in Moscow which was mildly critical of
the west's interaction with Russia after the fall of communism.
Parry's point is that there is a growing Washington consensus that consists of traditional
liberals and progressives as well as Democratic globalist interventionists and neoconservatives who
believe that Donald Trump must be removed from office no matter what it takes.
The interventionists and neocons in particular already control most of the foreign policy
mechanisms but they continue to see Trump as a possible impediment to their plans for aggressive
action against a host of enemies, most particularly Russia. As they are desirous of bringing
down Trump "legally" through either impeachment or Article 25 of the Constitution which permits removal
for incapacity, it might be termed a constitutional coup, though the other labels cited above also
fit.
The rationale Trump haters have fabricated is simple: the president and his team colluded with
the Russians to rig the 2016 election in his favor, which, if true, would provide grounds for impeachment.
The driving force, in terms of the argument being made, is that removing Trump must be done "for
the good of the country" and to "correct a mistake made by the American voters."
The mainstream media is completely on board of the process, including the outlets that flatter themselves
by describing their national stature, most notably the New York Times and Washington Post.
So what is to be done? For starters, until Donald Trump has unambiguously broken a law the critics
should take a valium and relax. He is an elected president and his predecessors George W. Bush and
Barack Obama certainly did plenty of things that in retrospect do not bear much scrutiny. Folks like
Ray McGovern and Robert Parry should be listened to even when they are being provocative in their
views. They are not, to be sure, friends of the White House in any conventional way and are not apologists
for those in power, quite the contrary. Ray has been strongly critical of the current foreign
policy, most particularly of the expansion of various wars, claims of Damascus's use of chemical
weapons, and the cruise missile attack on Syria. Robert in his latest article describes Trump as
narcissistic and politically incompetent. But their legitimate concerns are that we are moving in
a direction that is far more dangerous than Trump. A soft coup engineered by the national security
and intelligence agencies would be far more dangerous to our democracy than anything Donald Trump
can do. Are They
Really Out to Get Trump? Sometimes paranoia is justified
The coup, if successful, would probably mean the end of what would traditionally be considered
to be a republican form of government in the US and its replacement by a deep state dictatorship.
In light of what is being used, a phony claim of Russian interference with the US political system,
the danger that nuclear war might be the outcome of this coup is real.
I don't know who Robert Parry is but to me this Colin Powell stuff is pure nonsense. At the
same time my answer to the question "Are They Really Out to Get Trump?" is affirmative. Republicans
and Democrats want Trump out and Pence in. The operation with Flynn who allegedly deceived Pence
was part of this plan. That Trump fired Flynn was his greatest mistake in this game. It was not
fatal yet. This was Their plan since the election or even earlier since Republican convention:
have Trump step down and have Pence take over. After April 4th it seemed that They got Trump where
They wanted him to be. Trump even became presidential. The escalation of rhetoric against North
Korea over following weekend and week reinforced this perception until it turned out that it was
all fake. There was no fleet steaming to Korea. Media realized they were played by Trump. During
this time Trump and Tillerson in particular got some breathing space. The pre-April 4 policy of
agreeing with Russia on Syria continued. Apparently Russia understood that the missile attack
on Syria was just part of the game. It was not personal. More recently the US agreed to safe zones
plan by Russia, Syria, Iran and Turkey. One should expect a false flag of gas attack or accidental
bombing by US air force of Syrian forces to happen soon – broadcasted all night before the start
of the US media news cycle by BBC, so US media, all talking heads memorize all talking points.
While it is possible that Trump behaves erratically w/o well thought out plans we must give
him a benefit of doubt and assume that there is a deep reason for firing Comey. Trump is fighting
for his life. While he would prefer to be presidential and enjoy easy going times and provide
peace and safety for his family by know he knows that nothing will satisfy Them. They want him
out! Erratic Trump and confused and chaotic WH is a meme which They and Their media want to plant
and reinforce. That's why we hear about it all the time. But how to explain the firing of Comey?
I would look for the answer at DOJ. Initially their hands were tied up but slowly they showed
that there is new leadership at DOJ that was working for Trump for a change. Their independence
of the Deep State was demonstrated by forcing Israel police to arrest Mossad operative/patsy for
the wave of world wide anti-semitic hoaxes that were meant to undermine and compromise Trump.
This is the proof that DOJ and part of FBI finally is strong enough and working for Trump. What
next do they want to do? If they want to squash this "collusion with Russia" false narrative that
is paralyzing the administration and in fact all belt way they must hit at those who originated
this narrative, meaning Hillary Clinton and Obama. To do it they need to have a full control of
FBI. Comey is gone. McCabe must go next. Will DOJ and new FBI go after Susan Rice, Sally Yates
and Loretta Lynch? If they do this will lead to Obama. Will they go after Hillary Clinton and
her emails? Will they secure Anthony Weiner computer? Does it still exist? Who will be nominated
to replace Comey? What Trump will have to promise GOP to have him approved?
The bottom line is that Trump is fighting for his life.
Of course they are. The USA is not different from other western countries, such as GB, France, Austria, Italy, Greece,
Netherlands.
In each of these countries the battle is going on between the establishment, and those who want
to rid themselves of this establishment.
GB is the first country where maybe this succeeded, but, as in the USA, the GB establishment
and the EU establishment do anything to prevent that things really change.
The battle is between trying to dominate the world, neoliberalism, destruction of nation states,
power of money, on the one hand, and nationalism, more or less certain jobs, rejection of wars,
power of governments, on the other hand.
In France one sees that once again the establishment won, 60% of the French still support the
establishment, 40% rejects it.
In other countries more or less the same.
The opposing views make governing increasingly difficult, two months after the Dutch elections
the efforts to contrue a government are a failure.
Belgium was more than a year without a government.
In Spain one government after another.
The establishment now fears that Austria will turn around.
Until now Brussels, by threats and cajoling, prevented a rebellion against Brussels in Poland
and Hungary.
The Greek rebellion failed completely.
"A soft coup engineered by the national security and intelligence agencies would be far more
dangerous to our democracy than anything Donald Trump can do" concludes the writer.
What is amazing is that Mr Giraldi still believes the USA is a democracy. Maybe if one compares
it with China.
Anyway, "a soft coup" has already happened in you history -- Kennedy's assassination by the deep
state- and life just went on in the "greatest democracy" in the earth.
A "soft coup" against Donald Trump will be in fact an improvement. The "narcissist" president
won't be killed. It will be a soft clean coup. Progress.
Perhaps this is the indication of where Trump and DOJ are going: Monday during the 10 p.m. ET news broadcast on Fox's Washington, D.C. affiliate WTTG, correspondent
Marina Marraco said an investigation by former D.C. homicide detective Rod Wheeler found that
the now-deceased Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had been emailing with WikiLeaks.
Despite the TV image, it is rare for a CEO to outright sack one of his top executives. The
story of dinners where Comey made his pitch to stay rings true to what I have seen in real life.
Trump probably asked Comey if he wouldn't be happier returning to private business where he made
a boatload more money, and Comey, drunk on the power of high public office just wouldn't pull
the trigger for him.
Comey was a goner in November he just wouldn't go quietly and on his own accord, no doubt
for the reasons suggested in this piece a so-called higher calling and his own inflated sense
of service to his country.
Certainly writers like Robert Parry and Ray Mcgovern, as well as yourself, have earned the
highest of marks from internet readers around the globe, anxious for some integrity of analysis
, as they seek to understand our nation's policy decisions. As long as gentlemen like you, as well as others, keep writing , you will find your readership
growing at an exponential rate.
Having just noticed the latest by-line in Antiwar.com, I am forced to raise the question we
should all be asking ourselves "Was it Russia or was it .. Seth Rich ? "
If there was indeed a "soft coup" in our country, did it not occur at the DNC convention when
our back room oligarchs decided to "putsch" Bernie Sanders out of the race, and gift the nomination
to Hillary ?
Was it not Bernie Sanders who was igniting the young progressive liberal base by the tens of
millions ? Was it not Bernie who was gaining enormous momentum as the race for the nomination went on
?
Was it not Bernie's "message" that began to ring true for so many voters across the country ?
Was it not Bernie Sanders who may well have swept the DNC nomination, were it not for the "dirty
pool" being played out in the back room ?.
According to the retired homicide detective, hired by the family of Seth Rich to investigate
their son's bizarre murder, it was Seth Rich who WAS in contact with Wikileaks.
(For all those who don't know who Seth Rich was , he was the 27 year old "voter data director"
at the DNC, shot to death on july 10, 2016, in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington D.C.)
In an interview three days after Seth Rich was found dead, Julian Assange intimated, too, that
Seth Rich HAD contacted Wikileaks .NOT Russia.
The homicide detective hired by the family , also pointed out, after doing some rudimentary
due diligence, that word had come down through the DC mayor's office to stymie its own detectives
in the murder investigation of Mr. Rich. Strange thing, especially when we are dealing with a homicide .No, Mr Giraldi ? If the Seth Rich murder was a "botched robbery" as is claimed, why won't the DC police release
Seth's laptop computer to his family ?
We are all aware there were "shenanigans" going on in the DNC that put the kibosh on the Bernie
nomination.(we all know this)
This makes sense too, given the fact that the DNC party bosses and their oligarchs, wanted
Bernie running in the general election against the Donald like they wanted a "hole in the head".
What we "cannot" see ..is how decisive Bernie's margin of victory might have been, Nor can we see what "crimes" were committed to ensure Hillary's run at the W. H. It is not much of a stretch to assume Seth Rich had hard evidence, perhaps of multiple counts
of treasonous fraud and other sorted felonies that would have brought down "the back room" of
the DNC.
Not good for the party..not good for its oligarchs .and not good for their Hillary anointment.
"Russia-gate" may prove to be the most concerted effort, by the powers that be, to DEFLECT
from an investigation into their OWN "real"criminality .
How savvy and how clever they are to manipulate the public's perceptions, through Big Media,
by grafting the allegations of the very crimes they may well have committed .onto Russia, the
Donald, and Vladimir Putin.
Clever, clever, clever.
Can any of us imagine, how cold a day in hell it will be before Rachel Maddow(or any MSM "journalist")
asks some basic questions about the Seth Rich laptop .or what was on it ?
I would be very interested in your take on the latest impeachable "scandal", that Trump revealed
unrevealable top secrets to Lavrov and Kislyak during their recent White House meeting. Among other things, how would the Washington Post know the specifics of the Trump-Lavrov conversation?
Is the White House bugged? And if an intelligence source was somehow really compromised, is advertising that fact in the
Washington Post (presumably on the front page) really the wisest course?
Trump has turned out to be very weak. Maybe he just doesn't believe in anything, so it doesn't
matter to him. Or maybe he has some ideas, but has no clue about implementation. He's going to
see the Tribe next week. That will tell us a lot, I'm thinking. But it's a lot that we probably
already know or at least can guess.
"A soft coup engineered by the national security and intelligence agencies would be far more
dangerous to our democracy than anything Donald Trump can do."
Until further notice, that is absolutely correct.
It needs to be recalled – ad nauseam – that Russia-gate, or whatever rubbish its called, is a
LIE. There is NO, repeat NO evidence of ANY wrong-doing by Trump re the Russians.
The MSM & various elements of the "establishment" should suicide NOW from pure SHAME.
A soft coup engineered by the national security and intelligence agencies would be far more
dangerous to our democracy than anything Donald Trump can do.
For more dangerous to American democracy has been the ZOG engineered by the "Friends of Zion,"
but, unfortunately, there is little chance there will ever be a Zion-gate investigation.
Trump was right in firing Comey. An open ended investigation that hasn't yielded a scintilla
of evidence of collusion with Russia after one year is not acceptable. Such an investigation would
not have been tolerated if the target was a Marxist mulatto by the name of Barack Hussein Obama.
Blacks would have rioted in response while the media cheered them on.
If there's a Constitutional crisis then it's that the deep state apparatus in the form of the
various alphabet soup intelligence agencies have the power to plot a coup against a duly elected
president. They need to be stripped of much of their power and reformed but it's probably already
too late for that.
I thought since Trump went from advocating a humble, non-interventionist foreign policy to
loud and proud neo-conservative (in less than 100 days) that that would buy him protection from
deep state machinations and endear him to the corrupt Washington, D.C. establishment. For a time
he was even making "never Trumper" little (((William Kristol))) coo with delight which is no small
feat. Moreover, he's a lickspittle of Israel which seems a prerequisite for a presidential candidate.
The only thing I can think of is that even though Trump's picking up where Dubya and Obama
left off on foreign policy, the deep state knows that Trump can be totally unpredictable and change
on a dime. So he could go off the establishment reservation at a moment's notice which makes them
apoplectic. Hence, their attempts to get him out of the way and install someone more pliant and
predictable like Tom Pence.
@animalogic "A soft coup engineered by the national security and intelligence agencies would
be far more dangerous to our democracy than anything Donald Trump can do."
Until further notice, that is absolutely correct.
It needs to be recalled - ad nauseam - that Russia-gate, or whatever rubbish its called, is a
LIE. There is NO, repeat NO evidence of ANY wrong-doing by Trump re the Russians.
The MSM & various elements of the "establishment" should suicide NOW from pure SHAME.
Conspiracies are NOT hard to sustain. That's an absurd statement. Deepstate has been sustaining
and expanding its conspiracies for 100 years. (There is always a 'deep state' of some kind, but
the current well-organized structure was created by Wilson.) A conspiracy AGAINST Deepstate is hard to sustain because Deepstate owns and monitors all public
communications.
While the collusion story is an obvious canard there is another level to this "Russian thing"
which may prove to be extremely damaging to Trump. And that is Trump's participation in a money-laundering
operation with the Russo-jewish mafia going back decades.
Some of the investigations have expanded
their scope to include careful scrutiny of Trump's business dealings in relation to Russia. Recently FinCEN, which specializes in fighting money laundering, agreed to turn over records to the Senate
Intelligence Committee in this regard. Even Sen. Linsey Graham recently stated he wanted to know
more about Trump's business dealings with Russia. The possibility that this may result in a criminal
investigation cannot be ruled out. The money-laundering angle is already all over the Web (ex. google: Bayrock Trump) and, one must assume, in the hands of various intelligence agencies. .This
may be the basis for Trump's increasingly frantic attempts to shut down the "Russian thing" investigation.(Comey
firing??)
Dutch Public Broadcasting has recently broadcast a two part series exploring some of the connections
involving Trump's business dealings with Russia.
p.s.: Regarding the term Russo-jewish mafia, should you watch the videos and read the article
you will find the players involved are almost exclusively of a certain 'tribal' persuasion. (A
number have direct links to the infamous Mogilevich crime syndicate (top 10 FBI's most wanted
list) and one of the principals of Bayrock was named as a major Israeli organized crime figure
by the Turkish media following his arrest there.)
As you know, Brennan is an extreme liberal Democrat, a creature of both Clinton and Obama. He
is an utterly unprincipled old fool. He failed as a CIA operations officer and went back to Langley
with his tail between his legs to become analyst. Nothing wrong with that but he nursed bitter
resentment at the Clandestine Service during his whole career. He was finally allowed to go out
as chief in, of all places, Riyadh. He promptly destroyed the station with his incompetence, though
he earned the praise of the ambassador, as such toadies usually do. Brennan is perfectly capable
of the things you describe. Washington is awash in these kinds of traitors. If Trump does not
have a plan to arrest them all some dark night then he is a fool himself.
And President Barack Obama was likely the initiator, notably so when he de facto authorized
the wide distribution of raw intelligence on Trump and the Russians through executive order.
I repeat, why hasn't Trump issued an executive order cancelling Obama's executive order? He
needs to stop this information sharing if he expects to remain President.
Phil, is there any one who has Trump's ear? The mainstream media are hell bent in destroying
anyone close to Trump. First, Flynn, then Steve Bannon and now Kellyanne Conway. Trump must stop
these leaks from the White House. He should fire all Obama holdovers.
@Hobo
While the collusion story is an obvious canard there is another level to this "Russian
thing" which may prove to be extremely damaging to Trump. And that is Trump's participation in
a money-laundering operation with the Russo-jewish mafia going back decades.
... ... ... ...
p.s.: Regarding the term Russo-jewish mafia, should you watch the videos and read the article
you will find the players involved are almost exclusively of a certain 'tribal' persuasion. (A
number have direct links to the infamous Mogilevich crime syndicate (top 10 FBI's most wanted
list) and one of the principals of Bayrock was named as a major Israeli organized crime figure
by the Turkish media following his arrest there.)
I recently produced my own analysis of the possibility that there is in progress a soft,
or stealth or silent coup, call it what you will, underway directed against the president and
that, if it exists, it is being directed by former senior officials from the Obama White House.
Indeed, it is quite plausible to suggest that it was orchestrated within the Obama White House
itself before the government changed hands at the inauguration on January 20th. In line with
that thinking, some observers are now suggesting that Comey might well have been party to
the conspiracy and his dismissal would have been perfectly justified based on his demonstrated
interference in both the electoral process and in his broadening of the acceptable role of
his own Bureau , which Trump has described as "showboating."
It's quite difficult to accept this line of thought when Comey practically scuppered Hillary's
bid, something strongly endorsed by Obama. Going with this narrative requires Obama to have engineered
Hillary's departure followed by a concerted plan to unseat Trump as well, both objectives
utilizing
Comey! To what end? Paint chaos on the American political canvas?
@Colleen Pater This " theory " isnt a theory its not debatable and its clear both parties
and every power node in the world are signalling they will do whatever they can to help. Its really
a good thing they are not fooling anyone but some maroon prog snowflakes. Trump was the howard
beale last option before civil war candidate, he won fair and square , actually despite massive
cheating by the other side and now they are overthrowing him in full view of the american people.Its
good as long as idiots on the right still believed in democracy, that getting their candidate
in would change war was averted. after thirty years of steady leftism no matter who was in power
they voted trump now trumps being overthrown. They will see we dont live in a democracy we live
in the matrix democracy is diversionary tactic to prevent us from killing them all. And kill them
all is what we must do.
I don't think, however, the notion of the "establishment" is a problem in itself.
Our country has always had powerful elites, so have many other countries. The problem which presents
itself today is our elites seem determined to perpetuate endless wars that cost obscene amounts
of money, and do not seem to produce positive results in any of the places the wars are being
fought.
The "establishment" does not seem to care.
It is now wholly unthinkable for our "establishment" to consider "making peace"and ending our
wars. There is an addiction to "war spending" and "war profiteering" which has consumed the Deep
State Apparatus, especially since 9-11, and operates almost completely independently of any administration
in office.
Its an insatiable appetite...that grows larger every year.
Any President, elected by the people today,to end our wars will simply not be tolerated by the
establishment class and the deep state it lords over.
The problem is not that we have an "establishment", the problem is our establishment is addicted
to war.
Only "war" will do for them, full time, all the time..... end of story.
Today, any President is given two choices once in office....make WAR..... or be impeached.
The short answer is yes! March 31, 2017 The Surveillance State Behind Russia-Gate. Although many details are still hazy because of secrecy – and further befogged by politics
– it appears House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was informed last week about invasive
electronic surveillance of senior U.S. government officials and, in turn, passed that information
onto President Trump.
It is now wholly unthinkable for our "establishment" to consider "making peace"and ending
our wars. There is an addiction to "war spending" and "war profiteering" which has consumed
the Deep State Apparatus, especially since 9-11, and operates almost completely independently
of any administration in office.
Precisely. Frankly, I suspect 90% of the daily brouhaha of conspiracies and collusion theories
is a product solely of tawdry greed. The rich will do anything for money . anything.
Reopening the investigation in a dramatic public manner (I guess we do tell who is under
investigation) and then coming back to announce, "We were correct the first time; there is
no case" might convince a few thousand staggling doubters. It was very close.
Quite so. Comey's election-eve announcement was a calculated risk, with the intention of making
the "investigation" of Clinton look legitimate and professional, not just lip service to troublesome
legalities. It was intended to produce a public reaction like "Oh, they double-checked like good
investigators, and sure enough, Hillary's email operation was completely legit."
At what point does political infighting cross the line into treason?
There's a line somewhere between the two, obviously. Perhaps its when you break the law? Perhaps
its when you leak classified documents? Or details of a key diplomatic meeting?
@utu There will be no open coup. Trump will resign for health reason or in the worst case
scenario will be declared unfit for health reasons. And Pence will give a speech how great Trump
was and how great his ideas were and that now he as president will continue his vision. And many
people will believe it.
@iffen It's quite difficult to accept this line of thought when Comey practically scuppered
Hillary's bid
There is reason to believe that Clinton's email troubles were having a major impact. Many were unconvinced by Comey's first pronouncement that there was no case there. (I thought
this was the prosecutor's job anyway. People would have been skeptical of a compromised Lynch
saying that there was no case, but might be persuaded by Comey.)
Reopening the investigation in a dramatic public manner (I guess we do tell who is under investigation)
and then coming back to announce, "We were correct the first time; there is no case" might convince
a few thousand staggling doubters. It was very close.
@Sam Shama I need to understand why Phil Giraldi thinks she was considered a flawed candidate
from the Deep State's perspective .
In the minds of non-mainstream writers who constantly viewed her as the embodiment of the Establishment,
one wouldn't have wagered "their" perfect candidate to be marked for removal.
It looks to me as though the "deep state" is getting progressive dementia. While inhabited
by many high I.Q. players, their moves are increasingly insane. They had assumed their "Surveillance
State" would become all intrusive, giving them ever greater control over us peasants. The reverse
has happened, where most of the 7 billion of us have cell phones that record and display all their
nefarious deeds. We have a million times more high I.Q. people than them, that increasingly are
waking up and exposing those psychopaths for the pieces of garbage that they are.
@Sam Shama I need to understand why Phil Giraldi thinks she was considered a flawed candidate
from the Deep State's perspective .
In the minds of non-mainstream writers who constantly viewed her as the embodiment of the Establishment,
one wouldn't have wagered "their" perfect candidate to be marked for removal.
Comey's election-eve announcement was a calculated risk, with the intention of making the "investigation"
of Clinton look legitimate and professional, not just lip service to troublesome legalities.
No. They knew then that election could not be stolen (for whatever reasons) for Clinton. The 28th
October announcement by Comey was the signal to press to change the fake narrative of huge advantage
in polls by Hillary and prepare the eventual excuse for Hillary why she lost.
Comey was abruptly and unceremoniously fired after he stated that Clinton had forwarded thousands
of e-mails containing classified information on an unsecured server to wiener and friends. Hardly
covering Clintons back. The FBI investigates -- it does not prosecute -- that is the function of the
attorney generals office. The AG solely has the power to convene a grand jury, not the FBI. The
deputy attorney general Rosenstein writes a scathing report and recommendation to fire Comey.
Trump, probably on Kushner's urging fires Comey. Comey redacts his prior statement.
My guess is that the FBI were very close to the neocons hidden secret -- Clinton and its foundation are foreign
assets and not of Russia, hence, we have the Russia-gate diversion. Unfortunately, Comey;s replacement
will be toothless, merely a shelf ornament. And what happened? We hear no more of Kushners? omitting
his relationship to the Rothchilds enterprises. Flynn was fired for far less. Is/ are Kushner?
and/ or Rosenstein the leak(s)?
The people pushing the big lie about Trump and Russia are legion. And they are not stupid.
They are evil. They are the same people who are preparing a preemptive nuclear attack against
Russia and China. They are the globalists who would institute a universal Feudalism from which
there would be no escape. I have no further use for Trump. But his enemies remain enemies of the
people.
"... One of Steve Sailer's many clever commenters has brilliantly named it WhateverGate-the frantic legalistic churning about who said what to whom in President Trump's circle, and whether the thing that was or was not said warrants impeachment. Or whatever. But impeachment. ..."
"... Instead of registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Flynn reported his income through the Lobbying Disclosure Act! ..."
"... There's a grain of truth in that. The Watergate affair was a media witch-hunt against a president the Establishment elites disliked. Nixon's offenses were of a kind the Main Stream Media had never bothered about, nor even reported, when done by Democrat presidents-like Lyndon Johnson's bugging of Barry Goldwater in 1964. ..."
"... It's pretty plain by now that the Republican Party Establishment is not going to forgive Donald Trump for humiliating them last year. They'll be just as happy as Democrats to see him go, if they can somehow help the Democrats force him out without showing too much outward enthusiasm. ..."
"... Sixty-three million Americans rejected establishment politics last November. They took a chance on an outsider. From a field of seventeen seasoned Republican politicians, GOP primary voters selected the one un-seasoned guy. Then sixty-three million of us voted for him in the general. ..."
"... The GOP leadership would like to go back anyway. They think if they can get rid of Trump, that will get rid of Trump_vs_deep_state. They yearn to get back to the futile wars, the free trade sucker economy, the open borders and multiculturalism. ..."
"... They really think that, the McCains and Grahams and McConnells and Ryans . Get rid of Trump, you get rid of Trump_vs_deep_state, they believe. Then we can all go back to what Orwell called "the dear old game of scratch-my-neighbor." Yep, this is the Stupid Party. ..."
"... But whether Donald Trump is actually the right person to give us Trump_vs_deep_state is more and more in doubt. ..."
"... Those are small mercies, though. Where's the really big, bold swamp -draining exercise, like the one I just described? Why are we still issuing work permits to illegal aliens? Why no federal legislation to slam a mandatory ten-year sentence on any illegal who, after being deported, comes back in ? Why no request to Congress on funding for the border Wall? For an end to the visa lottery and restrictions on chain migration? When do we start testing the constitutionality of birthright citizenship? Why are we still in NATO ? Why are we still at war with North Korea ( which technically we are , since there hasn't been a peace treaty, only an armistice)? ..."
"... I like Ann Coulter's analogy: It's as if we're in Chicago, and Trump says he can get us to L.A. in six days; and then for the first three days we're driving towards New York. He can still turn around and get us to L.A. in three days. But, says Ann , she's getting nervous. ..."
One of Steve Sailer's many clever commenters has brilliantly
named it WhateverGate-the frantic legalistic
churning about who said what to whom in President Trump's circle, and whether the thing that was or was not said warrants impeachment.
Or whatever. But impeachment.
Every week, I think things can't get any crazier-the hysteria has to burn itself out, the temperature can't get any higher, the
fever has to break-and every week it's worse. Boy, they really want to get this guy. That
just gives us more reasons to defend him.
I don't even bother much any more to focus on the actual thing that President Trump or one of his colleagues is supposed to have
said or done. Every time, when you look closely, it's basically nothing.
I've been reading news and memoirs about American presidents since the Kennedy administration. I swear that every
single damn thing Trump is accused of, warranting special counsels, congressional enquiries, impeachment-every single thing has
been done by other recent presidents, often to a much greater degree, with little or no comment.
Remember
Barack Obama's hot-mike blooper in the 2012 campaign, telling the Russian President that, quote, "After my election I have more
flexibility"? [ Obama tells Russia's
Medvedev more flexibility after election , Reuters, March 26, 2012] Can you imagine how today's media would react
if footage showed up of Trump doing that in last year's campaign? Can you imagine ? I can't.
We are a big, important country with big, important things that need doing-most important of all, halting the demographic transformation
that's tugging us out of the
Anglosphere
into the Latino-sphere and filling our country with low-skill workers just as robots are arriving to take their jobs.
Those big, important things aren't getting done. Instead, our news outlets are shrieking about high crimes and misdemeanors in
the new administration–things that, when you read about the actual details, look awful picayune.
Sample, from today's press, concerning
Michael Flynn , the
national security advisor President Trump fired for
supposedly lying to the Vice President
about a phone conversation he'd had with the Russian Ambassador last December. To the best of my understanding, the root issue was
just a difference of opinion over the parsing of what Flynn remembered having said, and the precise definition of the word "substantive,"
but Trump fired him anyway.
Well, here's Eli Lake at Bloomberg News on the latest tranche of investigations into Flynn's activities:
Flynn's legal troubles come from his failure to properly report foreign income. One source close to Flynn told me that the
Justice Department had opened an investigation into Flynn after the election in November for failing to register his work on behalf
of a Turkish businessman, pursuant to the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Flynn had instead reported this income through the
more lax Lobbying Disclosure Act. After his resignation, Flynn registered as a foreign agent for Turkey.
Did you get that? Instead of registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Flynn reported his income through the
Lobbying Disclosure Act!
High crimes! Treason! Special Prosecutor! Congressional inquiry! The Republic is in danger! Suspend habeas corpus -- This
must not stand!
And then, the whole silly
Russia business. The Bloomberg guy has words about that, too:
Flynn also failed to report with the Pentagon his payment in 2015 from Russia's propaganda network, RT, for a speech in Moscow
at the network's annual gala. As I reported last month, Flynn did brief the Defense Intelligence Agency about that trip before
and after he attended the RT gala. The Pentagon also renewed his top-secret security clearance after that trip.
So obviously the rot goes deep into the Pentagon. They're covering for him! Let's have a purge of the military! Special
prosecutor!
Oh, we have a special prosecutor? Let's have another one!
You could make an argument, I suppose-I don't myself think it's much of an argument, but you could make it-that Russia's
a military threat to Europe.
Once
again , with feeling: Europe has a population three and a half times greater than Russia's and a GDP ten times greater.
Europe's two nuclear powers, Britain and France, have more than five hundred nuclear weapons between them. If the Euros can't defend
themselves against Russia, there's something very badly wrong over there, beyond any ability of ours to fix–even if you could show
me it's in our national interest to fix it, which you can't.
At this point, in fact, reading the news from Europe, I think a Russian invasion and occupation of the continent would be an improvement.
A Russian hegemony might at
least put up some resistance to the ongoing invasion of Europe from
Africa and the
Middle East . It doesn't look as though the Euros themselves are up to the job.
That aside, American citizens are free to visit Russia and talk to Russians, including Russian government employees, just as free
as we are to talk to Australians, Brazilians, or Cambodians. As the
Lion said on
his blog :
Do liberals who are making a big deal about the Trump-Russia thing really believe that no one involved in a presidential campaign
should have ever talked to anyone from another country? How would an administration ever conduct any foreign policy if no one
in the administration has ever left the United States or ever talked to a foreigner?
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, with whom Flynn had that December phone conversation, is, says the New York Post , "a
suspected Kremlin spy." [ Michael Flynn
won't honor subpoena to provide documents, By Bob Fredericks, May 18, 2017] Is he? Why should I care?
I bet ol' Sergey does all the spying he can. So, I'm sure, do the ambassadors of China, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Botswana. That's
what ambassadors do. That's what we do in their countries. Does anyone not know this?
"A Kremlin spy"? What is this, 1957 ?
Russia's just a country . And as our own James Kirkpatrick has pointed out
here at VDARE.com , it's a country run by people who hate us-the American people- less than our own elites do.
As James also points out, if it's interference in our elections that bothers you, consider what Mexico's been doing for the last
forty years: encouraging mass immigration of its own underclass into the U.S.A., lobbying through its consulates and Spanish-language
TV channels for voter registration, using Mexican-owned outlets like the New York Times to demonize and discredit national
conservatives.
The founder of Christianity scoffed at those who strain at
a gnat but swallow a camel. In the matter of foreign interference in our elections, the gnat here is Russia; the camel is Mexico.
Our media and opinion elites have swallowed the camel.
Unless, of course, just down the road a few months, there's going to be a hysteria-storm about Mexican interference in our elections.
My advice would be: Don't hold your breath.
All the shouting and swooning is just the rage of a dispossessed class-our political class.
Our political and government class, I think I should say. There are tens of thousands of federal functionaries who have
never stood for election to anything, but whose loyalty is to the political Establishment. Great numbers of these people settled
in to their comfortable seats during the eight years of Barack Obama's administration; so to the degree that they care about party
affiliation, they prefer the Democratic Party.
Washington, D.C. voted 91 percent for Mrs.
Clinton last November.
Obama Holdovers,
Vacant Posts Still Plague Trump - Administration housecleaning is long overdue to get agenda in motion, end damaging leaks,
by Thomas Richard, LifeZette.com, May 18, 2017] Draining the swamp means getting rid of those people. They should be
fired -en masse, in their hundreds and thousands, and marched out the office door by security guards before they can trash files.
Still, a big majority of federal politicians are helping to drive the hysteria; and their rage against Trump is, as they say in
D.C., bipartisan. Senator John McCain
told CNN on Tuesday that President Trump's troubles are,
quote , "of Watergate size and
scale."
There's a grain of truth in that. The
Watergate affair was a
media witch-hunt against a president the Establishment
elites disliked. Nixon's offenses were of a kind the Main Stream Media had never bothered about, nor even reported, when done by
Democrat presidents-like Lyndon Johnson's
bugging of Barry Goldwater in 1964.
So yes: When the political and media establishment try to drive from office a president they dislike, it is kinda like Watergate.
It's pretty plain by now that the Republican Party Establishment is not going to forgive Donald Trump for humiliating them
last year. They'll be just as happy as Democrats to see him go, if they can somehow help the Democrats force him out without showing
too much outward enthusiasm.
Last August, after Trump had clinched the Republican nomination, I reproduced a remark Peggy Noonan made in
one of her columns.
Here's the remark again,
quote :
From what I've seen there has been zero reflection on the part of Republican leaders on how much the base's views differ from
theirs and what to do about it. The GOP is not at all refiguring its stands.
Has there been any reflection among GOP leaders in the nine months since, about the meaning of Trump's victory? Not much that
I can see.
Sixty-three million Americans rejected establishment politics last November. They took a chance on an outsider. From a field
of seventeen seasoned Republican politicians, GOP primary voters selected the one un-seasoned guy. Then sixty-three million of us
voted for him in the general.
Does the GOP get this? Have they learned anything from it? Not that I can see.
With some exceptions, of course. GOP elder statesman Pat Buchanan spelled it out in an interview with the Daily Caller
this week:
The GOP leadership would like to go back anyway. They think if they can get rid of Trump, that will get rid of Trump_vs_deep_state.
They yearn to get back to the futile wars, the free trade sucker economy,
the open borders and multiculturalism.
If they can just pull off an impeachment, the Republican party bosses believe, and install some donor-compliant drone in the White
House, then we sixty-three million Trump voters will smack our foreheads with our palms and say: "Jeez, we are so dumb! Why did we
let ourselves get led astray like that? Why didn't we vote for
Marco Rubio or
Jeb Bush in the primaries, as you wise elders wanted us to? We're sorry! We promise to follow your advice in future!"
Those are small mercies, though. Where's the really big, bold
swamp -draining exercise, like the one I just described? Why are we still issuing work permits to illegal aliens? Why no federal
legislation to slam a mandatory ten-year sentence on any illegal who, after being deported,
comes back in ? Why no request to
Congress on funding for the border Wall? For an end to the
visa lottery and
restrictions on chain migration?
When do we start testing the
constitutionality
of birthright citizenship? Why are we still in
NATO ? Why are we still at war
with North Korea ( which technically we are
, since there hasn't been a peace treaty, only an armistice)?
I like Ann Coulter's analogy: It's as if we're in Chicago, and Trump says he can get us to L.A. in six days; and then for the
first three days we're driving towards New York. He can still turn around and get us to L.A. in three days. But,
says Ann , she's
getting nervous.
"... So, here we are, a little over one hundred days into " The Age of Darkness " and the " racially Orwellian " Trumpian Reich , and, all right, while it's certainly no party, it appears that those reports we heard of the Death of Neoliberalism were greatly exaggerated. Not only has the entire edifice of Western democracy not been toppled, but the global capitalist ruling classes seem to be going about their business in more or less the usual manner. The Goldman Sachs vampires are back in the White House (as they have been for over one hundred years). The post-Cold War destabilization and restructuring of the Middle East is moving forward right on schedule. The Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and other non-globalist-ball-playing parties remain surrounded by the most ruthlessly murderous military machine in the annals of history. Greece is being debt-enslaved and looted. And so on. Life is back to normal. ..."
"... OK, not completely normal. Because, despite the fact that editorialists at "respectable" papers like The New York Times (and I'm explicitly referring to Charles M. Blow and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman) have recently dropped the completely ridiculous "Trump is a Putinist agent" propaganda they'd been relentlessly spewing since he won the election, a significant number of deluded persons, having swallowed their official vomitus (i.e., the vomitus of Blow and Krugman, and other neoliberal establishment hacks) ..."
"... They are convinced (these deluded persons are) that the Russians are waging a global campaign not only to maliciously hack, or interfere with, or marginally influence, free and fair elections throughout the Western world, but to control the minds of Westerners themselves, in some Orwellian, or possibly Wachowskian fashion. Worse yet, these deluded persons are certain, the Russians are now secretly running the White House, and are just using Trump, and the Goldman Sachs gang, and capitalist centurions like General McMaster, as a front for their subversive activities, like denying Americans universal healthcare and privatizing the hell out of everything. ..."
"... whomever is responsible for ferreting out the Putin-Nazi infiltrators that "respected" pundits like Blow and Krugman (and stark raving loonies like Louise Mensch) have convinced them are now controlling the government. Weirdly, these same "respected" journalists, the ones who have been assuring the world that The President of the United States is a covert agent working for Russia, have failed to even mention this March for Truth, and are acting like they had nothing to do with whipping these folks up into a frenzy of apoplectic paranoia. ..."
"... Oh, yeah, and if Russiagate isn't paranoid enough, apparently, the corporate media is now prepared to deploy the "Putin-Nazi Election Hackers" propaganda in any and every election going forward ( as they did in the recent French election , and as they tried to do in the Dutch elections , and presumably will in the German elections, and as The Guardian appears to be retroactively doing in regard to the Brexit referendum ). Any day now, we should be hearing of the "Putin-Nazi-Corbyn Axis," and the "Putin-Nazi-Podemos Pact," and video footage of Martin Schultz and a bevy of former-East German hookers engaging in Odinist sex magick rituals in an FSB-owned bordello in Moscow. Soon, it won't just be elections no, we'll be hearing reports of Russian shipments of rocks, bottles, and pointy sticks to the "Putin-Nazi Palestinian Terrorists," and well, who knows how far they're willing to take this? ..."
"... You remember last year as clearly as I do, how, suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, the Putin-Nazi menace materialized, and took the place of the "self-radicalized terrorist" as the primary target for people's hatred and fear. OK, sure, at first, there were no Putin-Nazis. It was just that the Brexit folks were fascists, and Trump was Hitler, and Bernie Sanders was some sort of racist hacky sack Communist. But then the Putinists poisoned Clinton , and unleashed their legions of Russian propagandists on the gullible, Oxycodone-addicted denizens of "flyover country," and, as they say, the rest is history. ..."
"... In any event, here we are now stuck inside this simulation of "reality" where Putin-Nazi hackers are coming out of the woodwork, a partyless neoliberal banker has been elected the President of France, Donald Trump is an evil mastermind or a Russian operative, depending on what day it is (as opposed to just a completely incompetent, narcissistic billionaire idiot), and neoliberal propaganda outfits like The New York Times , The Washington Post , MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian , NPR, et al., are perceived as "respectable" sources of journalism, as if their role in generating and occasionally revising the official narrative weren't so insultingly obvious. ..."
So, here we are, a little over one hundred days into "
The Age of Darkness " and the "
racially Orwellian "
Trumpian
Reich , and, all right, while it's certainly no party, it appears that those reports we heard
of the
Death of Neoliberalism were greatly exaggerated. Not only has the entire edifice of Western democracy
not been toppled, but the global capitalist ruling classes seem to be going about their business
in more or less the usual manner. The Goldman Sachs vampires are back in the White House (as they
have been for over one hundred years). The post-Cold War destabilization and restructuring of the
Middle East is moving forward right on schedule. The Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and other
non-globalist-ball-playing parties remain surrounded by the most ruthlessly murderous military machine
in the annals of history. Greece is being debt-enslaved and looted. And so on. Life is back to normal.
Or OK, not completely normal. Because, despite the fact that editorialists at
"respectable" papers like The New York Times (and I'm explicitly referring to Charles M.
Blow and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman) have recently dropped the completely
ridiculous "Trump is a Putinist agent" propaganda they'd been relentlessly spewing since he won
the election, a significant number of deluded persons, having swallowed their official vomitus
(i.e., the vomitus of Blow and Krugman, and other neoliberal establishment hacks) like the
hungry Adélie penguin chicks in those nature shows narrated by David Attenborough.
They are convinced (these deluded persons are) that the Russians are waging a global
campaign not only to maliciously hack, or interfere with, or marginally influence, free and fair
elections throughout the Western world, but to control the minds of Westerners themselves, in
some Orwellian, or possibly Wachowskian fashion. Worse yet, these deluded persons are certain,
the Russians are now secretly running the White House, and are just using Trump, and the Goldman
Sachs gang, and capitalist centurions like General McMaster, as a front for their subversive
activities, like denying Americans universal healthcare and privatizing the hell out of
everything.
If you think I'm being hyperbolic, check out
#MarchforTruth
on Twitter, or
its anonymous Crowdpac fundraising page , which at first glance I took for an elaborate prank,
but which seems to be in deadly earnest about "restoring faith in American government," uncovering
Trump's "collusion" with Russia, and reversing his "subversion of the will of the people." The plan
is, on June 3, 2017, thousands of otherwise rational Americans are going to pour into the streets
"demanding answers" from well, I'm not sure whom, some independent prosecutor, or congressional
committee, or intelligence agency, or whomever is responsible for ferreting out the Putin-Nazi infiltrators
that "respected" pundits like Blow and Krugman (and stark raving loonies like Louise Mensch) have
convinced them are now controlling the government. Weirdly, these same "respected" journalists, the
ones who have been assuring the world that The President of the United States is a covert agent working
for Russia, have failed to even mention this March for Truth, and are acting like they had nothing
to do with whipping these folks up into a frenzy of apoplectic paranoia.
Incidentally, one of my colleagues contacted Mr. Blow directly and inquired as to whether he'd
be vociferously supporting or possibly leading the March for Truth, and was chastised by Blow and
his Twitter followers. I found this reaction extremely troubling, and asked my colleague to contact
Mensch and suggest she check with her handlers at The Times to make sure the Russians haven't
gotten to him. However, just as he was sitting down to do that, the "Comey-firing" brouhaha broke,
which
seems to have brought Blow back to the fold , albeit in a less hysterical manner than his Rooskie-hunting
readers have grown accustomed to. We can only hope that both he and Krugman return to form in the
weeks to come as Russiagate builds to its dramatic climax.
Oh, yeah, and if Russiagate isn't paranoid enough, apparently, the corporate media is now prepared
to deploy the "Putin-Nazi Election Hackers" propaganda in any and every election going forward (
as they did in the recent French election , and
as they tried to do in the Dutch elections , and presumably will in the German elections, and
as
The Guardian
appears to be retroactively doing in regard to the Brexit referendum ). Any day now, we should
be hearing of the "Putin-Nazi-Corbyn Axis," and the "Putin-Nazi-Podemos Pact," and video footage
of Martin Schultz and a bevy of former-East German hookers engaging in Odinist sex magick rituals
in an FSB-owned bordello in Moscow. Soon, it won't just be elections no, we'll be hearing reports
of Russian shipments of rocks, bottles, and pointy sticks to the "Putin-Nazi Palestinian Terrorists,"
and well, who knows how far they're willing to take this?
All joking aside,
as I've
written about previously , what we're dealing with here is more than just a lame attempt by the
Democratic Party to blame its humiliating loss on Putin (although of course it certainly is that
in part). The global neoliberal establishment is rolling out a new official narrative. It's actually
just a slight variation on the one it's been selling us since 2001. I could come up with a sixteen-syllable,
academic-sounding name for this narrative, but I'm trying to keep things simple these days so let's
call it The Normals versus The Extremists , (the Normals being the neoliberals and the Extremists
being everyone else). The goal of this narrative is to stigmatize and otherwise marginalize opposition
to Neoliberalism, regardless of the nature of that opposition (i.e., whether it comes from the left,
right, or from religious, environmentalist, or any other quarters). Now, as any professional storyteller
will tell you, one of the most important aspects of the narrative you're trying to suck people into
is to make your protagonist a likeable underdog, and then pit him or her against a much more powerful
and ideally incorrigibly evil enemy. During the Cold War, this was easy to do - the story was Democracy versus the Commies
, traditional "good versus evil"-type stuff.
Once the U.S.S.R.
collapsed, the concept needed major rewrites, as a new evil adversary had to be found. This (i.e.,
the 1990s) was a rather awkward and frustrating period. The global capitalist ruling classes, giddy
with joy after having become the first ever global ideological hegemon in the history of aspiring
global hegemons, got all avant-garde for a while, and thought they could do without an "enemy." This
approach, as you'll recall, did not sell well.
No one quite got why we were bombing Yugoslavia, and
Bush and Baker had to break out the Hitler schtick to gin up support for rescuing the Kuwaitis from
their old friend Saddam. Fortunately, in September 2001, the show runners got the break they were
looking for, and the official narrative was instantly switched to Democracy versus The Islamic
Terrorists . This re-brand got extremely good ratings, and would have been extended indefinitely
if not for what began to unfold in the latter half of 2016. (One could go back and locate the week
when the mainstream media officially switched from the "
Summer of Terror " narrative they were flogging to the new "Invasion of the Putin-Nazis" narrative
my guess is, it was early to mid-September.) It started with the Brexit referendum, continued with
the rise of Trump, and well, I don't have to recount it, do I? You remember last year as clearly
as I do, how, suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, the Putin-Nazi menace materialized, and took the
place of the "self-radicalized terrorist" as the primary target for people's hatred and fear. OK,
sure, at first, there were no Putin-Nazis. It was just that the Brexit folks were fascists, and Trump
was Hitler, and Bernie Sanders was some sort of racist hacky sack Communist. But then
the Putinists poisoned Clinton , and unleashed their
legions of Russian propagandists on the gullible, Oxycodone-addicted denizens of "flyover country,"
and, as they say, the rest is history.
In any event, here we are now stuck inside this simulation of "reality" where Putin-Nazi hackers
are coming out of the woodwork, a partyless neoliberal banker has been elected the President of France,
Donald Trump is an evil mastermind or a Russian operative, depending on what day it is (as opposed
to just a completely incompetent, narcissistic billionaire idiot), and neoliberal propaganda outfits
like The New York Times , The Washington Post , MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian
, NPR, et al., are perceived as "respectable" sources of journalism, as if their role in generating
and occasionally revising the official narrative weren't so insultingly obvious. Personally, I am
looking forward to the upcoming German elections this Autumn, wherein Neoliberal Party "A" is challenging
Neoliberal Party "B" for the right to continue privatizing Greece (and any other formerly sovereign
nations the banks can get their hands on) in a demonstration of European unity, and fiscal austerity
and, you know, whatever.
If this is the Death of Neoliberalism, just imagine what awaits us at the Resurrection.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin.
His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut
novel,
ZONE
23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at
cjhopkins.com or
consentfactory.org .
"... ..."Multiple reports show that my former colleagues in the intelligence community have decided that they must leak or withhold classified information due to unsettling connections between President Trump and the Russian Government... ..."
"... The deep state is running scared! I never+ attribute to coincidence that which is the FBI trampling the bill of rights. It is coincidence the deep state (fbi, nsa, various CIA and DoD spooks) tapped Russia spies who talk to private citizens who have no opportunity at espionage. Then the innuendo is leaked to the Clinton media! ..."
"... Worse on Trump for calling them out for leaking rather than as a civil liberty trampling Gestapo. Ben Franklin was right, give the democrat run spooks the power to protect you and you lose liberty and protection! ..."
This is running now on FoxNews.com, total fabrication especially the last sentence but Trumpers believe this Fake News. I think
this is where ilsm gets his intell insights from, phoney former intell officers, they sound exactly like him - check it out for
yourself
"I'm a Democrat (and ex-CIA) but the spies plotting against Trump are out of control"
By Bryan Dean Wright...February 18, 2017...Foxnews.com
..."Multiple reports show that my former colleagues in the intelligence community have decided that they must leak or
withhold classified information due to unsettling connections between President Trump and the Russian Government...
Days ago, they delivered their verdict. According to one intelligence official, the president "will die in jail."..."
The deep state is running scared! I never+ attribute to coincidence that which is the FBI trampling the bill of rights. It
is coincidence the deep state (fbi, nsa, various CIA and DoD spooks) tapped Russia spies who talk to private citizens who have
no opportunity at espionage. Then the innuendo is leaked to the Clinton media!
Worse on Trump for calling them out for leaking rather than as a civil liberty trampling Gestapo. Ben Franklin was right,
give the democrat run spooks the power to protect you and you lose liberty and protection!
"... The CIA and NSA (the largest part of the "national security state") were intruding politically in the other direction , by endorsing Clinton and demonizing Trump ..."
"... For months , the CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton's candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump. ..."
"... It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for restraining the CIA's proxy war in Syria and was eager to expand that war , while Trump denounced it . ..."
"... This is not a game, even at the electoral level. It has nation-changing, anti-democratic consequences. Democratic voters fear a coup, or a kind of coup, led by the Trump administration, and for good reason. But there's another coup in the making as well, and Democrats are cheering it. ..."
"... Yet the following actually did happen (Greenwald again, my emphasis): "Just last week, Chuck Schumer issued a warning to Trump, telling Rachel Maddow that Trump was being 'really dumb' by challenging the unelected intelligence community because of all the ways they possess to destroy those who dare to stand up to them ." And yet there was no shock or fear, at least from Maddow or her viewers. ..."
"... And Schumer really did use the phrase "they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you." The video is embedded here . Is that how Democrats plan to defeat Trump? Is it better, more comforting, if a Democrat makes that threat and appears to side with the security agencies' (the deep state's) strong-arm tactics? ..."
"... A coup in the making - not the one we fear, which may also occur - but a coup nonetheless. This really is not a game, and both sides are playing for keeps. ..."
The CIA and NSA (the largest part of the "national security state") were intruding politically
in the other direction , by
endorsing Clinton and demonizing Trump (my emphasis):
For months , the CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary
Clinton's candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump.
In August, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell
announced his endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed that "Mr. Putin had
recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." The CIA and NSA director
under George W. Bush, Gen. Michael Hayden, also endorsed Clinton, and
went to the Washington Post to warn , in the week before the election, that "Donald Trump
really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin," adding that Trump is "the useful fool, some naif,
manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted
and exploited."
It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical
of Obama for restraining the CIA's proxy war in Syria and was
eager to expand that war , while Trump denounced it .
Now Trump is president and the pro-war national security forces are at it again, leaning again
on Trump in yet another intrusion into the political process .
So who again tried to tilt the field for or against Clinton or Trump? Including Russia, the administration,
Comey, agents of the FBI and NY police, the CIA and national security forces, I count five groups.
This is a lot of political intrusion, regardless of which candidate you favored - all within the
last year - and we're still not done. I'm sure we're only halfway through this extended drama.
The Selective Blindness of the Democratic Party
Third, with all this political interference, where are the Democrats? Do they condemn it all,
praise it all, or pick and choose?
Bottom line: They see what they want to see, not what's in front of us all and in plain sight.
Which is not only unprincipled, it's dangerous for them as well as us.
Again, they did not see Obama's original declarations of Clinton's innocence as political
intrusion. But they did see Comey's eventual "won't indict, but will condemn" speech, and
his and other investigators' pre-election actions, as political intrusion. They did not see
the "pro-war" security apparatus' endorsement of Clinton and trashing of Trump as intrusions. But
they do see Russian interference as intrusion. And they absolutely don't see the security
services' present blackmail threats against a duly elected president as political interference.
They see what they want to see, what they think helps them politically and electorally, and they're
blind to the rest. This is highly unprincipled. And again, it's dangerous as well.
After all, one reason the institutional Democratic Party nearly lost to Sanders, a highly principled
man - and did lose to Trump, a man who pretended to be principled - is that plenty of voters in key
states were just tired of being taken for a ride by "say one thing, do another" Democrats. Tired,
in other words, of unprincipled Democrats - tired of job-promising. job-killing trade deals pushed
hard by both Democratic presidents, tired of the bank bailout that made every banker whole but
rescued almost no mortgagees , tired of their
reduced lives , their
mountain of personal debt , tired of the overly complex, profit-infected, still-unsolved medical
care system - tired of what 16 years of Democrats had done to them, not for them.
If Democrats want to start winning again, not just the White House, but Congress and state houses,
they can't continue to be these Democrats - unprincipled and self-serving. They must be
those Democrats, Sanders Democrats, principled Democrats instead.
Does the above litany of complaint about political interference when it suits them, and non-complaint
when it doesn't, look like principled behavior to you?
Which brings me to the end of this part of the discussion. If some people see this party behavior
as self-serving hypocrisy, you can bet others do as well. Democrats can only turn this decade-long
collapse around by not being who they appeared to be in the last three election cycles. They have
to attract the Sanders voters who stood aside in the general election and see them very negatively.
Yes, Democrats will continue to get votes - some people will always vote Democratic. But in the post-Sanders,
post-Trump era, will they get enough votes to turn the current tide, which runs heavily against them?
I'm not alone in thinking, not a chance.
But this is the long form of what I wanted to say. For the elevator speech version, just read
the three tweets at the top. I think they capture the main points very nicely.
Glenn Greenwald: "The Deep State Goes to War with the President-Elect, and Democrats Cheer"
Greenwald's take is very similar to mine, and there's much more research in his
excellent piece . Writing at The Intercept , he says (emphasis in original):
The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer
In January, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower delivered
his farewell
address after serving two terms as U.S. president; the five-star general chose to warn Americans
of this specific threat to democracy: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." That warning
was issued prior to the decadelong escalation of the Vietnam War, three more decades of Cold War
mania, and the post-9/11 era, all of which radically expanded that unelected faction's power even
further.
This is the faction that is now engaged in open warfare against the duly elected and
already widely disliked president-elect, Donald Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty
tactics and the defining ingredients of what has until recently been denounced as "Fake News."
Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves,
believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their
unexpected and traumatic election loss as well as a
systemic collapse of their party , seemingly divorced further and further from reason with
each passing day, are willing - eager - to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with
any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging those behaviors might be.
You can see where this is going. The "deep state," the CIA, NSA and the rest of the unelected
national security apparatus of the U.S., is going to war with an elected president even before
he takes office, and Democrats are so eager for a win that they're siding with them.
Did Russia attempt to interfere in the U.S. election? Of course, and Democrats condemned it. Did
the agents of the FBI et al attempt to interfere in the U.S. election? Of course, and Democrats
condemned it. Is the national security state today interfering in the outcome of a U.S. election,
by trying to destabilize and force its will on the incoming administration? Of course, and Democrats
are cheering it.
As horrible and as monstrous as this incoming administration is - and it will prove to be the
worst in American history - who would aid the national security apparatus in undermining it?
Apparently, the Democratic Party. Greenwald continues:
The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest. There are a wide
array of legitimate and effective tactics for combatting those threats: from bipartisan congressional
coalitions and constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings and sustained and aggressive
civil disobedience. All of those strategies have periodically proven themselves effective in times
of political crisis or authoritarian overreach.
But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election
and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive.
Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit
over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind. Demanding that evidence-free, anonymous
assertions be instantly venerated as Truth - despite emanating from the very precincts designed
to propagandize and lie - is an assault on journalism, democracy, and basic human rationality.
And casually branding domestic adversaries who refuse to go along as traitors and disloyal foreign
operatives is morally bankrupt and certain to backfire on those doing it.
And Greenwald agrees that this tactic is not just craven; it's also dangerous:
Beyond all that, there is no bigger favor that Trump opponents can do for him than attacking
him with such lowly, shabby, obvious shams, recruiting large media outlets to lead the way. When
it comes time to expose actual Trump corruption and criminality, who is going to believe the people
and institutions who have demonstrated they are willing to endorse any assertions no matter how
factually baseless, who deploy any journalistic tactic no matter how unreliable and removed from
basic means of ensuring accuracy?
All of this, don't forget, rests on the
one document mentioned above , the material summarized in an appendix to the classified version
of the security services' report on Russia (emphasis mine):
the Deep State unleashed its tawdriest and most aggressive assault yet on Trump: vesting credibility
in and then causing the public disclosure of a completely unvetted and unverified document,
compiled by a paid, anonymous operative while he was working for both GOP and Democratic opponents
of Trump , accusing Trump of a wide range of crimes, corrupt acts and salacious private conduct.
The reaction to all of this illustrates that while the Trump presidency poses grave dangers, so,
too, do those who are increasingly unhinged in their flailing, slapdash, and destructive attempts
to undermine it.
I'll send you to the
Greenwald piece for much more of this detail. As I said above, this story has seemed muddy until
now, but it just came clear.
A Coup in the Making
This is not a game, even at the electoral level. It has nation-changing, anti-democratic consequences.
Democratic voters fear a coup, or a kind of coup, led by the Trump administration, and for good reason.
But there's another coup in the making as well, and Democrats are cheering it.
If a Republican elected official had publicly warned Obama not oppose a policy the Republicans
and the CIA/NSA favored because "they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you," what would
- what should - our response to that be? Mine would be horror and shock that a Republican
had dared make that threat, followed by fear that he, and the agencies behind him, will make good
on it. At which point, it's farewell democracy, likely for a long long time.
Yet the following actually did happen (Greenwald again, my emphasis): "Just last week, Chuck
Schumer issued a warning to Trump, telling Rachel Maddow that Trump was being 'really dumb' by challenging
the unelected intelligence community because of all the ways they possess to destroy those who dare
to stand up to them ." And yet there was no shock or fear, at least from Maddow or her viewers.
And Schumer really did use the phrase "they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you."
The video is
embedded here . Is that how Democrats plan to defeat Trump? Is it better, more comforting, if
a Democrat makes that threat and appears to side with the security agencies' (the deep state's) strong-arm
tactics?
A coup in the making - not the one we fear, which may also occur - but a coup nonetheless.
This really is not a game, and both sides are playing for keeps.
By
Gaius Publius, a professional writer living on the West Coast of the United States and frequent
contributor to DownWithTyranny, digby, Truthout, and Naked Capitalism. Follow him on Twitter
@Gaius_Publius,
Tumblr
and
Facebook.
GP article archive
here.
Originally published at
DownWithTyranny
"... In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this. ..."
"... In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in. ..."
"... Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran. ..."
"... Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts ..."
"... Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege ..."
"... I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as he deserves ..."
"... "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." ― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. ..."
"... New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along." The Globe and Mail. ..."
"... No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken. ..."
"... The rise of the right wing in Europe is due to the fact that Social Democratic parties have completely sold out to neo-liberal agenda. ..."
"... So Putin's plan to undermine U.S. voter confidence was to simply show what actually happens behind the scenes at the DNC, how diabolical! ..."
"... Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote. ..."
"... So it's true because the CIA said so. That's the gold standard for me. ..."
"... "Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies" - Ron Paul ..."
"... At least Tucker Carlson is able to see through the BS and asks searching question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkeGkCjdHg ..."
"... President-elect Donald Trump's transition team said in a statement Friday afternoon that the same people who claim Russia interfered in the presidential election had previously claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. ..."
"... The neoliberal corporate machine is wounded but not dead. They will use every trick, ploy and opportunity to try to regain power. The fight goes on. ..."
"... Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime " US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis. ..."
"... Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it! ..."
Well, if Rupert Mudroach, an American citizen, can influence the Australian elections, who gives a stuff about anyone else's
involvement in US politics?
The US loves demonising Russia, even supporting ISIS to fight against them.
The United States of Amnesia just can't understand that they are run by the military machine.
As Frank Zappa once correctly stated: The US government is just the entertainment unit of the Military.
Altogether the only thing people are accusing the Russians of is the WikiLeaks scandal. And in hindsight of the enormous media
bias toward Trump it really comes of as little more than leveling the playing field. Hardly the sort of democratic subversion
that is being suggested.
And of course there is another problem and that is in principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set
up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table
modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.
In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any
occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much
emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.
In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the
traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is
preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There
are some nice logs of the NSA using this.
In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The US
even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.
In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same
thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses
who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious,
it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.
In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole
or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines
are in botnets.
In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing
in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled
the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.
So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They
are 100% untraceable.
Don't know about Russians, but in the early 2000's the Ukrainian hackers had some nasty viruses embedded in email attachments
that could fuckup ARM based computers.
Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become
a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside
the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran.
Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts, as the last battle in their support to jidaists
fighting the Syrian Army. This is the dark pit where our so called free press has fallen into.
Yep had a chat with an army mate yesterday asked him what the fcuk the supposed head of MI6 was on about regarding Russian support
for Syrian govt suggesting Russian actions made terrorism more likely here in UK. He shrugged his shoulders and said he hoped
Putin wiped the terrorists out...
Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists
in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege
Of course no news on the danger to the civilians of W,Aleppo, who have been bombarded indiscriminately for months by the 'moderates'
in the east of the city or the danger to the civilians of Palmyra, Mosul or al Bab.
I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as
he deserves.
I´ll still look for the Guardian articles on football which are excellent.
Cheers!
The Sanders movement inside the Democratic party did offer some hope but this was snuffed out by the DNC and the Clinton campaign
in collusion with the media. This is what likely caused her defeat in November and not some Kremlin intrigue.
"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."
― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda.
New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake
stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along."
The Globe and Mail.
No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot
multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken.
Distract the masses with bullsh*t , nothing new...
Trump needs to double up on his personal security, he has doubled down on the CIA tonight bringing upmtheir bullsh*t on WMD. Thing
are getting interesting...
"If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is
based on sheer lies. "
R. D. Laing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
US politicians and the MSM depend on sheer lies.....
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they
will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
R. D. Laing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
I'm sick of jumping through their hoops - how about you?
"Tin Foil Hat" Hillary--
"This is not about politics or partisanship," she went on. "Lives are at risk, lives of ordinary people just trying to go about
their days to do their jobs, contribute to their communities. It is a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly."
We fail to see how Russian propaganda has put people's lives directly at risk. Unless, of course, Hillary is suggesting that
the increasingly-bizarre #Pizzagate swarm journalism campaign (which apparently caused a man to shoot up a floor tile in a D.C.
pizza shop) was conjured up by a bunch of Russian trolls.
And this is about as absurd as saying Russian trolls were why Trump got elected.
"It needs to be said," former counterintelligence agent John R. Schindler (who, by the way, believes Assange and Snowden are
both Russian plants), writes in the Observer, "that nearly all of the liberals eagerly pontificating about how Putin put Trump
in office know nothing about 21st century espionage, much less Russia's unique spy model and how it works. Indeed, some of the
most ardent advocates of this Kremlin-did-it conspiracy theory were big fans of Snowden and Wikileaks -- right until clandestine
Russian shenanigans started to hurt Democrats. Now, they're panicking."
(Nonetheless, #Pizzagate and Trump, IMHO, are manifestations of a population which deeply deeply distrusts the handlers and
gatekeepers of the status quo. Justified or not. And with or without Putin's shadowy fingers strumming its magic hypno-harp across
the Land of the Free. This runs deeper than just Putin.)
Fake news has always been around, from the fake news which led Americans to believe the Pearl Harbor attack was a surprise
and completely unprovoked .
To the fake news campaigns put out by Edward Bernays tricking women into believing cigarettes were empowering little phallics
of feminism. (AKA "Torches of Freedom.")
This War on Fake News has more to do with the elites finally realizing how little control they have over the minds of the unwashed
masses. Rather, this is a war on the freaks, geeks and weirdos who've formed a decentralized and massively-influential media right
under their noses.
and there may be some truth to that. An article says has delved into financial matters in Russia.
Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.
Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that
alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.
Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta
was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian
front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position
on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.
As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt
to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.
chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties
to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars,
including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies
with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked
on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a
high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."
So it's true because the CIA said so.
That's the gold standard for me.
So let me be the first to thank Russia for providing us with their research.
Instead of assassination, coup or invasion, they simply showed us our leaders' own words when written behind the public's backs.
I'm no fan of Putin, but this was a useful bit of intelligence you've shared with us.
Happy Christmas, Vlad.
Next time why not provide us with the email of all our banks and fossil fuel companies; you can help us clean up both political
parties with one fell swoop that way.
The U.S. is getting what it deserves, IF Russia was even dumb enough to meddle. The government in this country has been meddling
in other countries' affairs sixty years, in the Middle East, in South America and other places we don't even know about. The result
is mayhem, all in the 'interests' of the U.S., as it is described.
Where's the gap in this logic:
A) The American public has been offered ZERO proof of hacking by the Russian government to alter our election.
B) Even if true, no one has disputed the authenticity of the emails hacked.
C) Therefore, the WORST Russia could have done is show us who are own leader are when they don't think we're listening.
D) Taken together, this article is pretty close to fake news, and gives us nothing that should outrage us much at this time --
unless we are trying to foment war with Russia or call for a military coup against the baboon about to take the oath of office.
Hacking by unnamed individuals. No direct involvement of the Russian government, only implied, alleged, etc. Seems to me that
if Hillary had obeyed the law and not schemed behind the scenes to sabotage Bernie S. there would have been nothing to leak! Really
this is all about being caught with fer fingers in the cookie jar. Does it matter who leaked it? Did the US public not have a
right to know what the people they were voting for had been up to? It's a bit like the governor of a province being filmed burgling
someone's house and then complaining that someone had leaked the film to the media, just when he was trying to get re-elected!
It is called passing the buck, and because of the underhanded undermining of Bernie Sanders, who was winning, we have Trump. Thank
you Democratic party.
I am disappointed that the Guardian gives so much prominence to such speculation which is almost totally irrelevant. Why would
we necessarily (a) believe what the superspies tell us and (b) even if it is true why should we care?
I am also very disappointed at the Guardians attitude to Putin, the elected leader of Russia, who was so badly treated by the
US from the moment he took over from Yeltsin. I was in Russia as a visitor around that time and it was obvious that Putin restored
some dignity to the Russian people after the disastrous Yeltsin term of office. If the US had been willing to deal with him with
respect the world could be a much better place today. Instead the US insisted in trying to subvert his rule with the support of
its supine NATO allies in order to satisfy its corporate rulers.
If this is true, the US can hardly complain. After all, the US has a long record of interfering in other countries' elections--including
CIA overthrow of elected governments and their replacement with murderous, oppressive, right-wing dictatorships.
If the worst that Russia did was reveal the truth about what Democratic Party figures were saying behind closed doors, I'd
say it helped correct the unbalanced media focus on preventing Trump from becoming President. Call it the globalization of elections.
First, the government has yet to present any persuasive evidence that Russia hacked the DNC or anyone else. All we have is that
there is Russian code (meaningless according to cyber-security experts) and seemingly baseless "conclusions" by "intelligence"
officials. In other words, fake news at this point.
Second, even if true, the allegation amounts to an argument that Russia presented us with facts that we shouldn't have seen.
Think about that for a while. We are seeing demands that we self-censor ourselves from facts that seem unfair. What utter idiocy.
This is particularly outrageous given that the U.S. directly intervenes in the governance of any number of nations all the
time. We can support coups, arm insurgencies, or directly invade, but god forbid that someone present us with unsettling facts
about our ruling class.
This nation has jumped the shark. The fact that Trump is our president is merely confirmation of this long evident fact. That
fighting REAL NEWS of emails whose content has not been disputed is part of our war on "fake news," and the top priority for some
so-called liberals, promises only worse to come.
>> Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said Russia had "succeeded" in "sow[ing] discord" in the
election, and urged as much public disclosure as is possible.
What utter bullshit. The DNC's own dirty tricks did that. Donna Brasille stealing debate questions and handing them to Hillary
so that she could cheat did that. The FBIs investigation into Hillary did that. Podesta's emails did that. The totally one-sided
press coverage (apart from Fox) of the election did that. But it seems the american people were smart enough to see through the
BS and voted for trump. Good for them.
And we're gonna need a lot more than the word of a few politicised so-called intelligence agencies to believe this russo-hacking
story. These are the same people who lied about Iraqi WMDs so they are proven fakers/liars. These are also the same people who
hack EVERYONE else so I, quite frankly, have no sympathy even of the story turns out to be true.
Announce "consensus" (not unanimous) "conclusion" based in circumstantial evidence now, before the Electoral College vote,
then write a report with actual details due by Jan 20.
Put a proven liar in charge of writing the report on Russian hacking.
Fail to mention that not one of the leaked DNC or Podesta emails has been shown to be inauthentic. So the supposed Russian hacking
simply revealed truth about Hillary, DNC, and MSM collusion and corruption.
Fail to mention that if hacking was done by or for US government to stop Hillary, blaming the Russians would be the most likely
disinformation used by US agencies.
Expect every pro-Hillary lapdog journalist - which is virtually all of them - in America will hyperventilate (Twitter is currently
on fire) about this latest fact-free, anti-Trump political stunt for the next nine days.
Or, as a reader put it, this is a soft coup attempt by leaders of Intel community and Obama Admin to influence the Electoral College
vote, similar to the 1960s novel "Seven Days in May."
When the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security release a joint
statement it is not without very careful consideration to the wording.
Therefore, to understand what is known by the US intelligence services one must analyse the language used.
This is very telling:
"The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona
are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts."
Alleged:
adjective [attributive]
said, without proof, to have taken place or to have a specified illegal or undesirable quality
Consistent:
adjective
acting or done in the same way over time
Method:
noun
a particular procedure for accomplishing or approaching something
Motivation:
noun
a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way
So, what exactly is known by the US intelligence services?
Well what we can tell is:
the alleged (without proof) hacks were consistent (done in the same way) with the methods (using a particular procedure) and motivations
(and having reason for doing so) with Russian State actions.
There is absolutely no certainty about this whatsoever.
Thank God Obama will be out of office soon. He is the biggest disappointment ever. He has ordered the death of THOUSANDS via drone
strikes in other people's countries and most of the deaths were innocent bystanders. If President Xi of China or Putin were to
do that we would all be calling them tyrannical dictators and accusing them of a back door invasions. But somehow people are brainwashed
into thinking its ok of the US president to do such things. Truly sickening.
Says the CIA the organisation set up to destabilise governments all over the world. Lol.....
Congratulations for keeping a straight face I hope Trump makes urgently needed personnel changes in the alphabet soup agencies
working against humanity for very many years.
This is an extremely dangerous game that Obama and the political elites are playing.
The American political elites - including senetors, bankers, investors, multinationals et al, can feel power and control slipping
away from them.
This makes them very dangerous people indeed - as self-preservation and holding onto power is their number one priority.
What they're aiming to do ( a child can see what's coming ), is to call into question the validity of Trump's victory and blame
the Russians for it.
The elites are looking to create chaos and insurrection, to have the result nullified and to vilify Putin and Russia.
American and Russian troops are already lined up and facing each other along the Eastern European borders and all it takes
is one small incident from either side.
And all because those that have ruled the roost for so many decades ( in the White house, the 2 houses of Congress and Wall
St ), simply cannot face losing their positions of power, wealth and political influence.
They're out to get Trump, the populists and President Putin.
This is starting to feel like an attempt to make the Trump presidency appear illegitimate. The problem is that it could actually
make the democrats look like sore losers instead. We've had the recount, now it's foreign interference. This might harm them in
2020.
I don't like that Trump won, but he did. The electoral college system is clearly in the constitution and all sides understood
and agreed to it at the campaign commencement. Also some, by no means all, of commenters saying that the popular vote should win
have also been on referendum BTL saying the result isn't a legitimate leave vote, make your minds up!
I don't want Trump and I wanted to remain but, by the rules, my sides lost.
Yet in August, Snowden warned that the recent hack of NSA tied cyber spies was not designed to expose Hillary Clinton, but rather
a display of strength by the hackers, showing they could eventually unmask the NSA's own international cyber espionage and prove
the U.S. meddles in elections around the world.
Will the CIA be providing evidence to support these allegations or is it a case of "just trust us guys"? In any event, hypocrisy
is a national sport for the Yanks. According to a Reuters article 9 August 2016 "NSA operations have, for example, recently delved
into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by
former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a "surge effort against one of Mexico's leading presidential
candidates, Enrique Peña Nieto, and nine of his close associates." Peña won that election and is now Mexico's president.
The NSA identified Peña's cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones
from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, "might find a needle
in a haystack." The analyst described it as "a repeatable and efficient" process.
The eavesdroppers also succeeded in intercepting 85,489 text messages, a Der Spiegel article noted.
Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena's predecessor, President Felipe Calderon.
The NSA, the documents revealed, was able "to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account."
At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection Service, are based in
the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world. It targets local government communications, as well
as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large
listening post in San Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America."
Breaking news! CIA admits people in USA aren't smart enough to vote for the person right person. Why blame Russians now?
Come on. Let's move on and enjoy the mess Trump will start. This is going to be worse than GWB.
We should all just enjoy the political comedy programs.
The CIA accusing a foreign power of interfering in the election of a showman for president - it would take me all day top cite
the times that this evil criminal organisation has interfered in the affairs of other countries, ordered assassinations, coups
etc. etc. etc
Yes like the "help" the CIA gave to the Taliban, Bin Laden and Co. when the Russians were in Afghanistan.
Then these dimwits from the CIA who taught Bin Laden and Co guerrilla warfare totally "missed" 9/11 and Twin Towers with all their
billions of funding.
So basically this is a total load of crap and if you think we are going to believe any reports vs. Russia these fools at the CIA
are going to publish then think again.
During the election our media was exposed as in essence a propaganda tool for the Democrat campaign and they continue the unholy
alliance after the election
Pathetic move from an organisation that created ISIS and is single handling every single conflict in the world. Here we have a
muppet president that for once wants to look after USA affairs internally and here we have a so alleged independent organisation
that wants to keep bombing and destabilising the world. Didn't Trump said he wanted to shake the FBI and CIA ? Who is going to
stop this machine of treachery ? : south America, middle east ...Asia ... they put their fingers on to create a problem- solution
caveat wereas is to create weapons contracts /farma or construction and sovereign debt . But it never tricles down to the layperson
..
"We are Not calling into question the election results"
next White House sentence - "Just the integrity.. " WTF
What more do you need to know - Bullshit Fake News.. propaganda, spoken by the youngest possible puppet boy White House Rep.
who almost managed to have his tie done up..
I am bookmarking this guy, for a laugh! White House Fake Newscaster ..:)
Worth watching the sides of his mouth onto his attempt to engage you with the eyes, but blinking way too much before, during
and after the word "Integrity".. FAKE!
His hand signals.. lmfao, so measured, how sweet.. now sack the sycophants --
People should know that these Breaking News stories we see in Western media on BBC, Guardian etc, about Russian interference are
in fact from Wash Post and NY Times quoting mysterious sources within the CIA
Of course we know that Wash Post and NY Times were completely objective during the election and didn't favor any party
Russia made Hillary run the most expensive campaign ever, spending 1.2 billion dollars.
Russia stole Hillary's message to the working people and gave her lousy slogans
My real comment is below, but work with me, for a moment.
So, since 2008, eh? Barack has thought carefully, with a legal mind.
Can't we somehow blame the Russians for the whole Economic collapse.. coming soon, Wall Street Cyber Crash, screwed up sKewed
up systems of Ponzi virus spiraling out of control..
blame the Russians , logic, the KGB held the FED at gunpoint and said "create $16.2 Trillion in 5 working days"
jeez, blame anything and anybody except peace prize guy Obama, the Pope, Bankers & Israel..
Now can we discuss the Security of the Pound against Cyber Attack.. what was it 6% in 2 minutes, early on Sunday morning, just
over month ago.. whoosh!
It seems more important than discussing an election where the result was always OBVIOUS!
And we called it, just like Kellyanne Conway..
Who is Huma Abedin? I wish to know and hear her talking to Kellyanne Conway, graciously in defeat.. is that so unreasonable?
********
Obama wishes to distract from exceedingly poor judgement, at the very minimum....
after his Greek Affair with Goldman Sachs.. surely.
As for his other Foreign Policy: Eternal Shame, founded on Fake News!
Obama the Fake News Founder to flounder over the Russians, who can prove that he, Obama supports & supported Terrorism!
Thus this article exists, to create doubt over the veracity of evidence to be presented over NATO's involvement in SYRIA! Obama
continues to resist, or loose face completely..
Just ask Can Dundar.... what he knows now and ask Obama to secure the release of Can Dundar's wife's passport, held for no
legitimate reason in Turkey! This outrageous stand off, from Erdogan & Obama to address their failures and arrogant disrespect
of Woman and her Legal Human Rights is Criminal.. & a Sickness of Mind that promotes Dictatorship!
Mainstream Media - Fake News.. for quite some time!
& Obama is guilty!
The one certainty of the US/EU led drive to remove an elected leader just in their 2nd year after an election that saw them
gain 47% of the popular vote was the Russki response, its borders were immediately at open 'threat' from any alliance. NATO or
otherwise, the deep sea ports of eastern Ukraine which had always been accessed by the Russki fleets would lose guaranteed access
etc....to believe the West was surprised by this action, would be to assume the US Generals were as stupid as the US administration,
they knew exactly the response of the Russkis & would have made no difference if their leader had been named Putin or Uncle Tom
Cobbly.
In some ways the Russkis partitioning of the East of Ukraine could well minimise the possibility of a world conflict as the
perceived threat is neutralised by the buffer.
The Russkis cyber doodah is no different to our own the US etc, they're all 'at it' & all attempt to inveigle the others in
terms of making life difficult.....not too sure Putin will be quite as comfortable with the Pres Elects 3 Trumpeteers though as
the new Pressie looks likely to open channels of communications but those negotiations might well see a far tougher stance......still,
in truth, all is never fair in love or war
.....that the CIA is not only suddenly involved, but suddenly at the forefront, may well reflect President-elect Trump's stated
policy intentions being far removed from those that the CIA has endorsed, and might be done with an eye toward undermining Trump's
position in those upcoming policy battles.
At the center of those Trump vs. CIA battles is Syria, as the CIA has for years pushed to move away from the ISIS war and toward
imposing regime change in Syria. Trump, by contrast, has said he intends to end the CIA-Saudi program arming the Syrian rebels,
and focus on fighting ISIS. Trump was even said to be seeking to coordinate anti-ISIS operations with Russia.
The CIA allegations could easily imperil that plan, as so long as the allegations remain part of the public discourse, evidence
or not, anything Trump does with respect to Russia is going to have a black cloud hanging over it. http://news.antiwar.com/2016/12/09/cia-claims-russia-intervened-to-get-trump-elected
/
Oh dear Obama trolls? Food for your starved thoughts:
Your degree of understanding IT is disturbing, especially given how dependent we are on it.
This is all very simple. The process by which you find out if and how a machine was hacked was clearly documented in the Russian
"Internet Audit", run by a group of Grey Hats.
Grey Hats: People concerned about security who perform unauthorized hacks for relatively benign purposes, often just notifying
people of how their system is flawed. IT staff have mixed reactions(!), the illegality is not disputed but the benefit of not
being hit by a Black Hat first can be considerable at times. Differentiation is rare, especially as some hacktivist groups belong
here, causing no damage beyond reputational by flagging activity that is not acceptable to the hacktivists.
Black Hats: These are the guys to worry about. These include actually destructive hacktivists. These are the ones who steal
data for malicious purposes, disrupt for malicious purposes and just generally act maliciously.
Nothing in reports indicates if the DNC hack was Grey Hat or Black Hat, but it should be obvious that there is a difference.
IP addresses and hangouts - worthless as evidence. Anyone can spoof the former, happens all the time (NMap used to provide
the option, probably still does), Grey Hats and Black Hats alike have the latter and may break into other people's. It's all about
knowing vulnerabilities.
That voting machines were even on the Internet is disturbing. That they and the DNC server were improperly configured for such
an environment is frightening - and possibly illegal.
The standard sequence of events is thus:
Network intrusion detector system identifies crafted packet attacking known vulnerability.
In a good system, the firewall is set to block the attack at that instant.
If the attacker scans the network, the only machine responding to such knocks should be a virtual machine running a honeypot
on attractive-looking port numbers. The other machines in the zone should technically violate the RFCs by not responding to ICMP
or generating recognized error codes on unused/blocked ports.
The system logger picks up an event that creates a process that shouldn't be happening.
In a good system, this either can't happen because the combination of permissions needed doesn't exist, or it doesn't matter because
the process is root jailed and hasn't the privileges to actually do any harm.
The file alteration logger (possibly Tripwire, though the Linux kernel can do this itself) detects that a process with escalated
privileges is trying to create, delete or alter a file that it isn't supposed to be able to change.
In a good system with mandatory access controls, this really is impossible. In a good system with logging file systems, it doesn't
matter as you can instruct the filesystem to revert those specific alterations. Even in adequate but feeble systems, checkpoints
will exist. No use in a voting system, but perfectly adequate for a campaign server. In all cases, the system logs will document
what got damaged.
The correct IT manager response is thus:
Find out why the firewall wasn't defaulting to deny for all unknown sources and for unnecessary ports.
Find out why the public-facing system wasn't isolated in the firewall's DMZ.
Find out why NIDS didn't stop the attack.
Non-public user mobility should be via IPSec using certificates. That deals with connecting from unknown IP addresses without
exposing the innards of the system.
Lock down misconfigured network systems.
Backup files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt for forensic purposes.
Revert files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt to last good version.
Close permission loopholes. Everything should run with the fewest privileges necessary, OS included. On Linux, kernel permissions
are controlled via capabilities.
Establish from the logs if the intruder came through a public-facing application, an essential LAN service or a non-essential
service.
If it's a LAN service, block access to that service outside the LAN on the host firewall.
Run network and host vulnerability scanners to detect potential attack vectors.
Update any essential software that is detected as flawed, then rerun the scanners. Repeat until fixed.
Now the system is locked down against general attacks, you examine the logs to find out exactly what failed and how. If that line
of attack got fixed, good. If it didn't, then fix it.
Password policy should prevent rainbow attacks, not users. Edit as necessary, lock accounts that aren't secure and set the password
control system to ban bad passwords.
It is impossible from system logs to track where an intruder came from, unsecured routers are common and that means a skilled
attacker can divert packets to anywhere. You can't trust brags, in security nobody is honest. The sensible thing is to not allow
such events in the first place, but when (not if) they happen, learn from them.
If the USA is to investigate the effect of foreign governments 'corrupting' the free decisions of the American people in elections,
perhaps they could look into the fact that for the past three decades every Republican candidate for president, after they have
won the nomination of their party, has gone to just one foreign country to pledge their firm commitment/allegiance to that foreign
power, for the purpose of shoring up large blocks of donors prior to the actual presidential election. The effect is probably
more 'corrupting' than any leak of emails!
Obama should confess to creating ISIS, sustaining ISIS & utilising ISIS as a proxy army to have them do things that he knew US
soldiers could never be caught doing!!!
They then spoon fed you bullshit propaganda about who the bad guys were, without ever being to properly explain why the US
armed forces were prevented from taking any hostile action against ISIS, until they were FORCED TO, that is, when Putin let the
the cat out of the bag!!!
Hilarious. One would've thought Obama of all presidents would be reluctant to delve too deeply into this particular midden. As
the author of the weakest and most incompetent American foreign policy agenda since Carter's, it's much the likeliest that if
China or Russia have been hacking US elections, then by far the biggest beneficiary will have been himself.
cdm Begin forwarded message: > From: Lynn Forester de Rothschild <[email protected]> > Date: May 28, 2015 at 9:44:12 AM
EDT > To: Nick Merrill <[email protected]>, "Cheryl Mills ([email protected])" <[email protected]> > Subject: FW:
POLITICO Playbook > > Morning, > I am sure you are working on this, but clearly, the opposition is trying to undercut Hillary's
reputation for honesty (the number one characteristic people look for in a President according to most polls) ..and also to benefit
from an attack on wealth that Dems did the most to start I am sure we need to fight back against both of these attacks. > Xoxo
> Lynn > > By Mike Allen (@mikeallen; [email protected]), and Daniel Lippman (@dlippman; [email protected]) > > > > QUINNIPIAC
POLL, out at 6 a.m., "Rubio, Paul are only Republicans even close to Clinton": "In a general election, ... Clinton gets 46 percent
of American voters to 42 percent for Paul and 45 percent of voters to 41 percent for Rubio." Clinton leads Christie 46-37 ...
Huckabee 47-40 ... Jeb 47-37 ... Walker 46-38 ... Cruz 48-37 ... Trump 50-32. > > --"[V]oters say 53-39 percent that Clinton is
NOT honest and trustworthy, but say 60-37 ... that she has strong leadership qualities. Voters are divided 48-47 ... over whether
Clinton cares about their needs and problems." > > --RNC's new chart - "'Dead Broke' Clintons vs. Everyday Americans": "Check
out the chart below to see how many households in each state it would take to equal the 'Dead Broke' Clintons."
http://bit.ly/1Avg8iE
Blind leading the Blind.. & Obama knows that very well after it was clear that Clinton was NEVER trusted by the Voters, which
makes Debbie and the DNC look like a complete bunch of..
Idiots?!?! STILL BLAMING The RUSSIANS.... instead of themselves!
She was and always will be unelectable due to exceedingly poor judgement, across the board.
Who is in charge of Internet security in the US government? Because it seems full of holes. Last time it was the Chinese and this
time it's the Russians, yet not one piece of evidence to say where hacks have come from. How much are these world class Internet
security people paid? And why do they still have a job? People sitting in their bedrooms on a pc from stores like staples have
hacked their security regularly.
In 2016, he said, the government did not detect any increased cyber activity on election day itself but the FBI made public
specific acts in the summer and fall, tied to the highest levels of the Russian government. "This is going to put that activity
in a greater context ... dating all the way back to 2008."
Extremely vague. Seems like there is no evidence at all to suggest any Russian involvement, but they need to pretend otherwise.
Blah, blah, blah, Weapons of mass destruction... Apollo mission, etc
Ole, Russians exposed the DNC emails, we knew about that. I though this should investigate Russians vote rigging, but I guess
not. I for once welcome anyone who hacks my government and exposes their skeletons, so I can see what kind of dirty garbage I
had leading or potentially leading my country.
Maybe the DNC should play fair and not dirty next time and put a candidate forward without skeletons that still reek of rotting
flesh.
Don't believe any of this at all.
American has been thee most corrupt and disgusting western nation for decades, run by people who are now being shown for who they
really are and they're shitting themselves big time. The stakes don't get higher than this.
What a total load of double talk. There is zero integrity in anything CIA says or does since the weapons of mass destruction deal
or before that it was the Iran Contra deal and before that it was the Bay of Pigs. Now we have this rigging os the election results
based on zero evidence. The whole thing is just idiocy. What is Obama trying to achieve?The end game will be for Obama to go down
in history as ... let's just say he is not the smartest tool in the shed when it comes to being a so called world leader. Well
done Obama you have now completely trashed what is left of your legacy.
"CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election – report "
You might as well ask accountants to do a study on wether it's worthwhile to use an accountant. Part of the CIAs job is to
influence elections around the world to get US-Corporation friendly gov'ts in to power. So yes of course they are going to say
that a gov't can influence elections, if they said otherwise then they'd be admitting they're wasting money.
So, it was the Russians! I knew it must've been them, they're so sneaky. All HFC had was the total backing of the entire establishment,
including prominent Republican figures, the total fawning support of the entire main-stream media machine which carefully controlled
the "she's got a comfortable 3 point lead maybe even double-digit lead" narrative and the "boo and hiss" pantomime slagging of
her opponent. Plus the endless funds from the crooked foundation and murderous fanatics from the compliant Gulf states, and lost.
But hey, do keep this going please, it'll help the Trumpster get a second term! Trump/Nugent 2020.
Good point. Add that the whole election was dogged is the most glaring media bias and suddenly Russia comes off as simply leveling
the playing field a bit
The 'secret' enquiry reported to Congress that the CIA concludes etc, etc, etc. Then yet more revelations from 'anonymous sources'
are quoted in the Washington Post and The New York Times reaching the same conclusions.....talk about paranoia, or are the Democrats
guilty of news fakery of the highest order to deny the US voters....
Ooh Obama...there's a little snag about this investigation.
In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer
appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be
detectable.
In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any
occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much
emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.
In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the
traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is
preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There
are some nice logs of the NSA using this.
In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S.
even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.
In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same
thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses
who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious,
it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.
In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole
or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines
are in botnets.
In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing
in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled
the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.
So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They
are 100% untraceable.
Of course the Americans would never interfere in other people's elections would they?...........I imagine the Russians wanted
to avoid a nuclear war with war monger Hilary & who can blame them?
Y'know really all they seem to be looking possibly guilty of is the wikileaks scandal. Compare that to the enormous media bias
regarding Trump and suddenly the Russians at worst come off as evening the playing field so as to help an election be less biased...
Paranoia about Russia has arrived at the laughable, almost like the fable of the boy who cried wolf! Even the way the CIA statement
is worded makes you smile. "silk purse sows ear"? Everyone is clutching at straws rather than looking down the barrel at the truth......that
folks is what is missing from Western Politics......"The Truth" --
Obama expected the review to be completed before he leaves office...
Really?? Obama wants a "deep review" of internet activities surrounding the elections of 2008, 2012, and 2016; and he wants
this done in less than 40 days? And it encompasses voting stations throughout the 50 states? That's the definition of political
shenanigans.
Seeing as how the CIA interfered with Ukraine before and during the overthrow of Yanukovich, and with Moscow protests a few years
ago...... seems like everyone is always trying to interfere with each-other. Hypocrisy abounds
This is not really a fight against Trump. That is lost. This is an intramural fight among Democrats.
This is desperate efforts by the corporate Democrats to hang on to power after Hillary (again) lost.
Excuses. Allegations without sources given, anonymous.
Remember that the same people used the same media contacts to spread fake news that the Podesta leaks were faked, and tried
to shift attention from what was revealed to who revealed it.
if the Ruskies did it, there's something funny: they did it on Obama's watch and her protege, Hillary, lost it. The system is
a real mess in this case.
Interesting link. It raises a particularly salient question: assuming the Russians did indeed do it - and after the whole CIA
yellow cake thing in Iraq, no one could possibly doubt national intelligence agencies any more - does it particularly matter?
Did the Russians write the emails? The betrayal of Sanders, the poor protection on classified materials, the cynical,
vicious nonsense spewed out by the HRC campaign, the media collusion with the DNC and HRC: did the Russians do these things too?
Or was that Clinton and the DNC? Silly question, I'm sure.
Well, chief, the Wisconsin recount is in and the results are staggering: after the recount, Clinton has gained on Trump by 3 votes...
and Trump gained on Clinton by a heady six votes. One begins to wonder at the 'Manchurian candidate' claim.
It is precisely charades like this that millions in the US and around the world have given up on the establishment. Business as
usual or rather lying as usual will only alienate more not-so-stupid citizens. It speaks volumes about their desperation that
they're are actually employing such obviously infantile tactics on the Russia even as they continue to paper over Hillary's tattered
past. The result of the investigation is totally predictable..................Yes, the Russians were involved in hacking the elections,
but..........for reasons of national security, details of the investigative process and evidence cannot be revealed.
If the Russians really wanted Trump to win that means they helped Hillary win the Democratic primaries because Bernie would have
beat Trump.. There was a mess of hanky-panky going on to defeat Bernie, and deflecting the blame to a foreign actor should keep
the demonstrators off the streets.
If someone is gullible enough to believe the Russians did it they'd also believe that Elvis made Bigfoot hack the DNC. That's
even more plausible since bigfoot is just a guy who spends so much time sitting at his computer he lost all interest in personal
hygiene.
The Democrats are really desperate to find anything they can use to challenge the results of the election.
Either way they look foolish - openly investigating the possibility of Russian hacking which acknowledges that their electoral
systems aren't well secured, OR look really foolish if they find anything (whether real or faked).
The big question now is if, and how much, they will fake the findings of the investigation so that they can declare the
election results wrong, and put Clinton into the White House.
Clearly, it is a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures. It is incredible that one man can make the largest Western
nation look so ridiculous in the eyes of the world.
Pot calling the kettle black. Reveal fully what the CIA get up to all over the planet. The phoney intel America has used to go
to war causing countries to implode. The selective way they release information to project the picture they want. I am not convinced
that Russia is any better or any worse than the USA.
I can understand the Russians wanting Obama in 2008 and 2012 because he is a weak leader and totally incompetent.
I can also understand Putin preferring DJT to HRC.
It's about time the planet settled down a little bit, Trump and Putin will do more for world peace in the next year than Obama
achieved in his 8 wasted years in charge.
The Democrats have yet to realise the reason for their demise was not the racists, the homophobes, the KKK, the Deplorables,
the misogynists, the xenophobes etc etc etc.
It was Hillary Clinton.
Get over it, move on, stop whining, get out of your safe room, put the puppy down, throw the play dough away, stop protesting,
behave like an adult.
As much as I am enjoying the monumental meltdown of the left, it is getting sad now and I am starting to feel very sorry for
you.
What a sad bunch of clowns. But the time is ripe. You and your sort are done Obama, Hillary Clinton, Juncker, Merkel, Hollande,
Mogherini, Kerry, Tusk, Nuland, Albright, Breedlove, SaManThe Power and the rest of the reptiles. With all respect - mwuahahaha!
- you will soon sink into the darkness of the darkest places of history, but you won't be forgotten, no you won't!
As for the Podesta email. John Podesta was so stupid that he gave out his password in a simple email scam that any 8 year old
kid could have conducted. I wouldn't be surprised if Assange did it himself. Assange will be celebrating at the demise of Hillary.
Guys! Your side lost the election. Get over it & stop looking for excuses.
I don't think it was the Russians, it was just a lot of people got sick of being told what to think & how to behave by your
side of politics.
It is because people who disagree with you are either ignored, shut-down or called names with weaponised words such as "racist,
bigot, xenophobe, homophobe, islamophobe, you name it. You go out onto the streets chanting mindless slogans aimed at shutting
down debate. You have infiltrated academia and no journalism graduate comes out of a western univerity without a 60 degree lean
to the left. People of alternative views to what is now the dominant social paradigm are not permitted to speak at universities.
Once they were the vanguard of dangerous ideas. Now they are just sheep pens.
You have infiltrated the mainstream media so of course people need to go to Info Wars, Breitbart & Project Veritas to get the
other side to your one-sided argument.
Your side of politics has regulated the very words we speak so that we can't even express a thought anymore without being chanted
down, or shut down, prosecuted or sued.
There was once a time when it was the left who spoke up for freedom of speech. It was the left who demanded that a man be judged
by the content of his character & not the color of his skin & it was once the right who used to be worried about the Russians
taking over our institutions.
Have a look at yourselves. Look at what you've become. You've stopped being the guardians of freedom & now you have become
the very anti-freedom totalitarians you thought you were campaigning against.
Bleating about the "popular vote" doesn't cut it either. That's like saying, the other side scored more goals than us but we
had possession of the ball more times. It is sad for you but it is irrelevant.
Trump won the election! Get over it!
Let's see what sort of job he does before deciding what to do next.
In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer
appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be
detectable.
In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any
occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much
emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.
In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the
traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is
preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There
are some nice logs of the NSA using this.
In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S.
even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.
In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same
thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses
who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious,
it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.
In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole
or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines
are in botnets.
In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing
in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled
the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.
So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They
are 100% untraceable.
Joe Biden unwittingly gave the game up when he spoke to the press with indignation of the Russian hacks. The US would respond
in kind with a covert cyber operation run by the CIA First of all it would be the NSA, not the CIA Secondly, it's not covert when
you tell the press! Oh Joe, you really let the Obama administration down with that gaffe! Who would believe them now? A lot of
people it would seem. Mainly those still reeling from an election they were so vested in
Unfortunately our media has lost all credibility.
For years we were told it was necessary to remove the dictator Assad in Syria. The result, a country destroyed, migrant crisis
that fuelled Brexit and brought EU to its knees.
Now they are going to sell the 'foreign entities decided the US election'.
It's just a sad situation
Syria has been destroyed because Western client states in the Middle East wanted this to happen. Assad had a reasonably successful
secular government and our medieval gulf state allies felt. threatened by his regime. there was the little business of a pipeline,
but of course that would be called a "conspiracy theory".
If Obama has resources to spend on investigations, he should be investigating why the US is providing guided missiles to the terrorist
in Syria. We had such great hopes for him, and he has proved to be totally useless as a president. Rather than giving us leadership
and guidance he is looking under his bed for spooks. Just another example of his incompetence at a time when we needed leadership.
Looking for proof of espionage will be like trying to prove a negative and only result in a possible or at best a likely type
of result for no purpose. It would just be another case of an unsupported accusation being thrown about.
Facing up to the question of who is supplying weapons to terrorist would require the courage to take on the Military Industrial
Complex and he hasn't got it. Trump will be different.
If the russians did interfere in the USA elections perhaps is a bit of poetic justice.
The USA has interfere in Latin America for over hundred years and they have given us Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Noriega, Pinochet,
Duvaliers , military juntas in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Streener in Paraguay to name a few. They all were narcissists, racists
and insecure. The american people love this type of leader now they got him in the white house may be from Russia with love. Empires
get destroyed from within, look at Little Britain now, maybe the same will happen soon in the USA.
Viva China , is far from Latin America
So if the US managed to somehow get rid of Russia and China, what would they do then? How would it justify hundreds of billions
in defense spending? Just remember, the US military industry desperately needs an external enemy to exist. Without it, there is
no industry.
No I disagree. I don't think it was a conpriscy. It was just decades of misinformation, lies, usually perpertrated by our esteemed
foreign minister. The man is a buffoon , liar and incompetent. It is quite amusing to see how inept, Incompotent and totally unsuited
this man child is to public office.
Another red herring that smacks of desperation. The final death throes of a failed administration. These carefully chosen words
reveal a lot. The email leaks were "consistent with the methods and motivations" of Russian hackers. In layman's terms its the
equivalent of saying "we haven't got a clue who it was but it's the kind of thing they would probably do". Don't expect a smoking
gun because it doesn't exist, otherwise we would have known about it by now.
It's not just the US who has accused Putin of meddling in their domestic affairs. Germany and the UK have made the same allegations.
Are they wrong too?
I think anyone with reasonable intelligence would take each accusation on a case by case basis. There is no doubt that Russia
conducts cyber operations, as the US and UK and Germany does. There is also little doubt that significant Russophobia exists,
particularly since the failed foreign attempt of regime change in Syria that was thwarted by Russia. On that last point many citizens
of the West are coming to the realisation that a secular government in Syria is preferable to one run by jihadists installing
crude sharia law (Libya was certainly a lesson). Furthermore, if Hillary Clinton had succeeded one dreads to think of the consequences
of her no-fly-zone plans. Thankfully she didn't succeed, no doubt in part to wikileaks revelations, who for the record stated
that did not result from Russian hacks
Hows the election recount going? You know the one this paper kept going on about a few weeks ago in Wisconsin that was supposed
to be motivated by "Russian Hacking" in the election? Not very well but you have gone quiet. Also I see the Washington Post has
been forced to backtrack for implying news outlets like Breitbart are Russian controlled on the advice of their own lawyers....after
all calling someone a Russian agent without a shred of evidence is seriously libellous and they know it. Russian agents to blame
yeah ok Obama no doubt the Easter Bunny will be next in your sights you fraud.
Look no further than Hillarys private server. Classified information sent and received and Obam was part of it. Obama is a liar
and a fraud who is now blaming the Russians for crooked Hillarys loss.
Feed the flames of the war mongers that want Russia and Putin to be our bogeyman.Feed the military industrial complex more billions.The
U.S. Defense budget is already 10 times that of Russia ,feed NATO already on Russia's boarder with tanks ,troops and heavy weapons.i
did expect more from this pres,... The lies ,mis information and propaganda has worked so well since the end of WW2,upon a public
who has been fed those lies {and is to busy with sports ,gadgets,games, alcohol and other drugs }for 70 yrs by a compliant,for
profit lap dog media more interested in producing infotainment and profits than supplying information..If you don't think the
"public" isn't very poorly informed and will believe anything ,..just look at who the next prez will be..
I don't think it's true that Trump voters were less informed than Clinton voters. The public knows that they all lie, they simply
choose the one who's lies most appeal to them.
Unfortunately Obama is not leaving office with dignity.
This action is another attempt to delegitimize the election of Trump. We already have the recount farce going on.
If Republicans had tried to delegitimize the election of Obama we know what the reaction from media would have been. An outcry
against antidemocratic and racist behaviour
The corporate media is so predictable at this point. The news cranks up the anti-Russia hysteria while the guys over in entertainment
roll out a slick fantasy about anti-Nazi resistance. It all adds up to a big steaming pile of crap but you hope it will push enough
buttons to keep the citizens chained to their their desks for another quarter. Don't bet on it. As a great American said at another
time of upheaval, you can't fool everyone forever...
Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.
Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that
alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.
Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta
was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian
front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position
on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.
As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt
to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.
chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties
to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars,
including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies
with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked
on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a
high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."
Sour grapes at the liberation of Aleppo and their loss of face.
I'm surprised they haven't started asking about the missing 250K civilians,who must even now be languishing in Assad's dungeons.
Keeping that one for tomorrow probably.
When Cheney used the terror alert levels to keep the US population in the constant state of fear, the Democrats denounced it as
fear mongering. Now they're embracing the same tactics in the constant demonization of Russia. Look, it's raining today! Russia
must be trying to control the weather in the US! Get them! Utterly ridiculous.
The US has been the most bloodthirsty, aggressive nation in my lifetime. Where the US goes we obediently follow. Yet as Obama
(7 countries he's bombed in his presidency, not bad for a Nobel Prize Winner) continues to circle Russia with NATO on their borders.
We're continually spun headline news that Russia is the aggressor and is continually meddling in foreign affairs. We are the aggressors,
we are the danger to ourselves and it's we who are run by megalomaniac elites who pump us full of fear and propaganda.
Malicious cyberactivity... has no place in international community... No? When West does it, then it's for democratic purposes?
But invading countries on a humanitarian pretense does? So Democrats are still looking to blame Russia for everything not going
their way I see. This rhetoric didn't work for Clinton in the election and it won't now. Stop with this nonsense
The Egyptian Empire lasted millenum,
The Greek and Roman Empires a thousand years, give or take.
The Holy Roman Empire centuries.
The British and French circa 200 years.
The USSR about 70, the USA 70 and counting
This is just the cyclical death throes of empires played out at ever increasing speed before our very eyes.
This is exactly why we should never move to electronic voting. Can you imagine the lengths the IPA would go to ensure their men
security the power they need to roll out their neoliberal agenda? As a tax-free right wing think tank composed of rich like Rinehart,
Murdoch, Forrest, et al. the sky's the limit.
The five stages of dealing with psychological trauma: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Hillary and the Democrats
are still at stage one and two. Obama is only beginning stage one as events dawn on him.
I really do feel the established media and its elite hierarchy are vexed by both the Trump victory and Brexit here in the UK.
Now the media attention turns to a report on another of its perpetual campaigns, namely Russia, and corruption in sport.
I'm not going to doubt the 'findings', but I know humans are corrupt ALL over the world, but it does strike me that no Western
outlet, ever prints anything positive about Russia. I mean - nothing, zero!
If, indeed, the Russian government gathered the DNC and Podesta info released by Wikileaks, the Russians did the American people
a favor by pulling back the curtain on behind the scenes scheming by Clinton campaign potentates.
Of course, I don't believe the Democratic claim that Clinton lost the election because of the Russians and the FBI.
US backed a coup, or set up a coup, to overthrow the democratically elected government in Ukraine which led to war. Putin's payback
seems fully justified.
Oh my, a foreign country may have had a tiny influence on a US Election.
How about investigating the overthrow of the Democratically elected Govt in Ukraine, or the influence the US has had on the
Syrian Govt, or even in Australia, where the Chinese Govt donates massive amounts of money to Political Parties (note, there's
no link of course between Chinese Govt donations and Chinese Companies being able to buy most of Australia and employ Chinese
Nationals in Australia on Chinese conditions and 500,000 Chinese Nationals being able to buy Real Estate in Sydney alone... none
whatsoever).
I'm not a policy or think tank wonk, but isn't Russia just a euphemism for China. Aren't their geopolitical interests linked.
You just say Russia because China has us by the financial balls (I'm sure the Guardian would prefer to NOT be censored on the
mainland) right? Package it that way and I'm on board. My love of Dostoevsky goes out the window. Albeit I still think Demons
one of the best novels ever written. Woke me up.
I'm all in favor of delegitimizing the incoming semi-fascist Trump/Pence regime, and find Obama's talk of a smooth transition
disgusting. However, I reject the appeal to Russophobia or other Xenophobia.
BTW, Obama and his collaborators like Diane Feinstein have done a lot to prepare the legal basis for fascistic repression under
the new POtuS.
I already know what the comission will find. They will find evidences that Iraq holds vast ammonúnt of weapons of mass destruction!
Oh wait, that was already used.
Obama has been as useless as his predecessor young Bush. His policies generally are in tatters and the US neo cons evil fantasy
of full spectrum dominance has met its death in Syria. Bravo.
After an election cycle with proven collusion between the DNC/Hillary Clinton campaign and our media, our media has the nerve
to come up with the term 'fake news'.
Hypocrisy at its finest
Nobody does paranoia like the yanks. To the rest of the world, the unedifying spectacle of the world's biggest bullies, snoops,
warmongers, liars and hypocrites complaining about how unfair life is, is pretty nauseating. Most of America's problems are home-grown.
And the final report will conclude with something along the lines of:
'After a thorough, exhaustive investigation of all relevant evidence concerning the potential of foreign interference in the United
States electoral process, the results of the investigation have shown that, although there remain troubling questions about the
integrity of U.S. cyber-security which should prompt immediate Congressional review, there has been uncovered no conclusive evidence
to support the conjecture that cyber attacks originating with any foreign actor, state or individual had any significant effect
on the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, and that there is no cause or justification for the American People to question
the fairness of or lose faith in the electoral process and laid out by and carried out according to the Constitution.'
I do Holiday cards too.
Georgia's Secretary of State is accusing someone at the Department of Homeland Security of illegally trying to hack its computer
network, including the voter registration database.
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, copied to the full Georgia congressional delegation, Georgia Secretary
of State Brian Kemp alleges that a computer with a DHS internet address attempted to breach its systems.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/309530-state-of-georgia-allegedly-accusing-homeland-security-of-attempted-hack
Wake up and smell the BS, the hacking is being done by people a lot nearer home.....
Oh dear, the GOP seem to have forgotten what they were saying about Putin and the Kremlin a short while back:
The continuing erosion of personal liberty and fundamental rights under the current officials in the Kremlin. Repressive
at home and reckless abroad, their policies imperil the nations which regained their self-determination upon the collapse of
the Soviet Union. We will meet the return of Russian belligerence with the same resolve that led to the collapse of the Soviet
Union. We will not accept any territorial change in Eastern Europe imposed by force, in Ukraine, Georgia, or elsewhere, and
will use all appropriate constitutional measures to bring to justice the practitioners of aggression and assassination.
..... prohibiting "fake" or "false" news would be a cure worse than the disease, i.e., censorship by other means. The government
cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because it has ulterior motives. News the government dislikes would
be conflated with fakery, and news the government approved would be conflated with truthfulness. Private businesses like Facebook
cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because its overriding mission is to make money and to win popularity,
not to spread truth. It would suppress news that risked injury to its reputation or profits but leave news that did the opposite
undisturbed. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/5/reflections-fake-news
/
Uh excuse me but that sort of introspection doesn't fly. She was flawless and the blame rests solely on Russia/alt-right/Sanders/Third
Parties/Racism/Misogyny/Alignment of the stars/etc/etc
I thnk the idea that russia has world domination is quite laughable, what else they gonna be blamed for next, reduction of giraffe
population!Lol
I think a teeny wee paranoia is setting in, or outright deliberate propaganda, too obvious
Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party
about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around.
The CIA hacks have been destabalisuping Government for a at least seventy years.
One thing is pretty obvious paper ballots and a different ballot for each is much harder to rig.
It is ironic it takes a despot life key Trump to bring the issue to a head AFTER unexpectedly won.
"Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party
about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around."
The CIA were caught hacking into the US Congressional computers just 6 or so months ago. Nothing came out of it.
Based on the fact that the US 2000 (and possibly 2004) election was outright stolen by George Bush Jr., perhaps the propagandists
in the White House and media ought to be looking for a "Russian connection" in regards to our illustrious former president.
I'm shocked--shocked--to hear that our close Russian allies have done anything to influence and undermine the stability of other
countries. Preposterous accusation! And to try to become huge winners in the Western Hemisphere, by cheating? Vitriolic nonsense!
Many posters here actually believe that Good Old Russia should just stick with what they do best. That's poison!
Rather like the Litvenenko inquiry...full of maybe's and possibilities, with not a shred of hard, factual proof shown - demonstrating
that the order came from the Kremlin.
It's just a total accident that Putin's most vocal opponents keep getting shot in the head, gunned down on bridges, suffering
'accidents' or strange miscarriages of (sometimes post-mortem) 'justice' and fall victim to radiological state-enacted terrorism
in foreign countries. No pattern there, whatsoever.
I am at a loss. On the one hand, I hear about Russian economy in tatters, gas station posing as a country, deep crisis, economy
the size of Italy, rusty old military toys, aircraft carrier smoking out the whole Northern hemisphere, etc. On the other hand,
I hear about Russian threat all the time, which must be countered by massive build up of the US and EU military, Russia successfully
interfering in the elections in the beacon of democracy, the US, with 20 times greater economy, with powerful allies, the best
armed forces in the world, etc. Are we talking about two different Russias, or is this schizophrenia, pure and simple?
It's always easy to find reasons to fear something, added to that the psychology of the unknown, and we have the makings of very
powerful propaganda. Whatever Russia's level of corruption, and general society, I feel I cannot trust the Western media anymore
100%. There seems to be a equally sinister hidden agenda deep within Western Elites - accessing Russia's land, political and potential
wealthly resources must surely be one of them!? The longterm Western agenda/mission?
The Democratic Party's problem is Russia, which the President is rightly putting front and center. All Russians are the summit
of eviality, and must be endlessly scapegoated in order for Democrats to regain power for the nation's greater good.
Democrats' problems have nothing to do with corruption, glaring conflicts of interest, favoritism, ass-licking editors, crappy
data, lacking enthusiasm, and horribly poor judgement.
None of these issues need to be publicly addressed, being of no consequence to independent voters, and the President, Guardian,
et al. must continue their silent -- and "independent" -- vigil on such silly topics, if Democrats are to have any hope of cultivating
enough mindless, enraged, and abandoned sheep to bring them future victories.
I admire Trump, Putin & Farage. Don't agree with them but I have admiration for them. They show all the cunning, calculating,
resourcefulness that put the European race on top. Liberals don't like that and want to see the own people fall to the bottom.
Thankfuly the neoliberal elite are finishedm
Absurd nonsense - the third anti-Russian story of the day. Very little of this has much traction because of the sheer volume of
misinformation coming out about Russia. there are very good cogent reasons why the Democrats lost the US election - none of them
have anything to do with Russia.
I can't see a thing wrong with reviewing the last three election cycles, if there is any doubt at all and to put speculation to
bed, it should be done.
So the US intelligence servies aren't doing similar operations?
If they werent, heads would roll as they have a considerable budget. Did we learn nothing from Edward Snowden? Are Russia just
better at this? I doubt it.
I think both sides conduct themselves in a despicable manner so please dont call me a Putin apologist. Well, feel free actually,
I could'nt care less.
Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election
US interference:
COUNTRY OR STATE Dates of intervention Comments
VIETNAM l960-75 Fought South Vietnam revolt & North Vietnam; one million killed in longest U.S. war; atomic bomb threats in
l968 and l969.
CUBA l961 CIA-directed exile invasion fails.
GERMANY l961 Alert during Berlin Wall crisis.
LAOS 1962 Military buildup during guerrilla war.
142 more rows
the vietnam fiasco alone is enough to disqualify america from any criticism about interference in internal affairs
they practically destroyed the country
The pathetic way the media are pushing this big-bad-Russians meme is a little depressing.
This "hack" is totally fictional, the wikileaks e-mails were almost certainly that...leaks. As most o their output has been
over the years. For 95% of the Wikileaks existence there have been absolutely zero connections with "the Kremlin", in fact they
have leaked stuff damaging to Russia before now.
The Russian's did not hack the DNC, or rig the election, this is yet another example of the political establishment hysterically
pointing fingers and making up lies when their chosen side loses an election.
I remember how North Korea was blamed for Sony hack. I think they were even cut from the internet for a day and there was all
this talk of punishing them. And then later it came out that very likely wasn't North Korea. Only the news cycle already moved
on and nobody cared.
Traditionally, the best Cold Warriors have been right-wing liberals. In the absence of policies that concretely benefit the people
they engage in threat inflation and demagoguery.
In 90s US set all figures in Russia - from president to news program anchor. Elections of 96 were ripped by American "advisors"
so that Eltsyn with 3% rating "won" them. It's payback time.
And yet the so-called "Russian trolls" (which is apparently anyone who exercise a modicum of skepticism) seem to be winning here
at CiF based on the number of likes per comment, which is likely why the NSA sponsored propagandists and clueless dopes are getting
so increasingly shrill.
If you take a wider view, this is all really about keeping the Dems in the game, trying to undo the Trump validity and give them
another go in 4 or so years. Really, seems quite desperate that a man that allowed 270000 wild horses to be sold for horsemeat
this year across the border to Mexico, brought HC in to his own cabinet having said 'she will say anything and do nothing', knowing
what a nightmare that would make, and is going to watch his healthcare get ripped to shreds, needs more accomplishments in his
last year, aka Obama, ergo, let's investigate the evil russians and their female athletes with male DNA ( you would think I am
making this stuff up, but I am not ) ... Come on Grandma, where are you when we need you most
we must somehow, subvert the despicable populace that elected trump. we must erase from history the conceding of president elect
clinton - newpeak from the ministry of truth. we'll get her into the white house if it takes more cash, lies, and corruption.
after all, who needs democracy in the democratic party when we have big brother. democracy just confuses the members. we'll send
the despicables through the ministry of love to re-educate them, of course, this IS 1984 after all....we will vote for you, the
intelligentsia of the left knows what is best for you.
"Malicious cyber activity, specifically malicious cyber activity tied to our elections , has no place in the international
community. Unfortunately this activity is not new to Moscow. We've seen them do this for years ... The president has made it clear
to President Putin that this is unacceptable."
Note how carefully it specifies that it is cyber activity tied to the american elections that is inappropriate. I presume that
is simply to avoid openly saying that mass-surveillance by the US government of everyone's private email, and social network accounts
doesn't come under that "no place in the international community" phrase. You know, one does wonder how these people's faces don't
come off in shame when whinning about potential interference by foreign governemnts after a full 8 years or so of constant revelations
of permanent spying and mass-surveillance by the US government of international leaders and ordinary citizens worldwide.
So the DNC was hacked - so what. Hacking is so common these days as to be expected. A quick perusal of the internet provides some
SIGNIFICANT hacks that deserved some consternation:
9/4/07 The Chinese government hacked a noncritical Defense Department computer system in June, a Pentagon source told FOX News
on Tuesday.
Spring 2011 Foreign hackers broke into the Pentagon computer system this spring and stole 24,000 files - one of the biggest
cyber-attacks ever on the U.S. military,
On the 12th of July 2011, Booz Allen Hamilton the largest U.S. military defence contractor admitted that they had just suffered
a very serious security breach, at the hands of hacktivist group AntiSec.
5/28/13 The confidential version of a Defense Science Board report compiled earlier this year reportedly says Chinese hackers
accessed designs for more than two dozen of the U.S. military's most important and expensive weapon systems.
June 2014 The UK's National Crime Agency has arrested an unnamed young man over allegations that he breached the Department
of Defense's network last June.
1/12/15 The Twitter account for U.S. Central Command was suspended Monday after it was hacked by ISIS sympathizers (OK twitter
accounts shouldn't be a big deal. Why does US CentCom even HAVE a twitter account???)
5/6/15 OPM hack: China blamed for massive breach of US government data
And so the neocon propaganda machine trundles on, churning out this interesting material day after day. The elephant in the room
is that if you get hacked you have no knowledge of this until your private stuff is all over the internet, and the chances of
finding out who did it are zilch. Everyone in IT security knows this.
Another "fake news" story. Does anybody with a pulse really believe that Russia hacked the DNC? The US Security Services admitted
that it was NOT Russia; the likelihood is that the leaks were provided to Wikileaks by insiders within the US Administration -
they wanted to ensure that Hillary did not win. None of the actual revelations were covered by the MSM, and "the Russians did
it" was a convenient distraction.
All people that on earth do dwell have no clue who hacked the DNC to the amusing end that Podesta's e-mails ended up on the internet,
but it suits a dangerous political narrative to demonise Russia until it becomes plain logical to attack them.
YES YES let attack Russia, YES YES YES, Russia Russia we should carry on attacking Russia. We the journalists are well paid by
the man from Australia. YES YES we must to carry on attacking Russia and forget the shit happening in other countries. YES YES
it is our duty.
Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference
And I guess Obama has also ordered the Guardian to do a full court press of anti-Russian propaganda, just judging by the articles
pumped out on today's rag alone.
The US government is seemingly attempting the "Big Lie" tactic of Joseph Goebbels and instigating support in the public for
war against Russia. By repeating the completely unsubstantiated allegations that Russia has somehow "interfered with the election"
they hope, without any genuine basis, to strong arm the public into accepting a further ramping of tensions and starting yet another
illegal war for profit.
There's nothing wrong with conducting the investigation, but shouldn't it have been done before accusing Russia?
And aren't all the people cited in the article political appointees, Democrats or avowed Trump enemies, and then there's closing,
" A spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment."
Surely of all the Orders Obama might issue during his last weeks in office, why does he choose to give a stupid Order that effectively
makes US some sort of Banana Republic? This man was/is more hype than real! At a stroke of a pen he seriously undermines the integrity
of the US Electoral System. Whatever credibility was left has now been eroded by these constant and silly claims that somehow
Russians installed Trump as President. Doesn't that make Trump some sort of Russian Agent?
Meanwhile MSM keeps on streaming some fake news and theories and then Obama Orders US intelligence to dig deeper. This is lunacy!
Obama certainly understands that Russia is not the reason why Trump was elected. However, he wants to create new obstacles on
the way of normalization of relations between the US and Russia and make it more difficult for Trump.
However, Trump is not a weak man, not a skinny worm; and he can hit these opponents back so hard that international court for
them (for invasions into sovereign countries) will lead to their life sentences.
Only two weeks ago the Obama Administration publicly stated there was no evidence of cybersecurity breaches affecting the electoral
process,
as reported in the NYT :
The administration, in its statement, confirmed reports from the Department of Homeland Security and intelligence officials
that they did not see "any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election
Day."
The administration said it remained "confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was
borne out." It added: "As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective."
Is there any limit to the ridicolous, Mr. Obama? what is this? a tragicomic play of the inept?
Here we are with the most childish fabrication that it must be the Russians' fault if Trump won the election. I'll be laughing
for an entire cosmic era! And all this after US publically announced that they were going to launch a devastating acher attack
against the badies: the Russians, which of course didn't work out. Come on, this is more comedy that a serious play.
What probably is going on, the readers can gather by having a look at the numberless articles that are being published by maistream
media against the Russians.
Why this histeric insurgence of Russofobia? Couldn't it be that it is intolerable for the US and their allies to see the Russians
winning in Aleppo, and most of all restoring peace and tollerance among the population returning to their abbandoned homes.
I think Hillary, in part, lost the election due to all the fake news being pumped out by the mainstream corporate media, doing
her bidding. People are tired of it, along with all the corruption and lies that came to the surface through the likes of Wikileaks.
Trump is a terrible alternative, but the only alternative people were given, so many went with it.
Now we see fake news making out the Russians to be the bad guys again, pumping out story after story, trying to propagandize the
population into sucking up these new memes. Russia has its problems, and will always act in its own self-interest, but it's nothing
compared to the tactics the US uses, bullying countries around the world to pander to its own will, desperately trying to maintain
its Empire.
The scripture tells us those who live by the sword will perish by it.
America was in the interference of other countries' elections before its ugly 2016 presidential election. Remember Ukraine
and Secretary Hillary Clinton's employee Victoria F****the EU Nuland in Ukraine. Now we have the makings of some kind of conflict
with Russia over its alleged meddling in America's elections. More global tension= More cash flowing into the US equity market,
money printing by another means.
I'd be surprised if the Russians weren't trying to affect the outcome of the election. The Brits had a debate in Parliament on
Trump, Obama made threats to the UK on the Brexit vote, so who knows what we're all doing in each others elections behind closed
doors while we are clear to do so publically.
The MSM's absolute refusal to address the leaks in a meaningful way (other than the stuff about recipes) suggests to be no
one felt it a big deal at the time.
Obama could realise that Hillary's viewes on Putin and Russia did not help her at all. People are not that stupid, they see well,
use own brains and not so easily impressed by whatever CNN says to them.
John McAfee said that any organization sophisticated enough to do these hacks is also sophisticated enough to make it look as
though any country they want did it. So it could have been anyone.
It's reported today on Ars Technica : ThyssenKrupp suffered a "professional attack"
The steelmaker, which makes military subs, says it was targeted from south-east Asia.
..the design of its plants were penetrated by a "massive," coordinated attack which made off with an unknown amount of "technological
know-how and research."
Neoliberals are just desperately losing ideological competition at home and abroad. They cannot convince people that they are
right because it's not what's going on.
It does not matter what some others say, it's what really goes on matters.
But there is innate, basic self-interest in all people (that does not depend on education, ethnicity, race) and people know it
instinctively well. They will not go against it even if all around will tell otherwise.
I love how this has now become solid fact. No confirmation, nothing official but it is no common fact that the Russians interfered.
How many reports do we hear about US interference with foreign countries infastructure through covert means.
Meh. Seems like tampering happens all the time. How many elections in South America did the USA fix? How many in the middle
east and Africa? I think this "russian's did it" rhetoric is counterproductive as it is stopping Democrats from doing the introspective
needed to really understand why HRC lost the election.
Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot and there was credible evidence that the Russians had rigged the election in favor
of the Democrat. The right-wing echo chamber would be having seizures! These people are UTTER HYPOCRITES. And they would obviously
rather win with the help of a hostile foreign power than try to preserve the integrity of our elections.
Russia may or may not have hacked the DNC. I'd like to find out. I hope the DNC aren't enough of doofusses to assume this wouldn't
be in the realm of possibility.
I presume that the U.S. has its own group of hackers doing the same Worldwide. This is not a criticism; I would expect the U.S.
intelligence community to learn what our rivals, and even some of our friends, are up to.
This is getting to be pretty lame. I have doubts that "Russia" could interfere to any great extent with our elections any more
than we could with theirs. Sure, individuals or organizations, and more than likely in THIS country, could do so. And they have,
as we saw with the DNC and Sanders campaign (and vice versa). Let's not go into an almost inevitable nuclear war over what is
quite possibly "fake news".
Russia did this, Russia did that
its getting very boring now, you have lost all credibility
you have cried wolf to many times
stop trying to manipulate us
When will the Democrats get it? It wasn't the Russians, who are blamed for everything, including the weather, by desperate Western
failed leaders, but an unsuitable candidate in Clinton, which lost them the Election. Bernie Sanders would have walked it.
Regarding the notorious "fuck the EU " on the part of the US "diplomat" Victoria Nuland "the State Department and the White House
suggested that an assistant to the deputy prime minister of Russia Dmitry Rogozin was the source of the leak, which he denied
" Wiki
Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime
" US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis.
Boy, oh boy, fake news is everywhere just read this headline!
Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference
Which states as fact there was interference by Russia and that the investigation is to determine how bad it was. NO EVIDENCE WHAT SO EVER has been offered by anyone that Russia interfered in any way. FAKE NEWS!!
Voting machine hacking is a very serious problem but you generally need physical access to a voting machine to hack it.
Anyone notice thousands of Russians hanging around in Detriot, Los Angeles, etc election HQs? How about Clinton drones?
If the DNC hadn't rigged the primary we'd be celebrating president-elect Bernie. If they hadn't rigged the general Hillary
would have lost by a landslide.
1000 Russian athletes were doping in the 2012 Olympics - but it's taken until now to realise it?!
Russia influenced the 2016 US election?!
Russia is presently "influencing" the German elections?!
Russia is killing civilians and destroying hospitals with impunity in Syria?!
etc
Wow! Russia is taking over the world, it must be stopped, can anyone save us? Obama? Trump? NATO?
Look out! Russian armies are massing on the border ready to sweep into Europe.......arrhhh!
"..ex-prime minister Anthony Charles Lynton Blair of the United Kingdom, and Hillary Rodham Clinton of the United States
of America, have formally announced a new transatlantic political party to be named: The Neoliberal Elite Party for bitter
anti-Brexiters and sore anti-Trumpettes.
Rather rich coming from my country which has interfered in elections around the world for decades. I suppose it's only cheating
if the other team does it.
Not that they'll find any evidence. Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the
worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it!
"... Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails." ..."
"... "Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there." ..."
"... And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails. ..."
"... GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). ..."
Binney also proclaimed that the NSA has all of Clinton's deleted emails, and the FBI could gain access to them if they so wished.
No need for Trump to ask the Russians for those emails, he can just call on the FBI or NSA to hand them over.
Binney referenced
testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke
of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases "to track down known and suspected terrorists."
Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown
of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA
Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those
emails."
"So if the FBI really wanted them they can go into that database and get them right now," he stated of Clinton's
emails as well as DNC emails.
Asked point blank if he believed the NSA has copies of "all" of Clinton's emails, including the deleted correspondence, Binney
replied in the affirmative.
"Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there."
Binney surmised that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community angry
over Clinton's compromise of national security data with her email use.
And the other point is that Hillary, according to an
article published by the Observer in March
of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And
so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She
lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive
material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the
past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails.
The Observer defined the GAMMA classification:
GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance,
decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was).
Over a year before Edward Snowden shocked the world in the summer of 2013 with revelations that have since changed everything
from domestic to foreign US policy but most of all, provided everyone a glimpse into just what the NSA truly does on a daily basis,
a former NSA staffer, and now famous whistleblower, William Binney, gave excruciating detail to Wired magazine about all that
Snowden would substantiate the following summer.
We covered it in a 2012 post titled "
We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" – Big Brother Goes Live September 2013." Not surprisingly, Binney received
little attention in 2012 – his suggestions at the time were seen as preposterous and ridiculously conspiratorial. Only after the
fact, did it become obvious that he was right. More importantly, in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, what Binney
has to say has become gospel.
Binney was an architect of the NSA's surveillance program. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31,
2001, after spending more than 30 years with the agency. He referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March
2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases
"to track down known and suspected terrorists."
"... This phenomenon has been termed the "resource curse." It consists of multiple elements, all bad. ..."
"... The curse is mostly the result of having powerful and rapacious neighbors with no compunction but to use whatever means necessary to install a 'friendly' government willing to repress its own people in order to allow the theft of their 'resources'. ..."
"... As for Chile's governing elite, they wore the comfortable version of the "copper collar', the one made of money as opposed to chains, and so paid-off, lived in wealth and comfort so long as they kept their countrymen from doing anything that Anaconda copper didn't like. ..."
"... Superb stuff, especially "monopolistic control of commodity markets", supply and demand pressures on wheat and oil and copper have mostly faded to insignificance with hyper-leveraged commodities markets and supine (complicit) regulators. ..."
"... See: oil going to $140 not so many years ago despite building supply and weak demand. Goldman famously decided commodities were an "asset class" in 2003 and completely f*cked up these critical price signals for the world economy. ..."
"... Oh, right, our precious middlemen call it "sequestration" and "arbitrage". There's a million pounds of aluminum in the Mexican desert that calls bullshit on your claim. Any more self-absorbed theology you would like to discuss this fine Monday? ..."
"... The terrible legacy of the Pinochet years were also done by the "Chicago boys" who were hired to run the government. In their hate of the people and the embrace of neoliberal capitalism, they did something much worse: they changed the Constitution of the country so that undoing all their hateful legislation would be near impossible to override. When you hear of Student Protests in Chile – they are still fighting to undo the terrible legacy. ..."
"... What was Allende's Socialist party's policies, were they Nordic-style Social Democracy? I still am not sure if there is a meaningful ideological difference between Nordic Social Democracy, & Latin American "Socialism of the 21st Century" in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia. ..."
"... Perhaps the Nordics have a special secret deal with Murica & the US Imperial MIC: go along with the US Imperial foreign policy, & don't loudly promote your Social Democratic system, to anyone but especially not to nonwhite nations; & in turn we won't falsely slander you as Commie Dictators as we do any other nation attempting Social Democracy. ..."
The story of Chile's popular, and democratic rejection of government by oligarchs is today's must-read, and provides unsettling
similarities to current events, most strikingly in my estimation, recently in Venezuela.
The Popular Unity government enjoyed promising successes during its first year in power. Domestic production spiked in 1971,
leading to a GDP growth rate of almost 9 percent. Unemployment fell from 7 percent to below 3 percent, and wages increased dramatically,
particularly for the lowest earners. Allende's land reform program - along with intensified popular attacks on large, unproductive
landholdings - led to near record harvests and a new abundance of food for the poor.
Of course no good deed goes unpunished by oligarchs.
On the other hand, Chilean elites also pursued a more top-down strategy in their effort to bring the economy to its knees.
Objecting to government-mandated price controls and export restrictions, powerful business interests took to hoarding consumer
essentials, secretly warehousing enormous quantities of basic goods only to let them spoil as avoidable food shortages rocked
the nation.
And of course there's the USA's never-ending efforts to spread peace and democracy.
Meanwhile, in Washington, President Nixon was making good on his promise to "make Chile's economy scream." He called for an
end to all US assistance to the Allende government, and instructed US officials to use their "predominant position in international
financial institutions to dry up the flow" of international credit to Chile.
And finally a sobering reminder, that in the end, if they can't beat you at the polls, they are not above putting and end to you
altogether.
Deeply committed to maintaining the legality of the revolutionary process, the UP government sought to slow the pace of radical
democratic reforms at the grassroots in a misguided effort to avoid a putsch, or the outbreak of open civil war. In the end, this
error proved fatal - an armed popular base, exercising direct control over its communities and workplaces, could have been an
invaluable line of defense for the Allende administration, as well as for its broader goal of total societal transformation.
When Henry Kissinger began secretly taping all of his phone conversations in 1969, little did he know that he was giving history
the gift that keeps on giving. Now, on the 35th anniversary of the September 11, 1973, CIA-backed military coup in Chile, phone
transcripts that Kissinger made of his talks with President Nixon and the CIA chief among other top government officials reveal
in the most candid of language the imperial mindset of the Nixon administration as it began plotting to overthrow President Salvador
Allende, the world's first democratically elected Socialist. "We will not let Chile go down the drain," Kissinger told CIA director
Richard Helms in a phone call following Allende's narrow election on September 4, 1970, according to a recently declassified transcript.
"I am with you," Helms responded.
The comparison with Venezuela is hugely important, especially with regard to the suppliers boycot, where the Venezuelan opposition
seem to be directly copying the Chilean playbook. Even so, there is another aspect that should be of greater concern. Chile stands
out for its reliance on mining, especially copper. By failing in his bid to diversify the Chilean economy, Allende left his country
vulnerable to the fluctuations of the global economy and the whims of first world importers.
If memory serves, in 1973 mining represented around ~25% of the Chilean economy. Venezuela, by contrast, now has 45% of its
GDP tied up in oil exports. The only fact that should be surprising, then, is that the Bolivarian governments have lasted as long
as they have; perhaps a testament to the sweeping social improvements that have won them a mass-supported bulwark against constant
right wing assaults. Even so, with the economy undiversified, that bulwark will only hold out for so long.
This phenomenon has been termed the "resource curse." It consists of multiple elements, all bad.
For one, the ability to produce a commodity at the world's lowest price reduces the incentive to diversify one's economy. In
an extreme case like Saudi Arabia, even the workers hired to produce the oil are mostly foreign, leaving domestic workers unskilled
and idle.
Second, contrary to the belief early in the industrial revolution that commodity prices would be driven up by scarcity, in
fact technological improvement has more than counterbalanced scarcity to keep commodity prices flat to down in real terms.
Finally, as every commodity trader knows, the stylized secular chart pattern of any commodity is a sharp spike owing to a shortage,
followed by a long (as in decades) bowl produced by excessive capacity brought online in the wake of the shortage.
Governments, not adept at realizing that commodity price spikes are not sustainable, accumulate fixed costs during the boom
years and then get crunched in the subsequent price crash.
Is this suppose to explain what happened in Chile in 1973? Catallactics, ushered in AND imposed via a brutal military dictatorship,
yet fail to recognize the contradiction in the so-called "effects of violent intervention with the market"
This phenomenon has been termed the "resource curse." It consists of multiple elements, all bad.
The curse is mostly the result of having powerful and rapacious neighbors with no compunction but to use whatever means
necessary to install a 'friendly' government willing to repress its own people in order to allow the theft of their 'resources'.
For one, the ability to produce a commodity at the world's lowest price reduces the incentive to diversify one's economy.
It was not the people of Chile, who profited by the "ability to produce a commodity at the world's lowest price" and so cannot
be blamed for the inability to diversify their economy.
As for Chile's governing elite, they wore the comfortable version of the "copper collar', the one made of money as opposed
to chains, and so paid-off, lived in wealth and comfort so long as they kept their countrymen from doing anything that Anaconda
copper didn't like.
In an extreme case like Saudi Arabia, even the workers hired to produce the oil are mostly foreign, leaving domestic
workers unskilled and idle.
The extreme case of Saudi Arabia is a direct result of the hegemonic tactics just described, install a government 'friendly'
to American 'interests' in this case the House of Saud, and make them so fabulously wealthy that there is no questioning their
loyalty, until it becomes questionable
Second, contrary to the belief early in the industrial revolution that commodity prices would be driven up by scarcity,
in fact technological improvement has more than counterbalanced scarcity to keep commodity prices flat to down in real terms.
Finally, as every commodity trader knows, the stylized secular chart pattern of any commodity is a sharp spike owing
to a shortage, followed by a long (as in decades) bowl produced by excessive capacity brought online in the wake of the shortage.
Until finally, after the inevitable effect of monopolistic control of commodity 'markets' and the corrupting influence of corporate
power destroy the working man's earning potential, and by extension his purchasing power, and so extinguishes 'demand'.
Governments, not adept at realizing that commodity price spikes are not sustainable, accumulate fixed costs during the
boom years and then get crunched in the subsequent price crash.
It was not the Chilean government who concerned themselves with sustainability, as they were paid not to, and the corporations
who made all the money didn't give a damn either.
It should be easy to understand the logic, and necessity of voting out the ruling elite who were very good at lining their
own pockets, but not so good at planning for their people's well-being.
The Chilean people grew tired of rule by greedy people bought-off by American corporations, and elected a socialist government
in an effort to remedy the situation.
For their troubles, they were treated to a violent coup with thousands killed, tortured and disappeared.
And finally, it appears that you think this is all the 'natural' operation of 'markets'?
Superb stuff, especially "monopolistic control of commodity markets", supply and demand pressures on wheat and oil and
copper have mostly faded to insignificance with hyper-leveraged commodities markets and supine (complicit) regulators.
See: oil going to $140 not so many years ago despite building supply and weak demand. Goldman famously decided commodities
were an "asset class" in 2003 and completely f*cked up these critical price signals for the world economy.
" . an armed popular base, exercising direct control over its communities and workplaces, could have been an invaluable
line of defense for the Allende administration, as well as for its broader goal of total societal transformation."
"Those who do not learn history" are condemned to being exploited and controlled by those who do.
'Objecting to government-mandated price controls and export restrictions, powerful business interests took to hoarding
consumer essentials.'
Businesses don't exist for the purpose of "hoarding." But if mandated prices are set below cost, of course goods will
not be sold at a loss. Blaming the victims instead of the price controllers is like blaming a murder victim for "getting in the
way of my bullet."
Goods perhaps, but not labor. If mandated prices (for labor) are set below cost, serfs will still sell their labor. For example,
any soldier who never came back from Iraq obviously under-priced his labor.
Businesses don't exist for the purpose of "hoarding."
Oh, right, our precious middlemen call it "sequestration" and "arbitrage". There's a million pounds of aluminum in the
Mexican desert that calls bullshit on your claim. Any more self-absorbed theology you would like to discuss this fine Monday?
The terrible legacy of the Pinochet years were also done by the "Chicago boys" who were hired to run the government. In
their hate of the people and the embrace of neoliberal capitalism, they did something much worse: they changed the Constitution
of the country so that undoing all their hateful legislation would be near impossible to override. When you hear of Student Protests
in Chile – they are still fighting to undo the terrible legacy.
Sidenote: US has one of the Chicago Boys, entrenched at the Cato Institute.
yeah the chicago austerity mongers, and kissinger. guess who takes advice from kissinger, and pushes neoliberal economic policies.
the democrats used to be opposed to that sort of thing, at least in public.
What was Allende's Socialist party's policies, were they Nordic-style Social Democracy? I still am not sure if there is
a meaningful ideological difference between Nordic Social Democracy, & Latin American "Socialism of the 21st Century" in Venezuela,
Ecuador, Bolivia.
Norway & Venezuela both have a state-owned oil company, the profits of which are actually used to help their citizens, specifically
in education & health funding. Yet the likes of 0bama/Bush43 praise Norway & slam Venezuela.
Allende was even a full White Guy TM like the Nordics, albeit not blond-hair blue eyes like some Nordics. I suspected this
was perhaps an important reason the likes of 0bama/Bush43 praises the Nordic nations while labeling the part-Native American &/or
Black Venezuelan/Ecuador/Bolivian Presidents as being "Commie" "Dictators".
Perhaps the Nordics have a special secret deal with Murica & the US Imperial MIC: go along with the US Imperial foreign
policy, & don't loudly promote your Social Democratic system, to anyone but especially not to nonwhite nations; & in turn we won't
falsely slander you as Commie Dictators as we do any other nation attempting Social Democracy.
"... The reality is that prosecutors don't normally consider the legislative history or possible unconstitutionality of criminal statutes. Why? Because that's not their job. ..."
"... We can say, accurately, that the judgment of the FBI in its investigation into Clinton and her associates ― and Comey confirmed Clinton was indeed a "subject" of the investigation ― is that Clinton is a criminal. ..."
"... whether criminal statutes on the books had been violated ..."
"... criminal statutes had been violated ..."
"... So, my first point: for Comey to imply that there is any prosecutor in America uncomfortable with the "constitutionality" of criminal statutes predicated on "negligent," "reckless," or "knowing" mental states is not just laughable but an insult to both the prosecutorial class and our entire criminal justice system. Whatever issue Comey may have had with the felony statute he agrees Clinton violated, that wasn't it. ..."
"... specific intent ..."
"... Black's Law Dictionary ..."
"... First he asked, "What would other prosecutors do?" That's not a question prosecutors are charged to ask, and we now see why: as Comey himself concedes, countless prosecutors have already come out in public to say that, had they been investigating Clinton, they would have prosecuted her. A standard for prosecutorial discretion in which you weigh what others in your shoes might do based on some sort of a census leads immediately to madness, not just for the reasons I'm articulating here but many others too numerous to go into in detail in this space. ..."
"... Comey found credible that Clinton had created her private basement server set-up purely out of "convenience"; yet he also found that old servers, once replaced, were "stored and decommissioned in various ways." Wait, "various ways"? If Clinton was trying to create a streamlined, convenient personal process for data storage, why were things handled so haphazardly that Comey himself would say that the servers were dealt with "in various ways" over time? ..."
"... And indeed, the evidence Comey turned up showed that Clinton's staff was aware ― was repeatedly and systematically made aware ― that the Secretary's set-up had the effect of evading FOIA requests. And Clinton was, by her own admission, clear with her inferiors that "avoiding access to the personal" was key to her private basement-server set-up. That's very different from "convenience." ..."
"... completely different and more stringent protocols and requirements for data storage ..."
1. According to Comey, Clinton committed multiple federal felonies and misdemeanors.
Many people will miss this in the wash of punditry from non-attorneys in the mainstream media that
has followed Comey's public remarks and Congressional testimony.
The issue for Comey wasn't that
Clinton hadn't committed any federal crimes, but that in his personal opinion the federal felony
statute Clinton violated (18 U.S.C. 793f) has been too rarely applied for him to feel comfortable
applying it to Clinton. This is quite different from saying that no crime was committed; rather,
Comey's position is that crimes were committed, but he has decided not to prosecute those crimes
because (a) the statute he focused most on has only been used once in the last century (keeping in
mind how relatively rare cases like these are in the first instance, and therefore how rarely we
would naturally expect a statute like this to apply in any case), and (b) he personally believes
that the statute in question might be unconstitutional because, as he put it, it might punish people
for crimes they didn't specifically intend to commit (specifically, it requires only a finding of
"gross negligence," which Comey conceded he could prove). Comey appears to have taken the extraordinary
step of researching the legislative history of this particular criminal statute in order to render
this latter assessment.
The reality is that prosecutors don't normally consider the legislative history or possible
unconstitutionality of criminal statutes. Why? Because that's not their job. Their job is to
apply the laws as written, unless and until they are superseded by new legislation or struck down
by the judicial branch. In Comey's case, this deep dive into the history books is even more
puzzling as, prior to Attorney General Loretta Lynch unethically having a private meeting with Bill
Clinton on an airport tarmac, Comey wasn't even slated to be the final arbiter of whether Clinton
was prosecuted or not. He would have been expected, in a case like this, to note to the Department
of Justice's career prosecutors that the FBI had found evidence of multiple federal crimes, and then
leave it to their prosecutorial discretion as to whether or not to pursue a prosecution. But more
broadly, we must note that when Comey gave his public justification for not bringing charges ― a
public justification in itself highly unusual, and suggestive of the possibility that Comey knew
his inaction was extraordinary, and therefore felt the need to defend himself in equally extraordinary
fashion ― he did not state the truth: that Clinton had committed multiple federal crimes per statutes
presently on the books, and that the lack of a recommendation for prosecution was based not on the
lack of a crime but the lack of prosecutorial will (or, as he might otherwise have put it, the exercise
of prosecutorial discretion).
The danger here is that Americans will now believe many untrue things about the executive branch
of their government. For instance, watching Comey's testimony one might believe that if the executive
branch exercises its prosecutorial discretion and declines to prosecute crimes it determines have
been committed, it means no crimes were committed. In fact, what it means (in a case like this) is
that crimes were committed but will not be prosecuted. We can say, accurately, that the judgment
of the FBI in its investigation into Clinton and her associates ― and Comey confirmed Clinton was
indeed a "subject" of the investigation ― is that Clinton is a criminal. She simply shouldn't,
in the view of the FBI, be prosecuted for her crimes. Prosecutorial discretion of this sort is relatively
common, and indeed should be much more common when it comes to criminal cases involving
poor Americans; instead, we find it most commonly in law enforcement's treatment of Americans with
substantial personal, financial, sociocultural, and legal resources.
Americans might also wrongly believe, watching Comey's testimony, that it is the job of executive-branch
employees to determine which criminal statutes written by the legislative branch will be acknowledged.
While one could argue that this task does fall to the head of the prosecuting authority in a given
instance ― here, Attorney General Loretta Lynch; had an independent prosecutor been secured in this
case, as should have happened, that person, instead ― one could not argue that James Comey's
role in this scenario was to decide which on-the-books criminal statutes matter and which don't.
Indeed, Comey himself said, during his announcement of the FBI's recommendation, that his role was
to refer the case to the DOJ for a "prosecutive decision" ― in other words, the decision on whether
to prosecute wasn't his. His job was only to determine whether criminal statutes on the books
had been violated.
By this test, Comey didn't just not do the job he set out to do, he wildly and irresponsibly
exceeded it, to the point where its original contours were unrecognizable. To be blunt: by obscuring,
in his public remarks and advice to the DOJ, the fact that criminal statutes had been violated
― in favor of observing, more broadly, that there should be no prosecution ― he made it not just
easy but a fait accompli for the media and workaday Americans to think that not only would no prosecution
commence, but that indeed there had been no statutory violations.
Which there were.
Americans might also wrongly take at face value Comey's contention that the felony statute Clinton
violated was unconstitutional ― on the grounds that it criminalizes behavior that does not
include a specific intent to do wrong. This is, as every attorney knows, laughable. Every single
day in America, prosecutors prosecute Americans ― usually but not exclusively poor people ― for crimes
whose governing statutes lack the requirement of "specific intent." Ever heard of negligent homicide?
That's a statute that doesn't require what lawyers call (depending on the jurisdiction) an "intentional"
or "purposeful" mental state. Rather, it requires "negligence." Many other statutes require only
a showing of "recklessness," which likewise is dramatically distinct from "purposeful" or "intentional"
conduct. And an even larger number of statutes have a "knowing" mental state, which Comey well knows
― but the average American does not ― is a general- rather than specific-intent mental state (mens
rea, in legal terms).
And the term "knowingly" is absolutely key to the misdemeanors Comey appears to concede
Clinton committed, but has declined to charge her for.
To discuss what "knowingly" means in the law, I'll start with an example. When I practiced criminal
law in New Hampshire, it was a crime punishable by up to a year in jail to "knowingly cause unprivileged
physical contact with another person." The three key elements to this particular crime, which is
known as Simple Assault, are "knowingly," "unprivileged," and "physical contact." If a prosecutor
can prove each of these elements beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant could, at the discretion
of a judge, find themselves locked in a cage for a year. "Physical contact" means just about exactly
what you'd expect, as does "unprivileged" ― contact for which you have no claim of privilege, such
as self-defense, defense of another, permission of the alleged victim, and so on. But what the heck
does "knowingly" mean? Well, as any law student can tell you, it means that you were aware of the
physical act you were engaged in, even if you didn't intend the consequences that act caused. For
instance, say you're in the pit at a particularly raucous speed-metal concert, leaping about, as
one does, in close proximity with many other people. Now let's say that after one of your leaps you
land on a young woman's foot and break it. If charged with Simple Assault, your defense won't be
as to your mental state, because you were "knowingly" leaping about, even if you intended no harm
in doing so. Instead, your defense will probably be that the contact (which you also wouldn't contest)
was "privileged," because the young lady had implicitly taken on, as had you, the risks of being
in a pit in the middle of a speed-metal concert. See the difference between knowingly engaging in
a physical act that has hurtful consequences, and "intending" or having as your "purpose" those consequences?
Just so, I've seen juveniles prosecuted for Simple Assault for throwing food during an in-school
cafeteria food fight; in that instance, no one was hurt, nor did anyone intend to hurt anybody, but
"unprivileged physical contact" was "knowingly" made all the same (in this case, via the instrument
of, say, a chicken nugget).
So, my first point: for Comey to imply that there is any prosecutor in America uncomfortable
with the "constitutionality" of criminal statutes predicated on "negligent," "reckless," or "knowing"
mental states is not just laughable but an insult to both the prosecutorial class and our entire
criminal justice system. Whatever issue Comey may have had with the felony statute he agrees Clinton
violated, that wasn't it.
What about the misdemeanor statute?
Well, there's now terrifying evidence available for public consumption to the effect that Director
Comey doesn't understand the use of the word "knowingly" in the law ― indeed, understands it less
than even a law student in his or her first semester would. Just over an hour (at 1:06) into the
six-hour
C-SPAN video of Comey's Congressional testimony, Representative Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) makes a
brief but absolutely unimpeachable case that, using the term "knowingly" as I have here and as it
is used in every courtroom in America, Secretary Clinton committed multiple federal misdemeanors
inasmuch as she, per the relevant statute (Title 18 U.S.C. 1924), "became possessed of documents
or materials containing classified information of the United States....and knowingly removed such
documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials
at an unauthorized location." Comey, misunderstanding the word "knowingly" in a way any law school
student would scream at their TV over, states that the FBI would still, under that statutory language,
need to prove specific intent to convict Clinton of a Title 18 U.S.C. 1924 violation. Lummis
points out that Comey is dead wrong ― and she's right, he is wrong. Per the above, all Clinton
had to be aware of is that (a) she was in possession of classified documents, and (b) she had removed
them to an unauthorized location. Comey admits these two facts are true, and yet he won't prosecute
because he's added a clause that's not in the statute. I can't emphasize this enough: Comey makes
clear with his answers throughout his testimony that Clinton committed this federal misdemeanor,
but equally makes clear that he didn't charge her with it because he didn't understand the statute.
(At 1:53 in the video linked to above, Representative Ken Buck of Colorado goes back to the topic
of Title 18 U.S.C. 1924, locking down that Comey is indeed deliberately adding language to that federal
criminal statute that quite literally is not there.)
Yes, it's true. Watch the video for yourself,
look up the word "knowingly" in Black's Law Dictionary, and you'll see that I'm right.
This is scary stuff for an attorney like me, or really for any of us, to see on television ― a government
attorney with less knowledge of criminal law than a first-year law student.
2. Comey has dramatically misrepresented what prosecutorial discretion looks like.
The result of this is that Americans will fundamentally misunderstand our adversarial system of justice.
Things like our Fourth and Fifth Amendment are part and parcel of our "adversarial" system of
justice. We could have elected, as a nation, to have an "inquisitorial" system of justice ― as some
countries in Europe, with far fewer protections for criminal defendants, do ― but we made the decision
that the best truth-seeking mechanism is one in which two reflexively zealous advocates, a prosecutor
and a defense attorney, push their cases to the utmost of their ability (within certain well-established
ethical strictures).
James Comey, in his testimony before Congress, left the impression that his job as a prosecutor
was to weigh his ability to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt not as a prosecutor, but as a
member of a prospective jury. That's not how things work in America; it certainly, and quite spectacularly,
isn't how it works for poor black men. In fact, what American prosecutors are charged to do is imagine
a situation in which (a) they present their case to a jury as zealously as humanly possible within
the well-established ethical code of the American courtroom, (b) all facts and inferences are taken
by that jury in the prosecution's favor, and then (c) whether, given all those conditions, there
is a reasonable likelihood that all twelve jurors would vote for a conviction.
That is not the standard James Comey used to determine whether to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
What Comey did was something else altogether.
First he asked, "What would other prosecutors do?" That's not a question prosecutors are charged
to ask, and we now see why: as Comey himself concedes, countless prosecutors have already come out
in public to say that, had they been investigating Clinton, they would have prosecuted her. A standard
for prosecutorial discretion in which you weigh what others in your shoes might do based on some
sort of a census leads immediately to madness, not just for the reasons I'm articulating here but
many others too numerous to go into in detail in this space.
The second thing Comey did was ask, "Am I guaranteed to win this case at trial?" Would that
this slowed the roll of prosecutors when dealing with poor black men! Instead, as I discuss later
on, prosecutors ― via the blunt instrument of the grand jury ― usually use the mere fact of misdemeanor
or felony charges against a defendant as a mechanism for ending a case short of trial. Even prosecutors
who ultimately drop a case will charge (misdemeanor) or indict (felony) it first, if only to give
themselves time ― because defendants do have speedy trial rights, and statutes of limitation do sometimes
intercede ― to plan their next move.
Third, Comey imagined his case at trial through the following lens: "How would we do at trial
if the jury took every fact and presumption ― as we already have ― in Clinton's favor?" Indeed, I'm
having more than a hard time ― actually an impossible time ― finding a single unknown or unclear
fact that Comey took in a light unfavorable to Clinton (including, incredibly, the facts that became
unknowable because of Clinton's own actions and evasions). Instead, Hillary was given the benefit
of the doubt at every turn, so much so that it was obvious that the only evidence of "intent" Comey
would accept was a full confession from Clinton. That's something prosecutors rarely get, and certainly
(therefore) never make a prerequisite for prosecution. But Comey clearly did here.
I have never seen this standard used in the prosecution of a poor person. Not once.
3. Comey left the indelible impression, with American news-watchers, that prosecutors
only prosecute specific-intent crimes, and will only find a sufficient mens
rea (mental state) if and when a defendant has confessed. Imagine, for a moment, if
police officers only shot unarmed black men who were in the process of confessing either verbally
("I'm about to pull a gun on you!") or physically (e.g., by assaulting the officer). Impossible to
imagine, right? That's because that's not how this works; indeed, that's not how any of this works.
Prosecutors, like police officers, are, in seeking signs of intent, trained to read ― and conceding
here that some of them do it poorly ― contextual clues that precede, are contemporaneous with, and/or
follow the commission of a crime.
But this apparently doesn't apply to Hillary Clinton.
It would be easier to identify the contextual clues that don't suggest Clinton had consciousness
of guilt than those that do ― as there are exponentially more of the latter than the former.
But let's do our best, and consider just a few of the clear signs that Clinton and her team, judging
them solely by their words and actions, knew that what they were doing was unlawful.
For instance, Clinton repeatedly said she used one server and only one device ― not that she
thought that that was the correct information, but that she knew it was. Yet the
FBI found, per Comey's July 5th statement, that Clinton used "several different servers" and "numerous
mobile devices." So either Clinton didn't know the truth but pretended in all her public statements
that she did; or she was given bad information which she then repeated uncritically, in which case
a prosecutor would demand to know from whom she received that information (as surely that
person would know they'd spread misinformation); or she knew the truth and was lying. A prosecutor
would want clear, on-the-record answers on these issues; instead, Comey let other FBI agents have
an unrecorded, untranscripted interview with Clinton that he himself didn't bother to attend. It's
not even clear that that interview was much considered by the FBI; Comey declared his decision just
a few dozen hours after the interview was over, and word leaked that there would be no indictment
just two hours after the interview. Which, again, incredibly ― and not in keeping with any
law enforcement policy regarding subject interviews I'm aware of ― was unrecorded, untranscripted,
unsworn, and unattended by the lead prosecutor.
This in the context of a year-long investigation for which Clinton was the primary subject.
Since when is an hours-long interview with an investigation's subject so immaterial to the charging
decision? And since when is such an interview treated as such a casual event? Since never. At least
for poor people.
And since when are false exculpatory statements not strong evidence of intent?
Since never - at least for poor people.
Comey found credible that Clinton had created her private basement server set-up purely out
of "convenience"; yet he also found that old servers, once replaced, were "stored and decommissioned
in various ways." Wait, "various ways"? If Clinton was trying to create a streamlined, convenient
personal process for data storage, why were things handled so haphazardly that Comey himself would
say that the servers were dealt with "in various ways" over time? Just so, Comey would naturally
want to test Clinton's narrative by seeing whether or not all FOIA requests were fully responded
to by Clinton and her staff in the four years she was the head of the State Department. Surely, Clinton
and her staff had been fully briefed on their legal obligations under FOIA ― that's provable ― so
if Clinton's "convenience" had caused a conflict with the Secretary's FOIA obligations that would
have been immediately obvious to both Clinton and her staff, and would have been remedied immediately
if the purpose of the server was not to avoid FOIA requests but mere convenience. At a minimum, Comey
would find evidence (either hard or testimonial) that such conversations occurred. And indeed,
the evidence Comey turned up showed that Clinton's staff was aware ― was repeatedly and systematically
made aware ― that the Secretary's set-up had the effect of evading FOIA requests. And Clinton was,
by her own admission, clear with her inferiors that "avoiding access to the personal" was key to
her private basement-server set-up. That's very different from "convenience."
Even if Comey believed that "avoiding access to the personal," rather than "convenience," was
the reason for Clinton's server set-up, that explanation would have imploded under the weight
of evidence Clinton, her team, and her attorneys exercised no due caution whatsoever in determining
what was "personal" and what was not personal when they were wiping those servers clean. If Clinton's
concern was privacy, there's no evidence that much attention was paid to accurately and narrowly
protecting that interest ― rather, the weight of the evidence suggests that the aim, at all times,
was to keep the maximum amount of information away from FOIA discovery, not just "personal" information
but (as Comey found) a wealth of work-related information.
But let's pull back for a moment and be a little less legalistic. Clinton claimed the reason for
her set-up was ― exclusively ― "convenience"; nevertheless, Comey said it took "thousands of hours
of painstaking effort" to "piece back together" exactly what Clinton was up to. Wouldn't that fact
alone give the lie to the claim that this system was more "convenient" than the protocols State already
had in place? "Millions of email fragments ended up in the server's 'slack space'," Comey said of
Clinton's "convenient" email-storage arrangement. See the contradiction? How would "millions of email
fragments ending up in a server's 'slack space'" in any way have served Clinton's presumptive desire
for both (a) convenience, (b) FOIA complicance, (c) a securing of her privacy, and (d) compliance
with State Department email-storage regulations? Would any reasonable person have found this set-up
convenient? And if not ― and Comey explicitly found not ― why in the world didn't that help
to establish the real intent of Clinton's private basement servers? Indeed, had Clinton
intended on complying with FOIA, presumably her own staff would have had to do the very same painstaking
work it took the FBI a year to do. But FOIA requests come in too fast and furious, at State, for
Clinton's staff to do the work it took the FBI a year to do in a matter of days; wouldn't this in
itself establish that Clinton and her staff had no ability, and therefore well knew they had no intention,
of acceding to any of the Department's hundreds or even thousands of annual FOIA requests in full?
And wouldn't ignoring all those requests be not just illegal but "inconvenient" in the extreme? And
speak to the question of intent?
It took Clinton two years to hand over work emails she was supposed to hand over the day she left
office; and during that time, she and her lawyers, some of whom appear to have looked at classified
material without clearance, deleted thousands of "personal" emails ― many of which turned out the
be exactly the sort of work emails she was supposed to turn over the day she left State. In this
situation, an actor acting in good faith would have (a) erred on the side of caution in deleting
emails, (b) responded with far, far more alacrity to the valid demands of State to see all work-related
emails, and (c) having erroneously deleted certain emails, would have rushed to correct the mistake
themselves rather than seeing if they could get away with deleting ― mind you ― not just work emails
but work emails with (in several instances) classified information in them. How in the world was
none of this taken toward the question of intent? Certainly, it was taken toward the finding of "gross
negligence" Comey made, but how in the world was none of it seen as relevant to Clinton's
specific intent also? Why does it seem the only evidence of specific intent Comey would've looked
at was a smoking gun? Does he realize how few criminal cases would ever be brought against anyone
in America if a "smoking gun" standard was in effect? Does anyone realize how many poor black men
wouldn't be in prison if that standard was in effect for them as well as Secretary Clinton?
4. Comey made it seem that the amount and quality of prosecutorial consideration he gave
Clinton was normal. The mere fact that Comey gave public statements justifying his prosecutorial
discretion misleads the public into thinking that, say, poor black men receive this level of care
when prosecutors are choosing whether to indict them.
While at least he had the good grace to call the fact of his making a public statement "unusual"
― chalking it up to the "intense public interest" that meant Clinton (and the public) "deserved"
an explanation for his behavior ― that grace ultimately obscured, rather than underscored, that what
Comey did in publicly justifying his behavior is unheard of in cases involving poor people. In the
real America, prosecutors are basically unaccountable to anyone but their bosses in terms of their
prosecutorial discretion, as cases in which abuse of prosecutorial discretion is successfully alleged
are vanishingly rare. Many are the mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers of poor black men who
would love to have had their sons' (or brothers', or fathers') over-charged criminal cases explained
to them with the sort of care and detail Hillary Clinton naturally receives when she's being investigated.
Clinton and the public "deserve" prosecutorial transparency when the defendant is a Clinton; just
about no one else deserves this level of not just transparency but also ― given the year-long length
of the FBI investigation ― prosecutorial and investigative caution.
What's amazing is how little use Comey actually made of all the extra time and effort. For instance,
on July 5th he said that every email the FBI uncovered was sent to the "owning" organization to see
if they wanted to "up-classify" it ― in other words, declare that it should have been classified
at the time it was sent and/or received, even if not marked that way at the time. One might think
Comey would want this information, the better to determine Clinton's intent with respect to those
emails (i.e., given Clinton's training, knowledge, and experience, how frequently did she "miss"
the classified nature of an email, relative to the assessment of owning agencies that a given email
was effectively and/or should have been considered classified ― even if not marked so ― at the time
Clinton handled it?) Keep in mind, here, that certain types of information, as Clinton without a
doubt knew, are "born classified" whether marked as such or not. And yet, just two days after July
5th, Comey testified before Congress that he "didn't pay much attention" to "up-classified" emails.
Why? Because, said Comey, they couldn't tell him anything about Clinton's intent. Bluntly,
this is an astonishing and indeed embarrassing statement for any prosecutor to make.
Whereas every day knowledge and motives are imparted to poor black men that are, as the poet Claudia
Rankine has observed, purely the product of a police officer's "imagination," the actual and indisputable
knowledge and motives and ― yes ― responsibilities held by Clinton were "downgraded" by Comey to
that of merely an average American. That is, despite the fact that Clinton was one of the most powerful
people on Earth, charged with managing an agency that collects among the highest number of classified
pieces of information of any agency anywhere; despite the fact that Clinton's agency had the strictest
policies for data storage for this very reason; despite the fact that State is, as Clinton well knew,
daily subjected to FOIA requests; despite all this, Comey actually said the following: "Like many
email users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted emails..."
What?
How in the world does the "many email users" standard come into play here? Clinton's server, unlike
anyone else's server, was set up in a way that permitted no archiving, an arrangement that one now
imagines led (in part) to the person who set up that server taking the Fifth more than a hundred
times in interviews with the FBI; even assuming Clinton didn't know, and didn't request, for her
server to be set up in this astonishing way ― a way, again, that her own employees believe could
incriminate them ― how in the world could she have been sanguine about deleting emails "like many
email users" when the agency she headed had completely different and more stringent protocols
and requirements for data storage than just about any government agency on Earth? Just so, once
it was clear that Clinton had deleted (per Comey) "thousands of emails that were work-related" instead
of turning them over to State, in what universe can no intent be implied from the fact that her attorneys
purged 30,000 emails simply by looking at their headers? At what point does Clinton, as
former Secretary of State, begin to have ill intent imputed to her by not directing her attorneys
to actually read emails before permanently destroying them and making them unavailable to the FBI
as evidence? If you were in her situation, and instead of saying to your team either (a) "don't delete
any more emails," or (b) "if you delete any emails, make sure you've read them in full first," would
you expect anyone to impute "no specific intent" to your behavior?
The result: despite saying she never sent or received emails on her private basement server that
were classified "at the time," the FBI found that 52 email chains on Clinton's server ― including
110 emails ― contained information that was classified at the time (eight chains contained
"top secret" information; 36, "secret" information; and another eight "confidential" information).
Moreover, Clinton's team wrongly purged ― at a minimum ― "thousands" of work-related emails. (And
I'm putting aside entirely here the 2,000 emails on Clinton's server that were later "up-classified.")
At what point does this harm become foreseeable, and not seeing it ― when you're one of the best-educated,
smartest, most experienced public servants in U.S. history, as your political team keeps reminding
us ― become evidence of "intent"? Comey's answer? Never.
Indeed, Comey instead makes the positively fantastical observation that "none [of the emails Clinton
didn't turn over but was supposed to] were intentionally deleted." The problem is, by Comey's own
admission all of those emails were intentionally deleted, under circumstances in which the
problems with that deletion would not just have been evident to "any reasonable person" but specifically
were clear ― the context proves it ― to Clinton herself. During her four years as Secretary of State
Clinton routinely expressed concern to staff about her own and others' email-storage practices, establishing
beyond any doubt that not only was Clinton's literal key-pressing deliberate ― the "knowing" standard
― but also its repeated, systemic effect was fully appreciated by her in advance. Likewise, that
her attorneys were acting entirely on their own prerogative, without her knowledge, is a claim no
jury would credit.
Clinton's attorneys worked Clinton's case in consultation with Clinton ― that's how things work.
In other words, Clinton's lawyers are not rogue actors here. So when Comey says, "They [Clinton and
her team] deleted all emails they did not produce for State, and the lawyers then cleaned their devices
in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery," we have to ask, what possible reason would
an attorney have for wiping a server entirely within their control to ensure that no future court
order could access the permanently deleted information? In what universe is such behavior not
actual consciousness of guilt with respect to the destruction of evidence? Because we must be clear:
Comey isn't saying Clinton and her lawyers accidentally put these emails outside even a hypothetical
future judicial review; they did so intentionally.
There's that word again.
The result of these actions? The same as every other action Clinton took that Comey somehow
attributes no intent to: a clear legal benefit to Clinton and a frustration, indeed an obstruction,
of the FBI's investigation. As Comey said on July 5th, the FBI can't know how many emails are "gone"
(i.e., permanently) because of Clinton and her team's intentional acts after-the-fact. So Comey is
quite literally telling us that the FBI couldn't conclude their investigation with absolute confidence
that they had all the relevant facts, and that the reason for this was the intentional destruction
of evidence by the subject of the investigation at a time when there was no earthly reason to destroy
evidence except to keep it from the FBI.
In case you're wondering, no, you don't need a legal degree to see the problem there.
As an attorney, I can't imagine destroying evidence at a time I knew it was the subject of a federal
investigation. And if I ever were to do something like that, I would certainly assume that all such
actions would later be deemed "intentional" by law enforcement, as my intent would be inferred from
my training, knowledge, and experience as an attorney, as well as my specific awareness of a pending
federal investigation in which the items I was destroying might later become key evidence. That Clinton
and her team repeatedly (and falsely) claimed the FBI investigation was a mere "security review"
― yet another assertion whose falseness was resoundingly noted by Comey in his public statements
― was clearly a transparent attempt to negate intent in destroying those emails. (The theory being,
"Well, yes, I destroyed possible evidence just by looking at email headers, but this was all just
a 'security review,' right? Not a federal investigation? Even though I knew the three grounds
for referral of the case to the FBI, and knew that only one of them involved anything like a 'security
review'?")
And certainly, none of this explains Comey's (again) gymnastic avoidance of stating the obvious:
that crimes were committed.
Listen to his language on July 5th: "Although we did not find clear evidence that Clinton or her
colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information" (emphasis
in original) ― actually, let's stop there. You'd expect the second half of that sentence to be something
like, "...they nevertheless did violate those laws, despite not intending to." It's the natural continuation
of the thought. Instead, Comey, who had prepared his remarks in advance, finished the thought this
way: "....there is evidence that they were extremely careless with very sensitive, highly
classified information" (emphasis in original).
Note that Comey now uses the phrase "extremely careless" instead of "gross negligence," despite
using the latter phrase ― a legal phrase ― at the beginning of his July 5th remarks. That matters
because at the beginning of those remarks he conceded "gross negligence" would lead to a statutory
violation. So why the sudden shift in language, when from a legal standpoint "extreme carelessness"
and "gross negligence" are synonymous ― both indicating the presence of a duty of care, the failure
to meet that duty, and moreover a repeated failure on this score? Comey also avoids finishing
his sentence with the obvious thought: that they may not have intended to violate criminal
statutes, but they did nonetheless. Remember that, just like our hypothetical raver may not have
intended to commit a Simple Assault by stepping on that poor young woman's foot, he nevertheless
could be found to have done so; just so, had Comey accepted the statute as written, Clinton's "gross
negligence" would have forced him to end the above sentence with the finding of a statutory violation,
even if there had been no "specific intent" to do so.
This is how the law works. For poor black men, just not for rich white women.
5. Comey, along with the rest of Congress, left the impression, much like the Supreme
Court did in 2000, that legal analyses are fundamentally political analyses. Not only is
this untrue, it also is unspeakably damaging to both our legal system and Americans' understanding
of that system's operations.
I'm a staunch Democrat, but I'm also an attorney. Watching fellow Democrats twist themselves into
pretzels to analyze Clinton's actions through a farcically slapdash legal framework, rather than
merely acknowledging that Clinton is a human being and, like any human being, can both (a) commit
crimes, and (b) be replaced on a political ticket if need be, makes me sick as both a Democrat and
a lawyer. Just so, watching Republicans who had no issue with George W. Bush declaring unilateral
war in contravention of international law, and who had no issue with the obviously illegal behavior
of Scooter Libby in another recent high-profile intel-related criminal case, acting like the rule
of law is anything they care about makes me sick. Our government is dirty as all get-out, but the
one thing it's apparently clean of is anyone with both (a) legal training, and (b) a sense of the
ethics that govern legal practice. Over and over during Comey's Congressional testimony I heard politicians
noting their legal experience, and then going on to either shame their association with that august
profession or honor it but (in doing so) call into question their inability or unwillingness to do
so in other instances.
When Comey says, "any reasonable person should have known" not to act as Clinton did, many don't
realize he's quoting a legal standard ― the "reasonable person standard." A failure to meet that
standard can be used to establish either negligence or recklessness in a court of law. But here,
Clinton wasn't in the position of a "reasonable person" ― the average fellow or lady ― and Comey
wasn't looking merely at a "reasonableness" standard, but rather a "purposeful" standard that requires
Comey to ask all sorts of questions about Clinton's specific, fully contextualized situation and
background that he doesn't appear to have asked. One might argue that, in keeping with Clinton's
campaign theme, no one in American political history was more richly prepared ― by knowledge, training,
experience, and innate gifts ― to know how to act properly in the situations Clinton found herself.
That in those situations she failed to act even as a man or woman taken off the street and put in
a similar situation would have acted is not indicative of innocence or a lack of specific intent,
but the opposite. If a reasonable person wouldn't have done what Clinton did, the most exquisitely
prepared person for the situations in which Clinton found herself must in fact have been providing
prosecutors with prima facie evidence of intent by failing to meet even the lowest threshold
for proper conduct. Comey knows this; any prosecutor knows this. Maybe a jury would disagree with
Comey on this point, but his job is to assume that, if he zealously advocates for this extremely
powerful circumstantial case, a reasonable jury, taking the facts in the light most favorable to
the government, would see things his way.
Look, I can't possibly summarize for anyone reading this the silly nonsense I have seen prosecutors
indict people for; a common saying in the law is that the average grand jury "would indict a ham
sandwich," and to be clear that happens not because the run-of-the-mill citizens who sit on grand
juries are bloodthirsty, but because the habitual practice of American prosecutors is to indict first
and ask questions later ― and because indictments are absurdly easy to acquire. In other words, I've
seen thousands of poor people get over-charged for either nonsense or nothing at all, only to have
their prosecutors attempt to leverage their flimsy cases into a plea deal to a lesser charge. By
comparison, it is evident to every defense attorney of my acquaintance that I've spoken to that James
Comey bent over backwards to not indict Hillary Clinton ― much like the hundreds of state
and federal prosecutors who have bent over backwards not to indict police officers over the past
few decades. Every attorney who's practiced in criminal courts for years can smell when the fix is
in ― can hear and see when the court's usual actors are acting highly unusually ― and that's what's
happened here. The tragedy is that it will convince Americans that our legal system is fundamentally
about what a prosecutor feels they can and should be able to get away with, an answer informed largely,
it will seem to many, by various attorneys' personal temperaments and political prejudices.
No one in America who's dedicated their life to the law can feel any satisfaction with how Hillary
Clinton's case was investigated or ultimately disposed of, no more than we can feel sanguine about
prosecutors whose approach to poor black defendants is draconian and to embattled police officers
positively beatific. What we need in Congress, and in prosecutor's offices, are men and women of
principle who act in accordance with their ethical charge no matter the circumstances. While James
Comey is not a political hack, and was not, I don't believe, in any sense acting conspiratorially
in not bringing charges against Hillary Clinton, I believe that, much like SCOTUS did not
decide in the 2000 voting rights case Bush v. Gore, Comey felt that this was a bad time
for an executive-branch officer to interfere with the workings of domestic politics. Perhaps Comey
had the best of intentions in not doing his duty; perhaps he thought letting voters, not prosecutors,
decide the 2016 election was his civic duty. Many Democrats could wish the Supreme Court had felt
the same way in 2000 with respect to the role of judges. But the fact remains that the non-indictment
of Hillary Clinton is as much a stain on the fair and equal administration of justice as is the disparate
treatment of poor black males at all stages of the criminal justice system. I witnessed the latter
injustice close up, nearly every day, during my seven years working as a public defender; now America
has seen the same thing, albeit on a very different stage, involving a defendant of a very different
class and hue.
To have prosecuted Clinton, said Comey, he would need to have seen "clearly intentional and willful
mishandling of classified information, or vast quantities of information exposed in such a way as
to support an inference of intentional misconduct, or....efforts to obstruct justice..." When Comey
concludes, "we do not see those things here," America should ― and indeed must ― wonder what facts
he could possibly be looking at, and, moreover, what understanding of his role in American life he
could possibly be acting upon. The answers to these two questions would take us at least two steps
forward in discussing how average Americans are treated by our increasingly dysfunctional system
of justice.
Seth Abramson is the Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University)
and the author, most recently, of
DATA (BlazeVOX, 2016).
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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10 hours ago Rational Agent:
1 day ago Independents view Rachael Maddow, Chris Cuomo and Sean Hannity as hate peddlers who spin, lie and twist every single issue to fit their fantasy of how the world exists. I cannot imagine how anyone with a brain or any semblance of logic could be a regular viewer of these hate mongers. If one does a cursory analysis of the predictions these people have made over the past couple of years, you will quickly see how ridiculous and wrong they have been. The bigger problem is that they represent their news organizations and only add to the distrust and declining reliance that rational folks have of the Media.
2 days ago [she is] Just another CIA mouthpiece.
7 minutes ago Thanks Q! I bring up Montgomery all of the time here. The Eff Bee Eye and Dee oh Jay have all of the documents and are sitting on them. This is how the IC controls everything in the Swamp.
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Although this profile says Virginia, tweets are from the Sofia, Bulgaria time zone and he writes in Russian. Another curiosity considering the Fancy Bear source code is in Russian. This image shows Crowdstrike in their network. Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network. In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The network communication goes through a secondary source.
Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence. The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could be on the list.
In George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography , Webster Tarpley wrote that, "many once-classified documents have come to light, which suggest that Bush organized and supervised many, or most, of the criminal aspects of the Iran-Contra adventures."
As described by Mike Ruppert (image left):
In his books Drugging America: A Trojan Horse and Defrauding America: Dirty Secrets of the CIA and other Government Operations , whistleblower Rodney Stich exposed in exhaustive detail the firsthand accounts of whistleblowers and insiders, who participated in the many criminal operations that stretched across the Bush and Clinton presidencies.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee look at a placard showing 'Russian social media manipulation' at a November 1, 2017 hearing. © REUTERS/Joshua Roberts Follow RT on
The Senate Intelligence Committee's final report on 'Russian interference' in the 2016 US presidential election is short on evidence and long on reheated assertions and innuendo from 'experts' exposed as actual election meddlers. There is little new in the 85-page , partially redacted document released on Tuesday, that has not been made public by the committee previously – including the accusations that "Russia" focused on stoking anger and resentment among African-Americans, for example .
READ MORE: Another nail in Russiagate coffin? Federal judge destroys key Mueller report claim
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Siavosh Hosseini/NurPhoto via Getty Images
September 12, 2019 © Photo: Wikimedia Certainly, there are many things that President Donald Trump can rightly be criticized for, but it is interesting to note how the media and chattering classes continue to be in the grip of the highly emotional but ultimately irrational "Trump derangement syndrome (TDS)." TDS means that even the most ridiculous claims about Trump behavior can be regurgitated by someone like Jake Tapper or Rachel Maddow without anyone in the media even daring to observe that they are both professional dissemblers of truth who lie regularly to enhance their professional resumes.
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© AFP 2018 / Timothy A. CLARY Congresswoman
Tulsi Gabbard Speaks the Truth on Syria, Gets Smeared by the Mainstream Media
© AP Photo / Marco Garcia 'Assad's
Mouthpiece in Washington': Controversial Dem. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard Announces 2020
Run
© REUTERS / Omar Sanadiki US Lawmakers
Call for Syria Strategy Where Assad Leaving Post, Russian Military Pulls Out
©
AP Photo/ J. Scott Applewhite
House Democrats Will Expand Russiagate in 2019 to Push Trump Toward War
2015 File
Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions
Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal
Incident
Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative
Invoice submitted to
Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections
